In the heart of the Iranian capital, the Boof cafe serves up refreshing cold drinks on a hot summer’s day.

They must be the most distinctive iced Americano coffees in this city – the cafe sits in a leafy corner of the long-shuttered US embassy.

Its high cement walls have been plastered with anti-American murals ever since Washington severed relations with Tehran in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis – which still cast a long shadow over this tortuous relationship.

Inside the charming Boof cafe, Amir the barista says he’d like relations to improve between America and Iran.

“US sanctions hurt our businesses and make it hard for us to travel around the world,” he reflects as he pours another iced coffee behind a jaunty wooden sign – “Keep calm and drink coffee.”

Only two tables are occupied – one by a woman covered up in a long black veil, another by a woman in blue jeans with long flowing hair, flouting the rules on what women should wear as she cuddles with her boyfriend.

It’s a small snapshot of this capital as it confronts its deeply uncertain future.

A short drive away, at the complex of Iran’s state TV station IRIB, a recorded speech by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was broadcast to the nation on Thursday.

“The Americans have been opposing the Islamic Republic of Iran from the very beginning” he declared.

• Iran carries out wave of arrests and executions in wake of Israel conflict
• ‘We are exhausted’ – how Iranians are feeling after fragile ceasefire

“At its core, it has always been about one thing: they want us to surrender,” went on the 86-year Ayatollah, said to have taken shelter in a bunker aer Israel unleashed its unprecedented wave of strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear and missile sites and assassinating senior commanders and scientists.

We watched his speech, his first since President Donald Trump suddenly announced a ceasefire on Tuesday, on a small TV in the only office still intact in a vast section of the IRIB compound. All that’s le is a charred skeleton of steel.

When an Israeli bomb slammed into this complex on 16 June, a raging fire swept through the main studio which would have aired the supreme leader’s address. Now it’s just ash.

You can still taste its acrid smell; all the TV equipment – cameras, lights, tripods – are tangles of twisted metal. A crunching glass carpet covers the ground.

Israel said it targeted the propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic, accusing it of concealing a military operation within – a charge its journalists rejected.

Its gaping shell seems to symbolise this darkest of times for Iran.

You can also see it in the city’s hospitals, which are still treating Iranians injured in Israel’s 12-day war.

“I am scared they might attack again, ” Ashraf Barghi tells me when we meet in the emergency department of the Taleghani General hospital where she works as head nurse.

“We don’t trust this war has ended” she says, in a remark reflecting the palpable worry we’ve heard from so many people in this city.

When Israel bombed the threshold of the nearby Evin prison on 23 June, the casualties, both soldiers and civilians, were rushed into Nurse Barghi’s emergency ward.

• What we know about the Iran-Israel ceasefire

“The injuries were the worst I’ve treated in my 32 years as nurse,” she recounts, still visibly distressed.

The strike on the notorious prison where Iran detains most of its political prisoners was described by Israel as “symbolic”.

It seemed to reinforce Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s repeated message to Iranians to “stand up for their freedom”.

“Israel says it only hit military and nuclear prison but it’s all lies,” insists Morteza from his hospital bed. He had been at work in the prison’s transport department when the missile slammed into the building. He shows us his injuries in both arms and his backside.

In the ward next door, soldiers are being cared for, but we’re not allowed to enter there.

Across this sprawling metropolis, Iranians are counting the cost of this confrontation. In its latest tally, the government’s health ministry recorded 627 people killed and nearly 5,000 injured.

Tehran is slowly returning to life and resuming its old rhythms, at least on the surface. Its infamous traffic is starting to fill its soaring highways and pretty tree-lined side streets.

Shops in its beautiful bazaars are opening again as people return to a city they fled to escape the bombs. Israel’s intense 12-day military operation, coupled with the US’s attacks on Iran’s main nuclear sites, has le so many shaken.

“They weren’t good days, ” says Mina, a young woman who immediately breaks down as she tries to explain her sadness. “It’s so heart-breaking, ” she tells me through her tears. “We tried so hard to have a better life but we can’t see any future these days.”

We met on the grounds of the soaring white marble Azadi tower, one of Tehran’s most iconic landmarks. A large crowd milling on a warm summer’s evening swayed to the strains of much-loved patriotic songs in an open air concert of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. It was meant to bring some calm to a city still on edge.

Supporters and critics of Iran’s clerical rulers mingled, drawn together by shared worry about their country’s future.

“They have to hear what people say,” insists Ali Reza when I ask him what advice he would give to his government. “We want greater freedoms, that’s all I will say.”

There’s defiance too. “Attacking our nuclear bases to show off that ‘you have to do as we say’ goes against diplomacy,” says Hamed, an 18-year-old university student.

Despite rules and restrictions which have long governed their lives, Iranians do speak their minds as they wait for the next steps by their rulers, and leaders in Washington and beyond, which carry such consequences for their lives.

MI6 has cast distance between its new chief and her grandfather, who was this week revealed to have been a Nazi spy known as “the butcher”.

Blaise Metreweli was announced as the incoming head of the Secret Intelligence Service earlier this month. She will be its first female “C” in its 116-year history.

With little known about her wider backstory, several newspapers reported on Friday that her grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, who defected from Soviet Russia’s Red Army to become the Nazis’ chief informant in Chernihiv, Ukraine.

However, the Foreign Office, which speaks on behalf of MI6, said Ms Metreweli “neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather”.

A spokesperson added: “Blaise’s ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.

“It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today’s hostile states, as the next chief of MI6.”

The Daily Mail, which first revealed the family link, reports that it found hundreds of pages of documents in an archive in Freiburg, Germany, which showed Mr Dobrowolski was known as “The Butcher” or “Agent No 30” by Wehrmacht commanders.

He reportedly signed off letters to his Nazi superiors with “Heil Hitler” and said he “personally” took part in “the extermination of the Jews”.

The archive documents are said to suggest Mr Dobrowolski looted the bodies of Holocaust victims, was involved in the murdering of local Jews, and laughed while watching the sexual assault of female prisoners.

After the war, Mr Dobrowolski’s wife, Barbara, and two-month-old son fled to Britain, and she married David Metreweli in 1947. Her son took his stepfather’s name, but the Mail reports that on some official documents his surname was still Dobrowolski.

Mr Dobrowolski’s son would go on to be a radiologist and UK armed forces veteran, and his daughter, Ms Metreweli, was born in 1977. She has not responded to the recent reports herself.

She joined MI6 – which gathers intelligence overseas – in 1999, and is currently responsible for technology and innovation there. She will be the agency’s 18th head when she takes over later this year from Sir Richard Moore, a senior civil servant.

Upon her appointment, she said in a statement that she was “proud and honoured” to have been asked to lead.

Ms Metreweli is a Cambridge graduate, a rower and has previously had operational roles in the Middle East and Europe.

Iran’s foreign minister has admitted that “excessive and serious” damage was done to the country’s nuclear sites in the recent US and Israeli bombings.

Abbas Araghchi told a state broadcaster on Thursday evening that an assessment of the damage is being carried out by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran.

But, just hours earlier, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the strikes did not disrupt the country’s nuclear programme. Khamenei was responding to US President Donald Trump’s assertion that the bombs had “totally obliterated” three nuclear sites.

Khamenei said the US attacks had failed to “accomplish anything significant”.

The supreme leader, who has been in hiding since the war with Israel began on 13 June, insisted that Trump had “exaggerated” the impact of the bombs, and declared victory over the US and Israel.

But Araghchi’s remarks create a different impression.

The foreign minister also said there were no plans to resume nuclear talks with the US. Iran cancelled a scheduled sixth round of talks when Israel began its attacks.

• When Iran’s supreme leader emerges from hiding he will find a very different nation

“I would like to state clearly that no agreement, arrangement or conversation has been made to start new negotiations,” he said.

He added that the government was examining what was in the “interest of the Iranian people”, saying its approach to diplomacy will take a “new form”.

He did not explain what he meant.

In an attempt to bring Iran back to the negotiating table, the Trump administration has discussed the possibility of helping Iran access $30bn to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear programme, easing sanctions and freeing up billions of dollars in restricted Iranian funds, CNN has reported.

But developments in Iran might obstruct such a move.

On Wednesday, Iran’s parliament approved a bill to stop co-operation with the global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). If it is implemented, it would mean Iran is no longer committed to allowing nuclear inspectors into its sites.

Israel has said its offensive against Iran was necessary to thwart what it claims are Iranian plans to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme is only intended for civilian purposes.

The US became directly involved in the conflict last weekend, striking facilities in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, before Trump sought to rapidly mediate a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said intelligence gathered by the US and Israel indicated the strikes “significantly damaged the nuclear programme, setting it back by years”.

A leaked preliminary Pentagon assessment downplayed the significance of the damage and said the US strikes only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by a few months. The leak has been dismissed by the administration.

Iran’s health ministry said 610 people were killed during the 12 days of Israel air strikes, while Israeli authorities said 28 were killed in Israel.

Dame Anna Wintour had just sent off her first edition of US Vogue in October 1988 when the magazine received a phone call from the printers. They had seen the issue’s front cover, and had one question: “Has there been a mistake?”

The cover, Dame Anna’s first as editor-in-chief, featured a lesser-known model, Michaela Bercu, smiling at the camera in a stylish Christian Lacroix couture jacket.

But two things were notably different from usual: the model was standing outside, in the street, and wearing a pair of jeans. The printers half-assumed there had been some kind of error.

“I couldn’t blame them,” Dame Anna later recalled. “It was so unlike the studied and elegant close-ups that were typical of Vogue’s covers back then, with tons of makeup and major jewellery. This one broke all the rules.”

The jeans had, in fact, been a last-minute addition, after the skirt which Bercu was supposed to wear didn’t fit properly. But the intended message was clear: the cover star was a regular, everyday girl – and this was a new era for Vogue.

Dame Anna’s arrival, and desire to defy convention, “signalled a revolution” at the magazine, according to CNN Style’s Oscar Holland, who praised her debut issue as “warm and easygoing”.

After two years in charge of British Vogue, Dame Anna had been hired for the US edition precisely to shake things up. She was tasked with making sure the magazine didn’t lose its edge as it headed towards the 1990s.

In the decades since, Dame Anna has “steered the title from glossy print editions featuring first supermodels then grunge, via Noughties celebrity culture and reality TV stars, into an online era of social media and digital publishing,” noted the Times’ fashion editor Harriet Walker.

But this week, Dame Anna announced she would be stepping back as Vogue’s editor-in-chief after 37 years.

She will remain publisher Condé Nast’s chief content officer, a role she was appointed to in 2020, which means she will still oversee Vogue’s content, along with the company’s other titles such as GQ, Wired and Tatler.

But while she may be staying with the company, her departure as editor-in-chief marks the end of an extraordinary era for the magazine, which helped to define pop culture.

Dame Anna will be remembered for “the greater sense of informality that she brought to her early Vogue covers” and the tone they set, says Dr Kate Strasdin, senior lecturer at the Falmouth University’s Fashion and Textile Institute.

“She also pioneered the celebrity cover image, positioning popular culture beneath the famous Vogue banner.”

In her first year as editor-in-chief, Dame Anna put Madonna on the cover, the first celebrity to have featured, as part of her wider mission to merge the words of fashion and entertainment.

“She was the first to make fashion a global, cultural industry,” Marian Kwei, a stylist and contributor to Vogue, told BBC Radio 4’s Today. But, she adds, Dame Anna “also showed that fashion could be more approachable”.

“She took away the elitism that was in fashion, and brought a democratisation, and made fashion this party that everybody else was invited to.”

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, however. In 1993, animal rights group Peta occupied her office in protest over Dame Anna’s decision to wear fur, something she no longer does.

There were arguably occasional cultural missteps, too. The LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen cover in April 2008 sparked a debate, Dr Strasdin recalls, about whether it reinforced old stereotypes of race and power.

More recently, Dame Anna faced a much more existential challenge – how to move Vogue into the digital age with hugely increased competition.

In 2018, designer Philip Plein compared the number of Vogue’s readers with the number of Instagram followers Kim Kardashian had.

“So what is more important nowadays for a brand?” he asked. “This is an interesting question.”

In a fast-moving media landscape, some industry watchers may wonder whether Dame Anna was quietly asked to step down by Conde Nast to make way for fresh blood.

But Alexandra Shulman, former editor of British Vogue, said she doubted this, telling BBC News: “I don’t think there’s any view that a new vision is needed.

“Anna’s made it perfectly clear that she’s remaining in control at American Vogue… so I think she will still have the final say.”

Shulman added that it was likely Dame Anna herself would choose her successor at Vogue.

Dame Anna is as known for her own image as much as the aesthetic she has created in her magazines. Her trademark sunglasses and bobbed haircut are partly what helped her become such an instantly recognisable figure.

She told the BBC’s Katie Razzall last year, somewhat cryptically, that her sunglasses “help me see and they help me not see… they help me be seen and not be seen”.

The editor has always been something of an enigma, and will be well aware that the conversation and speculation that surrounds her just fuels the interest further.

But she played down the focus on her image, saying: “I don’t really think about it. What I’m really interested in is the creative aspect of my job.”

Her reputation as an editor has, of course, been widely debated, Dr Strasdin notes.

“The fashion industry has traditionally been a space where egos and creativity can clash spectacularly,” she says, adding that documentaries such as The September Issue and First Monday in May “offer some insight into the strangeness of that world”.

