Andriy Portnov’s murder in a Madrid suburb has shocked Ukrainians, but it has not exactly triggered an outpouring of grief.

The controversial former official had just dropped his children off at the American School when he was shot several times in the car park.

The image of his lifeless body lying face down in a gym kit marked the end of a life synonymous with Ukrainian corruption and Russian influence.

Ukraine’s media have been discussing the 51-year-old’s frequent threats to journalists, as well as his huge influence under the country’s last pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.

“A man who called for the killing of political opponents suddenly got what he wanted from others,” observed reporter Oleksandr Holubov. News website Ukrayinska Pravda even called him “the devil’s advocate”.

Rare words of restraint came from Portnov’s once political rival Serhiy Vlasenko, an MP, who said: “You can’t kill people. When discussing someone’s death, we must remain human.”

Portnov was controversial and widely disliked. The motives for his murder may seem evident, but his death has still left unanswered questions.

Before entering Ukrainian politics, Portnov ran a law firm. He worked with then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko until 2010, before defecting to Yanukovych’s camp when he won the election.

“It was a big story of betrayal,” remembers Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykh. “Because Tymoshenko was a pro-Western politician, and Yanukovych pro-Russian.”

The adviser became the country’s first deputy head of the Presidential Office and set up a national criminal code in 2012. For him, his critics say, his ascent was less about politics, and more about power and influence.

“He was just a good lawyer, everyone knew he was very smart,” Kristina tells me.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Ukraine inherited a judicial system in desperate need of reform. Mykhailo Zhernakov, a legal expert and head of the Dejure Foundation believes Portnov remoulded it in order for the government to cover up illegal schemes, and to mask Russian attempts to control the country.

“He was the kingpin, mastermind and architect of this corrupt legal system designed to serve the pro-Russian administration at the time,” he says.

Over a decade, Portnov would sue journalists who wrote negative stories about him through the courts and judges he controlled. His attempts to control the judicial system would lead to him being sanctioned by the US.

At the time, Washington accused the adviser of placing loyal officials in senior positions for his own benefit, as well as “buying court decisions”.

Portnov later pursued activists who took part in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which toppled Viktor Yanukovych from power, and forced him to escape the country to Russia.

“He used sexual threats,” says Oksana Romaniuk who remembers her and other journalists’ interactions with Portnov well.

As director of the Institute of Mass Information, she monitors free speech in Ukraine.

Whenever a damning report was published, the reaction was familiar and consistent. “When people exposed his corruption, he accused them of fake news,” she says.

“Even when journalists had documents and testimonies backing up the allegations, it was impossible to win the lawsuits in court. It was impossible to defend yourself. It was a rotten system.”

Andriy Portnov eventually settled in Moscow after his old boss Yanukovych fled in 2014. Investigative reporter Maksym Savchuk subsequently investigated his ties to Moscow, as well as his extensive property portfolio there.

“He responded with words I don’t want to quote, derogatory ones about my mother,” he remembers. “It’s a trait of his character; he is a very vindictive person.”

Even after leaving Ukraine, Portnov still tried to influence Ukrainian politics by taking control of pro-Kremlin TV channel NewsOne.

He returned in 2019, only to flee again with the full-scale invasion in 2022.

The irony of Portnov eventually settling in Spain and sending his children to a prestigious American school has not been lost on many.

Alongside the undisguised delight in Portnov’s death, there has been endless speculation over who was responsible.

“It could have been the Russians because he knew so many things,” suggests legal expert Mykhailo Zhernakov.

“He was involved in so many shady Russian operations it could be them or other criminal groups. He managed to annoy a lot of people,” he says.

Despite the motives being clearer on this side of the border, Ukrainian security sources appear to be trying to distance themselves from the killing.

Kyiv has previously carried out assassinations in Russian-occupied territory and in Russia itself, but not in Spain.

Some Spanish media reports suggest his murder was not political, but rather over “economic reasons or revenge”.

“You can imagine how many people need to be interrogated in order to narrow down the suspects,” thinks Maskym Savchuk. “Because this person has a thousand and one enemies.”

In Ukraine, Portnov is seen as someone who helped Russia form the foundations for its invasion. A once general dislike of him has only been intensified since 2022.

Despite this, Mykhailo Zhernakov hopes his death is also an opportunity for wider judicial reforms.

“Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean his influence has,” he warns. “Because many of the people he appointed or helped get jobs are still in the system.”

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 lot of people ask me: ‘Father Moses, how can I increase my manliness to absurd levels?'”

In a YouTube video, a priest is championing a form of virile, unapologetic masculinity.

Skinny jeans, crossing your legs, using an iron, shaping your eyebrows, and even eating soup are among the things he derides as too feminine.

There are other videos of Father Moses McPherson – a powerfully-built father of five – weightlifting to the sound of heavy metal.

He was raised a Protestant and once worked as a roofer, but now serves as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in Georgetown, Texas, an offshoot of the mother church in Moscow.

ROCOR, a global network with headquarters in New York, has recently been expanding across parts of the US – mainly as a result of people converting from other faiths.

In the last six months, Father Moses has prepared 75 new followers for baptism in his church of the Mother of God, just north of Austin.

“When my wife and I converted 20 years ago we used to call Orthodoxy the best-kept secret, because people just didn’t know what it was,” he says.

“But in the past year-and-a-half our congregation has tripled in size.”

During the Sunday liturgy at Father Moses’s church, I am struck by the number of men in their twenties and thirties praying and crossing themselves at the back of the nave, and how this religion – with traditions dating back to the 4th century AD – seems to attract young men uneasy with life in modern America.

Software engineer Theodore tells me he had a dream job and a wife he adored, but he felt empty inside, as if there was a hole in his heart. He believes society has been “very harsh” on men and is constantly telling them they are in the wrong. He complains that men are criticised for wanting to be the breadwinner and support a stay-at-home wife.

“We are told that’s a very toxic relationship nowadays,” Theodore says. “That’s not how it should be.”

Almost all the converts I meet have opted to home-school their offspring, partly because they believe women should prioritise their families rather than their careers.

Father John Whiteford, an archpriest in the ROCOR from Spring, north of Houston, says home-schooling ensures a religious education and is “a way of protecting your children”, while avoiding any talk about “transgenderism, or the 57 genders of the month or whatever”.

Compared to the millions of worshippers in America’s evangelical megachurches, the numbers of Christian Orthodox are tiny – only about one percent of the population. That includes Eastern Orthodoxy, as practised across Russia, Ukraine, eastern Europe and Greece, and the Oriental Orthodox from the Middle East and Africa.

Founded by priests and clergy fleeing the Russian Revolution in 1917, ROCOR is seen by many as the most conservative Orthodox jurisdiction in the US. Yet this small religious community is a vocal one, and what’s unfolding within it mirrors broader political shifts, especially following President Donald Trump’s dramatic pivot toward Moscow.

The true increase in the number of converts is hard to quantify, but data from the Pew Research Centre suggests Orthodox Christians are 64% male, up from 46% in 2007.

A smaller study of 773 converts appears to back the trend. Most recent newcomers are men, and many say the pandemic pushed them to seek a new faith. That survey is from the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which was established by Russian monks in Alaska in the late 18th Century and now has more than 700 parishes, missions, communities, monasteries, and institutions in the US, Canada and Mexico which identify as Russian Orthodox.

Professor Scott Kenworthy, who studies the history and thought of Eastern Orthodox Christianity – particularly in modern Russia – says his OCA parish in Cincinnati “is absolutely bursting at the seams”.

He’s attended the same church for 24 years and says congregation numbers remained steady until the Covid lockdown. Since then, there has been constant flow of new inquirers and people preparing to be baptised, known as catechumens.

“This is not just a phenomenon of my own parish, or a few places in Texas,” Prof Kenworthy says, “it is definitely something broader.”

The digital space is key in this wave of new converts. Father Moses has a big following online – when he shares a picture of a positive pregnancy test on his Instagram feed he gets 6,000 likes for announcing the arrival of his sixth child.

But there are dozens of other podcasts and videos presented by Orthodox clergy and an army of followers – mainly male.

Father Moses tells his congregation there are two ways of serving God – being a monk or a nun, or getting married. Those who take the second path should avoid contraception and have as many children as possible.

“Show me one saint in the history of the Church who ever blessed any kind of birth control,” Father Moses says. As for masturbation – or what the church calls self-abuse – the priest condemns it as “pathetic and unmanly”.

Father Moses says Orthodoxy is “not masculine, it is just normal”, while “in the West everything has become very feminised”. Some Protestant churches, he believes, mainly cater for women.

“I don’t want to go to services that feel like a Taylor Swift concert,” Father Moses says.” If you look at the language of the ‘worship music’, it’s all emotion – that’s not men.”

Elissa Bjeletich Davis, a former Protestant who now belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church in Austin, is a Sunday school teacher and has her own podcast. She says many converts belong to “the anti-woke crowd” and sometimes have strange ideas about their new faith – especially those in the Russian Church.

“They see it as a military, rigid, disciplinary, masculine, authoritarian religion,” Elissa says. “It’s kind of funny. It’s almost as if the old American Puritans and their craziness is resurfacing.”

