US President-elect Donald Trump has announced his campaign manager, Susan Summerall Wiles, will serve as his White House chief of staff when he takes over the presidency next year.

In a statement, Trump said that Wiles “just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history” and “is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected”.

“It is a well deserved honour to have Susie as the first-ever female chief of staff in United States history,” he continued. “I have no doubt that she will make our country proud.”

Wiles, 67, is the first woman to be appointed White House chief of staff.

The Trump transition team is currently working to choose top members of the incoming Republican administration, including the heads of all 15 executive departments, such as the secretaries of state and defence, from 20 January.

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In his victory speech this week, Trump referred to Wiles as “the ice maiden” as she stood behind him on stage.

She operates mostly “in the back”, the president-elect said, but she is known as one of the most feared political operatives in the US.

“Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America Great Again,” he added in his statement on Thursday, referring to his oft-repeated campaign slogan.

A profile by Politico earlier this year described Susie Wiles as feared but little known.

Less than a year after Wiles started working in politics, she joined Ronald Reagan’s campaign ahead of his 1980 election.

She went on to play a key role in transforming politics in Florida, where she lives.

In 2010, she turned Rick Scott, a then-businessman with little political experience, into Florida’s governor in just seven months. Scott is now a US senator.

Wiles met Trump during the 2015 Republican presidential primary and became the co-chair of his Florida campaign. He went on to win the state over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Florida Gov Ron DeSantis, who put her in charge of his successful gubernatorial race two years later, described Wiles as “the best in the business”.

Wiles worked on the Trump campaign alongside Chris LaCivita, a veteran of Republican politics with decades of experience.

The two worked with Trump to formulate a winning presidential primary strategy.

In her Politico profile, the 67-year-old grandmother – who is the daughter of late American football player and broadcaster Pat Summerall – said that she comes from a “traditional” political background.

“In my early career things like manners mattered and there was an expected level of decorum,” she said, describing the Republican party as significantly different than the one of several decades ago.

“And so I get it that the GOP of today is different,” she said, referring to the Republican party, who are also called the Grand Old Party (GOP).

“There are changes we must live with in order to get done the things we’re trying to do.”

The chief of staff is considered to be the president’s top aide, and plays a crucial role in every president’s administration.

They essentially serve as the manager of the White House and are responsible for putting together a president’s staff. A chief leads the staff through the Executive Office of the President and oversees all daily operations and staff activities.

They also advise presidents on policy issues and are responsible for directing and overseeing policy development.

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The UN’s Human Rights Office has condemned the high number of civilians killed in the war in Gaza, saying its analysis shows close to 70% of verified victims over a six-month period were women and children.

The agency said the high number was largely due to Israel’s use of weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated areas, although some deaths may have been the result of errant projectiles by Palestinian armed groups.

The report said it found “unprecedented” levels of international law violations, raising concerns about “war crimes and other possible atrocity crimes”.

Israel has in the past said it targets Hamas and takes steps to mitigate risk to civilians by using precise munitions.

The BBC contacted the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for comment in response to Friday’s report.

The UN agency said it verified the details of 8,119 people killed in Gaza from November 2023 to April 2024.

Its analysis found around 44% of verified victims were children and 26% women. The ages most represented among the dead were five to nine-year-olds.

About 80% of victims were killed in residential buildings or similar housing, the agency added.

The report said the data indicates “an apparent indifference to the death of civilians and the impact of the means and methods of warfare”.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures the UN sees as reliable, has reported a death toll of more than 43,300 people over the past 13 months. Many more bodies are believed to remain under the rubble of bombarded buildings.

The health ministry said it obtained full demographic data for a majority of those killed and reported that children account for one in three of that number.

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said in a statement that “this unprecedented level of killing, and injury of civilians is a direct consequence of the failure to comply with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law”.

He cited the laws of distinction, which requires warring parties to distinguish between combatants and civilians, proportionality, which prohibits attacks where harm to civilians outweighs military advantage, and precautions in attacks.

Türk called for a “due reckoning with respect to the allegations of serious violations of international law”.

The IDF has previously told the BBC in response to criticism that it “will continue to act, as it always has done, according to international law”.

The report also said the way the warring parties have conducted the conflict in Gaza has “caused horrific human suffering”.

The UN said Palestinian armed groups have waged war from densely-populated areas and indiscriminately used projectiles, likely contributing to the death toll, while the IDF has destroyed civilian infrastructure and “left many of those alive, injured, displaced and starving, without access to adequate water, food or healthcare”.

The situation is worst in north Gaza, which aid groups say has been under siege since early October when Israel launched a new ground offensive against Hamas.

The UN said no food aid entered the north during the first two weeks of October.

This prompted the US to issue an ultimatum to Israel to increase aid by 12 November or risk losing some military support.

Jan Egeland, the head of aid organisation Norwegian Refugee Council, told the BBC on Friday that he saw “devastation, despair, beyond belief” on a recent visit to Gaza.

“There is hardly a building that is not damaged. And large areas looked like Stalingrad after the Second World War. You cannot fathom how intense this indiscriminate bombing has been on this trapped population,” he said.

“It’s evident that it is first and foremost children and women who are paying a price for this senseless war,” he added.

Israel launched its current military offensive in Gaza after Hamas’ attack on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages back to Gaza.

The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the devastating war in the Palestinian territory.

Professor Dr Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, is one of the region’s most respected religious authorities, so his legal opinion carries significant weight among Gaza’s two million population, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim.

A fatwa is a non-binding Islamic legal ruling from a respected religious scholar usually based on the Quran or the Sunnah – the sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad.

Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls “violating Islamic principles governing jihad”.

Jihad means “struggle” in Arabic and in Islam it can be a personal struggle for spiritual improvement or a military struggle against unbelievers.

Dr Dayah adds: “If the pillars, causes, or conditions of jihad are not met, it must be avoided in order to avoid destroying people’s lives. This is something that is easy to guess for our country’s politicians, so the attack must have been avoided.”

For Hamas, the fatwa represents an embarrassing and potentially damaging critique, particularly as the group often justifies its attacks on Israel through religious arguments to garner support from Arab and Muslim communities.

The 7 October attack saw hundreds of Hamas gunmen from Gaza invade southern Israel. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostage.

Israel responded by launching a military campaign to destroy Hamas, during which more than 43,400 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

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Dr Dayah argues that the significant civilian casualties in Gaza, together with the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and humanitarian disaster that have followed the 7 October attack, means that it was in direct contradiction to the teachings of Islam.

Hamas, he says, has failed in its obligations of “keeping fighters away from the homes of defenceless [Palestinian] civilians and their shelters, and providing security and safety as much as possible in the various aspects of life… security, economic, health, and education, and saving enough supplies for them.”

Dr Dayah points to Quranic verses and the Sunnah that set strict conditions for the conduct of jihad, including the necessity of avoiding actions that provoke an excessive and disproportionate response by an opponent.

His fatwa highlights that, according to Islamic law, a military raid should not trigger a response that exceeds the intended benefits of the action.

He also stresses that Muslim leaders are obligated to ensure the safety and well-being of non-combatants, including by providing food, medicine, and refuge to those not involved in the fighting.

“Human life is more precious to God than Mecca,” Dr Dayah states.

His opposition to the 7 October attack is especially significant given his deep influence in Gaza, where he is seen as a key religious figure and a vocal critic of Islamist movements, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

His moderate Salafist beliefs place him in direct opposition to Hamas’s approach to armed resistance and its ties to Shia-ruled Iran.

Salafists are fundamentalists who seek to adhere the example of the Prophet Muhammad and the first generations who followed him.

Dr Dayah has consistently argued for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate that adheres strictly to Islamic law, rather than the political party-based systems that Hamas and other groups advocate.

“Our role model is the Prophet Muhammad, who founded a nation and did not establish political parties that divide the nation. Therefore, parties in Islam are forbidden,” he said in a sermon he gave at a mosque several years ago.

He has also condemned extremism, opposing jihadist groups like Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and has used all of his platforms to issue fatwas on various social and political issues, ranging from commercial transactions, social disputes over marriage and divorce, to the conduct of political violence.

The fatwa adds to the growing internal debate within Gaza and the broader Arab world over the moral and legal implications of Hamas’s actions, and it is likely to fuel further divisions within Palestinian society regarding the use of armed resistance in the ongoing conflict with Israel.

Sheikh Ashraf Ahmed, one of Dr Dayah’s students who was forced to leave his house in Gaza City last year and flee to the south of Gaza with his wife and nine children, told the BBC: “Our scholar [Dr Dayah] refused to leave his home in northern Gaza despite the fears of Israeli air strikes. He chose to fulfil his religious duty by issuing his legal opinion on the attack”.

Ahmed described the fatwa as the most powerful legal judgment of a historical moment. “It’s a deeply well researched document, reflecting Dayah’s commitment to Islamic jurisprudence,” he said.

At least one thing was taken for granted before voting day – women across the US were going to turn out for Kamala Harris.

Just as months of relentless polling showed Harris in a virtual tie with Donald Trump, many of those same surveys told the story of a yawning gender gap.

It was a strategy Harris’s team was betting on, hoping that an over-performance among women could make up for losses elsewhere.

It didn’t happen.

Across the country, the majority of women did cast their ballots for Harris, but not by the historic margins she needed. Instead, if early exit polls bear out, Harris’s advantage among women overall – around 10 points – actually fell four points short of Joe Biden’s in 2020.

Democrats suffered a 10 point drop among Latino women, while failing to move the needle among non-college educated women at all, who again went for Trump 63-35, preliminary data suggests.

The shortfall was not for lack of trying.

Throughout her 15-week campaign, much of Harris’s messaging was aimed directly at women, most obviously with her emphasis on abortion.

On the trail, Harris made reproductive rights a cornerstone of her pitch. She repeatedly reminded voters that Trump had once bragged about his role in overturning Roe v Wade – a ruling that ended the nationwide right to an abortion.

“I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justice took away from the women of America,” Harris said at her closing address in DC last week.

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Her most powerful advertisements featured women who had suffered under state abortion bans – deemed “Trump abortion bans” by Harris – including those who said they were denied care for miscarriages.

The strategy, it seemed, was to harness the same enthusiasm for abortion access that drove Democrats’ unexpected success in the 2022 midterms.

Abortion rights remain broadly popular – this Gallup poll in May suggested only one in 10 Americans thought it should be banned.

And even these election results seemed to underline that. Eight out of the 10 states where abortion was on the ballot voted in favour of abortion rights.

But that support did not translate into support for Harris.

Abortion did matter to women, it just didn’t matter enough, said Evan Ross Smith, a pollster and campaign consultant.

“Voters – particularly the women – who feel strongest about abortion are already voting for Democrats,” he said. But Democrats were unable to raise the importance of abortion for women who didn’t yet see it as a pressing issue.

“The abortion argument did not penetrate at all with non-college educated women, did not move them an inch. And they lost ground with Latinos,” Mr Smith said.

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For many, the decisive issue proved to be the economy.

In pre-election surveys and preliminary exit data, inflation and affordability continued to top lists of voters’ concerns. And for these voters, Trump was the overwhelming favourite.

Jennifer Varvar, 51, an independent from Grand Junction, Colorado said she had not even considered a vote for Harris because of the financial stress she faced over the past four years.

“For me and my family, we’re in a worse position now than we ever have been financially. It’s a struggle. I have three boys to put food on the table for,” she said. Things had been better under Trump, she said, and that’s why she voted for him.

But if gender didn’t divide the electorate in the way some expected, it still played a part in the Harris defeat, say some analysts.

There have been many explanations offered for Trump’s resounding victory but for some there is one thing that stands out.

“I do think that the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, to Politico.

Unlike Clinton, who explicitly leaned into her gender and the history-making potential of her campaign, Harris was noticeably reluctant to do the same.

There is a widespread belief that the country is more ready for a woman president now than when Clinton ran a second time in 2016. But it’s still an open question.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll in October suggested 15% of those surveyed would not be able to vote for a female president.

And Donald Trump, who doubled down on masculinity in this election, may have played a part in exploiting that.

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“He framed being president as being a tough guy in a dangerous world… he framed that as the job description,” said Mr Smith.

“And that’s one of the hardest possible job descriptions for a woman to successfully meet, in the minds of many Americans.”

China has unveiled new measures aimed at boosting its flagging economy, as it braces for a second Donald Trump presidency.

The country plans to tackle tens of billions of dollars of local government debt to prevent it being a drag on growth.

Trump won the US election on a platform that promised steep import taxes, including tariffs as high as 60% on Chinese-made goods.

His victory is now likely to hinder Xi Jinping’s plans to transform the country into a technology powerhouse – and further strain relations between the world’s two biggest economies.

A property slump, rising government debt and unemployment, and low consumption have slowed down Chinese growth since the pandemic.

So the stakes are higher than ever for the latest announcement from the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the executive body of China’s legislature.

During his first term in office Trump hit Chinese goods with tariffs of as much as 25%.

China analyst Bill Bishop says Trump should be taken at his word about his new tariff plans.

“I think we should believe that he means it when [he] talks about tariffs, that he sees China as having reneged on his trade deal, that he thinks China and Covid cost him the 2020 election”.

The pressure from Washington did not ease after Trump left the White House in 2021. The Biden administration kept the measures in place and in some cases widened them.

While the first wave of Trump tariffs were painful for China, the country is now in a much more vulnerable position.

The economy has been struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels of growth since abruptly abandoning its tight Covid restrictions two years ago.

Instead of delivering a widely expected fast-paced recovery, China became a regular source of disappointing economic news.

Even before Trump’s election victory and after China began rolling out measures to support its economy in September, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lowered its annual growth target for the country.

The IMF now expects the Chinese economy to expand by 4.8% in 2024, at the lower end of Beijing’s “about 5%” target. Next year, it projects China’s annual growth rate will drop further to 4.5%.

The latest plan involves using an additional 6 trillion yuan ($840bn) from now until 2026 to bail out local governments which have piled up unsustainable levels of debt.

For decades, local governments have helped drive growth throughout the country by borrowing massive sums of money – much of which paid for infrastructure projects. But a downturn in the property industry has left some cities unable to pay their bills.

But the country’s leaders were not caught entirely off guard by the end to decades of super-fast growth.

Speaking in 2017, President Xi said his country planned to transition from “rapid growth to a stage of high-quality development.”

The term has since been used repeatedly by Chinese officials to describe a shift to an economy driven by advanced manufacturing and green industries.

But some economists say China cannot simply export itself out of trouble.

China risks falling into the type of decades-long stagnation that Japan endured after a stock and property bubble burst in the 1990s, Morgan Stanley Asia’s former chairman, Stephen Roach, says.

To avoid that fate, he says China should draw “on untapped consumer demand” and move away from “export and investment-led growth”.

That would not only encourage more sustainable growth but also lower “trade tensions and [China’s] vulnerability to external shocks,” he says.

This more robust economic model could help China fend off the kind of threats posed by Trump’s return to power.

But China, which has long been the world’s factory for low-cost goods, is trying to replicate that success with high-tech exports.

It is already a world leader in solar panels, electric vehicles (EVs) and lithium ion batteries.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) China now accounts for at least 80% of solar panel production. It is also the biggest maker of EVs and the batteries that power them.

The IEA said last year that China’s investments in clean energy accounted for a third of the world’s total, as the country continued to show “remarkable progress in adding renewable capacity.”

“For sure there is an overall effort to support high-tech manufacturing in China,” says David Lubin, a senior research fellow at London based-think tank, Chatham House.

“This has been very successful”, he adds.

Exports of electric vehicles, lithium ion batteries and solar panels jumped 30% in 2023, surpassing one trillion yuan ($139bn; £108bn) for the first time as China continued to strengthen its global dominance in each of those industries.

That export growth has helped soften the blow to China’s economy of the ongoing property crisis.

“China’s overcapacity will increase, there is not doubt about it. They have no other source of growth,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for the Asia Pacific region at investment bank Natixis.

But along with those increased exports, there has been a rise in resistance from Western countries, and not just the US.

Just last month, the European Union increased tariffs on Chinese-built EVs to as much as 45%.

“The problem right now is that large recipients of those goods including Europe and the US are increasingly reluctant to receive them,” said Katrina Ell, research director at Moody’s Analytics.

Today, as Trump is set to head back to the Oval Office with a pledge to hammer Chinese imports, Beijing will have to ask itself whether its latest measures to boost its slowing economy will be enough.

An Israeli football fan has described being attacked by several men in overnight violence that Amsterdam police say involved youths on scooters carrying out “hit-and-run” attacks that were hard to prevent.

Adi Reuben, a 24-year-old Maccabi Tel Aviv fan who was visiting Amsterdam for the club’s Europa League match with Ajax, told the BBC he was kicked on the floor by a group of young men who confronted him when he was walking to his hotel.

He said more than 10 men came up to him and his friends and asked them where they were from.

“They shouted ‘Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF’,” Mr Reuben said, referring to the Israeli military.

“They started to mess with me and I realised I had to run, but it was dark and I didn’t know where to go. I fell to the floor and 10 people were kicking me. They were shouting ‘Palestine’.

“They were kicking me on the floor for about a minute, then they walked off, they weren’t afraid of anything.

