A senior adviser to President-elect Donald Trump says the incoming administration will focus on achieving peace in Ukraine rather than enabling the country to gain back territory occupied by Russia.

Bryan Lanza, a Republican party strategist, told the BBC the Trump administration would ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his version of a “realistic vision for peace”.

“And if President Zelensky comes to the table and says, well we can only have peace if we have Crimea, he shows to us that he’s not serious,” he said. “Crimea is gone.”

Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Eight years later, it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has occupied territory in the country’s east.

The president-elect has consistently said his priority is to end the war and stem what he characterises as a drain on US resources, in the form of military aid to Ukraine.

However, he has yet to divulge how he intends to do so – and will likely be hearing competing visions for Ukraine’s future from his various advisers.

Mr Lanza, Trump’s political adviser since his 2016 campaign, did not mention areas of eastern Ukraine, but he said regaining Crimea from Russia was unrealistic and “not the goal of the United States”.

“When Zelensky says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for President Zelensky: Crimea is gone,” he told the BBC World Service’s Weekend programme.

“And if that is your priority of getting Crimea back and having American soldiers fight to get Crimea back, you’re on your own.”

The US has never deployed American soldiers to fight in Ukraine, nor has Kyiv requested American troops fight on its behalf. Ukraine has only requested American military aid to arm its own soldiers.

Mr Lanza said he had tremendous respect for the Ukrainian people, describing them as having the hearts of lions. But he said the US priority was “peace and to stop the killing”.

“What we’re going to say to Ukraine is, you know what you see? What do you see as a realistic vision for peace. It’s not a vision for winning, but it’s a vision for peace. And let’s start having the honest conversation,” he said.

Trump is expected to handle peace talks with a close circle of aides once in office.

An unnamed National Security Council aide who previously served under Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: “Anyone – no matter how senior in Trump’s circle – who claims to have a different view or more detailed window into his plans on Ukraine simply doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.”

They said that the former president “makes his own calls on national security issues” and had done so “many times in the moment”.

Trump spoke to Zelensky after his election win, with billionaire Elon Musk also taking part in the call.

A source in Ukraine’s presidential office told the BBC that the “good lengthy conversation” between Zelensky and Trump lasted “about half an hour”.

“It was not really a conversation to talk about very substantial things, but overall it was very warm and pleasant.”

Trump’s Democratic opponents have accused him of cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and say his approach to the war amounts to surrender for Ukraine that will endanger all of Europe.

Last month, Zelensky presented a “victory plan” to the Ukrainian parliament that included a refusal to cede Ukraine’s territories and sovereignty.

During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly said he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in a day”, but never gave further details.

A paper written by two of his former national security chiefs in May said the US should continue supplying weapons, but make the support conditional on Kyiv entering peace talks with Russia.

Ukraine should not give up its hopes of getting all of its territory back from Russian occupation, the paper said, but it should negotiate based on current front lines.

Earlier this week, Putin congratulated Trump on his election victory and said Trump’s claim that he can help end the war in Ukraine “deserves attention at least”.

Mr Lanza also criticised the support the Biden-Harris administration and European countries have given to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“The reality on the ground is that the European nation states and President Biden did not give Ukraine the ability and the arms to win this war at the very beginning and they failed to lift the restrictions for Ukraine to win,” he said.

Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives approved a $61bn (£49bn) package in military aid for Ukraine to help combat Russia’s invasion.

The US has been the biggest arms supplier to Ukraine – between February 2022 and the end of June 2024, it delivered or committed weapons and equipment worth $55.5bn (£41.5bn), according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research organisation.

Qatar has withdrawn as a mediator in ceasefire and hostage release talks between Israel and Hamas, reports say.

It comes after senior US officials reportedly said Washington would no longer accept the presence of Hamas representatives in Qatar, accusing the Palestinian group of rejecting fresh proposals for an end to the war in Gaza.

Anonymous diplomatic sources told the AFP and Reuters news agencies that Hamas’s political office in Doha “no longer serves its purpose” due to “a refusal to negotiate a deal in good faith”.

Qatar is ready to resume its role as a mediator were Israel and Hamas to show “sincere willingness to return to the negotiating table”, the sources reportedly said.

Hamas have had a base in the Qatari capital since 2012, reportedly at the request of the Obama administration.

In anonymous briefings to Reuters, US officials said the Qatari government had agreed to tell Hamas to close its political office 10 days ago.

The reports have been denied by Hamas officials.

The small but influential Gulf state is a key US ally in the region. It hosts a major American air base and has handled many delicate political negotiations, including with Iran, the Taliban and Russia.

Alongside the US and Egypt, the Qataris have also played a major role in rounds of so-far unsuccessful talks to broker a ceasefire in the year-long war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

But there is growing evidence of a shift in the relationship.

After the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Hamas held a two-hour mourning tent in Doha in a small hall, a stark contrast to the recent three-day mourning held for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which was conducted with official state oversight and security.

The latest round of talks in mid-October failed to produce a deal, with Hamas rejecting a short-term ceasefire proposal. The group has always called for a complete end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

Israel has also been accused of rejecting deals. Days after being fired earlier this week, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of rejecting a peace deal against the advice of his security chiefs.

The call for Hamas to be expelled from Qatar appears to be an attempt by the outgoing Biden administration to force some sort of peace deal before the end of his term in January.

Were Hamas to be forced to leave Doha, it is unclear where they would base their political office. Key ally Iran would be an option, although the assassination of former leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July suggests they may be at risk from Israel if based there. It would also not give them anything close to the same diplomatic channels to the West.

A more likely option would be Turkey. As a Nato member but also a Sunni majority state, it would give the group a base from which to operate in relative safety. Last April President Erdogan hosted then Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh and his delegation in Istanbul, where they talked about “what needs to be done to ensure adequate and uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and a fair and lasting peace process in the region”.

The move would also most likely be welcomed by Ankara, which has often sought to position itself as a broker between east and west.

Key Hamas figures such as Osama Hamdan, Taher al-Nunu, and others frequently featured on news outlets have been staying in Istanbul for over a month.

Their extended presence in Turkey marks a departure from past visits, which were typically limited to brief stays.

It is thought the personal safety of Hamas leadership is now a major concern for the group, which saw two leaders killed in less than four months. As well as Haniyeh’s death in July, in October Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the 7 October Hamas attack on southern Israel.

According to the European Council of Foreign Relations, “Hamas has adopted a temporary model of collective leadership to mitigate the effect of future Israeli assassinations”.

H A Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), told the BBC that nowhere “will give them protection from Israeli assassination attempts in the same way that being in Doha, where America has its largest military base in the region, did”.

The latest move comes as US officials appear increasingly frustrated with the approach the Israeli government has taken to ending the war. In October, the US Secretaries of State and Defense said if Israel did not allow more humanitarian aid into the territory by 12 November, they would face unspecified policy “implications”.

Last weekend a number of UN officials warned the situation in northern Gaza was “apocalyptic”. On Saturday the independent Famine Review Committee said there was a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas”.

The relationship between President Joe Biden and Netanyahu has deteriorated over the course of the war in Gaza, with increasing pressure from Washington to improve the humanitarian situation for the Palestinians and find some sort of negotiated settlement.

But, according to Dr Hellyer, US attempts at negotiation have been fatally flawed.

“By setting red lines and allowing Netanyahu to cross them without consequence, the Biden administration effectively encouraged further impunity. I don’t think any of this will change in the next 10 weeks,” he said.

Any overtures have been repeatedly rejected by Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition, who will now also feel emboldened by the prospect of an incoming Donald Trump presidency.

While exactly what approach Trump will take to the region remains uncertain, he is thought to be more likely to allow Israel to act on its terms.

He has previously said Israel should “finish what they started” in Gaza. During his last term in the White House, he took a number of steps deemed highly favourable to Israel, including moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

It has also been reported, however, that Trump has told Netanyahu that he wants to see an end to the fighting by the time he takes office.

Either way, it seems likely that the current US administration will have less influence over the government in Jerusalem.

They may therefore believe the best way to force some sort of deal is to apply pressure on Hamas. Whether it pays off may depend on whether Qatar, so long a reliable ally, decides to go along with it.

Arnaud Poulay never wanted to leave the tiny Indian Ocean island of Agalega, but this year he packed his bag and took off, broken-hearted by what he regards as the militarisation of his home.

Until recently, just 350 people lived on Agalega, fishing and growing coconuts. Other food was delivered four times a year by ship from the capital of Mauritius, 1,100km (680 miles) to the south. A small airstrip was rarely used except in medical emergencies.

But in 2015, Mauritius, an island nation of which Agalega is a part, signed a deal enabling India to build a vast 3,000m runway and a big new jetty there, as part of the two countries’ deepening collaboration on maritime security.

However some Agalegans fear this could grow into a fully-fledged military presence.

Mr Poulay, a 44-year-old handyman and reggae musician, led a campaign against the project.

“I love my island and my island loves me,” he says. “But when that base was unveiled, I knew I had to leave.”

Agalega – two small islands covering 25 sq km, in the south-west Indian Ocean – would be an ideal location for India to monitor marine traffic. And a comparison of satellite images from 2019 with others taken in July this year shows how much has changed.

A carpet of palm trees has made way for the runway, which stretches along the spine of the north island between the two main villages – La Fourche in the north and Vingt-Cinq further south.

Two 60m-wide buildings can be seen sitting on a tarmac apron, at least one of which could be a hangar to accommodate the Indian navy’s P-8I aircraft, according to Samuel Bashfield, a PhD scholar at the Australian National University.

The P-8I is a Boeing 737 modified to hunt and potentially attack submarines, and to monitor maritime communications. Islanders have already photographed the aircraft on the airstrip.

To the north-west is the new jetty jutting out into the ocean, which Mr Bashfield says could be used by Indian surface patrol vessels, as well as the ship that brings supplies to Agalega.

“As newer satellite images become available, we’ll better understand Agalega’s role in Indian Ocean communications,” he says.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies refers to the facility as a “surveillance station” and says it is likely to contain a coastal radar surveillance system similar to Indian-built equipment elsewhere in Mauritius.

The Indian government declined to answer questions about Agalega, and referred the BBC to earlier statements on its website. In one of these, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India and Mauritius were “natural partners” in maritime security, facing traditional and non-traditional challenges in the Indian Ocean region.

The two countries have had a close defence relationship since the 1970s. The country’s national security adviser, its coastguard chief and the head of the police helicopter squadron are all Indian nationals and officers in India’s external intelligence agency, navy and air force, respectively.

Both sides would want the facility to be seen “as one that is more about capacity building than for any overt military use”, says Prof Harsh Pant, of the India Institute at King’s College London.

It’s no secret, though, that India and its Western allies are concerned about China’s increasing presence in the Indian Ocean.

While it’s not unusual for a large country to establish a military outpost on the territory of a smaller ally, the construction work on Agalega has troubled some islanders.

A number of areas, including some of the island’s palm-fringed white-sand beaches, have already been cordoned off, islanders say. There are also persistent rumours that the village of La Fourche will be swallowed by the Indian infrastructure that has grown up around it, and that the 10 families who live there will be forced out.

“It will become a restricted area completely for Indians,” says Laval Soopramanien, president of the Association of Friends of Agalega.

He fears that “Agalega will become the story of the Chagos islands” – a concern echoed by 26-year-old handyman Billy Henri, who is the son of an Agalegan and a woman expelled from the Chagos islands.

“My mother [lost] her island,” says Mr Henri. “My father will be the next.”

A number of Agalega’s residents are from families scarred by eviction from the Chagos Islands, 2,000km to the east, after the UK government declared them in 1965 to be British territory and granted the US permission to build a communications station on the largest island, Diego Garcia. This gradually became a fully-fledged military base.

Billy Henri fears that the Mauritius government, which owns all land on Agalega and is the only employer, is trying to make conditions so miserable that everyone will leave.

He points to problems with healthcare and education, limited investment in the local economy, a lack of job opportunities, and a ban on local people opening their own businesses.

A Mauritius government spokesman told the BBC that no-one would be asked to leave, and that local people were only prevented from entering the airport and the port – facilities that he said would help the country control piracy, drug-trafficking and unregulated fishing.

Mauritius also denies suggestions that Agalega hosts a military base, saying that the national police are still in full control. However, it acknowledges that India will assist in the “maintenance and operation” of the new facilities, which were built at Indian expense.

The Mauritius and Indian governments say the improvements to sea and air transportation were designed to benefit the islanders and help lift them out of poverty. But local people say this hasn’t happened: there are still only four ferries to the main island of Mauritius every year, and no passenger flights.

Agalegans say they are barred from a new Indian-built hospital, even though a Mauritius government press release vaunted its operating theatres, X-ray machines and dentistry equipment.

Billy Henri says that a boy suffering from cooking oil burns, who needed more help than he could get from the north island’s health centre, was refused entry in October.

“It’s only for Indians!” he says.

The injured boy and his parents were flown to the main island of Mauritius instead. Laval Soopramanien says the boy is still in hospital there, and that the family will remain on the main island until the next boat leaves for Agalega.

The Mauritius government did not respond, when asked to comment on the plight of the boy with burns. The Indian government declined to comment.

In a recent speech to the Mauritius parliament, Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth said the socio-economic development of Agalega was higher than ever on his government’s agenda.

A “master plan” had been drawn up to improve health and education, transport connections and recreational facilities for the island’s residents, and to develop the fishing sector and the exploitation of coconut by-products, he said.

But distrust is fuelled by the fact that neither India nor Mauritius has published the details of the 2015 memorandum of understanding, so their plans for the future are unknown.

Authorities say at least 25 people have been killed after a bomb exploded at a railway station in Pakistan’s south-western Balochistan province.

Dozens of others were injured in the blast, which happened as a popular morning train was about to leave Quetta station in southwestern Pakistan for Peshawar.

A separatist militant group, the Balochistan Liberation Army, said it carried out what police are deeming a suicide attack.

There has been a recent surge in deadly attacks in the province, driven by demands for independence and control over local resources.

The city’s commissioner said that the suicide bomber was among the dead, while about 50 others were injured in the blast.

Senior police official Muhammad Baloch said the explosion was thought to have been caused by a suicide bomber carrying 6-8kg of explosives. The dead and injured included both civilians and military personnel, he told the BBC.

Videos shared on social media appear to show the moment the explosion happened on Saturday morning, with dozens of people visible at the platform.

There is also footage circulating of the aftermath, showing a number of injured people and debris spread across the station.

Abdul Jabbar was among the injured brought to the Civil Hospital. He said that he was entering the station, having purchased a ticket from the booking office, when the explosion happened.

“I can’t describe the horror I faced today, it was like a judgement day has come,” he said.

Muhammad Sohail arrived soon after the explosion had happened to catch his train to Multan, in Punjab province.

“Everything was destroyed at the station, and people were laying down on the ground screaming for help,” he said.

The Baloch Liberation Army, which claimed responsibility for the attack, said in a statement released on social media that it had targeted a Pakistan military unit that was returning from Quetta after completing a training course.

Police later confirmed 14 soldiers were among the dead.

The chief minister of Balochistan called the act deplorable and the perpetrators “worse than animals”. Mir Sarfraz Bugti said the authorities would pursue them and “bring them to their logical end”.

The speaker of Pakistan’s National Assembly, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, condemned the blast, saying those responsible were the “enemies of humanity”.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province and the richest in terms of natural resources, but it is the least developed.

The region shares a volatile border with Iran and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and also boasts a vast coastline along the Arabian Sea.

In August, at least 73 people were killed in a series of attacks – which the Baloch Liberation Army also claimed responsibility for – targeting police stations, railway lines and highways, according to Reuters.

The militant separatist group has been waging a decades-long insurgency to gain independence for the region from Pakistan.

A day after her husband’s big election night win, Melania Trump took to social media to address the nation.

“The majority of Americans have entrusted us with this important responsibility,” Mrs Trump said.

“We will safeguard the heart of the republic – freedom,” she vowed, and urged Americans to rise above ideology for the sake of the country.

It was a brief message, but suggested a shift in how the former first lady will approach the role this second time around.

When Trump won his first presidency in 2016, his wife was initially absent from the White House, instead staying in New York with their young son. She appeared reticent, at times, with the traditions set out by first ladies that preceded her.

But experts say that this time, Mrs Trump will likely be more deliberate with her approach to the largely undefined role of being America’s First Lady.

Born Melanija Knavs, the 54-year-old Slovenian-American former fashion model eventually traded a glamorous life in the gilded walls of Manhattan’s Trump Tower for the confines of political life that came with the Oval Office, during a presidency that was often mired in controversy.

