Russian President Vladimir Putin says he has ordered his forces to “stop all military activity” in Ukraine, as he declared an “Easter truce” until the end of Sunday.

He said the 30-hour truce would last until 22:00 BST on Sunday (00:00 Moscow time), adding that Russian forces should be prepared to respond to “any possible violations”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv would adhere to the truce, but accused Moscow of breaking it.

“If Russia is now suddenly ready to truly engage in a format of full and unconditional silence, Ukraine will act accordingly – mirroring Russia’s actions,” he said.

“Our actions are and will be symmetrical. The proposal for a full and unconditional 30-day silence remains on the table — the answer to it must come from Moscow,” he wrote on X.

He said fighting continued in Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions and Russian drones were still in use, but added that some areas had become quieter.

Zelensky said Ukraine would be ready to extend a truce beyond 20 April, seemingly referring to an earlier proposal from the US for a 30-day ceasefire which Ukraine had already agreed to.

Responding to Putin’s initial announcement, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha wrote on X: “Putin has now made statements about his alleged readiness for a cease-fire. 30 hours instead of 30 days.”

“Unfortunately, we have had a long history of his statements not matching his actions. We know his words cannot be trusted and we will look at actions, not words,” he added.

Putin announced the temporary truce at a meeting with his chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov.

“Based on humanitarian considerations… the Russian side announces an Easter truce. I order a stop to all military activities for this period,” Putin told Gerasimov.

“We assume that Ukraine will follow our example. At the same time, our troops should be prepared to repel possible violations of the truce and provocations by the enemy, any aggressive actions.”

The Russian defence ministry said its troops would adhere to the ceasefire provided it was “mutually respected” by Ukraine.

It is not the first time a pause in fighting has been suddenly announced – a previous attempt at a ceasefire during Orthodox Christmas in January 2023 fell apart after both sides failed to agree on a proposal.

Reacting to Putin’s truce announcement, a Foreign Office spokesman in the UK said: “Now is the moment for Putin to truly show he is serious about peace by ending his horrible invasion and committing to a full ceasefire, as the Ukrainian government has called for – not just a one day pause for Easter.”

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people – the vast majority of them soldiers – have been killed or injured on all sides.

The US has been directly talking to Russia as part of its efforts to end the war, but has struggled to make major progress.

Last month, Moscow rejected a proposal for a full and unconditional ceasefire that had been agreed by the US and Ukraine.

US President Donald Trump on Friday warned Washington would “take a pass” on brokering further talks on ending the war in Ukraine unless there was quick progress.

He was speaking after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US was not “going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end”, as it had “other priorities to focus on”.

“We need to determine very quickly now – and I’m talking about a matter of days – whether or not this is doable,” he added.

“If it’s not going to happen, then we’re just going to move on.”

Pakistan has deported more than 19,500 Afghans this month, among more than 80,000 who have left ahead of a 30 April deadline, according to the UN.

Pakistan has accelerated its drive to expel undocumented Afghans and those who had temporary permission to stay, saying it can no longer cope.

Between 700 and 800 families are being deported daily, Taliban officials say, with up to two million people expected to follow in the coming months.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Kabul on Saturday for talks with Taliban officials. His counterpart Amir Khan Muttaqi expressed “deep concern” about deportations.

Some expelled Afghans at the border said they had been born in Pakistan after their families fled conflict.

More than 3.5 million Afghans have been living in Pakistan, according to the UN’s refugee agency, including around 700,000 people who came after the Taliban takeover in 2021. The UN estimates that half are undocumented.

Pakistan has taken in Afghans through decades of war, but the government says the high number of refugees now poses risks to national security and causes pressure on public services.

• Pakistan orders Afghan asylum seekers out
• Afghans hiding in Pakistan live in fear

There has been a recent spike in border clashes between the security forces of both sides. Pakistan blames them on militants based in Afghanistan, which the Taliban deny.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry said the two sides had “discussed all issues of mutual interest” in Saturday’s meeting in Kabul.

Pakistan had extended a deadline for undocumented Afghans to leave the country by a month, to 30 April.

On the Torkham border crossing, some expelled Afghans told the BBC they left Afghanistan decades ago – or had never lived there.

“I lived my whole life in Pakistan,” said Sayed Rahman, a second-generation refugee born and raised in Pakistan. “I got married there. What am I supposed to do now?”

Saleh, a father of three daughters, worried what life under Taliban rule will mean for them. His daughters attended school in Pakistan’s Punjab province, but in Afghanistan, girls over the age of 12 are barred from doing so.

“I want my children to study. I don’t want their years in school to go to waste,” he said. “Everyone has the right to an education.”

Another man told the BBC: “Our children have never seen Afghanistan and even I don’t know what it looks like anymore. It might take us a year or more to settle in and find work. We feel helpless.”

At the border, men and women pass through separate gates, under the watch of armed Pakistani and Afghan guards. Some of those returning were elderly – one man was carried across on a stretcher, another in a bed.

Military trucks shuttled families from the border to temporary shelters. Those originally from distant provinces stay there for several days, waiting for transport to their home regions.

Families clustered under canvases to escape the 30C degree heat, as swirling dust caught in the eyes and mouth. Resources are stretched and fierce arguments often break out over access to shelter.

Returnees receive between 4,000 and 10,000 Afghanis (£41 to £104) from the Kabul authorities, according to Hedayatullah Yad Shinwari, a member of the camp’s Taliban-appointed finance committee.

The mass deportation is placing significant pressure on Afghanistan’s fragile infrastructure, with an economy in crisis and a population nearing 45 million people.

“We have resolved most issues, but the arrival of people in such large numbers naturally brings difficulties,” said Bakht Jamal Gohar, the Taliban’s head of refugee affairs at the crossing. “These people left decades ago and left all their belongings behind. Some of their homes were destroyed during 20 years of war.”

Nearly every family told the BBC that Pakistani border guards restricted what they could bring – a complaint echoed by some human rights groups.

Chaudhry said in response that Pakistan did “not have any policy that prevents Afghan refugees from taking their household items with them”.

One man, sitting on the roadside in the blistering sun, said his children had begged to stay in Pakistan, the country where they were born. They had been given temporary residency, but that expired in March.

“Now we’ll never go back. Not after how we were treated,” he said.

The US Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to pause the deportation of a group of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

A civil liberties group had sued to stop the removal of the men, currently in detention in Texas, saying they had not been able to contest their cases in court.

Donald Trump has sent accused Venezuelan gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president power to detain and deport natives or citizens of “enemy” nations without usual processes. The act was previously used only three times, all during war.

The White House called challenges to using the law for mass deportations “meritless litigation”.

“We are confident in the lawfulness of the administration’s actions and in ultimately prevailing against an onslaught of meritless litigation brought by radical activists who care more about the rights of terrorist aliens than those of the American people,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a post on X.

The Alien Enemies Act was last invoked in World War Two, when people of Japanese descent were imprisoned without trial and thousands sent to internment camps.

Since taking office in January, Trump’s hard-line immigration policies have encountered a number of legal hurdles.

Trump had accused Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” on US territory.

Out of 261 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador as of 8 April, 137 were removed under the Alien Enemies Act, a senior administration official told CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner.

A lower court temporarily blocked these deportations on 15 March.

The Supreme Court initially ruled on 8 April that Trump could use the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members, but deportees must be given a chance to challenge their removal.

The lawsuit that resulted in Saturday’s order said the Venezuelans detained in north Texas had been given notices about their imminent deportation in English, despite one detainee only speaking Spanish.

The challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also said the men had not been told they had a right to contest the decision in court.

“Without this Court’s intervention, dozens or hundreds of proposed class members may be removed to a possible life sentence in El Salvador with no real opportunity to contest their designation or removal,” the lawsuit read.

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented on Saturday.

In his second inaugural address in January, Trump pledged to “eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to US soil”.

In the highest-profile case, the government admitted it mistakenly deported El Salvador national Kilmar Ábrego García, but contends he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which his lawyer and family denies. Mr Ábrego García has never been convicted of a crime.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the government should facilitate bringing back Mr Ábrego García, but the Trump administration has said he will “never” live in the US again.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, visited Mr Ábrego García in El Salvador and said he had been moved from the mega-jail Cecot (Terrorism Confinement Centre) to a new prison.

Five people have drowned after huge waves hit parts of Australia at the start of the Easter weekend.

Two others are missing off the coasts of New South Wales and Victoria states.

On Saturday the body of a man was found in the water near Tathra in southern New South Wales. It came a day after a 58-year-old fisherman and two other men were found dead in separate incidents in the state.

Rescuers are searching for a man who was washed into the water near Sydney. Also on Friday, one woman drowned and a man is missing after their group was swept into sea in San Remo in Victoria.

“One of the women managed to make her way back to shore but the other woman and the man were unable to,” Victoria police said.

Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan said it marked a “awful start” to the Easter weekend.

“My thoughts are with the family of someone who has lost their life in such tragic circumstances, and potentially there is more difficult news to come,” she said.

Australia’s eastern states have been battered by dangerous waves.

The head of the charity Surf Life Saving Australia, Adam Weir, advised holidaymakers to visit patrolled beaches after their data showed 630 people had drowned at unpatrolled beaches in the past 10 years.

“But these coastal locations can present dangers, some that you can see and some that you can’t, which is why we have some simple advice: Stop, Look, Stay Alive.”

An 82-year-old woman who teaches the ancient Indian martial art of Kalaripayattu says she has no plans to retire.

“I’ll probably practise Kalari until the day I die,” says Meenakshi Raghavan, widely thought to be the oldest woman in the world to practise the art form.

Kalaripayattu – kalari means battleground and payattu means fight – is believed to have originated at least 3,000 years back in the southern state of Kerala and is regarded as India’s oldest martial art.

It is not solely practised for combat or fighting; it also serves to instil discipline, build strength and develop self-defence skills.

Ms Raghavan is fondly known as Meenakshi Amma – Amma means mother in the Malayalam language – in Kerala’s Vadakara, where she lives. The town is also home to other renowned exponents of the art like Unniyarcha, Aromal Chekavar and Thacholi Othenan.

Meenakshi Amma occasionally performs in other cities but mainly runs her own Kalari school, founded by her husband in 1950. Her days are busy, with classes from five in the morning to noon.

“I teach about 50 students daily. My four children were also trained [in the art form] by me and my husband. They started learning from the age of six,” she says.

Kalaripayattu has four stages and it requires patience to learn the art form.

Training begins with meypattu – an oil massage followed by exercises to condition the body.

After about two years, students progress to kolthari (stick fighting), then to angathari (weapon combat), and finally to verumkai – the highest level, involving unarmed combat. It typically takes up to five years to master Kalaripayattu.

Kung fu is believed to have adapted principles like breathing techniques and marmashastra (stimulating vital points to optimise energy flow) from Kalaripayattu, according to Vinod Kadangal, another Kalari teacher.

Legend has it that around the 6th Century, Indian Buddhist monk Bodhidharma introduced these techniques to the Shaolin monks, influencing the more famous Chinese martial art.

Meenakshi Amma still recalls the first time she stepped into a Kalari – the red-earth arena where the art is practised – 75 years ago.

“I was seven and quite good at dancing. So my guru – VP Raghavan – approached my father and suggested that I learn Kalaripayattu. Just like dance, the art form requires you to be flexible,” she says.

Hailing from Kerala’s Thiyya community, Meenakshi Amma’s guru was 15 when he and his brothers opened their own Kalaripayattu school after being denied admission elsewhere because of their low social caste.

“There was no bias when it came to girls enrolling to study Kalari – in fact, physical education was compulsory in all Kerala schools at that time. But we were expected to stop after attaining puberty,” she says.

Unlike others, Meenakshi Amma’s father encouraged her training into her late teens. At 17, she fell in love with Raghavan, and they soon married. Together, they went on to train hundreds of students, often for free.

“At the time, a lot of children came from poor families. The only money he [Raghavan] accepted was in the form of or a tribute paid to the teacher,” she says.

Donations sustained the school, while Raghavan later took a teaching job for extra income. After his death in 2007, Meenakshi Amma formally took charge.

While she has no plans to retire at the moment, she hopes to hand over the school one day to her eldest son Sanjeev.

The 62-year-old, who is also an instructor at the school, says he is lucky to have learnt from the best – his mother. But being her son earns no favours; he says she’s still his toughest opponent.

Meenakshi Amma is a local celebrity. During our interview, three politicians drop by to invite her to an awards ceremony.

“Amma, you must grace us with your presence,” one of them says with folded hands.

“Thank you for considering me, I’ll attend,” she replies.

Her students speak of “fierce admiration” for her. Many have opened their own Kalari schools across the state, a source of great pride for Meenakshi Amma.

“She’s an inspiration to women everywhere – a rare person who shows love and affection to her students, yet remains a strict disciplinarian when it comes to Kalari,” says KF Thomas, a former student.

Thousands took to the streets across the US on Saturday to protest recent actions by President Donald Trump.

Known as “50501”, for “50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement”, the demonstrations were intended to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolutionary War.

From outside the White House and Tesla dealerships and at the centres of many cities, protesters expressed a variety of grievances. Many called for the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

Political protests are becoming more common in the US, with the “Hands Off” demonstrations in early April drawing massive crowds, as polls suggest Trump’s popularity is faltering.

Saturday’s protests addressed a number of Trump actions, including those by the the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – Trump’s initiative to cut US government jobs and other spending – and the administration’s unwillingness to bring about the return of Ábrego García, a citizen of El Salvador.

Gihad Elgendy told CNN he joined the protest at the White House to criticise the deportation of Ábrego García. He believes Trump “could easily pressure El Salvador to bring him back”.

The protests were generally reported as peaceful, although Representative Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat, posted a video on X of a man holding a Trump sign and pushing through a crowd to angrily confront him.

Many demonstrators carried signs reading “No Kings,” a nod to the anniversary of the start of the country’s revolution against English rule.

During celebrations of the anniversary in Massachusetts that commemorated the battles of Lexington and Concord and the famous horse ride of Paul Revere, people held similar signs. There was also a 50501 demonstration in Boston on Saturday.

“This is a very perilous time in America for liberty,” Thomas Bassford, told the Associated Press, while in Boston with his partner, daughter and two grandsons. “I wanted the boys to learn about the origins of this country and that sometimes we have to fight for freedom.”

The most recent polling from Gallup, suggests 45% of voters approve of Trump’s performance in the first quarter of his term, which is more than the 41% who approved during the same period in his first administration.

Still, it is lower than the average first-quarter rating of 60% for all presidents elected between 1952 and 2020, and Trump’s popularity appears to be edging down, especially when it comes to the economy. When he took office in January, his approval rating was 47%, according to Gallup.

His approval rating in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll similarly dipped to 43% from 47% on Inauguration Day. In the same poll, only 37% approved of his performance on the economy, compared to 42% during inauguration.

Earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered for the largest nationwide show of opposition since Trump returned to the White House.

Those protests – which were larger than Saturday’s – happened in 1,200 locations in all 50 US states.

Every iPhone comes with a label which tells you it was designed in California.

While the sleek rectangle that runs many of our lives is indeed designed in the United States, it is likely to have come to life thousands of miles away in China: the country hit hardest by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, now rising to 245% on some Chinese imports.

Apple sells more than 220 million iPhones a year and by most estimates, nine in 10 are made in China. From the glossy screens to the battery packs, it’s here that many of the components in an Apple product are made, sourced and assembled into iPhones, iPads or Macbooks. Most are shipped to the US, Apple’s largest market.

Luckily for the firm, Trump suddenly exempted smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices from his tariffs last week.

But the comfort is short-lived.

The president has since suggested that more tariffs are coming: “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook’,” he wrote on Truth Social, as his administration investigated “semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN”.

The global supply chain that Apple has touted as a strength is now a vulnerability.

The US and China, the world’s two biggest economies, are interdependent and Trump’s staggering tariffs have upended that relationship overnight, leading to an inevitable question: who is the more dependent of the two?

China has hugely benefited from hosting assembly lines for one of the world’s most valuable companies. It was a calling card to the West for quality manufacturing and has helped spur local innovation.

Apple entered China in the 1990s to sell computers through third-party suppliers.

Around 1997, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy as it struggled to compete with rivals, Apple found a lifeline in China. A young Chinese economy was opening up to foreign companies to boost manufacturing and create more jobs.

It wasn’t until 2001 though that Apple officially arrived in China, through a Shanghai-based trading company, and started making products in the country. It partnered with Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronic manufacturer operating in China, to make iPods, then iMacs and subsequently iPhones.

As Beijing began trading with the world – encouraged by the US no less – Apple grew its footprint in what was becoming the world’s factory.

Back then, China was not primed to make the iPhone. But Apple chose its own crop of suppliers and helped them grow into “manufacturing superstars,” according to supply chain expert Lin Xueping.

He cites the example of Beijing Jingdiao, now a leading manufacturer of high-speed precision machinery, which is used to make advanced components efficiently. The company, which used to cut acrylic, was not considered a machine tool-maker – but it eventually developed machinery to cut glass and became “the star of Apple’s mobile phone surface processing,” Mr Lin says.

Apple opened its first store in the country in Beijing in 2008, the year the city hosted the Olympics and China’s relationship with the West was at an all-time high. This soon snowballed to 50 stores, with customers queuing out of the door.

As Apple’s profit margins grew, so did its assembly lines in China, with Foxconn operating the world’s largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, which has since been termed “iPhone City”.

For a fast-growing China, Apple became a symbol of advanced Western tech – simple yet original and slick.

Today, most of Apple’s prized iPhones are manufactured by Foxconn. The advanced chips that power them are made in Taiwan, by the world’s largest chip manufacturer, TSMC. The manufacturing also requires rare earth elements which are used in audio applications and cameras.

Some 150 of Apple’s top 187 suppliers in 2024 had factories in China, according to an analysis by Nikkei Asia.

“There’s no supply chain in the world that’s more critical to us than China,” Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said in an interview last year.

In Trump’s first term, Apple secured exemptions on the tariffs he imposed on China.

But this time, the Trump administration has made an example of Apple before it reversed tariffs on some electronics. It believes the threat of steep taxes will encourage businesses to make products in America instead.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones – that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview earlier this month.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that last week: “President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones and laptops.”

She added: “At the direction of the president, these companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible.”

But many are sceptical of that.

The thought that Apple could move its assembly operation to the US is “pure fantasy,” according to Eli Friedman, who formerly sat on the firm’s academic advisory board.

He says the company has been talking about diversifying its supply chain away from China since 2013, when he joined the board – but the US was never an option.

