“What will Vladimir Putin do next?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot this week.

Understandably so.

After all, this was the week the Kremlin leader lowered the threshold for the use of Russian nuclear weapons.

It was the week the US and UK crossed (another) Putin red line, allowing Ukraine to fire Western-supplied longer-range missiles into Russia.

It was also the week that President Putin, in effect, threatened the UK, America and any other country supplying Ukraine with such weapons and for such a purpose.

“We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities,” the Russian leader said in an address to the nation on Thursday evening.

So, you can see: “What will Vladimir Putin do next?” is a most pressing question. And, since I’m the BBC’s Russia Editor, you might expect me to have the answer.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t.

Perhaps even Putin doesn’t know the answer, which makes things even more serious.

Instead of answers, some observations.

• LIVE: Zelensky says world must respond to Russia’s use of new type of missile in Ukraine

This week the Kremlin accused the “collective West” of escalating the war in Ukraine.

But nearly three years of war in Ukraine have shown that it is Vladimir Putin who embraces escalation as a means to achieving his goals – in this case, control over Ukraine or at the very least peace on Russia’s terms.

Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his decision to declare four Ukrainian territories part of Russia, his deployment of North Korean troops to Kursk region, his decision on Thursday to target the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile, followed up by threats to strike the West – all of these represent moments of escalation in this conflict.

I once described Vladimir Putin as a car with no reverse gear and no brakes, careering down the highway, accelerator pedal stuck to the floor.

From what I can see, little has changed.

Don’t expect the Putinmobile to suddenly decelerate or de-escalate now in the face of longer-range missile strikes on Russia.

Escalation, though, is another matter. That’s a distinct possibility.

Ukraine will be bracing itself for more Russian attacks, even heavier bombardments.

Western governments will be assessing the threat level in light of Putin’s warnings.

Even before the Kremlin leader’s TV address, there had been fears in the West of an upsurge in hybrid Russian warfare.

Last month the head of MI5 warned that Russian military intelligence was engaged in a campaign to “generate mayhem on British and European streets”.

“We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more,” he added.

Back in June, Putin suggested that Moscow might arm adversaries of the West if Ukraine were allowed to strike deep into Russia with Western long-range missiles.

“We believe that if someone is thinking it is possible to supply such weapons to a war zone to strike our territory and create problems for us,” he said, “why can’t we supply our weapons of the same class to those regions around the world where they will target sensitive facilities of the countries that are doing this to Russia?”

Putin warns West as Russia hits Ukraine with new missile

The question “What will Putin do next?” is usually followed by: “Would Putin use a nuclear weapon in the Ukraine war?”

The Russian president has dropped some unsubtle hints.

On announcing the start of his “special military operation” – the full-scale invasion of Ukraine – he had issued a warning to “those who may be tempted to interfere from the outside”.

“No matter who tries to stand in our way or create threats for our country and our people,” the Kremlin leader declared, “they must know that Russia will respond immediately.

“And the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.”

Western leaders generally dismissed what they saw as nuclear sabre-rattling. Since the start of the war Western governments have crossed several Russian “red lines”: providing Ukraine with tanks, advanced missile systems and then F-16 fighter jets.

The “consequences” threatened by the Kremlin never materialised.

In September Putin announced he was lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons – the decree was published this week. A clear warning to Europe and America not to allow longer-range missile strikes on Russian territory.

Now this red line, too, has been crossed. In his address to the nation Putin confirmed Western reports that Ukraine had fired US-supplied Atacms and British-made Storm Shadow missiles at targets inside Russia.

Earlier this week, when pro-Kremlin tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets asked a retired lieutenant-general how Russia should respond to an Atacms attack on Bryansk region, he replied:

“Starting World War Three over strikes on an arms depot in Bryansk region would probably be short-sighted.”

It would be comforting to think that the Kremlin shares that view.

But Vladimir Putin’s address to the nation contained no evidence of that.

His message to Ukraine’s supporters in the West appeared to be: this is a red line I’m serious about, I dare you to cross it.

“Even Putin doesn’t know whether he can use a nuclear weapon, or he can’t. It depends on his emotions,” Novaya Gazeta columnist Andrei Kolesnikov told me recently.

“We know he’s a very emotional man. The decision to begin this war was also an emotional step. Because of that we must take seriously his idea of the changing of the nuclear doctrine. They say the fear of war must return and will contain both sides, but this is also a tool of escalation.

“In this interpretation we must admit that Putin, under some circumstances, can use at least a tactical nuclear weapon in the framework of a limited nuclear war. It will not solve the problem. But it will be the start of a suicidal escalation for the whole world.”

Tactical nuclear weapons are small warheads intended for use on the battlefield or a limited strike.

Vladimir Putin may act on emotions. He is also, clearly, driven by resentment of the West and appears determined not to back down.

But he also knows the world could soon be a very different place.

In two months’ time Joe Biden will be out of office and Donald Trump will be in the White House.

President-Elect Trump has expressed scepticism regarding US military assistance for Ukraine and has been fiercely critical of Nato.

He’s also said recently that talking to Vladimir Putin would be “a smart thing”.

All of that should be music to Putin’s ears.

Which means that, despite the latest threats and warnings, the Kremlin may decide against a major escalation right now.

That is, if the Kremlin has calculated that Donald Trump will help end the war on terms beneficial to Russia.

If that calculation changes, so could Moscow’s response.

Medics at the epicentre of the mpox outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have told the BBC there has been a notable reduction in new infections since the first batch of vaccines were rolled out last month.

The UN World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed to the BBC that new cases appeared to be “plateauing” in DR Congo, but cautioned that it was too early to tell the impact of vaccinations.

Mpox – formerly known as monkeypox – is a highly contagious disease and is suspected to have killed at least 900 people in DR Congo this year.

The news comes ahead of a meeting at which officials are set to decide if the outbreak should continue to be considered a global public health emergency.

Other public health experts in Africa have warned the disease is still spreading, with 19 countries in the continent reporting infections.

• What is mpox and how is it spread?
• Nurses working in fear: BBC visits mpox epicentre

In September the BBC visited a clinic in Lwiro, a rural area about an hour’s drive outside the city of Bukavu in DR Congo’s eastern province of South Kivu.

The cases there have been linked to a relatively new and more severe strain of mpox known as Clade 1b, which appears to spread more easily and cause more serious disease.

Two months ago, we found the community hospital overwhelmed – with long queues of infected patients, many forced to share beds or mattresses on the floor and doctors struggling to cope with the numbers arriving each day.

“Right now, we can’t have more than 60 patients in the hospital,” nurse Emmanuel Fikiri, who has been on the front line of the mpox crisis for months, told the BBC this week.

“This is due to the fact that there has been an improvement, there has been vaccination against mpox and there has been support from several partners who have enabled us to take care of the patients,” he said.

When Mr Fikiri last spoke to the BBC he could only talk briefly as he rushed off to treat some of the nearly 200 patients who were then crammed into the wards.

But he is now much more optimistic about the situation given that vaccine take up in the community has been high – meaning new infections appear to have dropped dramatically.

Indeed when a BBC producer visited the Lwiro hospital earlier this week we found a much calmer scene: the long queues had gone and there were some empty beds in the children’s ward.

DR Congo started its mpox vaccination programme in October after taking delivery of 265,000 doses donated by the international community.

More than 50,000 people have been vaccinated so far – with the rollout focused on communities most at risk, including towns and villages in the eastern DR Congo.

But experts have noted that mpox appears to be disproportionately affecting children in DR Congo – and they are not being vaccinated. It was only this week that the WHO authorised a vaccine expected from Japan for children.

“Out of the people affected, about 30% are children,” Dr Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), told the BBC – explaining that children were “also vectors of transmission”.

Another nurse at the Lwiro clinic, Jackson Murhula, warned that it was too early to say for sure the disease in the community had been beaten – though he too was happy to see things easing.

“Lately it’s started to slow down, because at the beginning we were receiving 10 or 15 new cases a day, but now we’re only receiving two or three cases a day,” he said.

“We can’t confirm that we’ve totally stabilised the disease, because cases are still coming in, but it’s not like before.”

Among the children being treated this week is three-year-old Atukuzwe Banissa.

He groans in pain, his eyes shut and face covered in whitish spots left behind by the healing sores.

His mother, 25-year-old Julienne Mwinja, says his symptoms began with teary eyes.

She administered eye drops, but within a day, the little boy developed sores in his mouth, face and body.

“He looked like he’d been scalded by hot water,” the mother of three told the BBC.

That is when she brought him to Lwiro hospital where he was admitted for more than a week.

For the medics at Lwrio, it is heartening that people are now tending to come to the clinic as soon as they get symptoms rather than first going to traditional healers.

Dr Samuel Boland, WHO incident manager for mpox, told the BBC that more than 96% of all new mpox cases were currently in DR Congo, Uganda and Rwanda.

While confirming DR Congo had turned a corner, he warned it was too soon to be sure the outbreak was over.

“In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we’ve actually seen, to some extent, a plateauing in the number of mpox cases, but collectively, it still is a very significantly affected country globally,” he said.

In fact, more than 90% of those who have died of mpox worldwide this year have been in DR Congo.

Although exact figures are unknown as only 77 deaths have been confirmed in the laboratory as there are not many testing centres available in certain areas of the continent.

“And so there remains a very, very strong need to make sure that we continue intervening at pace and at scale, even in places where we see that there may not be an escalation of cases at this moment in time,” Dr Boland said.

“Though overall, we might see a shift in the transmission in some places, we do again, still see escalation in others – and so we’re not out of the woods yet.”

Vaccination programmes have started elsewhere in Africa too, including in Nigeria and DR Congo’s neighbour Rwanda.

Dr Kaseya said the Africa CDC had not seen any notable changes week-on-week over the past month in the DR Congo and warned that it was too early to say the mpox outbreak was under control.

With every effort to conduct vaccinations, reinforce surveillance and laboratory systems “maybe by mid-January to February we’ll start to see a decrease in the cases of infection and deaths”.

WHO officials will now assess all the evidence on the pace of spread of the disease before deciding whether to downscale the global alert level.

• The children bearing the brunt of the mpox outbreak
• ‘Mpox made my throat so painful I couldn’t sleep’

A second Australian teenager has died of suspected methanol poisoning, bringing to six the number of foreign tourists who have died after apparently drinking tainted alcohol in Laos.

The family of Holly Bowles, 19, said it was with “broken hearts” that they confirmed her death, more than a week after she fell ill in the tourist town of Vang Vieng.

Her friend Bianca Jones, also 19, and British lawyer Simone White, 28, from south-east London, were confirmed to have died on Thursday.

An unnamed US man and two Danish women, aged 19 and 20, are also among the victims of the suspected poisoning, believed to be connected to bootleg alcohol.

In a statement released to media on Friday, Holly’s family said they were taking comfort from the fact she had brought so much “joy and happiness to so many people”.

They added that she had been living “her best life travelling through South East Asia meeting new friends and enjoying incredible experiences” when she became ill.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said: “All Australians will be heartbroken by the tragic passing of Holly Bowles. I offer my deepest sympathies to her family and friends.”

Holly and Bianca were taken to hospital on Wednesday, 13 November, after they failed to check out of their hostel in the small, riverside town of Vang Vieng, about two hours north of the capital Vientiane.

News reports and testimonies suggest the tourists may have consumed alcohol laced with methanol – a deadly substance often found in bootleg alcohol.

Medical specialists say drinking as little as 25 millilitres of methanol can be fatal, but it is sometimes added to drinks because it is cheaper than alcohol.

Christer Hogstrand, a professor of molecular ecotoxicology, at King’s College London points out, it is also “not uncommon in home-distilled alcohol”.

“Methanol is like the alcohol in our drinks – colourless and odourless – but its impact on humans can be deadly,” he explained. “It has a different carbon atom structure which completely changes how humans process it in the body, leading to these potentially fatal consequences.”

It is not yet known where any of the people who fell sick or died were poisoned. It can take up to 24 hours for victims to start showing signs of illness.

The Nana Backpacker Hostel – where the Australian teenagers were staying – has said it gave out free shots to around 100 guests the previous evening.

But the hostel’s manager told news agency Associated Press that no other guests had become unwell.

The manager of the hostel has since been detained for questioning by police.

Online booking agency Hostelworld said in a statement that it has removed Nana Backpacker Hostel from its platform, and has contacted all customers in Vang Vieng and surrounding areas.

It added it was advising all travellers in the area to “exercise caution” when consuming alcohol and to “only purchase products from reputable vendors”.

Few details have emerged about any of the other victims and where they may have visited.

Simone White, a lawyer who lived in Orpington, was reportedly travelling with a group of friends.

In a statement, her parents said they were “devastated by the loss of our beautiful, kind and loving daughter”.

“Simone was one of a kind and had the most wonderful energy and spark for life. She was a soul who gave so much to so many and was loved by her family, friends and colleagues.”

They added she had been “taken from us too soon” and would be “sorely missed by her brother, grandmother and entire family”.

“Our hearts go out to all other families who have been affected by this terrible tragedy,” the statement said.

Her law firm, Squire Patton Boggs, described Ms White as “a talented colleague with a bright future ahead of her”.

“Our thoughts go out to all of Simone’s family, friends, and those colleagues and clients who had the privilege to work with and know Simone.”

Australia is pushing authorities to be open about their investigation into the incident.

New Zealand and Dutch officials have also both said they were monitoring incidents involving nationals.

Vang Vieng is a hub for backpackers travelling across south-east Asia. It’s home to the Banana Pancake Trail – a popular backpacking route spanning Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces arrest if he travels to the UK, after an international arrest warrant was issued for him, Downing Street has indicated.

A No 10 spokesman refused to comment on the specific case but said the government would fulfil its “legal obligations”.

On Thursday the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, along with Israel’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

The court’s member countries, including the UK, have signed a treaty that obliges them to act on arrest warrants.

Asked whether Netanyahu would be detained if he entered the UK, the prime minister’s official spokesman refused to comment on “hypotheticals”.

However, he added: “The government would fulfil its obligations under the act and indeed its legal obligations.”

This refers to the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which states that if the court issues a warrant for arrest, a designated minister “shall transmit the request… to an appropriate judicial officer”, who, if satisfied the warrant appears to have been issued by the ICC, “shall endorse the warrant for execution in the United Kingdom”.

The PM’s spokesman confirmed the government stands by the process outlined in the act and would “always comply with its legal obligations as set out by domestic law and indeed international law”.

He was unable to confirm which secretary of state would be involved in the process and did not answer questions about whether the government was seeking legal advice from Attorney General Lord Hermer – the UK’s top lawyer – in relation to the case.

Asked whether the PM was still willing to talk to Netanyahu, the spokesman said it was “obviously important that we have a dialogue with Israel on all levels”, describing the country as “a key partner across a range of areas”.

Last month Lord Hermer told the BBC he would not allow political considerations to influence his conclusions if the ICC were to issue an arrest warrant.

“My advice [on an arrest warrant for Mr Netanyahu] would be legal advice, based on analysis of the law,” he said.

“It’s not for the attorney to dictate what a government chooses to do. The role of the attorney is to provide fearless legal advice as to what the law requires, what the contents of the law is, and where the law takes you. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

Following the arrest warrants being issued on Thursday, Downing Street said the UK government respected the ICC’s independence and remained focused on pushing for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The court also issued a warrant for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, who Israel says was killed in July, over alleged war crimes in relation to the 7 October 2023 attacks against Israel.

Shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel criticised the ICC for drawing a “moral equivalence” between Israel’s actions in Gaza and 7 October attacks.

She called on the government to “condemn and challenge” the court’s decision, describing it as “concerning and provocative”.

After winning power, the new Labour government scrapped its predecessor’s plan to challenge the right of the ICC to issue arrest warrants, saying it was a matter for the judges to decide.

The impact of the warrants will depend on whether the court’s 124 member states – which do not include Israel or its ally, the US – decide to enforce them or not.

US President Joe Biden has called the arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister “outrageous”, saying there is “no equivalence” between Israel and Hamas.

Both Israel and Hamas reject the allegations made by the ICC.

A New York judge has delayed Donald Trump’s scheduled sentencing as his attorneys continue to push for his conviction to be tossed out.

Trump originally was going to appear in court for sentencing on 26 November.

He was convicted on 34 felony fraud counts in May.

His attorneys argue his conviction should be thrown out on the grounds of presidential immunity, and because it would interfere with his duties as president.

The Manhattan District Attorney, who prosecuted Trump, plans to oppose Trump’s effort, but has suggested to the judge that he might wait to sentence the president-elect until after his second term in office.

Justice Juan Merchan has paused all proceedings until he hears briefs from both parties, which are due 9 December.

Russia is estimated to have supplied North Korea with more than a million barrels of oil since March this year, according to satellite imagery analysis from the Open Source Centre, a non-profit research group based in the UK.

The oil is payment for the weapons and troops Pyongyang has sent Moscow to fuel its war in Ukraine, leading experts and UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, have told the BBC.

These transfers violate UN sanctions, which ban countries from selling oil to North Korea, except in small quantities, in an attempt to stifle its economy to prevent it from further developing nuclear weapons.

The satellite images, shared exclusively with the BBC, show more than a dozen different North Korean oil tankers arriving at an oil terminal in Russia’s Far East a total of 43 times over the past eight months.

Further pictures, taken of the ships at sea, appear to show the tankers arriving empty, and leaving almost full.

North Korea is the only country in the world not allowed to buy oil on the open market. The number of barrels of refined petroleum it can receive is capped by the United Nations at 500,000 annually, well below the amount it needs.

Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to our request for comment.

• LIVE: Zelensky says world must respond to Russia’s use of new type of missile in Ukraine

The first oil transfer documented by the Open Source Centre in a new report, was on 7 March 2024, seven months after it first emerged Pyongyang was sending Moscow weapons.

The shipments have continued as thousands of North Korean troops are reported to have been sent to Russia to fight, with the last one recorded on 5 November.

“While Kim Jong Un is providing Vladimir Putin with a lifeline to continue his war, Russia is quietly providing North Korea with a lifeline of its own,” says Joe Byrne from the Open Source Centre.

“This steady flow of oil gives North Korea a level of stability it hasn’t had since these sanctions were introduced.”

Four former members of a UN panel responsible for tracking the sanctions on North Korea have told the BBC the transfers are a consequence of increasing ties between Moscow and Pyongyang.

“These transfers are fuelling Putin’s war machine – this is oil for missiles, oil for artillery and now oil for soldiers,” says Hugh Griffiths, who led the panel from 2014 to 2019.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy has told the BBC in a statement: “To keep fighting in Ukraine, Russia has become increasingly reliant on North Korea for troops and weapons in exchange for oil.”

He added that this was “having a direct impact on security in the Korean peninsula, Europe and Indo-Pacific”.

While most people in North Korea rely on coal for their daily lives, oil is essential for running the country’s military. Diesel and petrol are used to transport missile launchers and troops around the country, run munitions factories and fuel the cars of Pyongyang’s elite.

The 500,000 barrels North Korea is allowed to receive fall far short of the nine million it consumes – meaning that since the cap was introduced in 2017, the country has been forced to buy oil illicitly from criminal networks to make up this deficit.

This involves transferring the oil between ships out at sea – a risky, expensive and time-consuming business, according to Dr Go Myong-hyun, a senior research fellow at South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy, which is linked to the country’s spy agency.

“Now Kim Jong Un is getting oil directly, it’s likely better quality, and chances are he’s getting it for free, as quid pro quo for supplying munitions. What could be better than that?”

“A million barrels is nothing for a large oil producer like Russia to release, but it is a substantial amount for North Korea to receive,” Dr Go adds.

In all 43 of the journeys tracked by the Open Source Centre using satellite images, the North Korean-flagged tankers arrived at Russia’s Vostochny Port with their trackers switched off, concealing their movements.

The images show they then made their way back to one of four ports on North Korea’s east and west coast.

“The vessels appear silently, almost every week,” says Joe Byrne, the researcher from the Open Source Centre. “Since March there’s been a fairly constant flow.”

The team, which has been tracking these tankers since the oil sanctions were first introduced, used their knowledge of each ship’s capacity to calculate how many oil barrels they could carry.

Then they studied images of the ships entering and leaving Vostochny and, in most instances, could see how low they sat in the water and, therefore, how full they were.

The tankers, they assess, were loaded to 90% of their capacity.

“We can see from some of the images that if the ships were any fuller they would sink,” Mr Byrne says.

Based on this, they calculate that, since March, Russia has given North Korea more than a million barrels of oil – more than double the annual cap, and around ten times the amount Moscow officially gave Pyongyang in 2023.

This follows an assessment by the US government in May that Moscow had already supplied more than 500,000 barrels’ worth of oil.

Cloud cover means the researchers cannot get a clear image of the port every day.

“The whole of August was cloudy, so we weren’t able to document a single trip,” Mr Byrne says, leading his team to believe that one million barrels is a “baseline” figure.

Not only do these oil deliveries breach UN sanctions on North Korea, that Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, signed off on – but also, more than half of the journeys tracked by the Open Source Centre were made by vessels that have been individually sanctioned by the UN.

This means they should have been impounded upon entering Russian waters.

But in March 2024, three weeks after the first oil transfer was documented, Russia disbanded the UN panel responsible for monitoring sanctions violations, by using its veto at the UN Security Council.

Ashley Hess, who was working on the panel up until its collapse, says they saw evidence the transfers had started.

“We were tracking some of the ships and companies involved, but our work was stopped, possibly after they had already breached the 500,000-barrel cap”.

Eric Penton-Voak, who led the group from 2021-2023, says the Russian members on the panel tried to censor its work.

“Now the panel is gone, they can simply ignore the rules,” he adds. “The fact that Russia is now encouraging these ships to visit its ports and load up with oil shows a new level of contempt for these sanctions.”

But Mr Penton-Voak, who is on the board of the Open Source Centre, thinks the problem runs much deeper.

“You now have these autocratic regimes increasingly working together to help one another achieve whatever it is they want, and ignoring the wishes of the international community.”

This is an “increasingly dangerous” playbook, he argues.

“The last thing you want is a North Korean tactical nuclear weapon turning up in Iran, for instance.”

As Kim Jong Un steps up his support for Vladimir Putin’s war, concern is growing over what else he will receive in return.

The US and South Korea estimate Pyongyang has now sent Moscow 16,000 shipping containers filled with artillery shells and rockets, while remnants of exploded North Korean ballistic missiles have been recovered on the battlefield in Ukraine.

More recently, Putin and Kim signed a defence pact, leading to thousands of North Korean troops being sent to Russia’s Kursk region, where intelligence reports indicate they are now engaged in battle.

The South Korean government has told the BBC it would “sternly respond to the violation of the UN Security Council resolutions by Russia and North Korea”.

Its biggest worry is that Moscow will provide Pyongyang with technology to improve its spy satellites and ballistic missiles.

Last month, Seoul’s defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun, stated there was a “high chance” North Korea was asking for such help.

“If you’re sending your people to die in a foreign war, a million barrels of oil is just not sufficient reward,” Dr Go says.

Andrei Lankov, an expert in North Korea-Russia relations at Seoul’s Kookmin University, agrees.

“I used to think it was not in Russia’s interest to share military technology, but perhaps its calculus has changed. The Russians need these troops, and this gives the North Koreans more leverage.”

US President-elect Donald Trump has named Pam Bondi as his nominee for attorney general, hours after Matt Gaetz, his first choice, withdrew from consideration.

If confirmed by the Senate, the role means Bondi would be in charge of the justice department and its roughly $45bn (£35.7bn) budget.

Once the first female attorney general of Florida, she would play a key role in defending any legal challenges to Trump policies and implementing his vow to remake the department.

Some consider Bondi, 59, a less controversial choice than Gaetz, who faced scrutiny over sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Gaetz has denied the claims but said he hoped to avoid a “needlessly protracted Washington scuffle” by withdrawing.

Announcing his selection, Trump wrote in a social media post: “For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore.

“Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again. I have known Pam for many years – She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!”

• The rise and fall of Matt Gaetz in eight wild days

Bondi is a chair at America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank founded by former Trump staff members, leading its legal arm. She has also served on Trump’s opioid and drug abuse commission.

Bondi, a longtime Trump ally, was part of his legal team during his first impeachment trial and when it made false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him due to voter fraud.

She also publicly supported him by showing up at court during his hush money trial in New York, which ended in May with a conviction of 34 counts of fraud.

Born in Tampa, Florida, Bondi studied criminal justice at the University of Florida in 1987, before going on to receive a professional degree from Stetson University College of Law three years later. She was admitted to the Florida Bar in 1991.

Before entering politics, Bondi spent more than 18 years as a prosecutor at the Hillsborough county state attorney’s office, trying cases “ranging from domestic violence to capital murder”, according to a profile on her lobbying firm’s website.

She was elected as Florida’s first female attorney general in 2010 – having won the support of former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin – zoning in on opioid abuse, synthetic drugs and human trafficking.

Bondi’s relationship with Trump goes back years. She has supported him since his 2016 election campaign and told voters at a recent rally that she considers him a “friend”.

In 2016, Trump and Bondi came under scrutiny over a $25,000 (£19,982) contribution he had made in 2013 to her re-election campaign for Florida attorney general.

The payment was made at a time when Bondi’s office was reportedly considering whether to open a fraud investigation into Trump University.

The fraud investigation never happened, although Bondi denied the decision was influenced by the donation she received.

Bondi has criticised the criminal cases against Trump and spoken out against Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel, and other prosecutors who charged the president-elect in two federal cases.

She described them as “horrible” people who she said were trying to make names for themselves by “going after Donald Trump and weaponising our legal system”, AP reports.

In May, she told Fox News a “tremendous amount of trust” was lost in the justice system after Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in his historic criminal trial.

“It’s a sad day for our justice system,” she added.

Several Republican senators have expressed support for Bondi’s selection. Lindsey Graham, senator for South Carolina, called Bondi’s selection a “grand slam, touchdown, hole in one, ace, hat trick, slam dunk, Olympic gold medal pick.”

Eric Schmitt, senator for Missouri, said Bondi was a “great choice”.

An Alabama man convicted of murdering a female hitchhiker in 1994 became the third person in US history to be executed by nitrogen gas.

Carey Dale Grayson, 50, was convicted of capital murder in 1996 and was executed on Thursday for the death of then 37-year-old Vickie Deblieux.

His lawyers argued for the US Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the new execution method, but the high court halted a petition that would have stopped the execution.

No other state has used nitrogen hypoxia to carry out the death sentence.

Grayson was executed at the William C. Holman Correction Facility in Alabama for the murder, and members of his victim’s family protested the act.

Jodi Haley, Deblieux’s daughter who was 12 at the time of the murder, told reporters after the execution that Grayson was abused in his youth. She said that “society failed this man as a child, and my family suffered because of it”.

“Murdering inmates under the guise of justice needs to stop,” she said. She added that “no one should have the right to take a person’s possibilities, days, and life”.

Alabama began using nitrogen gas this year to carry out death sentences. It involves using a respirator gas mask to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas that results in a lack of oxygen.

Grayson’s attorneys argued the new method causes “conscious suffocation” and does not result in swift unconsciousness.

But state attorneys pointed to two prior executions of prisoners who died by nitrogen hypoxia earlier this year. The latest took place last month.

Grayson made obscene gestures before the execution on Thursday and shook while taking gasping breaths when the gas began flowing, US media reports.

He was one of four teenagers convicted in the killing of Deblieux and the only one who was over the age of 18 at the time of the murder. He was the only one to receive the death sentence.

Deblieux was planning to hitchhike from Tennessee to Louisiana when she was picked up by the four teenagers in Alabama.

The teenagers took her to a wooded area where they beat her, stood on her throat and threw her body off a cliff.

They later returned to the mountain where they mutilated her body by stabbing and cutting her 180 times and removing parts of her fingers.

Deblieux’s body was later found by three rock climbers. A medical examiner said every bone in her face was fractured at least once.

“My prayer for Vickie’s family is that they can find solace in the state of Alabama finally serving justice for their heart-breaking loss,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement. “And my hope is that one day it will not take three decades to provide justice for other victims of violent crimes.”

Dawn Richard, a former member of two groups formed by Sean “Diddy” Combs, was “absolutely terrified” of the rapper, her lawyer has said.

The singer sued Mr Combs in September, accusing him of threatening her life and “subjecting her to years of inhumane working conditions which included groping, assault, and false imprisonment”.

Ms Richard, a former member of Danity Kane and Diddy – Dirty Money, is among more than two dozen people who have filed lawsuits against him. He is also facing criminal charges of racketeering and sex trafficking.

He denies the charges, and his lawyer has called Ms Richard’s claims “manufactured” and “false”.

Speaking to the BBC’s Newsnight on Thursday, attorney Lisa Bloom said her client alleged that “he groped and grabbed her body parts, sexually assaulted her, that he not only failed to pay her money that was promised to her, but actually prevented her from eating and sleeping during those years – just treated her terribly”.

Ms Bloom also claimed the singer witnessed “some severe acts of violence” by Mr Combs against his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura and other women.

“And when she spoke out, she says she was threatened with more physical violence. She said Sean Combs had a vicious temper and she was absolutely terrified of him.”

Ms Ventura, also a singer, sued Mr Combs a year ago accusing him of rape and sex trafficking, and then settled the case a day later.

A video later emerged of him attacking her in a hotel corridor in 2016.

Ms Richard’s lawsuit said she witnessed him “brutally beat” Ms Ventura and tried to intervene many times, and encouraged her to leave him.

“Each time, Mr Combs learned of her efforts to help Ms Ventura and became enraged, threatening Ms Richard’s life,” the document said.

He allegedly told her “there will be consequences” if she told anyone, and warned that “people go missing”.

Ms Bloom said: “Dawn Richard, my client, says that when she spoke out about it, tried to get Cassie to speak out… When she complained about it, she was also threatened with physical violence. So [it was] just a really violent, tumultuous atmosphere.”

Mr Combs’ lawyer Erica Wolff said the rapper was “shocked and disappointed” by Ms Richard’s lawsuit and that she had “manufactured a series of false claims all in the hopes of trying to get a pay day”.

He was “confidently standing on truth and looks forward to proving that in court”, she added.

On Thursday, Ms Bloom also told Newsnight she has another client who is preparing to come forward with allegations relating to parties thrown by Mr Combs, which were dubbed “freak-offs”.

“But many other people already have come forward with the allegations that people were drugged, that they were forced into sexual activity in order to have business deals with Sean Combs,” she said.

Mr Combs is due back in court on Friday to make a new request for bail in his criminal case. Judges have previously denied his bail requests, citing a risk that he might tamper with witnesses.