Over time, Dame Anna gradually became a significant figure not just in fashion, but western culture. She is regularly referenced in hip-hop lyrics, with Nicki Minaj, Jay-Z and Ye (formerly Kanye West) among the artists who have name-checked her.

“I believe what she has done,” reflected Kwei, “is carved a space in fashion, culture, time, history that we will never be able to outdo”.

Dame Anna was the loose inspiration for Miranda Priestly, the demon magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada, portrayed on screen by Meryl Streep.

The editor has appeared to enjoy occasionally leaning in to the comparison, and last year attended the gala night for the stage adaptation.

But asked if she thought people were frightened of her in real life, Dame Anna replied: “I hope not.”

Dame Anna’s impact can be seen in all kinds of ways, including, for example, at Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wedding to Lauren Sánchez in Venice this weekend.

“She created that moment, and almost created that brand,” the former Sun editor David Yelland told the BBC. “It was when she put Lauren Sancehz on the front of Vogue in 2023, that the Bezos/Sanchez brand started.

“She did the same with Kim Kardashian and she did the same with the Trumps. When she put Ivana on the front in 1990 it was incredibly controversial, people called it tacky, but that was the beginning of the Trump brand in the higher end of global society. So she’s not just an editor, she’s the high priestess of our time.”

The question of Dame Anna’s successor is complicated. “This is a challenging era for print media,” explains Dr Strasdin. “Vogue’s social media platforms are frequently under fire for the seemingly relentless celebrity content which critics decry as diluting the mission of Vogue.

“But a strong digital presence is vital. Eva Chen, as director of fashion partnerships for Instagram, brings that expertise. She has long been a Met Gala regular and has to be on the longlist I should think.”

“Chioma Nnadi must also be in the running,” she continues. “She hails from London, and has spent the last two years heading up editorial content at British Vogue. She is Wintour’s protege and it does feel as if she has been waiting in the wings.”

Other possible candidates, according to the Daily Mail’s fashion editor Margaret Abrams, include former head of Teen Vogue Amy Astley, who still works for Condé Nast editing another magazine.

Vogue’s senior editor Chloe Schama, her namesake Chloe Malle, editor of Vogue’s website, or even Dame Anna’s own daughter, film producer Bee Shaffer Carrozzini, could also be in the frame.

“As ever fashion is regarded as both superficial and economically valuable,” says Dr Strasdin.

“Anna Wintour has had to tread the tightrope of maintaining relevance as far as style is concerned at the very same time that fashion has had to undergo re-evaluation in relation to sustainability, plagiarism and labour conditions.

“I think these are the very real concerns that her successor will have to navigate.”

Actor Brad Pitt’s home in Los Angeles has been ransacked by a trio of thieves.

Three suspects broke into the home in Los Feliz late on Wednesday through a front window and “ransacked the location,” according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Police did not confirm the home belonged to the Oscar-winning actor, but the address matched that of a home Mr Pitt purchased in 2023.

Authorities said the suspects fled with stolen items, though it’s unclear what was taken. The actor was not home at the time of the burglary, US media reported.

Mr Pitt was in the UK earlier this week for the London premier of his new film F1, which is released on Friday. He was accompanied by fellow Hollywood star Tom Cruise and Lewis Hamilton, who has seven Formula One World Drivers’ Championship titles.

Authorities said the burglary happened around 22:30 local time on Wednesday.

LA police would not confirm the value of items stolen. The BBC also contacted representatives for the actor.

The large three-bedroom home sits just outside Griffith Park – which is home to the famous Hollywood Sign. It is surrounded by a large fence and greenery that shields the home from public view.

The burglary follows others reported in the city targeting other celebrities, including Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban.

Last month, a man was also arrested on stalking and vandalism charges after he allegedly rammed his vehicle into the gate of the home of Pitt’s ex-wife, Jennifer Aniston.

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Japan has executed a man who murdered nine people in 2017, the first time since 2022 that the country has enacted capital punishment.

The serial killings by Takahiro Shiraishi, dubbed the “Twitter killer”, had shocked the country and triggered debate over how suicide was discussed online.

Shiraishi, then 30, lured his victims – most of them young women between the ages of 15 and 26 – to his apartment, before strangling and dismembering them.

The killings came to light in October 2017, when police found body parts in the Japanese city of Zama, near Tokyo, when they were searching for one of the victims.

Shiraishi later admitted to murdering nine suicidal victims and revealed that he got acquainted with them on Twitter, the social media platform now known as X.

He then told them he could help them die, and in some cases claimed he would kill himself alongside them.

His Twitter profile contained the words: “I want to help people who are really in pain. Please DM [direct message] me anytime.”

Nine dismembered bodies were found in coolers and tool boxes when officers visited his flat, which was dubbed by media outlets as a “house of horrors”.

While prosecutors sought the death penalty for Shiraishi, his lawyers argued for the lesser charge of “murder with consent”, claiming his victims had given their permission to be killed.

They also called for an assessment of his mental state.

Shiraishi later disputed his own defence team’s version of events and said he killed without the victims’ consent.

Hundreds of people showed up at his verdict hearing in December 2020, when he was sentenced to death.

The murders also prompted a change by Twitter, which amended its rules to state users should not “promote or encourage suicide or self-harm”.

Japan’s justice minister Keisuke Suzuki, who said he ordered Shiraishi’s execution, said the killer acted “for the genuinely selfish reason of satisfying his own sexual and financial desires”, according to an AFP report.

The case “caused great shock and anxiety to society”, Suzuki said.

MrBeast has removed a YouTube thumbnail generator that used artificial intelligence (AI) after a backlash from creators.

The world’s most-subscribed YouTuber, real name Jimmy Donaldson, released the tool last week and said his intention had been “to help smaller creators make better thumbnails”.

But he admitted he had “missed the mark” after it was criticised by other high-profile YouTubers, including PointCrow and Jacksepticeye, who said the tool “steals” creators’ work.

In a post on X, MrBeast said he’d decided to remove the tool from his YouTube analytics platform Viewstats and would replace it with links to human artists available for commission.

When he launched the AI thumbnail tool last week, MrBeast said, he “thought people were going to be pretty excited about it”.

The small preview pictures are a key part of any YouTuber’s strategy, and are used to catch the eye of potential viewers as they scroll through a sea of content.

Mr Beast’s tool was advertised as “taking the guesswork out” of designing eye-catching images for an $80 (£58) per month subscription.

It gave users the option to insert themselves into existing thumbnails and recreate the work of other creators.

Generative AI – or GenAI – tools such as this are trained on mountains of exisiting data, which are then used to create outputs in response to user prompts.

There are several current court cases examining accusations of copyright theft against companies that make AI models.

PointCrow, real name Eric Morino, accused MrBeast of making “something that can steal… hard work without a thought” and alleged that the AI model was “clearly trained on all our thumbnails and uses them without any creator’s permission”.

While the US streamer said the intention of making content creation more accessible was a “great idea”, the tool “fundamentally hurts creators as a whole”.

MrBeast acknowledged the feedback and told his followers: “I care more than any of you could ever imagine about the YouTube community.

“Obviously I’m the biggest YouTuber in the world and I don’t take that responsibility lightly and so it deeply makes me sad when I do something that people in the community are upset by.”

He said his goal with Viewstats had been to build tools to help creators, “but if creators don’t want the tools, no worries”.

The US YouTuber has more than 385 million subscribers on the site and is thought to be its highest-paid creator.

He has a number of other business ventures and last year hosted Beast Games, an Amazon series which saw 1,000 people competing in a series of elimination challenges for a $5m (£3.9m) cash prize.

The series was named in a lawsuit where some contestants claimed they’d been “exploited” during filming – allegations MrBeast said had been “blown out of proportion”.

In May, the Mexican government accused him of “exploiting” the Mayan pyramids for a video and the month before he had to apologise after fans had a “horrible” experience at a Las Vegas event in his name.

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Two men have been sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering an Aboriginal schoolboy, in a case that shocked Australia.

Cassius Turvey died of head injuries after a brutal assault on the outskirts of Perth in October 2022. The 15-year-old’s killing prompted nationwide protests and vigils, also sparking debate on pervasive racism in the country.

The killers, Jack Brearley and Brodie Palmer, were “callous and lacking in empathy” as they chased Turvey down and savagely beat the Noongar Yamatji boy with a metal pole, Justice Peter Quinlan told a packed courtroom on Friday.

Mitchell Forth, who was convicted of manslaughter, was sentenced to 12 years in jail.

The gallery cheered as Justice Quinlan handed down the sentences, while Cassius’ mother Mechelle Turvey burst into tears, local media reported.

Prosecutors had told the trial the attack on Cassius was the culmination of a complex series of tit-for-tat events that had nothing to do with him.

The vigilante gang responsible for his death had been “hunting for kids” because somebody had damaged Brearley’s car windows.

Brearley, 24, and Palmer, 30, had each blamed the other for Cassius’ death, with Brearley also alleging that he acted in self-defence as Cassius was armed with a knife.

Justice Quinlan rejected that as a “complete fabrication”, and found that it was Brearley who had delivered the fatal blows.

“Cassius Turvey was completely and utterly innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. The only reason that he was the person killed… was that he was the person you happened to catch,” Justice Quinlan said.

Brearley had shown “no remorse whatsoever”, the judge added.

“You cannot make amends when you don’t acknowledge the pain that you have caused.

“You cannot be remorseful when in an effort to avoid responsibility… You seek to frame an innocent man and when that does not work you give false evidence that your co-accused was in fact the killer,” the chief justice said in a scathing rebuke reported by ABC News.

Palmer did not physically strike Cassius, but Justice Quinlan ruled that he was “equally responsible but not equally culpable”.

The group had also assaulted other Aboriginal teenagers in what the judge described as “so-called vigilante justice [that] was completely misdirected”.

A fourth offender, Ethan MacKenzie, was handed a two-and-a-half years jail term for his part in some of the other assaults.

In one case, a 13-year-old boy’s own crutches were used to beat him, causing bruising to his face.

Justice Quinlan condemned Brearley, Palmer and Forth for their “celebration” after the assaults, calling it a “grotesque display of your complete disregard of the lives of the children you had attacked”.

In her victim impact statement on Thursday, Cassius’ mother Mechelle Turvey said the actions of the three men were racially motivated.

“Cassius was not just part of my life, he was my future,” Ms Turvey said. “There are no words that can fully capture the devastation of losing someone you love to violence.”

While Justice Quinlan did not find the attack to be motivated by race, he said the attackers’ use of racial slurs “rippled” through the Aboriginal community and created “justifiable fear”.

“The fear is real and legitimate. You are responsible for that fear,” he said.

Palmer is eligible for parole in January 2041, while Brearly will be eligible from October 2044, the Australian Associated Press reported.

By the time polls closed at 10pm on 4 July 2024, the Labour Party knew they were likely to return to government – even if they could not quite bring themselves to believe it.

For Sir Keir Starmer, reminiscing 10 months later in an interview with me, it was an “incredible moment”. Instantly, he said, he was “conscious of the sense of responsibility”. And yes, he confessed, a little annoyed that his landslide victory was not quite as big as Sir Tony Blair’s had been in 1997.

“I’m hugely competitive,” the prime minister said. “Whether it’s on the football pitch, whether it is in politics or any other aspect of life.”

Sir Keir watched the exit poll with a small group of advisers as well as his wife, Victoria, and his two teenaged children. Even in that moment of unsurpassable accomplishment, this deeply private prime minister was caught between the jubilation of his aides and the more complex reaction of his children, who knew their lives were about to change forever.

Looking back, the prime minister said, he would tell himself: “Don’t watch it with your family – because it did have a big impact on my family, and I could see that in my children.”

It’s important to remember how sunny the mood in the Labour Party was at that moment – because the weather then turned stormy with remarkable speed.

As the prime minister marks a year in office next week – which he will spend grappling with crises at home and abroad – British politics finds itself at an inflection point, where none of the old rules can be taken for granted.

So, why exactly was Sir Keir’s political honeymoon so short-lived? And can he turn things around?

Many members of the new cabinet had never been to Downing Street until they walked up to the famous black door on 5 July to be appointed. Why would they have been? The 14 turbulent years of opposition for the Labour Party meant that few had any experience of government.

This was a deficiency of which Sir Keir and his team were acutely aware.

As the leader of the opposition, he had spent significant time in ‘Privy Council’ – that’s to say, confidential, meetings with civil servants to understand what was happening in Ukraine and the Middle East.

He also sought knowledge from the White House. Jake Sullivan, then US President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser, told me that he spoke to the future prime minister “every couple of months” to help him “make sense of what was happening”.

“I shared with him our perspective on events in the Middle East, as well as in Ukraine and in other parts of the world,” says Sullivan. “I thought he asked trenchant, focused, sharp questions. I thought he was on point.

“I thought he got to the heart of the matter, the larger issue of where all of these things were going and what was driving them. I was impressed with him.”

Domestic preparations were not as smooth. For some, especially on the left of the Labour Party, this government’s difficulties began with an over-cautious election campaign.

Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the trade union Unite, told me that “everyday people [were] looking for change with a big C. They were not looking for managerialism”.

It’s a criticism with which Pat McFadden, a senior cabinet minister, having run the campaign, is wearily familiar. “We had tried other strategies to varying degrees in 2015, 2017, 2019, many other campaigns previously – and they’d lost.

“I had one job. To win.”

Having made his name as a prominent member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, Sir Keir won the party leadership in 2020 offering Labour members a kind of Corbynism without Corbyn.

