Ukraine said it hit a drone command unit in the Kursk region, amid reports of fresh attempts to cross into Russia.

Sunday's attack on the unit was located near the Russian village of Tyotkino, according to the Ukrainian general staff.

Multiple Russian military bloggers also reported that Ukrainian forces had attempted to cross into the village, posting images - as yet unverified by the BBC - of vehicles breaking through tank traps on the border.

The reports come after Moscow claimed in April to have regained control of the entire region, nine months after a Ukrainian forces launched a surprise invasion. Kyiv insists it still has soldiers operating across the border.

On Monday, Ukrainian forces fired missiles over the border and crossed minefields in special vehicles, according to the bloggers.

"The enemy blew up bridges with rockets at night and launched an attack with armoured groups in the morning," blogger RVvoenkor said according to Reuters news agency.

"The mine clearance vehicles began to make passages in the minefields, followed by armoured vehicles with troops. There is a heavy battle going on at the border."

In a statement on Monday, Ukraine said: "Nine months after the start of the Kursk operation, Ukraine's Defence Forces maintain a military presence on the territory of Russia's Kursk region."

While there has been no official response from Moscow, some military bloggers have also published maps showing opposing forces attempting to cross the border in two places towards Tyotkino - near where the drone command unit that was hit.

Meanwhile, in Sumy - around 12km across the border from Tyotkino in north-eastern Ukraine - local authorities urged people to evacuated from two settlements, Reuters reported.

Ukraine originally made its surprise incursion into Kursk in August 2024 to create a buffer zone and protect Sumy and surrounding areas, while also hoping to use it as a bargaining chip in future negotiations.

I ran from the White House briefing room, past the portico entrance of the West Wing to our camera position on the lawn, and flung on an ear piece connecting me to the studio.

A moment later the presenter asked me about the comments we had just heard live from US President Donald Trump.

I said we were seeing a fundamental shift in a United States' policy position after decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It was February this year, and Trump had just held talks with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - the first foreign leader since Trump's inauguration to be invited to the White House. The US president vowed that his country would take control of the Gaza Strip, having earlier pledged the territory would also be "cleaned out" and emptied of its Palestinian population.

Trump was grabbing the world's attention with a proposal that hardened his administration's support for Israel and also upended international norms, flying in the face of international law. It marked an apex of the current Republican Party's relationship with Israel - sometimes described as support "at all costs".

The alliance between the two countries had been thrust into the international spotlight after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel's offensive in Gaza that followed.

During that war, the administration of President Joe Biden sent some $18bn (£13.5bn) worth of weapons to Israel, maintaining unprecedented levels of US backing. The period was marked by intensifying protests in the US, with many of those protesting being traditional Democrat leaning voters. The fallout became the focus of a bitter culture war centring on American attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinians. I covered demonstrations in which protesters repeatedly labelled Biden "Genocide Joe" – an accusation he always rejected.

At the time Donald Trump branded the protesters "radical-left lunatics" and the Trump administration is now targeting for deportation hundreds of foreign students who it accuses of antisemitism or support for Hamas, a move being vigorously challenged in the courts.

But as a Democrat who could otherwise have expected the vote of many of those upset over his support for Israel that support was politically costly for Biden in a way not experienced by previous presidents or, indeed, Trump.

One of Biden's key decision makers over relations with Israel still wrestles with the decisions they took.

"My first reaction is just, I understand that this has evoked incredibly passionate feelings for Arab Americans, for non-Arab Americans, Jewish Americans," says Jake Sullivan, Biden's former national security adviser.

"There were two competing considerations: one was wanting to curb Israel's excesses, both with respect to civilian casualties and the flow of humanitarian assistance. The other was [...] wanting to make sure that we were not cutting Israel off from the capabilities it needed to confront its enemies on multiple different fronts."

He added: "The United States stood behind Israel materially, morally, and in every other way in those days following October 7th."

But opinion polls suggest support for Israel among the American public is dwindling.

A Gallup survey taken in March this year found only 46% of Americans expressed support for Israel (the lowest level in 25 years of Gallup's annual tracking) while 33% now said they sympathised with the Palestinians - the highest ever reading of that measure. Other polls have found similar results.

Surveys - with all their limitations - suggest the swing is largely among Democrats and the young, although not exclusively. Between 2022 and 2025, the Pew Research Center found that the proportion of Republicans who said they had unfavourable views of Israel rose from 27% to 37% (younger Republicans, aged under 49, drove most of that change).

The US has long been Israel's most powerful ally - ever since May 1948, when America was the first country to recognise the nascent State of Israel. But while US support for Israel is extremely likely to continue long-term, these swings in sentiment raise questions over the practical extent and policy limits of the US's ironclad backing and whether the shifting sands of public opinion will eventually feed through to Washington, with real-world policy impacts.

An Oval Office argument

To many, the close relationship between the US and Israel seems like a permanent, unshakeable part of the geopolitical infrastructure. But it wasn't always guaranteed - and at the very beginning largely came down to one man.

In early 1948, US President Harry S Truman had to decide on his approach to Palestine. The country was in the grip of sectarian bloodshed between Jews and Arab Palestinians after three decades of colonial rule by Britain, which had announced its intention to pull out. Truman was deeply moved by the plight of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust stranded in displaced persons camps in Europe.

In New York City, a young Francine Klagsbrun, who would later become an academic and historian of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, watched her parents praying for a Jewish homeland.

