On the surface, Muhammed Asif Hafeez was an upstanding individual.

A global businessman and ambassador of a prestigious London polo club, he rubbed shoulders with the British elite, including members of the Royal Family.

He also regularly passed on detailed information to the authorities in the UK and Middle East that, in some cases, led to the interception of huge shipments of drugs. He was motivated, he said, simply by what he saw as his “moral obligation to curb and highlight criminal activities”.

At least, that is what he would have had people think.

In reality, Hafeez was himself what US officials described as “one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers”.

From his residence in the UK, he was the puppet-master of a vast drugs empire, supplying many tonnes of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish from bases in Pakistan and India that were distributed across the world. The gangs he informed on were his rivals – and his motivation was to rid the market of his competitors.

His status in the underworld earned him the moniker “the Sultan”.

But this criminal power and prestige would not last forever. After a complex joint operation between the British and American authorities, Hafeez, 66, was extradited from the UK in 2023. He pleaded guilty last November.

On Friday, he was sentenced to 16 years in a New York prison for conspiring to import drugs – including enough heroin for “millions of doses” – into the US. Having been in custody since 2017, Hafeez’s sentence will end in 2033.

The BBC has closely followed Hafeez’s case. We have pieced together information from court documents, corporate listings and interviews with people who knew him.

We wanted to find out how he managed to stay under the radar for so long – and how he eventually got caught.

Hafeez was born in September 1958 to a middle-class family in Lahore, Pakistan. One of six children, his upbringing was comfortable. People in Lahore who knew the family told the BBC that his father had owned a factory near the city. Hafeez also later told a US court that he had trained as a commercial pilot.

From the early 1990s to about the mid-2010s, he ran an outwardly legitimate umbrella company called Sarwani International Corporation, with subsidiary businesses in Pakistan, the UAE and the UK.

According to its website – which has since been shut down – it sold technical equipment to militaries, governments and police forces throughout the world, including equipment for drug detection.

Among the other businesses under the Sarwani umbrella were a textiles company registered in various countries, an Italian restaurant in Lahore that was a franchise of a well-known Knightsbridge brand, and a company named Tipmoor, based near Windsor to the west of London, which specialised in “polo and equestrian services”.

These businesses not only afforded him a luxury lifestyle, but secured him access to the UK’s most exclusive circles. He was listed as an international ambassador for the prestigious Ham Polo Club for at least three years, from 2009 to 2011. He and his wife Shahina were also photographed chatting to Prince William, and embracing Prince Harry, at the club in 2009.

Ham Polo Club told the BBC that Hafeez had never been a member of the club, that the club no longer has “ambassadors”, and that the current board “has no ties to him”. It added that the event at which Hafeez and his wife were photographed meeting the princes “was run by a third party”.

Sarwani’s different global arms were dissolved at various stages in the 2010s, according to their listings on Companies House and equivalent global registries.

A former Sarwani employee based in the UAE told the BBC he suspected there had been “something fishy going on” when he worked for the business, because even big projects were “only paid for in cash”. The employee – who has asked not to be identified, for fear of reprisals – said he eventually left the business because he felt uncomfortable with this.

“There were no [bank] transactions, no records, no existence,” he told the BBC.

Hafeez would also periodically write letters to the authorities in the UAE and UK informing on rival cartels, under the guise of being a concerned member of the public.

The BBC has seen these, as well as letters he received in response from the British Embassy in Dubai and the UK Home Office, thanking him and expressing their appreciation for him getting in touch.

The Home Office told the BBC it does not comment on individual correspondence.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Government of Dubai were contacted by the BBC for comment but did not respond.

Members of Hafeez’s family shared these letters with the BBC in 2018, while he was embroiled in a lengthy legal fight against extradition to the US.

They also submitted them to courts in the UK and, later, to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as evidence that he had been an informant and needed protection. All the courts disagreed and ruled that this was a ploy by Hafeez to rid the market of competitors.

Hafeez, the ECHR said, was “someone who had brought to the attention of the authorities the criminal conduct of others who he knew to be actual or potential rivals to his substantial criminal enterprise”.

While Hafeez was writing these letters, a meeting took place in 2014 that – despite him not being there – would lead to his downfall.

Two of Hafeez’s close associates met a potential buyer from Colombia in a flat in Mombasa, Kenya. They burned a small amount of heroin in order to demonstrate how pure it was, and said they could supply him with any quantity of “100%… white crystal”.

The supplier of this high-quality heroin, they had told the buyer, was a man from Pakistan known as “the Sultan” – that is, Hafeez.

What they would soon learn was that the “buyer” from Colombia was actually working undercover for the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The entire meeting was part of an elaborate sting operation, and had been covertly filmed – footage that has been obtained by the BBC.

US court documents reveal the deal was co-ordinated by Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha, two brothers who led a violent cartel in Kenya. Their father was himself a feared kingpin who had been killed in Amsterdam’s Red Light District in 2000.

The deal also involved Vijaygiri “Vicky” Goswami, an Indian national who managed the Akashas’ operations.

In October 2014, with the Akashas, Goswami and Hafeez still unaware of who the buyers really were, 99kg of heroin and 2kg of crystal meth were delivered to the fake Colombian traffickers. The Akashas promised to provide hundreds of kilograms more of each drug.

A month later, the Akasha brothers and Goswami were arrested in Mombasa. They were released on bail shortly afterwards, and spent over two years fighting extradition to the US.

In the background, American law enforcers were working with counterparts in the UK to piece together their case against Hafeez, partly using evidence gathered from devices they had seized when they arrested Goswami and the Akasha brothers. On those, they had found multiple references to Hafeez as a major supplier, and were able to find enough evidence to identify him as “the Sultan”.

Facing charges in the US didn’t stop one of the men, Goswami, from continuing his illegal enterprise. In 2015, while on bail in Kenya, he hatched a plan with Hafeez to transport several tonnes of a drug called ephedrine from a chemical factory in Solapur, India, to Mozambique.

Ephedrine, a powerful medication that is legal in limited quantities, is used to make methamphetamine. The two men – Goswami and Hafeez – planned to set up a meth factory in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, US court documents show. But their scheme was abandoned in 2016, when police raided the Solapur plant and seized 18 tonnes of ephedrine.

The Akasha brothers and Goswami finally boarded a flight to the US to face trial in January 2017.

Hafeez was arrested eight months later in London, at his flat in the affluent St John’s Wood neighbourhood. He was detained at high security Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, and it was from there that he spent six years fighting extradition to the US.

A big development happened in 2019 in the US. Goswami pleaded guilty, and told a New York court he had agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. The Akasha brothers also pleaded guilty.

Baktash Akasha was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His brother Ibrahim was sentenced to 23 years.

Goswami, who is yet to be sentenced, would have testified against Hafeez in the US had the case gone to trial.

From Belmarsh, Hafeez was running out of options.

He tried to stop extradition to the US – but failed to convince magistrates, the High Court in London and the ECHR that he had, in fact, been an informant to the authorities who was “at risk of ill-treatment from his fellow prisoners” as a result.

He also claimed the conditions in a US prison would be “inhuman and degrading” for him because of his health conditions, including type 2 diabetes and asthma.

He lost all of these arguments at every stage and was extradited in May 2023.

His case did not go to trial. In November last year, Hafeez pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to manufacture and distribute heroin, methamphetamine and hashish and to import them into the US.

Pre-sentencing, prosecutors described the “extremely fortunate circumstances” of Hafeez’s life, which “throw into harsh relief his decision to scheme… and to profit from the distribution of dangerous substances that destroy lives and whole communities”.

“Unlike many traffickers whose drug activities are borne, at least in part, from desperation, poverty, and a lack of educational opportunities,” they said, “the defendant has lived a life replete with privilege and choice.”

A 12-year-old boy fell to his death at Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher after slipping in a puddle close to the edge, an inquest has heard.

Zhihan Zhao and his mother, both Chinese nationals, were with her friends at the beauty spot on the County Clare coast on 23 July last year when he walked ahead of the group.

The coroner embraced Zhihan’s distraught mother after recording a verdict of accidental death.

The accident was the second fatal fall at the Cliffs of Moher within a three-month period last year.

Zhihan and his mother, Xianhong Huang, had arrived in Ireland 12 days before his fatal fall.

In her deposition, Ms Huang said that Zhihan was walking ahead of her on the Cliffs of Moher trail when she lost sight of him.

“My son walked very fast and was ahead of us by 50 metres,” she said.

“As there was only one path, I thought we would meet him along the way.

“When I didn’t, I walked to the visitor centre and I checked the visitor centre.”

Unable to find him at the visitor centre, she returned to the path to search for him and when there was no sign of him, she reported him missing.

Ms Huang said she had last seen Zhihan at 13:00 that day and the court heard she had provided gardaí (Irish police) with a photo of him she had taken earlier on the trail.

Speaking through an interpreter at the inquest in Kilrush, County Clare, Ms Huang, wiping away tears, asked: “What exactly caused Zhihan to fall from the cliffs?”

Clare County Coroner Isobel O’Dea told the grieving mother that the evidence of an eyewitness would help answer that question.

A French tourist who witnessed him fall told Clare Coroner’s Court she had seen him slip and try to pull himself up by grasping at grass, before he disappeared over the edge.

French tourist Marion Tourgon told the inquest she had witnessed the fall at about 13:45 that day.

Ms Tourgon explained she had been at the edge of the cliffs with her husband and two children, taking a selfie at the time.

She describing seeing a young Asian boy, who was alone, come into view.

“I saw him slipping in the puddle that appears in the photo that my husband sent to the police,” the witness said.

“His right foot slipped into the puddle, with him trying to stop himself from falling with his left foot but his left foot ended up in the air.”

Ms Tourgon added: “It was very quick – he found himself in an awkward position with his left foot in a void over the cliff and his right knee on the edge of the cliff.”

She continued: “His right knee eventually fell into the void over the cliff and he was trying to grasp the grass with his hands to pull himself up.

“He didn’t shout and there was no noise.”

The Tourgon family then phoned the emergency services.

An air, land and sea search operation began involving the Irish Coast Guard, gardaí and Irish civil defence volunteers who used boats, drones, divers and a helicopter.

A police witness, Garda Colm Collins, told the inquest he had received a call at 14:00 that day after a male was seen falling off the edge of the Cliffs of Moher.

He said that the Irish Coast Guard had spotted a body floating in the water at the base of the cliffs.

The court heard a lifeboat had been launched but had not been able to access the site where the body was spotted because of the sea conditions.

It was another five days before Zhihan’s body was eventually recovered from the sea.

The boy was found by a fisherman, Matthew O’Halloran, from Corofin, County Clare.

He spotted a body face down with arms extended in the water between Doolin and the Aran Islands shortly after 10:00 on 28 July.

Mr O’Halloran alerted the Irish Coast Guard and its members retrieved Zhihan’s body and brought it ashore at Doolin.

The coroner said post-mortem results had confirmed that Zhihan died from multiple traumatic injuries consistent with a fall from a height.

“It is clear from evidence we heard that Zhihan slipped off the cliffs rather than any other way. His death would have been very quick – instantaneous.”

Addressing the boy’s mother, she said: “I can’t imagine how upsetting this is for you.”

Ms O’Dea also extended her sympathies to Zhihan’s father who was not present at the inquest.

She embraced Ms Huang as she left the coroner’s court.

In May 2024, a student in her 20s lost her footing on the cliffs while walking with friends and fell to her death.

Since August last year, large sections of the Cliffs of Moher trail have been closed due to safety concerns.

At the time, the Clare Local Development Company confirmed that it was taking the action following the two fatal accidents.

When Elon Musk recently announced that he was stepping back from politics, investors hoped that would mean he would step up his involvement in the many tech firms he runs.

His explosive row with President Donald Trump – and the very public airing of his dirty White House laundry – suggests Musk’s changing priorities might not quite be the salve they had been hoping for.

Instead of Musk retreating somewhat from the public eye and focusing on boosting the fortunes of Tesla and his other enterprises, he now finds himself being threatened with a boycott from one of his main customers – Trump’s federal government.

Tesla shares were sent into freefall on Thursday – falling 14% – as he sounded off about President Donald Trump on social media.

They rebounded a little on Friday following some indications tempers were cooling.

Even so, for the investors and analysts who, for months, had made clear they wanted Musk off his phone and back at work, the situation is far from ideal.

Some though argue the problems for Musk’s businesses run much deeper than this spat – and the controversial role in the Trump administration it has brought a spectacular end to.

For veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, that is especially so for Tesla.

“Tesla’s finished,” she told the BBC on the sidelines of the San Francisco Media Summit early this week.

“It was a great car company. They could compete in the autonomous taxi space but they’re way behind.”

Tesla has long attempted to play catch-up against rival Waymo, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, whose driverless taxis have traversed the streets of San Francisco for years – and now operate in several more cities.

This month, Musk is supposed to be overseeing Tesla’s launch of a batch of autonomous robo-taxis in Austin, Texas.

He posted to X last week that the electric vehicle maker had been testing the Model Y with no drivers on board.

“I believe 90% of the future value of Tesla is going to be autonomous and robotics,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told the BBC this week, adding that the Austin launch would be “a watershed moment”.

“The first task at hand is ensuring the autonomous vision gets off to a phenomenal start,” Ives added.

• Who is Elon Musk?
• How the Trump-Musk feud erupted

But with Musk’s attention divided, the project’s odds of success would appear to have lengthened.

And there’s something else to factor in too: Musk’s own motivation.

The talk in Silicon Valley lately centres less on whether Musk can turn things around and more on whether he even cares.

“He’s a really powerful person when he’s focused on something,” said Ross Gerber, President and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management.

“Before, it was about proving to the world that he would make EVs – the tech that nobody else could do. It was about proving he could make rockets. He had a lot to prove.”

A longtime Tesla investor, Gerber has soured on the stock, and has been paring back his holdings since Musk’s foray into right-wing politics. He called Thursday an “extremely painful day.”

“It’s the dumbest thing you could possibly do to think that you have more power than the president of the United States,” Gerber said, referring to Musk’s social media tirade against Trump.

The BBC contacted X, Tesla, and SpaceX seeking comment from Mr Musk but did not receive a response.

A particular problem for Musk is that, before he seemingly created an enemy in Donald Trump, he already had one in the grassroots social media campaign against his car-maker.

Protests, dubbed #TeslaTakedown, have played out across the country every weekend since Trump took office.

In April, Tesla reported a 20% drop in car sales for the first three months of the year. Profits plunged more than 70%, and the share price went down with it.

“He should not be deciding the fate of our democracy by disassembling our government piece by piece. It’s not right,” protestor Linda Koistinen told me at a demonstration outside a Berkeley, California Tesla dealership in February.

Koistinen said she wanted to make a “visible stand” against Musk personally.

“Ultimately it’s not about the tech or the Tesla corporation,” said Joan Donovan, a prominent disinformation researcher who co-organized the #TeslaTakedown protests on social media.

“It’s about the way in which the stock of Tesla has been able to be weaponized against the people and it has put Musk in such a position to have an incredible amount of power with no transparency,” Donovan added.

Another aspect of Musk’s empire that has raised the ire of his detractors is X, the social media platform once known as Twitter.

“He bought Twitter so that he had clout and would be able to – at the drop of a hat – reach hundreds of millions of people,” Donovan said.

There is another possibility here though.

Could Musk’s high-profile falling out with Trump help rehabilitate him in the eyes of people who turned against him because of his previous closeness to the president?

Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, thinks it could.

“We’re a very forgiving country,” Moorhead says in a telephone interview.

“These things take time,” he acknowledges, but “it’s not unprecedented”.

Swisher likened Musk’s personal brand to that of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates more than two decades ago.

She said Gates was once regarded as “the Darth Vader of Silicon Valley” because of his “arrogant and rude” personality.

Today, despite his flaws, Gates has largely rehabilitated his image.

“He learned. He grew up. People can change,” Swisher told me, even though Musk is “clearly troubled.”

The problem for Musk is the future for him and his companies is not just about what he does – but what Trump decides too.

And while Trump needed Musk in the past, not least to help fund his presidential race, it’s not so clear he does now.

Noah Smith, writer of the Noahpinion Substack, said Trump’s highly lucrative foray into cryptocurrencies – as unseemly as it has been – may have freed him from depending on Musk to carry out his will.

“My guess is that this was so he could get out from under Elon,” Smith said.

In Trump’s most menacing comment of the day, he suggested cutting Musk’s government contracts, which have an estimated value of $38 billion.

A significant chunk of that goes to Musk’s rocket company SpaceX – seemingly threatening its future.

However, despite the bluster, Trump’s warning may be a little more hollow than it seems.

That’s because SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft ferries people and cargo to the International Space Station where three NASA astronauts are currently posted.

It demonstrates that SpaceX has so entrenched itself in the US space and national security apparatus, that Trump’s threat could be difficult to carry out.

You could make a similar argument about Musk’s internet satellite company, Starlink. Finding an alternative could be easier said than done.

But, if there are limits on what Trump can do, the same is also true of Musk.