Buck Johnson has worked as a firefighter for 25 years and hosts the Counterflow podcast.

He says he was initially scared to enter his local Russian Orthodox Church as he “looks different, covered in tattoos”, but tells me he was welcomed with open arms. He was also impressed the church stayed open throughout the Covid lockdown.

Sitting on a couch in front of two huge TV screens at his home in Lockhart, he says his newfound faith is changing his view of the world.

“Negative American views on Russia are what worry me,” Buck says. He tells me the mainstream, “legacy” media presents a distorted picture of the invasion of Ukraine.

“I think there’s a holdover from the boomer generation here in America that lived through the Cold War,” Buck says, “and I don’t quite grasp why – but they say Russia’s bad.”

The head of the Russian Church in Moscow, Patriarch Kirill, has doggedly backed the invasion of Ukraine, calling it a Holy War, and expressing little compassion for its victims. When I ask Archpriest Father John Whiteford about Russia’s top cleric, who many see as a warmonger, he assures me the Patriarch’s words have been distorted.

Footage and photographs of Putin quoting Bible verses, holding candles during services in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and stripping down to his swim trunks to plunge into icy water at Epiphany, seem to have struck a chord. Some – in America and other countries – see Russia as the last bastion of true Christianity.

Nearly a decade ago, another Orthodox convert turned priest from Texas, Father Joseph Gleason, moved from America to Borisoglebskiy, a village four hours’ drive north of Moscow, with his wife and eight children.

“Russia does not have homosexual marriage, it does not have civil unions, it is a place where you can home-school your kids and – of course – I love the thousand-year history of Orthodox Christianity here,” he told a Russian video host.

This wispy-bearded Texan is in the vanguard of a movement urging conservatives to relocate to Russia. Last August, Putin introduced fast-track shared values visa for those fleeing Western liberalism.

Back in Texas, Buck tells me he and his fellow converts are turning their backs on instant gratification and American consumerism.

“We’re thinking of things long term,” Buck says, “like traditions, love for your family, love for you community, love for neighbours.

“I think that orthodoxy fits us well – and especially in Texas.”

North Korea has detained three shipyard officials over an accident during the launch of a new warship on Wednesday, state media has reported.

Parts of the 5,000-ton destroyer’s bottom were crushed during the launch ceremony, tipping the vessel off balance.

An investigation into the incident, which North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un described as a “criminal act”, is ongoing.

KCNA, North Korea’s official news agency, identified those detained as the chief engineer of the northern Chongjin shipyard where the destroyer was built, as well as the construction head and an administrative manager.

The report said that the three were “responsible for the accident”.

On Friday, KCNA said the manager of the shipyard, Hong Kil Ho, had been summoned by law enforcers.

Satellite images showed the vessel lying on its side covered by large blue tarpaulins, and a portion of the vessel appeared to be on land.

North Korea’s state media did not mention any casualties or injuries at the time, downplaying the damage.

KCNA reported that there were no holes on the ship’s bottom – contrary to initial reports.

“The hull starboard was scratched and a certain amount of seawater flowed into the stern section,” the agency said.

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

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

It is 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.

Founded in 1600 as a trading enterprise, the English East India company gradually transformed into a colonial power.

By the late 18th Century, as it tightened its grip on India, company officials began commissioning Indian artists – many formerly employed by the Mughals – to create striking visual records of the land they were now ruling.

A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings, c. 1790 to 1835, an ongoing show in the Indian capital put together by Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), features over 200 works that once lay on the margins of mainstream art history. It is India’s largest exhibition of company paintings, highlighting their rich diversity and the skill of Indian artists.

Painted by largely unnamed artists, these paintings covered a wide range of subjects, but mainly fall into three categories: natural history, like botanical studies; architecture, including monuments and scenic views of towns and landscapes; and Indian manners and customs.

“The focus on these three subject areas reflects European engagements with their Indian environment in an attempt to come to terms with all that was unfamiliar to Western eyes,” says Giles Tillotson of DAG, who curated the show.

“Europeans living in India were delighted to encounter flora and fauna that were new to them, and ancient buildings in exotic styles. They met – or at least observed – multitudes of people whose dress and habits were strange but – as they began to discern – were linked to stream of religious belief and social practice.”

Beyond natural history, India’s architectural heritage captivated European visitors.

Before photography, paintings were the best way to document travels, and iconic Mughal monuments became prime subjects. Patrons soon turned to skilled local artists.

Beyond the Taj Mahal, popular subjects included Agra Fort, Jama Masjid, Buland Darwaza, Sheikh Salim Chishti’s tomb at Fatehpur Sikri (above), and Delhi’s Qutub Minar and Humayun’s Tomb.

The once-obscure and long-anonymous Indian artist Sita Ram, who painted the tomb, was one of them.

From June 1814 to early October 1815, Sita Ram travelled extensively with Francis Rawdon, also known as the Marquess of Hastings, who had been appointed as the governor general in India in 1813 and held the position for a decade. (He is not to be confused with Warren Hastings, who served as India’s first governor general much earlier.)

The largest group in this collection is a set of botanical watercolours, likely from Murshidabad or Maidapur (in present-day West Bengal).

While Murshidabad was the Nawab of Bengal’s capital, the East India Company operated there. In the late 18th century, nearby Maidapur briefly served as a British base before Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) rise eclipsed it.

Originally part of the Louisa Parlby Album – named after the British woman who compiled it while her husband, Colonel James Parlby, served in Bengal – the works likely date to the late 18th Century, before Louisa’s return to Britain in 1801.

“The plants represented in the paintings are likely quite illustrative of what could be found growing in both the well-appointed gardens as well as the more marginal spaces of common greens, waysides and fields in the Murshidabad area during the late eighteenth century,” writes Nicolas Roth of Harvard University.

“These are familiar plants, domestic and domesticated, which helped constitute local life worlds and systems of meaning, even as European patrons may have seen them mainly as exotica to be collected.”

Another painting from the collection is of a temple procession showing a Shiva statue on an ornate platform carried by men, flanked by Brahmins and trumpeters.

At the front, dancers with sticks perform under a temporary gateway, while holy water is poured on them from above.

Labeled Ouricaty Tirounal, it depicts a ritual from Thirunallar temple in Karaikal in southern India, capturing a rare moment from a 200-year-old tradition.

By the late 18th Century, company paintings had become true collaborations between European patrons and Indian artists.

Art historian Mildred Archer called them a “fascinating record of Indian social life,” blending the fine detail of Mughal miniatures with European realism and perspective.

Regional styles added richness – Tanjore artists, for example, depicted people of various castes, shown with tools of their trade. These albums captured a range of professions – nautch girls, judges, sepoys, toddy tappers, and snake charmers.

“They catered to British curiosity while satisfying European audience’s fascination with the ‘exoticism’ of Indian life,” says Kanupriya Sharma of DAG.

Most studies of company painting focus on British patronage, but in south India, the French were commissioning Indian artists as early as 1727.

A striking example is a set of 48 paintings from Pondicherry – uniform in size and style – showing the kind of work French collectors sought by 1800.

One painting (above) shows 10 men in hats and loincloths rowing through surf. A French caption calls them nageurs (swimmers) and the boat a chilingue.

Among the standout images are two vivid scenes by an artist known as B, depicting boatmen navigating the rough Coromandel coast in stitched-plank rowboats.

With no safe harbours near Madras or Pondicherry, these skilled oarsmen were vital to European trade, ferrying goods and people through dangerous surf between anchored ships and the shore.

Company paintings often featured natural history studies, portraying birds, animals, and plants – especially from private menageries.

As seen in the DAG show, these subjects are typically shown life-size against plain white backgrounds, with minimal surroundings – just the occasional patch of grass. The focus remains firmly on the species itself.

Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG says the the latest show proposes company paintings as the “starting point of Indian modernism”.

Anand says this “was the moment when Indian artists who had trained in courtly ateliers first moved outside the court (and the temple) to work for new patrons”.

“The agendas of those patrons were not tied up with courtly or religious concerns; they were founded on scientific enquiry and observation,” he says.

“Never mind that the patrons were foreigners. What should strike us now is how Indian artists responded to their demands, creating entirely new templates of Indian art.”

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.”

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.

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.

It was supposed to be a defining, catalytic moment for French society.

Horrific, but unmissable. Unignorable.

The seaside town of Vannes, in southern Brittany, had carefully prepared a special venue and a separate overflow amphitheatre for the occasion.

Hundreds of journalists were accredited for a process that would, surely, dominate headlines in France throughout its three-month duration and force a queasy public to confront a crime too often shunted to the sidelines.

Comparisons were quickly made with – and expectations tied to – last year’s Pelicot mass rape trial in southern France and the massive global attention it garnered.

Instead, the trial of France’s most prolific known paedophile, Joel Le Scouarnec – a retired surgeon who has admitted in court to raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, almost all of them children – is coming to an end this Wednesday amid widespread frustration.