“I realised I had full blood on my face and my nose was broken and it is very painful.”

Mr Reuben said he could not see properly for about 30 minutes after the attack, but decided against going to hospital in Amsterdam because he had heard that taxi drivers were involved in the violence.

Instead he said he was flying to Israel on Friday afternoon on a flight organised by the Israeli government, and would get medical treatment there.

“This was a specific attack that was organised beforehand,” he added.

Some Israeli football fans said they were asked to show their passports when they were attacked.

Gal Binyanmin Tshuva, 29, told the BBC he was attacked on Wednesday outside a casino in the city after watching a different football game.

“We faced around 20 people who ran towards us. They asked me where I was from, and I said I was from Greece. They said they didn’t believe me and they asked to see my passport.

“I said I didn’t have my passport and then they beat me and pushed me to the ground and started kicking my face.

“I don’t remember anything after that, and I woke up in an ambulance with blood all over my face, and realised they had broken two of my teeth.”

Pnina, another Maccabi Tel Aviv supporter, also told Dutch media organisation NOS that the violence against Israelis appeared pre-planned.

“It seems like it was organised. There was a lot of people. They jumped on us… We hid in the hotels until it was safe to go outside,” she said.

Esther Voet, editor-in-chief of a Dutch Jewish weekly newspaper, lives in the city centre and says she offered her home to shelter several Israeli fans, after she saw footage of the violence.

“I told them this is a Jewish home and you are safe here,” she told Israeli public broadcaster Kann. “People were really scared. I never thought I would go through this in Amsterdam.”

Dutch police said Israeli fans had suffered “serious abuses” during “hit-and-run” attacks many of which were carried out by young men on scooters.

Amsterdam police chief Peter Holla said it had proved difficult to prevent such attacks even though police had been present in the city centre in numbers. The force eventually decided to bring Maccabi supporters together and protect them before transporting them out of the area in buses, he said.

Five people were injured but had left hospital and between 20 and 30 more had been lightly hurt, he said.

The attacks overnight into Friday followed some tensions between Maccabi fans and people in Amsterdam over previous days, officials said.

On Wednesday Maccabi fans attacked a taxi and burned a Palestinian flag, police chief Holla said. Taxi drivers then headed towards a location where about 400 Maccabi fans had gathered but police were able to take them out of the area. There were further clashes in Dam Square overnight into Thursday but police were mostly able to keep the groups separate.

On Thursday evening before the match police accompanied pro-Palestinian demonstrators and mostly managed to keep them separate from football fans – but were then unable to prevent attacks later in the evening.

“We are looking back on 36 hours that really shocked me. Supporters from Israel have been attacked and some abused in a terrible way,” Holla said.

“I’m particularly shocked by fact that we’ve had one of largest police actions and we were not able to control or prevent this violence.”

Amsterdam’s mayor Femke Halsema said the “war in the Middle East has threatened the peace in our city” and there had been a “terrible outburst of antisemitism”.

She said Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were not considered to pose a threat of violence and there was no animosity between them and fans of Dutch club Ajax.

“I do understand that this reminds us of pogroms and that this happened in Amsterdam is reprehensible. Not only people got injured last night but the history of our city has been deeply damaged, the Jewish culture has been threatened,” she said.

Some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have previously been involved in racist incidents in Israel, including cursing at the team’s Palestinian and Arab players and reportedly applying pressure on the team to oust them.

Fans of the team have also previously attacked protesters demonstrating against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Asked about video footage appearing to show Maccabi fans in Amsterdam chanting offensive slogans, Mayor Halsema said: “What happened last night has nothing to do with protest. There is no excuse for what happened.”

Is it legal to import Sir Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in India?

This question has been puzzling legal experts since the Delhi High Court suggested this week that the notification banning the novel’s import – issued in 1988 – might no longer be valid, as the government couldn’t locate it.

The Satanic Verses, criticised by some Muslims as blasphemous, was banned in India shortly after its release, sparking protests worldwide. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989, calling for Rushdie’s assassination. This forced the Indian-born Booker Prize-winning author into hiding for nearly a decade.

Although the book remains officially banned in India, some legal experts now believe it could be imported unless the government reaffirms the ban. Others, however, caution that practical obstacles may still exist.

The ban on the book came under scrutiny after Sandipan Khan, a resident of West Bengal state, tried to buy the book but learnt that it was not published in India nor could it be imported.

In 2017, he filed a Right to Information (RTI) request for the official notification banning the book’s import, but was sent through a series of departments without finding it.

In 2019, Khan took the matter to the Delhi High Court, arguing that the ban impacted his freedom to read.

Over five years, government departments repeatedly failed to produce the notification, despite customs having similar records from as far back as 1968.

Finally, on 5 November, the court declared it had no option but to “presume” that no such ban notification exists and therefore couldn’t assess its validity.

The case raises a perplexing question: is a notification valid if no copy of it can be found?

The simple answer is, we don’t know yet.

The court has not clarified if the book could be accessed in India but advised Mr Khan to pursue any legal options to obtain it.

Uddyam Mukherjee, Mr Khan’s lawyer, told the BBC that federal departments couldn’t provide a clear answer either, when asked by the court.

“I have never come across a situation like this,” said Madan Lokur, a former judge of the Supreme Court.

If the notification is not found then “technically no ban exists” and the book can be imported.

“However, the government may pass a fresh notification [banning the book’s import],” Mr Lokur added, since the court has not declared the ban to be unconstitutional, but only said that the notification is presumed to not exist.

Mr Mukherjee argued that the book could now be imported “as there is no legal impediment” against the book.

However, some legal experts disagree.

Raju Ramachandran, a senior lawyer, said he found the suggestion a “little extreme”.

“All that the high court says is that this particular petition has become infructuous [invalid] since the notification could not be found,” he said. “It has not given the right to the petitioner to import the book.”

Senior lawyer Sanjay Hegde said the book could have been published in India if “someone was brave enough to print it” as only its import was banned, not its publication.

“But after all the brouhaha, nobody wanted to print it in India.”

In 2012, the government of Rajasthan state sought the arrest of four Indian authors – Hari Kunzru, Ruchir Joshi, Amitava Kumar and Jeet Thayil – after they downloaded a few passages from the Satanic Verses and read them out at a literary festival in the city.

At the time, many legal experts were of the opinion that downloading a book whose import had been banned could not be considered a crime. But online copies of the book have been hard to find in India.

Rushdie, 76, continues to face threats over his outspoken views on Islam.

In 2022, he lost an eye and spent six weeks in hospital after being stabbed up to 10 times on stage at an event in New York state. The suspect, Hadi Matar, has been charged with attempted murder.

In his recent memoir, the writer has criticised the response to his book, noting that “no properly authorised body [in India] had reviewed the book, nor was there any semblance of a judicial process”.

New floods have hit the region of Girona in north-eastern Spain, sweeping away around 30 cars in the town of Cadaqués, according to Spanish media reports.

Videos posted by a local journalist showed a torrent of water gushing down the street and a pile of cars blocking a bridge early on Friday.

No casualties were reported in the latest round of flooding to hit the country.

More than 200 people were killed last week, most in the Valencia area, in one of the worst floods in Europe this century.

The disaster ignited intense anger at the authorities for not issuing emergency alerts sooner.

Flooding in Cadaqués in the early hours of Friday morning caused around 30 vehicles to pile up under a bridge, Catalonia’s fire service said on X, but luckily no one was injured or trapped.

More potentially dangerous weather is expected in the region on Friday night.

Catalonia’s meteorological service issued a rain warning from Friday evening until Saturday afternoon for the area of Alt Emporda, where Cadaqués is located. The weather agency warned rain intensity could exceed 20 mm (0.7 inches) in 30 minutes.

The agency recorded 76.8 mm (3 inches) of rain in Cadaqués on 7 and 8 November, with more than 100 mm logged in two other towns nearby.

Spain received 72% more rainfall from 1 October to 5 November than the normal value for that time period, according to Aemet, Spain’s weather agency.

The rainfall, which experts said was intensified by climate change, led to flash floods that trapped people in their cars.

A senior official at COP29 climate change conference in Azerbaijan appears to have used his role to arrange a meeting to discuss potential fossil fuel deals, the BBC can report.

A secret recording shows the chief executive of Azerbaijan’s COP29 team, Elnur Soltanov, discussing “investment opportunities” in the state oil and gas company with a man posing as a potential investor.

“We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed,” he says.

A former head of the UN body responsible for the climate talks told the BBC that Soltanov’s actions were “completely unacceptable” and a “betrayal” of the COP process.

As well as being the chief executive of COP29, Soltanov is also the deputy energy minister of Azerbaijan and is on the board of Socar.

Azerbaijan’s COP29 team has not responded to a request for comment.

Oil and gas accounts for about half of Azerbaijan’s total economy and more than 90% of its exports, according to US figures.

COP29 will open in Baku on Monday and is the 29th annual UN climate summit, where governments discuss how to limit and prepare for climate change, and raise global ambition to tackle the issue.

However, this is the second year in a row the BBC has revealed alleged wrongdoing by the host government.

The BBC has been shown documents and secret video recordings made by the human rights organisation, Global Witness.

It is understood that one of its representatives approached the COP29 team posing as the head of a fictitious Hong Kong investment firm specialising in energy.

He said this company was interested in sponsoring the COP29 summit but wanted to discuss investment opportunities in Azerbaijan’s state energy firm, Socar, in return. An online meeting with Soltanov was arranged.

During the meeting, Soltanov told the potential sponsor that the aim of the conference was “solving the climate crisis” and “transitioning away from hydrocarbons in a just, orderly and equitable manner”.

Anyone, he said, including oil and gas companies, “could come with solutions” because Azerbaijan’s “doors are open”.

However, he said he was open to discussions about deals too – including on oil and gas.

Initially, Soltanov suggested the potential sponsor might be interested in investing in some of the “green transitioning projects” Socar was involved in – but then spoke of opportunities related to Azerbaijan’s plans to increase gas production, including new pipeline infrastructure.

“There are a lot of joint ventures that could be established,” Soltanov says on the recording. “Socar is trading oil and gas all over the world, including in Asia.”

Soltanov then described natural gas as a “transitional fuel”, adding: “We will have a certain amount of oil and natural gas being produced, perhaps forever.”

The UN climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, acknowledges there will be a role for some oil and gas up to 2050 and beyond. However, it has been very clear that “developing… new oil and gas fields is incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5C”.

It also goes against the agreement the world made at the last global climate summit to transition away from fossil fuels.

Soltanov appeared eager to help get discussions going, telling the potential sponsor: “I would be happy to create a contact between your team and their team [Socar] so that they can start discussions.”

A couple of weeks later the fake Hong Kong investment company received an email – Socar wanted to follow up on the lead.

Attempting to do business deals as part of the COP process appears to be a serious breach of the standards of conduct expected of a COP official.

These events are supposed to be about reducing the world’s use of fossil fuels – the main driver of climate change – not selling more.

The standards are set by the UN body responsible for the climate negotiations, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The UN said it could not comment directly on our findings but remarked that “the same rigorous standards” are applied to whoever hosts the conference, and that those standards reflect “the importance of impartiality on the part of all presiding officers”.

Its code of conduct for COP officials states they are “expected to act without bias, prejudice, favouritism, caprice, self-interest, preference or deference, strictly based on sound, independent and fair judgement.

“They are also expected to ensure that personal views and convictions do not compromise or appear to compromise their role and functions as a UNFCCC officer.”

Christiana Figueres, who oversaw the signing of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global temperature rises to well below 2C, told the BBC that she was shocked anyone in the COP process would use their position to strike oil and gas deals.

She said such behaviour was “contrary and egregious” to the the purpose of COP and “a treason” to the process.

The BBC has also seen emails between the COP29 team and the fake investors.

In one chain, the team discusses a $600,000 (£462,000) sponsorship deal with a fake company in return for the Socar introduction and involvement in an event about “sustainable oil and gas investing” during COP29.

Officials offered five passes with full access to the summit and drafted a contract which initially required the firm to make some commitments to sustainability. Then it pushed back, one requirement was dropped and “corrections” were considered to another.

The BBC asked Azerbaijan’s COP29 team and Socar for comment. Neither responded to the requests.

The findings come a year after the BBC obtained leaked documents that revealed plans by the UAE to use its role as host of COP28 to strike oil and gas deals.

COP28 was the first time agreement was reached on the need to transition away from fossil fuels.

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to get exclusive insight on the latest climate and environment news from the BBC’s Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, delivered to your inbox every week. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

Nigeria has announced that free emergency Caesarean sections will be made available to “poor and vulnerable” women in an ambitious plan to bring down the high number of mothers dying in childbirth.

At 1,047 deaths per 100,000 live births, Africa’s most populous nation has the fourth highest maternal mortality rate in the world and the lack of access to Caesareans is thought to be one of the reasons.

Many pregnant women, particularly in rural Nigeria are unable to receive emergency medical care partly due to the cost.

“No woman should lose her life simply because she can’t afford a C-section,” Health Minister Muhammad Pate said while announcing the “powerful move”.

While the price may vary across Nigeria’s different states, on average, a Caesarean costs around 60,000 naira ($36;£28) which can be beyond the reach of many.

More than 40% of Nigerians live below the international extreme poverty line of $2.15 per day, according to 2023 data from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics.

The Maternal Mortality Reduction Innovation Initiative launched on Thursday will now allow all eligible women to access Caesarean sections in public hospitals.

To be a beneficiary, one must be registered under the country’s public health insurance scheme.

“By removing financial barriers to this life-saving procedure, we ensure that no woman in need is denied critical care due to cost,” Pate added.

The health scheme covers emergency situations only, Tashikalmah Hallah, a communication adviser to the health minister, told the BBC.

Social welfare units in public hospitals will help determine eligibility and identify those who cannot afford the procedure, Mr Hallah added.

Pate said maternal mortality remained “unacceptably high”.

Caesareans are seen as essential for preventing obstructed labour in cases where a woman’s pelvis is too small, the baby is in a breech position, or is too large to exit the birth canal.

Without intervention, a constricted baby may fatally rupture the uterus, or cause tears that catastrophically haemorrhage.

While offering to support the new initiative, the World Bank’s Trina Haque, described it as a “game-changer”.

“If implemented right, this initiative will deliver. We’re here to support every step of the way,” Kazadi Mulombo, the WHO country rep, said.

Causes of maternal deaths include severe haemorrhage, high blood pressure (pre-eclampsia and eclampsia), unsafe abortions and obstructed or prolonged labour.

The new policy will “improve maternal and child health outcomes in the country”, Rhoda Robinson, executive director of HACEY, an NGO advocating for healthcare access for vulnerable populations in Nigeria.

“Especially for women from low-income communities who might resort to alternative and often unsafe care options,” she told the BBC.

Mabel Onwuemena, national coordinator of the Women of Purpose Foundation, another NGO advocating for better maternal health access in Africa, praised the initiative and urged the Nigerian government to expand it to include free drugs and ultrasound to pregnant women.

• Should I stay or should I go? The dilemma for young Nigerians
• Why Nigeria’s economy is in such a mess
• ‘I’ve been sleeping under a bridge in Lagos for 30 years’

A general election in the Republic of Ireland has officially been called for Friday 29 November.

Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Simon Harris made the announcement outside government buildings in Dublin on Friday.

He said the time was “now right” to ask the Irish people for a new mandate for the government.

Harris then travelled to the Irish president’s residence – Áras an Uachtaráin – to ask Michael D Higgins to dissolve the current Dáil (lower house of the Irish parliament).

Under Irish law, once the Dáil is dissolved an election must be held within 30 days.

Announcing the snap poll in three weeks time, Harris said to voters that “you alone are sovereign”.

“You go out and you cast your vote, and in return you’re entitled to good government and hard work.”

The Fine Gael leader said the coalition government – made up of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and The Green Party – had made “real progress” and thanked his coalition partners.

“We did not agree on every issue but we did always work hard and together for the good of the Irish people.”

Harris continued by saying Ireland is a “small country with a big influence all over the world”.

“We have many assets, but no asset more valuable than our people,” he added.

The taoiseach said parties will seek alternative mandates over Ireland’s future over the next three weeks, and it was “vital” that an election take place to consider the different “visions for our country’s economic and social future”.

Harris also called for the election to be a “safe and respectful campaign” for politicians and their teams.

“Finally, I ask just one thing of the Irish people: Value your vote, use your voice,” he said.

“That’s how this country works, that’s how we listen, that’s how we act on your behalf.”

Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Sinn Féin have already sworn against a coalition ahead of the general election.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Martin said it is not a given that his party will enter government with Fine Gael again.

He said his party will campaign on its own merit.

“Debate is the lifeblood of democracy and elections.

“I look forward to the debates because the government will be putting forward its priorities, its policies, as we did in the last election,” he added.

Martin said Sinn Féin has ruled out working with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and they likewise had ruled out working with them.

“We have a multi-party system, or proportional representation system, it gives us good diversity. I’m not going to predict anything, the dynamic of the campaign will take over.”

At a launch of her Dublin Central campaign on Thursday, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said there was an “opportunity for a change” from the government parties.

She added her party was the only option for voters who want a government without Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael.

She said her party’s preference would be a left coalition government.

