Alec Baldwin broke into tears as a New Mexico judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter case against him for a fatal shooting on the set of the film Rust.

The trial collapsed three days into Baldwin’s trial in Santa Fe, at a court just miles from where Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer, was shot with a revolver that Mr Baldwin was using in rehearsals.

It is the second time the case against the actor has been dismissed since the October 2021 shooting. He will not be tried again.

His lawyers alleged police and prosecutors hid evidence – a batch of bullets – that could have been connected to the shooting on set.

A key aspect of the case has been how live ammunition ended up on the set and Mr Baldwin’s lawyers have questioned the investigation and mistakes made by authorities who processed the scene.

Their motion to dismiss set off a remarkable set of events, with one of the two special prosecutors leading the case resigning, and Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissing the jury to hear from multiple witnesses.

The bullets, Mr Baldwin’s lawyer said, could be related to Ms Hutchins’ death, but were filed in a different case with a different number.

Prosecutors argued the ammunition was not connected to the case and did not match bullets found on the Rust set.

The judge ruled, however, that they should have been shared with Mr Baldwin’s defence team regardless.

“The state’s wilful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate,” she said from the bench. “There is no way for the court to right this wrong.”

Prosecutors will not be able to lodge the charge against Baldwin again, as the judge did not rule the case a mistrial, but instead outright dismissed it with prejudice.

“It was the nuclear option. The case is over,” Los Angeles criminal defence lawyer Joshua Ritter told the BBC.

Mr Baldwin, best known for his role on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock and for portraying Donald Trump on sketch show Saturday Night Live, broke down in tears as the judge read from a lengthy statement detailing her reasons for the dismissal. His wife, Hilaria, covered her mouth. Other members of his family cried and smiled.

The actor hugged his lawyers then embraced his wife, who was seated behind him. They walked out hand-in-hand through a tunnel of press into a black vehicle without answering any questions or making any comments.

The evidence came to light on Thursday, when a crime-scene technician told the court that a man named Troy Teske, a retired police officer, had turned over live ammunition that could be related to the case.

Mr Teske is friends with the step-father of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armourer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter earlier this year.

He was working with Seth Kenney, who helped with props and ammunition on the film set.

After the judge sent the jury home on Friday, the court heard from a series of witnesses about the bullets, including authorities who led the case and Mr Kenney.

Towards the end of the hearing, one of the prosecutors leading the case – Kari Morrissey – took the stand to testify about the bullets and why they weren’t shared with the defence. It’s remarkably rare for a prosecutor to testify in a case they bring about their role in the investigation.

Ms Morrissey, while on the stand, said that her co-prosecutor, Erlinda Ocampo Johnson, resigned on Friday as the judge weighed to dismiss the case.

She explained Ms Johnson “didn’t agree with the decision to have a public hearing” over the evidence claims.

In 2023, prosecutors in the case dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge against Mr Baldwin, saying they had new evidence and needed more time to investigate.

They refiled that charge in January, arguing he had a flagrant disregard for gun safety on a film set that had a small budget and an inexperienced cast.

Mr Baldwin pleaded not guilty and has maintained he never pulled the trigger when the gun went off, killing Ms Hutchins.

His defence team has said he was simply an actor doing his job on the film set and placed his trust in the film crew that were tasked with ensuring weapon safety on set.

German political figures have reacted angrily to a report that Russia had plotted to kill the head of Germany’s biggest arms company Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger.

The CNN report said US officials had told their counterparts in Berlin earlier this year and security around him was stepped up.

Germany’s interior ministry refused to comment but Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock appeared to confirm the details.

“In view of latest reports on Rheinmetall, this is what we have actually been communicating more and more clearly in recent months,” she told reporters at the Nato summit in Washington. “Russia is waging a hybrid war of aggression.”

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the allegations. “It’s all presented in the style of another fake story, so such reports cannot be taken seriously.”

Rheinmetall avoided commenting on issues of “corporate security”, but Mr Papperger is now being described as the most highly protected figure in Germany’s economy. He told the Financial Times that German authorities had imposed a “great deal of security around my person”.

The company is one of the world’s biggest producers of ammunition and has become key to supplying Ukraine with arms, armoured vehicles and other military equipment.

Rheinmetall recently opened a tank repair plant in western Ukraine. Last month, it signed an agreement with Ukraine to expand co-operation in the coming years, including a joint venture to produce artillery shells.

Mr Papperger said at the time his company wanted to hand over the first Lynx infantry fighting vehicles later this year and to start producing them in Ukraine soon.

Although Chancellor Olaf Scholz avoided commenting on the reported assassination plot directly, he said it was well known that Germany was exposed to a variety of Russian threats and was paying close attention to them.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said “we are taking very seriously the significantly heightened threat of Russian aggression”.

Earlier this week, a senior Nato official told the BBC that Russia was “engaging in aggressive covert operations across Europe – involving sabotage, arson and assassination plots – aimed at weakening public support for Ukraine”.

The German foreign minister said the Baltic states had already highlighted the various methods deployed by Russia’s Vladimir Putin in his war on Ukraine. As well as sabotage, she spoke of cyberattacks and disrupting GPS signals so that Baltic flights could no longer land in neighbouring countries.

“We have seen that there have been attacks on factories, and that again underlines that, together, we as Europeans must protect ourselves as best we can and not be naive,” Ms Baerbock told reporters.

In early May, a building complex owned by the Diehl Metall firm went up in flames in south-west Berlin. Although a technical fault was blamed for the fire, sabotage has not been ruled out. Suspicious fires have also been reported in Poland and Lithuania.

Last April, Mr Papperger’s garden house was set alight at Hermannsburg in northern Germany, although there has been no evidence of a Russian link.

The fire was quickly brought under control and a rambling, anonymous confession purportedly from leftist militants appeared on activist network Indymedia.

The reported plot against such a high-profile German CEO has prompted widespread alarm.

Leading conservative figure Roderich Kiesewetter said the chancellor should come clean with the German population about how great the threat from Russia really was. German intelligence needed to be boosted to the level of neighbouring countries, he said.

“We must take it very seriously and also prepare ourselves accordingly,” he told public broadcaster ZDF.

Michael Roth, who chairs Germany’s foreign affairs committee told Bild newspaper that Vladimir Putin was waging a “war of extermination not only against Ukraine, but against its supporters and our values”.

The head of the defence committee, Marcus Faber, added his condemnation, saying if information about Russian intelligence involvement came to light, then “the expulsion of diplomats must follow and, if necessary, international arrest warrants must be issued”.

A number of children have died and more than 100 others are trapped after a school building collapsed in Nigeria’s central Plateau state, local officials say.

Saint Academy in the state capital Jos caved in while students were in class on Friday morning.

Trapped pupils were calling for help from under the rubble, AFP reported, with parents frantically searching for their children.

The National Emergency Management Agency (Nema) said “the exact number of deaths is still being confirmed”. Media reports say at least 17 students were killed.

In a post on X, Nema said more than 40 trapped students were rescued and taken to local hospitals.

Nigeria’s Punch newspaper reported 17 dead while the AFP news agency quoted Red Cross spokesman Nuruddeen Hussain Magaji as saying 21 people were killed.

The school is believed to have more than 1,000 pupils.

Local resident, Abel Fuandai, told the BBC that his friend’s son had been killed and said “the scale of the tragedy is frightening”.

He said rescue workers and emergency officials were racing to save those trapped and using excavators to dig through the rubble.

The cause of the collapse is not known but residents said it came after three days of heavy rains in Plateau.

Speaking from hospital, injured student Wulliya Ibrahim told AFP: “I entered the class not more than five minutes, when I heard a sound, and the next thing is I found myself here.

“We are many in the class, we are writing our exams,” he said.

Resident Chika Obioha said he had seen a number of dead bodies and that dozens of people had been rescued.

“Everyone is helping out to see if we can rescue more people,” he said.

There have been several major building collapses in Nigeria in recent years, with observers blaming a mix of bad workmanship, poor quality materials and corruption.

In 2021, at least 45 people were killed when a high-rise building under construction collapsed in a wealthy Lagos neighbourhood.

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As Joe Biden attempted to calm the storm engulfing his presidential re-election campaign, he hit an early snag: referring to “Vice-President Trump” during a Thursday press conference when he meant Kamala Harris.

Within minutes, Donald Trump mocked the gaffe on his social media platform, Truth Social, with an accompanying clip. “Great job, Joe!” he wrote.

It was the kind of reaction voters have come to expect from Trump, who has spent years insulting the president, 81.

And yet, for the past two weeks, as Mr Biden was fighting for his political life, Trump remained uncharacteristically quiet, letting Democrats argue among themselves.

Republican strategists claim the relative silence is down to Trump’s new-found discipline – a change from his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

“He’s played it brilliantly by not saying much about the Democratic crisis,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former senior Senate and House leadership aide. “Why take the shovel away when they’re digging their own hole?”

Trump, 78, has not gone entirely underground. Since Mr Biden’s poor debate performance in late June, Trump has given a handful of radio interviews, appeared at rallies in Virginia and Florida, and kept up a steady drumbeat of posts on Truth Social.

“The radical left Democratic party is divided in chaos,” Trump said at a Tuesday campaign rally in Miami. “They can’t decide which of their candidates is more unfit to be president, sleepy, crooked Joe Biden or laughing Kamala.”

He also challenged the president to a golf match, claimed all US airports were dirty, called the fictional cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter “lovely”, said that visitors to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington were often “shot, mugged and raped”, claimed 45,000 people were at the Miami event when there were closer to 700, and pondered why “we don’t eat bacon anymore.”

But experts say that compared to past behaviour, the Republican has been restrained. Some have suggested Trump’s camp may even be delaying his choice for vice-president to avoid stealing attention from Mr Biden’s problems.

“If you compare this strategy and execution [in] this campaign to 2016 and 2020, it is far more strategic, far more disciplined,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican communications expert who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential bids.

With the Democratic Party fracturing over Mr Biden’s candidacy, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, said the approach taken by Trump since the debate had been effective.

“The Trump campaign has done an outstanding job of allowing the Biden campaign to self-destruct,” he said.

That self-destruction may have been what the Trump campaign was banking on from the start. The Republican plan to win over the American people has, for a while now, leaned on voters’ well-documented fears about Mr Biden’s age.

Speaking to The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita said he had planned for an “extraordinarily visual” match-up where Mr Biden was viewed as old and frail while Trump appeared strong and vigorous.

“The debate was exactly what they wanted,” Mr Madden said. “They got the perfect split-screen that was going to endure.”

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A number of recent polls put Trump consistently – if still narrowly – ahead of Mr Biden.

But there is concern within the Trump camp that anxiety over Mr Biden’s fitness has peaked too soon.

Were he to be replaced by a younger nominee, Trump would lose two main lines of attack – age and frailty. And it would be harder to directly blame a new candidate for the president’s perceived policy failures: Mr Biden scores badly with voters on the economy and the southern border crisis.

“They’re silently hoping, with their fingers crossed, that Biden is the nominee,” said strategist Ron Bonjean of Trump’s campaign. “They feel they will win the election with Biden as their opponent.”

Some of Trump’s closest surrogates have seemed to suggest they want Mr Biden to stay on. On Thursday, while Democrats parsed the impact of the president’s defiant press conference, Trump’s son Don Jr offered rare praise.

Mr Biden’s performance had been “not too bad”, he said. “He did fine enough to be able to stay in it – he doesn’t want to go.”

Last week, Trump’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, Lara Trump, suggested it would “go against the democratic process” if Mr Biden were to be removed.

Nevertheless, Mr Bonjean and other Republican experts made clear that if it was hard for Republicans to take on a new candidate, it would be harder still for Democrats to choose one.

“Yes, it will cause the Trump campaign to scramble a little bit. But their scrambling is not nearly what it will be for the Democrats,” said Douglas Heye, a Republican strategist who served as chief of staff to former House majority leader Eric Cantor.

“They have to figure out how to nominate somebody else… they have to build a brand new structure from scratch.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are combing through records of Ms Harris and other possible replacements, he said. “They’re not prepared, necessarily, for this, but they are preparing.”

Next week, at the Republican party convention in Milwaukee, Trump will reclaim centre stage, officially accepting his party’s nomination and making a prime-time speech that will set the tone for the final months of his campaign.

Mr Heye suggested that the convention – four days of party fanfare built around a candidate who revels in the spotlight – will have made it easier to sell Trump the benefits of the strategy of remaining largely quiet.

“If you’re committed to keeping your candidate under wraps for an extended period, there has to be a pay-out later on,” he said. “His leadership can say: ‘You’ve got all of next week, it’s going to be the Donald Trump show’.”

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The things they see. The dead girl lowered by a rope from a ruined building. She sways slightly, then comes to rest, legs folding beneath her on the rubble.

They see people and parts of people lying out in the open where the blast or the bullet caught them. Violent death in all of its contortions.

Bodies lying in the streets, in the blasted open sitting rooms of houses, under the rubble. Sometimes covered by so much concrete the men will never reach them, and only in the future when the war is over will somebody come and give them a decent burial.

The men of the Gaza Civil Defence cannot close their eyes to any of this. There is no shutting out the smell. Every sense is on alert. Death can come from the skies in an instant.