Mr Friedman adds that Apple didn’t make much progress over the next decade but “really made an effort” after the pandemic, when China’s tightly controlled Covid lockdowns hurt manufacturing output.

“The most important new locations for assembly have been Vietnam and India. But of course the majority of Apple assembly still takes place [in China].”

Apple did not respond to the BBC’s questions but its website says its supply chain spans “thousands of businesses and more than 50 countries”.

Any change to Apple’s current supply chain status quo would be a huge blow for China, which is trying to kickstart growth post-pandemic.

Many of the reasons that the country wanted to be a manufacturing hub for Western companies in the early 2000s ring true today – it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, and gives the country a crucial edge in global trade.

“Apple sits at the intersection of US-China tensions, and tariffs highlight the cost of that exposure,” says Jigar Dixit, a supply chain and operations consultant.

It might explain why China has not bowed to Trump’s threats, retaliating instead with 125% levies on US imports. China has also imposed export controls on a range of critical rare earth minerals and magnets it has in stores, dealing a blow to the US.

There is no doubt the US tariffs still being levied on other Chinese sectors will hurt, though.

And it’s not just Beijing facing higher tariffs – Trump has made it clear he will target countries that are part of the Chinese supply chain. For instance Vietnam, where Apple has moved AirPods production, was facing 46% tariffs before Trump hit pause for 90 days, so moving production elsewhere in Asia is not an easy way out.

“All conceivable places for the huge Foxconn assembly sites with tens or hundreds of thousands of workers are in Asia, and all of these countries are facing higher tariffs,” Mr Friedman says.

So what does Apple do now?

The company is fighting off stiff competition from Chinese firms as the government pushes for advanced tech manufacturing in a race with the US.

Now that “Apple has cultivated China’s electronic manufacturing capabilities, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and others can reuse Apple’s mature supply chain,” according to Mr Lin.

Last year, Apple lost its place as China’s biggest smartphone seller to Huawei and Vivo. Chinese people are not spending enough because of a sluggish economy and with ChatGPT banned in China, Apple is also struggling to retain an edge among buyers seeking AI-powered phones. It even offered rare discounts on iPhones in January to boost sales.

And while operating under President Xi Jinping’s increasingly close grip, Apple has had to limit the use of Bluetooth and Airdrop on its devices as the Chinese Communist Party sought to censor political messages that people were sharing. It weathered a crackdown on the tech industry that even touched Alibaba founder and multi-billionaire Jack Ma.

Apple has announced a $500bn (£378bn) investment in the US, though that may not be enough to appease the Trump administration for long.

Given the several U-turns and the uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs, more unexpected levies are expected – which could again leave the company with little manoeuvring room and even less time.

Mr Dixit says smartphone tariffs will not cripple Apple should they rear their head again, but regardless will add “pressure – both operationally and politically” to a supply chain that cannot be unwound quickly.

“Clearly the severity of the immediate crisis has been lessened,” Mr Friedman adds, referring to last week’s exemption for smartphones.

“But I really don’t think this means Apple can relax.”

In January, Lina went to the police.

Her ex-partner had been threatening her at home in the Spanish seaside town of Benalmádena. That day, he’d allegedly raised his hand as if to hit her.

“There had been violent episodes – she was scared,” Lina’s cousin Daniel recalls.

When she got to the police station, she was interviewed and her case registered with VioGén, a digital tool which assesses the likelihood of a woman being attacked again by the same man.

VioGén – an algorithm-based system – asks 35 questions about the abuse and its intensity, the aggressor’s access to weapons, his mental health and whether the woman has left, or is considering leaving, the relationship.

It then records the threat to her as “negligible”, “low”, “medium”, “high” or “extreme”.

The category is used to make decisions about the allocation of police resources to protect the woman.

Lina was deemed to be at “medium” risk.

She asked for a restraining order at a specialist gender violence court in Malaga, so that her ex-partner couldn’t be in contact with her or share her living space. The request was denied.

“Lina wanted to change the locks at her home, so she could live peacefully with her children,” says her cousin.

Three weeks later, she was dead. Her partner had allegedly used his key to enter her flat and soon the house was on fire.

While her children, mother and ex-partner all escaped, Lina didn’t. Her 11-year-old son was widely reported as telling police it was his father who killed his mother.

Lina’s lifeless body was retrieved from the charred interior of her home. Her ex-partner, the father of her three youngest children, was arrested.

Now, her death is raising questions about VioGén and its ability to keep women safe in Spain.

VioGén didn’t accurately predict the threat to Lina.

As a woman designated at “medium” risk, the protocol is that she would be followed up again by a nominated police officer within 30 days.

But Lina was dead before that. If she had been “high” risk, the police follow-up would have happened within a week. Could that have made a difference to Lina?

Tools to evaluate the threat of repeat domestic violence are used in North America and across Europe. In the UK, some police forces use DARA (Domestic Abuse Risk Assessment) – essentially a checklist. And DASH (Domestic Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour-based Violence Assessment) may be employed by police or others, like social workers, to assess the risk of another attack.

But only in Spain is an algorithm woven so tightly into police practice. VioGén was developed by Spanish police and academics. It’s used everywhere apart from the Basque Country and Catalonia (those regions have separate systems, although police co-operation is nationwide).

The head of the National Police’s family and women’s unit in Malaga, Ch Insp Isabel Espejo, describes VioGén as “super-important”.

“It helps us follow each victim’s case very precisely,” she says.

Her officers deal with an average of 10 reports of gender violence a day. And every month, VioGén classifies nine or 10 women as being at “extreme” risk of repeat victimisation.

The resource implications in those cases are huge: 24-hour police protection for a woman until the circumstances change and the risk decreases. Women assessed as “high” risk may also get an officer escort.

A 2014 study found that officers accepted VioGén’s evaluation of the likelihood of repeated abuse 95% of the time. Critics suggest police are abdicating decision-making about women’s safety to an algorithm.

Ch Insp Espejo says that the algorithm’s calculation of risk is usually adequate. But she recognises – even though Lina’s case wasn’t under her command – that something went wrong with Lina’s assessment.

“I’m not going to say VioGén doesn’t fail – it does. But this wasn’t the trigger that led to this woman’s murder. The only guilty party is the person who killed Lina. Total security just doesn’t exist,” she says.

But at “medium” risk, Lina was never a police priority. And did Lina’s VioGén assessment have an impact on the court’s decision to deny her a restraining order against her ex-partner?

Court authorities didn’t give us permission to meet the judge who denied Lina an injunction against her ex-partner – a woman attacked on social media after Lina’s death.

Instead, another of Malaga’s gender violence judges, Maria del Carmen Gutiérrez tells us in general terms that such an order needs two things: evidence of a crime and the threat of serious danger to the victim.

“VioGén is one element I use to assess that danger, but it’s far from the only one,” she says.

Sometimes, the judge says, she makes restraining orders in cases where VioGén has assessed a woman as at “negligible” or “low” risk. On other occasions she may conclude there’s no danger to a woman deemed at “medium” or “high” risk of repeat victimisation.

Dr Juan Jose Medina, a criminologist at the University of Seville, says Spain has a “postcode lottery” for women applying for restraining orders – some jurisdictions are much more likely to grant them than others. But we don’t know systematically how VioGén influences the courts, or the police, because studies haven’t been done.

“How are police officers and other stakeholders using this tool, and how is it informing their decision-making? We don’t have good answers,” he says.

Spain’s interior ministry hasn’t often allowed academics access to VioGén’s data. And there hasn’t been an independent audit of the algorithm.

Gemma Galdon, the founder of Eticas – an organisation working on the social and ethical impact of technology – says if you don’t audit these systems, you won’t know if they’re actually delivering police protection to the right women.

Examples of algorithmic bias elsewhere are well-documented. In the US, analysis from 2016 of a recidivism tool found black defendants were more likely than their white peers to be incorrectly judged to be at higher risk of repeat offending. At the same time, white defendants were more likely than black defendants to be wrongly flagged as low risk.

In 2018, Spain’s interior ministry didn’t give a green light to an Eticas proposal to conduct a confidential, pro-bono, internal audit. So instead, Gemma Galdon and her colleagues decided to reverse-engineer VioGén and do an external audit.

They used interviews with women survivors of domestic abuse and publicly available information – including data from the judiciary about women who, like Lina, had been killed.

They found that between 2003 and 2021, 71 women murdered by their partners or ex-partners had previously reported domestic abuse to the police. Those recorded on the VioGén system were given risk levels of “negligible” or “medium”.

“What we’d like to know is, were those error rates that cannot be mitigated in any way? Or could we have done something to improve how these systems assign risk and protect those women better?” asks Gemma Galdon.

The head of gender violence research at Spain’s interior ministry, Juan José López-Ossorio, is dismissive of the Eticas investigation: it wasn’t done with VioGén data. “If you don’t have access to the data, how can you interpret it?” he says.

And he is wary of an external audit, fearing it could compromise both the security of women whose cases are recorded and VioGén’s procedures.

“What we know is that once a woman reports a man and she’s under police protection, the probability of further violence is substantially lowered – we’ve no doubts about that,” says López-Ossorio.

VioGén has evolved since it was introduced in Spain. The questionnaire has been refined, and the “negligible” category of risk will soon be abolished. And even critics agree it makes sense to have a standardised system responding to gender violence.

In Benalmádena, Lina’s home has become a shrine.

Flowers, candles and pictures of saints were left on the step. A small poster stuck on the wall declared: Benalmádena says no to gender violence. The community fundraised for Lina’s children.

Her cousin, Daniel, says everyone’s still reeling from news of her death.

“The family it’s destroyed – especially Lina’s mother,” he says.

“She’s 82 years old. I don’t think there’s anything sadder than to have your daughter killed by an aggressor in a way that could have been avoided. The children are still in shock – they’ll need a lot of psychological help.”

An Indian archaeologist, whose career was marked by brilliance and controversy, made one of the world’s greatest historical discoveries. Yet he remains largely forgotten today.

In the early 1900s, Rakhaldas Banerjee (also spelled Banerji) unearthed Mohenjo-daro – meaning “mound of the dead men” in the Sindhi language – in present-day Pakistan. It was the largest city of the thriving Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilisation, which stretched from north-east Afghanistan to north-west India during the Bronze Age.

Banerjee, an intrepid explorer and talented epigraphist, worked for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) when the country was under British colonial rule. He spent months travelling to distant corners of the subcontinent, looking for ancient artefacts, ruins and scripts.

But while his discovery of Mohenjo-daro was ground-breaking, Banerjee’s legacy is clouded by disputes. His independent streak and defiance of colonial protocols often landed him in trouble – tainting his reputation and perhaps even erasing parts of his contribution from global memory.

Interestingly, Banerjee’s reports on Mohenjo-daro were never published by the ASI. Archaeologist PK Mishra later accused then ASI chief John Marshall of suppressing Banerjee’s findings and claiming credit for the discovery himself.

“The world knows Marshall discovered the civilisation’s ruins and it is taught in institutions. Banerjee is an insignificant footnote,” Prof Mishra told the Times of India newspaper.

In her book, , historian Nayanjot Lahiri writes that Banerjee “lacked diplomacy and tact and displayed a high-handedness that ruffled feathers”. Her book also sheds light on the controversies he was embroiled in during his time at the ASI.

She notes how once, he attempted to procure inscriptions and images from a museum in north-east India without the approval or knowledge of his boss.

Another time, Banerjee attempted to relocate some stone sculptures from a museum in Bengal to the one he was stationed at without the necessary permissions.

In another instance, he purchased an antique painting for a sum without consulting his superiors who thought he’d paid more than was necessary.

“Banerjee’s many talents seemed to include being always able to rub people the wrong way,” Lahiri writes.

But Banerjee remains a prominent figure among world historians and scholars in Bengal because of his connection with Mohenjo-daro.

He was born in 1885 to a wealthy family in Bengal.

The medieval monuments that dotted Baharampur, the city he grew up in, kindled his interest in history and he pursued the subject in college. But he always had an adventurous streak.

Once, when he was tasked with writing an essay about the Scythian period of Indian history, he travelled to a museum in a neighbouring state to study first-hand sculptures and scripts from that era.

In her book, , author Yama Pande notes how Banerjee joined the ASI as an excavation assistant in 1910 and rose quickly within the ranks to become a superintending archaeologist in western India in 1917.

It was in this post that he first set eyes on Mohenjo-daro in Sindh in 1919. In the following years, he conducted a series of excavations at the site that revealed some of the most fascinating finds: ancient Buddhist stupas, coins, seals, pots and microliths.

Between 1922 and 1923, he discovered several layers of ruins that held clues about various urban settlements that had emerged in the region, but most importantly, the oldest one that had existed some 5,300 years ago – the Indus Valley Civilisation.

At that time, historians had not yet discovered the full scale of the Indus Civilisation which, we now know, covered an expanse of approximately 386,000 sq miles (999,735 sq km) along the Indus river valley.

Three seals from Banerjee’s excavation bore images and scripts similar to those from Harappa in the Punjab province in present-day Pakistan. This helped establish a link between the two sites, shedding light on the vast reach of the Indus Valley civilisation.

But by 1924, Banerjee’s funds for the project had dried up and he was also transferred to eastern India. He had no further contact with the site, nor did he participate in any excavations there, Pande writes in her book.

But Nayanjot Lahiri notes that Banerjee was transferred at his own request, after becoming entangled in questions over his spending. He had failed to account for several job-related expenses.

It was also revealed that Banerjee had used excavation grants to buy office furniture and his travel expenses were deemed excessive.

His explanations failed to convince his superiors and disciplinary action was recommended. After some negotiation, Banerjee was granted his request and transferred to another region.

Banerjee continued to work with the ASI in eastern India. He spent most of his time in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and oversaw the restoration work of many important monuments.

He resigned from the ASI in 1927, but his departure was marred by controversy. In the years prior to his departure, he became the prime suspect in a case of idol theft.

It all started in October 1925, when Banerjee had visited a revered Hindu shrine in Madhya Pradesh state that housed a stone idol of a Buddhist goddess. Banerjee was accompanied by two low-ranking assistants and two labourers, Lahiri notes in her book.

However, following their visit, the idol went missing, and Banerjee was implicated in its theft. He denied any involvement in the disappearance and an investigation was launched.

The idol was later recovered in Calcutta. Though the case against Banerjee was dismissed and the charges were found to be unsubstantiated, Marshall insisted on his resignation.

After leaving the ASI, Banerjee worked as a professor, but faced financial difficulties because of his lavish lifestyle.

Historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta told the Telegraph newspaper that Banerjee splurged on good food, horse carriages and friends. In 1928, he joined the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) as a professor. He died just two years later at the age of 45.

Police in Ecuador say they have arrested four people in connection with an attack by gunmen at a cockfighting ring in which 12 people died.

Weapons and replica police and army uniforms were seized during police raids in the north-western Manabí province on Friday – a day after the attack in the rural community of La Valencia.

Footage of the attack shared on social media showed gunmen entering the ring and opening fire, as terrified spectators dived for cover.

Reports in local media suggested the attackers in fake military gear were members of a criminal gang whose rivals were at the cockfight.

A criminal investigation has been launched by the provincial authorities.

As many as 20 criminal gangs are believed to be operating in the Latin American country, vying for control over major drug routes.

Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa has said that about 70% of the world’s cocaine now flows through Ecuador’s ports before being shipped to the US and Europe.

The drug is smuggled into Ecuador from neighbouring Colombia and Peru – the world’s two largest producers of cocaine.

This January saw 781 murders, making it the deadliest month in recent years. Many of them were related to the illegal drug trade.

• Tracking the world’s major cocaine route to Europe – and why it’s growing
• How Ecuador went from tourist haven to a nation in the grip of gangs

When the devastating war in Sudan reached Sarah Williams’ neighbourhood in the capital Khartoum, she and her children were caught in the crossfire.

Bullets tore through their home, fires engulfed buildings, and electricity lines sparked explosions.

“We were crawling on the ground,” she recalls, holding her one-year-old son close. “It was chaos.”

Ms Williams, a 33-year-old mother of five, is from South Sudan.

She was forced to flee when civil war erupted in 2013, two years after it gained independence from Sudan, to become the world’s newest nation.

But the post-independence euphoria soon dissipated, when a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar triggered a civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 400,000 people and forced 2.5 million people to flee their homes.

Ms Williams was among them. After arriving in what was then a peaceful Khartoum, she rebuilt her life, working as a housekeeper for a middle-class family.

But she was uprooted again after fighting erupted in the city in 2023 between forces loyal to military ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his then-deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.

“The conflict started among themselves,” Ms Williams says. “But later, they began killing South Sudanese also, even though we weren’t part of their fight.”

In the past two years, the conflict in Sudan has claimed more than 150,000 lives, forcing more than 12 million people from their homes, and turning large parts of Khartoum into rubble.

When her home came under attack, she packed her few belongings and headed back to South Sudan.

However, conflict has now resumed there too, with the United Nations (UN) warning that the 2018 peace agreement between Kiir and Machar is at risk of collapsing.

Ms Williams’ journey has ended, for now, in Renk. A once quiet dusty border town, it has turned into a transit hub, heaving with refugees from both Sudan and its neighbour to the south.

Stranded in Renk for about five months, Ms Williams wants to return to her hometown, Nasir, in Upper Nile State.

However, it is unsafe to travel to Nasir – a strategically important port town along the Sobat River – as it has turned into a war zone.

“There’s conflict ahead of us,” she tells the BBC, holding her four-year-old daughter while gently rocking her one-year-old son.

Her voice is steady, but her eyes are heavy – carrying the weight of war, loss, and uncertainty.

Government troops and the White Army – a militia allied with Machar during the civil war – have repeatedly clashed in Nasir, with reports of heavy shelling, ambushes, and displacement of residents.

Ms Williams has not heard from her family in the town.

“I don’t know where they ran to when the clashes started… or even if they’re alive,” she says quietly.

The fighting in South Sudan has left thousands of people like Ms Williams stranded at the Renk Transit Centre. The camp is overcrowded, accommodating more than 9,000 people – three times the number it was designed for.

Refugees are given a small amount of cash by aid agencies to buy food, but it lasts for only two weeks and they are then expected to fend for themselves.

Sarah says she and other refugees were then forced to chop down trees to sell as firewood, so that they could raise money for food

“I used to collect firewood and sell it to buy flour, but there’s nothing left in the forest now. No wood for women to collect and sell,” Ms Williams says – a reminder of the environmental degradation that war causes.

Corrugated shelters at the camp squeeze in up to 15 people per room. Others build fragile homes from sticks, cloth, and torn sacks. Overcrowding is fuelling disease, hunger and despair.

