Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has said his country deserves respect from the US and will only enter trade and security talks with President Donald Trump “on our terms”.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC as the polls were closing, Carney said he would only visit Washington when there was a “serious discussion to be had” that respected Canada’s sovereignty.

Since Trump’s re-election to the White House, the US president has repeatedly mentioned making Canada the “51st state” of America, and this was reiterated by the White House on Tuesday.

“The election does not affect President Trump’s plan to make Canada America’s cherished 51st state,” White House deputy spokesperson Anna Kelly said.

Carney, who secured a historic victory for his Liberal Party in a snap election on Monday, said such a scenario was “never, ever going to happen”.

“Frankly, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen with respect to any other [country]… whether it’s Panama or Greenland or elsewhere,” he added.

However, he said there was a “win-win possibility” for his country if it could secure a deal with the US and also build on trading relationships with the European Union and the UK.

The US is a big market for Canadian businesses with roughly 75% of Canada’s exports heading south.

Canada accounts for a much smaller 17% of US exports.

Canada is also America’s largest foreign supplier of crude oil. America’s trade deficit with Canada – expected to be $45bn in 2024 – was mostly driven by US energy demands.

Canada and US relations have been strained in recent months, driven by Trump’s talk of a “51st state” and referring to previous Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor” – the title for leaders of individual American states.

The US president has also sparked a global trade war in which Canada was one of the first countries targeted with tariffs.

Trump has partially imposed a blanket 25% tariff on various Canadian goods, along with 25% import taxes on all aluminium and steel imports, but has exempted products covered by a US, Canada and Mexico trade deal known as USMCA.

Canada has retaliated with some C$60bn ($42bn; £32bn) worth of tariffs on US goods.

Carney said talks with Trump would be “on our terms, not on their terms”.

“There is a partnership to be had, an economic and security partnership,” he said.

“It’s going to be a very different one than we’ve had in the past.”

Carney has touted his experience handling global economic crises as a way to deal with Trump on tariffs.

Before becoming PM in early March, Carney had never held political office.

He is a banker by trade, leading the Bank of Canada during the 2008 global financial crisis before becoming the first non-British person to take on the top job at the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

The PM said Canada was the “biggest client for more than 40 states” in the US.

“Remember that we supply them [the US] with vital energy. Remember that we supply their farmers with basically all their fertiliser,” Carney told the BBC.

“We deserve respect. We expect respect and I’m sure we’ll get it in due course again, and then we can have these discussions.”

Canada and the US, along with Mexico, have deeply integrated economies, with billions of pounds worth of manufactured goods crossing the borders on a daily basis, for example, car parts.

The introduction of tariffs, which are taxes levied on goods as they enter a country and paid for by the importer, threatens decades of collaborations between the nations.

Trump has argued tariffs will encourage more Americans to buy domestically-made goods, which will ultimately boost US manufacturing and jobs.

While America’s main opponent in the global trade conflict is China, the introduction of Trump’s blanket, so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on the likes of the UK and other European countries has led to allies seeking fresh agreements in response to barriers to trading with the world’s largest economy.

Carney, who endorsed UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves during the British general election, said “one would think” that Canada and the UK could sign a stalled free trade agreement as part of diversifying trade, but highlighted about 95% of trade between the countries is effectively tariff-free already.

“We could expand the level of integration between our countries, like-minded countries. You think about defence partnerships, and those conversations have just just begun, so there’s a lot that we can do,” he added.

In a statement congratulating Carney, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “I know we will continue to work closely on defence, security, trade and investment.”

Carney said the G7 summit hosted by Canada in June would be “very important” in deciding the future path of the global trade war, adding it would “put to the test” whether the group of the world’s seven most advanced economies – which includes the US – was still the most “like-minded of like-minded countries”.

The summit will occur just before the 90-day pause on some of Trump’s higher tariffs is set to expire.

Hong Kong has released four former opposition lawmakers who were among dozens of pro-democracy leaders jailed under the city’s controversial National Security Law (NSL).

The four – Claudia Mo, Kwok Ka-ki, Jeremy Tam and Gary Fan – had pleaded guilty and were each sentenced to four years and two months behind bars in November.

They were released on Tuesday because the fact they had been in prison since their arrests in 2021 was taken into account when calculating their sentence.

The four lawmakers were part of a group known as the Hong Kong 47. They were accused of trying to overthrow the government by running an unofficial primary to pick opposition candidates for local elections.

Police said they had left their correctional facilities early on Tuesday.

This was the biggest trial under the national security law (NSL) which China imposed on the city shortly after explosive pro-democracy protests in 2019.

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in a months-long standoff against Beijing. Triggered by a proposed government treaty that would have allowed extradition to mainland China, the protests quickly grew to reflect wider demands for democratic reform.

Beijing and Hong Kong authorities argue the law is necessary to maintain stability and deny it has weakened autonomy.

But critics have called it “the end of Hong Kong” and say it has created a climate of fear in the city.

The Hong Kong 47 included famous figures like Joshua Wong and Benny Tai, who were icons of the 2014 pro-democracy protests that rocked Hong Kong.

Others were arrested after they stormed the city’s Legislative Council (LegCo) and spray-painted Hong Kong’s emblem in what became a pivotal moment in the 2019 protests.

A total of 45 people were jailed for conspiring to commit subversion. Two of the defendants were acquitted in May.

The sentences were widely condemned by the international community including the UK and the US.

Claudia Mo, known affectionately in Cantonese as Auntie Mo, is among the most well known of the group.

A prominent opposition lawmaker, the 67-year-old helped set up the now disbanded opposition Civic Party in 2006 and by 2012 she had won a seat in LegCo.

She was among 15 lawmakers who resigned en masse from LegCo after four pro-democracy lawmakers were ousted in November 2020. The move left LegCo with no opposition presence.

Kwok Ka-ki and Jeremy Tam were also former Civic Party lawmakers. Gary Fan was a co-founder of another opposition party, the Neo Democrats.

The Israeli military has released a Palestinian paramedic detained when Israeli troops killed 15 other emergency workers in southern Gaza last month, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said.

Assad al-Nassasra was missing for three weeks until the International Committee of the Red Cross received information he was in Israeli detention.

He was reportedly one of 10 detainees freed at an Israeli border crossing with Gaza on Tuesday.

The Israeli military has not commented. But it had confirmed it was holding Mr Nassasra during a briefing on an internal inquiry into the attack, which identified “several professional failures”.

The PRCS denounced the findings as an attempt to justify a “war crime”.

Eight PRCS paramedics, six first responders from Gaza’s Civil Defence agency, and one employee of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) were killed when their ambulances, a fire engine and a UN vehicle came under fire in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah during an emergency call-out early on 23 March.

Their bodies were found buried in shallow graves a week later next to the crushed vehicles.

One other PRCS paramedic survived and said he was released by Israeli forces after being detained alongside Mr Nassasra.

The Israeli military initially said its troops fired on “suspicious vehicles” driving in darkness with their headlights and emergency lights off.

But it later said that account was “mistaken” after a video found on the mobile phone of one of the dead paramedics – Rifaat Radwan, who was in the same ambulance as Mr Nassasra – showed the convoy was using its emergency lights.

At the end of the video, the ambulances are seen having pulled over on the roadside. The sound of gunfire can then be heard just as Radwan gets out of his ambulance. It continues for more than five minutes and Radwan is heard saying his last prayers, before the voices of Israeli soldiers are heard approaching.

On 20 April, the military released a summary of its internal inquiry which said the shooting of the 14 PRCS and Civil Defence workers resulted from “an operational misunderstanding” by troops from a reconnaissance battalion “who believed they faced a tangible threat”.

It found the killing of the Unrwa employee meanwhile “involved a breach of orders during a combat setting”.

The military said the deputy commander of the reconnaissance battalion was dismissed “due to his responsibilities as the field commander in this incident and for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief”.

The PRCS condemned the report, saying it was evidence of what it called Israel’s “policy of systemic distortion of the truth” to protect its soldiers from accountability.

“The results of the occupation’s investigation hold the usual fallacious allegations of rescue teams in Gaza being part of Hamas in order to justify the war crime of targeting medical missions in general, and the war crime of attacking teams and vehicles carrying the protected emblems of the Geneva Conventions in particular,” it said.

A senior UN humanitarian official in Gaza warned “a lack of real accountability undermines international law and makes the world a more dangerous place”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 52,365 people have been killed in Gaza during the ensuing war, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

The ministry says more than 2,270 people have been killed since Israel resumed its offensive on 18 March after the collapse of a two-month ceasefire, saying it was putting pressure on Hamas to release the 59 hostages it is still holding.

Palestinian media reported on Tuesday that at least six people were killed in Israeli air and artillery strikes across Gaza City, in the north, including three in the al-Shaaf area.

Another four people were said to have been killed in strikes on tents housing displaced people in the southern al-Mawasi area, near the city of Khan Younis.

Israel has also blocked all deliveries of humanitarian aid and other supplies to Gaza since 2 March, which the UN says has caused severe shortages of food, medicine and fuel.

On Tuesday, the UN’s human rights chief urged the world to “prevent the total collapse of critical life-saving support in Gaza”.

“Any use of starvation of the civilian population as a method of war constitutes a war crime, and so do all forms of collective punishment,” Volker Türk warned.

The UN has said Israel is obliged under international law to ensure supplies for the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza.

But Israel has said it is complying with international law and that there is no shortage of aid because 25,000 lorry loads entered Gaza during the recent ceasefire. It has also accused Hamas of stealing supplies, which the group has denied.

Prosecutors have dropped some of the charges against an Australian woman accused of killing three relatives and seriously injuring another with a toxic mushroom lunch.

Erin Patterson will not face trial over allegations she also attempted to murder her husband, after those charges were withdrawn.

She still faces four charges: three counts of murder and one of attempted murder.

The 50-year-old has always maintained her innocence and has pleaded not guilty, with her trial to begin in the Supreme Court of Victoria on Wednesday.

Three people died in hospital days after the July 2023 lunch, including Patterson’s former in-laws, Don Patterson, 70, and Gail Patterson, 70, as well as Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66.

Heather’s husband, 68-year-old Baptist pastor Ian Wilkinson, survived after weeks of treatment in hospital.

The jury has been picked and is receiving instructions from the judge ahead of opening statements, which are expected Wednesday.

Justice Christopher Beale told the jury that most if not all them would probably have been aware of the previous charges in relation to Patterson’s husband, but said that the Director of Public Prosecutions had dropped them.

“In other words… you must put them out of your mind,” he said.

He also urged them to “dispassionately” weigh the evidence in the case, using their heads and not their hearts.

The trial is being held at a small courthouse in Morwell, about 60km (37 miles) from Leongatha, Victoria, where prosecutors allege the lunch took place.

Three people have been killed in a shooting in the Swedish city of Uppsala, police have confirmed.

The shooting took place at a hair salon close to Vaksala Square in the centre of the city, local media reported. The shooter, who fled on a scooter, is still on the run, according to the reports.

Officers have cordoned off a large area and a murder investigation is under way.

The incident happened on the eve of the Walpurgis spring festival, which brings large crowds onto the streets of Uppsala, a city located north of the capital Stockholm, and known for its university.

“Everything happened so fast. It just went bang, bang, bang,” a witness told Swedish channel TV4.

Another man said he was cooking at home when he heard “two bangs that sounded a bit like fireworks” going off outside on the street.

He told Swedish television he was “very surprised and scared” and shortly after “swarms of police and ambulances” started blocking off the street and telling people to move back.

A major effort is under way to find the shooter, with a police helicopter joining in the search, police spokesman Magnus Jansson Klarin told TV4.

Train services had been stopped in the area to stop the perpetrator using them to get away, Mr Klarin said, but they have now resumed.

Police officers have been going door-to-door to seek further witness information.

Meanwhile Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer described the incident to TV4 as a “brutal act of violence”.

In an update on their website, Swedish police acknowledged “concern among the public” ahead of the upcoming Walpurgis celebrations, but their initial assessment is that this was an “isolated incident” and there is “no danger to the public”.

The identity of the victims and the shooter are still unclear. But there has been increasing concern over the number of shootings and gang attacks in recent years in Sweden, and the government has said it wants to tighten the country’s gun laws.

In February, 10 people were killed in a shooting at an adult education centre in the Swedish town of Orebro.

The Spanish grid operator has ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of a massive power cut that crippled Spain, Portugal and parts of France on Monday.

Red Eléctrica’s operations director Eduardo Prieto said preliminary findings suggest “there was no kind of interference in the control systems” to imply an attack, echoing Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro the day before.

But the exact reason behind the cut is still unclear.

The grid operator said on Tuesday they “cannot draw conclusions” until they get concrete data. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said investigators were trying to pinpoint the cause, and then would take all necessary measures “to ensure that this does not happen again.”

Information is trickling out about what happened at the time of the cut, leading to theories about what could have caused it. Experts told the BBC it was likely caused by several failures.

Here is what we know and what questions remain unanswered.

Follow live: Travel chaos continues

Sánchez on Monday evening said 15GW of power – the equivalent to 60% of demand at that time – was “suddenly lost from the system… in just five seconds”.

Mr Prieto said during a news conference on Tuesday that there were two “disconnection events” barely a second apart in the south-west of Spain, where there is substantial solar power generation.

One issue that the Spanish grid operator may have been referring to was when power companies identify a mismatch of supply and demand for electricity that could lead to instability, and disconnect temporarily in order to protect their systems.

However, Sánchez later said the power cut was “not a problem of excessive renewables”. He said there was not a failure of coverage – meaning supply – and there was a relatively low demand for electricity that was quite normal in the days running up to the crisis.