In the middle of his row with Trump, he threatened to decommission the Dragon – but it wasn’t long before he was rowing back.

Responding to an X user’s suggestion he that he “cool down” he wrote, “Good advice. Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon.”

It’s clear Musk and Trump’s friendship is over. It’s less certain their reliance on each other is.

Whatever the future for Musk’s businesses is then, it seems Trump – and his administration’s actions – will continue to have a big say in them.

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Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old from El Salvador mistakenly deported in March, has been returned to the US to face prosecution on two federal criminal charges.

He has been accused of participating in a trafficking conspiracy over several years to move undocumented migrants from Texas to other parts of the country.

El Salvador agreed to release Mr Ábrego García after the US presented it with an arrest warrant, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday. His lawyer called the charges “preposterous”.

The White House had been resisting a US Supreme Court order from April to “facilitate” his return after he was sent to a jail in El Salvador alongside more than 250 other deportees.

In a two-count grand jury indictment, filed in a Tennessee court last month and unsealed on Friday, Mr Ábrego García was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and a second count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.

Bondi said the grand jury had found that Mr Ábrego García had played a “significant role” in an alien smuggling ring, bringing in thousands of illegal immigrants to the US.

The allegations, which date back to 2016, allege he transported undocumented individuals between Texas and Maryland and other states more than 100 times.

The indictment additionally alleges he transported members of MS-13, designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.

The Trump administration had previously alleged Mr Ábrego García was a member of the transnational Salvadorian gang, which he has denied.

Bondi also accused Mr Ábrego García of trafficking weapons and narcotics into the US for the gang, though he was not charged with any related offences.

He appeared in court for an initial hearing on Friday in Nashville, Tennessee. An arraignment hearing is scheduled 13 June, where US Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes will determine if there are grounds to keep him detained ahead of his trial.

For now, Mr Ábrego García remains in federal custody.

Mr Ábrego García’s lawyers have previously argued that he has never been convicted of any criminal offence, including gang membership, in the US or in El Salvador.

Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, one of his attorneys, called the charges “preposterous” and the events an “abuse of power” at a Friday news conference.

“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Mr Moshenberg said. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him.”

He added: “This is an abuse of power, not justice. The government should give him a full and fair trial in front of the same immigration judge who heard the case in 2019.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, President Donald Trump called Mr Ábrego García a “bad guy” and said the Department of Justice had made the right decision to return him to US soil to face trial.

Mr Ábrego García entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019, he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities.

But an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country

• What is the 1798 law that Trump used to deport migrants?
• What we know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia and MS-13 allegations

On 15 March, he was deported amid an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law that allows presidents to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy country.

Mr Ábrego García was taken to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador, known for its brutal conditions.

While government lawyers initially said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error”, the Trump administration refused to order his return.

Whether or not the government had to “facilitate” his return to his home in the US state of Maryland became the subject of a weeks-long legal and political battle.

After Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded to see Mr Ábrego García in El Salvador, he was released to a different prison in that country.

On Friday, Van Hollen reiterated that “this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all”.

“The administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”

El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a close ally of Trump, said on social media on Friday that if the administration “request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse”.

Mr Ábrego García is expected to make an initial appearance at a Tennessee court on Friday, where US will request he be held in pretrial custody “because he poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight”, according to the detention motion.

They rumble down the highway between Beijing and Tianjin port: big lorries, loaded up and fully able to navigate themselves.

Sure, there is a safety driver in the seat, as per government regulations, but these lorries don’t require them, and many analysts say it won’t take long before they are gone.

When “safety driver” Huo Kangtian, 32, first takes his hands off the wheel, and lets the lorry drive itself, it is somehow impressive and disconcerting in equal measures.

For the initial stages of the journey, he is in full control. Then – at a certain point – he hits a few buttons, and the powerful, heavy machine is driving itself, moving at speed along a public road to Tianjin.

“Of course, I felt a bit scared the first time I drove an autonomous truck,” says Mr Huo. “But, after spending a lot of time observing and testing these machines, I think they are actually pretty good and safe.”

As the lorry veers off the freeway and up a ramp towards the toll gates, the machine is still driving itself. On the other side of the tollgate, Mr Huo again presses a few buttons, and he is back in charge.

“My job as a safety driver is to act as the last line of defence. For example, in the case of an emergency, I would have to take back control of the vehicle immediately to ensure everyone’s safety,” he explains.

In terms of the upsides for a driver, he says that switching to autonomous mode can help combat stress and fatigue, as well as freeing up hands and feet for other tasks. He says it doesn’t make his job boring, but rather more interesting.

When asked if he is worried that this technology may one day render his job obsolete, he says he doesn’t know too much about this.

It’s the diplomatic answer.

Pony AI’s fleet of driverless lorries, currently operating on these test routes, is only the start of what is to come, the company’s vice-president Li Hengyu tells the BBC.

“In the future, with driverless operations, our transportation efficiency will definitely be greatly improved,” he says. “For example, labour costs will be reduced but, more importantly, we can deal better with harsh environments and long hours driving.”

What this all boils down to is saving money, says industry expert Yang Ruigang, a technology professor from Shanghai Jiaotong University, who has extensive experience working on driverless technology in both China and the US.

“Anything that can reduce operating costs is something a company would like to have, so it’s fairly easy to justify the investment in having a fully autonomous, driverless truck,” he tells the BBC.

In short, he says, the goal is simple: “Reduce the driver cost close to zero.”

However, significant hurdles remain before lorries will be allowed to drive themselves on roads around the world – not the least of which is public concern.

In China, self-driving technology suffered a major setback following an accident which killed three university students after their vehicle had been in “auto pilot” mode.

Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Chim Lee says the Chinese public still has quite a way to go before it is won over.

“We know that recent accidents involving passenger cars have caused a huge uproar in China. So, for driverless trucks – even though they tend to be more specific to certain locations for the time being – the public’s image of them is going to be absolutely critical for policy makers, and for the market as well, compared to passenger vehicles.”

Professor Yang agrees that lorry drivers are unlikely to lose their jobs in large numbers just yet.

“We have to discuss the context. Open environment? Probably not. High speed? Definitely no. But, if it is a low-speed situation, like with the last mile delivery trucks, it’s here already.”

In Eastern China’s Anhui Province, hundreds of driverless delivery vans navigate their way through the suburban streets of Hefei – a city with an official population of eight million – as human-driven scooters and cars whizz around them.

It was once one of country’s poorest cities, but these days its government wants it to be known as a place of the future, prepared to give new technology a chance.

Gary Huang, president of autonomous vehicle company, Rino.ai, says they discovered a market niche where driverless delivery vans could send parcels from big distribution hubs run by courier companies to local neighbourhood stations. At that point, scooter drivers take over, dropping off the packages to people’s front doors.

“We’re allowing couriers to stay within community areas to do pickup and drop off while the autonomous vans handle the repetitive, longer-distance trips. This boosts the entire system’s efficiency,” he tells us.

Rino has also been talking to other countries, and the company says the quickest uptake of its vehicles will be in Australia later this year, when a supermarket chain will start using their driverless delivery vehicles.

Meanwhile, in China, they say they’re now running more than 500 vans with road access in over 50 cities.

However, Hefei remains the most advanced.

Apart from Rino, the city has also now given permission for other driverless delivery van companies to operate.

Gary Huang says this is due to a combination of factors.

“Encouragement came from the government, followed by local experimentation, the gaining of experience, the refinement of regulations and eventually allowing a broad implementation.”

And you can see them on the roads, changing lanes, indicating before they turn, pulling up at red lights and avoiding other traffic.

For the courier companies, the numbers tell the story.

According to Rino’s regional director for Anhui Province, Zhang Qichen, deliveries are not only faster, but companies can hire three autonomous electric delivery vans which will run for days without needing a charge for the same cost as one driver.

She says she has been blown away by the pace of change in her industry and adds that she would not be surprised if heavy, long-haul lorries are routinely driving themselves on roads in certain circumstances within five years.

Professor Yang agrees. “Heavy trucks running along a highway unrestricted, at least five years away.”

When asked if it could really happen so soon, he responds: “I’m pretty sure it will happen. In fact, I’m confident that it will happen.”

Industry insiders say that the most immediate applications for driverless lorries – apart from in enclosed industrial zones likes open-cut mines or ports – are probably in remote, harsh terrain with extreme environmental conditions, especially along vast stretches and in a largely straight trajectory.

Significant technical challenges do remain though.

Heavy lorries need better cameras to track well ahead into distance to detect hazards much further down the road, in the same way a person can; more tricky roads may also need to have extra sensors placed along the route; other hurdles could include breakdowns in extreme weather or sudden, unexpected dangers emerging amidst very busy traffic.

On top of all this, the technology – when it comes to heavy lorries – is still not cheap. What’s more, these vehicles are right now modified old style lorries rather than self-driving vehicles straight off the production line.

China wants to be a champion of new tech, but it also has to be careful, not only because of the potential for deadly accidents but also because of how Chinese people might view this shift.

“This is not just about fulfilling regulations. It is not just about building a public image,” says Chim Lee. “But that, over time, the public will see the benefit of this technology, see how it will reduce their costs for buying things, or look at it as a way of imagining that society is improving, rather than viewing this as technology which is potentially destroying, causing car accidents or removing employment opportunities.”

Professor Yang sees another problem. “We humans can tolerate another human driver making mistakes but our tolerance for autonomous trucks is much much lower. Machines are not supposed to make mistakes. So, we have to make sure that the system is extremely reliable.”

As the annual Hajj pilgrimage draws to a close, a long-settled corner of Mecca is stirring up a storm thousands of miles away in India – not for its spiritual significance, but for a 50-year-old inheritance dispute.

At the heart of the controversy is Keyi Rubath, a 19th-Century guest house built in the 1870s by Mayankutty Keyi, a wealthy Indian merchant from Malabar (modern-day Kerala), whose trading empire stretched from Mumbai to Paris.

Located near Islam’s holiest site, Masjid al-Haram, the building was demolished in 1971 to make way for Mecca’s expansion. Saudi authorities deposited 1.4 million riyals (about $373,000 today) in the kingdom’s treasury as compensation, but said no rightful heir could be identified at the time.

Decades later, that sum – still held in Saudi Arabia’s treasury – has sparked a bitter tussle between two sprawling branches of the Keyi family, each trying to prove its lineage and claim what they see as their rightful inheritance.

Neither side has succeeded so far. For decades, successive Indian governments – both at the Centre and in Kerala – have tried and failed to resolve the deadlock.

It remains unclear if Saudi authorities are even willing to release the compensation, let alone adjust it for inflation as some family members now demand – with some claiming it could be worth over $1bn today.

Followers of the case note the property was a waqf – an Islamic charitable endowment – meaning descendants can manage but not own it.

The Saudi department that handles Awqaf (endowed properties) did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment, and the government has made no public statement on the matter.

That hasn’t stopped speculation – about both the money and who it rightfully belongs to.

Little is known about the guest house itself, but descendants claim it stood just steps from the Masjid al-Haram, with 22 rooms and several halls spread over 1.5 acres.

According to family lore, Keyi shipped wood from Malabar to build it and appointed a Malabari manager to run it – an ambitious gesture, though not unusual for the time.

Saudi Arabia was a relatively poor country back then – the discovery of its massive oil fields still a few decades away.

The Hajj pilgrimage and the city’s importance in Islam meant that Indian Muslims often donated money or built infrastructure for Indian pilgrims there.

In his 2014 book, Mecca: The Sacred City, historian Ziauddin Sardar notes that during the second half of the 18th Century, the city had acquired a distinctively Indian character with its economy and financial well-being dependent on Indian Muslims.

“Almost 20% of the city’s inhabitants, the largest single majority, were now of Indian origins – people from Gujarat, Punjab, Kashmir and Deccan, all collectively known locally as the Hindis,” Sardar wrote.

As Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth surged in the 20th century, sweeping development projects reshaped Mecca. Keyi Rubath was demolished three times, the final time in the early 1970s.

That’s when the confusion around compensation appears to have started.

According to BM Jamal, former secretary of India’s Central Waqf Council, the Indian consulate in Jeddah wrote to the government back then, seeking details of Mayankutty Keyi’s legal heir.

“In my understanding, authorities were looking for the descendants to appoint a manager for the property, not to distribute the compensation money,” Mr Jamal said.

Nonetheless, two factions stepped forward: the Keyis – Mayankutty’s paternal family – and the Arakkals, a royal family from Kerala into which he had married.

Both families traditionally followed a matrilineal inheritance system – a custom not recognized under Saudi law, adding further complexity.

The Keyis claim that Mayankutty died childless, making his sister’s children his rightful heirs under matrilineal tradition.

But the Arakkals claim he had a son and a daughter, and therefore, under Indian law, his children would be the legal inheritors.

As the dispute dragged on, the story took on a life of its own. In 2011, after rumours swirled that the compensation could be worth millions, more than 2,500 people flooded a district office in Kannur, claiming to be Keyi’s descendants.

“There were people who claimed that their forefathers had taught Mayankutty in his childhood. Others claimed that their forefathers had provided timber for the guest house,” a senior Keyi family member, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC.

Scams followed. State officials say in 2017 fraudsters posing as Keyi descendants duped locals into handing over money, promising a share of the compensation.

Today, the case remains unresolved.

Some descendants propose the best way to end the dispute would be to ask the Saudi government to use the compensation money to build another guest house for Hajj pilgrims, as Myankutti Keyi had intended.

But others reject this, arguing that the guest house was privately owned, and so any compensation rightfully belongs to the family.

Some argue that even if the family proves lineage to Mayankutty Keyi, without ownership documents, they’re unlikely to gain anything.

For Muhammed Shihad, a Kannur resident who has co-authored a book on the history of the Keyi and Arakkal families, though, the dispute is not just about the money – but about honouring the family’s roots.

“If they don’t get the compensation, it would be worth openly recognising the family’s and the region’s connection to this noble act.”

Matthew’s dad had brown eyes and black hair. His grandparents had piercing blue eyes.

There was a running joke in his family that “dad looked nothing like his parents”, the teacher from southern England says.

It turned out there was a very good reason for this.

Matthew’s father had been swapped at birth in hospital nearly 80 years ago. He died late last year before learning the truth of his family history.

Matthew – not his real name – contacted the BBC after we reported on the case of Susan, who received compensation from an NHS trust after a home DNA test revealed she had been accidentally switched for another baby in the 1950s.

BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.

During the pandemic, Matthew started looking for answers to niggling questions about his family history. He sent off a saliva sample in the post to be analysed.

The genealogy company entered his record into its vast online database, allowing him to view other users whose DNA closely matched his own.

“Half of the names I’d just never heard of,” he says. “I thought, ‘That’s weird’, and called my wife to tell her the old family joke might be true after all.”

Matthew then asked his dad to submit his own DNA sample, which confirmed he was even more closely related to the same group of mysterious family members.

Matthew started exchanging messages with two women who the site suggested were his father’s cousins. All were confused about how they could possibly be related.

Working together, they eventually tracked down birth records from 1946, months after the end of World War Two.

The documents showed that one day after his father was apparently born, another baby boy had been registered at the same hospital in east London.

That boy had the same relatively unusual surname that appeared on the mystery branch of the family tree, a link later confirmed by birth certificates obtained by Matthew.

It was a lightbulb moment.

“I realised straight away what must have happened,” he says. “The only explanation that made sense was that both babies got muddled up in hospital.”

Matthew and the two women managed to construct a brand new family tree based on all of his DNA matches.

“I love a puzzle and I love understanding the past,” he says. “I’m quite obsessive anyway, so I got into trying to reverse engineer what had happened.”

Before World War Two, most babies in the UK were born at home, or in nursing homes, attended by midwives and the family doctor.

That started to change as the country prepared for the launch of the NHS in 1948, and very gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.

“The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife,” says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.

“It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well.”

It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.

To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby’s name, mother’s name, the date and time of birth, and the baby’s weight.

“Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen”, says Ms Coates, who trained as a nurse herself in the 1970s and a midwife in 1981.

“If there were two or more members of staff in the nursery feeding babies, for example, a baby could easily be put down in the wrong cot.”

By 1956, hospital births were becoming more common, and midwifery textbooks were recommending that a “wrist name-tape” or “string of lettered china beads” should be attached directly to the newborn.

A decade later, by the mid-1960s, it was rare for babies to be removed from the delivery room without being individually labelled.

Stories of babies being accidentally switched in hospital were very rare at the time, though more are now coming to light thanks to the boom in genetic testing and ancestry websites.

The day after Jan Daly was born at a hospital in north London in 1951, her mother immediately complained that the baby she had been given was not hers.

“She was really stressed and crying, but the nurses assured her she was wrong and the doctor was called in to try to calm her,” Jan says.

The staff only backed down when her mum told them she’d had a fast, unassisted delivery, and pointed out the clear forceps marks on the baby’s head

“I feel for the other mother who had been happily feeding me for two days and then had to give up one baby for another,” she says.

“There was never any apology, it was just ‘one of those silly errors’, but the trauma affected my mother for a long time.”