Described by some as an “enigma”, Mrs Trump has preferred to be less public than her predecessors, giving fewer speeches both in the White House and on the campaign trail.

“She’s been unique among modern first ladies,” said Tammy Vigil, an associate professor of communications at Boston University and author of a book on Michelle Obama and Melania Trump.

“She does things the way she wants to do them, as opposed to the way she has to do them. But she fulfils the base expectations.”

In recent years, she avoided the spotlight as her husband challenged several legal cases against him while he campaigned for a second term.

Her absence inspired several news articles this summer asking: “Where is Melania?”

Mrs Trump did appear on key occasions, like when her husband announced in late 2022 that he would be running again.

She also attended the Republican National Convention in July wearing a bright red Christian Dior suit, but did not deliver a speech – another break from tradition.

When she does speak, her words appear carefully chosen, offering hints to her point of view.

At her husband’s Madison Square Garden rally just weeks before Election Day, she delivered short but pointed remarks in line with the Trump campaign’s law and order messaging, painting New York City as a “great metropolis” in decline due to rampant crime.

She also spoke after the first assassination attempt on her husband, calling for unity and labelling the perpetrator a “monster”.

In a rare interview on Fox, she later accused his political opponents and the media of “fuelling a toxic atmosphere” that led to the attack.

Mrs Trump declared her pro-choice stance in her recent memoir, putting her at odds with anti-abortion activists within the Republican Party – though the remarks prompted speculation due to their timing, as her husband was struggling to campaign on the issue after the overturning of Roe v Wade.

• Melania Trump is latest Republican First Lady to back abortion

Mrs Trump wrote about her modelling career, her admiration for her husband and their past political disagreements, but chose to keep details of those disputes private.

She has, however, publicly stood by Trump on controversial stances like his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“I am not the only person who questions the results,” she wrote in her book. On the Capitol Riots on 6 January, 2021, she wrote that she “wasn’t aware” of what was taking place because she was preoccupied with her duties.

Her former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, wrote in her own memoir that Mrs Trump refused to issue a statement condemning the violence, leading Ms Grisham to resign.

Some commentators have questioned whether she enjoyed the role of first lady at all.

One of her biographers, former CNN reporter Kate Bennett, maintains she did despite her early reluctance.

“She liked all the accoutrements that go with being first lady and living in the White House,” Ms Bennett told People magazine in 2021. “I think she actually really enjoyed it.”

In her memoir, Mrs Trump wrote that she has a “strong sense of duty to use the platform as First Lady for good”.

And she said in a 1999 interview that if her then-boyfriend Trump ever ran for president, she would use former first ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Betty Ford as role models, calling them “very traditional”.

• Five takeaways from Melania Trump’s new book

Mrs Kennedy was a fashion icon who was dedicated to the preservation of the White House, while Mrs Ford was known as a trailblazer who advocated for abortion rights and women’s rights.

After relocating to Washington, Mrs Trump started taking on first lady duties, such as hosting luncheons and state dinners for visiting world leaders. She also focused on White House aesthetics, ordering extensive renovations and overseeing ambitious Christmas decorations (and was once secretly recorded complaining about that last task).

Her clothing was the subject of media fascination and controversy, particularly after she was spotted wearing a jacket with the phrase “I really don’t care, do you?” during a trip to a migrant child detention centre in 2018.

She said the jacket was a message for “the people and the left-wing media” who were criticising her.

Mrs Trump came under fire again after being secretly recorded by her former friend and senior advisor. She was heard expressing her frustration at being criticised for her husband’s policy to separate migrant children from their families.

She later revealed that she had been blindsided by the policy, and had told Trump privately that she did not support it. The policy was dropped by the president in June 2018 after a firestorm of controversy.

Prof Vigil says one of the biggest challenges that Mrs Trump faced in her first term was her political inexperience as well as a revolving door of staff, who were equally inexperienced and at times disloyal.

But Mrs Trump kept quietly busy regardless, Prof Vigil adds, advocating for issues like children’s welfare through her Be Best campaign against online bullying.

She was forced to defend that campaign given her own husband’s aggressive use of social media, telling CBS in 2016 that how he conducted himself online got him in trouble – and boosted his followers.

She also advocated for children affected by the opioid crisis, and has since started a foundation that raises education funds for children in foster care.

Many expect for that work to continue once she moves back to Washington, though it remains unclear if she will live there full-time.

Prof Vigil says the role of first lady has evolved over the years and Mrs Trump will “make choices about how active in public she wants to be”.

“And I think she’ll do that much more intentionally.”

‘Thomas’ – not his real name – was 13 years old when he began his first stint in prison.

Following the sudden death of his father, he had robbed a shop in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT). He was detained for a week but, within a month, he was back in custody for another burglary.

Five years on, the Aboriginal teenager has spent far more of that time inside prison than out.

“It’s hard changing,” Thomas tells me. “[Breaking the law] is something that you grow up your whole life doing – it’s hard to [stop] the habit.”

His story – a revolving door of crime, arrest and release – is not an isolated one in the Northern Territory.

For many, over the years the crimes get more serious, the sentences longer and the time spent between prison spells ever briefer.

The Northern Territory is the part of Australia with the highest rate of incarceration: more than 1,100 per 100,000 people are behind bars, which is greater than five times the national average.

It’s also more than twice the rate of the US, which is the country with the highest number of people behind bars.

But the issue of jailing children in particular has been thrust into the spotlight here, after the territory’s new government controversially lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 back to 10.

The move, which defies a UN recommendation, means potentially locking up even more young people.

It’s not just an issue of incarceration. It’s one of inequalities too.

While around 30% of the Northern Territory’s population is Aboriginal, almost all young people locked up here are Indigenous.

So, Aboriginal communities are by far the most affected by the new laws.

The Country Liberal Party (CLP) government says it has a mandate after campaigning to keep Territorians safe. It helped the party claim a landslide victory in August’s elections.

Among those voting for the CLP was Sunil Kumar.

The owner of two Indian restaurants in Darwin, he’s had five or six break-ins this past year and wants politicians to take more action.

“It’s young kids doing [it] most of the time – [they] think it’s fun,” explains Mr Kumar.

He says he’s improved his locks, put in cameras and even offered soft drinks to kids loitering outside in a bid to win them over.

“How come they are out and parents don’t know?” he says. “There should be a punishment for the parents.”

But while the political rhetoric around crime is powerful, critics say it actually has little to do with real numbers.

Youth offender rates have risen since Covid. Last year, there was a 4% rise nationally.

But the rates are about half of what they were 15 years ago in the Northern Territory, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show.

Politicians, though, are playing to residents’ fears.

As well as lowering the age of criminal responsibility, they have also introduced tougher bail legislation known as Declan’s Law, after Declan Laverty, a 20-year-old who was fatally stabbed last year by someone on bail for a previous alleged assault.

“I never want another family to experience what we have,” said his mother Samara Laverty.

“The passing of this legislation is a turning point for the Territory, which will become a safer, happier, and more peaceful place.”

On the day the laws started to be debated in Darwin last month, a small crowd of demonstrators stood outside parliament in a last-ditch effort to turn the political tide.

One woman held up a placard that read: ’10 year olds still have baby teeth’. Another asked: ‘What if it was your child?’

“Our young people in Don Dale need to have opportunity for hope,” said Aboriginal elder, Aunty Barb Nasir, addressing the demonstrators.

She was referring to a notorious youth detention centre just outside Darwin, where evidence of abuse – including video of a child wearing a spit hood and shackled to a chair – outraged many in Australia and led to a royal commission inquiry.

“We need to always stand for them because they are lost in there,” Aunty Barb said.

Kat McNamara, an independent politician who opposed the bill, told the crowd: “The idea that in order to support a 10-year-old you have to criminalise them is irrational, ineffective and morally bankrupt.”

After a ripple of applause, she added: “We are not going to stand for it.”

But with a large majority in parliament, the CLP easily managed to pass the laws.

Lowering the age of criminal responsibility undid legislation passed just last year that had briefly lifted the threshold to 12.

And while other Australian states and territories have been under pressure to raise the age from 10 to 14, for now it is once again 10 across the country, with the exception of the Australian Capital Territory.

Australia is not alone – in England and Wales, for instance, it is also set at 10.

But in comparison, the majority of European Union members make it 14, in line with UN recommendations.

The Northern Territory’s Chief Minister, Lia Finocchiaro, argues that by lowering the age of criminal responsibility, authorities can “intervene early and address the root causes of crime”.

“We have this obligation to the child who has been let down in a number of ways, over a long period of time,” she said last month.

“And we have [an obligation to] the people who just want to be safe, people who don’t want to live in fear any more.”

But for people like Thomas, now 18, prison didn’t fix anything. His crimes just got worse, and his time inside increased.

He says he finds prison oddly comforting. It’s not that he likes it, but with custody comes familiarity.

“Most of my family has been in and out of jail. I felt like I was at home because all the boys took care of me.”

His two younger brothers are also stuck in a similar cycle. At one point, their mother was catching a bus to visit all three in prison every week.

Thomas still wears an ankle bracelet issued by authorities but he has been out of prison for nearly three months now – his longest spell of freedom since becoming a teenager.

He’s been helped by Brother 2 Another – an Aboriginal-led project that mentors and supports First Nations children caught up in the justice system.

“Locking these kids up is just a reactive way to go about it,” says Darren Damaso, a youth leader for Brother 2 Another.

“There needs to be more rehabilitative support services, more funding towards Aboriginal-led programmes, because they actually understand what’s happening for these families. And then we’re going to slowly start to see change. But if it’s just a ‘lock them up’ default action, it’s not going to work.”

Mr Damaso is from the Larrakia Aboriginal people, the ancestral owners of the region of Darwin, and he also has connections to the Yanuwa and Malak Malak people.

His organisation brings young people to a refashioned unit on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Darwin, providing a space to relax, a sensory room and a gym.

Brother 2 Another also works in schools and tries to help young people find work – opportunities that many who’ve been involved with police and prisons struggle to engage with.

“It’s a self-perpetuating cycle,” says John Lawrence, a Scottish criminal barrister who’s been based in Darwin for more than three decades.

He’s represented many young people and argues more money needs to go into schooling than the prison system, to prevent incarceration in the first place.

Aboriginal people “have no voice, and so they suffer great injustice and harm”, says Mr Lawrence.

“The fact that this can happen reveals very graphically and obviously how racist this country is.”

The tough talk on crime isn’t particular to politics in the Northern Territory.

In Queensland’s recent elections, the winning campaign by the Liberal National Party played heavily on its slogan: “Adult crime, adult time.”

In a recent report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, Anne Hollonds, the National Children’s Commissioner, argued that by criminalising vulnerable children – many of them First Nations children – the country is creating “one of Australia’s most urgent human rights challenges”.

“The systems that are meant to help them, including health, education and social services, are not fit-for-purpose and these children are falling through the gaps,” she said.

“We cannot police our way out of this problem, and the evidence shows that locking up children does not make the community safer.”

Which is why there’s a growing push to fund early intervention through education, not incarceration, and trying to reduce marginalisation and disadvantage in the first place.

“What are the cultural strengths of people? What are the community strengths of people? We are building on that,” says Erin Reilly, a regional director for Children’s Ground.

Her organisation works with communities and schools on their ancestral lands, learning about foods and medicines from the bush and about the Aboriginal ‘kinship’ system – how people fit in with their community and family.

“We centre Indigenous world views and Indigenous values and we work in a way that works for Aboriginal people,” explains Ms Reilly.

“We know that the education system and health systems don’t work for our people.”

For Thomas, life on the inside was hard, involving weeks at a time spent in isolation. But on the outside, he says, there’s little understanding of the circumstances he’s lived through.

“I felt like no one cared. Nobody wanted to listen,” he says.

He points out the bite marks on his forearms and adds: “So, I hurt myself all the time – see the scars here?”

Smog starts slow.

At first, you cannot see it but you can smell it. It smells like something is burning. And it intensifies as the temperature drops.

Then the smoke and fog start to envelop you and the city around you. Now you can see it. You are walking through the smoke, a thick ceiling of it hanging overhead.

If you are not wearing a mask or you lower it for a moment, you will immediately inhale the bitter air.

Your throat might start to feel itchy and sore. As it gets worse, you start sneezing and coughing. But it’s worse for others: children, the elderly, those with breathing difficulties. The hospitals know to expect the influx.

Lahore and its 13 million residents have now been choking for a week; the air quality index has passed the 1,000 mark repeatedly this month – anything above 300 is considered hazardous.

Pakistani officials have scrambled to respond to the crisis – its scale unprecedented even in a city which deals with smog at this time each year.

Schools are closed, workers have been told to stay home and people urged to stay indoors – part of a so-called “green lockdown”, which has also seen motorbike rickshaws, heavy vehicles and motorbike parking banned from hot spot areas.

By the end of the week, Lahore High Court had ordered all the markets in the Punjab province to close by 20:00 each night, with complete closures on Sundays. Parks and zoos have also been shut until 17 November.

The problem, according to Nasa scientist Pawan Gupta, is that pollution levels in the city “typically peak in late November and December”.

“So this is just beginning. The worst pollution days are probably still ahead of us,” he warned.

The smoke that has enveloped Lahore, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, can be seen from space – as can part of the cause.

Satellite images from the US space agency Nasa shows both the thick layer of smog and the multiple concentrations of fire in the region between the Indian capital, Delhi, and Pakistan’s Lahore.

The same image, six weeks earlier, shows clear skies and – crucially – far fewer fires.

A major cause of the smog is the fires which are caused by the burning of stubble after harvest by farmers in both Pakistan and India – a quick way to clear their fields ready for the next crops.

This year, Nasa estimates it will count “between 15,500 and 18,500 fires ”, according to Hiren Jethva, a senior research scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Morgan State University, higher than most years.

According to Pakistan’s environment protection authorities, around 30% of Lahore’s smog comes from across the border in India. The Indian government has this year doubled fines for farmers caught stubble-burning as it tries to deal with the issue.

But much of Lahore’s air pollution comes from its five million motorbikes and millions of other vehicles’ exhausts. On Friday, Lahore’s high court identified heavy traffic emissions as the main cause of the smog, according to the Associated Press of Pakistan.

Then there are the industries in the city’s outskirts – like the coal-fired brick kilns – adding even more pollution to the air.

And in the final months of the year, it all combines with cold air flowing down from Tibet, creating the smog which is currently sitting over the city.

It is clear the toxic air is making people sick.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Air Quality Index (AQI), a value of 50 or below indicates good air quality, while a value above 300 signals Hazardous air quality.

The WHO guidelines say the average concentration of PM2.5 level should be below five.

Abid Omar, founder of Pakistan’s Air Quality Initiative, which collects data from 143 air quality monitors across the country, says the readings in Lahore “have hit beyond index on every day in November”.

“Some locations in Lahore have exceeded 1,000,” he says, adding: “On Thursday we had one reading of 1,917 on the AQI scale.”

By Tuesday, it was widely reported 900 people had been admitted to hospital in Lahore with breathing difficulties.

“More and more people are coming with complaints of asthma, itchy throats and coughing,” says Dr Irfan Malik, a pulmonologist at one of the biggest hospitals in Lahore.

He has already seen a surge in patients complaining of respiratory tract illnesses – “particularly worrying because we have not yet seen our first cold wave of the winter season”.

The danger is a constant concern for Lahore resident Sadia Kashif.

“Like every mother, I want to see my children run and play without fearing pollution,” she tells the BBC.

“I see my children struggle with coughs and breathing problems these days, and it is a painful reminder that our air has become extremely toxic.”

But the current “green lockdown” has left her unimpressed.

“It is easy for the government to shut down school rather than taking real steps to address the crisis,” says Kashif.

For years, authorities have struggled to find a solution to Lahore’s pollution problem.

The government hopes short fixes will provide reprieve, but says long term solutions – like improving public transport – will take time.

In the meantime, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz announced this week she intends to write a letter to her counterpart in Indian Punjab to invite them to engage in “climate diplomacy”, since it impacts both regions. Delhi says it is yet to hear from Pakistan on the issue.

However, Omar points out air pollution is not a seasonal problem but a persistent issue.

“Lahore is much more polluted than Delhi with pollution episodes that last longer and reach higher peaks,” he notes.

And it is getting worse, he believes. As per his own analysis of data, October has seen a 25% rise in pollution level compared to the same period last year.

Governments on both sides of the border need to act swiftly to deal with the issue, he argues.