When the fighting in places like Shejaiya in eastern Gaza City, or Tal Al-Sultan, near Rafah, in the south, is as fierce as it has been in the last few days, the ambulances of the Civil Defence dare not venture out.

“Entering areas close to the Israeli occupation is dangerous, but we try to intervene to save lives and souls,” says Muhammed Al Mughayer, a local Civil Defence official.

He and his men seize any lull in the conflict to recover the dead and the wounded. Families constantly ask about missing relatives.

“It is very difficult to identify the bodies,” explains Mr Mughayer. “Some remain unidentified due to complete decomposition.”

Stray animals also prey on the corpses, tearing off clothes and scattering papers that might be used to identify them.

The ambulance crews are short of fuel. Two days ago one broke down in Tal Al-Sultan and had to be towed out, a nerve-wracking experience for the crews. The risk of being fired on by the Israeli forces, says Mr Mughayer, means seriously injured people often cannot be rescued.

“There is currently a report of an injured person near Al-Salihin Mosque from two days ago, but we can’t reach them due to delays in coordination. It may result in their death.”

Refugees are continuing to flee from Gaza city and areas like Shejaiya. Many have been displaced multiple times.

For them it is a world without laws or rules. World leaders express concern. But nobody is coming to rescue them. Nothing is more acute for these people than the sense that they can die at any moment.

Sharif Abu Shanab stands outside the ruins of his family home in Shejaiya with an expression that is part bewilderment, part grief.

“My house had four floors, and I can’t enter it,” he says. “I can’t take anything out of it, not even a can of tuna. We have nothing, no food or drink. They bulldozed all the houses, and it is not our fault. Why do they hold us accountable for the fault of others? What did we do? We are citizens. Look at the destruction around you…

“Where do we go, and to whom? We are thrown in the streets now, we have no home or anything, where do we go? There is only one solution and that is to hit us with a nuclear bomb and relieve us of this life.”

There are occasional glimpses of reprieve. The Al-Fayoumi family, arriving close to Deir Al Balah in central Gaza, were relieved to have escaped from Gaza City. This after a warning this week to evacuate from the Israel Defense Forces sent thousands of people onto the road south.

In the boiling heat of the asphalt road, without shade, family members were reunited with others who had gone ahead of them.

The new arrivals were given water and soft drinks. A boy sucked from a carton of juice, then squeezed it with all his strength to coax out a last few drops.

Nobody in the group took their survival for granted. So to see everyone alive, all in the one place, brought smiles and cries of happiness. An aunt reached into a car to hug her young niece. At first the child smiled. Then she turned her head and sobbed.

Where will they be tomorrow, next week, next month? They have no way of knowing. It depends on where the fighting moves next, on the next Israeli evacuation order, on the mediators and whether Hamas and Israel can agree a ceasefire.

These lines could have been written at any time in the last few months. Civilians dying. Taking to the roads. Hunger. Hospitals struggling. Talks about a ceasefire.

Since February, we have been following the story of Nawara al-Najjar whose husband Abed-Alrahman was among more than 70 people killed when Israeli forces launched an operation to rescue two hostages in Rafah.

They had fled Khan Younis 9km (6 miles) to the north, and took refuge closer to Rafah when bullets and shrapnel tore through the tented camp where they slept.

Nawara was six months pregnant when she was widowed, and taking care of six children, aged from four to 13. When a BBC colleague found her again today, Nawara was nursing her newborn baby, Rahma, just one month old.

She gave birth on a night of heavy airstrikes, rushed to the hospital by her in-laws.

“I kept saying: ‘Where are you Abed-Alrahman? This is your daughter coming into the world without a father.’” Baby Rahma has red hair like her dead father.

The Israeli advance into Rafah last month sent Nawara and her children fleeing again, back to their old home in Khan Younis. She struggled to settle there again.

“My husband’s things were there, his laugh, his voice. I couldn’t open the house. I tried to be strong. Then I took my children and opened the door, and we wandered around the house, but it was hard. I cried for my husband…He was the one who cleaned the house, cooked for us, made sure I was comfortable.”

There has been fighting around Khan Younis again in the last week. An Israeli air strike close to a school killed 29 people, local hospital sources say, and wounded dozens more.

But Nawara is adamant she will not move again. Here she is close to the memory of the man she loves. She imagines her husband as a still living presence. She sends texts to his phone: “I complain to him, and I cry to him…I try to reassure myself, telling myself that I need to be patient. I imagine he’s the one telling me.”

After months of lavish celebrations, the wedding ceremony of the son of Asia’s richest man is finally under way in the Indian city of Mumbai.

Anant Ambani, son of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, is tying the knot with Radhika Merchant, daughter of pharma tycoons Viren and Shaila Merchant.

The four-day extravaganza is the final stop in a string of elaborate parties the family has hosted since March, which have featured performances by popstars including Rihanna and Justin Bieber.

Reality TV star Kim Kardashian, and former UK PMs Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, were among the international guests. Also spotted was US wrestler and actor John Cena, who was seen hugging and congratulating relatives of the host.

Key roads in Mumbai are being sealed off for several hours a day until the festivities end on Monday.

Social media is awash with updates on the wedding, with people sharing minute-by-minute details of Bollywood stars and celebrities arriving.

But the extraordinary opulence has also led to backlash – city dwellers have complained the road closures have worsened traffic snarls caused by monsoon flooding, while others have questioned the ostentatious display of wealth at the seemingly never-ending celebrations.

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Mukesh Ambani, 66, is at present the world’s 10th richest man with a net worth of $115bn, according to Forbes. Reliance Industries, founded by his father in 1966, is a massive conglomerate that operates in sectors ranging from petroleum and retail, to financial services and telecoms.

Anant Ambani is the youngest of his three children, all of whom are on the board of Reliance Industries. The 29-year-old is involved in Reliance’s energy businesses and is on the board of Reliance Foundation.

The Ambanis have not revealed how much this wedding is costing them but wedding planners estimate they’ve already spent anywhere between 11bn and 13bn rupees [$132m-$156m]. It was rumoured Rihanna had been paid $7m (£5.5m) for her performance, while the figure suggested for Justin Bieber is $10m.

One unnamed executive at Reliance claimed the event was a “powerful symbol of India’s growing stature on the global stage” in a note shared with reporters.

But opposition politician Thomas Isaac said it was “obscene”.

“Legally it may be their money but such ostentatious expenditure is a sin against mother earth and (the) poor,” he posted on X.

On Friday, the groom set off from his residence in a luxurious red car covered in strings of white flowers, as joyful guests danced around it.

A convoy of cars, also decorated with flowers and carrying family members, followed him with music and cheers.

The grand procession, known as the baraat, culminated at the wedding venue – a convention centre owned by the Ambanis – where several Bollywood stars joined in another round of singing and dancing.

Reports say the bride and groom will exchange garlands to kick off the wedding. The pheras – the main wedding ritual of the couple walking around the sacred fire seven times – is set for 21:30 (1600GMT).

Guests will reportedly bless the newly-weds in a formal ceremony on Saturday – followed by a grand party where unconfirmed reports say pop stars Drake, Lana Del Ray and Adele are likely to perform.

Pictures and videos of Kim Kardashian, who is in the city with her sister Khloé Kardashian, are being widely shared online.

Reports say the sisters have brought a team of stylists, including celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton, along with a group of producers to capture every detail of their trip.

Former Indian president Ram Nath Kovind, British High Commissioner to India Lindy Cameron, and US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti are also in the city to attend the wedding.

Rajan Mehra, CEO of air charter company Club One Air, told Reuters that the family had rented three Falcon-2000 jets to ferry wedding guests to the event.

“The guests are coming from all over and each aircraft will make multiple trips across the country,” he said.

The wedding festivities began in March when the family held a three-day pre-wedding party in their home state of Gujarat.

Among the 1,200 guests to attend that celebration were Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

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The party started with a performance by Rihanna on the first night. Diljit Dosanjh, the first Punjabi singer to perform at Coachella, took the stage on the second night, while rapper Akon closed the show on the final day of celebrations.

In June, the Ambanis organised another pre-wedding celebration, this time, a luxury cruise from Italy to France. The Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry and Pitbull performed for the 800 guests, which included Bollywood stars and cricketers.

Money was also lavished on constructing 14 temples inside a sprawling complex in Jamnagar to showcase India’s cultural heritage and provide a backdrop for the wedding. As part of the celebrations, the Ambanis hosted a mass wedding for 50 underprivileged couples.

On Wednesday, the family hosted a bhandara – a community feast for underprivileged people.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban has no peace plan of his own, but he has spent the past two weeks on a whistle-stop tour of Kyiv, Moscow, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Washington and even Mar-a-Lago, on a one-man mission that has infuriated leaders in the EU and US.

“Peace will not come by itself in the Russia-Ukraine war, someone has to make it,” he proclaims in videos posted daily on his Facebook page.

He has been bitterly attacked by both Brussels and Washington for breaking EU and Nato unity and cosying up to Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping.

Few argue with his central premise, that there can be no peace without peacemakers. But his close economic relationship with Russia’s president leaves him open to the charge of acting as Mr Putin’s puppet.

The right-wing Hungarian PM says a ceasefire tied to a specific deadline would be a start.

“I am not negotiating on behalf of anyone,” he told Hungarian radio during a brief stopover in Budapest between visits to Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv and Mr Putin in Moscow.

For the next six months, Hungary holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

Mr Orban followed up his first visit to Kyiv since the start of the war with the first trip by an EU leader to Russia since April 2022. That visit to the Kremlin clearly angered his European partners.

Charles Michel, the head of the European Council of 27 EU governments, said the rotating presidency gave no mandate to engage with Russia on the EU’s behalf.

Mr Orban admitted that was the case, but insisted: “I’m clarifying the facts… I’m asking questions.”

In Kyiv he posed “three or four” to President Zelensky “so that we can understand his intentions, and where the red line is, the boundary up to which he can go in the interest of peace”.

He has also been generous in his praise of two other allies, Xi Jinping and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Meeting Mr Erdogan on arrival at the Nato summit in Washington, he spoke of him as “the only man who has overseen an agreement between Russia and Ukraine” so far, referring to a now defunct Black Sea grain agreement.

“China not only loves peace but has also put forward a series of constructive and important initiatives [for resolving the war],” he said of President Xi Jinping, according to Chinese state media.

The final visit on his whirlwind tour was to presidential candidate Donald Trump, another close ally who he strongly backs to win again in November and who he refers to as a man of peace.

In one interview, he declared that during Trump’s four-year term as president “he did not initiate a single war”.

This has been a remarkable trip in the international limelight for the leader of a small East European country with 9.7 million inhabitants. But who is it designed to impress, and could it have any effect?

A key target of his message is the domestic public.

Viktor Orban has had a relatively bad year so far, losing the two most prominent female politicians in his party to a scandal in February, and witnessing the emergence of his first serious challenger for more than a decade – Peter Magyar.

In June, Mr Orban’s Fidesz party won an impressive 45% in European elections, to 30% for Mr Magyar’s three-month-old Tisza party.

But he lost more than 700,000 votes (one in four) compared with the last parliamentary elections in 2022.

For the first time, he does not look invincible.

What better way to show Hungarians that their leader was still strong than to parade across the world stage, in a global tour “to make peace”?

His mission was also targeted at an international public, in the week that his new Patriots for Europe (PfE) group in the European Parliament attracted 84 MEPs from mainly far-right parties in 11 countries.

Patriots for Europe has emerged as the third largest faction in parliament, edging aside the rival Conservatives and Reformist group of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

Mr Orban’s visit to Moscow won him effusive praise from the Russians: “We take it very, very positively. We believe it can be very useful,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

The US was less impressed.

“We would welcome, of course, actual diplomacy with Russia to make it clear to Russia that they need to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, that they need to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” said US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “But that is not at all what this visit appears to have been.”

At the same time, the US did welcome Mr Orban’s first visit to neighbouring Ukraine since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion.

The Hungarian leader has given very little away about the actual content of his talks in Kyiv, Moscow or Beijing.

A leaked version of his letter to Charles Michel, sent from Azerbaijan, offers some clues.

Mr Putin was open to a ceasefire, Mr Orban told the European Council president, provided it did not provide Ukraine with a chance to reorganise its army on the front lines.

Three days earlier in Kyiv, on 2 July, the Ukrainian leader used a similar argument, telling Mr Orban that the Russians would abuse any ceasefire to regroup their invading forces.

Mr Orban was apparently “surprised” that President Zelensky still believed Ukraine could win back its lost territories.

And Vladimir Putin told Mr Orban that “time favours Russian forces”, according to the leaked letter.

Arriving in Washington days later, Mr Orban posted yet another video on Facebook, saying he would argue that Nato “should return to its original spirit: Nato should win peace, not the wars around it”.

Unlike his Nato allies, Viktor Orban views Russia’s two-and-a-half year war in Ukraine as a civil war between two Slav nations, prolonged by US support for one of them.

One thing he probably does agree on is that this autumn the conflict will become only worse.

A Trump presidential victory in November, he believes, would force the Ukrainians and Russians to the negotiating table.

Human remains have been found in west London by police investigating the discovery of body parts in suitcases in Bristol.

Officers believe the remains found in a flat on Scotts Road, Shepherd’s Bush, on Friday and those found two days ago at the Clifton Suspension Bridge belong to the same two men.

