News
'Operational misunderstanding' led to killing of Gaza medics, IDF inquiry says
Rosenberg: Is Putin's 'Easter truce' cause for scepticism or chance for peace?
'Why I hesitate to tell people I'm a Gypsy'
In pictures: Easter celebrated around the world from Greece to Iraq
Ukraine and Russia trade blame for breaking 'Easter truce'
Could an almighty eruption destroy a dreamy Greek island?
A death every three minutes: Why India's roads are among the world's deadliest
DHL suspends high value US deliveries over tariffs
Girl, 14, killed by lion in Kenya
Australian captured while fighting for Ukraine charged as mercenary
RAF jets intercept Russian aircraft near Nato airspace
US senator says 'traumatised' man deported to El Salvador moved to new prison
Could AI text alerts help save snow leopards from extinction?
Ten women, one guy: The risk-taking dating show that stirred Ethiopia
India's sword-wielding grandmother still going strong at 82
Hendrix's guitar ended up at the tip after 'first rock festival'
'Why I want an IVF baby to screen out gene that made me go blind'
These men put off doctor's visits again and again. Then came a tipping point
Inside the rural Texas town where Elon Musk is basing his business empire
King and Queen attend Easter Sunday church service
Earl Grey tea bread crowned Britain's best loaf
DR Congo bans ex-president's party over alleged rebel links
Oldest serving US astronaut returns to Earth on 70th birthday
Found on celebrity bags and in viral videos: The toy fashionistas are loving
2025 Sony World Photography Awards: Winners revealed
Police algorithm said Lina was at 'medium' risk. Then she was killed
Thousands join anti-Trump protests across US
Some families 'feel unsafe' after group puts up flags on lampposts
Business
Starmer and Trump discuss 'productive' trade talks
What we know about US-Ukraine minerals deal
Why everyone is suddenly so interested in US bond markets
Designed in US, made in China: Why Apple is stuck
Anxiety at US colleges as foreign students are detained and visas revoked
Firms say Meta not helping them to recover hacked accounts
US lays out plans to hit Chinese ships with port fees
Nvidia: The AI chip giant caught between US and China
PM Modi and Elon Musk talk India-US tech collaboration
Trump's tariffs leave China's neighbours with an impossible choice
No global recession despite US tariffs, says IMF
'My home is worth millions - but young people are priced out of this city'
Google has illegal advertising monopoly, judge rules
The rise and wobble of India's EV pioneer Ola
Trump and Meloni talk up chances of US trade deal with Europe
Trump administration threatens Harvard with foreign student ban
Trump attacks Fed boss Powell for not cutting interest rates
BluSmart breakdown - how Uber's EV rival in India collapsed
Tesla whistleblower wins latest legal battle in fight against Musk
Shein and Temu warn tariffs will raise prices in US
Why China curbing rare earth exports is a blow to the US
Innovation
'Biological reality': What genetics has taught us about race
Artists push back against AI dolls with their own creations
The genetic mystery of why some people develop autism
Quick home health tests: Check your reaction times
Is it finally safe to ditch your phone case? I put it to the test
The mystery of why some people develop ALS
Health bars and power ups: The 'freaky and unpleasant' world when video games leak into the physical realm
Choline: The underappreciated nutrient that's vital for our brains
How extinct animals could be brought back from the dead
AI could help decide where to build 5,400 homes
Influencers fuelling misogyny in schools, teachers say
I won't put my relationships online again, says Lilly Sabri
Wendy's praises Katy Perry after 'can we send her back' space tweet
Guernsey headteachers adapt to AI use in education
Culture
Three chords and the truth: Where country's big moment might go next
Albino hypnotist: I hypnotised myself to become a headline act
Andor: How the 'gangster' years of the young Joseph Stalin inspired the gritty Star Wars series
Race Across the World is back, and Self Esteem's new album: What's coming up this week
New exhibit to explore lost treasures of cathedral
Race Across the World winner on 'authentic travel' and how to do it
Singer Self Esteem: There were moments I considered giving up
Severance to Adolescence: 10 of the best TV shows of 2025 so far
The Fighting Temeraire: Why JMW Turner's greatest painting is so misunderstood
Coachella looks from Lady Gaga to Sabrina Carpenter – and the costumes that can make or break careers
'The epitome of what the horror film should be': How 1950s French horror Les Diaboliques inspired Psycho
'The elite of the criminal world': The men behind the Great Train Robbery
Warfare review: A combat epic that 'does what film does best'
'Really important stories': What nine rare 1800s photos reveal about US history
'We thought it was the end of the world': How the US dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain in 1966
Museum friends group charity closes after 75 years
Best-loved railway art unveiled after global vote
Elegant and eccentric - Easter bonnets on parade
Portraits to celebrate over 60s on the Isle of Man
How hard is it to stage a massive gig in a forest?
Popular natural history museum closes for upgrades
The ex-city trader who sold Malala painting for £51k
'I went from Suffolk to New York to pursue acting dream'
Arts
Couple who set up theatre 'overwhelmed' by its success
'We need £20k to refurbish our city's last theatre'
Bristol in Pictures: Easter fun across the city
Travel
The Peak District sights featured in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
The centuries-old baba recipe made with 96 egg yolks
Gatwick worst airport in UK for flight delays
Tourism tax 'risky economic move', says holiday let firm
Coach parking trial begins in busy village
Trespasser fears prompt calls for quick Oakwood sale
Beyond the buffet: Why all-inclusive resorts are sending guests off site
South Africa's new 'Big Five' safari destination
Chriselle Lim's self-care guide will have you googling flights to Seoul
Where to savour Rome's hidden Jewish food
The baffling purple honey found only in North Carolina
Thailand's cooling rice dish to beat the heat
Britain's tastiest town: Where Michelin chefs and gingerbread queens reign
What it's like to live in the happiest country on Earth
Songkran: The world's biggest water fight
Why Icelanders are happier than ever
Which US will tourists find when they visit?
Nine European vacation destinations to visit in 2025 if it's not your first time
The US's 2,000-year-old mystery mounds
A 58-tunnel slow train through India's Eastern Ghats
Earth
How alligators are breathing life into Florida's Everglades
Myanmar's capital Nay Pyi Taw to be redrawn following earthquake
Five dead as huge waves hit Australia coast
Wildlife trust's call to protect hoverfly 'heroes'
Solar farm plan for net-zero bid village
Litter group warns of beach dunes 'trashing'
Miliband accuses net zero opponents of 'nonsense and lies'
Scientists have a plan to save Italy's historic mussel farming sea – using plants
How climate change could affect arsenic in rice
Project to suck carbon out of sea begins in UK
Where bees won't go: The unloved pollinators of the underworld
Climate change is supercharging pollen and making allergies worse
Treading gently: The scientists who leave little trace at the world's northernmost lab
UK investigating claims green fuel contains virgin palm oil
Fur is firmly back in fashion - and even more divisive than ever
The polar bears living in an abandoned Arctic weather station
The Israeli military has said an "operational misunderstanding" led to the killing of 14 emergency workers in Gaza last month.
An inquiry into the incident by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) found a series of failings. It said the killing of a UN worker shortly afterwards was "a breach of orders during a combat setting".
It added that the deputy commander of the unit involved has been dismissed "for providing an incomplete and inaccurate report during the debrief".
Fourteen emergency workers and a UN worker were killed on 23 March after a convoy of Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances, a UN car and a fire truck came under fire by the Israeli military.
In a statement, the IDF said its troops opened fire believing they were facing a threat from enemy forces.
The IDF said its investigation found six of the casualties were Hamas members, and rejected there had been summary executions.
It did not produce evidence for any affiliation to Hamas, despite the names of those killed being in the public domain.
The report said the incident took place in what it called a "hostile and dangerous combat zone", and that the commander on the ground perceived an immediate and tangible threat after vehicles approached rapidly.
It also blamed "poor night visibility", which the IDF said meant the commander did not identify the vehicles as ambulances.
Israel originally claimed troops opened fire because the convoy approached "suspiciously" in darkness without headlights or flashing lights. It said movement of the vehicles had not been previously co-ordinated or agreed with the army.
But it later said that account was "mistaken" after a video found on the mobile phone of a medic showed the vehicles with their lights on and their emergency signals flashing.
In the footage, which is more than five minutes long, the paramedic says his last prayers before the voices of Israeli soldiers can be heard approaching the vehicles.
Last month the Trump administration proposed the idea of a 30-day comprehensive ceasefire.
Ukraine agreed. Russia did not. Or rather, it came up with a long list of conditions.
Instead of 30 days, the Kremlin decided on 30 hours. On Saturday, President Vladimir Putin announced a unilateral Easter truce in Ukraine until midnight Sunday night in Moscow.
He said he was acting out of "humanitarian" considerations.
Such a claim has been met with scepticism in Ukraine more than three years into Russia's war against the country.
Is Russia's Easter ceasefire simply PR from Vladimir Putin?
Or does it represent a genuine step towards ending the war?
The sceptical view is that a 30-hour truce is less about pushing for peace and has more to do with maintaining good relations with the Trump White House. Since Donald Trump's return to the Oval Office, Putin has been busy trying to repair ties with Washington and pave the way for a new era of co-operation.
However, recent public comments by American officials (including Trump himself) have suggested that the US administration has been growing impatient with the lack of progress on Ukraine. Trump has threatened to walk away from attempts to broker a peace deal if an agreement is looking unlikely.
By announcing a unilateral truce - albeit a short one - the Kremlin can argue that it is Russia - not Ukraine - that is committed to peace. Moscow is already blaming Kyiv for ceasefire violations and continued fighting.
Keep in mind, this brief ceasefire was declared at very short notice. Saturday's announcement will have given little time for either side - Russia or Ukraine - to fully prepare for it.
But there is also a more optimistic view.
The Kremlin's "Easter truce" was a surprise. But it did not come out of nowhere.
In recent weeks there has been intense international diplomacy to try to end the fighting.
Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff has met Putin three times in two months. The Kremlin leader's envoy Kirill Dmitriev flew to Washington recently.
A few days ago Mr Witkoff and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio were in Paris for talks on Ukraine with President Emmanuel Macron. A delegation from Ukraine was there too.
Might there be a rare window of opportunity for peace?
Despite the reports of continued fighting, could a 30-hour ceasefire somehow grow into something more substantial, more comprehensive?
Having displayed little desire for compromise or concessions up to this point, could Putin be persuaded that now is the moment to strike a deal?
It is hard to see that right now.
Then again, when it comes to diplomacy, we are not privy to all the conversations taking place behind closed doors or to the details of possible deals under discussion.
We tend to only see the tip of the iceberg - which leaves open the possibility of more unexpected announcements.
"Are they going to think I'm going to steal stuff from here?"
That's the question Chantelle remembers asking herself after starting a new job and wondering whether or not to share her Romany heritage.
Chantelle, 23 from Bedfordshire, says she's proud of her background but has sometimes been "nervous" to share it because of negative portrayals of her community in the media.
"When you watch films, it's always like, 'Oh, these are the Gypsies, they're the bad guys,'" she explains.
Chantelle features in Stacey Dooley's BBC documentary Growing Up Gypsy, which follows three young Romany women as they navigate everyday life.
The show comes as the charity Friends, Families and Travellers (FFT) - an organisation working to end discrimination against the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) community - says it regularly hears from Romany Gypsy women who feel pressure to hide their identity in professional or public spaces to avoid discrimination and hate.
Ebony, 23 from Nottinghamshire, works as a beautician and recalls a client at a previous job, who didn't know about her heritage, telling her she didn't want to park in a certain area because there were Gypsies living near there.
"And I was sat there, painting her nails, like: 'Little do you know'," she recalls thinking.
Romany Gypsies are one of the three ethnic groups within the GRT community. Some in the community prefer to refer to themselves as travellers, while others prefer to use the term Gypsy.
Presenter Dooley says she felt privileged to be invited into the community but that being with the women and their families has shown her "how unwelcome they can sometimes be made to feel".
It's something that as a Romany Gypsy myself, I've had conflicting feelings about.
Now 26, I'm incredibly proud of my heritage - it's often one of the first things I'll share about myself and I have incredible memories of summers spent in the cherry orchard where my family worked.
However, I didn't always feel that way. At school, I was reluctant to tell people about my identity for fear of being called a derogatory name and when I applied for university, my parents told me not to tick the GRT ethnicity box on the entrance form in case it hurt my chances of getting in.
I filled it in anyway, and have grown more confident in talking about my heritage but the hesitation is still there and is shared by many in the community today.
"There is a lot of hate and discrimination against travellers, and people don't get jobs because they're travellers," says Ebony, on why she's hidden her heritage in the past.
A spokesperson for the FFT says prejudice against the GRT community "remains widespread" and "too often goes unchallenged".
And in 2021, a YouGov poll organised by the FFT suggested that 22% of people surveyed would be uncomfortable employing a Gypsy or traveller.
However, Ebony also says she's had positive interactions with her employers when she did share her heritage and loves where she currently works.
Chantelle now enjoys working as a content creator, with more than 400,000 followers on TikTok, and is more open in speaking about her culture, explaining people online were really "interested" to learn more about her heritage.
Her content includes answering followers' questions about her community and making traditional dishes, like bacon pudding, which she learned to make from her grandmother.
However, she still sees negative comments, with some even claiming those who live in a house are not Gypsies, which Chantelle says shows a misunderstanding of how her culture works.
"It goes back in your generations and it's in your blood," she says.
Despite the comments, Chantelle continues to make videos and appreciates her heritage, explaining: "I know we get talked bad about and things like that, but I'm proud of it."
Ebony, meanwhile, hopes that people watching the documentary learn more about the GRT community and aren't so prejudiced towards them.
"I don't look at every non-traveller like you're a bad person," she says, adding that the community does experience that type of prejudice.
"That's what I would like people to sort of open their eyes to," she adds.
Christians around the world are celebrating Easter.
All Christians, from Orthodox and Western churches, are observing the holiday on the same day this year - not often the case because the churches use different calendars.
In Greece, the sky lit up with fireworks, while worshippers in Jerusalem lit candles at the church where Jesus is said to have been crucified and buried.
Here is a look at how some have been celebrating the holiday as days of festivities culminate in Easter Sunday.
Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of breaching a 30-hour "Easter truce" that was announced by the Russian president on Saturday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed Ukraine's front line had been hit by more than 46 Russian assaults since the start of the day on Sunday. The BBC has not independently verified these figures.
In response, Russia's defence ministry said it had "repelled" attempted assaults by Ukraine and accused Kyiv of launching hundreds of drones and shells, according to state media sources.
On Saturday, Putin said there would be an end to all hostilities from 16:00 BST on Saturday until 22:00 BST (midnight in Moscow) on Sunday. Kyiv said it would also adhere.
"For this period, I order all military actions to cease," Putin said in his announcement.
"We assume that the Ukrainian side will follow our example. At the same time, our troops must be ready to repel possible violations of the truce and provocations from the enemy, any of its aggressive actions."
However, Zelensky said Ukraine saw hundreds of attacks and drone launches on Sunday and that Putin's declaration of a truce amounted to a "PR" exercise.
Zelensky added that Vladimir Putin's words were "empty" and he accused the Kremlin of trying to create "a general impression of a ceasefire".
"This Easter has clearly demonstrated that the only source of this war, and the reason it drags on, is Russia," the president said on Sunday.
The Russian defence ministry insisted its troops had "strictly observed the ceasefire".
The surprise "Easter truce" announcement came shortly after US President Donald Trump threatened to "take a pass" on brokering further Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
Ukraine had said it would be ready to extend the truce, which is due to come to an end at midnight local time tonight (22:00 BST).
There were mixed reactions about the 30-hour truce from Ukrainians attending Easter morning services in Kyiv and the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk on Sunday.
"I do not think this man [Putin] has anything to do with humanity," 45-year-old lawyer Olena Poprych told Reuters news agency.
Meanwhile in Donetsk, where much of the city has been under Russian control since 2014, residents expressed similar distrust that Zelensky will stick to the terms of the ceasefire.
"I watched very closely his [Zelensky's] reactions," said Vladimir, who attended an Easter morning service in Donetsk. "There was nothing about the ceasefire... just some vague statements, not giving any confidence that we will not be shelled."
On Sunday, the British government described the proposed ceasefire as a "one day stunt", saying that the claimed truce involved "violations, including the killing and wounding of more innocent Ukrainians".
The statement from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said that the truce fitted the "pattern of previous fake ceasefires" and instead called for a longer 30 day pause in the fighting, as proposed by Ukraine.
"As ever, we see no evidence that President Putin is seriously preparing for peace," the FCDO statement said.
The US State Department also said it would welcome a ceasefire extension.
"We remain committed to achieving a full and comprehensive ceasefire," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement on Sunday.
"As we assess their seriousness in this instance, we would welcome it extending beyond Sunday."
Both Russia and Ukraine accused each other of breaking the ceasefire. Putin announced a one-day ceasefire in Ukraine until midnight Moscow time (2100 GMT) on Sunday.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of people - the vast majority of them soldiers - have been killed or injured on all sides.
The US has been directly talking to Russia as part of its efforts to end the war, but has struggled to make major progress.
Last month, Moscow came up with a long list of conditions in response to a full and unconditional ceasefire that had been agreed by the US and Ukraine.
On Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US was not "going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end", as it had "other priorities to focus on".
"We need to determine very quickly now - and I'm talking about a matter of days - whether or not this is doable," he added.
"If it's not going to happen, then we're just going to move on."
Perched on top of Santorini's sheer cliffs is a world-famous tourist industry worth millions. Underneath is the fizzing risk of an almighty explosion.
A huge ancient eruption created the dreamy Greek island, leaving a vast crater and a horse-shoe shaped rim.
Now scientists are investigating for the first time how dangerous the next big one could be.
BBC News spent a day on board the British royal research ship the Discovery as they searched for clues.
Just weeks before, nearly half of Santorini's 11,000 residents had fled for safety when the island shut down in a series of earthquakes.
It was a harsh reminder that under the idyllic white villages dotted with gyros restaurants, hot tubs in AirBnB rentals, and vineyards on rich volcanic soil, two tectonic plates grind in the Earth's crust.
Prof Isobel Yeo, an expert on highly dangerous submarine volcanoes with Britain's National Oceanography Centre, is leading the mission. Around two-thirds of the world's volcanoes are underwater, but they are hardly monitored.
"It's a bit like 'out of sight, out of mind' in terms of understanding their danger, compared to more famous ones like Vesuvius," she says on deck, as we watch two engineers winching a robot the size of a car off the ship's side.
This work, coming so soon after the earthquakes, will help scientists understand what type of seismic unrest could indicate a volcanic eruption is imminent.
Santorini's last eruption was in 1950, but as recently as 2012 there was a "period of unrest", says Isobel. Magma flowed into the volcanoes' chambers and the islands "swelled up".
"Underwater volcanoes are capable of really big, really destructive eruptions," she says.
"We are lulled into a sense of false security if you're used to small eruptions and the volcano acting safe. You assume the next will be the same - but it might not," she says.
The Hunga Tunga eruption in 2022 in the Pacific produced the largest underwater explosion ever recorded, and created a tsunami in the Atlantic with shockwaves felt in the UK. Some islands in Tonga, near the volcano, were so devastated that their people have never returned.
Beneath our feet on the ship, 300m (984ft) down, are bubbling hot vents. These cracks in the Earth turn the seafloor into a bright orange world of protruding rocks and gas clouds.
"We know more about the surface of some planets than what's down there," Isobel says.
The robot descends to the seabed to collect fluids, gases and snap off chunks of rock.
Those vents are hydrothermal, meaning hot water pours out from cracks, and they often form near volcanoes.
They are why Isobel and 22 scientists from around the world are on this ship for a month.
So far, no-one has been able to work out if a volcano becomes more or less explosive when sea water in these vents mixes with magma.
"We are trying to map the hydrothermal system," Isobel explains. It's not like making a map on land. "We have to look inside the earth," she says.
The Discovery is investigating Santorini's caldera and sailing out to Kolombo, the other major volcano in this area, about 7km (4.3 miles) north-east of the island.
The two volcanoes are not expected to erupt imminently, but it is only a matter of time.
The expedition will create data sets and geohazard maps for Greece's Civil Protection Agency, explains Prof Paraskevi Nomikou, a member of the government emergency group that met daily during the earthquake crisis.
She is from Santorini, and grew up hearing about past earthquakes and eruptions from her grandfather. The volcano inspired her to become a geologist.
"This research is very important because it will inform local people how active the volcanoes are, and it will map the area that will be forbidden to access during an eruption," she says.
It will reveal which parts of the Santorini sea floor are the most hazardous, she adds.
These missions are incredibly expensive, so Isobel crams in experiments night and day as the scientists work in 12-hour shifts.
John Jamieson, a professor at Canada's Memorial University in Newfoundland, shows us volcanic rocks extracted from the vents.
"Don't pick that one up," he warns. "It's full of arsenic."
Pointing to another that looks like a black and orange meringue with gold dusting, he explains: "This is a real mystery - we don't even know what it is made of."
These rocks tell the history of the fluid, temperature and material inside the volcano. "This is a geological environment different to most others - it's really exciting," he says.
But the mission's beating heart is a dark shipping container on deck where four people stare at screens mounted on a wall.
Using a joystick that wouldn't look out of a place on a gaming console, two engineers drive the underwater robot. Isobel and Paraskevi trade theories about what is in a pool of fluid that the robot has found.
They have recorded very small earthquakes around the volcano, caused by fluid moving through the system and causing fractures. Isobel plays us an audio recording of the fractures reverberating. It sounds like the bass in a nightclub being amped up and down.
They identify how fluid moves through rocks by pulsing an electromagnetic field into the earth.
This is creating a 3D map that shows how the hydrothermal system is connected to the volcano's magma chamber where an eruption is generated.
"We are doing science for the people, not science for the scientists. We are here to make people feel safe," Paraskevi says.
The recent earthquake crisis in Santorini highlighted how exposed the island's residents are to the seismic threats and how reliant they are on tourism.
Back on dry land, photographer Eva Rendl meets me in her favourite location for wedding shoots. When the so-called swarm of earthquakes hit in February, she left the island with her daughter.
"It was really scary, as it got more and more intense," she says.
She's back now but business is slower. "People have cancelled bookings. Normally I start shoots in April but my first job isn't until May," Eva says.
In the main square of Santorini's upmarket town Oia, British-Canadian tourist Janet tells us six of her group of 10 cancelled their holiday.
She believes more accurate scientific information about the likelihood of earthquakes and volcanoes would help others feel more reassured about visiting.
"I get the Google alerts, I get the scientists' alerts, and it helps me feel safe," she said.
But Santorini will always be a dream destination. In Imerovigli, we see two people climbing onto the curved rooftops to get the perfect shot.
The couple - married for just 15 minutes - travelled from Latvia and were not put off by the island's underwater risks.
"Actually we wanted to get married by a volcano," Tom says, his bride Kristina by his side.
Additional reporting by Tom Ingham and Kevin Church, Climate and science team
Every morning, India's newspapers are filled with reports of road accidents - passenger buses plunging into mountain gorges, drunk drivers mowing down pedestrians, cars crashing into stationary trucks and two-wheelers being knocked down by larger vehicles.
These daily tragedies underscore a silent crisis: in 2023 alone, more than 172,000 people lost their lives on Indian roads, averaging 474 deaths each day or nearly one every three minutes.
Although the official crash report for 2023 has yet to be released, Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari cited the data to paint a grim picture at a road safety event in December.
Among the dead that year were 10,000 children. Accidents near schools and colleges accounted for another 10,000 fatalities, while 35,000 pedestrians lost their lives. Two-wheeler riders also bore the brunt of fatalities. Over-speeding typically emerged as the single biggest cause.
A lack of basic safety precautions also proved deadly: 54,000 people died due to not wearing helmets and 16,000 from not wearing seatbelts.
Other major causes included overloading, which led to 12,000 deaths, and driving without a valid licence, which factored in 34,000 crashes. Driving on the wrong side also contributed to fatalities.
In 2021, 13% of accidents involved drivers with a learner permit or no valid licence. Many vehicles on the road are old and missing basic safety features like seatbelts - let alone airbags.
This hazardous road environment is further complicated by India's chaotic traffic mix.
A bewildering array of users crowds India's roads. There are motorised vehicles like cars, buses and motorcycles vying for space with non-motorised transport such as bicycles, cycle rickshaws and handcarts, animal-drawn carts, pedestrians and stray animals. Hawkers encroach upon roads and footpaths to sell their wares, forcing pedestrians onto busy roads and further complicating traffic flow.
Despite efforts and investments, India's roads remain among the most unsafe in the world. Experts say this is a crisis rooted not just in infrastructure, but in human behaviour, enforcement gaps and systemic neglect. Road crashes impose a significant economic burden, costing India 3% of its annual GDP.
India has the world's second-largest road network, spanning 6.6m kilometres (4.1m miles), just after the US. National and state highways together make up about 5% of the total network, while other roads - including gleaming access-controlled expressways - account for the rest. There are an estimated 350 million registered vehicles.
Gadkari told the road safety meeting that many road accidents happen because people lack respect and fear for the law.
"There are several reasons for accidents, but the biggest is human behaviour," he said.
Yet that's only part of the picture. Just last month, Gadkari pointed to poor civil engineering practices - flawed road design, substandard construction and weak management - along with inadequate signage and markings, as key contributors to the alarmingly high road accident rate.
"The most important culprits are civil engineers... Even small things like the road signages and marking system are very poor in the country," he said.
Since 2019, his ministry reported 59 major deficiencies in national highways, including cave-ins, Gadkari told the parliament last month. Of the 13,795 identified accident-prone "black spots", only 5,036 have undergone long-term rectification.
Over the years, road safety audits, conducted by the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre (TRIPP) at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, have uncovered serious flaws in India's road infrastructure.
Take crash barriers. These are meant to safely stop vehicles that stray off the road - without flipping them over. But in many places, they're doing the opposite.
Despite clear standards for height, spacing and installation, on-ground reality often tells a different story: the metal barriers at the wrong height, mounted on concrete bases, or poorly placed. These flaws can cause a vehicle, especially a truck or bus, to flip over instead of being safely stopped.
"Unless installed exactly as specified, crash barriers can do more harm than good," Geetam Tiwari, emeritus professor of civil engineering at IIT Delhi, told the BBC.
Then there are the tall medians - or road dividers, as they are locally called. On high-speed roads, medians are supposed to gently separate traffic moving in the opposite direction. They shouldn't be taller than 10cm (3.9in) but, audits show, many are.
When a high-speed vehicle's tyre hits a vertical median, it generates heat, risks a tyre burst, or even lifts the vehicle off the ground - leading to dangerous rollovers. Many medians in India are simply not designed keeping this threat in mind.
A stretch of a highway near the capital, Delhi, stands as a stark example - a road slicing through dense settlements on both sides without safety measures to protect residents. Throngs of people precariously stand on the medians as high-speed traffic whizzes by.
And then there are the raised carriageways. On many rural roads, repeated resurfacing has left the main road towering six to eight inches above the shoulder.
That sudden drop can be deadly - especially if a driver swerves to avoid an obstacle. Two-wheelers are most at risk, but even cars can skid, tip, or flip. With every layer added, the danger just keeps rising, experts say.
Clearly, India's road design standards are solid on paper - but poorly enforced on the ground.
"One key issue is that non-compliance with safety standards attracts minimal penalties. Contracts often don't clearly spell out these requirements, and payments are typically linked to kilometres constructed - not to adherence to safety norms," says Prof Tiwari.
Minister Gadkari recently announced an ambitious plan to upgrade 25,000km of two-lane highways to four lanes. "It will help reduce accidents on the roads significantly," he said.
Experts like Kavi Bhalla of the University of Chicago are sceptical. Mr Bhalla, who has worked on road safety in low and middle-income countries, argues that India's road designs often mimic Western models, ignoring the country's unique traffic and infrastructure needs.
"There is no reason to believe that road widening will lead to fewer traffic deaths. There is a lot of evidence that road upgradation in India results in higher traffic speeds, which is lethal to pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists," he says.
"A key issue is that new roads in India simply copy road designs used in the US and Europe, where the traffic environment is very different. India is trying to build US-style highway infrastructure but not investing in US-style highway safety engineering research and crash data systems," Mr Bhalla adds.
To tackle the escalating road safety crisis, the government is "implementing" the "5Es" strategy: engineering of roads, engineering of vehicles, education, enforcement and emergency care, says KK Kapila of the International Road Federation. (According to a report by the Law Commission of India, timely emergency medical care could have saved 50% of road crash fatalities.)
Mr Kapila is helping the federal government with a road safety plan. He says seven key states were asked to identify their most accident-prone stretches. After implementing targeted interventions based on the 5Es framework, these stretches "have become the safest" in their states, he told me.
Most economists agree building more roads is key to India's growth, but it must be sustainable and not take priority over the lives of pedestrians and cyclists.
"The price of development shouldn't be borne by the poorest segments of society. The only way to learn how to build such roads is to try to do interventions, evaluate if they improved safety and, if they didn't help, modify them and evaluate again," says Mr Bhalla. If that doesn't happen, roads will only get smoother, cars faster - and more people will die.
Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, X and Facebook.
DHL Express is suspending deliveries to the US worth more than $800 (£603) because of a "significant increase" in red tape at customs following the intruduction of Donald Trump's new tariff regime.
The delivery giant said it will temporarily stop shipments from companies in all countries to American consumers on Monday "until further notice".
It added that business-to-business shipments will still go ahead, "though they may also face delays".
Previously, packages worth up to $2,500 could enter the US with minimal paperwork but due to tighter customs checks that came into force alongside Trump's tariffs earlier this month, the threshold has been lowered.
DHL said that the change "has caused a surge in formal customs clearances, which we are handling around the clock".
It said that while it is working to "scale up and manage this increase, shipments woth over $800, regardless of origin, may experience multi-day delays".
The company said it will still deliver packages worth less than $800, which can be sent to the US with minimal checks.
But the White House is set to clamp down on deliveries under $800 - specifically those sent from China and Hong Kong - on 2 May when it closes a loophole allowing low-value packages to enter the US without incurring any duties.
The removal of the so-called "de minimis" rule will impact the likes of the fast-fashion firm Shein and Temu, the low-cost retail giant.
Shein and Temu have both warned that they will increase prices "due to recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs".
The Trump administration has claimed that "many shippers" in China "hide illicit substances and conceal the true contents of shipments sent to the US through deceptive shipping practices".
Under an excutive order, the White House said the measures were aimed at "addressing the synthetic opioid supply chain" which it said "play a significant role in the synthetic opioid crisis in the US".
Beijing has said that the opioid fentanyl is a "US problem" and China has the strictest drug policies in the world.
Last week, Hongkong Post said it was suspending packages sent to the US by sea and, from 27 April, would stop accepting parcels destined for America.
It said: "The US is unreasonable, bullying and imposing tariffs abusively."
A 14-year-old girl has been killed by a lion on the outskirts of Nairobi, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said.
The child was snatched from a residential compound on a ranch next to Nairobi National Park, according to the conservation agency.
The alarm was raised by another teenager and KWS rangers followed tracks to the nearby Mbagathi River, where they found the primary school girl's remains.
The lion has not been found but KWS said it had set a trap and deployed search teams to look for the animal.
The agency added that additional security measures had been taken to prevent any further attacks.
Nairobi National Park lies just 10km (six miles) from the city centre and is home to animals such as lions, buffalos, giraffes, leopards and cheetahs.
It is fenced on three sides to stop animals roaming into the city but it is open to the south to allow animals to migrate in and out of the area.
While lions often come into conflict with humans in Kenya, especially over livestock, it is not common for people to be killed.
Last year, CCTV footage captured the moment a lion snatched a Rottweiler dog from another home near Nairobi National Park.
KWS also reported that a 54-year-old man was killed by an elephant on Saturday. The incident happened in the central Nyeri country, about 130km (80 miles) north of Nairobi.
The elephant was grazing in Mere Forest when it attacked the man, who sustained serious chest injuries, fractured ribs and internal trauma.
He was taken to hospital where he died from his injuries.
Additional reporting by Ruth Nesoba in Nairobi
Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.
Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
An Australian man who was captured by Russian forces while fighting for Ukraine has been charged with being a mercenary in an armed conflict, authorities have said.
Oscar Jenkins, a 33-year-old teacher, was captured in December 2024, the prosecutor's office in the occupied Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine said.
The office said it had "approved the indictment" against him under Russia's criminal code.
Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australian officials "certainly have not" abandoned Mr Jenkins and "continue to make representations" on his behalf in response to a question from a reporter on Saturday.
Albanese told reporters that Australia will "stand up and use whatever avenues" at its disposal to make those representations.
The prosecutor's office said Mr Jenkins arrived in Ukraine in February 2024 and took part in military operations against Russians.
They alleged he was paid 600,000-800,000 rubles (£5,504-£7,339) a month.
Prosecutors said he would appear in court.
A video surfaced in December last year showing Mr Jenkins with his hands tied, being hit in the face and questioned by Russian forces. They ask him if he is being paid to fight in Ukraine.
At the time, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong called for his release, and for all prisoners of war to be treated in accordance with international humanitarian law.
Mr Jenkins has been charged in the occupied Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, a province annexed by Moscow in 2022 that was previously under almost complete Russian control.
Just before launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognised all of Luhansk and Donetsk as independent of Ukraine. Russian proxy forces began an insurgency there in 2014.
Last month, a British man James Scott Rhys Anderson, 22, was jailed for 19 years by a Russian military court after being charged with terrorism and mercenary activity when he was captured in Russia's Kursk region in November 2024.
He is the first British national to be convicted by Russia during the war.
Two Russian aircraft flying close to Nato airspace were detected by British fighter jets in separate incidents earlier this week, the UK's Ministry of Defence has said.
A pair of RAF Typhoons were scrambled to intercept a Russian Ilyushin Il-20M "Coot-A" intelligence aircraft over the Baltic Sea on 15 April, while another two Typhoons intercepted an unknown aircraft leaving the Kaliningrad airspace on 17 April.
The two intercepts, which took off from Malbork Air Base in Poland, were part of the UK's contribution to Nato's enhanced air policing.
They were the RAF's first intercepts since aircraft arrived in the region to begin the defence of Nato's eastern flank, working alongside Sweden.
The UK's involvement in Nato's enhanced air policing is called Operation Chessman and sees personnel from across the RAF deployed to Malbork alongside Sweden, Nato's newest member.
The undertaking follows Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's commitment to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP.
Minister for the Armed Forces Luke Pollard said that the UK was "unshakable" in its commitment to Nato.
"With Russian aggression growing and security threats on the rise, we are stepping up to reassure our Allies, deter adversaries and protect our national security through our Plan for Change," he said.
Mr Pollard added that the "mission shows our ability to operate side by side with NATO's newest member Sweden and to defend the Alliance's airspace wherever and whenever needed, keeping us safe at home and strong abroad".
Scrambling RAF jets not uncommon
This is not the first time RAF jets have been used to intercept Russian aircraft.
Last year, two Typhoons based at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland were scrambled after a Russian Bear-F bomber flew over the North Sea.
At the time, the MoD said the Russian reconnaissance plane had been detected in the UK's "area of interest", but had not been able to enter UK sovereign airspace.
Fifty Russian aircraft were also intercepted by RAF pilots based at Lossiemouth in 2023, when 21 aircraft were intercepted in a 21-day period.
In a separate incident in 2023, Typhoon fighters and a Norwegian F-35A fighter aircraft were launched as part of Nato's response to a Russian aircraft near Uk airspace.
Incidents like this - known as quick reaction alerts - are not uncommon and involve RAF crews shadowing Russian military aircraft near UK airspace and during operations further afield, if necessary. They have occurred since the Cold War era.
Intercepts are not just used to track Russian aircraft, though. In October 2024, RAF fighters were scrambled to intercept a civilian airliner which had reported a bomb on board.
Afterwards, an RAF spokesman said the alert ended without incident, and the Boeing 777-300 "was released to continue to its original destination".
A Maryland man who the Trump administration mistakenly deported to El Salvador has been moved to a new prison, US Senator Chris Van Hollen has said.
The Democratic senator was speaking after returning from El Salvador where he met Kilmar Ábrego García, who was sent to the notorious mega-jail Cecot (Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism) last month.
Mr Ábrego García was "traumatised" and fearful of other prisoners while inside the facility, Van Hollen said, adding that he was moved to another facility in the country over a week ago.
The Supreme Court has ordered the government to "facilitate" his return, however Trump administration officials have continued to push back against the order.
The White House accuses him of being a member of the transnational Salvadoran gang MS-13, a designated foreign terrorist organisation, and has said he will not return to the US.
Mr Ábrego García has never been convicted of a crime. His family and attorneys have fiercely denied he is a member of MS-13.
Chris Van Hollen said he was initially blocked from meeting Mr Ábrego García by Salvadoran authorities. Later, he said government officials helped facilitate a meeting and Mr Ábrego García was brought to the senator's hotel.
"His conversation with me was the first communication that he had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted," Van Hollen said.
"He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crimes."
Van Hollen added that conditions in the new prison, in the Salvadoran city of Santa Ana, were better.
"He still has no access to any news from the outside world and no ability to communicate with anybody in the outside world," Van Hollen said.
Mr Ábrego García's case is part of a simmering showdown between the Trump administration and the US courts system on the issue of immigration.
A separate feud has been brewing after a judge said he could hold the Trump administration in contempt for its "wilful disregard" of his order barring deportation flights.
Multiple judges - including a unanimous US Supreme Court ruling - said the government should facilitate Mr Ábrego García's return to the US. But the White House has insisted the Maryland man will "never" live in the US again.
"If he [Mr Ábrego García] ever ends up back in the United States, he would immediately be deported again," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
Snow leopards cannot growl. So when we step towards one of these fierce predators, she's purring.
"Lovely," as she's called, was orphaned and rescued 12 years ago in Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan.
After years of relying on staff to feed her, she does not know how to hunt in the wild - and cannot be set free.
"If we release her, she would just go attack a farmer's sheep and get killed," Lovely's caretaker, Tehzeeb Hussain, tells us.
Despite laws protecting them, between 221 to 450 snow leopards are killed each year, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) says, which has contributed to a 20% decline in the global population over the past two decades.
More than half of these deaths were in retaliation for the loss of livestock.
Now, scientists estimate that just 4,000 to 6,000 snow leopards are left in the wild - with roughly 300 of these in Pakistan, the third-largest population in the world.
To try and reverse these worrying trends, the WWF - with the help of Pakistan's Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) - has developed cameras powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Their aim is to detect a snow leopard's presence and warn villagers via text message to move their livestock to safety.
Tall, with a solar panel mounted on top, the cameras are positioned high among barren and rugged mountains at nearly 3,000m (9,843ft).
"Snow leopard territory," says Asif Iqbal, a conservationist from WWF Pakistan. He walks us a few more steps and points to tracks on the ground: "These are pretty new."
Asif hopes this means the camera has recorded more evidence that the AI software - which allows it to differentiate between humans, other animals and snow leopards - is working.
Trial and error
The WWF is currently testing 10 cameras, deployed across three villages in Gilgit-Baltistan. It has taken three years to train the AI model to detect these categories with impressive - if not perfect - accuracy.
Once we're back down the mountain, Asif pulls up his computer and shows me a dashboard. There I am, in a series of GIFs. It correctly detects I'm a human. But as we scroll down the list, I come up again, and this time I'm listed as both a human and an animal. I'm wearing a thick white fleece, so I forgive the programme.
Then, Asif shows me the money shot. It's a snow leopard, recorded a few nights prior, in night-vision. He pulls up another one from the week before. It's a snow leopard raising its tail against a nearby rock. "It's a mother leopard, looks like she's marking her territory," Asif says.
Setting up the cameras in rocky, high-altitude areas took a lot of trial and error. The WWF went through several types of batteries until it found one that could withstand the harsh winters. A specific paint was chosen to avoid reflecting light as animals pass by.
If the cellular service fails in the mountains, the device continues recording and capturing data locally. But the team has had to accept there are some problems they simply cannot solve.
While the camera lens is protected by a metallic box, they've had to replace solar panels damaged by landslides.
Doubt in the community
It is not just the technology that has caused problems. Getting the local community's buy-in has also been a challenge. At first, some were suspicious and doubted whether the project could help them or the snow leopards.
"We noticed some of the wires had been cut," Asif says. "People had thrown blankets over the cameras."
The team also had to be mindful of the local culture and the emphasis on women's privacy. Cameras had to be moved because women were walking by too often.
Some villages still have yet to sign consent and privacy forms, which means the technology cannot be rolled out in their area just yet. The WWF wants a binding promise that local farmers will not give poachers access to the footage.
Sitara lost all six of her sheep in January. She says she had taken them to graze on land above her home but that a snow leopard attacked them.
"It was three to four years of hard work raising those animals, and it all ended in one day," she says.
The loss of her livelihood left her bedridden for several days. When asked if she is hopeful the AI cameras could help in the future, she replies: "My phone barely gets any service during the day, how can a text help?"
At a gathering of village elders, leaders of the Khyber village explain how attitudes have changed over the years, and that a growing proportion of their village understands the importance of snow leopards and their impact on the ecosystem.
According to the WWF, snow leopards hunt ibex and blue sheep, which stops these animals from overgrazing and helps to preserve grasslands so villagers can feed their livestock.
But not all are convinced. One local farmer questions the benefits of the animals.
"We used to have 40 to 50 sheep, now we've only got four or five, and the reason is the threat from snow leopards and from ibex eating the grass," he says.
Climate change also has a part to play in why some feel threatened by snow leopards. Scientists say warming temperatures have led villagers to move their crops and livestock to higher areas in the mountains, encroaching on snow leopards' own habitat, making livestock more of a target.
Whether the villagers are convinced by the conservation message or not, the WWF tells us legal penalties have served as a strong deterrent in recent years. Three men were jailed in 2020 after killing a snow leopard in Hoper valley, about a two-hour drive from Khyber. One of them had posted photos of himself with the dead animal on social media.
While those involved in the camera project are hopeful their AI devices can have an impact, they know they cannot be the sole solution.
In September, they are going to start trialling smells, sounds and lights at the camera sites to try to deter snow leopards from moving onto nearby villages, putting themselves and livestock in jeopardy.
Their work tracking these "ghosts of the mountains" is not over yet.
Boy meets girl. Girl falls for boy. Girl fends off love rivals and boy - finally - declares his affection for her.
If you are a fan of reality TV dating shows, you will have seen several variations of this plot - it is a well-worn storyline that has played out on the likes of Love Island, Love is Blind and The Bachelor.
But in Ethiopia, this romantic scenario has broken convention.
Content creator Bethel Getahun won over insurance agent Messiah Hailemeskel in Latey: Looking for Love - a reality TV show that ignited debates about dating norms in the conservative East African country.
Latey's premise mirrored that of the aforementioned hit US show, The Bachelor (in fact, Latey is Amharic for bachelor/bachelorette).
Ten women had to compete for the affection of Mr Messiah, a 38-year-old Ethiopian-American who grew up and lives in Dallas.
Throughout the series, the women battled it out in boxing matches, basketball contests and even a bizarre contest where they had to devise a TV advert for a mattress, à la The Apprentice.
Broadcast on YouTube, Lately is a rare dating programme in a country where courtship is traditionally a private affair.
Winning such a ground-breaking show felt "surreal", 25-year-old Ms Bethel told the BBC's Focus on Africa podcast. Weeks on from the finale, which racked up more than 620,000 views, her victory still "feels like a badge of honour".
Of course, not everyone feels the same way.
"The concept of a dating show is entirely [a] Western idea," says Ethiopian vlogger Semere Kassaye.
"Dating in Ethiopia has always been a private matter, something that is nurtured carefully and only brought to the attention of family or society when it reaches a level of maturity."
Mr Semere, aged 41, also feels that the show devalues women, treating them as objects to be acquired.
Several viewers voiced the same opinion - one commenter on YouTube wrote: "Ladies, you are not an object that the one with money can easily pick you up."
Another asked: "Lots of creativity on the production but if it is against the culture, what is the point?"
Ms Bethel agrees that the concept of women openly competing for a man clashes with Ethiopian traditions, but insists that the show is more than its central premise.
"The whole point of the show is to represent different kinds of women," she says.
"If you have seen the episodes, you can see every woman in that episode has a lot of different struggles, backgrounds, and all different kinds of stuff that hasn't really been expressed or represented in media in Ethiopia."
Arguably, Latey succeeds in this respect. The women - who include hotel managers, flight attendants and accountants - swiftly bond, sharing their personal stories with each other and the viewers.
In one of the more heart-breaking scenes, actress Vivian divulges that she fled to Ethiopia from Eritrea, a neighbouring country that enforces indefinite military conscription for all able-bodied citizens. It has also been widely accused of human rights violations.
Vivian travelled alone to Ethiopia and has not seen her mother in five years.
"I miss her so much," she says tearfully.
Elsewhere, Rahel, a model, explains that she dropped out of school to take on multiple jobs and provide for her siblings, while other women have emotional conversations about grief and their reverence for those who raised them.
By baring these women's realities - and their romantic desires - Latey cemented its place as the "content of its times", producer Metasebia Yoseph tells the BBC.
Ms Metasebia, co-founder of D!nkTV, Latey's production company, says the show "rocked the boat", but is far from an affront to Ethiopian culture.
"Number one - it is not hyper-sexualised," she says.
"We leave it on the more innocent, get-to-know-you, stages of dating."
She says the show also asks its viewers to interrogate the concept of culture "sparking dialogue about 'What is our culture? Are we a monolith?'"
Adapting a universal reality TV formula to Ethiopia has delighted many, with one fan commenting: "I totally love the risk-taking, considering how reserved we are as a society... I have always wanted to see other shows in Ethiopian version. This is a ground-breaking moment."
A second viewer wrote: "I never imagined watching The Bachelor in Ethiopia, but you have done an excellent job bringing it to life."
Off the back of this success, D!nk TV is planning a second series.
This time, Ms Metasebia says, a single woman could be the one picking her match from 10 male hopefuls.
"We're getting a lot of feedback from the audience, people want to see the roles reversed," she explains.
As for Ms Bethel and Mr Messiah? Sadly, their love story has come to a halt.
"It is long distance because he's in America right now with his son. So it's really difficult... I don't know where it's going to go, basically," she says.
But Ms Bethel is still close to some of her fellow contestants, who she fondly refers to as her "sorority".
She is proud that Latey showcased "the romantic side of Ethiopia" and believes the show will lead to better representations of women in Ethiopian media.
"It is a new way of showcasing women and how they express themselves," she says.
"It is a new way of seeing."
Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.
Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
An 82-year-old woman who teaches the ancient Indian martial art of Kalaripayattu says she has no plans to retire.
"I'll probably practise Kalari until the day I die," says Meenakshi Raghavan, widely thought to be the oldest woman in the world to practise the art form.
Kalaripayattu - kalari means battleground and payattu means fight - is believed to have originated at least 3,000 years back in the southern state of Kerala and is regarded as India's oldest martial art.
It is not solely practised for combat or fighting; it also serves to instil discipline, build strength and develop self-defence skills.
Ms Raghavan is fondly known as Meenakshi Amma - Amma means mother in the Malayalam language - in Kerala's Vadakara, where she lives. The town is also home to other renowned exponents of the art like Unniyarcha, Aromal Chekavar and Thacholi Othenan.
Meenakshi Amma occasionally performs in other cities but mainly runs her own Kalari school, founded by her husband in 1950. Her days are busy, with classes from five in the morning to noon.
"I teach about 50 students daily. My four children were also trained [in the art form] by me and my husband. They started learning from the age of six," she says.
Kalaripayattu has four stages and it requires patience to learn the art form.
Training begins with meypattu - an oil massage followed by exercises to condition the body.
After about two years, students progress to kolthari (stick fighting), then to angathari (weapon combat), and finally to verumkai - the highest level, involving unarmed combat. It typically takes up to five years to master Kalaripayattu.
Kung fu is believed to have adapted principles like breathing techniques and marmashastra (stimulating vital points to optimise energy flow) from Kalaripayattu, according to Vinod Kadangal, another Kalari teacher.
Legend has it that around the 6th Century, Indian Buddhist monk Bodhidharma introduced these techniques to the Shaolin monks, influencing the more famous Chinese martial art.
Meenakshi Amma still recalls the first time she stepped into a Kalari - the red-earth arena where the art is practised - 75 years ago.
"I was seven and quite good at dancing. So my guru - VP Raghavan - approached my father and suggested that I learn Kalaripayattu. Just like dance, the art form requires you to be flexible," she says.
Hailing from Kerala's Thiyya community, Meenakshi Amma's guru was 15 when he and his brothers opened their own Kalaripayattu school after being denied admission elsewhere because of their low social caste.
"There was no bias when it came to girls enrolling to study Kalari - in fact, physical education was compulsory in all Kerala schools at that time. But we were expected to stop after attaining puberty," she says.
Unlike others, Meenakshi Amma's father encouraged her training into her late teens. At 17, she fell in love with Raghavan, and they soon married. Together, they went on to train hundreds of students, often for free.
"At the time, a lot of children came from poor families. The only money he [Raghavan] accepted was in the form of dakshina or a tribute paid to the teacher," she says.
Donations sustained the school, while Raghavan later took a teaching job for extra income. After his death in 2007, Meenakshi Amma formally took charge.
While she has no plans to retire at the moment, she hopes to hand over the school one day to her eldest son Sanjeev.
The 62-year-old, who is also an instructor at the school, says he is lucky to have learnt from the best - his mother. But being her son earns no favours; he says she's still his toughest opponent.
Meenakshi Amma is a local celebrity. During our interview, three politicians drop by to invite her to an awards ceremony.
"Amma, you must grace us with your presence," one of them says with folded hands.
"Thank you for considering me, I'll attend," she replies.
Her students speak of "fierce admiration" for her. Many have opened their own Kalari schools across the state, a source of great pride for Meenakshi Amma.
"She's an inspiration to women everywhere - a rare person who shows love and affection to her students, yet remains a strict disciplinarian when it comes to Kalari," says KF Thomas, a former student.
Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, X and Facebook.
The 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in the US is often cited as having been the first rock festival. But weeks earlier, thousands of fans crowded round a shed in Lincolnshire to watch some of music's biggest names perform.
"What you've got to remember is this was a shed," says record shop owner Alan Barnsdale, recalling the Tulip Bulb Auction Hall in Spalding, Lincolnshire.
"It was an auction house for selling off [flower] bulbs and commodities like that. No windows. There was nothing there."
And yet, on Monday 29 May 1967, history was made when the likes of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and The Move performed there to eager fans.
By luck or foresight, Barbeque 67 set the tone for what was to come.
"[It] was the first British rock festival, really, although nobody knew it was at the time," says Bev Bevan, the drummer from Electric Light Orchestra and The Move.
"It was groundbreaking."
Hendrix was among the attractions, but the day did not go too well for the legendary guitarist.
"He was not happy with the sound at all," remembers Bev. "He just couldn't get his guitar to sound like he wanted it to."
Local historian Doug Kendall was in the crowd that day.
"I think it was possibly the only time in history that Hendrix was heckled," he says.
Also on the line-up was Sounds Force Five. Drummer Colin Ward remembers the young guitarist kicking his amplifiers before taking his frustration one step further.
"He set fire to his guitar with lighter fuel, which was quite funny at the time, and then he threw that off stage," Colin recalls.
"Sadly, that guitar ended up on the council tip. Had we had the foresight of keeping it, it would be worth thousands now."
It was a gimmick Hendrix repeated to great acclaim the following month at the Monterey Pop Festival, which is widely regarded as launching his career in the US.
Hendrix and his frustration was just one of many odd moments at this curious festival.
Pink Floyd played to only a few hundred people, because there were too few turnstiles to allow the thousands of fans inside in time to see their set.
Later, there were so many people in the auction room that punters were pushed under the stage and watched through cracks in the floorboards.
And on the night of the gig, Hendrix was reported to have attracted the attention of plenty of adoring female fans outside his hotel window.
But its quirkiness was a product of the fact that nobody had done it before.
"It was one of the best festivals I ever did and the people running that festival... had it down, man. It was fantastic," singer Geno Washington says.
Washington and his Ram Jam Band headlined the gig and it is one he still remembers fondly.
"I can't see why they didn't do it again because it was huge, man," Geno adds.
'It was overshadowed'
It is believed the festival attracted a crowd of between 4,000 and 6,000, and there were many more outside unable to gain entry.
However, despite its popularity on the day, it didn't make that many headlines due to the release of an iconic Beatles album the Friday before the event.
"Sgt Pepper was released and it took over the rock press," Doug recalls.
"So, a little event in Spalding didn't raise the same interest.
"I think that it's something that needs publicity because not many people actually knew, even at the time, that it took place."
The auction room was eventually demolished and the area is now occupied by Halfords and Argos.
On the streets of Spalding today, most people have never heard of Barbeque 67.
One person asks if it is a "kind of sauce", another wonders if it is an "American barbecue" and one asks if it is a "kind of restaurant".
Despite a Blue Plaque marking the hotel where Hendrix stayed, many people in the town have no idea of the musical heritage on their doorstep or whose guitar might be languishing at the bottom of a nearby landfill site.
Listen to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
Blind content creator and TikTok star Lucy Edwards says she's "so excited" to be on a health kick to undergo IVF, but reveals the dilemma she faced in deciding to screen out the very gene that made her blind.
"I'm so broody," the 29-year-old tells the BBC Access All podcast.
Lucy and her husband Ollie married at Kew Gardens two years ago and are now ready to start a family - but there are complications to consider.
Lucy has the rare genetic condition Incontinentia Pigmenti (IP) and lost her sight due to this aged 17, just months after meeting Ollie.
The condition runs through the female line - Lucy's mum has IP although isn't blind, her Grandma did too and her great-aunt was blind in one eye.
Lucy is totally blind, but, if she had been a boy, she may not have survived.
The abnormal IP gene is located on the X chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes, while males have X and Y, meaning the appearance of the gene can be more catastrophic in male pregnancies.
"My grandma actually had nine miscarriages," Lucy says.
This is one of the facts that played into the complicated decision Lucy and Ollie made to opt for pre-implantation genetic testing, a special type of IVF where embryos are created outside of the body and screened for the genetic condition. Only those embryos which are not affected by the condition are placed back into the womb.
Without medical intervention, Lucy says there would be four potential outcomes to any pregnancy she carried: A healthy and unaffected boy or girl, an affected boy she would likely miscarry or who would be born with severe brain damage or an affected girl.
She pauses, then laughs: "That sounds horrible, doesn't it? That's me."
And that's the quandary. IVF will edit out the very thing that has made Lucy who she is today - a journalist, advocate, author and broadcaster.
It is an emotive topic of debate. The most well-known conversation is around Down's syndrome and the number of women who choose to abort a pregnancy once their baby is tested and diagnosed as having the condition. The question is around the value people place on other peoples' lives which may not look like our own.
In 2021 campaigner Heidi Crowter, who herself has Down's syndrome, challenged legislation allowing foetuses with the condition to be aborted up until birth. She took her case to the High Court arguing the rules were discriminatory to disabled people who could live a good life. She lost the case and the subsequent argument she made at the Court of Appeal. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) later rejected it as well, but Heidi continues to campaign to have the law overturned.
It is something Lucy is very aware of and she and her husband have spent a long time considering.
"It's understanding that it is removing that part of me that makes me, me," Lucy says. "It's such a personal decision and I know that I'm opening myself up for possible designer baby discussions, but I know I'm doing it for the right reasons."
Lucy says first being diagnosed with IP and then losing her sight as a teenager were both traumatic events and she wants to minimise the likelihood of miscarriage to limit any future traumatic load.
She says she found it impossible to "knowingly" consider having a baby naturally once she knew the science was available to give a baby the healthiest start possible.
"If I had a baby and, unknowingly, I had a gorgeous, gorgeous baby with disabilities, I would be so thankful, so happy and amazed but knowingly having this gene? That's why we're having IVF."
IP doesn't just cause blindness, it can also cause severe epilepsy and more difficult outcomes. Lucy says having the option to ensure complications were not passed on felt like both a responsibility and a privilege previous generations did not have.
"Whether we like it or not, we have to be responsible here. Maybe a responsible issue for you, if you have IP or another genetic disorder, is to have a child naturally and we are not judging you in any shape or form, this is just our decision."
In response to their openness around this decision comments were overwhelmingly positive from Lucy's fans which she thinks might be because she is so "disability positive" in her everyday life - "I love being blind," she frequently states.
But Lucy says responses have been different around the world. When she was working in Japan and her content was reaching audiences unfamiliar with her story, she faced a lot more trolling.
"I got a lot of abusive comments that go into my spam filter questioning why I would be a mother," she says. "I know that I'm going to get a lot of abuse, but I'm just going to block them.
"I'm going to be OK. All I think about is the other mothers that have come before me who are competent, capable and resilient."
Lucy, who is known for her How Does A Blind Girl... series of videos, is overjoyed by the prospect of IVF but she has also been frank about the fact she currently does not qualify, owing to her current weight, a sensitive element of IVF treatment that many keep to themselves.
NHS guidelines specify your Body Mass Index (BMI) must be 30 or under to qualify - a healthy BMI is considered to be between 18.5 and 24.9.
"I need to be a BMI of 30 and I'm very open that I need to lose 9kg," Lucy says. "I've already lost 15kg."
Her health journey has involved swimming, lifting weights and many runs with Ollie tethered to her as her sighted guide. She has also found a love for batch cooking nutritious meals which she posts about on all of her channels on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube and the workarounds she has developed as a blind cook.
"I wanted a positive representation of losing weight online because it's all about this blinking jab," she says, referring to weight loss injections. "I just wanted to lose it healthily, have lots of nice food, talk about meal prep and just smile and run."
Once she hits the required BMI, Lucy will qualify for three rounds of IVF on the NHS.
She will contact her consultant, after which she has to "spit in a cup" and offer up her DNA for genetic testing and analysis.
Over a period of about three months, a genetics team will "make a bespoke test to find the gene within my eggs," Lucy explains.
Meanwhile Lucy will inject herself with trigger shots to stimulate the follicles within her ovaries to increase the number of eggs produced which will be retrieved, and then made into embryos with Ollie's sperm.
The embryos will then be tested so only ones without the IP gene will be possible candidates. Those embryos will be "shuffled about" so Lucy and Ollie don't know which will be selected in terms of gender or other genetic qualities, and implanted into Lucy, who will carry the baby to term.
Lucy can't wait for the moment she holds her baby in her arms.
"It will never stop being a thing within my mind that this gene is being eradicated," she admits. "But I am very happy in my decision."
A few days ago Lucy posted on Instagram, her cardigan tightened at the back with a hairband to make it smaller and fit.
"I've lost so much [weight] that my clothes are too loose now so we had to tie it up with a bobble," she tells her followers.
"Fingers crossed [we're] only a few weeks away from ringing the clinic."
You can listen to Lucy Edwards on BBC Access All on BBC Sounds. Subscribe and email your thoughts to accessall@bbc.co.uk
Two years ago, Dan Somers started to experience a series of strange and unexplained symptoms. He had severe chest pain, was unable to keep food or even water down and kept "chucking up bile".
Though he had a sense that something might be wrong, Dan was reluctant to seek medical help. "I'm really stubborn when it comes down to going to the doctors," the 43-year-old from Ipswich tells the BBC. "I didn't want to be a burden."
Dan's pain continued to get worse, until he was "near enough screaming on the floor in pain" and had to take time off work. It was the worst pain he's ever experienced, he says upon reflection.
But "I honestly thought I could try and fix it," Dan recalls.
It was his wife who finally managed to push Dan to see the doctor.
His GP sent him straight to hospital, where he was diagnosed with a gallbladder infection and spent a week recovering. He was told he had been close to getting sepsis.
Dan's story mirrors those of other men who've told the BBC they've also put off seeking medical treatment - often until their symptoms became unbearable or until a loved one pushed them to get help.
It's well known that men go to the doctors less than women, and data backs this up.
The NHS told the BBC it doesn't release demographic data about GP appointments. But according to the ONS Health Insight Survey from February, commissioned by NHS England, 45.8% of women compared to just 33.5% of men had attempted to make contact with their GP practice for themselves or someone else in their household in the last 28 days.
Men were more likely to say they weren't registered at a dental practice and "rarely or never" used a pharmacy, too.
They also make up considerably fewer hospital outpatient appointments than women, even when pregnancy-related appointments are discounted.
Men are "less likely to attend routine appointments and more likely to delay help-seeking until symptoms interfere with daily function," says Paul Galdas, professor of men's health at the University of York.
This all affects men's health outcomes.
Experts say there's a long list of reasons why men might put off seeking medical help, and new survey data from the NHS suggests that concerns about how they are perceived come into play.
In the survey, 48% of male respondents agreed they felt a degree of pressure to "tough it out" when it came to potential health issues, while a third agreed they felt talking about potential health concerns might make others see them as weak. The poll heard from almost 1,000 men in England in November and December 2024.
Society associates masculinity with traits like self-reliance, independence and not showing vulnerability, says social psychologist Prof Brendan Gough of Leeds Beckett University. "Men are traditionally supposed to sort things out themselves".
"It's worrying to see just how many men still feel unable to talk about their health concerns," says Dr Claire Fuller, NHS medical director for primary care. She notes that men can be reluctant to seek medical support for mental health and for changes in their bodies that could be signs of cancer.
"GPs are often the best way to access the help they need," she adds.
'Men are inherent problem-solvers'
Kevin McMullan says he's learned from working for men's mental health charity ManHealth that men want to solve their own problems. He says he struggled with his mental health for years before he finally got help.
"You want to fix it yourself. Men are inherent problem-solvers and how you are feeling is a problem in the same way that having a flat tyre is a problem," says Kevin, 44, from Sedgefield in County Durham.
This is something that the Health Insights Survey indicates, too. The data suggests that when people were unable to contact their GP practice, men were significantly more likely than women to report "self-managing" their condition, while women were more likely than men to go to a pharmacy or call 111.
"Many men feel that help-seeking threatens their sense of independence or competence," Prof Galdas says.
Prof Galdas points to other factors deterring men from going to the doctors, like appointment systems that don't fit around their working patterns.
Services also rely on talking openly about problems, he suggests, which doesn't reflect how men speak about health concerns - and there are no fixed check-ups targeting younger men.
Women, in contrast, are "sort of forced to engage in the health system" because they might seek appointments related to menstruation, contraception, cervical screenings or pregnancy, says Seb Pillon, a GP in Bolton.
And they're largely in control of organising their family's healthcare, too. For example, roughly 90% of the people who contacted the children's sleep charity Sleep Action for help in the last six months were mums, grandmothers and other women in the children's lives, its head of service Alyson O'Brien says.
Because women are more integrated in the healthcare system - through seeking support for both themselves and their children - they're more health-literate and are often the driving force behind their partners seeking medical help, according to Prof Galdas.
And men just have a different attitude towards healthcare, Dr Pillon says. He believes many see it solely as treatment - solving their problems - rather than preventative. Men are, for example, less likely to take part in the NHS's bowel cancer screening programme. As Prof Galdas says: "men often seek help when symptoms disrupt their ability to function."
'Massive waste of time'
For Jonathan Anstee, 54, from Surrey, it took his symptoms getting drastically worse for him to book a doctors appointment, after months of stomach aches and blood in his stool.
"The pain got a lot worse and the blood got a lot worse," Jonathan says. "But even when I went to the doctors, I was sat in the waiting room thinking 'this is a massive waste of time'."
He was diagnosed with bowel cancer in September 2022.
Throughout his life he'd generally avoided doctors appointments, Jonathan says. And as a father, "you're used to worrying about your kids and not yourself," he says. Going to the doctors for himself, not his children, seemed "a bit sort of indulgent", he says.
Last year, Jonathan was told his bowel cancer was stage four.
Having blood in his stool had felt too embarrassing to talk to his friends and family about at the time. Jonathan's advice to other men is: "There is absolutely no need to be embarrassed. The alternative could kill you - literally."
'Connection can make a big difference'
In recent years, support groups for men with cancer and mental health conditions have sprung up.
Matthew Wiltshire started the men's charity the Cancer Club after being diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2015. He died in 2023.
Matthew felt there wasn't a space "where men were openly talking about what it's like to go through cancer," his son, Oliver Wiltshire, says. "He also noticed how much of the emotional load was being carried by the women around him."
Through the Cancer Club, men can message online and attend sports events together.
"Whether it's practical advice, honest chat or just knowing someone else gets it, that connection can make a big difference," Oliver adds.
Experts say that while men's attitudes towards healthcare are gradually changing for the better, more work still needs to be done.
Prof Galdas believes men will engage more if services are redesigned to meet their needs - proactively offering support, having flexible access and focusing on practical action to improve mental health issues.
"There's good evidence from gender-responsive programmes in mental health, cancer care, and health checks showing this consistently," he says.
For Dr Pillon, it's adding general health checks for men in their 20s to get them more used to accessing medical care.
They're already available through the NHS for people aged 40 to 74, but introducing them for younger men who might not otherwise go to the doctors would "embed the idea that you can come and use health services", he says.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this story, information and support can be found at the BBC's Action Line.
After fleeing Silicon Valley for political and business reasons, Elon Musk is building a corporate campus in rural Texas – but his new neighbours have mixed views.
Half an hour east of Austin, past the airport, the clogged-up traffic starts to melt away and the plains of Central Texas open up, leaving the booming city behind.
Somewhere along the main two-lane highway, a left turn takes drivers down Farm-to-Market Road 1209. It seems like an unlikely address for a high-tech hub, but that's exactly what Elon Musk, the world's richest man and one of President Donald Trump's closest allies, hopes it will become.
Court filings indicate that a large metal building finished in the last few months will be the new headquarters of X, his social media platform.
A short distance away, a large logo of the Boring Company, Musk's infrastructure company, is plastered on the side of another headquarters. And across FM 1209 is a rapidly growing SpaceX facility which manufactures Starlink satellite internet equipment.
Like most technology tycoons, Musk had long made Silicon Valley his home and headquarters. Once a supporter of the Democrats, his move to Texas is part of a larger tech world trend and also appears to reflect his own transformed ideological views.
Here the land is (relatively) cheap, skilled tech workers from nearby Austin are plentiful, and local laws are favourable to development.
Of course, there are also specific political angles to the move.
In July 2024, Musk said he was quitting California after the state passed a law prohibiting teachers from enforcing rules about notifying families when students' gender identity changes.
Musk has an estranged transgender daughter and has spoken out against what he calls "woke mind virus" - which he describes in interviews as divisive identity politics - along with anti-meritocratic and anti-free speech ideas.
And so Musk upped sticks and headed to Texas, a Republican stronghold and the fastest-growing state in the US.
In addition to the cluster of buildings near Bastrop in central Texas, he has built a SpaceX facility in Cameron County, on the southern tip of Texas near the border with Mexico. SpaceX employees there have filed a petition to create a new town called Starbase. The measure will go to a vote in May.
Locals in Bastrop have mixed feelings about the development.
"It's almost like we have a split personality," says Sylvia Carrillo, city manager of Bastrop, which has a growing population of more than 12,000. "Residents are happy that their children and grandchildren will have jobs in the area.
"On the other hand it can feel like we are being overwhelmed by a third party and that the development will quickly urbanise our area," she says.
Although the Musk development is technically outside of the city's limits, it's close enough that Texas laws give Bastrop's government sway over development. And, Ms Carrillo stresses, the Musk buildings are just one example of many developments springing up in a booming area.
"He's faced a backlash that is not entirely of his own creating," she says.
"But now that he's here and things are changing quickly, it's a matter of managing" issues like house and land prices and the environment, she says.
The Musk compound is still fairly bare-bones. The grandly named Hyperloop Plaza sits in the middle of the corporate buildings, and is home to the company-owned Boring Bodega, a bar, coffee shop, hairdresser and gift shop.
On a recent windy Sunday afternoon, a video game console sat unplayed in front of a couch near a display of company T-shirts, while a few children scurried back and forth to a playground outside.
The developments in Bastrop fit right into the quickening pace of activity across central Texas, where cranes perpetually loom above the Austin skyline and the housing market is a perpetual topic of conversation.
The area has gone through various industry booms and busts over the years, including lumber and coal mining, says Judy Enis, a volunteer guide at the Bastrop Museum and Visitor Center.
During World War Two, tens of thousands of soldiers - and around 10,000 German prisoners of war - poured in to Camp Swift, a US Army facility north of the town.
"That probably had more of an impact than Elon Musk," Ms Enis notes.
Views of the tycoon are mixed, to say the least, and inseparable not only from his politics but also opinions on economic development, in what still is a predominately rural area.
Judah Ross, a local real estate agent, says the development has supercharged population growth that started as a result of the Austin boom and accelerated during the Covid pandemic.
"I'm always going to be biased because I want the growth," Mr Ross says. "But I love it here and I want to be part of it.
"If nothing else, what's good is the amount of jobs that this is bringing in," he says. "In the past year, I've sold to people working at Boring and SpaceX."
Alfonso Lopez, a Texan who returned to the state after working in tech in Seattle, says he initially picked Bastrop figuring he would make a quick buck on a house purchase and move on.
Instead, he quickly became enamoured with the town, its mix of local businesses and friendly people, and wants to stay.
Mr Lopez is no big fan of Musk and is critical of some of his management practices and politics, but admires the technology his companies have built and is happy to live nearby as long as the companies are good neighbours.
"As long as they don't ruin my water or dig a tunnel beneath my house and create a sinkhole, this isn't bad," he says, gesturing around the metal shed housing the bodega, coffee shop and bar. "I'll come here and watch a game."
His concerns about water are more than theoretical. Last year The Boring Company was fined $11,876 (£8,950) by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality after being cited for water pollution violations.
The Boring Company initially planned to dump wastewater in the nearby Colorado River but, after local pressure, signed a deal to send the sludge to a Bastrop wastewater treatment plant.
The water issues appear to have delayed housebuilding, which reportedly could include more than 100 homes for Musk employees. The planned development of homes has so far failed to materialise, however. For now, the extent of living quarters is a handful of temporary trailers behind the bodega building, surrounded by a wall, acres of Texas plain and a few horses munching grass. Ms Carrillo, the city manager, says any large-scale home building is at least a year off.
In November, SpaceX applied for a free trade zone designation, which would allow it to move materials and finished products in and out of the Bastrop factory without being subject to tariffs - one of Donald Trump's signature policies.
It's a common practice for manufacturers, and there are hundreds of similar zones across the country.
Local officials in Texas have endorsed the proposal, saying it will boost the local economy, despite costing the county an estimated $45,000 (£34,800) in revenue this year.
The company is also getting an injection of $17.3m (£13.4m) from the Texas government to develop the site, a grant that officials say is expected to create more than 400 jobs and $280m in capital investment in Bastrop.
Few local residents wanted to directly criticise Musk when standing face-to-face with a visiting reporter. But it's a different story online, where sharper feelings shine through.
"They will ruin everything nearby," one resident posted on a local online forum. "Nothing good comes with him."
The BBC contacted SpaceX, The Boring Company and X for comment.
Ms Carrillo, the city manager, says she hasn't picked up on much personal anger on the part of locals prompted by Musk's activities in Washington.
But to protect Bastrop, she says, the city has recently enacted laws limiting housing density and providing for public parks - measures that she says will keep the "historic nature" of the well-preserved downtown while allowing for growth on the outskirts.
Bastrop, she says, is a conservative, traditionally Republican place.
"His national stuff doesn't really register," she says. "His companies have been good corporate citizens, and we hope it can stay that way."
King Charles and Queen Camilla have attended a church service at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle as part of their Easter celebrations.
The traditional Easter Matins service was held in the 15th Century chapel in Windsor, Berkshire.
Most other members of the Royal Family, including the Duke of York, were also present for the service - apart from the Prince and Princess of Wales and their children, who spent the weekend on holiday in Norfolk.
Following the service, the King and Queen were wished a "Happy Easter" by those gathered outside, and the Queen received a bouquet from a young girl.
Prince Andrew arrived with his ex-wife Sarah, Duchess of York, in a car along with Princess Anne and her husband Sir Tim Laurence.
Andrew missed the Royal Family's traditional Christmas gathering at Sandringham last year amid the controversy surrounding his links to an alleged Chinese spy.
Princess Anne chatted at some length with the Dean of Windsor, the Right Rev Christopher Cocksworth outside, while Prince Andrew quickly walked inside for the service.
Sisters Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice were joined by their husbands, while the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh arrived alongside their son, James.
As they walked to the church in front of crowds of royal fans, it became apparent that 17-year-old James is now noticeably taller than his father, Prince Edward.
On Thursday, the King and Queen took part in the traditional Maundy Thursday service, held this year at Durham Cathedral.
The service followed the King's Easter message, which sought to bring unity between different faiths and recognise those who provide humanitarian aid in wars and disasters.
"One of the puzzles of our humanity is how we are capable of both great cruelty and great kindness," he said.
Meanwhile, the Easter sermon traditionally given by the Archbishop of Canterbury and seen as the Church of England's primary religious message for the weekend, was instead delivered by the Archbishop of York at York Minster.
In his sermon, the archbishop called for peace in a "troubled world", listing Israel and Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, Sudan and DR Congo as "places of conflict that convulse our world".
He also spoke against "the madness of a world which 'others' others, drives wedges between communities, breeds hatred and promotes greed".
Justin Welby, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, resigned in November after facing increasing pressure to stand down over his failure to report prolific child abuser John Smyth. But his replacement has not yet been appointed.
The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, has also faced calls to resign over his handling of the case.
On Saturday, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales prayed for those caught up in "endless conflicts" and wars around the world in his Easter Vigil homily.
Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, said: "We pray for peace. We pray especially for those about whom it has been said, in recent times, that 'all hell' will be unleashed on them. May that never be so!"
Sign up here to get the latest royal stories and analysis every week with our Royal Watch newsletter. Those outside the UK can sign up here.
A brioche bread infused with lemon and Earl Grey tea has been crowned Britain's best loaf.
On a roll, Miyo Aoetsu - who started baking as a hobby - has now won the prize for the second time after her green loaf flavoured with matcha, white chocolate and fruit scooped the 2023 gong.
She runs Kuma-San Bakehouse from her home in Darley Dale in Derbyshire, supplying businesses and baking loaves for customers to collect.
She told the BBC she was delighted with the top award, and added: "I was speechless when I won... I was very, very happy, I was almost screaming on the stage."
The bread won top spot in the Britain's Best Loaf competition, run by trade magazine British Baker, and also won in the Innovation category.
Judges said the loaf - which beat 200 others to the prize - impressed them with its "unique flavour profile" featuring Earl Grey tea and limoncello-soaked candied lemon peel, combined with lemon curd and juice for a "zesty, aromatic finish".
Miyo, 55, said the limoncello gave the loaf "a kick" but the secret ingredient was a Japanese citrus fruit - commonly known as yuzu.
Miyo said: "In the last few years in Japan, the combination of Earl Grey tea and citrus fruits like lemon has been really trendy so people make a lot of cakes and cookies with these.
"So I started to think about making a bread with these combinations... I like the subtle aroma of tea when used in baking."
But she added it was not a perfect bake from the start and made "about 45 loaves" before she was satisfied with the finished product.
"I baked and baked and baked until I was confident it would be ready for the competition," she said.
On winning for the second time on 8 April, Miyo added: "There's always a chance but I didn't really think it would happen... but when they called my name I was speechless but I was really glad and happy because of the effort I had put in."
