As the sun slowly dips behind the jagged peaks of Mount Nam Xay, a group of brightly coloured hot air balloons drift across the Vang Vieng valley.

In the river below, young tourists laugh and splash each other from their kayaks.

It’s not hard to see what draws so many travellers here to this little town in central Laos. The scenery is stunning, the fun cheap and plentiful.

But the town has found itself at the centre of an international scandal after six tourists died last week following suspected methanol poisoning.

It is believed their alcoholic drinks may have contained methanol, an industrial chemical often used in bootleg alcohol.

For the throngs of young western travellers on South East Asia’s backpacker trail, Vang Vieng has become famous for what is called “tubing.” One described it to me as a water borne pub crawl.

Groups of friends in swimsuits and bikinis clamber aboard huge inner tubes that would normally be used on trucks and drift downstream, pulling in from time to time at river side bars where vodka shots are liberally administered, before plunging back into the water.

By the time they reach Vang Vieng everyone is fairly merry.

“I think we’re going to give the tubing a miss” two 27-year-old women from Hertfordshire in the UK tell me (they didn’t want to give their names).

“The vodka shots are part of the package, but no one wants to drink the local vodka right now.”

The pair arrived here from Vietnam, just as news of the deaths from methanol poisoning was spreading across the world.

“In Vietnam we got free drinks, particularly when you’re playing games in the evening,” one of them tells me. “And we just never thought about it, you just presume what they are giving you is safe. We’ve drunk buckets before, but we are not going to take the risk again, and a lot of people here feel the same.”

“Buckets” are exactly what they sound like – small plastic buckets filled with cheap vodka and other liquor. Groups of friends share the mixture through long plastic straws.

“Now this has happened it really makes you think about it,” the woman’s friend says. “You wonder why are the drinks free? At the hostel associated with the deaths we heard they were giving free vodka and whisky shots for an hour each evening. I think if that happened in the UK you would definitely think it was dodgy.”

Both women said they are now sticking to drinking bottled or canned beer.

The deaths of six tourists has sent shock waves through the backpacker scene. Young female travellers feel most vulnerable. The dead include Briton Simone White, 28, two young Australians, Holly Bowles and her best friend Bianca Jones, and two young Danish women, Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman and Freja Vennervald Sorensen.

Only one of the dead, a 57-year-old American, James Louis Hutson, was male. On the travellers’ chat-groups many have been questioning whether only women’s drinks had been spiked with methanol. The truth is, it’s still a mystery.

What we do know is all the victims stayed at the same place, The Nana Backpackers hostel. It’s now been confirmed the American victim was found dead in his bedroom there on 13 November. On the same morning the two Danish victims were found unconscious in their rooms and rushed to the local hospital.

Today, the Nana hostel is closed, the swimming pool that until a few days ago was hosting pool parties, is empty. A short walk away beside the river a bar called “JaiDees” has also been raided. The owners of both have forcefully denied serving any illegal or homemade alcohol.

Out on the river there is little sign that the poisonings are stopping people coming to Vang Vieng. Late November is peak tourist season. The rainy season is over, the skies are clear and the temperature is a relatively cool 28C (82F).

Along the main drag hostel owners told me they are fully booked. The young travellers from Europe and Australia are actually the minority. By far the largest groups are from neighbouring Thailand and China, the latter shuttling south on the newly finished Chinese-built Laos high-speed rail line.

Vang Vieng is still a dusty rural town. But it’s booming. Local business owners glide past in big black land cruisers and range rovers. As I walked back to my hotel on Saturday night, I was taken aback by the loud bark from the exhaust pipes of a Lamborghini cruising along Vang Vieng’s single main street.

Twenty years ago this was a sleepy little town surrounded by rice fields. Now it is being transformed by Thai and Chinese money. Fancy new hotels are springing up with riverside cocktail bars and infinity pools.

But the young western backpackers are not here for the five-star experience, they come for the friendly anything-goes atmosphere.

At a local motorbike rental I meet two fresh graduates from Sussex University.

Ned from Somerset says he has no intention of cancelling plans because of what happened. “People are scared for sure,” he says, “but I don’t get the impression anyone is leaving. Everyone is still here having a good time.”

He adds: “But everyone is also saying the same thing, don’t drink the spirits, so people are being careful, there’s definitely that feeling in the air, but I think it’s actually quite safe now because all the bars are on edge, no-one wants to go to jail”.

His friend Jack is equally unflustered. “We’ve come here to meet up with some friends and have some fun, and we’re still going to do that,” he says. “I’ve been here a week now and I can tell you the people here are absolutely lovely. They are some of the nicest people we’ve met in all of South East Asia. So whatever happened, I don’t think there’s anything malicious about it.”

Malicious or not, six people are dead, five of them young women.

The shock waves from what happened here has rippled out around the world to suburban homes from London to Melbourne, where worried parents with children on the backpacker trail are frantically messaging, checking where they are, and trying to persuade them not to go to Vang Vieng.

Chioma is adamant that Hope, the baby boy she is holding in her arms, is her son.  After eight years of failed attempts to conceive, she sees him as her miracle baby.

“I’m the owner of my baby,” she says defiantly.

She’s sitting next to her husband, Ike, in the office of a Nigerian state official who spends the best part of an hour interrogating the couple.

As the commissioner for women affairs and social welfare in Anambra state, Ify Obinabo has plenty of experience in resolving family disputes – but this is no ordinary disagreement.

Five members of Ike’s family, who are also present in the room, do not believe Hope is the couple’s biological child, as Chioma and Ike claim.

Chioma claims to have “carried” the child for about 15 months. The commissioner and Ike’s family are in disbelief at the absurdity of the claim.

Chioma says she faced pressure from Ike’s family to conceive. They even asked him to marry another woman.

In her desperation, she visited a “clinic” offering an unconventional “treatment” – an outlandish and disturbing scam preying on women desperate to become mothers that involves the trafficking of babies.

The BBC was allowed by authorities to sit in on the commissioner’s discussion with Chioma as part of our investigation into the cryptic pregnancy scam.

We have changed the names of Chioma, Ike and others in this article to protect them from reprisal in their communities.

Nigeria has one of the highest birth rates in the world, with women often facing social pressure to conceive and even ostracisation or abuse if they cannot.

Under this pressure, some women go to extremes to realise their dream of motherhood.

For over a year, BBC Africa Eye has been investigating the “cryptic pregnancy” scam.

Scammers posing as doctors or nurses convince women that they have a “miracle fertility treatment” guaranteed to get them pregnant. The initial “treatment” usually costs hundreds of dollars and consists of an injection, a drink, or a substance inserted into the vagina.

None of the women or officials we spoke to during our investigation know for sure what is in these drugs. But some women have told us they led to changes in their bodies – such as swollen stomachs – which further convinced them they were pregnant.

Women given the “treatment” are warned not to visit any conventional doctors or hospitals, as no scan or pregnancy test would detect “the baby”, which the scammers claim is growing outside the womb.

When it’s time to “deliver” the baby, women are told labour will only begin once they are induced with a “rare and expensive drug”, requiring further payment.

Accounts of how the “delivery” happens vary, but all are disturbing. Some are sedated only to wake up with a Caesarean-like incision mark. Others say they are given an injection that causes a drowsy, hallucinatory state in which they believe they’re giving birth.

Either way, the women end up with babies they are supposed to have given birth to.

Chioma tells commissioner Obinabo that when her time to “deliver” came, the so-called doctor injected her in the waist and told her to push. She does not spell out how she ended up with Hope, but says the delivery was “painful”.

Our team manages to infiltrate one of these secretive “clinics” – connecting with a woman known as “Dr Ruth” to her clients – by posing as a couple who have been trying to conceive for eight years.

This so-called “Dr Ruth” runs her clinic every second Saturday of the month in a dilapidated hotel in the town of Ihiala, in the south-eastern Anambra state. Outside her room, dozens of women wait for her in the hotel corridors, some with visibly protruding stomachs.

The whole atmosphere is buzzing with positivity. At one point, huge celebrations erupt inside the room after a woman is told she is pregnant.

When it’s our undercover reporters’ turn to see her, “Dr Ruth” tells them the treatment is guaranteed to work.

She offers the woman an injection, claiming it will enable the couple to “select” the sex of their future baby – a medical impossibility.

After they turn down the injection, “Dr Ruth” hands them a sachet of crushed pills as well as some more pills for them to take at home, along with instructions on when to have intercourse.

This initial treatment costs 350,000 naira ($205; £165).

Our undercover reporter neither takes the drugs nor follows any of “Dr Ruth’s” instructions and returns to see her four weeks later.

After running a device that looks like an ultrasound scanner across our reporter’s stomach, a sound like a heartbeat is heard and “Dr Ruth” congratulates her on being pregnant.

They both cheer with joy.

After delivering the good news, “Dr Ruth” explains how they’ll need to pay for a “scarce” and expensive drug needed for the baby to be born, costing somewhere between 1.5 and two million naira ($1,180; £945).

Without this drug, the pregnancy could extend beyond nine months, “Dr Ruth” claims with disregard for scientific fact, adding: “The baby will become malnourished – we’d need to build it up again.”

“Dr Ruth” has not responded to allegations the BBC has put to her.

The extent to which the women involved genuinely believe the claims is unclear.

But clues as to why they would be susceptible to such brazen lies can, in part, be found in online groups where disinformation around pregnancy is widespread.

Cryptic pregnancy is a recognised medical phenomenon, in which a woman is unaware of her pregnancy until the late stages.

But during our investigation, the BBC found widespread misinformation in Facebook groups and pages about this type of pregnancy.

One woman from the US, who dedicates her entire page to her “cryptic pregnancy”, claims to have been pregnant “for years” and that her journey cannot be explained by science.

In closed groups on Facebook, many posts use religious terminology to hail the bogus “treatment” as a “miracle” for those who’ve been unable to conceive.

All of this misinformation helps solidify women’s belief in the scam.

Members of these groups are not only from Nigeria, but also from South Africa, the Caribbean, and the US.

The scammers also sometimes manage, and post in, these groups, enabling them to reach out to women expressing an interest in the “treatment”.

Once someone expresses readiness to start the scam process, they are invited into more secure WhatsApp groups. There, admins share information about “cryptic clinics” and what the process involves.

Authorities tell us that to complete the “treatment”, the scammers need new-born babies and to do that they seek out women who are desperate and vulnerable, many of them young and pregnant, in a country where abortion is illegal.

In February 2024, the Anambra state health ministry raided the facility where Chioma “delivered” Hope.

The BBC obtained footage of the raid, which showed a huge complex made up of two buildings.

In one were rooms containing medical equipment – apparently for clients – while in the other were several pregnant women being kept against their will. Some were as young as 17.

Some tell us they were tricked into going there, unaware their babies would be sold to the scammer’s clients.

Others, like Uju, which is not her real name, felt too scared to tell their family they were pregnant and sought a way out. She said she was offered 800,000 naira ($470; £380) for the baby.

Asked if she regrets her decision to sell her baby, she says: “I’m still confused.”

Commissioner Obinabo, who has been part of efforts in her state to crack down on the scam, says scammers prey on vulnerable women like Uju to source the babies.

At the end of a tense interrogation, commissioner Obinabo threatens to take away baby Hope from Chioma.

But Chioma pleads her case, and the commissioner eventually accepts her explanation that she is a victim herself and that she hadn’t realised what was going on.

On this basis she allows Chioma and Ike to keep the baby – unless the biological parents come forward to claim him.

But unless attitudes towards women, infertility, reproductive rights and adoption change, scams like this will continue to thrive, experts warn.

• ‘Try or die’ – one man’s determination to get to the Canary Islands
• How sailors say they were tricked into smuggling cocaine by a British man
• Kidnapped and trafficked twice – a sex worker’s life in Sierra Leone
• World’s police in technological arms race with Nigerian mafia
• ‘Terrible things happened’ – inside TB Joshua’s church of horrors

A far-right, pro-Russia candidate has taken a surprise lead in the first round of Romania’s presidential election, with preliminary results putting his pro-Europe rival in close second.

