A Pakistan-born Chicago businessman wanted in India for his role in the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai city has been remanded in custody for 18 days.

Tahawwur Rana, a Canadian citizen, landed in Delhi on Thursday. India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) confirmed his extradition had been successful.

Indian authorities accuse 64-year-old Rana of aiding the Mumbai attacks by working with childhood friend David Headley to support Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani group blamed for the assault.

On 26 November 2008, 10 militants launched deadly attacks across Mumbai, killing 166 and injuring hundreds, before being stopped by security forces on 29 November.

Rana was extradited from the US and arrested by the NIA upon arrival in Delhi on Thursday evening.

He was escorted to a special court under heavy security, trailed by dozens of journalists vying for a glimpse of Rana.

On Friday, the NIA said in a statement that the agency would question Rana “in detail in order to unravel the complete conspiracy behind the deadly 2008 attacks”.

India’s home ministry has appointed well-known lawyer Narendra Mann to lead the prosecution in the case.

Rana or his lawyers have not made any public comments yet.

On Friday, the US Embassy in Delhi said in a press release that Rana was to stand trial in India on 10 criminal charges stemming from his alleged role in the attacks.

“Rana’s extradition is a critical step toward seeking justice for the six Americans and scores of other victims who were killed in the heinous attacks,” it said.

In 2011, a US court cleared Rana of directly plotting the attacks but convicted him of supporting the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

He was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 2013 but released in 2020 on health grounds. He was re-arrested later that year after India requested his extradition.

A US court approved Rana’s extradition in 2023, but he remained in custody awaiting final government clearance.

In February, President Donald Trump approved the move following a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The US Supreme Court later rejected Rana’s appeals against the decision.

US prosecutors in the case said that in 2006, Rana allowed Headley to open an office of his Chicago-based immigration services firm in Mumbai, which Headley then used as cover to scout sites for the 2008 attacks.

The charges brought against Rana by the NIA include criminal conspiracy, waging war against the Indian government and terrorism.

The Duke of Sussex met war victims in Ukraine on Thursday when he visited a clinic which rehabilitates wounded military personnel and civilians, a spokesperson has said.

Prince Harry visited the Superhumans Center, in the western city of Lviv, where he spoke to patients and staff.

He was accompanied by a group from the Invictus Games Foundation, including four veterans who had been through similar rehabilitation.

Lviv has frequently been targeted with Russian missiles and the visit was not announced until after the prince was out of the country.

Prince Harry, who served for 10 years in the British Army, founded the Invictus Games in 2014 for wounded veterans to compete in sports events.

The visit to Superhumans was to observe the support and rehabilitation services being provided in a country actively experiencing war, a spokesperson said.

Prince Harry was invited by Olga Rudneva, a chief executive of the centre, at the Invictus Games Vancouver Whistler 2025.

During the visit, the prince met patients and medical professionals, in addition to Ukraine’s Minister of Veterans Affairs, Natalia Kalmykova.

The clinic administers psychological help, reconstructive surgery and prosthetics to victims for free.

Rob Owen, chief executive of the Invictus Games Foundation, said Ukraine had been “a vital part” of the foundation since participating in the Invictus Games Toronto 2017.

“This visit to the Superhumans charity in Ukraine underscores the Invictus Games Foundation’s broader commitment to supporting recovery and rehabilitation for wounded injured and sick service personnel and veterans, even in the most challenging environments,” he said.

Held in Vancouver, the last edition of the games involved more than 500 competitors from 23 nations, while Birmingham will host the next games in 2027.

Prince Harry was in London this week for a Court of Appeal hearing over his security arrangements in the UK.

He is the second royal to visit Ukraine since Russia’s full scale invasion, after the Duchess of Edinburgh visited Kyiv last year.

His father the King welcomed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to his Sandringham estate in Norfolk in March, just days after Zelensky’s unprecedented exchange with US president Donald Trump and his vice president JD Vance in the White House’s Oval Office.

The Prince of Wales, Harry’s brother, met Ukrainian refugees during a two-day visit to Estonia last month.

Donald Trump announced a massive tariff plan last week that would have upended the global economic order as well as long-established trading relationships with America’s allies.

But that plan – or at least a significant part of it – is on ice after the president suspended higher tariffs on most countries for 90 days while leaning into a trade war with China.

So with this partial reversal, is Trump any closer to realising his goals on trade? Here’s a quick look at five of his key ambitions and where they now stand.

What Trump said:

Trump’s original trade plan packed a big punch that landed around the world, with a flat 10% baseline tariff on everyone (including some uninhabited islands) and additional “reciprocal” tariffs on the 60 counties that he said were the worst offenders.

It sent allies and adversaries scrambling, as they stared down the prospect of a debilitating blow to their economies.

The White House has been quick to boast about all the world leaders who have reached out to the president to make deals and offer trade concessions – “more than 75”, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Although the administration hasn’t released a list of all the countries that Trump said on Tuesday were “kissing my ass” and promising to do anything, the US has announced it is in negotiations with South Korea and Japan, among others.

The takeaway: America’s trading partners have 90 days to strike some sort of agreement with Trump, and the clock is ticking. But the fact that talks are happening indicates that the president has a good chance of getting something for his efforts.

• What does the tariff pause mean for global trade?

What Trump said:

Trump has said for decades that tariffs are an effective way of rebuilding America’s manufacturing base by shielding it from unfair foreign competition. While some factories may be able to increase production in current facilities, more substantive efforts take time. And for business leaders to pull the trigger on “reshoring” their production lines and investing in new US factories, they will want to know that the rules of the game are relatively stable.

The president’s on-again, off-again tariff moves over the past week are inherently unstable, however. For the moment, it’s difficult to predict where the final tariff levels will land and which industries will receive the greatest protections. It could be auto manufacturers and steel producers today, and high-tech electronics companies tomorrow.

The takeaway: When tariffs are applied and removed seemingly at the president’s whim, it’s much more likely that companies – both in the US and abroad – will hunker down and wait for the dust to settle before making any big commitments.

What Trump said:

After Trump’s tariff about-face on Wednesday, several White House officials – including Treasury Secretary Bessent – were quick to say that Trump’s goal was to drop the hammer on the real villain, China.

“They are the biggest source of the US trade problems,” Bessent told reporters, “and indeed they are the problem for the rest of the world.

If Trump wanted a battle of wills with China, testing each side’s tolerance for economic and political pain, he got one – even if the president and his aides have hinted that they are looking for an exit ramp.

On Wednesday, Trump said that he blamed past US leaders, not China, for the current trade dispute. The prior day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president would be “incredibly gracious” if China reaches out to make a deal.

The takeaway: Even if this showdown is one Trump wants, picking a fight with the second-largest economy in the world, with military power to match, comes at enormous risk. And along the way America may have alienated the allies it needs most in such a confrontation.

• Why Trump is hitting China – and what might happen next

What Trump said:

During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump regularly touted that his proposed tariffs would bring in vast sums in new revenue, which the US could then use to shrink its budget deficit, fund tax cuts and pay for new government programmes.

A study last year by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimated that a 10% universal tariff – which is what Trump has landed on for at least the next 90 days – would generate $2tn in new revenue over the next 10 years.

To put that in context, the tax cuts Congress recently included in its non-binding budget blueprint would cost approximately $5tn over the next 10 years, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The takeaway: Trump wanted more tariff revenue, and if he sticks with his baseline tariffs, plus the additional levies on certain imports and larger ones on China, he’s going to get it – at least until Americans switch to more domestic production, when the tariff money gusher could turn to a trickle.

• Is the US making $2bn a day from tariffs?

What Trump said:

Analysts and experts have offered a grab bag other explanations about why Trump made such an aggressive move on trade last week. Was he trying to drive down interest rates, or devalue the US dollar or bring the world to the table for a new, global agreement on trade? The president himself hasn’t spoken much about those kinds of elaborate schemes.

One thing he has talked about relentlessly, however, is his desire to lower costs for American consumers – and he has promised that his trade policy will help address this. While energy prices dipped in the week since Trump announced his tariff plan, that may have been a result of fears that the trade wars could trigger a global recession.

The consensus among economists is that new tariffs will drive up consumer prices, as tariffs are tacked on to the price of imports and, eventually, when there is less competition for US-made products. Last year, the Tax Foundation estimated that a 10% universal tariff would increase costs for American households by an average of $1,253 in its first year. Economists also warn that lower-income Americans will be hardest hit.

The takeaway: An increase in prices is an arrow moving in the wrong direction – and it represents an enormous potential liability for both Trump’s political standing and his party’s future electoral prospects.

Six people, including three children, were killed after a helicopter carrying a family of tourists crashed into the Hudson River in New York, authorities have said.

The family of five was from Spain and the sixth person was the pilot, New York City Mayor Eric Adams told reporters on Thursday. All were onboard the helicopter at the time of the crash.

“Our hearts go out to the families,” Adams said.

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the identities of the victims will not be released until the families are notified. The cause of the crash is under investigation.

Video footage of the incident shows the helicopter falling out of the sky upside down and then splashing into the Hudson River.

Officials said the helicopter lost control soon after turning at the George Washington Bridge to move along the New Jersey shoreline.

The helicopter was operated by New York Helicopters and took off from the Downtown Skyport on the lower side of Manhattan at 14:59 local time (19:59 BST).

• What we know about the Hudson helicopter crash

The first calls of the crash came around 15:17 EDT (20:17 GMT) and rescue boats were launched immediately, New York Fire Commissioner Robert Tucker said.

“Swimmers were in the water shortly after the call,” he said.

Once on the scene, rescuers searched the water for victims or survivors and initiated “immediate life-saving measures” but the efforts were unsuccessful.

Four victims were pronounced dead on scene, while two others were pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, officials said.

The part of the river where the helicopter crashed is near Manhattan’s west side, an area known for its trendy shops and dining. It’s also near the main campus of New York University.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the investigation into the crash of the Bell 206, a two-bladed helicopter, will be led by the National Transportation Safety Board.

In a social media post, President Trump said the crash was terrible and more details would soon be released into what happened.

“God bless the families and friends of the victims,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

The Bell 206 is commonly used by sightseeing companies, television new stations and police departments.

Michael Roth, the CEO of New York Helicopter Charter Inc, told CNN he was “devastated”.

“I’m a father, a grandfather and my wife hasn’t stopped crying since this afternoon,” he said. When asked about the maintenance of the helicopter, Mr Roth said, “It’s my director of maintenance who deals with that.”

Eyewitnesses who saw the crash told CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner, that they saw parts of the helicopter fall from the sky.

“I looked outside my window. I saw a few people running towards the water, and some people were acting pretty normal. So I was like oh, it might not be anything. Then I started to hear all the sirens come outside,” Jersey City resident Jenn Lynk said.

Another Jersey City resident, Ipsitaa Banigrhi, told CBS the crash sounded like thunder.

“I saw, like, black particles flying,” she said. “Again, I thought maybe it’s just like, dust, or birds, and then we heard all the emergency vehicles and sirens go by, and I think that’s when it was like, OK, what’s happening.”

This is not the first deadly tourist helicopter crash in New York City. In 2018, another tourist helicopter crashed into the East River and all five passengers drowned. Only the pilot survived.

In 2009, a helicopter carrying Italian tourists collided with a private plane over the Hudson River, killing nine.

India is the world’s fifth-largest and fastest-growing major economy.

Yet, a recent legacy of protectionism and inward-focused trade policies have held back its global competitiveness.

Its tariffs are high and the share of global exports remains under 2%. India’s vast domestic market has fuelled its growth – outpacing many others, economists argue, largely because the rest of the world is slowing. But in a turbulent, increasingly protectionist era, India’s instinct for self-reliance may oddly serve as a short-term shield.

As countries scramble to recalibrate in response to shifting US trade policies – like Donald Trump’s latest 90-day tariff pause after weeks of sabre-rattling – India’s relative detachment may have helped it weather shocks that have jolted more trade-dependent economies.

“India’s lower exposure to global goods trade could work in our favour. If export-driven economies slow down under tariff pressure, and we continue growing at 6%, we’ll start looking stronger by comparison – especially with our large domestic market to fall back on,” says Rajeswari Sengupta, an associate professor of economics at Mumbai-based Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research.

“Being trade-shy has turned into an advantage – but we can’t afford complacency. To seize new opportunities, India must stay nimble and open up more to trade gradually and strategically,” she adds.

It may not be easy, given India’s long and complicated relationship with trade barriers and tariffs.

In his book India’s Trade Policy: The 1990s and Beyond, Columbia University economist and noted trade expert Arvind Panagariya traces the complex and often inconsistent evolution of India’s approach to trade.

During the inter-war years, industries like textiles and iron and steel lobbied for – and received – high levels of protection. The chronic shortages of World War Two led to even stricter import controls, enforced through an elaborate licensing system.

While Asian peers such as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore shifted to export-led strategies in the 1960s – and began posting impressive growth rates of 8–10% annually – India chose to double down on import substitution. As a result, imports as a share of GDP shrank from 10% in 1957–58 to just 4% by 1969–70.

By the mid-1960s, India had banned imports of consumer goods altogether. This not only removed the pressure on domestic producers to improve quality but also denied them access to world-class inputs and technology.

As a result, Indian products lost their competitiveness in global markets and exports stagnated. The resulting foreign exchange shortages led to even tighter import controls, creating a vicious cycle that stifled growth. Between 1951 and 1981, per capita income grew at a sluggish pace of just 1.5% a year.

The turning point came in 1991. Faced with a balance-of-payments crisis, India dismantled many import controls and let the rupee depreciate – a move that gave a much-needed boost to exporters and domestic producers competing with imports. Import licensing on consumer goods ended only in 2001, after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruled against it.

The impact was striking: between 2002–03 and 2011–12, India’s exports of goods and services surged six-fold, soaring from $75bn to over $400bn.

With trade liberalisation and other reforms, India’s per capita income grew more in the first 17 years of the 21st Century than it did throughout the entire 20th Century, notes Prof Panagariya.

But the pushback to trade didn’t end.

Trade liberalisation in India was reversed twice – in 1996–97 and again since 2018 – with extensive use of anti-dumping measures to block imports from the most competitive sources, according to Prof Panagariya.

“Many post-colonial states like India harbour a deep-rooted suspicion that international commerce and trade are simply new forms of colonisation. Unfortunately, this mindset still lingers among some policymakers – and that’s a shame,” says Vivek Dehejia, a professor of economics at Carleton University in Canada.

Many economists argue that a decade of protectionist policies has undercut Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India initiative, which focused on capital and technology-intensive sectors while sidelining labour-intensive industries like textiles. As a result, the programme has struggled to deliver meaningful gains in manufacturing and exports.

“If foreigners cannot sell their goods to us, they will not have the revenues to pay for the goods they buy from us. If we cut back on their goods, they will have to cut back on ours,” Prof Panagariya wrote.

Such protectionism has also led to allegations of cronyism.

“Tariffs have created protectionism in several Indian industries, disincentivising investments in efficiency by cosy incumbents and allowing them to steadily garner market power by building up concentrated positions,” according to Viral Acharya, a professor of economics at New York University Stern School of Business.

With the US turning inward and China under pressure, countries belonging to the European Union are scrambling for reliable trade partners – and India could be one of them. To seize this moment, economists believe India must lower its tariffs, boost export competitiveness and signal its openness to global trade.

Sectors like garments, textiles and toys present a golden opportunity, especially for the medium and small-scale sectors. But after a decade of stagnation, the big question is: can they scale up – and will the government back them?

If Trump follows through on his tariff plans after the current pause, India could see a $7.76bn – or 6.4% – drop in exports to the US this year, according to an estimate by Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank. (In 2024, India exported $89bn worth of goods to the American market.)

“The Trump tariffs are expected to deliver a mild blow to India’s merchandise exports to the US,” says Ajay Srivastava of GTRI.

He emphasises the need for India to broaden its trade base after securing a balanced deal with the US. This includes fast-tracking agreements with the EU, UK and Canada, while deepening ties with China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Asean.

At home, real impact hinges on reforms: simpler tariffs, a smoother goods and services tax (GST), better trade processes and fair implementation of quality controls. Without these, India risks missing the global moment.

