An Israeli air strike on Gaza hit the home of a doctor and killed nine of her 10 children, the hospital where she works in the city of Khan Younis says.

Nasser hospital said one of Dr Alaa al-Najjar’s children and her husband were injured, but survived.

Graeme Groom, a British surgeon working in the hospital who operated on her surviving 11-year-old boy, told the BBC it was “unbearably cruel” that his mother, who spent years caring for children as a paediatrician, could lose almost all her own in a single missile strike.

Israel’s military said its aircraft had struck “a number of suspects” in Khan Younis on Friday, and “the claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review”.

A video shared by the director of the Hamas-run health ministry and verified by the BBC showed small burned bodies lifted from the rubble of a strike in Khan Younis.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its “aircraft struck a number of suspects who were identified operating from a structure adjacent to IDF troops in the area of Khan Younis”.

“The Khan Younis area is a dangerous war zone. Before beginning operations there, the IDF evacuated civilians from this area for their own safety,” the Israeli military said.

In a general statement on Saturday, the IDF said it had struck more than 100 targets across Gaza over the past day.

The health ministry said at least 74 people had been killed by the Israeli military over the 24 hour-period leading up to about midday on Saturday.

Dr Muneer Alboursh, director of the health ministry, said on X that the al-Najjars’ family house was hit minutes after Dr al-Najjar’s husband Hamdi had returned home after driving his wife to work.

Dr Alboursh said the eldest of Dr al-Najjar’s children was aged 12.

Mr Groom said the children’s father was “very badly injured”, in a video posted on the Instagram account of another British surgeon working at Nasser hospital, Victoria Rose.

He told the BBC that the father had a “penetrating injury to his head”.

He said he had asked about the father, also a doctor at the hospital, and had been told he had “no political and no military connections and doesn’t seem to be prominent on social media”.

He described it as an “unimaginable” situation for Dr Alaa al-Najjar.

Mr Groom said the surviving 11-year-old boy, Adam, was “quite small” for his age.

“His left arm was just about hanging off, he was covered in fragment injuries and he had several substantial lacerations,” he told the BBC.

“Since both his parents are doctors, he seemed to be among the privileged group within Gaza, but as we lifted him onto the operating table, he felt much younger than 11.”

“Our little boy could survive, but we don’t know about his father,” he added.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency, said on Telegram on Friday afternoon that his teams had recovered eight bodies and several injured from the al-Najjar house near a petrol station in Khan Younis.

The hospital initially posted on Facebook that eight children had been killed, then two hours later updated that number to nine.

Another doctor, Youssef Abu al-Rish, said in a statement posted by the health ministry that he had arrived to the operating room to find Dr al-Najjar waiting for information about her surviving son and tried to console her.

In an interview recorded by AFP news agency, relative Youssef al-Najjar said: “Enough! Have mercy on us! We plead to all countries, the international community, the people, Hamas, and all factions to have mercy on us.

“We are exhausted from the displacement and the hunger, enough!”

On Friday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that people in Gaza were enduring what may be “the cruellest phase” of the war, and denounced Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid imposed in March.

Israel partially lifted the blockade earlier this week. Israeli military body Cogat said 83 more trucks carrying flour, food, medical equipment pharmaceutical drugs entered Gaza on Friday.

The UN has repeatedly said the amount of aid entering is nowhere near enough for the territory’s 2.1 million people – saying between 500 to 600 trucks a day are needed – and has called for Israel to allow in much more.

The limited amount of food that trickled into Gaza this week sparked chaotic scenes, with armed looters attacking an aid convoy and Palestinians crowding outside bakeries in a desperate attempt to obtain bread.

A UN-backed assessment this month said Gaza’s population was at “critical risk” of famine.

People in Gaza have told the BBC they have no food, and malnourished mothers are unable to breastfeed babies.

Chronic shortages of water are also worsening as desalination and hygiene plants are running out of fuel, and Israel’s expanding military offensive causes new waves of displacement.

Israel has said the blockade was intended to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages still held in Gaza.

Israel has accused Hamas of stealing supplies, which the group has denied.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’s cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 53,901 people, including at least 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

A judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration’s plan to strip Harvard University of its ability to enrol foreign students.

The ruling came after Harvard filed a lawsuit – the latest escalation of a dispute between the White House and one of America’s most prestigious institutions.

The university said the administration’s decision on Thursday to bar international students was a “blatant violation” of the law and free speech rights.

The Trump administration says Harvard has not done enough to fight antisemitism, and change its hiring and admissions practices – allegations that the university has strongly denied.

US District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order in a short ruling issued on Friday.

The order pauses a move that the Department of Homeland Security made on Thursday to revoke Harvard’s access to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) – a government database that manages foreign students.

The next hearing will occur on 29 May in Boston.

“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission,” Harvard argued in the lawsuit.

“We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” Harvard President Alan Garber said in a letter.

• ‘We did not sign up for this’: Harvard’s foreign students are stuck and scared

“The revocation continues a series of government actions to retaliate against Harvard for our refusal to surrender our academic independence and to submit to the federal government’s illegal assertion of control over our curriculum, our faculty, and our student body,” he wrote.

In response, White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson said: “If only Harvard cared this much about ending the scourge of anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.

After the restraining order was issued, Ms Jackson accused the judge in the case of having a “liberal agenda”.

“These unelected judges have no right to stop the Trump Administration from exercising their rightful control over immigration policy and national security policy,” she said.

It was quiet at Harvard on Friday. Classes have finished for the year and preparations are being made for commencements. Gazebos were going up on the quad as students rented their gowns and collected tickets for family members.

For those graduating, it should be a week of celebration. But for foreign students hoping to remain in the US, it’s been a 24-hour whirlwind.

All morning Harvard’s international student body scrambled to find out what was going to happen. Would they have to leave the US immediately? Were they now under the threat of deportation?

Cormac Savage from Downpatrick in Co Down Northern Ireland is six days from graduating with a degree in government and languages. He’s taking a job in Brussels, partly because of the uncertainty in the US.

“You know that you’re fine if you’re still legally in the United States for the next 90 days, but you don’t know that you can come back and finish your degree,” he said on Friday. “You don’t know if you can stay and work in the US if you’re about to graduate.

The order also complicates plans for students still enroled, like Rohan Battula, a junior from the UK who will rely on his visa to work in New York in June.

“I was worried if I went home I wouldn’t get to come back,” he told BBC, so he opted to stay on campus.

For a group of international students gathered on the banks of the Charles River, as rowing teams sculled by, the relief was palpable when news came in of the reprieve from the Boston court.

Mr Battula also felt relieved after Judge Burroughs issued her order. But the uncertainty still is taking a toll.

“It’s surreal to think that even for some period of time you’re unlawfully staying in a country, just because you’ve been to university there,” Mr Battula said.

There are around 6,800 international students at Harvard, who make up more than 27% of its enrolled students this year.

Around a fifth of them are from China, with significant numbers from Canada, India, South Korea and the UK. Among the international students currently enrolled is the future queen of Belgium, 23-year-old Princess Elisabeth.

Leo Ackerman was set to study education and entrepreneurship at Harvard beginning in August, fulfilling a “dream”.

“I was really excited, and I’m still really excited if I manage to go there,” Mr Ackerman said. “Having it taken away feels like a really sad moment for a lot of people.”

Eliminating foreign students would take a large bite out of Harvard’s finances. Experts say international students are more likely to pay full tuition, essentially subsidising aid for American students.

Undergraduate tuition – not including fees, housing, books, food or health insurance – will reach $59,320 (£43,850) in the coming academic year, according to the university. The total cost of a year at Harvard before any financial aid is usually significantly more than $100,000.

Isaac Bangura, a public administration student from Sierra Leone, moved to Harvard with his wife and two young daughters after surviving a civil war.

“Since yesterday, my kids has been asking, ‘Daddy, I understand they are coming to return us home again.’ They are referring to deportation,” he said.

He said he has to be strong for them and has faith. “I know the American people are always, whenever they are into issues, they will find ways of resolving it,” he said.

In addition to Harvard, the Trump administration has taken aim at other elite institutions, not only arguing that they should do more to clamp down on pro-Palestinian activists but also claiming they discriminate against conservative viewpoints.

On Friday, speaking from the Oval Office, President Donald Trump said, “Harvard is going to have to change its ways” and suggested he is considering measures against more universities.

In April, the White House froze $2.2bn (£1.7bn) in federal funding to Harvard, and Trump has threatened to remove the university’s tax-exempt status, a standard designation for US educational institutions.

The funding freeze prompted an earlier Harvard lawsuit, also asking the courts to stop the administration’s actions.

Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor, said federal courts in Massachusetts and New England, where the initial stages of the case will play out, have consistently ruled against the Trump administration.

But the outcome may be less predictable in the US Supreme Court, where Harvard’s case may end up.

“These are tough issues for Harvard, but they have the resources and they seem to have the will to fight,” Mr Tobias said.

Harvard leaders have made concessions to the White House – including dismissing the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, who came under fire for failing to represent Israeli perspectives.

But it also enlisted several high-profile Republican lawyers, including Robert Hur, a former special counsel who investigated Joe Biden’s retention of classified documents.

Foreign students currently attending Harvard have expressed worries that the row could force them to transfer to another university or return home. Being logged on the SEVP system is a requirement for student visas and, if Harvard is blocked from the database, students could be found in violation and potentially face deportation.

Several British students enrolled at Harvard, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity out of fear of immigration authorities, worried their US education could be cut short.

“I definitely think freedom of speech is a problem on campus, but it’s being actively worked on… it was an absolute shock when yesterday’s announcement happened,” said one student

“There’s a lot of anger, people feeling like we’re being used as pawns in a game.”

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

A power cut in southern France caused by suspected sabotage has disrupted screenings on the final day of the Cannes Film Festival.

About 160,000 homes in the city of Cannes and surrounding areas lost power early on Saturday, before supply was restored in the afternoon.

Officials said an electricity substation had been set on fire and a pylon at another location damaged.

Organisers of the international film festival say the closing ceremony will go ahead as planned as they have an alternative power supply.

Prosecutors say a first power cut occurred when a substation in the village of Tanneron, which supplies Cannes, was attacked by arsonists in the early hours.

At about 10:00 (08:00 GMT) the legs of an electricity pylon near the town of Villeneuve-Loubet were cut, triggering a second outage.

In Cannes, shops and restaurants struggled to operate.

“Another hour and I’ll throw everything away,” Laurent Aboukrat, who owns Cannes’ Jamin restaurant, told the AFP news agency. He said his fridges had been off since the morning.

“Cannes is in a total slowdown, meltdown, there’s no coffee anywhere, and I think the town has run out of croissants, so this is like crisis territory,” Australian producer Darren Vukasinovic told Reuters news agency.

Several screenings were interrupted by the cut in the morning, before festival organisers were able to switch to private generators.

Saturday is the last day of the festival. French actress Juliette Binoche and her jury are set to announce the winner of the Palme d’Or – the highest prize awarded at the festival.

In his 1983 science fiction story, an Indian astrophysicist predicted what schools would look like in 2050.

Jayant Narlikar envisioned a scene where an alien, living among humans, would sit in front of a screen and attend online classes. The aliens are yet to manifest, but online classes became a reality for students far sooner, in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Narlikar also famously proposed an alternative to the Big Bang Theory – the popular idea that the universe was created in a single moment from a single point. He believed that the universe had always existed, expanding continuously into infinity.

With his passing on Tuesday, India lost one of its most celebrated astrophysicists. Narlikar was 86 – a man far ahead of his times and someone who shaped a generation of Indian researchers through his lifelong dedication to science education.

His funeral was attended by hundreds, from school children to renowned scientists and even his housekeeping staff, underscoring the profound impact he had on society.

Born on 19 July, 1938, in the town of Kolhapur in the western state of Maharashtra, Narlikar was raised in a home steeped in academic tradition.

His father, Vishnu Narlikar, was a professor and mathematician, and mother Sumati was a scholar of the Sanskrit language.

Following in his parents footsteps, the studious Narlikar went to Cambridge University for higher studies where topped a highly prestigious mathematical course. He also took a deep interest in astrophysics and cosmology.

But his most significant episode at Cambridge was his association with his PhD guide, physicist Sir Fred Hoyle. Together, Narlikar and Hoyle laid the groundwork for a revolutionary alternative to the popular Big Bang theory.

The two physicists contested the Big Bang Theory, which posits that all matter and energy in the universe came into existence in one single instance about 13.8 billion years ago.

The Hoyle-Narlikar theory boldly proposed the continuous creation of new matter in an infinite universe. Their theory was based on what they called a quasi-steady state model.

In his autobiography, My Tale of Four Cities, Narlikar used a banking analogy to explain the theory.

“To understand this concept better, think of capital invested in a bank which offers a fixed rate of compound interest. That is, the interest accrued is constantly added to the capital which therefore grows too, along with the interest.”

He explained that the universe expanded like the capital with compound interest. However, as the name ‘steady state’ implies, the universe always looks the same to the observer.

Astronomer Somak Raychaudhury says that though Narlikar’s theory isn’t as popular as the Big Bang, it is still useful.

“He advanced mechanisms by which matter could be continually created and destroyed in an infinite universe,” Raychaudhary said.

“While the Big Bang model gained broader acceptance, many tools developed for the steady-state model remain useful today,” he added

Raychaudhary recollects that even after Hoyle began to entertain elements of the Big Bang theory, Narlikar remained committed to the steady-state theory.

A sign outside his office fittingly stated: “The Big Bang is an exploding myth.”

Narlikar stayed in the UK till 1971 as a Fellow at King’s College and a founding member of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy.

As he shot to global fame in the astrophysics circles, the science community in India took note of his achievements.

In 1972, he returned to India and immediately took charge of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the coveted Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which he led it till 1989.

But his biggest contribution to India was the creation of an institution dedicated to cutting-edge research and the democratisation of science.

This dream materialised in 1988, when Narlikar, along with other distinguished scientists, founded the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune city in western India.

From a modest 100sq ft room, IUCAA has gone on to become an internationally respected institution for astronomy and astrophysics.

Narlikar served as its founder-director till 2003, and continued to be an emeritus professor after that.

He insisted that IUCAA should include programs aimed at school children and the general public. Monthly lectures, science camps, and workshops became regular events.

Recalling Narlikar’s vision for the institution, science educator Arvind Gupta says, “He said PhD scholars don’t fall from the sky, you must catch them young. He offered me a place to stay, told me to try running the children’s science centre for six months, and I ended up staying 11 years. He gave me wings to fly.”

Despite being a prolific scholar who published over 300 research papers, Narlikar never confined himself to being just a scientist. He also authored many science fiction books that have been translated into multiple languages.

These stories were often grounded in scientific principles.

In a story called Virus, published in 2015, he envisioned a pandemic taking over the world; his 1986 book Waman Parat Na Ala (The Return of Vaman), tackled the ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence.

Sanjeev Dhurandhar, who was part of the Indian team that contributed to the physical detection of gravitational waves in 2015, recalled how Narlikar inspired him to attempt the unthinkable.

“He gave me a complex problem early in my research. After I struggled for a week, he solved it on the board in 15 minutes – not to show superiority, but to guide and inspire. His openness to gravitational waves was what gave me the courage to pursue it.”

A well-known rationalist, Narlikar also took it upon himself to challenge pseudoscience. In 2008, he co-authored a paper that challenged astrology using a statistical method.

Raychaudhary said that his motivation to challenge pseudoscience came from the belief system of questioning everything that did not have a scientific basis.

But when it came to science, Narlikar believed in exploring the slimmest of possibilities.

In his last days, Narlikar continued doing what he loved most – replying to children’s letters and writing about science on his blog.

When Shreya Mishra Reddy was admitted to Harvard University in 2023, her parents were “ecstatic”.

It is “the ultimate school that anybody in India wants to get into,” she tells the BBC.

Now, with graduation around the corner, she has had to break the bad news to her family: she may not graduate in July from the executive leadership programme after the Trump administration moved to stop Harvard from enrolling international students “as a result of their failure to adhere to the law”.

“It has been very difficult for my family to hear. They’re still trying to process it,” she said.

Ms Reddy is one of around 6,800 international students at Harvard, who make up more than 27% of its enrolments this year. They are a crucial source of revenue for the Ivy League school. About a third of its foreign students are from China, and more than 700 are Indian, such as Ms Reddy.

All of them are now unsure of what to expect next. Harvard has called the move “unlawful”, which could lead to a legal challenge.

But that leaves the students’ futures in limbo, be it those who are waiting to enrol this summer, or are halfway through college, or even those awaiting graduation whose work opportunities are tied to their student visas.

Those who are already at Harvard would have to transfer to other American universities to remain in the US and retain their visas.

“I hope Harvard will stand for us and some solution can be worked out,” Ms Reddy says.

The university has said it is “fully committed to maintaining [its] ability to host our international students and scholars, who hail from more than 140 countries and enrich the University – and this nation – immeasurably”.

The move against Harvard has huge implications for the million or so international students in the US. And it follows a growing crackdown by the Trump administration on institutes of higher learning, especially those that witnessed major pro-Palestinian protests on campus.

Dozens of them are facing investigations, as the government attempts to overhaul their accreditation process and reshape the way they are run.

The White House first threatened to bar foreign students from Harvard in April, after the university refused to make changes to its hiring, admissions and teaching practices. And it also froze nearly $3bn in federal grants, which Harvard is challenging in court.

Still, Thursday’s announcement – which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said came because they were allegedly “fostering violence” and “antisemitism” – left students reeling.

Chinese student Kat Xie, who is in her second year in a STEM programme, says she is “in shock”.

“I had almost forgotten about [the earlier threat of a ban] and then Thursday’s announcement suddenly came.”

But she adds a part of her had expected “the worst”, so she had spent the last few weeks seeking professional advice on how to continue staying in the US.

But the options are “all very troublesome and expensive”, she says.

Harvard has been given 72 hours to comply with a list of demands to have an “opportunity” to regain its ability to enrol these students, including providing the government with all disciplinary records for non-immigrant students enrolled at Harvard over the past five years.

Noem also demanded Harvard turn over electronic records, videos, or audio of “illegal” and “dangerous or violent” activity by non-immigrant students on campus.

But the Trump administration also appeared to single China out when Noem also accused Harvard of “coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party” in her statement.