In this general election, the number of TDs (MPs) seeking election and the number of constituencies will increase following a 2023 review.

There are now 43 Dáil constituencies – an increase of four from 2020 – which will elect between three and five TDs each.

A total of 174 TDs will be selected, meaning that 88 TDs will be required to form a majority government.

Three parties – Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and The Green Party – make up the coalition government in the Republic of Ireland.

Voters last went to the polls in February 2020 where Fianna Fáil won the most seats (38).

But the party fell short of a majority and entered into negotiations with Fine Gael, who led the then-outgoing government, and the Green Party.

An agreement on a coalition deal was reached four months later, having been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, in June 2020.

As part of this, the role of taoiseach was to be swapped between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael mid-way through the five-year term – with Harris currently in the top job.

Sinn Féin, who recorded a historic result in the 2020 election after winning 37 seats, currently lead the opposition.

A number of other parties, such as Labour, Social Democrats, People Before Profit, Aontú and independents, also make up the opposition.

Analysis by BBC News NI political editor Enda McClafferty

When Higgins formally dissolves the Dáil, that will sound the starting gun on the election campaign.

But its quite clear the parties were not waiting for that gun – they already started this morning.

Along the street near government buildings, you can see the posters on the lampposts and large screens being driven around Dublin by Fianna Fáil trying to urge people to vote for them.

Not surprisingly, it’s only going to be a three week campaign so time is very much of the essence.

This morning, Micheál Martin took some early swipes at Sinn Féin, rejecting any plans to form a coalition government.

Mary Lou McDonald made it clear at a campaign launch on Thursday that her preference is a coalition of the left led by Sinn Féin.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House effectively slammed the door on the two cases involving federal criminal charges against him.

A state case against him for allegedly conspiring to interfere with Georgia’s election in 2020 will go on hold until after his term in office ends – if it’s still alive by then.

But next week, the fate of the remaining case – his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York – will be determined. It could stand, or it could be swept away in the same political and legal tide that has allowed him to escape the others.

Justice Juan Merchan will decide by Tuesday whether to grant Trump’s pre-election request to throw out his conviction. Should Justice Merchan side with Trump, it would almost wipe clean his slate of criminal woes.

But should the judge uphold the conviction, he would proceed to sentencing later this month. It would likely spark even more delay attempts from Trump and open up an unprecedented new front for America’s criminal justice system.

“This is truly uncharted territory,” said Anna Cominsky, a professor at the New York Law School.

In May, a New York jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records. The convictions stemmed from Trump’s attempt to cover up reimbursements to his ex-lawyer, Michael Cohen, who in 2016 paid off an adult film star to remain silent about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump.

Trump’s lawyers argue that a recent US Supreme Court ruling granting presidents a degree of immunity from criminal prosecution applies to certain aspects of his New York case, and therefore the indictment and conviction should be tossed.

During the trial, Justice Merchan dismissed attempts by Trump’s lawyers to throw out the case on immunity grounds. But that was before the US Supreme Court ruled in Trump’s favour this summer – and before Trump decisively won re-election.

Justice Merchan has set a deadline of 12 November to decide whether to grant Trump’s request.

If he throws out the conviction, that will be the end of the case.

But if he denies the defense’s request, Trump’s much-delayed sentencing will remain scheduled for 26 November.

Even if Justice Merchan upholds the conviction and keeps the scheduled sentencing, Trump’s team is almost certain to seek more delays and appeals.

Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead attorney, did not respond to inquiries about whether he planned to seek a delay.

Because Trump will be tied up with a presidential transition and the legal questions about sentencing a president are so complex, some scholars see very little chance it will stay on the calendar.

“I think the most likely outcome in the state case is the judge putting off sentencing until after Trump’s term in office,” said Daniel Charles Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School.

“To actually impose a sentence would raise any number of messy issues in the short term,” including political ones, he said.

If Trump does find himself in a Manhattan courtroom later this month, deciding his fate still would be an unprecedented challenge.

Under the law, Trump faces a range of sentences, including fines, probation and up to four years in prison. But many options are rendered impractical by his imminent return to the White House.

“Sentencing a sitting president may be one of the most complicated, fraught sentencing decisions you can imagine,” Ms Cominsky said.

“It’s hard to imagine what sentence could be imposed that would not impede a president’s ability to do their job or compromise the president’s security.”

Few expect Justice Merchan to sentence Trump to a stint behind bars at this point.

“He’s a 78-year old man with no criminal history, who has been convicted of a non-violent felony,” said retired New York Supreme Court Justice Diane Kiesel. “I don’t think a judge would give a person under those sentences an incarceration sentence.”

Even if Justice Merchan did reach for such a sentence, Trump’s team would almost certainly appeal it, delaying actual punishment.

Trump could leave a sentencing hearing with the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist. Justice Merchan could ask the former president to pay a relatively small fine in the three- or four-figure range.

He could also give Trump an unconditional discharge; “basically, goodbye,” as Justice Kiesel puts it.

The only thing that is certain is that Trump cannot make this conviction go away on his own.

Trump has explored the possibility of pardoning himself from potential criminal charges in the past, and could do so for his federal indictments when he becomes president in January.

But he cannot pardon himself in New York, as the conviction occurred in state court.

His fate, at the moment, is in the hands of the court. But regardless of the outcome, Trump will likely avoid the most serious punishments facing him.

“He is a very lucky man,” Justice Kiesel said.

Donald Trump made the first official hire of his incoming administration, announcing 2024 campaign co-chair Susan Summerall Wiles as his chief of staff.

The president-elect’s transition team already is vetting a series of candidates ahead of his return to the White House on 20 January 2025.

Many who served under Trump in his first term do not plan to return, though a handful of loyalists are rumoured by US media to be making a comeback.

A new group of colleagues also now surrounds the 78-year-old Republican.

There are more than 4,000 positions to be filled across Trump’s cabinet and White House, and across the federal government.

Here is a closer look at names in the mix for the top jobs.

• Follow live updates as Trump assembles senior team
• 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

Susie Wiles and campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita were the masterminds behind Trump’s landslide victory over Kamala Harris.

In his victory speech on Wednesday, he called her “the ice maiden” – a reference to her composure – and claimed she “likes to stay in the background”.

Wiles was confirmed the next day as the first appointee of his second term – as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman ever to hold that job.

Chief of staff is often a president’s top aide, overseeing daily operations in the White House West Wing and managing the boss’s staff.

Wiles, 67, is considered one of the most feared and respected political operatives in the country.

Less than a year after she started working in politics, she worked on Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign and later became a scheduler in his White House.

In 2010, she turned Rick Scott, a then-businessman with little political experience, into Florida’s governor in just seven months. Scott is now a US senator.

Wiles met Trump during the 2015 Republican presidential primary and she became the co-chair of his Florida campaign, at the time considered a swing state. Trump went on to narrowly defeat Hillary Clinton there in 2016.

Wiles has been commended by Republicans for her ability to command respect and check the big egos of those in Trump’s orbit, which could enable her to impose a sense of order that none of his four previous chiefs of staff could.

No personnel decision may be more critical to the trajectory of Trump’s second term than the appointee to lead the Department of Justice.

After uneven relationships with both Jeff Sessions and William Barr, Trump is widely expected to pick a loyalist who will wield the agency’s prosecutorial power to punish critics and opponents. Department officials are currently working to wind down two federal prosecutions brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office.

Among the names being floated for the cabinet post are Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was both indicted and impeached like Trump; Matthew Whitaker, the man who took over for three months as acting attorney general after Sessions stepped down at Trump’s request; and Mark Paoletta, former legal counsel to then-Vice-President Dick Cheney, who served in Trump’s budget office and argues there is no legal requirement for a president to stay out of justice department decisions.

The secretary of homeland security is responsible for handling immigration and border enforcement, and leading the government response to natural disasters.

Tom Homan, a chief proponent of Trump’s immigration approach, stands out as the most likely pick.

He served as the acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the first Trump administration, where he backed separating migrant children from their parents as a way to deter illegal crossings. He also made headlines for saying politicians who support sanctuary city policies should be charged with crimes.

He later resigned from his position in 2018, mid-way through the Trump presidency.

But he has been involved in developing Trump’s mass deportation proposals, recently telling CBS’s 60 Minutes programme that it will focus on “targeted arrests”.

“It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighbourhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” he said.

Though the plan could cost billions of dollars, Homan, 62, has responded: “What price do you put on national security?”

The US secretary of state is the president’s main adviser on foreign affairs, who acts as America’s top diplomat when representing the country overseas.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio is a major name floated for the position.

Rubio, 53, was most recently under consideration to be Trump’s vice-president – a role that ultimately went to his colleague from Ohio, JD Vance.

A senior member of the Senate foreign relations committee and vice-chairman of the chamber’s select intelligence panel, the Cuban American lawmaker is a China hawk who opposed Trump in the 2016 Republican primary but has since mended fences and worked closely with him.

But some Trump allies criticise him as a “neo-conservative” who fits poorly with Trump’s “America First” agenda. Other possibilities for the position include Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty, who was previously Trump’s ambassador to Japan.

A dark horse for the nomination, however, is Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, special envoy to the Balkans and his acting director of national intelligence.

Grenell, 58, was heavily involved in the efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat in the swing state of Nevada and the president-elect prizes his loyalty.

In September, he sat in on Trump’s private meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The former president often claims he will end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” of taking office and Grenell has advocated for setting up an autonomous zone in eastern Ukraine as a means to that end – an idea seen as unacceptable by Kyiv.

But Grenell’s combative style will likely make him a better fit for national security adviser – a position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Also rumoured for major national security posts are former Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe; Keith Kellogg, a national security adviser to Trump’s first Vice-President Mike Pence; and Kash Patel, a loyalist who staffed Trump’s national security council and later helped block the transition to the incoming Joe Biden administration as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defence. Patel could be the next Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief.

Trump also said he would fire Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) Director Chris Wray, who he nominated in 2017. Jeffrey Jensen, a former Trump-appointed US attorney, is under consideration to replace Wray.

Ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is among the few former Trump cabinet members who could return for his second term as secretary of defence, where he would oversee the US military.

The former Kansas congressman, 60, served first as Trump’s director of the CIA before becoming his chief diplomat.

A foreign policy hawk and a fierce supporter of Israel, he played a highly visible role in moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He was among the key players in the implementation of the Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

He remained a loyal defender of his boss, often tangling with the press and even joking that there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” amid Trump’s false claims of election fraud in late 2020.

Another name being discussed is Michael Waltz, a Florida lawmaker who sits on the armed services committee in the US House of Representatives.

To be the chief financial officer of his incoming administration, Trump is reportedly considering Robert Lighthizer, a free trade sceptic who led the Republican’s tit-for-tat tariff war with China as the US trade representative.

But at least four others may be under consideration for the role, including Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has become a major fundraiser and economic adviser to the president-elect; John Paulson, another megadonor from the hedge fund world; former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Jay Clayton; and Fox Business Network financial commentator Larry Kudlow, who ran Trump’s national economic council.

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum was not well-known on the national scene until he launched a bid for president in the 2024 Republican primary.

After making little impact, he dropped out and endorsed Trump, quickly impressing him with his no-drama persona, executive-level competence and wealth.

A software entrepreneur who sold his small company to Microsoft in 2001, he is considered a top contender to lead the interior department, where he will be responsible for managing federal lands and natural resources.

That is an opportunity for him to support Trump’s vows to “drill, baby, drill” and overhaul US energy policy.

The Trump 2024 campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, 27, previously served in his White House press office, as an assistant press secretary.

The 27-year-old Gen-Zer made a bid to become the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress in 2022, to represent her home state of New Hampshire, but fell short.

She is tipped to become the White House press secretary – the most public-facing position in the cabinet.

The past two years have been quite a journey for the nephew of former President John F Kennedy.

An environmental lawyer by trade, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 70, ran for president as a Democrat, with most of his family speaking out against his anti-vaccine views and conspiracy theories as they endorsed Joe Biden’s re-election.

He then became an independent but, failing to gain traction amid a series of controversies, dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.

In the last two months of the 2024 election cycle, he spearheaded a Trump campaign initiative called “Make America Healthy Again”.

Trump recently promised he would play a major role related to public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Safety Administration (FDA).

RFK Jr, as he is known, asserted he would push to remove fluoride from drinking water because “it’s a very bad way to deliver it into our systems” – though this has been challenged by some experts.

And in an interview with NBC News, Kennedy rejected the idea that he was “anti-vaccine”, saying he wouldn’t “take away anybody’s vaccines” but rather provide them with “the best information” to make their own choices.

Rather than a formal cabinet position, Kennedy used the interview to suggest he could take on a broader role within the White House.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, 53, announced his support for the former president earlier this year, despite saying in 2022 that “it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”.

The tech billionaire has since emerged as one of the most visible and well-known backers of Trump and donated more than $119m (£91.6m) this election cycle to America PAC – a political action committee he created to support the former president.

Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of the social media platform X, also launched a voter registration drive that included a $1m (£771,000) give-away to a random swing-state voter each day during the closing stretch of the campaign.

Since registering as a Republican ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Musk has been increasingly vocal on issues including illegal immigration and transgender rights.

Both Musk and Trump have concentrated on the idea of him leading a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, where he would cut costs, reform regulations and streamline what he calls a “massive, suffocating federal bureaucracy”.

The would-be agency’s acronym – DOGE – is a playful reference to a “meme-coin” cryptocurrency Musk has previously promoted.

The bar facing the US embassy building in central Jerusalem is called Deja Bu – a witty reference to something you’ve drunk before.

And outside the gates of the US compound, Israel is eager for a second round of Donald Trump.

“I’m very pleased,” said Rafael Shore, a rabbi who lives in Jerusalem’s Old City. “He understands the language of the Middle East.

“Iran will think twice about doing anything. I think if Kamala had been elected, there wouldn’t be much fear in the Middle East of attacking America or Israel.”

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was one of the first to congratulate the new president-elect on Wednesday morning. “Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” he tweeted.

Netanyahu has previously called Trump the “best friend Israel has ever had in the White House”.

Trump previously won favour here by scrapping an Iran nuclear deal that Israel opposed, brokering historic normalisation agreements with several Arab countries and upending decades of US policy – and international consensus – by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Donald Trump’s first term in office was “exemplary” as far as Israel is concerned, said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US.

“The hope is that he’ll revisit that. [But] we have to be very clear-sighted about who Donald Trump is and what he stands for.”

Firstly, he said, the former president “doesn’t like wars”, seeing them as expensive. Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly.

He’s also “not a big fan” of Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, said Amb Oren, and has opposed the wishes of some Israeli leaders to annex parts of it.

Both those policies could put him in conflict with far-right parties in Netanyahu’s current governing coalition, who have threatened to bring down the government if the prime minister pursues policies they reject.

• Seven things Trump says he will do in power
• What Trump’s win means for Ukraine, Middle East and China

When called upon to choose between the recent demands of his US ally and the demands of his coalition partners, Benjamin Netanyahu has tended to choose his coalition.

Friction with the current US President, Joe Biden, has grown sharply as a result.

Michael Oren believes Netanyahu will need to take a different approach with the incoming president.

“If Donald Trump comes into office in January and says, ‘OK, 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 to that single goal.

Trump “has some strong promises”, Ahmed said. “We hope he can help and bring peace.”

Ahmed’s wife and son were both killed in the war and his house destroyed.

“Enough is enough, we are tired,” he said. “We hope Trump is strong so that he can resolve this issue with Israel.”

Mohammed Dawoud, displaced eight times during the Gaza conflict, said a Trump victory meant that the end of the war would come soon.

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

“There’s no medicine, no hospitals, no food. There’s nothing left in Gaza,” he said. “We want someone strong who can separate us and the Jews.”

• The view from countries where Trump’s win really matters

In the occupied West Bank, home of the Palestinian Authority (PA), there is widespread scepticism about American influence, with many viewing US administrations from both sides of the political aisle as siding with Israel.

“Mediocre solutions which come at the expense of the Palestinians, or endless military support for Israel, is going to be nothing but a catalyst for future confrontations,” said Sabri Saidam, a senior member of the PA’s main faction, Fatah.

“We would like to see a new version of Trump, more like a Trump 2.0 who’s serious about immediately ending the war, and addressing the root cause of conflict in the Middle East.”

Recent polls suggested that more than two-thirds of Israelis wanted to see Trump back in the White House. But here too, there are those who caution about his unpredictability and his approach.

• Results: Who did each state vote for?

• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win

• Trump team: Who is Susie Wiles, chief of staff?

• Analysis – Why Harris lost: Flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

“He’s going to make the situation here more uncertain and unsafe,” one Israeli woman said. “I don’t trust him to keep the peace. I honestly think he’ll just make the war worse.”

The former Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren, said he believed there were “tremendous achievements ahead” if Israel co-operated with Trump, including the potential for a historic peace deal with Saudi Arabia and checks on Iran’s influence.

But it could also be harder for Netanyahu to navigate the demands and compromises involved in those regional goals.

Since Trump’s last term in office, moderate voices around both leaders have dwindled.

Many in Israel view Trump’s first term with fond memories. But relationships can be radically different the second time around – and past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

US President-elect Donald Trump has doubled down on his campaign promise of the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, saying the cost of doing so will not be a deterrent.

