US President Donald Trump has said he will send weapons, including Patriot air defence systems, for Ukraine via Nato.

Trump told NBC News that in a new deal, "we're going to be sending Patriots to Nato, and then Nato will distribute that", adding that Nato would pay for the weapons.

His announcement came after Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of having a "positive dialogue" with Trump on ensuring that arms arrived on time, particularly air defence systems.

Zelensky said he had asked for 10 Patriot systems, after a surge in Russian drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian cities in the past week.

Speaking in Rome on Thursday, the Ukrainian leader said Germany was ready to pay for two of the Patriots and Norway for one, while other European partners were also prepared to help.

After a phone-call with Russia's Vladimir Putin last week, Trump said he was "not happy" that progress had not been made towards ending the war, and he has since complained that Putin's "very nice" attitude turned out to be meaningless.

During his interview with NBC News, Trump said he would make a "major statement" on Russia on Monday, but did not say what it would be about.

He said "Nato is going to reimburse the full cost" for the weapons sent on to Ukraine. Nato is funded through the contributions of its members, including the US.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Friday that he had urged countries including Germany and Spain to hand over some of their existing Patriot batteries, as they could reach Ukraine faster.

"We have continued to encourage our Nato allies to provide those weapons... since they have them in their stocks, then we can enter into financial agreements... where they can purchase the replacements."

The US defence department halted some shipments of critical weapons last week, raising concerns in Kyiv that its air defences could run low in a matter of months.

Among the armaments reported to have been placed on pause were Patriot interceptor missiles and precision artillery shells.

Then, as Ukraine was pounded by record numbers of drone attacks this week, Trump said more weapons would be sent: "We have to... They're getting hit very hard now."

Zelensky had appealed for the shipments to resume, describing the Patriot systems as "real protectors of life".

On Tuesday night, Ukraine was hit by a record 728 drones, and the Ukrainian president warned that Russia wanted to increase that to 1,000.

June saw the highest monthly civilian casualties in Ukraine in three years, with 232 people killed and more than 1,300 injured, according to the UN.

Since re-entering the White House in January, Trump has pushed to scale back US support for Ukraine.

The US was the biggest source of military aid to Ukraine between the start of 2022 and the end of 2024, giving $69bn (£54.6bn) in that time period, according to German think tank the Kiel Institute.

Trump has also pressed Nato allies to pledge more of their GDP to the security alliance. Last year, all European Nato members pledged to spend 2% of GDP on defence.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The US has been urging the two countries to reach an agreement to end the war.

Rubio told reporters that he and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had a "frank" conversation on the sidelines of a meeting in Malaysia on Thursday.

Rubio echoed Trump's "frustration at the lack of progress at peace talks", including "disappointment that there has not been more flexibility on the Russian side to bring about an end to this conflict".

He said the two had shared some new ideas about how the conflict could conclude, which he would take back to Trump.

Rubio declined to elaborate on what Trump said would be a "major" announcement about Russia on Monday.

Israel believes that Iran could potentially retrieve enriched uranium buried beneath one of the three facilities struck by US forces last month, according to a senior Israeli official.

Speaking to US reporters, the official said that reaching the enriched uranium at Isfahan would be extremely difficult and any attempt would prompt renewed Israeli strikes.

Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that US air and missile strikes on Iran in June "obliterated" the country's nuclear facilities, even as some US intelligence agencies have taken a more cautious view.

Iran denies seeking to develop nuclear weapons and says its enrichment of uranium is for peaceful purposes.

In a briefing for reporters in Washington, the senior Israeli official - who declined to be named - said that intelligence indicates that much of Iran's enriched uranium is buried at Isfahan, which was struck by submarine-launched cruise missiles during "Operation Midnight Hammer" on 22 June.

The official, however, did not express concern about the assessment, noting that any Iranian attempt to recover the material would probably be detected.

According to the official, Israel's assessment is that Iran's nuclear programme was set back two years.

Trump and members of his administration have been adamant that the Iranian nuclear facilities were completely destroyed.

"As President Trump has said many times, Operation Midnight Hammer totally obliterated Iran's nuclear facilities," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement sent to US media outlets. "The entire world is safer thanks to his decisive leadership."

• What we know about US strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites

The BBC has contacted the White House for further comment.

US intelligence assessments have been more cautious, with a leaked preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report concluding that while all three sites - at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan - were heavily damaged, they were not completely destroyed.

In late June, CIA Director John Ratcliffe told US lawmakers that the destruction of Iran's only facility for producing metallic uranium effectively took away Iran's ability to build a nuclear weapon.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Rafael Grossi told CBS, the BBC's US partner, that while the three targeted Iranian sites were "destroyed to an important degree", parts are "still standing".

"Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared, and there is nothing there," Mr Grossi said.

In an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson published earlier this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Pezeshkian said that the facilities were "severely damaged".

"Therefore we don't have any access to them," he said, adding that a full assessment is impossible for now.