Beijing responded on Friday by criticising the “politicisation” of education.

It said the move would “only harm the image and international standing of the United States”, urging for the ban to be withdrawn “as soon as possible”.

“None of this is what we’ve signed up for,” says 20-year-old Abdullah Shahid Sial from Pakistan, a very vocal student activist.

A junior majoring in applied mathematics and economics, he was one of only two Pakistani undergraduate students admitted to Harvard in 2023.

He was also the first person in his family to study abroad. It was a “massive” moment for them, he says.

The situation he now finds himself in, he adds, is “ridiculous and dehumanising”.

Both Ms Reddy and Mr Sial said foreign students apply to go to college in the US because they see it as a welcoming place where opportunities abound.

“You have so much to learn from different cultures, from people of different backgrounds. And everybody really valued that,” Ms Reddy says, adding that this had been her experience at Harvard so far.

But Mr Sial says that has changed more recently and foreign students no longer feel welcome – the Trump administration has revoked hundreds of student visas and even detained students on campuses across the country. Many of them were linked to pro-Palestinian protests.

Now, Mr Sial adds, there is a lot of fear and uncertainty in the international student community.

That has only been exacerbated by the latest development. A postgraduate student from South Korea says she is having second thoughts about going home for the summer because she fears she won’t be able to re-enter the US.

She did not want to reveal her name because she is worried that might affect her chances of staying in the US. She is one year away from graduating.

She said she had a gruelling semester and had been looking forward to “reuniting with friends and family” – until now.

The anxiety among foreign students is palpable, says Jiang Fangzhou, who is reading public administration in Harvard Kennedy School.

“We might have to leave immediately but people have their lives here – apartments, leases, classes and community. These are not things you can walk away from overnight.”

And the ban doesn’t just affect current students, the 30-year-old New Zealander says.

“Think about the incoming ones, people who already turned down offers from other schools and planned their lives around Harvard. They’re totally stuck now.”

The last memory Han Tae-soon has of her daughter as a child is in May 1975, at their home in Seoul.

“I was going to the market and asked Kyung-ha, ‘Aren’t you coming?’ But she told me, ‘No, I’m going to play with my friends’,” recalled Ms Han.

“When I came back, she was gone.”

Ms Han would not see her daughter again for more than four decades. When they reunited, Kyung-ha was almost unrecognisable as a middle-aged American woman named Laurie Bender.

Kyung-ha had been kidnapped near her home, brought to an orphanage, then sent illegally to the US to be raised by another family, alleges Ms Han, who is now suing the South Korean government for failing to prevent her daughter’s adoption.

She is among the hundreds of people who have come forward in recent years with damning allegations of fraud, illegal adoptions, kidnapping and human trafficking in South Korea’s controversial overseas adoption programme.

No other country has sent as many children abroad for adoption, and for so long, as South Korea. Since the programme began in the 1950s, about 170,000 to 200,000 children have been adopted overseas – most of them in the West.

In March, a landmark inquiry found that successive governments had committed human rights violations with their lack of oversight, allowing private agencies to “mass export” children for profit on an industrial scale.

Experts say the findings could open the door to more lawsuits against the government. Ms Han’s is set to go to court next month.

It is one of two landmark cases. Ms Han is the first biological parent of an overseas adoptee seeking damages from the government, while in 2019, a man who was adopted in the US was the first adoptee to sue.

A government spokesman told the BBC that it “deeply sympathises with the emotional pain of individuals and families who could not find each other for a long time”.

It added that it considered Ms Han’s case with “deep regret” and that it would take “necessary actions” based on the outcome of the trial.

Ms Han, 71, told the BBC she is determined the government takes responsibility.

“I spent 44 years ruining my body and mind searching for [my daughter]. But in all that time, has anyone ever apologised to me? No one. Not once.”

For decades, she and her husband visited police stations and orphanages, put up flyers, and went on television appealing for information. Ms Han said she spent all day pounding the streets looking for her daughter “till all 10 of my toenails fell out”.

Over the years she thought she came close. In 1990, after one of her TV appeals, Ms Han met a woman who she believed could be Kyung-ha, and even took her in to live with her family for a while. But the woman eventually confessed she was not her daughter.

A breakthrough finally happened in 2019 when Ms Han signed up with 325 Kamra, a group that connects overseas Korean adoptees with their birth parents by matching their DNA.

They soon reported a match – Laurie Bender, a nurse in California. After several phone calls, she flew over to Seoul to meet Ms Han, where the two had a tearful reunion at the airport.

As they embraced, Ms Han ran her fingers through Kyung-ha’s hair. “I’ve been a hairdresser for 30 years. I can quickly tell if it’s my daughter just by feeling her hair. I had mistakenly thought I found her before, so I had to touch and feel the hair to confirm it,” she said.

The first thing she told her daughter was “I’m so sorry”.

“I felt guilty because she couldn’t find her way home when she was a child. I kept thinking about how much she must have searched for her mother… Meeting her after all those years made me realise how much she must have longed for her mother, and it broke my heart.”

“It’s like a hole in your heart has been healed, you finally feel like a complete person,” Kyung-ha said about their reunion in an earlier interview with the Associated Press. She did not respond to the BBC’s requests for an interview.

The pair eventually pieced together what happened on that day in May 1975.

Kyung-ha, who was six years old at the time, was playing near her home when she was approached by a strange woman claiming to know her mother. Kyung-ha was told her mother “didn’t need” her any more and was taken to a train station.

After taking a train ride with the woman, Kyung-ha was abandoned at the final stop, where she was eventually picked up by police officers and placed in an orphanage. Soon, she was flown to the US to be adopted by a couple in Virginia.

Years later, checks revealed she was given false papers stating she was an abandoned orphan whose parents were unknown.

“It’s like you’ve been living a fake life and everything you know is not true,” Kyung-ha said previously.

Her case was far from an isolated one.

South Korea’s overseas adoption programme began in the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War, when it was a deeply impoverished country with an estimated 100,000 orphaned and displaced children.

At that time, few families were willing to adopt non-biological children, and the government began an overseas adoption programme, billed as a humanitarian effort.

The programme was handled entirely by private adoption agencies. While they were under government oversight, over time these agencies gained significant autonomy through laws.

As their power grew, so did the number of children being sent abroad, rising in the 1970s and peaking in the 1980s. In 1985 alone, more than 8,800 children were sent overseas.

There was a massive demand from the West – with declining birth rates and fewer babies to adopt at home, families began seeking children elsewhere.

Photos from that era show planes heading to Western countries filled with Korean children, with swaddled babies strapped to seats – what the truth and reconciliation commission’s inquiry called the “mass transportation of children like cargo”.

The report alleges little care was taken of these children during these long flights. In one case it cited from 1974, a lactose-intolerant child was fed milk in transit and subsequently died upon arrival in Denmark.

Critics of the programme have long questioned why so many children needed to be sent overseas at a time when South Korea was already experiencing rapid economic growth.

A 1976 BBC Panorama documentary, which featured South Korea as one of several Asian countries sending children to the West, quoted an observer describing the situation as “out of control” and “almost like a trade in children… flowing from Asia into Europe and North America”.

According to the truth and reconciliation report, foreign adoption agencies set quotas for children, which Korean agencies willingly fulfilled.

It was a profitable business – the lack of government regulation allowed the Korean agencies to charge large amounts and demand hidden fees termed as “donations”.

Some of these children may have been obtained by unscrupulous means, with parents like Ms Han alleging their children were kidnapped. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of homeless or unattended children were rounded up and put in orphanages or welfare centres as part of a national campaign to “clean up the streets” of South Korea.

Other parents were told their babies had fallen sick and died, when they were actually alive and taken to adoption agencies. Agencies also did not obtain proper consent from birth mothers to take their children for adoption, according to the truth and reconciliation report.

The report also stated that adoption agencies deliberately falsified information in adoption records to cut corners and quickly meet the demand for children.

Lost children who were found without any identity documents would be made to appear, in paperwork, as if they had been abandoned and put up for adoption.

If a child intended for adoption had died or was reclaimed by their birth parents, another child would be swapped in and assigned the original child’s identity. This allowed agencies to avoid refunding adoption fees and expedite the adoption process.

Decades on, this has created immense difficulties for many overseas adoptees trying to track down their biological parents.

Some have wrong or missing information in their adoption records, while others have discovered they were given entirely false identities.

“We are victims of state violence but there is no trace of this – literally. This lack of documents must not make us victims for the second time,” said Han Boon-young, co-founder of an overseas adoptee rights group campaigning for greater access to birth information.

“This is a human rights issue. There were kidnappings, falsified documents – all of which were examples of violations committed during the inter-country adoption process.

“It is really necessary to move towards reconciliation, that we recognise these experiences, and that the people who committed these violations be held responsible.”

But some of the key players continue to stay silent or deny wrongdoing.

The BBC contacted Bu Chung-ha, who in the 1970s served as chairman of Holt International, South Korea’s largest adoption agency.

Holt is at the centre of numerous allegations of fraud and illegal adoptions, and the subject of two lawsuits so far, including Ms Han’s.

In a brief reply, Mr Bu denied that the agency had sent abroad any children wrongly identified as orphans during his tenure. Any parents alleging their children were kidnapped “did not lose their children, they abandoned them”, he said.

The current management of Holt International has yet to respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Experts say the responsibility lay not only with the private agencies but also with the state.

“Adoption agencies exploited the system, and the government turned a blind eye – allowing illegal practices to take root,” said Dr Lee Kyung-eun, an international law scholar at Seoul National University.

“The government was the captain, and the agencies rowed the boat,” said Shin Pil-sik, a researcher on transnational adoption at Seokyeong University, who added that this structure enabled both sides to deflect accountability.

Dr Shin said the state was not a passive observer- it actively shaped adoption policy, setting annual quotas for overseas placements and even on occasion halted some adoptions.

An Associated Press news investigation last year found successive Korean governments had rewritten laws to remove minimal safeguards and judicial oversight, fit their laws to match American ones to make children adoptable, and allowed foreign families to adopt Korean children quickly without ever visiting the country.

While the government billed the programme as a humanitarian effort, observers say it also served to strengthen ties with Western countries.

A 1984 government document obtained by the BBC stated that the official goals of the adoption policy included not only the welfare of children but also “the promotion of future national strength and people-to-people diplomacy”.

When asked about the state’s role in past adoption practices, South Korea’s health and welfare ministry said they were “continuing efforts to strengthen state responsibility” in the system and that it plans to promote adoptions that comply with international standards.

In 2012, the government revised adoption laws to tighten screening of potential adoptive parents, and to track birthparent data and birth information better.

It has also enacted reforms to the adoption system ensuring that overseas adoptions are minimised and that all adoptions would be handled by the government instead of private agencies. The changes will take effect in July.

Meanwhile, overseas adoptions have declined. In the late 1980s, overseas adoptions dropped sharply, before stabilising in the 1990s and dropping again in the 2010s. Only 79 children were adopted abroad in 2023, according to the latest available data.

But as South Korea begins to address this dark chapter in its past, adoptees and birth parents like Ms Han continue to struggle with their trauma.

After their initial reunion, Ms Han and Kyung-ha have struggled to maintain a close connection.

Not only do they live on opposite sides of the world, her daughter has forgotten most of her Korean while Ms Han knows little English.

They keep in touch over texts occasionally, and Ms Han spends two hours every day practising her English by writing phrases in an exercise book.

But it isn’t enough for Ms Han.

“Even though I have found my daughter, it doesn’t feel like I’ve truly found her. All I know is where she is, but what good is that, if we can’t even communicate?

“My entire life has been ruined… no amount of money will ever make up for what I’ve lost.”

As soon as Magnus Mæland became mayor of a small town on Norway’s northern tip in late 2023, three delegations from China came knocking on his door.

“It’s because they want to be a polar superpower,” he tells me.

China might not instinctively spring to mind when you think about the Arctic – but it’s determined to be a big Arctic player. It’s been vying to buy real estate, get involved in infrastructure projects and hopes to establish a permanent regional presence.

China already describes itself as a “near-Arctic state”, even though its northernmost regional capital Harbin is on roughly the same latitude as Venice, Italy.

But the Arctic is fast becoming one of the most hotly-contested parts of the world. Beijing faces stiff competition from Russia, Europe, India and the US.

The race for the Arctic is on.

Climate scientists say the Arctic is warming four times faster than anywhere else. This impacts ecosystems, wildlife and local populations. The Arctic is enormous, encompassing 4% of the globe.

But global powers see a new world of opportunities opening up in the Arctic on the back of environmental changes.

The melting ice in the Arctic makes it easier to access the region’s incredible natural resources – critical minerals, oil, and gas – around 30% of untapped natural gas is said to be found in the Arctic.

And it’s opening up possibilities for new maritime trade routes, drastically reducing travel time between Asia and Europe. In the export business, time is money. China has been developing a “Polar Silk Road” plan for Arctic shipping.

When I visit, the port of Kirkenes looks pretty ghostly.

Inside the Arctic Circle, at the northernmost point of mainland Norway, the former mining town is a gritty contrast with the picture-postcard, snow-covered mountains and fjords that surround it.

There are shuttered shops and abandoned warehouses, riddled with broken windows. The town feels forgotten and left behind.

So you can imagine the appeal of possibly becoming the first European port of call for masses of container ships from Asia, depending on how fast the polar ice continues to melt.

The town’s port director, Terje Jørgensen, plans to build a brand new international port. His eyes light up when he talks about becoming the Singapore of Europe’s High North.

“What we’re trying to build here in Kirkenes is a trans-shipment port where three continents meet: North America, Europe and Asia. We’ll take the goods ashore and reload onto other vessels [for further export]. We don’t need to sell any land to anyone. Not to a UK company, not a Chinese company.

New laws in Norway prohibit the transfer of property or businesses, if the sale could harm “Norwegian security interests”, he says. What they’re waiting for, he adds, are clear guidelines from the government about what kind of critical infrastructure this might cover.

Mayor Mæland certainly seems wary of China’s intentions. “We want a relationship with China, but we don’t want to be dependent on China,” he tells me.

“Europe has to ask itself ‘How dependent do you want to be on totalitarian and authoritarian regimes?'”

China’s purchase-your-way-into-the-Arctic approach is beginning to be rejected across the European Arctic. Recent attempts by Beijing to buy into seaports in Norway and Sweden and an airport in Greenland, for example, were rebuffed.

This is pushing polar-hungry China – the biggest emerging superpower in the world – into the arms of the Arctic’s largest player, Russia.

Russia controls a whopping half of the Arctic shoreline – and it’s been hoovering up Chinese investments.

The two countries cooperate militarily in the Arctic too. China’s coastguard entered the Arctic for the first time in October, in a joint patrol with Russian forces. The two countries had staged joint military exercises here the month earlier. In July, long-range bombers from both countries provocatively patrolled the Arctic Ocean near Alaska in the United States.

It’s as if Beijing and Moscow are looking over at Nato, which has stepped up its exercises in the Arctic, and are saying: We can do this too.

Every country bordering the Arctic is a member of Nato except Russia. Finland and Sweden joined after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Andreas Østhagen, a senior fellow at the independent Fridtjof Nansen Institute, describes the Arctic as “low-hanging fruit” for Russian-Chinese collaboration.

“Russia needs investments and commercial actors who are interested in developing the Arctic – LNG [liquefied natural gas] resources, oil resources, or developing a northern sea route as a shipping lane.

“China is that market. The two countries are looking for ways to expand their political, economic, even military cooperation.”

But China is keen not to align itself too closely with Russia. It wants to avoid Western sanctions and to continue doing business with Western powers, inside and outside the Arctic.

Russia has reservations too.

“Be careful not to overrate the Russia-China relationship,” says Mr Østhagen. “Russia remains wary of letting China too deep into its Arctic.”

Moscow relies heavily on its natural resources there. And it’s courting other Arctic investors too, including the US, according to reports.

Russia also relies on its Arctic to store strategic weapons – mainly on its Kola peninsula, which bristles with nuclear capabilities and is home to its legendary Northern Fleet.

Back in Norway, Kirkenes residents live under that shadow of the Russian Bear next door. They always have. The border with Russia is a 10 minutes drive away by car. And Kola peninsula feels uncomfortably close.

In Cold War times, the town became known as a nest of spies – a frontline between the West and the Soviet Union.

Norway believes Russia is using its Arctic to train new recruits to fight, and to fly bombers from, to attack Ukraine.

Though not directly at war with Russia, Norway, and specifically the north of the country along its roughly 200km long land border, feels under attack.

“We see it here locally,” says Col Jørn Kviller, speaking to me by the clear waters of the Pasvik River that separates Norway and Russia. Just in front of us are Norway’s bright yellow, and Russia’s red and green, border posts.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there have been increasingly frequent incidents of GPS jamming that have even caused commercial pilots to change navigation systems. Cases of espionage by the border – “everything from signals intelligence to agents being sent to Norway” – have shot up, Col Kviller tells me.

Norway and its Nato allies are also on the alert for Russian spy submarines and other vessels in the Arctic.

I’m able to see how Norway monitors this threat, after we get high security clearance to enter the country’s Cold War-era joint military command. It’s deep inside a quartz mountain in Bodø, within the Arctic Circle.

We find a labyrinth of tunnels and surveillance rooms where Norway gathers real-time intelligence from land, air and sea, focused on suspicious-looking vessels in and near its Arctic waters. Everything is shared in real-time with Nato allies.

Crucially, any Russian vessel wanting to enter Europe has to pass through Norwegian waters first.

Agents in the mountain HQ are on the lookout for signs of espionage and sabotage around what officials call underwater “critical infrastructure” as part of the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare against the West.

Targets include undersea communications cables – connecting continents and permitting trillions of dollars’ worth of financial transactions a day – and also oil and gas pipelines.

Norway is a major supplier of natural gas to Europe, including the UK, especially since sanctions were imposed on Russian exports following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Moscow has been modernising its military capabilities in the Arctic. It has a serious fleet of spy and nuclear submarines. If they pass undetected, they could potentially target missiles at capitals across Europe and also threaten the US.

US President Donald Trump has told Europe it must do more for its own defence, but inside the Arctic, there is a “great overlap of interests”, says the chief of the Norwegian joint headquarters Vice Adm Rune Andersen.

“This is also about US homeland defence… The Russian concentration of nuclear weapons, the capabilities that Russia is deploying are not only aimed at Europe, but also at the US,” he says.