Matthew’s father, an insurance agent from the Home Counties, was a keen amateur cyclist who spent his life following the local racing scene.

He lived alone in retirement and over the last decade his health had been deteriorating.

Matthew thought long and hard about telling him the truth about his family history but, in the end, decided against it.

“I just felt my dad doesn’t need this,” he says. “He had lived 78 years in a type of ignorance, so it didn’t feel right to share it with him.”

Matthew’s father died last year without ever knowing he’d been celebrating his birthday a day early for the past eight decades.

Since then, Matthew has driven to the West Country to meet his dad’s genetic first cousin and her daughter for coffee.

They all got on well, he says, sharing old photos and “filling in missing bits of family history”.

But Matthew has decided not to contact the man his father must have been swapped with as a baby, or his children – in part because they have not taken DNA tests themselves.

“If you do a test by sending your saliva off, then there’s an implicit understanding that you might find something that’s a bit of a surprise,” Matthew says.

“Whereas with people who haven’t, I’m still not sure if it’s the right thing to reach out to them – I just don’t think it’s right to drop that bombshell.”

Sir Rod Stewart has cancelled a string of concerts in the US as he recovers from flu, ahead of his Glastonbury legends set later this month.

The 80-year-old rock star is due to play the coveted teatime slot on Sunday, 29 June – 23 years after he last appeared at the Somerset festival.

Sir Rod announced on Instagram he was scrapping four dates and rescheduling another two that were due to take place over the next eight days.

“So sorry my friends,” he said. “I’m devastated and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience to my fans. I’ll be back on stage and will see you soon.”

He signed off “Sir Rod”, along with a heartbreak emoji.

He also listed the four shows he was cancelling – in Las Vegas and Stateline, Nevada – as well as two he plans to reschedule in California.

Sir Rod previously said he intended to stop playing “large-scale world tours” at the end of 2025 and instead perform at more intimate venues.

But he said he was “proud, ready and more than able to pleasure and titillate my friends at Glastonbury” when he became the first act to be confirmed for this year’s festival.

He told That Peter Crouch Podcast he was only due to play for an hour and a quarter on the Pyramid Stage.

“But I’ve asked them ‘Please, another 15 minutes’ because I play for over two hours every night and it’s nothing,” he said.

He also told the podcast he would be performing at Glastonbury with his former Faces bandmate Ronnie Wood.

Sir Rod’s most recent big performance came on 26 May at the American Music Awards (AMAs) in Las Vegas, where he was also presented with the lifetime achievement award by his children.

The father-of-eight seemed shocked to be introduced to the stage by five of his own grown-up children, before he later performed his 1988 track Forever Young.

Sir Rod’s best known solo songs include Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?, Every Beat Of My Heart, and Maggie May.

One of the best-selling artists of all time, he will follow in the footsteps of Dolly Parton, Barry Gibb, Shania Twain and Kylie Minogue by playing Glastonbury’s coveted Sunday afternoon slot.

The slot always draws one of the biggest crowds of the festival, and Sir Rod will become the first person to have been given legends billing and to have headlined the festival, following his previous appearance there in 2002 alongside Coldplay and Stereophonics.

The headliners this year at Worthy Farm are The 1975, Neil Young, and Olivia Rodrigo.

In the early 2010s, two ornate chairs said to have once belonged on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles appeared on the French antiques market.

Thought to be the most expensive chairs made for Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France’s Ancien Régime, they were stamped with the seal of Nicolas-Quinibert Foliot, a celebrated cabinet maker who worked in Paris in the 1700s.

A significant find, the pair were declared “national treasures” by the French government in 2013, at the request of Versailles.

The palace, which displays such items in its vast museum collection, expressed an interest in buying the chairs but the price was deemed too dear.

They were instead sold to Qatari Prince Mohammed bin Hamad Al Thani for an eye-watering €2m (£1.67m).

A remarkable number of items of 18th Century royal furniture have appeared on the antiques market in the past few years.

Other items included another set of chairs purported to have sat in one of Marie Antoinette’s chambers in Versailles; a separate pair said to have belonged to Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s mistress; the armchair of King Louis XVI’s sister, Princess Élisabeth; and a pair of – or stools – that belonged to the daughter of King Louis XV, Princess Louise Élisabeth.

Most of these were bought by Versailles to display in its museum collection, while one chair was sold to the wealthy Guerrand-Hermès family.

But in 2016, this assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.

The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.

The scandal saw one of France’s leading antiques experts, Georges “Bill” Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.

Galerie Kraemer and its director, Laurent Kraemer, were also accused of deception by gross negligence for selling on some of the chairs – something they both deny.

All three defendants are set to appear at a court in Pontoise, near Paris on Wednesday following a trial in March. Mr Pallot and Mr Desnoues have admitted to their crimes, while Mr Kraemer and his gallery dispute the charge of deception by gross negligence.

Considered the top scholar on French 18th-Century chairs, having written the authoritative book on the subject, Mr Pallot was often called upon by Versailles, among others, to give his expert opinion on whether historical items were the real deal. He was even called as an expert witness in French courts when there were doubts about an item’s authenticity.

His accomplice, Mr Desnoues, was a decorated cabinetmaker and sculptor who had won a number of prestigious awards, including best sculptor in France in 1984, and had been employed as the main restorer of furniture at Versailles.

Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a “joke” with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.

Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

And buoyed by their success, they started making more.

Describing how they went about constructing the chairs, the two described in court how Mr Pallot sourced wood frames at various auctions for low prices, while Mr Desnoues aged wood at his workshop to make others.

They were then sent for gilding and upholstery, before Mr Desnoues added designs and a wood finish. He added stamps from some of the great furniture-workers of the 18th Century, which were either faked or taken from real furniture of the period.

Once they were finished, Mr Pallot sold them through middlemen to galleries like Kraemer and one he himself worked at, Didier Aaron. They would then get sold onto auction houses such as Sotheby’s of London and Drouot of Paris.

“I was the head and Desnoues was the hands,” Mr Pallot told the court smilingly.

“It went like a breeze,” he added. “Everything was fake but the money.”

Prosecutors allege the two men made an estimated profit of more than €3m off the forged chairs – though Mr Pallot and Mr Desnoues estimated their profits to be a lower amount of €700,000. The income was deposited in foreign bank accounts, prosecutors said.

Lawyers representing Versailles told the BBC that Mr Pallot, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, managed to deceive the institution because of his “privileged access to the documentation and archives of Versailles and the Louvre Museum as part of his academic research”.

A statement from lawyer Corinne Hershkovitch’s team said that thanks to Mr Pallot’s “thorough knowledge” of the inventories of royal furniture recorded as having existed at Versailles in the 18th Century, he was able to determine which items were missing from collections and to then make them with the help of Mr Desnoues.

Mr Desnoues also had access to original chairs he had made copies of, they added, “enabling him to produce fakes that had all the visual appearance of an authentic, up to the inventory numbers and period labels”.

“The fraudulent association between these two professionally accomplished men, recognised by their peers, made it possible to deceive the French institutions that regarded them as partners and to betray their trust, thereby damaging the reputation of Versailles and its curators,” they said.

Prosecutor Pascal Rayer said the trial highlighted the need for more robust regulation of the art market, and also shone a light on the standards antiques dealers should abide by.

The court heard authorities were alerted to the scheme when the lavish lifestyle of a Portuguese man and his partner caught the attention of French authorities.

Questioned by police about the acquisition of properties in France and Portugal worth €1.2m while on an income of about €2,500 a month, the man – who it turned out worked as a handyman in Parisian galleries – confessed to his part in working as a middleman who collaborated in the furniture fraud, AFP news agency reported. The money trail then led investigators to Mr Desnoues and Mr Pallot.

Charges against some of those originally indicted in the case, including middlemen, were later dropped.

But charges against both Laurent Kraemer and Galerie Kraemer, which sold on some of the forged chairs to collectors such as Versailles and Qatar’s Prince al-Thani, were upheld.

Prosecutors allege that while the gallery itself may have been duped into first buying the fake pieces, Mr Kraemer and the gallery were “grossly negligent” in failing to sufficiently check the items’ authenticity before selling them on to collectors at high prices.

In his closing arguments, prosecutor Mr Rayer said that based on Galerie Kraemer’s “reputation and contacts, they could have taken the furniture to Versailles or the Louvre to compare them.

“They could also have hired other experts given the amounts at stake and considering the opacity on the origin of the chairs.”

Speaking in court, a lawyer representing Mr Kraemer and the gallery insisted his client “is victim of the fraud, not an accomplice”, stating Mr Kraemer never had direct contact with the forgers.

In a statement to the BBC, lawyers Martin Reynaud and Mauricia Courrégé added: “The gallery was not an accomplice of the counterfeiters, the gallery did not know the furniture was fake, and it could not have detected it”.

“Like the Château de Versailles and the specialists who classified the furniture as national treasures, the Kraemer gallery was a victim of the forgers,” they added.

“We are waiting for the judgement to recognise this.”

The BBC has contacted Mr Pallot’s lawyer for comment. The BBC was unable to reach Mr Desnoues or his lawyer.

Wearing an understated but chic outfit, flowing braids and a dewy, make-up free face, Arop Akol looks like your typical off-duty model.

She sinks into the sofa at the offices of her UK agency, First Model Management, and details the burgeoning career that has seen her walk runways for luxury brands in London and Paris.

“I had been watching modelling online since I was a child at the age of 11,” Akol, now in her early twenties, tells the BBC.

In the last three years, she has been streamed across the world while modelling, even sharing a runway with Naomi Campbell at an Off-White show.

Travelling for work can get lonely, but Akol is constantly bumping into models from her birth country – the lush, but troubled South Sudan.

“South Sudanese people have become very well known for their beauty,” says Akol, who has high cheekbones, rich, dark skin and stands 5ft 10in tall.

Flick through a fashion magazine or scan footage of a runway show and you will see Akol’s point – models born and raised in South Sudan, or those from the country’s sizable diaspora, are everywhere.

They range from up-and-comers, like Akol, to supermodels like Anok Yai, Adut Akech and Alek Wek.

After being scouted in a London car park in 1995, Wek was one of the very first South Sudanese models to find global success . She has since appeared on numerous Vogue covers and modelled for the likes of Dior and Louis Vuitton.

And the popularity of South Sudanese models shows no signs of waning – leading industry platform Models.com compiles an annual list of modelling’s top 50 “future stars” and in its latest selection, one in five models have South Sudanese heritage.

Elsewhere, Vogue featured four South Sudanese models in its article about the “11 young models set to storm the catwalks in 2025”.

“The expectation of what a model should be – most of the South Sudanese models have it,” says Dawson Deng, who runs South Sudan Fashion Week in the country’s capital, Juba, with fellow ex-model Trisha Nyachak.

“They have the perfect, dark skin. They have the melanin. They have the height.”

Lucia Janosova, a casting agent at First Model Management, tells the BBC: “Of course they are beautiful… beautiful skin, the height.”

However, she says she is unsure exactly why fashion brands seek out South Sudanese models over other nationalities.

“I’m not able to tell you because there are lots of girls who are also beautiful and they are from Mozambique, or Nigeria, or different countries, right?” Ms Janosova adds.

Akur Goi, a South Sudanese model who has worked with designers like Givenchy and Armani, has a theory.

She believes South Sudanese models are in demand not just for their physical beauty, but for their “resilience” too.

Goi was born in Juba but as a child she moved to neighbouring Uganda, like Akol and hundreds of thousands of other South Sudanese.

Many fled in the years after 2011, when South Sudan became independent from Sudan.

There were high hopes for the world’s newest nation, but just two years later a civil war erupted, during which 400,000 people were killed and 2.5 million fled their homes for places like Uganda.

Although the civil war ended after five years, further waves of violence, natural disasters and poverty mean people continue to leave.

Recently, fighting between government and opposition forces has escalated – sparking fears the country will return to civil war.

After leaving a war-weary South Sudan for Uganda, Goi’s “biggest dream” was to become a model.

Fantasy became reality just last year, when she was scouted by agents via Facebook. For her very first job, she walked for Italian fashion giant Roberto Cavalli.

“I was super excited and ready for my first season… I was really nervous and scared but I said to myself: ‘I can make it’ – because it was a dream,” Goi says, speaking to the BBC from Milan, having flown out for a job at the last minute.

But some South Sudanese models have had more tumultuous journeys.

An investigation by British newspaper the Times found that two refugees living in a camp in Kenya were flown to Europe only to be told they were too malnourished to appear on the runway.

After completing modelling jobs, several others were informed that they owed their agencies thousands of euros – as some contracts specify that visas and flights are to be repaid, usually once the models start earning money.

Akol says she encountered a similar issue. When she was scouted in 2019, the agency in question asked her to fork out for numerous fees – fees which she now knows agencies do not normally request.

“I was asked for money for registration, money for this, for that. I couldn’t manage all that. I’m struggling, my family is struggling, so I can’t manage all that,” she says.

Three years later, while living in Uganda, she was eventually scouted by a more reputable agency.

Deng, who helps fledgling South Sudanese models produce portfolios, tells the BBC that some have complained about being paid for jobs in clothes, rather than money.

Many models also come up against another challenge – their family’s perception of their career choice.

“They didn’t want it and they don’t want it now,” Akol, who now lives in London, says of her own relatives.

“But we [models] managed to come up and say: ‘We are [a] young country. We need to go out there and meet people. We need to do things that everyone else is doing.'”

Deng says those living in urban areas have become more open-minded, but some South Sudanese liken modelling to prostitution.

Parents question the whole concept – wondering why their daughters would be “walking in front of people”, he says.

Deng recalls a young woman he was assisting who was about to fly out for her first international job. Unhappy that she would be modelling, the woman’s family followed her to the airport and prevented her from getting on the plane.

But, Deng says, the woman’s relatives eventually came around and she has since modelled for a top lingerie brand.

“This girl is actually the breadwinner of the family. She’s taking all her siblings to school and nobody talks about it as a bad thing any more,” he says.

He is “proud” to see this model – and others from South Sudan – on the global stage and although the industry cycles through trends, Deng does not believe South Sudanese models will go out of fashion.

Goi agrees, saying there is an “increasing demand for diversity” in fashion.

Akol too believes South Sudan is here to stay, stating: “Alek Wek has been doing it before I was born and she is still doing it now.

“South Sudanese models are going to go a long way.”

• How luxury African fashion has wowed Europe’s catwalks
• No wigs please – the new rules shaking up beauty pageants
• Inside the beauty pageant in one of the world’s worst places to be a woman
• The ‘peacock of Savile Row’ on dressing stars for the Met Gala
• WATCH: Model Alek Wek on her unique career

It is fitting that we meet a woman once described as a “wrecker of civilisation” in the grounds of a ruined priory.

Cosey Fanni Tutti, a founding member of the influential band Throbbing Gristle and radical performance artist, was given the title by Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn in 1976 after an art exhibition, Prostitution, led to a tabloid furore and a House of Commons debate.

Prostitution, created by Tutti and her colleagues at the collective COUM Transmissions, showed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and included pornographic images of her alongside used bandages and tampons.

“It has taken 50 years for [the exhibition] to be revisited and understood for what it was really trying to say,” says the 73-year-old who lives near King’s Lynn, Norfolk.

Tutti modelled for pornographic magazines in her work as a performance artist and pages from these publications featured in Prostitution, but were hidden away in a back room.

She says she “infiltrated” the porn industry to turn the tables on the consumers of these magazines and subvert the male gaze – the watcher now being watched.

“It’s my point of view. It was my action,” she says in the grounds of Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk.

She wanted the exhibition to “bring [porn] into a different kind of viewpoint and interpretation” and to “empower women to think that [the porn industry] is something we have to discuss, regarding how you think of it, as either subverting it or going along [with it]”.

The porn industry in the 1970s involved “some of the most unlikely people”, she says.

“I won’t say who they are, but they were well known at the time. Famous names.”

Exhibits from Prostitution are now on display at the Maxwell Graham Gallery in New York City until 28 June, which coincides with the release of her new album 2T2.

“I haven’t been to see the exhibition because of the situation in America. I’ve no desire to go to America at the moment,” she says.

Throbbing Gristle produced extraordinary – sometimes terrifying – music and are regarded as founders of the genre known as industrial, named after the record label they founded.

Active between 1975 and 1981, and again between 2004 and 2010, they have influenced acts including Soft Cell, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry.

Today, Tutti shares a converted chapel with her partner, frequent collaborator and former bandmate, Chris Carter.

The couple left London with their son in the early 1980s and bought the chapel at auction after spotting it in a local newspaper.

They had previously been living in squats, a culture that has declined to Tutti’s regret.

“It’s not just the people that want to live an alternative lifestyle and be creative and do music and art and so on, but it’s also just impacting people that just want to live, have a family, just work and have a decent life,” she says.

“What do you do when you can’t afford the rent?”

The musicians now have a home studio where her new album was recorded.

She says 2T2 is infused with emotion; bereavement and illness informing tracks such as Stound, with its beats and spectral chanting.