The head of the British armed forces has visited China for the first time in a decade.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin discussed “issues of common concern” with China’s military leaders in Beijing, its defence ministry said in a short statement.

“We agreed that in an unstable world we must play our part as responsible nations with global interests,” Sir Tony wrote on X, “and we reflected on the importance of military-to-military communications”.

The last time a Chief of the Defence Staff visited China was in 2015. Since becoming prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer has sought to strengthen ties with the country.

The admiral’s visit coincided with the escalation of an intense trade war between China and the US after President Trump’s announcement of higher tariffs.

Defence Secretary John Healey confirmed on Thursday that the trip had happened earlier this week.

“It’s always good to have military to military engagement and that is what he was establishing”, Healey told reporters in Brussels.

He said that the admiral’s visit followed in the footsteps of one made recently by Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who became only the second foreign secretary to visit China in six years when we went in October last year.

Healey said that in the discussions the admiral was “very firm in the arguments about peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific” region “and concerns about any use of military aggression or assertiveness to pursue political ends”.

Healey did not specifically mention Taiwan, where China has launched major military drills which have been seen as provocation towards the island and wider region.

Beijing sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that will, eventually, be part of the country, and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve this.

But many Taiwanese consider themselves to be part of a separate nation – although most are in favour of maintaining the status quo where Taiwan neither declares independence from China nor unites with it.

Sir Tony has now joined the defence secretary in Brussels for meetings with allies on Ukraine.

A tattoo belonging to a man from Derbyshire has appeared in a US government document used to identify members of a notorious Venezuelan gang – despite the man having no connection to the group.

Pete Belton, 44, from Ilkeston says he was shocked to find his forearm featured in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document used to help identify alleged members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a transnational criminal organisation.

“I’m just an average middle-aged man from Derbyshire,” he told BBC Verify.

Mr Belton said it was a “bit strange, bit funny at first” but is now worried the family trip he booked to Miami with his wife and daughter in August might end up “being a six month all-inclusive holiday to Guantanamo”.

The Trump administration has already deported hundreds of alleged gang members to a high-security jail in El Salvador. Lawyers for some of those deportees say they have been incorrectly identified as TdA members based on their tattoos.

Mr Belton’s tattoo – a clock face with the date and time of his daughter’s birth – was included in a set of nine images for “detecting and identifying” TdA members. Other tattoos featured stars, crowns and a Michael Jordan “jumpman” logo.

“Open source material has depicted TdA members with a combination of the below tattoos,” states the document which appeared in court filings.

But reverse image searches show that several of the pictures first appeared on tattoo websites with no obvious links to Venezuela or TdA.

One of them led BBC Verify to an Instagram post by a Nottingham-based tattoo artist who posted about Mr Belton’s tattoo nearly a decade ago.

The tattoo image in the DHS document is worse quality than the Instagram post, which was shared in 2016, but it is clearly the same arm and features the same clock face tattoo.

The same image of Mr Belton’s tattoo also appeared in a September 2024 report by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) about TdA activity.

BBC Verify contacted both the US DHS and the Texas DPS about the source of the images, but did not receive a response.

But in an email the DHS said it was confident in its law enforcement’s intelligence and that its “assessments go well beyond just gang affiliate tattoos and social media.”

It’s unclear exactly how Mr Belton’s tattoo ended up in the US documents, but he’s worried about being linked to the gang.

“In my head I’m thinking if I’m working in border force and I saw me walking through I’d think ‘hey up we’ve got one, he’s the one in the document’.”

He provided multiple images of the tattoo to prove that it’s his – and he says that he has no association to the Venezuelan group.

The US government hasn’t deported anyone based on their tattoos alone, according to comments from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official in a court filing last month.

However, court documents show immigration officials are employing a points-based system known as the “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” to determine if someone is linked to the Venezuelan gang.

It includes a scorecard, and according to the document, eight points across a number of categories could be grounds for arrest or deportation.

Half of these points can be given if a “subject has tattoos denoting membership or loyalty to TdA”.

The document says if all eight points come from the symbolism category, which includes tattoos, then further consultation should be taken before designating someone as a member of TdA.

Venezuelan investigative journalist Ronna Risquez, who wrote a book on TdA’s origins, said tattoos alone are not evidence of membership.

“TdA does not have tattoos that identifies the gang,” she said.

“To confirm whether a person is a member of TdA, authorities must conduct a police investigation to determine whether they have a criminal record. A tattoo, their clothing, or their nationality are not proof.”

However, there have been cases where lawyers have argued that people have been wrongfully identified based on their tattoos and were subsequently deported.

US media have reported on a man whose lawyers say was deported because of a crown tattoo which was inspired by the Real Madrid football club logo.

Another case saw a makeup artist was sent to El Salvador after his a crown tattoo with the words “mum” and “dad” was used by US officials as evidence for gang membership, according to his attorneys.

Back in Derbyshire, Mr Belton says his family have considered cancelling their trip to the US due to the potential risks, but they are going to monitor how the story develops.

“Hopefully now they’d realise I’m not a Venezuelan gangster but I’ve seen crazier things happen in the news recently, so we’re just going to wait and see.”

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The US Supreme Court has instructed the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to a mega-jail in El Salvador.

The Trump administration has conceded that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error”, but appealed against a district court’s order to “facilitate and effectuate” his return to the US.

On Thursday, in a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court declined to block the lower court’s order.

That order “requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent”, the justices ruled.

Mr Garcia, a Salvadorian migrant, is one of dozens of migrants the US last month placed on military planes and sent to El Salvador’s infamous Cecot (Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism), a prison known for housing gang members, under an arrangement between the two countries.

In a statement on Thursday evening after the top court’s decision, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a lawyer for Mr Garcia, said “the rule of law prevailed”.

“The Supreme Court upheld the district judge’s order that the government has to bring Kilmar home.”

• Can the US return man deported to El Salvador? Immigration lawyers think so

In its emergency appeal to the Supreme Court last week, the Trump administration argued Judge Paula Xinis of the Maryland district court lacked the authority to issue the order to return Mr Garcia by 23:59 EST last Monday, and that US officials cannot compel El Salvador to return Mr Garcia.

US Solicitor General D John Sauer wrote in his emergency court filing: “The Constitution charges the president, not federal district courts, with the conduct of foreign diplomacy and protecting the nation against foreign terrorists, including by effectuating their removal.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Judge Xinis’s order while it considered the matter, before issuing its decision on Thursday.

On Thursday, the top court also directed Judge Xinis to explain her initial order to the extent she required the Trump administration to “effectuate” Mr Garcia’s return, adding she may have exceeded her authority.

“The district court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” the Supreme Court said.

A justice department spokesperson told the BBC that the Supreme Court correctly recognised “it is the exclusive prerogative of the President to conduct foreign affairs”.

“By directly noting the deference owed to the Executive Branch, this ruling once again illustrates that activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the President’s authority to conduct foreign policy.”

The government has said Mr Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error”, although they also allege he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which his lawyer denies.

The case will now return to the trial court. The justices did not give the administration a deadline for when Mr Garcia should be returned.

Mr Garcia, now 29, entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019 he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities.

But an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country.

Mr Garcia, who is married to a US citizen, was deported on 15 March despite a court ruling forbidding it.

His wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura has been calling for his release since his deportation.

“This continues to be an emotional roller coaster for my children, Kilmar’s mother, his brother and siblings,” Ms Sura told the New York Times on Thursday, adding that “I will continue fighting until my husband is home”.

Israeli troops fired more than 100 times during an attack in which they killed 15 emergency workers in Gaza, with some shots from as close as 12m (39ft) away, a forensic audio analysis of mobile phone footage commissioned by BBC Verify has found.

Two audio experts examined a 19-minute video authenticated by BBC Verify, showing the incident and the moments leading up to it near Rafah on 23 March.

The findings support a claim made by the Palestinian Red Crescent that the workers were “targeted from a very close range”. On 5 April an Israeli army official said aerial footage showed troops opening fire “from afar”.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declined to comment on the analysis directly when approached by BBC Verify.

A spokesperson said it was investigating the attack and repeated claims that six of the people killed were linked to Hamas, without offering evidence. The Palestinian Red Crescent rejected the allegation, as did a ninth paramedic who survived and was detained by the IDF for 15 hours.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said the full video was recovered from the phone of a medic killed and buried in a shallow grave by the IDF.

Video filmed by medic Rifaat Radwan who was killed in the incident showed the convoy driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights. At least one medic can be seen wearing a high-vis jacket.

Faced with this, the Israeli army changed its account, admitting that its initial statement that the convoy approached “suspiciously” with its lights off was inaccurate.

Experts told BBC Verify they used sound waveforms and spectrograms to measure the distance of the gunfire from the microphone of the mobile. Shortened time gaps indicate that the distance between the microphone and the gunfire decreased as the video progressed.

They concluded that the first shots were fired from around 40m to 43m away. But towards the end of the video, gunfire came from around 12m away.

At a briefing on 5 April, an IDF official told reporters that surveillance showed the troops were at some distance when they opened fire, adding: “It’s not from close. They opened fire from afar.”

One military expert told BBC Verify that any engagements under 50m to 100m would be considered as being within close range.

Robert Maher, an audio forensics expert at Montana State University, said towards the start of the footage one firearm is discharged about 43m away from the mobile phone.

Mr Maher and another expert, Steven Beck, independently corroborated one another’s view that in the final few moments of the audio, shots are fired as close at 12m away.

Mr Beck, a former FBI consultant who now runs Beck Audio Forensics, said: “The shooter(s) at these times is much closer, with distances of 12m to 18m. There is a strange pop sound that may be a tire hit by a bullet.”

He added: “The shockwaves indicate that the bullets are passing close to the recorder microphone – meaning they are being shot at.”

Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British Army officer with over 20 years experience in conducting investigations in conflicts zones, said that at 50m the Israeli troops would have “definitively been able to identify the convoy as humanitarian” and would have been able to “determine that the personnel were unarmed and not posing a threat”.

• Israel changes account of Gaza medic killings after video showed deadly attack
• Survivor challenges Israeli account of attack on Gaza paramedics

Voices can also be heard towards the end of the recording, shouting in Hebrew: “Get up,” and: “You (plural) go back”.

Over the period of more than five minutes, at times, multiple firearms were in use simultaneously, the audio experts determined.

Mr Maher said “the sounds are often overlapping in such a way that it is clear multiple firearms are in use at the same time”.

Because of the overlap of gunshots, Mr Maher said it’s difficult to identify individual shots. But both experts determined independently that there were more than 100 shots.

Our audio analysts could not comment on which weapons were being used but Mr Beck said there are “several bursts of fully automatic gunfire”.

A bullet travelling at supersonic speed first creates a sonic boom – often called a “crack”. The sound of the bullet being fired is what creates a second sound, often called a “pop”.

At close distances, the two sounds are almost indiscernible to the human ear.

But by looking closely at the waveform of the audio, the two sounds can be detected and the distance between them measured.

What Mr Maher describes as “crack-pop sequences” are visible in these waveforms.

Mr Maher said the further away the firearm is from the microphone, the longer the gap between the two sounds.

Mr Maher said: “The first few audible gunshots have a crack-pop timing of about 72ms. Assuming a bullet speed of 800 m/s and speed of sound 343 m/s, that time gap implies the firearm was about 43 meters away. If the bullet speed were actually faster, that would move the firearm estimate closer to the microphone.”

There are limitations to their estimates. For example, analysts told us they cannot be certain of the type of firearm used or of the miss distance, which is how far off the shot is from the intended target. They also must make an assumption about the average speed of the bullet.

BBC Verify will continue to investigate this incident.

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A controversial bill seeking to reinterpret New Zealand’s founding document, which established the rights of both Māori and non-Māori in the country, has been defeated at its second reading.

The Treaty Principles Bill was voted down 112 votes to 11, days after a government committee recommended that it should not proceed.

The proposed legislation sought to legally define the principles of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi – causing widespread outrage that saw more than 40,000 people taking part in a protest outside parliament last year.

The bill had already been widely expected to fail, with most major political parties committed to voting it down.

Members of the right-wing Act Party, which tabled it, were the only MPs to vote for it at the second reading on Thursday. Act’s leader David Seymour has promised to continue campaigning on the issue.

“I believe this Bill or something like it will pass one day because there are not good arguments against its contents,” he wrote on social media.

Tensions were high during a parliamentary debate on the bill in November. Labour MP Willie Jackson was told to leave after refusing to withdraw a comment he made calling Seymour a “liar”.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the proposed legislation would forever “be a stain on our country”, while Te Pāti Māori (The Māori Party) MP Hana Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke – who gained international attention for starting a haka in parliament at the bill’s first reading – said it had been “annihilated”.

“Instead of dividing and conquering, this bill has backfired and united communities across the motu [country] in solidarity for our founding agreement and what it represents,” Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson later said in a statement.

The second reading came after a select committee, which had been looking into the proposed legislation released its final report – revealing that more than 300,000 submissions had been made on it, the vast majority of which were opposed.

It is the largest response to proposed legislation that the New Zealand parliament has ever received.

While the principles of the Treaty have never been defined in law, its core values have, over time, been woven into different pieces of legislation in an effort to offer redress to Māori for the wrong done to them during colonisation.

Act’s proposed legislation had three main principles: that the New Zealand government has the power to govern, and parliament to make laws; that the Crown would respect the rights of Māori at the time the Treaty was signed; and that everyone is equal before the law and entitled to equal protection.

The party said the bill would not alter the Treaty itself but would “continue the process of defining the Treaty principles”. This, they believe, would help to create equality for all New Zealanders and improve social cohesion.

Among those backing it was Ruth Richardson, a former finance minister for the centre-right National Party, who told the select committee that the proposed legislation was “a bill of consequence whose time has come”.

She argued that while the Treaty itself could not be disputed, the idea of its principles was a “relatively modern matter”, and that these principles had so far been largely defined by the courts, rather than parliament.

“There is a new imperative in New Zealand on the cultural front, the necessity to address and correct Treaty overreach that has increasingly and evidently become wayward and wrong,” she said.

Opponents of the bill, meanwhile, believe it would be detrimental to Māori and create greater social divides.

Sharon Hawke, the daughter of the late Māori activist and MP Joe Hawke, spoke to the select committee on behalf of the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei hapū [sub-tribe] – telling it that the legislation “strips the fabric of where we’ve been heading for in the last three decades at improving our people’s [Māori’s] ability to gain education, gain warm housing, gain good health”.

She added that the bill “polluted” the idea of all New Zealanders having a future together.

“We will continue to show our opposition to this,” she said.

Key issues identified by members of the public who made submissions to the select committee included that it was inconsistent with the values of the Treaty, and that it had promoted equality with equity – not taking into account social disparities, such as those created by the legacy of colonisation.

There were also concerns about the extent to which the bill complied with international law, and whether it would negatively impact New Zealand’s reputation internationally.

Submitters who supported the bill, meanwhile, referred to a current lack of clarity and certainty about the principles of the Treaty, and of the importance of equality for all.

They also said that it was important to hold a referendum to facilitate a national conversation around the Treaty – something David Seymour believes is still needed.

The Treaty Principles Bill passed its first reading in November, with support from National – the dominant party in New Zealand’s ruling coalition – who had promised to back it as part of a coalition agreement with Act, but not any further.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who is also leader of the National Party, previously said there was nothing in the bill that he liked. He was not in parliament for its second reading, but remarked earlier in the day that it was time to move on from it.

There were some heroic efforts overnight from Donald Trump and those around him to suggest the past seven days were something other than absolute chaos.

By this reading, Trump’s 4D game of chess has left China in check. Certainly the Chinese economy faces a massive hit from punitive tariffs in its biggest market. But even accounting for the President’s roll back, the US has still erected a massive protectionist tariff wall, not seen since the 1930s.

The world is left with a universal 10% tariff, irrespective of whether that country (for example the UK or Australia) actually sells less to the US than the US sells to it. There is now no difference between the EU, which clearly does have a massive trade deficit in goods and was preparing to retaliate, and the UK.