“The roadmap to clean air is clear, but the present policies from both India and Pakistan aren’t enough to significantly reduce pollution.”

It has left him sceptical of the change in the near future.

“I tell people, blue skies are an indicator of good governance,” Omar says.

I can feel the anger rising. How am I facing this abuse again after 20 years?

My name is Alex. But increasingly young people shout “Timmy” at me in the street. This isn’t mistaken identity – it‘s mockery because I use a wheelchair.

I should ignore it, but this time, I react. I turn to see a group of young teenage boys smirking in front of me. “I heard you,” I tell them. “I know exactly who Timmy is.”

I know this because although we do not share a name, I have felt the shadow of Timmy since childhood – never through choice.

A disabled character from dark-humoured satire cartoon series South Park, he uses a wheelchair and can only shout his name, mainly loudly and uncontrollably.

Growing up at the show’s initial peak during the turn of the millennium, Timmy followed me through school corridors, classrooms and playgrounds – no matter my friends, sociability or relatively good grades.

Now, in my 30s, he’s back. For the third time in a year, this time heading to my local train station in my wheelchair, I hear the familiar, brutish drawl: “Timmaaah.”

A laugh. A snigger. An assumption I either won’t hear or be unable to understand.

When I confront the group of boys, one feigns innocence, claiming he’d been speaking to his friend.

“You weren’t,” I say. “I was watching the show before you were born.”

Initially I was baffled as to how this phenomenon had returned to a new young generation, 24 years after the character first appeared.

The answer lies in social media, particularly TikTok, where hundreds of short user-edited clips of Timmy and audio of him saying his name are sparking the revival.

TikTok users often take part in trends by using the audio of popular videos and overlaying it with their own clips.

That’s what many have done with Timmy, where the name is used as a punchline, or played on top of unrelated clips of wheelchair users, reinforcing harmful and dehumanising stereotypes.

The irony is that the character Timmy is presented with warmth in South Park and given character depth by co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

An equal in the show’s unflinching satire, his disability isn’t necessarily the butt of the joke.

Timmy is an accepted member of the class: he fails to complete homework, faces adversity and causes trouble with his disabled best friend Jimmy. His personality is conveyed through the different intonations in which he delivers his name.

One episode, Timmy 2000, sees him win a battle of the bands as frontman for a metal group. The adult characters are shown to respond in an over-protective and condescending way – a striking criticism of the way society often treats disabled people.

Nearly 20 years ago, a poll by Ouch! – the former name of the BBC’s disability section – crowned Timmy as the most popular disabled TV character.

Seattle Times’ late disabled critic Jeff Shannon described Timmy as the most “progressive, provocative and socially relevant disability humour ever presented on American television”.

“Without telling viewers what to think, South Park challenges [the audience’s] own fears and foibles regarding disability, and Timmy emerges triumphant,” he wrote in 2005.

In interviews Stone and Parker have spoken of how carefully and purposefully they integrated him into the show.

But two decades later, the fact remains that on meeting Timmy, certainly at first glance, many find him outrageously offensive.

South Park has always worked on multiple levels – offering outrageous forbidden shock value for schoolchildren while delivering crunching adult satire.

None of this nuance is reflected in the TikTok trend, which reduces Timmy, and by extension wheelchair users and disability, to one-dimensional ridicule.

This warped revival parallels the case of Joey Deacon, a man with cerebral palsy whose appearance on Blue Peter in the 1980s backfired to spark playground mockery, with kids shouting “you’re a Joey!”, and “do the Joey face”.

TikTok says its community guidelines strictly prohibit hate speech and content promoting discrimination, violence or harm based on disability.

It removed the videos flagged by the BBC for violating this policy. But it didn’t remove the Timmy sound used on several other videos – meaning it can be used again.

TikTok didn’t respond to a specific question about removing offensive audio.

Ciaran O’Connor, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank focusing on online hate, says that sounds are a “blind spot in TikTok’s content moderation practices”.

Even if a video with an “original sound” is removed by the platform, the audio usually isn’t, he says.

This makes it a common way of bypassing TikTok’s content moderation guidelines – including for harassment and abuse.

Bullying and trolling of disabled people is still common online. Three in 10 said they’d experienced it in a survey of 4,000 disabled people carried out by charity Scope.

My last experience of having the name hurled at me on the street shocked me not so much in the name-calling, but the absolute lack of contrition shown even when challenged.

It mirrored an experience last year when teenagers, again taunting me, rode off shouting “Timmy is going to run us over.”

Ross Hovey, a wheelchair user and Liverpool fan, recently posted on LinkedIn about a near-identical experience.

He was heading to a Liverpool match with his 79-year-old father and care assistant when a group of young men shouted “Timmy” at him. When Ross challenged them with “I heard you,” they too tried to claim innocence.

The abuse raises questions about what role platforms should take in providing context to young users.

“Brief, contextless clips and participatory trends are at the heart of TikTok’s popularity,” says O’Connor.

“That’s normally good and positive and funny … but when these dynamics are being used to demean, mock or stigmatise others, it does raise the question of whether TikTok should be doing more to inform or educate users.”

Alison Kerry, head of communications at Scope, told the BBC “these kinds of ableist trends are deeply harmful. They don’t exist in a vacuum, so a social media trend can quickly turn into someone facing abuse in their everyday life.”

The real-world impact is certainly becoming more noticeable.

Disabled TikTokers have been posting about their experiences, and a teacher recently wrote a Reddit thread titled “Getting real sick of this Timmy trend”, expressing frustration at students’ lack of awareness.

This is why I challenged the teens at the station – I felt a duty not only to my 12-year-old self, who once burst into tears feeling helpless at similar taunts, but also to disabled students today.

I returned a second time when the boys called out “Timmy” again after I turned to leave.

“Why?” I asked forcefully. Silence. One of the group eventually apologised, admitting the behaviour was wrong.

“Speak to your friends,” I pleaded, sensing a glimmer of hope. “Maybe then they’ll listen.”

Engineers have found a bottle with a 132-year-old message deep inside the walls of a lighthouse in the south of Scotland.

The bottle was found inside the Corsewall Lighthouse at the most northerly point of the Rhins of Galloway.

The “once in a lifetime” find is understood to be the first message in a bottle ever discovered in a lighthouse in Scotland.

Written using quill and ink, the letter dated 4 September 1892 reveals the names of three engineers who installed a new type of light in the 100ft (30m) tower.

It also has the names of the lighthouse’s three keepers.

The 8in (20cm) bottle was found by Ross Russell, a Northern Lighthouse Board mechanical engineer, during an inspection.

He spotted it after removing panels in a cupboard but it was well out of arm’s reach. The team retrieved it using a contraption made from a rope and a broom handle.

But they waited until retained lighthouse keeper, Barry Miller, arrived before they opened it.

“My goodness am I grateful for them doing that,” he said.

The bottle has an unusual convex base, meaning it cannot stand upright, and it is made of coarse glass, full of tiny air bubbles.

It is thought it would have once contained oil.

The bottle stopper was cork, which had expanded over time and stuck to the glass, while the wire which held it in place had rusted away.

The men had to cut the top off the cork and very carefully drill the cork out.

The note initially seemed too big to pull out the neck of the bottle so they devised a tool using two pieces of cable to twist it through the narrow opening.

Dr Miller, 77, told BBC Scotland News his hands were shaking when he opened it.

“It was so exciting, it was like meeting our colleagues from the past. It was actually like them being there,” he said.

“It was like touching them. Like them being part of our team instead of just four of us being there, we were all there sharing what they had written because it was tangible and you could see the style of their handwriting.

“You knew what they had done. You knew they had hidden it in such a place it wouldn’t be found for a long, long time.”

Ross Russell, from Oban, who found the bottle with his colleagues Morgan Dennison and Neil Armstrong, said it was an unbelievable discovery.

“The note was just sensational, I was just in utter amazement,” Ross said.

“Being the first person to touch the bottle after 132 years was just mind blowing.

“It’s a once in a lifetime find.”

The engineers had travelled to the 209-year-old lighthouse ahead of a year long project to check the bearing the five tonne lens rotates on.

They were trying to check under the floor to see if that section would be able to hold the lens while it was off its bearing when they found the bottle.

The men who wrote the note in 1892 had been at the lighthouse to install a different type of lantern and glazing at the top of the tower.

“It was just a strange coincidence to find the note while working on the equipment described on the note,” Ross said.

The 36-year-old said they planned to replace the note and bottle where they had found them as well as adding another of their own.

The bottle and note are currently being stored in the Northern Lighthouse Board’s headquarters in Edinburgh.

Meanwhile a descendant of one of the lighthouse keepers said he was delighted by the discovery.

Euan Murray, who grew up 10 miles (16km) from the lighthouse in Stranraer, is the great great great grandson of Robert Murray who worked alongside John Wilson at Corsewall.

“I do find it very interesting to see a bit of family history pop up out the blue like this,” he said.

The 32-year-old added: “It’s amazing to think that the work they did back then is still completely relevant today, even in the age of satellite navigation.”

The Royal Navy chief engineer said: “Ships are still using these lighthouses for safe navigation on a daily basis.

“All the more apparent because of my career at sea and having passed the lighthouse many times on vessels arriving and departing from around the world. Always a nice sign of home.”

Like every parent in Valencia that day, Victor Matías had quickly changed his plans, fearing what could be on the way.

The rain was still thundering down, but by now – early evening – he had managed to leave work early, safely pick up his boys from nursery and was about to make their favourite dinner – croquetas.

The crispy fried rolls of mashed potatoes, stuffed full of cheese and ham, would be a treat for Izan, 5, and Rubén, 3, while their mum Marta finished her late shift at the supermarket in town.

We have pieced together the tragic chronology of what happened next.

Our picture emerges from the testimony of neighbours and relatives we spoke to, as well as what Victor was able to recall himself along with other first-hand accounts given to local media.

The crushing story of the Matías family has generated huge attention in Spain. Many have followed updates on “Los niños desaparecidos” – the missing children – as they have been frequently described.

But this one family’s grief is many people’s grief as it’s a nightmare replicated across the Valencia region which was hammered by flash flooding nearly two weeks ago, killing at least 219 people.

More than 90 are still missing.

When we arrived at the family home, a few days after the deluge, it was languishing in a sea of destruction.

That startling statistic – a year’s worth of rain had been dumped on some parts of Valencia in a matter of hours – became easy to believe as you took all this in.

Huge metal containers – broken free from their articulated lorries – rested at unfathomable angles amid a jumble of cars, crumpled furniture and treacherous mud.

One of the few things still intact was the door to what had been the boys’ bedroom; the bright, white individual letters spelling their names standing out in a sea of brown.

Picking his way through this mess was Jonathan Perez, their next-door neighbour, who began to relive the terrifying sequence of events. “It was madness” he said. “I’ve never seen such force.”

Jonathan explained to us how the raging torrent had scooped up trucks parked next door to the Matías family home with one smashing through an external wall.

He said that Victor had explained to him how he’d grabbed his sons in his arms as the water dragged them all outside.

Then – despite his desperate efforts to keep hold of them – they were gone.

Victor was found around four hours later, more than 200m away.

He had been clinging to a tree.

His mother – the boys’ grandma – revealed that Victor had been ready to throw himself into the torrent and surrender to his fate, but then stopped.

He told himself he could not leave his wife alone.

For five-year-old Izan and Rubén, three, few places felt safer than the playground that was their house and garden.

Their aunt, Barbara Sastre, told us they were like little bugs – “bichetes” – an endearing description to convey how they buzzed around, that is, when they weren’t absorbed by their cartoons.

“They were such happy kids,” she told us.

Izan and Rubén’s parents had bought the property from a man called Francisco Javier Arona.

Javi – as he’s known – told EFE, the Spanish news agency, that the home had become “a paradise” for the Matías family.

He said he himself had lovingly constructed the house in La Curra, a neighbourhood of Mas del Jutge, in a colonial style over three years.

Javi said he’d affixed ornamental amphoras and delicate clay stars beneath a sweeping arch.

Outside, there was little traffic in the cul-de-sac, meaning the boys could run around carefree with little perceptible danger.

The impending storm gathering on 29 October was a very big danger, and so Victor closed his business early and picked up his boys from the nursey so that he could keep them safe and dry at home, as the rain fell harder and harder.

The force of the downpour became incredible, and soon the power was cut.

The brothers’ grandma, Antonia María Matías, a 72 year old cancer patient, told ABC Sevilla that she had called her son Victor at around 18:00 and heard the brothers crying.

The water around them was rising all the time. But still, they were safe for now.

It may have been their haven, but the family home was also next to a lorry park.

Jonathan Perez, their next door neighbour, explained to us how this played a deadly role.

He said, “The father told us that there was a truck that hit the back of the house and the force of the water tore away everything.”

“Victor regained his footing and carried the boys in his arms. But then he realised he no longer had them. The water took everything in its path,” he explained.

Barbara Sastre, the boy’s aunt also told us at least one truck had sliced open the house in a blow that precipitated the boys and their dad being swept towards the nearby ravine.

The unnamed owner of the parking lot from where the trucks came told one newspaper they had not hit the family house. He insisted it was the strength of the water that did the fatal damage.

Jonathan, the neighbour, encapsulated the seething anger millions of Spaniards are feeling. Particularly, at the fact the official red alert sent to mobile phones came at 20:00 – far too late.

“They were loving life and they hadn’t even started being people, they were three and five years old,” he said.

“With better co-ordination, better management, and an earlier alarm – even half an hour earlier – those kids could have been saved and those parents would not be going through hell.”

The whole neighbourhood in La Curra, stunned and shattered by the violence of the flooding, immediately began to search for the missing Izan and Rubén.

At least they did once the water had receded sufficiently for them to climb down from trees and clamber off their cars and try to reorientate themselves.

They were helped by police officers from nearby Alicante, including a friend of Victor’s, who quickly arrived and began a desperate search.

But where to start?

Cars, bricks, bed frames had been carried hundreds of metres from where they once stood.

A team of firefighters from Mallorca and then Civil Protection volunteers from the island of Ibiza also came and scoured the most hard-to-reach areas.

Despite nearly two weeks of intensive daily searches, the brothers have not been found.

In the hours before everything changed, Marta – the mother of the boys – had started her late shift at the shop, safe in the knowledge their dad would be picking them up from school and taking them home.

In the early hours of the next morning, she was told her boys were gone.

Relatives say they can’t describe what Marta is experiencing.

The boy’s grandma, Antonia María, said her son Victor’s life had been destroyed – in her own words “turned to dust”.

As he was recovering in hospital, Victor took to sleeping with his boys’ blankets – salvaged from the ruins of their family home – resting on his face.

It is the closest he can be to them now.

Someone moved the UK’s oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why.

Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet-1A was put high above Africa’s east coast to relay communications for British forces.

When the spacecraft ceased working a few years later, gravity might have been expected to pull it even further to the east, out over the Indian Ocean.

But today, curiously, Skynet-1A is actually half a planet away, in a position 22,369 miles (36,000km) above the Americas.

Orbital mechanics mean it’s unlikely the half-tonne military spacecraft simply drifted to its current location.

Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the mid-1970s to take it westwards. The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?

It’s intriguing that key information about a once vital national security asset can just evaporate. But, fascination aside, you might also reasonably ask why it still matters. After all, we’re talking about some discarded space junk from 50 years ago.

“It’s still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favours,” says space consultant Dr Stuart Eves.

“It’s now in what we call a ‘gravity well’ at 105 degrees West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis.

“Because it’s dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it’s ‘our’ satellite we’re still responsible for it,” he explains.

Dr Eves has looked through old satellite catalogues, the National Archives and spoken to satellite experts worldwide, but he can find no clues to the end-of-life behaviour of Britain’s oldest spacecraft.

It might be tempting to reach for a conspiracy theory or two, not least because it’s hard to hear the name “Skynet” without thinking of the malevolent, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) system in The Terminator movie franchise.

But there’s no connection other than the name and, in any case, real life is always more prosaic.

What we do know is that Skynet-1A was manufactured in the US by the now defunct Philco Ford aerospace company and put in space by a US Air Force Delta rocket.

“The first Skynet satellite revolutionised UK telecommunications capacity, permitting London to securely communicate with British forces as far away as Singapore. However, from a technological standpoint, Skynet-1A was more American than British since the United States both built and launched it,” remarked Dr Aaron Bateman in a recent paper on the history of the Skynet programme, which is now on its fifth generation.

This view is confirmed by Graham Davison who flew Skynet-1A in the early 70s from its UK operations centre at RAF Oakhanger in Hampshire.