In some of his first public remarks since winning the election, Trump said his priority upon taking office in January would be to make the border “strong and powerful”.

“It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not – really, we have no choice,” Trump told NBC News.

But how would Trump’s campaign pledge of mass deportations of migrants actually work and what are the hurdles he may face?

The latest figures from the Department of Homeland Security and Pew Research indicate that there are around 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the US, a number that has remained relatively stable since 2005.

Most are long-term residents – nearly four-fifths have been in the country for more than a decade.

Immigrants who are in the country without legal status have the right to due process, including a court hearing before their removal. A drastic increase in deportations would likely entail a large expansion in the immigration court system, which has been beset by backlogs.

Most immigrants already in the country enter into the deportation system not through encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents but through local law enforcement.

However, many of the country’s largest cities and counties have passed laws restricting local police co-operation with Ice.

Trump has pledged to take action against these “sanctuary cities”, but America’s patchwork of local, state and federal laws further complicates the picture.

• Follow live updates as Trump assembles senior team
• 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

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, or MPI, said that co-operation between Ice and local officials would be a “critical” aspect of any mass deportation programme.

“It’s much easier for Ice to pick someone up from a jail if local law enforcement co-operates, instead of having to go look for them,” she said.

As an example, Ms Bush-Joseph pointed to an early August declaration from the sheriff’s offices of Florida’s Broward and Palm Beach counties, in which they said they would not deploy deputies to help any mass deportation plan.

“There are many others who would not co-operate with a Trump mass deportation plan,” she said. “That makes it so much harder.”

Any mass deportation programme is also likely to be almost immediately met with a flurry of legal challenges from immigration and human rights activists.

A 2022 Supreme Court ruling, however, means that courts cannot issue injunctions on immigration enforcement policies – meaning they would continue even as the challenges work their way through the legal system.

If a US administration was able to legally move ahead with plans for mass deportations, authorities would still have to contend with enormous logistical challenges.

During the Biden administration, deportation efforts have focused on migrants recently detained at the border. Migrants deported from further inland in the US, from areas not located near the border, are, overwhelmingly, those with criminal histories or deemed national security threats.

Controversial raids on worksites that were carried out during the Trump administration were suspended in 2021.

Deportations of people arrested in the US interior – as opposed to those at the border – have hovered at below 100,000 for a decade, after peaking at over 230,000 during the early years of the Obama administration.

“To raise that, in a single year, up to a million would require a massive infusion of resources that likely don’t exist,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told the BBC.

For one, experts are doubtful that Ice’s 20,000 agents and support personnel would be enough to find and track down even a fraction of the figures being touted by the Trump campaign.

Mr Reichlin-Melnick added that the deportation process is long and complicated and only begins with the identification and arrest of an undocumented migrant.

After that, detainees would need to be housed or placed on an “alternative to detention” programme before they are brought before an immigration judge, in a system with a years-long backlog.

Only then are detainees removed from the US, a process that requires diplomatic co-operation from the receiving country.

“In each of those areas, Ice simply does not have the capacity to process millions of people,” Mr Reichlin-Melnick said.

Trump has said he would involve the National Guard or other US military forces to help with deportations.

Historically, the US military’s role in immigration matters has been limited to support functions at the US-Mexico border.

Aside from the use of the military and “using local law enforcement”, Trump has offered few specifics on how such a mass deportation plan could be carried out.

In an interview with Time magazine earlier this year, the former president said only that he would “not rule out” building new migrant detention facilities, and that he would move to give police immunity from prosecution from “the liberal groups or the progressive groups”.

He added that there could also be incentives for state and local police departments to participate, and that those who do not “won’t partake in the riches”.

“We have to do this,” he said. “This is not a sustainable problem for our country.”

Eric Ruark, the director of research at NumbersUSA – an organisation that advocates for tighter immigration controls – said that any deportation programme from the interior would only be effective if coupled with increased border enforcement.

“That has to be the priority. You’re going to make very little progress in the interior if that’s not the case,” he said. “That’s what keeps people showing up.”

Additionally, Mr Ruark said that a crackdown on companies that hire undocumented migrants would also be necessary.

“They’re coming for jobs,” he said. “And they’re getting those jobs because interior enforcement has basically been dismantled.”

Experts estimate that the total bill for one million or more deportations would run into tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Ice budget for transportation and deportation in 2023 was $420m (£327m). In that year the agency deported slightly more than 140,000 people.

Thousands of immigrants would be detained while awaiting court hearings or deportations, and the Trump campaign has envisioned building large encampments to house them all.

The number of removal flights would also need to be dramatically expanded, possibly requiring military aircraft to augment current capacity.

Just a small expansion in any of these areas could result in significant costs.

“Even a minor change is in the tens of millions, or hundreds of millions,” Mr Reichlin-Melnick said. “A significant change is in the tens or hundreds of millions.”

Those costs would be in addition to the expense of other border enforcement efforts that Trump has promised: continuing work on a southern US border wall, a naval blockade to prevent fentanyl entering the country, and moving thousands of troops to the border.

Adam Isacson, a migration and border expert from the Washington Office on Latin America, said that “nightmarish images” of mass deportations could also cost a potential Trump administration politically from a public relations standpoint.

“Every community in the US would see people they know and love put on buses,” Mr Isacson said.

“You’d have some very painful images on TV of crying children, and families,” he added. “All of that is incredibly bad press. It’s family separation, but on steroids.”

Under the four years of the previous Trump administration, around 1.5 million people were deported, both from the border and the US interior.

The Biden administration – which had deported about 1.1 million people up to February 2024 – is on track to match that, statistics show.

During the two terms of the Obama administration – when Mr Biden was vice-president – more than three million people were deported, leading some immigration reform advocates to dub Barack Obama the “deporter-in-chief”.

The only historical comparison to a mass deportation programme came in 1954, when as many as 1.3 million people were deported as part of Operation Wetback, named after a derogatory slur then commonly used against Mexican people.

That figure is disputed by historians, however.

The programme, under President Dwight Eisenhower, ran into considerable public opposition – partly because some US citizens were also deported – as well as a lack of funding. It was largely discontinued by 1955.

Immigration experts say that the earlier operation’s focus on Mexican nationals and lack of due process makes it incomparable to what a modern-day mass deportation programme would look like.

“Those [deported in the 1950s] were single, Mexican men,” said MPI’s Kathleen Bush-Joseph.

“Now, the vast majority of people coming between ports of entry are from places that are not Mexico, or even northern Central America. It makes it so much harder to return them,” she added.

“Those are not comparable situations.”

A 17-year-old girl in China hailed as a genius in a mathematics contest cheated, competition organisers have said – ending months of scepticism over her stellar results.

Jiang Ping, a fashion design student from a rural town in Jiangsu province, made headlines in June when she came 12th in the qualifiers of an international maths contest run by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

She was the first finalist since the competition began in 2018 to have come from a lowly vocational school, Chinese media reported. The vast majority of the 800 finalists came from elite universities.

Jiang’s results turned her into an overnight sensation, and she was labelled a “prodigy” in the press and on social media.

Under China’s notoriously cut-throat education system, academic excellence is lauded. Many people online were encouraged by Jiang’s results, seeing them as proof that students from vocational institutes could still excel academically.

However, as doubt surrounding her abilities snowballed, competition organisers said last Sunday that Jiang had violated competition rules in the preliminary round, by receiving help from her teacher, who was also a contestant himself.

“This has exposed problems like inadequacies in the competition format and the lack of rigour in supervision. We sincerely apologise,” organisers said in a statement.

According to the final results announced on Sunday, neither Jiang nor her teacher was among 86 winners in the competition.

The annual mathematics contest is open to contestants from institutions worldwide and hosted by Damo Academy, Alibaba’s research institute.

This year, Jiang, a student at Jiangsu Lianshui Secondary Vocational School, outperformed other finalists from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions — including Peking University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Oxford.

She had chosen to study at the vocational school both because she was interested in fashion design, and because her sister and friends were there, said local media outlets.

Jiang’s results and unconventional educational background soon grabbed nationwide attention. Her story was featured in a video produced by Damo Academy and she was interviewed by news outlets across the country.

“Learning maths is bumpy, but every time I solve the problems I feel quite happy,” she told the state-run People’s Daily. “No matter what the future holds, I will keep learning.”

Jiang’s teacher, Wang Runqiu, was also thrust into the spotlight, hailed as an educator who noticed and encouraged her passion for maths. Speaking to the media, he described her as an attentive student who had learnt advanced mathematics herself.

“I have encountered many setbacks in the process of learning maths,” he said. “So, I want to do everything I can to help my students and let them know that there are other possibilities in the future.”

But along with an outpouring of praise for Jiang and her teacher, the student’s story also sparked a discussion about whether China’s education system did enough to support gifted students in less academic pathways – especially those who may not have received similar recognition by their teachers.

China’s education system focuses much of its resources on those taking the “Gaokao” – the notoriously difficult exam that students need to take in order to get into university. Those in vocational schools had long faced restrictions in taking the gaokao and enrolling in regular universities, until an education reform in 2022 offered vocational school students an alternative university entrance exam.

An earlier op-ed in state-news media outlet Xinhua said that Jiang’s results “hint[ed] at an awkward truth: even youths as talented as her may be easily buried without good education credentials”.

But as Jiang’s fame burgeoned, criticism and scepticism surrounding her skills also started to bubble.

In June, dozens of other finalists published a joint letter they wrote to the competition organising committee demanding an investigation into Jiang. They also called for her answers to the preliminary test questions to be made public.

The finalists alleged that Jiang had made “several apparent writing mistakes” in an online video and that she “seemed unfamiliar with these mathematical expressions and symbols”.

While the preliminary round of the competition allowed participants to use programming software, the final round was a closed-book exam. The results of the finals, which were initially set to be released in August, were postponed for several months.

When the results were finally made public on Sunday, Jiang was not among the 86 winners of the final round.

Her school also confirmed in a statement on Sunday that Jiang had been helped by her teacher Wang, and that Wang had been given a warning and disqualified from teachers’ awards for the year. The statement also called for leniency and protection for the teenager.

Attempts by the BBC to contact Jiang’s family were unsuccessful. A social media account once used by her mother is now defunct, and a phone number linked to her father has been deactivated. Multiple phone calls by the BBC to Jiang’s school went unanswered, and a village official declined to discuss Jiang when contacted by the BBC.

While Sunday’s revelation unleashed a wave of criticism of Jiang and her teacher, many social media users also spoke up for the teenager, arguing the bigger responsibility lay with her school and teacher.

“Jiang Ping is not innocent, that’s without question. But who are the worst parties in this?” reads a post on Weibo. “The adults brought this child along to do a bad deed, and let her suffer all the consequences.”

“Even if the whole thing was faked, Jiang Ping was not the mastermind behind it,” another wrote on Weibo. “She should not be burned at the stake.”

It doesn’t get much more remote than this. I’m in inland Western Australia, at Rio Tinto’s Greater Nammuldi iron ore mine.

It’s about a two-hour flight north from Perth in a region called the Pilbara.

No-one lives permanently here. Around 400 workers are on the site at any one time, and they are flown in, working between four and eight days, depending on their shift pattern, before flying home.

Giant trucks the size of townhouses, capable of hauling 300 tonnes, criss-cross red-earth roads in various sections of this open-pit mine complex.

For an outsider like me their size is intimidating enough, but multiplying that feeling is the knowledge that there’s no driver at the wheel.

During a tour of the site in a normal-sized company vehicle, one of the trucks comes into view, approaching from a side road.

I sigh with relief as it deftly turns and continues in the direction we have just come. “Did it make you feel uncomfortable?,” asks the vehicle’s driver Dwane Pallentine, a production superintendent.

Greater Nammuldi has a fleet of more than 50 self-driving trucks that operate independently on pre-defined courses, along with a handful that remain manually driven and work separately in a different part of the mine.

Being trialled is also an autonomous water cart affectionately known as Henry, which, along with manually driven ones, sprays the mine roads to keep the dust down.

The company vehicle I am in is able to operate alongside the autonomous trucks only because it has been fitted with high-accuracy GPS, which allows it to be seen within a virtual system.

Before entering the mine’s gated autonomous zone, we logged onto this system and a controller verified over the radio that we were visible.

It has encased our vehicle in a virtual bubble that the self-driving trucks “see” and which causes them to manage their proximity by slowing or stopping as necessary.

A touch screen in our cabin displays all the staffed and autonomous vehicles and other equipment in the vicinity, along with “permission lines” that show the immediate routes the self-driving trucks are intending to take. Had I looked at the screen instead of fretting I would have seen that truck was going to turn.

In addition to all vehicles being fitted with a big red emergency button that can stop the system, the autonomous trucks have lasers and radars front and rear to detect collision risks.

The sensors also detect obstacles. If a large rock fell off the back of a truck, the sensors on the next truck along would notice it and the vehicle would stop.

However, some trucks seem extra sensitive – on my tour I see a couple foiled simply by rough roads.

Co-ordinating and monitoring these robots is Rio Tinto’s Operations Centre (OC) in Perth, about 1,500km (930 miles) to the south.

It’s the nerve centre for all the company’s Pilbara iron ore operations, which span 17 mines in total, including the three making up Greater Nammuldi.

Guided from here by controllers, include more than 360 self-driving trucks across all the sites (about 84% of the total fleet is automated); a mostly autonomous long-distance rail network to transport the mined ore to port facilities; and nearly 40 autonomous drills. OC staff also remotely control plant and port functions.

Autonomy isn’t new to Rio’s Pilbara operations: introduction began in the late 2000s.

Nor is it unique: Australia has the greatest number of autonomous trucks and mines that use automation of any country, and other mining companies in the Pilbara also use the technology.

But the scale Rio has grown its operations to here, including at Greater Nammuldi – which has one of the largest autonomous truck fleets in the world – gives it global significance.

And it’s a global trend. According to GlobalData the number of self-driving haul trucks worldwide has roughly quadrupled over the past four years to more than 2,000, with most made by either Caterpillar or Komatsu.

The biggest reason for introducing the technology has been to improve the physical safety of the workforce, says Matthew Holcz, the managing director of the company’s Pilbara mines.

Mining is a dangerous occupation: heavy machinery can be unpredictably operated by people who can also become fatigued. “The data clearly shows that, through automation, we’ve got a significantly safer business,” says Mr Holcz.

It has also improved productivity – to the tune of about 15%, he estimates. Autonomous equipment can be used more because there are no gaps due to shift changes or breaks. And autonomous trucks can also go faster when there is less staff-operated equipment on the scene.

Such automation does not come cheap. Rio won’t disclose what it has spent in total on its Pilbara automation journey to date, but observers put it at multiple billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, employment opportunities have evolved. The narrative might be one of robots taking jobs, but that doesn’t seem the case here so far.

While the OC has about one controller for every 25 autonomous trucks – according to Rio, no one has lost their job because of automation.

Instead, there have been redeployments: truck drivers have joined the OC as controllers themselves, been reskilled to operate different pieces of equipment, such as excavators, loaders and dozers, or gone to drive manual trucks at different sites.

On the OC’s large open plan floor, amid the banks of monitors arranged in clusters for the different mines, I meet Jess Cowie who used be a manual driller but now directs autonomous ones from the central drill pod. “I still put holes in the ground…just without the dust, the noise and being away from the family,” she says.

Automation is delivering a “step change” in terms of safety in the mining industry says Robin Burgess-Limerick, a professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane who studies human factors in mining. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.

Professor Burgess-Limerick has analysed incidents involving autonomous equipment reported to regulators.

As he sees it, the interfaces used by staff both in the field and in control centres to gain information aren’t optimally designed. There have been situations where field staff have lost awareness of the situation, which better screen design may have prevented. “The designers of the technology should put a bit more effort into considering people,” he says.

And there is also a risk that controllers’ workloads can be overwhelming – it is a busy, high stakes job.

Over-trust, where people become so confident the autonomous equipment will stop that they start putting themselves at risk, can also be an issue, and he notes effort needs to be directed into improving the ability of trucks themselves to detect moisture. There have been incidents where wet roadways have caused them to lose traction.

There can be legitimate safety concerns with autonomous equipment, says Shane Roulstone, co-ordinator for the Western Mine Workers Alliance, which represents mining-related workers in the Pilbara.

He points to a serious incident this May where an autonomous train slammed into the back of a broken-down train, which workers at the front end were repairing (they evacuated before it hit but were left shaken).

But Mr Roulstone also praises Rio generally for having, over time, developed “some good strategies, procedures and policies” around how people interact with automated vehicles.

Mr Roulstone expects that at some point options for redeployment will lessen and there will job losses. “It is just the mathematics of it,” he says.

Meanwhile, Rio’s automation journey in the Pilbara continues with more trucks, drills and Henry the water cart. It is also closely watching work by Komatsu and Caterpillar to develop un-staffed excavators, loaders and dozers.

Late in the afternoon, waiting at Greater Nammuldi’s airport for the last flight back to Perth, the announcement comes that it has been cancelled due to an issue with the plane. That’s 150 extra people who will now need to be fed and accommodated. It is nothing for Rio, but I can’t help but think we humans are complicated compared to robots.

Last month brought good news for the great Indian bustard, a critically endangered bird found mainly in India.