Earlier this week, prosecutors alleged that he had broken prison rules by contacting potential witnesses by using other inmates’ telephone accounts.

According to the New York Times, prosecutors have focused on a witness named Kalenna Harper, who was the third member of Diddy – Dirty Money alongside Mr Combs and Ms Richard.

Prosecutors say Mr Combs had 128 phone contacts with Ms Harper shortly after Ms Richard filed her lawsuit, US media reported.

Ms Harper put out a statement saying Ms Richard’s allegations “are not representative of my experiences, and some do not align with my own truth”.

On Newsnight, Ms Bloom did not name Ms Harper, but said there was a woman who Ms Richard had worked with who “came out publicly and essentially called my client a liar”.

She continued: “The strong implication there is that he talked her into making those statements, perhaps gave her money. We don’t know.

“But that would be witness tampering. That’s what the government argued. The judge agreed and he was denied bail as a result, which he should have been.”

However, Mr Combs’ lawyers have argued that Ms Harper’s statement was “the furthest thing from witness obstruction I can think of”, and was just “two witnesses having divergent recollections of similar events”.

Just weeks ago, Gautam Adani, one of the world’s richest men, celebrated Donald Trump’s election victory and announced plans to invest $10bn (£7.9bn) in energy and infrastructure projects in the US.

Now, the 62-year-old Indian billionaire and a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose sprawling $169bn empire spans ports and renewable energy, faces US fraud charges that could potentially jeopardise his ambitions at home and abroad.

Federal prosecutors have accused him of orchestrating a $250m bribery scheme and concealing it to raise money in the US. They allege Mr Adani and his executives paid bribes to Indian officials to secure contracts worth $2bn in profits over 20 years. Adani Group has denied the allegations, calling them “baseless.”

But this is already hurting the group and the Indian economy.

Adani Group firms lost $34bn in market value on Thursday, reducing the combined market capitalisation of its 10 companies to $147bn. Adani Green Energy, which is the firm at the centre of the allegations, also said it wouldn’t proceed with a $600m bond offering.

Then there are questions about the impact of the charges on India’s business and politics.

India’s economy is deeply intertwined with Mr Adani, the country’s leading infrastructure tycoon. He operates 13 ports (30% market share), seven airports (23% of passenger traffic), and India’s second-largest cement business (20% of the market).

With six coal-fired power plants, Mr Adani is India’s largest private player in power. At the same time, he has pledged to invest $50bn in green hydrogen and runs a 8,000km (4,970 miles)-long natural gas pipeline. He’s also building India’s longest expressway and redeveloping India’s largest slum. He employs over 45,000 people, but his businesses impact millions nationwide.

• Gautam Adani: Asia’s richest man

His global ambitions span coal mines in Indonesia and Australia, and infrastructure projects in Africa.

Mr Adani’s portfolio closely mirrors Modi’s policy priorities, beginning with infrastructure and more recently expanding into clean energy. He has thrived despite critics labeling his business empire as crony capitalism, pointing to his close ties with Modi, both as Gujarat’s chief minister – where they both hail from – and as India’s prime minister. (Like any successful businessman, Mr Adani has also forged ties with many opposition leaders, investing in their states.)

“This [the bribery allegations] is big. Mr Adani and Modi have been inseparable for a long time. This is going to influence the political economy of India,” says Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, an Indian journalist who has written extensively on the business group.

This crisis also comes as Mr Adani has spent nearly two years trying to rebuild his image after US short-seller Hindenburg Research’s 2023 report accused his conglomerate of decades of stock manipulation and fraud. Though Mr Adani denied the claims, the allegations triggered a market sell-off and an ongoing investigation by India’s market regulator, SEBI.

“Mr Adani has been trying to rehabilitate his image, and try to show that those earlier fraud allegations leveled by the Hindenburg group were not true, and his company and his businesses had actually been doing quite well. There’d been a number of new deals and investments made over the last year or so, and so this is just a body blow coming to this billionaire who had done a very good job of shaking off the potential damage of those earlier allegations,” Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center, an American think-tank, told the BBC.

For now, raising capital at home may prove challenging for Mr Adani’s cash-guzzling projects.

“The market reaction shows how serious this is,” Ambareesh Baliga, an independent market analyst, told the BBC. “Adanis will still secure funding for their major projects, but with delays.”

The latest charges could also throw a spanner in Mr Adani’s global expansion plans. He has been already challenged in Kenya and Bangladesh over a planned takeover of an international airport and a controversial energy deal. “This [bribery charges] stops international expansion plans linked to the US,” Nirmalya Kumar, Lee Kong Chian Professor at Singapore Management University, told the BBC.

What’s next? Politically, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has unsurprisingly called for Mr Adani’s arrest and promised to stir up parliament. “Bribing government officials in India is not news, but the amounts mentioned are staggering. I suspect the US has names of some of those who were the intended recipients. This has potential reverberations for the Indian political scene. There is more to come,” Mr Kumar believes.

Mr Adani’s team will undoubtedly assemble a top-tier legal defence. “For now, we have only the indictment, leaving much still to unfold,” says Mr Kugelman.

While the US-India business relationship may face scrutiny, it’s unlikely to be significantly impacted, particularly given the recent $500m US deal with Mr Adani for a port project in Sri Lanka, says Mr Kugelman. Despite the serious allegations, broader US-India business ties remain strong.

“The US-India business relationship is a very large and multifaceted one. Even with these very serious allegations against someone that’s such a major player in the Indian economy, I don’t think we should overstate the impact that this could have on that relationship,” Mr Kugelman says.

Also, it’s unclear if Mr Adani can be targeted, despite the US-India extradition treaty, as it depends on whether the new administration allows the cases to proceed. Mr Baliga believes it is not doom and gloom for the Adanis. “I still do think foreign investors and banks will back them like they did post Hindenburg though, given that they are part of very important, well performing sectors of the Indian economy,” he says.

“The sense in the market is also that this will perhaps blow over and be sorted out, once the [Donald] Trump administration takes over.”

The WhatsApp message was from the chief negotiator of one of the most powerful countries at the COP climate gathering. Could I stop by for a chat, he asked.

As his team hunched over computers eating takeaway pizza, he raged about the obstructionist behaviour of many of the other teams at the conference.

So far, so normal. Others had been saying versions of this all week – that this was the worst COP ever; that negotiating texts, which are meant to get smaller as deadlines approached, were in fact ballooning; that COP in its current form might be dead in the water…

Looming over it all was the prospect of US president-elect Donald Trump withdrawing the US from the COP process when he takes office for a second time. He has called climate action a “scam” and, at his victory celebration in West Palm Beach earlier this month, vowed to boost US oil production beyond its current record levels, saying, “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world”.

But there was one positive: China.

“It’s the only bright spot in all of this is,” the chief negotiator told me. Not only was its negotiating style markedly different to previous years, but he also observed that, as he puts it, “China could be stepping forward.”

Another sign that this may be the case came at the start of the conference, when China made public details of its climate funding. Traditionally, China has released minimal information about its climate policies and plans, so it came as a surprise when, for the first time, officials said they have paid developing countries more than $24 billion for climate action since 2016.

“That’s serious money, almost nobody else is at that level,” one COP insider told me.

It is a “notable signal”, says Li Shuo, a director of China Climate Hub, “as it’s the first time that the Chinese government has laid out a clear figure in terms of how much they have been providing.”

If these are indeed signs that China plans to take a more central role in the future, just as the US is stepping back, it would mark a tectonic shift in the COP process.

Historically, Western countries – particularly the US and EU – have provided the momentum, cheered on by smaller climate-vulnerable nations. The difference in the way the talks play out if China steps forward will be marked.

Jonathan Pershing, program director of environment at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, has been to every COP and understands better than most the behind-the-scenes bartering, bullying and brinkmanship that makes or breaks deals at summits. He says that China won’t lead from the front, like the US and Europe.

“They’re more cautious players than that. It may be that they’re leading with Chinese characteristics, which is what they might say themselves.”

(This echoes how Deng Xiaoping, president in the early 1980s, described his economic reforms, which catapulted the country’s economic growth into double figures: “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.)

Pershing suggests that China is likely to help drive the COP process forward by discreetly intervening to unblock disputes. Most of this effort will take place behind closed doors, he believes, but is likely to include urging developing and developed countries to increase their ambition – and the flow of cash.

However China may not be entirely helpful on some of the challenges that slow the process, such as instances when countries use COP as a stage to champion their own interests.

One of the biggest blockers in Baku was said to be Saudi Arabia, which heads up a group of fossil fuel producing countries that want to slow the transition to renewables. As a big consumer of fossil fuels, China has often thrown its weight behind them in the past, such as by resisting the UK’s effort to get agreement to phase out coal at COP26 in Glasgow.

There have been some other occasions in this year’s talks that indicate how China’s approach is already shifting.

In the past, it tended to focus on its own interests and as such, it played a dual role in these talks. Sometimes it has aligned with the US and Europe, for example on ambitious targets to boost renewable power or on the reduction of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. On other issues, meanwhile, it has slowed progress.

One such example was COP15, held in Copenhagen in 2009. There had been high hopes that an agreement would be reached to commit countries to deep cuts in carbon emissions. But the conference nearly collapsed when China fought against US pressure to submit to a regime of international monitoring. The final non-binding deal was generally considered a failure.

This year was different, the chief negotiator I spoke to said. He observed that China was being “unusually cooperative” across all the discussions.

Other changes were observed too, some around China’s presentation of its own economic status.

It is classed as a developing country in the context of UN climate talks, despite being the world’s second biggest economy, the result of a peculiarity in the COP rules. (This is linked to its economic status in 1992 when the talks process began.) It has also long resisted pressure from developed countries to change its status, meaning it doesn’t have to contribute to the pot that rich countries have agreed to pay to poorer ones. Yet this year some experts noticed a change in the wording used by Chinese negotiators.

“What’s so interesting is the language the Chinese used,” says Professor Michael Jacobs, an expert on climate politics at Sheffield University. “They described it as ‘provided and mobilised’ – that’s the term developed countries use for their payments.”

Language matters at climate conferences. Negotiators can spend days discussing whether something “should” or “will” happen. So, the Chinese echoing the language of the rich world is significant, Prof Jacobs argues.

“They used to calibrate everything against what the US did,” he says. When Trump took office in 2016, China stood back from the talks in response. This time is different, according to Prof Jacobs.

“This looks to me like a claim of leadership.”

None of this is driven by “altruism” on China’s part,” Prof Jacobs continues.

According to Li Shuo, the shifting economics of renewables explains why China is likely to be a bigger player.

“The green transformation is very much being led by China – not necessarily the government, but its private sector and companies”. These companies lead the rest of the world by what Li Shuo says is a “very significant margin”.

Eight out of every ten solar panels are made in China, and it controls some two-thirds of wind turbine production. It is reckoned to produce at least three-quarters of the world’s lithium batteries and more than 60% of the global market for electric vehicles.

Earlier this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that solar panels, EVs and batteries are the “new trio” at the heart of the Chinese economy.

It is the huge investments China has made in renewable technologies and the massive economies of scale that it has created that have also driven down renewable costs year after year – the challenge it faces now is finding new markets to sell it into.

The developing world is where the demand is set to boom. These countries will account for two-thirds of the renewable market within 10 years, according to a recent report by a group of economists tasked by the UN with calculating the costs of the energy transition.

Pakistan imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels in the first six months of this year alone, according to research by Bloomberg NEF. To put that in context, the UK has 17GW of installed solar.

Shipping clean tech to emerging economies dovetails with another of China’s policies: its “Belt and Road Initiative,” an effort to develop new trade routes, including roads, railways, ports and airports, to connect with the rest of the world.

China has spent more than a trillion dollars on the project, according to the World Economic Forum. Last week, President Xi opened a new port on the coast of Peru.

Which begins to explain why, as Prof Jacobs sees it, while the US may withdraw, China looks like it might be stepping up. “It now sees its best interest as encouraging other countries to also cut their emissions by using Chinese technologies and equipment.”

Ultimately, though, regardless of whether this plays, out, there is cause for hope, according to some well-placed observers. Camilla Born, who has been part of the UK’s negotiating team and helped run COP26 in Glasgow, believes that the future talks will be determined by the new economics of energy, not the politics of meetings.

“This isn’t just about an idea of how to deal with climate change anymore,” she argues. “This is about investments, about money – it’s people’s jobs, it’s new technologies. The conversations are different.”

It is, after all, the biggest revolution in energy since the start of the industrial revolution. And regardless of which superpower takes the lead, or if the US is out of the game for four years, it’s unlikely that anyone will want to miss out on such a vast market.

Jet engines are one of the most jaw-dropping feats of engineering humans have ever come up with.

But jet engines shouldn’t be possible, says Ben Beake, director of materials research at Micro Materials, an equipment testing company in Wales.

“The air coming in is hotter than the melting point of the metal underneath – which is obviously not a good thing,” he explains, pointing out that this air reaches temperatures well above 1,000C.

Designers of jet engines have got around this problem by applying heat-resistant ceramic coatings to the engine blades. And now, researchers are developing yet stronger coatings that allow the engines to run hotter still.

“If you get it to go hotter, then there’s a massive saving on fuel and CO2,” says Dr Beake. By increasing the temperature by just 30C or so, you might get an 8% fuel saving, he estimates.

This is the power of coatings – they radically transform the functionality and capabilities of an underlying material. Few people realise how important they are, but these overlays and veneers can supercharge high-performance machines, or ensure that expensive equipment survives the harshest of environments.

Dr Beake and his colleagues are tasked with pushing coatings to their limits, in order to see how robust or effective they really are. His clients don’t always get the results they want. He recalls telling a missile manufacturer, “We’ve broken your coating,” some years ago. “They stormed off in a huff,” says Dr Beake.

Besides exposing coatings to high temperatures, Micro Materials also has a “woodpecker” device, a tiny diamond stylus, which repeatedly taps a coating at random locations to test its durability.

Recently, the firm has worked with UK-based Teer Coatings to test a product that could be applied to satellite components including gears and bearings used in various moving parts.

It is a tricky task, says Xiaoling Zhang, from the company, because the coating must protect such components both pre-launch (when they are exposed to atmospheric humidity at ground level) and also in orbit, against dust particles and radiation in space. However, she claims that the firm has achieved the desired results.

But besides protecting spacecraft, coatings could also stop astronauts from getting sick.

Biofilms – gloopy accumulations of bacteria inside pipes – grow faster in low gravity environments, which could be a problem for water supplies or machinery that moves fluid around on space stations or future spacecraft, for example.

“Biofilms are known to cause mechanical failures,” says Kripa Varanasi at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You don’t want this.”

Prof Varanasi and his colleagues have developed a range of coatings that make surfaces slippery and therefore resistant to the formation of biofilms. Tests of one such coating in an experiment carried out on board the International Space Station found that it worked as intended.

The idea behind the coating is to mix together a solid material and a lubricant. This is then sprayed onto the interior of a pipe or tube, which makes that inner surface extremely slippery.

Prof Varanasi has previously made headlines for developing similar coatings for the insides of toothpaste packets – so you can get every last bit of toothpaste out. He and his colleagues have commercialised the technology through their spin-out company LiquiGlide.

Slipperiness is, perhaps, an underappreciated attribute. Nuria Espallargas at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and colleagues have developed a silicon carbide-based coating for equipment used in aluminium manufacturing or repair.

