A senior BBC correspondent has demolished Donald Trump’s claims that America is winning the Iran war.

Jeremy Bowen, the corporation’s international editor, tore apart the US president’s declarations of victory as a two-week ceasefire in the conflict teeters on the brink.

Trump has accused Tehran of not sticking to an agreement to re-open the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway.

Meanwhile, Israel is continuing to launch missiles against Lebanon in another apparent violation of the ceasefire.

In an article for the BBC website, Bowen said leaked versions of an American 15-point plan to end the war “sound more like a surrender document than a basis for negotiation”.

He also said that despite the killing of Iran’s supreme leader at the start of the war, there has been no regime change in the country, despite what the president has claimed.

“With or without the active participation of the new supreme leader, Iran’s regime has demonstrated depths of resilience that took Trump by surprise,” Bowen said.

“Now Donald Trump’s representatives, led by his vice-president JD Vance, must negotiate with adversaries that they claim, incorrectly, to have defeated.”

He added: “The US and Israel have done immense damage to Iran’s armed forces as well as its military and civilian infrastructure. However, while the Iranian regime may be battered, it’s also intact.

“Regime change is not happening. Iran can still launch missiles and drones. That means that despite loud claims, the US and Israel have not translated tactical victories into strategic advances.

“Iran, on the other hand, has shown that the closing of the Strait of Hormuz gives it a strategic edge that Donald Trump either dismissed or did not understand when he listened to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arguments for going to war with Iran.”

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First lady Melania Trump called for Congress to hold a public hearing centred on survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse, in a press appearance where she also attempted to distance herself from the late sex abuser.

“Give these victims their opportunity to testify under oath in front of Congress with the power of sworn testimony,” she told reporters. “Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public, if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the congressional record.”

The demand is a major step for the first lady, given the friendship her husband, President Donald Trump, had with the disgraced financier. The White House has not immediately responded to HuffPost’s request for comment, though CNN reports that the president was not previously aware his wife would mention Epstein in her speech.

The Trump administration has faced a major backlash for its efforts to hinder the full, transparent release of the Epstein files. Under recently ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi, relevant documents would be released over multiple drops, with many items censoring powerful names while revealing survivors’ identities.

“First Lady Melania Trump is now shifting the burden onto survivors under politicised conditions that protect those with power,” more than a dozen Epstein survivors said in a Thursday statement.

“The Department of Justice, law enforcement, prosecutors and the Trump Administration, which has still not fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”

Trump made sure to clarify, for some reason, that she herself “is not Epstein’s victim,” and that the “disgraceful” sex abuser was not responsible for introducing her to Donald Trump. She also condemned what she called “fake images and statements” purporting to link her to Epstein.

“The individuals lying about me are devoid of ethical standards, humility and respect,” she said. “I do not object to their ignorance, but rather I reject their mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation.”

The first lady named The Daily Beast as an example of an outlet that had to retract its claims about her ties with Epstein. But given that the story Trump is likely referring to was from February, it’s unclear why she is choosing to speak about it now.

“I have never had any knowledge of Epstein’s abuse of his victims. I was never involved in any capacity — I was not a participant, was never on Epstein’s plane and never visited his private island,” she said.

Trump did admit, however, that she exchanged an email at least once with Epstein’s now-imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. The October 2002 email in question was made public in February by the House.

“Dear G! How are you? Nice story about JE in NY mag. You look great on the picture,” her email to Maxwell read, with “JE” likely a shortened reference to Epstein. “I know you are very busy flying all over the world. How was Palm Beach? I cannot wait to go down. Give me a call when you are back in NY. Have a great time!”

Maxwell responded to Trump by thanking her for the message and calling her “sweet pea.”

“Actually plans changed again and I am now on my way back to NY,” she said. “I leave again on Fri so I still do not think I have time to see you sadly. I will try and call though. Keep well.”

On Thursday, Trump said her email to Maxwell “cannot be categorised as anything more than casual correspondence.”

“My polite reply to her email doesn’t amount to anything more than a [trivial] note,” she continued, after claiming that she was not friends with Epstein.

Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who alongside Democrat Ro Khanna has aggressively pushed for accountability and justice related to the Epstein files, said on Thursday that the job of asking survivors to testify before Congress falls on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

″[Khanna] & I already gave brave survivors a chance to tell their horrific stories on Capitol Hill,” Massie posted on X. “Pam Bondi wouldn’t even acknowledge them.”