Aid agencies are scrambling to move families to safer parts of South Sudan, where people have “stronger community or family ties, livelihood opportunities, and better access to services”, says Vijaya Souri of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Hundreds wait under a scorching sun to board metal boats bound for Malakal. The journey takes two and a half days down the River Nile. Passengers sit on their luggage or the floor of the boat.

Among them is Mary Deng, who escaped from Wad Madani, a fierce battleground in the Sudanese conflict.

“This child was just one day old when we crossed the border,” she says. “We are 16 in total. We had no money – but we had God.”

She clutches a bundle of documents – her family’s ticket out of Renk.

Medical services are stretched to their limits. The Joda border clinic – built from iron sheets – is the only functioning health centre in the area.

“Over 600 babies have been born here since the war began,” says a health worker. “But we can only operate during the day now, there’s no funding for night shifts.”

A cholera epidemic was declared in Renk last October. It spread across most of South Sudan, including the capital Juba, causing more than 450 deaths.

Tatek Wondimu Mamecha, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) emergency officer in South Sudan, warns of the growing risks.

“Even though the cholera outbreak is controlled, we’re not out of the woods. Right now, malaria is spiking and with the rainy season coming, it will shoot up,” he tells the BBC.

Mr Tatek adds that the ripple effects of global aid cuts by US President Donald Trump’s administration are devastating.

“Five of our partners either stopped service or reduced operations by 50%.”

Hospitals like Renk Referral have lost half their staff, including surgeons, obstetricians, paediatricians, putting an enormous strain on the remaining medics.

“The facility manages around 350 to 400 patients a day,” Mr Tatek says.

The refugee crisis in Renk brings into sharp focus the fact that tens of thousands people are trapped between two conflicts, with parts of South Sudan no longer a safe haven for people fleeing the two-year conflict in Sudan.

Tensions have escalated in South Sudan since March when Machar was put under house arrest after being accused by Kiir’s allies of supporting armed groups – a claim his party denies.

George Owino, the chair of a monitoring body set up under the 2018 peace deal to assist in its implementation, has warned that the latest clashes “threaten the foundation of the agreement.”

He tells the BBC the core problem is that political leaders continue to command rival troops, failing to integrate them into a unified national army.

“The link between politics and military power is still intact,” Mr Owino says.

“When leaders disagree, it quickly turns into armed confrontation – exactly what the agreement was supposed to prevent.”

The 2013 civil war broke out after Kiir sacked Machar as vice-president, accusing him of plotting a coup, while Machar made the counter-accusation that Kiir was a “dictator”.

The devastating civil war ended following the 2018 peace deal that saw Machar being reappointed as vice-president.

“There used to be more dialogue within the presidency. That has diminished,” Mr Owino says.

The African Union (AU) has so far failed in its efforts to get the peace process back on track, while Uganda has deployed troops to South Sudan to bolster Kiir’s position.

Machar’s party says the deployment undermines South Sudan’s sovereignty, and the 2018 peace deal.

Both Uganda and Kiir’s government defend the deployment, saying it is in accordance with a long-standing security agreement between the two nations.

Nevertheless, the deployment shows how fragile Kiir’s grip on power is, while fears grow that a full-scale civil war could resume.

And across the border in Sudan, the civil war continues to rage, with Gen Dagalo announcing the formation of a rival government.

His move comes despite the fact that his forces have lost control of Khartoum after heavy fighting. The city is now a burnt-out shell, with bombed and blackened buildings.

Ms Williams says she has no intention of going back to Khartoum, and has decided that it is best to try and rebuild her life in her home country, “even if the situation is bad”.

After fleeing Silicon Valley for political and business reasons, Elon Musk is building a corporate campus in rural Texas – but his new neighbours have mixed views.

Half an hour east of Austin, past the airport, the clogged-up traffic starts to melt away and the plains of Central Texas open up, leaving the booming city behind.

Somewhere along the main two-lane highway, a left turn takes drivers down Farm-to-Market Road 1209. It seems like an unlikely address for a high-tech hub, but that’s exactly what Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, hopes it will become.

Court filings indicate that a large metal building finished in the last few months will be the new headquarters of X, his social media platform.

A short distance away, a large logo of the Boring Company, Musk’s infrastructure company, is plastered on the side of another headquarters. And across FM 1209 is a rapidly growing SpaceX facility which manufactures Starlink satellite internet equipment.

Like most technology tycoons, Musk had long made Silicon Valley his home and headquarters. Once a supporter of the Democrats, his move to Texas is part of a larger tech world trend and also appears to reflect his own transformed ideological views.

Here the land is (relatively) cheap, skilled tech workers from nearby Austin are plentiful, and local laws are favourable to development.

Of course, there are also specific political angles to the move.

In July 2024, Musk said he was quitting California after the state passed a law prohibiting teachers from enforcing rules about notifying families when students’ gender identity changes.

Musk has an estranged transgender daughter and has spoken out against what he calls “woke mind virus” – which he describes in interviews as divisive identity politics – along with anti-meritocratic and anti-free speech ideas.

And so Musk upped sticks and headed to Texas, a Republican stronghold and the fastest-growing state in the US.

In addition to the cluster of buildings near Bastrop in central Texas, he has built a SpaceX facility in Cameron County, on the southern tip of Texas near the border with Mexico. SpaceX employees there have filed a petition to create a new town called Starbase. The measure will go to a vote in May.

Locals in Bastrop have mixed feelings about the development.

“It’s almost like we have a split personality,” says Sylvia Carrillo, city manager of Bastrop, which has a growing population of more than 12,000. “Residents are happy that their children and grandchildren will have jobs in the area.

“On the other hand it can feel like we are being overwhelmed by a third party and that the development will quickly urbanise our area,” she says.

Although the Musk development is technically outside of the city’s limits, it’s close enough that Texas laws give Bastrop’s government sway over development. And, Ms Carrillo stresses, the Musk buildings are just one example of many developments springing up in a booming area.

“He’s faced a backlash that is not entirely of his own creating,” she says.

“But now that he’s here and things are changing quickly, it’s a matter of managing” issues like house and land prices and the environment, she says.

The Musk compound is still fairly bare-bones. The grandly named Hyperloop Plaza sits in the middle of the corporate buildings, and is home to the company-owned Boring Bodega, a bar, coffee shop, hairdresser and gift shop.

On a recent windy Sunday afternoon, a video game console sat unplayed in front of a couch near a display of company T-shirts, while a few children scurried back and forth to a playground outside.

The developments in Bastrop fit right into the quickening pace of activity across central Texas, where cranes perpetually loom above the Austin skyline and the housing market is a perpetual topic of conversation.

The area has gone through various industry booms and busts over the years, including lumber and coal mining, says Judy Enis, a volunteer guide at the Bastrop Museum and Visitor Center.

During World War Two, tens of thousands of soldiers – and around 10,000 German prisoners of war – poured in to Camp Swift, a US Army facility north of the town.

“That probably had more of an impact than Elon Musk,” Ms Enis notes.

Views of the tycoon are mixed, to say the least, and inseparable not only from his politics but also opinions on economic development, in what still is a predominately rural area.

Judah Ross, a local real estate agent, says the development has supercharged population growth that started as a result of the Austin boom and accelerated during the Covid pandemic.

“I’m always going to be biased because I want the growth,” Mr Ross says. “But I love it here and I want to be part of it.

“If nothing else, what’s good is the amount of jobs that this is bringing in,” he says. “In the past year, I’ve sold to people working at Boring and SpaceX.”

Alfonso Lopez, a Texan who returned to the state after working in tech in Seattle, says he initially picked Bastrop figuring he would make a quick buck on a house purchase and move on.

Instead, he quickly became enamoured with the town, its mix of local businesses and friendly people, and wants to stay.

Mr Lopez is no big fan of Musk and is critical of some of his management practices and politics, but admires the technology his companies have built and is happy to live nearby as long as the companies are good neighbours.

“As long as they don’t ruin my water or dig a tunnel beneath my house and create a sinkhole, this isn’t bad,” he says, gesturing around the metal shed housing the bodega, coffee shop and bar. “I’ll come here and watch a game.”

His concerns about water are more than theoretical. Last year The Boring Company was fined $11,876 (£8,950) by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality after being cited for water pollution violations.

The Boring Company initially planned to dump wastewater in the nearby Colorado River but, after local pressure, signed a deal to send the sludge to a Bastrop wastewater treatment plant.

The water issues appear to have delayed housebuilding, which reportedly could include more than 100 homes for Musk employees. The planned development of homes has so far failed to materialise, however. For now, the extent of living quarters is a handful of temporary trailers behind the bodega building, surrounded by a wall, acres of Texas plain and a few horses munching grass. Ms Carrillo, the city manager, says any large-scale home building is at least a year off.

In November, SpaceX applied for a free trade zone designation, which would allow it to move materials and finished products in and out of the Bastrop factory without being subject to tariffs – one of Donald Trump’s signature policies.

It’s a common practice for manufacturers, and there are hundreds of similar zones across the country.

Local officials in Texas have endorsed the proposal, saying it will boost the local economy, despite costing the county an estimated $45,000 (£34,800) in revenue this year.

The company is also getting an injection of $17.3m (£13.4m) from the Texas government to develop the site, a grant that officials say is expected to create more than 400 jobs and $280m in capital investment in Bastrop.

Few local residents wanted to directly criticise Musk when standing face-to-face with a visiting reporter. But it’s a different story online, where sharper feelings shine through.

“They will ruin everything nearby,” one resident posted on a local online forum. “Nothing good comes with him.”

The BBC contacted SpaceX, The Boring Company and X for comment.

Ms Carrillo, the city manager, says she hasn’t picked up on much personal anger on the part of locals prompted by Musk’s activities in Washington.

But to protect Bastrop, she says, the city has recently enacted laws limiting housing density and providing for public parks – measures that she says will keep the “historic nature” of the well-preserved downtown while allowing for growth on the outskirts.

Bastrop, she says, is a conservative, traditionally Republican place.

“His national stuff doesn’t really register,” she says. “His companies have been good corporate citizens, and we hope it can stay that way.”

They say the recipe for a good country track is simple – just combine three chords and the truth.

Over the past year though, a growing number of artists have been adding their own sprinkles with pop stars including Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter leaning into the genre.

Chappell’s The Giver went straight to number two in the UK charts when it was released in March, with the self-proclaimed Midwest Princess saying she wanted to give country music a new take with “a little gay yodel”.

Figures from streaming platforms suggest that cooking up a country song has also been a recipe for success, with listening time up by 25% over the past year in the UK.

British artists are hopeful that’ll act as a giddy up to the UK scene and help them replicate some of the success of their US country cousins.

“It only benefits me and other country music artists in the UK because more people listening to country music just means they’re going to take an interest – hopefully – in what we’re doing,” 20-year-old singer Neeve Zahra tells BBC Newsbeat.

Her love for country music comes from two sources: her grandad and Hannah Montana.

The Disney Channel school-girl-by-day-pop-star-by-night character played by Miley Cyrus “probably started me off”, she says.

“I can now officially say I was country before country was cool.”

Neeve, from Manchester, is already noticing a spike in people coming to gigs and hopes the hype could build to a point where British country acts can be recognised with a category at the Brit Awards.

“That’s definitely the dream.”

Izzie Walsh is currently recording her debut album and tells Newsbeat it’s important fans support country artists “at a grassroots level” to ensure it can continue to grow in the UK.

“Everyone’s been sleeping on it and now it’s become this big thing.

“There’s a lot of support for the big US artists and it can be hard to compete with that budget, the press.

“There’s a big gap between people like me and these massive artists.”

In as far as a trend can ever be attributed to one person, this resurgence in the mainstream is “100%” down to Beyoncé, according to country music podcaster Matt Clewes.

Her 2024 album Cowboy Carter “very much splits opinions with country fans”, Matt tells Newsbeat, but “it has introduced new country artists to a country audience and gives a different perspective”.

Artists and critics predicted last year Cowboy Carter could “open the floodgates” for country music fans and Spotify credits “viral tracks” from 2024 with the sudden uptick in streams.

But there’s actually been a gradual increase in listenership going back much further it says, with streams of the genre in the UK growing by 154% since 2019, the year Lil Nas X released Old Town Road with country singer-songwriter Billy Ray Cyrus.

Apple Music says it’s noticed similar trends and both streamers report its rising popularity is particularly striking in the UK, where according to Apple it’s growing five times as quickly as in the US.

That’s reflected in some of the biggest songs of the past year.

Sabrina Carpenter’s country-pop hit Please, Please, Please, which she re-released with Dolly Parton, spent five weeks at number one in the UK and Shaboozey’s A Bar Song was a fixture of the top 10 for months.

British country music is even set to be represented on one of the world’s biggest stages next month thanks to the UK’s Eurovision entry, Remember Monday.

“Storytelling is so important to us and that is really rooted in country music,” singer Lauren Byrne tells Newsbeat about why the trio felt drawn to the genre.

“We never wanted to feel like we were trying to replicate or copy, we wanted to always make it feel our own.

“It doesn’t all have to be ‘yeehaw’.”

Matt says the next step will be to see British country artists headlining bigger festivals as the fan base continues to grow.

And as it does, he says it’ll have to embrace the different points of view feeding into it.

Country is often associated with being dominated by male artists, but the musicians driving it into the mainstream are mainly women.

Last week Lana Del Rey joined Beyoncé, Chappell and Sabrina with her country song Henry, come on, but before them it was Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Shania Twain making country more popular.

“We’re in the year of women in general for music,” says Neeve. “I think now it’s time for the country women.”

As British country music grows, there are a few differences too with the traditional US scene that will also need embracing.

“We’re often seen as, ‘Why are they making country music? They don’t live the country lifestyle’,” Matt says. “We don’t all live on farms, we don’t all drive tractors.

“But country is all about storytelling and everyone wants to write their own story.

“It’s evolving all the time so we have to be open to different styles and different perspectives.”

Neeve agrees that authenticity is the key to British country.

“It’s about telling our own story,” she says.

“I can dream about Nashville and maybe write some songs about it but I’m not gonna say I’m gonna pick you up in my truck because I don’t have a truck.

“You’ve got to stay real to yourself. We try to keep it country but in our own way.”

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

“Are they going to think I’m going to steal stuff from here?”

That’s the question Chantelle remembers asking herself after starting a new job and wondering whether or not to share her Romany heritage.

Chantelle, 23 from Bedfordshire, says she’s proud of her background but has sometimes been “nervous” to share it because of negative portrayals of her community in the media.

“When you watch films, it’s always like, ‘Oh, these are the Gypsies, they’re the bad guys,'” she explains.

Chantelle features in Stacey Dooley’s BBC documentary Growing Up Gypsy, which follows three young Romany women as they navigate everyday life.

The show comes as the charity Friends, Families and Travellers (FFT) – an organisation working to end discrimination against the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community – says it regularly hears from Romany Gypsy women who feel pressure to hide their identity in professional or public spaces to avoid discrimination and hate.

Ebony, 23 from Nottinghamshire, works as a beautician and recalls a client at a previous job, who didn’t know about her heritage, telling her she didn’t want to park in a certain area because there were Gypsies living near there.

“And I was sat there, painting her nails, like: ‘Little do you know’,” she recalls thinking.

Romany Gypsies are one of the three ethnic groups within the GRT community. Some in the community prefer to refer to themselves as travellers, while others prefer to use the term Gypsy.

Presenter Dooley says she felt privileged to be invited into the community but that being with the women and their families has shown her “how unwelcome they can sometimes be made to feel”.

It’s something that as a Romany Gypsy myself, I’ve had conflicting feelings about.

Now 26, I’m incredibly proud of my heritage – it’s often one of the first things I’ll share about myself and I have incredible memories of summers spent in the cherry orchard where my family worked.

However, I didn’t always feel that way. At school, I was reluctant to tell people about my identity for fear of being called a derogatory name and when I applied for university, my parents told me not to tick the GRT ethnicity box on the entrance form in case it hurt my chances of getting in.

I filled it in anyway, and have grown more confident in talking about my heritage but the hesitation is still there and is shared by many in the community today.

“There is a lot of hate and discrimination against travellers, and people don’t get jobs because they’re travellers,” says Ebony, on why she’s hidden her heritage in the past.

A spokesperson for the FFT says prejudice against the GRT community “remains widespread” and “too often goes unchallenged”.

And in 2021, a YouGov poll organised by the FFT suggested that 22% of people surveyed would be uncomfortable employing a Gypsy or traveller.

However, Ebony also says she’s had positive interactions with her employers when she did share her heritage and loves where she currently works.

Chantelle now enjoys working as a content creator, with more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, and is more open in speaking about her culture, explaining people online were really “interested” to learn more about her heritage.

Her content includes answering followers’ questions about her community and making traditional dishes, like bacon pudding, which she learned to make from her grandmother.

However, she still sees negative comments, with some even claiming those who live in a house are not Gypsies, which Chantelle says shows a misunderstanding of how her culture works.

“It goes back in your generations and it’s in your blood,” she says.

Despite the comments, Chantelle continues to make videos and appreciates her heritage, explaining: “I know we get talked bad about and things like that, but I’m proud of it.”

Ebony, meanwhile, hopes that people watching the documentary learn more about the GRT community and aren’t so prejudiced towards them.

“I don’t look at every non-traveller like you’re a bad person,” she says, adding that the community does experience that type of prejudice.

“That’s what I would like people to sort of open their eyes to,” she adds.

Stock markets around the world have been relatively settled this week after a period of chaos, sparked by US trade tariffs.

But investors are still closely watching a part of the market which rarely moves dramatically – the US bond market.

Governments sell bonds – essentially an IOU – to raise money for public spending and in return they pay interest.

Recently, in an extremely rare move the rate the US government had to pay on its bonds rose sharply, while the price of bonds themselves fell.

The volatility suggests investors were losing confidence in the world’s biggest economy.

You may think it’s too esoteric to bother you, but here’s why it matters and how it may change President Trump’s mind on tariffs.

When a government wants to borrow money, it usually does so by selling bonds – known as “Treasuries” in the US – to investors on financial markets.

Such payments are made over a number of pre-agreed years before a full and final payment is made when the bond “matures” – in other words, expires.

Investors who buy bonds are mainly made up of financial institutions, ranging from pension funds to central banks like the Bank of England.

Investors buy government bonds because they are seen as a safe place to invest their money. There is little risk a government will not repay the money, especially an economic superpower like the US.

So when the economy is turbulent and investors want to take money out of volatile stocks and shares markets, they usually place that cash in US bonds.

But recently that hasn’t happened.

Initially, following the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement on 2 April when shares fell, investors did appear to flock to US bonds.