It is a sort of non-stick frying pan solution, meaning that layers of molten aluminium do not get stuck on this expensive equipment. The precise functioning of this particular coating is currently something of a mystery, though.

“To be honest, we really don’t know how it works, the mechanism is unknown at the moment,” says Prof Espallargas.

Nonetheless, the coating is available commercially through her spin-out company Seram Coatings. Atlas Machine and Supply, a US firm that makes and repairs industrial machinery, has tried it out.

“The real benefit lies in extending the life of the tools and improving the quality of the products being produced,” says Jeremy Rydberg, chief innovation officer.

He says that, without the coating, Atlas must rebuild the roller tools it uses to work aluminium every two days. This costs $4.5m annually. But the new coating means that these tools last for a whole week, not just a couple of days, slashing those rebuild costs to around $1.3m per year.

Coatings can do some amazing things, but they don’t always work as intended, notes Andy Hopkinson, managing director at Safinah Group, a firm that often gets called in to investigate when coatings go wrong.

“We’re seeing a lot of issues at the moment with car parks, where their passive fire protection system is peeling off,” he says, referring to the fire-resistant paint sometimes applied to concrete structures.

And his company has also found that coatings applied to commercial ships do not always prevent barnacles and other sea life from attaching themselves to the hull. This problem, known as biofouling, increases friction, meaning the ship’s engine must work harder – and burn more fuel.

Despite the availability of coatings that promise to help, ship owners do not always choose the correct one for their vessel. That choice should depend on where the ship is sailing, how long it is due to be idle rather than in motion, and so on, says Dr Hopkinson.

The cost of fixing issues like this can run into many thousands, or even millions of pounds. “Typically, paint costs between 1 and 2% of the project. The problem is, when it goes wrong, the costs become exponential,” says Mr Hopkinson.

The researchers working in this field, though, say that there are still many opportunities to improve coatings and develop new ones that could drastically improve the performance of machines or infrastructure in the future.

The announcement of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant has triggered a furious response from across Israel’s political spectrum.

By contrast it has been welcomed by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and ordinary citizens in Gaza.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog called it “a dark day for justice and humanity”, saying the decision had “chosen the side of terror and evil over democracy and freedom”.

Netanyahu’s office called it “an antisemitic decision” and said that Israel “utterly rejects the false and absurd charges”, labelling the ICC “a biased and discriminatory political body”.

The chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Yuli Edelstein, called it “a shameful decision by a political body held captive by Islamist interests”. Israel’s foreign minister said the ICC had lost its legitimacy.

Hamas has welcomed the decision, without commenting on the issuing of a warrant for its own military commander, Mohammed Deif.

In a statement it said: “We call on all countries around the world to cooperate with the court in bringing the Zionist war criminals, Netanyahu and Gallant and to work immediately to stop the crimes of genocide against defenceless civilians in the Gaza Strip”.

Ordinary Palestinians in Gaza have also welcomed the announcement. Muhammad Ali, a 40-year old man displaced from Gaza City and currently in the central area of Deir al-Balah, said:

“We have been terrorised, starved, had our homes destroyed, and lost our children, sons, and loved ones. We welcome this decision, and of course, we hope that the decisions of the ICC will be implemented”.

Munira Al-Shami, whose sister was killed by Israeli forces last month, called the ICC decision “justice for tens of thousands of victims, including my sister Wafa”.

Meanwhile, some Israeli citizens said the arrests went against Israel’s right to defend itself.

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Ron Ackerman said, adding he thinks the ICC “is purely antisemitic and it doesn’t see what’s going on around Israel, only they look at Israel”.

Helen Kariv from Jerusalem said: “When I first heard it I said, ‘my God, where did they get the idea of arresting the prime minister of the state of Israel and his chief of staff’?… We are fighting for survival.”

A total of 124 countries are signatories to the ICC, including the UK, but not the US, Russia, China, nor Israel itself.

So this means that technically, if either Netanyahu or Gallant sets foot in any of the signatory countries they must be arrested and handed over to the court.

But international lawyers have expressed doubts over whether either man will ever be brought to The Hague for trial.

The last time Netanyahu travelled outside Israel was in July to the US, a country he could still theoretically visit with impunity.

Last year he visited several countries, including the UK in March, many of which are signatories.

It is thought unlikely he would want to risk arrest by doing this again and the countries in question would also be reluctant to find themselves put in that position.

Hamas has little to fear from the ICC warrant for Ibrahim Al-Masri, aka Mohammed Deif. Israel believes he was killed earlier this year, although this was never confirmed by Hamas.

The other two Hamas figures whom the ICC originally planned to prosecute – Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh – are both confirmed as dead.

There is no question that Thursday’s announcement is a major blow to Israel’s international standing, to the two individuals named and most specifically to Israel’s ongoing efforts to present its military campaign in Gaza as a fight between the forces of good and evil.

Israelis are appalled that, in their eyes, the world seems to have already forgotten or overlooked the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October last year.

Palestinians, especially Gazans, feel vindicated that their accusations of Israeli war crimes have now been echoed by an international body with some weight.

Suspected methanol poisoning from tainted drinks has reportedly killed six tourists in a Laos holiday town in the past fortnight.

A British woman, two Australian women, a US man and two Danish nationals have died. The deaths remain under police investigation, but reports suggest they may have consumed drinks tainted with methanol, a deadly substance often found in bootleg alcohol.

Methanol poisoning has long been a well-known issue across South East Asia, particularly in the poorer countries along the Mekong river.

But despite foreign governments posting warnings about alcohol consumption in these places, there is still little awareness among the backpacker party scene.

Flavourless and colourless, methanol is hard to detect in drinks and victims typically don’t see symptoms of poisoning straight away.

And in countries like Laos – one of the poorest and least developed in Asia – the problem arises from alcohol suppliers exploiting an environment where there is low law enforcement and almost no regulation in food and hospitality industries.

Methanol is a toxic alcohol used in industrial and household products like paint thinners, antifreeze, varnish and photocopier fluid.

It is colourless and has a similar smell to ethyl alcohol – the chemical substance found in alcoholic drinks.

But methanol is dangerous for humans and drinking just 25ml or half a shot can be lethal.

It can take up to 24 hours for victims to start showing signs of illness which include: nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain which can escalate into hyperventilation and breathing problems.

If not treated, fatality rates are often reported to be 20% to 40%, depending on the concentration of methanol and the amount taken, says international medical charity Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) which tracks the number of global outbreaks.

But if a poisoning is diagnosed quickly enough, ideally within the first 30 hours, treatment can reduce some of the worse effects.

Asia has the highest prevalence of methanol poisoning worldwide, according to MSF’s database.

It mainly affects poorer countries- outbreaks are common in Indonesia, India, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Indonesia is regarded as the hotspot – it has reported the highest number of incidents in the past two decades, according to MSF, largely down to the widespread production and consumption of bootleg liquor.

Towns like Vang Vieng in Laos, where the fatal poisonings took place, are known stops on the backpacking trail through South East Asia. The town’s economy is built on tourism, with streets of bars, restaurants and hostels that cater to visitors.

But in Laos, law enforcement is under-resourced and there are few regulations around food and alcohol standards. There is also an industry of home-brewed alcohol, which can lead to accidental poisonings.

Producers also make counterfeit drinks with methanol instead of ethanol because it is cheaper, say local observers.

“You have the unscrupulous producer adding methanol to their drinks because it’s cheaper – it’s used to create a stronger-seeming drink or make lower-quality alcohol drinks seem more potent,” one Western diplomat in the region told the BBC.

They said methanol poisonings were frequently reported to consulates across the region.

However, a lack of data means it is hard to quantify the scale of the contamination, and where tainted drinks enter the supply chain.

“I don’t think it’s nefarious bar owners going out of their way to poison tourists – that’s not good for them or their industry either,” the diplomat said.

“It’s more about the production side – there being being low education, low regulation, people cutting corners.”

Some campaigners have sought to raise attention to the dangers before. Australian man Colin Ahearn runs a Facebook page called ‘Don’t Drink Spirits in Bali‘ where he warns against mixed drinks like cocktails or drinks made from opened bottles of spirits.

He told Australian media earlier this week that his page used to receive a submission a week about methanol poisoning across South East Asia.

The diplomat said the risks of bootleg alcohol are well known among tourism operators and embassies, but a high-profile campaign is needed to inform tourists.

“This horrific event will probably help educate people, but not solve the cause of the problem,” they added.

Several Western governments updated their advice about alcohol dangers in South East Asia on their consulate and travel pages this week.

They advise that contaminated drinks could include local home-brewed spirits, spirit-based drinks such as cocktails and even brand name alcohol.

Eight tumultuous days after US President-elect Donald Trump picked Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, the firebrand congressman has withdrawn from consideration for the post.

It was a nomination that stunned Washington and sent a shiver through the corridors of the justice department.

Trump settled on Gaetz, 42, during a two-hour flight from Washington to Florida last week, according to reports.

Still basking in the glow of his election victory, the president-elect was flying back to West Palm Beach last Wednesday afternoon after a cordial meeting with President Joe Biden.

That morning Gaetz was not even on the shortlist for the position of America’s top law officer, according to Politico, but Trump had felt underwhelmed by his other options.

On so-called Trump Force One that day were Gaetz himself, Elon Musk, Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and his top legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, reports the New York Times.

Epshteyn reportedly set about convincing Trump that Gaetz should lead the justice department, which had conducted a sex-trafficking investigation into the lawmaker before dropping the matter.

The allegation that Gaetz had sex with a minor, which he denies, was set to dominate and probably torpedo his nomination process.

Losing his first choice is a setback to Trump and shows the reluctance of the Senate in ushering through a man who has no shortage of enemies in Congress.

The woman Trump has picked instead, another Floridian Pam Bondi, would seem to have more allies and a smoother path ahead.

Gaetz, a lawyer, has been one of Trump’s most strident defenders on Capitol Hill.

He helped prepare the Republican nominee for his televised debate against Biden that effectively knocked the Democrat out of the White House race.

One Trump adviser explained why the president-elect – who has himself been criminally investigated by the justice department, and accuses its prosecutors of witch hunts – took a shine to Gaetz as opposed to other contenders.

“Everyone else looked at AG [attorney general] as if they were applying for a judicial appointment,” the unnamed aide told the Bulwark.

“Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ [expletive] heads.’”

• What does Matt Gaetz actually want?
• What to know about the Matt Gaetz allegations
• Who has joined Trump’s team so far?

While Republicans on Capitol Hill reacted tepidly to the nomination, career lawyers at the justice department told US media they were stunned and outraged.

Speaking at a conservative conference last year, Gaetz had suggested that the justice department and the agencies it oversees, including the FBI, ought to be abolished, as he argued they were being weaponised against conservatives. The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, has rejected these claims.

Critics said Trump – who has also named three lawyers that defended him in criminal cases for senior positions at the justice department – was more interested in hiring loyalists than appointees who will uphold the rule of law.

Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton dismissed Gaetz as the “worst cabinet-level appointment in history”.

But the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, said the furore from the Washington establishment showed his father’s unconventional cabinet picks were just the kind of change-makers that American voters had elected him to usher in.

After being nominated last week for attorney general, Gaetz resigned as representative for Florida’s 1st congressional district, a seat he has held since 2017.

His resignation came as the House Ethics Committee was due to decide whether to release a report on its investigation into allegations of misconduct involving drugs, bribes and paying for sex, including with an underage girl.

Gaetz dismissed the claims as a smear. But his resignation triggered a drip feed of leaks in subsequent days as the ethics panel wrangled over what to do about the report.

Few Republicans seemed willing, meanwhile, to circle the wagons round one of the most unpopular lawmakers in the House.

Last year, the combative Gaetz came under fire from his own side of the aisle when he proved instrumental in ousting Republican Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker.

Markwayne Mullin, a former House member turned senator, told CNN at the time there was a reason why none of Gaetz’s colleagues would defend him from allegations of sexual misconduct.

“Because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor,” said the Oklahoman last October, accusing Gaetz of bragging about his sexual exploits.

Gaetz said Mullin was lying.

As the backlash to his nomination for attorney general began to build this week, Trump made calls to senators in an effort to shore up support.

Trump seemed to be holding firm on Gaetz as he attended a SpaceX rocket launch in Boca Chica, Texas, on Tuesday with Musk.

Asked if he was reconsidering, the president-elect said: “No.”

There was more encouraging news for Gaetz on Wednesday as House Ethics Committee Republicans voted not to release its investigation into him.

It happened as Vice-President-elect JD Vance ferried the attorney general nominee around the Senate in a charm offensive.

Gaetz said it had been “a great day”. But there were hints of turbulence ahead.

When asked how messy the confirmation process could become, incoming Senate majority leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said the hearings could be “on steroids”.

On Thursday morning, Trump was still calling Republican senators to gauge Gaetz’s chances.

But by lunchtime, the nominee had come to the conclusion he didn’t have the votes and he again shocked Washington with the announcement that he was showing himself the door.

“While the momentum was strong,” he posted on X, “it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”

Trump’s post on Truth Social confirming the volte-face – his first political setback since his election 16 days earlier – was unusually muted for the president-elect.

“I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be Attorney General,” he wrote, adding that the nominee did not wish to be a “distraction”.

Hours later, Trump nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi instead for the post.

While Trump predicted a “wonderful future” for Gaetz, a question mark hangs over what he will do next.

He was comfortably re-elected this month, but there are already plans for a special election to fill his vacated seat.

Randy Ross, a Florida-based fundraiser for Trump, told the BBC that America had not heard the last of Matt Gaetz.

“My opinion is there’s still a spot in Trump’s administration, Florida or our country’s future leadership for this patriot,” said Mr Ross. “We all look forward to his next steps.”

Meanwhile, Ginger Gaetz, who wed the congressman in 2021, posted an old photo on X following his withdrawal of them both on the steps on Capitol Hill.

“The end of an era,” she commented.

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Singer Katy Perry has successfully appealed against a trademark decision over her name, after being sued by an Australian designer who sells clothes under her birth name Katie Perry.

Three appeals judges on Friday overturned a court decision last year that favoured Katie Taylor over merchandise sold by the pop star during a 2014 tour of Australia.

The judges said Perry had been using her name as a trademark five years before Taylor started her business, adding that by that time, Perry had attained an “international reputation” in entertainment.

The judges also cancelled Taylor’s trademark registration on Friday.

Taylor had likened her legal battle with Perry to “David and Goliath”. She told the Sydney Morning Herald after Friday’s ruling that she was “devastated” with the case outcome.

The appeals judges said it was “unfortunate” that the case pitted two enterprising women who used their names as trademarks but were unaware that the other existed.

“Both women put blood, sweat and tears into developing their businesses,” the judges said.

“As the fame of one grew internationally, the other became aware of her namesake and filed a trademark application,” they said.

The judge who ruled in favour of Taylor last year referenced one of Perry’s biggest hits in her decision: “This is a tale of two women, two teenage dreams and one name”.

Friday’s ruling comes as Perry prepares for her Lifetimes world tour in early 2025 to support her comeback album 143.

This year’s winner of France’s biggest book prize is being sued in Algeria over claims he stole the story from a patient of his psychiatrist wife.

Kamel Daoud was awarded the Goncourt prize earlier this month for his novel Houris, a searing account of Algeria’s 1990s civil war in which up to 200,000 people were killed.