Vice Adm Andersen doesn’t believe any party is courting open conflict in the Arctic but with global tensions rising elsewhere, such as over Ukraine, the potential for spillover in the Arctic is there.

The vice admiral’s team schedules a routine call to Russia’s Northern Fleet every Wednesday afternoon -to keep communication channels open, they say. Just in case.

If you leave Kirkenes and head towards the North Pole, you come across the magnificent Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard at about the half-way mark. It’s home to ice floes, glaciers and more polar bears than people.

Svalbard is at the heart of the scramble between global powers for Arctic resources. While Norwegian, the archipelago is governed by a treaty allowing people from all countries that signed it to work there visa-free. Most are employed in mines, tourism and scientific research.

That may sound harmonious, but since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine there’s been a noticeable flexing of nationalist muscles in some communities here.

They include military parades by the Russian settlement to mark their commemorations for the end of World War Two, the flying of a Soviet flag over Russian infrastructure, and growing suspicion that the Chinese have made their Svalbard research station dual-purpose – for military espionage.

Regardless of whether or not that’s true, local mayor Terje Aunevik says it would be naïve to suggest there was no intelligence-gathering going on in the different countries’ research centres.

“Of course there is… I think the world has been gripped by Arctic fomo [fear of missing out].”

The day I arrive in Svalbard, it’s Norway’s national day. The streets are thronging with a snaking parade of mums, dads and children from the local school, clad in Norwegian national dress.

Longyearbyen is the northernmost town in the world. Bright sunshine glints off the Arctic waters below the main street, and the flat-topped, snow and ice-covered mountains all around.

Everywhere I look, I see shop windows, prams and women’s hairdos festooned with blue, white and red Norwegian flags. Perhaps I imagined it, but among all the cheeriness, it felt like there was another, unspoken sentiment that day, a reminder: ‘Svalbard belongs to us!’

The rising mood of national rivalries in the Arctic is not without consequences.

Indigenous communities in the region, just over half of whom live in the Russian Arctic, often feel that there is a failure on the part of those in power to acknowledge the rights of the peoples who have long called the region home.

Miyuki Daorana, a youth activist from Greenland representing the Inughuit indigenous community, says when Donald Trump claimed he wanted to buy the country during his first presidency, they laughed it off. But this time it feels different, she says.

“Because of the current global political situation, with power play and competition for resources, it’s much more serious.”

She, and others in the indigenous communities, accuse European countries of using the “climate crisis” as an excuse to “extract and invade indigenous lands”.

“It’s something we call green colonialism or developmental aggression where they really want to just take more and more from lands,” she says.

“[The Arctic] is not just a topic for us. It’s not just an interest, it’s not a study. It’s literally our lives and real struggles and emotions and very unfair injustices.

“The government and the politicians, they’re supposed to work for the people. But I haven’t seen that. It’s mostly diplomatic words.”

Not long ago, you used to hear talk of Arctic exceptionalism, where the eight countries bordering the Arctic – Canada, Russia, the US, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland – along with representatives of six Arctic indigenous communities and other observer countries, including China and the UK, would put aside political differences to work together to protect and govern this incredible part of the world.

But these are times now of big power politics. Countries increasingly act in their own interests.

With so many rival nations now in the Arctic, the risks of misinterpretation or miscalculation are high.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has previously been put in prison and banned from film-making in his home country, spoke out against the restrictions of the regime after winning the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Panahi picked up the prestigious Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident, described by BBC Culture as “a furious but funny revenge thriller that takes aim at oppressive regimes”.

He was cheered as he urged fellow Iranians to “set aside” differences and problems.

“What’s most important now is our country and the freedom of our country,” he said. “Let us join forces. No-one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do, or what we should not do.”

Panahi’s last spell in prison, from which he was freed in 2023, was for protesting against the detention of two fellow film-makers who had been critical of the authorities.

His trip to Cannes was his first appearance at an international festival in 15 years, after being subject to a long travel ban.

It Was Just an Accident was shot in secret and based partly on Panahi’s own experiences in prison.

“Before going to jail and before getting to know the people that I met there – and hearing their stories, their backgrounds – the issues I dealt with in my films were totally different,” the director told the Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s really in this context (…) with this new commitment that I had felt in prison, that I had the idea, the inspiration for this story.”

The film tells the tale of five ordinary Iranians who are confronted with a man they believed tortured them in jail.

The characters were inspired by conversations he had with other prisoners and “stories that they told me about, the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government”, the director added.

Panahi spent seven months of a six-year sentence in jail before being released in February 2023.

He was previously sentenced to six years in 2010 for supporting anti-government protests and creating “propaganda against the system”. He was released on conditional bail after two months, and was banned from making movies or travelling abroad.

He has vowed to return to Tehran after the festival despite the risks of prosecution.

“As soon as I finish my work here I will go back to Iran,” he told reporters in Cannes. “And I will ask myself what’s my next film going to be.”

The Guardian’s review described It Was Just an Accident as Panahi’s “most emotionally explicit film yet: a film about state violence and revenge, about the pain of tyranny that co-exists with ostensible everyday normality”.

“It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema,” the paper’s critic Peter Bradshaw wrote.

Variety said Panahi had transformed “from understated humanist to open critic of the Iranian regime, as revealed in his punchy new political thriller”.

Panahi was presented with the Palme d’Or by French actress Juliette Binoche, who is this year’s Cannes jury president, and Australian actress Cate Blanchett.

Introducing the award, Binoche said cinema and art are “provocative” and mobilise “a force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life”.

“That is why we have chosen for the Palme d’Or It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi.”

In her introduction, Blanchett said: “I applaud the festival’s understanding that cinema creates openings for wider social conversations to take place.”

The award ceremony went ahead as planned despite a five-hour power cut that local officials put down to suspected attacks on a substation and electricity pylon.

Panahi, 64, has now completed the rare feat of winning the top prizes from the Cannes, Berlin and Venice film festivals – and could now be in line for recognition in Hollywood.

Four of the past five Palme d’Or winners have been nominated for the Oscar for best picture.

However, It Was Just an Accident is unlikely to be nominated for the Oscar for best international feature. Films must have a cinematic release in their country of origin to be eligible for that prize, and Panahi’s films are banned in Iran.

Russian aerial attacks on Ukraine have killed at least 13 people and injured 56 civilians across the country since Friday, according to regional officials.

Russia launched 250 drones and 14 ballistic missiles against Kyiv alone, Ukraine’s air force said, causing fires in residential buildings.

At least 14 people were injured in the capital. It was one of the biggest combined aerial assaults on the city since the war began.

The air force said it had downed six missiles and 245 drones.

“With each such attack, the world becomes more certain that the cause of prolonging the war lies in Moscow,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on X.

The overnight barrage came as Russia and Ukraine are taking part in prisoner swaps agreed after talks between the two sides in Turkey.

Describing a “difficult night”, Zelensky said there had been fires and explosions across Kyiv with homes, businesses and cars damaged by strikes or falling debris.

Two schools and a clinic were among the facilities hit in the Kyiv region.

Olha Chyrukha, a 64-year-old Kyiv resident, told Reuters news agency: “I wish they’d agree to a ceasefire. To bomb people like this – poor children. My three-year-old granddaughter was screaming scared.”

Four people were killed in the eastern Donetsk region; five in the southern Odesa and Kherson regions and four in the northeast Kharkiv region.

Drones hit port infrastructure in Odesa on Saturday, local authorities reported.

Residential, facilities and several blocks of flats across Ukraine were damaged. Over 100 people were evacuated, including 13 children from front line areas.

Commenting on the combined use of aerial weapons, Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said: “The enemy is improving its own tactics of using drones, while simultaneously striking with ballistics.”

Zelensky said only “additional sanctions targeting key sectors of the Russian economy” could push Moscow to agree to a ceasefire.

Last week, Russia said Ukraine had launched hundreds of exploding drones at the country, including strikes over Moscow. The Russia’s defence ministry said that 485 drones had been shot down.

On Saturday, Zelensky announced that 307 Ukrainian prisoners had returned home as part of an exchange deal with the Kremlin.

On Friday, Ukraine and Russia each handed over 390 soldiers and civilians in the biggest prisoner exchange since Russia launched its full-scale assault in February 2022.

The two countries have agreed to swap a total of 1,000 prisoners each, and another exchange is expected on Sunday.

US President Donald Trump, who has pledged but so far failed to end the war, suggested on social media that the swap “could lead to something big???”.

Earlier this week, Trump had a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war, after which he said the Kremlin and Ukraine would “immediately start” negotiations for a ceasefire.

However, Putin has only said Russia would work with Ukraine to craft a “memorandum on a possible future peace agreement”, and failed to address calls for a 30-day ceasefire.

Fans of viral Labubu dolls have reacted angrily online after its maker pulled the toys from all UK stores following reports of customers fighting over them.

Pop Mart, which makes the monster bag charms, told the BBC it had paused selling them in all 16 of its shops until June to “prevent any potential safety issues”.

Labubu fan Victoria Calvert said she witnessed chaos in the Stratford store in London. “It was just getting ridiculous to be in that situation where people were fighting and shouting and you felt scared.”

The soft toys became a TikTok trend after being worn by celebrities like Rihanna and Dua Lipa. Now some retail experts are warning the stop on stock will only heighten demand.

Labubu is a quirky monster character created by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung, and popularised through a collaboration with toy store Pop Mart.

Since gaining celebrity status they’ve gone viral as a fashion accessory.

In the UK, prices can range from £13.50 to £50, with rare editions going for hundreds of pounds on resale sites such as Vinted and eBay.

Pop Mart said it was working on a fairer system for when the toys return to its shelves.

But fans on social media were not happy at the decision to pull the dolls.

“It’s your fault for drip feeding stock to us that’s caused this hype,” one commented on Pop Mart’s Instagram post.

Others vented their anger at resellers.

“Buyers are re-selling them for £100 for one Labubu, which is unacceptable. How come they get to buy and other people can’t?!” one said.

“Sooo upset that resellers ruin everything,” replied another.

Victoria said when she arrived at the store she met other customers who had been outside since 03:00 BST and others that had camped overnight.

“When I got there there were big crowds of people hovering around the shop and there was this really negative vibe,” she said.

“People were shouting, basically saying there were no more Labubus left. I even witnessed a fight between a worker and a customer.”

She said she left after feeling unsafe. “It was a pretty bad experience, it was really scary,” she said.

The store told the BBC: “Although no Pop Mart employees have been injured, we’ve chosen to act early and prevent any potential safety issues from occurring.”

Victoria said “it’s probably for the best” that Pop Mart paused in-store sales.

She believes some people at the front of the queue were resellers because “as soon as they got their ticket, apparently they were selling it for £150 and the ticket allowed you to get a Labubu.”

Jaydee, a marketing executive who posts Labubu unboxing videos on TikTok, blames resellers for ruining the fun of the Labubu trend.

“I’ve lived in London my whole life and there is a resale crowd who do this,” she told the BBC.

“It’s really unfortunate but for the real fans this is great news and the right decision,” she said. “Now I can go into Pop Mart without having to queue.”

Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, said Pop Mart’s restricting stock and selling the dolls in blind boxes had led to the fan frenzy.

“But the big crowds building on stock drop days have clearly become a costly headache to manage,” she said.

“Out-of-control crowds could affect ultimately the brand’s playful and fun appeal which is likely to be why sales have been paused,” she said.

She warned the suspension would probably lead to demand building up and more attempts to buy the dolls online – but they sell out within seconds.

“It could also push more fans to resale sites, but counterfeit Labubus are being sold, so there is a risk customers could be duped into buying fakes.”

Sarah Johnson, the founder of consultancy Flourish Retail, said suspending sales was “a strategic decision”.

Collectible brands like Labubu use scarcity as “a powerful tool”, she added.

Pop Mart told the BBC there had been large queues with some fans arriving the night before and said this was “not the kind of customer experience it aimed to offer”.

“Labubu will return to physical stores in June, and we are currently working on a new release mechanism that is better structured and more equitable for everyone involved.”

Satellite images have for the first time shown the extent of a shipyard accident in North Korea that damaged a new warship in the presence of the secretive state’s leader, Kim Jong Un.

The image shows the warship lying on its side, covered by large blue tarpaulins. A portion of the vessel appears to be on land.

An official investigation into the accident – which Kim described as a “criminal act” – has begun, state media reported on Friday.

None of the reports mentioned any casualties or injuries as a result of Thursday’s incident in the eastern port city of Chongjin.

KCNA, North Korea’s official news agency, downplayed the damage in a report on Friday, saying it was “not serious” and that, contrary to initial reports, there were no holes on the ship’s bottom.

“The hull starboard was scratched and a certain amount of seawater flowed into the stern section through the rescue channel,” KCNA reported.

The manager of the shipyard, Hong Kil Ho, has been summoned by law enforcers, it said.

It would take around 10 days to restore the destroyer’s side, according to KCNA.

Kim said on Thursday that the accident was caused by “absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism”.

He added that those who made “irresponsible errors” will be dealt with at a plenary meeting next month.

It’s not clear what punishment they might face, but the authoritarian state has a woeful human rights record.

It is uncommon for North Korea to publicly disclose local accidents – though it has done this a handful of times in the past.

This particular accident comes weeks after North Korea unveiled a similar 5,000-ton destroyer, the Choe Hyon.

Kim had called that warship a “breakthrough” in modernising North Korea’s navy and said it would be deployed early next year.

The European Union’s trade chief said the 27-member bloc is committed to securing a trade deal with the US based on “respect” not “threats”.

It comes after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap a 50% tariff on all goods sent to the US from the EU.

“The EU’s fully engaged, committed to securing a deal that works for both,” EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic said after a call with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

“EU-US trade is unmatched & must be guided by mutual respect, not threats. We stand ready to defend our interests.”

Earlier on Friday, Trump expressed impatience with the pace of ongoing EU-US trade negotiations, saying his plan to raise tariffs on 1 June was set.

Writing on social media, Trump said: “Our discussions with [the EU] are going nowhere,” adding that there would be no tariffs for products built or manufactured in the US.

“I’m not looking for a deal – we’ve set the deal,” he told reporters later, before immediately adding that a big investment in the US by a European company might make him open to a delay.

The EU is one of the Washington’s largest trading partners, sending more than $600bn (€528bn; £443bn) in goods last year and buying $370bn worth, US government figures show.

Reacting to Trump’s threats, European governments warned that higher tariffs would be damaging to both sides.

“We do not need to go down this road,” said Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheál Martin. “Negotiations are the best and only sustainable way forward.”

France’s Trade Minister Laurent Saint-Martin, said: “We are maintaining the same line: de-escalation, but we are ready to respond.”

German Economy Minister Katherina Reiche said the bloc “must do everything” to reach a solution with the US.

While Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof told reporters that he backed the EU’s strategy in trade talks and “we have seen before that tariffs can go up and down in talks with the US”.

The EU is negotiating with the US as a bloc, though Stephen Moore, a former economic advisor to Trump who works for conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, told the BBC: “What may happen in Europe… is that we may try to negotiate individually with countries in Europe.”

He added that in his opinion Trump’s “ultimate aim is really to decouple not just the US but the whole world from Chinese influence which would be a very good thing if he could pull that off”.

In early April, Trump announced tariffs against a long list of countries, including a 20% tax on most EU goods being sold into the US.

Soon afterwards, the president paused the higher tariffs for three months, until 8 July, to allow for more negotiations, but kept a 10% baseline tax in place against the US’s trade partners.

Higher US tariffs also remained in place against China though they were substantially lowered.

Despite the climbdown from Trump, the US kept a 25% tariff against EU steel and aluminium imports in place.

The EU has threatened – and paused – its own measures against the US. It said it would introduce a 25% tariff on €18bn ($20bn; £15bn) worth of US goods coming into Europe but this has been put on hold.

It is also currently consulting on additional measures against US imports into the US valued at €95bn.

Trump’s complaints about Europe have focused on what he claims is an uneven trade relationship – the EU sells more goods to the US than it buys from America.

Trump blames a trade deficit on policies that he claims are unfair to American companies, and he has specifically raised concerns about policies related to cars and agricultural products.

Trump also warned Apple that he would impose a 25% import tax “at least” on iPhones not manufactured in America, later widening the threat to any smartphone.

Shares in the US and EU fell on Friday after the latest threats, with America’s S&P 500 down about 0.7% and Germany’s Dax and France’s Cac 40 ending the day down more than 1.5%.

Walk into any Starbucks in South Korea right now, and there are some names you definitely won’t be hearing.

Six to be exact – and they happen to be the names of the candidates running in the upcoming presidential race.

That’s because Starbucks has temporarily blocked customers who are ordering drinks from using these names, which would be called out by baristas.

The company said it needed to “maintain political neutrality during election season”, adding that this would be lifted after the election on 3 June.

South Korean businesses and celebrities usually strive to be seen as neutral. But it has become more crucial in recent months, as political turmoil triggered by former president Yoon Suk Yeol left the country more divided than ever.

Now, as South Korea gears up to pick its new president following Yoon’s impeachment, even the most mundane things can become politicised – a lesson Starbucks has learnt the hard way.

In recent months, it has seen an increasing number of customers ordering drinks through their app and keying in phrases such as “arrest Yoon Suk Yeol” or “[opposition leader] Lee Jae-myung is a spy” as their nicknames.

Starbucks baristas had little choice but to yell out these names once the drinks were ready for collection.

“Our goal is to make sure every customer has a great experience in our coffeehouses,” Starbucks said in a statement about its new move to ban the six presidential candidates’ names.

“To help with that, we sometimes block certain phrases that could be misunderstood by our employees or customers — like names of political candidates with messages of support or opposition during election season to maintain neutrality.”

But this marks the first time it has banned the names of all the candidates running in an election. Besides Lee, the other names are Kim Moon-soo, Lee Jun-seok, Kwon Young-kook, Hwang Kyo-ahn and Song Jin-ho.

Some think the coffee giant is taking things a bit too far.

“I think people are being too sensitive. What if your real name is the same as a candidate’s?” said 33-year-old Jang Hye-mi.

Ji Seok-bin, a 27-year-old who is a regular at Starbucks, said he thought the rule was “too trivial”, though he said he understood the logic behind it given the country’s heightened political tensions.

