COP29 is over, with developing countries complaining that the $300bn (about £240bn) a year in climate finance they will receive by 2035 is a “paltry sum”.

Many of the rich country voices at the UN’s climate conference were amazed that developing nations were unhappy with what on the surface seems a huge settlement. It is an improvement – on the current contribution of $100bn (£79.8bn) a year.

However, the developing world, which had pushed for more, had many genuine issues with the final sum.

There were complaints it simply was not enough and that it was a mixture of grants and loans. And countries were deeply annoyed by the way the wealthy waited until the last minute to reveal their hand.

“It’s a paltry sum,” India’s delegate Chandni Raina told other delegates, after the deal had been gavelled through.

“This document is little more than an optical illusion. This, in our opinion, will not address the enormity of the challenge we all face.”

Ultimately, the developing world was compelled to accept it, with many rich countries pointing to next year’s arrival of President Donald Trump, a known climate sceptic, and arguing that they would not get a better deal.

But this package is also being criticised as short-sighted from the richer world’s perspective.

The argument runs that if you want to keep the world safe from rising temperatures, then wealthier nations need to help emerging economies cut their emissions, because that is where 75% of the growth in emissions has occurred in the past decade.

New national plans are due to be published next spring to outline how every country will limit their planet warming gases over the next 10 years.

A more generous cash settlement at COP29 would undoubtedly have had a positive knock-on effect on those efforts.

And at a time of geopolitical uncertainty and distraction, keeping countries united on climate should be critical. The big fight over money re-opened old divisions between rich and poor, with an anger and bitterness I have not seen in years.

Shepherding 200 countries to an intricate deal on climate finance was always going to be a tough task. But for hosts Azerbaijan, a country with no real history of involvement in the COP process, it proved to be almost beyond them.

The country’s president, Ilham Aliyev, did not help matters by describing oil and gas as a “gift from God”. His blunt attacks – accusing “Western fake news media”, charities and politicians of “spreading disinformation” – did not improve matters.

Azerbaijan follows Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as the third authoritarian state in a row to host COP, raising concerns about how host countries are selected.

Azerbaijan, like the UAE, has an economy which is built on oil and gas exports, which seems at odds with a process that is meant to be helping the world transition away from coal, oil and gas.

Privately, many senior negotiators spoke of their frustration with what some termed the worst COP in a decade. Half-way through the meeting, several senior climate leaders wrote a public letter saying COP was not fit for purpose and calling for reform.

With the role of the US in future climate talks in doubt because of Trump, attention shifted to who might become the real climate leader in the expected absence of the US over the next four years.

The natural successor is China.

The world’s largest carbon emitter was largely silent at this year’s COP, only showing its hand to give details for the first time on the amount of climate finance it gives to developing countries.

China is still defined by the United Nations as a “developing” country, meaning it has no formal obligation to cut greenhouse gas emissions or provide financial help to poorer countries.

However, China has agreed to a formula in the finance deal that would allow its contributions to be counted in the overall fund for climate-vulnerable countries, on a voluntary basis.

All in all, a move that is being seen as very deft and effective.

“China is becoming more transparent about its financial support to global south countries,” said Li Shuo, from the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“This should propel the country to play a larger role in the future.”

Although he was not there, Trump’s presence was felt across COP.

One common element among the negotiators in Baku was the need to ensure that a second Trump administration would not upend years of careful climate negotiations.

So it was no surprise to see that richer nations wanted to commit to raising funding by 2035. They believe putting that date will allow the US to contribute again once Trump has left office.

Similarly, the drive to increase the contributor base was done with Trump in mind.

Bringing China to the table, even in a voluntary capacity, will be used to show that it is worth engaging in international forums like COP.

“No-one thinks Trump in the White House will be anything but damaging to the multilateral climate regime,” said Prof Michael Jacobs, visiting senior fellow at the think tank ODI Global.

“But this agreement was about trying to limit the damage as much as possible.”

One very noticeable trend at COP29 was the sometimes more aggressive stance taken by many environmental NGOs and campaigners.

I witnessed it myself when US climate envoy John Podesta was chased out a meeting area with chants of “shame” ringing in his ears.

Many developing countries rely on these NGOs for support in dealing with complex events like COP.

During the talks, there was a strong push from many of these campaigners for an outright rejection of almost any deal.

Similarly, in the final plenary when all countries accepted the finance text, there were brash cheers when speakers from several nations spoke out against the agreement, after the gavelling.

Will confrontational activism and fraught debate become the new norm at a diplomatic climate conference?

We will have to wait for the next COP to see.

British superstar Adele cried on Saturday night as she played her 100th and final show in Las Vegas.

She has spent the past two years playing a weekend residency at the 4,000-capacity Caesars Palace.

Throughout her residency she often interacted with fans, but has indicated that the experience has been emotionally draining.

Earlier this year, she also said she plans to take a “big break” from music after her current run of concerts.

Videos from inside the venue on Saturday show Adele getting emotional during the concert and crying as she bid farewell to Vegas.

“I’m so sad this residency is over but I am so glad that it happened, I really, really am,” she said.

“I will miss it terribly, I will miss you terribly. I don’t know when I next want to perform again,” she added.

Adele’s Vegas residency was initially set to start in January 2022, but was cancelled just 24 hours before the first show was due to begin following a Covid outbreak among production staff and delays in finishing the set.

It began later that year, and she performed every Friday and Saturday.

There have been plenty of memorable moments over the years, including her bursting into tears after spotting Celine Dion at her concert.

The two singers then shared a hug in the Colosseum Theatre at Caesars Palace, a venue originally built for Dion’s 2003 debut residency.

Adele is known to idolise the Canadian icon, while Dion has also spoken in glowing terms about Adele.

The London-born singer – whose albums 19, 21, 25 and 30 have all been massive worldwide successes – also made headlines when she defended a fan who was told to sit down at one of her Vegas concerts.

The audience member was singing along enthusiastically to Water Under the Bridge when another fan sitting behind him and a security guard told him he was blocking the view.

Adele spotted that and paused the song, telling the guard to “leave him alone”.

The fan used a selfie stick to record the interaction, which he later posted on TikTok.

He also thanked the star for “standing up for me”.

However, not every Vegas concert has gone to plan.

In June, Adele angrily cursed an audience member who allegedly yelled “Pride sucks” during one of her shows.

“Did you come to my… show and just say that Pride sucks?” she scolded. “Don’t be so… ridiculous.

“If you have nothing nice to say, shut up, all right?”

The 36-year-old later admitted she got easily riled up these days, adding that she was “old and grumpy now”.

In July, Adele, best known for hits such as Rolling In The Deep, Hello, Someone Like You and Easy On Me, revealed she had plans to take an extended break from music after her current run of concerts.

“My tank is quite empty at the minute,” the star told German broadcaster ZDF.

“I don’t have any plans for new music at all,” she said.

“I want a big break after all this and I think I want to do other creative things just for a little while.

“You know, I don’t even sing at home at all. How strange is that?”

Adele added one of the reasons she wanted to take a break from music is because of a struggle with the limelight.

“I miss everything about before I was famous, I think probably being anonymous the most,” she said.

“I like that I get to make music all the time, whenever I want to, and people are receptive to it and like it. That’s pretty unimaginable. But the fame side of it, I absolutely hate.

“The fact that people are even interested in my songs and my voice is pretty wild. I don’t think it ever gets normal. So it’s worth it, the balance.”

Her career break has been a long time in the making. In 2022, Adele said she wanted to study for an English Literature degree once she left Las Vegas for the last time.

During a Q&A session with fans in Los Angeles she said: “If I hadn’t made it singing, I think I would be an English lit teacher.”

She added: “I definitely think I use my passion for English lit in what I do. I wish I’d gone to university and had that experience, but I will do it online with a tutor.”

She continued: “That’s my plan for 2025, just to get the qualification”.

As a guide dog handler of 25 and a half years, I’ve had hundreds of experiences of being refused service – but online threats and increasing hostility towards disabled people mean I’m giving up on asking publicly for equality and respect.

The last straw came about a week ago. I was already reeling from a number of refusals by restaurants and shops when, once again, I was refused entry because I have a guide dog.

I visited the restaurant, which I have chosen not to name, but was told I couldn’t enter as people could have allergies. This, by the way, is unlawful.

They later changed their reason – saying they simply had no space.

It’s difficult to describe how this feels.

I don’t think you can understand it unless you know what it is like to face daily discrimination.

I compare the feeling to December 2022 when I was briefly robbed of my smartphone near the BBC building in central London.

Unlike street robberies, refusals are rarely violent or physical, but the feeling of being slugged in the gut is identical.

I argue refusals feel worse – because at least I can understand the motivation of robbers.

I have never understood why, when everyone on the planet is one accident or medical condition away from disability, many people seem to lack any empathy and do not attempt to understand how it must feel to be refused service because of a disability.

After failing to politely persuade the restauranteurs that my guide dog was well-behaved and then reiterating that it is unlawful to refuse access, one customer who’d overheard me voiced their disgust at the restaurant’s attitude.

I invited people who witnessed the refusal to leave a review. Two voices from another table, however, said that I had “ruined their meal” and “you should leave”.

I felt as small as a gnat.

My guide dog journey began in 1998, when I first applied to train with one. I had poor partial sight up until the year before when, as a 14-year-old, I became completely blind.

I have a number of eye conditions, but the primary diagnosis are glaucoma and hypertension, which have left me totally blind.

Put simply, leaving my house is hard. Very fatiguingly hard.

I’ve been privileged to work with four wonderful guides – Brandy, Chipp, Sammy and now Shawn.

They’ve been my life, my freedom and independence.

That all feels ripped away from me when I’m refused service.

At the restaurant, more customers expressed their shock at the way I was treated. But for me, the customers who seemed annoyed sparked echoes in my mind of every occasion I’ve shared refusals to social media over the past eight years.

There I’ve faced constant demands to justify why I should want equal treatment and, more perturbingly, threats of violence and even death.

Two years ago, I was refused access to different branches of Tesco in London.

Tesco apologised and promised further training for staff.

The encounters were captured on a privately owned body-camera. Many people were supportive but large numbers were highly abusive and aggressive.

I have received abuse on many social media platforms. Recently one user, who identified himself as a retired police officer, posted pictures of “victim cards” which, ironically, I was unable to appreciate until described to me by a sighted colleague.

His account was later suspended – but the post was not removed when I reported it.

Other users have asked why I’m sharing my experience of service rejection. I would reply to as many questions as possible and explain that it was simply to shine a torch into a dark corner.

On other occasions, social media users have threatened to punch me, kill my guide dog and tell me I need to “be careful”. One user said my mother should be raped.

Often the most vile abuse comes in the replies to lengthy threads, where discourse seems to get out of hand.

Why would I continue to put myself through this?

In England, Wales and Scotland, the Equality Act 2010 makes it unlawful to discriminate against a disabled person because they have a guide dog with them when accessing businesses or services.

In Northern Ireland, the same is true but the legislation is named the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

There is a large anomaly in the law though. When taxis and cabs fail or refuse to carry an assistance dog, or attempt to charge more, it is a criminal offence.

When businesses and shops do the same, it’s a civil matter and it’s down to the individual disabled person to gather evidence and pursue them. It’s costly, energy-sapping and mostly not worth doing.

Raising the incidents on social media feels torturous when it means being threatened.

So I’ve had to accept there’s very little I can practically do.

Seeing is easy.

What seems harder for some, though, is trying to understand what it feels like to be barred from businesses when you can’t.

In Touch – Guide Dogs Q&A

Abida Sultaan was nothing like your typical princess.

She wore her hair short, shot tigers and was an ace polo player. She flew planes and drove herself around in a Rolls-Royce from the age of nine.

Born in 1913 into a family of brave ‘begums’ (a Muslim woman of high rank) who ruled the northern princely state of Bhopal in British India for over a century, Abida continued their legacy of defying stereotypes around women in general and Muslim women in particular.

She refused to be in purdah – a practice followed by Muslim, and some Hindu women, of wearing clothes that conceal them and secluding themselves from men – and became heir to the throne at the age of 15.

Abida ran her father’s cabinet for more than a decade, rubbed shoulders with India’s prominent freedom fighters and would eventually come to have a ringside view of the hate and violence the country disintegrated into after it was partitioned in 1947 to create Pakistan.

She was groomed from a young age to take on the mantle of ruler under the guidance of her grandmother, Sultan Jehan, a strict disciplinarian who was the ruler of Bhopal.

In her 2004 autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Princess, Abida writes about how she had to wake up at four in the morning to read the Quran – the religious text of Islam – and then proceed with a day filled with activities, which included learning sports, music and horse riding, but also included chores like sweeping the floor and cleaning bathrooms.

“We girls were not allowed to feel any inferiority on account of our sex. Everything was equal. We had all the freedom that a boy had; we could ride, climb trees, play any game we chose to. There were no restrictions,” she said in an interview about her childhood.

Abida had a fierce, independent streak even as a child and rebelled against her grandmother when she forced her into purdah at the age of 13. Her chutzpah coupled with her father’s broad-mindedness helped her escape the practice for the rest of her life.

Already heir to the throne of Bhopal, Abida stood the chance of becoming part of the royal family of the neighbouring princely state of Kurwai as well when at the age of 12, she was married off to Sarwar Ali Khan, her childhood friend and ruler Kurwai. She described her nikah (wedding), about which she was clueless, in hilarious detail in her memoir.

She writes about how one day, while she was pillow-fighting with her cousins, her grandmother walked into the room and asked her to dress up for a wedding. Only, no one told her that she was the bride.

“No-one had prepared or instructed me on how to conduct myself, with the result that I walked into the nikah chamber, pushing the gathered women out of my way, my face uncovered, sulking as usual for being chosen again for some new experiment,” she writes.

The wedding was brief like Abida’s marriage, which lasted for less than a decade.

Married life was difficult for Abida, not just because of her young age but also because of her strict, pious upbringing. She candidly describes how a lack of knowledge and discomfort with sex took a toll on her marriage.

“Immediately after my wedding, I entered the world of conjugal trauma. I had not realised that the consummation that followed would leave me so horrified, numbed and feeling unchaste,” she writes and adds that she could never bring herself to “accept marital relations between husband and wife”. This led to the breakdown of her marriage.

In her paper on intimacy and sexuality in the autobiographical writings of Muslim women in South Asia, historian Siobhan Lambert-Hurley underscores how Abida’s honest reflections on sexual intimacy with her husband tear apart the stereotype that Muslim women do not write about sex, by presenting an unabashed voice on the topic.

After her marriage fell apart, Abida left her marital home in Kurwai and moved back to Bhopal. But the couple’s only son, Shahryar Mohammad Khan, became the subject of an ugly custody dispute. Frustrated by the drawn-out battle and not wanting to part with her son, Abida took a bold step to make her husband back off.

On a warm night in March 1935, Abida drove for three hours straight to reach her husband’s home in Kurwai. She entered his bedroom, pulled out a revolver, threw it in her husband’s lap and said: “Shoot me or I will shoot you.”

This incident, coupled with a physical confrontation between the couple in which Abida emerged victorious, put an end to the custody dispute. She proceeded to raise her son as a single mother while juggling her duties as heir to the throne. She ran her state’s cabinet from 1935 till 1949, when Bhopal was merged with the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Abida also attended the round-table conferences – called by the British government to decide the future government of India – during which she met influential leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Motilal Nehru and his son, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was to become India’s first prime minister.

