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The failings of a doctor responsible for Martha Mills’ care, who died from sepsis, amounted to “gross negligence” and were “particularly grave”, a medical tribunal says.

Her death gave rise to Martha’s Rule in hundreds of hospitals in England, making it easier for parents to ask doctors for an urgent second opinion.

The tribunal found consultant Prof Richard Thompson failed to appreciate how seriously ill 13-year-old Martha had become in the summer of 2021, following a bike accident.

On the crucial afternoon, he did not examine her in person or send her to intensive care.

The tribunal concluded Prof Thompson’s fitness to practise was impaired, but decided to take no further action against the doctor.

Martha was transferred to King’s College Hospital in London in 2021, one of three specialist treatment centres in the UK, after a holiday bike accident left her with serious injuries to her pancreas.

During a family holiday, she had skidded on some sand while cycling and fell heavily onto the handlebars.

Her parents, Merope Mills and Paul Laity, wrote about their pain and anger over their daughter’s treatment following her death.

“It was a difficult, tricky injury, but it did not have to be a fatal one,” Merope has said.

Martha stayed in the hospital for the next month.

After a few weeks, she developed an infection and then signs of sepsis – when the body’s response to an infection is overwhelming and ends up injuring its own tissues and organs – but this was not managed properly.

An inquest found that she could have survived her injuries if she’d been referred to the specialist children’s intensive care in the hospital promptly, and received better care.

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in 2023, Merope Mills said her family were not listened to by senior doctors on several occasions and were “not given the full picture” about Martha’s deteriorating condition.

Over the past few weeks, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service has heard allegations from the doctors’ regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), that Prof Thompson failed on several counts over his care of Martha.

He was the consultant on call on her ward on Sunday 29 August 2021 – two days before she died.

The tribunal said it was “evident” that by around 17:00 that day Martha had “several high risk indicators” including her heart rate, breathing and a rising temperature, which “indicated a sudden and significant deterioration”.

It said Martha’s condition, which included a new rash, justified her being moved to intensive care but “this opportunity was not taken”.

Later that evening, Prof Thompson was called at home by a colleague about Martha’s continued fever. He had already seen her on his morning ward round, but did not return to the hospital to examine her in person.

Giving evidence, Prof Thompson he said that he felt “deep remorse” for Martha’s death, but did not believe he had made errors in the case.

He said one of the reasons he wanted to keep Martha on his ward was not to distress her parents, but the tribunal said this did not justify withholding or delaying her move to intensive care.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service concluded that his fitness to practise had been impaired.

It said this would reassure the public and send a message to doctors about the importance of following the fundamental principles of good care.

The GMC had argued that Prof Thompson should be suspended from clinical practice but the tribunal said he would face no disciplinary penalty.

Tribunal chairman Robin Ince said Prof Thompson had done “everything possible to address his failings” and a “stain on his reputation” would remain for the rest of his life.

“The tribunal considered that the best way to repair any harm caused by his failings would be for him to continue to provide his specialist expertise at home and abroad,” he added.

Martha’s parents raised concerns about their daughter’s care to the regulator, the GMC, in 2022.

Responding to the tribunal’s findings Martha’s parents said: “It is important to us that allegations denied have been found proved and the gravity of mistakes that led to our daughter’s preventable death has been recognised.

“King’s College hospital’s own report into Martha’s death made it clear that the high-status consultants on her ward had a poor relationship with paediatric intensive care, which helps to explain why Martha wasn’t referred there when, as every expert has agreed, she should have been.

“We will never understand why experienced doctors, with elevated reputations, took such a big risk with her life.”

The hospital that looked after Martha has admitted mistakes were made, and the trust said previously in a statement that it “remains deeply sorry that we failed Martha when she needed us most”.

A coroner pays tribute to Katie Watson, who appeared on Channel 4’s Geordie Hospital.

Union members have called for the NHS to stop using private companies.

Babatunde Aranmolate removed drugs without permission from a locked cupboard at a west London hospital.

A failed stem cell transplant was one of the factors that led to the death of Tina Doig.

Some staff at the Reaside Clinic had not received all the appropriate training, inspectors said.

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Invitations for cervical screening will be sent out every five years instead of every three for women aged 25-49 in England, if they have a negative test.

Research shows they are at very low risk of cervical cancer and can safely wait longer to be screened again, NHS England has said.

