Donald Trump is set to return to the White House, having promised action on issues including immigration, the economy and the war in Ukraine.

He looks likely to enjoy plenty of support for his political agenda in Congress after his Republican Party regained control of the Senate.

In his victory speech, Trump vowed he would “govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept. We’re going to keep our promises”.

But in some cases, he has given little detail of how he might achieve his aims.

Asked in 2023 by Fox News whether he would abuse his power or target political opponents, he replied he would not, “except for day one”.

“No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
• Results: Who did each state vote for?
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While campaigning, Trump promised the biggest mass deportations of undocumented migrants in US history.

He also pledged to complete the building of a wall at the border with Mexico that was started during his first presidency.

The number of crossings at the US southern border hit record levels at the end of last year during the Biden-Harris administration, before falling in 2024.

Experts have told the BBC that deportations on the scale promised by Trump would face huge legal and logistical challenges – and could slow economic growth.

Exit poll data has suggested the economy was a key issue for voters. Trump has promised to “end inflation” – which rose to high levels under President Joe Biden before falling again. But a president’s power to directly influence prices is limited.

He has also promised sweeping tax cuts, extending his overhaul from 2017. He has proposed making tips tax-free, abolishing tax on social security payments and shaving corporation tax.

He has proposed new tariffs of at least 10% on most foreign goods, to cut the trade deficit. Imports from China could bear an additional 60% tariff, he has said. Some economists have warned that such moves could push up prices for ordinary people.

During his first presidency, Trump rolled back hundreds of environmental protections and made America the first nation to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

This time, he has again vowed to cut regulations, particularly as a way to help the American car industry. He has constantly attacked electric vehicles, promising to overturn Biden’s targets encouraging the switch to cleaner cars.

He has pledged to increase production of US fossil fuels – vowing to “drill, drill, drill” on day one in favour of renewable energy sources such as wind power.

He wants to open areas such as the Arctic wilderness to oil drilling, which he argues would lower energy costs – though analysts are sceptical.

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Trump has criticised the tens of billions of dollars spent by the US on supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia – and has pledged to end the conflict “within 24 hours” through a negotiated deal.

He has not said what he thinks either side should give up. Democrats say the move would embolden President Vladimir Putin.

Trump wants the US to disentangle itself from foreign conflicts generally. Regarding the war in Gaza – Trump has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of Israel, but has urged the American ally to end its operation.

He has also pledged to end the related violence in Lebanon, but gave no detail on how.

Against the wishes of some of his supporters, Trump said during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris that he would not sign into law a national abortion ban.

In 2022, the nationwide constitutional right to abortion was overturned by the Supreme Court, which had a majority of conservative judges following Trump’s first presidency.

Reproductive rights became a key campaigning topic for Harris, and several states approved measures to protect or expand abortion rights on polling day.

Trump himself has regularly said states should be free to decide their own laws on abortion, but struggled to find a consistent message of his own.

Trump has said he will “free” some of those convicted of offences during the riot in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol building in an effort to thwart the 2020 election victory of Joe Biden.

Several deaths were blamed on the violence, which Trump was accused of inciting.

He has worked to downplay the riot’s significance and recast the hundreds of supporters who were convicted as political prisoners.

He continues to say many of them are “wrongfully imprisoned”, though has acknowledged that “a couple of them, probably they got out of control”.

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Trump has vowed to sack “within two seconds” of taking office the veteran prosecutor leading two criminal investigations against him.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has indicted Trump over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and over his alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Trump denies any wrongdoing, and managed to prevent either case coming to trial before the election. He says Mr Smith has subjected him to a “political witch hunt”.

Trump will return to the White House as the first ever president with a criminal conviction, having been found guilty in New York of falsifying business records.

• GLOBAL: What does Trump victory mean for UK?
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• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Republican Donald Trump will be the next US president – after a decisive victory that will send him back to the White House.

His defeated opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, urged her supporters to accept Trump’s win, and insisted there must be a peaceful transfer of power.

He will be the first former president to return to office in more than 130 years, and – at 78 – the oldest man ever elected to the role.

Trump has already been congratulated by world leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the UK’s Keir Starmer, but the official presidential election results are not yet confirmed.

There had been fears that extremely close races in some of the key battleground “swing” states might have left the results uncertain.

But earlier-than-expected wins in North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, coupled with victories in solidly Republican states, meant Trump reached the magic 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency.

CBS, the BBC’s broadcasting partner in the US, projected Donald Trump as the overall winner just after 05:30 EST (10:30 GMT) on 6 November, the day after the election.

However, it could still take days or even weeks for the detailed election results to be confirmed officially in every state.

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No. Trump becomes the president-elect, and his running mate JD Vance becomes the vice-president elect.

Trump will be sworn in at the presidential inauguration on Monday, 20 January 2025, at which point he legally assumes the power and responsibilities of the presidency.

After winning the 2016 election. Trump was sworn in as president in January 2017 and served until 2021.

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Once every valid vote has been included in the final results, a process known as the electoral college confirms the election result.

In each state a varying number of electoral college votes are up for grabs. It is securing these – and not the backing of voters themselves – that ultimately wins the presidency.

Generally, states award all of their electoral college votes to whoever wins the popular vote, and this is confirmed after meetings on 17 December.

The new US Congress then meets on 6 January to count the electoral college votes and confirm the new president. As the outgoing vice-president, Kamala Harris will preside over this process.

It was this meeting of Congress, to certify the election results, that Trump’s supporters tried to stop, when they marched on the US Capitol in 2021 after Trump refused to concede defeat to Joe Biden.

Trump and Vance will work with their transition team to organise the handover from President Biden’s outgoing administration.

They will identify their policy priorities, start vetting the candidates who will take up key roles in the new administration, and prepare to take over the functions of government.

At his victory rally, Trump hinted that the former Republican presidential candidate and vaccine sceptic Robert J Kennedy could be given a healthcare role.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is also expected to feature in the new administration. Trump previously said he would ask Mr Musk to tackle government waste.

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Trump and his team will also begin receiving classified national security briefings covering current threats and ongoing military operations.

The president-elect and vice-president-elect also receive mandatory protection from the US Secret Service.

Trump’s team says he has accepted a traditional invitation from Biden to visit the White House to ensure a smooth transition between the administrations.

The outgoing president also typically attends the inauguration of the incoming president, although Trump chose to boycott the 2021 event.

Trump did, however, follow the tradition begun by Ronald Reagan of leaving a handwritten note in the Oval Office for his successor to read.

At the time, President Biden told reporters that his predecessor had left “a very generous letter”.

After the inauguration, the new president begins work immediately.

The re-election of Donald Trump to the White House is focusing minds in Europe, and with dozens of leaders meeting in Budapest, they have the perfect chance to talk it through.

Trump’s first term in office saw a dramatic souring of relations. He was angry European countries didn’t pay more towards their own security.

He was livid about the US trade deficit with Europe. And he seemed particularly irate with EU big power Germany on both those counts. Just ask German ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

So what will the future Trump presidency mean for the continent? And in particular, for Ukraine?

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
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Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky is in the Hungarian capital for a meeting of the European Political Community. It was the brainchild of French President Emmanuel Macron – launched following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a talking-shop to jointly tackle continental challenges.

The fear here is that the new US administration will slow, if not stop, the flow of American military aid to Kyiv. The US has been the largest single donor to Ukraine. By far. And Europe will struggle to take up the slack.

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Trump boasted in the past he could end the war with Russia in a day. What isn’t clear is whether he wants Ukraine to win.

Europe’s leaders, notably UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, have repeatedly pledged to stand by Ukraine.

Zelensky will appeal to them on Thursday to stay true to their word.

Things look challenging for Kyiv, to say the least.

Not only is the future of US military aid now insecure, there’s a question mark too over Ukraine’s second largest donor, Germany. Its three-party coalition government crumbled late on Wednesday.

On top of all this, the host of Thursday’s meeting is none other than Hungary’s Trump-enthusiastic Prime Minister, Viktor Orban. Also well-known for his close ties to Moscow, his reluctance to impose sanctions on Russia and to provide self-defence weapons to Ukraine.

He has repeatedly called on the EU to demand an “unconditional and immediate ceasefire” between Ukraine and Russia: going against the insistence among Ukraine’s Western allies to date that Kyiv should dictate its own terms.

Orban describes Trump as being in what he calls his “pro-peace” camp.

All that said, President Zelensky and others in Budapest this Thursday hope to maintain friendly relations with the new Trump administration for as long as possible.

The mainly gushing congratulatory messages from Europe’s leaders on social media made that abundantly clear. But Trump will know that most of them favoured his Democrat rival for the presidency, Kamala Harris.

The US electoral race was always predicted to be tight, and EU officials insist they are better prepared for Trump 2.0 than in 2016, when they were taken by surprise.

But Trump’s isolationism still worries Europe deeply.

The continent looks to the US for security. It has done so since the end of World War Two. It seeks protection from Russian expansionism and help in defending Ukraine. Problem is: Trump is no fan (and that’s putting it politely) of Nato, the transatlantic military alliance.

Trade is another concern, especially for the EU.

The US is its biggest trade partner. But Trump is protectionist. He loves slapping tariffs on imports, he says.

This is bad news for Europe’s already sluggish economies. Like export-reliant Germany, with its ailing automobile industry. The European Commission says it’s ready, if needs be, with retaliatory measures, but would rather avoid marching down the trade war path with Trump.

Unity is another niggle. Trump, with his America First policy, not unlike Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping of China, who push their own nationalist agendas on the world stage, would prefer not to face off against a strong, united Europe. Divide and rule is their preference.

Viktor Orban is not the only huge Trump fan here. So is Slovakia’s prime minister, and, to an extent, Italy’s premier too. They lean towards Trump in a way that divides them from most of the rest.

Brussels frets about other EU member states now potentially rushing to secure good bilateral relations with Trump at the expense of unity. Leaving the bloc weaker.

But an EU diplomat I spoke to, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely, believes the opposite could also be true.

“We in Brussels about Brexit at the time,” he told me.

“We thought other member states would follow the UK out the EU door. But the reverse happened. EU countries melded together more through the Brexit process. Donald Trump might have the same effect on us. Drive us closer together. Force us to be more self-reliant.”

Just before US election day, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, himself a former big figure in Brussels proclaimed on X: “The future of Europe no longer depends on presidential elections in the US, but primarily on Europe itself.”

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Another, rather scared school of thought amongst traditional politicians in Europe is that this victory for Trump could prove a boost for right-wing nationalists far closer to home.

European populists who share his belief that they are the true voice of voters: upset about the economy, about immigration, about the state of their respective countries and demanding change now.

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The party that will control the US House of Representatives for the next two years is still in the balance.

Republicans were seven seats short of the 218 seats needed to take control on Thursday morning. Democrats need 15 more.

The Senate, or upper chamber, and the White House have already flipped to Republicans so President-elect Donald Trump could have total control when he is sworn in on 20 January 2025.

Control of the House, the lower chamber, gives a party the power to initiate spending legislation and launch impeachment proceedings against officials.

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Under Trump, a unified Republican Party could more easily push through tax cuts and introduce border control measures.

But Democrats hope the last votes trickling in from a handful of tight races will be enough to give them a majority in the House.

Here are some of the races that have yet to be called.

Democrats are closely monitoring five seats in California as crucial to winning back the House.

Challengers are hoping to defeat the incumbent Republicans and flip the seats blue, but initial polling shows incumbents holding onto their seats by narrow margins.

The key races to watch are:

• California’s 45th: Republican Congresswoman Michelle Steel, the incumbent, is currently leading against Democrat Derek Tran with 70% of votes reported. She has a lead of 4 points.
• California’s 27th: Democrat George Whitesides is challenging incumbent Republican Congressman Mike Garcia. With 69% of votes counted, Garcia leads by a narrow margin 2 points.
• California’s 41st: Incumbent Republican Congressman Ken Calvert is running against Democrat Will Rollins. Calvert is winning by a narrow margin of 2% with 76% of votes counted.
• California’s 22nd: Democrat Rudy Salas is challenging incumbent Republican Congressman David Valadao, who currently leads with a margin of 10 points. A little over 56% of votes have been counted.
• California’s 13th: Incumbent Republican Congressman John Duarte is running against Democrat Adam Gray. With 52% of votes counted, Duarte is leading by 2 points.

The two closely watched races in the state currently have margins of less than 2%.

Republican Juan Ciscomani currently leads his Democratic challenger, Kirsten Engel, by 0.5 points in Arizona’s 6th district located in the southeast corner of the state. About 67% of votes have been counted.

In Arizona’s 1st district, David Schweikert has a lead of 1% over Democratic challenger Amish Shah, with 69% of votes counted.

Schweikert’s district covers north-eastern Maricopa County, outside of Phoenix.

In Maine, incumbent Democratic Congressman Jared Golden is fighting to keep his seat – one of two congressional districts in the state.

Maine’s 2nd Congressional district encompasses the majority of the state north of Augusta and Portland.

Golden is currently leading in the race against his Republican challenger, Austin Theriault, by less than a point. Around 93% of votes have been counted.

Democrats are looking to hold onto one seat in Ohio’s 9th congressional district, which encompasses Toledo in northern Ohio.

Incumbent Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who has served in Congress since 1983, leads in the race against her Republican challenger, Derek Merrin.

Kaptur has a narrow 0.3 point lead. Around 95% of votes have been counted.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Nearly a month ago, Kamala Harris appeared on ABC’s The View in what was expected to be a friendly interview aimed at pitching herself to Americans who wanted to know more about her.

But the sit-down was quickly overshadowed by her response to a question on what she would have done differently from incumbent president, Joe Biden: “Not a thing comes to mind.”

Harris’s answer – which became a Republican attack ad on loop – underscored the political headwinds that her jumpstart campaign failed to overcome in her decisive loss to Donald Trump on Tuesday.

Publicly, she conceded the race late on Wednesday afternoon, telling supporters “do not despair”.

But soul-searching over where she went wrong and what else she could have done will likely take longer as Democrats begin finger-pointing and raising questions about the future of the party.

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Harris campaign officials were silent in the early Wednesday hours while some aides expressed tearful shock over what they had expected to be a much closer race.

“Losing is unfathomably painful. It is hard,” Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in an email to staff on Wednesday. “This will take a long time to process.”

As the sitting vice-president, Harris was unable to untether herself from an unpopular president and convince voters that she could offer the change they were seeking amid widespread economic anxiety.

After Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous debate performance, Harris was anointed to the top of the ticket, bypassing the scrutiny of a primary without a single vote being cast.

She began her 100-day campaign promising a “new generation of leadership”, rallying women around abortion rights and vowing to win back working-class voters by focusing on economic issues including rising costs and housing affordability.

With just three months until election day, she generated a wave of initial momentum, which included a flurry of memes on social media, a star-studded endorsement list that included Taylor Swift and a record-setting donation windfall. But Harris couldn’t shake the anti-Biden sentiment that permeated much of the electorate.

The president’s approval rating has consistently hovered in the low 40s throughout his four years in office, while some two-thirds of voters say they believe the US is on the wrong track.

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Some allies have privately questioned whether Harris remained too loyal to Biden in her bid to replace him. But Jamal Simmons, the vice-president’s former communication director, called it a “trap”, arguing any distance would have only handed Republicans another attack line for being disloyal.

“You can’t really run away from the president who chooses you,” he said.

Harris tried to walk the fine line of addressing the administration’s record without casting shade on her boss, showing a reluctance to break with any of Biden’s policies while also not outwardly promoting them on the campaign trail.

But she then failed to deliver a convincing argument about why she should lead the country, and how she would handle economic frustrations as well as widespread concerns over immigration.

About 3 in 10 voters said their family’s financial situation was falling behind, an increase from about 2 in 10 four years ago, according to data from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 US voters conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Nine in 10 voters were very or somewhat concerned about the price of groceries.

The same survey found that 4 in 10 voters said immigrants living in the US illegally should be deported to their country of origin, up from around 3 in 10 who said the same in 2020.

And though Harris tried to spend the home stretch of her campaign underlining that her administration would not be a continuation of Biden’s, she failed to clearly outline her own policies, often skirting around issues instead of addressing perceived failures head on.

The Harris campaign had hoped to reassemble the voting base that powered Biden’s 2020 victory, winning over the core Democratic constituencies of black, Latino and young voters as well as making further gains with college-educated suburban voters.

But she underperformed with these key voting blocs. She lost 13 points with Latino voters, two points with black voters, and six points with voters under 30, according to exit polls, which may change as votes are counted, but are considered representative of trends.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who lost the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton and the 2020 primary to Biden, said in a statement it was “no great surprise” that working class voters abandoned the party.

“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he said. “And they’re right.”