She also experienced first-hand the deteriorating relationship between Hindus and Muslims and the violence that broke out in the aftermath of India’s partition in 1947.

In her memoir Abida describes the discrimination she began facing in Bhopal; how her family, who had lived there peacefully for generations, began to be treated as “outsiders”. In one of her interviews, she spoke about a particularly disturbing memory she had of the violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims.

One day, after the Indian government informed her that a train carrying Muslim refugees would arrive in Bhopal, she went to the railway station to supervise the arrival.

“When the compartments were opened, they were all dead,” she said and added that it was this violence and distrust that drove her to move to Pakistan in 1950.

Abida left quietly, with only her son and hopes for a brighter future. In Pakistan, she championed democracy and women’s rights through her political career. Abida died in Karachi in 2002.

After she left for Pakistan, the Indian government had made her sister heir to the throne. But Abida is still known in Bhopal, where people refer to her by her nickname ‘bia huzoor’.

“Religious politics over the past few years have chipped away at her legacy and she isn’t spoken about as much any more,” says journalist Shams Ur Rehman Alavi, who has been researching Bhopal’s women rulers.

“But her name isn’t likely to be forgotten anytime soon.”

When Nila Ibrahimi set out to build a website telling the stories of Afghan girls, it wasn’t just to give them a voice.

The 17-year-old Afghan refugee was also determined to remind her fellow Gen Zs in her adopted country, Canada, that they were similar – they even listened to Taylor Swift just like other teenage girls around the world.

“I want to make them as real as possible so that other people, especially young people, Gen Z specifically, can put themselves in their shoes,” she told the BBC.

Nila spoke to the BBC earlier this week, before picking up the International Children’s Peace Prize previously won by education campaigner Malala Yousafzai and climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Nila’s is, perhaps, not an easy task. The plight of Afghanistan’s women and girls can feel a world away to young people living in Canada, where Nila found a home after fleeing her home country as the Taliban took over three years ago.

In that time, the Taliban have banned teenage girls from education, banned women from travelling long distances without a male chaperone, and now ordered them to keep their voices down in public – effectively silencing half the population.

The Taliban have defended the rulings to the BBC previously by saying they align with religious texts.

“The differences [between Afghanistan and Canada] are vast, so it makes it hard for them to feel connected,” acknowledges Nila.

That is why she helped set up HerStory – a place where she and others help share the stories of Afghan women and girls in their own words, both inside and out of the country.

“So many times we are lost in the differences that we don’t see the similarities and that’s our goal, to show that to the world.”

Nila Ibrahim was chosen from 165 nominees as the 20th winner of the prestigious prize.

The award recognises not just the work done on HerStory, but also her passion for standing up for women’s rights in Afghanistan.

Nila’s first stand for women’s rights came in March 2021, when she joined other young Afghan girls in sharing a video of her singing online.

It was a small but powerful protest against a decree by the then-director of education in the Afghan capital, Kabul, who tried to ban girls over 12 singing in public. The attempted order was never implemented.

“That was when I really understood the importance of performing, the importance of speaking up and talking about these issues,” explains Nila, who was part of a group called Sound of Afghanistan.

But less than six months later, everything would change – and, aged 14, she would have to flee with her family as the Taliban arrived.

The family – who are part of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority – made the difficult journey to Pakistan, where they spent a year before being granted asylum in Canada.

It was, after 12 months without education, a “breath of fresh air”, she says.

There, Nila was reunited with her friends from the singing group.

She was also invited to speak at events, about her experiences of Afghanistan, allowing her to advocate for all the girls left behind.

People, she says, were surprised at how eloquent she was. But Nila knew there were millions of women and girls in Afghanistan who were just as capable – although with less access to the opportunities she had.

“So I thought if my potential can surprise these people and they don’t know about how educated girls from Afghanistan can be, what if that information was accessible to them?”

HerStory – the website which grew out of this thought – started in 2023. It features interviews and first person accounts from both refugees and women inside Afghanistan.

The idea is to create a safe space where a group of people who “grew up with the stories of the first period of Taliban and how horrible the lives of women were at the time” share their stories – and their “shock and anger” at finding themselves in an increasingly similar situation.

The anger is a feeling Nila tries to keep separate from her work.

“When you see Afghanistan going back in time in 20 years, of course it makes you fear,” she says.

“It’s a shared feeling. It’s a shared experience for girls anywhere.”

The award, she says, is a chance for Afghan girls to once again remind the world about the restrictions they face on a daily basis – a reminder “not to forget Afghan girls”.

Marc Dullaert, founder of the KidsRights Foundation, which runs the award, pointed out that a “staggering” number of young women were currently being excluded from education.

“Nila’s inspirational work to provide them with a voice that will be heard across the world makes her a truly worthy winner of this year’s 20th International Peace Prize,” he added.

It is also a reminder that her generation – while young – can make a difference, Nila hopes.

“I think so many times when we talk about issues and different causes, we talk about it with the very adult like approach of oh, this is very serious,” she says.

“The world is a very scary place, but there is an approach that is more Gen Z-like… and we can take little steps and… do whatever we can.”

At the epicentre of this devastating family drama is Gisèle Pelicot, a diminutive 71-year-old woman, drugged by her former husband and abused for a decade by dozens of strangers he had recruited online.

Watching her entering the court in Avignon and giving evidence, it was staggering to imagine the amount of abuse her body sustained.

But as other members of her family have taken the stand, it has become painfully clear that no-one has emerged unscathed from the storm unleashed by the actions of the Pelicot patriarch.

The damage to this family is clear. Individually, they have described the destructive force that engulfed them in November 2020 as a “tsunami” that left nothing but ruin in its wake.

Dominique Pelicot was finally caught after an alert security guard caught him filming under women’s skirts.

But it took weeks for police to discover the full truth that ultimately tore his family apart.

For years, he had been drugging his wife and recruiting men online to rape her while she was unconscious.

He filmed the abuse and neatly classified each visit in folders on his hard drive. Faced with the evidence, Dominique Pelicot admitted the rape charges against him.

Alongside obscene language describing his videos, he added captions with the men’s names. Fifty other men have been on trial with him and only a handful admit rape. More than 20 others could not be identified and are still at large.

Gisèle Pelicot has attended almost all of this trial. She waived her anonymity and allowed the public to see what she had endured.

The videos leave no doubt that the sex acts were not consensual. Ms Pelicot can be seen lying on the bed, snoring, as her husband whispers instructions to various men to touch her, prod her, use her.

Artificial sleep affords her mind a degree of protection, but her body becomes an object.

She was, in her own words, treated “like a rag doll, like a garbage bag“.

“I am 72 now and I don’t know how much time I have left,” she told the court last week.

The magnitude of Dominique Pelicot’s betrayal and crimes is such that the aftershocks have rippled far beyond his ex-wife.

The Pelicots’ middle child, Caroline Darian, now 45, screamed her anguish at her father in court as she demanded to know the truth about photos found on his computer. Entitled “My naked daughter”, the images show her semi-naked and, she says, clearly drugged.

Mr Pelicot has offered various and at times contradictory explanations for the pictures, although he has denied abusing his daughter. “I never touched you,” he pleaded with her.

But his duplicity has been abundantly exposed during this trial, and he has clearly lost the right to be believed by his daughter.

“You are a liar,” she shouted back at him. “I am sick of your lies, you are alone in your lie, you will die lying.”

Fighting back tears, she accused her father of looking at her “with incestuous eyes”.

Caroline Darian has told the court she feels she is the trial’s “forgotten victim” as, unlike her mother’s case, there is no record of the abuse she is convinced was inflicted on her.

She has founded a charity to highlight the dangers of drug-induced assault and published a book in 2022 detailing her family’s trauma. In it, she hinted at a rift with her mother, who she found had dropped off a bundle of warm clothes for her father in jail, weeks after his crimes came to light.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Caroline wrote. “She was still looking after the person who got her raped for a decade.”

That apparent rift was exploited by a combative defence lawyer who suggested Gisèle Pelicot had chosen her former husband over her daughter by not demanding the truth about the photos of Caroline. Gisèle shook her head, but Caroline cracked a slight smile, appearing to acknowledge the lawyer’s description.

When Caroline’s brothers David and Florian took the stand they made repeated references to the pain she was going through, urging their father to tell the truth.

Stifling sobs, Florian, 38, the youngest of the family, turned to face Dominique Pelicot sitting in a glass box to his left and said: “If you have any dignity and humanity – you don’t have anything left to lose anyway – tell Caroline the truth.”

He also spoke of his longstanding suspicion he was the product of an affair his mother had in the 1980s, which was compounded by a faint but lifelong feeling that his father loved his siblings more than him.

In a desperate search for answers, he wondered out loud whether he could be the “motive” for his father’s crimes. He said he would seek out a paternity test, adding it would be a “relief” not to be Dominique Pelicot’s son.

Through tears, Florian painted a desolate picture of what his life had become. His marriage to the mother of his three children, Aurore, has not survived revelations that Dominique Pelicot also surreptitiously took photographs of her.

Despite their separation, this slight, softly-spoken woman has frequently attended the trial and said it had exposed the “banality” of abuse.

Aurore, herself a survivor of incest, is having to live with the regret of not having listened to her instincts regarding Mr Pelicot. “If she had, she may have been able to alter the course of events,” her lawyer said.

The eldest of the Pelicot children, David, is a burly man of 50 who bears a striking resemblance to his father.

Taking the stand this week, he described how he had grown closer to Dominique Pelicot when he had himself become a father.

Then, his voice growing more anguished and clutching the stand as if to steady himself, he recalled the harrowing detail the night his mother told him of his father’s arrest. “All of us know where we were when the tsunami hit,” he said.

Naked photographs of his wife Celine, pregnant with their twin daughters, were also found among Mr Pelicot’s files. She was in the bathroom, snapped with a hidden camera.

His voice heavy with emotion, David described watching his mother, frail and lost, standing on a train platform, her life reduced to her dog and a suitcase.

Recalling the birthday parties his parents used to throw for him and his siblings, to the envy of their friends, he said: “My childhood has disappeared; it was erased.”

The trauma rippling through this family seems without end. David’s son, now 18, wonders what really happened when Dominique asked him to “play doctor” as a child.

His young siblings, the family’s lawyer said on Wednesday, “will have to find their place in a family in which their grandmother, their mother, their brother and their aunts have all been victims of their grandfather.”

Caroline’s young son is still profoundly shaken by the carefully worded revelation, four years ago, that his beloved grandfather hurt his grandmother.

“This is just a sample of the depth of the suffering caused by a rape in the family,” lawyer Stéphane Babonneau said in his closing arguments.

A verdict is expected on 20 December. Mr Pelicot is facing 20 years in jail – the maximum sentence for rape in France.

And for the rest of his family the trauma will live on. Because none of them will ever know for certain what he may or may not have done.

In one of the shaky phone videos shown in court, a tall naked man stands in the middle of a dark bedroom. Another man sits on the bed, smiling, next to an unconscious woman lying on her side, lightly snoring.

Behind her, on a chest of drawers, is a photograph, clearly discernible despite the low lighting.

It is the Pelicot family, huddling close on a beach on a sunny day, and beaming at the camera.

Israel says a rabbi who went missing in the United Arab Emirates has been murdered, and have vowed to track down his killers.

“The murder of Zvi Kogan is a criminal antisemitic terrorist incident. The State of Israel will act in all of its abilities to bring to justice the criminals responsible for his death,” the PM’s office said following news on Sunday that the rabbi’s body had been found.

Rabbi Kogan, an envoy of the orthodox Jewish organisation Chabad, had been missing in Dubai since Thursday sparking a investigation from Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and UAE authorities.

Israeli officials have been in contact with the family of the Israeli-Moldovan national, since he went missing, the Israeli statement continued.

The recovery of Zvi Kogan’s body comes after his abandoned car was found an hour’s drive away from his home.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog also called his murder “a vile, antisemitic attack”.

Chabad is a religious foundation that seeks to build links with non-affiliated and secular Jews or other sects of Judaism. The group’s branch in the UAE supports thousands of Jewish visitors and residents, according to its website.

Rabbi Kogan, 28, worked with other Chabad emissaries “in establishing and expanding Jewish life in the Emirates”, the organisation says. He also managed a kosher supermarket in Dubai.

The Israeli government’s travel advisory service warns citizens to only travel to the UAE for “essential reasons”, as they say there is “terrorist activity” in the UAE, which constitutes “a real risk to Israelis who are staying/visiting in the country”.

Abu Dhabi established formal ties with Israel under an agreement brokered by the US, known as the Abraham Accords.

It has maintained the relationship during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

War-stricken Sudan is in danger of becoming another failed state because civil society is disintegrating amid a proliferation of armed groups, the head of a leading international aid agency has told the BBC.

As well as the two main warring parties in Sudan – the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces – there are many smaller “ethnic armies” looting and going “berserk” on civilians, Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said.

“The parties are tearing down their own houses, they are massacring their own people,” he said.

For nineteen months, there has been a brutal power struggle between the army and the RSF, that has forced over 10 million people to flee their homes and pushed the country to the brink of starvation.

• Sudan war: A simple guide to what is happening
• Fear and prayers in Sudan city under siege

“All that I saw confirms that this is indeed the biggest humanitarian emergency on our watch, the biggest hunger crisis, the biggest displacement crisis,” Mr Egeland said, following a trip to Sudan.

In September, the World Health Organization (WHO) said starvation in Sudan “is almost everywhere”.

Soup kitchens have been forced to close due to being underfunded. Egeland said the lack of humanitarian response meant remaining sources of aid are simply “delaying deaths instead of preventing them.”

“Most of Sudan is starving, it’s starving,” he said, adding that starvation has been used as a method of warfare.

Some food security specialists fear that as many as 2.5 million people could die from hunger by the end of this year.

Mr Egeland warned that the world is “failing Sudan completely” by not doing enough.

He told the BBC if Europe wanted to avoid a refugee crisis, it needed to invest in “aid, protection and peace in this corner of the world”.

“It’s an underfunded operation, even though it’s the world’s biggest emergency,” he said.

Thousands of people have been killed since a civil war broke out. Rights groups have also expressed fears that there may be ethnic cleansing and genocide in Sudan.

Despite this, peace talks between the RSF and the army have been fruitless.

“The war will stop when these warlords feel they have more to lose by continuing fighting, than by doing the sensible thing” Egeland said.

• A front-row seat to my country falling apart
• The children living between starvation and death in Darfur
• Famine looms in Sudan as civil war survivors tell of killings and rapes

Donald Trump has nominated longtime ally Brooke Rollins for secretary of agriculture, completing his cabinet roster.

He made the announcement Saturday late afternoon, tapping the head of Maga-backed think tank the America First Policy Institute for the job.

“As our next Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke will spearhead the effort to protect American Farmers, who are truly the backbone of our Country,” Trump said in a statement.

Her nomination marks the end of a whirlwind – and sometimes dramatic – spree of nominations to lead executive agencies.

Rollins has been a top Trump ally for many years, as the co-founder and president of the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump right-wing think tank.

