The Chinese coastguard has seized a tiny sandbank in the South China Sea, state media has reported, in an escalation of a regional dispute with the Philippines.

State broadcaster CCTV released images of four officers, wearing all black and holding the Chinese flag, stood on the disputed reef of Sandy Cay in the Spratly Islands.

CCTV said China had “implemented maritime control and exercised sovereign jurisdiction” on the reef earlier in April.

Both China and the Philippines have staked claims on various islands. The Philippines said later on Sunday that it had landed on three sandbanks, releasing an image of officers holding up their national flag in a pose that mimicked the Chinese photo.

It is unclear whether one of the sandbanks the Philippines security forces landed on was also Sandy Cay.

In a statement, the National Task Force West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS) said it witnessed “the illegal presence” of a Chinese Coastguard vessel 1,000 yards (914 metres) from one of the sandbanks, as well as seven Chinese militia vessels.

“This operation reflects the unwavering dedication and commitment of the Philippine Government to uphold the country’s sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the West Philippine Sea,” the statement said.

The dispute between the two nations has been escalating, with frequent confrontations including vessels colliding and scuffles.

Sandy Cay is near a Philippine military outpost on Thitu Island, also known as Pag-asa, which Manila reportedly uses to track Chinese movements in the area.

There is no sign that China is permanently occupying the 200 sq metre island and the coastguard is reported to have left.

The White House said reports of China seizing the reef were “deeply concerning if true”.

In comments reported by the Financial Times, James Hewitt, US National Security Council spokesperson, warned that “actions like these threaten regional stability and violate international law”, adding that the White House was “consulting closely with our own partners”.

The Chinese move comes as US and Philippine forces are carrying out their annual war scenario drills – called the Balikatan exercises. China has criticised the drills as provocative.

As many as 17,000 personnel are taking part in the coming days. Missiles from the US Marine Air Defense Integrated System were fired off the coast of the northern Philippines on Sunday, the system’s second live fire test and its first deployment to the Philippines. The drills are also set to feature the US anti-ship missile system NMESIS.

The Philippines military says the drills are a rehearsal for national defence but insists they are not directed at any particular country.

“This type of training is absolutely invaluable to us,” said Third Marine Littoral Regiment Officer John Lehane.

The exercise has helped allay fears among some US allies that Donald Trump may upend the years-long military support it has provided in the region.

On a visit to Manila last month, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Washington was “doubling down” on its alliance with the country and was determined to “re-establish deterrence” against China.

There have been wrangles over territory in the South China Sea for centuries, but tension has grown in recent years.

China claims by far the largest portion of territory in an area demarcated by its so-called “nine-dash line”. The line comprises nine dashes which extends hundreds of miles south and east from its most southerly province of Hainan. Beijing has backed its expansive claims with island-building and naval patrols.

Competing claimants such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei have staked claims on islands and various zones in the sea.

• What is the South China Sea dispute?

Israel carried out an air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sunday, after ordering an evacuation of a building that it said was being used by the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah.

The attack occurred despite a ceasefire that came into force five months ago which put an end to the conflict between Israel and the military group.

Israel said that it had targeted a Hezbollah store of “precision-guided missiles” that “poses a threat to the State of Israel and its civilians”.

The Lebanese presidency condemned the strike and called on the US and France – who brokered the ceasefire in November – to press Israel to cease its attacks on the country.

The attack marks the first time in almost a month that Israel has struck Beirut’s southern suburbs – called Dahieh – where Hezbollah is based.

This will put further pressure on the ceasefire. Despite the deal, Israel has struck targets it says are linked to Hezbollah almost every day. The Israeli government has said that it will respond to any perceived threats from Hezbollah.

Western officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told the BBC that the militant group has been largely compliant with the truce, while accusing Israel of multiple violations that include air strikes and drone surveillance.

Live footage streamed by Reuters showed a giant plume of smoke billowing from the targeted building an hour after the Israeli army issued an evacuation order to residents of the Hadath neighbourhood.

Lebanon’s Civil Defence later said that no casualties had been recorded and rescue crews had extinguished the fire.

In a statement on X following the strike, the Lebanese Presidency said that President Joseph Aoun condemned the attack.

“The United States and France, as guarantors of the cessation of hostilities agreement, must assume their responsibilities and compel Israel to immediately cease its attacks,” it wrote.

“Israel’s continued undermining of stability will exacerbate tensions and expose the region to real threats to its security and stability.”

Israel’s government said that it had targeted a Hezbollah store of “precision-guided missiles”.

“The storage of missiles in this infrastructure site constitutes a blatant violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon, and poses a threat to the State of Israel and its civilians,” the Israeli military said in a statement.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that Israel “will not allow Hezbollah to grow stronger”.

“The Dahiyeh neighbourhood in Beirut will not serve as a safe haven for the terrorist organisation Hezbollah,” it added.

UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, wrote on X that the strike “generated panic and fear of renewed violence among those desperate for a return to normalcy”.

“We urge all sides to halt any actions that could further undermine the cessation of hostilities understanding,” she added.

Earlier this month an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs killed four people, including a Hezbollah official.

The morning after the heist, burglar Yunice Abbas went home to catch up on some sleep.

When he woke up, his wife was glued to the TV. The headline news of the day was that American reality TV star Kim Kardashian, 35, had been tied up and robbed at gunpoint in a luxury Paris apartment.

All her jewellery had been taken for a sum of about $10m (£7.5m) – including the engagement ring her then-husband and rapper Kanye West gifted her, which alone was worth $4m (£3m).

Yunice Abbas’ wife glared at him. “This has you written all over it,” she grumbled.

She was right. The 62-year-old had dabbled in crime his whole life, from petty offences to bank heists.

The Kardashian robbery, he later wrote in a memoir, was going to be his last job before retirement.

But a series of blunders meant the heist was doomed from the start and in early 2017 – three months after the robbery – Abbas and several of his alleged accomplices were arrested.

Ten of them will now be appearing in court in Paris in a trial set to last just under three weeks.

Out of those, five are accused of taking part in the heist, and six are accused of being accessories to the crime.

Most of them were born in the 1950s, leading French media to dub them the “grandpa robbers”.

Abbas and a 68-year-old man, Aomar Ait Khedache, have confessed; the others have not.

One has since passed away, and another, aged 81, will be excused as he is suffering from advanced dementia.

By the time the trial starts, almost nine years will have gone by since the heist.

On the night between 2 and 3 October 2016, Abbas and four accomplices allegedly staked out Kardashian’s discreet suite in Hotel de Pourtalès, in the glitzy Madeleine neighbourhood in Paris, not far from the Opéra and Place Vendome.

At around 03:00 local time, they burst into the hotel’s entrance hall, dressed as policemen and wielding a gun.

They threatened and handcuffed Abderrahmane Ouatiki, an Algerian PhD student who regularly took up shifts as night receptionist, and marched him up to Kardashian’s room.

She was resting on her bed, tired from days of attending Paris Fashion Week events, when she heard stomping up the stairs.

She called out for her sister Kourtney and her stylist Stephanie, but when they didn’t answer she panicked.

“I knew someone was there to get me,” she recalled in an interview with US interviewer David Letterman years later. “You just feel it.”

Kim dialled 911 but the number, of course, didn’t work outside of the US. As she was calling her then-security guard Pascal Duvier – who had accompanied her sister to a club – the men burst in, pushed her on the bed and started shouting.

“They kept on saying: the ring, the ring! And I was so startled that it didn’t compute for a minute,” she told Letterman.

The language barrier meant Ouatiki had to act as an interpreter.

They grabbed the ring and several other jewels, as well as 1000 euros in cash. One of the men grabbed her and pulled her towards him.

Because she was wearing a robe with nothing underneath, she thought he was going to assault her, Kim later told Letterman, wiping tears away.

But instead – using the technique of saucissonnage, or the practice of tying them up like a saucisson, a salami – the man bound her with zip ties and duct tape, and left her in the bathroom.

Then, he and the rest of the burglars fled on bikes and on foot. Kim freed herself of her restraints, and shortly after her security guard turned up.

Traumatised, Kim gave a statement to French police in the early hours of the morning and flew back to the US by dawn.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when Abbas caught a glimpse of the TV screen his wife was watching, that he understood who their victim was.

“There were breaking news alerts saying Kim Kardashian had been robbed at gunpoint – that’s how important it was,” says LA-based entertainment journalist KJ Matthews.

“We were so fascinated with her and her family and their rise to fame… When the heist happened we were so surprised. How could burglars have gotten so close to her?” Matthews says.

But while mistakes were made in terms of Kardashian’s security, serious errors were made on the burglars’ side, too.

“They didn’t take into account the progress made by police techniques, which can now find micro traces of DNA anywhere,” said Patricia Tourancheau, a crime reporter and the author of “Kim and the grandpa robbers” – a thorough account of the heist and of the lives of its perpetrators.

“When they dressed up as police they thought ‘that’s it, nobody will be able to recognise us’,” she adds.

But in 2016 Paris was still reeling from the terrorist attacks of the previous year, and there were a huge number of CCTV cameras all round the city, meaning police were able to spot the thieves and see them make off with the jewels.

Other details of this story suggest that the thieves’ planning was rather haphazard. When fleeing the scene on a bike, Abbas fell, dropping a bag of jewels.

The next day, a passer-by found a diamond-encrusted necklace and wore it all day at the office before watching the news and realising where it had come from.

Police arrested Abbas and several other people in January 2017 and later confirmed that they had been under surveillance for several weeks, after DNA traces left at the scene provided a match with Aomar Ait Khedache, also known as “Omar the Old”.

French media published a photo from the police stakeout, which shows several of the men having coffee and chatting at a Parisian café that winter, just before their arrest.

The question that remains – and which will undoubtedly be explored doing the trial – is just how the gang got wind of Kardashian’s schedule.

Court documents seen by the BBC show that both Khedache and Abbas stated that all the information they needed was posted online by Kardashian herself, whose very career was built on sharing details about her life and movements.

But how did the gang know that on the night of 2 October Kardashian would be alone in her room, without her security guard?

Court documents indicate police believe Gary Madar, whose brother Michael’s firm had provided transportation and taxis to the Kardashians for years, was an accessory to the heist and that he had fed information to the gang about Kim’s whereabouts.

Mr Madar was arrested in January 2017. His lawyer Arthur Vercken vehemently pushed back against the accusations, telling the BBC that “since the start the case was built on assumptions, theses, theories – but no proof [of Madar’s involvement] was ever found”.

He added that although the Madar brothers exchanged texts about the Kardashians during Fashion Week it was just because they were “bored” and that when the heist took place Gary was asleep.

Gary’s brother, Michael, is not a defendant.

“Five men did this. You don’t think one of them was keeping an eye on who was coming and going from her hotel?” he said, suggesting that Mr Madar had only been arrested “to prove that the French justice system works”.

The trial will also attempt to determine where the jewels ended up.

Police tracking of the gang’s phones showed that soon after the heist Omar the Old travelled from Paris to Antwerp in Belgium, where 50% of the world’s polished diamonds and 80% of rough diamonds are sold, according to the Diamond Investment Office.

Many jewels were reportedly melted or broken up and sold. Abbas got 75,000 euro (£64,000); others far less.

As for Kim Kardashian’s engagement ring, Omar the Old said the gang was too scared to sell it on as it would be too easily traceable. It has never been found.

Kim Kardashian was undoubtedly spooked by the event, which marked the start of her social media hiatus.

In an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, she tearfully recalled the night of the heist and said had been scared for her life; later she also said the robbery had made her a “less materialistic person”.

Soon after the incident her sister Khloe told The Ellen DeGeneres that, for safety reasons, the Kardashian family were making some changes to how freely they posted on social media.

“The biggest change was her security detail,” KJ Matthews told the BBC.

Patricia Tourancheau, the author of the book about the heist, said she was “fascinated” by the “clash between these old-style burglars from the Parisian banlieue and this global social media star”.

“They fled on bikes and she flies around on private jets,” she laughed.

“These are a group of elderly down-and-out thieves, they’re always broke, they’re forever involved in convoluted plans… and they’re facing a huge celebrity and they don’t even know who she is.”

The gang was not “elite” as it was suggested in the early days, she added.

“This isn’t the creme de la creme of French banditry. They’re a bit of a bunch of losers, really. They’re the same kind of people who in the 60s and 70s would burglar banks or post offices and who then rebranded to drug trafficking and then moved on to jewels because it was easier,” she said.

Around mid-May, Kim will face the suspects for the first time in years when she takes the stand as a witness.

Cameras are not allowed in French courts but her arrival to the tribunal on Ile de la Cité alone will inevitably spark the same media frenzy that has accompanied her for over a decade.

In his memoir, Abbas expressed the hope the victim’s status and the global resonance of the case would not influence judges unduly.

However, he also said that on the last day of the trial he would bring a duffle bag with his belongings, ready to be sent to jail.

“The problem with the past,” he wrote, “is that it sticks with you as long as you live”.

From an office perched on the scalloped edge of the continent, Victoria Bradley jokes that she has the most beautiful doctor’s practice in Australia.

Outside her window, farmland rolls into rocky coastline, hemming a glasslike bay striped with turquoise and populated by showboating dolphins.

Home to about 3,000 people, a few shops, two roundabouts and a tiny hospital, Streaky Bay is an idyllic beach town.

For Dr Bradley, though, it is anything but. The area’s sole, permanent doctor, she spent years essentially on call 24/7.

Running the hospital and the general practitioner (GP) clinic, life was a never-ending game of catch up. She’d do rounds at the wards before, after and in between regular appointments. Even on good days, lunch breaks were often a pipe dream. On bad days, a hospital emergency would blow up her already punishing schedule.

Burnt out, two years ago she quit – and the thread holding together the remnants of the town’s healthcare system snapped.

Streaky Bay is at the forefront of a national crisis: inadequate government funding is exacerbating a shortage of critical healthcare workers like Dr Bradley; wait times are ballooning; doctors are beginning to write their own rules on fees, and costs to patients are skyrocketing.

A once-revered universal healthcare system is crumbling at every level, sometimes barely getting by on the sheer willpower of doctors and local communities.

As a result, more and more Australians, regardless of where they live, are delaying or going without the care they need.

Health has become a defining issue for voters ahead of the nation’s election on 3 May, with both of Australia’s major parties promising billions of dollars in additional funding.

But experts say the solutions being offered up are band-aid fixes, while what is needed are sweeping changes to the way the system is funded – reform for which there has so far been a lack of political will.

Australians tell the BBC the country is at a crossroads, and needs to decide if universal healthcare is worth saving.

Healthcare was the last thing on Renee Elliott’s mind when she moved to Streaky Bay – until the 40-year-old found a cancerous lump in her breast in 2019, and another one four years later.

Seeing a local GP was the least of her problems. With the expertise and treatment she needed only available in Adelaide, about 500km away, Mrs Elliott has spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars accessing life-saving care, all while raising three boys and running a business.

Though she has since clawed back a chunk of the cost through government schemes, it made an already harrowing time that much more draining: financially, emotionally and physically.

“You’re trying to get better… but having to juggle all that as well. It was very tricky.”

When Australia’s modern health system was born four decades ago – underpinned by a public insurance scheme called Medicare – it was supposed to guarantee affordable and accessible high-quality care to people like Mrs Elliott as “a basic right”.

Health funding here is complex and shared between states and federal governments. But the scheme essentially meant Australians could present their bright green Medicare member card at a doctor’s office or hospital, and Canberra would be sent a bill. It paid through rebates funded by taxes.

Patients would either receive “bulk billed” – completely free – care, mostly through the emerging public system, or heavily subsidised treatment through a private healthcare sector offering more benefits and choice to those who wanted them.

Medicare became a national treasure almost instantly. It was hoped this set up would combine the best parts of the UK’s National Health Service and the best of the United States’ system.

Fast forward 40 years and many in the industry say we’re on track to end up with the worst of both.

There is no denying that healthcare in Australia is still miles ahead of much of the world, particularly when it comes to emergency care.

But the core of the crisis and key to this election is GP services, or primary care, largely offered by private clinics. There has historically been little need for public ones, with most GPs choosing to accept Medicare rebates as full payment.

That is increasingly uncommon though, with doctors saying those allowances haven’t kept up with the true cost of delivering care. At the same time, staff shortages, which persist despite efforts to recruit from overseas, create a scarcity that only drives up prices further.

According to government data, about 30% of patients must now pay a “gap fee” for a regular doctor’s appointment – on average A$40 (£19.25; $25.55) out of pocket.

But experts suspect the true figure is higher: it’s skewed by seniors and children, who tend to visit doctors more often and still enjoy mostly bulk-billed appointments. Plus there’s a growing cohort of patients not captured by statistics, who simply don’t go to the doctor because of escalating fees.

Brisbane electrician Callum Bailey is one of them.

“Mum or my partner will pester and pester and pester… [but] I’m such a big ‘I’ll just suffer in silence’ person because it’s very expensive.”

And every dollar counts right now, the 25-year-old says: “At my age, I probably should be in my prime looking for housing… [but] even grocery shopping is nuts.

“[I] just can’t keep up.”

This is a tale James Gillespie kept hearing.

So his startup Cleanbill began asking the question: if the average Australian adult walked into a GP clinic, could they get a free, standard appointment?

This year, they called almost all of the nation’s estimated 7,000 GP clinics – only a fifth of them would bulk bill a new adult patient. In the entire state of Tasmania, for example, they couldn’t find a single one.

The results resonate with many Australians, he says: “It really brought it home to them that, ‘Okay, it’s not just us. This is happening nationwide’.”

And that’s just primary care.

Public specialists are so rare and so overwhelmed – with wait times often far beyond safe levels – that most patients are funnelled toward exorbitantly expensive private care. The same goes for a lot of non-emergency hospital treatments or dental work.

There are currently no caps on how much private specialists, dentists or hospitals can charge and neither private health insurance nor slim Medicare rebates reliably offer substantial relief.