While women largely threw their support behind Harris over Trump, the vice-president’s lead did not exceed the margins that her campaign had hoped her historic candidacy would turn out. And she was unable to deliver on her ambitions of winning over suburban Republican women, losing 53% of white women.

In the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Democrats had hoped her focus on the fight for reproductive rights would deliver a decisive victory.

While some 54% of female voters cast their ballots for Harris, it fell short of the 57% who backed Biden in 2020, according to exit poll data.

Even before she was catapulted to the top of the ticket, Harris had sought to frame the race as a referendum on Trump, not Biden.

The former California prosecutor leaned into her law enforcement record to prosecute the case against the former president.

But her nascent campaign opted to ditch Biden’s core argument that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy, prioritising a forward-looking “joyful” message about protecting personal freedoms and preserving the middle class.

In the final stretch, however, Harris made a tactical decision to again highlight the dangers of a second Trump presidency, calling the president a “fascist” and campaigning with disaffected Republicans fed up with his rhetoric.

After Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, told the New York Times that Trump spoke approvingly about Adolf Hitler, Harris delivered remarks outside her official residence describing the president as “unhinged and unstable”.

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she pivoted to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz said on Tuesday night.

“Voters already know everything there is about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration.”

“It was a colossal failure for her campaign to shine the spotlight on Trump more than on Harris’s own ideas,” he added.

Ultimately, the winning coalition Harris needed to beat Trump never materialised, and voters’ resounding rejection of Democrats showed that the party has a deeper problem than just an unpopular president.

• GLOBAL: What does Trump victory mean for UK?
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North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics and the global impact in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

News of Donald Trump’s return to power in the White House has made global headlines.

His so-called America First foreign policy could see a withdrawal of US involvement in areas of conflict around the world.

Five BBC correspondents assess the effect it could have where they are.

“Do not try to predict Trump’s actions. No one knows how he is going to act.”

The words of one Ukrainian MP reflect the political challenge facing Kyiv. A Trump victory was widely feared here, over what it could mean for future US support.

The Republican once vowed to end the war in a single day, and has repeatedly criticised US military aid for Ukraine. Now, it’s anyone’s guess what he could do.

“He could ask Putin to freeze this war, and he says ‘OK’,” says a front-line soldier. “It’s the worst scenario because in a couple of years the Russians will advance again and might destroy us.”

“The second scenario is if Putin refuses,” he says. “There is a chance Trump will react radically. That is a more promising scenario.”

Ukraine hopes that means the US further upping its military support in the face of a likely Ukrainian defeat.

For those close to the front lines who have had enough of Russian aggression, Trump is seen as a route to respite.

• Follow live US election updates
• What Trump’s win means for Ukraine, Middle East and China
• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win
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Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president once labelled by Trump as “the greatest salesman in history” sent an early message of congratulations.

He talked up the political and economic opportunities a partnership could provide, and wants to be able to keep fighting in return.

There’s also another ingredient.

Trump won’t just have to consider further military support for Ukraine, but also how or whether to respond to North Korea’s growing involvement in Russia’s invasion.

You might expect the Kremlin to be cock-a-hoop at Trump winning back the White House.

After all, out on the campaign trail, he had avoided criticising Vladimir Putin. Kamala Harris meanwhile called the Russian president “a murderous dictator”.

Trump had also questioned the scale of US military assistance to Kyiv.

Publicly, though, the Kremlin is going out of its way to give the impression that it’s not excited by a Trump victory.

“I’m not aware of any plans [for President Putin] to congratulate Trump,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “Don’t forget that [America] is an ‘unfriendly country’ which is directly and indirectly involved in a war against our state.”

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The dampening down of expectations are the result of how Trump’s first term turned out: the Kremlin had high hopes that a Trump presidency would transform US-Russian relations. It didn’t.

Nevertheless, at the political discussion club I’m attending in the mountains above Sochi, leading Russian political scientists seem to be looking forward to Trump the sequel.

One pundit told me he thinks that under Trump the US will “retreat” from its global super power status.

Another suggested the US election fitted the Kremlin’s “overall vision of the world”, in which “liberal globalism has depleted its efficiency”.

When dozens of European leaders from the EU and beyond gather in Budapest on Thursday, those on the right will be celebrating Donald Trump’s election victory, but the rest will be asking themselves what happens next.

Hungarian host and Trump ally Viktor Orban was first on to Facebook with his delighted message: “It’s in the bag!”

But for many other EU leaders Trump 2.0 could signal trouble ahead on security, trade and climate change.

Within minutes of congratulating the Republican candidate, France’s Emmanuel Macron said he had agreed with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to work towards a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context”.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock gave an idea of that context. Just back from Ukraine, she said Europeans now had to “think big and make investments in our European security big”, with the US as a partner.

Her Polish and Nato counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski said he had been in touch with Trump’s top team and agreed “Europe must urgently take greater responsibility for its security”.

The prospect of steep US tariffs on EU imports weigh heavily too. EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen congratulated Trump but gave a timely reminder that “millions of jobs and billions in trade” relied on their transatlantic relationship.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was one of the first to congratulate Trump and has previously called him Israel’s best ever friend in the White House.

Trump previously won favour here by scrapping a US nuclear deal with Iran that Israel opposed. He also upended decades of US policy by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Trump’s first term in office was “exemplary” as far as Israel is concerned, says Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US. But he adds: “We have to be very clear-sighted about who Donald Trump is and what he stands for.”

The former president sees wars as expensive, Mr Oren notes, and Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly.

“If Donald Trump comes into office in January and says, ‘okay, you have a week to finish this war’, Netanyahu is going to have to respect that.”

In Gaza, where the Israeli military has been battling Palestinian group Hamas, desperation has narrowed the focus of some residents.

Trump “has some strong promises”, says Ahmed, whose wife and son were both killed when their house was destroyed. “We hope he can help, and bring peace.”

Another displaced resident, Mamdouh, said he didn’t care who won the US election – he just wanted someone to help.

China is bracing itself for the return of Donald Trump where there are fears that his presidency will trigger a new trade war.

As president, Trump imposed tariffs on over $300 billion of Chinese imports. This time around he has said the tariffs could be in excess of 60%.

Beijing will not stand by – it will retaliate. But China’s economy is already ailing and it will be in no mood for a second protracted trade war.

Trump’s unpredictable policies and fiery rhetoric are also a headache for Chinese leaders who prefer stability.

But in the battle for power and influence, some analysts see an opportunity for Beijing.

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The Biden administration has spent the last four years building friendships across Asia with the likes of South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam – all in an effort to contain China.

Trump’s “America first” doctrine has, in the past, isolated and weakened these US alliances. He prefers trying to make deals over delicate diplomacy and often puts a price tag on America’s friendships.

In 2018, he demanded more money from South Korea to continue to host US troops in the country

Make no mistake, China wants to challenge the US-led world order. Beijing has already built alliances with emerging economies across the so-called Global South.

If Washington’s influence does wane in Asia and around the world, it could be a win for President Xi.

• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House will have a hugely negative effect on climate change action in the short-term but the longer term impact is less certain, experts say.

With world leaders meeting next week for the latest UN climate talks, COP29, the Trump victory will be seen as a huge roadblock to progress in both cutting emissions and raising cash for developing countries.

The US president-elect is a known climate sceptic who has called efforts to boost green energy a “scam”.

But with renewable energy gaining a strong foothold in the US and popular support for wind and solar, Trump’s efforts to ramp up oil and gas instead may be less effective.

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
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• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

While climate change did not play much of a role in this year’s campaign, Trump’s likely actions in office this time could be far more significant than in 2017.

Back then, he announced the US would pull out of the Paris climate agreement, the most important UN process to tackle climate change. The agreement saw almost all the world’s nations – for the first time – agree to cut the greenhouse gas emissions which cause global warming.

But the shock of Trump’s decision was limited. The treaty’s rules meant the US was not able to withdraw until November 2020, a few months before he left office.

If Trump withdraws again, he will only have to wait a year before the US is completely out. That would give him three years to chart his own course without any need to report to the UN or be bound by its rules.

While President Joe Biden’s negotiators will be at next week’s COP talks in Azerbaijan, nothing they agree to will be binding for the Trump administration.

“The US at this COP is not just a lame duck, it’s a dead duck,” said Prof Richard Klein, an expert on climate change policy for the Stockholm Environment Institute.

“They can’t commit to anything and that means that countries like China will not want to commit to anything.”

In recent years, richer countries such as the US, UK and EU states have tried to increase the funds available for developing countries to cope with climate change. But they also insist that big developing economies also contribute.

“The US basically wanted to have China cough up some money for that fund as well. Now they won’t be able to do that. That leaves China off the hook,” Prof Klein said.

Climate scientists say developing countries need billions of dollars of extra investment to become net zero, where they are not contributing to climate change, and stave off the effects of rising temperatures.

While the US might leave the Paris Agreement quite quickly, Trump would still be bound by other global efforts to fight climate change.

There have been reports that some of his supporters also want to turn their backs on these as well. Some have argued for a complete break from UN efforts on climate change, urging the president-elect to leave something called the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty that underpins global collective action to tackle climate change.

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This was ratified by the US Senate, almost unanimously, in 1992. Legal experts are unclear on the process of leaving the treaty, but any effort by the US to leave would be seen as a body blow to the principle of multi-lateral action to tackle the world’s greatest threat.

As well as these headline-grabbing international actions, the new Trump administration is likely to push for a major ramp up of oil and gas exploration within the US, roll back environmental protections as well as impose heavy tariffs on electric vehicles and solar panels coming from China.

“You are looking at, overall, a ‘drill baby drill’ philosophy,” Dan Eberhart, chief executive officer of oilfield services company Canary LLC told Bloomberg News.

“You are going to see offshore lease sales, you are going to see pipelines move much quicker, you are going to see fracking on federal lands and a mindset that is focused on lowering energy costs for consumers.”

There was a big drop in the share price of turbine manufacturers on Wednesday, as fears grew that US offshore wind farms would be cancelled by a Trump presidency.

But in the longer term, it is not clear if the new president will turn back the clock for coal, oil and gas, or curtail the growth of sustainable energy sources.

For a start he faces opposition – and notably from within his own party.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which may ultimately channel $1 trillion of spending into green energy, has been hugely beneficial to Republican districts.

According to one analysis, some 85% of the money has been in areas that elected Republicans.

With energy watchdog the International Energy Agency reporting that global investment in clean technology is running at double the size of coal, oil and gas in 2024, the new US administration might not want to drive this type of green investment into other, more eager countries.

Climate leaders are putting a lot of faith in the fact that the transition to green energy will not be derailed by the new Trump administration.

“The result from this election will be seen as a major blow to global climate action,” said Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief.

“But it cannot and will not halt the changes under way to decarbonise the economy and meet the goals of the Paris agreement.”

• When does Trump become US president again?
• What happens to Trump’s legal cases now?
• Who was who in Trump’s huge victory entourage?
• The Trump family: A guide to an American dynasty
• Donald Trump: A remarkable life in pictures

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Donald Trump vowed on his campaign that he would tax all goods imported into the US if he won back the White House. Following his victory, businesses and economists around the world are scrambling to work out how serious he is.

Trump sees tariffs as a way of growing the US economy, protecting jobs and raising tax revenue.

In the past, he has targeted tariffs at individual countries such as China or certain industries, for example steel.

But Trump’s election campaign pledge to impose taxes of 10% to 20% on all foreign goods could affect prices all over the world.

Last month, he appeared to single out Europe.

“The European Union sounds so nice, so lovely, right? All the nice European little countries that get together… They don’t take our cars. They don’t take our farm products,” he said.

“They sell millions and millions of cars in the United States. No, no, no, they are going to have to pay a big price.”

BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen shares all fell between 5% and 7% after Trump’s victory confirmation. The US is the single biggest export market for German carmakers.

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
• Results: Who did each state vote for?
• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win
• These are the seven things Trump says he will do as president
• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

During his campaign, Trump said tariffs were the answer to myriad issues, including containing China and preventing illegal immigration.

“Tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” he said. It is a weapon he clearly intends to use.

While much of this rhetoric and action is aimed at China it does not end there.

Some jurisdictions like the EU are already drawing up lists of pre-emptive retaliatory actions against the US, after ministers did not take seriously enough Trump’s earlier threats of tariffs, which he later imposed.

G7 finance ministers told me last week they would try to remind a Trump-led America of the need for allies in the world economy because “the idea is not to launch a trade war”.

However if “a very strong broad power is used”, Europe would quickly consider its response.

In the past the EU imposed tariffs on iconic American products such as Harley Davidson motorcycles, bourbon whiskey and Levi’s jeans in response to US duties on steel and aluminium.

A top Eurozone central banker told me US tariffs alone were “not inflationary in Europe but it depends on what Europe’s reaction will be”.

Last month the IMF told me a major trade war could hit the world economy by 7%, or the size of the French and German economies combined.

There are very big questions for the UK government about where exactly the post-Brexit UK should seat itself in a plausible, if not certain, transatlantic trade war.

The direction of travel until now for the UK has been to get closer to the EU, including on food and farm standards. This would make a close trade deal with the US very difficult.

The Biden administration was uninterested in such a deal. Trump’s still highly influential top trade negotiator Bob Lighthizer even said an assumption that the UK would stay close to the EU to help its own businesses had prevented him from pursuing a deal.

“They are a much bigger trade partner to you than we are,” he told me in an interview.

The UK could try and remain neutral, but would struggle to avoid the crossfire, especially for the goods trade in pharmaceuticals and cars.

The rhetoric from the UK government suggests it could try to be a peacemaker in global trade wars, but would anyone listen?

Britain could pick a side, by trying to be exempted from more general Trump tariffs.

Diplomats have been heartened by more pragmatic economic advisers to the President-elect suggesting that friendly allies might get a better deal.

Or would the world benefit more if the UK joined forces with the EU to head off the application of such trade tariffs?

Away from the US, what about the example to the rest of the world?

If the world’s biggest economy is resorting to mass protectionism, it’s going to be difficult to persuade many smaller economies not to do the same.

All of this is very much up for grabs. Trump’s warnings can be taken at face value. Nothing is certain, but this is how very serious trade wars can start.

• What does a Trump win mean for the UK?
• Trade, aid, security: What does Trump’s win mean for Africa?
• What Trump’s win means for Ukraine, Middle East and China
• US election is a major setback for climate action, experts say
• Analysis: Will Trump’s victory spark a global trade war?

Donald Trump has soared to a decisive election victory over Kamala Harris, lifted up by some of the very voters that Democrats once relied on.

The Republican president-elect showed strength with the white working-class voters who first propelled him to the White House in 2016, while racking up huge support from Latino voters and putting in a better-than-expected performance among younger Americans, especially men.

Among Latinos, a key part of the Democratic voter base for decades, Trump benefited from a mammoth 14 percentage-point bump compared to the 2020 election, according to exit polls.

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
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• These are the seven things Trump says he will do as president
• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

Nowhere is Trump’s reshaping of the electorate more apparent than in the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the highly coveted “blue wall” that helped propel Joe Biden to victory in 2020.

This time, Trump won all three states, crushing Democrats’ hopes that Harris could find a path to victory despite early election night losses in the southern states of North Carolina and Georgia.

In his victory speech in Florida, Trump – who is set to win the popular vote too – credited the result to “the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition” in American history.

“They came from all quarters. Union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American,” he told a roaring crowd. “We had everybody, and it was beautiful.”

In Pennsylvania, the prized battleground state, Trump benefited from a huge swell of support from the state’s growing Latino population.

Exit polls suggested Latinos in Pennsylvania amounted to about 5% of the total vote. Trump garnered 42% of that vote, compared to 27% when he ran against Joe Biden in 2020.

The polls will continue to change as votes are counted, but are broadly representative of electoral trends.

In the state’s “Latino belt” – an eastern industrial corridor that has shifted to the right in the last two elections – some voters said they were not surprised by the result.

“It’s simple, really. We liked the way things were four years ago,” said Samuel Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable and member of the large Puerto Rican community in the city of Allentown.

Mr Negron, and other Trump supporters in the now majority-Latino city, listed other reasons that their community was drifting towards Trump, including social issues and a perception that their family values now align more with the Republican Party.

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The most common factor, however, was the economy – specifically, inflation.

“Out here, you pay $5 for a dozen eggs. It used to be $1, or even 99 cents,” Mr Negron added. “A lot of us have woken up, in my opinion, from Democratic lies that things have been better. We realised things were better then.”

Ahead of the election, polls also suggested that many Latinos – across the US and in Pennsylvania specifically – were drawn to Trump’s proposals to block migrants at the US-Mexico border and enact much stricter immigration laws.