The roll out of a vaccine to protect against HPV – the virus which causes nearly all cervical cancers – has reduced cases by around a quarter since the early 1990s.

Charities said the change was good news for those at low risk because they no longer needed to go for screening as often.

Scotland and Wales have already introduced this change, which will start in England from 1 July.

Cancer Research UK urged women and people with a cervix not to wait for a screening invitation if they noticed any unusual changes.

They are encouraged to go for regular cervical screening between the ages of 25 and 64.

Currently, those aged 50-64 are invited every five years and 25-49 year olds every three years.

NHS England says it now wants to spare younger women appointments they don’t need as part of “a more personalised approach”.

Cervical screening involves testing for HPV, human papillomavirus. Some types of HPV can cause cell changes in the cervix, which may develop into cancer over time. Nearly all cases of cervical cancer are linked to high-risk HPV.

If that HPV test is negative, studies suggest the chances of someone developing cervical cancer over the next 10 years is very low.

This is more accurate than looking for cancer cells on their own.

A recent study showed that screening every five years is as safe as doing it every three years, because the same number of cancers are found and fewer screening tests are needed.

Anyone eligible will receive a notification via the NHS app to book a screening appointment, NHS England said.

“The NHS is following robust evidence on how often women need to be safely screened, and by putting invitations and reminders straight in women’s pockets on their phones, we’re making it easier than ever to take up screening appointments,” said Dr Sue Mann, national director for women’s health at NHS England.

It previously said it was possible to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040, thanks to improved rates of vaccination and screening.

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cause of cancer in women worldwide.

The main symptoms are:

People who test negative for HPV will be screened every five years, rather than three.

The interval will increase from three years due to advances in screening, public health bosses say.

Femi Elufowoju Jr says the actor talking about prostate cancer encouraged him to get checked.

Breast cancer patient Neil Ferriby from Hull has had lymph nodes and three tumours removed.

NHS patients could be treated using the non-invasive device by this summer.

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Warning: This article contains upsetting details and reference to suicide

There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary when Jane Figueiredo spoke to her daughter that night on the phone.

“Alice asked me to bring her some snacks for the next time we visited,” Jane says. But that call, at 22:15 on 6 July 2015, was the last conversation they ever had.

Around three hours later, Jane and her husband, Max, were being driven to hospital in a police car at speed. They had been told their daughter was gravely ill.

Alice had got into a communal toilet at Goodmayes Hospital, in Ilford, east London, where she was a mental health patient, and taken her own life. She was just months away from her 23rd birthday.

On Monday, almost 10 years later, the North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT), which runs the hospital, and Benjamin Aninakwa, the manager of the ward Alice was on, were found guilty of health and safety failings over her death.

The jury decided not enough was done by NELFT, or Aninakwa, to prevent Alice from killing herself.

It’s taken a decade of battling by Alice’s parents to uncover the truth about how the 22-year-old was able to take her own life in a unit where she was meant to be safe.

They twice had to sell their home, quit their jobs and have worked full-time on the case.

The jury deliberated for 24 days to reach all the verdicts, after which time the Trust was cleared of the more serious charge of corporate manslaughter, while Aninakwa, 53, of Grays, Essex, was cleared of gross negligence manslaughter.

During the seven-month trial, we sat a few seats away from the family. They’ve sometimes been overwhelmed, leaving the court angry or in tears, as they felt their voices – and that of Alice – were not being heard.

Now, Jane hopes the verdicts will bring major change to psychiatric care providers around the country. “You need to do far, far better to stop failing those people who you have a duty of care to,” she said after the verdict.

Weeks earlier, in mid-March this year, the Figueiredos were living in a hotel room in central London.

While folding their clothes, they spoke to the BBC during a break in the trial, which was already running months longer than expected.

They had been living out of suitcases since the end of October, when court hearings began.

Even before the pain of hearing evidence about their daughter’s death, they said simply existing like this had been a huge challenge.

For the couple, it was important to be at the Old Bailey every day in person – no matter the cost – because they felt this was their only chance to see the Trust held to account for their daughter’s death.

Alice was born in 1992, the second of three daughters. She was a bright and energetic child, and often the centre of attention. She loved music, poetry, reading and, in particular, art. Family and friends say she had a big personality.

“She had a really deeply thoughtful, sensitive, caring nature. She was really kind. She was really generous,” remembers Jane.