With 96% of votes counted, ultranationalist Calin Georgescu was on 22%, and Marcel Ciolacu, the prime minister, had 20%, according to the Central Electoral Bureau.

The strong showing of Georgescu, who has no party of his own, and campaigned largely on the social media platform TikTok, came as the biggest surprise of the election.

He is now on track to join Ciolacu in a final run-off for the presidency on 8 December.

That would pose a dilemma for the millions of Romanians who voted for other candidates.

One option would be to rally round populist Social Democrat Ciolacu, an establishment figure who would continue Romania’s pro-western path.

Backing Georgescu, who has promised to Romania’s sovereignty, is the alternative.

Georgescu, who belongs to no party, has also sworn to end what he calls subservience to the European Union and Nato, especially on support for Ukraine. He has condemned the Nato ballistic missile defence shield in Deveselu, Romania.

The final result of this round will be known later on Monday, when votes from the capital Bucharest and from the large Romanian diaspora are counted.

Campaigning focused largely on the soaring cost of living, with Romania having the EU’s biggest share of people at risk of poverty.

Exit polls released earlier on Sunday suggested that Ciolacu had a commanding lead, and projected the centre-right candidate, Elena Lasconi, would take second place.

The current tally, however, puts Lasconi in third on 18%, and another nationalist, George Simion, in fourth.

The president in Romania has a largely symbolic role but considerable influence on areas such as foreign policy.

Turnout was 51%, similar to the figure five years ago.

At the epicentre of this devastating family drama is Gisèle Pelicot, a diminutive 72-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.

In October, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) sent a chartered flight carrying Indian nationals back home, marking a growing trend in deportations to India.

This was no ordinary flight – it was one of multiple large-scale “removal flights” carried out this year, each typically carrying more than 100 passengers. The flights were returning groups of Indian migrants who “did not establish a legal basis to remain in the US”.

According to US officials, the latest flight carrying adult men and women was routed to Punjab, close to many deportees’ places of origin. No precise breakdown of hometowns was provided.

In the US fiscal year 2024 which ended in September, more than 1,000 Indian nationals had been repatriated by charter and commercial flights, according to Royce Bernstein Murray, assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security.

“That has been part of a steady increase in removals from the US of Indian nationals over the past few years, which corresponds with a general increase in encounters that we have seen with Indian nationals in the last few years as well,” Ms Murray told a media briefing. (Encounters refer to instances where non-citizens are stopped by US authorities while attempting to cross the country’s borders with Mexico or Canada.)

As the US ramps up repatriations of Indian nationals, concerns grow about how President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration policies will affect them. Trump has already promised the biggest deportation of migrants in history.

Since October 2020, US Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officials have detained nearly 170,000 Indian migrants attempting unauthorised crossings at both the northern and southern land borders.

“Though smaller than the numbers from Latin America and the Caribbean, Indian nationals represent the largest group of migrants from outside the Western Hemisphere encountered by the CPB in the past four years,” say Gil Guerra and Sneha Puri, immigration analysts at Niskanen Center, a Washington-based think tank.

As of 2022, an estimated 725,000 undocumented Indian immigrants were in the US, making them the third-largest group after those from Mexico and El Salvador, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. Unauthorised immigrants in all make up 3% of US’s total population and 22% of the foreign-born population.

Looking at the data, Mr Guerra and Ms Puri have identified notable trends in the spike in Indians attempting illegal border crossings.

For one, the migrants are not from the lowest economic strata. But they cannot secure tourist or student visas to the US, often due to lower education or English proficiency.

Instead, they rely on agencies charging up to $100,000 (£79,000), sometimes using long and arduous routes designed to dodge border controls. To afford this, many sell farms or take out loans. Not surprisingly, data from the US immigration courts in 2024 reveals that the majority of Indian migrants were male, aged 18-34.

Second, Canada on the northern border has become a more accessible entry point for Indians, with a visitor visa processing time of 76 days (compared to up to a year for a US visa in India).

The Swanton Sector – covering the states of Vermont and counties in New York and New Hampshire – has experienced a sudden surge in encounters with Indian nationals since early this year, peaking at 2,715 in June, the researchers found.

Earlier, most irregular Indian migrants entered the Americas through the busier southern border with Mexico via El Salvador or Nicaragua, both of which facilitated migration. Until November last year, Indian nationals enjoyed visa-free travel to El Salvador.

“The US-Canada border is also longer and less guarded than the US-Mexico border. And while it is not necessarily safer, criminal groups do not have the same presence there as they do along the route from South and Central America,” Mr Guerra and Ms Puri say.

Thirdly, much of the migration appears to originate from the Sikh-dominated Indian state of Punjab and neighbouring Haryana, which has traditionally seen people migrating overseas. The other source of origin is Gujarat, the home state of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Punjab, which accounts for a large share of irregular Indian migrants, is facing economic hardships, including high unemployment, farming distress and a looming drug crisis.

Migration has also long been common among Punjabis, with rural youth still eager to move abroad.

A recent study of 120 respondents in Punjab by Navjot Kaur, Gaganpreet Kaur and Lavjit Kaur found that 56% emigrated between ages 18-28, often after secondary education. Many funded their move through non-institutional loans, later sending remittances to their families.

Then there has been a rise in tensions over the separatist Khalistan movement, which seeks to establish an independent homeland for Sikhs. “This has caused fear from some Sikhs in India about being unfairly targeted by authorities or politicians. These fears may also provide a credible basis for claims of persecution that allows them to seek asylum, whether or not true,” says Ms Puri.

But pinning down the exact triggers for migration is challenging.

“While motivations vary, economic opportunity remains the primary driver, reinforced by social networks and a sense of pride in having family members ‘settled’ in the US,” says Ms Puri.

Fourth, researchers found a shift in the family demographics of Indian nationals at the borders.

More families are trying to cross the border. In 2021, single adults were overwhelmingly detained at both borders. Now, family units make up 16-18% of the detentions at both borders.

This has sometimes led to tragic consequences. In January 2022, an Indian family of four – part of a group of 11 people from Gujarat – froze to death just 12m (39ft) from the border in Canada while attempting to enter the US.

Pablo Bose, a migration and urban studies scholar at the University of Vermont, says Indians are trying to cross into the US in larger numbers because of more economic opportunities and “more ability to enter the informal economies in the US cities”, especially the large ones like New York or Boston.

“From everything I know and interviews I have conducted, most of the Indians are not staying in the more rural locations like Vermont or upstate New York but rather heading to the cities as soon as they can,” Mr Bose told the BBC. There, he says, they are entering mostly informal jobs like domestic labour and restaurant work.

Things are likely to become more difficult soon. Veteran immigration official Tom Homan, who will be in charge of the country’s borders following Trump’s inauguration in January, has said that the northern border with Canada is a priority because illegal migration in the area is a “huge national security issue”.

What happens next is unclear. “It remains to be seen if Canada would impose similar policies to prevent people migrating into the US from its borders. If that happens, we can expect a decline in detentions of Indians nationals at the border,” says Ms Puri.

Whatever the case, the dreams driving thousands of desperate Indians to seek a better life in the US are unlikely to fade, even as the road ahead becomes more perilous.

Israel’s military says around 250 rockets have been fired by Hezbollah across the border from Lebanon, marking one of the heaviest bombardments of Israel since fighting intensified in September.

Several people were injured and buildings damaged in northern and central Israel, some of them near Tel Aviv, Israel’s police said.

The attacks followed an Israeli air strike on central Beirut on Saturday, in which the Lebanese health ministry said 29 people were killed.

Also on Sunday, Israeli media widely reported that Israel and Lebanon were moving towards a ceasefire agreement to end the fighting with the Iran-backed militia, Hezbollah.

Following reports of heavy fire from Lebanon, Israel’s police said it had received reports of rocket debris falling in the Tel Aviv area.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said a direct hit on one neighbourhood had left “houses in flames and ruins”.

Rockets fell in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv, and in some northern areas: Haifa, Nahariya and Kfar Blum, Israeli media reported.

Hezbollah, which has previously vowed to respond to attacks on Beirut by targeting Tel Aviv, said it had launched precision missiles at two military sites in the city and nearby.

Later, the IDF said it had completed strikes on 12 Hezbollah command centres in Dahieh, a stronghold for the group in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Lebanon’s health ministry on Sunday raised the death toll from 20 to 29 from a massive Israeli strike launched without warning on central Beirut. It said a total of 84 people had been killed in the country Saturday.

The IDF has not commented on Saturday’s attack, but Israeli media reported at the time that it was an attempt to kill Mohammed Haydar, a top Hezbollah official.

• ‘Are we not humans?’: Anger in Beirut as massive Israeli strike kills 20

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.

Over the past fortnight, Israel has intensified its campaign against Hezbollah.

On Sunday the Israeli public broadcaster Kan, citing Israeli and US officials, reported that Israel had given the “green light” to advance a US-proposed ceasefire deal with Lebanon, but indicated some gaps remained.

The three Gardai – Irish police officers – walk down the rows of passengers on the bus, a few kilometres south of the border with Northern Ireland.

Observing this is the head of the Garda National Immigration Bureau, Det Ch Supt Aidan Minnock.

“If they don’t have status to be in Ireland, we bring them to Dublin,” he explains. “They’re removed on a ferry back to the UK on the same day.”

Asylum applications in Ireland have risen by nearly 300% so far this year compared to the same period five years ago. A spike in arrivals from the UK has been driven by various factors, among these the UK’s tougher stance post-Brexit, including the fear of deportations to Rwanda, as well as Ireland’s relatively healthy economy.

Most asylum seekers coming from the UK to the Republic of Ireland enter the country from Northern Ireland, as – unlike the airport or ferry routes – there is no passport control. The Garda checks along the 500km-long (310 miles) border are the only means of stopping illegal entry.

Det Ch Supt Minnock told the BBC that 200 people had been returned to the UK this year as a result of these checkpoints, thought to be only a small fraction of those crossing the porous border illegally.

More than 2,000 people who arrived in Ireland illegally have been issued deportation orders so far this year, a 156% increase on the same period in 2023. However, only 129 of those people (just over 6%) are confirmed to have since left the state. The government has said it will begin chartered deportation flights in the coming months, and free up more immigration Gardai from desk work.

Onboard the coach near the border, the Gardai question a young man about where he lives. He is Algerian – a student, he says. The police are suspicious and he is taken to the detention vehicle while his identity is checked.

A veteran of war crimes investigations in post-war Bosnia – as part of an EU police team – Det Ch Supt Minnock knows well the violence and poverty that drives migration.

“This is growing at such a scale because of the conflict and instability right across the world,” he says.

Public concern over immigration is closely linked to Ireland’s chronic housing problem. The Republic now has the worst record in the EU for housing young people.

The CEO of the Irish Refugee Council, Nick Henderson, says the crisis is a “perfect storm”, created in part by the failure to build enough housing stock over decades, and a government unprepared for the upsurge in asylum seekers – known in Ireland as International Protection Applicants (IPAs) – needing help with accommodation.

“[The government] is only able to provide accommodation through private contractors. That, coupled with an increase in the number of people seeking protection in Ireland, and against the background of a housing crisis has meant, in effect, that Ireland’s asylum reception system has really collapsed.”

In nearly three years, the number of asylum seekers accommodated by the state’s International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) has more than quadrupled – from 7,244 to 32,649 people. Over 100,000 Ukrainians, who were given a separate status, also sought refuge in Ireland during that time.

Tens of thousands of international protection applicants – some already with asylum status in Ireland, others waiting to be processed – have been sent to communities around the country, accommodated in hotels, former schools, apartments, even large tented camps.

Ireland’s housing shortage means that even those granted asylum are struggling to leave the temporary system as others arrive. Nearly 1,000 people are now living in tented accommodation.

This makeshift response has generated resentment. In the village of Dundrum, County Tipperary – population 221 – a group of locals attempted to block the arrival of asylum seekers at the gates of a former hotel in August. The proposal to house up to 277 people at Dundrum House, which hasn’t operated as a hotel since 2015, would double the local population. Locals worry that it will be a permanent fixture.