Daniel Campo, a Venezuelan-American, said that Trump’s claims of creeping “socialism” reminded him of the situation he left in his home country.

“I understand what [migrants] are leaving. But you have to do it the right way. I came the right way,” he said. “Things have to be done legally. Many of us were worried that the borders were just open” under the Biden-Harris administration, he said.

Collectively, the Latino shift towards Trump, his hold on white working-class voters and his increased support among non-college educated voters in general created an insurmountable obstacle for the Harris campaign.

But Trump also improved his position in some surprising corners.

In 2020 Joe Biden had a 24-point advantage with voters under 30. This time, that lead shrank to just 11 points. While nationally black voters still overwhelmingly supported Harris (85%), in Wisconsin Trump’s support among that demographic more than doubled, from 8% in 2020 to 22% this election.

Some of the most significant battlegrounds in Wisconsin were the three counties surrounding Milwaukee known as the Wow counties – Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington. Harris failed to significantly improve upon Biden’s 2020 vote share in these suburban areas, while also slipping in rural, whiter parts of the state dominated by Trump.

Preliminary results also indicate that Harris failed to get as many votes as Biden in Wisconsin’s biggest, most diverse city – Milwaukee.

Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said her direct appeals to working-class voters may not have made much of a difference given the national political climate.

Ted Dietzler cast his vote in a fire station on the outskirts of the small city of Waukesha.

“I’m voting Trump because of the border, the economy, and no more wars,” he said, wearing a Green Bay Packers hat.

“We saw a huge difference when Trump was president,” Dietzler said, adding that he was drawn to Trump’s embrace of former Democrats like Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom appear set to have roles in the Trump administration.

“Inflation is a big deal, and I don’t think Harris quite gets it,” he said. “I think we’ll all just be better off with Trump back.”

Trump’s national economic messaging hit home with working-class voters in the Midwestern state of Michigan, too.

With nearly all votes counted, Trump is leading the state that he lost in 2020 by about 85,000 votes. He increased his vote share in rural areas as well as in Macomb County, home to many working-class voters in the Detroit suburbs.

One of them, Nahim Uddin, a delivery driver and former Ford car-worker, cast his ballot for Trump because he said the former president would drive down prices.

“I went to go purchase a car – the interest rates had skyrocketed,” the 34-year-old said. “That’s the whole reason I voted for him.”

The same was true for Yian Yian Shein, a small business owner in the city Warren, who said Trump would lower income taxes and help people like her.

Democrats tried to tailor their economic messages in Michigan, touting their investments in electric car manufacturing while securing an endorsement from United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain, a frequent Trump critic.

But Republicans were able to “neutralise” those messages by arguing that the transition to electric vehicles would come at the cost of jobs, said Michigan State University professor Matt Grossmann.

Ultimately what cost Democrats among blue-collar voters across demographic groups was the perception that they were to blame for high prices and pinched budgets.

“Largely, voters have felt economic pain due to the post-Covid inflationary period, and they’re taking it out on Biden” and Harris, said University of Michigan professor Jonathan Hanson.

• UNITED KINGDOM: What does Trump victory mean for UK?
• GLOBAL: What Trump’s win means for Ukraine, Middle East and China
• AFRICA: Trade, aid, security: What does Trump’s win mean for Africa?
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Donald Trump will be the first president to take office while several criminal cases against him are pending.

His ascent to the highest office in the US while facing dozens of criminal charges has left the country in uncharted territory.

Many of his legal problems will go away when he steps into the White House. Discussions already have started between Trump’s team and the office overseeing federal cases about how to wind those down, according to the BBC’s US news partner CBS.

Here’s a look at what could happen with each of the four legal challenges he faces.

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
• Results: Who did each state vote for?
• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win
• These are the seven things Trump says he will do as president
• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in May in New York.

A jury of New Yorkers found him guilty of all counts in connection with a hush-money payment made to an adult film star.

Judge Juan Merchan pushed back Trump’s sentencing from September to 26 November, after the election.

He could still go forward with the sentencing as planned despite Trump’s win, said former Brooklyn prosecutor Julie Rendelman.

But legal experts said it is unlikely that Trump would be sentenced to prison as an older, first-time offender.

If he was, his lawyers would appeal the sentence immediately, arguing that jail time would prevent him from conducting official duties and that he should remain free pending the appeal, Ms Rendelman said.

“The appellate process in that scenario could go on for years,” she said.

Special counsel Jack Smith filed criminal charges against Trump last year over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

Trump pleaded not guilty.

The case has been in legal limbo since the Supreme Court ruled this summer that Trump was partially immune from criminal prosecution over official acts committed while in office.

Smith has since refiled his case, arguing Trump’s attempts to overturn the election were not related to his official duties.

This is one of the cases which could be wound down under current discussions.

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As president-elect, Trump’s criminal problems from the case now “go away”, according to former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani.

“It’s well established that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted, so the election fraud case in DC District Court will be dismissed,” he said.

Mr Rahmani said that if Smith refuses to dismiss the case, Trump can simply get rid of him, as he has pledged to do already.

“I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said during a radio interview in October.

Smith also is leading a case against Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House, charges Trump denies.

He is accused of storing sensitive documents in his Mar-a-Lago home and obstructing Justice Department efforts to retrieve the files.

The judge assigned to the case, Trump-appointee Aileen Cannon, dismissed the charges in July, arguing Smith was improperly appointed by the Justice Department to lead the case.

Smith appealed the ruling, but with Trump set to take office, talks are now underway about ending the case.

Mr Rahmani said he expects the classified documents case will meet the same fate as the election case.

“The DOJ will abandon its Eleventh Circuit appeal of the dismissal of the classified documents case,” he said.

Trump is also facing criminal charges in Georgia over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the state.

That case has faced a number of hurdles, including efforts to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis over her relationship with a lawyer she hired to work on the case.

An appeals court is in the process of weighing whether Willis should be allowed to stay on the case.

But now that Trump is the next president, the case could face even more delays, or possibly dismissal.

It is expected to be paused during Trump’s time in office, according to legal experts.

Trump’s lawyer Steve Sadow said as much when asked by the judge if Trump could still stand trial if elected.

“The answer to that is I believe that under the supremacy clause and his duties as president of the United States, this trial would not take place at all until after he left his term in office,” he said.

• UNITED KINGDOM: What does Trump victory mean for UK?
• GLOBAL: What Trump’s win means for Ukraine, Middle East and China
• AFRICA: Trade, aid, security: What does Trump’s win mean for Africa?
• ANALYSIS: Analysis: Will Trump’s victory spark a global trade war?
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate a part of California that has been savaged by wildfire for a second day running.

The fast-moving wildfire was first reported near Moorpark, 40 miles north-west of Los Angeles, early on Wednesday and has been boosted by heavy winds.

California governor Gavin Newsom confirmed in a statement that more than 10,000 evacuation orders had been issued, while 3,500 homes and other structures were under threat and federal funds had been secured to help fight the fire.

The National Weather Service said winds were expected to decrease significantly by Thursday night, but warned that conditions for high fire danger would stay in effect for now.

Video footage and images show large plumes of smoke rising in the sky, covering entire neighbourhoods.

Ventura County fire chief Dustin Gardner said on Wednesday that the fire was moving “dangerously fast” and destroying everything in its path.

“Bushes are burning, grass is burning, hedgerows are burning, agricultural fields are burning and structures are burning,” he said.

Fire officials also confirmed that two people suffered apparent smoke inhalation and were taken to hospitals on Wednesday. No firefighters reported significant injuries.

Officials in several southern Californian counties have meanwhile urged residents to watch out for fast-spreading blazes, power outages and downed trees.

The City of Ventura also posted on social media asking residents to limit their water use to ensure firefighters have enough water available to fight the blaze.

According to CBS, more than 20 schools in Ventura County will also be shut on Thursday.

The fire started during a Santa Ana wind event, featuring strong and dry winds that are sometimes referred to as devil winds.

Forecasters had reported gusts ranging from 70 to 80mph in some parts of Los Angeles County on Wednesday.

According to the Associated Press, the fire grew from just under 0.5 sq miles (about 1.2 sq km) to more than 16 sq miles (62 sq km) in just over five hours.

California is a state that is prone to wildfires. The amount of burned areas in the summer in northern and central California increased five times from 1996 to 2021 compared with the 24-year period before, which scientists attributed to human-caused climate change.

Not all wildfires can automatically be linked directly to climate change. The science is complicated and human factors, including how we manage land and forests, also contribute.

However, scientists say that climate change is making weather conditions that lead to wildfires, such as heat and drought, more likely.

Germany’s governing coalition has collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired a key minister and said he would call a vote of confidence in his government early next year.

The chancellor said he had no trust in Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who heads the pro-business Free Democrats and has been part of the coalition along with Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens.

The crisis inside the coalition plunged Europe’s largest economy into political chaos, hours after Donald Trump’s US election victory triggered deep uncertainty about the future of the continent’s economy and security.

President Frank-Walter Steinmeiner called for common sense to prevail.

“This is no time for tactics and squabbling, but for reason and responsibility,” he said.

The so-called “traffic-light” coalition has governed Germany since 2021 and its collapse means Scholz’s government no longer has a majority in parliament.

The confidence vote could lead to early elections by March, although the opposition says a confidence vote should come next week, not next year. Steinmeiner said he was prepared to dissolve parliament and call early elections if the chancellor lost a vote.

Internal tensions had been bubbling for weeks before exploding into the open on Wednesday night. It was triggered by a row over the 2025 budget, with Germany now facing its second year without economic growth.

“This is not a good day for Germany and not a good day for Europe,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens.

Olaf Scholz said his former finance minister had “betrayed my confidence” and had put the interests of his party base over those of the country.

He added that Germany needed to show it could be relied upon by other countries, particularly following Trump’s election success in the US.

Lindner, who leads the Free Democrats or FDP, accused Scholz of “leading Germany into a phase of uncertainty”. He had refused Scholz’s demand to loosen the spending limit known as a “debt brake” that requires German governments to balance the budget.

While two of his party colleagues also resigned from their cabinet posts, a third, Volker Wissing, said he had made a personal decision to stay on as transport minister and resign from his party.

The head of the conservative Christian Democrats, who are well ahead in opinion polls, said there was no time to wait. “We simply cannot afford to have a government without a majority in Germany for several months,” said Friedrich Merz.

The so-called traffic-light coalition was formed after Scholz’s Social Democrats narrowly defeated the conservatives in federal elections in September 2021.

It was named after the individual red, yellow and green colours of three parties – Scholz’s centre-left, the economically liberal FDP and environmentalist Greens – who all planned to spend big on their own individual core interest groups.

However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sent energy prices surging, and left Germany facing a increase in defence spending – and the cost of taking in 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees.

Scholz and his Green partners want to tackle this by loosening the debt brake to allow more spending. Lindner wanted to pay for tax cuts by slashing welfare and social budgets and pushing back environmental targets.

Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens said the party would not quit the government and that its ministers would remain in office.

Scholz announced that a vote of confidence would be held in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, on 15 January.

If MPs vote down the government, the country will head for fresh elections within weeks, instead of the scheduled date in September.

However, the opposition could force Scholz out earlier if they can find a majority for an alternative chancellor.

For now, Scholz will head a minority government comprised of his Social Democrats and the Greens – the second-largest party in the coalition.

Without a parliamentary majority, Scholz’s coalition will need to cobble together support for individual votes from other parties in order to pass laws and measures.

Scholz said he would ask Friedrich Merz for support in passing budgetary measures to help Germany’s ailing economy and boost military spending.

Scholz has named Jörg Kukies as Christian Lindner’s replacement as finance minister.

More than 200 seriously injured and ill Palestinians and their carers have been evacuated from Gaza, in one of the biggest operations of its kind in months, Israel says.

The operation – overseen by Cogat, the Israeli military body responsible for humanitarian affairs in Gaza, and the World Health Organization – saw 231 Gazans allowed through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing.

They include people with autoimmune diseases, blood diseases, cancer, kidney conditions and trauma injuries.

The WHO said there were still up to 14,000 people waiting for evacuation for medical reasons.

Israel and Egypt closed their crossings with Gaza following Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October last year.

Almost 4,900 Palestinian patients needing treatment abroad were allowed to leave between November, when Egypt reopened the Rafah crossing for medical evacuations, and May, when Egypt closed the crossing after Israeli forces seized control of the Gaza side.

Before Wednesday’s evacuation, only 229 patients had left since May, according to the UN.

Wednesday also saw the WHO and Cogat announce the conclusion of the polio vaccination campaign across Gaza.

The WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said 556,770 children under the age of 10 – or 94% – had received two doses of the vaccine since September.

The programme came about in reaction to the discovery of a case of polio in August, the first recorded in Gaza for 25 years.

The virus can paralyse children or even kill them. It has been the subject of a global vaccination campaign for decades and has been mostly eradicated.

On Saturday, the WHO and other UN agencies set out to administer vaccines in Gaza City, after being forced to postpone the rollout in the north of the territory last month because of Israeli bombardment, mass displacement and lack of access.

The three-day operation was briefly interrupted by an attack on a hospital. The WHO did not say who was behind the strike, but local medical staff blamed an Israeli quadcopter. The Israeli military said it was investigating but did not believe it was responsible.

Dr Tedros said 105,500 children in the north of Gaza received a second dose, which amounted to around 88% coverage. For herd immunity to work, at least 90% of all children in every community and neighbourhood need to be given a minimum of two doses.

He warned that “7,000-10,000 children couldn’t be reached for their second doses and are thus vulnerable to polio”.

Parts of northern Gaza were not included in the vaccinations due to the continuation of intense Israeli military operations in towns like Jabalia and Beit Lahia.

The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Wednesday morning announced that troops had started to operate in Beit Lahia following what it said was intelligence “indicating the presence of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure”.

The IDF called on all remaining civilians to leave the area through what it called “organised routes for their safety”.

Beit Lahia has come under heavy bombardment since the IDF launched a ground offensive in neighbouring Jabalia a month ago, saying it was acting against regrouping Hamas fighters.

The IDF said its troops had killed 50 “terrorists” in Jabalia over the past day.

The BBC and other international media are not able to get access to the Gaza Strip and so cannot independently verify these claims.

The people transported out of Gaza in the medical evacuation operation will be taken to the United Arab Emirates or Romania for treatment.

One of those being moved was Khuloud Tabasi’s son Mohammed.

Hugging her husband as she entered the ambulance in the southern city of Khan Younis, Khuloud said after four operations her son’s “situation went from bad to worse… Thank God [the WHO] organised the evacuation of my son.”

Israel has been under growing international pressure to do something to improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.

Last weekend, 15 senior UN figures said conditions in the north were “apocalyptic”, with the entire population “at risk of death from starvation, disease and violence”.

Israel has also faced calls from its ally, the US, to take action. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned the Israeli government on 13 October that it had 30 days to “surge” humanitarian aid to Gaza or risk having some US military assistance cut off.

The numbers still in need of medical support are huge, with 19 out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals out of service and the other 17 only partially functional.

Dr Marwan Abu Saada is general manager of the al-Shifa medical complex in Gaza City, which was left in ruins after being raided by Israeli forces for a second time in March.

The IDF said it had been used by Hamas for military purposes, something the group has always denied.

Parts of al-Shifa have now been rebuilt and reopened, including the emergency department, and the hospital recently received patients evacuated from hospitals in Beit Lahia.

Dr Abu Saada said there were children with leukaemia, people with breast and other cancers, as well as those disabled by the fighting.

“They desperately need to travel abroad as soon as possible,” he said. “Since none of the treatment facilities are available in Gaza.”

While Wednesday’s evacuation has been widely welcomed, the numbers taken to the UAE and Romania are a small fraction of the total who need medical aid.

More than that, as long as the fighting continues, the numbers in need of help will continue to grow.

The deaths of 10 elephants in three days in a national park in central India has raised alarm among conservationists.

The animals, part of a herd of 13 elephants, died over 29-31 October at the Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh state.

A preliminary toxicology report says that the elephants may have died from eating a millet crop infected with fungus.

The deaths have generated national headlines and criticism, putting the state’s government on the back foot.

“[The toxicology report indicates] that the elephants had consumed a large quantity of decayed kodo [millet] plants and grains,” said L Krishna Murthy, a senior forest official who is leading an inquiry into the deaths.

Initial unconfirmed reports said that the elephants had been poisoned, possibly by farmers to stop them destroying crops. But government officials say there is no sign of deliberate poisoning.

The toxicology report says cyclopiazonic acid – a fungal neurotoxin – was found in the samples taken from the dead elephants.

They are thought to have eaten a large amount of kodo millets, which are usually grown in arid regions in countries including India, Pakistan and Philippines and parts of West Africa.

