A former Chinese state media journalist has been sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison for espionage, his family has confirmed to the BBC.

Dong Yuyu, 62, who has been detained since 2022, was active in academic and journalism circles in the US and Japan and met regularly with foreign diplomats.

He was having lunch with a Japanese diplomat in Beijing when he was arrested by police.

At the time of his detention, Dong had been a senior staff member of the Guangming Daily, one of the five major newspapers linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

In February 2022, Dong was arrested while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat the day after the Winter Olympics ended in Beijing, at a restaurant where he had often met foreign friends.

The diplomat was also detained – then released several hours later amid protests from the Japanese government.

Dong met regularly with other journalists and foreign diplomats as part of his job.

His family said in a statement that according to a court judgement, two other Japanese diplomats Dong met with were named as “agents of an espionage organisation”, which is the Japanese embassy.

“We are shocked that the Chinese authorities would blatantly deem a foreign embassy an ‘espionage organization'”, said his family’s statement.

“Today’s verdict is a grave injustice not only to Yuyu and his family but also to every freethinking Chinese journalist and every ordinary Chinese committed to friendly engagement with the world,” they added.

The Beijing court where Dong was sentenced on Friday had a strong security presence, Reuters reported, as journalists were asked to leave and a diplomat said they were not allowed to attend the hearing.

“In the past, the Chinese court system has selected Western holidays to release news as it is a time when the public is focused on other matters,” the US National Press Club said in a statement on Tuesday, ahead of Dong’s sentencing on Thanksgiving night in the US.

While Dong’s trial had been completed in July 2023, he was held with no verdict and barred from seeing his family, the press club said.

Rights groups and advocates have criticised his conviction and called for him to be released.

“Chinese authorities must reverse this unjust verdict, and protect the right of journalists to work freely and safely in China,” Beh Lih Yi, Asia programme manager at the Committe to Protect Journalists told Reuters.

“Dong Yuyu should be reunited with his family immediately.”

Dong joined the Guangming Daily after graduating from Peking University’s law school in 1987.

In 1989, he was one of tens of thousands of students who participated in the Tiananmen Square protests. He was later sentenced to hard labour, but kept his job at the newspaper, according to a family statement.

He eventually rose to become deputy head of the editorial department, and was among the most pro-reform voices at Guangming Daily, the statement added.

A Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2007, Dong had also written several articles for the New York Times and was previously a visiting fellow and professor at several Japanese universities.

India’s airlines and airports received 999 hoax bomb threats this year as of 14 November, the country’s deputy civil aviation minister told its parliament.

This was nearly 10 times more than the threats received in 2023, Mr Murlidhar Mohol said.

More than 500 of the year’s threats were received just in the last two weeks of October.

The dramatic surge in hoax threats had wreaked havoc on flight schedules, causing widespread disruption in services.

The recent threats were all hoaxes, Mr Mohol said, with “no actual threat detected at any of the airports/aircraft in India”.

Police have registered 256 complaints and 12 people have been arrested in connection with these threats, the minister said.

But the cases mark an unprecedented spike in such hoaxes.

Between 2014 and 2017, authorities had recorded just 120 bomb hoax alerts at airports, with nearly half directed at Delhi and Mumbai, the country’s largest airports.

The flurry of hoax threats this October had delayed several affected flights while others were diverted.

Hoax threats against flights heading for other countries also lead to international agencies getting involved.

In October, Singapore’s Air Force sent two fighter jets to escort an Air India Express plane following a bomb threat.

The same month, another Air India flight from New Delhi to Chicago was forced to land in a remote airport in Canada.

Passengers on the flight were later airlifted to Chicago on an Air Force plane deployed by Canadian officials.

India’s civil aviation ministry had then said it was making “every possible effort” to safeguard flight operations.

India’s airports have a Bomb Threat Assessment Committee which assesses the gravity of the threat and takes action accordingly. A threat can lead to the involvement of the bomb disposal squad, sniffer dogs, ambulances, police and doctors.

Passengers are off-loaded from the plane along with cabin baggage, check-in baggage and cargo, and they are all screened again. Engineering and security teams also search the plane before it is cleared for flying again.

The resultant delay can cost thousands of dollars in damages to airlines and security agencies.

More than 150 million passengers flew domestically in India last year, according to the civil aviation ministry.

More than 3,000 flights arrive and depart every day in the country from more than 150 operational airports, including 33 international airports.

Rebel forces in Syria say they have entered Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, in the biggest offensive against the government in years.

Video posted on a channel affiliated with the rebels appears to show their fighters in vehicles inside the city. The footage has been geolocated by the BBC to a suburb in Western Aleppo.

A UK-based group says fighters set off two car bombs before advancing into neighbourhoods on Friday.

Government forces meanwhile say they have regained positions in a number of towns in Aleppo and Idlib provinces, following an offensive launched by Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied factions on Wednesday.

A statement posted on the rebel-affiliated channel on Friday said: “Our forces have begun entering the city of Aleppo”.

Earlier, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which uses a network of sources on the ground in Syria, reported that Syrian and Russian planes carried out 23 air strikes on the Aleppo region on Friday.

The SOHR said 255 people, mostly combatants, had been killed in the fighting, the deadliest between rebels and pro-government forces in Syria for years.

It said opposition forces had taken control of more than 50 towns and villages since Wednesday.

Fighting which had raged since the civil war began in Syria in 2011 had largely wound down by 2020, when Turkey and Russia – Syria’s key ally – brokered a ceasefire to halt a push by the government to retake Idlib.

That led to an extended lull in violence, but sporadic clashes, air strikes and shelling continued.

Idlib is the last remaining opposition stronghold and is home to more than four million people, many of whom have been displaced during the conflict and are living in dire conditions.

A former childcare worker dubbed “one of Australia’s worst paedophiles” has been sentenced to life in prison for raping and sexually abusing almost 70 girls.

Ashley Paul Griffith, 47, confessed to 307 offences committed at childcare centres in the Australian state of Queensland and overseas between 2003 and 2022. His victims were aged between one and seven.

Judge Paul Smith called the scale and nature of the crimes “depraved” and “horrendous”, saying “there was a significant breach of trust”.

In addition to this case, the BBC understands Griffith is separately accused of abusing at least two dozen children in the Australian state of New South Wales and in Italy.

In the Brisbane District Court on Friday, Judge Smith said Griffith – who the court heard had a “paedophilic disorder” – had a high risk of reoffending, ordering a non-parole period of at least 27 years.

Griffith was first arrested in August 2022 by the Australian Federal Police, and a year later charged with more than 1,600 child sex offences. Most of these were eventually dropped.

Investigators found thousands of photographs and videos of his abuse, which he had filmed and uploaded onto the dark web.

Although faces were cropped out of the footage, they managed to trace them to Griffith because of a unique set of bedsheets seen in the background of some of the videos, which had been sold to childcare centres across Queensland.

He pleaded guilty to 28 counts of rape, almost 200 charges relating to indecent treatment of a child, and several related to making and sharing child exploitation material.

Four of the girls who featured in his videos were from a childcare centre in Pisa, Italy. His other 65 victims were from 11 locations across Brisbane.

Ahead of his sentence behind handed down, the court heard a string of emotional statements from some of those victims and their parents – who cannot be identified for legal reasons.

Among them were two sisters who were abused in kindergarten, one of whom recalled Griffith being her favourite teacher.

“To find out what he was really doing was devastating… I don’t seem to be able to process it even now, because there’s a disconnect between what I remember and the reality,” she said, according to The Courier Mail.

Another woman told how his actions had robbed her of a normal childhood, recounting her struggles with mental illness in the years since.

“I will never know what my life could have been like,” she is quoted as saying, in an article by The Guardian Australia.

“I can never know what it would have been to grow up unafraid of people.”

Parents meanwhile told the court of their horror upon discovering the crimes inflicted upon their children, with several saying they struggled to forgive themselves for trusting Griffith.

“(My daughter) loved you like an uncle and you used her like a toy,” one said, according to News Corp Australia.

Another explained how she was trying to keep the burden of knowledge of the abuse from her daughter.

“I cannot undo what you did to her body but will do everything I can to limit the damage to her mind,” she said, according to the Courier Mail.

Outside court, the families called for an investigation into the childcare centres – and broader system – in which Griffith was able to go undetected for so long.

“Parents are walking their children into these centres today with a false sense of security,” one father told reporters.

Uniqlo is facing an online backlash in China after the boss of its parent company said the Japanese clothing retailer does not source cotton from Xinjiang.

Fast Retailing’s chief executive Tadashi Yanai said Uniqlo was “not using” cotton from the western Chinese province in a BBC interview broadcast this week.

Commentators in China picked up on the comment and urged a boycott of the retailer.

Cotton from Xinjiang is controversial because China has been accused of using forced labour by people from the Muslim Uyghur minority in its production. Beijing has consistently denied these allegations.

Following the BBC report, commentators took to social media platform Weibo calling for a boycott of Uniqlo.

Millions of people read posts with hashtags related to the topic: “Controversy over Uniqlo founder’s remarks”.

Related trending hashtags included: “Xinjiang cotton is the best in the world”, “I support Xinjiang cotton”, and “Uniqlo’s results in China sees a slump”.

One user wrote: “With this kind of attitude from Uniqlo, and their founder being so arrogant, they’re probably betting that mainland consumers will forget about it in a few days and continue to buy. So, can we stand firm this time?”

The online reaction came after Mr Yanai told the BBC: “We’re not using [cotton from Xinjiang].”

“By mentioning which cotton we’re using…” he continued, before pausing and ending his answer with: “Actually, it gets too political if I say anymore so let’s stop here”.

China is very important for Uniqlo not only as a huge market but also as a major manufacturing hub.

Beijing has consistently denied allegations of forced labour made by organisations including the US government.

The BBC has published reports of forced labour allegations.

In June 2022, firms started to have to prove that imports into the US are not produced using forced labour.

Sweden’s H&M saw its clothing pulled from major e-commerce stores in China after it refused to source cotton from Xinjiang.

Many global brands such as Nike, Burberry, Esprit and Adidas were boycotted after getting caught up in the controversy.

Part of the reason Uniqlo avoided the controversy was because Mr Yanai declined to take a stance at the time.

Western firms continue to get embroiled in the controversial topic.

In September, China’s commerce ministry launched an investigation into the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, PVH, saying it was suspected of “unjustly boycotting” Xinjiang cotton and other products “without factual basis”.

PVH has said it will respond in accordance with relevant regulations, according to media reports.

A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has followed through on his promise to eat the banana from a $6.2m (£4.9m) artwork he bought last week.

Justin Sun outbid six others to claim Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous 2019 work Comedian – a banana duct-taped to a wall – at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.

He ate the fruit during a news conference in Hong Kong where he used the moment to draw parallels between the artwork and cryptocurrency.

