Ed Husic has conceded many Muslim and Arab Australians do not feel the Albanese government has listened to their concerns about the war in Gaza, while saying he is speaking out despite his role as a cabinet minister to amplify their views.

Husic told Guardian Australia he had felt driven to make several public interventions against the scale of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, in part so that people believed “that their concerns have somewhere to go to be vented and aired”.

“I know and have for many years moved among people, particularly from an Islamic and [Arab] background [and] Palestinians … who feel like their voice isn’t heard,” Husic said.

“It’s important that people feel like they’re heard and that their viewpoints are being taken into account.”

Asked directly whether people from such backgrounds had felt their voices had not been heard by the government, Husic said: “It would be inconceivable for me to give you any other answer than yes, they have felt that.

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“They felt that politics – modern Australian politics, if I can put it this way – hasn’t heard those different viewpoints. And it is important to address that.”

Husic said the Albanese government had “moved quite a bit”, including by voting at the UN general assembly in December for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire along with the release of hostages held by Hamas.

But Husic acknowledged that some people thought the government should have moved more quickly to that ceasefire call “and I understand why they might have those views”.

The comments – made in an interview with Guardian Australia’s Australian Politics podcast, to be released on Saturday – are his most expansive to date on why he has chosen to raise his own voice in alarm.

The minister for industry and science is bound by cabinet solidarity obligations to publicly uphold the Australian government’s collective position.

While he has tended to criticise Israel’s military operations rather than dissenting from explicit Australian government positions, Husic has sometimes used more forthright language than his cabinet colleagues.

That included when Husic said in October that Palestinians were “being collectively punished here for Hamas’s barbarism”, and in December when he said children were bearing the brunt of Israel’s “very disproportionate” response.

In the new podcast, Husic went even further by saying he was worried some Palestinians could be permanently displaced from parts of Gaza.

“I’m very concerned about the fact that people who’ve been making their way back to see their homes [have been] completely destroyed, to see everything that sustains community life gone – schools, hospitals, infrastructure, roads, market places,” Husic said.

“I’m genuinely concerned, too, that we’re at a point where people would be understandably thinking: are we seeing permanent displacement before our eyes. And that’s a very serious issue under international humanitarian law.”

Husic said any move to re-establish Israeli settlements in Gaza – an idea backed by at least two Israeli ministers – “would be a terrible outcome and an unacceptable one at that”. Israel unilaterally withdrew its settlements from Gaza in 2005.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, parties to an armed conflict must not forcibly displace civilians “unless the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand”.

It says international humanitarian law also gives internally displaced persons “a right to voluntary return in safety”.

The Israeli government has denied claims of collective punishment, arguing that the “temporary” evacuation orders were issued to protect Palestinian civilians and that Hamas embeds its fighters in civilian infrastructure.

A new United Nations report estimates that Israel has destroyed more than 3,000 buildings within a 1km security “buffer zone” that it is creating inside the Gaza Strip along the territory’s border.

Husic, who made history in 2022 as the first Muslim to serve in Australia’s cabinet, declined to reveal whether he had considered quitting at any point in the past six months.

“It took me a while to get there [into cabinet], and I’d like to be able to take full advantage of that at the moments that matter,” he said.

Husic praised the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, for running “a cabinet government where people can speak their minds”.

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, accused Husic in December of making “comments that are offensive to the Jewish community here in Australia”.

But Husic said his record showed he had “spoken up strongly, not just on Islamophobia, but antisemitism as well”. He has also repeatedly called for Hamas to release the hostages it still holds in Gaza.

Husic said all politicians must ensure “that we are not dividing and creating a sense of deep division and tearing at social cohesion”.

“As much as I have very sharp criticisms about the way that the Israeli government has conducted itself in this, there is a big role for parliamentarians of all political colours, to make sure that Jewish Australians, Islamic Australians, all Australians, feel a degree of safety and surety and confidence,” he said.

The podcast interview was recorded on Monday, before a stabbing incident at Christ The Good Shepherd church in Wakeley in western Sydney.

After the incident, Husic posted on Facebook: “We all stand as one against violence, hatred and extremism.”

• Hear the full interview with Ed Husic on Guardian Australia’s Australian Politics podcast on Saturday

The Australian government has urged all parties to “exercise restraint and step back” after the US confirmed Israel has launched retaliatory strikes on Iran, bringing the Middle East closer to a regional war.