The BBC spoke to people across the country who say the increasing cost of healthcare had left them relying on charities for food, avoiding dental care for almost a decade, or emptying their retirement savings to fund treatment.

Others are borrowing from their parents, taking out pay-day loans to buy medication, remortgaging their houses, or selling their possessions.

Kimberley Grima regularly lies awake at night, calculating which of her three children – who, like her, all have chronic illnesses – can see their specialists. Her own overdue health checks and tests are barely an afterthought.

“They’re decisions that you really don’t want to have to make,” the Aboriginal woman from New South Wales tells the BBC.

“But when push comes to shove and you haven’t got the money… you’ve got no other option. It’s heart-breaking.”

Another woman tells the BBC that had she been able to afford timely appointments, her multiple sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disease, would have been identified, and slowed, quicker.

“I was so disabled by the time I got a diagnosis,” she says.

The people missing out tend to be the ones who need it the most, experts say.

“We have much more care in healthier, wealthier parts of Australia than in poorer, sicker parts of Australia,” Peter Breadon, from the Grattan Institute think tank says.

All of this creates a vicious cycle which feeds even more pressure back into an overwhelmed system, while entrenching disadvantage and fuelling distrust.

Every single one of those issues is more acute in the regions.

Streaky Bay has long farewelled the concept of affordable healthcare, fighting instead to preserve access to any at all.

It’s why Dr Bradley lasted only three months after quitting before “guilt” drove her back to the practice.

“There’s a connection that goes beyond just being the GP… You are part of the community.

“I felt that I’d let [them] down. Which was why I couldn’t just let go.”

She came back to a far more sustainable three-day week in the GP clinic, with Streaky Bay forced to wage a bidding war with other desperate regions for pricey, fly-in-fly-out doctors to fill in the gaps.

It’s yet another line on the tab for a town which has already invested so much of its own money into propping up a healthcare system supposed to be funded by state and private investment.

“We don’t want a gold service, but what we want is an equitable service,” says Penny Williams, who helps run the community body which owns the GP practice.

When the clinic was on the verge of closure, the town desperately rallied to buy it. When it was struggling again, the local council diverted funding from other areas to top up its coffers. And even still most standard patients – unless they are seniors or children – fork out about A$50 per appointment.

It means locals are paying for their care three times over, Ms Williams says: through their Medicare taxes, council rates, and then out-of-pocket gap fees.

“No-one would say this is the Australia that we want, surely,” Elizabeth Deveny, from the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, tells the BBC.

Like many wealthy countries, the nation is struggling to cope with a growing population which is, on average, getting older and sicker.

There’s a small but increasing cohort which says it is time to let go of the notion of universal healthcare, as we’ve known it.

Many doctors, a handful of economists, and some conservative politicians have sought to redefine Medicare as a “safety net” for the nation’s most vulnerable rather than as a scheme for all.

Health economist Yuting Zhang argues free healthcare and universal healthcare are different things.

The taxes the government collects for Medicare are already nowhere near enough to support the system, she says, and the country either needs to have some tough conversations about how it will find additional funds, or accept reasonable fees for those who can afford them.

“There’s always a trade-off… You have limited resources, you have to think about how to use them effectively and efficiently.”

The original promise of Medicare has been “undermined by decades of neglect”, the Australian Medical Association’s Danielle McMullen says, and most Australians now accept they need to contribute to their own care.

She says freezes to Medicare rebates – which were overseen by both parties between 2013 and 2017 and meant the payments didn’t even keep up with inflation – were the last straw. Since then, many doctors have been dipping into their own pockets to help those in need.

Both the Labor Party and the Liberal-National coalition accept there is a crisis, but blame each other for it.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton says his government will invest A$9bn in health, including funds for extra subsidised mental health appointments and for regional universities training key workers.

“Health has become another victim of Labor’s cost of living crisis… we know it has literally never been harder or more expensive to see a GP than it is right now,” health spokesperson Anne Ruston told the BBC in a statement.

On the other side, Albanese – whipping out his Medicare card almost daily – has sought to remind voters that Labor created the beloved system, while pointing out the Coalition’s previously mixed support of the universal scheme and the spending cuts Dutton proposed as Health Minister a decade ago.

“At this election, this little card here, your Medicare card, is what is at stake,” Albanese has said.

His government has started fixing things already, he argues, and has pledged an extra A$8.5bn for training more GPs, building additional public clinics, and subsidising more medicines.

But the headline of their rescue packages is an increase to Medicare rebates and bigger bonuses for doctors who bulk bill.

Proposed by Labor, then matched by the Coalition, the changes will make it possible for 9 out of 10 Australians to see a GP for free, the parties claim.

One Tasmanian doctor tells the BBC it is just a “good election sound bite”. He and many other clinicians say the extra money is still not enough, particularly for the longer consults more and more patients are seeking for complex issues.

Labor has little patience for those criticisms, citing research which they claim shows their proposal will leave the bulk of doctors better off and accusing them of wanting investment “without strings attached”.

But many of the patients the BBC spoke to are sceptical either parties’ proposals will make a huge difference.

There’s far more they need to be doing, they say, rattling off a wish list: more work on training and retaining rural doctors; effective regulation of private fees and more investment in public specialist clinics; universal bulk billing of children for all medical and dental expenses; more funding for allied health and prevention.

Experts like Mr Breadon say, above all else, the way Medicare pays clinicians needs to be overhauled to keep healthcare access genuinely universal.

That is, the government needs to stop paying doctors a set amount per appointment, and give them a budget based on how large and sick the populations they serve are – that is something several recent reviews have said.

And the longer governments wait to invest in these reforms, the more they’re going to cost.

“The stars may be aligning now… It is time for these changes, and delaying them would be really dangerous,” Mr Breadon says.

In Streaky Bay though, locals like Ms Williams wonder if it’s too late. Things are already dangerous here.

“Maybe that’s the cynic in me,” she says, shaking her head.

“The definition of universal is everyone gets the same, but we know that’s not true already.”

In Iran, mourning is turning to anger after a huge blast at its largest commercial port killed at least 40 people and injured more than 1,000.

The explosion happened on Saturday morning at Shahid Rajaee port. Many people rushed to hospitals up and down the country to give blood.

A day later, fires are still blazing as a thick black cloud of toxic chemicals hangs over the surrounding area.

People in nearby towns and cities have been told by the health ministry to stay indoors “until further notice” and wear more protective clothes.

In the nearby southern city of Bandar Abbas, home to the Iranian Navy’s main base, all schools and offices were ordered to shut on Sunday to allow authorities to focus on the emergency effort, state TV said.

A local festival not far from Shahid Rajee Port that was supposed to be a celebration spontaneously turned into a solemn occasion for remembering the dead and praying for the injured.

Authorities declared a day of national mourning on Monday, with an additional two days of mourning in Hormozgan province.

It is a reminder that while Iran has been rocked physically by the blast – residents up to 50km (31 miles) away reported feeling the effects – the country is now being rocked by a growing blame game too.

Ambrey Intelligence, a private maritime risk consultancy, said it believed that intense fires that could be seen spreading between containers before the explosion were a result of “improper handling of a shipment of solid fuel intended for use in Iranian ballistic missiles”.

The firm said it believed the affected containers had contained solid fuel destined for ballistic missiles, and was aware that an Iran-flagged ship “discharged a shipment of sodium perchlorate rocket fuel at the port in March 2025”.

The New York Times quoted a person with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, speaking on condition of anonymity, as saying that what exploded was sodium perchlorate – a major ingredient in solid fuel for missiles.

Some Iranians are asking whether they should believe speculation on social media which said Iran’s military and Revolutionary Guard were storing rocket fuel that they had recently imported from China at the port – a claim which has been denied by an army spokesman.

Many in Iran are blaming the authorities for incompetence and worse, asking: How could so much inflammable material apparently be left on the port without due care?

That is a question that the Iranian regime will need to address. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian visited the scene of the explosion on Sunday, saying: “We have come to see first-hand if there is anything or any issue that the government can follow up on.”

Pezeshkian had previously ordered an investigation into the cause of the blast, sending the interior minister to the region to lead it.

Defence ministry spokesman Reza Talaei-Nik later told state TV that “there has been no imported or exported cargo for military fuel or military use in the area”.

The port’s customs office said in a statement carried by state television that the explosion probably resulted from a fire that broke out at the hazardous and chemical materials’ storage depot.

There is also the question of whether Iran’s economy may be affected, given the port handles nearly 80% of the country’s imports.

On Saturday, authorities were warning of possible food shortages in the near term with the port out of action for some time.

A day later, they were playing that down, saying that the explosion only affected a part of the port and that the rest is functioning normally.

An image from Iran’s Tasnim news agency on Sunday showed a helicopter flying through a sky blackened by smoke to drop water on the disaster-struck area, AFP reported.

Others showed firefighters working among toppled and blackened cargo containers, and carrying out the body of a victim. The authorities have closed off roads leading to the site.

The Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered that multiple specialist firefighting aircraft be sent to Iran to help deal with the aftermath of the disaster.

Beijing’s foreign ministry said in a statement to AFP on Sunday that three Chinese victims were in a “stable” condition and that it had received no further reports of casualties.

Among the condolences being sent were from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Turkey, the United Nations and Russia.

The explosion ripped through the port as Iranian and US delegations were meeting via mediators in Oman for high-level talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme, with both sides reporting progress.

Iran has said it is open to curbs on its nuclear programme in return for sanctions easing but has insisted it will not stop enriching uranium. It insists its nuclear programme is for civilian use.

Images of Pope Francis’s tomb at the Santa Maria Maggiore church in Rome have been released.

A single white rose was pictured lying on the stone tomb that bears the name he was known by during his pontificate, below a crucifix illuminated by a single spotlight.

The late pope was laid to rest at the church – one of four major basilicas in the Italian capital, and one he would regularly visit during his time as cardinal and pontiff – in a private ceremony following his public funeral in the Vatican on Saturday.

Thousands of mourners have been filing past the tomb since the church opened to the public on Sunday morning to pay their respects to Pope Francis, who died aged 88 on Monday.

• Why Pope Francis hasn’t been buried in the Vatican
• Who was at the funeral and where did they sit?

Among them was Rosario Correale, an Italian, who said it was “very emotional” seeing the tomb. “He really left a mark on us,” he told the Associated Press.

Polish pilgrim Maria Brzezinska felt the resting place befit the man. “I feel like it’s exactly in the way of the Pope. He was simple, and so is his place now,” she told the news agency Reuters after visiting.

Francis was particularly devoted to the Virgin Mary, and Santa Maria Maggiore was the first church to be dedicated to her when it was built in the 4th Century.

The basilica sits near the Colosseum, a stone’s throw from the city’s endlessly bustling and chaotic central Termini station – well beyond the limits of the Vatican, where popes are traditionally entombed.

But it was one the South American pontiff had a long-held affinity for.

Its senior priest previously told an Italian newspaper that Pope Francis had said he wished to be laid to rest there in 2022, citing inspiration from the Virgin Mary.

“I thought it was amazing that he wanted to be buried here in this basilica,” Amaya Morris, another pilgrim, told AP.

“Out of all of the [churches], he chose this one. So I thought that was really amazing. It’s really humbling to be able to be here.”

Francis’s funeral was attended by heads of state, heads of government and monarchs from around the world – as well as hundreds of thousands of Catholics who lined the streets leading to the Vatican to pay their respects.

Hymns played out on giant speakers, occasionally drowned out by the sound of helicopters flying overhead, before 91-year-old Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re gave a homily on the pope’s legacy.

The cardinal emphasised that Pope Francis had repeatedly urged the world to “build bridges, not walls”.

The funeral was also the venue for a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, which the latter said afterwards had the “potential to become historic”.

Trump later questioned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to end the now three-year war in Ukraine, a conflict which Pope Francis had regularly called for peace during his papacy.

Following the public funeral, Pope Francis’s coffin was carried through Rome in a slow procession.

Authorities said 140,000 people had lined the streets, clapping and waving as the hearse – a repurposed white popemobile – crossed the Tiber river and drove past some of Rome’s most recognisable sights: the Colosseum, the Forum and the Altare della Patria national monument on Piazza Venezia.

After a period of mourning, attention will soon turn to the selection of the next pope.

A date has not yet been set but it is thought it could start as early as 5 or 6 May, with 135 cardinals set to attend, making it the largest conclave in modern history.

Qatar’s prime minister says there has been “a bit of progress” in efforts to broker a new ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, but that there was still no “answer for the ultimate question: how to end this war”.

It follows his meeting with the head of Israel’s spy agency on Thursday.

Speaking in Doha, Turkey’s foreign minister Hakan Fidan said that Hamas appeared to be more receptive to negotiating a lasting solution to the war.

After rejecting Israel’s latest ceasefire offer more than a week ago, Hamas now seems set on an agreement that would see the release of all the remaining hostages as part of a deal to end hostilities for at least five years.

Hamas has suggested it could consider disarming as part of such a tradeoff, but only if Israel were to pull all its forces out of Gaza. The Israeli government appears to have no intention of doing this.

Israel imposed a complete blockade on Gaza in early March and resumed air and ground attacks later in the month.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says 2,151 Palestinians have been killed since then, including 51 in the 24 hours into Sunday morning.

Fighting between Hamas and Israel has also intensified, with the Israeli military saying an Israeli soldier and a police officer were killed on Friday.

On Thursday, Israel’s Mossad spy agency chief David Barnea met with Qatari PM Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani in Doha.

Sheik Mohammed said that there had been “a bit of progress compared to other meetings, yet we need to find an answer for the ultimate question: how to end this war”.

Last week, Hamas rejected an Israeli proposal for a 45-day ceasefire that called for the group’s complete disarmament and the release of 10 of the 59 remaining hostages.

Sheikh Mohammed said that they were “trying to find a breakthrough” but added that Israel and Hamas remained at odds on what a ceasefire would entail.

He said Hamas has agreed to hand over all the remaining hostages in an exchange to an end to the war, but that Israel wants the hostages released without offering a vision on an end to the conflict.

“When you don’t have a common objective, a common goal, between the parties, I believe the opportunities [to end the war] become very thin,” Sheik Mohammed said at a press conference in Doha.

A Hamas delegation held talks with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Saturday which reportedly focused on a ceasefire agreement and addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

A Palestinian official familiar with negotiations told the BBC that Hamas has signalled its readiness to hand over governance of Gaza to any Palestinian entity agreed upon “at the national and regional level”. The official said this could be the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) or a newly formed administrative body.

The US has also encouraged the idea of a reformed PA governing Gaza after the war.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has ruled out any role for the PA in Gaza and has said he opposes the formation of a Palestinian state.

On Saturday, PA President Mahmoud Abbas named close confidant Hussein al-Sheikh as his deputy in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the PLO said.

Abbas, 89, has led the PLO and PA since 2004 but has previously resisted internal reforms, including naming a successor.

The PA’s leadership has regularly insisted it is ready to take over running post-war Gaza. But it has been criticised by Palestinians for not speaking out enough or taking effective action.

In a fiery speech during a meeting of the Palestinian Central Council in Ramallah on Wednesday, Abbas lashed out at Hamas, calling the group “sons of dogs” and demanding they release the hostages, disarm and hand over control of Gaza.

Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah organisation, which dominates the PA, have been bitterly divided for decades, with their rift ensuring that no unified Palestinian leadership in both the West Bank and Gaza has been able to emerge.

On Sunday, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza announced that the deal toll from the war had risen to at least 52,243 people, after taking account of hundreds of individuals listed as missing whose deaths have now been confirmed.

“An additional 697 martyrs have been added to the cumulative statistics after their data was completed and verified by the committee monitoring missing persons,” the health ministry said.

The ministry had earlier denied that it had manipulated death toll figures after media reports highlighted anomalies between the August and October 2024 and March 2025 lists of fatalities.

Last week the UN World Food Programme has warned that all of its food stocks in Gaza have run out as a result of the Israeli blockade.

The UN says Israel is obliged under international law to ensure supplies for the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza. Israel says it is complying with international law and there is no aid shortage.

During the press conference in Doha, Sheikh Mohammed condemned what he described as Israel’s “starvation” policy.

The war began on 7 October 2023 when Hamas carried out a cross-border attack, killing around 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s military campaign in response has killed tens of thousands in Gaza and turned most of the strip to rubble.

Drag star Bianca Castro-Arabejo, who performed as Jiggly Caliente, has died aged 44, her family has said.

The performer, who found fame on the fourth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, had part of her leg amputated on Thursday after suffering a “severe infection”.

Caliente had served as a judge on the show’s Philippines spin-off, and also appeared in the hit US TV series Pose.

Her family wrote in a statement on Instagram: “It is with profound sorrow that we announce the passing of Bianca Castro-Arabejo, known to the world and cherished by many as Jiggly Caliente.”

They said she died in the early hours of Sunday morning “surrounded by her loving family and close friends”.

Caliente’s family paid tribute to her “infectious energy, fierce wit, and unwavering authenticity”, adding that she left a legacy of “love, courage and light”.

“She touched countless lives through her artistry, activism, and the genuine connection she fostered with fans around the world,” they said.

“Though her physical presence is gone, the joy she shared and the space she helped create for so many will remain forever.”

Fellow drag queens have left tributes to the Filipino-American performer online.

Laganja Estranja, who appeared on the sixth season of the US reality TV programme, said Caliente was a “kind, caring soul”.

RuPaul’s Drag Race UK star Baga Chipz described Caliente as “one of the kindest, sweetest souls I’ve ever met”.

Cheryl The Queen, who also competed in the UK version of the show, wrote: “We will love you forever and always Jiggly.”

Tia Kofi, who won Drag Race UK versus the World, said Caliente was “someone I came to for advice, I looked up to, who gave me support when it was most needed and, I cannot lie, was always there for a good gossip!”

Drag Race judge Michelle Visage in her tribute said “the laughter was endless, our talks were special, your energy was contagious”.