"I grew up in a very Jewish home and a very Zionist home also," she explains. "So my older brother and I would go out and collect money to try to get England to open the doors. My brother would go on the subway trains, all the doors open on the train and he'd shout 'open, open, open the doors to Palestine'," she recalls.

Truman's administration was deeply divided over whether to back a Jewish state. The CIA and the Department of State cautioned against recognising a Jewish state. They feared a bloody conflict with Arab countries that might draw in the US, risking Cold War escalation with the Soviets.

Two days before Britain was due to pull out of Palestine, an explosive row took place in the Oval Office. Truman's domestic advisor Clark Clifford argued in favour of recognising a Jewish state. On the other side of the debate was Secretary of State George Marshall, a World War Two general whom Truman viewed as "the greatest living American".

The man Truman admired so much was vigorously opposed to the president immediately recognising a Jewish state because of his fears about a regional war - and even went as far as telling Truman he would not vote for him in the coming presidential election if he backed recognition.

But despite the moment of extraordinary tension, Truman immediately recognised the State of Israel when it was declared two days later by David Ben-Gurion, the country's first prime minister.

The historian Rashid Khalidi, a New York-born Palestinian whose family members were expelled from Jerusalem by the British in the 1930s, says the US and Israel were fused together in part by shared cultural connections. From 1948 onwards, he says, the Palestinians had a critical diplomatic disadvantage in the US, with their claim to national self-determination sidelined in an unequal contest.

"On the one side, you had the Zionist movement led by people whom are European and American by origin… The Arabs had nothing similar," he says. "[The Arabs] weren't familiar with the societies, the cultures, the political leaderships of the countries that decided the fate of Palestine. How could you speak to American public opinion if you had no idea what America is like?" says Khalidi.

Popular culture played its role too - notably the 1958 novel and subsequent blockbuster film Exodus by the author Leon Uris. It retold the story of Israel's establishment to mass audiences of the 1960s, the movie version creating a heavily Americanised portrayal of pioneers in a new land.

Ehud Olmert, who at the time was a political activist but would later become Israeli prime minister, points to the war of 1967 as the moment when America's support for Israel became the profound alliance that it is today.

That was the war in which Israel, after weeks of escalating fears of invasion by its neighbours, defeated the Arab countries in six days, effectively tripling the size of its territory, and launching its military occupation over (at that time) more than a million stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

"For the first time, the United States understood the importance and the significance of Israel as a major military and political power in the Middle East, and since then everything has changed in the basic relations within our two countries," he says.

Indispensable relations

Over the years, Israel became the biggest recipient of US foreign military aid on Earth. Strong American diplomatic support, particularly at the United Nations, has been a key element of the alliance; while successive US presidents have also sought to broker peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

But in recent years it has been far from a straightforward relationship.

When I spoke to Jake Sullivan, I put to him the issue of Arab Americans in the state of Michigan who boycotted Biden and his successor candidate Kamala Harris over the extent of their support for Israel during the Gaza conflict, voting instead for Trump. He rejected the idea that Biden lost the state because of this support.

But that backing still prompted a marked backlash within a section of the American public.

A Pew Research Center survey taken in March this year found that 53% of Americans expressed an unfavourable opinion of Israel, an 11 point increase since the last time the survey was taken in 2022.

A fraying special relationship?

Currently, these shifts in public opinion haven't yet prompted a major change in US foreign policy. Whilst some ordinary US voters are turning away from Israel, on Capitol Hill elected politicians from both parties are still mostly keen to talk up the importance of a strong alliance with Israel.

Some think that a sustained, long-term shift in public opinion might eventually lead to reduced real-world support for the country - with weaker diplomatic ties and reduced military aid. This issue is felt particularly sharply by some inside Israel. Several months before 7 October, the former Israeli general and head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, Tamir Hayman, warned of cracks forming between his country and the United States, in part because of what he described as the slow movement of American Jews away from Zionism.

Israel's political shift in favour of the national-religious right has played a key part in this. From early 2023, Israel was gripped by an unprecedented wave of protests among Jewish Israelis against Netanyahu's judicial reforms, with many arguing he was moving the country towards theocracy – a claim he always rejected. Some in the US who had always felt a deep sense of connection with Israel were watching with growing concern.

In March this year, the Institute for National Security Studies, a leading Tel Aviv-based think tank led by Hayman, published a paper arguing that US public opinion had entered the "danger zone", as far as support for Israel was concerned. "The dangers of diminished US support, particularly as it reflects long-term and deeply rooted trends, cannot be overstated," wrote the paper's author, Theodore Sasson. "Israel needs the support of the global superpower for the foreseeable future,".

That support at the policy level has only strengthened over the decades, but it is important to note that historic American opinion polling shows public opinion has ebbed and flowed before.

Today, Dennis Ross, who helped negotiate the Oslo accords with President Bill Clinton, says American opinion on Israel has become increasingly tied to sharp political divisions in the US.

"Trump is viewed very negatively by most Democrats - the latest polls show over 90 percent," Ross says. "There's potential for Trumpian support for Israel to feed a dynamic here that, at least among Democrats, increases criticism of Israel."

But he expects that Washington's support for Israel - in the form of military aid and diplomatic ties - will continue. And he thinks if Israeli voters eject their prime minister and replace him with a more centrist government, one that may reverse some of the disquiet in the US. A general election must be held in Israel before late October next year.

