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Kyiv no longer looks like a city at war in the way that it was three years ago. The shops are open and commuters get delayed in traffic jams on their way to work. But in the days since 12 February this year when US President Donald Trump rang Russia’s Vladimir Putin to send a 90-minute political embrace from the White House to the Kremlin, 2022’s old nightmares of national extinction have returned. Ukrainians used to get angry about the way that President Joe Biden held back weapons systems and restricted the way Ukraine used the ones that arrived here. Even so, they knew whose side he was on.

Instead, Donald Trump has delivered a stream of exaggeration, half-truths and outright lies about the war that echo the views of President Putin. They include his dismissal of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky as a dictator who does not deserve a seat at the table when America and Russia decide the future of his country. The biggest lie Trump has told is that Ukraine started the war.

Trump’s negotiating strategy is to offer concessions even before serious talks have started. Instead of putting pressure on the country that broke international law by invading its neighbour, leading to huge destruction and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, he has turned on Ukraine.

His public statements have offered Russia important concessions, declaring that Ukraine will not join Nato and accepting that it will keep at least some of the land it seized by force. Vladimir Putin’s record shows he respects strength. He regards concessions as a sign of weakness.

He has not budged from a demand for even more Ukrainian land than his men now occupy. Immediately after the first talks, held in Saudi Arabia, between Russia and the US since the 2022 invasion, Putin’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov repeated his demand that no Nato troops would be allowed into Ukraine to provide security guarantees.

A veteran European diplomat who has dealt with the Russians and the Americans told me that when the grizzled, highly experienced Lavrov met Trump’s novice Secretary of State Marco Rubio “he would have eaten him like a soft-boiled egg.”

A few days ago, as Trump threw more insults at Ukraine’s president, I went to the heavily guarded government quarter in Kyiv to meet Ihor Brusylo, who is a senior adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky and deputy head of his office. Brusylo acknowledged how much pressure Trump is putting on them.

“It’s very, very tough. These are very hard, challenging times,” Brusylo said. “I wouldn’t say that now it’s easier than it was in 2022. It’s like you live it all over again.”

Brusylo said Ukrainians, and their president, were as determined to fight to stay independent as they had been in 2022.

“We’re a sovereign country. We are part of Europe, and we will remain so.”

In the weeks after Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the sound of battle on the edge of Kyiv echoed around streets that were almost empty. Checkpoints and barricades, walls of sandbags and tank traps welded from steel girders were rushed out onto Kyiv’s broad boulevards. At the railway station, fifty thousand civilians a day, mostly women and children, were boarding trains going west, away from the Russians.

The platforms were packed and every time a train pulled in, came another surge of panic as people pushed and shoved to get on. In those freezing days, in bitter wind and flurries of snow, it felt as if the colours of the 21st century were fading into an old monochrome newsreel that Europeans had believed until then was safely consigned to the vaults of history.

President Zelensky, in Joe Biden’s words, “didn’t want to hear” American warnings that an invasion was imminent. Putin rattling a Russian sabre was one thing. A full-scale invasion, with tens of thousands of troops and columns of armour, surely belonged in the past.

Putin believed Russia’s mighty and modernised army would make quick work of its obstinate, independent neighbour and its recalcitrant president. Ukraine’s western allies also thought Russia would win quickly. On television news channels, retired generals talked about smuggling in light weapons to arm an insurgency while the west imposed sanctions and hoped for the best.

As Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, Germany delivered 5,000 ballistic combat helmets instead of offensive weapons. Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv and once heavyweight boxing champion of the world, complained to a German newspaper that it was “a joke… What kind of support will Germany send next, pillows?”

Zelensky turned down any idea of leaving his capital to form a government in exile. He abandoned his presidential dark suit for military attire, and in videos and on social media told Ukrainians he would fight alongside them.

Ukraine defeated the Russian thrust towards the capital. Once the Ukrainians had demonstrated that they could fight well, the attitude of the Americans and Europeans changed. Arms supplies increased.

“Putin’s mistake was that he prepared for a parade not a war” a senior Ukrainian official recalled, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He didn’t think Ukraine would fight. He thought they would be welcomed with speeches and flowers.”

On 29 March 2022, the Russians retreated from Kyiv. Hours after they left, we drove, nervously, into the chaotic, damaged landscape of Kyiv’s satellite towns, Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel. On the roads the Russians had hoped to use for a triumphant entry into Kyiv, I saw bodies of civilians left where they were killed. Charred tyres were stacked around some of them, failed attempts to burn the evidence of war crimes.

Survivors spoke of the brutality of the Russian occupiers. A woman showed me the grave where she had buried her son single-handed after he was casually shot dead as he crossed a road. Russian soldiers threw her out of her house. In the garden, they left piles of empty bottles of vodka, whisky and gin that they had looted and drunk. Hastily abandoned Russian encampments in the forests near the roads were choked with rubbish their soldiers had discarded over the weeks of occupation.

Professional, disciplined armies do not eat and sleep next to rotting piles of their own refuse.

Three years on, the war has changed. Although Kyiv has revived, it still has nightly alerts as its air defences detect incoming Russian missiles and drones. The war is closer, and more deadly, along the front line, more than 1,000 kilometres long, that runs from the northern border with Russia and then east and south down to the Black Sea. It is lined with destroyed, almost deserted villages and towns. To the east, in what was Kyiv’s industrial heartland of Donetsk and Luhansk, Russian forces grind forward slowly, at a huge cost in men and machines.

Last August, Ukraine sent troops into Russia, capturing a pocket of land across the border in Kursk. They are still there, fighting for land that Zelensky hopes to use as a bargaining chip.

Along the border with Kursk, in the snow-covered forests of north-eastern Ukraine, the geopolitical storm set off by Donald Trump is still not much more than a menacing, distant rumble. It will get here, especially if the US president follows up his harsh and mocking verbal attacks on president Zelensky with a final end to military aid and intelligence-sharing, and even worse from Ukraine’s perspective, an attempt to impose a peace deal that favours Russia.

For now, the rhythm built up in three years of war goes on, and the forest could be a throwback to the blood-soaked twentieth century. Fighting men move silently through the trees, along trenches and into bunkers dug deep into the frozen earth. In stretches of open ground, anti-tank defences made of concrete and steel stud the fields.

The 21st century is more present in the dry and warm underground bunkers. Generators and solar panels power laptops and screens linked to the outside world, and bring in the news feeds.

Just because bad news arrives doesn’t mean that the soldiers look at it. In a deep dug-out lined with bunks made of rough planks from the local sawmill, with nails hammered into the timber to hang weapons and winter uniforms, Evhen, a 30-year-old corporal said he had more urgent matters to think about – his men and the wife and two small children he left at home when he joined up, ten months ago.

That’s a long time on the front line in Kursk. He looks and sounds like a combat veteran. He has faced the North Koreans who have been sent to join the battle there by their leader, Putin’s ally, Kim Jong Un.

“Koreans fight till the end. Even if he is injured and you come to him, he might just blow himself up to take more of us with him.”

All the soldiers we interviewed asked to be referred to by first names for their own security. Evhen seemed relaxed about fighting on without the Americans.

“Help is not something that can last forever. We have it today, we don’t have it tomorrow.”

Ukraine, he said, was making many more of its own weapons. That’s true, especially when it comes to attack drones, but the US still supplies sophisticated systems that have damaged the Russians badly.

Many of the volunteers who took up arms three years ago have either been killed, maimed, or are too exhausted to fight any more. One of Ukraine’s most bitter fault lines runs between those who fight and those who bribe their way out of military service. Evhen said they were better off without them.

“It is better for them to pay not to fight than to come here and run away, tripping us up. It doesn’t bother me much. If they came here, they’d just scarper… they’re deserters.”

War strips away surplus thought. The stakes are straightforward for soldiers preparing to return to the battle in Kursk. Mykola, who commands a company of airborne assault troops, spoke affectionately about the capabilities of their Stryker armoured vehicles, supplied by the Americans.

“Kursk” he says, “shows the enemy, a nuclear weapons state, that a non-nuclear power with a smaller population and a smaller army can come in, capture land and the Russians have been able to do very little about it.”

Putin’s objectives, he said, were clear.

“His task is to seize all of Ukraine, change its legal status, and change the president and government. He wants to destroy our political system and to make Ukraine his vassal state.”

He laughed when I asked whether the Americans and others should trust Vladimir Putin.

“No! I don’t have enough fingers to count how many times Putin lied. To everyone! To the Russians, and to us, and to Western partners. He lied to everyone.”

At a volunteer centre in Kyiv in the first days after the invasion, I met two young students, Maxsym Lutsyk, 19, and Dmytro Kisilenko, 18, who were signing up to fight.

When they lined up alongside men old enough to be their fathers as well as other teenage recruits, they carried camping gear and could have been friends off to a festival, except for their assault rifles. At the time, I wrote “18 and 19-year-old lads have always gone off to war. I thought in Europe we’d got past that.” A few weeks later, Maxsym and Dmytro were in uniform and manning a checkpoint just behind the Kyiv front line, still students joking about their parents.

Both fought in the battle of Kyiv. Dmytro chose to leave the army, his right as a student volunteer, when the fight switched to the east. He is preparing to fight again if necessary, training to be an officer at the National Military University. Maxsym stayed in uniform, serving in the front line in the east for more than two years. Now he is an officer working in military intelligence.

I have stayed in touch with them as, like millions of other young people here, war shapes their adult lives in ways they never expected. Trump’s move towards Moscow makes them feel almost as if they have to start again.

“We mobilised,” Dmytro says. “We mobilised our resources, our people, and I think it’s time that we repeat it once again.”

Unlike the men in the forest on the Kursk border, they follow the news. Donald Trump’s diplomatic and strategic bombshells, starting at the Munich security conference only 10 days ago, reminds them of the infamous deal Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain made at Munich in 1938, forcing Czechoslovakia to capitulate to the demands made by Adolf Hitler.

“It’s similar,” Maxsym said. “The West gives an aggressor an opportunity to occupy some territories. The West is making a deal with the aggressor, with the United States in the role of Great Britain.”

“It’s a very dangerous moment for the entire world, not only for Ukraine,” Maxsym went on. “We can see that Europe is starting to wake up… but if they wanted to be ready for the war, they should [have] begun a few years ago.”

Dmytro agreed about the dangers ahead.

“I think that Donald Trump wants to become like a new Neville Chamberlain… Mr. Trump should be more focused on becoming more like Winston Churchill.”

If you’re a real estate developer, as Donald Trump was before he went into reality TV and then presidential politics, demolition makes money. Acquire a property, tear it down, rebuild and win. The trouble with that strategy in foreign policy is that sovereignty and independence don’t have a price tag. Trump boasts he puts America first, but he is not prepared to accept that non-Americans can feel the same about their own countries.

Since Trump was sworn in for the second time as president of the United States, he has been swinging the wrecking ball. He sent Elon Musk into the federal government to recoup billions of dollars he claims are being stolen or wasted. Abroad, Trump the demolition man has set about the assumptions that underpin the eighty year alliance between the US and European democracies.

