US President Donald Trump has celebrated the 100th day of his second term in office with a campaign-style speech, touting his achievements and targeting political foes.

Hailing what he called a “revolution of common sense”, he told a crowd of supporters in Michigan that he was using his presidency to deliver “profound change”.

The Republican mocked his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, and aimed fresh criticism at the US Federal Reserve’s chairman, while dismissing polls that show his own popularity slipping.

Trump has delivered a dramatic fall in the number of migrants crossing illegally into the US, but the economy is a potential political vulnerability as he wages a global trade war.

“We’ve just gotten started, you haven’t seen anything yet,” Trump told the crowd on Tuesday in a suburb of Detroit.

Speaking at the hub of America’s automative industry, Trump said car firms were “lining up” to open new manufacturing plants in the Midwestern state.

Earlier in the day he softened a key element of his economic plan – tariffs on the import of foreign cars and car parts – after US car-makers warned of the danger of rising prices.

At his rally, Trump also said opinion polls indicating his popularity had fallen were “fake”.

According to Gallup, Trump is the only post-World War Two president to have less than half the public’s support after 100 days in office, with an approval rating of 44%.

But the majority of Republican voters still firmly back the president. And the rival Democratic Party is also struggling in polling.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) said Trump’s first 100 days were a “colossal failure”.

“Trump is to blame for the fact that life is more expensive, it’s harder to retire, and a ‘Trump recession’ is at our doorstep,” the DNC said.

• Trump’s breakneck start is fraught with political risk
• ‘Kicking butt’ or ‘going too fast’? Trump voters reflect on 100 days

Trump conducted his own informal poll in Tuesday’s remarks, asking the crowd for their favourite Biden nicknames. He also mocked his Democratic predecessor’s mental agility and even how he appears in a swim suit, while continuing to insist he was the real victor of the 2020 election, which he lost.

Other targets of his ire included Jerome Powell, head of the US central bank, whom the president said was not doing a good job.

Trump touted progress on immigration – encounters at the southern border have plummeted to just over 7,000, down from 140,000 in March of last year.

The White House also said almost 65,700 immigrants had been deported in his term so far, although that is a slower pace than in the last fiscal year when US authorities deported more than 270,000.

Part of the way through his speech Trump screened a video of deportees being expelled from the US and sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador.

His immigration crackdown has faced a flurry of legal challenges, as has his effort to end the automatic granting of citizenship to anyone born on US soil.

During Tuesday’s speech he insisted egg prices had declined 87%, a claim contradicted by the latest government price figures.

Inflation, energy prices and mortgage rates have fallen since Trump took office, although unemployment has risen slightly, consumer sentiment has sagged and the stock market was plunged into turmoil by the tariffs.

Before the speech, Joe DeMonaco, who owns a carpentry business in Michigan, said Trump’s patchwork of on-again, off-again import taxes were starting to increase prices, which he will have to pass on to his customers.

“I was hoping. . . he would approach things a little bit differently seeing that he’s a little seasoned coming into a second term,” Mr DeMonaco told the BBC. “But we’re just treading water and seeing if things get better from here.”

But it’s clear that Trump’s most steadfast supporters stand by him.

“I’m just thrilled,” Teresa Breckinridge, owner of the Silver Skillet Diner in Atlanta, Georgia, told the BBC.

“He’s handling things wherever he can, multiple times a day, and he’s reporting back to the people. . . I think the tariffs will end up definitely being in our favour.”

US President Donald Trump has called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to congratulate him on his victory in the country’s general election and the two have agreed meet in the near future.

The two countries were expected to enter talks about a new economic and security relationship after Monday’s vote.

Trump’s trade tariffs and repeated comments undermining Canada’s sovereignty overshadowed the race, which ended with Carney’s Liberals projected to win a minority government, according to public broadcaster CBC.

That result will make Carney’s pressing tasks of negotiating with his US counterpart and tackling a range of domestic issues more of a challenge, as he’ll need to wrangle support from other political parties.

In their first call since the election, Trump congratulated Carney on his victory, according to the prime minister’s office on Tuesday.

The office also said the two leaders had “agreed on the importance of Canada and the United States working together – as independent, sovereign nations – for their mutual betterment”.

The Liberals will need to rely on their support to pass legislation through the House of Commons.

They also face possible defeat in any vote of confidence in the chamber.

The Liberals are most likely to find willing partners with the diminished left-wing New Democrats, who have in the past supported the Liberals, and the Bloc Québécois.

The Liberals are projected to have won 169 seats, three short of the 172 needed for a majority in Canada’s House of Commons.

It still marks a historic turnaround for a party that had seemed on course for collapse just months ago.

Carney, a former central banker for Canada and the UK, will continue as prime minister, having stepped into the role last month following his unpopular predecessor Justin Trudeau’s resignation.

One issue where it may be easy for the Liberals to find support in the House is in passing legislation to help workers and industries affected by US tariffs – something all parties swung behind on the campaign trail.

• RESULTS: How Canada voted – in charts
• ANALYSIS: Trump made Carney’s turnaround victory possible
• PROFILE: Five things Carney has pledged to do as Canadian PM
• WATCH: Relief, disappointment or surprise? Canadians react

On Tuesday morning, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet suggested Carney could benefit from at least a period of stability in the House.

Blanchet urged a “truce” among parties while Canada negotiated trade with the US, saying it was clear Canadians wanted political stability in unstable times.

He said it wasn’t time for other parties to “threaten to overthrow the government anytime soon” and didn’t see any scenario “other than collaboration for a period of slightly over a year”.

The leader of the sovereigntist party, which only runs candidates in Quebec, did urge Carney to avoid pressing the province on certain issues, noting that collaboration goes both ways.

On Tuesday, the White House commented on Carney’s win, with deputy press secretary Anna Kelly saying: “The election does not affect President Trump’s plan to make Canada America’s cherished 51st state.”

In an interview with the BBC, Carney said that Canada deserves “respect” from the US and he will only allow a Canada-US trade and security partnership “on our terms”.

Carney has told the BBC that a 51st state scenario was “never, ever going to happen”.

Meanwhile, new US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, said in a video statement that he is “committed to making progress in this great relationship”.

Carney has also promised action on a range of domestic issues, including tackling the country’s housing crisis and tax cuts for lower- and middle-income Canadians.

The prime minister also needs to prepare for the G7 summit in June, which Canada is hosting in the province of Alberta.

In Monday’s election, both the Liberals and the Conservatives saw a significant rise in their share of the national vote compared with four years ago.

The Conservative Party came in second, on track to win 144 seats, and will form Official Opposition.

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

Voter turnout for the election was 67%.

Both Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh lost their seats, with Singh announcing he will step down as leader of the left-wing party.

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.

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”.

On the journey into Yarrabah, there is nothing to suggest a national election is just days away.

Posters for candidates, inescapable in other parts of Australia, are conspicuously absent as you drive past fields of sugar cane and down a gently winding coastal road.

After entering this small Indigenous community near Cairns in far north Queensland, with fishing nets sitting on palm-lined shores, the only thing fighting for attention is a truck selling ice cream – urgently dinging a bell as it avoids the wild horses and dogs that wander the streets.

“It’s weird,” says Suzanne Andrews, chief executive of the town’s Gurriny Yealamucka Health Services. “We don’t see any placards. No-one’s visiting us.”

Watching the leaders of Australia’s two major parties debate each other on television, the Jaru Bunuba Bardi woman was dismayed that “they didn’t talk about any Aboriginal issues or concerns”.

“So,” she asks “what the hell’s going on?”

Indigenous Australians, who represent about 3.8% of the nation’s 26 million population, are by most socio-economic measures the most disadvantaged people in the country – something successive leaders have for years called a “national shame”.

Yet in this election campaign, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton have had little to say on First Nations issues.

One glaring exception occurred this week, when during the final leader’s debate Dutton said Indigenous “welcome to country” ceremonies – where a local Aboriginal person acknowledges and give consent to events taking place on their traditional lands – were “overdone” and should not take place so frequently.

The comments represent one of the only times on the campaign trail that Dutton has publicly addressed issues specifically relating to First Nations people – and not to discuss disadvantage, but within the context of a culture war.

Part of the reason politicians try to steer clear of First Nations issues, according to experts and advocates, is that many believe they are too divisive and therefore electorally risky – especially after the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023.

That referendum, which was loudly supported by Albanese in the most polarising moment of his leadership, saw 60% of voters reject a proposal to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia’s constitution and give them greater political say through a Voice to Parliament.

Those opposing it said the idea was divisive, would create special “classes” of citizens where some have more rights than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

Ahead of the vote, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on both sides of the debate told the BBC they hoped the unprecedented level of interest in their lives would build momentum for more policies to improve them.

Ms Andrews was one of them. But now she looks back at the result with sadness, believing it has now led political parties to “play it safe” and avoid “the hot Aboriginal issues”.

Others, including those who loudly opposed the Voice proposal, agree.

On referendum night, prominent anti-Voice campaigner Warren Mundine told the BBC “now the hard work starts”.

Some 18 months on, he says the reality is that people on both sides of the political aisle promptly disengaged with Indigenous issues after the referendum.

“This is one of the sad things about this election campaign here: whether the Voice got up or didn’t get up, we still had work to do,” he said.

“What’s happened now is that this is probably the first election that I’ve been in where there is no conversation about an Aboriginal policy. It’s just gone silent.”

Lidia Thorpe, an independent senator in Victoria, told the BBC that “Albanese particularly is too scared to mention us [Indigenous Australians] because of his failed referendum that we should never have had in the first place”.

Thorpe spearheaded an Indigenous-run Blak Sovereign movement opposing the Voice, calling instead for priority to be given to a legally binding treaty between First Nations peoples and the Australian government.

“In previous elections, even though we may have been an afterthought and tacked on the end of the sentences, like we always are, at least we were mentioned. Now it’s complete silence,” she said.