“I’m exhausted. I’m angry. Right now, I don’t have much hope. Society seems totally indifferent. It’s frightening to think [the rapes] could happen again,” one of Le Scouarnec’s victims, Manon Lemoine, 36, told the BBC.

Ms Lemoine and some 50 other victims, stung by an apparent lack of public interest in the trial, have formed their own campaign group to pressure the French authorities, accusing the government of ignoring a “landmark” case which exposed a “true laboratory of institutional failures”.

The group has questioned why a parliamentary commission has not been set up, as in other high-profile abuse cases, and spoken of being made to feel “invisible”, as if “the sheer number of victims prevented us from being recognised.”

Some of the victims, most of whom had initially chosen to testify anonymously, have now decided to reveal their identities in public – even posing for photos on the courthouse steps – in the hope of jolting France into paying more attention and, perhaps, learning lessons about a culture of deference that helped a prestigious surgeon to rape with impunity for decades.

The crimes for which Le Scouarnec is on trial all occurred between 1998 and 2014.

“It’s not normal that I should have to show my face. [But] I hope that what we’re doing now will change things. That’s why we decided to rise up, to make our voices heard,” said Ms Lemoine.

So, what has gone wrong?

Were the horrors too extreme, the subject matter too unremittingly grim or simply too uncomfortable to contemplate?

Why, when the whole world knows the name of Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot, has a trial with significantly more victims – child victims abused under the noses of the French medical establishment – passed by with what feels like little more than a collective shudder?

Why does the world not know the name Joel Le Scouarnec?

“The Le Scouarnec case is not mobilising a lot of people. Perhaps because of the number of victims. We hear the disappointment, the lack of wide mobilisation, which is a pity,” said Maëlle Nori, from feminist NGO (All of Us).

Some observers have reflected on the absence in this case of a single, totemic figure like Gisèle Pelicot, whose public courage caught the public imagination and enabled people to find some light in an otherwise bleak story.

Others have reached more devastating conclusions.

“The issue is that this trial is about sexual abuse of children.

There’s a virtual on this topic globally, but particularly in France. “We simply don’t want to acknowledge it,” Myriam Guedj-Benayoun, a lawyer representing several of Le Scouarnec’s victims, told me.

In her closing arguments to the court, Ms Guedj-Benayoun condemned what she called France’s “systemic, organised silence” regarding child abuse.

She spoke of a patriarchal society in which men in respected positions like medicine remained almost beyond reproach and pointed to “the silence of those who knew, those who looked the other way, and those who could have – should have – raised the alarm”.

The depravity exposed during the trial has been astonishing – too much for many to stomach.

The court in Vannes has heard in excruciating detail how Le Scouarnec, 74, wallowed in his paedophilia, carefully detailing each child rape in a succession of black notebooks, often preying on his vulnerable young patients while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from surgery.

The court has also been told of the retired surgeon’s growing isolation, and of what his own lawyer described as “your descent into hell”, in the final decade before he was caught, in 2017, after abusing a neighbour’s six-year-old daughter.

By the end, alone in a filthy house, drinking heavily and ostracised by many of his relatives, Le Scouarnec was spending much of his time watching violent images of child rape online, and obsessing over a collection of lifelike child-sized dolls.

“I was emotionally attached to them… They did what I wanted,” Le Scouarnec told the court in his quiet monotone.

A few blocks from the courthouse, in an adapted civic hall, journalists have watched the proceedings unfold on a television screen. In recent days, the seats have begun to fill up and coverage of the trial has increased as it moves towards a close.

Many commentators have noted how the Le Scouarnec trial, like the Pelicot case, has exposed the deep institutional failings which enabled the surgeon to continue his rapes long after they could have been detected and stopped.

Dominique Pelicot had been caught “upskirting” in a supermarket in 2010 and his DNA quickly linked to an attempted rape in 1999 – a fact that, astonishingly, wasn’t followed up for a whole decade.

At Le Scouarnec’s trial a succession of medical officials have explained – some ashamedly, others self-servingly – how an overstretched rural healthcare system chose, for years, to ignore the fact that the surgeon had been reported by America’s FBI in 2004 after using a credit card to pay to download videos of child rapes on his computer.

“I was advised not to talk about such and such a person,” said one doctor who’d tried to sound the alarm.

“There is a shortage of surgeons, and those who show up are welcomed like the messiah,” explained a hospital director.

“I messed up, I admit it, like the whole hierarchy,” a different administrator finally conceded.

Another connection between the Pelicot and Le Scouarnec cases is what they’ve both revealed about our understanding – or lack of understanding – of trauma.

Without warning or support, Gisèle Pelicot had been abruptly confronted by police with the video evidence of her own drugging and rapes.

Later, during the trial, some defence lawyers and other commentators sought to minimise her suffering by pointing to the fact that she’d been unconscious during the rapes – as if trauma only exists, like a wound, when its scar is visible to the naked eye.

In the Le Scouarnec case, French police appear to have gone about searching for the paedophile’s many victims in a similarly brusque manner, summoning people for an unexplained interview and then informing them, out of the blue, that they’d been listed in the surgeon’s notebooks.

The reactions of Le Scouarnec’s many victims have varied widely. Some have simply chosen not to engage with the trial, or with a childhood experience of which they have no memory.

For others, news of the abuse has affected them profoundly.

“You’ve entered my head, it’s destroying me. I’ve become a different person – one I don’t recognise,” said a victim, addressing Le Scouarnec in court.

“I have no memories and I’m already damaged,” said another.

“It turned me upside down,” a policeman admitted.

And then there is a different group of people who – not unlike Gisèle Pelicot – have found that knowledge of their abuse has been revelatory, enabling them to make sense of things they had not previously understood about themselves or their lives.

Some have connected their childhood abuse to a general sense of unhappiness, or poor behaviour, or failure in life.

For others, the links have been much more specific, helping to explain a litany of mysterious symptoms and behaviours, from a fear of intimacy to repeated genital infections and eating disorders.

“With my boyfriend, every time we have sex, I vomit,” one woman revealed in court.

“I had so many after-effects from my operation. But no-one could explain why I had this irrational fear of hospitals,” said another victim, Amélie.

Some have described the trial itself as being like a group therapy session, with victims bonding over shared traumas which they’d previously believed they were suffering alone.

“This trial is like a clinical laboratory involving 300 victims. I sincerely hope it will change France. In any case it will change the victims’ perception of trauma and traumatic memory,” said the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun.

Despite her concerns about the lack of public interest, Manon Lemoine said the trial had helped the victims “to rebuild ourselves, to turn a page. We lay out our pain and our experiences and we leave it behind [in the courtroom]. So, for me, really, it was liberating.”

Having confessed to his crimes, Le Scouarnec will inevitably receive a guilty verdict and will almost certainly remain in prison for the rest of his life.

Two of his victims took their own lives some years before the trial – a fact which he acknowledged in court with the same penitent but formulaic apology that he’s offered to everyone else.

Meanwhile, some activists remain hopeful that the case will prove to be a turning point in French society.

“Compared to the Pelicot trial… we can see we don’t talk very much about the Le Scouarnec case. We need to unite. We have to do this, otherwise nothing will happen, and the Le Scouarnec trial will have served no purpose. I was also a victim as a child. We’re obliged to react and to organise ourselves,” said Arnaud Gallais, a child rights campaigner and founder of the Mouv’Enfants NGO.

A more wary assessment came from the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun.

“Now, there is a very important standoff between those who want to denounce child sexual violence and those who want to cover it up, and this standoff is taking place today in this trial. Who will win?” she wondered.

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.

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.”

A decade ago, a portrait of the British monarch caused a row in Canadian politics. Now, the King is being invited to deliver the Speech from the Throne. What’s changed?

In 2011, shortly after forming a majority Conservative government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper caused a national uproar when he sought to emphasise Canada’s ties to the British monarchy. In one example, he replaced two artworks by a Quebec painter with a portrait of the Queen.

Some rebuked the gesture as being out of touch with modern times. Canada has, throughout its 157-year-old history, sought increasing independence from the British monarchy, while still remaining a part of the Commonwealth.

When Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau succeeded Harper four years later, the Queen’s portrait went down, the Quebec paintings, back up.

Fast forward to 2025, and a paradoxical shift has occurred in Canada’s relationship with the Crown. In a transparent show of Canada’s sovereignty and independence against threats from US President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney – a Liberal – has invited King Charles the III to open the 45th Canadian parliament.

• King Charles uses symbols to show support for Canada
• The strategy behind Carney’s invite to the King

The move is “a huge affirmation and statement about the uniqueness of Canada and its traditions,” Justin Vovk, a Canadian royal historian, told the BBC – “a theatrical display that is meant to show what makes Canadians separate from Americans” and not, as Trump has often repeated, a “51st state”.

Both countries are former British colonies, but America’s founding fathers took a different path and severed all formal connections to the Crown nearly 250 years ago.

Canada’s separation from the monarchy has been more gradual, and its ties have never been completely broken. Canada’s parliamentary system is modelled after Britain’s Westminster system. The British monarch is still formally the head of state, but their duties are often carried out by their Canadian representative, called the governor general.