Born in Tokushima, about 93 miles (150km) from Osaka, Miyo first moved to the UK to study at the University of Manchester, where she met her husband.
The couple later lived in Luxembourg and France, where Miyo got a taste for French bread. She then started baking her own bread after moving back to England.
The prestigious award has not left Derbyshire since Miyo won with her green loaf in 2023.
Last year, 4 Eyes Bakery, based in Staveley near Chesterfield, won with its garlic and rosemary deep pan focaccia creation.
"It's a great thing to keep the award here," Miyo said.
"I know Tom [at 4 Eyes Bakery] who won it last year... he's an excellent baker and I'm glad this award remains in the county.
"To have it still in Derbyshire is a wonderful thing because the quality of bread in this area is fantastic."
On her next creation, Miyo said: "I'm always interested in combining both Western and Japanese cultures in my baking... I'm experimenting all of the time."
Follow BBC Derby on Facebook, on X, or on Instagram. Send your story ideas to eastmidsnews@bbc.co.uk or via WhatsApp on 0808 100 2210.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has banned the party of former President Joseph Kabila, accusing him of links to the M23 rebel group which has seized large parts of the east of the country this year.
The ban comes amid reports that Kabila has returned to the country after spending two years in South Africa.
He is said to have returned to the town of Goma, which was seized by the Rwandan-backed M23 in January.
Kabila led DR Congo for 18 years, after succeeding his father Laurent, who was shot dead in 2001. Joseph Kabila was just 29 at the time.
An interior ministry statement said all activities of Kabila's PPRD party had been banned because of its "ambiguous attitude" to the occupation of Congolese territory by the M23.
It also noted that Kabila had chosen to return to Goma, where he was being protected by the "enemy".
The PPRD has not commented.
On Friday, the government accused Kabila, 53, of high treason and ordered the seizure of all his property.
Kabila has previously denied having links to the M23. He has not commented on the latest moves by the Congolese government, or confirmed that he has returned to DR Congo.
However, he did say earlier this month that he would be going back to the country. Senior PPRD officials have denied that Kabila is currently in Goma.
On Saturday, his spokesperson Barbara Nzimbi posted on X that Kabila would be addressing the nation in the coming hours or days.
Asked by BBC Great Lakes, the M23 spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied Kabila's presence in Goma, saying: "I don't see any problem him being here."
Who is Joseph Kabila?
After being sworn in as president following his father's death, he twice won elections. His second and final elected term in office officially ended in December 2016, but he refused to step down, saying it wasn't possible to organise elections, leading to deadly protests.
He stayed in power for two more years until elections were finally held in 2018.
In January 2019, he handed power to Félix Tshisekedi, the official winner of a disputed election, which many election observers said was rightfully won by Martin Fayulu.
He accused Kabila and Tshisekedi of agreeing a deal to exclude him from power - something both men have denied.
But relations between the pair worsened and their parties' coalition was formally ended in December 2020.
Kabila left DR Congo in 2023, officially to study in South Africa.
In January 2024, his doctoral thesis on the geopolitics of African relations with the US, China and Russia was validated at the University of Johannesburg.
Why has Kabila returned?
In a written statement to announce his forthcoming return, Kabila said it was motivated by a desire to help resolve the worsening institutional and security crisis in DR Congo.
He also told the French-language magazine Jeune Afrique he wanted to "play a role in seeking a solution after six years of complete retreat and one year in exile".
But Ben Radley, a political economist and lecturer in international development at Bath University, noted that the leader of the political grouping which includes the M23, Corneille Nangaa, was the head of the electoral commission under Kabila and had been a "close ally".
"In addition, the historical continuity with his father Laurent Kabila, who also entered Congo from the east in the late 1990s in his eventual march to the presidency, is also on the minds of many Congolese," he told the BBC.
Additional reporting by Alfred Lastek & Didier Bikorimana
More about the conflict in DR Congo from the BBC:
Go to BBCAfrica.com for more news from the African continent.
Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
America's oldest serving astronaut Dan Pettit has returned to Earth on his 70th birthday.
The Soyuz MS-26 space capsule carrying Pettit and his Russian crewmates Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan's steppe at 06:20 local time (01:20 GMT) on Sunday.
They spent 220 days on board the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting the Earth 3,520 times, the US space agency Nasa said.
For Pettit - who has now spent a total of 590 days in space - it was his fourth mission.
Still, he is not the oldest person to fly in orbit - that record belongs to John Glenn, who aged 77 flew on a Nasa mission in 1998. He died in 2016.
Pettit and the two Russian cosmonauts will now spend some time readjusting to gravity.
After that, Pettit - who was born in Oregon on 20 April 1955 - will be flown to Houston in Texas, while Ovchinin and Vagner will go to Russia's main space training base in Zvyozdniy Gorodok (Star City) near Moscow.
Before their departure from the ISS, the crew handed command of the spaceship to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi.
Last month, two Nasa astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, finally returned to Earth after spending more than nine months on board the ISS - instead of the initially planned just eight days.
They flew to the ISS in June 2024 - but technical issues with the spacecraft they used to get to the space station meant they were only able to return to Earth on 18 March this year.
James' reaction as he unboxes a rare, limited edition Labubu toy can only be described as pure, unadulterated joy.
The YouTuber delightedly holds up a brown plush monster, which has been described by collectors as "cute", "ugly", "creepy" and everything in between.
Labubus are furry snaggletoothed gremlins, which are designed by Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung and sold by Chinese toy company Pop Mart.
They're almost always sold out online and long queues often form outside the selected shops that stock them.
Labubus are also primarily sold in the blind box format, meaning customers never know what version they'll get until they open them - a fact collectors have said adds to their appeal.
While it's difficult to pin their recent rise in popularity to one particular ingredient, celebrity endorsement, social media unboxing videos and their ability to stir up nostalgia are all contributing factors.
James Welsh, from Hampshire, sees his Labubu collectable as an investment, which he tells the BBC "could probably earn a fair bit of money two or three years down the line".
He has just shy of 30 Labubus which retail at around £25 for an individual toy or £153 for a box of six.
He says he has "spent hundreds and hundreds but not quite thousands" on the dolls.
Labubu maker Pop Mart has doubled its profits in the last year and is eying up global expansion in 2025.
The company, which started 15 years ago, has been described as "elevating toy buying to an act of trendy connoisseurship" and praised for embracing non-traditional designs, which have made them a hit with collectors.
Artist Kasing Lung is behind some of their popular toys including The Monsters series and Labubu.
He credits living in The Netherlands as the inspiration behind the dolls and told Hypbeast "I liked to read storybooks and was influenced by ancient European elf legends".
Lung added that during his childhood, "there were no game consoles or computers, so I had to draw dolls with a pen, so I had the idea of painting fairy tales since I was a child".
He first came up with the designs in 2015 and signed a licensing agreement with Pop Mart in 2019 to make them into toys.
Labubu as a name has no specific meaning, it is a fictional character based around an elf-like creature.
James says his first thought when he saw the one of the toys was, "they're creepy but they're also really cute and I need as many of them as I can get, I need them in every colour".
The 36-year-old adds, "I think they [provide] some real escapism for millennials as it's like reverting back to your youth with these toys and collectables."
A former stylist, he now primarily creates beauty and skincare content, but has recently gained thousands of views on his channel from Labubu unboxing videos.
He tells the BBC: "there is a strong link between these plush pendants and the fashion community as well."
"They're a way to express who you are, you can show that through the different characters, which add a pop of colour and fashion is fun, it's not serious at the end of the day, it's reflective of who you are."
There are several iterations of Labubu - from vinyl figures to plush toys - but the keychain versions have become most popular recently.
Labubu's ascent into mainstream culture has been steady - but was elevated last year by BLACKPINK star Lisa.
The K-pop singer was seen with a Labubu creature hanging from her handbag and also called the toys "her secret obsession" in an interview.
Rihanna was also spotted with one of the toys attached to her bag in recent weeks, which has led to fashion fans replicating her look.
But for collectors such as 22-year-old Chulie, who shares her purchases on TikTok, she says Labubu becoming a "fashion trend" misses the point of why they're so loved.
"For me, it's all about the nostalgia and the surprise aspect," she tells the BBC.
One of Pop Mart's biggest selling points for collectors is the way their toys are packaged in what's known as blind boxes, which make the experience of getting one like a lucky dip.
You don't know what character you are getting until you unseal the package, so it's always a gamble for collectors.
"You know it's fun, it's a dopamine hit", James says.
"It's gambling for some of us - kind of like a happy meal, you don't know what toy you're getting until you open it up."
It also makes the toy perfect for the world of social media, as creators can catch their genuine surprise on camera and share it with other fans - something James says provides comfort and "escapism from the real world".
Chulie says, as a child, she would collect Pokemon trading cards, so collecting another surprise item "triggered memories for me".
"When you're having a rough time, especially for me personally, it's a big serotonin boost to not only buy a collectable and keep it, but share the experience with other people as well," she adds.
Others have compared Labubus to Beanie Babies, which were popular in the 1990s and 2000s, and say collecting Labubus evokes feelings of childhood nostalgia.
For some fans, just documenting the experience of getting a Labubu is a talking point, with many showing the long queues and hours of research required to find out where new collections are being stocked.
It's prompted backlash on some social media channels, with users criticising collectors that have bought large numbers of items.
"Just because you don't understand someone's hobby, doesn't mean it's not valid in any way," James says.
While James hasn't spent hours and hours queuing to build his collection, he says he "has gone out of my way" to source authentic dolls online. As with any popular item, counterfeits have made their way onto the market.
"I spend a fair bit of money on my hobby, but it's my adult money," he jokes.
Chulie says she currently has 10 Labubus, but has sold some to other fans when she's ended up with the same toy twice.
"When I first got exposed to them, I wasn't sure why people were spending money on them, because in the US they start at around $21 [£16], which is minimum wage for a lot of people.
"But it's so addictive getting one, and it's really hard to stop buying once you start," she adds.
The winners of the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards have been announced, with Zed Nelson named as Photographer of the Year for The Anthropocene Illusion, a project exploring the fractured relationship between humans and the natural world.
Nelson's project takes its name from the term Anthropocene - the current geological epoch where human activity has become the dominant force shaping the Earth's environment.
The project explores the tension between the human desire to connect with nature and ongoing environmental degradation.
Nelson's constructed environments highlight the growing gap between conservation efforts and ecological destruction.
The Anthropocene Illusion goes beyond a documentary, offering a thought-provoking exploration of modern human life in an era shaped by human impact.
Nelson's work, selected from the 10 professional competition category winners, triumphed in the wildlife and nature category.
Here are the other category winners.
Architecture & Design
The Tokyo Toilet Project by Ulana Switucha (Canada)
The Tokyo Toilet Project in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, is an urban redevelopment initiative aimed at creating modern public restrooms that encourage use.
These images are part of a larger series documenting the architectural design of these structures within their urban setting.
Creative
Rhi-Entry by Rhiannon Adam (United Kingdom)
In 2018, Japanese billionaire and art collector Yusaku Maezawa launched a global search for eight artists to join him on a week-long lunar mission aboard SpaceX's Starship, the first civilian deep space flight.
The mission would follow a path similar to Apollo 8's 1968 journey, which inspired astronaut Bill Anders to suggest NASA should have sent poets to capture the awe of space.
In 2021, Rhiannon Adam was chosen as the only female crew member from one million applicants and for three years she immersed herself in the space industry.
Maezawa abruptly cancelled the mission, leaving the crew to pick up the pieces of their disrupted lives - the experience informed Adam's thought provoking project.
Documentary projects
Divided Youth of Belfast by Toby Binder (Germany)
For years, Toby Binder has been documenting the experiences of young people born after the peace agreement in Northern Ireland, capturing what it means to grow up amid the intergenerational tensions in both Protestant and Catholic neighbourhoods.
Environment
Alquimia Textil by Nicolás Garrido Huguet (Peru)
Alquimia Textil is a collaborative project by Nicolás Garrido Huguet and fashion designer María Lucía Muñoz, highlighting the natural dyeing techniques of Pumaqwasin artisans in Chinchero, Cusco, Peru.
The project seeks to raise awareness and preserve these ancestral practices, which involve hours of meticulous work often overlooked in the textile industry.
Landscape
The Strata of Time by Seido Kino (Japan)
This project invites viewers to consider what it means for a country to grow, and the advantages and disadvantages linked to that growth, by overlaying archival photographs from the 1940s-60s within current scenes.
Perspectives
The Journey Home from School by Laura Pannack (United Kingdom)
Laura Pannack's project explores the tumultuous public lives of young people in the gang-governed Cape Flats area of Cape Town, South Africa, where their daily commute carries the risk of death.
Using handmade, lo-fi experimental techniques, this project explores how young people have to walk to and from school avoiding the daily threat of gang crossfire.
Portraiture
M'kumba by Gui Christ (Brazil)
M'kumba is an ongoing project that illustrates the resilience of Afro-Brazilian communities in the face of local religious intolerance.
Gui Christ wanted to photograph a proud, young generation representing African deities and mythological tales.
Sport
Shred the Patriarchy by Chantal Pinzi (Italy)
India, the world's most populous country, only has a handful of female skaters.
Through the art of falling and getting back up, these women challenge stereotypes, fight marginalisation and reclaim public spaces in both urban and rural areas.
Still life
Still Waiting by Peter Franck (Germany)
Still Waiting presents collages that capture moments of pause, of waiting.
Open - motion
Tbourida La Chute by Olivier Unia
The Open competition celebrates the power and dynamism of a single photograph.
Olivier Unia was chosen for his photograph Tbourida La Chute.
Many of the photographs taken during a traditional Moroccan 'tbourida' show the riders firing their rifles.
With this image, the photographer wanted to share another side of the event, and show how dangerous it can be when a rider is thrown from their mount.
Student photographer of the year
The Last Day We Saw the Mountains and the Sea by Micaela Valdivia Medina (Peru)
Medina's project explores female prison spaces across Chile, and the dynamics that shape the lives of incarcerated women and their families.
Youth photographer of the year
For the 2025 Youth competition, photographers aged 19 and under were invited to respond to an Open Call and enter their best images from the last year.
The winner, chosen from a shortlist of 11 photographers, was Daniel Dian-Ji Wu, Taiwan, 16 years old, for his image of a skateboarder doing a trick, silhouetted against a sunset in Venice Beach, Los Angeles.
Outstanding contribution to photography
The prestigious Outstanding Contribution to Photography 2025 was awarded to acclaimed documentary photographer Susan Meiselas.
For more than five decades, photographer Susan Meiselas has focused her lens on capturing compelling stories from diverse communities.
From documenting the lives of women performing striptease at rural American fairs to chronicling the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, her work provides an intimate portrait of resilience and humanity.
All photos courtesy of Sony World Photography Awards 2025. Exhibition at Somerset House, London, 17 April – 5 May 2025.
In January, Lina went to the police.
Her ex-partner had been threatening her at home in the Spanish seaside town of Benalmádena. That day, he'd allegedly raised his hand as if to hit her.
"There had been violent episodes - she was scared," Lina's cousin Daniel recalls.
When she got to the police station, she was interviewed and her case registered with VioGén, a digital tool which assesses the likelihood of a woman being attacked again by the same man.
VioGén - an algorithm-based system - asks 35 questions about the abuse and its intensity, the aggressor's access to weapons, his mental health and whether the woman has left, or is considering leaving, the relationship.
It then records the threat to her as "negligible", "low", "medium", "high" or "extreme".
The category is used to make decisions about the allocation of police resources to protect the woman.
Lina was deemed to be at "medium" risk.
She asked for a restraining order at a specialist gender violence court in Malaga, so that her ex-partner couldn't be in contact with her or share her living space. The request was denied.
"Lina wanted to change the locks at her home, so she could live peacefully with her children," says her cousin.
Three weeks later, she was dead. Her partner had allegedly used his key to enter her flat and soon the house was on fire.
While her children, mother and ex-partner all escaped, Lina didn't. Her 11-year-old son was widely reported as telling police it was his father who killed his mother.
Lina's lifeless body was retrieved from the charred interior of her home. Her ex-partner, the father of her three youngest children, was arrested.
Now, her death is raising questions about VioGén and its ability to keep women safe in Spain.
VioGén didn't accurately predict the threat to Lina.
As a woman designated at "medium" risk, the protocol is that she would be followed up again by a nominated police officer within 30 days.
But Lina was dead before that. If she had been "high" risk, the police follow-up would have happened within a week. Could that have made a difference to Lina?
Tools to evaluate the threat of repeat domestic violence are used in North America and across Europe. In the UK, some police forces use DARA (Domestic Abuse Risk Assessment) - essentially a checklist. And DASH (Domestic Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour-based Violence Assessment) may be employed by police or others, like social workers, to assess the risk of another attack.
But only in Spain is an algorithm woven so tightly into police practice. VioGén was developed by Spanish police and academics. It's used everywhere apart from the Basque Country and Catalonia (those regions have separate systems, although police co-operation is nationwide).
The head of the National Police's family and women's unit in Malaga, Ch Insp Isabel Espejo, describes VioGén as "super-important".
"It helps us follow each victim's case very precisely," she says.
Her officers deal with an average of 10 reports of gender violence a day. And every month, VioGén classifies nine or 10 women as being at "extreme" risk of repeat victimisation.
The resource implications in those cases are huge: 24-hour police protection for a woman until the circumstances change and the risk decreases. Women assessed as "high" risk may also get an officer escort.
A 2014 study found that officers accepted VioGén's evaluation of the likelihood of repeated abuse 95% of the time. Critics suggest police are abdicating decision-making about women's safety to an algorithm.
Ch Insp Espejo says that the algorithm's calculation of risk is usually adequate. But she recognises - even though Lina's case wasn't under her command - that something went wrong with Lina's assessment.
"I'm not going to say VioGén doesn't fail – it does. But this wasn't the trigger that led to this woman's murder. The only guilty party is the person who killed Lina. Total security just doesn't exist," she says.
But at "medium" risk, Lina was never a police priority. And did Lina's VioGén assessment have an impact on the court's decision to deny her a restraining order against her ex-partner?
Court authorities didn't give us permission to meet the judge who denied Lina an injunction against her ex-partner - a woman attacked on social media after Lina's death.
Instead, another of Malaga's gender violence judges, Maria del Carmen Gutiérrez tells us in general terms that such an order needs two things: evidence of a crime and the threat of serious danger to the victim.
"VioGén is one element I use to assess that danger, but it's far from the only one," she says.
Sometimes, the judge says, she makes restraining orders in cases where VioGén has assessed a woman as at "negligible" or "low" risk. On other occasions she may conclude there's no danger to a woman deemed at "medium" or "high" risk of repeat victimisation.
Dr Juan Jose Medina, a criminologist at the University of Seville, says Spain has a "postcode lottery" for women applying for restraining orders – some jurisdictions are much more likely to grant them than others. But we don't know systematically how VioGén influences the courts, or the police, because studies haven't been done.
"How are police officers and other stakeholders using this tool, and how is it informing their decision-making? We don't have good answers," he says.
Spain's interior ministry hasn't often allowed academics access to VioGén's data. And there hasn't been an independent audit of the algorithm.
Gemma Galdon, the founder of Eticas – an organisation working on the social and ethical impact of technology – says if you don't audit these systems, you won't know if they're actually delivering police protection to the right women.
Examples of algorithmic bias elsewhere are well-documented. In the US, analysis from 2016 of a recidivism tool found black defendants were more likely than their white peers to be incorrectly judged to be at higher risk of repeat offending. At the same time, white defendants were more likely than black defendants to be wrongly flagged as low risk.
In 2018, Spain's interior ministry didn't give a green light to an Eticas proposal to conduct a confidential, pro-bono, internal audit. So instead, Gemma Galdon and her colleagues decided to reverse-engineer VioGén and do an external audit.
They used interviews with women survivors of domestic abuse and publicly available information - including data from the judiciary about women who, like Lina, had been killed.
They found that between 2003 and 2021, 71 women murdered by their partners or ex-partners had previously reported domestic abuse to the police. Those recorded on the VioGén system were given risk levels of "negligible" or "medium".
"What we'd like to know is, were those error rates that cannot be mitigated in any way? Or could we have done something to improve how these systems assign risk and protect those women better?" asks Gemma Galdon.
The head of gender violence research at Spain's interior ministry, Juan José López-Ossorio, is dismissive of the Eticas investigation: it wasn't done with VioGén data. "If you don't have access to the data, how can you interpret it?" he says.
And he is wary of an external audit, fearing it could compromise both the security of women whose cases are recorded and VioGén's procedures.
"What we know is that once a woman reports a man and she's under police protection, the probability of further violence is substantially lowered - we've no doubts about that," says López-Ossorio.
VioGén has evolved since it was introduced in Spain. The questionnaire has been refined, and the "negligible" category of risk will soon be abolished. And even critics agree it makes sense to have a standardised system responding to gender violence.
In Benalmádena, Lina's home has become a shrine.
Flowers, candles and pictures of saints were left on the step. A small poster stuck on the wall declared: Benalmádena says no to gender violence. The community fundraised for Lina's children.
Her cousin, Daniel, says everyone's still reeling from news of her death.
"The family it's destroyed – especially Lina's mother," he says.
"She's 82 years old. I don't think there's anything sadder than to have your daughter killed by an aggressor in a way that could have been avoided. The children are still in shock – they'll need a lot of psychological help."
Thousands took to the streets across the US on Saturday to protest over recent actions by President Donald Trump.
Known as "50501", for "50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement", the demonstrations were intended to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolutionary War.
From outside the White House and Tesla dealerships and at the centres of many cities, protesters expressed a variety of grievances. Many called for the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
Political protests are becoming more common in the US - the "Hands Off" demonstrations in early April drew tens of thousands in cities across the country.
The most recent polling from Gallup suggests 45% of voters approve of Trump's performance in the first quarter of his term, which is more than the 41% who approved during the same period in his first administration.
Still, it is lower than the average first-quarter rating of 60% for all presidents elected between 1952 and 2020.
Saturday's protests addressed a number of Trump actions, including those by the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) - Trump's initiative to cut US government jobs and other spending - and the administration's unwillingness to bring about the return of Ábrego García, a citizen of El Salvador.
Gihad Elgendy told CNN he joined the protest at the White House to criticise the deportation of Ábrego García. He believes Trump "could easily pressure El Salvador to bring him back".
The protests were generally reported as peaceful, although Representative Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat, posted a video on X of a man holding a Trump sign and pushing through a crowd to angrily confront him.
Many demonstrators carried signs reading "No Kings," a nod to the anniversary of the start of the country's revolution against British rule.
During celebrations of the anniversary in Massachusetts that commemorated the battles of Lexington and Concord and the famous horse ride of Paul Revere, people held similar signs. There was also a 50501 demonstration in Boston on Saturday.
"This is a very perilous time in America for liberty," Thomas Bassford, told the Associated Press, while in Boston with his partner, daughter and two grandsons. "I wanted the boys to learn about the origins of this country and that sometimes we have to fight for freedom."
Trump's popularity appears to be edging down, especially when it comes to the economy. When he took office in January, his approval rating was 47%, according to Gallup.
His approval rating in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll similarly dipped to 43% from 47% on Inauguration Day. In the same poll, only 37% approved of his performance on the economy, compared to 42% during inauguration.
Earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered for the largest nationwide show of opposition since Trump returned to the White House.
Those protests - which were larger than Saturday's - happened in 1,200 locations in all 50 US states.
Some families in a new mixed-use social housing development in Lisburn have said they feel intimidated after a group of men placed flags on lampposts.
The group was wearing dark clothes and hoods and was seen erecting the Union flags on Saturday evening in Altona Drive and Altona Gardens.
One man said he was told if anyone removed the flags, "their house will be burnt".
Police said they would engage with "local community representatives and partner agencies around any complaints about flags".
It comes just weeks after some residents were sent leaflets claiming to be from a loyalist paramilitary organisation.
Video footage, seen by BBC News NI, appears to show four men with a ladder erecting flags in the area.
Conor Batchelor said he confronted the men about the displays on lampposts.
"They said anyone that touches the flags, their house will be burnt. So now we're living in fear," he said.
The 30-year-old, whose former partner and their two children live in the area, said they want to live in "peace and harmony with other religions, other cultures".
He said it should be a "friendly and welcoming" environment.
"We're just really disheartened with it all," he added.
Mr Batchelor described the new housing development as a "mixed area".
He some people may be supportive of the flags, but he said they should be placed "on their property".
"Not on public lamp-posts or outside people's houses that don't want the flags," he added.
The £16m mixed-use development was launched last year.
Carol Carey, who lives in the area with her four children, said she no longer feels safe.
"I did feel sick to my stomach. I don't want this for my kids," she added.
She said she was told by police "there is nothing we can do" because they are not paramilitary flags.
"The people on this street are already afraid because they have had the letters," she added.
Last month, some residents received leaflets through the letterboxes of their homes claiming to be from a loyalist paramilitary organisation.
The leaflets had a UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters) emblem and text which warned that "anyone caught removing loyalist flags from lampposts will be dealt with".
They also read: "This is loyalist Lisburn, not republican west Belfast."
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said officers in Lisburn were aware of the leaflets and they were still being investigated.
A PSNI spokeswoman added: "Police received a report on Saturday 19 April about flags that had been erected in the area of Altona Drive, Lisburn.
"Every case reported to police will be considered on an individual basis and, where offences have been committed they will be dealt with.
"Officers continue to engage with local community representatives and partner agencies around any complaints about flags."
Sir Keir Starmer and Donald Trump discussed "ongoing and productive" trade talks, No 10 has said, in their first call since the US president imposed tariffs on UK goods.
The prime minister stressed his commitment to "free and open trade and the importance of protecting the national interest", a Downing Street spokesperson said.
They added that the two leaders also discussed "the situation in Ukraine, Iran and recent action taken against the Houthis in Yemen".
Sir Keir is hoping to secure a deal with the US after Trump unveiled 10% tariffs on UK goods and a higher 25% rate on imports of cars, steel and aluminium.
"The leaders began by discussing the ongoing and productive discussions between the UK and US on trade," No 10 said in a statement.
A readout of the call from the White House said the two leaders discussed bilateral trade, ongoing talks to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a peaceful resolution, and regional security in the Middle East.
It added that Trump was looking forward to his upcoming state visit with His Majesty King Charles III in the UK later this year.
US Vice-President JD Vance said on Tuesday there was a "good chance" a trade deal could be reached with the UK.
Trump announced a barrage of tariffs earlier this month and shares on stock markets around the world have since tumbled.
The S&P 500 index of the largest firms listed in the US, the UK FTSE 100, German Dax, and French Cac 40 have recovered some value as Trump has delayed some tariffs and made exceptions, but are lower than before 2 April.
The current tariff policy now puts a 10% "baseline" tariff on all imports from the UK, France and other long-standing trade partners. China faces much harsher tariffs.
A tariff is a tax on businesses buying a good from overseas, but businesses often pass the costs from the tariff onto the consumer or overseas the seller.
The World Trade Organization said on Wednesday that global trade will shrink as a result of the tariffs while the International Monetary Fund downgraded its predictions for growth because of them.
The UK has been trying to avoid the tariffs by agreeing some kind of economic deal with the US, while the EU and Canada has responded with counter tariffs.
Washington and Kyiv are moving closer to signing a deal involving Ukraine's mineral deposits, almost two months after President Volodymyr Zelensky first travelled to the US to finalise it - but failed to do so.
Details are still emerging about what the latest version of the agreement would include, but previous leaks suggest it may include control of Ukraine's energy infrastructure, oil and gas, in addition to minerals.
A signed memorandum of intent, published by the Ukrainian government on 18 April, says the countries intend to set up an investment fund for the reconstruction of Ukraine as part of an economic partnership. Kyiv and Washington aim to finalise the text by 26 April, the memo says.
The initial agreement was due to be signed in February, but it was derailed after a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Zelensky turned into a public shouting match.
What are the terms of the latest deal?
The memo released on Friday contains broad statements, saying the US and Ukraine "intend to establish a reconstruction investment fund as part of an economic partnership between the two peoples and governments".
It provides no detail as to how this fund would work, nor does it mention the word "minerals" at all.
It also does not include the promise of a security guarantee from the US, something Zelensky has pushed hard for throughout negotiations.
Trump, for his part, has suggested a deal could act as compensation for US military aid given to Ukraine since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.
The memo does not explicitly frame the agreement in this way, but it does make note of the US's "significant financial and material support" for Ukraine.
Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko acknowledged the text of the final document was still being worked on, but said she expected the deal to be "very beneficial for both countries".
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal previously said the fund would be managed by Kyiv and Washington on "equal terms".
Clues about the agreement might be found in previous leaks, as US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the current deal was "substantially what we'd agreed on previously".
"When the president [Zelensky] was here, we had a memorandum of understanding," said Bessent, who signed the memo over a video call with Svyrydenko.
"We went straight to the big deal, and I think it's an 80-page agreement and that's what we'll be signing," he added.
The text prepared in February was never officially shared, but a version was published by Ukrainian media ahead of Zelensky's meeting with Trump.
It envisaged Ukraine contributing 50% of future proceeds from state-owned mineral resources, oil and gas to an investment fund, which would be used "to promote the safety, security and prosperity of Ukraine".
It also said the US would "maintain a long-term financial commitment to the development of a stable and economically prosperous Ukraine".
Since that draft was published, multiple sources have told the BBC's US partner CBS News that the updated version would be different.
The extent of this change, though, remains unclear.
Disagreement over the terms formed part of a deepening rift between Trump and Zelensky, days before he travelled to Washington to sign it.
The Ukrainian president rejected an initial request from the US for $500bn (£395bn) in mineral wealth, but this demand was dropped from the version published online.
Friday's memo says the final agreement was still being worked out, with Shmyhal due to visit Washington next week to conclude "technical discussions".
Does the deal include a security guarantee?
When will the deal be signed?
Both countries aim to complete discussions by 26 April, with the aim of signing a final deal "as soon as possible", according to the memo.
Trump has said he hopes to sign the deal sooner, by 24 April.
"We have a minerals deal which I guess is going to be signed on Thursday... next Thursday. Soon. And I assume they're going to live up to the deal. So we'll see. But we have a deal on that," he said this week.
Trump had previously said he and Zelensky would sign the deal during February's meeting at the White House.
Ukrainian PM Shmyhal said a final version of the agreement had been prepared ahead of that meeting, though Zelensky aide Mykhaylo Podolyak said only a framework agreement was due to be signed.
But nothing at all was signed during the visit, which instead descended into a heated exchange between Trump and Zelensky in the Oval Office.
At one point, a furious Trump said Zelensky was not grateful enough for the US's support during the war, and that he was "gambling with World War Three".
He said Zelensky had to "make a deal or we're out", adding: "You don't have the cards."
Not long after - and well ahead of schedule - the Ukrainian president was seen leaving the White House.
The White House then announced the deal had not been agreed - and said Trump had decided to call off the signing ceremony himself.
What minerals does Ukraine have?
How has Russia reacted?
Before the deal was supposed to be signed in February, Vladimir Putin told state TV he was ready to "offer" resources to American partners in joint projects, including mining in Russia's "new territories" - a reference to parts of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russia since its full-scale invasion three years ago.
Putin said a potential US-Ukraine deal on rare minerals was not a concern and that Russia "undoubtedly have, I want to emphasise, significantly more resources of this kind than Ukraine".
"As for the new territories, it's the same. We are ready to attract foreign partners to the so-called new, to our historical territories, which have returned to the Russian Federation," he added.
Stock markets around the world have been relatively settled this week after a period of chaos, sparked by US trade tariffs.
But investors are still closely watching a part of the market which rarely moves dramatically - the US bond market.
Governments sell bonds - essentially an IOU - to raise money for public spending and in return they pay interest.
Recently, in an extremely rare move the rate the US government had to pay on its bonds rose sharply, while the price of bonds themselves fell.
The volatility suggests investors were losing confidence in the world's biggest economy.
You may think it's too esoteric to bother you, but here's why it matters and how it may change President Trump's mind on tariffs.
What is a government bond?
When a government wants to borrow money, it usually does so by selling bonds - known as "Treasuries" in the US - to investors on financial markets.
Such payments are made over a number of pre-agreed years before a full and final payment is made when the bond "matures" - in other words, expires.
Investors who buy bonds are mainly made up of financial institutions, ranging from pension funds to central banks like the Bank of England.
What is happening with US bonds?
Investors buy government bonds because they are seen as a safe place to invest their money. There is little risk a government will not repay the money, especially an economic superpower like the US.
So when the economy is turbulent and investors want to take money out of volatile stocks and shares markets, they usually place that cash in US bonds.
But recently that hasn't happened.
Initially, following the so-called "Liberation Day" tariffs announcement on 2 April when shares fell, investors did appear to flock to US bonds.
However, when the first of these tariffs kicked in on 5 April and Trump doubled down on his policies that weekend, investors began dumping government bonds, sending the interest rate the US government would have to pay to borrow money up sharply.
The so-called yield for US government borrowing over 10 years shot up from 3.9% to 4.5%, while the 30-year yield spiked at almost 5%. Movements of 0.2% in either direction are considered a big deal.
Why the dramatic sell-off? In short, the uncertainty over the impact of tariffs on the US economy led to investors no longer seeing government bonds as such a safe bet, so demanded bigger returns to buy them.
The higher the perceived risk, the higher the yield investors want to compensate for taking it.
How does this affect ordinary Americans?
If the US government is spending more on debt interest repayments, it can affect budgets and public spending as it becomes more costly for the government to sustain itself.
But it can also have a direct impact on households and even more so on businesses.
John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics, says when investors charge higher rates to lend the government money, other rates for lending that have more risk attached, such as mortgages, credit cards and car loans, also tend to rise.
Businesses, especially small ones, are likely to be hardest hit by any immediate change in borrowing rates, as most homeowners in the US have fixed-rate deals of between 15 and 30 years. If businesses can't get access to credit, that can halt economic growth and lead to job losses over time.
Mr Canavan adds that banks can become more cautious in lending money, which could impact the US economy.
First-time buyers and those wishing to move home could also face higher costs, he says, which could impact the housing market in the longer term. It's common in the US for small business owners starting out to use the equity in their home as collateral.
Why does Trump care?
Following the introduction of tariffs, Trump urged his nation to "hang tough", but it appears the potential threat to jobs and the US economy stopped the president in his tracks.
Following the ructions in the bond markets, he introduced a 90-day pause for the higher tariffs on every country except China. The 10% blanket tariff, however, on all countries remains.
It proved a pressure point for Trump - and now the world knows it.
"Although President Donald Trump was able to resist the stock market sell-off, once the bond market began to weaken too, it was only a matter of time before he folded," says Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics.
According to US media reports, it was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, inundated with calls from business leaders, who played a key part in swaying Trump.
Is this similar to Liz Truss's mini-Budget?
The bond market reaction has led to comparisons with former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss's infamous mini-Budget of September 2022. The unfunded tax cuts announced then spooked investors, who dumped UK government bonds, resulting in the Bank of England stepping in to buy bonds to save pension funds from collapse.
Some analysts suggested that America's central bank, the US Federal Reserve, might have been forced to step in if the sell-off had worsened.
While bond yields have settled, some might argue the damage has already been done as they remain higher than before the blanket tariffs kicked in.
"Arguably the most worrying aspect of the [recent] turmoil... is an emerging risk premium in US Treasury bonds and the dollar, akin to what the UK experienced in 2022," according to Jonas Goltermann, deputy chief markets economist at Capital Economics.
But unless you're a first-time buyer or selling your home, Americans are unlikely to be immediately hit by higher mortgage costs, unlike Brits who were securing new shorter-term fixed deals.
How is China being linked to US bonds?
Since 2010, foreign ownership of US bonds has almost doubled, rising by $3 trillion, according to Deutsche Bank.
Japan holds the most US Treasuries, but China, the US's arch enemy in this global trade war, is the second biggest holder of US government debt globally.
Questions were raised about whether it sparked the debt sell-off in response to being hit with huge tariffs.
However, this is unlikely as any fire sale "would impoverish China more than it would hurt the US", according to Capital Economics.
Every iPhone comes with a label which tells you it was designed in California.
While the sleek rectangle that runs many of our lives is indeed designed in the United States, it is likely to have come to life thousands of miles away in China: the country hit hardest by US President Donald Trump's tariffs, now rising to 245% on some Chinese imports.
Apple sells more than 220 million iPhones a year and by most estimates, nine in 10 are made in China. From the glossy screens to the battery packs, it's here that many of the components in an Apple product are made, sourced and assembled into iPhones, iPads or Macbooks. Most are shipped to the US, Apple's largest market.
Luckily for the firm, Trump suddenly exempted smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices from his tariffs last week.
But the comfort is short-lived.
The president has since suggested that more tariffs are coming: "NOBODY is getting 'off the hook'," he wrote on Truth Social, as his administration investigated "semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN".
The global supply chain that Apple has touted as a strength is now a vulnerability.
The US and China, the world's two biggest economies, are interdependent and Trump's staggering tariffs have upended that relationship overnight, leading to an inevitable question: who is the more dependent of the two?
How a lifeline became a threat
China has hugely benefited from hosting assembly lines for one of the world's most valuable companies. It was a calling card to the West for quality manufacturing and has helped spur local innovation.
Apple entered China in the 1990s to sell computers through third-party suppliers.
Around 1997, when it was on the verge of bankruptcy as it struggled to compete with rivals, Apple found a lifeline in China. A young Chinese economy was opening up to foreign companies to boost manufacturing and create more jobs.
It wasn't until 2001 though that Apple officially arrived in China, through a Shanghai-based trading company, and started making products in the country. It partnered with Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronic manufacturer operating in China, to make iPods, then iMacs and subsequently iPhones.
As Beijing began trading with the world - encouraged by the US no less - Apple grew its footprint in what was becoming the world's factory.
Back then, China was not primed to make the iPhone. But Apple chose its own crop of suppliers and helped them grow into "manufacturing superstars," according to supply chain expert Lin Xueping.
He cites the example of Beijing Jingdiao, now a leading manufacturer of high-speed precision machinery, which is used to make advanced components efficiently. The company, which used to cut acrylic, was not considered a machine tool-maker - but it eventually developed machinery to cut glass and became "the star of Apple's mobile phone surface processing," Mr Lin says.
Apple opened its first store in the country in Beijing in 2008, the year the city hosted the Olympics and China's relationship with the West was at an all-time high. This soon snowballed to 50 stores, with customers queuing out of the door.
As Apple's profit margins grew, so did its assembly lines in China, with Foxconn operating the world's largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, which has since been termed "iPhone City".
For a fast-growing China, Apple became a symbol of advanced Western tech - simple yet original and slick.
Today, most of Apple's prized iPhones are manufactured by Foxconn. The advanced chips that power them are made in Taiwan, by the world's largest chip manufacturer, TSMC. The manufacturing also requires rare earth elements which are used in audio applications and cameras.
Some 150 of Apple's top 187 suppliers in 2024 had factories in China, according to an analysis by Nikkei Asia.
"There's no supply chain in the world that's more critical to us than China," Apple's chief executive Tim Cook said in an interview last year.
The tariff threat - fantasy or ambition?
In Trump's first term, Apple secured exemptions on the tariffs he imposed on China.
But this time, the Trump administration has made an example of Apple before it reversed tariffs on some electronics. It believes the threat of steep taxes will encourage businesses to make products in America instead.
"The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones - that kind of thing is going to come to America," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview earlier this month.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that last week: "President Trump has made it clear America cannot rely on China to manufacture critical technologies such as semiconductors, chips, smartphones and laptops."
She added: "At the direction of the president, these companies are hustling to onshore their manufacturing in the United States as soon as possible."
But many are sceptical of that.
The thought that Apple could move its assembly operation to the US is "pure fantasy," according to Eli Friedman, who formerly sat on the firm's academic advisory board.
He says the company has been talking about diversifying its supply chain away from China since 2013, when he joined the board - but the US was never an option.
Mr Friedman adds that Apple didn't make much progress over the next decade but "really made an effort" after the pandemic, when China's tightly controlled Covid lockdowns hurt manufacturing output.
"The most important new locations for assembly have been Vietnam and India. But of course the majority of Apple assembly still takes place [in China]."
Apple did not respond to the BBC's questions but its website says its supply chain spans "thousands of businesses and more than 50 countries".
Challenges ahead
Any change to Apple's current supply chain status quo would be a huge blow for China, which is trying to kickstart growth post-pandemic.
Many of the reasons that the country wanted to be a manufacturing hub for Western companies in the early 2000s ring true today - it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs, and gives the country a crucial edge in global trade.
"Apple sits at the intersection of US-China tensions, and tariffs highlight the cost of that exposure," says Jigar Dixit, a supply chain and operations consultant.
It might explain why China has not bowed to Trump's threats, retaliating instead with 125% levies on US imports. China has also imposed export controls on a range of critical rare earth minerals and magnets it has in stores, dealing a blow to the US.
There is no doubt the US tariffs still being levied on other Chinese sectors will hurt, though.
And it's not just Beijing facing higher tariffs - Trump has made it clear he will target countries that are part of the Chinese supply chain. For instance Vietnam, where Apple has moved AirPods production, was facing 46% tariffs before Trump hit pause for 90 days, so moving production elsewhere in Asia is not an easy way out.
"All conceivable places for the huge Foxconn assembly sites with tens or hundreds of thousands of workers are in Asia, and all of these countries are facing higher tariffs," Mr Friedman says.
So what does Apple do now?
The company is fighting off stiff competition from Chinese firms as the government pushes for advanced tech manufacturing in a race with the US.
Now that "Apple has cultivated China's electronic manufacturing capabilities, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and others can reuse Apple's mature supply chain," according to Mr Lin.
Last year, Apple lost its place as China's biggest smartphone seller to Huawei and Vivo. Chinese people are not spending enough because of a sluggish economy and with ChatGPT banned in China, Apple is also struggling to retain an edge among buyers seeking AI-powered phones. It even offered rare discounts on iPhones in January to boost sales.
And while operating under President Xi Jinping's increasingly close grip, Apple has had to limit the use of Bluetooth and Airdrop on its devices as the Chinese Communist Party sought to censor political messages that people were sharing. It weathered a crackdown on the tech industry that even touched Alibaba founder and multi-billionaire Jack Ma.
Apple has announced a $500bn (£378bn) investment in the US, though that may not be enough to appease the Trump administration for long.
Given the several U-turns and the uncertainty around Trump's tariffs, more surprise levies are expected - which could again leave the company with little manoeuvring room and even less time.
Mr Dixit says smartphone tariffs will not cripple Apple should they rear their head again, but regardless will add "pressure - both operationally and politically" to a supply chain that cannot be unwound quickly.
"Clearly the severity of the immediate crisis has been lessened," Mr Friedman adds, referring to last week's exemption for smartphones.
"But I really don't think this means Apple can relax."
Additional reporting by Fan Wang
For the last few weeks, many foreign students living in the US have watched as a sequence of events has repeated itself on their social media feeds: plain-clothes agents appearing unannounced and hauling students off in unmarked cars to detention centres.
Those taken into custody in a string of high-profile student detentions captured on video have not faced any criminal charges and instead appear to have been targeted for involvement in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
The Trump administration has said repeatedly that visas are a "privilege" and can be revoked at any time for a wide variety of reasons.
But the crackdown appears to be far wider than initially thought, with more than 1,000 international students or recent graduates at colleges across the US now having had their visas revoked or legal statuses changed, according to a tracker from Inside Higher Ed, an online news site covering the sector.
For many, the precise reasons are unknown, and universities have often only learned of the changes when checking a government-run database that logs the visa status of international students.
The combination of targeted detentions and reports of wide-scale visa revocations have left campuses on edge, from the biggest public universities to elite Ivy League institutions, students and faculty told the BBC.
"I could be next," said one student visa-holder attending Georgetown University, who has written articles about Israel and the war in Gaza.
He's begun carrying around a card in his pocket that lists his constitutional rights, in case he is ever stopped by law enforcement.
Another student in Texas said he's afraid to leave his apartment, even to buy groceries.
And at some colleges, departments are being hit as researchers abroad refuse to return to the US.
Most students the BBC spoke to requested anonymity out of fear that having their names in the media could make them a target.
The BBC has contacted the Department of Education for comment.
His detention followed that of Columbia University student protest organiser Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident arrested at home in New York but now awaiting deportation from a facility in Louisiana.
Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who co-authored a student newspaper op-ed about Gaza and was detained in Massachusetts, is also being held in Louisiana.
Last Monday, Mohsen Mahdawi, another Columbia student protester, was detained in Vermont as he attended an interview to obtain US citizenship. Like Mr Khalil, he holds a green card, rather than a student visa.
"Based on the detentions that we're seeing, I think there is a possibility anyone who has been outspoken about Palestine can be detained," said the Georgetown student, who knew Mr Suri.
The White House says it is going after those who have been involved in activities that "run counter" to US national interests. In Mr Khalil's case, officials have cited a 1952 law that empowers the government to order someone deported if their presence in the country could pose unfavourable consequences for US foreign policy.
In a post on X, the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association celebrated Mr Khalil's arrest, calling him the "ringleader of chaos" at the university.
In addition to checking his email daily to see if he is among the hundreds that have had their visas revoked recently, he has also prepared for the possibility of sudden arrest.
"I have cleared my chats across messaging apps, and I have learned how to quickly lock my phone in SOS mode," he said.
Georgetown professors have even begun offering spare rooms to students who worry about being visited by immigration agents at their residences, said Prof Hashemi.
"This is part of the trauma that I think students are facing," he said.
At Tufts University, outside of Boston, Massachusetts, students are waiting to see what happens to Ms Ozturk, who was detained outside her home.
Video shows her confused and shaking in fear as she is intercepted by agents while headed to a Ramadan dinner celebration. Last year, she had co-authored an op-ed supporting the boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) movement against Israel.
Tufts PhD student Anteri Mejr told the BBC that the actions have had a "chilling effect", and that international students she knows who have left the country to visit home or attend conferences are now afraid to return.
"There are students working remotely because they're afraid they can't get back in the country," he said.
At the University of Texas, rumours about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on campus have some students terrified.
"I'm scared to be out. I'm scared to come to school. I'm scared to go grocery shopping," a master's student there said.
"I'm afraid that if I'm walking, I will be approached by agents in incognito clothes and plain disguise," he continued.
Despite being a green card holder and having not played a role in pro-Palestinian protests on campus, he says he is still in "crippling anxiety" because he has written things that are critical of the president.
"How far does this administration dig through, like, an immigrant's history?" he asked. "What if I did say something and I'm not aware."
When wedding dress designer Catherine Deane saw her company's Instagram account get hacked, she says it was "devastating".
"It felt like the rug had been pulled from under us. Instagram is our primary social platform, and we've invested the most amount of time and business resources into it.
"To keep the account current we post content every day. Suddenly all this work… it was just pulled."
Ms Deane's UK-based business, which is named after her, sells wedding dresses online, with her biggest market being the US.
On Instagram it now has 59,000 followers, but a few years ago the firm lost control of the account after a member of its social media team received a message suggesting that the business had been selected to get blue-badge verification from Instagram, which is owned by Facebook's Meta.
This was the stamp of authenticity that Ms Deane had long sought. "We were obviously very excited about that," she says.
So her employee opened a link to what turned out to be a fake Instagram verification form that requested log-in credentials. She filled it in, divulging the username and password, and shortly afterwards the account was taken over by hackers.
What added to Ms Deane's anguish was that she says she had to fight with Meta to get her account back, which took four months.
Initially she filled out the admin dispute form and sent it off, but heard nothing. Multiple emails followed but no action was taken.
"It's so incredibly frustrating when you're dealing with your account being hacked and there is no-one to talk to," she says. "It's almost traumatising because there is no-one who understands and can help escalate it."
Eventually an email came from Meta, telling her that the case was closed, even though she was still unable to access her page.
In the end the matter was finally resolved for Ms Deane because someone in the firm had a contact at Facebook, and the team emailed that person daily for the four months.
"Finally, I think they just needed to get us off their backs and they reinstated the account," says Ms Deane.
According to Jonas Borchgrevink, boss of US-based cyber security firm Hacked.com, Ms Deane is far from a unique case among people with business accounts on Instagram and Facebook.
"I would say that it is a massive problem," says Mr Borchgrevink. "There are probably thousands every day that are losing their business pages."
His company helps firms recover their Instagram and Facebook accounts, and he gets "10 to 15 clients per week". "But those are just the ones that know about us and are able to pay the price, because these cases can take up to six months to sort."
The BBC asked Meta to provide some numbers that would reveal the extent of the problem, and how it was tackling it, but it declined.
However, it said in a statement, that "we take the safety and security of our community seriously and encourage everyone to create a strong password, enable two factor authentication and to be suspicious of emails or messages asking for personal details.
"We also have a feature called Security Check-up to help people keep their Instagram and Facebook accounts secure."
Hackers want to take over business social media accounts for a number of reasons. These including using the pages to sell fake products or place scam adverts, harvesting personal information, spreading malware, tricking people into sending money, or blackmailing the company in question to unblock the account.
The final thing in that list happened last year to David Davila, who is part of the marketing team at Quantum Windows & Doors, a small, family-run business based in Washington state in the US.
He got locked out of the firm's social Facebook account when he responded to what turned out to be a fake message purporting to be from Meta.
Because his phone number was linked to the account, that also fell into the hands of the scammers and, soon after the lock-out, he got a WhatsApp message demanding $1,200 (£900) to unlock the account.
Unable to find a helpline, he searched on Google, but the number he rang put him through to more scammers. That link has since been removed by Google.
Thankfully, Mr Davila was able to get the Facebook account unlocked a few days later.
Mr Borchgrevink believes that Meta is overwhelmed by the scale of the problem.
"It has implemented different security measures over the years and yet we still receive the same amount of clients, so I don't think there's been a lot of change there," he says.
In fact, with scammers now utilising AI to make their messages seem even more believable, Mr Borchgrevink thinks the situation could get a lot worse.
He tells the BBC that scammers are behind many of these lock-outs and one of their preferred methods of fooling people is to masquerade as customer support agents.
"They pretend to be Meta Support and send the business an email saying that they have infringed some kind of copyright or broken terms and conditions in some way, and that they need to verify themselves.
"The messages have the Facebook logo and are very believable. But when you start to verify your business page, they ask for the password and redirect you to a fake Meta site to steal log-ins."
He said that the fraudsters often target a personal Facebook page first, because all business accounts need to be linked to one.
"Your personal account will also have admin rights to your business account. The scammers go into your business account and transfer the admin rights to their own or to fake profiles.
"Then they go back to your personal account and disable it by posting inappropriate content like terror-related or pornography-related. That disables your account and makes it really hard to recover either that or your business account."
The BBC has also learned of businesses losing access to their Facebook and Instagram accounts despite them not being hacked.
One small business which is part of franchise, told the BBC that they lost access to their account when another franchisee gained a blue-tick verification. As a result of that their account was flagged as a clone.
Meanwhile, others, such as digital marketer Chetha Senadeera, say that Meta has wrongly closed business accounts.
Last autumn he realised that a Facebook page he managed for a mobile bank had gone missing. "It had just disappeared," he says.
"There was no notification to me or any of the team members. It was just gone. It was like it had been kidnapped, almost."
The page was a crucial gateway to customers across Europe for Lithuania bank MyTU.
Mr Senadeera says that the customer support agents he spoke to at Meta, Facebook's owner, were baffled. He says they told him that they could see the page, but that it had been restricted, and that they couldn't unblock it.
Six months later, and the page remains locked.
Meta tells the BBC that the page had been removed for violating its scams policies, via a link on the page that was flagged by its systems as potentially harmful.
Mr Senadeera disputes that the firm has ever posted any harmful or misleading content. He says that Meta needs to do more, and move more quickly, to help firms get their Facebook and Instagram pages back, whether they have been a victim of fraud or not.
The US has revealed plans to impose port fees on Chinese ships to try to revive shipbuilding in the US and challenge China's dominance of the industry.
From mid-October, Chinese ship owners and operators will be charged $50 per ton of cargo with the fees increasing each year for the next three years.
There have been concerns that the measures would further disrupt global trade after US President Donald Trump's raft of tariff policies, but the fee is less severe than originally suggested.
A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said the fees will raise prices for American consumers and "will not revitalise the US shipbuilding industry".
The US Trade Representative (USTR) said: "China has largely achieved its dominance goals, severely disadvantaging US companies, workers, and the US economy".
Fees on Chinese vessel owners and operators of ships built in China will be based on the weight of their cargo, how many containers they carry or the number of vehicles onboard.
For affected bulk vessels, the fee will be based on the weight of their cargo, while the charge for container ships will depend on how many containers a vessel is carrying.
The $50 per ton of cargo will rise by $30 a ton each year for the next three years. Fees on Chinese-built ships will start at $18 a ton or $120 per container and also rise over the next three years.
Non-US built ships carrying cars will be charged $150 per vehicle.
The fee will be applied once per voyage on affected ships and not more than five times a year.
The USTR also decided not to impose fees based on how many Chinese-built ships are in a fleet or based on prospective orders of Chinese ships, as it had originally proposed.
Empty vessels that arrive at US ports to carry bulk exports like coal or grain are exempted.
Vessels that move goods between American ports as well as from those ports to Caribbean islands and US territories are also exempted from rules, as are US and Canadian ships that call at ports in the Great Lakes.
The fees are much lower than a plan floated in February to charge up to $1.5m (£1.1m) for each American port a Chinese ship visits.
The USTR said a second phase of actions will begin in three years to favour US-built ships carrying liquified natural gas (LNG). These restrictions will rise incrementally over the following 22 years.
The announcement came as global trade is already being disrupted by Trump's trade tariffs, experts have said.
Cargoes originally destined for ports in the US from China are instead being redirected to European ports, a trade group said.
Businesses have warned this will raise prices for US consumers.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has imposed taxes of up to 145% on imports from China. Other countries are facing a blanket US tariff of 10% until July.
His administration said this week that when the new tariffs are added on to existing ones, the levies on some Chinese goods could reach 245%.
These tariffs have caused "significant build ups" of ships, especially in the European Union, but also "significant congestion" at UK ports, according to Marco Forgione, director general of the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade.
More containers are coming to the UK, he said.
"We've seen a lot of diversion of ships from China, that were due to head to the US, diverting and coming to the UK and into the EU."
In the first three months of 2025, Chinese imports into the UK have increased by about 15% and into the EU by about 12%.
"That's a direct impact of what President Trump is doing," he said, adding that uncertainty and increased disruption pushes up prices for consumers.
'More cargo to Europe'
Sanne Manders, president of logistics firm Flexport, said both tariffs and strikes at ports in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium in the first three months of the year had been "clogging" ports.
Congestion in the UK "is particularly severe in Felixstowe", while in continental Europe Rotterdam and Barcelona are "also pretty severe".
"I do believe that if more cargo is going to be routed towards Europe, finding new buyers that will drive up the volumes even further, that could lead to more congestion," he said - although terminals would be open for more hours per day in the summer due to better weather.
He said shippers were looking for new markets, but that also there may be a surge of goods to the US to try to take advantage of that 90-day window for goods from some countries.
He said in the US, consumers would pay for the tariffs, but European consumers would not see "much impact".
Companies would also probably start redesigning their supply chains, he said.
Computer chip giant Nvidia has once again found itself at the centre of US-China tensions over trade and technology.
On Thursday Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang flew to Beijing to meet senior Chinese officials, just after the US imposed new export controls on its chips.
The California-based company will require licenses to export its H20 AI chip to China, a move which the US Commerce Department said was designed to safeguard "national and economic security". Nvidia said federal officials had told them the requirement will be in force for the "indefinite future".
But why is the company so pivotal in the race for AI supremacy between the US and China?
What is Nvidia?
Nvidia designs advanced chips, or semiconductors, that are used in generative artificial intelligence. Generative AI can produce new content from a user's prompt, like ChatGPT.
In recent years, a surge in global demand for AI chips led Nvidia to become one of the world's most valuable companies. In November, Nvidia briefly unseated Apple as the largest company in the world by market capitalisation.
Because its chips are seen as so essential to advancements in generative AI, successive US administrations have scrutinised Nvidia's relationship with China.
Washington hopes the new export controls will slow China's development of advanced AI chips - especially their use by the Chinese military - and secure an advantage in AI competition with Beijing.
Why is Trump targeting Nvidia's H20 chips?
US restrictions on Nvidia selling chips to China are not new.
In 2022, Joe Biden's administration imposed separate export controls on the sale of advanced semiconductors to China. Nvidia specifically designed the H20 chip to comply with those existing restrictions.
A more powerful Nvidia chip, the H100, was already banned for sale in China.
However, the recent emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese generative AI company, has prompted fresh concerns in the US that even less powerful chips could lead to significant technological breakthroughs.
DeepSeek claimed it could operate as effectively as other applications like ChatGPT using less advanced chips.
Now, there is increasing demand for Nvidia's H20 chips among Chinese technology companies such as Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
Those companies have outstanding orders for the chips. But because there is no grace period on the imposition of the new curbs, Nvidia expects to be hit by losses of $5.5bn (£4.15bn) from these orders that it can no longer fulfil.
Chim Lee, a senior analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit in Beijing, told the BBC that there are alternative AI chips being developed in China, by companies like Huawei.
Although they are currently viewed as inferior to Nvidia's, Mr Lee said the US curbs could prompt China to focus on developing better chips.
"It will introduce challenges to China's AI scene, but it won't massively slow down China's AI development and deployment," Mr Lee added.
Why is Nvidia's CEO in China?
China is a critical market for Nvidia. The world's second-largest economy accounted for 13% of its total sales last year, though that is still far less than the United States, which accounted for nearly half.
The timing of Mr Huang's trip is being seen as an effort to shore up Nvidia's business in China despite the latest curbs.
In his Beijing meeting with Ren Hongbin, head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, Mr Huang said he hoped "to continue to cooperate with China", according to state broadcaster CCTV.
On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Mr Huang's trip to China also included a meeting with DeepSeek's founder, Liang Wenfeng.
Separately, top Chinese official He Lifeng told Mr Huang that "China's market investment and consumption potential is huge", according to state news agency Xinhua.
During talks with Shanghai's mayor on Friday, Mr Huang said he was committed to the Chinese market, according to a Shanghai government statement.
How will the export controls impact US-China competition?
The controls are part of Washington's broader goal to de-risk supply chains for advanced technology away from China, and bring more semiconductor production back to the US.
Nvidia this week announced plans to build up AI servers in the US worth up to $500bn. US president Donald Trump later claimed his re-election drove Nvidia's decision.
And in March, Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC, which manufactures Nvidia's chips, announced it would invest an additional $100bn in advanced manufacturing facilities in Arizona.
Gary Ng, senior economist at Natixis, told the BBC the latest developments show that global technology is becoming increasingly polarised between "two systems", one dominated by the US and the other by China.
"Tech will be less global in that sense, and it will be subject to more restrictions."
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he discussed his country's potential to collaborate with the US on "technology and innovation" during a conversation with Elon Musk.
On Friday, Modi shared a post on X detailing his telephone conversation with the tech billionaire and said they had revisited topics from their meeting in Washington earlier this year.
Modi's conversation with Musk comes as India is working towards securing a bilateral trade agreement with the US to offset the brunt of US President Donald Trump's potential tariffs.
It also comes days before US Vice-President JD Vance's four-day trip to India.
When US President Donald Trump hit China with tariffs in his first term, Vietnamese entrepreneur Hao Le saw an opportunity.
His company is one of hundreds of businesses that have emerged to compete with Chinese exports that have increasingly been facing restrictions from the West.
Le's SHDC Electronics, which sits in the budding industrial hub of Hai Duong, sells $2m (£1.5m) worth of phone and computer accessories every month to the United States.
But that revenue could dry up if Trump imposes 46% tariffs on Vietnamese goods, a plan that is currently on hold until early July. That would be "catastrophic for our business," Le says.
And selling to Vietnamese consumers is not an option, he adds: "We cannot compete with Chinese products. This is not just our challenge. Many Vietnamese companies are struggling in their own home market."
Trump tariffs in 2016 sent a glut of cheap Chinese imports, originally intended for the US, into South East Asia, hurting many local manufacturers. But they also opened new doors for other businesses, often into global supply chains that wanted to cut their dependence on China.
But Trump 2.0 threaten to shut those doors, which it sees as an unacceptable loophole. And that's a blow for fast-growing economies like Vietnam and Indonesia that are gunning to be key players in industries from chips to electric vehicles.
They also find themselves stuck between the world's two biggest economies - China, a powerful neighbour and their biggest trading partner, and the US, a key export market, which could be looking to strike a deal at Beijing's expense.
And so Xi Jinping's long-planned trip to Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia this week took on fresh urgency.
All three countries rolled out the the red carpet for him, but Trump saw it as more evidence of them conspiring to "screw" the US.
The White House will use its upcoming negotiations with smaller nations to pressure them into limiting their dealings with Beijing, according to reports.
But that could be a fanciful ambition given the amount of money flowing between China and South East Asia.
In 2024, China earned a record $3.5tn from exports - 16% of those went to South East Asia, its biggest market. Beijing, in turn, has paid for railways in Vietnam, dams in Cambodia and ports in Malaysia as part of its "Belt and Road" infratructure programme that seeks to boost ties abroad.
"We can't choose, and we will never choose [between China and the US]," Malaysia's trade minister Tengku Zafrul Aziz told the BBC on Tuesday, ahead of Xi's visit.
"If the issue is about something that we feel is against our interest, then we will protect [ourselves]."
A wake-up call
In the days after Trump unveiled his sweeping tariffs, South East Asian governments scrambled into deal-making mode.
In what Trump described as a "very productive call" with Vietnamese leader To Lam, the latter offered to completely scrap tariffs on US goods.
The US market is crucial to Vietnam, an emerging electronics powerhouse where manufacturing giants like Samsung, Intel and Foxconn, the Taiwanese firm contracted to make iPhones, have set up shop.
Meanwhile, Thai officials are headed to Washington with a plan that includes higher US imports and investments. The US is their largest export market, so they are hoping to avoid the 36% levy on Thailand that Trump may reinstate.
"We will tell the US government that Thailand is not only an exporter but also an ally and economic partner that the US can rely on in the long term," Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) has ruled out retaliation against Trump's tariffs, instead choosing to emphasise their economic and political importance to the US.
"We understand the concerns of the US," Mr Zafrul told the BBC. "That's why we need to show that actually we, Asean, especially Malaysia, can be that bridge."
It's a role that South East Asia's export-driven economies have played well - they have benefitted from both Chinese and US trade and investment. But Trump's paused levies could derail that.
Take Malaysia, for instance. In recent years, chip manufacturers from the US and elsewhere have invested there, as Washington blocks the sale of advanced tech to China. Last year China imported $18bn worth of chips from Malaysia. These chips are used in Chinese-made electronics, such as iPhones, typically bound for the US.
Trump's proposed tariffs on Malaysia - 24% - could cut off the multi-billion dollar US market. But that's not all.
"If this continues, then companies will have to rethink their investment commitments," Mr Zafrul says. "This will have an impact not just on Malaysia's economy, but on the global economy."
Then there is Indonesia, which could face 32% tariffs, and is home to vast nickel reserves and has its sights set on the global electric vehicle supply chain.
Cambodia, a Chinese ally, faces the steepest levies: 49%. One of the poorest countries in the region, it has thrived as a trans-shipment hub for Chinese businesses seeking to skirt US tariffs. Chinese businesses currently own or operate 90% of the clothes factories, which mainly export to the US.
Trump may have hit pause on these tariffs but "the damage is done," says Doris Liew, an economist at Malaysia's Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs.
"This serves as a wake-up call for the region, not only to reduce reliance on the US, but also to re-balance overdependence on any single trade and export partner."
China's loss and South East Asia's gain
In these uncertain times , Xi Jinping is trying to send a steadfast message: Let's join hands and resist "bullying" from the US.
That is no easy task because South East Asia also has trade tensions with Beijing.
In Indonesia, business owner Isma Savitri is worried that Trump's 145% tariffs on China means more competition from Chinese rivals who can no longer export to the US.
"Small businesses like us feel squeezed," says the owner of sleepwear brand Helopopy. "We are struggling to survive against an onslaught of ultra-cheap Chinese products."
One of Helopopy's popular pyjamas sells for $7.10 (119,000 Indonesian rupiah). Isma says she has seen similar designs from China going for around half that price.
"South East Asia, being close by, with open trade regimes and fast-growing markets, naturally became the dumping ground," says Nguyen Khac Giang, visiting fellow at the ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute in Singapore. "Politically, many countries are reluctant to confront Beijing, which adds another layer of vulnerability."
While consumers have welcomed competitively-priced Chinese products - from clothes to shoes to phones - thousands of local businesses have not been able to match such low prices.
More than 100 factories in Thailand have closed every month for the last two years, according to an estimate from a Thai think tank. During the same period in Indonesia, around 250,000 textile workers were laid off after some 60 garment manufacturers shut, local trade associations say - including Sritex, once the region's largest textile maker.
"When we see the news, there are lots of imported products flooding the domestic market, which messes up our own market," Mujiati, a worker who was laid off from Sritex in February after 30 years, tells the BBC.
"Maybe it just wasn't our luck," says the 50-year-old, who is still hunting for work. "Who can we complain to? There's no-one."
South East Asian governments responded with a wave of protectionism, as local businesses demanded to be shielded from the impact of Chinese imports.
Last year Indonesia considered 200% tariffs on a range of Chinese goods and blocked e-commerce site Temu, popular among Chinese merchants. Thailand tightened inspections of imports and imposed additional tax on goods worth less than 1,500 Thai baht ($45; £34).
This year Vietnam has twice imposed temporary anti-dumping duties on Chinese steel products. And after Trump's latest tariffs announcement, Vietnam is reportedly set to crack down on Chinese goods being trans-shipped via its territory to the US.
Allaying these fears would have been on Xi's agenda this week.
China is concerned that channelling its US-bound exports to the rest of the world would "end up really alienating and aggravating" its trading partners, David Rennie, the former Beijing bureau chief for the Economist newspaper, told BBC's Newshour.
"If a tidal wave of Chinese exports ends up swamping those markets and damaging employment and jobs … that's a massive diplomatic and geopolitical headache for the Chinese leadership."
China has not always had an easy relationship with this region. Barring Laos, Cambodia and a war-torn Myanmar, the others are wary of Beijing's ambitions. Territorial disputes in the South China have soured ties with the Philippines. This is also an issue with others such as Vietnam and Malaysia, but trade has been a balancing factor.
But that might change now, experts say.
"South East Asia had to think about whether they really wanted to offend China. Now this complicates things," says Chong Ja-Ian, associate professor at the National University of Singapore.
China's loss could be South East Asia's gain.
Hao Le, in Vietnam, says he has seen a surge in enquiries from American customers scouting for new electronics suppliers, outside of China: "In the past, US buyers would take months to switch suppliers. Today, such decisions are made within days."
Malaysia, with sprawling rubber plantations and the world's largest medical rubber glove maker, has nearly half the world's market for rubber gloves. But it is poised to grab a bigger share from its main competitor, China.
The region still faces a 10% baseline tariff, like most of the world. And that is bad news, says Oon Kim Hung, president of the Malaysian Rubber Glove Manufacturers Association.
But even if the paused tariffs kick in, he says, customers will find paying an additional 24% on Malaysian gloves vastly preferable to the 145% levy they will have to cough up for Chinese-made gloves.
"We're not exactly jumping with joy, but this may well benefit our manufacturers, as well as those in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia."
Additional reporting by Abhiram V Subramaniam
Trade tariff uncertainty is "literally off the charts" but there will not be a global recession, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said.
The international economic group said in its forecast for the world economy that global share prices have dropped "as trade tensions flared" and warned about an "erosion of trust" between countries.
However, it stopped short of predicting a worldwide recession, saying "our new growth projections will include notable markdowns, but not recession".
The comments come as leaders and businesses respond to US President Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs announced on 2 April.
Global stock markets plummeted following the announcement and many have not recovered since - with the FTSE 100 index of the largest firms listed in the UK still 4.6% lower than a month ago.
Meanwhile, predictions of a global recession have risen as firms slash spending and investment amid the uncertainty and some countries respond to Trump with tariffs of their own.
On Wednesday, the World Trade Organization (WTO) forecast that global trade will fall this year because of Trump's tariffs.
It follows similar comments from the Bank of England, which has said that rising trade tensions from tariffs have "contributed to a material increase in the risk to global growth" and financial stability.
Meanwhile, the European Central Bank (ECB) said on Thursday it had reduced its key interest rate "owing to rising trade tensions".
But the IMF's outlook is rosier by contrast. "[This] is a call to respond wisely," said IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva on Thursday.
"A better balanced, more resilient world economy is within reach. We must act to secure it."
She added "all countries must redouble efforts to put their own houses in order" in response to the uncertainty.
She specifically called on Europe to cut down on "restrictions on internal trade in services" and "deepen" its single market.
She also said China needs to increase its social safety net so that there is less "precautionary saving" and said the US government needs to reduce its debt.
Before Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and threatened its sovereignty, the Canadian psyche was consumed with another major issue: housing affordability. With an election on the horizon, voters are wondering if any party has a plan to fix what has become a generational problem.
Willow Yamauchi says she was just a "regular" person when she and her husband bought their family home in Vancouver 25 years ago for a modest sum of C$275,000 - around C$435,000 ($312,000; £236,400) in today's dollars.
That same property is now worth several million.
In the city on Canada's west coast, Ms Yamauchi's story is as common as the rainy weather. The average price of a detached home in Vancouver in 2000 was around C$350,000. Now, it is more than C$2m.
"My husband and I were very privileged to be able to purchase a house when we did," the 52-year-old writer tells the BBC. As a member of Generation X, timing was on her side.
The same, she says, cannot be said for younger people, who - without "the bank of mom and dad" - are effectively priced out of the city they grew up in.
Vancouver, a cultural and economic hub with a population of less than one million, is often seen as the epicentre of Canada's housing crisis. A report by Chapman University in California last year listed it among the top "impossibly unaffordable" cities in the world.
But it is not the only Canadian city where the cost of homes is out of reach for many. Canada as a whole has one of the highest house-price-to-income ratios among developed nations.
In 2021, the average household income after taxes in Canada was around C$88,000, according to national data. That same year, the average home price hit C$713,500 - more than eight times higher. The gap is even larger in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver.
For many Canadians, housing is one of the top issues in the federal election, eclipsed only recently by US President Donald Trump and his tariffs on Canada.
Before Trump, concerns on housing affordability had boosted the Conservative Party, which has consistently been seen as the best equipped to fix the crisis.
But then a trade war with the US came along and it catapulted the governing Liberal party to the top of the polls.
Even with the Trump factor, the topic featured prominently in the two election debates this week. During the French language one, moderator and journalist Patrice Roy displayed figures showing how much home prices had increased in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in the last decade.
"I'm sure this won't come as a surprise," Mr Roy told the federal leaders, before asking for their plans on how they would fix the crisis.
Polls show young people are especially worried about the housing crisis and what it means for their future.
Speaking to students at the University of British Columbia's (UBC) Vancouver campus, it quickly became clear that the issue was top of mind for many.
Many said they have either opted to live at home during their studies to save on costs, or are paying anywhere from C$1,100 to C$1,500 for a single room near campus, often in a home shared with five or six others.
Emily Chu, a 24-year-old who is in her final semester at UBC, says that she at one point had to delay her studies by two years in order to work, as she struggled to afford paying both tuition and rent.
She now shares an apartment with her older brother, who works full-time and pays the majority of the rent. Ms Chu considers herself one of the lucky ones.
As for home ownership in the future, she says "that's not even possible" for most people her age. "Everybody kind of assumes that we can't ever own housing."
Young professionals with well-paying jobs, like Margareta Dovgal, are also priced out. The 28-year-old director at Vancouver-based non-profit Resource Works told the BBC that she has considered moving to the neighbouring province of Alberta due to its lower cost of living, despite being a lifelong and "committed Vancouverite".
Still, Calgary, Alberta's largest city, saw house prices increase by 15% in 2024 from the previous year as the city experienced its highest population growth rate since 2001.
The root causes of Canada's housing affordability crisis are complex. One of the main issues is a supply that has not kept up with a growing population, which has driven up costs for both buyers and renters.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), the national housing agency, estimates that more than 3.8 million homes need to be built in the next six years to address the shortage.
Construction of new housing, however, has been well below that target, raising questions on whether Canada will meet this goal. Experts say barriers to ramping up building include the high cost and scarcity of land in urban areas, where most Canadians tend to live and work.
There are also regional barriers, like city zoning laws that prevent the construction of more affordable, higher density housing - including apartment buildings or multiplexes - in some neighbourhoods.
Daniel Oleksiuk, co-founder of the advocacy group Abundant Housing Vancouver, says his city is one example, where more than half of the land has historically been zoned for single-family homes.
"We've kept almost all of the land reserved," Mr Oleksiuk told the BBC. "There are whole neighbourhoods where all you have is three to five million dollar homes."
On the campaign trail, each major federal party has put forward a plan to fix the crisis, all with the goal of building as many homes as quickly as possible.
The Liberals, led by Mark Carney, said their aim is to build 500,000 new homes a year with the help of a new government agency called Build Canada Homes that would oversee and finance the construction of affordable housing in Canada - a plan similar to one implemented after the Second World War to house veterans.
Critics have questioned whether Carney's target is viable, as it would require Canada to more than double its current construction rate.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, vowed to tie federal funding to housing starts by rewarding cities that build more homes and penalising those that block construction - a carrot-and-stick approach.
Poilievre also promised to remove federal taxes on newly constructed homes in an effort to cut costs to would-be homebuyers. Critics, however, say this policy may have minimal effect, as most homes purchased in Canada are resold, rather than brand new.
Voters who spoke to the BBC say they welcome any plan to ramp up housing construction in Canada.
While much of housing is governed by provinces and cities, Ms Dovgal notes that the federal government has an ability "to lead persuasively" and implement measures that make it cheaper and easier to build across the country.
But others watching the issue closely caution that the steps proposed may not be enough.
Paul Kershaw, a public policy professor at UBC and founder of think tank Generation Squeeze, argues that politicians have failed to address the elephant in the room: the wealth older homeowners have generated off the housing crisis.
"The political bargain has asked younger Canadians to suffer higher rents and mortgages in order to protect those higher home values," Kershaw notes.
"None of the parties are really naming that generational tension," he says, adding that politicians may privately feel there is a political risk in trying to stall the cost of housing, and thus, older Canadians' assets.
Prof Kershaw calls this a "cultural problem", and says that parties should also focus on reducing costs for younger people as a way to alleviate this generational burden.
Fixing the housing crisis, he argues, is just as integral as asserting sovereignty and prosperity in the face of threats posed by Trump's tariffs.
The "dysfunction that has entered our housing market is disruptive to the well-being of the country", he says.
Until a fix is found, the possibility of homeownership still looks bleak for many.
Ms Dovgal contends half-heartedly that, other than moving elsewhere, "you have to win the lottery, or marry a multi-millionaire. These are kind of the options".
A US judge has ruled tech giant Google has a monopoly in online advertising technology.
The US Department of Justice, along with 17 US states, sued Google, arguing the tech giant was illegally dominating the technology which determines which adverts should be placed online and where.
This is the second antitrust case Google has lost in a year, after it was ruled the company also had a monopoly on online search.