Donald Trump is unpredictable, but much of what he is doing he has talked about for years. He is not the first American president to resent the way its European allies have saved money by sheltering behind the US defence budget. The phrase used by his defence secretary Pete Hegseth to his Nato partners, that “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker” was a conscious reference back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

A US government document from 4 November 1959 records his frustration. It says: “The President said that for five years he has been urging the State Department to put the facts of life before the Europeans He thinks the Europeans are close to ‘making a sucker out of Uncle Sam.’”

Trump wants payback. He demanded half a trillion dollars of mineral rights from Ukraine. Zelensky turned that deal down, saying he couldn’t sell his country. He wants security guarantees in exchange for any concessions.

In private, European politicians and diplomats recognise that, with Joe Biden, they gave Ukraine enough military and financial support not to lose to Russia, but never enough to win. The argument for more of the same is that Russia, weakened by sanctions and drained of manpower as its generals squander their men’s lives, will eventually lose a war of attrition. That is far from certain.

Wars usually end with agreements. Germany’s unconditional surrender in 1945 was a rarity. The complaint against Trump is that he has no real plan, so he has followed a gut instinct to get closer to Vladimir Putin, a man he admires. Trump seems to believe that strong leaders from the most powerful states can bend the world into the shape they want. The concessions Trump has already offered to Putin reinforce the idea that his top priority is normalising relations with Russia.

A more credible plan would have to include a way to make Putin drop ideas that are lodged deep in his geostrategic DNA. One of the strongest is that Ukraine’s sovereignty must be broken and control of the country returned to the Kremlin, as it was in Soviet times and before that in the empire of Russia’s Czars.

It is hard to see how that happens. The idea is as unlikely as Ukraine surrendering its independence to Moscow. Europe’s security is being turned upside down by the war in Ukraine. No wonder its leaders are so badly rattled by all they have heard and seen this month.

Their challenge is to find ways to avoid their young people being forced into the unexpected world of war that has enveloped Maxsym Lutsyk, the 22-year-old Ukrainian combat veteran.

“Everyone changed, and I have changed. I think that every Ukrainian matured during these three years. Everyone who entered the military and everyone who was fighting for such a long time drastically changed.”

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Donald Trump made a lot of promises while running for president. He pledged to cut taxes, reduce prices, stem undocumented migration, end wars and strengthen American industry.

Some of his proposals were detailed by his policy team or presented by Trump himself, in “Agenda 47” videos on his campaign website. Others were offered seemingly off-the-cuff – a product of Trump’s “think out loud” style and openness to adopting ideas others had suggested to him.

In his victory speech on 6 November, he made it clear he intended to keep the promises that sent him back to the White House: “I will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept.”

It’s become a slogan of sorts in his first month in office, which has been marked by a blizzard of activity and notable progress in achieving some of his goals.

In areas such as immigration and foreign policy, Trump has broad power to act unilaterally – and has done so. In other areas, he has run up against legal challenges and political obstacles. Many of the other promises he’s made will ultimately require action from Congress, under narrow Republican control, to become permanent.

Here’s a look at some of Trump’s biggest “day one” promises and his efforts to turn them into reality.

What he’s said:

“When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.” Aug 2024

What he’s done:

This is perhaps his biggest challenge and a major campaign promise that remains undelivered. In his inaugural address, Trump promised to “marshal the vast powers” of his Cabinet to rapidly bring down costs and prices, but it’s unclear how. One way, he says, is by increasing drilling to reduce energy costs.

A steep price rise in January, the biggest monthly increase for 16 months, has complicated Trump’s task. He blamed Joe Biden, who left office on 20 January, and Democratic spending. “I had nothing to do with it,” said Trump.

At other times, however, he has admitted it’s hard for US presidents to control prices. But economists warn some of his policies could fuel inflation and polling suggests voters would like to see him doing more about an issue that often tops their priorities.

What he’s said:

“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.” Nov 2024

What he’s done:

Immigration has perhaps been Trump’s main focus since taking power, with more than a dozen executive orders aimed at overhauling the system. His plan to deport foreign nationals in the country illegally, starting with those convicted of crimes, seems to have widespread public support.

But it is uncertain whether he will meet his promise to deport so many. A few raids have made headlines but the number of people being removed does not seem to be record-breaking, according to the daily figures.

In his first month in office, the US deported 37,660 people – less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration, data obtained by Reuters shows.

A DHS spokesperson told the agency that Biden-era deportation numbers were higher because illegal immigration was higher. Nationwide border encounters decreased 66% in January compared to 2024, according to the White House.

What he’s said:

“I’ll be looking at J6 early on, maybe the first nine minutes.” Dec 2024

What he’s done:

True to his word, hours after taking the presidential oath, Trump issued pardons and commutations that paved the way for the release of more than 1,500 people convicted or charged in connection with the US Capitol riot. A police officer who was punched that day told the BBC the pardons were a “slap in the face”.

What he’s said:

“They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done – I’ll have that done in 24 hours.” May 2023

What he’s done:

Trump has initiated the first talks between the US and Russia since the start of the war, but Ukraine has vowed to reject any deal hatched without it, and there’s been an angry exchange between leaders. President Volodymyr Zelensky fears the US president delivering on his campaign promise to end the war but on Moscow’s terms and with no security guarantees. There is also anxiety in European capitals that they are being sidelined, and that Trump may dismantle some of the sanctions imposed on Russia as punishment for the invasion.

What he’s said:

Trump told NBC in December he “absolutely” planned to end birthright citizenship on day one: “If somebody sets a foot of just a foot… on our land, congratulations. You are now a citizen of the United States of America. Yes, we’re going to end that.”

What he’s done:

In one of the first acts of his second presidency, Trump ordered an end to an automatic right to American citizenship currently received by nearly anybody born on US soil. Birthright citizenship is not the norm around the world, although it is in Mexico and Canada, and Trump’s move targets those who are in the US illegally or on temporary visas.

The right was established by an amendment to the US Constitution nearly 160 years ago, and most legal scholars say the president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally change it. The issue could be heading for the US Supreme Court after an appeals court ruled against Trump, upholding a legal block on his plan.

What he’s said:

“On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders.” Nov 2024

What he’s done:

Trump announced on 21 January that he would levy blanket tariffs on his neighbours on 1 February, linking them to the flow of drugs and migrants into the US. The president has long seen tariffs, which are a tax on imports, as a way to protect domestic industry and increase revenue. Canada and Mexico said they would enact retaliatory taxes on US imports. But Trump delayed starting the tariffs for one month, after promises by both countries to increase border enforcement. There had also been volatility in the markets and warnings from economic experts that these actions could cause prices to rise.

A large asteroid known as 2024 YR4 has grabbed headlines this week as scientists first raised its chances of hitting earth, then lowered them.

The latest estimate says the object has a 0.28% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, significantly lower than the 3.1% chance earlier in the week.

Scientists say it is now more likely to smash into the Moon, with Nasa estimating the probability of that happening at 1%.

But in the time since 2024 YR4 was first spotted through a telescope in the desert in Chile two months ago, tens of other objects have passed closer to Earth than the Moon, which in astronomical terms sounds like a near miss.

It is likely that others, albeit much smaller, have hit us or burned up in the atmosphere but gone unnoticed.

This is the story of the asteroids that you never hear about – the fly-bys, the near-misses and the direct hits.

The vast majority are harmless. But some carry the most valuable clues for unlocking mysteries in our universe, information we are desperate to get our hands on.

Asteroids, also sometimes called minor planets, are rocky pieces left over from the formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.

Rocks routinely orbit close to Earth, pushed by the gravity of other planets.

For most of human history, it has been impossible to know how close we have come to being struck by a large asteroid.

Serious monitoring of objects near Earth only started in the late 20th century, explains Professor Mark Boslough from the University of New Mexico. “Before that we were blissfully oblivious to them,” he says.

We now know that quite large objects – 40m across or more – pass between Earth and the Moon several times a year. That’s the same size of asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 injuring people and damaging buildings over 200 square miles.

The most serious near-miss, and the closest comparison with YR4, was an asteroid called Apophis which was first spotted in 2004 and measured 375 meters across, or around the size of a cruise ship.

Professor Patrick Michel from French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) tracked Apophis and recalls it was considered the most hazardous asteroid ever detected.

It took until 2013 to get enough observations to understand that it was not going to hit Earth.

But he says there was one big difference with YR4. “We didn’t know what to do. We discovered something, we determined an impact probability, and then thought, who do we call?” he says. Scientists and governments had no idea how to respond, he says.

A large asteroid strike could be catastrophic if it hits an area where humans live.

We don’t know exactly how big YR4 is yet, but if it is at the top end of estimates, about 90m across, it would likely remain substantially intact rather than break up as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The surviving asteroid mass could create a crater. Structures in the immediate vicinity would likely be destroyed and people within the local region (dozens of kilometers) would be at risk of serious injury,” explains Professor Kathryn Kunamoto from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Some people could die.

But since Apophis, there have been huge advances in what is called planetary defence.

Prof Michel is part of the international Space Mission Planning Advisory Group.

Its delegates advise governments on how to respond to an asteroid threat and run rehearsal exercise for direct hits. There is one going on right now.

If the asteroid was on course for a town or city, Dr Boslough compares the response to preparations made for a major hurricane, including evacuations and measures to protect infrastructure.

The Space Mission Planning Advisory Group will meet again in April to decide what to do about YR4.

By then most scientists expect the risk to have almost entirely gone, as their calculations of its trajectory become more precise.

We do have options beyond “taking a hit”, as Dr Kumamoto puts it.

Nasa and the European Space Agency have developed technologies to nudge dangerous asteroids off course.

Nasa’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos to change its path.

However scientists are sceptical if that would work in the case of YR4 due to uncertainty about what it is made of and the short window of time to successfully deflect it.

And what about the asteroids that do hit Earth? An awkward truth for scientists is that a direct strike on land far from humans is the ideal scenario for asteroids.

That gives them actual pieces from distant objects within of our solar system, as well as insights into Earth’s impact history.

Nearly 50,000 asteroids have been found in Antarctica. The most famous, called ALH 84001, is believed to have originated on Mars and contains minerals with vital evidence about the planet’s history, suggesting it was warm and had water on its surface billions of years ago.

In 2023 scientists detected an asteroid called 33 Polyhymnia which could have an element denser than anything found on Earth.

This superheavy element would be something entirely new to our planet. 33 Polyhymnia is at least 170 million kilometers away, but it’s an indication of the incredible potential of asteroids for our understanding of science.

Now that the chances are higher that YR4 will hit the Moon, some scientists are getting excited about that.

An impact could give real-world answers to questions they have only been able to simulate using computers.

“To have even one data point of a real example would be incredibly powerful,” says Prof Gareth Collins from Imperial College London.

“How much material comes out when the asteroid hits? How fast does it go? How far does that travel?” he asks.

It would help them test the scenarios they have modelled about asteroid impacts on Earth, helping create better predictions.

YR4 has reminded us that we live on a planet vulnerable to collisions with something the solar system is full of – rocks.

Scientists warn against complacency, saying it is a matter of when, not if, a large asteroid will threaten human life on Earth, although most expect that to be in the coming centuries rather than decades.

In the meantime, our ability to monitor space keeps improving. Later this year the largest digital camera ever built will begin working at the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, able to capture the night sky in incredible detail.

And the closer and longer we look, the more asteroids spinning close to Earth we are likely to spot.