After 40 years of armed struggle against the Turkish state, the outlawed Kurdish PKK will hold a ceremony on Friday to mark a symbolic first step in laying down its arms.

The disarmament process will start under tight security in Iraqi Kurdistan and is expected to take all summer.

Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has hailed the move as "totally ripping off and throwing away the bloody shackles that were put on our country's legs".

Some 40,000 people have been killed since the conflict began, and the PKK is listed as a terror group in Turkey, the US, EU and UK. Its disarmament will be felt not just in Turkey but in Iraq, Syria and Iran.

How and where will the PKK disarm?

A small group of PKK members will symbolically lay down their weapons in a ceremony near Suleymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, before going back to their bases.

For security reasons, the exact location is not being revealed, although it's thought members of Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition Dem party will be there, even if other major Turkish political parties will not.

Disarmament will then continue over the coming months at points set up with the involvement of the Turkish, Iraqi and Kurdistan regional governments, BBC Turkish has been told.

In a video, the PKK's long-imprisoned leader, Abdullah Ocalan, said it was "a voluntary transition from the phase of armed conflict to the phase of democratic politics and law". He has been in solitary confinement on the small prison island of Imrali, south-west of Istanbul, since he was captured in 1999.

Who are the Kurds?

Who are the PKK and why has the conflict lasted so long?

This is not the first attempt at peace involving Turkey and the PKK, but this is the best hope so far that the armed struggle that began in 1984 will come to an end.

Originally a Marxist group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party took up arms calling for an independent state inside Turkey.

In the 1990s, they called instead for greater autonomy for Kurds, who make up about 20% of the population.

Ocalan announced a ceasefire in 2013, and urged PKK forces to withdraw from Turkey. The 2015 Dolmabahce Agreement was supposed to bring democratic and language rights for Kurds, but the fragile truce collapsed amid devastating violence, especially in the Kurdish-dominated cities of the south-east, including Diyarbakir.

Turkey's air force targeted PKK bases in the mountains of northern Iraq. Several military campaigns have also targeted Kurdish-led forces in Syria.

The government in Ankara ruled out further talks until the PKK laid down its arms. That is now on the verge of happening.

Why has the PKK decided to disband?

In October 2024, a prominent nationalist leader and key Erdogan ally called Devlet Bahceli began a process described by the government as "terror-free Turkey". He urged the PKK's imprisoned leader to call for the dissolution of the outlawed group. It could pave the way for his possible release from Imrali island, he suggested.

The Turkish government launched talks with Ocalan via the pro-Kurdish Dem party, and then in February came his historic appeal for the PKK to disband, read out by two Dem MPs who had just returned from a visit to the prison island.

"All groups must lay their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself," read Ocalan's letter.

The PKK had been formed primarily because "the channels of democratic politics were closed", he said, but Devlet Bahceli and Erdogan's own positive signals had created the right environment.

The PKK followed Ocalan's lead and declared a ceasefire and later declared that it had "completed its historical mission": the Kurdish issue could now "be resolved through democratic politics".

President Erdogan said it was an "opportunity to take a historic step toward tearing down the wall of terror" and met pro-Kurdish politicians in April.

Why is Ocalan so important?

As founder of the PKK, Ocalan continues to be reviled by many Turks, even after 26 years in solitary confinement.

And yet he still plays an important role in the eyes of Kurds.

"I think he really has this authority; he is a main symbol for many Kurds, not all," says Joost Jongerden, a specialist on the 41-year conflict at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Two days before the PKK were due to begin disarmament, Ocalan appeared on video for the first time since he was put on trial more than 20 years ago.

Speaking for seven minutes, he addressed the outlawed group: "I believe in the power of politics and social peace, not weapons. And I call on you to put this principle into practice."

Ocalan was wearing a branded Lacoste polo shirt, and in an indication of his enduring relevance, the shirt quickly went viral and websites ran out of stock.

What happens next?

After Friday's ceremony, the scene switches to Turkey's parliament in Ankara where a commission will be set up to make decisions on the next steps for the government.

As the summer recess is around the corner, no concrete decisions are expected for several months, when MPs vote on the commission's recommendations and President Erdogan has the final say.

What happens to Abdullah Ocalan is not yet clear. The government says his conditions in jail could be reviewed as the process unfolds, but any chance of release will be left to the latter stages.

What's in this process for Erdogan?

Erdogan's AK Party has begun work on changing the constitution, and there has been speculation that this would mean Erdogan would be able to run for the presidency again when his final term runs out in 2028.

The AKP and pro-Kurdish Dem party deny there is any link between the peace process and reshaping the constitution, but if Erdogan secures Dem support he would have a far greater chance of pushing through changes.

Erdogan is behind in the polls, but his main opposition rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, is in jail accused of corruption, which he denies, and more opposition mayors have been arrested as part of a crackdown in the past week.