But before long he broke decisively with his predecessor.

In the campaign this meant not a long list of promises, but a careful approach. Reassurance was the order of the day: at the campaign’s heart, a focus on what Labour wouldn’t do: no increase in income tax, national insurance or VAT.

Yet a big part of preparing for government was not just the question of what this government would do, but how it would drive the government system.

For that, Sir Keir turned to Sue Gray.

Having led the Partygate investigation into Boris Johnson, Gray was already unusually high-profile for an impartial civil servant. Her close colleagues were stunned when in 2023 she agreed to take up a party political role as Sir Keir’s chief of staff.

“It was a source of enormous controversy within the civil service,” says Simon Case, who until a few months ago as cabinet secretary was head of the civil service.

Sue Gray’s task was to use her decades of experience of the Whitehall machine to bring order to Sir Keir’s longstanding team.

She started work in September 2023, and the grumblings about her work began to reach me weeks, or perhaps even days, later. Those in the team she joined had expected her to bring organisational clarity.

Tensions came when she involved herself in political questions too.

Gray also deliberately re-prioritised the voices of elected politicians in the shadow cabinet over unelected advisers.

Questions about what exactly her role should be were never quite resolved, in part because Rishi Sunak called the general election sooner than Labour had expected.

Gray spent the campaign in a separate office from the main team, working with a small group on plans for the early days in government. Yet those back in Labour HQ fretted that, from what little they gleaned, that work was inadequate.

A few days before the election those rumours reached me. I WhatsApped a confidant of Sir Keir to ask what they had heard of the preparation for government.

“Don’t ask,” came the reply. “I am too worried to discuss it.”

What is unquestionable is that any prime minister would have struggled with the backdrop Sir Keir inherited.

Simon Case described to me how, on 5 July just after Sir Keir had made his first speech on the steps of No 10, he had thwacked a sleepless new prime minister with “the heavy mallet of reality”.

“I don’t think there are many incoming prime ministers who’d faced such challenging circumstances,” he said, referring to both the country’s economic situation and wars around the world.

The King’s Speech on 17 July unveiled a substantial programme, making good on manifesto promises: rail nationalisation, planning reform, clean energy investment. But those hoping for a rabbit out of the hat, a defining surprise, were disappointed.

In so many crucial areas — social care, child poverty, industrial strategy — the government’s instinct was to launch reviews and consultations, rather than to declare a decisive direction.

As cabinet secretary, Case could see what was happening — or not happening — across the whole of government. “There were some elements where not enough thinking had been done,” he said.

“There were areas where, sitting in the centre of government, early in a new regime, the prime minister and his team, including me as his sort of core team, knew what we wanted to do, but we weren’t communicating that effectively across all of government.”

Not just communication within government: for us journalists there were days in that early period where it was utterly unclear what this new government wanted its story to be.

That made those early announcements, which did come, stand out even more: none more so than Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s announcement on 29 July that she would means-test the winter fuel payment.

It came in a speech primarily about the government’s parlous economic inheritance. That is not what it is remembered for.

Some in government admit that they expected a positive response to Reeves’s radical frankness about what the government could and could not afford to do. Yet it sat in isolation – a symbol of this new government’s economic priorities, with the Budget still three months away.

Louise Haigh, then the transport secretary, remembered: “It came so early and it hung on its own as such a defining policy for so long that in so many voters’ minds now, that is the first thing they think about when they think about this Labour government and what it wants to do and the kinds of decisions it wants to make.”

The policy lasted precisely one winter. Sir Keir and his chancellor have argued in recent weeks that they were able to change course because of a stabilising economy.

McFadden was more direct about the U-turn. “If I’m being honest, I think the reaction to it since the decision was announced was probably stronger than we thought,” he admits.

At the same time the chancellor stood up to announce the winter fuel cuts, news was unfolding of a horrific attack in Southport.

Misinformation about who had carried out the attack fuelled the first mass riots in this country since 2011, when Sir Keir had been the director of public prosecutions. Given the nature of the crisis, the prime minister was well placed to respond.

“As a first crisis, it was dealing with a bit of the machinery of government that he instinctively understood – policing, courts, prisons,” Case says.

Sir Keir’s response was practical and pragmatic — making the judicial system flow faster meant that by mid-August at least 200 rioters had already been sentenced, most jailed with an average term of two years.

But in a way that was not quite clear at the time, the riots spawned what has become one of the defining attacks on the prime minister from the right: that of ‘two-tier Keir’.

The idea that some rioters were treated more harshly than other kinds of protesters had been morphed over time into a broader accusation about who and what the prime minister stood for.

Sir Keir had cancelled his family holiday to deal with the riots. Exhausted, he ended the summer dealing with questions about his personal integrity in what became known as ‘freebiegate’.

Most of the gifts for which he was being criticised – clothing, glasses, concert tickets – had been accepted before the election but Sir Keir was prime minister now. Case told me there was a “naivety” about the greater scrutiny that came with leading the country.

Perhaps more than that, there was a naivety in No 10 about how Sir Keir was seen. Here was a man elected in large part because of a crisis of trust in politics. He had presented himself as different.

Telling voters that he had followed the rules was to miss the point — they thought the rules themselves were bust.

By the winter of 2024, the sense of a government failing to get a grip of itself or a handle on the public mood, had grown. A chorus of off-the-record criticism, much of it strikingly personal, threatened to overwhelm the government.

There were personal ambitions and tensions at play, but more and more insiders – some of them fans of Gray initially – were telling me that the way in which Sir Keir’s chief of staff was running government was structurally flawed, with the system simply not working properly.

Gray announced in early October that she had resigned because she risked becoming a “distraction”. In reality, Sir Keir had sacked her after some of his closest aides warned him he risked a mutiny if he did not.

Sue Gray was approached both for an interview and for her response to her critics but declined.

To the end she retained some supporters in the cabinet including Louise Haigh. “I felt desperately sorry for her,” she says.

“It was just a really, really cruel way to treat someone who’d already been so traduced by the Tories – and then [was] traduced by our side as well.”

Sir Keir appointed Gray. He empowered Gray. And he dispensed with Gray. This was the prime minister correcting his own mistakes – an episode which came at a high political price.

Yet on the world stage the prime minister continued to thrive, winning praise across political divides in the UK and abroad.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s adviser, was impressed by Sir Keir’s handling of US President Donald Trump, describing the Oval Office meeting where the prime minister brandished an invitation from the King as “the best I’ve seen in terms of a leader in these early weeks going to sit down with the current president”.

It’s an irony that it is Sir Keir, who made his reputation trying to thwart Brexit, who has found for the UK its most defined diplomatic role of the post-Brexit era — close to the US, closer than before to Europe, at the fore of the pro-Ukraine alliance, striking trade deals with India and others.

And it has provided him with something more elusive too: a story — a narrative of a confident, pragmatic leader stepping up on the world stage, acting as a bridge between other countries in fraught times.

The risk, brought into sharp relief during the Israel-Iran conflict in recent days, is that Trump is too unpredictable for such a role to be a stable one.

The international arena has sharpened Sir Keir’s choices domestically as well. Even while making welfare cuts that have displeased so many in his party, the prime minister has a clearer and more joined-up argument about prioritising security in all its forms: through work, through economic prudence, through defence of the realm.

And yet, for plenty of voters Sir Keir has found definition to his government’s direction too late. Labour’s poor performance last month in the local elections plus defeat at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were a blow to Sir Keir and his team.

It’s far from unheard of for a governing party to lose a by-election, but to lose it to Reform UK on the same night that Nigel Farage’s party hoovered up councils across England made this a distinctively new political moment.

Two days afterwards, Paul Ovenden, Sir Keir’s strategy director, circulated a memo to Downing Street aides, which I’ve obtained.

It called for a “relentless focus on the new centre ground in British politics”.

The crucial swing voters, Ovenden wrote, “are the middle-age, working class, economically squeezed voters that we persuaded in the 2024 election campaign. Many of them voted for us in 2024 thinking we would fix the cost of living, fix the NHS, and reduce migration… we need to become more ruthless in pursuing those outcomes”.

For more than 100 of Starmer’s own MPs, including many of those elected for the first time in that landslide a year ago, the main priority was ruthlessly dismantling the government’s welfare reforms – plunging the prime minister as he approaches his first anniversary into his gravest political crisis yet.

The stakes were beyond high. For the prime minister to have backed down to avoid defeat on this so soon after the winter fuel reversal raises questions about his ability to get his way on plenty else besides.

So, if this first year has done anything, it has clarified the stakes.

This is not just a prime minister and a Labour Party hoping to win a second term. They are trying to prove to a tetchy and volatile country that not only do they get their frustration with politics, but that they can fix it too. None of that will be possible when profound policy disagreements are on public display.

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Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough may not be a household name, but the so-called referee of the Senate has found herself at the centre of a firestorm after she objected to several parts of US President Donald Trump’s mega-sized tax bill.

The 1,000-page document, which he’s dubbed the “big beautiful bill”, would slash spending and extend tax cuts.

But Ms MacDonough has said that certain provisions violate Senate rules, throwing billions of dollars of cuts into doubt.

Her findings have also made it difficult for Congress to pass the bill by 4 July – a deadline set by the president himself.

Now, some Republicans are calling for the Senate to ignore her recommendations – going against long-standing tradition – or to fire her.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a massive spending bill that included cuts to low-income health insurance programme Medicaid, reforms to the food assistance programme SNAP, and a measure to end taxes on tips and overtime pay.

That version then went to the Senate, where both Republicans and Democrats wanted adjustments made.

The US Senate has spent recent weeks debating changes and writing a new version of the bill.

• A look at the key items in Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’
• ‘Our food doesn’t even last the month’ – Americans brace for Trump’s welfare cuts

Legislators are now racing against the clock to deliver the bill to Trump’s desk by 4 July.

Republicans maintain a majority in both the House and the Senate, which should make it easy to pass legislation. But leadership in both chambers has struggled to get consensus on a number of provisions – particularly on social programs like Medicaid – from competing factions within the party.

The Senate parliamentarian’s job is to decide whether a bill complies with budget rules.

Ms MacDonough – the first woman to hold the role – has held the position since 2012. Before that, she spent 25 years as a Senate staffer and worked for the Justice Department.

While she was appointed by former Democratic Senator Harry Reid, she has served Senates controlled by both Republicans and Democrats.

In 2021, multiple Democratic legislators called on the Senate to overrule Ms MacDonough when she said a minimum wage increase could not be included in a policy bill at the time.

People serving as the Senate parliamentarian have been fired before, too.

In 2001, the Senate majority leader at the time fired then Senate parliamentarian, Robert Dove, after one of Dove’s rulings on a bill infuriated Republicans.

Several of the provisions Republican senators have proposed violate the Byrd Rule, she said, which is a 1985 rule the Senate adopted that says “extraneous” provisions cannot be tacked onto “reconciliation” bills.

The budget bill is a reconciliation bill, which means it does not need a 60-vote supermajority to pass the Senate. Reconciliation bills tell the government how to spend money, not how to issue policy, the Byrd rule says.

Because of these rules, Republicans can avoid a Democratic filibuster on the bill and pass it with a simple majority.

But as Ms MacDonough has examined the text she has found a number of places where the reconciliation bill tries to change policy.

Among the provisions Ms MacDonough has ruled against is a plan that would cap states’ ability to collect more federal Medicaid funding through healthcare provider taxes and a measure that would have made it harder to enforce contempt findings against the Trump administration.

And more rulings could come as she continues to examine the large bill.

Some Republicans, like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, are not pleased with her rulings and have gone as far as calling for her to be fired.

“President Trump’s landslide victory was a MANDATE from 77 million Americans,” he wrote on X on Thursday. “The One Big Beautiful Bill delivers on that mandate. The Parliamentarian is trying to UNDERMINE the President’s mandate and should be fired.”

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall urged his party to pass a resolution to term limit the parliamentarian.

He noted in a social media post that the Senate parliamentarian was fired during reconciliation in 2001: “It’s 2025 during reconciliation & we need to again fire the Senate Parliamentarian.”

Texas Senator John Cornyn said Republicans should not let “an unelected Senate staffer” stop the party from passing the bill.

Such a move by Republicans could set a precedent for Democrats, however, whose past legislative priorities also have been thwarted by the parliamentarian’s rulings. When the party held the majority in 2022, they came two votes from scrapping the filibuster rule in order to pass voting rights legislation – and overriding or dismissing the parliamentarian would be a different means to achieve a similar procedural objective.

But Senate Republican Leader John Thune, of South Dakota, does not seem to agree with calls to oust her.

Thune, who is the chief spokesperson for the party in the chamber, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday he would not overrule Ms MacDonough.

Instead, he described the senate referee’s rulings as “speed bumps”, and said his party had other options to reach Republican-promised budget cuts, namely rewriting the bill.

Thune had previously said a vote on the bill was expected on Friday, though it remains unclear if Republicans can agree on a bill to move to the floor for a vote by then.

Once the bill passes the Senate, it goes back to the House for approval. Some Republicans in the House have already indicated their displeasure with the Senate’s edits to the bill.

After the bill passes both houses, then it can go to Trump’s desk.

Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, said the Trump administration is sticking by the 4 July deadline.

“This is part of the process, this is part of the inner workings of the United States Senate, but the president is adamant about seeing this bill on his desk here at the White House by Independence Day,” she said referring to the parliamentarian’s rulings.