Under such a new Israeli government, Ross argues, "there won't be the same impulse towards creating de-facto annexation of the West Bank. There'll be much more outreach to the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party officials."

Those who see a fraying relationship are paying particularly close attention to the views of younger Americans - a group that has shown the most marked shift in opinion since 7 October. As the 'TikTok generation', many young Americans get their news about the war from social media and the high civilian death toll from Israel's offensive in Gaza appears to have driven the declining support among young Democrats and liberals in America. Last year, 33 percent of Americans under 30 said their sympathies lie entirely or mostly with the Palestinian people, versus 14 percent who said the same about Israelis, according to a Pew Research poll published last month. Older Americans were more likely to sympathise with the Israelis.

Karin Von Hippel, chair of the Arden Defence and Security Practice and a former official in the US State Department, agrees there is a demographic divide among Americans on the topic of Israel - one that even extends to Congress.

"Younger Congress men and women are less knee jerk, reactively supporting Israel," she says. "And I think younger Americans, including Jewish Americans, are less supportive of Israel than their parents were."

But she is sceptical of the idea that this might lead to a serious change at the policy level. Despite changing opinions among the party's base, she says, many of the most prominent Democrats who might run for President in 2028 are "classically supportive of Israel". She names Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and Pete Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary, as examples. And what about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Instagram-famous congresswoman who is a long-standing supporter of Palestinian rights? Hippel responds bluntly: "I don't think an Ocasio-Cortez type can win right now."

In the weeks after February's Trump-Netanyahu press conference at the White House, I asked Jake Sullivan where he thought the US-Israel relationship was going. He argued that both countries were dealing with internal threats to their democratic institutions that would define their character and their relationship.

"I think it's almost less of a foreign policy question than it is a domestic policy question in these two countries - whither America and whither Israel?" he says. "The answer to those two questions will tell you where does the US-Israel relationship go five, ten, fifteen years from now."

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Sir David Attenborough is launching what he says is one of the most important films of his career as he enters his hundredth year.

He believes his new, cinema-length film Ocean could play a decisive role in saving biodiversity and protecting the planet from climate change.

Sir David, who will be 99 on Thursday, says: "After almost 100 years on the planet, I now understand the most important place on land is not on Earth but at sea."

The ocean is the planet's support system and humanity's greatest ally against climate catastrophe, the film argues. It shows how the world's oceans are at a crossroads.

A blue carpet will be rolled out at the film's premiere tonight at the Royal Festival Hall.

A host of celebrities are expected to attend including Chris Martin and Coldplay, Benedict Cumberbatch, astronaut Tim Peake, Geri Halliwell-Horner and Simon LeBon.

Toby Nowlan, who produced Ocean, says this new production is not a typical Attenborough film. "This is not about seeing brand new natural history behaviours. It is the greatest message he's ever told," he says.

The film documents how the state of the world's oceans and our understanding of how they function have changed in the course of Sir David's lifetime.

Sir David remembers his first scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef way back in 1957: "I was so taken aback by the spectacle before me I forgot – momentarily – to breathe."

Since then, there has been a catastrophic decline in life in the world's oceans. "We are almost out of time," he warns.

Ocean contains some of the most graphic footage of the damage that bottom trawling – a common fishing practice around the world - can do to the seabed. It is a vivid example of how industrial fishing can drain the life from the world's oceans, Sir David claims.

The new footage shows how the chain that the trawlers drag behind them scours the seafloor, forcing the creatures it disturbs into the net behind. The trawlers are often after a single species: more than three-quarters of what they catch may be discarded.

"It's hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish," comments Sir David.

The process also releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide which contributes to the warming of our planet, yet bottom trawling is not just legal but is actively encouraged by many governments.

Sir David says the state of the ocean has almost made him lose hope for the future of life on the planet. What has kept him from despair is what he calls the "most remarkable discovery of all" – that the ocean can "recover faster than we had ever imagined".

Sir David says the story of the world's whales has been a source of huge optimism for him.

It is estimated that 2.9 million whales were killed by the whaling industry in the 20th Century alone. Scientists have said it is the largest cull of any animal in history when measured in terms of total biomass. It pushed almost all whale species to the edge of extinction.

Just one per cent of Blue Whales were left, recalls Sir David: "I remember thinking that was it. There was no coming back, we had lost the great whales."

But in 1986 lawmakers bowed to public pressure and banned commercial whaling worldwide. The whale population has rapidly recovered since then.

One of the film's directors, Keith Scholey, has worked with Sir David for 44 years. "When I first met David, I was in shorts," he jokes. That was in 1981, two years after Sir David had resigned as the BBC's director of programmes – one of the most senior jobs at the Corporation. "He'd done one career, and he was off on his next."

Despite now nearing his 99th birthday Sir David is still remarkably energetic, says Scholey. "Every time you work with David, you learn something new," he says. "It's really good fun. But also, David keeps you on your mettle, because he is so on his mettle and so, you know, it's always a very creative process."

Sir David's key message in the Ocean film is that all is not lost. Countries have promised to protect a third of the world's oceans. He hopes his new film will spur leaders to take firm action on this promise at a UN conference next month.

He believes that could be transformational.

"The ocean can bounce back to life," Sir David says. "If left alone it may not just recover but thrive beyond anything anyone alive has ever seen."