As a child, Alice started to develop what became an eating disorder, and by 15 she was showing symptoms of severe depression and was admitted to a mental health unit.

In the following years she would be hospitalised on many more occasions.

In 2012, then 19, she was admitted to the Hepworth Ward, at Goodmayes Hospital, for the first time. It is an inpatient mental health unit for women, run by NELFT. She was admitted there a total of seven times over the following three years.

“She needed safety. She was a risk to herself,” says Jane.

“It was a question of, somehow managing the crisis and trusting the medical profession to make the right decisions,” adds Max, Alice’s stepfather.

Between admissions, Alice had long periods when hospital treatment wasn’t needed. She had been applying to go to university and was planning a brighter future.

But on 13 February 2015, as her mental health took a serious turn for the worse, Alice was admitted to the Hepworth Ward for what would prove to be the final time.

Three days later, Alice was detained on the unit under section three of the Mental Health Act to undergo treatment for her own safety and could not leave without her consultant’s permission.

Alice was put on one of the highest observation levels, reserved for patients at most risk of harming themselves. It meant a member of staff had to stay within arm’s length of her 24-hours-a-day.

In a letter to staff just over a month into her admission, Max and Jane wrote: “She cannot contain the sense of sheer torment, intense depression and overwhelming despair she is experiencing.”

The manager for Hepworth Ward at the time was Benjamin Aninakwa. The now 53-year-old had been working on the unit since it opened, in 2011. He was in charge of the unit during each of Alice’s previous admissions, so knew her well.

But other things on the ward had changed. The nurse and the consultant, who had previously cared for Alice, had both moved on and there was a high level of temporary agency staff filling long-standing gaps in the rota. Her parents say Alice felt unsettled.

“I think it became clear that there was an element of chaos in the ward,” says Max.

Jane, who was a chaplain to the mental health trust, would visit Alice every day; Max, who worked for the NHS as an accountant, would stop by a few times a week, often with food.

Alice told her parents that staff weren’t carrying out observations properly. On one occasion, within the first fortnight of her admission, she said an agency health care assistant who was supposed to be staying close to her, was instead making a phone call.

The family later saw an internal email saying Alice had been left alone while the care worker continued this conversation. In that time, Alice attempted to harm herself using her bedding.

The same email said that once the care assistant returned and found Alice she slapped her. “Nothing was done about that. There was no safeguarding,” says Jane.

During the trial, the court heard that Alice had attempted to harm herself on at least 39 occasions during her admission – many of these involved plastic bags or bin liners.

Even though they were in the dark about many of these incidents, her parents became so concerned they started raising it with staff at the hospital, in person and in several emails.

On 16 May, three months into Alice’s stay, Jane emailed the consultant for Hepworth Ward, Dr Anju Soni, about an incident of self-harm with a plastic bag in which Alice lost consciousness.

“If it had been a few minutes longer before she was found, the outcome could have been very different – she could have died,” she wrote.

The court heard that many of these incidents were not recorded properly by staff, nor communicated to the family.

After several months, Alice’s depression began to ease. In June, her observation levels were lowered to reflect her progress, and they were eventually reduced to hourly checks.

She was able to leave the unit for short periods, even going to a Fleetwood Mac concert with her boyfriend Andrew.

But her eating disorder remained a serious challenge, and she was still under section. She asked to be moved to a specialist unit to help her recovery.

On 30 June, Alice complained of chest pain and was transferred to nearby King George Hospital. When she came back to Hepworth Ward a couple of days later, the court heard she was told she was too frail to go on planned leave.

Her family remember intense fluctuations in her mood around this time. They say she was frustrated that her eating disorder wasn’t improving, little progress was being made on her moving to another unit and she was getting bullied by other patients on the ward.

On 4 July, three days before Alice died, Jane and Max went to visit her. The eating disorder was taking its toll. They could see their daughter was struggling.

“She sat there almost in silence, tears were rolling down her face,” remembers Jane.

Late on the night of 6 July, Alice and her boyfriend exchanged messages with each other, talking about their love of Bob Dylan’s music. At 23:30 he wrote: “I can’t stop thinking about you, x.”

The court heard that around that time Alice had asked to speak to a care assistant she got on with.

The care assistant was called away to an emergency elsewhere in the hospital. When she returned to Hepworth Ward she looked for Alice. She eventually found her slumped in the communal toilet.