But a woman who survived one of the massacres has appeared on Algerian television, alleging that the book’s heroine – named Fajr – is based on her own personal story.

As a girl, Saada Arbane had her throat cut in an Islamist militant attack that wiped out most of her family, and now communicates through a speaking tube. In the book, Fajr has suffered the same fate.

Ms Arbane said that from 2015 she had several psychiatric sessions with Daoud’s future wife, Aicha Dahdouh, and she accused the couple of using her story without her consent.

She said that many details in the heroine’s life – “her speaking tube, her scars, her tattoos, her hairdresser” – came directly from what she told Ms Dahdouh. Likewise, she said, Fajr’s relationship with her mother and her desire for an abortion.

Ms Arbane alleged she answered an invitation to meet Daoud three years ago, but refused when he asked if he could use her story as the basis for his book.

“It’s my life. It’s my past. He had no right to chuck me out like that,“ she told Algeria One TV.

Two lawsuits have been filed in Algeria against Daoud and his wife.

One cites rules on medical confidentiality. The second cites a law enacted after the end of the civil war which makes it a crime to “instrumentalise the wounds of the national tragedy”.

This “reconciliation” law greatly restricts the right to publish or speak publicly on the civil war, and is the reason why Daoud’s book has been proscribed in his home country and why his French publisher Gallimard was banned from the recent Algiers book fair.

Daoud, who moved to Paris in 2020 and took French nationality, is a controversial figure in Algeria, where he is accused by some of selling out to the former colonial power.

He is the first Algerian to win the main Goncourt prize. An earlier work won the best first novel award in 2015.

Daoud has yet to react to the lawsuit, although the BBC has approached the author for comment.

Antoine Gallimard, of the publishing firm, said that the writer was being made “the target of a campaign of violent defamation orchestrated by certain media close to the Algerian government.

“Houris was certainly inspired by the tragic events which happened in Algeria … but its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional.”

The lawsuits against Daoud and his wife were made public in Algeria on Wednesday by lawyer Fatima Benbraham, a woman described by newspaper as a “fervent supporter of the regime”.

She said the lawsuits were filed in August, shortly after the book’s publication, but were only revealed now “because the plaintiffs did not want it to be said that they were trying to upset the [book’s] nomination for the Goncourt.”

The row comes at a time of worsening tensions between Algeria and France, triggered by President Emmanuel Macron’s recent recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara.

Algeria is the historic backer of the Polisario independence movement.

Macron’s move angered many Algerians, who view the award to Daoud as a political rather than a literary gesture.

Another award-winning French-based Algerian writer Boualem Sansal was on Thursday reported to have gone missing in Algeria, amid fears he has been arrested.

Sansal, 75, obtained French nationality earlier this year but returned regularly to Algeria. He is known as a critic of the Algerian regime as well as of Islamism.

He flew to Algiers from Paris on Saturday. His editor Jean-François Colosimo said he had not been heard from since then.

“I am more than worried,” Mr Colosimo said.

Tributes have been paid to Lord John Prescott, a major figure in Labour politics and the former deputy prime minister, following his death at the age of 86.

Known for his blunt, no-nonsense style, Lord Prescott was Sir Tony Blair’s loyal deputy for 10 years after Labour’s 1997 general election landslide.

Sir Tony said he was “devastated” by the death of his friend, telling the BBC there was “no one quite like him in British politics”.

His successor Gordon Brown called Lord Prescott a “working class hero”, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer hailed a “true giant” of the Labour movement.

The King praised his “decades of public service” and recalled “with great fondness his unique and indomitable character, as well as his infectious sense of humour”.

• John Prescott: Political bruiser who played vital role in Labour comeback
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• No one was quite like John Prescott, says Blair

In a statement announcing his death, Lord Prescott’s wife and two sons said he had been in a care home recently living with Alzheimer’s.

They said he died “surrounded by the love of his family and the jazz music of Marian Montgomery”.

Sir Tony said the pair would talk via videocall in recent times, and Lord Prescott was “still as lively and punchy as ever”.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the former prime minister said Lord Prescott reached parts of the electorate that he could not, and was “loyal, committed and an enormous help” as his deputy.

However, he said their relationship was not just political and they developed a “genuine admiration, respect and affection for each other”.

Brown described him as a “colossus” and “a titan of the Labour movement”.

Lord Prescott played an invaluable role as peacemaker between Brown and Sir Tony, often being described as their “marriage counsellor”.

Paying tribute in the House of Commons, Sir Keir said Lord Prescott was “a man who fought for working-class ambition because he lived it”, adding: “He truly was a one off.”

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner – who shares a working class and trade union background with Lord Prescott – said he was “not only a Labour legend but an inspiration to me”.

She said he had been “a huge support”, offering the advice to “be authentically yourself and keep thinking about the people you’re there to represent”.

Lord Mandelson, a key architect of New Labour, hailed him as an “all time great” of the party.

The former cabinet minister, who at times clashed with Lord Prescott in government, said he was “the anchor of New Labour” and “the glue that kept us together”.

He told the BBC Lord Prescott was a “fighter for working people” and wanted them “to have all the opportunities that he’d had”, which made him “an essential part of New Labour”.

Born in Prestatyn, Wales, Lord Prescott left school at 15 and worked as a steward in the Merchant Navy. He then studied at Ruskin College in Oxford, before entering politics.

In a career that stretched back over half a century, Lord Prescott was first elected as MP for Hull East in 1970 and went on to hold the seat for almost 40 years.

He joined the shadow cabinet in 1983 as the party’s transport spokesman and would later become Sir Tony’s deputy.

When Labour won power in 1997, he became deputy prime minister, as well as leading a department with responsibilities spanning the environment, transport and the regions.

It was in that role that he helped negotiate the landmark Kyoto climate change treaty.

Despite pushing for a switch from cars to public transport, he was nicknamed “two jags” by the press after it emerged he had two Jaguar cars. But in 2021, he revealed he no longer had a motor vehicle, saying “I am now Zero Jags”.

He also famously punched a man who threw an egg at him while on the general election campaign trail in Rhyl, north Wales in 2001.

After pictures of the incident appeared in press around the world, a new nickname of “two jabs” was coined for him by journalists.

Lord Prescott said he had acted in self-defence and police refused to take any further action. Subsequent newspaper polls suggested most people supported his reaction.

Commenting at the time, Sir Tony said: “John is John”.

Speaking of the incident as he paid tribute on Today, Sir Tony said “that’s what he was like”.

“There were no rules that he really abided by.”

Though a loyal supporter of Sir Tony during his time in office, Lord Prescott was later critical of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war, telling the BBC that the 2003 invasion of the country “cannot be justified”.

He retired from the Commons in 2010 and to the surprise of many of his supporters accepted a peerage, despite reportedly having once said: “I don’t want to be a member of the House of Lords. I will not accept it.”

He defended the decision because it would give him continued influence over environmental policy.

He ceased to be a member of the House of Lords in July of this year due to non-attendance, having only spoken once in the chamber since suffering a stroke in 2019.

“John spent his life trying to improve the lives of others, fighting for social justice and protecting the environment, doing so from his time as a waiter on the cruise liners to becoming Britain’s longest serving deputy prime minister,” his family said.

“John dearly loved his home of Hull and representing its people in Parliament for 40 years was his greatest honour.”

Lord Prescott married his wife, Pauline, in 1961 and they had two children together – David and Jonathan.

Maurizio Cattelan’s provocative artwork of a banana duct-taped to a wall has fetched $6.2m (£4.9m) at Sotheby’s in New York – four times higher than pre-sale estimates.

The auction house says Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun outbid six other rivals to get the “Comedian” installation of the Italian visual artist on Wednesday.

“In the coming days, I will personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience,” Mr Sun was quoted as saying.

The taped banana – now perhaps one of the most expensive fruits ever sold – was actually bought earlier in the day for a mere $0.35, according to the New York Times.

“Comedian” was first unveiled to the public in 2019, instantly becoming a viral sensation and also provoking heated debates about what art is.

The installation – which has travelled around the world – comes with instructions on how to replace the banana whenever it rots.

In fact, the fruit has been eaten not once, but twice.

In 2023, a South Korean art student helped himself when the installation went on display at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art.

The museum later placed a new banana in the same spot, local media reported.

Four years earlier, a performance artist pulled the banana from the wall after the artwork was sold for $120,000 at Art Basel in Miami.

The banana was swiftly replaced, and no further action was taken.

Justin Sun runs the Tron blockchain network, which facilitates some cryptocurrency transactions. Last year the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused him of fraud, saying he had falsely inflated trading volumes of TRX, Tron’s crypto token. Mr Sun denies the charges.

In April, a fan approached American singer Gigi Perez after a show, and proudly showed off their latest tattoo.

“Gigi I 🖤 U,” read the ink. The singer was lost for words.

“In my head, I was like, ‘Please don’t regret that’,'” she laughs.

“It’s hard for me to process that somebody else has my name permanently on their skin.

“But, I mean, it’s just the ultimate honour to know that the music impacted them so greatly that they would do that.”

It was the first time anyone had felt passionately enough to turn her name into a tattoo – and the timing could not have been better.

Six months earlier, Gigi been dropped by her record label, in the middle of a promotional trip to London.

And after having to move back to her parents’ house, in Florida, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter had to reassess her life.

“I was free falling,” she says.

“I had no income, I was back home, and I was starting to doubt myself.

“But I was like, ‘Let me just give myself a year to learn how to record and produce my own records.

“From there, if I need to get a job so I can still make music, I’ll do that.

“And then everything happened…”

Everything, in case you have not been following Gigi’s story, involved scoring a global hit single out of nowhere.

Sailor Song, an aching love ballad about falling for a woman who looks like the actress Anne Hathaway, exploded online in June and quickly became a real-world success.

In the UK, it went to number one, ending Sabrina Carpenter’s nine-week run at the top.

The song also reached the summit in Ireland and Latvia and made the top 10 everywhere from New Zealand to Belgium.

“I knew the song was special to me,” Gigi says.

“I just didn’t know it was going to be special to so many other people.”

When she found out it had reached number one, “I got out of the shower and just started crying,” Gigi told the UK’s Official Charts Company.

The success marks a neat conclusion to a messy origin story.

Born in New Jersey and raised in Florida, Gigi was a drama school nerd who turned to music when she realised she was “never going to be cast in the ingenue role”.

Self-taught on piano and guitar, she went straight to the top of the US streaming charts, in 2021, with her self-released debut single, Sometimes (Backwood).

The song earned her a contract with Interscope Records and Gigi supported Coldplay on their Music of the Spheres tour before she had even played a headline show of her own.

Looking back, she says that initial wave of success created a pressure to expand her career too quickly. For a long time, she felt “stuck and limited” by her lack of progression.

“It was this cognitive dissonance where I’d get an amazing slot [on someone else’s tour] but didn’t know who’d be coming to the show,” Gigi says.

And by the time she played London last November, she knew she had reached breaking point.

“I asked God, or the universe, ‘Open the doors that need to be opened and close the doors that need to be shut,'” she says.

“I knew it had to happen – but I was so terrified of what that meant.”

Interscope released her two days later. But instead of the world ending, Gigi’s energy renewed. She wrote more songs – and taught herself how to produce them, by watching YouTube tutorials.

Sailor Song came to her in a sudden burst of inspiration this February.

“I was on my bed, my door was open and I was just messing around, jamming,” Gigi says.

“My little sister walked by, and she was like, ‘Gigi, what was that?’ And I was like, ‘I have no idea, but I think it’s really cool.'”

“There are times where I spend a lot of time thinking about a song and what I want to say. This was one of those times where it just blew out.”

She teased it on TikTok in April, released it in July – and, as of Wednesday 20 November, it has been streamed 340 million times on Spotify alone.

In some ways, it is an unlikely hit. The production is low-tech and homespun and Gigi’s vocals are androgynous to the point where many listeners were surprised to find it was a song about two women in love.

But the chorus is undeniable.

“Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor,” she sings. “And when you get a taste, can you tell me, what’s my flavour?”

Of course, in our terminally divided culture, no success remains untainted for long.

In the US, evangelical Christians criticised Sailor Song for the line: “I don’t believe in God, but you’re my saviour.”

Gigi’s response, posted to TikTok, was uncompromising.

“My songwriting is not a democracy,” she wrote, “and that applies to every artist’s work.”

The singer’s struggles with faith run deep.

Her parents became born-again Christians when she was in primary school, after which her mother took extra work as a bus driver to pay for Gigi and her sisters to attend a private religious school in Florida.

The experience was not all positive.

“Growing up gay in an environment where you’re not allowed to be that was very taxing on me,” Gigi told the Bringin’ It Backwards podcast, in 2022.

Her faith was really shaken, however, when her big sister Celene died suddenly, aged 22, in the early months of 2020.

The shock and the pain are unimaginable. The foundations of Gigi’s world were destabilised forever.

In her music, she tried to explain the unexplainable.

“The other day, I thought of something funny/ But no-one would’ve laughed but you,” she sang in a song simply called Celene.

“And Mom and Dad are always crying/ And I wish I knew what to do.”

Gigi’s latest release, Fable, is another attempt to confront that grief, lashing out at people who feebly offered “thoughts and prayers” after her sister’s death, and wondering why disconnecting from faith makes her “skin start to burn”.

“One of the hardest parts about my grief is that I didn’t have any music that touched on my life, on my situation, to get me through it,” she says.

“And so I made it for myself.

“I’ve written tons of grief songs but, finally, in Fable, I said it in the way I always felt, from the very day I lost her, and I was so just relieved by the expression of it.”

That catharsis is a sort of self-healing. And, more than anything, the singer wants her music to find its way to others who need it.

“One of my biggest wishes is to not let this experience that is so dark and isolating stay that way,” she says.

“My hope is that there can be some way this [music] can help. And it’s amazing, because I’ve been seeing a lot of that. It’s been very healing for me.”

And with that ability to reach people in their most vulnerable moments, it won’t be long before Gigi sees her name tattooed on many more arms.

William Ruto, who became Kenya’s president two years ago riding on the crest of the Christian vote, has been visibly shaken to find that over the last few months church leaders of all creeds are losing faith in him – seeing him less as a saviour and more as the greedy biblical tax collector.

In the run-up to his victory, some of his most ardent evangelical supporters had dubbed him “David”, after the shepherd boy in the Bible who rose to become king.

The opposition had baptised him “deputy Jesus”, accusing him of using Christianity to gain political capital as he attended church services from Catholic masses to the gatherings of obscure sects.

He would wear the appropriate religious attire for each setting, sometimes knelt in supplication and on occasion was moved to tears by sermons.

Afterwards, he credited God for his electoral success, and continued this practice of criss-crossing the country to attend a different church each Sunday.

But following massive opposition to the tax hikes imposed by his government, the 57-year-old gained a new nickname: “Zakayo” – which is Swahili for Zacchaeus, the wealthy and unpopular Jericho tax collector featured in the Bible.

The president has always maintained that if people want better public services and a reduction in the country’s debt burden, they have to pay up.

Over the last two years, taxes on salaries have gone up, the sales tax on fuel has doubled and people are also paying a new housing levy and a health insurance tax that is yet to benefit many Kenyans.

When momentous anti-tax protests erupted in June, the young people who led them, popularly referred to as Gen Zs, also called out churches for being too close to politicians and allowing them to preach from their pulpits.

Their anger forced the government to retract a controversial finance bill that had included more tax increases – and it woke up the churches, whose clergy began to openly criticise Ruto and his policies.