A healthier ocean ecosystem would also be able to trap more carbon dioxide, helping protect the world from climate change, according to scientists.

"In front of us is a chance to protect our climate, our food, our home," Sir David says.

As he celebrates his 99th birthday this week he is still fighting to protect the natural world he has worked his lifetime to show to us in all its glory.

Ocean will be in cinemas across the country from Thursday.

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.

A wild beaver has been filmed on a river in Wales in what has been described as a "hugely significant" sighting.

Beavers disappeared from Britain about 400 years ago after being hunted to extinction, but in the past two decades they have been making a comeback.

Naturalist and presenter Iolo Williams, who encountered the wild beaver on the River Dyfi near Machynlleth, said the clear and prolonged sighting was one of the "very, very best" things he had ever witnessed.

There are four managed enclosures that house beavers in Wales, and an unknown number living in the wild.

"I've seen some incredible wildlife in Wales, some amazing things, but this ranks up there, not just with the best, but as the very, very best," said Williams, who captured the moment as part of his BBC series Iolo's River Valleys.

"The last people to see wild beaver in Wales would have been the Welsh princes, who would have hunted them.

"So they've been absent for hundreds of years. So it's hugely significant."

In Wales, it is an offence to release beavers into open rivers without a licence, and Natural Resources Wales (NRW) said no licences of this type had been issued.

In England, where the government recently approved beavers' reintroduction to the wild, it is thought that there are about 500 of them living - some in the wild and others in enclosures.

In Scotland, which began reintroducing beavers to the wild several years ago, it is thought that there are now more than 1,500.

"We had information that a beaver had been seen on this section of the River Dyfi, and we were told to get to this particular site at 18:00 and the beaver will be there," said Williams.

"We had gone out a few days before, and it poured with rain and we'd seen nothing.

"And I must admit, I was thinking, we're not going to get it.

"But then when we went on the first dry day, 18:00, and the beaver was there."

Williams said the beaver "didn't pay us any attention at all".

"It was very chill," he added.

"We were on the opposite bank, and we thought we better be quiet, don't move around. And the beaver just saw us and it just carried on feeding and swam."

Local people have reported seeing the beaver, and others, on the same stretch of the River Dyfi multiple times in recent years.

But exactly where they have come from remains a mystery, after a nearby beaver enclosure ruled out any escapes.

Beaver family

Alicia Leow-Dyke, from Wildlife Trust Wales, said there was evidence of the semi-aquatic animals breeding along the waterway.

"On this occasion we know it's one family. It could be two families - one family split into two," she said.

"There has been evidence of breeding on the river. Youngsters have been spotted on the river over the years.

"Beavers only breed once a year and their litters are pretty small - two to three within a litter. So a beaver family could be anything from two adults, to five or eight if you include the young."

Last year the Welsh government said it was considering introducing legislation to protect beavers, as wildlife charities called for them to be released into Wales' rivers.

Dr Robert Needham, from the Beaver Trust, said their reintroduction could bring substantial benefits, describing them as "ecosystem engineer[s]".

"What this means is that the sort of habitat modification that beavers can do through damming, building lodges, digging canals - this can create habitats for other species, and they can increase biodiversity," said Dr Needham.

"They can help restore our wetland habitats, which are massively lost throughout Europe, let alone Great Britain.

"They can help alleviate flooding with the dams that they create, particularly in headwater streams, they hold that water back, releasing it slowly. So we see a reduction in peak flow events, during storm events. But this can be really beneficial to villages and society also during during the summer periods, during drought conditions."

But not everyone believes that reintroducing beavers to the wild is a good thing.

Critics say their dams can flood and waterlog fields while the animals themselves can feed on certain agricultural crops and damage trees.

"Fundamentally, there are issues. There are cases where river banks will fall in and the impact of flooding, particularly on on good farmland as well," said Aled Jones, president of NFU Cymru.

"The management [of beavers] is crucial. We can't allow an indiscriminate approach where farming businesses are severely impacted.

"So we have to have control measures because this is their livelihoods. And we have to remember this is where farmers make their living, and anything negatively impacting that, if they're losing their crops because of flooding, who pays?"

Iolo's River Valleys will be broadcast on BBC Two and BBC One Wales on 6 May at 19:00 and will also be available on BBC iPlayer.

Air traffic controllers at Newark Liberty International Airport briefly lost communications with planes under their control, "unable to see, hear, or talk to them" last week, a union spokesman has said.

The 28 April incident led to multiple employees being placed on trauma leave, contributing to hundreds of delayed or diverted flights. More than 150 flights have been cancelled so far on Monday alone, according to tracking website FlightAware.

The airport, one of New York's busiest hubs, has been grappling with staff shortages for more than a week.

The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged in a statement that "our antiquated air traffic control system is affecting our work force".

Confirming the controllers had taken leave following the incident, the FAA said it could "not quickly replace them".

"We continue to train controllers who will eventually be assigned to this busy airspace," the statement said.

Air traffic control operations at the airport have come under sustained criticism recently.

Last week, United Airlines announced it was cancelling 35 flights per day from its Newark schedule because the airport "cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there".

"In the past few days, on more than one occasion, technology that FAA air traffic controllers rely on to manage the airplanes coming in and out of Newark airport failed - resulting in dozens of diverted flights, hundreds of delayed and cancelled flights," United CEO Scott Kirby said.

He also said the issues were "compounded" because over 20% of FAA controllers "walked off the job".