However, when the first of these tariffs kicked in on 5 April and Trump doubled down on his policies that weekend, investors began dumping government bonds, sending the interest rate the US government would have to pay to borrow money up sharply.

The so-called yield for US government borrowing over 10 years shot up from 3.9% to 4.5%, while the 30-year yield spiked at almost 5%. Movements of 0.2% in either direction are considered a big deal.

Why the dramatic sell-off? In short, the uncertainty over the impact of tariffs on the US economy led to investors no longer seeing government bonds as such a safe bet, so demanded bigger returns to buy them.

The higher the perceived risk, the higher the yield investors want to compensate for taking it.

If the US government is spending more on debt interest repayments, it can affect budgets and public spending as it becomes more costly for the government to sustain itself.

But it can also have a direct impact on households and even more so on businesses.

John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics, says when investors charge higher rates to lend the government money, other rates for lending that have more risk attached, such as mortgages, credit cards and car loans, also tend to rise.

Businesses, especially small ones, are likely to be hardest hit by any immediate change in borrowing rates, as most homeowners in the US have fixed-rate deals of between 15 and 30 years. If businesses can’t get access to credit, that can halt economic growth and lead to job losses over time.

Mr Canavan adds that banks can become more cautious in lending money, which could impact the US economy.

First-time buyers and those wishing to move home could also face higher costs, he says, which could impact the housing market in the longer term. It’s common in the US for small business owners starting out to use the equity in their home as collateral.

Following the introduction of tariffs, Trump urged his nation to “hang tough”, but it appears the potential threat to jobs and the US economy stopped the president in his tracks.

Following the ructions in the bond markets, he introduced a 90-day pause for the higher tariffs on every country except China. The 10% blanket tariff, however, on all countries remains.

It proved a pressure point for Trump – and now the world knows it.

“Although President Donald Trump was able to resist the stock market sell-off, once the bond market began to weaken too, it was only a matter of time before he folded,” says Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics.

According to US media reports, it was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, inundated with calls from business leaders, who played a key part in swaying Trump.

The bond market reaction has led to comparisons with former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s infamous mini-Budget of September 2022. The unfunded tax cuts announced then spooked investors, who dumped UK government bonds, resulting in the Bank of England stepping in to buy bonds to save pension funds from collapse.

Some analysts suggested that America’s central bank, the US Federal Reserve, might have been forced to step in if the sell-off had worsened.

While bond yields have settled, some might argue the damage has already been done as they remain higher than before the blanket tariffs kicked in.

“Arguably the most worrying aspect of the [recent] turmoil… is an emerging risk premium in US Treasury bonds and the dollar, akin to what the UK experienced in 2022,” according to Jonas Goltermann, deputy chief markets economist at Capital Economics.

But unless you’re a first-time buyer or selling your home, Americans are unlikely to be immediately hit by higher mortgage costs, unlike Brits who were securing new shorter-term fixed deals.

Since 2010, foreign ownership of US bonds has almost doubled, rising by $3 trillion, according to Deutsche Bank.

Japan holds the most US Treasuries, but China, the US’s arch enemy in this global trade war, is the second biggest holder of US government debt globally.

Questions were raised about whether it sparked the debt sell-off in response to being hit with huge tariffs.

However, this is unlikely as any fire sale “would impoverish China more than it would hurt the US”, according to Capital Economics.

An Indian archaeologist, whose career was marked by brilliance and controversy, made one of the world’s greatest historical discoveries. Yet he remains largely forgotten today.

In the early 1900s, Rakhaldas Banerjee (also spelled Banerji) unearthed Mohenjo-daro – meaning “mound of the dead men” in the Sindhi language – in present-day Pakistan. It was the largest city of the thriving Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilisation, which stretched from north-east Afghanistan to north-west India during the Bronze Age.

Banerjee, an intrepid explorer and talented epigraphist, worked for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) when the country was under British colonial rule. He spent months travelling to distant corners of the subcontinent, looking for ancient artefacts, ruins and scripts.

But while his discovery of Mohenjo-daro was ground-breaking, Banerjee’s legacy is clouded by disputes. His independent streak and defiance of colonial protocols often landed him in trouble – tainting his reputation and perhaps even erasing parts of his contribution from global memory.

Interestingly, Banerjee’s reports on Mohenjo-daro were never published by the ASI. Archaeologist PK Mishra later accused then ASI chief John Marshall of suppressing Banerjee’s findings and claiming credit for the discovery himself.

“The world knows Marshall discovered the civilisation’s ruins and it is taught in institutions. Banerjee is an insignificant footnote,” Prof Mishra told the Times of India newspaper.

In her book, , historian Nayanjot Lahiri writes that Banerjee “lacked diplomacy and tact and displayed a high-handedness that ruffled feathers”. Her book also sheds light on the controversies he was embroiled in during his time at the ASI.

She notes how once, he attempted to procure inscriptions and images from a museum in north-east India without the approval or knowledge of his boss.

Another time, Banerjee attempted to relocate some stone sculptures from a museum in Bengal to the one he was stationed at without the necessary permissions.

In another instance, he purchased an antique painting for a sum without consulting his superiors who thought he’d paid more than was necessary.

“Banerjee’s many talents seemed to include being always able to rub people the wrong way,” Lahiri writes.

But Banerjee remains a prominent figure among world historians and scholars in Bengal because of his connection with Mohenjo-daro.

He was born in 1885 to a wealthy family in Bengal.

The medieval monuments that dotted Baharampur, the city he grew up in, kindled his interest in history and he pursued the subject in college. But he always had an adventurous streak.

Once, when he was tasked with writing an essay about the Scythian period of Indian history, he travelled to a museum in a neighbouring state to study first-hand sculptures and scripts from that era.

In her book, , author Yama Pande notes how Banerjee joined the ASI as an excavation assistant in 1910 and rose quickly within the ranks to become a superintending archaeologist in western India in 1917.

It was in this post that he first set eyes on Mohenjo-daro in Sindh in 1919. In the following years, he conducted a series of excavations at the site that revealed some of the most fascinating finds: ancient Buddhist stupas, coins, seals, pots and microliths.

Between 1922 and 1923, he discovered several layers of ruins that held clues about various urban settlements that had emerged in the region, but most importantly, the oldest one that had existed some 5,300 years ago – the Indus Valley Civilisation.

At that time, historians had not yet discovered the full scale of the Indus Civilisation which, we now know, covered an expanse of approximately 386,000 sq miles (999,735 sq km) along the Indus river valley.

Three seals from Banerjee’s excavation bore images and scripts similar to those from Harappa in the Punjab province in present-day Pakistan. This helped establish a link between the two sites, shedding light on the vast reach of the Indus Valley civilisation.

But by 1924, Banerjee’s funds for the project had dried up and he was also transferred to eastern India. He had no further contact with the site, nor did he participate in any excavations there, Pande writes in her book.

But Nayanjot Lahiri notes that Banerjee was transferred at his own request, after becoming entangled in questions over his spending. He had failed to account for several job-related expenses.

It was also revealed that Banerjee had used excavation grants to buy office furniture and his travel expenses were deemed excessive.

His explanations failed to convince his superiors and disciplinary action was recommended. After some negotiation, Banerjee was granted his request and transferred to another region.

Banerjee continued to work with the ASI in eastern India. He spent most of his time in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and oversaw the restoration work of many important monuments.

He resigned from the ASI in 1927, but his departure was marred by controversy. In the years prior to his departure, he became the prime suspect in a case of idol theft.

It all started in October 1925, when Banerjee had visited a revered Hindu shrine in Madhya Pradesh state that housed a stone idol of a Buddhist goddess. Banerjee was accompanied by two low-ranking assistants and two labourers, Lahiri notes in her book.

However, following their visit, the idol went missing, and Banerjee was implicated in its theft. He denied any involvement in the disappearance and an investigation was launched.

The idol was later recovered in Calcutta. Though the case against Banerjee was dismissed and the charges were found to be unsubstantiated, Marshall insisted on his resignation.

After leaving the ASI, Banerjee worked as a professor, but faced financial difficulties because of his lavish lifestyle.

Historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta told the Telegraph newspaper that Banerjee splurged on good food, horse carriages and friends. In 1928, he joined the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) as a professor. He died just two years later at the age of 45.

A brioche bread infused with lemon and Earl Grey tea has been crowned Britain’s best loaf.

On a roll, Miyo Aoetsu – who started baking as a hobby – has now won the prize for the second time after her green loaf flavoured with matcha, white chocolate and fruit scooped the 2023 gong.

She runs Kuma-San Bakehouse from her home in Darley Dale in Derbyshire, supplying businesses and baking loaves for customers to collect.

She told the BBC she was delighted with the top award, and added: “I was speechless when I won… I was very, very happy, I was almost screaming on the stage.”

The bread won top spot in the Britain’s Best Loaf competition, run by trade magazine British Baker, and also won in the Innovation category.

Judges said the loaf – which beat 200 others to the prize – impressed them with its “unique flavour profile” featuring Earl Grey tea and limoncello-soaked candied lemon peel, combined with lemon curd and juice for a “zesty, aromatic finish”.

Miyo, 55, said the limoncello gave the loaf “a kick” but the secret ingredient was a Japanese citrus fruit – commonly known as yuzu.

Miyo said: “In the last few years in Japan, the combination of Earl Grey tea and citrus fruits like lemon has been really trendy so people make a lot of cakes and cookies with these.

“So I started to think about making a bread with these combinations… I like the subtle aroma of tea when used in baking.”

But she added it was not a perfect bake from the start and made “about 45 loaves” before she was satisfied with the finished product.

“I baked and baked and baked until I was confident it would be ready for the competition,” she said.

On winning for the second time on 8 April, Miyo added: “There’s always a chance but I didn’t really think it would happen… but when they called my name I was speechless but I was really glad and happy because of the effort I had put in.”

Born in Tokushima, about 93 miles (150km) from Osaka, Miyo first moved to the UK to study at the University of Manchester, where she met her husband.

The couple later lived in Luxembourg and France, where Miyo got a taste for French bread. She then started baking her own bread after moving back to England.

The prestigious award has not left Derbyshire since Miyo won with her green loaf in 2023.

Last year, 4 Eyes Bakery, based in Staveley near Chesterfield, won with its garlic and rosemary deep pan focaccia creation.

“It’s a great thing to keep the award here,” Miyo said.

“I know Tom [at 4 Eyes Bakery] who won it last year… he’s an excellent baker and I’m glad this award remains in the county.

“To have it still in Derbyshire is a wonderful thing because the quality of bread in this area is fantastic.”

On her next creation, Miyo said: “I’m always interested in combining both Western and Japanese cultures in my baking… I’m experimenting all of the time.”

Blind content creator and TikTok star Lucy Edwards says she’s “so excited” to be on a health kick to undergo IVF for gene editing purposes, but reveals the dilemma she faced in deciding to screen out the very gene that made her blind.

“I’m so broody,” the 29-year-old tells the BBC Access All podcast.

Lucy and her husband Ollie married at Kew Gardens two years ago and are now ready to start a family – but there are complications to consider.

Lucy has the rare genetic condition Incontinentia Pigmenti (IP) and lost her sight due to this aged 17, just months after meeting Ollie.

The condition runs through the female line – Lucy’s mum has IP although isn’t blind, her Grandma did too and her great-aunt was blind in one eye.

Lucy is totally blind, but, if she had been a boy, she may not have survived.

The abnormal IP gene is located on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes, while males have X and Y, meaning the appearance of the gene can be more catastrophic in male pregnancies.

“My grandma actually had nine miscarriages,” Lucy says.

This is one of the facts that played into the complicated decision Lucy and Ollie made to opt for pre-implantation genetic testing, a special type of IVF where embryos are created outside of the body and screened for the genetic condition. Only those embryos which are not affected by the condition are placed back into the womb.

Without medical intervention, Lucy says there would be four potential outcomes to any pregnancy she carried: A healthy and unaffected boy or girl, an affected boy she would likely miscarry or who would be born with severe brain damage or an affected girl.

She pauses, then laughs: “That sounds horrible, doesn’t it? That’s me.”

And that’s the quandary. IVF will edit out the very thing that has made Lucy who she is today – a journalist, advocate, author and broadcaster.

It is an emotive topic of debate. The most well-known conversation is around Down’s syndrome and the number of women who choose to abort a pregnancy once their baby is tested and diagnosed as having the condition. The question is around the value people place on other peoples’ lives which may not look like our own.

In 2021 campaigner Heidi Crowter, who herself has Down’s syndrome, challenged legislation allowing foetuses with the condition to be aborted up until birth. She took her case to the High Court arguing the rules were discriminatory to disabled people who could live a good life. She lost the case and the subsequent argument she made at the Court of Appeal. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) later rejected it as well, but Heidi continues to campaign to have the law overturned.

It is something Lucy is very aware of and she and her husband have spent a long time considering.

“It’s understanding that it is removing that part of me that makes me, me,” Lucy says. “It’s such a personal decision and I know that I’m opening myself up for possible designer baby discussions, but I know I’m doing it for the right reasons.”

Lucy says first being diagnosed with IP and then losing her sight as a teenager were both traumatic events and she wants to minimise the likelihood of miscarriage to limit any future traumatic load.

She says she found it impossible to “knowingly” consider having a baby naturally once she knew the science was available to give a baby the healthiest start possible.

“If I had a baby and, unknowingly, I had a gorgeous, gorgeous baby with disabilities, I would be so thankful, so happy and amazed but knowingly having this gene? That’s why we’re having IVF.”

IP doesn’t just cause blindness, it can also cause severe epilepsy and more difficult outcomes. Lucy says having the option to ensure complications were not passed on felt like both a responsibility and a privilege previous generations did not have.

“Whether we like it or not, we have to be responsible here. Maybe a responsible issue for you, if you have IP or another genetic disorder, is to have a child naturally and we are not judging you in any shape or form, this is just our decision.”

In response to their openness around this decision comments were overwhelmingly positive from Lucy’s fans which she thinks might be because she is so “disability positive” in her everyday life – “I love being blind,” she frequently states.

But Lucy says responses have been different around the world. When she was working in Japan and her content was reaching audiences unfamiliar with her story, she faced a lot more trolling.

“I got a lot of abusive comments that go into my spam filter questioning why I would be a mother,” she says. “I know that I’m going to get a lot of abuse, but I’m just going to block them.

“I’m going to be OK. All I think about is the other mothers that have come before me who are competent, capable and resilient.”

Lucy, who is known for her How Does A Blind Girl… series of videos, is overjoyed by the prospect of IVF but she has also been frank about the fact she currently does not qualify, owing to her current weight, a sensitive element of IVF treatment that many keep to themselves.

NHS guidelines specify your Body Mass Index (BMI) must be 30 or under to qualify – a healthy BMI is considered to be between 18.5 and 24.9.

“I need to be a BMI of 30 and I’m very open that I need to lose 9kg,” Lucy says. “I’ve already lost 15kg.”

Her health journey has involved swimming, lifting weights and many runs with Ollie tethered to her as her sighted guide. She has also found a love for batch cooking nutritious meals which she posts about on all of her channels on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and the workarounds she has developed as a blind cook.

“I wanted a positive representation of losing weight online because it’s all about this blinking jab,” she says, referring to weight loss injections. “I just wanted to lose it healthily, have lots of nice food, talk about meal prep and just smile and run.”

Once she hits the required BMI, Lucy will qualify for three rounds of IVF on the NHS.

She will contact her consultant, after which she has to “spit in a cup” and offer up her DNA for genetic testing and analysis.

Over a period of about three months, a genetics team will “make a bespoke test to find the gene within my eggs,” Lucy explains.

Meanwhile Lucy will inject herself with trigger shots to stimulate the follicles within her ovaries to increase the number of eggs produced which will be retrieved, and then made into embryos with Ollie’s sperm.

The embryos will then be tested so only ones without the IP gene will be possible candidates. Those embryos will be “shuffled about” so Lucy and Ollie don’t know which will be selected in terms of gender or other genetic qualities, and implanted into Lucy, who will carry the baby to term.

Lucy can’t wait for the moment she holds her baby in her arms.

“It will never stop being a thing within my mind that this gene is being eradicated,” she admits. “But I am very happy in my decision.”

A few days ago Lucy posted on Instagram, her cardigan tightened at the back with a hairband to make it smaller and fit.

“I’ve lost so much [weight] that my clothes are too loose now so we had to tie it up with a bobble,” she tells her followers.

“Fingers crossed [we’re] only a few weeks away from ringing the clinic.”

You can listen to Lucy Edwards on BBC Access All on BBC Sounds. Subscribe and email your thoughts to accessall@bbc.co.uk

An 82-year-old woman who teaches the ancient Indian martial art of Kalaripayattu says she has no plans to retire.

“I’ll probably practise Kalari until the day I die,” says Meenakshi Raghavan, widely thought to be the oldest woman in the world to practise the art form.

Kalaripayattu – kalari means battleground and payattu means fight – is believed to have originated at least 3,000 years back in the southern state of Kerala and is regarded as India’s oldest martial art.

It is not solely practised for combat or fighting; it also serves to instil discipline, build strength and develop self-defence skills.

Ms Raghavan is fondly known as Meenakshi Amma – Amma means mother in the Malayalam language – in Kerala’s Vadakara, where she lives. The town is also home to other renowned exponents of the art like Unniyarcha, Aromal Chekavar and Thacholi Othenan.

Meenakshi Amma occasionally performs in other cities but mainly runs her own Kalari school, founded by her husband in 1950. Her days are busy, with classes from five in the morning to noon.

“I teach about 50 students daily. My four children were also trained [in the art form] by me and my husband. They started learning from the age of six,” she says.

Kalaripayattu has four stages and it requires patience to learn the art form.

Training begins with meypattu – an oil massage followed by exercises to condition the body.

After about two years, students progress to kolthari (stick fighting), then to angathari (weapon combat), and finally to verumkai – the highest level, involving unarmed combat. It typically takes up to five years to master Kalaripayattu.

Kung fu is believed to have adapted principles like breathing techniques and marmashastra (stimulating vital points to optimise energy flow) from Kalaripayattu, according to Vinod Kadangal, another Kalari teacher.

Legend has it that around the 6th Century, Indian Buddhist monk Bodhidharma introduced these techniques to the Shaolin monks, influencing the more famous Chinese martial art.

Meenakshi Amma still recalls the first time she stepped into a Kalari – the red-earth arena where the art is practised – 75 years ago.

“I was seven and quite good at dancing. So my guru – VP Raghavan – approached my father and suggested that I learn Kalaripayattu. Just like dance, the art form requires you to be flexible,” she says.