The banana is regularly replaced before exhibitions, with Mr Sun buying the right to display the installation along with a guide on how to replace the fruit.

It has been eaten twice before – first by a performance artist in 2019 and again by a South Korean student in 2023 – but neither paid any money to do so, let alone $6.2m.

“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” Mr Sun said.

“It’s much better than other bananas,” he added.

The 34-year-old said he was intrigued by the work, admitting he had “dumb questions” about whether the banana rotted.

The New York Times reported a fresh banana was bought for 35 cents on the day of last week’s auction, before becoming possibly one of the most expensive fruits in the world.

Each attendee at the event on Friday was given a banana and a roll of duct tape as a souvenir.

“Everyone has a banana to eat,” Mr Sun said.

Mr Sun runs the Tron blockchain network – a service where users can trade in cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that operate independent of banks, offering the potential of very secure decentralised transactions.

Mr Sun compared the artwork, and other abstract pieces like it, to NFTs.

These “non-fungible tokens” are pieces of digital artwork that have no intrinsic value, other than that prescribed by people.

NFTs can be traded on platforms like Mr Sun’s.

Last year, he was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for offering and selling unregistered security tokens. Mr Sun denies the charges and the case is ongoing.

This week, Mr Sun disclosed he made a $30m investment in a crypto project backed by US President-elect Donald Trump.

Australia has warned travellers not to drink some liquors in Laos, following a spate of deaths linked to suspected methanol poisoning.

Australians should avoid drinking Tiger Vodka and Tiger Whisky “due to serious safety concerns”, Australia’s foreign affairs department said on its travel advisory website on Friday.

It added that Laotian authorities have barred the sale and consumption of these two products due to concerns that they were a health risk. The BBC has contacted the Laotian government for confirmation.

Reports suggest that the six people who died earlier this month in the Laotian town of Vang Vieng had drunk shots of locally made vodka.

Noting the deaths, the Australian travel advisory said travellers should “be alert to the potential risks particularly with spirit-based drinks including cocktails”.

Among those who died in Vang Vieng were two Australians, Bianca Jones and Holly Bowles who were both 19. All of them had been staying at the Nana Backpackers hostel.

Eight members of staff were detained on Tuesday, but have yet to be charged.

The owners of the hostel, which is now closed, had previously denied serving illicit alcohol.

Families of the Australian victims have urged the government in Laos to continue pursuing the case.

“I was happy to hear that there’s been some movement over in Laos – we cannot have our girls passing and this continuing to happen,” Jones’s father Mark told reporters earlier.

The other four victims have been named as Simone White, a 28-year-old lawyer from the UK; James Louis Hutson, a 57-year-old American; and Danish citizens Anne-Sofie Orkild Coyman, 20, and Freja Vennervald Sorensen, 21.

It is unclear how many people remain ill from the suspected poisoning in Vang Vieng.

News reports say the tourists could have drunk alcohol laced with methanol, a toxic industrial chemical.

The colourless and odourless substance is often used in bootleg alcohol, and medical experts suggest say drinking as little as 25ml of it can be fatal.

The UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office has also updated its travel advice to reflect the dangers of methanol poisoning in Laos, warning that the substance has been used in the manufacture of counterfeit replicas of well-known liquor brands.

Riot police in Georgia used pepper spray and water cannon against protesters who turned out on the streets of Tbilisi after the government suspended moves to join the European Union.

Forty-three people were arrested at the demonstrations in the capital on Thursday night, the government said.

Crowds turned out after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said his government would drop its pursuit of EU membership “until the end of 2028” – a move criticised by more than 100 diplomats on Friday as “unconstitutional”.

Kobakhidze had accused the bloc of “blackmail” after EU legislators called for last month’s parliamentary elections in Georgia to be re-run. They cited “significant irregularities”.

Since 2012, Georgia has been governed by Georgian Dream, a party which critics say has tried to move the country away from the EU and closer to Russia.

The party claimed victory in last month’s election but opposition MPs are boycotting the new parliament, alleging fraud, while the country’s President Salome Zurabishvili, has called the one-party parliament “unconstitutional”.

On Thursday, the European Parliament backed a resolution describing the election as the latest stage in Georgia’s “worsening democratic crisis” and saying that the ruling party was “fully responsible”.

It expressed particular concern about reports of voter intimidation, vote buying and manipulation, and harassment of observers.

The European Parliament also urged sanctions against Georgia’s Prime Minister and other high-level officials including the billionaire founder of the governing party Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Following the resolution, Georgia’s Prime Minister said his government had “decided not to bring up the issue of joining the European Union on the agenda until the end of 2028”.

He said Georgia would still seek EU membership but with “dignity” and on its own terms.

Kobakhidze also lashed out at European politicians for “hurling a cascade of insults” at the Georgian government.

In response, thousands of pro-EU protesters demonstrated outside Georgian Dream offices in the cities of Tbilisi and Kutaisi.

Protesters see the government’s U-turn as a betrayal of a national aspiration. The goal of European integration is enshrined in Georgia’s constitution.

Police started dispersing the rally at 02:00 local time Friday (22:00 GMT Thursday), using batons, tear gas and water cannons after demonstrators barricaded some streets in Tbilisi.

The protest lasted until 06:00 local time, but further demonstrations are expected later on Friday.

Georgia’s interior ministry said protesters resorted to provocations on many occasions, damaging infrastructure and “badly injuring” 32 police officers.

The precise number of injured protesters is unknown, but a member of the opposition group Coalition for Change said one if its members, Nana Malashkhia, had their nose broken.

“During the crackdown, we took shelter in a pharmacy, but the special forces stormed in after us. If it was not for the presence of the media, they might have beaten us to death,” Giorgi Butikashvili told the BBC.

Footage on social media also showed a journalist from the opposition Formula TV station being severely beaten by the police.

Other media representatives wearing clearly marked press labels were also targeted.

On Friday, the EU’s ambassador to Georgia called the government’s suspension sad and heartbreaking.

Pawel Herczynski said it contradicted the policy of previous governments and the wishes of the vast majority of the population. Public polling has shown more than 80% of Georgians see their country’s future as being part of the European Union.

“Georgian Dream didn’t win the elections. It staged a coup,” 20-year-old Shota Sabashvili told AFP news agency.

“There is no legitimate parliament or government in Georgia. We will not let this self-proclaimed prime minister destroy our European future.”

Ana, a student, said Georgian Dream was “going against Georgian people’s will and want to drag us back to USSR”.

“That will never happen because Georgian people will never let this happen,” she told the Associated Press.

Georgia has had official EU candidate status since 2023. However Brussels had already halted the accession process earlier this year over a Russia-style law targeting organisations accused of “pursuing the interests of a foreign power”.

Kobakhidze said Georgia would continue to implement the reforms required for accession and that it still planned to join by 2030, but added that it was “crucial for the EU to respect our national interests and traditional values”.

Former Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili told the BBC the country was at an “unprecedented” turning point.

“Since we were independent 30 years ago, we were clearly pro-Western, we were clearly pro-Nato and clearly pro-EU and this was uniting any government that was in place.”

But now, he added, there was an effort “by the bunch of people who are controlling power in Tbilisi and the Kremlin to basically bring Georgia as fast as this is possible to Russian orbit”.

Adding to the criticism, more than 100 serving diplomats issued an open letter on Friday calling the Georgian government’s move to freeze European Union accession talks unconstitutional.

Georgia’s ambassador to Bulgaria also resigned in protest. Otar Berdzenishvili said he had over a two-decade career worked extensiely on progressing Georgia’s EU integration.

“Our tireless efforts must not be shaken or compromised under any circumstances. No, violence against the free will of peaceful protesters, full solidarity with them.”

A New Zealand naval ship which crashed into a coral reef before it caught fire and sank had been left on autopilot, an official inquiry has found.

Crew members of HMNZS Manawanui had thought the ship was under manual control while sailing in Samoan waters.

All 75 people aboard were evacuated safely. But the submerged ship started leaking oil into the ocean, prompting fears in nearby coastal villages.

HMNZS Manawanui was the first ship New Zealand had lost since World War Two. It was one of nine ships in the country’s small navy fleet.

The first report from an inquiry into the incident was released on Friday. It found that crew members had believed there were problems with the ship’s thruster when they could not change the vessel’s direction.

But none of the crew had bothered to check whether the ship was still on autopilot, before it crashed.

Navy chief Garin Golding told reporters that “the direct cause of the grounding has been determined as a series of human errors”.

“Muscle memory from the person in control should have leaned over to that panel and checked whether the screen said autopilot or not.”

The inquiry is expected to finish next year. Golding said that following the inquiry’s completion, officials would start a separate disciplinary process involving three unnamed crew members.

“I want to reassure the public of New Zealand that we will learn from this situation and that it is on me, as the Chief of Navy, to earn back your trust,” he said.

He added that divers were monitoring the “persistent slow leak”.

While equipment is set to be transported to Samoa this week to remove fuel and other pollutants from the ship, New Zealand authorities have not announced plans to remove the ship.

The ship was conducting a survey of waters off the island of Upolu when it struck a reef and caught fire during a bout of rough and windy weather. It sank shortly after that.

In the following days, social media users started trolling the ship’s female captain, claiming that her gender was to blame.

These commenters were denounced at the time by New Zealand’s defence minister as “armchair admirals”.

French President Emmanuel Macron has toured Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral live on TV, giving the public a first look inside the building since much of it was destroyed or damaged in a huge fire in 2019.

From the spire to the stained glass, it has been completely transformed. It is not just a renovation after the fire, but a complete overhaul including removing decades of crud and soot built up since the last restoration.

Here we take a look at some of the key features of the repair work and how it was achieved.

The collapse of the spire was the climax of the 2019 fire. Many people thought it was medieval, but in fact the original was taken down in the 1790s because it was deemed dangerous.

Its replacement, which burned down five years ago, was put up decades later as part of a neo-Gothic reconstruction conducted by architect Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc.

This time, carpenters used a mix of the traditional and the computerised to design and build the massive wooden base.

It was lifted into place by Europe’s largest crane, then a scaffolding shell was mounted allowing workers to assemble the steadily rising structure.

Like the rest of the roof, the spire is lined with lead. At the top a new gilded cock has been fitted to replace the original that fell in the fire. It was recovered but was too damaged to go back.

Inside the new cock are holy relics including a thorn from the cathedral’s Crown of Thorns, and a parchment with the names of 2,000 people who worked on the renovation.

The most striking feature of the renovated cathedral is the luminosity of the stonework. This is because all the limestone blocks have been cleaned, or in some parts replaced.

Replacement stone was sourced in quarries in northern France. Experts were able to detect tiny features in the original stone – like certain fossils – that helped them to determine the geographical origin.