“The last five years have been really difficult. I mean, personally, through illness and loss,” she says.

Carter became seriously unwell with Covid which “refocused our world completely”, she says, “and then I got ill with something else, which was indirectly related to Covid”.

Carter built some of the first sampling machines for the band to use, years before the technology became mainstream.

On 2T2 “there’s some tracks on that that express that anger I felt about what had happened to [Carter and I] and to the world, actually”, she says.

“It’s a war zone isn’t it?”

As she speaks, roaring jet fighters from a nearby airbase circle low overhead.

Following the publication of her memoir Art Sex Music in 2017, a documentary about Tutti’s life is now in the works.

It will be directed by Caroline Catz , with whom she previously collaborated on the film Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and Legendary Tapes.

Derbyshire was a British electronic music pioneer who only belatedly received acclaim and acknowledgement after her death, such as for her arrangement of the Dr Who theme.

Sexism was the reason, says Tutti, that “she wasn’t given the credit for what she had done”.

“A bit like me with the Throbbing Gristle records, actually.”

It was this identification with Derbyshire that led Tutti to write Re-Sisters in 2002, which also focused on another non-conformist woman, the medieval Norfolk mystic Margery Kempe.

Tutti says Kempe’s story left her “gobsmacked”.

“A woman from the 1300s who was resisting everything that was expected of a woman back then, and the more I looked into her, the more relevant her story was to both me and Delia.”

Gardening and reading is how this provocateur prefers to spend her time these days.

After giving up touring, the pioneer of avant-garde noise and electronica now enjoys the Norfolk countryside.

“I like peace and quiet,” she says.

They rumble down the highway between Beijing and Tianjin port: big lorries, loaded up and fully able to navigate themselves.

Sure, there is a safety driver in the seat, as per government regulations, but these lorries don’t require them, and many analysts say it won’t take long before they are gone.

When “safety driver” Huo Kangtian, 32, first takes his hands off the wheel, and lets the lorry drive itself, it is somehow impressive and disconcerting in equal measures.

For the initial stages of the journey, he is in full control. Then – at a certain point – he hits a few buttons, and the powerful, heavy machine is driving itself, moving at speed along a public road to Tianjin.

“Of course, I felt a bit scared the first time I drove an autonomous truck,” says Mr Huo. “But, after spending a lot of time observing and testing these machines, I think they are actually pretty good and safe.”

As the lorry veers off the freeway and up a ramp towards the toll gates, the machine is still driving itself. On the other side of the tollgate, Mr Huo again presses a few buttons, and he is back in charge.

“My job as a safety driver is to act as the last line of defence. For example, in the case of an emergency, I would have to take back control of the vehicle immediately to ensure everyone’s safety,” he explains.

In terms of the upsides for a driver, he says that switching to autonomous mode can help combat stress and fatigue, as well as freeing up hands and feet for other tasks. He says it doesn’t make his job boring, but rather more interesting.

When asked if he is worried that this technology may one day render his job obsolete, he says he doesn’t know too much about this.

It’s the diplomatic answer.

Pony AI’s fleet of driverless lorries, currently operating on these test routes, is only the start of what is to come, the company’s vice-president Li Hengyu tells the BBC.

“In the future, with driverless operations, our transportation efficiency will definitely be greatly improved,” he says. “For example, labour costs will be reduced but, more importantly, we can deal better with harsh environments and long hours driving.”

What this all boils down to is saving money, says industry expert Yang Ruigang, a technology professor from Shanghai Jiaotong University, who has extensive experience working on driverless technology in both China and the US.

“Anything that can reduce operating costs is something a company would like to have, so it’s fairly easy to justify the investment in having a fully autonomous, driverless truck,” he tells the BBC.

In short, he says, the goal is simple: “Reduce the driver cost close to zero.”

However, significant hurdles remain before lorries will be allowed to drive themselves on roads around the world – not the least of which is public concern.

In China, self-driving technology suffered a major setback following an accident which killed three university students after their vehicle had been in “auto pilot” mode.

Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Chim Lee says the Chinese public still has quite a way to go before it is won over.

“We know that recent accidents involving passenger cars have caused a huge uproar in China. So, for driverless trucks – even though they tend to be more specific to certain locations for the time being – the public’s image of them is going to be absolutely critical for policy makers, and for the market as well, compared to passenger vehicles.”

Professor Yang agrees that lorry drivers are unlikely to lose their jobs in large numbers just yet.

“We have to discuss the context. Open environment? Probably not. High speed? Definitely no. But, if it is a low-speed situation, like with the last mile delivery trucks, it’s here already.”

In Eastern China’s Anhui Province, hundreds of driverless delivery vans navigate their way through the suburban streets of Hefei – a city with an official population of eight million – as human-driven scooters and cars whizz around them.

It was once one of country’s poorest cities, but these days its government wants it to be known as a place of the future, prepared to give new technology a chance.

Gary Huang, president of autonomous vehicle company, Rino.ai, says they discovered a market niche where driverless delivery vans could send parcels from big distribution hubs run by courier companies to local neighbourhood stations. At that point, scooter drivers take over, dropping off the packages to people’s front doors.

“We’re allowing couriers to stay within community areas to do pickup and drop off while the autonomous vans handle the repetitive, longer-distance trips. This boosts the entire system’s efficiency,” he tells us.

Rino has also been talking to other countries, and the company says the quickest uptake of its vehicles will be in Australia later this year, when a supermarket chain will start using their driverless delivery vehicles.

Meanwhile, in China, they say they’re now running more than 500 vans with road access in over 50 cities.

However, Hefei remains the most advanced.

Apart from Rino, the city has also now given permission for other driverless delivery van companies to operate.

Gary Huang says this is due to a combination of factors.

“Encouragement came from the government, followed by local experimentation, the gaining of experience, the refinement of regulations and eventually allowing a broad implementation.”

And you can see them on the roads, changing lanes, indicating before they turn, pulling up at red lights and avoiding other traffic.

For the courier companies, the numbers tell the story.

According to Rino’s regional director for Anhui Province, Zhang Qichen, deliveries are not only faster, but companies can hire three autonomous electric delivery vans which will run for days without needing a charge for the same cost as one driver.

She says she has been blown away by the pace of change in her industry and adds that she would not be surprised if heavy, long-haul lorries are routinely driving themselves on roads in certain circumstances within five years.

Professor Yang agrees. “Heavy trucks running along a highway unrestricted, at least five years away.”

When asked if it could really happen so soon, he responds: “I’m pretty sure it will happen. In fact, I’m confident that it will happen.”

Industry insiders say that the most immediate applications for driverless lorries – apart from in enclosed industrial zones likes open-cut mines or ports – are probably in remote, harsh terrain with extreme environmental conditions, especially along vast stretches and in a largely straight trajectory.

Significant technical challenges do remain though.

Heavy lorries need better cameras to track well ahead into distance to detect hazards much further down the road, in the same way a person can; more tricky roads may also need to have extra sensors placed along the route; other hurdles could include breakdowns in extreme weather or sudden, unexpected dangers emerging amidst very busy traffic.

On top of all this, the technology – when it comes to heavy lorries – is still not cheap. What’s more, these vehicles are right now modified old style lorries rather than self-driving vehicles straight off the production line.

China wants to be a champion of new tech, but it also has to be careful, not only because of the potential for deadly accidents but also because of how Chinese people might view this shift.

“This is not just about fulfilling regulations. It is not just about building a public image,” says Chim Lee. “But that, over time, the public will see the benefit of this technology, see how it will reduce their costs for buying things, or look at it as a way of imagining that society is improving, rather than viewing this as technology which is potentially destroying, causing car accidents or removing employment opportunities.”

Professor Yang sees another problem. “We humans can tolerate another human driver making mistakes but our tolerance for autonomous trucks is much much lower. Machines are not supposed to make mistakes. So, we have to make sure that the system is extremely reliable.”

As the annual Hajj pilgrimage draws to a close, a long-settled corner of Mecca is stirring up a storm thousands of miles away in India – not for its spiritual significance, but for a 50-year-old inheritance dispute.

At the heart of the controversy is Keyi Rubath, a 19th-Century guest house built in the 1870s by Mayankutty Keyi, a wealthy Indian merchant from Malabar (modern-day Kerala), whose trading empire stretched from Mumbai to Paris.

Located near Islam’s holiest site, Masjid al-Haram, the building was demolished in 1971 to make way for Mecca’s expansion. Saudi authorities deposited 1.4 million riyals (about $373,000 today) in the kingdom’s treasury as compensation, but said no rightful heir could be identified at the time.

Decades later, that sum – still held in Saudi Arabia’s treasury – has sparked a bitter tussle between two sprawling branches of the Keyi family, each trying to prove its lineage and claim what they see as their rightful inheritance.

Neither side has succeeded so far. For decades, successive Indian governments – both at the Centre and in Kerala – have tried and failed to resolve the deadlock.

It remains unclear if Saudi authorities are even willing to release the compensation, let alone adjust it for inflation as some family members now demand – with some claiming it could be worth over $1bn today.

Followers of the case note the property was a waqf – an Islamic charitable endowment – meaning descendants can manage but not own it.

The Saudi department that handles Awqaf (endowed properties) did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment, and the government has made no public statement on the matter.

That hasn’t stopped speculation – about both the money and who it rightfully belongs to.

Little is known about the guest house itself, but descendants claim it stood just steps from the Masjid al-Haram, with 22 rooms and several halls spread over 1.5 acres.

According to family lore, Keyi shipped wood from Malabar to build it and appointed a Malabari manager to run it – an ambitious gesture, though not unusual for the time.

Saudi Arabia was a relatively poor country back then – the discovery of its massive oil fields still a few decades away.

The Hajj pilgrimage and the city’s importance in Islam meant that Indian Muslims often donated money or built infrastructure for Indian pilgrims there.

In his 2014 book, Mecca: The Sacred City, historian Ziauddin Sardar notes that during the second half of the 18th Century, the city had acquired a distinctively Indian character with its economy and financial well-being dependent on Indian Muslims.

“Almost 20% of the city’s inhabitants, the largest single majority, were now of Indian origins – people from Gujarat, Punjab, Kashmir and Deccan, all collectively known locally as the Hindis,” Sardar wrote.

As Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth surged in the 20th century, sweeping development projects reshaped Mecca. Keyi Rubath was demolished three times, the final time in the early 1970s.

That’s when the confusion around compensation appears to have started.

According to BM Jamal, former secretary of India’s Central Waqf Council, the Indian consulate in Jeddah wrote to the government back then, seeking details of Mayankutty Keyi’s legal heir.

“In my understanding, authorities were looking for the descendants to appoint a manager for the property, not to distribute the compensation money,” Mr Jamal said.

Nonetheless, two factions stepped forward: the Keyis – Mayankutty’s paternal family – and the Arakkals, a royal family from Kerala into which he had married.

Both families traditionally followed a matrilineal inheritance system – a custom not recognized under Saudi law, adding further complexity.

The Keyis claim that Mayankutty died childless, making his sister’s children his rightful heirs under matrilineal tradition.

But the Arakkals claim he had a son and a daughter, and therefore, under Indian law, his children would be the legal inheritors.

As the dispute dragged on, the story took on a life of its own. In 2011, after rumours swirled that the compensation could be worth millions, more than 2,500 people flooded a district office in Kannur, claiming to be Keyi’s descendants.

“There were people who claimed that their forefathers had taught Mayankutty in his childhood. Others claimed that their forefathers had provided timber for the guest house,” a senior Keyi family member, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC.

Scams followed. State officials say in 2017 fraudsters posing as Keyi descendants duped locals into handing over money, promising a share of the compensation.

Today, the case remains unresolved.

Some descendants propose the best way to end the dispute would be to ask the Saudi government to use the compensation money to build another guest house for Hajj pilgrims, as Myankutti Keyi had intended.

But others reject this, arguing that the guest house was privately owned, and so any compensation rightfully belongs to the family.

Some argue that even if the family proves lineage to Mayankutty Keyi, without ownership documents, they’re unlikely to gain anything.

For Muhammed Shihad, a Kannur resident who has co-authored a book on the history of the Keyi and Arakkal families, though, the dispute is not just about the money – but about honouring the family’s roots.

“If they don’t get the compensation, it would be worth openly recognising the family’s and the region’s connection to this noble act.”

After the full Glastonbury timetable was published this week, one band’s name was on everybody’s lips. Except no-one knows who they actually are.

Patchwork have a prime place on the festival’s line-up – third from the top of the bill on the main Pyramid Stage on the Saturday night. The only thing is, there’s no band called Patchwork.

It’s a fake name for a mystery guest – just as an unknown band called The ChurnUps were on the Pyramid bill in 2023, and turned out to be the Foo Fighters.

Fans immediately went into overdrive to try to work out Patchwork’s identity – part of the frenzied guessing game surrounding the festival’s “surprise” sets.

The main theories include:

• Pulp – The Britpop heroes, who stepped in to headline in 1995 (and did a secret set in 2011), have just released their first album for 24 years and have a gaping hole in their tour schedule around Glastonbury. Plus, eagle-eared fans noticed that keyboardist Candida Doyle talked in a BBC Radio 2 interview this week about her patchwork hobby. Their spokesman has said it’s not them. But is that a bluff?? Likelihood rating: 9/10 but because of the official denial, actually 3/10
• Haim – The singing US sisters also have a new album and have a UK show in Margate on the Friday of Glastonbury weekend – so it would make sense. Plus fans have discovered that Patchwork is the name of an obscure 2011 German novel by author Sylvia Haim (no relation) and an obscure 2015 film about three young women. Conclusive?! 7/10
• Mumford and Sons – The 2013 headliners are also on the comeback trail, but if they’re Patchwork some might think it a bit underwhelming. 6/10

• Oasis – It would be a bit overwhelming if the Gallagher brothers returned to Glastonbury to reunite a week before their first official gig. But they have categorically ruled it out. 0.5/10
• Robbie Williams – He has a new album called Britpop with artwork using a photo him at Glastonbury in 1995. 5/10
• Oasis and Robbie Williams – The name Patchwork could suggest a supergroup, so how about the real reunion we’ve all been waiting for, after they famously partied together in 95? 1/10 that Robbie plays and Liam rocks up to shake a tambourine for one song.

In conclusion: I don’t know.

“Radiohead also are in the mix of rumours because they’ve been teasing some tour action,” suggests music journalist and broadcaster Georgie Rogers, who was a judge for Glastonbury’s emerging talent competition this year and is DJing at the festival.

“Or could Elton John be returning to do something with Brandi Carlile?”

Sir Elton headlined in 2023, and Carlile, his collaborator on his last album, is on the Pyramid Stage bill on the same day as Patchwork.

The Patchwork slot is just one of several tantalising gaps in this year’s schedule.

Another mystery Pyramid performer is listed as “TBA” for Friday afternoon, while the smaller Park and Woodsies stages – which have hosted secret sets by big names in the past – each have an empty space on the line-up.

“They’re quite prominent sets, and they do tend to put in massive artists,” says Rogers.

One group of fans think they know who will fill those gaps.

“Of the four main slots, I think we’ve got three of them, maybe four, nailed down,” says Ad, one of the people behind the Secretglasto social media account.

“I think it’s definitely people who have got relationships with the festival who will be doing the big slots. An emotional return for one or two, I think. Some unfinished business.”

Ad doesn’t say any more, but that could point to Lewis Capaldi, who struggled to finish his set in 2023 before announcing a break from touring to get his “mental and physical health in order”. He made a tentative comeback last month, and would be a popular choice.

Lana Del Rey also has unfinished business – her 2023 set was cut short after she breached the curfew. She’s back on tour in the UK, with free days on the Friday and Sunday of Glastonbury weekend.

Other stars who have been rumoured include Lady Gaga, who hasn’t played Glastonbury since 2009.

Asked earlier this year what it would take for her to return to the festival, she replied: “Not much”. Gaga has already played Coachella and been on tour this year.

Lorde isn’t on the bill either, but told BBC Radio 2’s Jo Whiley this week she’s “pretty keen” to be.

“The album’s gonna be coming out right around that time,” she said. “I am quite tempted by what’s going on because I’ve got lots of friends playing as well. We’ll see if I can pull some strings and get there.”

The Secretglasto team have gathered and posted information about surprise sets for more than a decade, and interest in their tips has gone “a bit crazy” in recent years.

Ad – who doesn’t want to give his full name – says they have built up a network of reliable sources. “We’ve got loads of contacts at different stages and record labels and whatever else. And people trust us to be sensible with the information,” he says.

“And the bands themselves don’t want empty secret sets do they? So we have had occasions where they have come to us.”

The six people who work on the account aren’t music industry insiders themselves. Another team member, JB, says they sometimes approach acts directly to seek confirmation.

“Now that we’ve been around for 10 years and have a decent bit of clout, we will contact some of the artists via their inboxes, and quite often they’re happy to confirm.

“Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they block us. But generally we’re able to piece all that together fairly quickly.”

He adds: “By the time the gates open, there aren’t many things we don’t know.”