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association said the employees took leave under provisions for workers that experience a traumatic event at work.

The union would not say how many controllers had taken leave, or how long they lost contact with planes for.

The Newark incident comes as the US Department of Transport last week unveiled a package designed to boost the numbers of FAA air traffic controllers.

"The package will allow more of the best and brightest candidates to get into air traffic facilities and on the job faster, as well as increase retention of experienced controllers," the FAA said.

The transport department said it was on track to hire at least 2,000 controllers this year.

In February, the Trump administration began firing hundreds of FAA employees, weeks after a fatal mid-air plane collision in Washington DC.

The agency said it would continue to hire and onboard air traffic controllers and safety professionals.

I ran from the White House briefing room, past the portico entrance of the West Wing to our camera position on the lawn, and flung on an ear piece connecting me to the studio.

A moment later the presenter asked me about the comments we had just heard live from US President Donald Trump.

I said we were seeing a fundamental shift in a United States' policy position after decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It was February this year, and Trump had just held talks with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - the first foreign leader since Trump's inauguration to be invited to the White House. The US president vowed that his country would take control of the Gaza Strip, having earlier pledged the territory would also be "cleaned out" and emptied of its Palestinian population.

Trump was grabbing the world's attention with a proposal that hardened his administration's support for Israel and also upended international norms, flying in the face of international law. It marked an apex of the current Republican Party's relationship with Israel - sometimes described as support "at all costs".

The alliance between the two countries had been thrust into the international spotlight after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel's offensive in Gaza that followed.

During that war, the administration of President Joe Biden sent some $18bn (£13.5bn) worth of weapons to Israel, maintaining unprecedented levels of US backing. The period was marked by intensifying protests in the US, with many of those protesting being traditional Democrat leaning voters. The fallout became the focus of a bitter culture war centring on American attitudes towards Israel and the Palestinians. I covered demonstrations in which protesters repeatedly labelled Biden "Genocide Joe" – an accusation he always rejected.

At the time Donald Trump branded the protesters "radical-left lunatics" and the Trump administration is now targeting for deportation hundreds of foreign students who it accuses of antisemitism or support for Hamas, a move being vigorously challenged in the courts.

But as a Democrat who could otherwise have expected the vote of many of those upset over his support for Israel that support was politically costly for Biden in a way not experienced by previous presidents or, indeed, Trump.

One of Biden's key decision makers over relations with Israel still wrestles with the decisions they took.

"My first reaction is just, I understand that this has evoked incredibly passionate feelings for Arab Americans, for non-Arab Americans, Jewish Americans," says Jake Sullivan, Biden's former national security adviser.

"There were two competing considerations: one was wanting to curb Israel's excesses, both with respect to civilian casualties and the flow of humanitarian assistance. The other was [...] wanting to make sure that we were not cutting Israel off from the capabilities it needed to confront its enemies on multiple different fronts."

He added: "The United States stood behind Israel materially, morally, and in every other way in those days following October 7th."

But opinion polls suggest support for Israel among the American public is dwindling.

A Gallup survey taken in March this year found only 46% of Americans expressed support for Israel (the lowest level in 25 years of Gallup's annual tracking) while 33% now said they sympathised with the Palestinians - the highest ever reading of that measure. Other polls have found similar results.

Surveys - with all their limitations - suggest the swing is largely among Democrats and the young, although not exclusively. Between 2022 and 2025, the Pew Research Center found that the proportion of Republicans who said they had unfavourable views of Israel rose from 27% to 37% (younger Republicans, aged under 49, drove most of that change).

The US has long been Israel's most powerful ally - ever since May 1948, when America was the first country to recognise the nascent State of Israel. But while US support for Israel is extremely likely to continue long-term, these swings in sentiment raise questions over the practical extent and policy limits of the US's ironclad backing and whether the shifting sands of public opinion will eventually feed through to Washington, with real-world policy impacts.

An Oval Office argument

To many, the close relationship between the US and Israel seems like a permanent, unshakeable part of the geopolitical infrastructure. But it wasn't always guaranteed - and at the very beginning largely came down to one man.

In early 1948, US President Harry S Truman had to decide on his approach to Palestine. The country was in the grip of sectarian bloodshed between Jews and Arab Palestinians after three decades of colonial rule by Britain, which had announced its intention to pull out. Truman was deeply moved by the plight of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust stranded in displaced persons camps in Europe.

In New York City, a young Francine Klagsbrun, who would later become an academic and historian of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, watched her parents praying for a Jewish homeland.

"I grew up in a very Jewish home and a very Zionist home also," she explains. "So my older brother and I would go out and collect money to try to get England to open the doors. My brother would go on the subway trains, all the doors open on the train and he'd shout 'open, open, open the doors to Palestine'," she recalls.

Truman's administration was deeply divided over whether to back a Jewish state. The CIA and the Department of State cautioned against recognising a Jewish state. They feared a bloody conflict with Arab countries that might draw in the US, risking Cold War escalation with the Soviets.

Two days before Britain was due to pull out of Palestine, an explosive row took place in the Oval Office. Truman's domestic advisor Clark Clifford argued in favour of recognising a Jewish state. On the other side of the debate was Secretary of State George Marshall, a World War Two general whom Truman viewed as "the greatest living American".

The man Truman admired so much was vigorously opposed to the president immediately recognising a Jewish state because of his fears about a regional war - and even went as far as telling Truman he would not vote for him in the coming presidential election if he backed recognition.