Loyalty to the Crown was seen as important to Canada’s politicians in the 19th Century who wanted to maintain separation from the US, said Canadian royal historian and commentator Carolyn Harris.

That later changed in the 1960s, as Quebec – Canada’s majority French-speaking province – began to assert its own distinct identity and threatened separation. This led to an era of politicians like Lester B Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau who worked to untangle Canada from its British colonial past.

In 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau repatriated Canada’s constitution, giving full legislative power to the federal government and the provinces, and removing it from British parliament.

Ms Harris noted that Canada remained a constitutional monarchy throughout these periods. What fluctuated, however, was how much the prime minister of the day chooses to embrace that connection.

Carney’s invite to King Charles III signals that his government will be one that is much more supportive of the Crown, Mr Vovk said, marking “a very different tone” from previous Liberals.

A British monarch has not delivered Canada’s throne speech since 1977, and has not opened a brand new session of parliament since 1957, making the King’s upcoming visit a truly rare occasion.

It comes at a consequential time for Canada.

Carney heavily campaigned on standing up to Trump, after the US president spent months undermining Canada’s sovereignty by saying it would be better off as a US state.

Trump also imposed a series of tariffs that have threatened Canada’s economic stability, given that the US is its largest trade partner by far.

When announcing the visit last month, Carney called it “a historic honour that matches the weight of our times”.

He added that the King’s visit “clearly underscores the sovereignty of our country”.

Both historians, Mr Vovk and Ms Harris, noted that the bulk of Canada’s modern population is indifferent to the British monarchy. Some are even critical of it.

The coronation of King Charles III in 2023 made way for fresh scrutiny of the Crown’s historic mistreatment of indigenous people in Canada, and questions on whether the new monarch will move towards reconciliation.

Quebec politicians are also still calling for Canada to cut ties with the monarchy. On Friday, the separatist Bloc Québécois party said it will again seek to scrap the need for elected officials to swear allegiance to the King.

Some Canadians will be intrigued by the pomp and pageantry of the King’s visit, Mr Vovk said, but its chief purpose is to send a political message from Canada to the world.

It is also a way for Prime Minister Carney to improve the relationship with Trump, who is famously a fan of the British monarchy and its history.

“Strengthening the relationship with the monarchy puts a stamp on legitimacy that transcends individual parties and the current political climate,” Mr Vovk said. “Politicians come and go, but the monarchy has always remained.”

It also works to tie Canada closer to Europe – a key objective of Prime Minister Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, who has spoken about the need for Canada to find new allies as it navigates its changing relationship with the US.

The visit is notable for the Crown, too.

It will be the King’s first to Canada as reigning monarch. He and the Queen had intended to visit last year, but cancelled their plans due to his cancer diagnosis.

The palace has promised a throne speech that will “mark a significant moment between the Head of State and the Canadian people”.

And while it will be a short trip – the King and Queen will arrive Monday morning and depart Tuesday evening – the palace said they hope the trip will be “an impactful one”.

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 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.

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.

I was planning an ordinary afternoon out – bags packed, ready to roll – when I bounded downstairs and was hit by a jolt of disbelief.

The space where my cargo bike should have been was empty, and the double lock that had bolted it to my Amsterdam apartment wall was hacked.

My daughter darted between the other bikes, convinced someone must have moved it, but no, it was gone.

With cycling deeply embedded in daily life here in the Netherlands – part of the “Dutch DNA”, as we say – I have no car, so used my bike for everything, from the school run to a shopping trip.

This was no ordinary bicycle. My colleague Kate Vandy and I retrofitted it to become a mobile broadcasting studio, which we named the Bike Bureau. I started “Dutch News from the Cycle Path”, a reporting series born on the school run after my daughter asked me: “Why don’t you just tell people the news now?”

The bike allowed me to reach breaking news scenes and broadcast live from anywhere, my daughter by my side, showing that working motherhood could be visible, joyful and real.

It opened doors to collaborations, awards and a community of people who saw themselves in our story.

I have zero expectation of getting the bike back, and searching for it has proven fruitless. I called the police immediately and they opened a case, but closed it shortly afterwards because of a lack of evidence that would help find the thief.

People online and in my local community have rallied round to try to find it since I put out an appeal. Neighbours asked if I was okay, telling me they loved to see me enjoy their bike lanes and see their city from my foreigner’s perspective.

But why, my daughter asked, do so many people care that our bike was stolen?

Colleagues and friends responded to my Instagram Reel about the theft. Legendary BBC camerawoman Julie Ritson called my bike a blueprint for the future of journalism. Others said it was a relatable life-hack that showed how one person can manage motherhood and career, and inspired them to rethink what’s possible with a cargo bike.

It was solar-powered, cutting the need for satellite trucks with heavy equipment and the pollution that mode of transport brings.

Research last year from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows audiences are not only interested in climate change news – they are particularly engaged by stories that highlight individuals taking empowering action in response to the crisis.

Some people have expressed surprise that “this kind of thing” would happen in the Netherlands. What they may not realise is that bike theft is endemic here. Last year, more than 86,000 bikes were reported stolen in the Netherlands, up 1,000 compared to the year before, and 10,000 more than in 2022, according to police figures. Authorities say a rise in reports may have contributed to this.

Most bikes stolen are stripped for parts or sold on. My e-cargo bike cost nearly €5,000 (£4,200) – more than our old car which I sold.

I paid for the bike, so the BBC has undergone no financial loss.

What it really bought me was independence – and in a way, losing it is like losing a friend. Aside from the impact on my own lifestyle, that bike gave my daughter a magical, nature-filled childhood: picnics in the dunes, detours to see highland cows, fairy lights in winter, breezy rides to the beach in summer.

The theft has sparked conversations about urban safety, cycling infrastructure, and the burdens mothers still carry. But it’s also a testament to the community we’ve built and the power of sharing authentic stories from the saddle.

I might not get my bike back, but no one can steal what it gave us all.

As a footballer, Jay Emmanuel-Thomas seemed destined for greatness. But a drug-smuggling conviction has left his career and reputation in tatters. How did things unravel so dramatically for a player once tipped for the top?

Hailed by legendary Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger as a footballer who could “play anywhere”, Emmanuel-Thomas was marked out early on as having elite potential.

Imposing, technically gifted and surprisingly agile, the striker appeared to have the world at his feet.

But a career that promised so much at Arsenal faltered and saw him spend years flitting between the second and third tiers of English football.

In 2020 he moved to play in Scotland and was still plying his trade north of the border when, on 18 September, he was arrested at his home in Gourock, near Glasgow.

Sixteen days earlier, Border Force officers had stopped two women at London Stansted Airport and found drugs in their cases.

It was not a minor haul; they were staring at cannabis with a street value of £600,000.

How did it get there? The evidence soon led detectives to Emmanuel-Thomas.

Wind back a decade and a half, and things were very different.

It is 26 May 2009, and Arsenal’s latest batch of academy talents can barely contain their excitement.

The young prospects, including Jack Wilshere and Francis Coquelin, have just won the FA Youth Cup.

One player in particular has stood out: their 16-year-old captain, Emmanuel-Thomas, who has scored in every round of the competition.

“These young men have a very bright future indeed,” remarked one commentator.

But despite going on to make five first-team appearances, it was not quite to be for Emmanuel-Thomas.

He was shipped out on several loans before leaving the north London club for Ipswich Town.

It was a move that excited supporters in Suffolk, who were keen to see what the former Arsenal starlet could produce.

However, 71 games and eight goals later, Emmanuel-Thomas had not quite made the mark fans hoped for, and he moved to Bristol City in a player exchange deal.

Here, he helped the Robins secure promotion to the Championship and became something of a cult hero, scoring 21 goals in his first season.

A move to Queens Park Rangers followed, with subsequent loan spells at MK Dons and Gillingham.

But in 2019, Emmanuel-Thomas accepted a transfer to a Thai-based team that would alter the course of his life.

It is believed he was tempted into the country’s drugs underworld while playing for PTT Rayong, a club that folded in the same year.

Despite later moves to an Indian side and several Scottish outfits, including Aberdeen, Emmanuel-Thomas never shook off the criminal connections he made.

By the time he took a six-month contract at Greenock Morton, a 40-minute drive from Glasgow, the game was almost up.

As he lined up for them against Queens Park on 14 September, he would have surely known the law was about to catch up with him.

The women arrested at Stansted were his 33-year-old girlfriend, Yasmin Piotrowska, and her friend Rosie Rowland, 28.

Emmanuel Thomas, by then 33, appeared in court charged with orchestrating the attempted importation of drugs, and was sacked by his club.

Detectives discovered he had duped Ms Piotrowska, from north-west London, and Ms Rowland, from Chelmsford, into travelling to Thailand with the promise of £2,500 in cash and an all-expenses-paid trip.

Their job? To bring home two suitcases each, filled with what they were assured was gold, Chelmsford Crown Court heard.

They flew business class from Bangkok, landing in Essex via Dubai.

Unknown to them, they were smuggling in cannabis with a street value of £600,000, vacuum-packed inside the four cases.