“You were and remain so very loved. This world has lost an angel and we want you to soar high,” she added.

Born in the Philippines in 1980, Caliente moved to the Queens neighbourhood of New York City with her family when she was a child.

She quickly became a fan favourite on RuPaul’s Drag Race for her sense of humour and memorable interactions with other queens, when she appeared on the show in 2012.

In one particularly memorable moment, while arguing with Caliente, fellow contestant Lashauwn Beyond coined the catchphrase “this is not RuPaul’s Best Friend Race”, which has been frequently repeated in later series.

Caliente went on to embark on an acting career, appearing in episodes of sitcoms Broad City and Search Party.

She played the role of Veronica in the TV drama Pose, which chronicled New York’s LGBT ball culture in the 1980s and 90s.

Caliente, who publicly came out as transgender in 2016, later returned to the Drag Race universe, competing in the sixth series of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars in 2021 and judging the spin-off show Drag Race Philippines for three series.

Prior to her death, the drag performer’s family had said on Thursday that she had suffered a “serious health setback” which led to the loss of “most of her right leg”.

Greenland’s new prime minister has said the island is not a “piece of property that can be bought”, in response to Donald Trump’s repeated calls for the US to take control of the autonomous Danish territory.

On a visit to Copenhagen on Sunday, Jens-Frederik Nielsen said Greenland and Denmark must stand together in the face of “disrespectful” US rhetoric.

He was speaking alongside Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in what has been viewed as another show of unity between the two leaders.

In a further symbolic gesture, Nielsen is due to return to Greenland on Monday with Denmark’s King Frederik, who will begin his four-day royal visit to the island.

“We will never, ever be a piece of property that can be bought by anyone, and that’s the message I think is most important to understand,” said Nielsen, who became Greenland’s prime minister this April.

He added that Greenland and Denmark needed to move closer together in light of the new foreign policy situation.

Trump has caused outrage in both Denmark and Greenland for repeatedly saying he wants to bring the Arctic island under US control.

During a speech to Congress in March, Trump said that control of Greenland was essential “for national security and international security”.

He has floated the idea of buying the island and has previously refused to rule out using military force, though US Vice-President JD Vance said last month: “We do not think that military force is ever going to be necessary.”

Despite their criticism of Trump’s words, both Nielsen and Frederiksen on Sunday said they would be willing to meet the US president for talks.

Nielsen also reiterated that Greenland was prepared to deepen ties with the US, saying: “We are ready for a strong partnership and more development, but we want respect.”

Nielsen’s visit to Denmark follows Frederiksen’s own trip to Greenland earlier this month.

“You can’t annex other countries,” was her message for the US president at the time.

It followed Vance’s whirlwind visit to the territory, widely criticised in both Denmark and Greenland, in which he reiterated Trump’s ambitions and claimed Copenhagen had “not done a good job” for Greenlanders.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, has been controlled by Denmark for about 300 years. The island governs its own domestic affairs, but foreign and defence policy decisions are made in Copenhagen.

The US has long had a security interest in the island. It has had a military base there since World War Two, and Trump may also have an interest in the rare earth minerals that could be mined.

Polls show that the vast majority of Greenlanders want to become independent from Denmark but do not wish to become part of the US.

Formed in March, Greenland’s new coalition government is led by Nielsen’s centre-right Democrats party, which favours a gradual approach to independence.

A senior figure from South Africa’s ruling ANC party has defended his country’s sovereignty amid growing tensions with the US over race relations and a new land law.

“We are a free country, we’re a sovereign country. We’re not a province of the United States and that sovereignty will be defended,” ANC National Chair Gwede Mantashe said on Sunday.

US President Donald Trump has hit out at South Africa’s new expropriation law, signing an executive order in February stating it was a means to which the government could “seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.

President Cyril Ramaphosa says the law ensures “public access to land in an equitable and just manner”.

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The expropriation law does allow the government to seize land without compensation, but only in certain circumstances.

Trump’s February order also opened the door for Afrikaners to be admitted to the US as refugees, describing them as “victims of unjust racial discrimination”.

Standing in for Ramaphosa in a speech at South Africa’s Freedom Day celebration in the eastern province of Mpumalanga, Mantashe criticised South African citizens who have called on Trump to “punish” the country.

“Now they are told to go there and be refugees, they are refusing. They must go,” he said.

Tensions have also played out publicly on Elon Musk’s X page, where he has described his country’s ownership laws as “racist”.

Currently white South Africans, who are a minority of the population, own most of the country’s private land and wealth, despite the racist system of apartheid ending decades ago.

In an effort to quell tensions which have rumbled on for months, South Africa appointed a special envoy to Washington earlier this month.

Mcebisi Jonas will be tasked with advancing the country’s “diplomatic, trade and bilateral priorities,” Ramaphosa said.

The move comes after Washington expelled South Africa’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, after he accused Trump of “dog whistle” politics.

Last month, officials from the all-white separatist town of Orania, founded by Afrikaners after the end of apartheid, visited the US as part of efforts to gain recognition as an autonomous state.

In his address on Sunday, Mantashe suggested he would seek to integrate the community in Orania.

“Black people must go and build there, and we mix them,” he said.

He added that “hatred can never survive peace. It is peace that builds a nation”.

When Donald Trump made a historic return to power earlier this year, it was with the help of voters who represented a diverse coalition of backgrounds – truck drivers, veterans, business owners and more.

They represented a wide range of perspectives that helped explain Trump’s enduring appeal. But 100 days after he took office, how do his staunchest supporters feel now?

The BBC has returned to five of them. Here’s what they had to say about the promises he kept, the pledges he has yet to address, and what they want next.

Luiz Oliveira says he “can’t keep up” with the rapid policy changes Trump has made in his first 100 days.

On immigration, he has appreciated the flurry of new border restrictions and the emphasis on deportations, including sending men to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. Encounters between migrants and US border agents at the US-Mexico are now at a four-year low.

The issue is important to Luiz, a Brazilian who came to the US legally in the 1980s and now lives in Nevada. Echoing Trump, he describes the influx of migrants in recent years as an “invasion”.

Luiz, 65, says Trump is telling undocumented immigrants: “This is my house, my yard, and you’re not going to stay here.”

In other areas, however, he, is nervous about Trump’s approach.

The coffee shop owner supports Trump’s efforts to make other countries pay “their fair share” through tariffs. But he’s apprehensive about the short-term economic effects as well as how long it could take for America to see the benefits.

“It’s going to be painful [and] I don’t think it’s going to be as fast as he says.

“I’m a supporter, but at the end of the day, if this doesn’t work, I’ll say it’s a mistake – he did things too fast, scared the markets, scared the economy.”

Amanda Sue Mathis backed Trump in 2024 because she felt he was the best candidate to address America’s most pressing problems – 100 days in, she says he’s made strong progress.

“There were a lot of people who cared about the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, but I think it’s time we look at our country and get things in order before we go fix other countries’ problems,” the 34-year-old Navy veteran says.

She wants a “merit-based society” and praises Trump’s rollback of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies which had tried to boost minority representation and tackle discrimination. Critics say those policies are themselves discriminatory – and Amanda Sue believes they went too far in recent years.

She also welcomes Trump’s executive orders restricting gender care for Americans under the age of 19 and banning transgender women from female sports.

Broadly, she thinks the president is “kicking butt” and his first 100 days have made her “happier with [her] vote”.

But Amanda Sue is prepared to have her mind changed too.

“I’m not one of those people who is always for Trump,” she says. “If he messes up, I’ll be the first one to tell you.”

Trump’s promise to impose tariffs and bring manufacturing jobs back to America was a key reason why Ben Maurer, a 39-year-old freight truck driver from Pennsylvania, voted for the president.

“A lot of people thought he was bluffing on more than a few things,” he says.

So Ben’s delighted Trump hit the gas immediately, imposing tariffs on countries that range from allies like Canada and Mexico to adversaries like China.

It has not been a smooth ride, however. In a tumultuous series of announcements, the administration has raised, lowered, delayed and retracted tariffs in response to ongoing trade negotiations and stock market reaction.

Currently, the US has imposed a 10% tariffs on all imports – and China has been hit with a 145% tax on goods it exports to America.

Despite economists’ concerns about higher prices, Ben believes the businesses he delivers to will benefit in the long run.

“Trump has earned back the respect [for the US],” he says of the president’s tariff policies. “We are still the force to be reckoned with.”

Overall, he feels Trump has been more productive at the start of his second term. The president had time to prepare, he says, and it shows.

June Carey’s opinion of Donald Trump has not changed, but the first few months of Trump’s second term are not what she anticipated either.

“He’s a bit more aggressive and a little bit more erratic than I expected,” the California artist says.

But June, 70, doesn’t see the surprises as negative. She is “blown away” by the “waste” the so-called Department of Government Efficiency – led by billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk – says it has found.

Critics say his claims about savings appear to be inflated and he has faced a backlash for blunt cuts at government departments that were later reversed, including firings of key federal workers.

June says she’s uncertain about Musk himself.

“Musk is a character I don’t understand,” June says. “My feeling is that if Trump has trusted him as much as he has, than he must be a pretty good guy with the right ideas and the right goals.”

She previously told the BBC she was concerned about welfare spending and hoped Trump would push Americans to be more self-sufficient. While she is happy with the cuts so far, she hopes they leave alone social security – the monthly government payments that she and 67 million retired or disabled Americans live off.

Democrats warn those are at risk in future, but June asks: “Why would they cut [social security] when they’ve cut so many things that have saved them millions and millions of dollars?”

Jeremy Stevens has faithfully stood by Trump for years.

“[Trump is] very aggressively getting things he promised on the campaign trail done,” he says.

At his automotive repair and used car shop in Maine, Jeremy sees some customers who feel differently about Trump’s economic efforts. But the 45-year-old believes their nerves around tariffs in particular come from “a lack of understanding”.

The tariffs are part of a Trump administration vision that Jeremy believes will pay off in the long run – if critics can hold on until then.

“There definitely is a perception out there about the impact of these policies that is short-sighted,” he says.

Trump’s back-and-forth shift on tariff policies have come at a price, economists say. Markets around the world were sent spiralling. The International Monetary Fund has cut its global growth forecast because of the uncertainty, with the US hardest hit. It warned there is a 40% chance of a recession in the US.

But Jeremy is convinced time will prove Trump right.

“It’s a temporary pain,” he says. “This too shall pass.”

Democrats have struggled to land a unified message in President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, with fractures both in Congress and among supporters. What comes next for a party in a difficult spot?

The rural, agricultural town of Bakersfield, California, is an odd stop for a pair of East Coast progressive politicians.

After all, Trump won the surrounding county by 20 points, and the dusty fields and endless orchards feel a world away from the party’s power centres in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Yet Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders packed a local auditorium during a recent stop on their Fighting Oligarchy tour. The rally felt like a 1960s-style sit-in with attendees singing along to a gentle rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land. They launched rowdy boos and jeers every time Sanders inveighed against Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk.

The visit also felt like an answered prayer for local Democrats and left-leaning Independents who oppose Trump and his policies, while directing much of their fury at their own party, which they feel has failed to mount an effective opposition.

The Democratic party “should be doing more to try to protect everybody,” said Karla Alcantar, 26, who attended the rally. “I feel like some of them have just folded over completely, and there are some that are trying to do the work of all.”

“I definitely feel like they should be doing way more,” she said.

It is not a great time to be a Democratic politician in the United States. The party is out of power. Elected officials cannot agree on a course of action to counter Trump’s agenda. No clear leader has emerged to unify the unwieldy coalition. Various ideological and generational factions are warring against each other and nobody seems to be winning.

“I understand that they don’t have the power to, like, change like things drastically, but they do have the power to slow down like things even a little bit,” said rally attendee Juan Dominguez, 26. “It honestly feels like I’m not seeing any of that.”

The anger extends beyond the rally-goers.

Fifty-two percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said their party’s leadership is moving in the wrong direction, according to a CNN/SSRS poll conducted in mid-March, as opposed to 48% who said it is moving in the right direction.

That same survey suggested a desire for strong opposition: 57% wanted Democrats in Congress to try and stop the Republican party’s agenda. It’s a complete reversal of a poll in 2017, the year after Trump first won the presidency, that suggested 74% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents wanted leaders to work with Republicans following a divisive election.

“What they’re pressing for is not just Democratic leaders to lash out because that’s going to make their followers feel good,” said former Pennsylvania congressman Conor Lamb, who held a town hall-style event in Pittsburgh last week.

Though Lamb said he is not currently running for office, he felt a hunger within the Democratic base.

“I think they feel like the survival of the system we have all counted on is itself on the line, and they want us to act with that level of urgency,” Lamb told the BBC. “I think it’s important for us not to forget just to be advocates for things that are specific and concrete, and really affecting people.”

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s tour is just one attempt to solve that. It stops in conservative-dominated areas and remains laser-focused on the economy, citing cost of living grievances that propelled Trump to a second term, while framing him and his billionaire supporters like Musk as the culprits.

Ocasio-Cortez put the argument simply: “Oligarchy or democracy?”

But the Fighting Oligarchy tour is only one theory about how the Democratic Party should evolve.

“It is completely normal when a party loses, especially the presidency, for there to be this period of soul searching and asking, ‘What’s next?'” said Professor Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California.

Some Democrats accused their party of falling out of step with more conservative Americans on subjects like transgender rights, or failing to accommodate diverse viewpoints within the party’s ideological spectrum. Without widening their potential base, these Democrats argue, they stand little chance of regaining power.

One such gambit by California Governor Gavin Newsom involves moving the party’s branding more to the center. Though Newsom has long brushed off White House ambitions, he is among a new generation of Democrats who could vie for the presidency in 2028.

The governor, known nationwide as a liberal defender of abortion and LGBTQ rights, recently launched a podcast to host conversations with politicos who disagree with him.

Newsom’s decision to interview right-wing strategist Steve Bannon infuriated many Democrats.

“I think it’s important to have difficult conversations or even have a civil conversation that may be difficult for people to listen to, because everyone is out there trying to tear each other down,” Newsom said at a recent press conference.

While such debates over whether to moderate or play to the base feature in every party’s soul-searching, this year does have a new twist, Mr Grose noted.

“Some of the questions for the Democrats’ strategy is the age question – is it time for a new generation? That is a little unique,” he said.

David Hogg, 25, a gun safety organiser and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, is currently locked in a heated public debate with a party elder statesmen, strategist James Carville.

Hogg recently pledged $20m through his political group to fund primary challengers to Democrats in safe seats.

“We cannot win back the majority if we do not convince the American people that our party offers something that isn’t just, not Donald Trump, but something substantially better,” he said. “I think it’s time for some new voices in our party.”

Carville, credited with shepherding Bill Clinton to the White House, called the plan “insane.”

“Aren’t we supposed to run against Republicans?” he asked on CNN.

As party figures traded barbs on TV, disgruntled Democrats rallying in Bakersfield told the BBC that it doesn’t matter as much what leaders do, as long as they do something – preferably something loud.

Lisa Richards, a 61-year-old voter who drove 230 miles from San Diego, praised New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s recent 25-hour speech on the US Senate floor opposing Trump’s policies.

That speech, and the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez rallies are “showing people in the country that they care,” Ms Richards said.

A young female South African doctor has sparked a nationwide conversation about a form of domestic abuse often shrouded in silence – financial abuse.

In a series of viral videos Dr Celiwe Ndaba opened up about how she said she had been financially exploited by her husband, how it had spiralled and led to their separation.

Often sitting in her car on her way to work, the mother of three vlogged over two weeks about how despite her successful career she had become trapped in a toxic marriage for years, feeling manipulated to fund her husband’s lifestyle – in particular his desire to drive a Mercedes Benz.

Taking out loans for him to buy such vehicles was the “worst decision” of her life, putting the family under huge financial pressure, said Dr Ndaba – who since sharing her story has reverted to using her maiden name and the number of her followers has ballooned.

Despite pleas for her husband to downgrade, she said he refused – accusing her of wanting to “turn him into a laughing stock by making him drive a small car”.

The medic said she was speaking out as she wanted to issue a warning to others – that it was not only “uneducated” and “less fortunate” women who find themselves in abusive relationships.

Her estranged husband, Temitope Dada, has not responded to a BBC request for comment.

In the wake of the social media storm, he set up a TikTok account, where in one of his first videos he acknowledged: “You may know me as… ‘Mr Benz or nothing.'”

The few posts he has made are accompanied by hashtags such as #divorcetrauma – saying the accusations are lies.

Nonetheless, the comments section on Dr Ndaba’s TikTok and other social media platforms have transformed into support groups, filled with female breadwinners sharing eerily similar stories.

“You are brave to speak out so publicly… I have been suffering in silence,” one person commented.

Bertus Preller, a lawyer based in Cape Town, believes this is because although South African women are becoming doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs, getting well-paid jobs does not necessarily free them from the clutches of the patriarchy.

Women’s financial independence clashes with “cultural norms that prioritise male authority”, he says.

If anything, their success appears to make them targets.

Financial abuse occurs when one partner dominates or exploits the other’s financial resources, the lawyer explains.

“It is a subtle yet potent tactic of domestic violence, aimed at keeping the victim under control,” he says.

In South Africa, this is legally classified as economic abuse under the Domestic Violence Act.

Mr Preller says things like “unjustly withholding money for essentials or interfering with shared assets,” are covered by the act.

A university lecturer, who requested anonymity, told the BBC how her husband had lied about his qualifications and eventually left her in financial ruin.

It started with her car that he mostly drove but never refuelled. Then loans she took out for his multiple failed business ventures. Finally, there came an eviction notice as she said he had stopped contributing towards rent, leaving her to shoulder all the expenses for their family, which included three children.

Despite this, they stayed together for close to a decade – even though he was also physically abusive.

“He’s very smart… I was in love with his smartness, his big dreams. But he couldn’t follow them up with actions. His pride was his downfall,” she said.

Even when he managed to get some money, he still did not contribute.