Google said it would appeal against the decision.
"Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective," the firm's head of regulatory affairs Lee-Ann Mulholland said.
US district judge Leonie Brinkema said in the ruling Google had "wilfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts" which enabled it to "acquire and maintain monopoly power" in the market.
"This exclusionary conduct substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," she said.
Google lost on two counts, while a third was dismissed.
"We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half," Ms Mulholland said.
"The court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don't harm competition."
The ruling is a significant win for US antitrust enforcers, according to Laura Phillips-Sawyer, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law.
"It signals that not only are agencies willing to prosecute but also that judges are willing to enforce the law against big tech firms," she said.
She said the verdict sets an important legal precedent and is likely to affect decision-making in corporate America.
Google's lawyers had argued the case focused too much on its past activities, and prosecutors ignored other large ad tech providers such as Amazon.
"Google has repeatedly used its market power to self-preference its own products, stifling innovation and depriving premium publishers worldwide of critical revenue needed to sustain high-quality journalism and entertainment," said Jason Kint, head of Digital Content Next, a trade association representing online publishers.
'Structural changes'
Google owns large companies on the buyer and seller sides of the online advertising market, as well as an ad exchange which matches demand and supply.
Internet users will not notice a difference online as a result of the decision, said Anupam Chander, professor of law and technology at Georgetown University.
But it affects "the division of monies between advertisers, publishers, and ad service providers".
"The judge seems willing to order structural changes in Google's ad exchange practices, which may affect Google's bottom line somewhat, but don't seem to necessarily threaten its core value proposition as an advertising middleman," he added.
In an ongoing series of antitrust lawsuits, the US government argues Google and its parent company Alphabet should be broken up - which could include selling off parts of the company such as the Chrome browser.
The US case will now move to a second "remedies" phase, which could also lead to Alphabet being broken up, said John Kwoka, a professor of economics at Northeastern University.
In September, the UK's competition watchdog provisionally found Google was using anti-competitive practices to dominate the market for online advertising technology.
It was once the Indian start-up world's shining star, but Ola is now battling a multitude of crises.
Founded in 2010, it quickly became a household name, expanding from ride-hailing to electric vehicles and battery cells, challenging Uber along the way.
The company jumped on the AI bandwagon in 2023 with Krutrim, India's first AI company valued at over $1bn.
Marquee global investors such as Japan's SoftBank, US-based Tiger Global and Singapore's Temasek bankrolled this expansion. Last year, Ola's electric vehicles (EV) arm raised close to $734m (£567m) in a blockbuster initial public offering (IPO), India's biggest in 2024.
But this ambitious rise has been accompanied by a series of controversies lately, particularly at its EV arm.
Ola Electric has lost close to 70% of its value in the seven months since the IPO was launched. It is facing competition from more established two-wheeler giants, along with mounting regulatory scrutiny.
Sales of Ola's scooters are down to less than half from April last year and the company's losses have widened. Customers have posted videos on social media of Ola scooters going up in flames or breaking down mid-ride.
There's a government inquiry under way at hundreds of newly-opened Ola showrooms regarding licences and registrations. One of its vendors also filed an insolvency plea against the company, which Ola said in a statement to stock exchanges that it had settled.
The BBC has learnt from former employees and industry sources that delayed payments have led to many major suppliers and logistics partners ending ties with them.
Ola has been cutting jobs, restructuring operations and automating functions in a bid to reduce costs and trim losses. Media reports say it has undertaken a second round of layoffs since November, with over 1,000 roles axed.
The BBC sent detailed questions to Ola about these issues. The company shared links to some of its earlier press statements, not responding specifically to all the queries.
So, what's gone wrong?
Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal positioned the company as Tesla's two-wheeler equivalent, solving the emissions problem for the price-sensitive Indian market.
He poured in millions of marketing dollars, opening Ola showrooms across India, even delivering scooters at the doorstep of people who'd made online bookings.
But Ola has struggled to read the market well, says Rohit Paradkar, an analyst with the auto magazine Overdrive.
Its scooter is modelled on the AppScooter from Etergo, a Dutch start-up that Ola Electric acquired in 2020.
Several former employees told the BBC that Ola's first EV scooter was launched without many changes to Etergo's version. A former employee who worked in the compliance department told the BBC that clearances were rushed through to meet unrealistic launch deadlines.
In response to queries, Ola referred to an October 2023 blog post where it addressed the "myth" that the vehicle had "not been engineered and tested for India". It said it had "fully re-engineered" Etergo's scooter and tested it for "Indian conditions".
"The whole vehicle has been tested at three levels [for India] - digital simulations, component tests and vehicular lab tests, and vehicular field tests," it said in the post.
But several safety-related incidents reported by customers have raised questions.
Some scooters began catching fire which, auto experts say, was likely due to short-circuits or faulty battery management system.
Ola recalled more than 1,400 first-generation scooters in 2022 to investigate the fires, but the report was not publicly released. It had then said the battery systems were compliant for Indian and European standards but didn't explain what caused the fires.
Some riders also reported the front suspension - which holds the wheel in place - breaking mid-ride, causing injuries.
In early 2023, after such an accident, Ola called it a rare case, noting there were only a few such issues among 150,000 scooters.
The front fork arm, they said, had a significant safety margin for accidents and was designed to handle 80% more load than what it would typically experience during daily use.
Meanwhile, Ola's rivals - mostly established automakers - have rolled out electric scooters smoothly, adding to the pressure on the company.
Their entry shook the market. Ola's share had plunged from 52% to 19% by December, then recovered to 25% in January.
Ola aims to sell 50,000 units monthly to turn profitable, but analysts doubt the target, despite the company saying recent restructuring has helped it achieve $10m monthly savings and faster deliveries.
Government data shows that less than 10,000 scooters were sold in February, but Ola claims 25,000, blaming registration delays due to vendor contract changes. The federal transport ministry has issued notices over the discrepancy. Ola said it had registered over 23,000 scooters sold in March and held a 30% market share for the fiscal year.
But competing scooters with fewer features are now outselling Ola simply because they come from trusted, well-established brands, said Jay Kale, executive vice-president and auto analyst at Elara Capital.
To push sales, Ola has offered deep discounts, launching newer models at cheaper price points. But losses have widened to $65m in the October-December quarter from $43.6m a year ago.
Besides product issues, the reliability of its customer service has been another major issue, says Kale.
When angry customers flooded social media and consumer helplines with complaints about the fires and front suspension, their service requests were reportedly unanswered for days.
At one point, thousands of complaints were piling up monthly, a former employee at Ola told the BBC. India's consumer rights agency, the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA), also sent a notice to Ola after it got 10,000 complaints over the period of a year.
But since Ola had eschewed the established dealer route in a bid to sell directly to buyers and had just a few service centres, aggrieved consumers had few places to turn to.
Late last year, Ola wrote to the CCPA that it had a "robust mechanism to address complaints", and that most raised with the regulator had been satisfactorily resolved.
Aggarwal was initially dismissive of the problems on social media but later announced that Ola would be opening nearly 4,000 stores with service facilities, following a heated public exchange on X with a stand-up comedian who took up the customers' cause.
A majority of these new centres, however, came under the government's scanner for lacking relevant licences to store and sell vehicles.
On 21 March, Ola confirmed investigations in four states and said it was responding to authorities.
The sharp turn in Ola's fortunes is making investors - especially those who bought in at high IPO valuations - nervous.
Ola has been a key player in India's push to cut carbon emissions and expand manufacturing.
It benefits from two separate state subsidies, one to make scooters and the second to set up its own 20 gigawatt EV battery plant. But Reuters has reported that the costly gigafactory project is delayed and has missed a key milestone, potentially leading to penalties.
Critics say Ola's troubles emanate from typical culture issues that plague many start-ups - including CEO-driven decision-making, constant pivots and unrealistic, high-pressure deadlines.
"Software mindsets don't work with hardware products, which need time to build," said Deepesh Rathore, who used to head product strategy at Ola Electric and now runs consultancy firm Insight EV.
Some top executives across the wider company have quit recently, including a former Ola Cab CEO who quit within months. Key leaders in tech, marketing, sales and business also left last year.
Experts say the exits have also affected Ola's efforts to fix product and service issues.
Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, X and Facebook.
Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni talked up the chances of a trade deal between the US and Europe, as the Italian prime minister visited Washington.
"There will be a trade deal, 100%," Trump said, "but it will be a fair deal", while Meloni said she was "sure" they could reach an agreement, later adding that her aim was to "make the West great again".
Meloni is the first European leader to visit Washington since Trump imposed, then paused, 20% tariffs on imports from the bloc.
The US president separately said on Thursday that he is confident of making "a very good deal" with China, adding that representatives from Beijing have reached out "a number of times".
Trump and Meloni enjoy a good relationship and the Italian leader hopes to position herself as a bridge between the EU and the US amid fractured relations and mounting concerns about the global impact of Trump's tariffs.
Despite his confidence in an eventual deal, Trump said he was in "no rush".
"Everybody wants to make a deal. And if they don't want to make a deal, we'll make the deal for them," he said, adding that he expects to cut deals with every country "over the next three to four weeks".
Trump also suggested that he was reluctant to further raise tariffs on China - which currently stand at 145%.
"I may not want to go higher. I may want to go to less because you know, you want people to buy and, at a certain point, people aren't gonna buy," he told reporters at the White House.
At a press conference on Thursday following Trump's and Meloni's conversation, the leaders said they had discussed defence spending, immigration and tariffs.
The atmosphere in the Oval Office appeared relaxed and good-natured - similar to the reception UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer received during his visit to the White House in February.
However Meloni's aides had described the visit as a "commercial peace mission" following Trump's decision to impose a 10% baseline tariff on almost all foreign imports to the US.
He has strongly criticised the European Union on trade, claiming it was "formed to screw the United States". A 20% "retaliatory" tariff on the EU has been temporarily suspended until July.
Meloni previously called the tariffs "absolutely wrong" and said they would end up damaging the EU "as much as the US".
While she didn't score any tangible wins on tariffs during the meeting, she did convince Trump to accept an invitation to visit Rome, which she said would be an occasion for him to meet other European leaders.
Given the fraught relations between the EU and the US, Meloni will likely chalk that up as a significant win, particularly if Trump agrees to meet the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, during the visit.
Meloni will return to Europe with stronger credentials as the so-called "Trump whisperer", something that will be reinforced when she meets US Vice President JD Vance in Rome tomorrow.
The Italian leader was careful to praise Trump and align herself with the US president's viewpoints.
In her statement following the meeting, she criticised "woke ideology" and championed the "war against illegal migration".
"The goal for me is to make the West great again, and I think we can do it together," she added.
She also seized the opportunity to tout the work of her own government. "I'm proud of sitting here as prime minister of an Italy that today has a very good situation - a stable country, a reliable country," Meloni said.
She noted that her government had brought inflation down and improved employment, before gesturing towards Trump and adding with a broad smile: "Forgive me if I promote my country, but you're a businessman and you understand me". Trump grinned back.
Meloni basked in the praise lavished on her by Trump - from compliments about her work as prime minister to gushing about her Italian sounding "beautiful".
The US president praised Meloni for taking a tough stance on immigration and said he wished more people were like her. Meloni said that change was happening, thanks to the example set by Italy, referring to yesterday's EU announcement on safe countries.
It was only occasionally that she showed a tinge of irritation when asked about Italy's low defence spending.
Meloni said that she expects Italy to announce at the next Nato meeting in June that her country would be able to meet the alliance's requirement that each member nation spends 2% of GDP on defence.
Defence spending has been a key sticking point for Trump, with the US leader repeatedly demanding that Nato allies increase spending.
Italy is one of eight countries that currently does not meet the 2% threshold, spending 1.49% on defence.
Italian opposition leader Carlo Calenda said there had been "two very positive outcomes" from the visit: that Meloni "stayed on track on Ukraine and managed to convince Trump to meet EU figures in Italy".
Calenda said Meloni had "gained credibility as a bridge between the US and the EU" but criticised her praise of "Trump's fight on woke culture".
The US government has threatened to ban Harvard University from enrolling foreign students after the institution said it would not bow to demands from President Donald Trump's administration and was hit with a funding freeze.
The White House has demanded Harvard make changes to hiring, admissions and teaching practices to help fight antisemitism on campus.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has asked for records on what she called the "illegal and violent" activities of its foreign student visa-holders.
Harvard earlier said it had taken many steps to address antisemitism, and that demands were an effort to regulate the university's "intellectual conditions".
"The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights," Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message on Monday to the Harvard community.
The new request from Noem said the institution would lose the "privilege of enrolling foreign students" if it did not comply with the demand for records.
Harvard said it was aware of the new request from Noem, which was made in a letter, the Reuters news agency reported.
International students make up more than 27% of Harvard's enrolment this year. Even before Noem's statement, billions of dollars hung in the balance for the university, after the freeze of some $2.2 bn (£1.7bn) in federal funding.
Trump has also threatened to also remove Harvard's valuable tax exemption, the loss of which could cost Harvard millions of dollars each year. US media reports suggest the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has started drawing up plans to enact this.
Harvard has said there is "no legal basis" to remove its tax exemption, and that "such an unprecedented action would endanger our ability to carry out our educational mission".
Trump launched a renewed attack on the university on Wednesday, saying it could "no longer be considered even a decent place of learning".
The administration's attacks on Harvard are not isolated. The government's antisemitism task force has identified at least 60 universities for review.
During his presidential campaign, Trump pitched a funding crackdown on universities, painting them as hostile to conservatives. He and Vice-President JD Vance have long railed against higher education institutions.
Polling by Gallup last year suggested that confidence in higher education had been falling over time among Americans of all political backgrounds, particularly Republicans - in part due to a belief that universities push a political agenda.
Since taking office, Trump has focused particularly on universities where pro-Palestinian protests have taken place. Some Jewish students have said they felt unsafe and faced harassment on campus.
In March, Columbia University agreed to several of the administration's demands, after $400m in federal funding was pulled over accusations the university failed to fight antisemitism.
These included replacing the official leading its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department and pledging to take on a review to "ensure unbiased admission processes".
Harvard too has made concessions - including by dismissing the leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, who had come under fire for failing to represent Israeli perspectives.
But it has drawn the line at the White House's recent list of demands.
Donald Trump has attacked the head of the US central bank for not cutting interest rates, stating that Jerome Powell's "termination cannot come fast enough!".
The US president took to social media to renew his criticism of Powell ahead of the third interest rate cut this year by European Central Bank (ECB).
On Thursday, it announced that it had reduced the key rate "owing to rising trade tensions".
Trump, who nominated Powell as Federal Reserve chair in 2017 during his first term, wrote that he "is always TOO LATE AND WRONG" on reducing borrowing costs.
Ferris Bueller
Mr Powell said that despite the uncertainty and ructions in the markets, the "US economy is still in a solid position".
For now, he said, the Fed could keep its benchmark interest rate steady "to wait for greater clarity before considering any adjustments".
The Fed's benchmark interest rate is currently set in a range between 4.25% and 4.5%, where it has been since December following a series of rate cuts late last year.
If tariffs push up inflation, as many economists expect, the Fed could decide to hold or even raise rates. Traders on Wednesday kept their bets it will continue to cut rates this year.
But the Fed also has a mandate to maintain maximum employment as well as stable prices.
Should it be caught between rising inflation and a rising unemployment rate, Mr Powell said "we would consider how far the economy is from each goal" and then look at "the potentially different time horizons" for getting prices under control and bringing the unemployment rate down.
"As that great Chicagoan Ferris Bueller once noted, "life moves pretty fast", he added.
The fortunes of India's BluSmart, a popular electric ride hailing service and once a formidable rival to Uber, have quickly unravelled, with the company halting new cab bookings.
The brand, which still has India's largest all electric ride-hailing fleet of more than 8,000 cars, set high service standards, including well maintained cars and polite drivers.
Quality was BluSmart's biggest selling point as it took on bigger rivals - marred by badly maintained taxis, rude drivers and frequent cancellations – by offering a significantly more premium product that cost only a little more.
The possibility of its closure has led to hundreds taking to social media to express anger and sadness.
"As a frequent BluSmart user, the news of the service shutting down hits hard. Another service one got used to, lost to mismanagement," one user said on X.
Although many people said they had already received a refund of their money saved in BluSmart's digital wallet, some expressed anxiety about being asked to wait for 90 days.
So, what went wrong with a start-up that once raised millions of dollars in funding from marquee global investors and found a spot on every major clean-tech awards list since it launched in 2019?
The decision to halt services in the three cities it served - Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi - came after Indian market regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), alleged that BluSmart's founders Anmol Singh Jaggi and Puneet Singh Jaggi were diverting loans from another firm they owned to buy luxury apartments and golf equipment. The loans were meant to help BluSmart lease new cars.
BluSmart has not responded to the BBC's questions.
The problem appears to be with both gross financial mismanagement alleged by the regulator and also the way in which BluSmart business model was structured.
Unlike traditional cab aggregators who lease their vehicles from individual drivers, BluSmart leased its fleet from companies - in particular from one firm called Gensol Engineering Limited (GEL), a stock market listed solar energy and EV leasing firm which is also run by the Jaggis.
Last month, credit ratings agencies CARE Ratings and ICRA downgraded the investment rating of GEL after they found that BluSmart had defaulted on its payments to the company.
ICRA also said it had received feedback from GEL's lenders about delays in servicing debt and alleged that it had falsified records regarding its loans obligations, which raised concerns about the company's corporate governance and liquidity position.
With its funding crunch seemingly intensifying, GEL has reportedly been in the market to sell some 3,000 electric vehicles it had bought to lease to BluSmart, upending latter's ride-hailing business entirely.
The promoters of GEL and BluSmart publicly denied allegations made by the ratings agencies, but they were damning enough for India's market regulator to launch its own inquiry which found that the company's problems ran much deeper than just loan defaults.
"What has been witnessed in the present matter is a complete breakdown of internal controls and corporate governance norms in Gensol, a listed company," Sebi said in its order. "The company's funds were routed to related parties and used for unconnected expenses, as if the company's funds were promoters' piggy bank."
The regulator further said that while the alleged "fund diversion" primarily occurred in the context of electric vehicle (EV) purchases intended for leasing to BluSmart, the risk it has created is "neither isolated nor contained".
This is partly because the cars leased to BluSmart by GEL were financed by state lenders like the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency Ltd (IREDA), who could now potentially be staring at huge losses.
The founders have now resigned from its board following an order from Sebi. The regulator has also barred the promoters from any activity in the stock market. All of this follows a mass exodus of BluSmart senior leadership, including of its chief executive officer and chief technology officer last month.
The saga has also led to millions of dollars of investor money being wiped out, with the share price of GEL crashing some 90% in the last year.
The independent directors have a "fiduciary responsibility, they need to be answerable", said Dr Aniruddha Malpani, an activist angel investor.
Anil Singhvi who runs a corporate governance advisory firm, told the BBC the incident raised serious questions about continuing lapses of governance at Indian start-ups, where founders have often been caught "bungling".
While BluSmart is "collateral damage", he said, there were question marks about how sustainable its business model was, given continuing losses, growing competition and slowing consumer spending in India that would have led to the defaults.
For now GEL has said it is working to stabilise its operations following the revelations and will appoint a forensic auditor to examine the accounts of the company and its related entities. It is not clear whether BluSmart's cab services will restart.
A Tesla whistleblower who has fought Elon Musk and his company through the courts for years has won the latest round of a long-running legal battle.
Engineer Cristina Balan lost her job after she raised a safety concern in 2014 about a design flaw which could affect the cars' braking.
Her defamation claim against the firm seemed to have run out of road when a judge confirmed an arbitration decision dismissing her case - but a panel of appeal judges in California has reversed this decision in her favour.
She told BBC News she now wants to face Elon Musk and Tesla in open court.
Tesla has not responded to a request for comment.
Ms Balan said she believes the case will now in effect go back to square one, and new proceedings can be launched.
"We are hoping we will start a new lawsuit and we will have the chance to take on Elon Musk in front of a jury and judge," she said.
The engineer was once so prominent at Tesla that her initials were engraved on the batteries inside Model S vehicles.
In an interview with BBC News last year, she said she is determined to prove her innocence for the sake of her son.
She also revealed she was in remission from stage-3B breast cancer, and her biggest worry was she may not live to see her final day in court.
Ms Balan claimed she was worried the carpets were curling underneath some pedals in Tesla models, creating a safety hazard.
She said managers rebuffed her concerns, became hostile, and she lost her job.
She then won a wrongful dismissal case - but this turned out to be the start of a long journey through the courts.
Ms Balan was publicly accused by Tesla of using its resources for a "secret project" - accusations which amount to embezzlement, a crime under US law.
She has consistently denied the accusation, and decided to bring a defamation case against the firm in 2019.
"I want to clear my name," she told BBC News last year.
"I wish Elon Musk had the decency to apologise."
A court then decided Ms Balan's case should be subject to arbitration per a contract she signed while working for Tesla.
The arbitrator found in favour of the firm and Musk, dismissing her claims, due to California's statute of limitations - meaning too much time had passed since the alleged defamatory statements were made.
Tesla brought the case back to a district court in California to have the decision confirmed.
However, Ms Balan appealed this decision, and judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found in her favour - in effect deciding the California court did not have the jurisdiction to make its judgement.
They have ordered for the confirmation of the arbitration award to be cancelled, and for the district court to dismiss the action due to its lack of jurisdiction.
What could happen next?
The majority of legal experts the BBC has spoken to believe the case has some way to go before there will be any conclusion.
"Tesla is among the many corporations that force employees and customers into opaque arbitration processes and deploy aggressive strategies to retaliate against employees who voice criticism of corporate practices," said Stanford professor Anat Admati.
And Bill Moran, Ms Balan's attorney, agreed the legal process is far from over.
But he said the case was "revived" by the latest ruling.
"We are confident we can secure her either a new arbitration or alternatively a trial in court so that her case can be heard on the merits after so many years," he said.
"She has fought cancer while waging this case... she is the epitome of strength and resolve, and she is now one step closer to getting the justice she deserves."
Additional reporting by Lily Jamali
Chinese online retail giants Shein and Temu have warned US customers that goods will get pricier from next week, after President Donald Trump imposed hefty tariffs on goods from China.
In almost identical statements, the rival companies said they have seen operating expenses rise "due to recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs", adding they will make "price adjustments" from 25 April.
The shopping sites have gained tens of millions of customers in the US, attracted by their ultra-low prices.
Their popularity has put pressure on Amazon, prompting it to launch a new platform called Haul last November, featuring items for under $20 (£15.10).
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has imposed taxes of up to 145% on imports from China. His administration said this week that when the new tariffs are added on to existing ones the levies on some Chinese goods could reach 245%.
Trump has also ended a duty-free exemption for goods worth less than $800, which helped Shein and Temu make rapid inroads to the US market.
US lawmakers on both sides had raised concerns about how these companies had "exploited" the provision.
An estimated 1.4 billion packages entered the US under this arrangement last year, up from 140 million in 2013, according to US customs authorities.
Since Trump started imposing the tariffs, Shein and Temu have seen the ranking of their apps fall sharply.
Temu is now the 75th most downloaded free app on the US Apple Store, after having consistently taken one of the top five spots in the last two years. Shein is in 58th place, down from number 15 last month.
But other Chinese retail apps continue to be ranked highly in the US, including DHgate in second place and Alibaba's Taobao at number seven.
Shein and Temu have also slashed their advertising spending in the US.
Temu has "turned off all their Google Shopping ads in the US" as of 9 April, Mike Ryan, head of e-commerce insights at online advertising agency Smarter Ecommerce, said on LinkedIn.
Temu's average daily US advertising spend on social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram and YouTube fell by 31% in the two weeks leading to 13 April, compared with the past month.
Shein's average daily US ad spend fell by 19% over the same period, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
In their statements, Temu and Shein encouraged customers to shop before higher prices kick in.
"We stand ready to make sure your orders arrive smoothly during this time.
"We're doing everything we can to keep prices low and minimize the impact on you. Our team is working hard to improve your shopping experience," the statements said.
Temu and Shein did not immediately respond to requests from the BBC for further comment.
As the trade war between China and the US escalates, attention has been focused on the increasingly high levels of tit-for-tat tariffs the two countries are imposing on one another.
But slapping reciprocal tariffs on Washington is not the only way Beijing has been able to retaliate.
China has now also imposed export controls on a range of critical rare earth minerals and magnets, dealing a major blow to the US.
The move has laid bare how reliant America is on these minerals.
This week, Trump ordered the commerce department to come up with ways to boost US production of critical minerals and cut reliance on imports - an attempt by Washington to reclaim this critical industry. But why exactly are rare earths so important and how could they shake up the trade war?
What are rare earths and what are they used for?
"Rare earths" are a group of 17 chemically similar elements that are crucial to the manufacture of many high-tech products.
Most are abundant in nature, but they are known as "rare" because it is very unusual to find them in a pure form, and they are very hazardous to extract.
Although you may not be familiar with the names of these rare earths - like Neodymium, Yttrium and Europium - you will be very familiar with the products that they are used in.
For instance, Neodymium is used to make the powerful magnets used in loudspeakers, computer hard drives, EV motors and jet engines that enable them to be smaller and more efficient.
Yttrium and Europium are used to manufacture television and computer screens because of the way they display colours.
"Everything you can switch on or off likely runs on rare earths," explains Thomas Kruemmer, Director of Ginger International Trade and Investment.
Rare earths are also critical to the production of medical technology like laser surgery and MRI scans, as well as key defence technologies.
What does China control?
China has a near monopoly on extracting rare earths as well as on refining them - which is the process of separating them from other minerals.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that China accounts for about 61% of rare earth production and 92% of their processing.
That means it currently dominates the rare earths supply chain and has the capacity to decide which companies can and cannot receive supplies of rare earths.
Both the extraction and processing of these rare earths are costly and polluting.
All rare earth resources also contain radioactive elements, which is why many other countries, including those in the EU, are reluctant to produce them.
"Radioactive waste from production absolutely requires safe, compliant, permanent disposal. Currently all disposal facilities in EU are temporary," says Mr Kruemmer.
But China's dominance in the rare earth supply chain didn't take place overnight - but rather, is the result of decades of strategic government policies and investment.
In a visit to Inner Mongolia in 1992, the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw China's economic reform, famously said: "The Middle East has oil and China has rare earths".
"Beginning in the late 20th century, China prioritised the development of its rare earth mining and processing capabilities, often at lower environmental standards and labour costs compared to other nations," said Gavin Harper, a critical materials research fellow at the University of Birmingham.
"This allowed them to undercut global competitors and build a near-monopoly across the entire value chain, from mining and refining to the manufacturing of finished products like magnets."
How has China restricted exports of these minerals?
In response to tariffs imposed by Washington, China earlier this month began ordering restrictions on the exports of seven rare earth minerals - most of which are known as "heavy" rare earths, which are crucial to the defence sector.
These are less common and are harder to process than "light" rare earths, which also makes them more valuable.
From 4 April, all companies now have to get special export licenses in order to send rare earths and magnets out of the country.
That is because as a signatory to the international treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, China has the ability to control the trade of "dual use products".
According to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), this leaves the US particularly vulnerable as there is no capacity outside China to process heavy rare earths.
How could this impact the US?
A US Geological report notes that between 2020 and 2023, the US relied on China for 70% of its imports of all rare earth compounds and metals.
This means that the new restrictions have the ability to hit the US hard.
Heavy rare earths are used in many military fields such as missiles, radar, and permanent magnets.
A CSIS report notes that defence technologies including F-35 jets, Tomahawk missiles and Predator unmanned aerial vehicles all depend on these minerals.
It adds that this comes as China "expands its munitions production and acquires advanced weapons systems and equipment at a pace five to six times faster than the United States".
"The impact on the US defence industry will be substantial," said Mr Kroemmer.
And it's not only in the field of defence.
US manufacturing, which Trump has said he hopes to revive through the imposition of his tariffs, stand to be severely impacted.
"Manufacturers, particularly in defence and high-tech, face potential shortages and production delays due to halted shipments and limited inventories," said Dr Harper.
"Prices for critical rare earth materials are expected to surge, increasing the immediate costs of components used in a wide range of products, from smartphones to military hardware," he says, adding that this could result in potential production slowdowns for affected US companies.
If such a shortage from China persists in the long-run, the US could potentially begin diversifying its supply chains and scaling up its domestic and processing capabilities, though this would still require "substantial and sustained investment, technological advancements and potentially higher overall costs compared to the previous dependence on China".
And it's clear this is something already on Trump's mind. This week, he ordered an investigation into the national security risks posed by the US' reliance on such critical minerals.
"President Trump recognises that an overreliance on foreign critical minerals and their derivative products could jeopardise US defence capabilities, infrastructure development, and technological innovation," said the order.
"Critical minerals, including rare earth elements, are essential for national security and economic resilience."
Can't the US produce its own rare earths?
The US has one operational rare earths mine, but it does not have the capacity to separate heavy rare earths and has to send its ore to China for processing.
There used to be US companies that manufactured rare earth magnets - until the 1980s, the US was in fact the largest producer of rare earths.
But these companies exited the market as China began to dominate in terms of scale and cost.
This is largely believed to be part of why US president Donald Trump is so keen to sign a minerals deal with Ukraine - it wants to reduce dependency on China.
Another place Trump has had his eye on is Greenland - which is endowed with the eighth largest reserves of rare earth elements.
Trump has repeatedly showed interest in taking control of the autonomous Danish dependent territory and has refused to rule out economic or military force to take control of it.
These might have been places that the US could have sourced some of its rare earth exports from, but the adversarial tone Trump has struck with them means the US could be left with very few alternative suppliers.
"The challenge the U.S. faces is two-fold, on the one hand it has alienated China who provides the monopoly supply of rare earths, and on the other hand it is also antagonising many nations that have previously been friendly collaborators through tariffs and other hostile actions," said Dr Harper.
"Whether they will still prioritise collaboration with America remains to be seen in the turbulent policy environment of this new administration."
As US President Donald Trump takes aim at the Smithsonian Institution for "anti-American ideology", Adam Rutherford examines what the science of genetics has taught us about race.
When scientists unveiled the first draft of the Human Genome Project 25 years ago, it seemed to deliver the final word on some antiquated myths about race. It provided definitive evidence that racial groupings have no biological basis. In fact, there is more genetic variation within racial groups than between them. Race, it showed, is a social construct.
But despite that fundamental finding, which has only been reinforced as work on human genomes has continued, race and ethnicity are still often deployed to categorise human populations as distinct biological groups. These are views that can be found circulating in the pseudoscience on social media, but they also still creep into scientific research and healthcare systems.
It is even more troubling when this thinking finds its way into the halls of government.
President Donald Trump and his administration have made no secret of his rejection of many aspects of the scientific worldview. Since returning to the White House, he has made sweeping cuts to science funding for biomedical and climate research, but in a recent Executive Order, Trump took aim at what most scientists now regard as biological reality.
Entitled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History", the Presidential order, signed by Trump, targeted an exhibition in the Smithsonian American Art Museum called "The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture".
The order is part of a broader attempt to shape American culture by eliminating "improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology" from the institute's museums. It states: "Museums in our Nation's capital should be places where individuals go to learn – not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history."
The exhibition itself is criticised in the text for promoting the idea that "race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating 'race is a human invention'". The order offers the exhibition as an example of a "harmful and oppressive" shift in the narrative portraying American values.
This is the point when people like me, a geneticist who specialises in the history of race science, get a little bit vexed.
The issue here is that the sentence cited from the Smithsonian is 100% correct. This is neither controversial in science nor history.
Human variation is, of course, very real. People are different, and we can see those differences in skin pigmentation, in hair colour and texture and in other physical characteristics. These differences cluster in locations around the world: people from the same region on average look more similar to each other than to people from other areas – so far, so obvious.
In the 18th Century, these traits were the primary determinants for a new fashion for categorising humans in supposedly scientific terms. The Swedish botanist Karl Linnaeus is legitimately credited as the father of modern biology, as he gave us the classification system we still use today: genus and species. Every living thing is named according to this system, for example the bacteria Escherichia coli, or the lion, Panthera leo, or Gorilla gorilla, which probably doesn't need explaining.
We are Homo sapiens – wise people. But in his foundational work Systemae Naturae, Linnaeus introduced another tier of classification for us, designated primarily by that most visible of human traits: pigmentation. Linnaeus gave us four types of human, lumped together by continental landmasses: Asiaticus – people with "yellow skin", and straight black hair; Americanus – indigenous Americans, with "red skin" also with straight black hair; Africanus – "black skinned" people with tight curls in their hair; and Europeaus – "white skinned" with blue eyes.
These designations are clearly absurd – none of the colours are accurate, even if you took the obviously incorrect view that millions of people share the same skin tones even within those categories. But the roots of the race designations we still use today are visible in these labels. Some of these terms have fallen out of social acceptability and are considered racist. But we still use "black" and "white" as descriptors for millions of people, none of whom really have either black or white skin.
Even if this colour scheme were true, Linnaeus' original descriptions only began with physical traits. What he included in later editions of Systemae Naturae, which became the basis for scientific racism, were portrayals of behaviours. Asiaticus were described as "haughty, greedy and ruled by opinions" while Americanus were labelled "stubborn, zealous, regulated by customs". Africanus women were denoted as being "without shame" while both sexes were said to be "crafty, lazy, and governed by caprice". He described Europaeus as "gentle, acute, inventive, governed by laws".
By any definition in any age, these assertions are racist and entirely incorrect.
Of course, in examining history, we must be wary of judging people from the past by our own standards. But as the foundational text of modern biology, introducing a classification system for humans that is ludicrous, racist and most importantly, hierarchical, would leave an indelible mark on the centuries that followed.
Over the next 200 years, many men would seek to refine these categories with new metrics, including pseudoscientific interpretations of craniometry, or skull measurements. They never settled on a definitive answer about how many races there are – none of the characteristics that were being used are immutable, nor exclusive to the people to whom they were supposedly essential. We call this ideology "racial essentialism". But all of the many schemes put white Europeans as superior to all others.
It was biologist Charles Darwin who first began to unpick these ideas, recognising in his 1871 book the Descent of Man that there was much more continuity in traits between people that had been designated as discrete races. By the beginning of the 20th Century, molecular biology had entered the stage, and the era of genetics would dismantle the biological concept of race.
By the time we began to look at how genes are shared in families and populations, we saw that similarities do indeed cluster in groups, but these groupings do not align with the longstanding attempts to classify the races. The true metric of human difference is at a genetic level. In the 20th Century, when we began to unravel our genomes, and observe how people are similar and different in our DNA, we saw that the terms in use for several centuries bore little meaningful relation to the underlying genetics.
Even though only a tiny percentage of our DNA differs between individuals, the genome is so large and complex that there is great diversity. Geneticists are still working to unravel how this alters people's health, for example. But those genetic differences do not delineate along the lines of what we call race. They follow ancestral lines, can differ by geographic location and can be traced through historic migration patterns.
What we now know is that there is more genetic diversity in people of recent African descent than in the rest of the world put together. Take two people, for example from Ethiopia and Namibia, and they will be more different to each other at a genetic level than either one of them is to a white European, or indeed a Japanese person, an Inuit or an Indian. This includes the genes that are involved in pigmentation.
Yet, for historical reasons, we continue to refer to both Ethiopians and Namibians under the race definition of "black". Or take African Americans, people largely descended from enslaved Africans brought to the New World: sequencing the genomes of Black Americans reveals echoes of the history of transatlantic slavery. They not only mixed genetic ancestry from the handful of West African countries from which their ancestors were taken, but also significant amounts of White European DNA. This reflects the fact that slave owners had sexual relationships – many of which would not have been consensual – with enslaved people.
Therefore, the simple categorisation of descendants of the enslaved as "black" similarly does not make biological sense. They are genetically diverse in themselves and different from the African ancestors from which they are descended. To lump them together makes no scientific sense.
So it is by consensus, usage and history that we continue to use the term "black". This is what we mean by a social construct. The concept of race has little utility as a biological taxonomy. But it is enormously important socially and culturally. Social constructs are how the world works: money and time are both socially constructed too. The value of a pound or dollar is applied by agreement against goods and services. Time passes unerringly, but hours and minutes are entirely arbitrary units.
So, while race is not biologically meaningful, it has biologically meaningful consequences. The impact of most diseases correlates with poverty. As people of ethnic minority ancestry tend to be in lower tiers of socio-economic status, diseases tend to affect them more severely. This is true across the board, but was exposed early on in the pandemic. Black, South Asian and in America Hispanic people were disproportionately infected with and died of Covid-19.
The media immediately began to search for a reason that reified a biological version of race, sometimes focusing on vitamin D metabolism, which is connected with melanin production, and has effects on viral infections. Some studies showed that lower levels of vitamin D did associate with susceptibility to covid infection among black people. But this is a correlation not a cause.
More like this:
• The people whose DNA held a secret
• Why you have viruses hiding in our DNA
• The mystery of the human genome’s dark matter
Underlying any slight differences in biology are much more potent causes: while so many of us were locked down, frontline NHS workers, people cleaning up our rubbish and driving our buses all were more likely to be from ethnic minorities. They simply had a higher risk of being exposed and so infected with the virus. Combine that with the fact that minority groups are more likely to live in multigenerational, dense urban housing, and the supposedly biological susceptibility fades.
This is why genetics has played such an important role in the dismantling of a scientific justification of race and understanding racism itself. And it's why the latest statement from Trump's White House is troubling many in the scientific community.
Trump frequently speaks about aspects of genetics to make political points. One view that he has expressed repeatedly is that some people, and predictably himself, are genetically superior. "You have good genes, you know that, right?" he said in September 2020 to a rally in Minnesota – a state that is more than 80% white. "You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? You have good genes in Minnesota."
Similarly, in the successful 2024 campaign, he denounced immigrants as having "bad genes". It's hard for someone who studies genes – and the strange and sometimes troubling history of genetics – to understand even what might constitute a "bad" or "good" gene.
Ours may be a pernicious history, but the trajectory of genetics has been one that tends towards progress, and equity for all, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Artists and creatives are pushing back against a recent trend using artificial intelligence (AI) to generate "starter pack" images of people as toys - which they say may be in danger of risking their livelihoods.
Since the start of April, thousands of people have uploaded their photos to generate images of themselves as dolls, despite warnings of damaging the environment, giving away personal information, and devaluing creativity.
Nick Lavallee, who has made custom action figures for six years, told the BBC he was concerned his work may be at risk after "AI images saturated social media".
"People are sick of them," he said. "It's an artistic aesthetic - AI-generated art diminishes that."
Nick has made figures of - and for - comedians, film directors, and artists such as Weezer and Tyler Childers, which sell for as much as $250 (£188) online on his Wicked Joyful website.
His success has led to a clothing brand and will soon be followed by a physical shop in his hometown of Manchester, New Hampshire.
But he's concerned action figure commissions could soon dry up, as well as the public perception of his work, from thousands of AI images mimicking his passion.
The feeling has been shared by other creatives with the rise of the #StarterPackNoAI movement, which has been used thousands of times since first appearing on Instagram in early April before spreading to X soon after.
After Patouret's post, others quickly joined the counter-trend, with artist Maria Picassó Piquer saying she chose to take part "for fun, but also as a statement".
"While AI pieces all looked more or less the same, I was amazed at the variety of the 'human' works," she said.
"Plus, self-portraits added an extra layer of, well, humanity."
Maria, like many other artists, sees the dual risk of AI images threatening intellectual property rights by being "fed on 'stolen' art", and the possibility of reducing her finding new clients.
Illustrator Dav le Dessineux, working in Bordeaux, France, said some in his industry had already lost contracts to AI design work.
He contributed his starter pack because "like many artists who use their real hands", he was "tired" of the deluge of AI-generated doll images.
Dav's illustration featured only a pencil and sheet of white paper - tools he said are "all you need to start being an artist".
"People usually forget about it because of the technology surrounding us, but we really don't need more than basic stuff to create something and be original," he said.
Eli Dibitonto, an artist living in Barletta, Italy, agreed, describing the process of digitally illustrating his own starter pack as "carefree and fun".
"It doesn't have to be perfect - mine isn't," he said. "Art isn't meant to be perfect or look flawless."
And illustrator and student Evie Joyce said creating her own artwork meant being able to consider what to reflect of her personality during a process lasting several hours, rather than seconds.
"I think that what's so magical about it is you're seeing people put time and effort and their personality, all of their experiences, into pieces of art," she said.
"With AI, it can even steal from artists and steal their work and their style, it just loses that touch of personality."
Pot Noodles in the Large Hadron Collider
Back in New Hampshire, Nick understands the rebellion from illustrators, but says he believes there is use for AI.
"I don't necessarily want to say AI is bad when I know that it could be a useful tool," he said.
"I think all of us have experimented with it."
And Henk van Ess, a global expert in using AI in investigative research, has proven how useful it can be - but it would be safe to say he does not believe it lies in starter packs.
"It's like watching a supercomputer calculate how many Hobnobs fit in a Sports Direct mug, while solving climate change sits on the 'to-do' list," he said.
"Technically impressive? Sure. But it's the technological equivalent of using the Large Hadron Collider to heat up your Pot Noodle.
"While everyone's busy generating these digital equivalents of small talk, they're missing the actually revolutionary stuff AI can do - it's just wasteful to put all that energy into creating digital fluff when we can use it for solving real-world problems."
Call on the cabinetmakers
And Nick remains positive.
"The musicians who get my stuff, who are excited to hold a Wicked Joyful in their hands, they know it's my artwork, they know it's mine," he said.
Likewise, Dav is confident in the worth of human work.
Despite the rise of pre-fabricated furniture, he says, "people still call on cabinetmakers".
"I hope I'll be one of those artisans," he said.
Nick, who says he found his purpose "in bringing joy to people" with his creations, said he similarly wanted to remain hopeful about the future.
"I really hope people are totally sick of AI action figures," he said.
"But I hope that they are smart enough to understand the difference in something that I'm doing versus what is computer-generated."
Genetic factors are thought to play a major role in the development of autism – but for decades what they are has proven elusive. Now scientists are starting to uncover clues.
Until the 1970s, the prevailing belief in psychiatry was that autism was a consequence of bad parenting. In the 1940s, the Austrian psychiatrist Leo Kanner had coined the controversial "refrigerator mother" theory suggesting that autism arose from early childhood trauma, created by mothers who were cold, uncaring and rejected their children.
Daniel Geschwind, a neuroscience and genetics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), says that this is now rightly recognised as being deeply damaging and wrong – but it took the better part of three decades for Kanner's theory to be debunked. It was not until 1977, when a couple of psychiatrists carried out a landmark study demonstrating that autism often runs in identical twins, that a more nuanced and accurate picture of autism's origins began to emerge.
That 1977 study was the first time that a genetic component of autism had been identified. Research has since shown that when one identical twin is autistic, the likelihood that the other twin will be too can be more than 90%. Meanwhile, the chances of fraternal twins of the same sex each sharing a diagnosis of autism are around 34%. These levels are substantially higher than the typical rate of occurrence among the wider population, of around 2.8%.
It is now widely accepted that there is a strong genetic component to autism. But which genes are involved and how their expression is influenced by other factors are only just starting to be unravelled.
Tiny differences
Even after the twin study in 1977, it would take several more decades for the full subtleties of the interaction between autism and the human genome to become apparent.
Between any two individuals, the amount of genetic variation is around 0.1%, meaning that approximately one letter or base pair out of every 1,000 in their DNA will be different. "Sometimes these variations have no effect at all," says Thomas Bourgeron, a neuroscience professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. "Sometimes they have a little effect, and sometimes they have a super strong effect."
Currently, "super strong" variations have been identified in up to 20% of all cases of autism, with a single mutation in a single gene being largely responsible for driving critical neurodevelopmental differences. The role of these single gene mutations and how they arise is one of the most heavily studied areas in autism research, because as Bourgeron explains, they often result in severe and life-limiting disabilities.
"This is not like the autism you see in the movies," Bourgeron says. "If you're born with one of these major mutations, there's a high likelihood you'll end up with intellectual disability or motor delay [the ability to coordinate muscle groups] or epileptic encephalopathy. It has a major impact on their quality of life and their family in most cases."
So far scientists have identified at least 100 genes where these mutations can occur. Bourgeron himself made one of the first discoveries in March 2003 when he identified two gene mutations linked to autism. Each impacted proteins involved in synaptogenesis, the process of forming connections between neurons in the brain. It was a major breakthrough, although it barely made a ripple in the media at the time, with Bourgeron recalling how former US President George W Bush had recently declared war on Iraq.
But more discoveries were to come, including mutations in the Shank3 gene which are estimated to occur in less than 1% of people with autism. We now know that some of these mutations are known as de novo variants, which means that they occur through random chance in a developing embryo and aren't present in the blood DNA of either the mother or father. Geschwind describes de novo variants as being akin to a "bolt of lightning", that is both unexpected and rare.
However, in other cases, these mutations can have been passed on by one of the parents, even if both appear to be neurotypical, a more complex phenomenon which researchers have only begun to understand in the past decade.
"You might wonder, if an autistic child has inherited a rare gene mutation from one of their parents, why doesn't the parent have autism too?" says Geschwind. "What seems to happen is that in the parent, it's not sufficient to be causal, but in the child, that major gene mutation combines additively with other, less individually impactful gene variants to drive neurodevelopment differences," he says.
Of course, there are also thought to be environmental factors involved in the development of autism – even among identical twins where one has been diagnosed, 10% of the time the other one will not be.
Historically, identifying the environmental factors behind autism has led to pseudoscientific beliefs such as the idea – now widely debunked – that certain vaccines might be involved. Now the US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has pledged a massive research effort to identify the causes of autism before September 2025. This includes hiring the vaccine sceptic David Geier as a data analyst at the US Department of Health & Human Services. The Autism Society of America have expressed concerns that the plans are unrealistic, as well as potentially harmful and misleading.
According to the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), potential non-genetic causes of autism include prenatal exposure to air pollution and certain pesticides, extreme prematurity, and birth difficulties leading to oxygen deprivation in the baby's brain, among other factors.
Early development
Today genetic research is leading progress into how neurodevelopment can lead to autism. It appears that many of these genes become functional during the formation of the cortex – the wrinkly outer layer of the brain responsible for many high-level functions, including memory, problem-solving and thinking.
This critical part of brain development occurs in the foetus as it is developing in the womb, and according to Geschwind, peaks somewhere between 12 and 24 weeks. "You can think of these mutations as disrupting the normal patterns of development, knocking development off of its normal track so to speak and maybe onto another tributary, instead of the normal, neurotypical pattern of development," says Geschwind.
Because they cause such severe disability, the information about these gene mutations has enabled parents to form support groups, for example the FamilieSCN2A Foundation which serves as a community for families of autistic children where the autism diagnosis has been linked to a genetic change in the SCN2A gene. Discussions have also been held regarding the idea of using such genetic information to influence future reproductive decisions.
"If it's a de novo variant, then you can tell the parents that the risk would be low [of having another child with the same neurodevelopmental challenges], because there is a limited contribution from inherited factors, if they decided to have subsequent children," says Geschwind. "We can also give the family a sense of the spectrum of how their child might develop over time, and for parents of a two-year-old that's non-verbal and has some walking delay, they want to know what to expect."
But while this can offer huge benefits for these families, the concept of genetic research is not viewed with universal positivity across the autistic community. Autism is a vast spectrum, ranging from those with severe impairments in physical and mental development which will never allow them to live independently, to others with far fewer support needs who view their autism as an identity and advantage, and oppose depictions of autism as a disorder.
Because of this, for some autistic people, their families and a number of academic researchers, the compilation of genetic data has yielded ongoing concerns about how it might be used.
A complex picture
In the past half century, genetics studies have shown that in the majority of autistic people, their neurodiversity arises through the additive effects of hundreds or even thousands of relatively common gene variants which they have inherited from both parents.
These gene variants exist throughout the population of both neurotypical and neurodivergent people, and the individual contribution of any one of these genes to neurodevelopment is negligible. But in combination, they have a significant effect on the wiring of the brain. Bourgeron says that it is not uncommon for one or both parents, who carry some of these gene variants, to display autistic traits such as a preference for order, difficulties in detecting emotions, and being hyperaware of patterns; but unlike their child, these traits do not manifest to such a significant degree that they themselves could be diagnosed as autistic.
Over the last 20 years, autism researchers have devised some ingenious ways of identifying some of these more subtle variants. In the early 2000s, Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues, devised a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes. This is intended to assess a person's ability to detect emotions such as looking playful, comforting, irritated or bored – based on a photograph which shows only the person's eyes.
The idea is that poorer performance on the test indicates a higher likelihood of a person being autistic. "Autistic individuals have a different way of looking at the face, and they seem to get more information from a person's mouth," says Bourgeron. "Neurotypical individuals get more information from the eyes."
More recently, in partnership with the DNA testing site 23andMe, which agreed to host the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test on their website, Bourgeron and Baron-Cohen were able to gather data on the abilities of more than 88,000 people to read thoughts and emotions from a person's eyes, and compare this performance with their genetic information. Through this dataset, they were able to identify large groups of gene variants associated with poorer emotion recognition, many of which are thought to be carried by autistic people.
Other research studies have found that common gene variants associated with autism tend to be negatively correlated with empathy or social communication. But they are positively correlated with the ability to analyse and construct systems as well as rules and routines. Most intriguingly, they are also often linked to higher educational attainment, along with greater spatial or mathematical or artistic abilities. "This perhaps explains why these genetic variants, which come from very distant ancestors, have remained in the population throughout human history," says Geschwind.
Geschwind and Baron-Cohen are now embarking on a project to try to understand whether some of the common gene variants linked with autism can explain why autism seems to be more prevalent in men, and why autistic women are thought to be more adept at masking their neurodivergent traits compared with autistic men.
"The likelihood is that differences in male and female brain development and function make the men more susceptible and the women protected from the genetic susceptibility to autism to some degree, but we don't fully understand that yet," says Geschwind.
However, some experts believe that autism may be much more common in women than is currently thought, and that the experiences of this group are being overlooked.
Geschwind suggests that understanding sex differences in autism could help identify protective factors which could be used as future treatments, yet this very concept remains deeply divisive and reflective of one of the core underlying tensions within autism research. While some scientists pursue treatments, other researchers and some autistic people believe that autism is not a disorder to be fixed, but an identity and a shared experience.
"Autism isn't a biological phenomenon that has to be tested for, and where you get a categorical outcome or prognosis," says Sue Fletcher-Watson, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Edinburgh. "It isn't something, like cancer, that is universally agreed to be bad and for which everyone wants a cure. In my opinion, it never will be."
In particular, Fletcher-Watson says that many autistic people fear that the ultimate outcome of autism genetic research will be a prenatal test, which could pose an existential threat to autism. Beginning in 2005, one activist created the Autistic Genocide Clock, stating that if such a test existed, it would represent a continuation of historic attempts to eliminate minority groups. Two decades later, such fears remain.
"Genetic researchers on the whole have done little to listen to, and address, the fears of the autistic community regarding security and future use of genetic data," says Fletcher-Watson. These fears are heightened by political contexts, she says, such as the strength of certain far-right parties, which make the possibility of eugenic use of genetic data seem much more real.
Prenatal tests are already established practice in the UK for conditions caused by having an extra copy of a chromosome in some or all of the body’s cells. These include Down's syndrome (where there's an extra copy of chromosome 21), Edward syndrome (where there's an extra copy of chromosome 18), and Patau syndrome (where there's an extra copy of chromosome 13), and in some countries like Iceland, termination rates following a positive screen are close to 100%," she says.
A broad spectrum
Joseph Buxbaum, a psychiatry professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who founded the Autism Sequencing Consortium, an international group of scientists who share samples and genetic data, feels that some autistic activists are missing the point.
"When I get challenged by somebody who says, 'Well I have autism and I don't think I need be researched,' I'm like, 'Well, how about somebody who has no language, an IQ of 50 and will never be able to live alone and unsupervised,'" says Buxbaum. "What are your thoughts about that person? So, when I think about interventions, I'm thinking about these people, as opposed to someone who has trouble maintaining eye contact, unusual interests and conflicts in social situations."
Geschwind agrees, also citing the marked differences which exist across the autistic spectrum. "The majority of the spectrum is a condition that has to be accommodated like any other disability," he says. However, he adds that another cohort – those who are more severely impacted – would warrant treatment. "These are different things," he says.
To try and better stratify the broad spectrum of autistic traits, the Lancet Commission formally recognised the term "profound autism" in 2021, as a way of describing autistic people who are unable to advocate for themselves and are likely to require 24-hour support throughout their lives. Since then, a variety of clinical trials have begun, all using various therapeutic strategies to try and target the single genes underpinning physical and intellectual disability in different individuals with profound autism.
The main idea for these treatments surrounds the fact that all of us have two copies or alleles, or variants, of every single gene, one from each parent. A recent study from Geschwind's lab leveraged the understanding that most of the de novo gene mutations linked with profound autism only knock out one of these copies, suggesting it might be possible to reduce the degree of disability by boosting the unaffected copy. "That means you have one unaffected copy, [the activity of which] which we showed could be turned up to compensate," says Geschwind.
Bourgeron has recently been running a clinical trial using the metal lithium to boost a version of the Shank3 gene in autistic children who are known to have Shank3 mutations. In the future, Geschwind suggests that a technology such as Crispr, which allows scientists to edit a person's DNA, could be used to intervene at an even earlier stage of life. For example, gene therapy could be delivered to unborn babies found to have various mutations, while they are still in the womb. "We've recently figured out a way of doing this," he says. "It might not fully correct the impacted gene, but it could at least partially correct it."
The FDA has recently granted approval for the US-based biotechnology company Jaguar Gene Therapy to run a clinical trial where a gene therapy is administered to autistic children with a Shank3 gene mutation along with a co-occurring genetic condition called Phelan-McDermid syndrome which affects development, speech and behaviour.
"This trial is only possible because all the children participating have genetic diagnoses," says Buxbaum. "And because researchers at Mount Sinai and elsewhere have spent the past 15 years studying how these children develop when they have these mutations. We can then use this natural history data as a control in the study."
But while such trials could undoubtedly result in enormous benefits for the children involved and their families, Fletcher-Watson is still sceptical about their depiction as therapies for autism, profound or otherwise. She would prefer to see them characterised as treatments for intellectual disability.
"I believe that when people talk about these single-gene cases of autism, they are being disingenuous," says Fletcher-Watson. "They are talking about single-gene causes of intellectual disability, perhaps many of whom are also autistic. But there is funding available for research to address autism, active parent campaign groups and all sorts of resources, in a way that there is not for intellectual disability."
At the same time, Fletcher-Watson is more optimistic about the potential of genetic research to devise novel treatments for some of the co-occurring conditions with which autistic people are often diagnosed, including epilepsy, sleep disturbances, OCD and gastrointestinal disorders.
Bourgeron now coordinates a European project on risk, resilience and developmental diversity in mental health, collaborating with autistic people and their families to better understand why autism rarely comes in isolation, and what makes different individuals prone to these conditions.
At the same time, Bourgeron says that we also need to better recognise neurodiversity and reduce stigma relating to autism. "I think that for us as geneticists we need to go back to the needs of each person" he says. "Some autistic individuals with Shank3 mutations are so severely impacted that they need round the clock care. For others, they might only need specific support at school.
"Overall, we need to do a better job of recognising neurodiversity, and doing everything we can to make sure that people who function differently from the majority can flourish in our societies."
--
For trusted insights into better health and wellbeing rooted in science, sign up to the Health Fix newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Your reaction times can reveal a surprising amount about what's going on inside your body, from your brain health to your risk of an early death.
Of the course of our lifetimes, our reaction times will slowly wane. It's one of the reasons why athletic performance tends to drop off from our 30s onwards.
Scientists are finding that being able to maintain an average reaction speed can be a key indicator that our brain is still in good working order, even into our latter decades. But that isn't all they can reveal. From your heart health to your overall risk of an early death, your reaction times can provide a window into the inner workings of the body.
"Some people just tend to be faster than others, even before ageing effects really kick in," says Simon Cox, professor of brain and cognitive ageing at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. "But a decline in reaction times probably indicates an accumulation of age-related degradation. It's a marker which tells us a lot about the combined functioning of quite a lot of biological systems."
But how can you assess your reaction time in the comfort of your home?
One easy assessment is a well-known experiment known as the "ruler drop test". You'll need the assistance of a family member or friend for this one, as well as a ruler:
• Sit in a chair, resting your arm on a table so that your wrist is hanging off the edge, with your thumb and forefingers facing up.
• Ask your partner to hold a ruler vertically, over your hand, with the "zero", where the numbers start, aligned with your thumb.
• Without warning, your partner should drop the ruler, while you try to catch it as quickly as possible.
• The distance the ruler falls before being caught is an assessment of your reaction time.
Broadly speaking, an excellent performance equates to catching the ruler at a distance less than 7.5cm, above average counts as 7.5-15.9cm, average is 15.9-20.4cm, while below average is anything over 20.4cm and poor is more than 28cm.
Population studies have noticed a correlation between the speed of decline in reaction times and risk of multiple age-related illnesses. In addition to a person's overall risk of death – one study found that there was a significant link between a person's reaction times and the likelihood of death from all major causes – there is also a strong relationship between this metric and the risk of death from specific conditions. This includes coronary heart disease, stroke and respiratory disease.
A person's reaction times are also associated with their susceptibility to falls, losing the ability to live independently and the onset of dementia.
However, according to Cox, a single reaction time measurement doesn't reveal all that much, as reaction speeds vary considerably from one person to another due to factors ranging from gender to genetics, physical fitness, lifestyle habits and even personality type. Cox notes that what is likely to be more important is how your reaction speed varies if you compare your performance on the same test over time – for example, at yearly intervals over the course of a decade - and whether it starts to noticeably decline.
As Cox points out, our ability to react relies on a network of interconnected sensory systems: how well we see, hear or even smell a given stimulus, how quickly our brain can process the information it's receiving from our eyes or ears and issue a signal in response, and finally how quickly our nerve fibres, muscles and tendons can enact what the brain is telling them to do. "All these pieces of the jigsaw can be affected by ageing, and not necessarily to the same extent in all people," says Cox.
There are two components to a reaction to the ruler drop test – the brain's ability to make a quick assessment that it has been dropped, and the speed with which the body can act on the brain's instructions to catch it.
Researchers have found that the first component of this network which tends to break down, beginning in midlife, is our physical ability to act on the brain's signals. So, our brains might notice that the ruler has been let go within milliseconds – but it still takes a while for the body to catch up.
At the University of Colorado Boulder, biomedical professor Alaa Ahmed has found that as we get older, our reaction times may depend more heavily on our overall bodily health than our brain. She says this may be because things like fast-twitch muscle fibres which enable our physical ability to respond quickly, have waned, or because our mitochondria – the components within our cells which generate energy – are working less well, meaning that we're less efficient at moving swiftly.
"Making a faster movement is more costly to older adults, so they rely primarily on reacting faster," says Ahmed.
At the same time, if we stay relatively well, our brain and central nervous system can still function strongly into our latter years. According to Matthew Pain, a professor of biomechanics at Loughborough University in the UK, scientists have assessed this by measuring the "startle reflex" in the ankles of healthy elderly adults in response to a loud sound. The results showed their brain's ability to respond to the sound and send a "move" signal to the ankle tends to remain relatively intact.
"The raw nervous system hardware in healthy elderly [people] is not that [much] worse," says Pain. "Purely based on the startle reflex, they could still react quickly enough to be disqualified at the Olympics for a false start. They wouldn't, however, be able to get out of the blocks very quickly."
As well as the ruler test, reaction times can be assessed through simple computer games such as the Human Benchmark Reaction Time Test which involves waiting for a red box to turn green and then clicking on it as quickly as possible. Sharp deteriorations in performance over time can reflect a combination of sensory systems breaking down, as well as a slowing of the brain's decision-making. One study last year found that loss of visual sensitivity in seeing and responding to patterns can be one of the earliest signs of dementia, beginning more than a decade before symptoms begin.
"With age, the nerve fibres in the brain's white matter can start to communicate signals less efficiently, resulting in slower information processing," says Cox. "Once the decision has been made to react, the nerves that connect your brain to your muscles also need to be in good condition to transmit that message quickly, and these age too."
Improving your score
But there are things that we can all do to either slow or prevent this decline from happening. Pain recommends so-called dual task training, which involves simultaneous movement and cognitive training activities to tune both the brain and body. Examples include walking while turning your head from side to side, balancing on one leg while reciting the alphabet, or tossing a ball while verbally associating words.
Even things like such as participating in fitness classes via a TV screen or tablet can help with your reaction times. "This improves the ability to perceive [a stimulus] and respond with meaningful coordinated motions," says Pain.
Cox says that many of the activities which are often linked with healthy ageing, such as continuing to play a sport into later life, learning a musical instrument in retirement or simply keeping engaged with intellectual pursuits such as board games can have knock-on benefits for our reaction times.
"Sports performance drills which require fast responses could boost reaction times by enhancing both brain and body," says Cox. "And there's some evidence that generally keeping more socio-intellectually engaged is related to slower cognitive ageing across aspects of complex thinking."
--
For trusted insights into better health and wellbeing rooted in science, sign up to the Health Fix newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
With smartphones tougher than ever, a new wave of phone minimalists say cases are for cowards. I joined the case-free cult, called the experts and braced for the sound of broken glass.
A few months ago I walked into an Apple store to buy a new iPhone. After sifting through models and upgrades, a cheerful salesperson told me the price came to $1,199 (£919). She laughed when I mentioned that's close to what I pay for a month's rent. "Crazy, isn't it?" she said. "Now let's look at some phone cases."
It felt like the obvious next step. But even as the cost of mobile phones breaches the stratosphere, some seemingly reasonable consumers going a different route: they're walking around with their phones completely naked, moving through the concrete and the spills and the dust with no case, no screen protector, nothing. I know some of these people. Their phones are shiny, with titanium frames and carefully engineered glass on full display. They seem so happy and carefree. Is it all in my head? Is fear the only thing standing between me and case-free bliss?
"Come on man, just check out how this thing feels," a friend said to me couple of weeks later. A proud no-case guy, he handed me his iPhone. It was far more handsome without a case, and even better to hold. "They build phones tougher now. I drop it all the time, it's fine."
According to conversations I've had since then with glass manufacturers, die-hard anti-casers and people who get paid to damage phones on purpose, it seems he could be right. Experts agree: the modern smartphone is far more robust than its ancestors. Still, most people I know use protection. So who's the crazy one here?
I decided to find out. When I got home, I tore the case off my phone, threw it in a drawer and committed to a month of sweating through the case-free lifestyle. I pitched my editor a story about it. He liked the idea but assured me the BBC would not pay for repairs if my experiment goes sour. May God have mercy on my soul.
Shattered glass
There's been a lot of discussion about how going caseless has become a status symbol for some who want to give off an air of class and confidence. When I interview tech executives and entrepreneurs, for example, phone cases are a rare sight.
"You're saying 'I can afford to replace this'. But it's not about appearances for me. I was a no-case guy even before my first startup," says Yousef Ali, chief executive of Blast Radio, a live audio platform for DJs. "For me it just seems nuts to have a $1,000 [£766] luxury device known for its material design and spend your day touching a $30 [£23] plastic case instead. It's like putting a vinyl cover on your couch to save the fabric. I have expensive pants too, should I wear an extra pair of pants to protect them? Where does it end?"
I won't pretend the first week without a phone case didn't leave me feeling, well, kind of cool. It's the lamest possible version of flirting with danger. But trends come and go. What I want is facts – ideally some harder than the ground I picture my phone careening towards.
If you're reading this on a mobile phone, you're probably looking through Gorilla Glass, a patented, smash-resistant technology made by a company called Corning. All the big-name phone manufacturers use Gorilla Glass or another Corning product for some or all of their screens, including Apple, Google, Huawei and Samsung. There are some exceptions for older phones and budget brands, but for the most part, Corning has the market cornered.
The Gorilla process starts with dipping glass in a bath of molten salt heated to 400C (752F). "The bath pulls smaller ions such as lithium out of the glass and swaps in larger ions such as potassium," says Lori Hamilton, Corning's director of technology for Gorilla Glass. "It creates this layer of compressive stress that makes it more difficult for flaws to penetrate through the glass." In other words, it squishes the glass together, making it less susceptible to damage.
Corning's research involves putting phones through ritualistic torture to study what goes wrong and how to prevent it. Phones face special glass scratching machines and go into tumblers with car keys to simulate pockets. Corning even collects phones busted by consumers in the wild to find unusual damage.
"Then we go through a CSI-type effort called fracture analysis, where we study tiny shards of glass to understand the source of the original fracture," Hamilton says.
When your phone breaks, it's the screen that fails most of the time. But according to Hamilton, results have improved dramatically in recent years, and today's smartphones are far stronger. In 2016, Corning reported that Gorilla Glass 5 survived drops of 0.8m (2.6ft) in the lab. That grew to 2m (6.6ft) with Gorilla Glass Victus in 2020. Gorilla Armor 2, one of Corning's latest products featured on the Samsung Ultra S25, has reportedly braved up to 2.2m (7.2ft).
Outside evidence seems to back up these improvements in phone materials, construction and design. In 2024, the insurance company Allstate, which sells phone protection plans, found that 78 million Americans reported damaging their phones, compared to 87 million in 2020.
"We don't use the term unbreakable," says Hamilton. "There will always be failures. There are always situations where you get a deep enough flaw or the right kind of bending." But Hamilton says skipping a case is reasonable, and at this point it's just a matter of preference. "After all, phones are an investment," she says. "I don't use a screen protector, but I actually do use a case." It's not for safety, though. It's a wallet case. "I just like a place to put cards and money."
'It's made me more conscious of the thing'
Gorilla Glass was invented for the iPhone, though the latest models use a similar but upgraded Corning glass technology called "Ceramic Shield" made with "nano-ceramic crystals". Apple claims the latest iteration of Ceramic Sheild for the iPhone 16 makes it "2x tougher" than the glass on any other smartphone.
You might think those crystals and ions would be enough to shield me from spending money on a phone case, but manufacturers send mixed messages.
Apple will sell you on the wonders of ceramics, but is also happy to sell you a case stamped with the Apple logo. My iPhone salesperson suggested I might like a nice blue one for $49 (£38). So, does an iPhone need a case? Apple wouldn't say: a spokesperson declined to comment.
Phone case manufacturer Spigen, on the other hand, was happy to talk. "It's true that phones are more durable than ever," says Justin Ma, a Spigen spokesperson. "However, despite these advancements, these devices are always prone to accidents," he says.
But even Ma wouldn't call a case necessary. "You might expect us to say everyone needs a case. But the reality is that it depends on the individual." Some people like the feel of a bare phone, some want maximum protection and still others choose a case for aesthetic purposes.
Whatever their reasons, case users are a massive contingency. Ma says Spigen cases alone cover 100 million devices. The consulting firm Towards Packaging clocked the global phone case market at almost $25bn (£19bn) in 2024.
I was standing in my kitchen drinking a glass of water when I got the itch for one last bedtime doomscroll. As I yanked my phone out of my pocket, my fingers slipped. My pristine iPhone made a ferocious arc through the air, bounced off the side of my refrigerator and landed hard, corner first, by my feet.
But when I checked, my phone was fine, saved perhaps by hardened glass, dumb luck or my gentle linoleum floor.
For Jonna Valente, one half of a caseless couple based in North Carolina in the US, going without a case wasn't about science or status. "When I got my last phone, my daughter picked out the pink colour, and I didn't want to put a case on it because she just loved it so much," she says.
Valente never looked back, and as time went by, she realised living without a case changed her relationship with her phone. "Because my fingers don't grip it as well, I just have more of an awareness," she says. "It's made me more conscious of the thing, and I find I don't get blindly sucked in as much as I used to. I can't believe I'm saying this but I think I'm actually using my phone less."
As romantic as Valente makes it sound, I can't say the same. I'm as mindlessly glued to the internet as ever before.
The drop
Early in my career I worked at the magazine Consumer Reports, which has a full-on laboratory where teams of engineers have designed scientific tests to rate and review the products for almost 90 years. Just down the hall from my office was a crew that has rated phones for decades. To test for durability, Consumer Reports uses violence. If anyone knows the truth, it would be my old colleague Rich Fisco.
"We call it the drop test," says Fisco, who heads Consumer Reports' electronics testing. Phones go into a three-foot-long metal box with concrete panels at both ends, he says. Then the box spins, 50 times, slamming the phone against the concrete again and again. When the process is over, an engineer examines the device. If it survives, Fisco says they put the phone back in the box and give it yet another 50 drops.
"When the drop tests first started, about a third of phones would fail," says Fisco. "We haven't seen a phone fail the drop test in a long time. The glass has improved. These days they seem to be doing a lot better," he says.
"Look, I'm not saying the screen won't get scratched at some point, and if you drop it just right, or it lands on a little rock, say goodbye. But if your phone falls out of your hip pocket when you're walking down the street, the reality is it's probably not going to break," Fisco says. "It's true, you don't have to use a phone case anymore. But the real question is, are you a gambler?"
Even though Fisco publishes results that show dozens of phones passing the drop test every year, he still keeps his own device wrapped in a case. "Of course I do," he says. "I'm cheap."
I was rushing out the door on day 26 of my month with no case. Standing at the top of my building's staircase, I grabbed my phone to check on my commute to work. The next moment is a blur – I was probably being careless – but suddenly my phone was not in my hand but, in fact, tumbling out in front of me. I winced as it bounced down the steps once, twice and three times before clattering to a stop at the foot of the stairs.
I rushed down to rescue it, and lo and behold, there was a small gash in the corner of my iPhone's aluminium siding. The glass, however, was miraculously unscathed.
I spent the remaining days of my experiment playing it safe, clutching the phone tight on my rides on the subway, practicing mindfulness whenever I picked it up or set it down and on the whole simply using the thing a bit less.
More like this:
• Inside YouTube's world of forgotten videos
• What social hobbies taught me about friendship
• Lost Merlin legend found in cover of another book
My friend, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky. The next time we met up in the park, I asked him how his phone was doing. "Bad," he said. "I dropped it. It's smashed, cracked, the front and the camera lens." He was the first to call it ironic. Then again, he has an older iPhone. Maybe the newer ceramic glass would have saved him. Maybe not.
No matter how many salt baths they give your screen, glass is breakable. But I'm now convinced that with newer devices – and steadier hands than mine – a case really is optional if you're willing to accept some very real risks. By the end of the month, though, my nerves were shot. I'd been walking a tightrope, and while I'd survived a lot of bumps and drops, every near miss felt like a warning.
In the end, I'm back on the case. But every once in a while I still slip it off, just for the thrill, and let my phone feel the wind in its glass.
* Thomas Germain is a senior technology journalist for the BBC. He's covered AI, privacy and the furthest reaches of internet culture for the better part of a decade. You can find him on X and TikTok @thomasgermain.
--
For timely, trusted tech news from global correspondents to your inbox, sign up to the Tech Decoded newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Scientists are racing to find out what causes this progressive disease. And they're starting to make some headway.
After five and a half years of living with amyotrophic-lateral sclerosis (ALS), actor Kenneth Mitchell – who appeared in the films Star Trek: Discovery and Captain Marvel – died on 24 February 2024. In the months leading up to his death, he had described on social media what it was like living with the disease, which is also known as Lou Gehrig disease after the American baseball player who was diagnosed with the condition in 1939.
"It's been a long five years," wrote Mitchell in an Instagram post in August 2023. "So much lost, so much gained. Incredibly hard times, mixed with so many more blessings. At the heart of it all are friends and family, caregivers and doctors coming to the aid of my family over and over and over again. Giving a plethora of support and love and care and encouragement. There is so much beauty in that. This disease is absolutely horrific."
His death came just a few months after news that photographer Bryan Randall had died in August 2023, who had been diagnosed with ALS three years earlier at the age of 54. He was the partner of the actress Sandra Bullock, who met him on the job while he was taking portraits at a family party. In April 2025, American actor Eric Dane – who starred in Euphoria and Grey's Anatomy – revealed at the age of 52 that he had also been diagnosed with ALS.
Despite claiming numerous high-profile victims over the years – including young, otherwise healthy people – the mystery of what causes ALS remains. However, recent research has uncovered some clues. Could we finally be on track to decoding this devastating condition?
ALS is a form of motor-neurone disease (MND). It is a debilitating and painful condition in which the motor neurons – cells that control voluntary muscle movement – are gradually lost, leading to people slowly losing control of their bodies. A recent review of the available data estimated that it affects somewhere around five people per 100,000 in the US.
The disease occurs more commonly in men and the average age of diagnosis is about 60 years old, though it can also affect people who are significantly younger. While most people live only a few years after the diagnosis, there are notable exceptions, including the physicist Stephen Hawking who was diagnosed with a form of MND at 21 and died in 2018 at the age of 76.
The reasons why people develop ALS are complicated. For 10-15% of people with the condition, it runs in the family. In these cases, a mutation in a particular gene would have been passed through the generations. It is not certain that if one of your parents or ancestors had ALS, you will develop it as well, although there may be stories about cousin Lucy or grandpa Joe having a wasting illness in the family folklore.
However, it turns out that when people do develop the inherited form of ALS, the affected gene is not always the same one, even though the consequences are the same.
For the other 85% of people who develop ALS, identifying the cause is even less straightforward. When no-one says "your great uncle had something like that" after someone gets a diagnosis for ALS, then it is considered to be a random, one off, event and is called a "sporadic" case. Recent research has suggested that genetic mutations might be part of the story. However, these probably involve little changes in a few different genes rather the single drastic, obvious biological mistakes noted for familial ALS. Changes in up to 40 genes have been implicated in increasing someone's risk for sporadic ALS, though the condition is extremely rare.
Depending on the type of ALS, "the extent that disease can be explained by genetic factors is only about 8% to 60%," explains Eva Feldman, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan.
However, there's also emerging evidence that repeated and prolonged exposure to potential triggers in the external environment might increase the risk of someone developing ALS, particularly the sporadic form. This led Feldman and her colleagues to investigate.
"We suspected the presence of what we term the ALS 'exposome', which is the sum of toxic environmental exposures that increase risk," says Feldman. The team have found that prolonged exposure to organic chemical pollutants, metals, pesticides, particulate matter in dust from construction work and poor air quality could contribute to increasing a person's ALS risk.
Neil Thakur, chief mission officer of the ALS Association, says there is not a complete cause and effect for ALS. "It is always a combination of factors," he says. "Even if you have a risk factor or the genetic profile, it is not 100% sure you will get ALS."
But there is some evidence that exposure to particulates from diesel fuel, aviation fuel, particulates from burn pits, pesticides and aerosols may increase someone's risk of developing ALS, he adds. Military personnel, for example, are highly exposed to these and seem to have an increased chance of contracting the disease, he says.
There's also evidence that having lead in your drinking water, smoking and contact sports might trigger ALS. Still, there remains a lot of uncertainty. Studies assessing the effect of alcohol intake and cigarette smoking over a lifetime before an ALS diagnosis suggest being a teetotal non-smoker does not necessarily protect you. (These factors do reduce a person's risk of developing many other conditions, of course – so there are plenty of other reasons to limit your drinking and smoking.)