In the past couple of years, some acts have begun harnessing the buzz about secret sets for PR purposes for their album or tour, Ad believes.

“It used to just be friends of the festival, whereas now people are like, ‘If we do the secret set we’re going to get loads of hype and media attention’.”

Ad was among the lucky few to see Lady Gaga play an after-hours set in Club Dada following her main appearance as her career was taking off in 2009.

“She did three or four hits and then disappeared,” he recalls.

“Because the phone signal was so bad, you couldn’t ring or text your mate to let them know. So only the people who happened to be there got to experience it, which was a few hundred.

“I’m surprised she hasn’t come back. Yet.”

That was one of the more exclusive secret sets in Glastonbury history. Others draw huge crowds when the word gets out – which it usually does.

Rogers was in the right place when she a rumour swept the site that Radiohead would play in 2011.

“We were over that side of the festival anyway, so on a wing and a prayer, just in case it was true, we dashed over to the Park Stage in good time, and we got pretty close to the stage,” she says.

“There are reports that it was the biggest crowd on the Park Stage for a secret set ever. I’d waited my whole life to see Radiohead live, and then suddenly here we are, and they did this amazing set.

“As my first ever time seeing them, and being in prime position, and it being a genuine surprise – it was just pure glee. I was just so happy, and I couldn’t believe it.”

Secret sets have been a feature of the festival for decades.

In 1992, the line-up poster wasn’t topped by a star name but the promise of “a special guest that we can’t announce”. That turned out to be Welsh pop stallion Tom Jones.

But Glastonbury’s greatest ever secret set didn’t happen at the festival at all.

In 1995, indie gods The Stone Roses pulled out of headlining after guitarist John Squire broke his collarbone.

But by the time organiser Michael Eavis threw his annual low-key autumn gig in the local village to thank residents for putting up with the main event, Squire was back in action.

So the band made an unannounced live comeback after a five-year absence in a marquee on a Somerset playing field to a couple of thousand lucky people.

They still haven’t appeared at the festival itself, however.

Unfinished business? Tick. Emotional return? Tick! Could Patchwork in fact be The Stone Roses making a long-awaited and triumphant appearance?

Who cares if the likelihood rating is -100/10. Add them to the list!

So gaming’s biggest weekend for new announcements is here, with dozens of titles being shown off for the first time.

Summer Game Fest kicked off the annual preview marathon in the US last night as some of the industry’s major studios tried to grab attention with new reveals and glossy trailers.

Like previous years, some of the biggest stars from film and music were there to add some stardust too.

It’s all as lots of firms are cutting jobs, with people spending less on new games and instead playing long-running titles like Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft.

That means they need to work a lot harder to convince you to splash your cash on new games.

BBC Newsbeat has been through all the Summer Game Fest announcements that were hoping to get us doing just that.

Here are some of the highlights…

For years it was the TV show everyone was talking about.

Now Australian developer PlaySide is hoping we’ll do the same for its new game based on the popular Game of Thrones series.

War for Westeros is a real-time strategy game – or RTS – out next year, where players can control the armies of the Great Houses across some of the locations you might know from the show and books it’s based on.

We’ve been told you’ll be able to take over Westeros solo, or play against your mates online when it launches on PC next year.

What’s your favourite Bond film of all time? If the answer is Casino Royale, you’re in for a treat.

Mads Mikkelsen is reprising his role as villain Le Chiffre, albeit as a digital double based on his appearance.

But there’s a twist, this isn’t for a Bond game – instead he’ll be in an update for the popular Hitman series.

It all makes more sense now we know the studio behind that game, IO Interactive, is working on a brand new Bond game, called 007: First Light.

Players will unlock awards in that game if they take on this challenge in Hitman too.

It also gives us our strongest hint yet that Le Chiffre will make an appearance in 007: First Light.

Capcom’s zombie-horror Resident Evil series is almost 30 years old, and we now know it’ll celebrate that milestone with its new instalment.

An action packed trailer revealed Resident Evil 9 would be called Requiem, and showed off what looks like a destroyed version of the game’s iconic Racoon City.

It’s launching across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC next year.

No word on it coming to Nintendo’s new, more powerful Switch 2 console yet though.

Yes you read that right.

Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver promises to let you and your friends fight alongside the ’90s hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan in a game that mixes combat and music.

The developers have teased an Afro-surrealism style mixed with anime in the first trailer, as well as plenty of tracks from the band itself.

It’s not the first game to feature them though – back in 1999 they released a fighting game called Wu-Tang Shaolin Style to mixed reviews.

Stating the obvious a bit… but there was no shortage of dinosaurs in the first full trailer for Jurassic World Evolution 3.

It’s a game where you build and manage your own version of the amusement park from the movies it’s based on.

The studio behind it, Frontier Developments in Cambridge, also revealed a launch date in October across consoles and PC.

So that’s you up-to-date with some of the biggest moments from the opening night of Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles.

But that’s not all, there are plenty more showcases and announcements Newsbeat will be keeping across over the weekend…

…including Xbox’s big showcase on Sunday night where we might hear more about titles like Call of Duty, Gears of War or even the long-dormant Halo franchise.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

From the moment I arrived in Praia da Luz on Monday the word on everyone’s lips was “closure”.

All the long-term residents of the sleepy Atlantic resort told me closure was what they were hoping for. From the English woman who lived at the time above the apartment from which Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007, to the former neighbour of the main suspect in the case.

They all said: “We hope her family get closure”.

Of course, any chance of a really positive outcome disappeared years ago. Closure now would mean either finding Madeleine McCann’s body, or finding her living with another family, unable to remember her parents or her younger twin siblings.

But, frustrated as residents are when the world’s media return to Praia da Luz – year after year at the same time that purple flowers appear on the jacaranda trees – they do understand the unbearable pain that Kate and Gerry McCann must feel.

How that shock of realisation that Madeleine was not in her bed turned into minutes, then hours, and then days of panic. Then tortuous, unending months and years of uncertainty.

For 13 years there was no single theory as to what happened to Madeleine McCann. Did she wake up in the middle of an opportunistic burglary and have to be silenced? Was she abducted on behalf of a couple desperate for a child of their own? Had her own parents covered up her accidental death? (A theory given sufficient weight by Portuguese prosecutors that for a while Kate and Gerry McCann were officially under suspicion.)

The initial Portuguese investigation failed to preserve the scene adequately, so the opportunity to gather forensic evidence from Madeline McCann’s room at the Ocean Club was lost. Long-term residents remember joining in uncoordinated and ad-hoc searches of the town.

The Metropolitan Police investigation that began in 2011 built to a peak in 2014, with substantial searches near Praia da Luz – but they did not appear to have any identifiable suspects.

They had 60 people of interest, 38 of whom they were investigating. Portuguese prosecutors had allowed them to search only one of three sites they had asked for access to.

Everything changed in June 2020 when, out of the blue, the head prosecutor in Braunschweig in Germany, Hans Christian Wolters, said he had evidence that Madeleine McCann was dead.

Working with the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI, he said he had identified a suspect, later identified as Christian Brückner.

“The evidence is strong enough to say that the girl is dead, and to accuse a specific individual of murder,” Hans Christian Wolter said.

Brückner, who spent many years of his life in the Algarve, was a drifter, a petty criminal and a convicted sex offender. It all fitted neatly into place and it seemed that the mystery might finally be solved. Brückner’s long list of previous convictions includes ones for sexually abusing children in 1994 and 2016.

The Braunschweig prosecution team have never disclosed the extent of any evidence they have, but we do know their suspicions are partly based on a conversation an old acquaintance of Brückner’s claims they had at a festival in 2008.

Helge Busching says the topic of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance came up, and Brückner said she “didn’t scream”. Mr Busching says it was clear to him what Brückner meant.

Since 2019, Brückner has been in prison in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005. But he is due for release in September, or in January if he does not pay an outstanding fine.

Brückner told an RTL reporter earlier this year that he was looking forward to a “decent steak and a beer”. The concern is that he will leave the country and head somewhere with no extradition treaty with Germany, though he appears to have no money.

The Braunschweig prosecutors’ confidence was dealt a severe blow last year when they put Brückner on trial for rape and unconnected attempted child abductions.

Mr Busching gave evidence, but the court in Braunschweig acquitted Brückner and suddenly time was very short.

Mr Wolters has made no secret of the fact that he wants more evidence to charge Brückner. That is why the BKA footed the bill for the search this week in ruined farm buildings on merciless, shadeless scrubland in the rising heat of an Algarve summer.

The buildings are frequented at night by the kind of drifters and petty criminals that Brückner once was. Nearby residents told us they sometimes find looted suitcases among the ruins that have been stolen from holidaymakers.

But this week’s searches were not targeted on one specific building, so any intelligence they were based on was clearly quite vague.

It all felt a bit like a last desperate attempt to back Mr Busching’s statements with concrete, physical evidence.

In some ways this search was similar to those I have seen on previous trips. The use of shovels in the heat, digging up stone-hard ground.

But the German team were mostly targeting old farm buildings. This meant they needed a large, yellow mechanical digger to break up the concrete floors and sift through the resulting rubble.

They also made extensive use of a ground-penetrating radar, slowly pushing the device across the buildings’ floors, looking for anomalies and cavities underneath.

The Portuguese fire brigade helped on the first day, pumping out an old well so it could be safely searched. The officers were looking for traces of Madeleine McCann, or some of her clothing.

Every time I travel to Portugal for a new search it always begins optimistically. Could police find something this time? But on every occasion it quickly becomes apparent the searches are not tightly targeted. The police work always clearly based on quite vague intelligence – or just an investigator’s hunch.

Luis Neves, the National Director of the Polícia Judiciária, the Portuguese equivalent of the FBI, said at the end of the week that, “nothing is in vain, not least because doors are being closed”.

As we watched the German detectives packing away it felt like the spring of hope of a resolution that had bubbled up in June 2020 was evaporating in the thankless heat.

The Prince of Wales will travel to the South of France this weekend to call for more to be done to protect the world’s oceans.

In what his team describes as a “landmark speech” in Monaco on Sunday – World Oceans Day – he will address environmentalists and, crucially, investors, to urge them to work together to protect our oceans

Prince William will attend the Blue Economy and Finance Forum as founder of the Earthshot environmental prize which looks for solutions to the world’s climate challenges.

The forum is the curtain-raiser to the UN Oceans Conference in Nice next week.

“The Prince of Wales feels passionately about action being taken to protect and restore our oceans,” a Kensington Palace spokesperson told the BBC. “Tomorrow, he’s going to be calling for swift, immediate global action. The time is now.”

Rising temperatures, pollution and overfishing are causing huge damage to the world’s oceans and the communities that rely on them.

Events this weekend will look at the role oceans play in global trade, food security and sustainable energy.

The meeting will be held at the Grimaldi Forum, an eye-catching steel and glass venue, named after Monaco’s own royal family.

Prince Albert II of Monaco is a supporter of many oceans projects and is a key player at the forum.

“This event will be more than a forum. It will provide an unique opportunity to bring together decision makers, finance professionals, philanthropists, NGOs and players from the private sector to turn ambition into action,” he says.

Last month, Sir David Attenborough’s new film, Oceans, was released in cinemas.

It gave his lifelong perspective on the value of oceans.

“After living for nearly 100 years on this planet,” he says “I now understand that the most important place on earth is not on land but at sea and today we are living in the greatest age of ocean discovery.”

The film places the oceans as being at a crossroads, needing more action to help them continue as the “planet’s support system”.

Prince William shares that view.

He has made his admiration for Sir David, who was an inspiration for the creation of the Earthshot Prize, clear.

Sir David’s storytelling around the environment is a powerful asset in getting public attention and buy in – something the prince is acutely aware of.

The visit to France is an insight into how Prince William sees his role in the environmental space and part of his development as a global statesman.

Also attending the forum in Monaco will be France’s President Emmanuel Macron and President Rodrigo Roblez of Costa Rica.

Why Monaco?

Because, over the coming days, gathered in this wealthy, tax haven, amid the super yachts and holidaying multi-millionaires, is some serious cash and investors willing to spend it on protecting marine life and the oceans they live in.

The prince’s speech and meetings will largely be in public on Sunday.

But he will also hold a closed, private session with experts and the investor community.

It’s a pragmatic approach to using his royal soft power to draw in people who have the resources to help generate change.

Throughout his life, the King has used his platform to bring the conversation about the environment into the mainstream.

His son is now building on that, in his own way, to try to show that environmental solutions are worth the investment.

And the oceans can be a difficult sell.

The sheer scale of the work that needs to be done can make it less attractive to investors.

“I have a job that should not exist” is how Sam Teicher, the co-founder and chief reef officer of CoralVita often begins his pitches.

His business was the first winner of the million-pound Earthshot prize in 2021 for solutions to repair and protect oceans.

CoralVita grows corals to restore dying reefs.

Of this year’s Earthshot nominations, only 9% have entered the “Revive Our Oceans” category.

“We are land creatures, it is out of sight and out of mind for a lot of people,” says Sam Teicher.

He will be in Monaco this weekend and describes his approach to raising money for his business as “trying to harness capitalism for good”, stressing that “you need to be genuine and maintain integrity, you don’t want to blue wash or green wash”.

And that strategy is working.

The BBC has learnt that CoralVita has just won funding of about £6m ($8.1m) with investors led by Builders Vision – a philanthropic organisation created by Lukas Walton, whose grandparents founded the Walmart chain in the United States.

It is one of the biggest funding offers for oceans work and will mean CoralVita can scale up and accelerate its restoration projects to help preserve the ocean’s biodiversity.

The investment power of Builders Vision will now also support the Earthshot Prize in a newly announced partnership. It again highlights the impact Prince William can have in linking up environmental solutions with investors.

The Prince William factor has been a huge benefit to CoralVita as it works to scale up its business.

“He helps getting in front of people who would normally not think it was investible or that it mattered,” says Mr Teicher.

“We need to expand out to bankers, government leaders, tech specialists. He gets more people around the table.”

And ultimately this is an event where money matters.

For Mr Teicher the target is always the right type of investor.

“We aren’t looking for people wanting a traditional five to seven year return,” he says. “This is a long-haul problem. We need people in it for the long haul.”

Jack is one of only 16 children in the world with a life-limiting genetic condition that is so rare it doesn’t have a name.

The 11-month-old has a mutation of the PPFIBP1 gene which means he is blind, has frequent seizures and is unlikely to ever walk or talk.

His mum and dad want to track down the parents of the other children with his condition to better understand their son’s diagnosis and offer support.

“It is very limited with what they can tell us,” said his mum Amanda Thomas from St Athan, Vale of Glamorgan.

“But what they have said is it is life-limiting and it is likely that he will pass away at some point during childhood but they don’t know when that will be.”

To date Amanda has spoken to one other parent, a woman from Georgia in the US, whose daughter had the condition and died at the age of two.

“She felt so blessed to have her little girl in her life, even for a short time and you could just see how much love was there,” said Amanda.

She said being able to ask one another questions was helpful for both of them and she was left overwhelmed by the experience.

For the first few weeks of his life, Amanda and Nick’s fourth child Jack appeared completely healthy.

He was nine weeks old when they first spotted something that caused concern.

“His right eye had dropped to the outside and it had fixed but his head had stuck to the side as well,” explained Amanda.

“Nick took one look at him and said ‘I think he needs to go into A&E’.”

Initially doctors were not overly concerned and the family returned home.

Just hours later the same thing happened again only this time Jack was also lethargic and his breathing had become shallow so he was taken to hospital by ambulance.

Shortly after arriving he had his first seizure.

“He stopped breathing, I shouted for help and an entire crash team came in,” said Amanda.

“They resuscitated him and then on the way to taking him to resus they had to stop in the corridor and resuscitate him again.”

Jack was put on a ventilator and moved into intensive care.

Doctors were at a loss as to what was wrong with him.

Following a number of tests that led nowhere the family underwent genetic testing.

The results showed Jack has a mutated PPFIBP1 gene.

“They explained that every gene has two copies and with this particular gene I carry one mutated copy and Nick carries another mutated copy,” said Amanda.

“It’s meant that both of Jack’s copies of this gene have got a variation to it which has caused this neurodevelopmental disorder which doesn’t have a name because it is so rare.”

With so few known cases it is hard for doctors to predict Jack’s life expectancy.

“They’ve said it could be when he’s one, it could be when he’s five, it could be 10 years but knowing that we’re going to outlive our child and knowing that his brothers and his sister may one day have to say goodbye to him is heart-breaking,” said Amanda.

Amanda and Nick were told their other children – aged 10, eight and 4 – also had a 25% chance of having the mutated gene but tests showed this was not the case.

When Jack first became unwell last September the family were in the middle of fully renovating their house.

Everything came to a standstill so the family home is a partial building site.

Amanda has left her job in social services to take care of Jack full-time and Nick has been able to continue working but is recovering from a stroke in July 2023 and heart surgery that followed in May last year.

They are trying to crowdfund the renovation as well as equipment for Jack.

“Life is testing,” admitted Nick.