Errors by two nurses on duty on Hepworth Ward slowed the arrival of an on-call doctor and paramedics. Alice was eventually taken to another hospital where she died.

“It’s a moment where your entire life has changed and will never be the same. That’s what we have had to learn to live with,” says Jane.

Still dealing with the devastating shock of losing their daughter, the Figueiredos set about piecing together what had happened to her.

The Trust produced a Serious Incident (SI) report. These investigations are meant to help prevent similar incidents happening.

But the Figueiredos felt it was incomplete and the Trust was avoiding accepting responsibility for Alice’s death.

Whatever their concerns, the report contained information that was new and troubling. It mentioned 13 incidents in which Alice had used a plastic bag or bin bag to self-harm.

“I was shocked and horrified when I saw that,” says Jane. “I thought, [the Trust] knew this had happened, and [they] still let her carry on doing this, and she died,” she says.

The family felt the risk of plastic bags for patients on an acute mental health ward, particularly Alice, should have been obvious.

During a previous admission to Hepworth Ward the year before, Alice tried to harm herself using plastic bags on at least three occasions.

In November 2015, sensing there was more to uncover, the couple holed themselves up in a hotel in Lindisfarne, off the Northumbria coast, and started piecing together their suspicions.

“We went very quickly into actually writing our own report and sending it to all the authorities that we knew of,” says Max.

They used their insiders’ knowledge from working in the health service, to get their report in front of senior NHS people and regulators. They wrote to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, then head of London’s Metropolitan Police.

He wrote back and a police investigation into what happened to Alice was launched. The Nursing and Midwifery Council launched inquiries into several of the nurses involved in Alice’s care.

Even with the police involved, the Figueiredos kept digging, getting hold of as much documentation as they possibly could. When they weren’t able to get documents through official routes, they’d find other ways to get them, working like seasoned investigators.

Once they had them, they’d analyse them and produce detailed reports that they sent to the police and regulators.

“If I could discover something that would be helpful to their investigation. I would try to do that. We were a parallel investigation,” says Jane.

All this digging came at a financial cost.

“We were in our 50s, we both stopped working and actually sold our house and lived off that to be able to do this,” says Jane.

The emotional price was even higher. “You can’t underestimate or even find the words to say, the toll that that takes on you. It’s profoundly re-traumatising,” she says.

There were further shocks to come in Alice’s medical notes, which showed gaps in the hospital’s official SI report. They had been told Alice had attempted to self-harm with plastic bags on 13 occasions, in fact it happened at least 18 times.

Most of these incidents weren’t recorded in logs as they should have been.

“It still shocks us to the core today,” says Max.

On the unit, plastic bags were not used in the bins in patient bedrooms for safety reasons, but they were in a few communal locations, including a toilet that was often left unlocked. Alice used these bags to self-harm on multiple occasions, including the incident that led to her death.

The trial heard there was little evidence that ward manager Benjamin Aninakwa made any attempt to restrict access to those bin bags, despite the issue being raised with him, and it appearing in Alice’s care plan.

He did not appear as a witness in court but told police the toilet door was locked and he had been overruled when he tried to remove the bin bags. The court heard there were no emails or evidence in Alice’s clinical notes and records to corroborate this.

A Care Quality Commission inspection in April 2016, the year after Alice’s death, found bin bags still being used on the unit. The bags were eventually removed.

The court heard that around the time Alice was admitted to the hospital for the final time, the Trust was carrying out a “scoping exercise”, which looked at removing all plastic bin bags from the hospital’s wards. It was revealed a bin which didn’t need a plastic liner had been considered – it would have cost just £1.26.

“NELFT placed more value on their rubbish bins than they did on my daughter’s life,” says Jane.

In a statement, the Trust said: “Our thoughts are with Alice’s family and loved ones, who lost her at such a young age. We extend our deepest sympathy for the pain and heartbreak they have suffered this past 10 years.

“We will reflect on the verdict and its implications, both for the trust and mental health provision more broadly as we continue to work to develop services for the communities we serve.”

Jane and Max Figueiredo say they wanted to hold those at the Trust to account, but that they also wanted change for the future. But there will be no celebration at Monday’s verdicts.

“Nothing will ever bring Alice back to us and we will never stop thinking of her and missing her,” says Jane. “There’s always one place empty at our table, one very special voice silent that we long to hear in our conversations.”

