The US National Basketball Association (NBA) will return to China this week for the first time since 2019.

Two pre-season games are scheduled for Friday and Sunday between the Brooklyn Nets and the Phoenix Suns at an arena in Macau's Venetian casino and hotel.

China effectively froze the NBA out six years ago when one of the organisation's managers wrote in support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, a former British colony that has seen a clampdown on civil liberties.

The games come after the NBA and Chinese technology giant Alibaba announced a multi-year partnership at the end of last year. The Brooklyn Nets are owned by the company's chair, Joseph Tsai.

It is the first time an NBA fixture has been played in Macau - a special administrative region like Hong Kong, known for its casinos - since 2007.

The NBA has cast the games as part of efforts to tap into a burgeoning viewership of American basketball in the country, with commissioner Adam Silver telling news agency AFP that there was "tremendous interest in the NBA throughout China".

Analysis by US sports broadcaster ESPN in 2022 suggested the value of NBA China, the arm that manages its operations in the country, was estimated at approximately $5bn (£3.7bn).

Basketball's popularity in the east Asian nation skyrocketed when Chinese player Yao Ming was drafted by the Houston Rockets in 2002.

The NBA estimated in 2019 that 300 million people in China played the sport.

The games could be interpreted as the culmination of a slow but steady reconciliation between the NBA and China, on a backdrop of tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade.

China suspended NBA broadcasts on Chinese TV channels and streaming platforms after the NBA refused to apologise or discipline then-manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, who posted on social media: "Fight For Freedom. Stand With Hong Kong."

At the time, the city was engulfed in regular protests over the erosion of free speech and assembly rights, which culminated in China passing a security law to crack down on dissent. Beijing maintains this was necessary to maintain order.

Mr Morey backpedalled after a backlash from Chinese fans, while the NBA said it was "regrettable" that fans in China were upset and acknowledged he had "deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China".

Since then, NBA games have gradually returned to Chinese TV channels.

Chinese fans have expressed their excitement about the upcoming games.

"We'd been preparing and planning for this two months in advance," Lyu Yizhe, from Xiamen, told Reuters in Macau. "It feels extra special because we're long-time NBA fans - we've been watching since 1998, back in the Michael Jordan and Chicago Bulls era."

Mole Zeng, who travelled from Hangzhou, told the news agency: "I believe that in the future, as the NBA continues to grow in China, more and more star players will come here to meet us in person."

A South African farm worker has described to a court how he was forced by his boss to feed the bodies of two black women to pigs in an attempt to hide evidence after they were shot.

Adrian De Wet, 21, said he was told to throw the bodies inside a pig enclosure, explaining that "when pigs are hungry enough, they'll eat anything".

He admitted opening fire on the two women with his boss - farm owner Zachariah Johannes Olivier - before he ordered him to help dispose of their bodies.

Mr Olivier and another man, William Musora, are accused of murder after Maria Makgato, 45, and Lucia Ndlovu, 34, were killed while allegedly looking for food on a farm near Polokwane in South Africa's northern Limpopo province last year.

Farm supervisor Mr De Wet was also previously accused of murder, but charges were dropped by the prosecution when he turned state witness. He had argued he was under duress when he was forced to throw the bodies into the pig enclosure.

• South African farm worker says he was forced to feed women to pigs
• Outrage over farmer accused of feeding women to pigs

On Thursday, Mr De Wet told Polokwane High Court that he and Mr Olivier, 60, armed themselves with hunting rifles and waited for trespassers to enter the farm on the night of 17 August 2024.

He said after waiting for 30 minutes they heard voices of people talking and walking towards their direction.

They then opened fire and heard a person screaming, before inspecting the area and finding a person lying face down.

After leaving the area and going to sleep, they returned the next morning and found it was the body of a woman.

Mr De Wet said he was asked by Mr Olivier to help him throw the body inside the enclosure where eight to ten big adult pigs were kept.

The following day another body was found about 25 metres from where the first was found.

Mr Olivier, Mr De Wet and Mr Musora, 50, are said to have then thrown the second body inside the pigsty.

On the following Tuesday they returned to it and found that the pigs had bitten off large chunks of flesh on the women.

Pictures presented as exhibits in court show missing buttocks, face, thighs and shoulders.

State prosecutor Advocate George Sekhukhune asked Mr De Wet what the purpose of placing the bodies inside the pigsty was, to which he answered: "We were disposing the evidence because when pigs are hungry enough, they'll eat anything."

Mr De Wet also said Mr Olivier chopped up the hunting rifles with an angle grinder and burnt the wooden parts of the gun. They then threw away the cut up weapons including the spent cartridges inside a borehole.

The son of victim Ms Makgato cried repeatedly in court, while Mr Olivier was seen wiping away tears as Mr De Wet gave his evidence.