Parents in several Indian cities, including capital Delhi, are protesting against what they call “unsustainable” fee raises by private schools. These increases, they say, are stretching household budgets to a breaking point and taking a toll on their children.

Aaditya Mattey, 14, woke up on 9 May feeling confident about his English exam.

His father dropped him off at his school in Indian capital Delhi, but Aaditya never got to write his exam.

“Two or three minutes after I entered the class, guards and bouncers asked me to leave the room,” Aaditya recalls.

His father was still standing outside the school gates when Aaditya and a few other students were asked to get on the school bus, which dropped them off at their homes.

Aaditya’s name was removed from Delhi Public School Dwarka’s rolls after his father refused to pay a recent fee hike which he alleges was arbitrary and unauthorised.

The BBC reached out to DPS Dwarka and the Delhi Public School Society – which runs the DPS chain of schools – for comment, but did not receive a response.

Aaditya’s case is not an isolated one and DPS is not the only school which is facing allegations of arbitrary fee increase.

Over the past two months, protests have erupted across Indian cities – from Delhi to Pune to Hyderabad – as a growing number of parents accuse private schools of imposing steep fee raises.

In Delhi, which has emerged as the epicentre of the protests, the issue recently made headlines after DPS Dwarka allegedly confined students in the library, hired security guards to stop them from entering classes and expelled them over unpaid dues. Parents have accused the school of punishing children for financial decisions made by their families.

Government-run schools operate nationwide but often suffer from poor, inconsistent quality, prompting even many low-income families to choose private schools for better opportunities.

In Delhi, rules say that private schools on government-leased land must get Directorate of Education (DoE) approval before raising fees and must admit 25% economically weaker or disadvantaged students – a condition tied to their subsidised leases.

The BBC has contacted the DoE for comment on the fee rises, which parents have reported to us, but has not received a response.

Schools, on the other hand, have argued in court and told parents that they are struggling. They cite inflation, rising staff salaries, delayed reimbursements from the government for economically weaker students and the need for infrastructure upgrades as reasons for raising fees.

Divya Mattey says his son Aaditya’s annual fee in 2020 was 93,400 rupees ($1,077; £802). This, he says, has more than doubled to 189,096 rupees in 2025-26.

Mr Mattey is among dozens of parents who have taken the school to court, alleging it has unlawfully removed students from rolls and harassed families over the fee issue.

“We never thought a school of this stature would treat children like this – bar them from classrooms, assign bouncers and make them sit in the library for days,” he says.

The school did not answer the BBC’s questions over email and on a phone call. But in court, it reportedly argued that there was no legal obligation to retain students whose fees haven’t been paid. According to a report in The Indian Express newspaper, DPS claimed it suffered losses of 490m rupees last year and had to raise fees.

A notice on the school’s website meanwhile accuses “a small group of parents” of spreading “false and malicious information regarding the school fee structure” in an attempt to “mislead and create confusion”.

But the controversy reflects a broader problem.

A recent survey by online community platform LocalCircles found that more than 80% of parents with children in private schools said fees had increased by over 10% this academic year. In cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru, the rise in some schools was as high as 30%.

India has no centralised regulation for private schools; each state sets its own rules.

For example, Maharashtra allows a 15% fee rise every two years – subject to review if 25% of parents object – while Karnataka permits a 10% annual increase with audit justification. Enforcement, however, is weak, and legal disputes over fees often drag on for years, providing little timely relief to families.

Gagandeep Singh, whose son attends Mira Model School in West Delhi, says fees rose 45% last year and over 10% this year.

Singh is willing to pay the earlier DoE-approved fee, but says the school has refused his cheque for the current term, which began nearly three months ago.

The BBC reached out to Mira Model School but received no response.

“It’s not our job to regulate schools,” Mr Singh says. “That’s what the government is supposed to do.”

Meanwhile, many parents fear that the DPS case has set a troubling precedent.

“We don’t want our children to be thrown out of their classes, like what happened there,” says Pankaj Gupta, whose son studies at Delhi’s Maharaja Agarsain Public School.

Mr Gupta said the school increased fees by 25% this year without advance notice.

“We had no choice. We had to pay,” he added.

Mr Gupta runs a small convenience store but has faced declining sales since the pandemic. The rise of online shopping has further squeezed physical stores. Now, rising school fees are pushing his family to the brink.

The BBC has reached out to Maharaja Agarsain Public School for comment.

Another parent, who wanted to remain anonymous, said she’s considering withdrawing her son from the school he attended since childhood due to an “unsustainable” 30% fee hike this year.

“Both my husband and I work, but our salaries haven’t gone up significantly. As a parent, you try to give your child the best but sometimes that comes at great personal cost,” she said.

But she admits that switching schools also feels risky – what if the next one also increases fees?

“It’s the same situation everywhere,” she said.

The uproar has prompted the Delhi government to act.

On 10 June the state cabinet approved the Delhi School Education (Transparency in Fixation and Regulation of Fees) Ordinance, 2025, pending the Lieutenant Governor’s approval – necessary for it to become a law.

Though not yet public, Education Minister Ashish Sood says it will tighten private school fee regulations.

But parents are demanding greater transparency. Last weekend, hundreds protested in Delhi, urging the government to consider their feedback when drafting the bill.

Shikha Sharma Bagga, Supreme Court lawyer and secretary of a group called Justice for All, urges timely audits: “Schools’ finances must be audited before each academic year so parents know what they’re paying for.”

Back in Dwarka, Aaditya is still trying to get back to class.

Media reports say DPS Dwarka has agreed to reinstate students expelled for not paying fees. But Mr Mattey says they are still waiting.

“The school has shown some reciprocation, but to this date my child’s name is not back on the register,” he says, adding that he hasn’t received any assignments for the current academic session.

“My son is only 14. He should be focusing on his studies, not worrying about whether he’ll be allowed to sit in class tomorrow.”

When the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) announced last month that it would disband and end its decades-long insurgency against Turkey, Leila hoped she might soon be reunited with her son.

Three years ago, the former sandwich seller left home to join the group – proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US, UK and EU – in the remote Qandil Mountains, near Iraq’s border with Iran.

Apart from two videos he’s sent, the last in March, Leila hasn’t seen him since.

“When I first heard about the announcement I was very happy,” says Leila, whose name we have changed because she fears reprisals from the group.

“But as time has passed, nothing has changed.”

For 40 years the PKK has been at war with Turkey in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people, many of them civilians, and is one of the longest-running in the world.

Some families the BBC spoke to bitterly condemned the PKK, while others spoke proudly of how family members had died fighting for the group and felt this sacrifice had paved the way for peace talks.

The PKK’s announcement that it would stop fighting was seen as a historic moment for Turkey, its Kurdish minority, and neighbouring countries into which the conflict has spilled over.

But since then, no formal peace process with Turkey has begun and there is no official ceasefire in place, with reports of killing continuing on both sides.

Initially set up with the aim of fighting for an independent Kurdish state in Turkey, the PKK has, since the 1990s, shifted focus to demand greater cultural and political autonomy for the Kurds.

Leila, who lives in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which borders Turkey, says she hadn’t even heard of the PKK until her son, an Iraqi-Kurd in his twenties, came home one day talking about the group’s ideologies.

She accuses the group of “brainwashing” her son, convincing him they were defending the ethnic Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. The Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East but do not have a nation state.

Leila says over time her son started to become more independent, making his bed, washing his clothes and doing the dishes. She now believes the PKK was preparing him for the tough life he would soon be living in the mountains.

On the day he left, he came home with three “comrades” to tell his mother he was going to the mountains to begin six months of training.

She says she repeatedly tried to dissuade him from joining the PKK but he was determined to go.

“He was so determined. Arguing with him would have been of no use.”

Since then, Leila says she has regularly visited the Qandil Mountains in the hope of catching a glimpse of her son, but has never seen him.

“If they just let me see him once a year, I would be happy,” she says.

The BBC travelled to the Qandil Mountains, having been granted rare access by the PKK to film there.

The mountains, which are sparsely populated and known for their natural beauty, help shield thousands of PKK fighters from Turkish air strikes.

The journey took hours of driving up narrow, bumpy roads, in an area where there are few signs of inhabitation apart from a handful of farmers and shepherds.

As the BBC approached a PKK checkpoint, we saw large pictures of the group’s leader and founding member Abdullah Ocalan – imprisoned by Turkey in solitary confinement since 1999 – displayed across the mountains. But when the BBC reached the checkpoint, the PKK denied us entry.

We were later told by PKK authorities that talks are underway with the group and they did not want media attention.

They did not say what the talks were about, though Iraq’s Foreign Minister Fuad Mohammed Hussein last month told the BBC discussions would be taking place with the PKK, Turkey, Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government to discuss how the group’s weapons will be handed over.

So far, the terms of a possible peace deal between Turkey and the PKK are unknown.

The PKK told the BBC in a written statement that it is sincere and serious about the process, insisting its leader, Ocalan, must be freed.

“The ball is now in Turkey’s court. A peace process cannot develop based on unilateral steps,” said Zagros Hiwa, the spokesman for the PKK-linked Kurdistan Democratic Communities Union (KCK), an umbrella group of regional Kurdish organisations.

But in a possible sign of the hurdles ahead, a senior local commander, who’s part of the second line of leadership within the group in Iraq, told the BBC in a written statement that in his view disarmament is “not up for discussion”.

Still suspicious about Turkey’s intentions, he adds that “when we address the reasons of the armed conflict, weapons will be of no use for both sides”.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s apparent willingness to bring an end to the conflict with the PKK has been interpreted by some as a bid to attract Kurdish support for a new constitution to extend his 22-year-rule, which he denies.

He has described the PKK’s decision to disband as an important step towards “our goal of a Turkey without terrorism”.

Writing on X, the Turkish president said a new era was about to begin after “the elimination of terror and violence”.

For some families whose loved ones were killed fighting for the PKK, the idea the conflict might soon end is bitter-sweet.

Kawa Takoor was 21 when he was killed two years ago. His sister, Rondek Takoor, who lives in Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, last saw him in the Qandil Mountains in 2019.

Speaking from the family home, where photos of Kawa adorn the living room walls, Rondek says her brother’s death changed the family’s life. “I always dream about him,” she says with tearful eyes.

Rondek, who is in her twenties, still remembers the last conversation they had together.

“I asked him if he would like to go back home with me and he said ‘never’. He even asked me to join him in the mountains,” she says.

For Rondek and her family, who are pro-PKK, the group disbanding would be both a moment of “pride and pain, especially after our huge loss”.

She believes that “it’s the sacrifices we’ve made and the martyrs we’ve lost, that paved the way for leaders to talk peace”.

What happens next is uncertain.

There are questions about what would happen to thousands of Turkish PKK fighters and whether they would be allowed to reintegrate into Turkish society.

Turkish officials have yet to say whether these fighters will be treated as criminals and face prosecution. But Turkish media reports have suggested fighters who haven’t committed crimes in Turkey could return without fear of prosecution, though PKK leaders might be forced into exile to other countries or required to stay in Iraq.

It is also unclear what the group disbanding would mean for other Kurdish groups, notably in north-east Syria, which Turkey regards as being off-shoots of the PKK.

During the Syrian civil war, Turkish forces and Turkish-backed Syrian fighters launched a series of offensives to capture border areas held by a Syrian Kurdish militia called the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

The YPG dominates an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias called the Syrian Democratic Forces, which drove the Islamic State group out of a quarter of Syria with the help of a US-led multinational coalition.

The YPG says it is a distinct entity from the PKK, but Turkey rejects that and proscribes it as a terrorist organisation.

Erdogan has said the PKK’s decision to disband should “cover all extensions of the organisation in Northern Iraq, Syria and Europe”. SDF commander Mazloum Abdi said the PKK’s decision would “pave the way for a new political and peaceful process in the region”.

However, he has also said that the PKK’s disarmament does not apply to the SDF, which signed a separate deal to merge with the Syrian armed forces in December.

In Iran, the PJAK group, which is also part of the KCK, has told BBC Turkish that it supports the “new process” in Turkey, but that it is not planning to disarm or disband itself.

PJAK is designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey and Iran. There has been a de facto ceasefire between the group and the Iranian government since 2011.

Turkey says the PJAK is the Iranian arm of the PKK, but the Kurdish groups deny this.

For mothers like Leila, all the complexities of politics and the intricate balance of military powers across the region are irrelevant. What she cares about is having her son with her again.

“He will come back home when he gets tired of the harsh life in the mountains, at some point he will realise that he can take it no more.”

If this happens, Leila plans to leave their home city where her son was recruited by the PKK.

“This city has brought me nothing but pain.”

At his 1,200-person cleaning business in Maryland, chief executive Victor Moran carefully screens new recruits to make sure they are authorised to work in the US.

Even so, President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants is starting to chip away at his workforce.

About 15 people have left his company, Total Quality, since Trump won a fight to strip immigrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua from temporary protections shielding them from deportation, he says.

If the White House expands its efforts, it could cost him hundreds more of his workers, who rely on similar work permits and would be difficult to replace.

Similar kinds of concerns are reverberating at businesses across the US, as Trump’s deportation drive appears to pick up pace, threatening to choke off a supply of workers that is increasingly critical to the US economy.

Nearly one in five workers in the US was an immigrant last year, according to census data. That marked a record high in data going back decades, up from less than 10% in 1994.

Trump has said he is targeting people in the US illegally, who account for an estimated 4% of the US workforce. His pledge to conduct mass deportations was a centrepiece of his campaign and an issue on which he drew widespread support, including many Hispanic voters.