There are "reasonable grounds" to believe war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed in western Sudan, said the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the United Nations Security Council on Thursday.

Targeted sexual violence against women and girls of specific ethnicities was named as one of the most disturbing findings to emerge from the ICC probe on crimes committed in Darfur.

War broke out between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, leading to what the UN calls "devastating civilian casualties".

ICC Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said it was "difficult to find appropriate words to describe the depth of suffering" in the region.

The UN Security Council gave the ICC a mandate to investigate and prosecute crimes in Darfur two decades ago, with the body opening multiple investigations into war crimes and genocide committed in the region from July 2002 onwards.

The ICC launched a fresh probe in 2023 after civil war broke out once again, interviewing victims who had fled the most recent iteration of the conflict to neighbouring Chad.

Ms Khan described an "inescapable pattern of offending", and stressed that the team were working to translate such crimes into evidence for the court.

Allegations of war crimes have persisted throughout the past two years, and in January 2025 the US determined that the RSF and allied militias had committed a genocide.

The RSF has denied the claims, and said it was not involved in what it describes as a "tribal conflict" in Darfur.

Reports from the UN indicate that conditions in Darfur have continued to worsen, with hospitals and humanitarian convoys suffering targeted attacks, and food and water deliberately withheld.

Civilians in the capital city of El-Fasher have been cut off from aid entirely due to armed encirclement by RSF forces, and an outbreak of cholera across conflict zones poses a serious threat to already scarce water supplies.

An escalating famine has gripped the region, with the UN's children's agency (Unicef) reporting that more than 40,000 children were admitted for treatment due to severe acute malnutrition between January and May 2025 – more than double the number admitted in the same period last year.

"Children in Darfur are being starved by conflict and cut off from the very aid that could save them," said Sheldon Yett from Unicef.

In the past two years, more than 150,000 people have died in the conflict and approximately 12 million have fled their homes, but Ms Khan warned that "We should not be under any illusion - things can still get worse."

Nigeria's foreign minister says the country will not bow to pressure from the Trump administration to accept Venezuelan deportees from the US, following visa curbs and threats of tariff hikes.

Yusuf Tuggar told privately-owned Channels TV that Nigeria had "enough problems" of its own and would not host foreign prisoners from the US.

"We already have over 230 million people," the minister said.

"You will be the same person that will castigate us if we acquiesce to accepting Venezuelan prisoners into Nigeria," he added.

"It will be unfair for Nigeria to accept 300 Venezuelan deportees," he said, suggesting that the recent visa curbs on Nigerian travellers by the US was not "reciprocal" but a pressure tactic.

Earlier this week, the US Department of State said as part of a "global reciprocity realignment", nearly all non-immigrant and non-diplomatic visas issued to citizens of Nigeria, as well as those of Cameroon and Ethiopia, would now be single-entry and valid for only three months.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has threatened to hit countries which side with the policies of the Brics alliance that go against US interests with an extra 10% tariff.

Brics is an alliance of 11 developing nations designed to challenge the political and economic power of the West. They are: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, as well as Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Nigeria is not a full member of Brics but it became the ninth partner country of the alliance in January.

Mr Tuggar said the threat of tariff hikes did not "necessarily have to do with us participating in Brics.

"You have to also bear in mind that the US is mounting considerable pressure on African countries to accept Venezuelans to be deported from the US, some straight out of prison," he added.

"It will be difficult for a country like Nigeria to accept Venezuelans prisoners into Nigeria. We have enough problems of our own, we cannot accept Venezuelan deportees to Nigeria, for crying out loud," he concluded.

Instead, he said Nigeria was looking "to do deals with the US" because the country "possesses" a lot of gas, critical minerals and rare earths needed by American tech companies.

When further asked what Nigeria was doing to reach a diplomatic solution, the minister said the country was discussing with the US and resolving differences.

Mr Tuggar's claim comes after the Wall Street Journal quoted internal documents and sources as saying the Trump administration was pushing the leaders of Liberia, Senegal, Mauritania, Gabon and Guinea-Bissau to accept migrants deported by the US whose home countries refuse them or are slow to take them back.

Trump also appeared to allude to this during the meeting with the five leaders on Wednesday.

"I hope we can bring down the high rates of people overstaying visas, and also make progress on the safe, third-country agreements," he said during opening remarks.

Liberia's foreign minister denied receiving such communication from Washington.

You may also be interested in:

• Six things Trump should know about Liberia after he praised leader's 'good English'
• Why Trump invited five African leaders to the White House
• US cuts visa validity for applicants from three African countries

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

A mystery interstellar object spotted last week by astronomers could be the oldest comet ever seen, according to scientists.

Named 3I/Atlas, it may be three billion years older than our own solar system, suggests the team from Oxford university.

The preliminary findings were presented on Friday at the national meeting of the UK's Royal Astronomical Society in Durham.

"We're all very excited by 3I/Atlas," University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins told BBC News. He had just finished his PhD studies when the object was discovered.