Cycling rates in Paris have soared in recent years. But the death of 27-year-old Paul Varry – who was allegedly run over by a driver – has exposed a darker side to Paris’s cycling revolution.

“This was not an accident,” Paul’s colleague Corentin believes.

We’re standing on the edge of a bike lane on Boulevard Malesherbes, steps away from the place where Paul was crushed by an SUV on 15 October 2024.

The moments preceding his death are subject to a criminal investigation.

Paul was cycling home from work. The cycle path is separated from the road by a slightly raised kerb.

According to witnesses and CCTV, the driver of the SUV began driving in the bike lane. Prosecutors say the driver ran over Paul’s foot. Paul banged his fist on the bonnet.

The motorist reversed at first, but then allegedly drove towards the 27-year-old. An autopsy confirmed “the marks of the vehicle crossing his body”.

The 52-year-old driver has been charged with murder. His lawyer says he may have lost control of the vehicle in a stressful situation that he was trying to get out of.

At a hearing attended by news agency AFP, he broke into tears and said “I’m sorry for what happened. I never meant to run him over.”

Paris has seen a surge in cycling as part of a broader transformation spearheaded by Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Over the last decade, the city has invested €400m (£331m) in cycling infrastructure, creating more than 1,000 kilometres of bike lanes.

According to a recent study, cycling now makes up more than 11% of trips within Paris, compared to just 4% by car. Walking is still the most popular way of getting around – accounting for 53% of journeys, followed by public transport (30%).

But despite the investment, cycling in Paris still feels precarious.

Bike lanes are patchy, lack uniformity and often don’t have designated traffic lights. The rules surrounding right of way aren’t always clear and are often flouted, making it difficult for cyclists to safely navigate.

Paul Varry’s death was extreme, but it resonated and has become a symbol of the daily struggle for space on the streets of Paris.

His mother, Nathalie Tison, remembers her son as a carefree spirit who embraced the freedom of cycling. “He was a very happy and very bubbly person, he had a lovely sense of humour and was always very gentle with the people around him. It’s such an injustice because he didn’t deserve at all what happened.”

She told me she had always been concerned about the dangers of her son riding in Paris, where she detected a sense of entitlement among some drivers.

“Drivers can be super aggressive – nothing can get in their way,” she said. “For some, the car is an extension of their virility and if anyone touches their car… it’s taken as a personal attack.

“I was afraid for him.”

Paul understood these risks, and was an active member of the cycling group Paris en Selle – Paris in the Saddle. He campaigned for more segregated space for bicycles and safer junctions.

Advocates hope the progress made in Paris will continue.

Rémi Féraud, a socialist senator and Anne Hidalgo’s top choice for future mayor, doesn’t dream of a car-free future, “because there are Parisians who have cars”.

“But by reducing space for the car, we reserve it for those who really need to come by car,” he says. “We want a city that is 100% cyclable… It is an offer of freedom.”

Carving out more street space for cyclists has involved restricting space for cars. The number of parking spaces in Paris have been slashed by a half and certain vehicles have been banned from driving through the city.

Some drivers, particularly those from the suburbs, feel that the city’s car reduction policies have made their lives more difficult.

“Driving in Paris is like going to war,” says Shamy, a reserved 24-year-old midwife. “There are no rules.” I’m sitting in his car as he straddles a cycle path – he can’t reverse because people are walking there and in front of us cars are bumper to bumper.

What does he do if there’s a confrontation with a cyclist? “I just say sorry.”

Shamy lets me out as we approach a zone in the city centre where through-traffic has been outlawed – one of several measures that has drawn anger from business owners.

Patrick Aboukrat, who owns a fashion boutique in the Marais shopping district, has launched a lawsuit with other members of Comité Marais Paris, the business association he leads, to try to roll back some of the new rules.

He says they’re losing customers and that some were planning on selling up. “When young people say they want to open a shop, I say ‘open a shop in the suburbs, go outside of Paris.’

“We do understand the need to have fewer cars in the centre. I say to the Mayor we want to work together, to change the plan. But they don’t listen. It’s ideological. “

But Féraud, the senator, instead suggests the rise in online shopping is to blame.

According to polls, most of those who live within the main Paris ring road – of whom only 30% own a car – don’t mind the traffic-limiting measures.

Those on the outskirts tend to drive more, but they are not eligible to vote for the Paris mayor or influence its traffic polices.

Alexandra Legendre, who represents a motorists lobby group – the Drivers’ Defence League – says “no one [drives] for pleasure in Paris, it’s hell.” She feels authorities have prioritised cyclists at the expense of everyone else.

She accuses politicians of being blinkered by a desire to transform Paris into a cyclists’ paradise – ignoring road safety. She insists car drivers can’t be treated as “the only bad guys”.

There’s a consensus that Paul Varry’s death was a tragedy, but Ms Legendre doesn’t think it had anything to do with him being a cyclist.

Paris is navigating the challenges of its cycling revolution as European capitals are under pressure to curb transport-related carbon emissions. The EU’s green deal aims to achieve a 90% reduction in transport-related greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Corentin, Paul’s colleague, points out that while Paris is still far from perfect, the infrastructure has improved significantly, making it easier and safer than ever to enjoy the view.

“We are in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and there is no better way to see it than by bike.”

The constant stream of cyclists buzzing down Rue de Rivoli – which was a major highway until 2020 – suggests that the shift towards bike-friendly urban spaces is irreversible.

Paul’s mother hopes the safe transformation of Paris streets will be part of her son’s legacy.

No date has yet been set for the trial.

When it finally comes around, she will come face to face with the man who is accused of causing her son’s death for the first time.

He is a father of four, the authorities told her. Two families, she points out, have been “broken”.

She believes the way Paul lived and died must be a catalyst for change.

“He was so bright, intelligent, sensitive – it’s such a waste. And we’ve been reduced to a thousand pieces. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of society do we want to live in?”

Legend has it Bernard Shabangu’s grandfather, Bhobho, once speared down a lion that was terrorising his community in Mpumalanga, a province in eastern South Africa. The story goes that the lion was so fearsome that even the white people who had guns would run away when it roared.

“One day, my grandfather is said to have walked up the hill where the lion was roaring with his spear and shield,” says Bernard. “The lion charged at him, but my grandfather speared him to death and was made Headman for his bravery.”

As a Headman, or traditional leader, Bhobho owned cattle and land. Then one day in the mid-1950s, it was all taken away from him with no compensation under a law introduced in 1950 called the Group Areas Act. This stated that South Africa’s apartheid government could choose certain areas to be used by a single race.

In the early 1990s, democratic South Africa’s new constitution allowed for land taken from black farmers to be returned to them. But it did so with great care and the setting-up of new cross-community partnerships were encouraged.

In this spirit, when Bernard, now 48, and his community decided to reclaim their land, they agreed to work in partnership with the white farmers who had been working on it.

“We did not say we want the white folks to leave,” says Bernard. “They are here, they are working with us, they are supporting us… we are saying that partnership is what’s going to take this country forward.”

Today, the Matsamo Communal Property Association and its partners employ over 2,000 people from the local community and is the country’s biggest exporter of lychee to the US. It also grows papayas, sugar cane and bananas for local supermarkets. Matsamo has been hailed as an example of what successful land reform can look like in South Africa.

But for some in the country, progress on land reform has been too slow. In January, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a bill that allows, in some circumstances, land to be seized by the state without compensation.

Opponents argue it is a threat to the principle of private ownership. And among those opponents is Donald Trump. He has said the new bill was “hateful rhetoric” towards “racially disfavored landowners.”

Mr Trump said he would pause all aid to South Africa, which could be worth around $320m (£253m) according to the US Agency for International Development. Some worry he might eventually exclude South Africa from a trade agreement, estimated by the office of the US trade representative to be worth $14.7bn (£11.6bn) a year.

The challenge facing Rampahosa is a knotty one: can he find a way to speed up land reform to appease his political friends and foes, without losing one of the country’s biggest trading partners?

Three and a half hours’ drive west of the Matsamo CPA, near the town of Ermelo, is the farm of Lion du Plessis. He is an Afrikaner farmer, a descendant of Huguenots who once fled France. He works and lives on the farm his grandfather acquired in the 1970s. He grows maize and soybeans, as well as rearing sheep and cattle. His farm is spread across a thousand lush and green hectares with a serene lake in the middle of it.

“I was born on this farm, I grew up here and I’ve been farming since 2012,” he tells me in the middle of one of his fields.

For Lion, the new expropriation act threatens property rights and is a risk for farmers.

“Expropriation is not a problem if there’s compensation, but the compensation must be just and fair and equitable.”

He argues that without private property rights, farms such as his won’t be able to borrow money.

“If you put a tool like this in the government’s hands, where they can just take land, or take any property for that matter, it is not economically viable to invest in South Africa.

“In agriculture we need private property in order to access capital, we need to borrow money from the banks or from agricultural corporations to cover our costs. And if we don’t have private property rights, we won’t be able to get money and to get capital.”

The impact the bill could have on foreign investment is also of concern to AfriForum, a group that seeks to protect the rights of Afrikaners.

“We know that international investors, if they hear the term “no compensation”, and you give that power to many state organisations, what they call an expropriation authority, then it will deter investment,” its CEO Kallie Kriel tells me.

But for Bernard these laws are a careful attempt to address long-standing unfairness. He insists: “Land reform in South Africa is not going to be a vulgar land grab. What the president is proposing is a constitutionally-managed process of land reform for the public good, to say black and white people in South Africa must share in the land that is there.”

Professor Ruth Hall from the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies of the University of the Western Cape argues the issue of access to land in South Africa dates back to before the start of formal apartheid in 1948.

“If we think about the history of South Africa, this is what we can call a settler colony. It was a colony in which large numbers of European settlers, over many centuries, came and settled, displacing indigenous people,” she says.

By the end of the 19th Century, most of the land that is currently South Africa had been taken over by white people.

The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 defined less than one-tenth of South Africa as Black “reserves” and prohibited any purchase or lease of land by Blacks outside the reserves.

She says the subsequent Group Areas Act only reinforced the division and further reduced economic opportunities for black people.

Prof Hall calls it “structural apartheid geography” and explains that this is “very much intact,” today. She describes how even though there is a growing black middle class in South Africa, there are still fundamental problems for the majority of black South Africans “who either do not have access to well located land in the cities or who live in rural areas without secure rights.”

Agriculture remains one of the main sources of economic revenue for the country, but the majority of commercial agricultural land is still in the hands of the white minority which makes up around 7% of the population.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether the no-compensation clause breaches section 25 of the constitution, which establishes property rights for all South Africans.

Kallie Kriel thinks the bill is rife for abuse. He says: “Actually, any reason can be used by the expropriating authority, which can be a corrupt or radical municipality.”

But land lawyer Bulelwa Mabasa, who was on a panel that advised President Cyril Ramaphosa on land reform, thinks that there are “sufficient safeguards” and says it’s clear when expropriation can take place: “There is a very heavy burden that is placed on the expropriation authority to have reports from different departments, justifying the need for the expropriation in the first place, and justifying the need for expropriation without compensation.”

In 1996, the South African government launched its land reform programme, promising to settle all claims for redistribution by 2005 and to redistribute 30% of white-owned commercial agricultural land to black South Africans by 2014.