One of the challenges that scientists and clinicians investigating the causes of ALS (and MND overall) face is that they are, thankfully, rare diseases. Within the small number of patients, not everyone is willing or able to take part in research studies. And there are many differences in genetics and lifestyle that could be influencing the results. Even if a genetic change is found in 4% of cases, for example, there might not be enough people in that group to see a clear difference between those who have been exposed to a specific chemical pollutant and those who have not.
"It takes a long time to fully recruit enough people onto an ALS clinical trial, because the disease progresses so rapidly and people are only eligible early in the disease," says Thakur. "If you do have ALS in your family and you have an ALS gene, you can explore whether you could participate in trials, which would help you and others."
Feldman also says that her team's research looking at the combined risk from genetic and environmental factors "is a challenge" because they suspect that multiple genes – tens and possibly even hundreds – contribute to what they term the "polygenic risk profile" in ALS. This risk profile comes "in addition to traditional risk from single genes", she says. The team is now investigating how this polygenic risk profile might interact with environmental factors to cause ALS.
At the moment, ALS can't be cured. But the Food and Drug Administration has approved several treatments which can help to slow the speed of its progression and give people a little more time. These drugs have a range of mechanisms, ranging from reducing the levels of certain chemicals around the brain and spinal cord to preventing nerve cell death.
There also seems to be the possibility that targeting treatments against the effects of a particular faulty gene could be useful. A recent early trial of a drug designed to counteract the damage done by the SOD1 mutation produced some promising preliminary results, for example.
Knowing which genetic mutations might have been responsible for a person's diagnosis of ALS may not be particularly comforting to someone currently experiencing it. The focus of the ALS Association is to provide support and guidance for people with the condition and their families.
"The ALS Association strategy is to make it liveable until we have a cure," says Thakur. The organisation advocates for high quality care involving healthcare professionals from a range of different backgrounds, which can allow someone to have a more active life for a few months longer, he says. The association also plans to release guidance on how to reduce risk from potential contributors to the development of ALS, he says.
The challenge, however, is funding for appropriate research. As well as working out how much of a contribution each gene or environmental factor might make, more studies are needed on how to apply any knowledge gained. "The real question is not why do people get ALS, but what can we do to prevent it or treat it?" says Thakur.
Regardless of the cause, the march of this progressive disease will continue. Family and friends will have to respond to each new level of deterioration with love and patience, as Sandra Bullock has done. However, a better understanding of the science behind this devastating condition will hopefully lead to more effective treatments and, one day, may even help to prevent new cases emerging. And that is always welcome.
* This article was originally published 27 August 2023. It was updated on 26 February 2024 to include details of Kenneth Mitchell's death and updated again on 11 April 2025 to include details of Eric Dane's diagnosis.
--
Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List" – a handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, Travel and Reel delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Video games are the biggest form of entertainment in the world, but sometimes they bleed into people's lives offline in surprising and disturbing ways.
Christian Dines' hands were twitching. As though he were still gripping his video game controller, about to make a killer move. But the game was switched off and his hands were free. The US-based sustainability advisor had also noticed how, when he glanced at objects in his room, he felt an urge to absorb or "collect" them, like weapons or power-ups in his game.
He swallowed hard. "I thought, 'what the hell is this?' It was something I'd never experienced before as a gamer," he says. After a week of playing the same game maybe two or three hours a day, Dines' virtual experience was spilling over, disturbingly, into reality.
"It all only lasted a couple of days, but the effect was disorientating," he recalls. "It's unnerving to be distracted in some way by a screen when you're no longer in front of it."
Dines had, it seems, experienced something called Game Transfer Phenomenon, a condition in which the physical world and video games bleed together. While this might not be very common, for gamers who experience it, the condition can be extremely unsettling. And potentially even dangerous.
The term Game Transfer Phenomenon, or GTP, was first coined by Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, a psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway. She first proposed the concept a decade ago while working on her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Mark Griffiths, head of Nottingham Trent University's International Gaming Research Unit. Ortiz de Gortari was motivated by her own experience of GTP. One day, she was walking around her local supermarket and realised that she was imagining peering at products on the shelves through a rifle scope.
"I thought, 'Wow! This is interesting'," she recalls. "A phenomenon that changes your perception by encouraging you to see objects through the lens of the game you're playing," she says, adding that her response had felt involuntary, leaving her with serious questions about what it meant.
But what exactly is GTP? Ortiz de Gortari suggests that one could compare it to potentially more common experiences such as ear-worms, in which you spend days trying to get a catchy song out of your head. Or when images from a television show you binge-watched keep popping up in your mind's eye. With GTP, though, the intensity is arguably dialled up, says Ortiz de Gortari. Not least because gaming activates brain areas associated with control inhibition – the ability, or not, to control one's thoughts and behaviour rather than acting on impulse. This can also occur while passively watching television, but to a lesser degree than while gaming.
Ortiz de Gortari's studies suggest that GTP induces distress and dysfunction for around half of those gamers who say they have experienced it, with confusion, hyper-vigilance and irrationality among the symptoms. For others the only notable response may be a feeling of embarrassment that their game-play has spilled over into "real life".
One study participant she interviewed reported seeing health indicator bars like those in the role-playing game World of Warcraft floating above their companions' heads. Another spoke of lapses in concentration after not being able to stop "seeing" images from a game. Others said colours in the real world seemed transformed, and began to mimic the colours of a game world they had recently played in. While such effects are usually transitory, GTP can provoke a startling array of spontaneous or involuntary effects, according to Ortiz de Gortari's research.
While rare, these effects can even take the form of involuntary physical actions and behaviours. A game could end up shaping the way one interacts with real world objects or people. For example, a walk down a supermarket aisle could be experienced through the lens of gameplay, with the player perhaps "shooting" at products or people, possibly with a corresponding involuntary physical action in the hands as though working console controls.
In total, Ortiz de Gortari has recorded GTP experiences among gamers related to more than 400 titles of all kinds. Her largest on the subject to date, published in 2024, involved the participation of 623 Chinese gamers, both male and female. The results suggest that between 82% and 96% of those gamers have experienced some form of GTP.
It's possible that some gamers might have endured episodes of GTP but never admitted this to anyone, for fear of being considered "crazy", says Ortiz de Gortari. It is time we demystified GTP, she argues. "The mission for me is to inform people about the phenomenon, to raise awareness, because the [gamers] I've spoken to about it have been very concerned," she says. "Often, people don't want to talk about the experience of, say, seeing things that aren't there with their open eyes – even if that's what happens – because that's to talk about hallucinations, and they're associated with [potentially taboo, severe] mental illness."
Ortiz de Gortari argues that GTP has become a more common experience as games, especially role-playing, simulation, adventure and first-person shooter games, have become increasingly realistic and immersive. They offer sprawling environments full of detail and interaction. Essentially, gamers end up living virtual lives through such media and can find the gameplay deeply affecting.
"The more realistic the video game world is, the more likely players are to confuse the game world and the real world," says Ortiz de Gortari, who adds that this could mean GTP is becoming more common and impactful. The sophistication of games has undoubtedly increased since the days of Tetris and Super Mario, she points out. "Essentially the sophistication of the game facilitates the experience outside of the game."
Ali Farha, a gaming industry commentator and senior game producer at Stockholm-based Star Stable Entertainment, has experienced GTP himself. He describes his case as "a pretty harmless sense of gameplay repeating offline". He suggests that regular breaks during extended stretches of play and a period of conscious decompression after a long gaming session – reading a book or watching some light TV – could help counteract the likelihood of GTP raising its head.
Playing time – particularly above four hours – does appear to be a key factor in the onset of GTP. That's one reason why Scott Jennings, spokesperson for the US-based Gaming Addicts Anonymous (GAA), whose members invariably are at the high-end of playing hours, says the support group is increasingly mindful of this potential side-effect of gaming.
Farha also says that few people currently appreciate that, as he believes, the bridge between the real and the virtual is actually a two-way street.
"We overlook that we also take the experiences and expectations of the real world into the game world – and that too can be disorientating," he says. "I think it's quite common to enter a multi-player online game and feel loneliness, for example, even though you know you're at home. The experiences we have online become part of our personality. We build memories inside the virtual space of the games we play too, in the same way we build memories in the real world." In fact, studies suggest that games can be more conducive to memory formation than real life.
"I think for a lot of players the virtual and real worlds are starting to blur," Farha adds.
While no-one has reported physical harm as a consequence of GTP to date – GTP could, in principle, endanger someone. "It's not a good idea for me to be trying to kill demons while I'm driving," as Dines puts it.
Exactly why the virtual world can blur with the real world in this way, however, is still not clear. Some studies suggest different brain networks are activated when observing something in a virtual environment, compared to a real one. The same has been found with objects in augmented reality, where virtual elements are superimposed onto the real world. But some studies have shown that human memory can sometimes struggle to recall whether something occurred in a virtual environment or in real life – with the effects being more pronounced when using virtual reality systems.
Ortiz de Gortari has indicated that GTP might be more common among gamers who have a tendency for mind-wandering and have a low working memory capacity. She also believes it could be the result of the game priming the brain or some sort of associated learning effect that when gamers encounter something similar to an environment or scene they came across in a game, it can trigger an involuntary response.
But these are all theories for now.
"The human brain isn't built to differentiate between reality and today's virtual worlds," says a spokesperson for Game Addicts Anonymous. "That's one reason why games are so captivating and why it's no surprise the two experiences overlap."
Jennings also recounts a GTP-like experience. After playing an aggressive racing game he later felt "a disconcerting urge" when out driving, to smash into a vehicle that pulled up alongside him. He argues that GTP could be compared to alcoholism. It's not necessarily about how many drinks you've had but rather it's about your personal relationship to alcohol. Similarly, he says, while most people may have a functional relationship to gaming, some players are less able to contain its effect to playing time.
Recent research by Ortiz de Gortari would appear to back this up. Her findings suggests that certain personality traits are likely a factor in one's propensity towards GTP. Other influences she cites include suffering from sleep deprivation, stress, depression or anxiety.
Max Dzmitryiev, a US-based counsellor and gamer, says he grew up experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Video games, he says, offered an escape from reality.
"But I'd easily get immersed in them," he recalls. "And as the level of immersion grew, so the stimulation was higher and so I had more GTP experiences," he says. To him, GTP is "freaky and unpleasant" and something that can overwhelm his thoughts and decisions for as long as 20 minutes. After such a bout, GTP can keep popping up for days, intermittently, he explains.
Dzmitryiev has even noticed that watching someone else play a game can induce GTP-style effects. He gives the example of observing someone having fun in Minecraft, a colourful exploration and world-building game. Watching the other person's progress intently can lead to Dzmitryiev to, he says, literally perceiving his own surroundings as though they were built from the cube-like blocks used to construct the virtual environments in Minecraft. This effect – like an involuntary visual overlay to his surroundings – can last for an hour or so, he says. "It's why I tend to stay away from VR games now – because I still feel fully immersed for too long after taking the headset off," he says.
It raises questions about whether the games industry should be addressing GTP in some way? Since so many games are played by children and young people, Ortiz de Gortari argues that developers should take more responsibility in addressing the potential impact of GTP on susceptible gamers, possibly through their own research, or at least by acknowledging its effects.
Dines says that he would endorse some kind of warning on games. It may only have relevance for a few gamers but that's no different to the warnings about strobe lighting effects, which could induce epileptic seizures in a small subset of players, for example.
"Game developers intentionally craft their products to give certain experiences – they know their game's power," says Farha. "Players need to appreciate that games have to be used correctly. I know I've played too much at times and it didn't make me feel good."
But Nick Ballou, a postdocoral researcher in video games and mental health at the University of Oxford, expresses concern that overemphasising the dangers of GTP will fuel the moral panic around video games or stoke fears that all games are inherently unhealthy. Ballou is currently in the process of analysing data shared with him by the gaming industry. This data covers five leading video game platforms and his goal is to provide the most nuanced picture to date of how games affect people, both for better or worse. He aims to publish the first research from this project this spring.
More like this:
• Why children love Minecraft so much
• The mysterious origins of an uncrackable video game
• The people who 'see' foreign languages
Most gamers don't find that their hobby impacts their mental health negatively, he says. Rather, they more commonly report that gaming induces feelings of relief or relaxation, and that it gives them access to communities or offers a sense of achievement and identity. "Any problems are at the extremes [of gaming]," says Ballou. "[Similarly], in small doses, GTP doesn't strike me as particularly problematic. If it was endemic we'd see more people out there behaving in very strange ways. But we don't."
For Ortiz de Gortari, however, there's a lot still to uncover about this extraordinary phenomenon. We still know relatively little about the way gamers unconsciously process what they see and hear during play. A better understanding of this, through a complex and expensive brain scan study, might, she says, help us unravel what happens as GTP kicks in.
"We have enough evidence that GTP is happening," she says. "Now we need to know more about how and why."
--
For more technology news and insights, sign up to our Tech Decoded newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights to your inbox twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The compound has been linked to improved cognitive performance and reduced anxiety – but are you getting enough of it?
You may not have heard of choline before, but studies show that it's crucial for our health, at various stages of life.
Choline is neither a vitamin or a mineral – it's an organic compound that's vital to the healthy functioning of the human nervous system. Now there's emerging evidence that consuming more choline can have a wide range of powerful effects, from improving cognitive performance to protecting against neurodevelopmental disorders, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia.
The nutrient also seems to play a significant role in human neurodevelopment. In one study, babies who whose mothers took choline supplements during pregnancy gave birth to infants with higher information processing speeds – a measure of healthy cognitive functioning.
Scientists say that choline is a wonder-nutrient, but that it has been hugely overlooked. So, where does choline come from – and are you getting enough of it?
A crucial nutrient
Every cell in our body contains choline, says Xinyin Jiang, professor of health and nutrition sciences at Brooklyn College in New York, US.
Choline is an "essential" nutrient, which means we need it for our health, but our bodies don't produce enough on their own. Instead, we need to get some of it from our diets. In this sense, it's similar to omega 3 fatty acids, although it's actually closely associated with B vitamins, says Emma Derbyshire, science writer and founder and CEO of the consultancy Nutritional Insight.
More like this:
Choline can be found mostly in animal-based foods, including beef, eggs, fish, chicken and milk, but it's also in peanuts, kidney beans, mushrooms and cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli – although animal foods tend to contain more choline than plant-based sources.
We need choline for numerous functions in our bodies, including liver function. Not having enough can cause a number of problems.
"Choline helps fat transport out of the liver, and when a person is deficient, they can get a fatty liver," says Jiang.
Choline also helps the body to synthesise phospholipids, which are the main component of the cell membranes in our bodies. Being deficient in the nutrient can affect the expression of genes involved in the process of our cells multiplying. During the development of a foetus, choline deficiency can be particularly harmful because it inhibits cell proliferation in the brain.
Choline's role in the brain is crucial – in fact it's primarily a "brain nutrient", says Derbyshire. It's needed for our bodies to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is a chemical that carries messages from your brain to your body through nerve cells. Acetylcholine plays a major role in brain nerve cells, which are needed for our memory, thinking and learning.
In one study involving almost 1,400 people aged 36 to 83, researchers found that people with a higher choline intake tended to have better memories, and that choline intake during midlife may help to protect our brains. Choline is commonly included as an ingredient in supplements taken as "nootropics" – a diverse group of substances which some people believe can enhance learning and memory.
On the other hand, choline deficiency has also been associated with neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
Another way choline may affect the brain is our mental health. One study found that higher intake of choline was associated with lower levels of anxiety. In another study, having a higher dietary intake of choline was linked to a lower risk of depression.
Having an adequate choline intake can also come with a number of other benefits. A higher dietary intake of this nutrient .
Separately, research in mice has found that choline can help to lower the levels of homocysteine, an amino acid which can increase the risk of heart disease. High levels of homocysteine can also be linked to osteoporosis, and research has found that people with higher choline intakes from their diets tend to have a higher bone density – an indicator of strong, healthy bones with a lower risk of being fractured.
"Choline can potentially have an effect against bone loss," says Øyen Jannike, a researcher at the Institute of Marine Research in Norway, who has studied the link between choline and bone health.
This may partly be because of homocysteine, she says, but also because choline is an essential structure in our cell membranes.
The first 1000 days
It's well established that a child's first two years are critical for their development, and that the mother's diet during pregnancy and breastfeeding has an integral influence on this.
Studies show that choline is vitally important for a baby's development in the womb. In fact, babies are born with three times as much choline as their mothers, which Derbyshire says shows how important it is at this stage of life.
Several studies have found that the supply of choline in the womb correlates to the cognitive outcome of the baby, and its benefits may continue for years as the child develops. In one study, pregnant women who had the highest dietary choline intake during the second trimester of pregnancy (from week 13 to week 28) went on to have children who scored higher on a test of short- and long-term memory at the age of seven.
Some research even suggests insufficient choline intake when a woman is pregnant could be linked ADHD behaviours in their offspring.
"We're seeing a lot more ADHD and dyslexia in schools, and some is genetic, but it's also possible that, in utero, they're not getting key nutrients," Derbyshire says. "These very subtle neurodevelopment changes are occurring and impacting them later on. We're treating the aftermath now."
Jiang has studied the relationship between the supply of choline during pregnancy and breastfeeding, and brain development. "In animal findings, when the mum has more choline, the cognitive development of their offspring is better," she says. "We're starting to find similar results in human studies, although, not exactly the same."
Feeding the brain
A 2020 review of 38 animal and 16 human studies concluded that choline supplementation helps brain development. However, only animal studies currently show a strong link between choline and improved cognitive function. The paper doesn't define the ideal amount of supplementation, but says most human studies use supplements providing up to 930mg choline daily – an amount equivalent to the choline in roughly six chicken's eggs – with no adverse effects reported.
There may also be some people that require more choline than the recommended daily amounts, says Øyen – including post-menopausal women, for example, who have lower levels of oestrogen, and people with fatty liver disease.
We also know, Derbyshire says, that, due to the genetic differences from one person to another, some people may have higher requirements for choline. (Derbyshire has previously consulted for and advised The Meat Advisory Panel, Marlow Foods (Quorn), the Health Supplement Information Service and the British Egg Information Service, among other organisations).
When we eat foods containing choline, it's very easily absorbed into our blood, says Jiang, which should go some way to ensuring we're consuming enough choline.
However, several studies show that many of us aren't getting enough. One study found that only 11% of American adults consume the recommended daily amount.
Eggs are one of the most potent dietary sources of choline, and there is some concern that those who choose to follow a vegan diet may not be getting enough of this nutrient – though there are many plant-based sources and choline supplements are widely available in developed countries.
One study found that people who eat eggs have almost twice the usual choline intake compared with those who don't, leading the researchers to conclude that consuming the daily adequate amount of choline was "extremely difficult" without eating eggs or taking a supplement.
But the EFSA's recommendation of 400mg of choline per day is achievable for most people if you plan your diet carefully, says Jiang. Some vegan sources of choline include tofu (28mg of choline per 100g), peanut butter (61-66mg per 100g) and soy beans (120mg per 100g).
Anyone concerned they're not getting enough choline can take a daily supplement, Øyen says. In the meantime, she adds, there needs to be more animal and human research to better understand the mechanisms behind some of choline's health benefits.
However "clinicians are becoming more aware of [choline]", says Derbyshire. While it often seems to be slightly overlooked, she is hopeful that choline will soon start to enjoy the limelight.
--
For trusted insights into better health and wellbeing rooted in science, sign up to the Health Fix newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
From an Australian frog that swallowed its own eggs to woolly mammoths, scientists are getting ever closer to being able to bring long-lost species back from the dead.
Millions of years ago thylacines, also known as Tasmanian tigers, were widespread across Australia. About the size of an American coyote, these dog-like creatures with stripes disappeared from the mainland around 2,000 years ago. They remained in Tasmania until the 1920s, when they were slaughtered by European colonisers who saw them as a threat to livestock.
"It was a human-driven extinction – European settlers came to Australia and brutally obliterated this animal," says Andrew Pask, a geneticist at the University of Melbourne.
Pask is leading a team of scientists who, together with "de-extinction" company Colossal Biosciences, aim to recreate the wolf-like creature and bring it back.
Thanks to recent advances in genetics, namely the advent of gene editing technology Crispr-Cas9, the thylacine is not the only lost species that we could soon see again. How does the science of de-extinction work, and what kinds of ethical questions does it raise?
In the case of the thylacine, the first step is sequencing the extinct animal's DNA – the genetic blueprint contained in every single cell of the body. Pask did this in 2017.
"The great thing about the thylacine, is that as it was such an important marsupial every major museum wanted one in their collection, so there are hundreds of samples around the globe, and some are exceptionally preserved," says Pask.
"Our sample was a baby taken from its mothers' pouch. They shot the mum and immediately dropped the baby into alcohol, which preserves DNA. That was the miracle specimen and the holy grail for us in terms of being able to really build that genome."
Although it's in pretty good condition, the DNA isn't completely whole. Over time, exposure to UV light and the action of bacteria break down DNA into short fragments. The older the sample, the smaller the fragments that are left behind, until eventually there isn't enough left (there's no chance of bringing back a dinosaur, for this reason).
This leaves scientists with the seemingly impossible task of working out how the various bits of DNA fit together – a task comparable to completing an enormous jigsaw without the helpful picture on the front of the box.
Luckily, a small mouse-sized marsupial called a dunnart was able to provide a blueprint.
"We found the closest living relative to the thylacine, which was the dunnart," says Pask.
Dunnarts and thylacines share 95% of their DNA, which is thought to be highly conserved, meaning it hasn't changed much over time.
"We sequenced the dunnart's genome and compared that genetic code to our extinct species, we then overlapped them and found everywhere where it was different," says Pask.
However, knowing an animal's DNA is simply not enough to bring it back. The next stage of the puzzle involves tweaking the genes of the dunnart so that they match the thylacine's. This can be done with Crispr-Cas9, the Nobel Prize-winning genome editing method.
"We start with living cells from the dunnart, and we begin to edit all of those changes, so we essentially engineer or turn that dunnart cell into a living thylacine cell with thylacine chromosomes in it," says Pask.
Previously, gene editing wasn't advanced enough to be able to change all of the differing sequences to thylacine DNA in one go. With millions of edits needed, it was assumed that researchers would need to prioritise the most important DNA sequences, yielding an animal genome that wasn't exactly the same as the extinct one. Pask believes this will no longer be necessary.
"All of those technologies are in place, but nobody's done it on this scale before because the DNA-editing technology wasn't good enough or quick enough. But now it's come such a long way that we do have that tech, and we have had significant investment to try and make this work."
Once the researchers have a thylacine cell, they still need to turn it into a developing embryo, and then implant it into a living close-relative's womb. If that sounds easy, then it isn't. "We have a lot of work to do," says Pask.
"We've already made marsupial stem cells which took us about five years. We're now putting those stem cells into embryos to see if we can get them to develop into a whole living animal."
It isn't just the thylacine that could be brought back this way. Preserved scraps of woolly mammoth DNA found frozen in Arctic tundra mean that this large mammal could return. Most woolly mammoths died out roughly 10,000 years ago.
Scientists at Colossal Laboratories and Bioscience – cofounded by researchers from Harvard University – are using Crispr to splice bits of mammoth DNA into the genome of the Asian elephant, the mammoth's closest living relative. The resulting hybrid, known as a "mammophant'", would be adapted to the cold Siberian tundra, and could help fill an ecological void left by the mammoth when they went extinct. (Watch a film from BBC Reel about how mammoths might be a surprising help in tackling climate change or watch it below.)
There are, however, limitations with the technology, and obstacles that still need to be overcome.
"Many attributes that we have as living animals require several different copies of genes, but it's not easy to tell from looking at a reconstructed genome how many are needed," says Michael Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
"You keep your fingers crossed that one copy will be sufficient to enable the feature you're looking for, but there's a big suck-it-and-see component to these projects."
However, genome reconstruction is not the only method scientists could use to resurrect extinct animals.
The aurochs, a type of prehistoric cow, is the subject of ancient cave paintings around the globe. It once roamed the plains of Europe and stood as tall as an elephant. It became extinct in the 1600s. Although long gone, auroch genes can still be found in various breeds of cattle around the continent, with descendants in Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Balkans. Geneticists are now "back breeding" these species together to produce offspring closer to the qualities of an auroch.
Another idea is to essentially clone the dead animal by taking the nucleus from an intact cell, and then transferring it into the egg of a close living relative in the hope that an embryo will form.
The caveat is that you need a complete cell to do this, and cells quickly break down after death. An animal like the thylacine that died out almost a hundred years ago simply couldn't be brought back this way.
But it could be an option for recently extinct species.
In 2003, researchers successfully cloned a Pyrenean ibex, a type of goat that went extinct when the last living individual was killed by a falling tree. Sadly, the new-born died of a lung defect shortly after birth.
Archer is currently using a variation of cloning technology to bring back the southern gastric-brooding frog, a species native to Queensland, which became extinct in 1983. The creature had a bizarre method of reproduction, swallowing its fertilised eggs and using its stomach as a sort of womb.
In 2013, he completed the first step – transferring the nucleus from a frozen frog cell into the empty egg of a closely related amphibian. Incredibly the cells started dividing, and an embryo was formed.
"We did it many hundreds of times and it didn't work, and then suddenly one of them did and we saw this hybrid embryo start to divide under the microscope and it was very exciting," says Archer.
More like this:
• Why mammoths might be our climate saviours
• How mammals won the dinosaurs' world
• The grim fate that could be 'worse than extinction'
After this initial excitement, however, the project stumbled when none of the embryos developed into tadpoles or frogs.
"The frog embryos developed into a ball of cells, which is normal embryonic development, but then they stopped," says Archer.
"Normally the outside layer of cells folds in and you get a two-layered structure which leads to a tadpole, but ours didn't do that."
The same thing happened when the team tried to create an embryo with two living species of frogs, suggesting that it was an aspect of their experimental work that was interfering with the development of the embryo, rather than a problem with the extinct frog's DNA.
"We're working to find out what this obstacle is in living frogs before we can go back to the extinct animal's DNA," says Archer.
Are we playing God?
Even if we can bring back extinct animals, there are ethical considerations.
Reintroducing mammoths and thylacines might upset existing ecosystems. Since these animals became extinct, others will have evolved and adapted to fill their place. Will these organisms suffer as a result?
Thanks to climate change, the environments these creatures once lived in may have changed drastically. Some of the plants woolly mammoths fed on are long gone as well. Would mammoths still be able to survive on their own in the wild, and if not, who would look after them? Would they just end up as curiosities in a zoo?
"I don't think we should bring all animals back. I think it should have to fit certain criteria," says Pask.
"For the thylacine it's a recent extinction event, so its habitat in Tasmania still exists, all the food it used to eat still exists, so there's somewhere for them to go and they can thrive again in that environment.
"This animal also played a critical role in the ecosystem. It was an apex predator so it sat right at the top of the food chain. There are no other marsupial apex predators so when it was made extinct it left a massive gap."
Some researchers argue that efforts to bring back long-gone species could detract from conservation efforts to save existing animals and even increase the risk of biodiversity loss, and that people may be less incentivised to stop eating meat and destroying habitats.
But de-extinction technology could be used to save living species on the brink of extinction, especially those with an extremely small gene pool, like the white rhino.
Black headed ferrets are one of North America's most endangered animals – every ferret alive today can trace its ancestry to just seven individuals. Yet researchers at Santiago Zoo in Chile recently took frozen cells from a black footed ferret which died 30 years ago, and used them to create a clone, Elizabeth Ann. Elizabeth's DNA is entirely different, so she can bring a welcome boost of genetic diversity into the population.
"De-extinction tech isn't just about bringing back the thylacine, it's about preventing other animals from becoming extinct," says Pask.
"We have so many bush fires in Australia, and with rising global temperatures we are going to see more adverse weather events in the decades to come. What Australia has been doing is collecting tissues from marsupials in those areas that are most at risk and freezing them. This means that if a bush fire came along, once the vegetation grew back you could repopulate that area with that species."
Archer agrees that the moral rights outweigh any wrongs.
"I think it would be unethical not to do it. I think the ethical issue here was the impropriety of humans making these animals extinct in the first place. It's not about playing God, this is about playing smart human by undoing what we did."
* This article was originally published in 2023 and updated in April 2025 with Colossal Biosciences' announcement that it had bred "dire wolves".
--
Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List" – a handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, Travel and Reel delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Artificial intelligence is being trialled as a tool to help district councillors decide where to build 5,400 homes by 2041.
Forest of Dean district councillors are under pressure from the government to deliver 597 homes a year, a number that was increased in summer 2024 from 330 a year.
Council leader Adrian Birch said the authority had tasked an AI company with a research project to first see if the technology could be relied upon.
He said he wanted to speed up decision processes, telling a council meeting: "If we can trust the AI to get it right then we will look at whether that is a feasible option."
The district council, under its plan for 2021 to 2041, had already been planning to build 6,600 homes when the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government stepped in last year with new targets that it made mandatory.
The demands meant that the council had to build an extra 5,400 homes – 12,000 in total by 2041.
Locations for many of the 6,600 homes have already been mapped out, mainly in Lydney, Beachley and Newent.
The search for locations for the extra 5,400 properties means old ideas have been revived, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
These include creating a garden town between the A40 and A48 near Churcham and a new settlement off junction 2 of the M50 near Redmarley.
Mr Birch told councillors: "We are trialling some AI support on this which will see if it provides the information we need."
He said the AI company had been asked to assess public responses to the council's local plan consultation last summer.
"We will then be comparing our results with their results," he said.
He said the use of AI would be reviewed if there were any doubts.
The council voted unanimously to review its 2021 to 2041 local plan and explore alternative strategic options for housing.
Follow BBC Gloucestershire on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.
Social media influencers are fuelling an increase in misogyny and sexism in schools, according to a new poll by a teaching union.
Almost three in five teachers said they believe social media use has had a negative effect on behaviour in schools, the NASUWT poll of 5,800 teachers in the UK found.
Influencer and self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate was named by a number of teachers in the poll.
The Department for Education (DfE) said it was supporting the teachers to tackle the "damaging impact" on children caused by "the rise of dangerous influencers".
Union members will debate motions at its annual conference in Liverpool this weekend, including one that suggests far-right and populist movements have shifted their recruitment on to social media, messaging and online gaming platforms.
"I have had boys refuse to speak to me and speak to a male teaching assistant instead because I am a woman and they follow Andrew Tate and think he is amazing with all his cars and women... These were 10-year-olds," one teacher said.
Another teacher said: "In a secondary English class last year, a group of boys opted, despite discouragement, to write a persuasive essay on why Andrew Tate is the GOAT (greatest of all time) which included praise of his view that women are a man's property... all of the parents were contacted and were appalled."
In an interview with the BBC in 2023, when pushed on whether his controversial views on women harmed young people, Tate claimed he was a "force for good".
Patrick Roach, general secretary of the NASUWT, said "there is an urgent need for concerted action involving schools, colleges and other agencies to safeguard all children and young people from the dangerous influence of far-right populists and extremists".
"Teachers cannot be left alone to deal with these problems," he added.
But the founder of a group which trains professionals in how to work with boys and young men said the access young people have to pornography is "way more impactful" than the influence of people like Tate.
Michael Conroy, who launched Men at Work in 2019, told BBC Breakfast: "Without porn, Andrew Tate would not be a known name.
"Our boys, sadly, are learning about sex through porn, and it is usually representing to them a difference of power between men and women.
"That chimes when they see work from people like Andrew Tate. It's already been learned, in that sense."
Mr Conroy said this is often the case for boys aged "eight, nine upwards", adding: "Where there's access to a phone, there's access [to pornography], unfortunately."
He said while issues like misogyny and sexism were not new in schools, they were being "turbocharged because of accessibility" to dangerous material online.
The NASUWT conference came after Adolescence, a Netflix drama about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a girl from his class, prompted a national conversation about online safety.
Last month, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer welcomed a move by Netflix to make the series available to screen for free in secondary schools.
But he said there was no "simple solution" to stop boys from being dragged into a "whirlpool" of misogyny.
A DfE spokesperson, responding to the NASUWT poll, said the government provides a range of resources to support teachers and its curriculum review will look at the skills children need to thrive in an online world.
The Liberal Democrats said the results were "shocking, but should come as no surprise" and that it showed the need to "cut addictive algorithms off at their source".
The party is calling for a task force to be set up and for money from fines for breaching the Online Safety Act to be reinvested into a safer screens programme in schools.
Earlier this month, a survey commissioned by BBC News showed more than a third of secondary teachers have reported misogynistic behaviour from pupils at their school in the last week.
About 40% of the teachers who responded also said they felt ill-equipped to handle such conduct.
"Be mindful about what you're sharing, because once it's online, it's online forever," says Lilly Sabri.
The fitness influencer, who has six million followers on YouTube, has urged fans to heed her words as she plans to return to Instagram after a long absence.
Two years ago she was living her dream, running two successful businesses helped by her explosion in popularity during the Covid lockdowns.
But the physiotherapist went silent on Instagram in 2023 when a popular gossip podcast shared a story about a man who had allegedly cheated on his well-known fiancée - with enough clues to suggest the man in question was her then partner.
She woke to find "thousands" of notifications from social media and messaging apps as seemingly the whole world wanted to know whether there was truth behind the rumours.
Lilly was watching the life she knew fall apart in real time.
The creators of the podcast, which the BBC has chosen not to name, say they are not responsible for actions taken as a result of their content.
Lilly - who has not discussed what happened in public until now - sat down with me to talk about the moment which changed her future.
Soon after the podcast launched, her social media feeds began to fill with what she called "investigator-style" videos speculating about her life and how she would react.
Her first step was to delete her Instagram app.
"I just had to get away from social media," she said.
"People wanted answers, people wanted to see even more into my life, even when I asked for privacy.
"All I could do was control my own reaction and that meant withdrawing and protecting myself and my family."
Lilly's relationship ended, but there was much to untangle - her ex was also her business partner, leaving her faced with raising the funds to buy him out. He has been contacted by the BBC for comment.
She left Dubai, where she had been living with her partner, to move back in with her family in the UK - and had to lay off most of the companies' staff.
"It was very humbling and very difficult," Lilly said, explaining she had to go back to doing the work she used to have staff for - such as editing, filming her videos, and running the business' social media feeds.
It meant even though she was trying her best to avoid it, Lilly was constantly engaging with social media platforms to keep her businesses going - and she had to try to avoid looking at myriad personal comments.
"I was trying to manage the heartbreak and the shock combined with keeping the business afloat," she said.
Her most recent Instagram post until now, on her personal account, was uploaded in November 2023 - with many of the comments asking why she has not posted for so long.
Up until the gossip podcast launched, Lilly had been open about her life online.
And she accepted there may have "potentially" been less interest in her relationship had she shared less on social media.
"I truly don't know the answer to that," she said.
"I think when I compare to some other people, I didn't show a lot of my lifestyle.
"But it was clearly enough for people to put two and two together."
Lilly acknowledged she had shared snapshots about herself to help build her brand - to draw in those who wanted to know more about her - and for a long time it was a successful strategy.
While she maintained some boundaries such as not revealing information about her family, she said there was always an unspoken pressure to share more.
"I've learned people will constantly want more the more you give," she said.
"If it's just showing your dog, or sharing your relationship, it's like 'okay, what else, now show the house'.
"It can lead to a lot of exposure because you're chasing likes or you feel that's what your customers want."
Nearly eighteen months after her most recent post, Lilly is in a different headspace.
Her business - the workout videos and a nutrition app - are thriving and she feels ready to return to her personal Instagram account - but with a very different set of rules this time around.
"I'm not going to be showing my personal relationships, I've been too scarred, and I can't do it again," she said.
Since pop star Katy Perry returned to Earth earlier this week, the number of memes referencing her brief trip to space has skyrocketed.
After weighing in with jokes of its own, American fast-food chain Wendy's has clarified that its now-viral tweets weren't meant to cause offence.
Following criticism from followers, the company put out a statement this week saying it had no ill-will for Perry.
"We always bring a little spice to our socials, but Wendy's has a ton of respect for Katy Perry and her out-of-this-world-talent," it said.
The star-studded, all-female crew on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket took off in Texas on Monday and flew for 11 minutes in total. Perry was joined by five other women, including journalist Gayle King and Jeff Bezos's partner Lauren Sanchez.
But the "Fireworks" singer's reactions captivated the internet more than others'. After landing, she kissed the ground, saying she felt "so connected to love".
King revealed that Perry sang Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" while in space.
Memes and comments began to flood social media platforms, including Wendy's series of posts on its official X account when she landed: "When we said women in stem this isn't what we meant" and "Can we send her back".
Larger criticism
While the space flight was meant to celebrate women, the crew has faced some criticism. The backlash ranged from the environmental impact of the flight to looming cuts for actual Nasa employees.
Other celebrities also offered their two cents.
"I think it's a bit gluttonous," actress Olivia Munn said in an appearance on TODAY. "Space exploration was to further our knowledge and to help mankind. What are they going to do up there that is going to help us down here?"
Model and activist Emily Ratajkowski said on TikTok that the flight was "beyond parody".
"Look at the state of the world and think about how many resources went into putting these women into space," she said. "For what?"
But not all reactions were negative. TV reality star Khloe Kardashian, watching from the viewing platform, said: "Whatever you dream of is in our reach, especially in today's day and age."
Oprah Winfrey, a close friend of King, also watched the launch. She was seen tearing up as the craft landed.
"I've never been more proud of my friend than today," she said.
King countered some of the negative comments, saying she believes the flight inspired young women who want to be astronauts.
"I feel that anybody who is criticising doesn't really understand what's happening here," she said.
A Guernsey headteacher has changed the school curriculum to include Artificial Intelligence (AI) because of its potential impact on the futures of students.
Daniele Harford-Fox said The Ladies College used a custom-made AI agent to help Year 7 students set themselves targets.
She said staff also used an internal version of Microsoft Copilot with added restrictions to ensure safe learning.
"There are fundamental questions about whether [the education system] is going to still be relevant to this industrial revolution," she said.
Ms Harford-Fox said recent AI models, such as Chat GPT-4, were capable of writing work better than most A-level students and Guernsey teachers were concerned about verifying their work.
She said: "If AI can write a better essay than most students, the real question is why are we spending seven years of a student's life teaching them how to write essays?"
The States does not have a specific policy which covers AI use in schools, but its online safety guidance refers users to Guernsey's data protection laws.
'Transferable skills'
As data protection rules are laws, and not States' guidelines, independent schools are also expected to follow them.
However, States-maintained schools are also required to follow UK AI rules from examination boards.
Kieran James, headteacher at Les Varendes, said each exam board had different rules about appropriate AI use.
As schools may use different exam boards for different subjects, this could be challenging, as the definition of acceptable AI use could alter depending on which class a student was taking, he said.
He said education gave students "transferable skills" and felt that AI was "not threatening the current system".
Mr James compared using AI to using a calculator, saying parents were originally concerned about the use of those devices, but in reality using the tool correctly still required learning.
"It's the same with AI... it's a tool and it can be used really effectively as long as it's used appropriately, and not, for example, to pass off AI's work as a student's own."
Mr James added that if used responsibly, AI had the power to support students outside the classroom when teachers were not available.
He explained students could use AI as a "personal tutor" to practise questions and mark exams.
Ed Gregson, a media teacher at Les Varandes, said he used AI to support his marking workload.
He said using AI for administrative and more repetitive tasks freed up time, and allowed him to focus on tasks that required more attention and creativity.
However, the development of AI also made him concerned about his future role in teaching.
"I'm terrified to say that I think it marks better than I do. Humans are tired... you kind of know that your personal bias is entering in to your marking," he added.
Dave Costen, digital lead for Elizabeth College, said AI was not yet able to substitute for teaching.
Mr Costen said one difference was AI gave "too much [information] to students straight away" whereas teachers "develop the learning [of students] gradually".
Students generally have a poor understanding of AI, he said.
Despite this, some Elizabeth College students had experimented with the technology, he said.
One student explained to the BBC that AI was not good at adjusting the difficulty of example questions.
Another student said some of their peers over-relied on AI, and used it to complete work for them, which was not helping them learn.
AI was also better at some subjects than others, a third explained. It was very strong at coding, but in subjects that required reasoning it "really struggled".
Parent Gazz Barbe said he uses parental controls to restrict his daughter's phone use, and added that he did not allow the use of AI technology.
"I worry that if I give my daughter unrestricted access to this technology, she will use it to complete homework assignments.
"And if she does this in a subject that she really struggles with, she could easily become over-reliant on the technology," he said.
"The positive potential is absolutely massive... so long as it's used as a tool to assist teachers instead of doing the teaching," he added.
Follow BBC Guernsey on X and Facebook. Send your story ideas to channel.islands@bbc.co.uk.
They say the recipe for a good country track is simple - just combine three chords and the truth.
Over the past year though, a growing number of artists have been adding their own sprinkles with pop stars including Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter leaning into the genre.
Chappell's The Giver went straight to number two in the UK charts when it was released in March, with the self-proclaimed Midwest Princess saying she wanted to give country music a new take with "a little gay yodel".
Figures from streaming platforms suggest that cooking up a country song has also been a recipe for success, with listening time up by 25% over the past year in the UK.
British artists are hopeful that'll act as a giddy up to the UK scene and help them replicate some of the success of their US country cousins.
"It only benefits me and other country music artists in the UK because more people listening to country music just means they're going to take an interest - hopefully - in what we're doing," 20-year-old singer Neeve Zahra tells BBC Newsbeat.
Her love for country music comes from two sources: her grandad and Hannah Montana.
The Disney Channel school-girl-by-day-pop-star-by-night character played by Miley Cyrus "probably started me off", she says.
"I can now officially say I was country before country was cool."
Neeve, from Manchester, is already noticing a spike in people coming to gigs and hopes the hype could build to a point where British country acts can be recognised with a category at the Brit Awards.
"That's definitely the dream."
Izzie Walsh is currently recording her debut album and tells Newsbeat it's important fans support country artists "at a grassroots level" to ensure it can continue to grow in the UK.
"Everyone's been sleeping on it and now it's become this big thing.
"There's a lot of support for the big US artists and it can be hard to compete with that budget, the press.
"There's a big gap between people like me and these massive artists."
In as far as a trend can ever be attributed to one person, this resurgence in the mainstream is "100%" down to Beyoncé, according to country music podcaster Matt Clewes.
Her 2024 album Cowboy Carter "very much splits opinions with country fans", Matt tells Newsbeat, but "it has introduced new country artists to a country audience and gives a different perspective".
Artists and critics predicted last year Cowboy Carter could "open the floodgates" for country music fans and Spotify credits "viral tracks" from 2024 with the sudden uptick in streams.
But there's actually been a gradual increase in listenership going back much further it says, with streams of the genre in the UK growing by 154% since 2019, the year Lil Nas X released Old Town Road with country singer-songwriter Billy Ray Cyrus.
Apple Music says it's noticed similar trends and both streamers report its rising popularity is particularly striking in the UK, where according to Apple it's growing five times as quickly as in the US.
'It's about telling our own story'
That's reflected in some of the biggest songs of the past year.
Sabrina Carpenter's country-pop hit Please, Please, Please, which she re-released with Dolly Parton, spent five weeks at number one in the UK and Shaboozey's A Bar Song was a fixture of the top 10 for months.
British country music is even set to be represented on one of the world's biggest stages next month thanks to the UK's Eurovision entry, Remember Monday.
"Storytelling is so important to us and that is really rooted in country music," singer Lauren Byrne tells Newsbeat about why the trio felt drawn to the genre.
"We never wanted to feel like we were trying to replicate or copy, we wanted to always make it feel our own.
"It doesn't all have to be 'yeehaw'."
Matt says the next step will be to see British country artists headlining bigger festivals as the fan base continues to grow.
And as it does, he says it'll have to embrace the different points of view feeding into it.
Country is often associated with being dominated by male artists, but the musicians driving it into the mainstream are mainly women.
Last week Lana Del Rey joined Beyoncé, Chappell and Sabrina with her country song Henry, come on, but before them it was Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Shania Twain making country more popular.
"We're in the year of women in general for music," says Neeve. "I think now it's time for the country women."
As British country music grows, there are a few differences too with the traditional US scene that will also need embracing.
"We're often seen as, 'Why are they making country music? They don't live the country lifestyle'," Matt says. "We don't all live on farms, we don't all drive tractors.
"But country is all about storytelling and everyone wants to write their own story.
"It's evolving all the time so we have to be open to different styles and different perspectives."
Neeve agrees that authenticity is the key to British country.
"It's about telling our own story," she says.
"I can dream about Nashville and maybe write some songs about it but I'm not gonna say I'm gonna pick you up in my truck because I don't have a truck.
"You've got to stay real to yourself. We try to keep it country but in our own way."
Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.
A hypnotist born with the most severe form of albinism has gone from the depths of despair at his disability to headlining his own show.
Fraser Penman, 30, was born with oculocutaneous albinism.
The congenital disorder affects just one in 20,000 people and means he lacks pigment in his skin, hair and eyes as well as having a visual impairment.
Growing up in East Kilbride, Fraser was bullied at school "because he was different", culminating in a violent gang attack when he was a teenager.
He said: "The hate texts started when I was only eight years old. As I got older, it got much worse with rocks thrown at me before I was attacked by a gang of 15.
His difficult school days led to him trying to cover up his condition.
"I was so tired of fitting out of society, I wanted to cover up and change my appearance," he said.
"From the age of 14, I wore make-up, fake tan and dyed my hair.
"In my early 20s, I felt like I was living a double life and it gave me depression and anxiety. And it made me question if I wanted to be here at all."
Fraser's turning point came after a heart-to-heart with his older brother Ross. He encouraged Fraser to be anything in the world he wanted to be.
Fraser - who had become a fan of well-known hypnotist and illusionist Derren Brown - said his only wish was to be a hypnotist.
"I was inspired by Derren Brown's storytelling and showmanship," said Fraser. "I must have watched a DVD about hypnosis a thousand times. I remember being in a barber shop and we were talking about hypnosis, and I said to the barber I had done this before.
"So, after my haircut, I hypnotised someone in the shop using the same language and pattens used in the DVD and the person just dropped unconscious and in a trance. I then started hypnotising my friends in the pub for fun.
"I had never done a live stage performance before and for the first time I was not worried about how I looked. It was total freedom, the feeling was incredible," he said.
Fraser wanted nothing else but to perform on stage, but knew he had to sort his own mind out first, so he tried the hypnosis techniques on himself.
"I used self-hypnosis to give myself one suggestion. The simple suggestion I gave myself was 'You Are Enough'," he said.
"When I woke up the next morning, I hated the fake tan and hair dye. I shaved off all my hair and it was the first time I had seen my hair so short and white since I was 14.
"I felt liberated and I walked through the supermarket in shorts and T-shirt, I was not worried at people seeing me."
Fraser completed a diploma in clinical hypnotherapy and during Covid worked with clients online in the US, UK and Germany. After the pandemic, he embarked on a tour of pubs and halls around the country to hone his craft.
And he has just been announced as a headline act at the world's largest arts festival in Edinburgh.
He has been tipped as one of the Fringe's rising stars after securing a 25-day slot at the Gilded Balloon in July and August.
Fraser's show is a mix of hypnosis, mind reading and comedy which gives an insight into how the coping mechanism he initially used to deal with his limited sight has heightened his other senses, allowing him to perform stunts.
He is determined to change the perception of those with albinism and hopes his stage show will act as an inspiration for people with the condition.
" If I hadn't gone through these struggles, I wouldn't have been inspired to make a difference now.
" Many people with albinism are confined to the house wearing dark glasses but I'm determined to change that perception, I'm going against the grain."
It may be set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but Tony Gilroy's Star Wars series takes a key plot from a real robbery masterminded by Stalin in an Imperial Russian city. And Andor has as much to do with our world as it has with Stalin's.
It has all the makings of the perfect heist.
The scheme takes place far from the imperial seat of power, on the wild fringes of an empire almost too vast to comprehend. Fuelled with revolutionary zeal, the plotters are a rag-tag outfit of men and women that includes thieves, murderers and turncoats. Their prize? A treasure chest of cash that can fund ever-more-ambitious missions against the hated ruling elite.
If you watched the first season of the Star Wars spin-off TV series Andor, you'll recognise this plot as one of the high points. Over three episodes, anti-hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his band of accomplices hide out in mountain passes on the planet Aldhani, fine-tuning an audacious smash-and-grab from an Imperial garrison which is storing the wages of an entire sector.
The real-life theft that inspired it was also a long, long time ago, just not quite so far away.
It took place in Yerevan Square in what was then the imperial Russian city of Tiflis, now the Georgian capital Tblisi, on 26 June 1907. A shipment of cash for the city's Russian state bank branch, amounting to some 300,000 roubles ($1m at the time), was stolen by a gang of robbers linked to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement. Using bombs and guns, the gang left a scene of utter devastation in their wake; some 40 people were killed and dozens more injured. The news of the brazen daylight attack made headlines across the world.
The heist was the brainchild of a charismatic cobbler's son-turned-revolutionary called Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. He was a gifted public speaker, an ex-seminary student, a romantic poet rumoured to have left a string of broken hearts in his rakish wake. He often went by the name "Soso" (which he had used when writing poems for local publications), though in years to come he would become far better-known – and feared – as Joseph Stalin.
Yes, the troubled outlaw beloved by Star Wars fans everywhere is based in part on one of history’s most notorious mass murderers, as the series' creator, Tony Gilroy, has acknowledged. "If you look at a picture of young Stalin, isn’t he glamorous," Gilroy said in an interview in Rolling Stone in 2022. "He looks like Diego!"
Stalin took Russia from its war-ravaged imperial decline to a nuclear-armed superpower in just three decades, but also presided over a reign of authoritarian terror that starved, executed or imprisoned millions of its own citizens. Countless books had been written on his cruel years in power, but very little on his early years. Writer Simon Sebag Montefiore saw a gap, and began rifling through archives in post-Soviet countries to try and separate the truth from myth, and tell the little-known story of Stalin's early life.
A gangster and a killer
In 2007 – a century after the infamous heist in Tiflis – Young Stalin was published. It delved into the early life of the Soviet Union's dictatorial leader. "Should the life of a black-hearted ogre, a mass murderer who was the wickedest of the 20th-Century's monsters, be quite so entertaining," asked a review in The Observer at the time.
One person who read Young Stalin was Gilroy. The writer and producer, who had scripted the first four Bourne films and the Andor-precursor film, Rogue One, was planning a TV series that would explore Cassian Andor's journey from casual thief to rebellious figurehead. The true story of a revolutionary movement on the far fringes of a real empire gave Gilroy his source material. "Literally, I’m the classic old white guy who just can’t get enough history," Gilroy said in Rolling Stone. "The last 15 years, I’ve been reading all non-fiction." He added that Young Stalin was "an amazing book" and that its account of the Tiflis bank robbery was an "incredible movie sequence".
Did Sebag Montefiore ever think to himself, 'Here's the perfect setting for a Star Wars spin-off,' when he was researching his book? "No, I didn't ever think that when I was toiling in the archives in Moscow and Tbilisi," he tells the BBC. "But I did think that there was something pretty elemental about the life of Stalin, especially before 1917. It was a fascinating story, partly because no one knew about it."
The Tiflis heist was reported around the world and funded the revolutionaries' movement for years, says Sebag Montefiore. "Lenin and the whole Bolshevik Party lived off that money until the [1917] revolution."
Sebag Montefiore says that the young Stalin and the troubled Andor bear striking similarities: "A young man from nowhere with a revolutionary ideology, and a fight against a huge empire," the writer says. "I did think there was something interesting about the secret life of someone in that situation. That's basically what Tony Gilroy has focused on in Andor."
Stalin was, of course, not the only figure fomenting turmoil in Tsarist Russia, and Andor fleshes out other characters with attributes from the young Georgian's contemporaries. Among Andor's co-conspirators in the Aldanhi heist is Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther), an idealist writing a high-minded manifesto for the emerging resistance, similar to Bolshevik Leon Trotsky's polemics amid the opulent decline of Romanov rule.
Stellan Skarsgård's character, Luthen Rael, is an analogue for Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who was able to form a powerful movement from unlikely bedfellows. A wealthy art collector, Luthen's precise manners in front of his gilded customers hide an uncompromising hatred of the empire and a restless desire to fund a growing resistance. In Cassian's talented, taciturn thief he sees a useful tool; Lenin saw the same in Stalin. "In 1911, people said to Lenin, 'Why are you using this guy? He's a gangster. He's had people killed. He was involved in all these bank robberies,'" says Sebag Montefiore. "And Lenin replies, 'He's exactly the type we need.' Stalin could edit a paper. He could write and could read. And he was also someone who could arrange a hit on somebody and arrange a bank robbery. That was what Lenin talked about: some people were tea drinkers, and other people were thugs, Stalin could do both, and that's why Stalin won in the end."
The birth of an empire
The research into historical rebellions – Gilroy has said he studied other revolutions while writing Andor, as well – has no doubt helped create the show's oddly realistic feel. Andor feels more down to earth than anything the Star Wars universe has shown us before, if you'll excuse the occasional spaceship roaring overhead, or an alien or two sitting in the local bar. There are flashes of mundane detail rarely scene in big-budget sci-fi. People complain that Andor's mother Maarva's (Fiona Shaw) house is always too cold. Security officer Syril Karn's (Kyle Soller) petulant intensity even extends to tailoring his uniform to make him look smarter than his contemporaries. The Imperial Security Bureau hoping to root out the emerging rebellion is a nest of competing ambitions that feels as real as anything in a historical drama – or in everyday office politik. There are fewer blaster-toting Stormtroopers than there are in the Star Wars films, and more sadistic, trenchcoated officers who would have been right at home in the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, or its Soviet replacement, the Cheka.
"In the past, Star Wars movies drop us in at a very big moment," says Walter Marsh, an Australian writer who praised Andor's grown-up worldview in The Guardian in 2022. "There's the big climactic battle, or Luke Skywalker's heroic journey, and they're these big themes of good versus evil. But as any historian will tell you, wars and empires and revolutions don't start and end overnight, and there's always this bigger backstory. There's this sort of long tail. It takes years for that kind of colonial rot, those systems of control, to set in."
More like this:
• The Japanese film that Star Wars stole from
• The truth about Henry VIII's right-hand man
• Black Mirror's most 'devastating' episode ever
Andor shows the corruption and brutal entitlement found at every layer of autocratic regimes: the guards drinking in a brothel while they're supposed to be on duty (and prepared to shake down anyone they don't like the look of); the prison industrial system that requires constant additions even if the new prisoners have done nothing wrong; the subtle sabotage of ethnic pilgrimages to sacred land that is earmarked for imperial development. And with authoritarianism on the rise around the globe, Andor has as much to say about today's world as it does about Stalin's.
"When the show came out I think I was pleasantly surprised to see a story in that universe that was familiar, but which also approached this question of empire that's been so central to the whole franchise, but was never actually tackled in a really nuanced and human character-driven way," Marsh tells the BBC. "It's all well and good to have a big, evil Sith Lord achieve global, universal domination. But how does power assert itself on the street level, from one human to another?
"The Empire is this huge grinding, unthinking machine, but it's also a very human thing," Marsh continues. "Who are the people that find a place and thrive in those systems?" He remarks that in the original films the Imperials were little more than blank-and-you-miss-them pantomime villains: "British guys in suits getting choked by Darth Vader at some point, who are just fiddling with buttons in the background."
Andor's strength is its "three-episode arcs that showed us the kind of death by a thousand cuts that it takes to achieve this sort of social, political and economic dominance", says Marsh. "The converse of that is it shows all the ways in which that kind of oppression inspires pushback and resistance in all kinds of different ways."
From hero to villain?
The new season, which begins on Tuesday 22 April, will develop the rebellion's story as it rushes towards the events seen in Rogue One: the scenes of brutal Imperial reactions to a demonstration shown in the trailer evoke the Tsarist crackdown on a St Petersburg march in 1905, which was a slow-burning contributor to the Bolshevik revolution.
"The scavenger who becomes a passionate revolutionary leader is kind of fascinating," says Sebag Montefiore of the troubled Cassian Andor. "That's a great trajectory, because that's exactly what Stalin did. And it'll be interesting to see how deep Gilroy uses that – how far he goes to create a character with both heroic and villainous features."
George Lucas's original film trilogy rooted the rebellion in the classic good-guys-versus-bad-guys dynamic of countless Saturday matinee cliffhangers, the resistance modelled after anti-Nazi opposition in occupied Europe. The rebels of Andor inhabit a much more compromised reality; like real-life revolutionary movements, they are much more complicated than the ones we usually see on screen. Luthen, Andor's Lenin proxy, considers it with chilling deliberation in one of the first season's standout scenes: "I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see."
As Sebag Montefiore notes, the revolutionaries themselves knew deep down that if they took power, they themselves would have to use repression as a tool; they would become what they once despised. "Lenin himself said: 'A revolution without firing squads is meaningless.'"
Andor season two is available on Disney+ from 22 April.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
This week, Race Across the World returns to our screens, with five teams setting off from the Great Wall of China.
But that's not all the week has in store.
Self Esteem's new album is out, the next series of The Mangione Trial drops on BBC Sounds, and gaming fans have Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to look forward to.
Read on for what's coming up this week...
Race Across the World is back
Self Esteem is A Complicated Woman
By Mark Savage, music correspondent
"This album is going to get terrible reviews," Self Esteem predicted when I caught up with her last Christmas.
Why? "Because people hate women doing well," she laughed. "I'm very ready for a male journalist to say it doesn't make sense, because it's a lot."
That's kind of the point, though. Out on Friday, A Complicated Woman is an attempt to capture womanhood in all its complexities and contradictions – and that means moving through musical genres, modes and attitudes with almost whiplash-inducing speed.
But Self Esteem, aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor, is too clever to mess it up. Her trademark wit and sincerity are firmly in place, as she talks candidly about social anxiety, crises of confidence, infantilised men, her least favourite sexual positions and being beaten down for speaking up.
Highlights include The Curse, a stadium-sized ballad about using alcohol as an emotional crutch; and closing track The Deep Blue Okay, where she eventually finds a modicum of inner peace. Along the way, there are guest appearances from Nadine Shah, Moonchild Sanelly and even Coronation Street's Julie Hesmondhalgh.
She launched the album with a flashy West End residency last week – where fans were delighted to discover that A Complicated Woman was an uncomplicated delight.
More on the Mangione trial
Luigi Mangione's case went viral after he was charged with killing healthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in New York City in December.
He has pleaded not guilty to state charges, and has yet to enter a plea for separate federal charges.
Some on social media have celebrated the 26-year-old, and shared anger at America's private health insurers.
So what are the facts, and what are the conspiracies?
The Mangione Trial, on BBC Sounds, aims to unpick this. The latest episode drops on Wednesday, and looks at how the US healthcare system works.
It hears from a mother who says she spent $40,000 (£30,000) on her daughter's treatment while also battling for her insurance to cover it.
Future episodes will dive into what conspiracy theories are, and why people become so obsessed with them.
Defying destiny in Clair Obscur and Until Dawn
By Tom Richardson, Newsbeat reporter
Dark fantasy Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, out Thursday for PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Game Pass, quite literally caught people's eyes when it was first revealed at last year's Summer Game Fest.
As video games go, it's a stunner, with gorgeous art direction heavily inspired by France's 19th century Belle Époque era.
Players control a crew of characters on a quest to destroy the Paintress – a being who emerges once a year and scrawls a number onto a monolith. If someone's age matches the digits, they die (hence the 33 in the title).
Somehow, the 30-person team at French developer Sandfall Interactive has also managed to attract some top-tier acting talent to the role-playing game (RPG) project, including Daredevil's Charlie Cox, Gollum actor Andy Serkis, Final Fantasy XVI's Ben Starr and Baldur's Gate 3's Jennifer English.
But the thing that's arguably generated most excitement is the game's focus on old-school turn-based combat. It was a staple of classic 1990s and early 2000s RPG series such as Final Fantasy that's fallen out of fashion in the blockbuster space of late. If the studio sticks the landing with their debut title, expect to hear about Expedition 33 when Game of the Year season rolls around.
If that doesn't take your fancy, video game adaptation Until Dawn is out in cinemas on Friday. Passionate fans of the 2015 "interactive horror movie" were concerned when the first trailer revealed the film's makers had swapped the game's trademark choose-your-own-adventure device for a Happy Death Day-style time loop.
But with Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation director David F Sandberg and prolific horror writer Gary Dauberman on board, and a buzzy cast including Love, Victor star Michael Cimino and up-and-comer Ella Rubin, Until Dawn's fate isn't necessarily sealed yet.
Other highlights this week
* Good Bad Billionaire is out on BBC Sounds on Monday, telling the story of Selena Gomez
* Matriarch, a memoir by Tina Knowles, is out on Tuesday - I'll have an interview with her out that day too
* Andor, season 2, drops on Disney+ on Tuesday (Wednesday in the UK)
* You, the fifth season of Netflix's thriller series, is out on Thursday
* Murder on Line One, by Jeremy Vine, is published on Thursday
* Flintoff, a documentary about Freddie Flintoff, is out on Disney+ on Friday
* The Accountant 2 is released in cinemas on Friday
* Jeff Goldblum's new album Still Blooming is out on Friday
An exhibition inspired by objects taken from Lincoln Cathedral during the English Reformation is to open next month.
A Right Royal Heist will open at the cathedral on 3 May as part of Lincoln's Festival of History.
In 1536, items including jewels and vestments were removed from Lincoln Cathedral as part of the destruction of the monasteries after Henry VIII declared that he, not the Pope, was head of the Church of England.
Local artists are bringing the items back to life at the exhibition through digital illustration, ceramics, painting and textiles.
The register and inventory of all jewels, vestments and other ornaments was written by cathedral treasurer Henry Lytherland and has survived for more than 400 years, Lincoln Cathedral said.
Work from artists Mel Langton, Fiona Hodges, Lisa Tank and Hannah Cawthorne from Indigo Crow Gallery will be on display in the Exhibition Gallery until the end of July.
Ms Langton and Ms Hodges said they had been inspired by Henry VIII and their pieces focus on him, depicting a monstrous giant removing the objects and a ceramic sculpture showing him enthroned as the ultimate magpie, surrounded by artefacts.
Other works depict the cathedral's vestments and the inventory document itself.
'Really exciting'
Fern Dawson, curator at Lincoln Cathedral, said: "When the project was first developed, I really wanted to leave the options open for the artists involved to bring their own personality and material skills to express how the document inspired them.
"Bringing an historic document to life in this way has been really exciting and the ideas it has inspired are fantastic – we can wait for the exhibition to open and for everyone to see these new works."
Admission to the exhibition is included in the cathedral entrance fee.
Listen to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
Last year, Alfie Watts went global, becoming the youngest ever winner of Race Across the World - the BBC show that does exactly what it says on the tin.
Teams of two race to get from one part of the world to another with no air travel, no smartphones, no bank cards and a limited cash budget.
After 50 days spent travelling by land and sea from Japan to Indonesia alongside his St Albans schoolfriend Owen Wood, it all came down to a foot race by a beach off the island of Lombok.
The series four finale saw the pair pip mother and daughter duo Eugenie and Isabel by a mere eight minutes to take the title and £20,000 prize pot.
It also saw Alfie catch the travel bug, sending him on his way to a new career as a travel guru and online content creator.
As series five of the show gets underway on Wednesday, BBC News speaks to the 21-year-old about his new life on the road, advice for fellow travellers and tips for this year's contestants on how to win the show.
"The whole experience [on the show] kind of opened my eyes to real travel," Watts tells us over a video call from Portugal, while taking a break from refereeing a football match.
"I think there are definitely two different types of travel that we're used to in the UK; shallow travel, as I'd call it, where you go on holiday and you see what you want to see and you stay within your comfort zone or hotel.
"And then I'd say there's real authentic travel whereby you see the world as it actually is.
"And I've just learned that I actually much prefer the authenticity of places... rather than the weather."
Watts's main advice for readers with a similar wanderlust is to consider travelling further afield.
"Flights to Spain in the summer might be £300 return, but you are going to be paying extremely high prices for food, accommodation and things like that," he notes.
"Whereas, actually, if you go a little bit further afield, if you try Malaysia, Thailand, even Brazil, for sure the flights might be £600-700 but when you're actually there, you're spending £20-25 a day maximum."
He adds: "You're helping local people and you're trying something new."
Since his big TV win, he's been to around 30 countries, including five in one day for a Europe-based online challenge.
Another time he found and boarded the cheapest possible flights he could find online for seven days straight.
And he also returned to Japan to pay a bill he felt he owed for some Kobe beef steaks that were kindly donated to him and Owen for free when they were worried about their budget, as fans of the show will remember. "That was a really nice moment," he says.
Watts likes to travel solo as he enjoys his "own company" and doing things on his "own terms", while also meeting new people.
He acknowledges that it's not for everyone, and that some people prefer to be away with friends and family, but he wants to encourage would-be travellers to "throw yourself in".
"I don't do things that would put me in danger because I think I have a responsibility to the people that follow me," he says.
He does admit though that he once ended up in a taxi with an armed government official in Venezuela - a country he travelled to against UK goverment guidance.
"That was about as wacky as it got."
Bucket list
His favourite place he has been on his travels so far is "without doubt" Angel Falls in Venezuela, while his favourite country would be a coin flip between Jordan and Malaysia.
One thing he'd still like to tick off his bucket list is visiting the remote island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific Ocean, which sounds like a pitch for a new TV show in itself.
"It's the least visited country in the world," he explains.
"Only 1,500 people go there every year. It's very difficult to get to, very expensive to get to."
As well as becoming far better travelled, the past year has also seen him expand his horizons in other ways, acting as an ambassador for Young Minds UK, a mental health charity for young people, and Winston's Wish, a children and young people's grief charity.
One of the most heart-rending moments of series four was when it was revealed that Watts's mum had died of cancer when he was just a child.
Speaking of his ambassadorial work, he says: "I love it and I'm so glad that I get to have the opportunity [to help].
"But internalising it, it can be quite challenging, listening to people's stories."
Race Across the World resumes on Wednesday, with a new raft of contestants heading this time from north eastern China to the southernmost tip of India.
They include ex-spouses Gaz and Yin, and current couple Fin and Sioned, as well as sisters Elizabeth and Letitia, brothers Brian and Melvyn and mother and son duo Caroline and Tom.
The rules, as usual, are no smart phones, no bank cards (just a small cash budget) and no air travel.
Watts thinks it's going to be a "really tough route" and "a topsy turvey" series.
"China is very easy to get around but very hard to communicate," he stresses from personal experience. "And a lot of China doesn't accept cash anymore."
His "number one piece of advice" for anyone taking part is to learn from his mistakes and take a calculator and a whiteboard. "We had to borrow notebooks and God knows what else".
He'd also suggest taking "little travel placards" with pictures of buses, trains and people on, for ease of communication.
"I think now there's more and more series, people are watching it and starting to think, 'actually, this is where they're going wrong. This is how we can be creative around it'.
"And I think we're probably going to see that this series, that people have been a lot more streetwise with how they've prepared."
Is he worried about losing his title as the show's youngest winner?
He replies, like a true international diplomat, that he just wants the pair who "nicely interact" with the others and "who genuinely appreciate the opportunity to travel" to win.
"I think those are always the people that you want to do best, and if that happens to be the two 18-year-olds this time, then I'll be happy to hand my crown over."
Series five of Race Across the World begins on BBC One at 21:00 BST on Wednesday 23 April.
"Please be upstanding for the world's most confusing House of Games contestant and Bake Off failure, Self Esteem!"
This is how Rebecca Lucy Taylor – aka celebrated pop singer Self Esteem – is introduced to the stage at London's Duke of York's Theatre.
It's a typically irreverent comment, an example of the dry wit she uses to sweeten the sincerity and anger of her music.
"You can take piccies and videos," the off-stage voice continues, "because she needs all the help she can get."
That, too, is strictly tongue-in-cheek.
Three years ago, Taylor released her second album, Prioritise Pleasure, a body-shaking manifesto for female self-worth that bristled at society's expectations while acknowledging her own shortcomings ("Sexting you at the mental health talk seems counterproductive," she observed on Moody).
After 10 years in mid-ranking indie band Slow Club, the album propelled her into uncharted realms.
There were magazine covers, nominations for the Mercury Prize and Brit Awards, a starring role on stage in Cabaret, a support slot with Adele and, yes, an appearance on Celebrity Bake Off – where, unfortunately, she burned her crumpets.
"The week that Prioritise Pleasure came out, my whole life changed," she reflects.
"Not financially or in terms of fame, but it's like there was a knot in my stomach that untied.
"Then everyone was like, 'Right, can you do that again, please?'"
Taylor tore herself in two to make the follow-up, A Complicated Woman, which comes out on Friday.
After playing it live for the first time in the West End on Wednesday, she describes the album's gestation process as "horrible", "lonely", and "painful".
"It just felt really stressful to execute what was in my head," she explains in a phone interview the next morning.
"I was thinking so big, but I still don't have access to the resources I need to make it as big as I wanted."
Part of the problem was a punishing, but self-imposed, time limit.
"The music industry is like, 'You've got 10 minutes, then you're over and someone else is going to take your place'," she explains.
"So I felt like I had no choice [but to commit to another record] if I wanted to build on what I'd done.
"But as painful as it was and as dark as it got, the second I'm back on stage performing it, I'm like, 'Oh, this is why I love it'."
It all unravels
She hasn't just made a new album - she has also created a daring, jaw-dropping theatrical experience to go with it.
It's set in a sparse recreation of the community centre where eight-year-old Becky from Rotherham learned to tap dance.
"You just wanted to sing / You didn't know what that would bring," recalls an older, more cynical version of that child – as she assesses her life at the age of 38.
"This really is all there is, and that's what you've got to get comfortable with."
As the show opens, 10 dancers line up on either side of her, dressed in austere outfits that recall The Handmaid's Tale.
Initially, their movements are stiff and restricted but, as Taylor describes suffocating relationships with emotionally-stunted men, they start to thrash and jerk their bodies.
"We start in that world where we're shackled, and then we exorcise it," Taylor explains.
"Over the course of the show, it all unravels and everyone ends up being themselves instead of conforming to these societal norms."
A four-night theatre residency is an unusual way to launch an album. The audience is unfamiliar with most of the songs, and no-one's sure whether to absorb the performance attentively, or sing along and dance.
Several times, laughter ripples through the theatre as the singer's more acerbic observations hit home. The following morning, she's not quite sure what to make of the reaction.
"Every time people laugh, my heart sinks," she says. "But then I'm like, the lyrics are funny, aren't they?
"And I love changing the laughter into emotion. It feels like people are laughing because it's uncomfortable."
In the end, the audience members mirror the on-stage narrative. Shaking off their discomfort, they rise out of their seats and start making an almighty racket.
The music becomes a soundtrack to solidarity - which, it transpires, was Taylor's intention.
A Complicated Woman might be as cutting and powerful as its predecessor, but the melodies were designed for stadiums.
"Do you remember the Elbow song One Day Like This?" she asks. "The one that goes, 'Throw those curtains wii-iide'?
"I went mad for that song when it came out and, honestly, I played it over and over in the studio and said, 'I want to do this'."
"I was very inspired by trying to make it onto World Cup montages. That's a genre of music that I really, really enjoy."
That's only half the story, though. The album is all about capturing the complex and contradictory impulses of a woman in her mid-30s.
Recent single 69, for example, is a thumping house track on which Taylor talks with withering candour about her sex life. Imagine Madonna's Justify My Love, if she was really being honest.
"It's an idea I had for ages, of listing sex positions and scoring them so that there's no grey area [for prospective partners]," the singer laughs.
"But there's a more political element, which is that women still aren't saying what they want in the bedroom. And I'm like, I can't bear this any more. Please let us just enjoy having sex.
"It's not exactly going to win an Ivor Novello Award for lyrics, but I think it stands on the album with moments that are more emotional and deep."
Those moments include The Curse, a rousing ballad about using alcohol to dull her anxiety, which is possibly the best song Self Esteem's ever written.
Her personal favourite, however, is called In Plain Sight. A collaboration with South African musician Moonchild Sanelly, it's a response to the criticism they've both received for speaking their minds.
"The world is saying who I am, but I thought I knew myself all these years," says Sanelly in a semi-improvised rap.
"I shrink to keep the peace, hoping I don't shake my purpose."
It's a feeling Taylor immediately recognised.
As excitement built around Prioritise Pleasure in 2021, she started getting "nasty messages" on social media, which shook her up.
"I was really shocked the first time I got grief, because no-one's ever been that bothered about what I'm doing," she says.
"People say you should ignore it, but if you went to a wedding and had a nice day and one person called you an [expletive], who would you go home thinking about? It's just human nature."
Eventually, the criticism took its toll.
"There were moments where I considered giving up, which shocked me because I've been this defiant, angry thing for so long," she says.
"But over the last few years, especially with the world being like it is, I've definitely had feelings of protecting myself and shutting up.
"That's the saddest part of the album, really. But I found a way through.
"And if I can, then I hope the rest of the world can too, you know?"
That realisation is the connecting tissue of A Complicated Woman.
Life is never easy, she says. No-one is ever truly satisfied. Relationships are hard work. You can't please everyone. But that's OK. You're OK. Trust your gut.
She sums it up on Focus Is Power, held aloft by the sound of a gospel choir: "And now I see it clear with every passing of each year / I deserve to be here."
On stage in London, she sings those final lines a capella with her dancers and backing singers, arms wrapped around each other in a display of female solidarity.
It's a cathartic moment after the bruising process of putting the album together.
"There's so much joy in being a woman and just being yourself can be beautiful," she says. "You've just got to find a way to do it."
With that, she's off to make tweaks for the show's second night. After that, she has to find a way to scale down the West End production for a UK tour.
"I'll do what I can to make it continue, but it's a huge risk because there's so little revenue from anything else," she says.
Ultimately, though, her ambition is undimmed.
"I want to make 20 albums, I want to do bigger theatre shows," she says.
"Of course it'd be useful if I could 'cross over' because everything gets easier when you've got more resources.
"But last night I was like, 'Bloody hell, you did what you set out to do'. So I'm good."
From the latest season of the dystopian workplace drama to the UK miniseries that got the world talking and a new hit medical show, we pick the year's greatest programmes to stream right now.