“How can our government not engage properly with us?” asks Andrea Crowe, a local teacher and protester who has frequently spoken in public. She cites concerns over housing, health and education provision for the community.

Since July, there has been a 24-hour protest outside the hotel. Ms Crowe, whose family once owned the Dundrum House hotel, accuses the government of failing to consult with the community – a common complaint around the country.

“How can we not be concerned?” she says.

The IPAS community currently living at Dundrum House is made up of about 80 women and children. There is also a separate group of Ukrainian families, welcomed after the Russian invasion in February 2022.

Several locals told us they feared that single men – who make up 35% of asylum seekers arriving in Ireland so far this year – would eventually replace the women and children, although there so far is no evidence to suggest this is planned in Dundrum.

Local builder, Martin Barry, cites the housing crisis as a key reason for his protest, particularly the plight of his eldest son. “My own young fella, he can’t afford a place to rent,” he says.

But Martin Barry also speaks to deeper fears of change in some rural communities. The dance hall where he met his wife has closed. The local pub is for sale. There were hopes Dundrum House would be reopened and used by the local community.

“It’s just the worry of what’s coming down the line,” he says.

We meet two South African women given refuge at Dundrum House. Both were sent from their accommodation in Dublin – 180km (110 miles) away – to make way for newer arrivals into the capital, some of whom were sleeping in tents on the streets.

The women ask to remain anonymous. “Lerato” had been in Dublin for a year. “I had integrated with society, and made friends. My child was attending school and I was comfortable.” Her friend “Kayla” speaks of being isolated in Dundrum, a farming community with limited transport amenities.

Far-right parties show scant support in opinion polls. Immigration worries are likely to be expressed in support for independent candidates. But online, far-right agitators stoke fear. There have been violent riots and arson attacks on sites meant to house, or rumoured to house, asylum seekers, and refugees have been attacked in their tents on Dublin’s streets.

A common conspiracy theory is that migrants are being “planted” in Ireland as part of a plot to dominate Irish people and destroy their culture.

We saw two posters referring to a “plantation” at the Dundrum House protest. The now-closed online GoFundMe Page for Dundrum referred to Ireland’s “indigenous” population fighting “for our very existence” and the government “flooding communities with asylum seekers”.

The page – which raised more than €3,000 (£2,500) – was set up by a local businessman. He turns out to have posted antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-vaccine conspiracist material on social media.

We ask Andrea Crowe, one of the prominent voices of the Dundrum protest, if she is comfortable with such a person being involved? Ms Crowe says she does not “follow social media much” and it is not up to her to manage other people’s reactions. But she says she’s “not comfortable with it”.

Others in County Tipperary welcome asylum seekers. Some 17 groups came together under the slogan “Tipperary Welcomes” after the Dundrum protest began.

John Browne, a member of the community council, says the issue divides people. “I don’t have a problem with it because we’re relatively wealthy, and the situation is pretty bad in parts of Africa and where most of these people are coming from.”

But he disagrees strongly with the numbers involved in small places like Dundrum. “It imbalances the community. And it’s no good for the people coming in, because there’s nothing here for them.”

We caught up with Ireland’s Minister for Integration, Roderic O’Gorman, while he was campaigning in Dublin for the General Election, due to be held on 29 November. He now canvasses votes with two police guards after being assaulted by a man protesting against immigration.

Mr O’Connor says many areas welcome asylum seekers.

“There are communities all over the place who are actually embracing and supporting,” he says.

But he accepts some failures. “I recognise in the initial parts of our response, there were times where there wasn’t that level of engagement that we need,” he says.

There are now Community Engagement Teams responsible for liaising with residents, although the protesters we spoke to in Dundrum say they have had only one meeting with a team and are still no wiser about the long-term plans for the hotel.

Official policy is hardening. Ukrainian asylum seekers who arrived amid widespread public sympathy and were given special benefits, recently saw these slashed from €232 (£190) to €38.80 (£32) per week – a cut of 83%.

South Africans now need visas to enter the country. A visa loophole which allowed Jordanians – at one point the largest group of asylum seekers in Ireland – to enter from the UK has been closed.

Concern over immigration has so far not translated into electoral support for far-right parties. Nick Henderson at the Refugee Council believes this need not be inevitable in Ireland. “Communities want to welcome people, but they need resources. They need communication.”

The Republic’s image as a stable and progressive democracy won’t change in this electoral cycle. But the rise in far-right populism internationally is a warning for the future – of how concern over immigration can be made a focus for other discontents and create turbulent politics.

A British man has been captured by Russian forces while fighting for Ukraine, according to reports.

In a video circulating online, a man dressed in military clothing identifies himself as James Scott Rhys Anderson, 22, and says he formerly served in the British Army.

Russian state news agency Tass quotes a military source saying that what they call a “UK mercenary” had been “taken prisoner in the Kursk area” of Russia, part of which Ukraine has held since launching a surprise offensive in August.

The Foreign Office said it was “supporting the family of a British man following reports of his detention”.

In the video, first posted to the Telegram messaging platform, Mr Anderson tells a man questioning him from behind a camera that he served as a private in the British Army from 2019 to 2023.

He says he joined the Ukraine’s International Legion – a military unit made up of foreign volunteers – after losing his job and seeing reports on television about the war.

He says he flew to Krakow in Poland from Luton and travelled from there by bus to the Ukrainian border.

Ukraine launched a surprise attack into Kursk on 6 August, advancing up to 18 miles (29km) and taking control of around 1,000 square kilometres of Russian territory.

Russia has deployed some 50,000 troops to the region, and has begun retaking territory amid fierce fighting.

A tourist in Tasmania has had his leg amputated in the middle of a raging river after getting trapped between rocks during a kayaking trip with friends.

Medics said they made the “life or death” decision in consultation with the international visitor during a complex rescue on the Franklin River lasting some 20 hours.

The visitor in his 60s was partially submerged in water throughout the ordeal, and rescuers said it was clear that “had he remained in the location where he was, and trapped in the rock crevice he would not have survived”.

Multiple attempts to move him prior to the amputation were unsuccessful, police in the Australian island state said.

The tourist was kayaking with a group in the south-west of Tasmania when his leg got stuck between rocks in an area of rapids on Friday afternoon.

Emergency services rushed to the remote and inaccessible area after the man’s smartwatch called for assistance, police said.

After a number of unsuccessful attempts were made to free the man overnight and as his condition deteriorated, the decision was made to amputate his leg so he could be winched from the location and airlifted to hospital.

“This rescue was an extremely challenging and technical operation, and an incredible effort over many hours to save the man’s life,” Doug Oosterloo, acting assistant commissioner at Tasmania Police, said in a statement.

“This was a life and death situation,” Oosterloo told Australian national broadcaster ABC.

The man is now in a critical condition in hospital.

Oosterloo said that though the kayaker was “well prepared”, he wasn’t prepared for spending “that significant amount of time in a rock crevice with that temperature and the torrent of water that was he was under”.

The other 10 travellers who were kayaking with the man were being airlifted from the area and police plan to speak to them about how the accident happened, the Australian Associated Press reported.

Oosterloo told the news agency that the tourists had stopped kayaking and were on the shore when the man slipped.

“He was scouting the area and he slipped and fell into that rock crevice,” Oosterloo said.

Wicked is projected to have the top-grossing opening weekend of any Broadway musical adaptation ever in the UK and Ireland, as well as North America.

The adaptation of the hit musical is expected to rake in $114m (£90.6m) on its opening weekend in North America, according to data firm the Boxoffice Company.

In the UK and Ireland, the film is forecast to earn $17.6m this weekend, making it the top-grossing opening weekend of 2024.

In North America, where Gladiator II also opened on Friday, this was the strongest weekend at the box office before the Thanksgiving holiday since 2013, the Boxoffice Company said.

Final figures will be released on Monday.

The musical Wicked, based on a book inventing the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West, premiered on Broadway and has been running on the West End for two decades.

In North America, the film adaptation raked in $46.48m on Friday (the data also includes Thursday premieres), and $36m on Saturday.

The audience skewed heavily female – 72% – and 67% were over the age of 25, which is a “massive victory” for Universal, Boxoffice’s Daniel Loria said.

The musical had the third biggest opening in the US this year – after Deadpool & Wolverine with $211m in July and Inside Out 2 with $154m in June.

Elsewhere, the soundtrack’s hits voiced by Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, including “Popular” and “Defying Gravity”, have soared into most-played lists on streaming services.

Also in North America, another reinvented classic, Gladiator II, following up on Ridley Scott’s 2000 epic, opened this weekend to $22m on Friday. It then earned $18.8m on Saturday.

The sequel is projected to make $55.5m over its opening weekend.

However, Mr Loria predicted that Moana 2, out on Wednesday in the US, could take the top spot of the three films in North America.

But with more people expected to see Wicked and Gladiator II over the holiday week, “we have potential of reaching the highest-grossing Thanksgiving weekend on record in North America by this time next week”, he said.

Cinemas in the US celebrated the performance on Sunday, which comes after years of disruption from the pandemic. The National Association of Theatre Owners heralded “one of the most successful November weekends ever at the box office”.

In the UK and Ireland, Wicked’s opening weekend was the biggest at the box office for filmmaker Universal since No Time to Die, the most recent James Bond instalment it distributed in 2021.

Gladiator II, meanwhile, opened on 15 November in the UK and Ireland.

It made $11.4m on its first weekend, then dropped to $6m this weekend, a “fairly strong performance”, Mr Loria said.

Together with Paddington In Peru, which earned £9.7m on its opening weekend on 8 November, it’s “one of the most exciting box offices times in the UK post-pandemic with those three titles”, he said.

Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan has said the floods brought by Storm Bert have been “absolutely devastating”, as heavy rain and strong winds continue to move across the UK.

South Wales, where a major incident has been declared by one council, has seen over 100mm of rain in places, while two areas in the south east of the country are under severe flood warnings, detailing a “significant risk to life”.

Ms Morgan said authorities had been prepared for the storm, but added that “when you get the kind of enormity of rain we’ve had over the past few days”, minimising the impact was always “going to be difficult”.

The worst of the rain is moving eastwards into England, where the midlands and south west have also seen flooding. Across the UK, more than 100 flood warnings are now in force.

Yellow warnings for wind and rain have been in effect for western Scotland, southern England and Wales, as well as Northern Ireland but are due to expire late on Sunday. A sole yellow warning for wind comes into force on Monday covering part of Scotland.

There are also hundreds of flood alerts in place in England, Wales and Scotland.

Wind gusts have reached 75mph in coastal areas and up to 65mph inland.

North Wales Police said on Sunday afternoon that a body had been found by officers searching for a man who went missing at the River Conwy near Trefriw in Conwy county during the storm on Saturday.

Formal identification has not yet taken place but the family of Brian Perry, 75, have been informed, police said.

Around London, all of the Royal Parks closed on Sunday due to high winds – including Hyde Park and its popular Winter Wonderland attraction.

The parks’ management said there would be delayed re-openings on Monday following a safety inspection.

Travel disruption to roads and railway lines due to floodwater, high winds and fallen trees continued in some areas on Sunday after similar incidents on Saturday.

One train from Sheffield to London was more than five hours delayed, with the service taking a detour and encountering further flooding along the alternative route.

A backlog meant the train was stationary for two hours, with staff giving out free water and snacks.

There were many families with tired young kids crying, and people getting frustrated with the lack of information.

Pictures from Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire showed streets submerged in water as the town’s Kyre Brook rose and caused a wall to collapse.

In south Wales, a major incident has been declared by Rhondda Cynon Taf Council after significant flooding. The River Taff has burst its banks in Pontypridd, and residents in the town were seen using buckets to remove water from outside their homes.

Wales’ first minister said there had been “huge investment” since the Storm Dennis, but acknowledged that many people had been affected for a second time.

Asked about claims of a lack of warnings from authorities ahead of the storm, she added: “We certainly knew Storm Bert was coming, so there was an amount of preparation.