Officials in Washington said Israeli forces were carrying out military operations against Iran but did not describe the character or scale of those operations. Iranian state media said that drones had been shot down over Isfahan province in the early hours, and showed live shots of morning traffic in Isfahan city after sunrise to show that the situation was calm.

The acting foreign minister, Katy Gallagher, said on Friday that Australia “remains extremely concerned about the potential for miscalculation and further escalation of conflict in the region”.

“This is in no one’s interests,” Gallagher said.

“We urge all parties to exercise restraint and step back to avoid a further spiral of violence.”

Gallagher said Australia would continue working with its partners to try to reduce tensions and prevent further regional spillover.

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Reuters on Friday cited sources saying Israel launched an attack on Iranian soil, in the latest tit-for-tat exchange between the two arch-foes.

Iranian media later reported explosions but an Iranian official told Reuters those were caused by air defence systems.

Three drones over the central city of Isfahan were shot down. Israel was silent on Friday about the latest escalation.

The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, said the Albanese government must condemn all sides, adding silence against Israel’s action would be “considered tacit support of the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme war cabinet”.

“The only role Australia should play is pushing for de-escalation,” he said.

At a Jewish congregation in Melbourne on Friday morning, shortly before the first strikes, the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, said his party would always discern “lawful from the lawless, always differentiate civilisation from barbarism, and always discern the good from the evil”.

“This is why the unequivocal condemnation of Hamas is right,” he said. “And that is why we must unambiguously denounce Iran’s military attack on Israel and the regime’s sponsoring of terrorist groups across the region.”

Tensions have been rising since an airstrike on the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus on 1 April that was blamed on Israel. That strike killed a senior figure in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and eight other officers.

In response, Iran on 14 April launched missiles toward Israel. Almost all were shot down.

The Australian government unequivocally condemned Iran’s strikes towards Israel, saying the “reckless” action was “a grave threat to the security of Israel and the entire region”.

Meanwhile, the Australian government’s SmartTraveller website was updated on Friday to reflect the latest developments. The advice for Australians remains “do not travel” to Iran and “reconsider your need to travel” to Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

“Regional tensions are high, and the security situation could deteriorate quickly with little or no notice,” the website said.

For Israel, SmartTraveller warns “there’s a high threat of military reprisals and terrorist attacks against Israel and Israeli interests across the region”.

– With Australian Associated Press

A couple of weeks ago, Joe Fontaine stood in the middle of one of Western Australia’s eucalypt forests on another hot and dry day that was stripped of the usually raucous backing-track of bird calls.

“I could hear this scratching-crunching noise coming from the trees,” says Fontaine, a forest ecologist at Perth’s Murdoch University.

Peeling back the bark, a handful of beetle larvae “about the size of your pinky” were eating away at the dead and dying wood. “When the trees are stressed, the beetles get the upper hand,” he says.

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Above Fontaine, the forest canopy was turning brown. Trees more than a century old are barely alive. Some of these giant jarrahs might survive, but some won’t.

It’s a scene that’s being replicated in forests and coastal shrublands spanning more than 1,000km (620 miles) across the state’s south-west after drought and baking heat.

Many of these ecosystems are dominated by eucalypt trees such as jarrah and marri, and coastal shrublands spread with banksias, the likes of which are found nowhere else on Earth.

Pictures of dead and dying shrubs and trees have been flooding Fontaine’s inbox. One of the earliest signs came in February when Perth’s street trees started dying after a record run of days above 40C. The city had its driest six months – from October to March – since records began.

There were similar scenes in the state’s south-west eucalypt forests in 2010 and 2011 – a die-back event that prompted more than a dozen studies. Drought-hit forests were hit by fire years later, releasing carbon dioxide, and raising concerns the forests could switch to become a source, rather than a store, of carbon.

Dr Katinka Ruthrof, a senior research scientist in the state government’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, says the current die-off has similar characteristics to the 2011 event. The department is assessing the damage using imagery from satellites, fixed wing aircraft and drones, along with field checking.

“Some plants may be able to survive and resprout when conditions improve, but many may die,” she says. “This depends on how much longer the dry season lasts.”

Ruthrof says changes to the structure and composition of the habitats would have flow-on effects for some species, including the provision of habitat and food resources for wildlife.

Dr Mark Harvey, curator of spiders, millipedes and centipedes at the Western Australian Museum, says the south-west has hundreds of invertebrate species found nowhere else.

“The south-west corner of Western Australia has been isolated from other parts of the continent for the last three million years. That’s allowed species to develop in isolation.”