Around 35% of kodo millet produced in India is cultivated in Madhya Pradesh.

The crop grows quickly, can withstand drought conditions and can be stored for long periods. It is also easy to digest and has several health benefits.

But some studies have found that eating the millet can cause “intoxication and poisoning” as the grains are “frequently infested” with a kind of fungus that produces cyclopiazonic acid.

Another study, done by researchers at the Indian Institute of Millets Research, says that while many “crops suffer from [cyclopiazonic acid] contamination, major adverse effects have been recorded only in kodo millet because of lack of scientific management”. They also suggest that some practices, such as drying the harvested crop quickly, could ensure it is safe.

There have been some reported cases of animals dying after eating the crop, though they are not that frequent.

In 1933, 14 elephants died near a forest in the southern state of Tamil Nadu after consuming kodo millets, according to a report co-authored by ecologist Raman Sukumar and mycologist TS Suryanarayanan in Down to Earth magazine.

Mr Sukumar, who has worked extensively on the Asian elephant and human–wildlife conflict, told the BBC that elephants frequently eat millets when they enter fields looking for food.

Elephants have a good sense of smell, but mycotoxins are odourless and tasteless.

“My sense is that elephants tried to eat as much as possible in as little time as possible because they knew that farmers would chase them away,” he said.

He adds that weather also likely played a role in the fungal growth on the millets. Days before the deaths, there were heavy rains in the region, producing moist conditions conducive to fungal infection.

After news reports began blaming kodo millets, authorities destroyed some crops in villages close to the national park.

The toxicology report recommends surveying and destroying the residue of the fungus-infected crop and preventing the entry of domestic and wild animals into such fields.

But farmers in the area said that they have been growing kodo millets for years without any adverse events.

Mr Sukumar also says it is still rare for fungal infections to produce mycotoxins in kodo millets.

“The elephants were unfortunate this time,” he says.

Australian scientists have solved a mystery which has gripped Sydney: what were the sticky dark blobs which washed up on some of the city’s famed beaches last month?

Initially believed to be tar balls, they were in fact a “disgusting” combination of human faeces, cooking oil, chemicals and illicit drugs, researchers say.

Eight beaches including Bondi were closed for several days and a massive clean-up ordered after thousands of the black deposits started appearing from 16 October.

Testing by chemists has determined the balls were most likely the result of a sewage spill, though their exact origin remains unknown.

Last month authorities in New South Wales (NSW) said they suspected the objects were a mixture of fatty acids, fuel oil and chemicals found in cleaning and cosmetic products.

But further testing found the material is unlikely to have originated solely from an oil spill or waste from a ship, as some had thought.

Each ball was slightly different but had a firm surface – hardened partially by accumulating sand and minerals like calcium – and a soft core.

Inside was everything from cooking oil and soap scum molecules, to blood pressure medication, pesticides, hair, methamphetamine and veterinary drugs.

“They smell absolutely disgusting, they smell worse than anything you’ve ever smelt,” lead investigator Associate Professor Jon Beves, from the University of NSW, told 9News.

Professor William Alexander Donald said they resembled fat, oil, and grease blobs – often called fatbergs – which are commonly formed in sewerage systems.

Detecting this along with recreational drugs and and industrial chemicals had “pointed us to sewage and other sources of urban effluent”, he explained.

The researchers said they had received unconfirmed reports of smaller but otherwise similar balls washing up over the past two years.

Sydney Water has reported that there are no known issues with waste systems in the city.

One of Russia’s youngest political prisoners has lost an appeal to overturn a five-year jail sentence.

Arseny Turbin was only 15 when he was arrested in the summer of 2023.

Authorities accused him of joining the Freedom of Russia Legion – a paramilitary unit composed of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine against the Russian army.

The Freedom of Russia Legion is designated as terrorist organisation by Russia, and Arseny was sentenced to five years in a juvenile colony. On Thursday, the court of appeal reduced his five-year term – but only by 24 days.

Arseny is one of nine minors who have faced politically motivated criminal charges since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent crackdown on civil liberties, according to Russian human rights organisation OVD-Info.

He denies all the charges against him. He says he researched the legion but that he never applied and has committed no crime. His mother Irina also maintains he is innocent.

“I just don’t understand the judge who handed down the sentence,” she told the BBC.

Investigators have also claimed Arseny distributed leaflets critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin on the legion’s behalf.

He admitted to distributing leaflets but denied following instructions from anybody.

Arseny did openly criticise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin in school.

He was also politically active on social media, reposting content from Russian opposition figures and occasionally sharing his own political content, including a video in which he can be seen holding a solo picket in support of late opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

His mother says he was acting of his own accord and not on the instructions of the Freedom of Russia Legion.

Yet, in late August 2023, agents from the FSB, Russia’s security service, searched Arseny’s home in the small town of Livny, 450km (280 miles) south of Moscow, and confiscated his electronic devices.

The next day he was summoned for questioning and accused of joining the Freedom of Russia Legion.

“I was hysterical, I was shaking, crying,” says his mother. “Arseny told me: ‘Mum, calm down, I didn’t commit any crime, they will work it out.'”

No lawyer was present during the interrogation, which Irina deeply regrets. She believes the FSB subsequently added to the transcript a confession of guilt that Arseny never made.

Some of his schoolmates were questioned by investigators and said Arseny would often criticise Putin and Russia’s actions in Ukraine. But in their statements – which the BBC has seen – none of them said he had a connection to the Freedom of Russia Legion.

Nevertheless, Arseny was formally arrested the following week.

He spent several months under house arrest as he awaited sentencing. Then, last June, he was transferred to a Moscow detention centre, where he has been detained ever since.

In that time, his mother says his weight has dropped from 69kg to 52kg as he struggled with lack of appetite due to constant stress.

Irina also noticed he has withdrawn emotionally, and that he often asks why he is punished for something he did not do.

For a time Arseny also had a violent cellmate who attacked him, hit him on the head and threatened him.

Speaking to the BBC, Irina and Arseny’s teachers painted a picture of a highly intelligent and politically engaged young man who now faces several long years in jail for a crime he did not commit.

His mother said from a young age Arseny had been passionate about science, particularly physics and economics.

He had dreamed of studying political science at a prestigious Moscow university. “He wanted to improve life in Russia,” his mother said.

She spoke of her son having a strong sense of justice, which he developed after experiencing bullying at school.

He was frequently mocked and called derogatory names because he was born in Dubai and his father was from the United Arab Emirates.

Irina says that since his arrest Arseny no longer has any friends, as most have distanced themselves from him.

Her neighbours and co-workers even accuse her of having “raised a terrorist”, she says.

If Arseny really was innocent, they argue, the court would have acquitted him. She believes they don’t fully understand how the Russian judicial system works.

Her standard response is to hope they never have to encounter the system themselves.

“But if you do, you’ll find out.”

Once regarded as a safe haven for refugees, Kenya is slowly becoming a hostile place for some of those seeking protection from political persecution and war, rights groups say.

Their concerns come after masked men abducted at gunpoint four Turkish refugees in the capital, Nairobi, last month – the latest in a series of such cases in the East African state.

Kenyan authorities said the four, who were recognised by the UN as refugees, were deported at the request of the Turkish government, which wants them on treason charges.

Critics accuse Kenya of abandoning an age-old legal principle of “non-refoulement”, which prohibits the forced return of people to countries where they may face persecution.

This has tarnished Kenya’s reputation, with the local Daily Nation newspaper reporting that the chiefs of the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the UK’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 – William Burns and Richard Moore respectively – raised the deportations with President William Ruto during their visit to Nairobi late last month.

Kenya’s refugee commissioner John Burugu declined to comment about the expulsions, but senior foreign ministry official Korir Sing’oei highlighted the dilemma the government faced when he said it needed to perform a “crucial balancing of interests for the bigger good”.

“Harbouring the subversive elements accused of undertaking activities detrimental to a friendly country posed both a diplomatic and humanitarian dilemma to Kenya,” he added.

In the end, realpolitik triumphed, with Kenya not prepared to jeopardise its closer ties with Turkey, which saw the two countries sign a military co-operation agreement in July.

Compared to its neighbours, Kenya has enjoyed peace and stability for many years, making it a prime destination for refugees and asylum seekers, from various conflict-hit or authoritarian countries in the region such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda and South Sudan.

East Africa’s biggest economy, Kenya is home to more than 800,000 refugees, according to Burugu.

But rights groups fear that the country has in recent years become an increasingly unsafe for those fleeing persecution in their home countries.

Kenyan police have also been accused on numerous occasions of colluding with foreign security agencies trying to apprehend people they regard as threats.

The latest example of this came when it was accused of being complicit – as Uganda’s Observer newspaper put it – in the “brazen cross-border abductions” of 36 Ugandan opposition supporters in July.

The group had travelled to the Kenyan city of Kisumu for a training course, according to their lawyers, but were deported to Uganda without proper legal channels like deportation orders or extradition requests being followed.

Uganda’s police accused the suspects of being “engaged in covert activities that are suspected to be subversive, drawing the attention of Kenyan security forces”.

But the group denied any wrongdoing through their lawyer.

“By allowing Ugandan security operatives to cross into Kenya and essentially kidnap these individuals, Kenya has failed in its duty to safeguard the liberty and wellbeing of all people on its territory, regardless of their nationality or political affiliations,” the Observer said in an editorial.

Last May, Rwandan human rights defender Yusuf Ahmed Gasana was abducted from his home in Nairobi by unidentified persons and has not been seen since.

Sources told Gasana’s family he was being held in a secret detention facility in Rwanda with several other people who were yet to be charged.

Other standout cases include:

• South Sudanese refugee Mabior Awikjok Bak, who was abducted in Nairobi last February by men reportedly in Kenyan police uniform. A critic of the government, he is now in arbitrary detention back home.
• Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif, who was shot dead outside Nairobi by police in October 2022, two months after he had sought safety in Kenya after fleeing Pakistan. Police say it was a case of mistaken identity.
• Nnamdi Kanu, a separatist leader from Nigeria, who said he was arrested in 2021 at a Kenyan airport and handed over to Nigerian intelligence services. He is now on trial facing charges of terrorism and incitement. Both governments denied involvement in his arrest.

For those seeking refuge in Kenya, it is frightening.

“I’m longer active on social media because of threats from all sides,” a Rwandan refugee critical of Rwanda’s government, who has lived in Kenya for more than 10 years, told the BBC.

The 40-year-old believes the authorities in Kenya are aiding Rwandan officials to track him down.

“Going back home is not an option for me and my family but we live in constant fear here,” he said.

“I’m afraid because being accessed by the people we are running away from is a huge possibility,” the refugee added.

Because of the growing threat, more than 3,000 refugees and asylum seekers are currently living under the protection of a non-governmental organisation, the Refugee Consortium of Kenya (RCK).

The fear of being arrested, charged or extradited are among the reasons why they had turned to the RCK for assistance, the organisation’s lead researcher, Shadrack Kuyoh, told the BBC.

He said the deportation of refugees was in breach of the Refugees Act of Kenya, which seeks to ensure that they “are not returned to territories where they may face harm”.

The fate of the Turkish nationals since their deportation remains unclear.

The four were believed to be part of the Gulen movement, named after the Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, which ran schools in Kenya and other parts of the world.

Their deportation came soon after Gulen, whom Turkey accused of plotting a failed coup in 2016, died, suggesting that Turkey exploited his death to crack down on his supporters.

The chair of the Interreligious Council of Kenya, Bishop Willybard Kitogho Lagho, described the four as “peace-loving people” who were involved in humanitarian work.

“Their abductions underscore the growing concerns about the safety of all refugees and asylum seekers in Kenya,” he said.

Kenyan foreign policy analyst Edgar Githua said the government should have handed them over to the UN refugee agency to shield itself from criticism.

“Kenya has soiled its international image. This will be quoted for ages. We cannot undo what we have done,” he said.

• Lupita Nyong’o speaks of family ordeal and condemns ‘chilling’ Kenya crackdown
• The ever-shifting alliances that fuelled Kenya’s impeachment drama
• Can Kenya close Dadaab, the world’s biggest refugee camp?

The Eastern European country of Moldova is continuing efforts to attract overseas firms, as it tries to move past political uncertainty.

“I went with a backpack, and set up a business,” says Dutch entrepreneur Luc Vocks, recalling how he moved to Moldova in 2007.

Mr Vocks had first visited the former Soviet republic three years earlier, and recalls experiencing “the cliché that one would have of Eastern Europe at that time”.

“Everything was dirt cheap, and if you were a foreigner you’d get attention,” he says.

Today, Mr Vocks is the owner of a Moldovan company called DevelopmentAid. Based in the capital Chisinau, it employs 180 people in the country, and runs a website that lists job vacancies in the international development community.

Mr Vocks is one of a growing number of foreign entrepreneurs in Moldova. The government wants to attract more like him and hopes that low business tax rates will help.

The country’s standard corporation tax rate – the amount that firms have to pay on their profits – is just 12%. This compares with 25% in the UK, and 25.8% in the Netherlands where Mr Vocks had initially launched his company before relocating it to Moldova.

There’s an even better deal for tech firms. In 2018 the Moldovan government launched an initiative to grow the country’s IT sector – the Moldova IT Park (MITP).

This isn’t a physical business park. Instead it is virtual scheme open to all IT firms in the country – and those that wish to move there from overseas. Firms that sign up only have to pay a corporation tax rate of 7%.

The MITP is part of a wider effort by the Moldovan government to modernise and expand its economy ahead of a bid to join the European Union in 2030.

This drive is being led by Moldova’s pro-EU President Maia Sandu, who this week was re-elected for a second term. And last month Moldovans voted “yes” on pro-EU constitutional changes.

However, the vote was extremely close, with Yes getting 50.46% and No receiving 49.54%. Although Russia denied interfering in the vote, Moldova’s authorities said attempts had been made to buy up to 300,000 votes in what Maia Sandu described as an “unprecedented assault on freedom and democracy”.

Moscow is opposed to Moldova joining the EU, and supports Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria economically, politically and militarily.

Dumitru Alaiba, Moldova’s deputy prime minister and minister for economic development and digitalisation, is positive about where Moldova is heading.

“Moldova in the past 10 to 15 years has really proven that it’s a country that can change very fast,” he tells the BBC.

“This used to be a highly corrupt country, a country where, exactly 10 years ago, a billion dollars from our central banks just disappeared.”

“We are moving very fast towards joining the EU, and we are reforming our economy at top speed. Of course, we have a long way to go.”

He pointed to Moldova’s rise on the global Corruption Perceptions Index, produced by anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International.

Out of 180 countries – with a lower placing meaning that a country is less corrupt – Moldova is now in 76th place, up from 91st a year earlier.

“Now entrepreneurs can breathe freely without fear of repercussion, without fear of corrupt inspectors, without fear of a filthy justice sector that commits crazy abuses.”

Mr Vocks agrees that Moldova is now a much easier place in which to do business than when he first set up his company there back in 2007.

“Back then, it was extremely bureaucratic. It was hard to get a residence permit. It was painful to register a company, especially as a foreigner.

“It was painful intersecting with the tax agency. The banks were rough to work with.”

Member companies of the MITP don’t just benefit from the 7% corporation tax rate. They also don’t need to make employer social security contributions, and staff don’t have to pay income tax. Mr Volks signed up DevelopmentAid almost immediately.

The MITP has also simplified immigration procedures through the IT Visa program.

More than 2,000 companies are now registered with the MITP, 300 of which have come from overseas. The most common countries these have moved from being the US, UK, Germany, Netherlands, and Ukraine.

In the first half of 2024, MITP firms generated a combined €365m ($397m; £308m) in revenues, according to official figures. And now employing 22,000 people in general, they are said to contribute around 6% of the country’s GDP.

While the MITP scheme has worked to boost Moldova’s IT sector, the influx of foreign tech companies has driven up salaries in the industry considerably.

Sven Wiese, a German expat who has set up a small IT services business in the country called Trabia, says he is now finding himself priced out when it comes to employee pay.

He says that the biggest firms signed up to the MITP can offer IT specialists more than €100,000 a year, “because that is still cheaper than hiring people within a bigger country like the US or Germany”.

At the same time he says that many Moldovan IT sector workers still want to leave the country. “Fewer people are now leaving Moldova, but emigration is still high.”

Another negative issue is the continuing war in neighbouring Ukraine, which is likely making some Western IT firms think twice about investing in Moldova. Mr Alaiba says is confident that Moldova is safe “as long as the free world is supporting Ukraine”.

Marina Bzovii, MITP’s administrator and an assistant professor at the Technical University of Moldova, already sees Moldova as a regional business hub. “Moldova is connecting even Central Asia, countries like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, who are culturally much further from Europe.