The survivors said on Thursday that they have already shown “extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports and giving testimony,” and that asking them to do more is “a deflection of responsibility, not justice.”

“Survivors have done their part,” they said. “Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.”

Warning: This articles contains spoilers for The Drama.

Going to see The Drama, the new flick starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, may initially feel like sitting down to a typical romantic comedy.

The film’s marketing revolves heavily around the idea of a gorgeous wedding, surrounded by loved ones, until the bride-to-be reveals a secret a few days before she and her fiancé are set to get married: When she was 15, she planned to carry out a school shooting.

After another mass shooting happened the same day, though, Zendaya’s character, Emma, ultimately didn’t go through with her plans.

Production company A24 has been coy about the big secret in all of its promotional materials, and viewers are given no forewarning as they settle into their seats about the subject matter that is about to play out onscreen.

The trailer suggests that Emma committed a serious faux pas — but one that might simply reflect a quirk of her personality.

In fact, the only way a moviegoer would know about the big twist is if they had already seen spoilers online, where critics have congregated to question the movie’s whole premise.

Melissa Alexander, whose two kids survived the 2023 Covenant School shooting that left three other children and three adults dead, knew about the plot twist going in.

Still, she walked out of the cinema before The Drama was finished. The film gave her a nightmare later that night.

Alexander saw the movie Friday night with another Covenant mum in a cinema less than a mile away from the Tennessee school, and the pair walked out about two-thirds of the way in, as Charlie is talking to his friends about Emma’s past.

In the scene, Charlie wonders aloud, given that mass shootings are such a prevalent problem in America, whether there may be a bunch of people who think about committing such a crime but never go through with it.

“There’s not just a bunch of normal people walking around thinking about doing something like this,” Alexander told HuffPost. “It’s a specific type of person. And to diminish it down to everyday people just really annoyed me.

“If somebody is watching this movie, who has some sort of ideations or thoughts about this, I think what it does for them is it helps to normalise it for them.”

An increasing number of Americans have first-hand experience with the terror of a mass shooting.

So far this year, there have been 32 shootings on campuses across the US, resulting in 15 deaths and 15 injuries, according to Everytown, a gun violence prevention organisation.

And there have been 99 mass shootings in America this year, which the Gun Violence Archive defines as at least four people shot, not including the shooter. Gun violence is the number one cause of death in teens and children; in 2024, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis.

Emma explains to Charlie she was bullied in school and got caught up in the “aesthetics” of mass shooters – a definition she never really parses. The movie shows Emma, wearing dark eye makeup, posing with a rifle in front of her webcam. But after a nearby shooting leaves one of her classmates dead, Emma abandons her plans and instead joins her fellow classmates in advocating for gun control.

Later on, it’s revealed that Emma becomes so involved in gun control activism that she’s arrested for harassing Walmart employees for selling guns.

For Alexander, Emma’s motivating factor – bullying – felt oversimplified and woefully unrealistic. The person who killed six people at the Covenant School was not exacting revenge against peers for bullying: They were 28 and killed three nine-year-olds.

“These people are mentally ill, and they don’t just grow up to be a beautiful Hollywood actress like Zendaya,” she said.“That’s not a normal trajectory or the way somebody matures.”

Gun control activists have been among the film’s most vocal critics. One of them, Mia Tretta, was shot during the deadly 2019 mass shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, and also survived the recent deadly shooting at Brown University. She is an advisor for Students Demand Action, an organization of students advocating for the end of gun violence.

Tretta chastised The Drama’s filmmakers for treating school shootings as a “plot point”.

“It’s a reality I lived through when I was shot at my school at 15 years old, and again as a terrified student at Brown this past December,” she said in a statement to HuffPost.

“Using a planned massacre as a rom-com hook isn’t ‘starting a conversation’, it’s exploiting a crisis. There are ways to show nuance without using trauma as a gimmick. Studios and stars have massive platforms, and they should use them to give dimension to survivors, not perpetrators.”

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was murdered in the 2018 Parkland high school shooting, hasn’t seen the movie yet, but told HuffPost that he had hope for it given Zendaya’s past acknowledgement of his own activism. The actress once shared a clip of Guttenberg speaking at a Parkland vigil on Instagram.

But Guttenberg remains wary of any effort to explain away a mass shooter.

“Once somebody makes a decision to commit the act of gun violence, I don’t feel the need to humanise them,” Gutenberg told HuffPost.