He says it could be more than seven billion years old, and it may be the most remarkable interstellar visitor yet.

3I/Atlas was first spotted on 1 July 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile, when it was about 670 million km from the Sun.

Since then astronomers around the world have been racing to identify its path and discover more details about it.

Mr Hopkins believes it originated in the Milky Way's 'thick disk'. This is a group of ancient stars that orbit above and below the area where the Sun and most stars are located.

The team believe that because 3I/ATLAS probably formed around an old star, it is made up of a lot of water ice.

That means that as it approaches the Sun later this year, the energy from the Sun will heat the object's surface, leading to blazes of vapour and dust.

That could create a glowing tail.

The researchers made their findings using a model developed by Mr Hopkins.

"This is an object from a part of the galaxy we've never seen up close before," said Professor Chris Lintott, co-author of the study.

"We think there's a two-thirds chance this comet is older than the solar system, and that it's been drifting through interstellar space ever since."

Later this year, 3I/ATLAS should be visible from Earth using amateur telescopes.

Before 3I/Atlas soared into view, just two others had been seen. One was called 1I/'Oumuamua, found in 2017 and another called 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019.

Astronomers globally are currently gearing up to start using a new, very powerful telescope in Chile, called the Vera C Rubin.

When it starts fully surveying the southern night sky later this year, scientists expect that it could discover between 5 and 50 new interstellar objects.

Texas officials are facing mounting questions about when Kerrville's residents were notified about deadly flash floods that killed 96 locals, with over 160 others still missing.

Asked about a possible police radio failure at a press conference on Thursday - almost a week after 4 July flooding - Kerrville Police community services officer Jonathan Lamb said, "I don't have any information to that point."

The questioning followed a tense exchange the day before when reporters asked officials repeatedly about a possible lag in emergency communications.

Early Friday, the Guadalupe River rose several metres in a matter of minutes, after an estimated 100bn gallons of rain.

At least 120 people have died in the Texas Hill Country flash floods. Kerr County, which includes Kerrville, absorbed the brunt of the devastation, with 96 confirmed deaths, including 36 children, many of whom attended a nearby Christian camp.

Kerr County officials have been pressed on the various reasons behind the tragedy.

According to an audio recording obtained by an ABC News affiliate, a firefighter located upstream from Kerrville asked the Kerr County Sheriff's Office to alert nearby residents about the rising water around 04:22 local time on 4 July.

But, ABC News reported, Kerr County officials did not notify residents until nearly six hours later, after hundreds of people had been engulfed in floodwater.

The first alert from Kerr County's CodeRED system did not arrive until roughly 90-minutes later, the news outlet reported.

"The Guadalupe Schumacher sign is underwater on State Highway 39," the firefighter said in the dispatch audio obtained by ABC News. "Is there any way we can send a CodeRED out to our Hunt residents, asking them to find higher ground or stay home?"

• A girls' summer camp cut tragically short by a 'horrific' deluge
• 'Hero' dad, twin girls and riverside campers among Texas flood victims
• Back-to-back floods in New Mexico and Texas with very different outcomes

"Stand by, we have to get that approved with our supervisor," a Kerr County Sheriff's Office dispatcher replied.

Officials were asked during a press conference on Wednesday about any delays in emergency communications.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said he was first notified around the "four to five area", and said prior to that "we're in the process of trying to put a timeline".

"That's going to take a little bit of time," he continued. "That is not my priority this time."

He said he was instead focused on locating those missing and identifying victims. Over 160 people were still listed as missing on Thursday morning, including five campers and one counselor from Camp Mystic.

Kerr County officials say they have not rescued anyone alive since the day of the floods.

Weather alerts preceded the storm. The National Weather Service sent several about rain and possible flooding starting Thursday afternoon, and the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) activated state resources because of flooding concerns.

Officials have cited lack of cell phone service, no sense of the storm's intensity and public desensitisation to such alerts in the flood-prone area, as reasons some did not evacuate.

President Donald Trump signed a federal disaster declaration at the request of Texas Governor Greg Abbott. This enabled the Federal Emergency Management Agency to deploy to Central Texas and open a disaster recovery centre in Kerr County.

Rescue efforts included over 2,100 responders on the ground, private helicopters, drones, boats and cadaver-detecting dogs. They are searching for the missing and the dead buried beneath mounds of mud-soaked debris.

"These large piles (of debris) can be very obstructive, and to get deep into these piles is very hazardous," Lt Colonel Ben Baker of the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department said on Wednesday.

"It's extremely treacherous, time consuming. It's dirty work. It's the water still there. So, we're having to go layer by layer, peeling these off, to make those recoveries," he said.

Canadian singer Justin Bieber has surprised fans by releasing a new album titled Swag.

The record features 20 songs with track names including Dadz Love, Devotion and Therapy Session and follows online concern for the singer's mental health after a confrontation with paparazzi.