“However, Moldova understands both of the cultures. So it’s the kind of business hub that Europe needs… and Chisinau is now really vibrant.”

Australia’s government says it will introduce “world-leading” legislation to ban children under 16 from social media.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the proposed laws, to be tabled in parliament next week, were aimed at mitigating the “harm” social media was inflicting on Australian children.

“This one is for the mums and dads… They, like me, are worried sick about the safety of our kids online. I want Australian families to know that the government has your back,” he said.

While many of the details are yet to be debated, the government said the ban would not apply to young people already on social media.

There will be no exemptions on the age limit for children who have consent from their parents. The government says that the onus would be on social media platforms to show they are taking reasonable steps to prevent access.

Albanese said there would be no penalties for users, and that it would be up to Australia’s online regulator – the eSafety Commissioner – to enforce the laws.

The legislation would come into force 12 months after it passes and be subject to a review after it’s in place.

While most experts agree that social media platforms can harm the mental health of adolescents, many are split over the efficacy of trying to outlaw them all together.

Some experts argue that bans only delay young people’s exposure to apps such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, instead of teaching them how to navigate complex online spaces.

Previous attempts at restricting access, including by the European Union, have largely failed or faced backlash from tech firms. And questions remain over how implementation would work given there are tools which can circumvent age-verification requirements.

One of Australia’s largest advocacy groups for child rights has criticised the proposed ban as “too blunt an instrument”.

In an open letter sent to the government in October, signed by over 100 academics and 20 civil society organisations, the Australian Child Rights Taskforce called on Albanese to instead look at imposing “safety standards” on social media platforms.

The group also pointed to UN advice that “national policies” designed to regulate online spaces “should be aimed at providing children with the opportunity to benefit from engaging with the digital environment and ensuring their safe access to it”.

But other grassroots campaigners have lobbied Australia’s government for the laws, saying bans are needed to protect children from harmful content, misinformation, bullying and other social pressures.

A petition by the 36Months initiative, which has over 125,000 signatures, argues children are “not yet ready to navigate online social networks safely” until at least 16, and that currently “excessive social media use is rewiring young brains within a critical window of psychological development, causing an epidemic of mental illness”.

When asked whether there should be broader efforts to educate children about how to navigate the benefits and risks of being online, Albanese said that such an approach would be insufficient because it “assumes an equal power relationship”.

“I don’t know about you, but I get things popping up on my system that I don’t want to see. Let alone a vulnerable 14-year-old,” he told reporters on Thursday.

“These tech companies are incredibly powerful. These apps have algorithms that drive people towards certain behaviour.”

On a rainy November night in 1994, Lindsay Rimer walked the short route from her home to a local shop to buy breakfast cereal. The 13-year-old’s body was discovered weighed down in a nearby canal months later. In her pocket, the exact change from the cornflakes she had bought. Her killer has never been caught.

Senior detectives are not usually immediately alerted to a missing teenager.

On the day the alarm was raised Tony Whittle was chatting with colleague Graham Sunderland.

The conversation turned to the cases they were working on, with Graham saying the force received a call that morning about a young girl who had not turned up for her daily paper round.

Her parents were frantic because it appeared she had not been home all night.

Whether it was professional judgement or gut feeling, the men agreed there was something they could not put their finger on that left them concerned.

Then a detective superintendent in the murder squad, Tony was based in Bradford where it was not too unusual for teenagers to disappear overnight before re-emerging the next day.

But this was Hebden Bridge.

Eight miles (12km) outside of Halifax in West Yorkshire, a hippie-spirited town surrounded by rolling hills and stone bridges. The definition of a community where everyone knows everyone.

Although no-one in Lindsay Rimer’s family knew it yet, their lives had changed forever.

“We were just a normal family before that night. Then it all exploded,” recalls Kate, Lindsay’s elder sister who was 20 when she disappeared.

One of three girls, Kate was a new mum and living near the family home on Cambridge Street. Lindsay would often come for a sleepover.

Having realised there were no cornflakes for breakfast the next day, at 22:00 GMT on 7 November Lindsay had walked less than a mile to the Spar on Crown Street.

When she left the house, her dad was on the phone so Lindsay called at the nearby Trades Club where her mum was meeting friends and got some money from her so she could buy the cereal.

After her mum returned later, Lindsay’s parents went to bed assuming their daughter had come home and gone straight up to her attic room.

But the next morning they were called by the newsagents where Lindsay worked to say she had not turned up.

“Mum and dad realised her paper delivery bag was still in the kitchen along with her school money. They ran upstairs and realised she hadn’t slept in her bed.

“They knew straight away something had happened,” Kate says.

Grainy CCTV footage from the shop captured Lindsay leaving at 22:22 GMT.

She was spotted moments later by two bus passengers as she leant against a wall near to the town’s Memorial Garden.

That was the last confirmed sighting of her alive.

In the early days of her disappearance, police and the community joined forces and combed the area, hoping to bring the teenager home.

Three close friends of Geri and Gordon moved in with the family.

Together, they would spend nights brainstorming, writing down potential leads or information on a flip chart – anything that could help find Lindsay.

A week into the search and Kate, who describes being “plucked from normality into a world of crime and press,” played the role of her sister in a televised reconstruction.

It was hoped tracing her last movements would jog people’s memories.

Kate remembers: “I was insistent I wanted to take part. She was my build and we looked similar. I felt it was the least I could do to try and find her.”

“I look back at photos of myself at the time and the reconstruction and I look so young. I don’t recognise myself but I recognise the terror in my face,” she adds.

As the investigation wore on Kate says she remembers when officers, growing increasingly desperate for a breakthrough, searched the home of every man in the town.

There were rumours of sightings in other parts of the country. One man told police he had seen Lindsay being dragged into a car and had followed it to a nearby reservoir but his claims were disproved.

Tony reflects: “All we had was this CCTV picture of her in her big baggy jumper and jeans and that was it.”

“There were people around at the time and had she been dragged into a vehicle kicking and screaming, someone would have seen or heard.”

The lack of sightings led detectives to believe Lindsay had got into a vehicle with someone she knew.

She was described as an “intelligent, cautious girl” who would not have gone off with a stranger.

The investigation gained national attention, generating a sense of fear about how a schoolgirl could vanish in a place like Hebden Bridge.

An offender profile drawn up by a psychiatrist suggested the likely suspect would be someone who could drive, probably aged 17 to early 20s, and perhaps someone Lindsay would be attracted to.

Could it be someone she had met recently or maybe an older brother of someone she knew?

Several weeks into the inquiry and there was hope of a breakthrough.

Exhausted detective Tony had been persuaded to take his first day off in weeks when he received a call to say officers had tracked down the driver of a stolen red Honda Civic.

The vehicle had been spotted around the town when Lindsay disappeared. It was thought the driver had attempted to talk to schoolgirls.

Tony remembers: “I thought, ‘right, that’s our guy, let’s get him in’.”

However, it turned out the man had an alibi and was ruled out.

“He was actually being spoken to by a police officer miles away at about the time Lindsay would have left the shop,” he adds.

As the months wore on, and with the absence of any concrete leads, the inquiry was beginning to wind down.

Then in April 1995, Lindsay’s body was found a mile out of the town centre in the Rochdale Canal by two council workers clearing debris from the waterway.

Kate says: “I remember it clearly. I was sat in the park watching my daughter play.

“My dad walked down and sat next to me. He said they’d found a body and we needed to go back to the house.

“It wasn’t a shock because after so long we weren’t expecting her to come home. But it was just deeply sad.”

Lindsay had been strangled – likely killed on the night she vanished and her body dumped.

The arms of her jumper had been tied together in a sling with a stone used to weigh her down. There was no suggestion of a sexual assault.

Being submerged in the water for so long had erased any chance of forensic clues that might help police.

Hundreds of witness statements were taken. Officers spoke to thousands of people, examined hundreds of vehicles and made repeated appeals, but no progress was made.

Over the years the case has remained open and there have been moments where a breakthrough appeared within touching distance.

In April 2016, police believed that scientific advances had enabled them to create a DNA profile which may lead them back to the killer.

A 63-year-old man was arrested in November of that year with a 68-year-old from Bradford arrested in April 2017.

Both were later released without charge.

Three decades on, Lindsay’s younger sister Juliet reflects on how she has no living memory of her sibling.

A baby when she disappeared, Juliet has grown up knowing Lindsay to exist only in the context of murder and death.

She talks about a childhood where her family were in a “perpetual cycle of grief”.

“I don’t think there was one particular instance where I found out I had a sister that was killed.

“You can’t have a conversation with your young child about murder so it was something I pieced together over the years.”

The shadow of Lindsay’s murder still looms across Hebden Bridge and weighs heavily on the minds of both former and current officers.

Graham, who was a detective inspector on the investigation, says he thinks about the case often and it was the only one in his career that officers hadn’t solved.

Although now retired, he is desperate for the case to be solved: “We need to know what happened to Lindsay. No matter how insignificant, if someone knows something, for heaven’s sake come forward.”

“It’s a little girl I’ve never met and yet I know really well,” he adds.

• ‘Now’s the time to talk over murdered schoolgirl’

The detective now heading up the inquiry says police are still committed to finding the killer and getting justice for the Rimers.

Det Ch Insp James Entwistle says: “Loyalties change around people who know things, science moves on. There is always an opportunity and always a drive because this is a relentless pursuit for the truth.”

The wounds of not knowing remain unhealed for Lindsay’s family.

Kate describes her parents as “broken” with the whole family “exhausted by grief”.

They have created a memory box of their sister. They talk about a young teenager who had a love of fashion, was into Nirvana and the Prodigy and was keen to go to university.

But for self-preservation Kate and Juliet can’t focus too much on what Lindsay’s life may have been like.

“For our own wellbeing, we cannot go there.

“It’s too painful to think about what she would be doing and what she’s missed out on.”

The family’s only way of finding peace is to find the killer.

Kate says: “If you’ve experienced a death in the family you’re allowed to move on from it.

“You can forge a life where you encompass grief, but it doesn’t overwhelm it.

“But we’re stuck in this overwhelm all the time because we don’t have closure.

“We can only move on when we know who is responsible for killing our sister.”

West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds

A Scottish man has landed his “dream job” as a lighthouse keeper on a remote Australian island.

Sandy Duthie, 42, jumped at the chance when the previous lighthouse keeper decided to retire after 25 years on Gabo Island, off the coast of Victoria.

Sandy, from Aberdeenshire, visited Australia five years ago with his partner, and never left. When he went to the small lighthouse island he realised he would love to one day become part of its history.

Landing the lighthouse keeper and island caretaker job means he is now spending six months of the year there – one month on and one month off – with a colony of penguins for company.

Sandy hails from Kirkton of Durris, near Banchory.

He studied ecology at the University of Aberdeen before becoming an arborist.

He visited Mallacoota in 2019 with his partner Brodie Gaudion on an initial three-month holiday visa to meet her family for the first time, and ended up staying.

He first went to Gabo Island two years ago, and dreamed of eventually being its caretaker.

Gabo lighthouse itself was built more than 160 years ago.

Previous keeper Leo op den Brouw, 70, had spent every second month alone on the island for the past 25 years.

When he decided to return to family life on the mainland earlier this year that left the post open, and Sandy landed the job with government organisation Parks Victoria.

He and another keeper – who has now been working there for 16 years – share the month-on and month-off rotation.

Sandy and his enormous beard – which he has been cultivating for many years, and which he thinks may have helped in the job interview – started his new job back in March.

He gets to and from the island via a small boat charter.

It takes about 30 minutes if the weather allows it – the conditions are often choppy – and there tend to be whales nearby.

Sandy’s first experience of Gabo Island came when he visited for two weeks to do weed control work.

“It felt like home immediately, it felt very much like the north east of Scotland,” he explained.

“The foliage – it’s pretty scrubby – and the granite is unlike any other part of Australia that I’ve seen. I fell immediately in love with the place.

“I asked the caretaker then how he got he job and he told me it was just luck at the right place and the right time. And since then he retired and I applied for the job – right place, right time.

“The job does not come up very often.”

He described Gabo island as small but with “amazing” wildlife.

“We have little penguins – a large colony of them,” he said.

“We have whales, sea eagles and seals. We have whales go past constantly at the moment.

“I saw around 15 or 16 today. Sometimes there are 30 or 40 a day.”

Sandy said the job itself is more like a way of living.

“You have to really get with the rhythm of what you have to do and not put too much expectation or planning because Gabo Island has a way of flipping round whatever plans you have.

“You have to be able to problem-solve. Our range of tasks run from weather observations every six hours to cleaning the public toilets, painting everything – we have 80% humidity with salt air so everything rusts and corrodes and it all needs looked after.

“There’s a lot of ongoing maintenance that needs to be done to the house.

“You just have to expect the unexpected.”

He said the job was ideal for him, but that it came with challenges.

“There’s enough difference to keep your mind busy all the time,” Sandy said.

“I quite enjoy my own company. I do also enjoy the company of others. My partner comes to visit.

“Don’t get me wrong, there are some days where it seems like a prison sometimes.

“The previous caretaker described it as Alcatraz the rock. You can’t leave, go to family events if you’re here. Sometimes we get stuck on here for days on end because of the weather.

“But at the same time you can basically write your own script of the day and go about your duties.

“It can be difficult when phone signal drops out but there’s not much that I miss..

He said supplies could run low if a boat did not come.

“But the other side of it is when I get back to the mainland, something I’ve found is having to be super cautious about being in a crowd of people.

“If you’ve been here for weeks by yourself and not seen another face it’s quite intimidating going to the pub or going to an event.”

He has also discovered that there were other Scottish connections to Gabo Island.

“The pink granite on Gabo is very hard compared to other Australian granite,” Sandy explained.

“Documents I’ve found suggest the person in charge of building the lighthouse in 1859 actually sought Scottish stonemasons, in particular ones who had worked on the Aberdeen and Peterhead lighthouses, as they were used to working with such a hard material.

“Unfortunately we don’t know much more about who built the lighthouse though.

“There’s a book about all of the caretakers who have been on the island since 1859, and a lot of them are Scottish – people from the Highlands and Islands, Perth, Edinburgh, Glasgow and from the north east too.

“It’s really incredible the Scottish connection here.

“It is 100% a dream job. For me it’s perfect.”

Ghana’s outgoing President Nana Akufo-Addo is facing a backlash on social media after he unveiled a statue of himself during a tour of the country’s Western Region.

The monument is intended to honour the development initiatives the president has overseen whilst in office, the region’s minister Kwabena Okyere Darko-Mensah says.

But many Ghanaians have been mocking its installation – outside a hospital in the city of Sekondi – seeing it as “self glorification”.

“The people of the Western Region deserve better than these self-serving displays,” opposition MP Emmanuel Armah Kofi-Buah posted on X.

Akufo-Addo, who will be standing down in January after two terms in power, has boasted that he has fulfilled 80% of his promises to Ghanaians.

He unveiled the monument, prominently placed in front of Sekondi’s Effia-Nkwanta Regional Hospital, on Wednesday during his visit that has been dubbed a “thank-you tour”.

At the ceremony, Darko-Mensah, who oversees the Western Region, highlighted several key projects initiated under the president.

But the statue has sparked a wave of criticism, with some Ghanaians questioning its importance when several key projects remain incomplete.

“It would be admirable if the president had allowed posterity to recognise and appreciate his work,” an X user posted.

A section of the public is calling for the statue – photos of which have gone viral – to be pulled down after the president leaves office.

But not everyone is critical, with some seeing it as an acknowledgement of Akufo-Addo’s contributions to the development of the country.

“He is very deserving of this exquisite monument. The greatest president I’ve ever had. You will be missed by Ghanaians,” one person posted, adding that Akufo-Addo was the “founder of Ghana’s free education system”.

During his tour, the 80-year-old president has singled out his policy to scrap fees for secondary schools as his “most significant legacy”.

His visit has also fed into campaigning nationwide by the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). Western Region, in the south-west, is one of 16 regions in the country.

The president urged people there to vote for his deputy, Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia, in next month’s general election.

He will be the NPP’s candidate and Akufo-Addo said a vote for him would see the continuation of the party’s policies and projects.

Bawumia’s main challenger will be former President John Dramani Mahama, who is seeking a comeback under the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The high cost of living is a key campaign issue in Ghana, Africa’s leading producer of gold.

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North Korean soldiers have clashed with Ukrainian troops for the first time, Ukraine’s top officials have revealed.

In an interview with South Korean broadcaster KBS, Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said a “small group” of North Korean soldiers were attacked.

US officials told the Reuters news agency that North Korean troops were engaged in combat in the Kursk region of Russia on 4 November.

Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky, who had earlier condemned the West’s lack of response to the North Korean troops, said these “first battles with North Korea open a new chapter of instability in the world”.

Seoul, however, said it “does not believe [troops on both sides] engaged in direct combat”, but that there was an “incident” involving a small number of North Korean soldiers “near the frontline”.

Ukraine says an estimated 11,000 North Korean soldiers were in the Kursk border region, where Ukrainian troops have a foothold.

In recent weeks, South Korean and US intelligence as well as Nato have said that they have seen evidence of North Korean troops being involved in Russia’s war.

But Moscow and Pyongyang have so far not responded directly to any of the allegations.

Ukraine’s top counter-disinformation official Andriy Kovalenko first said in a Telegram post on Monday that North Korea’s “first military units… [had] already come under fire in Kursk”.

In an interview with South Korean broadcaster KBS, Rustem Umerov confirmed this, saying he expects a “significant number” of the North Korean troops to be engaged in combat, though he added it was “so far just small contacts, not full-scale engagement”.

Most of them are still undergoing training, he added.

“They’re wearing Russian uniforms, they’re undergoing tactical training, and they’re being deployed under various commands of the Russian army on the front lines,” Umerov said.

He said it was likely that five units, each consisting of around 3,000 soldiers, would be deployed across the battlefield.

He did not mention if there were any casualties.

In a daily video address on Wednesday, Zelensky called on Ukraine “together with the world… [to do] everything to make this Russian step toward expanding the war… a failure. Both for them, and for North Korea.”

Reports of such a move by North Korea have also alarmed the South, raising tensions between the two sides.

Late last month, Seoul had summoned Russia’s ambassador, seeking the “immediate withdrawal” of North Korean troops from Ukraine. It also warned that it was considering directly supplying arms to Ukraine.

Analysts have said that Pyongyang could be paid, or may be given access to Russian military technology in exchange for the troops.

On Wednesday, Russian lawmakers will vote to ratify a mutual defence treaty with North Korea, first proposed during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s lavish visit to Pyongyang in June.

It pledges that Russia and North Korea will help each other in the event of “aggression” against either country.

Japan’s Mount Fuji has seen its first snowfall after going through the longest period without snow since records began 130 years ago.

Snow fell on Japan’s highest peak about a month later than expected, as the country recovers from one of its hottest summers.

The news was welcomed, with locals celebrating and sharing photos of the snow-clad peak.

Mount Fuji is one of Japan’s most popular tourist attractions and has inspired centuries of artwork.

Snow was spotted on Wednesday, 6 November, by the Japan Meteorological Agency’s branch in Shizuoka.

As photos of the snowy peak spread on Wednesday, an X user commented, “Oh, I’ve been waiting for this”. Another wrote, “I’ve never been so excited for the first snowfall this year”.

“Finally… make-up makes you look even more beautiful,” read a third tweet, referring to the white peak.

The weather agency’s office in Kofu officially confirmed the presence of snow on Mount Fuji’s peak on Thursday. It could not do so on Wednesday due to clouds obstructing the view of the summit.

This was the most delayed sighting since 2023 when snow was first seen on the summit on 5 October, according to AFP news agency. The previous record was 26 October – that happened twice, in 1955 and 2016.

Located south-west of Tokyo, Mount Fuji stands at 3,776m (12,460 ft). It last erupted just over 300 years ago and is visible from the capital on a clear day.

With temperatures between June and August 1.76C (3.1F) higher than average, Japan had its joint hottest summer on record – the other was in 2003.

The warmer-than-usual weather continued in September.

While it’s hard to attribute delayed snowfall on Mount Fuji directly to climate change, it is in line with what experts predict in a warming world.

Cuba suffered a nationwide blackout on Wednesday as Hurricane Rafael brought winds of up to 185km/h (115mph) to the Caribbean island.

The country’s national energy company said strong winds had caused the shutdown of the electricity system.

At least 70,000 people were evacuated from their homes before the category three storm made landfall on Wednesday evening with warnings of storm surges, flash flooding, and mudslides.

It comes just weeks after millions were left without power for four days following a blackout caused by issues with the country’s creaking energy infrastructure. The incident also coincided with Hurricane Oscar, which killed at least six people.

Rafael made landfall in the western province of Artemisa, near capital Havana, at around 16:15 local time (21:15 GMT), the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

A spokesperson for the state-owned energy company, Unión Eléctrica, said engineers would have to wait for the storm to pass over the island before they could assess its impact on power plants and the grid more generally.

By 22:00, Rafael had moved on into the Gulf of Mexico and weakened to a category two hurricane, with maximum wind speeds of 169km/h.

The NHC said the storm would continue to bring heavy rains across western Cuba through Thursday and that storm surges could pose a danger to life.

Heavy rains are also expected in the Cayman Islands, while a tropical storm warning is in force in the Florida Keys.

Last month, around 10 million people in Cuba were left without power following a blackout caused by maintenance issues and a lack of fuel to run power stations.

That blackout also coincided with Hurricane Oscar, a less powerful category one storm that left a trail of destruction along the island’s north-eastern coast.

The worst-affected area was the eastern province of Guantánamo, where more than 1,000 homes were damaged by heavy rains and strong winds.

Roblox is introducing new safety features for children under the age of 13, following criticism of how it protects younger users.

The free online gaming platform, which has around 70 million daily users worldwide, allows players to create their own games and play those made by others.

It is particularly popular with children – but some have complained they have been exposed to upsetting and harmful content on the site.

Starting 3 December, game creators will be asked to say whether their games are suitable for under-13s – with any that fail to do so being blocked for players 12 and younger.

And from 18 November, under-13s will also be barred from accessing “social hangouts”, which are online spaces where players can talk to each other by text and voice.

It specifies hangout experiences as games where “the primary theme or purpose” is to allow people to communicate with each other as themselves, rather than role-playing as a character.

Younger users will also be unable to use “free-form 2D user creation” from the same date, which it said were games “that allow users to draw or write in 2D and replicate those creations to other users without the completed creation going through Roblox moderation”.

It is thought that this is aimed at preventing users writing or drawing offensive images or messages which are difficult to moderate.

“We recognize the deadline is soon, but we greatly appreciate your cooperation in helping us ensure Roblox is a safe and civil place for users of all ages to come together,” it said in a post on the Roblox developer website.

According to the media regulator Ofcom, Roblox is the most popular game in the UK for children aged 8 to 12.

But it has faced criticism over its protections for younger users, with one young person telling the BBC in May he had been approached on Roblox and asked for sexual images.

At the time, Ofcom, the regulator for online safety, told tech firms to hide “toxic” content from children and published draft codes of practice.

Since then there have been further issues, with Turkey entirely blocking access to Roblox in August.

“As a company that’s transparent with our community of developers, we needed to share key information about the upcoming changes prior to launch,” Roblox told the BBC in a statement.

“We’re constantly strengthening our safety systems and policies — we shipped over 30 improvements this year and we have more to come,” it added.

But despite announcing the changes would begin swiftly, it said it would not begin enforcing the requirements until 2025.

A Malaysian businessman has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for his role in the US Navy’s biggest corruption scandal and for skipping a previous sentencing hearing.

Leonard Glenn Francis, known as “Fat Leonard”, pleaded guilty in 2015 to bribing senior Navy officials with millions of dollars in cash, prostitutes, luxury travel and top-shelf liquor and cigars.

In exchange, Francis said he received classified information and was able to overcharge the Navy $35m (£27m) for his company’s services to the 7th Fleet based in the Indo-Pacific.

He had been due for sentencing in 2022 but he escaped in September that year by cutting off his ankle bracelet, and was recaptured within days.

The US Attorney’s Office said Tuesday’s sentence reflected admissions in his 2015 guilty plea, his “extensive cooperation with the government”, and his guilty plea earlier on Tuesday for failing to attend the original sentencing hearing.

The court also fined the 60-year-old $150,000 and ordered him to pay the US Navy $20m in restitution.

His company, Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia, was also sentenced on Tuesday to five years probation and was fined $36m.

US officials said the scandal had weakened public trust in some Navy leaders and its fallout will be long-felt.

Francis was arrested in California in 2013 and he pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud charges in 2015.

After his escape in September, he was recaptured days later in Venezuela while trying to get to Russia.

His case came to be known as the Fat Leonard scandal because of Francis’ rotund frame at that time.

Francis was returned to California last December under a prisoner swap between the US and Venezuela that saw Washington release an ally of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in exchange for 10 American detainees.

“Leonard Francis lined his pockets with taxpayer dollars while undermining the integrity of US Naval forces,” said US Attorney Tara McGrath in a statement.

“The impact of his deceit and manipulation will be long felt, but justice has been served today,” McGrath said.

The bribery and corruption that Francis had “fostered” within the US Navy over many years was “aggravated and egregious”, but under custody, he helped investigators uncover “unprecedented levels of corruption” in the establishment, the US Attorney’s Office said.

Francis provided investigators with detailed information on hundreds of sailors, from petty officers to admirals.

“Mr. Francis’ sentencing brings closure to an expansive fraud scheme that he perpetrated against the US Navy with assistance from various Navy officials,” said Kelly Mayo, Director of the defence department’s Office of the Inspector General.

“Mr. Francis’ actions not only degraded the 7th Fleet’s readiness but shook the Fleet’s trust in its leadership who furthered his corrupt practices,” Kelly said.

Donald Trump is set to return to the White House, having promised action on issues including immigration, the economy and the war in Ukraine.

He looks likely to enjoy plenty of support for his political agenda in Congress after his Republican Party regained control of the Senate.

In his victory speech, Trump vowed he would “govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept. We’re going to keep our promises”.

But in some cases, he has given little detail of how he might achieve his aims.

Asked in 2023 by Fox News whether he would abuse his power or target political opponents, he replied he would not, “except for day one”.

“No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border, and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
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While campaigning, Trump promised the biggest mass deportations of undocumented migrants in US history.

He also pledged to complete the building of a wall at the border with Mexico that was started during his first presidency.

The number of crossings at the US southern border hit record levels at the end of last year during the Biden-Harris administration, before falling in 2024.

Experts have told the BBC that deportations on the scale promised by Trump would face huge legal and logistical challenges – and could slow economic growth.

Exit poll data has suggested the economy was a key issue for voters. Trump has promised to “end inflation” – which rose to high levels under President Joe Biden before falling again. But a president’s power to directly influence prices is limited.

He has also promised sweeping tax cuts, extending his overhaul from 2017. He has proposed making tips tax-free, abolishing tax on social security payments and shaving corporation tax.

He has proposed new tariffs of at least 10% on most foreign goods, to cut the trade deficit. Imports from China could bear an additional 60% tariff, he has said. Some economists have warned that such moves could push up prices for ordinary people.

During his first presidency, Trump rolled back hundreds of environmental protections and made America the first nation to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

This time, he has again vowed to cut regulations, particularly as a way to help the American car industry. He has constantly attacked electric vehicles, promising to overturn Biden’s targets encouraging the switch to cleaner cars.

He has pledged to increase production of US fossil fuels – vowing to “drill, drill, drill” on day one in favour of renewable energy sources such as wind power.

He wants to open areas such as the Arctic wilderness to oil drilling, which he argues would lower energy costs – though analysts are sceptical.

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Trump has criticised the tens of billions of dollars spent by the US on supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia – and has pledged to end the conflict “within 24 hours” through a negotiated deal.

He has not said what he thinks either side should give up. Democrats say the move would embolden President Vladimir Putin.

Trump wants the US to disentangle itself from foreign conflicts generally. Regarding the war in Gaza – Trump has positioned himself as a staunch supporter of Israel, but has urged the American ally to end its operation.

He has also pledged to end the related violence in Lebanon, but gave no detail on how.

Against the wishes of some of his supporters, Trump said during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris that he would not sign into law a national abortion ban.

In 2022, the nationwide constitutional right to abortion was overturned by the Supreme Court, which had a majority of conservative judges following Trump’s first presidency.

Reproductive rights became a key campaigning topic for Harris, and several states approved measures to protect or expand abortion rights on polling day.

Trump himself has regularly said states should be free to decide their own laws on abortion, but struggled to find a consistent message of his own.

Trump has said he will “free” some of those convicted of offences during the riot in Washington DC on 6 January 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol building in an effort to thwart the 2020 election victory of Joe Biden.

Several deaths were blamed on the violence, which Trump was accused of inciting.

He has worked to downplay the riot’s significance and recast the hundreds of supporters who were convicted as political prisoners.

He continues to say many of them are “wrongfully imprisoned”, though has acknowledged that “a couple of them, probably they got out of control”.

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Trump has vowed to sack “within two seconds” of taking office the veteran prosecutor leading two criminal investigations against him.

Special Counsel Jack Smith has indicted Trump over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and over his alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Trump denies any wrongdoing, and managed to prevent either case coming to trial before the election. He says Mr Smith has subjected him to a “political witch hunt”.

Trump will return to the White House as the first ever president with a criminal conviction, having been found guilty in New York of falsifying business records.

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North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

News of Donald Trump’s return to power in the White House has made global headlines.

His so-called America First foreign policy could see a withdrawal of US involvement in areas of conflict around the world.

Five BBC correspondents assess the effect it could have where they are.

“Do not try to predict Trump’s actions. No one knows how he is going to act.”

The words of one Ukrainian MP reflect the political challenge facing Kyiv. A Trump victory was widely feared here, over what it could mean for future US support.

The Republican once vowed to end the war in a single day, and has repeatedly criticised US military aid for Ukraine. Now, it’s anyone’s guess what he could do.

“He could ask Putin to freeze this war, and he says ‘OK’,” says a front-line soldier. “It’s the worst scenario because in a couple of years the Russians will advance again and might destroy us.”

“The second scenario is if Putin refuses,” he says. “There is a chance Trump will react radically. That is a more promising scenario.”

Ukraine hopes that means the US further upping its military support in the face of a likely Ukrainian defeat.

For those close to the front lines who have had enough of Russian aggression, Trump is seen as a route to respite.

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Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president once labelled by Trump as “the greatest salesman in history” sent an early message of congratulations.

He talked up the political and economic opportunities a partnership could provide, and wants to be able to keep fighting in return.

There’s also another ingredient.

Trump won’t just have to consider further military support for Ukraine, but also how or whether to respond to North Korea’s growing involvement in Russia’s invasion.

You might expect the Kremlin to be cock-a-hoop at Trump winning back the White House.

After all, out on the campaign trail, he had avoided criticising Vladimir Putin. Kamala Harris meanwhile called the Russian president “a murderous dictator”.

Trump had also questioned the scale of US military assistance to Kyiv.

Publicly, though, the Kremlin is going out of its way to give the impression that it’s not excited by a Trump victory.

“I’m not aware of any plans [for President Putin] to congratulate Trump,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “Don’t forget that [America] is an ‘unfriendly country’ which is directly and indirectly involved in a war against our state.”

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The dampening down of expectations are the result of how Trump’s first term turned out: the Kremlin had high hopes that a Trump presidency would transform US-Russian relations. It didn’t.

Nevertheless, at the political discussion club I’m attending in the mountains above Sochi, leading Russian political scientists seem to be looking forward to Trump the sequel.

One pundit told me he thinks that under Trump the US will “retreat” from its global super power status.

Another suggested the US election fitted the Kremlin’s “overall vision of the world”, in which “liberal globalism has depleted its efficiency”.

When dozens of European leaders from the EU and beyond gather in Budapest on Thursday, those on the right will be celebrating Donald Trump’s election victory, but the rest will be asking themselves what happens next.

Hungarian host and Trump ally Viktor Orban was first on to Facebook with his delighted message: “It’s in the bag!”

But for many other EU leaders Trump 2.0 could signal trouble ahead on security, trade and climate change.

Within minutes of congratulating the Republican candidate, France’s Emmanuel Macron said he had agreed with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to work towards a “more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this new context”.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock gave an idea of that context. Just back from Ukraine, she said Europeans now had to “think big and make investments in our European security big”, with the US as a partner.

Her Polish and Nato counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski said he had been in touch with Trump’s top team and agreed “Europe must urgently take greater responsibility for its security”.

The prospect of steep US tariffs on EU imports weigh heavily too. EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen congratulated Trump but gave a timely reminder that “millions of jobs and billions in trade” relied on their transatlantic relationship.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was one of the first to congratulate Trump and has previously called him Israel’s best ever friend in the White House.

Trump previously won favour here by scrapping a US nuclear deal with Iran that Israel opposed. He also upended decades of US policy by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Trump’s first term in office was “exemplary” as far as Israel is concerned, says Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US. But he adds: “We have to be very clear-sighted about who Donald Trump is and what he stands for.”

The former president sees wars as expensive, Mr Oren notes, and Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly.