“But when you get the kind of enormity of rain we’ve had over the past few days – and it’s still coming down – then we’ve got to recognise that it is going to be difficult.”

She added that discussions had begun about what support would be provided to those affected.

Climate change was “clearly making a difference in the severity and the frequency of these weather events”, she said.

“There will come a point when it will be too difficult to protect every home in the country, but clearly we want to put the support in place if we’re able to do that,” she said.

Three rest centres have been set up for affected residents. Between 200 and 300 properties – residential and commercial – have been affected by flooding, the council added.

Record river levels were recorded on the River Taff on Saturday night but officials said these levels were beginning to drop as rain subsides, although residents were still urged to be cautious.

The Abercynon Feeder Pipe Footbridge over the river was completely washed away, council leader Andrew Morgan told a news conference on Sunday afternoon.

The bridge was being rebuilt after being badly damaged during Storm Dennis in 2020, which also caused significant flooding to homes and businesses when it hit the area.

Mr Morgan told reporters he was “amazed” that only a yellow weather warning was issued for the area and said “we were preparing for the possibility of an amber warning”.

Further east, National Resources Wales (NRW) issued two severe flood warnings on Sunday covering parts of the River Monnow in Monmouthshire.

The warnings are the most serious that can be issued and indicate that “significant risk to life” and disruption is expected from severe flooding.

Pontypridd resident Paula Williams said flooding had hit “in exactly the same place” as it had done previously, criticising NRW’s efforts to adequately protect the area.

“They’ve tried to convince everybody that the flood defences worked. I have got videos proving the flood defences don’t work,” she added.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Sunday he had spoken with Ms Morgan and would continue to receive updates about Storm Bert as it moved across the UK.

“Thank you to the emergency services who are working tirelessly to protect communities — my thoughts are with those impacted,” he said on X.

Since Storm Bert made landfall on Friday, at least five men have died – including the man reported to be Brian Perry – on the roads.

A man in his 60s died on Saturday after a tree hit his car near Winchester, and two others died in crashes – one in West Yorkshire and another in Northamptonshire – though the latter incidents have not been directly attributed to the storm.

In Lancashire, a man in his 80s died after his car entered a ford on Saturday – police have not directly related his death to the storm.

Parts of Scotland experienced a second day of disruption with high winds and localised flooding after Storm Bert swept heavy snow and rain across the country.

Milder temperatures caused the snow which covered the north of England and much of Scotland earlier this week to melt.

Amber weather warnings for snow were in place on Saturday for parts of Scotland and north-east England, while large swathes of the UK were under yellow weather warnings.

Following hours of heavy rain caused by Storm Bert, residents in Dundonald in Northern Ireland were stranded in their homes due to the floodwater on Saturday.

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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We asked our readers to send in their best pictures on the theme of “autumn walks”. Here is a selection of the photographs we received from around the world.

The next theme is “Fluids” and the deadline for entries is 3 December 2024.

The pictures will be published later that week and you will be able to find them, along with other galleries, on the In Pictures section of the BBC News website.

You can upload your entries directly here or email them to yourpics@bbc.co.uk.

Terms and conditions apply.

Further details and themes are at: We set the theme, you take the pictures.

All photographs subject to copyright.

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.”

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.

A video of a fashion shoot in India has gone viral and unexpectedly turned a group of underprivileged school children into local celebrities.

The footage shows the children, most of them girls between the ages of 12 and 17, dressed in red and gold outfits fashioned from discarded clothes.

The teenagers designed and tailored the outfits and also doubled up as models to showcase their creations, with the grubby walls and terraces of the slum providing the backdrop for their ramp walk.

The video was filmed and edited by a 15-year-old boy.

The video first appeared earlier this month on the Instagram page of Innovation for Change, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the city of Lucknow.

The charity works with about 400 children from the city’s slums, providing them free food, education and job skills. The children featured in the shoot are students of this NGO.

Mehak Kannojia, one of the models in the video, told the BBC that she and her fellow students closely followed the sartorial choices of Bollywood actresses on Instagram and often duplicated some of their outfits for themselves.

“This time, we decided to pool our resources and worked as a group,” the 16-year-old said.

For their project, they chose wisely – a campaign by Sabyasachi Mukherjee, one of India’s top fashion designers who has dressed Bollywood celebrities, Hollywood actresses and billionaires. In 2018, Kim Kardashian wore his sequinned red sari for a Vogue shoot.

Mukherjee is also known as the “king of weddings” in India. He has dressed thousands of brides, including Bollywood celebrities such as Anushka Sharma and Deepika Padukone. Priyanka Chopra married Nick Jonas in a stunning red Sabyasachi outfit.

Mehak said their project, called Yeh laal rang (the colour red), was inspired by the designer’s heritage bridal collection.

“We sifted through the clothes that had come to us in donation and picked out all the red items. Then we zeroed in on the outfits we wanted to make and began putting them together.”

It was intense work – the girls stitched about a dozen outfits in three-four days but, Mehak says, they had “great fun doing it”.

For the ramp walk, Mehak says they studied the models carefully in Sabyasachi videos and copied their moves.

“Just like his models, some of us wore sunglasses, one drank from a sipper with a straw, while another walked carrying a cloth bundle under her arm.”

Some of it, Mehak says, came together organically. “At one point in the shoot, I was supposed to laugh. At that moment, someone said something funny and I just burst out laughing.”

It was an ambitious project, but the result has won hearts in India. Put together on a shoestring budget with donated clothes, the video went viral after Mukherjee reposted it on his Instagram feed with a heart emoji.

The campaign won widespread praise, with many on social media comparing their work to that of professionals.

The viral video has brought enormous attention to the charity and its school has been visited by several TV channels, some of the children were invited to participate in shows on popular FM radio stations and Bollywood actress Tamannah Bhatia visited them to accept a scarf from the children.

The response, Mehak says, has been “totally unexpected”.

“It feels like a dream come true. All my friends are sharing the video and saying ‘you’ve become famous’. My parents were full of joy when they heard about all the attention we are getting.

“We are feeling wonderful. Now we have only one dream left – to meet Sabyasachi.”

The shoot, however, also received criticism, with some wondering if showing young girls dressed as brides could encouraged child marriage in a country where millions of girls are still married off by their families before they turn 18 – the legal age.

The Innovation for Change addressed the concern in a post on Instagram, saying they had no intention to encourage child marriage.

“Our aim is not to promote child marriage in any way. Today, these girls are able to do something like this by fighting against such ideas and restrictions. Please appreciate them, otherwise the morale of these children will fall.”

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.”

You can see thick plumes of smoke rise from the Agbogbloshie dumpsite from miles away.

The air at the vast dump, in the west of Ghana’s capital Accra, is highly toxic. The closer you get, the harder it is to breathe and your vision starts to blur.

Around these fumes are dozens of men, who wait for tractors to unload piles of cables before setting them on fire. Others climb up a toxic waste hill and bring down TVs, computers and washing machine parts and set them alight.

The men are extracting valuable metals like copper and gold from electrical and electronic waste – or e-waste – much of which has made its way to Ghana from rich countries.

“I don’t feel well,” says young worker Abdulla Yakubu, whose eyes are red and watery as he burns cables and plastic.

“The air, as you can see, is very polluted and I have to work here every day, so it definitely affects our health.”

Abiba Alhassan, a mother of four, works near the burning site sorting out used plastic bottles, and the toxic smoke does not spare her either.

“Sometimes, it’s very difficult to breathe even, my chest becomes heavy and I feel very unwell,” she says.

E-waste is the world’s fastest-growing waste stream, with 62 million tonnes generated in 2022, up 82% from 2010, according to a UN report.

It is electronisation of our societies that is primarily behind the e-waste rise — ranging from smartphones, computers and smart alarms, to automobiles with electronic devices installed, whose demand is steadily on the rise.

Annual smartphone shipments, for instance, have more than doubled since 2010, hitting 1.2 billion in 2023, according to a UN Trade and Development report this year.

The UN says only around 15% of the world’s e-waste is recycled, so unscrupulous companies are seeking to offload it elsewhere, often through middle men who then traffick the waste out of the country.

Such waste is difficult to recycle because of their complex composition including toxic chemicals, metals, plastics and elements that cannot be easily separated and recycled.

Even developed countries do not have adequate e-waste management infrastructure.

UN investigators say they are seeing a significant rise in the trafficking of e-waste from developed countries and rapidly emerging economies. E-waste is now the most frequently seized item, accounting for one in six of all types of waste seizures globally, the World Customs Organisation has found.

Officials at Italy’s Naples port showed the BBC World Service how traffickers mis-declared and hid e-waste, which they said made up around 30% of their seizures.

They showed a scan of a container bound for Africa, carrying a car. But when port officials opened the container, broken parts of vehicles and e-waste were stacked inside, with oil leaking from some of them.

“You don’t pack your personal goods like this, much of it is meant for dumping,” says Luigi Garruto, an investigator with the European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf), who collaborates with port officials across Europe.

In the UK, officials say they are also seeing a rise in trafficked e-waste.

At the Port of Felixstowe, Ben Ryder, a spokesman for the UK Environment Agency, said waste items were often wrongly declared as reusable but in reality, “broken down for precious metals and then illegally burnt after they reach the destination” in countries like Ghana.

Traffickers also attempt to conceal e-waste by grinding it down and blending it with other forms of plastic that can be exported with the correct paperwork, he said.

A previous report by the World Customs Organization showed there had been an increase of almost 700% in trafficking of end-of-life motor vehicles – a huge source of e-waste.

But experts say such seizures and reported cases are just the tip of the iceberg.

Although there has been no comprehensive global study that traces all the e-waste trafficked out of the developed world, the UN e-waste report shows countries in Southeast Asia still remain a major destination.

But with some of those countries now clamping down on waste trafficking, UN investigators and campaigners say more e-waste is making its way to African countries.

In Malaysia, officials seized 106 containers of hazardous e-waste from May to June 2024, according to Masood Karimipour, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s regional representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

But traffickers often outsmart authorities with new smuggling tactics and governments don’t catch up fast enough, UN investigators say.

“When ships carrying hazardous waste like e-waste cannot easily offload them in their usual destination, they turn their beacon off when they are in the middle of the sea so that they cannot be detected,” said Mr. Karimapour.

“And the illegal shipment is dumped at sea as part of a business model of organised crime activity.

“There are far too many groups and far too many countries profiting from this global criminal enterprise.”

When e-waste is burnt or dumped, the plastic and metals it contains can be very hazardous to human health and have negative effects on the environment, a recent report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

The WHO says many recipient countries also see informal e-waste recycling – meaning untrained people including women and children are doing the job without protective equipment and the right infrastructure, and are being exposed to toxic substances like lead.

The International Labour Organisation and WHO estimate that millions of women and child labourers working in the informal recycling sector may be affected.

The organisations also say exposure during foetal development and in children can cause neurodevelopmental and neurobehavioural related disorders.

From January 2025, global waste treaty the Basel Convention will require exporters to declare all e-waste and obtain permission from recipient countries. Investigators are hopeful that this will close some of the loopholes that traffickers have been using to ship such waste across the world.

But there are some countries including the US — a major e-waste exporter — that have not ratified the Basel Convention – one reason campaigners say e-waste trafficking continues.

“As we start to crack down, the US is now more and more shipping trucks across the border to Mexico,” said Jim Puckett, executive director of Basel Action Network, an organisation campaigning to end toxic trade including e-waste.

Back at the Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Ghana, the situation is getting worse by the day.

Abiba says she spends almost half the money she earns from collecting waste on medicines to deal with conditions resulting from working at the dump.

“But I am still here because this is my means of survival and that of my family.”

The Ghana Revenue Authority and Environment Ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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”.

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 away 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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Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Simon Harris has apologised to a disability care worker he walked away from when she tried to ask him about low pay in her job sector.

Charlotte Fallon stopped Harris in County Cork on Friday to ask him a question while he was campaigning for the general election.