They have named the suspect they are searching for as Yostin Andres Mosquera, a 24-year-old Colombian national, and have warned the public not to approach him.

Both victims are thought to have been known to Mr Mosquera, but have not yet been formally identified.

A 36-year-old man who was arrested in connection with the investigation on Friday in Greenwich has since been released without charge.

The Met’s Deputy Assistant Commissioner Andy Valentine said: “This is a fast-moving enquiry with detectives in London and Bristol actively pursuing a number of lines of enquiry.

“Locating Yostin Andres Mosquera, however, is the priority and I appeal to anyone with information on his whereabouts to get in touch.”

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has said Warsaw is considering a proposal from Kyiv to shoot down Russian missiles heading towards Polish territory while they are still in Ukrainian airspace.

The proposal was included in a joint defence agreement between the two countries signed during President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Warsaw earlier this week.

“At this stage, this is an idea. What our agreement said is we will explore this idea,” Mr Sikorski told the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

He said some Russian missiles fired from the St Petersburg area towards Ukrainian targets near the western city of Lviv, not far from the Polish border, traversed Belarus and entered Polish airspace for about 40 seconds before turning towards their targets in Ukraine.

Mr Sikorski acknowledged that such a short time gave Poland little time to react.

However the proposal would theoretically cover any missile traversing western Ukraine in the direction of Poland.

“We are a frontline state and Russian missiles breach our airspace. We assume by mistake,” Mr Sikorski said.

“Our dilemma is the following. If we shoot them down only when they enter our airspace the debris is a threat to our citizens and to our property.

“And the Ukrainians are saying, ‘Please, we will not mind, do it over our airspace when they’re in imminent danger of crossing into Polish territory.

“To my mind, that’s self-defence but we are exploring the idea,” Mr Sikorski said.

Mr Sikorski said an unarmed Russian missile landed near his home in Bydgoszcz about 500km (311 miles) from the Belarusian border, without harming anyone, in December 2022.

Two Polish citizens had been killed by falling debris when Ukraine shot down a Russian missile near the Polish border a month earlier.

Earlier this week, Polish Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said Warsaw would consult with its Nato allies and seek their agreement before attempting to shoot down any Russian missiles.

“If there would be such a decision, it can only be an allied decision. It will never be an individual decision,” Mr Kosiniak-Kamysz told Poland’s TVN broadcaster at a Nato summit in Washington DC.

“The key opinion is the United States, who is quite sceptical in this matter, so Poland will certainly not make such a decision on its own,” he added.

Marek Swierczynski, a defence analyst for Polityka Insight, told the BBC the idea could prove perilous for Poland.

“Without robust allied support, which there isn’t, this proposal is very risky,” he said.

“From the point of view of our air defence assets and the fact we might be subject to some kind of Russian response.”

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Poland has provided Ukraine with 44 packages of weapons and ammunition, including more than 250 tanks, MiG-29 fighter jets, combat helicopters, artillery systems and portable air defence missile systems worth more than €4bn ($4.4bn; £3.4bn).

Poland plans to provide additional military assistance to Ukraine this year.

Two French international rugby players have been charged with the aggravated rape of a woman following a match in Argentina, prosecutors in the South American country say.

Hugo Auradou, 20, and Oscar Jegou, 21, are accused of raping a 39-year-old woman after France beat Argentina on Saturday.

She alleges that they raped her multiple times and beat her in a hotel room in the city of Mendoza.

The pair, who chose “not to testify” at a hearing in the city, say they had consensual sex with the woman and deny rape. They will remain in custody while authorities investigate further.

The woman alleged the attack took place at the Diplomatic Hotel, where France’s players and staff were staying as part of a tour of South America.

Her lawyer says she left a nightclub with one of the men and accompanied him to the hotel room, where she alleges that she was raped “at least six times” by one of the men and once by the other.

Ms Romano told AFP that her client suffered “fierce” violence, with injuries to her face, back, breasts, legs and ribs as well as various bite and scratch marks.

The woman was held against her will for several hours and tried to escape several times, Ms Romano said.

Her client went to hospital on Thursday after feeling ill emotionally and physically because of the incident and is receiving treatment at a health facility, she added.

On Friday a lawyer for the players said his clients were confident in their version of events.

“They are well and sure of their version, they are calm because they know they are innocent, but of course they are worried about this whole situation that they have had to live through,” German Hnatow told reporters.

On Wednesday another lawyer said the “sexual relations” had been consensual.

“There are witnesses who saw her leave [the hotel]. There are cameras that saw her leave. Apparently no injuries are seen in the footage,” Mariano Cuneo Libarona told journalists.

French Rugby Federation (FFR) president Florian Gill, who is in Argentina, also told AFP that the players had “quite a different version of events”.

“We are not judges. We are not investigators. But we think that the Argentine justice system should look at the case very quickly,” he said.

Mr Auradou and Mr Jegou have been replaced by lock Mickael Guillard and flanker Judicael Cancoriet for Saturday’s second match against Argentina in Buenos Aires.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr has apologised to a former family babysitter who accused him of sexual assault, US media report.

Mr Kennedy reportedly texted his apology to Eliza Cooney, shortly after her allegations were published in Vanity Fair magazine.

Ms Cooney accused the former environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist of groping her on several occasions in the late 1990s.

“I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings,” Mr Kennedy said according to screenshots of the text the woman shared with US media.

“I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”

The message was first reported on Friday by the Washington Post and Reuters, which said it had verified the message and linked the phone number it was sent from to Kennedy.

Mr Kennedy told the Post “the text message speaks for itself” declining to comment further. The BBC has contacted Mr Kennedy’s campaign for comment.

Ms Cooney was 23 at the time of the alleged assault and was working as a live-in babysitter to Mr Kennedy’s children and at the same time helping him with his legal work.

She told the Post that she found the message from Mr Kennedy “disingenuous and arrogant”.

“I’m not sure how somebody has a true apology for something that they don’t admit to recalling. I did not get a sense of remorse,” she said.

The Vanity Fair story included a number of allegations about the candidate, including that he ate dog meat during a trip abroad, had several extramarital affairs and vigorously defended a cousin, Michael Skakel, who was convicted of murdering a 15-year-old girl in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Mr Kennedy, the nephew of President John F Kennedy and son of Robert F Kennedy, called the story a “lot of garbage”.

He denied eating dog meat and shortly after the story came out he told a podcast: “I am not a church boy.”

“I had a very, very rambunctious youth,” he said. “I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world.”

He did not directly address the sexual assault allegations.

The BBC has contacted Ms Cooney for comment.

Only one US president has been at the Nato summit in Washington this week, but the shadow of another – his predecessor – has loomed over this meeting of the world’s most powerful military alliance.

While the host Joe Biden has presided over a message of unity from the group’s 32 members, the Nato-sceptic views of his rival for power, Donald Trump, have imbued conversations here with an urgency and an anxiety.

At times the smiles from world leaders in the conference hall have felt fragile. Trump “hangs over every conversation here”, said one Eastern European diplomat who asked to remain nameless.

The Republican’s election as president in November “could change everything”, the diplomat said. The fact that Mr Biden has been trying to fend off a political crisis over his frailty has only sharpened the sense that a second Trump term could bring far-reaching changes to an alliance forged in the ashes of the World War Two and still reliant on hard US military power to deter adversaries.

So does Nato need to “Trump-proof” itself – as some describe it – and if so, is it possible?

There is a lot of evidence of efforts by Nato allies to reach out already to those in Trump’s political orbit to try to manage relationships and limit what they would see as the potential damage of a second term. But others suggest something more unmanageable.

Camille Grand, a French former official who was one of Nato’s deputy leaders throughout the Trump administration, described himself as “much more worried” than colleagues who think a second term may be “Trump [term] one on steroids” but ultimately workable for the alliance.

“He doesn’t have the same sort of guardrails, he doesn’t have the same sort of adults in the room. And he has around him a team that is trying to turn his instinct into policy,” said Mr Grand, who is now a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Four members of visiting delegations, who asked to remain anonymous, told the BBC their concern was not necessarily that a Trump administration would withdraw entirely from Nato, as he has threatened before.

• What is Nato and which countries are members?

Rather it is a fear that the US commitment to the alliance’s core principle of collective security – “all for one and one for all”, meaning any ally under attack can expect defence from the others – could wane.

Trump’s positions on Nato have veered erratically from outright hostility – portraying the alliance as a bunch of freeloading Europeans surviving off protection paid for by US taxpayers – to suggesting his outbursts are simply part of a cunning negotiating tactic to compel more of Nato’s members to meet its defence spending targets.

He has frequently tried to rally crowds of supporters with attacks on the organisation. As the summit began, he posted to his Truth Social network that when he started as president most Nato members were “delinquent” until they “paid up” due to his pressure.

By the end of Trump’s presidency, four more Nato countries had hit the alliance’s guidelines of spending at least 2% of national income on defence. So far during President Biden’s term, another 13 countries have reached the target.

That progress is frequently touted by the Biden administration and its backers, although in reality much of the increase was triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

At a February campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump said he would let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to Nato countries that did not spend enough.

That sparked outrage from some quarters in Washington, but privately his threats are said to have gone further.

At a panel event in January, European Union commissioner Thierry Breton described a meeting he had attended in 2020 between Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“Donald Trump said to Ursula: ‘You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you. And by the way, Nato is dead. And we will leave, we will quit Nato.’

“It was the president of the United States of America,” recalled Mr Breton. “He may come back.”

Trump’s campaign has been approached by the BBC with a request to confirm whether the account was accurate. Evelyn Farkas, a former senior official at the Pentagon in the Obama administration, believes there remains a real concern even over Nato’s existence under Mr Trump.

“I think there is a danger with Trump that he tries to pull us out of Nato. I won’t sugarcoat that,” said Dr Farkas, now executive director at public policy think tank the McCain Institute.

“The reality is Trump is dangerous to the alliance in that America is still the strongest economic, political, military power and Nato is stronger if Nato has the United States inside the alliance.”

But one of those familiar with the thinking in Trump’s political orbit, Dan Caldwell from the right-wing think tank Defence Priorities, believes the former president’s priority is to push European nations to invest more in their own militaries.

“I don’t think he wants to withdraw from Nato, but he has said that the United States should re-evaluate its role and the purpose of Nato going forward,” he said.

“Not only the former president but more and more national security experts on the right believe the United States has really no choice but to do less in Europe. So I think that there’s some larger forces at play, that will eventually force the next president, regardless of who it is… to substantially pull back from Nato.”

The most detailed account of policy positions that might influence a second Trump term comes from an initiative being brought up by supporters and detractors of Trump alike. Overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation, “Project 2025” is a 900-page detailed blueprint for a Republican president to usher in a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch.

The initiative says a future president should “transform Nato” so that America’s role is primarily for its nuclear deterrent, while other members should field “the great majority” of conventional forces required to deter Russia.

This is in keeping with the project’s foreign policy position, seeing the main threat to US primacy as China and therefore calling for the next president to “bring resolution to the foreign policy tensions” sparked by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Trump himself has equivocated over the war but has said he would end it in “24 hours”. He favours brokering a deal between Russia and Ukraine on terms that many Nato allies would see as surrender for Kyiv.

Trump has partially disavowed Project 2025, saying he does not know who is behind it but many of his former officials had a hand in writing it, including a former acting defense secretary.

Since Trump left office, the increase in the number of Nato members spending at least 2% of their income on defence has better insulated the alliance for the future, said Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Asked about “Trump-proofing”, he said Congress had also moved to shield America’s membership of Nato from the whims of the White House, in a law passed last year. “We clarified no president can unilaterally withdraw from Nato without a vote of approval from the Senate,” Mr Coons told the BBC.

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He also highlighted the $60bn military assistance package for Ukraine finally passed in April in a bipartisan effort following nine months of paralysis, after allies of Trump blocked passage of the bill through Congress.

“It is my hope that we will continue to be a counterweight and a counterbalance to the president should we, I think, make the tragic mistake of moving forward with a second Trump term.”

But Trump has repeatedly challenged current levels of US military provision for Ukraine, again arguing he could negotiate the war’s end with Russia.

Another possible attempt to future-proof US support for Ukraine is by moving more co-ordination for arms supply to Nato itself – taking it further out of reach of a future American president. Such a move has been pitched by Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as a way to “shield” Ukraine’s supply of aid “against the winds of political change”, officials told The Financial Times.

At the summit the alliance agreed to launch a new program in which Nato will supplement, but not replace, a 50-nation “contact group” that co-ordinates delivery of weapons. Camille Grand, the former Nato official, thinks the summit may have “raised the cost” for a future President Trump to roll back the “messaging” from Nato, but in the end, he said, Trump-proofing was impossible.

“If the US, as the biggest shareholder in the alliance, decides to be tough on the alliance, on Ukraine, there is no nothing in the [summit agreement] and previous summits that prevent it from doing that.

“But I think it’s sending an important message to Trump and his team, which is that the Europeans have turned the corner when it comes to [increased] spending.”

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský reiterated that, telling me that any future president of the US that wanted to change things on Nato had the power to do so.