Wildlife officials in the western state of Rajasthan have performed the first successful hatching of a chick through artificial insemination.

A lone adult male in one of two breeding centres in Jaisalmer city was trained to produce sperm without mating, which was then used to impregnate an adult female at the second centre some 200km (124 miles) away.

Officials said the development was important as it has opened up the possibility of creating a sperm bank.

Over the years, habitat loss, poaching and collisions with overhead power lines have effected great Indian bustards. Their numbers have fallen from more than 1,000 in the 1960s to around 150 at present.

Most of them are found in Jaisalmer and hence, conservation activists say that the bird’s habitat in the city should be protected. But this land is also prime real estate for renewable energy firms, presenting authorities with a unique conservation challenge.

The great Indian bustard may not be as well known as the peacock (India’s national bird) but it’s just as impressive, says Sumit Dookia, a conservation ecologist who has been studying the bird for close to a decade. The massive bird, which weighs between 15kg and 18kg, is one of the biggest flying birds in India.

It once had a prolific presence in the country and was found in at least 11 states, but today, its population is confined to Rajasthan, while a handful might be spotted in the southern state of Karnataka and the western state of Gujarat.

The shy bird plays an important role in the food chain by preying on rodents, snakes and other pests and is also the state bird of Rajasthan, where it is called ‘Godawan’ by locals.

But some of the bird’s unique evolutionary traits are clashing with human interventions, making it vulnerable to extinction.

For one, the great Indian bustard has good peripheral vision but poor frontal vision, making it difficult for them to spot power lines until they fly too close to them. Their large size makes it difficult for them to quickly change their flight path and they end up colliding with the cables and dying.

“Their vision could have developed like this as the bird spends a large amount of time on land,” says Mr Dookia. It also lays its eggs on the ground, without a nest or any other form of protection except for the watchful eye of the mother and this might have caused it to develop good side vision, he adds.

The great Indian bustard also has unique breeding habits. The bird lays just one egg at a time and spends the next two years caring for its offspring.

“Since it reaches maturity at around four years of age and lives for 12-15 years, it lays just about four-five eggs in its lifetime and many of these eggs are destroyed by predators,” Mr Dookia says.

Conservationists say that over the past few years, the great Indian bustard’s habitat in Jaisalmer has been overrun by solar and wind energy farms, leading to an increase in flying accidents.

“The increased human presence has also created more filth, attracting stray dogs who kill the birds or destroy their eggs,” Mr Dookia says.

To boost the bird’s population, the government of Rajasthan collaborated with the federal government and the Wildlife Institute of India to launch a conservation breeding centre at Sam city in 2018. Another breeding centre was set up at Ramdevra village in 2022, says Ashish Vyas, a top forest official in Jaisalmer.

As a first step, researchers collected eggs found in the wild and hatched them in incubation centres. “Currently, there are 45 birds in both the centres,14 of which are captive-bred chicks (including the one born through artificial insemination),” he adds.

The plan is to further boost the bird’s population and then eventually release them into the wild. But conservationists say that this is easier said than done.

This is because the birds born in these breeding centres have imprinted on human researchers (in other words, they have formed close bonds with their human caretakers) and have lost about 60-70% of their ability to survive in the wild, says Mr Dookia.

“Human imprinting is necessary for feeding and handling the birds but it also makes them lose their natural instincts. It will be extremely challenging to re-wild them, especially if there’s no habitat left for the birds to be released into,” he adds.

The loss of habitat has also resulted in another problem: researchers have noticed that the birds, which used to migrate across states, have almost completely stopped doing so. Even in Jaisalmer, where the birds are found in two pockets – Pokhran in the eastern part of the city and the Desert National Park in the west – there’s hardly any cross-migration, says Mr Dookia.

It’s likely that the birds have stopped migrating over large distances in response to flying accidents, he adds. This increases the risk of inbreeding, which could result in birth defects.

“Thus, the only solution to conserve the great Indian bustard is to preserve its natural habitat,” he says.

But a Supreme Court judgement from April has made conservationists uneasy.

The court overturned an earlier interim order, which had instructed Rajasthan and Gujarat to prioritise moving power cables underground in great Indian bustard habitats. The order had created a furore among renewable energy firms, who said that this would cost them billions of rupees and virtually kill their business.

In its latest judgment, the court observed that people had the right to be free from the harmful effects of climate change and that shifting large sections of power cables underground may not be feasible for firms from a monetary and technical standpoint.

It also directed that a committee be set up to look into the feasibility of moving power lines and the efficacy of bird diverters – devices that have reflectors and are attached to power cables to alert birds about their presence.

While corporates have hailed the top court’s judgment, conservationists and some legal experts say that it’s problematic as it pits one good cause against another.

“The judgment brings into focus a flawed understanding of the interplay between climate change, biodiversity and development issues,” ecologist Debadityo Sinha wrote in a column.

He noted that many highly-populated cities in India have underground power lines and that other states have taken such a step to protect other bird species in the past. He also pointed out that although moving power cables underground is expensive, it’s likely to amount to a fraction of a firm’s total earnings.

Mr Dookia says that one of the reasons renewable energy companies are flocking to Rajasthan is because of the low cost of land.

“There’s also not much research on how these renewable energy farms will impact the state’s climate and ecology in the long run,” he says.

“So it’s not just the bird’s future that hangs in the balance, it’s also man’s.”

Standing between two bars erected at a mobile clinic in Rafah, southern Gaza, Rizeq Tafish concentrates as he takes his first tentative steps in four months.

“My feelings before were sadness and despair. Now I feel happiness and freedom,” he says, grinning afterwards.

Rizeq is one of the first of thousands of wounded Palestinians who should receive new prosthetic limbs from Jordanian doctors using state-of-the-art British technology.

Displaced to Rafah, he was wounded by Israeli tank fire as he left Friday prayers in June. With his leg amputated, the blacksmith could no longer work and was feeling desperate.

“I lost my whole life: my job and my hope,” Rizeq says. “There was no one to take care of my wife and baby. I even needed help to use the toilet.”

The human cost of Israel’s destructive year-long war in Gaza is measured not just in lives lost but in lives changed forever.

After analysing emergency medical data, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that at least 94,000 people are injured. More than 24,000 people – one in every 100 Gazans – have a life-changing injury. These include serious burns, trauma to the head and spine and limb amputations.

At the same time, it has become virtually impossible to leave Gaza for medical treatment and only 16 out of 36 hospitals are functional. Rehabilitation services are heavily disrupted. The WHO says just 12% of equipment needed for injured people – such as wheelchairs and crutches – is available.

The Jordanian programme uses innovative prosthetics from two British firms, Koalaa and Amparo. They have easy-to-fit sockets and a new direct moulding technique for lower limbs, which avoid months of waiting and multiple fittings.

“This is a new type of prosthesis. Its main feature is fast manufacture. It means it will be ready for the patient within only one to two hours,” explains Jordanian army doctor, Lt Abdullah Al-Hemaida, who has deftly fitted Rizeq with his replacement leg.

His medical team has already helped dozens of amputees. Each prosthetic limb costs about $1,400 (£1,100), with funding from the Jordanian state and a national charity.

Every fitting is registered digitally allowing for remote monitoring and follow-up procedures.

If it is safe enough, the plan is for two Jordanian mobile units to move around. There is a huge need for prosthetics across all of Gaza among all age groups.

At the al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in central Gaza, sisters Hanan and Misk al-Doubri are so small that they fit in one wheelchair. Last month, they lost their mother and their legs in an Israeli air strike on their home in Deir al-Balah.

Misk, who is 18 months old, had just learned to walk. Now she struggles to stand on her one good foot. But Hanan, who is three, has much more severe injuries; she was blasted out of her family’s first-floor apartment.

“We try to distract her, but she always returns to asking about her mum,” her aunt, Sheifa says. “Then she asks, ‘Where are my legs?’ I don’t know what to tell her.”

I asked the Israeli military why the al-Doubris were targeted but received no response.

Locals believe the girls’ father, a policeman, who remains in intensive care, may have been targeted. Israel has attacked many people who worked for the security forces in Hamas-governed Gaza.

With Israeli drones overhead, 15-year-old Diya al-Adini surveys the destruction by his home in Deir al-Balah. Around his neck he always wears his prized possession, bought with months of savings: a digital camera.

However, he can no longer use it unaided: he has no arms.

In August, Diya was playing a computer game in a coffee shop when Israel bombed it.

“The speed of the rocket made it hard for me to react. After it hit, I lost consciousness for a few seconds,” Diya recalls. “When I came to, everything was white. It felt like I was watching a movie. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move at all; I didn’t have any hands to help me.”

Diya used to love swimming and walking his dogs, he did errands on his bicycle and photographed landscapes. Now he relies on his older sister, Aya, to take photos for him. But he is determined to be positive.

“I am trying to plan a good future so that after I get prosthetics, I can work hard and excel to become a famous photographer,” he says. “I need my limbs to return to my photography, and to everything I loved.”

Making his way on the uneven path to the tent camp that he now calls home, Rizeq Tafish has been given crutches to help him adjust to his new prosthetic leg.

“I want to forget the period when I was without my legs and start again. I still consider myself to be whole and complete,” he tells a local journalist working for the BBC in Gaza.

“I could go back to my job or get a different one now that I have my new limb. Just getting my leg back is also giving me back my smile that I want to share with everyone.”

But there are tears of joy as well as smiles when he reaches his family. Rizeq’s mother is overcome as he walks forward without any help to embrace her and his wife praises God as he stands holding their little boy.

Rizeq is just one among many in Gaza learning to cope with a new serious disability but he has taken a step towards getting back his life.

For over two millennia, the Roman temples at Baalbek in eastern Lebanon have stood as some of the finest examples of Roman architecture anywhere in the world.

On Wednesday, a car park just metres away from the Unesco World Heritage site was hit by an Israeli air strike.

The attack, which also destroyed a centuries-old Ottoman building, highlighted what some archaeologists say is the risk of irreparable damage to historical sites across Lebanon from the current war between Israel and Hezbollah.

“Baalbek is the major Roman site in Lebanon. You couldn’t replace it if someone bombed it,” says Graham Philip, an archaeology professor at Durham University.

“It would be a huge loss. It would be a crime.”

Since late September, Israel has pummelled Lebanon with thousands of air strikes in an escalation of its campaign against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group it has been fighting in nearly a year of cross-border strikes.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has largely been targeting southern Lebanon, suburbs in the capital Beirut and the eastern Bekaa Valley.

But in the past fortnight, the campaign has moved into new areas, or rather, very old ground.

The IDF told the BBC that it only targets military sites. But those targets are incredibly close to the Baalbek temples and Roman ruins in Tyre, a major port of the Phoenician Empire around 2,500 years ago.

According to legend, Tyre is the place where purple pigment was first created – the dye crushed out of snail shells to embroider royal robes.

On 23 October, the IDF issued evacuation orders for neighbourhoods close to the city’s Roman ruins, including the remains of a necropolis and a hippodrome.

Hours later it began striking targets. More bombing of the sites was reported last week.

Videos from the strikes showed huge clouds of black smoke rising from seafront areas only a few hundred metres from the ruins.

There is no evidence that the Roman sites in Tyre and Baalbek have been damaged by the Israeli strikes. But Lebanese archaeologists are alarmed at how close the fighting has been to the millennia-old ruins, recognised by Unesco as having outstanding value to humanity.

“For Baalbek it was even worse than Tyre, because the temples are located within the area that is targeted and [the IDF] did not make any exemption for the temples,” says local archaeologist Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly.

She says there are no Hezbollah facilities at the Baalbek site: “No one knows what the excuse or the message behind the hit is.”

The IDF disputes this. In a statement, it told the BBC it targets military sites in accordance with strict protocol, adding that it is “aware of the existence of sensitive sites and this is taken into account and constitutes an essential part of the planning of strikes”.

“Each strike that poses a risk to a sensitive structure is weighed carefully and goes through a rigorous approval process as required.”

Some ordinary Lebanese attempting to escape Israeli bombing reportedly fled to the Baalbek ruins, judging that ancient sites would not be targeted by Israel and would therefore offer protection.

Ms Farchakh Bajjaly says “those who didn’t have a car to flee” moved closer to the ruins, in the belief that the Unesco sites are considered more valuable than their lives.

It prompted the local government to issue a warning urging people against travelling to the ruins.

“They see the site as their shelter. But the site is not a shelter,” Ms Farchakh Bajjaly says.

The war puts Israel in a “difficult situation”, says Israeli archaeologist Erez Ben-Yosef.

He said that war damage to important archaeological sites would be a “huge loss to the cultural heritage of Lebanon and indeed the entire world.

“However, I know personally that Israel is doing everything it can to prevent such damage.

“Many of my fellow archaeologists, both colleagues and students, serve in the army and participate in the war… they actively work to prevent such damage, in accordance with the general guidelines of our military.”

Graham Philip, the Durham University archaeology professor, says he doesn’t believe Israel would intentionally hit Baalbek or other sites.

“It’s hard to see what they would gain in a military sense, bombing a Roman temple.”

But he cautioned about the risk of some bombs or missiles going off target and hitting the ruins, even unintentionally: “If you drop enough ordnance, not all of that lands within 25 metres of the target.”

Mr Philip has been closely monitoring the impact of Israel’s strikes on heritage sites in Gaza where it is fighting Hamas, leading a British university team documenting archaeological destruction across the territory.

He says it is still too early to assess how much damage has been done by the current wars in Lebanon and Gaza. But a Unesco survey published in September found that 69 cultural heritage sites in Gaza had been damaged by the war, which was triggered by the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.

The oldest mosque in Gaza, the Great Omari Mosque, is one. It was built on the site of an ancient Philistine temple before being converted into a church and then a mosque. It was reportedly mostly destroyed by an Israeli strike in December 2023.

Mr Philip says these ancient sites are not only important anchors to the classical past, but are “almost like the soul of a population”.

“Imagine how people would feel in Britain if the Tower of London or Stonehenge were destroyed.

“It’s part of their identity.”

Three people have been charged in connection with the death of One Direction star Liam Payne, Argentinian authorities have said.

The singer died on 16 October after falling from the third-floor balcony of a hotel in Buenos Aires.

Argentina’s National Criminal and Correctional Prosecutor’s Office said one person, who had been accompanying Payne, is accused of “the abandonment of a person followed by death”.

A hotel employee and a third person have also been charged with supplying drugs. None of those arrested have been named.

Payne, 31, a father-of-one, became one of the most recognisable names in pop after appearing on The X Factor and rising to fame with the boyband One Direction in the 2010s.

Argentinian authorities have been investigating Payne’s final days at the CasaSur hotel.

After the singer’s death, police found substances in his hotel room and destroyed objects and furniture. Hotel staff had made two calls to emergency services saying they had a guest who had taken “too many drugs and alcohol”, and was “trashing the entire room”, it was previously reported.

On Thursday, the public prosecutor’s office said toxicology tests revealed traces of alcohol, cocaine and a prescription antidepressant in his body.

A post-mortem examination determined his cause of death as “multiple trauma” and “internal and external haemorrhage”, as a result of the fall from the hotel balcony.

According to the prosecutor’s office, medical reports also suggested Payne may have fallen in a state of semi or total unconsciousness.

The prosecutor’s office say this rules out the possibility of a conscious or voluntary act by Payne, and they have concluded the singer did not know what he was doing nor have any comprehension of his actions.

In addition, authorities have carried out nine raids on houses in Buenos Aires.

They are continuing to investigate Payne’s broken laptop and other devices seized.

The prosecutor’s office added it has examined more than 800 hours of video footage from security cameras in the hotel and on public roads, and received dozens of testimonies from hotel staff, family members, friends and medical professionals.

The singer’s body was released to his family on Wednesday to be flown back to the UK.

Following Payne’s death, tributes flooded in including from his former partner Cheryl, One Direction bandmates and music mogul Simon Cowell.

Payne’s bandmates Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik and Harry Styles said in a joint statement that they were “completely devastated” and will miss the singer “terribly”, adding the “memories we shared with him will be treasured forever”.

Thousands of fans also remembered the late singer at memorial events in the UK and around the world.

Vladimir Putin has congratulated Donald Trump on his election victory, calling him a “courageous man”.

Speaking at an event in the Russian city of Sochi, the Russian president said that Trump was “hounded from all sides” during his first term in the White House.

Putin also said that Trump’s claim that he can help end the war in Ukraine “deserves attention at least”.

During his campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly said he could end the war “in a day” but has never elaborated on how that could happen.

During Putin’s address, which lasted several hours and covered a wide range of topics, he also spoke of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July, saying it “made an impression” on him.

After being shot, Trump punched his fist into the air and mouthed the words “fight, fight, fight”, before being hauled away by Secret Service agents.

“He behaved, in my opinion, in a very correct way, courageously, like a man,” Putin said.

Asked if he was ready to have discussions with Donald Trump, Putin replied: “We’re ready, we’re ready.”

Trump had already said on Thursday that he was prepared to speak with Putin, telling NBC News: “I think we’ll speak”.

The Kremlin was widely accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election to boost Donald Trump’s campaign against Hilary Clinton, claims rejected by Moscow.

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated allegations of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia in 2016, but said in a report three years later that had found no evidence of conspiracy.