The fact neither target has been met helps explain the pressure for last month’s toughened-up legislation.

Prof Hall explains: “There’s a mandate on the state that it must actually redistribute land. It must deal with historical claims to land.”

AfriForum has conceded that no large-scale land seizures have taken place and that the majority of land still remains in the hands of the white minority.

But balancing the obligation to redistribute with property rights was never going to be straightforward.

And now the debate around land ownership has gone beyond the borders of South Africa due to the recent intervention of US president Donald Trump, who issued an executive order on 7 February, just two and a half weeks after being sworn into office. The order claimed the expropriation act would “enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.

The executive order claimed the act was part of a number of discriminatory policies and “hateful rhetoric” towards “racially disfavored landowners”.

The American President also accused Pretoria of taking aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and strengthening its ties with Iran.

As a result of these actions, Trump said he would pause all aid to South Africa and offered to resettle all “Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination”.

South Africa’s case against Israel is seen by some as evidence it supports Hamas, in addition to the close ties it maintains with Iran.

“South Africa is trying to maintain its alliance with North America and Europe, while at the same time building its relationship with its partners in the global South,” says Prof Hall. “In my view, South Africa’s attempt to play both sides in an increasingly polarised world is what is really at play here.”

Trump is not the only figure in his administration to have taken an interest in South Africa’s internal affairs. So too has Elon Musk, who’s been tasked with managing government efficiency in the US. Musk, who was born in Pretoria, has been trying to license his Starlink telecommunications business in South Africa.

But under the country’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy telecom firms are required to have 30% ownership by black people. Musk called BEE “racist”. Currently, only 3% of the country’s top companies are controlled by black South Africans.

Every year, the US president reviews which African countries should continue to be part of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). It allows some African countries to export goods to the US duty free and is credited with creating thousands of jobs across the continent, including in South Africa.

But now there are fears Donald Trump’s promise to cut all “future funding to South Africa” may see South Africa excluded.

Doing so may, however, be a bit of a blunt tool – Prof Hall points out that coming out of AGOA would ironically disproportionately affect the white farmers Donald Trump says he wants to protect.

“I can assure you that most white farmers are far more worried about this punitive act on our trade deal with the US than they are about land expropriation,” she said.

So can the South African government, and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC specifically, satisfy those who believe further land reform is a must without being frozen out economically by the US and losing foreign investors?

One job is to work out what is really driving Donald Trump. Nomvula Mokonyane, Deputy Secretary General of the ANC, does not believe this is solely about the issue of land and thinks South Africa’s position over Israel may well be the driver.

She says: “Our view is that we need to let our government engage the American administration, so that then we understand whether are we dealing with the issue of the expropriation of land, or are we dealing with many other issues… related to Palestine and so on and so forth.”

The signing of the expropriation bill comes in the context of the ANC finding itself in a coalition with other parties for the first time, and it may be trying to signal to black voters that it’s still willing to fight for their rights.

After Mr Trump’s funding freeze, Mr Ramaphosa said South Africa will not be bullied in his state of the nation address earlier this month. It’s one of the few positions that all his coalition partners appear to agree with.

Prof Hall does not detect much possibility of any kind of u-turn on the new law. She says: “We have said very clearly the Expropriation Act is a law that was passed by a democratic parliament. He has signed it into law, which is his obligation as state president.”

South Africa is already feeling the effects of US’ diplomatic pressure: both the US secretary of state and the treasury secretary have refused to join their counterparts at this month’s G20 meetings hosted by South Africa. And there are concerns Donald Trump could also be absent from the leaders’ summit later this year.

President Ramaphosa has promised to send envoys to the US and other countries to explain his country’s positions on the expropriation act, the war in the Middle East, as well as some of its other foreign policy decisions.

Whether South Africa can soften the current hostility coming from Washington, without compromising on its national priorities is a huge test for this fledgling democracy.

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Israel says it is indefinitely delaying the release of more than 600 Palestinian prisoners, in another potentially major setback in the ceasefire process.

Benjamin Netanyahu said the release was now going to be delayed until the next handover of hostages by Hamas was guaranteed – and without what the Israeli prime minister called the degrading ceremonies Hamas has put on each week.

Only one more handover – of the bodies of four hostages who died in captivity – is due to take place in the first phase of the ceasefire deal, which is due to end on 1 March.

No arrangements for the release of other living hostages, due to take place in the second phase, have yet been made.

Delegations from Israel and Hamas were due to negotiate the exact terms of the second phase while the first was ongoing – but have yet to meet.

Mediators will be working overtime to get the deal back on track and avert a possible collapse, after both Israel and Hamas accused one another of breaking the terms of the agreement.

Netanyahu accused Hamas of “repeated violations”, including the “cynical use of the hostages for propaganda purposes”.

In response, Hamas official Izzat al-Rishq strongly condemned the decision to postpone the release of the prisoners in a statement on Sunday morning.

He said that Israel’s claim that the handover ceremonies were humiliating was a “false claim and a flimsy argument” aimed at evading its obligations under the ceasefire agreement.

Netanyahu’s statement came after four hostages taken captive on 7 October – Tal Shoham, Omer Shem Tov, Eliya Cohen and Omer Wenkert – were released on Saturday.

The two other released hostages, Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, were held in Gaza for years – Mr Mengistu since 2014 and Mr al-Sayed since 2015.

In exchange, Israel was supposed to release 602 Palestinian prisoners. Hamas accused Israel of violating the agreement by delaying the release.

The six Israeli hostages are the final living hostages to be returned as part of the first phase of a ceasefire agreement.

Meanwhile, outside the Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank, family and friends waited for the release of Palestinian prisoners.

According to Palestinian authorities, 50 prisoners who were going to be released were serving life sentences, 60 had long sentences, and 445 were detained by Israel since 7 October.

There are 62 hostages taken on 7 October 2023 still being held by Hamas, about half of whom are believed to be alive.

Hamas began releasing hostages, facilitated by the Red Cross, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners after the ceasefire agreement took effect on 19 January.

Initial chaotic scenes have become more choreographed, with hostages flanked by fighters on stages before the handovers.

On Saturday, Mr Shoham, 40, and Mr Mengistu, 39, were passed to the Red Cross in Rafah in southern Gaza before being transferred to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Mr Shoham was visiting family at Kibbutz Be’eri in October 2023 when he and others, including his wife and two children, were kidnapped by Hamas. His captured family members were released after 50 days.

In a statement, his family said: “This is an unforgettable moment, where all emotions are rapidly mixing together. Our Tal is with us.”

Mr Mengistu, who is Ethiopian-Israeli, had been held by Hamas since September 2014 when he crossed into northern Gaza.

He and Mr al-Sayed, a Bedouin Arab Israeli who entered Gaza in 2015, had both suffered with mental health problems in the past, according to their families.

Mr al-Sayed’s release was conducted privately in Gaza City on Saturday.

“After nearly a decade of fighting for Hisham’s return, the long-awaited moment has arrived,” his family said in a statement.

“During these days, we need privacy for Hisham and the entire family so we can begin to care for Hisham and ourselves.”

Separately, at Nuseirat in central Gaza, Mr Shem Tov, 22, Mr Cohen, 27, and Mr Wenkert, 23, were freed in another public show by Hamas.

All three were taken captive at the Nova music festival.

Mr Shem Tov had initially escaped by car when Hamas fighters descended on the festival, but was captured when he went back to rescue his friends.

Mr Cohen had hidden with girlfriend Ziv Abud in a shelter at the festival, but was found and driven away. The shelter was bombed, but Ms Abud survived and escaped.

Mr Wenkert managed to send text messages to his family when festival-goers were being attacked, to tell them he was going to a safe shelter, but they lost contact with him.

Crowds in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square greeted the public releases with cheers as they watched them unfold on a live feed.

Families celebrating the return of the six men called for all remaining hostages to be released.

“Our only request is to seize this window of opportunity to secure a deal that will… return all hostages home,” Mr Shoham’s family said.

Remaining hostages include Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old Israeli-American soldier captured on 7 October.

His mother, Yael Alexander, who was watching Saturday’s hostage release, told the BBC it was “amazing” to see them freed, but for her family it is “very tough” waiting.

“There are more than dozens of young men alive, like my son, still waiting to be released,” she said. “This is the main goal, to release the live people now from Gaza.”

Saturday’s joyful scenes contrasted with earlier this week, when the bodies of hostages Shiri Bibas, her two young sons and another captive Oded Lifschitz were returned to Israel.

About 1,200 people – mostly civilians – were killed in the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages.

Israel launched a massive military campaign against Hamas in response, which has killed at least 48,319 Palestinians – mainly civilians – according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

One person has been killed and five police officers injured in a knife attack in the eastern French city of Mulhouse.

A 37-year-old Algerian man was arrested at the scene and the prosecutor has opened a terrorist inquiry because the suspect reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is great”.

The man injured two police officers seriously, one in the neck and one in the chest. A 69-year-old Portuguese man who tried to intervene was stabbed and killed.

The suspect was subject to a deportation order because he was on a terrorism watch list, according to the local prosecutor. President Emmanuel Macron said there was “no doubt it was an Islamist terrorist attack”.

After expressing his condolences to the family of the victim, Macron added: “I want to reiterate the determination of the government, and mine, to continue the work to eradicate terrorism on our soil.”

The attack took place at about 16:00 local time (15:00 GMT) on Saturday near a busy market in Mulhouse, which is close to the borders with Germany and Switzerland.

The police officers were on patrol at a demonstration taking place in support of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I have lived in France for 41 years and I have never experienced something like this,” Cemalettin Canak, 55, told the Reuters news agency.

“It has shocked me a lot,” he added. “Now when I go to the market, I will be a little nervous.”

Of the two officers taken to hospital, the one injured to the chest was later discharged, prosecutors told the AFP news agency, while three others suffered minor injuries.

“Horror has seized our city,” Mulhouse mayor Michele Lutz wrote on Facebook.

French Prime Minister François Bayrou posted on X that “fanaticism has struck again and we are in mourning”.

“My thoughts naturally go to the victims and their families, with the firm hope that the injured will recover,” he said.

Visiting the scene on Saturday evening, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau told broadcaster TF1 that the suspect had been found to have a “schizophrenic profile” following his arrest.

He also said France had attempted to expel the suspect 10 times, and each time Algeria had refused to accept him.

He called for the establishment of a new “balance of power” with Algeria, and told reporters “we must change the rules” on how detention centres operate.

There was no immediate public comment from Algeria in response.

Additional reporting by Tom Bennett and Rorey Bosotti

Over 95,000 people fighting for Russia’s military have now died as the war in Ukraine enters the fourth year, according to data analysed by the BBC.

This figure doesn’t include those who were killed serving in the militia of the self-proclaimed Donbas republics which we estimate to be between 21,000 and 23,500 fighters.

BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022.

The list includes names of the deceased that we verified using information from official reports, newspapers, social media, and new memorials and graves. The real death toll is believed to be much higher.

Daniil Dudnikov, a 21-year-old history student at Donetsk National University, was reading international relations and enjoyed swimming.

On the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on 24 February 2022, the authorities in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic forcibly mobilised Daniil and despatched him to the Kharkiv region.