The real work of “Trump-proofing” at this summit has instead felt like Nato supporters pitching the alliance to conservative Americans to try to change their view. This found its most striking moment when President Zelensky appeared at the Reagan Institute for an on-stage conversation with Fox News host Bret Baier.

Mr Zelensky repeatedly raised the memory of the late Republican President Ronald Reagan, quoting Cold War lines on deterring enemies through working with allies.

Reagan is a favoured reference for Democrats trying to expose Republican divisions and what they see as the maverick isolationism of Trump. The subtext is: Reagan would turn in his grave at Trump’s Nato-sceptic stance. But it’s a message that may fall flat with those who Mr Zelensky thinks need to hear it.

Celebrities, politicians and popstars from across the globe have arrived in Mumbai for the wedding of youngest son of Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani.

Anant Ambani is tying the knot with Radhika Merchant, daughter of Indian pharma tycoons Viren and Shaila Merchant, in a traditional Hindu ceremony in Mumbai city on Friday.

The wedding events began with parties and celebrations in March, before the family invited over 800 guests to join them on a cruise around Europe.

But Friday saw the arrival of some of the world’s most recognisable faces, as politics, power and celebrity mixed on the red carpet.

Among those who crossed the globe for the events were several prominent political leaders. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson – accompanied by his wife Carrie – was seen dancing as he entered the venue with one of his young children.

His predecessor, Tony Blair, was also in attendance. He was joined by his wife Cherie. The pair sported traditional Indian attire and arrived just days after Mr Blair’s Labour Party returned to power in the UK.

Reality TV star Kim Kardashian documented her arrival on Instagram, travelling with her sister Khloe. She hinted that their journey to the ceremony would be featured in the upcoming season of the Kardashians.

Sporting stars were also in attendance. Indian cricket legend MS Dhoni was accompanied by his family, while Fifa President Gianni Infantino was spotted hitting the red carpet with his wife Leena Al Ashqar.

WWE legend John Cena followed soon after, cracking jokes with photographers as he entered the venue.

Bollywood’s leading lights also dazzled. Priyanka Chopra arrived in Mumbai with her husband, singer Nick Jonas. The pair were seen grooving on the dance floor, according to Indian media.

Kriti Sanon walked the red carpet in a pink lehenga, while Ananya Panday – who is a bridesmaid – appeared in a tiger-print yellow lehenga embroidered with “Anant’s Brigade” on the back.

The couple’s wedding celebrations are likely to continue over several days. Parties have been reportedly planned for Saturday and Sunday and a grand reception is scheduled for Monday.

Every day, for the last seven years, Arun Kumar has set up his fruit stall on a busy Mumbai street.

It’s not an easy way to make a living.

“Being a street vendor is a challenge. There’s the fear of being robbed or, as I am not a licensed vendor, the local body can come and dismantle my store anytime,” he says.

But over the past four years at least one aspect of his work has become easier.

“Prior to Covid everything was in cash. But now everyone pays with UPI. Scan the code and the payment is done within seconds.

“No issues of handling cash, giving change to customers. It has made my life and business smooth,” he says.

UPI, or to give it its full name the Unified Payments Interface, was launched in 2016 in a collaboration between India’s central bank and the nation’s banking industry.

It’s an app-based instant payment system, which allows users to send and receive money, pay bills and authorise payments in a single step – no need to enter bank details or any other personal information. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s free.

It has become so popular that India is now the biggest real-time payments market.

In May, UPI recorded 14 billion transactions, up from nine billion the year before.

But the popularity and ease of use has made it a rich feeding ground for scammers.

“While digital payments are convenient, they do come with vulnerabilities,” says Shashank Shekhar, founder of the Delhi-based Future Crime Research Foundation.

Mr Shekhar says that scammers use a variety of ways to trick people, including persuading them to share their UPI pin number, which is needed to authorise payments.

Some scammers have also created fake UPI apps, that are clones of legitimate banking apps, and then steal login details or other valuable information.

“The pace at which digital transformation took place in the country means unfortunately digital literacy and safe internet practice could not catch up,” says Mr Shekhar.

He says that between January 2020 and June 2023 almost half of all financial fraud involved the use of the UPI system.

According to government figures there were more than 95,000 cases of fraud involving UPI in the financial year ending April 2023, up from 77,000 in the previous year.

Shivkali was one such victim. She had always wanted to own a scooter, but they were beyond her budget.

However, earlier in the year the 22-year-old, who lives in Bihar state in northeastern India, spotted one for sale on Facebook that looked like a great deal.

“I grabbed the opportunity without thinking,” she says.

A couple of clicks later and she was talking to the owner, who said that for $23 he would send over the vehicle papers.

That went smoothly, so Shivkali continued to send the owner money, via instant transfers. She eventually ended up paying $200, but the scooter (also commonly called a Scooty in India), was never delivered.

Shivkali realised she had been scammed.

“I did not think I could be cheated, as I have some education background and know what is happing in the world. But scammers are smart. They have an art of speaking to convince the opposite person,” she says.

The government and the central bank are looking at ways to protect UPI users from scammers.

But at the moment, if a victim wants compensation, they have to approach their bank.

“The problem is deep rooted,” says Dr Durgesh Pandey, an expert in financial crime.

“Most of the onus lies with banks and telecom companies. They are lax in making identity checks, that’s why the fraudster can’t be traced.

“But the challenge for banks particularly is that they have to balance between inclusivity, ease of business and enforcement of identity checks. If they are too rigid, the vulnerable section of society will remain without banking facilities.”

But Dr Pandey argues that in most cases of fraud, the bank is not totally to blame.

“It’s a complex question because the problem lies with banks, but it’s the victim who is giving his credentials in most case. I would say both victim and bank should bear the loss.”

Despite those problems, UPI is being promoted in rural areas where access to banking services can be difficult.

Poonam Untwal from Rajasthan runs a guidance centre which helps people use the internet and digital banking.

“Most of us are not that educated, nor know the proper use of smartphones. I teach them that phones are no longer a device just to talk to people but banks at their fingertips,” she says.

She believes that UPI will help develop the local economy.

“Many women like me have a small business that we run from our home. Now we can receive and send money with UPI. People who don’t have smart phones come to my centre to get their transactions done,” she says.

As well as making inroads into rural areas, UPI is spreading overseas.

Retailers in Bhutan, Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka and UAE will take UPI payments.

And this year, France become the first European country to accept UPI payments, starting with tickets to the Eiffel Tower.

Back in Mumbai, Mr Kumar is happy that he no longer has to use cash, but remains wary.

If he can’t get a good internet connection then customers can, by accident or design, make off without paying.

“For a small vendor like me it [UPI] made receiving money very easy. But I am always scared of fraud. I keep hearing in the news how the UPI frauds are increasing. Hopefully some mechanisms are invented so a small vendor like me doesn’t face losses.”

Sabrina Cohen-Hatton has gone from rough sleeping as a teenager to visiting the Prince of Wales in Windsor Castle to give him advice on tackling homelessness.

She was able to give her own story to Prince William as proof that homeless people should not be “written off”.

“I sit in front of you now with a job, a home, a family and a PhD,” said Sabrina, who works as a fire service chief.

Prince William marked the first year of his Homewards project with a visit to Lambeth in south London where he pleged: “It is possible to end homelessness.”

The prince delivered the message that there is nothing inevitable about homelessness and that it shouldn’t be normalised.

Meeting Homewards representatives in Brixton he said: “Homelessness is a complex societal issue, and one that touches the lives of far too many people in our society. However, I truly believe that it can be ended.”

He spoke of the importance of “shifting perspectives” about homeless people and the need to “focus on prevention, rather than simply managing the crisis”.

Homewards is a five-year project based around six areas around the UK.

That includes Newport in South Wales – and as a 15- and 16-year-old that was where Sabrina was sleeping rough, after the death of a parent and problems at home.

Her way out was selling the Big Issue – “I credit them with saving my life” – and once she had secure accommodation she was able to get a job in the fire service, which became her career.

She used this “lived experience” to tell Prince William and the Homewards project about what was needed.

“There were lots of closed doors in my face,” she said. Even when support was meant to be available, she said in practice it could be hard for homeless people to have the confidence to access it.

Or there can be practical barriers. She said she relied on her dog, called Menace, but many hostels wouldn’t let people stay with pets.

Sabrina also warned of how homelessness was linked to the “pernicious” long-term impact of poverty.

She went on to become chief fire officer of West Sussex and has spoken widely about her own journey, including this latest role as an advocate for Homewards.

Sabrina said Prince William showed a lot of “empathy” towards the issue of homelessness, which she suggested reflected some of the “trauma” in his early life.

At the event in Brixton, Sabrina spoke alongside Chris Lynam, who recalled the intense “loneliness” that accompanied his own homelessness and drug addiction.

“It’s a very isolating experience… society is quite hostile to homeless people,” said Chris, who is now supporting Homewards’ work in Sheffield.

Prince William described it as an “honour” to hear Chris talk about his experiences.

The homelessness project, operating in Aberdeen, Bournemouth, Lambeth, Newport, Sheffield and Northern Ireland, wants to find successful approaches that can be replicated elsewhere.

There are links with employers about helping people into work. A partnership with Homebase provides starter packs of furniture to help those moving from homelessness into accommodation.

There are efforts to identify sofa-surfing and addressing links between relationship breakdown and homelessness.

Putting housing officers in schools has been tried to identify young people who might be at risk.

Through the Duchy of Cornwall there are 24 homes being built with “wrap-around support” for people leaving homelessness – and Prince William is now involved in developing further plans.

There is a push to change attitudes towards homelessness – and Sabrina talked about the need to get rid of the stigma. She said that for 20 years she hadn’t told anyone about her own experiences, before becoming such a public speaker about homelessness.

Matt Downie, chief executive of Crisis, says the Homewards project can challenge the “cynicism and fatalism” that says homelessness is inevitable.

He says that even though the big picture has seen homelessness getting worse, the evidence exists to prevent it.

Finland is given as an example of a sustained drive to end homelessness, with the claim that there are now only about 150 homeless families. In contrast in the UK, there are more than 100,000 households categorised as homeless.

There have also been questions about whether a wealthy royal should be pronouncing on homelessness.

The anti-monarchy group Republic has previously described it as “crass and hypocritical”.

But George Anderson, a Big Issue seller and medical researcher in London, welcomes that Prince William has used his high public profile to talk about homelessness.

“He encourages people who are distant from homelessness to feel empathy and care,” says George.

“Given the pomp and ceremony around his official role, it is easy for people to question as to what he really knows about homelessness,” says George.

“I am sure that he is aware of that whilst also knowing he is in a position, like his mother, to highlight the plight of homelessness to the media.

“His mother would have experienced similar, being photographed in a tiara at a ball one day, whilst serving soup in a homeless kitchen the next,” says George, who sees the prince’s interest as being linked to Princess Diana bringing her sons to homelessness charities when they were children.

Guess who’s back, back again?

Eminem’s latest album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), has been released and is being met with mixed reviews by critics.

In the US rapper’s 12th album, his alter ego Slim Shady is killed off – the artwork shows Shady in a body bag, and in the music video for Tobey, Eminem takes a chainsaw to him.

Clash called the album “a mixed bag” and described it as “at once an effective piece of fan service, while also being a record that disappoints”.

“It doesn’t quite feel like an ending, but neither does it feel like a continuation,” Robin Murray wrote.

“A mixed, often muddled album, it features some of Eminem’s best rapping in a decade – those fast, skippy-yet-intricate flows will never fail to thrill – but his pen is often blunted.”

Ahead of the release, Eminem told fans this is a “conceptual album” and the songs should be listened to in order.

The 19 tracks include previously released singles Tobey and Houdini, as well as a sequel to his 1999 hit Guilty Conscience with Dr Dre.

Billboard ranked the latter song as one of the best on the new album and said “it’s not the original, but is a worthy second coming”.

“At one point, Slim Shady puts Marshall on blast for creating him as an alter-ego to stir up controversy and essentially be a shield to say jarring things that he didn’t really have the courage to stand on,” Michael Saponara wrote.

USA Today said the 51-year-old is a “lyrical pugilist throughout, except when he turns misty-eyed dad rapping about daughter Hailie Jade”.

His song Temporary starts with old recordings of the rapper and his daughter talking as a child.

Melissa Ruggieri said it was the most memorable song on the album “because it gives Eminem permission to drop the shtick and explore his vulnerability – which isn’t often apparent elsewhere on the album”.

Eminem calls on his 28-year-old daughter to “be strong” and that he will always be her rock.

On his track Fuel, Eminem references the multiple sexual assault allegations against fellow rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs.

“I’m like an R-A-P-E-R/I got so many S-As/S-As/Wait, he didn’t just spell the word rapper and leave out a ‘P’, did he?” the lyrics say.

Pitchfork said Eminem, real name Marshall Mathers III, “reckons with his controversies while taking pains to create new one”.

The track Antichrist “take pains to offend as crudely as possible” with references to pronouns, woke society and “the harrowing video of Diddy attacking his then-girlfriend Cassie in a hotel in 2016”.

Mr Combs, one of rap’s most successful moguls, apologised for his “inexcusable” actions shown in that video, and has denied all allegations of sexual assault.

A review by the Independent gave the album two stars and said the rapper was “punching downwards, joylessly and without inspiration”.