“After [Yoon’s impeachment] I don’t really talk about politics anymore. It feels like the ideological divide has grown so much that conversations often turn into arguments.”

Starbucks is not alone. The country’s biggest search engine, Naver, has disabled autocomplete and related search suggestions for candidates, as it usually does during election season.

A search on Google for Lee, who is widely tipped to win the election, yields phrases like “Lee Jae-myung trial” – a reference to the fact that he is currently embroiled in several criminal trials.

A search for the country’s conservative presidential candidate Kim Moon-soo brings up a related suggestion for “conversion”, as he is widely seen to have “converted” from being a fervent labour activist to a conservative politician.

Naver said it decided to do this to “provide more accurate and fair information during the election campaign”.

Celebrities and public figures are also being extra careful, as they are held to high standards of political impartiality. Even the clothes they wear during election time would be highly scrutinised.

Wearing colours like blue and red – which represent the country’s liberal Democratic Party (DP) and conservative People’s Power Party (PPP) respectively – has in the past been enough to trigger online backlash.

Sometimes, even a baseball cap or necktie alone is enough to spark accusations of partisan support.

During the last presidential election in 2022, Kim Hee-chul of K-pop group Super Junior was accused of being a PPP supporter when he was spotted wearing red slippers and a pink mask.

Last year, Shinji, lead vocalist of the popular trio Koyote, posted a black and white workout photo on Instagram a day before the general election, with the caption that she “made the photo black and white… [after] seeing the colour of my sweatpants.”

“Funny and sad at the same time,” she added.

Some celebrities go even further, deliberately wearing a mix of red and blue.

One makeup artist with over a decade of experience working with K-pop stars and actors told the BBC that during elections, styling teams steer clear of politically symbolic colours.

“We usually stick to neutral tones like black, white, or grey,” said the make-up artist, who declined to be named.

Celebrities even have to be careful when striking a pose, she added.

Flashing the peace sign for a photo? That could be read as the number two – and thus an endorsement of a political candidate. In South Korea, election candidates are each assigned a number.

Dr Cho Jin-man, of Duksung Women’s University, says it is “important to be able to talk about different things without crossing the line, and to be able to recognise and understand differences”.

But with so much division in the country, he adds that many are choosing to “remain silent to remain politically neutral”.

In 2010, Indian filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan made a striking debut at Cannes with Masaan – a poignant tale of love, loss, and the oppressive grip of the caste system, set against the holy city of Varanasi.

The main lead in the film (Vicky Kaushal) performed a job assigned to one of the lowest castes in the rigid Hindu caste hierarchy – cremating dead bodies along the Ganges. Masaan played in the “Un Certain Regard” section at the festival, which looks at films with unusual styles and or that tells non-traditional stories. It won the FIPRESCI and the Avenir – also known as the Promising Future Prize – prizes.

Since then, Ghaywan was in search of a story about India’s marginalised communities. Five years ago in the middle of the pandemic, a friend, Somen Mishra – the head of creative development at Dharma Productions in Mumbai – recommended an opinion piece called Taking Amrit Home, published in The New York Times. It was written by the journalist Basharat Peer.

What drew Ghaywan to Peer’s article was that it tracked the journeys – sometimes of hundreds or even thousands of miles – taken by millions of Indians who travelled on foot to get home during the nation’s strict lockdown during the pandemic. But he was also drawn to the core of the story, which focused on the childhood friendship between two men – one Muslim and the other Dalit (formerly known as the untouchables).

Ghaywan’s new film Homebound, inspired by Peer’s article, premiered at Cannes Film Festival’s “Un Certain Regard” section this week, ending with a nine-minute long standing ovation.

Many in the audience were seen wiping away tears. Ghaywan gave the lead producer Karan Johar a tight hug, while he and his young lead actors – Ishan Khatter, Vishal Jethwa and Janhvi Kapoor – came together in a larger group hug later.

Since this was the biggest South Asian event at Cannes 2025, other film luminaries showed up to support the screening. India’s Mira Nair (who won the Camera d’Or in 1988 for Salaam Bombay) leaned across two rows of seats to reach out to Johar. Pakistan’s Siam Sadiq (who won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize in 2022 for Joyland) was seen making a reel of the mood inside the theatre that he later posted on Instagram.

The film also received backing from a rather unexpected quarter. Its main producer is Johar, the leading Indian commercial filmmaker (known for blockbuster films like Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham and the recent Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani). But last month Martin Scorsese stepped in as the executive producer after he was introduced to the film by the French producer Mélita Toscan du Plantier.

This is the first time Scorsese has stepped in to support a contemporary Indian film. Until now he has only backed restored classic Indian films.

“I have seen Neeraj’s first film Masaan in 2015 and I loved it, so when Mélita Toscan du Plantier sent me the project of his second film, I was curious,” Scorsese said in a statement last month.

“I loved the story, the culture and was willing to help. Neeraj has made a beautifully crafted film that’s a significant contribution to Indian cinema.”

According to Ghaywan, Scorsese helped nurture the film by mentoring the team through a number of rounds of edits. But he also tried to understand the cultural context which helped the exchange of ideas.

The context was important to Ghaywan, since he had been trying to capture the right spirit of the subject he was tackling.

The film’s two lead characters – Mohammed Shoaib Ali (Khatter) and Chandan Kumar (Jethwa) have shared histories – the weight of centuries of discrimination at the hand of upper caste Hindus, but also similar goals to rise above the barriers imposed on them – in this case by joining their state’s police force.

Ghaywan has openly shared that he was born into a Dalit family – a reality that has cast a long shadow over his life, haunting him since childhood.

As an adult, he went on to study business administration and then worked in a corporate job in Gurgaon outside the capital, Delhi. He said he never faced discrimination but was acutely aware of his position in the caste hierarchy and still lives with the weight of where he was born.

“I am the only acknowledged person from the community who is there behind and in the front of camera in all of Hindi cinema history. That is the kind of gap we are living with,” he says.

A majority of India lives in its villages, but Hindi filmmakers rarely talk about bringing the villages to their stories, says Ghaywan. What also offends him is that marginalised communities are only talked about as statistics.

“What if we pick one person out of that statistic and see what happened in their lives?” he says. “How did they get to this point? I felt it was worth narrating a story.”

When he sat down to write the script, he tried to fictionalise the backstories of the two protagonists until the point that they took the journey during Covid – which is the beginning of Peer’s article.

As a child in Hyderabad, Ghaywan had a close Muslim friend, Asghar, so he felt deeply connected to Ali and Kumar’s lived experiences in the film.

“What appealed to me more was the humanity behind it, the interpersonal, the interiority of the relationship,” he says, that took him back to his childhood in Hyderabad.

In Ghaywan’s hands, Homebound has the wonderful glow and warmth of the winter sun. It is gorgeously shot in India’s rural North, capturing simple joys and the daily struggles of its Muslim and Dalit protagonists. The two men, the woman one of them loves (Kapoor and Jethwa both portray Dalit characters), and their interactions offer much to reflect on and understand.

For the most part, Ghaywan’s script keeps viewers on the edge. Back in 2019, none of us truly grasped the scale of the coming pandemic – but the film subtly foreshadows a shift, reminding us that a crisis can cut across class, caste, and ethnicity, touching everyone.

Homebound’s seamless blend of fiction and reality has produced a powerful public document, grounding its characters in authenticity. More than just moving its audience to tears, the film is bound to spark meaningful conversations – and, one hopes, a deeper understanding of those who live in the shadows.

A headline in Israel’s liberal daily Ha’aretz this week put it starkly: “Diplomatic tsunami nears,” it warned, “as Europe begins to act against Israel’s ‘complete madness’ in Gaza.”

This week’s diplomatic assault has taken many forms, not all of them foreseen.

From concerted international condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza, to the shocking murder of two young Israeli embassy staff members in Washington, this has been, to put it mildly, a tumultuous week for the Jewish state.

The waves started crashing on Israel’s shores on Monday evening, when Britain, France and Canada issued a joint statement condemning its “egregious” actions in Gaza.

All three warned of the possibility of “further concrete actions” if Israel continued its renewed military offensive and failed to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid.

They also threatened “targeted sanctions” in response to Israel’s settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.

A statement from 24 donor nations followed, condemning a new, Israeli-backed aid delivery model for Gaza.

But that was just the start.

On Tuesday, Britain suspended trade talks with Israel and said a 2023 road map for future cooperation was being reviewed.

A fresh round of sanctions was imposed on Jewish settlers, including Daniela Weiss, a prominent figure who featured in Louis Theroux’s recent documentary, The Settlers.

Israel’s ambassador in London, Tzipi Hotovely, was summoned to the Foreign Office, a move generally reserved for the representatives of countries like Russia and Iran.

To make matters worse for Israel, the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said a “strong majority” of the bloc’s members favoured reviewing the 25-year-old Association Agreement with Israel.

The reasons for this flurry of diplomatic condemnation seemed clear enough.

Evidence that Gaza was closer to mass starvation than at any time since the war began, following Hamas’s attack in October 2023, was sending ripples of horror across the world.

Israel’s military offensive, and the rhetoric surrounding it, suggested that conditions in the stricken territory were about to deteriorate once more.

Addressing MPs on Tuesday, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy singled out the words of Israel’s hardline Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who had spoken of “cleansing” Gaza, “destroying what’s left” and relocating the civilian population to third countries.

“We must call this what it is,” Lammy said. “It’s extremism. It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous. And I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”

Smotrich is not a decision-maker when it comes to conduct of the war in Gaza. Before now, his incendiary remarks might have been set to one side.

But those days appear to be over. Rightly or wrongly, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seen as in thrall to his far-right colleagues. Critics accuse him of relentlessly pursuing a war, without regard for the lives of Palestinian civilians or the remaining Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza.

Countries that have long supported Israel’s right to defend itself are beginning to say “enough is enough.”

This week was clearly a significant moment for Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a staunch defender of Israel (he once said “I support Zionism without qualification”) who faced strong criticism from within the Labour Party for his reluctance last year to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.

On Tuesday, Sir Keir said the suffering of innocent children in Gaza was “utterly intolerable”.

In the face of this unusually concerted action from some of his country’s strongest allies, Netanyahu reacted furiously, suggesting Britain, France and Canada were guilty of supporting Hamas.

“When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice,” he posted on X.

“You’re on the wrong side of humanity and you’re on the wrong side of history.”

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar went further, suggesting there was a “direct line” between Israel’s critics, including Starmer, and Wednesday night’s killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, the two Israeli embassy employees gunned down outside the Jewish Museum in Washington.

But despite the outpourings of sympathy following the shooting, the Israeli government seems increasingly isolated, with western allies and prominent members of the Jewish diaspora all voicing anger – and anguish – over the war in Gaza.

Lord Levy, former Middle East envoy and advisor to Tony Blair, said he endorsed the current government’s criticisms, even suggesting they might have come “a little late”.

“There has to be a stand, not just from us in this country but internationally, against what is going on in Gaza,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One, describing himself as “a very proud Jew…who passionately cares for Israel”.

But silent, throughout all this, is the one man who could, if he wanted, stop the war.

At the end of his recent tour of the Gulf, Donald Trump said “a lot of people are starving”.

White House officials indicated the US president was frustrated with the war and wanted the Israeli government to “wrap it up”.

But while other western leaders release expressions of outrage, Trump is saying almost nothing.

Three weeks after Prince Harry’s dramatic court loss, any likelihood of him reviving the legal battle over his personal security arrangements is narrowing by the day.

His anger and hurt at how he feels his family’s security was seemingly lessened, after he stepped back from working royal duties, has played out publicly – and earlier this month he lost his challenge at the Court of Appeal in London.

In a week’s time, the deadline passes for Prince Harry – the Duke of Sussex – to try one last go, at the Supreme Court. But that seems unlikely after he told the BBC, in his exclusive interview after losing, he had no legal options left.

And even if he were to ask for a hearing, the chances of him getting one appear slim because of what the courts have said so far.

While the prince’s complaint was about his treatment, ultimately the courts took no view on that. Instead, they ruled he had not understood how the body organising Royal Family protection worked – and how his decision to quit the UK, yet still have an “in-and-out” role in public life, was exceptional.

One former senior judge, who was not involved and spoke on background, felt the prince’s case had been “preposterous” and “hopeless” from the start and anyone else bringing such a flawed claim would have been on the receiving end of more critical language from the courts.

However, Prince Harry’s argument was always wider – saying the state had to take into account the accident of his birth which made him a target.

“I was born into this position. I was born into those risks. And they’ve only increased over time,” he said in the BBC interview.

At his first court hearing, in 2023, the prince said the UK was a place where he wanted his children “to feel at home” – but argued that can’t happen “if it’s not possible to keep them safe”.

After losing his appeal, he said he “[couldn’t] see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the UK”.

Harry’s entire legal case centred on Ravec – which authorises security for senior royals on behalf of the Home Office, and which Harry believes unfairly treated him.

So, to understand why he lost and seemingly has nowhere else to go, we first have to understand three key issues:

– Why was Ravec created, and what is its specific role?

– How did Ravec and the Home Office respond when Prince Harry quit as a front line royal?

– Why did he think this was something the courts should solve?

Ravec evolved out of a 2003 Daily Mirror stunt when one of its reporters blagged his way into a job as a Buckingham Palace footman.

It led to panic in government – and a major review concluded royal security needed a jolt.

So Ravec was born – the Royal and VIP Executive Committee (its exact name has changed down the years).

Ravec oversees security for key public figures by assessing risks from terrorism, extremism, stalkers and any other foreseeable threat such as a “fixated individual”. Unsurprisingly, there is no public list of who gets protected.

It is responsible for VIP security within England, Wales and Scotland.

The committee is funded and overseen by the Home Office because its work is on behalf of the home secretary of the day.

The Royal Household has two members on the committee, including the monarch’s private secretary. They contribute what they think is needed to protect people and key locations, such as Buckingham Palace.

The Metropolitan Police feeds information into the intelligence assessment and, ultimately provides the officers and kit to protect each “principal” – protected person.

But crucially, it’s the Home Office-appointed chair who must decide how to spend the money and justify it to government.

Part of Prince Harry’s case was heard in private, behind closed court doors, to ensure Ravec’s precise workings and its security plans remain confidential.

We learned Ravec’s decisions typically draw on a report from the Risk Management Board (RMB), a Home Office panel pulling together all the facts about risks and actual threats.

So, in the example of the prince, it is well-known that al-Qaeda supporters and racist extremists are a concern for his family. We can therefore infer that the RMB has probably tried to work out what those threats really amount to.

That’s the background. Let’s turn to how it all became such a public row, leading from the High Court to the Court of Appeal.

The critical decisions were in spring 2020 when Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, “stepped back” from being working royals.

Their choice to move first to Canada, with their baby son, raised a question for Ravec: what kind of security should the prince’s family now have, if they were no longer working royals and no longer living in the UK? What role should Ravec play in providing security, given its GB-only remit?

Court documents, while heavily redacted in places, show emails and letters were flying backwards and forwards between the Home Office, the Palace, Scotland Yard – and ultimately Prince Harry’s team.

Ravec ruled out very early on allowing the Sussexes to pay the Met to deliver their security abroad. That, it said, was not what Ravec was for. Its task was to protect working royals in GB.

The government quickly formed the view that the couple would “essentially become private citizens” living abroad – and relations began to break down on 28 February 2020.

Ravec’s then-chair, Sir Richard Mottram, told the late Queen’s private secretary Sir Edward Young that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would lose their existing Met protection.

Sir Richard wrote: “The future arrangements for [the duke and duchess] do not fit readily within this framework.”

It was that simple: the Sussexes were moving overseas, outside of Ravec’s duties.

The consequence was Prince Harry felt he was also being stripped of security when returning home – and there had been no formal Ravec meeting to decide his future protection.

In essence, he seemed to be arguing that the Royal Household’s two members of the committee – which at the time included Sir Edward – may have influenced the Home Office’s decision to reduce his security.

In his BBC interview, Harry asked “What is the Royal Household’s role [on Ravec]… if it isn’t to influence and decide what they want for the members of their household?”

But suspecting something is afoot is a world away from proving in court it really is.

In fact, the government successfully argued in court that Ravec had thought carefully and fairly about what to do.

After the duke and duchess had quit the UK, the committee carried out some threat risk assessments and then committed to decide on the duke’s security at home on a case-by-case basis.

It meant he would, in principle, potentially get at least some Met Police protection if Ravec thought the circumstances of his visit home warranted it. While living abroad, however, the royal couple would have to fund their own security.

Ravec asked Prince Harry and his private security advisers for 28 days’ notice of planned returns so it could work out what the state should provide.

This notice condition is one of the reasons why the prince says his security had been downgraded. Essentially, he feared he would get a fuller security detail if he were attending a grand royal occasion at home than if he were returning on his own private business.

The first test was when he flew in for the funeral of his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, in April 2021.

Prince Harry was offered personal protective security – but outside of the Ravec system. The prince regarded this to be insufficient, in light of the risks he believed he faced.

His opinion was strengthened two months later when he said he had been dangerously hounded by paparazzi after a charity event.

In evidence, his security adviser noted the paparazzi’s role in chasing Princess Diana to her death in a Paris tunnel.

The prince was convinced he had been treated unfairly and launched his Judicial Review of whether Ravec had acted unlawfully.

To win his case, Prince Harry had to land one of three legal arguments:

– Ravec had acted unlawfully, beyond the powers it had

– The committee had treated him unfairly in the way it had acted

– Its decision was so irrational that nobody else sensible could possibly have reached the same conclusion

The prince’s team did so by arguing Ravec’s policy had been overly rigid and inflexible. That failed – but there were other lines of attack:

– The committee chairman had not followed Ravec’s policies properly

– The decision over the prince’s future security had lacked transparency and consultation

– No other decision-maker could have come up with the same bespoke plan he was offered

Yet, all of these complaints were rejected by judges.

In Judicial Reviews, it’s not the role of judges to say what they would prefer to have happened. So, they never expressed a view whether Prince Harry deserved 20 or 250 more protection officers.

Mr Justice Lane, who legally demolished the prince’s case a year ago in the High Court, said Ravec’s chair and the Home Office officials who came up with the bespoke plan, had done so from “positions of significant knowledge and expertise in the highly specialist area”.

“Courts should be wary of concluding that expert adjudicators have fundamentally misunderstood how to go about their allotted tasks,” he said.