The Studio
Hollywood is an easy target, but this satire is so sharp, astute and sometimes absurd that it may be the funniest show of the year. Seth Rogen, who co-created the show, plays Matt Remick, the newly appointed head of Continental Studios, a lover of high-art films with a mandate to make commercial hits based on IP including Kool-Aid. A flood of actors and directors – including Ron Howard, Olivia Wilde and Zoe Kravitz – make cameo appearances, gleefully spoofing their own images, none funnier than Martin Scorsese in the hilarious opening episode. The series regulars are ideally cast, with Ike Barniholtz as Sal Saperstein, Matt's second-in-command, Catherine O'Hara as the previous studio head and Kathryn Hahn as the loud, wackily-dressed head of publicity. Taking us into the Golden Globes and marketing meetings, The Studio suggests that everyone is just bumbling along at a moment when the entire movie industry is in crisis. The industry might not know where it's going, but this behind-the-scenes comedy is a pure delight. (CJ)
Available on Apple TV+ internationally
The White Lotus
One thing's for sure: if Mike White's first-world-problems satire about rich holidaymakers was admired by many for its first two seasons, it broke out to become a true cultural phenomenon in its third, with a huge ratings boost. This time round, it sent its dysfunctional groupings – a corrupt financier and his family, three clashing female friends, a vengeful man and his younger girlfriend – to a Thai wellness retreat, and every week, you could not move online (metaphorically) for the discourse it generated and debate it stirred. Some complained that this season was too slow and lacked suitable plot momentum, while others pointed out, sagely, that the problem was that it was a character-led drama that was never meant to be dissected like Game of Thrones, but for its unexpected blockbuster popularity. Personally? I enjoyed it as both the darkest and most reflective series so far, but one which again thrived off a magisterially cast ensemble, in which Parker Posey, Carrie Coon, Aimee Lou Wood and Patrick Schwarzenegger were standouts, but no one was a weak link. (HM)
Available on Max in the US and Now in the UK
Adolescence
It's no wonder that this uncompromising British series about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a girl in his school has become a cultural flashpoint, praised by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, made available to be shown in schools and sparking conversations about young men and the toxic influence of social media. The social issue is wrapped in a drama brilliantly personalized and brought to life by the actors. Stephen Graham, who created the show with Jack Thorne, plays the boy's father and conveys the shock and grief of a parent forced to consider the unthinkable possibility that his son might be a killer. Owen Cooper gives a remarkably sophisticated performance as the accused boy, who seems guileless until he explodes in anger. And Ashley Waters plays a detective who struggles to understand his own teenage son, expanding the theme beyond one family. Each episode was shot in a single, real-time take, which sounds like a gimmick, but director Philip Barantini handles that approach so smoothly that it fades into the background, even while adding intensity to a piercing drama that offers no comfortable resolution. (CJ)
Available on Netflix internationally
Severance
Fairly or not, Apple TV+ has become a streamer known for ploughing huge resources (
over $20bn, reportedly) into a range of starry shows that not very many people watch – but with the second series of this dystopian workplace drama, it became clear it had a genuine watercooler hit on its hands. Which is even more surprising, when you consider just how strange Severance is. Its compelling high-concept premise – in which employees of the sinister Lumon corporation have their consciousness separated into office selves, or "innies", and home selves, or "outies" – is one thing, but beyond that, it is constantly taking the story down surreal rabbit holes, involving for example, mysterious "macrodata refinement" work or a herd of goats. In truth, as this series progressed through its second half, it felt a little too meandering for its own good, and its climactic payoff couldn't match that from the first season. But it's still an exquisite work in all areas, from the clever dual-identity acting (especially from shining star Britt Lower) to the stark visuals. Bring on season three, and perhaps a few more solid answers as to what's
really
going on at Lumon. (HM)
Available on Apple TV+ internationally
The Pitt
It might sound like just another medical drama, but this show about a trauma centre in Pittsburgh revitalises the genre with its attention to the psychological stress on caregivers. Noah Wyle gives a shattering performance as the department head, the dedicated, harried, emotionally wracked Dr Robbie, still traumatised after failing to save his mentor during the Covid-19 pandemic. He is surrounded by other doctors and a group of students and interns, each adding a different dimension, from Supriya Ganesh as a brilliant medical prodigy to Isa Briones as an abrasive intern and Taylor Dearden as the caring Dr Mel, whose neurodivergence makes her especially empathetic with her patients. Unlike most medical shows, The Pitt never lets their personal melodrama overwhelm the focus on their work. Each absorbing, fast-paced episode takes place in real time during one 15-hour-long shift, and each veers between the devastation of losing patients and the relief of saving them. You'd think a series so blunt about death would be depressing, but instead The Pitt is exhilarating in its focus on people for whom life and death are everyday events. (CJ)
Available on Max in the US
Paradise
It's difficult to discuss the power of this show without giving away the key twist that comes at the end of episode one. But safe to say, it turns what starts as a relatively conventional political thriller on its head. Sterling K Brown is the head of the US president's security detail, who finds himself accused of murder of his boss – but above and beyond the killing itself, not everything seems quite right with the world. Created by Dan Fogelman, the man behind the equally rug-pulling TV weepie This is Us, this is solid entertainment in the very best sense, with sharp plotting matched by some strong performances, from Brown’s tortured hero to Julianne Nicholson as a sinister tech billionaire. Plus, later on in the series, one particular episode which deals with truly monumental matters is simply breathtaking – but again, that's all that can be said without spoiling things for those yet to watch. The good news for those that have is that it's already been recommissioned. (HM)
Available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ internationally
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light
The sumptuous conclusion to this adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy blends a beautifully shot escape into the luxurious past of Henry VIII's court with an evergreen depiction of the high personal cost of manoeuvring for power and influence. Mark Rylance is poignant as the king's advisor, Thomas Cromwell, who questions his own decisions, while the mercurial Henry is losing confidence in him. And Damian Lewis's fresh interpretation of Henry is dazzling, his voice and manner chillingly subdued even as he issues the most ruthless commands. Henry's wives come and go, but the unravelling bond between these men, and their opposite trajectories – Cromwell's self-doubts and decline and Henry's iron will that eliminates anyone in his way – shape the story. Written by Peter Straughn, a recent Oscar winner for his screenplay of Conclave, The Mirror and the Light is more resonant today than the original Mantel book was when it was published in 2020. It feels entirely relevant in a world where creeping authoritarianism is a global concern. (CJ)
Available on PBS in the US and BBC iPlayer in the UK
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Since breaking out in HBO teen drama Euphoria, rising star Jacob Elordi has chosen his roles well – but perhaps nothing has served him better so far than returning to his home country of Australia to play the protagonist in this searing war drama. An adaptation of Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel, it explores the life of World War Two army surgeon Dorrigo Evans across three time periods: his stint stationed in Adelaide for military training, his hellish experiences as a prisoner of war in the Thai jungle, and then his existence as a professionally successful but emotionally deeply troubled veteran (now played by Ciarán Hinds), still unable to truly process the events of decades ago. Brought to impactful visual life by Justin Kurzel, known for his visceral studies of male violence on the big screen like Snowtown and The Order, it is simply one of the best evocations of the horrors of conflict that has been committed to screen. But at the same time, it takes as much care in its exploration of passion as violence, with the chemistry between Elordi's young Dorrigo and his uncle's wife Amy (a superb Odessa Young) burning up the screen. Given some of the scenes of sadistic brutality, it is of course a difficult watch, as it should be, but also one whose sheer artistry offers a kind of transcendence. (HM)
Available on Prime Video in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada
Your Friends and Neighbors
Jon Hamm has never been better, expertly mixing comedy and drama in this series about a hedge-fund manager called Coop, who loses his job. He schemes to keep up appearances in his wealthy community, only to discover a new sense of himself. The show has a broad comic element, as Coop turns cat burglar, solving his financial problems by stealing luxury items from his neighbours. But the series is best in its bold take on what he calls in one of his mordant voiceovers, "the quiet desperation of rich middle-aged men", and in its depiction of his complicated relationships. He is still emotionally attached to his ex-wife (Amanda Peet), who left him for one of his friends, and struggles to connect with his two teenage children. He has a tender, supportive bond with his emotionally fragile sister (Lena Hall, a standout in the cast). Hamm hasn't had a role this rich since Don Draper in Mad Men, another flawed but sympathetic charmer who makes some wildly bad decisions, and defines the character so perfectly that it's hard to imagine anyone else at the centre of this sleek but penetrating series. (CJ)
Available on AppleTV+ internationally
Big Boys
It might have created a little less noise than Adolescence, but here is another British show about masculinity that really deserves to be seen. Jack Rooke's semi-autobiographical show about two university students who form an odd-couple friendship – nerdy gay man Jack and straight jack-the-lad Dan – has been an incredibly deft mix of laugh-out-loud humour, complete with delightfully niche pop culture references, and poignant drama – covering sexual awakening, depression, dementia and more besides – since it started in 2022. But this third and final series was undoubtedly its most powerful, kicking off with a hilarious episode on a package holiday in Greece but getting more serious as it continued, and handling Danny's spiralling mental health problems with particular skill. And boy, does Rooke know how to shatter audience hearts – the final episode is an emotional masterclass, including a significant cameo from the man himself. Here's hoping that it launches its extremely talented creator into the big time. (HM)
Available on Hulu in the US and Channel 4 in the UK
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
As museums around the world celebrate the 250th birthday of JMW Turner, it's time to reappraise his beloved and celebrated painting, The Fighting Temeraire.
JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire became a national celebrity when it was first unveiled in 1839, and its fame has endured to the present day. It was once voted Britain's favourite painting and currently features on £20 banknotes. But the widely accepted interpretation of this iconic painting's message might, in fact, contradict Turner's true intentions.
The "Temeraire" of the title refers to a 98-gun warship of the British Navy, which is depicted in the painting's background. It was a hero in Britain's defence against France during the Napoleonic Wars, but it caught the nation's attention in 1838 when it was dismantled and its parts sold off. Turner's painting depicts this once-mighty gladiator of the seas being towed down a burnished River Thames by a much more recently invented steam-powered tugboat.
A brief segment in the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall captures a popular view about the painting. In the scene, Bond (Daniel Craig) meets Q (Ben Whishaw), his new head of research and development, in London's National Gallery, and they sit in front of The Fighting Temeraire. "It always makes me feel a little melancholy", says the young, tech-savvy Q, in a pointed jibe to 007, an old-school field agent. "A grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap."
This echoes the widely held belief that the painting evokes a sense of nostalgia and faded national glory. According to this view, the ghostly Temeraire is the painting's heroine, and the tugboat its villain. In the 19th Century, the English writer William Makepeace Thackeray referred to the smaller vessel as "a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer" and the American novelist Herman Melville called it "a pygmy steam-tug" by comparison to the "Titan Temeraire".
You can see why Turner's original audience may have sympathised with the humbled HMS Temeraire and been saddened by her fate. Back in 1804, she had played a critical role in blockading French ports and defending the British coast. But her finest moment came on the afternoon of 21 October 1805, in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of south-west Spain.
At this pivotal hour, the Battle of Trafalgar, a deadly sea battle between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of Spain and France, was at its climax. Admiral Lord Nelson's flagship HMS Victory had led the attack but was being pummelled by the French vessel Redoubtable. Then, out of the cannon smoke, surged HMS Temeraire, followed by a war-hungry flotilla of British vessels. The Temeraire blasted the Redoubtable with her guns and endured a hailstorm of cannon volleys in return – an onslaught that lacerated the ship and spattered her decks with blood. But like a stalwart prize-fighter, the Temeraire weathered the bout. She valiantly protected her flagship and played a vital part in the British navy's ultimate victory in the Battle of Trafalgar.
Finding beauty in newness
Turner was 64 when he painted The Fighting Temeraire. He was born in 1775 in a down-at-heel area of London near Covent Garden but managed to enrol at the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts aged 14. He became an Academician at the precocious age of 24, and a Professor of Perspective when he was just 32. But although he rubbed shoulders with the great and the good, he refused to soften his Cockney accent or refine his manners. He was also fiercely entrepreneurial – he opened his own private gallery, sought wealthy patrons, and was always on the lookout for captivating and lucrative new artistic projects that might have widespread appeal. On one level, The Fighting Temeraire achieves his desire for broad popularity by harnessing people's sense of national pride.
But there's an even more important message to learn from the painting than its patriotism and sentimentality. It concerns that much maligned tugboat: the true focal point of the painting.
Steam power was the new mechanical wonder of Turner's age, and his attitude to this recent technology was much more complicated than Thackeray, Melville or Q recognised. In other Turner artworks, like Snow Storm – Steam-Boat (1842) and Rain, Steam and Speed (1844), you can see his fascination with modern machinery and its transformative influence on individual experience, the environment, and society as a whole. This is in stark contrast with Turner's great rival John Constable, whose parents were from the elite, and whose paintings tended to overlook some of the most seismic changes that were reshaping the British Isles at the time.
In Constable's iconic 1821 painting The Hay Wain, an archaic cart rolls gently away from the viewer into a bucolic English landscape. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire gives us the exact opposite, putting the spectator on a collision course with the unstoppable force of industry.
This reflected contemporary reality. At the time The Fighting Temeraire was painted, the Royal Navy was increasingly using steamboats for towing bigger vessels. Moves were already afoot to replace its sail-powered fleet with new steam frigates. But the demise of the Temeraire didn't reflect a routine upgrade in armaments. This was a one-of-a-kind revolution in seafaring. Sailors around the world had relied on wind-and-sail or oar-propulsion for thousands of years. Now, steam engines could allow seafarers to overcome the vagaries of gusts, shallows and tidal patterns – to supersede nature itself. The future was steam-powered, but how this was going to affect the future of transport, trade and naval combat was still anybody's guess in the 1830s. What Turner did know was that as far back as Homer's Odyssey, sailing functioned as a profound symbol of the life journey in art and literature. And so, by hitching the old and the new so unforgettably in his painting, he shows us a compelling metamorphosis – the beginning of a new, post-industrial lifecycle in human history.
Turner was awake to the responsibility of artists in times of irreversible historical change. For him, the age-old skill of depicting wooden sailing ships, their rigging, sails and ornately carved figureheads was becoming obsolete. The challenge for every artist (and every member of society) in the modern age, he realised, was to discover beauty and significance in newness, and in artefacts that had not previously been depicted in art, like iron funnels, pistons, valves, and paddle wheels. In The Fighting Temeraire, his rise to this challenge is captured in a very memorable and uncompromising symbol.
More like this:
• The forgotten Monet finally getting her moment
• The schmaltzy paintings that divided the US
• The surprising story of Van Gogh's guardian angel
Turner even adapted his painting technique to express the technological and social transformations in the world around him. He used newly invented paint hues like Lemon Yellow and Scarlet Lake in The Fighting Temeraire. Pigment analysis of the painting also indicates that he raided from his kitchen for substances to add his paint to achieve desired effects, like tallow, cooking fat or even salad oil.
His interest in new technology, and his search for innovative techniques with which to represent them, had a direct impact on the next generation of avant-garde painters. Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro were both wowed by Turner's art. An engraving of Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed (which depicts a train hurtling over Maidenhead bridge) was even displayed at the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874 – a pivotal event in the history of modern art.
In 2025 various exhibitions will celebrate the 250th anniversary of Turner's birth, from Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (Turner: Always Contemporary), to Turner's House in Twickenham (Turner's Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts), and from the Yale Centre for British Art, Connecticut (JMW Turner: Romance and Reality) to Tate Britain (Turner and Constable). But to fully appreciate this extraordinary artist, it's important to grasp the true meaning of his masterpiece, The Fighting Temeraire.
Frequently it's been accepted as a melancholy image, a forlorn lament for past glories and a lost way of life. But this misses its essential point. The Fighting Temeraire is really about transformation and the inevitability of change rather than nostalgia. The most important lessons to learn from The Fighting Temeraire are about Turner's attitude and outlook. It embodies his refusal to be daunted by newness or enslaved by traditional artistic values. His quest to find the beauty and grandeur of modern experience, and leave the past behind, is magnificently on display in The Fighting Temeraire. And these qualities are truly his lasting legacy to modern art.
The 250th anniversary of JMW Turner's birth is on 23 April 2025.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Behind the creation of the festival's most iconic and outrageous costumes – from wardrobe malfunctions to insider tips and viral sensations.
Lisa recently had a broken corset strap. The K-Pop superstar and White Lotus cast member was waiting to greet fans at her Los Angeles hotel, but one wrong step outside her suite, and suddenly it wouldn't have been a photo opportunity – it would have been a serious wardrobe malfunction. "I always put a back-up corset in the Uber with me," Genesis Webb, the fashion director for pop star Chappell Roan and one of Lisa's main style advisors, tells the BBC. "It's the number one rule of styling a music artist: anything can happen."
As artists like Lisa, Lady Gaga and Charli XCX descend on the Palm Springs desert for Coachella's 26th annual Music and Arts Festival, they bring with them an elite team of creative directors and fashion experts whose visual creations can make or break their performances. "How an artist dresses at Coachella can be a monumental tool for establishing their identity, or reinventing themselves," says Tomás Mier, a Rolling Stone music critic and staff writer. "Look at what Sabrina Carpenter was achieving last year onstage. The babydoll dresses, the big blonde hair, the pastels – using that iconography onstage was impactful in creating a global hit, which created her career as a pop star." Meanwhile, says Mier, an unfocused or "chaotic" outfit can lead to online mockery, or worse: "If people don't want to look at you onstage, they'll just stop paying attention. That's the kiss of death for a pop star's career."
For emerging artists aiming for stardom, getting fashion right can have immediate benefits. Witness Chappell Roan, who arrived at last year's Coachella festival as an underground indie singer and left a newly crowned star. "She had a cult following, but she wasn't mainstream by any means," says Webb. "We knew audiences still had to 'meet' her, and we knew that style could help define her to the world." Webb commissioned the California costume shop Jackalope Land to make a giant beaded butterfly suit for the singer, which soon became a viral sensation. "Everybody knew who she was after that. People still wear the butterfly outfit as a Halloween costume. That's how you know you've done your job."
Despite the high stakes of an artist's signature concert look, time to make it is often short. "By the time you get through creative inspirations, logistics and budget, you're looking at three weeks from final idea to performance," longtime creative director for Missy Elliott, June Ambrose, tells the BBC. The costume designer and fashion director is responsible for some of music's most indelible imagery, from Elliott's 1997 inflatable suit for the video of The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) to her couture-tailored tracksuit at the 2003 Grammy Awards.
Elliott's 2024 Out of This World tour featured more than 250 costumes covered in half a million rhinestones, many of which will make an appearance this weekend at Coachella. Ambrose is also creating an extra three looks for the hip-hop star. All of the elaborate looks will be towed into the desert by a tractor-trailer before the show, along with new looks for the dancers and special-effect fabric that makes the entire show cast appear soaking wet, even in the bone-dry Coachella Valley.
More like this:
• The candid street photos showcasing amazing looks
• How Scandinavian dressing can make us happier
• How one surprising Kate Moss image kickstarted the 90s
Why so much investment in the clothes themselves? "From inception, Missy's always been an individual type of artist," says Ambrose. "She's remade hip-hop culture, and been brazen about redefining what women in the space look like." Ambrose says Elliott sees her concerts as "full experiences" that align with Broadway musicals or blockbuster films. "We develop the show with a three-act structure. We have a narrative; we have characters. The costumes translate Missy's songs into visuals. They express the same energy and emotion as the music, and help Missy get into character on-stage." They also serve as memory markers for the audience, giving them simultaneous visual and audio cues that can embed more deeply in the brain, allowing Elliott's musical canon to hang out in their heads rent-free. "We consider it a real challenge because Missy's been an iconic performer for so long," says Ambrose. "Now, we keep asking ourselves, 'How do we raise the game? What else can we try?' The goal is to show them something they've never seen before."
Cultural moments
Like Elliott, Beyoncé used style to help convey a narrative, during her famous Coachella set in 2018. Instead of her usual arsenal of stunning couture gowns and crystal-studded leotards, she teamed with stylist Marni Senofonte to present more unexpected archetypes – the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, historically black collegiate sorority members, and even Tibetan monks.
To create the show-stopping numbers, Senofonte worked with Olivier Rousteing from Balmain, who is currently the only black womenswear designer at a major luxury fashion house. In combining the heavy and elaborate costumes with the masterful, lighter-than-air choreography, Beyoncé admitted in the 2019 Netflix documentary Homecoming, "I definitely pushed myself further than I knew I could."
"She raised the bar in a way no other artist has come close to reaching," says Mier. "And she did it through the visuals. That's the epitome of using Coachella for your artistry through fashion."
Sometimes, an artist uses their concert style to get personal with her audience. Take Megan Thee Stallion, whose 2025 Coachella set traced her trek from aspiring Texas rapper to global superstar, using fashion as signposts along the way. To represent her early years on the Houston rap scene, stylist Eric Archibald found pieces from the artists youth, like "old-school Citizens of Humanity denim" in bright colours that pop on stage. As the show progressed into Megan Thee Stallion's later albums, her outfits changed to reflect her success, with leather, faux fur and custom couture pieces from Paris ateliers like DSquared and Off-White. "It's such a big moment that we have everything custom-made," Archibald tells the BBC. "The clothes really help the audience go on the journey with her during the show. They see where she came from and where she's going. It's truly like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It's gorgeous, and very moving."
Physical movement counts as much as emotional whirlwinds. During a performance, artists are on-stage for up to three hours, often performing full dance routines and powerhouse vocals while navigating moving light rigs, constant set changes, and costume swaps timed to the millisecond. When hair artist Danielle Priano created the beachy waves for Sabrina Carpenter on Saturday Night Live, she brought more than a dozen cans of the right hair product to ensure the pop star's hair had enough movement to look natural, but enough shape that even in high-contrast video Carpenter's signature bombshell style was unmistakable.
"They say TV adds 10lbs (4.5kg), but TV screens and concert jumbotrons [large, hi-res video screens] actually thin out the look of hair. That's why 90% of pop stars use hair extensions," says Priano, who also creates hair looks for Rosé, Mariah Carey and Lisa. Priano says artists like Carpenter request to wear their hair down during concerts because "it becomes part of the act – they toss it around, they use it to accentuate the choreography. It completes their character on-stage". At least a month of prep time is required to order, dye and curl the hair extensions so they're an exact match for the celebrity. Then Priano arrives between three and six hours before showtime to ensure they're perfectly placed. "I had a celebrity call me once, asking if I could work with her. She told me that during her last big tour, her hair extensions began to fall out of her head. She pulled it into a ponytail herself between songs and made it look like a costume change. She needed someone who could handle that type of craziness, because things always go wrong."
"My motto is, 'always have a solution before there's a problem,'" says Ambrose of Missy Elliott's elaborate costumes. "For quick changes, we've done drills, and the wardrobe crew, they're superheroes. They can pull it off in under a minute." To make movement around the stage easier, Ambrose enlisted Timberland designer Tadd Smith to create super-high work boots made with eight layers of stacked soles. "We cored out the interior of the leatherboard and inserted foam to reduce weight," says Smith. To help shield Megan Thee Stallion's face from Coachella's notorious gusts of wind, Archibald commissioned a custom-made cowboy hat from Stetson that recalls her cowgirl roots, along with hand-carved leather boots that allowed the artist to navigate the desert's dust and sand.
But sometimes, says Webb, "the costume is more important than the comfort. They know what they're getting into. They're pop stars. This is what they train for." She cites Lisa and her former bandmates in the K-Pop sensation Blackpink as a prime example. "The discipline and the knowledge needed to work in that world is militant. It's incredible. You ask Lisa how she wants to look, and she can tell you exactly what she wants already. I just bring in my own feelings about the clothes, and that's when we get to have fun."
She also brings in an extra corset – just in case.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Seventy years old this year, Henri-Georges Clouzot's film about two women plotting murder is a masterclass in macabre dread – and inspired Hitchcock's classic among others.
Famous for writing the novel Psycho (1959), the basis for the influential 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, author Robert Bloch understood the horror genre more than most. So when you read that he called a film his "favourite horror of all time", as he did in an interview with French magazine L'Ecran Fantastique, you have to take that appraisal seriously. The film referred to by Bloch wasn't the adaptation of his own story, nor a Hollywood classic, but instead a quietly influential French feature, 70 years old this year, that packs as much of a macabre punch as his own morbid masterpiece: Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955).
Adapted from the novel She Who Was No More (1952) by French crime-writing partnership Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (also known as Boileau-Narcejac), Clouzot's film was a revolution in chilling cinema. It mixed techniques from film noir and horror to great effect, creating a hybrid that was deeply influential with its heart-stopping atmosphere of suspense.
Les Diaboliques concerns the tumultuous relationships of several teachers in a private boarding school situated in outer Paris. The weak heart of Christina – played by Clouzot's own wife Véra – is continually strained by the actions of her abusive husband Michel (Paul Meurisse), the school's headmaster, especially since fellow teacher Nicole (Simone Signoret) became his mistress. However, Michel's volatile behaviour is now hurting both women, so they hatch a plan. Though reluctant, Christina is convinced by Nicole to help murder Michel and make it appear accidental. Luring him to Nicole's out-of-town flat, they drown him in a bath and dump the body in the school's swimming pool, ready to be found as if the result of a drunken accident. However, when the body disappears the following day, the women are terrified as to what has happened. Did Michel survive? Or are his haunted remains wandering the school in search of revenge?
A darker shade of thriller
Clouzot's work was often laced with cynicism and pessimism. As Susan Hayward suggests in her 2005 book exploring the film, "the thriller is the genre we most readily associate with him. But not just any thriller. His take on the genre is dark, relentless, stifling, cruel". Beginning his career as a screenwriter before switching to directing in the 1940s, Clouzot was a divisive figure in France. His work for the Nazi-controlled and funded Continental Films, run by Goebbels-appointed party member Alfred Greven, during the occupation played a role in his being barred from directing for two years following the end of the war. At this time, his drama Le Corbeau (1943), about a small town whose citizens are beset by poison pen letters, was read as anti-French and collaborationist, which was ironic considering that the Vichy Government had previously pulled the film from cinemas because of its own negative reading of it. Clouzot's pessimism made him adept at making enemies.
Surviving this furore, Clouzot went on to make some of France's most celebrated films, often indebted to the work of Hitchcock, but still uniquely Gallic. Unlike Hitchcock, however, the French critics of the period, many of whom would form the Nouvelle Vague – a radical and inventive group of French film-makers, who sought new ways of film-making while exhibiting a deep knowledge of cinema history – had little time for him or his work due to the somewhat traditional nature of his film-making. He seemed to embody what was known as la tradition de qualité, the pre-Nouvelle Vague style of French cinema which prioritised story over formal innovation. As Hayward writes, "the Nouvelle Vague consigned him thus to the purgatorial ranks of the cinema de papa [dad's cinema], and Clouzot was an auteur no more".
In hindsight, though, films such as Quai des Orfèvres (1947), The Wages of Fear (1953), and, of course, Les Diaboliques, were ahead of their time, representing a new pessimistic variety of thriller that became more commonplace from the 1960s onwards, both in France and internationally. Many thrillers up to this point had rigidly defined concepts of good and evil, while certainly never daring to end on an unhappy note. But Clouzot was at the forefront of a breed of thrillers which refused simplistic notions of morality, and resisted the need for happy, comforting endings. They became less about heroes walking off into the sunset and more about who could escape the least scathed from their scenarios.
Robert Bloch didn't limit his praise of Les Diaboliques to mere hyperbole. In L'Ecran Fantastique, he noted the fact "there is very little bloodshed" as a reason for its success. Though possessing a few moments of disturbing violence, Les Diaboliques avoids showing much in the way of blood and guts. What it possesses instead is a grim foreboding that builds to an unforgettable climax.
Professor Claire Gorrara of the University of Cardiff, an academic specialising in French cultural memory, attributes the film's effectiveness to the "incredible atmosphere of rising paranoia and suspense surrounding the main female protagonist [Christina]", she tells BBC Culture. "And [also] the twist at the end, which, in the original film reel, viewers were asked not to reveal outside the cinema to future spectators." While Clouzot certainly had film-making forebears in Hollywood like Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise, when it came to film-making in Europe, no director had created such levels of tension.
Clouzot works a kind of push-pull psychology throughout Les Diaboliques, teasing a possible solution to the mystery one minute, only to utterly subvert it the next; all the while putting his characters through the emotional mixer and taking the audience along with them. In particular, he inserts supernatural insinuations to keep the characters (and the viewer) on the back foot. A young boy swears that he was punished by the supposedly-now-dead Michel. The suit Michel was murdered in somehow reappears newly pressed from a Parisian drycleaners. And then, most alarmingly, his ghostly face appears at the window in a school photo.
The shocking denouement
It would be remiss not to discuss the film's famous finale and its aforementioned twist. It sees Christina come upon Michel submerged in a bath, only for him to suddenly rise out of it as if waking from the dead, at which point Christina's heart finally gives way – a demise that was bizarrely echoed five years later when Véra herself would die of a heart attack aged just 46, leading Clouzot into a depressive spiral that haunted the rest of his life. As it transpires, Nicole and Michel have been in cahoots all along, the real plot being to eliminate Christina so they can sell off the school and live happily ever after.
Gorrara believes the twist "is so well plotted through cinematographic 'sleight of hand' that I would defy uninitiated viewers to discover it before the ending". Said sleight of hand arises once again from Clouzot's skilful blending of genre – he films the finale exactly as if it was a supernatural ghost story, right until the death of Christina. Even then, the film has one last twist, this time with a real supernatural insinuation, when a boy claims to have seen the now-deceased Christina, just as he had seen Michel earlier when he was supposedly dead.
In an interview with Time magazine, even Stephen King, modern horror's most celebrated author, declared that the finale in the bath was the "single scariest moment I have ever had in entertainment". King is also a great admirer of British horror writer Ramsey Campbell, himself a fan of Les Diaboliques. When asked if he agrees with Bloch's original assessment of Les Diaboliques as the ultimate psychological horror, Campbell tells the BBC: "It may well have been at the time, certainly in terms of commitment to sheer terror of an intensity not previously encountered in the cinema (just as Psycho would up the ante several years later)… and I've seen Les Diaboliques disquiet a recent audience as much as I imagine it did in its day."
In her mixed 1955 review of Les Diaboliques for The Observer, critic CA Lejeune described a trend in cinema of the period that the film exemplified. "Since there seems to be a vogue at the moment for the horrid in entertainment," she opined, "Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques is likely to do well." Undoubtedly this trend was in part down to Hitchcock and his skill in making artful, popular thrillers that increasingly toyed in nastiness, such as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951). Yet Clouzot's contribution was just as impactful, not simply on the thrillers that came after but also upon Hitchcock himself, with a sense of competitiveness growing between the two in the 1950s. As King suggested in a 2007 interview with the British Film Institute about his favourite films, Clouzot "out-Hitchcocked Hitchcock". Les Diaboliques clearly raised the stakes for Hitch.
In fact, Hitchcock himself had wanted to adapt Boileau-Narcejac's original novel. According to Hayward, Véra introduced Clouzot to it, and he secured the screen rights just before Hitchcock. "He… blocked those rights for a year," she wrote, "thus effectively preventing Alfred Hitchcock getting his hands on the story." Cinematic folklore suggests that Clouzot's insomnia meant he was up early enough to secure the rights mere hours before Hitchcock – though there is scant evidence to suggest it was such a close call.
More like this:
• How Monty Python and the Holy Grail changed comedy
• The violent French film that transformed crime cinema
• 11 of the best films to watch this April
Once they were secured, Clouzot would play fast and loose with the original work. In particular, he moved the action to the closed environment of a school, something Gorrara believes is one of Clouzot's improvements. "From my point of view," she says, "the key improvement is setting the film in a boys' boarding school which provides the 'hermetically sealed' community so beloved of the whodunit/ locked-room mystery, but also provides a fascinating socio-cultural context for the trio's passion, corruption and horror."
Clouzot also shifted the relationships around, changing the plot from it being the husband and mistress seemingly ganging up to kill the wife, whose body then disappears, to making the two women the apparent plotters and the husband the ostensible victim. "Making the husband the 'victim' and a sadist to boot allows Clouzot to entice us into complicity with the crime, which may well add to our dread when things go Gothically wrong," suggests Campbell of the change. In the book, the final twist is that the two women are the actual co-conspirators, as they are lovers; in changing the set-up, Clouzot removes the novel's more overt lesbian overtones but retains an implication of intimacy between the women, which seemingly helps to foster Christina's misplaced trust in Nicole.
Its influence, on Hitchcock and beyond
Hitchcock would be quicker off the mark in securing Boileau-Narcejac's third novel, The Living and the Dead (1954), though perhaps the director wouldn't have been so determined if Clouzot hadn't snatched the previous work and made such a fine film from it. The resulting Hitchcock adaptation was Vertigo (1957), regularly considered one of cinema's greatest achievements. While Vertigo feels thematically connected to Les Diaboliques because of their shared authorship, many other films also took aspects from Clouzot's film without having such an overt connection.
France wasn't particularly known for horror in the post-war period, but it's difficult to imagine the country's other great shocker, Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960), existing without Clouzot's film, if only because French film as a whole still veered away from too much cinematic darkness back then. Indeed, Clouzot opened the door for French cinema's return to horror and all things morbid, while the outbreak of psychologically tense, Gothic thrillers in Western cinema more generally seems spurred on by Les Diaboliques as much as by Hitchcock. It's difficult, without Les Diaboliques, to imagine the cinematic landscape later dominated by psychological thriller/horror hybrids such Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) and Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), to name but a few. In Italy especially, its imprint can be felt in the Giallo genre, with films by the likes of Mario Bava and Dario Argento taking the atmospheres and domestic tensions of Clouzot's film and often adding a dose of bloody violence, as well as visuals more obviously cribbed from Psycho.
Which brings us back to Robert Bloch, Les Diaboliques' great fan. Clouzot's film undoubtedly had a profound effect on both the writing of Psycho and Hitchcock's subsequent film, as evidenced by their shared mixture of the psychological and the insinuated supernatural, grim atmospherics, and a quintessential moment of terror unfolding in that most ordinary of spaces, the bathroom. As Campbell notes, despite being beaten to the rights of She Who Was No More, Hitchcock admired Clouzot's version and reportedly "played it to the film crew while making Psycho – very possibly also emulating Clouzot's plea to the audience not to give away the ending". In Hitchcock's case, he wove an anti-spoiler message throughout the film's advertising with one of the taglines being, "If you can't keep a secret, please stay away from people after you see Psycho."
Considering Psycho's vast influence on cinema, Les Diaboliques' macabre DNA has undeniably been spread far and wide. "I think that is the epitome of what the horror film should be," Bloch concluded of Les Diaboliques in the interview in L'Ecran Fantastique. With its wealth of scares, its chilling precision and undeniable lasting impact on Bloch and others, it certainly remains an essential benchmark the horror genre should aspire to.
--
If you liked this story sign up for The Essential List newsletter, a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram
Britain in the 1960s was captivated by the daring of the Great Train Robbery, and the sheer scale of the money stolen. But when the accused men stood trial in April 1964, the judge was determined to send a message that such crimes would not be tolerated. Fourteen years later, several of the convicts talked to the BBC.
On 16 April 1964, Robert Welch was one of the 12 men found guilty of a notorious heist in Aylesbury Crown Court. Fourteen years later, in 1978, he was on the BBC's documentary and current affairs programme, Man Alive, and recalled seeing local dignitaries jostle for positions in the courtroom to hear the sentencing. "This was what they had all come to watch. The climax of the play, the drama," Welch said. "And the medieval setting in which we were sentenced, you know, it was a bit chilling."
Welch and his fellow convicts had fallen a long way since pulling off one of the most audacious and lucrative thefts the UK had ever seen: the Great Train Robbery.
Welch and his co-defendants were part of a band who held up a Royal Mail night train travelling from Glasgow to London. The robbers had made off with £2.6m in used banknotes, a record haul at that time, and the equivalent of over £50m ($65.8m) today. At the time of Welch's trial, police were still hunting for three of the people they suspected had been involved in the crime.
To execute this carefully orchestrated robbery, 15 members of two of London's biggest criminal gangs had worked together, each tasked with a particular role in the plot. "They were regarded as the elite of the criminal world," Reginald Abbiss, who had covered the crime for the BBC as a young reporter, told the Witness History podcast in 2023. "You had to have a certain talent and audacity, certain abilities to be able to pull a heist of this magnitude and they came together because they needed a multitude of talent."
The daring robbery took place just after 03:00 on 8 August 1963. The first step the criminals had taken was to cut the phone lines to stop an alarm being raised. They then rigged the train signals to stay red. "They put a glove over the green light, they wired a cheap battery up to the red light and this, of course, meant the driver had to slow up," said Abbiss.
Seeing the red light, the train's driver, Jack Mills, stopped the engine, and his co-driver, David Whitby, climbed out to use the trackside phone to find out what the problem was. That's when Whitby discovered that the line had been cut, and he was set upon by masked men wearing boiler suits. In the meantime, a masked robber burst into the train's cab to restrain the driver. When Mills tried to put up a fight, another gang member hit him over the head, rendering him semi-conscious.
"The one glitch, if you like, was the fact that the train driver… tried to resist," said Abbiss. "One of the robbers hit him on the head with a cosh. A lot of blood and down he went."
The gang had been given inside information that the cash and high-value packages were held in the train's front two coaches. And because it was a Bank Holiday weekend, it would be carrying more money than usual.
One hundred and twenty sacks of money
Although there weren't any police onboard, there were more than 70 Post Office employees, mostly in the rear carriages, where they were busy sorting letters. The criminals who had already familiarised themselves with the train's operation and layout quickly uncoupled the two money-laden carriages. The plan was to detach them and drive them away from the steep embankment to a predetermined rendezvous where it would be easier to unload the bags of cash.
It was then they hit a problem. "They had a driver to drive the train, he couldn't get the train going, and they had to pull the original driver, Jack Mills, up from the floor and threaten him and say, 'Drive the train,'" said Abbiss. "He managed to get the train a mile up the line to where most of the gang were waiting, leaving the other eight or nine coaches with sorters happily sorting, totally unaware that the main part of the train had gone on ahead."
Mills, still bleeding profusely, was told to stop the two front carriages at Bridego Bridge. There, the rest of the gang broke into the carriages, overpowering the Post Office staff working in them, and forcing them to lie face down on the floor. They also brought in Mills and Whitby, who were handcuffed together.
The gang had decided that they would give themselves just 15 minutes to unload the loot and then leave whatever money was left. They formed a human chain and swiftly removed 120 sacks containing two-and-a-half tonnes of money into parked Land Rovers. After a quarter of an hour, the crew called time and ordered the terrified Post Office staff to stay still and not to attempt to contact the police for 30 minutes. Then the robbers drove off into the night.
The boldness of the theft and the enormous sum of money involved captured the British public's imagination. In the weeks that followed, the country was gripped by sensational headlines detailing the police's hunt for the perpetrators. But despite the meticulous nature of the robbery's planning and its skilful execution, within a year the majority of the criminal gang had been rounded up and were facing trial.
"Well, at first view, the job was a very well-planned job," ex-Det Supt Malcolm Fewtrell, who led investigations into the heist, told BBC News in 1964. "But in the event, it has been a disaster. They obviously weren't so clever as they thought they were."
The judge at their trial did not view the robbers' actions in the "romantic" way some of the public seemed to, saying that it would be "positively evil" if he showed the convicted men any semblance of leniency.
Crime and punishment
"I remember a shock wave ran through the courtroom when the judge, a man called Lord Justice Edmund Davies, handed down 307 years in the space of half an hour," Abbiss told BBC Witness History in 2023. At the time, the punishments they received for the robbery were some of the harshest in British criminal history, especially since nobody had been killed and no firearms had been used.
"I was just numbed, I couldn't think of anything but 30 years. When are we going to get out? We are never going to get out," one of the robbers, Tommy Wisbey, told Man Alive in 1978.
"I don't think it really hits you until a couple of days later and you realise what you've got," fellow gang member Gordon Goody said to the BBC. "I mean it was a bit of a joke downstairs, clowning around and all that kind of thing. But deep down, I suppose you were sick."
More like this:
• The British politician who was caught faking his own death
• The true story of The Great Escape
• The bizarre siege behind Stockholm Syndrome
The reason the judge gave for the severity of the prison terms was the assault on Mills. "Anybody who has seen that nerve-shattered engine driver can have no doubt of the terrifying effect on law-abiding citizens of a concerted assault by armed robbers," said Justice Davies at the trial. Mills never worked again and died in 1970 of leukaemia. His co-driver Whitby died of a heart attack the following year at the age of 34.
But there was also a sense, at least among the robbers themselves, that they were being disproportionately punished because the heist had embarrassed the British establishment. One of them, Roy James, said to the BBC in 1978, "At that moment, all the shame that was with me throughout the trial was lifted because I felt that Mr Edmund Davies then used his position as a High Court judge, used the backing of the state for vengeance. He put himself on a par with me and everything that he said I was."
"There was a feeling that Justice Davies came down particularly hard for two reasons," said Abbiss. "One was the violence shown against the train driver, and the other was that the establishment, the government, the Post Office and British Rail, the way that they were sort of caught with their pants down. It showed the establishment to be people perhaps who take their eye off the ball."
The criminals' notoriety only grew following their sentencing when two of the gang made dramatic escapes from prison. Charles Wilson, who had been the treasurer of the group, broke out of jail just four months after the trial. He was recaptured in Canada after four years on the run and served another 10 years behind bars. Ronnie Biggs escaped from London's Wandsworth Prison, 15 months after his sentencing, using a makeshift rope ladder. He underwent plastic surgery and lived at times in Spain, Australia and Brazil, evading arrest for nearly 40 years. In 2001, he voluntarily returned to the UK for medical treatment and served the rest of his prison sentence.
On the run
The law would also eventually catch up with the three gang members who didn't stand trial that day. Bruce Reynolds, considered to be the robbery's mastermind, spent five years on the run until he was arrested on his return to England. He was sentenced to 25 years in jail, but ended up serving just 10. His son Nick, who spent his early life on the run with his father in Mexico and Canada, would later have his own link to the outlaw lifestyle when his band Alabama 3's song Woke Up This Morning became the opening theme of The Sopranos TV series.
Ronald "Buster" Edwards, who was later played by Genesis singer Phil Collins in a 1988 film, Buster, fled to Mexico following the robbery. He gave himself up in 1966 and was released after serving nine years. James White, who acted as the quartermaster for the robbery, was caught in Kent and sent to prison after three years on the run. He was released in 1975.
Despite the lengthy jail time handed down, all the men convicted of the Great Train Robbery would end up being released early. None served more than 13 years for the crime – although many of them would return to prison for different offences in the years that followed.
As for the huge haul stolen during the robbery, despite the police in 1964 offering a 10% share for information that would lead them to it, the majority of the money was never recovered.
--
For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Alex Garland explored the slide into fractious factionalism in Civil War. Now he turns his gaze towards the ferocity of combat in new film Warfare, which stars Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and Charles Melton.
Joseph Quinn's excruciating howls of pain go on and on, and on and on in Warfare, continuing long after most films would have moved forward. The relentlessness of those cries, with his leg one bloody open wound, defines what is so unique and effective about this real-time 90-minute immersion into an actual US mission in Iraq.
Alex Garland, the writer and director of Civil War, and Ray Mendoza, a veteran who was its military advisor, have co-directed a bold marvel of a film. Together, Garland's virtuosity and Mendoza's first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing.
Warfare feels even more visceral because it arrives when actual wars are raging, from Israel and Gaza to Ukraine, giving the film more immediacy than it might have had even just five years ago.
Civil War extrapolated from today's politically divided world into a near-future where combat tears across the US. The film's marketing, somewhat disingenuously, claimed it was apolitical, but that was only true in the sense that this dire warning didn't endorse specific political parties. Warfare is more truly apolitical, focusing on the nature of war itself by way of one that happens to be in Iraq.
Mendoza was part of the 2006 mission the film depicts, an operation that was not major or particularly notable, just a cog in the war machine. Minutes into the film, a group of US Navy Seals – played by first-rate actors including Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Charles Melton, Kit Connor and D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai – creep into an Iraqi town to do surveillance ahead of ground troops arriving the next day. They take over a house, dragging its residents out of bed and smashing through a wall between two apartments, and soon spot al-Qaeda jihadists gathering across the street. Tension builds, but nothing prepares us for the shattering sound or the bloody impact when a grenade is lobbed into their window.
Let's not exaggerate that immersive element. Sitting in a cinema doesn't come close to the reality of combat, but Warfare does what film does best, recreating the feelings of fear and simple will to live when you are trapped, a sitting target for armed men doing their best to kill you.
Garland and Mendoza's rigorous approach to the screenplay makes this film more docudrama than fiction. They relied entirely on the accounts of the men who were part of the mission, cross-checking to account for faulty memories. They invented no plot twists, and drop us into the action without any backstory about the characters. The dialogue is restricted to the military shorthand the Seals would have used, with no time for the jokey banter most war movies indulge in.
That sounds dry, but every actor makes it work, partly because they have faces that hold the screen. Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs) is a central character, playing Mendoza himself, a communications officer relaying by radio the team's locations and information back to home base. Woon-A-Tai captures the intensity of the job. If he fails, it all goes wrong. The film doesn't explain its military jargon, but it's easy enough to grasp that when he radios for a "casevac" it means a casualty evacuation for the wounded.
Poulter plays the officer in charge of the group, and has one of the few memorable lines. When help is nearby and he can't pinpoint his exact location, he tells them: "Look for the blood and the smoke. We're there."
Quinn is a standout even before his character's injuries, conveying a fear and sense of danger not far from the surface. But the effectiveness of the real-time approach is felt most strongly after he is wounded, and his inescapable cries continue in the background even as the others strategise how to move him and Jarvis's severely wounded character out when US tanks arrive.
As Civil War demonstrated, Garland is an expert at creating intense action scenes. When the Seals attempt to leave, another grenade explodes on the street. Sound becomes muffled. The screen fills with smoke so that it feels like night. When the smoke clears, there are wounded men and a severed leg on the ground. In real-life news reports, the most graphic videos usually come with warnings that the images might be disturbing, but Garland and Mendoza don't let us look away.
Warfare is in a line of films about divisive conflicts, from Vietnam (Apocalypse Now) to Iraq (The Hurt Locker), that have focused on the soldiers rather than the politics. But no war film is entirely detached from its setting, and Garland and Mendoza acknowledge that in a significant way.
The Iraqi civilians don't get much time on screen, but the impact of those scenes is enormous. As a father, mother and their two small children cower together in the corner of a bedroom, the Americans' reassurances that they won't be hurt seem hollow. These people are civilians held at gunpoint as their home is destroyed around them simply because it is in a convenient location for surveillance. They are both specific to Iraq and stand-ins for innocent victims of wars everywhere.
Apolitical though Warfare is, with its blood-soaked scenes and brutal sounds, it seems to question the wisdom of settling any conflict, even or especially one about global power and politics, with the kind of violence this film draws us into so intimately.
★★★★★
--
If you liked this story sign up for The Essential List newsletter, a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram
A new exhibition documents American photography's first 70 years, exploring the US during a period of immense social, geographical and industrial change.
Modern culture is indebted to photography. "We can't be literate in today's world if we don't know how to make and share and interpret images", Jeff Rosenheim, photography curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, tells the BBC. "And when did camera culture become so much a part of all of our lives? It actually started in the 1840s and 50s."
Though originating in Europe, "the speed with which this medium took hold in the US is one of the great surprises," says Rosenheim, who, thanks to the incredible range of early American images in the William L Schaeffer Collection, a recent gift to the museum, saw an opportunity "to tell an expanded story about the birth of this medium".
The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910, which opened on 11 April, documents American photography's first 70 years through 225 photographs, reversing the usual top-down approach by focusing on unknown makers that tell nuanced stories about the US during a period of immense social, geographical and industrial change.
"I quickly realised that there was fantastic picture-making, really important stories, outside of the big cities, all across the country," says Rosenheim. One such story is embodied in an anonymous 1850s daguerreotype (an image created on silver-coated copper plate) of a young man holding a chicken − a man for whom a painted portrait was probably unaffordable. But, thanks to this new art, he had made his way to a studio, along with his feathered companion, to receive his likeness.
Holding the pose – sometimes for minutes rather than seconds − was essential to a good image, and the bird's minimal blurring suggests it was at ease in the boy's arms. Though photography was in its infancy, the sharpness of the image, from the boy's freckles to the rooster's scaly feet, is remarkable. The young farmer's photograph captures the spirit of the American pioneers and is filled, says Rosenheim, "with pride and optimism for his own future".
It would be another decade before the US would abolish slavery, and a century before the Civil Rights Act prohibited racial segregation. As a result, the theme of agency is implicit in many of these early images. An 1850s daguerreotype of a woman wearing a tignon (cloth turban) is a reminder of the Tignon Law in colonial Louisiana that required free black women to cover their hair. In response, some women reclaimed the tignon as an object of beauty and pride. This elegant portrait, with its extraordinary detail − from the delicately carved earrings to the weave in the translucent shawl − provides an opportunity for positive self-representation against a background of racial discrimination and negative stereotyping.
For the 19th-Century US, the making of these images was a spectacle in itself. In a rare photograph printed on salted paper around 1855, we see this wizardry at work. "There's this sort of magic about photography, that you have to go into the box itself, in a certain sense, and cover your head to make a picture," says Rosenheim. But for all the photographer's mastery, they are never entirely in control. Edward's Steichen's famous 1903 portrait of JP Morgan is an example; it inadvertently conveys his impatience with posing, and an innocent object – the chair handle – appears like a dagger in his hand.
"The world coalesces and comes together in ways that the photographer intended and did not," says Rosenheim. "A painter can always redo things. They can add and subtract. A photographer, until recently, had to accept what the film or the plate recorded."
Though the miracle of photography captured America's imagination, it was still deemed inferior to fine art. Pioneers such as John Moran, who came from a family of artists, challenged this by demonstrating the medium's creative potential and the unacknowledged artistry involved in making images. "It is the power of seeing and deciding what shall be done, on which will depend the value and importance of any work, whether canvas or negative," he argued in an essay published in The Photographic News of 1848. In his landscapes, we see a more atmospheric, ethereal quality that goes beyond realism to emphasise mood and emotion. "There are hundreds who make, chemically, faultless photographs," he asserted, "but few make pictures."
While the daguerreotype was indebted to France, the tintype – an image created on blackened iron – was an American invention. Producing high-quality results at a low cost, with no need for a studio, the tintype, peddled by itinerant photographers, meant remote communities and those of limited means could now also take part.
The broadening of access was reinforced by the industrialisation of the US, with the railroad and the telegraph connecting distant corners of the country – to the detriment of the Native American population who were pushed into ever-decreasing spaces. This geographic expansion, supported by topographic photography, is encapsulated in a c 1870 tintype of a man, perhaps a railroad worker, with his surveying equipment. Occupational portraits such as this, featuring workers with the tools of their trade, were a popular way to show the pride people took in their work and how they were contributing to the burgeoning American society.
In an 1870s tintype of a boy posing with a cornet, it may be an interest or talent, rather than a career, that this tiny keepsake records. On the left is a lock of his hair, fastened with paper flowers, possibly from his first haircut or perhaps obtained post-mortem. It was not uncommon for families to employ a photographer to memorialise a deceased loved one who had never been photographed before. Photography is "very linked" to life and death, says Rosenheim. A photograph is always younger than we are, always reminds us of our mortality, but at the same time preserves us in time.
As sitting for a portrait became more commonplace, novel experiences were sought. In a self-deprecating, comical tintype from the 1870s, the sitter's headshot is surrounded by an imagined scene scratched into the metal plate. The studio was Golder & Robinson, on Broadway, New York City, also known for its photographs of public figures that people would collect in the form of "cabinet cards'" – slender photographs mounted on card.
"Cartomania" as the craze became known, "was somewhat driven by Queen Victoria, who sat for her portraits and everyone wanted them," says Rosenheim. The introspection of the self-portrait era was running alongside the dawning of a culture of celebrity, with "everybody collecting pictures of everybody else".
While Golder & Robinson were distributing images of the good and the great, Alice Austen would use photography to speak up for the marginalised. She documented the daily lives of impoverished children, street sellers, and immigrants; and, as a queer women in a society that saw no place for same-sex relationships, questioned gender norms with her satirical images of women in the arms of other women, larking about in their underclothes or dressed as men.
Several of these photographs involve Austen's close friend Trude Eccleston, who features in an 1888 silver print of a boat trip on Lake Mahopac. There's a charming complicity as a smiling Eccleston locks eyes with the photographer. The gaze goes unnoticed by the dozing men, one of whom Eccleston would eventually marry.
Carleton E Watkins was a gold prospector who moved from New York to California to seek his fortune, but instead of taking from the landscape, made a career of photographing it, recording the humbling scale of its mighty glaciers, waterfalls and canyons. This awe was intensified by the stereograph experience, where two slightly different images were viewed through a stereoscope to create a 3D effect. In Watkins' picturesque View on the Columbia River (1867), the felled trees in the foreground hint at the impermanence of the US's breathtaking landscapes.
More like this:
• Eight striking images that define the US
• How one image kickstarted the 90s
• Eight photos of quirky US groups
As Miles Orvell writes in American Photography (2003): "Nature, in this 19th-Century context, was land to claim and defend in the name of the US government, it was a wild land to be exuberantly explored, mined, and mapped… And it was spectacularly beautiful." But photography was beginning to cast a critical eye on what this nascent civilisation was doing to this ancient wilderness.
"If the mood of the 19th Century was an essentially optimistic one, happy in its discovery and exploitation of the American continent," continues Orvell, "the 20th Century began gradually to wake up from that dream, look around, and see everywhere the destructiveness of the machines that had invaded the garden."
The stories the camera told about the US and its people, argues Rosenheim, "entered their consciousness in a way that no painting or sculpture, or other forms of art, ever have". Most of the pictures in the exhibition have never been published and offer fresh insights into early photography's role in the making of America. This, Rosenheim says, has proved instructive. "The more we release things that are not known, the more we learn about our own history."
The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York until 20 July 2025.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
In 1966, the remote Spanish village of Palomares found that the "nuclear age had fallen on them from a clear blue sky". Two years after the terrifying accident, BBC reporter Chris Brasher went to find what happened when the US lost a hydrogen bomb.
On 7 April 1966, almost 60 years ago this week, a missing nuclear weapon for which the US military had been desperately searching for 80 days was finally found. The warhead, with an explosive power 100 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was carefully winched from a depth of 2,850ft (869m) out of the Mediterranean Sea and delicately lowered onto the USS Petrel. Once it was on board, officers painstakingly cut into the thermonuclear device's casing to disarm it. It was only then that everyone could breathe a sigh of relief – the last of the four hydrogen bombs that the US had accidentally dropped on Spain had been recovered.
"This was not the first accident involving nuclear weapons," said BBC reporter Chris Brasher when he reported from the scene in 1968. "The Pentagon lists at least nine previous accidents to aircraft carrying hydrogen bombs. But this was the first accident on foreign soil, the first to involve civilians and the first to excite the attention of the world."
This terrifying situation had come about because of a US operation code-named Chrome Dome. At the beginning of the 1960s, the US had developed a project to deter its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, from launching a pre-emptive strike. A patrol of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers would continuously criss-cross the skies, primed to attack Moscow at a moment's notice. But to stay airborne on these long looping routes, the planes needed to refuel while in flight.
On 17 January 1966, one such bomber was flying at a height of 31,000ft (9.5km) over the Almería region of southern Spain, and attempted a routine air-to-air refuelling with a KC-135 tanker plane. "I believe what happened was the bomber was closing at a too-high rate of closure speed and he didn't stabilise his position," US Maj Gen Delmar Wilson, the man in charge of dealing with the catastrophic accident, told Brasher, "with the result that they got too close and collided."
The B-52 bomber's impact with the refuelling plane tore it open, igniting the jet fuel the KC-135 was carrying and killing all four of the crew onboard. The ensuing explosion also killed two men in the B-52's tail section. A third managed to eject, but died when his parachute did not open. The other four members of the bomber's crew successfully bailed out of their burning plane before it broke apart and fell to earth, raining down both flaming aircraft fragments and its lethal thermonuclear cargo onto the remote Spanish village of Palomares.
The huge fireball was seen a mile away. Thankfully, it did not trigger a nuclear explosion. The bomber's warheads were not armed and had built-in safeguards to prevent an unintended atomic chain reaction. But the thermonuclear devices did have explosives surrounding their plutonium cores as part of the triggering mechanism. In the event of an accident, the bombs had parachutes attached to them designed to cushion the impact on landing and prevent radioactive contamination. And indeed, one undetonated bomb did land safely in a riverbed and was recovered intact the following day. Unfortunately, two of the plummeting nuclear bombs' parachutes failed to open.
That morning, Spanish farmer Pedro Alarcón was walking to his house with his grandchildren when one of the nuclear bombs landed in his tomato field and blew apart on impact. "We were blown flat. The children started to cry. I was paralysed with fear. A stone hit me in the stomach, I thought I'd been killed. I lay there feeling like death with the children crying," he told the BBC in 1968.
Devastation and chaos
The other hydrogen bomb also exploded when it hit the ground near a cemetery. These dual blasts created vast craters and scattered highly toxic, radioactive plutonium dust across several hundred acres. Burning aircraft debris also showered the Spanish village. "I was crying and running about," a villager called Señora Flores told the BBC in 1968. "My little girl was crying, 'Mama, Mama, look at our house, it is burning.' Because of all the smoke I thought what she said must be true. There were a lot of stones and debris falling around us. I thought it would hit us. It was this terrific explosion. We thought it was the end of the world."
Once the news that the bomber had come down with nuclear weapons aboard reached US military command, a huge operation was launched. At the time of the disaster, Capt Joe Ramirez was an US Air Force lawyer stationed in Madrid. "There were a lot of people talking, there was a lot of excitement in the conference room. Everyone kept talking about a 'broken arrow'. I learnt then that 'broken arrow' was the code word for a nuclear accident," he told BBC's Witness History in 2011.
US military personnel were scrambled to the area by helicopter. When Capt Ramirez arrived in Palomares, he immediately saw the devastation and chaos wrought by the accident. Huge pieces of smoking wreckage were strewn all over the area – a large part of the burning B-52 bomber had landed in the school's yard. "It's a small village but there were people scrambling in different directions. I could see smouldering debris, I could see some fires."
Despite the carnage, miraculously no one in the village was killed. "Nearly 100 tonnes of flaming debris had fallen on the village but not even a chicken had died," said Brasher. A local school teacher and doctor climbed up to the fire-scarred hillside to retrieve the remains of the US airmen who had been killed. "Later still, they sorted the pieces and the limbs into five coffins, an act that was to cause a certain amount of bureaucratic difficulty when the Americans came to claim only four bodies from that hillside," said Brasher.
Three of the B-52 crew who managed to eject landed in the Mediterranean several miles off the coast and were rescued by local fishing boats within an hour of the accident. The fourth, the B-52 radar-navigator, ejected through the plane's explosion, which left him badly burned, and was unable to separate himself from his ejection seat. Despite this, he managed to open his parachute and was found alive near the village and taken to hospital.
However, this still left the problem of locating the plane's deadly nuclear payload. "My main concern was to recover those bombs, that was number-one priority," Gen Wilson told the BBC in 1968.
One of our nuclear bombs is missing
"The first night, the Guardia Civil [the Spanish national police force] had come to the little bar in Palomares, and that was about the only place that had electricity. And they had reported what they considered to be a bomb, so we immediately despatched some of our people to this riverbed which is not far from the centre of town, and, in fact, it was a bomb, so we placed a guard on that. And then the next morning, at first daylight, we started conducting our search, and I believe it was something in the order of 10am or 11am the following morning, we located two other bombs."
This accounted for three of the nuclear bombs, but there was still one missing. By the next day, trucks filled with US troops had been sent from nearby bases, with the beach in Palomares becoming a base for some 700 US airmen and scientists urgently trying to contain any radioactive contamination and locate the fourth warhead.
"The first thing that you could see as the search really got underway in earnest was Air Force personnel linking up hand-by-hand and 40 or 50 people in a line. They would have designated search areas. There were some people with Geiger counters who started arriving, and so they started marking off the areas which were contaminated," said Capt Ramirez in 2011. When US personnel registered an area contaminated with radiation, they would scrape up the first three inches of topsoil and seal it in barrels to be shipped back to the US. Some 1,400 tonnes of irradiated soil ended up being sent to a storage facility in South Carolina.
More like this:
• How a US general nearly started a nuclear war in 1950
• The greatest sailing rescue ever made
• How Russia launched a giant space mirror in 1993
Both the US and Spain, which at the time was under the brutal rule of Francisco Franco's military dictatorship, were keen to downplay the devastating accident. Franco was especially worried that radiation fears would hurt Spain's tourism industry, a major source of revenue for his regime. In an effort to reassure the local population and the wider world that there was no danger, the US Ambassador to Spain, Angier Biddle Duke, would end up taking a swim in the sea off Palomares coast in front of the international press just weeks after the accident.
But despite hundreds of US personnel conducting an intensive and meticulous search of the surrounding area for a week, they still couldn't find the fourth bomb. Then Capt Ramirez spoke to a local fisherman who had helped rescue some of the surviving airmen who had splashed down in the sea. The fisherman kept apologising to Capt Ramirez for not being able to save one of the US flyers, whom he thought he had witnessed drifting down into the depths.
Capt Ramirez realised that the fisherman could have actually seen the missing nuclear bomb. "All the bodies had been accounted for, I knew that," he said. The search then quickly shifted to the Mediterranean Sea, with the US Navy mobilising a flotilla of more than 30 ships, including mine-sweepers and submersibles, to scour the seabed. The exploration of miles of ocean floor was both technically complicated and a very slow process, but after weeks of exhaustive searching, a newly developed deep-diving vessel, Alvin, finally located the missing bomb in an underwater trench.
Nearly four months after it was first lost, the warhead was finally made safe and back in US hands. The next day, despite the secrecy with which the US military had surrounding its nuclear arsenal, it took the unusual step of showing the bomb to the world's press. Ambassador Duke reasoned that unless people saw the bomb for themselves, they would never feel certain that it had actually been recovered.
Almost six decades later, the incident still casts a long shadow over the Almería region. The US clean-up operation managed to miss some areas of contamination, and the US and Spain agreed to fund yearly health-checks for Palomares residents. They also promised to monitor the soil, the water, the air and local crops. But there are still some 100 acres (40 hectares) of contaminated land in Palomares that remain fenced off. And despite Spain and the US signing a mutual agreement in 2015 to clean up the area, neither has yet complied.
--
For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
A museum's friends group has agreed to close after 75 years due to a fall in income and lack of volunteers.
The Friends of The Bowes Museum, which is independent of the museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham, voted to close and wind up the charity on Wednesday.
Colin Hardy, chair of the group, said the decision was difficult but was unanimously agreed upon by the Friends trustees following professional advice.
The group's assets of £170,000 will be held in a legacy fund by the museum to support the production of its programmes.
"This is a bittersweet moment," Mr Hardy said, adding: "We're celebrating 75 years of existence with a vote to close."
He said over several years there had been a steady decline in memberships, a rising age profile of members and a fall in income.
"The prospect of seeing Friends slide deeper and deeper into decline was not the way anyone of us would want the story of such an important group to end," Mr Hardy said.
"This vote to close allows the group to wind up its affairs with dignity while honouring the achievements of the past 75 years."
Its 1,300 members would now be looked after by the museum and continue to have unlimited access to the site for the duration of their memberships, Mr Hardy said,
When their annual memberships expire, they would be invited to join the museum directly as members.
"Friends have played a significant part in the history of the museum," Mr Hardy said.
"It is well documented that Friends kept the museum open when it was threatened with closure and we as a group have supported the museum in so many ways, both financially and practically, over the years," he said.
Follow BBC Tees on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram.
A global vote has unveiled a shortlist of the UK's best-loved railway artwork to celebrate 200 years of the modern railway.
Twenty paintings have been selected, nine of which are held at the National Railway Museum in York.
The public has now been invited to choose an outright winner to be announced on 9 June, the birthday of rail pioneer George Stephenson.
Shortlisted artwork includes paintings by 14 artists, such as renowned railway painter Terence Cuneo.
Famous works by J.M.W. Turner and Eric Ravilious are also included in the final 20, along with two works by Norman Wilkinson, whose paintings are featured in popular travel posters.
Female painters Anna Todd, Ann Emily Carr and Grace Lydia Golden also made it into the shortlist.
The top 20 were selected by a public vote from a longlist of 200 artworks compiled by art education charity Art UK.
They were drawn from 11 public collections in the UK, including the National Railway Museum, Hopetown Darlington and The Postal Museum.
Nearly 4,000 votes were cast, according to organisers.
Heritage Minister Baroness Twycross said: "For two centuries, our railways have carried passengers and freight as well as inspiring artistic creativity across Britain.
"This remarkable collection showcases how deeply trains are woven into our cultural fabric."
She added she had been "delighted" to see such a diverse shortlist and encouraged people to vote for their favourite.
Anyone can register for the final vote to choose the nation's favourite, with polls closing at midnight on 1 June.
The paintings will be displayed in The Railway 200 Gallery in an exhibition on the Art UK website until 31 December 2025.
Railway 200 commemorates the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 when George Stephenson drove Locomotion No.1 a distance of 26 miles (42km) between Shildon, Darlington and Stockton in the north east of England.
Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Traditionally, Easter was a time to wear new clothes. After the self-denial of Lent, it was a chance to celebrate in style - and represented the emergence of a new, reborn, person.
Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary in 1662 about getting new clothes for his wife "against Easter" and Shakespeare's Mercutio asks, "Didst though not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter?"
It was considered lucky to first wear new clothes to church, and many people would proudly display their new garments by taking a promenade afterwards through town - hence the Easter parade.
But if a new outfit is beyond the budget - a newly trimmed hat would suffice.
And this was a sentiment indulged by the then London Tourist Board which obligingly ran annual Easter Bonnet competitions.
So take a look.
Listen to the best of BBC Radio London on Sounds and follow BBC London on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to hello.bbclondon@bbc.co.uk
The faces of 60 Manx people over the age of 60 are set to be captured in an art project to celebrate how "getting old is a privilege and every wrinkle is a gift".
The Isle Be Creative project, run by Debra Tracey, aims to celebrate residents who have contributed to island life or made a difference further afield, into their later years.
Funded the Isle of Man Arts Council's extraordinary events fund, a range of artists and community groups will create 60 portraits set to be displayed in December.
Ms Tracey said "sometimes the older you get the more invisible you become. We want to shine a spotlight on those people who haven't been championed before".
The artist, who is coordinating the 60 Over 60 Faces of Mann project which was awarded £15,000 from the fund, will also create six glass portraits.
Six other artists will be given a small fee to produce further images, and the rest will be completed by schools, care homes and community groups.
Ms Tracey said while the people in the portraits were to be over the age of 60, she wanted it to be an "inclusive project" which saw young people working with older people to "open up a dialogue and share wonderful stories".
'Quietly brilliant'
The artist said the project would bring people who were "quietly brilliant into the spotlight".
"We need to know their stories," she added.
Ms Tracey is calling on residents to nominate people to feature in the exhibition, whether they are alive or are figures from the past, by 30 April.
The Isle of Man Arts Council's £100,000 fund, launched to mark its 60th anniversary in 2025, was designed to support innovation by the creation and development of new "audience-centred" events.
Read more stories from the Isle of Man on the BBC, watch BBC North West Tonight on BBC iPlayer and follow BBC Isle of Man on Facebook and X.
In 2001, the organisation responsible for England's forests launched a concert series in a bid to increase funding and visitor numbers.
It was the brainchild of Mike Taylor, a manager at the Forestry Commission, now Forestry England, who had a "strong passion" for music and the outdoors.
In the 24 years since, Forest Live has become a mainstay of the music scene, with stars like Ed Sheeran, Massive Attack, Blondie, Madness and the Beach Boys performing among the nation's trees.
This year's gigs will be held in June at Cannock Chase Forest in Staffordshire, Delamere Forest in Cheshire, Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire and High Lodge, Thetford Forest in Norfolk.
Among the 2025 performers, which vary from venue to venue, are Sting, Snow Patrol, Gary Barlow, Nile Rodgers & CHIC, Rag'n'Bone Man and James.
But according to Rhodri Jones, Forestry England's national events programme manager, staging the gigs was not an easy task.
"It's a really challenging environment and requires a big transformation," he said.
"The strengths and uniqueness of our sites are also what brings the greatest challenges."
Getting people to the sites quickly and safely presented difficulties, Mr Jones said, as well as transporting and setting up the "considerable" infrastructure needed.
"It requires an enormous amount of planning by an incredibly skilled team to pull it all off," Mr Jones said.
Then there's the impact on the forests themselves – home to a vast array of animal and plant life, described by Mr Jones as a "constant consideration" for Forestry England.
He said the organisation made use of its in-house experts, who advise the teams on how to minimise impact on the environment.
"It would be counter-intuitive to present these concerts to protect and preserve the forest environments but do damage to them with the presentations themselves," he said.
"Our sites are home to incredible wildlife and plant life and the concerts are presented to raise funds for the protection and conservation of the nation's forests, so we must ensure that the concert operation does nothing to disturb the natural surroundings."
Constructing the stages takes a team of about 50 people, which will grow to roughly 250 during show days.
With capacities at the venues ranging from 8,000 to 10,000 concert-goers, Mr Jones said working out entry and exit points for traffic, as well as emergency access, can prove challenging.
"We must ensure everyone can get to and from the rural settings, so we set our capacities in line with that," he said.
Then there's the English weather, with forests particularly vulnerable to extreme conditions like high winds and thunderstorms.
Mr Jones said Forestry England was always "alive to the dangers" of natural challenges and aware of what it needed to do to protect the public.
"High structures along with the trees are susceptible to extreme weather events, so we must be reactive to forecasts and be prepared to cancel a show and issue refunds if there is any danger to the public," he said.
Tickets for the concerts start at between £50 and £60, with all money raised going towards maintaining forests across the country, contributing towards Forestry England's efforts to plant 7m trees a year.
"The experience is one of complete disconnect from the pace and noise of modern life - and connection with music, nature and a sea of like-minded concert-goers," Mr Jones said.
"By attending a concert, you are also investing in the future of these incredible spaces, as the funds raised go towards preserving the nation's forests for generations to come."
Follow BBC Stoke & Staffordshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
A popular natural history museum in Brighton is to be closed for 12 months for essential improvements.
The Booth Museum, which is overseen by Brighton & Hove Museums, will be closed from Sunday as part of plans to improve its collections and infrastructure.
The museum has more than 600,000 specimens, including insects, minerals, fossils and dinosaur bones.
Hedley Swain, chief executive of Brighton & Hove Museums, said: "The Booth Museum is a cherished institution, but it needs vital improvements to safeguard its collections and create a more engaging visitor experience."
He said: "This temporary closure will allow us to make much-needed upgrades."
During the closure, the museum says it will tackle collection management challenges, improve storage conditions, alarm system, and fire safety.
It adds many of its collections are stored in now out-dated cabinets and packaging, and it is working to ensure the items are protected for future generations.
The Booth will open for monthly special event days which will offer behind-the-scenes access for visitors to explore previously unseen collections.
It will also continue with as many pre-booked school events as possible, the museum said.
History of the Booth Museum
The museum was founded in 1874 by naturalist Edward Thomas Booth. It began as a collection of more than 300 dioramas showcasing British birds in their natural habitats.
During the Victorian era, people were passionate about natural history and Booth's particular interest was ornithology - the study of birds.
In 1971, the Booth became a Museum of Natural History. It is now home to a collection of 525,000 insects, 50,000 minerals and rocks, 30,000 plants and 5,000 microscope slides.
Some of its oldest specimens include shells from the bottom of a 55-million-year-old Mediterranean lagoon.
Follow BBC Sussex on Facebook, on X, and on Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp us on 08081 002250.
Alexandra Johnson was already grieving her mother's death when Covid-19 hit the UK in 2020.
As a former city trader, she had no formal art qualifications, but she nonetheless decided to manage the boredom and channel her grief by painting in her kitchen.
The mother-of-three has gone on to sell her works - painted exclusively with a palette knife and spatula - for five-figure sums.
Earlier this month, her portrait of Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai sold for £51,200 at the prestigious Bonhams auction house.
"I always go for powerful women, not for [their] jobs and career, just for their inner strength," said Johnson, who lives in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.
Johnson left her job as a trader in 2002 to become a full-time mum.
She became a full-time carer for her own mother in 2017 after her cancer diagnosis, and Janet died in February 2019.
The 53-year-old recalled how "we were really bored" when the first lockdown was imposed and she was still "fresh in grief".
"I don't think I'd spent five hours painting [at that point] but during lockdown the pace of life had become a lot slower," she told the BBC.
"I wanted to see how good I could be."
Her "amazing" mother served as an "inspiration" for those early paintings.
Janet had already sacrificed her own health by giving a kidney to one of her brothers when she was 60 years old.
The painter said she was forever in awe of how women supported other women in times of crisis, and she described how her work paid "homage" to their "strength and grace".
She says her paintings explore memory, femininity and resilience.
"I pull from my experiences. It's personal, it's my feelings on a canvas, my favourite pieces are anything that are of my mum.
"I found it so therapeutic.
"I only do women, and I've had some really low points in my life and the women in my life just pushed me through.
"We come from a big family of powerful women."
Women wear many hats and spin many plates, she explained: "We take on so much."
Breakthrough
Johnson - who works under the name Zara Muse - sold her first painting "Angelique" in 2023 for £22,500. Shape of Stillness went for £47,500 in December.
The painting of Malala was was put up for sale at Bonham's after it was put forward by one of her loyal collectors.
Malala, now 27, was 15 when she was shot in the head by the Taliban on the way home from school.
"Malala represents strength and bravery — the kind of woman I want to celebrate through my work."
Follow Essex news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
When Jonny-James Kajoba developed an appetite for the performing arts as a child, he knew he wanted to do everything he could to make it a career.
Born in Ipswich, Kajoba became a chorister at St Mary le Tower at the age of five.
During his A-levels, he became one of thousands to be accepted into the prestigious Juilliard School for drama in New York, USA.
Now a year on from graduating, the 22-year-old has worked on several plays and short films, and will star in a Broadway show next year.
Kajoba said his parents pushed him academically, but he spent a lot of his youth learning to play piano, violin and the harp while enjoying after school and weekend drama clubs.
A pivotal moment he said was when he was inspired by a show at the Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich.
"I didn't really know what it meant to be an actor, whether that was something that someone could do," he explained.
"I went to see this play and I was so mesmerised at how something on stage could be so beautiful.
"It wasn't just acting itself, it was the whole production of it all."
In secondary school, Kajoba would spend lunchtimes looking up drama school requirements and learning monologues.
He continued to perform in shows and notably in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe theatre in London when he was 16.
During his A-levels, he set his sights on Juilliard and started the long application process while applying to UK universities as a "backup plan".
He had to submit videos of himself reciting monologues, and he nearly gave up on the application until he found out the admissions deadline had been extended.
He was soon invited for in-person auditions in New York in January 2020 and once there, he made it through countless rounds.
"Everybody around me was like, 'Jonny, you're going to get it', but you have to understand that was one day out of like 30 days of auditions they do," he explained.
He returned to his A-Levels and his final audition was staged online because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A short time later, on the day his school was sent home for lockdown, he was told he had been accepted into Juilliard's class for 2020, made up of just 18 students.
"I was running around... I could not believe it, I made it to Juilliard," he said.
"Out of between 6,000 to 8,000 people, 18 got in."
Kajoba started online classes in July 2020 before later moving to New York in October for his studies.
"Across the four years, we only perform publicly in the third and fourth year because the first two years are all about the interior work you do as an actor," he added.
"One thing the head of the division always used to say is, 'We are training you for a 70-year career'.
"It's about building yourself as a true artist."
In his fourth year, Kajoba was signed to a New York talent agency and he received the John Houseman Award for acting.
It is given to the actor who displays exceptional ability in classic theatre and he said it was "an honour to be part of that legacy".
Kajoba, who still lives in New York, continued: "Juilliard really allowed me to meet myself, meet the version of myself I was always meant to be.
"Of course that changes everyday, but I'm just so grateful for that gift and the fact I get to honour that in every play, film, whatever that I do."
Kajoba has already worked on some short films as well as several plays.
He recently starred in a short film called Seek No Favor produced by Carmen Cuba, a well-known Los Angeles producer, that is currently in post-production.
He will start work on another film called Good Mourning this month, and is due to star in a Broadway theatre show called Spare Parts next year.