His administration has resumed raids at workplaces, a tactic that had been suspended under Biden.

But White House efforts have been much broader in scope, taking aim at people in the US on student visas; suspending admissions of refugees; and moving to revoke temporary work permits and other protections that had been granted to immigrants by previous presidents.

The actions threaten disruption to millions of people, many of whom have lived and worked in the US for years.

“We are terrified,” says Justino Gomez, who is originally from El Salvador and has lived in the US for three decades.

The 73-year-old is authorised to work under a programme known as TPS, which grants temporary work permits and protection from deportation, based on conditions in immigrants’ home countries.

His employment, first as a dishwasher and line cook in a restaurant and now as a cleaner, helped him send an adopted daughter in El Salvador to school to become a teacher.

But Trump has already taken steps to end the programme for people from Haiti and Venezuela. Mr Gomez, who lives in Maryland, fears El Salvador could be next.

“Every time I leave home, I have this stress on my mind,” he tells the BBC, through a translator provided by his labour union, 32BJ SEIU. “Even when I go to the metro, I’m afraid that ICE will be there waiting to abduct us.”

Many of Trump’s actions have been subject to legal challenge, including a lawsuit over TPS brought by the SEIU.

But even if the White House does not successfully ramp up arrests and deportations, analysts say his crackdown could weigh on the economy in the near term, as it scares people like Mr Gomez into hiding and slows arrivals.

Growth in the workforce, which has been powered by immigrants, has already flattened since January, when Trump took office.

As firms have a harder time finding workers, it will limit their ability to grow, slowing the economy, warns economist Giovanni Peri of University of California, Davis.

A smaller workforce could also feed inflation, by forcing firms to pay more to recruit staff.

If the policies are sustained, they could have far-reaching economic consequences, Prof Peri adds. He points to the example of Japan, which has seen its economy shrink as it keeps a lid on immigration and the population ages.

“The undocumented raids are a piece of a policy that really wants to transform the United States from one of the places where immigrants come, are integrated and part of the success of society to a closed country,” he says.

“Instead of an engine of growth, it will become a more stagnant and slow growing and less dynamic economy.”

Many firms say it is already hard to find people to fill the jobs available.

Adam Lampert, the chief executive of Texas-based Cambridge Caregivers and Manchester Care Homes, which provides assisted living and in-home care, says about 80% of his 350 staff are foreign-born.

“I don’t go out and place ads for non-citizens to fill our roles,” he says. “It is the immigrants who are answering the call.”

Like Mr Moran, he said Trump’s moves had already cost him some workers, who had been authorised to work on temporary permits.

He said he was also worried about the ripple effects of Trump’s crackdown on his business, which in some ways competes with undocumented workers employed directly by families to provide care.

He said if those workers are forced out, it will drive up demand for his own staff – forcing him to pay more, and ultimately raise his rates.

“We’re going to have incredible inflation if you scrape all these people out of the economy,” he warned. “We can’t do without these people in the workforce.”

At Harris Health System, a major hospital network in Texas, Trump’s policy changes have already led to the loss of some workers, says chief executive Esmail Porsa.

He says training American workers to fill the jobs available in his sector would take years, given the rising needs.

“As the population is getting older and we are clamping down on one viable source of current and future workforce, this issue will come to a head,” he says.

Trump last week acknowledged the disruption his policies were creating for sectors that rely heavily on undocumented labour, such as hospitality and agriculture, even reportedly pausing workplace raids in some industries temporarily after receiving blowback from fellow Republicans.

But despite the concerns about the economic impact, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the BBC that such raids remain a “cornerstone” of their efforts.

In the homebuilding industry, firms across the country are reporting seeing some work crews stop showing up for work, which will slow construction and raise costs in a sector where prices are already a concern, says Jim Tobin, president of the National Association of Homebuilders, which represents businesses in the sector.

The industry has called on Congress to reform immigration laws, including creating a special visa programme for construction workers.

But Mr Tobin says he was not expecting big changes to immigration policy anytime soon.

“I think it’s going to take a signal from the president about when it’s time to engage,” he says. “Right now it’s all about enforcement.”

Kenya has been hit by a recent wave of repression, tarnishing its reputation as a beacon of democracy in East Africa.

Critics fear that it is sliding down the path of her neighbours – Uganda and Tanzania, both of which are notorious for cracking down on dissent.

Kenya’s laws are widely regarded as being more progressive – particularly in protecting fundamental freedoms like the right to protest.

But Kenya has witnessed an increasing crackdown on protests – the latest example being the killing of at least 10 people in nationwide demonstrations against President William Ruto’s government while it attempted to ban live TV and radio coverage of the protests.

“Rogue Regime” – declared the headline of Kenya’s respected Standard newspaper as it pointed out that young people had flooded the streets in defiant remembrance of those gunned down a year ago in mass anti-tax demonstrations but “Instead of a listening ear they were met with razor wire, armoured trucks and the cold grip of repression”.

But as far as Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen is concerned, the police showed “remarkable restraint” as they foiled an “attempted coup”.

“We condemn the criminal anarchists who in the name of peaceful demonstrations unleashed a wave of violence, looting, sexual assault and destruction upon our people,” he said, accusing the protesters of attacking police stations and injuring 300 officers.

However, the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) condemned the police for their handling of the protest.

“The unnecessary aggression and brute force that culminated in the senseless loss of life and senseless destruction of property have no place in a free democratic society,” it said.

The crackdown came just weeks after a 31-year-old blogger and teacher, Albert Ojwang, died in police custody. He was arrested after being accused of defaming a senior police officer – and died in detention of assault wounds, an autopsy found.

His death triggered a small protest in the capital, Nairobi, which police clamped down on and a street vendor, who was caught in the crossfire – shot at close-range, is fighting for his life in hospital.

The LSK denounced his shooting as unbefitting for “any sane democracy”.

Its comment brought into sharp focus the fact that Kenya risks losing its status as a democracy that many Tanzanians and Ugandans envied – and drew inspiration from.

Tanzanian political analyst Nicodemus Minde said there had long been an “appreciation” among Tanzanians of the ability of Kenyans to “speak truth to power”.

It was a view shared by Tanzania’s main opposition leader Tundu Lissu who told the BBC last year that “We have not pressed hard enough for democratic reform”.

“What Kenya did to build its democratic space is something we need to do,” he said.

Having miraculously survived an assassination attempt after being shot 16 times in 2017, Lissu has become a symbol of state repression in Tanzania.

He is currently in detention, charged with treason for rallying his supporters under the slogan “No reform; no elections”.

The government saw this as an attempt by Lissu to launch a rebellion – and he risks being sentenced to death if convicted.

The 57-year-old opposition leader sees his detention as an attempt by the Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party – which has been in power since independence in 1961– to clear its path to victory in presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for October.

This perception has been strengthened by the fact that his Chadema party has been barred from contesting the poll after it refused to sign an electoral code of conduct that it believed would undermine its right to campaign freely.

The opposition in Uganda sees itself in a similar situation, pointing out that President Yoweri Museveni has been in power for almost 40 years, and – along with his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who heads the army – is cracking down on political rivals in the build-up to elections in early 2026.

Ugandan opposition politician Kizza Besigye has been in detention since November, with the government wanting to try him for treason in a military court after accusing him of plotting to overthrow the government – a charge he denies.

Although Kenya has an independent judiciary and holds regular elections that lead to power changing hands, Martha Karua – one of the country’s most respected human rights lawyers, a former justice minister and the leader of a small opposition party – believes that democracy is under threat in all three East African states.

“We are staring at a regional crisis – not at an economic crisis, not a crisis of trade, but of democracy itself,” she said at a recent press conference.

Activists like her are alarmed by the fact that more than 80 Kenyans have been abducted in the past year by people who never identified themselves, raising fears that this was the government’s latest strategy to crush dissent after the protests over moves to increase taxes amidst a cost-of-living crisis.

There is also mounting evidence that Kenya is no longer a safe haven for Ugandans and Tanzanians, with security agencies from the three states apparently colluding to crack down on the opposition.

Besigye was in Nairobi for a book launch in November, when he vanished – only to surface four days later in a military court in Uganda.

The government in Uganda accused him of trying to negotiate an arms deal in Kenya to launch a rebellion back home and said he had been arrested in a cross-border operation carried out with the knowledge of Kenya’s intelligence services.

Kenya’s government initially denied this, saying it was unaware of the Ugandan operation on its soil, although Kenya’s foreign minister recently told local media that “there were certain issues” about Besigye’s visit in Kenya and “he had to go”. He did not elaborate.

About two months after Besigye’s ordeal, exiled Tanzanian activist Maria Sarungi Tsehai said she was abducted by armed men in Nairobi who then, luckily for her, released her several hours later.

Ms Tsehai said she was manhandled and choked by four assailants who forced her into a vehicle.

“I am sure that the reason for the abduction was to get access to my social media and [because of] the whistleblowing job that I do,” she said, as her abductors kept asking how to unlock her phone.

Ms Tsehai is a staunch critic of Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan, and has accused her government of bringing “tyranny back” to the country, despite promising reforms when she took office in 2021 following the death of her authoritarian predecessor, John Magufuli.

Karua said that despite the “backsliding” of democracy and human rights in East Africa, there was little concern about this internationally, with the African Union “silent”, the United Nations offering “rhetoric – not redress”, while the US – “a self-declared champion of liberty” – was facing its “own issues of liberty” under the administration of President Donald Trump.

Tanzania deported Karua and two Kenyan activists when they flew into the country in May to show solidarity with Lissu, while Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi and Ugandan lawyer Agather Atuhaire were detained after being allowed to enter.

Following their release, both accused the Tanzanian police of sexually abusing them.

Tanzania’s police denied the accusation, however amidst the outcry over the detention and deportation of foreign activists, President Samia issued a stark warning.

“If they have been contained in their country, let them not come here to meddle. Let’s not give them a chance. They have already created chaos in their own country,” she said.

To the dismay of activists, Kenya’s President Ruto failed to condemn the alleged abuse and instead, apologised to the Tanzanian government.

“To our neighbours from Tanzania, if we have wronged you in any way, forgive us,” he said.

“If there is anything that Kenyans have done that is not right, we want to apologise.”

Macharia Munene, a Kenyan professor in international relations, told the BBC that Ruto’s apology stemmed from his “perceived failure to keep people [Kenyans] in check”.

He added that the Tanzanian government had become “jittery” of the potential influence of Kenyan activists on the October elections, with Ruto’s government under pressure to “contain troublemakers”.

For Kenyan activists the worsening repression in the three states has merely strengthened their resolve to fight back.

Mr Mwangi, one of Kenya’s most prominent human rights campaigners, summed it up by saying: “If these people are united in oppressing their citizens, then we must be united in fighting to remove them from power.”

• ‘We live in fear’ – forced expulsions taint Kenya’s safe haven image
• BBC identifies security forces who shot Kenya anti-tax protesters
• Could this be the end of the road for Tanzania’s great survivor, Tundu Lissu?
• Why Kenya’s president has so many nicknames
• Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni: How an ex-rebel has stayed in power for 35 year

More than a third of Tuvalu citizens have entered the ballot for a world-first climate visa which would allow them to permanently migrate to Australia.

Opening for the first intake on 16 June, the influx of registrations could indicate that programme will be hugely oversubscribed, with only 280 visas awarded to Tuvalu citizens from the random ballot each year.

The visa programme has been pegged by the Australia’s foreign affairs department as a landmark response to the threat of climate-related displacement.

At just five metres (16ft) above sea level, the tiny Pacific archipelago is one of the most climate-threatened nations in the world.

There have been 1,124 applications submitted to the ballot as of 27 June, which accounts for 4,052 Tuvalu citizens with the inclusion of family members.

The island nation is home to 10,643 people, according to census figures collected in 2022.

If successful, holders of the Pacific Engagement visa will be granted indefinite permanent residency in Australia, with the ability to freely travel in and out of the country.

The visa will also provide for Australian supports on arrival in the country, such as access to the country’s Medicare system, childcare subsidies and the ability to study at schools, university and vocational facilities at the same subsidisation as Australian citizens.

Entry to the 2025 ballot costs A$25 (£11.93, $16.37), and will close 18 July.

The new class of visa was created as part of the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union, announced in August 2024, which includes a commitment by Canberra to defend the island in the face of natural disasters, public health emergencies and “military aggression”.

“For the first time there is a country that has committed legally to recognise the future statehood and sovereignty of Tuvalu despite the detrimental impact of climate changed-induced sea level rise,” said Prime Minister Feleti Teo in a statement last year.

Scientists at Nasa have predicted that the majority of land mass and critical infrastructure in Tuvalu will sit below the level of the current high tide by 2050.

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Two men have been sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering an Aboriginal schoolboy, in a case that shocked Australia.

Cassius Turvey died of head injuries after a brutal assault on the outskirts of Perth in October 2022. The 15-year-old’s killing prompted nationwide protests and vigils, also sparking debate on pervasive racism in the country.

The killers, Jack Brearley and Brodie Palmer, were “callous and lacking in empathy” as they chased Turvey down and savagely beat the Noongar Yamatji boy with a metal pole, Justice Peter Quinlan told a packed courtroom on Friday.

Mitchell Forth, who was convicted of manslaughter, was sentenced to 12 years in jail.

The gallery cheered as Justice Quinlan handed down the sentences, while Cassius’ mother Mechelle Turvey burst into tears, local media reported.

