Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has told the BBC the gas deals she made with Russia were intended to help German firms and kept the peace with Moscow.

She also insisted the war with Ukraine would have started earlier if she hadn’t blocked Kyiv’s entry into Nato in 2008.

Angela Merkel led Germany for 16 years. She was in office during the financial crisis, the 2015 migrant crisis and, significantly, Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

Was she too soft on Moscow? Too slow to help Kyiv? If she hadn’t blocked Ukraine’s Nato membership in 2008, would there be a war there now?

Speaking to the BBC in Berlin, Mrs Merkel is robust in her defence of her time in office.

She says she believes the war in Ukraine would have started sooner and would likely have been worse, if Kyiv had begun the path to Nato membership in 2008.

“We would have seen military conflict even earlier. It was completely clear to me that President Putin would not have stood idly by and watched Ukraine join Nato.

“And back then, Ukraine as a country would certainly not have been as prepared as it was in February 2022.”

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky disagrees.

He describes Mrs Merkel’s Nato decision, backed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, as a clear “miscalculation” that emboldened Russia.

In a rare interview since she stepped down from politics three years ago, Mrs Merkel expresses concern about Vladimir Putin’s renewed threats of using nuclear weapons.

The two leaders got to know each other well over the course of two decades.

“We must do everything possible to prevent the use of nuclear weapons,” the former German Chancellor says.

“Thankfully, China also spoke about this a while back. We shouldn’t be paralysed by fear, but we must also acknowledge that Russia is the biggest, or alongside the US, one of the two biggest nuclear powers in the world.

“The potential is frightening.”

Despite enjoying high popularity ratings during most of her time in office, Mrs Merkel now finds herself on the defensive.

She has just published her memoir, Freedom. And the timing is interesting.

She says she did everything in her power to ensure peaceful means of co-operation with Russia.

In fact, Mr Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine just months after she left office.

This prompted a thorough re-examination in Europe of energy policies, diplomacy with Russia and also migration policies that had become the norm under Mrs Merkel.

At the helm of Europe’s biggest economy, she was, as former Italian premier Matteo Renzi says, the de-facto leader of Europe – “the boss of the European Union”.

“Do you remember when [former US Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger used to say ‘what is the telephone number of Europe?’,” he says. “My answer was: clearly, the mobile number of Angela Merkel.”

He adds that when judging the Merkel legacy – over Russia and otherwise – it is important to remember the norms of the time.

“One cannot attack Angela for the relations with Russia,” he says.

“In 2005, 2006 [they] were a goal of everyone in Europe, not only a goal of Angela Merkel.”

Under Mrs Merkel, Germany and its energy-hungry big industries became dependent on Moscow. Germany built two gas pipelines directly linked to Russia.

President Zelensky described that cheap gas as a geopolitical tool of the Kremlin.

Mrs Merkel tells the BBC she had two motives with the pipelines: German business interests but also maintaining peaceful links with Russia.

Fellow EU and Nato members in eastern Europe strongly disagreed with her.

The Polish MP, Radoslaw Fogiel, said German gas money filled Russia’s war chest – used to fund the invasion of Ukraine.

Mrs Merkel insists she tried to curb Russian attacks on Ukraine using diplomacy and negotiations, which – she admits – ultimately failed.

And German industry has been disproportionately hit by sanctions on Russian energy. Forced to look for other suppliers, the country is now buying expensive LNG. Businesses says they are crippled by the costs.

A new era in Europe’s relations with Russia “regrettably” began following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, says Mrs Merkel.

On Monday, defence ministers from the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy are meeting to discuss the deteriorating situation on Ukraine’s frontlines.

Ms Merkel, 70, now finds herself having to defend her legacy in other areas too.

The migration crisis of 2015, when she famously opened Germany’s doors to over a million asylum seekers, was perhaps the defining moment of her time in office.

It was hated by some, hailed by others.

US President Barack Obama praised her as a courageous and moral leader.

But critics blamed her for breathing life into the then almost redundant far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

It is now polling comfortably in second place in German public opinion polls, ahead of a snap general election early next year.

The AfD’s main political rallying cry: a strong anti-migrant message.

Angela Merkel admits the AfD made big gains, but she makes no apology for her political decisions.

As for suggestions that her 2015 policies helped fuel anti-immigration and far-right parties elsewhere too, including the Netherlands, Poland and France, after she tried to impose migrant quotas across EU countries, Mrs Merkel says she can’t be held responsible for all of Europe.

The only way to combat the far right is to stop illegal migration, she says.

She calls on Europe’s leaders to invest more in African nations to improve standards of living there, so fewer people will be tempted to leave their homes.

But with Europe’s economies sluggish, and voters worried about the cost of living, governments say there is little cash to spare.

Angela Merkel appeared to put her country and its economic interests first when it came to buying Russian energy or during the eurozone crisis – when southern EU nations blamed her for squeezing them with austerity measures in order to rescue German banks and businesses.

But even at home in Germany, she is now accused of simply “managing” successive crises and failing to make far-reaching, perhaps painful reforms to future-proof her country and the EU.

Germany is now labelled by some as “the sick man of Europe”.

Once an export powerhouse on the world stage, its economy hovers just above recession.

Voters complain she failed to invest in roads, railways and digitalisation, in favour of maintaining a balanced budget.

Under Angela Merkel, Germany not only became reliant on Russia for energy, but on China and the US for trade. Those decisions have not stood the test of time.

Donald Trump threatens punishing tariffs on imports when he returns to the White House in January.

Mrs Merkel does have some thoughts for Europe’s nervous leaders faced with Trump 2.0.

His first term in office was marked by anger at Europe, particularly Germany, over low defence spending and trade deficits. Those gripes with Europe haven’t changed.

What are the Merkel tips for handling him?

“It’s really important to know what your priorities are, to present them clearly and not to be scared, because Donald Trump can be very outspoken,” she says.

“He expresses himself very clearly. And if you do that, there is a certain mutual respect. That was my experience anyway.”

But Europe’s leaders facing the US, China, and Russia, are apprehensive – arguably more so than during Angela Merkel’s time.

Economies are sluggish, voters unhappy, traditional politics under pressure from the far-right and the far-left.

China and Russia are more bullish, the West weaker on the world stage.

Wars burn in the Middle East and in Europe, with Donald Trump appearing less interested in bolstering European security.

Perhaps that’s why Angela Merkel says, these days, when world leaders she knows well call her for advice, she happily responds.

But when I ask if she misses all that power and politics, her swift answer is: “No, not at all.”

Egyptian authorities say 17 people are missing, including foreigners, and 28 have been rescued after a tourist boat sank in the Red Sea.

A distress signal was received at 05:30 (03:30 GMT) from the Sea Story, which left port near Marsa Alam on Sunday for a five-day diving trip with 31 tourists and 14 crew, according to the governor of Red Sea province.

Red Sea Governor Maj-Gen Amr Hanafi said the survivors were found in the Wadi el-Gemal area, south of Marsa Alam, and that they were receiving the necessary medical care.

The BBC understands two British tourists have been rescued and two are still missing.

Hanafi added that the Egyptian Navy warship El Fateh and military aircraft were intensifying their efforts to locate the missing.

“Intensive search operations are underway in coordination with the navy and the armed forces,” he said.

Authorities have not indicated the possible cause of the incident.

On Saturday, the Egyptian Meteorological Authority forecasted turbulence on the Mediterranean and Red Seas due to the weather, and warned people against marine activities on Sunday and Monday.

Wind speeds were between 60-70 km/h, and wave heights were three to four metres high.

According to the local council in Marsa Alam, the crew of the Sea Story are all Egyptians and the tourists on board included five Spanish, four British, four Germans and two US nationals.

It is unclear who is among the rescued and who is still missing.

The Finnish foreign ministry confirmed to AFP news agency that one of its nationals is also among the missing.

A British Foreign Office spokesperson said they were in contact with the authorities, and were providing “support to a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Egypt”.

The Chinese embassy in Egypt confirmed two of its nationals were “in good health” after being rescued, according to their state media, as reported by AFP.

Marsa Alam is a popular destination for tourists on Egypt’s southern Red Sea coast and is surrounded by diving spots, including renowned coral reefs.

There was no immediate comment from Sea Story’s Egypt-based owner and operator, Dive Pro Liveaboard.

But its website says the vessel was built in 2022 and is 44m (144ft) long. It has four decks and 18 cabins that can accommodate up to 36 passengers.

Last year, three Britons died off the coast of Marsa Alam after their dive boat caught fire.

The bodies of at least eight people, including six children, have been recovered after a migrant boat sank off the Greek island of Samos, the coastguard has said.

Around 40 people were rescued by authorities during an operation in the Aegean Sea involving aircraft and vessels, authorities said.

Strong winds have been complicating rescue efforts.

An official said a non-governmental organisation alerted authorities, and that it was believed about 50 people were on board the vessel.

Greece’s migration minister, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, said the incident “fills us with sadness and anger”, while also pledging to crack down on people-smugglers.

Samos is just off the Turkish coast and has long been a regular destination for migrants trying to reach European soil.

More than 50,000 migrants have arrived in Greece by boat so far this year, making it the second most used European migrant route – behind only Italy.

Migrant arrivals had been steadily declining since August 2023, but increased again since summer, according to data from United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR.

About 160,000 migrants have arrived in Europe by sea this year, agency figures show, while 2,000 people were dead or missing.

Around 23 percent of arrivals were children.

Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, is under lockdown for a second day as thousands of protesters demanding the release of former prime minister Imran Khan from jail converge on the city.

His supporters are also calling for the overturning of election results they say were rigged – a claim disputed by the government.

The former PM has been detained for more than a year on various charges, but remains hugely popular despite his legal troubles and his supporters have been protesting for months.

His wife, Bushra Bibi, told supporters on Monday that the march would continue until her husband was free.

The latest rally came after Khan issued a “final call” to supporters, calling on them to stay in the capital until their demands are met.

There have been clashes between his supporters and police. The authorities have banned the protest, blocking streets with shipping containers and suspending some internet services.

Schools and colleges have shut because of fears of violence.

Members of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party say they’ve been repeatedly tear gassed by the police.

The police say their officers have been injured by stones thrown by protesters. Police told the BBC that 139 people had been arrested and 14 policemen injured.