“Amanda and I have to be realistic this could be his last Christmas, this could be his last birthday so really we’re just trying to get this as comfortable as possible so Jack enjoys the time he does have with us.

He said he and Amanda found strength in one another.

Alongside all of this Amanda is continuing her search for other parents of children with Jack’s condition.

“When we had our diagnosis we had nobody to turn to because there was nobody who had the same condition so there’s no support groups available, there’s nothing,” said Amanda.

“If somebody in the future gets this diagnosis then perhaps they can find me, and I can offer a bit of support that I didn’t have in the beginning because there were so many questions, so many what ifs, where, how, which were all just being met with ‘we don’t know’.”

Over the past eight months Jack has been taken to hospital by air ambulance three times and the family have spent about 60 nights in hospital.

With the future so uncertain the family are making the most of every moment.

“I just used to stress about the things that didn’t matter, my house not being tidy, the washing piling up, now I’m learning that’s not important anymore,” said Amanda.

“We really do have limited time with Jack so it’s about having those moments and making the most of it.”

The watchdog charged with holding MI5 to account rewrote a report into the handling of a violent neo-Nazi agent after the Security Service gave it false information, the BBC can reveal.

An early draft of the report by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) contradicted false evidence given by MI5 to court, but the final version did not.

IPCO told the BBC it was “misled” by the Security Service.

MI5 director general Sir Ken McCallum apologised to IPCO, after the BBC challenged the Security Service’s false statements to the courts.

The revelation means that MI5 has effectively given false evidence in this case to every organisation or court which is supposed to have access to the Security Service’s secrets and is responsible for holding it to account.

It also raises questions about how easily IPCO accepts false assurances from MI5, when it is supposed to ensure the Security Service works within the law and in the public interest.

IPCO began its secret investigation into MI5’s handling of the agent – a genuine neo-Nazi known publicly as X who informed on extremist networks – in 2022.

It was prompted by a BBC story about how X used his Security Service role to coerce and terrorise his then-girlfriend, known publicly as “Beth”.

MI5 had told me he was an agent in 2020 while trying to stop me running a news story about the man’s extremism. I had already heard he was an agent, also known as a covert human intelligence source (Chis), and told MI5 as much.

The calls were an attempt by MI5 to protect and cover for X, a violent misogynistic abuser with paedophilic tendencies. Telling me he was an agent was inconsistent with MI5’s public claims about always abiding by a core secrecy policy – known as neither confirm nor deny (NCND) – on the status of agents.

But the Security Service maintained it had stuck by the NCND policy – first in a court case where the government tried to prevent the BBC from publishing a story about X, and then in two further courts where Beth made a claim against MI5.

Keeping X’s status officially secret meant that key evidence was withheld from Beth.

IPCO’s role is to inspect the use of investigatory powers by MI5, such as its use of agents, and to identify any concerns in its reports.

It reviewed MI5 documents about the case of agent X, including an official record authorising a departure from NCND, and sent a draft report to MI5 in February 2023.

The report concluded that MI5 had taken the “extraordinary” decision to depart from NCND on X’s agent status in calls with me.

But MI5 pushed back and denied it had departed from the policy, including in correspondence with the Investigatory Powers Commissioner himself Sir Brian Leveson, a retired Court of Appeal judge best known for chairing a public inquiry into the culture and standards of the media.

MI5 told IPCO: “We would like to make clear that we did not in fact take any such decision. [X’s] status was not disclosed to the BBC either at that time or subsequently.”

In December 2023 Sir Brian wrote back, saying that “based on the records available” it was “entitled to conclude as a justifiable inference, on the balance of probabilities, that MI5 disclosed [X’s] role as a CHIS”.

He said that MI5 had provided no documentary evidence to support its position, nor any explanation about how it had convinced me not to run a story about X, as the Security Service had claimed.

“I note that MI5 has not disputed that disclosure was, at least, contemplated… either there was inadequate record keeping or there has been a failure to make records available to inspectors. Either would represent a serious compliance failure,” he said.

MI5 refused to back down and IPCO changed its position, with the final report falsely saying that there was no departure from NCND.

The final version introduced three significant falsehoods.

First, the report said that “an operational plan was agreed that there would be no disclosure that X was an MI5 CHIS”. This was the opposite of the truth. MI5’s entire operational plan involved a sustained attempt to persuade me to stop doing a story by disclosing that X was an agent.

Second, the report said “it was not MI5 policy to record all such exchanges” with journalists. This was untrue. There was a policy requiring such exchanges to be recorded.

Third, the report referenced a High Court witness statement I had given and said: “De Simone’s witness statement confirms that no disclosure of X’s status as a CHIS was made.” This was false. My witness statement said no such thing.

When contacted by the BBC, IPCO said it was “misled into amending our draft report to remove the finding that Agent X’s status had been disclosed.”

IPCO said the first two falsehoods were included due to “assurances provided by MI5” and that it is now “clear that this information was incorrect and that the findings in our draft report reflected the true position”.

Regarding the false information about my witness statement, IPCO said: “We accept that this line in the report reflects our interpretation of your statement based on the information available to us at the time.”

The BBC challenged MI5 on its false evidence late last year, leading to the Security Service apologising in the High Court. MI5 promised to transparently investigate what happened, and produced new witness statements from the senior officer in charge of the MI5 team who handled X and MI5’s director general of strategy – who is in effect third-in-command of the Security Service.

But neither of them told the court about the IPCO reports, even in the closed, secret part of the case intended to allow MI5 to disclose sensitive evidence.

The judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, only learned about the IPCO report after he had made MI5 hand over another secret document which mentioned it.

MI5 made further witness statements apologising to the court, with the senior officer in charge of the team who handled X saying that “on reflection” they recognised the “IPCO issue” should have been revealed earlier.

“I apologise for not recognising the importance of explaining the IPCO aspect,” the director general of strategy said, but he insisted there had been no “attempt to conceal or obscure that aspect of the background”.

The BBC was only told about the IPCO issue last week, with further information then provided after MI5 abandoned an attempt to keep applying its NCND secrecy policy on X’s agent status.

Following a High Court hearing on Tuesday, a panel of senior judges is considering what to do next about MI5’s false evidence.

MI5’s internal review into the false evidence said it was a result of mistakes, poor memories and bad record-keeping.

The BBC said there is evidence of lies by MI5 officers, the internal inquiry was lacklustre and MI5 tried to keep damning material from the court.

IPCO said its investigation of how MI5 had managed Agent X found a “critical failure to create and maintain accurate documentary records; a finding which was reinforced in the final report due to MI5’s inability to produce any contemporaneous records and the length of time taken to respond to our requests for supporting evidence”.

In IPCO’s most recent annual report, published in the past few days, Sir Brian referred to Agent X, saying: “Recent developments in this case mean that we are keeping it under review.”

Police are still looking for a Washington man they believe murdered his three young daughters one week ago.

Travis Decker, 32, is wanted on kidnapping and first-degree murder charges for killing his daughters, aged nine, eight and five, according to the Wenatchee Police Department in Washington state.

Officials believe Mr Decker, who they say is an outdoorsman and may have gone to mountain survival school as part of his military training, is hiding in a remote part of the mountainous and wooded state, making the search for him difficult.

He has been said to “pose a significant risk, if approached”. Police have not provided a possible motive.

The girls – Paityn, Evelyn and Olivia – died from apparent suffocation in a remote campground earlier this week, according to police.

Their mother reported them missing on 30 May, after Mr Decker failed to return his daughters to her following a visit. He also did not take her phone calls.

A few days later, on 2 June, police found the girls’ bodies near the campground.

Police also found Mr Decker’s cell phone at the campground, but he was no longer there. His truck, which he was believed to have been living in, was also found nearby.

“I don’t think any motive would be acceptable. And clearly it’s not the decision of a sound mind,” Chelan County Sheriff Mike Morrison said at a press conference on Wednesday, where he made a public plea to Mr Decker to turn himself in.

Mr Decker’s outdoor survival skills may be helping him evade the authorities searching for him, which includes the FBI, Sheriff Morrison said.

“It sounds like at times he would go out and would be off-grid for sometimes up to two and a half months,” Sheriff Morrison said after speaking to Mr Decker’s family.

Mr Decker may have scoped out the area and hidden supplies there before allegedly killing his children, and he has “the knowledge to survive for a long period of time”, the sheriff added.

“We want a peaceful resolution to this, but we’re not going to relinquish our efforts,” Sheriff Morrison said while asking Mr Decker to come forward. “Let’s wrap this up and do what’s right for your kids.”

The US Marshals Service on Wednesday announced a $20,000 (£14,780) reward for information leading to Mr Decker’s capture.

The search has caused widespread closures of national forests popular among hikers in the area.

On the surface, Muhammed Asif Hafeez was an upstanding individual.

A global businessman and ambassador of a prestigious London polo club, he rubbed shoulders with the British elite, including members of the Royal Family.

He also regularly passed on detailed information to the authorities in the UK and Middle East that, in some cases, led to the interception of huge shipments of drugs. He was motivated, he said, simply by what he saw as his “moral obligation to curb and highlight criminal activities”.

At least, that is what he would have had people think.

In reality, Hafeez was himself what US officials described as “one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers”.

From his residence in the UK, he was the puppet-master of a vast drugs empire, supplying many tonnes of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish from bases in Pakistan and India that were distributed across the world. The gangs he informed on were his rivals – and his motivation was to rid the market of his competitors.

His status in the underworld earned him the moniker “the Sultan”.

But this criminal power and prestige would not last forever. After a complex joint operation between the British and American authorities, Hafeez, 66, was extradited from the UK in 2023. He pleaded guilty last November.

On Friday, he was sentenced to 16 years in a New York prison for conspiring to import drugs – including enough heroin for “millions of doses” – into the US. Having been in custody since 2017, Hafeez’s sentence will end in 2033.

The BBC has closely followed Hafeez’s case. We have pieced together information from court documents, corporate listings and interviews with people who knew him.

We wanted to find out how he managed to stay under the radar for so long – and how he eventually got caught.

Hafeez was born in September 1958 to a middle-class family in Lahore, Pakistan. One of six children, his upbringing was comfortable. People in Lahore who knew the family told the BBC that his father had owned a factory near the city. Hafeez also later told a US court that he had trained as a commercial pilot.

From the early 1990s to about the mid-2010s, he ran an outwardly legitimate umbrella company called Sarwani International Corporation, with subsidiary businesses in Pakistan, the UAE and the UK.

According to its website – which has since been shut down – it sold technical equipment to militaries, governments and police forces throughout the world, including equipment for drug detection.

Among the other businesses under the Sarwani umbrella were a textiles company registered in various countries, an Italian restaurant in Lahore that was a franchise of a well-known Knightsbridge brand, and a company named Tipmoor, based near Windsor to the west of London, which specialised in “polo and equestrian services”.

These businesses not only afforded him a luxury lifestyle, but secured him access to the UK’s most exclusive circles. He was listed as an international ambassador for the prestigious Ham Polo Club for at least three years, from 2009 to 2011. He and his wife Shahina were also photographed chatting to Prince William, and embracing Prince Harry, at the club in 2009.

Ham Polo Club told the BBC that Hafeez had never been a member of the club, that the club no longer has “ambassadors”, and that the current board “has no ties to him”. It added that the event at which Hafeez and his wife were photographed meeting the princes “was run by a third party”.

Sarwani’s different global arms were dissolved at various stages in the 2010s, according to their listings on Companies House and equivalent global registries.

A former Sarwani employee based in the UAE told the BBC he suspected there had been “something fishy going on” when he worked for the business, because even big projects were “only paid for in cash”. The employee – who has asked not to be identified, for fear of reprisals – said he eventually left the business because he felt uncomfortable with this.

“There were no [bank] transactions, no records, no existence,” he told the BBC.

Hafeez would also periodically write letters to the authorities in the UAE and UK informing on rival cartels, under the guise of being a concerned member of the public.

The BBC has seen these, as well as letters he received in response from the British Embassy in Dubai and the UK Home Office, thanking him and expressing their appreciation for him getting in touch.

The Home Office told the BBC it does not comment on individual correspondence.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Government of Dubai were contacted by the BBC for comment but did not respond.

Members of Hafeez’s family shared these letters with the BBC in 2018, while he was embroiled in a lengthy legal fight against extradition to the US.

They also submitted them to courts in the UK and, later, to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as evidence that he had been an informant and needed protection. All the courts disagreed and ruled that this was a ploy by Hafeez to rid the market of competitors.

Hafeez, the ECHR said, was “someone who had brought to the attention of the authorities the criminal conduct of others who he knew to be actual or potential rivals to his substantial criminal enterprise”.

While Hafeez was writing these letters, a meeting took place in 2014 that – despite him not being there – would lead to his downfall.

Two of Hafeez’s close associates met a potential buyer from Colombia in a flat in Mombasa, Kenya. They burned a small amount of heroin in order to demonstrate how pure it was, and said they could supply him with any quantity of “100%… white crystal”.

The supplier of this high-quality heroin, they had told the buyer, was a man from Pakistan known as “the Sultan” – that is, Hafeez.

What they would soon learn was that the “buyer” from Colombia was actually working undercover for the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The entire meeting was part of an elaborate sting operation, and had been covertly filmed – footage that has been obtained by the BBC.

US court documents reveal the deal was co-ordinated by Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha, two brothers who led a violent cartel in Kenya. Their father was himself a feared kingpin who had been killed in Amsterdam’s Red Light District in 2000.

The deal also involved Vijaygiri “Vicky” Goswami, an Indian national who managed the Akashas’ operations.

In October 2014, with the Akashas, Goswami and Hafeez still unaware of who the buyers really were, 99kg of heroin and 2kg of crystal meth were delivered to the fake Colombian traffickers. The Akashas promised to provide hundreds of kilograms more of each drug.

A month later, the Akasha brothers and Goswami were arrested in Mombasa. They were released on bail shortly afterwards, and spent over two years fighting extradition to the US.

In the background, American law enforcers were working with counterparts in the UK to piece together their case against Hafeez, partly using evidence gathered from devices they had seized when they arrested Goswami and the Akasha brothers. On those, they had found multiple references to Hafeez as a major supplier, and were able to find enough evidence to identify him as “the Sultan”.

Facing charges in the US didn’t stop one of the men, Goswami, from continuing his illegal enterprise. In 2015, while on bail in Kenya, he hatched a plan with Hafeez to transport several tonnes of a drug called ephedrine from a chemical factory in Solapur, India, to Mozambique.

Ephedrine, a powerful medication that is legal in limited quantities, is used to make methamphetamine. The two men – Goswami and Hafeez – planned to set up a meth factory in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, US court documents show. But their scheme was abandoned in 2016, when police raided the Solapur plant and seized 18 tonnes of ephedrine.

The Akasha brothers and Goswami finally boarded a flight to the US to face trial in January 2017.

Hafeez was arrested eight months later in London, at his flat in the affluent St John’s Wood neighbourhood. He was detained at high security Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, and it was from there that he spent six years fighting extradition to the US.

A big development happened in 2019 in the US. Goswami pleaded guilty, and told a New York court he had agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. The Akasha brothers also pleaded guilty.

Baktash Akasha was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His brother Ibrahim was sentenced to 23 years.

Goswami, who is yet to be sentenced, would have testified against Hafeez in the US had the case gone to trial.

From Belmarsh, Hafeez was running out of options.

He tried to stop extradition to the US – but failed to convince magistrates, the High Court in London and the ECHR that he had, in fact, been an informant to the authorities who was “at risk of ill-treatment from his fellow prisoners” as a result.

He also claimed the conditions in a US prison would be “inhuman and degrading” for him because of his health conditions, including type 2 diabetes and asthma.

He lost all of these arguments at every stage and was extradited in May 2023.

His case did not go to trial. In November last year, Hafeez pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to manufacture and distribute heroin, methamphetamine and hashish and to import them into the US.

Pre-sentencing, prosecutors described the “extremely fortunate circumstances” of Hafeez’s life, which “throw into harsh relief his decision to scheme… and to profit from the distribution of dangerous substances that destroy lives and whole communities”.

“Unlike many traffickers whose drug activities are borne, at least in part, from desperation, poverty, and a lack of educational opportunities,” they said, “the defendant has lived a life replete with privilege and choice.”

Matthew’s dad had brown eyes and black hair. His grandparents had piercing blue eyes.

There was a running joke in his family that “dad looked nothing like his parents”, the teacher from southern England says.

It turned out there was a very good reason for this.

Matthew’s father had been swapped at birth in hospital nearly 80 years ago. He died late last year before learning the truth of his family history.

Matthew – not his real name – contacted the BBC after we reported on the case of Susan, who received compensation from an NHS trust after a home DNA test revealed she had been accidentally switched for another baby in the 1950s.

BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.

During the pandemic, Matthew started looking for answers to niggling questions about his family history. He sent off a saliva sample in the post to be analysed.

The genealogy company entered his record into its vast online database, allowing him to view other users whose DNA closely matched his own.