“The Americans originally controlled the satellite in orbit. They tested all of our software against theirs, before then eventually handing over control to the RAF,” the long-retired engineer told me.

“In essence, there was dual control, but when or why Skynet-1A might have been handed back to the Americans, which seems likely – I’m afraid I can’t remember,” says Mr Davison, who is now in his 80s.

Rachel Hill, a PhD student from University College London, has also been scouring the National Archives.

Her readings have led her to one very reasonable possibility.

“A Skynet team from Oakhanger would go to the USAF satellite facility in Sunnyvale (colloquially known as the Blue Cube) and operate Skynet during ‘Oakout’. This was when control was temporarily transferred to the US while Oakhanger was down for essential maintenance. Perhaps the move could have happened then?” Ms Hill speculated.

The official, though incomplete, logs of Skynet-1A’s status suggest final commanding was left in the hands of the Americans when Oakhanger lost sight of the satellite in June 1977.

But however Skynet-1A then got shifted to its present position, it was ultimately allowed to die in an awkward place when really it should have been put in an “orbital graveyard”.

This refers to a region even higher in the sky where old space junk runs zero risk of running into active telecommunications satellites.

Graveyarding is now standard practice, but back in the 1970s no-one gave much thought to space sustainability.

Attitudes have since changed because the space domain is getting congested.

At 105 degrees West longitude, an active satellite might see a piece of junk come within 50km of its position up to four times a day.

That might sound like they’re nowhere near each other, but at the velocities these defunct objects move it’s starting to get a little too close for comfort.

The Ministry of Defence said Skynet-1A was constantly monitored by the UK’s National Space Operations Centre. Other satellite operators are informed if there’s likely to be a particularly close conjunction, in case they need to take evasive action.

Ultimately, though, the British government may have to think about removing the old satellite to a safer location.

Technologies are being developed to grab junk left in space.

Already, the UK Space Agency is funding efforts to do this at lower altitudes, and the Americans and the Chinese have shown it’s possible to snare ageing hardware even in the kind of high orbit occupied by Skynet-1A.

“Pieces of space junk are like ticking time bombs,” observed Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

“We need to avoid what I call super-spreader events. When these things explode or something collides with them, it generates thousands of pieces of debris that then become a hazard to something else that we care about.”

The Queen will miss Remembrance events this weekend while she recovers from a chest infection, Buckingham Palace has said.

A statement said Queen Camilla was “following doctors’ guidance to ensure a full recovery from a seasonal chest infection, and to protect others from any potential risk”.

The Queen, who is 77, will “mark the occasion privately at home and hopes to return to public duties early next week”.

On Friday, it was confirmed the Princess of Wales would attend Remembrance events in London this weekend as Catherine gradually returns to public duties following her cancer treatment.

The Buckingham Palace statement said: “Following doctors’ guidance to ensure a full recovery from a seasonal chest infection, and to protect others from any potential risk, Her Majesty will not attend this weekend’s Remembrance events.”

“While this is a source of great disappointment to the Queen, she will mark the occasion privately at home and hopes to return to public duties early next week.”

The Queen will not join the rest of the Royal Family in attending the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday evening or the Sunday service at the Cenotaph.

King Charles, who is still receiving cancer treatment, will lay a wreath on behalf of the nation at the memorial in Whitehall, central London.

The Queen had already withdrawn from events earlier in the week but it had been hoped she would be able to attend weekend Remembrance events.

It is understood that there is no cause for alarm and no downturn in her condition, but that her doctors have advised a few more days of rest to enable a return to full health.

Queen Camilla is said to be disappointed that she will be unable to pay tribute to the nation’s fallen service personnel this weekend, but that she is mindful of minimising the risk of passing on any lingering infection to the elderly veterans in attendance.

The Queen missed the annual opening of the Field of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey on Thursday, where she was instead represented by the Duchess of Gloucester.

She also withdrew from a Buckingham Palace reception for Olympic and Paralympic athletes, which was hosted by the King on Thursday evening.

The Queen returned to the UK last Wednesday after a trip with the King to Australia and Samoa, which included a stopover in India on the way back.

King Charles received a cancer diagnosis in February. His treatment was paused during his overseas trip but was expected to begin again on his return to the UK.

Prince William on Thursday described the past year as the “hardest year” of his life following both his wife and his father being diagnosed with cancer.

“I’m so proud of my wife, I’m proud of my father, for handling the things that they have done,” he told reporters at the end of his visit to South Africa to promote his Earthshot eco-project.

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

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 is already 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.

The 78-year-old Republican is also surrounded by new allies who could fill his cabinet, staff his White House and take up other key roles across government.

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

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 West Wing and managing the boss’s staff.

Wiles, 67, has worked in Republican politics for decades, from Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign to turning businessman Rick Scott into Florida’s governor in just seven months back in 2010.

Republicans have said she commands respect and has an ability to corral 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 his appointee to lead the Department of Justice.

After uneven relationships with both Jeff Sessions and William Barr, the attorney generals during his first term, Trump is widely expected to pick a loyalist who will wield the agency’s prosecutorial power to punish critics and opponents.

Among the names being floated for the cabinet post are Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been 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; Mike Davis, a right-wing activist who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and has issued bombastic threats against Trump critics and journalists; and Mark Paoletta, 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 will take the lead in enforcing Trump’s promises of deporting undocumented migrants en masse and “sealing” the US-Mexico border, as well as leading the government response to natural disasters.

Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), stands out as the most likely pick.

Homan, 62, supported separating migrant children from their parents as a means to deter illegal crossings and has said politicians who support migrant sanctuary policies should be charged with crimes. Though he resigned in 2018, mid-way through the Trump presidency, he remains a proponent of the Trump approach on immigration.

Chad Wolf, who served as acting homeland secretary from 2019 to 2020 until his appointment was ruled unlawful, and Chad Mizelle, the homeland department’s former acting general counsel, are also potential contenders.

Stephen Miller, widely considered to be the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, is expected to once again play a senior advisory role with the White House.

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

Florida Senator Marco Rubio – who was most recently under consideration to be Trump’s vice-president – is a major name being floated for the key cabinet post.

Rubio, 53, is a China hawk who opposed Trump in the 2016 Republican primary but has since mended fences. He is a senior member of the Senate foreign relations committee and vice-chairman of the chamber’s select intelligence panel.

Other contenders for the job include Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien; Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty, who was previously Trump’s ambassador to Japan; and Brian Hook, the hawkish special envoy to Iran in Trump’s first term and the man who is leading the transition effort at the State Department.

A dark horse for the nomination, however, is Richard Grenell, a loyalist who served as ambassador to Germany, special envoy to the Balkans and acting national intelligence chief. Grenell, 58, was heavily involved in Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and even sat in on his private meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September.

Grenell’s combative style may make him a better fit for national security adviser – a position that does not require Senate confirmation – than secretary of state.

Also in line for major posts in a second Trump term are former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe; Keith Kellogg, a national security adviser to Trump’s first Vice-President Mike Pence; former defence department official Eldridge Colby; and Kash Patel, a loyalist who staffed the national security council and became chief of staff to the acting secretary of defence in Trump’s final months in office.

Patel, 44, who helped block the transition to the incoming Joe Biden administration in the latter role, is tipped to become the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief.

Trump has also said he would fire Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) Director Chris Wray, who he nominated in 2017 but has since fallen out with. 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 cabinet members who could return for Trump’s second term – this time as secretary of defence, where he would oversee the US military.

Pompeo, 60, is a former Kansas congressman and was Trump’s first CIA director before leading the administration’s diplomatic blitz in the Middle East.

A loyal defender of his boss, he often tangled with the press and – amid Trump’s false claims of election fraud in late 2020 – joked about “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”.

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

During Trump’s first term, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik transformed from a moderate to a vocal backer. The fourth-ranking House Republican leader has remained one of Trump’s most fiercely loyal defenders on Capitol Hill – which makes her a leading contender to represent him in unfriendly territory at the United Nations.

But she may find herself competing for the position with the likes of former State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus; David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel; and Kelly Craft, who served as UN ambassador at the end of Trump’s term.

Trump is reportedly considering Robert Lighthizer, a free trade sceptic who led the tariff war with China as the US trade representative, as his chief financial officer.

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 during his first term.

The woman co-chairing Trump’s transition team, Linda McMahon, is tipped as a key contender to represent US businesses and job creation in his cabinet – after previously serving as small business administrator during his first term.

Others who could fill this vacancy include Brooke Rollins; Robert Lighthizer; and Kelly Loeffler, a wealthy businesswoman who briefly served in the US Senate.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem – who was passed over to be Trump’s running mate over a bizarre admission that she killed her pet dog – could see her loyalty to him pay off with the leadership of the interior department, which manages public land and natural resources.

She may compete with North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum for the role.

Doug Burgum is also a contender to lead the energy department, where he would implement Trump’s pledges to “drill, baby, drill” and overhaul US energy policy.

A software entrepreneur who sold his small company to Microsoft in 2001, Burgum briefly ran in the 2024 Republican primary before dropping out, endorsing Trump and quickly impressing him with his low-drama persona and sizeable wealth.

Former energy secretary Dan Brouillette is also reportedly in the running.

Karoline Leavitt, 27, who impressed Trump as his campaign’s national press secretary, has already served as an assistant White House press secretary and may be a shoo-in to be the administration’s spokesperson.

RFK Jr, as he is known, is an environmental lawyer by trade, a vaccine sceptic by fame and the nephew of former President John F Kennedy.

He is on a shortlist to run the heath and human services department, multiple people close to the president-elect’s campaign told CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner.

Despite having no medical qualifications to his name, Kennedy, 70, is expected to become a kind of “public health star” in the Trump administration.

Democratic Party attacks on Kennedy’s credentials are not likely to carry much weight, as control of the US senate is in the hands of Republicans and confirming Kennedy to any cabinet-level post will not require Democratic support.

Besides a new job at the health and human services department, Kennedy could also influence policy at the agriculture department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Safety Administration (FDA).

The world’s richest man poured millions of dollars into re-electing Trump and critics fear he will now have the power to weaken or entirely shape the regulations that impact his companies Tesla, SpaceX and X.

Both he and Trump have focused on the idea of him leading a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, where he would cut costs 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.

But Musk, 53, could also play a role in global diplomacy. He participated in Trump’s first call with Ukraine’s Zelensky on Wednesday.

Donald Trump has offered a sweeping immigration pitch that he has promised to begin on the first day of his presidency, including mass deportations and a major crackdown on illegal border crossings. Arizona could find itself on the frontline of these moves, and the sharply divided state is contending with what they could mean.

In the Phoenix home of the Villalobos family, members across three generations discussed Donald Trump’s decisive election victory with their friends.

Over Latin jazz and a dinner of empanadas, beans and rice, the group – mostly women – were close to tears.

“I really had hope for humanity, and I feel like we were let down,” said Monica Villalobos, 45. “It changes the way we think about ourselves in the Latino community.”

Her family made America their home after immigrating from Jalisco, Mexico. They worry that friends and relatives’ families could be torn apart with deportations.

Trump has promised the biggest mass deportations of migrants in US history, and has pledged to seal the border and stop the “migrant invasion”. He is also promising to hire 10,000 Border Patrol agents and says he will ask Congress to give all agents a 10 % pay raise.

His message is one that resonates with many voters here who consistently rank immigration and border security as top concerns. Many detail seeing the impacts of illegal migration firsthand, but voters are divided on how to handle it.

Arizona was, for a time, a Republican stronghold. Trump was the first to lose here in more than 20 years when Joe Biden came out victorious in 2020. The 2024 result is still too close to call – a testament to just how split residents are.

Voters on Tuesday, however, overwhelmingly approved a Republican-supported measure that gives sheriffs, police and state law enforcement the authority to enforce federal immigration laws and arrest those who cross the border illegally. It had faced opposition from Democratic and Latino groups, who argue it could result in racial profiling.

• Trump says there’s ‘no price tag’ for mass deportations. How would it work?
• Seven things Trump says he will do as president
• In maps and charts: How small gains delivered Trump a big win

There are an estimated 12 million undocumented migrants in the US, and many have lived and worked here for decades. When discussing Trump’s mass deportation proposals, Ms Villalobos’s niece, 19-year-old university student Alexandra de Leon, said they were “terrifying”.

“It’s your neighbours, it’s the people you see in the grocery store, it’s your teachers, it’s your friend’s parents,” she said. “To know that those people are in danger and their families could be torn apart at any moment… it’s heartbreaking.”

One of the main storylines of election night was the extent to which Trump racked up huge support from Latino voters nationwide. He saw a mammoth 14 percentage-point bump compared to the 2020 election, according to exit polls.

One of these supporters is Jorge Gonzalez, Sr, who moved his family to Arizona from Mexico 20 years ago in the hope of building a more prosperous future. Now the proud owner of a body shop in Phoenix, he believes Trump’s policies will help him as a business owner.

“As a person I don’t like him, but as a politician, I like how he ran the economy. Many Latinos probably think he managed the country better,” he said.

“He allowed a large number of undocumented workers to come here and get work visas. I didn’t see any family separations,” he added. “I saw that he integrated and allowed undocumented immigrants to live and work here in a regulated way.”

Across the yard, Jorge’s son, Jorge Jr, was under a car examining brake pads and checking an engine.

As he swapped out wrenches, he said Trump had the right tools to be a successful president.

“I don’t like his attitude. His mouth gets the better of him a lot of times, but when you are in a position of power or leadership, you need to be able to be a little bit tough,” he said.

When asked about the mass, militarised deportations Trump campaigned on in his home state, Jorge Jr just laughed.

“That’s impossible!” he said, noting the millions of undocumented immigrants in the US. “You will need a lot of resources, planes, food, detention centres, police, more ICE officers, so I don’t think it will be feasible.”

If the Trump administration were to move forward with mass deportations, they would likely face a host of challenges. Experts are wary that federal immigration authorities do not have proper staffing to track down migrants, or the capacity to hold them until a court date.

“You learn to develop a thick skin, especially coming from where we come from,” Jorge Jr said. “We don’t pay attention to a lot of the things that people say, because we know those are just words and there’s a long gap between the things that we say and the things that we actually do.”

Others are excited to see Trump’s proposals come to fruition.

Mark Lamb, the sheriff in Pinal County – a conservative area just south-east of Phoenix – said Trump winning the White House would deter migrants.

“Once you start holding people accountable, securing the border, you’re going to start to see a lot of these folks will go back on their own. And then we can start to go after the criminals, people that are causing problems in communities.”

But how Trump’s policies will actually work on the ground is still anyone’s guess.

“I don’t think anybody has the resources right now,” Sheriff Lamb said. “But the people he picks are going to really have to figure out what that looks like.”

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

The US government has brought charges against an Afghan national in connection with an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump before he was elected as the next president.

The Department of Justice on Friday unsealed an indictment against Farhad Shakeri, 51, alleging he was tasked with “providing a plan” to kill Trump.

The US government said Mr Shakeri has not been arrested and is believed to be in Iran – which described the claims as “completely baseless”.

In a criminal complaint filed in Manhattan court, prosecutors allege that an official in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard directed Mr Shakeri in September to devise a plan to surveil and kill Trump.

“The Justice Department has charged an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald Trump,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

The justice department also charged two others allegedly recruited to kill an American journalist who was an outspoken critic of Iran.

The other individuals were identified by the justice department as Carlisle Rivera, also known as “Pop”, 49, from Brooklyn, and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, from Staten Island.

The two appeared in court in the Southern District of New York on Thursday and are being detained pending a trial.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said similar accusations of attempts to assassinate US presidents had been made in the past, which Iran denied and went on to be false.

In a statement, Mr Baghaei added that repeating such claims risked “further complicating the issues between the US and Iran”.

Trump has faced two separate alleged assassination attempts this year. In July, a gunman grazed the former president’s ear after shooting at him during a Pennsylvania rally.

Then, in September, a man was arrested for pointing a rifle at Trump who was golfing on his course in West Palm Beach.

Mr Shakeri was asked to come up with a plan to kill Trump in seven days, the indictment alleges.

According to prosecutors, Mr Shakeri told law enforcement that he did not intend to propose a scheme to kill Trump within that seven-day timeframe, so the Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials put the plan on pause.

Mr Shakeri said the Iranian government told him it would be easier to try to assassinate Trump after the election, because they believed he would lose, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors described Mr Shakeri as an Afghan national who came to the US when he was a child. He was eventually deported around 2008 after spending 14 years in prison for a robbery conviction.