Those species have been used to moist conditions for many thousands of years, he says.

“We’re quite concerned about this drying event. If the animals don’t have a coping mechanism like burrowing to escape the heat, they literally die.

“They become locally extinct. They have nowhere to go. It will take thousands of years to recolonise, even if the habitat came good again. The prognosis is not good.”

Fontaine says seeing the death of shrublands and forests is “distressing” and he’s worried about the wildlife.

“I’m going hell for leather now to get people to go ‘oh shit, we need to document this’,” he says.

Clear climate signal

Fontaine’s Murdoch University colleague, atmospheric scientist Dr Kerryn Hawke, says the region’s trees and plants are used to a Mediterranean-style climate with cold fronts from the ocean to the south bringing good rainfall in the winter.

But studies have shown these fronts have been shifting further south, away from the coast.

She says: “These fronts no longer reach as far north, and that means we’re seeing less frontal rains and, when they do reach us, it’s not as intense. And we’re seeing more and more very hot days because of climate change. The vegetation just isn’t used to such low rainfall.”

Over the past 12 months, much of the state’s west has seen rainfall well below average and in some places the lowest on record, while temperatures have been among the highest on record.

“It’s a perfect storm of temperature and rainfall. But the stand out was the heat we had very early on,” she says, pointing to heatwaves in September and November.

The conditions in recent months are part of a distinct drying that scientists have seen in the region since the 1970s.

Compared with the period from 1901 to 1960, cool season rainfall in the last two decades has dropped by 20%. Very wet years have almost completely disappeared.

About half of this change has been blamed on rising greenhouse gas emissions, which could be an underestimate, according to one study led by Bureau of Meteorology scientists.

Even with rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the study suggested, the drying trend would probably continue for the rest of this century.

Dr Michael Grose, a climate scientist at the Australian government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, says as early as the 1970s scientists were seeing a drying trend.

“It is one of the clearest and strongest signals in mean rainfall anywhere in the world,” he says.

Fire and fear

There appears little relief on the horizon, with forecasts for the next three months suggesting more hot and dry weather to come.

Fontaine says with so much dead vegetation around, the risk of bushfires is rising.

Fire authorities will need to be cautious, he says, as they carry out prescribed burning to try to reduce the risk of larger out of control fires.

About 430km south-east of Perth is Walpole, where David Edmonds has a beef and orchid farm while volunteering with the Walpole-Nornalup National Parks Association.

He grew up in Walpole and this year has watched parts of the wilderness region – including giant 90-metre karri trees – turning brown.

“The rain just stopped really early. The die-off is becoming really obvious on the granite outcrops,” he says.

“It’s saddening. You worry if this is a one-off or something that’s going to be more common. We can’t start watering the trees.”

Three brothers, one of them only nine years old, and a family friend have been killed in a car crash in the Western Australian wheatbelt region.

The brothers, aged 21, 19 and nine, died at the scene in Clackline in the early hours of Friday morning, along with a 45-year-old man, who was visiting from NSW.

Police Supt Gene Pears said the accident site about an hour north-west of Perth was a confronting scene for first responders.

“This is a heartbreaking incident … unimaginable,” he told reporters.

The 21-year-old was driving and the family friend was travelling in the passenger seat when the silver Nissan Navara left the road and hit a tree about 12.30am.

The younger man’s brothers were in the ute’s back seat.

“When you lose three young men in the prime of their life and their friend, this will have lifelong impacts for that family, for their friends and for our community,” Pears said.

“This is a heartbreaking incident for WA … my heart goes out to the families.”

Major crash investigators are investigating the incident.

Anyone with information or dashcam footage of the ute before the crash is urged to contact Crime Stoppers.

Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into US critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow”, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has warned.

An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday.

China is developing the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing”, Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt summit on modern conflict and emerging threats.

He added: “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”

Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning, which was aligned with China’s broader intent to deter the US from defending Taiwan.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China’s sovereignty claims and says only the island’s people can decide their future.

Earlier this week, a Chinese ministry of foreign affairs (MFA) spokesperson said Volt Typhoon was in fact unrelated to China’s government, but was part of a criminal ransomware group.

In a statement, China’s embassy in Washington referred back to the MFA spokesperson’s comment, saying: “Some in the US have been using origin-tracing of cyber-attacks as a tool to hit and frame China, claiming the US to be the victim while it’s the other way round, and politicizing cybersecurity issues.”

