Ten people, including six children, have been killed in an Israeli air strike while waiting to fill water containers in central Gaza on Sunday, emergency service officials say.
Their bodies were sent to Nuseirat's al-Awda Hospital, which also treated 16 injured people, seven of them children, according to a doctor there.
Eyewitnesses said a drone fired a missile at a crowd of people queuing with empty jerry cans next to a water tanker in the heart of the al-Nuseirat refugee camp.
The Israeli military has been asked to comment.
Unverified footage shared online after the strike showed bloodied children and lifeless bodies, with screams of panic and desperation.
Residents rushed to the scene and transported the wounded using private vehicles and donkey carts.
The strike came as Israeli aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip have escalated.
A spokesperson for Gaza's Civil Defense Agency said 19 other Palestinians had been killed on Sunday, in three separate strikes on residential buildings in central Gaza and Gaza City.
Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas's cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 57,882 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Most of Gaza's population has been displaced multiple times.
More than 90% of homes are estimated to be damaged or destroyed. The healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed, and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.
This week, for the first time in 130 days, 75,000 litres of fuel was allowed into Gaza - "far from enough to meet the daily needs of the population and vital civilian aid operations", the United Nations said.
Nine UN agencies warned on Saturday that Gaza's fuel shortage had reached "critical levels", and if fuel ran out, it would affect hospitals, water systems, sanitation networks and bakeries.
"Hospitals are already going dark, maternity, neonatal and intensive care units are failing, and ambulances can no longer move," the UN said.
Watch Heidi Alexander "guarantees" electric vehicle costs will be lowered
The government will make it cheaper to buy an electric car (EV) in a bid to get more drivers to make the switch, the Transport Secretary has said.
Heidi Alexander was responding to reports suggesting the government will offer drivers thousands of pounds in grants to cut the price of buying an EV.
People without driveways will be able to have charge points fitted using "cross-pavement gullies" paid for with £25m allocated to councils, she told the BBC's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
The Conservatives welcomed the investment but accused the government of "forcing families" into "expensive electric vehicles before the country was ready".
"We are going to be making some announcements later this week on how we make it more affordable for people to buy an electric vehicle," Alexander said.
When pushed on whether this would come in the form of hundreds of millions of pounds in EV grants, as reports suggested, Alexander refused to say.
"I can guarantee to your viewers that we will be making it cheaper for those who do want to make the switch to an electric vehicle, " she added.
The Department for Transport would not comment further.
It comes after Alexander told the Telegraph the high cost of electric vehicles was making people wary, saying "It was right that the government thinks in the round about what we can do to tackle both of the issues, on charging and on the upfront cost of purchase."
Richard Fuller MP, shadow chief Secretary to the Treasury, accused Labour of "forcing families into more expensive electric vehicles before the country is ready."
Alexander admitted she did not have an electric vehicle herself, adding that she lived in a terraced house without a driveway.
"I don't have an electric car... like millions of people in this country - I bought a new car about six years ago, I'm thinking about the next car that I will purchase and it will definitely be an electric vehicle," she said.
Some 21.6% of new cars sold during the first half of the year were electric, according to the latest figures from the UK motor trade association the SMMT.
However, figures remain well below the mandated targets manufacturers have been set, ahead of the ban on selling new petrol and diesel cars which comes into effect in 2030.
In April, Alexander announced manufacturers would have more flexibility on annual targets and face lower fines to allow them to manage the impact of trade tariffs from the US.
Laura Strang, 25, from Oban, Scotland saves money by booking at the last minute.
She even booked her honeymoon just two days before they flew.
"We got married on the 21st of June and waited until the 23rd of June to book a holiday for June 25th.
"We had two weeks in Mexico because it was cheaper than two weeks in Europe."
Laura and her husband Sam Gledhill, 27, paid £1,200 each for 14 nights all-inclusive in Cancun.
"I would say we saved thousands of pounds, based on reviews," she says.
"Ten nights in Spain was coming up the same or more expensive. It's a 10-hour flight over to Mexico so it's a little bit crazy, that."
She says she and her husband have previously booked holidays within a few days of flying to Tenerife, Salou and Marrakesh and have saved money each time.
"Choosing not to go all-inclusive can save money but that depends on the country," says Laura.
"We found Mexico quite expensive when going out and about [so all-inclusive made sense], but you could probably save money in Spain by going half board."
'We travel off-peak and look for kids go free places'
Nathan Hart and his fiancee Cassie Farrelly estimate they saved £3,300 by searching for a holiday that offered a free child's place and going outside school holidays.
They have booked a 10-day all-inclusive holiday in Spain's Balearic Islands at the end of September with their three-year-old twin daughters Alba and Luna.
The couple from Merthyr Tydfil, Wales recommend using the filter option on some of the biggest travel agency websites.
"When searching you can see which places offer one free child place, choose a range of locations and sort by lowest price," says Nathan.
"We found an exceptional hotel for £800 per person plus one free child place, so that's already an £800 saving.
"As well as that, on the booking page you can see a calendar showing the difference in price for the holiday on different dates."
Nathan says when he compared the same holiday in August it was double the price.
"That would have been completely unaffordable for us.
"I now completely understand why parents with older kids travel inside school term time and it's absolutely something we will have to consider when our girls are older."
Parents who take their children out of school for holidays during term time risk being fined, and repeat offenders could face prosecution.
'I swapped my London flat for a Spanish villa'
May Burrough works in central London. But her flat is too small to have lots of people to stay, so last October she invited some close friends to a five-bedroomed villa with a pool on the Costa Brava, Spain.
She estimates it would normally have cost around £3,500 to rent a house like that. But she used a home-swapping site and only paid €100 (£85) - for the cleaning fee - plus around £250 on transport.
Although she saved money on the villa, May and her friends did splash out on food and drink, such as oysters and wine from the region.
"We really had a lush time at the house because we were like, 'well, we're not paying for the accommodation!'"
Because finding someone to do a straight swap with can often be tricky, the Home Exchange site she uses allows her to earn credits by letting people stay in her one-bedroom flat, and then spend them elsewhere.
"It does take a bit of effort. I put valuables away, you have to change the bedsheets, cleaning every time. But it is fully worth it," says May.
She says the site is a bit clunky to use, but she loves what it allows her to do, for an annual fee of around £170.
Recently she booked a one-night stay in Vienne, France so she could go to a concert.
"A hotel was going to be mega-expensive. So I booked a room in someone's home and left in the morning."
'I use my credit card to get loyalty points for flights'
Ebrahim Paruk, 35, from Nuneaton near Coventry in Warwickshire saves money on flights by saving up Virgin Atlantic credit card points.
He does his best to collect as many points as possible.
"I pay for everything I can with the card," he says, including his bills, weekly petrol, and weekly groceries.
"These are day-to-day necessities that you have to buy, so you might as well get a reward," he says.
Describing himself as "the biggest football fan you will probably ever find", he started doing it as a way of going to the major international tournaments.
The best saving he made with the points was a return flight to Düsseldorf to watch Germany v Denmark in the 2024 Euros - he saved £400 on his £800 flight.
To add to the saving, he won the match ticket and hotel accommodation in a competition, meaning the whole trip cost him a total of £500.
Now he uses the same method to save money when booking holidays for him and his wife.
'I house sit and get to see the US'
Annmaree Bancroft is a single mum of a three-year-old and has been house sitting with him 11 times.
Their first time was looking after two dogs for a week in a house in Scarsdale outside New York City.
This year they will be going back there for a few days, this time as friends of the homeowner. Then they will stay on for three more weeks in the US, without paying for any overnight accommodation, thanks to further housesitting stints in Connecticut and Brooklyn.
The cost of the holiday will be the £1,435 she is spending on flights, plus travel between cities and spending money.
"A lot of parents think that once you have a child, you can't travel," says Annmaree.
"That is just not true. There are these alternative ways now to travel and make it affordable."
If you do choose to house sit, it is recommended that you use a reputable site. Annmaree uses the online platform Trusted Housesitters, which charges a membership fee for sitters of £99 to £199 a year.
'We're staycationing in the UK'
House sitting may also be an option for those choosing not to go abroad.
Kayleigh Pennel-Price lives with her partner, two children, aged two and four months, and their golden retriever Kofi in Wiltshire.
She had looked into a family holiday through the traditional means but calculated that it would cost around £3,000 to go on a foreign holiday for a week.
Instead, the whole family is going house sitting in a small village in Buckinghamshire for two weeks.
They will be staying in a home with a sauna, swimming pool and a private woodland, to look after two Yorkshire terriers, booked through the website HouseSit Match.
"We mostly plan to just stay there," says Kayleigh, who thinks the whole trip could cost £250.
"We love both abroad and UK holidays, but we don't like to leave our dog," she says. "And with the two babies, abroad is a little harder."
Diogo Jota (right) scored 65 goals in 182 appearances for Liverpool.
Published
Liverpool boss Arne Slot says his players should be themselves and follow their emotions as they come to terms with the death of team-mate Diogo Jota.
Portugal forward Jota and his brother Andre Silva died in a car crash on 3 July in the Spanish province of Zamora.
The Reds play their first pre-season friendly since Jota's death at Preston North End at 15:00 BST on Sunday.
In his first interview since Jota's death, Slot told Liverpool TV: "If we want to laugh, we laugh; if we want to cry, we're going to cry.
"If they want to train they can train, if they don't want to train they can not train. But be yourself, don't think you have to be different than your emotions tell you.
"We will always carry him with us in our hearts, in our thoughts, wherever we go."
The funeral of the brothers took place in their hometown of Gondomar last Saturday when a large Liverpool delegation, including Slot, were in attendance.
There have also been floral tributes at Anfield, where Jota's wife Rute Cardoso, members of the brothers' family and Liverpool's squad all visited on Friday to pay their respects.
Liverpool have retired Jota's number 20 shirt across their men's, women's and academy teams in "honour and memory" of the former Wolves forward.
A number of tributes have been planned for the Preston game, including a pre-match rendition of Liverpool's anthem You'll Never Walk Alone and a minute's silence, with both sets of players wearing black armbands.
"Nothing seems to be important if we think of what has happened," said Slot. "But we are a football club and we need to train and we need to play again, if we want it or not.
"What I've said to the players, I can say it here as well. It's very difficult to find the right words because we constantly debate what is appropriate. What is appropriate in our actions? What is appropriate [for] what we have to say? Can we train again? Can we laugh again? Can we be angry if there's a wrong decision?
"And I've said to them, maybe the best thing for us to do is handle this situation like Jota was. And what I meant with that is that Jota was always himself, it didn't matter if he was talking to me, to his team-mates, to the staff, he was always himself. So let us try to be ourselves as well."
Jota scored 65 goals in 182 appearances for Liverpool, helping them win the FA Cup and League Cup in 2022 and the Premier League title last season.
He played his final match for Portugal as they beat Spain in the final of the Nations League on 8 June. He scored 14 goals in 49 internationals.
The Guardia Civil told BBC Sport that Jota and his brother died after their car, a Lamborghini, left the road due to a tyre blowout while overtaking another vehicle.
The brothers had been heading to the Spanish port of Santander so Jota could return to Liverpool for pre-season training.
Ten people, including six children, have been killed in an Israeli air strike while waiting to fill water containers in central Gaza on Sunday, emergency service officials say.
Their bodies were sent to Nuseirat's al-Awda Hospital, which also treated 16 injured people, seven of them children, according to a doctor there.
Eyewitnesses said a drone fired a missile at a crowd of people queuing with empty jerry cans next to a water tanker in the heart of the al-Nuseirat refugee camp.
The Israeli military has been asked to comment.
Unverified footage shared online after the strike showed bloodied children and lifeless bodies, with screams of panic and desperation.
Residents rushed to the scene and transported the wounded using private vehicles and donkey carts.
The strike came as Israeli aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip have escalated.
A spokesperson for Gaza's Civil Defense Agency said 19 other Palestinians had been killed on Sunday, in three separate strikes on residential buildings in central Gaza and Gaza City.
Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas's cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 57,882 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Most of Gaza's population has been displaced multiple times.
More than 90% of homes are estimated to be damaged or destroyed. The healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed, and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.
This week, for the first time in 130 days, 75,000 litres of fuel was allowed into Gaza - "far from enough to meet the daily needs of the population and vital civilian aid operations", the United Nations said.
Nine UN agencies warned on Saturday that Gaza's fuel shortage had reached "critical levels", and if fuel ran out, it would affect hospitals, water systems, sanitation networks and bakeries.
"Hospitals are already going dark, maternity, neonatal and intensive care units are failing, and ambulances can no longer move," the UN said.
Alder Hey said it would not officially comment on individual cases to respect patient confidentiality but the death has been confirmed to the BBC.
No details have been released about whether the child was being treated for other health problems or their vaccination status.
It is thought 17 children have been treated at Alder Hey for the virus since June.
The child is believed to be only the second in the UK in a decade to have died after contracting measles, after Renae Archer, of Salford, Greater Manchester, died aged 10 in 2023.
PA Media
There has been a spike in cases at Liverpool's Alder Hey Children's Hospital
An Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust spokesperson said: "To respect patient confidentiality, we can't comment on individual cases.
"We are concerned about the increasing number of children and young people who are contracting measles.
"Measles is a highly contagious viral illness which can cause children to be seriously unwell, requiring hospital treatment, and in rare cases, death.".
The hospital warned parents earlier this week that a fall in MMR vaccine uptake was behind the spike in measles cases in the region.
Chief nurse Nathan Askew said he felt misunderstandings around the vaccine were to blame.
"This vaccine's been in use for well over 50 years. It's very safe, tried and tested," he said.
Patients at the site include those with compromised immunity due to other health issues "making them more susceptible to infections, including measles, an Alder Hey spokesperson said.
Watch: New Ofcom rules "foundation" for safer internet but "not end of the conversation" says Heidi Alexander
The government is considering further action to keep children safe online and will not "sit back and wait" on the issue, a cabinet minister has said.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told the BBC new age-verification rules beginning later this month would have a "really important" impact.
She said the regulations, to be overseen by media regulator Ofcom, would not be the "end of the conversation" on online safety.
Ofcom boss Melanie Dawes vowed to rigorously enforce the new requirements, adding the regulator "means business". But she acknowledged Ofcom may require further legal powers in order to keep pace with the rapidly developing impact of artificial intelligence (AI).