Prosecutors say the 51-year-old used “a network of criminal associates”, from prison, including Mr Rivera and Mr Loadholt, to conduct surveillance on the Iranian government’s targets.

Mr Shakeri promised Mr Rivera and Mr Loadholt $100,000 to murder the American journalist, who had reported on the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses and corruption, prosecutors alleged. The journalist, who was not named, had been targeted in the past, prosecutors said.

In a post on social media Friday, Brooklyn-based journalist Masih Alinejad said the FBI had arrested two men for attempting to kill her. She said the alleged killers came to the front of her house in Brooklyn.

“I came to America to practice my First Amendment right to freedom of speech—I don’t want to die,” Ms Alinejad wrote. “I want to fight against tyranny, and I deserve to be safe.”

In addition to the American journalist and Trump, the indictment alleges the Iranian government sought to kill two Jewish American businesspeople living in New York City, who were supportive of Israel on social media.

Mr Shakeri also told prosecutors that his Iranian contacts asked him to plan a mass shooting to target Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka in October 2024, a year after the Hamas attacks on Israel.

Mr Shakeri, Mr Rivera and Mr Loadholt were all charged with murder-for-hire, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. They also face counts of money laundering conspiracy – which could lead to 20 years in prison – and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire.

In an election full of uncertainties, one thing at least felt likely – 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. Seven 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 Roth 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.”

A selection of striking news photographs taken around the world this week.

‘Thomas’ – not his real name – was 13 years old when he began his first stint in prison.

Following the sudden death of his father, he had robbed a shop in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT). He was detained for a week but, within a month, he was back in custody for another burglary.

Five years on, the Aboriginal teenager has spent far more of that time inside prison than out.

“It’s hard changing,” Thomas tells me. “[Breaking the law] is something that you grow up your whole life doing – it’s hard to [stop] the habit.”

His story – a revolving door of crime, arrest and release – is not an isolated one in the Northern Territory.

For many, over the years the crimes get more serious, the sentences longer and the time spent between prison spells ever briefer.

The Northern Territory is the part of Australia with the highest rate of incarceration: more than 1,100 per 100,000 people are behind bars, which is greater than five times the national average.

It’s also more than twice the rate of the US, which is the country with the highest number of people behind bars.

But the issue of jailing children in particular has been thrust into the spotlight here, after the territory’s new government controversially lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 back to 10.

The move, which defies a UN recommendation, means potentially locking up even more young people.

It’s not just an issue of incarceration. It’s one of inequalities too.

While around 30% of the Northern Territory’s population is Aboriginal, almost all young people locked up here are Indigenous.

So, Aboriginal communities are by far the most affected by the new laws.

The Country Liberal Party (CLP) government says it has a mandate after campaigning to keep Territorians safe. It helped the party claim a landslide victory in August’s elections.

Among those voting for the CLP was Sunil Kumar.

The owner of two Indian restaurants in Darwin, he’s had five or six break-ins this past year and wants politicians to take more action.

“It’s young kids doing [it] most of the time – [they] think it’s fun,” explains Mr Kumar.

He says he’s improved his locks, put in cameras and even offered soft drinks to kids loitering outside in a bid to win them over.

“How come they are out and parents don’t know?” he says. “There should be a punishment for the parents.”

But while the political rhetoric around crime is powerful, critics say it actually has little to do with real numbers.

Youth offender rates have risen since Covid. Last year, there was a 4% rise nationally.

But the rates are about half of what they were 15 years ago in the Northern Territory, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show.

Politicians, though, are playing to residents’ fears.

As well as lowering the age of criminal responsibility, they have also introduced tougher bail legislation known as Declan’s Law, after Declan Laverty, a 20-year-old who was fatally stabbed last year by someone on bail for a previous alleged assault.

“I never want another family to experience what we have,” said his mother Samara Laverty.

“The passing of this legislation is a turning point for the Territory, which will become a safer, happier, and more peaceful place.”

On the day the laws started to be debated in Darwin last month, a small crowd of demonstrators stood outside parliament in a last-ditch effort to turn the political tide.

One woman held up a placard that read: ’10 year olds still have baby teeth’. Another asked: ‘What if it was your child?’

“Our young people in Don Dale need to have opportunity for hope,” said Aboriginal elder, Aunty Barb Nasir, addressing the demonstrators.

She was referring to a notorious youth detention centre just outside Darwin, where evidence of abuse – including video of a child wearing a spit hood and shackled to a chair – outraged many in Australia and led to a royal commission inquiry.

“We need to always stand for them because they are lost in there,” Aunty Barb said.

Kat McNamara, an independent politician who opposed the bill, told the crowd: “The idea that in order to support a 10-year-old you have to criminalise them is irrational, ineffective and morally bankrupt.”

After a ripple of applause, she added: “We are not going to stand for it.”

But with a large majority in parliament, the CLP easily managed to pass the laws.

Lowering the age of criminal responsibility undid legislation passed just last year that had briefly lifted the threshold to 12.

And while other Australian states and territories have been under pressure to raise the age from 10 to 14, for now it is once again 10 across the country, with the exception of the Australian Capital Territory.

Australia is not alone – in England and Wales, for instance, it is also set at 10.

But in comparison, the majority of European Union members make it 14, in line with UN recommendations.

The Northern Territory’s Chief Minister, Lia Finocchiaro, argues that by lowering the age of criminal responsibility, authorities can “intervene early and address the root causes of crime”.

“We have this obligation to the child who has been let down in a number of ways, over a long period of time,” she said last month.

“And we have [an obligation to] the people who just want to be safe, people who don’t want to live in fear any more.”

But for people like Thomas, now 18, prison didn’t fix anything. His crimes just got worse, and his time inside increased.

He says he finds prison oddly comforting. It’s not that he likes it, but with custody comes familiarity.

“Most of my family has been in and out of jail. I felt like I was at home because all the boys took care of me.”

His two younger brothers are also stuck in a similar cycle. At one point, their mother was catching a bus to visit all three in prison every week.

Thomas still wears an ankle bracelet issued by authorities but he has been out of prison for nearly three months now – his longest spell of freedom since becoming a teenager.

He’s been helped by Brother 2 Another – an Aboriginal-led project that mentors and supports First Nations children caught up in the justice system.

“Locking these kids up is just a reactive way to go about it,” says Darren Damaso, a youth leader for Brother 2 Another.

“There needs to be more rehabilitative support services, more funding towards Aboriginal-led programmes, because they actually understand what’s happening for these families. And then we’re going to slowly start to see change. But if it’s just a ‘lock them up’ default action, it’s not going to work.”

Mr Damaso is from the Larrakia Aboriginal people, the ancestral owners of the region of Darwin, and he also has connections to the Yanuwa and Malak Malak people.

His organisation brings young people to a refashioned unit on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Darwin, providing a space to relax, a sensory room and a gym.

Brother 2 Another also works in schools and tries to help young people find work – opportunities that many who’ve been involved with police and prisons struggle to engage with.

“It’s a self-perpetuating cycle,” says John Lawrence, a Scottish criminal barrister who’s been based in Darwin for more than three decades.

He’s represented many young people and argues more money needs to go into schooling than the prison system, to prevent incarceration in the first place.

Aboriginal people “have no voice, and so they suffer great injustice and harm”, says Mr Lawrence.

“The fact that this can happen reveals very graphically and obviously how racist this country is.”

The tough talk on crime isn’t particular to politics in the Northern Territory.

In Queensland’s recent elections, the winning campaign by the Liberal National Party played heavily on its slogan: “Adult crime, adult time.”

In a recent report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, Anne Hollonds, the National Children’s Commissioner, argued that by criminalising vulnerable children – many of them First Nations children – the country is creating “one of Australia’s most urgent human rights challenges”.

“The systems that are meant to help them, including health, education and social services, are not fit-for-purpose and these children are falling through the gaps,” she said.

“We cannot police our way out of this problem, and the evidence shows that locking up children does not make the community safer.”

Which is why there’s a growing push to fund early intervention through education, not incarceration, and trying to reduce marginalisation and disadvantage in the first place.

“What are the cultural strengths of people? What are the community strengths of people? We are building on that,” says Erin Reilly, a regional director for Children’s Ground.

Her organisation works with communities and schools on their ancestral lands, learning about foods and medicines from the bush and about the Aboriginal ‘kinship’ system – how people fit in with their community and family.

“We centre Indigenous world views and Indigenous values and we work in a way that works for Aboriginal people,” explains Ms Reilly.

“We know that the education system and health systems don’t work for our people.”

For Thomas, life on the inside was hard, involving weeks at a time spent in isolation. But on the outside, he says, there’s little understanding of the circumstances he’s lived through.

“I felt like no one cared. Nobody wanted to listen,” he says.

He points out the bite marks on his forearms and adds: “So, I hurt myself all the time – see the scars here?”

The much-anticipated new Paddington in Peru film has had mixed reviews over its opening weekend, with critics calling it “charming-enough”, but some agreeing the film struggles to reach the heights of its predecessors.

The third instalment in the Paddington live action adventure franchise sees the marmalade sandwich munching bear return to Peru to visit his aunt Lucy.

The film, that includes a return of much loved cast members including Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer and Hugh Bonneville, opened in UK cinemas on Friday 8 November.

Since the beginning of the film series in 2014, Paddington Bear has grown to become a national treasure with fans of all ages through its heart-warming appeal.

Of the latest film, Peter Bradshaw wrote in the Guardian that the experience was “just as jolly as the previous two films, but not really as funny” and likened it to a “special episode of a TV sitcom that takes the cast to the Costa del Sol”.

In the Hollywood Reporter, Leslie Felperin wrote that while the film “lacks the absurdist wit and decidedly dark edge that elevated the first two Paddington movies”, it was “serviceable enough given its limitations”.

Nick Curtis was more cutting with his two star review in the Standard, saying Paddington in Peru “misses the easy charm, the fluency and the icy sliver of jeopardy” from the first two movies “which had genuine cross-generational appeal”.

He added the pacing felt “ponderous and slow”.

The Telegraph’s Tim Robey was one of many critics to give Paddington in Peru a three-star rating, praising the addition of new characters portrayed by Hollywood heavyweights Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas, calling them “assets” to the film, albeit not matching the previous “scene-stealing” from Hugh Grant.

Nick de Semlyen also agreed, writing in Empire: “Colman is perfect casting as sinister sister Reverend Mother, overseer of the Home For Retired Bears.

“Whether riffing on The Sound Of Music, strumming irritatingly on a guitar, or struggling to keep a phony smile plastered across her face, Colman is great fun, though a little underused. Antonio Banderas, meanwhile, goes full Kind Hearts And Coronets, playing not just a boat captain with a secret, but his many descendants.”

Speaking in an interview with BBC Radio 1, Whishaw, who has voiced the character of Paddington in all three movies, said “I think they are beautiful films made with such care and love.

“A good film is a good film and they are hard to make, so I feel very proud of them and very proud to be associated in this way with this character.”

The director of the first two Paddington films, Paul King, has since moved on to new projects including Wonka, starring Timothee Chalamet, but he is credited with writing this latest story alongside Simon Farnaby and Mark Burton.

Clarisse Loughrey gave the film three stars in the Independent, calling Paddington in Peru “the worst in the franchise” but praised the production design, which takes full advantage of moving the cast away from the cosy comforts of London, and making “every interior look like an untouched escape room with secrets hidden under every trinket”.

Leila Latif of Total Film gave Paddington in Peru four stars, saying “despite the title, the film feels distinctly un-Peruvian”.

She added: “There are no Peruvian characters (unless you count the bears) and while the film alludes to the previous horrors of plundering Spanish colonizers in a surprisingly brutal montage, it’s still an uneasy shift that there is more screen presence from people of colour in London than there is in South America.”

Away from the big screen, a new Paddington musical is being developed for the stage, with McFly’s Tom Fletcher set to write the music and lyrics.

On November 7 the cast of the upcoming film unveiled special livery on a Great Western Railway (GWR) train that will travel through Devon and Cornwall.

Israeli football fans have described being attacked by groups of young men in Amsterdam, with some left with injuries including broken noses.

Adi Reuben, 24, said he was kicked on the ground and had his nose broken when he and his friends were confronted by a group of over 10 men while walking back to their hotel.

The men asked Mr Reuben where he and his friends were from. “They shouted ‘Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF’,” he said, referring to the Israeli military.

Police say the violence involved men on scooters carrying out “hit and run” attacks which were difficult to prevent.

“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’,” Mr Reuben told the BBC.

“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, 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 and would get medical treatment there.

He added that it appeared to be “a specific attack that was organised beforehand”.

Some Israeli football fans said they were ordered to show their passports when they were set upon.

Gal Binyanmin Tshuva, 29, told the BBC he was attacked on Wednesday outside a casino 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.

When he told them he didn’t have it, the men beat him, pushed him to the ground and kicked his face, Mr Tshuva said.

“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.”

British men Aaron and Jacob, who are Jewish, told the BBC they went to the match, but left early.

Afterwards, they said they saw men yelling antisemitic threats and stamping on an Israeli man. They intervened, helped the man to his feet, and went to leave.

Shortly after, a group asked the men if they were Jewish, and Aaron said that they were British.

“But they said ‘you helped the Jew’, and he punched me in my face and broke my glasses,” Aaron said.

“I was bleeding and have a black eye. I’m okay but a bit shaken.”

The BBC has seen a photo of Aaron that shows a stream of blood running down his nose, his eye swollen and other cuts on his face.

Esther Voet, editor-in-chief of a Dutch Jewish weekly newspaper, lives in the city centre. She says she offered her home to 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 carried out by young men on scooters.

Amsterdam police chief Peter Holla said it had proven difficult to prevent such attacks even with a significant number of officers present.

The force eventually decided to bring Maccabi supporters together and protect them before transporting them out of the area in buses, 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.

There were further clashes in Dam Square overnight into Thursday but police were mostly able to keep the groups separate.

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.”

A DNA-testing firm appears to have ceased trading – without telling its customers what has happened to the highly sensitive data they shared with it.

Atlas Biomed, which has offices in London, offered to provide insights into people’s genetic make up as well as their predisposition to certain illnesses.

However, users are no longer able to access their personalised reports online and the company has not responded to the BBC’s requests for comment.

Customers of the firm describe the situation as “very alarming” and say they want answers about what has happened to their “most personal information”.

The regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), has confirmed it has received a complaint about Atlas Biomed.

“People have the right to expect that organisations will handle their personal information securely and responsibly,” it said in a statement.

Experts say it shows how users of DNA-testing services can find themselves “completely at the mercy” of such companies when it comes to protecting very sensitive data.

Lisa Topping, from Saffron Walden, Essex, sent a saliva sample to Atlas Biomed several years ago, paying around £100 for a personalised genetic report.

As well as telling her about her DNA profile, it claimed to also inform her about her predisposition to diseases and even injuries, taking into account information she had provided in an accompanying questionnaire.

She could access her report online – which she checked from time to time – until one day the website disappeared. She got no reply when she contacted them to ask what had happened.

“I don’t know what someone else could do with [the data] but it’s the most personal information… I don’t know how comfortable I feel that they have just disappeared,” Lisa told me.

In 2023, Kate Lake from Tonbridge, Kent, paid Atlas Biomed £139 for a report it never delivered.

It promised her a refund – then went silent, despite her trying every means of contact she could find.

“I just never heard back from anyone, it’s like no-one was at home,” she said.

She describes the situation as “very alarming.”

“What happens now to that information they have got? I would like to hear some answers,” she said.

The BBC was also unable to contact Atlas Biomed.

A phone number listed for the company is dead. The BBC visited its offices in London, but there was no sign of Atlas Biomed there.

The firm’s Instagram account, with over 11,000 followers, was last updated in March 2022. Its final post on X was in August the same year.

It shared a post on Facebook in June 2023, but did not respond to any of the comments – which were full of people complaining about being unable to contact it or access their profiles.

The apparent disappearance of Atlas Biomed is a mystery – but it appears to have links with Russia.

It is still listed as an active company with Companies House, where all UK-based businesses must register. However, it has not filed any accounts since December 2022.

It lists eight official positions – though four of its officers have resigned.

Two of the apparently remaining officers are listed at the same address in Moscow – as is a Russian billionaire, who is described as a now resigned director.

Atlas Biomed’s registered office is near London’s so-called Silicon Roundabout, one of the prime locations in the UK for tech firms.

When the BBC visited, there was no sign of Atlas Biomed itself, but a company registration firm based in the building confirmed that it was a client of theirs, and legitimately used the address as its own.