Hailing from Kerala’s Thiyya community, Meenakshi Amma’s guru was 15 when he and his brothers opened their own Kalaripayattu school after being denied admission elsewhere because of their low social caste.

“There was no bias when it came to girls enrolling to study Kalari – in fact, physical education was compulsory in all Kerala schools at that time. But we were expected to stop after attaining puberty,” she says.

Unlike others, Meenakshi Amma’s father encouraged her training into her late teens. At 17, she fell in love with Raghavan, and they soon married. Together, they went on to train hundreds of students, often for free.

“At the time, a lot of children came from poor families. The only money he [Raghavan] accepted was in the form of or a tribute paid to the teacher,” she says.

Donations sustained the school, while Raghavan later took a teaching job for extra income. After his death in 2007, Meenakshi Amma formally took charge.

While she has no plans to retire at the moment, she hopes to hand over the school one day to her eldest son Sanjeev.

The 62-year-old, who is also an instructor at the school, says he is lucky to have learnt from the best – his mother. But being her son earns no favours; he says she’s still his toughest opponent.

Meenakshi Amma is a local celebrity. During our interview, three politicians drop by to invite her to an awards ceremony.

“Amma, you must grace us with your presence,” one of them says with folded hands.

“Thank you for considering me, I’ll attend,” she replies.

Her students speak of “fierce admiration” for her. Many have opened their own Kalari schools across the state, a source of great pride for Meenakshi Amma.

“She’s an inspiration to women everywhere – a rare person who shows love and affection to her students, yet remains a strict disciplinarian when it comes to Kalari,” says KF Thomas, a former student.

“No man avenged has ever risen from the grave” is the haunting tagline of a film that has shocked Somalis to the core in a case of life imitating art.

Called Aano Qabiil, meaning “Clan Vengeance”, the short film sought to highlight the futility of vendettas between rival clans that sometimes go back generations and lead to senseless killings – often of young men who are targeted just because of their lineage.

It was a poetic warning, a cry – a story intended not just to entertain, but to educate a wounded nation.

Since its release earlier this month, it has gone viral as people have learnt that one of the actors in the drama was later shot dead in exactly the kind of clan revenge killing the film had warned about.

Guudey Mohamed Geedi, a veteran of Somali cinema, had played a character who tried to intervene to stop the owner of a teashop from being killed as he hid in a building from gunmen from a rival clan.

Outside a woman is heard shouting: “Don’t let him leave alive, I want to drink his blood,” as Geedi’s character pleads: “He’s just a tea vendor – what did he do to you that warrants his death?”

Not long after the filming of Aano Qabiil wrapped up in the town of Bal’ad, around 30km (18 miles) north-east of the capital, Mogadishu, Geedi travelled to visit his family in the countryside.

It is in rural areas that rivalries between Somali clans proliferate. Sometimes the disputes are about long-standing competition for resources such as grazing land or access to wells for camels and other livestock.

But even minor issues can sometimes spark a deadly feud – for example a remark by a politician in the capital.

When Geedi reached his small village outside Warsheikh, in the Middle Shabelle region, he did not know that tensions between two Abgal sub-clans were about to boil over.

The 45-year-old was shot dead outside his home in November by armed men as part of this long-standing inter-family feud.

No-one has been arrested for his murder and the authorities have not commented on the case.

It often happens that clan-related killings go un-investigated – especially in rural zones. They are seen as “private matters” or too complex to intervene in.

“He died in real life the same way as the violence played out in the film,” his friend Adaawe, who requested that only his first name be used, told the BBC.

“Only this time, there was no camera, no director to yell ‘cut’. No-one to plead for his life.”

Abdisiyaad Abdullhai Mohamed, who wrote and directed Aano Qabiil for Astaan TV, said Geedi had been instrumental during filming.

“We worked closely together. Guudey believed in the message we were trying to convey. He wasn’t just an actor; he was a key part of the vision I had for the story,” the 32-year-old told the BBC.

The film-maker grew up in a community often affected by stories of bloodshed, where people are killed in the name of seeking justice.

“I wanted to show the humanitarian cost that follows simply hearing the news that someone has been killed due to clan revenge,” he said.

“As Somalis, every time we hear someone has been killed, we never stop to think or ask ourselves if that person belonged to a close family that is now destroyed and a future lost.”

The story of the film centres on two friends, Ali and Salah, who belong to rival sub-groups of an unnamed clan.

Together they run a teashop in Bal’ad, when clan violence from the countryside intrudes upon their lives. Neither of them knows what has brought the feud to their doorstep.

“The same cursed clans we were born into are at war again,” says Ali, who at first manages to save Salah’s life before he himself becomes a target.

To avenge Ali’s death, Salah is then killed. The film ends with clansmen laughing over his bullet-ridden body near Ali’s grave – happy that honour has been satisfied.

“In my film, I showed how the death of Ali affects his wife, Sahra, who is pregnant. Overall, this film was a cry for help, meant to raise awareness among the Somali community,” said the director, Mohamed.

Clan identity is deeply engrained in Somali society. The country has four major clans, and each has hundreds of sub-clans, with even those divided, depending on the region.

Many Somalis have grown up hearing about the killings of close relatives in the name of past grievances or clan rivalries.

Clan-related killings contribute to internal conflicts and displacement in Somalia, especially in rural areas.

But a 2023 report from PeaceRep, a research organisation based in the UK, highlighted the spread of clan revenge killings to cities in central Somalia.

Somali Peace Line, a local organisation, recorded in its 2022 annual report more than 160 clan-related killings in just one year, most of which went without justice, further fuelling the cycle of violence.

In some central regions, up to 80% of clan killings remain unresolved, leading to communities failing to learn from the tragedies.

Mohamed explained that he had met Geedi, who was married with 11 children, through a community casting contact.

“From the moment we spoke, I knew he understood the depth of what we were trying to portray,” he said.

“He was a man who truly understood the impact of clan violence, and that’s why he was perfect for our message.”

The film-maker is tormented by how a man who raised his voice for peace has become a victim of clan vengeance.

“It’s painful,” he said. “We made this film to warn people, and then, it happens to him. It’s hard to accept.”

Reaction to the film has been splashed all over social media, the mantra “no man avenged has ever risen from the grave” has been shared widely across Somali TikTok and Facebook, along with images of Geedi and clips from the film.

When asked what he hoped people would take away from the film, Mohamed said: “I want people to understand that revenge does not bring resolution – it only leads to more death and destruction.

“I can say Guudey gave his life to spread a message to society. Anyone who hears that message, I hope they take something positive from it.”

• ‘Why I spent my university fees on Somali TikTok battles’
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James’ reaction as he unboxes a rare, limited edition Labubu toy can only be described as pure, unadulterated joy.

The YouTuber delightedly holds up a brown plush monster, which has been described by collectors as “cute”, “ugly”, “creepy” and everything in between.

Labubus are furry snaggletoothed gremlins, which are designed by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung and sold by Chinese toy company Pop Mart.

They’re almost always sold out online and long queues often form outside the selected shops that stock them.

Labubus are also primarily sold in the blind box format, meaning customers never know what version they’ll get until they open them – a fact collectors have said adds to their appeal.

While it’s difficult to pin their recent rise in popularity to one particular ingredient, celebrity endorsement, social media unboxing videos and their ability to stir up nostalgia are all contributing factors.

James Welsh, from Hampshire, sees his Labubu collectable as an investment, which he tells the BBC “could probably earn a fair bit of money two or three years down the line”.

He has just shy of 30 Labubus which retail at around £25 for an individual toy or £153 for a box of six.

He says he has “spent hundreds and hundreds but not quite thousands” on the dolls.

Labubu maker Pop Mart has doubled its profits in the last year and is eying up global expansion in 2025.

The company, which started 15 years ago, has been described as “elevating toy buying to an act of trendy connoisseurship” and praised for embracing non-traditional designs, which have made them a hit with collectors.

Artist Kasing Lung is behind some of their popular toys including The Monsters series and Labubu.

He credits living in The Netherlands as the inspiration behind the dolls and told Hypbeast “I liked to read storybooks and was influenced by ancient European elf legends”.

Lung added that during his childhood, “there were no game consoles or computers, so I had to draw dolls with a pen, so I had the idea of painting fairy tales since I was a child”.

He first came up with the designs in 2015 and signed a licensing agreement with Pop Mart in 2019 to make them into toys.

Labubu as a name has no specific meaning, it is a fictional character based around an elf-like creature.

James says his first thought when he saw the one of the toys was, “they’re creepy but they’re also really cute and I need as many of them as I can get, I need them in every colour”.

The 36-year-old adds, “I think they [provide] some real escapism for millennials as it’s like reverting back to your youth with these toys and collectables.”

A former stylist, he now primarily creates beauty and skincare content, but has recently gained thousands of views on his channel from Labubu unboxing videos.

He tells the BBC: “there is a strong link between these plush pendants and the fashion community as well.”

“They’re a way to express who you are, you can show that through the different characters, which add a pop of colour and fashion is fun, it’s not serious at the end of the day, it’s reflective of who you are.”

There are several iterations of Labubu – from vinyl figures to plush toys – but the keychain versions have become most popular recently.

Labubu’s ascent into mainstream culture has been steady – but was elevated last year by BLACKPINK star Lisa.

The K-pop singer was seen with a Labubu creature hanging from her handbag and also called the toys “her secret obsession” in an interview.

Rihanna was also spotted with one of the toys attached to her bag in recent weeks, which has led to fashion fans replicating her look.

But for collectors such as 22-year-old Chulie, who shares her purchases on TikTok, she says Labubu becoming a “fashion trend” misses the point of why they’re so loved.

“For me, it’s all about the nostalgia and the surprise aspect,” she tells the BBC.

One of Pop Mart’s biggest selling points for collectors is the way their toys are packaged in what’s known as blind boxes, which make the experience of getting one like a lucky dip.

You don’t know what character you are getting until you unseal the package, so it’s always a gamble for collectors.

“You know it’s fun, it’s a dopamine hit”, James says.

“It’s gambling for some of us – kind of like a happy meal, you don’t know what toy you’re getting until you open it up.”

It also makes the toy perfect for the world of social media, as creators can catch their genuine surprise on camera and share it with other fans – something James says provides comfort and “escapism from the real world”.

Chulie says, as a child, she would collect Pokemon trading cards, so collecting another surprise item “triggered memories for me”.

“When you’re having a rough time, especially for me personally, it’s a big serotonin boost to not only buy a collectable and keep it, but share the experience with other people as well,” she adds.

Others have compared Labubus to Beanie Babies, which were popular in the 1990s and 2000s, and say collecting Labubus evokes feelings of childhood nostalgia.

For some fans, just documenting the experience of getting a Labubu is a talking point, with many showing the long queues and hours of research required to find out where new collections are being stocked.

It’s prompted backlash on some social media channels, with users criticising collectors that have bought large numbers of items.

“Just because you don’t understand someone’s hobby, doesn’t mean it’s not valid in any way,” James says.

While James hasn’t spent hours and hours queuing to build his collection, he says he “has gone out of my way” to source authentic dolls online. As with any popular item, counterfeits have made their way onto the market.

“I spend a fair bit of money on my hobby, but it’s my adult money,” he jokes.

Chulie says she currently has 10 Labubus, but has sold some to other fans when she’s ended up with the same toy twice.

“When I first got exposed to them, I wasn’t sure why people were spending money on them, because in the US they start at around $21 [£16], which is minimum wage for a lot of people.

“But it’s so addictive getting one, and it’s really hard to stop buying once you start,” she adds.

Iran and the US have held a second round of high-stakes nuclear talks in Rome – and agreed to meet again next week – even as hopes for de-escalation are tempered by mounting military threats and mixed messages.

US President Donald Trump reminds Tehran nearly every day of its options: a deal or war.

He has previously said Israel would lead a military response if the talks failed.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Trump had “waved off” an Israeli plan to strike Iranian nuclear sites as early as next month.

“I wouldn’t say waved off. I’m not in a rush to do it,” Trump told reporters in response to the article on Thursday, adding that he preferred to give diplomacy a chance.

“I think that Iran has a chance to have a great country and to live happily without death… That’s my first option. If there’s a second option, I think it would be very bad for Iran.”

After both sides described the first round of talks in Oman last weekend as constructive, Trump had said he would be “making a decision on Iran very quickly”.

In 2018, Trump pulled the US out of a 2015 agreement which saw Iran limit its nuclear activities and allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in return for sanctions relief.

He said it did too little to stop Iran’s potential pathway to a nuclear weapon and reinstated US sanctions as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign to compel Iran to negotiate a new deal.

However, Iran refused and increasingly breached restrictions in retaliation. It has now stockpiled enough highly-enriched uranium to make several bombs if it chose to do so – something it says it would never do.

The threat of military action appears to have played a role in bringing Iran back to the negotiating table. Yet it insists that is not the reason.

The website of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Iran had agreed to talks only because the US limited its demands strictly to nuclear issues – not out of fear of US and Israeli strikes.

Even so, reaching a deal remains far from certain.

Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, who is leading the US negotiating team, posted on X on Tuesday: “Any final arrangement must set a framework for peace, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East – meaning that Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization programme.”

It came just a day after he had suggested in an interview with Fox News that Iran would be allowed to continue enriching uranium.

“They do not need to enrich past 3.67%,” he said, referring to the limit set by the 2015 nuclear deal.

“This is going to be much about verification on the enrichment programme and then ultimately verification on weaponization.”

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the head of the Iranian delegation, responded by noting Witkoff’s “contradictory statements” and stressing that “real positions will be made clear at the negotiating table”.

“We are ready to build trust regarding possible concerns over Iran’s enrichment, but the principle of enrichment is not negotiable,” he said.

Saturday’s talks in Rome come amid a flurry of diplomatic activity.

Saudi Arabia’s Defence Minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, visited Tehran on Thursday, delivering a personal message from his father King Salman to Ayatollah Khamenei. He also met Iran’s President, Masoud Pezeshkian.

Iran has warned that any US military action would be met with retaliation against American bases in the region – many of them hosted by Iran’s Arab neighbours.

At the same time, Araghchi visited Moscow and handed a letter from Khamenei to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Iran and Russia have strengthened their military ties since the start of the war in Ukraine, with Tehran accused of supplying drones to support Moscow’s war effort.

The Russian parliament ratified a 20-year strategic partnership between Iran and Russia 10 days ago. However, the deal does not include a mutual defence clause.

Meanwhile, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi completed a two-day visit to Tehran this week, meeting Iranian nuclear officials and the foreign minister in a bid to ease tensions and restore inspection protocols.

Since Trump returned to office this year, Ayatollah Khamenei has consistently denounced negotiations with Washington.

“Negotiating with this administration is not logical, not wise, nor honourable,” he said in a February speech, just two months before agreeing to the current round of talks.

The supreme leader’s distrust stems from Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the “maximum pressure” campaign that followed, and the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani in a US strike in Iraq in 2020.

Ayatollah Khamenei expressed satisfaction with the first round of talks, saying it was “implemented well”.

But he cautioned that he was “neither overly optimistic nor overly pessimistic”.

He has also previously warned that Iran would ​retaliate in the event of strikes on its nuclear programme.

Some officials, including his adviser Ali Larijani, have even said that Iran might be “forced” to acquire a nuclear weapon if attacked.

“We are not pursuing weapons, and we have no problem with IAEA oversight – even indefinitely. But if you resort to bombing, Iran will have no choice but to reconsider. That is not in your interest,” Larijani told state TV earlier this month.

Each side is pushing its own narrative about how the talks are being conducted.

The US says they are direct. Iran says they indirect, and that Oman is mediating by exchanging written notes.

After the first round in Muscat, Araghchi acknowledged he had a brief exchange with Witkoff “out of diplomatic courtesy” after crossing paths.

US news website Axios, citing sources, reported the two chief negotiators spoke for up to 45 minutes.

Tehran prefers secrecy. Washington seeks publicity.

After both sides put out positive statements about the first round, Iran’s currency surged by 20%.

Iran’s leadership is well aware of public discontent over the country’s harsh economic conditions – and the potential for protests it may trigger.

For the Islamic Republic, the fear is not just over bombs – it’s protests too.

A Maryland man who the Trump administration mistakenly deported to El Salvador has been moved to a new prison, US Senator Chris Van Hollen has said.

The Democratic senator was speaking after returning from El Salvador where he met Kilmar Ábrego García, who was sent to the notorious mega-jail Cecot (Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism) last month.

Mr Ábrego García was “traumatised” and fearful of other prisoners while inside the facility, Van Hollen said, adding that he was moved to another facility in the country over a week ago.

The Supreme Court has ordered the government to “facilitate” his return, however Trump administration officials have continued to push back against the order.

The White House accuses him of being a member of the transnational Salvadoran gang MS-13, a designated foreign terrorist organisation, and has said he will not return to the US.

Mr Ábrego García has never been convicted of a crime. His family and attorneys have fiercely denied he is a member of MS-13.

Chris Van Hollen said he was initially blocked from meeting Mr Ábrego García by Salvadoran authorities. Later, he said government officials helped facilitate a meeting and Mr Ábrego García was brought to the senator’s hotel.

“His conversation with me was the first communication that he had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted,” Van Hollen said.

“He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crimes.”

Van Hollen added that conditions in the new prison, in the Salvadoran city of Santa Ana, were better.

“He still has no access to any news from the outside world and no ability to communicate with anybody in the outside world,” Van Hollen said.

Mr Ábrego García’s case is part of a simmering showdown between the Trump administration and the US courts system on the issue of immigration.

A separate feud has been brewing after a judge said he could hold the Trump administration in contempt for its “wilful disregard” of his order barring deportation flights.

Multiple judges – including a unanimous US Supreme Court ruling – said the government should facilitate Mr Ábrego García’s return to the US. But the White House has insisted the Maryland man will “never” live in the US again.

“If he [Mr Ábrego García] ever ends up back in the United States, he would immediately be deported again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House Mr Ábrego García was “not a very innocent guy”.

Mr Ábrego García has faced at least two other allegations of criminal activity, neither of which resulted in a conviction.

His wife alleged in a 2021 protective order request that he’d physically attacked her on multiple occasions, according to documents shared by the US Department of Homeland Security.

Jennifer Vasquez Sura decided not to follow through with the court process, saying she and her husband were “able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counselling”.

A separate incident was reported in 2022, when Mr Ábrego García was pulled over in Tennessee for allegedly speeding.

An officer speculated that he was involved in human trafficking, due to him having multiple people in the car and telling authorities he’d been travelling from Texas to Maryland, according to information shared by the Department of Homeland Security that was obtained by the BBC’s partner CBS.