Under new powers introduced by the Online Safety Act and passed under the previous Tory government, Ofcom will require internet companies to conduct stricter age verification methods to check whether a user is under 18.
A new code of practice, to apply from 25 July, will also require platforms to change algorithms affecting what is shown in children's feeds to filter out harmful content.
At the last election, Labour committed to "build on" the previous government's law and consider further measures to keep children safe.
But it is yet to publish fresh legislation of its own, with ministers arguing the existing set of new regulations need to be rolled out first.
'Addictive habits'
Speaking to Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Alexander said the new rules would bring in "really robust safeguards" to ensure proper age verification.
But she added: "We are very clear as a government that this is the foundation for a safer online experience for children, but it is not the end of the conversation".
She said Technology Secretary Peter Kyle was looking at further action in a number of areas, including how to address "addictive habits" among children, although she did not provide further details.
"We're not going to be a government that sits back and waits on this, we want to address it," she added.
Ofcom's chief executive told the programme the new rules would mean tech platforms would have to change their content algorithms "very significantly".
Ms Dawes said the regulator would give websites some flexibility when deciding which age-verification tools to use, but pledged that those failing to put adequate checks in place "will hear from us with enforcement action".
However, she acknowledged some newer forms of AI "may not" be covered be powers contained in the existing legislation.
"There may need to be some changes to the legislation to cover that," she added.
Resident doctors took part in 11 separate strikes during 2023 and 2024
Talks between Health Secretary Wes Streeting and the British Medical Association (BMA) will take place next week in a bid to avert strike action in England's NHS, the BBC understands.
Resident doctors, previously known as junior doctors, announced earlier this week that they will walk out for five consecutive days from 25 July until 30 July over a dispute about pay with the government.
The BMA said strikes would only be called off if next week's talks produce an offer it can put to its members.
The government has insisted it cannot improve its offer of a 5.4% increase for this year.
Resident doctors were awarded a 5.4% pay rise for this financial year - which will go into pay packets from August - following a 22% increase over the previous two years.
But they are arguing that pay in real terms is still around 20% lower than it was in 2008 and have called for the government to set out a pathway to restoring its value.
They believe that this year's 5.4% increase doesn't take them far enough down that path.
Health department sources have told the BBC the health secretary is sympathetic to improving working conditions for resident doctors, but he won't budge on salaries.
After the BMA's strike announcement, Streeting called the strike "unnecessary and unreasonable", adding: "The NHS is hanging by a thread - why on earth are they threatening to pull it?"
He said the government was "ready and willing" to work with the BMA, but any further strike action would be a disaster for patients and push back the progress made in reducing waiting lists in England.
BMA resident doctor committee co-chairs, Dr Melissa Ryan and Dr Ross Nieuwoudt, said on Wednesday they had been left with "no choice" but to strike without a "credible offer to keep us on the path to restore our pay".
Lord Robert Winston, a professor and TV doctor who was a pioneer of IVF treatment, resigned from the BMA on Friday over the planned strikes.
In an interview with The Times, he urged against strike action and said it could damage people's trust in the profession.
Resident doctors took part in 11 separate strikes during 2023 and 2024.
In order to end the previous strikes last year the incoming Labour government awarded a backdated increase worth 22% over two years.
The action in England will not affect resident doctors in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, who negotiate directly with their devolved governments on pay.
Resident doctors' basic salaries in England range from £37,000 to £70,000 a year for a 40-hour week, depending on experience, with extra payments for working nightshifts and weekends.
That does not include the latest 5.4% average pay award for this year which will start to be paid into wage packets from August.
Absorbing Sinner-Alcaraz rivalry set for next chapter
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz are meeting for the second successive Grand Slam men's singles final
Published
There are a number of factors which turn an exciting rivalry into an epic, enduring duel that transcends the sport.
The core talent. The blend of personalities. The gripping encounters on the biggest stages.
The tussle between Italy's Jannik Sinner and Spain's Carlos Alcaraz - ranked one and two in the men's game - has all those components.
It also has arguably the most important ingredient: each player being pushed to a greater height by the other.
On Sunday, the pair will meet again in the Wimbledon final - where Sinner aims to win his first title and Alcaraz bids for a rare third in a row.
A renewal of their acquaintance at the All England Club comes just 35 days after Alcaraz beat Sinner in an all-time classic French Open final.
Asked about their rivalry, Alcaraz said: "I'm not going to say I'm feeling like when Rafa [Nadal] and Roger [Federer] are playing.
"But I'm feeling like it is a different energy when we are facing each other than other players."
Sinner, 23, and 22-year-old Alcaraz have created a duopoly in the men's game over the past two seasons.
Because of his brilliance, Sinner has remained the world number one - despite serving a three-month doping ban this year in a case which rocked the sport.
The pair have gained a grip on the Grand Slam tournaments, winning the past six majors between them.
Their epic French Open battle was another demonstration of how the absorbing rivalry - which the ATP Tour has long pinned its hopes on filling the Federer-Nadal-Novak Djokovic void - could be a blockbuster for years to come.
"You cannot compare what the 'Big Three' did for 15-plus years. [Our rivalry] is not that big yet," said three-time Grand Slam champion Sinner, who is aiming for his first non-hard court major.
"This is the second consecutive Grand Slam that we are in the final and playing each other - I believe it's good for the sport.
"The more rivalries we have from now on, the better it is, because people want to see young player going against each other."
The quality, excitement and tension of the recent Roland Garros final accelerated interest in the pair.
Alcaraz fighting back from two sets down - and having saved three championship points - to win a five-setter in over five hours has whetted the appetite for Wimbledon.
The five-time major champion expects to be pushed "to the limit" again at the All England Club.
"It's going to be a great day, a great final. I'm just excited about it," he said.
"I just hope not to be five and a half hours again. But if I have to, I will."
Ice versus fire - the 21st century version
The contrasting personalities are reminiscent of another pair who created a rivalry which continues to endure almost 50 years later.
Bjorn Borg was the 'ice' compared to John McEnroe's 'fire' and there are similar characteristics in Sinner and Alcaraz.
Sinner is ice-cold during matches and little appears to faze the mild-mannered Italian - on or off court.
He was able to stay sanguine during the doping controversy and has also moved on quickly from the brutal nature of his French Open defeat.
"We keep talking about the fact that he's got really good self-awareness and puts everything into perspective," Sinner's coach Darren Cahill told BBC Sport.
"I think that's part of the reason why he's been able to do what he's been able to do here.
"I would have been heartbroken after losing a final where I had match points, but he sees the big picture really well and is why he's able to bounce back so quickly."
Alcaraz is not as combustible as the famously volatile McEnroe. But he does possess a more colourful side than Sinner.
He bellows 'Vamos' when big moments go his way in matches and also regularly shows his emotion by breaking out into beaming smiles.
The natural warmth and authenticity of the Spaniard, plus his array of stunning shot-making, makes him relatable to fans.
"He's got the X-Factor - he's a performer," American great Billie Jean King told BBC Sport.
Who's got the advantage?
Sinner has been the dominant player on the ATP Tour for the past two seasons, winning 98 of his 109 matches (90%) and lifting nine titles.
In the same timeframe, Alcaraz has won 102 of his 120 matches (85%) and claimed nine titles.
But it is the Spaniard who is dominating their head-to-head record.
The triumph on the Paris clay was his fifth straight victory over Sinner, extending his dominance to eight wins from their 12 career meetings.
"When Sinner brings his A game there is no-one that can beat him - other than Alcaraz," said seven-time major champion McEnroe, who is a BBC Sport analyst during the championships.
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Sinner won their only previous meeting at Wimbledon, back in 2022 when he won 6-1 6-4 6-7 (6-8) 6-3 in the last 16
"On the other hand if Alcaraz doesn't bring his A game then Sinner will win every time. So it's going to be extremely interesting."
Alcaraz has moved through the gears nicely at the All England Club and goes into the final - unlike Sinner - having suffered no injury problems over the past fortnight.
After beating Djokovic in the semi-finals, Sinner said the elbow injury he suffered in the fourth round against Grigor Dimitrov would provide "no issues" on Sunday.
"I will give a slight edge to Carlos as a favourite because of the two titles he's won here and the way he's playing and the confidence he has right now," seven-time champion Djokovic said.
"But it's just a slight advantage because Jannik is hitting the ball extremely well.
"It's going to be, again, a very close match-up like we had in Paris."
Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had ordered the charges to be dropped
The US attorney general has ordered charges to be dropped against a doctor accused of destroying Covid-19 vaccines worth $28,000 (£20,742), distributing fake vaccination record cards, and giving children saline shots instead of the vaccine at their parents' request.
Pam Bondi said Dr Michael Kirk Moore Jr. "gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so". He had been indicted by the Justice Department under the Biden administration in 2023.
The plastic surgeon was already on trial in Utah, where he had pleaded not guilty to all charges including conspiracy to defraud the US.
The acting US Attorney for the district of Utah, Felice John Viti, filed to dismiss the charges on Saturday, saying this was "in the interests of justice".
Dr Moore was accused of providing fraudulently completed vaccination certificates for more than 1,900 vaccine doses, the US Attorney's office in Utah said in 2023.
These were allegedly provided, without administering the vaccine, for a charge of $50 (£37), in exchange for direct cash payments or donations to a specific charity.
The government also accused him of giving children saline shots at their parents' request so that the "children would think they were receiving a COVID-19 vaccine," according to the US attorney's office.
He was accused alongside his company - Plastic Surgery Institute of Utah, Inc. - and three others of seeking to defraud the US and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Bondi wrote on X on Saturday that she had ordered the Justice Department to drop the charges because Dr Moore "did not deserve the years in prison he was facing".
She said US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Mike Lee, both Republicans, had brought the case to her attention, calling them champions for "ending the weaponization of government".
Lee thanked the attorney general for "standing with the countless Americans who endured too many official lies, mandates, and lockdowns during COVID".
Dr Moore and other defendants faced up to 35 years in prison on multiple charges, according to the Associated Press news agency.
Nothing until 2014, when an amateur historian uncovered evidence of a mass grave, potentially in a former sewage tank, believed to contain hundreds of babies in Tuam, County Galway, in the west of Ireland.
Now, investigators have moved their diggers onto the nondescript patch of grass next to a children's playground on a housing estate in the town. An excavation, expected to last two years, will begin on Monday.
The area was once where St Mary's children's home stood, a church-run institution that housed thousands of women and children between 1925 and 1961.
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Many of the women had fallen pregnant outside of marriage and were shunned by their families - and separated from their children after giving birth.
According to death records, Patrick Derrane was the first baby to die at St Mary's – in 1915, aged five months. Mary Carty, the same age, was the last in 1960.
In the 35 years between their deaths, another 794 babies and young children are known to have died there - and it is believed they are buried in what former Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Enda Kenny dubbed a "chamber of horrors".
PJ Haverty spent the first six years of his life in the place he calls a prison - but he considers himself one of the lucky ones.
"I got out of there."
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
PJ Haverty, pictured at the garden where investigators will begin their excavations
He remembers how the "home children", as they were known, were shunned at school.
"We had to go 10 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early, because they didn't want us talking to the other kids," PJ said.
"Even at break-time in the school, we weren't allowed to play with them – we were cordoned off.
The stigma stayed with PJ his whole life, even after finding a loving foster home and, in later years, tracking down his birth mother, who was separated from him when he was a one-year-old.
The home, run by the nuns of the Bon Secours Sisters, was an invisible spectre that loomed over him and many others in Tuam for decades – until amateur historian Catherine Corliss brought St Mary's dark past into the light.
Discovering the mass grave
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Catherine Corliss' shocking findings about the mass grave emerged in 2014
Interested in delving into her family's past, Catherine took a local history course in 2005. Later, her interest turned to St Mary's and the "home children" who came to school separately from her and her classmates.
"When I started out, I had no idea what I was going to find."
To begin with, Catherine was surprised her innocuous inquiries were being met with blank responses or even suspicion.
"Nobody was helping, and nobody had any records," she said.
That only fed her determination to find out more about the children at the home.
A breakthrough came when she spoke to a cemetery caretaker, who brought her to the housing estate where the institution once stood.
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
The grotto at the garden above what is believed to be the mass grave. People have left mementoes, messages and items of remembrance
At the side of a children's playground, there was a square of lawn with a grotto – a small shrine centred on a statue of Mary.
The caretaker told Catherine that two boys had been playing in that area in the mid-1970s after the home was demolished, and had come across a broken concrete slab. They pulled it up to reveal a hole.
Inside they saw bones. The caretaker said the authorities were told and the spot was covered up.
People believed the remains were from the Irish Famine in the 1840s. Before the mother-and-baby home, the institution was a famine-era workhouse where many people had died.
But that didn't add up for Catherine. She knew those people had been buried respectfully in a field half a mile away - there was a monument marking the spot.
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Catherine received a list recording hundreds of children's deaths at the St Mary's institution
Her suspicion was further raised when she compared old maps of the site. One, from 1929, labelled the area the boys found the bones as a "sewage tank". Another, from the 1970s after the home was demolished, had a handwritten note next to that area saying "burial ground".
The map did seem to indicate there was a grave at the site – and Catherine had read the sewage tank labelled on the map had become defunct in 1937 so, in theory, was empty. But who was buried there?
Catherine called the registration office for births, deaths and marriages in Galway and asked for the names of all the children who had died at the home.
A fortnight later a sceptical member of staff called to ask if she really wanted them all – Catherine expected "20 or 30" - but there were hundreds.
The full list, when Catherine received it, recorded 796 dead children.
She was utterly shocked. Her evidence was starting to indicate who was likely to be underneath that patch of grass at St Mary's.
But first, she checked burial records to see if any of those hundreds of children were buried in cemeteries in Galway or neighbouring County Mayo – and couldn't find any.
Without excavation, Catherine couldn't prove it beyond doubt. She now believed that hundreds of children had been buried in an unmarked mass grave, possibly in a disused sewage tank, at the St Mary's Home.
When her findings broke into an international news story in 2014, there was considerable hostility in her home town.
"People weren't believing me," she recalled. Many cast doubt - and scorn - that an amateur historian could uncover such an enormous scandal.
But there was a witness who had seen it with her own eyes.