This firm, in an email, claimed that it could not put the BBC in touch with Atlas Biomed “for security purposes”.

“We highly suggest that you contact them directly,” it said.

No-one from Atlas Biomed has responded to the BBC’s attempts to contact it.

Cybersecurity expert Prof Alan Woodward said the apparent links to Russia were “odd.”

“If people knew the provenance of this company and how it operates they might not be quite so ready to trust them with their DNA,” he told the BBC.

None of this explains where Atlas Biomed’s database of customer DNA has ended up – and the BBC has seen no evidence it is being misused.

But Prof Carissa Veliz – author of Privacy is Power – points out that DNA is arguably the most valuable personal data you have. It is uniquely yours, you can’t change it, and it reveals your – and by extension, your family’s – biological strengths and weaknesses.

Biometric data is given special protection under the UK’s version of GDPR, the data protection law.

“When you give your data to a company you are completely at their mercy and you have to be able to trust them,” Prof Veliz said.

“We shouldn’t have to wait until something happens.”

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation about racism and racist attacks almost 50 years on.”

Lynval Golding, founding member of The Specials, is angry that this summer’s riots have given him “flashbacks” of his experiences in Coventry in the 1970s and 80s.

But after violence flared across the UK, fuelled by online misinformation and anti-immigration sentiment, Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) is being relaunched, more than 40 years after its predecessor Rock Against Racism (RAR) first combined pop music with politics.

A Coventry event on Saturday, involving a gig with local bands, will add poignancy, organisers say, given the city’s history of brutal racist killings and violent assaults.

After the violence across the UK this summer, British Asians recalled the 1970s and 1980s, when racist violence was widespread and the National Front was on the rise.

With the National Front at its most vocal, they were then coping with day-to-day harassment, police brutality and later on, riots.

“How can people get into the state where they would want to go and burn down a hotel with other human beings in it?,” guitarist and vocalist Golding asks.

The Specials were one of many bands, including Birmingham reggae legends Steel Pulse, Aswad and The Clash, to play RAR gigs.

The movement emerged in 1976 in reaction to a rise in racist attacks before LMHR launched in 2002, picking up the mantel of its predecessor.

It is now necessary to revise the movement to fight “a frightening expansion of the far-right across Europe,” said Clive Dixon, from Coventry LMHR.

“We mustn’t be afraid to confront it again.”

During the late 1970s and early 80s, areas of Britain experienced increasing racial intolerance and violence, and in a period of just five months Coventry witnessed two racist killings, one attempted murder, several petrol bombings and numerous attacks.

The violence formed the backdrop to the foundation of the 2 Tone movement, by Jerry Dammers.

In April 1981, 20-year-old student Satnam Singh Gill was stabbed to death in broad daylight in the the city centre, reportedly for walking with his white girlfriend.

This followed the death of Dr Amal Dharry, who was also stabbed outside a chip shop in the Earlsdon area of the city.

At the time, it was reported in court that a 17-year-old had killed the professional for a bet.

Both deaths shocked the city.

In response to the violence local groups including the Indian Workers’ Association and Anti Nazi League banded together to form Coventry Committee Against Racism (CCAR).

It also prompted The Specials to organise a benefit concert in the city.

Previously a prosperous city, Coventry had been hit “particularly hard” by the recession, said Dr Nirmal Puwar, of Goldsmiths University in London.

Growing up there, she said, you always had to be on your guard.

“[Racism] affected the activities you did, the time of day you went out, who you went out with,” she said.

“The hostility became part of your membrane.”

Asians were specifically targeted because they personified difference, she explained.

Co-author of a book Racist Tones, documenting stories of racism from parts of the 1970s and 80s, she said football crowds were particularly fearsome.

“Match day was almost a day when curfew would encircle the family and you had to make sure everyone was home, because there was such a lot of anger and violence,” Dr Puwar remembers.

Co-author Jitey Samra, whose family had a business in the Foleshill area of the city, said she had “almost normalised” racist incidents she witnessed.

One particular “terrifying” experience involved a driving instructor who had made racist comments during a lesson.

“I actually ran from the car, but it was the racism and the hate in the guy’s face that really frightened me,” she said.

The atmosphere in the city following the racist killings was “like a cloud” had descended, she added.

“You know when you have this horrible gut feeling and a feeling of fear for children as well,” she explains.

Despite using music to spread anti-racism messages with The Specials, Golding described how he himself was also subjected to horrific racial violence.

He was beaten up in a park for intervening in a racist incident and had to run for his “dear life” through the city centre, chased by thugs.

In early 1982, he was also stabbed in the neck whilst at a city centre nightclub, leaving him traumatised.

Looking back at the attack was “very painful, emotionally,” he said.

“It took years to get over being in a club without having my back against the wall,” he explained.

“The stabbing and racial attacks – it lives on with those who’ve had to go through the trauma for years.”

Those experiences would lead to Golding writing The Specials’ Why?, which is on the B-side of 1981’s iconic Ghost Town.

In response to the attacks the CCAR organised a march for racial harmony in the city, joined by thousands of people.

The demonstration was a mile long, and was attended by groups from across the country, said Mr Dixon, who took part.

Setting off from Edgwick Park in Foleshill, by the time marchers entered the city centre “it all got a bit tense”, he remembers.

“The National Front were waiting for us, and the police were attempting to keep us apart,” he said.

“And there were justifiably angry young Asians, determined to show that they were not going to be too intimidated.”

Reports from the time document large numbers of skinheads had lined the route giving Nazi-style salutes and chanted “Sieg Heil.”

When the rally reached Cathedral Square, mounted police were sent into the crowd who retaliated with rocks, sticks and bottles.

Eleven police officers received minor injuries and 74 demonstrators were arrested.

More peaceful was the concert at the city’s Butts Park Stadium, which Golding said he was proud to have taken part in.

It was one of many in the area attended by Mr Dixon.

“I remember seeing Tom Robinson, John Cooper Clarke, Stiff Little Fingers, all at Warwick University at a Rock Against Racism gig,” he said.

He also attended the RAR march and concert at Victoria Park in London in the same year, joined by an estimated 100,000 demonstrators.

“And now we’ve got to do it all again,” he said.

Groups like RAR had, in the 80s, “pushed racism into the background, so that it became unfashionable, it wasn’t cool.”

“And this is as much about allowing artists to take a position on it, and allow them to sing on behalf of something,” he added.

Coventry musician Ace Ambrose said she was excited to be taking part in the re-launch concert, and it was important musicians took a stand against racism.

“It’s now become engrained that music is a universal language, it’s one of those things that binds us together regardless of what type of human being you are,” she said.

“This event is to remind people of that,” she added.

Another who is set to play, Duke Keats, said the movement also served as a reminder of how “diverse and rich the city is”.

“It’s absolutely incredible to think I have been born in a city with such a culture of cultures banding together,” he says.

“Everybody loves music and everybody deep down should hate racism.”

The movement reinforces our culture that’s already there, including the 2 Tone era, and allows people to look back and feel represented.

“I’m proud of what we did with The Specials, Fun Boy Three, Steel Pulse, Aswad – all of those bands who got out to support Rock Against Racism,” asserts Golding.

“Is there something wrong with us because we want to deal in love and unity? I don’t think so”.

Olympic sailor Sir Ben Ainslie and his wife Georgie have revealed in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that they used a surrogate to have their second child.

They described how after years of struggling to conceive, they had used an agency to find a mother in California, where commercial surrogacy is legal.

Their son Fox was born in 2021, five years after their daughter Bellatrix, who they had via IVF.

After the ordeal of their conception attempts, which Georgie described as a journey “to hell and back”, Sir Ben called for surrogacy to be “professionalised as much as possible” as they praised the process in the US as “so well-regulated”.

In the UK, commercial surrogacy is illegal, so a third party cannot profit from matching people, though it is not illegal for a surrogate to be paid expenses.

High-profile feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Julie Bindel argue that surrogacy commodifies a woman’s body, leaving surrogates, who are often from poorer backgrounds, open to exploitation.

IVF – or in vitro fertilisation – is when an egg is removed from a woman’s ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory. The fertilised egg is then returned to the woman’s womb to develop.

In the words of the Telegraph, the couple chose to tell their story now primarily because they “want to help get rid of some of the stigma surrounding surrogacy, and to educate others in a similar situation”.

Sir Ben, 47, a four-time Olympic champion who led a British crew in the America’s Cup last month, met his wife in 2011 when she was a Sky Sports presenter.

They married in December 2014, when Georgie was 37.

“Like everyone you think ‘Oh, it will be easy to go from doing whatever you were doing in your working life to, you know, making a family work,'” she told the paper.

“But pretty soon we were like, ‘Actually, this is proving to be harder than we realised.’ That was when we went on our first IVF journey with Bellatrix.”

The 30 or so eggs initially harvested from Georgie resulted in a single embryo that became their first baby in 2016, she recalled.

However, when they tried for a second child, they went through seven further rounds of IVF, the last of them using a donor egg. None worked.

“It was an incredibly difficult period,” said Sir Ben. “We had three miscarriages during that time – at eight weeks, 12 weeks and 14 weeks.”

Both admit, the Telegraph says, that had it been up to him, they would have stopped after the last miscarriage but they had two donor eggs left that were viable.

“I persisted and eventually we did get there,” said Georgie.

The couple accept that the financial costs of surrogacy are “prohibitive – tens of thousands of pounds”.

As for ethical concerns, Georgie said, surrogacy “felt like the last step” in their IVF journey using “Ben’s sperm, a donor egg and a surrogate carrier”.

“It’s the hardest thing we’ve ever done,” said Sir Ben. “But in the end it was one of the most rewarding.”

Authorities are investigating racist text messages sent to black Americans across the country telling them to report to a plantation “to pick cotton”.

Black Americans, including school and college students, were among the recipients in states including Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, New York and Pennsylvania.

“The FBI is aware of the offensive and racist text messages sent to individuals around the country and is in contact with the Justice Department and other federal authorities on the matter,” the agency said.

The messages appear to have started on Wednesday, the day after election day. Some of the messages mentioned the Trump campaign – which strongly denied any connection.

Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said: “The campaign has absolutely nothing to do with these text messages.”

The source of the anonymous messages and the total number sent are unclear.

A 42-year-old mother in Indiana sent a copy of the texts her high-school-aged daughter received to the BBC.

The messages said that the daughter had “been selected to become a slave at your nearest plantation” and would be “picked up in a white van” and “searched thoroughly once you’ve reached your destination”.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous for her safety, called the messages “extremely, extremely alarming” and made her feel “really vulnerable”.

“It’s because of America’s history, but the timing is specific to the day after the election,” she said. “This had to be a strategised effort.”

Another recipient, Hailey Welch, told a University of Alabama student newspaper that several students on the campus had also received the messages.

“At first I thought it was a joke, but everyone else was getting them. People were texting, posting on their stories, saying they got them,” Ms Welch told The Crimson White. “I was just stressed out, and I was scared because I didn’t know what was happening.”

The wording of the messages varied but generally instructed recipients to report to a “plantation” or wait to be picked up in a van, and referred to “slave” labour.

The texts were sent from numbers with area codes in at least 25 different states, according to CBS News, the BBC’s partner network in the US.

TextNow, a mobile provider that allows people to create phone numbers for free, said it found one or more of its accounts were used to send text messages “in violation of its terms of service”. The company disabled the accounts within an hour of discovering the misuse, it said in a statement.

“We do not condone the use of our service to send harassing or spam messages and will work with the authorities to prevent these individuals from doing so in the future,” it said.

Civil rights group NAACP condemned the messages saying they were a consequence of President-elect Trump’s election.

“These actions are not normal, ” said the group’s chief executive Derrick Johnson. “These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday’s election results.”

Jessica Rosenworcel, chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, which is also investigating the messages, said: “These messages are unacceptable. We take this type of targeting very seriously.”

In several states, top law enforcement officials said they were aware of the messages and encouraged residents to report them to the authorities if they received them.

The office of Nevada’s attorney general said it was working to “probe into the source of what appear to be robotext messages”.

In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said Louisiana Bureau of Investigation officers had traced some of the messages to a virtual private network – a method of masking the origins of electronic communications – based in Poland.

Murrill said investigators “have found no original source – meaning they could have originated from any bad actor state in the region or the world”.

The Indiana mother responded to reports the messages could have originated abroad, telling the BBC: “It doesn’t make it any safer or better that it could have been foreign.”

“They know the mindset of America,” she said.

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.

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.

A Brazilian businessman, with ties to one of the country’s most powerful criminal groups, has been shot dead at Guarulhos Airport in São Paulo.

Antônio Vinicius Gritzbach had recently entered into a plea bargain with local prosecutors to provide information about Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) – or First Capital Command.

He received death threats from the gang as a result, local media reports.

Three others were injured in the attack, with footage online showing the aftermath. Police said officers had been deployed to the airport and surrounding area.

The moment two hooded men exited a car holding sub-machine guns and began firing outside the airport terminal was caught on security camera.

Gritzbach, a former member of the PCC, dropped his bag and tried to run away – but he was shot many times and died at the scene.

A cryptocurrency expert, Gritzbach had been in the process of telling officials how he helped the group launder millions of dollars.

Reports in Brazilian media suggest he was once considered a key player in the gang’s operation.

As part of his plea deal, Gritzbach had promised to help investigators locate other members and hand over documents.

In exchange, São Paulo prosecutors are said to have offered Gritzbach a judicial pardon and a reduction of his sentence for money laundering.

The PCC was formed in the early 1990s and has gone on to become one of Brazil’s most feared drug gangs. Its members, however, are not confined to Latin America.

Last year, a report by security services in Portugal alone suggested the group had 1,000 associates in the European country’s capital, Lisbon.

São Paulo’s organised crime taskforce estimated in 2023 that PCC makes almost $1bn (£773,000,000) from international cocaine trafficking.

The Dutch king says Jewish people must feel safe in the Netherlands, after violent attacks against Israeli football fans in the centre of Amsterdam.

Willem-Alexander said “our history has taught us how intimidation goes from bad to worse,” adding that the country could not ignore “antisemitic behaviour”.

Youths on scooters had criss-crossed the Dutch capital in “hit-and-run” attacks on Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters who were visiting Amsterdam for a Europa League match, authorities said.

Police said five people were treated in hospital and others suffered minor injuries. At least 62 people have been arrested.

“My heart goes out to the victims and to their families here and in Israel as well,” Amsterdam’s Mayor Femke Halsema told a press conference on Friday.

Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof flew back early from a summit of EU leaders in Budapest where he said he had been following developments with horror.

“The perpetrators will be tracked down and prosecuted,” he promised.

The violence on Thursday night was condemned by leaders across Europe, the US and Israel. For many, it was especially shocking coming on the eve of commemorations marking Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogroms against German Jews.

Three-quarters of Jewish people in the Netherlands were murdered during the Holocaust in World War Two.

• Israeli fans describe violence in Amsterdam

• Are you in Amsterdam? Please share your experiences here.

The king alluded to that history, saying: “Jews must feel safe in the Netherlands, everywhere and at all times. We put our arms around them and will not let them go.”

US President Joe Biden said the attacks “echo dark moments in history when Jews were persecuted”.

There had already been trouble and some arrests the night before Thursday’s match, involving Maccabi fans as well as pro-Palestinian protesters.

Police chief Peter Holla confirmed there had been incidents “on both sides”. Israeli supporters had removed a Palestinian flag from a wall and set it alight and attacked a taxi, although there had been no further trouble until the following night, he said.

There were also reports of supporters setting off fireworks. One unverified video showed fans going down an escalator chanting anti-Arab slogans.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned “anti-Arab chants” and an “attack on the Palestinian flag,” calling on the Dutch government to “protect Palestinians and Arabs” living in the Netherlands.

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”.

Mayor 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. She 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 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 unverified videos, people could be heard shouting pro-Palestinian slogans.

Two British visitors said they came under attack as they tried to help an Israeli beaten up by people on mopeds. Jacob, 33, told the BBC he saw “10 people stamping and kicking” the man, and that they had seen “lots of little gangs chasing people”.

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.

“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.”

In a statement, Telegram said it had closed a group chat on the platform which “may have been linked to the disturbance”. The company said it did not tolerate “calls to violence” and would cooperate with the Dutch authorities.

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”.

Israeli airline El Al said it was operating free “rescue flights” to Amsterdam to bring passengers back to Israel.

On Friday, those flights started arriving back at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport, where passengers were swarmed by reporters in the arrival hall and asked to share their experiences of the violence.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke of a “pogrom” against Maccabi fans and 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”.