Promotional pictures shared by the singer feature his wife, Hailey Bieber, and their son - at points being held over his head.

Fellow artists and fans have reacted with glee to the new music, which comes four years after Bieber's last album, Purpose.

With a run time of just under an hour, the once-teen-icon turned megastar collaborates with a host of rappers on Swag including Sexxy Red, Cash Cobain and Gunna.

Its title appears to hark back to the singer's 2012 hit Boyfriend, featuring the line "swag, swag, swag, on you".

American rapper Big Sean was among the famous names to welcome the news of the album's release, commenting on the singer's Instagram post "Yes!!!!".

The album drop also comes on the back of fans' worries for Bieber's mental health. In recent months, the singer has shared multiple posts online about the intrusion of paparazzi in his personal life.

One video, filmed on Father's Day when he confronted a photographer, shows the singer saying "I'm a dad. I'm a husband. You're not getting it. It's not clocking to you. I'm standing on business."

The video was widely circulated and remixed online. Now, it not only features as part of the promotion of the singer's new album, but is sampled in one of its songs, Butterflies.

Bieber's marriage has also been under the spotlight recently after another controversial social media post. The singer celebrated his wife featuring on the cover of Vogue with a social media post detailing an argument between them.

The lyrics of Daisies, the second song on Swag, appear to allude to the couple's relationship with "falling petals do you love me or not" and "you said forever babe, did you mean it or not?"

Other song titles on the album seem to touch on religious themes including Devotion, Soulful and Forgiveness, in keeping with Bieber's Christian faith.

The UK economy shrank unexpectedly in May, according to latest official figures.

The economy shrank by 0.1%, the Office for National Statistics said, the second month in a row it has contracted.

Economists had expected GDP to grow by 0.1%.

The fall in economic output was mainly driven by a drop in production, the ONS said.

A mystery interstellar object spotted last week by astronomers could be the oldest comet ever seen, according to scientists.

Named 3I/Atlas, it may be three billion years older than our own solar system, suggests the team from Oxford university.

The preliminary findings were presented on Friday at the national meeting of the UK's Royal Astronomical Society in Durham.

"We're all very excited by 3I/Atlas," University of Oxford astronomer Matthew Hopkins told BBC News. He had just finished his PhD studies when the object was discovered.

He says it could be more than seven billion years old, and it may be the most remarkable interstellar visitor yet.

3I/Atlas was first spotted on 1 July 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile, when it was about 670 million km from the Sun.

Since then astronomers around the world have been racing to identify its path and discover more details about it.

Mr Hopkins believes it originated in the Milky Way's 'thick disk'. This is a group of ancient stars that orbit above and below the area where the Sun and most stars are located.

The team believe that because 3I/ATLAS probably formed around an old star, it is made up of a lot of water ice.

That means that as it approaches the Sun later this year, the energy from the Sun will heat the object's surface, leading to blazes of vapour and dust.

That could create a glowing tail.

The researchers made their findings using a model developed by Mr Hopkins.

"This is an object from a part of the galaxy we've never seen up close before," said Professor Chris Lintott, co-author of the study.

"We think there's a two-thirds chance this comet is older than the solar system, and that it's been drifting through interstellar space ever since."

Later this year, 3I/ATLAS should be visible from Earth using amateur telescopes.

Before 3I/Atlas soared into view, just two others had been seen. One was called 1I/'Oumuamua, found in 2017 and another called 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019.

Astronomers globally are currently gearing up to start using a new, very powerful telescope in Chile, called the Vera C Rubin.

When it starts fully surveying the southern night sky later this year, scientists expect that it could discover between 5 and 50 new interstellar objects.

Irvine Welsh is pointing up to the second floor of a grey stone building in Leith, the port district of Edinburgh.

As he gets ready to publish a sequel to his 1993 cult novel Trainspotting, the author is showing me the window of the room, with its view over a local park, where he wrote that first book, which later became a hit film starring Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller.

The son of a Leith docker and a waitress - who did a course in electrical engineering, spent time in a punk band and was addicted to heroin as a younger man - Welsh had moved back home to Leith from London and "just started typing". He tells me that before writing Trainspotting he had decided "this is my last chance to do something creative".

Trainspotting follows the lives of a group of heroin-addicted friends in Edinburgh. Violent, often shocking and darkly funny, the book is a picture of the social decay sparked by the decimation of Britain's industrial heartlands. It was Welsh's first novel and sold more than a million copies in the UK alone.

But as he sat typing away, back in the early 90s, he had no idea it would do well. "I just wanted to get it done," he explains. It certainly paid off.

The book and film tapped so successfully into the cultural zeitgeist that more than 30 years on, you can still book an official Trainspotting tour in Leith. But on a blustery Scottish summer's day, I'm getting a bespoke one from the writer himself, touring some of the key haunts that inspired him.

We head to the so-called Banana Flats, the curved building officially called Cables Wynd House that dominates the Leith skyline and where his character Sick Boy (played by Miller in the film) grows up.