“If Donald Trump comes into office in January and says, ‘okay, you have a week to finish this war’, Netanyahu is going to have to respect that.”

In Gaza, where the Israeli military has been battling Palestinian group Hamas, desperation has narrowed the focus of some residents.

Trump “has some strong promises”, says Ahmed, whose wife and son were both killed when their house was destroyed. “We hope he can help, and bring peace.”

Another displaced resident, Mamdouh, said he didn’t care who won the US election – he just wanted someone to help.

China is bracing itself for the return of Donald Trump where there are fears that his presidency will trigger a new trade war.

As president, Trump imposed tariffs on over $300 billion of Chinese imports. This time around he has said the tariffs could be in excess of 60%.

Beijing will not stand by – it will retaliate. But China’s economy is already ailing and it will be in no mood for a second protracted trade war.

Trump’s unpredictable policies and fiery rhetoric are also a headache for Chinese leaders who prefer stability.

But in the battle for power and influence, some analysts see an opportunity for Beijing.

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The Biden administration has spent the last four years building friendships across Asia with the likes of South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam – all in an effort to contain China.

Trump’s “America first” doctrine has, in the past, isolated and weakened these US alliances. He prefers trying to make deals over delicate diplomacy and often puts a price tag on America’s friendships.

In 2018, he demanded more money from South Korea to continue to host US troops in the country

Make no mistake, China wants to challenge the US-led world order. Beijing has already built alliances with emerging economies across the so-called Global South.

If Washington’s influence does wane in Asia and around the world, it could be a win for President Xi.

• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Nearly a month ago, Kamala Harris appeared on ABC’s The View in what was expected to be a friendly interview aimed at pitching herself to Americans who wanted to know more about her.

But the sit-down was quickly overshadowed by her response to a question on what she would have done differently from incumbent president, Joe Biden: “Not a thing comes to mind.”

Harris’s answer – which became a Republican attack ad on loop – underscored the political headwinds that her jumpstart campaign failed to overcome in her decisive loss to Donald Trump on Tuesday.

Publicly, she conceded the race late on Wednesday afternoon, telling supporters “do not despair”.

But soul-searching over where she went wrong and what else she could have done will likely take longer as Democrats begin finger-pointing and raising questions about the future of the party.

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Harris campaign officials were silent in the early Wednesday hours while some aides expressed tearful shock over what they had expected to be a much closer race.

“Losing is unfathomably painful. It is hard,” Harris campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in an email to staff on Wednesday. “This will take a long time to process.”

As the sitting vice-president, Harris was unable to untether herself from an unpopular president and convince voters that she could offer the change they were seeking amid widespread economic anxiety.

After Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous debate performance, Harris was anointed to the top of the ticket, bypassing the scrutiny of a primary without a single vote being cast.

She began her 100-day campaign promising a “new generation of leadership”, rallying women around abortion rights and vowing to win back working-class voters by focusing on economic issues including rising costs and housing affordability.

With just three months until election day, she generated a wave of initial momentum, which included a flurry of memes on social media, a star-studded endorsement list that included Taylor Swift and a record-setting donation windfall. But Harris couldn’t shake the anti-Biden sentiment that permeated much of the electorate.

The president’s approval rating has consistently hovered in the low 40s throughout his four years in office, while some two-thirds of voters say they believe the US is on the wrong track.

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Some allies have privately questioned whether Harris remained too loyal to Biden in her bid to replace him. But Jamal Simmons, the vice-president’s former communication director, called it a “trap”, arguing any distance would have only handed Republicans another attack line for being disloyal.

“You can’t really run away from the president who chooses you,” he said.

Harris tried to walk the fine line of addressing the administration’s record without casting shade on her boss, showing a reluctance to break with any of Biden’s policies while also not outwardly promoting them on the campaign trail.

But she then failed to deliver a convincing argument about why she should lead the country, and how she would handle economic frustrations as well as widespread concerns over immigration.

About 3 in 10 voters said their family’s financial situation was falling behind, an increase from about 2 in 10 four years ago, according to data from AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 US voters conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Nine in 10 voters were very or somewhat concerned about the price of groceries.

The same survey found that 4 in 10 voters said immigrants living in the US illegally should be deported to their country of origin, up from around 3 in 10 who said the same in 2020.

And though Harris tried to spend the home stretch of her campaign underlining that her administration would not be a continuation of Biden’s, she failed to clearly outline her own policies, often skirting around issues instead of addressing perceived failures head on.

The Harris campaign had hoped to reassemble the voting base that powered Biden’s 2020 victory, winning over the core Democratic constituencies of black, Latino and young voters as well as making further gains with college-educated suburban voters.

But she underperformed with these key voting blocs. She lost 13 points with Latino voters, two points with black voters, and six points with voters under 30, according to exit polls, which may change as votes are counted, but are considered representative of trends.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who lost the 2016 Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton and the 2020 primary to Biden, said in a statement it was “no great surprise” that working class voters abandoned the party.

“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he said. “And they’re right.”

While women largely threw their support behind Harris over Trump, the vice-president’s lead did not exceed the margins that her campaign had hoped her historic candidacy would turn out. And she was unable to deliver on her ambitions of winning over suburban Republican women, losing 53% of white women.

In the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Democrats had hoped her focus on the fight for reproductive rights would deliver a decisive victory.

While some 54% of female voters cast their ballots for Harris, it fell short of the 57% who backed Biden in 2020, according to exit poll data.

Even before she was catapulted to the top of the ticket, Harris had sought to frame the race as a referendum on Trump, not Biden.

The former California prosecutor leaned into her law enforcement record to prosecute the case against the former president.

But her nascent campaign opted to ditch Biden’s core argument that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy, prioritising a forward-looking “joyful” message about protecting personal freedoms and preserving the middle class.

In the final stretch, however, Harris made a tactical decision to again highlight the dangers of a second Trump presidency, calling the president a “fascist” and campaigning with disaffected Republicans fed up with his rhetoric.

After Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, told the New York Times that Trump spoke approvingly about Adolf Hitler, Harris delivered remarks outside her official residence describing the president as “unhinged and unstable”.

“Kamala Harris lost this election when she pivoted to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz said on Tuesday night.

“Voters already know everything there is about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration.”

“It was a colossal failure for her campaign to shine the spotlight on Trump more than on Harris’s own ideas,” he added.

Ultimately, the winning coalition Harris needed to beat Trump never materialised, and voters’ resounding rejection of Democrats showed that the party has a deeper problem than just an unpopular president.

• GLOBAL: What does Trump victory mean for UK?
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics and the global impact in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is set to reshape US foreign policy, promising potentially radical shifts on multiple fronts as war and uncertainty grip parts of the world.

During his campaign, Trump made broad policy pledges, often lacking specific details, based on principles of non-interventionism and trade protectionism – or as he puts it “America First”.

His victory signals one of the most significant potential disruptions in many years in Washington’s approach to foreign affairs in the midst of parallel crises.

We can piece together some of his likely approach to different areas from both his comments on the campaign trail and his track record in office from 2017 to 2021.

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
• Results: Who did each state vote for?
• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win
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• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly said he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in a day”. When asked how, he suggested overseeing a deal, but has declined to give specifics.

A research paper written by two of Trump’s former national security chiefs in May said the US should continue its weapons supply to Ukraine, but make the support conditional on Kyiv entering peace talks with Russia.

To entice Russia, the West would promise to delay Ukraine’s much-wanted entry into Nato. The former advisers said Ukraine should not give up its hopes of getting all of its territory back from Russian occupation, but that it should negotiate based on current front lines.

Trump’s Democratic opponents, who accuse him of cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, say his approach amounts to surrender for Ukraine and will endanger all of Europe.

He has consistently said his priority is to end the war and stem the drain on US resources.

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It’s not clear how far the former advisers’ paper represents Trump’s own thinking, but it’s likely to give us a guide to the kind of advice he’ll get.

His “America First” approach to ending the war also extends to the strategic issue of the future of Nato, the transatlantic all-for-one and one-for-all military alliance set up after the World War Two, originally as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

Nato now counts 32 countries and Trump has long been a sceptic of the alliance, accusing Europe of free-riding on America’s promise of protection.

Whether he would actually withdraw the US from Nato, which would signal the most significant shift in transatlantic defence relations in nearly a century, remains a matter of debate.

Some of his allies suggest his hard line is just a negotiating tactic to get members to meet the alliance’s defence spending guidelines.

But the reality is Nato leaders will be seriously worried about what his victory means for the alliance’s future and how its deterrent effect is perceived by hostile leaders.

As with Ukraine, Trump has promised to bring “peace” to the Middle East – implying he would end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon – but has not said how.

He has repeatedly said that, if he had been in power rather than Joe Biden, Hamas would not have attacked Israel because of his “maximum pressure” policy on Iran, which funds the group.

Broadly, it’s likely Trump would attempt to return to the policy, which saw his administration pull the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, apply greater sanctions against Iran and kill Gen Qasem Soleimani – Iran’s most powerful military commander.

In the White House, Trump enacted strongly pro-Israel policies, naming Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy there from Tel Aviv – a move which energised Trump’s Christian evangelical base, a core Republican voter group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump the “best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House”.

But critics argue his policy had a destabilising effect on the region.

The Palestinians boycotted the Trump administration, because of Washington’s abandonment of their claim to Jerusalem – the city that forms the historical centre of national and religious life for Palestinians.

They were further isolated when Trump brokered the so-called “Abraham Accords”, which saw a historic deal to normalise diplomatic ties between Israel and several Arab and Muslim countries. They did so without Israel having to accept a future independent Palestinian state alongside it – the so-called two-state solution – previously a condition of Arab countries for such a regional deal.

The countries involved were instead given access to advanced US weapons in return for recognising Israel.

The Palestinians were left at one of the most isolated points in their history by the only power that can really apply leverage to both sides in the conflict – further eroding their ability as they saw it to protect themselves on the ground.

Trump made several statements during the campaign saying he wants the Gaza war to end.

He has had a complex, at times dysfunctional relationship with Netanyahu, but certainly has the ability to apply pressure on him.

He also has a history of strong relations with leaders in the key Arab countries that have contacts with Hamas.

It’s unclear how he would navigate between his desire to show strong support for the Israeli leadership while also trying to bring the war to a close.

Trump’s allies have often portrayed his unpredictability as a diplomatic asset, but in the highly contested and volatile Middle East in the midst of a crisis already of historical proportions, it’s far from clear how this would play out.

Trump will have to decide how – or whether – to take forward the stalled diplomatic process launched by the Biden administration to get a Gaza ceasefire in return for the release of the hostages held by Hamas.

America’s approach to China is its most strategically important area of foreign policy – and one which has the biggest implications for global security and trade.

When he was in office, Trump labelled China a “strategic competitor” and imposed tariffs on some Chinese imports to the US. This sparked tit-for-tat tariffs by Beijing on American imports.

There were efforts to de-escalate the trade dispute, but the Covid pandemic wiped out this possibility, and relations got worse as the former president labelled Covid a “Chinese virus”.

While the Biden administration claimed to take a more responsible approach to China policy, it did, in fact, keep in place many of the Trump-era tariffs on imports.

• What Chinese people want from the US

The trade policy has become closely linked to domestic voter perceptions in the US about protecting American manufacturing jobs – even though much of the long-term jobs decline in traditional US industries like steel has been as much about factory automation and production changes as global competition and offshoring.

Trump has praised Chinese President Xi Jinping as both “brilliant” and “dangerous” and a highly effective leader who controls 1.4 billion people with an “iron fist”- part of what opponents characterised as Trump’s admiration for “dictators”.

The former president seems likely to shift away from the Biden administration’s approach of building stronger US security partnerships with other regional countries in a bid to contain China.

The US has maintained military assistance for self-ruled Taiwan, which China sees as a breakaway province that will eventually be under Beijing’s control.

Trump said in October that if he returned to the White House, he would not have to use military force to prevent a Chinese blockade of Taiwan because President Xi knew he was “[expletive] crazy”, and he would impose paralysing tariffs on Chinese imports if that happened.

• When does Trump become US president again?
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• Who was who in Trump’s huge victory entourage?
• The Trump family: A guide to an American dynasty
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Republican Donald Trump will be the next US president – after a decisive victory that will send him back to the White House.

His defeated opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, urged her supporters to accept Trump’s win, and insisted there must be a peaceful transfer of power.

He will be the first former president to return to office in more than 130 years, and – at 78 – the oldest man ever elected to the role.

Trump has already been congratulated by world leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the UK’s Keir Starmer, but the official presidential election results are not yet confirmed.

There had been fears that extremely close races in some of the key battleground “swing” states might have left the results uncertain.

But earlier-than-expected wins in North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, coupled with victories in solidly Republican states, meant Trump reached the magic 270 electoral votes needed to secure the presidency.

CBS, the BBC’s broadcasting partner in the US, projected Donald Trump as the overall winner just after 05:30 EST (10:30 GMT) on 6 November, the day after the election.

However, it could still take days or even weeks for the detailed election results to be confirmed officially in every state.

• Follow live as Trump prepares to appoint top jobs
• Who did each state vote for?
• Watch: How election night unfolded
• What’s next for the Trump agenda?
• Analysis: Why the US gave Trump a second chance
• Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

No. Trump becomes the president-elect, and his running mate JD Vance becomes the vice-president elect.

Trump will be sworn in at the presidential inauguration on Monday, 20 January 2025, at which point he legally assumes the power and responsibilities of the presidency.

After winning the 2016 election. Trump was sworn in as president in January 2017 and served until 2021.

• Seven things Trump says he will do as president
• What happens to Trump’s legal cases?
• Will Trump’s victory spark a global trade war?
• Trump victory is a major setback for climate action, experts say

Once every valid vote has been included in the final results, a process known as the electoral college confirms the election result.

In each state a varying number of electoral college votes are up for grabs. It is securing these – and not the backing of voters themselves – that ultimately wins the presidency.

Generally, states award all of their electoral college votes to whoever wins the popular vote, and this is confirmed after meetings on 17 December.

The new US Congress then meets on 6 January to count the electoral college votes and confirm the new president. As the outgoing vice-president, Kamala Harris will preside over this process.

It was this meeting of Congress, to certify the election results, that Trump’s supporters tried to stop, when they marched on the US Capitol in 2021 after Trump refused to concede defeat to Joe Biden.

Trump and Vance will work with their transition team to organise the handover from President Biden’s outgoing administration.

They will identify their policy priorities, start vetting the candidates who will take up key roles in the new administration, and prepare to take over the functions of government.

At his victory rally, Trump hinted that the former Republican presidential candidate and vaccine sceptic Robert J Kennedy could be given a healthcare role.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is also expected to feature in the new administration. Trump previously said he would ask Mr Musk to tackle government waste.

• Who was in Trump’s huge victory entourage?
• The Trump family: A guide to an American dynasty

Trump and his team will also begin receiving classified national security briefings covering current threats and ongoing military operations.

The president-elect and vice-president-elect also receive mandatory protection from the US Secret Service.

Trump’s team says he has accepted a traditional invitation from Biden to visit the White House to ensure a smooth transition between the administrations.

The outgoing president also typically attends the inauguration of the incoming president, although Trump chose to boycott the 2021 event.

Trump did, however, follow the tradition begun by Ronald Reagan of leaving a handwritten note in the Oval Office for his successor to read.

At the time, President Biden told reporters that his predecessor had left “a very generous letter”.

After the inauguration, the new president begins work immediately.

Donald Trump has soared to a decisive election victory over Kamala Harris, lifted up by some of the very voters that Democrats once relied on.

The Republican president-elect showed strength with the white working-class voters who first propelled him to the White House in 2016, while racking up huge support from Latino voters and putting in a better-than-expected performance among younger Americans, especially men.

Among Latinos, a key part of the Democratic voter base for decades, Trump benefited from a mammoth 14 percentage-point bump compared to the 2020 election, according to exit polls.

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
• Results: Who did each state vote for?
• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win
• These are the seven things Trump says he will do as president
• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

Nowhere is Trump’s reshaping of the electorate more apparent than in the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the highly coveted “blue wall” that helped propel Joe Biden to victory in 2020.

This time, Trump won all three states, crushing Democrats’ hopes that Harris could find a path to victory despite early election night losses in the southern states of North Carolina and Georgia.

In his victory speech in Florida, Trump – who is set to win the popular vote too – credited the result to “the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition” in American history.

“They came from all quarters. Union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American,” he told a roaring crowd. “We had everybody, and it was beautiful.”

In Pennsylvania, the prized battleground state, Trump benefited from a huge swell of support from the state’s growing Latino population.

Exit polls suggested Latinos in Pennsylvania amounted to about 5% of the total vote. Trump garnered 42% of that vote, compared to 27% when he ran against Joe Biden in 2020.