A former White House aide during the president-elect’s first administration, she served as director of the Office of American Innovation and acting director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Having grown up on a farm, Rollins was involved early with Future Farmers of America in addition to 4H, a nationwide agricultural club.

She graduated from the Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture development and later worked as a lawyer.

If confirmed by the Senate, she would oversee farm subsidies, federal nutrition programmes, meat inspections and other facets of the country’s farm, food and forestry industries.

She would also play a key role in renegotiating the trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico, which could involve imposing Trump’s promised tariffs.

Rollins’ nomination marks the end of Trump’s picks for his cabinet – a group of 15 advisers who each helm a bureaucratic department within the American government.

Each nominee will have to be confirmed by the Senate.

Trump has chosen an eclectic array of cabinet picks, from Maga loyalists to former political rivals.

Some of his nominations – such as Robert Kennedy Jr for the Department of Health and Human Services and Matt Gaetz for attorney general – have raised eyebrows.

Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer and vaccine sceptic who ran against Trump as an independent before dropping out and endorsing him, would be in charge of the Food and Drug Administration.

Gaetz, a bombastic former Florida congressman who spearheaded the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, withdrew his nomination and resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor, soliciting for sex and illicit drug use.

Media reported that senators made it clear it would be difficult to confirm Gaetz for the job. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing, but said he withdrew from consideration because he was becoming a “distraction”.

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

Trump did not waste time, quickly nominating Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, to the post instead.

Another pick, Pete Hegseth, has also been embroiled in scandal, after a police report revealed new details about an alleged sexual assault encounter the former Fox-news host had with a woman in 2017.

Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing and claims the encounter was consensual. He was never arrested or charged.

Education secretary nominee Linda McMahon – the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment – has also been criticised for her lack of experience in education.

A court in South Korea has found a man guilty of trying to avoid mandatory military service by deliberately gaining weight, local media report.

The 26-year-old began binge eating before his physical examination for the draft, a judge in the capital, Seoul, said. He was categorised as obese, allowing him to serve in a non-combat role at a government agency.

The defendant received a one-year suspended sentence. A friend who devised a special regimen that doubled his daily food intake got a six-month suspended sentence, the Korea Herald newspaper reports.

All able-bodied men in South Korea over the age of 18 must serve in the army for at least 18 months.

According to the Korean Herald, the defendant was assessed as fit for combat duty during an initial physical exam.

But at the final examination last year, he weighed in at over 102kg (225 lbs, 16 stone), making him heavily obese.

The man who recommended binge dieting had denied the charge of aiding and abetting, saying he never believed his friend would through with it, the newspaper adds.

A massive Israeli air strike on central Beirut has killed at least 20 people, Lebanese officials say, in the latest attack on the capital amid an escalation of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah.

The strike happened without warning at about 04:00 (02:00 GMT) on Saturday, and was an attempt to assassinate a senior Hezbollah official, Israeli media reported.

The attack was heard and felt across the city, and destroyed at least one eight-storey residential building in the densely populated Basta district.

Lebanon’s National News Agency said a so-called bunker buster bomb was used, a type of weapon previously used by Israel to kill senior Hezbollah figures, including former leader Hassan Nasrallah.

• Israel-Lebanon in maps: Tracking the conflict with Hezbollah and Iran

• What is Hezbollah and why is Israel attacking Lebanon?

The death toll rose from 15 to 20 on Saturday as emergency workers used heavy machinery to remove the rubble and retrieve bodies.

The Lebanese health ministry said more than 60 people had been wounded, and that the number of victims was expected to rise as DNA tests would be carried out on body parts that had been recovered.

“It was a very horrible explosion. All the windows and glasses were over me, my wife and my children. My home now is a battlefield,” said 55-year-old Ali Nassar, who lived in a nearby building.

“Even if one person is hiding here…Should you destroy buildings where people are sleeping inside? Is it necessary to kill all the people for one person? Or we’re not humans? That’s what I’m asking.”

According to the Israeli public broadcaster Kan, the attack was an attempt to kill Mohammed Haydar, a top Hezbollah official. Hezbollah MP Amin Sherri said none of the group’s leaders were in the building hit, and Haydar’s fate remained unclear.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has not commented.

Also on Saturday, the IDF carried out further air strikes on the Dahieh, the area in southern Beirut where Hezbollah is based, saying they were buildings linked to the group.

Israeli attacks have also hit the south, where an Israeli ground invasion is advancing, and the east, where air strikes in the city of Baalbek killed at least 15 people, including four children, the Lebanese health ministry said.

In the past two weeks, Israel has intensified its campaign against Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia and political movement, amid international efforts for a ceasefire, in what appears to be a strategy to pressure the group to accept a deal.

The escalation comes as renewed negotiations to end more than one year of conflict showed initial signs of progress. This week, Amos Hochstein, who has led the Biden administration’s diplomatic efforts, held talks in Lebanon and Israel to try to advance a US-drafted deal.

Since the conflict intensified in late September, Lebanese authorities have said any deal should be limited to the terms of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel.

The resolution includes the withdrawal of Hezbollah’s fighters and weapons in areas between the Blue Line – the unofficial frontier between Lebanon and Israel – and the Litani river, about 30km (20 miles) from the boundary with Israel.

Israel says that was never fully respected, while Lebanon says Israeli violations included military flights over Lebanese territory.

The proposal, according to a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity, includes a 60-day ceasefire which would see the withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon and the removal of Hezbollah’s presence from the area. The Lebanese military would then boost its presence there, with thousands of extra troops.

But disagreements over some elements remained, the diplomat added, including about the timeline for an Israeli pull-out and the formation of an international mechanism to monitor the agreement.

Both Hezbollah and Iran have indicated being interested in a deal, according to a senior Lebanese source. After the initial shock, the group has reorganised itself, and continues to carry out daily attacks on Israel, though not with the same intensity, and confront invading Israeli soldiers.

On Wednesday, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Naim Qassem said the group had received the US proposal, clarified its reservations, and that it was allowing the talks to go ahead to see if they produced any results. The conditions for a deal, he said, were a complete cessation of hostilities and the preservation of Lebanon’s sovereignty, warning that Hezbollah was ready for a long fight.

Israel’s stated goal in its war against Hezbollah is to allow the return of about 60,000 residents who have been displaced from communities in northern Israel because of the group’s attacks.

In Lebanon, more than 3,670 people have been killed and at least 15,400 injured since October 2023, according to Lebanese authorities, with more than one million forced from their homes.

The couple stands on the edge of the sheer limestone cliff.

More than 100 metres (328ft) beneath them is a lost world of ancient forests, plants and animals. All they can see is leafy tree tops and hear is the echoes of cicadas and birds bouncing off the cliffs.

For thousands of years, this “heavenly pit” or “tiankeng”, in Mandarin, was unexplored.

People feared demons and ghosts hiding in the mists which swirled up from the depths.

But drones and a few brave souls who lowered themselves into places untouched since dinosaurs roamed the Earth have revealed new treasures – and turned China’s sinkholes into a tourist attraction.

Two-thirds of the world’s more than 300 sinkholes are in China, scattered throughout the country’s west – with 30 known tiankeng, Guangxi province in the south has more of of them than anywhere else. Its biggest and most recent find was two years ago: an ancient forest with trees reaching as high as 40m (130ft). These cavities in the earth trap time, preserving unique, delicate ecosystems for centuries. Their discovery, however, has begun to draw tourists and developers, raising fears that these incredible, rare finds could be lost forever.

“I’ve never done this kind of thing before,” says 25-year-old Rui, looking down into the chasm. “It’s very cool. It will be the first time but not the last time.”

She takes a big breath. Then she and her boyfriend step back – off the edge and into the air.

Fei Ge – the man who had just meticulously checked Rui and Michael’s harnesses before sending them over the cliff – knows better than most the feeling of stepping back over the edge.

He was one of the first explorers. Now in his 50s, he works as a tour guide helping people discover the secrets of Guangxi’s sinkholes.

Growing up in a village nearby, Fe had been told to stay away. “We thought that if humans went into the sinkholes, demons would bring strong winds and heavy rain. We thought ghosts brought the mist and fog.”

Fei Ge – or Brother Fei as he is known – was taught that these sinkholes have their own microclimate. The wind rushes through the tunnels and evaporated water from rivers inside the caves produces the mist.

Eventually Brother Fei’s curiosity won and he found a way into a sinkhole as a child.

“Every tiny stone caused loud noises and echoes,” he said. There was wind, rain and even “mini tornadoes”, he recalled. “At first, we were afraid.”

But he kept exploring. It was only when he brought scientists to the site that he realised how unique the sinkholes were.

“The experts were astonished. They found new plants and told us they’ve been doing research for decades and never seen these species. They were very excited. We couldn’t believe that something we had taken for granted nearby was such a treasure.”

As scientists published their finds in journals, and word spread of their discovery, others came to study the sinkholes. Fei says explorers from the UK, France and Germany have come in the last 10 years.

Sinkholes are rare. China – and Guangxi particularly – has so many because of the abundance of limestone. When an underground river slowly dissolves the surrounding limestone rock, it creates a cave that expands upwards towards the ground.

Eventually, the ground collapses, leaving a yawning hole. Its depth and width must measure at least 100m for it to qualify as a sinkhole. Some, like the one found in Guangxi in 2022, are much bigger, stretching 300m into the earth and 150m wide.

For scientists these cavernous pits are a journey back in time, to a place where they can study animals and plants they had thought extinct. They have also found species they had never seen or known, including types of wild orchid, ghostly white cave fish and various spiders and snails.

Protected by sheer cliffs, jagged mountains and limestone caves, these plants and animals have thrived deep in the earth.

There is a delighted shriek as Rui dangles mid-air, before she starts rappelling down.

This is just the start of the adventure for her and Michael. They have more ropework to do, in the belly of the cave.

After a short walk through a maze of stalactites, Michael is lowered into the dark. The guides sweep the area with torches, illuminating the arc above us – a network of caves – and then shine the light into the narrow passages below, where a river once carved through the rock.

That’s where we are headed. The guides have to work hard to move the ropes into position.

“I am not a person that does much exercise,” says Michael, his words echoing in the cave.

This is the highlight of the Shanghai couple’s two-week break in Guangxi, the kind of holiday they had craved during China’s long Covid lockdowns. “This kind of tourism is more and more familiar on the Chinese internet,” he says. “We saw it and thought it looked pretty cool. That’s why we wanted to try it.”

Videos of the Guangxi sinkholes have gone viral on social media. What is a fun and daring feat for young people is a source of much-needed revenue in a province that was only recently lifted out of poverty.

There is little farmland in Guangxi’s unusual but stunning terrain, and its mountainous borders make trade with the rest of China and neighbouring Vietnam difficult.

Still, people come for the views. Pristine rivers and the soaring karst peaks of Guilin and Yangshuo in the north draw more than a million Chinese tourists each year. Photographs of mist-covered Guangxi have even made it onto the 20-yuan note.

Yet few have heard of Ping’e village, the nearest settlement to the sinkholes. But that is changing.

Brother Fei says says a steady stream of visitors is changing fortunes for some in Ping’e. “It used to be very poor. We started developing tourism and it brought lots of benefits. Like when the highways were built. We were really happy knowing we have something so valuable here.”

But there are concerns that tourism revenue could override the demands of scientific research.

About 50km from Ping’e, developers have built what they say is the highest viewing platform, which overlooks Dashiwei, the second-deepest sinkhole in the world. Tourists can peer 500m down into this particular “heavenly pit”.

“We should better protect such habitats,” says Dr Lina Shen, a leading sinkhole researcher based in China. “Sinkholes are paradises for many rare and endangered plant species. We are continuing to make new discoveries.”

By studying sinkholes, scientists also hope to find out how the Earth has changed over tens of thousands of years, and better understand the impact of climate change. At least one sinkhole in Guangxi has already been closed to tourists to protect unique orchid varieties.

“Overdevelopment could cause tremendous damage. We should maintain their original ecological state,” Dr Shen says, adding that the solution lies in striking a balance.

“Hot air balloons, drones for aerial photography, and appropriate pathways for observation from a distance could allow tourists to closely yet remotely view sinkholes, while disturbing as few organisms as possible.”

Brother Fei doesn’t disagree, and insists there are “clear rules” to protect the sinkholes and what they hold. To him, they are a prized find that has changed his life. He is now one of Guangxi’s most qualified climbers and a renowned guide for both tourists and scientists, which has made him “very happy”.

As we walk through acres of lush forest inside the sinkhole, he points to a cliff above us. He tells us to return when the rains do to see the waterfalls that pour down the side. It’s worth coming back for, he assures us.

Rui and Michael are being roped up as they encourage each other to abseil further into the cave. All that is visible beneath them is a narrow chasm, lit up by a torch. It’s all that remains of a river bed, the catalyst in making this sinkhole.

“We need to balance this joy with protecting this place,” Michael says, looking around him.

He smiles as he is slowly lowered down and disappears into the cave.

Abida Sultaan was nothing like your typical princess.

She wore her hair short, shot tigers and was an ace polo player. She flew planes and drove herself around in a Rolls-Royce from the age of nine.

Born in 1913 into a family of brave ‘begums’ (a Muslim woman of high rank) who ruled the northern princely state of Bhopal in British India for over a century, Abida continued their legacy of defying stereotypes around women in general and Muslim women in particular.

She refused to be in purdah – a practice followed by Muslim, and some Hindu women, of wearing clothes that conceal them and secluding themselves from men – and became heir to the throne at the age of 15.

Abida ran her father’s cabinet for more than a decade, rubbed shoulders with India’s prominent freedom fighters and would eventually come to have a ringside view of the hate and violence the country disintegrated into after it was partitioned in 1947 to create Pakistan.

She was groomed from a young age to take on the mantle of ruler under the guidance of her grandmother, Sultan Jehan, a strict disciplinarian who was the ruler of Bhopal.

In her 2004 autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Princess, Abida writes about how she had to wake up at four in the morning to read the Quran – the religious text of Islam – and then proceed with a day filled with activities, which included learning sports, music and horse riding, but also included chores like sweeping the floor and cleaning bathrooms.

“We girls were not allowed to feel any inferiority on account of our sex. Everything was equal. We had all the freedom that a boy had; we could ride, climb trees, play any game we chose to. There were no restrictions,” she said in an interview about her childhood.

Abida had a fierce, independent streak even as a child and rebelled against her grandmother when she forced her into purdah at the age of 13. Her chutzpah coupled with her father’s broad-mindedness helped her escape the practice for the rest of her life.

Already heir to the throne of Bhopal, Abida stood the chance of becoming part of the royal family of the neighbouring princely state of Kurwai as well when at the age of 12, she was married off to Sarwar Ali Khan, her childhood friend and ruler Kurwai. She described her nikah (wedding), about which she was clueless, in hilarious detail in her memoir.

She writes about how one day, while she was pillow-fighting with her cousins, her grandmother walked into the room and asked her to dress up for a wedding. Only, no one told her that she was the bride.

“No-one had prepared or instructed me on how to conduct myself, with the result that I walked into the nikah chamber, pushing the gathered women out of my way, my face uncovered, sulking as usual for being chosen again for some new experiment,” she writes.

The wedding was brief like Abida’s marriage, which lasted for less than a decade.