She wanted to know why the issue of carers’ low pay had been “ignored” in the last government’s most recent budget

The Fine Gael leader disagreed with her and cut their conversation short, but has since expressed regret for not giving Ms Fallon the time she “deserved” to discuss her concerns.

The tetchy encounter between the two has attracted about two million views online to date.

Harris, who is campaigning to regain the role of taoiseach, said Ms Fallon “was absolutely owed an apology”.

“The buck stops with me entirely here. I’m annoyed with how I didn’t give Charlotte the time last night. She deserved that time,” he said on Saturday.

In the encounter in a shop, the care worker told him she was “very passionate” about her job but claimed the disability sector was “a joke”.

“You’ve done nothing for us, our people are suffering,” she told him.

Harris told her it was “not true” for her to say that carers had been ignored in the budget and insisted he was also very passionate about disability.

He tried to bring the conversation to a close by shaking her hand and walking away.

“Keep shaking hands and pretend you’re a good man,” Ms Fallon replied, clearly annoyed by how her questions had been received.

“You’re not a good man because you don’t care about our people,” she added.

The following morning, Harris phoned Ms Fallon to apologise to her and to discuss her concerns in detail.

Speaking later on Instagram Live, he said he “didn’t give her the time that I should’ve given her and I feel really bad about that because it’s not who I am”.

The 38-year-old politician became Ireland’s youngest ever taoiseach (prime minister) in April.

His involvement in politics began at the age of 16, when he began campaigning for better support services for his autistic brother in his home town of Greystones.

Harris added that if he gets a chance to serve as taoiseach again he is determined to prioritise the issue of disability.

Ms Fallon has since given an interview to the Irish Mail on Sunday in which she said Harris had made her “feel small” and she left the shop crying on Friday.

“I felt like, ‘who’s going to listen to me anyway?’ I felt stupid. I felt, ‘you shouldn’t have opened your stupid mouth, silly girl’,” she recalled.

However, Ms Fallon said that Harris “gave me a sincere apology” during their phone call on Saturday, which lasted up to 20 minutes.

“He explained about his brother and his autism, his mother who is a carer and a special needs assistant and I genuinely felt for him,” she told the paper.

She said he offered to keep in contact with her to work on her concerns, which she said she would be “delighted” to do.

Ms Fallon also said Harris expressed an interest in visiting the charity she works for early next year, which she said she would agree to provided that no media attend.

Despite making amends with Ms Fallon, Harris’s political rivals have been quick to capitalise on the incident, some saying it is an example of how carers have been dismissed by those in power.

Irish voters will go to the polls on Friday 29 November.

“I felt really scared to be honest,” says James, describing an incident on Snapchat that left him questioning whether it was safe to go to school.

The Australian boy, 12, had had a disagreement with a friend, and one night before bed the boy added him to a group chat with two older teenagers.

Almost instantly, his phone “started blowing up” with a string of violent messages.

“One of them sounded like he was probably 17,” James tells the BBC. “He sent me videos of him with a machete… he was waving it around. Then there were voice messages saying that they were going to catch me and stab me.”

James – not his real name – first joined Snapchat when he was 10, after a classmate suggested everyone in their friendship group get the app. But after telling his parents about his cyberbullying experience, which was ultimately resolved by his school, James deleted his account.

His experience is a cautionary tale that shows why the Australian government’s proposed social media ban on children under 16 is necessary, says his mother Emma, who is also using a pseudonym.

The laws, which were tabled in parliament’s lower house on Thursday, have been billed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as “world-leading”.

But while many parents have applauded the move, some experts have questioned whether kids should – or even can – be barred from accessing social media, and what the adverse effects of doing so may be.

Albanese says the ban – which will cover platforms such as X, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram – is about protecting kids from the “harms” of social media.

“This is a global problem and we want young Australians essentially to have a childhood. We want parents to have peace of mind,” he said on Thursday.

The new legislation provides a “framework” for the ban. But the 17-page document, which is expected to head to the Senate next week, is sparse on detail.

Instead, it will be up to the nation’s internet regulator – the eSafety Commissioner – to hash out how to implement and enforce the rules, which will not come into effect for at least 12 months after legislation is passed.

According to the bill, the ban will apply to all children under 16 and that there will be no exemptions for existing users or those with parental consent.

Tech companies will face penalties of up to A$50m ($32.5m; £25.7) if they do not comply, but there will be exemptions for platforms which are able to create “low-risk services” deemed suitable for kids. Criteria for this threshold are yet to be set.

Messaging services and gaming sites, however, will not be restricted, as will some sites that can be accessed without an account like YouTube, which has prompted questions over how regulators will determine what is and isn’t a social media platform in a fast-moving landscape.

A group representing the interests of tech companies such as Meta, Snapchat and X in Australia has dismissed the ban as “a 20th Century response to 21st Century challenges”.

Such legislation could push kids into “dangerous, unregulated parts of the internet”, Digital Industry Group Inc says – a fear also expressed by some experts.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has acknowledged the gargantuan task her office will face when enforcing the ban, given “technology change is always going to outpace policy”.

“It will always be fluid, and this is why regulators like eSafety have to be nimble,” she told BBC Radio 5 Live.

But Ms Inman Grant has also raised concerns about the central idea behind the government’s policy, which is that there’s a causal link between social media and declining mental health.

“I would say that the evidence base is not settled at all,” she said, pointing to research from her own office which found that some of the most vulnerable groups, such as LGBTQ+ or First Nations teenagers, “feel more themselves online than they do in the real world”.

This is a sentiment echoed by Lucas Lane, 15, who runs an online business selling nail polish to boys. “This [ban] destroys… my friendships and the ability to make people feel seen,” the Perth teenager tells the BBC.

Ms Inman Grant would rather see tech companies clean up their platforms, as well as more investment in education tools to help young people stay safe online. She uses the analogy of teaching children to swim, rather than banning them from the water.

“We don’t fence the ocean… but we do create protected swimming environments that provide safeguards and teach important lessons from a young age,” she told parliament earlier this year.

But Emma – who has lobbied for the ban through the parent-led Heads Up Alliance – sees it differently.

“Should we really be wasting our time trying to help kids navigate these difficult systems when tech companies just want them on them all the time?” she says.

“Or should we just allow them to be kids and learn how to be sociable outside with each other, and then start these discussions later on?”

Amy Friedlander, a mother of three from the Wait Mate movement – which encourages parents to delay giving their kids smartphones – agrees.

“We can’t ignore all the positives that technology has brought into our lives. There are huge upsides, but what we haven’t really considered is the impact it is having on brains which aren’t ready for it.”

Over 100 Australian academics have criticised the ban as “too blunt an instrument” and argued that it goes against UN advice which calls on governments to ensure young people have “safe access” to digital environments.

It has also failed to win the backing of a bipartisan parliamentary committee that’s been examining the impact of social media on adolescents. Instead, the committee recommended that tech giants face tougher regulations.

To address some of those concerns, the government says it will eventually introduce “digital duty of care” laws, which will make it a legal obligation for tech companies to prioritise user safety.

Joanne Orlando, a researcher in digital behaviour, argues that while a ban “could be part of a strategy, it absolutely can’t be the whole strategy”.

She says “the biggest piece of the puzzle” should be educating kids to think critically about the content they see on their feeds and how they use social media.

The government has already spent A$6m since 2022 to develop free “digital literacy tools” to try and do just that. However, research suggests that many young Australians aren’t receiving regular lessons.

Ms Orlando and other experts warn there are also significant hurdles to making the age-verification technology – which is required to enforce the ban – effective and safe, given the “enormous risks” associated with potentially housing the identification documents of every Australian online.

The government has said it is aiming to solve that challenge through age-verification trials, and hopes to table a report by mid-next year. It has promised that privacy concerns will be front and centre, but offered little detail on what kind of technology will actually be tested.

In its advice, the eSafety Commissioner has floated the idea of using a third-party service to anonymise a user’s ID before it is passed on to any age verification sites, to “preserve” their privacy.

However, Ms Orlando remains sceptical. “I can’t think of any technology that exists at this point that can pull this off,” she tells the BBC.

Australia is by no means the first country to try to restrict how young people access certain websites or platforms online.

In 2011, South Korea passed its “shutdown law” which prevented children under 16 from playing internet games between 22:30 and 6:00, but the rules – which faced backlash – were later scrapped citing the need to “respect the rights of youths”.

More recently France introduced legislation requiring social media platforms to block access to children under 15 without parental consent. Research indicated almost half of users were able to circumvent the ban using a simple VPN.

A law in the US state of Utah – which was similar to Australia’s – ran into a different issue: it was blocked by a federal judge who found it unconstitutional.

Albanese has conceded that Australia’s proposal may not be foolproof, and if it passes the parliament, it would be subject to a review.

“We all know technology moves fast and some people will try to find ways around these new laws but that is not a reason to ignore the responsibility that we have,” he told lawmakers.

But for mothers like Emma and Ms Friedlander – who have lobbied for the changes – it’s the message that the ban sends which matters most.

“For too long parents have had this impossible choice between giving in and getting their child an addictive device or seeing their child isolated and feeling left out socially,” Ms Friedlander says.

“We’ve been trapped in a norm that no one wants to be a part of.”

James says that since quitting Snapchat he’s found himself spending more time outside with friends.

And he hopes that the new laws could enable more kids like him to “get out and do the things they love” instead of feeling pressured to be online.

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 British businessman caught on camera confessing he was illegally selling luxury perfume to Russia is not facing criminal charges, the BBC has learned.

David Crisp admitted to an undercover investigator that he had “ignored government edicts” on sanctions by selling £1,000-a-bottle “Boadicea the Victorious” perfume in Russia.

The BBC can now exclusively show the undercover video, which has previously only been shared in court.

Mr Crisp was arrested in 2023 by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) – the UK government agency responsible for sanctions enforcement – but the investigation was dropped earlier this year. This is despite the discovery of evidence that he tried to conceal more than £1.7m of illegal sales.

Mr Crisp, from Surrey, denies knowingly breaching sanctions or concealing trades with Russia.

There has not been a single UK criminal conviction for violating trade sanctions on Russia, the BBC understands, since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago.

Failing to punish violators is “a bad signal to send” and makes the UK look like a “soft touch,” says senior Conservative MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who has been calling for tougher action against Russia.

Mr Crisp travelled the world selling high-end perfume, regularly rubbing shoulders with celebrities and VIPs, who were unaware of his activities in Russia.

But when he started chatting to a friendly American in the lift of a luxury hotel in Dallas in July last year, he had no idea he was actually speaking to a private investigator.

Posing as a Las Vegas businessman, the agent said he was interested in stocking Mr Crisp’s perfumes. They later met in Crisp’s hotel room to smell the fragrances – where the investigator secretly filmed the conversation.

“How’s your Russian market?” the investigator asked. “Don’t tell anyone.” Mr Crisp replied, “We’re doing really well… we ignore government edicts.”

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the UK government introduced sanctions banning trade with Russia in several areas – perfumes are specifically named. Breaching these regulations is a serious offence, with a maximum prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Following the introduction of sanctions, Mr Crisp had agreed with his then-business partner, David Garofalo, to cease trading with Russia. But Mr Garofalo later became suspicious after a whistleblower claimed that Crisp continued to sell perfume in Moscow. Mr Garofalo then hired the private investigators.

The undercover footage is “sickening” David Garofalo told me as we watch the footage together, adding “he knows that he’s violating the sanctions”.

Without Mr Crisp’s knowledge, the company also compiled a dossier of evidence that he had knowingly violated sanctions.

Staff also found pallets of goods in the company’s UK facility with paperwork showing recipients in Russia, and international shipping data confirming deliveries. Products were discovered on sale in Moscow that the company had only launched after the imposition of sanctions.

“He had actually gone out of his way to disguise the fact that he’d continued selling to Russia,” Mr Garofalo told us. “He had deceived our in-house lawyer and misled our auditors.”

Mr Garofalo reported Mr Crisp to HMRC and it opened a criminal investigation. At the same time, Mr Garofalo pursued a civil case against his partner to remove him from the company.