“This election could have been a real opportunity for both leaders to unite the nation and tell some truth about the plight of our people. They need to tell the truth that these injustices continue, and they need to tell the truth that they are in a position to change that, to turn that around.”

Since 2008, the Australian government’s Closing the Gap strategy has sought to reduce levels of Indigenous disadvantage through the annual tracking of 18 key measures in areas such as health and education.

The latest review, however, found only four were on track to be met, while four were worsening – including the annual rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander incarceration, which was up 12% in a year.

Despite these trends, Professor Rodney Smith of the University of Sydney says the defeat of the Voice – including in many Labor strongholds – makes it “electorally foolish” to talk too much about First Nations issues this election.

He points to Coalition adverts that tie money “wasted” on the referendum – which is estimated to have cost more than $A400m – into the discussion about cost of living and a struggling economy.

Prof Smith also argues, however, that the 2025 election is not unprecedented in its lack of focus on Indigenous affairs, but rather a return to the norm after several years of the issues receiving more attention than usual.

“I’m not saying people shouldn’t care about this,” he says. “I’m just saying that generally speaking, the electorate doesn’t particularly care about it.”

Recent data from Australian National University (ANU) seems to back that up. A long-term study of voter attitudes found that between January 2024 and January 2025 there was a sharp decline in the number of people believing it was the government’s responsibility to reduce the gap in living standards between First Nations Australians and the rest of the population.

“This lack of policy focus (by Labor and the Coalition) reflects a low prioritisation amongst the Australian population” ANU’s Professor Nicholas Biddle said.

Independent MP Bob Katter puts it more bluntly.

A former minister of Aboriginal Affairs when a Queensland state MP in the 1980s, Mr Katter says he thinks about the struggles of many Indigenous Australians “every night before I go to bed”.

He told the BBC he believes in more self-governance and has campaigned to give greater access to farmable land and fishing rights.

He also admits he doesn’t talk about those issues on the campaign trail, though.

“As a politician that’s got to win votes in the election, I wouldn’t be game,” he told the BBC.

That’s hard for many Indigenous people to swallow given the toll the referendum took – on those on both sides of the debate.

A report published by Sydney’s University of Technology last month found that the Voice referendum led to an increase in hostile levels of racism towards First Nations People, recording 453 “validated” incidents of racism roughly six months either side of the vote.

About a fifth of all complaints contained mention of the failed referendum.

“While there was significant thought and debate given to the ideas of nation building and the righting of wrongs, the undercurrent of racism was ever present,” said the report’s guest author Professor Lindon Coombes in his introduction.

“This is its insidiousness.”

In Yarrabah, Ms Andrews becomes suddenly tearful, telling how her two daughters, studying at university in Brisbane, were intimidated and got “so many racist remarks” after the vote.

“To do this to young people, who have left community to better their life and to be something, is so wrong,” she said.

It was not just increased racism that caused harm, but the tone and intensity of the debate leading up to the vote, many say.

Mr Mundine says his participation in the toxic and polarised national discussion meant he felt alienated from many in his community.

“I got kicked off boards. I lost jobs… [I] was ostracised.”

“Being the topic of every discussion for such a long period of time was overwhelming and extremely damaging to people’s social and emotional well-being,” says Clinton Schultz, a Gamilaroi/Gomeroi man, psychologist and Director of First Nations Strategy at the Black Dog Institute.

“The aftermath of that has left a lot of people not willing to engage in in the debates moving forward.”

Millima May, a Kulumbirigin Danggalaba Tiwi woman from the Northern Territory, in 2023 told the BBC all First Nations people wanted was “a seat at the table” where decisions about their lives were made. But now there’s been a “tactical” decision by some in the community to “lie low”.

“I think a lot of Aboriginal people have really chosen to opt out of the political space and of so -called democracy in Australia,” she says.

“If you could trust our political leaders and candidates to have nuanced and informed conversations, then you would be able to have debates and conversations in a respectful and safe way.

“But that is not how Australian politics is operating at the moment.”

On a searing afternoon in Vietnam, Tung Linh declared she “basically knows nothing” about the bloody, decades-long war that pitted her country’s Communist-run North against the United States-backed South.

“My grandparents fought in the war and because of that today we can look at the sky and see an airplane and we don’t feel scared, like they did,” says the 20-year-old college student.

Stuck to her right cheek was a little yellow star on a red rectangle – the Vietnamese flag. Like her, the capital, Ho Chi Minh, was gearing up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, when the Communists triumphed.

Today’s Vietnam is a remarkably different country than the one American troops withdrew from in defeat – it’s enterprising, it’s growing fast and it’s getting richer.

Its authoritarian Communist leadership has embraced capitalism. They aspire to follow in China’s footsteps, and have ploughed money and effort into becoming a reliable manufacturing hub, even an alternative to China.

But that is a risky ambition during US President Donald Trump’s trade war – it’s partly why he is threatening a 46% levy against the South East Asian nation. That could shatter the country’s economic potential.

Vietnam was a French colony, a Chinese vassal and for 20 years, the proxy battlefield in America’s bloody struggle to stop China spreading communism across South East Asia.

But it cannot escape its geography. Nestled beneath China’s wide rump, it is once again on the frontline in a new American battle –which hopes to stem Beijing’s rise as an economic superpower.

Vietnam is a young country in a hurry. The median age is 33, considerably younger than Thailand or China (40), and far younger than Japan (50).

“I want to do a job that will bring more success to Vietnam,” said Linh in fluent English. She is studying economics and marketing. “And yes, success for me too,” she admits, with a smile, when prodded.

It’s a dream that suits the bustling she city she lives in – now a sprawling metropolis of 10 million people, the Vietnamese capital has the same choking traffic, glass-clad skyscrapers, five-star hotels, restaurants and seedy massage parlours as any Asian mega city.

You would be hard put to find traces of the socialist ideology that led to the city’s capture in 1975, when it was the capital of South Vietnam. The victors renamed it city Ho Chi Minh, after the revolutionary father of North Vietnam. But to locals, it is still Saigon.

And when it fell on this day 50 years ago, South Vietnam ceased to exist as North Vietnamese tanks smashed through the tall iron gates of the presidential compound and raised the red flag with a yellow star over the presidential palace.

America’s ally, the southern regime, was vanquished. Its last president had fled the previous day. More than two decades of bitter conflict was over.

The victory had come at enormous cost. An estimated three million dead and millions more injured. Between 1968 and 1975, a greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on this slender piece of land than in all theatres in World War Two.

But few here want talk about the war even as they celebrate the anniversary of their “reunification”.

Linh and her friends screamed in delight as a truck carrying soldiers drove past. The shy idols waved back – they were on their way to the barracks after rehearsals for the anniversary parade.

“I am excited because this is the day when we reunited, when we became one country again,” Linh said.

Her answer sounded a little rehearsed, not least because of the government-appointed minder who accompanied the BBC throughout. But her enthusiasm for her future – and her country’s – is not uncommon.

A little further down the road, 18-year-old Minh, who did not want to share her last name, told us she was studying to be a lawyer so she could “become successful”. With a laugh, she added: “And rich!”

When we asked about how young people feel about Americans, the minder winced visibly and tried to stop her answering.

“We’re not angry,” she says. “We don’t hate them. That was the past. Now we want to trade with America. You know globalisation? We want to learn from America.”

Vietnam’s new leaders appears to have the same ambition. In January the country’s new Communist party chief, To Lam, embarked on a program to slash bureaucracy that could impress Elon Musk, who has been overseeing the Trump administration’s controversial cost-cutting team.

The country’s 63 provinces and municipalities are being reduced to 34, and government ministries and agencies cut from 30 to 17. This year, 100,000 government employees are being laid off, according to official estimates.

The ambition is huge. So far only one country in South East Asia, Singapore, has managed to escape the “middle-income trap”, where economic growth slows before countries become rich. Vietnam, whose economy is growing at a steady 5%, intends to be the second. It has flung its doors wide open to investment – and is welcoming back those it once drove from its shores.

After the 1975 victory around two million southern Vietnamese fled the country. Many were ethnic Chinese. They packed on to flimsy boats and set out across the South China Sea. They became known as “the boat people”. Today their descendants make up a diaspora of nearly six million stretching from the United States and Canada to France, Germany, Japan and Taiwan.

“Since 2017, I have promoted many Taiwanese companies to invest in Vietnam, and I myself am an advisor to several large electronics companies that I brought here,” said Lisa Wu, who was born in Saigon but spent three decades in Taiwan. Now she is back.

“The most attractive thing is that the Vietnamese government is very supportive. The electronics industry is expanding out of China and a lot will choose Vietnam.”

It’s no coincidence this shift began around 2017, when Trump declared his first trade war against China.

Two young businesswomen from southern China, who did not want to share their names, tell us they have spent the last two years setting up a shoe factory here: “Now it’s ready to go.”

They plan to export to the US. They are concerned about the possibility of higher tariffs for Vietnam – it currently faces a 10% levy, like most of the world – but “it’s a lot better here than China”, they say with a laugh. Chinese imports to the US face a range of tariffs that go up to 245% for some goods.

Still, Vietnam is feeling the impact, Ms Wu said. “I had several factories preparing to begin operations here this May. But because of the policy change, all have stopped and everyone is waiting.”

Vietnam is again being asked to choose – America or China. But it’s not a choice it can or will make because it needs both.

Less than two weeks ago, they rolled out the red carpet to welcome Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Hanoi. Warm words were spoken of fraternal friendship and support. But relations with their big communist neighbour are trickier than they may appear. For years, Vietnam has walked a tightrope between Washington and Beijing – the latter’s expansive ambitions can be a threat to neighbours, especially growing economies that are keen to woo US businesses.

As Vietnam insists on “looking forward”, it appears to have almost forgotten the men and women who fought in the jungles and through the hell of American bombs.

But even they say there must be no return to the past. “I used to have a scar here,” says Le Thanh Gian, pointing to his right hand, where a bullet had once lodged.