The prince’s team, who argued his military service heightened the risks he faced, said that he had been treated unfairly compared with another Ravec-protected VIP whose life had changed.

We don’t know who that was but it’s common knowledge that former prime ministers can be protected long after they have left office. That’s partly to ensure that decisions they take while in government – such as declaring war – are not affected by them worrying about their own personal future safety.

The prince appealed the judgement, going to the Court of Appeal. It ultimately ruled it was “superficial” to compare Prince Harry’s circumstances with other VIPs.

So, was there something that the courts could not see – the whiff of an “establishment stitch-up” that meant the process was unfair?

Prince Harry told the BBC: “My representative on the Ravec committee, still to this day, is the Royal Household. I am forced to go through the Royal Household and accept that they are putting my best interests forward.”

But that complaint was a legal cul-de-sac because the High Court said the prince had no evidence Ravec members had a “closed mind” or had been biased against him.

What about his complaints about reckless paparazzi following his vehicle? Did he not have a case there? In a word, no. Ravec’s job was to protect VIPs from people with “hostile intent”, not photographers breaching his privacy.

The High Court ultimately described some of his submissions as having a “distinct air of unreality”. This is wording judges use when they have been really unimpressed with what they have heard – but don’t want to sound rude.

Sir Geoffrey Vos, the senior judge who oversaw the later review in the Court of Appeal, put it differently and diplomatically.

Nobody could have been failed to be moved by Prince Harry’s concerns, he said, but he needed to hear why the prince thought Ravec was breaking the law by giving him a bespoke security plan.

“I have tried to see how and whether the Claimant’s sense of grievance translates into a legal argument,” he explained. But he couldn’t find that legal argument. And so, Prince Harry lost.

Five years of anguished legal battles came down to a difficult disagreement – but not one that the courts could find amounted to a “stitch-up”.

It’s 2:30am.

Inside the Kremlin walls I’m wandering alone through the vast grounds trying – and failing – to find my way out.

I spot a checkpoint, approach and show my passport.

“Nyet vykhoda!” [“No exit!”] replies the guard. He points in the opposite direction.

I walk back and, eventually, come to another checkpoint.

“No way out!” says the sentry.

I’m lost. Inside the Kremlin. In the dead of night.

It’s like being in a John le Carré novel.

It’s been quite an evening. I arrived at 5pm. Along with a small group of journalists, I’d been invited to “an event with President Putin”. What kind of event? To begin with the Kremlin wouldn’t say. Eventually we were told Vladimir Putin would be taking questions.

Eight hours later, the president strode into the Malachite Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace and sat at a desk.

But there’d been a change of plan. No press conference. No questions. Instead, live on Russian TV, Putin delivered a statement in which he proposed direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul.

Event over, I walk out of the Kremlin Palace but take a wrong turn. Finally, I locate the correct exit and, bleary-eyed, take a taxi home.

This was the start of what has turned out to be a real rollercoaster of a fortnight. What began with a late-night Kremlin statement continued with peace talks in Turkey and then a two-hour telephone call between Putin and Donald Trump.

But, at the end of it, are we any closer to peace in Ukraine?

It doesn’t feel like it.

Although there is talk about more talks, and of а possible future “memorandum” on a “possible future peace”, it all sounds rather vague.

For now, the fighting goes on.

Russia is still refusing to sign up to an unconditional comprehensive ceasefire. It has no intention of returning any of the Ukrainian land it has seized, occupied and claims to have annexed. On the contrary: it’s pushing for more.

Right now, the Ukraine peace process resembles being lost in the Kremlin late at night.

It’s hard to see the exit.

And yet the past two weeks have revealed a lot.

First, how Russia neutralises potential threats and pressure points.

Kremlin critics would put this another way: how Russia plays for time.

On 10 May (a few hours before I got lost in the Kremlin), after a phone call with Donald Trump, European leaders had issued an ultimatum to President Putin: agree to an unconditional long-term ceasefire in Ukraine in two days or face crushing new sanctions.

Since March the Trump administration has been calling on Russia and Ukraine to accept a 30-day comprehensive ceasefire. Kyiv agreed. Moscow hasn’t.

The Kremlin leader sidestepped the European ultimatum with his counter proposal of direct talks in Turkey. The idea was greeted with scepticism in Ukraine and across Europe. But it was enough to placate Trump and convince him Russia was serious about wanting peace. He was all for the talks. “Crushing” new sanctions were delayed.

Ahead of the Istanbul meeting on 16 May, President Trump gave the impression that Vladimir Putin might attend. The Kremlin leader did not, sending instead a comparatively low-level delegation that once more rejected the idea of a long-term ceasefire. But, again, the modest results of the talks were sufficient to persuade the US president that progress was being made.

Then came the Trump-Putin phone call on 19 May.

By the end of it, Russia had still not agreed to an immediate comprehensive cessation of hostilities. Instead, according to President Trump, “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War”.

But Moscow is already casting doubt on whether it would sign any future peace treaty with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. For a year now the Russian authorities have been attempting to delegitimise Ukraine’s president since the expiry of his presidential term. However, Ukraine’s Constitution prohibits the holding of elections in wartime.

And the reason for martial law in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion.

“Would Russia sit down and sign a peace agreement with President Zelensky?” I asked Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday.

“You’re putting the cart before the horse,” Mr Lavrov replied. “First we need to have a deal. When it’s agreed, then we will decide. But, as President Putin has said many times, President Zelensky does not have legitimacy… Probably the best option would be new elections…”

The Russian media has concluded that, after two weeks of diplomacy, Moscow has strengthened its hand.

“Russia has won the latest round of global poker,” declared the Izvestia newspaper last week.

“Donald Trump’s stance couldn’t be more advantageous to Moscow,” wrote Kommersant. “In effect he backed Russia’s position of ‘Talks first, ceasefire later’ and refused to strengthen sanctions against Russia.”

A social scientist told Kommersant: “Donald Trump, at least for now, is our ideological partner on certain issues. His views are much closer to Russia’s than to Europe’s.”

And the ultra pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda had this message for European leaders:

“You were warned. Don’t wave threats and ultimatums in the face of the bear. Don’t try to impose conditions in talks that have nothing to do with you.

“Just sit in the lobby and breathe in the smell of the new world order.”

Moscow’s confidence is also fuelled by the belief that, in Ukraine, it holds the initiative on the battlefield.

Back in 2023 Donald Trump had promised that, if he won the presidency, “we will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled… I’ll get them both. I know Zelensky, I know Putin. It’ll be done within 24 hours, you watch”.

Trump has been in the Oval Office for more than four months now, but the “horrible war” goes on.

On rare occasions, he has publicly rebuked the Kremlin and threatened further sanctions. Last month he said: “…there was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions?'”

But there’s been no follow-through. The US president appears reluctant to ratchet up the pressure on the Kremlin, instead signalling to Moscow that he’s keen to reboot US-Russia relations.

Following the presidents’ telephone conversation, Putin’s foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, who’d sat in on the call, told journalists: “Trump spoke rather emotionally about the prospects for [bilateral] relations. Trump sees Russia as one of America’s most important partners in trade and economic matters.”

President Trump seems determined to push on with his rapprochement with Russia, whatever happens on Ukraine.

And Moscow senses that.

“President Trump does not link continued US-Russia dialogue to the Ukraine peace process,” was a headline in the Russian government paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta this week.

That doesn’t mean the Kremlin has headed off the danger of additional restrictions completely. The US Senate has threatened tough new sanctions against Russia if Moscow doesn’t get serious about diplomacy.

Up to this point the Kremlin has been able to deflect or to sidestep whatever pressure it’s come under to make compromises and concessions regarding its war on Ukraine.

It seems confident it will continue to do so.

A former British soldier who became a people smuggler has told the BBC how he transported dozens of Vietnamese migrants by yacht into private marinas in seaside towns across south-east England.

The man was convicted and sent to prison in 2019, but we have learned that smugglers are still using similar routes and methods – described by Border Force as “a really concerning risk”.

Private marinas have “no more security than a caravan site”, one harbourmaster on the Essex coast told us – while another said “there is nothing to stop this [people smuggling] happening”.

The ex-soldier and smuggler, who we are calling Nick, has also been describing how he smuggled Albanian people in cars on to ferries – and how the migrants then jumped into lorries on the vehicle decks mid-journey in the English Channel.

The smuggling routes – whether by yacht or ferry – were “easy” and “low risk”, Nick told us.

He said he had chosen to speak out now because he was “angry” he had been jailed for a crime that was still very possible to commit. He claimed to know people who, in the past year, had used the same routes and methods as him.

Convicting him was “pointless”, he said, if the authorities would not improve security to stop other people smugglers.

Border Force is responsible for securing the 11,000 miles of UK coastline, but the security of harbours and marinas rests with private operators, Charlie Eastaugh, the force’s director of maritime, told the BBC.

“We patrol 24/7, we carry out proactive, as well as reactive, operations,” he said – citing a luxury yacht, hiding 20 Albanians below deck, that was intercepted en route to Newquay in Cornwall last month.

Nick’s story is a particularly striking example of how a British citizen became involved in the international people-smuggling trade.

His “stories and confessions represent a concerning risk posed to the UK around people smuggling and irregular migration at sea”, said Border Force’s Charlie Eastaugh. We will “look at the vulnerabilities he [Nick] has identified,” he added.

Unlike many migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats, the majority of those transported by Nick did not want to be found by authorities to formally claim asylum. Having arrived on UK shores, they wanted to disappear anonymously into the black economy. Nick said he had been told the Vietnamese migrants would go on to work on cannabis farms.

The fact that Nick travelled with them too – skippering a yacht – is also unusual.

It all started in 2009, when an Albanian friend he met on a construction site recruited him – saying Nick’s pale complexion and UK passport would help him to avoid suspicion from border authorities.

The friend, whom we are calling Matt, offered to pay Nick £3,500 for every migrant he smuggled into the UK. Nick was working as a self-employed builder at the time, but his business had been pulled under by the financial crash in the late 2000s and he was struggling to make ends meet. He also had a baby on the way and was desperate to provide for them, he told us.

Matt spoke briefly to the BBC and confirmed details of Nick’s story – but we did not move forward with a full interview because he demanded payment.

At first, Nick picked up migrants hiding near French ferry ports, concealing them in the boot of his car.

The migrants tended to be Albanian men, he told us, with no right to work in the UK. Often they had been smuggled across the English Channel three or four times previously, only to be deported each time, he added. Some of his other passengers, from places such as Sri Lanka, were looking to claim asylum however, he told us.

On the ferry, Nick would pick a lorry that another smuggling-gang member waiting on dry land would spot easily. Nick said he would send them a photo and share the vehicle’s number plate.

You then tell the migrant to get on top of the lorry, he explained. “You give him a knife… just cut one side like a V, you slide in.”

The waiting gang member would then trail the lorry once it disembarked and collect the migrant when it eventually stopped. The lorry driver would have had no idea or involvement, said Nick.

“I’m telling you now how easy it is,” he told us – insisting he would never have been caught, had it not been for a friend, whom he had taken along one day, alerting the French authorities with suspicious body language. Nick ended up spending five months in a prison in France.

Matt, meanwhile, was also eventually caught and given a seven-year UK prison sentence. It had happened after a migrant jumped off a fast-moving lorry, to avoid paying the smuggler, and severed his foot.

Nick was reunited with Matt, who was granted early release, in 2017 and the pair began smuggling people across the Channel again.

This time however, Nick told us he took charge of a plan that saw Vietnamese migrants arrive from France by yacht at Ramsgate Marina.

The operation was brokered by one of Matt’s contacts, Nick told us, a Vietnamese woman we are calling Lin. She had lived in the UK for more than a decade and had spent time behind bars for growing cannabis and removing the proceeds of drug trafficking.

Nick said she paid him and Matt £12,000 per migrant.

Nick, who grew up sailing the English Channel with his father, told us he knew Ramsgate Marina was a big, low-security place which “no-one watched”. As he was a registered member of the marina, there was no reason for anyone to suspect wrongdoing, he explained.

It was also a good place to keep tabs on the comings and goings of Border Force agents, he told us, because a fleet of the force’s boats was based there too.

“People are going to hate me because there’ll be smuggling going on now,” said Nick, who insists private marinas in English seaside towns are still hotspots. “When they hear this, there’s going to be an issue.”

Two harbourmasters, speaking anonymously to the BBC, agreed with Nick that private marinas were an easy target for people-smugglers because they were not manned 24/7.

One based in Essex likened security to a caravan site and said that someone could hide people in a boat “easily”.

“In a busy marina in peak season, with a lot of people coming in and out, it would be very easy to do this,” they said.

In Kent, Thanet District Council – which is responsible for Ramsgate Marina – told us it was Border Force, and not individual harbours, that was “the front line response for immigration and illegal activities”.

“Staff at the port and harbour are vigilant and report any concerns or suspicions directly to Border Force for them to follow up,” said a spokesperson.

There are hundreds of harbours and marinas in the UK and it would not be a reasonable expectation for Border Force to have a fixed presence at all of them, said the force’s Charlie Eastaugh.

But we do receive “really good information” from the maritime community which the force responds to, he added. “We need to be able to respond to intelligence so we can proportionately use our resources around the whole of the UK.”

We also spoke to former Border Force chief Tony Smith, who told us the “vast majority” of the agency’s resources were currently deployed to the Small Boats Operational Command – focusing on specific routes used by large numbers of people crowded into small craft.

“My preference certainly would be to be able to deploy more widely and to look more across the whole of the UK coastline to identify threats,” he said, adding he thought the BBC’s conversations with Nick would be “really, really helpful as another source of intelligence”.

More than 12,500 people have crossed the English Channel on small boats so far in 2025 – and a record number of migrants died while attempting to make the dangerous crossing in 2024.

• How many people cross the Channel in small boats and how many claim asylum?

Small-boat crossings are different from what Nick was doing because most of those migrants want to be seen and rescued by Border Force to claim asylum in the UK. Smugglers are not on the boats, which are instead often manned by migrants who get discounts on their fees.

The numbers of migrants involved in an operation like Nick’s are harder to pin down because there are no published estimates of how many illegal immigrants enter the UK through small ports, marinas and harbours.

Nick told us he would carefully plan his trips to France around favourable tides and weather conditions – setting sail from Kent after dark. He would head for private marinas, yacht clubs and other discreet locations around Dunkirk to collect the Vietnamese migrants who had been driven from a Paris safehouse. He would normally smuggle four per trip, he said.

He would return back to Ramsgate in the early hours before it got light, he told us. The migrants would stay hidden inside the boat’s cabin until the next evening, when one of the smuggling gang would collect them under the cover of darkness.

But there were occasions when he had to escape prying eyes, Nick recalled. For a time, he had to switch from Ramsgate to a different marina because one of the harbour staff told him there had been “foreigners” around his boat, having spotted some of the Vietnamese migrants.

He managed to continue his ruse, however, for up to 18 months before being caught.

A police unit tasked with tackling serious organised crime had been watching him and Matt for months. In late summer 2018, officers spotted Nick sail into view with four Vietnamese men in his boat. Nick was charged with conspiracy to facilitate the illegal entry of foreign nationals into the UK and later sentenced to eight years in prison.

Lin, the Vietnamese woman who had been paying him, got the same sentence. They both denied the charges, whereas Matt, the Albanian, pled guilty and was given a lesser sentence of five years and four months.

“I regret a lot of it, but I don’t know that it would have ever been any different,” said Nick, reflecting on his time in the people-smuggling trade.

“I think I was always out for self-destruction anyway.”

He was recently recalled to prison for breaching the terms of his licence. Matt and Lin, meanwhile, are both out of prison and living in the UK.

In his 1983 science fiction story, an Indian astrophysicist predicted what schools would look like in 2050.

Jayant Narlikar envisioned a scene where an alien, living among humans, would sit in front of a screen and attend online classes. The aliens are yet to manifest, but online classes became a reality for students far sooner, in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Narlikar also famously proposed an alternative to the Big Bang Theory – the popular idea that the universe was created in a single moment from a single point. He believed that the universe had always existed, expanding continuously into infinity.

With his passing on Tuesday, India lost one of its most celebrated astrophysicists. Narlikar was 86 – a man far ahead of his times and someone who shaped a generation of Indian researchers through his lifelong dedication to science education.

His funeral was attended by hundreds, from school children to renowned scientists and even his housekeeping staff, underscoring the profound impact he had on society.

Born on 19 July, 1938, in the town of Kolhapur in the western state of Maharashtra, Narlikar was raised in a home steeped in academic tradition.

His father, Vishnu Narlikar, was a professor and mathematician, and mother Sumati was a scholar of the Sanskrit language.

Following in his parents footsteps, the studious Narlikar went to Cambridge University for higher studies where topped a highly prestigious mathematical course. He also took a deep interest in astrophysics and cosmology.

But his most significant episode at Cambridge was his association with his PhD guide, physicist Sir Fred Hoyle. Together, Narlikar and Hoyle laid the groundwork for a revolutionary alternative to the popular Big Bang theory.

The two physicists contested the Big Bang Theory, which posits that all matter and energy in the universe came into existence in one single instance about 13.8 billion years ago.

The Hoyle-Narlikar theory boldly proposed the continuous creation of new matter in an infinite universe. Their theory was based on what they called a quasi-steady state model.

In his autobiography, My Tale of Four Cities, Narlikar used a banking analogy to explain the theory.

“To understand this concept better, think of capital invested in a bank which offers a fixed rate of compound interest. That is, the interest accrued is constantly added to the capital which therefore grows too, along with the interest.”

He explained that the universe expanded like the capital with compound interest. However, as the name ‘steady state’ implies, the universe always looks the same to the observer.

Astronomer Somak Raychaudhury says that though Narlikar’s theory isn’t as popular as the Big Bang, it is still useful.

“He advanced mechanisms by which matter could be continually created and destroyed in an infinite universe,” Raychaudhary said.

“While the Big Bang model gained broader acceptance, many tools developed for the steady-state model remain useful today,” he added

Raychaudhary recollects that even after Hoyle began to entertain elements of the Big Bang theory, Narlikar remained committed to the steady-state theory.

A sign outside his office fittingly stated: “The Big Bang is an exploding myth.”

Narlikar stayed in the UK till 1971 as a Fellow at King’s College and a founding member of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy.