“He started withholding whatever money he had for himself. He’d go out drinking with his friends, come back – the salary is gone,” she said.

Legal financial expert Somila Gogoba says that beyond the control of money, financial abuse often has deep psychological roots.

“For the abuser, this behaviour may stem from feelings of inadequacy, fear of abandonment, or the need for dominance,” she told the BBC.

“For the victim, the psychological impact includes feelings of worthlessness, fear, and dependence, which can be paralysing.”

Research from the University of South Africa suggests these are not isolated cases – and that women who out-earn their partners face significantly higher risks of intimate partner violence.

Out of their in-depth study of 10 women who were the primary breadwinners of their families, only two were married.

“For eight of the participants, their choice of being single resulted from their experiences of physical, emotional and sexual violence… All the women said they believed that their role as female breadwinners was viewed as threatening to the traditional male role of a provider,” said researcher Bianca Parry.

Ms Gogoba says female breadwinners are less valued than their male counterparts, despite their economic contributions: “This cultural backdrop can encourage some partners to feel entitled to control the finances, even when they do not contribute equally.

“This control is not just about money – it is also about power and maintaining a grip on the relationship dynamics.”

Nombulelo Shange, sociologist lecturer at the University of the Free State, says it is part of a growing pattern in South Africa of middle-class women being financially exploited.

“Black women face a double patriarchy: Western expectations at work, traditional expectations at home. When these collide, harmful ideologies escalate,” she told the BBC.

She explained that balancing the pressures of being a successful woman, but playing the role of “the caregiver, the mother, the good wife, the good neighbour and community member who goes to church every Sunday”, was difficult as women were always taught to tiptoe around men’s egos.

Since Dr Ndaba’s revelations, women on social media have shared stories of giving their male partners their debit or credit cards when they go out to eat so it appears as though he is paying for the meal.

For Ms Shange this shows how the burden of a happy home is often placed on the woman’s shoulders.

“You think: ‘If I just get them a car, they’ll be happy.’ Love makes you blind. When your person struggles, you struggle too – you want to fix it,” she said.

By the time the university lecturer divorced her husband, she was left with debts of 140,000 rand ($7,500; £5,600) – all racked up in her name.

“Before, I could plan things like holidays. Now they are a luxury,” she said.

Dr Ndaba has been at pains to tell her followers, as she did on one vlog: “Finance is an important aspect of people’s marriages.”

The lecturer could not agree more, urging young women to take their time when getting to know their partners and have open, honest conversations.

“Talk about the finances, talk about your background, talk about emotions and character.”

Ms Gogoba urged more people to protect themselves from their partner, telling them to keep a separate bank account, keep their pins secure and monitor their credit cards.

They all agreed that women should understand that love should not come with an unsustainable price tag.

• Oscar Pistorius release: A reminder of South Africa’s femicide problem
• Will I be next? South Africa women ask
• Do men hold the key to fighting rape in South Africa? Published 30 September 2011

At a rally in London, Ontario, on Friday, the crowd booed as Mark Carney delivered his core campaign line about the existential threat Canada faces from its neighbour.

“President Trump is trying to break us so that America could own us,” the Liberal leader warned.

“Never,” supporters shouted back. Many waved Canadian flags taped to ice hockey sticks.

Similar levels of passion were also on display at the union hall where Pierre Poilievre greeted enthusiastic supporters in the Toronto area earlier in the week.

The Conservative leader has drawn large crowds to rallies across the country, where “Bring it Home” is a call to arms: both to vote for a change of government and a nod to the wave of Canadian patriotism in the face of US tariff threats.

In the final hours of a 36-day campaign, Donald Trump’s shadow looms over everything. The winner of Monday’s election is likely to be the party able to convince voters they have a plan for how to deal with the US president.

National polls suggest the Liberals have maintained a narrow lead entering last stretch.

Still, Trump is not the only factor at play – he was only mentioned once in Poilievre’s stump speech.

The Conservative leader has focused more on voters disaffected by what he calls a “Lost Liberal decade”, promising change from a government he blames for the housing shortage and a sluggish economy, and for mishandling social issues like crime and the fentanyl crisis.

His pitch resonates with voters like Eric and Carri Gionet, from Barrie, Ontario. They have two daughters in their mid-20s and said they were attending their first ever political rally.

“We’re pretty financially secure – but I worry about them,” said Eric Gionet. While he and his wife could buy their first home while young, he said, “there’s no prospect” their children will be able to do the same.

“I’m excited to be here,” said Carri Gionet. “I’m hopeful.”

Tapping into voter frustration has helped opposition parties sweep governments from power in democracies around the world. Canada seemed almost certain to follow suit.

Last year, the Conservatives held a 20-point lead in national polls over the governing Liberals for months. Poilievre’s future as the country’s next prime minister seemed baked in.

Then a series of shockwaves came in quick succession at the start of 2025, upending the political landscape: Justin Trudeau’s resignation, Carney’s subsequent rise to Liberal leader and prime minister; and the return of Trump to the White House with the threats and tariffs that followed.

By the time the election was called in mid-March, Carney’s Liberals were polling neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, and by early April they had pulled slightly ahead, national surveys suggest.

It has been a stunning reversal of fortunes. Seemingly dead and buried, the Liberals now believe they could win a fourth successive election, and even a majority in Parliament.

Carney is pitching himself as the man most ready to meet this critical moment – a steady central banker who helped shepherd Canada’s economy through the 2008 financial crisis and later, the UK through Brexit.

For Conservative voter Gwendolyn Slover, 69, from Summerside in the province of Prince Edward Island, his appeal is “baffling”.

“Many people think Mark Carney is some kind of Messiah,” she said. “It’s the same party, he’s one person. And he’s not going to change anything.”

For Carney’s supporters, they see a strong CV and a poise that has calmed their anxieties over Trump’s threats of steep tariffs and repeated suggestions the country should become the 51st US state – though the president has been commenting less frequently on Canada during the campaign.

“I’m very impressed by the stability and the serious thought process of Mark Carney,” said Mike Brennan from Kitchener, Ontario, as he stood in line to meet the Liberal leader at a coffee shop in Cambridge, about an hour outside Toronto.

Mr Brennan is a “lifelong Liberal” who did not initially plan to vote for the party in this election because of his dislike for Trudeau.

The departure of former prime minister Trudeau, who had grown increasingly unpopular over his decade in power, released “a massive pressure valve”, said Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, a non-profit public opinion research organisation.

“All of these angry Liberals who are either parking their votes with the [left-wing] NDP or parking their votes with the Conservatives start re-coalescing,” she said.

Then more disaffected Liberals and other progressive voters began to migrate towards Carney’s Liberals, driven by Trump, this election’s “main character”, Ms Kurl said.

“The threats, the annexation talk, all of that has been a huge motivator for left of centre voters.”

It has worked to Carney’s advantage, with Trump’s tariffs threats giving the political neophyte – he is the first prime minister never to have held elected public office – the chance to publicly audition to keep his job during the campaign.

Trump’s late-March announcement of global levies on foreign automobile imports allowed Carney to step away from the trail and take on the prime minister’s mantle, setting up a call with the president and meeting US Cabinet ministers.

He’s never been tested in a gruelling federal election campaign, with its relentless travel, high-pressure demands for retail politics and daily media scrutiny. Yet on the campaign trail, and in the high-stakes debate with party leaders, he is considered to have performed well.

Poilievre, in contrast, is a veteran politician and polished performer. But on the shifting political ground, Conservatives appeared to struggle to find their footing, pivoting their message from Canada being broken to “Canada First”.

Poilievre had to fend off criticism from political rivals that he is “Trump lite”, with his combative style, his vows to end “woke ideology”, and willingness to take on the “global elite”.

“I have a completely different story from Donald Trump,” he has said.

More on the Canadian election:

• Canada’s top candidates talk up fossil fuels as climate slips down agenda
• Patriotism surges in Quebec as Trump rattles Canada
• ‘My home is worth millions – but young people are priced out of this city’
• A simple guide to Canada’s federal election

Canadians have historically voted in either Conservative or Liberal governments, but smaller parties – like the NDP or the Bloc Québécois, a sovereigntist party that only runs candidates in the province of Quebec – have in the past formed Official Opposition.

In this campaign, both are languishing and face the possibility of losing a number of seats in the House of Commons as anxious voters turn towards the two main political parties.

If the Liberals and Conservatives both succeed in getting over 38% of the vote share nationally, as polls suggest is likely, it would be the first time that has happened since 1975.

The message from the NDP – which helped prop up the minority Liberals in the last government – in the final days of campaigning has been to vote strategically.

“You can make the difference between Mark Carney getting a super majority or sending enough New Democrats to Ottawa so we can fight to defend the things you care about,” leader Jagmeet Singh said earlier this week.

The campaign has also highlighted festering divides along regional lines.

With much of the campaign dominated by the US-Canada relationship and the trade war, many issues – climate, immigration, indigenous reconciliation – have been on the backburner.

Even when the campaigns have focused on other policies, the discussion has centred on the country’s economic future.

Both frontrunners agree in broad strokes on the priorities: the need to pivot away from dependence on the US; the development of oil, gas and mining sectors; protection for workers affected by tariffs; and increased defence spending.

But they disagree on who is best to lead Canada forward, especially when so much is at stake.

“It’s time for experience, not experiments,” Carney told his supporters in London.

Poilievre closing message was: “We can choose change on Monday. We can take back control of our lives and build a bright future.”

Former clients of a Canadian tech entrepreneur say they were let down after they paid his company tens of thousands of dollars to help launch their start-ups.

People across the world – from Scotland to the southern states of the US – have told the BBC they paid Josh Adler’s software company ConvrtX up to $245,000 (£184,000) but did not receive the websites and apps they expected.

We spoke to more than 20 former employees and customers who say that Mr Adler continued to sell services and ask for more money, despite repeatedly not delivering everything customers paid for.

In a letter to the BBC, Mr Adler’s lawyers say the allegations are false and have been incited by one former client who they are suing.

They add that although Mr Adler was “inexperienced” when he founded his business, aged 21, his company became very successful in a short period of time and “the vast majority of clients were happy with their work”.

Launched in 2019, ConvrtX claims to be a “world-leading venture studio” that has helped more than 700 aspiring entrepreneurs start companies by developing business plans, making pitch documents for potential investors, and building custom websites and apps.

In pitches to clients, the company claims it has a five-star satisfaction rating. It also says it has 70 staff worldwide and operates from the UK, US and Canada. Mr Adler runs the company from Dubai.

Leaked internal documents suggest ConvrtX billed more than $5m (£3.8m) in sales to more than 280 customers between 2019 and 2023 alone, but senior insiders say there were few success stories.

Our investigation found:

• Customers who say they spent their life savings without receiving a viable product – they told the BBC they received products from ConvrtX which didn’t work or match what they had paid for
• Clients who received legal or financial threats after complaining, including one woman who was sent inappropriate, flirtatious emails from a lawyer working for the company
• Fake positive website testimonials – one attributed to a complainant who had in fact requested a refund of $18,000 (£13,600)
• ConvrtX said on its now-disabled website that it had been featured in Forbes Magazine and had a working relationship with Harvard Business Review – both publications have denied this was the case

In response, Mr Adler’s legal team say ConvrtX had only received about 12-15 complaints out of about 340 customers – adding that after the incident of the sexually inappropriate emails, the company immediately terminated its contract with the lawyer.

Amy (not her real name), a 37-year-old single mother from the UK, says she was “led down the garden path” after paying $53,000 (£40,000) in 2021 for a website and an app for her non-profit organisation, which aims to match people with fertility issues to potential surrogates.

She says she was strung along for two years, only ever receiving a basic website and no working app, while Mr Adler continued to ask for more funds.

Amy was particularly annoyed by a text she says Mr Adler sent to her, featuring a picture of him celebrating New Year’s Eve on a tropical beach in Bali.

“Why flaunt your money to me? It’s disgraceful,” says Amy, who had funded the project by remortgaging her home and using credit cards.

Eventually, she requested a refund through her bank and complained to the UK’s Financial Ombudsman Service. A senior investigator there has provisionally recommended that the bank return $39,000 (£30,000) to Amy, according to documents seen by the BBC. She is still waiting for her bank to agree to the recommendation.

As part of the process, two expert software developers reviewed the app developed by ConvrtX. According to the senior investigator, the evidence supported Amy’s claim that the company had breached their contract by failing to provide the service she paid for.

“I think it’s fair to say ConvrtX failed to exercise reasonable care and skill when they were providing the service,” the investigator said. “It seems the work completed by ConvrtX cannot be salvaged and the entire process would need to be completed again if [Amy] wanted a working app to be developed.”

In response, lawyers for Mr Adler say that the client had “received a website, clickable prototype and a fully developed mobile app from ConvrtX”.

Former senior staff say that Josh Adler – the son of Kerry Adler, a wealthy Canadian businessman – presided over a culture of instability, resulting in high turnover of staff and errors due to “cutting corners” and hiring and firing inexperienced contractors.

On his Facebook profile, Mr Adler described himself as #YoungAndReckless and #LivingTheDream. We spoke to a number of former employees who described him as immature and a poor leader.

In company meetings, they say he “bragged” about living at the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Abu Dhabi, boasted about renting a villa in Bali, and showed off a newly purchased Porsche 911 and multiple speeding fines.

He cared about “his rich kid, bling-bling lifestyle,” says a former senior employee speaking on the condition of anonymity. “When you have that many unhappy clients, it can’t be a coincidence.”

Mr Adler’s lawyers describe him as “highly ambitious” and say he sought to build a world-leading business, but that not all staff lived up to his high standards and would be “let go” if they under-delivered. “Young and Reckless” is a clothing brand he likes, they add.

But several senior ex-staff told us they had concerns about how Mr Adler ran his company, saying he continued to take on new clients even after being warned that some business and app ideas were unviable or impossible to make. They say he requested payments from clients in advance, sometimes as much as $53,000 (£40,000), though the company had a no-refund policy.

Two senior ex-employees claim that when Mr Adler was informed that some apps were not working, he would subsequently tell customers – against the advice of the development team – that he could fix the problem if they paid more money, or their outstanding balance.

“So don’t tell the client that it cannot be done because we’ll find [a contractor] that can do it when they’ve paid,” one ex-staff member recalls Mr Adler repeatedly telling them. “He’s a good talker, he’s good at sales… but he gives a lot of false promises.”

A former customer, DeShawn Womack, says he felt “lied to” after he hired ConvrtX in 2021. He says he paid more than $50,000 (£37,750) for a mobile app that would allow users to remotely access their phone and all its data from another device if it was lost, stolen or damaged.

He says he received a design prototype, but not a finished working app.

After making payments over two years, Mr Womack – a truck driver from the US state of Georgia – messaged a senior ConvrtX employee for clarity about whether his app would be able to sync missed calls and voicemails. He also asked if it would allow users to make phone calls from a different device using their same number – a specific feature he said Mr Adler had told him was possible and was referenced in his contract with ConvrtX.

“This is impossible, your app was never ever possible in the first place,” the employee responded in messages seen by the BBC. “Did someone tell you this was possible?”

Mr Womack replied: “Yes, Josh [Adler] did and plus it’s in my project sign-off.”

The 40-year-old, who says he spent his life savings on the project, told the BBC he stopped making additional payments after he believed his app was not being properly worked on.

“He [Josh Adler] sold me a dream and this is frustrating,” he says.

Lawyers for Mr Adler say he denies telling customers that their ideas were viable when they were not. They say ConvrtX was always clear about the difficulty of developing an app, but if the client wanted to proceed it would usually take on the project.

Gemma Martin from Dundee, who runs a tarot-card-reading business, says ConvrtX failed to deliver after she paid more than $35,000 (£26,000) for services including a working interactive website and mobile app that would let users request readings and subscribe to her services.

After she wrote negative reviews online, the 33-year-old says ConvrtX refused to release her website unless she signed a non-disclosure agreement stopping her from criticising the company – which she declined.

In emails seen by the BBC, a company lawyer then made sexually inappropriate remarks to Ms Martin while trying to resolve the dispute, writing that he had researched her online and her “professional profile” did not “match [her] beauty”.

Lawyers for ConvrtX say the emails were sent by a part-time third-party contractor who was terminated immediately once Mr Adler, who also apologised to Ms Martin, learned of the incident.

Ms Martin says she received a business plan from ConvrtX and eventually raw source codes for her website and app, though she says these were unusable and incomplete.

Lawyers for ConvrtX say it delivered Ms Martin a fully developed mobile app and source code, despite her having failed to pay her remaining balance. The company has since taken legal action against her for defamation, which she is contesting.

Steven Marshall, 53, says he was also threatened with legal action by ConvrtX when he asked for a full refund. He says he was “thoroughly disappointed” with work he had paid $5,183 (£3,920) for to help launch his business supporting independent filmmakers.

In emails seen by the BBC, ConvrtX’s compliance officer told Mr Marshall that if he publicly shared his “baseless allegations” it would be “criminal and civil libel” and the company would seek a “criminal charge” against him.

The compliance officer also said that Mr Marshall had “signed away” his right to post negative reviews online about ConvrtX because of a non-disclosure agreement signed prior to the work starting.

Other former customers say they also faced threats – including Ayesha Imran, who told the BBC she had requested a refund of $18,000 (£13,500) when she did not receive an app and a privacy policy for her website, after hiring ConvrtX in 2021.

In March 2023, she complained to Mr Adler for what she described as a breach of contract because of ConvrtX’s failure to deliver.

In her complaint, she wrote she had been informed that Mr Adler was not paying his development team the appropriate amount for the work that needed to be done, causing several delays because of staff turnover, and resulting in insufficient product delivery.

The company’s compliance officer responded that Ms Imran would face damages of at least $60,000 (£47,000) if she publicly shared negative comments about ConvrtX or attempted to contact any of its employees. She says she viewed this as an attempt to intimidate and scare her.