“Much of The Death Of Slim Shady resembles a Telegraph op-ed: the ham-fisted mashing of people’s buttons, the blethering about ‘the PC police’ and ‘Gen Z’ coming to get him. Anything to get a reaction,” Stevie Chick wrote.

Joe Biden took to the stage at his Thursday night news conference with everything on the line – his presidency, his re-election hopes, his political life.

If those were the stakes, he barely acknowledged them at the hour-long session to mark the end of a Nato summit, having earlier introduced Ukraine’s President Zelensky as “President Putin” at a separate event.

The news conference was his first unscripted appearance after a disastrous debate with his rival Donald Trump, leading to calls from several Democratic politicians and donors for him to drop out of the race for president.

Mr Biden, 81, has faced continuous questions over his age and ability to serve another term, which intensified after the debate.

But at the highly anticipated news conference, he dismissed the concerns about his campaign that were posed again and again by a room full of reporters, and promised that he was fighting not for his legacy, but to finish the job he started when he took office in 2021.

“If I slow down and can’t get the job done, that’s a sign I shouldn’t be doing it,” he said. “But there’s no indication of that yet.”

Depending on perspective, it was either a sign of dogged determination or of a man in denial about how dire his situation has become.

Minutes after the news conference finished, several more Democratic members of Congress publicly called on Mr Biden to step down, joining at least a dozen other lawmakers in the president’s own party who have done so.

The question for Joe Biden’s campaign is whether the floodgates will now open, or if the tide will hold.

The situation will not be helped by two excruciating gaffes that will be remembered by anyone who watched.

In his very first answer, he called his own Vice-President Kamala Harris “Vice-President Trump” – a painful faceplant in front of a national television audience.

That came just an hour after another headline-grabbing mistake at a Nato event, when Mr Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin”, prompting loud gasps in the audience.

He corrected the first verbal misstep involving Ukraine’s leader quickly. The second one he didn’t catch, even as some reporters in the room murmured in surprise and several of his top Cabinet secretaries sat stone-faced in the front row of the audience.

Those moments – the only major stumbles in an otherwise steady if not vigorous, appearance – will surely prompt nervous Democrats to wonder if there are more gaffes to come if the president presses ahead with his campaign.

But for now at least, Mr Biden seemed the happy warrior, insisting he will push on. He laughed and smiled as he was peppered with questions, and said he could keep up with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, even if the hoarseness and cough that had been on display during his debate two weeks ago still appeared to linger.

He again insisted he didn’t need cognitive tests, telling reporters that if he even saw “two doctors or seven”, his critics wouldn’t be satisfied.

The election campaign, he said, had barely started, and he again repeated that he was confident he could beat Donald Trump in November’s election.

The Democratic delegates who will back him officially as the party’s nominee at next month’s convention were free to change their minds as they pleased, he said, before mock whispering: “It’s not going to happen.”

He said he would consider stepping aside if his staff gave him data that he couldn’t win, but that polls still show the race a dead heat.

In that regard, he is on firm ground. An Ipsos survey released earlier on Thursday, for instance, had Mr Biden only one point behind his opponent – well within the margin of error. If there’s one thing that has been clear since the start of the year, support for the two candidates has remained remarkably stable despite unprecedented drama surrounding both men.

Polling alone won’t calm the panic that has set in among many Democratic officials, however, and the storm clouds that linger around Biden’s campaign won’t be so easily dispelled.

More Democratic politicians are waiting in the wings, according to reports, poised to announce their own break with the president, having waited until the conclusion of this Nato summit to voice their concerns.

And that’s just the first round of tests for the embattled president. He has another high-profile sit-down interview, with NBC’s Lester Holt, on Monday. Donors are anxious, and earlier on Thursday several reports suggested that even figures in the president’s own campaign were plotting ways to usher their candidate toward the exit.

Despite all of this, Mr Biden made clear that it will be a challenging task to pry the nomination away from him. The 81-year-old man who at times gripped the lectern with two hands and insisted he was the “best-qualified person” to run the country is not going to exit the stage quietly.

• POLICIES: Where Biden and Trump stand on key issues
• GLOBAL: What Moscow and Beijing think of rematch
• ANALYSIS: Could US economy be doing too well?
• EXPLAINER: RFK Jr and others running for president
• VOTERS: US workers in debt to buy groceries

An Australian soldier and her husband have been arrested and each charged with spying for Russia.

Investigators say the couple – both Russian-born Australian citizens – obtained Australian Defence Force (ADF) material to share with Moscow.

However, Australian police say “no significant compromise” of military secrets has been identified.

It is the first time stricter foreign interference laws – introduced by Australia in 2018 – have been used to lay espionage charges.

Kira Korolev, a 40-year-old army private, and her 62-year-old husband Igor Korolev faced court in Brisbane on Friday, each on one count of preparing for an espionage offence – which carries a maximum 15-year jail sentence.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he had been “briefed extensively” by the nation’s security agencies but would not comment on the case directly as it is now before the courts.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Reece Kershaw said the couple had been in Australia for more than a decade before the alleged offending and had both become citizens several years ago.

Igor worked as a self-employed labourer, and Kira was an information systems technician in the army, a role for which she had obtained a security clearance, police say.

Mr Kershaw alleged she secretly travelled to Russia while on leave from the ADF, then instructed Igor to access her work account and send sensitive material so that she could forward it on to Russian authorities.

An investigation in to whether any of the material was ever delivered to them is still underway, Mr Kershaw said, adding that the charges could be upgraded.

Both Mr Kershaw and Australia’s spy agency boss Mike Burgess – who addressed media together on Friday – declined to answer questions about the nature of the documents or how authorities were tipped off about the alleged crimes.

But Mr Burgess said that the ongoing threat of espionage is “real”.

“Multiple countries are seeking to steal Australia’s secrets. We cannot be naive, and we cannot be complacent.”

“If you are spying in this country, we are looking for you. If you are being spied on in this country, we are looking out for you,” he added.

Mr Kershaw stressed that Australia’s allies could be “confident” that the country would “continue to identify and disrupt espionage and foreign interference activity”.

In a statement, the ADF said it was aware one of its members had been arrested and that it “takes all breaches of security seriously”.

A team of imaging experts, scientists and historians set sail for the Titanic on Friday to gather the most detailed photographic record ever made of the wreck.

The BBC had exclusive access to expedition members in the US city of Providence, Rhode Island, as they made preparations to leave port.

They’ll be using state of the art technology to scan every nook and cranny of the famous liner to gain new insights into its sinking.

This is the first commercial mission to Titanic since last year’s OceanGate tragedy. Five men died while trying to visit the lost ship in a novel submersible.

A joint memorial service will be held at sea in the coming days for them and the 1,500 passengers and crew who went down with Titanic in 1912.

The new expedition is being mounted by the US company that has sole salvage rights and which to date has brought up some 5,500 objects from the wreck.

But this latest visit is purely a reconnaissance mission, says RMS Titanic Inc, based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Two robotic vehicles will dive to the ocean bottom to capture millions of high-resolution photographs and to make a 3D model of all the debris.

“We want to see the wreck with a clarity and precision that’s never before been achieved,” explained co-expedition lead David Gallo.

The logistics ship Dino Chouest is going to be the base for operations out in the North Atlantic.

Weather permitting, it should spend 20 days above the wreck, which lies in 3,800m (12,500ft) of water.

It will be a poignant few weeks for all involved.

One of the five who died on the OceanGate sub was Frenchman Paul-Henri (“PH”) Nargeolet. He was the director of research at RMS Titanic Inc and was due to lead this expedition.

A plaque will be laid on the seabed in his honour.

“It’s tough but the thing about exploration is that there’s an urge and a drive to keep going. And we’re doing that because of that passion PH had for continuous exploration,” explained friend and historian Rory Golden, who will be “chief morale officer” on Dino Chouest.

There can be few people on Earth who don’t know the story of the supposedly unsinkable Titanic and how it was holed by an iceberg, east of Canada, on the night of 15 April 1912.

There are countless books, movies and documentaries about the event.

But although the wreck site has been the target of repeated study since its discovery in 1985, there still isn’t what could be described as a definitive map.

And while the bow and stern sections of the broken ship are reasonably well understood, there are extensive areas of the surrounding debris field that have received only cursory inspection.

Two six-tonne remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) intend to put that right. One will be fitted with an array of ultra-high-definition optical cameras and a special lighting system; the other will carry a sensor package that includes a lidar (laser) scanner.

Together, they’ll track back and forth across a 1.3km-by-0.97km section of seafloor.

Evan Kovacs, who’s in charge of the imaging programme, says his camera systems should produce millimetre resolution.

“If all of the weather gods, the computer gods, the ROV gods, the camera gods – if all those gods align, we should be able to capture Titanic and the wreck site in as close to digital perfection as you can get. You would be able to quite literally count grains of sand,” he told BBC News.

There’s huge anticipation for what the magnetometer aboard the sensor ROV might produce. This is a first for Titanic.

The instrument will detect all the metals at the wreck site, even material that is buried out of sight in the sediment.

“It would be an absolute dream to determine what has happened with Titanic’s bow below the seafloor,” explained geophysics engineer Alison Proctor.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to deduce whether or not the bow was crushed when it hit the seabed, or if it might actually extend down well into the sediment intact.”

The team wants to review the state of some well known objects in the debris field, such as the boilers that spilled out as the opulent steamliner broke in half.

There’s the desire, too, to locate items thought to have been sighted on previous visits. These include an electric candelabra, which in its day would have been a fascinating curio, as well as the possibility of a second Steinway grand piano.

The musical instrument’s wooden surround would have long since decayed away, but the cast iron plate, or frame, that held the strings should still be there, perhaps even some of the keys.

“For me, it’s the passengers’ possessions, especially their bags, that are of greatest interest,” said Tomasina Ray, who curates the collection of Titanic artefacts held by the company.

“It’s their belongings – if we are able to retrieve more in the future – that help flesh out their stories. For so many passengers, they are just names on a list, and it’s a way to keep them meaningful.”

This will be RMS Titanic Inc’s ninth visit to the wreck site. The firm has attracted controversy in recent years with its stated desire to try to bring up part of the Marconi radio equipment that transmitted the distress calls on the night of the sinking.

It won’t happen on this expedition but if and when it does occur, it would mean extracting an object from inside the disintegrating ship.

For many, Titanic is the gravesite to the 1,500 who died that night in 1912 and should not be touched, its interior especially.

“We get that and understand it,” said company researcher James Penca.

“We dive to Titanic to learn as much as we can from her; and like you should with any archaeological site, we do it with the utmost respect. But to leave her alone, to just let her passengers and crew be lost to history – that would be the biggest tragedy of all.”

Narcissistic people get more empathetic, generous and agreeable with age, according to new research into the personality trait.

But although their unreasonably high sense of self-importance may mellow, they do not fully grow out of it, the study involving more than 37,000 people suggests.

Those who were more narcissistic than their peers as children tended to remain that way as adults, investigators found.

And there are at least three types of narcissistic behaviour to look for, they say.

Narcissist has become an insult often hurled at people who are perceived as difficult or diagreeable.

We all may show some narcissistic traits at times.

Doctors use the term to describe a specific, diagnosable type of personality disorder.

Although definitions can vary, common themes shared by those who have it is an unshakeable belief they are better or more deserving than other people, which might be described by others as arrogance and selfishness.

The work, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, comes from data from 51 past studies, involving 37,247 participants who ranged in age from eight to 77.

Researchers looked for three types of narcissist, based on behaviour traits:

• Agentic narcissists – who feel grand or superior to others and crave admiration
• Antagonistic narcissists – who see others as rivals and are exploitative and lack empathy
• Neurotic narcissists – who are shame-prone, insecure and overly sensitive to criticism

They studied what happened to these personality measures over time, based on questionnaires, and found that, generally, narcissism scores declined with age.

However, the changes were slight and gradual.

“Clearly, some individuals may change more strongly, but generally, you wouldn’t expect someone you knew as a very narcissistic person to have completely changed when you meet them again after some years,” lead researcher Dr Ulrich Orth, from the University of Bern in Switzerland, told BBC News.

He says some narcissistic traits can be helpful, at least in the short term.

It might boost your popularity, dating success, and chance of landing a top job, for example. But over longer periods, the consequences are mostly negative, because of the conflict it causes.

“These consequences do not only affect the person themselves, but also the wellbeing of individuals with whom they interact, such as partners, children, friends, co-workers, and employees,” he explained.

Dr Sarah Davies is a chartered counselling psychologist who has written a book on how to leave a narcissist.

She told the BBC that although people may be arrogant or selfish at times, that should not be confused with true clinical narcissism.

“Narcissists tend to be envious and jealous of others and they are highly exploitative and manipulative,” she said.

“They do not experience remorse or feeling bad, or have a sense of responsibility like other non-narcissistic people do.”

She says there has been a boom in interest about narcissism, driven by social media.

“To some extent that’s helpful – it helps inform more people about it and to bring more awareness of this issue. However, like many mental health terms, the clinical meaning can get a little lost.

Dr Davies says we should be more discerning with the term.

“I find it much more useful to be specific with naming behaviours and separate them. For example, a friend of mine recently called her ex a narcissist because he had ghosted her after they broke up.