Elsewhere on Thursday, leaders gathering for the European Political Community in Budapest discussed Trump’s return to the White House.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had a “very warm” and “productive conversation” with the president-elect.

“But we have to do everything to ensure that the results of our interaction between Ukraine and America, the whole of Europe and America, are productive and positive,” he added.

Many in Ukraine and Europe are worried that Trump might slow, if not halt, the flow of American military aid to Kyiv upon taking power in January.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer assured Zelensky at the summit that the UK’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia remains “iron-clad”.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban – who previously said he celebrated Trump’s win by “tapping into the vodka supply happily” – said the US and Europe now face tough talks on trade.

Orban, who is a close ally of Trump, told a press conference that “the trade issue with the US will come up and it will not be easy”.

Before winning the election, Trump said he would impose tariffs of 10% on all imports.

“There was an agreement that Europe should assume greater responsibility for its own peace and security in the future. To put it even more bluntly, we cannot expect Americans to be the only ones to take care of us,” Orban said.

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

A Liverpool hospice which cares for babies and young children has been saved from closure after the local community raised more than £6m in a month.

Zoe’s Place, which helps children aged under five with chronic or life-limiting conditions, recently announced it would have to shut at the end of the year.

Now the charity’s trustees have confirmed it had received enough money from individuals and businesses to remain open.

Liverpool-based retailer TJ Morris Ltd, which trades as Home Bargains, pledged £2.5m of the £6.4m target, while local businesses including sportswear firm Montirex and the Hot Water Comedy Club raised hundreds of thousands.

Speaking at the hospice as news of its survival was announced, fundraiser Gina Earnshaw said the past few weeks had been “all-consuming”.

But she added: “All the stress and all the emotion it has been worth it for this moment right now.”

Michelle Wright, head of care at the hospice, said: “Words cannot express how I feel.

“The fact that we can continue to support our children and families means everything and is all every member of the team has wanted to do.”

When it was announced on 7 October that the hospice in Yew Tree Lane, West Derby, would have to close, several affected families spoke of their devastation.

Stephanie Perry, whose three-year-old daughter Robyn attends twice a week, said: “There’s nowhere else we can take our children, our babies, where they’re looked after, where they’re safe and that we trust.”

Zoe’s Place, which also operates in Middlesbrough and Coventry, opened in Liverpool in 1995.

In October it said a plan to move to a new purpose-built site nearby had fallen through due to spiralling costs and a lack of time.

The planned closure meant 41 members of staff faced losing their jobs.

It later emerged the charity could not use the building beyond June 2025 because the building and land owners, Catholic order The Institute of Our Lady of Mercy, were leaving and selling up.

Hopes were restored after a fundraising campaign, supported by West Derby MP Ian Byrne, gained traction with the public in Merseyside and beyond.

Mr Byrne said he “could not be more proud right now to be a Scouser”.

“From kids dropping their pocket money into a collection bucket, and elderly people donating their pension, to local businesses organising fundraising events and celebrities giving generously of their time and money, it really has felt like the whole city has come together over the last four weeks to save Zoe’s – just as I knew they would,” he said.

Zoe’s Place said the fundraising effort included comedy gigs and other sponsored events as well as support from some of the city’s more well-known sons and daughters.

Ex-Liverpool footballer Robbie Fowler, musician Jamie Webster, mixed martial arts fighters Paddy Pimblett and Meatball Molly, and comedians John Bishop and Adam Rowe have joined the campaign.

Staff from the Liverpool Echo newspaper also conducted a sponsored walk from their city centre office to West Derby.

Zoe’s Place said a new charity had been formed to take on sole responsibility for the Liverpool site and overseeing the construction of a new hospice.

Mr Byrne also vowed to raise the wider issue of funding for children’s hospices in parliament.

He presented a bill on children’s hospice funding to Parliament on 29 October, requiring the government to conduct a review of funding for hospices specialising in the care of children and to guarantee access to hospices for all children who need palliative care.

On 30 October he secured a Westminster Hall debate on the issue and has written to the Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

The Prince of Wales has described the past year as the “hardest year” of his life.

Speaking to reporters at the end of his visit to South Africa, Prince William talked about how he has coped after both his wife and his father were diagnosed with cancer.

“It’s been dreadful. It’s probably been the hardest year in my life. So, trying to get through everything else and keep everything on track has been really difficult,” he said after being asked how his year has been after a difficult year for the Royal Family.

Buckingham Palace revealed the King had cancer in February and would begin treatment. Just six weeks later it was announced the Princess of Wales was undergoing chemotherapy after a cancer diagnosis.

The King has since returned to public duties and Catherine has finished chemotherapy treatment.

Prince William said: “I’m so proud of my wife, I’m proud of my father, for handling the things that they have done.

“But from a personal family point of view, it’s been brutal.”

On Friday, royal author Robert Hardman told the BBC’s Today programme the prince’s admission was part of a greater sense of the royal family “resetting the dial” on their public image.

He also referenced the recent documentaries the Prince of Wales and the Queen have participated in, saying the monarchy had had “an extraordinary year”.

“It’s been a hell of a year – there he (William) is on the one hand helping his wife through a very serious illness, and he’s also expected to stand in for his father who is suffering from cancer,” Mr Hardman, author of recently-released Charles III: New King. New Court. The Inside Story, added.

“He’s been holding the fort throughout all this”.

The Prince of Wales has been in South Africa for his Earthshot prize awards ceremony.

On Wednesday night, five projects each won £1m in prize money for their environmental innovations.

He was also asked about the role of Prince of Wales and whether he liked the freedom and responsibility that came with it.

“It’s a tricky one. Do I like more responsibility? No,” he said.

“Do I like the freedom that I can build something like Earthshot then yes.

“And that’s the future for me. It’s very important with my role and my platform, that I’m doing something for good.

“That I’m helping people’s lives and I’m doing something that is genuinely meaningful.”

The prince has been sporting a beard since the summer and it has divided opinion even amongst those closest to him including his daughter Princess Charlotte.

“Well Charlotte didn’t like it the first time. I got floods of tears, so I had to shave it off. And then I grew it back. I thought, hang on a second, and I convinced her it was going to be okay.”

And on his general feelings about combining his role as a future king, husband and father, there was a sense that he had found the right mix of official duty and private time.

“I enjoy my work and I enjoy pacing myself and keeping sure that I have got time for my family too.”

The Prince’s final day in Cape Town saw him learn more about the work of Abalobi, a 2023 Earthshot prize finalist which aims to protect small-scale fishing communities.

He was met with shouts of “we love you, William” and chatted to local fishermen and women involved in the programme.

But later a handful of vocal protesters held up placards or shouted about a range of issues including conflict in Israel, indigenous rights, the culling of baboons in the area and lack of representation for local fishermen.

On Wednesday, the Prince William told broadcasters Catherine is doing “really well” and has been “amazing this whole year”.

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Police are on the hunt for 43 monkeys who escaped from a research facility in South Carolina, after a keeper left their pen open.

The rhesus macaque fugitives broke out of Alpha Genesis, a company that breeds primates for medical testing and research, and are on the loose in a part of the state known as the Lowcountry.

Authorities have urged residents to keep their doors and windows securely closed and to report any sightings immediately. The escaped monkeys are young females, weighing about 7lbs (3.2kg) each, according to the Yemassee Police Department.

Police said on Thursday that the company had located the “skittish” group, and “are working to entice them with food”.

“Please do not attempt to approach these animals under any circumstances,” police said.

The statement added that traps had been set in the area, and police were on-site “utilizing thermal-imaging cameras in an attempt to locate the animals”.

Police say the research company has told them that because of their size, the monkeys have not yet been tested on and “are too young to carry disease”.

• What should you do if you encounter an escaped monkey?

Greg Westergaard, CEO of Alpha Genesis, called the escape “frustrating”.

He told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner network, that he was “hoping for a happy ending”, and that the monkeys would return to the facility on their own.

Mr Westergaard said the monkeys had escaped on Wednesday after a keeper left a door open to their outdoor enclosure. He said they were now “hanging out in the woods”.

“It’s really like follow-the-leader. You see one go and the others go,” Mr Westergaard said.

“It was a group of 50, and 7 stayed behind and 43 bolted out the door.”

“There are some little things to eat in the woods but no apples which are what they really like, ” he said, “so we are hoping that will draw them in the next day or two”.

Speaking to South Carolina newspaper The Post and Courier, he added that capturing the monkeys had been made more difficult due to the weather, saying efforts were “hampered a bit by the rain as the monkeys are hunkered down”.

According to The Post and Courier, this is not the first time that monkeys have escaped from the facility.

In 2016, 19 monkeys escaped before being returned about six hours later. Two years earlier, 26 primates escaped the facility.

The town of Yemassee, 60 miles (100km) east of Charleston, has a population of fewer than 1,100 residents.

Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who represents South Carolina in the House of Representatives, tweeted that her office is “diligently gathering all relevant information to keep our constituents informed regarding the recent escape of primates”.

Macaques are known for being aggressive and competitive. However, Yemassee Police Chief Gregory Alexander said, in a news conference on Thursday, that “there is almost no danger to the public”.

Earlier this year, a Japanese macaque named Honshu escaped from a zoo in Scotland.

After more than five days on the loose, he was located by a drone and then shot with a tranquiliser dart before being returned to the zoo.

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 Steinmeier 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. Steinmeier 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.

Few nations are as closely tied as the US and Canada. The two share the world’s longest land border and a trade relationship worth more than a trillion dollars.

Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, was quick to congratulate President-elect Donald Trump on his election victory.

But there is no doubt their relationship has been rocky and there are challenges on the horizon.

Here are the ways Trump’s win could affect America’s northern neighbour.

On Wednesday morning, Canadian political leaders were cautiously laudatory about Trump’s win.

Trudeau congratulated “Donald” on the decisive victory, saying he was looking forward to working with him.

“The world is actually more difficult and more complicated than it was four years ago and I know there’s lots of work for us to do,” he said.

• 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?

Trump and Trudeau have been counterparts before, notably successfully renegotiating, along with Mexico, the USMCA – the North American trade pact.

But the pair have had strained moments – Trump has referred to Trudeau as a “far-left lunatic” and “two-faced”, while Trudeau once appeared to mock Trump at a meeting of Nato leaders in 2019.

It is also possible that Canada could get a new prime minister and government altogether, with Trudeau facing a possible snap election while his Liberal Party trails badly in the polls.

This could complicate the process of forging a renewed, strong relationship with the incoming Trump administration – at least in the short-term, said Louise Blais, a former Canadian diplomat.

“It’s not an ideal situation to find ourselves politically at the moment,” she said.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said on Wednesday that she knew “a lot of Canadians are feeling unsettled today”.

But she touted “enduring relationships – I would even say even friendships” that Canadian officials have with their US counterparts.

“Canada will be prosperous, Canadians will be safe and our sovereign identity will be secure as we work with this newly elected administration,” she said.

Canada and the US have a deeply entwined economic and trade relationship.

Canada exports 75% of its goods and services to the US – and Trump’s promise of blanket 10% tariffs could significantly affect its economy.

“I do worry about what an across-the-board tariff would actually look like,” said Trevor Tombe, a Canadian economist with the University of Calgary.

“This is where details are really important – and we unfortunately don’t have details for what these tariffs would actually look like.”

• Analysis: The view from countries where Trump’s win really matters
• What does a Trump win mean for the UK?
• Trade, aid, security: What does Trump’s victory mean for Africa?
• What Trump’s win means for Ukraine, Middle East and China
• Analysis: Will Trump’s victory spark a global trade war?

In July, the Business Development Bank of Canada estimated the move could subtract $7bn from Canada’s GDP in the year it is implemented – mainly from a drop in business investment – and drive down the Canadian dollar.

Mr Tombe warned that Canada’s economic growth is already slowing and in a poor position to absorb shocks.

Also in question is the future of USMCA. The three trade partners will decide in 2026 whether to extend the pact for another 16 years.

John Dickerman, a US-based policy adviser for the Business Council of Canada, said Canada could lean on its previous experience renegotiating that trilateral deal six years ago to meet the challenge.

He said Canada should be consistent in its messaging on the issue, “reminding Americans that this deal has been good for them”.

Analysts say that Canada may have to make some concessions as it tries to navigate this new relationship.

Among them is working out how to address policies already unpopular with the US – such as Canada’s new Digital Services Tax – a 3% tax on major foreign digital services companies like Google and Amazon.

“The previous Trump administration took a really aggressive view on the Digital Services Tax,” said Dickerman. “I wouldn’t expect that to change. If anything, I expect it to amplify a little bit.”

Freeland, the deputy PM, addressed some of these concerns on Wednesday.

She said that Canada being the single biggest export market for the US gives the country “leverage” in future negotiations.

Canada has long been seen as a laggard among allies on Nato and defence spending. Trump is expected to place the most pressure on his northern neighbour.

Trudeau has said his country will reach the alliance’s minimum target of spending 2% of GDP on defence by 2032, up from the current 1.29%.

In an interview with CTV News Kelly Craft, the former US ambassador to Canada under the first Trump administration said that timeline was “not good enough”.

“Donald Trump, when he says he expects people to pay their fair share, they will.”

Ms Blais said Canada has to “get creative” to accelerate the timeline, including leaning on its rich supply of critical minerals for defence purposes.

“We don’t have huge fiscal wiggle room,” she said. “But at the same time, I think we can show a little more commitment.”

Trump’s threat of mass deportations has raised questions in Canada about what it means for the shared northern border.

Terri Givens, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, said even if that threat was not enacted, there was “an issue of perception” that could drive people to cross the Canadian border.

In 2017, thousands of people began entering Canada via Roxham Road – an unofficial access point on the New York-Quebec border – to seek asylum.

The reasons that drove them were diverse, but many cited both concerns of their ability to stay in the US under the first Trump presidency and the belief that they would be welcomed in Canada.

Canada and the US have since closed a loophole in a border pact that allowed people to cross at unofficial border points – but US figures suggest people are still trying to make the attempt.

Asked about the concern, Freeland said there was a plan in place.

“I do want to assure Canadians that we absolutely do recognise the importance of border security and control of the border,” she said.

Solving any potential issue will take close collaboration between Canadian and US officials. The 5,525 miles (8,891km) border is undefended.

“How do you actually enforce that border?” said Julie Young, the Canada Research Chair in Critical Border Studies and an associate professor at the University of Lethbridge.

“And my concern is for the people whose lives will be endangered by how border policies are enforced.”

• 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 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?
• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win
• Analysis – Why Kamala Harris lost: A flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

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.

• 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
• Seven states expand abortion protections as Florida ballot fails

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”.

• When does Trump become US president again?
• What could happen 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

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.

Last month brought good news for the great Indian bustard, a critically endangered bird found mainly in India.

Wildlife officials in the western state of Rajasthan have performed the first successful hatching of a chick through artificial insemination.

A lone adult male in one of two breeding centres in Jaisalmer city was trained to produce sperm without mating, which was then used to impregnate an adult female at the second centre some 200km (124 miles) away.

Officials said the development was important as it has opened up the possibility of creating a sperm bank.

Over the years, habitat loss, poaching and collisions with overhead power lines have effected great Indian bustards. Their numbers have fallen from more than 1,000 in the 1960s to around 150 at present.

Most of them are found in Jaisalmer and hence, conservation activists say that the bird’s habitat in the city should be protected. But this land is also prime real estate for renewable energy firms, presenting authorities with a unique conservation challenge.

The great Indian bustard may not be as well known as the peacock (India’s national bird) but it’s just as impressive, says Sumit Dookia, a conservation ecologist who has been studying the bird for close to a decade. The massive bird, which weighs between 15kg and 18kg, is one of the biggest flying birds in India.

It once had a prolific presence in the country and was found in at least 11 states, but today, its population is confined to Rajasthan, while a handful might be spotted in the southern state of Karnataka and the western state of Gujarat.

The shy bird plays an important role in the food chain by preying on rodents, snakes and other pests and is also the state bird of Rajasthan, where it is called ‘Godawan’ by locals.

But some of the bird’s unique evolutionary traits are clashing with human interventions, making it vulnerable to extinction.

For one, the great Indian bustard has good peripheral vision but poor frontal vision, making it difficult for them to spot power lines until they fly too close to them. Their large size makes it difficult for them to quickly change their flight path and they end up colliding with the cables and dying.

“Their vision could have developed like this as the bird spends a large amount of time on land,” says Mr Dookia. It also lays its eggs on the ground, without a nest or any other form of protection except for the watchful eye of the mother and this might have caused it to develop good side vision, he adds.

The great Indian bustard also has unique breeding habits. The bird lays just one egg at a time and spends the next two years caring for its offspring.

“Since it reaches maturity at around four years of age and lives for 12-15 years, it lays just about four-five eggs in its lifetime and many of these eggs are destroyed by predators,” Mr Dookia says.

Conservationists say that over the past few years, the great Indian bustard’s habitat in Jaisalmer has been overrun by solar and wind energy farms, leading to an increase in flying accidents.

“The increased human presence has also created more filth, attracting stray dogs who kill the birds or destroy their eggs,” Mr Dookia says.