We visit the Leith Dockers' Club where Renton (played by McGregor) goes with his mum and dad and where Welsh remembers hanging out "as a kid and sitting there with lemonade and crisps" and "feeling really sort of resentful" while everyone else was getting drunk.

Welsh's latest return to his characters is called Men in Love. He's previously written follow-up books and a prequel about the Trainspotting gang (he clearly can't get enough of them), but this new novel is set immediately after the first one finished, when Renton has run off with the money he and his friends have made from a big drug deal.

This time, Welsh is exploring what happens when young men start to fall in love and have relationships. He was partly motivated to write it, he says, because "we're living in a world that seems to be so full of hate and poison... I think that it's time we focused more on love as a kind of antidote to all that".

But don't expect saccharine stories of romance - this is Welsh, after all. The cheating, lying, manipulative - and at times, horrifying - behaviour of some of his characters is still much in evidence.

The book even has a disclaimer at the end explaining that because the novel is set in the 1980s, many of the characters "express themselves in ways that we now consider offensive and discriminatory".

Welsh says the publishers insisted on it. "They felt we live in such sensitive times that we need to make that point.

"We live in a much more censorious environment," he continues. While he accepts that misogynist terms in the book including "fat lassie" are hurtful and "there's a good reason why we don't say them", he worries that if the state starts to say "you can't talk about this, you can't talk about that, I think we're on a dangerous road".

The Men in Love story spans into the early 90s. It's being published at a time when Britain is indulging in a bit of 90s nostalgia, with Oasis on tour and Pulp's surprise set at Glastonbury getting rave reviews.

Welsh tells me he "never left" that era, but says younger generations also feel a nostalgia for it because "people had lives then".

He pins some of the blame for cultural change on the internet and social media which has become "a controlling rather than an enabling force".

As someone who understands addiction, Welsh hopes we'll be "more judicious" about using social media in future. He points to the way people have "their phones stuck to their face" while they are moving around.

"If we survive the next 50 years, that's going to look as strange in film as people chain smoking cigarettes did back in the 80s."

He also thinks the internet is making us more stupid. "When you get machines thinking for you, your brain just atrophies." He fears we're heading towards "a post-democratic, post-art, post-culture society where we've got artificial intelligence on one side and we've a kind of natural stupidity on the other side, we just become these dumbed down machines that are taking instructions".

Trainspotting's success came in part he says at a time when people were willing to read more challenging, less formulaic books. And as the money rolled in, it gave him the freedom to write.

He's also a DJ and is releasing an album with the Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra to go with his new book. The disco tracks relate to the characters, the storyline and the "emotional landscape" of the novel.

Music is "fundamental" to his writing and he's also "looking for that four-four beat all the time while I'm typing".

He builds a playlist in his head for every character and theme.

Renton's into Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Velvet Underground. Sick Boy also likes Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, New Order, he says.

The aggressive and violent Begbie likes "Rod Stewart and power ballads basically".

The singer recently told The Times that the public should give the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage a chance. I wondered if Irvine Welsh thinks that his Trainspotting characters would support that party if they were growing up now.

He pushes back, telling me the Scottish working classes "still have a radical kind of spirit. They're not really there to be the stooge of some public school idiot".

Although later he adds "people are so desperate that they'll go along with anybody who has that rhetoric of change".

Welsh has always been political and, as we walk around the area where he grew up, he describes how Margaret Thatcher ended centuries of shipbuilding in Leith "at a stroke". Five thousand dockers became none, he says.

Trainspotting also resonated, he thinks, because it "heralded the adjustment to people living in a world without paid work. And now we're all in that position".

His argument is that Britain's class system is changing "because of this massive concentration of wealth towards the wealthy".

The working classes already have no money and now the middle classes are being pulled into more and more debt too and are less able to pass on their assets which makes life increasingly insecure.

"We're all members of the Precariat, basically. We don't know how long we'll have paid work if we do have it, and we just don't know how long this will last because our economy, our society is in a long-form revolutionary transformation."

In my time in Welsh's company, we haven't just toured Leith, I've had an insight into his brain, exploding with opinions on everything from our dystopian future, to why the best music was made in the analogue era and even to what would happen if he were offered a knighthood (it's a no, by the way).

When our time's up, he heads into the bar at the Dockers' Club to see a friend he first met at primary school 60 years ago. His old pal jokes to me that he's a plumber while Welsh is a millionaire author. You can see the affection between them.

Trainspotting may have changed Welsh's life entirely. But he's still plugged into the community that shaped him, and the Leith that he turned so spectacularly into fiction.

Men in Love is published on 24 July 2025

There will be no immediate changes to cash Individual Savings Accounts (Isas), the BBC understands.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves was widely expected to announce plans to reduce the £20,000 tax-free allowance.

The move was aimed at encouraging more investment in stocks and shares, which the goverment says it will still focus on.