“Being ghosted [suddenly cutting someone out of your life without explanation] is of course horrible, but he may not have been able to deal with a conversation after their relationship came to an end. It doesn’t necessarily mean he is a raging narcissist.

“They were together a while and there were no other indications of his ‘narcissism’.”

According to Dr Davies, some signs you may be involved with or around a narcissist include:

• Constant drama – a narcissist needs to be needed and seeks chaos and conflict
• No genuine apologies – they never really take full responsibility for their own behaviours
• Blame game – they manipulate and exploit others for their own selfish gains

Dr Tennyson Lee is a consultant psychiatrist with the Deancross Personality Disorder Service, based in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. He said the study was well-conducted and the findings were useful.

“The good news is narcissism typically reduces with age. The bad news is this reduction is not of a high magnitude.

“Do not expect narcissism will dramatically improve at a certain age – it doesn’t.

“This has implications for the long-suffering spouse who thinks ‘an improvement is just around the corner’,” he told BBC News.

support is available.

Kenya’s police chief Japhet Koome has resigned, following weeks of violent protests against proposed tax hikes in which more than 40 people died.

Human rights groups have accused police of shooting dozens of protestors, some of them fatally, and abducting or arbitrarily arresting hundreds more.

The resignation comes a day after President William Ruto sacked most of his cabinet, following pressure from the protest movement which is largely coordinated online by young Kenyans.

Two weeks ago protesters stormed parliament, shortly after legislators passed the controversial finance bill. Police responded by opening fire on demonstrators in the streets.

President Ruto later withdrew the bill but that has failed to satisfy the demonstrators, who want him to step down and are planning more protests to demand further reforms.

Deputy police chief Douglas Kanja takes over running the force with immediate effect, the Kenyan presidency has said.

Mr Koome’s resignation has been welcomed by Kenyans, yet police officers who caught on film firing at protesters remain at large.

Last week during an unprecedented discussion on X, formerly Twitter, President Ruto promised Kenyans he would take action against those police officers once he received video evidence. It is not clear whether this has happened.

On Friday at least 11 dead bodies, some of them dismembered, were found at a rubbish tip in the capital, Nairobi, after residents raised the alarm. It is not yet clear whether their deaths have any connection with the protests.

In the midst of the biggest crisis of his two-year presidency, Mr Ruto earlier this week met opposition leader Raila Odinga and announced plans to form a 150-member dialogue panel to help find a solution to the country’s problems.

After sacking key cabinet members on Thursday including the attorney-general, the president said he would now consult widely in order to set up a broad-based government.

The proposed tax measures were intended to help ease the country’s debt burden of over $80bn (£63bn). About 60% of Kenya’s collected revenues goes to servicing debt.

But protesters have insisted the government should first cut spending, saying there was too much waste and corruption. In response to this demand, the presidency last week announced a number of austerity measures.

Additional reporting by Natasha Booty

• Was there a massacre after Kenya’s anti-tax protests?
• Protesters traumatised by abductions – lawyer
• Kenyan president’s humbling shows power of African youth
• Historic first as president takes on Kenya’s online army
• Protesters set fire to Kenya’s parliament – but also saved two MPs

Alec Baldwin broke into tears as a New Mexico judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter case against him for a fatal shooting on the set of the film Rust.

The trial collapsed three days into Baldwin’s trial in Santa Fe, at a court just miles from where Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer, was shot with a revolver that Mr Baldwin was using in rehearsals.

It is the second time the case against the actor has been dismissed since the October 2021 shooting. He will not be tried again.

His lawyers alleged police and prosecutors hid evidence – a batch of bullets – that could have been connected to the shooting on set.

A key aspect of the case has been how live ammunition ended up on the set and Mr Baldwin’s lawyers have questioned the investigation and mistakes made by authorities who processed the scene.

Their motion to dismiss set off a remarkable set of events, with one of the two special prosecutors leading the case resigning, and Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissing the jury to hear from multiple witnesses.

The bullets, Mr Baldwin’s lawyer said, could be related to Ms Hutchins’ death, but were filed in a different case with a different number.

Prosecutors argued the ammunition was not connected to the case and did not match bullets found on the Rust set.

The judge ruled, however, that they should have been shared with Mr Baldwin’s defence team regardless.

“The state’s wilful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate,” she said from the bench. “There is no way for the court to right this wrong.”

Prosecutors will not be able to lodge the charge against Baldwin again, as the judge did not rule the case a mistrial, but instead outright dismissed it with prejudice.

“It was the nuclear option. The case is over,” Los Angeles criminal defence lawyer Joshua Ritter told the BBC.

Mr Baldwin, best known for his role on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock and for portraying Donald Trump on sketch show Saturday Night Live, broke down in tears as the judge read from a lengthy statement detailing her reasons for the dismissal. His wife, Hilaria, covered her mouth. Other members of his family cried and smiled.

The actor hugged his lawyers then embraced his wife, who was seated behind him. They walked out hand-in-hand through a tunnel of press into a black vehicle without answering any questions or making any comments.

The evidence came to light on Thursday, when a crime-scene technician told the court that a man named Troy Teske, a retired police officer, had turned over live ammunition that could be related to the case.

Mr Teske is friends with the step-father of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armourer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter earlier this year.

He was working with Seth Kenney, who helped with props and ammunition on the film set.

After the judge sent the jury home on Friday, the court heard from a series of witnesses about the bullets, including authorities who led the case and Mr Kenney.

Towards the end of the hearing, one of the prosecutors leading the case – Kari Morrissey – took the stand to testify about the bullets and why they weren’t shared with the defence. It’s remarkably rare for a prosecutor to testify in a case they bring about their role in the investigation.

Ms Morrissey, while on the stand, said that her co-prosecutor, Erlinda Ocampo Johnson, resigned on Friday as the judge weighed to dismiss the case.

She explained Ms Johnson “didn’t agree with the decision to have a public hearing” over the evidence claims.

In 2023, prosecutors in the case dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge against Mr Baldwin, saying they had new evidence and needed more time to investigate.

They refiled that charge in January, arguing he had a flagrant disregard for gun safety on a film set that had a small budget and an inexperienced cast.

Mr Baldwin pleaded not guilty and has maintained he never pulled the trigger when the gun went off, killing Ms Hutchins.

His defence team has said he was simply an actor doing his job on the film set and placed his trust in the film crew that were tasked with ensuring weapon safety on set.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski has said Warsaw is considering a proposal from Kyiv to shoot down Russian missiles heading towards Polish territory while they are still in Ukrainian airspace.

The proposal was included in a joint defence agreement between the two countries signed during President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Warsaw earlier this week.

“At this stage, this is an idea. What our agreement said is we will explore this idea,” Mr Sikorski told the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

He said some Russian missiles fired from the St Petersburg area towards Ukrainian targets near the western city of Lviv, not far from the Polish border, traversed Belarus and entered Polish airspace for about 40 seconds before turning towards their targets in Ukraine.

Mr Sikorski acknowledged that such a short time gave Poland little time to react.

However the proposal would theoretically cover any missile traversing western Ukraine in the direction of Poland.

“We are a frontline state and Russian missiles breach our airspace. We assume by mistake,” Mr Sikorski said.

“Our dilemma is the following. If we shoot them down only when they enter our airspace the debris is a threat to our citizens and to our property.

“And the Ukrainians are saying, ‘Please, we will not mind, do it over our airspace when they’re in imminent danger of crossing into Polish territory.

“To my mind, that’s self-defence but we are exploring the idea,” Mr Sikorski said.

Mr Sikorski said an unarmed Russian missile landed near his home in Bydgoszcz about 500km (311 miles) from the Belarusian border, without harming anyone, in December 2022.

Two Polish citizens had been killed by falling debris when Ukraine shot down a Russian missile near the Polish border a month earlier.

Earlier this week, Polish Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said Warsaw would consult with its Nato allies and seek their agreement before attempting to shoot down any Russian missiles.

“If there would be such a decision, it can only be an allied decision. It will never be an individual decision,” Mr Kosiniak-Kamysz told Poland’s TVN broadcaster at a Nato summit in Washington DC.

“The key opinion is the United States, who is quite sceptical in this matter, so Poland will certainly not make such a decision on its own,” he added.

Marek Swierczynski, a defence analyst for Polityka Insight, told the BBC the idea could prove perilous for Poland.

“Without robust allied support, which there isn’t, this proposal is very risky,” he said.

“From the point of view of our air defence assets and the fact we might be subject to some kind of Russian response.”

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Poland has provided Ukraine with 44 packages of weapons and ammunition, including more than 250 tanks, MiG-29 fighter jets, combat helicopters, artillery systems and portable air defence missile systems worth more than €4bn ($4.4bn; £3.4bn).

Poland plans to provide additional military assistance to Ukraine this year.

Two French international rugby players have been charged with the aggravated rape of a woman following a match in Argentina, prosecutors in the South American country say.

Hugo Auradou, 20, and Oscar Jegou, 21, are accused of raping a 39-year-old woman after France beat Argentina on Saturday.

She alleges that they raped her multiple times and beat her in a hotel room in the city of Mendoza.

The pair, who chose “not to testify” at a hearing in the city, say they had consensual sex with the woman and deny rape. They will remain in custody while authorities investigate further.

The woman alleged the attack took place at the Diplomatic Hotel, where France’s players and staff were staying as part of a tour of South America.

Her lawyer says she left a nightclub with one of the men and accompanied him to the hotel room, where she alleges that she was raped “at least six times” by one of the men and once by the other.

Ms Romano told AFP that her client suffered “fierce” violence, with injuries to her face, back, breasts, legs and ribs as well as various bite and scratch marks.

The woman was held against her will for several hours and tried to escape several times, Ms Romano said.

Her client went to hospital on Thursday after feeling ill emotionally and physically because of the incident and is receiving treatment at a health facility, she added.

On Friday a lawyer for the players said his clients were confident in their version of events.

“They are well and sure of their version, they are calm because they know they are innocent, but of course they are worried about this whole situation that they have had to live through,” German Hnatow told reporters.

On Wednesday another lawyer said the “sexual relations” had been consensual.

“There are witnesses who saw her leave [the hotel]. There are cameras that saw her leave. Apparently no injuries are seen in the footage,” Mariano Cuneo Libarona told journalists.

French Rugby Federation (FFR) president Florian Gill, who is in Argentina, also told AFP that the players had “quite a different version of events”.

“We are not judges. We are not investigators. But we think that the Argentine justice system should look at the case very quickly,” he said.

Mr Auradou and Mr Jegou have been replaced by lock Mickael Guillard and flanker Judicael Cancoriet for Saturday’s second match against Argentina in Buenos Aires.

German political figures have reacted angrily to a report that Russia had plotted to kill the head of Germany’s biggest arms company Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger.

The CNN report said US officials had told their counterparts in Berlin earlier this year and security around him was stepped up.

Germany’s interior ministry refused to comment but Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock appeared to confirm the details.

“In view of latest reports on Rheinmetall, this is what we have actually been communicating more and more clearly in recent months,” she told reporters at the Nato summit in Washington. “Russia is waging a hybrid war of aggression.”

In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejected the allegations. “It’s all presented in the style of another fake story, so such reports cannot be taken seriously.”

Rheinmetall avoided commenting on issues of “corporate security”, but Mr Papperger is now being described as the most highly protected figure in Germany’s economy. He told the Financial Times that German authorities had imposed a “great deal of security around my person”.

The company is one of the world’s biggest producers of ammunition and has become key to supplying Ukraine with arms, armoured vehicles and other military equipment.

Rheinmetall recently opened a tank repair plant in western Ukraine. Last month, it signed an agreement with Ukraine to expand co-operation in the coming years, including a joint venture to produce artillery shells.

Mr Papperger said at the time his company wanted to hand over the first Lynx infantry fighting vehicles later this year and to start producing them in Ukraine soon.

Although Chancellor Olaf Scholz avoided commenting on the reported assassination plot directly, he said it was well known that Germany was exposed to a variety of Russian threats and was paying close attention to them.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said “we are taking very seriously the significantly heightened threat of Russian aggression”.

Earlier this week, a senior Nato official told the BBC that Russia was “engaging in aggressive covert operations across Europe – involving sabotage, arson and assassination plots – aimed at weakening public support for Ukraine”.

The German foreign minister said the Baltic states had already highlighted the various methods deployed by Russia’s Vladimir Putin in his war on Ukraine. As well as sabotage, she spoke of cyberattacks and disrupting GPS signals so that Baltic flights could no longer land in neighbouring countries.

“We have seen that there have been attacks on factories, and that again underlines that, together, we as Europeans must protect ourselves as best we can and not be naive,” Ms Baerbock told reporters.

In early May, a building complex owned by the Diehl Metall firm went up in flames in south-west Berlin. Although a technical fault was blamed for the fire, sabotage has not been ruled out. Suspicious fires have also been reported in Poland and Lithuania.

Last April, Mr Papperger’s garden house was set alight at Hermannsburg in northern Germany, although there has been no evidence of a Russian link.

The fire was quickly brought under control and a rambling, anonymous confession purportedly from leftist militants appeared on activist network Indymedia.

The reported plot against such a high-profile German CEO has prompted widespread alarm.

Leading conservative figure Roderich Kiesewetter said the chancellor should come clean with the German population about how great the threat from Russia really was. German intelligence needed to be boosted to the level of neighbouring countries, he said.