Khan’s wife Bushra Bibi is one of the leaders of the main convoy.

“Until Khan comes to us, we will not end this march,” she told crowds as the rally neared the capital earlier on Monday.

“I will stand till my last breath and you have to support me. This is not just about my husband but about this country and its leader,” she said.

Bushra Bibi was sentenced alongside Khan in January, but released on bail in late October.

Although Khan has now been behind bars for more than a year, he is still the dominant force of Pakistan’s opposition politics.

He was voted out of power by parliament in 2022 amid reports that he had fallen out with the country’s powerful military.

He denies all the charges against him, which range from corruption to instigating violence to getting married to Bushra Bibi illegally.

In February’s general election, his party was banned from standing. Independent candidates backed by the PTI unexpectedly won the most seats – but not enough to form a government.

Khan accused the two parties now in government – the PML-N and PPP – of stealing the election. The authorities deny accusations of vote tampering.

A far-right, pro-Russia candidate has taken a surprise lead in the first round of Romania’s presidential election.

With more than 99% of votes counted, ultranationalist Calin Georgescu was on 23%, followed by centre-right candidate Elena Lasconi of the Save Romania Union and populist social democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, the pre-election favourite.

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.

The latest count suggests Lasconi is narrowly ahead of Ciolacu by around 2,000 votes and will face Georgescu in a final run-off for the presidency on 8 December.

Ciolacu tended his resignation as leader of the Social Democrats on Monday morning.

Political commentator Radu Magdin said the support for Georgescu was unprecedented, with earlier opinions polls placing him at around 5% of the vote.

“Never in our 34 years of democracy have we seen such a surge compared to surveys,” Mr Magdin said.

The victory of Georgescu, who campaigned under the slogan “Restore the dignity of the Romanian nation”, has been warmly welcomed in Russian media.

He previously condemned the Nato ballistic missile defence shield based at the Deveselu military base in southern Romania as “a disgrace”.

Georgescu was a prominent figure in another far-right party, George Simion’s AUR (Alliance for the Union of Romanians), which eventually expelled him as too radical, after he praised leaders of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist movement during World War Two.

But late on Sunday night, George Simion endorsed Georgescu, and urged the 1.3 million voters who voted for him on Sunday to support Georgescu in the run-off.

Georgescu’s success poses a dilemma for the millions of Romanians who voted for other candidates.

If Elena Lasconi gets through to the second round, as expected, many supporters of the Social Democrats, especially in rural areas, would find it difficult to support such a liberal, progressive figure.

Campaigning in this election focused largely on the soaring cost of living, with Romania having the EU’s biggest share of people at risk of poverty. Resentment of handouts to Ukrainian refugees in Romania also played a role.

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.

The northern Indian city of Sambhal is on alert after four people died and dozens were injured in violent clashes over a Centuries-old mosque on Sunday.

Clashes broke out between protesters and the police during a court-monitored survey of the Shahi Jama Masjid (mosque), a federally-protected 16th Century monument.

Authorities in Uttar Pradesh state – where Sambhal is located – have registered four cases in connection with the violence and have suspended internet services and shut schools in the area for a day.

The survey was ordered by a local court last week, hours after a petition claimed that the mosque had been built on the site of a destroyed temple.

Videos and images of the clashes shared on social media show slippers, bricks and stones strewn around the mosque.

Protesters allege that four men were shot in police firing but authorities have denied this.

“No weapons were used that could take anyone’s life,” Superintendent of Police Krishan Kumar told the Hindu newspaper.

The controversy around the Shahi Jama Masjid is the latest in a series of disputes around mosques in the country, where Hindu groups have claimed that Mughal rulers destroyed temples to build them.

Legal cases pertaining to these claims are currently being fought by Muslim groups in various courts.

In Sambhal, tensions have been brewing since Tuesday, after a local court ordered a video-recorded survey of the Jama Masjid. The survey was ordered hours after a petition claimed that the mosque was built after Mughal ruler Babur destroyed the Hari Har temple in the 1520s.

Authorities in Uttar Pradesh, which is governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), conducted an initial survey of the mosque the same day.

Sections of Muslim groups in Sambhal protested against this, alleging that they were not given any prior notice about it. They have also questioned the urgency with which the court ordered the exercise.

A second survey of the mosque was held on Sunday morning, which turned violent after a large group of protesters gathered near the mosque and began shouting slogans at the survey team, police say.

Top police official Aunjaneya Kumar Singh told the Hindu that protesters allegedly pelted stones at the police, leaving them with no option but to use force to escort the survey team to safety.

He added that tear gas shells and plastic bullets were fired to disperse the crowds.

Opposition leaders have criticised the state government and accused it of orchestrating the violence for political gain – a charge it denies.

“No one is allowed to take law into their own hands,” Uttar Pradesh’s Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak told the Indian Express newspaper, adding that authorities were investigating the incident.

Mahmood Madani, president of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind – a leading organisation of Islamic scholars – condemned disputes around mosques in the country, saying they violate Indian laws.

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.

A Malaysian court has ordered the country’s government to return 172 rainbow-coloured watches it seized from watchmaker Swatch last year.

The government said it took the timepieces from the Swiss company because they featured “LGBT elements” – homosexuality is illegal in Muslim-majority Malaysia and punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

However, a court ruled the government did not have a warrant to confiscate the items and a law prohibiting their sale was only passed later, making the seizure unlawful.

Malaysia’s Home Affairs minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail said the government’s legal team will need to “examine the basis of the judgement” before deciding to appeal against the order.

He said the government “must respect the decision, or else it would be viewed as contempt of court”.

He went on to say his ministry may appeal against the ruling but must first “examine the basis of the judgement thoroughly”.

Authorities raided Swatch shops across Malaysia in May 2023, but an order prohibiting sale of the watches was not issued until August 2023.

Therefore, Swatch had not committed an offence at the time of the seizure, the court ruled.

But the prohibition order has not been overturned, so although the watches – worth $14,000 (£10,700) – have been returned they cannot be sold.

The authorities must hand back the items within 14 days, government prosecutor Mohammad Sallehuddin Md Ali told the Kuala Lumpur High Court today.

Swatch took legal action contesting the seizure in June 2023, arguing the product was “not in any way capable of causing any disruption to public order or morality or any violations of the law”.

Homosexuality is illegal under both secular and religious laws in Malaysia.

Swatch described the Pride flag as a “symbol of humanity that speaks for all genders and races”, but at the time of the confiscation, the Malaysian government claimed the acronym “LGBTQ” could be found on the watches themselves.

The Swiss manufacturer argued the company’s reputation had been damaged and business had suffered after the seizures.

Malaysian authorities claimed the watches “may harm… the interests of the nation by promoting, supporting and normalising the LGBTQ+ movement that is not accepted by the general public”.

The Swatch Group declined to comment.

Russia and Ukraine have traded air strikes, after a week of intensifying rhetoric in which Russia tested a new missile on Ukraine.

Russia has made close to 1,500 strikes on Ukraine since Sunday evening on about half of the country’s regions causing dozens of injuries, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Meanwhile Ukraine’s military said it had struck a key oil depot south of Moscow, and targets in the Bryansk and Kursk border regions.

Russia’s use of the Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro capped a week of escalation in the war that also saw Ukraine fire US and British missiles into Russia for the first time.

US President Joe Biden is reported to have given Ukraine permission to use longer-range Atacms missiles against targets inside Russia as a response to Moscow’s use of North Korean troops.

Kharkiv Governor Oleh Synehubov said that 23 people had been injured in a missile strike on the city of Kharkiv, where a rescue operation was currently under way.

An S-400 missile was used in the attack, he said.

Odesa’s emergencies department said 10 people had been injured in a missile attack, which damaged residential buildings, schools and a university sports hall.

Regional officials said three more people were injured in strikes on Kherson region, and one each in Zaporizhzhya and Chernihiv regions.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military said that overnight they struck the Kaluganefteprodukt oil depot in Kaluga region southeast of Moscow with drones.

Sources told Ukrainian media the attack caused a series of explosions and a fire at the site.

There has been no comment from the Russian military on the attack, but regional governor Vladislav Shapsha said debris from drones shot down by air defences had caused “a fire on the territory of an industrial enterprise”. Eight drones in total were destroyed, he added.

Ukraine’s military also mentioned attacks in the Bryansk and Kursk regions, without specifying what was hit.

Russian military bloggers, however, said that the Khalino air base in Kursk region had been struck in an attack by eight US-supplied Atacms missiles.

US permission for use of the Atacms is said to be restricted to this region because of the presence of North Korean troops there.

They are thought to be involved in a Russian offensive to drive Ukrainian forces out of a small area of Kursk region, which they captured in the autumn in a surprise attack.

Russia’s defence ministry said only that it had shot down eight ballistic missiles from Ukraine, without saying where.

Russian forces have also been hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in an effort to create difficult conditions as winter approaches.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Both countries are now trying to secure a battlefield advantage before Donald Trump becomes US president in January and seeks to end the conflict.

He has vowed to end the war within hours but has not provided details as to how.

The mystery behind why two young men killed their wealthy parents in their plush Beverly Hills mansion in the late 1980s has prompted books, documentaries and dramas.

A jury in 1995 decided Lyle and Erik Menendez had committed murder in order to get a $14m (£11m) inheritance.

But their lawyers have always argued they acted in self-defence after years of sexual abuse.

On Monday, the brothers will appear in court in Los Angeles by video link to find out if their bid for freedom can proceed.

Here’s what you need to know about the family at the centre of the story.

• Three ways the Menendez brothers could be freed
• Brothers should be freed on parole, says top prosecutor

He was born in New York and spent some of his childhood in New Jersey, before the family moved to California in 1986.

A year later, Lyle was accepted by Princeton University so moved back to the east coast to study. But he was suspended from the university for plagiarism and eventually withdrew.

He was 21 when he and his brother shot their parents Jose and Kitty multiple times at close range.

It was Lyle’s 911 call that first alerted the police, with the words “someone killed my parents”. But eight months later, he was the first son to be arrested.

He testified in the first trial that he had been sexually abused by his mother and father.

In the days before the murder, his brother had told him he had also been abused, so Lyle confronted his parents.