In July this year, a High Court judge granted a rare provisional injunction, meaning Mr Crisp would be removed immediately pending the full civil trial.

In his ruling, the judge said the undercover video was “compelling evidence” that Mr Crisp knew he was breaching sanctions and the company accounts showed he “concealed the Russian trading”.

After taking full control of the company, Mr Garofalo immediately halted all sales to Russia.

In a statement, David Crisp told the BBC: “I strongly refute the allegations made against me by Mr Garofalo, at no point did I knowingly trade in breach of Russian sanctions… at no point did I attempt to conceal those trades… the companies’ trades with Russia were well known to those within the business… I look forward to being fully exonerated.”

HMRC officers arrested Mr Crisp upon arrival at Gatwick Airport in October 2023 and seized his passport.

But, by July this year, HMRC had dropped its investigation and told Mr Crisp that it would take no further action against him, returning his passport.

Mr Garofalo told us he was shocked HMRC had showed no interest in the evidence he had collected. “It was an open and shut case. The evidence was just irrefutable.”

HMRC does not comment on individual cases, but it told the BBC that failure to comply with sanctions is a serious offence, and those who breach them could face enforcement actions including financial penalties or referral for criminal prosecution.

Its statement added: “HMRC has fined five companies for breaches of the Russia sanctions regulations in the last two years, including a £1m fine issued in August 2023.”

But the BBC understands there haven’t been any criminal prosecutions for violating trade sanctions on Russia since February 2022.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, the chair of a committee of MPs working on sanctions against Russia, told the BBC the Crisp case isn’t a “one-off”.

“In terms of prosecution and seriously pursuing people over sanctions, the UK is very poor indeed,” said Sir Iain. “If we don’t prosecute, who the hell is deterred from breaching sanctions?

He said other countries including the US, were “light years” ahead of the UK in terms of prosecuting violators.

“There needs to be arrest, prosecution and incarceration. And if we don’t do that, then there’s no such thing as sanctions.”

The former Conservative Party leader said that HMRC often reached settlements, instead of issuing large fines or criminal convictions.

“The authorities may say the sanctions breaches are too small to prosecute, but the answer is you prosecute the small ones, because the big ones need to know that you’re coming after them as well,” he added.

The UK government had hoped sanctions would be a deterrent, without the need for robust enforcement, according to Tim Ash from the foreign affairs think tank Chatham House.

“The reality is, the allure of doing business with Russia, the huge profits to be made, are too much for some people,” explained Mr Ash.

“They’re more interested in their bottom line, as opposed to the bottomless pit of Ukrainians dying.”

He said cases like Mr Crisp’s sent a clear message that there would be no consequences for continuing business with Russia.

“We are almost three years into the [full-scale] invasion, and the fact that we haven’t got our sanctions regime together is pretty extraordinary.”

As the sun slowly dips behind the jagged peaks of Mount Nam Xay, a group of brightly coloured hot air balloons drift across the Vang Vieng valley.

In the river below, young tourists laugh and splash each other from their kayaks.

It’s not hard to see what draws so many travellers here to this little town in central Laos. The scenery is stunning, the fun cheap and plentiful.

But the town has found itself at the centre of an international scandal after six tourists died last week following suspected methanol poisoning.

It is believed their alcoholic drinks may have contained methanol, an industrial chemical often used in bootleg alcohol.

For the throngs of young western travellers on South East Asia’s backpacker trail, Vang Vieng has become famous for what is called “tubing.” One described it to me as a water borne pub crawl.

Groups of friends in swimsuits and bikinis clamber aboard huge inner tubes that would normally be used on trucks and drift downstream, pulling in from time to time at river side bars where vodka shots are liberally administered, before plunging back into the water.

By the time they reach Vang Vieng everyone is fairly merry.

“I think we’re going to give the tubing a miss” two 27-year-old women from Hertfordshire in the UK tell me (they didn’t want to give their names).

“The vodka shots are part of the package, but no one wants to drink the local vodka right now.”

The pair arrived here from Vietnam, just as news of the deaths from methanol poisoning was spreading across the world.

“In Vietnam we got free drinks, particularly when you’re playing games in the evening,” one of them tells me. “And we just never thought about it, you just presume what they are giving you is safe. We’ve drunk buckets before, but we are not going to take the risk again, and a lot of people here feel the same.”

“Buckets” are exactly what they sound like – small plastic buckets filled with cheap vodka and other liquor. Groups of friends share the mixture through long plastic straws.

“Now this has happened it really makes you think about it,” the woman’s friend says. “You wonder why are the drinks free? At the hostel associated with the deaths we heard they were giving free vodka and whisky shots for an hour each evening. I think if that happened in the UK you would definitely think it was dodgy.”

Both women said they are now sticking to drinking bottled or canned beer.

The deaths of six tourists has sent shock waves through the backpacker scene. Young female travellers feel most vulnerable. The dead include Briton Simone White, 28, two young Australians, Holly Bowles and her best friend Bianca Jones, and two young Danish women, Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman and Freja Vennervald Sorensen.

Only one of the dead, a 57-year-old American, James Louis Hutson, was male. On the travellers’ chat-groups many have been questioning whether only women’s drinks had been spiked with methanol. The truth is, it’s still a mystery.

What we do know is all the victims stayed at the same place, The Nana Backpackers hostel. It’s now been confirmed the American victim was found dead in his bedroom there on 13 November. On the same morning the two Danish victims were found unconscious in their rooms and rushed to the local hospital.

Today, the Nana hostel is closed, the swimming pool that until a few days ago was hosting pool parties, is empty. A short walk away beside the river a bar called “JaiDees” has also been raided. The owners of both have forcefully denied serving any illegal or homemade alcohol.

Out on the river there is little sign that the poisonings are stopping people coming to Vang Vieng. Late November is peak tourist season. The rainy season is over, the skies are clear and the temperature is a relatively cool 28C (82F).

Along the main drag hostel owners told me they are fully booked. The young travellers from Europe and Australia are actually the minority. By far the largest groups are from neighbouring Thailand and China, the latter shuttling south on the newly finished Chinese-built Laos high-speed rail line.

Vang Vieng is still a dusty rural town. But it’s booming. Local business owners glide past in big black land cruisers and range rovers. As I walked back to my hotel on Saturday night, I was taken aback by the loud bark from the exhaust pipes of a Lamborghini cruising along Vang Vieng’s single main street.

Twenty years ago this was a sleepy little town surrounded by rice fields. Now it is being transformed by Thai and Chinese money. Fancy new hotels are springing up with riverside cocktail bars and infinity pools.

But the young western backpackers are not here for the five-star experience, they come for the friendly anything-goes atmosphere.

At a local motorbike rental I meet two fresh graduates from Sussex University.

Ned from Somerset says he has no intention of cancelling plans because of what happened. “People are scared for sure,” he says, “but I don’t get the impression anyone is leaving. Everyone is still here having a good time.”

He adds: “But everyone is also saying the same thing, don’t drink the spirits, so people are being careful, there’s definitely that feeling in the air, but I think it’s actually quite safe now because all the bars are on edge, no-one wants to go to jail”.

His friend Jack is equally unflustered. “We’ve come here to meet up with some friends and have some fun, and we’re still going to do that,” he says. “I’ve been here a week now and I can tell you the people here are absolutely lovely. They are some of the nicest people we’ve met in all of South East Asia. So whatever happened, I don’t think there’s anything malicious about it.”

Malicious or not, six people are dead, five of them young women.

The shock waves from what happened here has rippled out around the world to suburban homes from London to Melbourne, where worried parents with children on the backpacker trail are frantically messaging, checking where they are, and trying to persuade them not to go to Vang Vieng.

In October, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) sent a chartered flight carrying Indian nationals back home, marking a growing trend in deportations to India.

This was no ordinary flight – it was one of multiple large-scale “removal flights” carried out this year, each typically carrying more than 100 passengers. The flights were returning groups of Indian migrants who “did not establish a legal basis to remain in the US”.

According to US officials, the latest flight carrying adult men and women was routed to Punjab, close to many deportees’ places of origin. No precise breakdown of hometowns was provided.

In the US fiscal year 2024 which ended in September, more than 1,000 Indian nationals had been repatriated by charter and commercial flights, according to Royce Bernstein Murray, assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security.

“That has been part of a steady increase in removals from the US of Indian nationals over the past few years, which corresponds with a general increase in encounters that we have seen with Indian nationals in the last few years as well,” Ms Murray told a media briefing. (Encounters refer to instances where non-citizens are stopped by US authorities while attempting to cross the country’s borders with Mexico or Canada.)

As the US ramps up repatriations of Indian nationals, concerns grow about how President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration policies will affect them. Trump has already promised the biggest deportation of migrants in history.

Since October 2020, US Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officials have detained nearly 170,000 Indian migrants attempting unauthorised crossings at both the northern and southern land borders.

“Though smaller than the numbers from Latin America and the Caribbean, Indian nationals represent the largest group of migrants from outside the Western Hemisphere encountered by the CPB in the past four years,” say Gil Guerra and Sneha Puri, immigration analysts at Niskanen Center, a Washington-based think tank.

As of 2022, an estimated 725,000 undocumented Indian immigrants were in the US, making them the third-largest group after those from Mexico and El Salvador, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. Unauthorised immigrants in all make up 3% of US’s total population and 22% of the foreign-born population.

Looking at the data, Mr Guerra and Ms Puri have identified notable trends in the spike in Indians attempting illegal border crossings.

For one, the migrants are not from the lowest economic strata. But they cannot secure tourist or student visas to the US, often due to lower education or English proficiency.

Instead, they rely on agencies charging up to $100,000 (£79,000), sometimes using long and arduous routes designed to dodge border controls. To afford this, many sell farms or take out loans. Not surprisingly, data from the US immigration courts in 2024 reveals that the majority of Indian migrants were male, aged 18-34.

Second, Canada on the northern border has become a more accessible entry point for Indians, with a visitor visa processing time of 76 days (compared to up to a year for a US visa in India).

The Swanton Sector – covering the states of Vermont and counties in New York and New Hampshire – has experienced a sudden surge in encounters with Indian nationals since early this year, peaking at 2,715 in June, the researchers found.

Earlier, most irregular Indian migrants entered the Americas through the busier southern border with Mexico via El Salvador or Nicaragua, both of which facilitated migration. Until November last year, Indian nationals enjoyed visa-free travel to El Salvador.

“The US-Canada border is also longer and less guarded than the US-Mexico border. And while it is not necessarily safer, criminal groups do not have the same presence there as they do along the route from South and Central America,” Mr Guerra and Ms Puri say.

Thirdly, much of the migration appears to originate from the Sikh-dominated Indian state of Punjab and neighbouring Haryana, which has traditionally seen people migrating overseas. The other source of origin is Gujarat, the home state of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Punjab, which accounts for a large share of irregular Indian migrants, is facing economic hardships, including high unemployment, farming distress and a looming drug crisis.

Migration has also long been common among Punjabis, with rural youth still eager to move abroad.

A recent study of 120 respondents in Punjab by Navjot Kaur, Gaganpreet Kaur and Lavjit Kaur found that 56% emigrated between ages 18-28, often after secondary education. Many funded their move through non-institutional loans, later sending remittances to their families.

Then there has been a rise in tensions over the separatist Khalistan movement, which seeks to establish an independent homeland for Sikhs. “This has caused fear from some Sikhs in India about being unfairly targeted by authorities or politicians. These fears may also provide a credible basis for claims of persecution that allows them to seek asylum, whether or not true,” says Ms Puri.

But pinning down the exact triggers for migration is challenging.

“While motivations vary, economic opportunity remains the primary driver, reinforced by social networks and a sense of pride in having family members ‘settled’ in the US,” says Ms Puri.

Fourth, researchers found a shift in the family demographics of Indian nationals at the borders.

More families are trying to cross the border. In 2021, single adults were overwhelmingly detained at both borders. Now, family units make up 16-18% of the detentions at both borders.

This has sometimes led to tragic consequences. In January 2022, an Indian family of four – part of a group of 11 people from Gujarat – froze to death just 12m (39ft) from the border in Canada while attempting to enter the US.