To boost the bird’s population, the government of Rajasthan collaborated with the federal government and the Wildlife Institute of India to launch a conservation breeding centre at Sam city in 2018. Another breeding centre was set up at Ramdevra village in 2022, says Ashish Vyas, a top forest official in Jaisalmer.

As a first step, researchers collected eggs found in the wild and hatched them in incubation centres. “Currently, there are 45 birds in both the centres,14 of which are captive-bred chicks (including the one born through artificial insemination),” he adds.

The plan is to further boost the bird’s population and then eventually release them into the wild. But conservationists say that this is easier said than done.

This is because the birds born in these breeding centres have imprinted on human researchers (in other words, they have formed close bonds with their human caretakers) and have lost about 60-70% of their ability to survive in the wild, says Mr Dookia.

“Human imprinting is necessary for feeding and handling the birds but it also makes them lose their natural instincts. It will be extremely challenging to re-wild them, especially if there’s no habitat left for the birds to be released into,” he adds.

The loss of habitat has also resulted in another problem: researchers have noticed that the birds, which used to migrate across states, have almost completely stopped doing so. Even in Jaisalmer, where the birds are found in two pockets – Pokhran in the eastern part of the city and the Desert National Park in the west – there’s hardly any cross-migration, says Mr Dookia.

It’s likely that the birds have stopped migrating over large distances in response to flying accidents, he adds. This increases the risk of inbreeding, which could result in birth defects.

“Thus, the only solution to conserve the great Indian bustard is to preserve its natural habitat,” he says.

But a Supreme Court judgement from April has made conservationists uneasy.

The court overturned an earlier interim order, which had instructed Rajasthan and Gujarat to prioritise moving power cables underground in great Indian bustard habitats. The order had created a furore among renewable energy firms, who said that this would cost them billions of rupees and virtually kill their business.

In its latest judgment, the court observed that people had the right to be free from the harmful effects of climate change and that shifting large sections of power cables underground may not be feasible for firms from a monetary and technical standpoint.

It also directed that a committee be set up to look into the feasibility of moving power lines and the efficacy of bird diverters – devices that have reflectors and are attached to power cables to alert birds about their presence.

While corporates have hailed the top court’s judgment, conservationists and some legal experts say that it’s problematic as it pits one good cause against another.

“The judgment brings into focus a flawed understanding of the interplay between climate change, biodiversity and development issues,” ecologist Debadityo Sinha wrote in a column.

He noted that many highly-populated cities in India have underground power lines and that other states have taken such a step to protect other bird species in the past. He also pointed out that although moving power cables underground is expensive, it’s likely to amount to a fraction of a firm’s total earnings.

Mr Dookia says that one of the reasons renewable energy companies are flocking to Rajasthan is because of the low cost of land.

“There’s also not much research on how these renewable energy farms will impact the state’s climate and ecology in the long run,” he says.

“So it’s not just the bird’s future that hangs in the balance, it’s also man’s.”

Donald Trump made the first official hire of his incoming administration, announcing 2024 campaign co-chair Susan Summerall Wiles as his chief of staff.

The president-elect’s transition team already is vetting a series of candidates ahead of his return to the White House on 20 January 2025.

Many who served under Trump in his first term do not plan to return, though a handful of loyalists are rumoured by US media to be making a comeback.

A new group of colleagues also now surrounds the 78-year-old Republican.

There are more than 4,000 positions to be filled across Trump’s cabinet and White House, and across the federal government.

Here is a closer look at names in the mix for the top jobs.

• Follow live updates as Trump assembles senior team
• 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

Susie Wiles and campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita were the masterminds behind Trump’s landslide victory over Kamala Harris.

In his victory speech on Wednesday, he called her “the ice maiden” – a reference to her composure – and claimed she “likes to stay in the background”.

Wiles was confirmed the next day as the first appointee of his second term – as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman ever to hold that job.

Chief of staff is often a president’s top aide, overseeing daily operations in the White House West Wing and managing the boss’s staff.

Wiles, 67, is considered one of the most feared and respected political operatives in the country.

Less than a year after she started working in politics, she worked on Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign and later became a scheduler in his White House.

In 2010, she turned Rick Scott, a then-businessman with little political experience, into Florida’s governor in just seven months. Scott is now a US senator.

Wiles met Trump during the 2015 Republican presidential primary and she became the co-chair of his Florida campaign, at the time considered a swing state. Trump went on to narrowly defeat Hillary Clinton there in 2016.

Wiles has been commended by Republicans for her ability to command respect and check the big egos of those in Trump’s orbit, which could enable her to impose a sense of order that none of his four previous chiefs of staff could.

No personnel decision may be more critical to the trajectory of Trump’s second term than the appointee to lead the Department of Justice.

After uneven relationships with both Jeff Sessions and William Barr, Trump is widely expected to pick a loyalist who will wield the agency’s prosecutorial power to punish critics and opponents. Department officials are currently working to wind down two federal prosecutions brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office.

Among the names being floated for the cabinet post are Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was both indicted and impeached like Trump; Matthew Whitaker, the man who took over for three months as acting attorney general after Sessions stepped down at Trump’s request; and Mark Paoletta, former legal counsel to then-Vice-President Dick Cheney, who served in Trump’s budget office and argues there is no legal requirement for a president to stay out of justice department decisions.

The secretary of homeland security is responsible for handling immigration and border enforcement, and leading the government response to natural disasters.

Tom Homan, a chief proponent of Trump’s immigration approach, stands out as the most likely pick.

He served as the acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the first Trump administration, where he backed separating migrant children from their parents as a way to deter illegal crossings. He also made headlines for saying politicians who support sanctuary city policies should be charged with crimes.

He later resigned from his position in 2018, mid-way through the Trump presidency.

But he has been involved in developing Trump’s mass deportation proposals, recently telling CBS’s 60 Minutes programme that it will focus on “targeted arrests”.

“It’s not going to be a mass sweep of neighbourhoods. It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” he said.

Though the plan could cost billions of dollars, Homan, 62, has responded: “What price do you put on national security?”

The US secretary of state is the president’s main adviser on foreign affairs, who acts as America’s top diplomat when representing the country overseas.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio is a major name floated for the position.

Rubio, 53, was most recently under consideration to be Trump’s vice-president – a role that ultimately went to his colleague from Ohio, JD Vance.

A senior member of the Senate foreign relations committee and vice-chairman of the chamber’s select intelligence panel, the Cuban American lawmaker is a China hawk who opposed Trump in the 2016 Republican primary but has since mended fences and worked closely with him.

But some Trump allies criticise him as a “neo-conservative” who fits poorly with Trump’s “America First” agenda. Other possibilities for the position include Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty, who was previously Trump’s ambassador to Japan.

A dark horse for the nomination, however, is Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany, special envoy to the Balkans and his acting director of national intelligence.

Grenell, 58, was heavily involved in the efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat in the swing state of Nevada and the president-elect prizes his loyalty.

In September, he sat in on Trump’s private meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The former president often claims he will end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” of taking office and Grenell has advocated for setting up an autonomous zone in eastern Ukraine as a means to that end – an idea seen as unacceptable by Kyiv.

But Grenell’s combative style will likely make him a better fit for national security adviser – a position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Also rumoured for major national security posts are former Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe; Keith Kellogg, a national security adviser to Trump’s first Vice-President Mike Pence; and Kash Patel, a loyalist who staffed Trump’s national security council and later helped block the transition to the incoming Joe Biden administration as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defence. Patel could be the next Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief.

Trump also said he would fire Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) Director Chris Wray, who he nominated in 2017. Jeffrey Jensen, a former Trump-appointed US attorney, is under consideration to replace Wray.

Ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is among the few former Trump cabinet members who could return for his second term as secretary of defence, where he would oversee the US military.

The former Kansas congressman, 60, served first as Trump’s director of the CIA before becoming his chief diplomat.

A foreign policy hawk and a fierce supporter of Israel, he played a highly visible role in moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He was among the key players in the implementation of the Abraham Accords, which normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

He remained a loyal defender of his boss, often tangling with the press and even joking that there would be “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” amid Trump’s false claims of election fraud in late 2020.

Another name being discussed is Michael Waltz, a Florida lawmaker who sits on the armed services committee in the US House of Representatives.

To be the chief financial officer of his incoming administration, Trump is reportedly considering Robert Lighthizer, a free trade sceptic who led the Republican’s tit-for-tat tariff war with China as the US trade representative.

But at least four others may be under consideration for the role, including Scott Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager who has become a major fundraiser and economic adviser to the president-elect; John Paulson, another megadonor from the hedge fund world; former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Jay Clayton; and Fox Business Network financial commentator Larry Kudlow, who ran Trump’s national economic council.

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum was not well-known on the national scene until he launched a bid for president in the 2024 Republican primary.

After making little impact, he dropped out and endorsed Trump, quickly impressing him with his no-drama persona, executive-level competence and wealth.

A software entrepreneur who sold his small company to Microsoft in 2001, he is considered a top contender to lead the interior department, where he will be responsible for managing federal lands and natural resources.

That is an opportunity for him to support Trump’s vows to “drill, baby, drill” and overhaul US energy policy.

The Trump 2024 campaign’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, 27, previously served in his White House press office, as an assistant press secretary.

The 27-year-old Gen-Zer made a bid to become the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress in 2022, to represent her home state of New Hampshire, but fell short.

She is tipped to become the White House press secretary – the most public-facing position in the cabinet.

The past two years have been quite a journey for the nephew of former President John F Kennedy.

An environmental lawyer by trade, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 70, ran for president as a Democrat, with most of his family speaking out against his anti-vaccine views and conspiracy theories as they endorsed Joe Biden’s re-election.

He then became an independent but, failing to gain traction amid a series of controversies, dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.

In the last two months of the 2024 election cycle, he spearheaded a Trump campaign initiative called “Make America Healthy Again”.

Trump recently promised he would play a major role related to public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Safety Administration (FDA).

RFK Jr, as he is known, asserted he would push to remove fluoride from drinking water because “it’s a very bad way to deliver it into our systems” – though this has been challenged by some experts.

And in an interview with NBC News, Kennedy rejected the idea that he was “anti-vaccine”, saying he wouldn’t “take away anybody’s vaccines” but rather provide them with “the best information” to make their own choices.

Rather than a formal cabinet position, Kennedy used the interview to suggest he could take on a broader role within the White House.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, 53, announced his support for the former president earlier this year, despite saying in 2022 that “it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”.

The tech billionaire has since emerged as one of the most visible and well-known backers of Trump and donated more than $119m (£91.6m) this election cycle to America PAC – a political action committee he created to support the former president.

Musk, the head of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of the social media platform X, also launched a voter registration drive that included a $1m (£771,000) give-away to a random swing-state voter each day during the closing stretch of the campaign.

Since registering as a Republican ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Musk has been increasingly vocal on issues including illegal immigration and transgender rights.

Both Musk and Trump have concentrated on the idea of him leading a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, where he would cut costs, reform regulations and streamline what he calls a “massive, suffocating federal bureaucracy”.

The would-be agency’s acronym – DOGE – is a playful reference to a “meme-coin” cryptocurrency Musk has previously promoted.

At least one thing was taken for granted before voting day – women across the US were going to turn out for Kamala Harris.

Just as months of relentless polling showed Harris in a virtual tie with Donald Trump, many of those same surveys told the story of a yawning gender gap.

It was a strategy Harris’s team was betting on, hoping that an over-performance among women could make up for losses elsewhere.

It didn’t happen.

Across the country, the majority of women did cast their ballots for Harris, but not by the historic margins she needed. Instead, if early exit polls bear out, Harris’s advantage among women overall – around 10 points – actually fell four points short of Joe Biden’s in 2020.

Democrats suffered a 10 point drop among Latino women, while failing to move the needle among non-college educated women at all, who again went for Trump 63-35, preliminary data suggests.

The shortfall was not for lack of trying.

Throughout her 15-week campaign, much of Harris’s messaging was aimed directly at women, most obviously with her emphasis on abortion.

On the trail, Harris made reproductive rights a cornerstone of her pitch. She repeatedly reminded voters that Trump had once bragged about his role in overturning Roe v Wade – a ruling that ended the nationwide right to an abortion.

“I will fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court justice took away from the women of America,” Harris said at her closing address in DC last week.

• Follow live updates
• The shifts that delivered Trump a big win

Her most powerful advertisements featured women who had suffered under state abortion bans – deemed “Trump abortion bans” by Harris – including those who said they were denied care for miscarriages.

The strategy, it seemed, was to harness the same enthusiasm for abortion access that drove Democrats’ unexpected success in the 2022 midterms.

Abortion rights remain broadly popular – this Gallup poll in May suggested only one in 10 Americans thought it should be banned.

And even these election results seemed to underline that. Eight out of the 10 states where abortion was on the ballot voted in favour of abortion rights.

But that support did not translate into support for Harris.

Abortion did matter to women, it just didn’t matter enough, said Evan Ross Smith, a pollster and campaign consultant.

“Voters – particularly the women – who feel strongest about abortion are already voting for Democrats,” he said. But Democrats were unable to raise the importance of abortion for women who didn’t yet see it as a pressing issue.

“The abortion argument did not penetrate at all with non-college educated women, did not move them an inch. And they lost ground with Latinos,” Mr Smith said.

• 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?

For many, the decisive issue proved to be the economy.

In pre-election surveys and preliminary exit data, inflation and affordability continued to top lists of voters’ concerns. And for these voters, Trump was the overwhelming favourite.

Jennifer Varvar, 51, an independent from Grand Junction, Colorado said she had not even considered a vote for Harris because of the financial stress she faced over the past four years.

“For me and my family, we’re in a worse position now than we ever have been financially. It’s a struggle. I have three boys to put food on the table for,” she said. Things had been better under Trump, she said, and that’s why she voted for him.

But if gender didn’t divide the electorate in the way some expected, it still played a part in the Harris defeat, say some analysts.

There have been many explanations offered for Trump’s resounding victory but for some there is one thing that stands out.

“I do think that the country is still sexist and is not ready for a woman president,” said Patti Solis Doyle, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, to Politico.

Unlike Clinton, who explicitly leaned into her gender and the history-making potential of her campaign, Harris was noticeably reluctant to do the same.

There is a widespread belief that the country is more ready for a woman president now than when Clinton ran a second time in 2016. But it’s still an open question.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll in October suggested 15% of those surveyed would not be able to vote for a female president.

And Donald Trump, who doubled down on masculinity in this election, may have played a part in exploiting that.

• Trump attempts to woo the manosphere

“He framed being president as being a tough guy in a dangerous world… he framed that as the job description,” said Mr Smith.

“And that’s one of the hardest possible job descriptions for a woman to successfully meet, in the minds of many Americans.”

The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the devastating war in the Palestinian territory.

Professor Dr Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, is one of the region’s most respected religious authorities, so his legal opinion carries significant weight among Gaza’s two million population, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim.

A fatwa is a non-binding Islamic legal ruling from a respected religious scholar usually based on the Quran or the Sunnah – the sayings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad.

Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls “violating Islamic principles governing jihad”.

Jihad means “struggle” in Arabic and in Islam it can be a personal struggle for spiritual improvement or a military struggle against unbelievers.

Dr Dayah adds: “If the pillars, causes, or conditions of jihad are not met, it must be avoided in order to avoid destroying people’s lives. This is something that is easy to guess for our country’s politicians, so the attack must have been avoided.”

For Hamas, the fatwa represents an embarrassing and potentially damaging critique, particularly as the group often justifies its attacks on Israel through religious arguments to garner support from Arab and Muslim communities.

The 7 October attack saw hundreds of Hamas gunmen from Gaza invade southern Israel. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken hostage.

Israel responded by launching a military campaign to destroy Hamas, during which more than 43,400 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

• Israel Gaza war: History of the conflict explained
• What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza?

Dr Dayah argues that the significant civilian casualties in Gaza, together with the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure and humanitarian disaster that have followed the 7 October attack, means that it was in direct contradiction to the teachings of Islam.

Hamas, he says, has failed in its obligations of “keeping fighters away from the homes of defenceless [Palestinian] civilians and their shelters, and providing security and safety as much as possible in the various aspects of life… security, economic, health, and education, and saving enough supplies for them.”

Dr Dayah points to Quranic verses and the Sunnah that set strict conditions for the conduct of jihad, including the necessity of avoiding actions that provoke an excessive and disproportionate response by an opponent.

His fatwa highlights that, according to Islamic law, a military raid should not trigger a response that exceeds the intended benefits of the action.

He also stresses that Muslim leaders are obligated to ensure the safety and well-being of non-combatants, including by providing food, medicine, and refuge to those not involved in the fighting.

“Human life is more precious to God than Mecca,” Dr Dayah states.

His opposition to the 7 October attack is especially significant given his deep influence in Gaza, where he is seen as a key religious figure and a vocal critic of Islamist movements, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

His moderate Salafist beliefs place him in direct opposition to Hamas’s approach to armed resistance and its ties to Shia-ruled Iran.

Salafists are fundamentalists who seek to adhere the example of the Prophet Muhammad and the first generations who followed him.

Dr Dayah has consistently argued for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate that adheres strictly to Islamic law, rather than the political party-based systems that Hamas and other groups advocate.