The vast majority of the masonry was undamaged, but it was covered not just in age-old accretions of dust and dirt from the past, but also in a layer of soot and lead powder from the fire. It was cleaned with high-power vacuums, and then with a spray which peeled off to remove the dirt.

Overall some 40,000 square metres of stone were cleaned.

To rebuild the vaulted ceiling beneath where the spire had stood, masons had to relearn the principles of Gothic architecture – using a wooden frame to put the stones in place and crowning it all with the keystone.

It was the wooden roof that burned – all 100 metres of it. None of the 800-year-old timbers survived. But the decision was quickly made to replace them as faithfully as possible – with oak from the forests of France.

By happy coincidence an architect called Remi Fromont had conducted an in-depth study of the timber frame as part of his university thesis. This served as a template for carpenters.

Some 1,200 oak trees had to be found, with the stipulation that they be straight, free from knots and a condition called “frost-crack”, and 13 metres long.

Much of the wood was hand-sawn then hewed into shape with axes, just as the beams were in the 13th century.

Altogether there are 35 “fermes” (the triangular structures that take the weight) running the length of the building.

Many of the exterior sculptures – including the famous (but not medieval) gargoyles and chimaeras – were damaged by high-pressure hoses used to fight the fire. Many were already in poor condition because of pollution.

A workshop was set up in front of the cathedral to repair and where necessary replace these statues. Five of the gargoyles (products of Viollet-le-Duc’s imagination) were scanned by computer, and then re-made in limestone.

Inside the cathedral, the most famous sculptures – such as The Virgin of the Pillar and The Vow of Louis XIII – emerged unscathed. But they have all been cleaned and given minor repairs.

The cathedral’s many paintings have also been cleaned. These include the “Mays” – massive scenes from the life of Christ which were an annual gift to the cathedral in the 17th Century from the goldsmiths of Paris.

One of the most remarkable changes to the cathedral is the return of colour to the choir and many of the side-chapels.

Here again, the fire offered an opportunity to rediscover the glories that lay beneath decades of crud and soot. Blues, reds and golds have re-emerged, combining with the creaminess of the rejuvenated limestone to create a lightness that must be much closer to the original experience.

The same is true of the stained-glass windows. These were undamaged, but filthy. They were dismantled, removed, cleaned, and returned. The big rose-windows were left alone.

Again, much of what the visitor sees today is not actually medieval – but the product of the medieval imagination of Viollet-le-Duc.

The great organ – built in the 18th Century – was unaffected by either heat or water on the night of the fire. What did for it was the accumulation of a yellow dust – lead monoxide – in its pipes.

The whole structure – 12 metres high, six keyboards, 7,952 pipes, 19 wind-chests – was disassembled and taken to workshops outside Paris.

Sheep-leather linings were replaced and new electronic controls were added. After reinstallation the instrument was re-tuned – a task which takes several months as each pipe is minutely altered.

On 7 December, the Archbishop of Paris’s first words on entering the reclaimed cathedral will be: “Awake oh organ, Let God’s praise be heard!”

The eight bells of the north tower were also removed in 2023 – a massive operation given their size. They were cleaned and treated, and then returned a few weeks ago. The biggest of the bells is called Emmanuel.

Visitors will also notice a change to the liturgical lay-out of the cathedral, whose altar, lectern and seating were all destroyed. A simple bronze altar has been created, with new chalices for the sacraments.

There are 1,500 new wooden chairs for the congregation, and a new reliquary behind the choir to hold the Crown of Thorns.

New vestments have also been created for clergy by designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.

Renovation work at Notre-Dame has been a boon for archaeologists, who have been able to access underground areas that date back to hundreds of years before the cathedral was built.

Among the many sets of bones they discovered are those believed to belong to the Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay.

Another major discovery was the carefully buried remains of the medieval rood-screen, which originally separated the sacred part of the church from the congregation.

This 11-metre stone partition, built in the 13th Century, contained rich and colourful sculptures depicting the life of Christ. It was dismantled in the 18th Century following a change in church rules.

But clergy clearly hoped the remains would be rediscovered because the parts appear to have been lain with great care beneath the ground. It is hoped they can be pieced together and put on display.

Despite the success of the renovation, work is not complete. There is still scaffolding around much of the eastern end, and in coming years the outside walls of the apse and sacristy will need treatment.

There are also plans to redesign the esplanade, and to create a museum in the neighbouring Hôtel-Dieu hospital.

The Israeli military has warned Lebanese citizens not to return to 60 villages in the south of the country, three days into a ceasefire after more than a year of fighting with the Shia armed group Hezbollah.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) published a map showing a swathe of territory several miles deep, which it said residents must not return to. Anyone who did, it said, would be putting themselves in danger.

More than a million Lebanese have been displaced by the fighting, mostly from the south. Tens of thousands of Israelis have also been displaced.

The truce came into effect on Wednesday morning, though officials in Israel and Lebanon have accused each other of already breaching it.

On Thursday, the IDF said its forces fired artillery and carried out air strikes against targets in southern Lebanon. It added that it had fired at suspects after spotting activity at a Hezbollah weapons facility, and vehicles arriving in several areas, which it said breached the ceasefire.

Lebanon accused Israel of violating the agreement “multiple times” and said it was monitoring the situation.

A multinational monitoring group which includes representatives from the US, France, and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) was set up as part of the ceasefire to oversee compliance with its terms.

In his first interview since the ceasefire was declared, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had instructed the IDF to wage “an intensive war” should Hezbollah commit a “massive violation” of the ceasefire.

The ceasefire “can be short”, he said in the interview with Israel’s Channel 14.

Under the terms of the agreement, which was brokered by the US and France, Israeli forces will withdraw from south Lebanon as the Lebanese army deploys there simultaneously with no other armed groups allowed to operate in the area. This is meant to happen within 60 days from the start of the ceasefire.

The zone which the IDF said residents should not yet return to stretches from Mansouri on the coast to Shebaa in the east.

On Wednesday, the Lebanese army warned residents not to return to areas where Israeli forces were before they had withdrawn.

Israel invaded southern Lebanon at the start of last month after the IDF intensified military action against Hezbollah.

Hezbollah began the current conflict with Israel by firing rockets in and around northern Israel on 8 October 2023, a day after Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel from Gaza which killed about 1,200 people.

Hezbollah said it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinians after Israel responded to the Hamas attack with a massive military campaign in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry says at least 44,330 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive.

Since 8 October, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire with increasing intensity. The Lebanese health ministry said Israeli strikes had killed at least 3,961 people and injured 16,520 others in that period. The figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Hezbollah’s attacks have killed 31 soldiers and 45 civilians inside Israel, Israeli authorities say. Another 45 Israeli soldiers have been killed fighting in southern Lebanon.

In Kibbutz Menara in northern Israel, the sound of gunfire from across the border marked the first day of the ceasefire with Hezbollah.

Menara sits face to face with the Lebanese village of Meiss el-Jabal. It was one of several places where the Israeli military said it fired towards suspects spotted nearby.

They were not gun battles with Hezbollah fighters, it said, but warning shots to push the suspects back. Four of them were arrested.

The handover of control on the Lebanese side of the border, from Israeli troops to the Lebanese army, has not yet begun.

And Lebanese residents have been told not to return there yet.

In Menara, the ceasefire bought Meitel and her 13-year-old daughter Gefen back their first visit home in more than a year.

“This is unbelievable. It’s like a nightmare,” Meitel said, as they inspected a damaged building.

They left the kibbutz on 8 October 2023, when Hezbollah began firing rockets into northern Israel the day after Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza.

Israel’s government said its intense bombardment and ground invasion in Lebanon would ensure the tens of thousands of northern Israeli residents of the evacuated from their homes would be able to return safely.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that would happen during a speech on Tuesday in which he said he had agreed to the ceasefire because the war had set Hezbollah back “tens of years”, destroyed most of its rockets, and demolished its infrastructure next to the border.

However, Meitel said she had little trust in the ceasefire, noting the gunfire that echoed through Menara’s empty streets during her visit.

“They want to come back. We need to keep them away,” she said.

Three quarters of the buildings in Menara have been destroyed in almost 14 months of fighting, along with the electricity, sewage and gas supplies.

The roof of the communal kitchen, caved in from a direct hit, lies tangled in hills of concrete and metal on the floor.

In house after house, the tell-tale tattoos of shrapnel damage, and rough-edged holes from anti-tank missiles have left homes burned out and unsafe.

Through the burned-out windows, the many shattered houses of their Lebanese neighbours are also visible.

Orna has lived in Menara through two previous wars but she said this ceasefire was different.

“Our forces will not leave these villages and will not allow terrorists to come back here. You can hear it yourself. Whenever someone tries to come back, they will be shot,” she explained.

“I personally will be come and be here regardless of what goes on there. But I’m a crazy, stubborn old lady. Families will not come back here. It’s impossible.”

The ceasefire is triggering the first discussions of what it would take for residents to return.

Repairing Menara will take months, but rebuilding a sense of security could take longer still.

The damage, a practical challenge, is also a reminder of what Hezbollah weapons can do.

Early in the morning they grabbed what they could – bags with clothes, blankets, and mattresses – and headed south.

Families who had been forced to flee because of the war did not wait to see if the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah would hold.

Just hours after it came into effect they were driving back home on the main road from Beirut.

Some waved the yellow and green flag of Hezbollah, others carried posters with images of the group’s former leader Hassan Nasrallah, killed in an Israeli air strike two months ago.

For many this was a moment of celebration.

“What happened is very good. This is a victory for the resistance,” said Abu Ali, referring to the ceasefire that had been brokered by the US and France.

“May God have mercy on our martyrs. The resistance is a source of honour and pride for us. Without its existence, there would be no homeland, no south, nothing.”

His plan was to return to the village Houla, right next to the border. But Israeli troops were still there, he said.

“We don’t know whether our house is still standing or has been destroyed,” Ali said. “But we’ll go there.”

The 60-day ceasefire will see the gradual withdrawal of the Israeli military, and of Hezbollah fighters and weapons, from Lebanon’s south.

The Lebanese army said it was already strengthening its presence there, as part of the deployment of an additional 5,000 soldiers under the deal. Both Israel and Hezbollah have said they are ready to respond to any violations.

The ceasefire is the main hope to bring an end to over a year of conflict, that intensified in September with widespread Israeli air strikes, assassinations of top Hezbollah officials and a ground invasion.

Israel’s stated goal was to move the group away from the border and stop the attacks on its northern communities.

In Lebanon, more than one million people were displaced, mostly from Shia Muslim areas in the south, the eastern Bekka Valley and Dahieh in Beirut – which are essentially controlled by Hezbollah, the powerful militia and political party supported by Iran.

They started to return despite warnings from Israeli and Lebanese authorities that it was not yet safe to do so.