Pablo Bose, a migration and urban studies scholar at the University of Vermont, says Indians are trying to cross into the US in larger numbers because of more economic opportunities and “more ability to enter the informal economies in the US cities”, especially the large ones like New York or Boston.

“From everything I know and interviews I have conducted, most of the Indians are not staying in the more rural locations like Vermont or upstate New York but rather heading to the cities as soon as they can,” Mr Bose told the BBC. There, he says, they are entering mostly informal jobs like domestic labour and restaurant work.

Things are likely to become more difficult soon. Veteran immigration official Tom Homan, who will be in charge of the country’s borders following Trump’s inauguration in January, has said that the northern border with Canada is a priority because illegal migration in the area is a “huge national security issue”.

What happens next is unclear. “It remains to be seen if Canada would impose similar policies to prevent people migrating into the US from its borders. If that happens, we can expect a decline in detentions of Indians nationals at the border,” says Ms Puri.

Whatever the case, the dreams driving thousands of desperate Indians to seek a better life in the US are unlikely to fade, even as the road ahead becomes more perilous.

Chioma is adamant that Hope, the baby boy she is holding in her arms, is her son.  After eight years of failed attempts to conceive, she sees him as her miracle baby.

“I’m the owner of my baby,” she says defiantly.

She’s sitting next to her husband, Ike, in the office of a Nigerian state official who spends the best part of an hour interrogating the couple.

As the commissioner for women affairs and social welfare in Anambra state, Ify Obinabo has plenty of experience in resolving family disputes – but this is no ordinary disagreement.

Five members of Ike’s family, who are also present in the room, do not believe Hope is the couple’s biological child, as Chioma and Ike claim.

Chioma claims to have “carried” the child for about 15 months. The commissioner and Ike’s family are in disbelief at the absurdity of the claim.

Chioma says she faced pressure from Ike’s family to conceive. They even asked him to marry another woman.

In her desperation, she visited a “clinic” offering an unconventional “treatment” – an outlandish and disturbing scam preying on women desperate to become mothers that involves the trafficking of babies.

The BBC was allowed by authorities to sit in on the commissioner’s discussion with Chioma as part of our investigation into the cryptic pregnancy scam.

We have changed the names of Chioma, Ike and others in this article to protect them from reprisal in their communities.

Nigeria has one of the highest birth rates in the world, with women often facing social pressure to conceive and even ostracisation or abuse if they cannot.

Under this pressure, some women go to extremes to realise their dream of motherhood.

For over a year, BBC Africa Eye has been investigating the “cryptic pregnancy” scam.

Scammers posing as doctors or nurses convince women that they have a “miracle fertility treatment” guaranteed to get them pregnant. The initial “treatment” usually costs hundreds of dollars and consists of an injection, a drink, or a substance inserted into the vagina.

None of the women or officials we spoke to during our investigation know for sure what is in these drugs. But some women have told us they led to changes in their bodies – such as swollen stomachs – which further convinced them they were pregnant.

Women given the “treatment” are warned not to visit any conventional doctors or hospitals, as no scan or pregnancy test would detect “the baby”, which the scammers claim is growing outside the womb.

When it’s time to “deliver” the baby, women are told labour will only begin once they are induced with a “rare and expensive drug”, requiring further payment.

Accounts of how the “delivery” happens vary, but all are disturbing. Some are sedated only to wake up with a Caesarean-like incision mark. Others say they are given an injection that causes a drowsy, hallucinatory state in which they believe they’re giving birth.

Either way, the women end up with babies they are supposed to have given birth to.

Chioma tells commissioner Obinabo that when her time to “deliver” came, the so-called doctor injected her in the waist and told her to push. She does not spell out how she ended up with Hope, but says the delivery was “painful”.

Our team manages to infiltrate one of these secretive “clinics” – connecting with a woman known as “Dr Ruth” to her clients – by posing as a couple who have been trying to conceive for eight years.

This so-called “Dr Ruth” runs her clinic every second Saturday of the month in a dilapidated hotel in the town of Ihiala, in the south-eastern Anambra state. Outside her room, dozens of women wait for her in the hotel corridors, some with visibly protruding stomachs.

The whole atmosphere is buzzing with positivity. At one point, huge celebrations erupt inside the room after a woman is told she is pregnant.

When it’s our undercover reporters’ turn to see her, “Dr Ruth” tells them the treatment is guaranteed to work.

She offers the woman an injection, claiming it will enable the couple to “select” the sex of their future baby – a medical impossibility.

After they turn down the injection, “Dr Ruth” hands them a sachet of crushed pills as well as some more pills for them to take at home, along with instructions on when to have intercourse.

This initial treatment costs 350,000 naira ($205; £165).

Our undercover reporter neither takes the drugs nor follows any of “Dr Ruth’s” instructions and returns to see her four weeks later.

After running a device that looks like an ultrasound scanner across our reporter’s stomach, a sound like a heartbeat is heard and “Dr Ruth” congratulates her on being pregnant.

They both cheer with joy.

After delivering the good news, “Dr Ruth” explains how they’ll need to pay for a “scarce” and expensive drug needed for the baby to be born, costing somewhere between 1.5 and two million naira ($1,180; £945).

Without this drug, the pregnancy could extend beyond nine months, “Dr Ruth” claims with disregard for scientific fact, adding: “The baby will become malnourished – we’d need to build it up again.”

“Dr Ruth” has not responded to allegations the BBC has put to her.

The extent to which the women involved genuinely believe the claims is unclear.

But clues as to why they would be susceptible to such brazen lies can, in part, be found in online groups where disinformation around pregnancy is widespread.

Cryptic pregnancy is a recognised medical phenomenon, in which a woman is unaware of her pregnancy until the late stages.

But during our investigation, the BBC found widespread misinformation in Facebook groups and pages about this type of pregnancy.

One woman from the US, who dedicates her entire page to her “cryptic pregnancy”, claims to have been pregnant “for years” and that her journey cannot be explained by science.

In closed groups on Facebook, many posts use religious terminology to hail the bogus “treatment” as a “miracle” for those who’ve been unable to conceive.

All of this misinformation helps solidify women’s belief in the scam.

Members of these groups are not only from Nigeria, but also from South Africa, the Caribbean, and the US.

The scammers also sometimes manage, and post in, these groups, enabling them to reach out to women expressing an interest in the “treatment”.

Once someone expresses readiness to start the scam process, they are invited into more secure WhatsApp groups. There, admins share information about “cryptic clinics” and what the process involves.

Authorities tell us that to complete the “treatment”, the scammers need new-born babies and to do that they seek out women who are desperate and vulnerable, many of them young and pregnant, in a country where abortion is illegal.

In February 2024, the Anambra state health ministry raided the facility where Chioma “delivered” Hope.

The BBC obtained footage of the raid, which showed a huge complex made up of two buildings.

In one were rooms containing medical equipment – apparently for clients – while in the other were several pregnant women being kept against their will. Some were as young as 17.

Some tell us they were tricked into going there, unaware their babies would be sold to the scammer’s clients.

Others, like Uju, which is not her real name, felt too scared to tell their family they were pregnant and sought a way out. She said she was offered 800,000 naira ($470; £380) for the baby.

Asked if she regrets her decision to sell her baby, she says: “I’m still confused.”

Commissioner Obinabo, who has been part of efforts in her state to crack down on the scam, says scammers prey on vulnerable women like Uju to source the babies.

At the end of a tense interrogation, commissioner Obinabo threatens to take away baby Hope from Chioma.

But Chioma pleads her case, and the commissioner eventually accepts her explanation that she is a victim herself and that she hadn’t realised what was going on.

On this basis she allows Chioma and Ike to keep the baby – unless the biological parents come forward to claim him.

But unless attitudes towards women, infertility, reproductive rights and adoption change, scams like this will continue to thrive, experts warn.

• ‘Try or die’ – one man’s determination to get to the Canary Islands
• How sailors say they were tricked into smuggling cocaine by a British man
• Kidnapped and trafficked twice – a sex worker’s life in Sierra Leone
• World’s police in technological arms race with Nigerian mafia
• ‘Terrible things happened’ – inside TB Joshua’s church of horrors

A British man has been captured by Russian forces while fighting for Ukraine, according to reports.

In a video circulating online, a man dressed in military clothing identifies himself as James Scott Rhys Anderson, 22, and says he formerly served in the British Army.

Russian state news agency Tass quotes a military source saying that what they call a “UK mercenary” had been “taken prisoner in the Kursk area” of Russia, part of which Ukraine has held since launching a surprise offensive in August.

The Foreign Office said it was “supporting the family of a British man following reports of his detention”.

In the video, first posted to the Telegram messaging platform, Mr Anderson tells a man questioning him from behind a camera that he served as a private in the British Army from 2019 to 2023.

He says he joined the Ukraine’s International Legion – a military unit made up of foreign volunteers – after losing his job and seeing reports on television about the war.

He says he flew to Krakow in Poland from Luton and travelled from there by bus to the Ukrainian border.

Ukraine launched a surprise attack into Kursk on 6 August, advancing up to 18 miles (29km) and taking control of around 1,000 square kilometres of Russian territory.

Russia has deployed some 50,000 troops to the region, and has begun retaking territory amid fierce fighting.

The three Gardai – Irish police officers – walk down the rows of passengers on the bus, a few kilometres south of the border with Northern Ireland.

Observing this is the head of the Garda National Immigration Bureau, Det Ch Supt Aidan Minnock.

“If they don’t have status to be in Ireland, we bring them to Dublin,” he explains. “They’re removed on a ferry back to the UK on the same day.”

Asylum applications in Ireland have risen by nearly 300% so far this year compared to the same period five years ago. A spike in arrivals from the UK has been driven by various factors, among these the UK’s tougher stance post-Brexit, including the fear of deportations to Rwanda, as well as Ireland’s relatively healthy economy.

Most asylum seekers coming from the UK to the Republic of Ireland enter the country from Northern Ireland, as – unlike the airport or ferry routes – there is no passport control. The Garda checks along the 500km-long (310 miles) border are the only means of stopping illegal entry.

Det Ch Supt Minnock told the BBC that 200 people had been returned to the UK this year as a result of these checkpoints, thought to be only a small fraction of those crossing the porous border illegally.

More than 2,000 people who arrived in Ireland illegally have been issued deportation orders so far this year, a 156% increase on the same period in 2023. However, only 129 of those people (just over 6%) are confirmed to have since left the state. The government has said it will begin chartered deportation flights in the coming months, and free up more immigration Gardai from desk work.

Onboard the coach near the border, the Gardai question a young man about where he lives. He is Algerian – a student, he says. The police are suspicious and he is taken to the detention vehicle while his identity is checked.

A veteran of war crimes investigations in post-war Bosnia – as part of an EU police team – Det Ch Supt Minnock knows well the violence and poverty that drives migration.

“This is growing at such a scale because of the conflict and instability right across the world,” he says.

Public concern over immigration is closely linked to Ireland’s chronic housing problem. The Republic now has the worst record in the EU for housing young people.

The CEO of the Irish Refugee Council, Nick Henderson, says the crisis is a “perfect storm”, created in part by the failure to build enough housing stock over decades, and a government unprepared for the upsurge in asylum seekers – known in Ireland as International Protection Applicants (IPAs) – needing help with accommodation.

“[The government] is only able to provide accommodation through private contractors. That, coupled with an increase in the number of people seeking protection in Ireland, and against the background of a housing crisis has meant, in effect, that Ireland’s asylum reception system has really collapsed.”

In nearly three years, the number of asylum seekers accommodated by the state’s International Protection Accommodation Services (IPAS) has more than quadrupled – from 7,244 to 32,649 people. Over 100,000 Ukrainians, who were given a separate status, also sought refuge in Ireland during that time.

Tens of thousands of international protection applicants – some already with asylum status in Ireland, others waiting to be processed – have been sent to communities around the country, accommodated in hotels, former schools, apartments, even large tented camps.