"I used to say this when I was 14 or 15 years old, to my friends; the big, big dream is that I produce my own films.
"I want to make projects that make audiences think, 'OK, how did you do that?', in the sense that creating something that goes beyond language and physicality.
"I want to do that while uplifting voices that are not necessarily given the space to do that."
Follow Suffolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
A couple who opened a 90-seat theatre in November say they have been "overwhelmed with happiness" at its popularity.
Neil Wilson and Cath Cooper said, so far, every show put on at Backyard Theatre in Watchet, Somerset, has sold out.
Performances at the theatre have included a one-man show called Frankenstein (on a Budget) and a folk musical called The Musicians of Bremen.
Ms Cooper said: "We really wanted there to be a theatre in Watchet. A town without a theatre is a strange thing really because most towns have some performance space. This is a dream come true."
The theatre had previously been a skittle alley, so already had a bar and toilets.
To complete its transformation, Mr Wilson renovated the space, with the help of volunteers, adding a full lighting rig and a backstage dressing room.
"We can put on our own shows and do what we want to," Mr Wilson said.
The couple already have business experience, having run Watchet's Radio Museum – which sits right next to the theatre.
Mr Wilson runs the technical side of the operation, while Ms Cooper finds the shows.
Ms Cooper said she had previously retired, only to find the theatre has now become a full-time job.
She praised the army of volunteers helping on show days.
"We're overwhelmed with happiness that this has become a success," she said.
Follow BBC Somerset on Facebook and X. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.
Three volunteers refurbishing a city's last remaining theatre are calling for more help and donations to get the job done.
It was hoped that The Kings Theatre in Gloucester would be able to reopen in May, but an audit carried out in March exposed fire safety risks. The venue is now expected to remain closed until 1 September.
Andrew Taylor, chair of the theatre's board of trustees, said the volunteer-run site needed to raise more than £20,000 to fund the necessary work.
"I'm really looking forward to seeing the completion of this project and being able to bring the magic back into the building," he said.
The volunteers have so far completed difficult jobs including demolishing the bar and replacing the ceiling in the front of house area.
They now need to install a new fire detection system, new fire doors, staircases leading to the upper floors and an expansion of the bar area.
Mr Taylor described the venue as "a bomb site" but said the team was working hard to meet the September deadline.
"With our funds dwindling, it's looking to be quite difficult to achieve, but we're really, really confident that we can," he said.
He is appealing for more volunteers to join the team of three.
Anybody who is able to help clean, paint or plaster is welcome.
The team is also keen for donations of spare materials, such as timber, screws and plasterboard.
"This project is definitely more than just a lick of paint," Mr Taylor said.
"It's about making the building more accessible, but also it gives us the perfect opportunity to reimagine the space and make the space more functional."
Follow BBC Gloucestershire on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.
Why does the weather so often ruin Bank Holiday weekends? A question for another day maybe.
Not that the rain and wind stopped life carrying on in Bristol, with plenty to enjoy indoors such as the Tina Turner musical at the Hippodrome and tasty treats at bakeries in the city.
City kept up their play-off push and the Park Run competitors kept on going too.
Simply the Best: The Tina Turner Musical is on at the Hippodrome until 26 April, telling the story of the multiple Grammy-winning star from her humble Tennessee beginnings to global fame.
Also simply the best: Bristol & West AC runners are celebrating winning the ultimate accolade in British endurance running after becoming National Road Relay Champions, adding that to their National Cross Country Championship earlier this season.
Getting it done: Bristol City cemented their place in the Championship top six by beating 10-man Sunderland 2-1 at Ashton Gate on Good Friday.
Night glow: The lights of the many rides and stalls at Funderworld on The Downs are not just illuminating that part of the city, but the taller rides can be seen from miles away.
Grey Good Friday: It was a damp day on Friday as the weather did not play ball with it being a bank holiday but at least the gulls enjoyed having the harbour (largely) to themselves.
Maybe just one: It is hard to travel across Bristol without passing an artisan bakery of some sort or another. These cardamom and pistachio knots were being baked this week.
In the shadow of giants: The cricket season is here, meaning fans heading to watch Gloucestershire home games can once again walk into the County Ground under the mural of legendary player W. G. Grace.
In all weathers: Every Saturday morning hundreds of runners take on the hills of Ashton Court as part of the weekly Park Run. Easter Saturday was no different despite the wind and rain.
Park life: Charity Your Park Bristol & Bath has been given almost £250,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to improve accessibility for disabled people and their carers in parks in the two cities.
Recognition: The team at Common Ambition Bristol, which aims to reverse HIV health inequalities in the city, has been given a national award. Common Ambition raises awareness of HIV in African and Caribbean heritage communities through dedicated clinics and community events.
Lifesavers: Staff from University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust (UHBW) have been providing crucial liver scans to people in the city's homeless community with the support of the Big Issue under the "Alright My Liver?" scheme.
Follow BBC Bristol on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.
As the UK celebrates the writer's 250th birthday, there's never been a better time to explore the dramatic bluffs and picture-perfect villages connected to her most famous novel.
"There is not a finer county in England than Derbyshire," wrote 19th-Century novelist Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, arguably her most famous novel. Indeed, its idyllic stone villages and towns, verdant valleys, deep caverns, towering gritstone edges and windswept moorlands make the East Midlands county one of the best places to enjoy England's great outdoors.
Derbyshire played a starring role in Austen's novel, shining particularly in the latter half when its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, travels north from Hertfordshire to the Peak District and is reunited with the book's romantic hero, Mr Darcy. Joe Wright's 2005 film adaptation brought the stunning scenery to the big screen, leading travellers to flock to Derbyshire and see the sights through their own eyes.
Yet, according to Hazel Jones, editor of the Jane Austen Society's Annual Report, there is no evidence that Austen actually ever visited Derbyshire. Instead, Austen would have read romanticised descriptions in contemporary journals of the county, which experienced a Georgian period boom in tourism, and completed "scrupulous research", says Jones.
"We just have to trust Jane Austen's instinct that Derbyshire is the perfect county for Pemberley [Mr Darcy's home] says Jones. "It is, after all, far enough away from Mrs Bennet."
This year not only marks the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth but also the 30th anniversary of the adapted BBC miniseries and the 20th anniversary of the four-time Oscar-nominated film – which will be re-released in select cinemas in the UK, US and Australia starting 20 April. As the weather warms and wildflowers blanket the region, it's an opportune time to explore the many landmarks and filming locations connected to one of the world's great love stories.
Pemberley
Any tour of Austen's Derbyshire should begin at Chatsworth House. Fittingly, the opulent Grade I-listed estate and stables were transformed into Pemberley, the home of Pride and Prejudice's wealthy suitor, Mr Darcy, in the 2005 film.
Chatsworth sits on 1,822 manicured acres on the banks of the Derwent river, and it is home to herds of deer and sheep as well as wild animals. Owned and lived in by 17 generations of the Devonshire family, it opened its doors to the public in 1708.
Today, visitors can tour the stately home to admire one of Europe's most significant private art collections, whose paintings, rare books and historical documents span more than four centuries. Visitors will eventually come to the sculpture gallery, which fans of the film will recognise – particularly the Veiled Vestal. Keep your eyes peeled in the gift shop for a bust of Darcy's head, though, unfortunately, it's not available to purchase – or kiss!
While you could easily spend a day exploring Chatsworth's 105-acre garden, dipping your toes into the 300-year-old Cascade waterfall, winding through the giant maze or running around the Willow Tree Fountain (a brass tree that might just soak you when standing underneath it), there are plenty of free walks you can take around the estate too.
Medieval manors
Derbyshire is home to many of England's finest aristocratic houses – including Sudbury Hall, which was used for the interior shots of Pemberley in the BBC adaption. And just a five-minute drive south of the town of Bakewell is Haddon Hall, which has been owned by the Manners family for the last 900 years. There's something magical about this country house, especially when the pale pink and red roses adorn the walls in the summer months. Wandering through the Elizabethan gardens feels like you're stepping back in time.
Film location scouts agree. Haddon Hall's medieval and Tudor architecture was also featured in Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Jane Eyre, The Princess Bride film, and more recently, Firebrand. Fans of the Pride & Prejudice film may recognise the wood-panelled banqueting hall, which served as the interiors of the fictional Inn at Lambton; and the parlour, which became Elizabeth Bennet's bedroom.
"There's a palpable magic at Haddon Hall, where centuries-old architecture meets the vibrant hues of summer," says Julie Mellor, filming coordinator at Haddon. "Beyond its visual splendour, Haddon offers a sanctuary of learning and culture."
Haddon runs a specialist film tour with experts who have been on the film sets, as well as variety of workshops and events ranging from art and craft sessions to ecological walks. "It's an idyllic setting that encourages reflection and discovery, making summer 2025 an ideal time to experience the romance and elegance that define it," says Mellor.
Bakewell
According to local lore, Austen stayed in Bakewell at the Rutland Arms Hotel and wrote much of Pride and Prejudice here. Some Austen experts dispute this claim, yet she does reference the market town in the novel as Elizabeth travels through it on her way to Pemberley.
More like this
:
• How to celebrate Jane Austen on her 250thanniversary
• A Tolkien trail: Where to find the real-life Middle-earth
• Britain's tastiest town: Where Michelin chefs and gingerbread chefs reign
Set on the banks of the river Wye, bustling Bakewell is ideally situated between Chatsworth House and Haddon Hall. It's also the start of the 8.5-mile walking, jogging, cycling and wheelchair-accessible Monsal Trail, built atop a former Manchester-to-London railway line.
Bakewell is home to two traditional English sweet treats: the Bakewell pudding and Bakewell tart. For an authentic taste of both, head to The Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop, which has sold the former since the 1800s (made with their secret recipe), and now sells tarts too.
Stanage Edge
In the film adaptation, Bennet's arrival in Derbyshire is marked with an iconic shot of actress Keira Knightley standing atop the four-mile-long gritstone ridge of Stanage Edge, looking out onto the vast and dramatic Hope Valley beneath her. Two decades later, many Pride and Prejudice fans scour the Edge to find the exact spot where the actress stood – so much so it's often called "Keira Knightley rock".
The windswept landmark's rugged terrain attracts climbers and hikers from across the country. Geologist Rob Donnelly tells the BBC that Stanage Edge's millstone grit is emblematic of the Peak District National Park (you will spot the circular stones as you travel around). "The gritstone edges form part of the Peak District's unique landscape," he says. "They are an iconic rock type in the region, having been laid down roughly 300 million years ago."
The Edge overlooks the village of Hathersage (reached via a six-mile walk through trails and woodland or a short drive), whose heated 30m outdoor pool makes for a scenic swim.
Matlock and Matlock Bath
Set in the Peak District's south-eastern side and characterised as "celebrated beauties" by Austen are the twin towns of Matlock and Matlock Bath. Bennet travels through both locales on her way to Pemberley, and these namesake neighbours (Matlock is slightly bigger and lies about one mile north), are great bases for a stay in Derbyshire, with good transport connections, independent shops and cafes.
The spa resort of Matlock Bath is frequently described as a seaside town without the sea. It has attracted visitors since the late 17th Century, when its thermal springs (which had previously been discovered and mined by the Romans) became used for medicinal purposes. Today, there is a historic outdoor swimming pool fed by mineral-rich natural spring water tucked around the back of the New Matlock Bath Hotel & Spa.
Austen was likely well aware of the town's famed thermal waters. When Bennet enters Derbyshire with apprehension about seeing Darcy, she says, "But surely … I may enter his county without impunity and rob it of a few petrified spars without his perceiving me." Austen might have been referring to Matlock Bath's petrifying well – where the mineral-rich thermal water, turns objects into stone.
Matlock is also popular with walkers as it lies in a valley of the River Derwent. Pride and Prejudice fans may opt to explore the fittingly named Lovers' Walks, a series of footpaths along the riverside, or if you'd prefer something more challenging, there are also trails that go up and over the wooded cliffs. But perhaps the most famous tourist attraction is the Heights of Abraham, where you can take a mountain cable car to the top of Masson Hill, a 60-acre hilltop estate with a panoramic view of the surrounding valley and town below.
It is remarkable to think that an author who may not have set foot in Derbyshire cast such a bright light on the county. By intertwining real places into her narrative, Austen masterfully carried the reader along with Bennet on her journey through Derbyshire to reconcile with Darcy. As Jones says, "What should be a truth universally acknowledged is that Jane Austen knew exactly what she was doing when she sent her liveliest heroine on the road north to Pemberley."
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The baba is often served at Easter in Poland, with the most extraordinary version – the muslin baba – made from a rich dough of flour, yeast, butter and quite a lot of egg yolks.
Depending on where it's baked, the baba or babka takes on many different forms. In the US, it's a braided brioche-like bread that often has chocolate, nuts or other ingredients mixed in. Europeans might be more familiar with baba au rhum, a desert popular in France and Italy that is soaked in liqueur and served in individual portions.
But in Poland, the word "baba" can refer to a variety of baked goods. Some are made in Bundt pans, while others are loaf shaped. Some are more bread-like and use yeast while others more closely resemble pound cake, like the lemon baba I made for my son's birthday. And some, like the potato babka so popular in Poland's Podlasie region, are savoury instead of sweet.
[jump to recipe]
The typical yeasted baba is often served at Easter and added to the Easter basket brought to church to be blessed, with the most extraordinary version being the muslin baba named for muslin cloth because of its lightness. It's made from a rich dough that contains flour, butter, yeast and a lot of egg yolks – 96 of them for every kilogram of flour.
One food website says to "take a deep breath", as the home version of the muslin baba recipe calls for just 250g of flour, so you will only need 24 egg yolks. By contrast, the Easter baba recipe I usually make contains six egg yolks for 500g of flour (or 12 egg yolks per kilogram), and I already consider that to be a lot.
The original recipe for muslin baba is often credited to the 19th-Century food writer and journalist Lucyna Ćwierczakiewiczowa, an extremely popular and successful cookbook writer at the time. I came across the recipe in two other cookbooks: Jak Gotować (How to Cook) by Maria Disslowa, first published in 1931, and then again in Old Polish Traditions in the Kitchen and at the Table (published in 1979) by Maria Lemnis and Henryk Vitry, both pseudonyms of Polish musicologist Tadeusz Żakiej, which provides fascinating insights into the life and traditions of pre-war Poland.
"The cook, the lady of the house and all the women locked themselves up in the kitchen," Żakiej writes. "They sieved the whitest of flours, mixed hundreds of egg yolks with sugar in clay bowls, dissolved saffron in vodka."
This is not the easiest of recipes. It requires long mixing and rising times and keeping an eye on the oven during baking to prevent burning (not to mention having to crack so many eggs). In other words, making baba was serious business.
Some say that the name "baba" (the word for "woman" in Polish) referred to the fact that the dough was finnicky and moody, "just like a woman's temperament". And men weren't allowed into the kitchen during baking as it was thought their presence could lead to a failed, undercooked cake. While the dough was rising, it would be covered in a linen tablecloth and doors and windows were sealed to prevent drafts. After baking, the baba rested on cushions, and because it was thought to be so sensitive until it fully cooled, everyone would whisper because it was believed loud noises would cause it to collapse. Sometimes, after taking the baba out of the oven, the kitchen would be filled with sobbing: "A burned or collapsed baba was a terrible faux pas," Żakiej writes.
But one question remains, why the extreme amount of egg yolks?
"Egg yolks contain lecithin, which acts as natural leavening agent," says Jacek Malarski, the co-founder of Lukullus, a Warsaw-based bakery that sells the 96-egg yolk baba (or as they call it, Baba 96). "Adding a large amount of yolks results in a tender and fluffy texture, and adding an extreme amount of egg yolks results in an extremely fluffy texture, like a cloud."
Because of their high fat content and emulsifying properties, the egg yolks also make the baba last for longer without having to add any preservatives and give the finished product a beautiful golden-yellow colour.
In the past, serving such a rich pastry was a status symbol. "Fat was more expensive than even the most expensive of meats," says Jarosław Dumanowski, a food historian at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. The recipe also calls for 400g of butter for every kilogram of flour, which acts as carrier for the vanilla flavour. Some households even added saffron, one of the most expensive spices. "These were exotic things from far away so that rich people could distinguish themselves from the rest," Dumanowski says.
More like this:
• Poland's famous gingerbread from Torun
• The dumpling that comforts Poland
• Bebinca: a multi-layered egg yolk cake
When Malarski and his partner, Albert Judycki, decided to offer a baba at Lukullus bakery, they tested several dozens of versions, both old and modern, before deciding on a clear winner: the muslin baba. "The muslin baba was beyond compare. It melted in your mouth and remained fresh for longest," Malarski says. They use bourbon vanilla from Madagascar and cover the Baba 96 in homemade lemon glaze. The muslin baba has been making a regular appearance at Lukullus at Easter ever since.
When I ask Malarski about the popularity of this particular baba despite it being so rich and labour-intensive, he replied: "It's the best. If someone tries it, they never want to go back. They miss it too much."
Muslin baba recipe
Adapted from Old Polish Traditions in the Kitchen and at the Table
Method
Step 1
In a heated bain-marie, beat the egg yolks and sugar (what remains after separating out 1 tsp) until white and fluffy. The original recipe calls for half an hour by hand with a whisk but with an electric mixer, 10 minutes should be enough. Set aside to cool.
Step 2
Heat up the milk until lukewarm and add the yeast, 1 tsp sugar and 1 tsp flour. Let rest until bubbly, around 5 minutes.
Step 3
Add this mixture, with the remaining flour and vanilla bean seeds or vanilla extract to the egg yolks and sugar and beat for another 10 minutes.
Step 4
Add the melted (but not hot) butter, beat for another 10 minutes, then leave the dough to rest in a warm place until doubled in size. The dough will be loose, more like a cake batter than yeast dough. (You won't be able to knead it, not by hand and not with the dough hook. Even the stretch-and-fold technique, typically used when handling wetter doughs, will fail here.)
Step 5
When it has doubled in size, carefully transfer it to a buttered 4-liter-sized Bundt pan.
Step 6
Allow it to rest in a warm spot until the dough has risen out of the form. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 170C/340F.
Step 7
Carefully transfer the baba to the hot oven and bake for 35-40 minutes but keep a good eye on it as the high amount of egg yolk and sugar may cause it to burn easily. A toothpick inserted into the baba should come out clean. Allow to cool.
Remove from the pan, then decorate with lemon glaze (a mix of lemon juice and powdered sugar to taste), or candied orange peel if you wish.
Notes
* If 24 yolks seems excessive to you, you can halve the recipe and make a smaller baba.
** Some people online have suggested decreasing the amount of yeast to 45g.
This story was originally published in 2024.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Gatwick has retained its position as the UK's worst airport for flight delays, as it continues to suffer from air traffic control (ATC) disruption, data shows.
Departures from the West Sussex airport were an average of more than 23 minutes behind schedule in 2024, according to analysis of Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) data.
This is an improvement from nearly 27 minutes during the previous 12 months but is still longer than at any other UK airport.
A Gatwick Airport spokesperson said: "Air traffic control restrictions in other parts of Europe have continued to impact the airport. Together with our airlines, we've put in place a robust plan... to improve on-time performance further in 2025."
Gatwick, which is the UK's second busiest airport, was badly affected by ATC staff shortages across continental Europe in 2024, and suffered the same problem in its own control tower.
Flights from Birmingham Airport had the second poorest punctuality record last year, with an average delay of more than 21 minutes.
In third place was Manchester Airport, with 20 minutes.
Belfast City Airport recorded the best punctuality performance in the UK for the second year in a row, with an average delay per flight of under 12 minutes.
Depending on the distance of the route and length of delay, passengers booked on flights from UK airports which are running behind schedule may be entitled to compensation.
However, ATC issues are considered to be an "extraordinary circumstance", meaning affected passengers are not entitled to compensation.
The Gatwick spokesperson says the airport is "the world's most efficient single-runway airport, with flights departing or arriving every 55 seconds".
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said in February she was prepared to support Gatwick's expansion plan to bring its emergency runway into routine use, if the project is adjusted.
The airport has until Thursday to respond.
A Manchester Airport spokesperson says it is "committed to doing everything in our power to support all our carriers to achieve the best possible on-time departure rates."
Additional reporting by PA Media.
Follow BBC Sussex on Facebook, on X, and on Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp us on 08081 002250.
Introducing a tourism tax in Wales would be a "very risky economic move" which could jeopardise jobs and businesses, the UK's largest holiday let provider has claimed.
Charging people extra for overnight stays would mean "taxing something you really want to encourage", said Ben Spier of Sykes Holiday Cottages.
The Welsh government wants people staying overnight in Wales to pay £1.30 plus VAT per night for hotels, B&Bs and self-catering accommodation, and 80p plus VAT for hostels and campsites, possibly from 2027, if passed by the Senedd.
It said the levy could raise up to £33m per year to support and improve tourism in local areas and that councils would choose whether to charge it.
The Welsh government said it believed "it is fair that everyone contributes towards the services they use".
Tourism employs nearly 160,000 people in Wales, and is thought to be worth between £3bn and £4bn to the economy.
Although children would be exempt from lower cost accommodation like camping, if approved, the levy would also apply to people who live in Wales.
Mr Spier, of Sykes, which has 22,500 UK properties including more than 4,000 in Wales, said: "I don't think a tourism levy necessarily says to visitors, 'you're not welcome'. But I think it's just pure economics. I just think it's a very risky economic move."
He added: "There is a risk of just making Wales that bit less competitive.
"We've seen the largest theme park in Wales close in the last few weeks because of increasing costs... is this really what you want to be putting a tax on?"
He said there was a risk border towns might suffer if people choose areas in England where there was no tax, "only jeopardising those that rely on those tourist jobs".
With customers looking for competitive prices, he said operators might absorb the tax themselves, warning: "You're absolutely risking either that you're increasing prices and that you risk driving tourists away from Wales altogether, or you're hitting the bottom line for operators who may choose to do something else.
"So there's a ripple effect across the economy from local suppliers and contractors to cultural attractions."
Like some others in the sector, he was concerned overnight stays were being targeted, while day-trippers - which some believe put more pressure on local services and contribute much less economically - would not pay the levy.
Laura Tenison owns Wonderful Escapes near Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, where she has 16 bedrooms and specialises in business and wellness retreats.
Close to the border, she can see seven counties on her evening walk - five of them in England.
She said she believed a tourist tax "makes sense" in places with a high tourist concentration in a small area like Edinburgh, where "there's a massive shortage of accommodation".
But Wales was very different, she said, and "we're already seriously struggling to encourage inbound tourists to the UK to visit".
Not opposed to raising money from tourists, she said: "Apparently, it costs £10 to have an Instagram picture at Land's End nowadays.
"Why don't we do that for Tenby High Street or any of the highest peaks of the mountains? If that's the case, where we are absolutely drowning in tourists, we can tax them at point of use.
"But don't make this a national issue that is only going to be negative publicity for those inbound tourists who may or may not be considering Wales, and have a detrimental effect on the industry already struggling to fill their nights."
If a tax is introduced, Ms Tenison said there was "absolutely no way that I am going to impose this on my guests", and her business would "swallow it".
It comes as an industry body has warned thousands of tourism jobs could be lost in Wales without changes to holiday let rules.
Dr Linda Osti, senior lecturer in tourism management at Bangor Business School, prepared a report for the Welsh government and studied five areas in the world operating a levy.
Venice recently introduced an entrance tax for day visitors to counter over-tourism at peak times of the season.
She said she believed a levy in specific areas - rather than councils imposing it county-wide - would work in Wales.
"We cannot say that the same recipe works for every single destination in Gwynedd, and so it's the same talking about south or south west Wales," she said.
"The same recipe cannot work so there is a need to be more tailored to different tourism destinations."
She agreed a tourism tax might initially see a drop in visitor numbers in some areas, but long-term numbers could recover if tax revenue is used to improve services for visitors.
"I think the doors are open," she said, adding: "It's just about implementing it in the correct way and I think Wales has the potential to let it work."
Steven Hesketh, director of Hotel Wrexham in Holt, is fully behind a tourism levy in Wales, but one that is managed by the industry.
He is chief executive of Savvy Hotels group and vice chairman of the Liverpool Accommodation Business Improvement District (BID).
The BID sees hoteliers and other members paying into a pot which is used to invest in improving experiences and attracting large events and more visitors.
But they were balloting to switch to a new model where visitors would pay £2 plus VAT per hotel room, within a designated area of the city. The BID board would then decide where to invest.
He said he believed a similar model would be best for Wales.
"I think most businesses have that general feeling that when money goes into the big conglomerate that is the government or local council, that maybe you don't see every pound that goes into there, because it can be used for other necessary funds," he added.
"That's not a criticism of local councils or government, but actually for this particular fund we want total transparency, total responsibility, of where every penny goes.
"Those at the forefront of the industry... are best placed to know where to spend that money."
A controversial trial to stop tourist coaches parking in inappropriate areas in a popular village is beginning this Easter.
Residents in Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds have been complaining that the area "has become "choked" by traffic since a private car park stopped accepting coaches in 2023.
Ahead of the trial start date, local business owners have said they hope the scheme will "give some respite to residents".
Some residents and coach drivers have spoken out against the trial parking arrangements but a spokesperson for Gloucestershire County Council said it will make changes as required to ensure the best possible results.
Residents, visitors and operators can share feedback with the village parish council, the spokesperson added.
The trial will see coaches dropping off and collecting tourists from Meadow Way, a 10-minute walk from the village centre, before parking at a nearby business park for the day.
Andrew Lund-Yates, owner of the Old New Inn and secretary of the Bourton Business Network, said getting coach parking right was "crucial".
He said the removal of designated parking had hit businesses and locals alike.
"It wasn't ideal for residents, it wasn't ideal for passengers and we did see a drop in the number of coaches coming into the village," Mr Lund-Yates said.
He said: "It's important that everybody should be encouraged to be out in this part of the world.
"It's a lovely place and we're fortunate enough to live here."
He said businesses hope the trial "gives some respite to residents, who saw a number of coaches dropping off and turning round inappropriately last year".
Alex Chutter, area director for Pulhams & Sons Coaches, which is based in the village, said he hoped the trial will be a "decent compromise" for all and prevent "confusion" among coach drivers who have been unable to park safely.
"I can guarantee that none of them set out in order to frustrate residents, but I understand how frustrations may have kind of developed over the summer period.
"Once we've got this plan in place, hopefully coach operators will know what's expected of them."
One of the concerns about the parking plans is that coaches might block emergency vehicles accessing a care home.
In February, the manager of Jubilee Lodge care home wrote to the parish council, warning that people might die as a result of the parking trial.
Follow BBC Gloucestershire on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.
Concerns trespassers may enter an old theme park site and try filming themselves on disused rides have prompted calls for it to be sold quickly.
Social media footage has shown people wandering around Oakwood, near Narberth, Pembrokeshire, since it closed last month.
Tory MS Sam Kurtz wants a "quick sale", saying the longer it stays empty, the chances of "other problems occurring" increase.
Owner Aspro Parks, which closed Oakwood citing a drop in visitor numbers, has been asked to comment.
Oakwood opened in 1987, and was adored by generations of Welsh children, with rides including the world-renowned rollercoaster Megafobia, which operated from 1996.
But Aspro confirmed at the start of March that Oakwood Theme Park would not reopen for the 2025 season, saying "future investment is unsustainable".
Mr Kurtz, the MS for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, wants a quick plan for a new future, believing the longer the site stays closed, the more issues this will create.
"That's a risk to their [trespassers'] health and safety, but also if this is a site that deteriorates, then we potentially lose the opportunity for a quick sale and turnaround to get this site back up and running, whatever that might be in the future," he said.
"I really want to see Aspro working with everybody that's available including the Welsh government, myself and other businesses, and potential buyers to see if we can get a quick sale of this asset.
"It's such a great asset."
Dyfed-Powys Police said it was "aware of reports of persons gaining entry to Oakwood" and had received a number of calls "indicating trespassing and potential crimes".
Cardiff University Professor of Economics Calvin Jones said it was "fairly unlikely" a new operator would be interested in taking over the Oakwood site as a theme park.
"If an established operator, who's already invested tens of millions in the site over the last decade or so can't make it work, then it's unlikely a new entrant could make it work," he said.
"I think we have seen some new theme and activity developments in Wales but they've been much narrower in the last few years.
"Things like zipwires and underground trampolines and mountain biking, where we see people using the topography of Wales in interesting and innovative ways."
Prof Jones said the future of the site was dependant on what kind of use the local planning authority would allow.
"It'll very much depend on planning permission," he said.
"I don't think it'll be a theme park. It may be some kind of recreational use, depending on the view of the planning bodies.
"It may be something very different."
Bluestone National Park Resort, which employs 700 people, is adjacent to Oakwood, but a spokesperson had declined to comment on whether it would be interested in purchasing the site.
Prof Jones said the holiday resort had previously expanded in a considered and "careful" way.
"I suspect Bluestone would look on this with a fair bit of trepidation unless the land is available cheaply," he added.
"I can't imagine we'll see anything quick happening with the land if Bluestone were to take it."
Mr Kurtz said "plenty of businesses" had been in touch with him expressing an interest in purchasing the former theme park.
He added: "This is a bit of a plea to the parent company - let's work together and try and get going to find a buyer for this site.
"I've not yet heard from them. I really wish they get back in touch with me."
The Welsh government said it "continues to engage" with the owner of the site.
"We recognise the significant value the former Oakwood site holds for locals and visitors, and are hopeful a buyer will come forward to ensure its continued contribution to the local economy and tourism industry," a spokesperson said.
Pembrokeshire council confirmed it had not held any discussions with Aspro Parks.
Aspro did not respond to enquiries from BBC Wales.
Long associated with swim-up bars and endless beach time, all-inclusive resorts are rewriting the rules to meet the changing expectations of post-pandemic travellers.
When international travel resumed following the easing of Covid-19-related restrictions in 2022, Gregor Nassief, owner of Dominica's Fort Young Hotel and Dive Resort, was preparing for what many were calling the era of "revenge travel". With demand surging for all-inclusive holidays, he considered launching simple, one-stop-shop holiday packages. But he quickly realised that Dominica – nicknamed the "Nature Island of the Caribbean" – is not your typical beach destination.
"Travellers who come here don't want to do the fly-and-flop, where you sit at the beach and do nothing else," says Nassief. "People come here to explore Dominica. It would be impossible for an all-inclusive offering to succeed here if we don't include the island."
Nassief's realisation is part of a broader shift in resort travel. Long associated with swim-up-bars, buffets and endless beach time, all-inclusive resorts are adapting to meet the changing expectations of post-pandemic travellers. Many now crave both ease and adventure, seeking a frictionless stay with access to meaningful local experiences. From guided hikes and cultural outings to restaurant dinners and self-drive excursions, the all-inclusive model is expanding to include more of the surrounding destination. The shift, which began in earnest around 2022, continues to evolve in 2025 as more travellers prioritise connection, authenticity and exploration – all from the comfort of a five-star resort.
Nassief's "island inclusive" package launched in January 2022, offering guests not only full board and airport transfers, but a daily land or sea group excursion such as a trek to the spectacular waterfalls at Trafalgar Falls or a guided visit to lively Roseau Market. Despite requiring a five-night minimum booking and a significant upcharge (the island-inclusive package is $456 per person per night based on double occupancy, while the room-only rate starts at $302 a night), the programme now accounts for 30% of the hotel's all-inclusive leisure bookings.
A similar model drew Manila-based lawyer Kathrina Sadsad-Tamesis to Nay Palad Hideaway on Siargao, a recently trendy island in south-eastern Philippines, in 2024. With rates starting at $900 per person per night, a stay at the luxury resort includes made-to-order meals, massages and private off-property excursions like surfing classes, paddleboarding along nearby mangroves or visiting the picturesque Magpupungko rock pools.
"I like the fact that you don't need to check prices once you're there," Sadsad-Tamesis says, adding that she would love to see more resorts offering similar packages that build outings into their rate. To her, it encourages a more active trip. "You don't need to think about what you are going to eat, you don't have to plan your activities, because they planned it all for you.
"Sometimes planning is the hardest part," she adds, "so if the resort is already including activities, it is easier to participate."
This blend of ease and engagement appeals to many travellers. A'Rielle Thomas, a family and honeymoons specialist at Fora Travel, estimates that 50% of her all-inclusive clients are now looking for experiences beyond the resort gates. "They don't want just a flop-and-stop vacation. They want to interact with locals and with the destination," she says. Thomas believes that it's an opportunity for resorts to reimagine the guest experience – and tap into a new demographic of travellers who want the best of both worlds: a great beach resort and an opportunity for adventure.
"This is a blind spot for many resorts, because for a long time, getting guests offsite hasn't been their focus," she explains. "If I'm staying at a resort but they offer a transfer and a guide to see Chichén Itzá, that's a totally different value proposition and will be more enticing to someone who might not want to sit at a beach the whole time."
But the excursions don't have to be as involved as a visit to a historical site or a day of island hopping. For some, a change of scenery for a meal could be enough, which is why Sandals launched their Island Inclusive dining programme in 2022 at Sandals Royal Curaçao. The initiative offers guests in select room categories dinner at a local restaurant, complete with transfers and a $250 dining credit. According to Jessica Shannon, chief experience officer at Sandals, this has been a wildly popular perk with a vast majority of qualifying guests taking advantage. The company now plans to bring the activation to the entire Sandals portfolio of 17 resorts.
Off-site meals are just one part of the Local Discovery initiative at Ikos Resorts, which operates seven hotels in Mediterranean hotspots like the island of Kos and the historic city of Marbella. Introduced in 2015, the initiative encourages guests to explore some of Europe's most beautiful regions for no extra cost. In addition to lunches or dinners at seafood taverns and family-owned eateries, visitors can also borrow a car for independent rides through the Costa del Sol or Mallorca's hilly interior. The Museum of Asian Art on Corfu, Pablo Picasso Museum in Marbella and Akrani winery on Kos are just some of the venues included in the brand's Culture Pass programme, which offers Ikos guests free access.
More like this:
• The 25 best places to travel in 2025
• The seven travel trends that will shape 2025
• The biggest travel trend for 2025? Staying away longer
Meanwhile, in 2023 Paradisus by Meliá unveiled their "Destination-Inclusive concept" for guests staying in higher rooms categories, which adds off-resort experiences to the all-in packages at many of their resort locations, from Los Cabos, Mexico, to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic and Gran Canaria in Spain. At Paradisus Palma Real Golf & Spa Resort, a guest might be whisked away on a catamaran to practice yoga on an unspoiled beach. At Paradisus by Meliá Gran Canaria, meanwhile, staying in a superior room can include a guided hike around Roque Nublo or a visit to the Banana Museum.
According to Paula Forero, general manager of Paradisus Palma Real, hoteliers are learning that the needs of today's travellers – even those who are booking all-inclusives – have shifted as a result not just of the pandemic but also of social media. Now that travellers can easily consume content about the destinations of their upcoming vacation, they're feeling more intrepid, not wanting to miss out on the sights and sounds of the places they're scouting on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
"Before, travellers were OK with spending seven days at a hotel, resting, enjoying, eating, not thinking," Forero explains. "Now, no. Guests are more curious, because they have access to more information. They want more experiences, more adventures."
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Once emptied of wildlife, South Africa's Babanango Game Reserve is now home to the Big Five – thanks to a bold rewilding project led by Zulu communities and global conservationists.
Daybreak filters through the fever trees and umbrella thorns of South Africa's White Umfolozi River Valley, splintering orange light across a puckered grassland teeming with newly arrived wildlife. Bumping atop rough roads in an open-sided safari vehicle is field guide Eduan Balt, who's "reading the bush newspaper" – studying fresh prints on dirt trails for signs of apex predators.
Balt drives along some of the valley's 600km of roads – many built in recent years – passing bomas (enclosures) holding quarantined buffalo and a pond where hippos with giant jowls yawn into the morning air. The smell of wild anise wafts over the vehicle as it careens toward the valley floor. Then, suddenly, a lioness darts across the golden grassland to our left, muscling her way to a fallen tree where three kitten-like cubs bound into view.
These are the first lions born in this part of KwaZulu-Natal province in at least 150 years. Lions, like most native animals, became locally extinct in the decades following the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, after which the British Empire gained control of the region, turning it into farmland. Zulu communities got large swathes of it back during the land reforms that followed the fall of apartheid. But after decades of cattle grazing and illicit hunting, the area was largely depleted of wildlife.
That changed starting in 2018, thanks to an innovative collaboration between philanthropic investors, local NGOs and three Zulu community trusts, who leased lands to create one of the most ambitious rewilding projects in South Africa in more than a decade. The 20,000-hectare Babanango Game Reserve has welcomed nearly 4,000 medium- to large-sized animals since the process of game translocation – and remediating landscapes – began, in earnest, five years ago. Many, like the lions, have reproduced. So, there are now about 5,000 wild animals roaming a landscape they were largely absent from for more than a century.
German philanthropists Barbara and Hellmuth Weisser invested nearly 1 billion rand (£42.5m) to rewild these animals. They also bankrolled the tourist infrastructure that should support Babanango's future operational costs. "I don't know of anyone else doing something quite like this," Hellmuth tells me over dinner at the Zulu Rock Lodge, one of four safari lodges now spread across the park.
The 77-year-old – a former energy executive and keen photographer – has been visiting southern Africa since the 1980s. In retirement, he and his wife wanted to find a place for a park that would uplift communities while restoring biodiversity. "The problem for us is that there was no supermarket for finding projects," he recalls.
Babanango is south of Kruger National Park in a poorer region of South Africa closer to Durban than Johannesburg that wasn't historically a safari destination. It appeared on Hellmuth's radar only because the NGO Conservation Outcomes had identified a community trust, Emcakwini, looking for a partner to lease its unpopulated lands.
Hellmuth visited Babanango in 2017 and says he fell in love with its wild topography, including the boulder-strewn hills that tumble down 700m from our hilltop perch at Zulu Rock. "We didn't want to buy somewhere where there was an existing project that had been run into the ground," he recalls. "When we got here, we found a landscape that was extremely interesting."
In 2018, the Weissers signed a contract with the Emcakwini Community Trust. Two smaller neighbouring trusts, Esibongweni and Kwa Ngono, came onboard in 2019 and 2020 respectively. All told, about three-fourths of the game reserve is now leased from these communities, who earn a rental fee and share ownership of the animals. The community trusts will also receive 25% of park profits when the project becomes solvent.
Babanango transformed into a Big Five game reserve in record time, but the process was not without its challenges. First, there was the 2,600 cows, 300 goats and 35 donkeys that the community trusts promised to remove from the land; something that didn't happen for more than three years. Then, in 2022, finally free of livestock, the park could complete its 81km perimeter fence, though much of what was initially laid was cut by ranchers and poachers. A majority of the wild animals arrived beginning in late 2022.
"It was very important, becoming a nature reserve, that we have species that were endemic to the area," explains Chris Galliers, conservation manager at Conservation Outcomes, which consulted on the project. "A number of species were completely removed from the system; others like kudu, bushbucks and warthogs were still there in low numbers, but we needed to top them up for genetic purposes."
A few leopards roamed the land, too. Yet, rhinos, buffalo and lions were all reintroduced between May 2022 and March 2023. Elephants were the last of the Big Five to arrive in June 2023. "It was a big milestone," says Galliers. "It symbolised that everything we had to do to get to that point had been done correctly."
All rewilded animals live in bomas for several months before release to control for diseases such as foot-and-mouth. Most come from similar habitats to ensure they'll adapt and climatise as quickly as possible. There's also intense monitoring to ensure the balance of predator and prey remains intact. Efforts to discourage poaching include dehorning the rhinos (a procedure that conservationists use to increase the species' survival rates), which I spot my third day at Babanango behind fanning candelabra trees.
Galliers is the first to acknowledge that the park is a massive disrupter for the region. "People have, for a large part of the past 200 years, been trying to get rid of these animals because of the threats they posed," he says. "Now, the animals are sitting on their doorsteps again. So, it's quite a thing to try and understand."
On my fourth and final day, I travel beyond the fence line, past browned fields trampled by cattle, to the village of Denny Dalton. Here, I meet with Thina Nyathi, manager of the African Habitat Conservancy Foundation (AHC), a registered public benefit organisation that supports Babanango with its community development work.
More like this:
• Zimbabwe's stunning 80km safari train
• The African elephant in the room: Is there such a thing as guilt-free safari?
• The vital tradition of naming baby gorillas
Nyathi, who was born in KwaZulu-Natal and is a native Zulu speaker, shows me one of the 17 solar-powered boreholes that AHC built to bring running water to neighbouring communities. She also tells me about AHC's efforts to remove invasive plants, such as black wattles, which suck up the region's groundwater. "We see the direct impact this has on water scarcity because there are streams that were not flowing that, all of the sudden, are flowing again," she explains.
The foundation works with communities within a 10km radius of Babanango's fence line on everything from conservation education to agricultural support. It also runs vocational training, including classes on ceramics and Zulu beadwork so that the lodges in Babanango can sell crafts that uplift local artisans. "It's about teaching someone to fish, and not just giving them the fish," Nyathi says. "Working together means we also understand what their challenges are and support them to get to a point where they no longer need our help."
About 75% of the staff at Babanango comes from the surrounding communities, and for many, it's their first salaried employment. Dudu Ngcobo, who works as part of the park's ecological restoration team, sent her two daughters to university, which for Nyathi demonstrates the ripple effects of higher-paying job opportunities.
The park hires locally for short-term projects, such as land rehabilitation, which helps build a greater understanding of the reserve's potential paybacks and long-term impact. The hope is that Babanango can become a kind a blueprint for other conservation areas on locally owned landscapes. "Done right, we are able to have quite a big benefit on the environment," Nyathi says, "but also the communities that surround it."
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
She jets around the world for her high-profile beauty career, but her heart is in Seoul. Here are her top K-beauty experiences in town, from face lasers to body scrubs.
For Chriselle Lim – style guru, digital creator and creative director of PHLUR fragrances – self-care is a way of life. Especially when she visits South Korea, the birthplace of the viral "K-beauty"– beloved for its multi-layer "glass skin" skincare regimens and high-tech sun creams.
"Beauty and self-care in Korea is a daily thing," says the fresh-faced and flawlessly stylish Lim, who spent her formative years in the glamorous South Korean capital and returns with her daughters each year. "It's not about hitting a certain age and then taking care of your skin. You just do it since you're a very young girl. As we're trying to reverse [sun damage] here in the States, in Korea, the women have been taught to protect themselves early on. We were always embarrassed about our moms taking us around in their crazy massive sun hats and their gloves. But now I get it. I've become that lady."
While innovative Korean products like collagen sheet masks continue to dominate the international market, Korea is also seeing an uptick in beauty tourism. Consumers can visit "skin clinics" for medical aesthetic treatments powered by ultra-modern Korean technologies; often not yet approved by the FDA. Adding to the appeal, patients can get several treatments – from Botox to Titanium skin lifting to liquid laser sun spot removal – in one sitting with jaw-dropping transformations and little downtime – compared to Western protocols, which require patients wait 28 days between treatments.
"I have a lot of followers that ask me for tips and where to go," says Lim. "It makes a lot of sense. One, the technology is there. And two, it's so much cheaper [than the US], at least by five times. The flight there, renting an Airbnb or a hotel; it actually makes a lot of sense because you are saving money in the long run."
Not that Lim ever needs a reason to visit Seoul. "It's a fast-paced city that is extremely clean, chic, sophisticated," she says. "Just imagine fashion and art and beauty all combined in one. It's one of those places I go whenever I'm feeling like I need inspiration."
Here is Lim's go-to plan for a self-care holiday in Seoul.
1. Best skin clinic: Eun Skin Clinic
Gangnam, the stylish district made world-famous by a certain 2012 K-pop song, is considered Seoul's K-beauty and medical tourism hot spot – and it's where Lim's self-care holidays start. First stop: Eun Skin Clinic in the affluent Cheongdam neighbourhood, south of the Han River.
"They do incredible lasers, the best I've experienced," says Lim. "They speak really good English there, which is a big make or break for me because I'm not fluent in Korean. And because [the doctor] deals with a lot of English-speaking people, I think she realises that a lot of them are here to explore and have fun, so she doesn't want to be so aggressive with their face. They do a very customised approach."
Korean skin lasers, notes Lim, are so gentle they can even be layered on top of each other to compound their transformative effects.
"It's very, very gentle," says Lim of her most recent visit. "I did something called Ruby toning; helps with even skin tone and brightening. And there's another laser that I did called MeDioStar®, which is brightening and tightening. And then on top of that, I did PRP [platelet-rich plasma treatment]. And then I also did microneedling and then salmon DNA. It takes maybe an hour and a half to do."
She cautions: "The next day, if you get five to eight treatments, your skin will be slightly bruised, but it goes away within, I would say, 48 hours. [These lasers are] effective on the deeper surface level, but on the topical level, you can't really tell that you've gotten anything done… But then after I went home, and people were like, 'Wait, did you, did you do something to your face? ' And you're like, 'Okay, I think it's kicking in'."
Lim recommends visitors hit skin clinics at the beginning of their trip – "first thing when they land… because these clinics like to check up on you after three-to-five days. During that downtime, you could do coffee and check out some incredible museums and do some shopping."
Website:
www.eunskin.co.kr/
Address: 88-37 Cheongdam-dong, Gangnam District, Seoul
Phone: +
82 2 546 3322
Instagram: @eunskinclinic/
2. Best relaxing body treatment: Gogyeol
As part of her downtime from skin procedures, Lim also likes to indulge in relaxing body treatments.
"There's this spa called Gogyeol," says Lim. "I love this place to reset my body. They do a traditional Korean massage and scrub."
Like Eun Skin Clinic, Spa Gogyeol is found in Cheongdam; a two-minute walk from the Gangnam-Gu Office metro station. Lim notes that Spa Gogyeol is a not a jjimjilbang (a public Korean bathhouse). "A lot of people love Korean bathhouses [because] they do this intensive scrub where they literally scrub off all the dead cells off your skin and it just comes purging off your body. It's pretty disgusting. But [Spa Gogyeol does] that treatment in a private setting, so you can get the body scrub, the upgrade massage and a detox wrap. They literally scrub off every dead skin cell on your body, and it just feels so soft. You feel like you're floating."
Spa Gogyeol also offers a rich menu of holistic medical treatments, working with the body's five Tae energies. "In Korean health, a lot of it is about balance," says Lim. "So they'll really analyse your body to see what they need to focus on, and they'll customise it for you.
"I think a lot of people that are on holiday just want to relax," she adds. "A lot of tired mamas. It's a very calming space."
Website:
https://spa-gogyeol.com/
Address: 3F&4F, 13, Seolleung-ro 132-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Phone: +82 10-7682-1297
Instagram: @spa_gogyeol
3. Best overall spa: The Trinity Spa
Where Eun Skin Clinic is expressly high tech and Spa Gogyeol takes a holistic approach, Lim's next spa pick – Trinity Spa in Seoul's Yongsan District – is all about pampering and beautification.
"It's a little tricky with Trinity spa because their English isn't the best," says Lim. "But I think they're working on it. They're more of a general spa; that's why I feel okay recommending it. They do everything from amazing facials, really focussing on lifting the face and focussing on your lines, and brightening and tightening to body contouring, massages. They cover it all."
Trinity Spa's array of facial and body treatments toe the line between technology and relief – like the Real Jade Stone V-line jaw contour treatment or the lymphatic drainage leg massages – all administered in private guest rooms with cushy spa beds designed for ultimate relaxation.
"It's just a very relaxing experience for someone that wants a general spa experience," says Lim.
Website:
www.trinityspa.co.kr/
Address: 3rd floor, Taeseok Building 116 Dokseodang-ro, Hannam-dong, Yongsan District, Seoul
Phone: +82-2-420-0797
Instagram:
@the_trinityspa_official/
4. Best beauty shopping: Amorepacific Headquarters, Sulwhasoo flagship and Olive Young
The Korean skincare craze began in the early 2010s; global cosmetic purveyor Sephora's website now features a K-beauty section and Lim herself often provides K-beauty product recommendations on social media.
So when in Korea, shop as the Koreans do.
"Everyone needs to go to Amorepacific World Headquarters," declares Lim. Known as the inventor of the cushion foundation, Amorepacific now also owns many popular Korean skincare companies including Sulwhasoo, Innisfree, Cosrx and Laneige. "It's open to the public, which a lot of people don't know," says Lim. "In their lobby, you can get your face scanned; a lot of people go there to get their cushion foundation customised… they have a beauty store in their lobby, so you can experience all of their brands at once. [There's also] an interactive Amorepacific store called AMORE Seongsu. It's in this warehouse-y cement building; it's like you're walking through a store, but with a bathroom installation in front of you while you try things. Everything is technology-driven; you can get customised lip treatments, customised foundation. I could spend hours there."
Lim adds: "There's also the Sulwhasoo flagship store, which is just beautiful in itself."
Sulwhasoo, a luxury skin line, is headquartered in Seoul's upscale shopping district Sinsa-dong, in a modular structure channelling a golden lantern. "The shopping is great, and it looks like you're entering an installation," says Lim. "It has two spas. You could have, like, a foot scrub [or] a therapist with the singing bowl around your abdomen."
Lim also enjoys shopping for her favourite Korean brands at Olive Young. "It's the Sephora of Korea," she says. "They're on every corner. But the key thing is to know which one to go to. There's one in Myeongdong, which is the largest. Then the newest one is in Seongsu and it's a lot more tech-driven." Apart from beauty shopping, the five-storey Olive Young in Seongsu houses a cafe and a skin and scalp clinic as well as professional makeup services and a "trend pod" showroom. "Olive Young can be slightly outdated depending which one you go to," says Lim. "But this one feels like the future of what Olive Young will be."
Website:
https://www.apgroup.com/int/en/our-culture/amorepacific-space/amorepacific-headquarters/amorepacific-headquarters.html (Amorepacific World Headquarters)
Address: 100 Hangang-daero, Yongsan District, Seoul
Phone: +82-2-604-05114
Instagram:
@amorepacificgroup.official/
Website:
https://www.amoremall.com/kr/ko/store/display?storeCode=001 (Amorepacific Seongsu)
Address: 7 Achasan-ro 11-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul
Phone: +82-2-469-8600
Website:
https://www.sulwhasoo.com/int/en/flagship/dosan/index.html (Sulwhasoo flagship)
Address: 18 Dosan-daero 45-gil, Sinsa-dong, Gangnam District, Seoul
Phone: +82 2-541-9270
Instagram:
@sulwhasoo.official/
Website:
https://global.oliveyoung.com/ (Olive Young Seongsu)
Address: 300-65 Seongsu-dong 2(i)-ga, Seongdong-gu, SeoulPhone: +82 2-461-5290
Instagram: @oliveyoung_global/
5. Best after a day of beauty: ABYBOM in Gangnam and Nudake Café
To cap off a day of beauty, Lim heads straight for the hair salon. "This is actually quite common in Korea," she says. "After you get all your skin treatments, you go get your hair done."
Lim favours ABYBOM, a massive, three-storey salon on Seolleung-ro that boasts a client roster of Korean celebs like Sandara Park. "A lot of people that go to events get the full service of hair and makeup done," says Lim. "They do amazing cuts. They style, they detoxify your scalp, if needed. They're incredible."
Afterwards, Lim always likes to visit a café. "Café life in Korea is so major," she says. "Between cafés and skin, you will never see the end of day." One of her favourite stops is inside the Dosan Park Gentle Monster branch; 35 minutes outside of Seoul proper. "Gentle Monster is a sunglass brand; they have the coolest shops ever," says Lim. "It's like an art installation. Then downstairs, there is a cafe called Nudake; they have conceptual coffees and baked goods."
Nudake Café proffers its coffees and whimsical pastries on stark countertops, like modern art displays. "It sounds so ridiculous, but they have these tiny, tiny, tiny, miniature croissants," says Lim. "They're literally the size of your pinky nail bed, but it's so good, and it's just so fun to take a photo with. [And] they have incredible coffee. It's actually quite hard to find non-dairy milks, but they have non-dairy milk there. So that's personally the reason why I like to go to that café, to just get my lattes without dairy milk."
"There's a lot of things that we have been doing in Korea that I feel like the world is finally noticing," adds Lim. "It's something that I'm very proud of."
Website:
www.abybom.com/
Address: 3
층
, 40 Seolleung-ro 152-gil, Gangnam District, Seoul
Phone: + 82-2-516-8765
Instagram:
@abybom__official/reels/
Website:
https://nudake.com/en
Address: 26 Seongsui-ro 7-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul
Phone: +82-7-041-284408
Instagram:
@nu_dake/
BBC Travel's The SpeciaList is a series of guides to popular and emerging destinations around the world, as seen through the eyes of local experts and tastemakers.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Chef Ruben Bondì knows that Rome's Jewish restaurants serve some of the best food in the city. Here are his picks in the historic Jewish quarter.
In 2025, millions of pilgrims and tourists are flocking to Rome and the Vatican City, the historic seat of the Catholic Church, in honour of the Jubilee year. But less than a mile from St Peter's Basilica, Europe's oldest Jewish community is thriving – and continuing a rich culinary tradition dating back to when Jews first settled in Rome in the 2nd Century BCE.
For Ruben Bondì, an influencer chef and member of the city's Jewish community, the tradizione giudaico-romanesca (Judaeo-Roman tradition) is not just a subset of Roman cuisine; it's one of its cornerstones.
"Jewish cuisine is the true Roman cuisine," says Bondì, famed for filming his cooking videos on his balcony in Rome's Monteverde neighbourhood. "Our food is very poor and simple. But it's incredibly flavourful."
Developed over the centuries and influenced by waves of Sephardic migration when Jews were exiled from Spain and Portugal over the 15th and 16th Centuries, Roman Jewish dishes are often fried and typically feature almonds, artichokes, sour cherries, cod and preserved fish. Among these are some of the Eternal City's most beloved recipes – expressly kosher yet iconic throughout largely Catholic Italy – from carciofi alla giudia (fried artichokes) to stracotto (braised pot roast). Today, they can be savoured in the string of Roman Jewish restaurants clustered near the southern banks of the Tiber River, in what was once the city's Jewish ghetto.
"Every family has their own recipe, their own way of making a dish," Bondì says. "Food is a strong presence in my home. Every Friday, before Shabbat, my grandmother would prepare the same thing – typical [Jewish] dishes like concia di zucchine [marinated fried courgettes] and abbacchio [roasted lamb] with potatoes."
But behind the delicious recipes and family traditions is a tragic history. As a target of persecution throughout history – from 1st Century CE purges by Roman emperors Tiberius and Claudius to almost three centuries of ghetto confinement under Papal rule from 1555 to 1815 – Roman Jewish identity was forged in response to oppression, and its food is no exception.
"In the ghetto, Jews were forbidden from trading, and this influenced many of our dishes," Bondì says. "Like how ricotta cheese is hidden in our tarts [so] the Pope's Guards wouldn't notice. Or our famous fish soup [brodo di pesce] made of sardines, was because we weren't allowed to buy prized fish, only anchovies and sardines."
Today, Rome's former ghetto – sandwiched between heavily touristed landmarks like the Roman Forum and Campo de' Fiori marketplace – is a picturesque, lively Jewish quarter of meandering cobblestone alleyways, bakeries and restaurants, but it still emanates the joy and pain of its roots.
Here are Bondì's top ways to savour Rome's hidden Jewish soul.
1. Best for a quintessential Jewish Roman experience: Ba'Ghetto
Located at the Jewish quarter's heart, near the Tempio Maggiore synagogue and Porticus Octaviae – the 1st-Century BCE ruins of an ancient Roman portico that eventually became a fish market, and the neighbourhood's symbol – Ba'Ghetto is just about as quintessentially Judaeo-Roman as it gets... with a twist.
"They do a mix of cuisines, a bit of everything," Bondì says. "Jewish Roman, of course, but also Middle Eastern and Arab Israeli food."
Among its Roman Jewish staples is carciofi alla giudia – a delicacy that balances both freshness and fried heartiness.
The restaurant's menu features Middle Eastern and North African Mizrahi dishes, like hummus, falafel, couscous, Tunisian binik, tabbouleh, lahmacun, kebab and baklava, as well as kosher takes on pork-based Roman pasta recipes like spaghetti alla carbonara and bucatini all'amatriciana, made with dried beef.
"Their aim is to unite these [foreign] cuisines with the Jewish Roman tradition," Bondì says.
Ba'Ghetto, which opened in 2007 and abides by strict kosher rules, now has branches in Venice, Florence and Milan. Its main restaurant – a chic, minimalist eatery covered in Hebrew inscriptions and black-and-white pictures – does not serve any milk-based products, preparing its desserts with vegan alternatives. For dairy delicacies and desserts, you can try the nearby Ba'Ghetto Milky.
Website: https://www.baghetto.com
Address: Via del Portico D'Ottavia, 57, 00186 / Via del Portico D'Ottavia 2/A (Ba'Ghetto Milky)Phone: +39 06 9674 0389 / 06 6830 0077 (Ba'Ghetto Milky)
Instagram: @baghettorestaurants/
2. Best on the go: Rosetteria Renato al Ghetto
Roman food is simple and unfussy by nature and its Jewish variant is no exception; often best savoured on the go.
So when local institution Renato al Ghetto – where Bondì worked as a waiter in his younger days – realised it could replicate its success with street food, its hole-in-the-wall "Rosetteria" was opened, serving the best of the Roman Jewish tradition in a bun.
"Rosette are a type of Roman bap," Bondì says, referring to the popular rosebud-shaped bread with a distinctively crusty exterior and soft, fluffy heart; the perfect vehicle for hearty sandwich fillings. "I'd recommend beef stracotto or Roman artichokes."
Among the other sandwich topping options at the takeout spot, squeezed between the neighbourhood's multitude of restaurants, are the tomato-braised chicken alla cacciatora, beef jerky, lemon escalope and even a sweet soy chocolate variant, all of which come in under €12 (£10).
"It's very good," Bondì says. "I advise it for anyone who wants a quick meal."
Address: Via di S. Maria del Pianto, 63, 00186
Phone: +39 338 859 3395
Instagram: @rosetteria_renato_al_ghetto
3. Best for meat dishes: BellaCarne
"Meat is a strong part of our culinary tradition," Ruben says. "And for meat lovers, I recommend BellaCarne."
Located a mere block from the ruins of the Porticus Octaviae, the restaurant's name itself is particularly promising – translating literally to "Beautiful Meat" – and its dishes definitely live up to expectations.
"I can especially vouch for their grilled meats," Bondì says, which include scottadito lamb and veal chops.
But while meat in all its forms – roast, fried, stewed and braised – is the undeniable star, it isn't the only thing worth ordering.
"They have an excellent vegan crostata [tart] for dessert," Bondì says, made with almond paste and sour cherries.
Roman Jewish food may be humble by nature, but BellaCarne offers a decidedly refined dining experience, set in a chic, wood-panelled interior. As with other restaurants in the area, BellaCarne has also dedicated itself to street food, and you can find take-out options and lunchboxes at their grab-and-go spot, BellaCarne Street Food.
Website:
https://www.bellacarne.it
Address: Via del Portico d'Ottavia, 51, 00186
Phone: +39 06 683 3104
Instagram:
@bellacarne/
4. Best for home cooking: Casalino Osteria Kosher
The dishes of Roman cuisine are famous throughout Italy for being hearty and expressly casereccio – homestyle, homemade.
Casalino, whose name evokes the warmth of the Italian lunch table, promises a cosy dining experience, and its oak floorings and earthy colours create an inviting ambiance.
"It's hearty, homey Jewish Roman food," Bondì says.
The restaurant was opened by the Zarfati family in 2021, after the opening of their successful Dolce Kosher bakery, and follows the recipes of the household matriarch, nonna Letizia.
Among its dishes are distinctive spins on local classics, such as salt-cured cod with tomatoes, pine nuts and raisins; butter and truffle tonnarelli pasta; and the must-have carciofi alla giudia. Bondì emphatically recommends Casalino's roasts, but notes that the Zarfati family tightly guards the recipe.
"It's a secret," he says.
Website: https://casalinoosteriakosher.it
Address: Via del Portico d'Ottavia, 1e, 00186
Phone number: +39 06 7978 1514
Instagram: @casalino.osteriakosher/
5. Best for non-kosher, plant-forward dishes: Il Giardino Romano
While most of the quarter's restaurants follow kosher food rules (including forbidding pork and the preparation of meat and dairy products together), Il Giardino Romano has adapted the Roman Jewish culinary tradition for a secular palate.
"It's the only Roman Jewish restaurant that isn't kosher," Bondì says.
As its name suggests, Il Giardino Romano ("The Roman Garden") has a green thumb – its menu focuses heavily on vegetables, from chicory and courgettes to artichokes, which Bondì calls the restaurant's speciality.
The mighty artichoke is a recurring character in many of the restaurant's takes on traditional Italian and Roman Jewish dishes that don't typically warrant its use – from fettuccine alle vongole (pasta with clams) to cacio e pepe to even more idiosyncratic pairings.
"[Il Giardino Romano] has a particularly unique dessert," Bondì says. "A ricotta crostata with artichoke."
And if the menu does not succeed in evoking the bucolic delights of the Roman orchard, its setting certainly will – the restaurant has a small brick courtyard covered in trees and hanging ivy.
Website:https://www.ilgiardinoromano.com
Address: Via del Portico d'Ottavia 18, 00186
Phone: +39 06 6880 9661
Instagram: @ristorante_il_giardino_romano/
BBC Travel's The SpeciaList is a series of guides to popular and emerging destinations around the world, as seen through the eyes of local experts and tastemakers.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
In a quiet corner of North Carolina, bees produce a violet-hued honey so rare and unpredictable that even experts can't explain it – and that's what makes it magical.
In the Sandhills region of North Carolina, between the capital of Raleigh and the Nascar Hall of Fame in the sport-mad town of Charlotte, visitors may not even realise what a rare ecological niche they're stepping into. This is where the Atlantic once met the venerable Uwharrie Mountains, 145km inland; when the ocean pulled away, it left behind the grit that gave the region its name.
The region is one of the last homes for unique flora and fauna like the southern hognose snake and the Carolina gopher frog, both of which are endangered. What it's also known for, though, is something that has university researchers, foodies and conspiracy theorists all scratching their heads. It's a rare and coveted honey in a deep shade of aubergine-purple, and no one knows for sure what gives it the hue.
People largely travel to the Sandhills region for open-air adrenaline pursuits and laid-back rural charm – think corn mazes, trout fishing and country fair-style Americana.
The prestigious Pinehurst Golf Resort, commonly referred to as the "cradle of American golf", is here (don't miss its celebrated No 2 course), as is the horse riding hub Southern Pines and its abundance of equestrian trails and backcountry trekking. Kayakers and canoers flock to Drowning Creek, drawn by the scenic 13-mile route from Turnpike Road to Highway 401.
Hunting classic Southern game like white-tailed deer, wild turkey and wood ducks is popular in these parts, with extensive land preserves designated for conservation to support the pursuit. The longleaf pine forests are themselves a thing of simple beauty, and twitchers come here to search for northern bobwhite quails, bald eagles and – the star attraction – imperilled red-cockaded woodpeckers with their binoculars.
But travellers also come to the region to seek out something even more extraordinary than threatened species and unique biomes. Here, if the conditions are exactly right (a mystery even to the experts) and the timing is perfect (a secret only the bees know), apiarists will visit their hives and find not just frames brimming with a slow and sultry river of liquid gold, but perhaps one that gleams with deep violet treasure.
"It is true that nobody knows what causes purple honey," says Paige Burns, who has a degree in horticulture and works with farmers and foresters in her role as the Richmond County Extension Director. Theories abound, both of the folklore and pseudo-scientific variety, and much like a porch swing, everybody here has one.
Burns tells me a few of the more popular speculations: that it's the alkalinity of the soil changing the honey's colour as it does hydrangeas from blue to pink; that it's wild berries surrounding the bee's territory; and, the one that sparks the most vociferous debate among locals, that it's the deep violet flower of the invasive (and wildly reviled) kudzu vine. Beekeepers in the area have reported finding the jewel-hued honey in their hives for years, but even so, its appearance is so sporadic and at the whim of chance, it continues to be a surprise when it does appear.
Don Dees, who owns and operates Dees Bees Apiary in nearby Aberdeen, North Carolina, has purple honey on his website, but it's sold out. It's impossible to pre-sale for this year's harvest since no one knows how much, or even if, the bees will deign to colour the combs in plum or in the customary amber. Instead, he invites people to check his Facebook page for updates from mid-July. His pure raw honey costs $16.50 (£13) for 900g. Purple honey, when he has it, goes for $75 (about £58) for an 85g glass jar. Talk about finding treasure; this is a limited edition in every sense of the word.
Dees' take on the phenomenon? He refutes the lore that aluminium in the terrain plays a factor and insists that kudzu isn't part of the equation, reasoning his apiary would produce it every season if so. Purple honey is most likely to arise under drought-like conditions, he says, and Dees believes that blue-black huckleberries that grow on shrubs rooted in thirst-tolerant clay feed the hard-up-for-food bees that can't locate traditional more water-dependent blooms.
However, Rusty Burlew, a master beekeeper who directs the Native Bee Conservancy of Washington State, says that a lot of circumstantial evidence points to the inky-violet flower of the kudzu, and she doubts that bees have the jaws necessary to pierce fruit for nectar. Flavour-wise, she says, "to my untrained palate, the honey really does taste purple, in a grape-y sort of way".
Burns tells me that she's never been one of the lucky ones to harvest the jammy-sweet treasure. "One of the beekeepers I work with, she's probably, as the crow flies, two miles from me. I'm on the creek; she's on the creek. Obviously, we're in a very similar environment. She regularly gets purple honey; I've never gotten it." Laughing, she adds that it's a surprise even to the bee farmers when they open the hive and find it. "Some years you get it, and then 10 years you don't."
More like this:
• The unexpected origins of Houston's favourite po' boy
• The US island that once belonged to Russia
• The US's ancient, underrated culinary capital
And here I am, a native to the state, with no idea such a wild-foraged wonder existed. Turns out some mysteries aren't just hidden; they're hidden in plain sight. That's the beauty of travel: not just the landscapes that render you speechless or the food that rewrites the rules, but the stories you stumble into along the way. The ones that don't come with tidy explanations or easy answers. There aren't many of those left.
There's something incredible about standing under a sky unbothered by city lights, surrounded by the literal hum of a place still untamed, knowing that not even the beekeepers – who spend their days elbow-deep in the stuff – can tell you why this honey defies nature's colour wheel. Maybe we'll never know. And perhaps that's the point. Some places keep their secrets – and that's precisely what makes them worth the trip.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The sweltering heat during Buddhist New Year calls for Thailand's cooling khao chae, a fragrant and refreshing bowl of rice delicately scented with flowers.
By the time Songkran, Thailand's new year based on the Buddhist calendar, arrives in April, the temperatures in the Southeast Asian country are soaring. The sky is typically blue and spotless, so reprieve under the shade of a passing cloud is non-existent while the humidity is as thick as a fleece blanket. One way to cool off is in the country-wide water fights that take place during the annual celebrations (this year from 13-15 April), which include water guns, buckets and coloured powder smeared onto the face like war paint. Another way to celebrate and cool off is to eat khao chae.
Khao chae (soaked rice) is an icy, seasonal treat that marks the beginning of summer in Thailand. The history of the dish can be traced back hundreds of years to the Mon people, an ethnic group that originated throughout Myanmar and Thailand and integrated into what was then Siamese society in the 16th Century.
[jump to recipe]
"The form of khao chae that we're looking at right now, especially in Bangkok, has very little resemblance to the Mon khao chae," says Leela Punyaratabandhu, a Thai scholar and the author of the 2017 cookbook Bangkok, which includes a recipe for khao chae. In the 16th Century, the soaked rice porridge was served in terracotta pots to keep the dish cold because ice wasn't readily available. The accompanying side dishes were also not nearly as intricate as they would eventually become.
It was within the kingdom of Siam's royal family, dating back to King Rama IV's rule in the 19th Century, that the dish blossomed into something far more complex – a metamorphosis of its humble origins. A lot of effort was made to ensure that khao chae looked visually beautiful, so side dishes included delicately carved vegetables shaped into flowers. In addition, ice, which was impossible for commoners to get at the time, distinguished kaho chae as an exclusively royal dish.
The recipe that exists now has been passed down through generations of royal cooks and aristocratic families. The dish starts by vigorously washing jasmine rice to remove all the starch. "You have to wash the rice more than regular steamed rice so it doesn't stick together when cooked," explains Max Wittawat, the executive chef of New York City's Bangkok Supper Club. Wittawat grew up in Bangkok and was taught to make khao chae by culinary artist and teacher Jantararat Hemvej, who is known in Bangkok for having perfected khao chae.
Since the rice also needs to withstand being soaked for long periods without falling apart, which would render the dish cloudy, washing it is especially important. After it's steamed, the rice is submerged in ice water that's perfumed with the scent of flowers, ranging from jasmine, ylang ylang, damask roses and bread flowers. "It's a mark of summer when the flowers bloom," adds Wittawat.
Punyaratabandhu has childhood memories of her grandfather using a spreadsheet to track the specific times that the flowers bloomed in his garden. "All of this was very systematic," she says. It's important to pick the flowers at the precise time – typically the evening before preparing khao chae – in order to achieve the optimal fragrance. From there, the flowers are submerged in water for at least two hours to imbue their aroma.
Even the process of soaking the flowers is very intentional. If the flowers are left in the water for too long, they will bruise and go bad, leaving the water with a pungent and off-putting flavour. If they aren't steeped long enough, the bouquet will not be impactful enough to stand up to the side dishes served alongside khao chae. To enhance the dish's fragrance even further, a Thai culinary candle known as tian op may be used to smoke the flowery water.
And that's just the base of the dish. Khao chae is an experience that includes many elaborate accoutrements. "It's not only hard to make, but it's hard to eat as well," says Punyaratabandhu. This is because there are a lot of pungent, salty and fishy flavours that could be unfamiliar to some. "Shrimp paste balls mixed with fish and then dipped in egg and fried? It's a far cry from pad see ew [stir-fried noodles]."
When Punyaratabandhu began writing her cookbook, she struggled with whether or not she should include a recipe for khao chae, knowing how impractical and challenging the dish can be to prepare at home. "I knew it was going to be a tough sell, but also it's a part of Bangkok," she explains. "My job was to be faithful to whatever is happening in Bangkok."
More like this:
• A rice dish with 'sexual power'
• The 3,000-year-old new year's celebration
• The Thai noodles eaten for breakfast
Even Wittawat admits that khao chae, outside of the aristocratic society of Bangkok, was not really in Thailand's zeitgeist until the past 10 years, when many chefs began reflecting on their Thai heritage and exploring culturally significant and historical dishes. "Before that, it was very old school and not common in restaurants," he says. "But nowadays, with technology, the flowers can bloom throughout the year, and it has risen so much in popularity."
Recently, khao chae has become a social media darling due to its myriad side dishes, like shrimp paste dumplings, elaborately carved vegetables, stuffed shallots and peppers, sweetened beef and pork jerky and delicate egg nests. It's visually stunning, especially when served in traditional Thai pots or tiffins. "Sometimes, it's too pretty to eat," Wittawat says.
There is a particular way to enjoy the dish to avoid muddying the crystal-clear flower-scented water. "You're not supposed to put all the condiments with the rice," Wittawat says. Instead, you should alternate eating the rice and side dishes. Vegetables and pickles can cut through the heavier flavours of sweetened beef and salty shrimp paste. "This is the fun thing about khao chae," Wittawat says, acknowledging that the various flavours work in tandem to keep the meal fresh and exciting. "You can continue eating more and more."
Wittawat is happy that khao chae, once exclusive to the royal family and upper echelon of Thai society, is now more readily available and accessible to everyone – especially during Songkran, when Thailand is so hot. "Thai people are returning to their roots," he says. "They're appreciating their history and culture.
Khao chae recipe
by Max Wittawat
Serves 8
This is a general overview of how to make the rice for khao chae, along with two side dishes. Feel free to include additional sides to your liking.
Method
Step 1
Rinse the jasmine rice in water 4 to 5 times. Cook the rice in boiling water until half-cooked, then strain. Wash the rice in water again, using your hands to rub the rice; rinse and repeat until the water becomes clear. Transfer the rice to a steamer and steam until fully cooked. Let cool.
Step 2
To make the shrimp balls, blend all the ingredients (except the eggs and oil) in a blender until smooth. Pour into a large nonstick frying pan and cook until thick paste forms. Let cool slightly, then roll into small balls.
Step 3
Heat the oil in a medium pot. Dip the shrimp balls into beaten eggs, then deep-fry until golden brown. Set aside. (Reserve the oil for the green peppers.)
Step 4
Pound the coriander, garlic and peppercorns in a mortar with a pestle until smooth, then mix with the minced pork and shrimp. Season with sugar and salt. Stuff the mixture into the green peppers. Set the peppers into a steamer and steam for 10mins.
Step 5
To make the egg net, reheat the oil in the pot. Beat all the eggs together and strain through a sieve. Dip 5 fingers in the beaten eggs and shake into the pot of heated oil left to right, then up and down to form an egg net. When the eggs turn golden brown, transfer the egg net to a kitchen towel and place the steamed stuffed peppers on top, then roll the egg net around the peppers. Repeat with the remaining peppers.
Step 6
Spoon the steamed rice into bowls and pour the cold scented over it. Enjoy the khao chae with the shrimp balls and stuffed peppers, as well as sliced cucumber, green mango, scallion and lesser ginger.
Note
To make the scented water, steep jasmine, ylang-ylang (กระดังงา) and chommanard (ชมนาด) flowers with drinking water and (if using) smoke with a Thai aromatic candle (เทียนหอม) overnight. Once the water is infused, strain it, then chill thoroughly.
This story was originally published in 2024.
BBC.com's World's Table "smashes the kitchen ceiling" by changing the way the world thinks about food, through the past, present and future.
--
Join more than three million BBC Travel fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on X, and Instagram.
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Home to three Michelin-starred restaurants and a royal gingerbread legacy, the unassuming Lancashire town of Ormskirk is fast becoming the UK's most delicious destination.
When it comes to UK destinations for a gourmet weekend away, there's a new name on the lips of serious foodies. Forget the metropolitan streets of Chelsea, Mayfair or even Edinburgh. Britain's latest gastronomic hotspot is in the rural hinterlands of deepest Lancashire.
Holidaymakers journeying to this historic county in north-west England – a key location in the English and Industrial revolutions – would have traditionally been heading for Blackpool, the classic British seaside resort whose best-known epicurean delight is Blackpool Rock, a tooth-shatteringly tough cylindrical stick of boiled sugar and glucose syrup.
But, for those with more refined palates – or more delicate dental work – the tastiest rewards are to be found in Ormskirk, a bustling market town that was once a Viking settlement, and in Aughton, the small village next door.
It's in this small village where Mark Birchall serves as chef patron of Moor Hall, a produce-driven restaurant within the grounds of a Grade II-listed, 16th-Century manor house. And at this year's Michelin awards, he was the only chef in Britain and Ireland to have been awarded a third Michelin star. As such, he has become one of only 10 chefs in the country (and fewer than 150 in the entire world) to hold the three-star accolade, a designation signalling that, according to the tyre company's inspectors, a restaurant is worth making a dedicated journey for.