So what exactly happened? It is unclear, especially as many systems fail in electricity supply quite frequently, not only renewables, and outages on this scale happen somewhere in the world around once a year on average.

The mismatch between supply and demand of electricity can change the frequency of the electricity grid, which is 50Hz in Europe and the UK.

If that frequency changes out of a narrow range, it could lead to damage to equipment.

“When a big company detects that the frequency is moving out of their tolerance, they can go offline to protect their equipment,” said Prof Hannah Christensen at the University of Oxford.

If lots of companies do that in quick succession, it can have “cascading effects” and lead to a black-out, she added.

But when it comes to renewables, operators have very accurate short-term weather forecasts to predict when there will be a surplus of wind of solar power, so they adjust power supply accordingly, Prof Christensen said.

Renewable power has different challenges to fossil fuel energy “because of its intermittency”, she said, but it is a well-known issue that is planned for.

“It is a little perplexing that this wouldn’t have been predicted,” she said.

Prof Keith Bell, at the University of Strathclyde, added that “if a system is relying on solar and wind, they design a system to reflect that,” suggesting that the additional supply of energy from renewables will not have been a surprise to the grid.

“Spain has a lot of experience of wind and solar, and a long-standing system of forecasting weather and its impacts,” he said.

“All sorts of systems fail,” he added. “Things can and do go wrong, whether that is from renewables, fossil fuels or nuclear power. This could be the Swiss cheese model, where the holes in the system have happened to align.”

Red Eléctrica also suggested that the drop of power caused a grid interconnection between Spain and France to trip.

Two basic technologies are used to interconnect parts of a grid or countries – a standard transmission line that carries alternating currents, and increasingly, high voltage direct current lines.

Spain has a high voltage line that came into service seven years ago, meaning it is well-tested, Prof Bell said.

The Iberian peninsula is often referred to as an “electricity island” because it relies on just a few connections through the Pyrenees to France, meaning it can be vulnerable to failures.

Sánchez said power was brought back online thanks to connections with France and Morocco as well as gas and hydropower sources.

Portugal’s grid operator REN refuted initial reports, attributed to the agency on Monday, which said the blackout was caused by a rare atmospheric event.

The message in Portuguese said that “due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration'”.

“These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

However, REN spokesman Bruno Silva told AFP on Tuesday that the grid operator “did not put out this statement,” without giving further details.

One week after a devastating militant attack near the mountain resort of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir killed 26 people, the town wears a look of quiet desolation, although tourists have begun trickling back in small numbers.

The main high street, abandoned by visitors last week – with shops shuttered and hotels completely emptied out – is seeing fleeting signs of life again.

Last Tuesday, militants opened fire on people, mostly tourists, who were visiting Baisaran, a mountain-top meadow three miles (5 km) from Pahalgam, often described as the “Switzerland of India”.

The attack was one of the deadliest in recent years, devastating the lives of many families and sparking widespread anger in India.

In the days since, tensions between India and Pakistan, which both claim Kashmir in full but administer it only in part, have significantly risen, with each side announcing retaliatory measures against the other.

There is now growing speculation about whether there will be a military response from Delhi. The government in Kashmir has closed down over half the tourist destinations in the valley, as authorities review the security situation and carry out search operations.

While violence has often broken out in the region, with militants targeting security forces and civilians since an insurgency broke out in 1989, the brazen killing of tourists has been rare and has shocked local businesses and tourists alike.

Tourism is a mainstay of the economy in places like Pahalgam and there’s now fear that many livelihoods might be irrevocably hit.

At a “selfie point” outside town, overlooking lush meadows and a rushing river, Akshay Solanki, a tourist from Mumbai, said there was “panic” among his group of travellers on the day of the attack. But they had decided to continue with their journey because flights back home had become unaffordable.

Other tourists said constant reassurances from the locals and security forces had given them a sense of comfort. A driver who had brought visitors from the capital, Srinagar, told BBC Hindi that he was pleading with those visiting not to “distance” themselves from Kashmir.

After a washout three days, shawl-seller Rafi Ahmed said he’d managed to sell just a few pieces and feared for his livelihood in the long run if tourists stopped coming.

Among those exhorting tourists to come to Pahalgam was Bollywood actor Atul Kulkarni, who visited the town days after the attack. He told BBC Hindi, if the message from the militants was “don’t come here, we should respond by coming in even larger numbers”.

“Don’t cancel bookings, cancel your other plans and come here,” Kulkarni said.

But uncertainty and apprehension loom large in Pahalgam and it could take several years before a sense of normalcy is restored, local business owners and residents told the BBC.

Indian authorities have launched combing operations in the region, detaining hundreds of people and destroying homes belonging to alleged militants.

India and Pakistan have also reportedly exchanged small arms fire across the border.

The escalation in tensions is keeping tourists and business owners on tenterhooks.

Indian authorities have often claimed Kashmir witnessed a period of relative peace after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government revoked its autonomous status in 2019. Ahead of India’s general elections in 2024, Modi hailed the “freedom” that had come to the region, saying Kashmir was touching new heights of development because it was breathing freely.

Top leaders pointed to high tourism numbers – some 23 million last year and millions more in the years before – as proof of a big boom after years of unquiet. But last week’s attacks have, yet again, shattered any idea of lasting peace in the restive valley.

“This [attack] is a blot on us…How we wipe it off is a long-term concern,” Rafi Ahmed Meer, a politician from Pahalgam told BBC Hindi, urging tourists to remember that it was local Kashmiris who rushed to help after the attacks, even picking up bodies.

The cancellation rate for trips planned from cities like Pune, Mumbai and Bengaluru are very high, Abhishek Sansare, a Mumbai-based tour operator told the BBC. A group of prominent tour operators said in a press conference that some 80-90% of all bookings had been cancelled.

“After the attack, there’s a sense that a war is looming. So tourists are confused about what to do,” said Sansare. “Some of those who’ve already made advance bookings are going ahead with their plans. I’m also going there on the 2nd of next month.”

The attack on tourists is also likely to weigh on Kashmir in other ways. The inauguration of the world’s highest single-arch rail bridge, set to connect the Kashmir valley with the rest of India was slated to happen this month after several delays.

The timeline for the opening of this showpiece project now “looks uncertain”, a source told the BBC.

The region was just beginning to attract fledgling business investments, but those too could dry up if hostilities go up.

“People who were investing in logistics and other sectors will now think twice because of the security environment. Until they regain some confidence, I don’t foresee investments coming to Kashmir immediately,” said Ubair Shah, who owns one of Kashmir’s largest cold storage facilities for fruits in Pulwama district in south Kashmir.

As the region continues to boil over, local leaders have expressed deep anguish to the families who lost their loved ones.

In an impassioned speech in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly on Monday, the state’s chief minister and tourism minister Omar Abdullah paid tributes to the victims by reading out names of all the 26 people.

He said people from every part of the country had come under attack, and while they’d come to Kashmir at his invitation he could not ensure their safe return.

“I had no words to apologise to them. What could I say to the children who saw their father drenched in blood? To the widow of the navy officer who was married barely a few days ago?

“Some people told me they’d come to Kashmir for the first time, but will have to pay for their holiday life long,” he said, adding that the attack had “hollowed out” Kashmir.

A teenager has been charged after Australian opposition leader Peter Dutton’s office was vandalised for the third time during the election campaign.

The Liberal Party leader’s office in Arana Hills, Brisbane was splattered in red paint, and covered with posters criticising his stance on a number of issues.

Police say four people seen acting suspiciously at the site in the early hours of the morning fled when officers arrived, but an 18-year-old woman was tracked by the dog squad and charged with causing wilful damage.

Australians vote in an election on Saturday, 3 May, and Dutton has in recent days caused controversy for his comments about ceremonial Aboriginal rites.

The opposition leader has been criticised by some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, including former party colleagues, after saying Aboriginal “welcome to country” ceremonies are “overdone”. The short ritual has become standard at public events and recognises traditional land owners.

One of the posters plastered on his office said “always was, always will be Aboriginal land”. Others criticised his comments about finding “common ground” with Donald Trump, his stance on the Israel-Gaza war, and his links to mining billionaire Gina Rinehart.

The same office was vandalised earlier this month, with the words “maggot” and “scum” written in black, and again a few days later, with a window smashed and white paint splashed across the entrance.

Dutton is yet to comment on the vandalism, but members of his party have previously said attacks on political offices are “out of control”.

“Unfortunately this is an increasingly frequent occurrence, not just targeting Peter’s office – although his has been targeted a number of times – but targeting members of parliament all around the country with graffiti and even more serious acts of violence,” James Paterson told Sky News Australia last week.

The Duchess of Sussex used the title HRH on a card sent with a personal gift but not for any public purpose, sources close to her have said.

A video accompanying a podcast shows a gift basket for US cosmetics entrepreneur Jamie Kern Lima, which includes a card saying: “With the Compliments of HRH The Duchess of Sussex.”

When Prince Harry and Meghan stepped down as working royals there was an agreement to stop using HRH, which stands for Her/His Royal Highness, but they still hold the titles.

Sources close to the California-based couple reject that this card was a breach of the agreement struck on their departure from royal duties.

According to sources, the couple do not use HRH in commercial or public settings – and this was only a private use of the title and was for a gift given more than a year ago.

This distinction would mean the HRH title was not being used to promote the jams and food products in Meghan’s As Ever range or her Netflix cookery series.

The card was shown in a video of a podcast hosted by Jamie Kern Lima, who said that when she had been “super-stressed” that Meghan had cheered her up by dropping round some ice cream and “home made strawberry sauce”.

Mrs Kern Lima said the gift showed great empathy and gave something that “adds value to my life”.

Prince Harry and Meghan lost the use of the titles when they stopped being working royals in 2020 and left the UK, initially to move to Canada and then to the US.

“The Sussexes will not use their HRH titles as they are no longer working members of the Royal Family,” said a statement from Buckingham Palace at the time.

They also stopped receiving public funding as they embarked on “the next chapter of their lives”.

But this agreement did not remove the title, it restricted how it was used, with this card suggesting that it has still been used in private.

Another non-working royal, Prince Andrew, also does not use HRH in any official capacity, but still has the title.

The podcast with Jamie Kern Lima also included Meghan discussing her relationship with Prince Harry: “You have to imagine at the beginning, everyone has, like, butterflies.

“Then we immediately went into the trenches together. Yeah, right out of the gate, like six months into dating.

“So now, seven years later, when you have a little bit of breathing space, you can just enjoy each other in a new way, and that’s why I feel like it’s more of a honeymoon period for us now.”

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Sir Tony Blair has called for a major rethink of net zero policies, arguing that limiting energy consumption and fossil fuel production is “doomed to fail”.

In a new report, the former Labour prime minister says voters “feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know the impact on global emissions is minimal”.

He does not call for Labour to halt its push to decarbonise the UK economy – but says all governments need to rethink their approach, as it is not working.

The Tories – who have joined Reform UK in opposing net zero emissions by 2050 – urged Labour to end the “mad dash” to this goal – but Downing Street said it would not be changing course.

In its report The Tony Blair Institute argues that global institutions such as COP and the UN have failed to make sufficient progress in halting climate change.

At the same time, it argues, the public have lost faith in climate policies because the promised green jobs and economic growth have failed to materialise, thanks in part to global instability and the Covid pandemic.

Writing in the foreword, Sir Tony says: “Though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they’re turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy.”

He says “any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail”.

He also warns against the “alarmist” tone of the debate on climate change, which he says is “riven with irrationality”.

The report calls for the rapid deployment of carbon capture and storage technology, greater use of AI to make energy grids efficient and investment in small scale nuclear reactors.

It also argues for a greater focus on climate change mitigation measures such as flood defences and a new international push to persuade China and India to cut emissions.

Downing Street said it would not be changing course on net zero – and rejected Sir Tony’s suggestions that the public was no longer prepared to make sacrifices to meet green goals.

“We will reach net zero in a way that treads lightly on people’s lives, not telling them how to live or behave,” said the prime minister’s official spokesman.

“Net zero is the economic opportunity of the 21st century, one that has the potential to reignite our industrial heartlands, create good jobs for the future and lower bills in the long term.”

The government claims its net zero strategy is already delivering results, with £43bn of private investment since last July and that its climate policies “now support around 600,000 jobs across the UK”.

Labour sources are also pushing back against claims Sir Keir Starmer is going cold on the net zero agenda, pointing to a speech he made last week in which he said the clean energy mission was “in the DNA of my government”.

Reacting in the Commons to Sir Tony’s comments in the report, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said he agreed “with a lot of what it says” particularly on carbon capture and storage and AI “which the government are doing”.

But Labour’s opponents were quick to seize on the former prime minister’s words.

Writing on social media, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said: “Even Tony Blair now says the push for Net Zero has become ‘irrational’ and ‘hysterical’. We are winning the argument!”

Conservative acting shadow energy secretary, Andrew Bowie said the government needed to “urgently change course”.

“It seems even Tony Blair has come to the realisation that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party’s mad dash to net zero by 2050 is simply not feasible, or sustainable,” he added.

Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said: “Blair is wrong, both morally and pragmatically. The British public understands the need for decisive climate action and expects politicians to lead in delivering this action.”

Sir Tony’s intervention has also been met with dismay by Labour-supporting environmental groups.

One campaigner told the BBC: “This is an oddly public and oddly-timed intervention that would usually be made by someone struggling for access.

“The Labour government are getting on with many of the policies outlined in the report because they know this is popular with people, especially the voting coalition they need to maintain for the next election.

“But adopting the anti-net-zero framing of [Tory leader Kemi] Badenoch and Reform is out of step with where the public are on this issue and will not help Labour.”