Warning: The following sections contains details some readers might find distressing
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Mary Moriarty lived in one of the houses built at the site of the home in the 1970s
Mary Moriarty lived in one of the houses near the site of the institution in the mid-1970s. Shortly after she spoke to BBC News, she passed away, but her family have agreed to allow what she told us to be published and broadcast.
Mary recalled two women coming to her in the early 1970s saying "they saw a young fella with a skull on a stick".
Mary and her neighbours asked the child where he had found the skull. He showed them some shrubbery and Mary, who went to look, "fell in a hole".
Light streamed in from where she had fallen. That's when she saw "little bundles", wrapped in cloths that had gone black from rot and damp, and were "packed one after the other, in rows up to the ceiling".
How many?
"Hundreds," she replied.
Some time later, when Mary's second son was born in the maternity hospital in Tuam, he was brought to her by the nuns who worked there "in all these bundles of cloths" - just like those she had seen in that hole.
"That's when I copped on," Mary says, "what I had seen after I fell down that hole were babies."
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Anna Corrigan discovered her mother gave birth to two boys - John and William - in the home
The bones were not from the famine and the "age-at-death range" was from about 35 foetal weeks to two or three years.
By now, a campaign was under way for a full investigation of the site - Anna Corrigan was among those who wanted the authorities to start digging.
Until she was in her 50s, Anna believed she was an only child. But, when researching her family history in 2012, she discovered her mother had given birth to two boys in the home in 1946 and 1950, John and William.
Anna was unable to find a death certificate for William, but did find one for John – it officially registers his death at 16 months. Under cause of death it listed "congenital idiot" and "measles".
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
The death certificate for John lists "congenital idiot" and "measles" under cause of death
An inspection report of the home in 1947 had some more details about John.
"He was born normal and healthy, almost nine pounds (4kg) in weight," Anna said. "By the time he's 13 months old, he's emaciated with a voracious appetite, and has no control over bodily functions.
"Then he's dead three months later."
An entry from the institution's book of "discharges" says William died in 1951 – she does not know where either is buried.
Anna, who set up the Tuam Babies Family Group for survivors and relatives, said the children have been given a voice.
"We all know their names. We all know they existed as human beings."
Now, the work begins to find out the full extent of what lies beneath that patch of grass in Tuam.
'Absolutely tiny'
PA
Daniel MacSweeney, the head of the excavation, has previously been involved in searches for missing bodies in conflict zones around the world
The excavation is expected to take about two years.
"It's a very challenging process – really a world-first," said Daniel MacSweeney, the head of the operation, who has helped find missing bodies in conflict zones such as Afghanistan.
He explained that the remains would have been mixed together and that an infant's femur - the body's largest bone - is only the size of an adult's finger.
"They're absolutely tiny," he said. "We need to recover the remains very, very carefully – to maximise the possibility of identification."
The difficulty of identifying the remains "can't be underestimated", he added.
For however long it takes, there will be people like Anna waiting for news - hoping to hear about sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts and cousins they never had the chance to meet.
Details of help and support with child bereavement are available in the UK at BBC Action Line
In an unassuming building in Stratford, east London, British start-up Better Dairy is making cheese that has never seen an udder, which it argues tastes like the real thing.
It is one of a handful of companies around the world hoping to bring lab-grown cheese to our dinner tables in the next few years.
But there has been a trend away from meat-free foods recently, according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB).
The statutory research organisation says that plant-based cheese sales across the UK declined 25.6% in the first quarter of 2025, while sales of cow's cheese grew by 3%.
One reason for this, the AHDB tells the BBC, might be because the number of vegans in Britain is small – just 1% of the population (the Vegan Society puts it at 3%), far fewer than the amount of dairy cheese eaters – and has slightly declined lately.
The Vegan Society insists that the meat-free food market remains "competitive" and steady.
Those Vegan Cowboys
Hille van der Kaa touts a "silent revolution", swapping cheeses people don't often think about
Other reasons may be concerns about health and price. A recent government survey found that that food being ultra-processed - a key challenge with vegan cheese - was the second-greatest concern for consumers, the first being cost. Plant-based cheese is generally more expensive than cow's cheese, the AHDB says.
So are these efforts a recipe for success or disaster? Some think the coming years present an opportunity.
In the Netherlands, Those Vegan Cowboys expects to bring its cheeses to the US later this year, and Europe in three to four years due to regulatory hurdles. This is because lab-made cheeses count as a "novel food" and so need EU approval to go on sale.
Its chief executive, Hille van der Kaa, admits the appetite for vegan cheese is low right now, but her company is targeting a "silent revolution" by swapping cheeses people don't often think about.
"If you buy frozen pizza, you don't really think of what kind of cheese is on that," she explains. "So it's quite easy to swap."
Meanwhile, French firm Standing Ovation plans on launching in the US next year, and in the UK and Europe in 2027.
And back in Stratford, London-based Better Dairy hasn't launched its lab-grown cheese yet because it would cost too much right now.
But chief executive Jevan Nagarajah plans to launch in three or four years, when he hopes the price will be closer to those seen in a cheesemonger, before getting it down to the sorts seen in a supermarket.
Jevan Nagarajah sees vegan hard cheeses as having the greatest "quality gap" to the real thing
So does it taste any good?
Better Dairy invited me – a committed carnivore and dairy devotee – to its lab to poke holes in this new cheese.
Currently, the company is only making cheddar because it sees vegan hard cheeses as having the biggest "quality gap" to dairy cheeses. It has made blue cheese, mozzarella and soft cheese, but argues the proteins in dairy don't make as big a difference in taste.
The process starts with yeast that has been genetically modified to produce casein, the key protein in milk, instead of alcohol. Jevan says this is the same technique used to produce insulin without having to harvest it from pigs.
Other companies also use bacteria or fungi to produce casein.
Once the casein is made through this precision fermentation, it is mixed with plant-based fat and the other components of milk needed for cheese, and then the traditional cheese-making process ensues.
Having tried Better Dairy's three-month, six-month and 12-month aged cheddars, I can say they tasted closer to the real thing than anything else I've tried. The younger cheese was perhaps a bit more rubbery than usual, and the older ones more obviously salty. On a burger, the cheese melted well.
On a burger, Better Dairy's cheddar was visibly melty
Jevan accepts there's room to improve. He says the cheese I tried was made in his lab, but in future wants artisanal cheesemakers to use the firm's non-dairy "milk" in their own labs to improve the taste.
As the company cannot use dairy fats, it has had to "optimise" plant-derived fats to make them taste better.
"If you've experienced plant-based cheeses, a lot of them have off flavours, and typically it comes from trying to use nut-based or coconut fats – and they impart flavours that aren't normally in there," Better Dairy scientist Kate Royle says.
Meanwhile, Those Vegan Cowboys is still focusing on easy-to-replace cheeses, like those on pizzas and burgers, while Standing Ovation says its casein can make a range of cheeses including camembert.
Will these new cheeses find their match?
It'll be a tall order. Of those who bought vegan cheese on the market in the past year, 40% did not buy it again, according to an AHDB survey – suggesting taste may be a turn-off.
Damian Watson from the Vegan Society points out that resemblance to the real thing may not even be a good thing.
"Some vegans want the taste and texture of their food to be like meat, fish or dairy, and others want something completely different," he tells me.
And Judith Bryans, chief executive of industry body Dairy UK, thinks the status quo will remain strong.
"There's no evidence to suggest that the addition of lab-grown products would take away from the existing market, and it remains to be seen where these products would fit in from a consumer perception and price point of view," she tells the BBC.
Studio Lazareff/Antoine Repesse
Yvan Chardonnens hopes to launch his cheeses in the UK in 2027
But both Better Dairy and Those Vegan Cowboys tout partnerships with cheese producers to scale up production and keep costs down, while Standing Ovation has already struck a partnership with Bel (makers of BabyBel).
Standing Ovation's CEO Yvan Chardonnens characterises the recent unpopularity as a first wave in the vegan "analogues" of cheese faltering because of quality, while he hopes that will improve in the next phase.
Besides the current concerns about a shrinking vegan market, taste, quality and price, the issue of ultra-processed foods is one that these companies may have to grapple with.
They argue a lack of lactose, no cholesterol and lower amounts of saturated fats in lab-made cheese can boost its health benefits - and that any cheese is processed.
Precision fermentation may also allow producers to strip out many ultra-processed elements of current vegan cheeses.
Hille suggests it's a question of perception. People have a "romanticised view" of dairy farming, she says, despite it now being "totally industrialised" - a point backed by AHDB polling, which found 71% of consumers see dairy as natural.
"I wouldn't say that's really a traditional, natural type of food," Hille argues.
"We do have an important task to show people how cheese is made nowadays."
Valery Gergiev seen conducting an orchestra at Moscow's Red Square in 2018
Russian conductor Valery Gergiev has been barred from European stages ever since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A close ally of Vladimir Putin for many years, the director of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Russian state theatres has never spoken out against the war.
But a region of southern Italy has now invited Gergiev back to Europe, signalling the artist's rehabilitation even as Russia's attacks on Ukraine intensify.
Vincenzo de Luca, who runs the Campania region, insists that the concert at the Un'Estate da REfestival later this month will go ahead despite a growing swell of criticism.
"Culture… must not be influenced by politics and political logic," De Luca said in a livestream on Friday. "We do not ask these men to answer for the choices made by politicians."
The 76-year-old local leader has previously called Europe's broad veto on pro-Putin artists "a moment of stupidity – a moment of madness" at the start of the war and announced that he was "proud" to welcome Gergiev to town.
Getty Images
Russia's President Putin (R) pins a medal on conductor Gergiev (L) at the Kremlin in 2016
But Pina Picierno, a vice-president of the European Parliament, has told the BBC that allowing Gergiev's return is "absolutely unacceptable".
She calls the star conductor a "cultural mouthpiece for Putin and his crimes".
Ukrainian human rights activist and Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk said the invitation by the regional government was "hypocrisy", rather than neutrality.
Russian opposition activists have also condemned the director's sudden return. The Anti-Corruption Foundation, of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, wants his concert cancelled and is calling on Italy's interior ministry to ban Gergiev's entry to the country.
GEORG HOCHMUTH/APA/AFP
Valery Gergiev has been shunned by European orchestras since the full-scale war began
Before Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine, the virtuoso Gergiev was a regular visitor to stages in Italy and across Europe, despite his closeness to Putin.
His long and illustrious career includes stints at the London Symphony Orchestra and Munich Philharmonic.
But the invitations to Europe stopped abruptly on 24 February 2022.
Hours before the first Russian missiles were launched at Ukraine, Gergiev was on stage at Milan's La Scala opera house. Urged then by the city's mayor to speak out against the war, Gergiev chose silence.
He was promptly dropped from the bill.
Abandoned by his manager, despite calling Gergiev "the greatest conductor alive", he was then fired as chief conductor in Munich and removed from concert schedules across the continent.
That's why the invitation from Italy is so controversial.
Pina Picierno, who is from the Campania region herself, says her call to stop the event is not Russophobic.
"There is no shortage of brilliant Russian artists who choose to disassociate themselves from Putin's criminal policies," she told the BBC.
The European MP, who says she has received threats for her work exposing Russia's hybrid warfare, warns that allowing Gergiev to perform would be both wrong and dangerous.
"This is not about censorship. Gergiev is part of a deliberate Kremlin strategy. He is one of their cultural envoys to soften Western public opinion. This is part of their war."
Pasquale Gargano/KONTROLAB/LightRocket via Getty Images
Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (centre) welcomed Ukraine's president and first lady to a conference in Rome last week
The cultural controversy erupted in a week when Italy was hosting heads of state from all over Europe to reaffirm their support for Ukraine and discuss how to rebuild the country once the war is over.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been a strong and consistent critic of Vladimir Putin from the start. But her culture ministry is one of the backers ofUn'Estate da RE, which has invited Gergiev.
A senior MP from Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, Alfredo Antoniozzi, has described Gergiev as "simply a great artist".
"If Russians have to pay for the mistakes of their president, then we are committing a kind of cultural genocide," he argued.
Last month, Canada formally barred Gergiev from entry and declared it would freeze any assets.
But the European Union has shied away from formal sanctions against the conductor, who has avoided voicing open support for the war.
Gergiev has been a vocal supporter of Putin since the 1990s, later campaigning for his re-election and backing Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
He was handed management of Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre, in addition to the Mariinsky Theatre, taking over from a director who signed an open letter against Russia's war.
Gergiev is a state employee, but in 2022 an investigation by Alexei Navalny's team uncovered properties in several Italian cities that they say he never declared.
They also alleged he used donations to a charitable fund to pay for his own lavish lifestyle.
The activists argued that was Gergiev's reward for his public loyalty to Putin.
The BBC has so far been unable to reach the conductor for comment.
A spokeswoman for the European Commission, Eva Hrncirova, has clarified that the Un'Estate da RE festival is not receiving EU cash: it is financed by Italy's own "cohesion funds".
But she added that the commission urged European stages not to give space "to artists who support the war of aggression in Ukraine".
In Campania, the artistic director who crafted this year's festival programme declined to comment. A spokesman was confident Gergiev's performance would go ahead, though – despite the controversy.
"Yes," he assured the BBC. "For sure."
Additional reporting from Rome by Davide Ghiglione.
Walter Renwick was questioned by Northumbria Police but released without charge
Within hours of the world-famous Sycamore Gap tree being illegally felled, Walter Renwick found himself in a maelstrom of accusations and abuse.
Online amateur sleuths, who had taken it upon themselves to investigate, thought that in the former lumberjack they had found their man.
He had the skills, a chainsaw and an apparent motive, but there was one flaw in the theories.
It was not him.
Walter Renwick had been evicted from Plankey Mill where his parents and grandparents had farmed
Photographs quickly appeared in a national newspaper showing police searching Mr Renwick's Northumberland home and a chainsaw being removed.
"It was heartbreaking," Mr Renwick said.
"There were police everywhere, drones flying around the valley, divers in the lake, they were 100% certain I'd done it.
"Every time I went shopping in Haltwhistle or Hexham, people were nudging each other and saying 'that's him that cut the tree down', stuff like that."
Mr Renwick even wore a disguise to hide his identity.
"I know it was daft but I put a Rod Stewart wig on so people didn't spot me."