Just a month later, on 25 March, Daniil went missing in action. Of the 18 soldiers in his unit, none returned. 13 were killed, and five were taken prisoner. Four months later, following a prisoner exchange, those who had survived confirmed that Daniil had been one of the 13 killed in combat.

Daniil’s story mirrors those of thousands of other residents from the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, created in 2014 by Moscow-backed separatists in the predominantly Russian-speaking parts of eastern Ukraine.

With the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, civilian men were drafted en masse, often inadequately trained and poorly equipped before being assigned to near-impossible missions. This resulted in a staggering number of dead and missing soldiers, the fate of whom often remains unknown for months or years.

According to our analysis of published obituaries and missing persons reports from the regions, the majority of deaths in Donbass militias occurred during the first year of the invasion, a toll comparable to the total number of confirmed Russian military losses over the same period – 25,769 deaths.

Yet despite many people in the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine having relatives or friends in Russia, they are far less integrated into the country’s everyday life, which makes their losses less “visible” to ordinary Russians.

Another large part of the Russian losses are convicts recruited in prisons.

Ildus Sadykov was 59 when he was arrested for stealing a bag at a railway station in Moscow. It was the fourth time he ended up in jail, having spent a total of 16 years behind bars for separate criminal convictions.

“They told me, ‘If you don’t want to go back to prison, sign a contract.’ They assured me that at my age, I wouldn’t be sent to the front, just assigned to an auxiliary role. Well, I went along with it.” He recalls, speaking as a prisoner of war after being captured by Ukrainian forces in the summer of 2024.

Following a prisoner exchange, he was returned to Russia, where he was sent back to the frontlines again. This month, Ildus Sadykov was killed in combat.

Currently, the BBC Russian database of war casualties includes 16,171 convicted criminals who were recruited from penal colonies to fight. These are just the cases in which we could verify criminal records through open sources. The actual number of deceased convicts is likely far higher.

By including an analysis of leaked documents from the Wagner Group private military company, we can estimate that prisoners may make up as much as a third of Russia’s military fatalities over the three years of the invasion. Many of these individuals lived in correctional facilities, effectively cut off from broader society, for years on end.

“The losses are felt most by segments of Russian society with fewer resources, be they educational, financial, or political,” says Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London.

“The Kremlin seems to have designed it this way, ensuring that the most privileged sections of society remain largely disconnected from the war. Hence recruitment of prisoners and foreign mercenaries.”

“In small towns, people are far more aware of the scale of casualties. The war has hit social groups that lack the means not only to protest but even to express their views openly. Discussions are confined to private conversations,” she adds.

Only 30% of Russians have had direct exposure to the war, either by fighting in it or family connections to combatants, according to a public opinion poll from the Chronicles project in September 2024. The proportion of Ukrainians who know someone killed or wounded is almost 80%.

Measuring genuine support for the war in Russia is difficult, since many respondents fear speaking honestly. But a study commissioned by the PROPA project, supported by the University of Helsinki, found that 43% of surveyed Russians openly backed the invasion.

“Would public attitudes toward the war be different if more people personally knew the fallen?” asks leading Russian sociologist Viktor Vakhshtayn. “Without a doubt.”

Russia’s actual losses are almost certainly substantially higher than open-source data can reveal. The military analysts we have consulted estimate that the BBC’s research, which is based on graveyards, war memorials, and obituaries, probably captures only 45% to 65% of total casualties.

Added to which, the bodies of many of those killed in recent months likely remain on the battlefield, since retrieving them requires living soldiers to risk exposure to drone strikes.

Given the estimate above, the true number of Russian military deaths could range from 146,194 to 211,169. If one adds estimated losses from DPR and LPR forces, the total number of Russian-aligned fatalities may range from 167,194 to 234,669.

Russia last officially reported its military losses in September 2022, and cited fewer than 6,000 deaths.

Ukraine last updated its casualty figures in December 2024, when President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged 43,000 Ukrainian deaths among soldiers and officers. Western analysts believe this figure to be an under-estimate.

The website Ukraine Losses, which compiles casualty data from open sources, currently lists more than 70,400 surnames of Ukrainian soldiers. Our verification of a random sample of 400 of them found the database to be reliable.

The Ukrainian casualty list is likely more complete than the Russian equivalent, as Ukrainian presidential decrees on posthumous military awards remain publicly accessible. In Russia such data is classified.

As the war approaches its fourth year, global attention has shifted to the new U.S. administration’s push for peace negotiations. We continue to monitor activity at Russian military cemeteries and war memorials, and analyse obituaries, which have surged sharply in number since September last year.

Germans are going to the polls after an intense election campaign dominated by their country’s faltering economy and a succession of deadly attacks that have made migration and security a focal issue.

Friedrich Merz, the 69-year-old conservative leader, is in pole position to become Germany’s next chancellor, in a vote closely watched in Europe and the US.

He promises to fix most problems in four years – a tall order for Europe’s biggest economy and a creaking infrastructure.

If Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) win, he will need to forge an alliance with at least one other party, most likely Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, whose government collapsed late last year.

On the eve of the vote, Merz was adamant there would be no deal with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is poised to become the second biggest political force, ahead of Scholz’s centre-left party.

Some 59.2 million Germans are eligible to vote, and while millions already have by post, polls indicate as many 20% were undecided ahead of election day.

The polls close at 18:00 (17:00 GMT) with a clear idea of a result likely to emerge during the evening.

Voters are energised by this pivotal election, and campaigning continued right through Saturday evening with a final debate on national TV – the ninth this month.

This is a watershed moment as Germany will have to make big decisions on the world stage as well as at home.

Merz promises strong leadership in Europe, but Berlin is also under pressure to loosen the budget strings for its military.

As Ukraine’s second-biggest provider of military aid, Germany’s next government will face a US president who has condemned President Volodymyr Zelensky as a dictator and fractured the West’s united front against Russia.

German political leaders have also been shocked by US Vice-President JD Vance, who has met the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, and called for an end to the long-standing taboo of talking to the far-right.

In Germany, that taboo is known as a firewall or brandmauer.

Merz was accused of breaking it last month when he used their support in parliament. There were protests against the far-right in several German cities on Saturday.

The AfD is already popular in several eastern states, but is rapidly growing in the west too, attracting support among younger Germans via TikTok.

One Weidel campaign video has had four million views.

Her message is simple: Vote AfD, break the firewall and change German politics.

The AfD wants a vote on leaving the EU if it can’t reform it, to scrap climate change measures, build nuclear power plants, and repair gas lines and relations with Russia.

But its voice has been loudest on migration and security after five deadly attacks since last May, including three during the election campaign in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and Munich – all allegedly carried out by immigrants.

A stabbing at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial on Friday night has kept the issue in the headlines. The victim survived, and police said the attacker was Syrian and his motive antisemitic.

The AfD has embraced a highly controversial policy called “remigration”, which it defines as deporting migrants who have committed crimes. But the term can also refer to the mass deportation of migrants and their descendants.

The anti-immigration party has already secured a foothold in parts of the west, especially in Germany’s old industrial heartland in the Ruhr valley.

In last summer’s European elections it won the vote in some northern areas of the city of Duisburg, with 20% in Marxloh, 25% in an adjacent area and 30% next door to that.

Marxloh is a vibrant district with a large immigrant community, known for its array of shops selling Turkish fashionwear for brides.

But it has also suffered extensively from the decline of the coal and steel industry and a lack of government investment.

In a park close to Marxloh’s remaining steelworks, five young men in their early 20s explained why they all planned to vote AfD.

“We’re young, we need work and they don’t give us a chance to find training,” one man complained.

“We’ve no money; everything’s more expensive; there aren’t many jobs any more and there’s so much dirt here.”

The AfD is not known for its social policies, but its message on security cuts through, and this group does not see the anti-immigration party as extreme.

“No, they’re just normal people.”

In the east, it is in the rural areas where the AfD does best, but in the west it is growing in cities that have lost their industrial base, says Prof Conrad Ziller of the University of Duisburg-Essen.

“Voices of people in favour of the AfD have become so loud, so if you’re in a doctor’s waiting room it’s really common to hear people chat about getting angry about the established politicians and government.”

Migration is the most common frustration, and he believes Weidel has capitalised on that by appearing so prominently in all the TV debates.

Often when the debate touched on the economy, social justice or inequality, Prof Ziller said “the AfD deflected it and said the main problem is not economics, it’s migration, and the government didn’t do a good job”.

While the opinion polls have been consistent about who is leading the race, some of the parties might not make it over the 5% threshold for the newly slimmed-down parliament.

If fewer parties make it into the 630-seat Bundestag, it will be more straightforward to form a coalition with a majority.

The economic liberals, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), were in the outgoing government but risk oblivion on Sunday along with left-wing populist party BSW.

The Left party, however, has seen a resurgence in recent days and pollsters suggest it will become the fifth largest party after the Greens.

The closing credits of 2021’s No Time To Die, the most recent film in the 007 series, ended with a familiar message: “James Bond will return.”

But for the last few years, fans haven’t been so sure.

A year after the release of Daniel Craig’s final film in the franchise, Amazon bought the series’ parent company MGM. Since then, very little has happened.

That finally changed on Thursday, when Amazon announced a new deal that would see long-term Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson step back, and Jeff Bezos’s company take full creative control.

In the intervening years, it’s been widely reported that there was tension between Amazon, who understandably wanted a return on their investment, and Wilson and Broccoli, whose top priority remained protecting the Bond brand.

The news of the deal has been met with mixed reaction from 007 fans.

“I’m in two minds,” says David Zaritsky, creator of The Bond Experience fan channel on YouTube and Instagram.

“The nostalgic part of my mind feels a little bit of sadness. Broccoli and Wilson have been the custodians for all these years, so it feels like a bit of royal blood in lineage has been severed.

“That being said, nobody likes inactivity. And there’s been a lot of inactivity around the James Bond franchise for many years, and I know that Amazon as a company will not have patience for inactivity.

“So I’m very hopeful, and dare I say even a little bit excited, that they’re going to do something with the franchise that will be interesting nonetheless.”

Other franchises which have drastically expanded perhaps offer some clues about what we can expect from the forthcoming Amazon era of Bond.

Lancelot Narayan, a James Bond historian, journalist and filmmaker, told BBC Radio 5 Live a good comparison is George Lucas selling Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, giving the company control of the Star Wars brand.

“They went off and made that sequel trilogy, and whether you like it or not, it got made rather quickly,” he notes. “There wasn’t a three-year wait between films.”

However, despite the explosion in productivity, there is a feeling that both Marvel and Star Wars have overstretched themselves with their spin-off products.

Narayan says he believes Star Wars has become “creatively redundant” since the explosion in productivity.

“The Star Wars TV series have been very hit and miss – Andor is fantastic, The Mandalorian is OK, I haven’t seen Skeleton Crew… but there are very disparate creative voices going on there,” he notes. “So this is the worry, you need the correct creative people to run the show.”

Similarly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe built on the films by launching a string of Disney+ TV shows.

The subsequent decline in Marvel’s popularity arguably owes much to fan fatigue, something which won’t have been helped by the huge number of story strands they had to keep up with.

Both cases, Marvel and Star Wars, highlight the risks of brand expansion, which can cause long-term damage for short-term financial gain.