The Liberal Democrats have been contacted for a response.

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One of Prince Andrew’s prized business assets was administered for two years by a company controlled by the controversial millionaire Doug Barrowman, the BBC can reveal.

After the prince’s disastrous Newsnight interview in 2019, legal ownership of his Dragons’ Den-style start-up competition, Pitch@Palace Global, was transferred to a Barrowman-linked firm, Knox House Trustees (UK).

Barrowman and his wife, lingerie boss Baroness Michelle Mone, hit the headlines when she admitted they had lied about their links to a company that won large government contracts during the Covid pandemic after she recommended it to ministers.

A lawyer for Mr Barrowman said he “at no time… had any business or personal involvement with the duke”.

Pitch@Palace Global remained the prince’s company, under his control. But in line with longstanding royal practice, it was owned under the names of other people or companies, acting on his behalf as so-called “nominees”.

Documents filed at Companies House show that from 2021, the nominee owner was Knox House Trustees (UK), which was controlled and ultimately owned by Mr Barrowman until 2023.

Prince Andrew’s finances have been under intense scrutiny, with questions about how he can afford to live in his Royal Lodge mansion in Windsor after he was cut off financially by his brother, King Charles.

The prince’s choice of business associates has long been controversial. In December, he said he “ceased all contact” with Yang Tengbo, who led the Chinese arm of Pitch@Palace, after receiving advice from the UK government which alleged that he was a spy.

Mr Yang has denied being a spy or doing anything unlawful.

Mr Barrowman has attracted plenty of controversy too. In 2017, HMRC began an investigation into one of his companies, AML Tax (UK), which it said “aggressively promoted” tax avoidance schemes. It was fined £150,000 in 2022.

In January that year, the Guardian newspaper first reported links between Mr Barrowman, Baroness Mone and PPE Medpro. The pair denied involvement until December 2023, when she admitted in a BBC interview that they had lied about their links with the company.

The National Crime Agency is now investigating suspected criminal offences at the firm. Mr Barrowman and Baroness Mone both deny any wrongdoing.

Author Andrew Lownie, who is writing a biography of the prince, said: “Andrew has a long history of associating with dubious business figures and disguising his business activities behind nominee and offshore accounts. There really needs to be a full investigation into the duke’s financial activities.”

Pitch@Palace was a start-up competition, founded in 2014, where entrepreneurs would pitch their ideas to possible investors in the hope of winning their backing. It had two parts:

• a UK-based version, set up as a community interest company, which cannot pay profits to shareholders
• an international arm, Pitch@Palace Global Ltd, which held competitions in places such as Australia, Bahrain and China, and was set up as a for-profit UK company

Both arms of Pitch@Palace suspended operations following the Newsnight interview in 2019 about the prince’s links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which led to Andrew stepping down as a working royal.

Nonetheless, the international operation has emerged as a possible way for the duke to fund his lifestyle. In a court witness statement from 2023, Mr Yang wrote that the duke had needed money “and saw the relationships with China through Pitch as one possible source of funding”.

Earlier this year a Dutch company said it was in talks to buy it, saying it saw “immense value” in the network, even though it had suspended operations.

However, Prince Andrew has never held the company in his own name.

Founded in 2017, Pitch@Palace Global Ltd was initially held in the name of Amanda Thirsk, the prince’s private secretary, in an arrangement often used by the Royal Family.

But early in 2021, the legal ownership was transferred to Knox House Trustees (UK) Limited.

This company had been set up the year before, and Mr Barrowman was named as having “significant influence and control” over it.

Corporate filings in the Isle of Man show Knox House Trustees (UK) was ultimately owned by Knox Limited, whose sole shareholder is Mr Barrowman.

In 2023, ownership of Knox House Trustees (UK) Ltd – which still owned Pitch@Palace Global – was transferred to Arthur Lancaster, an accountant who has a longstanding working relationship with both the prince and Mr Barrowman. This remains the situation today.

The same year Mr Lancaster took over as the sole director and shareholder of PPE Medpro. He was also a director of many of the companies involved in the AML tax avoidance case.

The judge in that case called him “evasive” and said he had “real concerns as to the reliability of Mr Lancaster’s evidence”, which contained “significant inconsistencies”.

After the case, his lawyer wrote to the court arguing that the conclusions were “unnecessarily harsh”, that Mr Lancaster had been a “diligent and truthful witness”, and that his efforts to provide information had been hampered by the Covid pandemic.

For decades the Royal Family has held investments through nominees, and still does. In the past this has served to keep details of their holdings private, though not in this case. Prince Andrew’s involvement in Pitch@Palace Global is well known, and he is listed as having “significant influence or control” over the company on Companies House.

Mr Barrowman’s lawyer said in a statement: “Mr Lancaster was a director of KHT (UK) Ltd which provided company administration services to a number of external companies, including Pitch@Palace, a company wholly owned by the duke. Mr Lancaster acted for the duke in a personal capacity at all times and has been an associate of the duke for many years.”

Mr Lancaster declined to comment. Prince Andrew did not respond to requests for comment.

Mark Carney’s Liberals have won Canada’s federal election – riding a backlash of anti-Trump sentiment to form the next government.

It is a stunning political turnaround for a party who were widely considered dead and buried just a few months ago.

It’s not yet clear if the party – which has been in power for almost a decade – will be able to secure a majority as results continue to roll in.

Either way, the prime minister faces major challenges, including divisions in the country laid bare by the campaign.

Here are five takeaways from an election which saw the Conservative opposition make major gains but still lose.

There is no doubt the US president’s tariff threats and comments undermining Canada’s sovereignty played an outsized role in this election, suddenly making leadership and the country’s economic survival the defining issues of the campaign.

Mark Carney used it to his advantage, running as much against Trump as he did against his main opposition rival, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.

Carney warned Canada was at a crisis moment, saying frequently on the campaign trail – and in his victory speech – that Trump “wants to break us so America can own us”.

Poilievre brought Trump up much less frequently during the campaign, focusing his message on domestic issues – the cost of living, the housing affordability crisis, and crime – and targeting the Liberals for their record on those matters.

Carney – who has declared the old relationship with the US “over” – plans to start negotiations on a new economic and security relationship immediately following the election.

Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian businessman close to Trump who previously ran for the Conservative leadership, acknowledged it was a successful campaign strategy.

“Right now Canadians are very frustrated with America and Carney has used that to his advantage,” he told the BBC just before polls closed. “He was able to distract Canadians from his own mistakes… and say ‘Stop looking at that. Look south of the border and I can save you’.”

At the start of the year, Carney was a former central banker with no experience as a politician. By mid-March, he was being sworn in as prime minister – the first to have never held elected public office before – after a resounding win in the Liberal leadership race.

Now, he’s faced the Canadian electorate as a first time campaigner, won an Ottawa-area seat in the House of Commons and steered his party to an unlikely victory.

Carney had long flirted with entering Canadian politics – and he seized his moment, swooping in after former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sudden resignation in January.

He also took full advantage of the new political landscape, leaning into his experience helping Canada and the UK navigate previous crises at a time when Canadians were feeling anxious about their economic future.

Trump’s late-March announcement of global levies on foreign automobile imports gave Carney the chance to publicly audition to keep his job during the campaign. He was able to step away from the trail and take on the prime minister’s mantle, setting up a call with the president and bringing together his ministers on the US file.

• REACTION: Follow the latest live
• RESULTS: How Canada voted – in charts
• ANALYSIS: A turnaround victory made possible by Trump
• EXPLAINER: What happens next?

In a different election, this would have been a successful one for the Conservatives.

In 2011, the Conservatives won a majority with 39.6% of the vote. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is on track to beat that this time, with roughly 41.4% of the vote with most polls reporting, according to Elections Canada.

They are currently projected to have won 144 seats – that’s up from 120 at dissolution, when the election was called in March.

But with the progressive vote coalescing around the Liberals, those numbers weren’t enough this time.

The bitter blow was Poilievre losing his riding (parliamentary seat) in Carleton, Ontario.

Only months ago his party had a clear path to victory and they will now need to figure out a way forward after a series of electoral defeats.

Whether that includes the diminished figure of Poilievre as leader is the first big question for them to face.He is the third leader they’ve had since the Liberals swept the 2015 election.

The election results have highlighted divisions in Canada that could pose a challenge for Carney.

Notably, the Liberals are largely shut out of Alberta and Saskatchewan – oil-rich and gas-rich prairie provinces where a sense of alienation from the centre of power in Ottawa has long festered.

Even before the election, some in those regions were warning of a national unity crisis if the Liberals won another mandate.

Carney touched on those divisions in his victory speech, acknowledging the millions who had voted for a different outcome.

“I intend to govern for all Canadians,” he said.

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s message, which relentlessly focused on cost of living issues, especially on housing affordability, resonated with many young people.

Support for the Conservatives outpaced Liberals by 44% to 31.2% among 18 to 34 year olds, a Nanos poll on 25 April indicated. The divide was more stark among younger men.

Separately, Abacus Data polling found that about 18% of 18 to 29 year olds were worried about Trump. That jumped to 45% for voters over 60, suggesting a polarisation on issues between generations.

On Monday night, Poilievre remarked on demographic breakthroughs Conservative had made, including with younger Canadians.

“We gave voices to countless people across the country who’ve been left out and left behind for far too long,” he said.

In this election, the smaller political parties have taken a hit as Canadians choose to park their votes with either the Liberals or the Conservatives – especially the left-wing New Democrats, or NDP.

Some of the smaller parties have lost a significant amount of vote share – particularly the NDP who have received just 6% of votes counted across Canada so far, compared with 18% in 2021.

Jagmeet Singh, who has been NDP leader for almost eight years, lost his own riding in British Columbia and announced he will step down.

“Obviously I know this night is a disappointing night for New Democrats,” he said, adding: “We’re only defeated if we stop fighting.”

The Greens have also seen their vote share cut in half from 2% to 1%.

Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, a non-profit public opinion research organisation, told the BBC that Trump’s rhetoric was behind the shift to the Liberals.

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

The sovereigntist Bloc Québécois have maintained a vote share of around 7%. They are on track to win 23 seats in Quebec.

This is based on around 97% of polls reporting.

Canada doesn’t have a two-party system, even though it has historically voted in conservative or liberal governments in some form.

In the country’s political system, these smaller parties still play a role in Parliament. Both the NDP and the Bloc have at some points formed Official Opposition in the House of Commons.

As life in Spain and Portugal stutters back to normal, the big questions are not just what went wrong but how to prevent such a full-scale power failure from happening again.

It was not until 11:15 (09:15 GMT) on Tuesday, almost 23 hours after the system collapsed that Spain’s electricity grid declared it was back to normal.

The trains have started running again although some lines are suspended and most homes have got their power back.

So how did it get back up and running and why did it take so long?

For most of Monday, Spain was in chaos.

The issue appears to relate to two separate connection problems in the south west within moments of each other and then a disconnection from the French network for almost an hour.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez highlighted the sudden loss of 15 gigawatts of electricity at 12:33 on Monday, when about 60% of Spain’s power generation suddenly vanished.

Eduardo Prieto, the director of operations for the grid Red Eléctrica, said the systems had been stable, until a loss of power generation in southwestern Spain.

Only the Canary Islands, the Balearics and Ceuta and Melilla on the North African coast were unaffected.

An increasing number of public figures are blaming a saturation of solar power and an over-reliance on renewable energy.

Minutes before the outage, Spain was running on 60.64% solar photovoltaic generation, with 12% wind and 11.6% nuclear.

However diversified and advanced Spain’s energy mix is, the national power collapse at 12:35 on Monday required an enormous effort to get Spain back up and running.

The initial focus was to get the northern and southern power generating regions working again, which grid operator Red Eléctrica said was key to “gradually re-energising the transmission grid as the generating units are connected”.

The risk lay in overloading the system by turning everything on at the same time and triggering another massive outage.

So everything had to be carefully phased for what experts call a “black start” working out as a success.

The initial focus was on hydro-electric plants, in particular pumped-storage plants with reservoirs full at this time of year and able to produce electricity fast from a standing start.

Combined-cycle gas plants also played a significant part in repowering the grid, but four nuclear power reactors at Almaraz, Ascó and and Vandellós were automatically shut down by the outage, and three others were already offline anyway.

Spain’s neighbours France and Morocco also came to its aid.

Morocco said 900MW of power had been transferred through two high-voltage lines that cross the Strait of Gibraltrar from Fardioua to Tarifa in southern Spain.

French operator RTE said it had been “gradually transferring more electricity to the Spanish border” via its power lines supplying Catalonia in north-east Spain and the Basque country in the north-west.

RTE said the Iberian network had been disconnected from 12:38 to 13:30 on Monday, when the 400kV line to Catalonia was restored. Within minutes, France had supplied 700MW and RTE said it was later able to increase that by up to 2,000 MW.

Power was then eventually restored to Spain’s electricity substations in the north, south and west of the peninsula.

By 19:20 on Monday, the grid operator said more than a fifth of demand had been restored by way of Spain’s own electricity generation and from France.

Electricity provider Endesa said it had restored almost 3.5 million customers by 19:15 and had prioritised hospitals and other strategic infrastructure.

Just over an hour later the head of Red Eléctrica boss Eduardo Prieto said about 9,200 MW of demand – about 35.1% – had been restored.

That figure rose steadily to 61.35% by midnight on Monday and more than 99% by 07:00 on Tuesday.

• How massive power cut unfolded in Spain and Portugal

Spain is only now beginning to count the cost. The CEOE bosses’ organisation has estimated a €1.6bn hit on the economy.

And the political blame game has already begun.