"Our ambition is to ensure people's hard-earned savings are delivering the best returns and driving more investment into the UK economy," a Treasury spokesperson said.

The Treasury is expected to continue to talk to banks, building societies and investment firms about options for reform.

An Isa is a savings or investment product that is treated differently for tax purposes.

Any returns you make from an Isa are tax-free, but there is a limit to how much money you can put in each year.

The current £20,000 annual allowance can be used in one account or spread across multiple Isa products as you wish.

Millions of people are facing restrictions on water use as the UK's first regional hosepipe ban of 2025 comes into force. Despite Yorkshire Water saying it has cut leakage by 15% in recent years, bill payers say they are frustrated at the number of leaks which appear to go unchecked.

"It's literally going out of that hole and straight into a drain," said Neela Patel.

The business owner said water has been pouring along Greasbrough Road, in Rotherham, for two weeks.

"They've put a few cones up but I've not seen much work done so we're not sure what's going on.

"We just want it resolved, they've put a hosepipe ban on and it's just flowing out of there."

Fellow shop owner John Smallwood said everyone in the area had reported it, calling it "ridiculous" to impose restrictions on customers while water was being wasted in this way.

"They came and stopped the traffic, caused a lot of havoc and not been back," he said.

"It's just a tonne of water going down the drain."

The hosepipe ban applies to customers across much of Yorkshire, parts of North Lincolnshire and parts of Derbyshire.

It prohibits the use of a hosepipe for activities such as watering the garden, washing the car or filling a paddling pool. Anyone flouting the restriction could be fined up to £1,000.

Dean Majors, a massage therapist from Skipton, North Yorkshire, said he had reported a leak outside his home on Canal Street at the end of June.

He said water had been pooling outside his house, with some passing down a drain and through an overflow pipe into the nearby canal.

"It just got worse and worse and every time any traffic came through, water just splashed down the overflow."

Mr Majors also reported a leak outside his business, The Backcave, last May, with the residual water so deep that he floated rubber ducks on it.

He said the leak outside his home was fixed on Thursday, joking that the company had remembered his duck stunt.

Carol Lilleker, from Laughton-en-le-Morthen, near Dinnington in South Yorkshire, said water has been leaking from beneath a manhole cover in the village since 27 June.

She said despite several calls to Yorkshire Water it has not been repaired and "thousands of gallons of water" must have been lost.

"We reported it. Our neighbours across the road reported it. The school's reported it. Several other people have reported it," she said.

"We're going to have a hosepipe ban on Friday, which is understandable - we can understand the reasons why that's going to happen - but it's a bit much when thousands and thousands of gallons of water are flowing past our houses and nobody seems to be doing anything."

In West Yorkshire, Kevin Baker said he had noticed a significant leak on Green Hill Road, in Armley, Leeds, six weeks ago.

"They came along, put traffic lights on, dug a hole, scratched their heads and went away and it's been pouring out ever since."

He said having passed it on Thursday he noticed a digger was there and hoped that meant it was finally being dealt with.

Having had a leak at his homes that Yorkshire Water charged him for, he said it was incredibly frustrating.

"It just felt like no action was taken on top of the frustration that they can charge me an exorbitant amount of money for what was a very small leak on my system."

Yorkshire Water said it understood how "frustrating leaks are" for its customers.

"Leakage is the lowest it has ever been in Yorkshire, and it's something that we work on all year round," a spokesperson said.

"We reduced leakage by 15% over the last five years, and will be spending £38m over the next five years to continue bringing the number of leaks down."

It said it had dedicated more resources to reducing leaks and had recruited 100 extra leakage inspectors to "help us find and fix leaks faster".

It said its team fix on average 334 leaks every week and prioritise those losing the most water.

Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.

When she started in vitro fertilisation (IVF) last November, Kim Mi-ae knew it would be a gruelling test of patience - something she had already endured when she conceived her first child three years ago.

But what shocked her this time around were the "crazy" waits at the fertility clinic.

"When I went in January, it felt like everyone had made a New Year's resolution to have a baby! Even with a reservation, I waited over three hours," says the 36-year-old Seoul resident.

While South Korea continues to struggle with the world's lowest birth rates, fertility clinics are in growing demand - a bright spot in the country's demographic crisis.

Between 2018 and 2022, the number of fertility treatments carried out in the country rose nearly 50% to 200,000. Last year, one in six babies in Seoul were born with the help of fertility treatment.

Underpinning the boom, experts say, is a shift in attitudes about family planning.

"We have a young generation… that is used to being in control of its life," says Sarah Harper CBE, professor in Gerontology at the University of Oxford. That control, she adds, may come in the form of single women freezing their eggs or couples trying IVF when they can't conceive.

"Whereas in previous generations there was a greater acceptance that whether you conceive or not can be a bit haphazard, now we have Korean women saying, 'I want to plan my life.'"