There is also an anxious wait to find out what comes next. One of the questions is whether President Trump pushes ahead with tariffs on medicines, the UK’s second biggest goods export.

Plus there is potential logistical chaos on the cards from a little-noticed multi-million dollar port tax for every cargo vessel docking in the US that was “made in China”. That is more than half of the global merchant fleet – and it is due next Friday.

Even with Trump’s stated 90 day pause on implementing higher tariffs, there remains too much uncertainty for companies to go through the rigmarole of rerouting global trade.

The central issue today, however, is that the world’s two great economic superpowers are now facing off against each other like rutting stags.

Tariffs at these sky-high rates are massively hitting business between two nations which together account for around 3% of the entire world’s trade. The main motorway of the global economy is effectively shut.

The visible tangible consequences of all this will become very real very quickly: Chinese factories will close, workers will stroll from plant to plant looking for work.

Beijing will need to organise a stimulus package to account for the loss of whole percentage points of GDP, the kind of thing that happens when a natural disaster flattens a major city. Painful, but manageable at a cost, though not forever.

Meanwhile the US will see consumer prices surge. President Trump might try to order these US companies not to raise prices, but the effect will come through soon enough.

In theory this will be in sharp contrast to what is happening in other countries in the world. Across the border in Canada, or in Europe, not only will there not be such China-sourced price rises, there could be price cuts.

Trade wars on this scale do not stay confined to the flow of goods. They tend to become currency wars.

What we saw last night was the trade turmoil spread to credit markets, especially the US bond market, having already hit share prices.

Indeed there was an invaluable reveal for the game theory of this conflict. The Trump administration revealed a key pressure point with its concern about the “yippy” – as Trump called it – bond market.

As trading in US government debt continued overnight in Asia, the effective interest rate on these bonds rose to 5%.

This sort of borrowing should not move in such an erratic fashion.

The last time this happened was in the “Dash for Cash”, the key moment of financial fragility at the very beginning of the pandemic. The world was focussed on life or death in March 2020, but this potential further crisis was alleviated only by emergency action.

Effectively, the President’s row back was a form of emergency policy change.

Was the Chinese government behind this rash of US government bond sales in Asia? Probably not. However, what happened on Wednesday highlighted a vulnerability for Trump.

China is the second biggest holder of US government debt in the world and if it chose to, dumping all that debt would be catastrophic for America. But doing so would be a form of mutually assured economic destruction – the losses for China would be huge.

More importantly, what the bond markets were telling Trump is that they are deeply sceptical about his tariff policy.

The US does have the Federal Reserve, which does have some power to tranquillise bond markets. But right now it does not look like its chairman Jerome Powell will ride to the rescue.

The bond market scepticism echoes the sentiment of the ascendant Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He is now pushing for Trump to reach trade deals with their allies because the US needs them to take on China.

Given the US was previously calling these same close allies cheaters, looters and pillagers, there is no way this was the strategy all along.

This does matter. The US needs the EU, UK, the rest of the G7 on side in terms of China. China probably needs those countries just to stay neutral, and carry on soaking up its exports.

The rest of the world has seen Trump’s team struggle to explain tariffing penguin islands or poor African economies and the President himself recirculating the suggestion he was crashing stock markets on purpose. And they’ve witnessed the fact that the tariff rates were changed after they came into effect and also the absurd nature of the equation used to calculate them.

It’s in this context that Trump’s handling of the situation has handed leverage back to the rest of the world, because neither friend nor foe will know quite what they are negotiating with this America.

There is a calm, welcomed by all, but it could be rather brief.

There has been a historic upheaval in American trade policy.

The announcement of Donald Trump’s so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on 2 April – what he called “liberation day” – sent a shockwave through the global trading system and financial markets.

And the President’s 90-day pause on some of these tariffs on 9 April set off a relief rally in stock markets.

But where has the rollercoaster of new US tariff announcements – and partial reversals – actually left the situation?

And what will it all mean for global trade?

The announced pause only applies to some of the new tariffs – taxes on imports – that Donald Trump announced on 2 April.

The new minimum 10% tariff rate, which came into effect on Saturday 5 April, is still in place for goods coming from all countries, including the UK.

There are exemptions for pharmaceuticals and microchips and some other items.

But that 10% tariff in itself is a major change in America’s trading relations with all other countries.

And for China, the rate will not fall at all but will be hiked further to 125%, plus another 20% linked to the drug fentanyl.

Nevertheless, the pause means the rates above 10% for 59 other territories will be suspended until July.

That includes 46% on Vietnam, 44% on Sri Lanka and 20% on the European Union.

That’s something of a relief for these nations, especially developing countries that rely heavily on manufactured goods exports to America.

Exports to the US are equivalent to 30% of Vietnam’s economy and there were fears a 46% tariff would have plunged the South East Asian nation into recession.

But Vietnam and others will still be paying the new 10% minimum tariff rate when previously many were facing substantially lower levies.

And countries such as Australia and South Korea, which had free trade deals with Washington – meaning zero tariffs on many exports to the US – will still see a major break in their trading relationships with America. They too will be subject to the 10% tariff.

The president has unilaterally torn up those free trade deals – as well as the one America had with Canada and Mexico, which Trump signed in his first term.

Numerous other tariffs Trump has announced since returning to the White House remain in place and are not affected by the pause.

That includes:

• 25% tariffs on all car imports to America, including from the UK
• 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, including products made from these metals
• 25% tariffs on many imports from Mexico and Canada.

In big picture terms, economists warn the extent to which the pause actually changes the direction of overall US trade policy should not be exaggerated.

Bloomberg Economics has calculated the US’s average tariff on all its imports was set to go to 27% before yesterday’s pause, the highest in more than 100 years.

And after the pause they estimate it will rise to 24%, still the highest in a century.

The pause on some tariffs has made relatively little difference for two reasons.

First, because the 10% universal rate on all US imports still applies.

Second, because of the president’s simultaneous hike, alongside the pause, in the tariff rate imposed on all imports from China, from 104% to 125%.

The US imported $440bn (£340bn) of goods from China in 2024, according to official US data.

That still represented around 13% of all US goods imports.

Most economists think, even after the pause, this all represents a major shift in US trade policy, which will harm the global economy.

And the intensification of the US trade war with China on top of this is expected to do further damage.

China and the US between them were projected to account for around 43% of the global economy by the International Monetary Fund in 2025.

A slowdown in both economies as a result of the trade conflict will have a knock-on negative effect on most other countries.

And economists caution that the impact of the additional uncertainty created by Trump’s pause will in itself further undermine the world economy by holding back corporate investment.

Before the Trump pause, some hoped the UK could potentially benefit in some ways from the new round of Trump tariffs.

The UK’s relatively lower tariff of 10% could have incentivised some multinational companies to produce more in Britain – rather than in the EU, which was facing a 20% tariff – for export to the US.

With the EU now facing the same US tariff as the UK that incentive has gone, although the UK government hopes to ultimately negotiate a free trade deal with the US to eliminate the 10% tariff.

It’s also the case that the majority of the UK’s exports to the US are services, rather than goods, and services are not affected by the US tariffs.

Nevertheless, the UK is now in the same position as every almost every other country in the world with respect to US tariff barriers on goods.

The UK is still facing America’s 25% tariff on aluminium and steel exports – and also on products derived from those metals.

The UK exported $720m (£558m) of raw steel and aluminium to America in 2024 according to United Nations data.

And calculations by the Global Trade Alert research group suggest UK exports of metal products that are exposed to these new tariffs amounted to $2.9bn in 2024.

The UK is also subject to the new blanket US 25% import tariff on cars.

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows the UK exported $9bn of cars to the US in 2024, around a quarter of its total car exports.

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As a former champion runner, Richard McDonald can move quickly.

But the speed of the market falls, triggered by the sweeping global tariffs Donald Trump announced last week, still kept him on his toes.

Previously a trader for Credit Suisse, he now buys and sells stocks privately. At his laptop in London last week, he watched as the president unveiled a poster board outlining tariff rates, some as high as 50%, for imports from countries around the world.

He raced to understand which companies might be worst hit. Then he sold.

“There are billions being wiped off share prices every second, so it’s really ‘fastest finger first’,” he said. “My mind was sprinting.”

In 25 years of trading, he said he had rarely experienced anything like it.

Trillions were wiped off the value of financial markets around the world in the aftermath of Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement.

Leading share indexes in the US and UK saw some of the steepest declines since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, dropping more than 10% over three days.

Oil prices sank and so did the dollar.

By Wednesday, the worries had spread to the bond market, as investors started dumping US government debt, usually a safe haven for investors in times of uncertainty.

When Trump announced he was putting some of the most eye-watering tariffs on pause, shares stopped sliding and rallied.

But the market turmoil was far from over.

Trump left in place a tariff of 10% on imports from most countries and a tariff of 145% on goods from China, America’s third largest source of imports after the European Union and Mexico.

A day after the announcement, the S&P 500 dropped another 3.5%, the Dow slid 2.5% and the Nasdaq fell 4.3%.

At St Louis-based Argent Capital Management, the mood, said portfolio manager Jed Ellerbroek, was “still miserable”.

Some of his firm’s holdings, like health insurance giant United Healthcare, have done well over the last week, as investors look for companies likely to be able to weather the tariff storm.

But his third largest investment is Apple, which makes the majority of its iPhones and other products in China.

“Trump has induced a gigantic amount of uncertainty into the global economy and consumers and investors and business managers are reeling and unable to make long-term decisions,” Mr Ellerboek said.

“We are really on hold, because we only trade when we have high conviction levels,” he said.

“What do we do with Apple? I don’t know. I’m not going to change when I have no clue what the tariff rate is going to be next week,” he said.

Faced with so many uncertainties, some investors are simply quitting the market, said John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics.

“What you’re looking at, broadly speaking, is a market that is frustrated, uncertain and confused about where we’re going to be one day to the next,” he said. “In that environment you have a tendency to see some investors choosing the safety of cash.”

While Trump’s tariff rollback was a “relief”, he said it did not change the bigger picture: firms in the US that are bringing in parts or products are facing significantly higher import taxes than they were at the start of the year.

“The tariffs that remain are still high enough that they are likely to push up inflation and weigh significantly on the economy as we go forward,” he said.

“We’re just back trading again on the broader long-term outlook of the tariff implications, which is still negative.”

The world’s most popular gadgets – phones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches – could be about to get a lot more expensive in the US.

Many of them are made in China, which now faces a 145% tariff on its goods imported to the US, under President Donald Trump’s controversial trade policy.

The effect this may have on the iPhone and its maker Apple is under the spotlight – with some analysts saying if costs are passed onto consumers, iPhone prices in the US could rise by hundreds of dollars.

And if the tariffs impact the value of the dollar, it could become more expensive to import iPhones and other devices around the world – potentially leading to higher prices in UK shops.

Ben Wood of CCS Insight told the BBC that if tariffs remain in place, Apple may raise iPhone prices globally when the next iteration is launched.

“It is unlikely the company would want to have differentiated pricing globally,” he said – as the tech giant would want to avoid people buying the device cheaply in the UK and selling it on for profit in the US.

Though others say they believe it could result in cheaper prices if firms which normally send their goods to the US instead send them to countries which don’t have such steep tariffs, like the UK.

And there may be a significant change if the cost of tariffs is passed onto consumers globally – longer contracts to spread out the cost of the device.

While a phone contract may typically last two years, Mr Wood said some firms already offer four year deals, and he believed “we might see five-year contracts” in 2025.

“One could argue it is almost like having a mortgage for your smartphone,” he said.

The US is a major market for iPhones and Apple accounted for more than half of its smartphones sales last year, according to Counterpoint Research.

It says as much as 80% of Apple’s iPhones intended for US sale are made in China, with the remaining 20% made in India.

Along with fellow smartphone giants such as Samsung, Apple has been trying to diversify its supply chains to avoid over-reliance on China in recent years.

India and Vietnam emerged as frontrunners for additional manufacturing hubs.

As tariffs took effect, Apple reportedly looked to speed up and increase its production of India-produced devices in recent days.

Reuters reported on Thursday that Apple chartered cargo flights to ship more than 600 tons of iPhones from India to the US.

Amid Trump’s 90-day pause on tariffs, including those levied on India, the country may be set to benefit from an iPhone manufacturing boost.

The BBC has approached Apple for comment on the impact of tariffs on their operations and prices, but has not had any response yet.

Trump and his advisors have said the aim of its tariffs are to encourage more US manufacturing.

However, the tech industry relies on a global network of suppliers for product components and assembly.

This, and finding skilled workers to match the fast pace and low cost of production in Asia, means relocating supply chains is no simple feat.

Apple committed a $500bn (£385bn) investment in the US in February – which the Trump administration believes will result in more homegrown manufacturing.

But Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said shifting parts of its supply chain from cheaper manufacturing hubs in Asia to the US will take a lot of time, and money.

“The reality is it would take 3 years and $30 billion dollars in our estimation to move even 10% of its supply chain from Asia to the US with major disruption in the process,” he wrote on X on 3 April.

Apple have not revealed yet whether they plan to pass on the costs of the tariffs onto consumers in the US and increase prices.

Some analysts believe Apple is in a more fortunate position than others, having reaped more money from its products than it has spent on making them.

“As a company with lucrative margins on its devices, Apple can absorb some of the tariff-induced cost increases without significant financial impact, at least in the short term,” says Forrester principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee.

But he notes the company’s strong branding and popularity may allow it to pass some costs to consumers without too much backlash.

“The brand commands better loyalty than its competitors, and it is unlikely that a manageable price increase will send these customers fleeing into the arms of Android-based competitors.”

Some estimates suggest iPhone prices in the US could as much as triple if costs were passed to consumers.

Following Trump’s tariff increase on China to 125%, the cost for a China-made iPhone 16 Pro Max with 256GB storage would have surged from $1,199 to $1,999, according to estimates by investment banking firm UBS.

They estimate a less significant increase on the iPhone 16 Pro 128GB storage – which is made in India – by five percent from $999 to $1046.

While some analysts such as Dan Ives have suggested that the cost of a “Made in USA” iPhone could soar to as much as $3500.

There’s still plenty of uncertainty about what happens next, and how companies like Apple will respond to tariffs remains to be seen.

This hasn’t stopped some US customers reportedly rushing to Apple stores to buy its smartphones.

The BBC spoke to shoppers outside an Apple Store in New York who had bought products in fear of a potential price hike.

Anthony Cacioppo, a 53-year-old DJ and security technician, purchased the new iPhone.

“I really didn’t need a phone… but I’m not ready to pay double the price,” he said.

Bruce Conroy, a hair stylist, told the BBC that even if prices had risen considerably he “would have stuck with Apple products” – though potentially delayed his purchase of a new iPad.

“I bought it because the tariffs are coming, I want to buy before the prices go up and I expect they will,” said Julia Baumann, a personal finance editor, of her new MacBook.

We will likely have to wait until the autumn to see how much the next iPhone will cost.

But if it looks like costs incurred by tariffs will result in higher price tags, some may look to rival handsets or second-hand devices.

CCS Insight estimates that 5.5m second-hand smartphones will be sold in the UK in 2025, representing 29.7% of the total market.

The iPhone remains one of the most expensive smartphones on the market – and brands such as Google and Samsung offer phones with similar features at a lower cost.

The other option, and perhaps the most cost-effective, could be for people to skip upgrades to newer iPhone models and look to slightly older, cheaper versions.

“The path of least resistance would be to keep the smartphone they already have for longer,” said Mr Wood.

It was a typical Friday lunchtime in Beirut’s southern suburb. Then, a single warning, posted in Arabic on X by a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), triggered panic and chaos in the densely populated area known as Dahieh.

“Urgent warning to those in the southern suburb of Beirut,” it read. The post included a map of a residential area, marking a building in red and two nearby schools. The IDF identified the building as a Hezbollah facility, and ordered the immediate evacuation of the schools.

An air strike was imminent.

What followed were scenes of sheer panic. Parents rushed towards the threatened area to collect their children from the schools, while residents fled in the opposite direction, visibly shaken and fearful.