The conservative head of the Madrid community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, said the government’s response had been slow and ineffective, while the leader of her People’s Party Alberto Núñez Feijóo complained of a “lamentable” image of Spain being sent around the world.

Despite all the problems, Spaniards were praised by the government for rising to the occasion and showing solidarity.

Hospitals had back-up diesel-operated generators so they were able to keep critical care going.

Spain’s Guardia Civil police force said it had rescued 13,000 passengers trapped on trains.

Residents in the southern town of Villanueva de Córdoba came to the aid of passengers stranded on a Ouigo train.

Local police in Barcelona returned to the old ways, regulating traffic in the Plaça España because the lights were out.

Passengers on the Barcelona metro had to walk to safety using the torches on their mobile phones when their trains became stuck in tunnels.

A conference centre in Girona was converted into a 180-bed shelter for people stranded by rail disruptions.

Although flights across the country were affected, airports operator Aena kept going throughout the disruption with the aid of generators.

Phone batteries ran down, TVs were on the blink and for many Spaniards their only lifeline to the outside world was from a car or battery-operated radio, as radio stations soldiered on through the blackout.

In Madrid there has been an urgent call for blood donations ahead of the big public holiday weekend.

Pedro Sánchez is determined that lessons will be learned and such a crisis will not happen again.

But energy expert Carlos Cagigal told Spanish TV there was a risk that it might, because Spain’s infrastructure was simply not in a position to cope with all the renewable energy being produced.

The power grid operator warned earlier this year of the risks of excessive renewable energy while closing nuclear plants.

But a clip of its president Beatriz Corredor has gone viral from 2021, in which she insisted that Spain had “one of the safest and most advanced” electrical systems in the world and there was no reason to worry.

To their fans, west Belfast rave-rap group Kneecap are a rowdy, subversive force of nature. But to many others, their inflammatory political messages make them dangerous and amoral.

Following in the footsteps of anti-establishment rap groups like NWA and Run The Jewels, the trio present themselves as dissident underdogs, giving a voice to the oppressed.

Their lyrics, delivered in a rapid-fire mix of English and Irish, cover everything from drug-fuelled parties to their desire to free Northern Ireland from British rule.

On stage and on film, they’ve created a riotous experience that’s thrilled Glastonbury, won a Bafta award, and inspired what’s been called an “Irish language revolution“.

But their rising profile has resulted in increased scrutiny and anger about their political statements.

During an incendiary performance at the Coachella music festival in California earlier this month, they described Israel’s military action in Gaza as a US-funded genocide. As a result, they’ve been called anti-Semitic and branded “terrorist sympathisers”.

Now, footage from two previous gigs is being assessed by counter-terrorism police in the UK.

In one, the band allegedly call for the death of Conservative MPs. Another seems to show a band member shouting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah”. Both groups are banned in the UK and it is a crime to express support for them.

Kneecap have responded with a statement, saying they “do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah”.

They claimed that footage where they appeared to say “the only good Tory is a dead Tory” had been “taken out of all context”, and apologised for the hurt caused to the families of murdered MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess.

But Cox’s widower Brendan was unimpressed, calling their statement “only half an apology”. Downing Street agreed, describing their words as “half-hearted” and “completely unacceptable”.

The row was discussed in the House of Commons on Tuesday, with Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp calling their comments “evil”.

It isn’t the band’s first brush with controversy. If anything, controversy is in their DNA. But this time, the fallout threatens to engulf their career, with venues and festivals under pressure to cancel the band’s gigs.

To understand how we got here, here’s Kneecap’s origin story.

Kneecap were formed in 2017 by rappers Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh) and Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Cairealláin), alongside beatmaker DJ Próvaí (JJ Ó Dochartaigh).

Their career was sparked by an incident in which Móglaí and a friend were out spray-painting the day before a march in support of an Irish Language Act.

Móglaí had written “cearta” (rights) on a bus stop when police arrived. He fled but his friend was arrested, and spent a night in the cells after refusing to speak English to the police.

They documented the incident in the song C.E.A.R.T.A, which they released “just for the craic. No plans for after,” Mo Chara told the Irish Times.

To their surprise, the song was playlisted by Irish broadcaster RTÉ, only to be removed after listeners complained about drug references in the lyrics.

After that, their output was sporadic. The mixtape 3CAG (slang for the drug MDMA) arrived in 2018, followed by the singles H.O.O.D and MAM – dedicated to Móglaí’s mother, who had died by suicide.

Those early records showcased an ability to move between sharp satire, tender vulnerability and the experiences of Northern Ireland’s “ceasefire babies” – the generation born around the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Talking to the BBC in 2023, the band said they were inspired by US bands like Dead Prez, NWA and Wu Tang Clan.

“Rebel music in Ireland has all the same sort of ideas as hip-hop in America. A community that’s oppressed, using songs to revolt in some way,” said Mo Chara.

Unusually, they perform most of their lyrics in Irish, reclaiming the language from rural folk music.

“The only way that Irish history and mythology was passed down was orally. I think that’s why it’s important for us to have that intertwined with our music,” Móglaí Bap told Crack magazine last year.

Kneecap’s lyrics frequently contain Republican slang and slogans. Even their name is a reference to the IRA’s chosen method of punishment for alleged drug dealers during the Troubles.

The messaging has landed them in hot water before. DJ Próvaí lost his job as a teacher in 2020 after his school was alerted to a video of a concert where he’d painted “Brits out” on his buttocks.

Two years later, the band made headlines in Belfast after commissioning a mural of a burning police vehicle with a slogan criticising Northern Ireland’s pre-Good Friday police force, the RUC.

Designed to promote a festival appearance, it was criticised by politicians across the spectrum.

“Loathe to give the band more publicity,” said Alliance leader Naomi Long, “but as a community we need to start asking ourselves what messages we’re sending out about the kind of future we want.”

The band have claimed their take on Republicanism is partially tongue-in-cheek – satirising the self-important sloganeering they grew up with.

“Republicanism is so vast, and on a spectrum,” Móglaí Bap told the New York Times. “We like to toy with it. We like to take the irony on.”

Certainly, the band’s gleeful celebration of drug culture puts them at odds with the old guard of the movement – but the band are serious about their desire for a unified Ireland.

“The British government has failed us for 100 years,” Mo Charra told Vulture last year. “It’s not like this is a trial run. You’ve had enough time and it’s failed.”

Kneecap’s reputation grew in 2024 with the release of a film, also called Kneecap, which presented a semi-fictional, and often hilarious, account of their rise to fame.

Starring the band as themselves, with Michael Fassbender as Móglaí’s father, the movie won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival, with critics praising its “punky defiance” and “unruly energy“, and was nominated for six Baftas.

It was followed by their debut album, Fine Art, a concept record that threw fans into a hedonistic night out with the band at a fictional Belfast pub called The Rutz.

With songs that skewered the music industry and addressed Northern Ireland’s mental health crisis, it showcased a band with more to say than their reputation suggested.

Still, in an era of sanitised, apolitical music, Kneecap’s instincts for provocation and protest were inevitably going to draw attention.

Pro-Palestinian chants have featured in their gigs since the start of the latest Israel-Gaza war. But when they brought those messages to Coachella, they faced a new level of scrutiny and criticism.

Kneecap weren’t the only people who uttered pro-Palestinian messages at the festival, but accusations of genocide and video screens that declared “F*** Israel” were seen by some as crossing a line into hate speech.

The organisers of Israel’s Nova Music Festival, where more than 360 people were killed by Hamas in 2023, said Kneecap’s message “deeply hurt” their community, and invited the band to visit an exhibition about the victims and survivors – “not to shame or silence but to connect”.

Others took a more strident tone. A music industry group called The Creative Community For Peace, along with Sharon Osbourne, called on the US government to revoke the band’s visas.

The band’s manager defended their actions. Citing Hamas-run health ministry figures that more than 50,000 Palestinians had been killed since the start of the war, Daniel Lambert characterised criticism of the Coachella performance as “moral hysteria”.

“If somebody’s hurt by the truth, that’s something for them to be hurt by,” he told RTÉ1. “But it’s really important to speak truth and thankfully, the lads are not afraid to do that.

“They have the bravery and the conviction, given where they’ve come from in a post-conflict society, to stand up for what’s right, and [they] are willing to do that despite the fact that it may harm their career.”

Right now, their career is under intense pressure.

Since Coachella, Kneecap have received death threats and have been dropped by their booking agents in the US, which could jeopardise their visas ahead of a forthcoming sold-out tour.

The discovery of the concert video in which the band shouted “the only good Tory is a dead Tory” and advised the audience to “kill your local MP” shocked the political establishment, with counter-terrorism police reviewing the footage.

In Scotland, First Minister John Swinney has called for the band to be dropped from Glasgow’s TRNSMT festival, saying their comments had “crossed a line”.

The Eden Project in Cornwall has cancelled their gig in July, and others, including Glastonbury, are under pressure to call off appearances.

Home Office minister Dan Jarvis said on Tuesday: “There is an ongoing live police investigation, so the government would urge the organisers at the Glastonbury Festival to think very carefully about who is invited to perform there later this year.”

At the same time, the criticism has only increased the profile of an act who were essentially an underground act a month ago.

This week, Kneecap’s album entered the iTunes chart in Italy, Brazil and Germany for the first time.

The global significance of Mark Carney’s election as Canadian Prime Minister is he now sits at the centre of an alternative pole of global economic thinking. Everything but Trump.

There was a half expectation here that Carney would immediately sue for peace with President Trump when the polls closed on the election. It has emphatically not happened.

In the final days of polling, in his victory speech in Ottawa, and in his interview with me, he clearly intends to continue with the approach that has brought him to elected power, with a majority still possible. Even if he falls just short of a majority, two of the other main party leaders have lost their seats, and are likely to sign up to some degree behind a united Canada agenda on issues facing the US.

Underpinning this approach is absolute conviction that the US is making a mistake that will primarily and visibly backfire on itself, its companies, and its consumers. The fact the White House is attacking Amazon for “hostile acts” in publishing tariffs is a cast-iron example of this. President Trump’s gun is pointed primarily at his own feet, the thinking goes.

Jordan Peterson, an implacable opponent of Mark Carney, recently lamented on Joe Rogan’s podcast that “once Carney is elected, Trump will not have a more seasoned enemy in the West. Carney is very well connected especially in Europe and the UK.”

While “enemy” is overstating it, Peterson was right, and additionally Carney is also very adept at understanding the nexus between markets and headlines. He made a number of announcements as PM about rethinking the purchase of US fighter jets, slightly changing the purchases of US government debt, all of which would have quickly focused some minds in the US.

• Live coverage: Carney celebrates historic win in Canada
• Canada will deal with Trump ‘on our terms’, Carney tells BBC
• Carney’s Liberals won. What happens next?
• Carney pushes for ‘unity’ in face of Trump threats

That said, there is significant potential economic damage about to be wrought by these tariffs on a Canadian economy, with three quarters of its exports going to the US. There is no getting away from that.

Carney’s answer during the campaign was to accept the US has changed and to diversify. A credible push in that direction might also help any chance of US businesses, Congress, or forces within the administration rowing back on the tariffs.

Carney was abundantly clear to me that he is in no rush to go to the White House or Mar-a-Lago.

“We’ll have a partnership on our terms. There’s a win-win possibility there, but on our terms, not on their terms,” he said.

A key part of that is forging new strategic alliances elsewhere, with Europe, and the UK. “One would assume” that Canada and the UK could do a free trade agreement that has been stalled, he told me. Co-operation on defence and Canada’s abundant critical minerals is also on the table. He also dismissed President Trump’s territorial ambitions not just for his country, but Greenland and Panama too.

On the campaign trail in his hometown of Edmonton, I heard him say “America’s leadership of the global economy is over” and that was a “tragedy”. Implicitly, he is saying, with the help of the rest of the G7, he will step up.

And by an incredible quirk of fate, it is he who will host the G7 summit in Alberta in June, just days before the expiry of President Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs pause. Will Trump attend on the land he both tariffs and covets?

All roads lead to Kananaskis in the middle of June.

The trial has begun of 10 people who are accused of robbing Kim Kardashian at a Paris hotel in 2016.

The reality TV star and business woman was tied up and held at gunpoint in a luxury suite where she was staying during Paris Fashion Week.

About $10m (£7.5m) worth of jewels were taken from her, including a $4m (£2.9m) diamond engagement from then-husband Kanye West.

In a grand courtroom adorned with 19th Century tapestries, the court was given a fascinating snapshot into the lives of the diverse cast of characters suspected of involvement in the heist.

For the first one up – 71-year-old Yunice Abbas – this was done through a “enquête de personnalité”, a sort of background report on a person accused of a crime which French courts regularly include in their trials. These reports take in elements of the defendant’s family history, behaviour and work to paint a picture of their lives and help jurors make a decision.

The court heard a long list of crimes that Abbas has been found guilty of in the past – from petty crime and small-time drug trafficking to bank robberies – and retraced his difficult childhood, which was partly spent in Algeria and marked by the deaths of two of his siblings.

Abbas – who has spent almost a third of his life in jail – has already admitted to his role in the heist, and even wrote a memoir entitled I Held Up Kim Kardashian. The president of the court, David De Pas, suggested that the book shows Abbas was proud of what he did – something he has repeatedly denied.

When asked if he had any sympathy for his victims, Abbas said that he never did before the Kardashian heist, “but this time I do regret what I did… It opened my eyes.”

Abbas said that while watching television in jail, he was confronted with relentless coverage of the burglary, which made him realise how much Kim Kardashian had suffered.

“We just grabbed the lady’s handbag but I have discovered there’s trauma behind it,” he said.