“Our role model is the Prophet Muhammad, who founded a nation and did not establish political parties that divide the nation. Therefore, parties in Islam are forbidden,” he said in a sermon he gave at a mosque several years ago.

He has also condemned extremism, opposing jihadist groups like Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and has used all of his platforms to issue fatwas on various social and political issues, ranging from commercial transactions, social disputes over marriage and divorce, to the conduct of political violence.

The fatwa adds to the growing internal debate within Gaza and the broader Arab world over the moral and legal implications of Hamas’s actions, and it is likely to fuel further divisions within Palestinian society regarding the use of armed resistance in the ongoing conflict with Israel.

Sheikh Ashraf Ahmed, one of Dr Dayah’s students who was forced to leave his house in Gaza City last year and flee to the south of Gaza with his wife and nine children, told the BBC: “Our scholar [Dr Dayah] refused to leave his home in northern Gaza despite the fears of Israeli air strikes. He chose to fulfil his religious duty by issuing his legal opinion on the attack”.

Ahmed described the fatwa as the most powerful legal judgment of a historical moment. “It’s a deeply well researched document, reflecting Dayah’s commitment to Islamic jurisprudence,” he said.

The bar facing the US embassy building in central Jerusalem is called Deja Bu – a witty reference to something you’ve drunk before.

And outside the gates of the US compound, Israel is eager for a second round of Donald Trump.

“I’m very pleased,” said Rafael Shore, a rabbi who lives in Jerusalem’s Old City. “He understands the language of the Middle East.

“Iran will think twice about doing anything. I think if Kamala had been elected, there wouldn’t be much fear in the Middle East of attacking America or Israel.”

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was one of the first to congratulate the new president-elect on Wednesday morning. “Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!” he tweeted.

Netanyahu has previously called Trump the “best friend Israel has ever had in the White House”.

Trump previously won favour here by scrapping an Iran nuclear deal that Israel opposed, brokering historic normalisation agreements with several Arab countries and upending decades of US policy – and international consensus – by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Donald Trump’s first term in office was “exemplary” as far as Israel is concerned, said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US.

“The hope is that he’ll revisit that. [But] we have to be very clear-sighted about who Donald Trump is and what he stands for.”

Firstly, he said, the former president “doesn’t like wars”, seeing them as expensive. Trump has urged Israel to finish the war in Gaza quickly.

He’s also “not a big fan” of Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, said Amb Oren, and has opposed the wishes of some Israeli leaders to annex parts of it.

Both those policies could put him in conflict with far-right parties in Netanyahu’s current governing coalition, who have threatened to bring down the government if the prime minister pursues policies they reject.

• Seven things Trump says he will do in power
• What Trump’s win means for Ukraine, Middle East and China

When called upon to choose between the recent demands of his US ally and the demands of his coalition partners, Benjamin Netanyahu has tended to choose his coalition.

Friction with the current US President, Joe Biden, has grown sharply as a result.

Michael Oren believes Netanyahu will need to take a different approach with the incoming president.

“If Donald Trump comes into office in January and says, ‘OK, 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 to that single goal.

Trump “has some strong promises”, Ahmed said. “We hope he can help and bring peace.”

Ahmed’s wife and son were both killed in the war and his house destroyed.

“Enough is enough, we are tired,” he said. “We hope Trump is strong so that he can resolve this issue with Israel.”

Mohammed Dawoud, displaced eight times during the Gaza conflict, said a Trump victory meant that the end of the war would come soon.

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

“There’s no medicine, no hospitals, no food. There’s nothing left in Gaza,” he said. “We want someone strong who can separate us and the Jews.”

• The view from countries where Trump’s win really matters

In the occupied West Bank, home of the Palestinian Authority (PA), there is widespread scepticism about American influence, with many viewing US administrations from both sides of the political aisle as siding with Israel.

“Mediocre solutions which come at the expense of the Palestinians, or endless military support for Israel, is going to be nothing but a catalyst for future confrontations,” said Sabri Saidam, a senior member of the PA’s main faction, Fatah.

“We would like to see a new version of Trump, more like a Trump 2.0 who’s serious about immediately ending the war, and addressing the root cause of conflict in the Middle East.”

Recent polls suggested that more than two-thirds of Israelis wanted to see Trump back in the White House. But here too, there are those who caution about his unpredictability and his approach.

• Results: Who did each state vote for?

• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win

• Trump team: Who is Susie Wiles, chief of staff?

• Analysis – Why Harris lost: Flawed candidate or doomed campaign?

“He’s going to make the situation here more uncertain and unsafe,” one Israeli woman said. “I don’t trust him to keep the peace. I honestly think he’ll just make the war worse.”

The former Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren, said he believed there were “tremendous achievements ahead” if Israel co-operated with Trump, including the potential for a historic peace deal with Saudi Arabia and checks on Iran’s influence.

But it could also be harder for Netanyahu to navigate the demands and compromises involved in those regional goals.

Since Trump’s last term in office, moderate voices around both leaders have dwindled.

Many in Israel view Trump’s first term with fond memories. But relationships can be radically different the second time around – and past performance is no guarantee of future returns.

US President-elect Donald Trump has announced his campaign manager, Susan Summerall Wiles, will serve as his White House chief of staff when he takes over the presidency next year.

In a statement, Trump said that Wiles “just helped me achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history” and “is tough, smart, innovative, and is universally admired and respected”.

“It is a well deserved honour to have Susie as the first-ever female chief of staff in United States history,” he continued. “I have no doubt that she will make our country proud.”

Wiles, 67, is the first woman to be appointed White House chief of staff.

The Trump transition team is currently working to choose top members of the incoming Republican administration, including the heads of all 15 executive departments, such as the secretaries of state and defence, from 20 January.

• Follow live updates as Trump assembles senior team
• A quick guide to Donald Trump
• From Wiles to Musk: What new administration may look like

In his victory speech this week, Trump referred to Wiles as “the ice maiden” as she stood behind him on stage.

She operates mostly “in the back”, the president-elect said, but she is known as one of the most feared political operatives in the US.

“Susie will continue to work tirelessly to Make America Great Again,” he added in his statement on Thursday, referring to his oft-repeated campaign slogan.

A profile by Politico earlier this year described Susie Wiles as feared but little known.

Less than a year after Wiles started working in politics, she joined Ronald Reagan’s campaign ahead of his 1980 election.

She went on to play a key role in transforming politics in Florida, where she lives.

In 2010, she turned Rick Scott, a then-businessman with little political experience, into Florida’s governor in just seven months. Scott is now a US senator.

Wiles met Trump during the 2015 Republican presidential primary and became the co-chair of his Florida campaign. He went on to win the state over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Florida Gov Ron DeSantis, who put her in charge of his successful gubernatorial race two years later, described Wiles as “the best in the business”.

Wiles worked on the Trump campaign alongside Chris LaCivita, a veteran of Republican politics with decades of experience.

The two worked with Trump to formulate a winning presidential primary strategy.

In her Politico profile, the 67-year-old grandmother – who is the daughter of late American football player and broadcaster Pat Summerall – said that she comes from a “traditional” political background.

“In my early career things like manners mattered and there was an expected level of decorum,” she said, describing the Republican party as significantly different than the one of several decades ago.

“And so I get it that the GOP of today is different,” she said, referring to the Republican party, who are also called the Grand Old Party (GOP).

“There are changes we must live with in order to get done the things we’re trying to do.”

The chief of staff is considered to be the president’s top aide, and plays a crucial role in every president’s administration.

They essentially serve as the manager of the White House and are responsible for putting together a president’s staff. A chief leads the staff through the Executive Office of the President and oversees all daily operations and staff activities.

They also advise presidents on policy issues and are responsible for directing and overseeing policy development.

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South Korea’s president has apologised for a string of controversies surrounding his wife that included allegedly accepting a luxury Dior handbag and stock manipulation.

Addressing the nation on television, Yoon Suk Yeol said his wife, Kim Keon Hee, should have conducted herself better, but her portrayal had been excessively “demonised”, adding that some of the claims against her were “exaggerated”.

The president said he would set up an office to oversee the first lady’s official duties, but rejected a call for an investigation into her activities.

Yoon’s apology came as he tries to reverse a dip in his popularity among the South Korean public, linked to the controversies surrounding his wife.

Late in 2023, left-wing YouTube channel Voice of Seoul published a video that purportedly showed Kim accepting a 3m won ($2,200; £1,800) Dior bag from a pastor, who filmed the exchange in September 2022 using a camera concealed in his watch.

In February, Yoon said that the footage was leaked as a “political manoeuvre”, and did not apologise.

South Korea’s Democratic Party, the opposition to Yoon’s conservative People Power Party, at the time labelled the president’s “shameless attitude” as “hopeless”.

The scandal also caused rifts within Yoon’s party, with one leader comparing Ms Kim with Marie Antoinette, the queen of France notorious for her extravagant lifestyle.

The opposition party has also long accused the first lady of being involved in stock price manipulation. Earlier in the year, Yoon vetoed a bill calling for his wife to be investigated over those allegations.

A 17-year-old girl in China hailed as a genius in a mathematics contest cheated, competition organisers have said – ending months of scepticism over her stellar results.

Jiang Ping, a fashion design student from a rural town in Jiangsu province, made headlines in June when she came 12th in the qualifiers of an international maths contest run by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

She was the first finalist since the competition began in 2018 to have come from a lowly vocational school, Chinese media reported. The vast majority of the 800 finalists came from elite universities.

Jiang’s results turned her into an overnight sensation, and she was labelled a “prodigy” in the press and on social media.

Under China’s notoriously cut-throat education system, academic excellence is lauded. Many people online were encouraged by Jiang’s results, seeing them as proof that students from vocational institutes could still excel academically.

However, as doubt surrounding her abilities snowballed, competition organisers said last Sunday that Jiang had violated competition rules in the preliminary round, by receiving help from her teacher, who was also a contestant himself.

“This has exposed problems like inadequacies in the competition format and the lack of rigour in supervision. We sincerely apologise,” organisers said in a statement.

According to the final results announced on Sunday, neither Jiang nor her teacher was among 86 winners in the competition.

The annual mathematics contest is open to contestants from institutions worldwide and hosted by Damo Academy, Alibaba’s research institute.

This year, Jiang, a student at Jiangsu Lianshui Secondary Vocational School, outperformed other finalists from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions — including Peking University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Oxford.

She had chosen to study at the vocational school both because she was interested in fashion design, and because her sister and friends were there, said local media outlets.

Jiang’s results and unconventional educational background soon grabbed nationwide attention. Her story was featured in a video produced by Damo Academy and she was interviewed by news outlets across the country.

“Learning maths is bumpy, but every time I solve the problems I feel quite happy,” she told the state-run People’s Daily. “No matter what the future holds, I will keep learning.”

Jiang’s teacher, Wang Runqiu, was also thrust into the spotlight, hailed as an educator who noticed and encouraged her passion for maths. Speaking to the media, he described her as an attentive student who had learnt advanced mathematics herself.

“I have encountered many setbacks in the process of learning maths,” he said. “So, I want to do everything I can to help my students and let them know that there are other possibilities in the future.”

But along with an outpouring of praise for Jiang and her teacher, the student’s story also sparked a discussion about whether China’s education system did enough to support gifted students in less academic pathways – especially those who may not have received similar recognition by their teachers.

China’s education system focuses much of its resources on those taking the “Gaokao” – the notoriously difficult exam that students need to take in order to get into university. Those in vocational schools had long faced restrictions in taking the gaokao and enrolling in regular universities, until an education reform in 2022 offered vocational school students an alternative university entrance exam.

An earlier op-ed in state-news media outlet Xinhua said that Jiang’s results “hint[ed] at an awkward truth: even youths as talented as her may be easily buried without good education credentials”.

But as Jiang’s fame burgeoned, criticism and scepticism surrounding her skills also started to bubble.

In June, dozens of other finalists published a joint letter they wrote to the competition organising committee demanding an investigation into Jiang. They also called for her answers to the preliminary test questions to be made public.

The finalists alleged that Jiang had made “several apparent writing mistakes” in an online video and that she “seemed unfamiliar with these mathematical expressions and symbols”.

While the preliminary round of the competition allowed participants to use programming software, the final round was a closed-book exam. The results of the finals, which were initially set to be released in August, were postponed for several months.

When the results were finally made public on Sunday, Jiang was not among the 86 winners of the final round.

Her school also confirmed in a statement on Sunday that Jiang had been helped by her teacher Wang, and that Wang had been given a warning and disqualified from teachers’ awards for the year. The statement also called for leniency and protection for the teenager.

Attempts by the BBC to contact Jiang’s family were unsuccessful. A social media account once used by her mother is now defunct, and a phone number linked to her father has been deactivated. Multiple phone calls by the BBC to Jiang’s school went unanswered, and a village official declined to discuss Jiang when contacted by the BBC.

While Sunday’s revelation unleashed a wave of criticism of Jiang and her teacher, many social media users also spoke up for the teenager, arguing the bigger responsibility lay with her school and teacher.

“Jiang Ping is not innocent, that’s without question. But who are the worst parties in this?” reads a post on Weibo. “The adults brought this child along to do a bad deed, and let her suffer all the consequences.”

“Even if the whole thing was faked, Jiang Ping was not the mastermind behind it,” another wrote on Weibo. “She should not be burned at the stake.”

The mayor of Amsterdam has condemned what she called an “explosion of antisemitism” in the city, during which Israeli football fans came under violent attack from local rioters.

Femke Halsema said youths on scooters had criss-crossed the Dutch capital on Thursday night on the hunt for Israeli supporters in a “hit-and-run”.

The police chief said five fans had been taken to hospital and as many as 30 others had suffered minor injuries. Prosecutors said a total of 62 people were arrested. Eight men and two minors were still in custody on Friday.

Supporters of Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv had travelled to Amsterdam for a Europa League match against Ajax which passed off peacefully.

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“Antisemitic, hateful rioters and criminals yesterday and last night have attacked Jewish visitors visiting our city,” Halsema told a press conference on Friday.

“My heart goes out to the victims and to their families here and in Israel as well.”

Ahead of the match, there had already been some trouble and arrests in Dam Square involving Maccabi fans and pro-Palestinian protesters.

Police chief Peter Holla confirmed there had been incidents “on both sides” the previous night. He said Maccabi supporters had removed a Palestinian flag from the wall of a building and set it alight, but that there had been no further trouble until the following night.

There were also reports of supporters setting off fireworks and one unverified video showed fans going down an escalator chanting anti-Arab slogans.

Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said he had been following developments from an EU leaders’ summit with horror, adding that he had spoken to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He emphasised that the “perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted”.

The night of violence came on the eve of commemorations marking the Nazis’ pogrom against Jews across Germany in November 1938, and there was widespread shock that such an outbreak of antisemitism could happen in the Dutch capital. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were murdered in World War Two.

King Willem-Alexander said Dutch history had shown how intimidation could go from bad to worse, with terrible consequences: “Jews must feel safe in the Netherlands, everywhere and at all times. We put our arms around them and will not let them go.”

The national co-ordinator for combating antisemitism in the Netherlands said a line had been crossed and the “readiness to commit such violence was disgusting”.

Femke Halsema said Dutch counter-terror co-ordinator NCTV had not flagged any concrete threat about the game itself as there was no animosity between the fans of the two clubs. There was no trouble at the game in which Ajax inflicted a heavy 5-0 defeat on the visiting team.

But the unrest spiralled out of control soon afterwards. Halsema spoke of fans being “attacked, abused and pelted with fireworks” as they walked from the Johan Cruyff Arena to the centre of Amsterdam.

Police initially said it was unclear who had taken part in the riots, although the mayor later spoke of young men on scooters. The mayor was careful not to give details about the ethnic backgrounds of those involved in the attack, emphasising that it was part of the police investigation.

Several videos have circulated on social media, with one showing a man being kicked and beaten on the ground and another showing someone being run over. In some videos, people could be heard shouting pro-Palestinian slogans, although the footage was not verified by the BBC.

Asked whether locals had been provoked by a Palestinian flag being torn down in the city, the mayor said what had happened in the centre of her city had nothing to do with protests about the situation in the Middle East, it was a crime.

“I am deeply ashamed of the behaviour that unfolded,” Halsema told reporters. “On Telegram [messaging] groups people talked of going to hunt down Jews. It’s so terrible I can’t find the words for it.”

Police chief Peter Holla said he had been deeply shocked with the events of the past 35 hours, insisting they had prepared for this period for weeks.

The mayor confirmed reports that taxi drivers had been involved in the attacks, after the head of the Netherlands’ Central Jewish Committee (CJO) said they had “moved in groups and cornered their targets”.

Chanan Hertzberger said “videos are circulating of assaults and attempts to run over Israelis”. Amsterdam’s biggest taxi company said its drivers had not been involved.

Israeli airline El Al said it was operating two “rescue flights” to Amsterdam to bring passengers back to Israel. The Israeli prime minister had earlier cancelled plans to send two military planes.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke of a “pogrom” against Maccabi fans and Israeli citizens. Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders who leads the biggest party in parliament also spoke of a pogrom, saying “authorities will be held accountable for their failure to protect the Israeli citizens”.

Herzog said on X that he trusted the Dutch authorities would act immediately to “protect, locate and rescue all Israelis and Jews under attack”.