Despite her experience, Ms Imran was being featured – until last month – as a false testimonial on the company’s website.

“ConvrtX has helped us go from vision, to launch and supported with everything in between. They are really quite holisitc [sic], in what they do!” the post read.

“Those words never left my mouth,” says Ms Imran, who tells us she had previously asked Mr Adler to remove it.

Alongside Ms Imran’s fake testimonial, the BBC has found that Mr Adler also used an image of Jen Selter, a lifestyle and fashion influencer with more than 13 million followers on social media. Ms Selter confirmed she had never used ConvrtX’s services, and that the image had been used without her consent.

Mr Adler’s lawyers say these testimonials were on a “dummy site” that was “not intended by ConvrtX to be publicly available”.

However, they were publicly available as recently as last month and some date back to August 2020, according to website archives and screengrabs taken by the BBC.

Earlier this year, Mr Adler rebranded ConvrtX and, until being contacted by the BBC, was selling eight-week “bootcamps” for $159 (£124). In a promotional video, he claimed to have helped “founders raise capital – six, eight, nine figures and the like” and to have “positively impacted 10,000 lives”.

The BBC wrote to Mr Adler asking what these numbers were based on, but his lawyers did not answer our question.

In a letter, lawyers for Josh Adler say he “unequivocally” denies the allegations. They say that Mr Adler and his business are the “victims” and that, until Gemma Martin made defamatory statements about it, ConvrtX had received very few, if any, complaints from its clients.

The French government has been urged to reconsider rehoming two stranded killer whales in Canada.

Wikie, 23, and her 11-year-old son Keijo are currently held at Marineland Antibes, a marine zoo in southern France, where they were born and have been kept their entire lives. It closed in January.

An application to send them to the most likely rehoming destination – Loro Parque marine zoo in Tenerife – was blocked by Spanish authorities. Loro Parque is already home to four orcas, including one born last month.

Lori Marino, president of The Whale Sanctuary Project (WSP), said their site in Nova Scotia is “the only option left”, as French authorities have not yet identified a location in Europe for orcas and rejected a move to a marine zoo in Japan.

Her group is bidding to rehome the orcas in the east Canadian province despite a previous offer being rejected by the French ministry for ecology earlier this year.

Animal rights groups want the orcas to be rehomed in a whale sanctuary where they will have more space to swim and will not be forced to breed or perform in shows.

Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the French ecology minister, said in February she was looking for a European sanctuary but a suitable site for Wikie and Keijo has not been secured yet.

“If you don’t even have a site, you’re years away from being a viable sanctuary,” said Lori, adding that the WSP had already carried out environmental studies, water surveys and been offered a lease by Canada’s department of natural resources.

Managers at Marineland said sanctuaries are a hypothetical that “will take years” to be built and with “no guarantees” the whales will be properly looked after.

They stressed that Wikie and Keijo “must leave now” for their own welfare, adding: “Marineland reaffirms the extreme urgency of transferring the animals to an operational destination.”

Though Marineland has closed as a marine zoo business, they are still legally responsible for the welfare of the animals until they are rehomed.

The application to move them to Loro Parque was described as a temporary measure by Pannier-Runacher that would bridge the gap until a sanctuary in Europe had been found and built.

But activists feared the transfer would end up being permanent. The decision by a Spanish scientific panel to block it came as a pleasant surprise to many of them.

“I was shocked,” Lori told BBC News. “We thought it was a fait accompli. We assumed that was where the orcas were going, it looked like a done deal.”

The scientific panel’s approval was needed to complete the transfer but they concluded Loro Parque’s facilities did “not meet the minimum requirements in terms of surface area, volume and depth necessary to house the specimens in optimal conditions”.

Dr Jan Schmidt-Burbach, head of animal welfare and wildlife research at the charity World Animal Protection, said the decision was “unexpected but rational”.

He added that it “perfectly illustrates the fact that marine parks are an outdated industry with dropping acceptability” in society.

Loro Parque responded to the panel’s decision by saying their “facilities are recognised by independent assessors as providing among the highest levels of animal welfare in the world”.

The WSP has identified a site in Port Hilford Bay, Nova Scotia that they plan to cordon off using 1,600m of nets.

The project’s team also contains people who were involved in a whale sanctuary that was created to house Keiko – the orca who starred in the 1993 movie Free Willy.

Charles Vinick, CEO of the WSP, managed the Keiko project in Iceland and Jeff Foster, who specialises in moving marine animals, was also part of that team.

Keiko was born in the wild and was able to relearn some survival skills after arriving at the sanctuary in 1998.

He spent four years there before leaving with a pod of orcas he had joined. They swam to Norway where he died in 2003 following an infection.

There is no chance Wikie and Keijo will be released into the wild as, unlike Keiko, they were born in captivity.

They have spent their whole lives being cared for and entertained by their trainers. Lori says they would be similarly cared for in Nova Scotia but have much more space to live in than a pool.

“We have a whole crew who know how to build and run a sanctuary,” said Lori. “They have done it before and I think we are the only team who has any experience in doing this.”

Lori and the WSP team contacted the ministry after learning the transfer to Loro Parque had been blocked. At time of writing, they had not received a response.

BBC News also contacted the ministry for comment. Pannier-Runacher had not made any new announcements about what will happen to the orcas.

Until a decision is made Wikie and Keijo remain in Marineland, unaware the rest of their home is now empty.

A letter written by a Titanic passenger days before the ship sank has been sold for a record-breaking £300,000 ($400,000) at auction in the UK.

Colonel Archibald Gracie’s letter was purchased by an anonymous buyer at Henry Aldridge and Son auction house in Wiltshire on Sunday, at a price five times higher than the £60,000 it was expected to fetch.

The letter has been described as “prophetic”, as it records Col Gracie telling an acquaintance he would “await my journey’s end” before passing judgement on the “fine ship”.

The letter was dated 10 April 1912, the day he boarded the Titanic in Southampton, and five days before it sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic.

Col Gracie was one of about 2,200 passengers and crew on board the Titanic sailing to New York. More than 1,500 died in the disaster.

The first-class passenger, wrote the letter from cabin C51. It was posted when the ship dropped anchor in Queenstown, Ireland, on 11 April 1912. It was also postmarked London on 12 April.

The auctioneer who facilitated the sale said the letter had attracted the highest price of any correspondence written onboard the Titanic.

Col Gracie’s account of the sinking is among the best known.

He later wrote the book The Truth About The Titanic, recalling his experience onboard the doomed ocean liner.

He recounted how he survived by scrambling onto an overturned lifeboat in the icy waters.

More than half the men who had originally reached the lifeboat died from exhaustion or cold, he wrote.

Although Col Gracie survived the disaster, his health was severely affected by the hypothermia and physical injuries he suffered.

He fell into a coma on 2 December 1912, and died of complications from diabetes two days later.

South Sudan’s rival leaders should “honour” Pope Francis’ legacy by ending the country’s conflict, the Vatican’s diplomatic representative to the nation has said.

“We must try to make concrete in the daily life of South Sudan his ardent wish to see a true, durable peace, to see dialogue as the condition of that peace and to see the silencing of the weapons of war,” Archbishop Séamus Patrick Horgan said.

The Pope, who died aged 88 on Monday, had urged the two sides of South Sudan’s conflict to forge a permanent peace during a historic trip to the east African nation in 2023.

Recent violence has threatened to end a fragile peace agreement struck in 2018 between the civil war’s two factions.

• Why fears are growing of a return of civil war to South Sudan
• ‘We walked for nine days to see the Pope’
• The mother and children trapped between two conflicts

The head of the UN mission in South Sudan, Nicolas Haysom, recently warned that the country was “on the brink of a return to full-scale civil war”.

Tensions rose at the start of March, when a militia group allied to Vice-President Riek Machar during South Sudan’s civil war clashed with the army.

Archbishop Horgan said Pope Francis “spoke firmly” during his 2023 visit, calling for “no more bloodshed, no more conflict, no more violence”, adding that the late pontiff’s message was still “relevant”.

The Archbishop, who spoke to congregants attending Mass at St Theresa’s Cathedral in the capital, Juba, on Friday, said it was “disheartening” to see continuing reports of violence.

The same day, the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (Unmiss) called for an end to the clashes in the country after reports of fighting between the Sudan People’s Liberation Army In Opposition (SPLM-IO) and South Sudan People’s Defence Forces.

Meanwhile, Machar, who leads the SPLM-IO, remains under house arrest, facing accusations of trying to spark a rebellion.

Shortly after South Sudan’s birth in 2011, the country descended into civil war between supporters of Machar and President Salva Kiir.

Archbishop Horgan reminded congregants that South Sudan held a special place in the Pope’s heart, outlining his “extraordinary relationship” with the country and “affection” for the people.

The Mass was also attended by Kiir and Vice-President Taban Deng Gai – two of the four South Sudanese leaders – whose feet were kissed by Pope Francis in the Vatican in 2019.

Speaking at the end of the Mass, Kiir said: “As an icon of peace, tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, harmony and inclusivity, Pope Francis’ message resonated with the people of all faiths all over the world.”

However, Christian faithful who attended the Mass said they were disappointed that the president did not use the opportunity to re-commit to peace, reconciliation and dialogue.

Justin Badi Arama, the Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan (ECSS) and the Anglican Primate, who took part in the prayer service, said: “It is sad that Pope Francis has passed on when the Revitalised Peace Agreement is seriously sick.

“As we celebrate his passing on today, we call upon the transitional government of national unity to make every effort to make sure that the revitalised agreement, which is seriously sick, does not die.”

The Auxiliary Bishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Juba, Santo Loku Pio, said the leaders of South Sudan chose to ignore Pope Francis’ iconic “simplicity and gesture” in Rome in 2019, when he knelt down and kissed their feet in a humble plea for peace, unity and reconciliation.

He said the gesture by the Pope remained “deeply moving”.

Bishop Loku added that Pope Francis wanted to make South Sudan a nation that understood the urgency for peace, unity and reconciliation, but that the leaders of the country ignored his efforts.

Ambassadors, religious leaders from other Christian denominations, and representatives of Muslim community also attended the prayer service.

Friends and family of a British Paralympian who went missing in Las Vegas are appealing for help in finding him.

Sam Ruddock from Rugby in Warwickshire, who has competed in shot put, cycling and sprinting, had travelled to the United States to watch a WrestleMania event and was last heard from on 16 April.

His close friend Lucy Hatton said his disappearance was “really, really out of character” but that he had not “been in quite the right head space” recently.

She said Las Vegas police were aware and were treating him as a missing person.

Ms Hatton said her friend, who has cerebral palsy, was a “fantastic human being” who enjoyed going into schools to “inspire the next generation”.

She said she drove him to the airport on 13 April and knew he had been staying at a hostel in Las Vegas before the big wrestling event.

Mr Ruddock was “very active on social media”, she said, so when all contact stopped on 16 April, she said “it started to raise flags”.

His mother, Fran Ruddock from Lincoln, said he normally spoke to her every day and was usually “very sociable”.

She asked anyone who might know him, in the UK or United States, to get in touch if they had information.

“Anything at all to piece together the gaps,” she said.

Along with his mother, Ms Hatton said she alerted the police in the UK and they raised the case with police in the United States and with Interpol.

She said she had also spoken to the hostel where he had been staying and was told he had not checked out, but his possessions had been left in his room.

British Cycling said it understood he had been reported missing to police in the United States and the UK.

A spokesperson added: “We urge anyone who has been in contact with Sam since 16 April or may have any information of his whereabouts to contact their local police department as soon as possible.”

Lincolnshire Police confirmed there was an active missing persons investigation.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We are supporting the family of a British man reported missing in Las Vegas and are in contact with the local authorities.”

From an office perched on the scalloped edge of the continent, Victoria Bradley jokes that she has the most beautiful doctor’s practice in Australia.

Outside her window, farmland rolls into rocky coastline, hemming a glasslike bay striped with turquoise and populated by showboating dolphins.

Home to about 3,000 people, a few shops, two roundabouts and a tiny hospital, Streaky Bay is an idyllic beach town.

For Dr Bradley, though, it is anything but. The area’s sole, permanent doctor, she spent years essentially on call 24/7.

Running the hospital and the general practitioner (GP) clinic, life was a never-ending game of catch up. She’d do rounds at the wards before, after and in between regular appointments. Even on good days, lunch breaks were often a pipe dream. On bad days, a hospital emergency would blow up her already punishing schedule.

Burnt out, two years ago she quit – and the thread holding together the remnants of the town’s healthcare system snapped.

Streaky Bay is at the forefront of a national crisis: inadequate government funding is exacerbating a shortage of critical healthcare workers like Dr Bradley; wait times are ballooning; doctors are beginning to write their own rules on fees, and costs to patients are skyrocketing.

A once-revered universal healthcare system is crumbling at every level, sometimes barely getting by on the sheer willpower of doctors and local communities.

As a result, more and more Australians, regardless of where they live, are delaying or going without the care they need.

Health has become a defining issue for voters ahead of the nation’s election on 3 May, with both of Australia’s major parties promising billions of dollars in additional funding.

But experts say the solutions being offered up are band-aid fixes, while what is needed are sweeping changes to the way the system is funded – reform for which there has so far been a lack of political will.

Australians tell the BBC the country is at a crossroads, and needs to decide if universal healthcare is worth saving.

Healthcare was the last thing on Renee Elliott’s mind when she moved to Streaky Bay – until the 40-year-old found a cancerous lump in her breast in 2019, and another one four years later.

Seeing a local GP was the least of her problems. With the expertise and treatment she needed only available in Adelaide, about 500km away, Mrs Elliott has spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars accessing life-saving care, all while raising three boys and running a business.

Though she has since clawed back a chunk of the cost through government schemes, it made an already harrowing time that much more draining: financially, emotionally and physically.

“You’re trying to get better… but having to juggle all that as well. It was very tricky.”

When Australia’s modern health system was born four decades ago – underpinned by a public insurance scheme called Medicare – it was supposed to guarantee affordable and accessible high-quality care to people like Mrs Elliott as “a basic right”.

Health funding here is complex and shared between states and federal governments. But the scheme essentially meant Australians could present their bright green Medicare member card at a doctor’s office or hospital, and Canberra would be sent a bill. It paid through rebates funded by taxes.

Patients would either receive “bulk billed” – completely free – care, mostly through the emerging public system, or heavily subsidised treatment through a private healthcare sector offering more benefits and choice to those who wanted them.

Medicare became a national treasure almost instantly. It was hoped this set up would combine the best parts of the UK’s National Health Service and the best of the United States’ system.

Fast forward 40 years and many in the industry say we’re on track to end up with the worst of both.

There is no denying that healthcare in Australia is still miles ahead of much of the world, particularly when it comes to emergency care.

But the core of the crisis and key to this election is GP services, or primary care, largely offered by private clinics. There has historically been little need for public ones, with most GPs choosing to accept Medicare rebates as full payment.

That is increasingly uncommon though, with doctors saying those allowances haven’t kept up with the true cost of delivering care. At the same time, staff shortages, which persist despite efforts to recruit from overseas, create a scarcity that only drives up prices further.

According to government data, about 30% of patients must now pay a “gap fee” for a regular doctor’s appointment – on average A$40 (£19.25; $25.55) out of pocket.

But experts suspect the true figure is higher: it’s skewed by seniors and children, who tend to visit doctors more often and still enjoy mostly bulk-billed appointments. Plus there’s a growing cohort of patients not captured by statistics, who simply don’t go to the doctor because of escalating fees.

Brisbane electrician Callum Bailey is one of them.

“Mum or my partner will pester and pester and pester… [but] I’m such a big ‘I’ll just suffer in silence’ person because it’s very expensive.”

And every dollar counts right now, the 25-year-old says: “At my age, I probably should be in my prime looking for housing… [but] even grocery shopping is nuts.

“[I] just can’t keep up.”

This is a tale James Gillespie kept hearing.

So his startup Cleanbill began asking the question: if the average Australian adult walked into a GP clinic, could they get a free, standard appointment?

This year, they called almost all of the nation’s estimated 7,000 GP clinics – only a fifth of them would bulk bill a new adult patient. In the entire state of Tasmania, for example, they couldn’t find a single one.

The results resonate with many Australians, he says: “It really brought it home to them that, ‘Okay, it’s not just us. This is happening nationwide’.”

And that’s just primary care.

Public specialists are so rare and so overwhelmed – with wait times often far beyond safe levels – that most patients are funnelled toward exorbitantly expensive private care. The same goes for a lot of non-emergency hospital treatments or dental work.

There are currently no caps on how much private specialists, dentists or hospitals can charge and neither private health insurance nor slim Medicare rebates reliably offer substantial relief.

The BBC spoke to people across the country who say the increasing cost of healthcare had left them relying on charities for food, avoiding dental care for almost a decade, or emptying their retirement savings to fund treatment.

Others are borrowing from their parents, taking out pay-day loans to buy medication, remortgaging their houses, or selling their possessions.

Kimberley Grima regularly lies awake at night, calculating which of her three children – who, like her, all have chronic illnesses – can see their specialists. Her own overdue health checks and tests are barely an afterthought.

“They’re decisions that you really don’t want to have to make,” the Aboriginal woman from New South Wales tells the BBC.

“But when push comes to shove and you haven’t got the money… you’ve got no other option. It’s heart-breaking.”

Another woman tells the BBC that had she been able to afford timely appointments, her multiple sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disease, would have been identified, and slowed, quicker.

“I was so disabled by the time I got a diagnosis,” she says.

The people missing out tend to be the ones who need it the most, experts say.

“We have much more care in healthier, wealthier parts of Australia than in poorer, sicker parts of Australia,” Peter Breadon, from the Grattan Institute think tank says.

All of this creates a vicious cycle which feeds even more pressure back into an overwhelmed system, while entrenching disadvantage and fuelling distrust.

Every single one of those issues is more acute in the regions.

Streaky Bay has long farewelled the concept of affordable healthcare, fighting instead to preserve access to any at all.