If you are suffering distress or despair, details of help and support in the UK are available at BBC Action Line.

Hindu temples in Harrow and Neasden are offering special prayers for the Air India crash victims.

One British man, who was a passenger on the London-bound flight, survived the crash in Ahmedabad, western India.

Shortly after Shamiah McKenzie and Codee Godfrey carried out the attack, they mingled with police officers.

Six tourists staying at the Nana Backpackers hostel died in November from suspected methanol poisoning.

The video from police body-worn cameras showed what jurors heard was the bravery of the officers.

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Women would no longer be prosecuted for terminating a pregnancy in England and Wales under a proposed shake-up of abortion laws.

MPs are set to get a free vote next week – meaning they will not be told how to vote by their party – on a change to the law.

It comes amid concern more women are being investigated by police on suspicion of illegally ending a pregnancy.

Abortion is illegal in England and Wales, most often prosecuted under a piece of Victorian legislation, the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861. But it is allowed up to 24 weeks and in certain other circumstances under the terms of the 1967 Abortion Act.

This requires two doctors to sign it off and even before 24 weeks can require a woman to testify that her mental or physical health is at risk.

An amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, tabled by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, aims to decriminalise abortion at any stage by a woman acting in relation to her own pregnancy, ending the threat of investigation or imprisonment.

The framework by which abortion is accessed would remain the same.

But abortions would only need to be signed off by two doctors – as the law currently demands – if the procedure takes place in a hospital or other healthcare setting.

Time limits would also still apply in healthcare settings.

“The police cannot be trusted with abortion law – nor can the CPS or the wider criminal justice system,” Antoniazzi said.

“My amendment to the crime and policing bill will give us the urgent change we need to protect women.”

Six women have appeared in court in England charged with ending or attempting to end their own pregnancy outside abortion law, in the past three years.

Last month, Nicola Packer, 45, was cleared by a jury of “unlawfully administering” herself with abortion pills at home during a coronavirus lockdown in 2020.

She had taken prescribed abortion medicine when she was around 26 weeks pregnant, beyond the legal limit of 10 weeks for taking such medication at home. She told jurors she did not realise she had been pregnant for more than 10 weeks.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) said Ms Packer’s trial demonstrated “just how outdated and harmful” current abortion law was and called for reform.

The RCOG are among several royal medical colleges, charities and trade unions backing Antoniazzi’s amendment, which has been signed by 136 MPs so far, including Labour MPs, Lib Dems, Greens and a handful of Conservatives.

A rival amendment by Labour MP Stella Creasey, which would make accessing an abortion a human right, is backed by 101 MPs so far.

It seeks to decriminalise abortion up to 24 weeks, negating elements of the Abortion Act. It would also ensure that late-term abortions outside the Abortion Act did not result in prison sentences.

Creasy said her amendment would simply bring the rest of the UK into line with Northern Ireland, where abortion was decriminalised in 2019.

But some of Britain’s biggest abortion care providers have expressed concern about it being rushed through without proper scrutiny, saying it would effectively rip up the 1967 Abortion Act and could open the door to a whole debate about a woman’s right to an abortion.

Rachael Clarke, head of advocacy at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), warned that MPs should not be asked to back a “generational change” after just three hours of debate next week.

“For us, unfortunately, although we truly believe that we need overwhelming and generational change for abortion law, Stella Creasy’s amendment is not the right way to do it,” she told Radio 4’s Today programme.

BPAS is among the organisations backing Antoniazzi’s proposals.

The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children said both of the proposed amendments represent “the greatest threat to unborn children and their mothers since the Abortion Act”.

They urged supporters to lobby their MPs to vote against both proposals, warning that abortion “up to birth” could become possible under the changes.

MPs are likely to be offered a vote on one of the two amendments, with Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives all saying their MPs will not be told to vote for or against the changes.

The prime minister’s official spokesman said: “It is important that women have access to safe and legal abortions on the NHS and this now includes taking abortion pills at home.

“This is an extremely sensitive issue and we recognise there are strongly held views on all sides of the discussion and by longstanding convention any change to the law in this area would be a matter of conscience for individual MPs rather than the government.”

The spokesman declined to say which way Sir Keir Starmer would vote on the issue, as it was a “matter of conscience”.

The 1967 Abortion Act initially allowed abortions to take place up to 28 weeks in England and Wales. This was reduced to 24 weeks in 1990.