The pair were stopped and arrested by Border Force officers, before being charged with drug importation offences.

With the pair in custody, and Emmanuel-Thomas later remanded, police probed how the drugs made it to the UK.

They soon found the player was the intermediary between suppliers in Thailand and dealers in the UK, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

With the footballer’s encouragement, the women had also made a near-identical trip in July, having been made similar promises of cash and a lavish holiday.

On his way to custody, Emmanuel-Thomas even told NCA officers: “I just feel sorry for the girls.”

His first court hearing in September was told he carried out “extensive research” into flights and directions, including which airports the women had been going to.

David Philips, a senior NCA investigator, said “organised criminals like Emmanuel-Thomas” used persuasion and payment to get people to do their dirty work.

“But the risk of getting caught is very high and it simply isn’t worth it,” he added.

During several court appearances, Emmanuel-Thomas, of Cardwell Road, Gourock, strenuously denied attempting to import cannabis.

However, he changed his plea to guilty at the start of May and restrictions on reporting this were lifted on Wednesday.

Charges against both Ms Piotrowska and Ms Rowland were dropped after the prosecution revealed they had been tricked by Emmanuel-Thomas.

It followed what David Josse KC described as a “very thorough investigation”.

Emmanuel-Thomas appeared via video link from HMP Chelmsford at his latest court hearing.

When he returns to court for sentencing, on a date still to be confirmed, it will not be his first time in the spotlight.

But it will be for very different reasons to the day he lifted that trophy aloft in 2009.

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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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.”

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.

Andriy Portnov’s murder in a Madrid suburb has shocked Ukrainians, but it has not exactly triggered an outpouring of grief.

The controversial former official had just dropped his children off at the American School when he was shot several times in the car park.

The image of his lifeless body lying face down in a gym kit marked the end of a life synonymous with Ukrainian corruption and Russian influence.

Ukraine’s media have been discussing the 51-year-old’s frequent threats to journalists, as well as his huge influence under the country’s last pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.

“A man who called for the killing of political opponents suddenly got what he wanted from others,” observed reporter Oleksandr Holubov. News website Ukrayinska Pravda even called him “the devil’s advocate”.

Rare words of restraint came from Portnov’s once political rival Serhiy Vlasenko, an MP, who said: “You can’t kill people. When discussing someone’s death, we must remain human.”

Portnov was controversial and widely disliked. The motives for his murder may seem evident, but his death has still left unanswered questions.

Before entering Ukrainian politics, Portnov ran a law firm. He worked with then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko until 2010, before defecting to Yanukovych’s camp when he won the election.

“It was a big story of betrayal,” remembers Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykh. “Because Tymoshenko was a pro-Western politician, and Yanukovych pro-Russian.”

The adviser became the country’s first deputy head of the Presidential Office and set up a national criminal code in 2012. For him, his critics say, his ascent was less about politics, and more about power and influence.

“He was just a good lawyer, everyone knew he was very smart,” Kristina tells me.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Ukraine inherited a judicial system in desperate need of reform. Mykhailo Zhernakov, a legal expert and head of the Dejure Foundation believes Portnov remoulded it in order for the government to cover up illegal schemes, and to mask Russian attempts to control the country.

“He was the kingpin, mastermind and architect of this corrupt legal system designed to serve the pro-Russian administration at the time,” he says.

Over a decade, Portnov would sue journalists who wrote negative stories about him through the courts and judges he controlled. His attempts to control the judicial system would lead to him being sanctioned by the US.

At the time, Washington accused the adviser of placing loyal officials in senior positions for his own benefit, as well as “buying court decisions”.

Portnov later pursued activists who took part in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which toppled Viktor Yanukovych from power, and forced him to escape the country to Russia.

“He used sexual threats,” says Oksana Romaniuk who remembers her and other journalists’ interactions with Portnov well.

As director of the Institute of Mass Information, she monitors free speech in Ukraine.

Whenever a damning report was published, the reaction was familiar and consistent. “When people exposed his corruption, he accused them of fake news,” she says.

“Even when journalists had documents and testimonies backing up the allegations, it was impossible to win the lawsuits in court. It was impossible to defend yourself. It was a rotten system.”

Andriy Portnov eventually settled in Moscow after his old boss Yanukovych fled in 2014. Investigative reporter Maksym Savchuk subsequently investigated his ties to Moscow, as well as his extensive property portfolio there.

“He responded with words I don’t want to quote, derogatory ones about my mother,” he remembers. “It’s a trait of his character; he is a very vindictive person.”

Even after leaving Ukraine, Portnov still tried to influence Ukrainian politics by taking control of pro-Kremlin TV channel NewsOne.

He returned in 2019, only to flee again with the full-scale invasion in 2022.

The irony of Portnov eventually settling in Spain and sending his children to a prestigious American school has not been lost on many.

Alongside the undisguised delight in Portnov’s death, there has been endless speculation over who was responsible.

“It could have been the Russians because he knew so many things,” suggests legal expert Mykhailo Zhernakov.

“He was involved in so many shady Russian operations it could be them or other criminal groups. He managed to annoy a lot of people,” he says.

Despite the motives being clearer on this side of the border, Ukrainian security sources appear to be trying to distance themselves from the killing.

Kyiv has previously carried out assassinations in Russian-occupied territory and in Russia itself, but not in Spain.

Some Spanish media reports suggest his murder was not political, but rather over “economic reasons or revenge”.

“You can imagine how many people need to be interrogated in order to narrow down the suspects,” thinks Maskym Savchuk. “Because this person has a thousand and one enemies.”

In Ukraine, Portnov is seen as someone who helped Russia form the foundations for its invasion. A once general dislike of him has only been intensified since 2022.

Despite this, Mykhailo Zhernakov hopes his death is also an opportunity for wider judicial reforms.

“Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean his influence has,” he warns. “Because many of the people he appointed or helped get jobs are still in the system.”

“A lot of people ask me: ‘Father Moses, how can I increase my manliness to absurd levels?'”

In a YouTube video, a priest is championing a form of virile, unapologetic masculinity.

Skinny jeans, crossing your legs, using an iron, shaping your eyebrows, and even eating soup are among the things he derides as too feminine.

There are other videos of Father Moses McPherson – a powerfully-built father of five – weightlifting to the sound of heavy metal.

He was raised a Protestant and once worked as a roofer, but now serves as a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in Georgetown, Texas, an offshoot of the mother church in Moscow.

ROCOR, a global network with headquarters in New York, has recently been expanding across parts of the US – mainly as a result of people converting from other faiths.

In the last six months, Father Moses has prepared 75 new followers for baptism in his church of the Mother of God, just north of Austin.

“When my wife and I converted 20 years ago we used to call Orthodoxy the best-kept secret, because people just didn’t know what it was,” he says.

“But in the past year-and-a-half our congregation has tripled in size.”

During the Sunday liturgy at Father Moses’s church, I am struck by the number of men in their twenties and thirties praying and crossing themselves at the back of the nave, and how this religion – with traditions dating back to the 4th century AD – seems to attract young men uneasy with life in modern America.

Software engineer Theodore tells me he had a dream job and a wife he adored, but he felt empty inside, as if there was a hole in his heart. He believes society has been “very harsh” on men and is constantly telling them they are in the wrong. He complains that men are criticised for wanting to be the breadwinner and support a stay-at-home wife.

“We are told that’s a very toxic relationship nowadays,” Theodore says. “That’s not how it should be.”

Almost all the converts I meet have opted to home-school their offspring, partly because they believe women should prioritise their families rather than their careers.

Father John Whiteford, an archpriest in the ROCOR from Spring, north of Houston, says home-schooling ensures a religious education and is “a way of protecting your children”, while avoiding any talk about “transgenderism, or the 57 genders of the month or whatever”.

Compared to the millions of worshippers in America’s evangelical megachurches, the numbers of Christian Orthodox are tiny – only about one percent of the population. That includes Eastern Orthodoxy, as practised across Russia, Ukraine, eastern Europe and Greece, and the Oriental Orthodox from the Middle East and Africa.

Founded by priests and clergy fleeing the Russian Revolution in 1917, ROCOR is seen by many as the most conservative Orthodox jurisdiction in the US. Yet this small religious community is a vocal one, and what’s unfolding within it mirrors broader political shifts, especially following President Donald Trump’s dramatic pivot toward Moscow.

The true increase in the number of converts is hard to quantify, but data from the Pew Research Centre suggests Orthodox Christians are 64% male, up from 46% in 2007.

A smaller study of 773 converts appears to back the trend. Most recent newcomers are men, and many say the pandemic pushed them to seek a new faith. That survey is from the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), which was established by Russian monks in Alaska in the late 18th Century and now has more than 700 parishes, missions, communities, monasteries, and institutions in the US, Canada and Mexico which identify as Russian Orthodox.

Professor Scott Kenworthy, who studies the history and thought of Eastern Orthodox Christianity – particularly in modern Russia – says his OCA parish in Cincinnati “is absolutely bursting at the seams”.

He’s attended the same church for 24 years and says congregation numbers remained steady until the Covid lockdown. Since then, there has been constant flow of new inquirers and people preparing to be baptised, known as catechumens.