Arguments followed and Lyle told the court they were convinced they could be killed to stop the family secret coming out.

The case was declared a mistrial and Lyle chose not to give evidence at the retrial. He and his brother were sentenced to life without parole.

He married twice behind bars and his current wife is a magazine editor, Rebecca Sneed.

Younger brother Erik alluded to some of the abuse he allegedly suffered in a letter written to his cousin months before the killings. This was later unveiled as new evidence in the siblings’ case.

As well as the physical and sexual abuse, Erik, now 53, accused his father of pressurising him to succeed in fields such as tennis – in which he was a teenage talent.

He is also said to have expressed an interest in screenwriting, creating a script about a son who kills his wealthy parents for inheritance money.

Erik ended up with a criminal record – committing burglaries with his brother but avoiding jail time.

The brothers shot their parents when Erik was 18 – and it was the younger Menendez who first confessed to the crime, speaking to his therapist.

Erik married Tammi Saccoman in 1999, three years after his conviction, following a pen-pal relationship that turned into a romance.

He has incurred some rules violations while imprisoned in California, but is also reported to have become more religious and has spent time providing hospice care to terminally ill inmates.

Erik once told People magazine that he was a “good person” but “needed” to go to prison.

Born in Havana in 1944, the Menendez brothers’ father was sent by his parents to the US during the Cuban Revolution with little money.

After meeting his future wife Kitty, with whom he had his two sons, Jose went on to amass a fortune of millions of dollars working as a music and film executive.

That included as the head of top record label RCA – which signed artists including Duran Duran.

He gained a reputation as a ruthless businessman, and was described after his death by both sons as a harsh and overbearing parent who abused them.

He was 45 when he was killed on 20 August 1989.

Years after his death, Jose was accused of raping a member of boyband Menudo that was signed to RCA – an allegation that prompted his sons to request a new hearing in their own case.

The mother of Erik and Lyle was born Mary Louise Anderson in Oak Lawn, Illinois, in 1941, according to journalist Robert Rand – who wrote one of the definitive tellings of the incident and its aftermath, The Menendez Murders.

She met her future husband Jose Menendez in a philosophy class at Southern Illinois University, where she was studying communications.

The couple married in 1963 and moved to New York, and had their first son five years later. A second followed.

She raised the two boys in Princeton, New Jersey, as her husband was away a lot helping to run his huge record company.

His career took the family to the west coast, a move that reportedly made Kitty unhappy.

Her life ended aged 47 at the hands of her sons when she was shot four times in the head and five times in the body.

Members of Kitty’s family have had their say on the brothers’ new bid for freedom.

Her sister Joan Anderson VanderMolen said times had changed. When the sons were convicted in the 1990s, she said, “the whole world wasn’t ready to believe that the boys could be raped, or that young men could be victims of sexual violence”. But “we know better”, she added, and “a jury today would never deliver such a harsh sentence”.

The brothers’ cousin Diane VanderMolen has also supported their account, telling ABC News in 2017: “I know that they would never, ever have done what they did unless they felt that they had no choice – that it was either them or their parents.”

But the family is not in total agreement.

A lawyer for Kitty’s brother, Milton Andersen, called the brothers “cold-blooded” and said their “actions shattered their family and left a trail of grief that has persisted for decades”.

“Jose was shot six times, and Kitty was shot 10 times, including a shot to her face after Erik reloaded.” Mr Andersen believes his nephews should stay in prison for their “heinous act”, the lawyer added.

Previous statements have also suggested disagreement between Kitty’s other brother Brian Andersen Sr – who in 2017 dismissed abuse claims against his sister as “insanity” – and his son, Brian Andersen Jr, who supports the brothers.

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The natural successor is China.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’Gorman 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 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.”

At 31 years old, I was told by doctors that if I didn’t stop drinking alcohol, I could die.

I was shocked because I didn’t drink every day, I never drank alone and I drank because I enjoyed it as a social activity, not because I felt alcohol-dependent.

But by definition, my alcohol consumption from my late teens to late 20s would be considered binge drinking. It felt normal because people around me were doing the same – and now it was catching up with me.

I’d recently become a mum and had gone to the GP because I felt tired all the time. This led to blood tests and a liver function check.

Further tests revealed I had severe alcohol-related liver fibrosis, or extreme scarring on my liver, most likely because of my drinking habits.

I trundled home from the hospital in a daze, with my daughter in her pram. This might have happened to me, I thought, but I could not be the only one.

I wanted to know what this said about the UK’s drinking culture and began looking into it for BBC Panorama.

Alcohol-specific deaths are at their highest levels in the UK since records began in 2001.

While the problem is undoubtedly bigger in men – particularly older men – more women under the age of 45 are dying due to alcohol-related liver disease, or ARLD, than ever before, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures from 2001-22.

If we binge a given amount of alcohol in one go – for example on a night out – it can be much more damaging than if we drink the same amount over a longer period.

The latest research, by a team at University College London and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, suggests bingeing may be up to four times as damaging for the liver.

When we think of binge drinking, we tend to imagine people drunkenly sprawling out of bars and falling over at bus stops. But actually, a binge can be less alcohol than you might think.

In the UK, a binge is considered as drinking six or more units of alcohol in one sitting for women, and eight or more for men. That is two large glasses of wine for a woman.

At King’s College Hospital in London, consultant hepatologist Debbie Shawcross tells me that she regularly treats professional women in their 40s and 50s with liver disease.

“They’re spinning plates in the air, and maybe they have young families,” she says. “They’re not alcoholics… but they are just drinking too much as a habit.”

I’m not in my 40s yet, but she could have been describing me.

When I was younger, I would easily drink more than what’s defined as a binge on a night out. I didn’t think anything of it until I got my diagnosis.

After my blood tests came back as abnormal I was sent to Glasgow’s New Victoria Hospital, where I had an ultrasound, and finally a fibroscan. All this took place over the course of about a year.

A fibroscan is a type of non-invasive ultrasound which measures liver stiffness. A reading of seven kPA (a unit used to measure the level of oxygen in the blood) or below is considered normal. My reading was 10.2.

This indicated severe scarring – if it had not been caught, and if I had not stopped drinking, it could have developed into cirrhosis.

I received my diagnosis in February 2024. My consultant, Dr Shouren Datta, said if I abstained from alcohol, then there was a possibility that my fibrosis could be reversed.

I feel extremely lucky that the problem was picked up in time for me to try to do something about it.

Doctors had discovered the problem while investigating my tiredness.

However, part of the problem with liver disease is that there are often no initial symptoms.

Seven in 10 people with end-stage liver disease don’t know anything about it until they are admitted to hospital with symptoms such as jaundice, fluid retention and abnormal bleeding.

That is what happened to Emma Jones, 39, originally from north Wales. I met her 15 months after her successful liver transplant.

Like me, Emma was a social drinker, with a successful career and vibrant social life. But during the Covid lockdowns things spiralled for her – at the worst point, she was drinking three bottles of wine a day.

Emma was admitted to hospital where she found out she was in end-stage liver disease. She was given less than 36 hours to live.

Miraculously, she pulled through and – after fulfilling the required six months of sobriety – got the transplant she so desperately needed.

Emma’s recovery is ongoing and is not without major life changes. She will be on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life and is immunosuppressed, meaning it is harder for her body to fight infections and disease.

But she is alive, well, and says she is in the best place she has ever been. I find her positivity and determination infectious.

According to the most recent ONS statistics, from 2018, liver disease is consistently among the top three causes of death each year among women aged 39-45.

“Women’s drinking pretty much doubled in a really short period of time… about 10 years,” Prof Fiona Measham, a leading expert in drink and drug culture from the University of Liverpool, tells me.

Her research suggests that in the 1990s and 2000s, the alcohol industry zeroed in on female drinkers, targeting them with products such as alcopops and shots – and using feminism, female empowerment and liberation as a marketing tool.

She thinks these practices established a drinking culture in a whole generation of young women that would leave a lasting legacy.

“What we’re seeing now is that young people, their consumption is falling fastest, but it’s still holding quite steady for people in their 30s, 40s and 50s,” she says.

The same aggressive approach persists today within the alcohol industry, believes Prof Carol Emslie, from Glasgow Caledonian University. Only now it is pushing things like prosecco, “gin o’clock” and “wine time” as a way for women to relax and practise self-care after a hard day.

The Portman Group, which represents the alcohol industry, says:

While “the increase in alcohol-related liver disease among both women and men in the UK is a serious concern, it’s important to remember that alcohol has always been a legal product.”

It says its Code of Practice… “does not protect against gender-based marketing specifically” but sets “minimum standards for alcohol producers to market their products responsibly”.

And it is “committed to continuing…(its) efforts to promote moderate drinking as well as holding the alcohol industry to account.”

• Support and information for anyone affected by these issues can be found at BBC Action Line

Binge Drinking and Me

BBC journalist Hazel Martin goes on a personal journey to find out why alcohol-related deaths from liver disease among women under 40 have risen sharply over the last decade.

Watch now on BBC iPlayer or on Monday 25 November at 20:00 (20:30 in Wales and Northern Ireland) on BBC One.

Several months after my diagnosis, I went back for a repeat fibroscan to see if there had been any improvement.

I was relieved to see that my fibroscan reading had gone from 10.2 to 4.7 – back in the normal and healthy range.

I was surprised what a dramatic difference cutting out alcohol had made in such a short space of time.

I don’t plan on drinking again – I’ve been advised not to.

I haven’t touched a drop for nearly a year and feel much better for it – but I still mourn it in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

Alcohol is ingrained in our culture. We drink at birthday parties, weddings and funerals. And then of course there’s the festive season, which builds up ahead of Christmas and lasts right through to New Year’s Day.

For me growing up, alcohol felt normalised and I don’t think I was fully aware how much pressure there was to drink until I was forced to give it up.

Abstaining hasn’t been easy though. It has taken a long time to reprogramme my brain to not need or want alcohol as a treat, a reward, or as a way to relax and have fun socially.

I think that was part of the problem for me then, and it remains a problem for our society now.

When large swathes of invasive seaweed started washing up on Caribbean beaches in 2011, local residents were perplexed.

Soon, mounds of unsightly sargassum – carried by currents from the Sargasso Sea and linked to climate change – were carpeting the region’s prized coastlines, repelling holidaymakers with the pungent stench emitted as it rots.