But despite the moment of extraordinary tension, Truman immediately recognised the State of Israel when it was declared two days later by David Ben-Gurion, the country's first prime minister.

The historian Rashid Khalidi, a New York-born Palestinian whose family members were expelled from Jerusalem by the British in the 1930s, says the US and Israel were fused together in part by shared cultural connections. From 1948 onwards, he says, the Palestinians had a critical diplomatic disadvantage in the US, with their claim to national self-determination sidelined in an unequal contest.

"On the one side, you had the Zionist movement led by people whom are European and American by origin… The Arabs had nothing similar," he says. "[The Arabs] weren't familiar with the societies, the cultures, the political leaderships of the countries that decided the fate of Palestine. How could you speak to American public opinion if you had no idea what America is like?" says Khalidi.

Popular culture played its role too - notably the 1958 novel and subsequent blockbuster film Exodus by the author Leon Uris. It retold the story of Israel's establishment to mass audiences of the 1960s, the movie version creating a heavily Americanised portrayal of pioneers in a new land.

Ehud Olmert, who at the time was a political activist but would later become Israeli prime minister, points to the war of 1967 as the moment when America's support for Israel became the profound alliance that it is today.

That was the war in which Israel, after weeks of escalating fears of invasion by its neighbours, defeated the Arab countries in six days, effectively tripling the size of its territory, and launching its military occupation over (at that time) more than a million stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

"For the first time, the United States understood the importance and the significance of Israel as a major military and political power in the Middle East, and since then everything has changed in the basic relations within our two countries," he says.

Indispensable relations

Over the years, Israel became the biggest recipient of US foreign military aid on Earth. Strong American diplomatic support, particularly at the United Nations, has been a key element of the alliance; while successive US presidents have also sought to broker peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

But in recent years it has been far from a straightforward relationship.

When I spoke to Jake Sullivan, I put to him the issue of Arab Americans in the state of Michigan who boycotted Biden and his successor candidate Kamala Harris over the extent of their support for Israel during the Gaza conflict, voting instead for Trump. He rejected the idea that Biden lost the state because of this support.

But that backing still prompted a marked backlash within a section of the American public.

A Pew Research Center survey taken in March this year found that 53% of Americans expressed an unfavourable opinion of Israel, an 11 point increase since the last time the survey was taken in 2022.

A fraying special relationship?

Currently, these shifts in public opinion haven't yet prompted a major change in US foreign policy. Whilst some ordinary US voters are turning away from Israel, on Capitol Hill elected politicians from both parties are still mostly keen to talk up the importance of a strong alliance with Israel.

Some think that a sustained, long-term shift in public opinion might eventually lead to reduced real-world support for the country - with weaker diplomatic ties and reduced military aid. This issue is felt particularly sharply by some inside Israel. Several months before 7 October, the former Israeli general and head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, Tamir Hayman, warned of cracks forming between his country and the United States, in part because of what he described as the slow movement of American Jews away from Zionism.

Israel's political shift in favour of the national-religious right has played a key part in this. From early 2023, Israel was gripped by an unprecedented wave of protests among Jewish Israelis against Netanyahu's judicial reforms, with many arguing he was moving the country towards theocracy – a claim he always rejected. Some in the US who had always felt a deep sense of connection with Israel were watching with growing concern.

In March this year, the Institute for National Security Studies, a leading Tel Aviv-based think tank led by Hayman, published a paper arguing that US public opinion had entered the "danger zone", as far as support for Israel was concerned. "The dangers of diminished US support, particularly as it reflects long-term and deeply rooted trends, cannot be overstated," wrote the paper's author, Theodore Sasson. "Israel needs the support of the global superpower for the foreseeable future,".

That support at the policy level has only strengthened over the decades, but it is important to note that historic American opinion polling shows public opinion has ebbed and flowed before.

Today, Dennis Ross, who helped negotiate the Oslo accords with President Bill Clinton, says American opinion on Israel has become increasingly tied to sharp political divisions in the US.

"Trump is viewed very negatively by most Democrats - the latest polls show over 90 percent," Ross says. "There's potential for Trumpian support for Israel to feed a dynamic here that, at least among Democrats, increases criticism of Israel."

But he expects that Washington's support for Israel - in the form of military aid and diplomatic ties - will continue. And he thinks if Israeli voters eject their prime minister and replace him with a more centrist government, one that may reverse some of the disquiet in the US. A general election must be held in Israel before late October next year.

Under such a new Israeli government, Ross argues, "there won't be the same impulse towards creating de-facto annexation of the West Bank. There'll be much more outreach to the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party officials."

Those who see a fraying relationship are paying particularly close attention to the views of younger Americans - a group that has shown the most marked shift in opinion since 7 October. As the 'TikTok generation', many young Americans get their news about the war from social media and the high civilian death toll from Israel's offensive in Gaza appears to have driven the declining support among young Democrats and liberals in America. Last year, 33 percent of Americans under 30 said their sympathies lie entirely or mostly with the Palestinian people, versus 14 percent who said the same about Israelis, according to a Pew Research poll published last month. Older Americans were more likely to sympathise with the Israelis.

Karin Von Hippel, chair of the Arden Defence and Security Practice and a former official in the US State Department, agrees there is a demographic divide among Americans on the topic of Israel - one that even extends to Congress.