No criminal case was launched from the incident. His wife said he “worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites”.

• What next in legal fight over El Salvador deportations?
• Who is the man in middle of Maryland deportation case?

At the heart of the case, though, are the allegations of his involvement in MS-13, which the Trump administration used to expel him under the Alien Enemies Act.

The president has evoked the law to deport hundreds so far, by arguing the alleged gang members were terrorists.

Sen Van Hollen said the Trump administration wants to “flat out lie about what this case is about”.

“If you want to make claims about Ábrego García, you should present them in the courts, not on social media,” he said.

Mr Ábrego García was arrested by immigration authorities on 12 March in Baltimore, before being deported from Texas to El Salvador on 15 March.

An Indian archaeologist, whose career was marked by brilliance and controversy, made one of the world’s greatest historical discoveries. Yet he remains largely forgotten today.

In the early 1900s, Rakhaldas Banerjee (also spelled Banerji) unearthed Mohenjo-daro – meaning “mound of the dead men” in the Sindhi language – in present-day Pakistan. It was the largest city of the thriving Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilisation, which stretched from north-east Afghanistan to north-west India during the Bronze Age.

Banerjee, an intrepid explorer and talented epigraphist, worked for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) when the country was under British colonial rule. He spent months travelling to distant corners of the subcontinent, looking for ancient artefacts, ruins and scripts.

But while his discovery of Mohenjo-daro was ground-breaking, Banerjee’s legacy is clouded by disputes. His independent streak and defiance of colonial protocols often landed him in trouble – tainting his reputation and perhaps even erasing parts of his contribution from global memory.

Interestingly, Banerjee’s reports on Mohenjo-daro were never published by the ASI. Archaeologist PK Mishra later accused then ASI chief John Marshall of suppressing Banerjee’s findings and claiming credit for the discovery himself.

“The world knows Marshall discovered the civilisation’s ruins and it is taught in institutions. Banerjee is an insignificant footnote,” Prof Mishra told the Times of India newspaper.

In her book, , historian Nayanjot Lahiri writes that Banerjee “lacked diplomacy and tact and displayed a high-handedness that ruffled feathers”. Her book also sheds light on the controversies he was embroiled in during his time at the ASI.

She notes how once, he attempted to procure inscriptions and images from a museum in north-east India without the approval or knowledge of his boss.

Another time, Banerjee attempted to relocate some stone sculptures from a museum in Bengal to the one he was stationed at without the necessary permissions.

In another instance, he purchased an antique painting for a sum without consulting his superiors who thought he’d paid more than was necessary.

“Banerjee’s many talents seemed to include being always able to rub people the wrong way,” Lahiri writes.

But Banerjee remains a prominent figure among world historians and scholars in Bengal because of his connection with Mohenjo-daro.

He was born in 1885 to a wealthy family in Bengal.

The medieval monuments that dotted Baharampur, the city he grew up in, kindled his interest in history and he pursued the subject in college. But he always had an adventurous streak.

Once, when he was tasked with writing an essay about the Scythian period of Indian history, he travelled to a museum in a neighbouring state to study first-hand sculptures and scripts from that era.

In her book, , author Yama Pande notes how Banerjee joined the ASI as an excavation assistant in 1910 and rose quickly within the ranks to become a superintending archaeologist in western India in 1917.

It was in this post that he first set eyes on Mohenjo-daro in Sindh in 1919. In the following years, he conducted a series of excavations at the site that revealed some of the most fascinating finds: ancient Buddhist stupas, coins, seals, pots and microliths.

Between 1922 and 1923, he discovered several layers of ruins that held clues about various urban settlements that had emerged in the region, but most importantly, the oldest one that had existed some 5,300 years ago – the Indus Valley Civilisation.

At that time, historians had not yet discovered the full scale of the Indus Civilisation which, we now know, covered an expanse of approximately 386,000 sq miles (999,735 sq km) along the Indus river valley.

Three seals from Banerjee’s excavation bore images and scripts similar to those from Harappa in the Punjab province in present-day Pakistan. This helped establish a link between the two sites, shedding light on the vast reach of the Indus Valley civilisation.

But by 1924, Banerjee’s funds for the project had dried up and he was also transferred to eastern India. He had no further contact with the site, nor did he participate in any excavations there, Pande writes in her book.

But Nayanjot Lahiri notes that Banerjee was transferred at his own request, after becoming entangled in questions over his spending. He had failed to account for several job-related expenses.

It was also revealed that Banerjee had used excavation grants to buy office furniture and his travel expenses were deemed excessive.

His explanations failed to convince his superiors and disciplinary action was recommended. After some negotiation, Banerjee was granted his request and transferred to another region.

Banerjee continued to work with the ASI in eastern India. He spent most of his time in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and oversaw the restoration work of many important monuments.

He resigned from the ASI in 1927, but his departure was marred by controversy. In the years prior to his departure, he became the prime suspect in a case of idol theft.

It all started in October 1925, when Banerjee had visited a revered Hindu shrine in Madhya Pradesh state that housed a stone idol of a Buddhist goddess. Banerjee was accompanied by two low-ranking assistants and two labourers, Lahiri notes in her book.

However, following their visit, the idol went missing, and Banerjee was implicated in its theft. He denied any involvement in the disappearance and an investigation was launched.

The idol was later recovered in Calcutta. Though the case against Banerjee was dismissed and the charges were found to be unsubstantiated, Marshall insisted on his resignation.

After leaving the ASI, Banerjee worked as a professor, but faced financial difficulties because of his lavish lifestyle.

Historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta told the Telegraph newspaper that Banerjee splurged on good food, horse carriages and friends. In 1928, he joined the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) as a professor. He died just two years later at the age of 45.

Every iPhone comes with a label which tells you it was designed in California.

While the sleek rectangle that runs many of our lives is indeed designed in the United States, it is likely to have come to life thousands of miles away in China: the country hit hardest by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, now rising to 245% on some Chinese imports.

Apple sells more than 220 million iPhones a year and by most estimates, nine in 10 are made in China. From the glossy screens to the battery packs, it’s here that many of the components in an Apple product are made, sourced and assembled into iPhones, iPads or Macbooks. Most are shipped to the US, Apple’s largest market.

Luckily for the firm, Trump suddenly exempted smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices from his tariffs last week.

But the comfort is short-lived.

The president has since suggested that more tariffs are coming: “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook’,” he wrote on Truth Social, as his administration investigated “semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN”.

The global supply chain that Apple has touted as a strength is now a vulnerability.

The US and China, the world’s two biggest economies, are interdependent and Trump’s staggering tariffs have upended that relationship overnight, leading to an inevitable question: who is the more dependent of the two?

China has hugely benefited from hosting assembly lines for one of the world’s most valuable companies. It was a calling card to the West for quality manufacturing and has helped spur local innovation.

Apple entered China in the 1990s to sell computers through third-party suppliers.

Around 1997, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy as it struggled to compete with rivals, Apple found a lifeline in China. A young Chinese economy was opening up to foreign companies to boost manufacturing and create more jobs.

It wasn’t until 2001 though that Apple officially arrived in China, through a Shanghai-based trading company, and started making products in the country. It partnered with Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronic manufacturer operating in China, to make iPods, then iMacs and subsequently iPhones.

As Beijing began trading with the world – encouraged by the US no less – Apple grew its footprint in what was becoming the world’s factory.

Back then, China was not primed to make the iPhone. But Apple chose its own crop of suppliers and helped them grow into “manufacturing superstars,” according to supply chain expert Lin Xueping.

He cites the example of Beijing Jingdiao, now a leading manufacturer of high-speed precision machinery, which is used to make advanced components efficiently. The company, which used to cut acrylic, was not considered a machine tool-maker – but it eventually developed machinery to cut glass and became “the star of Apple’s mobile phone surface processing,” Mr Lin says.

Apple opened its first store in the country in Beijing in 2008, the year the city hosted the Olympics and China’s relationship with the West was at an all-time high. This soon snowballed to 50 stores, with customers queuing out of the door.

As Apple’s profit margins grew, so did its assembly lines in China, with Foxconn operating the world’s largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, which has since been termed “iPhone City”.

For a fast-growing China, Apple became a symbol of advanced Western tech – simple yet original and slick.

Today, most of Apple’s prized iPhones are manufactured by Foxconn. The advanced chips that power them are made in Taiwan, by the world’s largest chip manufacturer, TSMC. The manufacturing also requires rare earth elements which are used in audio applications and cameras.

Some 150 of Apple’s top 187 suppliers in 2024 had factories in China, according to an analysis by Nikkei Asia.

“There’s no supply chain in the world that’s more critical to us than China,” Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said in an interview last year.

In Trump’s first term, Apple secured exemptions on the tariffs he imposed on China.

But this time, the Trump administration has made an example of Apple before it reversed tariffs on some electronics. It believes the threat of steep taxes will encourage businesses to make products in America instead.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones – that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview earlier this month.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that last week: “President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones and laptops.”

She added: “At the direction of the president, these companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible.”

But many are sceptical of that.

The thought that Apple could move its assembly operation to the US is “pure fantasy,” according to Eli Friedman, who formerly sat on the firm’s academic advisory board.

He says the company has been talking about diversifying its supply chain away from China since 2013, when he joined the board – but the US was never an option.

Mr Friedman adds that Apple didn’t make much progress over the next decade but “really made an effort” after the pandemic, when China’s tightly controlled Covid lockdowns hurt manufacturing output.

“The most important new locations for assembly have been Vietnam and India. But of course the majority of Apple assembly still takes place [in China].”

Apple did not respond to the BBC’s questions but its website says its supply chain spans “thousands of businesses and more than 50 countries”.

Any change to Apple’s current supply chain status quo would be a huge blow for China, which is trying to kickstart growth post-pandemic.

Many of the reasons that the country wanted to be a manufacturing hub for Western companies in the early 2000s ring true today – it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, and gives the country a crucial edge in global trade.

“Apple sits at the intersection of US-China tensions, and tariffs highlight the cost of that exposure,” says Jigar Dixit, a supply chain and operations consultant.

It might explain why China has not bowed to Trump’s threats, retaliating instead with 125% levies on US imports. China has also imposed export controls on a range of critical rare earth minerals and magnets it has in stores, dealing a blow to the US.

There is no doubt the US tariffs still being levied on other Chinese sectors will hurt, though.

And it’s not just Beijing facing higher tariffs – Trump has made it clear he will target countries that are part of the Chinese supply chain. For instance Vietnam, where Apple has moved AirPods production, was facing 46% tariffs before Trump hit pause for 90 days, so moving production elsewhere in Asia is not an easy way out.

“All conceivable places for the huge Foxconn assembly sites with tens or hundreds of thousands of workers are in Asia, and all of these countries are facing higher tariffs,” Mr Friedman says.

So what does Apple do now?

The company is fighting off stiff competition from Chinese firms as the government pushes for advanced tech manufacturing in a race with the US.

Now that “Apple has cultivated China’s electronic manufacturing capabilities, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and others can reuse Apple’s mature supply chain,” according to Mr Lin.

Last year, Apple lost its place as China’s biggest smartphone seller to Huawei and Vivo. Chinese people are not spending enough because of a sluggish economy and with ChatGPT banned in China, Apple is also struggling to retain an edge among buyers seeking AI-powered phones. It even offered rare discounts on iPhones in January to boost sales.

And while operating under President Xi Jinping’s increasingly close grip, Apple has had to limit the use of Bluetooth and Airdrop on its devices as the Chinese Communist Party sought to censor political messages that people were sharing. It weathered a crackdown on the tech industry that even touched Alibaba founder and multi-billionaire Jack Ma.

Apple has announced a $500bn (£378bn) investment in the US, though that may not be enough to appease the Trump administration for long.

Given the several U-turns and the uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs, more unexpected levies are expected – which could again leave the company with little manoeuvring room and even less time.

Mr Dixit says smartphone tariffs will not cripple Apple should they rear their head again, but regardless will add “pressure – both operationally and politically” to a supply chain that cannot be unwound quickly.

“Clearly the severity of the immediate crisis has been lessened,” Mr Friedman adds, referring to last week’s exemption for smartphones.

“But I really don’t think this means Apple can relax.”

Healthcare in the Gaza Strip is itself a casualty of 18 months of war between Israel and Hamas. With doctors struggling to cope, the BBC followed one GP through her shift at a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) clinic.

By 07:30, a slight figure in a pink headscarf, Dr Wissam Sukkar, is picking her way through the devastated streets of Gaza City.

“I was walking for around 50 minutes to reach our clinic,” she explains when she is met by a local BBC journalist who helped us log her day. With virtually no fuel left in Gaza, few taxis are running.

“With our limited resources we’re still trying to be here in northern Gaza through these difficult times,” adds Dr Sukkar.

The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) says that only 21 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are currently partially functional. Medical supplies are running critically low due to Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza.

The GP points out what is left of her former workplace, an MSF burns clinic that came under fire in the early weeks of the war, during street battles between Israeli soldiers and Hamas fighters.

Her team has now converted an office towards the west of Gaza City into a clinic – and by 09:30, as Dr Sukkar is putting on her white robe, there are already some 150 people waiting outside in a tented reception area.

“Most of our patients are displaced people,” Dr Sukkar says. “They live in shelters, they even live in tents in the streets.”

Since a ceasefire collapsed a month ago, thousands of Gazans have once again left their homes and fled to this neighbourhood, seeking safety.

With little food and clean water, there is a rise in malnutrition and diseases – from stomach bugs to scabies. The elderly and young are worst affected, and the first patients of the day are babies with viral infections.

“We receive a lot of children who suffer from upper respiratory tract infections and diarrhoea. In the shelters, there are a lot of children in the same place and a virus can spread very quickly,” the doctor explains.

One toddler has his face dotted with mosquito bites and Dr Sukkar administers some soothing cream. As cooking gas has run out, families have taken to using open fires to heat food and this has also led to an increase in serious burns.

Within an hour, Dr Sukkar and three other physicians have seen dozens of patients. But there are many whom they struggle to help.

“We have more and more challenges with the huge number of patients with less and less medical supplies,” Dr Sukkar says wearily.

“Also, we receive complicated cases, and we don’t know where to refer these patients because the health system in Gaza has collapsed.”

There has been an influx in seriously wounded patients arriving at the clinic since last Sunday, when Israeli warplanes attacked al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City.

Israel accused Hamas of using a hospital building as a “command and control centre”; something the armed group denied.

Al-Ahli – which was the main medical site for treating trauma in northern Gaza – can no longer accept patients. The WHO says the emergency room, laboratory, X-ray machines and pharmacy were destroyed.

“I started my treatment at al-Shifa hospital, then I got transferred to al-Ahli and they bombed it,” says Saeed Barkat, an older man with a fractured thigh bone, who arrives at the MSF clinic on crutches.

He had surgery after he was wounded by Israeli artillery fire on the shelter where he was staying late last year. He has pins in his leg, and it is swollen.

“I came here for any treatment and to follow-up,” says Mr Barkat, as nurses change his dressing and give new painkillers.

At midday, when Dr Sukkar checks on the small pharmacy at the clinic, she looks worried. Many of the shelves are bare.

Israel closed all crossings to Gaza at the start of March, saying it was putting pressure on Hamas to release the remaining hostages it is holding. Since then, no aid has entered.

“For diabetes, we don’t have insulin, we don’t have treatments for epilepsy, we don’t have basic medicines like anti-fever drugs,” Dr Sukkar says.

“It’s the season for skin infections and we don’t have creams or ointments for bacterial infections, no medicines to treat scabies and head lice.”

The doctors are rationing the supplies that remain.

“We are doing our best so that it will be enough for the coming week,” sums up Dr Sukkar, “but we expect that our stock will run out in more or less two weeks.”

Soon Dr Sukkar is back in her consultation room. The rush of patients continues with many more sick children. They have coughs, fevers and stomach upsets.

By 15:30, it is time to close up the clinic for the day. The four doctors here calculate that they have seen nearly 390 patients.

After a long, tiring day, there is the long, tiring walk home for Dr Sukkar.

As she leaves the clinic she telephones her family. Her thoughts turn to looking after her own children, who have been displaced with her nine times in the past year and a half.

“Like every Gazan, I have a daily struggle to secure clean water, food for my kids,” says Dr Sukkar. “We don’t have electricity, so it’s really hard even to charge the battery of my mobile.”

“Most of all, it’s really hard to have any hope,” she goes on. “I feel I live in a nightmare that doesn’t end. When will this war end?”

For now, there is no answer, and no respite.

Thousands took to the streets across the US on Saturday to protest recent actions by President Donald Trump.

Known as “50501”, for “50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement”, the demonstrations were intended to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolutionary War.

From outside the White House and Tesla dealerships and at the centres of many cities, protesters expressed a variety of grievances. Many called for the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

Political protests are becoming more common in the US, with the “Hands Off” demonstrations in early April drawing massive crowds, as polls suggest Trump’s popularity is faltering.

Saturday’s protests addressed a number of Trump actions, including those by the the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – Trump’s initiative to cut US government jobs and other spending – and the administration’s unwillingness to bring about the return of Ábrego García, a citizen of El Salvador.

Gihad Elgendy told CNN he joined the protest at the White House to criticise the deportation of Ábrego García. He believes Trump “could easily pressure El Salvador to bring him back”.

The protests were generally reported as peaceful, although Representative Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat, posted a video on X of a man holding a Trump sign and pushing through a crowd to angrily confront him.

Many demonstrators carried signs reading “No Kings,” a nod to the anniversary of the start of the country’s revolution against English rule.

During celebrations of the anniversary in Massachusetts that commemorated the battles of Lexington and Concord and the famous horse ride of Paul Revere, people held similar signs. There was also a 50501 demonstration in Boston on Saturday.

“This is a very perilous time in America for liberty,” Thomas Bassford, told the Associated Press, while in Boston with his partner, daughter and two grandsons. “I wanted the boys to learn about the origins of this country and that sometimes we have to fight for freedom.”

The most recent polling from Gallup, suggests 45% of voters approve of Trump’s performance in the first quarter of his term, which is more than the 41% who approved during the same period in his first administration.

Still, it is lower than the average first-quarter rating of 60% for all presidents elected between 1952 and 2020, and Trump’s popularity appears to be edging down, especially when it comes to the economy. When he took office in January, his approval rating was 47%, according to Gallup.

His approval rating in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll similarly dipped to 43% from 47% on Inauguration Day. In the same poll, only 37% approved of his performance on the economy, compared to 42% during inauguration.

Earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered for the largest nationwide show of opposition since Trump returned to the White House.