“There are still some pieces of shrapnel in my body that couldn’t be removed. There were battles where it seemed like we would all be killed. But some of us survived while others fell.”

But he says he bears no anger anymore.

“We must have peace. We have already made a lot of progress. People’s lives are more prosperous and fulfilled. Now we must work together with the Americans for the future.”

Nestled in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan sits the picturesque village of Sergele.

For generations villagers have made a living growing pomegranates, almonds and peaches and foraging in the surrounding forests for wild fruits and spices.

But Sergele, located 16km (10 miles) from the border with Turkey, has become increasingly surrounded by Turkish military bases, which are dotted across the slopes.

One, perched halfway up the western ridge, looms over the village, while another in the east is under construction.

At least seven have been built here over the past two years, including one by a small dam that regulates Sergele’s water supply, rendering it off limits to villagers.

“This is 100% a form of occupation of Kurdish [Iraqi Kurdistan] lands,” says farmer Sherwan Sherwan Sergeli, 50, who has lost access to some of his land.

“The Turks ruined it.”

Sergele is now in danger of being dragged into what’s known locally as the “Forbidden Zone” – a large strip of land in northern Iraq affected by Turkey’s war with the Kurdish militant group the PKK, which launched an insurgency in southern Turkey in 1984.

The Forbidden Zone spans almost the entire length of the Iraqi border with Turkey and is up to 40km (25 miles) deep in places.

Community Peacemaker Teams, a human rights group based in Iraqi Kurdistan, says that hundreds of civilians have been killed by drone and air strikes in and around the Forbidden Zone. According to a 2020 Kurdistan parliamentary report, thousands have been forced off their land and whole villages have been emptied out by the conflict.

Sergele is now effectively on the front line of Turkey’s war with the PKK.

When the BBC World Service Eye Investigations team visited the area, Turkish aircraft pummelled the mountains surrounding the village to root out PKK militants, who have long operated from caves and tunnels in northern Iraq.

Much of the land around Sergele had been burned by shelling.

“The more bases they put up, the worse it gets for us,” says Sherwan.

Turkey has been rapidly growing its military presence in the Forbidden Zone in recent years, but until now the scale of this expansion was not publicly known.

Using satellite imagery assessed by experts and corroborated with on-the-ground reporting and open-source content, the BBC found that as of December 2024, the Turkish military had built at least 136 fixed military installations across northern Iraq.

Through its vast network of military bases, Turkey now holds de-facto control of more than 2,000 sq km (772 square miles) of Iraqi land, the BBC’s analysis found.

Satellite images further reveal that the Turkish military has built at least 660km (410 miles) of roads connecting its facilities. These supply routes have resulted in deforestation and left a lasting imprint on the region’s mountains.

While a few of the bases date back to the 1990s, 89% have been constructed since 2018, after which Turkey began significantly expanding its military presence in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Turkish government didn’t respond to the BBC’s requests for interviews, but has maintained that its military bases are necessary to push back the PKK, which is designated a terrorist organisation by Ankara and a number of Western nations, including the UK.

The sub-district capital of Kani Masi, which is only 4km (2.5 miles) from the Iraqi-Turkish border and parts of which are within the Forbidden Zone, may offer a glimpse into Sergele’s future.

Once famous for its apple production, few residents remain here now.

Farmer Salam Saeed, whose land is in the shadow of a large Turkish base, hasn’t been able to cultivate his vineyard for the past three years.

“The moment you get here, you will have a drone hover over you,” he tells the BBC.

“They will shoot you if you stay.”

The Turkish military first set up here in the 1990s and has been consolidating its presence since.

Its main military base, featuring concrete blast walls, watch and communication towers and space for armoured personnel carriers to move inside, is much more developed than the smaller outposts around Sergele.

Salam, like some other locals, believes Turkey ultimately wants to claim the territory as its own.

“All they want is for us to leave these areas,” he adds.

Near Kani Masi, the BBC saw first-hand how Turkish forces have effectively pushed back the Iraqi border guard, which is responsible for protecting Iraq’s international boundaries.

At several locations, the border guards were manning positions well inside Iraqi territory, directly opposite Turkish troops, unable to go right up to the border and potentially risk a clash.

“The posts that you see are Turkish posts,” says General Farhad Mahmoud, pointing to a ridge just across a valley, about 10km (6 miles) inside Iraqi territory.

But “we cannot reach the border to know the number of posts”, he adds.

Turkey’s military expansion in Iraqi Kurdistan – fuelled by its rise as a drone power and growing defence budget – is seen as part of a broader foreign policy shift towards greater interventionism in the region.

Similar to its operations in Iraq, Turkey has also sought to establish a buffer zone along its border with Syria to contain Syrian armed groups allied with the PKK.

In public, Iraq’s government has condemned Turkey’s military presence in the country. But behind closed doors it has accommodated some of Ankara’s demands.

In 2024, the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly fight the PKK.

But the document, obtained by the BBC, did not place any limitations on Turkish troops in Iraq.

Iraq depends on Turkey for trade, investment and water security, while its fractured internal politics have further undermined the government’s ability to take a strong stance.

Iraq’s national government did not respond to the BBC requests for comment.

Watch Turkey’s hidden war: The Forbidden Zone on iPlayer

People outside the UK can watch the documentary on YouTube

Meanwhile, the rulers of the semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan have a close relationship with Ankara based on mutual interests and have often downplayed the civilian harm due to Turkey’s military action.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), an arch enemy of the PKK, dominates the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and has officially been in charge since 2005, when Iraq’s constitution granted the region its semi-autonomous status.

The KDP’s close ties with Turkey have contributed to the region’s economic success and have strengthened its position, both against its regional political rivals and with the Iraqi government in Baghdad, with which it tussles for greater autonomy.

Hoshyar Zebari, a senior member of the KDP’s politburo, sought to blame the PKK for Turkey’s presence in Iraqi Kurdistan.

“They [the Turkish military] are not harming our people,” he told the BBC.

“They are not detaining them. They are not interfering in them going about their business. Their focus, their sole goal is the PKK.”

The conflict shows no signs of ending, despite the PKK’s long-jailed leader Abdulla Ocalan calling in February for his fighters to lay down arms and disband.

Turkey has continued to shell targets across Iraqi Kurdistan, while the PKK claimed responsibility for downing a Turkish drone last month.

And while violent incidents in Turkey have declined since 2016, according to a tally by the NGO Crisis Group, those in Iraq have spiked, with civilians living on the border region facing growing risk of death and displacement.

One of those killed was 24-year-old Alan Ismail, a stage-four cancer patient hit by an air strike in August 2023 while on a trip to the mountains with his cousin, Hashem Shaker.

The Turkish military has denied carrying out a strike that day, but a police report seen by the BBC attributes the incident to a Turkish drone.

When Hashem filed a complaint in a local court about the attack he was detained by Kurdish security forces and held for eight months on suspicion of supporting the PKK – an accusation he and his family deny.

“It has destroyed us. It’s like killing the whole family,” says Ismail Chichu, Alan’s father.

“They [the Turks] have no rights to kill people in their own country on their own land.”

Turkey’s Defence Ministry did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment. It has previously told the media that the Turkish armed forces follow international law, and that in the planning and execution of their operations they only target terrorists, while taking care to prevent harm to civilians.

The BBC has seen documents suggesting Kurdish authorities may have acted to help Turkey evade accountability for civilian casualties.

Confidential papers seen by the BBC show a Kurdish court closed the investigation into Alan’s killing, saying the perpetrator was unknown.

And his death certificate – issued by Kurdish authorities and seen by the BBC – says he died because of “explosive fragments”.

Failing to mention when victims of air strikes have died as a result of violence, rather than an accident, makes it difficult for families to seek justice and compensation, to which they’re entitled under both Iraqi and Kurdish law.

“In most of the death certificates, they only wrote ‘infijar’, which means explosion,” says Kamaran Othman from Community Peacemaker Teams.

“It can be anything exploding.

“I think the Kurdish Regional Government doesn’t want to make Turkey responsible for what they are doing here.”

The KRG said it acknowledged the “tragic loss of civilians resulting from military confrontation between the PKK and Turkish army in the region”.

It added that “a number of casualties” had been documented as “civilian martyrs”, meaning they have been unjustly killed and entitling them to compensation.

Almost two years after Alan was killed, his family is still waiting, if not for compensation, at least for acknowledgement from the KRG.

“They could at least send their condolences – we don’t need their compensation,” says Ismail.

“When something is gone, it’s gone forever.”

The power is out and nothing is working. How am I supposed to get through the day?

That was the question faced by millions of people on Monday across Spain and Portugal during the worst electricity blackout in their history.

We ask people who spent the day without electricity about what helped them get on with life and what outage essentials they were missing.

Paying with phone and card has become the norm, but in cities across Spain and Portugal, queues formed at cash machines – at least the ones that were still working – as shops switched away from card payments.

“We managed to pay for our coffees with card when the outage first started, [but later] we didn’t have any cash so we couldn’t buy a thing,” Ed Rowe, 26, in Madrid told the BBC.

“All the restaurants that were open were cash only.”

Grace O’Leary, 32, who also lives in Spain’s capital, said she and her mum were counting coins to see if she had enough money to buy wine from a corner shop.

“Cash, apparently, is in fact, king.”

Jaime Giorgio, 28, was lucky enough to have some cash on him, which allowed him to buy food and other essentials.

“In Madrid it was quite chaotic, there was no tube and you couldn’t take out any cash.

“I had cash, but my flatmate didn’t, so I had to lend him money to buy things.”

The power outage also led to an information blackout, as people spent the day without internet, WhatsApp, calls, and TV.

“The complete loss of communication was the most confusing and concerning thing… we were only left to speculate as to the cause and piece together news from people in the neighbourhood,” said Daniel Clegg from Barcelona.

The 42-year-old said the absence of information led him to looking at the sky to see if planes were still flying.