Married life was difficult for Abida, not just because of her young age but also because of her strict, pious upbringing. She candidly describes how a lack of knowledge and discomfort with sex took a toll on her marriage.

“Immediately after my wedding, I entered the world of conjugal trauma. I had not realised that the consummation that followed would leave me so horrified, numbed and feeling unchaste,” she writes and adds that she could never bring herself to “accept marital relations between husband and wife”. This led to the breakdown of her marriage.

In her paper on intimacy and sexuality in the autobiographical writings of Muslim women in South Asia, historian Siobhan Lambert-Hurley underscores how Abida’s honest reflections on sexual intimacy with her husband tear apart the stereotype that Muslim women do not write about sex, by presenting an unabashed voice on the topic.

After her marriage fell apart, Abida left her marital home in Kurwai and moved back to Bhopal. But the couple’s only son, Shahryar Mohammad Khan, became the subject of an ugly custody dispute. Frustrated by the drawn-out battle and not wanting to part with her son, Abida took a bold step to make her husband back off.

On a warm night in March 1935, Abida drove for three hours straight to reach her husband’s home in Kurwai. She entered his bedroom, pulled out a revolver, threw it in her husband’s lap and said: “Shoot me or I will shoot you.”

This incident, coupled with a physical confrontation between the couple in which Abida emerged victorious, put an end to the custody dispute. She proceeded to raise her son as a single mother while juggling her duties as heir to the throne. She ran her state’s cabinet from 1935 till 1949, when Bhopal was merged with the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Abida also attended the round-table conferences – called by the British government to decide the future government of India – during which she met influential leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Motilal Nehru and his son, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was to become India’s first prime minister.

She also experienced first-hand the deteriorating relationship between Hindus and Muslims and the violence that broke out in the aftermath of India’s partition in 1947.

In her memoir Abida describes the discrimination she began facing in Bhopal; how her family, who had lived there peacefully for generations, began to be treated as “outsiders”. In one of her interviews, she spoke about a particularly disturbing memory she had of the violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims.

One day, after the Indian government informed her that a train carrying Muslim refugees would arrive in Bhopal, she went to the railway station to supervise the arrival.

“When the compartments were opened, they were all dead,” she said and added that it was this violence and distrust that drove her to move to Pakistan in 1950.

Abida left quietly, with only her son and hopes for a brighter future. In Pakistan, she championed democracy and women’s rights through her political career. Abida died in Karachi in 2002.

After she left for Pakistan, the Indian government had made her sister heir to the throne. But Abida is still known in Bhopal, where people refer to her by her nickname ‘bia huzoor’.

“Religious politics over the past few years have chipped away at her legacy and she isn’t spoken about as much any more,” says journalist Shams Ur Rehman Alavi, who has been researching Bhopal’s women rulers.

“But her name isn’t likely to be forgotten anytime soon.”

Republican President-elect Donald Trump has said his election victory handed him an “unprecedented and powerful” mandate to govern.

He beat Democratic rival Kamala Harris in all seven closely watched swing states, giving him a decisive advantage overall.

Trump’s party has also won both chambers of Congress, giving the returning president considerable power to enact his agenda.

He has broadened his appeal across nearly all groups of voters since his 2020 defeat. And in doing so he pulled off a comeback unmatched by any previously defeated president in modern history.

But the data suggests it was a much closer contest than he and his allies are suggesting.

His communications director Steven Cheung has called it a “landslide” victory. Yet it emerged this week that his share of the vote has fallen below 50%, as counting continues.

“It feels grandiose to me that they’re calling it a landslide,” said Chris Jackson, senior vice-president in the US team of polling firm Ipsos.

The Trump language suggested overwhelming victories, Jackson said, when in fact it was a few hundred-thousand votes in key areas that propelled Trump back to the White House.

That is thanks to America’s electoral college system, which amplifies relatively slender victories in swing states.

Here are three ways to look at his win.

With 76.9 million votes and counting, Trump won what is known as the popular vote, according to the latest tally by the BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

That means he scored more votes than Harris (74.4 million), or any other candidate. No Republican has managed that feat since 2004.

But as vote-tallying continues in some parts of the US, he has now slipped a fraction of a percentage point below 50% in his vote share. He is not expected to make up the gap as counting goes on in places like Democratic-leaning California.

This was also the case in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton to the presidency despite losing the popular vote – having notched only 46% of the overall ballots cast.

In 2024, Trump’s win of both the popular vote and the presidency can be seen as an improvement on his last victory eight years ago.

But Trump cannot say that he won the outright majority of the presidential votes that were cast in the election overall.

To do so, he would need to have won more than 50%, as all victors have done for the last 20 years – other than Trump in 2016.

For this reason, his claim to have a historic mandate “may be overwrought”, suggested Chris Jackson of polling firm Ipsos, who said the language of Trump and his supporters was a tactic being used to “justify the sweeping actions they’re planning to take once they have control of the government”.

On a different metric, Trump’s win over Harris in 2024 appears more comfortable. He won 312 votes in the US electoral college compared with Harris’s 226.

And this is the number that really matters. The US election is really 50 state-by-state races rather than a single national one.

The winner in any given state wins all of its electoral votes – for example, 19 in swing state Pennsylvania. Both candidates hoped to reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes to earn a majority in the college.

Trump’s 312 is better than Joe Biden’s 306 and beats both Republican wins by George W Bush. But it is well shy of the 365 achieved by Barack Obama in 2008 or the 332 Obama won getting re-elected, or the colossal 525 by Ronald Reagan in 1984.

And it is important to remember that the “winner takes all” mechanic of the electoral college means that relatively slender wins in some critical areas can be amplified into what looks like a much more resounding triumph.

• What is the US electoral college, and how does it work?

Trump is ahead by just over 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the latest numbers from CBS. All three states were the focus of intensive campaigning by both parties ahead of the 5 November vote.

If just over 115,000 voters in that group had instead picked Harris, she would have won those Rust Belt swing states, giving her enough votes in the electoral college to win the presidency.

That might sound like a lot of people but the number is a drop in the ocean of the more-than-150 million votes that were cast nationwide.

In other swing states in the Sun Belt – namely Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina – the margins of victory for Trump were much more comfortable.

But when looking at the power wielded by the Republicans more broadly, their majority in the US House, the lower chamber of Congress, remains slender.

• Republicans win House in major boost for Trump
• How America voted in maps and charts
• ‘It’s simple, really’ – why Latinos voted for Trump

There is another measure with which to consider Trump’s win, which is to look at the number of votes he received, although this is a relatively crude measure.

The 76.9 million that he has amassed so far is the second-highest tally in American history.

It is important to remember that the US population, and therefore the electorate, is constantly growing. The more-than-150 million people who voted in the US this year is more than double the number of 74 million who went to the polls in 1964.

That makes comparisons through time tricky. But it was only four years ago that the record haul was achieved.

Biden won 81.3 million votes on his way to the White House in 2020 – a year of historic voter turnout when Trump was again on the ticket.

Although the Republicans made important breakthroughs in 2024, the Democrats also failed to connect with voters, said Jackson, who put the trend down to Americans’ wish to return to “2019 prices” after a years-long cost-of-living squeeze.

“The real story is Harris’s inability to mobilise people who voted for Biden in 2020,” he said.

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

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.

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.”

When Nila Ibrahimi set out to build a website telling the stories of Afghan girls, it wasn’t just to give them a voice.

The 17-year-old Afghan refugee was also determined to remind her fellow Gen Zs in her adopted country, Canada, that they were similar – they even listened to Taylor Swift just like other teenage girls around the world.

“I want to make them as real as possible so that other people, especially young people, Gen Z specifically, can put themselves in their shoes,” she told the BBC.

Nila spoke to the BBC earlier this week, before picking up the International Children’s Peace Prize previously won by education campaigner Malala Yousafzai and climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Nila’s is, perhaps, not an easy task. The plight of Afghanistan’s women and girls can feel a world away to young people living in Canada, where Nila found a home after fleeing her home country as the Taliban took over three years ago.

In that time, the Taliban have banned teenage girls from education, banned women from travelling long distances without a male chaperone, and now ordered them to keep their voices down in public – effectively silencing half the population.

The Taliban have defended the rulings to the BBC previously by saying they align with religious texts.

“The differences [between Afghanistan and Canada] are vast, so it makes it hard for them to feel connected,” acknowledges Nila.

That is why she helped set up HerStory – a place where she and others help share the stories of Afghan women and girls in their own words, both inside and out of the country.

“So many times we are lost in the differences that we don’t see the similarities and that’s our goal, to show that to the world.”

Nila Ibrahim was chosen from 165 nominees as the 20th winner of the prestigious prize.

The award recognises not just the work done on HerStory, but also her passion for standing up for women’s rights in Afghanistan.

Nila’s first stand for women’s rights came in March 2021, when she joined other young Afghan girls in sharing a video of her singing online.

It was a small but powerful protest against a decree by the then-director of education in the Afghan capital, Kabul, who tried to ban girls over 12 singing in public. The attempted order was never implemented.

“That was when I really understood the importance of performing, the importance of speaking up and talking about these issues,” explains Nila, who was part of a group called Sound of Afghanistan.

But less than six months later, everything would change – and, aged 14, she would have to flee with her family as the Taliban arrived.

The family – who are part of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority – made the difficult journey to Pakistan, where they spent a year before being granted asylum in Canada.

It was, after 12 months without education, a “breath of fresh air”, she says.

There, Nila was reunited with her friends from the singing group.

She was also invited to speak at events, about her experiences of Afghanistan, allowing her to advocate for all the girls left behind.

People, she says, were surprised at how eloquent she was. But Nila knew there were millions of women and girls in Afghanistan who were just as capable – although with less access to the opportunities she had.

“So I thought if my potential can surprise these people and they don’t know about how educated girls from Afghanistan can be, what if that information was accessible to them?”

HerStory – the website which grew out of this thought – started in 2023. It features interviews and first person accounts from both refugees and women inside Afghanistan.

The idea is to create a safe space where a group of people who “grew up with the stories of the first period of Taliban and how horrible the lives of women were at the time” share their stories – and their “shock and anger” at finding themselves in an increasingly similar situation.

The anger is a feeling Nila tries to keep separate from her work.

“When you see Afghanistan going back in time in 20 years, of course it makes you fear,” she says.

“It’s a shared feeling. It’s a shared experience for girls anywhere.”

The award, she says, is a chance for Afghan girls to once again remind the world about the restrictions they face on a daily basis – a reminder “not to forget Afghan girls”.

Marc Dullaert, founder of the KidsRights Foundation, which runs the award, pointed out that a “staggering” number of young women were currently being excluded from education.

“Nila’s inspirational work to provide them with a voice that will be heard across the world makes her a truly worthy winner of this year’s 20th International Peace Prize,” he added.

It is also a reminder that her generation – while young – can make a difference, Nila hopes.

“I think so many times when we talk about issues and different causes, we talk about it with the very adult like approach of oh, this is very serious,” she says.

“The world is a very scary place, but there is an approach that is more Gen Z-like… and we can take little steps and… do whatever we can.”

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.”

For Australian friends Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles, it was their first big trip venturing out to explore the world.

Like so many 19-year-olds, they were drawn to the romance of backpacking across South East Asia – where food is great, people are friendly and the scenery stunning.

They had “saved up enough money after school and university to have their overseas jaunt, as so many of our kids do,” said their football team coach Nick Heath. “And off they went.”

They ended up on 12 November in the riverside town of Vang Vieng in central Laos.

The two checked into the popular Nana Backpacker Hostel – where guests often receive a free shot upon arrival. Days later both were on life support in hospitals in Thailand.

Jones’s death was announced on 21 November, and Bowles’s a day later. The death of a British woman, 28-year-old Simone White, was also announced on Thursday.

They are among six foreign tourists who have died from what is believed to be a mass incident of methanol poisoning in Vang Vieng.

Two Danish women, aged 19 and 20, died last week, while an American man also died. They have not been identified.

It is unclear how many others have fallen ill, but a transnational police investigation is now underway into the deaths.

Much of the scrutiny has fallen on the hostel where some of the victims were reportedly staying. The girls had taken free shots there before heading out for the night.

The hostel manager has denied culpability, saying the same drinks had been served to at least 100 other guests that night who reported no problems. The manager was taken in by police for questioning on Thursday.

Mr Heath, who spoke to media on behalf of Ms Bowles’s family, said they knew it was methanol that caused the girls to fall ill. But “no one really knows how and where it entered their system”.

To understand what happened, the BBC spoke to backpackers and a diplomat about the area.

Our reporting found the town where travellers fell ill remains a party hotspot despite past efforts, with some success, to clean up its image, and that while the risk of methanol poisoning is known among consulates and tourism operators, travellers appear largely ignorant.

• Parents ‘devastated’ over daughter’s suspected poisoning death

Vang Vieng – a tiny town on the Nam Song river surrounded by limestone mountains and paddy fields – is known for its scenery.

It is also known as a party town – a reputation Laos officials have been trying to shed over the past decade.

A four-hour bus ride from the capital Vientiane, it has long been the stopping point on the Banana Pancake Trail backpacking route between Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam before heading north to the ancient temples of Luang Prabang.

In Vang Vieng, hostel bunks are advertised at less than €10 (£8) a night, while a bucket of beer can cost half that. Drugs like marijuana and mushrooms are in ready supply, openly advertised at cafes and diners.

During the early 2000s and 2010s the town was famous for hardcore partying and as a spot for riding inflatables down the local river. But after several tourists were injured or died, efforts were made at raising safety standards.

“To combat the river tubing deaths they demolished a bunch of the riverside bars that were selling buckets of vodka to people floating by,” one Western diplomat in the region told the BBC.

Laos officials aimed to re-centre the town as a spot for eco-tourism rather than just a hub for the young and drunk.

“And it worked,” they say. “It’s actually changed a quite a lot in the past decade, they’ve cleaned it up, it’s way more modern than it used to be.”

But because of that: “I think it can be very easy for young travellers to miss that this is still a very poor country with lax regulations and safety standards.”

The diplomat said methanol poisoning – where alcoholic drinks are contaminated with a toxic compound – is well-known among consulates and tourism operators.

Consulates are fairly regularly having to deal with cases of tourists who have fallen ill from dodgy drinks, the diplomat noted.

South East Asia is documented as the worst region for methanol poisoning. Local producers making cheap alcohol often will not correctly reduce the toxic level of methanol produced in the process.

Thousands of incidents are recorded every year in the region, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

But for tourists, awareness around poisonous alcohol is low.

British backpacker Sarisha told the BBC’s Newsbeat programme that people did not seem to consider the risks of free drinks when she was recently staying at Nana Backpacker.

Like most other hostels, happy hours were a daily staple at the venue as well as free shots of local vodkas as courtesies, she said.

“It’s a very party city,” she said.

Tourists still in town are now taking extra precautions after the shocking deaths.

On Friday, Miika, 19, a Finnish backpacker staying at a hostel just 10 minutes walk from Nana Backpacker, told the BBC he and his friends had arrived in town two days ago. They were now only ordering bottled beers and rethinking river tubing because shots were included.

“Now because we know about this, we didn’t really want to go there,” he said.

British woman Natasha Moore, 22, told the BBC she cancelled her booking for Nana Backpacker after hearing about the deaths.