Walter Renwick
Walter Renwick had undertaken lumberjack work
Months earlier he had been evicted from Plankey Mill Farm near Bardon Mill, just a few miles from Hadrian's Wall, by landowners Jesuits in Britain.
His family had been there for decades, but the tenancy held by his grandfather and father had not passed to him.
"I'd just lost everything I had, my cows, my sheep, my parents' stuff. I'd lost my home and then this," Mr Renwick said of the Sycamore Gap accusations.
Jesuits in Britain said they made the "difficult decision" to evict Mr Renwick in 2021 after "many attempts to engage with him".
They cited "serious breaches of his tenancy, including unauthorised camping on the land, damage to the farmhouse and repeated refusal to allow inspections".
Mr Renwick admits he had been running a campsite and there had been concerns about anti-social behaviour there and elsewhere on his land.
One of the complaints, he alleges, was from the National Trust which owns a neighbouring property and the land at Sycamore Gap.
The National Trust said it would be "inappropriate to discuss our complaints procedure in relation to any individual".
Reuters
Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers cut down the tree at Sycamore Gap
Freelance journalist Kevin Donald was one of those deployed to try and find out who had been arrested in the days immediately following the felling.
"It's a bit tenuous, but there was a sort of motive there," he said.
"Suddenly everything was pointing to Walter Renwick who then became a massive target for online trolling."
Walter Renwick
Walter Renwick's family had farmed the land for decades
Walter Renwick was arrested on 29 September 2023, the day after the felling, but hours earlier another person had also been taken into custody.
Journalist Mr Donald said neighbours in Haltwhistle described seeing "a large police presence" and a teenager being put into a car "with blue lights flashing".
"At first local people seemed reluctant to name him. They seemed to want to protect him," Mr Donald said.
Northumbria Police then announced they had arrested a 16-year-old boy, who we are not naming at his request.
But while being questioned, his name and photograph were posted on social media.
"The picture showed him with a chainsaw and he was in what you'd call lumberjack gear," Mr Donald said.
"It suddenly went from 'a kid couldn't do this' to 'maybe that kid could'."
Scott Donaldson said many local people did not believe the arrested teenager had any involvement
Those in the boy's home town remember a time of febrile speculation.
Bed and breakfast owner Ed Corble called it "absolute chaos".
"His family had no idea why it was happening and for a 16-year-old to have the eyes of the world on him like that was so dangerous."
Scott Donaldson, owner of the nearby Milecastle Inn, said many people had concerns about the arrest.
"We had family members in the tree surgery business and they just thought there was no way a 16-year-old could have done it," he said.
"There was a lot of discussion in the pub and we quickly came to the conclusion that there was no way that young lad was involved."
PA
Daniel Graham (centre-left) and Adam Carruthers (centre-right) were convicted
That, however, did not stop trolls sending the teenager disturbing abuse online about the recent death of a relative.
"You've immediately got this trial by social media going on," Mr Donald said.
"It was all over the place that they'd arrested Walter and his grandson, but it turned out they didn't even know each other."
By that time Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, both from Cumbria, had been arrested.
Nick Lewis
Adam Carruters and Daniel Graham were each convicted of two counts of criminal damage
We asked Northumbria Police what prompted the arrests of Mr Renwick and the teenager and why it had taken the force several weeks to conclude no further action would be taken against them.
In a statement the force said it recognised the "strength of feeling that the felling has caused" and that it had carried out a "a meticulous and proportionate investigation".
It added "the unwavering commitment" of those involved in the case had led to a successful prosecution.
On 9 May, a jury at Newcastle Crown Court unanimously convicted Graham and Carruthers of two counts of criminal damage.
"I just keep asking myself why they did it," Mr Renwick said.
"Was it just attention seeking? I don't know what it was but, for me at least, it's over.
"Actually, you know, the tree, that was one thing. But losing my farm. That was the thing that hurt most of all."
Jesuits in Britain said Mr Renwick's father "gave up" the tenancy in 2008 and Mr Renwick did not meet the legal criteria to succeed his dad, but he was offered a 10-year lease which was extended twice, "well beyond any legal obligation on our part".
A spokeswoman said Mr Renwick was "fully aware" of the process and options available and he was given "multiple opportunities to discuss alternative arrangements".
"Throughout we have sought to act with kindness and integrity," the charity said, adding: "We sincerely wish him well as he moves forward."
President Donald Trump has announced that the European Union and Mexico will face a 30% tariff on imports to the US from 1 August.
He warned he would impose even higher import taxes if either of the US trading partners decided to retaliate.
The announcement was made in two letters posted on Trump's Truth Social website. Similar letters were sent this week to several other countries.
The 27-member EU - America's biggest trading partner - said earlier this week it hoped to agree a deal with Washington before 1 August.
In the letter to European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, Trump wrote: "We have had years to discuss our trading relationship with the European Union, and have concluded that we must move away from these long-term-large, and persistent, trade deficits, engendered by your tariff, and non-tariff, policies and trade barriers."
"Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from reciprocal," the letter added.
The EU has been a frequent target of Trump's criticism, and in April Washington announced levies of 20% on European goods.
In 2024, the US trade deficit with the bloc was $235.6bn (€202bn; £174bn), according to the office of the US trade representative.
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Hot weather will continue across the UK on Sunday with possible highs of 31C as the country moves past the peak of its third heatwave this year.
Temperatures are forecast to dip slightly on Sunday before a cooler change on Monday that will bring "heavy spells of rain" for many areas, the Met Office said.
Amber heat health alerts remain in place for the Midlands, southern and eastern England until 9:00 on Monday.
On Saturday Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales all recorded their warmest day of the year so far, while England saw a temperature high of 33.1C in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.
Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands recorded a temperature of 32.2C - the first time Scotland has exceeded 30C since June 2023, according to the Met Office.
In Northern Ireland, there was a high of 30C in Magilligan, Londonderry - the first time that temperature has been reached since July 2022, the weather service said, adding that in Wales, Cardiff's Bute Park reached 33.1C.
The amber heat health alerts have been issued for six regions of England - the West Midlands, East Midlands, South East, South West, London and East of England.
Amber alerts mean weather impacts are likely to be felt across the whole health service, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).
It warns of possible health impacts across the wider population, including a potential increase in the risk to health of people aged 65 and over, or those with pre-existing health conditions, as well as a rise in deaths for the over 65 age group.
Less severe yellow health warnings are in place until 9:00 on Monday for the North East, North West and Yorkshire and The Humber.
The latest heatwave has led to hosepipe bans being declared for millions of people in Yorkshire, Kent and Sussex.
This can mean restrictions on certain activities like watering gardens, washing cars, or filling up paddling pools - and those who break the ban could face a fine.
In Scotland, an "extreme" wildfire warning is in effect across much of the country with crews battling a blaze in Perth.
Firefighters in Surrey were also battling a wildfire to the south of Farnham which had grown to eight hectares as of Saturday evening.
The Surrey Fire and Rescue Service have told the public to avoid the area and urged nearby residents to close windows and doors.
The heat has also affected sporting events, with Wimbledon fans braving close to the hottest women's finals day at the tennis championship.
Sunday's men's finals day will see a cooler shift to 29C as the intense heat begins to ease, which will make conditions more comfortable for fans and players.
According to the Met Office, "the heatwave will begin to breakdown" from Sunday, and Monday will see showers developing across many parts of the UK.
"If you're not a fan of the heat, temperatures will be falling away but also bringing some heavy spells of rain, or welcome rainfall, for many of us," Met Office meteorologist Kathryn Chalk said.
The heatwave is expected to end for most on Monday, as cooler Atlantic air brings temperatures closer to the seasonal average for much of the UK.
The changed weather pattern will also bring rain to some areas, including those where rain has been seriously lacking recently.
However, those in the south-east of England may have to wait until Tuesday for some respite from the heat, with temperatures set to remain around 27C or 28C on Monday.
While linking climate change with specific individual extreme weather events can be difficult, scientists say that climate change is generally making heatwaves hotter, longer and more frequent.
Three summer heatwaves in quick succession after an unusually warm spring suggests climate change is having some effect on 2025's weather - impacting not just humans but wildlife as well.
The Princess of Wales' appearance at the Wimbledon women's singles final dominated the Sunday papers. The Sunday Telegraph leads with a smiling photo of Catherine in the royal box as she received a standing ovation from the crowd. Elsewhere, the paper says a government-backed commission on behalf of the Board of Deputies of British Jews has found that antisemitism is "rife" among the UK's middle classes.
The Sunday Mirror dubs the princess's Wimbledon visit an "ace", spotlighting a photo of Catherine in her white ensemble. In other royal news, the paper features Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh saying she is proud of being called a "royal secret weapon" through her role of helping women in global conflicts.
The Sunday Times features a photo of Catherine congratulating Wimbledon women's champion Iga Swiatek, who dominated American Amanda Anisimova with a 6-0, 6-0 win. Sharing the front page is the story of a child who died after contracting measles, with the paper reporting experts warning of a decline in vaccine rates against the disease.
A "wave" of support for the princess headlines the Sunday Express's Wimbledon report. Also dominating the front page is an "exclusive message" from Sir Keir Starmer hitting back at critics who say his migrant deal with France "won't stop a single boat". Writing in the paper, the prime minister gives a "full-throttle defence" of his record on stopping illegal immigration.
The Mail on Sunday follows with their royal exclusive of a "secret peace summit" between King Charles' and the Duke of Sussex's senior aides. The paper says the meeting is a first step towards restoring the "broken relationship" between Prince Harry and the Royal Family.
The Observer leads with "the battle within" the BBC over its Gaza coverage, saying the broadcaster is "divided" over its reporting on the conflict.
The Sun reports on the arrest of an actor working as an extra on the EastEnders set over an "alleged indecent assault" incident that left other stars "shocked".
Finally, the Daily Star teases the rise of the "Robo landlord" as it says that artificial intelligence could be used in pubs to handle tasks such as hiring staff and ordering beer from the brewery. Alongside is a photoshopped image of comedian Al Murray as a robot getting ready to pour a pint behind the bar.
Resident doctors took part in 11 separate strikes during 2023 and 2024
Talks between Health Secretary Wes Streeting and the British Medical Association (BMA) will take place next week in a bid to avert strike action in England's NHS, the BBC understands.
Resident doctors, previously known as junior doctors, announced earlier this week that they will walk out for five consecutive days from 25 July until 30 July over a dispute about pay with the government.
The BMA said strikes would only be called off if next week's talks produce an offer it can put to its members.
The government has insisted it cannot improve its offer of a 5.4% increase for this year.
Resident doctors were awarded a 5.4% pay rise for this financial year - which will go into pay packets from August - following a 22% increase over the previous two years.
But they are arguing that pay in real terms is still around 20% lower than it was in 2008 and have called for the government to set out a pathway to restoring its value.
They believe that this year's 5.4% increase doesn't take them far enough down that path.
Health department sources have told the BBC the health secretary is sympathetic to improving working conditions for resident doctors, but he won't budge on salaries.
After the BMA's strike announcement, Streeting called the strike "unnecessary and unreasonable", adding: "The NHS is hanging by a thread - why on earth are they threatening to pull it?"
He said the government was "ready and willing" to work with the BMA, but any further strike action would be a disaster for patients and push back the progress made in reducing waiting lists in England.
BMA resident doctor committee co-chairs, Dr Melissa Ryan and Dr Ross Nieuwoudt, said on Wednesday they had been left with "no choice" but to strike without a "credible offer to keep us on the path to restore our pay".
Lord Robert Winston, a professor and TV doctor who was a pioneer of IVF treatment, resigned from the BMA on Friday over the planned strikes.
In an interview with The Times, he urged against strike action and said it could damage people's trust in the profession.
Resident doctors took part in 11 separate strikes during 2023 and 2024.
In order to end the previous strikes last year the incoming Labour government awarded a backdated increase worth 22% over two years.
The action in England will not affect resident doctors in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, who negotiate directly with their devolved governments on pay.
Resident doctors' basic salaries in England range from £37,000 to £70,000 a year for a 40-hour week, depending on experience, with extra payments for working nightshifts and weekends.
That does not include the latest 5.4% average pay award for this year which will start to be paid into wage packets from August.
Drake has already played to 100,000 fans across two nights at London's Wireless Festival
Drake has certainly had a difficult couple of months, with the most notable moment being when fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar used his Super Bowl halftime show as an opportunity to call the Canadian a paedophile - something Drake's lawyers are now suing Lamar's record label over.
Social media would have you believe that Drake came off worse from the pair's constant sparring, that he was no longer culturally relevant and had been deserted by his friends in the music industry.
So what better way to dispel those views than by headlining three nights of London's biggest festival - performing to more than 150,000 people in the process?
The Toronto rapper has just finished night two at Wireless, which featured so many special guests that there was barely a moment to breathe throughout the set, let alone sneak off for a drink or toilet break.
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Lauryn Hill was a surprise special guest on Friday night, collaborating on Nice For What with Drake
Each night of the festival has centred around a different era of the 38-year-old's extensive back catalogue, with Friday delving into his R&B roots, Saturday dedicated to UK rap and grime and Sunday set to explore his forays into global genres such as dancehall, reggaeton and Latin pop.
The two hour sets left plenty of room for collaborators - with Lauryn Hill, Bryson Tiller, Central Cee and Dave getting the biggest cheers of the weekend.
Both nights have also proved that if Drake needs a new place to call home, London would welcome him with open arms.
The festival reached sweltering levels of heat on both days, but nothing could kill the spirit of the thousands of fans, whose energy rippled through the crowd.
"There's no place like home - London, England.
"You've shown me so much love over the years," he added - amassing huge cheers from the crowd.
Friday love songs
Drake's Friday performance marked the first time the Canadian had played properly to UK crowds in more than six years - so fans appeared a little deflated when he wasn't the first face they saw as the lights went down.
Instead, co-headliner PARTYNEXTDOOR started off the show, performing a medley of solo hits for around 20 minutes.
Drake then entered the stage to little fanfare, but all was forgotten quickly as he launched into some of his biggest R&B hits, including Marvin's Room, Teenage Fever and the everlastingly catchy Passionfruit.
Then barely minutes into his headline slot, the Canadian was once again on the sidelines as he introduced his first and second of many special guests.