Prosecutors had told the trial the attack on Cassius was the culmination of a complex series of tit-for-tat events that had nothing to do with him.

The vigilante gang responsible for his death had been “hunting for kids” because somebody had damaged Brearley’s car windows.

Brearley, 24, and Palmer, 30, had each blamed the other for Cassius’ death, with Brearley also alleging that he acted in self-defence as Cassius was armed with a knife.

Justice Quinlan rejected that as a “complete fabrication”, and found that it was Brearley who had delivered the fatal blows.

“Cassius Turvey was completely and utterly innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. The only reason that he was the person killed… was that he was the person you happened to catch,” Justice Quinlan said.

Brearley had shown “no remorse whatsoever”, the judge added.

“You cannot make amends when you don’t acknowledge the pain that you have caused.

“You cannot be remorseful when in an effort to avoid responsibility… You seek to frame an innocent man and when that does not work you give false evidence that your co-accused was in fact the killer,” the chief justice said in a scathing rebuke reported by ABC News.

Palmer did not physically strike Cassius, but Justice Quinlan ruled that he was “equally responsible but not equally culpable”.

The group had also assaulted other Aboriginal teenagers in what the judge described as “so-called vigilante justice [that] was completely misdirected”.

A fourth offender, Ethan MacKenzie, was handed a two-and-a-half years jail term for his part in some of the other assaults.

In one case, a 13-year-old boy’s own crutches were used to beat him, causing bruising to his face.

Justice Quinlan condemned Brearley, Palmer and Forth for their “celebration” after the assaults, calling it a “grotesque display of your complete disregard of the lives of the children you had attacked”.

In her victim impact statement on Thursday, Cassius’ mother Mechelle Turvey said the actions of the three men were racially motivated.

“Cassius was not just part of my life, he was my future,” Ms Turvey said. “There are no words that can fully capture the devastation of losing someone you love to violence.”

While Justice Quinlan did not find the attack to be motivated by race, he said the attackers’ use of racial slurs “rippled” through the Aboriginal community and created “justifiable fear”.

“The fear is real and legitimate. You are responsible for that fear,” he said.

Palmer is eligible for parole in January 2041, while Brearly will be eligible from October 2044, the Australian Associated Press reported.

Canada’s parliament has passed a landmark bill giving Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government new powers to fast-track major national projects.

The One Canadian Economy Act was passed by the Senate on Thursday, and allows the cabinet to streamline approvals processes and bypass certain provisions of federal laws for projects that could boost the economy.

Supporters have argued the legislation is a critical step in reducing Canada’s dependence on the United States, amid trade tensions sparked by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

But it has been criticised by Indigenous groups and environmental activists who say expediting the projects could stifle opposition voices.

The legislation does not determine what will be built, but the prime minister has previously signalled that it could be used to construct energy corridors, such as pipelines and electricity grids, and expand mines and ports.

The act will “remove trade barriers, expedite nation-building projects, and unleash economic growth, with Indigenous partnership at the centre of this growth,” Carney said last week.

The government said the act will reduce barriers for internal trade and labour mobility. It will also give the government sweeping powers to approve projects “that are in the national interest”.

That has alarmed Indigenous leaders, who fear they will not be consulted adequately before such projects are approved.

The passage of the bill into law is a significant victory for Carney, and upholds an election promise to remove interprovincial barriers by Canada Day on 1 July.

Trump has imposed tariffs on Canadian steel, aluminium and its auto sector. Carney had campaigned heavily on bolstering the country’s economy to counter tariff threats from the US, with whom Canada does the bulk of its trade.

Paul Prosper, a Nova Scotia senator who belongs to the Mi’kmaq Indigenous group, unsuccessfully attempted to insert an amendment that would require consent from Indigenous groups before a project could go ahead.

He criticised the speed with which the legislation passed, saying that rights holders could have been consulted by “investing a few more months”.

He said he supports development, but the law could allow the government and industry leaders to ignore Indigenous rights.

“No one wants to watch our children grow up in squalor, with no access to clean drinking water, no opportunity for good-paying jobs and no support for our sick and dying. However, we do not want success and progress to come on the backs of Indigenous Peoples,” he said in the Senate, as quoted by CBC.

However a supporter of the bill, Senator Hassan Yussuff, said it was a response to an “urgent and immediate crisis”, in comments reported by CBC.

The legislation states that the government will consult with Indigenous peoples before fast-tracking a project.

A young Syrian national has been charged with supporting a foreign terror group over a foiled plot to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna last August.

Mohamed A, who is described by German authorities as a juvenile and not in custody, is accused of following the ideology of jihadist group Islamic State (IS) and helping another suspect to prepare the attack.

Concert organisers called off Taylor Swift’s three sold-out gigs on the eve of the first show at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium last year, disappointing tens of thousands of fans during her Eras Tour.

Authorities arrested several suspects at the time saying they appeared to have been inspired by IS and al-Qaeda.

“Mohammad A has adhered since April 2024 at the latest to the ideology of the terrorist organisation Islamic State (IS),” Germany’s federal public prosecutor said in a statement.

“Between mid-July and August 2024, he was in contact with a young adult from Austria who was planning a bomb attack on a concert by singer Taylor Swift in Vienna.”

Sixty-five thousand fans had bought tickets for Swift’s three concerts on 8-10 August, and the singer later apologised for the cancellation, speaking of the “tremendous amount of guilt” she felt. She said she had decided to throw all her energy into the shows at the end of her European tour in London.

The main suspect in the case has been identified as Beran A, who authorities say was part of an IS cell in eastern Austria.

Beran A, who is now 20 and from Ternitz south of Vienna, was arrested before the concerts following a tip-off by the CIA, which said the plotters had hoped to kill a large number of concert-goers.

Investigators allege he had also planned to carry out an earlier attack in Dubai in March 2024.

Reports suggested it was part of a co-ordinated plot involving three simultaneous IS attacks but Beran A had changed his mind at the last minute.

According to the federal prosecutor in Germany, Mohammad A had helped the main suspect with a translation of bomb-making instructions from Arabic as well as making contact with a member of IS abroad over the internet.

He is also accused of providing the text for an oath of allegiance to the main suspect to join IS.

Under cover of darkness, a nocturnal creature emerges from a crate and takes its first tentative steps into a new life in the wild.

“It is just essentially God’s work. We’re undoing the damage of hundreds of years ago and bringing back these extraordinary animals,” claimed Ben, who spoke to the BBC on the condition of anonymity.

He is part of an underground network where members risk arrest, jail and hefty fines by carrying out covert and unlicensed releases of beavers.

It is an offence to release beavers into the wild without a licence and a spokeswoman for the National Farmers Union (NFU) said it was “irresponsible” and “really worrying”.

There is now a legal route in the UK for the species to be reintroduced. Despite this and the risks of acting without licences, activists whose names have been changed were unrepentant and said they were taking action themselves because the legal option was “too bureaucratic”.

“It feels like they’re back in their proper place,” Ben said.

Like the nocturnal creatures at the heart of their cause, the group he belongs to operates under the cover of darkness.

He said secrecy was key in everything from where other parts of the network got the animals – “we really don’t need to know” – to the clandestine releases.

“You don’t want to be caught with a box of beavers in the boot so you have to be quite quick,” Ben said.

“You open the door, do it and drive away. They are instantly much happier in the water.”

However, the NFU said concerns over unlicensed releases included flooding, tree-gnawing and damage to land and crops.

NFU countryside advisor Poppy Sherborne said illegal releases were “irresponsible”.

“They are really worrying because there has been no process put in place to check that release should be happening,” she said.

“There’s no support for farmers who could be impacted by that release if it’s not happened in the right way.”

She said the “rigorous” legal process should be followed.

When challenged over his actions, Ben said:  “I’m unfamiliar with species of animals or species of wildlife, plants or animal that would be badly affected by the presence of beavers… they can reduce risk of flooding, mitigate the damage that a drought can bring. They can help to clean up water.

“What’s not to like about this?”

Det Insp Mark Harrison, of the National Wildlife Crime Unit, which supports wildlife crime enforcement across the UK, said he loved nature and visiting rewilding locations but “it has to be done properly”.

He said although there had been prosecutions for illegal species release in England, none had applied to beavers.

“The reason for that is because we’ve got no evidence,” he said, describing the covert nature of releases and the fact beavers could be on site for long periods before they were spotted.

“You commit an offence so there could be consequences for you but you’ve also got to think about the impact on the animal so there could be welfare issues,” he said.

“You could be reintroducing other diseases and parasites.”

Marie, who is also part of the network, said being part of beaver releases was “one of the most amazing things I’ve ever witnessed”.

Asked about the difficulties beavers could cause for farmers and landowners, she added: “I can understand why it is scary to some people… but there are so many ways that you can maintain control.

“If the landowner wants to protect particular trees, you can make sure that beavers don’t fell an individual tree.

“You can control the water level even and I think beavers can actually bring benefits to farmland too.”

Beavers were hunted to extinction in Britain 400 years ago for their meat, furry water-resistant pelts and a substance they secrete called castoreum – used in food, medicine and perfume.

For a long time, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 regulated the release of “non-native” species, including beavers.

It allowed for licensed releases of beavers – imported from countries including Germany and Norway – into enclosures, of which there are 52 in England, according to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra).

But in 2013, video evidence emerged of a wild beaver with young on the River Otter, near Ottery St Mary, Devon.

After public pressure, the population became central to the River Otter Beaver Trial, which resulted in the 15 families being given licensed status.

Their descendants are among upwards of 600 beavers currently roaming free in England, according to Natural England; the majority through unlicensed releases or escapes.

The Beaver Trust’s figure is higher; its “educated estimate” is that there are 1,000 wild beavers in England, mostly in the South West, with a total of 3,500 in England, Wales and Scotland.

In 2022, Eurasian beavers were recognised as a protected species in England, making it illegal to capture, kill, injure or disturb them.

In February 2025, a licensing scheme overseen by Natural England was introduced – without which it is still illegal to introduce or move beavers.

Natural England is now considering about 50 expressions of interest.

Applicants will have to demonstrate clear benefits and where risks can be “avoided, mitigated or managed”.

Cornwall Wildlife Trust applied to release beavers on a site near Helman Tor as part of a planned £800,000 10-year project.

During the two-year preparation of its application, a pair turned up at the site in what the trust believes was an unlicensed release.

“We have seen this site be absolutely transformed,” beaver officer Lauren Jasper said.

“They’ve created a couple of dams. In doing so, this is holding back water and it’s slowing the flow and it’s created this amazing wetland area that’s now brimming with wildlife.”

The trust said its project work would include providing advice on learning to co-exist with the species again and added it did not support unlicensed release.

Other rewilding efforts – both legal and illegal – causing debate include sea eagles, lynx, wolves, elk, and even some species of butterfly, while sightings of wild boar on Dartmoor sparked division.

Devon farmer and conservationist Derek Gow said he believed they had been released by illegal rewilders.

“I wouldn’t imagine very many people are involved in doing this but the effect they’ve had, especially when it comes to beavers, has been profound,” he said.

Mr Gow, who is working to rewild 150 acres of his own land near Launceston, said he had also legally reintroduced species including beavers, dormice, 25,000 water voles and glow-worms.

He said biodiversity in England was at “rock bottom” and the licensing system was fraught with “complex and medieval rules” and an obligation to “pay for the next 10 years”.

“What they are trying to do is shut the stable door long after the horse, the horse’s grandmother and the horses’ relatives have crossed the mountain range to emerge free on the other side,” he said.

Defra said unlicensed releases could “reduce the likelihood of success of beaver reintroductions”.

It said detailed and comprehensive licensing applications were important to “achieve a measured pace of reintroduction and prioritise areas where beavers can thrive without causing significant conflicts with people, agriculture and infrastructure”.

But rewilder Ben, who said the licensing process was a step in the right direction, said he thought there “may well be a requirement” to continue releasing the animals illegally.

“We are in a national emergency of climate and biodiversity loss,” he said, adding rewilding beavers was being treated as “yet another bureaucratic exercise”.

“It’s not good enough for beavers, and it’s not good enough for the people of this country,” he said.

Det Insp Harrison said “coexistence” was needed and a lot of wildlife crime issues were “because we don’t know how to live with these animals anymore”.

He said: “It brings about a lot of conflict and usually it’s human-human conflict because of an animal.”

XX

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Iran’s foreign minister has admitted that “excessive and serious” damage was done to the country’s nuclear sites in the recent US and Israeli bombings.

Abbas Araghchi told a state broadcaster on Thursday evening that an assessment of the damage is being carried out by the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran.

But, just hours earlier, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the strikes did not disrupt the country’s nuclear programme. Khamenei was responding to US President Donald Trump’s assertion that the bombs had “totally obliterated” three nuclear sites.

Khamenei said the US attacks had failed to “accomplish anything significant”.

The supreme leader, who has been in hiding since the war with Israel began on 13 June, insisted that Trump had “exaggerated” the impact of the bombs, and declared victory over the US and Israel.

But Araghchi’s remarks create a different impression.

The foreign minister also said there were no plans to resume nuclear talks with the US. Iran cancelled a scheduled sixth round of talks when Israel began its attacks.

• When Iran’s supreme leader emerges from hiding he will find a very different nation

“I would like to state clearly that no agreement, arrangement or conversation has been made to start new negotiations,” he said.

He added that the government was examining what was in the “interest of the Iranian people”, saying its approach to diplomacy will take a “new form”.