Precisely how to tackle it was a dilemma of unprecedented proportions for the tiny tourism-reliant islands with limited resources.

In 2018, Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley declared sargassum a national emergency.

Now, a pioneering group of Caribbean scientists and environmentalists hope to turn the tide on the problem by transforming the troublesome algae into a lucrative biofuel.

They recently launched one of the world’s first vehicles powered by bio-compressed natural gas. The innovative fuel source created at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Barbados also uses wastewater from local rum distilleries, and dung from the island’s indigenous blackbelly sheep which provides the vital anaerobic bacteria.

The team says any car can be converted to run on the gas via a simple and affordable four-hour installation process, using an easily available kit, at a total cost of around $2,500 (£1,940).

Researchers had initially looked into using sugarcane to reduce reliance on costly, imported fossil fuels and help steer the Caribbean towards its ultimate target of zero emissions.

However, despite Barbados being one of few islands still producing sugarcane, the quantity was deemed insufficient for the team’s ambitious goals, explains the project’s founder Dr Legena Henry.

Sargassum on the other hand, she grimaces, is something “we will never run out of”.

“Tourism has suffered a lot from the seaweed; hotels have been spending millions on tackling it. It’s caused a crisis,” Dr Henry, a renewable energy expert and UWI lecturer, continues.

The idea that it could have a valuable purpose was suggested by one of her students, Brittney McKenzie, who had observed the volume of trucks being deployed to transport sargassum from Barbados’ beaches.

“We’d just spent three weeks researching sugarcane. But I looked at Brittney’s face and she was so excited, I couldn’t break her heart,” Dr Henry recalls.

“We already had rum distillery waste water so we decided to put that with sargassum and see what happened.”

Brittney was tasked with collecting seaweed from beaches and setting up small scale bioreactors to conduct preliminary research.

“Within just two weeks we got pretty good results,” Brittney tells the BBC. “It was turning into something even bigger than we initially thought.”

The team filed a patent on their formula and, in 2019, presented their project to potential investors during a side meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York.

Upon touchdown back in Barbados, Dr Henry’s phone was “buzzing” with messages of congratulation – including one from US non-profit Blue Chip Foundation offering $100,000 to get the work off the ground.

Biologist Shamika Spencer was hired to experiment with differing amounts of sargassum and waste water to figure out which combination produced the most biogas.

She says she leapt at the chance to take part.

“Sargassum has been plaguing the region for several years,” Ms Spencer, who is from Antigua and Barbuda, explains. “I had always wondered about this new seaweed ruining the beaches in Antigua, and when I came to Barbados to study I noticed it here too.”

The algae do not just threaten tourism. They also pose a threat to human health through the hydrogen sulphide they release as they decomposes, along with native wildlife like critically endangered sea turtle hatchlings which get trapped in thick mats of beached seaweed.

Water pollution and warming seas are credited with the upsurge in sargassum, another cataclysmic result of climate change that the Caribbean has done little to contribute to but often bears the brunt of.

Calls for eco reparations from leaders including Barbados’ leader Mia Mottley and Antigua’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne have been clamorous in recent years as the region battles ever-rising sea levels and worsening storms.

While waiting for those to bear fruit, this project represents one example of the Caribbean taking its environmental future into its own hands.

“I realised it was important that after removing the sargassum from beaches, it doesn’t just go to landfills,” Ms Spencer continues.

“By repurposing it in vehicles you protect tourism and prevent people from inhaling it. When we scale up to fuel more vehicles it will require a very large volume.”

Watching the successful test drive of a biogas-charged Nissan Leaf – supplied by the Caribbean Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency – was utterly exhilarating, smiles Dr Henry.

The MIT-educated mechanical engineer knew she was risking her reputation should the venture fail.

“We didn’t sleep the night before the test drive event,” she admits. “I was putting my whole life’s work on the line.”

Dr Henry and her husband, career data scientist Nigel Henry, created deep tech firm Rum and Sargassum Inc and are on a mission to change the face of energy production in the Caribbean.

Both are originally from leading oil producer Trinidad, studied in the US and were determined to bring their skills back home.

“My goal is to help build up this region,” Dr Henry says. “We are now setting up a four-car pilot to demonstrate real life working prototypes to convince funders that this is workable and scalable.”

She estimates it will cost around $2m to display initial commercial activity and $7.5m to reach the point where the company is able to sell gas to 300 taxis in Barbados.

Potential funders include the US Agency for Internationals Development, the European Union and international development banks through debt financing.

The team plans to expand its work by setting up a biogas station to replace its small existing facility.

UWI hopes to introduce other sargassum-based innovations too, such as pest control products.

Ms Spencer says it’s been “heart-warming” to witness the results of the team’s research.

“Just seeing the actual potential is motivating me to keep working,” she adds.

As for Brittney, five years after her eureka moment, she says she’s still “pinching” herself.

“To see the car in action was mind-blowing,” she grins. “I would encourage all young scientists to press ahead with their ideas. You never know when you might make the next big discovery.”

“It’s taken years of work, plenty of grit and pushing against walls to reach this point,” Dr Henry concurs. “It’s an example of UWI innovation and is exportable to the wider world, because it’s not just the Caribbean that’s affected; sargassum also impacts parts of West Africa, South America and Florida.

“These small islands have created technology that can benefit the rest of the world; this is a big win for the Caribbean.”

An extraordinary week stands ahead of us at Westminster.

A week in which MPs will be asked to make a decision that could have consequences for decades.

If the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill for England and Wales becomes law, it would give people, in certain circumstances, the right to die at a time of their choosing.

Scotland is also considering a change in the law on the issue too.

It is a colossal potential social change, compared by many to the Abortion Act of 1967, the abolition of capital punishment, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the introduction of gay marriage.

Opinion polls suggest most people are broadly in favour of a change in the law and have been for years.

But it is impossible to be certain how the House of Commons will vote, not least because MPs are not being instructed on how to by their parties, as normally happens.

MPs have a free vote on Friday.

Speaking to those on both sides of the debate who are trying to keep a track on the numbers, there is an acknowledgement that sentiment has ebbed and flowed over the last few weeks, with opponents of change perhaps gaining some momentum after the Health Secretary Wes Streeting came out on their side of the argument.

It is, for so many MPs, an intensely personal moment.

Their usual political compass bearings, party loyalty and a broad sense of being on the left or the right, count for little here.

Instead, an experience in their own life, such as the loss of a relative or their religious conviction may weigh considerably.

There are three groups of MPs on this issue.

There are the unshiftably opposed, who won’t change their minds whatever arguments are made in the next few days.

There are the unshiftably in favour, who also won’t change their minds whatever is said this week.

And then there are those still making up their minds.

The running tallies of public declarations leave you hundreds of MPs short and so little the wiser about how things might shake out in the end.

Those in favour of change say that if all of those who have indicated privately that they are inclined to back it do back it, it will clear its first hurdle, what is known as second reading, on Friday.

Those against it telling me “it is on a knife edge”, think the more people are exposed to the arguments the more doubts creep in and believe the debate itself on Friday will sway some people to vote against.

There will be five hours of debate on Friday and I am told more than 100 MPs have said they would like to speak.

That would amount to three minutes each but the indication at this stage is there won’t be time limits imposed on speeches.

Some of those opposed to a change in the law say the lack of time for adequate debate and scrutiny is itself a problem.

Those in favour say the scope for much more detailed discussion would come after an approval in principle for a change in the law on Friday, in the far more detailed examination of the plans that would follow in the new year.

They are saying to some waverers that the pragmatic thing to do if you are open minded but uncertain is to allow the debate to continue in 2025, with the option still open to reject it at a later stage.

Those who are opposed point to the lack of an impact assessment – a consequence of this being a bill brought forward by a backbencher, Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, rather than the government – and a fear that if the idea isn’t rejected now a badly thought through idea could gather unstoppable momentum.

So, in the next few days, there will be intense discussion and debate at Westminster.

Talks and presentations are being held by both sides, with discussions, for instance, on opinion polling, palliative care, and international comparisons.

And then, on Friday, the debate and the vote.

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.

Author Barbara Taylor Bradford, known for best-selling novels including A Woman of Substance, has died at the age of 91.

Published in 1979, A Woman of Substance sold 30 million copies and spawned seven sequels and a TV adaptation, which is still the most-watched programme in Channel 4’s history.

It was the first of 40 novels by Taylor Bradford; others include the Ravenscar, Cavendon and the House of Falconer series.

Paying tribute, her publisher and editor Lynne Drew said: “Dominating the bestseller lists, she broke new ground with her sweeping epic novels spanning generations, novels which were resolutely not romances, and she epitomised the woman of substance she created, particularly with her ruthless work ethic.”

• Obituary: An author of substance

The author was “perennially curious, interested in everyone and extraordinarily driven”, Drew said, and was “an inspiration for millions of readers and countless writers”.

Charlie Redmayne, chief executive of publisher HarperCollins, said: “Barbara Taylor Bradford was a truly exceptional writer whose first book, the international bestseller A Woman of Substance, changed the lives of so many who read it – and still does to this day.”

She was “a natural storyteller” as well as “a great, great friend”, he added.

A Woman of Substance was the rags-to-riches tale of Emma Harte, a young woman who goes from a being a maid to building and running a major department store.

The mini-series was watched by almost 14 million people on Channel 4 in 1985 and was nominated for two Emmy Awards.

Emma was played by Jenny Seagrove, who paid tribute to the author as a “dear friend”.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s World at One, Seagrove recalled being a young and nervous actress when she first met Taylor Bradford.

“I met Barbara at a screening [of A Woman of Substance] and she just walked up to me and she hugged me and said: ‘Oh, you are my Emma.’

“That was all I needed. I burst into tears.”

She added that the book was semi-autobiographical and “you could feel the truth in it”.

Taylor Bradford had a huge impact on women, Seagrove said.

“We’d go on publicity tours… and women would come up to me randomly… and say ‘You changed my life’ because Emma Harte had changed their life in some way, [like] to start a business. It literally changed women’s lives.”

The actress said she went to the US for Taylor Bradford’s 90th birthday celebrations last year.