No stranger to recognition, Moor Hall was voted Best Restaurant in England in the 2023 National Restaurant Awards, and also possesses a green Michelin star for the sustainable cooking practices used to create its 18-course tasting menu. Additionally, Birchall's "neighbourhood restaurant", The Barn (offering more casual dining at a lower price point), is a mere 30 second stroll around the lake from Moor Hall and possesses a Michelin star of its very own too.
As if that weren't enough, less than 10 minutes' walk away is Chef Tim Allen's restaurant sō-lō which has a Michelin star as well, bringing the total to a rather stellar six in the space of less than half a mile.
So what makes the food so special in this part of Lancashire, I ask Birchall as he forages for micro herbs and other ingredients on Moor Hall's six-acre country estate, dotted with secluded luxury garden rooms where diners can stay.
"Aughton and Ormskirk have a deep-rooted connection to the land, and that plays a massive part in why the food here is so special," he tells me. "The landscape, the soil, the weather – it all contributes to the quality of the produce. We're lucky to have incredibly fertile, well-draining soil, which means the fruit and vegetables – particularly leafy greens, brassicas and root veg – even the grass that feeds the livestock, are all packed with flavour."
Indeed, the West Lancashire coastal plain between Preston and Southport is often referred to as "the salad bowl of England". According to the National Farmers Union, England's north-west region accounts for 15% of the country's food production, leading them to call it "Britain's farming powerhouse".
"The climate, too, plays its role," Birchall continues. "We get just the right balance – enough rain to keep things abundant, but not so much that it drowns the land. That allows for a longer growing season, and when you combine that with generations of skilled farmers who understand how to work with the land, you get outstanding ingredients. It's that connection between produce and place that really sets the region apart."
Allen agrees with Birchall, with whom he consulted before opening sō-lō. He has seen an influx of foodies not just from London (which is a little more than two hours away by train) but from right across the globe. "We get people coming from America, Mexico, Norway, Finland, even Singapore," Allen tells me.
"But also, because we're located midway between Liverpool and Manchester – whose football teams (Everton, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United) are massive – you get a lot of people travelling for the football. And many of them, it turns out, quite like eating Michelin-starred food."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these discerning fans eschew the plastic platefuls of pie and chips usually consumed on the terraces to partake of Allen's altogether more elevated offerings; dishes made with ingredients such as Louet Fessier oyster emulsion, Oscietra caviar and salt-baked celeriac (which he employs somebody to grow purely for sō-lō's seven-course tasting menu).
But this part of Lancashire offers more than the ultra-modern cordon bleu cuisine of Moor Hall and sō-lō; travellers in search of the area's deepest culinary roots may find them at the famous Omskirk Market. Held on Thursdays and Saturdays, it is one of the country's oldest (King Edward I granted it a Royal Charter in 1286) and is where you can sample the town's original claim to culinary fame: gingerbread.
As far back as 1732, recipes for the spicy baked treat were being passed down through generations of Ormskirkers. Sellers – almost exclusively women identified by their white shawls and aprons – would tout fresh gingerbread to passengers on the stagecoaches that stopped at the inns along Aughton Street on their way from Liverpool to Preston. When Ormskirk railway station opened in 1849, the women switched to targeting train passengers.
More like this:
• The English wine that's rivalling Champagne
• Is the future of French cheese at stake?
• The surprising 'lesbian capital of the UK'
"They would make their way along the platform, loudly knocking on all the carriage windows crying out 'Gingerbread! Who will buy my freshly baked gingerbread?'," explains Kathryn MacDonald of the Ormskirk and District Family History Society. "There were so many of them and they were such persuasive sellers that Ormskirk's gingerbread women became well known around the region. So when, in 1885, the Prince of Wales alighted here – he was going to a shooting party at nearby Lathom House – there was a welcome reception put on for him at the station and three of the gingerbread women were allowed to present the Prince with a gift of Ormskirk gingerbread. A few years later, when he became king (Edward VII), he'd stop the royal train at Ormskirk on his way up to Balmoral, and stock up with supplies for himself and the royal family. So, he obviously must have really liked our gingerbread!"
The white-aproned women no longer ply their wares at the station, but one baker of Ormskirk gingerbread can still be found today in the town. Mr Thompson's Bakery is a family business run by Neil Thompson, his wife Janet and daughter Lilli who bake the treats in a converted shed in their back garden.
"Back in 2010, we revived an ancient Ormskirk gingerbread recipe but made some tweaks, such as using less salt, to suit modern tastes," says Lilli, who mans their stall each week at Ormskirk's famous food market.
The Thompsons' bakery, which has appeared in an episode of BBC TV's The Hairy Bikers Go West, is also carrying on the town's tradition of reeling in royalty with its legendary gingerbread. Janet reveals how she and Lilli were given the honour, when Princess Anne visited Ormskirk in 2022 to open a new facility at Edge Hill University, of including some of their gingerbread in a welcome hamper.
"Has she come back since to stock up with supplies, like her great-grandfather Edward VII did?" I ask.
"Not as far I know," she laughs, "but I'd like to think there's a secret stash of Ormskirk gingerbread somewhere in one of the larders of Buckingham Palace!"
Each year the town hosts Ormskirk Gingerbread Festival which, this year, is scheduled to take place on 13 July. The family-friendly event allows locals and visitors to learn more about the town's culinary heritage, and some women dress up in white shawls and aprons to honour Ormskirk's most famous gingerbread hawkers.
It's also an opportunity to celebrate this unassuming pocket of Lancashire that has quietly become a food lover's destination in its own right – no small achievement in a country where most culinary trends tend to point south. Whether you come for the royal gingerbread, the six Michelin stars or the rich farming roots that nourish it all, Ormskirk delivers the goods… and they’re anything but half-baked.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Finland has topped the World Happiness Rankings for the eighth year running – but the real appeal for travellers lies in the country's deeply-lived values of balance, nature and everyday contentment.
Finns tend to accept the accolade of supreme happiness, bestowed on them by the UN's World Happiness Report in March 2025 for the eighth time in a row, with a collective shrug and eye roll. But Finnish travel operators are celebrating as travellers increasingly make the connection between Finland and happiness, hoping to come and experience that Finnish brand of happiness for themselves.
However, don't expect to be greeted with howls of laughter and cheerful quips when you land at Helsinki Airport or disembark from one of the Baltic ferries in the capital's harbour. There is some truth in the perception of Finland being a no-nonsense, down-to-earth kind of nation. Generally, Finns are flattered – happy, even – to be honoured by the report's conclusions, but while graciously accepting them, they feel "happiness" isn't really the right word. Instead, "contentment", "fulfilment" or "life satisfaction" are widely considered more appropriate terms. As Finnish President Alexander Stubb recently posted on Facebook: "No one can be happy all the time, and sometimes circumstance makes it difficult. But getting the basics right – security, freedom and equality – is a good start."
But while the concept of happiness in Finland may be nuanced and culturally specific, it is deeply embedded in the fabric of daily life. Rather than seeking constant highs, the Finnish approach is rooted in balance, connection and quiet contentment – qualities that increasingly resonate with visitors. And for travellers, this state of being is not just something to observe but one to get involved with first-hand, through embracing the country's nature, sauna culture, food, sustainable design and lifestyle.
"We see Finnish happiness as a summary of these five elements," says Teemu Ahola, director of international operations at Visit Finland, "but we don't measure or collect data to evaluate happiness as a single attraction in itself".
To experience these tangible, authentic aspects of Finnish life that underpin its consistent happiness ranking, Ahola suggests Finnish sauna culture as an increasingly popular, most globally identifiable attraction; and stresses that Finland is a safe country, naming the risk of bumping into free-roaming reindeer in northern Lapland as one of the few potential hazards for visiting tourists. Meanwhile, he adds, a new and confident generation of Finnish chefs has earned international respect for and interest in the Finnish culinary scene.
Finland is home to the world's northernmost Michelin star restaurant, Tapio, in Ruka-Kuusamo; and the Saimaa Lakeland region was named a European Region of Gastronomy in 2024. Many restaurants across Helsinki celebrate the edible riches – mushrooms, berries, fish and game – that are accessible to all in the country's endless forests, coastal archipelagos and inland waterways through Finland's Jokaisenoikeudet or "Everyman's Right", a law that grants everyone the freedom to roam and forage.
Connect with nature
Helsinki, where most visitors start or end their trip, offers a first-hand glimpse of this national contentment. This is a seaside city, spread over a beautiful natural archipelago and reclaimed land. It's easy to grab a city bike from one of the dozens of stands around town and head off to explore the coast-hugging cycling routes or disappear into Central Park, a belt of forest that stretches from the city centre to its northern periphery.
The endorphin boost experienced by this kind of freewheeling adventure and access to plentiful natural resources ties directly into the UN's happiness metrics of life expectancy, freedom and positive emotions. This connection can be found at the heart of SaimaaLife, a nature and wellness company in eastern Finland's sprawling Saimaa Lakeland region, run by mental health expert and guide Mari Ahonen.
Ahonen is an enthusiastic advocate of the mental balance that Finnish nature and lifestyle have to offer and leads her guests through shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), traditional lakeside saunas, wild swimming, foraging trips for mushrooms and berries and cooking over an open fire.
"We Finns can be too modest," she says. "We should notice the World Happiness status in a positive way. I'm a living example of having been able to develop a business with the support that has been available for my entrepreneurship. Some people say it's a lottery win to be born in Finland."
A lottery win, that is, in the form of life satisfaction and balance; of living comfortably and having "enough" in a material sense. This ceiling of expectation shouldn't be confused with a lack of ambition or resourcefulness. After all, this is the birthplace of mobile communications pioneer Nokia, the distinctive garden tool and scissor brand Fiskars and textile and clothing icon Marimekko.
Stoic and stubborn
Finland isn't immune from economic pressure or controversies, however, and the long, dark winters can put a strain on mental health. The Finnish idea of happiness also includes a dose of sisu: a hard-to-translate concept of resilience, fortitude, courage and grit. Finnish-Canadian author Katja Pantzar, who has written extensively about this perceived national quality, explains that it's "a mindset that allows people and communities to work together in the face of challenges rather than give up or blame and attack others".
More like this:
• The 25 best places to travel in 2025
• The European region where young people are happiest
• Turku: Finland's under-the-radar Nordic destination
She notes that the top four nations in the World Happiness Report are all Nordic countries with strong welfare systems designed to support the collective good. "Happiness is very culturally specific," she said. "In Finland, there are many examples of everyday happiness that are available and accessible to everyone, whether it's nature – every person in Finland is on average about 200m from the nearest forest, park, seashore or natural body of water – saunas, public libraries, safe and efficient public transport, free clean drinking water, education or healthcare."
Pantzar also highlights the mood-boosting properties of contrast therapy – hot saunas followed by cold dips – as an accessible, every-day mood booster. "It's incredibly easy to do in Helsinki, surrounded by the sea," she says. "When you don't need to travel great distances or pay large fees to have a quick dip, it's easier to do more regularly, before or after work or on your lunch break."
And while some Finns remain sceptical of the "happiest nation" label, most seem to appreciate what they have. "I don't find it easy to think of Finland as the happiest country in the world," says pensioner Juha Roiha. "In poorer countries like Thailand and Nepal, people seem relaxed in spite of any hardship. In Finland, you might sometimes hear people say that they'd be happier somewhere else. But within ourselves, with what we have, we're happy."
Happy Land - Finding the Inner Finn, a travel memoir by Tim Bird, will be published by Eye Books in the UK in January 2026. It takes a "sideways" look at Finland's happiness status.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
For three days every year, Thailand transforms into a wet and wild party. But this ancient festival is far more than just a raucous good time.
Every year from 13-15 April, Thais across the country cool off and celebrate new beginnings with what is arguably the nation's largest and most important festival: Songkran. Tied to the Thai New Year and the close of the annual rice harvest season, this annual celebration is all about purification, honouring elders and fostering a sense of renewal. However, it's most well-known among travellers as a raucous country-wide splash fest.
"The most famous part of the festival is the massive water fights," explained Worapa Angkhasirisap,director of the Tourism Authority of Thailand. "People of all ages take to the streets armed with water guns and buckets."
Viewers of the latest season of The White Lotus recently got a glimpse of this when three unaware travellers were dropped in the middle of a town-wide Songkran celebration. "Why is everyone carrying those guns?" one of the women asked. Within moments, the trio were being chased through the streets by water gun-wielding children and smiling revellers before seeking refuge in a convenience store, bewildered and soaked to the gills.
Despite its White Lotus portrayal, these water fights are generally a friendly and joyous part of the festivities that visitors are welcome to take part in. In fact, hordes of travellers now descend on Thailand each year to take part in what is commonly called "the world's biggest water fight". Yet, the festival's modern popularity among international travellers belies Songkran's deep roots.
Meaning "to enter" or "move forward" in Sanskrit, Songkran occurs when the Sun moves to the Aries constellation – the first sign of the Zodiac. Some scholars believe the Unesco-inscribed festival harks back to an ancient Hindu festival called Makar Sankranti and was adopted by the Khmer Empire that ruled Thailand in the 11th Century. Today, Songkran is all about making a fresh start, with water symbolising the washing away of the previous year and purification.
During the three-day festival, scented water is often poured atop images of the Buddha to represent renewal. It is also common for Thais to wash the hands of their elders and ask for their blessings, splash water on family and friends and give offerings to temples. "Since most Thai people practice Buddhism, Songkran is also a spiritual time," explained Kharitthakorn Sakulsupapong, sales and marketing managerof the Thailand-based Tropical Vacation travel agency.
Despite being a three-day national holiday, some Thai communities – such as the popular beach resort town of Pattaya – extend the party for as many as 10 days.
Because April is often Thailand's hottest month, cooling foods are typically on the menu during Songkran. "Since April is the peak of mango season, you'll find plenty of mango sticky rice, one of Thailand's most beloved desserts," Angkhasirisap told the BBC. "Another seasonal favourite is khao chae, a refreshing dish of rice soaked in jasmine-scented iced water, served with savoury side dishes – perfect for cooling down in the summer heat."
Visitors who find themselves in the country during Songkran are more than welcome to join in on the festivities. "Thai people are always very happy to teach tourists about their cultural traditions and will be delighted to answer any questions visitors may have [about the festival]," said Jurairat Mongkolwongsiri, vice president of sales at Centara Hotels & Resorts in Bangkok. As with any religious festival, Mongkolwongsiri noted that it's also important to be respectful.
"Songkran is very inclusive – the water splashing is open to everyone, although it's always important to understand and respect the cultural boundaries," Mongkolwongsiri cautioned. "For example, visitors must avoid throwing water on monks or elders and try not to spray water directly in anyone’s face."
While Thailand's cities attract the biggest Songkran crowds, Angkhasirisap says travellers venturing away from the nation's main tourist hotspots are also likely to encounter the festival.
"Bangkok and Chiang Mai are well-known hotspots, attracting huge crowds and hosting grand celebrations," she explained. "[However], in recent years, Thailand has made an effort to promote celebrations in all regions, [including] lesser-known provinces."
More like this:
• A White Lotus actor's guide to Thailand
• Koh Mak: The tiny island that's redefining travel to Thailand
• Measuring the 'White Lotus effect': How TV and film locations impact travel
According to Angkhasirisap, smaller destinations have their own special twist to the holiday, with beach destinations like Songkhla and Surat Thani, being much more laidback than the party vibes found in larger cities, while provinces like Phrae, Lamphun, and Ubon Ratchathani incorporate cultural parades into the traditional festivities.
"Wherever you go, you’ll find a warm and welcoming atmosphere," said Angkhasirisap. "It's a truly unforgettable festival!"
--
If you liked this story,
sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on
,
X
and
.
Iceland is one of the few places in the world where happiness is rising. Locals say the secret lies in nature, gender equality and a deep-rooted sense of resilience.
For the third year in a row, Finland has topped the 2025 World Happiness Report. While the Nordic countries traditionally fare well in the rankings, Denmark (ranked second), Sweden (fourth), and Norway (seventh) have all reported a net lower total happiness score since the survey started, measuring a slight decline in happiness over time. In fact, out of the top 20, only seven countries have been getting happier year on year – and Iceland stands out as having one of the biggest increases of them all, seeing a 9.1% boost since its measure on the first index in 2008.
Ranked the third-happiest country in the world this year (compared to 18th in 2008), Iceland scores the highest out of all countries in social support, with impressive scores in the freedom and generosity measures as well (third and fifth respectively). Despite its relatively small population – numbering just under 400,000 – the country continues to invest in infrastructure, progressive social policies and tourism.
But the thing that makes many Icelanders the happiest is something that the government has relatively little control over: the nation's otherworldly landscapes.
"From home, from work, it's very easy to get to a national park or open spaces where we can hike, walk by the river, coast or lakes," says Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir, author of forthcoming book InnSæi: Heal, Revive and Reset with the Icelandic Art of Intuition. She especially loves the landscape's variations and stark contrasts, from green and lush to barren and black sands.
As a geologist originally from the US, Jessica Poteet moved to Iceland specifically to be closer to nature. "Being somewhere with volcanoes and Northern Lights and cotton candy-pink skies with snow-capped mountains in winter is a dream," she says. "I never take it for granted. It's one of the key things contributing to my happiness."
That said, residents note that winters can be long and dark, which can be a challenge – but that the summer's midnight Sun more than makes up for it. Poteet notes that on particularly sunny days, employers will often offer a "Sun holiday" so people can enjoy a day of hiking or skiing, depending on the season.
The country's strong social safety net also lends residents a sense of stability and ease. "During Covid, I lost my job. I was able to go on unemployment until I found a new job," says Brenna Elizabeth Scheving, another US expat living in Iceland. She also was able to take advantage of the country's generous parental leave policy, where both parents are entitled to share 12 months parental leave, up to six months each, with six weeks transferrable to the other parent. The policy applies to both adoptive and biological parents, regardless of marital status or sexuality.
Kindergarten is also available to children as young as two, which enables parents to work and generate income, knowing that childcare and education are provided for.
In fact, equitable gender policies have been built into the country's DNA for decades, with the world's smallest gender gap for 15 years running, according to the 2024 World Economic Forum. This no doubt leads to a sense of happiness as well, say residents.
"The government is run by women," says Gunnsteinsdóttir, noting that Iceland had the world's first democratically elected female president in 1980. "I was six years old when she was elected a president, and I didn't necessarily conceive of a man being a president."
Those gender equality gains were hard fought. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Women's Day Off, when Icelandic women went on strike for a day to underscore the lack of equal representation in politics and the labour force. "I'm truly grateful to these women and the men who supported them," says Gunnsteinsdóttir. "Where you have gender equality, the social, economic and political aspects tend to be more stable and better for people and the natural surroundings. In countries with greater gender equality, people are healthier, happier and have better wellbeing."
That's not to say Iceland hasn't had its own share of growing pains in recent years. Costs, particularly in the capital city of Reykjavík, have grown particularly high. "The cost of living is steep, especially housing, which can be a struggle for both locals and expats," said Kevin Mercier, a French photographer who has lived in Iceland the past six years and chronicles his travels at Kevmrc Travel.
The high cost of short-term rentals has been partially blamed for this rise in housing expense, and tourism in general has put some pressures on the small island. The nation has been transformed by tourism over the past decade, welcoming around 2.3 million international visitors in 2024 – nearly double the 2015 numbers) and around six times the number of residents. That said, the benefits of tourism have outweighed the costs, say many residents, and as visitor numbers continue to grow, the country is adopting new initiatives to manage the impact and protect its natural resources.
"The movement around making tourism more responsible has been very grassroots and run by Iceland Tourism in collaboration with local and central authorities and private companies," says Gunnsteinsdóttir.
Iceland's infrastructure has also seen a boost from tourism. "Finishing The Ring Road [the looped highway around Iceland that was fully paved in 2019] was great for everyone, making sometimes isolated communities now easily accessible," said Poteet. "Also, the amount of tourists to the Fagradalsfjall volcano meant the government built trails in the area almost immediately. So impressive!"
Accommodations are pushing to educate visitors about sustainability and the Icelandic way of life. Family-owned property Hotel Ranga on the south coast offers a "Live Like an Icelander" programme, where a local guide takes guests through ancient farmsteads and lets them drink from a well that is said to promote longevity. ION Hotels, owned by female entrepreneur Sigurlaug Sverrisdóttir, has committed to having a female-majority staff across its two properties, ION City Hotel in Reykjavík and the ION Adventure Hotel on Lake Thingvellir, the largest lake in Iceland.
More like this:
• A First Lady's guide to Iceland
• The European region where young people are happiest
• What makes Vanuatu one of the happiest places in the world?
The number of restaurants, bars and cafes has also grown to meet tourist demand, leading to more vibrant urban centres. "When I was growing up, you would walk the streets in Reykjavík and there was hardly anyone walking around in most of the year," said Gunnsteinsdóttir. "I personally quite like having people around."
Regardless of the external factors, it may be an internal sense of adaptability and resilience that leads to Icelanders' ultimate happiness. Gunnsteinsdóttir points to the ancient Icelandic word for intuition, innsæi, which translates to the "the sea within".
"It's the world beyond words – of vision, feelings, imagination and things that brew before they come to the surface of our attention," she explains. "It also means 'to see from the inside out', which refers to having a strong inner compass that enables us to navigate the ocean of life and the world we live in."
Gunnsteinsdóttir theorises that this sense of direction comes directly from living alongside an often-unpredictable natural environment and fast-changing weather conditions. "In recent years, we've had multiple eruptions and earthquakes. When you constantly feel the earth is shaking, it really reminds you that things can change quite rapidly," she says. "When it comes to happiness, it encourages us to make the best out of what we have when things don't go according to plan."
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Recent changes by the Trump administration are affecting how US museums and institutions tell the nation's multicultural history to travellers.
In the last few months, US President Donald Trump has threatened to annex Canada; warned that the US will "go as far as we have to go" to seize Greenland; and imposed tariffs on all nations, effectively initiating a global trade war. But while many of Trump's most dramatic "America first" actions are aimed at other countries, his sweeping new policy changes are also affecting how the US tells its own multicultural story.
Several highly touristed landmarks in the US are already facing significant changes.
On 27 March, Trump signed an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, arguing that there has been "a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth". The order took specific aim at the Smithsonian Institution, whose 21 museums, 21 libraries and many other research and cultural centres comprise the world's largest museum complex and were visited by nearly 17 million people in 2024.
"Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement," the order states, "the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of divisive, race-centred ideology."
The order threatens to bar congressional funds from institutions that espouse "improper, divisive or anti-American" beliefs. As an example of this, Trump cited programming from the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture, the only national museum devoted exclusively to documenting African American life, history and culture from slavery to the modern era.
Headquartered on the National Mall in Washington DC, some of the Smithsonian's many museums focus on marginalised communities in the US – including the National Museum of the American Indian,the National Museum of African Art, the National Museum of the American Latino and the embattled National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Many activists and historians have expressed outrage over the order's broader meaning and argued that it is actually a brazen attempt to do what Trump is denouncing: rewrite US history. This begs the question, which version of the US will visitors find?
"It seems like we're headed in the direction where there's even an attempt to deny that the institution of slavery even existed, or that Jim Crow laws and segregation and racial violence against Black communities, Black families, Black individuals even occurred," said Dr Clarissa Myrick-Harris White, a historian and Africana studies professor at the historically Black Morehouse College in a statement to the Associated Press.
This concern was echoed by the American Historical Association, whose 10,000 members represent the world's largest organisation of professional historians. In a statement co-signed by 31 organisations, the association says the executive order "egregiously misrepresents the work of the Smithsonian Institution", which was established by Congress more than 175 years ago for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge".
"The stories that have shaped our past include not only elements that make us proud but also aspects that make us acutely aware of tragedies in our nation's history," the statement notes. "No person, no nation, is perfect, and we should all – as individuals and as nations – learn from our imperfections."
Some feel Trump's targeting of the Smithsonian is part of a broader culture war he has been waging against "woke ideology" across many of the nation's federally run institutions. Since returning to office, Trump has worked to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, which oversaw grant funding for numerous Native American, Native Hawaiian, Latinx and African American museums across the country; and Trump's agencies have reportedly issued a list of words to limit or disappear from government websites, like "women", "Black" and "cultural heritage".
Some of these references have already been removed from websites or displays of traveller-friendly landmarks. In February, Stonewall National Monument in New York City, which is run by the US National Park Service, erased references to transgender people. In March, Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia – which is managed by the US Department of the Army – scrubbed its website of any information highlighting the contributions of African American, Hispanic or female servicemembers, including removing stories about veteran and civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the Tuskegee Airmen, the US's first Black Airforce pilots. In nearby Washington DC, a two-block section of 16th Street leading to the White House with the words "Black Lives Matter" was recently repaved in response to threats to cut transportation funding if the plaza was not renamed.
"If you take a broad brush and say we've spent too much time talking about folks other than old white [men], then you have wiped out a lot of what actually makes America great," said Greg Werkheiser, founding partner of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm that specialises in protecting cultural heritage sites. "A lot of places around the world have had similar challenges and have not overcome them. We have. And those lessons are not lessons of self-loathing and tragedy, they're lessons about how we keep pushing towards a more perfect union."
Since the Black Lives Matter protests five years ago, many museums and other cultural institutions have sought to include more diverse perspectives in their exhibitions, a move that often boosted their visitor numbers. But as Werkheiser explained, the Trump administration's unprecedented exertion of influence on cultural institutions is especially problematic for those that specialise in telling stories from Black, Asian, Latinx and LGBTQ+ perspectives, since many of these places rely on federal funding to keep them afloat.
"That baseline of commitment [from the government] is essential to ensure that the ebbs and flows of private donors don't take out institutions. When we take that away, we make these institutions very unstable."
Visitors to the US may now find that even larger museums and organisations have been forced to make sweeping changes to their programming in light of the new policies. The DC-based Art Museum of the Americas cancelled two planned exhibitions highlighting the work of Black and LGBTQ+ artists in March, reportedly in response to the administration's new diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Meanwhile, the United States Marine Band, the country's oldest continually active musical association, recently cancelled a concert that was supposed to feature young musicians of colour. Perhaps most famously, in February Trump seized control of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, one of the US's premier arts institutions. Since Trump's takeover, a host of acts have cancelled their planned appearances in protest.
"If it didn't matter, they wouldn't try to stop us," said Ashley Rogers, executive director of the Whitney Plantation, the only plantation museum in Louisiana focussing exclusively on the experience of the people who were forcibly enslaved there. "These stories that we've been telling, they explain us to ourselves. You cannot understand the United States today without understanding our history with regard to race, slavery, relationships with Indigenous people and the genocides – all of these things that are 'bad'. We have to understand them, because they explain who we are today."
The Whitney and other nearby locations, including a centuries-old sugar-cane plantation that once housed Africans and Creole people recently lost a bid to be designated as a National Historic Landmark District, a process that had been in the works for several years. The designation would have protected the Whitney and other historical sites from outside development, a necessary move as many in the local area had long wanted to clear the path for more industrial development, according to Rogers. She added that local government officials requested to have the application pulled from consideration once the Trump administration got in office.
Both Rogers and Werkheiser expressed concern that the budget cuts Trump is imposing on cultural institutions might have long-term repercussions. They stressed that even if funding cuts and DEI restrictions are ultimately overturned in court, they may still trigger a long-lasting drop in the financial stability of smaller institutions – especially those that seek to tell stories from diverse perspectives, which may not attract as many visitors as larger, more "mainstream" museums. Historians, scholars, artists and others employed by cultural institutions who carry this specialised knowledge are also at risk.
"These artefacts and the sites that represent our shared history, are vulnerable to destruction and to permanent loss, but I'm also worried that the people who preserve those histories are also irreplaceable," said Werkheiser. "I'm very concerned about the scholars and government employees who have devoted their careers to preserving our country's cultural heritage. Many have lost their jobs or worried that they might soon be out of work, and we know that their knowledge and expertise are vital."
More like this:
• The Alabama museum grappling with the 'Gulf of America'
• How Trump's sweeping new policies could change travel
• 'A hostile state': Why some travellers are avoiding the US
Rogers and Werkheiser stressed the importance of institutions and individuals pushing back against these policies as much as possible. They also highlighted the role of visitors in helping to support cultural institutions that tell stories from diverse perspectives, particularly in difficult times.
"What's happening at [the] Whitney, the way that this administration's policies are affecting us, that is happening in everyone's local community," said Rogers. "There is going to be a local museum, a local library [near you] who is really struggling, and they need our support more than ever right now."
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
From romantic retreats in the Mediterranean to fresh-air-filled Alpine hikes, these are the most exciting areas of Europe to visit this year.
While much of Europe is ripe with history, culture, cuisine and breathtaking landscapes, some spots are particularly primed to welcome visitors right now.
This is not your typical all-time European getaway list; you won't find Rome or London here. Paris made the cut because of its post-Olympics peacefulness (plus the reopening of Notre Dame, an icon that has finally found its voice). Instead of a lifetime bucket list, we've curated 2025-specific picks that will make this year's holidays particularly memorable. Many of these are unsung destinations free from the overcrowding that's caused tourism upheaval – and rows with locals – in highly touristed European cities for the last several years.
These are on-the-rise areas of Europe where you can experience iconic cultural sites, spectacular hotels and outdoor adventures. From spending days on the sun-soaked Mediterranean coast to climbing the highest Alpine peaks, here are nine exciting European destinations to visit in 2025.
1. Puglia, Italy
Puglia saw a 20% jump in international arrivals in 2024 with more than 15 million overnight stays – still a fraction of Rome's 51 million. With two international airports (Bari and Brindisi) and rising interest, now is the time to visit before word gets out much further.
"The heel of Italy's boot offers incredible value compared to the Amalfi Coast with authentic masserie (farmhouse hotels) being converted into luxury properties," says California-based travel advisor and photographer Coco Tran, who has been researching and photographing Italy for years. "The region's celebration of slow food, incredible coastline and Unesco sites like Alberobello make it exceptional," she adds. In 2025, travellers can also experience the Jubilee Puglia, a Catholic event that only takes place every 25 years, aligning with larger events in Rome.
Tran recommends booking a table at cliff-side Osteria Sant'Anna in Polignano a Mare where the morning's catch is served fresh. On warm days, take a dip at Grotta della Poesia (Poetry Cave), a picture-perfect natural swimming hole; or saunter through Lecce's Baroque-filled streets. And while it's a new year, some old favourites remain the same. Tran says Masseria Torre Coccaro remains the spot to stay, with white-washed rooms surrounded by ancient olive groves – plus villas with private plunge pools so you can soak it all in without another guest in sight.
Best time to visit: Puglia's shoulder seasons, in late spring (May-June) and early autumn (September-October), offer ideal weather and fewer crowds.
2. Alentejo Coast, Portugal
Portugal continues to attract global attention, but there's far more to this Iberian nation than Porto and Lisbon. One region finally stepping into the spotlight is the Alentejo coast, which experienced its best tourism year on record in 2024.
"Portugal's Alentejo coast is finally getting deserved attention, with its pristine beaches and fantastic wineries," says Tran. While many travellers tack the region onto a trip to Lisbon or the Algarve, this breathtaking section of coast is worth a dedicated journey – especially for those seeking nature, history and adventure.
The area's "mix of coastal beauty, incredible cycling routes and overall affordability compared to many other places in Europe" make it an ideal getaway for thrill-seekers, says Maria Elena Price of ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours, which hosts tours around the world, including the Alentejo Coast.
Évora, a Unesco-listed city with Roman ruins and medieval architecture, is ideal for history buffs; while Zambujeira do Mar offers one of the nation's most beautiful beaches. Throughout June, travellers can also take part in the famed Festas dos Santos Populares (Popular Saints' Festivals), a nationwide celebration of Portugal's patron saints. Base yourself at Craveiral, a boutique stay where more than 70% of the restaurant's ingredients come from its on-site farm – including the toppings on its wood-fired pizzas.
Best time to visit: Summer is a blast in the Alentejo, with busy beaches and hiking through the Fisherman's Trail. If you prefer thinner crowds, you'll still find spectacular weather in the autumn, between September and November.
3. Andermatt-Sedrun-Disentis, Switzerland
About five million people visit Chamonix a year, while a million others visit Verbier – both rightly famous for their epic snowfalls and fantastic on- and off-piste terrain. However, it's high time global travellers explored the less-touristed European peaks – specifically, Andermatt-Sedrun-Disentis, three interconnected resorts that together offer 180km of skiable terrain. And while the skiing is already supreme, Mike Goar, who is the COO of mountain operations in Switzerland for Vail Resorts, says 2025 will see the investment of 110m Swiss francs (£89.5m) into mountain improvements such as snowmaking, meaning it's only going to get better.
However, this destination is not just for winter. In any season, you can ride the Glacier Express train through the Alpine region, take a day hike to the glacial Lago di Tom or visit the nearby Uri Alps for a multi-day cycling trip. This region offers that small Alpine village feel – including a seemingly endless supply of fondue – and fewer crowds than its better-known Swiss counterparts. Stay at the luxurious Chedi Andermatt, which offers easy access to the slopes; and look out for the Post Hotel & residences by Elie Saab, a fashion-forward hotel expected to open next ski season.
Best time to visit: Andermatt-Sedrun-Disentis is a true all-season destination. You can ski from December through April, hike and bike from June through September and enjoy spring flowers and autumn foliage in between.
4. Cap dAntibes, French Riviera
Cap d'Antibes is having a cultural moment in 2025, making this glamourous corner of the French Riviera worth another look. This year marks the 100th anniversary of F Scott Fitzgerald's arrival on the Côted'Azur – an event that helped shape the Riviera's Jazz Age legacy – and the literary milestone is drawing renewed attention to the region's artistic significance.
The iconic Belles Rives hotel – Fitzgerald's home for part of the 1920s – is embracing its storied past with a series of celebratory events. "The centennial anniversary of Fitzgerald's arrival makes this legendary hotel more relevant than ever," says Andria Mitsakos, founder of AMPR, which represents the property.
Beyond the hotel, Cap d'Antibes hosts the Juan-les-Pins International Jazz Festival in July, when Bastille Day celebrations bring fireworks and festivities to the beaches. Later in the year, visitors can attend the Festival International d'Art Sacré, one of the region's oldest music festivals. Bonus: you'll be right in the heart of everything the French Riviera has to offer, from golden beaches and dramatic cliffs to cultural sites such as the Picasso Museum and the Chapelle Matisse.
Best time to visit: The summer sun beckons A-listers, making it a great time to come for a bit of celebrity-spotting and warm waters for dipping. For cooler temps and fewer crowds, stick to April-June and September-October.
5. Slovenia
While Italy continues to grapple with overtourism, nearby Slovenia is quietly emerging as a smart alternative, offering spectacular scenery, cultural depth and fewer crowds. With Nova Gorica named a European Capital of Culture for 2025, the timing couldn't be better to explore this captivating nation.
At just under 20,720sq km, Slovenia is a "small but mighty country", says James Montie, branch manager at Fox World Travel, who's seen growing demand from clients looking for off-the-beaten-path destinations. Slovenia's breathtaking landscapes, "from Lake Bled's fairytale setting to the underground wonders of Postojna Cave", are a primary draw, he adds.
More like this:
• The 25 best places to travel in 2025
• Eight of the world's most extraordinary tiny hotel rooms
• Here's how to safely visit glacier sites around the world
Independent travel advisor Kimberly Denison agrees that Slovenia is poised for a tourism boom and that now is the time to pre-empt the crowds "Slovenia is a leader in wellness and sustainability, with green-certified cities, boutique eco-lodges and luxurious wellness retreats," she says. It also has bonafide stats to back up its green messaging, including that 60% of the country's surface area is forest and it was certified as the world's first green destination in 2016.
To explore its glorious landscapes, hike Triglav National Park, home to Slovenia's highest peak, before overnighting at Vila Bled, a historic lakeside retreat that looks like it should be a summer house for royals.
Best time to visit: The warmer months between May through September offer the greatest opportunities to enjoy outdoor adventures.
6. Peloponnese, Greece
The Greek Islands are a perennial favourite, but in 2025, it's the mainland that's set to shine – specifically the outstretched fingers of the Peloponnese. Greece is investing heavily in the region this year, upgrading infrastructure like the Mycenae road network and directing funding towards sustainable agritourism and local olive producers. The result for travellers is easier access, deeper cultural connection and fewer crowds.
Of the Peloponnese's three peninsulas, Mani – the rugged middle finger – stands out. "Far from the Cycladic island buzz, Mani is Greece's best-kept secret," says Mitsakos, who lives in Greece and represents a boutique hotel in Mani. "This rugged, sun-scorched region is a treasure find for travellers seeking authenticity, serenity and deep cultural resonance." Expect cobblestoned villages, pristine beaches and hidden coves, along with "a deep-rooted history", she adds. Stay at Pirgos Mavromichali, a restored 18th-Century tower turned boutique hotel where whitewashed rooms overlook the bay's turquoise waters.
Elsewhere in the region, travellers can visit Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympics; or relax on Voidokilia Beach on the west coast. Mitsakos also recommends traditional villages like Milea, Rigklia and Exoxhori for their vibrant folk feasts that are reviving local traditions.
Best time to visit: Greece is packed in the summer, but thanks to the mainland's slightly warmer temperatures, you can get away with a warm-weather break with fewer crowds from April to June and September to October.
7. Paris, France
Paris had quite the 2024 hosting the Summer Olympics, which means the crowds have thinned and prices dipped back down for 2025. Plus, travel here is now easier than ever; since 1 January 2025, the Paris metro system no longer relies on a complicated zone system with extra fares for the banlieues (suburbs). Today, you can use a single ticket to travel the entire network for up to two hours.
What parts of this renowned city should you prioritise? Paul Holinaty, who specialises in Central and Northern European travel at Goway, says you should hit up the neighbourhoods on the Left Bank of the Seine in particular. "Saint Germain des Pres and Luxembourg gardens are close enough to the main sites," he explains, "but nicely tucked away, where you can still find really authentic bakeries, local shops and amazing cafe culture – there's a lot of locals buzzing around the area too." The Rive Gauche is also home to plenty of book shops, theatres and elegant boutiques, making the whole area something out of a romantic film. Travellers can also rediscover an old favourite, thanks to Notre Dame reopening its doors at the end of 2024. As for where to stay, the classic Hôtel du Savoir, formerly called the Hôtel Petit Belloy, just reopened post-reno (done by Laune Architecture) in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and is, let's just say, trés chic.
Best time to visit: Paris is a feast for the senses in all seasons. That said, it's particularly lovely in spring, from April to June, with flowers blooming and longer, sunnier days.
8. Sweden's west coast
Tourism to Sweden has surged in recent years, driven in part by the rise of the "coolcation" trend where travellers seek out more temperate destinations for their summer getaways. With pristine landscapes, clean air and progressive values, the Nordic nation fits the brief perfectly. Even in the height of summer, temperatures rarely break 20C, making it a compelling alternative to the heat of southern Europe.
While many first-timers gravitate to Stockholm, the west coast remains a wilder, more rugged alternative; think granite islands, salty air and seafood straight off the boat. The long summer days and crisp nights create ideal conditions for kayaking, hiking or just soaking up the Nordic light – minus the crowds and queues of the capital.
It's also a fantastic place for sustainability-minded travellers, with Gothenburg, Sweden's second-largest city, recently awarded the EU's Mission Label for its ambitious plans to become climate-neutral by 2030. Check in at Hotel Pigalle, a boutique hotel with vintage flair and eco-conscious touches, including bio-cleaning products and locally sourced ingredients. If you're seeking more solitude than the city can offer, the Bohuslän archipelago beckons with low-impact adventures, island-hopping and some of the best shellfish you'll ever taste.
Best time to visit: June-August brings long daylight hours, with sunsets at 22:00 and the best weather for coastal adventures.
9. Albania
Albania has long been one of Europe's most underrated destinations, but that's changing fast. Thanks to relaxed visa requirements and expanded international flight routes, the country is quickly rising on the travel radar. In 2024, Albania welcomed a record 11.7 million international visitors, a surge driven in part by the global rise in interest in lesser-known Mediterranean escapes – which means that now is prime time to see this beautiful country before it books up.
"Albania is quickly gaining recognition for its mix of history, unspoiled coastline and emerging food and wine scene," says Denison. "The Unesco-listed town of Gjirokastër, the pristine beaches of the Albanian Riviera and the vineyards of Berat create a Mediterranean escape that is still under the radar but rapidly gaining momentum."
New infrastructure projects are smoothing the journey (fewer potholes are always a plus). Albania is also investing in luxury accommodations, including the Green Coast Hotel near the Unesco World Heritage site of Butrint, which is set to provide unparalleled luxury nestled among the sea caves. "Albania is poised to become a major player in luxury travel," Denison adds.
While hotpots like Ksamil are growing in popularity, travellers who venture just a little beyond the crowds are rewarded with clear turquoise waters that rival the Greek Islands. Inland, the Accursed Mountains' dramatic landscapes draw hikers and adventure seekers to the country's rugged north. Stylish coastal stays like La Brisa Boutique Hotel in Dhermi place you just steps from the sand; while major developments like the new Marriott in the Vlora Marina (expected to open in 2028) signal that this Mediterranean up-and-comer won't stay quiet for long.
Best time to visit: The summer months are prime time in Albania – and not yet experiencing the crowds of neighbours like Greece. The warm weather makes for ideal beach, hiking and exploring conditions.
Want to explore even further? Check out the BBC's 25 Best Places to Travel in 2025.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Constructed by a mysterious civilisation that left no written records, the massive site is now open to the public for the first time in more than a century.
Autumn leaves crackled under our shoes as dozens of eager tourists and I followed a guide along a grassy mound. We stopped when we reached the opening of a turf-topped circle, which was formed by another wall of mounded earth. We were at The Octagon, part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, a large network of hand-constructed hills spread throughout central and southern Ohio that were built as many as 2,000 years ago. Indigenous people would come to The Octagon from hundreds of miles away, gathering regularly for shared rituals and worship.
"There was a sweat lodge or some kind of purification place there," said our guide, Brad Lepper, senior archaeologist for the Ohio History Connection's World Heritage Program (OHC), as he pointed to the circle. I looked inside to see a perfectly manicured lawn – a putting green. A tall flag marked a hole at its centre.
That's because from 1910 through 2024, The Octagon had been used as a golf course. But on 1 January 2025, this ancient, enigmatic site reopened to visitors for the first time in more than a century.
All these prehistoric ceremonial earthworks in Ohio were created by what is now called the Hopewell Culture, a network of Native American societies that gathered from as far away as Montana and the Gulf of Mexico between roughly 100 BCE and 500 CE and were connected by a series of trade routes. Their earthworks in Ohio consist of shapes – like circles, squares and octagons – that were often connected to each other. Archaeologists are only now beginning to understand the sophistication of these engineering marvels.
Built with astonishing mathematical precision, as well as a complex astronomical alignment, these are the largest geometrical earthworks in the world that were not built as fortifications or defensive structures. And while most people have never heard about the sites or its builders, that may be about to change.
In 2023, eight of Hopewell's earthworks were inscribed as a Unesco World Heritage site. These include The Great Circle and The Octagon in Newark, Ohio, as well Ohio's first state park, Fort Ancient (not an actual fort). The other five are part of the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park: Mound City, Hopeton Earthworks, High Bank Works, Hopewell Mound Group and Seip Earthworks.
Lepper told me The Octagon and The Great Circle were once a larger, single Hopewell complex spanning 4.5 square miles and connected by a series of roads lined by earthwork walls. Walking through both sites today, there is an immediate shock of scale. The Great Circle, where the museum for Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks is found, is 1,200ft in diameter. Its walls rise up to 14ft high and are outlined on the inside by a deep ditch. The Great Circle was once connected to a square and a burial ellipse, with only part of the square still visible today. The Octagon sprawls a massive 50 acres and is attached to the 20-acre Observatory Circle, a large earthwork circle for gathering and rituals connected to the observation of the night sky.
"You could put four Roman Colosseums inside just The Octagon," Lepper told me. "Stonehenge would fit within just that small circle now serving as a putting green." He added that 2,000 years ago, Indigenous workers built these earthworks without modern tools, digging up soil with pointed sticks and hauling it in wicker baskets on their backs. One estimate, he noted, is that they moved seven million cubic feet of dirt.
The achievement of the Hopewell Culture, however, is not simply in creating large, precise shapes, which they did without the vantage point of hills for an aerial view. They also embedded a sort of hidden geometry within these structures. Until the mounds were measured and compared, it was thought that the builders didn't have any mathematical and geometrical sophistication, as there are no written records to testify to their level of knowledge. It was eventually discovered, however, that they made precise measurements across their earthworks and connected them in unsuspecting ways.
Lepper explained that the circumference of The Great Circle "is equal to the perimeter of the perfect square that it was connected to", and that "the area of that perfect square is equal to the area of the [Observatory Circle] that's connected to The Octagon".
He added: "If you draw a square inside The Octagon by drawing a line from alternate corners of The Octagon, the sides of that square [1,054ft] are equal to the diameter of the circle that it's attached to [1,054ft]."
Examples of this interplay between earthworks have been found repeatedly by archaeologists. According to Lepper, that measure of 1054ft, whether halved or doubled, is found in other Indigenous earthworks across the country, and served as a common unit of measure.
While the Hopewell Culture's geometrical and mathematical knowledge astonished scholars, another level of sophistication appears when the layers are peeled back further: astronomical alignment.
More like this
:
• The US's lost, ancient megacity
• A mysterious US desert civilisation
• A long-lost Maya city that was just discovered
In the 1980s, two professors at Earlham College in Indiana, Ray Hively (a physicist and astronomer) and Robert Horn (a philosopher), decided to pay a visit to The Octagon and its attached Observatory Circle. As astronomical monuments like Stonehenge had received great attention, they wondered if these earthworks were also aligned to a solar calendar.
Hively and Horn found no solar connections, but they then considered an alternative purpose: the lunar cycle.
"We thought deliberate lunar alignments unlikely at Newark," they wrote, because while the Sun can be tracked over a year, a complete lunar cycle takes 18.6 years. Even so, the lunar cycle proved to correspond to the position of the Observatory Mound at The Observatory Circle. There, one can watch the Moon rise over the exact centre of The Octagon in the distance every 18.6 years.
"Astronomical alignments are only relevant and useful if they somehow tie the celestial orbs to belief systems and understandings of life," said Timothy Darvill, professor of archaeology at Bournemouth University who has researched both Stonehenge and the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. "The ceremonies around the observation of the skyscape could well have a secondary function in terms of fostering community."
That ancient community and culture was part of the reason for its Unesco World Heritage Site inclusion.
A Unesco site needs to show that it has "outstanding universal value", said Jennifer Aultman, director of historic sites and museums at Ohio History Connection which helped lead its Unesco consideration. One criterion for this, she said, "is that these are masterpieces of human creative genius", which is where these mathematical, geometrical and astronomical features are important. The other, "is that they bear really exceptional testimony to the cultural tradition that produced them".
Aultman explained: "You really can understand something about the lives of the people and what mattered to them by looking at, and learning about, the earthworks."
Consider the Moon, for example, which was clearly important for the Hopewell Culture. Darvill told me that, for some cultures, the "Sun, Moon... are considered to have power over what happens on a day-to-day basis. As such, the heavenly bodies are often deified, which is how their power is justified and rationalised." It is therefore likely that the Moon was a deity shared by those who gathered at the mounds.
"The land we know as Ohio is home to a number of extraordinary earthworks built by Indigenous residents of this region thousands of years ago," said Megan Wood, executive director and CEO of the Ohio History Connection. While not all earthworks in Ohio are specifically Hopewell Mounds – such as the solar-aligned Serpent Mound Historical Site in Peebles, Ohio, for example – Wood sees them all as "icons" of Indigenous "cultural achievements".
Since the Hopewell Culture left no written records, only the earthworks and the few objects retrieved from them serve as their last cultural testimony. While archaeological excavations continue on some sites, objects like ritual smoking pipes and a small stone statue of a shaman wearing a bear skin and holding a human skull called "the Shaman of Newark" have been found. As these earthworks were gathering places and not villages, artefacts representing the locations from where these Indigenous peoples travelled have also been discovered, like effigy pipes, a copper head plate and an obsidian knife.
However, after the Hopewell Culture gradually began to disappear starting around 500 CE, other Indigenous peoples stepped in to become caretakers of the land. One of those groups was the Shawnee Tribe, which called Ohio home before they were forcibly removed west of the Mississippi River in the 1830s.
"We may not have been responsible for building or creating them, but I know that my ancestors lived there, and that my ancestors protected them and respected them," said Chief Glenna Wallace of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, who believes that other tribes should have a role in the future of protecting the Hopewell Earthworks and communicating their cultural importance.
For years, The Octagon was under the control of the Moundbuilders Country Club. After more than a decade of negotiations, the OHC and the club finally reached a deal in 2024 to transfer the site's long-term lease to the historical society, paving the way for them to open the earthworks to visitors beginning this January.
For advocates of the site's preservation, the Unesco designation and opening of these mysterious mounds to the public offers a new chapter to educate visitors about Ohio's Native American history. It also means more Indigenous stakeholders, like the Shawnee, can tell that story from an Indigenous perspective for future generations.
"I just want people to know about it," said Chief Wallace, "I want people to be able to see it. I want people to be able to visit it and want people to realise that it is a cultural phenomenon. That it's priceless."
This story was originally published in December 2022 and has been updated to reflect recent developments.
---
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
Join more than three million BBC Travel fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
Take a four-hour slow train through the Eastern Ghats to discover how a remote hill station is changing the global coffee game.
Even in December, early mornings are rarely pleasant on much of India's Andhra Pradesh coast. The air is already muggy by 06:30 as a crowd mills restlessly on platform five at Visakhapatnam (Vizag) railway station. However, these would-be passengers are no ordinary commuters, but travellers gathered for an experience. When the Visakhapatnam Kirandul Passenger Special rolls onto the platform, the crowd's relief is palpable; the two vistadome coaches at the back of the train that they've been anxiously waiting to board are air-conditioned.
Indians have only a nodding acquaintance with the concept of queues, so a mad scramble ensues as the train comes to a halt. Things settle down as it chugs out of the station and gradually picks up speed. The Visakhapatnam Kirandul Passenger Special also serves as a regular commuter service headed to the town of Kirandul in Chhattisgarh state, about 400km to the north-west, and takes about 14 hours to traverse the distance. But those in the vistadome coaches are interested only in the first leg, to Araku Valley. This serene hill station is about 120km away but takes four hours as the train winds its way through a whopping 58 tunnels cut through the Eastern Ghats. The two vistadome coaches – with their extra-large windows and rotatable seats – are designed to provide panoramic views of the area's mountain peaks and valleys and its gentle forested slopes that end in rushing rivers and streams, gorges and rocky promontories.
As the train whizzes past Vizag's neighbourhoods and suburbs, it provides snapshots of a city waking up: a vegetable vendor hauling their cart, a dog walker pulled by his dog, two bleary-eyed uniformed children clutching onto their father on a scooter to school. As the city segues into wide open fields and farmlands, the images change: smoke curls lazily into the sky from a lone thatched house in the middle of a farm, a diligent farmer urges on his oxen, a tractor hauls vegetables to the nearby market. The rhythmic clickety-clack of the train's wheels is familiar and soporific.
Less than 30 minutes after leaving Vizag, the train slows considerably and begins ascending into the foothills of the Eastern Ghats. As if on cue, most seats in the coach swing to face the windows. The train climbs, plains fall away and even the sporadic habitations clinging to the peaks vanish. Hills and mountains in the distance appear blue-grey in the tender morning sun. But even before this panorama can register, complete darkness descends as the train enters the route's first tunnel. I'm startled by the sounds of adults and children screaming, in jest of course, for the few minutes it takes for us to come out the other side.
When we emerge into daylight, the sight is jaw-dropping: a series of hillocks and gentle valleys, thickly forested, stretch out to the horizon where a haze-shrouded mountain range is just a hint of the soaring peaks to come. As I try to take in as much of the scene as possible, darkness descends again, and with it, more screaming.
On the other side is another surreal and dramatic sight: tracks bent around a hill, a green wall sloping straight up on one side, and a sheer drop on the other. The train slowly chugs forward, hugging the inner curve. The vistadomes' rear position means that the entire length of the train is visible, curling against the hill as if teetering on the edge. It then uncoils and wraps itself on the other side, trundling on a bridge built over a stream that gently flows several metres below. The bridge has no continuous guardrails, so, for a moment, it feels like the train is suspended in the air. But soon, the feeling is interrupted by darkness and more screaming, and another breathtaking view on the other side.
This sequence repeats over and over again and yet it never gets predictable or boring. Each of the route's 58 tunnels sets up anticipation for what might lay on the other side. Thick curtains of mist clinging to mountainsides or low-hanging clouds cloaking the peaks; rolling grasslands and forests spread out like someone had shaken out a giant green blanket and laid it down; deep valleys and gorges surrounded by undulating peaks; and fleeting glimpses of hamlets and habitations perched precariously on the hillsides.
We stop every few minutes to drop and pick up commuters at musical-sounding stations that could be tongue-twisters to those unfamiliar: Pendurthi, Kottavalasa, Chimidipalli, Borraguhallu, Karakavalasa. At Shimiliguda, the station proudly wears its altitude on its sleeve: 996m above sea level. Throughout the journey, there is also a continuous parade of food vendors, delectable aromas wafting from their baskets as they sell idli-vada-chutney (a common breakfast of steamed rice cake with coconut chutney), samosa, savoury puffed rice and boiled peanuts.
When the train finally rolls into Araku town, the station is crowded and noisy and the magic of the journey dissipates somewhat. But early next morning, Araku's appeal is on full display. A short walk leads to forests and coffee plantations speckled with tall silver oak trees, their trunks wrapped by pepper vines. Everything is covered in thick fog and the air is nippy, a far cry from Vizag's mugginess. The air is sappy and thick with terpenes. I catch faint whiffs of coffee and pepper.
Coffee came to Araku with the British and was grown in scattered patches of plantations. Like other coffee-growing regions in India, Araku was an ideal location owing to its combination of soil, altitude and weather. After independence from British rule in 1947, the land passed into local government hands, but decades of underdevelopment and sporadic insurgency kept the region off most investment maps. That began to change in the early 2000s.
"The local community wanted progress," says Manoj Kumar, CEO of the Naandi Foundation, a non-profit that works with farmers through community initiatives and sustainable models. "So we looked around and thought since coffee was already growing in pockets, it could be expanded."
Working with local farmers, the organisation began establishing micro-plots of Arabica coffee using regenerative agriculture. What began at around 1,000 acres in 2002 currently stands at 100,000 acres farmed by more than 90,000 families, who each own about an acre on average. Besides coffee, farmers have been encouraged to multi-crop and now produce pepper, red kidney beans, ginger, turmeric, millets, rice, vegetables, fruits such as chikoo (sapodilla), mango, custard apple and avocado. The result: a unique fair-trade coffee model known as Arakunomics, which won the Rockefeller Foundation's Food System Vision 2050 Prize in 2020.
But the foundation didn't stop there. In a first for Indian coffee, they "terroir-mapped" the beans – borrowing a concept from winemaking – and classified the end product into six distinct flavour profiles under the brand name ARAKU. Selective harvesting, sustainable practices and meticulous post-harvest processes have helped the beans consistently score 91/100 on specialty coffee rankings.
More like this:
• How the bullet train transformed Japan
• Malaysia's iconic 'Jungle Railway'
• The Baltic Express: Central Europe's new hop-on hop-off train
"We grow about 2,000 metric tons of coffee, 98% of which is sourced by specialty coffee promoters across the world," Kumar says.
Travellers can explore this story at various coffee holdings in the area, but Priya Rajagopal, a coffee enthusiast and former project manager in tech, recommends the Sunkarametta Coffee Plantation, about 13km south-east of Araku, where a wooden bridge runs for a few hundred metres through the plantation, suspended above the coffee plants and flanked by towering silver oaks. "When I went, it was the flowering season (March to May) and the plants were full of white flowers, " she says. "The air is filled with a sweet, jasmine-like smell."
A short distance away, the modest but informative Araku Coffee Museum offers a primer on the journey from seed to cup. The small adjacent café serves a robust filter brew – earthy, rich and perfect for a chilly morning in the hills.
A few days after the train trip, back in Bengaluru, I head to the sole ARAKU cafe in India (most of their production is either exported, retailed in stores or available online), which is tucked away in the tree-lined avenues of the city's Indiranagar neighbourhood. I am torn between the various options but opt for their signature medium roast. It is beautifully rich red-brown and utterly mellow on the tongue. More importantly, a subtle peppery end note immediately transports me back to Araku’s mist-covered winding lanes, the lush green forests and plantations – and the slow, soulful train ride that led me there.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Travel stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Everglades' eclectic alligators are surprisingly diverse builders, bodyguards, commuters, and health-bringing engineers.
From the edge of the Miccosukee Indian Reservation, in the north of the Florida Everglades, it is a short fan-boat ride through grassy swamp to get to an island that 18-year-old Hector Tigertail's family visit each year. For decades, this family "hammock" – as the tree-covered islands that poke out from the Everglades are known – has been their retreat; a place where the family can camp, cook and hunt. But they share this particular island with at least one permanent resident: an American alligator that, at around 7ft (2.1m) from nose to tail, is the largest female he's ever seen.
Tigertail's family, members of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, and this powerful reptile, which locals refer to as Mama Gator, have lived side by side for much of the 60-year-old animal's life, he explains. This intimate coexistence provides a chance to observe how alligators meticulously shape their surroundings. Through the dry season between December and May, she excavates a "gator pond" with her snout, claws and tail, a depression where water pools and she can wallow, keep cool and mate. At the start of the rainy season (from June to November), she builds a raised nest for her clutch of eggs, from mud, grass and twigs – a time when the humans know to keep a respectful distance from the protective mother. In return, for the next few years, they are often rewarded with the sight of Mama and her baby gators in tow.
"We like to call her Mama Gator because she's everybody's grandma," says Tigertail.
In recent years, scientific research is adding support to something Florida's Miccosukee Tribe have long known: alligators like Mama play vital roles as "guardians of the Everglades" and engineer their environment in ways that protect freshwater ecosystems. Alligators carry around nutrients that feed ecosystem webs, and their ponds and nests provide refuges where plants, fish and frogs live. New data hints that that alligators may also benefit us.
"Apex predator or not, alligators are actually very helpful and they can change the ecosystem significantly," says Tigertail, who researches alligators for the Miccosukee Tribe's Fish and Wildlife Department. "During the dry season, a lot of animals – deer, fish, otters, turtles, birds – follow the alligators."
For those like biologist Christopher Murray who has spent decades closely studying alligators, it's high time to move past their reputation as cold-hearted killers and recognise the varied roles they're playing as caring and constructive ecosystem engineers. While the cute, herbivorous beaver is widely celebrated for stewarding temperate wetlands, it is the "gnarly swamp monsters" who deserve plaudits in the southeastern United States and many other places, says Murray, associate professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. "I think we're just beginning to understand that crocodilians, in general, and specifically alligators, do a lot more good than we think."
From near-extinction to mass appreciation
Alligators are often called "living fossils", relatively untouched by major evolutionary changes for at least eight million years, with remarkably similar ancestors already hunting swamps alongside the dinosaurs. Yet, beginning in the 1850s, the arrival of rifle-wielding European settlers into the wetlands of Florida and Louisiana drove this evolutionary line to the verge of extinction.
More than 10 million alligators were killed by commercial hunting up to the 1960s, driven by the popularity of their hides for bags, belts and boots, with others shot for sport or "just for fun" according to historical accounts. In 1967, American alligators were placed on endangered species lists, leading to nationwide hunting bans that allowed populations to recover. Today, the species is recognised as a standout conservation success story, as the population has rebounded to more than three million alligators estimated to live in the wild in the states of Florida and Louisiana, and thousands more spread across the south-eastern United States.
Just as conservationists began fighting to save the species from extinction in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers began documenting their important ecological roles. In the wet season, the raised ridges around the edge of these nests are relatively dry land where some plants can escape flooding and provide platforms where smaller reptiles build their own nests. Meanwhile wading birds build their own nests above alligators, which act as "bodyguards", keeping raccoons and other predators away from the birds' eggs. (More recent research has shown that this is a macabre but overall mutually beneficial arrangement with alligators being rewarded with snacks from chicks that fall from the nests.)
Mike Heithaus, professor of biological sciences at Florida International University, explains that, despite its lush appearances, the Everglades can be a nutrient poor environment. A largely flat wetland, dominated by grass-like plants, many key nutrients are carried out to sea by great slow-flowing seasonal rivers, some kilometres wide.
In the dry season, when the water level falls, research since the mid-20th Century has shown that alligators' habit of excavating holes created variety in the otherwise monotonous landscape, with unique communities of plants, animals and algae around ponds. These holes can be architecturally diverse – created by one alligator or up to a dozen together – incorporating eclectic "burrows and hidey-holes", says Heithaus, including underwater caverns, where the alligator can stay submerged for hours. These aquatic environments form refuges in which fish like juvenile largemouth bass survive the dry season but can also be "death traps" which lure birds in search of a snack, he adds.
We're now learning these are surprisingly dynamic systems. Research in 2023 showed that it was not only the construction of the ponds that counted "but actively being in the pond matters", says Heithaus. As the alligators move, they continually stir up the sediment to keep those nutrients in the water. "The alligators are moving around; they're pooping in there. That's providing nutrients which algae – that form the base of the food web – rely on. So, you kind of prime the pump: you feed the bottom of the food chain and [the nutrients] come all the way up."
Without alligators, there would be much less nutrients circulated in the water, says Heithaus. "You put alligators there, and you get food and water, and that's happy times for most critters in the Everglades."
Eclectic alligators
This research also reveals a lesser-seen side of alligators, spotlighting them as remarkably sophisticated and adaptable creatures. The alligator's reputation as a "man-eating monster" was inspired long ago by accounts like William Bartram's widely reproduced (and wildly inaccurate) stories of encountering alligators in Florida swamps with "clouds of smoke" erupting from their nostrils. Although attacks on humans are very rare, these cold-blooded animals remain feared by many as killers or "weird swamp things", says Murray, who has worked with alligators for more than two decades.
Those who live up close with alligators see other qualities. One alligator in the state of Georgia, named Wally, was even docile enough to be domesticated as an "emotional support alligator", providing comfort and "hugs" to help alleviate his owner's depression.
Despite the reported gentleness of some individuals, it is recommended to stay at least 9m (30ft) away from alligators in the wild. Alligators are carnivores, powerful enough to bring down a wild deer or feral boar but "naturally they're going to be more of a flighty, non-confrontational animal," says Kendall Osceola, who worked at the Miccosukee Indian Village, the tribe's cultural centre. The Miccosukee learn a strict set of rules from a young age for sharing their coastal homes with gators. "We were always told if there's a body of water in Florida, there's going to be an alligator in there. So, keep a careful eye on any pets or anything small around the water line," she says. Yet Miccosukee stories depict them as "benevolent creatures", she says.
More like this:
• How do you re-home a rhino? Upside down
• Elephants hate bees - here's how that helps humans
• A wild 'freakosystem' has been born in Hawaii
Today, alligators have adapted to live in the urbanised environments of golf courses, canals and sewers. Researchers have been surprised by how varied and flexible alligators are, explains Heithaus, yet research in 2011 found behaviours that have shocked even those who study them. Near Miccosukee village, in an area where alligators live in mangrove forests alongside a fast-flowing river, Heithaus and Adam Rosenblatt fitted trackers to alligators, finding that similar alligators lived very different lives – some were "couch potatoes" who remain close to home, while others were "commuters" who travel long distances to coastal areas. "Tag two alligators – same size, both males, 20m (65.6ft) apart on the shore – and one will not move more than 7km (4.3 miles) in total in three months, and the other might do 800km (497 miles)," says Heithaus.
While American alligators have been spotted swimming out in the ocean in the past, prior to this research this behaviour was believed to be extremely rare, says Heithaus. Unlike crocodiles, alligators lack specialised glands to process salt, yet this monitoring showed that some alligators frequently venture out into the ocean when there are abundant saltwater fish and crabs to feast on. "When we first got some data suggesting the alligators were down in these saltwater environments for maybe 18 hours at a time, we were looked at like we had two heads – people didn't believe it at all," says Heithaus. "And I think it's one of the cool things we're finding across sharks, alligators, and lots of animals – that there's a lot more behavioural adaptability and individual specialisation than we would have thought – bold individuals, shy individuals; exploratory individuals, stay-at-home individuals."
Carbon-consuming monsters
Heithaus is aiming to figure out what causes these different behaviours – whether genetic or influenced by environmental factors – as well as what role "commuting" plays in cycling nutrients around wetland environments. Already, studies have shown that alligator ponds are richer in key nutrients like phosphorus and commuters are carrying nutrients up into the wetlands from coastal areas, by eating in the oceans and excreting upstream. "We know that they're moving these nutrients upstream," says Heithaus. His team at the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research Program is seeking a more granular understanding of how this affects the overall "nutrient budget" of the ecosystem, where nutrients are deposited, and how it affects the overall system.
Crucially, at a time when the Gulf Coast is being hard hit by the impacts of climate change, we are also learning that alligators may affect their environments' ability to capture carbon. By analysing soil samples across Louisiana, Murray was recently able to demonstrate in a study that areas with high numbers of alligators are rich carbon stores. "What this paper says to me is: look, we rescued the American alligator from extinction," he says, "but what we didn't realise, back then, was that maybe we were actually doing a lot more for the environment – in the context of carbon sequestration and the battle against climate change – than we previously thought."
The next step, says Murray, is to show that alligators are actively contributing to higher carbon storage in these areas – and how. We have good reason to think alligators, as apex predators, may be playing a similar "top-down" role to the famed wolves of Yellowstone, whose return has reduced herbivore grazing on small trees and helped forests to regrow. The theory of trophic cascades developed by Utah State University ecologist Trisha Atwood has shown that apex predators are not only vital for ecosystem health but could have big impacts on CO2 dynamics. This could be particularly important in freshwater ecosystems like Louisiana's tidally inundated wetlands, which store enormous amounts of carbon, says Murray, but can turn into a carbon source when they dry out.
Murray hopes his forthcoming research can provide further evidence about the value of supporting healthy alligator populations. Although hunting bans were the most important step to save the species from extinction, efforts to protect and restore populations are ongoing and involve groups who are often less recognised, he says. Among them are commercial alligator ranchers who retrieve eggs from the wild, incubate them and raise them through the first few years of life in enclosed or semi-wild environments, safeguarding them when they are most vulnerable to predation and disease. This form of early-years care, known as "head-starting", is common in conservation initiatives that aim to help endangered animals – from Eastern indigo snakes to burrowing owls. But, in Louisiana, this is a "self-funded" system driven by ranchers, says Murray. These ranchers are required to release 5% of alligators they raise into the wild, while the rest are treated as livestock that can be butchered for meat and hides.
In the Everglades, head-starting is also carried out by the Miccosukee, who rescue eggs in years when water levels in the Everglades rise, threatening to drown eggs, or temperatures fall to levels that can harm baby alligators. "Sometimes I would be at home and my uncle would tell me: 'Hey, the temperature is dropping really fast. It's going to be a really cold night. So get on the airboat and we have to go out there before the cold weather kills them'," says Tigertail.
Despite their fearsome reputation, all this hints at a future where humans and alligators coexist, with these reptiles recognised as "helpful participants" in solutions to the challenges we both face, says Murray. "If you think historically, alligators and other crocodilians have been revered as a sacred entity in cultures around the world. Do they command respect? Yes. But are they monsters? Are they to be feared? No."
--
For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and X and Instagram.
The layout of Myanmar's capital city Nay Pyi Taw will be redrawn after the devastating earthquake last month, the country's military ruler has said.
During a government meeting, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing said that buildings which collapsed during the earthquake were so badly affected because they were built on soft soil.
Office buildings will be rebuilt and must be resistant to future earthquakes, he said, with tests on soil also being conducted before any rebuilding is done.
The BBC has seen evidence indicating about 70% of government buildings were damaged by the quake in the capital, and some offices have reportedly been moved to Yangon.
Myanmar was devastated by a huge earthquake which hit the country on 28 March. The 7.7 magnitude quake was so strong it was felt in Thailand and south-west China.
According to state media, over 3,500 people were killed and 5,012 were injured in Myanmar as a result of the quake.
The city of Nay Pyi Taw covers at least four times the area of London, but with only a fraction of the people. Its history is short: it has only existed since 2005, raised out of the flatlands by the then military rulers of Myanmar, which was previously known as Burma.
The name Nay Pyi Taw means "seat of the king". The reasons for moving the capital some 370km inland from the largest city, Yangon, have never been entirely clear.
The city bears all the hallmarks of a planned capital: the road leading from parliament to the presidential palace is 20 lanes wide, but carries hardly any traffic. Shiny shopping malls and empty luxury hotels line the boulevards. There's a safari park, a zoo, and at least three stadiums.
Since 2021, Myanmar has been plagued by civil war between the junta, which seized power in a military coup, and ethnic militias and resistance forces across the country.
A 20-day ceasefire was declared by the military council on 2 April, following the announcement of a pause in hostilities by an alliance made up of three rebel groups.
The ceasefires were announced to help relief efforts, but the military has reportedly continued to attack rebel-held areas.
The military council's photo archives show that several government buildings, including the Ministry of Labour, Ministry of Planning and the Court of the Union were severely damaged in the earthquake.
Most of the buildings are still in ruins as repair work on them has not yet started.
The removal of important government documents has reportedly been ordered, along with equipment and other moveable items.
Reconstruction of the buildings could take years, and as a result, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Tourism have reportedly moved their offices to the former capital Yangon - 366km (228m) away.
Other departments are relocating their offices to open air halls called "hotai" in Nay Pyi Taw, which are built with steel frames.
Social media posts written by staff at the National Museum in Nay Pyi Taw say they have moved inscriptions and manuscripts and are trying to save as many as possible of the tens of thousands of books, along with literature and computers.
Five people have drowned after huge waves hit parts of Australia at the start of the Easter weekend.
Two others are missing off the coasts of New South Wales and Victoria states.
On Saturday the body of a man was found in the water near Tathra in southern New South Wales. It came a day after a 58-year-old fisherman and two other men were found dead in separate incidents in the state.
Rescuers are searching for a man who was washed into the water near Sydney. Also on Friday, one woman drowned and a man is missing after their group was swept into sea in San Remo in Victoria.
"One of the women managed to make her way back to shore but the other woman and the man were unable to," Victoria police said.
Victoria Premier Jacinta Allan said it marked a "awful start" to the Easter weekend.
"My thoughts are with the family of someone who has lost their life in such tragic circumstances, and potentially there is more difficult news to come," she said.
Australia's eastern states have been battered by dangerous waves.
The head of the charity Surf Life Saving Australia, Adam Weir, advised holidaymakers to visit patrolled beaches after their data showed 630 people had drowned at unpatrolled beaches in the past 10 years.
"But these coastal locations can present dangers, some that you can see and some that you can't, which is why we have some simple advice: Stop, Look, Stay Alive."
A wildlife trust has called on gardeners to help protect and save hoverflies.
The Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) said hoverflies are the second most significant pollinator after bees.
They are also food for birds and help break down gardens' organic matter but intensive agriculture, pesticides and climate change have meant their population has declined, BBOWT and the RHS said.
In 2022, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature added hoverflies to its Red List of threatened species.
"Hoverflies are a tiny but essential part of the natural world," Andy Coulson-Phillips, BBOWT's principal ecologist, said.
"They are vital for pollinating both wildflowers and garden plants alike, so we'd love everyone across our three counties to invite them into their gardens or outside space."
Stingless hoverflies are often mistaken for wasps, bees or hornets. Common species include Batman, Footballer and Marmalade, named after their distinctive markings and colours.
Hoverflies have only one pair of flight wings but bees and wasps have two.
They can be easily identified by their behaviour, rather than the way they look, because they hover or zigzag around plants.
Vicki Hird, strategic agriculture lead for The Wildlife Trusts, said hoverflies are the "hidden heroes of our gardens and countryside".
"Whatever their shape, size or disguise, they are critical for our food security," she added.
The RHS's senior wildlife specialist, Helen Bostock, said the gardening charity wants people to "open their garden gates to hoverflies this summer".
She said: "Gardeners can help attract them by planting open, easily accessible flowers.
"In spring, they'll be drawn to aubretia. In summer, they'll love blackberry flowers, oxeye daisy, marigolds, fennel, cow parsley and poppies. Come autumn, they can be seen on heather, aster and even common ivy."
You can follow BBC Oxfordshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
A village's bid to be more sustainable could see the installation of hundreds of solar panels in an unused orchard.
In an attempt to become carbon net-zero, villagers in Crowle, in Worcestershire, created a community energy company last year.
Plans have now been unveiled to install 424 solar panels at Fircone Farm, capable of generating up to 249kW.
The proposals have been submitted to Wychavon District Council by Crowle Community Energy (CCE), a collaboration between Crowle Parish Council and energy management firm Savi.
In the planning application, the organisation said it would go on a one-acre (0.4 hectare) plot "that is currently a non-productive, immature apple orchard".
CCE said the location had been chosen "to ensure minimal disruption to active agricultural areas" and that mature apple trees would remain in place around the perimeter of the site.
It added that the orientation of the panels would be adjusted slightly from the standard model to minimise their visual impact.
Steve Bott, one of the founders of CCE, said the company was now registered as a Community Benefit Society - a business with a social purpose.
Energy will be sold to residents, and all profits will be reinvested back into the community.
This news was gathered by the Local Democracy Reporting Service which covers councils and other public service organisations.
Follow BBC Hereford & Worcester on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
A group of volunteer beach cleaners in Cornwall has warned of an increase in litter ahead of the summer months.
Fistral Beach Clean said it had removed seven bags of rubbish from the dunes on Sunday, following a joint effort with the Beach Guardian group.
The volunteers said cans, wrappers, broken bottles and disposable BBQs were some of the items cleared from the beach.
"With the warmer weather comes the trashing of the dunes," the group said on a social media post. "People mindlessly destroying the very thing they likely came to enjoy."
Giving an example of some of the items left on the beach, they added: "Wooden pallets are regularly used for bonfires. The nails left behind are not removed."
Fistral Beach Clean was set up in 2010 and says it meets on the last Saturday of each month "to litter pick through the dunes, the surrounding foot paths and, on the beach, where we also focus on removing micro plastics from the strand line".
Follow BBC Cornwall on X, Facebook and Instagram. Send your story ideas to spotlight@bbc.co.uk.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has said the government will "double down" on its environmental agenda and accused opponents of the move to net zero of "making up nonsense and lies".
Political opponents in the Conservatives and Reform UK - and some trade unions – have argued that his agenda is putting jobs in traditional industries at risk and have urged a change of course.
The UK is legally committed to moving to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 – a goal set under a previous Conservative government.
Writing in the Observer, Miliband warned that an anti-net zero agenda would not only risk "climate breakdown" but "forfeit the clean energy jobs of the future".
A green power transition will help secure social justice and national security, Miliband argued.
He said that the UK's reliance on fossil fuels meant "markets went into meltdown and prices rocketed" after Russia waged its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
"The cost of living impacts caused back then still stalk families today," he said.
"So the argument for the clean energy transition is not just the traditional climate case but the social justice case too – it is working people who pay the greatest price for our energy insecurity."