The violence in Amsterdam has raised questions about security for Israeli fans elsewhere in Europe.

Israel’s national security council had urged fans to avoid a basketball game in the Italian city of Bologna on Friday due to the risk of “copycat actions”, though there were no reports of violence following the EuroLeague fixture.

According to Italian media, Bologna’s police chief assigned a special escort to the Israeli players for their travel to the match, which Virtus Bologna won 84-77.

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.

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A senior adviser to President-elect Donald Trump says the incoming administration will focus on achieving peace in Ukraine rather than enabling the country to gain back territory occupied by Russia.

Bryan Lanza, a Republican party strategist, told the BBC the Trump administration would ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for his version of a “realistic vision for peace”.

“And if President Zelensky comes to the table and says, well we can only have peace if we have Crimea, he shows to us that he’s not serious,” he said. “Crimea is gone.”

Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. Eight years later, it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has occupied territory in the country’s east.

The president-elect has consistently said his priority is to end the war and stem what he characterises as a drain on US resources, in the form of military aid to Ukraine.

However, he has yet to divulge how he intends to do so – and will likely be hearing competing visions for Ukraine’s future from his various advisers.

Mr Lanza, Trump’s political adviser since his 2016 campaign, did not mention areas of eastern Ukraine, but he said regaining Crimea from Russia was unrealistic and “not the goal of the United States”.

“When Zelensky says we will only stop this fighting, there will only be peace once Crimea is returned, we’ve got news for President Zelensky: Crimea is gone,” he told the BBC World Service’s Weekend programme.

“And if that is your priority of getting Crimea back and having American soldiers fight to get Crimea back, you’re on your own.”

The US has never deployed American soldiers to fight in Ukraine, nor has Kyiv requested American troops fight on its behalf. Ukraine has only requested American military aid to arm its own soldiers.

Mr Lanza said he had tremendous respect for the Ukrainian people, describing them as having the hearts of lions. But he said the US priority was “peace and to stop the killing”.

“What we’re going to say to Ukraine is, you know what you see? What do you see as a realistic vision for peace. It’s not a vision for winning, but it’s a vision for peace. And let’s start having the honest conversation,” he said.

Trump is expected to handle peace talks with a close circle of aides once in office.

An unnamed National Security Council aide who previously served under Trump told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday: “Anyone – no matter how senior in Trump’s circle – who claims to have a different view or more detailed window into his plans on Ukraine simply doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.”

They said that the former president “makes his own calls on national security issues” and had done so “many times in the moment”.

Trump spoke to Zelensky after his election win, with billionaire Elon Musk also taking part in the call.

A source in Ukraine’s presidential office told the BBC that the “good lengthy conversation” between Zelensky and Trump lasted “about half an hour”.

“It was not really a conversation to talk about very substantial things, but overall it was very warm and pleasant.”

Trump’s Democratic opponents have accused him of cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and say his approach to the war amounts to surrender for Ukraine that will endanger all of Europe.

Last month, Zelensky presented a “victory plan” to the Ukrainian parliament that included a refusal to cede Ukraine’s territories and sovereignty.

During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly said he could end the war between Russia and Ukraine “in a day”, but never gave further details.

A paper written by two of his former national security chiefs in May said the US should continue supplying weapons, but make the support conditional on Kyiv entering peace talks with Russia.

Ukraine should not give up its hopes of getting all of its territory back from Russian occupation, the paper said, but it should negotiate based on current front lines.

Earlier this week, Putin congratulated Trump on his election victory and said Trump’s claim that he can help end the war in Ukraine “deserves attention at least”.

Mr Lanza also criticised the support the Biden-Harris administration and European countries have given to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“The reality on the ground is that the European nation states and President Biden did not give Ukraine the ability and the arms to win this war at the very beginning and they failed to lift the restrictions for Ukraine to win,” he said.

Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives approved a $61bn (£49bn) package in military aid for Ukraine to help combat Russia’s invasion.

The US has been the biggest arms supplier to Ukraine – between February 2022 and the end of June 2024, it delivered or committed weapons and equipment worth $55.5bn (£41.5bn), according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research organisation.

Qatar has withdrawn as a mediator in ceasefire and hostage release talks between Israel and Hamas, reports say.

It comes after senior US officials reportedly said Washington would no longer accept the presence of Hamas representatives in Qatar, accusing the Palestinian group of rejecting fresh proposals for an end to the war in Gaza.

Anonymous diplomatic sources told the AFP and Reuters news agencies that Hamas’s political office in Doha “no longer serves its purpose” due to “a refusal to negotiate a deal in good faith”.

Qatar is ready to resume its role as a mediator were Israel and Hamas to show “sincere willingness to return to the negotiating table”, the sources reportedly said.

Hamas have had a base in the Qatari capital since 2012, reportedly at the request of the Obama administration.

In anonymous briefings to Reuters, US officials said the Qatari government had agreed to tell Hamas to close its political office 10 days ago.

The reports have been denied by Hamas officials.

The small but influential Gulf state is a key US ally in the region. It hosts a major American air base and has handled many delicate political negotiations, including with Iran, the Taliban and Russia.

Alongside the US and Egypt, the Qataris have also played a major role in rounds of so-far unsuccessful talks to broker a ceasefire in the year-long war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

But there is growing evidence of a shift in the relationship.

After the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Hamas held a two-hour mourning tent in Doha in a small hall, a stark contrast to the recent three-day mourning held for Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which was conducted with official state oversight and security.

The latest round of talks in mid-October failed to produce a deal, with Hamas rejecting a short-term ceasefire proposal. The group has always called for a complete end to the war and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

Israel has also been accused of rejecting deals. Days after being fired earlier this week, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of rejecting a peace deal against the advice of his security chiefs.

The call for Hamas to be expelled from Qatar appears to be an attempt by the outgoing Biden administration to force some sort of peace deal before the end of his term in January.

Were Hamas to be forced to leave Doha, it is unclear where they would base their political office. Key ally Iran would be an option, although the assassination of former leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July suggests they may be at risk from Israel if based there. It would also not give them anything close to the same diplomatic channels to the West.

A more likely option would be Turkey. As a Nato member but also a Sunni majority state, it would give the group a base from which to operate in relative safety. Last April President Erdogan hosted then Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh and his delegation in Istanbul, where they talked about “what needs to be done to ensure adequate and uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and a fair and lasting peace process in the region”.

The move would also most likely be welcomed by Ankara, which has often sought to position itself as a broker between east and west.

Key Hamas figures such as Osama Hamdan, Taher al-Nunu, and others frequently featured on news outlets have been staying in Istanbul for over a month.

Their extended presence in Turkey marks a departure from past visits, which were typically limited to brief stays.

It is thought the personal safety of Hamas leadership is now a major concern for the group, which saw two leaders killed in less than four months. As well as Haniyeh’s death in July, in October Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the 7 October Hamas attack on southern Israel.

According to the European Council of Foreign Relations, “Hamas has adopted a temporary model of collective leadership to mitigate the effect of future Israeli assassinations”.

H A Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), told the BBC that nowhere “will give them protection from Israeli assassination attempts in the same way that being in Doha, where America has its largest military base in the region, did”.

The latest move comes as US officials appear increasingly frustrated with the approach the Israeli government has taken to ending the war. In October, the US Secretaries of State and Defense said if Israel did not allow more humanitarian aid into the territory by 12 November, they would face unspecified policy “implications”.

Last weekend a number of UN officials warned the situation in northern Gaza was “apocalyptic”. On Saturday the independent Famine Review Committee said there was a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas”.

The relationship between President Joe Biden and Netanyahu has deteriorated over the course of the war in Gaza, with increasing pressure from Washington to improve the humanitarian situation for the Palestinians and find some sort of negotiated settlement.

But, according to Dr Hellyer, US attempts at negotiation have been fatally flawed.

“By setting red lines and allowing Netanyahu to cross them without consequence, the Biden administration effectively encouraged further impunity. I don’t think any of this will change in the next 10 weeks,” he said.

Any overtures have been repeatedly rejected by Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition, who will now also feel emboldened by the prospect of an incoming Donald Trump presidency.

While exactly what approach Trump will take to the region remains uncertain, he is thought to be more likely to allow Israel to act on its terms.

He has previously said Israel should “finish what they started” in Gaza. During his last term in the White House, he took a number of steps deemed highly favourable to Israel, including moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

It has also been reported, however, that Trump has told Netanyahu that he wants to see an end to the fighting by the time he takes office.

Either way, it seems likely that the current US administration will have less influence over the government in Jerusalem.

They may therefore believe the best way to force some sort of deal is to apply pressure on Hamas. Whether it pays off may depend on whether Qatar, so long a reliable ally, decides to go along with it.

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.”

A day after her husband’s big election night win, Melania Trump took to social media to address the nation.

“The majority of Americans have entrusted us with this important responsibility,” Mrs Trump said.

“We will safeguard the heart of the republic – freedom,” she vowed, and urged Americans to rise above ideology for the sake of the country.

It was a brief message, but suggested a shift in how the former first lady will approach the role this second time around.

When Trump won his first presidency in 2016, his wife was initially absent from the White House, instead staying in New York with their young son. She appeared reticent, at times, with the traditions set out by first ladies that preceded her.

But experts say that this time, Mrs Trump will likely be more deliberate with her approach to the largely undefined role of being America’s First Lady.

Born Melanija Knavs, the 54-year-old Slovenian-American former fashion model eventually traded a glamorous life in the gilded walls of Manhattan’s Trump Tower for the confines of political life that came with the Oval Office, during a presidency that was often mired in controversy.

Described by some as an “enigma”, Mrs Trump has preferred to be less public than her predecessors, giving fewer speeches both in the White House and on the campaign trail.

“She’s been unique among modern first ladies,” said Tammy Vigil, an associate professor of communications at Boston University and author of a book on Michelle Obama and Melania Trump.

“She does things the way she wants to do them, as opposed to the way she has to do them. But she fulfils the base expectations.”

In recent years, she avoided the spotlight as her husband challenged several legal cases against him while he campaigned for a second term.

Her absence inspired several news articles this summer asking: “Where is Melania?”

Mrs Trump did appear on key occasions, like when her husband announced in late 2022 that he would be running again.

She also attended the Republican National Convention in July wearing a bright red Christian Dior suit, but did not deliver a speech – another break from tradition.

When she does speak, her words appear carefully chosen, offering hints to her point of view.

At her husband’s Madison Square Garden rally just weeks before Election Day, she delivered short but pointed remarks in line with the Trump campaign’s law and order messaging, painting New York City as a “great metropolis” in decline due to rampant crime.

She also spoke after the first assassination attempt on her husband, calling for unity and labelling the perpetrator a “monster”.

In a rare interview on Fox, she later accused his political opponents and the media of “fuelling a toxic atmosphere” that led to the attack.

Mrs Trump declared her pro-choice stance in her recent memoir, putting her at odds with anti-abortion activists within the Republican Party – though the remarks prompted speculation due to their timing, as her husband was struggling to campaign on the issue after the overturning of Roe v Wade.

• Melania Trump is latest Republican First Lady to back abortion

Mrs Trump wrote about her modelling career, her admiration for her husband and their past political disagreements, but chose to keep details of those disputes private.

She has, however, publicly stood by Trump on controversial stances like his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“I am not the only person who questions the results,” she wrote in her book. On the Capitol Riots on 6 January, 2021, she wrote that she “wasn’t aware” of what was taking place because she was preoccupied with her duties.

Her former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, wrote in her own memoir that Mrs Trump refused to issue a statement condemning the violence, leading Ms Grisham to resign.

Some commentators have questioned whether she enjoyed the role of first lady at all.

One of her biographers, former CNN reporter Kate Bennett, maintains she did despite her early reluctance.

“She liked all the accoutrements that go with being first lady and living in the White House,” Ms Bennett told People magazine in 2021. “I think she actually really enjoyed it.”

In her memoir, Mrs Trump wrote that she has a “strong sense of duty to use the platform as First Lady for good”.

And she said in a 1999 interview that if her then-boyfriend Trump ever ran for president, she would use former first ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Betty Ford as role models, calling them “very traditional”.

• Five takeaways from Melania Trump’s new book

Mrs Kennedy was a fashion icon who was dedicated to the preservation of the White House, while Mrs Ford was known as a trailblazer who advocated for abortion rights and women’s rights.

After relocating to Washington, Mrs Trump started taking on first lady duties, such as hosting luncheons and state dinners for visiting world leaders. She also focused on White House aesthetics, ordering extensive renovations and overseeing ambitious Christmas decorations (and was once secretly recorded complaining about that last task).

Her clothing was the subject of media fascination and controversy, particularly after she was spotted wearing a jacket with the phrase “I really don’t care, do you?” during a trip to a migrant child detention centre in 2018.

She said the jacket was a message for “the people and the left-wing media” who were criticising her.

Mrs Trump came under fire again after being secretly recorded by her former friend and senior advisor. She was heard expressing her frustration at being criticised for her husband’s policy to separate migrant children from their families.

She later revealed that she had been blindsided by the policy, and had told Trump privately that she did not support it. The policy was dropped by the president in June 2018 after a firestorm of controversy.

Prof Vigil says one of the biggest challenges that Mrs Trump faced in her first term was her political inexperience as well as a revolving door of staff, who were equally inexperienced and at times disloyal.

But Mrs Trump kept quietly busy regardless, Prof Vigil adds, advocating for issues like children’s welfare through her Be Best campaign against online bullying.

She was forced to defend that campaign given her own husband’s aggressive use of social media, telling CBS in 2016 that how he conducted himself online got him in trouble – and boosted his followers.

She also advocated for children affected by the opioid crisis, and has since started a foundation that raises education funds for children in foster care.

Many expect for that work to continue once she moves back to Washington, though it remains unclear if she will live there full-time.

Prof Vigil says the role of first lady has evolved over the years and Mrs Trump will “make choices about how active in public she wants to be”.

“And I think she’ll do that much more intentionally.”

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.

I can feel the anger rising. How am I facing this abuse again after 20 years?

My name is Alex. But increasingly young people shout “Timmy” at me in the street. This isn’t mistaken identity – it‘s mockery because I use a wheelchair.

I should ignore it, but this time, I react. I turn to see a group of young teenage boys smirking in front of me. “I heard you,” I tell them. “I know exactly who Timmy is.”

I know this because although we do not share a name, I have felt the shadow of Timmy since childhood – never through choice.

A disabled character from dark-humoured satire cartoon series South Park, he uses a wheelchair and can only shout his name, mainly loudly and uncontrollably.

Growing up at the show’s initial peak during the turn of the millennium, Timmy followed me through school corridors, classrooms and playgrounds – no matter my friends, sociability or relatively good grades.

Now, in my 30s, he’s back. For the third time in a year, this time heading to my local train station in my wheelchair, I hear the familiar, brutish drawl: “Timmaaah.”

A laugh. A snigger. An assumption I either won’t hear or be unable to understand.

When I confront the group of boys, one feigns innocence, claiming he’d been speaking to his friend.

“You weren’t,” I say. “I was watching the show before you were born.”

Initially I was baffled as to how this phenomenon had returned to a new young generation, 24 years after the character first appeared.

The answer lies in social media, particularly TikTok, where hundreds of short user-edited clips of Timmy and audio of him saying his name are sparking the revival.

TikTok users often take part in trends by using the audio of popular videos and overlaying it with their own clips.

That’s what many have done with Timmy, where the name is used as a punchline, or played on top of unrelated clips of wheelchair users, reinforcing harmful and dehumanising stereotypes.

The irony is that the character Timmy is presented with warmth in South Park and given character depth by co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

An equal in the show’s unflinching satire, his disability isn’t necessarily the butt of the joke.

Timmy is an accepted member of the class: he fails to complete homework, faces adversity and causes trouble with his disabled best friend Jimmy. His personality is conveyed through the different intonations in which he delivers his name.

One episode, Timmy 2000, sees him win a battle of the bands as frontman for a metal group. The adult characters are shown to respond in an over-protective and condescending way – a striking criticism of the way society often treats disabled people.

Nearly 20 years ago, a poll by Ouch! – the former name of the BBC’s disability section – crowned Timmy as the most popular disabled TV character.

Seattle Times’ late disabled critic Jeff Shannon described Timmy as the most “progressive, provocative and socially relevant disability humour ever presented on American television”.

“Without telling viewers what to think, South Park challenges [the audience’s] own fears and foibles regarding disability, and Timmy emerges triumphant,” he wrote in 2005.