“We must take it very seriously and also prepare ourselves accordingly,” he told public broadcaster ZDF.

Michael Roth, who chairs Germany’s foreign affairs committee told Bild newspaper that Vladimir Putin was waging a “war of extermination not only against Ukraine, but against its supporters and our values”.

The head of the defence committee, Marcus Faber, added his condemnation, saying if information about Russian intelligence involvement came to light, then “the expulsion of diplomats must follow and, if necessary, international arrest warrants must be issued”.

Headlines scream for Joe Biden to quit. Donors threaten to withhold campaign funds, and a growing list of Democrats call time on the president’s career.

But for all the stories dominated by the latest politician, fundraiser or left-wing actor to voice their displeasure, a longer list of Democrats are sticking by him.

At least 80 Democratic politicians have publicly backed the 81-year-old, and more are joining them as he insists he is going nowhere.

To many, his political record, his principles and his 2020 victory over Donald Trump mean more than the damage of a rambling performance in any debate or public appearance, or health fears during a new four-year term.

Mr Biden’s first solo news conference of the year on Thursday, though hampered by mistakes, sparked several more public expressions of support.

“Tonight, President Biden was knowledgeable, engaging, and capable,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons said on social media afterwards. “No one is more prepared to lead our nation forward than Joe Biden.”

Gavin Newsom, the California governor touted as a possible successor, told CBS on Friday he was “all in” for Mr Biden, adding that there was “no daylight” between them.

Representative Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania said Mr Biden “showed he knows a million times more about policy” than Trump, “the convict conman”.

Experts say these politicians have a host of reasons for their support, including Mr Biden’s record in office, his 2020 victory against Trump and the gamble of putting in a new candidate so close to the November election.

“The president has made it clear he wants to continue to run, and I think people are being very respectful of that,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist.

“And it’s also true that in our system, replacing a candidate for president this late is hard and is unprecedented, and so there’s enormous reticence about making a big change.”

He added that there was a “healthy debate” about who the nominee should be.

However, a range of groups have said that the candidate should be Mr Biden, including the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which has about 40 members, and the 60-member Congressional Black Caucus, which Mr Biden met earlier this week.

Ameshia Cross, a former Obama campaign adviser, said that the black caucus, as well as many black voters, see Mr Biden as a president committed to civil rights, unlike his rival, Trump.

“They understand what is at stake with a Donald J Trump presidency,” she said. “This is a guy who has stood against DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.”

Mr Biden has received public support from several politicians on the left, including the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who have previously criticised Mr Biden for an agenda they have said is not progressive enough.

Ms Cross said many recognise the risks a Trump presidency brings to civil and LGBTQ rights, and climate change.

“These are things that matter to the progressive left, and the president has actually worked on those things,” she said.

To date, most of Mr Biden’s support comes from politicians running for re-election in safer districts, rather than those who worry Mr Biden could harm their own election chances in tougher seats.

Mr Rosenberg said that the White House “needs to be respectful of their concerns and deal with them, I think, in a far more aggressive manner”.

Even as calls grow for Mr Biden to exit the race, the most recent poll seems to suggest that he has not lost much voter support.

The Biden campaign has touted a survey from the Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos published this week, which shows Mr Biden and Trump in a dead-heat, similar to survey results from before the debate. But the poll also found two-thirds of Americans want Mr Biden to step aside.

Mr Biden has also lost support from some donors, including Democratic fundraiser and actor George Clooney, who wrote a damning op-ed this week calling on Mr Biden to step down.

Other top donors, however, are sticking by the president.

Shekar Narasimhan, who has been organising fundraisers for Democrats for more than two decades, said there had been no change in his plans.

“Our eyes can see what’s going on, our ears can hear what’s being talked about but we are keeping our heads down to get the work done,” said Mr Narsimhan, who is the founder of the Asian American Pacific Islander Victory Fund Super-PAC.

“It’s the president’s decision to make, whether he wants to run or not, and we will go with whatever he decides,” he said. “But it’s better to end this discussion as soon as possible.”

He said his support for Mr Biden came from the belief that he would win.

“This election will be decided by no more than a total of 50,000 votes in three states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – and we have the ground game and infrastructure to win there,” he said.

Frank Islam, who sits on the National Finance Committee, said he had a fundraiser planned at his Maryland home later this month. “I am absolutely going ahead with it because I know he [Mr Biden] will win,” he said.

After months of lavish celebrations, the wedding ceremony of the son of Asia’s richest man is finally under way in the Indian city of Mumbai.

Anant Ambani, son of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, is tying the knot with Radhika Merchant, daughter of pharma tycoons Viren and Shaila Merchant.

The four-day extravaganza is the final stop in a string of elaborate parties the family has hosted since March, which have featured performances by popstars including Rihanna and Justin Bieber.

Reality TV star Kim Kardashian, and former UK PMs Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, were among the international guests. Also spotted was US wrestler and actor John Cena, who was seen hugging and congratulating relatives of the host.

Key roads in Mumbai are being sealed off for several hours a day until the festivities end on Monday.

Social media is awash with updates on the wedding, with people sharing minute-by-minute details of Bollywood stars and celebrities arriving.

But the extraordinary opulence has also led to backlash – city dwellers have complained the road closures have worsened traffic snarls caused by monsoon flooding, while others have questioned the ostentatious display of wealth at the seemingly never-ending celebrations.

• In photos: Kim Kardashian, Bieber and Rihanna at grand India wedding
• The marathon Indian wedding turning heads around the world

Mukesh Ambani, 66, is at present the world’s 10th richest man with a net worth of $115bn, according to Forbes. Reliance Industries, founded by his father in 1966, is a massive conglomerate that operates in sectors ranging from petroleum and retail, to financial services and telecoms.

Anant Ambani is the youngest of his three children, all of whom are on the board of Reliance Industries. The 29-year-old is involved in Reliance’s energy businesses and is on the board of Reliance Foundation.

The Ambanis have not revealed how much this wedding is costing them but wedding planners estimate they’ve already spent anywhere between 11bn and 13bn rupees [$132m-$156m]. It was rumoured Rihanna had been paid $7m (£5.5m) for her performance, while the figure suggested for Justin Bieber is $10m.

One unnamed executive at Reliance claimed the event was a “powerful symbol of India’s growing stature on the global stage” in a note shared with reporters.

But opposition politician Thomas Isaac said it was “obscene”.

“Legally it may be their money but such ostentatious expenditure is a sin against mother earth and (the) poor,” he posted on X.

On Friday, the groom set off from his residence in a luxurious red car covered in strings of white flowers, as joyful guests danced around it.

A convoy of cars, also decorated with flowers and carrying family members, followed him with music and cheers.

The grand procession, known as the baraat, culminated at the wedding venue – a convention centre owned by the Ambanis – where several Bollywood stars joined in another round of singing and dancing.

Reports say the bride and groom will exchange garlands to kick off the wedding. The pheras – the main wedding ritual of the couple walking around the sacred fire seven times – is set for 21:30 (1600GMT).

Guests will reportedly bless the newly-weds in a formal ceremony on Saturday – followed by a grand party where unconfirmed reports say pop stars Drake, Lana Del Ray and Adele are likely to perform.

Pictures and videos of Kim Kardashian, who is in the city with her sister Khloé Kardashian, are being widely shared online.

Reports say the sisters have brought a team of stylists, including celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton, along with a group of producers to capture every detail of their trip.

Former Indian president Ram Nath Kovind, British High Commissioner to India Lindy Cameron, and US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti are also in the city to attend the wedding.

Rajan Mehra, CEO of air charter company Club One Air, told Reuters that the family had rented three Falcon-2000 jets to ferry wedding guests to the event.

“The guests are coming from all over and each aircraft will make multiple trips across the country,” he said.

The wedding festivities began in March when the family held a three-day pre-wedding party in their home state of Gujarat.

Among the 1,200 guests to attend that celebration were Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

• World’s rich in India for tycoon son’s pre-wedding gala

The party started with a performance by Rihanna on the first night. Diljit Dosanjh, the first Punjabi singer to perform at Coachella, took the stage on the second night, while rapper Akon closed the show on the final day of celebrations.

In June, the Ambanis organised another pre-wedding celebration, this time, a luxury cruise from Italy to France. The Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry and Pitbull performed for the 800 guests, which included Bollywood stars and cricketers.

Money was also lavished on constructing 14 temples inside a sprawling complex in Jamnagar to showcase India’s cultural heritage and provide a backdrop for the wedding. As part of the celebrations, the Ambanis hosted a mass wedding for 50 underprivileged couples.

On Wednesday, the family hosted a bhandara – a community feast for underprivileged people.

As Joe Biden attempted to calm the storm engulfing his presidential re-election campaign, he hit an early snag: referring to “Vice-President Trump” during a Thursday press conference when he meant Kamala Harris.

Within minutes, Donald Trump mocked the gaffe on his social media platform, Truth Social, with an accompanying clip. “Great job, Joe!” he wrote.

It was the kind of reaction voters have come to expect from Trump, who has spent years insulting the president, 81.

And yet, for the past two weeks, as Mr Biden was fighting for his political life, Trump remained uncharacteristically quiet, letting Democrats argue among themselves.

Republican strategists claim the relative silence is down to Trump’s new-found discipline – a change from his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

“He’s played it brilliantly by not saying much about the Democratic crisis,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and former senior Senate and House leadership aide. “Why take the shovel away when they’re digging their own hole?”

Trump, 78, has not gone entirely underground. Since Mr Biden’s poor debate performance in late June, Trump has given a handful of radio interviews, appeared at rallies in Virginia and Florida, and kept up a steady drumbeat of posts on Truth Social.

“The radical left Democratic party is divided in chaos,” Trump said at a Tuesday campaign rally in Miami. “They can’t decide which of their candidates is more unfit to be president, sleepy, crooked Joe Biden or laughing Kamala.”

He also challenged the president to a golf match, claimed all US airports were dirty, called the fictional cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter “lovely”, said that visitors to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington were often “shot, mugged and raped”, claimed 45,000 people were at the Miami event when there were closer to 700, and pondered why “we don’t eat bacon anymore.”

But experts say that compared to past behaviour, the Republican has been restrained. Some have suggested Trump’s camp may even be delaying his choice for vice-president to avoid stealing attention from Mr Biden’s problems.

“If you compare this strategy and execution [in] this campaign to 2016 and 2020, it is far more strategic, far more disciplined,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican communications expert who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential bids.

With the Democratic Party fracturing over Mr Biden’s candidacy, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, said the approach taken by Trump since the debate had been effective.

“The Trump campaign has done an outstanding job of allowing the Biden campaign to self-destruct,” he said.

That self-destruction may have been what the Trump campaign was banking on from the start. The Republican plan to win over the American people has, for a while now, leaned on voters’ well-documented fears about Mr Biden’s age.

Speaking to The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita said he had planned for an “extraordinarily visual” match-up where Mr Biden was viewed as old and frail while Trump appeared strong and vigorous.

“The debate was exactly what they wanted,” Mr Madden said. “They got the perfect split-screen that was going to endure.”

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A number of recent polls put Trump consistently – if still narrowly – ahead of Mr Biden.

But there is concern within the Trump camp that anxiety over Mr Biden’s fitness has peaked too soon.

Were he to be replaced by a younger nominee, Trump would lose two main lines of attack – age and frailty. And it would be harder to directly blame a new candidate for the president’s perceived policy failures: Mr Biden scores badly with voters on the economy and the southern border crisis.

“They’re silently hoping, with their fingers crossed, that Biden is the nominee,” said strategist Ron Bonjean of Trump’s campaign. “They feel they will win the election with Biden as their opponent.”

Some of Trump’s closest surrogates have seemed to suggest they want Mr Biden to stay on. On Thursday, while Democrats parsed the impact of the president’s defiant press conference, Trump’s son Don Jr offered rare praise.

Mr Biden’s performance had been “not too bad”, he said. “He did fine enough to be able to stay in it – he doesn’t want to go.”

Last week, Trump’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, Lara Trump, suggested it would “go against the democratic process” if Mr Biden were to be removed.

Nevertheless, Mr Bonjean and other Republican experts made clear that if it was hard for Republicans to take on a new candidate, it would be harder still for Democrats to choose one.

“Yes, it will cause the Trump campaign to scramble a little bit. But their scrambling is not nearly what it will be for the Democrats,” said Douglas Heye, a Republican strategist who served as chief of staff to former House majority leader Eric Cantor.

“They have to figure out how to nominate somebody else… they have to build a brand new structure from scratch.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are combing through records of Ms Harris and other possible replacements, he said. “They’re not prepared, necessarily, for this, but they are preparing.”

Next week, at the Republican party convention in Milwaukee, Trump will reclaim centre stage, officially accepting his party’s nomination and making a prime-time speech that will set the tone for the final months of his campaign.

Mr Heye suggested that the convention – four days of party fanfare built around a candidate who revels in the spotlight – will have made it easier to sell Trump the benefits of the strategy of remaining largely quiet.

“If you’re committed to keeping your candidate under wraps for an extended period, there has to be a pay-out later on,” he said. “His leadership can say: ‘You’ve got all of next week, it’s going to be the Donald Trump show’.”