Wray said China’s hackers operated a series of botnets – constellations of compromised personal computers and servers around the globe – to conceal their malicious cyber activities.

Private sector American technology and cybersecurity companies previously attributed Volt Typhoon to China, including reports by security researchers with Microsoft and Google.

Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into US critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow”, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has warned.

An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday.

China is developing the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing”, Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt summit on modern conflict and emerging threats.

He added: “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”

Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning, which was aligned with China’s broader intent to deter the US from defending Taiwan.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China’s sovereignty claims and says only the island’s people can decide their future.

Earlier this week, a Chinese ministry of foreign affairs (MFA) spokesperson said Volt Typhoon was in fact unrelated to China’s government, but was part of a criminal ransomware group.

In a statement, China’s embassy in Washington referred back to the MFA spokesperson’s comment, saying: “Some in the US have been using origin-tracing of cyber-attacks as a tool to hit and frame China, claiming the US to be the victim while it’s the other way round, and politicizing cybersecurity issues.”

Wray said China’s hackers operated a series of botnets – constellations of compromised personal computers and servers around the globe – to conceal their malicious cyber activities.

Private sector American technology and cybersecurity companies previously attributed Volt Typhoon to China, including reports by security researchers with Microsoft and Google.

The Victorian government is “fiercely proud” of its transgender health clinics, the state’s health minister has said in response to findings from a long anticipated review of gender-affirming care for young people in England.

Chaired by paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, the review was commissioned by England’s National Health Service (NHS) in 2020, with the final report published in April 2024.

The review found the evidence base underpinning medical and non-medical interventions for children and young people with gender dysphoria must be improved and that the NHS should exercise “extreme caution” in prescribing masculinising or feminising hormones from 16 years old.

Australian experts, including clinicians, politicians and peak medical bodies, spoken to by Guardian Australia all said the trans and gender-diverse care provided by states and territories is substantially different from that in England, and is based on holistic, best-practice care with various levels of assessments.

Guardian Australia understands neither New South Wales or Victoria have plans to make changes to puberty blocker prescribing or accessibility as a result of the Cass review.

Victoria’s health minister, Mary-Anne Thomas, said: “Our gender clinics offer some of the most vulnerable young people in our community the support they deserve – we’re fiercely proud of the important work they do.

“We will continue engaging with trans and gender-diverse community and health service partners to ensure that trans and gender-diverse people can access the care they need.”

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What the Cass review recommended

While the Cass review recommends every case considered for medical treatment should be discussed by a multidisciplinary team, Australian standards of care and treatment already include a multidisciplinary assessment of pubertal status, mental health needs, medical needs and social context.

Medical treatment is only initiated where clinically and legally appropriate, with informed consent from the young person, their carer and medical team all required. This may include prescribing puberty blockers, which can be used to delay the changes of puberty in transgender and gender-diverse youth.

The Cass review raised concerns that when puberty blockers were being prescribed within the NHS, young people, including older adolescents finished with puberty, only had to see psychologists.

In Australia, puberty blockers are seldom used for young people who have finished puberty.

The Cass review also raised concerns that puberty blockers can decrease bone density. In Australia, measures to counteract this are recommended, such as weight bearing exercises, vitamin D supplementation and calcium intake.

Associate Prof Ada Cheung, an endocrinologist with the Trans Health Research Group, said there are cases where “not providing, or delaying, wished-for and medically indicated treatment for transgender young people is emotionally distressing and is associated with poorer outcomes”.

“Doing nothing carries significant risk.”

While the Cass review found insufficient and inconsistent evidence around the impact of puberty blockers on psychosocial wellbeing, Cheung said it is important to note it found no studies which show worsening psychological functioning as a result of treatment with puberty blockers.

The Cass review did state: “clinicians agreed that puberty blockers and hormones provided an important pathway for care alongside therapeutic support”. Ensuring their safe use and considering long-term consequences is important, the review found.

Cheung said clinical guidelines elsewhere, including in Canada and Germany, support clinicians being able to confidently prescribe puberty blockers where appropriate. She is concerned the Cass review “downplays the risk of denying treatment to young people with gender dysphoria and limits their options by placing restrictions on their access to care”.

As a result of Cass’s preliminary findings, released in 2022, the NHS has banned the routine use of puberty blockers to treat children and young people who have gender dysphoria outside clinical research settings. Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland have taken a similar approach.