March For Our Lives, an organisation started by victims of the Parkland massacre, wrote on X that the marketing for The Drama — as a dark romantic comedy — is “deeply misaligned” with the reality of school shootings.

During the press tour, Zendaya has played into cutesy matrimonial tradition, donning “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue”.

Zendaya has acknowledged in interviews that the movie has “many elements of a romantic comedy”, but called it “heartbreaking, disturbing to some, emotional, but also so much more than that”. Robert, meanwhile, has said it is “so romantic”.

Entertainment reporters appear to be helping preserve the film’s big twist, though, as the stars have not been pressed to answer for the controversy. Their discussions have instead focused more broadly on the relationship between Emma and Charlie, and the moral lines that people may draw – or not – when it comes to those closest to them.

“I think the movie is exploring more, like, your personal limit, and … the limits for how honest and how flawed you can be in your most private life,” Kristoffer Borgli, the 40-year-old Norwegian who wrote and directed The Drama, told the Popcorn Podcast.

There is little solid research into the minds of mass shooters. Two criminologists who spent a decade researching mass shootings told the US news show 60 Minutes that shooters often experience “horrific trauma” early in life, but can appear very normal in person, like “the kid sitting next to you in class”. They suggested overstigmatising shooters could lead people to believing there is nothing that can be done to help them.

Julia Moralez knows what it’s like to know someone before they reveal a horrifying secret. She knew the mass shooter who carried out the 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people and injured 89 others. The shooter once lived with Moralez, who told HuffPost that when she knew him, he was “polite, kind and well-mannered”. But reports after the shooting revealed he was a white supremacist.

Moralez was initially interested in seeing The Drama, but once she read the spoiler online, she didn’t think she could.

“It seemed edgy for the sake of being edgy,” Moralez told HuffPost. “There were just things I didn’t like and felt exploitative to me personally. Even the title, The Drama, just making light of something that is a real-life situation for a lot of people … just doesn’t sit right with me.”

The film also goes against statistics that show mass shootings are typically carried out by boys and men. Emma’s gender is only briefly discussed in the movie when, during a class discussion on mass shooters, Emma corrects one of her classmates when they say that mass shooters are almost always boys. Emma chimes in and says that not only do girls do it sometimes, but mass shootings even happen outside of America, too.

But Moralez doesn’t see it that way.

“If you look at the numbers, it’s something that affects men,” Moralez said. “And I think that that’s something that needs to be looked at. And I think that twisting it to [be] a female issue, for the sake of a story, a good drama, is kind of belittling an issue that affects males, especially as someone who knows someone who shot and killed more than 50 people and live-streamed it.”

“I like Zendaya as an actor, but I’m kind of disappointed that she took this role because I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem right to me.”

Donald Trump’s apparent failure to foresee one of the main consequences of the war in Iran has been mocked by an LBC presenter.

James Hanson said it “beggars belief” that the US president did not think Tehran would end up charging oil tankers for passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The key waterway, which normally carries around one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquid gas supply, has been effectively closed by Iran since shortly after the start of the war.

Under the terms of a two-week ceasefire agreed on Tuesday night, Iran is supposed to have re-opened the strait.

But in a post on his Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said: “There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait — They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!”

In a follow up post, the president added: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!”

In a monologue on his LBC show, James Hanson said: “Honestly, it beggars belief that the man still has not thought through the consequences of his actions.

“What did he think would happen when he started bombing Iran? Of course they were going to retaliate.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending what the Iranians are doing, not least because it’s blooming inconvenient for the rest of us who are paying more at the pumps as a result.

“But if you are the Iranians, of course the only way you are going to raise revenue to carry on fighting is by charging vessels for the right to pass safely through the Strait of Hormuz.

“This is why officials in the Pentagon warned successive presidents for the best part of half a century ’do not launch a war against Iran because they will retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz and that will be incredibly difficult to unpick.

“What did he think was going to happen?”

CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes offered some insight as to why first lady Melania Trump, seemingly out of the blue, attempted to distance herself from the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday.

“I’m told by a number of White House officials that they were just absolutely stunned, particularly by the timing of these remarks,” Holmes told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday night. “It sparked rumors all across the White House campus that she was trying to get ahead of something that most people must not know about.”

Holmes added that some sources close to Trump told her they were less surprised by the first lady’s remarks because she had reportedly been growing frustrated with the online discourse about her alleged relationship with Epstein.