“It’s just so scary, I feel so overwhelmed… it feels like I’ve escaped death, almost like survivor’s guilt”, she said in a TikTok video warning other travellers.

Her group arrived in the town two days after the poisoning, where “it was still kind of hush hush, nobody really knew too much about what was going on”.

She knew many travellers decided to skip the town and said there were signs in the hostel warning to be careful about drinks.

She said she “can’t even count how many free drinks” she had on her travels, but over five nights in Vang Vieng, she and her friends had no free drinks or spirits, only bottled alcohol.

“I feel so, so sad and upset for all the friends and family and the people still in hospital. It’s just so unfair, we were just trying to have a good time,” she said.

“We’ve worked hard to save up to go travel, like it’s such a brave thing to do, and then something like that can happen.”

Forty years on from the original recording, the cream of British and Irish pop music past and present are once again asking whether Ethiopians know it is Christmas.

In 1984, responding to horrific images of the famine in northern Ethiopia broadcast on the BBC, musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure corralled some of the biggest stars of the era to record a charity song.

The release of the Band Aid single, and the Live Aid concert that followed eight months later, became seminal moments in celebrity fundraising and set a template that many others followed.

Do They Know It’s Christmas? is back on Monday with a fresh mix of the four versions of the song that have been issued over the years.

But the chorus of disapproval about the track, its stereotypical representation of an entire continent – describing it as a place “where nothing ever grows; no rain nor rivers flow” – and the way that recipients of the aid have been viewed as emaciated, helpless figures, has become louder over time.

“To say: ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ is funny, it is insulting,” says Dawit Giorgis, who in 1984 was the Ethiopian official responsible for getting the message out about what was happening in his country.

His incredulity decades on is obvious in his voice and he remembers how he and his colleagues responded to the song.

“It was so untrue and so distorted. Ethiopia was a Christian country before England… we knew Christmas before your ancestors,” he tells the BBC.

But Mr Dawit has no doubt that the philanthropic response to the BBC film, by British journalist Michael Buerk and Kenyan cameraman Mohamed Amin, saved lives.

As the head of Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission he had managed to smuggle the TV crew into the country. This was despite the government at that time, which was marking 10 years of Marxist rule and fighting a civil war, not wanting news of the famine to get out.

“The way the British people responded so generously strengthened my faith in humanity,” he says, speaking from Namibia where he now works.

He praises the “young and passionate people” behind Band Aid – describing them as “amazing”.

His questioning of the song, whilst also recognising its impact, sums up the debate for many who might feel that when lives need to be saved the ends justify the means.

Geldof was typically robust in defending it responding to a recent article in The Conversation about the “problematic Christmas hit”.

“It’s a pop song [expletive]… The same argument has been made many times over the years and elicits the same wearisome response,” he is quoted as saying.

“This little pop song has kept hundreds of thousands if not millions of people alive.”

He also recognises that Ethiopians celebrate Christmas but says that in 1984 “ceremonies were abandoned”.

In an email to the BBC, Joe Cannon, the chief financial officer of the Band Aid Trust, said that in the past seven months the charity has given more than £3m ($3.8m) helping as many as 350,000 people through a host of projects in Ethiopia, as well as Sudan, Somaliland and Chad.

He adds that Band Aid’s swift action as a “first responder” encourages others to donate where funds are lacking, especially in northern Ethiopia, which is once again emerging from a civil war.

But this is not enough to dampen the disquiet.

In the last week, Ed Sheeran has said he is not happy about his voice from the 2014 recording – made to raise funds for the West African Ebola crisis – being used as his “understanding of the narrative associated with this has changed”.

He was influenced by British-Ghanaian rapper Fuse ODG, who himself had refused to take part a decade ago.

“The world has changed but Band Aid hasn’t,” he told the BBC’s Focus on Africa podcast this week.

“It’s saying there’s no peace and joy in Africa this Christmas. It’s still saying there’s death in every tear,” he said referring to the lyrics of the 2014 version.

“I go to Ghana every Christmas… every December so we know there’s peace and joy in Africa this Christmas, we know there isn’t death in every tear.”

Fuse ODG does not deny that there are problems to be resolved but “Band Aid takes one issue from one country and paints the whole continent with it”.

The way that Africans were portrayed in this and other fundraising efforts had had a direct effect on him, he said.

When growing up “it was not cool to be African in the UK… [because of] the way that I looked, people were making fun of me”, the singer said.

Research into the impact of charity fundraisers by British-Nigerian King’s College lecturer Edward Ademolu backs this up.

He himself remembers the short films shot in Africa by Comic Relief, which had been influenced by Band Aid, and that his “African peers at [a British] primary school would passionately deny their African roots, calling all Africans – with great certainty – smelly, unintelligent and equated them to wild animals”.

Images of dangerously thin Africans became common currency in efforts to elicit funds.

The cover for the original Band Aid single, designed by pop artist Sir Peter Blake, features colourful Christmas scenes contrasted with two gaunt Ethiopian children, in black and white, each eating what looks like a life-saving biscuit.

For part of the poster for the Live Aid concert the following year, Sir Peter used a photograph of the back of an anonymous, naked, skeletal child.

That image was used again in the art work for the 2004 release and it has appeared once more this year.

For many working in the aid sector, as well as academics who study it, there is shock and surprise that the song and its imagery keep coming back.

The umbrella body Bond, which works with more than 300 charities including Christian Aid, Save the Children and Oxfam, has been very critical of the release of the new mix.

“Initiatives like Band Aid 40 perpetuate outdated narratives, reinforce racism and colonial attitudes that strip people of their dignity and agency,” Lena Bheeroo, Bond’s head of anti-racism and equity, said in a statement.

Geldof had previously dismissed the idea that Band Aid’s work was relying on “colonial tropes”.

The way that charities raise funds has undergone big changes in recent years.

While remaining critical, Kenyan satirist and writer Patrick Gathara, who often mocks Western views of Africa, agrees things have shifted.

“There has been a push within humanitarian agencies to start seeing people in a crisis first as human beings and not as victims, and I think that’s a big, big change,” he tells the BBC.

“In the days of Live Aid, all you really had were these images of starvation and suffering… the idea that these are people were incapable of doing anything for themselves and that was always a misconception.”

The fallout from the Black Lives Matter protests added impetus to the change that was already happening.

A decade ago, a Norwegian organisation Radi-Aid made it its mission to highlight the way that Africa and Africans were presented in fundraising campaigns using humour.

For example, it co-ordinated a mock campaign to get Africans to send radiators to Norwegians who were supposedly suffering in the cold.

In 2017, Sheeran himself won one of their “Rusty Radiator” awards for a film he made for Comic Relief in Liberia in which he offered to pay for some homeless Liberian children to be put up in a hotel room.

The organisers of the awards said “the video should be less about Ed shouldering the burden alone but rather appealing to the wider world to step in”.

University of East Anglia academic David Girling, who once wrote a report for Radi-Aid, argues that its work is one of the reasons that things have shifted.

More and more charities are introducing ethical guidelines for their campaigns, he says.

“People have woken up to the damage that can be caused,” he tells the BBC.

Prof Girling’s own research, carried out in Kibera, a slum area in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, showed that campaigns involving and centred on those who are the targets of the charitable assistance could be more effective than the traditional top down efforts.

Many charities are still under pressure to use celebrities to help raise awareness and money. The professor says that some media outlets will not touch a fundraising story unless a celebrity is involved.

But work by his colleague Martin Scott suggests that big stars can often distract from the central message of a campaign. Whereas the celebrity might benefit, the charity and the understanding of the issue that it is working on lose out.

If a Band Aid-type project were to get off the ground now it would have to be centred on African artists, music journalist Christine Ochefu tells the BBC.

“The landscape for African artists and African music has changed so much that if there was a new release it would need to come from afrobeats artists or amapiano artists or afro-pop artists,” she argues

“I don’t think people could get way without thinking about the sentiment and imagery associated with the project and it couldn’t continue the saviour narrative that Band Aid had.”

As King’s College academic Dr Ademolu argues: “Perhaps it’s time to abandon the broken record and start anew – a fresh tune where Africa isn’t just a subject, but a co-author, harmonising its own story.”

• LISTEN: BBC Witness History – Ethiopia’s famine
• ‘I lost my leg on the way home from school’
• The country where a year lasts 13 months
• A quick guide to Ethiopia

A number of unidentified drones have been spotted over three airbases in Britain, the United States Air Force (USAF) has confirmed.

The incidents, which occurred between Wednesday and Friday, saw “small unmanned aerial systems” spotted over RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall, in Suffolk, and RAF Feltwell in the neighbouring county of Norfolk.

The USAF, which uses the bases, said it was unclear at this stage whether the drones were considered hostile.

It also declined to comment on whether any defence mechanisms were used, but said it retained “the right to protect” installations.

A spokesperson for USAF in Europe said: “We can confirm that small unmanned aerial systems [UASs] were spotted in the vicinity of and over RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall and RAF Feltwell.

“The number of UASs fluctuated and they ranged in size/configuration.

“The UASs were actively monitored and installation leaders determined that none of the incursions impacted base residents or critical infrastructure.

“To protect operational security, we do not discuss our specific force protection measures but retain the right to protect the installation.

“We continue to monitor our airspace and are working with host-nation authorities and mission partners to ensure the safety of base personnel, facilities and assets.”

RAF Mildenhall is primarily home to the USAF’s 100th Air Refueling Wing; RAF Lakenheath is home to USAF F-35A and F-15E fighter jets, while RAF Feltwell is mainly concerned with logistics and offers housing for military personnel.

A spokesperson for the British Ministry of Defence, which owns the bases, said: “We take threats seriously and maintain robust measures at defence sites.

“This includes counter drone security capabilities.

“We won’t comment further on security procedures.”

Jaguar has urged people to “trust and reserve judgement” over the rebrand of the carmaker.

The company, embarking on the biggest change in its 102-year old history, released a new logo and a so-called “social media tease” this week, ahead of its relaunch as an electric-only brand in early December.

The teaser video has faced backlash, with many critics pointing to the fact it doesn’t feature an actual car. Others have praised the company for being bold and shaking things up.

Either way, the rebrand has grabbed people’s attention and Jaguar has since admitted it not only expected such debate – but it wanted it.

In the 1960s, Jaguar launched the E-Type and XJ which have come to be known among some of the most iconic cars of all time.

Now the company is trying to do the same again by unveiling its new “design vision” in Miami next month.

Teasing the vision online, the 30 second advert features models in extravagant, brightly-coloured outfits who reveal the new company logo written as JaGUar.

No cars, no suave men in suits, no big cats.

“Do you sell cars?” was the response on X, from owner Elon Musk, who is also the boss of electric car firm Tesla.

“This is surely a joke?” added one user, while another suggested the move would “cost jobs and do real damage”. Some said “Go woke, go broke”.

Specsavers, known for its humorous social media manner, created a mock-up of its own logo in response, which looked like it had been created on Microsoft Paint.

While supermarket Aldi chipped in at Jaguar’s “Copy Nothing” slogan with: “You sound like our legal team.”

Amid the anger and sarcasm, Jaguar has doubled down on its decision, replying to some posts with phrases such as “To live is to evolve”.

“We had to break rules and do something that would get us cut thru,” a spokesman told the BBC – suggesting this is all part of the plan.

As Martin Brundle, the former Formula 1 racing driver turned broadcaster, put it: “I have no idea what this is all about, but it’s genius.

“Everyone is talking about Jaguar in a moment of time when they’re not actually making cars.”

Lee Rolston is the chief growth officer of global branding agency Jones Knowles Ritchie and has worked on rebrands of household names such as Burger King and the RSPCA.

He was also part of the thinking to famously drop the donuts from Dunkin’ to move “to a first-name basis with America”, given it was also one of the country’s the biggest coffee sellers.

He says rebrands occur generally when a company wants to “shift” its business strategy, which is what Jaguar is doing in its move to electric-only cars.

In an “ideal world” the rebrand leads to buzz and a positive reaction, Mr Rolston adds, but to achieve that you need to “make sure people understand the context”.

“Don’t ever just launch a logo – when people see a logo they tend to subjectively respond to it. It’s always good to show as much as you can,” he explains.

“Unless you want that response. Maybe Jaguar did actually want this kind of response” Mr Rolston ponders.

As a result of Jaguar’s rebrand strategy to tease and drip feed information of its plans, a void has been created, and that has been “filled by opinion”, Mr Rolston says.

“They have taken a very brave route – it’s one that very, very few brands ever do take because it’s very risky, but time will tell.”

It’s not new to not include a product in an ad or to raise eyebrows – the gorilla beating the drums to Phil Collins didn’t feature any Cadbury’s chocolate, for example.

Keith Wells, founder and director of brand strategy business Brandwell, points out Apple’s “think different” advert in 1997 which, rather than showcasing its computers, instead featured the likes of Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi.

However, Mr Wells has first-hand experience of a rebrand backlash. Remember Consignia? (Readers under the age of 40 can be forgiven for not).

In 2001, he led the consultancy Dragon Brands, which came up with the new corporate name for the Post Office Group. The aim was to create a new, modern umbrella brand for the restructured organisation, which included not just the Post Office, but Royal Mail and Parcelforce too.

But the creation of Consignia led to a backlash from the public, largely due to people misinterpreting the rebrand.

Some people thought Post Office branches would be renamed Consignia, which wasn’t the case.

Nonetheless, the negativity, and a new leadership team, eventually led to Consignia being canned, and being renamed Royal Mail plc 16 months later.

While Jaguar isn’t changing its name, Mr Wells says the brand has taken a “huge, bold step” and people should give “respect and time” to see how things pan out.

Mr Rolston said “branding logic” suggests companies “lean into” their current perception with the public, but Jaguar appears to have shunned that.

“Everything they have put out so far is not like a Jaguar. The question is, if it’s not a Jaguar as you used to know it, what is it?”

Jaguar argues its rebrand can been traced back to the words of its founder, Sir William Lyons, that “A Jaguar should be a copy of nothing”.

But it’s clear, as Erin Baker, editorial director at AutoTrader puts it, that the carmaker is trying to ditch the “sage” image, that its cars are only for older, white men, who perhaps frequent golf clubs, or wear cravats and smoke cigars.

“It’s been languishing in terms of sales for years now,” she said. “Something has to change fundamentally with the brand.”

But Ms Baker is a fan of the rebrand ad. “I think it needs to really stir emotion, it needs to stir curiosity, get people asking questions,” she says.

Jaguar has been the weakest link within the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) group owned by Tata Motors for almost a decade, with The Range Rover and Defender behind the company’s highest profits.

Ms Baker believes Jaguar’s radical rebrand is a final attempt to revive it. But what happens if it doesn’t pay off?

“I am not sure what else they can do,” adds Ms Baker. “It’s a very risky move to go pure electric in 2026 when sales of electric cars the world over have largely stalled amongst private buyers.

“But the truth is…no one has an idea if this is going to succeed or not.”

All agree that Jaguar probably won’t mind the current noise. Jaguar replied to some critics saying “soon you’ll see things our way”. Only time will tell.

Zayn Malik has paid tribute to his former One Direction bandmate Liam Payne at his show in Leeds on Saturday night, with a sign which read: “Love you bro”.

The message, which has been widely shared on social media, also had Payne’s name and the year he was born and died.