The court also focused on Gary Madar, whose brother’s company provided transportation and taxis to the Kardashians for several years. Now 35, the father-of-two has been accused of feeding information to the gang about Kim Kardashian’s location on the night of the heist.

At the time, Gary worked as a customer service agent in airports for the transport company. His task was to welcome VIPs arriving at Paris airports and escort them through passport and customs checks. Through this job, he met the Kardashians several times.

But he also worked at a café owned by another defendant, Florus Héroui, 52, to whom investigators believe Madar passed on information about Kim Kardashian.

He has denied this and his lawyer has told the BBC that Madar should not be on the dock as there is “no solid proof” of his involvement.

Marc Boyer, 78, who is accused of supplying the weapon that was used to threaten Kardashian, was also questioned at length. He expressed regret that his son Marc-Alexandre Boyer – also a defendant – had grown up surrounded by “thieves” and “crooks” who had led him to make the wrong life choices.

The rest of the week will see more defendants take the stand as the trial ticks on towards 13 May – the day Kim Kardashian is expected to testify.

The vast majority of the 400 journalists reporting on this trial are expected to flock to the courthouse that day, and court staff are unsure how they will accommodate so many reporters who will want a front seat.

• ‘Grandpa robbers’ held Kim Kardashian at gunpoint – but didn’t know who she was
• Bodyguard sued for $6.1m over Paris robbery

The court will only hear from 10 out of the 12 people who were arrested in 2017, as one died last month, and another, aged 81, will be excused as he has advanced dementia.

Another, Aomar Ait Khedache, will be up on Wednesday – but he is now nearly deaf and mute and will have to write his answers down on a piece of paper.

The trial is taking place eight and a half years after the heist.

Patricia Tourancheau, a crime reporter and author of a book on the robbery, told the BBC that Paris courts were busy with large terrorism trials for several years, which created a backlog.

She also said the long wait had to do with the defendants’ age and health issues which meant they spent little time in provisional detention.

“Once they were freed it felt less urgent for judges to bring this to trial,” Tourancheau said.

The opposition in the Caribbean twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago has won a decisive victory in Monday’s parliamentary election, preliminary results suggest.

The win by the centrist United National Congress (UNC) party means that Kamla Persad-Bissessar will be appointed as the next prime minister.

The 73-year-old already held the post once before, from 2010 to 2015, but her party was defeated in the last two elections by the centre-left People’s National Movement (PNM).

Preliminary results suggest the UNC, which campaigned on a promise to raise wages and create employment, managed to win a number of parliamentary seats previously held by the PNM.

PNM leader Keith Rowley conceded defeat late on Monday, saying that it had not been a good night for his party and that it was clear that it had lost the election.

Rowley, 75, served as prime minister from 2015 to March of this year, when he announced he was stepping down and handing the reins of power to the 50-year-old energy minister, Stuart Young.

But rather than serving out the remainder of Rowley’s term, Young called a snap election just hours after being sworn in as prime minister.

The move was widely seen as an attempt by Young to secure a stronger mandate amid criticism by the opposition that his elevation to prime minister was unconstitutional.

The election came at a time when the country is grappling with a rise in homicides and an economic slump.

The outgoing government declared a state of emergency in December, which stayed in force for 105 days.

• Trouble in Paradise: Battling crime wave in Trinidad & Tobago

During her campaign, Persad-Bissessar promised to raise wages for public sector workers who have been struggling to meet rising costs of living.

It was an issue she addressed again after the governing party had conceded defeat.

“This victory is for the senior citizens to keep their pensions. This victory is for public servants to get their rightful salary increases. This victory is to re-open the children’s hospital. (…) This victory is once again to give laptops to our children and to create over 50,000 jobs,” she told supporters who had gathered at the party headquarters.

She also assured those gathered that “no-one” would be left behind, stressing that “when UNC wins, everybody wins”.

Prosecutors have dropped some of the charges against an Australian woman accused of killing three relatives and seriously injuring another with a toxic mushroom lunch.

Erin Patterson will not face trial over allegations she also attempted to murder her husband, after those charges were withdrawn.

She still faces four charges: three counts of murder and one of attempted murder.

The 50-year-old has always maintained her innocence and has pleaded not guilty, with her trial to begin in the Supreme Court of Victoria on Wednesday.

Three people died in hospital days after the July 2023 lunch, including Patterson’s former in-laws, Don Patterson, 70, and Gail Patterson, 70, as well as Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66.

Heather’s husband, 68-year-old Baptist pastor Ian Wilkinson, survived after weeks of treatment in hospital.

The jury has been picked and is receiving instructions from the judge ahead of opening statements, which are expected Wednesday.

Justice Christopher Beale told the jury that most if not all them would probably have been aware of the previous charges in relation to Patterson’s husband, but said that the Director of Public Prosecutions had dropped them.

“In other words… you must put them out of your mind,” he said.

He also urged them to “dispassionately” weigh the evidence in the case, using their heads and not their hearts.

The trial is being held at a small courthouse in Morwell, about 60km (37 miles) from Leongatha, Victoria, where prosecutors allege the lunch took place.

Days after a 7.7-magnitude earthquake shook Myanmar at the end of March, killing at least 3,700 people, the country’s ruling junta agreed to a halt in its devastating military campaign.

It then violated that ceasefire, again and again.

I went inside rebel-held territory in the eastern Karenni state for 10 days from mid-April. I witnessed daily violations by the junta, including rocket and mortar attacks which killed and injured civilians and resistance fighters.

One of those was Khala, a 45-year-old father killed in a strike by military warplanes, in a place his wife Mala said should have been safe.

When the ceasefire was announced, on 2 April, Mala and Khala sensed an opportunity to return to their home for the first time in years.

With their four-year-old child, they headed from the camp where they’d taken refuge to their village, Pekin Coco. They found it abandoned, with buildings shattered from drawn-out fighting. Almost everyone there had moved to farmland further away from the junta’s weapons.

But as the young family was about to leave Pekin Coco again, their car loaded with their possessions, the shelling started.

“We were all at the front of the house. Then, shells landed near us. We hid at the back of the house. But he [Khala] stayed where he was,” said Mala. “The artillery shell landed and exploded near him. He died in the place where he thought he was safe.

“He was a good man,” she said and began to cry.

• Myanmar military announces temporary ceasefire
• Inside Mandalay: BBC finds huge devastation and little help for Myanmar quake survivors

Later that afternoon, the junta’s warplanes attacked a house on the same street, killing four more men.

“I hate them,” Mala said. “They always attack people without reason. I don’t feel safe here. Jet fighters are flying over the sky often but there is no place to hide.”

Mala is 31 and seven months pregnant. When we spoke she was back in a displaced people’s camp, grieving. Her son Zoe, missing his father, wouldn’t leave her side.

Before the earthquake, Myanmar was in the midst of a nationwide civil war.

After decades of military rule and brutal repression, ethnic groups, along with a new army of young insurgents, brought the dictatorship to crisis point. As much as two-thirds of the country has fallen to the resistance.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed, including many children, since the military seized power in a coup in 2021. The UN says the earthquake has pushed a further two million people into need, some 2.5 million were already displaced before the quake.

Karenni, or Kayah, state is far from the earthquake’s epicentre. Its remoteness is both a blessing and a curse. Its thick jungle provides cover for those who oppose military rule, but it is difficult to get around, the roads are poor and main highways remain in range of the army’s guns. Most of the state is now controlled by rebel and armed ethnic groups.

On 28 March when the quake hit, there were no reported deaths in Karenni – but the hospitals still filled quickly with people suffering spinal and crush injuries.

A 30m (100ft) sinkhole had appeared in the forests around the town of Demoso. Locals who heard the ground open up thought it was another air strike. For many weeks, the sinkhole continued to expand with the aftershocks.

The UN noted that the Myanmar military continued operations after the earthquake and beyond the ceasefire, and called for them to end. The State Administration Council, the ruling junta, has not commented on the alleged violations but has claimed that it was attacked by resistance groups. During the ceasefire all sides in the conflict have reserved the right to respond if attacked.

During my 10 days in Mobeye, Karenni, I witnessed daily attacks by the junta.

I met Stefano there, a 23-year-old fighting the military dictatorship with the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF).

He leads a platoon of young fighters who have set up trenches around the base.

From a dugout just 100m (330ft) from the junta’s positions, he explained the army had continued attacks “using all means” during the ceasefire – soldiers on the ground, drones and jets.

“They usually attack with drones and heavy artillery on this side. When it rains, they advance by taking advantage of the weather.”

He called the ceasefire a “joke”.

“We did not believe the military council from the beginning. We don’t believe it now, and we won’t believe it in the future.”

The day after we spoke, the military launched a full-scale assault with heavy weapons and men, attacking rebel lines. As we made our way to the front lines, small-arms fire could be heard nearby, along with mortar strikes. The ground was pitted with fresh hits from armed drones.

Nearby lay the corpse of a junta fighter who had tried to breach the rebel positions. The resistance forces say they have suspended all offensive activities during the ceasefire, but they have said they will respond if attacked. Yi Shui, the commander of another resistance group, the Karenni National Army, showed me pictures on his phone. “When we saw them, we shot them. One of them got hit” and another ran away, he said.

And again, the military wasn’t just targeting the resistance forces. Its rockets hit farmland beyond, killing a 60-year-old woman. We arrived at fields where four rockets had landed, children were playing with the bent metal and shrapnel from the strikes.

The injured were taken to local hospitals, which are hidden deep in the jungle to avoid air strikes from junta warplanes.

In one, a young fighter was being treated in a wooden ward with a dirt floor. He had a shrapnel wound to his shoulder and was losing a lot of blood.

The doctor in charge, 32-year-old Thi Ha Tun, said he’d treated around a dozen patients for war-related injuries since the ceasefire was declared. Two of the patients, resistance fighters, died.

He dismissed what he called the junta’s lies. “They only care about their own interests,” he said. “They will only care about their own organisation. They will not care about the rest of this country, their own generation, the youth, the children, the elderly, anything.”

The only solution is to keep fighting, he said.

High on a hilltop in the rebel-controlled areas is the church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The earthquake brought down the church steeple and part of the roof. The bell from Rome now sits in a temporary cradle. Repairs have been made, but the church will probably need to be rebuilt.

They are still feeling the aftershocks here weeks later.

But for Father Philip, the local priest, the greatest threat to his congregation, many of whom are the war displaced, comes from above, not below.

“No place is safe. When we have jet fighters flying in the sky… you never know what will come falling from the sky.”

Back at the Mobeye front, Stefano and his men pass the hours between attacks, cleaning their weapons and singing songs. “I can hear the people’s prayers, cries, and cries. We will overthrow the dictatorship,” they sing in unison. They say the only ceasefire they will trust will come with the junta’s defeat.

The truce will finish at the end of the month, but for most of the people here, it’s as if it never existed at all.

The UK’s only ever judge to publicly say they are transgender is planning to take the government to the European Court of Human Rights over the Supreme Court’s ground-breaking ruling on biological sex.

Dr Victoria McCloud, who stepped down from court last year, said the judgement and equality watchdog’s new guidance violated her human rights and she felt “contained and segregated”.

She said the court had failed to consider human rights arguments that would have been put by trans people and the judgement had left her with the legal “nonsense” of being “two sexes at once”.

Two weeks ago, judges at the Supreme Court unanimously ruled a woman is defined by biological sex under equalities law.

It was asked to decide on the proper interpretation of the 2010 Equality Act, which applies across Britain.

Lord Hodge said the central question was how the words “woman” and “sex” are defined in the legislation.

He told the court: “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex.

“But we counsel against reading this judgement as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another, it is not.”

Since then, interim guidance says in places like hospitals, shops and restaurants, “trans women (biological men) should not be permitted to use the women’s facilities”.

• Equality watchdog issues interim guidance on single-sex spaces
• Supreme Court backs ‘biological’ definition of woman

Dr McCloud was one of at least two trans people who had wanted to present arguments to the Supreme Court about how its outcome would affect them.

Courts have the discretion to consider arguments from outside “interveners” – but judges often reject such interventions if they conclude they are going to hear all the relevant arguments from others.

The Supreme Court considered arguments on trans issues from the human rights campaign group Amnesty International, but not from exclusively trans activists.

Dr McCloud, 55, came out as trans in her twenties and is one of about 8,000 people to have legally changed the sex on their birth certificate.

She went on to be a High Court Master – judges who often manage complex, expensive cases – and was publicly promoted as a symbol of the modern judiciary’s diversity.

She stood down a year ago, saying she could not continue her judicial work amid an increasingly difficult public debate that had led to her being singled out for abuse and criticism.

Following the Supreme Court ruling, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said it had given “much-needed clarity” for those drawing up guidance.

But Dr McCloud said that far from clarifying the law, the court had not considered how such an outcome would impact the lives of trans people.

“Trans people were wholly excluded from this court case,” said Dr McCloud. “I applied to be heard. Two of us did. We were refused.

“[The court] heard no material going to the question of the proportionality and the impact on trans people. It didn’t hear evidence from us.

“The Supreme Court failed in my view, adequately, to think about human rights points.”

Dr McCloud says she and other campaigners will go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to seek a declaration that the actions of the UK government and Supreme Court judgement “violate [her] fundamental human rights”.

“Just as the prime minister didn’t know what a woman was, actually the Supreme Court don’t know because they haven’t defined biological sex,” said the former judge.

“The answer [in my view] is that a woman in law is someone with the letter F on her birth certificate.”

Dr McCloud has a Gender Recognition Certificate – which means her acquired female gender is recorded on her birth certificate. At the same time, the Supreme Court ruling means she is defined as a man for the purposes of the Equality Act.