Abortions after 24 weeks are allowed only if:

Since 2018, women in England have taken the second abortion pill at home, aligning the rules with Scotland and Wales.

Though the same rules apply in Scotland, it has a distinct healthcare and legal system.

Abortion laws are currently under review in Scotland following appeals from advocacy groups’ to decriminalise the process.

Separate bills to let terminally ill people end their life are being considered at Westminster and in Scotland.

But the NHS in England is still well below its target for seeing patients within 18 weeks.

The trial, involving patients in Yeovil and Taunton, is looking at reducing courses of antibiotics.

Marine pilot Ian Lawrence and his family spent a year volunteering on a hospital ship.

A medical tribunal has found a senior doctor’s failings amounted to gross negligence and misconduct.

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The backlog in routine hospital treatments in England has reached its lowest level for two years.

Data for the end of April showed the waiting list dropped to 7.39 million, down from 7.42 million in March.

But it is nine years since the NHS has met its target of 92% of patients being seen in 18 weeks – currently it is just below 60%.

The government has made meeting the target one of its key missions for this parliament – and on Wednesday announced above-inflation rises for the NHS in the coming years to help achieve it.

Responding to the latest figures, Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting, said: “We are putting the NHS on the road to recovery.”

And he added this was “just the start” as the extra investment announced in the spending review, which will see the NHS budget rise by 3% a year in the next three years, combined with reforms that will be announced in the 10-year plan due next month, would help build on what has been achieved.

The drop in the numbers on the waiting list, which covers people waiting for routine treatments like hip and knee operations, came after March saw a rise in numbers – the first time in six months the waiting list had gone up.

Although a little bit of fluctuation from month to month is normally seen, the government said it was clear the numbers waiting were on a downward trend.

The peak occurred in September 2023, when the waiting list climbed to nearly 7.8 million.

Meghana Pandit, of NHS England, said the progress being made was “thanks to NHS staff”.

“We are determined to continue on this trajectory for patients as staff work to turn the tide for patients waiting for care, and while huge pressure on services remains, we are starting to see a real difference across our services.”

Key targets for cancer care and A&E continue to be made, although there are signs of progress, the government said.

The health services in the rest of the UK nations are also missing their key targets.

Dr Tim Cooksley, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said significant problems still remained in England, pointing out that the number of 12-hour waits in emergency departments went up last month compared with the previous year.

He said a major problem facing hospitals was the lack of social care available in the community.

This causes delayed discharges where patients fit to leave hospital cannot go, because they need support to return home or to a care home. That in turn slows the ability of hospitals to see new patients coming in via A&E, or for routine treatments.

He said: “Social care remains unaddressed – and will do for the foreseeable future after the spending review announcement – so patients will continue to wait extended periods of time and often in corridors.

“The issue remains that, for all the rhetoric of investment, plans and solutions, the government is too focused on short-term quick wins which will fail to deliver effective and lasting change.”

A coroner pays tribute to Katie Watson, who appeared on Channel 4’s Geordie Hospital.

Union members have called for the NHS to stop using private companies.

A medical tribunal has found a senior doctor’s failings amounted to gross negligence and misconduct.

Babatunde Aranmolate removed drugs without permission from a locked cupboard at a west London hospital.

A failed stem cell transplant was one of the factors that led to the death of Tina Doig.

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US President Donald Trump has pushed back on his tariffs reversals after a reporter asked about “Taco”, an acronym which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out”, which reportedly being used by Wall Street traders.

The term is meant to describe the president’s habit of threatening to impose tariffs on countries and then backing out at the last moment, or reducing the tariffs rates.

Trump responded by criticising the reporter’s “nasty” question and saying that his actions are “negotiations”.

Read more on Trump tariffs on our live page.

Protests flare up in Los Angeles, as demonstrators against immigration raids face off with law enforcement

This is the first meeting between both leaders since Friedrich Merz won the election on 6 May.

President Trump said he’s always liked Elon Musk, and was surprised to see Musk’s criticism of his signature tax and spending bill.

As many as 40 decommissioned buses were damaged in the fire, according to officials

In a Facebook post, the owner of the store said that they “feel a profound sense of loss” over the destruction of the artefacts.

The world’s richest man has called on voters to contact lawmakers and voice their opposition to the president’s Big Beautiful Bill.