This too was a momentous development as the faith economy is big business in a country where more than 80% of the population are Christian – and a fundraiser with the right politician can greatly improve the fortunes of a church.

Last month, Teresia Wairimu, founder of Faith Evangelistic Ministries (Fem), a church in the capital, Nairobi, where Ruto and his family have frequently worshipped, suggested their King David was heading back to the field where sheep grazed.

“As a voter, I’m embarrassed,” she said in her sermon.

Another sermon by Rev Tony Kiama of the River of God Church recently went viral after he called out Ruto’s government for “not serving God’s purpose but an evil one”, citing the killings during the recent protests, the rising cost of living and every-day corruption.

The most hard-hitting criticism was last week’s statement from Catholic bishops, who carry more weight because of the respect and influence they command in Kenya.

They accused Ruto’s government of perpetuating a “culture of lies”, citing unfulfilled campaign promises.

“Basically, it seems that truth does not exist, and if it does, it is only what the government says,” the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops said, also hitting out at corruption, greed and over-taxation that was stifling the economy.

One bishop dubbed Kenya an “Orwellian dystopian authoritarian” state, where dissent was met “with intimidation, abduction or even assassination”.

This was a pointed reference to the 60 people who died and the 1,300 others arrested during the anti-tax demonstrations. A further 74 people have been abducted and 26 reported missing in the last five months, according to the state-run Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

The stinging statement by the bishops was followed by the Church’s rejection of a $40,000 (£32,000) donation make by Ruto when he attended the Soweto Catholic Church in Nairobi last Sunday – with the Archbishop of Nairobi citing “ethical concerns and the need to safeguard the Church from being used for political purposes”.

Many of Kenya’s Christians are Catholic – about 10 million people, or 20% of the population, according to government statistics.

Other Christians belong to a variety of evangelical churches and other denominations, including the Anglican Church of Kenya and the Presbyterian Church.

And the Catholic Church’s influence in Kenya goes beyond its congregation owing to its wide investment in education, healthcare and other social programmes.

It has also been angered by the chaotic transition to a new social health insurance scheme, with the government owing millions of dollars to faith-based hospitals.

The bishops’ outspoken assessment of the state of the nation has reminded Kenyans of the role church leaders played when they pushed for a return to multi-party democracy in the 1990s.

Brave clerics such as Ndingi Mwana a’Nzeki of the Catholic Church, Alexander Muge, Henry Okullu and David Gitari of the Anglican Church and Timothy Njoya of the Presbyterian Church fearlessly challenged the repressive and single-party rule of then-President Daniel arap Moi.

But analysts say under Moi’s successors – Mwai Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta, both Catholics – clerics lost their voice.

“Under President William Ruto, things got even worse because important elements of the church were seemingly co-opted into the feeding trough,” veteran journalist and columnist Macharia Gaitho wrote in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper this week, suggesting “churches were bribed into silence”.

The Catholic bishops’ stance has won support from other denominations, as well as Muslim clerics – despite the widespread faith-based support Ruto enjoyed previously for his tough stand on gay rights and his conservative views on abortion.

A joint statement by some Pentecostal and evangelical leaders hailed the bishops for their bravery and also for “doing the unthinkable” in rejecting Ruto’s money.

Head of the Anglican Church of Kenya Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit, who led national prayers on the day Ruto was declared winner of the presidential race, joined Catholic bishops in condemning what he described as “escalating misrule, impunity, and widespread rights violations”.

“In the circumstances, we should not simply fold our hands and pray for miracles,” Ole Sapit said, adding that the Catholic bishops reflected the feelings of many Kenyans.

Baptist cleric Daniel Wambua added that religious leaders were now determined to end the “transactional relationship” with the state.

Meanwhile Sheikh Abubakar Bini, chair of the North Rift Council of Imams and Preachers of Islam, urged the government to take the bishops’ remarks as advice rather than criticism.

At first, Ruto and his allies hit back – one accusing the bishops of spreading “misinformation”.

But analysts say Ruto, who frequently uses the scriptures to respond to critics, should be wary of a direct confrontation with the churches as even smaller ones can have thousands of followers who could negatively affect his re-election bid.

The president is already facing rebellion in parts of his 2022 political strongholds after the impeachment of former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua last month.

They fell out over the handling of the anti-tax demonstrations, which have rocked Ruto’s administration to its core.

A close ally of the president, MP Oscar Sudi, has taken to X to eat some humble pie, apologising to Catholic bishops on behalf of the government.

Ruto himself has since appeared to soften his response to the growing criticism, saying he has heard the clerics and is ready to engage further.

“We have made undeniable progress in our country. However, there remains much to be done. We must continue working together to hasten the delivery of our commitments and change Kenya,” he tweeted on Thursday.

What Kenya’s first evangelical Christian president is having to accept is that the churches he used so successfully to take state house could well help unseat him in the next election.

“He knows he cannot fight the church,” said Mr Gaitho.

• ‘We are the Church’: Kenyan tax protesters take on Christian leaders
• New faces of protest – Kenya’s Gen Z anti-tax revolutionaries
• Why Kenyan churches are banning politicians from pulpits
• Podcast: Is the church in Kenya too close to the government?
• Kenya’s discreet church set up to welcome LGBT worshippers

A town council in Canada is at a standstill after its newly elected members refused to pledge allegiance to King Charles III as required in the swearing-in ceremony.

Stephen Johnson, the mayor-elect of Dawson City in Yukon Territory, and the new council were elected last month. They were to be sworn early this month but that process stalled after they refused to take the oath.

Johnson says the refusal is in solidarity with an indigenous council member who has raised concerns about the Crown’s history with Canada’s indigenous people.

Under Yukon law, a newly elected official must take the oath within 40 days of their election or else their win “shall be considered null”.

This means Johnson and the rest of council have until 9 December to take the Oath of Allegiance, in which elected officials in Canada – a Commonwealth country and former British colony – swear or affirm they “will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King Charles III” and his “heirs and successors according to law”.

In the meantime, the new council is not able to govern or make official decisions until the matter is resolved.

In an interview with the Canadian Press, Mayor-elect Johnson said the situation had left him stuck.

“We can’t do anything legally required of us under the Municipal Act,” he explained, until the council takes the oath. “It’s a bit of a sticky situation.”

Johnson said he and the other councillors refused the oath in solidarity with fellow councillor Darwyn Lynn, a member of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, who was hesitant to pledge allegiance.

“This is being done with no disrespect to His Majesty King Charles,” Johnson told the Canadian Press. “And also we’re not doing this to go, ‘Rah, rah, look at us,’ to poke everybody across Canada, to get rid of the Crown.

“It was just something we wanted to do together to show solidarity in what we do here in this town.”

As a remedy, the town council has asked Yukon provincial officials if they could take an alternative oath.

A spokesperson for Yukon’s Department of Community Services confirmed to the BBC that they had received this request, but have not commented on whether it will be granted.

Bill Kendrick, the town’s outgoing mayor, told the BBC that he hoped “it gets worked out for the sake of the new council, so they can get down to business”.

He added the town’s response to the standoff had been mixed.

“I’d say it’s the whole gamut,” Mr Kendrick said. Some believe the oath is outdated, while others interpret it as a symbol of support for Canada’s system of governance.

Dawson City is a town of 2,400, known for being the heart of the historic Klondike Gold Rush that began in 1896. It is the second-largest municipality in the Yukon, a Canadian territory that borders Alaska.

The town is located on the former site of Tr’ochëk, a hunting and fishing camp where the Klondike and Yukon rivers meet. Its people, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, were displaced after the Klondike gold rush brought nearly 17,000 new settlers.

Canada has acknowledged its fraught history with its indigenous peoples in recent years. In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared before the United Nations that the country’s legacy of colonialism was one of “humiliation, neglect and abuse”.

This is not the first time that elected officials in Canada have refused to take an oath to the King.

In 2022, the French-speaking province of Quebec passed legislation that ended the requirement to have elected officials take an oath to the monarchy. One lawmaker called it “a relic from the past”.

Earlier this year, a member of Canada’s national parliament introduced a similar bill, though it was defeated by a vote of 197-113.

Sign up here to get the latest royal stories and analysis straight to your inbox every week with our Royal Watch newsletter. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

A second Australian teenager has died of suspected methanol poisoning, bringing to six the number of foreign tourists who have died after apparently drinking tainted alcohol in Laos.

The family of Holly Bowles, 19, said it was with “broken hearts” that they confirmed her death, more than a week after she fell ill in the tourist town of Vang Vieng.

Her friend Bianca Jones, also 19, and British lawyer Simone White, 28, from south-east London, were confirmed to have died on Thursday.

An unnamed US man and two Danish women, aged 19 and 20, are also among the victims of the suspected poisoning, believed to be connected to bootleg alcohol.

In a statement released to media on Friday, Holly’s family said they were taking comfort from the fact she had brought so much “joy and happiness to so many people”.

They added that she had been living “her best life travelling through South East Asia meeting new friends and enjoying incredible experiences” when she became ill.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said: “All Australians will be heartbroken by the tragic passing of Holly Bowles. I offer my deepest sympathies to her family and friends.”

Holly and Bianca were taken to hospital on Wednesday, 13 November, after they failed to check out of their hostel in the small, riverside town of Vang Vieng, about two hours north of the capital Vientiane.

News reports and testimonies suggest the tourists may have consumed alcohol laced with methanol – a deadly substance often found in bootleg alcohol.

Medical specialists say drinking as little as 25 millilitres of methanol can be fatal, but it is sometimes added to drinks because it is cheaper than alcohol.

Christer Hogstrand, a professor of molecular ecotoxicology, at King’s College London points out, it is also “not uncommon in home-distilled alcohol”.

“Methanol is like the alcohol in our drinks – colourless and odourless – but its impact on humans can be deadly,” he explained. “It has a different carbon atom structure which completely changes how humans process it in the body, leading to these potentially fatal consequences.”

It is not yet known where any of the people who fell sick or died were poisoned. It can take up to 24 hours for victims to start showing signs of illness.

The Nana Backpacker Hostel – where the Australian teenagers were staying – has said it gave out free shots to around 100 guests the previous evening.

But the hostel’s manager told news agency Associated Press that no other guests had become unwell.

The manager of the hostel has since been detained for questioning by police.

Online booking agency Hostelworld said in a statement that it has removed Nana Backpacker Hostel from its platform, and has contacted all customers in Vang Vieng and surrounding areas.

It added it was advising all travellers in the area to “exercise caution” when consuming alcohol and to “only purchase products from reputable vendors”.

Few details have emerged about any of the other victims and where they may have visited.

Simone White, a lawyer who lived in Orpington, was reportedly travelling with a group of friends.

In a statement, her parents said they were “devastated by the loss of our beautiful, kind and loving daughter”.

“Simone was one of a kind and had the most wonderful energy and spark for life. She was a soul who gave so much to so many and was loved by her family, friends and colleagues.”

They added she had been “taken from us too soon” and would be “sorely missed by her brother, grandmother and entire family”.

“Our hearts go out to all other families who have been affected by this terrible tragedy,” the statement said.

Her law firm, Squire Patton Boggs, described Ms White as “a talented colleague with a bright future ahead of her”.

“Our thoughts go out to all of Simone’s family, friends, and those colleagues and clients who had the privilege to work with and know Simone.”

Australia is pushing authorities to be open about their investigation into the incident.

New Zealand and Dutch officials have also both said they were monitoring incidents involving nationals.

Vang Vieng is a hub for backpackers travelling across south-east Asia. It’s home to the Banana Pancake Trail – a popular backpacking route spanning Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

“What will Vladimir Putin do next?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot this week.

Understandably so.

After all, this was the week the Kremlin leader lowered the threshold for the use of Russian nuclear weapons.

It was the week the US and UK crossed (another) Putin red line, allowing Ukraine to fire Western-supplied longer-range missiles into Russia.

It was also the week that President Putin, in effect, threatened the UK, America and any other country supplying Ukraine with such weapons and for such a purpose.

“We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities,” the Russian leader said in an address to the nation on Thursday evening.

So, you can see: “What will Vladimir Putin do next?” is a most pressing question. And, since I’m the BBC’s Russia Editor, you might expect me to have the answer.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t.

Perhaps even Putin doesn’t know the answer, which makes things even more serious.

Instead of answers, some observations.

• LIVE: Zelensky says world must respond to Russia’s use of new type of missile in Ukraine

This week the Kremlin accused the “collective West” of escalating the war in Ukraine.

But nearly three years of war in Ukraine have shown that it is Vladimir Putin who embraces escalation as a means to achieving his goals – in this case, control over Ukraine or at the very least peace on Russia’s terms.

Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his decision to declare four Ukrainian territories part of Russia, his deployment of North Korean troops to Kursk region, his decision on Thursday to target the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile, followed up by threats to strike the West – all of these represent moments of escalation in this conflict.

I once described Vladimir Putin as a car with no reverse gear and no brakes, careering down the highway, accelerator pedal stuck to the floor.

From what I can see, little has changed.

Don’t expect the Putinmobile to suddenly decelerate or de-escalate now in the face of longer-range missile strikes on Russia.

Escalation, though, is another matter. That’s a distinct possibility.

Ukraine will be bracing itself for more Russian attacks, even heavier bombardments.

Western governments will be assessing the threat level in light of Putin’s warnings.

Even before the Kremlin leader’s TV address, there had been fears in the West of an upsurge in hybrid Russian warfare.

Last month the head of MI5 warned that Russian military intelligence was engaged in a campaign to “generate mayhem on British and European streets”.

“We’ve seen arson, sabotage and more,” he added.

Back in June, Putin suggested that Moscow might arm adversaries of the West if Ukraine were allowed to strike deep into Russia with Western long-range missiles.

“We believe that if someone is thinking it is possible to supply such weapons to a war zone to strike our territory and create problems for us,” he said, “why can’t we supply our weapons of the same class to those regions around the world where they will target sensitive facilities of the countries that are doing this to Russia?”

Putin warns West as Russia hits Ukraine with new missile

The question “What will Putin do next?” is usually followed by: “Would Putin use a nuclear weapon in the Ukraine war?”

The Russian president has dropped some unsubtle hints.

On announcing the start of his “special military operation” – the full-scale invasion of Ukraine – he had issued a warning to “those who may be tempted to interfere from the outside”.

“No matter who tries to stand in our way or create threats for our country and our people,” the Kremlin leader declared, “they must know that Russia will respond immediately.

“And the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.”

Western leaders generally dismissed what they saw as nuclear sabre-rattling. Since the start of the war Western governments have crossed several Russian “red lines”: providing Ukraine with tanks, advanced missile systems and then F-16 fighter jets.

The “consequences” threatened by the Kremlin never materialised.

In September Putin announced he was lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons – the decree was published this week. A clear warning to Europe and America not to allow longer-range missile strikes on Russian territory.

Now this red line, too, has been crossed. In his address to the nation Putin confirmed Western reports that Ukraine had fired US-supplied Atacms and British-made Storm Shadow missiles at targets inside Russia.

Earlier this week, when pro-Kremlin tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets asked a retired lieutenant-general how Russia should respond to an Atacms attack on Bryansk region, he replied:

“Starting World War Three over strikes on an arms depot in Bryansk region would probably be short-sighted.”

It would be comforting to think that the Kremlin shares that view.

But Vladimir Putin’s address to the nation contained no evidence of that.