In its judgement, the court said biological sex refers to “the sex of a person at birth”. It emphasises that only women can be pregnant, for example, and women have specific legal protection during pregnancy.

Trans campaigners argue the court did not take into account their view of the complexities of biology. They argue it is impossible for services – from police officers performing a strip search through to restaurants – to truly specify someone’s biology, pointing to intersex cases as an example of where biological sex is not binary.

However, gender-critical campaigners say biology comes down to a common-sense assessment of what makes a man or a woman.

“[This judgement] has left me two sexes at once, which is a nonsense and ironic, because the Supreme Court said that sex was binary,” said Dr McCloud.

“I am a woman for all purposes in law, but [now under this judgement] I’m a man for the Equality Act 2010. So I have to probably guess on any given occasion which sex I am.”

The equalities watchdog’s interim guidance says trans women should not be permitted to use women’s facilities. It also means trans men – biological females who want to live as men – have to use women’s spaces.

The guidance states that “in some circumstances the law also allows trans women (biological men) not to be permitted to use the men’s facilities, and trans men (biological women) not to be permitted to use the women’s facilities”.

For example, trans men could be excluded from women’s facilities “where reasonable objection is taken to their presence, for example because the gender reassignment process has given them a masculine appearance”, the watchdog told the BBC.

The guidance adds: “Where facilities are available to both men and women, trans people should not be put in a position where there are no facilities for them to use.”

Dr McCloud believes dangerous predators could exploit this confusion to further target women.

“This is going to make matters much, much more dangerous,” she said. “I am now expected to use male spaces.

“I have female anatomy. It isn’t safe for women to use the men’s loos. It is as simple as that.”

Many gender critical campaigners do not accept the views of some trans people that they have the anatomy of their acquired sex. Campaigners including For Women Scotland – the group that brought the case to the Supreme Court – say women felt unsafe with trans women using female facilities.

Dr McCloud continued: “The approach here is really to treat normal people like me, who just happened to change legal sex decades ago, people who’ve served their country, worked in the military, doctors, lawyers, nurses, just ordinary, hard-working, peaceable people, as if we’re a threat to be contained and segregated.”

Maya Forstater, of campaign group Sex Matters, which was part of the case, said: “[Dr] McCloud may wish to undertake this challenge as a personal pursuit, but… any chance of success lies more in the realm of fantasy rather than reality.

“The Supreme Court has just laid out in a clear and unanimous decision precisely how the Equality Act has to be interpreted, and one of the guiding principles of this exercise in statutory interpretation was to ensure that the Equality Act was compatible with the Human Rights Act.”

And Kate Barker, of the campaign group LGB Alliance, said: “The needs and wishes of a tiny number of trans women like Victoria McCloud cannot supersede the rights of 34 million women in the UK who need and deserve the privacy, dignity and safety of single-sex spaces.”

The husband of murdered MP Jo Cox has called on Kneecap to give a “real apology” after footage emerged of the band allegedly calling for MPs to be killed.

It comes after the band defended themselves and posted an apology to the families of murdered MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess in a statement on X on Monday night.

The band said that “an extract of footage, deliberately taken out of all context, is now being exploited and weaponised, as if it were a call to action”.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “They should apologise. I think you have seen what they have said, I think it is half-hearted”.

Brendan Cox, whose wife was killed in June 2016, said this was “only half an apology”.

Speaking on Tuesday, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said that “what they’re reported to have said is a total disgrace”.

“I hope that everybody involved – not just the band but also those involved surrounding them and those involved in events – also take some responsibility on this and look very seriously at the consequences of these kinds of remarks, not just what’s been said,” she told Times Radio.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Tuesday, Tory MP Mark Francois described it as a “crocodile tears apology” and said the group should not be allowed to play Glastonbury in light of the ongoing police investigation.

Home Office Minister Dan Jarvis joined condemnation of the band in the Commons and urged the organisers of the Glastonbury festival to “think very carefully about who is invited there later this year”.

Tánaiste (Irish deputy prime minister) Simon Harris said he could understand why it was important Kneecap clarify any comments attributed to them.

“We need to get back to the focus here being on the fact that there are children in Gaza dying. There are children in Gaza being killed,” Harris told the Irish Cabinet.

“Tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza have been killed as a result of the actions of the Israeli Defense forces.”

Speaking on Radio Ulster’s Talkback programme on Tuesday, Mr Cox said: “It’s fine to say that you’re sorry for it, but the way that they have actually spoken about it is to suggest that it’s a conspiracy, that they have been targeted unfairly and for me that then doesn’t come across as unfortunately particularly genuine.”

In their statement, Kneecap said they rejected “any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual. Ever”.

“To the Amess and Cox families, we send our heartfelt apologies, we never intended to cause you hurt,” the band added.

The footage of Kneecap is being assessed by counter-terrorism police and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has called for prosecution.

On Tuesday, the Cornwall-based Edens Sessions announced that the Kneecap show scheduled for 4 July has been cancelled.

The daughter of Conservative MP Sir David Amess, Katie Amess, who was stabbed to death at a constituency surgery in 2021, said the rap group should apologise.

Speaking to BBC News NI on Tuesday, Katie Amess said she had not heard from Kneecap directly.

“They definitely need to reach out to the people they’re apologising to, otherwise you’re just apologising generically. It would be nice to hear from them directly,” Ms Amess said.

“The apology, it just seems to blame everybody else, it doesn’t really take any accountability. I think we just need to let the authorities do the work they are employed to do now and see where that goes,” she said.

Ms Amess added: “It would be good if they could actually be sincere with the apology and actually try and make amends on a human level rather than on a social media level.”

She said her offer to meet with the band still stands.

Mrs Cox, the former Batley and Spen MP, was killed by far-right terrorist Thomas Mair on 16 June 2016, a week before the EU referendum vote.

“The apology that they’ve given I don’t think has grappled enough with the gravity of what they said,” said Mr Cox.

“When you lose someone that close to you, that never goes away and that every single day that is part of your life. It’s the real sense that they are missing out.”

Mr Cox added: “It wasn’t a throwaway remark. It was part of a conversation that they were having about politics, and it was a very clear incitement to violence.

“I doubt that they really wanted someone to go out and kill a Tory MP, but if you say those words… then the risk of someone acting on those words is there.”

Mr Cox said the band needed to “deeply reflect” on whether they want to be associated with calls for violence.

“I think a more fulsome reflection on the mistake that they’ve made, if it indeed is a mistake, I think is necessary.”

Mr Cox added that “in order to be confident” that the band is “genuinely remorseful” and not “just trying to save their bookings or their tour, I think they need to grapple more fundamentally with it”.

Mr Cox said “using the plight of people in Gaza in the way that they have done and to say that this is an attempt to shut them up on those issues is not acceptable”.

“Whatever your democratic politics, whether you’re a Tory, Labour, Sinn Féin, Ulster Unionist, whatever, there is no excuse for incitement of violence against members of parliament or against civilians, and that should be something that we can all agree on,” he added.

In their statement, Kneecap said: “They want you to believe words are more harmful than genocide.”

They condemned “all attacks on civilians, always” and added that the band “do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah”.

Both Hamas and Hezbollah, are banned in the UK and it is a crime to express support for them.

Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people – mostly civilians – and taking 251 back to Gaza as hostages.

Israel launched a massive military offensive in response, which has killed at least 52,243 Palestinians – mostly civilians – according to the latest figures released by Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Last week, Sharon Osbourne called for the band’s US work visas to be revoked.

It came after their performances at Coachella, an annual music festival in California, where they ended their set with pro-Palestinian messages.

Writing on social media, the TV personality and America’s Got Talent judge said the hip-hop trio “took their performance to a different level by incorporating aggressive political statements”.

Kneecap hit back at the visa call, and when asked by BBC News NI for a response, the band replied: “Statements aren’t aggressive, murdering 20,000 children is though.”

The visas held by the band members are understood to no longer be valid and they are in the process of securing a new sponsor ahead of their sell-out October tour in North America.

Kneecap are an Irish-speaking rap trio who have courted controversy with their provocative lyrics and merchandise.

The group was formed in 2017 by three friends who go by the stage names of Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí.

Their rise to fame inspired a semi-fictionalised film starring Oscar-nominated actor Michael Fassbender.

The film won a British Academy of Film Award (Bafta) in February 2025.

Women with endometriosis are at a significantly higher risk for developing a range of autoimmune diseases, new research has shown.

The new study, involving researchers from the University of Oxford, has identified a significant genetic link between conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, coeliac disease and multiple sclerosis to endometriosis.

Women with endometriosis were found to have a 30-80% increased risk of developing autoimmune diseases.

The research team said the new information could be used “to look for new treatment avenues that may work across these conditions”.

Endometriosis, a condition where cells similar to those in the lining of the womb grow in other parts of the body, affects about 1.5 million women in the UK.

Symptoms include severe period pain and it causes extreme tiredness.

The study used data from the UK Biobank to analyse more than 8,000 endometriosis cases and 64,000 clinical disease cases.

The researchers examined the association between endometriosis and 31 different immune conditions.

Prof Krina Zondervan, joint senior author and head of the Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford, said such large studies provided “valuable new insights into disease biology”.

“In this case, we have provided solid evidence of a link between endometriosis and subsequent risk of diseases such as osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, and we have shown this has a biological basis,” she said.

“This new information can now be leveraged to look for new treatment avenues that may work across these conditions.”

The team said that understanding “opens up exciting possibilities” for new therapeutic approaches, such as drug repurposing or the development of combined treatments.

The findings also suggest that women with endometriosis should be more closely monitored for the development of immunological conditions.

The research was mainly funded by Wellbeing of Women UK.

Chief executive Janet Lindsay said it was “an important step” in building a more accurate understanding of endometriosis.

“For too long there has been too little investment in research into women’s health issues like endometriosis,” she said.

“It is crucial that we increase research investment in the next generation of women’s health researchers to expand our knowledge and improve patient outcomes.”

The full paper can be read in the Human Reproduction journal.

The Duchess of Sussex used the title HRH on a card sent with a personal gift but not for any public purpose, sources close to her have said.

A video accompanying a podcast shows a gift basket for US cosmetics entrepreneur Jamie Kern Lima, which includes a card saying: “With the Compliments of HRH The Duchess of Sussex.”

When Prince Harry and Meghan stepped down as working royals there was an agreement to stop using HRH, which stands for Her/His Royal Highness, but they still hold the titles.

Sources close to the California-based couple reject that this card was a breach of the agreement struck on their departure from royal duties.

According to sources, the couple do not use HRH in commercial or public settings – and this was only a private use of the title and was for a gift given more than a year ago.

This distinction would mean the HRH title was not being used to promote the jams and food products in Meghan’s As Ever range or her Netflix cookery series.

The card was shown in a video of a podcast hosted by Jamie Kern Lima, who said that when she had been “super-stressed” that Meghan had cheered her up by dropping round some ice cream and “home made strawberry sauce”.

Mrs Kern Lima said the gift showed great empathy and gave something that “adds value to my life”.

Prince Harry and Meghan lost the use of the titles when they stopped being working royals in 2020 and left the UK, initially to move to Canada and then to the US.

“The Sussexes will not use their HRH titles as they are no longer working members of the Royal Family,” said a statement from Buckingham Palace at the time.

They also stopped receiving public funding as they embarked on “the next chapter of their lives”.

But this agreement did not remove the title, it restricted how it was used, with this card suggesting that it has still been used in private.

Another non-working royal, Prince Andrew, also does not use HRH in any official capacity, but still has the title.

The podcast with Jamie Kern Lima also included Meghan discussing her relationship with Prince Harry: “You have to imagine at the beginning, everyone has, like, butterflies.

“Then we immediately went into the trenches together. Yeah, right out of the gate, like six months into dating.

“So now, seven years later, when you have a little bit of breathing space, you can just enjoy each other in a new way, and that’s why I feel like it’s more of a honeymoon period for us now.”

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Mark Carney’s Liberal Party is expected to win enough seats in the House of Commons to form a government in Canada. However, they are still short of the majority they wanted.

Carney is set to remain prime minister, having only assumed the role in early March following Justin Trudeau’s resignation.

His main rival, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, is projected to have lost his own seat as has Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP).

Carney’s Liberals are leading in 168 seats but would need 172 for a majority.

The Conservatives are set to remain in opposition as the second-largest party and are leading in 144 seats, with 99% of polls having reported results.

Bloc Québécois is leading in 23 seats and only runs candidates in the province of Quebec. The NDP is leading in seven seats and the Green Party in one.

Both the Liberals and the Conservatives have seen a significant rise in their share of the national vote compared with four years ago.

Increased support for Canada’s two largest parties has come at the expense of smaller parties, particularly the New Democratic Party (NDP) whose share of the popular vote is down by around 12 percentage points.

The increased support for the Conservatives was not enough to save Mr Poilievre, who is projected to have lost his own seat in Carleton, Ontario.

The 45-year-old had promised a return to “common sense politics”.

Opinion polls at the start of the year had the Conservatives over 20 percentage points ahead of the Liberals. But after the resignation of former Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the arrival of new PM Mark Carney and the tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump, that lead evaporated.

In his own seat, Mr Poilievre had 90 opponents, mostly independent candidates linked to a group calling for electoral reform.

The NDP’s leader, Jagmeet Singh, also lost his own seat in the House of Commons and came third behind the Liberal and Conservative candidates.

Canada has a “first-past-the-post” electoral system.

The candidate who gets the most votes in each electoral district, or riding, wins that seat and become a Member of Parliament (MP).