“Half of the names I’d just never heard of,” he says. “I thought, ‘That’s weird’, and called my wife to tell her the old family joke might be true after all.”

Matthew then asked his dad to submit his own DNA sample, which confirmed he was even more closely related to the same group of mysterious family members.

Matthew started exchanging messages with two women who the site suggested were his father’s cousins. All were confused about how they could possibly be related.

Working together, they eventually tracked down birth records from 1946, months after the end of World War Two.

The documents showed that one day after his father was apparently born, another baby boy had been registered at the same hospital in east London.

That boy had the same relatively unusual surname that appeared on the mystery branch of the family tree, a link later confirmed by birth certificates obtained by Matthew.

It was a lightbulb moment.

“I realised straight away what must have happened,” he says. “The only explanation that made sense was that both babies got muddled up in hospital.”

Matthew and the two women managed to construct a brand new family tree based on all of his DNA matches.

“I love a puzzle and I love understanding the past,” he says. “I’m quite obsessive anyway, so I got into trying to reverse engineer what had happened.”

Before World War Two, most babies in the UK were born at home, or in nursing homes, attended by midwives and the family doctor.

That started to change as the country prepared for the launch of the NHS in 1948, and very gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.

“The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife,” says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.

“It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well.”

It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.

To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby’s name, mother’s name, the date and time of birth, and the baby’s weight.

“Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen”, says Ms Coates, who trained as a nurse herself in the 1970s and a midwife in 1981.

“If there were two or more members of staff in the nursery feeding babies, for example, a baby could easily be put down in the wrong cot.”

By 1956, hospital births were becoming more common, and midwifery textbooks were recommending that a “wrist name-tape” or “string of lettered china beads” should be attached directly to the newborn.

A decade later, by the mid-1960s, it was rare for babies to be removed from the delivery room without being individually labelled.

Stories of babies being accidentally switched in hospital were very rare at the time, though more are now coming to light thanks to the boom in genetic testing and ancestry websites.

The day after Jan Daly was born at a hospital in north London in 1951, her mother immediately complained that the baby she had been given was not hers.

“She was really stressed and crying, but the nurses assured her she was wrong and the doctor was called in to try to calm her,” Jan says.

The staff only backed down when her mum told them she’d had a fast, unassisted delivery, and pointed out the clear forceps marks on the baby’s head

“I feel for the other mother who had been happily feeding me for two days and then had to give up one baby for another,” she says.

“There was never any apology, it was just ‘one of those silly errors’, but the trauma affected my mother for a long time.”

Matthew’s father, an insurance agent from the Home Counties, was a keen amateur cyclist who spent his life following the local racing scene.

He lived alone in retirement and over the last decade his health had been deteriorating.

Matthew thought long and hard about telling him the truth about his family history but, in the end, decided against it.

“I just felt my dad doesn’t need this,” he says. “He had lived 78 years in a type of ignorance, so it didn’t feel right to share it with him.”

Matthew’s father died last year without ever knowing he’d been celebrating his birthday a day early for the past eight decades.

Since then, Matthew has driven to the West Country to meet his dad’s genetic first cousin and her daughter for coffee.

They all got on well, he says, sharing old photos and “filling in missing bits of family history”.

But Matthew has decided not to contact the man his father must have been swapped with as a baby, or his children – in part because they have not taken DNA tests themselves.

“If you do a test by sending your saliva off, then there’s an implicit understanding that you might find something that’s a bit of a surprise,” Matthew says.

“Whereas with people who haven’t, I’m still not sure if it’s the right thing to reach out to them – I just don’t think it’s right to drop that bombshell.”

When Elon Musk recently announced that he was stepping back from politics, investors hoped that would mean he would step up his involvement in the many tech firms he runs.

His explosive row with President Donald Trump – and the very public airing of his dirty White House laundry – suggests Musk’s changing priorities might not quite be the salve they had been hoping for.

Instead of Musk retreating somewhat from the public eye and focusing on boosting the fortunes of Tesla and his other enterprises, he now finds himself being threatened with a boycott from one of his main customers – Trump’s federal government.

Tesla shares were sent into freefall on Thursday – falling 14% – as he sounded off about President Donald Trump on social media.

They rebounded a little on Friday following some indications tempers were cooling.

Even so, for the investors and analysts who, for months, had made clear they wanted Musk off his phone and back at work, the situation is far from ideal.

Some though argue the problems for Musk’s businesses run much deeper than this spat – and the controversial role in the Trump administration it has brought a spectacular end to.

For veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher, that is especially so for Tesla.

“Tesla’s finished,” she told the BBC on the sidelines of the San Francisco Media Summit early this week.

“It was a great car company. They could compete in the autonomous taxi space but they’re way behind.”

Tesla has long attempted to play catch-up against rival Waymo, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, whose driverless taxis have traversed the streets of San Francisco for years – and now operate in several more cities.

This month, Musk is supposed to be overseeing Tesla’s launch of a batch of autonomous robo-taxis in Austin, Texas.

He posted to X last week that the electric vehicle maker had been testing the Model Y with no drivers on board.

“I believe 90% of the future value of Tesla is going to be autonomous and robotics,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told the BBC this week, adding that the Austin launch would be “a watershed moment”.

“The first task at hand is ensuring the autonomous vision gets off to a phenomenal start,” Ives added.

• Who is Elon Musk?
• How the Trump-Musk feud erupted

But with Musk’s attention divided, the project’s odds of success would appear to have lengthened.

And there’s something else to factor in too: Musk’s own motivation.

The talk in Silicon Valley lately centres less on whether Musk can turn things around and more on whether he even cares.

“He’s a really powerful person when he’s focused on something,” said Ross Gerber, President and CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management.

“Before, it was about proving to the world that he would make EVs – the tech that nobody else could do. It was about proving he could make rockets. He had a lot to prove.”

A longtime Tesla investor, Gerber has soured on the stock, and has been paring back his holdings since Musk’s foray into right-wing politics. He called Thursday an “extremely painful day.”

“It’s the dumbest thing you could possibly do to think that you have more power than the president of the United States,” Gerber said, referring to Musk’s social media tirade against Trump.

The BBC contacted X, Tesla, and SpaceX seeking comment from Mr Musk but did not receive a response.

A particular problem for Musk is that, before he seemingly created an enemy in Donald Trump, he already had one in the grassroots social media campaign against his car-maker.

Protests, dubbed #TeslaTakedown, have played out across the country every weekend since Trump took office.

In April, Tesla reported a 20% drop in car sales for the first three months of the year. Profits plunged more than 70%, and the share price went down with it.

“He should not be deciding the fate of our democracy by disassembling our government piece by piece. It’s not right,” protestor Linda Koistinen told me at a demonstration outside a Berkeley, California Tesla dealership in February.

Koistinen said she wanted to make a “visible stand” against Musk personally.

“Ultimately it’s not about the tech or the Tesla corporation,” said Joan Donovan, a prominent disinformation researcher who co-organized the #TeslaTakedown protests on social media.

“It’s about the way in which the stock of Tesla has been able to be weaponized against the people and it has put Musk in such a position to have an incredible amount of power with no transparency,” Donovan added.

Another aspect of Musk’s empire that has raised the ire of his detractors is X, the social media platform once known as Twitter.

“He bought Twitter so that he had clout and would be able to – at the drop of a hat – reach hundreds of millions of people,” Donovan said.

There is another possibility here though.

Could Musk’s high-profile falling out with Trump help rehabilitate him in the eyes of people who turned against him because of his previous closeness to the president?

Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, thinks it could.

“We’re a very forgiving country,” Moorhead says in a telephone interview.

“These things take time,” he acknowledges, but “it’s not unprecedented”.

Swisher likened Musk’s personal brand to that of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates more than two decades ago.

She said Gates was once regarded as “the Darth Vader of Silicon Valley” because of his “arrogant and rude” personality.

Today, despite his flaws, Gates has largely rehabilitated his image.

“He learned. He grew up. People can change,” Swisher told me, even though Musk is “clearly troubled.”

The problem for Musk is the future for him and his companies is not just about what he does – but what Trump decides too.

And while Trump needed Musk in the past, not least to help fund his presidential race, it’s not so clear he does now.

Noah Smith, writer of the Noahpinion Substack, said Trump’s highly lucrative foray into cryptocurrencies – as unseemly as it has been – may have freed him from depending on Musk to carry out his will.

“My guess is that this was so he could get out from under Elon,” Smith said.

In Trump’s most menacing comment of the day, he suggested cutting Musk’s government contracts, which have an estimated value of $38 billion.

A significant chunk of that goes to Musk’s rocket company SpaceX – seemingly threatening its future.

However, despite the bluster, Trump’s warning may be a little more hollow than it seems.

That’s because SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft ferries people and cargo to the International Space Station where three NASA astronauts are currently posted.

It demonstrates that SpaceX has so entrenched itself in the US space and national security apparatus, that Trump’s threat could be difficult to carry out.

You could make a similar argument about Musk’s internet satellite company, Starlink. Finding an alternative could be easier said than done.

But, if there are limits on what Trump can do, the same is also true of Musk.

In the middle of his row with Trump, he threatened to decommission the Dragon – but it wasn’t long before he was rowing back.

Responding to an X user’s suggestion he that he “cool down” he wrote, “Good advice. Ok, we won’t decommission Dragon.”

It’s clear Musk and Trump’s friendship is over. It’s less certain their reliance on each other is.

Whatever the future for Musk’s businesses is then, it seems Trump – and his administration’s actions – will continue to have a big say in them.

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As the annual Hajj pilgrimage draws to a close, a long-settled corner of Mecca is stirring up a storm thousands of miles away in India – not for its spiritual significance, but for a 50-year-old inheritance dispute.

At the heart of the controversy is Keyi Rubath, a 19th-Century guest house built in the 1870s by Mayankutty Keyi, a wealthy Indian merchant from Malabar (modern-day Kerala), whose trading empire stretched from Mumbai to Paris.

Located near Islam’s holiest site, Masjid al-Haram, the building was demolished in 1971 to make way for Mecca’s expansion. Saudi authorities deposited 1.4 million riyals (about $373,000 today) in the kingdom’s treasury as compensation, but said no rightful heir could be identified at the time.

Decades later, that sum – still held in Saudi Arabia’s treasury – has sparked a bitter tussle between two sprawling branches of the Keyi family, each trying to prove its lineage and claim what they see as their rightful inheritance.

Neither side has succeeded so far. For decades, successive Indian governments – both at the Centre and in Kerala – have tried and failed to resolve the deadlock.

It remains unclear if Saudi authorities are even willing to release the compensation, let alone adjust it for inflation as some family members now demand – with some claiming it could be worth over $1bn today.

Followers of the case note the property was a waqf – an Islamic charitable endowment – meaning descendants can manage but not own it.

The Saudi department that handles Awqaf (endowed properties) did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment, and the government has made no public statement on the matter.

That hasn’t stopped speculation – about both the money and who it rightfully belongs to.

Little is known about the guest house itself, but descendants claim it stood just steps from the Masjid al-Haram, with 22 rooms and several halls spread over 1.5 acres.

According to family lore, Keyi shipped wood from Malabar to build it and appointed a Malabari manager to run it – an ambitious gesture, though not unusual for the time.

Saudi Arabia was a relatively poor country back then – the discovery of its massive oil fields still a few decades away.

The Hajj pilgrimage and the city’s importance in Islam meant that Indian Muslims often donated money or built infrastructure for Indian pilgrims there.

In his 2014 book, Mecca: The Sacred City, historian Ziauddin Sardar notes that during the second half of the 18th Century, the city had acquired a distinctively Indian character with its economy and financial well-being dependent on Indian Muslims.

“Almost 20% of the city’s inhabitants, the largest single majority, were now of Indian origins – people from Gujarat, Punjab, Kashmir and Deccan, all collectively known locally as the Hindis,” Sardar wrote.

As Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth surged in the 20th century, sweeping development projects reshaped Mecca. Keyi Rubath was demolished three times, the final time in the early 1970s.

That’s when the confusion around compensation appears to have started.

According to BM Jamal, former secretary of India’s Central Waqf Council, the Indian consulate in Jeddah wrote to the government back then, seeking details of Mayankutty Keyi’s legal heir.

“In my understanding, authorities were looking for the descendants to appoint a manager for the property, not to distribute the compensation money,” Mr Jamal said.

Nonetheless, two factions stepped forward: the Keyis – Mayankutty’s paternal family – and the Arakkals, a royal family from Kerala into which he had married.

Both families traditionally followed a matrilineal inheritance system – a custom not recognized under Saudi law, adding further complexity.

The Keyis claim that Mayankutty died childless, making his sister’s children his rightful heirs under matrilineal tradition.

But the Arakkals claim he had a son and a daughter, and therefore, under Indian law, his children would be the legal inheritors.

As the dispute dragged on, the story took on a life of its own. In 2011, after rumours swirled that the compensation could be worth millions, more than 2,500 people flooded a district office in Kannur, claiming to be Keyi’s descendants.

“There were people who claimed that their forefathers had taught Mayankutty in his childhood. Others claimed that their forefathers had provided timber for the guest house,” a senior Keyi family member, who wanted to stay anonymous, told the BBC.

Scams followed. State officials say in 2017 fraudsters posing as Keyi descendants duped locals into handing over money, promising a share of the compensation.

Today, the case remains unresolved.

Some descendants propose the best way to end the dispute would be to ask the Saudi government to use the compensation money to build another guest house for Hajj pilgrims, as Myankutti Keyi had intended.

But others reject this, arguing that the guest house was privately owned, and so any compensation rightfully belongs to the family.

Some argue that even if the family proves lineage to Mayankutty Keyi, without ownership documents, they’re unlikely to gain anything.

For Muhammed Shihad, a Kannur resident who has co-authored a book on the history of the Keyi and Arakkal families, though, the dispute is not just about the money – but about honouring the family’s roots.

“If they don’t get the compensation, it would be worth openly recognising the family’s and the region’s connection to this noble act.”

A 12-year-old boy fell to his death at Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher after slipping in a puddle close to the edge, an inquest has heard.

Zhihan Zhao and his mother, both Chinese nationals, were with her friends at the beauty spot on the County Clare coast on 23 July last year when he walked ahead of the group.

The coroner embraced Zhihan’s distraught mother after recording a verdict of accidental death.

The accident was the second fatal fall at the Cliffs of Moher within a three-month period last year.

Zhihan and his mother, Xianhong Huang, had arrived in Ireland 12 days before his fatal fall.

In her deposition, Ms Huang said that Zhihan was walking ahead of her on the Cliffs of Moher trail when she lost sight of him.

“My son walked very fast and was ahead of us by 50 metres,” she said.

“As there was only one path, I thought we would meet him along the way.

“When I didn’t, I walked to the visitor centre and I checked the visitor centre.”

Unable to find him at the visitor centre, she returned to the path to search for him and when there was no sign of him, she reported him missing.

Ms Huang said she had last seen Zhihan at 13:00 that day and the court heard she had provided gardaí (Irish police) with a photo of him she had taken earlier on the trail.

Speaking through an interpreter at the inquest in Kilrush, County Clare, Ms Huang, wiping away tears, asked: “What exactly caused Zhihan to fall from the cliffs?”

Clare County Coroner Isobel O’Dea told the grieving mother that the evidence of an eyewitness would help answer that question.

A French tourist who witnessed him fall told Clare Coroner’s Court she had seen him slip and try to pull himself up by grasping at grass, before he disappeared over the edge.

French tourist Marion Tourgon told the inquest she had witnessed the fall at about 13:45 that day.

Ms Tourgon explained she had been at the edge of the cliffs with her husband and two children, taking a selfie at the time.

She describing seeing a young Asian boy, who was alone, come into view.

“I saw him slipping in the puddle that appears in the photo that my husband sent to the police,” the witness said.

“His right foot slipped into the puddle, with him trying to stop himself from falling with his left foot but his left foot ended up in the air.”

Ms Tourgon added: “It was very quick – he found himself in an awkward position with his left foot in a void over the cliff and his right knee on the edge of the cliff.”

She continued: “His right knee eventually fell into the void over the cliff and he was trying to grasp the grass with his hands to pull himself up.

“He didn’t shout and there was no noise.”

The Tourgon family then phoned the emergency services.

An air, land and sea search operation began involving the Irish Coast Guard, gardaí and Irish civil defence volunteers who used boats, drones, divers and a helicopter.

A police witness, Garda Colm Collins, told the inquest he had received a call at 14:00 that day after a male was seen falling off the edge of the Cliffs of Moher.

He said that the Irish Coast Guard had spotted a body floating in the water at the base of the cliffs.

The court heard a lifeboat had been launched but had not been able to access the site where the body was spotted because of the sea conditions.

It was another five days before Zhihan’s body was eventually recovered from the sea.

The boy was found by a fisherman, Matthew O’Halloran, from Corofin, County Clare.

He spotted a body face down with arms extended in the water between Doolin and the Aran Islands shortly after 10:00 on 28 July.

Mr O’Halloran alerted the Irish Coast Guard and its members retrieved Zhihan’s body and brought it ashore at Doolin.