“It was total chaos,” recalls Ahmad Alama, the director of St Georges School, one of those highlighted on the map. “We tried to contain the situation as much as we could, but it was crazy.”

The area was soon cleared, and Israeli forces destroyed the marked building, which they said was a warehouse storing Hezbollah drones.

The strike, carried out two weeks ago, was the first on Dahieh – an area with a strong Hezbollah presence – since a ceasefire ending the war between Israel and Hezbollah took effect last November.

It came hours after two rockets were launched from southern Lebanon towards northern Israel. Israel said it intercepted one rocket, while the other fell short of the border.

Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant and political group, denied involvement. Israel described the rocket fire as a ceasefire “violation”, while the office of Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, condemned the Israeli strike as a “violation of the agreement”.

“We thought the war had ended with the ceasefire,” says Mr Alama, “But unfortunately, we’re still living it every day.”

• What is Hezbollah and why has it been fighting Israel in Lebanon?
• Hezbollah at crossroads after blows from war weaken group

Despite the ceasefire, Israel has continued near-daily strikes on people and targets it says are linked to Hezbollah, saying it is acting to stop Hezbollah from rearming. The strikes have mainly occurred in southern Lebanon, but the recent bombings in Dahieh have sparked particular alarm.

On 1 April, a second Israeli strike hit the area – this time without warning – killing a Hezbollah commander and three other people, according to the Lebanese health ministry.

Mr Alama has been running St Georges School for 30 years. It serves around 1,000 children of all ages, boys and girls. Although religion is part of the curriculum for older pupils, he describes the school as secular.

It is also well-known in the community for its association with the Lebanese pop star and talent show judge, Ragheb Alama – Ahmad Alama’s brother and the school’s owner.

The recently destroyed building lies just metres from the school. It isn’t the only nearby scene of devastation. Another building, opposite one of St Georges’ gates, remains a massive pile of rubble – brought down by Israeli air strikes before the ceasefire.

During the war, the schools were closed. They didn’t have to deal with situations such as the one they faced. Now reopened, they are braced for the possibility of more bombing.

The school has devised evacuation plans, designating emergency meeting points in the basement and routes for pupils and staff to follow in case of any danger.

There are also new communication plans with parents to prevent a repeat of the chaos of last month’s strike. Children are now routinely reminded of these procedures, with regular evacuation drills.

Students, staff, and parents alike are traumatised by what happened, Mr Alama says.

Initially, the school considered cutting back on extracurricular activities to make up for lost learning, but they changed their minds.

“We decided otherwise,” Mr Alama says. “Pupils shouldn’t pay the price for something they aren’t responsible for. We’ve actually ended up increasing these activities – these kids need to release some of the pressure on them.”

Nearly five months into the ceasefire, the return of Israeli air strikes to Beirut has intensified fears of a return to all-out war.

The ceasefire was meant to end more than 13 months of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which began when Hezbollah launched attacks on Israeli military positions the day after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, saying it was acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

• The Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal

The conflict escalated in September 2024, when Israel launched a devastating air campaign across Lebanon and invaded the south of the country.

Dahieh, deserted during the war, is bustling again. Shops have reopened, hookah smokers are back at crowded cafes, and the suburb seems as busy as before, with its persistently paralysing traffic.

But amid these signs of normality, scenes of destruction serve as a reminder of the pounding this area endured just months ago.

Some 346 buildings in the area were destroyed and another were 145 partly damaged by Israeli air strikes, according to a municipal official. Israel said it targeted Hezbollah facilities and weapons caches.

In many neighbourhoods, the rubble is still being cleared. The roar of bulldozers and jackhammers drilling into piles of debris is almost constant.

Some of the mounds of debris have Hezbollah flags planted on top of them, while large and small portraits of Hassan Nasrallah, the former Hezbollah leader killed by Israel during the war, line the roads.

However, amid the customary signs of defiance, many are now expressing a deep concern not always voiced – at least in front of cameras – by residents of Dahieh.

“The destruction is terrifying. I see the destroyed buildings and I cry,” says Sawsan Hariri, the headteacher of Burj High School, also in Dahieh.

The school, which also sits opposite a flattened building, sustained damage from nearby strikes.

“It’s depressing. Walking on the street, driving your car – it’s all just depressing.”

Ms Hariri used to live on the top floor of the school building with her husband and daughter, but their home has been destroyed. They now rent a flat nearby.

Before the war, Burj High School had around 600 pupils. Now, it has barely 100.

Many parents are reluctant to send their children back amid the scenes of destruction and the constant buzz of machinery. Others were concerned about the health risks, with thick dust still filling the air.

After the ceasefire, owners of the private school made some basic repairs at their own expense.

Hezbollah, which is banned as a terrorist organisation in many countries but in Lebanon is a political and social movement as well as a paramilitary force, has given those who lost their homes $12,000 for a year’s rent and has offered to cover the costs of repairs to apartments. However, schools and other institutions have not received any aid.

The Lebanese government has pledged to set up a reconstruction fund, which the World Bank estimates will cost $11bn nationwide. But international donors are believed to be insisting on the disarmament of Hezbollah and political reform – conditions that appear a distant prospect.

Though the clearing of rubble is expected to be over by the end of the year, few expect large-scale rebuilding to follow anytime soon.

This week saw the global markets ride a rollercoaster led by Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, Madonna bury the hatchet with Elton John, and new details revealed about how the Titanic sank.

But how much attention did you pay to what else has been going on in the world over the past seven days?

Quiz compiled by Ben Fell.

In the mood for more? Try last week’s quiz, or have a go at something from the archives.

Máximo Peña had been coming to the Jet Set nightclub every single Monday for the past 30 years.

This week, excited to see a concert by the popular Dominican singer Rubby Pérez, he took his wife and his sister. Now all three are buried beneath the rubble of the collapsed discotheque, after the roof caved in part way through the performance, leaving at least 218 dead.

“I haven’t heard any news about any of them,” said Shailyn Peña, Máximo’s 17-year-old daughter as she sat on a wall outside the devastated venue.

“It was just another Monday night for them. In fact, my dad invited my mum to come too but at the last minute she decided not to go. It was a blessing in disguise.”

Behind her as she spoke to me on Wednesday afternoon, a team of rescue workers was meticulously going through the rubble inside the building, listening for the slightest sound of a survivor beneath them.

They had been joined by Israeli and Mexican search teams and were using sophisticated heat-seeking equipment to try to locate anyone still alive.

Shailyn told me her cousin was one of the rescue workers, sifting through the debris for her own uncle, which she said brought her peace of mind that a relative was inside doing everything in her power to try to track Máximo down.

But the uncertainty and the endless wait for information were becoming unbearable, Shailyn said.

“I feel the urge to just go in there and push aside all the rocks and pull him out. But as much as I want to, I really can’t. I just have to sit here and wait it out.”

Hours later, the government released a statement saying that “all reasonable chances of finding more survivors have been exhausted” and so the search and rescue mission would give way to the recovery of bodies.

The authorities have been doing what they can to keep the public informed, delivering grim updates on the number of dead, which has risen steadily with every passing hour.

At regular intervals, teams have been emerging from the site carrying bodies covered by blankets on stretchers.

Earlier on, some people were brought out alive, bolstering the hopes of the relatives.

The head of the Emergency Operations Center (COE) said that since the roof collapse, 189 people had been “rescued alive”.

But by Wednesday evening, officials said that given the conditions at the site observed by the more than 300 rescue workers, they would conclude the rescue phase of their operations “within hours”.

The president of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, has declared three days of national mourning, a reflection of the scale of the tragedy unfolding at the site.

Among those confirmed to have lost their lives in the accident were some well-known national figures including Pérez himself, two much-loved former baseball players, Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco, and a regional governor. And alongside them, scores of merengue music-lovers and Pérez fans also died in the collapse.

For now, the authorities’ focus remains on the recovery operation. However, eventually the questions will turn to the cause of the collapse and government investigators will have to provide meaningful answers to the families in due course.

One theory is already circulating outside the venue. Many are pointing the finger of blame at a fire at the nightclub around two years ago. Some fear the blaze structurally weakened the site or that any repairs carried out were insufficient or not up to code.

The owner of the Jet Set nightclub, Antonio Espaillat, delivered a video message via social media expressing his condolences and those of “all the Jet Set family”, to the victims’ relatives.

He also insisted that he and his team were co-operating “totally and transparently with the authorities” over the disaster.

Shailyn Peña has heard about the fire at the nightclub and is among those who thinks it played a part. However, for now she has bigger worries. Despite the family’s efforts to protect them, her younger stepsisters found out that their father and mother were trapped under the rubble from other children at school.

They are “terrified”, she added.

It is Shailyn’s birthday on Thursday, a day she would normally celebrate alongside her father, stepmother and aunt.

Instead, she must endure it in the worst possible circumstances, caught inside the worst such tragedy in her country’s modern history.

It sounds like something from a science fiction movie, but Stephen Eisele is confident that one day his company will open a data centre on the Moon.

“The way we see it is that by putting the data centre in space, you’re really offering unparalleled security,” says the president of Lonestar Data Holdings.

Last month, the Florida-based firm claimed to have successfully tested a tiny data centre the size of a hardback book that hitched a ride to the Moon on the Athena Lunar Lander from US space exploration firm Intuitive Machines. This, in turn, had been launched by a rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Data centres are the vast warehouses that house stacks of computers that store and process data used by websites, companies and governments.

Lonestar says that putting them on the Moon will offer customers secure, reliable data processing, while taking advantage of unlimited solar energy to power them.

And while space-based data centres may sound far-fetched, it’s an idea that’s really starting to take off.

Part of the reason is rocketing demand and the difficulty of finding suitable sites on Earth.

The ever-expanding use of artificial intelligence (AI) computing has seen a massive increase in the amount of data that needs to be stored and processed around the world.

As a result, the need for data centres has shot up too, with annual demand set to rise between 19% and 22% by 2030, according to global management consultants McKinsey.

New facilities are springing up all the time – but it’s getting hard to find places to put them. Data centres are large and sprawling, and use enormous amounts of power and water for cooling.

And increasingly local people don’t want them built nearby.

Putting data centres in space – either in orbit around Earth, or on the Moon – the theory goes, means they can’t do quite so much harm. There’s more-or-less unlimited energy available from the sun, for example, and no neighbours to complain about the environmental impacts.

Not only that, space-based data centres could specialise in services for spacecraft and other space facilities, with space-to-space data transfers quicker than from the ground.

Last summer, a European Commission-funded feasibility study into orbiting data centres published its results.

The Ascend report by carried out by Thales Alenia Space – a joint venture between French and Italian aerospace groups Thales and Leonardo – published its results.

It determined that deploying data centres in space “could transform the European digital landscape”, and be “more eco-friendly”.

Thales Alenia Space envisages building a constellation of 13 satellites measuring a combined 200m-by-80m, and with a total data processing power of around 10 megawatts (MW). That’s equivalent to a current medium-sized, ground-based data centre, with some 5,000 servers.

Based on technologies that already exist or are under development, the satellites would be assembled in orbit.

Damien Dumestier, Ascend project architect at Thales Alenia Space, says that for space-based data centres to be more environmentally friendly than existing ground-based ones it will be necessary to make the rocket launchers 10 times less emissive over their lifecycles. He says this looks possible.

“But in order to cover the new technology’s developments and the production capacity ramp-up to benefit from scale, we have to consider larger system capacity, around 200MW, meaning 200 of our envisaged large space infrastructures and 200 launches,” he says.

“The main question is when an adapted launcher will be ready. Depending on the investment and decisions to be taken, this could be done for 2030 or 2035, meaning commercial viability before 2037.”

However, despite this optimism from firms aiming to develop the technology, Dr Domenico Vicinanza, associate professor of intelligent systems and data science at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, says there are numerous big hurdles before space-based data centres can be a viable proposition.

“Even with the contribution and advancements of companies like SpaceX, launching hardware into orbit remains extremely expensive,” he says. “Each kilogram sent into space costs thousands of dollars.

“Space-based data centres would require not only the data equipment but also the infrastructure to protect, power, and cool them. All of which add up in weight and complexity.”

Cooling the equipment will be a particular problem, because even though space is cold, conventional cooling systems don’t work well without gravity.

Meanwhile, space weather can damage electronics, while the ever-increasing quantity of space debris puts the physical hardware at risk.

Dr Vicinanza adds: “And fixing problems in orbit is far from straightforward. Even with robotics and automation, there are limits to what can be repaired remotely.

“A big hardware failure might necessitate a costly human mission, potentially making downtime stretch for weeks or months.”

Yet firms like Lonestar are supremely confident, and say that they are responding to demand. “We wouldn’t be doing this if the customers weren’t asking us to,” says Mr Scott.

Its next target is to put a small data centre in orbit around the moon in 2027. Meanwhile, other companies are hoping to get there a bit faster, such as Washington state-based Starcloud, which is due to launch a satellite-based data centre next month, and start commercial operations in mid-2026.

Lonestar’s Mr Eidele says that space-based facilities offer more security for governments and businesses because their data does not need to be routed through terrestrial networks. Instead the information can be beamed directly from space to a dedicated ground station.

“It’s like having the vaults at the back of the bank,” he says. “You don’t have to open it every day, but it’s there to provide an extra measure of security, and the distance from the Earth to the moon offers that – it’s that much harder to hack, that much harder to access.”

The distance to the Moon means that data takes about a second and a half to reach the ground – this doesn’t matter for some applications, like longer-term data storage and backups.

And meanwhile, says Lonestar founder and chief executive Chris Stott, space-based data centres can help organisations meet regulations about data sovereignty – the need to hold peoples’ data in the country of origin.

“Under space law, that box of electronics is literally under the law of the licensing or launching state – it is an actual embassy in space,” he says.

Lonestar already has customers lined up, including the state of Florida and the Isle of Man government.

The young cast of Alex Garland’s film Warfare had to bond pretty quickly, to play a US military unit whose lives depended on each other, during the Iraq war in 2006.

Familiarity was crucial, so before filming began, the cast were sent on a three-week military bootcamp.

They lived together, learning military jargon and gun safety and were pushed beyond their limits – all of which brought them closer together.

First off though, they agreed to shave each other’s heads to look the part, boosting trust and familiarity.

“We shaved our heads on day one, and got tattoos at the end of the process, so it bookended the experience,” Poulter tells the BBC.

The actor, who recently appeared in The Bear and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, plays Captain Eric, who was part of a group of US soldiers and Iraqi scouts on a surveillance mission.

We see how it goes wrong, with devastating consequences.

Heartstopper star Connor plays newcomer Tommy, hitting home how young the soldiers were – he’s just turned 21, the same age Tommy was at the time.

The actor says the decision to get a shared tattoo with his castmates after filming wrapped was a “no-brainer”. The casts of The Avengers and The Lord of the Rings did the same thing after their final films.

Warfare’s actors decided their tattoo would say “Call On Me”, to reflect their brotherhood, while referencing Erik Prydz’s 2004 dance hit, which kicks the film off.

The cast features some other big names, including Reservation Dogs’ D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Shōgun’s Cosmo Jarvis, Stranger Things and the forthcoming Beatles biopic’s Joseph Quinn, and Riverdale’s Charles Melton.

“It was really formative for me,” Connor says about his time on the film. “I’ve made friends I really do believe I will know for a long time.

“We all wanted to commemorate it – we are so proud of the work we’ve done together.”

-The movie is based entirely on a real-life mission that took place during the Iraq war, and is built on the memories of the US soldiers who were there.

The group was embedded in the home of an ordinary Iraqi family, who we briefly see in the film, in Ramadi – an area controlled by Al-Qaeda forces.

The military’s goal had been to slip into and observe the area under the cover of darkness, to ensure the safe passage of ground forces there the next day.

What they didn’t know what that they were next door to an insurgent house, making them the target of an attack.

Shot in real-time, Warfare has no music or flashbacks, so there’s no let-up for the audience. You’re dropped into the thick of the action for the whole film.

The soldiers in command have to make split-second decisions amid the pain and chaos, with the Iraqi family caught in the crossfire.