"Younger Congress men and women are less knee jerk, reactively supporting Israel," she says. "And I think younger Americans, including Jewish Americans, are less supportive of Israel than their parents were."

But she is sceptical of the idea that this might lead to a serious change at the policy level. Despite changing opinions among the party's base, she says, many of the most prominent Democrats who might run for President in 2028 are "classically supportive of Israel". She names Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and Pete Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary, as examples. And what about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Instagram-famous congresswoman who is a long-standing supporter of Palestinian rights? Hippel responds bluntly: "I don't think an Ocasio-Cortez type can win right now."

In the weeks after February's Trump-Netanyahu press conference at the White House, I asked Jake Sullivan where he thought the US-Israel relationship was going. He argued that both countries were dealing with internal threats to their democratic institutions that would define their character and their relationship.

"I think it's almost less of a foreign policy question than it is a domestic policy question in these two countries - whither America and whither Israel?" he says. "The answer to those two questions will tell you where does the US-Israel relationship go five, ten, fifteen years from now."

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US President Donald Trump has doubled down on his proposal to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the once-notorious prison island in the icy waters of San Francisco Bay.

Alcatraz- popularly known as "the Rock" - has been closed for decades, and is now a historic landmark visited by millions of tourists each year.

The US President says he believes the prison could be once against used to house dangerous inmates, and serve as a symbol of law and order in the US.

But experts say that refurbishing the dilapidated remains of the once-formidable prison is "not realistic at all".

Here's what we know about the plan.

What is Alcatraz and who owns it?

Located on an island about 1.25 miles (2km) offshore from San Francisco, Alcatraz was originally built as a naval defence fort, but was rebuilt in the early 20th century as a military prison.

In 1934, it was formally converted into a federal prison - Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary - housing notorious inmates including gangster Al Capone, Mickey Cohen and George "Machine Gun" Kelly, among others.

The prison was among one of the most notorious in the US at the time, and was considered inescapable because of the strong currents and frigid temperatures of San Francisco Bay.

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The facility was also made famous by the 1979 film, the American biographical prison drama, Escape from Alcatraz, which recounted a 1962 prisoner escape with Clint Eastwood starring as ringleader Frank Morris.

It was also the site of the 1996 film The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage, about a former SAS captain and FBI chemist who rescue hostages from Alcatraz Island.

When did Alcatraz close?

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, BOP, it was nearly three times more costly to operate than other federal institutions and was ultimately closed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1963.

The island and prison are now a museum operated by the National Park Service. More than 1.4m people visit each year.

"Alcatraz is a place where the past meets the present," Christine Lehnertz, president and CEO of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy said in a statement sent to the BBC.

"It challenges us to listen, to learn, and to carry forward the stories that still shape our world today," she added.

Has it been considered for reopening before?

Donald Trump is not the first president to mull re-opening the facility as a detention centre.

In 1981, Alcatraz was one of 14 sites considered by the Reagan administration to hold up to 20,000 refugees who had fled from Cuba to Florida in the famous "Mariel Boatlift".

The site was eventually rejected due to a complete lack of adequate facilities and its value as a historical tourist site.

What has Donald Trump said about Alcatraz?

In a Truth Social post on 4 May, Trump first said he had directed his government to re-open and expand the island prison, saying that "for too long America has been plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat criminal offenders".

Speaking to reporters at the White House the following day, Trump said that, in his view, Alcatraz "represents something very strong, very powerful" - law and order.

"We need law and order in this country," he said. "So we're going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that."

While he said he finds the idea "interesting", Trump also acknowledged that the prison is currently a "big hulk" that is "rusting and rotting".

"It sort of represents something that is both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable," he said.

Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, also told reporters that Alcatraz could be "an option" for "significant public safety threats and national security threats".

"It should be on the table," he added.

Can Alcatraz actually be reopened?

Soon after Trump's comments made news around the world, justice department spokesman Chad Gilmartin said in a statement that BOP "is working towards rebuilding and opening Alcatraz to serve as a symbol of law and order".

But prison experts and historians have expressed serious doubts whether the plan is feasible.

"To be frank, at first I thought it was a joke," Hugh Hurwitz, who served as acting director of the BOP between May 2018 and August 2019, told the BBC. "It's not realistic to think you can repair it. You'd have to tear it up and start over."

Mr Hurwitz pointed to a number of issues with the facility, including buildings that are "literally falling apart", cells in which "a six-foot person can't stand up".

"There's no security upgrades. No cameras. No fencing," he added. "You can't run a prison."

"I have two words: water and sewage," said Jolene Babyak, an author and Alcatraz historian who lived there for two stints as a child with her father, a prison administrator.

"In its heyday, all the sewage for 500 or more people was just dumped in the bay," she said. "Nowadays it has to be boated off. It's just not realistic at all. But it captures everyone's imagination."

When the facility closed in 1963, the BOP said it was nearly three times more expensive to operate Alcatraz than any other federal prison - the per-capita cost being $10 and $13, compared to between $3 and $5 for other facilities. This was in part because it required food and supplies to be dropped off by boat.

In today's federal prisons, the per capita cost for inmates is between $120 and $164 - meaning that the costs could rise to over $500 per person in a facility like Alcatraz, which could only hold about 340 prisoners at its peak.

"It was mind bogglingly expensive to keep a convict there," said John Martini, a historian who spent several years on Alcatraz as a ranger with the National Park Service. "Things have not changed. But the place has gone downhill."