Malik’s tour was meant to begin in Edinburgh earlier this week. However, he rescheduled two of his shows in the city, citing “unforeseen circumstances”.

The singer also previously postponed his US tour, after what he called the “heartbreaking loss” of Payne.

Payne died, aged 31, after falling from the third floor of hotel balcony in Argentina last month.

Family, friends and former bandmates remembered him at his funeral in Amersham in Buckinghamshire on Wednesday.

Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Malik were among the mourners, alongside Payne’s girlfriend Kate Cassidy and his former partner Cheryl, with whom he shares a son.

At the O2 Academy Leeds, Malik played a string of his hits including Pillowtalk and My Woman.

Many had expected he might pay tribute to Payne during the show. In the end, he did so right at the end, with a message that was accompanied by a pink heart.

It came after Malik announced last week that he was rescheduling two of his Edinburgh shows.

In an Instagram story, he said that the show originally scheduled for 20 November at the O2 Academy Edinburgh venue had been rescheduled for 8 December.

A further date on 21 November at the same venue has been moved to 9 December.

“All tickets for the original show dates will be honoured on the rescheduled dates,” the post added.

In October, he made the decision to postpone his US shows, telling fans: “Given the heartbreaking loss experienced this week, I’ve made the decision to postpone the US leg of the Stairway to the Sky Tour.”

The US part of Malik’s tour was due to start in San Francisco, before visiting Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Washington DC and New York.

He has told fans on X the dates would be rescheduled for January and the tickets will remain valid for the new dates.

“Love you all and thank you for your understanding,” he added.

Payne and Malik rose to global fame as part of the boyband One Direction – created on The X Factor TV show in 2010 – and sang together with bandmates Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, and Niall Horan.

Malik left the group in 2015 to embark on a solo singing career, and the band later split in 2016.

After Payne’s death, his One Direction bandmates posted a series of poignant and heartfelt tributes to their “brother”, who they remembered as “the most vital part” of the group.

“I loved and respected you dearly. I will cherish all the memories I have with you in my heart forever, there is no words that justify or explain how I feel right now other than beyond devastated,” Malik wrote.

“I hope that wherever you are right now you are good and are at peace and you know how loved you are.”

The stakes have never been higher in the Ukraine-Russia war.

In the week that saw the conflict pass its 1000th day, Western powers substantially boosted Ukraine’s military arsenal – and the Kremlin made its loudest threats yet of a nuclear strike.

Here is how the last week played out – and what it means.

Late on Sunday night, reports emerged that outgoing US President Joe Biden had given Ukraine permission to use longer-range ATACMS missiles to strike targets inside Russia.

The move marked a major policy change by Washington – which for months had refused Ukraine’s requests to use the missiles beyond its own borders.

After the decision was leaked to the press, a volley of ATACMS missiles were fired by Ukraine into Russia’s Bryansk region.

The Kremlin said six were fired, with five intercepted, while anonymous US officials claimed it was eight, with two intercepted.

Whatever the specifics, this was a landmark moment: American-made missiles had struck Russian soil for the first time in this war.

Then on Wednesday, Ukraine launched UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at targets in Russia’s Kursk region – where Ukrainian troops have seized a roughly 600-sq km (232 sq mile) patch of Russian territory.

Later in the week, Biden added the final element of a ramped-up weapons arsenal to Ukraine by approving the use of anti-personnel landmines.

Simple, controversial, but highly-effective, landmines are a crucial part of Ukraine’s defences on the eastern frontline – and it is hoped their use could help slow Russia’s advance.

With three swift decisions, over a few seismic days, the West signalled to the world that its support for Ukraine was not about to vanish.

If Ukraine’s western allies raised the stakes this week – so too did Moscow.

On Tuesday, the 1000th day of the war, Putin pushed through changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

The doctrine now says an attack from a non-nuclear state, if backed by a nuclear power, will be treated as a joint assault on Russia.

The Kremlin then took its response a step further by deploying a new type of missile – “Oreshnik” – to strike the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Putin claimed it travelled at 10 times the speed of sound – and that there are “no ways of counteracting this weapon”.

Most observers agree the strike was designed to send a warning: that Russia could, if it chose, use the new missile to deliver a nuclear weapon.

Such posturing would once have caused serious concern in the West. Now, not so much.

Since the start of the conflict nearly three years ago, Putin has repeatedly laid out nuclear “red lines’” which the West has repeatedly crossed. It seems many have become used to Russia’s nuclear “sabre-rattling”.

And why else do Western leaders feel ready to gamble with Russia’s nuclear threats? China.

Beijing has become a vital partner for Moscow in its efforts to soften the impact of sanctions imposed by the US and other countries.

China, the West believes, would react with horror at the use of nuclear weapons – thus discouraging Putin from making true on his threats.

• What we know about Russia’s Oreshnik missile

In a rare televised address on Thursday evening, the Russian president warned that the war had “acquired elements of a global character”.

That assessment was echoed by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who said “the threat is serious and real when it comes to global conflict”.

The US and UK are now more deeply involved than ever – while the deployment of North Korean troops to fight alongside Russia saw another nuclear power enter the war.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said on Thursday that “never before” has the threat of a nuclear war been greater, blaming the US for its “aggressive and hostile” policy towards Pyongyang.

So, why are we seeing these developments now?

The likely reason is the impending arrival of US President-elect Donald Trump, who will officially enter the White House on 20 January.

While on the campaign trail, Trump vowed to end the war within “24 hours”.

Those around him, like Vice President-elect JD Vance, have signalled that will mean compromises for Ukraine, likely in the form of giving up territory in the Donbas and Crimea.

That goes against the apparent stance of the Biden administration – whose decisions this week point to a desire to get as much aid through the door as possible before Trump enters office.

But some are more bullish about Ukraine’s prospects with Trump in power.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said himself Kyiv would like to end the war through “diplomatic means” in 2025.

Former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba told the BBC this week: “President Trump will undoubtedly be driven by one goal, to project his strength, his leadership… And show that he is capable of fixing problems which his predecessor failed to fix.”

“As much as the fall of Afghanistan inflicted a severe wound on the foreign policy reputation of the Biden administration, if the scenario you mentioned is to be entertained by President Trump, Ukraine will become his Afghanistan, with equal consequences.”

“And I don’t think this is what he’s looking for.”

This week’s developments may not be the start of the war escalating out of control – but the start of a tussle for the strongest negotiating position in potential future talks to end it.

Israel says a rabbi who went missing in the United Arab Emirates has been murdered, and have vowed to track down his killers.

“The murder of Zvi Kogan is a criminal antisemitic terrorist incident. The State of Israel will act in all of its abilities to bring to justice the criminals responsible for his death,” the PM’s office said following news on Sunday that the rabbi’s body had been found.

Rabbi Kogan, an envoy of the orthodox Jewish organisation Chabad, had been missing in Dubai since Thursday sparking a investigation from Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and UAE authorities.

Israeli officials have been in contact with the family of the Israeli-Moldovan national, since he went missing, the Israeli statement continued.

The recovery of Zvi Kogan’s body comes after his abandoned car was found an hour’s drive away from his home.

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog also called his murder “a vile, antisemitic attack”.

Chabad is a religious foundation that seeks to build links with non-affiliated and secular Jews or other sects of Judaism. The group’s branch in the UAE supports thousands of Jewish visitors and residents, according to its website.

Rabbi Kogan, 28, worked with other Chabad emissaries “in establishing and expanding Jewish life in the Emirates”, the organisation says. He also managed a kosher supermarket in Dubai.

The Israeli government’s travel advisory service warns citizens to only travel to the UAE for “essential reasons”, as they say there is “terrorist activity” in the UAE, which constitutes “a real risk to Israelis who are staying/visiting in the country”.

Abu Dhabi established formal ties with Israel under an agreement brokered by the US, known as the Abraham Accords.

It has maintained the relationship during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

British superstar Adele cried on Saturday night as she played her 100th and final show in Las Vegas.

She has spent the past two years playing a weekend residency at the 4,000-capacity Caesars Palace.

Throughout her residency she often interacted with fans, but has indicated that the experience has been emotionally draining.

Earlier this year, she also said she plans to take a “big break” from music after her current run of concerts.

Videos from inside the venue on Saturday show Adele getting emotional during the concert and crying as she bid farewell to Vegas.

“I’m so sad this residency is over but I am so glad that it happened, I really, really am,” she said.

“I will miss it terribly, I will miss you terribly. I don’t know when I next want to perform again,” she added.

Adele’s Vegas residency was initially set to start in January 2022, but was cancelled just 24 hours before the first show was due to begin following a Covid outbreak among production staff and delays in finishing the set.

It began later that year, and she performed every Friday and Saturday.

There have been plenty of memorable moments over the years, including her bursting into tears after spotting Celine Dion at her concert.

The two singers then shared a hug in the Colosseum Theatre at Caesars Palace, a venue originally built for Dion’s 2003 debut residency.

Adele is known to idolise the Canadian icon, while Dion has also spoken in glowing terms about Adele.

The London-born singer – whose albums 19, 21, 25 and 30 have all been massive worldwide successes – also made headlines when she defended a fan who was told to sit down at one of her Vegas concerts.

The audience member was singing along enthusiastically to Water Under the Bridge when another fan sitting behind him and a security guard told him he was blocking the view.

Adele spotted that and paused the song, telling the guard to “leave him alone”.

The fan used a selfie stick to record the interaction, which he later posted on TikTok.

He also thanked the star for “standing up for me”.

However, not every Vegas concert has gone to plan.

In June, Adele angrily cursed an audience member who allegedly yelled “Pride sucks” during one of her shows.

“Did you come to my… show and just say that Pride sucks?” she scolded. “Don’t be so… ridiculous.

“If you have nothing nice to say, shut up, all right?”

The 36-year-old later admitted she got easily riled up these days, adding that she was “old and grumpy now”.

In July, Adele, best known for hits such as Rolling In The Deep, Hello, Someone Like You and Easy On Me, revealed she had plans to take an extended break from music after her current run of concerts.

“My tank is quite empty at the minute,” the star told German broadcaster ZDF.

“I don’t have any plans for new music at all,” she said.

“I want a big break after all this and I think I want to do other creative things just for a little while.

“You know, I don’t even sing at home at all. How strange is that?”

Adele added one of the reasons she wanted to take a break from music is because of a struggle with the limelight.

“I miss everything about before I was famous, I think probably being anonymous the most,” she said.

“I like that I get to make music all the time, whenever I want to, and people are receptive to it and like it. That’s pretty unimaginable. But the fame side of it, I absolutely hate.

“The fact that people are even interested in my songs and my voice is pretty wild. I don’t think it ever gets normal. So it’s worth it, the balance.”

Her career break has been a long time in the making. In 2022, Adele said she wanted to study for an English Literature degree once she left Las Vegas for the last time.

During a Q&A session with fans in Los Angeles she said: “If I hadn’t made it singing, I think I would be an English lit teacher.”

She added: “I definitely think I use my passion for English lit in what I do. I wish I’d gone to university and had that experience, but I will do it online with a tutor.”

She continued: “That’s my plan for 2025, just to get the qualification”.

At the epicentre of this devastating family drama is Gisèle Pelicot, a diminutive 71-year-old woman, drugged by her former husband and abused for a decade by dozens of strangers he had recruited online.

Watching her entering the court in Avignon and giving evidence, it was staggering to imagine the amount of abuse her body sustained.

But as other members of her family have taken the stand, it has become painfully clear that no-one has emerged unscathed from the storm unleashed by the actions of the Pelicot patriarch.

The damage to this family is clear. Individually, they have described the destructive force that engulfed them in November 2020 as a “tsunami” that left nothing but ruin in its wake.

Dominique Pelicot was finally caught after an alert security guard caught him filming under women’s skirts.

But it took weeks for police to discover the full truth that ultimately tore his family apart.

For years, he had been drugging his wife and recruiting men online to rape her while she was unconscious.

He filmed the abuse and neatly classified each visit in folders on his hard drive. Faced with the evidence, Dominique Pelicot admitted the rape charges against him.

Alongside obscene language describing his videos, he added captions with the men’s names. Fifty other men have been on trial with him and only a handful admit rape. More than 20 others could not be identified and are still at large.

Gisèle Pelicot has attended almost all of this trial. She waived her anonymity and allowed the public to see what she had endured.

The videos leave no doubt that the sex acts were not consensual. Ms Pelicot can be seen lying on the bed, snoring, as her husband whispers instructions to various men to touch her, prod her, use her.

Artificial sleep affords her mind a degree of protection, but her body becomes an object.

She was, in her own words, treated “like a rag doll, like a garbage bag“.

“I am 72 now and I don’t know how much time I have left,” she told the court last week.

The magnitude of Dominique Pelicot’s betrayal and crimes is such that the aftershocks have rippled far beyond his ex-wife.

The Pelicots’ middle child, Caroline Darian, now 45, screamed her anguish at her father in court as she demanded to know the truth about photos found on his computer. Entitled “My naked daughter”, the images show her semi-naked and, she says, clearly drugged.

Mr Pelicot has offered various and at times contradictory explanations for the pictures, although he has denied abusing his daughter. “I never touched you,” he pleaded with her.

But his duplicity has been abundantly exposed during this trial, and he has clearly lost the right to be believed by his daughter.

“You are a liar,” she shouted back at him. “I am sick of your lies, you are alone in your lie, you will die lying.”

Fighting back tears, she accused her father of looking at her “with incestuous eyes”.

Caroline Darian has told the court she feels she is the trial’s “forgotten victim” as, unlike her mother’s case, there is no record of the abuse she is convinced was inflicted on her.

She has founded a charity to highlight the dangers of drug-induced assault and published a book in 2022 detailing her family’s trauma. In it, she hinted at a rift with her mother, who she found had dropped off a bundle of warm clothes for her father in jail, weeks after his crimes came to light.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Caroline wrote. “She was still looking after the person who got her raped for a decade.”

That apparent rift was exploited by a combative defence lawyer who suggested Gisèle Pelicot had chosen her former husband over her daughter by not demanding the truth about the photos of Caroline. Gisèle shook her head, but Caroline cracked a slight smile, appearing to acknowledge the lawyer’s description.

When Caroline’s brothers David and Florian took the stand they made repeated references to the pain she was going through, urging their father to tell the truth.

Stifling sobs, Florian, 38, the youngest of the family, turned to face Dominique Pelicot sitting in a glass box to his left and said: “If you have any dignity and humanity – you don’t have anything left to lose anyway – tell Caroline the truth.”

He also spoke of his longstanding suspicion he was the product of an affair his mother had in the 1980s, which was compounded by a faint but lifelong feeling that his father loved his siblings more than him.

In a desperate search for answers, he wondered out loud whether he could be the “motive” for his father’s crimes. He said he would seek out a paternity test, adding it would be a “relief” not to be Dominique Pelicot’s son.

Through tears, Florian painted a desolate picture of what his life had become. His marriage to the mother of his three children, Aurore, has not survived revelations that Dominique Pelicot also surreptitiously took photographs of her.

Despite their separation, this slight, softly-spoken woman has frequently attended the trial and said it had exposed the “banality” of abuse.

Aurore, herself a survivor of incest, is having to live with the regret of not having listened to her instincts regarding Mr Pelicot. “If she had, she may have been able to alter the course of events,” her lawyer said.