The coroner said post-mortem results had confirmed that Zhihan died from multiple traumatic injuries consistent with a fall from a height.

“It is clear from evidence we heard that Zhihan slipped off the cliffs rather than any other way. His death would have been very quick – instantaneous.”

Addressing the boy’s mother, she said: “I can’t imagine how upsetting this is for you.”

Ms O’Dea also extended her sympathies to Zhihan’s father who was not present at the inquest.

She embraced Ms Huang as she left the coroner’s court.

In May 2024, a student in her 20s lost her footing on the cliffs while walking with friends and fell to her death.

Since August last year, large sections of the Cliffs of Moher trail have been closed due to safety concerns.

At the time, the Clare Local Development Company confirmed that it was taking the action following the two fatal accidents.

They rumble down the highway between Beijing and Tianjin port: big lorries, loaded up and fully able to navigate themselves.

Sure, there is a safety driver in the seat, as per government regulations, but these lorries don’t require them, and many analysts say it won’t take long before they are gone.

When “safety driver” Huo Kangtian, 32, first takes his hands off the wheel, and lets the lorry drive itself, it is somehow impressive and disconcerting in equal measures.

For the initial stages of the journey, he is in full control. Then – at a certain point – he hits a few buttons, and the powerful, heavy machine is driving itself, moving at speed along a public road to Tianjin.

“Of course, I felt a bit scared the first time I drove an autonomous truck,” says Mr Huo. “But, after spending a lot of time observing and testing these machines, I think they are actually pretty good and safe.”

As the lorry veers off the freeway and up a ramp towards the toll gates, the machine is still driving itself. On the other side of the tollgate, Mr Huo again presses a few buttons, and he is back in charge.

“My job as a safety driver is to act as the last line of defence. For example, in the case of an emergency, I would have to take back control of the vehicle immediately to ensure everyone’s safety,” he explains.

In terms of the upsides for a driver, he says that switching to autonomous mode can help combat stress and fatigue, as well as freeing up hands and feet for other tasks. He says it doesn’t make his job boring, but rather more interesting.

When asked if he is worried that this technology may one day render his job obsolete, he says he doesn’t know too much about this.

It’s the diplomatic answer.

Pony AI’s fleet of driverless lorries, currently operating on these test routes, is only the start of what is to come, the company’s vice-president Li Hengyu tells the BBC.

“In the future, with driverless operations, our transportation efficiency will definitely be greatly improved,” he says. “For example, labour costs will be reduced but, more importantly, we can deal better with harsh environments and long hours driving.”

What this all boils down to is saving money, says industry expert Yang Ruigang, a technology professor from Shanghai Jiaotong University, who has extensive experience working on driverless technology in both China and the US.

“Anything that can reduce operating costs is something a company would like to have, so it’s fairly easy to justify the investment in having a fully autonomous, driverless truck,” he tells the BBC.

In short, he says, the goal is simple: “Reduce the driver cost close to zero.”

However, significant hurdles remain before lorries will be allowed to drive themselves on roads around the world – not the least of which is public concern.

In China, self-driving technology suffered a major setback following an accident which killed three university students after their vehicle had been in “auto pilot” mode.

Economist Intelligence Unit analyst Chim Lee says the Chinese public still has quite a way to go before it is won over.

“We know that recent accidents involving passenger cars have caused a huge uproar in China. So, for driverless trucks – even though they tend to be more specific to certain locations for the time being – the public’s image of them is going to be absolutely critical for policy makers, and for the market as well, compared to passenger vehicles.”

Professor Yang agrees that lorry drivers are unlikely to lose their jobs in large numbers just yet.

“We have to discuss the context. Open environment? Probably not. High speed? Definitely no. But, if it is a low-speed situation, like with the last mile delivery trucks, it’s here already.”

In Eastern China’s Anhui Province, hundreds of driverless delivery vans navigate their way through the suburban streets of Hefei – a city with an official population of eight million – as human-driven scooters and cars whizz around them.

It was once one of country’s poorest cities, but these days its government wants it to be known as a place of the future, prepared to give new technology a chance.

Gary Huang, president of autonomous vehicle company, Rino.ai, says they discovered a market niche where driverless delivery vans could send parcels from big distribution hubs run by courier companies to local neighbourhood stations. At that point, scooter drivers take over, dropping off the packages to people’s front doors.

“We’re allowing couriers to stay within community areas to do pickup and drop off while the autonomous vans handle the repetitive, longer-distance trips. This boosts the entire system’s efficiency,” he tells us.

Rino has also been talking to other countries, and the company says the quickest uptake of its vehicles will be in Australia later this year, when a supermarket chain will start using their driverless delivery vehicles.

Meanwhile, in China, they say they’re now running more than 500 vans with road access in over 50 cities.

However, Hefei remains the most advanced.

Apart from Rino, the city has also now given permission for other driverless delivery van companies to operate.

Gary Huang says this is due to a combination of factors.

“Encouragement came from the government, followed by local experimentation, the gaining of experience, the refinement of regulations and eventually allowing a broad implementation.”

And you can see them on the roads, changing lanes, indicating before they turn, pulling up at red lights and avoiding other traffic.

For the courier companies, the numbers tell the story.

According to Rino’s regional director for Anhui Province, Zhang Qichen, deliveries are not only faster, but companies can hire three autonomous electric delivery vans which will run for days without needing a charge for the same cost as one driver.

She says she has been blown away by the pace of change in her industry and adds that she would not be surprised if heavy, long-haul lorries are routinely driving themselves on roads in certain circumstances within five years.

Professor Yang agrees. “Heavy trucks running along a highway unrestricted, at least five years away.”

When asked if it could really happen so soon, he responds: “I’m pretty sure it will happen. In fact, I’m confident that it will happen.”

Industry insiders say that the most immediate applications for driverless lorries – apart from in enclosed industrial zones likes open-cut mines or ports – are probably in remote, harsh terrain with extreme environmental conditions, especially along vast stretches and in a largely straight trajectory.

Significant technical challenges do remain though.

Heavy lorries need better cameras to track well ahead into distance to detect hazards much further down the road, in the same way a person can; more tricky roads may also need to have extra sensors placed along the route; other hurdles could include breakdowns in extreme weather or sudden, unexpected dangers emerging amidst very busy traffic.

On top of all this, the technology – when it comes to heavy lorries – is still not cheap. What’s more, these vehicles are right now modified old style lorries rather than self-driving vehicles straight off the production line.

China wants to be a champion of new tech, but it also has to be careful, not only because of the potential for deadly accidents but also because of how Chinese people might view this shift.

“This is not just about fulfilling regulations. It is not just about building a public image,” says Chim Lee. “But that, over time, the public will see the benefit of this technology, see how it will reduce their costs for buying things, or look at it as a way of imagining that society is improving, rather than viewing this as technology which is potentially destroying, causing car accidents or removing employment opportunities.”

Professor Yang sees another problem. “We humans can tolerate another human driver making mistakes but our tolerance for autonomous trucks is much much lower. Machines are not supposed to make mistakes. So, we have to make sure that the system is extremely reliable.”

The EU is investigating Pornhub, Stripchat and two other pornography websites it believes may be falling foul of its online content laws.

The European Commission said the sites, which also include XVideos and XNXX, did not appear to have measures in place to safeguard children and their rights.

It said this included an apparent lack of “appropriate” age verification methods to stop children accessing adult material.

“Online platforms must ensure that the rights and best interests of children are central to the design and functioning of their services,” it said.

Pornhub’s parent company Aylo said it was aware of the investigation and “fully committed to ensuring the safety of minors online”.

“We will always comply with the law, but we hope that governments around the world will implement laws that protect the safety and security of users,” it added.

The BBC has also approached Stripchat for comment.

The Commission said its initial investigations found the four platforms had not put in place “appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors”.

It said the platforms also do not appear to be abiding by requirements for porn sites to use age verification tools to protect children from accessing adult content.

A Commission official said that “click away” pop-ups currently used by some porn sites, asking users if they are over 18, may not be an effective means of doing so.

The platforms were also found not to have put into place “risk assessment and mitigation measures of any negative effects on the rights of the child, the mental and physical well-being of users,” it said.

It comes amid wider scrutiny of online pornography services worldwide, with many regulators looking to crack down on those that do not have age verification in place.

The UK’s online safety regulator Ofcom recently announced two investigations into porn sites that did not appear to have any methods to check the age of users.

It said in early May that Itai Tech Ltd – which operates a so-called “nudifying” site – and Score Internet Group LLC had failed to detail how they were preventing children from accessing their platforms.

Pornhub is the most visited porn site in the world – and the 19th most visited on the entire web, according to data from Similarweb.

But it finds itself under increasing regulatory pressure.

It has blocked access to its site in 16 US states, including Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, that passed laws requiring it to verify the age of users.

It argues age verification should take place on users’ devices, rather than on individual, age-restricted sites, to create a simpler process for regulators and enhance privacy for users.

The companies subject to the EU’s investigation were designated as very large online platforms under its Digital Services Act (DSA) in 2023.

Under the bloc’s sweeping set of digital content rules, they face tougher requirements to tackle harmful and illegal material on the platforms.

If suspected infringements of the DSA are confirmed, platforms could face further enforcement actions or, ultimately, a fines of up to 6% of their annual turnover.

The Commission said on Tuesday that Stripchat would no longer be designated a so-called VLOP, but its suspected non-compliance with its digital content rules would still be investigated.

Smaller platforms that do not meet the 45m EU user threshold must also abide by the bloc’s digital rules to safeguard children, it said.

Coordinated action by its member states will also seek to enforce requirements for smaller pornography sites.

“Our priority is to protect minors and allow them to navigate safely online,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.

“Together with the Digital Service Coordinators in the Member States we are determined to tackle any potential harm to young online users.”

Sir Rod Stewart has cancelled a string of concerts in the US as he recovers from flu, ahead of his Glastonbury legends set later this month.

The 80-year-old rock star is due to play the coveted teatime slot on Sunday, 29 June – 23 years after he last appeared at the Somerset festival.

Sir Rod announced on Instagram he was scrapping four dates and rescheduling another two that were due to take place over the next eight days.

“So sorry my friends,” he said. “I’m devastated and sincerely apologise for any inconvenience to my fans. I’ll be back on stage and will see you soon.”

He signed off “Sir Rod”, along with a heartbreak emoji.

He also listed the four shows he was cancelling – in Las Vegas and Stateline, Nevada – as well as two he plans to reschedule in California.

Sir Rod previously said he intended to stop playing “large-scale world tours” at the end of 2025 and instead perform at more intimate venues.

But he said he was “proud, ready and more than able to pleasure and titillate my friends at Glastonbury” when he became the first act to be confirmed for this year’s festival.

He told That Peter Crouch Podcast he was only due to play for an hour and a quarter on the Pyramid Stage.

“But I’ve asked them ‘Please, another 15 minutes’ because I play for over two hours every night and it’s nothing,” he said.

He also told the podcast he would be performing at Glastonbury with his former Faces bandmate Ronnie Wood.

Sir Rod’s most recent big performance came on 26 May at the American Music Awards (AMAs) in Las Vegas, where he was also presented with the lifetime achievement award by his children.

The father-of-eight seemed shocked to be introduced to the stage by five of his own grown-up children, before he later performed his 1988 track Forever Young.

Sir Rod’s best known solo songs include Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?, Every Beat Of My Heart, and Maggie May.

One of the best-selling artists of all time, he will follow in the footsteps of Dolly Parton, Barry Gibb, Shania Twain and Kylie Minogue by playing Glastonbury’s coveted Sunday afternoon slot.

The slot always draws one of the biggest crowds of the festival, and Sir Rod will become the first person to have been given legends billing and to have headlined the festival, following his previous appearance there in 2002 alongside Coldplay and Stereophonics.

The headliners this year at Worthy Farm are The 1975, Neil Young, and Olivia Rodrigo.

Kilmar Ábrego García, a 29-year-old from El Salvador mistakenly deported in March, has been returned to the US to face prosecution on two federal criminal charges.

He has been accused of participating in a trafficking conspiracy over several years to move undocumented migrants from Texas to other parts of the country.

El Salvador agreed to release Mr Ábrego García after the US presented it with an arrest warrant, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Friday. His lawyer called the charges “preposterous”.

The White House had been resisting a US Supreme Court order from April to “facilitate” his return after he was sent to a jail in El Salvador alongside more than 250 other deportees.

In a two-count grand jury indictment, filed in a Tennessee court last month and unsealed on Friday, Mr Ábrego García was charged with one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and a second count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.

Bondi said the grand jury had found that Mr Ábrego García had played a “significant role” in an alien smuggling ring, bringing in thousands of illegal immigrants to the US.

The allegations, which date back to 2016, allege he transported undocumented individuals between Texas and Maryland and other states more than 100 times.

The indictment additionally alleges he transported members of MS-13, designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US.

The Trump administration had previously alleged Mr Ábrego García was a member of the transnational Salvadorian gang, which he has denied.

Bondi also accused Mr Ábrego García of trafficking weapons and narcotics into the US for the gang, though he was not charged with any related offences.

He appeared in court for an initial hearing on Friday in Nashville, Tennessee. An arraignment hearing is scheduled 13 June, where US Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes will determine if there are grounds to keep him detained ahead of his trial.

For now, Mr Ábrego García remains in federal custody.

Mr Ábrego García’s lawyers have previously argued that he has never been convicted of any criminal offence, including gang membership, in the US or in El Salvador.

Simon Sandoval Moshenberg, one of his attorneys, called the charges “preposterous” and the events an “abuse of power” at a Friday news conference.

“The government disappeared Kilmar to a foreign prison in violation of a court order,” Mr Moshenberg said. “Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him.”

He added: “This is an abuse of power, not justice. The government should give him a full and fair trial in front of the same immigration judge who heard the case in 2019.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, President Donald Trump called Mr Ábrego García a “bad guy” and said the Department of Justice had made the right decision to return him to US soil to face trial.

Mr Ábrego García entered the US illegally as a teenager from El Salvador. In 2019, he was arrested with three other men in Maryland and detained by federal immigration authorities.

But an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation on the grounds that he might be at risk of persecution from local gangs in his home country

• What is the 1798 law that Trump used to deport migrants?
• What we know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia and MS-13 allegations

On 15 March, he was deported amid an immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law that allows presidents to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy country.

Mr Ábrego García was taken to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador, known for its brutal conditions.

While government lawyers initially said he was taken there as a result of “administrative error”, the Trump administration refused to order his return.

Whether or not the government had to “facilitate” his return to his home in the US state of Maryland became the subject of a weeks-long legal and political battle.

After Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded to see Mr Ábrego García in El Salvador, he was released to a different prison in that country.

On Friday, Van Hollen reiterated that “this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all”.

“The administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”

El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a close ally of Trump, said on social media on Friday that if the administration “request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse”.

Mr Ábrego García is expected to make an initial appearance at a Tennessee court on Friday, where US will request he be held in pretrial custody “because he poses a danger to the community and a serious risk of flight”, according to the detention motion.

Aylo, the company which runs a number of pornographic websites, including Pornhub, is to stop operating in France from Wednesday.

It is in reaction to a French law requiring porn sites to take extra steps to verify their users’ ages.

An Aylo spokesperson said the law was a privacy risk and assessing people’s ages should be done at a device level.

Pornhub is the most visited porn site in the world – with France its second biggest market, after the US.

Aylo – and other providers of sexually explicit material – find themselves under increasing regulatory pressure worldwide.

The EU recently announced an investigation into whether Pornhub and other sites were doing enough to protect children.

Aylo has also pulled out of a number of US states, again over the issue of checking the ages of its users.

All sites offering sexually explicit material in the UK will soon also have to offer more robust “age assurance.”

Aylo, formerly Mindgeek, also runs sites such as Youporn and RedTube, which will also become unavailable to French customers.

It is owned by Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners.

Their vice president for compliance, Solomon Friedman, called the French law “dangerous,” “potentially privacy-infringing” and “ineffective”.

“Google, Apple and Microsoft all have the capability built into their operating system to verify the age of the user at the operating system or device level,” he said on a video call reported by Agence France-Presse.

Another executive, Alex Kekesi, said the company was pro-age verification, but there were concerns over the privacy of users.

In some cases, users may have to enter credit cards or government ID details in order to prove their age.

French minister for gender equality, Aurore Bergé, wrote “au revoir” in response to the news that Pornhub was pulling out of France.

In a post on X [in French], she wrote: “There will be less violent, degrading and humiliating content accessible to minors in France.”

The UK has its own age verification law, with platforms required to have “robust” age checks by July, according to media regulator Ofcom.

These may include facial detection software which estimates a user’s age.

In April – in response to messaging platform Discord testing face scanning software – experts predicted it would be “the start of a bigger shift” in age checks in the UK, in which facial recognition tech played a bigger role.

BBC News has asked Aylo whether it will block its sites in the UK too when the laws come in.

In May, Ofcom announced it was investigating two pornography websites which had failed to detail how they were preventing children from accessing their platforms.

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