"It's basically a shell. Even the concrete has major problems. The Park Service has put millions into structurally stabilising it," he added. "They would need water, electricity, heat, and sanitation. None of those functions."

"This [Trump's comments] are just another twist in the odd history of Alcatraz," Mr Martini added.

Air traffic controllers at Newark Liberty International Airport briefly lost communications with planes under their control, "unable to see, hear, or talk to them" last week, a union spokesman has said.

The 28 April incident led to multiple employees being placed on trauma leave, contributing to hundreds of delayed or diverted flights. More than 150 flights have been cancelled so far on Monday alone, according to tracking website FlightAware.

The airport, one of New York's busiest hubs, has been grappling with staff shortages for more than a week.

The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged in a statement that "our antiquated air traffic control system is affecting our work force".

Confirming the controllers had taken leave following the incident, the FAA said it could "not quickly replace them".

"We continue to train controllers who will eventually be assigned to this busy airspace," the statement said.

Air traffic control operations at the airport have come under sustained criticism recently.

Last week, United Airlines announced it was cancelling 35 flights per day from its Newark schedule because the airport "cannot handle the number of planes that are scheduled to operate there".

"In the past few days, on more than one occasion, technology that FAA air traffic controllers rely on to manage the airplanes coming in and out of Newark airport failed - resulting in dozens of diverted flights, hundreds of delayed and cancelled flights," United CEO Scott Kirby said.

He also said the issues were "compounded" because over 20% of FAA controllers "walked off the job".

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association said the employees took leave under provisions for workers that experience a traumatic event at work.

The union would not say how many controllers had taken leave, or how long they lost contact with planes for.

The Newark incident comes as the US Department of Transport last week unveiled a package designed to boost the numbers of FAA air traffic controllers.

"The package will allow more of the best and brightest candidates to get into air traffic facilities and on the job faster, as well as increase retention of experienced controllers," the FAA said.

The transport department said it was on track to hire at least 2,000 controllers this year.

In February, the Trump administration began firing hundreds of FAA employees, weeks after a fatal mid-air plane collision in Washington DC.

The agency said it would continue to hire and onboard air traffic controllers and safety professionals.

Israel's military says it has hit Houthi targets in Yemen in response to the group's missile launch at Israel's Ben Gurion airport the previous day.

The IDF said it attacked sites that it claimed served as a "central supply source for the Houthis" in the Hudaydah Port, as well as the Bajil cement factory east of the city of Hudaydah.

Following Sunday's airport strike, the Houthis said they would impose "a comprehensive aerial blockade" on Israel by targeting airports in response to Israel's plans to expand operations in Gaza.

The Iran-backed group said 21 people were injured in Monday's attack, and described it as a joint raid of "US-Israeli aggression". The US denied involvement.

The IDF said its Monday strikes were "conducted precisely, with measures taken to mitigate harm to vessels docked at the port".

It claimed the Bajil factory functioned as a "significant economic resource", and was used by the group to construct tunnels and infrastructure, while the port sites were used "for the transfer of Iranian weapons".

The port is the second-largest in the Red Sea after Aden, and is the entry point for about 80% of Yemen's food imports.

Multiple residents told Reuters news agency that more than 10 strikes targeted Hudaydah Port and the al-Salakhanah and al-Hawak areas in the city, while four more targeted the cement factory.

A spokesman for the Houthi-run health ministry, Anees al-Asbahi, said at least 21 people were injured in the attack.

The Houthis blamed the US and Israel jointly for the attack. A US defence official told the AFP news agency that their forces "did not participate in the Israeli strikes on Yemen today".

The missile fired towards Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv on Sunday morning landed next to an access road near the main terminal. Four people were injured by the blast, with another two injured on their way to a shelter, Israeli emergency services said.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, threatened retaliation, saying: "We attacked in the past, we will attack in the future."

Iran said the airport attack was an "independent decision" by the Yemeni group.

The US has also been launching air strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen.

Former US president Joe Biden's administration approved US strikes on the Houthis, which have continued under Donald Trump, the current president.

Last month, the Houthis said at least 68 African migrants were killed in a US air strike on a detention centre in north-western Yemen.

US President Donald Trump says he plans to hit movies made in foreign countries with 100% tariffs, as he ramps up trade disputes with countries around the world.

Trump said he was authorising the US Trade Representative to start the process to impose the levy because America's movie industry was dying "a very fast death".

He blamed a "concerted effort" by other countries that offer incentives to attract filmmakers and studios, which he described as a "National Security threat".

"It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!" Trump said on his Truth Social platform. "WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!"

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has imposed tariffs on countries around the world.

He argues that tariffs will boost US manufacturers and protect jobs - but the global economy has been thrown into chaos as a result, and prices on goods around the world are expected to rise.

Trump has hit China hardest with his tariffs salvo, imposing import taxes of up to 145% on goods from there.

His administration said last month that when the new tariffs are added on to existing ones, the levies on some Chinese goods could reach 245%.

Beijing has hit back with a 125% import duty on goods from the US.

Other countries currently face a blanket US tariff of 10% until a pause on higher levies expires in July.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, Trump said he was meeting with many countries, including China, on trade deals.

He added, however, that he had no plans to speak with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping this week.

Asked if any trade agreements would be announced this week, Trump said that could "very well be", but gave no details.