“Even though she was ill, she put on her finery and was piped in by a bagpiper. She just never changed. She was always curious, always kind, always championing women and always giving and sharing.

“She championed women before it was fashionable, and that’s a great legacy,” Seagrove added.

A statement from Taylor Bradford’s representative on Monday said she “died peacefully at her home yesterday (24 November 2024) following a short illness, and was surrounded by loved ones to the very end”.

Taylor Bradford was born in Leeds, where her mother “force-fed me books” and she was in the same primary school class as Alan Bennett.

Young Barbara had her first story published at the age of 10 in a children’s magazine, and left school at 15 to work as a typist and copytaker on the Yorkshire Evening Post.

She got her first stories into the newspaper’s pages by surreptitiously slipping them into the sub-editor’s tray. It took the editors some time to realise what she was doing, but they then promoted her to be a journalist, and she was the paper’s only female reporter at the time.

She went on to write an interior decoration column that was syndicated to 183 newspapers, and her first books were about home design.

They included the Complete Encyclopedia of Homemaking Ideas in 1968, and she also wrote a string of entries in the How to be the Perfect Wife series.

Her first foray into fiction, when she was in her mid-40s, brought huge success and broke the mould.

“When I wrote A Woman of Substance I didn’t sit down and think, I’m going to write about a woman warrior who conquers the world and smashes the glass ceiling, but I did want to write about women in a positive way,” she told the Guardian in 2017.

“At the time there were a lot of very sexy books out there but the women didn’t come out of them very well.”

Her other novels included the Ravenscar trilogy, about a 20th Century dynasty that finished with 25-year-old Elizabeth, loosely based on Elizabeth I, at the head of a business empire.

The four-book Cavendon series follows two families – one aristocratic, the other their servants – from the 1920s to the 40s.

Standalone novels included A Sudden Change of Heart, The Women in His Life and A Secret Affair.

Her most recent novel, The Wonder of it All, was published last year.

“I think people understand now, I write about women warriors – women who go out and conquer the world, who are not going to be dependent on anybody,” the author told BBC Radio 3’s Private Passions in 2022.

“They’re going to have a career, and they’re going to be successful, and they’re driven and ambitious and disciplined and determined.

“And I guess I keep borrowing from myself because that’s the way I’m made.”

A number of her books were turned into TV or film versions. A Woman of Substance starred Liam Neeson opposite Seagrove, while Elizabeth Hurley appeared in 1989’s Act of Will, and Anthony Hopkins was in 1991’s To Be The Best.

The screen versions were made by the author’s husband, Hollywood producer Robert Bradford.

They married on Christmas Eve in 1963, after which she moved to the US. He died in 2019.

Taylor Bradford’s spokeswoman said she would be buried alongside her late husband in New York.

Taylor Bradford was made an OBE for services to literature by Queen Elizabeth in 2007, and was also an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust.

In its tribute, the charity hailed her as “a passionate advocate for improving literacy skills throughout her life”, and said she “helped change lives in some of the UK’s most disadvantaged communities”.

The northern Indian city of Sambhal is on alert after four people died and dozens were injured in violent clashes over a Centuries-old mosque on Sunday.

Clashes broke out between protesters and the police during a court-monitored survey of the Shahi Jama Masjid (mosque), a federally-protected 16th Century monument.

Authorities in Uttar Pradesh state – where Sambhal is located – have registered four cases in connection with the violence and have suspended internet services and shut schools in the area for a day.

The survey was ordered by a local court last week, hours after a petition claimed that the mosque had been built on the site of a destroyed temple.

Videos and images of the clashes shared on social media show slippers, bricks and stones strewn around the mosque.

Protesters allege that four men were shot in police firing but authorities have denied this.

“No weapons were used that could take anyone’s life,” Superintendent of Police Krishan Kumar told the Hindu newspaper.

The controversy around the Shahi Jama Masjid is the latest in a series of disputes around mosques in the country, where Hindu groups have claimed that Mughal rulers destroyed temples to build them.

Legal cases pertaining to these claims are currently being fought by Muslim groups in various courts.

In Sambhal, tensions have been brewing since Tuesday, after a local court ordered a video-recorded survey of the Jama Masjid. The survey was ordered hours after a petition claimed that the mosque was built after Mughal ruler Babur destroyed the Hari Har temple in the 1520s.

Authorities in Uttar Pradesh, which is governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), conducted an initial survey of the mosque the same day.

Sections of Muslim groups in Sambhal protested against this, alleging that they were not given any prior notice about it. They have also questioned the urgency with which the court ordered the exercise.

A second survey of the mosque was held on Sunday morning, which turned violent after a large group of protesters gathered near the mosque and began shouting slogans at the survey team, police say.

Top police official Aunjaneya Kumar Singh told the Hindu that protesters allegedly pelted stones at the police, leaving them with no option but to use force to escort the survey team to safety.

He added that tear gas shells and plastic bullets were fired to disperse the crowds.

Opposition leaders have criticised the state government and accused it of orchestrating the violence for political gain – a charge it denies.

“No one is allowed to take law into their own hands,” Uttar Pradesh’s Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak told the Indian Express newspaper, adding that authorities were investigating the incident.

Mahmood Madani, president of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind – a leading organisation of Islamic scholars – condemned disputes around mosques in the country, saying they violate Indian laws.

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.

That overtakes the previous record holder, Les Miserables, which brought in $103m globally on its opening weekend in 2012.

In the UK and Ireland, the film is forecast to earn $17.6m (£14m) 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.

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 (£37m) 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 (£168m) in July and Inside Out 2 with $154m (£122m) 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.

The coming weeks will determine whether Wicked can take in the same worldwide totals of Broadway film adaptations such as Les Miserables ($442m / £352m) and Chicago ($306m / £244m).

Also in North America, another reinvented classic, Gladiator II, following up on Ridley Scott’s 2000 epic, opened this weekend to $22m (£17.5m) on Friday. It then earned $18.8m on Saturday.

The sequel is projected to make $55.5m (£44.2m) 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 (£9m) on its first weekend, then dropped to $6m (£4.8m) 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.

Drake’s first Australian tour since 2017 will start on the same day rival Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl half-time show.

The high-profile beef between the two rappers has dominated the hip-hop scene this year, with both swapping a series of diss tracks.

Kendrick, who dropped surprise new album GNX on Friday, is set to headline the final of the NFL championship – one of the most coveted gigs in music – in New Orleans on 9 February.

Drake revealed his Australian tour would kick off on the same day during an appearance with streamer xQc on Sunday night.

The Canadian rapper didn’t provide any other details but said he’d be playing Melbourne, Sydney and the Gold Coast.

Anita Max Wynn – the tour’s name – is a reference to Drake’s alter ego, a play on gambling phrase “I need a max win”.

He said the shows would be limited to Australia, and also said his upcoming album with singer and producer PARTYNEXTDOOR was “75% done”.

Drake also appeared to reference accusations made against him by Kendrick during the stream, telling xQc: “You need facts to take me out. Fairytales won’t do it.”

The tour announcement came just after Kendrick dropped GNX, his first album since 2022’s Mr Morale & The Big Steppers.

Drake doesn’t get namechecked on the new release, but Kendrick does call out people who’ve backed his rival in some way, such as Snoop Dogg.

The beef between Drake and Kendrick dates back years but exploded about a year ago when Kendrick reacted to being named as one of hip hop’s “big three” with Drake and J Cole.

The pairs’ diss tracks have taken increasingly hostile swipes at each other’s families and appearance as well as their rap skills.

The February Super Bowl will be the first time Kendrick’s headlined solo – although there has been some criticism that the slot should have gone to Lil Wayne, who’s from New Orleans.

Kendrick seemed to address this on GNX, rapping on Wacced Out Murals: “I think my hard work let Lil Wayne down / Won the Super Bowl and Nas the only one congratulate me.”

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

At least one person has died and three others have been injured after a cargo plane crashed near Vilnius airport in Lithuania in the early hours of Monday.

The Boeing 737, operated for DHL by the Spanish cargo airline Swiftair, crashed near a house as it was on its final approach for landing, local authorities said.

All 12 people have been safely evacuated from the property, police said.

The cause of the crash is still unclear but the defence minister said there were no initial signs it was sabotage or terrorism.

The aircraft departed from DHL’s hub at Leipzig Airport in Germany just after 03:00 local time (02:00 GMT) and crashed around an hour and a half later, according to Flightradar24. DHL said the plane had made an “emergency landing”.

Images from the scene show chunks of blackened wreckage scattered among the trees.

“The plane was landing, but it fell a few kilometres before the airport, skidded for several hundred meters, its wreckage caught a residential building,” said Renatas Pozela, a leading police official.

One person in the four-member crew died, he added.

It was not immediately clear how many people in total were on the flight.

Mr Pozela said a nearby house was “slightly damaged” and infrastructure near it caught on fire, but all residents were safely evacuated.

Both the Lithuanian authorities and DHL have started separate investigations into what happened.

The head of police, Arunas Paulauskas, told a news conference that the reason for the crash was “most likely either a technical accident or it could be a human error” but that all possible causes would be investigated.

“In the recording of the conversation between the pilots and the [air traffic control] tower, the pilots, until the very last second did not tell the tower of any extraordinary event,” Marius Baranauskas, head of the Lithuanian National Aviation Authority, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying.

Authorities said they do not have any data at the moment that suggests there was an explosion before the crash.

The plane was a Boeing 737-400, an airport spokesperson said.

Reported weather before the crash was a temperature of 0C (32F), with clouds before sunrise and winds around 30 km/h (19mph), the Associated Press reported.

The aircraft was 31 years old, AP added.

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.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has told the BBC the gas deals she made with Russia were intended to help German firms and kept the peace with Moscow.

She also insisted the war with Ukraine would have started earlier if she hadn’t blocked Kyiv’s entry into Nato in 2008.

Angela Merkel led Germany for 16 years. She was in office during the financial crisis, the 2015 migrant crisis and, significantly, Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

Was she too soft on Moscow? Too slow to help Kyiv? If she hadn’t blocked Ukraine’s Nato membership in 2008, would there be a war there now?

Speaking to the BBC in Berlin, Mrs Merkel is robust in her defence of her time in office.