“It doesn’t matter if the house is still intact or not, the important thing is that we are returning, thanks to the blood of our martyr, Nasrallah,” said Fatma Balhas, who was travelling to the town of Seddiqine.

Hezbollah-allied media also said this was a sign the group had been victorious in the war.

Near Sidon, the first big city on the coast south of Beirut, cars drove on the opposite carriageway, as a traffic jam formed just outside a military checkpoint.

Soldiers handed out leaflets telling people to not touch unexploded ordnance. “Don’t get close, don’t touch it, report it immediately”.

As night fell on Wednesday the truce appeared to be holding, with UN chief Antonio Guterres describing it as the “first ray of hope for peace amid the darkness of the past months”.

The war has devastated this country, and recovery will be long and difficult. And what will happen with Hezbollah is not clear. The group has been diminished, but it still enjoys significant support.

For Lebanon, it means this crisis is not over.

A ceasefire has come into effect between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon after a deal was agreed to end 13 months of fighting.

In October 2023, Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza and Israel launched retaliatory air strikes in Lebanon.

The conflict escalated in late September 2024, when Israel launched an intense air campaign and ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

In Lebanon, more than 3,800 people have been killed since October 2023, according to Lebanese authorities, with one million people forced to flee their homes.

On the Israeli side, at least 82 soldiers and 47 civilians have been killed, while 60,000 people have been displaced, Israeli authorities say.

• Follow live updates on this story
• What we know about Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire deal
• Questions over Hezbollah’s future after ceasefire
• Israeli anger at ‘irresponsible and hasty’ ceasefire
• Watch: People in Israel and Lebanon react to ceasefire deal

Lebanon is a small country with a population of about 5.5 million people, which borders Syria to the north and east, Israel to the south, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. It is about 170km (105 miles) away from Cyprus.

Under the terms of the ceasefire, Hezbollah must end its armed presence in the area of southern Lebanon between the Blue Line – the unofficial border between Lebanon and Israel – and the Litani River, about 30km (20 miles) to the north.

Over the next 60 days, Israel will gradually withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon and thousands of Lebanese army troops will move into the vacated positions in parallel, the agreement says.

The Lebanese army will ensure that Hezbollah’s infrastructure or weaponry is removed and that it cannot be rebuilt, according to a senior US official.

Under UN Security Council resolution 1701, which ended the last war in 2006, the area south of the Litani should be free of any armed personnel or weapons other than those of the Lebanese state and the UN peacekeeping force (Unifil). However, both sides claimed violations of the resolution.

The US and France will join the existing tripartite mechanism, involving Unifil, Lebanon and Israel, which will be charged with monitoring violations, the senior US official said.

The agreement also says that “these commitments do not preclude either Israel or Lebanon from exercising their inherent right of self-defence, consistent with international law”. Israel’s prime minister insisted it would “maintain full freedom of military action” to attack Hezbollah if it violated the agreement.

Tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians displaced by the war have started returning to their homes in the south, despite being warned by the Israeli military that it was not safe to return to areas where its soldiers were still deployed.

Israel launched its ground invasion of southern Lebanon on the night of 30 September 2024, with troops and tanks crossing the border in several locations.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was carrying out “limited, localised, and targeted ground raids” to dismantle what it called Hezbollah’s “terrorist infrastructure”.

Analysis by experts at the Institute for the Study of War suggests Israeli ground operations were limited to areas within a few kilometres of the border, as shown in the map below.

The IDF warned people living in dozens of towns and villages in southern Lebanon to leave their homes and head north of the Awali River, which meets the coast about 50km (30 miles) from the border with Israel.

Lebanese civilians were also told by the IDF not to use vehicles to travel south of the Litani River.

The IDF carried out air strikes in Lebanon throughout the conflict.

But it sharply escalated the air campaign on 23 September 2024, when it launched an operation targeting what it said were Hezbollah infrastructure sites and weapons in all areas of the country where the group has a strong presence.

However, Lebanese authorities say more than 700 women and 200 children have been killed since the start of the conflict, as well as another 200 people working in the country’s health sector.

As the chart below shows, the intensity of the strikes stepped up significantly in the weeks before the Israeli ground invasion in late September and peaked in October.

The majority of Israeli strikes were in southern Lebanon, where about a million people lived before the conflict escalated over a year ago.

The map below – using analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University – shows which areas of Lebanon sustained the most concentrated damage during the conflict.

As the following map shows, Beirut was also heavily targeted by Israeli air strikes.

There were some strikes close to central Beirut but the majority of them hit the southern suburbs of the city – densely populated areas that were home to hundreds of thousands of civilians.

These areas, close to the international airport, have a strong Hezbollah presence and it was a series of strikes on buildings there that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September.

There were several dozens air strikes in the southern suburbs and central Beirut on 26 November hours before the ceasefire deal was agreed.

Israel has a decades-long history of conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon but it is just one of the fronts that it is currently engaged in hostilities.

The others include armed forces and non-state armed groups in several countries in the Middle East, including Iran, Syria and Iran-backed groups operating in Gaza, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

When a sitting vice-president says she has hired assassins to kill the president, and dreams of cutting off his head, you might think that country was in serious trouble.

But then this is the Philippines, where politics and melodrama go hand in hand.

“I have talked to a person,” Vice-president Sara Duterte said on her Facebook page last weekend. “I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM [President Marcos], [First Lady] Liza Araneta, and [House Speaker] Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke. I said, do not stop until you kill them, and then he said yes.”

Last month she told reporters her relationship with President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos had become toxic, and she dreamed of cutting off his head.

She also threatened to dig up the body of the president’s father from the Heroes’ Cemetery in Manila and dump the ashes in the sea.

Behind all this drama is a once powerful political alliance which has spectacularly unravelled.

The decision by the Marcos and Duterte clans to join forces in the 2022 presidential election was a marriage of convenience. Both candidates were the offspring of presidents – Sara Duterte’s father Rodrigo was the incumbent then – and had strong support in different regions of the Philippines. Both had populist appeal.

However, having both run for president risked dividing their supporters and losing to a third candidate.

So she agreed that Marcos would go for president, while she went for vice-president – the two posts are elected separately – but that they would form one team on the campaign trail.

The assumption was that the younger Duterte would then be in prime position to contest the next presidential election in 2028.

It proved a very effective strategy. The UniTeam, as they branded themselves, won by a landslide.

However, as any of her predecessors could have told Duterte, the vice-presidency is largely ceremonial, and has few powers.

The Dutertes had wanted the influential defence portfolio; President Marcos instead gave her Education, an early sign he was wary of letting his vice-president build up her power base.

He also made an abrupt turn away from the politics of his predecessor.

He ordered the Philippines navy and coastguard to stand up to China in disputed areas of the South China Sea. This was a marked contrast to President Rodrigo Duterte who had refused to challenge China’s dominant presence there, and even declared that he loved Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Marcos also toned down President Duterte’s infamous war on drugs, in which thousands of suspected drug dealers were gunned down.

He has hinted at the possibility of rejoining the International Criminal Court, which has issued an indictment for crimes against humanity against Rodrigo Duterte. The former president has also found himself in front of the Philippines Senate being grilled about the extrajudicial killings that happened during his presidency.

Relations between the two camps soured further when Marcos’s allies in the lower house launched an investigation into Sara Duterte’s use of the confidential funds she was allocated when she got the job.

In July, the vice-president resigned as education secretary, and her language became increasingly inflammatory.

Sara Duterte is no stranger to controversy. Thirteen years ago, when she was mayor of Davao City, she was filmed repeatedly punching a court official.

She comes from the same political mould as her outspoken father, both of them known for tough talking. He called the Pope a “son of a whore” and boasted of having killed people.

He describes her as the “alpha” character of the family who always gets her way; she says he is hard to love. Like her father she likes riding big motorbikes.

Her latest threats to her one-time ally President Marcos, though, may prove to be one verbal indiscretion too far.

Marcos has responded by calling Duterte’s comments “reckless” and “troubling”. The Philippines National Bureau of Investigation – its equivalent of the American FBI – has summoned the vice-president to explain her threats on Friday.

She has now walked them back, denying they were real. “This is a plan without flesh,” she explained, accusing Marcos of being a liar who was leading the country to hell.

Perhaps it was inevitable that two such powerful families would become rivals in the maelstrom of Filipino politics, which is still largely about personalities, big families and regions.

Political loyalties are fluid; senators and members of congress constantly shift their party allegiances. Power inevitably concentrates around the president, with his authority to dispense government funds. Former presidents are routinely investigated for corruption or abuses of power once they leave office.

President Marcos wants to rehabilitate the reputation of his family, after his father’s shameful ejection by a popular uprising in 1986, and will be keen to influence the choice of his successor in 2028. The Dutertes have their own dynastic ambitions.

For now Sara Duterte is still vice-president. She could be removed through impeachment by the Senate, but that would be a risky move for President Marcos.

She enjoys strong popular support in the south, and among the millions of overseas Filipino workers, and getting sufficient support in the Senate for impeachment could be difficult.

Mid-term elections are due in May next year, in which the entire lower house and half of the 24 senatorial seats will be contested. They will be seen as a test of the strength for each of the rival camps.

Duterte’s explosive break with the president is an opportunity for her to back her own candidates, and present herself as an alternative to a government which has lost popularity over the lacklustre performance of the economy.

That could give her a better launching pad for the 2028 presidential race than staying shackled to the Marcos administration.

But after her incendiary comments of the past few weeks, Filipinos must be wondering: what will she say next?

For the first time in almost a decade, MPs will vote on Friday on giving terminally ill adults in England and Wales the right to have an assisted death. While it’s something that remains illegal in most countries, more than 300 million people now live in countries which have legalised assisted dying.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Austria have all introduced assisted dying laws since 2015 – when UK MPs last voted on the issue – some allowing assisted death for those who are not terminally ill.

The proposed bill in England and Wales comes with safeguards supporters say will make it the strictest set of rules in the world, with patients needing the approval of a High Court judge. Critics on the other hand say changing the law would be a dangerous step that would place the vulnerable at risk. They argue the focus should be on improving patchy access to palliative care.

Ahead of Friday’s vote, we look at assisted dying laws in North America, Europe and Australasia.

• LIVE UPDATES: MPs vote in favour of allowing assisted dying
• EXPLAINED: What is assisted dying and when is the vote?
• TERMINALLY ILL: Two people close to death on what they want from vote
• CLOSE CALL: MPs talk of hardest decision of their careers

Across the US, assisted dying – which some critics prefer to call assisted suicide – is legal in 10 states, as well as in Washington DC. Oregon was one of the first places in the world to offer help to die for some patients, in 1997, and so has more than 25 years’ experience. It has become the model on which other US assisted dying laws have been framed.