For Siegfried and Christine Buschschluter, an old windup transistor radio helped tune in to local radio stations to find out what was happening after their phones stopped working and power went off at their rural home outside Spain’s capital.

Christine, 82, explained: “You had to keep on winding and winding.

“It was quite a strange situation. I was born in Berlin during the war and it reminded me of those days when my parents tried to get some news – it took me back.”

The couple reckon the outage will lead to boom in demand for battery-operated radios.

And it is also on Daniel’s shopping list. “Essential kit for back to basics communication and staying informed that I completely neglected to remember.”

Microwaves, air fryers and some hobs and ovens all demand electricity.

But on Monday food that does not require electricity to heat or prepare it were in demand.

In supermarkets, shoppers formed long queues and panic-bought essentials – echoing scenes from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We bought a lot of food that wasn’t going to go off, like tuna in cans, just in case,” says actor Jaime.

“The outage only lasted a day and now we have so much food, but most of it isn’t going to go bad, as it is easily preserved.”

Lesley Elder, in town Fortuna in south-eastern Spain, said: “Trying to find food you don’t need to heat up, that was more difficult than we thought.

“So we ended up having ham and cheese for dinner.”

She adds a little gas stove to heat up food in a pan would have been helpful.

Across the Iberian peninsula, people turned to candles to light up dark spaces.

Richard, who lives in the Spanish city of Alcala de Henares, said not a single street light was on when night fell.

“People were finding their way around by torchlight. It was quite surreal seeing the view from my window totally black especially as I live next to a dual carriageway,” he said.

“In my spare time, I make candles and luckily I had a few going spare so I could see in the dark.”

Sarah Baxter, from Barcelona, said she even used a candle stovetop to heat up food.

“We could heat beans and rice, and bring water to a boil for instant potatoes,” she said.

“It was much safer than a propane camping stove inside the apartment.”

Although candles and naked flames can pose a fire risk.

With no power people relied on having battery in their devices.

In Madrid, people queued outside tech shops to get their hands on a power bank.

Luckily for Sarah she had a solar charger that kept her phone charged through ten hours of blackout, and helped her elderly neighbour do the same.

Lesley says her Kindle ran out of battery. “No TV, no Scrabble puzzle on my phone. So having a couple of books would have been helpful,” she said.

But for others, not having access to the internet and their devices was a relief.

“Everyone relies on technology so much that it’s quite a nice reminder you can be more independent,” said Ed.

“You don’t have to be connected with everyone all the time,” said his flatmate Hannah Steiner, 23. “I was having a good time with my flatmates.”

Sara Francisco, 24, from Leiria, in central Portugal, said: “I feel this thing that happened was important to make us be more aware and be more conscious about our habits.”

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.

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.

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.

On the journey into Yarrabah, there is nothing to suggest a national election is just days away.

Posters for candidates, inescapable in other parts of Australia, are conspicuously absent as you drive past fields of sugar cane and down a gently winding coastal road.

After entering this small Indigenous community near Cairns in far north Queensland, with fishing nets sitting on palm-lined shores, the only thing fighting for attention is a truck selling ice cream – urgently dinging a bell as it avoids the wild horses and dogs that wander the streets.

“It’s weird,” says Suzanne Andrews, chief executive of the town’s Gurriny Yealamucka Health Services. “We don’t see any placards. No-one’s visiting us.”

Watching the leaders of Australia’s two major parties debate each other on television, the Jaru Bunuba Bardi woman was dismayed that “they didn’t talk about any Aboriginal issues or concerns”.

“So,” she asks “what the hell’s going on?”

Indigenous Australians, who represent about 3.8% of the nation’s 26 million population, are by most socio-economic measures the most disadvantaged people in the country – something successive leaders have for years called a “national shame”.

Yet in this election campaign, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton have had little to say on First Nations issues.

One glaring exception occurred this week, when during the final leader’s debate Dutton said Indigenous “welcome to country” ceremonies – where a local Aboriginal person acknowledges and give consent to events taking place on their traditional lands – were “overdone” and should not take place so frequently.

The comments represent one of the only times on the campaign trail that Dutton has publicly addressed issues specifically relating to First Nations people – and not to discuss disadvantage, but within the context of a culture war.

Part of the reason politicians try to steer clear of First Nations issues, according to experts and advocates, is that many believe they are too divisive and therefore electorally risky – especially after the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023.

That referendum, which was loudly supported by Albanese in the most polarising moment of his leadership, saw 60% of voters reject a proposal to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia’s constitution and give them greater political say through a Voice to Parliament.

Those opposing it said the idea was divisive, would create special “classes” of citizens where some have more rights than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

Ahead of the vote, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on both sides of the debate told the BBC they hoped the unprecedented level of interest in their lives would build momentum for more policies to improve them.

Ms Andrews was one of them. But now she looks back at the result with sadness, believing it has now led political parties to “play it safe” and avoid “the hot Aboriginal issues”.

Others, including those who loudly opposed the Voice proposal, agree.

On referendum night, prominent anti-Voice campaigner Warren Mundine told the BBC “now the hard work starts”.

Some 18 months on, he says the reality is that people on both sides of the political aisle promptly disengaged with Indigenous issues after the referendum.

“This is one of the sad things about this election campaign here: whether the Voice got up or didn’t get up, we still had work to do,” he said.

“What’s happened now is that this is probably the first election that I’ve been in where there is no conversation about an Aboriginal policy. It’s just gone silent.”

Lidia Thorpe, an independent senator in Victoria, told the BBC that “Albanese particularly is too scared to mention us [Indigenous Australians] because of his failed referendum that we should never have had in the first place”.

Thorpe spearheaded an Indigenous-run Blak Sovereign movement opposing the Voice, calling instead for priority to be given to a legally binding treaty between First Nations peoples and the Australian government.

“In previous elections, even though we may have been an afterthought and tacked on the end of the sentences, like we always are, at least we were mentioned. Now it’s complete silence,” she said.

“This election could have been a real opportunity for both leaders to unite the nation and tell some truth about the plight of our people. They need to tell the truth that these injustices continue, and they need to tell the truth that they are in a position to change that, to turn that around.”

Since 2008, the Australian government’s Closing the Gap strategy has sought to reduce levels of Indigenous disadvantage through the annual tracking of 18 key measures in areas such as health and education.

The latest review, however, found only four were on track to be met, while four were worsening – including the annual rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander incarceration, which was up 12% in a year.

Despite these trends, Professor Rodney Smith of the University of Sydney says the defeat of the Voice – including in many Labor strongholds – makes it “electorally foolish” to talk too much about First Nations issues this election.

He points to Coalition adverts that tie money “wasted” on the referendum – which is estimated to have cost more than $A400m – into the discussion about cost of living and a struggling economy.

Prof Smith also argues, however, that the 2025 election is not unprecedented in its lack of focus on Indigenous affairs, but rather a return to the norm after several years of the issues receiving more attention than usual.

“I’m not saying people shouldn’t care about this,” he says. “I’m just saying that generally speaking, the electorate doesn’t particularly care about it.”

Recent data from Australian National University (ANU) seems to back that up. A long-term study of voter attitudes found that between January 2024 and January 2025 there was a sharp decline in the number of people believing it was the government’s responsibility to reduce the gap in living standards between First Nations Australians and the rest of the population.

“This lack of policy focus (by Labor and the Coalition) reflects a low prioritisation amongst the Australian population” ANU’s Professor Nicholas Biddle said.

Independent MP Bob Katter puts it more bluntly.

A former minister of Aboriginal Affairs when a Queensland state MP in the 1980s, Mr Katter says he thinks about the struggles of many Indigenous Australians “every night before I go to bed”.

He told the BBC he believes in more self-governance and has campaigned to give greater access to farmable land and fishing rights.

He also admits he doesn’t talk about those issues on the campaign trail, though.

“As a politician that’s got to win votes in the election, I wouldn’t be game,” he told the BBC.

That’s hard for many Indigenous people to swallow given the toll the referendum took – on those on both sides of the debate.

A report published by Sydney’s University of Technology last month found that the Voice referendum led to an increase in hostile levels of racism towards First Nations People, recording 453 “validated” incidents of racism roughly six months either side of the vote.

About a fifth of all complaints contained mention of the failed referendum.

“While there was significant thought and debate given to the ideas of nation building and the righting of wrongs, the undercurrent of racism was ever present,” said the report’s guest author Professor Lindon Coombes in his introduction.

“This is its insidiousness.”

In Yarrabah, Ms Andrews becomes suddenly tearful, telling how her two daughters, studying at university in Brisbane, were intimidated and got “so many racist remarks” after the vote.

“To do this to young people, who have left community to better their life and to be something, is so wrong,” she said.

It was not just increased racism that caused harm, but the tone and intensity of the debate leading up to the vote, many say.

Mr Mundine says his participation in the toxic and polarised national discussion meant he felt alienated from many in his community.

“I got kicked off boards. I lost jobs… [I] was ostracised.”

“Being the topic of every discussion for such a long period of time was overwhelming and extremely damaging to people’s social and emotional well-being,” says Clinton Schultz, a Gamilaroi/Gomeroi man, psychologist and Director of First Nations Strategy at the Black Dog Institute.

“The aftermath of that has left a lot of people not willing to engage in in the debates moving forward.”

Millima May, a Kulumbirigin Danggalaba Tiwi woman from the Northern Territory, in 2023 told the BBC all First Nations people wanted was “a seat at the table” where decisions about their lives were made. But now there’s been a “tactical” decision by some in the community to “lie low”.

“I think a lot of Aboriginal people have really chosen to opt out of the political space and of so -called democracy in Australia,” she says.

“If you could trust our political leaders and candidates to have nuanced and informed conversations, then you would be able to have debates and conversations in a respectful and safe way.

“But that is not how Australian politics is operating at the moment.”

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.

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.

On a searing afternoon in Vietnam, Tung Linh declared she “basically knows nothing” about the bloody, decades-long war that pitted her country’s Communist-run North against the United States-backed South.