Those protests – which were larger than Saturday’s – happened in 1,200 locations in all 50 US states.

After fleeing Silicon Valley for political and business reasons, Elon Musk is building a corporate campus in rural Texas – but his new neighbours have mixed views.

Half an hour east of Austin, past the airport, the clogged-up traffic starts to melt away and the plains of Central Texas open up, leaving the booming city behind.

Somewhere along the main two-lane highway, a left turn takes drivers down Farm-to-Market Road 1209. It seems like an unlikely address for a high-tech hub, but that’s exactly what Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, hopes it will become.

Court filings indicate that a large metal building finished in the last few months will be the new headquarters of X, his social media platform.

A short distance away, a large logo of the Boring Company, Musk’s infrastructure company, is plastered on the side of another headquarters. And across FM 1209 is a rapidly growing SpaceX facility which manufactures Starlink satellite internet equipment.

Like most technology tycoons, Musk had long made Silicon Valley his home and headquarters. Once a supporter of the Democrats, his move to Texas is part of a larger tech world trend and also appears to reflect his own transformed ideological views.

Here the land is (relatively) cheap, skilled tech workers from nearby Austin are plentiful, and local laws are favourable to development.

Of course, there are also specific political angles to the move.

In July 2024, Musk said he was quitting California after the state passed a law prohibiting teachers from enforcing rules about notifying families when students’ gender identity changes.

Musk has an estranged transgender daughter and has spoken out against what he calls “woke mind virus” – which he describes in interviews as divisive identity politics – along with anti-meritocratic and anti-free speech ideas.

And so Musk upped sticks and headed to Texas, a Republican stronghold and the fastest-growing state in the US.

In addition to the cluster of buildings near Bastrop in central Texas, he has built a SpaceX facility in Cameron County, on the southern tip of Texas near the border with Mexico. SpaceX employees there have filed a petition to create a new town called Starbase. The measure will go to a vote in May.

Locals in Bastrop have mixed feelings about the development.

“It’s almost like we have a split personality,” says Sylvia Carrillo, city manager of Bastrop, which has a growing population of more than 12,000. “Residents are happy that their children and grandchildren will have jobs in the area.

“On the other hand it can feel like we are being overwhelmed by a third party and that the development will quickly urbanise our area,” she says.

Although the Musk development is technically outside of the city’s limits, it’s close enough that Texas laws give Bastrop’s government sway over development. And, Ms Carrillo stresses, the Musk buildings are just one example of many developments springing up in a booming area.

“He’s faced a backlash that is not entirely of his own creating,” she says.

“But now that he’s here and things are changing quickly, it’s a matter of managing” issues like house and land prices and the environment, she says.

The Musk compound is still fairly bare-bones. The grandly named Hyperloop Plaza sits in the middle of the corporate buildings, and is home to the company-owned Boring Bodega, a bar, coffee shop, hairdresser and gift shop.

On a recent windy Sunday afternoon, a video game console sat unplayed in front of a couch near a display of company T-shirts, while a few children scurried back and forth to a playground outside.

The developments in Bastrop fit right into the quickening pace of activity across central Texas, where cranes perpetually loom above the Austin skyline and the housing market is a perpetual topic of conversation.

The area has gone through various industry booms and busts over the years, including lumber and coal mining, says Judy Enis, a volunteer guide at the Bastrop Museum and Visitor Center.

During World War Two, tens of thousands of soldiers – and around 10,000 German prisoners of war – poured in to Camp Swift, a US Army facility north of the town.

“That probably had more of an impact than Elon Musk,” Ms Enis notes.

Views of the tycoon are mixed, to say the least, and inseparable not only from his politics but also opinions on economic development, in what still is a predominately rural area.

Judah Ross, a local real estate agent, says the development has supercharged population growth that started as a result of the Austin boom and accelerated during the Covid pandemic.

“I’m always going to be biased because I want the growth,” Mr Ross says. “But I love it here and I want to be part of it.

“If nothing else, what’s good is the amount of jobs that this is bringing in,” he says. “In the past year, I’ve sold to people working at Boring and SpaceX.”

Alfonso Lopez, a Texan who returned to the state after working in tech in Seattle, says he initially picked Bastrop figuring he would make a quick buck on a house purchase and move on.

Instead, he quickly became enamoured with the town, its mix of local businesses and friendly people, and wants to stay.

Mr Lopez is no big fan of Musk and is critical of some of his management practices and politics, but admires the technology his companies have built and is happy to live nearby as long as the companies are good neighbours.

“As long as they don’t ruin my water or dig a tunnel beneath my house and create a sinkhole, this isn’t bad,” he says, gesturing around the metal shed housing the bodega, coffee shop and bar. “I’ll come here and watch a game.”

His concerns about water are more than theoretical. Last year The Boring Company was fined $11,876 (£8,950) by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality after being cited for water pollution violations.

The Boring Company initially planned to dump wastewater in the nearby Colorado River but, after local pressure, signed a deal to send the sludge to a Bastrop wastewater treatment plant.

The water issues appear to have delayed housebuilding, which reportedly could include more than 100 homes for Musk employees. The planned development of homes has so far failed to materialise, however. For now, the extent of living quarters is a handful of temporary trailers behind the bodega building, surrounded by a wall, acres of Texas plain and a few horses munching grass. Ms Carrillo, the city manager, says any large-scale home building is at least a year off.

In November, SpaceX applied for a free trade zone designation, which would allow it to move materials and finished products in and out of the Bastrop factory without being subject to tariffs – one of Donald Trump’s signature policies.

It’s a common practice for manufacturers, and there are hundreds of similar zones across the country.

Local officials in Texas have endorsed the proposal, saying it will boost the local economy, despite costing the county an estimated $45,000 (£34,800) in revenue this year.

The company is also getting an injection of $17.3m (£13.4m) from the Texas government to develop the site, a grant that officials say is expected to create more than 400 jobs and $280m in capital investment in Bastrop.

Few local residents wanted to directly criticise Musk when standing face-to-face with a visiting reporter. But it’s a different story online, where sharper feelings shine through.

“They will ruin everything nearby,” one resident posted on a local online forum. “Nothing good comes with him.”

The BBC contacted SpaceX, The Boring Company and X for comment.

Ms Carrillo, the city manager, says she hasn’t picked up on much personal anger on the part of locals prompted by Musk’s activities in Washington.

But to protect Bastrop, she says, the city has recently enacted laws limiting housing density and providing for public parks – measures that she says will keep the “historic nature” of the well-preserved downtown while allowing for growth on the outskirts.

Bastrop, she says, is a conservative, traditionally Republican place.

“His national stuff doesn’t really register,” she says. “His companies have been good corporate citizens, and we hope it can stay that way.”

Five people have drowned after huge waves hit parts of Australia at the start of the Easter weekend.

Two others are missing off the coasts of New South Wales and Victoria states.

On Saturday the body of a man was found in the water near Tathra in southern New South Wales. It came a day after a 58-year-old fisherman and two other men were found dead in separate incidents in the state.

Rescuers are searching for a man who was washed into the water near Sydney. Also on Friday, one woman drowned and a man is missing after their group was swept into sea in San Remo in Victoria.

“One of the women managed to make her way back to shore but the other woman and the man were unable to,” Victoria police said.

Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan said it marked a “awful start” to the Easter weekend.

“My thoughts are with the family of someone who has lost their life in such tragic circumstances, and potentially there is more difficult news to come,” she said.

Australia’s eastern states have been battered by dangerous waves.

The head of the charity Surf Life Saving Australia, Adam Weir, advised holidaymakers to visit patrolled beaches after their data showed 630 people had drowned at unpatrolled beaches in the past 10 years.

“But these coastal locations can present dangers, some that you can see and some that you can’t, which is why we have some simple advice: Stop, Look, Stay Alive.”

In January, Lina went to the police.

Her ex-partner had been threatening her at home in the Spanish seaside town of Benalmádena. That day, he’d allegedly raised his hand as if to hit her.

“There had been violent episodes – she was scared,” Lina’s cousin Daniel recalls.

When she got to the police station, she was interviewed and her case registered with VioGén, a digital tool which assesses the likelihood of a woman being attacked again by the same man.

VioGén – an algorithm-based system – asks 35 questions about the abuse and its intensity, the aggressor’s access to weapons, his mental health and whether the woman has left, or is considering leaving, the relationship.

It then records the threat to her as “negligible”, “low”, “medium”, “high” or “extreme”.

The category is used to make decisions about the allocation of police resources to protect the woman.

Lina was deemed to be at “medium” risk.

She asked for a restraining order at a specialist gender violence court in Malaga, so that her ex-partner couldn’t be in contact with her or share her living space. The request was denied.

“Lina wanted to change the locks at her home, so she could live peacefully with her children,” says her cousin.

Three weeks later, she was dead. Her partner had allegedly used his key to enter her flat and soon the house was on fire.

While her children, mother and ex-partner all escaped, Lina didn’t. Her 11-year-old son was widely reported as telling police it was his father who killed his mother.

Lina’s lifeless body was retrieved from the charred interior of her home. Her ex-partner, the father of her three youngest children, was arrested.

Now, her death is raising questions about VioGén and its ability to keep women safe in Spain.

VioGén didn’t accurately predict the threat to Lina.

As a woman designated at “medium” risk, the protocol is that she would be followed up again by a nominated police officer within 30 days.

But Lina was dead before that. If she had been “high” risk, the police follow-up would have happened within a week. Could that have made a difference to Lina?

Tools to evaluate the threat of repeat domestic violence are used in North America and across Europe. In the UK, some police forces use DARA (Domestic Abuse Risk Assessment) – essentially a checklist. And DASH (Domestic Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour-based Violence Assessment) may be employed by police or others, like social workers, to assess the risk of another attack.

But only in Spain is an algorithm woven so tightly into police practice. VioGén was developed by Spanish police and academics. It’s used everywhere apart from the Basque Country and Catalonia (those regions have separate systems, although police co-operation is nationwide).

The head of the National Police’s family and women’s unit in Malaga, Ch Insp Isabel Espejo, describes VioGén as “super-important”.

“It helps us follow each victim’s case very precisely,” she says.

Her officers deal with an average of 10 reports of gender violence a day. And every month, VioGén classifies nine or 10 women as being at “extreme” risk of repeat victimisation.

The resource implications in those cases are huge: 24-hour police protection for a woman until the circumstances change and the risk decreases. Women assessed as “high” risk may also get an officer escort.

A 2014 study found that officers accepted VioGén’s evaluation of the likelihood of repeated abuse 95% of the time. Critics suggest police are abdicating decision-making about women’s safety to an algorithm.

Ch Insp Espejo says that the algorithm’s calculation of risk is usually adequate. But she recognises – even though Lina’s case wasn’t under her command – that something went wrong with Lina’s assessment.

“I’m not going to say VioGén doesn’t fail – it does. But this wasn’t the trigger that led to this woman’s murder. The only guilty party is the person who killed Lina. Total security just doesn’t exist,” she says.

But at “medium” risk, Lina was never a police priority. And did Lina’s VioGén assessment have an impact on the court’s decision to deny her a restraining order against her ex-partner?

Court authorities didn’t give us permission to meet the judge who denied Lina an injunction against her ex-partner – a woman attacked on social media after Lina’s death.

Instead, another of Malaga’s gender violence judges, Maria del Carmen Gutiérrez tells us in general terms that such an order needs two things: evidence of a crime and the threat of serious danger to the victim.

“VioGén is one element I use to assess that danger, but it’s far from the only one,” she says.

Sometimes, the judge says, she makes restraining orders in cases where VioGén has assessed a woman as at “negligible” or “low” risk. On other occasions she may conclude there’s no danger to a woman deemed at “medium” or “high” risk of repeat victimisation.

Dr Juan Jose Medina, a criminologist at the University of Seville, says Spain has a “postcode lottery” for women applying for restraining orders – some jurisdictions are much more likely to grant them than others. But we don’t know systematically how VioGén influences the courts, or the police, because studies haven’t been done.

“How are police officers and other stakeholders using this tool, and how is it informing their decision-making? We don’t have good answers,” he says.

Spain’s interior ministry hasn’t often allowed academics access to VioGén’s data. And there hasn’t been an independent audit of the algorithm.

Gemma Galdon, the founder of Eticas – an organisation working on the social and ethical impact of technology – says if you don’t audit these systems, you won’t know if they’re actually delivering police protection to the right women.

Examples of algorithmic bias elsewhere are well-documented. In the US, analysis from 2016 of a recidivism tool found black defendants were more likely than their white peers to be incorrectly judged to be at higher risk of repeat offending. At the same time, white defendants were more likely than black defendants to be wrongly flagged as low risk.

In 2018, Spain’s interior ministry didn’t give a green light to an Eticas proposal to conduct a confidential, pro-bono, internal audit. So instead, Gemma Galdon and her colleagues decided to reverse-engineer VioGén and do an external audit.

They used interviews with women survivors of domestic abuse and publicly available information – including data from the judiciary about women who, like Lina, had been killed.

They found that between 2003 and 2021, 71 women murdered by their partners or ex-partners had previously reported domestic abuse to the police. Those recorded on the VioGén system were given risk levels of “negligible” or “medium”.

“What we’d like to know is, were those error rates that cannot be mitigated in any way? Or could we have done something to improve how these systems assign risk and protect those women better?” asks Gemma Galdon.

The head of gender violence research at Spain’s interior ministry, Juan José López-Ossorio, is dismissive of the Eticas investigation: it wasn’t done with VioGén data. “If you don’t have access to the data, how can you interpret it?” he says.

And he is wary of an external audit, fearing it could compromise both the security of women whose cases are recorded and VioGén’s procedures.

“What we know is that once a woman reports a man and she’s under police protection, the probability of further violence is substantially lowered – we’ve no doubts about that,” says López-Ossorio.

VioGén has evolved since it was introduced in Spain. The questionnaire has been refined, and the “negligible” category of risk will soon be abolished. And even critics agree it makes sense to have a standardised system responding to gender violence.

In Benalmádena, Lina’s home has become a shrine.

Flowers, candles and pictures of saints were left on the step. A small poster stuck on the wall declared: Benalmádena says no to gender violence. The community fundraised for Lina’s children.

Her cousin, Daniel, says everyone’s still reeling from news of her death.

“The family it’s destroyed – especially Lina’s mother,” he says.

“She’s 82 years old. I don’t think there’s anything sadder than to have your daughter killed by an aggressor in a way that could have been avoided. The children are still in shock – they’ll need a lot of psychological help.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin says he has ordered his forces to “stop all military activity” in Ukraine, as he declared an “Easter truce” until the end of Sunday.

He said the 30-hour truce would last until 22:00 BST on Sunday (00:00 Moscow time), adding that Russian forces should be prepared to respond to “any possible violations”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv would adhere to the truce, but accused Moscow of breaking it.

“If Russia is now suddenly ready to truly engage in a format of full and unconditional silence, Ukraine will act accordingly – mirroring Russia’s actions,” he said.

“Our actions are and will be symmetrical. The proposal for a full and unconditional 30-day silence remains on the table — the answer to it must come from Moscow,” he wrote on X.

He said fighting continued in Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions and Russian drones were still in use, but added that some areas had become quieter.

Zelensky said Ukraine would be ready to extend a truce beyond 20 April, seemingly referring to an earlier proposal from the US for a 30-day ceasefire which Ukraine had already agreed to.

Responding to Putin’s initial announcement, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha wrote on X: “Putin has now made statements about his alleged readiness for a cease-fire. 30 hours instead of 30 days.”

“Unfortunately, we have had a long history of his statements not matching his actions. We know his words cannot be trusted and we will look at actions, not words,” he added.

Putin announced the temporary truce at a meeting with his chief of general staff, Valery Gerasimov.

“Based on humanitarian considerations… the Russian side announces an Easter truce. I order a stop to all military activities for this period,” Putin told Gerasimov.

“We assume that Ukraine will follow our example. At the same time, our troops should be prepared to repel possible violations of the truce and provocations by the enemy, any aggressive actions.”

The Russian defence ministry said its troops would adhere to the ceasefire provided it was “mutually respected” by Ukraine.

It is not the first time a pause in fighting has been suddenly announced – a previous attempt at a ceasefire during Orthodox Christmas in January 2023 fell apart after both sides failed to agree on a proposal.

Reacting to Putin’s truce announcement, a Foreign Office spokesman in the UK said: “Now is the moment for Putin to truly show he is serious about peace by ending his horrible invasion and committing to a full ceasefire, as the Ukrainian government has called for – not just a one day pause for Easter.”

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people – the vast majority of them soldiers – have been killed or injured on all sides.

The US has been directly talking to Russia as part of its efforts to end the war, but has struggled to make major progress.

Last month, Moscow rejected a proposal for a full and unconditional ceasefire that had been agreed by the US and Ukraine.

US President Donald Trump on Friday warned Washington would “take a pass” on brokering further talks on ending the war in Ukraine unless there was quick progress.

He was speaking after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US was not “going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end”, as it had “other priorities to focus on”.

“We need to determine very quickly now – and I’m talking about a matter of days – whether or not this is doable,” he added.

“If it’s not going to happen, then we’re just going to move on.”

An 82-year-old woman who teaches the ancient Indian martial art of Kalaripayattu says she has no plans to retire.

“I’ll probably practise Kalari until the day I die,” says Meenakshi Raghavan, widely thought to be the oldest woman in the world to practise the art form.

Kalaripayattu – kalari means battleground and payattu means fight – is believed to have originated at least 3,000 years back in the southern state of Kerala and is regarded as India’s oldest martial art.

It is not solely practised for combat or fighting; it also serves to instil discipline, build strength and develop self-defence skills.

Ms Raghavan is fondly known as Meenakshi Amma – Amma means mother in the Malayalam language – in Kerala’s Vadakara, where she lives. The town is also home to other renowned exponents of the art like Unniyarcha, Aromal Chekavar and Thacholi Othenan.

Meenakshi Amma occasionally performs in other cities but mainly runs her own Kalari school, founded by her husband in 1950. Her days are busy, with classes from five in the morning to noon.

“I teach about 50 students daily. My four children were also trained [in the art form] by me and my husband. They started learning from the age of six,” she says.

Kalaripayattu has four stages and it requires patience to learn the art form.

Training begins with meypattu – an oil massage followed by exercises to condition the body.

After about two years, students progress to kolthari (stick fighting), then to angathari (weapon combat), and finally to verumkai – the highest level, involving unarmed combat. It typically takes up to five years to master Kalaripayattu.

Kung fu is believed to have adapted principles like breathing techniques and marmashastra (stimulating vital points to optimise energy flow) from Kalaripayattu, according to Vinod Kadangal, another Kalari teacher.