In Oregon, assisted dying is open to terminally ill, mentally competent adults expected to die within six months – and must be signed off by two doctors. Since 1997, 4,274 people have received a prescription for a lethal dose of medication – with 2,847 (67%) deaths.

Two thirds of patients in the state who asked for help to die last year had cancer. Around one in 10 had a neurological condition and about the same proportion had heart disease. Of the 367 patients who took a lethal dose of medication last year, the vast majority (91.6%) said loss of autonomy was a key concern, while others cited:

• Loss of dignity – 234 patients (63.8%)
• Losing control of bodily functions – 171 (46.6%)
• Concern about being a burden on family and friends – 159 (43.3%)
• Inadequate pain control – 126 (34.3%)
• Financial implications of treatment – 30 (8.2%)

In Oregon, as in other US states that permit assisted dying, the lethal medication must be self-administered – the same is proposed in England and Wales. Around one in three of those prescribed a lethal dose don’t go ahead with it.

Oregon is important for supporters of assisted dying in England and Wales as they point out it has remained restricted to terminally ill adults since its introduction. However, opponents say some of the rules have been relaxed. A residency requirement has been lifted, which means it is open to people from outside the state. The number of assisted deaths has also risen substantially over the years.

Canada is the country often cited by opponents of assisted dying as an example of the so-called “slippery slope” – a place where assisted dying has been extended and made available to more people since it was first brought in. Medical assistance in dying (Maid) was introduced in 2016, initially just for the terminally ill.

This was amended in 2021 and extended to those experiencing “unbearable suffering” from an irreversible illness or disability. It’s still due to become available to those with a mental illness in three years, despite delays.

Critics say the more the law is widened, the more disabled and vulnerable people will be put at risk. There has also been a dramatic growth in the number of people using Maid. Four in 100 deaths in Canada are now medically assisted, compared to about one in 100 in Oregon.

Kim Leadbeater, the MP who proposed the assisted dying bill in Westminster, says the Canadian system is not what is being debated for England and Wales, where eligibility would be restricted to the terminally ill.

Across Europe, six countries have some form of legalised assisted dying: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain and Austria. In all of them – unlike the proposals in England and Wales – help to die is not restricted to the terminally ill.

Switzerland was the first country in the world to create a “right to die” when it made assisted suicide legal in 1942. It is one of the few countries which allows foreigners access to help to die via organisations like Dignitas, in Zurich. More than 500 Britons have died at Dignitas in the past two decades, including 40 last year. The lethal medication must be self-administered.

The Netherlands and Belgium both legalised assisted dying more than 20 years ago for patients experiencing unbearable suffering from an incurable illness, including mental health issues. It has since been extended to children – the only European countries to allow this. Both allow euthanasia – or physician-assisted dying.

Most recently, Spain and Austria have legalised assisted dying for both terminal illness and intolerable suffering. In Austria, the drugs must be self-administered, whereas in Spain a medical professional can administer them.

Despite the variation, what’s clear is that eligibility for assisted dying is far wider across Europe than is being proposed anywhere in the British Isles. MSPs at Holyrood are to debate a similar bill covering Scotland as that being voted on at Westminster.

A bill to allow terminally ill adult patients to die if they have 12 months or less to live has nearly passed all its stages in the Isle of Man parliament. The legislation is likely to get Royal Assent next year and the first assisted death on the island could happen in 2027. There is a residency requirement of five years. Jersey has also committed to changing the law to allow assisted dying for the terminally ill.

In the past few years voluntary assisted dying has become legal across most of Australia. While in New Zealand, patients must be terminally ill and expected to die within six months. That is extended to 12 months for those with a neurodegenerative condition in eligible parts of Australia.

In both countries, patients can self-administer the lethal medication. But it can also be administered by a doctor or nurse, usually via an intravenous injection.

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Can a navigation app be held responsible if a user gets into an accident?

That is the question being asked in India after three men died when their car veered off an unfinished bridge and fell on to a riverbed in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

Police are still investigating the incident, which took place on Sunday, but they believe that Google Maps led the group to take that route.

A part of the bridge had reportedly collapsed earlier this year because of floods and while locals knew this and avoided the bridge, the three men were not aware of this and were from outside the area. There were no barricades or sign boards indicating that the bridge was unfinished.

Authorities have named four engineers from the state’s road department and an unnamed official from Google Maps in a police complaint on charges of culpable homicide.

A spokesperson from Google told BBC Hindi that it was co-operating with the investigation.

The tragic accident has spotlighted India’s poor road infrastructure and sparked a debate on whether navigation apps like Google Maps share responsibility for such incidents.

Some blame the app for not providing accurate information while others argue that it is a larger failure on the part of the government for not cordoning off the place.

Google Maps is the most popular navigation app in India and has become synonymous with GPS (Global Positioning System), a satellite-based radio navigation system.

It also powers the services of many ride-sharing, e-commerce and food delivery platforms. The app reportedly has around 60 million active users and witnesses around 50 million searches in a day.

But the app has frequently come under scrutiny for providing incorrect directions, sometimes leading to fatal accidents.

In 2021, a man from Maharashtra state drowned after he drove his car into a dam, allegedly while following directions on the app.

Last year, two young doctors in Kerala state died after they drove their car into a river. Police said that they had been following a route shown by the app and cautioned people against relying on it too much when roads were flooded.

But how does Google Maps learn about changes on a road?

GPS signals from users’ apps track traffic changes along routes – an increase signals congestion, while a decrease suggests a road is less used. The app also receives updates from governments and users about traffic jams or closures.

Complaints related to high traffic, or the ones notified by authorities are given priority, as Google does not have the manpower to deal with the millions of complaints streaming in daily, says Ashish Nair, the founder of mapping platform Potter Maps and a former Google Maps employee.

“A map operator then uses satellite imagery, Google Street View and government notifications to confirm the change and update the map.”

According to Mr Nair, navigating apps cannot be held responsible for mishaps as their terms of services make it clear that users must apply their own judgement on the road and that the information provided by the app might differ from actual conditions.

Besides, it is simply very difficult for a platform like Google, which manages maps across the world, to keep across every change that happens on a road, he adds.

Unlike other countries, India also does not have a robust system for reporting such issues on time.

“Data remains a big challenge in India. There is no system for infrastructural changes to be logged into a web interface, which can then be used by apps like Google Maps. Countries like Singapore have such a system,” Mr Nair says.

He adds that India’s vast population and fast-paced development make it even more challenging to get accurate, real-time data. “In other words, bad maps are here to stay until governments become more proactive about collecting and sharing data.”

Lawyers are divided on whether GPS apps can be held legally responsible for road accidents.

Advocate Saima Khan says that since India’s Information Technology (IT) Act gives digital platforms like Google Maps the status of an ‘intermediary’ (a platform that merely disseminates information provided by a third party) it is protected against liability.

But she adds that if it can be proven that the platform did not rectify its data despite being given correct, timely information, then it might be held liable for negligence.

It is the perfect start to a holiday: your plane ticket is cheap, your cabin baggage is safely stowed, the engines are roaring into life – and the pilot has announced that there’s no need to worry about the environmental impact.

This is Jet Zero, a vision where air travel is entirely carbon neutral thanks to new technology and green ventures that offset the environmental impact. The plan was drafted in 2022 when Boris Johnson was prime minister, marking a step towards the government’s legal obligation to reach net zero by 2050. The Labour government has since made a similar pledge, and in addition it wants all domestic flights and UK airport operations to reach zero emissions by 2040.

This is no easy feat when you consider the scale of the challenge: one passenger taking an economy-class flight from London to New York generates 309kg of carbon dioxide, which would take roughly a year to absorb via 10 mature trees.

Multiply this on the global scale and the aviation industry would need to plant roughly 100 billion mature trees each year to offset its emissions. For UK emissions alone you’d need a forest almost the size of Wales.

So, just how realistic is the plan to hit Jet Zero by 2050? And what is the knock-on cost for passengers?

Earlier this year, Anthony Browne, who was the aviation minister in the Conservative government at the time, said that he thought any increase in ticket prices would be “marginal”.

“We don’t think the difference will be noticeable to most consumers,” he said.

But some experts claim that politicians are not being realistic. Sir Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, argues that there “definitely would be higher cost”.

“Governments desperately don’t want to tell people they’re going to have to pay for what they do.”

But ultimately, the cost depends on which methods are employed to cut or reduce emissions.

The previous government said that it aimed reach Jet Zero by focusing on “the rapid development of technologies”, as well as operational improvements and – among other things – more sustainable fuel types.

This is not an entirely new quest. Aircraft around the world have been steadily getting cleaner since 1969 when the first high-bypass turbofan engines were used on the new Boeing 747 aircraft. In the years since there have been other innovations including sharklets, or upturned wing tips on modern planes that reduce drag and save, on average, 4% of fuel per trip.

More developments are in the pipeline, including a new type of jet engine, developed by Rolls Royce, called the “UltraFan”, which will reduce average fuel consumption by 10%.

“Because it’s a gearbox, the turbine can run very fast, much more efficiently, the fan can run slower and be much bigger,“ explains Simon Burr, a director at Rolls-Royce.

The problem is that, though it was first tested in 2023, it’s unlikely to be available on commercial aircraft until the 2030s because of production lead times – and even then, a 10% improvement is impressive but not a game changer.

Aviation’s CO2 emissions come primarily through jet engines using carbon-rich fossil fuels, which produce CO2 when burned, so there have been attempts to create an alternative type made from renewable biomass and waste resources, known as Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).

The first SAF flight ran between London and Amsterdam in 2008 using fuel derived from a mixture of Brazilian babassu nuts and coconuts.

Now the British government says that 22% of all jet fuel from UK aviation has to come from sustainable sources by 2040. But this comes with further challenges.

In the UK, SAF is mainly made from cooking oil, some of which is shipped from Asia, and shipping is responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions.

Alternative methods of creating SAF require large quantities of electricity as part of the manufacturing process. This would involve a vast amount of renewable energy to make it sustainable.

“It’s very hard, to think there is such a thing as a sustainable aviation fuel,” says Sir Dieter Helm. “There are aviation fuels that are less polluting than the ones being used at the moment, and you can use elements of biofuel and chip fat and so on.

“Think about the scale that’s required to do it.”

There is another more unexpected way that airlines could reduce emissions. That is, making their flight paths more direct to reduce fuel consumption.

Currently most planes fly on routes determined by a network of beacons, many of which were put in place decades ago. As a result they don’t always fly by the shortest route, but “airspace modernisation”, as it is known, will allow for straighter paths to destinations.

Satellite technology is required to do this: aircraft flying over the Atlantic used to have to fly at least 40 miles apart, but the satellite technology means that aircraft can in theory fly as close as 14 miles apart, allowing more aircraft to fly on the direct flight paths.

The Jet Zero Strategy estimates that this, together with other fuel efficiency improvements, could cut emissions by as much as 15% by 2050.