In Australia, puberty blockers are prescribed “always with individual weighing-up of the young person’s needs and wishes, and the benefits, risks and unknowns of the treatment in their personal situation,” Cheung said. It is not routine treatment.

“The UK have one single clinic with ridiculously long waiting lists with thousands who can’t access care and their approach is different to the holistic gender-affirming approach in Australia,” Cheung said.

Takeaways from the review

The Cass review highlights the importance of working with young people to explore their concerns and experiences around gender, “not to change who they are” but to “help alleviate their distress regardless of whether or not the young person subsequently proceeds on a medical pathway”, it said.

The president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP), Dr Elizabeth Moore, said it was important to make clear that being trans or gender diverse is not a mental health condition.

“RANZCP also acknowledges stigma, discrimination, trauma, abuse and assault contribute to trans and gender-diverse people experiencing higher rates of mental illness than the general population,” she said.

“Psychiatry has a role and a responsibility to help counter, prevent and protect against this.”

The vice-president of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Danielle McMullen, said a key message from the Cass review was that trans and gender-diverse young people are a very vulnerable population that requires the best care and support available.

“It is extremely important that every child who is gender-questioning has timely access to both clinical and mental health services that are multidisciplinary and responsive to their individual needs,” she said.

Issues with applying the Cass review to Australia

A spokesperson for the federal health minister, Mark Butler, said clinical treatment of transgender children and adolescents is a complex and evolving area in which longer-term evidence to inform treatment protocols is still developing.

“The clinical care pathways are different in the UK from Australia,” the spokesperson said. “The provision of public gender services to young people in Australia is led by the states and territories, who are responsible for the relevant services.”

The Cass review has been criticised by some Australian clinicians and trans health experts for having an unrealistic threshold for high-quality evidence, effectively discounting moderate-quality observational studies that were not randomised control trials, considered the gold standard of scientific research.

Randomised control trials are not always feasible or ethical to conduct, the vice-president of the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH), Dr Portia Predny, said. Many areas of medicine, including perinatal care and paediatric care, lack randomised control trials, she said.

“Additionally, when you have multiple observational studies looking at a particular intervention and those studies are producing similar findings, the cumulative evidence becomes compelling.”

Applying the findings and recommendations of the Cass review to the care of young people in Australia “was fundamentally flawed” because it looked specifically at the NHS system, she added.

The Queensland health minister, Shannon Fentiman, said the state’s Children’s Gender Service “is considered one of the best in the country, and continually reviews its models of care to ensure it is based off the best available evidence”.

“All trans young people deserve access to high-quality and timely healthcare and that is something we are committed to continue providing,” she said.

A spokesperson for the NSW health minister, Ryan Park, said trans and gender-diverse healthcare is a complex and evolving practice area.

“NSW Health continues to monitor developments in the evidence to ensure the care we provide remains consistent with national and international best practice,” he said.

The New South Wales Liberal party has expelled state MP Taylor Martin as a result of an investigation into text messages he sent to a woman with whom he was in a relationship.

Martin, who has been a member of the NSW upper house since 2017, has sat outside of the Liberal party room since July last year after the party launched the investigation.

At the time, Martin unreservedly apologised for what he called “heated words” during an “undignified breakup”. The text messages were allegedly sent by Martin to a woman he was in a relationship with, who wishes to remain anonymous.

In a statement on Friday, the NSW Liberal party state director, Richard Shields, said a report on the investigation had been received and Martin would be expelled as a result.

“On the basis of the report’s findings the NSW Liberal party state director has acted quickly and decisively, ratified by the state executive, to expel Mr Martin as a member of the NSW division,” Shields said.

“The NSW Liberal party expects the highest standards of behaviour of its members and elected representatives and will continue to strive to ensure those standards are consistently upheld.”

NSW Liberal leader Mark Speakman said on Friday night that he supported the party’s decision to expel Martin and that the public was “entitled to expect, the highest standards of behaviour by MPs”.

The report has not been released, and the party said it remains confidential.

Martin said he was shocked and disappointed with the finding. In July he had said he was “young and inexperienced” in a situation that was “way beyond me”.

“There were heated words during my attempts to go separate ways that I sincerely regret. It was an ugly and undignified parting of ways.”

In 2022, a report uncovered systemic bullying, five alleged sexual assaults and widespread harassment within the state’s parliament.

The review, conducted by former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, uncovered “systemic and multi-directional bullying, with more than a third of respondents saying they had been bullied or sexually harassed over the past five years.