He did not explain what he meant.

In an attempt to bring Iran back to the negotiating table, the Trump administration has discussed the possibility of helping Iran access $30bn to build a civilian-energy-producing nuclear programme, easing sanctions and freeing up billions of dollars in restricted Iranian funds, CNN has reported.

But developments in Iran might obstruct such a move.

On Wednesday, Iran’s parliament approved a bill to stop co-operation with the global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). If it is implemented, it would mean Iran is no longer committed to allowing nuclear inspectors into its sites.

Israel has said its offensive against Iran was necessary to thwart what it claims are Iranian plans to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme is only intended for civilian purposes.

The US became directly involved in the conflict last weekend, striking facilities in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, before Trump sought to rapidly mediate a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said intelligence gathered by the US and Israel indicated the strikes “significantly damaged the nuclear programme, setting it back by years”.

A leaked preliminary Pentagon assessment downplayed the significance of the damage and said the US strikes only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by a few months. The leak has been dismissed by the administration.

Iran’s health ministry said 610 people were killed during the 12 days of Israel air strikes, while Israeli authorities said 28 were killed in Israel.

MI6 has cast distance between its new chief and her grandfather, who was this week revealed to have been a Nazi spy known as “the butcher”.

Blaise Metreweli was announced as the incoming head of the Secret Intelligence Service earlier this month. She will be its first female “C” in its 116-year history.

With little known about her wider backstory, several newspapers reported on Friday that her grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, who defected from Soviet Russia’s Red Army to become the Nazis’ chief informant in Chernihiv, Ukraine.

However, the Foreign Office, which speaks on behalf of MI6, said Ms Metreweli “neither knew nor met her paternal grandfather”.

A spokesperson added: “Blaise’s ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.

“It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today’s hostile states, as the next chief of MI6.”

The Daily Mail, which first revealed the family link, reports that it found hundreds of pages of documents in an archive in Freiburg, Germany, which showed Mr Dobrowolski was known as “The Butcher” or “Agent No 30” by Wehrmacht commanders.

He reportedly signed off letters to his Nazi superiors with “Heil Hitler” and said he “personally” took part in “the extermination of the Jews”.

The archive documents are said to suggest Mr Dobrowolski looted the bodies of Holocaust victims, was involved in the murdering of local Jews, and laughed while watching the sexual assault of female prisoners.

After the war, Mr Dobrowolski’s wife, Barbara, and two-month-old son fled to Britain, and she married David Metreweli in 1947. Her son took his stepfather’s name, but the Mail reports that on some official documents his surname was still Dobrowolski.

Mr Dobrowolski’s son would go on to be a radiologist and UK armed forces veteran, and his daughter, Ms Metreweli, was born in 1977. She has not responded to the recent reports herself.

She joined MI6 – which gathers intelligence overseas – in 1999, and is currently responsible for technology and innovation there. She will be the agency’s 18th head when she takes over later this year from Sir Richard Moore, a senior civil servant.

Upon her appointment, she said in a statement that she was “proud and honoured” to have been asked to lead.

Ms Metreweli is a Cambridge graduate, a rower and has previously had operational roles in the Middle East and Europe.

In the heart of the Iranian capital, the Boof cafe serves up refreshing cold drinks on a hot summer’s day.

They must be the most distinctive iced Americano coffees in this city – the cafe sits in a leafy corner of the long-shuttered US embassy.

Its high cement walls have been plastered with anti-American murals ever since Washington severed relations with Tehran in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis – which still cast a long shadow over this tortuous relationship.

Inside the charming Boof cafe, Amir the barista says he’d like relations to improve between America and Iran.

“US sanctions hurt our businesses and make it hard for us to travel around the world,” he reflects as he pours another iced coffee behind a jaunty wooden sign – “Keep calm and drink coffee.”

Only two tables are occupied – one by a woman covered up in a long black veil, another by a woman in blue jeans with long flowing hair, flouting the rules on what women should wear as she cuddles with her boyfriend.

It’s a small snapshot of this capital as it confronts its deeply uncertain future.

A short drive away, at the complex of Iran’s state TV station IRIB, a recorded speech by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was broadcast to the nation on Thursday.

“The Americans have been opposing the Islamic Republic of Iran from the very beginning” he declared.

• Iran carries out wave of arrests and executions in wake of Israel conflict
• ‘We are exhausted’ – how Iranians are feeling after fragile ceasefire

“At its core, it has always been about one thing: they want us to surrender,” went on the 86-year Ayatollah, said to have taken shelter in a bunker aer Israel unleashed its unprecedented wave of strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear and missile sites and assassinating senior commanders and scientists.

We watched his speech, his first since President Donald Trump suddenly announced a ceasefire on Tuesday, on a small TV in the only office still intact in a vast section of the IRIB compound. All that’s le is a charred skeleton of steel.

When an Israeli bomb slammed into this complex on 16 June, a raging fire swept through the main studio which would have aired the supreme leader’s address. Now it’s just ash.

You can still taste its acrid smell; all the TV equipment – cameras, lights, tripods – are tangles of twisted metal. A crunching glass carpet covers the ground.

Israel said it targeted the propaganda arm of the Islamic Republic, accusing it of concealing a military operation within – a charge its journalists rejected.

Its gaping shell seems to symbolise this darkest of times for Iran.

You can also see it in the city’s hospitals, which are still treating Iranians injured in Israel’s 12-day war.

“I am scared they might attack again, ” Ashraf Barghi tells me when we meet in the emergency department of the Taleghani General hospital where she works as head nurse.

“We don’t trust this war has ended” she says, in a remark reflecting the palpable worry we’ve heard from so many people in this city.

When Israel bombed the threshold of the nearby Evin prison on 23 June, the casualties, both soldiers and civilians, were rushed into Nurse Barghi’s emergency ward.

• What we know about the Iran-Israel ceasefire

“The injuries were the worst I’ve treated in my 32 years as nurse,” she recounts, still visibly distressed.

The strike on the notorious prison where Iran detains most of its political prisoners was described by Israel as “symbolic”.

It seemed to reinforce Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s repeated message to Iranians to “stand up for their freedom”.

“Israel says it only hit military and nuclear prison but it’s all lies,” insists Morteza from his hospital bed. He had been at work in the prison’s transport department when the missile slammed into the building. He shows us his injuries in both arms and his backside.

In the ward next door, soldiers are being cared for, but we’re not allowed to enter there.

Across this sprawling metropolis, Iranians are counting the cost of this confrontation. In its latest tally, the government’s health ministry recorded 627 people killed and nearly 5,000 injured.

Tehran is slowly returning to life and resuming its old rhythms, at least on the surface. Its infamous traffic is starting to fill its soaring highways and pretty tree-lined side streets.

Shops in its beautiful bazaars are opening again as people return to a city they fled to escape the bombs. Israel’s intense 12-day military operation, coupled with the US’s attacks on Iran’s main nuclear sites, has le so many shaken.

“They weren’t good days, ” says Mina, a young woman who immediately breaks down as she tries to explain her sadness. “It’s so heart-breaking, ” she tells me through her tears. “We tried so hard to have a better life but we can’t see any future these days.”

We met on the grounds of the soaring white marble Azadi tower, one of Tehran’s most iconic landmarks. A large crowd milling on a warm summer’s evening swayed to the strains of much-loved patriotic songs in an open air concert of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra. It was meant to bring some calm to a city still on edge.

Supporters and critics of Iran’s clerical rulers mingled, drawn together by shared worry about their country’s future.

“They have to hear what people say,” insists Ali Reza when I ask him what advice he would give to his government. “We want greater freedoms, that’s all I will say.”

There’s defiance too. “Attacking our nuclear bases to show off that ‘you have to do as we say’ goes against diplomacy,” says Hamed, an 18-year-old university student.

Despite rules and restrictions which have long governed their lives, Iranians do speak their minds as they wait for the next steps by their rulers, and leaders in Washington and beyond, which carry such consequences for their lives.

Actor Brad Pitt’s home in Los Angeles has been ransacked by a trio of thieves.

Three suspects broke into the home in Los Feliz late on Wednesday through a front window and “ransacked the location,” according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

Police did not confirm the home belonged to the Oscar-winning actor, but the address matched that of a home Mr Pitt purchased in 2023.

Authorities said the suspects fled with stolen items, though it’s unclear what was taken. The actor was not home at the time of the burglary, US media reported.

Mr Pitt was in the UK earlier this week for the London premier of his new film F1, which is released on Friday. He was accompanied by fellow Hollywood star Tom Cruise and Lewis Hamilton, who has seven Formula One World Drivers’ Championship titles.

Authorities said the burglary happened around 22:30 local time on Wednesday.

LA police would not confirm the value of items stolen. The BBC also contacted representatives for the actor.

The large three-bedroom home sits just outside Griffith Park – which is home to the famous Hollywood Sign. It is surrounded by a large fence and greenery that shields the home from public view.

The burglary follows others reported in the city targeting other celebrities, including Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban.

Last month, a man was also arrested on stalking and vandalism charges after he allegedly rammed his vehicle into the gate of the home of Pitt’s ex-wife, Jennifer Aniston.

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Iranian authorities have carried out a wave of arrests and multiple executions of people suspected of links to Israeli intelligence agencies, in the wake of the recent war between the two countries.

It comes after what officials describe as an unprecedented infiltration of Iranian security services by Israeli agents.

Authorities suspect information fed to Israel played a part in a series of high-profile assassinations during the conflict. This included the targeted killings of senior commanders from the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and nuclear scientists, which Iran attributes to operatives of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency working inside the country.

Shaken by the scale and precision of these killings, authorities have been targeting anyone suspected of working with foreign intelligence, saying it is for the sake of national security.

But many fear this is also a way to silence dissent and tighten control over the population.

During the 12-day conflict, Iranian authorities executed three people accused of spying for Israel. On Wednesday – just one day after the ceasefire – three more individuals were executed on similar charges.

Officials have since announced the arrest of hundreds of suspects across the country on accusations of espionage. State television has aired alleged confessions from several detainees, purportedly admitting to collaboration with Israeli intelligence.

Human rights groups and activists have expressed fears over the latest developments, citing Iran’s longstanding practice of extracting forced confessions and conducting unfair trials. There are concerns that more executions may follow.

Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence claims it is engaged in a “relentless battle” against what it calls Western and Israeli intelligence networks – including the CIA, Mossad, and MI6.

According to Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with the IRGC, since the beginning of Israel’s attack on Iran on 13 June, “the Israeli spy network has become highly active inside the country”. Fars reported that over the course of 12 days, Iranian intelligence and security forces arrested “more than 700 individuals linked to this network”.

Iranians have told BBC Persian they received warning text messages from Iran’s intelligence ministry informing them their phone numbers had appeared on social media pages related to Israel. They were instructed to leave these pages or face prosecution.

The Iranian government has also stepped up pressure on journalists working for Persian-language media outlets abroad, including BBC Persian and the London-based Iran International and Manoto TV.

According to Iran International, the IRGC detained the mother, father, and brother of one of its TV presenters in Tehran to pressure her into resigning over the channel’s coverage of the Iran-Israel conflict. The presenter received a phone call from her father – prompted by security agents – urging her to quit and warning of further consequences.

After the conflict began, threats directed at BBC Persian journalists and their families have become increasingly severe. According to the journalists recently affected, Iranian security officials contacting their families have claimed that, in a wartime context, they are justified in targeting family members as hostages. They have also labelled the journalists as “mohareb” — a term meaning ‘one who wages war against God’ — a charge that, under Iranian law, can carry the death penalty.

Manoto TV has reported similar incidents, including threats against employees’ families and demands to cut all ties with the outlet. Some relatives were reportedly threatened with charges such as “enmity against God” and espionage – both capital offences under Iranian law.

Analysts view these tactics as part of a broader strategy to silence dissent and intimidate exiled media workers.

Security forces have also detained dozens of activists, writers and artists, in many cases without formal charges. There are also reports of arrests targeting family members of those killed during the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” anti-government protests.

These actions suggest a broader campaign aimed not only at current activists but also at those connected to previous waves of dissent.

During the war, the Iranian government severely restricted access to the internet, and even after the ceasefire, full access has not yet been restored. Limiting internet access during crises, especially during nationwide protests against the government, has become a common pattern by Iran. Additionally, most of the social networks like Instagram, Telegram, X and YouTube, as well as news websites such as BBC Persian, have long been blocked in Iran and cannot be accessed without using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) proxy service.

Human rights advocates and political observers have drawn parallels to the 1980s, when the Iranian authorities brutally suppressed political opposition during the Iran-Iraq War.

Many fear that, in the wake of Iran’s weakened international standing after the conflict with Israel, the authorities may again turn inward, resorting to mass arrests, executions, and heavy-handed repression.

Critics point to events of 1988, when, according to human rights groups, thousands of political prisoners – many already serving sentences – were executed following brief, secretive trials by so-called “death commissions.” Most victims were buried in unmarked mass graves.

An Egyptian national has pleaded guilty after he kicked a customs dog so hard it became airborne at a Washington, DC area airport, authorities say.

Hamed Ramadan Bayoumy Aly Marie, 70, pleaded guilty to kicking Freddie the Beagle, who was working with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to detect smuggled agricultural products at Washington Dulles International Airport.

Authorities say he kicked the dog after it allegedly detected over 100lb (45kg) of prohibited food products in his luggage.

Marie was ordered to pay for Freddie’s veterinarian bills and was deported back to Egypt.