As he shot to global fame in the astrophysics circles, the science community in India took note of his achievements.

In 1972, he returned to India and immediately took charge of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the coveted Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which he led it till 1989.

But his biggest contribution to India was the creation of an institution dedicated to cutting-edge research and the democratisation of science.

This dream materialised in 1988, when Narlikar, along with other distinguished scientists, founded the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune city in western India.

From a modest 100sq ft room, IUCAA has gone on to become an internationally respected institution for astronomy and astrophysics.

Narlikar served as its founder-director till 2003, and continued to be an emeritus professor after that.

He insisted that IUCAA should include programs aimed at school children and the general public. Monthly lectures, science camps, and workshops became regular events.

Recalling Narlikar’s vision for the institution, science educator Arvind Gupta says, “He said PhD scholars don’t fall from the sky, you must catch them young. He offered me a place to stay, told me to try running the children’s science centre for six months, and I ended up staying 11 years. He gave me wings to fly.”

Despite being a prolific scholar who published over 300 research papers, Narlikar never confined himself to being just a scientist. He also authored many science fiction books that have been translated into multiple languages.

These stories were often grounded in scientific principles.

In a story called Virus, published in 2015, he envisioned a pandemic taking over the world; his 1986 book Waman Parat Na Ala (The Return of Vaman), tackled the ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence.

Sanjeev Dhurandhar, who was part of the Indian team that contributed to the physical detection of gravitational waves in 2015, recalled how Narlikar inspired him to attempt the unthinkable.

“He gave me a complex problem early in my research. After I struggled for a week, he solved it on the board in 15 minutes – not to show superiority, but to guide and inspire. His openness to gravitational waves was what gave me the courage to pursue it.”

A well-known rationalist, Narlikar also took it upon himself to challenge pseudoscience. In 2008, he co-authored a paper that challenged astrology using a statistical method.

Raychaudhary said that his motivation to challenge pseudoscience came from the belief system of questioning everything that did not have a scientific basis.

But when it came to science, Narlikar believed in exploring the slimmest of possibilities.

In his last days, Narlikar continued doing what he loved most – replying to children’s letters and writing about science on his blog.

An Indian IT company is conducting an internal investigation to determine whether it was the gateway for the cyber-attack on Marks & Spencer, BBC News understands.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has provided services to M&S for more than a decade.

Earlier this week, M&S said the hackers who had brought huge disruption to the retailer had managed to gain access to their systems via a “third party” – a company working alongside it – rather than accessing those systems directly.

M&S and TCS have both declined to comment.

The FT, which first reported the story, cited people close to the investigation who said it was hoped the inquiry would be concluded by the end of the month.

It is not clear when TCS launched its investigation.

Customers have not been able to buy items on the M&S website since the end of April.

It said earlier this week that online services should see a gradual return to normal over the coming weeks, but some level of disruption would continue until July.

M&S estimates that the cyber-attack will hit this year’s profits by around £300m.

Police are focusing on a notorious group of English-speaking hackers, known as Scattered Spider, the BBC has learned.

The same group is believed to have been behind attacks on the Co-op and Harrods, but it was M&S that suffered the biggest impact.

TCS says it has over 607,000 employees across the world and is the lead sponsor of three prestigious marathons – New York, London and Sydney.

On its website, TCS said it worked with M&S on Sparks, its customer reward scheme.

In 2023, TCS and M&S won the Retail Partnership of the Year award at the Retail Systems Awards.

TCS has a portfolio of well-known clients including the Co-op, according to its website.

There is no indication if the internal probe is also looking at the hack on the Co-Op.

TCS also counts easyjet, Nationwide and Jaguar Land Rover among its many clients.

Earlier this week, M&S chief executive Stuart Machin said: “Over the last few weeks, we have been managing a highly sophisticated and targeted cyber-attack, which has led to a limited period of disruption.”

In a media call on Wednesday, he did not respond to a question about whether the company had paid a ransom as part of the process.

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A Ugandan activist who was arrested and held for days in Tanzania and later found at the border between the two countries has told the BBC that she was raped while in detention.

Expanding on the earlier remarks of her rights group who said she showed “indications of torture”, Agather Atuhaire alleged that people dressed in plain clothes “blindfolded” her, after which she was hit, “violently” stripped and sexually assaulted.

Atuhaire had been held incommunicado in Tanzania alongside fellow Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi, who was on Thursday found at the border with his home country.

The Tanzanian authorities have not commented.

Regional rights groups have called for an investigation and the US Department of State’s Bureau of Africa Affairs said it was deeply concerned by the reports of the two activists’ mistreatment.

“The pain was too much,” said Atuhaire, showing the BBC a scar from where she said she had been handcuffed.

She added that she was “screaming so hard” that they had to cover her mouth.

Atuhaire told the BBC about her alleged rape in graphic detail.

She said she also heard screams from Mwangi, and that those holding him had threatened to circumcise him.

The pair had gone to Tanzania to show solidarity with opposition leader Tundu Lissu, who appeared in court on Monday after being charged with treason

Mwangi recounted his alleged experience in a post on X: “We had been tortured, and we were told to strip naked and to go bathe. We couldn’t walk and were told to crawl and go wash off the blood.”

Despite being allowed into the country, Mwangi and Atuhaire were not permitted to attend the hearing and were arrested.

On Monday, President Samia Suluhu Hassan had warned that she would not allow activists from neighbouring countries to “meddle” in her country’s affairs and cause “chaos”.

• Why Samia’s hesitant reforms are fuelling Tanzanian political anger

Atuhaire was found abandoned at the border on Thursday night after being held in custody since Monday, Agora Centre for Research, the Uganda-based rights group that she leads, posted on X.

Uganda’s high commissioner to Tanzania Fred Mwesigye said Atuhaire had “safely returned home” and had been “warmly received by her family”.

Mwangi, who was earlier found abandoned on a roadside in northern Tanzania near the Kenyan border, said he had heard Atuhaire “groaning in pain” when they were held together on Tuesday.

“Any attempt to speak to each other during the night we were tortured was met with kicks and insults. We were removed from the torture location in different vehicles,” Mwangi added.

He said those who were holding them were getting orders from a “state security” official, who directed the activist to be given a “Tanzanian treatment”.

Mwangi’s disappearance had sparked widespread concern across Kenya, with his family, civil society and human rights groups staging protests and demanding his release.

On Wednesday, the Kenyan government formally protested against his detention, accusing the Tanzanian authorities of denying consular access despite repeated requests.

Earlier on Thursday, Kenya’s foreign affairs ministry issued a statement saying it had not been able to access the activist.

Regional rights groups have called for an investigation into the alleged mistreatment of the activists by the Tanzanian authorities and urged all East African countries to uphold rights treaties.

The US Department of State’s Bureau of Africa Affairs said it was deeply concerned by the reports of the two activists’ mistreatment, noting that Ms Atuhaire had been recognised by the department “in 2024 as an International Women of Courage Awardee”.

“We call for an immediate and full investigation into the allegations of human rights abuses. We urge all countries in the region to hold to account those responsible for violating human rights, including torture,” it tweeted.

• Could this be the end of the road for Tanzania’s great survivor, Tundu Lissu?
• X restricted in Tanzania after police targeted by hackers
• ‘Manhandled and choked’ – Tanzanian activist recounts abduction
• The Tanzanians searching for their grandfathers’ skulls in Germany

Eighteen people were injured in a knife attack at the main railway station in the German city of Hamburg on Friday evening, police said.

Hamburg police said on Saturday that four of the victims who had sustained life-threatening injuries were in a stable condition.

Officers arrested a 39-year-old German woman at the scene of the attack, which took place at about 18:00 local time (16:00 GMT) on Friday.

Police said there was “very concrete evidence” of mental illness in the suspect, and no evidence the attack was politically motivated.

The woman remains in police custody and is scheduled to appear in court on Saturday.

The attack happened between platforms 13 and 14 – which are accessible via a busy main road – while a train was on one of the platforms.

The suspect began stabbing people waiting for the train, but was stopped by the “rapid intervention” of two people on the platform as well as emergency services, police said.

The victims range in age from 19 to 85. Seven people were slightly injured, seven seriously injured, and four critically injured, police said.

The critically injured – a 24-year-old female, 24-year-old male, 52-year-old female, and an 85-year-old female – were stable as of Saturday.

On Saturday police said there was still no evidence of a political motive for the attack.

“Rather, there is now very concrete evidence of a mental illness on the part of the suspect,” they said, adding that the woman did not appear to have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

An investigation is under way.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the attack was “shocking” and thanked the emergency services for “their rapid assistance”.

Pictures from the scene on Friday showed emergency service personnel and vehicles and barriers that seem to be hiding the injured from public view.

A video on social media appears to show the suspect with her hands behind her back being escorted out of the station platform by officers who put her in a police vehicle.

Hamburg’s central station is one of Germany’s busiest transport hubs. It is often crowded during Friday rush hour.

This is the latest in a series of violent attacks in Germany in recent months.

In January, a two-year-old boy and a 41-year-old man were killed in a stabbing in a park in Aschaffenburg, with several others hurt.

A Spanish tourist was stabbed just a month later at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial.

Last December, six people were killed and hundreds were injured after a car drove into a crowd at a Christmas market in the eastern city of Magdeburg.

The suspects in these previous attacks were migrants, which has led Germany to tighten border control checks and saw immigration become a key issue for voters during the country’s federal elections in February.

Carrie and Boris Johnson have announced the birth of their fourth child, a girl.

Poppy Eliza Josephine Johnson was born on 21 May, Mrs Johnson wrote in an Instagram post accompanied by a series of images of the baby.

“I can’t believe how pretty and tiny you are,” she said. “Feel so incredibly lucky. We are all totally smitten.”

The new baby joins their sons, Wilfred and Frank, and daughter Romy. Poppy – or “Pop Tart”, as she has been nicknamed – is the former prime minister’s ninth child.

Pictures of the new arrival included Poppy lying in a bassinet with their other children standing over her, as well as being held by Carrie, 37, and Boris Johnson, 60, in hospital.

“Not sure I’ve slept a minute since you were born as can’t stop looking at how completely lovely you are,” Mrs Johnson wrote.

She also thanked the maternity team at University College London Hospital in Euston, north London, “and particularly to Asma and Patrick who have looked after me so well through all my pregnancies”.

The Johnson’s first two children – Wilfred and Romy – were born while the couple were in Downing Street during the Covid pandemic.

Frank was born in July 2023, their first after Boris Johnson left office.

Mrs Johnson, a former communications director for the Conservative Party, hinted that their fourth child would be their last, describing Poppy as a “final gang member”.

She said her other children were “utterly delighted” with the addition to the family, noting Romy was “desperate for a little sister”.

The former Tory leader has four grown-up children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, and another daughter from an affair.

He was prime minister from July 2019 until his resignation in September 2022.

An Israeli air strike on Gaza hit the home of a doctor and killed nine of her 10 children, the hospital where she works in the city of Khan Younis says.

Nasser hospital said one of Dr Alaa al-Najjar’s children and her husband were injured, but survived.

Graeme Groom, a British surgeon working in the hospital who operated on her surviving 11-year-old boy, told the BBC it was “unbearably cruel” that his mother, who spent years caring for children as a paediatrician, could lose almost all her own in a single missile strike.

Israel’s military said its aircraft had struck “a number of suspects” in Khan Younis on Friday, and “the claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review”.

A video shared by the director of the Hamas-run health ministry and verified by the BBC showed small burned bodies lifted from the rubble of a strike in Khan Younis.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its “aircraft struck a number of suspects who were identified operating from a structure adjacent to IDF troops in the area of Khan Younis”.

“The Khan Younis area is a dangerous war zone. Before beginning operations there, the IDF evacuated civilians from this area for their own safety,” the Israeli military said.

In a general statement on Saturday, the IDF said it had struck more than 100 targets across Gaza over the past day.

The health ministry said at least 74 people had been killed by the Israeli military over the 24 hour-period leading up to about midday on Saturday.

Dr Muneer Alboursh, director of the health ministry, said on X that the al-Najjars’ family house was hit minutes after Dr al-Najjar’s husband Hamdi had returned home after driving his wife to work.

Dr Alboursh said the eldest of Dr al-Najjar’s children was aged 12.

Mr Groom said the children’s father was “very badly injured”, in a video posted on the Instagram account of another British surgeon working at Nasser hospital, Victoria Rose.

He told the BBC that the father had a “penetrating injury to his head”.

He said he had asked about the father, also a doctor at the hospital, and had been told he had “no political and no military connections and doesn’t seem to be prominent on social media”.

He described it as an “unimaginable” situation for Dr Alaa al-Najjar.

Mr Groom said the surviving 11-year-old boy, Adam, was “quite small” for his age.

“His left arm was just about hanging off, he was covered in fragment injuries and he had several substantial lacerations,” he told the BBC.

“Since both his parents are doctors, he seemed to be among the privileged group within Gaza, but as we lifted him onto the operating table, he felt much younger than 11.”

“Our little boy could survive, but we don’t know about his father,” he added.

Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency, said on Telegram on Friday afternoon that his teams had recovered eight bodies and several injured from the al-Najjar house near a petrol station in Khan Younis.

The hospital initially posted on Facebook that eight children had been killed, then two hours later updated that number to nine.

Another doctor, Youssef Abu al-Rish, said in a statement posted by the health ministry that he had arrived to the operating room to find Dr al-Najjar waiting for information about her surviving son and tried to console her.

In an interview recorded by AFP news agency, relative Youssef al-Najjar said: “Enough! Have mercy on us! We plead to all countries, the international community, the people, Hamas, and all factions to have mercy on us.

“We are exhausted from the displacement and the hunger, enough!”

On Friday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that people in Gaza were enduring what may be “the cruellest phase” of the war, and denounced Israel’s blockade on humanitarian aid imposed in March.

Israel partially lifted the blockade earlier this week. Israeli military body Cogat said 83 more trucks carrying flour, food, medical equipment pharmaceutical drugs entered Gaza on Friday.

The UN has repeatedly said the amount of aid entering is nowhere near enough for the territory’s 2.1 million people – saying between 500 to 600 trucks a day are needed – and has called for Israel to allow in much more.

The limited amount of food that trickled into Gaza this week sparked chaotic scenes, with armed looters attacking an aid convoy and Palestinians crowding outside bakeries in a desperate attempt to obtain bread.

A UN-backed assessment this month said Gaza’s population was at “critical risk” of famine.

People in Gaza have told the BBC they have no food, and malnourished mothers are unable to breastfeed babies.

Chronic shortages of water are also worsening as desalination and hygiene plants are running out of fuel, and Israel’s expanding military offensive causes new waves of displacement.

Israel has said the blockade was intended to put pressure on Hamas to release the hostages still held in Gaza.

Israel has accused Hamas of stealing supplies, which the group has denied.

Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas’s cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

At least 53,901 people, including at least 16,500 children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

As soon as Magnus Mæland became mayor of a small town on Norway’s northern tip in late 2023, three delegations from China came knocking on his door.

“It’s because they want to be a polar superpower,” he tells me.

China might not instinctively spring to mind when you think about the Arctic – but it’s determined to be a big Arctic player. It’s been vying to buy real estate, get involved in infrastructure projects and hopes to establish a permanent regional presence.

China already describes itself as a “near-Arctic state”, even though its northernmost regional capital Harbin is on roughly the same latitude as Venice, Italy.

But the Arctic is fast becoming one of the most hotly-contested parts of the world. Beijing faces stiff competition from Russia, Europe, India and the US.

The race for the Arctic is on.

Climate scientists say the Arctic is warming four times faster than anywhere else. This impacts ecosystems, wildlife and local populations. The Arctic is enormous, encompassing 4% of the globe.

But global powers see a new world of opportunities opening up in the Arctic on the back of environmental changes.

The melting ice in the Arctic makes it easier to access the region’s incredible natural resources – critical minerals, oil, and gas – around 30% of untapped natural gas is said to be found in the Arctic.

And it’s opening up possibilities for new maritime trade routes, drastically reducing travel time between Asia and Europe. In the export business, time is money. China has been developing a “Polar Silk Road” plan for Arctic shipping.

When I visit, the port of Kirkenes looks pretty ghostly.

Inside the Arctic Circle, at the northernmost point of mainland Norway, the former mining town is a gritty contrast with the picture-postcard, snow-covered mountains and fjords that surround it.

There are shuttered shops and abandoned warehouses, riddled with broken windows. The town feels forgotten and left behind.

So you can imagine the appeal of possibly becoming the first European port of call for masses of container ships from Asia, depending on how fast the polar ice continues to melt.

The town’s port director, Terje Jørgensen, plans to build a brand new international port. His eyes light up when he talks about becoming the Singapore of Europe’s High North.

“What we’re trying to build here in Kirkenes is a trans-shipment port where three continents meet: North America, Europe and Asia. We’ll take the goods ashore and reload onto other vessels [for further export]. We don’t need to sell any land to anyone. Not to a UK company, not a Chinese company.

New laws in Norway prohibit the transfer of property or businesses, if the sale could harm “Norwegian security interests”, he says. What they’re waiting for, he adds, are clear guidelines from the government about what kind of critical infrastructure this might cover.

Mayor Mæland certainly seems wary of China’s intentions. “We want a relationship with China, but we don’t want to be dependent on China,” he tells me.

“Europe has to ask itself ‘How dependent do you want to be on totalitarian and authoritarian regimes?'”

China’s purchase-your-way-into-the-Arctic approach is beginning to be rejected across the European Arctic. Recent attempts by Beijing to buy into seaports in Norway and Sweden and an airport in Greenland, for example, were rebuffed.

This is pushing polar-hungry China – the biggest emerging superpower in the world – into the arms of the Arctic’s largest player, Russia.

Russia controls a whopping half of the Arctic shoreline – and it’s been hoovering up Chinese investments.

The two countries cooperate militarily in the Arctic too. China’s coastguard entered the Arctic for the first time in October, in a joint patrol with Russian forces. The two countries had staged joint military exercises here the month earlier. In July, long-range bombers from both countries provocatively patrolled the Arctic Ocean near Alaska in the United States.

It’s as if Beijing and Moscow are looking over at Nato, which has stepped up its exercises in the Arctic, and are saying: We can do this too.