She says she believes the war in Ukraine would have started sooner and would likely have been worse, if Kyiv had begun the path to Nato membership in 2008.

“We would have seen military conflict even earlier. It was completely clear to me that President Putin would not have stood idly by and watched Ukraine join Nato.

“And back then, Ukraine as a country would certainly not have been as prepared as it was in February 2022.”

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky disagrees.

He describes Mrs Merkel’s Nato decision, backed by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, as a clear “miscalculation” that emboldened Russia.

In a rare interview since she stepped down from politics three years ago, Mrs Merkel expresses concern about Vladimir Putin’s renewed threats of using nuclear weapons.

The two leaders got to know each other well over the course of two decades.

“We must do everything possible to prevent the use of nuclear weapons,” the former German Chancellor says.

“Thankfully, China also spoke about this a while back. We shouldn’t be paralysed by fear, but we must also acknowledge that Russia is the biggest, or alongside the US, one of the two biggest nuclear powers in the world.

“The potential is frightening.”

Despite enjoying high popularity ratings during most of her time in office, Mrs Merkel now finds herself on the defensive.

She has just published her memoir, Freedom. And the timing is interesting.

She says she did everything in her power to ensure peaceful means of co-operation with Russia.

In fact, Mr Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine just months after she left office.

This prompted a thorough re-examination in Europe of energy policies, diplomacy with Russia and also migration policies that had become the norm under Mrs Merkel.

At the helm of Europe’s biggest economy, she was, as former Italian premier Matteo Renzi says, the de-facto leader of Europe – “the boss of the European Union”.

“Do you remember when [former US Secretary of State] Henry Kissinger used to say ‘what is the telephone number of Europe?’,” he says. “My answer was: clearly, the mobile number of Angela Merkel.”

He adds that when judging the Merkel legacy – over Russia and otherwise – it is important to remember the norms of the time.

“One cannot attack Angela for the relations with Russia,” he says.

“In 2005, 2006 [they] were a goal of everyone in Europe, not only a goal of Angela Merkel.”

Under Mrs Merkel, Germany and its energy-hungry big industries became dependent on Moscow. Germany built two gas pipelines directly linked to Russia.

President Zelensky described that cheap gas as a geopolitical tool of the Kremlin.

Mrs Merkel tells the BBC she had two motives with the pipelines: German business interests but also maintaining peaceful links with Russia.

Fellow EU and Nato members in eastern Europe strongly disagreed with her.

The Polish MP, Radoslaw Fogiel, said German gas money filled Russia’s war chest – used to fund the invasion of Ukraine.

Mrs Merkel insists she tried to curb Russian attacks on Ukraine using diplomacy and negotiations, which – she admits – ultimately failed.

And German industry has been disproportionately hit by sanctions on Russian energy. Forced to look for other suppliers, the country is now buying expensive LNG. Businesses says they are crippled by the costs.

A new era in Europe’s relations with Russia “regrettably” began following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, says Mrs Merkel.

On Monday, defence ministers from the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy are meeting to discuss the deteriorating situation on Ukraine’s frontlines.

Ms Merkel, 70, now finds herself having to defend her legacy in other areas too.

The migration crisis of 2015, when she famously opened Germany’s doors to over a million asylum seekers, was perhaps the defining moment of her time in office.

It was hated by some, hailed by others.

US President Barack Obama praised her as a courageous and moral leader.

But critics blamed her for breathing life into the then almost redundant far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

It is now polling comfortably in second place in German public opinion polls, ahead of a snap general election early next year.

The AfD’s main political rallying cry: a strong anti-migrant message.

Angela Merkel admits the AfD made big gains, but she makes no apology for her political decisions.

As for suggestions that her 2015 policies helped fuel anti-immigration and far-right parties elsewhere too, including the Netherlands, Poland and France, after she tried to impose migrant quotas across EU countries, Mrs Merkel says she can’t be held responsible for all of Europe.

The only way to combat the far right is to stop illegal migration, she says.

She calls on Europe’s leaders to invest more in African nations to improve standards of living there, so fewer people will be tempted to leave their homes.

But with Europe’s economies sluggish, and voters worried about the cost of living, governments say there is little cash to spare.

Angela Merkel appeared to put her country and its economic interests first when it came to buying Russian energy or during the eurozone crisis – when southern EU nations blamed her for squeezing them with austerity measures in order to rescue German banks and businesses.

But even at home in Germany, she is now accused of simply “managing” successive crises and failing to make far-reaching, perhaps painful reforms to future-proof her country and the EU.

Germany is now labelled by some as “the sick man of Europe”.

Once an export powerhouse on the world stage, its economy hovers just above recession.

Voters complain she failed to invest in roads, railways and digitalisation, in favour of maintaining a balanced budget.

Under Angela Merkel, Germany not only became reliant on Russia for energy, but on China and the US for trade. Those decisions have not stood the test of time.

Donald Trump threatens punishing tariffs on imports when he returns to the White House in January.

Mrs Merkel does have some thoughts for Europe’s nervous leaders faced with Trump 2.0.

His first term in office was marked by anger at Europe, particularly Germany, over low defence spending and trade deficits. Those gripes with Europe haven’t changed.

What are the Merkel tips for handling him?

“It’s really important to know what your priorities are, to present them clearly and not to be scared, because Donald Trump can be very outspoken,” she says.

“He expresses himself very clearly. And if you do that, there is a certain mutual respect. That was my experience anyway.”

But Europe’s leaders facing the US, China, and Russia, are apprehensive – arguably more so than during Angela Merkel’s time.

Economies are sluggish, voters unhappy, traditional politics under pressure from the far-right and the far-left.

China and Russia are more bullish, the West weaker on the world stage.

Wars burn in the Middle East and in Europe, with Donald Trump appearing less interested in bolstering European security.

Perhaps that’s why Angela Merkel says, these days, when world leaders she knows well call her for advice, she happily responds.

But when I ask if she misses all that power and politics, her swift answer is: “No, not at all.”

Egyptian authorities say 17 people are missing, including foreigners, and 28 have been rescued after a tourist boat sank in the Red Sea.

A distress signal was received at 05:30 (03:30 GMT) from the Sea Story, which left port near Marsa Alam on Sunday for a five-day diving trip with 31 tourists and 14 crew, according to the governor of Red Sea province.

Red Sea Governor Maj-Gen Amr Hanafi said the survivors were found in the Wadi el-Gemal area, south of Marsa Alam, and that they were receiving the necessary medical care.

The BBC understands two British tourists have been rescued and two are still missing.

Hanafi added that the Egyptian Navy warship El Fateh and military aircraft were intensifying their efforts to locate the missing.

“Intensive search operations are underway in coordination with the navy and the armed forces,” he said.

Authorities have not indicated the possible cause of the incident.

On Saturday, the Egyptian Meteorological Authority forecasted turbulence on the Mediterranean and Red Seas due to the weather, and warned people against marine activities on Sunday and Monday.

Wind speeds were between 60-70 km/h, and wave heights were three to four metres high.

According to the local council in Marsa Alam, the crew of the Sea Story are all Egyptians and the tourists on board included five Spanish, four British, four Germans and two US nationals.

It is unclear who is among the rescued and who is still missing.

The Finnish foreign ministry confirmed to AFP news agency that one of its nationals is also among the missing.

A British Foreign Office spokesperson said they were in contact with the authorities, and were providing “support to a number of British nationals and their families following an incident in Egypt”.

The Chinese embassy in Egypt confirmed two of its nationals were “in good health” after being rescued, according to their state media, as reported by AFP.

Marsa Alam is a popular destination for tourists on Egypt’s southern Red Sea coast and is surrounded by diving spots, including renowned coral reefs.

There was no immediate comment from Sea Story’s Egypt-based owner and operator, Dive Pro Liveaboard.

But its website says the vessel was built in 2022 and is 44m (144ft) long. It has four decks and 18 cabins that can accommodate up to 36 passengers.

Last year, three Britons died off the coast of Marsa Alam after their dive boat caught fire.

A father of a missing Hawaii woman was found dead on Sunday in the US state of California after he travelled to search for her.

Ryan Kobayashi had recently journeyed to Los Angeles to help search for his daughter, Hannah Kobayashi, 30. She went missing earlier this month after a stopover at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on her way to New York City.

Officials in LA confirmed that Mr Kobayashi, who was 58, has since been found dead in a car park near the airport.

Both police and the coroner’s office have not publicly given a suspected cause of death.

The BBC has reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for comment.

Ms Kobayashi, who lived in Maui, Hawaii, went missing shortly after landing in LAX on 8 November. It remains unclear what has happened to her, and the LAPD has launched a search.

She was set to visit her aunt Geordan Montalvo in New York to attend a concert, in what was described as a “bucket list” trip.

Since her disappearance, family and friends have said that they received odd text messages from her mobile phone, in which she said she had been “tricked pretty much into giving away all my funds” to “someone I thought I loved”.

She has been spotted a few times, they said – once at a Los Angeles mall on 10 November, and again the following day in surveillance video around a downtown metro train station with an unknown person.

Ms Kobayashi’s aunt, Larie Pidgeon, told a local TV station that her niece did not look well. “She is not safe, and she is not alone,” she said.

Ms Kobayashi’s family later held a rally outside the metro station where she was last seen, and handed out flyers with her picture on them in a bid to find her.

Speaking to the media at the rally before his death, Mr Kobayashi said: “We’re just trying to get us as much information as we can.”

He added that he had been worried and confused since his daughter’s disappearance. “Everything is just a blur it seems, because I haven’t slept well since I’ve heard the news,” he said.

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.

As cities across North America grapple with homelessness, one Canadian city has taken a different approach by regulating tent encampments instead of banning them, as it tries to tackle what one official calls the issue “of the decade”.

Andrew Goodsell has called his small orange tent on a grassy patch in downtown Halifax home for almost a year.

In late October, on a park bench outside his makeshift dwelling, the 38-year-old described life at the homeless encampment where he lives with about a dozen or so others as “depressing”.

“I wake up in an area I don’t want to be,” Mr Goodsell said, as a stream of cars drove by.

“I’d much rather wake up in a spot where I could take a shower and maybe make myself something to eat. But I’ll still get myself out of bed.”

Mr Goodsell has been without a home on-and-off for a decade.