His message to Ukraine’s supporters in the West appeared to be: this is a red line I’m serious about, I dare you to cross it.

“Even Putin doesn’t know whether he can use a nuclear weapon, or he can’t. It depends on his emotions,” Novaya Gazeta columnist Andrei Kolesnikov told me recently.

“We know he’s a very emotional man. The decision to begin this war was also an emotional step. Because of that we must take seriously his idea of the changing of the nuclear doctrine. They say the fear of war must return and will contain both sides, but this is also a tool of escalation.

“In this interpretation we must admit that Putin, under some circumstances, can use at least a tactical nuclear weapon in the framework of a limited nuclear war. It will not solve the problem. But it will be the start of a suicidal escalation for the whole world.”

Tactical nuclear weapons are small warheads intended for use on the battlefield or a limited strike.

Vladimir Putin may act on emotions. He is also, clearly, driven by resentment of the West and appears determined not to back down.

But he also knows the world could soon be a very different place.

In two months’ time Joe Biden will be out of office and Donald Trump will be in the White House.

President-Elect Trump has expressed scepticism regarding US military assistance for Ukraine and has been fiercely critical of Nato.

He’s also said recently that talking to Vladimir Putin would be “a smart thing”.

All of that should be music to Putin’s ears.

Which means that, despite the latest threats and warnings, the Kremlin may decide against a major escalation right now.

That is, if the Kremlin has calculated that Donald Trump will help end the war on terms beneficial to Russia.

If that calculation changes, so could Moscow’s response.

Eight tumultuous days after US President-elect Donald Trump picked Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, the firebrand congressman has withdrawn from consideration for the post.

It was a nomination that stunned Washington and sent a shiver through the corridors of the justice department.

Trump settled on Gaetz, 42, during a two-hour flight from Washington to Florida last week, according to reports.

Still basking in the glow of his election victory, the president-elect was flying back to West Palm Beach last Wednesday afternoon after a cordial meeting with President Joe Biden.

That morning Gaetz was not even on the shortlist for the position of America’s top law officer, according to Politico, but Trump had felt underwhelmed by his other options.

On so-called Trump Force One that day were Gaetz himself, Elon Musk, Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and his top legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, reports the New York Times.

Epshteyn reportedly set about convincing Trump that Gaetz should lead the justice department, which had conducted a sex-trafficking investigation into the lawmaker before dropping the matter.

The allegation that Gaetz had sex with a minor, which he denies, was set to dominate and probably torpedo his nomination process.

Losing his first choice is a setback to Trump and shows the reluctance of the Senate in ushering through a man who has no shortage of enemies in Congress.

The woman Trump has picked instead, another Floridian Pam Bondi, would seem to have more allies and a smoother path ahead.

Gaetz, a lawyer, has been one of Trump’s most strident defenders on Capitol Hill.

He helped prepare the Republican nominee for his televised debate against Biden that effectively knocked the Democrat out of the White House race.

One Trump adviser explained why the president-elect – who has himself been criminally investigated by the justice department, and accuses its prosecutors of witch hunts – took a shine to Gaetz as opposed to other contenders.

“Everyone else looked at AG [attorney general] as if they were applying for a judicial appointment,” the unnamed aide told the Bulwark.

“Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ [expletive] heads.’”

• What does Matt Gaetz actually want?
• What to know about the Matt Gaetz allegations
• Who has joined Trump’s team so far?

While Republicans on Capitol Hill reacted tepidly to the nomination, career lawyers at the justice department told US media they were stunned and outraged.

Speaking at a conservative conference last year, Gaetz had suggested that the justice department and the agencies it oversees, including the FBI, ought to be abolished, as he argued they were being weaponised against conservatives. The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, has rejected these claims.

Critics said Trump – who has also named three lawyers that defended him in criminal cases for senior positions at the justice department – was more interested in hiring loyalists than appointees who will uphold the rule of law.

Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton dismissed Gaetz as the “worst cabinet-level appointment in history”.

But the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, said the furore from the Washington establishment showed his father’s unconventional cabinet picks were just the kind of change-makers that American voters had elected him to usher in.

After being nominated last week for attorney general, Gaetz resigned as representative for Florida’s 1st congressional district, a seat he has held since 2017.

His resignation came as the House Ethics Committee was due to decide whether to release a report on its investigation into allegations of misconduct involving drugs, bribes and paying for sex, including with an underage girl.

Gaetz dismissed the claims as a smear. But his resignation triggered a drip feed of leaks in subsequent days as the ethics panel wrangled over what to do about the report.

Few Republicans seemed willing, meanwhile, to circle the wagons round one of the most unpopular lawmakers in the House.

Last year, the combative Gaetz came under fire from his own side of the aisle when he proved instrumental in ousting Republican Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker.

Markwayne Mullin, a former House member turned senator, told CNN at the time there was a reason why none of Gaetz’s colleagues would defend him from allegations of sexual misconduct.

“Because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor,” said the Oklahoman last October, accusing Gaetz of bragging about his sexual exploits.

Gaetz said Mullin was lying.

As the backlash to his nomination for attorney general began to build this week, Trump made calls to senators in an effort to shore up support.

Trump seemed to be holding firm on Gaetz as he attended a SpaceX rocket launch in Boca Chica, Texas, on Tuesday with Musk.

Asked if he was reconsidering, the president-elect said: “No.”

There was more encouraging news for Gaetz on Wednesday as House Ethics Committee Republicans voted not to release its investigation into him.

It happened as Vice-President-elect JD Vance ferried the attorney general nominee around the Senate in a charm offensive.

Gaetz said it had been “a great day”. But there were hints of turbulence ahead.

When asked how messy the confirmation process could become, incoming Senate majority leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, said the hearings could be “on steroids”.

On Thursday morning, Trump was still calling Republican senators to gauge Gaetz’s chances.

But by lunchtime, the nominee had come to the conclusion he didn’t have the votes and he again shocked Washington with the announcement that he was showing himself the door.

“While the momentum was strong,” he posted on X, “it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”

Trump’s post on Truth Social confirming the volte-face – his first political setback since his election 16 days earlier – was unusually muted for the president-elect.

“I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be Attorney General,” he wrote, adding that the nominee did not wish to be a “distraction”.

Hours later, Trump nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi instead for the post.

While Trump predicted a “wonderful future” for Gaetz, a question mark hangs over what he will do next.

He was comfortably re-elected this month, but there are already plans for a special election to fill his vacated seat.

Randy Ross, a Florida-based fundraiser for Trump, told the BBC that America had not heard the last of Matt Gaetz.

“My opinion is there’s still a spot in Trump’s administration, Florida or our country’s future leadership for this patriot,” said Mr Ross. “We all look forward to his next steps.”

Meanwhile, Ginger Gaetz, who wed the congressman in 2021, posted an old photo on X following his withdrawal of them both on the steps on Capitol Hill.

“The end of an era,” she commented.

US President-elect Donald Trump has nominated veteran prosecutor Pam Bondi as his new pick for attorney general, hours after Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration.

Bondi has a long track record in law enforcement and previously served as Florida’s attorney general.

The 59-year-old is a long-time Trump ally who defended him during his first Senate impeachment trial.

Losing his first choice, Gaetz, to run the Justice Department is a setback for Trump but his new pick should have a less bumpy ride from senators who must approve the appointment.

“Pam was a prosecutor for nearly 20 years, where she was very tough on Violent Criminals, and made the streets safe for Florida Families,” Trump said in a social media post announcing his choice.

Bondi has been close to Trump since his 2016 campaign, telling voters at a recent Trump rally that she considers him a “friend”.

In 2019, she joined his White House to focus on “proactive impeachment messaging”, serving both as his legal advisor and defence attorney during his first impeachment – during which he was acquitted.

She continued to be part of Trump’s legal team in 2020 as it made false claims that the election had been stolen from Trump due to voter fraud.

She also served on Trump’s Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission, and more recently, has headed the legal arm of the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank founded by former Trump staff members.

• The rise and fall of Matt Gaetz in eight wild days

If confirmed by the Senate, Bondi will become the country’s chief law enforcement officer, in charge of the justice department’s more than 115,000 employees and roughly $45bn (£35.7bn) budget.

She would also play a key role in attempting to implement Trump’s vow to punish his political enemies once he takes office.

She has been a vocal critic of the criminal cases brought against Trump, as well as special counsel Jack Smith, who charged Trump in two federal cases.

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore,” Trump wrote on Thursday evening.

“Pam will refocus the DOJ [Department of Justice] to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”

Trump’s other plans for the department include ending “weaponised government”, protecting US borders, dismantling criminal organisations and restoring Americans’ “badly-shattered faith and confidence” in the department.

Trump’s transition team will be hoping that Bondi’s nomination path will be less tumultuous than Gaetz’s.

Reacting to the announcement, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham predicted that Bondi “will be confirmed quickly,” calling her selection a “grand slam, touchdown, hole in one, ace, hat trick, slam dunk, Olympic gold medal pick”.

The news of Bondi’s nomination came about six hours after Gaetz said he would not seek the high-profile cabinet post, following days of debate over whether to release a congressional report on sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Announcing his withdrawal, the 41-year-old said the controversy over his potential nomination “was unfairly becoming a distraction” to the work of the incoming Trump administration.

The report included the findings of a probe sparked by allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Gaetz has vehemently denied the claims but said that he hoped to avoid a “needlessly protracted Washington scuffle” by withdrawing.

Later on Thursday, Gaetz offered his congratulations to Bondi, calling her “a stellar selection by President Trump”.

It is unclear if Gaetz, who resigned his House seat soon after Trump tapped him for attorney general, will now try to retain his seat.

Since his resounding election win earlier this month, Trump has named several close allies to fill high-ranking positions in his administration.

• How these new recruits will be vetted
• What Trump can and can’t do on day one
• How undocumented migrants feel about deportations
• Fact-checking RFK’s views on health policy
• Competing agendas could be headache for Trump

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

Just weeks ago, Gautam Adani, one of the world’s richest men, celebrated Donald Trump’s election victory and announced plans to invest $10bn (£7.9bn) in energy and infrastructure projects in the US.

Now, the 62-year-old Indian billionaire and a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose sprawling $169bn empire spans ports and renewable energy, faces US fraud charges that could potentially jeopardise his ambitions at home and abroad.

Federal prosecutors have accused him of orchestrating a $250m bribery scheme and concealing it to raise money in the US. They allege Mr Adani and his executives paid bribes to Indian officials to secure contracts worth $2bn in profits over 20 years. Adani Group has denied the allegations, calling them “baseless.”

But this is already hurting the group and the Indian economy.

Adani Group firms lost $34bn in market value on Thursday, reducing the combined market capitalisation of its 10 companies to $147bn. Adani Green Energy, which is the firm at the centre of the allegations, also said it wouldn’t proceed with a $600m bond offering.

Then there are questions about the impact of the charges on India’s business and politics.

India’s economy is deeply intertwined with Mr Adani, the country’s leading infrastructure tycoon. He operates 13 ports (30% market share), seven airports (23% of passenger traffic), and India’s second-largest cement business (20% of the market).

With six coal-fired power plants, Mr Adani is India’s largest private player in power. At the same time, he has pledged to invest $50bn in green hydrogen and runs a 8,000km (4,970 miles)-long natural gas pipeline. He’s also building India’s longest expressway and redeveloping India’s largest slum. He employs over 45,000 people, but his businesses impact millions nationwide.

• Gautam Adani: Asia’s richest man

His global ambitions span coal mines in Indonesia and Australia, and infrastructure projects in Africa.

Mr Adani’s portfolio closely mirrors Modi’s policy priorities, beginning with infrastructure and more recently expanding into clean energy. He has thrived despite critics labeling his business empire as crony capitalism, pointing to his close ties with Modi, both as Gujarat’s chief minister – where they both hail from – and as India’s prime minister. (Like any successful businessman, Mr Adani has also forged ties with many opposition leaders, investing in their states.)

“This [the bribery allegations] is big. Mr Adani and Modi have been inseparable for a long time. This is going to influence the political economy of India,” says Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, an Indian journalist who has written extensively on the business group.

This crisis also comes as Mr Adani has spent nearly two years trying to rebuild his image after US short-seller Hindenburg Research’s 2023 report accused his conglomerate of decades of stock manipulation and fraud. Though Mr Adani denied the claims, the allegations triggered a market sell-off and an ongoing investigation by India’s market regulator, SEBI.

“Mr Adani has been trying to rehabilitate his image, and try to show that those earlier fraud allegations leveled by the Hindenburg group were not true, and his company and his businesses had actually been doing quite well. There’d been a number of new deals and investments made over the last year or so, and so this is just a body blow coming to this billionaire who had done a very good job of shaking off the potential damage of those earlier allegations,” Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center, an American think-tank, told the BBC.

For now, raising capital at home may prove challenging for Mr Adani’s cash-guzzling projects.

“The market reaction shows how serious this is,” Ambareesh Baliga, an independent market analyst, told the BBC. “Adanis will still secure funding for their major projects, but with delays.”

The latest charges could also throw a spanner in Mr Adani’s global expansion plans. He has been already challenged in Kenya and Bangladesh over a planned takeover of an international airport and a controversial energy deal. “This [bribery charges] stops international expansion plans linked to the US,” Nirmalya Kumar, Lee Kong Chian Professor at Singapore Management University, told the BBC.

What’s next? Politically, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has unsurprisingly called for Mr Adani’s arrest and promised to stir up parliament. “Bribing government officials in India is not news, but the amounts mentioned are staggering. I suspect the US has names of some of those who were the intended recipients. This has potential reverberations for the Indian political scene. There is more to come,” Mr Kumar believes.

Mr Adani’s team will undoubtedly assemble a top-tier legal defence. “For now, we have only the indictment, leaving much still to unfold,” says Mr Kugelman.

While the US-India business relationship may face scrutiny, it’s unlikely to be significantly impacted, particularly given the recent $500m US deal with Mr Adani for a port project in Sri Lanka, says Mr Kugelman. Despite the serious allegations, broader US-India business ties remain strong.

“The US-India business relationship is a very large and multifaceted one. Even with these very serious allegations against someone that’s such a major player in the Indian economy, I don’t think we should overstate the impact that this could have on that relationship,” Mr Kugelman says.

Also, it’s unclear if Mr Adani can be targeted, despite the US-India extradition treaty, as it depends on whether the new administration allows the cases to proceed. Mr Baliga believes it is not doom and gloom for the Adanis. “I still do think foreign investors and banks will back them like they did post Hindenburg though, given that they are part of very important, well performing sectors of the Indian economy,” he says.

“The sense in the market is also that this will perhaps blow over and be sorted out, once the [Donald] Trump administration takes over.”

The announcement of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant has triggered a furious response from across Israel’s political spectrum.

By contrast it has been welcomed by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and ordinary citizens in Gaza.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog called it “a dark day for justice and humanity”, saying the decision had “chosen the side of terror and evil over democracy and freedom”.

Netanyahu’s office called it “an antisemitic decision” and said that Israel “utterly rejects the false and absurd charges”, labelling the ICC “a biased and discriminatory political body”.

The chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Yuli Edelstein, called it “a shameful decision by a political body held captive by Islamist interests”. Israel’s foreign minister said the ICC had lost its legitimacy.

Hamas has welcomed the decision, without commenting on the issuing of a warrant for its own military commander, Mohammed Deif.