Every country bordering the Arctic is a member of Nato except Russia. Finland and Sweden joined after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Andreas Østhagen, a senior fellow at the independent Fridtjof Nansen Institute, describes the Arctic as “low-hanging fruit” for Russian-Chinese collaboration.

“Russia needs investments and commercial actors who are interested in developing the Arctic – LNG [liquefied natural gas] resources, oil resources, or developing a northern sea route as a shipping lane.

“China is that market. The two countries are looking for ways to expand their political, economic, even military cooperation.”

But China is keen not to align itself too closely with Russia. It wants to avoid Western sanctions and to continue doing business with Western powers, inside and outside the Arctic.

Russia has reservations too.

“Be careful not to overrate the Russia-China relationship,” says Mr Østhagen. “Russia remains wary of letting China too deep into its Arctic.”

Moscow relies heavily on its natural resources there. And it’s courting other Arctic investors too, including the US, according to reports.

Russia also relies on its Arctic to store strategic weapons – mainly on its Kola peninsula, which bristles with nuclear capabilities and is home to its legendary Northern Fleet.

Back in Norway, Kirkenes residents live under that shadow of the Russian Bear next door. They always have. The border with Russia is a 10 minutes drive away by car. And Kola peninsula feels uncomfortably close.

In Cold War times, the town became known as a nest of spies – a frontline between the West and the Soviet Union.

Norway believes Russia is using its Arctic to train new recruits to fight, and to fly bombers from, to attack Ukraine.

Though not directly at war with Russia, Norway, and specifically the north of the country along its roughly 200km long land border, feels under attack.

“We see it here locally,” says Col Jørn Kviller, speaking to me by the clear waters of the Pasvik River that separates Norway and Russia. Just in front of us are Norway’s bright yellow, and Russia’s red and green, border posts.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there have been increasingly frequent incidents of GPS jamming that have even caused commercial pilots to change navigation systems. Cases of espionage by the border – “everything from signals intelligence to agents being sent to Norway” – have shot up, Col Kviller tells me.

Norway and its Nato allies are also on the alert for Russian spy submarines and other vessels in the Arctic.

I’m able to see how Norway monitors this threat, after we get high security clearance to enter the country’s Cold War-era joint military command. It’s deep inside a quartz mountain in Bodø, within the Arctic Circle.

We find a labyrinth of tunnels and surveillance rooms where Norway gathers real-time intelligence from land, air and sea, focused on suspicious-looking vessels in and near its Arctic waters. Everything is shared in real-time with Nato allies.

Crucially, any Russian vessel wanting to enter Europe has to pass through Norwegian waters first.

Agents in the mountain HQ are on the lookout for signs of espionage and sabotage around what officials call underwater “critical infrastructure” as part of the Kremlin’s hybrid warfare against the West.

Targets include undersea communications cables – connecting continents and permitting trillions of dollars’ worth of financial transactions a day – and also oil and gas pipelines.

Norway is a major supplier of natural gas to Europe, including the UK, especially since sanctions were imposed on Russian exports following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Moscow has been modernising its military capabilities in the Arctic. It has a serious fleet of spy and nuclear submarines. If they pass undetected, they could potentially target missiles at capitals across Europe and also threaten the US.

US President Donald Trump has told Europe it must do more for its own defence, but inside the Arctic, there is a “great overlap of interests”, says the chief of the Norwegian joint headquarters Vice Adm Rune Andersen.

“This is also about US homeland defence… The Russian concentration of nuclear weapons, the capabilities that Russia is deploying are not only aimed at Europe, but also at the US,” he says.

Vice Adm Andersen doesn’t believe any party is courting open conflict in the Arctic but with global tensions rising elsewhere, such as over Ukraine, the potential for spillover in the Arctic is there.

The vice admiral’s team schedules a routine call to Russia’s Northern Fleet every Wednesday afternoon -to keep communication channels open, they say. Just in case.

If you leave Kirkenes and head towards the North Pole, you come across the magnificent Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard at about the half-way mark. It’s home to ice floes, glaciers and more polar bears than people.

Svalbard is at the heart of the scramble between global powers for Arctic resources. While Norwegian, the archipelago is governed by a treaty allowing people from all countries that signed it to work there visa-free. Most are employed in mines, tourism and scientific research.

That may sound harmonious, but since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine there’s been a noticeable flexing of nationalist muscles in some communities here.

They include military parades by the Russian settlement to mark their commemorations for the end of World War Two, the flying of a Soviet flag over Russian infrastructure, and growing suspicion that the Chinese have made their Svalbard research station dual-purpose – for military espionage.

Regardless of whether or not that’s true, local mayor Terje Aunevik says it would be naïve to suggest there was no intelligence-gathering going on in the different countries’ research centres.

“Of course there is… I think the world has been gripped by Arctic fomo [fear of missing out].”

The day I arrive in Svalbard, it’s Norway’s national day. The streets are thronging with a snaking parade of mums, dads and children from the local school, clad in Norwegian national dress.

Longyearbyen is the northernmost town in the world. Bright sunshine glints off the Arctic waters below the main street, and the flat-topped, snow and ice-covered mountains all around.

Everywhere I look, I see shop windows, prams and women’s hairdos festooned with blue, white and red Norwegian flags. Perhaps I imagined it, but among all the cheeriness, it felt like there was another, unspoken sentiment that day, a reminder: ‘Svalbard belongs to us!’

The rising mood of national rivalries in the Arctic is not without consequences.

Indigenous communities in the region, just over half of whom live in the Russian Arctic, often feel that there is a failure on the part of those in power to acknowledge the rights of the peoples who have long called the region home.

Miyuki Daorana, a youth activist from Greenland representing the Inughuit indigenous community, says when Donald Trump claimed he wanted to buy the country during his first presidency, they laughed it off. But this time it feels different, she says.

“Because of the current global political situation, with power play and competition for resources, it’s much more serious.”

She, and others in the indigenous communities, accuse European countries of using the “climate crisis” as an excuse to “extract and invade indigenous lands”.

“It’s something we call green colonialism or developmental aggression where they really want to just take more and more from lands,” she says.

“[The Arctic] is not just a topic for us. It’s not just an interest, it’s not a study. It’s literally our lives and real struggles and emotions and very unfair injustices.

“The government and the politicians, they’re supposed to work for the people. But I haven’t seen that. It’s mostly diplomatic words.”

Not long ago, you used to hear talk of Arctic exceptionalism, where the eight countries bordering the Arctic – Canada, Russia, the US, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland – along with representatives of six Arctic indigenous communities and other observer countries, including China and the UK, would put aside political differences to work together to protect and govern this incredible part of the world.

But these are times now of big power politics. Countries increasingly act in their own interests.

With so many rival nations now in the Arctic, the risks of misinterpretation or miscalculation are high.

Carrie and Boris Johnson have announced the birth of their fourth child, a girl.

Poppy Eliza Josephine Johnson was born on 21 May, Mrs Johnson wrote in an Instagram post accompanied by a series of images of the baby.

“I can’t believe how pretty and tiny you are,” she said. “Feel so incredibly lucky. We are all totally smitten.”

The new baby joins their sons, Wilfred and Frank, and daughter Romy. Poppy – or “Pop Tart”, as she has been nicknamed – is the former prime minister’s ninth child.

Pictures of the new arrival included Poppy lying in a bassinet with their other children standing over her, as well as being held by Carrie, 37, and Boris Johnson, 60, in hospital.

“Not sure I’ve slept a minute since you were born as can’t stop looking at how completely lovely you are,” Mrs Johnson wrote.

She also thanked the maternity team at University College London Hospital in Euston, north London, “and particularly to Asma and Patrick who have looked after me so well through all my pregnancies”.

The Johnson’s first two children – Wilfred and Romy – were born while the couple were in Downing Street during the Covid pandemic.

Frank was born in July 2023, their first after Boris Johnson left office.

Mrs Johnson, a former communications director for the Conservative Party, hinted that their fourth child would be their last, describing Poppy as a “final gang member”.

She said her other children were “utterly delighted” with the addition to the family, noting Romy was “desperate for a little sister”.

The former Tory leader has four grown-up children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, and another daughter from an affair.

He was prime minister from July 2019 until his resignation in September 2022.

The last memory Han Tae-soon has of her daughter as a child is in May 1975, at their home in Seoul.

“I was going to the market and asked Kyung-ha, ‘Aren’t you coming?’ But she told me, ‘No, I’m going to play with my friends’,” recalled Ms Han.

“When I came back, she was gone.”

Ms Han would not see her daughter again for more than four decades. When they reunited, Kyung-ha was almost unrecognisable as a middle-aged American woman named Laurie Bender.

Kyung-ha had been kidnapped near her home, brought to an orphanage, then sent illegally to the US to be raised by another family, alleges Ms Han, who is now suing the South Korean government for failing to prevent her daughter’s adoption.

She is among the hundreds of people who have come forward in recent years with damning allegations of fraud, illegal adoptions, kidnapping and human trafficking in South Korea’s controversial overseas adoption programme.

No other country has sent as many children abroad for adoption, and for so long, as South Korea. Since the programme began in the 1950s, about 170,000 to 200,000 children have been adopted overseas – most of them in the West.

In March, a landmark inquiry found that successive governments had committed human rights violations with their lack of oversight, allowing private agencies to “mass export” children for profit on an industrial scale.

Experts say the findings could open the door to more lawsuits against the government. Ms Han’s is set to go to court next month.

It is one of two landmark cases. Ms Han is the first biological parent of an overseas adoptee seeking damages from the government, while in 2019, a man who was adopted in the US was the first adoptee to sue.

A government spokesman told the BBC that it “deeply sympathises with the emotional pain of individuals and families who could not find each other for a long time”.

It added that it considered Ms Han’s case with “deep regret” and that it would take “necessary actions” based on the outcome of the trial.

Ms Han, 71, told the BBC she is determined the government takes responsibility.

“I spent 44 years ruining my body and mind searching for [my daughter]. But in all that time, has anyone ever apologised to me? No one. Not once.”

For decades, she and her husband visited police stations and orphanages, put up flyers, and went on television appealing for information. Ms Han said she spent all day pounding the streets looking for her daughter “till all 10 of my toenails fell out”.

Over the years she thought she came close. In 1990, after one of her TV appeals, Ms Han met a woman who she believed could be Kyung-ha, and even took her in to live with her family for a while. But the woman eventually confessed she was not her daughter.

A breakthrough finally happened in 2019 when Ms Han signed up with 325 Kamra, a group that connects overseas Korean adoptees with their birth parents by matching their DNA.

They soon reported a match – Laurie Bender, a nurse in California. After several phone calls, she flew over to Seoul to meet Ms Han, where the two had a tearful reunion at the airport.

As they embraced, Ms Han ran her fingers through Kyung-ha’s hair. “I’ve been a hairdresser for 30 years. I can quickly tell if it’s my daughter just by feeling her hair. I had mistakenly thought I found her before, so I had to touch and feel the hair to confirm it,” she said.

The first thing she told her daughter was “I’m so sorry”.

“I felt guilty because she couldn’t find her way home when she was a child. I kept thinking about how much she must have searched for her mother… Meeting her after all those years made me realise how much she must have longed for her mother, and it broke my heart.”

“It’s like a hole in your heart has been healed, you finally feel like a complete person,” Kyung-ha said about their reunion in an earlier interview with the Associated Press. She did not respond to the BBC’s requests for an interview.

The pair eventually pieced together what happened on that day in May 1975.

Kyung-ha, who was six years old at the time, was playing near her home when she was approached by a strange woman claiming to know her mother. Kyung-ha was told her mother “didn’t need” her any more and was taken to a train station.

After taking a train ride with the woman, Kyung-ha was abandoned at the final stop, where she was eventually picked up by police officers and placed in an orphanage. Soon, she was flown to the US to be adopted by a couple in Virginia.

Years later, checks revealed she was given false papers stating she was an abandoned orphan whose parents were unknown.

“It’s like you’ve been living a fake life and everything you know is not true,” Kyung-ha said previously.

Her case was far from an isolated one.

South Korea’s overseas adoption programme began in the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War, when it was a deeply impoverished country with an estimated 100,000 orphaned and displaced children.

At that time, few families were willing to adopt non-biological children, and the government began an overseas adoption programme, billed as a humanitarian effort.

The programme was handled entirely by private adoption agencies. While they were under government oversight, over time these agencies gained significant autonomy through laws.

As their power grew, so did the number of children being sent abroad, rising in the 1970s and peaking in the 1980s. In 1985 alone, more than 8,800 children were sent overseas.

There was a massive demand from the West – with declining birth rates and fewer babies to adopt at home, families began seeking children elsewhere.

Photos from that era show planes heading to Western countries filled with Korean children, with swaddled babies strapped to seats – what the truth and reconciliation commission’s inquiry called the “mass transportation of children like cargo”.

The report alleges little care was taken of these children during these long flights. In one case it cited from 1974, a lactose-intolerant child was fed milk in transit and subsequently died upon arrival in Denmark.

Critics of the programme have long questioned why so many children needed to be sent overseas at a time when South Korea was already experiencing rapid economic growth.

A 1976 BBC Panorama documentary, which featured South Korea as one of several Asian countries sending children to the West, quoted an observer describing the situation as “out of control” and “almost like a trade in children… flowing from Asia into Europe and North America”.

According to the truth and reconciliation report, foreign adoption agencies set quotas for children, which Korean agencies willingly fulfilled.

It was a profitable business – the lack of government regulation allowed the Korean agencies to charge large amounts and demand hidden fees termed as “donations”.

Some of these children may have been obtained by unscrupulous means, with parents like Ms Han alleging their children were kidnapped. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of homeless or unattended children were rounded up and put in orphanages or welfare centres as part of a national campaign to “clean up the streets” of South Korea.

Other parents were told their babies had fallen sick and died, when they were actually alive and taken to adoption agencies. Agencies also did not obtain proper consent from birth mothers to take their children for adoption, according to the truth and reconciliation report.

The report also stated that adoption agencies deliberately falsified information in adoption records to cut corners and quickly meet the demand for children.

Lost children who were found without any identity documents would be made to appear, in paperwork, as if they had been abandoned and put up for adoption.

If a child intended for adoption had died or was reclaimed by their birth parents, another child would be swapped in and assigned the original child’s identity. This allowed agencies to avoid refunding adoption fees and expedite the adoption process.

Decades on, this has created immense difficulties for many overseas adoptees trying to track down their biological parents.

Some have wrong or missing information in their adoption records, while others have discovered they were given entirely false identities.

“We are victims of state violence but there is no trace of this – literally. This lack of documents must not make us victims for the second time,” said Han Boon-young, co-founder of an overseas adoptee rights group campaigning for greater access to birth information.

“This is a human rights issue. There were kidnappings, falsified documents – all of which were examples of violations committed during the inter-country adoption process.

“It is really necessary to move towards reconciliation, that we recognise these experiences, and that the people who committed these violations be held responsible.”

But some of the key players continue to stay silent or deny wrongdoing.

The BBC contacted Bu Chung-ha, who in the 1970s served as chairman of Holt International, South Korea’s largest adoption agency.

Holt is at the centre of numerous allegations of fraud and illegal adoptions, and the subject of two lawsuits so far, including Ms Han’s.

In a brief reply, Mr Bu denied that the agency had sent abroad any children wrongly identified as orphans during his tenure. Any parents alleging their children were kidnapped “did not lose their children, they abandoned them”, he said.

The current management of Holt International has yet to respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Experts say the responsibility lay not only with the private agencies but also with the state.

“Adoption agencies exploited the system, and the government turned a blind eye – allowing illegal practices to take root,” said Dr Lee Kyung-eun, an international law scholar at Seoul National University.

“The government was the captain, and the agencies rowed the boat,” said Shin Pil-sik, a researcher on transnational adoption at Seokyeong University, who added that this structure enabled both sides to deflect accountability.

Dr Shin said the state was not a passive observer- it actively shaped adoption policy, setting annual quotas for overseas placements and even on occasion halted some adoptions.

An Associated Press news investigation last year found successive Korean governments had rewritten laws to remove minimal safeguards and judicial oversight, fit their laws to match American ones to make children adoptable, and allowed foreign families to adopt Korean children quickly without ever visiting the country.

While the government billed the programme as a humanitarian effort, observers say it also served to strengthen ties with Western countries.

A 1984 government document obtained by the BBC stated that the official goals of the adoption policy included not only the welfare of children but also “the promotion of future national strength and people-to-people diplomacy”.

When asked about the state’s role in past adoption practices, South Korea’s health and welfare ministry said they were “continuing efforts to strengthen state responsibility” in the system and that it plans to promote adoptions that comply with international standards.

In 2012, the government revised adoption laws to tighten screening of potential adoptive parents, and to track birthparent data and birth information better.

It has also enacted reforms to the adoption system ensuring that overseas adoptions are minimised and that all adoptions would be handled by the government instead of private agencies. The changes will take effect in July.

Meanwhile, overseas adoptions have declined. In the late 1980s, overseas adoptions dropped sharply, before stabilising in the 1990s and dropping again in the 2010s. Only 79 children were adopted abroad in 2023, according to the latest available data.

But as South Korea begins to address this dark chapter in its past, adoptees and birth parents like Ms Han continue to struggle with their trauma.

After their initial reunion, Ms Han and Kyung-ha have struggled to maintain a close connection.

Not only do they live on opposite sides of the world, her daughter has forgotten most of her Korean while Ms Han knows little English.

They keep in touch over texts occasionally, and Ms Han spends two hours every day practising her English by writing phrases in an exercise book.

But it isn’t enough for Ms Han.

“Even though I have found my daughter, it doesn’t feel like I’ve truly found her. All I know is where she is, but what good is that, if we can’t even communicate?

“My entire life has been ruined… no amount of money will ever make up for what I’ve lost.”

Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who has previously been put in prison and banned from film-making in his home country, spoke out against the restrictions of the regime after winning the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Panahi picked up the prestigious Palme d’Or for It Was Just an Accident, described by BBC Culture as “a furious but funny revenge thriller that takes aim at oppressive regimes”.

He was cheered as he urged fellow Iranians to “set aside” differences and problems.

“What’s most important now is our country and the freedom of our country,” he said. “Let us join forces. No-one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do, or what we should not do.”

Panahi’s last spell in prison, from which he was freed in 2023, was for protesting against the detention of two fellow film-makers who had been critical of the authorities.