Women who have been secretly filmed on nights out are being urged to contact UK police after videos posted online have racked up millions of views and attracted an abundance of misogynistic comments.

Police are trying to catch people responsible for dozens of voyeuristic TikTok and YouTube videos that have titles such as “Manchester nightlife” and feature women who do not know they are being filmed.

Women have described feeling unsafe after discovering videos of them have been posted online, some of which suggest they are sex workers or invite sexualised comments.

One woman, Meg, who was filmed on Deansgate in Manchester walking to get a taxi with some other women, told the BBC: “I didn’t see him, I didn’t know I was being recorded. I can’t believe I’ve been targeted in that way. He looked at me and thought ‘yeah, I’ll video them’.”

The filmer appears to target young women wearing tight clothes or short dresses, focusing in particular on women who have been drinking. The videos tend to be posted on the same night they are taken.

Greater Manchester police (GMP) said woman had reported seeing a man wearing Ray-Ban-style glasses with a hidden camera inside.

While filming people on a public street is not illegal, it becomes criminal when it constitutes harassment.

Meg said: “I have no words really other than it just made me feel a bit sick. It’s just not nice at all, and obviously not just in a selfish way but also towards the other women. A lot of them will be really, really young girls, maybe even underage girls, not knowing that they were being recorded.

“There’s videos of girls like falling over and having their underwear on show and stuff. And then being posted online like that, something really needs to be done about it.”

Ch Insp Stephen Wiggins said GMP needed women to come forward in order to catch the perpetrator. He said: “We are very much up against it if we don’t get that intelligence, that information, coming from the actual victims and communities themselves.

“We have intervened recently on a number of occasions where we had males acting suspiciously in the city centre. So our plea from our organisation is that people ring us if they see any suspicious behaviour in the city centre.”

TikTok and YouTube told the BBC they had removed a number of videos and accounts relating to this content for violating their guidelines.

A TikTok spokesperson said: “Misogyny is prohibited on TikTok. Any content found to violate these guidelines will be removed.”

However, searching TikTok for “uk nightlife” brings up suggested search terms including “chav girls uk”, “uk slagz fit”, “oops girls no kickers” (sic) and “girls helping me finish”.

Meg said: “They shouldn’t be allowed to be posted online without consent. These videos are creating almost a danger of violence towards women. The video that was took of me was posted on the same night. So if I was still out that night and that video was posted, that creates some sort of danger of violence, I believe.”

A woman who stalked Harry Styles has been jailed and banned from seeing him perform.

Myra Carvalho, who appeared at Harrow crown court sitting at Hendon magistrates court in London, was said to have stalked the singer by sending him 8,000 cards in less than a month.

She was sentenced to 14 weeks’ imprisonment after pleading guilty on Tuesday to a charge of stalking involving serious alarm or distress, a court official said.

A 10-year restraining order was also imposed on Carvalho, who was told she was forbidden from attending any event where Styles was performing.

Carvalho, who had been staying at a backpacker hostel in south-west London, was also ordered not to contact the singer, directly or indirectly.

She was told not to enter an area of north-west London that was described in the court, the official added, and ordered to pay a victim surcharge of £134.

Carvalho sent the 30-year-old singer handwritten letters while in the UK, and ordered a series of cards for him online that were sent to his address, the court had previously heard.

Of the 8,000 cards sent, some were wedding cards and two of the letters were hand-delivered to Styles’s address, prosecutors said.

Carvalho is a Brazilian national who has been in the UK since December. Her family did not know she had travelled to the country, the court was told previously.

Appearing via video link from HMP Bronzefield in a hearing in February, Carvalho spoke only to confirm her name.

Styles has been targeted by a stalker before. In 2019, a homeless man who spent months camped outside the pop star’s home was found guilty of the offence. Styles first encountered Pablo Tarazaga-Orero outside his home on a wet night, and was “sad to see someone so young sleeping rough”, Hendon magistrates court heard.

He offered him money for a hotel or food and, in the coming weeks, began to see Tarazaga-Orero around regularly. He began showing up at Styles’s local pub up to four times a week, entering the establishment “anywhere between a minute and two minutes after [Styles] arrived”, leading the pop star to believe he was being followed.

The encounters made Styles feel “unsafe and uneasy” in his home, leading him to employ a night guard, lock his bedroom door at night and assess “weak spots” in his residence. “If I see people on multiple occasions, I view them differently than I would before,” Styles told the court.