Oscar nominee Garland, whose back catalogue includes the 28 Days film franchise and Ex Machina, got the idea for Warfare when he was making last year’s film Civil War.

He was working on the battle scenes with Hollywood stunt man and gunfight co-ordinator Ray Mendoza.

“During the edit process of Civil War, I was able to really focus on some of the work Ray had done, and how sophisticated and how nuanced it was,” Garland recalls.

They got chatting about Mendoza’s previous life as a US Navy Seal, and about the Ramadi operation, where he was its communications officer.

Mendoza said he’d always wanted to make a film about that mission.

The veteran had a very big reason for wanting to recreate what happened that day – to help replace the lost memories of his colleague Elliott Miller.

Miller, a former Navy Seal, was so badly injured in Ramadi that he suffered traumatic brain injury and memory loss, and had to have a leg amputated.

During the mission, Mendoza carried the unconscious soldier to the rescue tank that ultimately saved his life.

“Elliott doesn’t remember it, and when he woke up, he had a lot of questions,” Mendoza says.

“No matter how many maps we drew, or how many times we wrote it out – without that core memory, I think he’s had a hard time.

“It just raised more questions than answers. So I wanted to recreate this one.”

So Garland and Mendoza decided to make Warfare together, sharing writing and directing credits, and dedicating the film to Miller.

The crucial question is whether seeing the film helped Miller piece things together.

“It did, yeah – he was a sponge,” Mendoza says.

“We walked him through it – he had a lot of questions, he’s got kids that have questions.

“It’s now a film memory, but it’s as close as he’s gonna have – he’s super grateful.”

Miller was played by Jarvis, who calls him “a funny guy… he’s great – a living embodiment of perseverance”.

It was a “unique situation to be in when you’re entrusted with portraying somebody that’s sitting right across from you”, Jarvis said, about having the person he was playing actually on set.

“But because he didn’t remember [what happened], a lot of my references had to come from his colleagues.”

The soldiers’ casting has caused some excitement online, with some publications breathily calling the actors “all of the internet’s boyfriends” and “red hot rising stars”.

Garland arches an eyebrow at this, and Mendoza jumps in to talk about why those actors were chosen.

“I’ve said this to them, so I’m not trying to offend them, but we weren’t looking for the best actors. They’re all great actors. We were looking for the right actors,” he says.

“So what that means is their willingness to push their bodies past a comfort level that they’re maybe not used to. ‘You’re gonna be exhausted. You’re gonna be required to rely on other people. It’s not about you, it’s about the team’.

“And the ones that jump at that opportunity, you’re like, ‘Yep, that’s the attitude that we need’.”

Collating and cross-checking the soldiers’ memories was a big job, largely undertaken by Garland.

“I think there’s an inherent value in attempting to be honest and truthful about something as serious and significant as war,” he says.

He shot the film in a studio in a suburb north of London, on a former World War Two airfield, making it in real-time to recreate “a real incident of combat… as honestly, forensically and accurately as possible”.

Not surprisingly, while sharing credits with Garland, former US Navy Seal Mendoza ran the actors’ bootcamp.

He was played by Woon-A-Tai, who calls him “a brilliant instructor who instilled a lot of confidence in us”, while also making gun safety a top priority.

The actor was also fascinated by the narrative not being “dramatised or Hollywoodised”.

“To see these guys not obey orders – and do what they needed to save their platoon was interesting to me,” he says, talking about the soldiers’ evacuation process.

Mendoza thinks the film may also help veterans who are struggling to express what warfare can be like.

“Some of these things are harder to explain in words,” he says. “So art imagery is how I’m able to communicate that.”

Connor echoes this, saying: “A lot of these men are very much less inclined to talk about themselves in these situations, whether it be to be due to humility, or a difficulty in really articulating it.

“A lot of them just don’t really enjoy talking about their involvement.”

The film has been called “the most harrowing – and honest – depiction of modern combat ever made” by the Telegraph, while the New Yorker said it offers a “hyperrealist rebuke of the American war movie”.

The Guardian said the “film-makers’ message gets lost in the deafening blizzard of battle”, while Empire added: “It may well be cinema’s most effective, purest anti-war film: there is no sentimentality, no hand-wringing, but most significantly not a second of it makes war look cool, or attractive.”

Poulter says he admires the film-makers’ determination to make Warfare purely factual.

“Hopefully this film contributes to a better understanding of just how negative, and how the consequences of war are characterised by a lot of loss…

“I think this is as much an anti-war film as you can possibly hope to hope to see.”

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has said a helicopter crashed into the Hudson River and killed all six people onboard including a family of five from Spain.

It is very much an active investigation, but here is what we know so far about the fatal crash:

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has given some details about the fatal helicopter ride.

She said the helicopter was operated by New York Helicopters and took off from the Downtown Skyport on the lower side of Manhattan at 14:59 local time (19:59 BST).

According to the popular real-time flight-tracking website Flightradar24, the helicopter was in the air for about 15 minutes.

It started its route heading towards the Statue of Liberty and pivoted north towards the George Washington Bridge.

Then, the helicopter circled back down the Hudson along the New Jersey side and plunged into the River Hudson near a pier in Hoboken, New Jersey, at 15:15 local time (20:15 BST).

The helicopter was upside-down when it hit the water, Tisch added.

• Hudson River helicopter crash kills family of five

Police boats assisted in the rescue efforts and Bruce Wall, who was nearby when the crash happened, described what he saw.

“It started falling apart in mid-air and then the tail came off and then just flipped over in mid-air and started falling to the ground,” he said.

In total there were six people onboard the helicopter when it went down – including one American pilot.

According to reports, the Spanish family of two adults and three children were taking the helicopter ride to see sights of New York.

Dive teams worked to recover the bodies and despite CPR efforts all six people have been pronounced dead.

Four victims were pronounced dead on scene, the other two victims were pronounced dead at an area hospital, officials have said.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has not released any names of the victims.

The cause of the crash is currently under investigation and early details are vague.

But, NYPD Commissioner Tisch has said the “aircraft lost control” and hit the water “just a few feet off the coast of a pier”.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said the helicopter was a Bell 206.

Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will investigate – with the NTSB leading the investigation.

Thursday’s incident was the deadliest helicopter crash in New York City since at least 2018, according to the New York Times.

In that incident, all five passengers drowned and only the pilot survived when a sightseeing helicopter that was flying with its doors off fell into the East River and flipped over.

The corner shop Ramji Dharod has manned for over six decades is now on the brink of closure.

The store sits in a bylane in the central Indian city of Mumbai’s busy shopping precinct, and has served the community for 75 years.

Dharod began coming to the shop with his father when he was just 10. These days, he mostly sits idle, waiting for an occasional customer to walk in.

Behind him, cardboard boxes of unsold biscuit packets and snacks show a “stock clearance sale” sign posted on them.

“I wouldn’t get a minute to breathe a few years ago, but now I rarely get anyone coming,” says the septuagenarian wryly. “They are all shopping online. I’ve decided to retire and down the shutters.”

As 10-minute online deliveries by “quick commerce” apps like Zomato, BlinkIt and Zepto pervade urban India, hundreds of thousands of neighbourhood stores across cities have closed down.

A lobby group of consumer product distributors estimated that number to be 200,000 last October, while the municipal body of the southern city of Chennai estimated 20% of small grocers and 30% of larger departmental stores had shut down in the city in the past 5 years.

Sunil Kenia who runs a provision store right beside Dharod’s shop says he’s still in business only because his family owns the shop. Those on rent are no longer able to stay afloat, he says.

“It started going downhill after the Covid lockdowns. Business is at 50% of what we did before the pandemic,” Kenia told the BBC.

Most of his revenue now comes from wholesale customers – hawkers or those selling street-side snacks. The retail customer has all but “vanished”, he says, because of the convenience of mobile deliveries.

Mumbai-based graphic designer Monisha Sathe is among the millions of urban Indians who’ve stopped their weekly run to the market because of the ease of quick commerce.

“Lugging groceries back home was a big pain,” says Sathe. And occasionally, when she took out her car, navigating narrow market lanes and finding a parking slot would be a challenge.

Sathe says she misses the human interaction she had with the grocers and vegetable vendors and even the variety of fresh produce on sale – but for her, the balance still tilts in favour of online deliveries because of how much easier it has made her life.

A recent survey by consultancy PwC shows some 42% of urban consumers in India’s big cities think like Sathe, especially preferring quick delivery for their urgent needs. And these shifts in buying behaviour have led to three out of 10 retailers reporting a negative impact on their business, with a 52% drop in essential goods sales.

But to what extent is quick commerce really hollowing out the Indian high street?

There’s no doubt general trade – which includes grocery stores, corner shops and even big retail outlets – has come under threat, says Ankur Bisen, a partner at Technopak retail advisory. But at least for now “quick commerce is still a three-four city story”, he says. Nearly all of their sales come from these cities.

Lightning fast deliveries bucked the global trend and became successful in India largely due to a large concentration of people staying in urban clusters.

They are serviced through low-rent “dark stores” – or small shops dedicated to delivery and not open to the public – in densely populated areas, enabling economies of scale.

But the precarious nature of demand and fragmented demographics of smaller towns could make it expensive for quick commerce players to expand and make money beyond the metros, says Mr Bisen.

There’s little doubt though that these online deliveries will disrupt trade in the longer run.

Bain and Company expects quick commerce to grow at over 40% annually through to 2030, driven by expansion across “geographies”.

And this has made traditional retail nervous.

Trade organisations – like the Confederation of All India Traders, or the All India Consumer Products Distributors Federation which calls itself the voice of India’s 13m retailers – have made urgent and repeated pleas to the government against this breakneck expansion.

They allege that these companies are using billions of dollars in venture capital funds to engage in anti-competitive practices like “predatory pricing” or “deep discounting” which has further distorted the playing field for mom-and-pop shops.

The BBC spoke to several small retailers who shared these concerns. Mr Bisen too agreed there’s evidence of such practices in the clusters that quick commerce companies operate.

Swiggy, Zepto and Blinkit, who primarily control this market, did not agree to comment on the BBC’s queries on these allegations.

But a source within one of the quick commerce companies told the BBC the discounting was done by traders on the platform and not by them.

The source also said that contrary to the binary narrative of the “big guy versus small guy”, online deliveries were solving real-world challenges for people for whom going to the market was a “traumatic” experience.

“Think of women or senior citizens – they don’t want to be harassed or navigate potholes and traffic,” the source said. “Also consider the small brands that sell on our platform – they never get shelf space in physical shops where only the big names are displayed. We’ve democratised the market.”

Analysts say, the sheer diversity of India in terms of its stages of development, levels of income and infrastructure will mean that in the end all retail models – small corner shops, organised big retailers and quick commerce platforms – will cohabit in the country.

This is not a “winner takes all market”, says Mr Bisen, giving the example of e-commerce which came into India in 2010 and was meant to sound the death knell of local retailers.

Even after all these years, only 4% of all shopping is done online in India.

But the ripples caused by quick commerce should be a warning for physical retailers, say analysts, to improve their marketing and integrate technology to use both online and offline channels to give their consumers a better shopping experience.

Competing with click-of-a-button delivery means it can no longer be business as usual for the millions of corner shops who’ve existed for decades, with little or no innovation.

Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa has been cast in a new play as Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, the Royal Shakespeare Company has announced.

Born With Teeth will explore the relationship between a 27-year-old Marlowe and rising star William Shakespeare, as they are forced to work together on a new piece of work.

Gatwa said he was “so excited” to be appearing in the play, which he said was “like no version of Shakespeare and Marlowe that I’ve ever seen before”.

Shakespeare will be portrayed by Edward Bluemel, who has starred in Killing Eve, A Discovery of Witches, and alongside Gatwa in Sex Education.

The show will play for 11 weeks at the Wyndham’s Theatre from 13 August.

Born With Teeth, written Liz Duffy Adams, will take an “irreverent” look at the “high-octane world of two of the theatre’s greatest literary icons”, the RSC said.

Set in the backroom of a pub in 1591, the show sees Marlowe and Shakespeare forced to come together across three secret meetings to collaborate on a new play.

It’s a dangerous time for artists in England, a country rife with paranoia where spies are everywhere, and as the rivals duel with each other, they become increasingly tempted by the idea of betrayal.

The play premiered in Houston in 2022 and has since been performed around the US in Oregon, California and Florida, but this will mark its West End debut.

The UK production will be directed by Daniel Evans, whose previous stage credits include a production of American Buffalo starring Damian Lewis and John Goodman, and the James Graham play Quiz, about the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire coughing scandal.

In a statement, Bluemel said he felt “incredibly proud and excited” to be working with Gatwa and Evans.

“To be stepping into the shoes of a young William Shakespeare is a huge thrill for any actor and I can’t wait to get started,” he said.

“When I read Liz Duffy Adams’ script, I was instantly drawn into the high-stakes world of these two rival playwrights and the incredible, creative chemistry they share.

“There’s a real freshness and vitality to Liz’s writing that speaks directly to our world, and I can’t wait for West End audiences to experience it for the first time.”

Gatwa said: “Liz Duffy Adams has written an exceptional play that is smart, dark, sexy, sharp and funny! There’s a lot to get one’s teeth into.

“This is like no version of Shakespeare and Marlowe that I’ve ever seen before, and I can’t wait for audiences to join us for the ride”.

In a review after the play’s Texas premiere, Broadway World’s Christian Gill said: “It’s one part fan fiction, one part examination of egos, and another part commentary of the destructive capabilities of societal expectations.

“We spend ninety minutes watching a game between the best writers of their time.”

Rohan Preston of the Minnesota Star Tribune added: “The play cuts to the bone as Kit and Will trade barbs, ambitions and, ultimately, places in a history play that rewrites our understanding of these two figures.”

Gatwa got his breakthrough role playing Eric in Netflix’s Sex Education and has also appeared in Barbie.

He was cast in Doctor Who in 2022, taking over the lead role from Jodie Whittaker. His second season as the Doctor due to begin airing this weekend.

Gatwa’s casting in Born With Teeth comes after unconfirmed reports that he is set to leave Doctor Who, and that the show may be facing the axe. Neither Gatwa, the BBC or Disney+ have commented on the reports.

A woman in Australia has unknowingly given birth to a stranger’s baby, after her fertility clinic accidentally implanted another woman’s embryos into her.

The mix-up at Monash IVF in Brisbane, Queensland has been blamed on human error, Australian media reports.

“On behalf of Monash IVF, I want to say how truly sorry I am for what has happened,” CEO Michael Knaap said, adding that everyone at the fertility clinic was “devastated” at the mistake.

Last year, the same clinic paid a A$56m (£26.8m) settlement to hundreds of patients whose embryos were destroyed despite them being viable.

According to a spokesperson for Monash IVF, staff became aware of the problem in February when the birth parents asked to transfer their remaining frozen embryos to another clinic.

Monash has confirmed that an embryo from another patient had been mistakenly thawed and transferred to the wrong person, resulting in the birth of a child.

The clinic has launched an investigation and Mr Knaap said the clinic was confident it was an isolated incident.

Monash said when the incident was discovered it activated its crisis management team and within a week the Brisbane clinic started meeting affected patients to apologise and offer them support, the firm said.

The company has also reported the incident to relevant regulators, including the Reproductive Technology Accreditation Committee, and voluntarily reported the incident to the new Queensland assisted reproductive technology regulator.

Last year, Monash IVF reached a A$56m (£26.8m) settlement in a landmark class action with 700 former patients for destroying embryos after inaccurate genetic testing.

The case found that about 35% of the embryos, which were actually normal and could have resulted in a viable pregnancy, were found to be abnormal by the faulty screening.

IVF – or in vitro fertilisation – involves the removal of eggs from a woman’s ovaries, which are then fertilised with sperm in a laboratory. When the fertilised eggs become embryos, they are inserted into the woman’s uterus.

It is an expensive process and not successful every time.

In 2021 there were 20,690 babies born as a result of IVF in Australia and New Zealand, according to a report by the University of New South Wales.

Best-selling author Jillian Lauren has been shot by police and charged with attempted murder, after getting caught up in a search for hit-and-run suspects.