His trip to Cannes was his first appearance at an international festival in 15 years, after being subject to a long travel ban.

It Was Just an Accident was shot in secret and based partly on Panahi’s own experiences in prison.

“Before going to jail and before getting to know the people that I met there – and hearing their stories, their backgrounds – the issues I dealt with in my films were totally different,” the director told the Hollywood Reporter.

“It’s really in this context (…) with this new commitment that I had felt in prison, that I had the idea, the inspiration for this story.”

The film tells the tale of five ordinary Iranians who are confronted with a man they believed tortured them in jail.

The characters were inspired by conversations he had with other prisoners and “stories that they told me about, the violence and the brutality of the Iranian government”, the director added.

Panahi spent seven months of a six-year sentence in jail before being released in February 2023.

He was previously sentenced to six years in 2010 for supporting anti-government protests and creating “propaganda against the system”. He was released on conditional bail after two months, and was banned from making movies or travelling abroad.

He has vowed to return to Tehran after the festival despite the risks of prosecution.

“As soon as I finish my work here I will go back to Iran,” he told reporters in Cannes. “And I will ask myself what’s my next film going to be.”

The Guardian’s review described It Was Just an Accident as Panahi’s “most emotionally explicit film yet: a film about state violence and revenge, about the pain of tyranny that co-exists with ostensible everyday normality”.

“It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema,” the paper’s critic Peter Bradshaw wrote.

Variety said Panahi had transformed “from understated humanist to open critic of the Iranian regime, as revealed in his punchy new political thriller”.

Panahi was presented with the Palme d’Or by French actress Juliette Binoche, who is this year’s Cannes jury president, and Australian actress Cate Blanchett.

Introducing the award, Binoche said cinema and art are “provocative” and mobilise “a force that transforms darkness into forgiveness, hope and new life”.

“That is why we have chosen for the Palme d’Or It Was Just an Accident by Jafar Panahi.”

In her introduction, Blanchett said: “I applaud the festival’s understanding that cinema creates openings for wider social conversations to take place.”

The award ceremony went ahead as planned despite a five-hour power cut that local officials put down to suspected attacks on a substation and electricity pylon.

Panahi, 64, has now completed the rare feat of winning the top prizes from the Cannes, Berlin and Venice film festivals – and could now be in line for recognition in Hollywood.

Four of the past five Palme d’Or winners have been nominated for the Oscar for best picture.

However, It Was Just an Accident is unlikely to be nominated for the Oscar for best international feature. Films must have a cinematic release in their country of origin to be eligible for that prize, and Panahi’s films are banned in Iran.

It’s 2:30am.

Inside the Kremlin walls I’m wandering alone through the vast grounds trying – and failing – to find my way out.

I spot a checkpoint, approach and show my passport.

“Nyet vykhoda!” [“No exit!”] replies the guard. He points in the opposite direction.

I walk back and, eventually, come to another checkpoint.

“No way out!” says the sentry.

I’m lost. Inside the Kremlin. In the dead of night.

It’s like being in a John le Carré novel.

It’s been quite an evening. I arrived at 5pm. Along with a small group of journalists, I’d been invited to “an event with President Putin”. What kind of event? To begin with the Kremlin wouldn’t say. Eventually we were told Vladimir Putin would be taking questions.

Eight hours later, the president strode into the Malachite Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace and sat at a desk.

But there’d been a change of plan. No press conference. No questions. Instead, live on Russian TV, Putin delivered a statement in which he proposed direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul.

Event over, I walk out of the Kremlin Palace but take a wrong turn. Finally, I locate the correct exit and, bleary-eyed, take a taxi home.

This was the start of what has turned out to be a real rollercoaster of a fortnight. What began with a late-night Kremlin statement continued with peace talks in Turkey and then a two-hour telephone call between Putin and Donald Trump.

But, at the end of it, are we any closer to peace in Ukraine?

It doesn’t feel like it.

Although there is talk about more talks, and of а possible future “memorandum” on a “possible future peace”, it all sounds rather vague.

For now, the fighting goes on.

Russia is still refusing to sign up to an unconditional comprehensive ceasefire. It has no intention of returning any of the Ukrainian land it has seized, occupied and claims to have annexed. On the contrary: it’s pushing for more.

Right now, the Ukraine peace process resembles being lost in the Kremlin late at night.

It’s hard to see the exit.

And yet the past two weeks have revealed a lot.

First, how Russia neutralises potential threats and pressure points.

Kremlin critics would put this another way: how Russia plays for time.

On 10 May (a few hours before I got lost in the Kremlin), after a phone call with Donald Trump, European leaders had issued an ultimatum to President Putin: agree to an unconditional long-term ceasefire in Ukraine in two days or face crushing new sanctions.

Since March the Trump administration has been calling on Russia and Ukraine to accept a 30-day comprehensive ceasefire. Kyiv agreed. Moscow hasn’t.

The Kremlin leader sidestepped the European ultimatum with his counter proposal of direct talks in Turkey. The idea was greeted with scepticism in Ukraine and across Europe. But it was enough to placate Trump and convince him Russia was serious about wanting peace. He was all for the talks. “Crushing” new sanctions were delayed.

Ahead of the Istanbul meeting on 16 May, President Trump gave the impression that Vladimir Putin might attend. The Kremlin leader did not, sending instead a comparatively low-level delegation that once more rejected the idea of a long-term ceasefire. But, again, the modest results of the talks were sufficient to persuade the US president that progress was being made.

Then came the Trump-Putin phone call on 19 May.

By the end of it, Russia had still not agreed to an immediate comprehensive cessation of hostilities. Instead, according to President Trump, “Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War”.

But Moscow is already casting doubt on whether it would sign any future peace treaty with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. For a year now the Russian authorities have been attempting to delegitimise Ukraine’s president since the expiry of his presidential term. However, Ukraine’s Constitution prohibits the holding of elections in wartime.

And the reason for martial law in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion.

“Would Russia sit down and sign a peace agreement with President Zelensky?” I asked Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday.

“You’re putting the cart before the horse,” Mr Lavrov replied. “First we need to have a deal. When it’s agreed, then we will decide. But, as President Putin has said many times, President Zelensky does not have legitimacy… Probably the best option would be new elections…”

The Russian media has concluded that, after two weeks of diplomacy, Moscow has strengthened its hand.

“Russia has won the latest round of global poker,” declared the Izvestia newspaper last week.

“Donald Trump’s stance couldn’t be more advantageous to Moscow,” wrote Kommersant. “In effect he backed Russia’s position of ‘Talks first, ceasefire later’ and refused to strengthen sanctions against Russia.”

A social scientist told Kommersant: “Donald Trump, at least for now, is our ideological partner on certain issues. His views are much closer to Russia’s than to Europe’s.”

And the ultra pro-Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda had this message for European leaders:

“You were warned. Don’t wave threats and ultimatums in the face of the bear. Don’t try to impose conditions in talks that have nothing to do with you.

“Just sit in the lobby and breathe in the smell of the new world order.”

Moscow’s confidence is also fuelled by the belief that, in Ukraine, it holds the initiative on the battlefield.

Back in 2023 Donald Trump had promised that, if he won the presidency, “we will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled… I’ll get them both. I know Zelensky, I know Putin. It’ll be done within 24 hours, you watch”.

Trump has been in the Oval Office for more than four months now, but the “horrible war” goes on.

On rare occasions, he has publicly rebuked the Kremlin and threatened further sanctions. Last month he said: “…there was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions?'”

But there’s been no follow-through. The US president appears reluctant to ratchet up the pressure on the Kremlin, instead signalling to Moscow that he’s keen to reboot US-Russia relations.

Following the presidents’ telephone conversation, Putin’s foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, who’d sat in on the call, told journalists: “Trump spoke rather emotionally about the prospects for [bilateral] relations. Trump sees Russia as one of America’s most important partners in trade and economic matters.”

President Trump seems determined to push on with his rapprochement with Russia, whatever happens on Ukraine.

And Moscow senses that.

“President Trump does not link continued US-Russia dialogue to the Ukraine peace process,” was a headline in the Russian government paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta this week.

That doesn’t mean the Kremlin has headed off the danger of additional restrictions completely. The US Senate has threatened tough new sanctions against Russia if Moscow doesn’t get serious about diplomacy.

Up to this point the Kremlin has been able to deflect or to sidestep whatever pressure it’s come under to make compromises and concessions regarding its war on Ukraine.

It seems confident it will continue to do so.

Satellite images have for the first time shown the extent of a shipyard accident in North Korea that damaged a new warship in the presence of the secretive state’s leader, Kim Jong Un.

The image shows the warship lying on its side, covered by large blue tarpaulins. A portion of the vessel appears to be on land.

An official investigation into the accident – which Kim described as a “criminal act” – has begun, state media reported on Friday.

None of the reports mentioned any casualties or injuries as a result of Thursday’s incident in the eastern port city of Chongjin.

KCNA, North Korea’s official news agency, downplayed the damage in a report on Friday, saying it was “not serious” and that, contrary to initial reports, there were no holes on the ship’s bottom.

“The hull starboard was scratched and a certain amount of seawater flowed into the stern section through the rescue channel,” KCNA reported.

The manager of the shipyard, Hong Kil Ho, has been summoned by law enforcers, it said.

It would take around 10 days to restore the destroyer’s side, according to KCNA.

Kim said on Thursday that the accident was caused by “absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism”.

He added that those who made “irresponsible errors” will be dealt with at a plenary meeting next month.

It’s not clear what punishment they might face, but the authoritarian state has a woeful human rights record.

It is uncommon for North Korea to publicly disclose local accidents – though it has done this a handful of times in the past.

This particular accident comes weeks after North Korea unveiled a similar 5,000-ton destroyer, the Choe Hyon.

Kim had called that warship a “breakthrough” in modernising North Korea’s navy and said it would be deployed early next year.

In his 1983 science fiction story, an Indian astrophysicist predicted what schools would look like in 2050.

Jayant Narlikar envisioned a scene where an alien, living among humans, would sit in front of a screen and attend online classes. The aliens are yet to manifest, but online classes became a reality for students far sooner, in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Narlikar also famously proposed an alternative to the Big Bang Theory – the popular idea that the universe was created in a single moment from a single point. He believed that the universe had always existed, expanding continuously into infinity.

With his passing on Tuesday, India lost one of its most celebrated astrophysicists. Narlikar was 86 – a man far ahead of his times and someone who shaped a generation of Indian researchers through his lifelong dedication to science education.

His funeral was attended by hundreds, from school children to renowned scientists and even his housekeeping staff, underscoring the profound impact he had on society.

Born on 19 July, 1938, in the town of Kolhapur in the western state of Maharashtra, Narlikar was raised in a home steeped in academic tradition.

His father, Vishnu Narlikar, was a professor and mathematician, and mother Sumati was a scholar of the Sanskrit language.

Following in his parents footsteps, the studious Narlikar went to Cambridge University for higher studies where topped a highly prestigious mathematical course. He also took a deep interest in astrophysics and cosmology.

But his most significant episode at Cambridge was his association with his PhD guide, physicist Sir Fred Hoyle. Together, Narlikar and Hoyle laid the groundwork for a revolutionary alternative to the popular Big Bang theory.

The two physicists contested the Big Bang Theory, which posits that all matter and energy in the universe came into existence in one single instance about 13.8 billion years ago.

The Hoyle-Narlikar theory boldly proposed the continuous creation of new matter in an infinite universe. Their theory was based on what they called a quasi-steady state model.

In his autobiography, My Tale of Four Cities, Narlikar used a banking analogy to explain the theory.

“To understand this concept better, think of capital invested in a bank which offers a fixed rate of compound interest. That is, the interest accrued is constantly added to the capital which therefore grows too, along with the interest.”

He explained that the universe expanded like the capital with compound interest. However, as the name ‘steady state’ implies, the universe always looks the same to the observer.

Astronomer Somak Raychaudhury says that though Narlikar’s theory isn’t as popular as the Big Bang, it is still useful.

“He advanced mechanisms by which matter could be continually created and destroyed in an infinite universe,” Raychaudhary said.

“While the Big Bang model gained broader acceptance, many tools developed for the steady-state model remain useful today,” he added

Raychaudhary recollects that even after Hoyle began to entertain elements of the Big Bang theory, Narlikar remained committed to the steady-state theory.

A sign outside his office fittingly stated: “The Big Bang is an exploding myth.”

Narlikar stayed in the UK till 1971 as a Fellow at King’s College and a founding member of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy.

As he shot to global fame in the astrophysics circles, the science community in India took note of his achievements.

In 1972, he returned to India and immediately took charge of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the coveted Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which he led it till 1989.

But his biggest contribution to India was the creation of an institution dedicated to cutting-edge research and the democratisation of science.

This dream materialised in 1988, when Narlikar, along with other distinguished scientists, founded the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune city in western India.

From a modest 100sq ft room, IUCAA has gone on to become an internationally respected institution for astronomy and astrophysics.

Narlikar served as its founder-director till 2003, and continued to be an emeritus professor after that.

He insisted that IUCAA should include programs aimed at school children and the general public. Monthly lectures, science camps, and workshops became regular events.

Recalling Narlikar’s vision for the institution, science educator Arvind Gupta says, “He said PhD scholars don’t fall from the sky, you must catch them young. He offered me a place to stay, told me to try running the children’s science centre for six months, and I ended up staying 11 years. He gave me wings to fly.”

Despite being a prolific scholar who published over 300 research papers, Narlikar never confined himself to being just a scientist. He also authored many science fiction books that have been translated into multiple languages.

These stories were often grounded in scientific principles.

In a story called Virus, published in 2015, he envisioned a pandemic taking over the world; his 1986 book Waman Parat Na Ala (The Return of Vaman), tackled the ethical dilemmas of artificial intelligence.

Sanjeev Dhurandhar, who was part of the Indian team that contributed to the physical detection of gravitational waves in 2015, recalled how Narlikar inspired him to attempt the unthinkable.

“He gave me a complex problem early in my research. After I struggled for a week, he solved it on the board in 15 minutes – not to show superiority, but to guide and inspire. His openness to gravitational waves was what gave me the courage to pursue it.”

A well-known rationalist, Narlikar also took it upon himself to challenge pseudoscience. In 2008, he co-authored a paper that challenged astrology using a statistical method.

Raychaudhary said that his motivation to challenge pseudoscience came from the belief system of questioning everything that did not have a scientific basis.

But when it came to science, Narlikar believed in exploring the slimmest of possibilities.

In his last days, Narlikar continued doing what he loved most – replying to children’s letters and writing about science on his blog.

A power cut in southern France caused by suspected sabotage has disrupted screenings on the final day of the Cannes Film Festival.

About 160,000 homes in the city of Cannes and surrounding areas lost power early on Saturday, before supply was restored in the afternoon.

Officials said an electricity substation had been set on fire and a pylon at another location damaged.

Organisers of the international film festival say the closing ceremony will go ahead as planned as they have an alternative power supply.

Prosecutors say a first power cut occurred when a substation in the village of Tanneron, which supplies Cannes, was attacked by arsonists in the early hours.

At about 10:00 (08:00 GMT) the legs of an electricity pylon near the town of Villeneuve-Loubet were cut, triggering a second outage.

In Cannes, shops and restaurants struggled to operate.

“Another hour and I’ll throw everything away,” Laurent Aboukrat, who owns Cannes’ Jamin restaurant, told the AFP news agency. He said his fridges had been off since the morning.

“Cannes is in a total slowdown, meltdown, there’s no coffee anywhere, and I think the town has run out of croissants, so this is like crisis territory,” Australian producer Darren Vukasinovic told Reuters news agency.

Several screenings were interrupted by the cut in the morning, before festival organisers were able to switch to private generators.

Saturday is the last day of the festival. French actress Juliette Binoche and her jury are set to announce the winner of the Palme d’Or – the highest prize awarded at the festival.

Russian aerial attacks on Ukraine have killed at least 13 people and injured 56 civilians across the country since Friday, according to regional officials.

Russia launched 250 drones and 14 ballistic missiles against Kyiv alone, Ukraine’s air force said, causing fires in residential buildings.

At least 14 people were injured in the capital. It was one of the biggest combined aerial assaults on the city since the war began.

The air force said it had downed six missiles and 245 drones.

“With each such attack, the world becomes more certain that the cause of prolonging the war lies in Moscow,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on X.

The overnight barrage came as Russia and Ukraine are taking part in prisoner swaps agreed after talks between the two sides in Turkey.

Describing a “difficult night”, Zelensky said there had been fires and explosions across Kyiv with homes, businesses and cars damaged by strikes or falling debris.

Two schools and a clinic were among the facilities hit in the Kyiv region.

Olha Chyrukha, a 64-year-old Kyiv resident, told Reuters news agency: “I wish they’d agree to a ceasefire. To bomb people like this – poor children. My three-year-old granddaughter was screaming scared.”

Four people were killed in the eastern Donetsk region; five in the southern Odesa and Kherson regions and four in the northeast Kharkiv region.

Drones hit port infrastructure in Odesa on Saturday, local authorities reported.

Residential, facilities and several blocks of flats across Ukraine were damaged. Over 100 people were evacuated, including 13 children from front line areas.

Commenting on the combined use of aerial weapons, Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, said: “The enemy is improving its own tactics of using drones, while simultaneously striking with ballistics.”

Zelensky said only “additional sanctions targeting key sectors of the Russian economy” could push Moscow to agree to a ceasefire.

Last week, Russia said Ukraine had launched hundreds of exploding drones at the country, including strikes over Moscow. The Russia’s defence ministry said that 485 drones had been shot down.

On Saturday, Zelensky announced that 307 Ukrainian prisoners had returned home as part of an exchange deal with the Kremlin.

On Friday, Ukraine and Russia each handed over 390 soldiers and civilians in the biggest prisoner exchange since Russia launched its full-scale assault in February 2022.

The two countries have agreed to swap a total of 1,000 prisoners each, and another exchange is expected on Sunday.

US President Donald Trump, who has pledged but so far failed to end the war, suggested on social media that the swap “could lead to something big???”.

Earlier this week, Trump had a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the war, after which he said the Kremlin and Ukraine would “immediately start” negotiations for a ceasefire.

However, Putin has only said Russia would work with Ukraine to craft a “memorandum on a possible future peace agreement”, and failed to address calls for a 30-day ceasefire.