It’s why Dr Bradley lasted only three months after quitting before “guilt” drove her back to the practice.

“There’s a connection that goes beyond just being the GP… You are part of the community.

“I felt that I’d let [them] down. Which was why I couldn’t just let go.”

She came back to a far more sustainable three-day week in the GP clinic, with Streaky Bay forced to wage a bidding war with other desperate regions for pricey, fly-in-fly-out doctors to fill in the gaps.

It’s yet another line on the tab for a town which has already invested so much of its own money into propping up a healthcare system supposed to be funded by state and private investment.

“We don’t want a gold service, but what we want is an equitable service,” says Penny Williams, who helps run the community body which owns the GP practice.

When the clinic was on the verge of closure, the town desperately rallied to buy it. When it was struggling again, the local council diverted funding from other areas to top up its coffers. And even still most standard patients – unless they are seniors or children – fork out about A$50 per appointment.

It means locals are paying for their care three times over, Ms Williams says: through their Medicare taxes, council rates, and then out-of-pocket gap fees.

“No-one would say this is the Australia that we want, surely,” Elizabeth Deveny, from the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, tells the BBC.

Like many wealthy countries, the nation is struggling to cope with a growing population which is, on average, getting older and sicker.

There’s a small but increasing cohort which says it is time to let go of the notion of universal healthcare, as we’ve known it.

Many doctors, a handful of economists, and some conservative politicians have sought to redefine Medicare as a “safety net” for the nation’s most vulnerable rather than as a scheme for all.

Health economist Yuting Zhang argues free healthcare and universal healthcare are different things.

The taxes the government collects for Medicare are already nowhere near enough to support the system, she says, and the country either needs to have some tough conversations about how it will find additional funds, or accept reasonable fees for those who can afford them.

“There’s always a trade-off… You have limited resources, you have to think about how to use them effectively and efficiently.”

The original promise of Medicare has been “undermined by decades of neglect”, the Australian Medical Association’s Danielle McMullen says, and most Australians now accept they need to contribute to their own care.

She says freezes to Medicare rebates – which were overseen by both parties between 2013 and 2017 and meant the payments didn’t even keep up with inflation – were the last straw. Since then, many doctors have been dipping into their own pockets to help those in need.

Both the Labor Party and the Liberal-National coalition accept there is a crisis, but blame each other for it.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton says his government will invest A$9bn in health, including funds for extra subsidised mental health appointments and for regional universities training key workers.

“Health has become another victim of Labor’s cost of living crisis… we know it has literally never been harder or more expensive to see a GP than it is right now,” health spokesperson Anne Ruston told the BBC in a statement.

On the other side, Albanese – whipping out his Medicare card almost daily – has sought to remind voters that Labor created the beloved system, while pointing out the Coalition’s previously mixed support of the universal scheme and the spending cuts Dutton proposed as Health Minister a decade ago.

“At this election, this little card here, your Medicare card, is what is at stake,” Albanese has said.

His government has started fixing things already, he argues, and has pledged an extra A$8.5bn for training more GPs, building additional public clinics, and subsidising more medicines.

But the headline of their rescue packages is an increase to Medicare rebates and bigger bonuses for doctors who bulk bill.

Proposed by Labor, then matched by the Coalition, the changes will make it possible for 9 out of 10 Australians to see a GP for free, the parties claim.

One Tasmanian doctor tells the BBC it is just a “good election sound bite”. He and many other clinicians say the extra money is still not enough, particularly for the longer consults more and more patients are seeking for complex issues.

Labor has little patience for those criticisms, citing research which they claim shows their proposal will leave the bulk of doctors better off and accusing them of wanting investment “without strings attached”.

But many of the patients the BBC spoke to are sceptical either parties’ proposals will make a huge difference.

There’s far more they need to be doing, they say, rattling off a wish list: more work on training and retaining rural doctors; effective regulation of private fees and more investment in public specialist clinics; universal bulk billing of children for all medical and dental expenses; more funding for allied health and prevention.

Experts like Mr Breadon say, above all else, the way Medicare pays clinicians needs to be overhauled to keep healthcare access genuinely universal.

That is, the government needs to stop paying doctors a set amount per appointment, and give them a budget based on how large and sick the populations they serve are – that is something several recent reviews have said.

And the longer governments wait to invest in these reforms, the more they’re going to cost.

“The stars may be aligning now… It is time for these changes, and delaying them would be really dangerous,” Mr Breadon says.

In Streaky Bay though, locals like Ms Williams wonder if it’s too late. Things are already dangerous here.

“Maybe that’s the cynic in me,” she says, shaking her head.

“The definition of universal is everyone gets the same, but we know that’s not true already.”

Actor Jack Lowden has said he likes the idea of “breaking down barriers” by being a ginger Mr Darcy in a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

The 34-year-old joked on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that “it is one of the great last barriers to break down”.

In a wide-ranging interview alongside fellow British actor Martin Freeman, 53, he discussed being trained by an ex-MI6 officer and their upcoming West End play.

On his role in Netflix’s six-part adaptation of Austen’s classic novel, Lowden said he might draw on inspiration from some actors who have previously played the iconic Mr Darcy role.

“I quite like the idea of being a ginger Darcy,” he told the BBC. “I think that is really breaking down barriers – one of the great last barriers to be broken down.”

Sitting next to Lowden a smiling Freeman said he “agreed”.

Lowden continued: “I quite like the idea of me coming along and doing something else with it.

“Or just copying one of them because some of the guys who played it are amongst the best. Matthew Macfadyen, to me, is one of the best actors on the planet. So if I just try copy him – maybe that’s alright?”

“But ginger?” Freeman asked.

“Ginger”, Lowden replied. “Yep, change it up.”

Lowden and Freeman are set to take part in David Ireland’s West End theatre show the Fifth Step which is due to open at Soho Place Theatre on 12 May.

The pair told the programme they had not met before they agreed to play an alcoholic and his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor.

Lowden said he enjoyed the dark humour of the show, saying that, while it may be “corny”, laughter was “the best medicine” and a way of “self-healing”.

Asked about the Bafta-nominated series Slow Horses, which focuses on intelligence agents who have been discarded by MI5, Lowden talked about being trained in spycraft.

“We did a day with an ex-MI6 officer who was helping us to train in the art of surveillance and counter-surveillance. Walking along and following a mark.

“He gave us a lecture for a bit and then said ‘right we are going to go outside and do this’. But then he pulled the shutters up on the window and saw that it was raining and he went ‘oh no maybe we shouldn’t’.

“So MI6 don’t operate a lot in the rain,” Lowden – who has been touted as a possibility for the new James Bond – said. “Maybe it’s cause they’re abroad a lot.”

Freeman then shared his own experiences about being “tailed occasionally”.

“Just by people, sometimes follow you around. And they think you don’t know and of course you do know.”

Freeman said those experiences are “less scary and more annoying”.

“It’s annoying because they think you don’t know they are doing it. So occasionally I do just turn round and go ‘look, what do you want?’

“I try to be reasonable with people and say ‘look I am not a prop’.”

At a rally in London, Ontario, on Friday, the crowd booed as Mark Carney delivered his core campaign line about the existential threat Canada faces from its neighbour.

“President Trump is trying to break us so that America could own us,” the Liberal leader warned.

“Never,” supporters shouted back. Many waved Canadian flags taped to ice hockey sticks.

Similar levels of passion were also on display at the union hall where Pierre Poilievre greeted enthusiastic supporters in the Toronto area earlier in the week.

The Conservative leader has drawn large crowds to rallies across the country, where “Bring it Home” is a call to arms: both to vote for a change of government and a nod to the wave of Canadian patriotism in the face of US tariff threats.

In the final hours of a 36-day campaign, Donald Trump’s shadow looms over everything. The winner of Monday’s election is likely to be the party able to convince voters they have a plan for how to deal with the US president.

National polls suggest the Liberals have maintained a narrow lead entering last stretch.

Still, Trump is not the only factor at play – he was only mentioned once in Poilievre’s stump speech.

The Conservative leader has focused more on voters disaffected by what he calls a “Lost Liberal decade”, promising change from a government he blames for the housing shortage and a sluggish economy, and for mishandling social issues like crime and the fentanyl crisis.

His pitch resonates with voters like Eric and Carri Gionet, from Barrie, Ontario. They have two daughters in their mid-20s and said they were attending their first ever political rally.

“We’re pretty financially secure – but I worry about them,” said Eric Gionet. While he and his wife could buy their first home while young, he said, “there’s no prospect” their children will be able to do the same.

“I’m excited to be here,” said Carri Gionet. “I’m hopeful.”

Tapping into voter frustration has helped opposition parties sweep governments from power in democracies around the world. Canada seemed almost certain to follow suit.

Last year, the Conservatives held a 20-point lead in national polls over the governing Liberals for months. Poilievre’s future as the country’s next prime minister seemed baked in.

Then a series of shockwaves came in quick succession at the start of 2025, upending the political landscape: Justin Trudeau’s resignation, Carney’s subsequent rise to Liberal leader and prime minister; and the return of Trump to the White House with the threats and tariffs that followed.

By the time the election was called in mid-March, Carney’s Liberals were polling neck-and-neck with the Conservatives, and by early April they had pulled slightly ahead, national surveys suggest.

It has been a stunning reversal of fortunes. Seemingly dead and buried, the Liberals now believe they could win a fourth successive election, and even a majority in Parliament.

Carney is pitching himself as the man most ready to meet this critical moment – a steady central banker who helped shepherd Canada’s economy through the 2008 financial crisis and later, the UK through Brexit.

For Conservative voter Gwendolyn Slover, 69, from Summerside in the province of Prince Edward Island, his appeal is “baffling”.

“Many people think Mark Carney is some kind of Messiah,” she said. “It’s the same party, he’s one person. And he’s not going to change anything.”

For Carney’s supporters, they see a strong CV and a poise that has calmed their anxieties over Trump’s threats of steep tariffs and repeated suggestions the country should become the 51st US state – though the president has been commenting less frequently on Canada during the campaign.

“I’m very impressed by the stability and the serious thought process of Mark Carney,” said Mike Brennan from Kitchener, Ontario, as he stood in line to meet the Liberal leader at a coffee shop in Cambridge, about an hour outside Toronto.

Mr Brennan is a “lifelong Liberal” who did not initially plan to vote for the party in this election because of his dislike for Trudeau.

The departure of former prime minister Trudeau, who had grown increasingly unpopular over his decade in power, released “a massive pressure valve”, said Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, a non-profit public opinion research organisation.

“All of these angry Liberals who are either parking their votes with the [left-wing] NDP or parking their votes with the Conservatives start re-coalescing,” she said.

Then more disaffected Liberals and other progressive voters began to migrate towards Carney’s Liberals, driven by Trump, this election’s “main character”, Ms Kurl said.

“The threats, the annexation talk, all of that has been a huge motivator for left of centre voters.”

It has worked to Carney’s advantage, with Trump’s tariffs threats giving the political neophyte – he is the first prime minister never to have held elected public office – the chance to publicly audition to keep his job during the campaign.

Trump’s late-March announcement of global levies on foreign automobile imports allowed Carney to step away from the trail and take on the prime minister’s mantle, setting up a call with the president and meeting US Cabinet ministers.

He’s never been tested in a gruelling federal election campaign, with its relentless travel, high-pressure demands for retail politics and daily media scrutiny. Yet on the campaign trail, and in the high-stakes debate with party leaders, he is considered to have performed well.

Poilievre, in contrast, is a veteran politician and polished performer. But on the shifting political ground, Conservatives appeared to struggle to find their footing, pivoting their message from Canada being broken to “Canada First”.

Poilievre had to fend off criticism from political rivals that he is “Trump lite”, with his combative style, his vows to end “woke ideology”, and willingness to take on the “global elite”.

“I have a completely different story from Donald Trump,” he has said.

More on the Canadian election:

• Canada’s top candidates talk up fossil fuels as climate slips down agenda
• Patriotism surges in Quebec as Trump rattles Canada
• ‘My home is worth millions – but young people are priced out of this city’
• A simple guide to Canada’s federal election

Canadians have historically voted in either Conservative or Liberal governments, but smaller parties – like the NDP or the Bloc Québécois, a sovereigntist party that only runs candidates in the province of Quebec – have in the past formed Official Opposition.

In this campaign, both are languishing and face the possibility of losing a number of seats in the House of Commons as anxious voters turn towards the two main political parties.

If the Liberals and Conservatives both succeed in getting over 38% of the vote share nationally, as polls suggest is likely, it would be the first time that has happened since 1975.

The message from the NDP – which helped prop up the minority Liberals in the last government – in the final days of campaigning has been to vote strategically.

“You can make the difference between Mark Carney getting a super majority or sending enough New Democrats to Ottawa so we can fight to defend the things you care about,” leader Jagmeet Singh said earlier this week.

The campaign has also highlighted festering divides along regional lines.

With much of the campaign dominated by the US-Canada relationship and the trade war, many issues – climate, immigration, indigenous reconciliation – have been on the backburner.

Even when the campaigns have focused on other policies, the discussion has centred on the country’s economic future.

Both frontrunners agree in broad strokes on the priorities: the need to pivot away from dependence on the US; the development of oil, gas and mining sectors; protection for workers affected by tariffs; and increased defence spending.

But they disagree on who is best to lead Canada forward, especially when so much is at stake.

“It’s time for experience, not experiments,” Carney told his supporters in London.

Poilievre closing message was: “We can choose change on Monday. We can take back control of our lives and build a bright future.”

In Iran, mourning is turning to anger after a huge blast at its largest commercial port killed at least 40 people and injured more than 1,000.

The explosion happened on Saturday morning at Shahid Rajaee port. Many people rushed to hospitals up and down the country to give blood.

A day later, fires are still blazing as a thick black cloud of toxic chemicals hangs over the surrounding area.

People in nearby towns and cities have been told by the health ministry to stay indoors “until further notice” and wear more protective clothes.

In the nearby southern city of Bandar Abbas, home to the Iranian Navy’s main base, all schools and offices were ordered to shut on Sunday to allow authorities to focus on the emergency effort, state TV said.

A local festival not far from Shahid Rajee Port that was supposed to be a celebration spontaneously turned into a solemn occasion for remembering the dead and praying for the injured.

Authorities declared a day of national mourning on Monday, with an additional two days of mourning in Hormozgan province.

It is a reminder that while Iran has been rocked physically by the blast – residents up to 50km (31 miles) away reported feeling the effects – the country is now being rocked by a growing blame game too.

Ambrey Intelligence, a private maritime risk consultancy, said it believed that intense fires that could be seen spreading between containers before the explosion were a result of “improper handling of a shipment of solid fuel intended for use in Iranian ballistic missiles”.

The firm said it believed the affected containers had contained solid fuel destined for ballistic missiles, and was aware that an Iran-flagged ship “discharged a shipment of sodium perchlorate rocket fuel at the port in March 2025”.

The New York Times quoted a person with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, speaking on condition of anonymity, as saying that what exploded was sodium perchlorate – a major ingredient in solid fuel for missiles.

Some Iranians are asking whether they should believe speculation on social media which said Iran’s military and Revolutionary Guard were storing rocket fuel that they had recently imported from China at the port – a claim which has been denied by an army spokesman.

Many in Iran are blaming the authorities for incompetence and worse, asking: How could so much inflammable material apparently be left on the port without due care?

That is a question that the Iranian regime will need to address. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian visited the scene of the explosion on Sunday, saying: “We have come to see first-hand if there is anything or any issue that the government can follow up on.”

Pezeshkian had previously ordered an investigation into the cause of the blast, sending the interior minister to the region to lead it.

Defence ministry spokesman Reza Talaei-Nik later told state TV that “there has been no imported or exported cargo for military fuel or military use in the area”.

The port’s customs office said in a statement carried by state television that the explosion probably resulted from a fire that broke out at the hazardous and chemical materials’ storage depot.

There is also the question of whether Iran’s economy may be affected, given the port handles nearly 80% of the country’s imports.

On Saturday, authorities were warning of possible food shortages in the near term with the port out of action for some time.

A day later, they were playing that down, saying that the explosion only affected a part of the port and that the rest is functioning normally.

An image from Iran’s Tasnim news agency on Sunday showed a helicopter flying through a sky blackened by smoke to drop water on the disaster-struck area, AFP reported.

Others showed firefighters working among toppled and blackened cargo containers, and carrying out the body of a victim. The authorities have closed off roads leading to the site.

The Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered that multiple specialist firefighting aircraft be sent to Iran to help deal with the aftermath of the disaster.

Beijing’s foreign ministry said in a statement to AFP on Sunday that three Chinese victims were in a “stable” condition and that it had received no further reports of casualties.

Among the condolences being sent were from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Turkey, the United Nations and Russia.

The explosion ripped through the port as Iranian and US delegations were meeting via mediators in Oman for high-level talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme, with both sides reporting progress.

Iran has said it is open to curbs on its nuclear programme in return for sanctions easing but has insisted it will not stop enriching uranium. It insists its nuclear programme is for civilian use.

The Chinese coastguard has seized a tiny sandbank in the South China Sea, state media has reported, in an escalation of a regional dispute with the Philippines.

State broadcaster CCTV released images of four officers, wearing all black and holding the Chinese flag, standing on the disputed reef of Sandy Cay in the Spratly Islands.

CCTV said China had “implemented maritime control and exercised sovereign jurisdiction” on the reef earlier in April.

Both China and the Philippines have staked claims on various islands. The Philippines said later on Sunday that it had landed on three sandbanks, releasing an image of officers holding up their national flag in a pose that mimicked the Chinese photo.

It is unclear whether one of the sandbanks the Philippines security forces landed on was also Sandy Cay.

In a statement, the National Task Force West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS) said it witnessed “the illegal presence” of a Chinese Coastguard vessel 1,000 yards (914 metres) from one of the sandbanks, as well as seven Chinese militia vessels.