But the National Air Traffic Services (NATS), which control most flights in and out of England and Wales, caution that these changes are neither easy nor quick. “It’s a very, very complicated thing to do,” warns Chris Norsworthy, director of future planning.

“The national infrastructure change of this type takes many years. The deployments we’ve made already are years in the making.”

Hidden away in a mini aircraft hangar of sorts, just outside Bristol, inventor Stephen Fitzpatrick has spent seven years working on a pioneering aircraft that could be the basis of another solution. His carbon fibre creation, known as VX4, has eight propellers and looks like a giant drone, but what’s crucial is that it doesn’t use fuel. Instead it is powered by lithium-ion batteries similar to those in electric cars.

The batteries alone weigh 800kg, which brings the first challenge: the sheer weight limits how far it can fly.

Mr Fitzpatrick says the VX4 will have a range of around 100 miles to begin with. “Each year the batteries that we use will improve… Over time, we’ll be able to develop a hybrid powertrain, probably using hydrogen fuel cells and batteries, and that will increase the range further.”

The prospect of replacing jet engine-powered long-haul flights is, however, remote. “There is no battery chemistry in the world that will give us the energy we need to take hundreds of passengers over the Atlantic,” he concedes.

Harnessing hydrogen in other ways may be a better bet.

The British-American aircraft company, ZeroAvia, says it expects to have an 80-seater powered entirely by hydrogen in the air within two to three years. Airbus is developing something similar.

Both are propeller planes, however, with limited speeds and ranges.

The reductions from SAF, fuel efficiency improvements and zero carbon aircraft will only cut aviation emissions by around a third, according to the previous government’s estimates. So another part of the Jet Zero strategy involves a pricing scheme to charge airlines for CO2 emissions and carbon offsetting.

Airlines already pay a duty for each flight someone takes in the UK, a cost that is passed to passengers. In much of the UK (excluding Scotland) this adds £7 to each domestic flight, £14 to short-haul ones and £92 for long-haul. But carbon offsetting means paying another fee.

Some schemes have been highly controversial, with questions around how to prove how many trees have been prevented from being cut down.

Cait Hewitt, policy director at the Aviation Environment Federation, is concerned that the current informal offsetting projects may be counterproductive: “They could actually have made that problem a bit worse over time by giving consumers the false impression that the emissions from their flight [are] being cancelled out somehow by an offset.”

Duncan McCourt, chief executive of Sustainable Aviation, an umbrella group for UK airlines, airports, manufacturers and others in the business, is optimistic that removing carbon from flying won’t add much more than a few pounds to the cost of an airline ticket.

“We think we can do it while enabling people to continue to fly and continue to get that benefit of flying, such as connecting people, such as being able to go on holiday,” he says.

But the Jet Zero plan says nothing directly about the knock-on cost to passengers. Instead, it refers to “demand management”.

Sir Dieter Helm has his own take on what Jet Zero means for holidaymakers and fully believes that it will lead to higher costs. As for the likelihood of the government hitting its Jet Zero target on time, he is unconvinced of this too, but he also suggests that this may not be the point.

“It depends whether you think Jet Zero is… genuinely a target and they mean to achieve it. I’m really sceptical about the second.”

And now, the number of flights taken annually by people in the UK is projected to rise even further, translating into an additional 150 million more flights a year. So the scale of the government’s challenge, which was large enough when it began, is only set to grow.

One of Zambia’s most popular actors and filmmakers Owas Mwape broke a social taboo by admitting that one of his young sons has an addiction to drugs when he posted a recent appeal for advice on Facebook.

The 52-year-old told the BBC he wanted to use his standing as a public figure to open the lid on Zambia’s drug problems and help other parents who fear the stigma of having a child with substance abuse in a socially conservative country.

“I’ve discovered most parents hide such kind of things, they’re hiding their children,” said Mwape, the father of five sons and one daughter.

“It’s out there and on our doorsteps. We can’t run away from it. As long as you send your children to school, know that it could hit your household.”

The star of award-winning films like Mwansa the Great agreed to sit down to do an in-depth interview with the BBC to discuss the acute pain he feels as a parent and the problem that has clearly shattered his family over the last four to five years.

Mayamiko, now 23, was a teenager when things began to unravel.

First his dad noticed that money was missing from his bank account – Mayamiko had hacked his phone to steal about $3,000 (£2,300) over about two years. Then there was some petty thieving.

Initially it was not clear that he was using the money for drugs, but things came to a head a few minutes before he was due to write final-year school exams – and he ran away from home to live on the streets.

It all clearly stunned and pained Mwape who could not believe the boy he described as sparky and generous could have gone down this path, saying his whole demeanour changes when he’s on drugs.

“It’s a very difficult thing to be a father in the moment that I have found myself in. It’s tough because every child is special and Maya is one of those special kids because he is intelligent,” he says.

But he says you have to forgive your children to help them, turning to an African proverb to express himself: “Your child is like an axe, it will hammer you and you pick it up and put it on your shoulder.”

Mayamiko is now back in touch with his father, but it is always on his terms as he uses different phone numbers, making it difficult to contact him.

But it has given his father hope that things can change – though he realises that for any rehab to work, Mayamiko needs to want to change.

When we met for our interview, Mwape had managed to coax Mayamiko to come along too. It was a frank conversation that at one stage turned into a moving discussion between father and son.

“Maya, if we found you work to do and you start getting paid, are you going to work extra hard?” Mwape asked him nearly an hour into our session.

Mayamiko, whose speech was somewhat incoherent and punctuated by long pauses, admitted he would like some help to change his lifestyle and be able to earn money.

His dad followed up with this question: “Are you promising us that you will stay away from drugs?”

Mayamiko hesitated and said: “Yeah.”

For his father it was a relief to hear that he has aspirations – it is something that he can build on.

But the most frustrating thing for Mwape is that his second-oldest son is never explicit about what drugs he is taking, how he gets hold of them – and often obfuscates when asked a question.

“When you’re trying to speak to him, you can tell that things are not adding up, so that’s why for me I really need that sort of… intervention.”

When probed more during the interview about the drugs, Mayamiko said he mostly took “cheese” – a reference to marijuana – or “anything”.

That is why Mwape, who is currently starring in popular Zambian soap opera Zuba that airs on DStv, took to Facebook, because he wanted to know about rehab centres that have proven examples of success – stories not widely shared in a country where drug addiction is such a hush-hush affair.

There are several private facilities in Zambia – but no publicly funded one – and he says some people have even reportedly sent their children to China.

“I couldn’t believe [it], there were a number of parents who came into my inbox with similar problems,” he said.

Mwape’s experience has also influenced the films his company has recently produced – with subject matter considered to be “un-Zambian”.

“Girls 2 Ladies is about drugs in boarding schools,” he said.

“I’m not saying boarding schools are not good, but I think it’s important as parents now that we put a keen eye to try to find out what type of schools we’re sending our children to, [which is] one of my greatest fears even with what type of rehabilitation centre I should send him [Mayamiko] to.”

His oldest son, Maxwell, has just directed The Flask, a hard-hitting account of an alcoholic’s downward spiral into addiction that will be released next month.

Researching all these projects has led Mwape to the door of Zambia’s Drug Enforcement Commission (DEC) – headed by Nason Banda, whom he praises for his enlightened leadership that favours interventions for youngsters rather than jail – which many parents fear.

“Sending them to prison doesn’t help because there are still drugs in there,” Mwape said.

According to Mr Banda, drug abuse in Zambia is worsening, with some of the most abused drugs being cannabis, cocaine, heroin and over-the-counter medicines such as the cough syrup Benylin, which contains codeine.

He told the BBC there had been a 300% increase in the number of people his organisation had attended to over the past 10 years.

“Now that is just as DEC but we have several other institutions that assist with drug-dependent persons, so that is not the full reflection of the extent of the problem.”

The head of the country’s anti-drug agency said the main drivers of drug abuse were broken families plus the accessibility and affordability of drugs.

Peer pressure and the glamourising of drug culture by adults had also contributed, he said.

The DEC was committed to fighting drug abuse by targeting suppliers, consumers and proceeds of the trade, Mr Banda said, adding that he also wanted the government to launch a dedicated rehab centre if the money was available.

For Mwape, he hopes his openness about his son’s problems will not only help his own family but others too – and stop the country living in denial.

And while he admits the pain of a parent never leaves, he feels he will succeed – and that Mayamiko will get clean.

“Sometimes, battles are never won by simply getting into battle – battles are won by employing strategy and I know that all strategies that I have employed are definitely taking me to the right place.”

• ‘Legendary Glamma’: How a grandma became an unlikely fashion icon
• Zambians mourn gospel singer popular in churches and clubs
• Zambia made education free, now classrooms are crammed

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has said it is “unbelievable” that the Labour government have decided to no longer contest a discrimination case brought by Belfast rap group Kneecap.

The group won its case against the UK government over a decision Badenoch took when she was a minister to withdraw an arts grant.

The group was awarded £14,250 – the same amount they were initially granted.

A government spokesperson said the decision was made not to continue contesting the band’s challenge as “we do not believe it is in the public interest”.

They added: “This government’s priority is to try to reduce costs and help protect the taxpayer from further expense.”

Badenoch described the move as “yet another cowardly decision after giving away the Chagos Islands“.

“Labour will always capitulate rather than defend UK interests,” a spokesperson for the Conservative leader added.

The decision to block the grant, taken by Badenoch when she was business and trade minister, was described in court by Kneecap’s barrister as “unlawful and procedurally unfair”.

In a statement, the band said Badenoch and her department had “tried to silence us and they have failed”.

The band said it would split the £14,250 equally between two youth organisations who work with Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland “to create a better future for our young people”.

Kneecap originally applied for a grant allocated to support UK-registered artists in global markets in December 2023.

The group, who have faced controversy for their lyrics and political outlook, were successful in their application, but were subsequently blocked from receiving the funding after an intervention by the Department for Business and Trade.

At the time, then-UK Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch’s spokesperson said they did not want to hand taxpayers’ money “to people that oppose the United Kingdom itself”.

The band’s music and marketing heavily features themes relating to Irish republicanism and opposition to British rule in Northern Ireland.

The group have courted controversy and it claimed it was told a 2019 tour, entitled Farewell to the Union, had angered the then Conservative government.

Kneecap have also antagonised unionists in Northern Ireland – one of their best known records is called Get Your Brits Out, a parody rap in which the band go on an imaginary, drug-fuelled night out with prominent members of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

In statement following Friday’s court hearing, band member DJ Próvaí said: “For us this action was never about £14,250, it could have been 50p.”

The group said its motivation for taking the case was “equality”.

“This was an attack on artistic culture, an attack on the Good Friday Agreement itself and an attack on Kneecap and our way of expressing ourselves.”