“My grandparents fought in the war and because of that today we can look at the sky and see an airplane and we don’t feel scared, like they did,” says the 20-year-old college student.

Stuck to her right cheek was a little yellow star on a red rectangle – the Vietnamese flag. Like her, Ho Chi Minh City, where she lived, was gearing up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, when the Communists triumphed.

Today’s Vietnam is a remarkably different country than the one American troops withdrew from in defeat – it’s enterprising, it’s growing fast and it’s getting richer.

Its authoritarian Communist leadership has embraced capitalism. They aspire to follow in China’s footsteps, and have ploughed money and effort into becoming a reliable manufacturing hub, even an alternative to China.

But that is a risky ambition during US President Donald Trump’s trade war – it’s partly why he is threatening a 46% levy against the South East Asian nation. That could shatter the country’s economic potential.

Vietnam was a French colony, a Chinese vassal and for 20 years, the proxy battlefield in America’s bloody struggle to stop China spreading communism across South East Asia.

But it cannot escape its geography. Nestled beneath China’s wide rump, it is once again on the frontline in a new American battle –which hopes to stem Beijing’s rise as an economic superpower.

Vietnam is a young country in a hurry. The median age is 33, considerably younger than Thailand or China (40), and far younger than Japan (50).

“I want to do a job that will bring more success to Vietnam,” said Linh in fluent English. She is studying economics and marketing. “And yes, success for me too,” she admits, with a smile, when prodded.

It’s a dream that suits her bustling city – now a sprawling metropolis of 10 million people, Ho Chi Minh City has the same choking traffic, glass-clad skyscrapers, five-star hotels, restaurants and seedy massage parlours as any Asian mega city.

You would be hard put to find traces of the socialist ideology that led to the city’s capture in 1975, when it was the capital of South Vietnam. The victors renamed it city Ho Chi Minh, after the revolutionary father of North Vietnam. But to locals, it is still Saigon.

And when it fell on this day 50 years ago, South Vietnam ceased to exist as North Vietnamese tanks smashed through the tall iron gates of the presidential compound and raised the red flag with a yellow star over the presidential palace.

America’s ally, the southern regime, was vanquished. Its last president had fled the previous day. More than two decades of bitter conflict was over.

The victory had come at an enormous cost. An estimated three million dead and millions more injured. Between 1968 and 1975, a greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on this slender piece of land than in all theatres in World War Two.

But few here want to talk about the war even as they celebrate the anniversary of their “reunification”.

Linh and her friends screamed in delight as a truck carrying soldiers drove past. The shy idols waved back – they were on their way to the barracks after rehearsals for the anniversary parade.

“I am excited because this is the day when we reunited, when we became one country again,” Linh said.

Her answer sounded a little rehearsed, not least because of the government-appointed minder who accompanied the BBC throughout. But her enthusiasm for her future – and her country’s – is not uncommon.

A little further down the road, 18-year-old Minh, who did not want to share her last name, told us she was studying to be a lawyer so she could “become successful”. With a laugh, she added: “And rich!”

When we asked about how young people feel about Americans, the minder winced visibly and tried to stop her answering.

“We’re not angry,” she says. “We don’t hate them. That was the past. Now we want to trade with America. You know globalisation? We want to learn from America.”

Vietnam’s new leaders appear to have the same ambition. In January the country’s new Communist party chief, To Lam, embarked on a program to slash bureaucracy that could impress Elon Musk, who has been overseeing the Trump administration’s controversial cost-cutting team.

The country’s 63 provinces and municipalities are being reduced to 34, and government ministries and agencies cut from 30 to 17. This year, 100,000 government employees are being laid off, according to official estimates.

The ambition is huge. So far only one country in South East Asia, Singapore, has managed to escape the “middle-income trap”, where economic growth slows before countries become rich. Vietnam, whose economy is growing at a steady 5%, intends to be the second. It has flung its doors wide open to investment – and is welcoming back those it once drove from its shores.

After the 1975 victory around two million southern Vietnamese fled the country. Many were ethnic Chinese. They packed on to flimsy boats and set out across the South China Sea. They became known as “the boat people”. Today their descendants make up a diaspora of nearly six million stretching from the United States and Canada to France, Germany, Japan and Taiwan.

“Since 2017, I have promoted many Taiwanese companies to invest in Vietnam, and I myself am an advisor to several large electronics companies that I brought here,” said Lisa Wu, who was born in Saigon but spent three decades in Taiwan. Now she is back.

“The most attractive thing is that the Vietnamese government is very supportive. The electronics industry is expanding out of China and a lot will choose Vietnam.”

It’s no coincidence this shift began around 2018, when Trump declared his first trade war against China.

Two young businesswomen from southern China, who did not want to share their names, tell us they have spent the last two years setting up a shoe factory here: “Now it’s ready to go.”

They plan to export to the US. They are concerned about the possibility of higher tariffs for Vietnam – it currently faces a 10% levy, like most of the world – but “it’s a lot better here than China”, they say with a laugh. Chinese imports to the US face a range of tariffs that go up to 245% for some goods.

Still, Vietnam is feeling the impact, Ms Wu said. “I had several factories preparing to begin operations here this May. But because of the policy change, all have stopped and everyone is waiting.”

Vietnam is again being asked to choose – America or China. But it’s not a choice it can or will make because it needs both.

Less than two weeks ago, they rolled out the red carpet to welcome Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the capital Hanoi. Warm words were spoken of fraternal friendship and support. But relations with their big neighbour are trickier than they may appear. For years, Vietnam has walked a tightrope between Washington and Beijing – the latter’s expansive ambitions can be a threat to neighbours, especially growing economies that are keen to woo US businesses.

As Vietnam insists on “looking forward”, it appears to have almost forgotten the men and women who fought in the jungles and through the hell of American bombs.

But even they say there must be no return to the past. “I used to have a scar here,” says Le Thanh Gian, pointing to his right hand, where a bullet had once lodged.

“There are still some pieces of shrapnel in my body that couldn’t be removed. There were battles where it seemed like we would all be killed. But some of us survived while others fell.”

But he says he bears no anger anymore.

“We must have peace. We have already made a lot of progress. People’s lives are more prosperous and fulfilled. Now we must work together with the Americans for the future.”

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.

Victims of the car attack that left 11 people dead at a festival in Vancouver, Canada, on Saturday have not yet been named by police, but they are now being identified online by family and colleagues.

The victims, nine females and two males, range in age from a five-year-old girl to a 65-year-old man. More than two dozen other people were injured, according to police.

Up to 100,000 revellers were celebrating the Lapu-Lapu festival in Canada’s largest west coast city when the attack occurred.

A 30-year-old man has been arrested and is facing multiple murder charges. Officials have not yet released a motive, but say the case is not being treated as terrorism.

Seven victims in hospital were in a critical condition, according to Vancouver police spokesman Sgt Steve Addison. Three others were in a serious condition.

Here’s what we know about some of those who have been identified in social media posts and on fundraising pages by family and colleagues.

Katie Le, five, was the youngest person to die in the attack. She was killed along with her father, Richard Le, 47, and mother Linh Hoang, 30.

Her 16-year-old brother, who stayed home from the festival to do homework, is the family’s sole survivor, a relative wrote on a GoFundMe page.

“This event was meant to be a joyful community gathering, celebrating unity and the strength of a connected people,” wrote Richard Le’s brother, Toan Le.

Katie was about to graduate from kindergarten, and was “vibrant, joyful, and full of life”.

Toan Le remembered his brother Richard Le as “a dedicated father, badminton and tennis coach, and real estate professional”.

“He devoted his life to teaching young people the values of sportsmanship and team spirit. He served his community and clients with pride and always went out of his way to help others,” he wrote.

Linh Hoang “was known for her kindness and gentle spirit”, and had recently been planning a trip to visit family in Vietnam.

Toan Le told CTV News the 16-year-old survivor was still in shock.

“He’s still trying to absorb the situation, and I don’t think he is fully comprehending what has happened,” he said, adding that the boy was in the care of family.

Kira Salim, a teacher and counsellor at Fraser River Middle School and New Westminster Secondary School, was among those killed.

“Kira was a valued member of our community whose wisdom and care for our middle and secondary school students had a powerful impact,” school officials Maya Russell and Mark Davidson wrote in a statement.

“The loss of our friend and colleague has left us all shocked and heartbroken,” they added.

“We recognize Kira’s passing may be difficult to process,” the school district’s statement said.

“We are a small but mighty community. This is one of the qualities of New Westminster that Kira loved the most,” they wrote.

Salim is described in a LinkedIn page as a mental health provider and educator.

“My personal mission is facilitating and guiding youth and marginalized communities to thrive in their lives while creating a diverse and equitable environment that uplifts different strengths and personalities while providing customized and innovative solutions to support patients,” Salim wrote.

Salim wrote in a post that it “is a dream come true” after taking a job at Frazer River Middle School nine months ago.

New West Pride, an LGBT advocacy group, memorialised Salim with a photo.

“They were an epic drag king, a wonderful exuberant contributer [sic] to our local community, volunteer, activist, local educator, mental health worker,” the group wrote.

“Kira will be deeply missed.”

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.

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.

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 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.

Most 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 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.”

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”.

Mark Carney’s Liberal Party has won enough seats in the House of Commons to form a government in Canada.

However, CBC News projects they will fall 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, has lost his own seat as has Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP).

Carney’s Liberals are leading in 169 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.

The Bloc Québécois is leading in 22 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 NDP whose share of the popular vote is down by almost 12 percentage points.

The increased support for the Conservatives was not enough to save Poilievre, who 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, Poilievre had 90 opponents, mostly independent candidates linked to a group calling for electoral reform.

NDP leader Singh also lost his own seat in the House of Commons, coming 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.

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

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

The 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.

The 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 13.

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

The Liberals won Terrebonne from the Bloc by a margin of just 35 votes.