It became evident early on that Drake knows a thing or two about creating a viral moment, first when he brought out Bobby V to perform his hit Slow Down and then Mario, who provided flawless vocals on his signature track Let Me Love You.
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Mario performed his classic track Let Me Love You on Friday evening
A theme of the weekend was established early on - that Drake felt comfortable enough as a performer to allow others to take centre stage and lift up those whose talents he appreciated.
He went on to collaborate with several more artists on the night, including R&B newcomer Giveon, Kentucky singer and rapper Bryson Tiller and once again with PARTYNEXTDOOR, as the pair performed tracks from their February album, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, together for the first time.
The set as a whole was completely unstructured - coming to a frantic end as Drake whizzed around the festival site on a crane platform while Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You boomed from the speakers.
As fireworks appeared from behind the stage, a mass of people headed for the exit.
But much to everyone's surprise, the night wasn't over - was Drake covering Ready or Not by the Fugees?
It turns out he wasn't and pretty much everyone was surprised when none other than Lauryn Hill's impressive vocals began to ring out across Finsbury Park.
She rattled through Ex-Factor as Finsbury Park's curfew crept ever closer, transitioning into Nice For What, the 2018 Drake song which samples said track.
It was certainly the highlight of the evening, tainted slightly by Wireless' technical team cutting the mics before Hill could sing one more song.
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Dave and Central Cee performed their chart-topping hit Sprinter on Saturday evening
Star-studded Saturday
If Friday was frenetic, Saturday's performance took the chaos factor to whole new levels.
The show can only be described as what would happen if Gen Z was put in charge of the Royal Variety Performance.
It was hard to keep up with the carousel of famous faces making their way onto the stage, each one met with more and more gasps from the crowd.
Emerging artist fakemink was the first UK rap artist to make an appearance, who was then replaced with Headie One.
The Tottenham rapper paced up and down the stage as he rapped alongside Drake on their track Only You Freestyle.
Then came drill artist K-Trap, followed by J Hus.
Drake famously brought J Hus on stage in 2019 on the day he was released from prison, which he referenced on Saturday evening as "one of my greatest moments as a performer".
The pair jammed their way through their 2023 collaboration Who Told You, which proved the perfect accompaniment to a beautiful London sunset.
As fans battled with frozen phone cameras and sore arms from all the filming, there was no respite.
Skepta - who had already performed earlier with grime collective Boy Better Know, returned to the stage for Shutdown, a rap classic that just so happens to sample an old Drake social media video.
As the cameras cut to the Canadian, he could be seen smiling and dancing on the sidelines, clearly enjoying his own personal performance from some of UK rap's titans.
"Nobody can out-rap London," he mused from side of stage.
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Skepta performed his hit Shutdown to the Wireless crowd
It felt impossible that each special guest could top the previous one, but then came Streatham rapper Dave, who made an exception from his music hiatus for one night only.
He performed his track with Drake - Wanna Know, who then teased that yet another guest was coming to the stage.
As Sprinter - arguably one of the biggest UK tracks of this decade began to play, audience screams reached their greatest of the weekend so far.
Central Cee made his way onto the stage, with Drake declaring him and Dave as "two of the biggest artists together at the moment".
After collaborating on Sprinter, Central Cee launched into a selection of some of his biggest hits, including Band4Band, Doja and Obsessed With You.
It would be almost impossible to imagine that anyone left this show disappointed, unless they wanted to see Drake and Drake only.
He performed just 18 of the 60 songs across the two nights on his own - a departure from his usual touring style.
As Saturday drew to a close there were even more surprises - this time from across the pond.
PARTYNEXTDOOR once again made an appearance, as did female rappers Sexxy Red and Latto.
21 Savage did too, but was then replaced rather bizarrely with singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton.
Visuals of her playing piano and singing A Thousand Miles flashed across the mega on-stage screens as friends turned to each other bewildered.
Drake then once again climbed onto his crane for another round of Whitney, further intensifying the feeling that we had somehow been transported to the sticky dance floor of a hometown nightclub at 2am.
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Drake and Dave perform together at Wireless Festival
If there's anything to take from two nights of back-to-back Drake, it's that he will certainly always receive a warm welcome when he performs in the UK.
As someone who was bitterly labelled as a "culture vulture" by a British grime artist in 2019, the Canadian certainly got the opportunity to set the record straight over the weekend.
Drake joked on Saturday that he had "made a lot of phone calls" to the UK's biggest rap and grime artists - whose willingness to support the Canadian at this time spoke volumes.
Whilst his feud with Kendrick Lamar has certainly provided more headlines than his recent music, these shows have proven that his mass appeal remains, as does his exceptional showmanship and enduring pop, rap and R&B back catalogue.
Drake performs alongside Burna Boy, Popcaan and Vybz Kartel on the final day of Wireless Festival on Sunday.
He will return to the UK in two weeks to play several arena shows with PARTYNEXTDOOR in Birmingham and Manchester.
Ryan Davies worked at the Port Talbot steelworks for 33 years and from his very first day, he heard rumours that the plant was on the verge of closing.
Whispers would spread among his colleagues about new ownership and redundancies. Usually, they weren't true.
"You took it with a pinch of salt," he recalls.
It was an exhausting job. He remembers the clanging of metal and the high-pitched whining of steam, as well as the fear of gas leaks. In the summer it became "excruciatingly" hot inside the plant and his shifts lasted 12 hours.
But he also valued his job. Being a steelworker was part of his identity.
Then, a few years ago, he heard a new rumour: that Tata Steel, the plant's Indian owners, was to close its blast furnaces. This one turned out to be true.
The two furnaces were switched off in July and September last year, part of a restructure that would ultimately remove around 2,000 jobs, half of the number employed there.
PA Media
Steel is integral to Port Talbot's identity - everyone there has either worked at the steelworks plant or knows someone who did
"It was the end of it all - the end of 100 years of steelmaking in Port Talbot," says Mr Davies, who took voluntary redundancy in November.
He is 51 now and unsure about his own future, and what the news means for his wife and his 19-year-old daughter. But he also worries deeply about Port Talbot.
Steel is integral to the town's identity. The bronze-coloured chimneys loom across the skyline; the first thing you see as you drive towards the town from the M4.
Steel, Mr Davies says, was "the whole reason Port Talbot was ever a successful town".
It is a similar story across the handful of other British communities that historically relied on steelmaking as a source of employment.
As well as Port Talbot, they include places like Redcar in North Yorkshire and Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire.
At its peak around 1970, the UK's steel industry produced more than 26 million tonnes of steel each year and employed more than 320,000 people.
Then came the long decline. Now just four million tonnes are produced each year, with fewer than 40,000 employed.
But in the last few years, the industry has entered a particularly difficult period, thanks in part to rising energy prices. The ongoing uncertainty about tariffs on steel exports to the US is not helping.
This has frayed nerves and cost the UK steel industry orders from US companies, according to steel industry executives.
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The blast furnaces in Port Talbot were switched off last year
While 27.5% tariffs on cars were reduced to 10% and tariffs on aerospace products were lowered to zero, a 25% tariff on UK steel and aluminium exports to the US is still in place.
British officials say they are determined to reduce steel tariffs to zero too, and talks are ongoing. But this all adds to a sense of foreboding on the ground in steel towns.
So, what comes next if UK steel manufacturing really does near extinction? And where does that leave places like Port Talbot and Redcar that have so much of their identity bound up in their industrial history?
The 'wilderness' ghost steel towns
If you want to peer into a post-steel future, look at Redcar on the northeast coast - an area sometimes described as Britain's "rust belt", owing to the derelict industrial sites scattered across the landscape.
Teesside's steel industry emerged in the mid-19th Century and went on to employ more than 40,000 people. It has long been a point of local pride that the Sydney Harbour Bridge was built from Teesside steel.
But along with other steel towns, it suffered in the latter half of the 20th Century. Cheap imports from China created tough competition. Britain moved from a manufacturing to a service-based economy - and towns like Redcar were left behind.
In 1987, Margaret Thatcher walked with a handbag through a nearby derelict wasteland; a photograph of the "wilderness" visit became a symbol of industrial hardship.
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Margaret Thatcher visits the derelict Head Wrightson site in Middlesbrough
More recently, the steel industry has struggled under the weight of the UK's relatively high energy prices (which makes it expensive to heat a furnace).
Some analysts also say that the UK's drive towards decarbonisation is raising costs for steel producers.
In 2015, the Thai owners of Redcar's steelworks pulled the plug. Sue Jeffrey, then Labour leader of Redcar Council, remembers watching the blast furnace in action, on one of its final days in use.
"It was one of the most devastating things I've been involved in," she recalls.
About 2,000 workers lost their jobs at the site, with thousands more affected through the steel supply chain.
Local businesses were hit too; B&Bs have lost custom from the contractors no longer visiting the area.
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Steelworkers in Redcar in 2015: About 2,000 workers lost their jobs at the site, with thousands more affected
The council set up a task force to help former steelworkers into new jobs. It saw some success.
Of the more than 2,000 steelworkers who made an initial claim for benefits when the plant closed, the vast majority had come off benefits within three years, according to a council report published in 2018.
But Ms Jeffrey argues that many could not find jobs that made use of their industrial skills.
Some became dog walkers and decorators; others, chimney sweeps. Many, she says, accepted a large cut in salary.
The same tale has been told in other steel towns; laid-off worker forced to find new jobs.
Some are delighted with the change.
After his redundancy, Ryan Davies decided to pursue his dream since boyhood: street art. He now runs a business, painting murals of ladybirds, ducks and mythical creatures.
Ryan Davies
Former steelworker Ryan Davies has started a business making murals since being made redundant: "I've been far happier"
Though his income is lower, he finds it fulfilling. "I've been a far happier person since I left," he says.
"When you've got a grey wall and you paint something colourful, it makes people smile."
But not everyone is so upbeat.
Cassius Walker-Hunt, 28, opened a coffee shop in Port Talbot last year after taking redundancy from the town's steelworks, using a £7,500 loan from Tata Steel to buy professional coffee-making equipment.
"I've been working around the clock just to survive," he says today.
The fight to keep blast furnaces burning
The job security that steelmaking once offered is one reason unions argue it's imperative to keep the industry alive.
Alun Davies, national secretary at the Community Union, the largest union for steelworkers, thinks governments should step in when required to keep blast furnaces burning.
That's exactly what happened earlier this year in Scunthorpe, the last place in the UK that makes virgin steel from melting iron ore in blast furnaces.
It has lurched from crisis to crisis. The last government took control when it was on the brink of going bust and - £600million of UK taxpayer support later - sold it to Chinese company Jingye.
AFP via Getty Images
An operator changes the nozzle on a clay gun at the steelworks in Port Talbot
Now it is back in government control. The government was forced to intervene after Jingye failed to order vital supplies to keep the furnaces burning.
From here, Scunthorpe's future is uncertain. Some have urged the Labour government to fully nationalise the site.
But Jonathon Carruthers-Green, an analyst at steel consultancy MEPS International, believes that ministers will be wary of that option because of the huge potential costs and complications.
Alternatively, the plant could be sold to a different foreign buyer.
But, asks Mr Carruthers-Green, "Who is going to come along and start making steel in the UK, where there's higher [energy] costs, where there's all sorts of issues around decarbonisation?"
Scunthorpe resident, Sean Robinson, told the BBC earlier this year that he fears the town will become another steel "ghost town".
A question of Trump's tariffs
Looming large over all of this is the question of what will become of Trump's tariffs and how it will impact UK steel.
The good news is that the UK was exempted from a surprise hike on those tariffs from 25 to 50% last month, and trade officials seem confident that they will also be unaffected by the new deferred date of 1 August, which is when the White House says its most swingeing tariffs on US trading partners will come into effect.
But steel companies are still frustrated that the original plan to reduce tariffs on UK steel to zero is yet to be agreed.
There are two sticking points. The first, according to steel industry sources, is that US trade negotiators are overwhelmed with the sheer volume of work to get through when negotiating with the rest of the world simultaneously.
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While car and aerospace industries had tariffs cut in a UK-US trade deal, steel faces a 25% charge when exported to America
But the second, and the reason steel was not waved through alongside cars and planes, is that there are concerns in the US that the UK's largest steel maker Tata no longer makes steel from scratch.
Having closed its blast furnaces, it no longer "melts and pours" the steel but rather imports virgin steel from India to be modified in the UK, leading to some questions in the US as to whether it even counts as UK steel.
Even if and when a zero-tariff deal is done on steel, it is likely to include quotas above which tariffs will be charged, putting a ceiling on future growth in exports to the US.
Is 'romanticism' blocking sensible debate?
There is, however, a bigger, more profound question that steel towns must wrestle with. In a post-industrial age, what exactly are these places for?
And, should they try to reignite the embers of their dying steel trade - or pivot to a new industry of the future?
Some trade union leaders maintain that steel towns can, in effect, remain steel towns. With the right investment in green technologies, Mr Davies of the Community Union thinks, a new, cleaner steel industry could emerge.
"Imagine Port Talbot without any steelworkers - it's unthinkable," he says.
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Some believes towns like Port Talbot should now look to industries of the future
But others think that view is unrealistic. Paul Swinney, a director at the Centre for Cities think tank, argues that there is a certain romanticism in the debate around steel that blocks sensible thinking.
"I think it's wrapped up in what some people perceive as being 'good jobs,'" he says. "You did a hard day's graft, you got your hands dirty, and you felt like you'd contributed. [But that framing] just isn't helpful."
As he sees it, "there's no plausible route forward which is going to have more of these kinds of jobs. "The UK economy has changed," he argues.
Instead, he believes towns like Port Talbot and Redcar should look to industries of the future.
Industries of the future
Redcar is already taking steps in this direction. The derelict land that once housed the town's steelworks is now at the centre of an ambitious redevelopment led by the South Tees Development Corporation.
The old steelmaking structures have been flattened to make way for renewable energy and carbon capture and storage.
The managers of the Teesworks project say they have created more than 2,000 "long-term" jobs - and they hope to create 20,000 in total.
But last year, a central government review criticised "inappropriate decisions and a lack of transparency" at the corporation, and looked at why private property developers had ended up owning a large amount of the site.
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Should Britain focus on 'saving our steel' - or focus on other industries such as renewable energy and carbon capture?
Tees Valley Conservative Mayor Lord Houchen, who at that point chaired the corporation, said he "welcomed" the panel's recommendations to improve transparency.