“This is not just a phenomenon of my own parish, or a few places in Texas,” Prof Kenworthy says, “it is definitely something broader.”

The digital space is key in this wave of new converts. Father Moses has a big following online – when he shares a picture of a positive pregnancy test on his Instagram feed he gets 6,000 likes for announcing the arrival of his sixth child.

But there are dozens of other podcasts and videos presented by Orthodox clergy and an army of followers – mainly male.

Father Moses tells his congregation there are two ways of serving God – being a monk or a nun, or getting married. Those who take the second path should avoid contraception and have as many children as possible.

“Show me one saint in the history of the Church who ever blessed any kind of birth control,” Father Moses says. As for masturbation – or what the church calls self-abuse – the priest condemns it as “pathetic and unmanly”.

Father Moses says Orthodoxy is “not masculine, it is just normal”, while “in the West everything has become very feminised”. Some Protestant churches, he believes, mainly cater for women.

“I don’t want to go to services that feel like a Taylor Swift concert,” Father Moses says.” If you look at the language of the ‘worship music’, it’s all emotion – that’s not men.”

Elissa Bjeletich Davis, a former Protestant who now belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church in Austin, is a Sunday school teacher and has her own podcast. She says many converts belong to “the anti-woke crowd” and sometimes have strange ideas about their new faith – especially those in the Russian Church.

“They see it as a military, rigid, disciplinary, masculine, authoritarian religion,” Elissa says. “It’s kind of funny. It’s almost as if the old American Puritans and their craziness is resurfacing.”

Buck Johnson has worked as a firefighter for 25 years and hosts the Counterflow podcast.

He says he was initially scared to enter his local Russian Orthodox Church as he “looks different, covered in tattoos”, but tells me he was welcomed with open arms. He was also impressed the church stayed open throughout the Covid lockdown.

Sitting on a couch in front of two huge TV screens at his home in Lockhart, he says his newfound faith is changing his view of the world.

“Negative American views on Russia are what worry me,” Buck says. He tells me the mainstream, “legacy” media presents a distorted picture of the invasion of Ukraine.

“I think there’s a holdover from the boomer generation here in America that lived through the Cold War,” Buck says, “and I don’t quite grasp why – but they say Russia’s bad.”

The head of the Russian Church in Moscow, Patriarch Kirill, has doggedly backed the invasion of Ukraine, calling it a Holy War, and expressing little compassion for its victims. When I ask Archpriest Father John Whiteford about Russia’s top cleric, who many see as a warmonger, he assures me the Patriarch’s words have been distorted.

Footage and photographs of Putin quoting Bible verses, holding candles during services in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and stripping down to his swim trunks to plunge into icy water at Epiphany, seem to have struck a chord. Some – in America and other countries – see Russia as the last bastion of true Christianity.

Nearly a decade ago, another Orthodox convert turned priest from Texas, Father Joseph Gleason, moved from America to Borisoglebskiy, a village four hours’ drive north of Moscow, with his wife and eight children.

“Russia does not have homosexual marriage, it does not have civil unions, it is a place where you can home-school your kids and – of course – I love the thousand-year history of Orthodox Christianity here,” he told a Russian video host.

This wispy-bearded Texan is in the vanguard of a movement urging conservatives to relocate to Russia. Last August, Putin introduced fast-track shared values visa for those fleeing Western liberalism.

Back in Texas, Buck tells me he and his fellow converts are turning their backs on instant gratification and American consumerism.

“We’re thinking of things long term,” Buck says, “like traditions, love for your family, love for you community, love for neighbours.

“I think that orthodoxy fits us well – and especially in Texas.”

A decade ago, a portrait of the British monarch caused a row in Canadian politics. Now, the King is being invited to deliver the Speech from the Throne. What’s changed?

In 2011, shortly after forming a majority Conservative government, Prime Minister Stephen Harper caused a national uproar when he sought to emphasise Canada’s ties to the British monarchy. In one example, he replaced two artworks by a Quebec painter with a portrait of the Queen.

Some rebuked the gesture as being out of touch with modern times. Canada has, throughout its 157-year-old history, sought increasing independence from the British monarchy, while still remaining a part of the Commonwealth.

When Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau succeeded Harper four years later, the Queen’s portrait went down, the Quebec paintings, back up.

Fast forward to 2025, and a paradoxical shift has occurred in Canada’s relationship with the Crown. In a transparent show of Canada’s sovereignty and independence against threats from US President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Mark Carney – a Liberal – has invited King Charles the III to open the 45th Canadian parliament.

• King Charles uses symbols to show support for Canada
• The strategy behind Carney’s invite to the King

The move is “a huge affirmation and statement about the uniqueness of Canada and its traditions,” Justin Vovk, a Canadian royal historian, told the BBC – “a theatrical display that is meant to show what makes Canadians separate from Americans” and not, as Trump has often repeated, a “51st state”.

Both countries are former British colonies, but America’s founding fathers took a different path and severed all formal connections to the Crown nearly 250 years ago.

Canada’s separation from the monarchy has been more gradual, and its ties have never been completely broken. Canada’s parliamentary system is modelled after Britain’s Westminster system. The British monarch is still formally the head of state, but their duties are often carried out by their Canadian representative, called the governor general.

Loyalty to the Crown was seen as important to Canada’s politicians in the 19th Century who wanted to maintain separation from the US, said Canadian royal historian and commentator Carolyn Harris.

That later changed in the 1960s, as Quebec – Canada’s majority French-speaking province – began to assert its own distinct identity and threatened separation. This led to an era of politicians like Lester B Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau who worked to untangle Canada from its British colonial past.

In 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau repatriated Canada’s constitution, giving full legislative power to the federal government and the provinces, and removing it from British parliament.

Ms Harris noted that Canada remained a constitutional monarchy throughout these periods. What fluctuated, however, was how much the prime minister of the day chooses to embrace that connection.

Carney’s invite to King Charles III signals that his government will be one that is much more supportive of the Crown, Mr Vovk said, marking “a very different tone” from previous Liberals.

A British monarch has not delivered Canada’s throne speech since 1977, and has not opened a brand new session of parliament since 1957, making the King’s upcoming visit a truly rare occasion.

It comes at a consequential time for Canada.

Carney heavily campaigned on standing up to Trump, after the US president spent months undermining Canada’s sovereignty by saying it would be better off as a US state.

Trump also imposed a series of tariffs that have threatened Canada’s economic stability, given that the US is its largest trade partner by far.

When announcing the visit last month, Carney called it “a historic honour that matches the weight of our times”.

He added that the King’s visit “clearly underscores the sovereignty of our country”.

Both historians, Mr Vovk and Ms Harris, noted that the bulk of Canada’s modern population is indifferent to the British monarchy. Some are even critical of it.

The coronation of King Charles III in 2023 made way for fresh scrutiny of the Crown’s historic mistreatment of indigenous people in Canada, and questions on whether the new monarch will move towards reconciliation.

Quebec politicians are also still calling for Canada to cut ties with the monarchy. On Friday, the separatist Bloc Québécois party said it will again seek to scrap the need for elected officials to swear allegiance to the King.

Some Canadians will be intrigued by the pomp and pageantry of the King’s visit, Mr Vovk said, but its chief purpose is to send a political message from Canada to the world.

It is also a way for Prime Minister Carney to improve the relationship with Trump, who is famously a fan of the British monarchy and its history.

“Strengthening the relationship with the monarchy puts a stamp on legitimacy that transcends individual parties and the current political climate,” Mr Vovk said. “Politicians come and go, but the monarchy has always remained.”

It also works to tie Canada closer to Europe – a key objective of Prime Minister Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, who has spoken about the need for Canada to find new allies as it navigates its changing relationship with the US.

The visit is notable for the Crown, too.

It will be the King’s first to Canada as reigning monarch. He and the Queen had intended to visit last year, but cancelled their plans due to his cancer diagnosis.

The palace has promised a throne speech that will “mark a significant moment between the Head of State and the Canadian people”.

And while it will be a short trip – the King and Queen will arrive Monday morning and depart Tuesday evening – the palace said they hope the trip will be “an impactful one”.

North Korea has detained three shipyard officials over an accident during the launch of a new warship on Wednesday, state media has reported.

Parts of the 5,000-ton destroyer’s bottom were crushed during the launch ceremony, tipping the vessel off balance.

An investigation into the incident, which North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un described as a “criminal act”, is ongoing.

KCNA, North Korea’s official news agency, identified those detained as the chief engineer of the northern Chongjin shipyard where the destroyer was built, as well as the construction head and an administrative manager.

The report said that the three were “responsible for the accident”.

On Friday, KCNA said the manager of the shipyard, Hong Kil Ho, had been summoned by law enforcers.

Satellite images showed the vessel lying on its side covered by large blue tarpaulins, and a portion of the vessel appeared to be on land.

North Korea’s state media did not mention any casualties or injuries at the time, downplaying the damage.

KCNA reported that there were no holes on the ship’s bottom – contrary to initial reports.

“The hull starboard was scratched and a certain amount of seawater flowed into the stern section,” the agency said.