The eldest of the Pelicot children, David, is a burly man of 50 who bears a striking resemblance to his father.

Taking the stand this week, he described how he had grown closer to Dominique Pelicot when he had himself become a father.

Then, his voice growing more anguished and clutching the stand as if to steady himself, he recalled the harrowing detail the night his mother told him of his father’s arrest. “All of us know where we were when the tsunami hit,” he said.

Naked photographs of his wife Celine, pregnant with their twin daughters, were also found among Mr Pelicot’s files. She was in the bathroom, snapped with a hidden camera.

His voice heavy with emotion, David described watching his mother, frail and lost, standing on a train platform, her life reduced to her dog and a suitcase.

Recalling the birthday parties his parents used to throw for him and his siblings, to the envy of their friends, he said: “My childhood has disappeared; it was erased.”

The trauma rippling through this family seems without end. David’s son, now 18, wonders what really happened when Dominique asked him to “play doctor” as a child.

His young siblings, the family’s lawyer said on Wednesday, “will have to find their place in a family in which their grandmother, their mother, their brother and their aunts have all been victims of their grandfather.”

Caroline’s young son is still profoundly shaken by the carefully worded revelation, four years ago, that his beloved grandfather hurt his grandmother.

“This is just a sample of the depth of the suffering caused by a rape in the family,” lawyer Stéphane Babonneau said in his closing arguments.

A verdict is expected on 20 December. Mr Pelicot is facing 20 years in jail – the maximum sentence for rape in France.

And for the rest of his family the trauma will live on. Because none of them will ever know for certain what he may or may not have done.

In one of the shaky phone videos shown in court, a tall naked man stands in the middle of a dark bedroom. Another man sits on the bed, smiling, next to an unconscious woman lying on her side, lightly snoring.

Behind her, on a chest of drawers, is a photograph, clearly discernible despite the low lighting.

It is the Pelicot family, huddling close on a beach on a sunny day, and beaming at the camera.

Abida Sultaan was nothing like your typical princess.

She wore her hair short, shot tigers and was an ace polo player. She flew planes and drove herself around in a Rolls-Royce from the age of nine.

Born in 1913 into a family of brave ‘begums’ (a Muslim woman of high rank) who ruled the northern princely state of Bhopal in British India for over a century, Abida continued their legacy of defying stereotypes around women in general and Muslim women in particular.

She refused to be in purdah – a practice followed by Muslim, and some Hindu women, of wearing clothes that conceal them and secluding themselves from men – and became heir to the throne at the age of 15.

Abida ran her father’s cabinet for more than a decade, rubbed shoulders with India’s prominent freedom fighters and would eventually come to have a ringside view of the hate and violence the country disintegrated into after it was partitioned in 1947 to create Pakistan.

She was groomed from a young age to take on the mantle of ruler under the guidance of her grandmother, Sultan Jehan, a strict disciplinarian who was the ruler of Bhopal.

In her 2004 autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Princess, Abida writes about how she had to wake up at four in the morning to read the Quran – the religious text of Islam – and then proceed with a day filled with activities, which included learning sports, music and horse riding, but also included chores like sweeping the floor and cleaning bathrooms.

“We girls were not allowed to feel any inferiority on account of our sex. Everything was equal. We had all the freedom that a boy had; we could ride, climb trees, play any game we chose to. There were no restrictions,” she said in an interview about her childhood.

Abida had a fierce, independent streak even as a child and rebelled against her grandmother when she forced her into purdah at the age of 13. Her chutzpah coupled with her father’s broad-mindedness helped her escape the practice for the rest of her life.

Already heir to the throne of Bhopal, Abida stood the chance of becoming part of the royal family of the neighbouring princely state of Kurwai as well when at the age of 12, she was married off to Sarwar Ali Khan, her childhood friend and ruler Kurwai. She described her nikah (wedding), about which she was clueless, in hilarious detail in her memoir.

She writes about how one day, while she was pillow-fighting with her cousins, her grandmother walked into the room and asked her to dress up for a wedding. Only, no one told her that she was the bride.

“No-one had prepared or instructed me on how to conduct myself, with the result that I walked into the nikah chamber, pushing the gathered women out of my way, my face uncovered, sulking as usual for being chosen again for some new experiment,” she writes.

The wedding was brief like Abida’s marriage, which lasted for less than a decade.

Married life was difficult for Abida, not just because of her young age but also because of her strict, pious upbringing. She candidly describes how a lack of knowledge and discomfort with sex took a toll on her marriage.

“Immediately after my wedding, I entered the world of conjugal trauma. I had not realised that the consummation that followed would leave me so horrified, numbed and feeling unchaste,” she writes and adds that she could never bring herself to “accept marital relations between husband and wife”. This led to the breakdown of her marriage.

In her paper on intimacy and sexuality in the autobiographical writings of Muslim women in South Asia, historian Siobhan Lambert-Hurley underscores how Abida’s honest reflections on sexual intimacy with her husband tear apart the stereotype that Muslim women do not write about sex, by presenting an unabashed voice on the topic.

After her marriage fell apart, Abida left her marital home in Kurwai and moved back to Bhopal. But the couple’s only son, Shahryar Mohammad Khan, became the subject of an ugly custody dispute. Frustrated by the drawn-out battle and not wanting to part with her son, Abida took a bold step to make her husband back off.

On a warm night in March 1935, Abida drove for three hours straight to reach her husband’s home in Kurwai. She entered his bedroom, pulled out a revolver, threw it in her husband’s lap and said: “Shoot me or I will shoot you.”

This incident, coupled with a physical confrontation between the couple in which Abida emerged victorious, put an end to the custody dispute. She proceeded to raise her son as a single mother while juggling her duties as heir to the throne. She ran her state’s cabinet from 1935 till 1949, when Bhopal was merged with the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Abida also attended the round-table conferences – called by the British government to decide the future government of India – during which she met influential leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Motilal Nehru and his son, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was to become India’s first prime minister.

She also experienced first-hand the deteriorating relationship between Hindus and Muslims and the violence that broke out in the aftermath of India’s partition in 1947.

In her memoir Abida describes the discrimination she began facing in Bhopal; how her family, who had lived there peacefully for generations, began to be treated as “outsiders”. In one of her interviews, she spoke about a particularly disturbing memory she had of the violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims.

One day, after the Indian government informed her that a train carrying Muslim refugees would arrive in Bhopal, she went to the railway station to supervise the arrival.

“When the compartments were opened, they were all dead,” she said and added that it was this violence and distrust that drove her to move to Pakistan in 1950.

Abida left quietly, with only her son and hopes for a brighter future. In Pakistan, she championed democracy and women’s rights through her political career. Abida died in Karachi in 2002.

After she left for Pakistan, the Indian government had made her sister heir to the throne. But Abida is still known in Bhopal, where people refer to her by her nickname ‘bia huzoor’.

“Religious politics over the past few years have chipped away at her legacy and she isn’t spoken about as much any more,” says journalist Shams Ur Rehman Alavi, who has been researching Bhopal’s women rulers.

“But her name isn’t likely to be forgotten anytime soon.”

As a guide dog handler of 25 and a half years, I’ve had hundreds of experiences of being refused service – but online threats and increasing hostility towards disabled people mean I’m giving up on asking publicly for equality and respect.

The last straw came about a week ago. I was already reeling from a number of refusals by restaurants and shops when, once again, I was refused entry because I have a guide dog.

I visited the restaurant, which I have chosen not to name, but was told I couldn’t enter as people could have allergies. This, by the way, is unlawful.

They later changed their reason – saying they simply had no space.

It’s difficult to describe how this feels.

I don’t think you can understand it unless you know what it is like to face daily discrimination.

I compare the feeling to December 2022 when I was briefly robbed of my smartphone near the BBC building in central London.

Unlike street robberies, refusals are rarely violent or physical, but the feeling of being slugged in the gut is identical.

I argue refusals feel worse – because at least I can understand the motivation of robbers.

I have never understood why, when everyone on the planet is one accident or medical condition away from disability, many people seem to lack any empathy and do not attempt to understand how it must feel to be refused service because of a disability.

After failing to politely persuade the restauranteurs that my guide dog was well-behaved and then reiterating that it is unlawful to refuse access, one customer who’d overheard me voiced their disgust at the restaurant’s attitude.

I invited people who witnessed the refusal to leave a review. Two voices from another table, however, said that I had “ruined their meal” and “you should leave”.

I felt as small as a gnat.

My guide dog journey began in 1998, when I first applied to train with one. I had poor partial sight up until the year before when, as a 14-year-old, I became completely blind.

I have a number of eye conditions, but the primary diagnosis are glaucoma and hypertension, which have left me totally blind.

Put simply, leaving my house is hard. Very fatiguingly hard.

I’ve been privileged to work with four wonderful guides – Brandy, Chipp, Sammy and now Shawn.

They’ve been my life, my freedom and independence.

That all feels ripped away from me when I’m refused service.

At the restaurant, more customers expressed their shock at the way I was treated. But for me, the customers who seemed annoyed sparked echoes in my mind of every occasion I’ve shared refusals to social media over the past eight years.

There I’ve faced constant demands to justify why I should want equal treatment and, more perturbingly, threats of violence and even death.

Two years ago, I was refused access to different branches of Tesco in London.

Tesco apologised and promised further training for staff.

The encounters were captured on a privately owned body-camera. Many people were supportive but large numbers were highly abusive and aggressive.

I have received abuse on many social media platforms. Recently one user, who identified himself as a retired police officer, posted pictures of “victim cards” which, ironically, I was unable to appreciate until described to me by a sighted colleague.

His account was later suspended – but the post was not removed when I reported it.

Other users have asked why I’m sharing my experience of service rejection. I would reply to as many questions as possible and explain that it was simply to shine a torch into a dark corner.

On other occasions, social media users have threatened to punch me, kill my guide dog and tell me I need to “be careful”. One user said my mother should be raped.

Often the most vile abuse comes in the replies to lengthy threads, where discourse seems to get out of hand.

Why would I continue to put myself through this?

In England, Wales and Scotland, the Equality Act 2010 makes it unlawful to discriminate against a disabled person because they have a guide dog with them when accessing businesses or services.

In Northern Ireland, the same is true but the legislation is named the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.

There is a large anomaly in the law though. When taxis and cabs fail or refuse to carry an assistance dog, or attempt to charge more, it is a criminal offence.

When businesses and shops do the same, it’s a civil matter and it’s down to the individual disabled person to gather evidence and pursue them. It’s costly, energy-sapping and mostly not worth doing.

Raising the incidents on social media feels torturous when it means being threatened.

So I’ve had to accept there’s very little I can practically do.

Seeing is easy.

What seems harder for some, though, is trying to understand what it feels like to be barred from businesses when you can’t.

In Touch – Guide Dogs Q&A

Donald Trump has nominated longtime ally Brooke Rollins for secretary of agriculture, completing his cabinet roster.

He made the announcement Saturday late afternoon, tapping the head of Maga-backed think tank the America First Policy Institute for the job.

“As our next Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke will spearhead the effort to protect American Farmers, who are truly the backbone of our Country,” Trump said in a statement.

Her nomination marks the end of a whirlwind – and sometimes dramatic – spree of nominations to lead executive agencies.

Rollins has been a top Trump ally for many years, as the co-founder and president of the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump right-wing think tank.

A former White House aide during the president-elect’s first administration, she served as director of the Office of American Innovation and acting director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Having grown up on a farm, Rollins was involved early with Future Farmers of America in addition to 4H, a nationwide agricultural club.

She graduated from the Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture development and later worked as a lawyer.

If confirmed by the Senate, she would oversee farm subsidies, federal nutrition programmes, meat inspections and other facets of the country’s farm, food and forestry industries.

She would also play a key role in renegotiating the trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico, which could involve imposing Trump’s promised tariffs.

Rollins’ nomination marks the end of Trump’s picks for his cabinet – a group of 15 advisers who each helm a bureaucratic department within the American government.

Each nominee will have to be confirmed by the Senate.

Trump has chosen an eclectic array of cabinet picks, from Maga loyalists to former political rivals.

Some of his nominations – such as Robert Kennedy Jr for the Department of Health and Human Services and Matt Gaetz for attorney general – have raised eyebrows.

Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer and vaccine sceptic who ran against Trump as an independent before dropping out and endorsing him, would be in charge of the Food and Drug Administration.

Gaetz, a bombastic former Florida congressman who spearheaded the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, withdrew his nomination and resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor, soliciting for sex and illicit drug use.

Media reported that senators made it clear it would be difficult to confirm Gaetz for the job. Gaetz has denied wrongdoing, but said he withdrew from consideration because he was becoming a “distraction”.

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Trump did not waste time, quickly nominating Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, to the post instead.

Another pick, Pete Hegseth, has also been embroiled in scandal, after a police report revealed new details about an alleged sexual assault encounter the former Fox-news host had with a woman in 2017.

Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing and claims the encounter was consensual. He was never arrested or charged.

Education secretary nominee Linda McMahon – the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment – has also been criticised for her lack of experience in education.

Forty years on from the original recording, the cream of British and Irish pop music past and present are once again asking whether Ethiopians know it is Christmas.

In 1984, responding to horrific images of the famine in northern Ethiopia broadcast on the BBC, musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure corralled some of the biggest stars of the era to record a charity song.

The release of the Band Aid single, and the Live Aid concert that followed eight months later, became seminal moments in celebrity fundraising and set a template that many others followed.

Do They Know It’s Christmas? is back on Monday with a fresh mix of the four versions of the song that have been issued over the years.

But the chorus of disapproval about the track, its stereotypical representation of an entire continent – describing it as a place “where nothing ever grows; no rain nor rivers flow” – and the way that recipients of the aid have been viewed as emaciated, helpless figures, has become louder over time.

“To say: ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ is funny, it is insulting,” says Dawit Giorgis, who in 1984 was the Ethiopian official responsible for getting the message out about what was happening in his country.

His incredulity decades on is obvious in his voice and he remembers how he and his colleagues responded to the song.

“It was so untrue and so distorted. Ethiopia was a Christian country before England… we knew Christmas before your ancestors,” he tells the BBC.

But Mr Dawit has no doubt that the philanthropic response to the BBC film, by British journalist Michael Buerk and Kenyan cameraman Mohamed Amin, saved lives.

As the head of Ethiopia’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission he had managed to smuggle the TV crew into the country. This was despite the government at that time, which was marking 10 years of Marxist rule and fighting a civil war, not wanting news of the famine to get out.

“The way the British people responded so generously strengthened my faith in humanity,” he says, speaking from Namibia where he now works.

He praises the “young and passionate people” behind Band Aid – describing them as “amazing”.

His questioning of the song, whilst also recognising its impact, sums up the debate for many who might feel that when lives need to be saved the ends justify the means.

Geldof was typically robust in defending it responding to a recent article in The Conversation about the “problematic Christmas hit”.

“It’s a pop song [expletive]… The same argument has been made many times over the years and elicits the same wearisome response,” he is quoted as saying.

“This little pop song has kept hundreds of thousands if not millions of people alive.”

He also recognises that Ethiopians celebrate Christmas but says that in 1984 “ceremonies were abandoned”.