Speaking on local radio in May, he said the Teesworks project has provided "billions of pounds of investment for the region".
But Mr Swinney of Centre for Cities says we need to think bigger still. Rather than trying to recreate their industrial glory, steel towns may want to lean into white-collar, knowledge economy jobs - the sort of work that made many city centres comparatively rich.
The key is to improve transport from steel towns to cities, where office jobs tend to be located, he says.
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The key is to improve transport from steel towns to cities where office jobs are located, argues one expert
But ex-steelworker Ryan Davies laughs at the suggestion of steelworkers slipping seamlessly into office jobs.
"When you come from an environment of 33 years of steelworking, going into an office is such a radical difference," he says.
There are other challenges too: people in steel towns tend to have fewer formal qualifications - often essential for office work.
For example, about 37% of working-age adults in Port Talbot have the equivalent of one year of university education, versus a UK average of 49%.
A slow death vs hope for the future
Ultimately, the future of these towns may rest on the wider fate of the UK's steel industry. And there is some cause for optimism.
The government insists that Scunthorpe and the rest of the UK steel industry has a future, not least because of the big increase in spending on a steel-intensive defence industry.
Mr Carruthers-Green thinks that the UK's decarbonisation drive could also eventually play to steel's advantage.
With more investment in green energy, he says, there will be further demand for the sort of high-quality steel used in things like wind turbines. This, in turn, creates more energy, lowering prices for steel producers.
"The hope is we can get into this virtuous spiral," he adds.
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The government insists that the UK steel industry has a future, not least because of the increase in defence spending
Gareth Stace, director general of the trade group UK Steel, is a little more cautious, however. There's a "worst case" scenario where the UK "continue[s] to make less and less and less, he argues.
As he puts it, "We don't go out of business in one bang". Instead, there's a slow death.
Yet he also believes that with some tailored policies, steel could be revived even in this scenario. In particular, he wants to see action on energy prices, as well as policies on procurement in which government departments buy more steel from the UK instead of from abroad.
"If it works," he says, "for the first time in a very, very long time, we'll actually have some hope for the future."
Additional reporting: David Macmillan
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Absorbing Sinner-Alcaraz rivalry set for next chapter
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz are meeting for the second successive Grand Slam men's singles final
Published
There are a number of factors which turn an exciting rivalry into an epic, enduring duel that transcends the sport.
The core talent. The blend of personalities. The gripping encounters on the biggest stages.
The tussle between Italy's Jannik Sinner and Spain's Carlos Alcaraz - ranked one and two in the men's game - has all those components.
It also has arguably the most important ingredient: each player being pushed to a greater height by the other.
On Sunday, the pair will meet again in the Wimbledon final - where Sinner aims to win his first title and Alcaraz bids for a rare third in a row.
A renewal of their acquaintance at the All England Club comes just 35 days after Alcaraz beat Sinner in an all-time classic French Open final.
Asked about their rivalry, Alcaraz said: "I'm not going to say I'm feeling like when Rafa [Nadal] and Roger [Federer] are playing.
"But I'm feeling like it is a different energy when we are facing each other than other players."
Sinner, 23, and 22-year-old Alcaraz have created a duopoly in the men's game over the past two seasons.
Because of his brilliance, Sinner has remained the world number one - despite serving a three-month doping ban this year in a case which rocked the sport.
The pair have gained a grip on the Grand Slam tournaments, winning the past six majors between them.
Their epic French Open battle was another demonstration of how the absorbing rivalry - which the ATP Tour has long pinned its hopes on filling the Federer-Nadal-Novak Djokovic void - could be a blockbuster for years to come.
"You cannot compare what the 'Big Three' did for 15-plus years. [Our rivalry] is not that big yet," said three-time Grand Slam champion Sinner, who is aiming for his first non-hard court major.
"This is the second consecutive Grand Slam that we are in the final and playing each other - I believe it's good for the sport.
"The more rivalries we have from now on, the better it is, because people want to see young player going against each other."
The quality, excitement and tension of the recent Roland Garros final accelerated interest in the pair.
Alcaraz fighting back from two sets down - and having saved three championship points - to win a five-setter in over five hours has whetted the appetite for Wimbledon.
The five-time major champion expects to be pushed "to the limit" again at the All England Club.
"It's going to be a great day, a great final. I'm just excited about it," he said.
"I just hope not to be five and a half hours again. But if I have to, I will."
Ice versus fire - the 21st century version
The contrasting personalities are reminiscent of another pair who created a rivalry which continues to endure almost 50 years later.
Bjorn Borg was the 'ice' compared to John McEnroe's 'fire' and there are similar characteristics in Sinner and Alcaraz.
Sinner is ice-cold during matches and little appears to faze the mild-mannered Italian - on or off court.
He was able to stay sanguine during the doping controversy and has also moved on quickly from the brutal nature of his French Open defeat.
"We keep talking about the fact that he's got really good self-awareness and puts everything into perspective," Sinner's coach Darren Cahill told BBC Sport.
"I think that's part of the reason why he's been able to do what he's been able to do here.
"I would have been heartbroken after losing a final where I had match points, but he sees the big picture really well and is why he's able to bounce back so quickly."
Alcaraz is not as combustible as the famously volatile McEnroe. But he does possess a more colourful side than Sinner.
He bellows 'Vamos' when big moments go his way in matches and also regularly shows his emotion by breaking out into beaming smiles.
The natural warmth and authenticity of the Spaniard, plus his array of stunning shot-making, makes him relatable to fans.
"He's got the X-Factor - he's a performer," American great Billie Jean King told BBC Sport.
Who's got the advantage?
Sinner has been the dominant player on the ATP Tour for the past two seasons, winning 98 of his 109 matches (90%) and lifting nine titles.
In the same timeframe, Alcaraz has won 102 of his 120 matches (85%) and claimed nine titles.
But it is the Spaniard who is dominating their head-to-head record.
The triumph on the Paris clay was his fifth straight victory over Sinner, extending his dominance to eight wins from their 12 career meetings.
"When Sinner brings his A game there is no-one that can beat him - other than Alcaraz," said seven-time major champion McEnroe, who is a BBC Sport analyst during the championships.
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Sinner won their only previous meeting at Wimbledon, back in 2022 when he won 6-1 6-4 6-7 (6-8) 6-3 in the last 16
"On the other hand if Alcaraz doesn't bring his A game then Sinner will win every time. So it's going to be extremely interesting."
Alcaraz has moved through the gears nicely at the All England Club and goes into the final - unlike Sinner - having suffered no injury problems over the past fortnight.
After beating Djokovic in the semi-finals, Sinner said the elbow injury he suffered in the fourth round against Grigor Dimitrov would provide "no issues" on Sunday.
"I will give a slight edge to Carlos as a favourite because of the two titles he's won here and the way he's playing and the confidence he has right now," seven-time champion Djokovic said.
"But it's just a slight advantage because Jannik is hitting the ball extremely well.
"It's going to be, again, a very close match-up like we had in Paris."
Palestinians seeking food and other supplies near an aid distribution site in May
The Nasser hospital in southern Gaza has said 24 people have been killed near an aid distribution site.
Palestinians who were present at the site said Israeli troops opened fire as people were trying to access food on Saturday.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said there were "no known injured individuals" from IDF fire near the site.
Separately, an Israeli military official said warning shots were fired to disperse people who the IDF believed were a threat.
The claims by both sides have not been independently verified. Israel does not allow international news organisations, including the BBC, into Gaza.
Footage seen by the BBC later on Saturday showed what appeared to be a number of body bags at Nasser hospital's courtyard surrounded by nurses and people in blood-stained clothes.
In another video, a man said people were waiting to get aid when they came under targeted fire for five minutes. A paramedic accused Israeli troops of killing in cold blood.
The videos have not been verified by the BBC.
Reuters said it had spoken to witnesses who described people being shot in the head and torso. The news agency also reported seeing bodies wrapped in white shrouds at Nasser hospital.
There have been almost daily reports of people being killed by Israeli fire while seeking food in Gaza.
Israel imposed a total blockade of aid deliveries to the Gaza Strip in March, and later resumed its military offensive against Hamas, collapsing a two-month ceasefire. It said it wanted to put pressure on the Palestinian armed group to release Israeli hostages.
Although the blockade was partially eased in late May, amid warnings of a looming famine from global experts, there are still severe shortages of food, as well as medicine and fuel.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, says there are thousands of malnourished children across the territory, with more cases detected every day.
In addition to allowing in some UN aid lorries, Israel and the US set up a new aid distribution system run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), saying they wanted to prevent Hamas from stealing aid.
On Friday, the UN human rights office said that it had so far recorded 798 aid-related killings, including 615 in the vicinity of the GHF's sites, which are operated by US private security contractors and located inside military zones in southern and central Gaza.
The other 183 killings were recorded near UN and other aid convoys.
The Israeli military said it recognised there had been incidents in which civilians had been harmed and that it was working to minimise "possible friction between the population and the [Israeli] forces as much as possible".
The GHF accused the UN of using "false and misleading" statistics from Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry.
Earlier this month, a former security contractor for the GHF told the BBC he witnessed colleagues opening fire several times on hungry Palestinians who had posed no threat. The GHF said the allegations were categorically false.
Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza in response to Hamas' cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 57,823 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
Nothing until 2014, when an amateur historian uncovered evidence of a mass grave, potentially in a former sewage tank, believed to contain hundreds of babies in Tuam, County Galway, in the west of Ireland.
Now, investigators have moved their diggers onto the nondescript patch of grass next to a children's playground on a housing estate in the town. An excavation, expected to last two years, will begin on Monday.
The area was once where St Mary's children's home stood, a church-run institution that housed thousands of women and children between 1925 and 1961.
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Many of the women had fallen pregnant outside of marriage and were shunned by their families - and separated from their children after giving birth.
According to death records, Patrick Derrane was the first baby to die at St Mary's – in 1915, aged five months. Mary Carty, the same age, was the last in 1960.
In the 35 years between their deaths, another 794 babies and young children are known to have died there - and it is believed they are buried in what former Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Enda Kenny dubbed a "chamber of horrors".
PJ Haverty spent the first six years of his life in the place he calls a prison - but he considers himself one of the lucky ones.
"I got out of there."
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
PJ Haverty, pictured at the garden where investigators will begin their excavations
He remembers how the "home children", as they were known, were shunned at school.
"We had to go 10 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early, because they didn't want us talking to the other kids," PJ said.
"Even at break-time in the school, we weren't allowed to play with them – we were cordoned off.
The stigma stayed with PJ his whole life, even after finding a loving foster home and, in later years, tracking down his birth mother, who was separated from him when he was a one-year-old.
The home, run by the nuns of the Bon Secours Sisters, was an invisible spectre that loomed over him and many others in Tuam for decades – until amateur historian Catherine Corliss brought St Mary's dark past into the light.
Discovering the mass grave
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Catherine Corliss' shocking findings about the mass grave emerged in 2014
Interested in delving into her family's past, Catherine took a local history course in 2005. Later, her interest turned to St Mary's and the "home children" who came to school separately from her and her classmates.
"When I started out, I had no idea what I was going to find."
To begin with, Catherine was surprised her innocuous inquiries were being met with blank responses or even suspicion.
"Nobody was helping, and nobody had any records," she said.
That only fed her determination to find out more about the children at the home.
A breakthrough came when she spoke to a cemetery caretaker, who brought her to the housing estate where the institution once stood.
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The grotto at the garden above what is believed to be the mass grave. People have left mementoes, messages and items of remembrance
At the side of a children's playground, there was a square of lawn with a grotto – a small shrine centred on a statue of Mary.
The caretaker told Catherine that two boys had been playing in that area in the mid-1970s after the home was demolished, and had come across a broken concrete slab. They pulled it up to reveal a hole.
Inside they saw bones. The caretaker said the authorities were told and the spot was covered up.
People believed the remains were from the Irish Famine in the 1840s. Before the mother-and-baby home, the institution was a famine-era workhouse where many people had died.
But that didn't add up for Catherine. She knew those people had been buried respectfully in a field half a mile away - there was a monument marking the spot.
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Catherine received a list recording hundreds of children's deaths at the St Mary's institution
Her suspicion was further raised when she compared old maps of the site. One, from 1929, labelled the area the boys found the bones as a "sewage tank". Another, from the 1970s after the home was demolished, had a handwritten note next to that area saying "burial ground".
The map did seem to indicate there was a grave at the site – and Catherine had read the sewage tank labelled on the map had become defunct in 1937 so, in theory, was empty. But who was buried there?
Catherine called the registration office for births, deaths and marriages in Galway and asked for the names of all the children who had died at the home.
A fortnight later a sceptical member of staff called to ask if she really wanted them all – Catherine expected "20 or 30" - but there were hundreds.
The full list, when Catherine received it, recorded 796 dead children.
She was utterly shocked. Her evidence was starting to indicate who was likely to be underneath that patch of grass at St Mary's.
But first, she checked burial records to see if any of those hundreds of children were buried in cemeteries in Galway or neighbouring County Mayo – and couldn't find any.
Without excavation, Catherine couldn't prove it beyond doubt. She now believed that hundreds of children had been buried in an unmarked mass grave, possibly in a disused sewage tank, at the St Mary's Home.
When her findings broke into an international news story in 2014, there was considerable hostility in her home town.
"People weren't believing me," she recalled. Many cast doubt - and scorn - that an amateur historian could uncover such an enormous scandal.
But there was a witness who had seen it with her own eyes.
Warning: The following sections contains details some readers might find distressing
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Mary Moriarty lived in one of the houses built at the site of the home in the 1970s
Mary Moriarty lived in one of the houses near the site of the institution in the mid-1970s. Shortly after she spoke to BBC News, she passed away, but her family have agreed to allow what she told us to be published and broadcast.
Mary recalled two women coming to her in the early 1970s saying "they saw a young fella with a skull on a stick".
Mary and her neighbours asked the child where he had found the skull. He showed them some shrubbery and Mary, who went to look, "fell in a hole".
Light streamed in from where she had fallen. That's when she saw "little bundles", wrapped in cloths that had gone black from rot and damp, and were "packed one after the other, in rows up to the ceiling".
How many?
"Hundreds," she replied.