The polls will continue to change as votes are counted, but are broadly representative of electoral trends.

In the state’s “Latino belt” – an eastern industrial corridor that has shifted to the right in the last two elections – some voters said they were not surprised by the result.

“It’s simple, really. We liked the way things were four years ago,” said Samuel Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable and member of the large Puerto Rican community in the city of Allentown.

Mr Negron, and other Trump supporters in the now majority-Latino city, listed other reasons that their community was drifting towards Trump, including social issues and a perception that their family values now align more with the Republican Party.

• When does Trump become US president again?
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• Donald Trump: A remarkable life in pictures

The most common factor, however, was the economy – specifically, inflation.

“Out here, you pay $5 for a dozen eggs. It used to be $1, or even 99 cents,” Mr Negron added. “A lot of us have woken up, in my opinion, from Democratic lies that things have been better. We realised things were better then.”

Ahead of the election, polls also suggested that many Latinos – across the US and in Pennsylvania specifically – were drawn to Trump’s proposals to block migrants at the US-Mexico border and enact much stricter immigration laws.

Daniel Campo, a Venezuelan-American, said that Trump’s claims of creeping “socialism” reminded him of the situation he left in his home country.

“I understand what [migrants] are leaving. But you have to do it the right way. I came the right way,” he said. “Things have to be done legally. Many of us were worried that the borders were just open” under the Biden-Harris administration, he said.

Collectively, the Latino shift towards Trump, his hold on white working-class voters and his increased support among non-college educated voters in general created an insurmountable obstacle for the Harris campaign.

But Trump also improved his position in some surprising corners.

In 2020 Joe Biden had a 24-point advantage with voters under 30. This time, that lead shrank to just 11 points. While nationally black voters still overwhelmingly supported Harris (85%), in Wisconsin Trump’s support among that demographic more than doubled, from 8% in 2020 to 22% this election.

Some of the most significant battlegrounds in Wisconsin were the three counties surrounding Milwaukee known as the Wow counties – Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington. Harris failed to significantly improve upon Biden’s 2020 vote share in these suburban areas, while also slipping in rural, whiter parts of the state dominated by Trump.

Preliminary results also indicate that Harris failed to get as many votes as Biden in Wisconsin’s biggest, most diverse city – Milwaukee.

Michael Wagner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said her direct appeals to working-class voters may not have made much of a difference given the national political climate.

Ted Dietzler cast his vote in a fire station on the outskirts of the small city of Waukesha.

“I’m voting Trump because of the border, the economy, and no more wars,” he said, wearing a Green Bay Packers hat.

“We saw a huge difference when Trump was president,” Dietzler said, adding that he was drawn to Trump’s embrace of former Democrats like Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom appear set to have roles in the Trump administration.

“Inflation is a big deal, and I don’t think Harris quite gets it,” he said. “I think we’ll all just be better off with Trump back.”

Trump’s national economic messaging hit home with working-class voters in the Midwestern state of Michigan, too.

With nearly all votes counted, Trump is leading the state that he lost in 2020 by about 85,000 votes. He increased his vote share in rural areas as well as in Macomb County, home to many working-class voters in the Detroit suburbs.

One of them, Nahim Uddin, a delivery driver and former Ford car-worker, cast his ballot for Trump because he said the former president would drive down prices.

“I went to go purchase a car – the interest rates had skyrocketed,” the 34-year-old said. “That’s the whole reason I voted for him.”

The same was true for Yian Yian Shein, a small business owner in the city Warren, who said Trump would lower income taxes and help people like her.

Democrats tried to tailor their economic messages in Michigan, touting their investments in electric car manufacturing while securing an endorsement from United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain, a frequent Trump critic.

But Republicans were able to “neutralise” those messages by arguing that the transition to electric vehicles would come at the cost of jobs, said Michigan State University professor Matt Grossmann.

Ultimately what cost Democrats among blue-collar voters across demographic groups was the perception that they were to blame for high prices and pinched budgets.

“Largely, voters have felt economic pain due to the post-Covid inflationary period, and they’re taking it out on Biden” and Harris, said University of Michigan professor Jonathan Hanson.

• UNITED KINGDOM: What does Trump victory mean for UK?
• GLOBAL: What Trump’s win means for Ukraine, Middle East and China
• AFRICA: Trade, aid, security: What does Trump’s win mean for Africa?
• IN PICS: Different lives of Harris and Trump
• IN FULL: All our election coverage in one place

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Germany’s governing coalition has collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired a key minister and said he would call a vote of confidence in his government early next year.

The chancellor said he had no trust in Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who heads the pro-business Free Democrats and has been part of the coalition along with Scholz’s Social Democrats and the Greens.

The crisis inside the coalition plunged Europe’s largest economy into political chaos, hours after Donald Trump’s US election victory triggered deep uncertainty about the future of the continent’s economy and security.

President Frank-Walter Steinmeiner called for common sense to prevail.

“This is no time for tactics and squabbling, but for reason and responsibility,” he said.

The so-called “traffic-light” coalition has governed Germany since 2021 and its collapse means Scholz’s government no longer has a majority in parliament.

The confidence vote could lead to early elections by March, although the opposition says a confidence vote should come next week, not next year. Steinmeiner said he was prepared to dissolve parliament and call early elections if the chancellor lost a vote.

Internal tensions had been bubbling for weeks before exploding into the open on Wednesday night. It was triggered by a row over the 2025 budget, with Germany now facing its second year without economic growth.

“This is not a good day for Germany and not a good day for Europe,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens.

Olaf Scholz said his former finance minister had “betrayed my confidence” and had put the interests of his party base over those of the country.

He added that Germany needed to show it could be relied upon by other countries, particularly following Trump’s election success in the US.

Lindner, who leads the Free Democrats or FDP, accused Scholz of “leading Germany into a phase of uncertainty”. He had refused Scholz’s demand to loosen the spending limit known as a “debt brake” that requires German governments to balance the budget.

While two of his party colleagues also resigned from their cabinet posts, a third, Volker Wissing, said he had made a personal decision to stay on as transport minister and resign from his party.

The head of the conservative Christian Democrats, who are well ahead in opinion polls, said there was no time to wait. “We simply cannot afford to have a government without a majority in Germany for several months,” said Friedrich Merz.

The so-called traffic-light coalition was formed after Scholz’s Social Democrats narrowly defeated the conservatives in federal elections in September 2021.

It was named after the individual red, yellow and green colours of three parties – Scholz’s centre-left, the economically liberal FDP and environmentalist Greens – who all planned to spend big on their own individual core interest groups.

However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sent energy prices surging, and left Germany facing a increase in defence spending – and the cost of taking in 1.5 million Ukrainian refugees.

Scholz and his Green partners want to tackle this by loosening the debt brake to allow more spending. Lindner wanted to pay for tax cuts by slashing welfare and social budgets and pushing back environmental targets.

Economy Minister Robert Habeck of the Greens said the party would not quit the government and that its ministers would remain in office.

Scholz announced that a vote of confidence would be held in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, on 15 January.

If MPs vote down the government, the country will head for fresh elections within weeks, instead of the scheduled date in September.

However, the opposition could force Scholz out earlier if they can find a majority for an alternative chancellor.

For now, Scholz will head a minority government comprised of his Social Democrats and the Greens – the second-largest party in the coalition.

Without a parliamentary majority, Scholz’s coalition will need to cobble together support for individual votes from other parties in order to pass laws and measures.

Scholz said he would ask Friedrich Merz for support in passing budgetary measures to help Germany’s ailing economy and boost military spending.

Scholz has named Jörg Kukies as Christian Lindner’s replacement as finance minister.

The party that will control the US House of Representatives for the next two years is still in the balance.

Republicans were seven seats short of the 218 seats needed to take control on Thursday morning. Democrats need 15 more.

The Senate, or upper chamber, and the White House have already flipped to Republicans so President-elect Donald Trump could have total control when he is sworn in on 20 January 2025.

Control of the House, the lower chamber, gives a party the power to initiate spending legislation and launch impeachment proceedings against officials.

• Follow live updates after Trump won US election
• Results: Who did each state vote for?
• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win
• These are the seven things Trump says he will do as president
• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

Under Trump, a unified Republican Party could more easily push through tax cuts and introduce border control measures.

But Democrats hope the last votes trickling in from a handful of tight races will be enough to give them a majority in the House.

Here are some of the races that have yet to be called.

Democrats are closely monitoring five seats in California as crucial to winning back the House.

Challengers are hoping to defeat the incumbent Republicans and flip the seats blue, but initial polling shows incumbents holding onto their seats by narrow margins.

The key races to watch are:

• California’s 45th: Republican Congresswoman Michelle Steel, the incumbent, is currently leading against Democrat Derek Tran with 70% of votes reported. She has a lead of 4 points.
• California’s 27th: Democrat George Whitesides is challenging incumbent Republican Congressman Mike Garcia. With 69% of votes counted, Garcia leads by a narrow margin 2 points.
• California’s 41st: Incumbent Republican Congressman Ken Calvert is running against Democrat Will Rollins. Calvert is winning by a narrow margin of 2% with 76% of votes counted.
• California’s 22nd: Democrat Rudy Salas is challenging incumbent Republican Congressman David Valadao, who currently leads with a margin of 10 points. A little over 56% of votes have been counted.
• California’s 13th: Incumbent Republican Congressman John Duarte is running against Democrat Adam Gray. With 52% of votes counted, Duarte is leading by 2 points.

The two closely watched races in the state currently have margins of less than 2%.

Republican Juan Ciscomani currently leads his Democratic challenger, Kirsten Engel, by 0.5 points in Arizona’s 6th district located in the southeast corner of the state. About 67% of votes have been counted.

In Arizona’s 1st district, David Schweikert has a lead of 1% over Democratic challenger Amish Shah, with 69% of votes counted.

Schweikert’s district covers north-eastern Maricopa County, outside of Phoenix.

In Maine, incumbent Democratic Congressman Jared Golden is fighting to keep his seat – one of two congressional districts in the state.

Maine’s 2nd Congressional district encompasses the majority of the state north of Augusta and Portland.

Golden is currently leading in the race against his Republican challenger, Austin Theriault, by less than a point. Around 93% of votes have been counted.

Democrats are looking to hold onto one seat in Ohio’s 9th congressional district, which encompasses Toledo in northern Ohio.

Incumbent Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who has served in Congress since 1983, leads in the race against her Republican challenger, Derek Merrin.

Kaptur has a narrow 0.3 point lead. Around 95% of votes have been counted.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House also looks set to be a win for one of his most visible supporters: Elon Musk.

Mr Musk, the world’s richest man, spent election night with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

“The people of America gave @realDonaldTrump a crystal clear mandate for change tonight,” Mr Musk wrote on the social media platform X, which he owns.

Trump also singled-out Mr Musk in his victory speech, spending several minutes praising his rocket firm, Space X.

Mr Musk’s association with the president-elect also boosted the share price of his electric car maker Tesla – and, with it, his net worth, which now stands at an estimated $290bn.

• Follow live updates after Trump’s US election win
• Who is Elon Musk and what is his net worth?
• Results: Who did each state vote for?
• These are the seven things Trump says he will do as president
• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

Mr Musk threw his support behind the Republican almost immediately after the assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.

He had previously described himself as “politically moderate”, but said in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential Election that he felt no choice but to support Trump as the Republican candidate.

He has frequently voiced concerns over the Biden administration’s approach to immigration and the economy, and claimed free speech would be at risk with another Democrat presidency.

As one of the president-elect’s most important backers, the tech billionaire donated more than $119m (£92m) to fund a Super PAC aimed at re-electing Trump.

He also spent the last weeks before election day running a get-out-the-vote effort in the battleground states, which included a daily giveaway of $1m to voters in those states.

The giveaway became the subject of a legal challenge, though a judge later ruled they could go ahead.

After throwing his name, money, and platform behind Trump, Mr Musk has plenty to gain from Trump’s re-election.

The president-elect has said that in a second term, he would invite Mr Musk into his administration to eliminate government waste.

Mr Musk has referred to the potential effort as the “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, the name of a meme and cryptocurrency that he has popularised.

The businessman could also benefit from Trump’s presidency through his ownership of SpaceX, which already dominates the business of sending government satellites to space.

With a close ally in the White House, Mr Musk could seek to further capitalise on those government ties.

Mr Musk has criticised rivals including Boeing for the structure of their government contracts, which he says disincentive finishing projects on budget and on time.

SpaceX has also moved into building spy satellites just as the Pentagon and American spy agencies appear poised to invest billions of dollars into them.

Tesla could meanwhile reap gains from an administration that Trump has said would be defined by “the lowest regulatory burden.”

Tesla’s share price jumped by more than 12% on Wednesday following news of Trump’s victory.

Just last month, the US agency in charge of regulating road safety revealed it was probing Tesla’s self-driving software systems.

Mr Musk has also come under fire for allegedly seeking to block Tesla workers from unionising. The United Auto Workers filed unfair labour practice charges against both Trump and Musk after the two talked about Musk supposedly firing striking workers during a conversation on X.

Trump has also pledged to lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

That’s another promise Mr Musk is likely hoping he will keep.

• When does Trump become US president again?
• What happens to Trump’s legal cases now?
• Who was who in Trump’s huge victory entourage?
• The Trump family: A guide to an American dynasty
• Donald Trump: A remarkable life in pictures

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

One of Russia’s youngest political prisoners has lost an appeal to overturn a five-year jail sentence.

Arseny Turbin was only 15 when he was arrested in the summer of 2023.

Authorities accused him of joining the Freedom of Russia Legion – a paramilitary unit composed of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine against the Russian army.

The Freedom of Russia Legion is designated as terrorist organisation by Russia, and Arseny was sentenced to five years in a juvenile colony. On Thursday, the court of appeal reduced his five-year term – but only by 24 days.

Arseny is one of nine minors who have faced politically motivated criminal charges since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent crackdown on civil liberties, according to Russian human rights organisation OVD-Info.

He denies all the charges against him. He says he researched the legion but that he never applied and has committed no crime. His mother Irina also maintains he is innocent.

“I just don’t understand the judge who handed down the sentence,” she told the BBC.

Investigators have also claimed Arseny distributed leaflets critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin on the legion’s behalf.

He admitted to distributing leaflets but denied following instructions from anybody.

Arseny did openly criticise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin in school.

He was also politically active on social media, reposting content from Russian opposition figures and occasionally sharing his own political content, including a video in which he can be seen holding a solo picket in support of late opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

His mother says he was acting of his own accord and not on the instructions of the Freedom of Russia Legion.

Yet, in late August 2023, agents from the FSB, Russia’s security service, searched Arseny’s home in the small town of Livny, 450km (280 miles) south of Moscow, and confiscated his electronic devices.

The next day he was summoned for questioning and accused of joining the Freedom of Russia Legion.

“I was hysterical, I was shaking, crying,” says his mother. “Arseny told me: ‘Mum, calm down, I didn’t commit any crime, they will work it out.'”

No lawyer was present during the interrogation, which Irina deeply regrets. She believes the FSB subsequently added to the transcript a confession of guilt that Arseny never made.

Some of his schoolmates were questioned by investigators and said Arseny would often criticise Putin and Russia’s actions in Ukraine. But in their statements – which the BBC has seen – none of them said he had a connection to the Freedom of Russia Legion.

Nevertheless, Arseny was formally arrested the following week.

He spent several months under house arrest as he awaited sentencing. Then, last June, he was transferred to a Moscow detention centre, where he has been detained ever since.

In that time, his mother says his weight has dropped from 69kg to 52kg as he struggled with lack of appetite due to constant stress.

Irina also noticed he has withdrawn emotionally, and that he often asks why he is punished for something he did not do.

For a time Arseny also had a violent cellmate who attacked him, hit him on the head and threatened him.

Speaking to the BBC, Irina and Arseny’s teachers painted a picture of a highly intelligent and politically engaged young man who now faces several long years in jail for a crime he did not commit.

His mother said from a young age Arseny had been passionate about science, particularly physics and economics.

He had dreamed of studying political science at a prestigious Moscow university. “He wanted to improve life in Russia,” his mother said.

She spoke of her son having a strong sense of justice, which he developed after experiencing bullying at school.

He was frequently mocked and called derogatory names because he was born in Dubai and his father was from the United Arab Emirates.

Irina says that since his arrest Arseny no longer has any friends, as most have distanced themselves from him.

Her neighbours and co-workers even accuse her of having “raised a terrorist”, she says.

If Arseny really was innocent, they argue, the court would have acquitted him. She believes they don’t fully understand how the Russian judicial system works.

Her standard response is to hope they never have to encounter the system themselves.

“But if you do, you’ll find out.”