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

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

It is 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.

Founded in 1600 as a trading enterprise, the English East India company gradually transformed into a colonial power.

By the late 18th Century, as it tightened its grip on India, company officials began commissioning Indian artists – many formerly employed by the Mughals – to create striking visual records of the land they were now ruling.

A Treasury of Life: Indian Company Paintings, c. 1790 to 1835, an ongoing show in the Indian capital put together by Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), features over 200 works that once lay on the margins of mainstream art history. It is India’s largest exhibition of company paintings, highlighting their rich diversity and the skill of Indian artists.

Painted by largely unnamed artists, these paintings covered a wide range of subjects, but mainly fall into three categories: natural history, like botanical studies; architecture, including monuments and scenic views of towns and landscapes; and Indian manners and customs.

“The focus on these three subject areas reflects European engagements with their Indian environment in an attempt to come to terms with all that was unfamiliar to Western eyes,” says Giles Tillotson of DAG, who curated the show.

“Europeans living in India were delighted to encounter flora and fauna that were new to them, and ancient buildings in exotic styles. They met – or at least observed – multitudes of people whose dress and habits were strange but – as they began to discern – were linked to stream of religious belief and social practice.”

Beyond natural history, India’s architectural heritage captivated European visitors.

Before photography, paintings were the best way to document travels, and iconic Mughal monuments became prime subjects. Patrons soon turned to skilled local artists.

Beyond the Taj Mahal, popular subjects included Agra Fort, Jama Masjid, Buland Darwaza, Sheikh Salim Chishti’s tomb at Fatehpur Sikri (above), and Delhi’s Qutub Minar and Humayun’s Tomb.

The once-obscure and long-anonymous Indian artist Sita Ram, who painted the tomb, was one of them.

From June 1814 to early October 1815, Sita Ram travelled extensively with Francis Rawdon, also known as the Marquess of Hastings, who had been appointed as the governor general in India in 1813 and held the position for a decade. (He is not to be confused with Warren Hastings, who served as India’s first governor general much earlier.)

The largest group in this collection is a set of botanical watercolours, likely from Murshidabad or Maidapur (in present-day West Bengal).

While Murshidabad was the Nawab of Bengal’s capital, the East India Company operated there. In the late 18th century, nearby Maidapur briefly served as a British base before Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) rise eclipsed it.

Originally part of the Louisa Parlby Album – named after the British woman who compiled it while her husband, Colonel James Parlby, served in Bengal – the works likely date to the late 18th Century, before Louisa’s return to Britain in 1801.

“The plants represented in the paintings are likely quite illustrative of what could be found growing in both the well-appointed gardens as well as the more marginal spaces of common greens, waysides and fields in the Murshidabad area during the late eighteenth century,” writes Nicolas Roth of Harvard University.

“These are familiar plants, domestic and domesticated, which helped constitute local life worlds and systems of meaning, even as European patrons may have seen them mainly as exotica to be collected.”

Another painting from the collection is of a temple procession showing a Shiva statue on an ornate platform carried by men, flanked by Brahmins and trumpeters.

At the front, dancers with sticks perform under a temporary gateway, while holy water is poured on them from above.

Labeled Ouricaty Tirounal, it depicts a ritual from Thirunallar temple in Karaikal in southern India, capturing a rare moment from a 200-year-old tradition.

By the late 18th Century, company paintings had become true collaborations between European patrons and Indian artists.

Art historian Mildred Archer called them a “fascinating record of Indian social life,” blending the fine detail of Mughal miniatures with European realism and perspective.

Regional styles added richness – Tanjore artists, for example, depicted people of various castes, shown with tools of their trade. These albums captured a range of professions – nautch girls, judges, sepoys, toddy tappers, and snake charmers.

“They catered to British curiosity while satisfying European audience’s fascination with the ‘exoticism’ of Indian life,” says Kanupriya Sharma of DAG.

Most studies of company painting focus on British patronage, but in south India, the French were commissioning Indian artists as early as 1727.

A striking example is a set of 48 paintings from Pondicherry – uniform in size and style – showing the kind of work French collectors sought by 1800.

One painting (above) shows 10 men in hats and loincloths rowing through surf. A French caption calls them nageurs (swimmers) and the boat a chilingue.

Among the standout images are two vivid scenes by an artist known as B, depicting boatmen navigating the rough Coromandel coast in stitched-plank rowboats.

With no safe harbours near Madras or Pondicherry, these skilled oarsmen were vital to European trade, ferrying goods and people through dangerous surf between anchored ships and the shore.

Company paintings often featured natural history studies, portraying birds, animals, and plants – especially from private menageries.

As seen in the DAG show, these subjects are typically shown life-size against plain white backgrounds, with minimal surroundings – just the occasional patch of grass. The focus remains firmly on the species itself.

Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG says the the latest show proposes company paintings as the “starting point of Indian modernism”.

Anand says this “was the moment when Indian artists who had trained in courtly ateliers first moved outside the court (and the temple) to work for new patrons”.

“The agendas of those patrons were not tied up with courtly or religious concerns; they were founded on scientific enquiry and observation,” he says.

“Never mind that the patrons were foreigners. What should strike us now is how Indian artists responded to their demands, creating entirely new templates of Indian art.”

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.

It was supposed to be a defining, catalytic moment for French society.

Horrific, but unmissable. Unignorable.

The seaside town of Vannes, in southern Brittany, had carefully prepared a special venue and a separate overflow amphitheatre for the occasion.

Hundreds of journalists were accredited for a process that would, surely, dominate headlines in France throughout its three-month duration and force a queasy public to confront a crime too often shunted to the sidelines.

Comparisons were quickly made with – and expectations tied to – last year’s Pelicot mass rape trial in southern France and the massive global attention it garnered.

Instead, the trial of France’s most prolific known paedophile, Joel Le Scouarnec – a retired surgeon who has admitted in court to raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, almost all of them children – is coming to an end this Wednesday amid widespread frustration.

“I’m exhausted. I’m angry. Right now, I don’t have much hope. Society seems totally indifferent. It’s frightening to think [the rapes] could happen again,” one of Le Scouarnec’s victims, Manon Lemoine, 36, told the BBC.

Ms Lemoine and some 50 other victims, stung by an apparent lack of public interest in the trial, have formed their own campaign group to pressure the French authorities, accusing the government of ignoring a “landmark” case which exposed a “true laboratory of institutional failures”.

The group has questioned why a parliamentary commission has not been set up, as in other high-profile abuse cases, and spoken of being made to feel “invisible”, as if “the sheer number of victims prevented us from being recognised.”

Some of the victims, most of whom had initially chosen to testify anonymously, have now decided to reveal their identities in public – even posing for photos on the courthouse steps – in the hope of jolting France into paying more attention and, perhaps, learning lessons about a culture of deference that helped a prestigious surgeon to rape with impunity for decades.

The crimes for which Le Scouarnec is on trial all occurred between 1998 and 2014.

“It’s not normal that I should have to show my face. [But] I hope that what we’re doing now will change things. That’s why we decided to rise up, to make our voices heard,” said Ms Lemoine.

So, what has gone wrong?

Were the horrors too extreme, the subject matter too unremittingly grim or simply too uncomfortable to contemplate?

Why, when the whole world knows the name of Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot, has a trial with significantly more victims – child victims abused under the noses of the French medical establishment – passed by with what feels like little more than a collective shudder?

Why does the world not know the name Joel Le Scouarnec?

“The Le Scouarnec case is not mobilising a lot of people. Perhaps because of the number of victims. We hear the disappointment, the lack of wide mobilisation, which is a pity,” said Maëlle Nori, from feminist NGO (All of Us).

Some observers have reflected on the absence in this case of a single, totemic figure like Gisèle Pelicot, whose public courage caught the public imagination and enabled people to find some light in an otherwise bleak story.

Others have reached more devastating conclusions.

“The issue is that this trial is about sexual abuse of children.

There’s a virtual on this topic globally, but particularly in France. “We simply don’t want to acknowledge it,” Myriam Guedj-Benayoun, a lawyer representing several of Le Scouarnec’s victims, told me.

In her closing arguments to the court, Ms Guedj-Benayoun condemned what she called France’s “systemic, organised silence” regarding child abuse.

She spoke of a patriarchal society in which men in respected positions like medicine remained almost beyond reproach and pointed to “the silence of those who knew, those who looked the other way, and those who could have – should have – raised the alarm”.

The depravity exposed during the trial has been astonishing – too much for many to stomach.

The court in Vannes has heard in excruciating detail how Le Scouarnec, 74, wallowed in his paedophilia, carefully detailing each child rape in a succession of black notebooks, often preying on his vulnerable young patients while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from surgery.

The court has also been told of the retired surgeon’s growing isolation, and of what his own lawyer described as “your descent into hell”, in the final decade before he was caught, in 2017, after abusing a neighbour’s six-year-old daughter.

By the end, alone in a filthy house, drinking heavily and ostracised by many of his relatives, Le Scouarnec was spending much of his time watching violent images of child rape online, and obsessing over a collection of lifelike child-sized dolls.