Some time later, when Mary's second son was born in the maternity hospital in Tuam, he was brought to her by the nuns who worked there "in all these bundles of cloths" - just like those she had seen in that hole.
"That's when I copped on," Mary says, "what I had seen after I fell down that hole were babies."
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
Anna Corrigan discovered her mother gave birth to two boys - John and William - in the home
The bones were not from the famine and the "age-at-death range" was from about 35 foetal weeks to two or three years.
By now, a campaign was under way for a full investigation of the site - Anna Corrigan was among those who wanted the authorities to start digging.
Until she was in her 50s, Anna believed she was an only child. But, when researching her family history in 2012, she discovered her mother had given birth to two boys in the home in 1946 and 1950, John and William.
Anna was unable to find a death certificate for William, but did find one for John – it officially registers his death at 16 months. Under cause of death it listed "congenital idiot" and "measles".
Getty Images/Charles McQuillan
The death certificate for John lists "congenital idiot" and "measles" under cause of death
An inspection report of the home in 1947 had some more details about John.
"He was born normal and healthy, almost nine pounds (4kg) in weight," Anna said. "By the time he's 13 months old, he's emaciated with a voracious appetite, and has no control over bodily functions.
"Then he's dead three months later."
An entry from the institution's book of "discharges" says William died in 1951 – she does not know where either is buried.
Anna, who set up the Tuam Babies Family Group for survivors and relatives, said the children have been given a voice.
"We all know their names. We all know they existed as human beings."
Now, the work begins to find out the full extent of what lies beneath that patch of grass in Tuam.
'Absolutely tiny'
PA
Daniel MacSweeney, the head of the excavation, has previously been involved in searches for missing bodies in conflict zones around the world
The excavation is expected to take about two years.
"It's a very challenging process – really a world-first," said Daniel MacSweeney, the head of the operation, who has helped find missing bodies in conflict zones such as Afghanistan.
He explained that the remains would have been mixed together and that an infant's femur - the body's largest bone - is only the size of an adult's finger.
"They're absolutely tiny," he said. "We need to recover the remains very, very carefully – to maximise the possibility of identification."
The difficulty of identifying the remains "can't be underestimated", he added.
For however long it takes, there will be people like Anna waiting for news - hoping to hear about sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts and cousins they never had the chance to meet.
Details of help and support with child bereavement are available in the UK at BBC Action Line
Watch: Australia’s mushroom murder case... in under two minutes
For years, from behind a computer screen, Erin Patterson built up a reputation in an online true crime community as a "super sleuth".
Today, she herself has become a true crime obsession.
When three people died – and another fell gravely ill - after eating toxic-mushroom-laced beef Wellingtons at her home in rural Victoria two years ago, her entire life was put under a microscope.
Journalists have descended from around the world to cover her lengthy murder trial, spectators have queued daily to nab a spot in the courtroom, and thousands of people have picked apart details of the case online.
But, despite a jury earlier this week finding her guilty on all charges, the frenzy of speculation and depth of fascination has only intensified.
"It has shades of Macbeth," criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro told the BBC.
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The mushroom murder trial was the biggest case in recent history
It was in one of Australia's smallest courtrooms that its biggest trial in recent history took place.
Over 11 weeks, seven documentary-making teams cast their lens on the tiny town of Morwell. Podcasters here were a dime a dozen. Journalists vied for the six seats reserved for media inside the court each day. Even one of Australia's best-loved authors, Helen Garner, frequently dropped by the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, fuelling rumours that she is preparing to write another best-seller.
Waiting with the sea of tripods outside the building most mornings of the trial was a queue of camp chairs.
Come rain, frost or fog, court watchers – predominantly women, often rugged up in beanies and encased in sleeping bags – watched for the moment the glass doors would open.
Once inside, they would lay a line of belongings – scarves, water bottles, notepads, bags – outside the courtroom entry to reserve their spot.
The Patterson trial heard from more than 50 witnesses
Tammy Egglestone commuted for more than an hour to reach Morwell most days of the trial. "I'm a bit of a true crime fanatic," she explains.
She was in court when it heard evidence that Patterson was once just like her.
Patterson had been an active member in a Facebook group focussed on the crimes of Keli Lane, a woman who was found guilty of killing her two-day-old daughter in one of Australia's most notorious cases.
In 2018, Lane became the subject of a major podcast after writing to a journalist claiming to have been wrongly convicted and begging her to investigate.
At Patterson's trial, one of her online friends Christine Hunt said she was renowned among her peers for her nimble researching and tech skills.
"She was a bit of a super sleuth," she said. "She was highly regarded in that group."
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A Melbourne lane with a mural of Erin Patterson
But as her case unfolded in Morwell, Patterson was also put on trial in the court of public opinion.
She became water-cooler talk in workplaces around the country, gossip among friend groups, and the ultimate topic of debate online.
Thousands of people theorised over a motive for the crime, provided commentary on bits of evidence, and even alleged corrupt forces were behind the case – much of the discussion unfounded, almost all of it in breach of laws designed to give defendants a fair trial.
Memes filled social media feeds. On Google Maps, someone created a restaurant listing at Patterson's home address. Others shared trial bingo cards they had created for those following it closely.
Throughout the week the jury was considering their verdict, sequestered in a hotel to protect them from the maelstrom, the question everyone had was: what were they thinking?
"What are they doing in there?" one lawyer was overheard asking in a Morwell café on day four of deliberations.
Ms Egglestone has spent hours commuting to see the trial evidence in person
With jury members bound by strict secrecy requirements, we will never know.
"In the US, they can interview jurors after a trial," criminal psychologist Tim Watson-Munro told the BBC. "We can't get into the heads of jurors in Australia… so it's really hard to know what they're thinking has been and why they've come to that conclusion."
That leaves a massive vacuum for members of the public to fill with their speculation.
People like Ms Egglestone pondered: if the poisoning was intended to kill, wouldn't Patterson have planned and executed it better?
"I've come in here [as] Switzerland," Ms Egglestone clarified, calling the discourse around the case "very pitchforky".
"And a lot of them are using hindsight reasoning. 'If I was in that situation, I wouldn't do this, this and this.' Well, you don't know what you would do in that situation."
But people like her were drowned out by the hordes proclaiming Patterson guilty.
Many said it was her lies that convinced them. Some claimed the evidence showed a clear lack of empathy and concern for those who died.
"What really gave her away was wearing white pants when she had 'gastro' and needed to go to hospital for it!" one person posted, referring to CCTV footage of her movements in the days after the lunch, which was played at the trial.
Watch: CCTV and audio shown to court in mushroom trial
Already, the case has inspired a television special, a silver screen drama series, a bevy of podcasts, several documentaries and a handful of books.
"It has those typical cliché things that make true crime sell," Ms Egglestone said, explaining why she and flocks of others have become obsessed with the case.
"The fact that she did take out family members... [she's] white, female, financially stable, you know. And they're all church people."
For David Peters, seemingly benign circumstances surrounding the crime – and the fact it was in his local area – drew him in: "The fact that it was a family sitting down to do something you would consider to be safe - have a meal - and then the consequences of that meal..."
Several people tell the BBC the case reminds them of the frenzy over Lindy Chamberlain's notorious trial in 1982. She was falsely convicted of murder after her infant daughter Azaria was taken from an outback campsite by a dingo.
It's no coincidence that both of those cases centre around women, criminology researcher Brandy Cochrane tells the BBC.
The world has long been fascinated by women who kill – in no small part because it contradicts their traditional "caring" gender role, they explain.
Those stereotypes also cast a shadow on Patterson's time in court.
EPA
"She's expected to act in a particular way, and she's not," says Dr Cochrane, a lecturer at Victoria University.
"It's like, 'Oh, obviously she's guilty, she's not crying the whole time' or 'Obviously she's guilty, she's lied about this'. The legal system in and of itself treats women very differently."
Away from the ghoulish spectre of the trial, there's anger – albeit dwindling – among the communities where the victims are from over the way the case has been dissected, local councillor Nathan Hersey tells the BBC.
Don and Gail Patterson and Heather Wilkinson were respected and adored by many in the South Gippsland region, he says, but it feels like they've been forgotten.
"This has been an extremely high-profile case that's brought a lot of attention, often unwanted through to our local community.
"[And] some people haven't had that humanity… they've certainly lost focus that for people, there is a loss, there is grief."
Laura Strang, 25, from Oban, Scotland saves money by booking at the last minute.
She even booked her honeymoon just two days before they flew.
"We got married on the 21st of June and waited until the 23rd of June to book a holiday for June 25th.
"We had two weeks in Mexico because it was cheaper than two weeks in Europe."
Laura and her husband Sam Gledhill, 27, paid £1,200 each for 14 nights all-inclusive in Cancun.
"I would say we saved thousands of pounds, based on reviews," she says.
"Ten nights in Spain was coming up the same or more expensive. It's a 10-hour flight over to Mexico so it's a little bit crazy, that."
She says she and her husband have previously booked holidays within a few days of flying to Tenerife, Salou and Marrakesh and have saved money each time.
"Choosing not to go all-inclusive can save money but that depends on the country," says Laura.
"We found Mexico quite expensive when going out and about [so all-inclusive made sense], but you could probably save money in Spain by going half board."
'We travel off-peak and look for kids go free places'
Nathan Hart and his fiancee Cassie Farrelly estimate they saved £3,300 by searching for a holiday that offered a free child's place and going outside school holidays.
They have booked a 10-day all-inclusive holiday in Spain's Balearic Islands at the end of September with their three-year-old twin daughters Alba and Luna.
The couple from Merthyr Tydfil, Wales recommend using the filter option on some of the biggest travel agency websites.
"When searching you can see which places offer one free child place, choose a range of locations and sort by lowest price," says Nathan.
"We found an exceptional hotel for £800 per person plus one free child place, so that's already an £800 saving.
"As well as that, on the booking page you can see a calendar showing the difference in price for the holiday on different dates."
Nathan says when he compared the same holiday in August it was double the price.
"That would have been completely unaffordable for us.
"I now completely understand why parents with older kids travel inside school term time and it's absolutely something we will have to consider when our girls are older."
Parents who take their children out of school for holidays during term time risk being fined, and repeat offenders could face prosecution.
'I swapped my London flat for a Spanish villa'
May Burrough works in central London. But her flat is too small to have lots of people to stay, so last October she invited some close friends to a five-bedroomed villa with a pool on the Costa Brava, Spain.
She estimates it would normally have cost around £3,500 to rent a house like that. But she used a home-swapping site and only paid €100 (£85) - for the cleaning fee - plus around £250 on transport.
Although she saved money on the villa, May and her friends did splash out on food and drink, such as oysters and wine from the region.
"We really had a lush time at the house because we were like, 'well, we're not paying for the accommodation!'"
Because finding someone to do a straight swap with can often be tricky, the Home Exchange site she uses allows her to earn credits by letting people stay in her one-bedroom flat, and then spend them elsewhere.
"It does take a bit of effort. I put valuables away, you have to change the bedsheets, cleaning every time. But it is fully worth it," says May.
She says the site is a bit clunky to use, but she loves what it allows her to do, for an annual fee of around £170.
Recently she booked a one-night stay in Vienne, France so she could go to a concert.
"A hotel was going to be mega-expensive. So I booked a room in someone's home and left in the morning."
'I use my credit card to get loyalty points for flights'
Ebrahim Paruk, 35, from Nuneaton near Coventry in Warwickshire saves money on flights by saving up Virgin Atlantic credit card points.
He does his best to collect as many points as possible.
"I pay for everything I can with the card," he says, including his bills, weekly petrol, and weekly groceries.
"These are day-to-day necessities that you have to buy, so you might as well get a reward," he says.
Describing himself as "the biggest football fan you will probably ever find", he started doing it as a way of going to the major international tournaments.
The best saving he made with the points was a return flight to Düsseldorf to watch Germany v Denmark in the 2024 Euros - he saved £400 on his £800 flight.
To add to the saving, he won the match ticket and hotel accommodation in a competition, meaning the whole trip cost him a total of £500.
Now he uses the same method to save money when booking holidays for him and his wife.
'I house sit and get to see the US'
Annmaree Bancroft is a single mum of a three-year-old and has been house sitting with him 11 times.
Their first time was looking after two dogs for a week in a house in Scarsdale outside New York City.
This year they will be going back there for a few days, this time as friends of the homeowner. Then they will stay on for three more weeks in the US, without paying for any overnight accommodation, thanks to further housesitting stints in Connecticut and Brooklyn.
The cost of the holiday will be the £1,435 she is spending on flights, plus travel between cities and spending money.
"A lot of parents think that once you have a child, you can't travel," says Annmaree.
"That is just not true. There are these alternative ways now to travel and make it affordable."
If you do choose to house sit, it is recommended that you use a reputable site. Annmaree uses the online platform Trusted Housesitters, which charges a membership fee for sitters of £99 to £199 a year.
'We're staycationing in the UK'
House sitting may also be an option for those choosing not to go abroad.
Kayleigh Pennel-Price lives with her partner, two children, aged two and four months, and their golden retriever Kofi in Wiltshire.
She had looked into a family holiday through the traditional means but calculated that it would cost around £3,000 to go on a foreign holiday for a week.
Instead, the whole family is going house sitting in a small village in Buckinghamshire for two weeks.
They will be staying in a home with a sauna, swimming pool and a private woodland, to look after two Yorkshire terriers, booked through the website HouseSit Match.
"We mostly plan to just stay there," says Kayleigh, who thinks the whole trip could cost £250.
"We love both abroad and UK holidays, but we don't like to leave our dog," she says. "And with the two babies, abroad is a little harder."
While more people are tuning in for episodes, it's Love Island's socials that are really turning heads this year
Love Island is back for its 12th series - and it's not just the villa that's had an upgrade.
After falling audience figures in recent years, the number of us tuning in is returning to series eight levels - the year that delivered Love Island icons like Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu, Indiyah Polack and Tasha Ghouri.
But if daily episodes are our type on paper, social media is the bombshell that's turning heads.
Figures from ITV shared with BBC Newsbeat suggest the series' growth on socials is outstripping the success it's having on TV.
Analysis by the BBC found that Love Island's official accounts had gained 1.8m followers since the start of 2025, with 1m of those on TikTok.
Ex-islander Diamanté Laiv tells BBC Newsbeat the short-form updates are much more appealing than committing to the nightly TV show.