The shooting occurred amidst a chase through the streets of Los Angeles on Tuesday, as officers tried to find three suspects who were alleged to have fled the scene of a car accident.

Lauren became involved when one of the alleged suspects ended up on the street where she lives with her husband, Weezer bassist Scott Shriner.

The 51-year-old emerged from her house with a weapon and refused to drop it despite “numerous” demands, according to an LAPD press release. She “then pointed the handgun at the officers,” who shot her in the shoulder.

The shooting took place in the back yard of her home in the hip Eagle Rock neighbourhood in the northeast of Los Angeles.

According to local media reports, Lauren had opened fire at one of the alleged hit-and-run suspects after they tried to break into her property.

After being shot by police, the 51-year-old ran back into her house, where she stayed for approximately half an hour, before coming back outside with her babysitter and surrendering to police.

Both women were taken into custody, and Lauren was treated for non-life-threatening injuries at a local hospital.

A nine-millimetre handgun was recovered from her house, and she was later charged with attempted murder.

The California Highway Patrol arrested the suspected hit-and-run driver shortly afterwards, according to agency spokesperson Daniel Keene.

The suspect was found wearing nothing but his boxer shorts in the backyard of a home near Shriner’s residence.

News helicopters had previously filmed him removing his clothes and jumping into a swimming pool, as well as watering the property’s plants, in what appeared to be an attempt to blend into the neighbourhood.

His identity has not been released. The other two suspects are still at large.

Lauren, who also goes by the name Jillian Shriner, is the author of two bestselling memoirs, including 2010’s Some Girls: My Life in a Harem – which described her experiences in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei.

In 2023, she also published Behold the Monster: Facing America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, based on interviews with the serial killer Samuel Little, who confessed to committing 93 murders between 1970 and 2005.

She married Scott Shriner in 2005, two years before he joined Weezer, the US band known for skewed alt-rock anthems such as Buddy Holly and Hash Pipe.

Earlier this week, the band were confirmed alongside Ed Sheeran as last-minute additions to the line-up of California’s Coachella music festival, which kicks off on Friday.

It is not known whether Lauren’s arrest will affect their plans to play the festival.

A mother is pleading to be reunited with her 10-year-old son who she has not seen in four years.

Lobna Yakout, who was raised in Northern Ireland, told BBC News NI her son Zayn was taken by her ex-husband while she was living in Egypt.

Her former husband, Karim Selim, 37, has since been convicted of the murder and torture of three women in Cairo, last year, according to local media reports. He has been sentenced to death.

The BBC has seen an Egyptian court document, from July, showing that Lobna has custody of Zayn. As far as Lobna is aware, this is still the legal position.

Lobna’s MP, Sinn Féin’s John Finucane, who has been helping her, said it was a “distressing” situation.

She has not seen Zayn since 2021, but said she had made numerous attempts to reunite with him.

Her son was born in Michigan, in the US, but the family moved to Egypt when he was two. She also brought Zayn on a visit to Belfast when he was one.

Lobna said she was in an abusive marriage with Selim for more than seven years and that she feared for her life before leaving him in 2020.

“It got to a point where I just couldn’t stay,” she told BBC News NI.

“I took my son and left. He didn’t contact us for six months, then he wanted us back.”

However, in 2021, at a short meeting with his father in Egypt, she said Zayn was taken away from her and she has not seen him since.

“I have been fighting to see him,” she said.

Lobna told the BBC that her ex tried to kill her and sent threatening messages.

It was then that she fled back to Belfast.

“No-one believed that he would try to kill me. I knew deep down he was going to kill me,” she said.

When the teacher came back to Belfast she trained in aesthetics to make money for her legal battle.

“I didn’t want to be a teacher and have one location where I could be found, so with aesthetics I can plan my location and clients,” she said.

In May 2024, she was then told the shocking news that he been accused of killing three people.

Selim was convicted last August of the murders of three women in Egypt.

She told BBC News NI she was able to get a “forced divorce” – a Khula – where a wife initiates divorce proceedings – part of family law, which is based on Islamic principles, in November 2024.

Lobna understands that her son, who is also a US citizen, is in Egypt and was placed with her former mother-in-law following Karim’s arrest.

Lobna said living without her son had been very difficult and she felt “numb”.

She has moved back to Egypt and has hired a lawyer to try to get Zayn returned to her custody, but has been highly critical of initial Egyptian police efforts to get her son back.

Lobna has also taken to social media channels, like TikTok, where her videos have been getting millions of views.

Lobna said her attempts at communication with her former in-laws have not been successful.

She said she continued to message her mother-in-law on the only numbers she has for her about her son, but does not get a reply, adding that the number has now blocked her.

“As a soon as I wake up I text my son: ‘I miss you, love you, hope you’re ok.’

“I need my son back – I want him back. He is 10 now.

“He is going to have social media. Someone must have seen him.”

The BBC has spoken to Zayn’s paternal grandmother, who disputes Lobna’s account of the situation and said she was originally given custody after his father’s arrest and said this was because Lobna was not considered a fit person to look after her son.

Due to the four years that Lobna has not been in her son’s life, she believes Lobna effectively abandoned her son.

She disputes Lobna’s custody claim and said she is acting in his best interests and is worried about the impact of the publicity on him.

Lobna’s lawyer, Shady Abdellatif Abdel Rahman, specialises in family law.

“Her ex-husband is a serial killer and he is still in the courts and there is a decision to kill him,” he told BBC News NI.

He said the Prosecutor General in Egypt had ruled that Zayn should be given back to Lobna, but added “we need to know the location of the boy”.

He has a meeting with the Assistant Minister of Justice for International Cooperation planned and is hopeful this will help to find Zayn and “bring him to his mother”.

“Until now I have helped 80 kids to get back to their mothers around the world.”

He hopes Zayn will be 81.

Lobna’s other lawyer, Ashraf Farahat, who she hired in autumn 2024, has also been working on her behalf.

“The husband’s mother keeps changing her residence address, which makes it difficult to enforce the legal order,” he told BBC News NI in December.

He said “we are taking this to the next level of pursuing a legal order against the husband’s mother we are hoping this will force her to surrender the child”.

Zayn’s grandmother strenuously denies the allegations that she has changed her residence address.

Lobna believes she will see Zayn again but said she is going public because if she does not, “when he grows up he will know that his mother loves him and has been looking for him”.

“I will never stop looking for you until the day that I die.”

Lobna’s MP Sinn Féin’s John Finucane has been working on her behalf.

The North Belfast MP said he had been in contact with UK government ministers to ask what assistance they can provide to Lobna and her family to help bring her son home.

“I will continue working to assist Lobna and her family during this very distressing time,” he added.

In a letter, seen by BBC News NI, Finucane was told by the Middle East and North Africa Minister Hamish Falconer that consular officials were in touch with her and the US Embassy and the British Embassy had registered its concern with the Egyptian foreign ministry.

A British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office spokesperson told the BBC it had “provided support to a British woman in Egypt”.

BBC News NI understands that the US embassy has done a welfare check on Zayn.

When BBC News NI contacted the US State Department a spokeswoman said: “One of the highest priorities of the US Department of State is the safety and welfare of US citizens overseas, and we are dedicated to the safety and welfare of children – some of our most vulnerable citizens. Due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment.”

The BBC has also attempted to contact the Egyptian Interior Ministry and police.

If you have been affected by any of the content of this article, details of support can be found on the BBC Action Line website.

Prada has agreed to buy its smaller rival Versace in a billion dollar deal to unite two of the biggest designer fashion labels.

The deal to unite the two Italian brands has an estimated value of $1.36bn (£1.06bn), the Prada Group said on Thursday.

“We aim to continue Versace’s legacy celebrating and re-interpreting its bold and timeless aesthetic,” said Prada chairman Patrizio Bertelli.

The Prada Group already owns several other designer labels including Miu Miu and luxury footwear brand Church’s.

Its acquisition of Versace will create a multi-billion dollar luxury fashion group, putting the brands in a position to compete with the likes of French luxury fashion conglomerates LVMH and Kering.

Negotiations to buy Versace between Prada and Capri began in February.

The price Prada agreed to pay for Versace is significantly lower than the $2.15bn that Capri Holdings spent when it bought Versace in 2018.

The deal, which includes the brand’s debt pile, comes as Versace has been operating at a loss amid a slowdown in demand for luxury fashion worldwide.

Capri also owns other fashions brands including Jimmy Choo and Michael Kors.

Mr Bertelli said that the Prada Group would provide Versace with “a strong platform”.

“Versace has huge potential. The journey will be long and will require disciplined execution and patience,” added Andrea Guerra, the chief executive of Prada.

In March, Donatella Versace stepped down from her creative director role at the luxury brand after nearly 30 years.

She had held the position since 1997 and took over after the murder of her brother Gianni.

The 69-year-old has a new role as the chief brand ambassador for Versace, while Dario Vitale, who is a former design and image director of Miu Miu, took over as chief creative officer.

Evangelical Christian and former talk show host Mike Huckabee has been confirmed as the new US ambassador to Israel.

The former Arkansas governor has long been a fervent supporter of Israel. He strongly backs Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, which are considered illegal under international law – though Israel rejects this.

“This is a great day for the Israeli-American alliance,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, joining other members of his government in celebrating the outcome of Wednesday’s vote.

The Senate backed Huckabee by 53 to 46, largely along party lines, with only one Democrat, John Fetterman, supporting him.

Many Democrats have, however, been critical of his previous statements about the ongoing war in Gaza.

Democratic Senator Jerry Nadler last month said Huckabee was “woefully unfit” for the role.

Nadler also accused him of engaging in “brazen denial of the existence of the Palestinian people”, referencing a 2017 news conference where Huckabee said there was “no such thing as a Palestinian”.

Huckabee takes up his post at a time when there is little sign of any agreement on a fresh ceasefire in Gaza and the return of the remaining hostages.

He has also frequently expressed his support for annexing the occupied West Bank, with far-right politicians in Israel calling this year for Israeli sovereignty to be extended there.

But during his questioning by a Senate committee, he sought to play down some of his past statements, saying he would “carry out the president’s priorities”, not his, and denied backing the expulsion of Palestinians.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Huckabee’s appointment would “strengthen the unbreakable bond between our nations”, following a phone call between the two.

Israel’s prime minister also shared his congratulations, describing Huckabee as a “dear friend” in a post on X.

Netanyahu has just returned from Washington where he stood next to US President Donald Trump as he told the world he was conducting direct talks with Iran – Israel’s principal regional adversary – and praised Turkey’s President Erdogan – whom Israel regards as a potential threat in the remaking of Syria.

Speaking on Wednesday, the Trump said Huckabee would “be fantastic” in his new role.

“He’s going to bring home the bacon,” he said from the Oval Office, “even though bacon isn’t too big in Israel. I had to clear that up.”

Oscar-winning actress and Avengers star Scarlett Johansson is featuring twice at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, both in front of and behind the camera.

She will appear in Wes Anderson’s new project, The Phoenician Scheme, alongside Benicio Del Toro and Tom Hanks and off-screen in her first directorial project.

Her new film, Eleanor the Great, has also been revealed as part of the line-up and follows an elderly woman as she copes with the death of her best friend.

Johansson’s starring role comes as organisers of the film festival have said that they are committed to showcasing more work from female filmmakers.

Speaking at a press conference, Cannes president Iris Knobloch said she was “honoured to amplify” the voices of women.

Johansson, 40, who is best known for starring as Black Widow in the Avengers films, has entered her film into the second prize category.

Competing for the main Palme d’Or prize this year are 20 films, of which six come from female directors.

This includes Kelly Reichardt, whose drama The Mastermind, starring Josh O’Connor and John Magaro, will be showing at the festival.

Those looking to replace Oscar-winning Sean Baker, who won the top prize at Cannes for Anora last year, also include Iranian director Jafar Panahi and his film A Simple Accident, plus horror newcomer Ari Aster with Eddington, which stars Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone.

Robert De Niro will also make an appearance at the festival to receive an honorary Palme d’Or, while Tom Cruise’s final instalment of Mission: Impossible will also be shown.

It’s also been a busy few weeks for Harris Dickinson, who was recently announced as one of the new stars of Sir Sam Mendes’ Beatles quadrilogy.

Dickinson, who will play John Lennon in the films, will also be making a directing debut at Cannes.

The 28-year-old will show his film Urchin, about a homeless man in London, at the French festival.

Donald Trump announced a massive tariff plan last week that would have upended the global economic order as well as long-established trading relationships with America’s allies.

But that plan – or at least a significant part of it – is on ice after the president suspended higher tariffs on most countries for 90 days while leaning into a trade war with China.

So with this partial reversal, is Trump any closer to realising his goals on trade? Here’s a quick look at five of his key ambitions and where they now stand.

What Trump said:

Trump’s original trade plan packed a big punch that landed around the world, with a flat 10% baseline tariff on everyone (including some uninhabited islands) and additional “reciprocal” tariffs on the 60 counties that he said were the worst offenders.

It sent allies and adversaries scrambling, as they stared down the prospect of a debilitating blow to their economies.

The White House has been quick to boast about all the world leaders who have reached out to the president to make deals and offer trade concessions – “more than 75”, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Although the administration hasn’t released a list of all the countries that Trump said on Tuesday were “kissing my ass” and promising to do anything, the US has announced it is in negotiations with South Korea and Japan, among others.

The takeaway: America’s trading partners have 90 days to strike some sort of agreement with Trump, and the clock is ticking. But the fact that talks are happening indicates that the president has a good chance of getting something for his efforts.

• What does the tariff pause mean for global trade?

What Trump said:

Trump has said for decades that tariffs are an effective way of rebuilding America’s manufacturing base by shielding it from unfair foreign competition. While some factories may be able to increase production in current facilities, more substantive efforts take time. And for business leaders to pull the trigger on “reshoring” their production lines and investing in new US factories, they will want to know that the rules of the game are relatively stable.

The president’s on-again, off-again tariff moves over the past week are inherently unstable, however. For the moment, it’s difficult to predict where the final tariff levels will land and which industries will receive the greatest protections. It could be auto manufacturers and steel producers today, and high-tech electronics companies tomorrow.

The takeaway: When tariffs are applied and removed seemingly at the president’s whim, it’s much more likely that companies – both in the US and abroad – will hunker down and wait for the dust to settle before making any big commitments.

What Trump said:

After Trump’s tariff about-face on Wednesday, several White House officials – including Treasury Secretary Bessent – were quick to say that Trump’s goal was to drop the hammer on the real villain, China.

“They are the biggest source of the US trade problems,” Bessent told reporters, “and indeed they are the problem for the rest of the world.

If Trump wanted a battle of wills with China, testing each side’s tolerance for economic and political pain, he got one – even if the president and his aides have hinted that they are looking for an exit ramp.

On Wednesday, Trump said that he blamed past US leaders, not China, for the current trade dispute. The prior day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president would be “incredibly gracious” if China reaches out to make a deal.

The takeaway: Even if this showdown is one Trump wants, picking a fight with the second-largest economy in the world, with military power to match, comes at enormous risk. And along the way America may have alienated the allies it needs most in such a confrontation.

• Why Trump is hitting China – and what might happen next

What Trump said:

During last year’s presidential campaign, Trump regularly touted that his proposed tariffs would bring in vast sums in new revenue, which the US could then use to shrink its budget deficit, fund tax cuts and pay for new government programmes.

A study last year by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimated that a 10% universal tariff – which is what Trump has landed on for at least the next 90 days – would generate $2tn in new revenue over the next 10 years.

To put that in context, the tax cuts Congress recently included in its non-binding budget blueprint would cost approximately $5tn over the next 10 years, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The takeaway: Trump wanted more tariff revenue, and if he sticks with his baseline tariffs, plus the additional levies on certain imports and larger ones on China, he’s going to get it – at least until Americans switch to more domestic production, when the tariff money gusher could turn to a trickle.

• Is the US making $2bn a day from tariffs?