Ros Atkins from BBC Verify takes a look at the facts surrounding remarks that came our of Washington.

More than 200 fires are burning in the country, with over 100 of them considered out of control.

The BBC’s Carl Nasman on Senator Joni Ernst’s back and forth about Medicaid with a town hall audience member.

A newly-installed web camera captured the moment the national park’s Black Diamond Pool in Wyoming belched a dark liquid sludge.

A zebra, described as a pet, is still running free after after being filmed on 31 May galloping on a road in Christiana.

A suspect has been arrested and charged with a federal hate crime and attempted murder, accused of “setting people on fire”.

Eight people were injured after a man “started setting people on fire” at a mall in Boulder, Colorado, police say.

“Mia” also said the rap mogul sexually assaulted her “on more than one occasion”, though he has denied all allegations.

The former president announced earlier this month he had an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer.

The tech mogul, whose time as a special government employee has ended, explained how he had got the bruise.

The Canadian province of Manitoba declared a state of emergency and told 17,000 people to flee wildfires.

Faizan Zaki correctly spelled the French-derived word “éclaircissement” to secure the title and take home the $52,500 prize.

Severe weather swept through the Central Texas city causing floods, damage and power outages.

The world’s richest man spent nearly 130 days working with the Trump administration to slash the federal government.

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President Donald Trump has built another wall, and he thinks everyone else is going to pay for it. But his decision to impose sweeping tariffs of at least 10% on almost every product that enters the US is essentially a wall designed to keep work and jobs within it, rather than immigrants out.

The height of this wall needs to be put in historical context. It takes the US back a century in terms of protectionism. It catapults the US way above the G7 and G20 nations into levels of customs revenue, associated with Senegal, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan.

What occurred this week was not just the US starting a global trade war, or sparking a rout in stock markets. It was the world’s hyper power firmly turning its back on the globalisation process it had championed, and from which it handsomely profited in recent decades.

And in so doing, using the equation that underpinned his grand tariff reveal on the Rose Garden’s lawns, the White House also turned its back on some fundamentals of both conventional economics and diplomacy.

Trump talked a lot about 1913 in his announcement. This was a turning point when the US both created federal income tax and significantly lowered its tariffs.

Before this point, from its inception, the US government was funded mainly by tariffs, and was unapologetically protectionist, based on the strategy of its first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.

The basic lesson the White House has taken from this is that high tariffs made America, made it “great” the first time, and also meant that there was no need for a federal income tax.

On this side of the Atlantic, underpinning globalisation and free trade are the theories of 19th-Century British economist David Ricardo. In particular, the 1817 Theory of Comparative Advantage.

There are equations, but the basics are pretty easy to understand: Individual countries are good at making different things, based on their own natural resources and the ingenuity of their populations.

Broadly speaking, the whole world, and the countries within it, are better off, if everyone specialises in what they are best at, and then trades freely.

Here in Britain this remains a cornerstone of the junction between politics and economics. Most of the world still believes in comparative advantage. It is the intellectual core of globalisation.

But the US was never a full convert at the time. The underlying reluctance of the US never disappeared. And this week’s manifestation of that was the imaginative equation created by the US Trade Representative to generate the numbers on Trump’s big board.

It is worth unpacking the rationale for these so-called “reciprocal” tariffs. The numbers bear little resemblance to the published tariff rates in those countries.

The White House said adjustments had been made to account for red tape and currency manipulation. A closer look at the, at-first, complicated looking equation revealed it was simply a measure of the size of that country’s goods trade surplus with the US. They took the size of the trade deficit and divided it by the imports.

In the hour before the press conference a senior White House official explained it quite openly. “These tariffs are customised to each country, calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers… The model they use is based on the concept the trade deficit that we have is the sum of all the unfair trade practices, the sum of all cheating.”

This is really important. According to the White House, the act of selling more goods to the US than the US sells to you, is by definition “cheating” and is deserving of a tariff that is calculated to correct that imbalance.

This is why the surreal stories about the US tariffing rarely visited islands only inhabited by penguins matter. It reveals the actual method.

The long-term aim, and the target of the policy, is to get the US $1.2 trillion trade deficit and the largest country deficits within that down to zero. The equation was simplistically designed to target those countries with surpluses, not those with recognisable quantifiable trade barriers. It targeted poor countries, emerging economies and tiny irrelevant islets based on that data.