Fans will be hoping any Bond extensions will be better than 2023’s dubious game show 007: Road to a Million, hosted by Succession’s Brian Cox, which was poorly received.

The James Bond franchise, and particularly the subject of which actor will take over from Craig, is of such fascination to the public that it’s the focus of a new show currently playing in Cirencester, called A Role To Die For.

“There are a lot of people who have grown up with it, for whom James Bond has been part of their culture their entire lives,” says the appropriately named Derek Bond, who directs the show.

“As time has gone on, being able to reinvent that character and have him perhaps change with the times, has been the secret to his longevity.

“But I wonder if we’re now in a situation where the times have changed so much, that James Bond now feels as if he belongs in a different era, and it needs something really radical to keep him relevant today.”

One area the company will almost certainly be looking at now they’re in creative control is the potential for character origin stories, in a similar vein to other famous and beloved film characters who have received their own spin-off films.

Cruella, an extension of the 101 Dalmatians villain, and Wonka, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, have both been hugely successful film spin-offs in their own right in the last five years, with Emma Stone and Timothée Chalamet respectively bringing the characters and worlds to a whole new audience.

It’s not hard to imagine the popularity of a similar film or show based on famous Bond villains such as Jaws, Oddjob, Blofeld, Goldfinger or May Day – all big brands in their own right.

“I mean, why has nobody made Moneypenny?!” laughs Derek Bond. “There’s a great series to made about her and her journey.

“Also M, I’d love to know how Judi Dench’s M ended up in that role. And the villains especially, it’s a very rich universe, and it’s easy to imagine the Marvelisation of it, where you have a kind of spin-off for every character that James Bond ever passed in a corridor.”

But Zaritsky notes: “I think Amazon will stop short of doing it ad nauseum, to the point where they’re having spin-offs about the MI6 janitor that sleeps in the corner. If they do have spin-offs, I think it’s going to be prime characters.”

Not everyone is a fan of the idea. “This is quite possibly the WORST thing to happen to this franchise,” tweeted Griffin Schiller of Film Speak after Amazon’s announcement.

“James Bond was more than your average franchise. It had class, prestige, they were indie films made as blockbusters… now? It’ll be milked dry. It’s truly the end.”

Broccoli has been seen as a steward of the brand throughout her tenure; a safe pair of hands who protected the traditions of the original character.

That may not necessarily have been compatible with Amazon, who were presumably looking to buy a brand rather than only a film franchise, in an effort to maximise profit.

“It does tend to be a slightly older generation that it skews to, and there’s a whole generation of people who have not experienced a James Bond film, and now, I wonder if they will,” Bond says.

In her own tenure, Broccoli has made efforts to keep attracting young audiences in other ways, however, such as selecting popular young artists such as Billie Eilish to sing the theme songs.

A repositioning of of the brand could see Amazon try to take the franchise in a direction that appeals more to a younger audience as well as an American market, which is culturally slightly cooler on the Bond brand than the UK.

“I think it’s quite bad news for the franchise, and British film as a whole,” movie journalist Hannah Strong told Radio 4’s PM following Amazon’s announcement.

“It’s the premier British film property, and I think the control reverting to an American company, not least one that hasn’t shown that much commitment to great cinema, is probably quite a worrying sign.”

That said, Amazon will be aware that Bond makes a huge amount of money as it currently is – and that altering the core product itself in a way that appeals more to an American audience would be a huge risk.

Strong added: “When Amazon bought MGM, Barbara Broccoli was quite outspoken about the fact she was finding it difficult to come to a middle ground with Amazon. I suspect the middle ground involves an awful lot of money.”

The biggest decision remains who will replace Craig in the leading role.

Broccoli previously said James Bond could be any race, but that he would remain male. That guarantee may no longer stand now she is has handed over the reins, although her approach was widely regarded as sensible and Amazon are unlikely to rock the boat too much.

How long could it be until we see the first new Bond product? Zaritsky suggests Amazon won’t wait around, although the first thing to launch may not be a film.

“It could be with merchandise, or in the form of fan outreach,” he says. “Whatever it is, I think we might see something extremely fast.”

An Indian pharmaceutical company is manufacturing unlicensed, highly addictive opioids and exporting them illegally to West Africa where they are driving a major public health crisis in countries including Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote D’Ivoire, a BBC Eye investigation has revealed.

Aveo Pharmaceuticals, based in Mumbai, makes a range of pills that go under different brand names and are packaged to look like legitimate medicines. But all contain the same harmful mix of ingredients: tapentadol, a powerful opioid, and carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant so addictive it’s banned in Europe.

This combination of drugs is not licensed for use anywhere in the world and can cause breathing difficulties and seizures. An overdose can kill. Despite the risks, these opioids are popular as street drugs in many West African countries, because they are so cheap and widely available.

The BBC World Service found packets of them, branded with the Aveo logo, for sale on the streets of Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Ivoirian towns and cities.

Having traced the drugs back to Aveo’s factory in India, the BBC sent an undercover operative inside the factory, posing as an African businessman looking to supply opioids to Nigeria. Using a hidden camera, the BBC filmed one of Aveo’s directors, Vinod Sharma, showing off the same dangerous products the BBC found for sale across West Africa.

In the secretly recorded footage, the operative tells Sharma that his plan is to sell the pills to teenagers in Nigeria “who all love this product”. Sharma doesn’t flinch. “OK,” he replies, before explaining that if users take two or three pills at once, they can “relax” and agrees they can get “high”. Towards the end of the meeting, Sharma says: “This is very harmful for the health,” adding “nowadays, this is business.”

It is a business that is damaging the health and destroying the potential of millions of young people across West Africa.

In the city of Tamale, in northern Ghana, so many young people are taking illegal opioids that one of the city’s chiefs, Alhassan Maham, has created a voluntary task force of about 100 local citizens whose mission is to raid drug dealers and take these pills off the streets.

“The drugs consume the sanity of those who abuse them,” says Maham, “like a fire burns when kerosene is poured on it.” One addict in Tamale put it even more simply. The drugs, he said, have “wasted our lives”.

The BBC team followed the task force as they jumped on to motorbikes and, following a tip off about a drug deal, launched a raid in one of Tamale’s poorest neighbourhoods. On the way they passed a young man slumped in a stupor who, according to locals, had taken these drugs.

When the dealer was caught, he was carrying a plastic bag filled with green pills labelled Tafrodol. The packets were stamped with the distinctive logo of Aveo Pharmaceuticals.

It’s not just in Tamale that Aveo’s pills are causing misery. The BBC found similar products, made by Aveo, have been seized by police elsewhere in Ghana.

We also found evidence that Aveo’s pills are for sale on the streets of Nigeria and Cote D’Ivoire, where teenagers dissolve them in an alcoholic energy drink to increase the high.

Publicly-available export data show that Aveo Pharmaceuticals, along with a sister company called Westfin International, is shipping millions of these tablets to Ghana and other West African countries.

Nigeria, with a population of 225 million people, provides the biggest market for these pills. It has been estimated that about four million Nigerians abuse some form of opioid, according to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics.

The Chairman of Nigeria’s Drug and Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Brig Gen Mohammed Buba Marwa, told the BBC, opioids are “devastating our youths, our families, it’s in every community in Nigeria”.

In 2018, following a BBC Africa Eye investigation into the sale of opioids as street drugs, Nigerian authorities tried to get a grip on a widely abused opioid painkiller called tramadol.

The government banned the sale of tramadol without prescription, imposed strict limits on the maximum dose, and cracked down on imports of illegal pills. At the same time, Indian authorities tightened export regulations on tramadol.

Not long after this crackdown, Aveo Pharmaceuticals began to export a new pill based on tapentadol, an even stronger opioid, mixed with the muscle-relaxant carisoprodol.

West African officials are warning that opioid exporters appear to be using these new combination pills as a substitute for tramadol and to evade the crackdown.

In the Aveo factory there were cartons of the combination drugs stacked on top of each other, almost ceiling-high. On his desk, Vinod Sharma laid out packet after packet of the tapentadol-carisoprodol cocktail pills that the company markets under a range of names including Tafrodol, the most popular, as well as TimaKing and Super Royal-225.

He told the BBC’s undercover team that “scientists” working in his factory could combine different drugs to “make a new product”.

Aveo’s new product is even more dangerous than the tramadol it has replaced. According to Dr Lekhansh Shukla, assistant professor at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences in Bengaluru, India, tapentadol “gives the effects of an opioid” including very deep sleep.

“It could be deep enough that people don’t breathe, and that leads to drug overdose,” he explained. “And along with that, you are giving another agent, carisoprodol, which also gives very deep sleep, relaxation. It sounds like a very dangerous combination.”

Carisoprodol has been banned in Europe because it is addictive. It is approved for use in the US but only for short periods of up to three weeks. Withdrawal symptoms include anxiety, insomnia, and hallucinations.

When mixed with tapentadol the withdrawal is even “more severe” compared to regular opioids, said Dr Shukla. “It’s a fairly painful experience.”

He said he knew of no clinical trials on the efficacy of this combination. Unlike tramadol, which is legal for use in limited doses, the tapentadol-carisoprodol cocktail “does not sound like a rational combination”, he said. “This is not something that is licensed to be used in our country.”

In India, pharmaceutical companies cannot legally manufacture and export unlicensed drugs unless these drugs meet the standards of the importing country. Aveo ships Tafrodol and similar products to Ghana, where this combination of tapentadol and carisoprodol is, according to Ghana’s national Drug Enforcement Agency, unlicensed and illegal. By shipping Tafrodol to Ghana, Aveo is breaking Indian law.

We put these allegations to Vinod Sharma and Aveo Pharmaceuticals. They did not respond.

The Indian drugs regulator, the CDSCO, told us the Indian government recognises its responsibility towards global public health and is committed to ensuring India has a responsible and strong pharmaceutical regulatory system.

It added that exports from India to other countries are closely monitored and that recently tightened regulation is strictly enforced. It also called importing countries to support India’s efforts by ensuring they had similarly strong regulatory systems.

The CDSCO stated it has taken up the matter with other countries, including those in West Africa, and is committed to working with them to prevent wrongdoing. The regulator said it will take immediate action against any pharmaceutical firm involved in malpractice.

Aveo is not the only Indian company making and exporting unlicensed opioids. Publicly available export data suggest other pharma companies manufacture similar products, and drugs with different branding are widely available across West Africa.

These manufacturers are damaging the reputation of India’s fast-growing pharmaceutical industry, which makes high-quality generic medicines upon which millions of people worldwide depend and manufactures vaccines which have saved millions of lives. The industry’s exports are worth at least $28bn (£22bn) a year.

Speaking about his meeting with Sharma, the BBC’s undercover operative, whose identity must remain concealed for his safety, says: “Nigerian journalists have been reporting on this opioid crisis for more than 20 years but finally, I was face to face… with one of the men at the root of Africa’s opioid crisis, one of the men who actually makes this product and ships it into our countries by the container load. He knew the harm it was doing but he didn’t seem to care… describing it simply as business.”

Back in Tamale, Ghana, the BBC team followed the local task force on one final raid that turned up even more of Aveo’s Tafrodol. That evening they gathered in a local park to burn the drugs they had seized.