In a statement following the settlement, Badeonch’s spokesperson said “this case is not about whether a band promotes violence or hates the UK, as Kneecap clearly do; this is about whether government ministers have the ability to stop taxpayers’ money subsidising people who neither need nor deserve it”.

“Labour would rather waste your money than stand up to a group of Irish republicans who go to court because the UK government won’t hand them cash.”

Kneecap have said it will split the money awarded to them between two Belfast charities, Glór Na Móna in Ballymurphy and RCity Belfast on the Shankill Road.

Sarah Jane Waite, director of RCity Belfast, expressed the charity’s thanks for the “generosity and support from Kneecap”.

She said the donation will be used toward a number of projects, including both local and international programmes.

Meanwhile, Conchúr Ó Muadaigh, chairperson of Glór na Móna, said the support of Kneecap would have a “lasting on our work with young people and the Irish language revival here in west Belfast”.

Kneecap are an Irish-speaking rap trio from west Belfast who have courted controversy with their provocative lyrics and merchandise.

The group was formed in 2017 by three friends who go by the stage names of Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí.

Their rise to fame inspired a semi-fictionalised film starring Oscar-nominated actor Michael Fassbender.

The film gained rave reviews and won an audience award at the Sundance Film Festival.

However, the group has faced criticism and censorship over their politically-charged, expletive-filled and drug-referencing lyrics.

Their use of Troubles-related imagery has also offended some critics.

A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has followed through on his promise to eat the banana from a $6.2m (£4.9m) artwork he bought last week.

Justin Sun outbid six others to claim Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous 2019 work Comedian – a banana duct-taped to a wall – at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.

He ate the fruit during a news conference in Hong Kong where he used the moment to draw parallels between the artwork and cryptocurrency.

The banana is regularly replaced before exhibitions, with Mr Sun buying the right to display the installation along with a guide on how to replace the fruit.

It has been eaten twice before – first by a performance artist in 2019 and again by a South Korean student in 2023 – but neither paid any money to do so, let alone $6.2m.

“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” Mr Sun said.

“It’s much better than other bananas,” he added.

The 34-year-old said he was intrigued by the work, admitting he had “dumb questions” about whether the banana rotted.

The New York Times reported a fresh banana was bought for 35 cents on the day of last week’s auction, before becoming possibly one of the most expensive fruits in the world.

Each attendee at the event on Friday was given a banana and a roll of duct tape as a souvenir.

“Everyone has a banana to eat,” Mr Sun said.

Mr Sun runs the Tron blockchain network – a service where users can trade in cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that operate independent of banks, offering the potential of very secure decentralised transactions.

Mr Sun compared the artwork, and other abstract pieces like it, to NFTs.

These “non-fungible tokens” are pieces of digital artwork that have no intrinsic value, other than that prescribed by people.

NFTs can be traded on platforms like Mr Sun’s.

Last year, he was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for offering and selling unregistered security tokens. Mr Sun denies the charges and the case is ongoing.

This week, Mr Sun disclosed he made a $30m investment in a crypto project backed by US President-elect Donald Trump.

Television host Gregg Wallace has been accused of making “lesbian jokes constantly” by a woman who worked on a travel show with him.

The woman, who we are calling Anna, said he was “fascinated” by the fact she dated women and asked her the “logistics” of how it worked. She is one of a number of workers across a range of shows who came to BBC News with claims about the TV presenter.

On Thursday, MasterChef’s production company said Wallace is to step away from presenting the show while allegations of historical misconduct are investigated.

Wallace’s lawyers say it is entirely false that he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature. Masterchef’s production company Banijay UK has launched an investigation and said Wallace is co-operating.

• MasterChef’s Gregg Wallace steps aside after allegations

Downing Street said allegations about Wallace were “deeply concerning”.

A Number 10 spokesman said it was “right” that a thorough investigation is conducted but that “this of course is one for the BBC”.

“While that process is under way it wouldn’t be right for me to comment,” the spokesman added.

Other allegations the BBC has heard are that Wallace talked about spanking and threesomes in front of crew.

In a video posted on Instagram on Thursday evening, Wallace said: “I would like to thank all the people getting in touch, reaching out and showing their support.

“It’s good of you – thank you very much.”

Anna worked on Gregg Wallace’s Big Weekends in 2019. She told us that Wallace regularly talked about sex, and about domination and spanking.

“[It] was highly inappropriate,” she said.

She says he also constantly made comments about her sexual orientation, including when he met her partner.

“I date women and Gregg Wallace was fascinated by that,” she said.

She added that he asked her if she was “sure” she didn’t want to date men.

Another woman, who we are calling Georgina, worked on the BBC’s Eat Well For Less TV show with Wallace in 2019.

She says he would constantly say inappropriate things to her, such as making comments that his wife was only two years older than her.

“It made me uncomfortable,” she said. “What am I meant to say in response to that?”

On another occasion, she says she had to go to Wallace’s car to sort out his parking ticket for him.

She asked him if that was OK, to which he allegedly responded: “You can come to my car, but can you handle the fact everyone will think you just got off with a celebrity?”

Both Georgina, and her colleague, who we’re calling Lisa, also say he came out of a bathroom topless in front of them once during a shoot and asked them to take his coffee order.

“[Wallace’s] behaviour isn’t acceptable,” Lisa said.

“To not only continue to put women in these scenarios but to continue publicly platforming him is a disgrace to our industry standards.”

Georgina said she refused to work on a show with him afterwards.

Another young female worker, who the BBC is calling Amanda, highlighted two experiences with Wallace while filming the Channel 5 show, Gregg Wallace’s Big Weekends, in 2019.

The first, she said, was when they were travelling together by car. She said he took out his phone and showed her photos of a woman in her underwear.

A second time, she said they had just finished filming in Italy and she took him back to his hotel room.

She said he started showing them his outfits for the next day, and then took off his top and said “let me give you a fashion show”.

A male colleague was initially in the room, but she said he then left, leaving her alone with Wallace.

She said she still remembers the Millwall tattoo on his chest and that she found the hotel room experience very uncomfortable.

“It’s weird to be alone in a room with a topless stranger.”

BBC News, which is editorially independent from the wider organisation, started investigating Wallace in the summer, after becoming aware of allegations. The claims we have heard are from 13 people, across five shows, from 2005 to 2022.

One of them was the broadcaster Kirsty Wark, a Celebrity MasterChef contestant in 2011, who said he told “sexualised” jokes during filming.

On Tuesday, we sent a letter to Wallace’s representatives setting out allegations we have heard.

Two days later, it was announced that Wallace is to step away from presenting MasterChef pending an investigation.

Since then, more people have come forward with allegations about the presenter.

Writing on Instagram on Thursday, singer Sir Rod Stewart described Wallace as an “ill-mannered bully”, and said the presenter “humiliated” his wife when she was on MasterChef in 2021.

BBC News has asked Wallace’s representatives for a comment on Sir Rod’s post.

• A female worker on MasterChef in 2019, who said Wallace talked about his sex life and asked her if her new boyfriend had a nice bottom
• A female worker on the BBC Good Food Show in 2010, who said Wallace stared at her chest
• A female worker on Eat Well For Less in 2019, who said Wallace told her he wasn’t wearing any boxer shorts under his jeans
• A male worker on MasterChef in 2005-06, who said Wallace regularly said sexually explicit things on set. He said Wallace once said a dish tasted like his aunt’s vagina, and on another occasion, asked a female runner if she put her finger up her boyfriend’s bottom
• A male worker who worked on Big Weekends and other travel shows between 2019 and 2022, who says Wallace talked about threesomes with prostitutes and said he “loves spanking” multiple times a day

One of Britain’s biggest trade unions says it was aware of allegations about Wallace’s behaviour.

“I’d like to say I’m surprised by these reports, but… I guess my reaction is it was a matter of when, not if these stories started to emerge,” Philippa Childs, head of Bectu, told BBC News.

She said it was difficult for freelancers to be able to make complaints because of the precarious nature of the industry.

“They’re always concerned about where their next job is coming from or indeed are they going to be able to establish themselves in the industry,” she said.

“So there is quite a tendency not to report, to feel that it’s not safe to report, to feel that even if they do report, the production company or the broadcaster are not going to take them seriously and are not going to take action because of the power that people on screen might hold.”

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, former BBC One controller Lorraine Heggessey said Wallace was “the latest in a long line of presenters behaving badly”.

She said she was “particularly concerned” that the issues had been raised and investigated, “and yet the behaviour was allowed to continue”.

“[TV presenting] is not a unique skill, and I think we have to stop treating presenters as if they are a special case, they are just one person in a huge team that gets a show on air, and they are no more or less special than anybody else,” she said.

“And somehow we’ve got a culture, I guess because it started in showbiz, of pandering to those who are in front of camera, and letting them get away with behaviour that other people in teams would not be allowed to get away with.”

But others have defended Wallace. TV producer Alice Harper told the Times: ““I have come to know Gregg extremely well and have run a team, many of whom are young women, and I have never, ever seen Gregg do anything inappropriate,”

He tells jokes incessantly on set to relax people… I had to sort of teach him things that were not appropriate to joke about. I did have to take him aside a couple of times and he took it on board and became more careful.”

Journalist William Sitwell, who has known Wallace for about 25 years, said in a Daily Telegraph column that the presenter is “always genuinely interested in the wellbeing of people around him”.

“He builds up relationships with contestants, there is palpable warmth and, off camera, his interest is not in what they cook, but what they do and who they are.”

Sitwell added Wallace “fires off jokes like he’s running a Bernard Manning comedy workshop. Some are plain silly, others outrageous. Which is, of course, the point of jokes.”

The allegations come at a difficult time for the BBC.

In October, the BBC announced details of a review into preventing abuses of power, in the wake of revelations about Huw Edwards, formerly its most senior news presenter, who committed offences involving child abuse images.

In November, BBC chairman Samir Shah said in a speech that there “continues to be a sense that powerful people ‘get away with it’.”

One MasterChef worker we spoke to, who we’re calling Claire, thinks that how the industry responds to allegations is at the root of the problem.

“We should be getting better at dealing with this, we should be getting better at shutting things down, and not allowing celebrity or fame or power to embolden people to think they can act like that, and treat people really poorly.”

Announcing its investigation on Thursday, Banijay UK, which produces MasterChef, said in a statement: “This week the BBC received complaints from individuals in relation to historical allegations of misconduct while working with presenter Gregg Wallace on one of our shows.”

Wallace, 60, is “committed to fully co-operating throughout the process”, it added.

Banijay’s statement concluded by encouraging anyone who wanted to raise any issues or concerns to come forward.

A BBC spokesman said: “We take any issues that are raised with us seriously and we have robust processes in place to deal with them.”

Last month, the BBC also announced an independent review of its workplace culture.