Ireland’s housing shortage means that even those granted asylum are struggling to leave the temporary system as others arrive. Nearly 1,000 people are now living in tented accommodation.

This makeshift response has generated resentment. In the village of Dundrum, County Tipperary – population 221 – a group of locals attempted to block the arrival of asylum seekers at the gates of a former hotel in August. The proposal to house up to 277 people at Dundrum House, which hasn’t operated as a hotel since 2015, would double the local population. Locals worry that it will be a permanent fixture.

“How can our government not engage properly with us?” asks Andrea Crowe, a local teacher and protester who has frequently spoken in public. She cites concerns over housing, health and education provision for the community.

Since July, there has been a 24-hour protest outside the hotel. Ms Crowe, whose family once owned the Dundrum House hotel, accuses the government of failing to consult with the community – a common complaint around the country.

“How can we not be concerned?” she says.

The IPAS community currently living at Dundrum House is made up of about 80 women and children. There is also a separate group of Ukrainian families, welcomed after the Russian invasion in February 2022.

Several locals told us they feared that single men – who make up 35% of asylum seekers arriving in Ireland so far this year – would eventually replace the women and children, although there so far is no evidence to suggest this is planned in Dundrum.

Local builder, Martin Barry, cites the housing crisis as a key reason for his protest, particularly the plight of his eldest son. “My own young fella, he can’t afford a place to rent,” he says.

But Martin Barry also speaks to deeper fears of change in some rural communities. The dance hall where he met his wife has closed. The local pub is for sale. There were hopes Dundrum House would be reopened and used by the local community.

“It’s just the worry of what’s coming down the line,” he says.

We meet two South African women given refuge at Dundrum House. Both were sent from their accommodation in Dublin – 180km (110 miles) away – to make way for newer arrivals into the capital, some of whom were sleeping in tents on the streets.

The women ask to remain anonymous. “Lerato” had been in Dublin for a year. “I had integrated with society, and made friends. My child was attending school and I was comfortable.” Her friend “Kayla” speaks of being isolated in Dundrum, a farming community with limited transport amenities.

Far-right parties show scant support in opinion polls. Immigration worries are likely to be expressed in support for independent candidates. But online, far-right agitators stoke fear. There have been violent riots and arson attacks on sites meant to house, or rumoured to house, asylum seekers, and refugees have been attacked in their tents on Dublin’s streets.

A common conspiracy theory is that migrants are being “planted” in Ireland as part of a plot to dominate Irish people and destroy their culture.

We saw two posters referring to a “plantation” at the Dundrum House protest. The now-closed online GoFundMe Page for Dundrum referred to Ireland’s “indigenous” population fighting “for our very existence” and the government “flooding communities with asylum seekers”.

The page – which raised more than €3,000 (£2,500) – was set up by a local businessman. He turns out to have posted antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-vaccine conspiracist material on social media.

We ask Andrea Crowe, one of the prominent voices of the Dundrum protest, if she is comfortable with such a person being involved? Ms Crowe says she does not “follow social media much” and it is not up to her to manage other people’s reactions. But she says she’s “not comfortable with it”.

Others in County Tipperary welcome asylum seekers. Some 17 groups came together under the slogan “Tipperary Welcomes” after the Dundrum protest began.

John Browne, a member of the community council, says the issue divides people. “I don’t have a problem with it because we’re relatively wealthy, and the situation is pretty bad in parts of Africa and where most of these people are coming from.”

But he disagrees strongly with the numbers involved in small places like Dundrum. “It imbalances the community. And it’s no good for the people coming in, because there’s nothing here for them.”

We caught up with Ireland’s Minister for Integration, Roderic O’Gorman, while he was campaigning in Dublin for the General Election, due to be held on 29 November. He now canvasses votes with two police guards after being assaulted by a man protesting against immigration.

Mr O’Connor says many areas welcome asylum seekers.

“There are communities all over the place who are actually embracing and supporting,” he says.

But he accepts some failures. “I recognise in the initial parts of our response, there were times where there wasn’t that level of engagement that we need,” he says.

There are now Community Engagement Teams responsible for liaising with residents, although the protesters we spoke to in Dundrum say they have had only one meeting with a team and are still no wiser about the long-term plans for the hotel.

Official policy is hardening. Ukrainian asylum seekers who arrived amid widespread public sympathy and were given special benefits, recently saw these slashed from €232 (£190) to €38.80 (£32) per week – a cut of 83%.

South Africans now need visas to enter the country. A visa loophole which allowed Jordanians – at one point the largest group of asylum seekers in Ireland – to enter from the UK has been closed.

Concern over immigration has so far not translated into electoral support for far-right parties. Nick Henderson at the Refugee Council believes this need not be inevitable in Ireland. “Communities want to welcome people, but they need resources. They need communication.”

The Republic’s image as a stable and progressive democracy won’t change in this electoral cycle. But the rise in far-right populism internationally is a warning for the future – of how concern over immigration can be made a focus for other discontents and create turbulent politics.

A far-right, pro-Russia candidate has taken a surprise lead in the first round of Romania’s presidential election, with preliminary results putting his pro-Europe rival in close second.

With 96% of votes counted, ultranationalist Calin Georgescu was on 22%, and Marcel Ciolacu, the prime minister, had 20%, according to the Central Electoral Bureau.

The strong showing of Georgescu, who has no party of his own, and campaigned largely on the social media platform TikTok, came as the biggest surprise of the election.

He is now on track to join Ciolacu in a final run-off for the presidency on 8 December.

That would pose a dilemma for the millions of Romanians who voted for other candidates.

One option would be to rally round populist Social Democrat Ciolacu, an establishment figure who would continue Romania’s pro-western path.

Backing Georgescu, who has promised to Romania’s sovereignty, is the alternative.

Georgescu, who belongs to no party, has also sworn to end what he calls subservience to the European Union and Nato, especially on support for Ukraine. He has condemned the Nato ballistic missile defence shield in Deveselu, Romania.

The final result of this round will be known later on Monday, when votes from the capital Bucharest and from the large Romanian diaspora are counted.

Campaigning focused largely on the soaring cost of living, with Romania having the EU’s biggest share of people at risk of poverty.

Exit polls released earlier on Sunday suggested that Ciolacu had a commanding lead, and projected the centre-right candidate, Elena Lasconi, would take second place.

The current tally, however, puts Lasconi in third on 18%, and another nationalist, George Simion, in fourth.

The president in Romania has a largely symbolic role but considerable influence on areas such as foreign policy.

Turnout was 51%, similar to the figure five years ago.

At the epicentre of this devastating family drama is Gisèle Pelicot, a diminutive 72-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.

Welsh First Minister Eluned Morgan has said the floods brought by Storm Bert have been “absolutely devastating”, as heavy rain and strong winds continue to move across the UK.

South Wales, where a major incident has been declared by one council, has seen over 100mm of rain in places, while two areas in the south east of the country are under severe flood warnings, detailing a “significant risk to life”.

Ms Morgan said authorities had been prepared for the storm, but added that “when you get the kind of enormity of rain we’ve had over the past few days”, minimising the impact was always “going to be difficult”.

The worst of the rain is moving eastwards into England, where the midlands and south west have also seen flooding. Across the UK, more than 100 flood warnings are now in force.

Yellow warnings for wind and rain have been in effect for western Scotland, southern England and Wales, as well as Northern Ireland but are due to expire late on Sunday. A sole yellow warning for wind comes into force on Monday covering part of Scotland.

There are also hundreds of flood alerts in place in England, Wales and Scotland.

Wind gusts have reached 75mph in coastal areas and up to 65mph inland.

North Wales Police said on Sunday afternoon that a body had been found by officers searching for a man who went missing at the River Conwy near Trefriw in Conwy county during the storm on Saturday.

Formal identification has not yet taken place but the family of Brian Perry, 75, have been informed, police said.

Around London, all of the Royal Parks closed on Sunday due to high winds – including Hyde Park and its popular Winter Wonderland attraction.

The parks’ management said there would be delayed re-openings on Monday following a safety inspection.

Travel disruption to roads and railway lines due to floodwater, high winds and fallen trees continued in some areas on Sunday after similar incidents on Saturday.

One train from Sheffield to London was more than five hours delayed, with the service taking a detour and encountering further flooding along the alternative route.

A backlog meant the train was stationary for two hours, with staff giving out free water and snacks.

There were many families with tired young kids crying, and people getting frustrated with the lack of information.

Pictures from Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire showed streets submerged in water as the town’s Kyre Brook rose and caused a wall to collapse.

In south Wales, a major incident has been declared by Rhondda Cynon Taf Council after significant flooding. The River Taff has burst its banks in Pontypridd, and residents in the town were seen using buckets to remove water from outside their homes.

Wales’ first minister said there had been “huge investment” since the Storm Dennis, but acknowledged that many people had been affected for a second time.

Asked about claims of a lack of warnings from authorities ahead of the storm, she added: “We certainly knew Storm Bert was coming, so there was an amount of preparation.

“But when you get the kind of enormity of rain we’ve had over the past few days – and it’s still coming down – then we’ve got to recognise that it is going to be difficult.”

She added that discussions had begun about what support would be provided to those affected.

Climate change was “clearly making a difference in the severity and the frequency of these weather events”, she said.

“There will come a point when it will be too difficult to protect every home in the country, but clearly we want to put the support in place if we’re able to do that,” she said.

Three rest centres have been set up for affected residents. Between 200 and 300 properties – residential and commercial – have been affected by flooding, the council added.

Record river levels were recorded on the River Taff on Saturday night but officials said these levels were beginning to drop as rain subsides, although residents were still urged to be cautious.

The Abercynon Feeder Pipe Footbridge over the river was completely washed away, council leader Andrew Morgan told a news conference on Sunday afternoon.

The bridge was being rebuilt after being badly damaged during Storm Dennis in 2020, which also caused significant flooding to homes and businesses when it hit the area.

Mr Morgan told reporters he was “amazed” that only a yellow weather warning was issued for the area and said “we were preparing for the possibility of an amber warning”.

Further east, National Resources Wales (NRW) issued two severe flood warnings on Sunday covering parts of the River Monnow in Monmouthshire.

The warnings are the most serious that can be issued and indicate that “significant risk to life” and disruption is expected from severe flooding.

Pontypridd resident Paula Williams said flooding had hit “in exactly the same place” as it had done previously, criticising NRW’s efforts to adequately protect the area.

“They’ve tried to convince everybody that the flood defences worked. I have got videos proving the flood defences don’t work,” she added.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Sunday he had spoken with Ms Morgan and would continue to receive updates about Storm Bert as it moved across the UK.

“Thank you to the emergency services who are working tirelessly to protect communities — my thoughts are with those impacted,” he said on X.

Since Storm Bert made landfall on Friday, at least five men have died – including the man reported to be Brian Perry – on the roads.

A man in his 60s died on Saturday after a tree hit his car near Winchester, and two others died in crashes – one in West Yorkshire and another in Northamptonshire – though the latter incidents have not been directly attributed to the storm.

In Lancashire, a man in his 80s died after his car entered a ford on Saturday – police have not directly related his death to the storm.

Parts of Scotland experienced a second day of disruption with high winds and localised flooding after Storm Bert swept heavy snow and rain across the country.

Milder temperatures caused the snow which covered the north of England and much of Scotland earlier this week to melt.

Amber weather warnings for snow were in place on Saturday for parts of Scotland and north-east England, while large swathes of the UK were under yellow weather warnings.

Following hours of heavy rain caused by Storm Bert, residents in Dundonald in Northern Ireland were stranded in their homes due to the floodwater on Saturday.

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.

Three people have been arrested in connection with the murder, the UAE’s interior ministry confirmed on Sunday evening.

Rabbi Kogan, an envoy of the orthodox Jewish organisation Chabad Lubavitch, 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”.

Mossad investigators are working to identify those responsible for the rabbi’s death.

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.

Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, chairman of Chabad Lubavitch said: “We trust that the UAE will work with the countries in the region to bring the perpetrators to justice, and hold all those involved accountable for this act of sheer evil.”

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.

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.”