“This operation reflects the unwavering dedication and commitment of the Philippine Government to uphold the country’s sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the West Philippine Sea,” the statement said.

The dispute between the two nations has been escalating, with frequent confrontations including vessels colliding and scuffles.

Sandy Cay is near a Philippine military outpost on Thitu Island, also known as Pag-asa, which Manila reportedly uses to track Chinese movements in the area.

There is no sign that China is permanently occupying the 200 sq metre island and the coastguard is reported to have left.

The White House said reports of China seizing the reef were “deeply concerning if true”.

In comments reported by the Financial Times, James Hewitt, US National Security Council spokesperson, warned that “actions like these threaten regional stability and violate international law”, adding that the White House was “consulting closely with our own partners”.

The Chinese move comes as US and Philippine forces are carrying out their annual war scenario drills – called the Balikatan exercises. China has criticised the drills as provocative.

As many as 17,000 personnel are taking part in the coming days. Missiles from the US Marine Air Defense Integrated System were fired off the coast of the northern Philippines on Sunday, the system’s second live fire test and its first deployment to the Philippines. The drills are also set to feature the US anti-ship missile system NMESIS.

The Philippines military says the drills are a rehearsal for national defence but insists they are not directed at any particular country.

“This type of training is absolutely invaluable to us,” said Third Marine Littoral Regiment Officer John Lehane.

The exercise has helped allay fears among some US allies that Donald Trump may upend the years-long military support it has provided in the region.

On a visit to Manila last month, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Washington was “doubling down” on its alliance with the country and was determined to “re-establish deterrence” against China.

There have been wrangles over territory in the South China Sea for centuries, but tension has grown in recent years.

China claims by far the largest portion of territory in an area demarcated by its so-called “nine-dash line”. The line comprises nine dashes which extends hundreds of miles south and east from its most southerly province of Hainan. Beijing has backed its expansive claims with island-building and naval patrols.

Competing claimants such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei have staked claims on islands and various zones in the sea.

• What is the South China Sea dispute?

Images of Pope Francis’s tomb at the Santa Maria Maggiore church in Rome have been released.

A single white rose was pictured lying on the stone tomb that bears the name he was known by during his pontificate, below a crucifix illuminated by a single spotlight.

The late pope was laid to rest at the church – one of four major basilicas in the Italian capital, and one he would regularly visit during his time as cardinal and pontiff – in a private ceremony following his public funeral in the Vatican on Saturday.

Thousands of mourners have been filing past the tomb since the church opened to the public on Sunday morning to pay their respects to Pope Francis, who died aged 88 on Monday.

• Why Pope Francis hasn’t been buried in the Vatican
• Who was at the funeral and where did they sit?

Among them was Rosario Correale, an Italian, who said it was “very emotional” seeing the tomb. “He really left a mark on us,” he told the Associated Press.

Polish pilgrim Maria Brzezinska felt the resting place befit the man. “I feel like it’s exactly in the way of the Pope. He was simple, and so is his place now,” she told the news agency Reuters after visiting.

Francis was particularly devoted to the Virgin Mary, and Santa Maria Maggiore was the first church to be dedicated to her when it was built in the 4th Century.

The basilica sits near the Colosseum, a stone’s throw from the city’s endlessly bustling and chaotic central Termini station – well beyond the limits of the Vatican, where popes are traditionally entombed.

But it was one the South American pontiff had a long-held affinity for.

Its senior priest previously told an Italian newspaper that Pope Francis had said he wished to be laid to rest there in 2022, citing inspiration from the Virgin Mary.

“I thought it was amazing that he wanted to be buried here in this basilica,” Amaya Morris, another pilgrim, told AP.

“Out of all of the [churches], he chose this one. So I thought that was really amazing. It’s really humbling to be able to be here.”

Francis’s funeral was attended by heads of state, heads of government and monarchs from around the world – as well as hundreds of thousands of Catholics who lined the streets leading to the Vatican to pay their respects.

Hymns played out on giant speakers, occasionally drowned out by the sound of helicopters flying overhead, before 91-year-old Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re gave a homily on the pope’s legacy.

The cardinal emphasised that Pope Francis had repeatedly urged the world to “build bridges, not walls”.

The funeral was also the venue for a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, which the latter said afterwards had the “potential to become historic”.

Trump later questioned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to end the now three-year war in Ukraine, a conflict which Pope Francis had regularly called for peace during his papacy.

Following the public funeral, Pope Francis’s coffin was carried through Rome in a slow procession.

Authorities said 140,000 people had lined the streets, clapping and waving as the hearse – a repurposed white popemobile – crossed the Tiber river and drove past some of Rome’s most recognisable sights: the Colosseum, the Forum and the Altare della Patria national monument on Piazza Venezia.

After a period of mourning, attention will soon turn to the selection of the next pope.

A date has not yet been set but it is thought it could start as early as 5 or 6 May, with 135 cardinals set to attend, making it the largest conclave in modern history.

The morning after the heist, burglar Yunice Abbas went home to catch up on some sleep.

When he woke up, his wife was glued to the TV. The headline news of the day was that American reality TV star Kim Kardashian, 35, had been tied up and robbed at gunpoint in a luxury Paris apartment.

All her jewellery had been taken for a sum of about $10m (£7.5m) – including the engagement ring her then-husband and rapper Kanye West gifted her, which alone was worth $4m (£3m).

Yunice Abbas’ wife glared at him. “This has you written all over it,” she grumbled.

She was right. The 62-year-old had dabbled in crime his whole life, from petty offences to bank heists.

The Kardashian robbery, he later wrote in a memoir, was going to be his last job before retirement.

But a series of blunders meant the heist was doomed from the start and in early 2017 – three months after the robbery – Abbas and several of his alleged accomplices were arrested.

Ten of them will now be appearing in court in Paris in a trial set to last just under three weeks.

Out of those, five are accused of taking part in the heist, and six are accused of being accessories to the crime.

Most of them were born in the 1950s, leading French media to dub them the “grandpa robbers”.

Abbas and a 68-year-old man, Aomar Ait Khedache, have confessed; the others have not.

One has since passed away, and another, aged 81, will be excused as he is suffering from advanced dementia.

By the time the trial starts, almost nine years will have gone by since the heist.

On the night between 2 and 3 October 2016, Abbas and four accomplices allegedly staked out Kardashian’s discreet suite in Hotel de Pourtalès, in the glitzy Madeleine neighbourhood in Paris, not far from the Opéra and Place Vendome.

At around 03:00 local time, they burst into the hotel’s entrance hall, dressed as policemen and wielding a gun.

They threatened and handcuffed Abderrahmane Ouatiki, an Algerian PhD student who regularly took up shifts as night receptionist, and marched him up to Kardashian’s room.

She was resting on her bed, tired from days of attending Paris Fashion Week events, when she heard stomping up the stairs.

She called out for her sister Kourtney and her stylist Stephanie, but when they didn’t answer she panicked.

“I knew someone was there to get me,” she recalled in an interview with US interviewer David Letterman years later. “You just feel it.”

Kim dialled 911 but the number, of course, didn’t work outside of the US. As she was calling her then-security guard Pascal Duvier – who had accompanied her sister to a club – the men burst in, pushed her on the bed and started shouting.

“They kept on saying: the ring, the ring! And I was so startled that it didn’t compute for a minute,” she told Letterman.

The language barrier meant Ouatiki had to act as an interpreter.

They grabbed the ring and several other jewels, as well as 1000 euros in cash. One of the men grabbed her and pulled her towards him.

Because she was wearing a robe with nothing underneath, she thought he was going to assault her, Kim later told Letterman, wiping tears away.

But instead – using the technique of saucissonnage, or the practice of tying them up like a saucisson, a salami – the man bound her with zip ties and duct tape, and left her in the bathroom.

Then, he and the rest of the burglars fled on bikes and on foot. Kim freed herself of her restraints, and shortly after her security guard turned up.

Traumatised, Kim gave a statement to French police in the early hours of the morning and flew back to the US by dawn.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when Abbas caught a glimpse of the TV screen his wife was watching, that he understood who their victim was.

“There were breaking news alerts saying Kim Kardashian had been robbed at gunpoint – that’s how important it was,” says LA-based entertainment journalist KJ Matthews.

“We were so fascinated with her and her family and their rise to fame… When the heist happened we were so surprised. How could burglars have gotten so close to her?” Matthews says.

But while mistakes were made in terms of Kardashian’s security, serious errors were made on the burglars’ side, too.

“They didn’t take into account the progress made by police techniques, which can now find micro traces of DNA anywhere,” said Patricia Tourancheau, a crime reporter and the author of “Kim and the grandpa robbers” – a thorough account of the heist and of the lives of its perpetrators.

“When they dressed up as police they thought ‘that’s it, nobody will be able to recognise us’,” she adds.

But in 2016 Paris was still reeling from the terrorist attacks of the previous year, and there were a huge number of CCTV cameras all round the city, meaning police were able to spot the thieves and see them make off with the jewels.

Other details of this story suggest that the thieves’ planning was rather haphazard. When fleeing the scene on a bike, Abbas fell, dropping a bag of jewels.

The next day, a passer-by found a diamond-encrusted necklace and wore it all day at the office before watching the news and realising where it had come from.

Police arrested Abbas and several other people in January 2017 and later confirmed that they had been under surveillance for several weeks, after DNA traces left at the scene provided a match with Aomar Ait Khedache, also known as “Omar the Old”.

French media published a photo from the police stakeout, which shows several of the men having coffee and chatting at a Parisian café that winter, just before their arrest.

The question that remains – and which will undoubtedly be explored doing the trial – is just how the gang got wind of Kardashian’s schedule.

Court documents seen by the BBC show that both Khedache and Abbas stated that all the information they needed was posted online by Kardashian herself, whose very career was built on sharing details about her life and movements.

But how did the gang know that on the night of 2 October Kardashian would be alone in her room, without her security guard?

Court documents indicate police believe Gary Madar, whose brother Michael’s firm had provided transportation and taxis to the Kardashians for years, was an accessory to the heist and that he had fed information to the gang about Kim’s whereabouts.

Mr Madar was arrested in January 2017. His lawyer Arthur Vercken vehemently pushed back against the accusations, telling the BBC that “since the start the case was built on assumptions, theses, theories – but no proof [of Madar’s involvement] was ever found”.

He added that although the Madar brothers exchanged texts about the Kardashians during Fashion Week it was just because they were “bored” and that when the heist took place Gary was asleep.

Gary’s brother, Michael, is not a defendant.

“Five men did this. You don’t think one of them was keeping an eye on who was coming and going from her hotel?” he said, suggesting that Mr Madar had only been arrested “to prove that the French justice system works”.

The trial will also attempt to determine where the jewels ended up.

Police tracking of the gang’s phones showed that soon after the heist Omar the Old travelled from Paris to Antwerp in Belgium, where 50% of the world’s polished diamonds and 80% of rough diamonds are sold, according to the Diamond Investment Office.

Many jewels were reportedly melted or broken up and sold. Abbas got 75,000 euro (£64,000); others far less.

As for Kim Kardashian’s engagement ring, Omar the Old said the gang was too scared to sell it on as it would be too easily traceable. It has never been found.

Kim Kardashian was undoubtedly spooked by the event, which marked the start of her social media hiatus.

In an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, she tearfully recalled the night of the heist and said had been scared for her life; later she also said the robbery had made her a “less materialistic person”.

Soon after the incident her sister Khloe told The Ellen DeGeneres that, for safety reasons, the Kardashian family were making some changes to how freely they posted on social media.

“The biggest change was her security detail,” KJ Matthews told the BBC.

Patricia Tourancheau, the author of the book about the heist, said she was “fascinated” by the “clash between these old-style burglars from the Parisian banlieue and this global social media star”.

“They fled on bikes and she flies around on private jets,” she laughed.

“These are a group of elderly down-and-out thieves, they’re always broke, they’re forever involved in convoluted plans… and they’re facing a huge celebrity and they don’t even know who she is.”

The gang was not “elite” as it was suggested in the early days, she added.

“This isn’t the creme de la creme of French banditry. They’re a bit of a bunch of losers, really. They’re the same kind of people who in the 60s and 70s would burglar banks or post offices and who then rebranded to drug trafficking and then moved on to jewels because it was easier,” she said.

Around mid-May, Kim will face the suspects for the first time in years when she takes the stand as a witness.

Cameras are not allowed in French courts but her arrival to the tribunal on Ile de la Cité alone will inevitably spark the same media frenzy that has accompanied her for over a decade.

In his memoir, Abbas expressed the hope the victim’s status and the global resonance of the case would not influence judges unduly.

However, he also said that on the last day of the trial he would bring a duffle bag with his belongings, ready to be sent to jail.

“The problem with the past,” he wrote, “is that it sticks with you as long as you live”.

Drag star Bianca Castro-Arabejo, who performed as Jiggly Caliente, has died aged 44, her family has said.

The performer, who found fame on the fourth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, had part of her leg amputated on Thursday after suffering a “severe infection”.

Caliente had served as a judge on the show’s Philippines spin-off, and also appeared in the hit US TV series Pose.

Her family wrote in a statement on Instagram: “It is with profound sorrow that we announce the passing of Bianca Castro-Arabejo, known to the world and cherished by many as Jiggly Caliente.”

They said she died in the early hours of Sunday morning “surrounded by her loving family and close friends”.

Caliente’s family paid tribute to her “infectious energy, fierce wit, and unwavering authenticity”, adding that she left a legacy of “love, courage and light”.

“She touched countless lives through her artistry, activism, and the genuine connection she fostered with fans around the world,” they said.

“Though her physical presence is gone, the joy she shared and the space she helped create for so many will remain forever.”

Fellow drag queens have left tributes to the Filipino-American performer online.

Laganja Estranja, who appeared on the sixth season of the US reality TV programme, said Caliente was a “kind, caring soul”.

RuPaul’s Drag Race UK star Baga Chipz described Caliente as “one of the kindest, sweetest souls I’ve ever met”.

Cheryl The Queen, who also competed in the UK version of the show, wrote: “We will love you forever and always Jiggly.”

Tia Kofi, who won Drag Race UK versus the World, said Caliente was “someone I came to for advice, I looked up to, who gave me support when it was most needed and, I cannot lie, was always there for a good gossip!”

Drag Race judge Michelle Visage in her tribute said “the laughter was endless, our talks were special, your energy was contagious”.

“You were and remain so very loved. This world has lost an angel and we want you to soar high,” she added.

Born in the Philippines in 1980, Caliente moved to the Queens neighbourhood of New York City with her family when she was a child.

She quickly became a fan favourite on RuPaul’s Drag Race for her sense of humour and memorable interactions with other queens, when she appeared on the show in 2012.

In one particularly memorable moment, while arguing with Caliente, fellow contestant Lashauwn Beyond coined the catchphrase “this is not RuPaul’s Best Friend Race”, which has been frequently repeated in later series.

Caliente went on to embark on an acting career, appearing in episodes of sitcoms Broad City and Search Party.

She played the role of Veronica in the TV drama Pose, which chronicled New York’s LGBT ball culture in the 1980s and 90s.

Caliente, who publicly came out as transgender in 2016, later returned to the Drag Race universe, competing in the sixth series of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars in 2021 and judging the spin-off show Drag Race Philippines for three series.

Prior to her death, the drag performer’s family had said on Thursday that she had suffered a “serious health setback” which led to the loss of “most of her right leg”.

From an office perched on the scalloped edge of the continent, Victoria Bradley jokes that she has the most beautiful doctor’s practice in Australia.

Outside her window, farmland rolls into rocky coastline, hemming a glasslike bay striped with turquoise and populated by showboating dolphins.

Home to about 3,000 people, a few shops, two roundabouts and a tiny hospital, Streaky Bay is an idyllic beach town.

For Dr Bradley, though, it is anything but. The area’s sole, permanent doctor, she spent years essentially on call 24/7.

Running the hospital and the general practitioner (GP) clinic, life was a never-ending game of catch up. She’d do rounds at the wards before, after and in between regular appointments. Even on good days, lunch breaks were often a pipe dream. On bad days, a hospital emergency would blow up her already punishing schedule.

Burnt out, two years ago she quit – and the thread holding together the remnants of the town’s healthcare system snapped.

Streaky Bay is at the forefront of a national crisis: inadequate government funding is exacerbating a shortage of critical healthcare workers like Dr Bradley; wait times are ballooning; doctors are beginning to write their own rules on fees, and costs to patients are skyrocketing.

A once-revered universal healthcare system is crumbling at every level, sometimes barely getting by on the sheer willpower of doctors and local communities.

As a result, more and more Australians, regardless of where they live, are delaying or going without the care they need.

Health has become a defining issue for voters ahead of the nation’s election on 3 May, with both of Australia’s major parties promising billions of dollars in additional funding.

But experts say the solutions being offered up are band-aid fixes, while what is needed are sweeping changes to the way the system is funded – reform for which there has so far been a lack of political will.

Australians tell the BBC the country is at a crossroads, and needs to decide if universal healthcare is worth saving.

Healthcare was the last thing on Renee Elliott’s mind when she moved to Streaky Bay – until the 40-year-old found a cancerous lump in her breast in 2019, and another one four years later.

Seeing a local GP was the least of her problems. With the expertise and treatment she needed only available in Adelaide, about 500km away, Mrs Elliott has spent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars accessing life-saving care, all while raising three boys and running a business.

Though she has since clawed back a chunk of the cost through government schemes, it made an already harrowing time that much more draining: financially, emotionally and physically.

“You’re trying to get better… but having to juggle all that as well. It was very tricky.”

When Australia’s modern health system was born four decades ago – underpinned by a public insurance scheme called Medicare – it was supposed to guarantee affordable and accessible high-quality care to people like Mrs Elliott as “a basic right”.

Health funding here is complex and shared between states and federal governments. But the scheme essentially meant Australians could present their bright green Medicare member card at a doctor’s office or hospital, and Canberra would be sent a bill. It paid through rebates funded by taxes.