“We are burning it in an open glare for everybody to see,” said Zickay, one of the leaders, as the packets were doused in petrol and set ablaze, “so it sends a signal to the sellers and the suppliers: if they get you, they’ll burn your drugs”.

But even as the flames destroyed a few hundred packets of Tafrodol, the “sellers and suppliers” at the top of this chain, thousands of miles away in India, were churning out millions more – and getting rich on the profits of misery.

It looked small at first, in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Yet as we approached the USS Carl Vinson it filled the view out of the back of the Osprey tilt-rotor which was carrying us there, its deck packed with state-of-the-art warplanes. At nearly 90,000 tonnes, and more than 300 metres in length, the nuclear-powered Carl Vinson is one of the largest warships ever built.

Watching its FA18 and F35 fighter jets being hurled into the air every minute or two by the carrier’s steam catapults is a spine-tingling experience, a procedure managed with impressive composure by the crew on the crowded deck.

An untimely Pacific squall which drenched us and everything else did not slow them at all.

Even after years of rapid advances in Chinese military capabilities, the United States is still unrivalled in its capacity to project force anywhere around the world with its fleet of 11 super-carriers.

But does a $13bn (£10bn) aircraft carrier which the latest Chinese missiles could sink in a matter of minutes make sense anymore – particularly in the age of Donald Trump?

We had been invited onto the Carl Vinson to see another side of US carrier strategy, one which emphasises American friendliness, and willingness to work with allies – something you don’t hear much in Washington these days.

The Carl Vinson was taking part in an exercise with two other aircraft carriers and their escorting destroyers from France and Japan, about 200km east of the Philippines. In the absence of wars to fight, US carrier groups spend much of their time doing this, learning how to operate together with allied navies. Last year they held one exercise that brought together ships from 18 navies.

This one was smaller, but was the first in the Pacific involving a French carrier for more than 40 years.

Down in the massive hangar, below the noisy flight deck, Rear Adm Michael Wosje, commander of the Carl Vinson’s strike force, was sitting with his French colleague, Rear Adm Jacques Mallard of the carrier Charles de Gaulle, and his Japanese colleague Rear Adm Natsui Takashi of the Kaga, which is in the process of being converted to Japan’s first aircraft carrier since the Second World War.

The Charles de Gaulle is the only warship in the world which matches some of the capabilities of the US super-carriers, but even then is only half their size.

All three admirals were brimming with bonhomie.

The fraught scenes in Europe, where President Trump’s men were ripping up the rule book which underscored the international order for the past 80 years, and telling one-time allies they were now on their own, seemed a world away.

“Our network of strong alliances and partnerships, such as those that we share with France and Japan, is a key advantage of our nations as we confront our collective security challenges,” said Adm Wosje. In impeccable English Adm Mallard concurred: “This exercise is the expression of a will to better understand each other, and to work for the defence of compliance in international law.”

No one mentioned the radical new views emanating from Washington, nor did they mention an increasingly assertive China, although Adm Natsui might have had both in mind when he said Japan now found itself in “the most severe and complex security environment. No country can now protect her own security alone.”

Down in the warren of steel corridors which make up the living quarters of the 5,000 men and women on the Carl Vinson, the official portraits of the new president and vice-president were already hanging, the one of Trump with its now familiar pugilistic glower. We were not permitted to interview the crew, and politics would have been off-limits anyway, but some of those on board were curious what I thought of the new administration.

Internet access on board is spotty, but they do keep in touch with home. We were told they even get Amazon deliveries while at sea, picked up from designated collection points.

It is a fair bet then that there is plenty of discussion of what President Trump has in store for these giants of the navy. Elon Musk has already vowed to bring his cost-cutting wrecking ball to the Pentagon and its $900bn budget, and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has welcomed that, although, he stressed, the Pentagon is not USAID which President Trump has vowed to shut down completely.

In the hangar we watched the crew maintaining the aircraft, surrounded by packing cases and spare parts. We were warned not to film any exposed parts of these technological marvels, for fear of revealing classified information. We could not even risk touching the F35 fighters, which have a prohibitively expensive special coating to help conceal them from radar.

They showed us the “Jet Shop” where they repair and test the engines, a technician who identified himself as ‘082 Madeiro’ explained that they needed to carry enough spare parts to keep the planes flying on long deployments, and that after a certain number of hours the engines had to be completely replaced, whether or not they were faulty. There was a brand new engine in its enormous packaging next to him. Cost, around $15m.

Running the Carl Vinson costs around $700m a year.

So will the Trump administration take a knife to the Pentagon budget? Hegseth has said he believes there are significant efficiencies to be found. He has also openly mused about the value of aircraft carriers. “If our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers, and if 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our ten aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of conflict, what does that look like?”, he said in an interview last November.

The debate about the utility of aircraft carriers is not new. It goes right back to when they first appeared a century ago. Critics today argue that they are too vulnerable to the latest generation of Chinese ballistic and hypersonic missiles, forcing them to stay at a distance from the Chinese coast which would put their aircraft out of range. The money, they say, would be better spent on newer technology.

There is something archaic about these massive, welded hunks of steel, that seemed to have their heyday in the Pacific War of the 1940s. Yet in the vast expanse of the ocean, with few airfields, it has proved difficult to do without them. Supporters argue that, with their escorts of guided-missile destroyers, the super carriers can defend themselves quite well, and that they are still hard to sink. Downsize these carriers, to carry only helicopters or planes which can land and take off vertically as many countries have done, and you end up with vessels which are even more vulnerable.

It is worth noting that China too believes in the value of aircraft carriers; it has already built three. And as floating symbols of US prestige, they may appeal to President Trump, a man known for his love of flamboyant structures, whatever the economic arguments for and against them.

At his Senate confirmation hearing Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration would prioritise increased ship-building, although he did not say how this can be achieved. The US has only four naval shipyards left; China has, by some estimates, more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the US. He also told his counterparts in Japan and South Korea that he wanted to deepen defence co-operation with them. Europe may be on its own, but it seems Asian allies will get the attention of this White House as it focuses on the strategic challenge posed by China.

Three new Ford-class nuclear carriers, the next generation after the Carl Vinson, are currently under construction, although two will not be in service until the next decade. The plan is to complete ten of this new class of carrier, and so far there have been no indications that the Trump administration wants to change that. For all its many critics, the US super-carrier is probably here to stay.

A meeting between Chinese president Xi Jinping and some of the country’s foremost business leaders this week has fuelled excitement and speculation, after Alibaba founder Jack Ma was pictured at the event.

The charismatic and colourful Mr Ma, who was one of China’s most prominent businessmen, had withdrawn from public life after criticising China’s financial sector in 2020.

His reappearance at Monday’s event has sparked a wave of discussion, with experts and analysts wondering what it means for him, China’s tech sector and the economy in general.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive – tech stocks, including those of Alibaba, rallied soon after the event.

On Thursday, the e-commerce giant reported financial results that beat expectations, with shares ending the trading day in New York more than 8% higher. The company’s shares are up 60% since the beginning of the year.

So what are analysts reading into Mr Ma’s appearance at the event alongside other high-profile guests – including DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng?

Analysts began looking for clues about the significance of the meeting as soon as Chinese state media started releasing pictures of the event.

“Jack Ma’s attendance, his seating in the front row, even though he did not speak, and his handshake with Xi are clear signs he has been rehabilitated,” China analyst Bill Bishop wrote.

Social media was abuzz with users praising Mr Ma for his return to the public spotlight.

“Congratulations [Jack] Ma for the safe landing,” said one user on Chinese social media platform Weibo.

“The comeback of [Jack] Ma is a shot in the arm to the current Chinese economy,” said another.

It is unsurprising that observers have attached so much significance to an appearance by Mr Ma.

Before his disappearance from public life in 2020 – following comments at a financial conference that China’s state-owned banks had a “pawn-shop mentality” – Mr Ma was the poster boy for China’s tech industry.

An English teacher with no background in computing, Mr Ma co-founded Alibaba in his apartment more than two decades ago after convincing a group of friends to invest in his online marketplace.

He went on to build one of China’s largest tech conglomerates and become one of the country’s richest men.

That was before his “pawn shop” comment, when he also lamented the “lack of innovation” in the country’s banks.

It led to the cancellation of his $34.5bn (£27.4bn) stock market flotation of Ant Group, his financial technology giant.

This was seen at the time as an attempt by Beijing to humble a company that had become too powerful, and a leader who had become too outspoken.

Analysts agree that the fact he’s back in the spotlight, at a symposium where Xi Jinping himself presided, is a very good sign for Mr Ma.

Some caution, however, that the fact he was not among the speakers may show that he has not fully returned to the exalted status he once enjoyed.

Also, the lack of coverage his attendance received in Chinese media outlets seems to confirm he has not been completely rehabilitated.

Xi Jinping told participants at the symposium that their companies needed to innovate, grow and remain confident despite China’s economic challenges, which he described as “temporary” and “localised”.

He also said it was the “right time for private enterprises and private entrepreneurs to fully display their talents”.

This has been widely interpreted as the government telling private tech firms that they too are back in good graces.

Mr Ma’s downfall had preceded a broader crackdown on China’s tech industry.

Companies came to face much tighter enforcement of data security and competition rules, as well as state control over important digital assets.

Other companies across the private sector, ranging from education to real estate, also ended up being targeted in what came to be known as the “common prosperity” campaign.

The measures put in place by the common prosperity policies were seen by some as a way to rein in the billionaire owners of some of China’s biggest companies, to instead give customers and workers more of a say in how firms operate and distribute their earnings.

But as Beijing imposed tough new regulations, billions of dollars were wiped off the value of some of these companies – many of them tech firms – rattling international investors.

This, along with a worsening global economy that was affected by the pandemic as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has contributed to considerable changes in China’s economic situation.

Growth has slowed, jobs for the country’s youth have become more scarce and, amid a property sector downturn, people are not spending enough.

As rumours that Mr Ma would attend Monday’s meeting began to spread, so did a glimmer of hope. Richard Windsor, director of technology at research firm Counterpoint, said Mr Ma’s presence would be a sign that China’s leadership “had enough of stagnation and could be prepared to let the private sector have a much freer hand”.

Aside from Mr Ma and Mr Liang, the list of guests also included key figures from companies such as telecommunications and smartphone firm Huawei, electric-vehicle (EV) giant BYD, and many others from across the tech and industrial sectors.

“The [guest] list showcased the importance of internet/tech/AI/EV sectors given their representation of innovation and achievement,” said a note from market analysts at Citi.

“[It] likely indicates the importance of technology… and the contribution of private enterprises to the development and growth of China’s economy.”

Those present at the meeting seemed to share that sentiment. Lei Jun, the chief executive of consumer electronics giant Xiaomi, told state media that he senses the president’s “care and support” for businesses.

The symposium took place after the country experienced what some observers have described as a “Sputnik moment”: the arrival of DeepSeek’s disruptive R1 artificial intelligence (AI) model at the end of last month.

Soon after its release, the Chinese-made AI chatbot rose through the ranks to become one of the most downloaded in the world. It also triggered a sudden sell-off of major US tech stocks, as fears mounted over America’s leadership in the sector.