This is good news for South Korea's government, which is trying to lift the country out of a demographic crisis. One in five people in South Korea are now aged 65 or above. As a proportion of the country's total population, there have never been fewer babies.

The country has repeatedly broken its own record for having the world's lowest birth rate: 0.98 babies per woman in 2018, 0.84 in 2020 and 0.72 in 2023. If this trend continues, experts warn the population of 50 million could halve in 60 years.

But recently there is reason for cautious optimism: instead of another record low, South Korea's birth rate rose slightly to 0.75 in 2024 - its first increase in nine years.

"It's a small bump, but still a meaningful one," says Seulki Choi, a professor at the Korea Development Institute's School of Public Policy and Management.

It is too early to tell whether this is the start of a much-needed reversal or just a blip. The country's birth rate remains far below the global average of 2.2. But many like Dr Choi are cautiously optimistic.

"If this trend holds, it could signal a longer-term shift," says Dr Choi. "We need to watch how young people's attitudes toward marriage and parenthood are changing."

A baby bump

For years, having children was the last thing on Park Soo-in's mind. She was mostly busy at work, often only clocking off from her advertising job at 04:00.

"I was in a company with endless overtime, so it wasn't even something I could realistically consider," says the 35-year-old.

Things started to change after she got married two years ago. She landed a new job with better hours - and friends around her started having babies.

"Seeing and interacting with their kids made it feel less overwhelming," she said. "And watching my husband take initiative, doing research on pregnancy and childbirth and showing real effort, gave me confidence that we could do this."

When Ms Park and her husband had trouble conceiving, they looked to fertility treatments. Many others are doing the same, fuelling projections that the burgeoning industry could be worth more than $2bn by 2030.

"This is actually an important signal for policymakers that there are still some women who want to start families but are facing … barriers to doing so," says Jennifer Sciubba, president and CEO of the non-profit Population Reference Bureau in Washington, DC.

"More than anything, this is a sign that people are unable to fulfil their desires to have children."

Difficulty conceiving is just one barrier. At the heart of South Korea's population woes are a raft of social and financial pressures - from patriarchal norms that place most childcare responsibilities on women to long work hours and high education costs - which discourage many young people from having children.

For some, however, those dreams have merely been delayed. More than half of South Koreans say they want kids but can't afford them, according to a UN report. And by the time South Korean women have their first child, their average age is 33.6 - among the highest in the world.

"Looking back, it might have been better to start earlier," says Ms Park. "But realistically… now actually feels like the right time. In my late 20s, I just didn't have the financial capacity to think about marriage or kids."

The same goes for Ms Kim, who spent three years saving up for marriage and another four for a child.

"People spend their youth studying, job hunting, and spending money to prepare for life. And by the time they're ready to settle down, it's often late," she says. "But the later you wait, the harder it gets [to become pregnant], physically and emotionally."

Bumps in the road

For those who opt for IVF, the process of trying to conceive also becomes much more expensive.

"It's hard to say exactly how much IVF costs because it varies so much by person and cycle," says Ms Kim. "It's a huge and unpredictable expense that can really affect your finances."

As part of concerted efforts to boost its birth rate, South Korea's government has expanded its support for fertility treatments. Seoul now subsidises up to 2 million Korean won ($1,460; £1,100) for egg-freezing and 1.1 million won for each IVF treatment.

But even with government subsidies, Ms Kim says she spent more than 2 million won in January for IVF - mostly on out-of-pocket items that subsidies do not cover, such as supplements and additional tests.

And with less than half of IVF cycles ending in success, the costs can stack up quickly.

This has been the case for Jang Sae-ryeon in the southwestern Jeolla province. The 37-year-old started fertility treatment two years ago and has done five IVF cycles, each of which cost her around 1.5 million won.

"I wish things worked out after just one or two tries, but for most people, that's not the case," she says. "Without money, you simply can't move forward. That's the reality. And I think that's the most frustrating part."

Equally challenging, women say, are the workplace pressures they face when they commit to a demanding IVF schedule.

While South Korean companies offer several days of leave for fertility treatment, women say that in reality it is difficult to utilise them. Ms Kim says she underwent IVF for her first child without taking leave at all. Ms Jang, meanwhile, says her colleagues asked her to postpone her treatment.

"It made me feel like IVF and a full-time job just don't mix," says Ms Jang. "So I quit. But once I left, I struggled financially. That led to another cycle of quitting and job-hunting again."

Such financial and cultural pressures may have dampened many South Koreans' dreams of having children, but not Ms Jang's. She still gets teary when she recalls two pregnancies from early in her marriage - both of which ended in miscarriages.

"You know how they say when you have a child, you feel a love that's limitless?" she says. "I think having a child that resembles both of us and creating a family together is one of the greatest forms of happiness a person can feel."

Temperatures in 2025 so far

Why is it so hot?

Role of El Niño and La Niña?

What about the historic heatwave of June 1976?

Will it stay hot all summer?