In interviews Stone and Parker have spoken of how carefully and purposefully they integrated him into the show.

But two decades later, the fact remains that on meeting Timmy, certainly at first glance, many find him outrageously offensive.

South Park has always worked on multiple levels – offering outrageous forbidden shock value for schoolchildren while delivering crunching adult satire.

None of this nuance is reflected in the TikTok trend, which reduces Timmy, and by extension wheelchair users and disability, to one-dimensional ridicule.

This warped revival parallels the case of Joey Deacon, a man with cerebral palsy whose appearance on Blue Peter in the 1980s backfired to spark playground mockery, with kids shouting “you’re a Joey!”, and “do the Joey face”.

TikTok says its community guidelines strictly prohibit hate speech and content promoting discrimination, violence or harm based on disability.

It removed the videos flagged by the BBC for violating this policy. But it didn’t remove the Timmy sound used on several other videos – meaning it can be used again.

TikTok didn’t respond to a specific question about removing offensive audio.

Ciaran O’Connor, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank focusing on online hate, says that sounds are a “blind spot in TikTok’s content moderation practices”.

Even if a video with an “original sound” is removed by the platform, the audio usually isn’t, he says.

This makes it a common way of bypassing TikTok’s content moderation guidelines – including for harassment and abuse.

Bullying and trolling of disabled people is still common online. Three in 10 said they’d experienced it in a survey of 4,000 disabled people carried out by charity Scope.

My last experience of having the name hurled at me on the street shocked me not so much in the name-calling, but the absolute lack of contrition shown even when challenged.

It mirrored an experience last year when teenagers, again taunting me, rode off shouting “Timmy is going to run us over.”

Ross Hovey, a wheelchair user and Liverpool fan, recently posted on LinkedIn about a near-identical experience.

He was heading to a Liverpool match with his 79-year-old father and care assistant when a group of young men shouted “Timmy” at him. When Ross challenged them with “I heard you,” they too tried to claim innocence.

The abuse raises questions about what role platforms should take in providing context to young users.

“Brief, contextless clips and participatory trends are at the heart of TikTok’s popularity,” says O’Connor.

“That’s normally good and positive and funny … but when these dynamics are being used to demean, mock or stigmatise others, it does raise the question of whether TikTok should be doing more to inform or educate users.”

Alison Kerry, head of communications at Scope, told the BBC “these kinds of ableist trends are deeply harmful. They don’t exist in a vacuum, so a social media trend can quickly turn into someone facing abuse in their everyday life.”

The real-world impact is certainly becoming more noticeable.

Disabled TikTokers have been posting about their experiences, and a teacher recently wrote a Reddit thread titled “Getting real sick of this Timmy trend”, expressing frustration at students’ lack of awareness.

This is why I challenged the teens at the station – I felt a duty not only to my 12-year-old self, who once burst into tears feeling helpless at similar taunts, but also to disabled students today.

I returned a second time when the boys called out “Timmy” again after I turned to leave.

“Why?” I asked forcefully. Silence. One of the group eventually apologised, admitting the behaviour was wrong.

“Speak to your friends,” I pleaded, sensing a glimmer of hope. “Maybe then they’ll listen.”

Someone moved the UK’s oldest satellite and there appears to be no record of exactly who, when or why.

Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet-1A was put high above Africa’s east coast to relay communications for British forces.

When the spacecraft ceased working a few years later, gravity might have been expected to pull it even further to the east, out over the Indian Ocean.

But today, curiously, Skynet-1A is actually half a planet away, in a position 22,369 miles (36,000km) above the Americas.

Orbital mechanics mean it’s unlikely the half-tonne military spacecraft simply drifted to its current location.

Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the mid-1970s to take it westwards. The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?

It’s intriguing that key information about a once vital national security asset can just evaporate. But, fascination aside, you might also reasonably ask why it still matters. After all, we’re talking about some discarded space junk from 50 years ago.

“It’s still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favours,” says space consultant Dr Stuart Eves.

“It’s now in what we call a ‘gravity well’ at 105 degrees West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis.

“Because it’s dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it’s ‘our’ satellite we’re still responsible for it,” he explains.

Dr Eves has looked through old satellite catalogues, the National Archives and spoken to satellite experts worldwide, but he can find no clues to the end-of-life behaviour of Britain’s oldest spacecraft.

It might be tempting to reach for a conspiracy theory or two, not least because it’s hard to hear the name “Skynet” without thinking of the malevolent, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) system in The Terminator movie franchise.

But there’s no connection other than the name and, in any case, real life is always more prosaic.

What we do know is that Skynet-1A was manufactured in the US by the now defunct Philco Ford aerospace company and put in space by a US Air Force Delta rocket.

“The first Skynet satellite revolutionised UK telecommunications capacity, permitting London to securely communicate with British forces as far away as Singapore. However, from a technological standpoint, Skynet-1A was more American than British since the United States both built and launched it,” remarked Dr Aaron Bateman in a recent paper on the history of the Skynet programme, which is now on its fifth generation.

This view is confirmed by Graham Davison who flew Skynet-1A in the early 70s from its UK operations centre at RAF Oakhanger in Hampshire.

“The Americans originally controlled the satellite in orbit. They tested all of our software against theirs, before then eventually handing over control to the RAF,” the long-retired engineer told me.

“In essence, there was dual control, but when or why Skynet-1A might have been handed back to the Americans, which seems likely – I’m afraid I can’t remember,” says Mr Davison, who is now in his 80s.

Rachel Hill, a PhD student from University College London, has also been scouring the National Archives.

Her readings have led her to one very reasonable possibility.

“A Skynet team from Oakhanger would go to the USAF satellite facility in Sunnyvale (colloquially known as the Blue Cube) and operate Skynet during ‘Oakout’. This was when control was temporarily transferred to the US while Oakhanger was down for essential maintenance. Perhaps the move could have happened then?” Ms Hill speculated.

The official, though incomplete, logs of Skynet-1A’s status suggest final commanding was left in the hands of the Americans when Oakhanger lost sight of the satellite in June 1977.

But however Skynet-1A then got shifted to its present position, it was ultimately allowed to die in an awkward place when really it should have been put in an “orbital graveyard”.

This refers to a region even higher in the sky where old space junk runs zero risk of running into active telecommunications satellites.

Graveyarding is now standard practice, but back in the 1970s no-one gave much thought to space sustainability.

Attitudes have since changed because the space domain is getting congested.

At 105 degrees West longitude, an active satellite might see a piece of junk come within 50km of its position up to four times a day.

That might sound like they’re nowhere near each other, but at the velocities these defunct objects move it’s starting to get a little too close for comfort.

The Ministry of Defence said Skynet-1A was constantly monitored by the UK’s National Space Operations Centre. Other satellite operators are informed if there’s likely to be a particularly close conjunction, in case they need to take evasive action.

Ultimately, though, the British government may have to think about removing the old satellite to a safer location.

Technologies are being developed to grab junk left in space.

Already, the UK Space Agency is funding efforts to do this at lower altitudes, and the Americans and the Chinese have shown it’s possible to snare ageing hardware even in the kind of high orbit occupied by Skynet-1A.

“Pieces of space junk are like ticking time bombs,” observed Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

“We need to avoid what I call super-spreader events. When these things explode or something collides with them, it generates thousands of pieces of debris that then become a hazard to something else that we care about.”

Authorities say at least 25 people have been killed after a bomb exploded at a railway station in Pakistan’s south-western Balochistan province.

Dozens of others were injured in the blast, which happened as a popular morning train was about to leave Quetta station in southwestern Pakistan for Peshawar.

A separatist militant group, the Balochistan Liberation Army, said it carried out what police are deeming a suicide attack.

There has been a recent surge in deadly attacks in the province, driven by demands for independence and control over local resources.

The city’s commissioner said that the suicide bomber was among the dead, while about 50 others were injured in the blast.

Senior police official Muhammad Baloch said the explosion was thought to have been caused by a suicide bomber carrying 6-8kg of explosives. The dead and injured included both civilians and military personnel, he told the BBC.

Videos shared on social media appear to show the moment the explosion happened on Saturday morning, with dozens of people visible at the platform.

There is also footage circulating of the aftermath, showing a number of injured people and debris spread across the station.

Abdul Jabbar was among the injured brought to the Civil Hospital. He said that he was entering the station, having purchased a ticket from the booking office, when the explosion happened.

“I can’t describe the horror I faced today, it was like a judgement day has come,” he said.

Muhammad Sohail arrived soon after the explosion had happened to catch his train to Multan, in Punjab province.

“Everything was destroyed at the station, and people were laying down on the ground screaming for help,” he said.

The Baloch Liberation Army, which claimed responsibility for the attack, said in a statement released on social media that it had targeted a Pakistan military unit that was returning from Quetta after completing a training course.

Police later confirmed 14 soldiers were among the dead.

The chief minister of Balochistan called the act deplorable and the perpetrators “worse than animals”. Mir Sarfraz Bugti said the authorities would pursue them and “bring them to their logical end”.

The speaker of Pakistan’s National Assembly, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, condemned the blast, saying those responsible were the “enemies of humanity”.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province and the richest in terms of natural resources, but it is the least developed.

The region shares a volatile border with Iran and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and also boasts a vast coastline along the Arabian Sea.

In August, at least 73 people were killed in a series of attacks – which the Baloch Liberation Army also claimed responsibility for – targeting police stations, railway lines and highways, according to Reuters.

The militant separatist group has been waging a decades-long insurgency to gain independence for the region from Pakistan.

Tony Todd, best known for starring in the Candyman horror films, has died aged 69.

The American actor died at his home in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, according to reports.

He starred as the title character in the horror series, depicting the ghostly Candyman character with a hook for a hand, summoned by saying his name five times in front of a mirror.

Todd continued as Candyman from the first film in 1992 through follow-ups in 1995 and 1999, and reprised the role in 2021 for a fourth film serving as a direct sequel to the original.

Throughout his 40-year career, Todd also featured in hundreds of films, stage productions and television dramas, including roles in the Transformers and Final Destination films.

In Candyman, Todd’s titular character is the ghost of artist Daniel Robitaille, a black man who was lynched in the 19th Century.

The 1992 film sees Todd’s character accidentally summoned to the real world by a graduate student in Chicago intrigued by the urban legend of the Candyman, setting off a chain of murderous events.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2019, Todd recalled the film’s famous scene that sees Candyman swarmed with bees, during which he was stung 23 times and apparently paid a $1,000 bonus each time.

“Everything that’s worth making has to involve some sort of pain,” he remarked.

Read next: How horror reflected black trauma, for better or worse.

On his Candyman character, he told the same interview: “I’ve done 200 movies, this is the one that stays in people’s minds. It affects people of all races. I’ve used it as an introductory tool in gang-intervention work: what frightens you? What horrible things have you experienced?”

Paying tribute, actor Virginia Madsen, who starred as student Helen Lyle in Candyman, said Todd “now is an angel. As he was in life”.

She called him a “truly poetic man” with “a deep knowledge of the arts”.

“I will miss him so much and hope he haunts me once in a while,” she added. “But I will not summon him in the mirror!”

The original film’s sequel – Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh – set three years later sees Todd’s iconic lead appear again in New Orleans, encountering a descendant of his daughter.

The third film – Candyman: Day of the Dead – was released in 1999, but set in 2020 Los Angeles.

Todd, and others from the 1992 film, reprised their roles in the 2021 film.

In 2020, Todd called that version “brilliant”, crediting the film’s director Nia DaCosta as “a fan of body horror”.

As part of her tribute, Madsen praised the “gift” that the film’s co-writer Jordan Peele had given herself and Todd to “let us live again as lovers”.

Before Candyman, one of Todd’s earliest roles in film was in 1986 as Sgt Warren in war drama Platoon.

Smog starts slow.

At first, you cannot see it but you can smell it. It smells like something is burning. And it intensifies as the temperature drops.

Then the smoke and fog start to envelop you and the city around you. Now you can see it. You are walking through the smoke, a thick ceiling of it hanging overhead.

If you are not wearing a mask or you lower it for a moment, you will immediately inhale the bitter air.

Your throat might start to feel itchy and sore. As it gets worse, you start sneezing and coughing. But it’s worse for others: children, the elderly, those with breathing difficulties. The hospitals know to expect the influx.

Lahore and its 13 million residents have now been choking for a week; the air quality index has passed the 1,000 mark repeatedly this month – anything above 300 is considered hazardous.

Pakistani officials have scrambled to respond to the crisis – its scale unprecedented even in a city which deals with smog at this time each year.

Schools are closed, workers have been told to stay home and people urged to stay indoors – part of a so-called “green lockdown”, which has also seen motorbike rickshaws, heavy vehicles and motorbike parking banned from hot spot areas.

By the end of the week, Lahore High Court had ordered all the markets in the Punjab province to close by 20:00 each night, with complete closures on Sundays. Parks and zoos have also been shut until 17 November.

The problem, according to Nasa scientist Pawan Gupta, is that pollution levels in the city “typically peak in late November and December”.

“So this is just beginning. The worst pollution days are probably still ahead of us,” he warned.

The smoke that has enveloped Lahore, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, can be seen from space – as can part of the cause.

Satellite images from the US space agency Nasa shows both the thick layer of smog and the multiple concentrations of fire in the region between the Indian capital, Delhi, and Pakistan’s Lahore.

The same image, six weeks earlier, shows clear skies and – crucially – far fewer fires.

A major cause of the smog is the fires which are caused by the burning of stubble after harvest by farmers in both Pakistan and India – a quick way to clear their fields ready for the next crops.

This year, Nasa estimates it will count “between 15,500 and 18,500 fires ”, according to Hiren Jethva, a senior research scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Morgan State University, higher than most years.

According to Pakistan’s environment protection authorities, around 30% of Lahore’s smog comes from across the border in India. The Indian government has this year doubled fines for farmers caught stubble-burning as it tries to deal with the issue.

But much of Lahore’s air pollution comes from its five million motorbikes and millions of other vehicles’ exhausts. On Friday, Lahore’s high court identified heavy traffic emissions as the main cause of the smog, according to the Associated Press of Pakistan.

Then there are the industries in the city’s outskirts – like the coal-fired brick kilns – adding even more pollution to the air.

And in the final months of the year, it all combines with cold air flowing down from Tibet, creating the smog which is currently sitting over the city.

It is clear the toxic air is making people sick.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Air Quality Index (AQI), a value of 50 or below indicates good air quality, while a value above 300 signals Hazardous air quality.

The WHO guidelines say the average concentration of PM2.5 level should be below five.

Abid Omar, founder of Pakistan’s Air Quality Initiative, which collects data from 143 air quality monitors across the country, says the readings in Lahore “have hit beyond index on every day in November”.

“Some locations in Lahore have exceeded 1,000,” he says, adding: “On Thursday we had one reading of 1,917 on the AQI scale.”

By Tuesday, it was widely reported 900 people had been admitted to hospital in Lahore with breathing difficulties.

“More and more people are coming with complaints of asthma, itchy throats and coughing,” says Dr Irfan Malik, a pulmonologist at one of the biggest hospitals in Lahore.

He has already seen a surge in patients complaining of respiratory tract illnesses – “particularly worrying because we have not yet seen our first cold wave of the winter season”.

The danger is a constant concern for Lahore resident Sadia Kashif.

“Like every mother, I want to see my children run and play without fearing pollution,” she tells the BBC.

“I see my children struggle with coughs and breathing problems these days, and it is a painful reminder that our air has become extremely toxic.”

But the current “green lockdown” has left her unimpressed.

“It is easy for the government to shut down school rather than taking real steps to address the crisis,” says Kashif.

For years, authorities have struggled to find a solution to Lahore’s pollution problem.

The government hopes short fixes will provide reprieve, but says long term solutions – like improving public transport – will take time.

In the meantime, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz announced this week she intends to write a letter to her counterpart in Indian Punjab to invite them to engage in “climate diplomacy”, since it impacts both regions. Delhi says it is yet to hear from Pakistan on the issue.

However, Omar points out air pollution is not a seasonal problem but a persistent issue.

“Lahore is much more polluted than Delhi with pollution episodes that last longer and reach higher peaks,” he notes.

And it is getting worse, he believes. As per his own analysis of data, October has seen a 25% rise in pollution level compared to the same period last year.

Governments on both sides of the border need to act swiftly to deal with the issue, he argues.

“The roadmap to clean air is clear, but the present policies from both India and Pakistan aren’t enough to significantly reduce pollution.”

It has left him sceptical of the change in the near future.

“I tell people, blue skies are an indicator of good governance,” Omar says.