Back in China, the app’s global success has sparked a wave of national pride that has quickly spread to financial markets. Investment has been pouring into Chinese stocks – particularly those of tech companies – listed in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Investment banking giant Goldman Sachs has also upgraded its outlook for Chinese stocks, saying rapid AI adoption could boost companies’ revenues and attract as much as $200bn of investment.

But the biggest significance of this innovation was that it came as a result of DeepSeek having to innovate due to a ban on the export of advanced chips and technology to China.

Now, with Trump back in the White House and his fondness of trade tariffs, Mr Xi may have found it necessary to recalibrate his approach to China’s entrepreneurs.

Instead of a return to an era of unregulated growth, some analysts believe Monday’s meeting signalled an attempt to steer investors and businesses toward Mr Xi’s national priorities.

The Chinese president has been increasingly emphasising policies that the government has referred to as “high-quality development” and “new productive forces”.

Such ideas have been used to reflect a switch from what were previously fast drivers of growth, such as property and infrastructure investment, towards high-end industries such as semiconductors, clean energy and AI.

The goal is to achieve “socialist modernisation” by 2035 – higher living standards for everyone, and an economy driven by advanced manufacturing and less reliant on imports of foreign technology.

Mr Xi knows that to get there he will need the private sector fully on board.

“Rather than marking the end of tech sector scrutiny, [Jack Ma’s] reappearance suggests that Beijing is pivoting from crackdowns to controlled engagement,” an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, Marina Zhang told the BBC.

“While the private sector remains a critical pillar of China’s economic ambitions, it must align with national priorities – including self-reliance in key technologies and strategic industries.”

A cult-like US group known as Zizians has been linked to a string of murders, sparking several arrests – who are the people behind this group and what do they believe?

Jack Lasota, 34, who allegedly leads a group of a few dozen followers known as Zizians, was arrested on Sunday alongside Michelle Zajko, 32, and Daniel Blank, 26, on charges including trespassing and obstruction.

Authorities say they are investigating at least six killings across the US that are allegedly connected to members of the group, including a double homicide in Pennsylvania, a knife attack in California, and the shooting of a US border guard in January.

Four other alleged members of the group have already been charged with murder.

Lasota, a transgender woman, is allegedly the leader of the group.

She earned a degree in computer science from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 2013 and, according to her blog, moved to the San Francisco area three years later.

There, she wrote that she applied for a series of jobs at tech companies and startups – including a brief internship with Nasa – and began to associate with people involved in the rationalist movement, an intellectual trend popular in Silicon Valley that emphasises the power of the human mind to see clear truth, eliminate bias and bad thinking, and improve individuals and society.

Lasota began blogging using the alias “Ziz”, but soon fell out with mainstream rationalists as her writings spun off in bizarre directions.

The blog included posts of thousands of words, blending Lasota’s personal experiences, theories about technology and philosophy, and esoteric comments about pop culture, computer coding and dozens of other subjects.

At one point, during a long diatribe about the TV series The Office, artificial intelligence and other subjects, she wrote: “I realized that I was no longer able to stand people. Not even rationalists anymore. And I would live the rest of my life completely alone, hiding my reaction to anyone it was useful to interact with. I had given up my ability to see beauty so I could see evil.”

Other themes included veganism – total avoidance of any animal food or products – and anarchism.

In 2019 Lasota and three others were arrested while holding a protest outside an event held by a rationalist organisation. The last posts on her blog date from around this time.

Over the next few years, Lasota and others would move around the US, according to reports, at one point living on a boat, and later staying on property owned by others in California and North Carolina.

In 2022, a warrant was issued when Lasota failed to show up for a court hearing, related to the protest outside the rationalist organisation meeting. But her lawyer at the time stated she was “now deceased after a boating accident in the San Francisco Bay area”.

An obituary – noting that Lasota loved “adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals” – even appeared in an Alaska newspaper.

But the story was wrong: Lasota was still alive.

Jessica Taylor, an artificial intelligence researcher who says she knew several of the group members, told the Associated Press that Lasota and the Zizians stretched their rationalist beliefs to justify breaking laws.

“Stuff like thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” Taylor said.

Poulomi Saha, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies cults, says that while there is no strict legal definition of such a group, several of the Zizians’ attributes align with the popular cultural conception of the term.

“This is a group of individuals that seem to share some unorthodox viewpoints,” she said. “That in and of itself wouldn’t open up them up to the cult label… but then there is this leadership figure ‘Ziz.’”

Saha noted, however, that there is still significant uncertainty about the relationships between group members and about what may have motivated alleged acts of violence in recent years.

Not long after the obituary was published, Lasota resurfaced along with other members of the group in Vallejo, California, which is north of San Francisco. Several members were living in vans and trucks on land owned by a man named Curtis Lind.

At some point the Zizians allegedly stopped paying rent, and Lind sued to evict them.

But the dispute escalated and in November 2022, Lind was attacked, stabbed 50 times and blinded in one eye. In an act of what police would later say is self-defence, he fired a gun, which killed Emma Borhanian, a former Google employee who was one of the Zizians and who had previously been arrested at the rationalist protest.

Two other members, Suri Dao and Somni Logencia, were arrested and charged with attempting to murder Lind. They remain in prison awaiting trial. Lasota was also at the scene of the attack, but was not charged with a crime.

The following month, two parents of a Zizian member were killed in a small Pennsylvania town.

Richard Zajko, 71, and his wife, Rita, 69, were found shot in the head in their home.

The Zajkos were the parents of Zizian member Michelle Zajko, who was briefly held by police but not charged with a crime.

Lasota was arrested and charged with obstructing law enforcement and disorderly conduct in connection with the incident.

Despite the links to those two attacks, the group mostly flew under the radar without receiving much wider public attention until earlier this year.

On 17 January, Lind, the California landlord who had allegedly been attacked by members of the group, was killed.

Vallejo Police Department say he was stabbed to death by an assailant wearing a mask and black beanie.

Police later charged Maximilian Snyder with murder, and alleged that Snyder killed Lind in order to stop him from testifying during the attempted murder trial.

That was followed just a few days later by the killing of a US border patrol agent on the other side of the country.

Two Zizians, Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt, were pulled over by US Border Patrol Agent David Maland near the Canadian border in Vermont.

A firefight ensured. Bauckholt, a German citizen who also went by the name Ophelia, was killed in the shootout along with Maland.

Youngblut – who was previously known as Milo – was wounded and later arrested on firearms charges.

The shooting led to a wider hunt for members of the group after police said the gun used to kill Maland was bought by Michelle Zajko.

After the Vermont shootout, police in Pennsylvania said they had uncovered new evidence about the shooting of Zajko’s parents, and Lasota was wanted for failing to appear at several court hearings.

The whereabouts of the pair were unknown until Sunday, when they were arrested with fellow group member Daniel Blank in Maryland.

A police report said a resident of Frostburg, about 160 miles (260km) north-west of Washington DC, had called police saying he wanted three “suspicious” people off his property after they asked to camp on his land for a month.

Maryland State Police said that the trio were charged with trespassing and obstruction, and that Lasota and Zajko were additionally charged with weapons violations. All three were denied bail.

A lawyer for Lasota, Daniel McGarrigle, declined to comment on the arrest but instead sent the BBC a statement he had previously issued about his client, saying: “I urge members of the press and the public to refrain from speculation and premature conclusions.”

One of four bodies returned from Gaza to Israel on Thursday is not hostage Shiri Bibas, as claimed by Hamas, the Israeli military said.

The news that Shiri Bibas, 33, and her two sons, Ariel and Kfir, who would now be aged five and two, were dead triggered an outpouring of grief in Israel.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has informed the Bibas family that the bodies of her sons have been identified after their remains were given to Israel by Hamas on Thursday.

But the third body was not that of their mother, the IDF says.

It demanded the return of her body along with the other remaining hostages. Hamas has not yet commented on Israel’s claim.

“During the identification process, it was determined that the additional body received is not that of Shiri Bibas, and no match was found for any other hostage. This is an anonymous, unidentified body,” the IDF posted on X.

“This is a violation of utmost severity by the Hamas terrorist organisation, which is obligated under the agreement to return four deceased hostages. We demand that Hamas return Shiri home along with all our hostages.”

The IDF said that the two children “were brutally murdered by terrorists in captivity in November 2023”, according to intelligence and forensic findings. Hamas had said the boys and their mother were killed in an Israeli bombing.

Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were aged 32, four and nine months when they were kidnapped during the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023.

The children’s father Yarden Bibas, 34, was released by Hamas on 1 February.

Israel has confirmed that the fourth body returned on Thursday was that of veteran peace activist, Oded Lifshitz.

The release of hostages’ bodies was agreed as part of the ceasefire deal which came into effect on 19 January. Israel has confirmed there will be eight.

The two sides agreed to exchange 33 hostages for about 1,900 prisoners by the end of the first six weeks of the ceasefire.

Talks on progressing to the next phase of the deal – under which the remaining living hostages would be released and the war would end permanently – were due to start earlier this month but have not yet begun.

Twenty-eight hostages and more than 1,000 prisoners have so far been exchanged.

Sixty-six hostages taken on 7 October are still being held in Gaza. Three other hostages, taken more than a decade ago, are also being held. About half of all the hostages still in Gaza are believed to be alive.

About 1,200 people – mostly civilians – were killed in the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Israel launched a massive military campaign against Hamas in response, which has killed at least 48,297 Palestinians – mainly civilians – according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Also on Thursday, three buses exploded in Bat Yam, south of Tel Aviv, in what Israeli police said is a suspected terror attack.

Devices in two other buses failed to explode, they said, adding that “large police forces are at the scenes, searching for suspects”. No casualties have been reported.

In response, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced he had ordered the IDF to carry out an “intensive operation against centers of terrorism” in the West Bank.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has told G20 foreign ministers that a commitment to multilateralism and international law is vital to solving global crises.

His comments follow growing concern about the Trump administration’s “America First” policy, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio boycotting the meeting and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying he will not attend next week’s gathering of G20 finance ministers.

Rubio said he would not “coddle anti-Americanism”, while Bessent said he had other commitments in Washington.

South Africa is the first African state to lead the G20, hoping to advance the interests of developing nations in talks with the world’s richest states.

The G20 consists of 19 countries, along with the African Union (AU) and European Union (EU), and makes up more than 80% of the global economy and two-thirds of the world population.

The foreign ministers of China, Russia, France and the UK are among those attending the meeting in Johannesburg, while the US is represented by the deputy chief of mission at its South African embassy.

In his opening address, Ramaphosa said that an “already fragile global coexistence” was threatened by rising intolerance, conflicts and climate change.

“Yet there is a lack of consensus among major powers, including in the G20, on how to respond to these issues of global significance,” the South African president said.

“It is critical that the principles of the UN Charter, multilateralism and international law should remain at the centre of all our endeavour,” he added.

South Africa holds the G20 presidency until November 2025, when it is expected to hand it over to the US.

Relations between the two countries have become increasingly strained since President Donald Trump took office in January, raising questions about how much South Africa can achieve during its presidency.

Trump has cut aid to the country, accusing it of “unjust and immoral practices” against the white minority Afrikaner community and by filing a genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023.

His decision was followed by Rubio saying he would not attend the meeting of foreign ministers because South Africa was “doing very bad things”, using the G20 “to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change”.

In a post on X, he added: “My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.”