The Liberals and the Conservatives have dominated the popular vote, with both parties receiving more than 40% each of ballots counted across Canada so far.

This has them on track to win a combined 90% of seats.

The NDP has received just over 6% of the total vote declared so far, but this translates to just 2% of seats in the House of Commons.

Bloc Québécois has just over 6% of the vote and a similar share of seats.

The Liberals are on course to win the most seats in the key provinces of Ontario and Quebec, which account for 200 of Canada’s 343 electoral districts.

The Conservatives are ahead in Alberta, while there is little to choose between the two main parties in British Columbia.

One of the most closely-watched areas was around Toronto. The “905” are places that all share the same telephone code.

While the Liberals are projected to have won in most of Toronto, including a seat they lost in a by-election last year, the Conservatives were able to flip some of the ridings in the surrounding region.

The NDP are also projected to have lost a seat, Hamilton Centre, that they’d held for over 20 years.

After Ontario, Quebec is the second most populated province of Canada and has a big impact on the results of federal elections.

Bloc Québécois, which focuses on Quebec interests and only runs candidates in the province, was defending 35 seats, a number which changed after boundaries were reviewed. It is projected to have lost 12.

Most of those have flipped to the Liberal party while one is narrowly projected to have gone to the Conservatives.

In Montmorency-Charlevoix, the Conservatives were leading the Bloc by 688 votes, with just one more poll left to report.

The riding of Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou is one of the largest in Canada by land area and is projected to have flipped from the Bloc to the Liberals.

The NDP held on to their seat in Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie in Montreal.

About two-thirds of registered electors voted, according to the preliminary results from Elections Canada. This is in up on the last election in 2021 and similar to 2015 and 2019.

More than 7 million Canadians cast their ballots in advance, setting a new record for early voter turnout, Elections Canada said.

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s coverage of the election
• RESULTS: How Canada voted – in charts
• ANALYSIS: Why Carney’s Liberals won – and the Conservatives lost
• WATCH: How Canada’s election night unfolded
• PROFILE: Who is Mark Carney, Canada’s new PM?
• VOTERS: How I decided who gets my vote
• US VIEW: A turnaround victory made possible by Trump

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has said his country deserves respect from the US and will only enter trade and security talks with President Donald Trump “on our terms”.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC as the polls were closing, Carney said he would only visit Washington when there was a “serious discussion to be had” that respected Canada’s sovereignty.

Since Trump’s re-election to the White House, the US president has repeatedly mentioned making Canada the “51st state” of America, and this was reiterated by the White House on Tuesday.

“The election does not affect President Trump’s plan to make Canada America’s cherished 51st state,” White House deputy spokesperson Anna Kelly said.

Carney, who secured a historic victory for his Liberal Party in a snap election on Monday, said such a scenario was “never, ever going to happen”.

“Frankly, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen with respect to any other [country]… whether it’s Panama or Greenland or elsewhere,” he added.

However, he said there was a “win-win possibility” for his country if it could secure a deal with the US and also build on trading relationships with the European Union and the UK.

The US is a big market for Canadian businesses with roughly 75% of Canada’s exports heading south.

Canada accounts for a much smaller 17% of US exports.

Canada is also America’s largest foreign supplier of crude oil. America’s trade deficit with Canada – expected to be $45bn in 2024 – was mostly driven by US energy demands.

Canada and US relations have been strained in recent months, driven by Trump’s talk of a “51st state” and referring to previous Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor” – the title for leaders of individual American states.

The US president has also sparked a global trade war in which Canada was one of the first countries targeted with tariffs.

Trump has partially imposed a blanket 25% tariff on various Canadian goods, along with 25% import taxes on all aluminium and steel imports, but has exempted products covered by a US, Canada and Mexico trade deal known as USMCA.

Canada has retaliated with some C$60bn ($42bn; £32bn) worth of tariffs on US goods.

Carney said talks with Trump would be “on our terms, not on their terms”.

“There is a partnership to be had, an economic and security partnership,” he said.

“It’s going to be a very different one than we’ve had in the past.”

Carney has touted his experience handling global economic crises as a way to deal with Trump on tariffs.

Before becoming PM in early March, Carney had never held political office.

He is a banker by trade, leading the Bank of Canada during the 2008 global financial crisis before becoming the first non-British person to take on the top job at the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

The PM said Canada was the “biggest client for more than 40 states” in the US.

“Remember that we supply them [the US] with vital energy. Remember that we supply their farmers with basically all their fertiliser,” Carney told the BBC.

“We deserve respect. We expect respect and I’m sure we’ll get it in due course again, and then we can have these discussions.”

Canada and the US, along with Mexico, have deeply integrated economies, with billions of pounds worth of manufactured goods crossing the borders on a daily basis, for example, car parts.

The introduction of tariffs, which are taxes levied on goods as they enter a country and paid for by the importer, threatens decades of collaborations between the nations.

Trump has argued tariffs will encourage more Americans to buy domestically-made goods, which will ultimately boost US manufacturing and jobs.

While America’s main opponent in the global trade conflict is China, the introduction of Trump’s blanket, so-called “reciprocal tariffs” on the likes of the UK and other European countries has led to allies seeking fresh agreements in response to barriers to trading with the world’s largest economy.

Carney, who endorsed UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves during the British general election, said “one would think” that Canada and the UK could sign a stalled free trade agreement as part of diversifying trade, but highlighted about 95% of trade between the countries is effectively tariff-free already.

“We could expand the level of integration between our countries, like-minded countries. You think about defence partnerships, and those conversations have just just begun, so there’s a lot that we can do,” he added.

In a statement congratulating Carney, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “I know we will continue to work closely on defence, security, trade and investment.”

Carney said the G7 summit hosted by Canada in June would be “very important” in deciding the future path of the global trade war, adding it would “put to the test” whether the group of the world’s seven most advanced economies – which includes the US – was still the most “like-minded of like-minded countries”.

The summit will occur just before the 90-day pause on some of Trump’s higher tariffs is set to expire.

As life in Spain and Portugal stutters back to normal, the big questions are not just what went wrong but how to prevent such a full-scale power failure from happening again.

It was not until 11:15 (09:15 GMT) on Tuesday, almost 23 hours after the system collapsed that Spain’s electricity grid declared it was back to normal.

The trains have started running again although some lines are suspended and most homes have got their power back.

So how did it get back up and running and why did it take so long?

For most of Monday, Spain was in chaos.

The issue appears to relate to two separate connection problems in the south west within moments of each other and then a disconnection from the French network for almost an hour.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez highlighted the sudden loss of 15 gigawatts of electricity at 12:33 on Monday, when about 60% of Spain’s power generation suddenly vanished.

Eduardo Prieto, the director of operations for the grid Red Eléctrica, said the systems had been stable, until a loss of power generation in southwestern Spain.

Only the Canary Islands, the Balearics and Ceuta and Melilla on the North African coast were unaffected.

An increasing number of public figures are blaming a saturation of solar power and an over-reliance on renewable energy.

Minutes before the outage, Spain was running on 60.64% solar photovoltaic generation, with 12% wind and 11.6% nuclear.

However diversified and advanced Spain’s energy mix is, the national power collapse at 12:35 on Monday required an enormous effort to get Spain back up and running.

The initial focus was to get the northern and southern power generating regions working again, which grid operator Red Eléctrica said was key to “gradually re-energising the transmission grid as the generating units are connected”.

The risk lay in overloading the system by turning everything on at the same time and triggering another massive outage.

So everything had to be carefully phased for what experts call a “black start” working out as a success.

The initial focus was on hydro-electric plants, in particular pumped-storage plants with reservoirs full at this time of year and able to produce electricity fast from a standing start.

Combined-cycle gas plants also played a significant part in repowering the grid, but four nuclear power reactors at Almaraz, Ascó and and Vandellós were automatically shut down by the outage, and three others were already offline anyway.

Spain’s neighbours France and Morocco also came to its aid.

Morocco said 900MW of power had been transferred through two high-voltage lines that cross the Strait of Gibraltrar from Fardioua to Tarifa in southern Spain.

French operator RTE said it had been “gradually transferring more electricity to the Spanish border” via its power lines supplying Catalonia in north-east Spain and the Basque country in the north-west.

RTE said the Iberian network had been disconnected from 12:38 to 13:30 on Monday, when the 400kV line to Catalonia was restored. Within minutes, France had supplied 700MW and RTE said it was later able to increase that by up to 2,000 MW.

Power was then eventually restored to Spain’s electricity substations in the north, south and west of the peninsula.

By 19:20 on Monday, the grid operator said more than a fifth of demand had been restored by way of Spain’s own electricity generation and from France.

Electricity provider Endesa said it had restored almost 3.5 million customers by 19:15 and had prioritised hospitals and other strategic infrastructure.

Just over an hour later the head of Red Eléctrica boss Eduardo Prieto said about 9,200 MW of demand – about 35.1% – had been restored.

That figure rose steadily to 61.35% by midnight on Monday and more than 99% by 07:00 on Tuesday.

• How massive power cut unfolded in Spain and Portugal

Spain is only now beginning to count the cost. The CEOE bosses’ organisation has estimated a €1.6bn hit on the economy.

And the political blame game has already begun.

The conservative head of the Madrid community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, said the government’s response had been slow and ineffective, while the leader of her People’s Party Alberto Núñez Feijóo complained of a “lamentable” image of Spain being sent around the world.

Despite all the problems, Spaniards were praised by the government for rising to the occasion and showing solidarity.

Hospitals had back-up diesel-operated generators so they were able to keep critical care going.

Spain’s Guardia Civil police force said it had rescued 13,000 passengers trapped on trains.

Residents in the southern town of Villanueva de Córdoba came to the aid of passengers stranded on a Ouigo train.

Local police in Barcelona returned to the old ways, regulating traffic in the Plaça España because the lights were out.

Passengers on the Barcelona metro had to walk to safety using the torches on their mobile phones when their trains became stuck in tunnels.

A conference centre in Girona was converted into a 180-bed shelter for people stranded by rail disruptions.

Although flights across the country were affected, airports operator Aena kept going throughout the disruption with the aid of generators.

Phone batteries ran down, TVs were on the blink and for many Spaniards their only lifeline to the outside world was from a car or battery-operated radio, as radio stations soldiered on through the blackout.

In Madrid there has been an urgent call for blood donations ahead of the big public holiday weekend.

Pedro Sánchez is determined that lessons will be learned and such a crisis will not happen again.

But energy expert Carlos Cagigal told Spanish TV there was a risk that it might, because Spain’s infrastructure was simply not in a position to cope with all the renewable energy being produced.

The power grid operator warned earlier this year of the risks of excessive renewable energy while closing nuclear plants.

But a clip of its president Beatriz Corredor has gone viral from 2021, in which she insisted that Spain had “one of the safest and most advanced” electrical systems in the world and there was no reason to worry.

US President Donald Trump has called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos after it was reported that the retail giant planned to detail the cost of trade tariffs to its customers.

Amazon said it had looked into itemising the impact for shoppers using Amazon Haul, a low-cost site it launched in the US last year to compete with Shein and Temu.

But it said it had decided not to move forward and the idea had never been under consideration for its main platform.

The White House decision to go on the attack over the report is an indication of the pressure it is facing over its new import taxes, which analysts say will lead to higher prices for consumers and increase the chances of a recession.

At a news conference marking the president’s first 100 days in office on Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she had discussed Amazon’s reported move with the president and argued it represented “another reason why Americans should buy American”.

“This is a hostile and political act by Amazon,” she said. “Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?”

Trump has ramped up tariffs since re-entering office in January, measures he argues will boost manufacturing and raise tax revenue for the US.

Even after rolling back some of his initial plans this month, Trump’s announcements have left many foreign imports facing new duties of at least 10%, while products from China are facing import taxes of at least 145%.

The measures have prompted a sharp drop in trade between the two countries, and raised fears of supply shocks and shortages of products from baby prams to umbrellas, items for which China is a major supplier.

Some businesses are starting to detail the costs of the measures for customers, with Shein and Temu, known for business models that ship directly from Chinese manufacturers to customers, among the online platforms to already announce price hikes.

Merchants from China represent about half of the sellers on Amazon in the US, according to analysts.

Amazon’s plan to detail the tariff impact for customers was first reported by Punchbowl News on Tuesday, citing an anonymous source.

Asked about the report, Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle confirmed that the company had considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products for its Amazon Haul store.

“This was never approved and is not going to happen,” he said in a statement to the BBC.

A source familiar with the Amazon discussions said they had been sparked by the end of the exemption from tariffs for shipments from China worth less than $800.

The person said the decision not to spotlight the new costs was not a response to the White House complaints on Tuesday.

But asked by reporters about his call with Mr Bezos, Trump said the billionaire, who stepped down as chief executive in 2021, had “solved the problem”.

“Jeff Bezos was very nice. He was terrific. He solved the problem very quickly. He did the right thing. He’s a good guy,” he said.

Amazon was among the many businesses to donate money to the president’s inauguration and Mr Bezos was given a seat of honour at the event.

Mr Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, met Trump after the election and has praised his push for deregulation and lower taxes.

But the two men have had a tense relationship in the past.

Trump repeatedly criticised Amazon and the Washington Post during his first term, while Mr Bezos in 2016 accused Trump of using rhetoric that “erodes our democracy around the edges” and once joked about blasting him to space in a rocket.

In 2019, Amazon filed a lawsuit against the Pentagon, alleging that it had been denied a $10bn contract due to Trump’s decision to “pursue his own personal and political ends” to harm Mr Bezos, “his perceived political enemy”.

Three people have been killed in a shooting in the Swedish city of Uppsala, police have confirmed.