The incident unfolded early on Tuesday in the baggage claim area of the airport, which is located just outside of Washington in Virginia.

Freddie and his handler were roaming the area around 06:30 local time when the dog alerted to a piece of luggage which had arrived on a flight from Cairo, a federal criminal complaint reads.

Hamed Aly Marie, who owned the bag, briefly spoke with the CBP officer before he kicked Freddie “so hard that he was lifted off of the ground,” the complaint states.

Still images from surveillance footage inside the airport show the dog on his hind legs and another of him in the air with his ears standing up.

Freddie, who weighs 25lb (11kg), was taken to a veterinary emergency room and was found to have contusions to his right rib area, CBP said.

Hamed Aly Marie’s bags were searched and authorities found beef, rice, eggplant, cucumbers, bell peppers, corn seeds, and herbs, according to CBP, which said the items were prohibited from entering the country.

Such products can carry diseases which can hurt native flora and fauna, and prove difficulty to eradicate once inside a country.

At an initial court appearance on Wednesday, Hamed Aly Marie pleaded guilty to one count of harming animals used in law enforcement. He was sentenced to time served and ordered to pay for the animal’s veterinarian bill, which court records show was $840.

Hamed Aly Marie was removed from the US on Thursday afternoon and placed on a flight back to Egypt after the court hearing, according to CBP.

Japan has executed a man who murdered nine people in 2017, the first time since 2022 that the country has enacted capital punishment.

The serial killings by Takahiro Shiraishi, dubbed the “Twitter killer”, had shocked the country and triggered debate over how suicide was discussed online.

Shiraishi, then 30, lured his victims – most of them young women between the ages of 15 and 26 – to his apartment, before strangling and dismembering them.

The killings came to light in October 2017, when police found body parts in the Japanese city of Zama, near Tokyo, when they were searching for one of the victims.

Shiraishi later admitted to murdering nine suicidal victims and revealed that he got acquainted with them on Twitter, the social media platform now known as X.

He then told them he could help them die, and in some cases claimed he would kill himself alongside them.

His Twitter profile contained the words: “I want to help people who are really in pain. Please DM [direct message] me anytime.”

Nine dismembered bodies were found in coolers and tool boxes when officers visited his flat, which was dubbed by media outlets as a “house of horrors”.

While prosecutors sought the death penalty for Shiraishi, his lawyers argued for the lesser charge of “murder with consent”, claiming his victims had given their permission to be killed.

They also called for an assessment of his mental state.

Shiraishi later disputed his own defence team’s version of events and said he killed without the victims’ consent.

Hundreds of people showed up at his verdict hearing in December 2020, when he was sentenced to death.

The murders also prompted a change by Twitter, which amended its rules to state users should not “promote or encourage suicide or self-harm”.

Japan’s justice minister Keisuke Suzuki, who said he ordered Shiraishi’s execution, said the killer acted “for the genuinely selfish reason of satisfying his own sexual and financial desires”, according to an AFP report.

The case “caused great shock and anxiety to society”, Suzuki said.

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough may not be a household name, but the so-called referee of the Senate has found herself at the centre of a firestorm after she objected to several parts of US President Donald Trump’s mega-sized tax bill.

The 1,000-page document, which he’s dubbed the “big beautiful bill”, would slash spending and extend tax cuts.

But Ms MacDonough has said that certain provisions violate Senate rules, throwing billions of dollars of cuts into doubt.

Her findings have also made it difficult for Congress to pass the bill by 4 July – a deadline set by the president himself.

Now, some Republicans are calling for the Senate to ignore her recommendations – going against long-standing tradition – or to fire her.

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a massive spending bill that included cuts to low-income health insurance programme Medicaid, reforms to the food assistance programme SNAP, and a measure to end taxes on tips and overtime pay.

That version then went to the Senate, where both Republicans and Democrats wanted adjustments made.

The US Senate has spent recent weeks debating changes and writing a new version of the bill.

• A look at the key items in Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’
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Legislators are now racing against the clock to deliver the bill to Trump’s desk by 4 July.

Republicans maintain a majority in both the House and the Senate, which should make it easy to pass legislation. But leadership in both chambers has struggled to get consensus on a number of provisions – particularly on social programs like Medicaid – from competing factions within the party.

The Senate parliamentarian’s job is to decide whether a bill complies with budget rules.

Ms MacDonough – the first woman to hold the role – has held the position since 2012. Before that, she spent 25 years as a Senate staffer and worked for the Justice Department.

While she was appointed by former Democratic Senator Harry Reid, she has served Senates controlled by both Republicans and Democrats.

In 2021, multiple Democratic legislators called on the Senate to overrule Ms MacDonough when she said a minimum wage increase could not be included in a policy bill at the time.

People serving as the Senate parliamentarian have been fired before, too.

In 2001, the Senate majority leader at the time fired then Senate parliamentarian, Robert Dove, after one of Dove’s rulings on a bill infuriated Republicans.

Several of the provisions Republican senators have proposed violate the Byrd Rule, she said, which is a 1985 rule the Senate adopted that says “extraneous” provisions cannot be tacked onto “reconciliation” bills.

The budget bill is a reconciliation bill, which means it does not need a 60-vote supermajority to pass the Senate. Reconciliation bills tell the government how to spend money, not how to issue policy, the Byrd rule says.

Because of these rules, Republicans can avoid a Democratic filibuster on the bill and pass it with a simple majority.

But as Ms MacDonough has examined the text she has found a number of places where the reconciliation bill tries to change policy.

Among the provisions Ms MacDonough has ruled against is a plan that would cap states’ ability to collect more federal Medicaid funding through healthcare provider taxes and a measure that would have made it harder to enforce contempt findings against the Trump administration.

And more rulings could come as she continues to examine the large bill.

Some Republicans, like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, are not pleased with her rulings and have gone as far as calling for her to be fired.

“President Trump’s landslide victory was a MANDATE from 77 million Americans,” he wrote on X on Thursday. “The One Big Beautiful Bill delivers on that mandate. The Parliamentarian is trying to UNDERMINE the President’s mandate and should be fired.”

Kansas Senator Roger Marshall urged his party to pass a resolution to term limit the parliamentarian.

He noted in a social media post that the Senate parliamentarian was fired during reconciliation in 2001: “It’s 2025 during reconciliation & we need to again fire the Senate Parliamentarian.”

Texas Senator John Cornyn said Republicans should not let “an unelected Senate staffer” stop the party from passing the bill.

Such a move by Republicans could set a precedent for Democrats, however, whose past legislative priorities also have been thwarted by the parliamentarian’s rulings. When the party held the majority in 2022, they came two votes from scrapping the filibuster rule in order to pass voting rights legislation – and overriding or dismissing the parliamentarian would be a different means to achieve a similar procedural objective.

But Senate Republican Leader John Thune, of South Dakota, does not seem to agree with calls to oust her.

Thune, who is the chief spokesperson for the party in the chamber, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday he would not overrule Ms MacDonough.

Instead, he described the senate referee’s rulings as “speed bumps”, and said his party had other options to reach Republican-promised budget cuts, namely rewriting the bill.

Thune had previously said a vote on the bill was expected on Friday, though it remains unclear if Republicans can agree on a bill to move to the floor for a vote by then.

Once the bill passes the Senate, it goes back to the House for approval. Some Republicans in the House have already indicated their displeasure with the Senate’s edits to the bill.

After the bill passes both houses, then it can go to Trump’s desk.

Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary, said the Trump administration is sticking by the 4 July deadline.

“This is part of the process, this is part of the inner workings of the United States Senate, but the president is adamant about seeing this bill on his desk here at the White House by Independence Day,” she said referring to the parliamentarian’s rulings.

South Africa’s criminal intelligence chief Lt-Gen Dumisani Khumalo has been arrested and has appeared in court on allegations of fraud and corruption.

Gen Khumalo was picked up on Thursday evening after landing at the main international airport in Johannesburg by members of anti-corruption unit, local media reported.

He made his court appearance in the capital, Pretoria, on Friday, alongside six co-accused, all senior police officers.

Their lawyer said they intended to plead not guilty to any charges laid against them.

Details of the charges are not yet clear but local media say Gen Khumalo and the other six had been linked to an ongoing investigation into alleged abuse of intelligence funds and potentially unlawful appointments within the South African Police Service (SAPS).

• Cape Town safety fears force parents to seek former white-only schools

It marks the second wave of arrests within two weeks targeting the SAPS’ Crime Intelligence unit.

Three other top officials are facing corruption and other charges.

The arrests have raised questions about the integrity of the unit, which is meant to be actively preventing crime and cracking down on criminals.

The Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party in the coalition government, welcomed the arrests, saying it was a right “step in rescuing an organisation on the brink of collapse”.

“This points to yet another serious breach of trust within a critical state institution tasked with performing our nation’s policing functions and mandate,” the party said in a statement.

The Economic Freedom Fighters party said the arrest of Gen Khumalo was not an isolated scandal, but the “latest symptom of a sick, and hollowed-out policing system, which urgently requires structural overhaul”.

Gen Khumalo became the head of the Crime Intelligence unit in 2022.

Up until then, he had served in different police units for more than two decades.

Numerous corruption cases against senior police officers over the years have tainted their reputation in the country.

• Mass killer who ‘hunted’ black people says police encouraged him
• Pictures of how Muslim worship helps quell South African ganglands
• ‘We are students thanks to South Africa’s #FeesMustFall protests’
• South Africa’s deadly love affair with guns

The Supreme Court is expected to decide one of the most consequential cases in modern US history on Friday – whether a single federal judge can block an order from the US president from taking effect nationwide.

The case stems from President Donald Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship, which has been frozen by multiple lower courts.

The Supreme Court is not likely to rule on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship itself. It will instead focus on federal judges’ use of nationwide injunctions, which have stunted key aspects of Trump’s agenda.

The Trump administration has argued that the judges have overstepped their power, but others say the injunctions are needed to avoid “chaos”.

LIVE: Follow BBC’s coverage of the Supreme Court decision

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order aimed at ending automatic citizenship rights for nearly anyone born on US territory – commonly known as “birthright citizenship”.

The move was instantly met by a series of lawsuits that ended in judges in district courts in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state issuing nationwide injunctions that blocked the order from taking effect.

In Washington, US District Court Judge John Coughenour called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional”.

Trump’s Department of Justice responded by saying the case did not warrant the “extraordinary measure” of a temporary restraining order and appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

Injunctions have served as a check on Trump during his second term, amid a flurry of executive orders signed by the president.

Roughly 40 different court injunctions have been filed this year. This includes two lower courts that blocked the Trump administration from banning most transgender people from the military, although the Supreme Court eventually intervened and allowed the policy to be enforced.

So the case being heard at the nation’s highest court is not about birthright citizenship directly – but about whether lower courts should have the authority to block nationwide presidential orders with injunctions.

The issue of nationwide injunctions has long troubled Supreme Court justices across the ideological spectrum.

Conservative and liberal justices alike have argued that a judge in one district should not be able to unilaterally decide policy for the entire country.

Liberal Justice Elena Kagan said in remarks in 2022: “It can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.”

Similarly, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas once wrote that “universal injunctions are legally and historically dubious”.

Injunctions are also criticised for enabling what is known as forum shopping – the practice of filing a lawsuit in a jurisdiction where a more favourable ruling is likely.

Another critique of injunctions is the speed at which they are delivered versus their far-reaching impact.

The Trump administration is arguing in the birthright citizenship case that lower judges did not have the right to put time-consuming legal obstacles in front of Trump’s agenda.

Without nationwide injunctions, backers of the measure say the power of the executive branch could go unchecked and leaves the burden of protection from potentially harmful laws on individuals who would need to file separate lawsuits.

Injunctions are often the only legal mechanism to prevent Trump’s executive orders from taking immediate legal effect. Such orders are a marked contrast from laws passing through Congress, which takes longer and subjects them to additional scrutiny.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the Trump administration’s argument advocated for a “catch me if you can” justice system.

“Your argument says ‘we get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, etc,'” Jackson said.

“I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law,” she said.

The other argument for injunctions is that it allows for consistency in the application of federal laws.

Lawyers arguing against the Trump administration have said that in the birthright citizenship case there would be “chaos” in the absence of a nationwide injunction, creating a patchwork system of citizenship.

The first sentence of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution establishes the principle of birthright citizenship.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

However, the Trump administration’s arguments rest on the clause in the 14th Amendment that reads “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. It argues that the language excludes children of non-citizens who are in the US unlawfully.

Most legal scholars say President Trump cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order.

At the 15 May hearing, Justice Kagan noted that the administration had lost on the birthright citizenship issue in every lower court and asked: “Why would you ever take this case to us?”

On nationwide injunctions, the justices could say injunctions can only apply to the people who sued, including class actions, as government lawyers have advocated for.

The justices could also say injunctions can only apply in the states where the cases are brought, or that injunctions can only be issued on constitutional questions (like birthright citizenship).

Constitutional questions, though, concern the bulk of the cases with nationwide injunctions that the Trump administration is appealing.

If the court rules the injunctions should be lifted, then the Trump administration could deny birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants while the court cases proceed.

If the injunctions hold, the individual court cases challenging the birthright citizenship order will likely work their way to the Supreme Court.

The high court could decide on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but justices have indicated they would prefer a separate, full hearing on the question.

They could also give indications or hints in their written opinion on which way they are leaning on the citizenship question, without ruling directly on it.