In a statement it said: “We call on all countries around the world to cooperate with the court in bringing the Zionist war criminals, Netanyahu and Gallant and to work immediately to stop the crimes of genocide against defenceless civilians in the Gaza Strip”.

Ordinary Palestinians in Gaza have also welcomed the announcement. Muhammad Ali, a 40-year old man displaced from Gaza City and currently in the central area of Deir al-Balah, said:

“We have been terrorised, starved, had our homes destroyed, and lost our children, sons, and loved ones. We welcome this decision, and of course, we hope that the decisions of the ICC will be implemented”.

Munira Al-Shami, whose sister was killed by Israeli forces last month, called the ICC decision “justice for tens of thousands of victims, including my sister Wafa”.

Meanwhile, some Israeli citizens said the arrests went against Israel’s right to defend itself.

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Ron Ackerman said, adding he thinks the ICC “is purely antisemitic and it doesn’t see what’s going on around Israel, only they look at Israel”.

Helen Kariv from Jerusalem said: “When I first heard it I said, ‘my God, where did they get the idea of arresting the prime minister of the state of Israel and his chief of staff’?… We are fighting for survival.”

A total of 124 countries are signatories to the ICC, including the UK, but not the US, Russia, China, nor Israel itself.

So this means that technically, if either Netanyahu or Gallant sets foot in any of the signatory countries they must be arrested and handed over to the court.

But international lawyers have expressed doubts over whether either man will ever be brought to The Hague for trial.

The last time Netanyahu travelled outside Israel was in July to the US, a country he could still theoretically visit with impunity.

Last year he visited several countries, including the UK in March, many of which are signatories.

It is thought unlikely he would want to risk arrest by doing this again and the countries in question would also be reluctant to find themselves put in that position.

Hamas has little to fear from the ICC warrant for Ibrahim Al-Masri, aka Mohammed Deif. Israel believes he was killed earlier this year, although this was never confirmed by Hamas.

The other two Hamas figures whom the ICC originally planned to prosecute – Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh – are both confirmed as dead.

There is no question that Thursday’s announcement is a major blow to Israel’s international standing, to the two individuals named and most specifically to Israel’s ongoing efforts to present its military campaign in Gaza as a fight between the forces of good and evil.

Israelis are appalled that, in their eyes, the world seems to have already forgotten or overlooked the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October last year.

Palestinians, especially Gazans, feel vindicated that their accusations of Israeli war crimes have now been echoed by an international body with some weight.

A woman in Thailand has been sentenced to death in the first of a string of cases in which she is accused of murdering 14 friends with cyanide.

The court in Bangkok found Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn, 36, guilty of putting poison in a wealthy friend’s food and drink while they were on a trip last year.

Relatives of the friend refused to accept she died of natural causes and an autopsy found traces of cyanide in her body. Police arrested Sararat and uncovered other similar deaths going back to 2015. One person she allegedly targeted survived.

Police say Sararat, dubbed Am Cyanide by Thai media, had a gambling addiction and targeted friends she owed money to, then stole their jewellery and valuables.

Sararat travelled with her friend Siriporn Khanwong, 32, to Ratchaburi province, west of Bangkok in April 2023, where they took part in a Buddhist protection ritual at a river, police said.

Siriporn collapsed and died after a meal with Sararat, who made no effort to help her, investigators said.

Traces of cyanide were found in Siriporn’s body and her phone, money and bags were missing when she was found, police said.

“You got justice, my child. Today, there is justice in this world,” Siriporn’s mother, Thongpin Kiatchanasiri, said in front of the courtroom, as she held a photo of her daughter.

Thongpin said that out of anger, she could not stand to look at Sararat, who she said was smiling when the sentence was being read. Sararat pleaded not guilty to the charges against her.

Her former husband, an ex-police officer, and her lawyer, were handed prison terms of one year and four months, and two years respectively, for hiding evidence to help her evade prosecution. They had also pleaded not guilty before Wednesday’s sentencing.

The ex-husband, Vitoon Rangsiwuthaporn, gave himself up last year. Police said he most likely helped Sararat poison an ex-boyfriend, Suthisak Poonkwan.

Sararat was also ordered to pay Siriporn’s family two million baht ($57,667; £45,446) in compensation.

Cyanide starves the body’s cells of oxygen, which can induce heart attacks. Early symptoms include dizziness, shortness of breath and vomiting.

It can lead to lung injury, coma and death within seconds when consumed in large amounts, but even small doses can still be very harmful.

Its use in Thailand is heavily regulated and those found to have unauthorised access face up two years in jail.

Russia is estimated to have supplied North Korea with more than a million barrels of oil since March this year, according to satellite imagery analysis from the Open Source Centre, a non-profit research group based in the UK.

The oil is payment for the weapons and troops Pyongyang has sent Moscow to fuel its war in Ukraine, leading experts and UK Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, have told the BBC.

These transfers violate UN sanctions, which ban countries from selling oil to North Korea, except in small quantities, in an attempt to stifle its economy to prevent it from further developing nuclear weapons.

The satellite images, shared exclusively with the BBC, show more than a dozen different North Korean oil tankers arriving at an oil terminal in Russia’s Far East a total of 43 times over the past eight months.

Further pictures, taken of the ships at sea, appear to show the tankers arriving empty, and leaving almost full.

North Korea is the only country in the world not allowed to buy oil on the open market. The number of barrels of refined petroleum it can receive is capped by the United Nations at 500,000 annually, well below the amount it needs.

Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to our request for comment.

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The first oil transfer documented by the Open Source Centre in a new report, was on 7 March 2024, seven months after it first emerged Pyongyang was sending Moscow weapons.

The shipments have continued as thousands of North Korean troops are reported to have been sent to Russia to fight, with the last one recorded on 5 November.

“While Kim Jong Un is providing Vladimir Putin with a lifeline to continue his war, Russia is quietly providing North Korea with a lifeline of its own,” says Joe Byrne from the Open Source Centre.

“This steady flow of oil gives North Korea a level of stability it hasn’t had since these sanctions were introduced.”

Four former members of a UN panel responsible for tracking the sanctions on North Korea have told the BBC the transfers are a consequence of increasing ties between Moscow and Pyongyang.

“These transfers are fuelling Putin’s war machine – this is oil for missiles, oil for artillery and now oil for soldiers,” says Hugh Griffiths, who led the panel from 2014 to 2019.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy has told the BBC in a statement: “To keep fighting in Ukraine, Russia has become increasingly reliant on North Korea for troops and weapons in exchange for oil.”

He added that this was “having a direct impact on security in the Korean peninsula, Europe and Indo-Pacific”.

While most people in North Korea rely on coal for their daily lives, oil is essential for running the country’s military. Diesel and petrol are used to transport missile launchers and troops around the country, run munitions factories and fuel the cars of Pyongyang’s elite.

The 500,000 barrels North Korea is allowed to receive fall far short of the nine million it consumes – meaning that since the cap was introduced in 2017, the country has been forced to buy oil illicitly from criminal networks to make up this deficit.

This involves transferring the oil between ships out at sea – a risky, expensive and time-consuming business, according to Dr Go Myong-hyun, a senior research fellow at South Korea’s Institute for National Security Strategy, which is linked to the country’s spy agency.

“Now Kim Jong Un is getting oil directly, it’s likely better quality, and chances are he’s getting it for free, as quid pro quo for supplying munitions. What could be better than that?”

“A million barrels is nothing for a large oil producer like Russia to release, but it is a substantial amount for North Korea to receive,” Dr Go adds.

In all 43 of the journeys tracked by the Open Source Centre using satellite images, the North Korean-flagged tankers arrived at Russia’s Vostochny Port with their trackers switched off, concealing their movements.

The images show they then made their way back to one of four ports on North Korea’s east and west coast.

“The vessels appear silently, almost every week,” says Joe Byrne, the researcher from the Open Source Centre. “Since March there’s been a fairly constant flow.”

The team, which has been tracking these tankers since the oil sanctions were first introduced, used their knowledge of each ship’s capacity to calculate how many oil barrels they could carry.

Then they studied images of the ships entering and leaving Vostochny and, in most instances, could see how low they sat in the water and, therefore, how full they were.

The tankers, they assess, were loaded to 90% of their capacity.

“We can see from some of the images that if the ships were any fuller they would sink,” Mr Byrne says.

Based on this, they calculate that, since March, Russia has given North Korea more than a million barrels of oil – more than double the annual cap, and around ten times the amount Moscow officially gave Pyongyang in 2023.

This follows an assessment by the US government in May that Moscow had already supplied more than 500,000 barrels’ worth of oil.

Cloud cover means the researchers cannot get a clear image of the port every day.

“The whole of August was cloudy, so we weren’t able to document a single trip,” Mr Byrne says, leading his team to believe that one million barrels is a “baseline” figure.

Not only do these oil deliveries breach UN sanctions on North Korea, that Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, signed off on – but also, more than half of the journeys tracked by the Open Source Centre were made by vessels that have been individually sanctioned by the UN.

This means they should have been impounded upon entering Russian waters.

But in March 2024, three weeks after the first oil transfer was documented, Russia disbanded the UN panel responsible for monitoring sanctions violations, by using its veto at the UN Security Council.

Ashley Hess, who was working on the panel up until its collapse, says they saw evidence the transfers had started.

“We were tracking some of the ships and companies involved, but our work was stopped, possibly after they had already breached the 500,000-barrel cap”.

Eric Penton-Voak, who led the group from 2021-2023, says the Russian members on the panel tried to censor its work.

“Now the panel is gone, they can simply ignore the rules,” he adds. “The fact that Russia is now encouraging these ships to visit its ports and load up with oil shows a new level of contempt for these sanctions.”

But Mr Penton-Voak, who is on the board of the Open Source Centre, thinks the problem runs much deeper.

“You now have these autocratic regimes increasingly working together to help one another achieve whatever it is they want, and ignoring the wishes of the international community.”

This is an “increasingly dangerous” playbook, he argues.

“The last thing you want is a North Korean tactical nuclear weapon turning up in Iran, for instance.”

As Kim Jong Un steps up his support for Vladimir Putin’s war, concern is growing over what else he will receive in return.

The US and South Korea estimate Pyongyang has now sent Moscow 16,000 shipping containers filled with artillery shells and rockets, while remnants of exploded North Korean ballistic missiles have been recovered on the battlefield in Ukraine.

More recently, Putin and Kim signed a defence pact, leading to thousands of North Korean troops being sent to Russia’s Kursk region, where intelligence reports indicate they are now engaged in battle.

The South Korean government has told the BBC it would “sternly respond to the violation of the UN Security Council resolutions by Russia and North Korea”.

Its biggest worry is that Moscow will provide Pyongyang with technology to improve its spy satellites and ballistic missiles.

Last month, Seoul’s defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun, stated there was a “high chance” North Korea was asking for such help.

“If you’re sending your people to die in a foreign war, a million barrels of oil is just not sufficient reward,” Dr Go says.

Andrei Lankov, an expert in North Korea-Russia relations at Seoul’s Kookmin University, agrees.

“I used to think it was not in Russia’s interest to share military technology, but perhaps its calculus has changed. The Russians need these troops, and this gives the North Koreans more leverage.”

A holidaymaker who has been detained in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) after posting a negative Google review has said he “just wants to be home for Christmas”.

Craig Ballentine, from Northern Ireland, was arrested in Abu Dhabi airport in October because he posted critical comments about his former employer in Dubai.

He has been accused of slander, but the UAE’s strict cybercrime laws mean there is a chance he could be jailed for the remarks he made in the online review.

The 33-year-old care worker told BBC News NI: “It’s just a waiting game for my family now, the most important thing for me at the minute is to be with them on Christmas Day.”

His comments come as Sinn Féin have released details about Michelle O’Neill’s intervention in the case.

BBC News NI has seen a letter sent by the first minister to the UAE Embassy in London.

In the letter she states: “The increasing number of people travelling from across Ireland to UAE is to be very much welcomed, however cases such as Mr Ballentine’s creates a concern for many of those, whether tourists, or taking up employment.

“I would sincerely urge your good offices to intervene on behalf of Mr Ballentine, taking a compassionate approach to the matter and ensuring that he can return home at the earliest opportunity.”

A spokesperson for Sinn Féin confirmed that to date no reply has been received from the UAE Embassy.

Mr Ballentine, from Cookstown in County Tyrone, welcomed the continued intervention from politicians.

He said: “We’ve seen a number of councillors and MLAs get involved and I’m so grateful, obviously with Michelle O’Neill being Stormont first minister that’s very important.

“She’s still waiting for a reply from the UAE embassy, but fingers crossed that will come soon.”

In 2023 Mr Ballentine got a job in a dog grooming salon in Dubai.

After working there for almost six months, he needed time off due to illness and so he gave his employer a doctor’s certificate as proof of his condition.

But when he did not show up for work, he was registered as “absconded” with the UAE authorities, which meant he could not leave the county.

Mr Ballentine later managed to get that travel ban lifted and he went home to Northern Ireland, but doing so took two months and cost him thousands of pounds.

While he was back in Northern Ireland, he wrote an online review of the dog grooming salon, outlining the problems his former boss had allegedly caused him.

He told BBC News NI his Google post “explained the ordeal that I went through”.

In late October Mr Ballentine returned to the UAE for a short holiday, at which point he was immediately arrested for the alleged slander.

The care worker was released from custody but he cannot leave the UAE until the case against him is resolved.

He was transferred from Abu Dhabi to Dubai where he now has wait until the case against him either goes to court or the charges are dropped.

Mr Balletine told BBC News NI that he has been encouraged by the cross-party support in Northern Ireland for his case, including from UUP councillor Trevor Wilson and DUP MLA Kieth Buchanan.

It has also included intervention from the former Ulster Unionist Party leader, Sir Reg Empey.

Sir Reg sent a letter to Labour’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Middle East Hamish Falconer MP.

The letter states: “Can you advise what steps your department is taking to secure Mr Ballentine’s free passage back to the United Kingdom?”

The letter has not yet received a response.

Mr Ballentine added: “I am hoping the UK government and their embassies can continue to become more involved, and politicians highlighting the case is an important part of that.

“For now, I’m keeping in contact with my family as much as I can, but my parents are waking up everyday day asking – ‘when will our son return home?’ I hope we can answer that soon.”

Singer Katy Perry has successfully appealed against a trademark decision over her name, after being sued by an Australian designer who sells clothes under her birth name Katie Perry.

Three appeals judges on Friday overturned a court decision last year that favoured Katie Taylor over merchandise sold by the pop star during a 2014 tour of Australia.

The judges said Perry had been using her name as a trademark five years before Taylor started her business, adding that by that time, Perry had attained an “international reputation” in entertainment.

The judges also cancelled Taylor’s trademark registration on Friday.

Taylor had likened her legal battle with Perry to “David and Goliath”. She told the Sydney Morning Herald after Friday’s ruling that she was “devastated” with the case outcome.

The appeals judges said it was “unfortunate” that the case pitted two enterprising women who used their names as trademarks but were unaware that the other existed.

“Both women put blood, sweat and tears into developing their businesses,” the judges said.

“As the fame of one grew internationally, the other became aware of her namesake and filed a trademark application,” they said.

The judge who ruled in favour of Taylor last year referenced one of Perry’s biggest hits in her decision: “This is a tale of two women, two teenage dreams and one name”.

Friday’s ruling comes as Perry prepares for her Lifetimes world tour in early 2025 to support her comeback album 143.