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

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

Turnout has surpassed the levels seen in 2015 and 2019, with 69% of registered electors having voted. This is according to the preliminary results from Elections Canada.

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

US President Donald Trump has celebrated the 100th day of his second term in office with a campaign-style speech, touting his achievements and targeting political foes.

Hailing what he called a “revolution of common sense”, he told a crowd of supporters in Michigan that he was using his presidency to deliver “profound change”.

The Republican mocked his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, and aimed fresh criticism at the US Federal Reserve’s chairman, while dismissing polls that show his own popularity slipping.

Trump has delivered a dramatic fall in the number of migrants crossing illegally into the US, but the economy is a potential political vulnerability as he wages a global trade war.

“We’ve just gotten started, you haven’t seen anything yet,” Trump told the crowd on Tuesday in a suburb of Detroit.

Speaking at the hub of America’s automative industry, Trump said car firms were “lining up” to open new manufacturing plants in the Midwestern state.

Earlier in the day he softened a key element of his economic plan – tariffs on the import of foreign cars and car parts – after US car-makers warned of the danger of rising prices.

At his rally, Trump also said opinion polls indicating his popularity had fallen were “fake”.

According to Gallup, Trump is the only post-World War Two president to have less than half the public’s support after 100 days in office, with an approval rating of 44%.

But the majority of Republican voters still firmly back the president. And the rival Democratic Party is also struggling in polling.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) said Trump’s first 100 days were a “colossal failure”.

“Trump is to blame for the fact that life is more expensive, it’s harder to retire, and a ‘Trump recession’ is at our doorstep,” the DNC said.

• Trump’s breakneck start is fraught with political risk
• ‘Kicking butt’ or ‘going too fast’? Trump voters reflect on 100 days

Trump conducted his own informal poll in Tuesday’s remarks, asking the crowd for their favourite Biden nicknames. He also mocked his Democratic predecessor’s mental agility and even how he appears in a swim suit, while continuing to insist he was the real victor of the 2020 election, which he lost.

Other targets of his ire included Jerome Powell, head of the US central bank, whom the president said was not doing a good job.

Trump touted progress on immigration – encounters at the southern border have plummeted to just over 7,000, down from 140,000 in March of last year.

The White House also said almost 65,700 immigrants had been deported in his term so far, although that is a slower pace than in the last fiscal year when US authorities deported more than 270,000.

Part of the way through his speech Trump screened a video of deportees being expelled from the US and sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador.

His immigration crackdown has faced a flurry of legal challenges, as has his effort to end the automatic granting of citizenship to anyone born on US soil.

During Tuesday’s speech he insisted egg prices had declined 87%, a claim contradicted by the latest government price figures.

Inflation, energy prices and mortgage rates have fallen since Trump took office, although unemployment has risen slightly, consumer sentiment has sagged and the stock market was plunged into turmoil by the tariffs.

Before the speech, Joe DeMonaco, who owns a carpentry business in Michigan, said Trump’s patchwork of on-again, off-again import taxes were starting to increase prices, which he will have to pass on to his customers.

“I was hoping. . . he would approach things a little bit differently seeing that he’s a little seasoned coming into a second term,” Mr DeMonaco told the BBC. “But we’re just treading water and seeing if things get better from here.”

But it’s clear that Trump’s most steadfast supporters stand by him.

“I’m just thrilled,” Teresa Breckinridge, owner of the Silver Skillet Diner in Atlanta, Georgia, told the BBC.

“He’s handling things wherever he can, multiple times a day, and he’s reporting back to the people. . . I think the tariffs will end up definitely being in our favour.”

US President Donald Trump has called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to congratulate him on his victory in the country’s general election and the two have agreed meet in the near future.

The two countries were expected to enter talks about a new economic and security relationship after Monday’s vote.

Trump’s trade tariffs and repeated comments undermining Canada’s sovereignty overshadowed the race, which ended with Carney’s Liberals projected to win a minority government, according to public broadcaster CBC.

That result will make Carney’s pressing tasks of negotiating with his US counterpart and tackling a range of domestic issues more of a challenge, as he’ll need to wrangle support from other political parties.

In their first call since the election, Trump congratulated Carney on his victory, according to the prime minister’s office on Tuesday.

The office also said the two leaders had “agreed on the importance of Canada and the United States working together – as independent, sovereign nations – for their mutual betterment”.

The Liberals will need to rely on their support to pass legislation through the House of Commons.

They also face possible defeat in any vote of confidence in the chamber.

The Liberals are most likely to find willing partners with the diminished left-wing New Democrats, who have in the past supported the Liberals, and the Bloc Québécois.

The Liberals are projected to have won 169 seats, three short of the 172 needed for a majority in Canada’s House of Commons.

It still marks a historic turnaround for a party that had seemed on course for collapse just months ago.

Carney, a former central banker for Canada and the UK, will continue as prime minister, having stepped into the role last month following his unpopular predecessor Justin Trudeau’s resignation.

One issue where it may be easy for the Liberals to find support in the House is in passing legislation to help workers and industries affected by US tariffs – something all parties swung behind on the campaign trail.

• RESULTS: How Canada voted – in charts
• ANALYSIS: Trump made Carney’s turnaround victory possible
• PROFILE: Five things Carney has pledged to do as Canadian PM
• WATCH: Relief, disappointment or surprise? Canadians react

On Tuesday morning, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet suggested Carney could benefit from at least a period of stability in the House.

Blanchet urged a “truce” among parties while Canada negotiated trade with the US, saying it was clear Canadians wanted political stability in unstable times.

He said it wasn’t time for other parties to “threaten to overthrow the government anytime soon” and didn’t see any scenario “other than collaboration for a period of slightly over a year”.

The leader of the sovereigntist party, which only runs candidates in Quebec, did urge Carney to avoid pressing the province on certain issues, noting that collaboration goes both ways.

On Tuesday, the White House commented on Carney’s win, with deputy press secretary Anna Kelly saying: “The election does not affect President Trump’s plan to make Canada America’s cherished 51st state.”

In an interview with the BBC, Carney said that Canada deserves “respect” from the US and he will only allow a Canada-US trade and security partnership “on our terms”.

Carney has told the BBC that a 51st state scenario was “never, ever going to happen”.

Meanwhile, new US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, said in a video statement that he is “committed to making progress in this great relationship”.

Carney has also promised action on a range of domestic issues, including tackling the country’s housing crisis and tax cuts for lower- and middle-income Canadians.

The prime minister also needs to prepare for the G7 summit in June, which Canada is hosting in the province of Alberta.

In Monday’s election, both the Liberals and the Conservatives saw a significant rise in their share of the national vote compared with four years ago.

The Conservative Party came in second, on track to win 144 seats, and will form Official Opposition.

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

Voter turnout for the election was 67%.

Both Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh lost their seats, with Singh announcing he will step down as leader of the left-wing party.

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.

On the journey into Yarrabah, there is nothing to suggest a national election is just days away.

Posters for candidates, inescapable in other parts of Australia, are conspicuously absent as you drive past fields of sugar cane and down a gently winding coastal road.

After entering this small Indigenous community near Cairns in far north Queensland, with fishing nets sitting on palm-lined shores, the only thing fighting for attention is a truck selling ice cream – urgently dinging a bell as it avoids the wild horses and dogs that wander the streets.

“It’s weird,” says Suzanne Andrews, chief executive of the town’s Gurriny Yealamucka Health Services. “We don’t see any placards. No-one’s visiting us.”

Watching the leaders of Australia’s two major parties debate each other on television, the Jaru Bunuba Bardi woman was dismayed that “they didn’t talk about any Aboriginal issues or concerns”.

“So,” she asks “what the hell’s going on?”

Indigenous Australians, who represent about 3.8% of the nation’s 26 million population, are by most socio-economic measures the most disadvantaged people in the country – something successive leaders have for years called a “national shame”.

Yet in this election campaign, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition leader Peter Dutton have had little to say on First Nations issues.

One glaring exception occurred this week, when during the final leader’s debate Dutton said Indigenous “welcome to country” ceremonies – where a local Aboriginal person acknowledges and give consent to events taking place on their traditional lands – were “overdone” and should not take place so frequently.

The comments represent one of the only times on the campaign trail that Dutton has publicly addressed issues specifically relating to First Nations people – and not to discuss disadvantage, but within the context of a culture war.

Part of the reason politicians try to steer clear of First Nations issues, according to experts and advocates, is that many believe they are too divisive and therefore electorally risky – especially after the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023.

That referendum, which was loudly supported by Albanese in the most polarising moment of his leadership, saw 60% of voters reject a proposal to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia’s constitution and give them greater political say through a Voice to Parliament.

Those opposing it said the idea was divisive, would create special “classes” of citizens where some have more rights than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.

Ahead of the vote, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on both sides of the debate told the BBC they hoped the unprecedented level of interest in their lives would build momentum for more policies to improve them.

Ms Andrews was one of them. But now she looks back at the result with sadness, believing it has now led political parties to “play it safe” and avoid “the hot Aboriginal issues”.

Others, including those who loudly opposed the Voice proposal, agree.

On referendum night, prominent anti-Voice campaigner Warren Mundine told the BBC “now the hard work starts”.

Some 18 months on, he says the reality is that people on both sides of the political aisle promptly disengaged with Indigenous issues after the referendum.

“This is one of the sad things about this election campaign here: whether the Voice got up or didn’t get up, we still had work to do,” he said.

“What’s happened now is that this is probably the first election that I’ve been in where there is no conversation about an Aboriginal policy. It’s just gone silent.”

Lidia Thorpe, an independent senator in Victoria, told the BBC that “Albanese particularly is too scared to mention us [Indigenous Australians] because of his failed referendum that we should never have had in the first place”.

Thorpe spearheaded an Indigenous-run Blak Sovereign movement opposing the Voice, calling instead for priority to be given to a legally binding treaty between First Nations peoples and the Australian government.