What Trump said:

Analysts and experts have offered a grab bag other explanations about why Trump made such an aggressive move on trade last week. Was he trying to drive down interest rates, or devalue the US dollar or bring the world to the table for a new, global agreement on trade? The president himself hasn’t spoken much about those kinds of elaborate schemes.

One thing he has talked about relentlessly, however, is his desire to lower costs for American consumers – and he has promised that his trade policy will help address this. While energy prices dipped in the week since Trump announced his tariff plan, that may have been a result of fears that the trade wars could trigger a global recession.

The consensus among economists is that new tariffs will drive up consumer prices, as tariffs are tacked on to the price of imports and, eventually, when there is less competition for US-made products. Last year, the Tax Foundation estimated that a 10% universal tariff would increase costs for American households by an average of $1,253 in its first year. Economists also warn that lower-income Americans will be hardest hit.

The takeaway: An increase in prices is an arrow moving in the wrong direction – and it represents an enormous potential liability for both Trump’s political standing and his party’s future electoral prospects.

Six people, including three children, were killed after a helicopter carrying a family of tourists crashed into the Hudson River in New York, authorities have said.

The family of five was from Spain and the sixth person was the pilot, New York City Mayor Eric Adams told reporters on Thursday. All were onboard the helicopter at the time of the crash, which is under investigation.

“Our hearts go out to the families,” Adams said.

Authorities have yet to release the identities, but they were widely named as Agustín Escobar and his wife Mercè Camprubí Montal, who were both executives at Siemens, and their children aged 4, 5 and 11.

Earlier, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the identities of the victims will not be released until the families are notified.

Video footage of the incident shows the helicopter falling out of the sky upside down and then splashing into the Hudson River.

Officials said the helicopter lost control soon after turning at the George Washington Bridge to move along the New Jersey shoreline.

The helicopter was operated by New York Helicopters and took off from the Downtown Skyport on the lower side of Manhattan at 14:59 local time (19:59 BST).

• What we know about the Hudson helicopter crash

The first calls of the crash came around 15:17 EDT (20:17 GMT) and rescue boats were launched immediately, New York Fire Commissioner Robert Tucker said.

“Swimmers were in the water shortly after the call,” he said.

Once on the scene, rescuers searched the water for victims or survivors and initiated “immediate life-saving measures” but the efforts were unsuccessful.

Four victims were pronounced dead on scene, while two others were pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, officials said.

The part of the river where the helicopter crashed is near Manhattan’s west side, an area known for its trendy shops and dining. It’s also near the main campus of New York University.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said the investigation into the crash of the Bell 206, a two-bladed helicopter, will be led by the National Transportation Safety Board.

In a social media post, President Trump said the crash was terrible and more details would soon be released into what happened.

“God bless the families and friends of the victims,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

The Bell 206 is commonly used by sightseeing companies, television new stations and police departments.

Michael Roth, the CEO of New York Helicopter Charter Inc, told CNN he was “devastated”.

“I’m a father, a grandfather and my wife hasn’t stopped crying since this afternoon,” he said. When asked about the maintenance of the helicopter, Mr Roth said, “It’s my director of maintenance who deals with that.”

Eyewitnesses who saw the crash told CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner, that they saw parts of the helicopter fall from the sky.

“I looked outside my window. I saw a few people running towards the water, and some people were acting pretty normal. So I was like oh, it might not be anything. Then I started to hear all the sirens come outside,” Jersey City resident Jenn Lynk said.

Another Jersey City resident, Ipsitaa Banigrhi, told CBS the crash sounded like thunder.

“I saw, like, black particles flying,” she said. “Again, I thought maybe it’s just like, dust, or birds, and then we heard all the emergency vehicles and sirens go by, and I think that’s when it was like, OK, what’s happening.”

This is not the first deadly tourist helicopter crash in New York City. In 2018, another tourist helicopter crashed into the East River and all five passengers drowned. Only the pilot survived.

In 2009, a helicopter carrying Italian tourists collided with a private plane over the Hudson River, killing nine.

India is the world’s fifth-largest and fastest-growing major economy.

Yet, a recent legacy of protectionism and inward-focused trade policies have held back its global competitiveness.

Its tariffs are high and the share of global exports remains under 2%. India’s vast domestic market has fuelled its growth – outpacing many others, economists argue, largely because the rest of the world is slowing. But in a turbulent, increasingly protectionist era, India’s instinct for self-reliance may oddly serve as a short-term shield.

As countries scramble to recalibrate in response to shifting US trade policies – like Donald Trump’s latest 90-day tariff pause after weeks of sabre-rattling – India’s relative detachment may have helped it weather shocks that have jolted more trade-dependent economies.

“India’s lower exposure to global goods trade could work in our favour. If export-driven economies slow down under tariff pressure, and we continue growing at 6%, we’ll start looking stronger by comparison – especially with our large domestic market to fall back on,” says Rajeswari Sengupta, an associate professor of economics at Mumbai-based Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research.

“Being trade-shy has turned into an advantage – but we can’t afford complacency. To seize new opportunities, India must stay nimble and open up more to trade gradually and strategically,” she adds.

It may not be easy, given India’s long and complicated relationship with trade barriers and tariffs.

In his book India’s Trade Policy: The 1990s and Beyond, Columbia University economist and noted trade expert Arvind Panagariya traces the complex and often inconsistent evolution of India’s approach to trade.

During the inter-war years, industries like textiles and iron and steel lobbied for – and received – high levels of protection. The chronic shortages of World War Two led to even stricter import controls, enforced through an elaborate licensing system.

While Asian peers such as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore shifted to export-led strategies in the 1960s – and began posting impressive growth rates of 8–10% annually – India chose to double down on import substitution. As a result, imports as a share of GDP shrank from 10% in 1957–58 to just 4% by 1969–70.

By the mid-1960s, India had banned imports of consumer goods altogether. This not only removed the pressure on domestic producers to improve quality but also denied them access to world-class inputs and technology.

As a result, Indian products lost their competitiveness in global markets and exports stagnated. The resulting foreign exchange shortages led to even tighter import controls, creating a vicious cycle that stifled growth. Between 1951 and 1981, per capita income grew at a sluggish pace of just 1.5% a year.

The turning point came in 1991. Faced with a balance-of-payments crisis, India dismantled many import controls and let the rupee depreciate – a move that gave a much-needed boost to exporters and domestic producers competing with imports. Import licensing on consumer goods ended only in 2001, after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruled against it.

The impact was striking: between 2002–03 and 2011–12, India’s exports of goods and services surged six-fold, soaring from $75bn to over $400bn.

With trade liberalisation and other reforms, India’s per capita income grew more in the first 17 years of the 21st Century than it did throughout the entire 20th Century, notes Prof Panagariya.

But the pushback to trade didn’t end.

Trade liberalisation in India was reversed twice – in 1996–97 and again since 2018 – with extensive use of anti-dumping measures to block imports from the most competitive sources, according to Prof Panagariya.

“Many post-colonial states like India harbour a deep-rooted suspicion that international commerce and trade are simply new forms of colonisation. Unfortunately, this mindset still lingers among some policymakers – and that’s a shame,” says Vivek Dehejia, a professor of economics at Carleton University in Canada.

Many economists argue that a decade of protectionist policies has undercut Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India initiative, which focused on capital and technology-intensive sectors while sidelining labour-intensive industries like textiles. As a result, the programme has struggled to deliver meaningful gains in manufacturing and exports.

“If foreigners cannot sell their goods to us, they will not have the revenues to pay for the goods they buy from us. If we cut back on their goods, they will have to cut back on ours,” Prof Panagariya wrote.

Such protectionism has also led to allegations of cronyism.

“Tariffs have created protectionism in several Indian industries, disincentivising investments in efficiency by cosy incumbents and allowing them to steadily garner market power by building up concentrated positions,” according to Viral Acharya, a professor of economics at New York University Stern School of Business.

With the US turning inward and China under pressure, countries belonging to the European Union are scrambling for reliable trade partners – and India could be one of them. To seize this moment, economists believe India must lower its tariffs, boost export competitiveness and signal its openness to global trade.

Sectors like garments, textiles and toys present a golden opportunity, especially for the medium and small-scale sectors. But after a decade of stagnation, the big question is: can they scale up – and will the government back them?

If Trump follows through on his tariff plans after the current pause, India could see a $7.76bn – or 6.4% – drop in exports to the US this year, according to an estimate by Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank. (In 2024, India exported $89bn worth of goods to the American market.)

“The Trump tariffs are expected to deliver a mild blow to India’s merchandise exports to the US,” says Ajay Srivastava of GTRI.

He emphasises the need for India to broaden its trade base after securing a balanced deal with the US. This includes fast-tracking agreements with the EU, UK and Canada, while deepening ties with China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Asean.

At home, real impact hinges on reforms: simpler tariffs, a smoother goods and services tax (GST), better trade processes and fair implementation of quality controls. Without these, India risks missing the global moment.

The US Supreme Court has instructed the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to a mega-jail in El Salvador.

The Trump administration has conceded that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error”, but appealed against a district court’s order to “facilitate and effectuate” his return to the US.

On Thursday, in a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court declined to block the lower court’s order.

That order “requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent”, the justices ruled.

Mr Garcia, a Salvadorian migrant, is one of dozens of migrants the US last month placed on military planes and sent to El Salvador’s infamous Cecot (Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism), a prison known for housing gang members, under an arrangement between the two countries.

In a statement on Thursday evening after the top court’s decision, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a lawyer for Mr Garcia, said “the rule of law prevailed”.

“The Supreme Court upheld the district judge’s order that the government has to bring Kilmar home.”

• Can the US return man deported to El Salvador? Immigration lawyers think so

In its emergency appeal to the Supreme Court last week, the Trump administration argued Judge Paula Xinis of the Maryland district court lacked the authority to issue the order to return Mr Garcia by 23:59 EST last Monday, and that US officials cannot compel El Salvador to return Mr Garcia.

US Solicitor General D John Sauer wrote in his emergency court filing: “The Constitution charges the president, not federal district courts, with the conduct of foreign diplomacy and protecting the nation against foreign terrorists, including by effectuating their removal.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked Judge Xinis’s order while it considered the matter, before issuing its decision on Thursday.

On Thursday, the top court also directed Judge Xinis to explain her initial order to the extent she required the Trump administration to “effectuate” Mr Garcia’s return, adding she may have exceeded her authority.

“The district court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” the Supreme Court said.

A justice department spokesperson told the BBC that the Supreme Court correctly recognised “it is the exclusive prerogative of the President to conduct foreign affairs”.

“By directly noting the deference owed to the Executive Branch, this ruling once again illustrates that activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the President’s authority to conduct foreign policy.”

The government has said Mr Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error”, although they also allege he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which his lawyer denies.

The case will now return to the trial court. The justices did not give the administration a deadline for when Mr Garcia should be returned.

Mr Garcia, now 29, entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019 he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities.

But an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country.

Mr Garcia, who is married to a US citizen, was deported on 15 March despite a court ruling forbidding it.

His wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura has been calling for his release since his deportation.

“This continues to be an emotional roller coaster for my children, Kilmar’s mother, his brother and siblings,” Ms Sura told the New York Times on Thursday, adding that “I will continue fighting until my husband is home”.

Michelle Obama has spoken out against rumours that her marriage to Barack Obama might be in trouble.

The former first lady has not accompanied her husband to several high-profile events – including Donald Trump’s inauguration and the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter – fuelling speculation that they might be separating.

Without explicitly mentioning these occasions, Mrs Obama told the Work in Progress podcast hosted by actress Sophia Bush that she was now in a position to control her own calendar as a “grown woman”.

She said that people were not able to believe that she was “making a decision” for herself and instead “had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing”.

Mrs Obama shared that she felt some guilt for stepping back from certain duties.

“That’s the thing that we as women, I think we struggle with like disappointing people,” she said.

“I mean, so much so that this year people couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing.

“This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right? But that’s what society does to us.”

Mrs Obama also said in the podcast: “I chose to do what was best for me. Not what I had to do. Not what I thought other people wanted me to do.”

While her absence from President Trump’s inauguration was seen as a break from tradition, she did give a high-profile speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this past summer.

“Hope is making a comeback,” she told a Chicago crowd of thousands at the DNC, as she urged them to throw their weight behind then-presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Despite carving out more time for herself, the former first lady said she still finds time to “give speeches, to be out there in the world, to work on projects. I still care about girls’ education”.

The Obamas celebrated their 32nd anniversary last year in October.

Mrs Obama has previously been open about the struggles she faced in her marriage due to Mr Obama’s political ambitions and time in the White House in her best-selling memoir, Becoming.

She wrote in the book that her husband’s aspirations resulted in loneliness and exhaustion.

Donald Trump is going to “make America’s showers great again” by easing rules restricting water flow, the White House says.

The US president is ordering the energy secretary to rescind a change introduced by Barack Obama that restricted multi-nozzle showers from discharging over 2.5 gallons of water per minute overall.

This served “a radical green agenda that made life worse for Americans”, the White House said, as Trump criticised the “ridiculous” amount of time he says it takes to wet his hair in the shower.

Consumer and conservation groups have previously argued that changing the rules is wasteful and unnecessary.

According to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, which shared a factsheet in 2024, efficiency standards in the US set more than three decades ago “reduce water waste… save consumers money on their water and energy bills and help protect the environment”.

Under a 1992 energy law, showerheads in the US are not allowed to produce more than 2.5 gallons (9.5l) of water per minute.

Obama introduced a redefinition, as part of an Energy Conservation Program, that meant for showers with multiple nozzles, the restriction applied overall rather than to each nozzle.

At the end of Trump’s first term, in 2020, he moved to allow each nozzle to produce up to 2.5 gallons a minute.

But when Joe Biden succeeded him as president, he stopped that.

The current administration has dubbed their efforts a “war on water pressure”, saying Americans “pay for their own water and should be free to choose their showerheads without federal meddling”.

Trump now wants to return to the “straightforward meaning” of ‘showerhead’ from the 1992 law.

According to the White House fact sheet: “The Order frees Americans from excessive regulations that turned a basic household item into a bureaucratic nightmare.

“No longer will showerheads be weak and worthless.”

The order says the change will come into effect 30 days after the energy secretary publishes a notice rescinding the definition.

While signing the order in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump said it was “ridiculous” he has to stand under the water for 15 minutes for his “beautiful” hair to get wet – echoing remarks he made during 2020.

At that time, he also complained about water not coming out of shower heads, saying his hair “has to be perfect”.

Donald Trump has said there will “always be transition problems” and “difficulty” as markets fell again amid continued uncertainty over the US president’s global tariff war.

His statement on Thursday comes hours after the White House said that tariffs on China would reach 145% for some products due to a pre-existing 20% levy imposed on those producing the drug fentanyl.

Despite this, Trump said he was still hoping to secure a deal with China. “I think we’ll end up working something out that’s very good for both countries. I look forward to it,” he said.

Meanwhile, markets continued to face a turbulent time on Thursday, following Trump’s 10% tariff announcement for all countries except China.

Trump on Wednesday paused his threat to impose tariffs as high as 50% on “worst offender” countries, but pressed on with his trade war with China.

Beijing has shown no sign of backing down, this week increasing its retaliatory tariffs to 84% on American products.

The three major US stock markets managed to regain some initial ground early on Thursday. However by closing, the S&P 500 lost 3.6%, the Dow Jones 2.5% and the Nasdaq 4.31%. Warner Bros Discovery shares fell 14% on Thursday, while Amazon and Apple who were both down 7%.

• Will iPhones cost more because of Trump’s tariffs on China?
• Trump may have backtracked, but this is far from over
• What does Trump’s tariff pause mean for global trade?

In a televised cabinet meeting, Trump said there would “always be transition difficulty” but added that “it was the biggest day in history in markets”.

He said that investors were happy with how the US was running and that they were “trying to get the world to treat us fairly”.

He claimed that “everybody wants to come and make a deal” to reduce tariffs.

Echoing Trump’s statements in the meeting, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that many countries were coming to talk and that they’d come with “offers they never would have” if it was not for the president’s policies.

“We’re getting the respect we deserve now,” he added. “I think you’re going to see historic deals one after the other.”