Patients would either receive “bulk billed” – completely free – care, mostly through the emerging public system, or heavily subsidised treatment through a private healthcare sector offering more benefits and choice to those who wanted them.

Medicare became a national treasure almost instantly. It was hoped this set up would combine the best parts of the UK’s National Health Service and the best of the United States’ system.

Fast forward 40 years and many in the industry say we’re on track to end up with the worst of both.

There is no denying that healthcare in Australia is still miles ahead of much of the world, particularly when it comes to emergency care.

But the core of the crisis and key to this election is GP services, or primary care, largely offered by private clinics. There has historically been little need for public ones, with most GPs choosing to accept Medicare rebates as full payment.

That is increasingly uncommon though, with doctors saying those allowances haven’t kept up with the true cost of delivering care. At the same time, staff shortages, which persist despite efforts to recruit from overseas, create a scarcity that only drives up prices further.

According to government data, about 30% of patients must now pay a “gap fee” for a regular doctor’s appointment – on average A$40 (£19.25; $25.55) out of pocket.

But experts suspect the true figure is higher: it’s skewed by seniors and children, who tend to visit doctors more often and still enjoy mostly bulk-billed appointments. Plus there’s a growing cohort of patients not captured by statistics, who simply don’t go to the doctor because of escalating fees.

Brisbane electrician Callum Bailey is one of them.

“Mum or my partner will pester and pester and pester… [but] I’m such a big ‘I’ll just suffer in silence’ person because it’s very expensive.”

And every dollar counts right now, the 25-year-old says: “At my age, I probably should be in my prime looking for housing… [but] even grocery shopping is nuts.

“[I] just can’t keep up.”

This is a tale James Gillespie kept hearing.

So his startup Cleanbill began asking the question: if the average Australian adult walked into a GP clinic, could they get a free, standard appointment?

This year, they called almost all of the nation’s estimated 7,000 GP clinics – only a fifth of them would bulk bill a new adult patient. In the entire state of Tasmania, for example, they couldn’t find a single one.

The results resonate with many Australians, he says: “It really brought it home to them that, ‘Okay, it’s not just us. This is happening nationwide’.”

And that’s just primary care.

Public specialists are so rare and so overwhelmed – with wait times often far beyond safe levels – that most patients are funnelled toward exorbitantly expensive private care. The same goes for a lot of non-emergency hospital treatments or dental work.

There are currently no caps on how much private specialists, dentists or hospitals can charge and neither private health insurance nor slim Medicare rebates reliably offer substantial relief.

The BBC spoke to people across the country who say the increasing cost of healthcare had left them relying on charities for food, avoiding dental care for almost a decade, or emptying their retirement savings to fund treatment.

Others are borrowing from their parents, taking out pay-day loans to buy medication, remortgaging their houses, or selling their possessions.

Kimberley Grima regularly lies awake at night, calculating which of her three children – who, like her, all have chronic illnesses – can see their specialists. Her own overdue health checks and tests are barely an afterthought.

“They’re decisions that you really don’t want to have to make,” the Aboriginal woman from New South Wales tells the BBC.

“But when push comes to shove and you haven’t got the money… you’ve got no other option. It’s heart-breaking.”

Another woman tells the BBC that had she been able to afford timely appointments, her multiple sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disease, would have been identified, and slowed, quicker.

“I was so disabled by the time I got a diagnosis,” she says.

The people missing out tend to be the ones who need it the most, experts say.

“We have much more care in healthier, wealthier parts of Australia than in poorer, sicker parts of Australia,” Peter Breadon, from the Grattan Institute think tank says.

All of this creates a vicious cycle which feeds even more pressure back into an overwhelmed system, while entrenching disadvantage and fuelling distrust.

Every single one of those issues is more acute in the regions.

Streaky Bay has long farewelled the concept of affordable healthcare, fighting instead to preserve access to any at all.

It’s why Dr Bradley lasted only three months after quitting before “guilt” drove her back to the practice.

“There’s a connection that goes beyond just being the GP… You are part of the community.

“I felt that I’d let [them] down. Which was why I couldn’t just let go.”

She came back to a far more sustainable three-day week in the GP clinic, with Streaky Bay forced to wage a bidding war with other desperate regions for pricey, fly-in-fly-out doctors to fill in the gaps.

It’s yet another line on the tab for a town which has already invested so much of its own money into propping up a healthcare system supposed to be funded by state and private investment.

“We don’t want a gold service, but what we want is an equitable service,” says Penny Williams, who helps run the community body which owns the GP practice.

When the clinic was on the verge of closure, the town desperately rallied to buy it. When it was struggling again, the local council diverted funding from other areas to top up its coffers. And even still most standard patients – unless they are seniors or children – fork out about A$50 per appointment.

It means locals are paying for their care three times over, Ms Williams says: through their Medicare taxes, council rates, and then out-of-pocket gap fees.

“No-one would say this is the Australia that we want, surely,” Elizabeth Deveny, from the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, tells the BBC.

Like many wealthy countries, the nation is struggling to cope with a growing population which is, on average, getting older and sicker.

There’s a small but increasing cohort which says it is time to let go of the notion of universal healthcare, as we’ve known it.

Many doctors, a handful of economists, and some conservative politicians have sought to redefine Medicare as a “safety net” for the nation’s most vulnerable rather than as a scheme for all.

Health economist Yuting Zhang argues free healthcare and universal healthcare are different things.

The taxes the government collects for Medicare are already nowhere near enough to support the system, she says, and the country either needs to have some tough conversations about how it will find additional funds, or accept reasonable fees for those who can afford them.

“There’s always a trade-off… You have limited resources, you have to think about how to use them effectively and efficiently.”

The original promise of Medicare has been “undermined by decades of neglect”, the Australian Medical Association’s Danielle McMullen says, and most Australians now accept they need to contribute to their own care.

She says freezes to Medicare rebates – which were overseen by both parties between 2013 and 2017 and meant the payments didn’t even keep up with inflation – were the last straw. Since then, many doctors have been dipping into their own pockets to help those in need.

Both the Labor Party and the Liberal-National coalition accept there is a crisis, but blame each other for it.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton says his government will invest A$9bn in health, including funds for extra subsidised mental health appointments and for regional universities training key workers.

“Health has become another victim of Labor’s cost of living crisis… we know it has literally never been harder or more expensive to see a GP than it is right now,” health spokesperson Anne Ruston told the BBC in a statement.

On the other side, Albanese – whipping out his Medicare card almost daily – has sought to remind voters that Labor created the beloved system, while pointing out the Coalition’s previously mixed support of the universal scheme and the spending cuts Dutton proposed as Health Minister a decade ago.

“At this election, this little card here, your Medicare card, is what is at stake,” Albanese has said.

His government has started fixing things already, he argues, and has pledged an extra A$8.5bn for training more GPs, building additional public clinics, and subsidising more medicines.

But the headline of their rescue packages is an increase to Medicare rebates and bigger bonuses for doctors who bulk bill.

Proposed by Labor, then matched by the Coalition, the changes will make it possible for 9 out of 10 Australians to see a GP for free, the parties claim.

One Tasmanian doctor tells the BBC it is just a “good election sound bite”. He and many other clinicians say the extra money is still not enough, particularly for the longer consults more and more patients are seeking for complex issues.

Labor has little patience for those criticisms, citing research which they claim shows their proposal will leave the bulk of doctors better off and accusing them of wanting investment “without strings attached”.

But many of the patients the BBC spoke to are sceptical either parties’ proposals will make a huge difference.

There’s far more they need to be doing, they say, rattling off a wish list: more work on training and retaining rural doctors; effective regulation of private fees and more investment in public specialist clinics; universal bulk billing of children for all medical and dental expenses; more funding for allied health and prevention.

Experts like Mr Breadon say, above all else, the way Medicare pays clinicians needs to be overhauled to keep healthcare access genuinely universal.

That is, the government needs to stop paying doctors a set amount per appointment, and give them a budget based on how large and sick the populations they serve are – that is something several recent reviews have said.

And the longer governments wait to invest in these reforms, the more they’re going to cost.

“The stars may be aligning now… It is time for these changes, and delaying them would be really dangerous,” Mr Breadon says.

In Streaky Bay though, locals like Ms Williams wonder if it’s too late. Things are already dangerous here.

“Maybe that’s the cynic in me,” she says, shaking her head.

“The definition of universal is everyone gets the same, but we know that’s not true already.”

When Donald Trump made a historic return to power earlier this year, it was with the help of voters who represented a diverse coalition of backgrounds – truck drivers, veterans, business owners and more.

They represented a wide range of perspectives that helped explain Trump’s enduring appeal. But 100 days after he took office, how do his staunchest supporters feel now?

The BBC has returned to five of them. Here’s what they had to say about the promises he kept, the pledges he has yet to address, and what they want next.

Luiz Oliveira says he “can’t keep up” with the rapid policy changes Trump has made in his first 100 days.

On immigration, he has appreciated the flurry of new border restrictions and the emphasis on deportations, including sending men to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. Encounters between migrants and US border agents at the US-Mexico are now at a four-year low.

The issue is important to Luiz, a Brazilian who came to the US legally in the 1980s and now lives in Nevada. Echoing Trump, he describes the influx of migrants in recent years as an “invasion”.

Luiz, 65, says Trump is telling undocumented immigrants: “This is my house, my yard, and you’re not going to stay here.”

In other areas, however, he, is nervous about Trump’s approach.

The coffee shop owner supports Trump’s efforts to make other countries pay “their fair share” through tariffs. But he’s apprehensive about the short-term economic effects as well as how long it could take for America to see the benefits.

“It’s going to be painful [and] I don’t think it’s going to be as fast as he says.

“I’m a supporter, but at the end of the day, if this doesn’t work, I’ll say it’s a mistake – he did things too fast, scared the markets, scared the economy.”

Amanda Sue Mathis backed Trump in 2024 because she felt he was the best candidate to address America’s most pressing problems – 100 days in, she says he’s made strong progress.

“There were a lot of people who cared about the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, but I think it’s time we look at our country and get things in order before we go fix other countries’ problems,” the 34-year-old Navy veteran says.

She wants a “merit-based society” and praises Trump’s rollback of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies which had tried to boost minority representation and tackle discrimination. Critics say those policies are themselves discriminatory – and Amanda Sue believes they went too far in recent years.

She also welcomes Trump’s executive orders restricting gender care for Americans under the age of 19 and banning transgender women from female sports.

Broadly, she thinks the president is “kicking butt” and his first 100 days have made her “happier with [her] vote”.

But Amanda Sue is prepared to have her mind changed too.

“I’m not one of those people who is always for Trump,” she says. “If he messes up, I’ll be the first one to tell you.”

Trump’s promise to impose tariffs and bring manufacturing jobs back to America was a key reason why Ben Maurer, a 39-year-old freight truck driver from Pennsylvania, voted for the president.

“A lot of people thought he was bluffing on more than a few things,” he says.

So Ben’s delighted Trump hit the gas immediately, imposing tariffs on countries that range from allies like Canada and Mexico to adversaries like China.

It has not been a smooth ride, however. In a tumultuous series of announcements, the administration has raised, lowered, delayed and retracted tariffs in response to ongoing trade negotiations and stock market reaction.

Currently, the US has imposed a 10% tariffs on all imports – and China has been hit with a 145% tax on goods it exports to America.

Despite economists’ concerns about higher prices, Ben believes the businesses he delivers to will benefit in the long run.

“Trump has earned back the respect [for the US],” he says of the president’s tariff policies. “We are still the force to be reckoned with.”

Overall, he feels Trump has been more productive at the start of his second term. The president had time to prepare, he says, and it shows.

June Carey’s opinion of Donald Trump has not changed, but the first few months of Trump’s second term are not what she anticipated either.

“He’s a bit more aggressive and a little bit more erratic than I expected,” the California artist says.

But June, 70, doesn’t see the surprises as negative. She is “blown away” by the “waste” the so-called Department of Government Efficiency – led by billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk – says it has found.

Critics say his claims about savings appear to be inflated and he has faced a backlash for blunt cuts at government departments that were later reversed, including firings of key federal workers.

June says she’s uncertain about Musk himself.

“Musk is a character I don’t understand,” June says. “My feeling is that if Trump has trusted him as much as he has, than he must be a pretty good guy with the right ideas and the right goals.”

She previously told the BBC she was concerned about welfare spending and hoped Trump would push Americans to be more self-sufficient. While she is happy with the cuts so far, she hopes they leave alone social security – the monthly government payments that she and 67 million retired or disabled Americans live off.

Democrats warn those are at risk in future, but June asks: “Why would they cut [social security] when they’ve cut so many things that have saved them millions and millions of dollars?”

Jeremy Stevens has faithfully stood by Trump for years.

“[Trump is] very aggressively getting things he promised on the campaign trail done,” he says.

At his automotive repair and used car shop in Maine, Jeremy sees some customers who feel differently about Trump’s economic efforts. But the 45-year-old believes their nerves around tariffs in particular come from “a lack of understanding”.

The tariffs are part of a Trump administration vision that Jeremy believes will pay off in the long run – if critics can hold on until then.

“There definitely is a perception out there about the impact of these policies that is short-sighted,” he says.

Trump’s back-and-forth shift on tariff policies have come at a price, economists say. Markets around the world were sent spiralling. The International Monetary Fund has cut its global growth forecast because of the uncertainty, with the US hardest hit. It warned there is a 40% chance of a recession in the US.

But Jeremy is convinced time will prove Trump right.

“It’s a temporary pain,” he says. “This too shall pass.”

Greenland’s new prime minister has said the island is not a “piece of property that can be bought”, in response to Donald Trump’s repeated calls for the US to take control of the autonomous Danish territory.

On a visit to Copenhagen on Sunday, Jens-Frederik Nielsen said Greenland and Denmark must stand together in the face of “disrespectful” US rhetoric.

He was speaking alongside Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in what has been viewed as another show of unity between the two leaders.

In a further symbolic gesture, Nielsen is due to return to Greenland on Monday with Denmark’s King Frederik, who will begin his four-day royal visit to the island.

“We will never, ever be a piece of property that can be bought by anyone, and that’s the message I think is most important to understand,” said Nielsen, who became Greenland’s prime minister this April.

He added that Greenland and Denmark needed to move closer together in light of the new foreign policy situation.

Trump has caused outrage in both Denmark and Greenland for repeatedly saying he wants to bring the Arctic island under US control.

During a speech to Congress in March, Trump said that control of Greenland was essential “for national security and international security”.

He has floated the idea of buying the island and has previously refused to rule out using military force, though US Vice-President JD Vance said last month: “We do not think that military force is ever going to be necessary.”

Despite their criticism of Trump’s words, both Nielsen and Frederiksen on Sunday said they would be willing to meet the US president for talks.

Nielsen also reiterated that Greenland was prepared to deepen ties with the US, saying: “We are ready for a strong partnership and more development, but we want respect.”

Nielsen’s visit to Denmark follows Frederiksen’s own trip to Greenland earlier this month.

“You can’t annex other countries,” was her message for the US president at the time.

It followed Vance’s whirlwind visit to the territory, widely criticised in both Denmark and Greenland, in which he reiterated Trump’s ambitions and claimed Copenhagen had “not done a good job” for Greenlanders.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, has been controlled by Denmark for about 300 years. The island governs its own domestic affairs, but foreign and defence policy decisions are made in Copenhagen.

The US has long had a security interest in the island. It has had a military base there since World War Two, and Trump may also have an interest in the rare earth minerals that could be mined.

Polls show that the vast majority of Greenlanders want to become independent from Denmark but do not wish to become part of the US.

Formed in March, Greenland’s new coalition government is led by Nielsen’s centre-right Democrats party, which favours a gradual approach to independence.

Israel carried out an air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sunday, after ordering an evacuation of a building that it said was being used by the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah.

The attack occurred despite a ceasefire that came into force five months ago which put an end to the conflict between Israel and the military group.

Israel said that it had targeted a Hezbollah store of “precision-guided missiles” that “poses a threat to the State of Israel and its civilians”.

The Lebanese presidency condemned the strike and called on the US and France – who brokered the ceasefire in November – to press Israel to cease its attacks on the country.

The attack marks the first time in almost a month that Israel has struck Beirut’s southern suburbs – called Dahieh – where Hezbollah is based.

This will put further pressure on the ceasefire. Despite the deal, Israel has struck targets it says are linked to Hezbollah almost every day. The Israeli government has said that it will respond to any perceived threats from Hezbollah.

Western officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told the BBC that the militant group has been largely compliant with the truce, while accusing Israel of multiple violations that include air strikes and drone surveillance.

Live footage streamed by Reuters showed a giant plume of smoke billowing from the targeted building an hour after the Israeli army issued an evacuation order to residents of the Hadath neighbourhood.

Lebanon’s Civil Defence later said that no casualties had been recorded and rescue crews had extinguished the fire.

In a statement on X following the strike, the Lebanese Presidency said that President Joseph Aoun condemned the attack.

“The United States and France, as guarantors of the cessation of hostilities agreement, must assume their responsibilities and compel Israel to immediately cease its attacks,” it wrote.

“Israel’s continued undermining of stability will exacerbate tensions and expose the region to real threats to its security and stability.”

Israel’s government said that it had targeted a Hezbollah store of “precision-guided missiles”.

“The storage of missiles in this infrastructure site constitutes a blatant violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon, and poses a threat to the State of Israel and its civilians,” the Israeli military said in a statement.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that Israel “will not allow Hezbollah to grow stronger”.

“The Dahiyeh neighbourhood in Beirut will not serve as a safe haven for the terrorist organisation Hezbollah,” it added.

UN Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, wrote on X that the strike “generated panic and fear of renewed violence among those desperate for a return to normalcy”.

“We urge all sides to halt any actions that could further undermine the cessation of hostilities understanding,” she added.

Earlier this month an Israeli airstrike in Beirut’s southern suburbs killed four people, including a Hezbollah official.