“In previous elections, even though we may have been an afterthought and tacked on the end of the sentences, like we always are, at least we were mentioned. Now it’s complete silence,” she said.

“This election could have been a real opportunity for both leaders to unite the nation and tell some truth about the plight of our people. They need to tell the truth that these injustices continue, and they need to tell the truth that they are in a position to change that, to turn that around.”

Since 2008, the Australian government’s Closing the Gap strategy has sought to reduce levels of Indigenous disadvantage through the annual tracking of 18 key measures in areas such as health and education.

The latest review, however, found only four were on track to be met, while four were worsening – including the annual rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander incarceration, which was up 12% in a year.

Despite these trends, Professor Rodney Smith of the University of Sydney says the defeat of the Voice – including in many Labor strongholds – makes it “electorally foolish” to talk too much about First Nations issues this election.

He points to Coalition adverts that tie money “wasted” on the referendum – which is estimated to have cost more than $A400m – into the discussion about cost of living and a struggling economy.

Prof Smith also argues, however, that the 2025 election is not unprecedented in its lack of focus on Indigenous affairs, but rather a return to the norm after several years of the issues receiving more attention than usual.

“I’m not saying people shouldn’t care about this,” he says. “I’m just saying that generally speaking, the electorate doesn’t particularly care about it.”

Recent data from Australian National University (ANU) seems to back that up. A long-term study of voter attitudes found that between January 2024 and January 2025 there was a sharp decline in the number of people believing it was the government’s responsibility to reduce the gap in living standards between First Nations Australians and the rest of the population.

“This lack of policy focus (by Labor and the Coalition) reflects a low prioritisation amongst the Australian population” ANU’s Professor Nicholas Biddle said.

Independent MP Bob Katter puts it more bluntly.

A former minister of Aboriginal Affairs when a Queensland state MP in the 1980s, Mr Katter says he thinks about the struggles of many Indigenous Australians “every night before I go to bed”.

He told the BBC he believes in more self-governance and has campaigned to give greater access to farmable land and fishing rights.

He also admits he doesn’t talk about those issues on the campaign trail, though.

“As a politician that’s got to win votes in the election, I wouldn’t be game,” he told the BBC.

That’s hard for many Indigenous people to swallow given the toll the referendum took – on those on both sides of the debate.

A report published by Sydney’s University of Technology last month found that the Voice referendum led to an increase in hostile levels of racism towards First Nations People, recording 453 “validated” incidents of racism roughly six months either side of the vote.

About a fifth of all complaints contained mention of the failed referendum.

“While there was significant thought and debate given to the ideas of nation building and the righting of wrongs, the undercurrent of racism was ever present,” said the report’s guest author Professor Lindon Coombes in his introduction.

“This is its insidiousness.”

In Yarrabah, Ms Andrews becomes suddenly tearful, telling how her two daughters, studying at university in Brisbane, were intimidated and got “so many racist remarks” after the vote.

“To do this to young people, who have left community to better their life and to be something, is so wrong,” she said.

It was not just increased racism that caused harm, but the tone and intensity of the debate leading up to the vote, many say.

Mr Mundine says his participation in the toxic and polarised national discussion meant he felt alienated from many in his community.

“I got kicked off boards. I lost jobs… [I] was ostracised.”

“Being the topic of every discussion for such a long period of time was overwhelming and extremely damaging to people’s social and emotional well-being,” says Clinton Schultz, a Gamilaroi/Gomeroi man, psychologist and Director of First Nations Strategy at the Black Dog Institute.

“The aftermath of that has left a lot of people not willing to engage in in the debates moving forward.”

Millima May, a Kulumbirigin Danggalaba Tiwi woman from the Northern Territory, in 2023 told the BBC all First Nations people wanted was “a seat at the table” where decisions about their lives were made. But now there’s been a “tactical” decision by some in the community to “lie low”.

“I think a lot of Aboriginal people have really chosen to opt out of the political space and of so -called democracy in Australia,” she says.

“If you could trust our political leaders and candidates to have nuanced and informed conversations, then you would be able to have debates and conversations in a respectful and safe way.

“But that is not how Australian politics is operating at the moment.”

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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Nestled in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan sits the picturesque village of Sergele.

For generations villagers have made a living growing pomegranates, almonds and peaches and foraging in the surrounding forests for wild fruits and spices.

But Sergele, located 16km (10 miles) from the border with Turkey, has become increasingly surrounded by Turkish military bases, which are dotted across the slopes.

One, perched halfway up the western ridge, looms over the village, while another in the east is under construction.

At least seven have been built here over the past two years, including one by a small dam that regulates Sergele’s water supply, rendering it off limits to villagers.

“This is 100% a form of occupation of Kurdish [Iraqi Kurdistan] lands,” says farmer Sherwan Sherwan Sergeli, 50, who has lost access to some of his land.

“The Turks ruined it.”

Sergele is now in danger of being dragged into what’s known locally as the “Forbidden Zone” – a large strip of land in northern Iraq affected by Turkey’s war with the Kurdish militant group the PKK, which launched an insurgency in southern Turkey in 1984.

The Forbidden Zone spans almost the entire length of the Iraqi border with Turkey and is up to 40km (25 miles) deep in places.

Community Peacemaker Teams, a human rights group based in Iraqi Kurdistan, says that hundreds of civilians have been killed by drone and air strikes in and around the Forbidden Zone. According to a 2020 Kurdistan parliamentary report, thousands have been forced off their land and whole villages have been emptied out by the conflict.

Sergele is now effectively on the front line of Turkey’s war with the PKK.

When the BBC World Service Eye Investigations team visited the area, Turkish aircraft pummelled the mountains surrounding the village to root out PKK militants, who have long operated from caves and tunnels in northern Iraq.

Much of the land around Sergele had been burned by shelling.

“The more bases they put up, the worse it gets for us,” says Sherwan.

Turkey has been rapidly growing its military presence in the Forbidden Zone in recent years, but until now the scale of this expansion was not publicly known.

Using satellite imagery assessed by experts and corroborated with on-the-ground reporting and open-source content, the BBC found that as of December 2024, the Turkish military had built at least 136 fixed military installations across northern Iraq.

Through its vast network of military bases, Turkey now holds de-facto control of more than 2,000 sq km (772 square miles) of Iraqi land, the BBC’s analysis found.

Satellite images further reveal that the Turkish military has built at least 660km (410 miles) of roads connecting its facilities. These supply routes have resulted in deforestation and left a lasting imprint on the region’s mountains.

While a few of the bases date back to the 1990s, 89% have been constructed since 2018, after which Turkey began significantly expanding its military presence in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Turkish government didn’t respond to the BBC’s requests for interviews, but has maintained that its military bases are necessary to push back the PKK, which is designated a terrorist organisation by Ankara and a number of Western nations, including the UK.

The sub-district capital of Kani Masi, which is only 4km (2.5 miles) from the Iraqi-Turkish border and parts of which are within the Forbidden Zone, may offer a glimpse into Sergele’s future.

Once famous for its apple production, few residents remain here now.

Farmer Salam Saeed, whose land is in the shadow of a large Turkish base, hasn’t been able to cultivate his vineyard for the past three years.

“The moment you get here, you will have a drone hover over you,” he tells the BBC.

“They will shoot you if you stay.”

The Turkish military first set up here in the 1990s and has been consolidating its presence since.

Its main military base, featuring concrete blast walls, watch and communication towers and space for armoured personnel carriers to move inside, is much more developed than the smaller outposts around Sergele.

Salam, like some other locals, believes Turkey ultimately wants to claim the territory as its own.

“All they want is for us to leave these areas,” he adds.

Near Kani Masi, the BBC saw first-hand how Turkish forces have effectively pushed back the Iraqi border guard, which is responsible for protecting Iraq’s international boundaries.

At several locations, the border guards were manning positions well inside Iraqi territory, directly opposite Turkish troops, unable to go right up to the border and potentially risk a clash.

“The posts that you see are Turkish posts,” says General Farhad Mahmoud, pointing to a ridge just across a valley, about 10km (6 miles) inside Iraqi territory.

But “we cannot reach the border to know the number of posts”, he adds.

Turkey’s military expansion in Iraqi Kurdistan – fuelled by its rise as a drone power and growing defence budget – is seen as part of a broader foreign policy shift towards greater interventionism in the region.

Similar to its operations in Iraq, Turkey has also sought to establish a buffer zone along its border with Syria to contain Syrian armed groups allied with the PKK.

In public, Iraq’s government has condemned Turkey’s military presence in the country. But behind closed doors it has accommodated some of Ankara’s demands.

In 2024, the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly fight the PKK.

But the document, obtained by the BBC, did not place any limitations on Turkish troops in Iraq.

Iraq depends on Turkey for trade, investment and water security, while its fractured internal politics have further undermined the government’s ability to take a strong stance.

Iraq’s national government did not respond to the BBC requests for comment.

Watch Turkey’s hidden war: The Forbidden Zone on iPlayer

People outside the UK can watch the documentary on YouTube

Meanwhile, the rulers of the semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan have a close relationship with Ankara based on mutual interests and have often downplayed the civilian harm due to Turkey’s military action.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), an arch enemy of the PKK, dominates the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and has officially been in charge since 2005, when Iraq’s constitution granted the region its semi-autonomous status.

The KDP’s close ties with Turkey have contributed to the region’s economic success and have strengthened its position, both against its regional political rivals and with the Iraqi government in Baghdad, with which it tussles for greater autonomy.

Hoshyar Zebari, a senior member of the KDP’s politburo, sought to blame the PKK for Turkey’s presence in Iraqi Kurdistan.

“They [the Turkish military] are not harming our people,” he told the BBC.

“They are not detaining them. They are not interfering in them going about their business. Their focus, their sole goal is the PKK.”

The conflict shows no signs of ending, despite the PKK’s long-jailed leader Abdulla Ocalan calling in February for his fighters to lay down arms and disband.