Trump said the US would “love to be able to work a deal (with China)”, adding that he had “great respect for President Xi” and thought that they would “end up working something out that’s very good for both countries”.

However, he repeated his claims that China had “taken advantage” and “ripped off” the US “more than anybody” for a long time.

China announced that it would cut the number of American-made films shown in its cinemas, and claimed the tariff dispute has dampened audience appetite for Hollywood.

Beijing already restricts US releases to 34 a year, and Hollywood has become less important in China as homegrown films increase in popularity.

The European Union meanwhile said it would be pausing the countermeasures it had planned to impose on the US from 15 April also for 90 days.

Twenty-six EU member states – all bar Hungary – had voted to impose retaliatory tariffs on Wednesday if the US imposed its levy of 20%.

In a statement, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU wanted “to give negotiations a chance”.

A controversial bill seeking to reinterpret New Zealand’s founding document, which established the rights of both Māori and non-Māori in the country, has been defeated at its second reading.

The Treaty Principles Bill was voted down 112 votes to 11, days after a government committee recommended that it should not proceed.

The proposed legislation sought to legally define the principles of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi – causing widespread outrage that saw more than 40,000 people taking part in a protest outside parliament last year.

The bill had already been widely expected to fail, with most major political parties committed to voting it down.

Members of the right-wing Act Party, which tabled it, were the only MPs to vote for it at the second reading on Thursday. Act’s leader David Seymour has promised to continue campaigning on the issue.

“I believe this Bill or something like it will pass one day because there are not good arguments against its contents,” he wrote on social media.

Tensions were high during a parliamentary debate on the bill in November. Labour MP Willie Jackson was told to leave after refusing to withdraw a comment he made calling Seymour a “liar”.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the proposed legislation would forever “be a stain on our country”, while Te Pāti Māori (The Māori Party) MP Hana Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke – who gained international attention for starting a haka in parliament at the bill’s first reading – said it had been “annihilated”.

“Instead of dividing and conquering, this bill has backfired and united communities across the motu [country] in solidarity for our founding agreement and what it represents,” Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson later said in a statement.

The second reading came after a select committee, which had been looking into the proposed legislation released its final report – revealing that more than 300,000 submissions had been made on it, the vast majority of which were opposed.

It is the largest response to proposed legislation that the New Zealand parliament has ever received.

While the principles of the Treaty have never been defined in law, its core values have, over time, been woven into different pieces of legislation in an effort to offer redress to Māori for the wrong done to them during colonisation.

Act’s proposed legislation had three main principles: that the New Zealand government has the power to govern, and parliament to make laws; that the Crown would respect the rights of Māori at the time the Treaty was signed; and that everyone is equal before the law and entitled to equal protection.

The party said the bill would not alter the Treaty itself but would “continue the process of defining the Treaty principles”. This, they believe, would help to create equality for all New Zealanders and improve social cohesion.

Among those backing it was Ruth Richardson, a former finance minister for the centre-right National Party, who told the select committee that the proposed legislation was “a bill of consequence whose time has come”.

She argued that while the Treaty itself could not be disputed, the idea of its principles was a “relatively modern matter”, and that these principles had so far been largely defined by the courts, rather than parliament.

“There is a new imperative in New Zealand on the cultural front, the necessity to address and correct Treaty overreach that has increasingly and evidently become wayward and wrong,” she said.

Opponents of the bill, meanwhile, believe it would be detrimental to Māori and create greater social divides.

Sharon Hawke, the daughter of the late Māori activist and MP Joe Hawke, spoke to the select committee on behalf of the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei hapū [sub-tribe] – telling it that the legislation “strips the fabric of where we’ve been heading for in the last three decades at improving our people’s [Māori’s] ability to gain education, gain warm housing, gain good health”.

She added that the bill “polluted” the idea of all New Zealanders having a future together.

“We will continue to show our opposition to this,” she said.

Key issues identified by members of the public who made submissions to the select committee included that it was inconsistent with the values of the Treaty, and that it had promoted equality with equity – not taking into account social disparities, such as those created by the legacy of colonisation.

There were also concerns about the extent to which the bill complied with international law, and whether it would negatively impact New Zealand’s reputation internationally.

Submitters who supported the bill, meanwhile, referred to a current lack of clarity and certainty about the principles of the Treaty, and of the importance of equality for all.

They also said that it was important to hold a referendum to facilitate a national conversation around the Treaty – something David Seymour believes is still needed.

The Treaty Principles Bill passed its first reading in November, with support from National – the dominant party in New Zealand’s ruling coalition – who had promised to back it as part of a coalition agreement with Act, but not any further.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who is also leader of the National Party, previously said there was nothing in the bill that he liked. He was not in parliament for its second reading, but remarked earlier in the day that it was time to move on from it.

Police officers smash through the back doors of a bright, modern barber shop in the market town of Shrewsbury.

Inside they immediately detain two men – who we are later told are Kurdish asylum seekers. Both men are later released.

It is the first of six raids that day where police seize thousands of pounds in cash and illicit vapes.

The officers are here with a warrant to search the premises because of suspected money laundering. They say their intelligence also suggests the shop is linked to sale of illicit cigarettes and vapes, illegal immigration and drug-dealing.

Det Insp Daniel Fenn, on his ninth raid of the week, says some barber shops such as this are claiming income of £100,000 to £150,000 a month. “They aren’t getting that amount of customers to warrant that amount of money.”

CCTV in other barbers that have been raided has shown they do not have many customers, so footage of this one will also be examined, DI Fenn says.

The raid in Shrewsbury was one of 265 carried out across England and Wales last month as part of a crackdown on High Street businesses – often Turkish-style barbers, vape shops and mini-marts – suspected of being fronts for international crime gangs.

Politicians and members of the public have raised concerns about many of these businesses which have boomed even while High Streets appear to be in decline. The average number of barbers per person in England and Wales has doubled in the past 10 years, according to commercial property analysts Green Street.

Now the National Crime Agency (NCA) says it has launched the crackdown, called Operation Machinize, in response to growing intelligence reports that some of these shops are being used for money laundering – where gangs falsely present the proceeds of criminal operations as if they were earnings from legitimate businesses handling large amounts of cash.

Despite these shops operating openly for years on High Streets and attracting widespread local suspicion, this is the first co-ordinated action of its kind by police, tax and immigration inspectors and Trading Standards officers. We were given exclusive access to dozens of raids carried out by Greater Manchester and West Mercia Police.

Det Insp Melanie Johnson, who led the operation for Greater Manchester Police, said her own local High Street had 10 barbers and a mini-mart, which was “not sustainable”.

“As a mum to young children, I want them to grow up feeling safe, in a community that isn’t derelict, a High Street that isn’t falling apart, and isn’t populated by criminality,” she said.

During the operation:

• Police targeted a series of linked mini-marts in Rochdale that they suspect are “fronts” for illegal activity, staffed by Kurdish, Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers. Officers later said some of the staff were working in the UK illegally
• A cannabis farm was found in Leigh and over 150 plants seized. Also found during raids across Greater Manchester were brown powder believed to be heroin, vials of testosterone, nitrous oxide, Xanax tranquilliser and a machete
• 35 people were arrested, and 55 suspected illegal immigrants were questioned. Three potential victims of modern slavery were identified
• Bank accounts and assets worth over £1m were later frozen and £40,000 in cash was seized

The Shrewsbury raid was on a barber shop in the centre of town, one of five close together which were also targeted in the operation.

“Members of the public are angry. They can see these fronts are there,” says Det Insp Fenn. “The criminals feel they are hidden here. They think they can come to sleepy areas such as Shrewsbury and Telford and won’t be found.”

It looks like the two men detained here have been living in the rooms above the barbers – there are clothes, shoes and food scattered on the floor as we move from room to room. The flats are barely furnished, with just a mattress and blankets on the floor.

Det Insp Fenn says organised crime groups are different all over the country, but here he has been seeing familiar patterns of shops staffed with asylum seekers or illegal immigrants, many of the people in the barber shops being from Kurdish backgrounds.

The detective says that behind the front of a High Street business “the main criminality may be modern-day slavery, exploitation and drugs”.

Despite the barber shop’s supposed high revenue, police find an unpaid £7,000 gas bill along with the seized cash and illicit vapes.

Legitimate barbers say they want to see a registration scheme and a crackdown on unscrupulous operators. Gareth Penn, chief executive of the Hair and Barber Council, said the rise of illegal barbers has led to fungal infections, such as ringworm, from improperly cleaned equipment.

“This has a massive impact on legitimate businesses as they can’t compete against those with few of the costs genuine barbers have,” said Mr Penn.

The NCA estimates that £12bn in illicit cash is laundered in the UK every year, some of it through criminal front organisations on the High Street. Their numbers appeared to surge as shop vacancies grew in the wake of the pandemic, creating an opening for criminal gangs.

Politicians began to demand action, prompting law enforcement, tax, immigration and Trading Standards agencies to develop this co-ordinated response.

The NCA now has to analyse what Operation Machinize has uncovered for evidence of fraud and money laundering, to try to trace the networks behind these shops and stop the flow of criminal cash.

Rachael Herbert, deputy director of economic crime at the NCA, said the presence of criminal front organisations “gives the perception from the local community that criminals have the run of the High Street” and contributes to the demise of shopping centres.

“Money laundering is not a victimless crime. It’s associated with some of the most high-harm and violent crimes on the street,” she said.

The NCA believes some barber shops or mini-marts are used as fronts for drug-trafficking, people-smuggling, modern slavery and child sexual exploitation. These kinds of shops have also been linked to the illicit importation of tobacco, vapes and firearms.

In 2023, it secured the conviction of one Iranian Kurdish barber shop owner, Hewa Rahimpur, who was using his shop in London as a base for a far-reaching criminal organisation which smuggled 10,000 people to the UK in small boats.

“These businesses also evade an enormous amount of tax. That is money that doesn’t go to the exchequer to be used for local communities,” Ms Herbert said.

Seeing illicit products like vapes, cigarettes and tobacco on sale is also a red flag to the investigating teams.

In Rochdale, the sniffer dog shakes with excitement, her tail wagging frantically, above a hole concealing dozens of boxes of illegally imported tobacco products in one shop.

“We could hit this shop every day for a week and we’d still find stuff. It’s non-stop,” Dennis Chalmers from Trading Standards says. “These shops are just set up to do this.”

Outside on the street, Mr Chalmers gestures to half a dozen shops on the street which he has visited and believes to be linked. “They seem to be popping up everywhere. There’s like five, six hairdressers in one row.”

He estimates across Rochdale there are more than 20 businesses that are fronts for criminal organisations and he says he sees many of the same people from Iran, Iraq and Kurdistan working in them.

In one shop, a worker who says he is Kurdish claims he has only worked there for two days.

“Two days?” asks Mr Chalmers. “Even though I saw you here last week?”

The shop worker tells the Trading Standards officer he doers not know his boss’s name.

Mr Chalmers tells us: “The danger is, because you don’t know who is behind these businesses, as the employee doesn’t know who the owner is, when we try and chase them they just keep changing, changing.”

Companies House documents show the shop address has been used to register four almost-identically named businesses since 2019, three of which faced action to strike them off the company register for failing to file accounts properly.

Immigration officers say the Kurdish man in the shop has been in the country for four years, but has been granted the right to work while he waits for his asylum application to be decided.

Close by, police and Trading Standards officers show us more mini-marts that have been left empty – they say staff disappeared as soon as police arrived.

Outside one, a man approaches us laughing. It is clear he is not put off by the police action. He tells us he is from Iran and, when questioned, claims he does not work in the shop. We return later and see him inside the mini-mart, apparently working.

“We see him every day,” says Mr Chalmers in frustration. “It’s just a game to them. A dangerous one.”

He says he would like more resources to get on top of the issue and greater powers to shut down these premises more quickly.

Security Minister Dan Jarvis said the operation “highlights the scale and complexity of the criminality our towns and cities face”.

“High Street crime undermines our security, our borders, and the confidence of our communities, and I am determined to take the decisive action necessary to bring those responsible to justice,” he said.

But so far only 10 of the shops that were raided last month across England have been shut down. The majority of the shops we visited were back up and running within minutes of the police leaving.

In Rochdale, we watched as Trading Standards officers identified a man they said was linked to the mini-marts walking from shop to shop with a backpack, which they believed contained illicit tobacco to restock the shelves.

The challenge for authorities now is to stop the problem at its root and dismantle the suspected serious organised crime gangs – which may have been profiting in plain sight for years on our High Streets.

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A tattoo belonging to a man from Derbyshire has appeared in a US government document used to identify members of a notorious Venezuelan gang – despite the man having no connection to the group.

Pete Belton, 44, from Ilkeston says he was shocked to find his forearm featured in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document used to help identify alleged members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a transnational criminal organisation.

“I’m just an average middle-aged man from Derbyshire,” he told BBC Verify.

Mr Belton said it was a “bit strange, bit funny at first” but is now worried the family trip he booked to Miami with his wife and daughter in August might end up “being a six month all-inclusive holiday to Guantanamo”.

The Trump administration has already deported hundreds of alleged gang members to a high-security jail in El Salvador. Lawyers for some of those deportees say they have been incorrectly identified as TdA members based on their tattoos.

Mr Belton’s tattoo – a clock face with the date and time of his daughter’s birth – was included in a set of nine images for “detecting and identifying” TdA members. Other tattoos featured stars, crowns and a Michael Jordan “jumpman” logo.

“Open source material has depicted TdA members with a combination of the below tattoos,” states the document which appeared in court filings.

But reverse image searches show that several of the pictures first appeared on tattoo websites with no obvious links to Venezuela or TdA.

One of them led BBC Verify to an Instagram post by a Nottingham-based tattoo artist who posted about Mr Belton’s tattoo nearly a decade ago.

The tattoo image in the DHS document is worse quality than the Instagram post, which was shared in 2016, but it is clearly the same arm and features the same clock face tattoo.

The same image of Mr Belton’s tattoo also appeared in a September 2024 report by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) about TdA activity.

BBC Verify contacted both the US DHS and the Texas DPS about the source of the images, but did not receive a response.

But in an email the DHS said it was confident in its law enforcement’s intelligence and that its “assessments go well beyond just gang affiliate tattoos and social media.”

It’s unclear exactly how Mr Belton’s tattoo ended up in the US documents, but he’s worried about being linked to the gang.

“In my head I’m thinking if I’m working in border force and I saw me walking through I’d think ‘hey up we’ve got one, he’s the one in the document’.”

He provided multiple images of the tattoo to prove that it’s his – and he says that he has no association to the Venezuelan group.

The US government hasn’t deported anyone based on their tattoos alone, according to comments from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official in a court filing last month.

However, court documents show immigration officials are employing a points-based system known as the “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” to determine if someone is linked to the Venezuelan gang.

It includes a scorecard, and according to the document, eight points across a number of categories could be grounds for arrest or deportation.

Half of these points can be given if a “subject has tattoos denoting membership or loyalty to TdA”.

The document says if all eight points come from the symbolism category, which includes tattoos, then further consultation should be taken before designating someone as a member of TdA.

Venezuelan investigative journalist Ronna Risquez, who wrote a book on TdA’s origins, said tattoos alone are not evidence of membership.

“TdA does not have tattoos that identifies the gang,” she said.

“To confirm whether a person is a member of TdA, authorities must conduct a police investigation to determine whether they have a criminal record. A tattoo, their clothing, or their nationality are not proof.”

However, there have been cases where lawyers have argued that people have been wrongfully identified based on their tattoos and were subsequently deported.

US media have reported on a man whose lawyers say was deported because of a crown tattoo which was inspired by the Real Madrid football club logo.

Another case saw a makeup artist was sent to El Salvador after his a crown tattoo with the words “mum” and “dad” was used by US officials as evidence for gang membership, according to his attorneys.

Back in Derbyshire, Mr Belton says his family have considered cancelling their trip to the US due to the potential risks, but they are going to monitor how the story develops.

“Hopefully now they’d realise I’m not a Venezuelan gangster but I’ve seen crazier things happen in the news recently, so we’re just going to wait and see.”

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