Legend has it that around the 6th Century, Indian Buddhist monk Bodhidharma introduced these techniques to the Shaolin monks, influencing the more famous Chinese martial art.

Meenakshi Amma still recalls the first time she stepped into a Kalari – the red-earth arena where the art is practised – 75 years ago.

“I was seven and quite good at dancing. So my guru – VP Raghavan – approached my father and suggested that I learn Kalaripayattu. Just like dance, the art form requires you to be flexible,” she says.

Hailing from Kerala’s Thiyya community, Meenakshi Amma’s guru was 15 when he and his brothers opened their own Kalaripayattu school after being denied admission elsewhere because of their low social caste.

“There was no bias when it came to girls enrolling to study Kalari – in fact, physical education was compulsory in all Kerala schools at that time. But we were expected to stop after attaining puberty,” she says.

Unlike others, Meenakshi Amma’s father encouraged her training into her late teens. At 17, she fell in love with Raghavan, and they soon married. Together, they went on to train hundreds of students, often for free.

“At the time, a lot of children came from poor families. The only money he [Raghavan] accepted was in the form of or a tribute paid to the teacher,” she says.

Donations sustained the school, while Raghavan later took a teaching job for extra income. After his death in 2007, Meenakshi Amma formally took charge.

While she has no plans to retire at the moment, she hopes to hand over the school one day to her eldest son Sanjeev.

The 62-year-old, who is also an instructor at the school, says he is lucky to have learnt from the best – his mother. But being her son earns no favours; he says she’s still his toughest opponent.

Meenakshi Amma is a local celebrity. During our interview, three politicians drop by to invite her to an awards ceremony.

“Amma, you must grace us with your presence,” one of them says with folded hands.

“Thank you for considering me, I’ll attend,” she replies.

Her students speak of “fierce admiration” for her. Many have opened their own Kalari schools across the state, a source of great pride for Meenakshi Amma.

“She’s an inspiration to women everywhere – a rare person who shows love and affection to her students, yet remains a strict disciplinarian when it comes to Kalari,” says KF Thomas, a former student.

Pakistan has deported more than 19,500 Afghans this month, among more than 80,000 who have left ahead of a 30 April deadline, according to the UN.

Pakistan has accelerated its drive to expel undocumented Afghans and those who had temporary permission to stay, saying it can no longer cope.

Between 700 and 800 families are being deported daily, Taliban officials say, with up to two million people expected to follow in the coming months.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Kabul on Saturday for talks with Taliban officials. His counterpart Amir Khan Muttaqi expressed “deep concern” about deportations.

Some expelled Afghans at the border said they had been born in Pakistan after their families fled conflict.

More than 3.5 million Afghans have been living in Pakistan, according to the UN’s refugee agency, including around 700,000 people who came after the Taliban takeover in 2021. The UN estimates that half are undocumented.

Pakistan has taken in Afghans through decades of war, but the government says the high number of refugees now poses risks to national security and causes pressure on public services.

• Pakistan orders Afghan asylum seekers out
• Afghans hiding in Pakistan live in fear

There has been a recent spike in border clashes between the security forces of both sides. Pakistan blames them on militants based in Afghanistan, which the Taliban deny.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry said the two sides had “discussed all issues of mutual interest” in Saturday’s meeting in Kabul.

Pakistan had extended a deadline for undocumented Afghans to leave the country by a month, to 30 April.

On the Torkham border crossing, some expelled Afghans told the BBC they left Afghanistan decades ago – or had never lived there.

“I lived my whole life in Pakistan,” said Sayed Rahman, a second-generation refugee born and raised in Pakistan. “I got married there. What am I supposed to do now?”

Saleh, a father of three daughters, worried what life under Taliban rule will mean for them. His daughters attended school in Pakistan’s Punjab province, but in Afghanistan, girls over the age of 12 are barred from doing so.

“I want my children to study. I don’t want their years in school to go to waste,” he said. “Everyone has the right to an education.”

Another man told the BBC: “Our children have never seen Afghanistan and even I don’t know what it looks like anymore. It might take us a year or more to settle in and find work. We feel helpless.”

At the border, men and women pass through separate gates, under the watch of armed Pakistani and Afghan guards. Some of those returning were elderly – one man was carried across on a stretcher, another in a bed.

Military trucks shuttled families from the border to temporary shelters. Those originally from distant provinces stay there for several days, waiting for transport to their home regions.

Families clustered under canvases to escape the 30C degree heat, as swirling dust caught in the eyes and mouth. Resources are stretched and fierce arguments often break out over access to shelter.

Returnees receive between 4,000 and 10,000 Afghanis (£41 to £104) from the Kabul authorities, according to Hedayatullah Yad Shinwari, a member of the camp’s Taliban-appointed finance committee.

The mass deportation is placing significant pressure on Afghanistan’s fragile infrastructure, with an economy in crisis and a population nearing 45 million people.

“We have resolved most issues, but the arrival of people in such large numbers naturally brings difficulties,” said Bakht Jamal Gohar, the Taliban’s head of refugee affairs at the crossing. “These people left decades ago and left all their belongings behind. Some of their homes were destroyed during 20 years of war.”

Nearly every family told the BBC that Pakistani border guards restricted what they could bring – a complaint echoed by some human rights groups.

Chaudhry said in response that Pakistan did “not have any policy that prevents Afghan refugees from taking their household items with them”.

One man, sitting on the roadside in the blistering sun, said his children had begged to stay in Pakistan, the country where they were born. They had been given temporary residency, but that expired in March.

“Now we’ll never go back. Not after how we were treated,” he said.

The US Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to pause the deportation of a group of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

A civil liberties group had sued to stop the removal of the men, currently in detention in Texas, saying they had not been able to contest their cases in court.

Donald Trump has sent accused Venezuelan gang members to a notorious prison in El Salvador, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president power to detain and deport natives or citizens of “enemy” nations without usual processes. The act was previously used only three times, all during war.

The White House called challenges to using the law for mass deportations “meritless litigation”.

“We are confident in the lawfulness of the administration’s actions and in ultimately prevailing against an onslaught of meritless litigation brought by radical activists who care more about the rights of terrorist aliens than those of the American people,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a post on X.

The Alien Enemies Act was last invoked in World War Two, when people of Japanese descent were imprisoned without trial and thousands sent to internment camps.

Since taking office in January, Trump’s hard-line immigration policies have encountered a number of legal hurdles.

Trump had accused Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” on US territory.

Out of 261 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador as of 8 April, 137 were removed under the Alien Enemies Act, a senior administration official told CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner.

A lower court temporarily blocked these deportations on 15 March.

The Supreme Court initially ruled on 8 April that Trump could use the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members, but deportees must be given a chance to challenge their removal.

The lawsuit that resulted in Saturday’s order said the Venezuelans detained in north Texas had been given notices about their imminent deportation in English, despite one detainee only speaking Spanish.

The challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also said the men had not been told they had a right to contest the decision in court.

“Without this Court’s intervention, dozens or hundreds of proposed class members may be removed to a possible life sentence in El Salvador with no real opportunity to contest their designation or removal,” the lawsuit read.

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented on Saturday.

In his second inaugural address in January, Trump pledged to “eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to US soil”.

In the highest-profile case, the government admitted it mistakenly deported El Salvador national Kilmar Ábrego García, but contends he is a member of the MS-13 gang, which his lawyer and family denies. Mr Ábrego García has never been convicted of a crime.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the government should facilitate bringing back Mr Ábrego García, but the Trump administration has said he will “never” live in the US again.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, visited Mr Ábrego García in El Salvador and said he had been moved from the mega-jail Cecot (Terrorism Confinement Centre) to a new prison.

Every iPhone comes with a label which tells you it was designed in California.

While the sleek rectangle that runs many of our lives is indeed designed in the United States, it is likely to have come to life thousands of miles away in China: the country hit hardest by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, now rising to 245% on some Chinese imports.

Apple sells more than 220 million iPhones a year and by most estimates, nine in 10 are made in China. From the glossy screens to the battery packs, it’s here that many of the components in an Apple product are made, sourced and assembled into iPhones, iPads or Macbooks. Most are shipped to the US, Apple’s largest market.

Luckily for the firm, Trump suddenly exempted smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices from his tariffs last week.

But the comfort is short-lived.

The president has since suggested that more tariffs are coming: “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook’,” he wrote on Truth Social, as his administration investigated “semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN”.

The global supply chain that Apple has touted as a strength is now a vulnerability.

The US and China, the world’s two biggest economies, are interdependent and Trump’s staggering tariffs have upended that relationship overnight, leading to an inevitable question: who is the more dependent of the two?

China has hugely benefited from hosting assembly lines for one of the world’s most valuable companies. It was a calling card to the West for quality manufacturing and has helped spur local innovation.

Apple entered China in the 1990s to sell computers through third-party suppliers.

Around 1997, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy as it struggled to compete with rivals, Apple found a lifeline in China. A young Chinese economy was opening up to foreign companies to boost manufacturing and create more jobs.

It wasn’t until 2001 though that Apple officially arrived in China, through a Shanghai-based trading company, and started making products in the country. It partnered with Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronic manufacturer operating in China, to make iPods, then iMacs and subsequently iPhones.

As Beijing began trading with the world – encouraged by the US no less – Apple grew its footprint in what was becoming the world’s factory.

Back then, China was not primed to make the iPhone. But Apple chose its own crop of suppliers and helped them grow into “manufacturing superstars,” according to supply chain expert Lin Xueping.

He cites the example of Beijing Jingdiao, now a leading manufacturer of high-speed precision machinery, which is used to make advanced components efficiently. The company, which used to cut acrylic, was not considered a machine tool-maker – but it eventually developed machinery to cut glass and became “the star of Apple’s mobile phone surface processing,” Mr Lin says.

Apple opened its first store in the country in Beijing in 2008, the year the city hosted the Olympics and China’s relationship with the West was at an all-time high. This soon snowballed to 50 stores, with customers queuing out of the door.

As Apple’s profit margins grew, so did its assembly lines in China, with Foxconn operating the world’s largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, which has since been termed “iPhone City”.

For a fast-growing China, Apple became a symbol of advanced Western tech – simple yet original and slick.

Today, most of Apple’s prized iPhones are manufactured by Foxconn. The advanced chips that power them are made in Taiwan, by the world’s largest chip manufacturer, TSMC. The manufacturing also requires rare earth elements which are used in audio applications and cameras.

Some 150 of Apple’s top 187 suppliers in 2024 had factories in China, according to an analysis by Nikkei Asia.

“There’s no supply chain in the world that’s more critical to us than China,” Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said in an interview last year.

In Trump’s first term, Apple secured exemptions on the tariffs he imposed on China.

But this time, the Trump administration has made an example of Apple before it reversed tariffs on some electronics. It believes the threat of steep taxes will encourage businesses to make products in America instead.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones – that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview earlier this month.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that last week: “President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones and laptops.”

She added: “At the direction of the president, these companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible.”

But many are sceptical of that.

The thought that Apple could move its assembly operation to the US is “pure fantasy,” according to Eli Friedman, who formerly sat on the firm’s academic advisory board.

He says the company has been talking about diversifying its supply chain away from China since 2013, when he joined the board – but the US was never an option.

Mr Friedman adds that Apple didn’t make much progress over the next decade but “really made an effort” after the pandemic, when China’s tightly controlled Covid lockdowns hurt manufacturing output.

“The most important new locations for assembly have been Vietnam and India. But of course the majority of Apple assembly still takes place [in China].”

Apple did not respond to the BBC’s questions but its website says its supply chain spans “thousands of businesses and more than 50 countries”.

Any change to Apple’s current supply chain status quo would be a huge blow for China, which is trying to kickstart growth post-pandemic.

Many of the reasons that the country wanted to be a manufacturing hub for Western companies in the early 2000s ring true today – it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, and gives the country a crucial edge in global trade.

“Apple sits at the intersection of US-China tensions, and tariffs highlight the cost of that exposure,” says Jigar Dixit, a supply chain and operations consultant.

It might explain why China has not bowed to Trump’s threats, retaliating instead with 125% levies on US imports. China has also imposed export controls on a range of critical rare earth minerals and magnets it has in stores, dealing a blow to the US.

There is no doubt the US tariffs still being levied on other Chinese sectors will hurt, though.

And it’s not just Beijing facing higher tariffs – Trump has made it clear he will target countries that are part of the Chinese supply chain. For instance Vietnam, where Apple has moved AirPods production, was facing 46% tariffs before Trump hit pause for 90 days, so moving production elsewhere in Asia is not an easy way out.

“All conceivable places for the huge Foxconn assembly sites with tens or hundreds of thousands of workers are in Asia, and all of these countries are facing higher tariffs,” Mr Friedman says.

So what does Apple do now?

The company is fighting off stiff competition from Chinese firms as the government pushes for advanced tech manufacturing in a race with the US.

Now that “Apple has cultivated China’s electronic manufacturing capabilities, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and others can reuse Apple’s mature supply chain,” according to Mr Lin.

Last year, Apple lost its place as China’s biggest smartphone seller to Huawei and Vivo. Chinese people are not spending enough because of a sluggish economy and with ChatGPT banned in China, Apple is also struggling to retain an edge among buyers seeking AI-powered phones. It even offered rare discounts on iPhones in January to boost sales.

And while operating under President Xi Jinping’s increasingly close grip, Apple has had to limit the use of Bluetooth and Airdrop on its devices as the Chinese Communist Party sought to censor political messages that people were sharing. It weathered a crackdown on the tech industry that even touched Alibaba founder and multi-billionaire Jack Ma.

Apple has announced a $500bn (£378bn) investment in the US, though that may not be enough to appease the Trump administration for long.

Given the several U-turns and the uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs, more unexpected levies are expected – which could again leave the company with little manoeuvring room and even less time.

Mr Dixit says smartphone tariffs will not cripple Apple should they rear their head again, but regardless will add “pressure – both operationally and politically” to a supply chain that cannot be unwound quickly.

“Clearly the severity of the immediate crisis has been lessened,” Mr Friedman adds, referring to last week’s exemption for smartphones.

“But I really don’t think this means Apple can relax.”

Stock markets around the world have been relatively settled this week after a period of chaos, sparked by US trade tariffs.

But investors are still closely watching a part of the market which rarely moves dramatically – the US bond market.

Governments sell bonds – essentially an IOU – to raise money for public spending and in return they pay interest.

Recently, in an extremely rare move the rate the US government had to pay on its bonds rose sharply, while the price of bonds themselves fell.

The volatility suggests investors were losing confidence in the world’s biggest economy.

You may think it’s too esoteric to bother you, but here’s why it matters and how it may change President Trump’s mind on tariffs.

When a government wants to borrow money, it usually does so by selling bonds – known as “Treasuries” in the US – to investors on financial markets.

Such payments are made over a number of pre-agreed years before a full and final payment is made when the bond “matures” – in other words, expires.

Investors who buy bonds are mainly made up of financial institutions, ranging from pension funds to central banks like the Bank of England.

Investors buy government bonds because they are seen as a safe place to invest their money. There is little risk a government will not repay the money, especially an economic superpower like the US.

So when the economy is turbulent and investors want to take money out of volatile stocks and shares markets, they usually place that cash in US bonds.

But recently that hasn’t happened.

Initially, following the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement on 2 April when shares fell, investors did appear to flock to US bonds.

However, when the first of these tariffs kicked in on 5 April and Trump doubled down on his policies that weekend, investors began dumping government bonds, sending the interest rate the US government would have to pay to borrow money up sharply.

The so-called yield for US government borrowing over 10 years shot up from 3.9% to 4.5%, while the 30-year yield spiked at almost 5%. Movements of 0.2% in either direction are considered a big deal.

Why the dramatic sell-off? In short, the uncertainty over the impact of tariffs on the US economy led to investors no longer seeing government bonds as such a safe bet, so demanded bigger returns to buy them.

The higher the perceived risk, the higher the yield investors want to compensate for taking it.

If the US government is spending more on debt interest repayments, it can affect budgets and public spending as it becomes more costly for the government to sustain itself.

But it can also have a direct impact on households and even more so on businesses.

John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics, says when investors charge higher rates to lend the government money, other rates for lending that have more risk attached, such as mortgages, credit cards and car loans, also tend to rise.

Businesses, especially small ones, are likely to be hardest hit by any immediate change in borrowing rates, as most homeowners in the US have fixed-rate deals of between 15 and 30 years. If businesses can’t get access to credit, that can halt economic growth and lead to job losses over time.

Mr Canavan adds that banks can become more cautious in lending money, which could impact the US economy.

First-time buyers and those wishing to move home could also face higher costs, he says, which could impact the housing market in the longer term. It’s common in the US for small business owners starting out to use the equity in their home as collateral.

Following the introduction of tariffs, Trump urged his nation to “hang tough”, but it appears the potential threat to jobs and the US economy stopped the president in his tracks.

Following the ructions in the bond markets, he introduced a 90-day pause for the higher tariffs on every country except China. The 10% blanket tariff, however, on all countries remains.

It proved a pressure point for Trump – and now the world knows it.

“Although President Donald Trump was able to resist the stock market sell-off, once the bond market began to weaken too, it was only a matter of time before he folded,” says Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics.

According to US media reports, it was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, inundated with calls from business leaders, who played a key part in swaying Trump.

The bond market reaction has led to comparisons with former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s infamous mini-Budget of September 2022. The unfunded tax cuts announced then spooked investors, who dumped UK government bonds, resulting in the Bank of England stepping in to buy bonds to save pension funds from collapse.

Some analysts suggested that America’s central bank, the US Federal Reserve, might have been forced to step in if the sell-off had worsened.

While bond yields have settled, some might argue the damage has already been done as they remain higher than before the blanket tariffs kicked in.

“Arguably the most worrying aspect of the [recent] turmoil… is an emerging risk premium in US Treasury bonds and the dollar, akin to what the UK experienced in 2022,” according to Jonas Goltermann, deputy chief markets economist at Capital Economics.

But unless you’re a first-time buyer or selling your home, Americans are unlikely to be immediately hit by higher mortgage costs, unlike Brits who were securing new shorter-term fixed deals.

Since 2010, foreign ownership of US bonds has almost doubled, rising by $3 trillion, according to Deutsche Bank.

Japan holds the most US Treasuries, but China, the US’s arch enemy in this global trade war, is the second biggest holder of US government debt globally.

Questions were raised about whether it sparked the debt sell-off in response to being hit with huge tariffs.

However, this is unlikely as any fire sale “would impoverish China more than it would hurt the US”, according to Capital Economics.