Turkey has continued to shell targets across Iraqi Kurdistan, while the PKK claimed responsibility for downing a Turkish drone last month.

And while violent incidents in Turkey have declined since 2016, according to a tally by the NGO Crisis Group, those in Iraq have spiked, with civilians living on the border region facing growing risk of death and displacement.

One of those killed was 24-year-old Alan Ismail, a stage-four cancer patient hit by an air strike in August 2023 while on a trip to the mountains with his cousin, Hashem Shaker.

The Turkish military has denied carrying out a strike that day, but a police report seen by the BBC attributes the incident to a Turkish drone.

When Hashem filed a complaint in a local court about the attack he was detained by Kurdish security forces and held for eight months on suspicion of supporting the PKK – an accusation he and his family deny.

“It has destroyed us. It’s like killing the whole family,” says Ismail Chichu, Alan’s father.

“They [the Turks] have no rights to kill people in their own country on their own land.”

Turkey’s Defence Ministry did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment. It has previously told the media that the Turkish armed forces follow international law, and that in the planning and execution of their operations they only target terrorists, while taking care to prevent harm to civilians.

The BBC has seen documents suggesting Kurdish authorities may have acted to help Turkey evade accountability for civilian casualties.

Confidential papers seen by the BBC show a Kurdish court closed the investigation into Alan’s killing, saying the perpetrator was unknown.

And his death certificate – issued by Kurdish authorities and seen by the BBC – says he died because of “explosive fragments”.

Failing to mention when victims of air strikes have died as a result of violence, rather than an accident, makes it difficult for families to seek justice and compensation, to which they’re entitled under both Iraqi and Kurdish law.

“In most of the death certificates, they only wrote ‘infijar’, which means explosion,” says Kamaran Othman from Community Peacemaker Teams.

“It can be anything exploding.

“I think the Kurdish Regional Government doesn’t want to make Turkey responsible for what they are doing here.”

The KRG said it acknowledged the “tragic loss of civilians resulting from military confrontation between the PKK and Turkish army in the region”.

It added that “a number of casualties” had been documented as “civilian martyrs”, meaning they have been unjustly killed and entitling them to compensation.

Almost two years after Alan was killed, his family is still waiting, if not for compensation, at least for acknowledgement from the KRG.

“They could at least send their condolences – we don’t need their compensation,” says Ismail.

“When something is gone, it’s gone forever.”

The power is out and nothing is working. How am I supposed to get through the day?

That was the question faced by millions of people on Monday across Spain and Portugal during the worst electricity blackout in their history.

We ask people who spent the day without electricity about what helped them get on with life and what outage essentials they were missing.

Paying with phone and card has become the norm, but in cities across Spain and Portugal, queues formed at cash machines – at least the ones that were still working – as shops switched away from card payments.

“We managed to pay for our coffees with card when the outage first started, [but later] we didn’t have any cash so we couldn’t buy a thing,” Ed Rowe, 26, in Madrid told the BBC.

“All the restaurants that were open were cash only.”

Grace O’Leary, 32, who also lives in Spain’s capital, said she and her mum were counting coins to see if she had enough money to buy wine from a corner shop.

“Cash, apparently, is in fact, king.”

Jaime Giorgio, 28, was lucky enough to have some cash on him, which allowed him to buy food and other essentials.

“In Madrid it was quite chaotic, there was no tube and you couldn’t take out any cash.

“I had cash, but my flatmate didn’t, so I had to lend him money to buy things.”

The power outage also led to an information blackout, as people spent the day without internet, WhatsApp, calls, and TV.

“The complete loss of communication was the most confusing and concerning thing… we were only left to speculate as to the cause and piece together news from people in the neighbourhood,” said Daniel Clegg from Barcelona.

The 42-year-old said the absence of information led him to looking at the sky to see if planes were still flying.

For Siegfried and Christine Buschschluter, an old windup transistor radio helped tune in to local radio stations to find out what was happening after their phones stopped working and power went off at their rural home outside Spain’s capital.

Christine, 82, explained: “You had to keep on winding and winding.

“It was quite a strange situation. I was born in Berlin during the war and it reminded me of those days when my parents tried to get some news – it took me back.”

The couple reckon the outage will lead to boom in demand for battery-operated radios.

And it is also on Daniel’s shopping list. “Essential kit for back to basics communication and staying informed that I completely neglected to remember.”

Microwaves, air fryers and some hobs and ovens all demand electricity.

But on Monday food that does not require electricity to heat or prepare it were in demand.

In supermarkets, shoppers formed long queues and panic-bought essentials – echoing scenes from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We bought a lot of food that wasn’t going to go off, like tuna in cans, just in case,” says actor Jaime.

“The outage only lasted a day and now we have so much food, but most of it isn’t going to go bad, as it is easily preserved.”

Lesley Elder, in town Fortuna in south-eastern Spain, said: “Trying to find food you don’t need to heat up, that was more difficult than we thought.

“So we ended up having ham and cheese for dinner.”

She adds a little gas stove to heat up food in a pan would have been helpful.

Across the Iberian peninsula, people turned to candles to light up dark spaces.

Richard, who lives in the Spanish city of Alcala de Henares, said not a single street light was on when night fell.

“People were finding their way around by torchlight. It was quite surreal seeing the view from my window totally black especially as I live next to a dual carriageway,” he said.

“In my spare time, I make candles and luckily I had a few going spare so I could see in the dark.”

Sarah Baxter, from Barcelona, said she even used a candle stovetop to heat up food.

“We could heat beans and rice, and bring water to a boil for instant potatoes,” she said.

“It was much safer than a propane camping stove inside the apartment.”

Although candles and naked flames can pose a fire risk.

With no power people relied on having battery in their devices.

In Madrid, people queued outside tech shops to get their hands on a power bank.

Luckily for Sarah she had a solar charger that kept her phone charged through ten hours of blackout, and helped her elderly neighbour do the same.

Lesley says her Kindle ran out of battery. “No TV, no Scrabble puzzle on my phone. So having a couple of books would have been helpful,” she said.

But for others, not having access to the internet and their devices was a relief.

“Everyone relies on technology so much that it’s quite a nice reminder you can be more independent,” said Ed.

“You don’t have to be connected with everyone all the time,” said his flatmate Hannah Steiner, 23. “I was having a good time with my flatmates.”

Sara Francisco, 24, from Leiria, in central Portugal, said: “I feel this thing that happened was important to make us be more aware and be more conscious about our habits.”

The Liberal Party has won a fourth successive mandate in Canada, staging an unexpected comeback.

In his victory speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to stand up to the US, which he accused of trying to “break” Canada.

Carney is a relative political newcomer, having replaced Justin Trudeau as leader of the Liberals two months ago.

So what happens next?

Yes.

Canadian media called the election for the Liberals shortly after polls closed nationally at 22:00 EDT (03:00 BST) on Monday, projecting that Mark Carney’s Liberal Party was on its way to win enough seats in the House of Commons to form a government.

While the CBC projected the Liberals will have a minority government, the counting of ballots is ongoing. A handful of close races remains to be called.

Federal election officials are required to count ballots by hand in front of witnesses. Ballots are tallied only after polls close in each location where the votes were cast.

These projections are based on initial results from Elections Canada, which runs the country’s federal elections.

Officials double-check vote totals after the election.

• Follow the latest Canada election news here

Liberal leader Mark Carney does not need to be sworn in again as prime minister. Instead, he will continue doing his job, along with his Cabinet ministers.

Should Carney decide to reshuffle his Cabinet, there will be a ceremony with the governor general, but until then, the ministers stay in their posts.

Carney may indeed choose to shuffle his Cabinet after bringing in a team when he became prime minister last month.

When Parliament reconvenes after an election, expect the swearing-in of members and the election of the Speaker.

There will also be a Speech from the Throne, which opens every new session of Parliament and allows a government to introduce its goals and priorities.

No.

Around 16:00 EDT (21:00 BST) on Tuesday the CBC projected Liberals would fall three seats short of the 172 needed for a majority in the House of Commons.

The Liberals are now projected to form a minority government with Carney as prime minister. They will have to strike deals with the other parties to survive no-confidence votes and pass legislation in Parliament.

The Bloc Québécois and the NDP could play a role here, as they can help the Liberals pass their legislation.

Bloc Québécois leader Yves-Francois Blanchet suggested Carney may benefit from a short period of stability with the help of other parties.

Blanchet urged a “truce” among parties while Canada negotiated trade with the US president, saying Canadians wanted stability in unstable times.

He said he does not see any scenario “other than collaboration for a period of slightly over a year”.

The Conservatives are on track to once again form the Official Opposition.

One of his priorities is to navigate the relationship with US President Donald Trump.

When the pair spoke in late March, Carney and Trump agreed they would begin negotiations about a new economic and security relationship right after the election.

When Parliament returns, it’s possible we see the Liberals quickly introduce legislation focused on securing Canada’s economy in the face of US tariff headwinds.

• Five things Carney has pledged to do as Canadian PM

That could include a promised tax cut for lower- and middle-class Canadians, and moving ahead with a “one project, one review” process to speed up approval for key energy and mining proposals.

The Liberals have said they want to make Canada a “clean and conventional energy” superpower.

They also committed to putting C$5bn into a trade diversification fund.

The new government also will need to focus on the June G7 summit, which Canada is hosting in Alberta.

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre made significant inroads with the party’s vote share, securing roughly 41% of the vote, according to Election Canada.

That would be the highest the party has won in decades.

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

But there are some bitter pills to swallow – Poilievre himself is projected to have lost his seat in Ontario.

And with voters switching from NDP and the Bloc mostly to the Liberals, those expanded Conservative numbers weren’t enough to win.

This will be a tough loss for them, being in such a strong position only a few months ago when they had a clear path to victory.

They will now need to figure out a way forward after a series of electoral defeats.

And it is hard to see Poilievre staying on at the helm, which would mean a fourth leader since the Liberals swept the 2015 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