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Hello, I'm David Harper with the BBC News.
Donald Trump confirmed that billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons would be sent to Ukraine in an operation funded by other members of the alliance. Speaking at the White House alongside the NATO secretary-general, Mr. Trump also threatened Russia and its trading partners with tariffs if there's no peace deal soon. "We are very unhappy, I am, with Russia and we're gonna be doing very severe tariffs if we don't have a deal in 50 days, tariffs at about 100 percent, you call them secondary tariffs, you know what that means." Our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg has been monitoring developments in Moscow. Still no reaction from the Kremlin but the Moscow Stock Exchange has reacted to the announcement. It rose by nearly three percent and that is because I think Russia was bracing itself for even tougher sanctions, even tougher measures to be announced by President Trump. I mean if we take those secondary tariffs that he talked about, they will only kick in in 50 days time. That gives Russia plenty of time to try and come up with a counterproposal to try to delay those tariffs even more. It also gives Donald Trump time to change his mind. India's aviation safety regulator has ordered airlines to inspect fuel control switches on most Boeing commercial aircraft registered in the country. The move by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation came after a report on an Air India passenger jet that crashed last month found that fuel switches on both its engines had been simultaneously flipped to cut off minutes after takeoff. South Korea said it would also order a similar measure despite Boeing and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration telling airlines and regulators in recent days that the locks were safe. The founder of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has said the social media giant will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building huge AI data centers. Our North America technology correspondent Lily Jamali has the details. The data centers will be named after figures from sci-fi and mythology like Prometheus and Hyperion. One cluster will be almost as large as the island of Manhattan in New York City. Meta has made most of its money from online advertising. Now it's scrambling to compete in developing so-called Superintelligence, technology that's smarter than humans. But the multi-gigawatt data centers announced by Mr. Zuckerberg Monday will burn through electricity at a steady clip. Critics argue the environmental costs of powering such data centers dwarf any benefit. Police in the U.S. city of Atlanta have issued a warrant for an unnamed suspect who allegedly stole unreleased music belonging to Beyoncé last week. An incident report alleges that the suspect broke into a vehicle that had been hired by the singer's choreographer and made away with hard drives that contained the songs. Beyoncé has been in Atlanta as part of her Cowboy Carter tour. This is the latest world news from the BBC. Cuba's economy has contracted for a second consecutive year as the country struggles to recover the impact of tougher U.S. sanctions, natural disasters and a sharp drop in international tourism since the COVID pandemic. Official figures say the GDP shrank by 1.1 percent in 2024. It had already fallen by almost 2 percent in the previous year. The World Health Organization has warned that years of progress on childhood vaccination are at risk due to disinformation and increased conflict and not least funding cuts, most notably by the U.S. government. From Geneva, Imogen Foulkes reports. Diseases like polio, diphtheria or measles can be prevented, even virtually eradicated. But now funding cuts have disrupted dozens of vaccination programs. Conflict is putting more and more children out of reach and in wealthy countries vaccine hesitancy, fueled by misinformation, is growing. In the last 12 months there have been major measles outbreaks in 60 countries, compared to just 32 countries two years ago. The French basketball star Victor Wembanyama says he has been cleared to return to the NBA next season after being sidelined in February with deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder. "Wemby", who plays for the San Antonio Spurs, was the NBA Rookie of the Year in 2024. Some fans regard the 21-year-old as the best player to join the NBA since LeBron James in 2003. And in cricket, Australia have bowled out the West Indies for 27, the second lowest score in the history of men's test cricket. The Australian feat in the second innings of their match in Kingston, Jamaica, gave the tourists a 3-0 clean sweep in the Test Series. The lowest score in a Test match was in 1955, when New Zealand scored only 26 runs in an innings against England. And that's the latest BBC News. |