"I'm a very busy person, so I don't really have the time to sit down every day for an hour and just watch people kiss," she says.
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Series 11 islander Diamanté Laiva watches clips online but hasn't committed to the full series
Diamanté, who appeared in series 11, says she's not surprised millions are keeping up to date on their phone.
"It's more popular online because everybody's online, it's easily accessible. Every 10 scrolls on TikTok is something Love Island-related, so you can't really avoid it."
She's not alone in staying away from streaming the episodes in full.
But that's still a fraction of the 13m following various official accounts online.
On TikTok there's been an explosion in Love Island content - with view counts for individual clips outstripping viewing figures for whole episodes.
Dramatic or funny moments from the show proper tend to perform well, but reactions, analysis, and debriefs - where content creators recap whole episodes in a few minutes - also notch up big numbers.
According to data gathered by the BBC there have been more than 87,000 TikTok uploads with a Love Island or Love Island UK hashtag so far in 2025.
For the whole of 2024, the same data suggests that figure was just below 40,000.
ITV/Shutterstock
Producers promised the ITV reality series would have more drama and twists than ever before
Anthony, better known as "giletslays", is one of many content creators who have been feeding that growth.
He's been making videos about the latest series for his 170,000 followers, and some of his Love Island takes have had millions of views.
Anthony says the real draw of Love Island has always been the discourse on social media.
But to take part you need to be up to date, and a nightly show can feel like too much of a long-term commitment for some.
"Sometimes if people miss a couple of episodes they feel they're too far behind to catch up," says Anthony.
Super-fan Harriet Fisher, who's been watching Love Island since series one, agrees TikTok has become the go-to place for updates.
She says the US version of the show, which has overlapped with the UK edition this year, is "popping off" on the app, and believes this has boosted interest in Love Island overall.
"The way that people are engaging with reality TV and Love Island in general is obviously changing," she says.
"It needs TikTok and social media to survive, to gain viewers.
"It shows that viewers of old can stay engaged, but also get those new viewers in."
But those new viewers are forming a very different relationship with the contestants, Diamanté warns.
ITV/Shutterstock
Yasmin Pettet has become a standout islander on socials, largely due to her great posture
Traditionally, audiences have spent whole series getting to know islanders over one-hour episodes.
Even then, contestants have never been shy about blaming selective editing for making them look bad.
But on social media, with character arcs compressed into bite-sized clips, Diamanté worries fans aren't getting the full picture.
"Conversations are being pulled and tweaked so I feel like it makes it even more orchestrated," she says. "It kind of takes the reality out of the reality TV."
Grace Henry, Cosmopolitan's acting entertainment and lifestyle director, agrees that watching the show via social media fundamentally changes the experience.
"We have to be mindful that these are short clips and clips can be taken out of context," she says.
"We're never going to see the full picture of how someone is and things change very quickly in there."
But Grace thinks online notoriety could work in aspiring reality stars' favour - even if it means audiences spend less time with them.
Grace Henry
Grace Henry has been reporting on the latest series of Love Island for Cosmo
She singles out Yasmin Pettet, nicknamed YasGPT online, as one islander who's been able to connect with audiences this year.
Videos of Yas giving posture lessons have been viewed more than a million times on TikTok and gained tens of thousands of likes on Instagram.
"We will still have those people and we will have a connection to them, but they will just come around differently," says Grace.
"It will be based on viral moments and whether they do something big that becomes a meme or a social media moment."
Diamanté agrees and thinks social clips might even be a better way to build a following than being popular on the series.
As well as reaching more people, she says "more brands are seeing it and that's the aim of the game".
Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays - or listen back here.
Valery Gergiev seen conducting an orchestra at Moscow's Red Square in 2018
Russian conductor Valery Gergiev has been barred from European stages ever since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A close ally of Vladimir Putin for many years, the director of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Russian state theatres has never spoken out against the war.
But a region of southern Italy has now invited Gergiev back to Europe, signalling the artist's rehabilitation even as Russia's attacks on Ukraine intensify.
Vincenzo de Luca, who runs the Campania region, insists that the concert at the Un'Estate da REfestival later this month will go ahead despite a growing swell of criticism.
"Culture… must not be influenced by politics and political logic," De Luca said in a livestream on Friday. "We do not ask these men to answer for the choices made by politicians."
The 76-year-old local leader has previously called Europe's broad veto on pro-Putin artists "a moment of stupidity – a moment of madness" at the start of the war and announced that he was "proud" to welcome Gergiev to town.
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Russia's President Putin (R) pins a medal on conductor Gergiev (L) at the Kremlin in 2016
But Pina Picierno, a vice-president of the European Parliament, has told the BBC that allowing Gergiev's return is "absolutely unacceptable".
She calls the star conductor a "cultural mouthpiece for Putin and his crimes".
Ukrainian human rights activist and Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk said the invitation by the regional government was "hypocrisy", rather than neutrality.
Russian opposition activists have also condemned the director's sudden return. The Anti-Corruption Foundation, of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, wants his concert cancelled and is calling on Italy's interior ministry to ban Gergiev's entry to the country.
GEORG HOCHMUTH/APA/AFP
Valery Gergiev has been shunned by European orchestras since the full-scale war began
Before Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine, the virtuoso Gergiev was a regular visitor to stages in Italy and across Europe, despite his closeness to Putin.
His long and illustrious career includes stints at the London Symphony Orchestra and Munich Philharmonic.
But the invitations to Europe stopped abruptly on 24 February 2022.
Hours before the first Russian missiles were launched at Ukraine, Gergiev was on stage at Milan's La Scala opera house. Urged then by the city's mayor to speak out against the war, Gergiev chose silence.
He was promptly dropped from the bill.
Abandoned by his manager, despite calling Gergiev "the greatest conductor alive", he was then fired as chief conductor in Munich and removed from concert schedules across the continent.
That's why the invitation from Italy is so controversial.
Pina Picierno, who is from the Campania region herself, says her call to stop the event is not Russophobic.
"There is no shortage of brilliant Russian artists who choose to disassociate themselves from Putin's criminal policies," she told the BBC.
The European MP, who says she has received threats for her work exposing Russia's hybrid warfare, warns that allowing Gergiev to perform would be both wrong and dangerous.
"This is not about censorship. Gergiev is part of a deliberate Kremlin strategy. He is one of their cultural envoys to soften Western public opinion. This is part of their war."
Pasquale Gargano/KONTROLAB/LightRocket via Getty Images
Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (centre) welcomed Ukraine's president and first lady to a conference in Rome last week
The cultural controversy erupted in a week when Italy was hosting heads of state from all over Europe to reaffirm their support for Ukraine and discuss how to rebuild the country once the war is over.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been a strong and consistent critic of Vladimir Putin from the start. But her culture ministry is one of the backers ofUn'Estate da RE, which has invited Gergiev.
A senior MP from Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, Alfredo Antoniozzi, has described Gergiev as "simply a great artist".
"If Russians have to pay for the mistakes of their president, then we are committing a kind of cultural genocide," he argued.
Last month, Canada formally barred Gergiev from entry and declared it would freeze any assets.
But the European Union has shied away from formal sanctions against the conductor, who has avoided voicing open support for the war.
Gergiev has been a vocal supporter of Putin since the 1990s, later campaigning for his re-election and backing Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
He was handed management of Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre, in addition to the Mariinsky Theatre, taking over from a director who signed an open letter against Russia's war.
Gergiev is a state employee, but in 2022 an investigation by Alexei Navalny's team uncovered properties in several Italian cities that they say he never declared.
They also alleged he used donations to a charitable fund to pay for his own lavish lifestyle.
The activists argued that was Gergiev's reward for his public loyalty to Putin.
The BBC has so far been unable to reach the conductor for comment.
A spokeswoman for the European Commission, Eva Hrncirova, has clarified that the Un'Estate da RE festival is not receiving EU cash: it is financed by Italy's own "cohesion funds".
But she added that the commission urged European stages not to give space "to artists who support the war of aggression in Ukraine".
In Campania, the artistic director who crafted this year's festival programme declined to comment. A spokesman was confident Gergiev's performance would go ahead, though – despite the controversy.
"Yes," he assured the BBC. "For sure."
Additional reporting from Rome by Davide Ghiglione.
Northern Ireland and Scotland will see temperatures soar as the UK's third heatwave of the year spreads across the country.
Scotland is likely to see its warmest day of the year with temperatures of up to 31C. Northern Ireland could potentially the mercury rise above 29.5C - the highest recorded temperature so far this year.
For England and Wales, temperatures are expected to be widely in the high 20s to low 30s with the south-west Midlands and south-east Wales predicted to see the hottest temperatures.
However, for eastern parts of England, an easterly breeze will bring slightly cooler temperatures though most areas will still meet heatwave thresholds.
On Friday, Astwood Bank in the West Midlands recorded the highest temperature of 34.7C.
Amber heat health alerts for southern England, the Midlands, and East Anglia will remain in place until Monday, the UK Health Security Agency said.
Less severe yellow warnings remain in place for northern England, while Scotland and Northern Ireland face warnings of wildfires on Saturday and Sunday.
Yellow weather alerts are issued during periods that are only likely to affect those who are particularly vulnerable, such as the elderly, and those with existing health conditions.
Amber alerts are issued in situations that could put the whole population at risk.
For the thousands expected to attend the Wimbledon finals this weekend, temperatures in south-west London will remain high on Saturday and are expected to reach 30C, possibly 32C in some areas, according the Met Office.
Sunday will see a slight dip to 29C in daytime highs, but the heat will remain with a chance of some places around London seeing 30C or above.
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World number one Aryna Sabalenka said conditions were "super hot" during her semi-final on Thursday
This year, Wimbledon has faced some of the hottest temperatures in its 148-year history and has a heat rule in place for all singles matches.
The men's singles semi-final on Friday between Carlos Alcaraz and Taylor Fritz was stopped twice in less than five minutes due to fans in the crowd requiring medical attention.
Temperatures on Centre Court reached a sweltering 32C on Friday.
Tournament organisers have added more free water refill points on the grounds and increased reminders for fans to take sun precautions and seek shade.
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Fire chiefs have also warned people of the increased risk of drowning when trying to keep cool, urging parents to supervise their children at all times around the water.
Dry and hot conditions also make wildfires a crucial concern, with the risk currently rated at "severe" in London by the Natural Hazards Partnership.
"Our experience tells us that wildfires can start in an instant and escalate rapidly. That's why we're asking everyone to stay alert and act responsibly," the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) chairman Phil Garrigan said.
National Rail has warned commuters of possible disruption to travel this weekend as overhead power lines and rails could be affected by the heat.
On Friday, more than seven million people across England and Wales were affected by hosepipe bans, restricting activities including watering of gardens, cleaning cars and filling paddling pools.
The heatwave will be over for most on Monday as cooler Atlantic air spreads, bringing cloud and some showers to northern and western areas.
Scientists warn that extreme weather conditions are made more likely as a result of manmade climate change.
Swiatek inflicts 6-0 6-0 defeat on Anisimova to win Wimbledon
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Iga Swiatek has added Wimbledon to her four French Open titles and one US Open victory
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Poland's Iga Swiatek ruthlessly took advantage of American opponent Amanda Anisimova's nerves to win her maiden Wimbledon title, with the 6-0 6-0 victory taking just 57 minutes.
Swiatek, 24, was also playing in her first final at the All England Club but looked more assured from the very start.
No woman had won a Wimbledon with a double bagel - the name given to a victory without dropping a game - since 1911.
It is the sixth Grand Slam victory of Swiatek's career, having won on each of her appearances in major finals.
"It seems super surreal," said Swiatek,whose five previous titles came on clay or hard courts.
"Honestly, I didn't even dream of winning Wimbledon because it was way too far.
"I feel like I'm an experienced player, having won other Slams, but I didn't expect this."
Eighth seed Swiatek drew on all of her greater experience to race through the first set in just 25 minutes.
Anisimova, just three months younger than Swiatek, looked tense from the very start and made a flurry of errors in an opener where she won just nine points.
Despite a sympathetic Centre Court crowd willing her on, things did not improve in the second set for the 13th seed.
A total of 28 unforced errors, plus five double faults, starkly illustrated Anisimova's struggles.
Fighting back the tears as she addressed the crowd, Anisimova said: "It's been an incredible fortnight for me - even though I ran out of gas.
"I wish I could have put on a better performance for you today."
Swiatek becomes an all-court great
If Swiatek had not already proved she should be ranked among the greats of the game, she has certainly done so now.
Mastering a surface considered her weakest – even though she won the Wimbledon junior title in 2018 – has added further credence to her case.
Swiatek has become the youngest woman since 23-time champion Serena Williams in 2002 to win Grand Slam titles on all three surfaces.
A sixth major takes her clear of Maria Sharapova and Martina Hingis, with only a total of 10 women now having won more in the Open era.
Swiatek became known as the 'Queen of Clay' after winning four French Open titles in five years, while her two-year reign as the world number one - ended by Aryna Sabalenka last year - was underpinned by consistent success on the hard courts.
Grass was the surface she had not cracked.
Before this triumph, Swiatek had made the second week at the All England Club only once, when she reached the quarter-finals in 2023.
Losing in this year's Roland Garros semi-finals – early by her previous standards – meant she had longer to prepare on the surface, helping her quickly readjust improve her confidence and game.
Anisimova's struggles meant she was not fully tested. Nevertheless, the weight and depth of Swiatek's ball provided constant pressure which her opponent could not deal with.
'Special moment' for Swiatek but Anisimova 'froze'
Three-time Wimbledon singles champion John McEnroe on BBC TV: "Everyone is in a state of shock. Nobody saw Swiatek being this good on this surface.
"She played against someone who absolutely froze and I feel terrible for Anisimova.
"Well deserved for Iga."
Two-time Grand Slam champion Tracy Austin, on BBC TV: "A special moment for Swiatek and her team. I did not see this coming at the beginning of the tournament.
"You have got to hand it to Iga. She went about a tactical way to conquer grass and made it look so easy."
Former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash, on BBC Radio 5 Live: "It's an incredible story for Anisimova to be in the final in the first place.
"It's a fantastic effort and she has to look back at that. Iga played really well and the balls weren't dropping for Amanda. It was a masterclass in what to do in a final. It was a great tournament for her."