“She’s never actually come out and flat out denied it, and she wanted an on-the-record denial,” Holmes said.

President Donald Trump told MS NOW that he did not know about the first lady’s statement ahead of time. He added that “she didn’t know [Epstein].”

However, Holmes said a source inside the White House told her the president was indeed aware of the first lady’s statement in advance.

Former Malcolm In The Middle cast member Erik Per Sullivan evidently had no interest in returning for the show’s new revival.

As a child performer, Erik played Malcolm’s younger brother Dewey in all seven seasons of the family sitcom, which is about to be rebooted for a new generation.

However, in the show’s new iteration, the character of Dewey will be played by new addition Caleb Ellsworth-Clark, after the OG actor declined to return.

During a new interview with The Guardian, Malcolm In The Middle star Jane Kaczmarek made it clear that Erik was approached about coming back – and producers were more than willing to make it worth his while.

“They offered him buckets of money to come back, and he just said: ‘No thank you’,” Jane said, pointing out that Erik is happier focussing on his studies at Harvard, where he’s pursuing a master’s degree in literature.

Outside of Malcolm In The Middle, Erik went on to appear in Christmas With The Kranks and Finding Nemo during his career as a child actor.

It seems he has now retired from acting altogether, last appearing in the 2010 crime drama Twelve, at the age of 19.

Jane and her on-screen husband Bryan Cranston are both appearing in the revival, as are co-stars Frankie Muniz, Christopher Masterson and Justin Berfield.

Among the other new members of the cast are Keeley Karsten, playing Malcolm’s daughter Leah, while Anthony Timpano and Vaughan Murrae will play his younger brothers.

A synopsis for the four-part Disney+ series, titled Malcolm In The Middle: Life’s Still Unfair, reads: “Malcolm and his daughter are drawn into the family’s chaos when Hal and Lois demand his presence for their 40th wedding anniversary party.”

Malcolm In The Middle: Life’s Still Unfair is now streaming on Disney+. Take a look at the official trailer below:

It’s extremely rare for a baby to be born on a plane – but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. In fact, in the past week, a baby was born on board a Caribbean Airlines flight to JFK Airport in New York, just as the plane was landing.

Dubbed ‘skyborns’, there are thought to be less than 100 people born on flights globally. One study analysing data on all in-flight births on commercial airlines found there were 74 babies born on commercial flights between 1929 and 2018 – 71 of which were known to have survived.

Of the births analysed, 10% were born at 37-38 weeks, 16% were born at 34-36 weeks, 19% were born at 31-33 weeks and 12% were born prior to 32 weeks. To put that into perspective, a pregnancy is considered full-term at 39 weeks – so, all of them were early to some degree.

As the chance of going into labour is naturally higher after 37 weeks (or 32 weeks for those carrying twins), some airlines won’t let you fly if you’re near these dates. But policies differ between airlines. A medical certificate from a doctor or midwife confirming you’re “fit to fly” is typically required after 28 weeks of pregnancy.

First things first, labour can be a pretty long process (although for parents having subsequent children, it can certainly be quicker). Some expectant parents might be able to touch down before their baby’s arrival.

If contractions begin during a flight, the cabin crew should be made aware and they can then move the person to a more comfortable part of the plane. They will also alert the pilot, who will relay the message to air traffic control.

Per Flightright UK, the cabin crew will then make an announcement, calling on any medical professionals among the passengers for assistance. Cabin crew receive basic training on handling an emergency delivery but they aren’t trained midwives or doctors, so do not have the training to deal with complications.

The study charting ‘skyborns’ found in 45% of the births recorded on planes; physicians, nurses, the flight crew and other medical personnel provided medical assistance.

“In extreme cases, the pilot can initiate an emergency landing to provide the mother and newborn with professional medical care as quickly as possible,” added Flightright.

The aircraft might be diverted to a hospital, HuffPost UK understands, however there are other aviation safety considerations for the pilot, and an immediate diversion is limited by the route of the aircraft – for example, if it’s crossing an ocean.

Last year, a baby was born mid-flight from Dakar to Brussels, delivered by a cabin crew member, newly-graduated nurse and doctor (who were passengers).

At the time, Brussels Airlines shared a photo of the newborn baby, called Fanta, held by one of the cabin crew members who helped deliver her, saying: “It was a true reflection of teamwork, care, and the extraordinary moments that happen in the sky.”