He once got by with couch surfing or working minimum-wage jobs to pay rent, but with Halifax’s skyrocketing housing costs, he can no longer afford a place to live.

His encampment is one of nine sites chosen by the city as a place where people without housing can lawfully camp outside. The sites were approved this summer as a temporary, but some argue necessary, solution while indoor shelters are at-capacity.

The policy has been adopted by at least one other municipality in Canada and is being considered by others who too are facing a rise in homelessness.

It’s in stark contrast to other North American cities where police officers forcibly remove homeless encampments. These so-called “street sweeps” have been criticised as violent and ineffective in addressing the housing crisis.

But they have become increasingly popular as homelessness has grown since the pandemic. California has cleared more than 12,000 encampments since 2021, while cities like Fresno, California and Grants Pass, Oregon have passed complete bans on camping in public spaces.

Proponents of banning encampments say that the campsites lead to disorder, and that funding should go to getting people off the streets.

Among detractors of Halifax’s approach are some encampment residents themselves, who say they want resources spent on affordable housing instead.

“Canada is one of the richest, most beautiful countries around,” Mr Goodsell said. “We have so much land, so much resource, but we must be one of the greediest countries out there.”

Although several Canadian cities, including Halifax, have tried to remove homeless encampments in the past, recent court decisions in British Columbia and Ontario have ruled that people without homes can camp outside if there are no appropriate indoor shelters available.

In contrast, the US Supreme Court ruled in June that cities can fine and arrest homeless people, even if there is no shelter for them to go to, paving the way for the outright bans on encampments in California and Oregon.

Another difference is the growing recognition in Canada that previous approaches have failed, says Stepan Wood, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, who has studied the issue.

“The approach up until a couple years ago had been to clear them out, but it’s now no longer deniable that that doesn’t solve the problem,” he told the BBC.

Canada’s national database estimates that there are 235,000 homeless people across the country in a given year, though experts argue that number is higher.

This figure puts the rate of homelessness in Canada above that of the US and England, according to a comparison of official data. Globally, many cities have seen a rise in homelessness since the pandemic.

In 2018, Halifax – the largest city on Canada’s Atlantic Coast with a population of around 518,000 – only had 18 people sleeping rough, said Max Chauvin, the director of housing and homelessness in Halifax. Now it’s over 200.

While Halifax has approved nine designated encampment sites, only five are operating. Each has a proposed limit of up to a dozen tents, but most are over capacity.

The city provides the sites with portable toilets, while outreach workers come by weekly to drop off bottled water and check in on people, encampment residents told the BBC.

Sometimes they will bring things that residents need, like a coat, or a warmer sleeping bag for the winter.

Mr Chauvin said the designated encampments are born out of a realisation that the city has run out of options to immediately address its housing crisis.

The city is waiting for the provincial government to ramp up affordable housing construction. Nova Scotia has not built any new public housing units since 1995.

In the meantime, “the question becomes: ‘Where are people going to go?’” Mr Chauvin said.

He believes solving the housing crisis will be “the item of the decade” for his city and others.

“One of the largest groups of homelessness we see growing is simply people who don’t have enough money to pay rent, and that’s new,” he said, adding that includes seniors, students, and entire families.

Mr Chauvin also points to a lack of accessible healthcare for people with mental and physical illnesses.

Proponents of the designated sites say they prevent the criminalisation of people who are homeless and allow the city to concentrate its outreach services.

Still, Halifax’s policy is both provisional and divisive.

It was a focal point of the city’s October mayoral election, where the winner promised to end the expansion of designated encampments and to remove unlawful ones.

Trish Purdy, a city councillor, unsuccessfully fought to remove a proposed designated site in her district, after hearing from constituents who feared it would bring crime and drug use.

She acknowledged that the issue is socially and morally complex, but said she believes allowing people to live in “horrible conditions” is not “empathetic or compassionate”.

“I’m sure the residents who live by any of the encampments could tell you they didn’t receive any empathy or compassion when the encampments were placed on their doorstep,” Ms Purdy told the BBC.

One such encampment in Dartmouth, a Halifax suburb, sits adjacent to a row of public housing units, where residents complain of needle debris, violence and disputes with those living at the site.

“This used to be a fun field where the kids can come out and play baseball or kickball,” said Clarissa, a mother of three who declined to give her last name.

“Now we can’t even do that, because we’re too worried about stepping on a needle.”

Clarissa said she and her neighbours were not consulted about the encampment and believes the site was chosen because their neighbourhood is low-income.

But Ames Mathers, who lives near another encampment, called its residents her neighbours.

“It’s really messed up that people are having to live in parks at all as an only option for housing,” she said.

“We’re in the middle of a housing crisis, and our province and city are dropping the ball.”

Some encampment residents told the BBC they welcomed knowing they wouldn’t be asked to leave at a moment’s notice. But many said they themselves didn’t always feel safe at the sites.

They also question the government’s willingness to find them housing, saying they have received more help from volunteers than officials. They note that multiple high-rise condominiums are under development in Halifax – none of which, they say, are affordable.

“We would like to be treated like people,” said Samantha Nickerson, who lived with her fiance, Trent Smith, at the same encampment as Mr Goodsell.

“Some of us really are trying hard to get our lives back together and work.”

Ms Nickerson and Mr Smith, who are in their 30s, said they faced violence from other residents and were often verbally harassed by members of the public.

“We understand that this is an eyesore, and nobody wants it,” Ms Nickerson said.

“We don’t want to be here. We don’t want to be in this situation.”

By mid-November, the couple had been moved to a temporary indoor shelter with the help of volunteers.

Mr Goodsell and a handful of others remain at site, which was recently de-designated over concerns it would be in the way of snow-clearing operations.

He said he has not been offered indoor shelter and does not want to be uprooted to another encampment.

He has outfitted his tent for the coming harsh Canadian winter as he waits for news.

“Outside in the winter in a tent anywhere is unsafe,” he told the BBC in a phone call.

“I’m prepped as I can be, and I consider myself luckier than most.”

Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, is under lockdown for a second day as thousands of protesters demanding the release of former prime minister Imran Khan from jail converge on the city.

His supporters are also calling for the overturning of election results they say were rigged – a claim disputed by the government.

The former PM has been detained for more than a year on various charges, but remains hugely popular despite his legal troubles and his supporters have been protesting for months.

His wife, Bushra Bibi, told supporters on Monday that the march would continue until her husband was free.

The latest rally came after Khan issued a “final call” to supporters, calling on them to stay in the capital until their demands are met.

There have been clashes between his supporters and police. The authorities have banned the protest, blocking streets with shipping containers and suspending some internet services.

Schools and colleges have shut because of fears of violence.

Members of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party say they’ve been repeatedly tear gassed by the police.

The police say their officers have been injured by stones thrown by protesters. Police told the BBC that 139 people had been arrested and 14 policemen injured.

Khan’s wife Bushra Bibi is one of the leaders of the main convoy.

“Until Khan comes to us, we will not end this march,” she told crowds as the rally neared the capital earlier on Monday.

“I will stand till my last breath and you have to support me. This is not just about my husband but about this country and its leader,” she said.

Bushra Bibi was sentenced alongside Khan in January, but released on bail in late October.

Although Khan has now been behind bars for more than a year, he is still the dominant force of Pakistan’s opposition politics.

He was voted out of power by parliament in 2022 amid reports that he had fallen out with the country’s powerful military.

He denies all the charges against him, which range from corruption to instigating violence to getting married to Bushra Bibi illegally.

In February’s general election, his party was banned from standing. Independent candidates backed by the PTI unexpectedly won the most seats – but not enough to form a government.

Khan accused the two parties now in government – the PML-N and PPP – of stealing the election. The authorities deny accusations of vote tampering.

The northern Indian city of Sambhal is on alert after four people died and dozens were injured in violent clashes over a Centuries-old mosque on Sunday.

Clashes broke out between protesters and the police during a court-monitored survey of the Shahi Jama Masjid (mosque), a federally-protected 16th Century monument.

Authorities in Uttar Pradesh state – where Sambhal is located – have registered four cases in connection with the violence and have suspended internet services and shut schools in the area for a day.

The survey was ordered by a local court last week, hours after a petition claimed that the mosque had been built on the site of a destroyed temple.

Videos and images of the clashes shared on social media show slippers, bricks and stones strewn around the mosque.

Protesters allege that four men were shot in police firing but authorities have denied this.

“No weapons were used that could take anyone’s life,” Superintendent of Police Krishan Kumar told the Hindu newspaper.

The controversy around the Shahi Jama Masjid is the latest in a series of disputes around mosques in the country, where Hindu groups have claimed that Mughal rulers destroyed temples to build them.

Legal cases pertaining to these claims are currently being fought by Muslim groups in various courts.

In Sambhal, tensions have been brewing since Tuesday, after a local court ordered a video-recorded survey of the Jama Masjid. The survey was ordered hours after a petition claimed that the mosque was built after Mughal ruler Babur destroyed the Hari Har temple in the 1520s.

Authorities in Uttar Pradesh, which is governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), conducted an initial survey of the mosque the same day.

Sections of Muslim groups in Sambhal protested against this, alleging that they were not given any prior notice about it. They have also questioned the urgency with which the court ordered the exercise.

A second survey of the mosque was held on Sunday morning, which turned violent after a large group of protesters gathered near the mosque and began shouting slogans at the survey team, police say.

Top police official Aunjaneya Kumar Singh told the Hindu that protesters allegedly pelted stones at the police, leaving them with no option but to use force to escort the survey team to safety.

He added that tear gas shells and plastic bullets were fired to disperse the crowds.

Opposition leaders have criticised the state government and accused it of orchestrating the violence for political gain – a charge it denies.

“No one is allowed to take law into their own hands,” Uttar Pradesh’s Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak told the Indian Express newspaper, adding that authorities were investigating the incident.

Mahmood Madani, president of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind – a leading organisation of Islamic scholars – condemned disputes around mosques in the country, saying they violate Indian laws.

A Malaysian court has ordered the country’s government to return 172 rainbow-coloured watches it seized from watchmaker Swatch last year.

The government said it took the timepieces from the Swiss company because they featured “LGBT elements” – homosexuality is illegal in Muslim-majority Malaysia and punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

However, a court ruled the government did not have a warrant to confiscate the items and a law prohibiting their sale was only passed later, making the seizure unlawful.