“I was emotionally attached to them… They did what I wanted,” Le Scouarnec told the court in his quiet monotone.

A few blocks from the courthouse, in an adapted civic hall, journalists have watched the proceedings unfold on a television screen. In recent days, the seats have begun to fill up and coverage of the trial has increased as it moves towards a close.

Many commentators have noted how the Le Scouarnec trial, like the Pelicot case, has exposed the deep institutional failings which enabled the surgeon to continue his rapes long after they could have been detected and stopped.

Dominique Pelicot had been caught “upskirting” in a supermarket in 2010 and his DNA quickly linked to an attempted rape in 1999 – a fact that, astonishingly, wasn’t followed up for a whole decade.

At Le Scouarnec’s trial a succession of medical officials have explained – some ashamedly, others self-servingly – how an overstretched rural healthcare system chose, for years, to ignore the fact that the surgeon had been reported by America’s FBI in 2004 after using a credit card to pay to download videos of child rapes on his computer.

“I was advised not to talk about such and such a person,” said one doctor who’d tried to sound the alarm.

“There is a shortage of surgeons, and those who show up are welcomed like the messiah,” explained a hospital director.

“I messed up, I admit it, like the whole hierarchy,” a different administrator finally conceded.

Another connection between the Pelicot and Le Scouarnec cases is what they’ve both revealed about our understanding – or lack of understanding – of trauma.

Without warning or support, Gisèle Pelicot had been abruptly confronted by police with the video evidence of her own drugging and rapes.

Later, during the trial, some defence lawyers and other commentators sought to minimise her suffering by pointing to the fact that she’d been unconscious during the rapes – as if trauma only exists, like a wound, when its scar is visible to the naked eye.

In the Le Scouarnec case, French police appear to have gone about searching for the paedophile’s many victims in a similarly brusque manner, summoning people for an unexplained interview and then informing them, out of the blue, that they’d been listed in the surgeon’s notebooks.

The reactions of Le Scouarnec’s many victims have varied widely. Some have simply chosen not to engage with the trial, or with a childhood experience of which they have no memory.

For others, news of the abuse has affected them profoundly.

“You’ve entered my head, it’s destroying me. I’ve become a different person – one I don’t recognise,” said a victim, addressing Le Scouarnec in court.

“I have no memories and I’m already damaged,” said another.

“It turned me upside down,” a policeman admitted.

And then there is a different group of people who – not unlike Gisèle Pelicot – have found that knowledge of their abuse has been revelatory, enabling them to make sense of things they had not previously understood about themselves or their lives.

Some have connected their childhood abuse to a general sense of unhappiness, or poor behaviour, or failure in life.

For others, the links have been much more specific, helping to explain a litany of mysterious symptoms and behaviours, from a fear of intimacy to repeated genital infections and eating disorders.

“With my boyfriend, every time we have sex, I vomit,” one woman revealed in court.

“I had so many after-effects from my operation. But no-one could explain why I had this irrational fear of hospitals,” said another victim, Amélie.

Some have described the trial itself as being like a group therapy session, with victims bonding over shared traumas which they’d previously believed they were suffering alone.

“This trial is like a clinical laboratory involving 300 victims. I sincerely hope it will change France. In any case it will change the victims’ perception of trauma and traumatic memory,” said the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun.

Despite her concerns about the lack of public interest, Manon Lemoine said the trial had helped the victims “to rebuild ourselves, to turn a page. We lay out our pain and our experiences and we leave it behind [in the courtroom]. So, for me, really, it was liberating.”

Having confessed to his crimes, Le Scouarnec will inevitably receive a guilty verdict and will almost certainly remain in prison for the rest of his life.

Two of his victims took their own lives some years before the trial – a fact which he acknowledged in court with the same penitent but formulaic apology that he’s offered to everyone else.

Meanwhile, some activists remain hopeful that the case will prove to be a turning point in French society.

“Compared to the Pelicot trial… we can see we don’t talk very much about the Le Scouarnec case. We need to unite. We have to do this, otherwise nothing will happen, and the Le Scouarnec trial will have served no purpose. I was also a victim as a child. We’re obliged to react and to organise ourselves,” said Arnaud Gallais, a child rights campaigner and founder of the Mouv’Enfants NGO.

A more wary assessment came from the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun.

“Now, there is a very important standoff between those who want to denounce child sexual violence and those who want to cover it up, and this standoff is taking place today in this trial. Who will win?” she wondered.

As a footballer, Jay Emmanuel-Thomas seemed destined for greatness. But a drug-smuggling conviction has left his career and reputation in tatters. How did things unravel so dramatically for a player once tipped for the top?

Hailed by legendary Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger as a footballer who could “play anywhere”, Emmanuel-Thomas was marked out early on as having elite potential.

Imposing, technically gifted and surprisingly agile, the striker appeared to have the world at his feet.

But a career that promised so much at Arsenal faltered and saw him spend years flitting between the second and third tiers of English football.

In 2020 he moved to play in Scotland and was still plying his trade north of the border when, on 18 September, he was arrested at his home in Gourock, near Glasgow.

Sixteen days earlier, Border Force officers had stopped two women at London Stansted Airport and found drugs in their cases.

It was not a minor haul; they were staring at cannabis with a street value of £600,000.

How did it get there? The evidence soon led detectives to Emmanuel-Thomas.

Wind back a decade and a half, and things were very different.

It is 26 May 2009, and Arsenal’s latest batch of academy talents can barely contain their excitement.

The young prospects, including Jack Wilshere and Francis Coquelin, have just won the FA Youth Cup.

One player in particular has stood out: their 16-year-old captain, Emmanuel-Thomas, who has scored in every round of the competition.

“These young men have a very bright future indeed,” remarked one commentator.

But despite going on to make five first-team appearances, it was not quite to be for Emmanuel-Thomas.

He was shipped out on several loans before leaving the north London club for Ipswich Town.

It was a move that excited supporters in Suffolk, who were keen to see what the former Arsenal starlet could produce.

However, 71 games and eight goals later, Emmanuel-Thomas had not quite made the mark fans hoped for, and he moved to Bristol City in a player exchange deal.

Here, he helped the Robins secure promotion to the Championship and became something of a cult hero, scoring 21 goals in his first season.

A move to Queens Park Rangers followed, with subsequent loan spells at MK Dons and Gillingham.

But in 2019, Emmanuel-Thomas accepted a transfer to a Thai-based team that would alter the course of his life.

It is believed he was tempted into the country’s drugs underworld while playing for PTT Rayong, a club that folded in the same year.

Despite later moves to an Indian side and several Scottish outfits, including Aberdeen, Emmanuel-Thomas never shook off the criminal connections he made.

By the time he took a six-month contract at Greenock Morton, a 40-minute drive from Glasgow, the game was almost up.

As he lined up for them against Queens Park on 14 September, he would have surely known the law was about to catch up with him.

The women arrested at Stansted were his 33-year-old girlfriend, Yasmin Piotrowska, and her friend Rosie Rowland, 28.

Emmanuel Thomas, by then 33, appeared in court charged with orchestrating the attempted importation of drugs, and was sacked by his club.

Detectives discovered he had duped Ms Piotrowska, from north-west London, and Ms Rowland, from Chelmsford, into travelling to Thailand with the promise of £2,500 in cash and an all-expenses-paid trip.

Their job? To bring home two suitcases each, filled with what they were assured was gold, Chelmsford Crown Court heard.

They flew business class from Bangkok, landing in Essex via Dubai.

Unknown to them, they were smuggling in cannabis with a street value of £600,000, vacuum-packed inside the four cases.

The pair were stopped and arrested by Border Force officers, before being charged with drug importation offences.

With the pair in custody, and Emmanuel-Thomas later remanded, police probed how the drugs made it to the UK.

They soon found the player was the intermediary between suppliers in Thailand and dealers in the UK, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).

With the footballer’s encouragement, the women had also made a near-identical trip in July, having been made similar promises of cash and a lavish holiday.

On his way to custody, Emmanuel-Thomas even told NCA officers: “I just feel sorry for the girls.”

His first court hearing in September was told he carried out “extensive research” into flights and directions, including which airports the women had been going to.

David Philips, a senior NCA investigator, said “organised criminals like Emmanuel-Thomas” used persuasion and payment to get people to do their dirty work.

“But the risk of getting caught is very high and it simply isn’t worth it,” he added.

During several court appearances, Emmanuel-Thomas, of Cardwell Road, Gourock, strenuously denied attempting to import cannabis.

However, he changed his plea to guilty at the start of May and restrictions on reporting this were lifted on Wednesday.

Charges against both Ms Piotrowska and Ms Rowland were dropped after the prosecution revealed they had been tricked by Emmanuel-Thomas.

It followed what David Josse KC described as a “very thorough investigation”.

Emmanuel-Thomas appeared via video link from HMP Chelmsford at his latest court hearing.

When he returns to court for sentencing, on a date still to be confirmed, it will not be his first time in the spotlight.

But it will be for very different reasons to the day he lifted that trophy aloft in 2009.

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.

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.”