The shooting took place at a hair salon close to Vaksala Square in the centre of the city, local media reported. The shooter, who fled on a scooter, is still on the run, according to the reports.

Officers have cordoned off a large area and a murder investigation is under way.

The incident happened on the eve of the Walpurgis spring festival, which brings large crowds onto the streets of Uppsala, a city located north of the capital Stockholm, and known for its university.

“Everything happened so fast. It just went bang, bang, bang,” a witness told Swedish channel TV4.

Another man said he was cooking at home when he heard “two bangs that sounded a bit like fireworks” going off outside on the street.

He told Swedish television he was “very surprised and scared” and shortly after “swarms of police and ambulances” started blocking off the street and telling people to move back.

A major effort is under way to find the shooter, with a police helicopter joining in the search, police spokesman Magnus Jansson Klarin told TV4.

Train services had been stopped in the area to stop the perpetrator using them to get away, Mr Klarin said, but they have now resumed.

Police officers have been going door-to-door to seek further witness information.

Meanwhile Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer described the incident to TV4 as a “brutal act of violence”.

In an update on their website, Swedish police acknowledged “concern among the public” ahead of the upcoming Walpurgis celebrations, but their initial assessment is that this was an “isolated incident” and there is “no danger to the public”.

The identity of the victims and the shooter are still unclear. But there has been increasing concern over the number of shootings and gang attacks in recent years in Sweden, and the government has said it wants to tighten the country’s gun laws.

In February, 10 people were killed in a shooting at an adult education centre in the Swedish town of Orebro.

Malta’s so-called golden passport scheme that lets people become citizens through financial investment is contrary to European law, the EU’s top court has ruled.

The EU commission took Malta to court in 2022 over the scheme, which grants foreigners a Maltese passport and thereby the right to live and work in any EU country in return for paying at least €600,000 (£509,619), buying or renting property of a certain value, and donating €10,000 to charity.

The EU’s Court of Justice said the scheme “amounts to rendering the acquisition of nationality a mere commercial transaction”.

Malta’s government has not yet responded to the ruling, which former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat called “political”.

He said he believed the scheme could continue with “some changes”.

The country risks hefty fines if it does not comply with the judgment.

The EU’s Court of Justice said “the acquisition of Union citizenship cannot result from a commercial transaction.”

Malta has repeatedly insisted that it was correct in its interpretation of EU treaties, Reuters news agency reported.

In 2022, it suspended the scheme for Russian and Belarusian nationals in the wake of Russia’s invasion and Europe’s crackdown on Kremlin-linked individuals.

Tuesday’s ruling goes against a report last October from the court’s Advocate General at the time, Anthony Collins.

He said the commission had failed to prove that EU law requires a “genuine link” between the person and the country to grant lawful citizenship, adding it is for each member state to decide who is “to be one of their nationals and, as a consequence, who is an EU citizen”.

Although each EU member state determines how they grant nationality, the court said Malta’s scheme “jeopardises the mutual trust” between member states.

The EU has previously called on countries to end the practice, noting that investor citizenship schemes carried “inherent” security issues, as well as risks of money laundering, tax evasion and corruption.

The Spanish grid operator has ruled out a cyber attack as the cause of a massive power cut that crippled Spain, Portugal and parts of France on Monday.

Red Eléctrica’s operations director Eduardo Prieto said preliminary findings suggest “there was no kind of interference in the control systems” to imply an attack, echoing Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro the day before.

But the exact reason behind the cut is still unclear.

The grid operator said on Tuesday they “cannot draw conclusions” until they get concrete data. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said investigators were trying to pinpoint the cause, and then would take all necessary measures “to ensure that this does not happen again.”

Information is trickling out about what happened at the time of the cut, leading to theories about what could have caused it. Experts told the BBC it was likely caused by several failures.

Here is what we know and what questions remain unanswered.

Follow live: Travel chaos continues

Sánchez on Monday evening said 15GW of power – the equivalent to 60% of demand at that time – was “suddenly lost from the system… in just five seconds”.

Mr Prieto said during a news conference on Tuesday that there were two “disconnection events” barely a second apart in the south-west of Spain, where there is substantial solar power generation.

One issue that the Spanish grid operator may have been referring to was when power companies identify a mismatch of supply and demand for electricity that could lead to instability, and disconnect temporarily in order to protect their systems.

However, Sánchez later said the power cut was “not a problem of excessive renewables”. He said there was not a failure of coverage – meaning supply – and there was a relatively low demand for electricity that was quite normal in the days running up to the crisis.

So what exactly happened? It is unclear, especially as many systems fail in electricity supply quite frequently, not only renewables, and outages on this scale happen somewhere in the world around once a year on average.

The mismatch between supply and demand of electricity can change the frequency of the electricity grid, which is 50Hz in Europe and the UK.

If that frequency changes out of a narrow range, it could lead to damage to equipment.

“When a big company detects that the frequency is moving out of their tolerance, they can go offline to protect their equipment,” said Prof Hannah Christensen at the University of Oxford.

If lots of companies do that in quick succession, it can have “cascading effects” and lead to a black-out, she added.

But when it comes to renewables, operators have very accurate short-term weather forecasts to predict when there will be a surplus of wind of solar power, so they adjust power supply accordingly, Prof Christensen said.

Renewable power has different challenges to fossil fuel energy “because of its intermittency”, she said, but it is a well-known issue that is planned for.

“It is a little perplexing that this wouldn’t have been predicted,” she said.

Prof Keith Bell, at the University of Strathclyde, added that “if a system is relying on solar and wind, they design a system to reflect that,” suggesting that the additional supply of energy from renewables will not have been a surprise to the grid.

“Spain has a lot of experience of wind and solar, and a long-standing system of forecasting weather and its impacts,” he said.

“All sorts of systems fail,” he added. “Things can and do go wrong, whether that is from renewables, fossil fuels or nuclear power. This could be the Swiss cheese model, where the holes in the system have happened to align.”

Red Eléctrica also suggested that the drop of power caused a grid interconnection between Spain and France to trip.

Two basic technologies are used to interconnect parts of a grid or countries – a standard transmission line that carries alternating currents, and increasingly, high voltage direct current lines.

Spain has a high voltage line that came into service seven years ago, meaning it is well-tested, Prof Bell said.

The Iberian peninsula is often referred to as an “electricity island” because it relies on just a few connections through the Pyrenees to France, meaning it can be vulnerable to failures.

Sánchez said power was brought back online thanks to connections with France and Morocco as well as gas and hydropower sources.

Portugal’s grid operator REN refuted initial reports, attributed to the agency on Monday, which said the blackout was caused by a rare atmospheric event.

The message in Portuguese said that “due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration'”.

“These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

However, REN spokesman Bruno Silva told AFP on Tuesday that the grid operator “did not put out this statement,” without giving further details.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) – set up to cut US government spending – claims to have saved, on average, more than $10bn a week since President Trump entered office.

“We’re talking about almost $200bn and rising fast,” Trump told the BBC when talking about Mr Musk’s cost-cutting drive on 23 April.

Doge’s website says it is focusing on cancelling contracts, grants and leases put in place by previous administrations, as well as tackling fraud and reducing the government workforce.

BBC Verify has looked at the agency’s biggest claimed savings, examining the figures and speaking to experts.

Our analysis found that behind some of the large numbers, there is a lack of evidence to back them up.

In October, Mr Musk pledged to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal government budget. He subsequently halved this target and on 10 April talked about making savings of $150bn from “cutting fraud and waste” by the end of the next financial year in 2026.

The US federal budget for the last financial year was $6.75tn.

Doge publishes a running total of its estimated savings on its website – which stood at $160bn the last time the site was updated on 20 April.

However, less than 40% of this figure is broken down into individual savings.

We downloaded the data from the Doge website on 23 April and added up the total claimed savings from contracts, grants and leases.

Our analysis found only about half of these itemised savings had a link to a document or other form of evidence.

US media has also highlighted some accounting errors, including Doge mistakenly claiming to have saved $8bn from cancelling an immigration contract which in fact had a total value of $8m.

Doge says it is working to upload all receipts in a “digestible and transparent manner” and that, as of 20 April, it has posted receipts “representing around 30% of all total savings”. It also lists some receipts as being “unavailable for legal reasons”.

• What is Doge and why is Musk stepping back?

BBC Verify examined the four largest savings listed on the Doge website which had receipts attached.

The department claims these add up to $8.3bn, but after examining the evidence provided and speaking to people familiar with federal contracts, this figure appears to be overstated.

For three of the savings, Doge links to documents on the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS). This is a database which records contracts given out by the US government.

The documents show a contract’s start and end date, the maximum amount the government has agreed to spend, and how much of that has been spent.

David Drabkin, a federal contracts expert who helped develop the FPDS database, said the maximum figure listed should be treated with caution.

“FPDS does not reflect the actual paid price until some period of time after the contract has been completed and the contract actions have been recorded,” he says.

“For example, when buying research and development into a vaccine no one really knows how much that’s going to cost – so when a price is set, it’s not a definite price but rather an upper limit.”

So if Doge counts the maximum figure, that can represent projected spending over a number of years, rather than a direct saving from the country’s yearly spending.

Doge’s largest listed individual saving is $2.9bn.

It comes from cancelling a contract – which started in 2023 under President Biden – for a facility in Texas to house up to 3,000 unaccompanied migrant children.

Doge appears to have taken the “total contract value” until 2028 – the end date listed – and subtracted the amount spent so far to get the $2.9bn figure.

But the contract was reviewed annually, meaning renewing it until 2028 was not guaranteed.

A source familiar with this contract – who spoke on condition of anonymity – told BBC Verify that Doge’s figure is “based on speculative, never-used figures” and that the actual spending depended on how many children were placed at the facility and the services they required.

“In truth, the government never incurred those costs and could never reach that ceiling amount. The real, documentable savings from early termination were approximately $153 million”, they estimated.

They say this figure comes from tallying up the $18m per month fixed running costs (for things like staffing and security at the facility) from February – when Doge announced the cut – to November – when the contract was subject to annual review.

They also told us that the site – which closed on the same day as the Doge announcement – never reached its maximum capacity of 3,000 children, and about 2,000 stayed at the Texas facility at its peak, before numbers fell significantly as border crossings decreased.

We contacted the Administration for Children and Families and the Department for Health and Human Services which awarded the contract but are yet to hear back.

The second largest saving listed by Doge comes from cancelling a contract between the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and an IT company called Centennial Technologies which it claims was worth $1.9bn.

The document which Doge links to has a total contract value of $1.9bn and all of the other cost fields, including the amount already spent, are for $0.

However, Mr Drabkin told us this does not necessarily mean that nothing had been spent on the contract.

He said several government departments have poor recording keeping, meaning the amount spent during some contracts might not always be updated in a timely fashion.

• Musk to reduce Doge role after Tesla profits plunge
• Will Elon Musk be able to cut $2 trillion from US government spending?

The contract start date is listed as August 2024 and was estimated to run until 2031.

However, Centennial Technologies’ CEO told the New York Times that the agreement had actually been cancelled last autumn during the Biden administration.

The company did not respond to our requests for further comment.

Another IT contract, this time with the Department of Defense, is the third largest claimed saving.

Doge says $1.76bn was saved by cancelling a contract with an IT services company called A1FEDIMPACT.

On the contract document, the total value is listed as $2.4bn. An online database of government contracts called Higher Gov says this amount was the ceiling value.

Again, there is $0 recorded for the amount that had been spent at the time the contract was terminated.

It is unclear where Doge’s figure of $1.76bn comes from – we have asked the Pentagon and the supplier about it.

The fourth largest claimed saving of $1.75bn comes from cancelling a USAID grant to Gavi, a global health organisation, which campaigns to improve access to vaccines.

Doge links to a page on USASpending.gov. It shows a grant was paid to Gavi in three instalments, during the Biden administration, totalling $880m.

Gavi confirmed that $880m had been paid out by USAID but said it had not been told the grant had been terminated.

“Gavi has not received a termination notice related to this grant,” a spokesperson told us.

We have not found any evidence for the $1.75bn saving claimed by Doge, and a source familiar with the contract said it was unclear where it comes from.

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We asked the USAID Office of Inspector General about the grant but it did not respond to us.

While Doge may have cut a significant amount of government spending, the lack of evidence provided for its biggest claimed savings makes it impossible to independently confirm exactly how much.

Doge does not have a press office but BBC Verify has contacted the White House to ask for more evidence of these claimed savings.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Prosecutors have dropped some of the charges against an Australian woman accused of killing three relatives and seriously injuring another with a toxic mushroom lunch.

Erin Patterson will not face trial over allegations she also attempted to murder her husband, after those charges were withdrawn.

She still faces four charges: three counts of murder and one of attempted murder.

The 50-year-old has always maintained her innocence and has pleaded not guilty, with her trial to begin in the Supreme Court of Victoria on Wednesday.

Three people died in hospital days after the July 2023 lunch, including Patterson’s former in-laws, Don Patterson, 70, and Gail Patterson, 70, as well as Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66.

Heather’s husband, 68-year-old Baptist pastor Ian Wilkinson, survived after weeks of treatment in hospital.

The jury has been picked and is receiving instructions from the judge ahead of opening statements, which are expected Wednesday.

Justice Christopher Beale told the jury that most if not all them would probably have been aware of the previous charges in relation to Patterson’s husband, but said that the Director of Public Prosecutions had dropped them.

“In other words… you must put them out of your mind,” he said.

He also urged them to “dispassionately” weigh the evidence in the case, using their heads and not their hearts.

The trial is being held at a small courthouse in Morwell, about 60km (37 miles) from Leongatha, Victoria, where prosecutors allege the lunch took place.