Malaysia’s Home Affairs minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail said the government’s legal team will need to “examine the basis of the judgement” before deciding to appeal against the order.

He said the government “must respect the decision, or else it would be viewed as contempt of court”.

He went on to say his ministry may appeal against the ruling but must first “examine the basis of the judgement thoroughly”.

Authorities raided Swatch shops across Malaysia in May 2023, but an order prohibiting sale of the watches was not issued until August 2023.

Therefore, Swatch had not committed an offence at the time of the seizure, the court ruled.

But the prohibition order has not been overturned, so although the watches – worth $14,000 (£10,700) – have been returned they cannot be sold.

The authorities must hand back the items within 14 days, government prosecutor Mohammad Sallehuddin Md Ali told the Kuala Lumpur High Court today.

Swatch took legal action contesting the seizure in June 2023, arguing the product was “not in any way capable of causing any disruption to public order or morality or any violations of the law”.

Homosexuality is illegal under both secular and religious laws in Malaysia.

Swatch described the Pride flag as a “symbol of humanity that speaks for all genders and races”, but at the time of the confiscation, the Malaysian government claimed the acronym “LGBTQ” could be found on the watches themselves.

The Swiss manufacturer argued the company’s reputation had been damaged and business had suffered after the seizures.

Malaysian authorities claimed the watches “may harm… the interests of the nation by promoting, supporting and normalising the LGBTQ+ movement that is not accepted by the general public”.

The Swatch Group declined to comment.

Russia and Ukraine have traded air strikes, after a week of intensifying rhetoric in which Russia tested a new missile on Ukraine.

Russia has made close to 1,500 strikes on Ukraine since Sunday evening on about half of the country’s regions causing dozens of injuries, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Meanwhile Ukraine’s military said it had struck a key oil depot south of Moscow, and targets in the Bryansk and Kursk border regions.

Russia’s use of the Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro capped a week of escalation in the war that also saw Ukraine fire US and British missiles into Russia for the first time.

US President Joe Biden is reported to have given Ukraine permission to use longer-range Atacms missiles against targets inside Russia as a response to Moscow’s use of North Korean troops.

Kharkiv Governor Oleh Synehubov said that 23 people had been injured in a missile strike on the city of Kharkiv, where a rescue operation was currently under way.

An S-400 missile was used in the attack, he said.

Odesa’s emergencies department said 10 people had been injured in a missile attack, which damaged residential buildings, schools and a university sports hall.

Regional officials said three more people were injured in strikes on Kherson region, and one each in Zaporizhzhya and Chernihiv regions.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military said that overnight they struck the Kaluganefteprodukt oil depot in Kaluga region southeast of Moscow with drones.

Sources told Ukrainian media the attack caused a series of explosions and a fire at the site.

There has been no comment from the Russian military on the attack, but regional governor Vladislav Shapsha said debris from drones shot down by air defences had caused “a fire on the territory of an industrial enterprise”. Eight drones in total were destroyed, he added.

Ukraine’s military also mentioned attacks in the Bryansk and Kursk regions, without specifying what was hit.

Russian military bloggers, however, said that the Khalino air base in Kursk region had been struck in an attack by eight US-supplied Atacms missiles.

US permission for use of the Atacms is said to be restricted to this region because of the presence of North Korean troops there.

They are thought to be involved in a Russian offensive to drive Ukrainian forces out of a small area of Kursk region, which they captured in the autumn in a surprise attack.

Russia’s defence ministry said only that it had shot down eight ballistic missiles from Ukraine, without saying where.

Russian forces have also been hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in an effort to create difficult conditions as winter approaches.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Both countries are now trying to secure a battlefield advantage before Donald Trump becomes US president in January and seeks to end the conflict.

He has vowed to end the war within hours but has not provided details as to how.

At 31 years old, I was told by doctors that if I didn’t stop drinking alcohol, I could die.

I was shocked because I didn’t drink every day, I never drank alone and I drank because I enjoyed it as a social activity, not because I felt alcohol-dependent.

But by definition, my alcohol consumption from my late teens to late 20s would be considered binge drinking. It felt normal because people around me were doing the same – and now it was catching up with me.

I’d recently become a mum and had gone to the GP because I felt tired all the time. This led to blood tests and a liver function check.

Further tests revealed I had severe alcohol-related liver fibrosis, or extreme scarring on my liver, most likely because of my drinking habits.

I trundled home from the hospital in a daze, with my daughter in her pram. This might have happened to me, I thought, but I could not be the only one.

I wanted to know what this said about the UK’s drinking culture and began looking into it for BBC Panorama.

Alcohol-specific deaths are at their highest levels in the UK since records began in 2001.

While the problem is undoubtedly bigger in men – particularly older men – more women under the age of 45 are dying due to alcohol-related liver disease, or ARLD, than ever before, according to Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures from 2001-22.

If we binge a given amount of alcohol in one go – for example on a night out – it can be much more damaging than if we drink the same amount over a longer period.

The latest research, by a team at University College London and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, suggests bingeing may be up to four times as damaging for the liver.

When we think of binge drinking, we tend to imagine people drunkenly sprawling out of bars and falling over at bus stops. But actually, a binge can be less alcohol than you might think.

In the UK, a binge is considered as drinking six or more units of alcohol in one sitting for women, and eight or more for men. That is two large glasses of wine for a woman.

At King’s College Hospital in London, consultant hepatologist Debbie Shawcross tells me that she regularly treats professional women in their 40s and 50s with liver disease.

“They’re spinning plates in the air, and maybe they have young families,” she says. “They’re not alcoholics… but they are just drinking too much as a habit.”

I’m not in my 40s yet, but she could have been describing me.

When I was younger, I would easily drink more than what’s defined as a binge on a night out. I didn’t think anything of it until I got my diagnosis.

After my blood tests came back as abnormal I was sent to Glasgow’s New Victoria Hospital, where I had an ultrasound, and finally a fibroscan. All this took place over the course of about a year.

A fibroscan is a type of non-invasive ultrasound which measures liver stiffness. A reading of seven kPA (a unit used to measure the level of oxygen in the blood) or below is considered normal. My reading was 10.2.

This indicated severe scarring – if it had not been caught, and if I had not stopped drinking, it could have developed into cirrhosis.

I received my diagnosis in February 2024. My consultant, Dr Shouren Datta, said if I abstained from alcohol, then there was a possibility that my fibrosis could be reversed.

I feel extremely lucky that the problem was picked up in time for me to try to do something about it.

Doctors had discovered the problem while investigating my tiredness.

However, part of the problem with liver disease is that there are often no initial symptoms.

Seven in 10 people with end-stage liver disease don’t know anything about it until they are admitted to hospital with symptoms such as jaundice, fluid retention and abnormal bleeding.

That is what happened to Emma Jones, 39, originally from north Wales. I met her 15 months after her successful liver transplant.

Like me, Emma was a social drinker, with a successful career and vibrant social life. But during the Covid lockdowns things spiralled for her – at the worst point, she was drinking three bottles of wine a day.

Emma was admitted to hospital where she found out she was in end-stage liver disease. She was given less than 36 hours to live.

Miraculously, she pulled through and – after fulfilling the required six months of sobriety – got the transplant she so desperately needed.

Emma’s recovery is ongoing and is not without major life changes. She will be on anti-rejection drugs for the rest of her life and is immunosuppressed, meaning it is harder for her body to fight infections and disease.

But she is alive, well, and says she is in the best place she has ever been. I find her positivity and determination infectious.

According to the most recent ONS statistics, from 2018, liver disease is consistently among the top three causes of death each year among women aged 39-45.

“Women’s drinking pretty much doubled in a really short period of time… about 10 years,” Prof Fiona Measham, a leading expert in drink and drug culture from the University of Liverpool, tells me.

Her research suggests that in the 1990s and 2000s, the alcohol industry zeroed in on female drinkers, targeting them with products such as alcopops and shots – and using feminism, female empowerment and liberation as a marketing tool.

She thinks these practices established a drinking culture in a whole generation of young women that would leave a lasting legacy.

“What we’re seeing now is that young people, their consumption is falling fastest, but it’s still holding quite steady for people in their 30s, 40s and 50s,” she says.

The same aggressive approach persists today within the alcohol industry, believes Prof Carol Emslie, from Glasgow Caledonian University. Only now it is pushing things like prosecco, “gin o’clock” and “wine time” as a way for women to relax and practise self-care after a hard day.

The Portman Group, which represents the alcohol industry, says:

While “the increase in alcohol-related liver disease among both women and men in the UK is a serious concern, it’s important to remember that alcohol has always been a legal product.”

It says its Code of Practice… “does not protect against gender-based marketing specifically” but sets “minimum standards for alcohol producers to market their products responsibly”.

And it is “committed to continuing…(its) efforts to promote moderate drinking as well as holding the alcohol industry to account.”

• Support and information for anyone affected by these issues can be found at BBC Action Line

Binge Drinking and Me

BBC journalist Hazel Martin goes on a personal journey to find out why alcohol-related deaths from liver disease among women under 40 have risen sharply over the last decade.

Watch now on BBC iPlayer or on Monday 25 November at 20:00 (20:30 in Wales and Northern Ireland) on BBC One.

Several months after my diagnosis, I went back for a repeat fibroscan to see if there had been any improvement.

I was relieved to see that my fibroscan reading had gone from 10.2 to 4.7 – back in the normal and healthy range.

I was surprised what a dramatic difference cutting out alcohol had made in such a short space of time.

I don’t plan on drinking again – I’ve been advised not to.

I haven’t touched a drop for nearly a year and feel much better for it – but I still mourn it in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

Alcohol is ingrained in our culture. We drink at birthday parties, weddings and funerals. And then of course there’s the festive season, which builds up ahead of Christmas and lasts right through to New Year’s Day.

For me growing up, alcohol felt normalised and I don’t think I was fully aware how much pressure there was to drink until I was forced to give it up.

Abstaining hasn’t been easy though. It has taken a long time to reprogramme my brain to not need or want alcohol as a treat, a reward, or as a way to relax and have fun socially.

I think that was part of the problem for me then, and it remains a problem for our society now.