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Only one US president has been at the Nato summit in Washington this week, but the shadow of another – his predecessor – has loomed over this meeting of the world’s most powerful military alliance.

While the host Joe Biden has presided over a message of unity from the group’s 32 members, the Nato-sceptic views of his rival for power, Donald Trump, have imbued conversations here with an urgency and an anxiety.

At times the smiles from world leaders in the conference hall have felt fragile. Trump “hangs over every conversation here”, said one Eastern European diplomat who asked to remain nameless.

The Republican’s election as president in November “could change everything”, the diplomat said. The fact that Mr Biden has been trying to fend off a political crisis over his frailty has only sharpened the sense that a second Trump term could bring far-reaching changes to an alliance forged in the ashes of the World War Two and still reliant on hard US military power to deter adversaries.

So does Nato need to “Trump-proof” itself – as some describe it – and if so, is it possible?

There is a lot of evidence of efforts by Nato allies to reach out already to those in Trump’s political orbit to try to manage relationships and limit what they would see as the potential damage of a second term. But others suggest something more unmanageable.

Camille Grand, a French former official who was one of Nato’s deputy leaders throughout the Trump administration, described himself as “much more worried” than colleagues who think a second term may be “Trump [term] one on steroids” but ultimately workable for the alliance.

“He doesn’t have the same sort of guardrails, he doesn’t have the same sort of adults in the room. And he has around him a team that is trying to turn his instinct into policy,” said Mr Grand, who is now a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Four members of visiting delegations, who asked to remain anonymous, told the BBC their concern was not necessarily that a Trump administration would withdraw entirely from Nato, as he has threatened before.

• What is Nato and which countries are members?

Rather it is a fear that the US commitment to the alliance’s core principle of collective security – “all for one and one for all”, meaning any ally under attack can expect defence from the others – could wane.

Trump’s positions on Nato have veered erratically from outright hostility – portraying the alliance as a bunch of freeloading Europeans surviving off protection paid for by US taxpayers – to suggesting his outbursts are simply part of a cunning negotiating tactic to compel more of Nato’s members to meet its defence spending targets.

He has frequently tried to rally crowds of supporters with attacks on the organisation. As the summit began, he posted to his Truth Social network that when he started as president most Nato members were “delinquent” until they “paid up” due to his pressure.

By the end of Trump’s presidency, four more Nato countries had hit the alliance’s guidelines of spending at least 2% of national income on defence. So far during President Biden’s term, another 13 countries have reached the target.

That progress is frequently touted by the Biden administration and its backers, although in reality much of the increase was triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

At a February campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump said he would let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to Nato countries that did not spend enough.

That sparked outrage from some quarters in Washington, but privately his threats are said to have gone further.

At a panel event in January, European Union commissioner Thierry Breton described a meeting he had attended in 2020 between Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“Donald Trump said to Ursula: ‘You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you. And by the way, Nato is dead. And we will leave, we will quit Nato.’

“It was the president of the United States of America,” recalled Mr Breton. “He may come back.”

Trump’s campaign has been approached by the BBC with a request to confirm whether the account was accurate. Evelyn Farkas, a former senior official at the Pentagon in the Obama administration, believes there remains a real concern even over Nato’s existence under Mr Trump.

“I think there is a danger with Trump that he tries to pull us out of Nato. I won’t sugarcoat that,” said Dr Farkas, now executive director at public policy think tank the McCain Institute.

“The reality is Trump is dangerous to the alliance in that America is still the strongest economic, political, military power and Nato is stronger if Nato has the United States inside the alliance.”

But one of those familiar with the thinking in Trump’s political orbit, Dan Caldwell from the right-wing think tank Defence Priorities, believes the former president’s priority is to push European nations to invest more in their own militaries.

“I don’t think he wants to withdraw from Nato, but he has said that the United States should re-evaluate its role and the purpose of Nato going forward,” he said.

“Not only the former president but more and more national security experts on the right believe the United States has really no choice but to do less in Europe. So I think that there’s some larger forces at play, that will eventually force the next president, regardless of who it is… to substantially pull back from Nato.”

The most detailed account of policy positions that might influence a second Trump term comes from an initiative being brought up by supporters and detractors of Trump alike. Overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation, “Project 2025” is a 900-page detailed blueprint for a Republican president to usher in a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch.

The initiative says a future president should “transform Nato” so that America’s role is primarily for its nuclear deterrent, while other members should field “the great majority” of conventional forces required to deter Russia.

This is in keeping with the project’s foreign policy position, seeing the main threat to US primacy as China and therefore calling for the next president to “bring resolution to the foreign policy tensions” sparked by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Trump himself has equivocated over the war but has said he would end it in “24 hours”. He favours brokering a deal between Russia and Ukraine on terms that many Nato allies would see as surrender for Kyiv.

Trump has partially disavowed Project 2025, saying he does not know who is behind it but many of his former officials had a hand in writing it, including a former acting defense secretary.

Since Trump left office, the increase in the number of Nato members spending at least 2% of their income on defence has better insulated the alliance for the future, said Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Asked about “Trump-proofing”, he said Congress had also moved to shield America’s membership of Nato from the whims of the White House, in a law passed last year. “We clarified no president can unilaterally withdraw from Nato without a vote of approval from the Senate,” Mr Coons told the BBC.

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He also highlighted the $60bn military assistance package for Ukraine finally passed in April in a bipartisan effort following nine months of paralysis, after allies of Trump blocked passage of the bill through Congress.

“It is my hope that we will continue to be a counterweight and a counterbalance to the president should we, I think, make the tragic mistake of moving forward with a second Trump term.”

But Trump has repeatedly challenged current levels of US military provision for Ukraine, again arguing he could negotiate the war’s end with Russia.

Another possible attempt to future-proof US support for Ukraine is by moving more co-ordination for arms supply to Nato itself – taking it further out of reach of a future American president. Such a move has been pitched by Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as a way to “shield” Ukraine’s supply of aid “against the winds of political change”, officials told The Financial Times.

At the summit the alliance agreed to launch a new program in which Nato will supplement, but not replace, a 50-nation “contact group” that co-ordinates delivery of weapons. Camille Grand, the former Nato official, thinks the summit may have “raised the cost” for a future President Trump to roll back the “messaging” from Nato, but in the end, he said, Trump-proofing was impossible.

“If the US, as the biggest shareholder in the alliance, decides to be tough on the alliance, on Ukraine, there is no nothing in the [summit agreement] and previous summits that prevent it from doing that.

“But I think it’s sending an important message to Trump and his team, which is that the Europeans have turned the corner when it comes to [increased] spending.”

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský reiterated that, telling me that any future president of the US that wanted to change things on Nato had the power to do so.

The real work of “Trump-proofing” at this summit has instead felt like Nato supporters pitching the alliance to conservative Americans to try to change their view. This found its most striking moment when President Zelensky appeared at the Reagan Institute for an on-stage conversation with Fox News host Bret Baier.

Mr Zelensky repeatedly raised the memory of the late Republican President Ronald Reagan, quoting Cold War lines on deterring enemies through working with allies.

Reagan is a favoured reference for Democrats trying to expose Republican divisions and what they see as the maverick isolationism of Trump. The subtext is: Reagan would turn in his grave at Trump’s Nato-sceptic stance. But it’s a message that may fall flat with those who Mr Zelensky thinks need to hear it.

Human remains have been found in west London by police investigating the discovery of body parts in suitcases in Bristol.

Officers believe the remains found in a flat on Scotts Road, Shepherd’s Bush, on Friday and those found two days ago at the Clifton Suspension Bridge belong to the same two men.

They have named the suspect they are searching for as Yostin Andres Mosquera, a 24-year-old Colombian national, and have warned the public not to approach him.

Both victims are thought to have been known to Mr Mosquera, but have not yet been formally identified.

A 36-year-old man who was arrested in connection with the investigation on Friday in Greenwich has since been released without charge.

The Met’s Deputy Assistant Commissioner Andy Valentine said: “This is a fast-moving enquiry with detectives in London and Bristol actively pursuing a number of lines of enquiry.

“Locating Yostin Andres Mosquera, however, is the priority and I appeal to anyone with information on his whereabouts to get in touch.”

China’s foreign minister Wang Yi has hit back at Nato’s “groundless accusations” that Beijing is helping Russia in its war on Ukraine.

He has also warned the Western alliance against stirring up confrontation.

Mr Wang’s comments, made in a call with his Dutch counterpart, came hours after leaders of Nato member states gathered in Washington DC and issued a declaration that mentioned the war.

They accused China of being a “decisive enabler” of Russia through its “large-scale support for Russia’s defence industrial base”, in some of their harshest remarks yet about Beijing.

They called on China to stop “all material and political support” to Russia’s war effort such as the supply of dual-use materials, which are items that can be used for both civilian and military purposes.

Western states have previously accused Beijing of transferring drone and missile technology and satellite imagery to Moscow. The US estimates about 70% of the machine tools and 90% of the microelectronics Russia imports now come from China.

Beijing was also accused of conducting “malicious cyber and hybrid activities, including disinformation” on Nato states.

In a press conference on Thursday, US President Joe Biden said that he had discussions with other leaders about spelling out the consequences for China.

“China has to understand that if they are supplying Russia with information and capacity, working with North Korea and others to help Russia and [their] armament, that they’re not going to benefit economically as a consequence of that,” he said.

“I think you’ll see that some of our European friends are going to be curtailing their investment in China.”

Pointing out that Russia had been seeking weapons from China and North Korea, he added that Nato states were looking into a new policy to turn the West into an “industrial base” for munitions and to develop new weapons systems.

On Thursday, while speaking to the Netherlands’ new foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp, Mr Wang said “China absolutely does not accept” all these accusations and insisted that they have “always been a force for peace and force for stability”.

In comments carried by state media, he said that China’s different political system and values “should not be used as a reason for Nato to incite confrontation with China”, and called for Nato to “stay within its bounds”.

His remarks was the latest in a flurry of angry responses from Beijing.

Earlier on Thursday, a foreign ministry spokesperson said Nato was smearing China with “fabricated disinformation”, while Beijing’s mission to the EU told the alliance to “stop hyping up the so-called China threat”.

Beijing has long rebutted accusations that it has been aiding Russia in the war and insists that it remains a neutral party. It has called for an end to the conflict and proposed a peace plan, which Ukraine has rejected.

But, besides the growing accusations of military support, observers have also pointed out that Beijing’s purchases of vast amounts of oil and gas have helped prop up Russia’s economy crippled by sanctions and replenish coffers drained by war spending.

Beijing’s official rhetoric on the conflict often mirrors Moscow’s – like them, China still does not call it a war. Chinese President Xi Jinping has maintained a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with both of them famously declaring their partnership has “no limits”.

Beijing has accused the US and other Western states of pouring “fuel on the fire” by supplying lethal weapons and technology to Ukraine for its defence.

In recent weeks, several countries have gone a step further and allowed Ukraine to use their weapons to hit targets inside Russia.

During Nato’s three-day summit, which ended on Thursday, the alliance continued to underscore its commitment to Ukraine. Member states said they would support Ukraine on its “irreversible path” to future membership, adding that “Ukraine’s future in Nato”.

They also announced further integration with Ukraine’s military and support for its defence. The alliance has committed at least €40bn ($43.3bn, £33.7bn) in aid in the next year, including F-16 fighter jets and air defence support.

Two French international rugby players have been charged with the aggravated rape of a woman following a match in Argentina, prosecutors in the South American country say.

Hugo Auradou, 20, and Oscar Jegou, 21, are accused of raping a 39-year-old woman after France beat Argentina on Saturday.

She alleges that they raped her multiple times and beat her in a hotel room in the city of Mendoza.

The pair, who chose “not to testify” at a hearing in the city, say they had consensual sex with the woman and deny rape. They will remain in custody while authorities investigate further.

The woman alleged the attack took place at the Diplomatic Hotel, where France’s players and staff were staying as part of a tour of South America.

Her lawyer says she left a nightclub with one of the men and accompanied him to the hotel room, where she alleges that she was raped “at least six times” by one of the men and once by the other.

Ms Romano told AFP that her client suffered “fierce” violence, with injuries to her face, back, breasts, legs and ribs as well as various bite and scratch marks.

The woman was held against her will for several hours and tried to escape several times, Ms Romano said.

Her client went to hospital on Thursday after feeling ill emotionally and physically because of the incident and is receiving treatment at a health facility, she added.

On Friday a lawyer for the players said his clients were confident in their version of events.

“They are well and sure of their version, they are calm because they know they are innocent, but of course they are worried about this whole situation that they have had to live through,” German Hnatow told reporters.

On Wednesday another lawyer said the “sexual relations” had been consensual.

“There are witnesses who saw her leave [the hotel]. There are cameras that saw her leave. Apparently no injuries are seen in the footage,” Mariano Cuneo Libarona told journalists.

French Rugby Federation (FFR) president Florian Gill, who is in Argentina, also told AFP that the players had “quite a different version of events”.

“We are not judges. We are not investigators. But we think that the Argentine justice system should look at the case very quickly,” he said.

Mr Auradou and Mr Jegou have been replaced by lock Mickael Guillard and flanker Judicael Cancoriet for Saturday’s second match against Argentina in Buenos Aires.