The case has sparked outrage across South Africa, exacerbating racial tensions between black and white people in the country.

This is especially rife in rural areas of the country, despite the end of the racist system of apartheid 30 years ago.

Most private farmland remains in the hands of the white minority, while most farm workers are black and poorly paid, fuelling resentment among the black population, while many white farmers complain of high crime rates.

Cross examination by defence lawyers of Mr Olivier and Mr Musora will resume next Wednesday.

A man arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences following the Manchester synagogue attack has been re-arrested.

Two people were killed after Jihad Al-Shamie, 35, drove a car at pedestrians and launched an attack outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Crumpsall on 2 October.

Counter Terrorism Police said the 30-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of commission, preparation and instigation of acts of terrorism.

It said he had been re-arrested earlier at Manchester Airport on suspicion of failing to disclose information contrary to Section 38B of the Terrorism Act 2000.

Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.

Rishi Sunak has taken up senior part-time advisor roles at tech giant Microsoft and artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic.

The former prime minister has been told he must not lobby ministers on behalf of the companies by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), an independent watchdog which oversees the activities of former government figures.

Sunak - who remains the MP for Richmond and Northallerton - will donate payments for the jobs to a charity he recently founded, the watchdog said.

During his premiership, Sunak made tech regulation a significant priority, setting up an AI safety summit in 2023.

In letters of advice sent to Sunak by Acoba and published on Thursday, his role at Microsoft was described as providing "high- level strategic perspectives" on geopolitical trends.

The watchdog said it had been informed by Sunak that his advisory role at Anthropic - an AI firm seeking to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta - would be "akin to operating as an internal think tank".

Sunak was told not to advise on bidding for UK contracts, or to lobby the government for two years from his last day in ministerial office.

In addition to the two tech roles, it was previously confirmed Sunak will act as a paid advisor to the bank Goldman Sachs, where he previously worked between 2001 and 2004.

There had been speculation that Sunak, who was in No 10 between October 2022 and July 2024, would leave the Commons to take up a Silicon Valley role shortly after the election.

He previously lived in California, where he still has a home, and held a US visa until 2021.

But in his final prime minister's questions, Sunak vowed to spend more time in his constituency, which he called "the greatest place on Earth".

"If anyone needs me, I will be in Yorkshire," he said.

Earlier this year, he founded the Richmond Project, a charity which will focus on tackling numeracy problems, another area he was vocal about while in Downing Street.

They are weird, bald, subterranean rodents that look like sausages with teeth, and they have just revealed a genetic secret to long life.

A new study of the bizarre naked mole rat shows that the animals have evolved a DNA repair mechanism that could explain their longevity.

These burrow-dwelling rats have a maximum life span of nearly 40 years, making them world's the longest-lived rodent.

The new findings, published in the journal Science, could also shed light on why naked mole rats are resistant to a wide range of age-related diseases.

The animals are resistant to cancer, deterioration of the brain and spinal cord, and arthritis, so many scientists want to understand more about how their bodies work.

For this study, led by a team at Tonji University in Shanghai, China, the focus was DNA repair - a natural process in our bodies' cells. When strands of DNA - our genetic building blocks - are damaged, a mechanism is triggered whereby another undamaged strand of DNA is used as a template to repair the break.

The focus of this research was on a particular protein that is involved in that system of damage sensing and repair.

When a cell senses the damage, one of the substances it produces is a protein called c-GAS. That plays several roles, but what was of interest to these scientists is that in humans, it interferes with and hampers the process by which DNA is knitted back together.

Scientists think that this interference could promote cancer and shorten our lifespan.

In naked mole rats though, the researchers found that the exact same protein does the opposite. It helps the body mend strands of DNA and keeps the genetic code in each cell intact.

• Whale menopause linked to longer lifespan
• Mutations across species reveal clue to ageing
• BBC Future: What naked mole rats can teach us about treating cancer

Professor Gabriel Balmus studies DNA repair and ageing at the University of Cambridge. He said the discovery was exciting and "the tip of the iceberg" when it comes to understanding why these animals live such extraordinarily long lives.

"You can think of cGAS as a biological Lego piece - the same basic shape in humans and naked mole-rats, but in the mole-rat version a few connectors are flipped, allowing it to assemble an entirely different structure and function."

Over millions of years of evolution, Prof Balmus explained, naked mole-rats appear to have rewired the same pathway and "used it to their advantage".

"This finding raises fundamental questions: how did evolution reprogram the same protein to act in reverse? What changed? And is this an isolated case or part of a broader evolutionary pattern?"

Most importantly, scientists want to know what they can learn from these rodents to improve human health and extend quality of life with age.

"I think if we could reverse-engineer the naked mole-rat's biology," said Prof Balmus, "we might bring some much-needed therapies for an ageing society."