While these two different factors overlap, they are not the same thing.

There are many reasons why some countries have surpluses, and some have deficits. There is no inherent reason why these numbers should be zero. Different countries are better at making different products, and have different natural and human resources. This is the very basis of trade.

The US appears no longer to believe in this. Indeed if the same argument was applied solely to trade in services, the US has a $280bn (£216bn) surplus in areas such as financial services and social media tech.

Yet services trade was excluded from all the White House calculations.

There is something bigger here. As the US Vice President JD Vance said in a speech last month, globalisation has failed in the eyes of this administration because the idea was that “rich countries would move further up the value chain, while the poor countries made the simpler things”.

That has not panned out, especially in the case of China, so the US is moving decisively away from this world.

For the US, it is not David Ricardo who matters, it is David Autor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economist and the coiner of the term “China shock”.

In 2001, as the world was distracted by the aftermath of 9/11, China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO), having relatively free access to US markets, and so transforming the global economy.

Living standards, growth, profits and stock markets boomed in the US as China’s workforce migrated from the rural fields to the coastal factories to produce exports more cheaply for US consumers. It was a classic example of the functioning of “comparative advantage”. China generated trillions of dollars, much of which was reinvested in the US, in the form of its government bonds, helping keep interest rates down.

Everyone was a winner. Well, not quite. Essentially US consumers en masse got richer with cheaper goods, but the quid pro quo was a profound loss of manufacturing to East Asia.

Autor’s calculation was that by 2011, this “China shock” saw the loss of one million US manufacturing jobs, and 2.4 million jobs overall. These hits were geographically concentrated in the Rust Belt and the south.

The trade shock impact on lost jobs and wages was remarkably persistent.

Autor further updated his analysis last year and found that while the Trump administration’s first term dabble with tariff protection had little net economic impact, it did loosen Democrat support in affected areas, and boosted support for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Fast forward to this week, and the array of union car workers and oil and gas workers celebrating the tariffs in the White House.

So the promise is that these jobs will return, not just to the Rust Belt, but across the US. This is indeed likely to some degree. The president’s clear message to foreign companies is to avoid the tariffs by moving your factories. The carrots offered by Biden followed by the stick from Trump could well lead to material progress on this.

But the president’s characterisation of the past half century of freer trade as having “raped and pillaged” the US obviously doesn’t reflect the overall picture, even if it has not worked for specific regions, sectors or demographics.

The US service sector thrived, dominating the world from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. US consumer brands used hyper-efficient supply chains stretching into China and East Asia to make incredible profits selling their aspirational American products everywhere.

The US economy did very well indeed. The problem, simply, was that it was not evenly distributed among sectors. And what the US lacked was levels of redistribution and adaptation to spread that wealth across the country. This reflects America’s political choices.

Now, as the US chooses to reshore its manufacturing with a sudden jolt of protectionism, other countries also have choices as to whether to support the flows of capital and trade that have made the US rich.

The world’s consumers have choices.

It is little wonder major blue chip American companies, which have built cash machines on hyper-efficient East Asian supply chains producing cheaply and then selling to the whole world based on their attractive aspirational brands, have a big problem.

Their share prices are particularly badly affected because the president has both decimated their supply chain strategies, and also risks greatly impairing their brand image amongst global consumers.

Ultimately, this is the first social media trade war. The experience of Tesla’s sale slump and Canada’s backlash against US goods may prove contagious. That would be as powerful as any counter-tariff.

These countries that bet on being the workshops for US consumers have choices over trade too. New alliances will form and intensify that seek to cut out an erratic US.

The president’s sensitivity to this was apparent when he threatened to increase tariffs if the EU and Canada joined forces over retaliation. This would be the nightmare scenario.

In the game theory of trade wars, credibility does matter. The US has unrivalled military and technological might, which helps. But to transform the global trading system using an arbitrary formula, that throws up transparent absurdities, even without the penguins, is likely to encourage the other side to resist.

This is especially the case when the rest of the world thinks that the loaded gun that the president is holding is being aimed at his own foot. The stock market fell most in the US. Inflation will go up most in the US. It is Wall Street now calculating a more-than-evens chance of a recession in the US.

Perhaps there is some substance to the theory that the real objective here is to weaken the dollar and lower US borrowing costs.

For now, the US is checking out of the global trade system it created. It can continue without it. But the transition is going to be very messy indeed.

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