On his opponents, he said there are "siren voices that want to knock us off course" and added "they will also make up any old nonsense and lies to pursue their ideological agenda".
Despite her party committing to net zero while in government, current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has said this cannot be achieved without potentially bankrupting the country.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who has criticised what he calls "net-zero lunacy", told the Sun on Sunday that the policy could become "the next Brexit – where Parliament is so hopelessly out of touch with the country".
Miliband has been concerned that his green policies will be blamed for the well-publicised difficulties at British Steel.
The government passed an emergency law to take control of British Steel amid accusations that its Chinese-owner Jingye was planning to switch the furnaces off.
Beijing has accused the government of "politicising trade co-operation" and said this situation had raised doubts about Chinese investment in the UK.
Parts of the labour movement, including unions such as the GMB and Unite, have warned of risks to thousands of well-paid jobs in the oil and gas sector.
But Miliband has attempted to reassure them by declaring that green energy generation will provide the good unionised jobs of the future.
Decades of industrialisation have polluted the waters of Italy's Mar Piccolo and brought mussel farming to its knees. Can harnessing the power of plants bring back a traditional way of life?
Adriano Lippo grips the tiller of his small boat, staring out over the dark blue waters of the Mar Piccolo. "I don't think it will happen this year," he says, shaking his head. "Everything is dead." The air carries a scent of salt, heat, and the bittersweet nostalgia of summer's end.
For the past decade, Lippo has made the same journey at the end of every summer, steering his boat between the port and the looming smokestacks of Taranto, southern Italy. His task: to transfer mussels from one inlet to the other across the Mar Piccolo, a semi-enclosed bay located between the city and the open sea. The narrow strait connecting the Mar Piccolo's two inlets has always been a lifeline for mussel farmers – a vital passage to shield their harvests from the contamination that has plagued the first inlet after years of relentless industrial growth.
The first inlet has historically been the best site for collecting larvae, and mussel farmers have passed down this knowledge over the generations, explains Giovanni Fanelli, a researcher working with mussel farmers at the National Research Council in the Istituto di Ricerca Sulle Acque (CNR-IRSA). "The first inlet is closer to the open sea, allowing cooler water to stream in. But for years, it has not been possible to complete mussel growth in that area," says Fanelli, as he bends from his boat to collect a submarine data logger, a device used to record and store environmental data underwater.
When mussels reach a certain size, farmers must transfer them to the second inlet, which lies further from the sources of pollution, to complete their growth. This allows the mussels to purge any toxins they may have absorbed during their early growth phase in the first inlet. But last year, rising temperatures killed the mussels before they could even make the trip. Ninety per cent of mussels were lost in the final weeks of September, devastating current yields and jeopardising future harvests.
Once the lifeblood of a centuries-old tradition, the Mar Piccolo supported generations of mussel farmers, producing an impressive 60,000 tonnes of mussels annually at the sector's peak in the early 2000s. Since then, mussel farming has been in decline, with pollution and heatwaves exerting ever greater pressure on an already precarious sector.
Now, researchers and mussel farmers are pinning their hopes on a plan to restore the contaminated Mar Piccolo through phytoremediation, a process where plants are used to absorb harmful toxins. While the approach holds promise for both the environment and the livelihoods of mussel farmers, its implementation faces significant hurdles, including logistical challenges, funding constraints and the ongoing impact of heavy industry in the region.
The toll of heavy industry
Known as "the city of the two seas" because of its location between the Mar Grande – the open sea – and the Mar Piccolo, Taranto has long wrestled with the impacts of industrial development. Since 1889, it has hosted Italy's largest naval base and military shipyard, and a major oil refinery and cement plant have been operating since the second half of the 20th Century. More recently, the city has been home to one of the biggest steel factories in Europe, Acciaierie d'Italia – still referred to locally by the name of its former owners, the state-owned Ilva Group.
Operational since 1965, at its peak, the factory produced more than 11 million tonnes of steel every year. Over the years, various scientific studies have identified alarmingly high levels of heavy metals and organic pollutants in marine sediments, alongside elevated cancer rates in the areas closest to the factory.
A trial in 2021 convicted 37 people and three companies for allowing the steelworks plant to emit deadly pollution, which the trial found had caused a surge in cancer in Taranto. However the verdicts were overturned by an appeals court in 2024. New legal proceedings are now underway.
A resilient ecosystem struggles to survive
A vibrant ecosystem home to seahorses, rare seaweeds and endangered fan mussels, the Mar Piccolo's low salinity levels create an ideal environment for mussel cultivation. "What should be, according to human logic, practically a putrid pond is instead a sea rich in biodiversity," says Giovanni De Vincentis, President of the Taranto branch of the World Wildlife Fund. The vitality of this ecosystem is largely attributed to the citri – submarine springs that help maintain relatively stable temperatures, ranging between 15C (59F) and 18C (64F) throughout the year. "This unique feature acts as a natural temperature regulator for the Mar Piccolo, supporting its rich biodiversity and fostering the growth of the Taranto black mussel," explains De Vincentis.
As filter-feeding organisms, mussels can accumulate toxic contaminants in their tissues. In 2011, concentrations of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that exceeded European Union standards were found in mussels grown in Mar Piccolo's first inlet, leading to a temporary ban on mussel farming in the area. Since then, stringent pollution controls have been implemented. "The local health authority takes samples to analyse. If the product is free of PCBs, dioxins, and other contaminants, they approve us to transfer the mussels from the first inlet to the second," explains Lippo.
For Lippo and other mussel farmers, the need to relocate their entire mussel crop to the second inlet is increasingly jeopardising their harvest. "From the moment all this started, mussel farming has been brought to its knees, and the mussel farmers have paid the price. The climate crisis has further accentuated these problems," says Fanelli. This past July, the temperature in the second inlet climbed to 31.5C (89F), reports Fanelli – a level that scientific research indicates can be fatal to mussels. An estimated 9,000 tonnes of mussels, valued at €8m (£6.72m, $9.07m), perished last year.
The restoration plans
Environmental remediation in Taranto has a long and complex history. "An endless story," says Vera Corbelli, the former special commissioner for Taranto's remediation efforts. Corbelli was appointed in 2014 with a mandate to lead targeted interventions to deal with the contamination. During her six-year tenure, she oversaw remediation projects and carried out extensive research covering an area of 564 sq km (218 sq miles), which includes the Mar Piccolo. "We realised that much of the Mar Piccolo had been used as a dumping ground," says Corbelli. "We found everything – cars, hospital equipment, washing machines, refrigerators. Removing this debris was our first step." Yet further progress on the ground remained frustratingly slow.
It wasn't until early 2024, when geologist Vito Felice Uricchio became the new special commissioner for Taranto's remediation efforts, that significant progress began to take shape. Although Uricchio had been working on environmental solutions for years, his efforts are only now translating into tangible policy actions.
"It started over 15 years ago," Uricchio recalls, of his environmental work in the area. "There was not only an environmental need but also a social one." At the time, Uricchio served as a researcher and coordinator. Alongside Reverend Nicola Preziuso, a priest in the Tamburi district which lies adjacent to the factory, Uricchio and his team of researchers launched a pilot project aimed at providing both ecological restoration and employment opportunities for workers who had lost their jobs. The initiative focused on decontaminating one hectare of polluted land using plants such as the Monviso clone, a species known for promoting PCB biodegradation through its root system.
"The first 600 [poplars] were planted, then another 600," Preziuso says. "We kept planting and planting. At first, the plants ranged from 50cm (20in) to 60cm (24in) in height. Over time, they've grown to about 12 to 13m (40 to 43ft), with strong, consistent trunks – a beautiful sight on a terrain condemned to be contaminated."
After a year of planting, chemical analyses revealed significant improvements, demonstrating the method's ability to address both organic and inorganic contamination. Inspired by this success, Uricchio now aims to deploy the technology on a larger scale, targeting the heavily polluted first inlet of the Mar Piccolo.
The process can treat soil up to 5m (16.5ft) deep – the reach of the plant roots – at a fraction of the cost of traditional remediation methods. "Traditional soil removal, or 'scarification', involves excavating contaminated soil and sending it to landfills, which is both wasteful and harmful," Uricchio explains. "It takes thousands of years to form just one centimetre of soil from bedrock. Discarding that is criminal."
Cleaning up contaminants with plants
The idea of using living organisms to clean up toxic areas is not new. Early research primarily focused on the use of microbes to break down waste materials and pollutants. Over time, scientists expanded their studies to include plants capable of performing similar functions. In the 1990s, Rutgers University biologist Ilya Raskin, who first coined the term "phytoremediation", demonstrated the technique's potential by using mustard seeds to extract heavy metals from contaminated soil around Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
While many plants can absorb organic compounds such as dioxins and PCBs, only certain types, known as hyperaccumulators, are capable of effectively absorbing and tolerating high concentrations of heavy metals. This group includes poplar trees, used in Uricchio's research, as well as other species like sunflowers, some types of grass, and hemp.
Though current research so far shows promise, Werther Guidi Nissim, an assistant professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, says phytoremediation alone is unlikely to fully decontaminate an area as large as the Mar Piccolo. The long timeframes needed – from a few years for the easiest pollutants to centuries for some metal and organic compounds – are another bottleneck, according to Nissim.
Instead, the technique should be combined with other more traditional remediation methods like excavation and soil removal, he says. "Since, in most cases, sites are polluted by different contaminants, an integration between conventional and green approaches such as phytoremediation could be an interesting idea to explore."
Acknowledging these limitations, the remediation plan for Taranto encompasses both typical remediation approaches alongside more innovative approaches, says Uricchio. "Phyto-assisted bioremediation will be used in cases where contamination affects the most superficial soil layers or depths compatible with the root systems of the species intended for use," he explains.
In addition, most phytoremediation projects have so far focused on the use of terrestrial plants on land, says Nissim. In saline environments, salt-tolerant species of plants, known as halophytes, must be used, and while research is still ongoing, they also form part of Uricchio's plan for the Mar Piccolo. Algae species, such as sea lettuce, can also play a role. According to Uricchio, these algae not only help restore ecosystems but also have valuable industrial applications, including in bioethanol production.
Hope despite the barriers
Taranto is one of 42 contaminated areas in Italy designated a "site of national interest" because of the urgent need for remediation. The sixth Sentieri Report – an epidemiological study of communities living in industrially contaminated areas in Italy – highlights the severe health risks associated with living in polluted environments. It also warns that even the most well-executed remediation efforts risk being compromised by ongoing or future recontamination.
"In places like Taranto, even if we managed to carry out the best possible remediation, the benefits would be completely nullified by the continuation of polluting activities," says Agostino di Ciaula, a doctor and researcher of the effects of pollution on human health.
Despite a ruling by the European Court of Justice last year stating that the heavily indebted steel plant should be shut down if it continues to pose environmental and health risks, it remains operational. Under state ownership since 2020, the plant plans to produce 3.5 million tonnes of steel in 2025, as the Italian government searches for new owners.
In a joint statement, Giovanni Fiori, Davide Tabarelli and Giancarlo Quaranta, the current commissioners of Acciaierie d'Italia, tell the BBC investments in maintenance have improved efficiency and sustainability, and emissions reductions have been achieved through upgrades to cooling and gas purification systems. "These efforts are driven by the determination to lift Acciaierie d'Italia out of a period of decline, ensure production continuity, and create the conditions for a more sustainable future."
Meanwhile, Uricchio's broader vision to restore Mar Piccolo faces significant hurdles. Securing full operational permission from the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security took nearly a year, and he is still waiting for the necessary funding. Of the estimated €500m (£423m, $566m) needed for Taranto's decontamination, only €52m (£44m, $58m) is currently available. The Ministry has acknowledged the uphill battle. "The funds available in the Special Accounting [funds allocated for sites that have yet to be remediated] are partially being used to settle debts left by previous commissioners. Soon additional resources will be unlocked," a spokesperson tells the BBC.
More like this:
• Mar Menor: cleaning Europe's largest saltwater lagoon
• The rewilded golf courses teeming with life
• The giant battery that was once a UK coal plant
A significant portion of funding was expected from the Contratti Istituzionali di Sviluppo (CIS) – a government-led instrument aimed at accelerating strategic projects in regions facing economic or environmental challenges, using EU and national funding. In a move criticised by trade unions and environmental groups, a decision about CIS funding for the remediation of the Mar Piccolo was effectively halted in December 2020.
Substantial funding is expected this year from the Just Transition Fund, a European Union fund aimed at supporting economic diversification and the energy transition, and the EU Fund for Development and Cohesion. Uricchio has submitted seven funding proposals on green supply chains that the Just Transition Fund could potentially support. These initiatives focus on soil and surface water decontamination and reducing particulate matter. However, Uricchio fears these funds might be insufficient, even if they are approved. "For this reason, I am advocating for the exploration of additional funding channels," he says.
With promises of action and new funding on the horizon, the question remains: will it be enough to restore Taranto's future and protect the livelihoods of mussel farmers and citizens?
The embattled Uricchio remains full of fight. "I want to act; I want to remediate as much as possible."
* The travel for this article was supported by a grant from Journalismfund Europe.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
Rice is a staple food for billions of people around the planet, but a new study suggests climate change may increase arsenic levels contained within the grain.
Rice is a staple food for more than half of the global population. It is consumed on a daily basis by more people than either wheat or maize, also known as corn.
So it is with some concern that scientists have unveiled a recent finding: that as carbon emissions rise and the Earth continues to warm, so too will arsenic levels in rice.
The presence of arsenic in rice has long been known as a problem. Almost all rice contains arsenic. The harmful, naturally occurring chemical can accumulate in the soil of paddy fields, leaching into the grains of rice grown there. But the amounts found in rice grains can vary considerably from well below the recommended limits set by regulatory bodies to several times higher.
Yet, consuming even low amounts of inorganic arsenic through food or drinking water can lead to cancers and a range of other health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Researchers around the world have been working on ways to reduce the levels of arsenic in rice – and in the meantime, there are ways of cooking it that can extract some of this harmful element from grains (see the box further down the story for more).
But a new study of inorganic arsenic accumulation has found it may become a greater problem due to climate change. The researchers grew 28 different strains of paddy rice at four different locations in China in experimental conditions over a 10-year period.
They found that arsenic levels in the rice increased as carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere and temperatures rise. Then epidemiologists modelled how, at current rice consumption levels, these arsenic levels could affect people's health. They estimated that the corresponding increases in arsenic levels in rice could contribute approximately 19.3 million more cancer cases in China alone.
"Inorganic arsenic has been shown in more studies than I can throw a stick at to be a carcinogen, to have adverse effects with respect to pulmonary health, with respect to cardiovascular health – it's a long laundry list," says Lewis Ziska, associate professor of environmental health science at Columbia University in New York, who co-authored the study. "And two metrics of climate change – the increase in CO2 and the increase in temperatures – are resulting in greater amounts."
It's worth noting that the researchers' worst-case scenario is beyond the high emissions "business as usual" scenario used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body on climate change. The most dire predictions assume temperatures rise by 2C, and CO2 levels increase by an additional 200 parts per million between 2025 and 2050. But it does provide a snapshot of what may happen to rice crops in the future if carbon emissions are not reduced.
While the researchers focused on locations in China for their experiments, they say such impacts are likely to be seen in rice grown in regions including Europe and the US too, as inorganic arsenic is common in rice grown around the world.
"We're not the first ones to look at CO2, we're not the first ones to do temperature – but we're the first ones to put them together in the field. And that's what stunned us," says Ziska.
More like this:
• The foods that eat up carbon
• Saving Italy's polluted sea
• Why we may soon need to eat 'resurrection' plants
Of course, the study has limitations, aside from the metrics chosen for the 2050 scenario. For one, it assumed that people will continue to consume the same amount of rice per person in 2050 that they were eating in 2021, even though, as countries get wealthier, their rice consumption tends to drop. On the other hand, it also assumed that people would continue to eat far more white rice than brown rice, like they do now. Because of how it is processed, white rice contains less inorganic arsenic than brown rice – so a shift in the other direction could make numbers even worse.
Still, this is "one of the most comprehensive studies" ever done on the topic, says Andrew Meharg, professor at the school of biological sciences at Queen's University Belfast, and a long-time researcher of rice and arsenic, who was not involved in the study. "This is as robust as you’re ever likely to get."
Humans have known for hundreds of years that arsenic is toxic. Its tasteless, colourless, odourless nature even made it a preferred method for dispatching enemies in the courts of ancient Rome and medieval Europe. But in single doses at trace amounts, it does not cause poisoning.
Over the last few decades scientists have discovered that even lower amounts of arsenic can cause health impacts when exposure happens chronically over a lifetime.
This is particularly true of inorganic arsenic, which is more readily able to attach to biomolecules in the human body where it can cause harm. While naturally occurring in rocks and soils, inorganic arsenic can be a byproduct of activities like mining, coal burning and other industrial processes. (Read more about why "natural" doesn’t always mean better).
This means inorganic arsenic is particularly prevalent in the groundwater in a number of regions, including South America and parts of southern and central Asia. But people elsewhere are vulnerable too: in the US, for example, more than 7% of private well owners, or 2.1 million people, are drinking dangerous levels of inorganic arsenic. Worldwide, some 140 million people drink water with arsenic levels above the WHO-recommended guidelines.
And, outside of drinking water, the main source of dietary exposure to arsenic worldwide is rice. In regions that tend to have little arsenic in their groundwater, like Europe, rice is the single biggest source of dietary exposure to inorganic arsenic.
The problem comes down to how around 75% of the world's supply of rice is grown, says Ziska – in irrigated paddy fields.
Rice tends to be choked out by weeds. But rice can grow in water, while weeds cannot. "That gives rice a big advantage over weeds, and you don't have to spray, you don't have to hoe," Ziska says. "But there's a downside. The downside is, because it's flooded, there's no oxygen in the soil." In these conditions, anaerobic bacteria in the soil then turn to arsenic as an alternative to oxygen to accept electrons as they respire. These bacteria then facilitate reactions with other minerals in the soil that make the arsenic more bioavailable and easier for the rice plants to absorb through their root systems.
"When you shift the soil by making it less having less oxygen, arsenic comes into its own," Ziska says. It changes the microbiome of the soil in such a way that arsenic-loving bacteria become more prolific.
And this is what he and his fellow researchers predict will get worse as temperature and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise. "This bacteria in the soil is getting more carbon. It's getting warmer. And it's being more active," Ziska says. "It really is a synergistic effect. You're making the little bacteria happier with warm, warmer temperatures, but you're also giving them more carbon, and they just go crazy."
Ziska and his team found that this effect played out for about 90% of the 28 different types of rice that they grew over their 10-year study.
What worries public health experts is that the more research is done on inorganic arsenic, the worse its effect on humans appears to be. In January 2025, the US's Environmental Protection Administration updated their assessment of inorganic arsenic's "cancer potency factor", taking into account all new research on arsenic and disease. Their latest assessment found that "arsenic is a lot more potent of a carcinogen than we previously believed", says Keeve Nachman, professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a co-author of the rice and arsenic study. In particular, there is now good evidence that arsenic not only raises the risk of skin cancer, but lung and bladder cancers.
Aside from cancer, inorganic arsenic raises the risk of heart disease and diabetes. When consumed by pregnant women, it also makes foetal or infant mortality more likely, as well as raises the risk that the infant will be born low birth weight – which can have lifelong health impacts such as cardiovascular disease – or have developmental neurocognitive effects.
For individuals, the risks are slight. For example, the latest EPA review found that consuming 0.13 micrograms per kg of body weight of inorganic arsenic per day – or 7.8 micrograms for a 60kg person – would raise the risk of developing bladder cancer by about 3% and diabetes by about 1%.
But across populations, particularly those that eat a lot of rice, these small risks can add up. And, if the predictions made by Ziska and his colleagues turn out to be correct, this could significantly impact disease in populations that depend on rice as a staple over the decades to come.
So, aside from cutting emissions and keeping temperature rise as low as possible, what can be done?
"We can't pretend that we're going to take rice off the table. That's not feasible," says Nachman. As well as an important food tradition, rice is important to people living in poverty, some of whom get up to half of their daily calories from rice alone. "But we need to do something differently."
Researchers have also been experimenting with whether different types of water management could reduce arsenic levels. One process – where, instead of flooding a field continuously, the field is partly flooded, drained and then flooded again – does seem to reduce the amount of inorganic arsenic. "But that just increases cadmium," Marham says. "And cadmium is perceived as an even bigger threat." Cadmium can cause breast, lung, prostate, pancreatic and kidney cancers, as well as liver and kidney disease.
There is also interest in trying to breed varieties of rice that take up less inorganic arsenic, but this hasn't yet panned out, researchers say.
Because some types of rice accumulate less inorganic arsenic, there is interest in exploring their cultivation. Another solution might be adding sulphur to water, which can absorb electrons, like arsenic. Another way to shift the microbiome of fields could be adding certain types of fertiliser – one combination found to decrease arsenic content has been a mix of mountain thyme and bird manure. But more research on any of these approaches is needed.
Another approach may be to grow rice under rainwater-fed conditions, or where both the soil and irrigation water are lower in arsenic. Rice from East Africa, which tends to be rainwater- rather than irrigation-fed, has been found to be particularly low in inorganic arsenic, as has rice in Indonesia. Rice grown in the US, Central and South America, south-east Asia, Europe and Australia all have been found to have higher amounts of arsenic.
There also needs to be better monitoring and regulation of arsenic exposures in food, researchers say. "Policymakers have been dragging their feet for decades on this," says Marham.
Currently, the US Food and Drug Administration does not regulate arsenic levels in rice but has set a limit of 0.1mg/kg of rice intended for consumption by children. In 2023, the EU set new limits on inorganic arsenic in rice at 0.2mg/kg of rice while China has proposed introducing similar limits. But these recommendations don't take into account the fact that some communities eat far more rice than others.
"There are ways in which to reduce the amount of inorganic arsenic, but it will require a fundamental change in management of how rice is currently being grown," Ziska says. "It really needs attention, because it affects so many individuals globally."
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
A ground-breaking project to suck carbon out of the sea has started operating on England's south coast.
The small pilot scheme, known as SeaCURE, is funded by the UK government as part of its search for technologies that fight climate change.
There's broad consensus among climate scientists that the overwhelming priority is to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the chief cause of global warming.
But many scientists also believe that part of the solution will have to involve capturing some of the gases that have already been released.
These projects, known as carbon capture, usually focus either on capturing emissions at source or pulling them from the air.
What makes SeaCure interesting is that it is testing whether it might be more efficient to pull planet-warming carbon from the sea, since it is present in greater concentrations in water than in the air.
To reach the project's entrance you have to go round the back of the Weymouth Sealife Centre and walk past a sign that says "Caution: Moray Eels may Bite".
There's a reason this ground-breaking project has been placed here.
It's a pipe that snakes under the stony beach and out into the English Channel, sucking up seawater and bringing it onshore.
The project is trying to find whether removing carbon from the water might be a cost effective way of reducing the amount of the climate warming gas CO2 in the atmosphere.
SeaCURE processes the seawater to remove the carbon before pumping it back out to sea where it absorbs more CO2.
We're the first broadcast journalists to visit and Professor Tom Bell from Plymouth Marine Laboratory is tasked with showing us around.
He explains that the process begins by treating some of the seawater to make it more acidic. This encourages the carbon that's dissolved in the seawater to turn into a gas and be released into the atmosphere as CO2.
"This is the seawater stripper" Prof Bell says with a smile as we turn a corner.
The "stripper" is a large stainless steel tank which maximises the amount of contact between the acidic seawater and the air.
"When you open a fizzy drink it froths, that's the CO2 coming out." Prof Bell says. "What we're doing by spreading the seawater on a large surface area. It's a bit like pouring a drink on the floor and allowing the CO2 to come out of the seawater really quickly."
The CO2 that emerges into the air is sucked away and then concentrated using charred coconut husks ready to be stored.
The low-carbon seawater then has alkali added to it – to neutralise the acid that was added – and is then pumped back out into a stream that flows into the sea.
Once back in the sea it immediately starts to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere contributing in a very small way to reducing greenhouse gases.
There are already much more developed carbon capture technologies which take carbon directly out of the air – but Dr Paul Halloran who leads the SeaCURE project tells me that using water instead has its advantages.
"Seawater has got loads of carbon in it compared to the air, about 150 times more," says Dr Halloran.
"But it has got different challenges, the energy requirements to generate the products that we require to do this from seawater are huge."
At present the amount of CO2 this pilot project is removing is tiny – at most 100 metric tonnes per year – that's less CO2 than a commercial plane emits crossing the Atlantic. But given the size of the world's oceans those behind SeaCURE think it has potential.
In its submission to the UK government SeaCURE said the technology had the potential to be massively scaled up to remove 14 billion tonnes of CO2 a year if 1% of the world's seawater on the ocean's surface was processed.
For that to be plausible the entire process for stripping the carbon – would have to be powered by renewable energy. Possibly by solar panels in a floating installation at sea.
"Carbon removal is necessary. If you want to reach net zero emissions and net zero emissions is needed to halt further warming," says Dr Oliver Geden who's part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an expert in carbon capture.
"Capturing directly from seawater is one of the options. Directly capturing it from the air is another one. There are basically 15 to 20 options, and in the end the question of what to use, of course, will depend on the cost."
The Seacure project has £3m of funding from the government and is one of 15 pilot projects being backed in the UK as part of efforts to develop technologies that capture and store greenhouse gases.
"Removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is essential in helping us achieve net zero," says energy minister Kerry McCarthy. "Innovative projects like SeaCURE at the University of Exeter play an important role in creating the green technologies needed to make this happen, while supporting skilled jobs and boosting growth."
'Some impact on environment'
There's also the question of what a large quantity of low-carbon water would do to the sea and the things that live in it. In Weymouth it dribbles out of a pipe in such small quantities it is unlikely to have any impact.
Guy Hooper is a PhD student at Exeter University and is researching the possible impacts of the project. He's been exposing marine creatures to low-carbon water under laboratory conditions.
"Marine organisms rely on carbon to do certain things," he says. "So phytoplankton use carbon to photosynthesize while things like mussels also use carbon to build their shells."
Hooper says early indications are that massively increasing the amount of low-carbon water could have some impact on the environment.
"It might be damaging but there might be ways to mitigate that – for example through pre-diluting the low-carbon water. It's important this is included in the discussion early on."
New research is showing just how much plants and crops rely on a host of darkness-dwelling creepy crawlies.
Think pollination, and you will likely picture a butterfly or bee flitting between flowers. But while these are indeed important pollinators, both the natural world and our food supplies rely on a host of other creatures, some of them decidedly less appealing.
Most of the world's 350,000 species of flowering plants rely on animal pollinators for reproduction. Pollinators and their importance for ecosystems are increasingly in the spotlight in recent years due to the dramatic decline in their numbers. Birds, bats, bees, bumblebees and butterflies have all been affected, with some populations shrinking by 80% or more. The causes include habitat loss, pesticides and climate change.
And recent research has also shown that pollinator diversity is just as vital for ecosystems and cultivated plants as the sheer numbers of pollinators, and found that this diversity is on the decline for similar reasons.
Scientists estimate that 3-5% of fruit, vegetable and nut production is lost globally as a result of inadequate pollination, affecting the availability of healthy food and threatening human health.
From cockroaches and beetles to the tiny "bees of the seas", here are some of the most unexpected, and occasionally disconcerting, pollinators the world continues to rely on – even if we don't always see them.
Cockroaches
Cockroaches are, in the words of one study, "among Earth's most despised creatures". But recent research suggests they play a beneficial and long overlooked role as plant pollinators – especially in the darker areas of forest often avoided by the world's more beloved bees and butterflies.
"Traditionally, pollination has been associated with bees, flies, moths and butterflies," says Kenji Suetsugu, a professor of biology at Kobe University in Japan. "However, emerging studies reveal that unexpected visitors such as cockroaches can play significant roles under certain conditions."
These "alternative pollinators", he adds, are often particularly important in environments where conventional pollinators are scarce, such as "in dense, shaded understories where light is limited and typical pollinators are infrequent".
In fact, a growing body of research suggests that cockroaches act as pollinators in a rich and varied range of ecosystems – a role that previously went mostly unnoticed by researchers, since the creatures are nocturnal and less obvious in their interactions with plants than bees. In recent years, cockroach pollination has been reported for plant species such as Clusia blattophila, which grows on rocky outcrops in French Guiana, and the rare and endangered Vincetoxicum hainanense in China, amongst others.
Suetsugu has studied the role of cockroaches in pollination in dense, evergreen forests on Yakushima Island, a lush, subtropical island off Japan. He was specifically interested in cockroach-assisted pollination of Balanophora tobiracola, a mushroom-shaped parasitic plant.
Since cockroaches are elusive and nocturnal, he used several tricks to better understand their interactions with this plant. For example, he set up a waterproof digital camera in front of one flowering plant which took photos of it in 50-second intervals from dusk till dawn for around three weeks. The resulting photographs – more than 34,000 shots – showed cockroaches visiting the flower at night. Suetsugu also captured cockroaches after they'd visited the plant to identify and count the pollen grains on their bodies.
To investigate how a single cockroach visit affected the plant's chance of setting fruit, he enclosed five of the plant's flowers with a fine mesh and opened it only for one visit by the Margattea satsumana cockroach (the most frequent cockroach visitor for this plant), then closed it again. He compared this with other treatments of the plant, such as covering the flowers with mesh for the entire flowering period, to exclude all pollinators.
The study, published in 2025, provides "the first direct evidence of effective cockroach pollination" in this type of plant, says Suetsugu. "In the case of a single visit [by a cockroach], nearly 40% of flowers developed pollen tubes, a strong indicator of successful pollination."
Beetles
As soon as the first ever flowers unfurled from their buds in the early Cretaceous period, they were visited by pollinators. But those first soft landings on their petals weren't by bees or butterflies – instead, it's thought that the pioneers of pollination may have had six scuttling legs and tough, shiny shells. They were beetles.
Beetles remain important pollinators to this day, often visiting flowers with the most seemingly unpromising allure – little nectar, greenish flowers, and an overpowering, possibly putrid smell, a set of traits known as "beetle pollination syndrome".
Despite millions of years of evolution, beetles remain among the most frequent pollinators of primitive flowers which emerged among the dinosaurs, such as magnolias. And unlike the more well-known modern pollinators, many beetles like to operate at night, flying or crawling towards the warmth and delectable scent emitted by certain beetle-specialised flowers, such as lowiaceae orchids in Borneo which smell strongly of faeces – a favourite of dung beetles.
Moths
As they hover above wild tobacco flowers, hawkmoths unfurl their 8cm (3in)-long proboscis to drink up its nectar – among their favourite meals. As they do this, grains of pollen are also pulled – as if by magic – across air gaps of several millimetres or even centimetres.
This happens because, incredibly, moths collect so much static electricity whilst in flight that pollen is pulled through the air towards them. The fact that they don't need to touch flowers in order to pollinate them makes them very good pollinators.
The majority of pollination research has tended to focus on day-flying insects, but researchers are now probing what is happening at night.
In 2023, researchers from the University of Sussex, UK, discovered moths may even be more efficient pollinators than bees. The team studied both daytime and nocturnal pollinator visits to bramble plants, a widespread species across Europe which is important to pollinators for its pollen and nectar. While the study found that 83% of all visits were made in the day, and just 17% made under cover of darkness (almost exclusively by moths), it also found the moths were able to pollinate the flowers more quickly than their daytime counterparts.
The authors say nocturnal pollination is understudied. As moths have been shown to transport pollen from wide variety of plant species, further research is needed to fully appreciate the role they and other nocturnal insects play in pollinating, they say.
Another recent study from the University of Sheffield, UK, found moths account for a third of all urban pollination. However, a lack of native plant species and diversity of plant life in cities, coupled with scent-stifling air pollution, is still leaving moths struggling to find their next meal. Now, experts are warning of an "alarming" global decline in moth abundance and diversity.
There are ways we can help, though, such as planting white flowers, leaving patches of scrub, rough grass and brambles to grow and turning off lights at night. Night-time pollinators such as moths, it turns out, need protecting just as much as bees.
Bats
Bats are another oft-overlooked furry night-time pollinator. While most bats eat mainly insects, at least 500 plant species in the tropics and subtropics are pollinated largely by nectar-feeding bats. Scientists say that bat pollination (chiropterophily) could have advantages: their large size means they can transfer a lot of pollen at once, and they fly long distances compared with many other pollinators. However, the large size of bats can also make pollination by them energetically expensive for plants.
One example is the endangered greater long-eared bat, native to the south-western US and Mexico. It feeds mainly on the pollen and nectar of agave (used to make mezcal and tequila) and various cacti, hovering above the plants just like a hummingbird to feed. Along with the lesser long-nosed bat, it is the main pollinator of agave.
Like agave, the pale flowers these bats feed on are often long and bell-shaped, and many bats have evolved ways to reach the nectar at the bottom of them. An extreme example is the tube-lipped nectar bat, found in the cloud forests of Ecuador. The size of a mouse, it has a tongue more than one and a half times its body length – the longest tongue-to-body ratio of any mammal and is the sole pollinator of a plant with corolla tubes of matching length. While not in use, it stows this huge tongue down in its rib cage.
More like this:
• A wild 'freakosystem' has been born on Hawaii
• Elephants hate bees – here's why that's good news for Kenyan farmers
• How bug poo can help reverse the soil crisis
In fragmented tropical habitats, nectar bats play an important role in keeping certain plants populations healthy, but also in pollinating crops for farmers. However, researchers have warned that bats' status as a long-overlooked pollinator means there is a lack of knowledge of how dependent crops are on bats for harvest yield and quality.
A 2020 study found, for example, that bats were the main pollinators of pitayas (dragon fruit), a major crop in central Mexico – and that when bats were excluded from pollinating this crop, yields decreased by 35%. Experts have also warned that decreased populations of bats could lead to a fall in agave abundance.
Bats also play an crucial ecological role worldwide for wild plants and crops as both seed dispersers and insect eaters. Pest control by bats has been found to support many crops around the world – from coffee in Costa Rica and cacao in Indonesia to rice in Thailand and cotton in the US – sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars in avoided losses.
Like many other pollinators, bats are being impacted by environmental change around the world, with researchers warning that these changes are putting the pollination services bat species provide at risk.
'Bees of the seas'
Despite their tiny, inconspicuous flowers, seagrasses are capable of reproducing with no help from animals. Turtle grass, for example, a seagrass which grows in shallow seas across the Caribbean, has miniscule, pollen-producing male flowers and female flowers which don't produce pollen. In coordinated cycles, the female flowers open, followed by male flowers, which release pollen into the tides after sunset.
A decade ago, it was widely believed this was the only way that seagrasses pollinated, with pollinating animals only visiting flowers that bloom in the open air. But in an experiment at an aquarium in Mexico in 2016, ecologist Brigitta van Tussenbroek from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and her colleagues showed marine crustaceans were in fact playing a role.
"At the onset of the night, many small organisms that were hiding during the day from predators started swimming around," she says. The majority were barely visible crustacean larvae, which approached the male flowers to feed on the energy-rich pollen embedded in "a slimy and sticky substance".
"Some of this substance and pollen attached to their body parts when they swim around, while also being tossed to-and-fro by the water movement," says van Tussenbroek. On the receiving end, the female flowers have "tentacle-like stigmas which capture the small pollen-carrying organisms", thus depositing the pollen grains.
Mostly, these invertebrates are at the whims of ocean currents, but when waters are calm, they are able to swim purposefully, she adds, earning these bugs the nickname "the bees of the seas".
"This was a complete surprise," says van Tussenbroek, and upended the belief that small free-moving fauna played no role at all in pollinating seagrass.
But perhaps even more surprising was the discovery in 2022 that tiny Baltic isopods help transport the pollen-like "spermatia" produced by red algae. Does it count as pollination if there is no pollen? The researchers call it "animal-mediated fertilisation" and ask what this means for our understanding of pollination, which is believed to have developed around 130 million years ago when flowering plants first appeared on land.
The discovery opens the possibility that these kinds of symbiotic interactions might have developed completely separately on land and in water – and that animal-mediated fertilisation may have emerged in the sea well before plants moved ashore.
--
For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Seasonal allergy sufferers are being hit with more pollen over a longer season due to rising temperatures, but global warming is also triggering alarming extreme allergy events, say experts.
People could see the thunderstorm, but they couldn't see what was going on inside it. Trillions of pollen particles, sucked up into the clouds as the storm formed, were now being splintered by rain, lightning and humidity into ever-smaller fragments – then cast back down to Earth for people to breathe them in.
It was around 18:00 on 21 November 2016 when the air in Melbourne, Australia, turned deadly. Emergency service phone lines lit up, people struggling to breathe began flooding into hospitals, and there was so much demand for ambulances that the vehicles were unable to reach patients stuck at home. Emergency rooms saw eight times as many people turning up with breathing problems as they would normally expect. Nearly 10 times as many people with asthma were admitted to hospital.
In total, 10 people died, including a 20-year-old law student who passed away on her lawn, waiting for an ambulance while her family tried to resuscitate her. One survivor described how he had been breathing normally and then, within 30 minutes, found himself gasping for air. "It was insane," he told reporters from his hospital bed.
Paul Beggs, an environmental health scientist and professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, remembers the incident well. "It was an absolutely massive event. Unprecedented. Catastrophic," he says. "The people in Melbourne, the doctors and the nurses and the people in pharmacies – they all didn't know what was happening."
It soon became clear that this was a massive case of "thunderstorm asthma", which occurs when certain types of storms break up pollen particles in the air, releasing proteins and showering them on unsuspecting people below. The widely dispersed proteins can trigger allergic reactions in some people – even among those who weren't previously asthmatic.
Thunderstorm asthma events like the one that hit Melbourne are one extreme example of how pollen from plants and the allergies it causes are being dramatically altered by climate change. As temperatures rise, many regions – especially the US, Europe and Australia – are seeing seasonal allergies affect an increasing proportion of people, over a longer season and with worse symptoms, say scientists.
This year, in the US, pollen levels are predicted to be higher than the historical average across 39 states this season. And that is only likely to get worse in the years to come, experts warn.
Pollen itself is an essential and ever-present part of our world. These microscopic particles pass between plants, enabling them to reproduce. While some plants spread their pollen with the help of insects, others rely on the wind, sending huge volumes of this powdery substance airborne. Many trees, grasses and weed species rely upon wind dispersal for their pollen. It is these that are especially likely to cause seasonal allergies, or hay fever.
This occurs when your immune system mistakenly identifies the pollen as a harmful substance, triggering a response normally reserved for pathogenic bacteria or viruses. Common symptoms can include a runny nose, itchy eyes and sneezing. In some cases, seasonal allergies can trigger breathing difficulties when inflammation in the airways leads to swelling, making it hard to get enough air into the lungs.
While Melbourne has been the unlucky epicentre of thunderstorm asthma, with seven thunderstorm asthma major events recorded since 1984, similar incidents have occurred around the world, from Birmingham in the UK to Atlanta in the US. Although these are still rare events, climate change may be increasing the likelihood of thunderstorm asthma incidents, in part because it is extending pollen seasons, but also because it is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, including storms.
While it isn't possible to determine exactly how much climate change influenced the 2016 thunderstorm asthma incident in Melbourne, Beggs is "reasonably certain" it had some impact.
"We know that climate change is leading to greater amounts of pollen in the atmosphere," he says. "It's changing the seasonality of the pollen. It's changing the types of pollen that we're exposed to." Beggs, who has researched thunderstorm asthma extensively, published a paper in 2024 that examined the links between this phenomenon and climate change.
Thankfully, major thunderstorm asthma events remain rare. But climate change is increasing people's risk of pollen exposure in other ways, too.
For one thing, rising temperatures mean that pollen seasons – when plants emit pollen, typically during spring and summer – are starting earlier and lasting longer, says Elaine Fuertes, a public health scientist who focuses on the environment and allergic disease at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College, UK. "You're going to get people who experience symptoms earlier in the year, for a longer period of time," she says.
In parts of the world, including the US and Europe, one of the key culprits is ragweed – a widespread group of flowering plants that many people consider to be weeds. There are various species of ragweed around the world but they can produce mind-bending amounts of pollen. A single plant is capable of emitting one billion pollen grains, for example. Ragweed grows in gardens and farmland but also in nooks and crannies in urban environments.
Allergies to ragweed pollen already affect some 50 million people in the US alone. A study analysing data from 11 locations in North America between 1995 to 2015 found that 10 of those locations experienced longer ragweed pollen seasons – sometimes much longer. During that 20-year period, the season lengthened by 25 days in Winnipeg, Manitoba, 21 days in Fargo, North Dakota and 18 days in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
"The winter warms, the springs are starting earlier, and the falls are being delayed, and so the time that you spend outdoors in contact with allergic pollen is definitely going up," says Lewis Ziska, associate professor of environmental health science at Columbia University, in New York, US, and one of the scientists who researched the ragweed pollen season.
These changes get more drastic in northern parts of North America, Europe and Asia, Ziska says. But also in Australia and the southern parts of South America and Africa.
Without immediate cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, the effect is likely to only get worse. One 2022 study, for example, estimated that, by the end of the century, pollen seasons will begin up to 40 days earlier and end up to 15 days later than they do now – potentially meaning an additional two months of symptoms for hay fever sufferers per year.
It isn't just that people are being exposed to allergens for longer. It is also that the amount of allergens in the air are increasing in many parts of the world. In the 2000s, the pollen season in the continental US started three days earlier than it did during the 1990s, but crucially, the amount of pollen in the air was also 46% higher.
This is partly because carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere are rising, due to emissions from human activities. And many of the most bothersome plants for hay fever sufferers thrive on CO2.
When researchers grew a certain type of grass under different CO2 levels, for example, they found that plants grown in an atmosphere containing CO2 at 800 parts per million (ppm) had flowers that produced about 50% more pollen than plants grown in air containing 400ppm. The latter mimics current levels of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere.
Similarly, other scientists have also experimented with growing different types of oak tree, the pollen from which often causes hay fever in countries such as South Korea. Under a 720ppm CO2 scenario, they found that each oak tree had an average pollen count 13 times what the trees had under a 400ppm scenario. Even at 560ppm, pollen production was 3.5 times higher than current levels.
More like this:
• Meet Siku, the itchy polar bear with allergies
• How light pollution disrupts plants' senses
• The science of probiotics and skin
Ziska, who authored the 2022 book Greenhouse Planet, ran similar experiments with ragweed. His results mirror those of other researchers. "Every time we cranked up the carbon dioxide, the ragweed plants responded. They grew more. They produced more pollen," he says. "And there was some evidence that they were producing a more allergenic form of the pollen, one that could induce your immune system to respond even to a greater extent than had been in the past."
The spread of invasive species across new parts of the world is also triggering allergic reactions in new populations of people. While originally from North America, ragweed, for example, has spread across Europe, as well as into Australia, Asia and South America. Already, some 60% of people in Hungary, 20% in Denmark and 15% in the Netherlands are reportedly sensitive to the pollen from this prolific group of plants.
This makes it especially concerning that, by 2050, the concentration of ragweed pollen in the air is estimated to be about four times what it is today. Even in parts of Europe where ragweed pollen is virtually absent at present, including southern UK and Germany, "pollen loads become substantial" under both moderate or high-end climate scenarios, researchers wrote in a 2015 study.
About one-third of the increase is due to the continuing spread of the invasive species, the researchers note. The remaining two-thirds is specifically due to climate change, including the lengthening of the growing season as temperatures warm. "So it'll be an earlier season, a longer season, as well as a more intense season for those who experience allergic symptoms – and then a higher risk of new sensitisation for a previously unexposed population," Fuertes says.
Not every region in the world will see more pollen production. Some researchers have found that southern California, for example, will experience earlier but less productive pollen seasons, largely as a result of reduced rainfall.
But these predictions don't account for all the potential effects of climate change on airborne allergens. There could also be health impacts from the increased likelihood of wildfires, for example, because this raises the risk of both asthma and allergy symptoms.
Relatively speaking, the amount of pollen in the air will still vary from year to year, Fuertes points out. But that may not be of much help to hay fever sufferers. "Once you're sensitised and go on to develop allergic symptoms, you'll still likely experience symptoms during years when pollen levels may be lower than average," she says. "You'll react to the pollen that's around."
So, what can people do about this? Cutting carbon emissions would help to avert some of the worst climate impacts and other strategies might also mitigate the problem.
It might be possible to make some drastic but direct interventions, for example. A century ago, some US cities even set up commissions to tackle ragweed. "Chicago employs 1,350 in hay fever fight," blares one headline from 1932. The news story explains that men – otherwise unemployed during the Great Depression – were paid the equivalent of one week's food and lodging (and "25 cents in cash") for each day they spent cutting down the plant.
While this might sound quaint, it made a difference. A 1956 study of New York City's "Operation Ragweed" estimated that cutting down the plant in droves cut pollen production by about 50%. Today, it is in Europe where you can find coordinated action ongoing. In Berlin, workers have been dispatched to find and eliminate ragweed around the city, while Switzerland banned the import or sale of the plant in 2024 and established volunteer groups patrolling public parks to pull it out.
Other solutions lie in smarter urban design. "We should definitely green our cities," Fuertes says. "But we do need to do it thoughtfully."
Planting of exotic species, for example, can trigger new allergies. Opting for the male, pollen producing trees in some species over "messy" fruit and seed producing female ones – so-called "botanical sexism" – can also increase pollen levels in urban areas, although studies have shown the effect of this bias is relatively small in major cities such as New York.
It is also important to monitor and forecast pollen levels, scientists say. "We need to know what we're breathing in. That's a pretty fundamental thing in terms of our health," says Beggs, who points out that while most people take it for granted that they can get reliable, real-time, validated information on metrics like temperature or rainfall in their area, relatively few can say the same for airborne allergens.
But even those services that are modelling pollen counts in an extensive, detailed way – such as the Finnish Meteorological Institute – aren't monitoring or modelling airborne allergen levels, which are more accurate as each pollen grain can release different amounts of allergens and they can vary by the weather conditions. These are a different measurement, Fuertes points out, and one that she's shown is more closely linked to allergy symptoms. "Nobody is measuring allergen levels on a routine basis," Fuertes says. "We should be moving towards that."
Overall, experts say, the science is clear. Without concrete, coordinated action, climate change will continue to make hay fever worse across many regions of the world. This might include more dramatic, deadly events like thunderstorm asthma. But it might also mean more people sniffling and suffering, for a longer season, every year.
"We have the studies now to show that it's really having an impact on human health," says Beggs. "And there's more to come."
--
For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Scientists in the high Arctic are lifting their labs into the air to avoid damage from melting permafrost.
Ny-Ålesund in Norway's Arctic is the world's most northerly settlement. A team of scientists surrounded by glaciers, polars bears, walruses and arctic foxes call this hostile environment home while they're researching the Arctic's ice, ecosystems and atmosphere.
"The polar night is always the hardest," explains Marion Maturilli, a scientist studying Arctic climate dynamics with the French and German Polar Institutes, who is based at the station.
For more than 50 years, Ny-Ålesund has housed an international community at the top of the world just 1,200km (745 miles) from the North Pole. Remnants of scientific equipment from the mission which mapped the lines of longitude which define our time zones, still stand at Ny-Ålesund. More recently, Nasa used the base for its satellite lasers and measurements of the Earth's electrical field. Now, scientists from 10 countries live there to conduct their research. For almost three months at a time, they wake and go to sleep in darkness. Their experiments stretch from space to the mysteries of phytoplankton, microplastic pollution, walrus behaviour and alterations in Arctic cyclones.
Leave minimal trace
The need to protect the unique polar archipelago resulted in the Svalbard Environmental Protection Act, which was one of the world's first international environmental protection agreements. But the impact left on this pristine landscape by the researchers is necessary, the scientists say.
Maturilli's team records long-term series of temperature and solar radiation measurements at Ny-Ålesund. Everyday for 30 years, the team at the German station used a weather balloon to raise a radiosonde – a small instrument which measures atmospheric conditions – which has to be carefully operated to prevent icing up in the clouds. The results are used to make accurate up-to-date weather forecasts but also document the long-term changes of temperature in the upper air of the region. These measurements depend on having precise and accurate reference points made at the station's high latitudes which give the global coverage and even our place in space.
"It doesn't sound spectacular but our daily measurements have produced reliable data for an international climate reference observing network," says Maturilli.
But to limit the impact of the settlement, only around 30 people are permitted live at the research station year-round.
"We do everything we can from planning to execution to change the Arctic as little as possible but this research is vital", explains Iain Rudkin, the Arctic Operations Manager for the British Antarctic Survey.
Efforts to mitigate their own environmental impacts are a high priority according to Geir Gotaas, leader of the Norwegian Polar Institute at the base.
Scientists are careful to collaborate to avoid any duplicated research. The teams on the base share data and boat rides to collect Arctic specimens and are planning to transition to electric snowmobiles – although there are challenges. "In the field researchers typically cover long distances and bring a lot of heavy equipment, and EV snowmobiles aren't up to the task – yet," says Gotaas.
Keeping the science on track
And, while protecting the rare ecosystem is enshrined in the Svalbard Treaty, the carbon footprint must also be limited so the science itself is not derailed.
"It's very important to limit our carbon footprint when we are working in such a unique environment", Maturilli says. She explains that if a car or engine snowmobile visits the atmospheric lab, the data for these periods is not usable due to the carbon increases. (Read more about why Ny-Ålesund is the town with the cleanest air in the world.)
"Worsened battery performance in cold conditions and any projects which involve sea or diving activities are very difficult because the logistics use up many resources," she adds. "We co-ordinate within the international community of climate researchers, each doing a puzzle piece to make sure we optimise activities so there's benefits for all".
The site has enabled long-term research in the high Arctic and unique collaboration between countries and disciplines. The scientists share equipment – everything from meteorologic balloons to second hand winter clothing.
The Korean Polar Institute's team is one such example of cross-country collaboration. The team used results from a project carried out by a German-Nordic partnership. The work led to the Korean team publishing a paper about how Arctic ecosystems operate during the dark.
Yoo Kyung Lee from the Korean Polar Institute says she also minimises her carbon footprint at the station by freeze-drying her plant samples to transport back to South Korea for further energy-intensive experiments. The frozen samples show the multi-generational changes in Svalbard's plant life. From the base, she monitors changes in the plants – creating DNA markers to distinguish populations and later sequences their genomes so she can study their adaptations to the changing climate.
In addition the Norwegian and Italian bases are collaborating in the Ice Memory operation, collecting cores to preserve these rich records before they disappear. The cores are sampled as twins, one being used for research and the other sent for preservation meaning that future generations of scientists can access high-quality cores to study the environmental conditions of our planet long after glaciers may have disappeared due to global warming.
At the busiest times for conducting research in the summer when the sun never sets, the population still remains less than 200, with food and waste strictly managed. The researchers eat the same meals as each otherin only one room to limit the container ship deliveries and the waste generated is sorted in 10 to 15 fractions – fractions is the term for waste categories such as food, cardboard, glass – and shipped to the Norwegian mainland for recycling
The majority of the produce comes from Norwegian wholesale suppliers and is imported from the mainland as there is no agricultural produce in Svalbard. Gotaas says they try to keep food waste at a minimum.
"The most important step is quite simple; only prepare the amount of food needed to feed the number of people in Ny-Ålesund at any given time," he explains.
Leftovers are typically served as part of lunch the following day and whatever is left of food waste is shipped to the Norwegian mainland for composting and regular waste handling.
While undertaking their projects, scientists regularly receive spot check visits when their power usage is scrutinised – with use of electronic devices limited to conserve electricity. The power station which provides electricity and hot water still runs on diesel, although heat exchangers have been installed to extract as much heat and energy as possible from the power generator exhausts. Smaller measures are also implemented, such as installing more efficient ventilation systems in the labs, switching from regular light bulbs to LED lights, having motion sensors to switch off lights automatically, and lowering of the temperature in rooms that are not being used.
Research instruments themselves are meticulously tracked across this remote landscape – each registered in a Geographic Information System (GIS) layer – or collection of geographic data – with every project's tools mapped and constantly updated. The general rule is that all projects should have a start and end date so that instruments no longer active are quickly collected, explains Gotaas. Because of the need to provide environmental data of the highest quality possible, Geir says it is in "everyone's interest to keep the local carbon footprint at a minimum to avoid any disturbance to the sensitive measurements".
A necessary presence
The stations themselves are as vulnerable as the ecosystem. The buildings, which function as both living quarters and laboratories were built as early as 1910, though to the 1960s.
Improving insulation is a step typically taken when renovating the old buildings. But since many of the oldest buildings in Ny-Ålesund are protected as cultural heritage, there are limits to what changes can be made. So, the scientists focus on improving efficiency and have installed the heat exchangers for this purpose.
But due to the melting permafrost, the stations are shifting and tilting with doors no longer fitting their frames, and pools of water are rotting their wooden foundations. To tackle this problem, the teams devised an engineering method to move the stations using car jacks to raise and then lower the buildings on new steel girded frames. In some cases engineers must drill 50m (164ft) deep into the bedrock and reinforce concrete pillars which have replaced the original wooden supports.
When the station was first built, the permafrost was so stable that this wasn't necessary, but with the changes from global warming over the last decades causing thawing permafrost several of the old buildings have extensive damages as the structural integrity has been compromised. Geir says that inserting steel pillars into the bedrock will "prevent damages from occurring, and reduce the need for expensive maintenance and reparations".
Two or three people can pull the entire building off its foundations, simply cut its electricity for half an hour and then reconnect it with none of the ongoing lab research compromised. With the Italian station already moved, the UK station is next in line in spring.
A race against time
Svalbard is the fastest warming place in the world, and even within the Arctic. Leaving as little trace as possible is a challenge for the whole Ny-Ålesund community. Now, not only the results but the research itself is being outpaced by the climate crisis as it becomes more seasonally dependent.
Until recently, scientists hoping to study the sea ice in the Arctic could research at the station but the presence of sea ice can no longer be guaranteed. "Normally now it is too warm and turbulent for the sea ice so we've had to turn down some projects otherwise the scientists could lose their funding," explains Rudkin.
More like this:
• An icy plunge: Diving under sea ice for science
• The race to study Antarctica before it melts
• The astronauts of the underworld
The work that takes place on the research base informed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that the Arctic is likely to be nearly ice-free in the summer before 2050, with Arctic sea ice cover already at its lowest level since at least 1850. And if scientists cannot research this sea ice, Rudkin worries about what will be lost to science.
"It's incredibly sad. Over 15 years, I've seen it change too much. [The] mind-blowing scenery gets under your skin and you fall in love with it. But I have two small kids and the thought of what world I'm leaving behind for them is always on my mind," Rudkin says.
"In daily life I meet people who ask me if the Arctic is actually changing," says Rudkin. "I wish they could see how much its lost so quickly. We always hope our science gets fed into policy so we could still change the future."
--
For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook and X and Instagram.
The UK government is investigating a fast-growing "green fuel" called HVO diesel amid claims of significant fraud, the BBC has learned.
HVO is increasingly popular as a transport fuel and for powering music festivals and its backers say it can curb carbon emissions by up to 90% as it can be made from waste materials like used cooking oil.
But industry whistleblowers told the BBC they believe large amounts of these materials are not waste but instead are virgin palm oil, which is being fraudulently relabelled.
And data analysed by the BBC and shared with the UK's Department for Transport casts further doubt on one of the key ingredients in HVO, a material called palm sludge waste.
Europe used more of this waste in HVO and other biofuels in 2023 than it is thought possible for the world to produce.
In response to the BBC's findings, the Department for Transport said they "take the concerns raised seriously and are working with stakeholders and international partners to gather further information".
HVO, or hydrotreated vegetable oil, has been called something of a wonder-fuel in recent years as it can be used as 100% substitute for diesel reducing planet warming emissions.
UK consumption rocketed from 8 million litres in 2019 to about 699 million litres in 2024, according to provisional government figures.
Its green credentials rely heavily on the assumption that it is made from waste sources, particularly used cooking oil or the waste sludge from palm oil production.
But industry whistle-blowers have told the BBC that they believe virgin palm oil and other non-waste materials are often being used instead.
That would be bad news for the planet, as virgin palm oil is linked to increased tropical deforestation, which adds to climate change and threatening endangered species like orang-utans.
This palm oil "floods the market like cancer," one large European biofuel manufacturer told the BBC.
They said that to stay in business they have to go along with the pretence that they are using waste materials.
Another whistle-blower, a former trader of these biofuels, also speaking anonymously, gave the BBC his account of one recent case dealing with supposedly waste products.
"I believe that what I bought was multiple cargos of virgin palm oil that has been wrongly classified as palm oil sludge," they said.
"I called one of the board members and told them about the situation, and then I was told that they didn't want to do anything about it, because the evidence would be burned."
As well as this testimony, data compiled by campaign group Transport & Environment and analysed by the BBC suggests that more palm sludge waste is being used for transport biofuels than the world is probably able to produce.
The figures show that the UK and EU used about two million tonnes of palm sludge waste for HVO and other biofuels in 2023, based on Eurostat and UK Department for Transport figures.
EU imports of this sludge appear to have risen further in 2024, according to preliminary UN trade data, although the UK appears to have bucked this trend.
But the data analysed by the BBC, which is based on well-established UN and industry statistics, suggests the world can only produce just over one million tonnes of palm sludge waste a year.
This mismatch further suggests non-waste fuels such as virgin palm oil are being used to meet Europe's rapid growth in biofuels, according to researchers and industry figures.
"It's a very easy game," said Dr Christian Bickert, a German farmer and editor with experience in biofuels, who believes that much of the HVO made with these waste products is "fake".
"Chemically, the sludge and the pure palm oil are absolutely the same because they come from the same plant, and also from the same production facilities in Indonesia," he told BBC News.
"There's no paper which proves [the fraud], no paper at all, but the figures tell a clear story."
Underpinning the sustainability claims of biofuels is an independent system of certification where producers have to show exactly where they get their raw materials from.
It is mainly administered by a company called ISCC, and in Europe it has a long-standing reputation for ensuring that waste materials turned into fuel really do come from waste, by working with national authorities.
But in Indonesia, Malaysia and China, three of the main sources of the raw ingredients claimed to be waste for HVO, supervision is much more difficult.
"ISCC is simply not allowed to send anybody to China," said Dr Christian Bickert.
"They have to rely on certification companies in China to check that everything is OK, but China doesn't allow any inspectors in from outside."
This concern is echoed by several other groups contacted by the BBC.
Construction giant Balfour Beatty, for example, has a policy of not using the fuel, citing sustainability concerns.
"We just are not able to get any level of visibility over the supply chain of HVO that would give us that level of assurance that this is truly a sustainable product," Balfour Beatty's Jo Gilroy told BBC News.
The European Waste-based and Advanced Biofuels Association represents the major biofuel manufacturers in the EU and UK.
In a statement they said "there is a major certification verification issue that needs to be addressed as a matter of priority", adding that the "ISCC should do much more to ensure that non-EU Biodiesel is really what it claims to be".
In the light of growing fraud allegations, the Irish authorities have recently restricted incentives for fuels made from palm waste.
The BBC also understands that the EU is about to propose a ban on ISCC certification of waste biofuels for two-and-a-half years, although it is expected to say it is not aware of direct breaches of renewable goals.
It would then be up to individual member countries to decide whether to accept certifications.
In response, the ISCC said it was "more than surprised" by the EU's move, adding that it had been "a frontrunner in implementing the most strict and effective measures to ensure integrity and fraud prevention in the market for years".
"The measure would be a severe blow to the entire market for waste-based biofuels," it said.
Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to keep up with the latest climate and environment stories with the BBC's Justin Rowlatt. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.
It's having a moment with celebrities, fashionistas and Gen Z. But wearing any kind of fur, from vintage to synthetic, poses some difficult questions. Could a new plant-based faux fur be the way forward?
From Tory Burch in New York and Simone Rocha in London, to Fendi in Milan and Miu Miu in Paris, fur dominated the autumn/winter 2025-26 catwalks. And celebrities matched the runways, with Hailey Bieber, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Taylor Swift and Rihanna all spending the start of the year wrapped up in faux and vintage fur coats.
The last time fur hit the headlines was in 2017, when Gucci pledged to go fur-free, influencing a host of designer brands to follow suit. The move was welcomed by animal rights campaigners, but what followed was the scaling of a new problem: much of the real fur has been replaced by synthetic alternatives that are derived from fossil fuels. Given the tensions around animal welfare and the environment, why is fur now firmly back in fashion?
It began in early 2024 with the arrival of the mob wife aesthetic, an ostentatious, glamorous response to the understated, minimalist trend that preceded it: stealth wealth. "Reviving historical looks for contemporary wear is a natural part of the fashion cycle. It's escapism, and who doesn't want some of that?" says Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas, associate professor, MBA fashion business and entrepreneurship, at Ravensbourne University, London. "I was in the room when [former CEO] Marco Bizzarri announced Gucci would no longer use animal fur in its collections, and remember what an amazing shift this was for an Italian luxury brand where fur was such a prevalent material. But the topic of faux fur is such a tricky one, too."
Radclyffe-Thomas adds that, since designer labels' decision to ban real fur from their collections, the faux-fur market has evolved from the early days of "fun" fur – low cost, often in bright colours that didn't attempt to imitate the real thing – to a new level of quality where most consumers wouldn't know the difference between real and fake.
The production of fossil fuel-based fabrics continues to rise globally, with polyester the most common, accounting for 57% of all fibre production. Even clothing made from recycled polyester is problematic because the model isn't circular. The vast majority is made using plastic bottles – not old textiles – which means that it can't be recycled again, and will most likely end up in landfill at some point.
One way to keep faux fur out of landfill – or delay its final destination – is to keep it in circulation. At fashion rental company By Rotation, the rental of faux fur and wool coats has been increasing since even before the recent catwalk shows. London label Charlotte Simone – whose faux fur coats have been worn by Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa and Madonna – is the third most rented brand across coats and jackets. "Higher quality, well-made faux fur, especially from designer brands, tends to last longer, meaning it's more likely to be passed down, resold or rented rather than discarded," By Rotation founder and CEO, Eshita Kabra-Davies, tells the BBC.
The global second hand clothing market is expected to reach $367bn by 2029, with a record number of shoppers having bought pre-loved clothes in 2024. This year, since the autumn/winter 2025-26 collections were shown, searches for both real and faux fur have spiked at rental platforms and online retailers.
Changing tastes
Holly Watkins, owner of vintage boutique One Scoop Store in north London, says that in the past few years she has seen a considerable shift away from selling real fur to fake alternatives, in response to changing tastes and demands from her customers. "I only sell real fur if it's a super-special vintage piece which I can't say no to, or has a detachable collar or trim," she tells the BBC. "Personally, I don't have a problem with old [real] fur – it's better to prolong its life than send it to landfill. I have more of a problem with polyester, in that it will never biodegrade."
But from conversations with vintage dealers in west London – home to the likes of Portobello market – Watkins says that many stores have never stopped selling real fur, both old and new, with younger shoppers helping to drive the trend.
"Fashion turned on fur. Young customers want more" was the headline of a recent Wall Street Journal article – and the consensus does seem to be that Gen Z is leading the revival of vintage fur. Madison Avenue Furs, the largest buyer of pre-owned fur in the US, reports a significant uplift in sales, particularly of pre-owned pieces. "We saw college students coming in to buy fur, which we haven't seen in years," Larry Cowit, owner of Madison Avenue Furs, tells the BBC. "The vintage furs against the new furs was a concern for many of the younger buyers and – ethically – they were comfortable with vintage."
Customers are buying vintage furs across the board, says Cowit, including mink, fox and beaver in oversized silhouettes – from the likes of Christian Dior, Fendi, Oscar de la Renta, Prada and YSL. "Once these brands come in, they go rather quickly."
On the catwalks at the recent fashion weeks, much of the fur was faux, although among the headlines at Paris Fashion Week was a mink coat made from real vintage fur at Gabriela Hearst, a designer label that positions itself as "luxury with a conscience".
Animal rights campaigners don't accept the vintage argument. "Regardless of when the damage was done, vintage fur remains clothing made from the skin of a needlessly killed and caged animal," says Emma Håkansson, founder of Collective Fashion Justice. "It is an ongoing symbol of human supremacy over other animals, and we should not accept that in the 21st Century when we have myriad other options without animal exploitation, wildlife killing or factory farming."
Among the new-generation alternatives to fossil-fuel-made fur and real animal skin is Savian, a 100% plant-based fur made from nettle, flax and hemp sourced from Europe and produced in Italy. Developed by material science company BioFluff, Savian launched in the form of a longline coat by Stella McCartney during COP28 in November 2023, and was later used in 2024 by Danish fashion brand Ganni to create a collection of bags for Copenhagen Fashion Week.
"We are working with several fashion brands across the luxury, contemporary and accessible markets to develop materials that are suited to their needs," BioFluff co-founder Roni Gamzon tells the BBC, adding that cost remains a challenge to scaling up the adoption of new-gen materials. "So many brands have built a reliance on low-cost synthetic materials manufactured at mass in the Far East, making it impossible for us to compete purely on pricing."
BioFluff is part of La Maison des Startups, a programme from LVMH to help accelerate the implementation of new solutions within its portfolio of brands, which includes Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Fendi and Céline. Conversely, LVMH also helps to fund The International Fur Federation, paying €300,000 ($318,000) for Furmark membership, a global certification and traceability system for real fur.
More like this:
• Ten items in your wardrobe is enough – here's why
• The Indigenous-American supermodel bringing change
• How one surprising image kick-started the 1990s
The argument that synthetic fur has a higher environmental impact than real fur is questioned by a 2013 scientific study, which compared the impact of natural mink fur coats against that of faux fur coats, and found that the production of natural mink fur had the highest climate impact. When this study is considered alongside two other facts – approximately 100 million animals are killed for their fur and more than 100 billion items of clothing are produced globally each year (with 65% ending up in landfill within 12 months) – is the production of new fur clothing ever justified?
Cowit, who continues to sell both new and vintage furs, believes it's up to customers to make the choice, while Radclyffe-Thomas says her anti-real-fur views were challenged when she worked in the US and met people for whom hunting and trapping were part of their traditions.
"For many Indigenous cultures, fur and animal skins are part of a cultural heritage used for ceremonial and everyday dress, and I do think that there is an argument for respecting this," she says, before recalling her early student days where she learnt sewing techniques from a furrier. "Those classes brought home to me the reality of the number of animals killed for clothing, and pretty much cemented my personal view: I have never considered buying real fur."
Three Things to Help Heal the Planet by Ana Santi is published by Welbeck Balance.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.
For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
A photographer's iconic shot of polar bears in abandoned buildings on a Russian island shines a spotlight on wider changes in their behaviour.
In September 2021, Russian wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh and his team were sailing around the wild and remote Chukotka Peninsula in Russia's extreme northeast. They were hoping to visit Wrangel Island, a well-known gathering place for polar bears, when the weather turned.
"We faced a heavy storm, with super-strong wind and waves, and we tried to find a place to shelter from the storm because the boat was small," Kokh recalls. They sheltered near the rocky shore of a small, uninhabited island called Kolyuchin, home to an abandoned Soviet-era weather station – and made an unexpected discovery.
"We saw some movement on the island, took out our binoculars, and saw polar bears roaming around there, many of them, maybe 15 or 20," Kokh says. "We were super surprised because we never expected to meet polar bears so far to the south. At this time of the year, they should be on the sea ice already, and on Wrangel Island, normally."
The weather station on Kolyuchin had been abandoned in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Stepping on the island to take pictures of the bears was too dangerous. Instead, Kokh used a drone, taking his time to get the bears used to it, then slowly flying it closer. As he was watching them, he noticed something else: there were bears inside some of the houses.
"I realised that it was a perfect setting for photography, because these houses are super photogenic, they are old and ruined, and animals looking out of these houses, is a perfect picture," he says. "And the weather was terrible, [there was] wind and rain and fog, which is also very good for photography! So everything came together."
One of the photos captures a bear in the entrance to the weather station, and another one looking out of the window. Titled "House of Bears", it won Kokh the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, given out annually by the Natural History Museum in London. "It's the best picture I've ever taken, and I think I won't be able to repeat it, ever," he says.
Tom Smith, a professor of wildlife sciences at Brigham Young University in Utah, has spent decades conducting field work among bears, including polar bears, and says it's not unusual to see polar bears in abandoned buildings. "They're curious animals so we see them in structures often, or they will be climbing on top of cars or pipelines," he explains. There has, however, been a more worrying trend across the Arctic, he says: as the sea ice melts, polar bears are increasingly approaching or wandering into inhabited towns or villages, to feed on open rubbish dumps. "They are fatefully drawn towards human settlements," says Smith, and this can result in conflict with humans.
The problem is two-fold, according to Smith. One is that isolated, northern communities often use open rubbish pits near the village. Securing garbage so it can't be accessed, for example in bear-proof bins and enclosed landfills, is expensive, he points out – and in the past, was not necessary. "The overwhelming Western influence in the north has resulted in [throwaway] economies that never existed there," he says. "Those cultures never had a throwaway society, so the notion of having to secure garbage – that's a new thing."
Secondly, Smith notes that polar bears are spending more time on land due to the climate-change-driven loss of sea ice. They are also shifting their dens from the ice onto the land, to avoid the risk of denning on the increasingly unstable sea ice, research in northern Alaska shows. Without the sea ice, the bears can't hunt for their preferred, ideal diet of blubber-rich seals, and may resort to land-based food, be it prey or rubbish.
"So we have a prediction that more and more bears are coming onto the land, they are increasingly hungry and drawn to these pits," Smith says. The rubbish pits tend to be close to the villages. "Because of that, we can expect more and more conflict with bears," he warns.
He emphasises that polar bear attacks on humans are very rare. According to one study, across more than a century, from 1870 to 2014, there were only 73 attacks by wild polar bears on humans, distributed among the five countries with polar bears: Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States. Twenty of the attacks were deadly, and 63 caused injuries. (Because the attacks often involved more than one person, the total number of deaths and injuries is higher than the number of attacks.) Smith says that humans are not part of bears' natural diet – in contrast to big cats such as tigers and lions, who do see humans as potential food. "That is a global myth, that [polar bears] are the only bear that stalks and kills humans," he says.
Nevertheless, there have been cases where polar bears have attacked people, with malnourished male bears most likely to pose a threat to humans. In some cases, starving polar bears who have become used to human-provided food may then see humans as prey, research suggests. Smith says it's the increasing proximity to humans that's the problem, rather than the bears hunting humans as such: "The [bears] are there for the garbage, and then they will spin off into the village and of course they're quite capable of ripping doors and windows off. So we've seen an uptick in these confrontations," he says.
A 2022 research paper warns that food from human sources – especially waste – is an emerging threat to polar bears. The supply of such human-provided food including from dumps is growing, according to the paper. As a consequence, some communities in the Arctic have seen startling incursions of dozens of polar bears. The study notes that when given the choice between sea ice, and rubbish dumps on land, polar bears still prefer the sea ice – suggesting that they are resorting to the dumps out of necessity.
For example, in 2019, 60 polar bears gathered at a dump near the village of Ryrkaypiy in the Chukotka region of Russia, a few 100 metres from the village, according to the study. The bears also entered the village, causing alarm, and forcing the villagers to cancel public events and keep their children at home. However, once the sea ice formed and thickened, the polar bears left the land and returned to the sea.
In Novaya Zemlya, a remote Russian archipelago, a similar invasion of 52 polar bears happened in 2019, according to the study. "Although polar bears had visited the dump in previous years, this event was unprecedented," the researchers note, and was likely due to the loss of sea ice. In Arviat, an Inuit community in Nunavut, Canada, the number of polar bears using the local open dump has grown each year since record keeping began in the 1960s.
Spending more time on land could threaten the bears' long-term survival, Smith says, as the marine diet is more suited to them. In particular, the high fat content of their preferred prey, seals, is crucial for their health. Fat, in the form of seal blubber, makes up around 70% of polar bears' natural diet on the sea ice. It contains twice the energy per gramme as muscle. In fact, when catching a seal, the bears mostly eat the blubber and leave the meat behind. To capture seals, the bears need sea ice – they stalk the seals on the ice, or wait by breathing holes in the ice for seals to appear. Over the past 50 years, as the sea ice has shrunk, the number of polar bears has fallen, studies show.
"They're using [the fat from the seal] for everything: growth, maintenance, reproduction, keeping their body warm," says Smith. "They just need a seal and some water and they're fine. They're unusual animals," he adds. They can subsist on this high-fat, seal-based diet without suffering any nutritional deficits, he says: "It's a metabolic marvel".
When they can't access seals and instead resort to less fatty prey on land, such as Arctic birds, bird eggs, or food from dumps, the bears' health and reproduction rates decline, and they risk starvation, studies suggest. Polar bears on land lose around one kilogramme of body mass a day, research shows.
"Part of the problem we have with climate change is the scale of change is so rapid," says Smith. There's not enough time for the highly specialised polar bears, who evolved to thrive on a diet of marine mammals, to adapt to permanently being on land again, he warns: "We're fearful this animal can't possibly adapt back to a land-based, herbivorous diet." If they had to be on land constantly, "as a species, they would die", he says.
Smith and other researchers are appealing to governments to provide funding to help secure rubbish dumps near coastal villages from bears. "It's extremely expensive. They need help. It wouldn't be asking too much to secure the garbage and make it safer for people, and for bears," he says. Otherwise, people confronted with growing numbers of bears in their villages may kill them to stay safe, he warns: "It is extremely unfortunate to see bears die from such a preventable cause [as unsecured garbage]."
In the town of Churchill, Canada, closing an open dump, along with other measures, decreased damage and human injury. Smith and his colleagues are also studying a range of additional steps to help communities co-exist with polar bears, such as bear spray.
More like this:
• The huskies that revealed the rapid shrinking of Greenland's ice
• Why polar bears are no longer the poster image of climate change
• The deep ocean photographer that captured a 'living fossil'
While the real-life human-bear conflict is playing out, humans around the world still love seeing polar bears in pictures, the reaction to Kokh's photos suggests. In a video call, he shows a wealth of artwork and even tattoos which people made as the photos went viral.
"This was an absolutely crazy time, because I got so many emails and interview requests, and many people were talking to me about these images. And they were saying something like: 'this is a post-apocalyptic picture, this is how our planet will look like if we continue to do the same things with the planet and won't change our ways'," he says.
For Kokh, the award-winning photos of the polar bears opened many doors, and he has been on other expeditions to take photos of many kinds of marine wildlife. But as he reflects on that storm-swept journey to Chukotka, he comes back to the relationship between people and polar bears. For a start, even in that incredibly remote, wild region, you come across human rubbish, he says: "What you see in this area of Russian Arctic, it's abandoned barrels, fuel barrels. It's a commonly known problem because in the Soviet Union they brought thousands of fuel barrels and abandoned them, because it was expensive to bring them back. And they still lie there, and polar bears are roaming around them." In the photo series of the abandoned weather station, for example, there is a shot of the bears standing in a landscape of scattered barrels.
But Kokh also points out that the images can be interpreted in different ways – as a warning about our impact on the planet, but also, as testimony to the power and resilience of nature.
"When I was taking the picture, I was thinking about the striking contrast between the living animals, and these destroyed buildings," he says, and holds up a bottle, and a cup: "You know, all the things we make – this bottle, this cup – all the things made by humans, will be destroyed one day and will cease to exist, if we don't continue to make them. If humanity will fail, nothing will remain of us. But life will still exist."
--
For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week.
For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.