In an email to the BBC, Joe Cannon, the chief financial officer of the Band Aid Trust, said that in the past seven months the charity has given more than £3m ($3.8m) helping as many as 350,000 people through a host of projects in Ethiopia, as well as Sudan, Somaliland and Chad.

He adds that Band Aid’s swift action as a “first responder” encourages others to donate where funds are lacking, especially in northern Ethiopia, which is once again emerging from a civil war.

But this is not enough to dampen the disquiet.

In the last week, Ed Sheeran has said he is not happy about his voice from the 2014 recording – made to raise funds for the West African Ebola crisis – being used as his “understanding of the narrative associated with this has changed”.

He was influenced by British-Ghanaian rapper Fuse ODG, who himself had refused to take part a decade ago.

“The world has changed but Band Aid hasn’t,” he told the BBC’s Focus on Africa podcast this week.

“It’s saying there’s no peace and joy in Africa this Christmas. It’s still saying there’s death in every tear,” he said referring to the lyrics of the 2014 version.

“I go to Ghana every Christmas… every December so we know there’s peace and joy in Africa this Christmas, we know there isn’t death in every tear.”

Fuse ODG does not deny that there are problems to be resolved but “Band Aid takes one issue from one country and paints the whole continent with it”.

The way that Africans were portrayed in this and other fundraising efforts had had a direct effect on him, he said.

When growing up “it was not cool to be African in the UK… [because of] the way that I looked, people were making fun of me”, the singer said.

Research into the impact of charity fundraisers by British-Nigerian King’s College lecturer Edward Ademolu backs this up.

He himself remembers the short films shot in Africa by Comic Relief, which had been influenced by Band Aid, and that his “African peers at [a British] primary school would passionately deny their African roots, calling all Africans – with great certainty – smelly, unintelligent and equated them to wild animals”.

Images of dangerously thin Africans became common currency in efforts to elicit funds.

The cover for the original Band Aid single, designed by pop artist Sir Peter Blake, features colourful Christmas scenes contrasted with two gaunt Ethiopian children, in black and white, each eating what looks like a life-saving biscuit.

For part of the poster for the Live Aid concert the following year, Sir Peter used a photograph of the back of an anonymous, naked, skeletal child.

That image was used again in the art work for the 2004 release and it has appeared once more this year.

For many working in the aid sector, as well as academics who study it, there is shock and surprise that the song and its imagery keep coming back.

The umbrella body Bond, which works with more than 300 charities including Christian Aid, Save the Children and Oxfam, has been very critical of the release of the new mix.

“Initiatives like Band Aid 40 perpetuate outdated narratives, reinforce racism and colonial attitudes that strip people of their dignity and agency,” Lena Bheeroo, Bond’s head of anti-racism and equity, said in a statement.

Geldof had previously dismissed the idea that Band Aid’s work was relying on “colonial tropes”.

The way that charities raise funds has undergone big changes in recent years.

While remaining critical, Kenyan satirist and writer Patrick Gathara, who often mocks Western views of Africa, agrees things have shifted.

“There has been a push within humanitarian agencies to start seeing people in a crisis first as human beings and not as victims, and I think that’s a big, big change,” he tells the BBC.

“In the days of Live Aid, all you really had were these images of starvation and suffering… the idea that these are people were incapable of doing anything for themselves and that was always a misconception.”

The fallout from the Black Lives Matter protests added impetus to the change that was already happening.

A decade ago, a Norwegian organisation Radi-Aid made it its mission to highlight the way that Africa and Africans were presented in fundraising campaigns using humour.

For example, it co-ordinated a mock campaign to get Africans to send radiators to Norwegians who were supposedly suffering in the cold.

In 2017, Sheeran himself won one of their “Rusty Radiator” awards for a film he made for Comic Relief in Liberia in which he offered to pay for some homeless Liberian children to be put up in a hotel room.

The organisers of the awards said “the video should be less about Ed shouldering the burden alone but rather appealing to the wider world to step in”.

University of East Anglia academic David Girling, who once wrote a report for Radi-Aid, argues that its work is one of the reasons that things have shifted.

More and more charities are introducing ethical guidelines for their campaigns, he says.

“People have woken up to the damage that can be caused,” he tells the BBC.

Prof Girling’s own research, carried out in Kibera, a slum area in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, showed that campaigns involving and centred on those who are the targets of the charitable assistance could be more effective than the traditional top down efforts.

Many charities are still under pressure to use celebrities to help raise awareness and money. The professor says that some media outlets will not touch a fundraising story unless a celebrity is involved.

But work by his colleague Martin Scott suggests that big stars can often distract from the central message of a campaign. Whereas the celebrity might benefit, the charity and the understanding of the issue that it is working on lose out.

If a Band Aid-type project were to get off the ground now it would have to be centred on African artists, music journalist Christine Ochefu tells the BBC.

“The landscape for African artists and African music has changed so much that if there was a new release it would need to come from afrobeats artists or amapiano artists or afro-pop artists,” she argues

“I don’t think people could get way without thinking about the sentiment and imagery associated with the project and it couldn’t continue the saviour narrative that Band Aid had.”

As King’s College academic Dr Ademolu argues: “Perhaps it’s time to abandon the broken record and start anew – a fresh tune where Africa isn’t just a subject, but a co-author, harmonising its own story.”

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Young people who refuse to work will face having their benefits cut, the work and pensions secretary has said.

Liz Kendall told the BBC the government will offer young people the opportunity to “earn or learn” under new proposals to be unveiled on Tuesday.

“In return for those new opportunities young people will have a responsibility to take them up,” she said.

Official figures published earlier this week showed that nearly a million young people were out of education, employment or training between July and September.

Under new measures to reform the welfare system, a “Youth Guarantee” for 18 to 21-year-olds aims to train young people or get them back into work.

Kendall told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg these proposals would see an overhaul of the apprenticeship system so “more people have the chance to train” with young people offered “the opportunity to be earning or learning”.

Asked if those who did not take up these offers would lose benefits, Kendall replied: “Yes.”

She said this would transform opportunities for young people.

“If you are out of work when you’re young that can have lifelong consequences in terms of your future job prospects and earning potential.”

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In an op-ed in the Mail on Sunday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised that the benefits overhaul would crack down on “criminals” who “game the system”.

Kendall told the BBC that she believed there were people who can work but refused to do so, but said she thought these people were “in the minority” of benefit claimants.

Economic inactivity has grown rapidly since the pandemic. There are now 9.3 million people who are neither in work nor looking for a job – a rise of 713,000 since Covid.

Nearly three million people are out of work due to ill health, a 500,000 increase since 2019.

Asked about the rise in benefit claimants in recent years, Kendall said some people have “self-diagnosed” mental health problems, as well as those “diagnosed by doctors” – but added that there was a “genuine problem” with mental health in the UK.

Under the previous Conservative government’s plans to tighten eligibility for incapacity benefits, an estimated 400,000 people signed off work long-term would have lost payments.

The work and pensions secretary refused to confirm whether those people would keep their benefits under Labour’s proposals.

“We will deliver those savings, we will bring forward our own reforms,” she said.

Shadow housing secretary Kevin Hollinrake said that rising numbers of people out of work due to ill health was “a phenomenon caused largely by the pandemic”.

He said the previous government had been “dealing with it” and welcomed Labour’s focus on the issue, but added: “I want to make sure they do the right things rather than just talk a good game.”

Robert F Kennedy Jr has set his sights on changing how Americans eat and drink.

From the dyes in Fruit Loops cereal to seed oils in chicken nuggets, Kennedy – who is President-elect Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) – has long spoken out against ingredients that he says hurt Americans’ health.

“We are betraying our children by letting [food] industries poison them,” Kennedy said at a rally in November, after he had ended his independent presidential bid and backed Donald Trump.

But if Kennedy hopes to target junk food, he will first have to shake up the country’s food regulations – and run up against Big Food.

“What he’s suggesting is taking on the food industry,” said former New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle. “Will Trump back him up on that? I’ll believe it when I see it.”

The former environmental attorney – who still must face confirmation by the Senate – is considered by many to be a controversial pick, given his history of making baseless health claims, including that vaccines can cause autism and that wifi technology causes cancer.

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Yet some of his ideas around reforming the FDA have found support from health experts, lawmakers and concerned consumers alike – including some Democrats.

Kennedy “will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA”, Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis wrote on social media this week, welcoming his nomination. After receiving public backlash for praising him, Polis qualified his endorsement, writing on social media that “science must remain THE cornerstone of our nation’s health policy”.

Leading up to the election, Kennedy – a former Democrat – offered several ideas for tackling chronic diseases under his slogan “Make America Healthy Again”.

He has frequently advocated for eliminating ultra-processed foods – products altered to include added fats, starches and sugars, like frozen pizzas, crisps and sugary breakfast cereals, that are linked to health problems like cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

He has taken aim primarily at school lunches, telling Fox News: “We have a generation of kids who are swimming around in a toxic soup right now.”

Part of Kennedy’s new mandate will include overseeing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has over 18,000 employees.

The agency is in charge of ensuring the safety of pharmaceuticals and the US food supply, but has come under fire in recent years from some lawmakers and consumer groups, who have accused it of a lack of transparency and action on food safety.

The 70-year-old has pledged to take a sledgehammer to the agency, and fire employees he says are part of a “corrupt system”.

“There are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA … that have to go, that are not doing their job,” Kennedy told MSNBC this month.

He has also pushed for getting rid of food dyes, including Red No. 3, and other additives banned in other countries.

The former Democrat has also singled out more controversial health issues, including fluoride in drinking water, which he says should be banned altogether, and raw milk, which he believes has health benefits despite the increased risk of bacterial contamination.

He’s also come after seed oils, writing on social media that Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by products like canola and sunflower oil that are used in fast foods.

Several public health experts stand behind Kennedy’s goal to tackle ultra-processed food, which they say the US eats at much higher rates than many other countries.

“It is just thrilling to hear somebody argue for doing something about chronic disease,” Ms Nestle said.

Kennedy’s aim to get rid of certain food additives and dyes also could be beneficial, said Dr Peter Lurie, executive director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit group that advocates for food safety.

The former FDA official said several food dyes, including Red No. 3 – which is banned in California – should also be blocked by the US government because of concerns about carcinogens.

The FDA has pushed back on Kennedy’s claim that the US allows thousands of additives that are banned in the European Union. A spokesperson said it was necessary “to dig deeper and understand the context behind the numbers” when comparing regulations in the US and EU, which use different methodologies.

But public health experts and former officials said a number of Kennedy’s goals were not worthwhile – and in some cases, harmful.

For instance, drinking raw milk that has not been pasteurized – a process that helps kill bacteria – can make people sick or even kill them, research has found.

“There’s no evidence of any nutritional benefit of any magnitude that we know that comes from non-pasteurizing of milk,” said Dr Lurie.

Kennedy’s proposal to remove fluoride from drinking water also could be problematic, because fluoride, in the low levels found in water, has been proven to improve dental health, said University of Michigan nutritional sciences professor Jennifer Garner.

Removing it from the water supply would also be out of his jurisdiction, because fluoride levels are controlled by states.

And his claim that seed oils are helping drive the obesity epidemic is not based in science, either, Dr Lurie said.

“We see no evidence for that. In fact, they seem like important products to the extent that they substitute for saturated fats” such as butter, he said.

Food reforms, while long part of the public health conversation, could also simply be unrealistic both politically and bureaucratically, some experts said.

“It’s a good deal more complicated than he lets on,” said Dr Lurie. “These are real challenges, and you will encounter industry opposition at every turn.”

For one, the FDA does not have authority over the catch-all of “ultra-processed foods”, several former officials told the BBC.

Instead, they said, the process is more complicated. Both the US Department of Agriculture and the FDA regulate the food industry. The FDA does not make the rules – it carries out policies passed by Congress and works to limit unhealthy foods by enforcing limits and labelling on certain nutrients, like sodium and saturated fat.

Kennedy’s comments “make for great political rhetoric”, Ms Garner said. “In my view, I don’t see how that could be feasible without drastic changes in other policy and infrastructure.”

He will also face industry backlash for proposals to ban pesticides and genetically modified organisms commonly used by American farmers, former FDA officials said.

“The businesses will complain,” said Rosalie Lijinsky, a former FDA official of 33 years.

The industry is used to limited oversight from both Democrats and Republicans – including under Trump’s first term – while many of Kennedy’s goals would involve even more rulemaking.

Several food industry groups met with lawmakers before Kennedy’s appointment this month to lobby against him, Politico reported last month.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, said this week that he planned to meet Kennedy before his confirmation hearing and “spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture”.

Kennedy’s position also puts him at odds with President-elect Trump, a longtime lover of fast food who worked to roll back stricter health requirements for school lunches during his first term.

“You get some ideas that make a certain amount of sense, but they are exactly the kind to which this administration is hostile,” Dr Lurie said.

In a statement to the BBC, the Food Industry Association, which represents food retailers, producers and manufacturers, like General Mills, said it looked forward to working with Trump’s team to “ensure food and drug policy continues to be grounded in science, to reduce regulatory complexity”.

The industry complaints about Kennedy’s agenda do not come as a surprise, said Jeff Hutt, a spokesperson for the Make America Healthy Again political action committee, which is urging Republican lawmakers to confirm Kennedy.

The goal of the health movement, Mr Hutt said, is “prioritising the wellness of America over corporate profits”.

“Even if the idea of banning ultra-processed food is not possible politically, it’s a conversation that we need to have,” he said.

Kennedy still could work within existing US regulatory frameworks to improve America’s food systems, former officials said.

Ms Nestle said Kennedy could take on ultra-processed foods by altering the US Dietary Guidelines, which set nutritional standards for the industry and federal government programmes, including school lunches and military meals.

“They have an enormous impact on the food industry,” Ms Nestle said. “That would make a big difference.”

The guidelines are updated every five years by the US Department of Agriculture and DHHS, which has previously said there is not enough evidence against ultra-processed foods.

Still, officials and nutrition experts raised concerns about the means by which Kennedy has proposed to enact his agenda, including firing the FDA’s nutritionists.

The move would have large ramifications for food safety, said Ms Lijinsky. “If you lose your top experts, you’re going to have problems,” she said.

Ultimately, Ms Garner said it is difficult to disentangle some of Kennedy’s more reasonable food-improvement goals with the false health claims he has spread.

“There’s an opportunity here,” Ms Garner said.

“But I think there’s rightful concern based on other issues and how his approach to those issues might play in here.”

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A court in South Korea has found a man guilty of trying to avoid mandatory military service by deliberately gaining weight, local media report.

The 26-year-old began binge eating before his physical examination for the draft, a judge in the capital, Seoul, said. He was categorised as obese, allowing him to serve in a non-combat role at a government agency.

The defendant received a one-year suspended sentence. A friend who devised a special regimen that doubled his daily food intake got a six-month suspended sentence, the Korea Herald newspaper reports.

All able-bodied men in South Korea over the age of 18 must serve in the army for at least 18 months.

According to the Korean Herald, the defendant was assessed as fit for combat duty during an initial physical exam.

But at the final examination last year, he weighed in at over 102kg (225 lbs, 16 stone), making him heavily obese.

The man who recommended binge dieting had denied the charge of aiding and abetting, saying he never believed his friend would through with it, the newspaper adds.