A spokesman for Channel 5, which airs Big Weekends, said: “We take any allegations of this nature extremely seriously.

“We have asked the production company to look into these historical claims. The health and wellbeing of everyone involved in our productions is very important to us and we want all of our productions to be safe and secure places for people to work.”

Production company Rumpus, which produced Big Weekends, said: “We do not tolerate inappropriate behaviour on our productions.

“Our comprehensive duty of care processes were in place during production of these series and any matters raised would have been investigated in accordance with these.”

Chad has said it is terminating a key defence cooperation agreement with France, raising questions about Paris’s waning influence in Africa’s embattled Sahel region.

Chadian Foreign Minister Abderaman Koulamallah said it was time for his country to “assert its full sovereignty”.

The announcement came just hours after Koulamallah’s French counterpart, Jean-Noel Barrot, met Chad’s President Mahamat Deby.

Chad is a key partner in the West’s fight against Islamist militants in the West African Sahel region.

But prior to the presidential election in May, Chad’s authorities ordered the withdrawal of US troops from the country, signalling a distancing from the country’s traditional Western allies.

France currently has about 1,000 troops in the Central African country providing intelligence and logistical assistance to the Chadian military from their bases, including in the capital N’Djamena.

France, Chad’s former colonial ruler, had signed a revised version of the military and security agreement in 2019.

Chad is just the latest nation in Central and West Africa to sever its security agreements with Paris.

Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have all ended deals with France and other Western nations in recent years, turning to Russia for support instead.

But Koulamallah told the AFP news agency that Chad’s decision did not mark a “break with France, like Niger or elsewhere”.

In other statements on Thursday, Koulamallah said France was an “essential partner” but that Chad must “redefine its strategic partnerships according to national priorities”.

The authorities insisted the move would not affect Chad’s relations with France in other areas.

• France admits colonial ‘massacre’, says Senegal’s leader
• Why does France have military bases in Africa?
• Why Russia’s Africa propaganda warrior was sent home from Chad
• Chad exploits Russian-Western rivalry to its advantage
• Is France to blame for coups in West Africa?

India’s airlines and airports received 999 hoax bomb threats this year as of 14 November, the country’s deputy civil aviation minister told its parliament.

This was nearly 10 times more than the threats received in 2023, Mr Murlidhar Mohol said.

More than 500 of the year’s threats were received just in the last two weeks of October.

The dramatic surge in hoax threats had wreaked havoc on flight schedules, causing widespread disruption in services.

The recent threats were all hoaxes, Mr Mohol said, with “no actual threat detected at any of the airports/aircraft in India”.

Police have registered 256 complaints and 12 people have been arrested in connection with these threats, the minister said.

But the cases mark an unprecedented spike in such hoaxes.

Between 2014 and 2017, authorities had recorded just 120 bomb hoax alerts at airports, with nearly half directed at Delhi and Mumbai, the country’s largest airports.

The flurry of hoax threats this October had delayed several affected flights while others were diverted.

Hoax threats against flights heading for other countries also lead to international agencies getting involved.

In October, Singapore’s Air Force sent two fighter jets to escort an Air India Express plane following a bomb threat.

The same month, another Air India flight from New Delhi to Chicago was forced to land in a remote airport in Canada.

Passengers on the flight were later airlifted to Chicago on an Air Force plane deployed by Canadian officials.

India’s civil aviation ministry had then said it was making “every possible effort” to safeguard flight operations.

India’s airports have a Bomb Threat Assessment Committee which assesses the gravity of the threat and takes action accordingly. A threat can lead to the involvement of the bomb disposal squad, sniffer dogs, ambulances, police and doctors.

Passengers are off-loaded from the plane along with cabin baggage, check-in baggage and cargo, and they are all screened again. Engineering and security teams also search the plane before it is cleared for flying again.

The resultant delay can cost thousands of dollars in damages to airlines and security agencies.

More than 150 million passengers flew domestically in India last year, according to the civil aviation ministry.

More than 3,000 flights arrive and depart every day in the country from more than 150 operational airports, including 33 international airports.

Chart-topping K-pop group NewJeans have said they are leaving their agency after accusing it of “mistreatment” and “manipulation”.

The five-member girl band announced their departure from Ador, a subsidiary of powerhouse label Hybe, in a late-night press conference held on Thursday.

Ador however has said its contract with NewJeans still stands, as the agency has not violated any terms.

This dispute is the latest development in a long-running conflict between former NewJeans producer Min Hee-Jin and Hybe’s chairman Bang Si-hyuk, which has made headlines in South Korea.

• K-pop star gives tearful testimony on harassment
• NewJeans face uncertainty after failed ultimatum

One of the group’s members, Hanni, has alleged that she suffered workplace harassment while working with the label.

“This is not the type of work ethic we respect and not one we want to be a part of, and to continue working under a company with no intention of protecting NewJeans would only do us harm,” Hanni said.

She added the group had faced “mistreatment, not just towards us but also including our staff”, and said the group had experienced “deliberate miscommunications and manipulation in multiple areas”.

Ador maintains that its contract with NewJeans remains valid as it has not violated its duty and has asked the group to “continue their activities” with the agency.

“A unilateral claim that trust has been broken does not constitute valid grounds for termination of a contract,” Ador said in the statement after the group’s announcement.

“We regret that the press conference on the termination of the contract took place without sufficient consideration, and even before we gave our response to the demand letter,” the agency said.

NewJeans said they would like to work with Min, the group’s former mastermind who left Ador in August following accusations that she had planned to split from Hybe, taking NewJeans with her.

This would have made NewJeans and Ador independent of Hybe. Min has denied the accusations against her.

She has previously accused Hybe of launching another girl group, Illit, that was copying NewJeans’ music and appearance.

On 13 November, NewJeans filed a legal notice to Ador demanding the company resolve breaches of their exclusive contracts within 14 days.

They said that failure to meet their demands would result in the termination of their contracts.

The group has asked for an apology for a comment allegedly made by an executive at Belift Lab, another subsidiary of Hybe, and accused the company of workplace bullying. They have also asked for the immediate reinstatement of Min.

They added that they would fulfil their contractual obligations, but at the conference warned their fans they might not be able to use the band’s name after the contract terminates.

Prior to the NewJeans’ announcement, the band were committed to a seven-year contract, which runs out in 2029.

The contract includes a clause specifying that parties can unilaterally terminate the contract if the other has violated its duty. However, the matter is likely to go to court as both sides do not agree. In such a scenario, a judge would decide if the contract can be terminated and if one side owes the other any damages.

In October, the K-pop news site Koreaboo estimated that the members would have to pay about 300bn South Korean Won (about £170m) to terminate the contract early.

But group singer Haerin said it made “no sense” that the group would be liable to pay a contract breach fee.

“We never broke any rules,” Haerin said. “We did nothing but try our best – they are the ones at fault. Hybe and Ador are the ones responsible.”

Ador said it had not “violated” the terms of the contract, adding that it “respectfully requests that the group continue its collaboration with Ador on upcoming activities”.

“Despite multiple requests for meetings with the artists, our efforts have not been successful. We hope the members will now be willing to engage in an open and candid discussion,” it said, referring to NewJeans.

The group has been embroiled in a year-long controversy with audits and emotional accusations making South Korean headlines.

In October, a member of the group, Hanni, 20, testified at the Labour Committee of South Korea’s National Assembly at a hearing about workplace harassment.

She alleged that entertainment agency Hybe had deliberately undermined her band, and accused senior managers of deliberately ignoring her.

Following several incidents, she said: “I came to the realisation that this wasn’t just a feeling. I was honestly convinced that the company hated us.”

Hybe shares fell by 4% in Seoul trading on Friday.

NewJeans made its debut in 2022 and is among Hybe’s most successful K-pop groups, along with BTS.

With slick pop hits including Super Shy and OMG, NewJeans were the eighth biggest-selling act in the world last year, and were nominated for best group at this year’s MTV Awards.

Formed by Ador in 2022, its five members – Minji, Hanni, Danielle, Haerin and Hyein – range in age from 16 to 20.

A former Chinese state media journalist has been sentenced on Friday to seven years in prison for espionage, his family has confirmed to the BBC.

Dong Yuyu, 62, who has been detained since 2022, was active in academic and journalism circles in the US and Japan and met regularly with foreign diplomats.

He was having lunch with a Japanese diplomat in Beijing when he was arrested by police.

At the time of his detention, Dong had been a senior staff member of the Guangming Daily, one of the five major newspapers linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

In February 2022, Dong was arrested while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat the day after the Winter Olympics ended in Beijing, at a restaurant where he had often met foreign friends.

The diplomat was also detained – then released several hours later amid protests from the Japanese government.

Dong met regularly with other journalists and foreign diplomats as part of his job.

His family said in a statement that according to a court judgement, two other Japanese diplomats Dong met with were named as “agents of an espionage organisation”, which is the Japanese embassy.

“We are shocked that the Chinese authorities would blatantly deem a foreign embassy an ‘espionage organization'”, said his family’s statement.

“Today’s verdict is a grave injustice not only to Yuyu and his family but also to every freethinking Chinese journalist and every ordinary Chinese committed to friendly engagement with the world,” they added.

The Beijing court where Dong was sentenced on Friday had a strong security presence, Reuters reported, as journalists were asked to leave and a diplomat said they were not allowed to attend the hearing.

“In the past, the Chinese court system has selected Western holidays to release news as it is a time when the public is focused on other matters,” the US National Press Club said in a statement on Tuesday, ahead of Dong’s sentencing on Thanksgiving night in the US.

While Dong’s trial had been completed in July 2023, he was held with no verdict and barred from seeing his family, the press club said.

Rights groups and advocates have criticised his conviction and called for him to be released.

“Chinese authorities must reverse this unjust verdict, and protect the right of journalists to work freely and safely in China,” Beh Lih Yi, Asia programme manager at the Committe to Protect Journalists told Reuters.

“Dong Yuyu should be reunited with his family immediately.”

Dong joined the Guangming Daily after graduating from Peking University’s law school in 1987.

In 1989, he was one of tens of thousands of students who participated in the Tiananmen Square protests. He was later sentenced to hard labour, but kept his job at the newspaper, according to a family statement.

He eventually rose to become deputy head of the editorial department, and was among the most pro-reform voices at Guangming Daily, the statement added.

A Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 2007, Dong had also written several articles for the New York Times and was previously a visiting fellow and professor at several Japanese universities.

Rebel forces in Syria say they have entered Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, in the biggest offensive against the government in years.

Video posted on a channel affiliated with the rebels appears to show their fighters in vehicles inside the city. The footage has been geolocated by the BBC to a suburb in Western Aleppo.

A UK-based group says fighters set off two car bombs before advancing into neighbourhoods on Friday.

Government forces meanwhile say they have regained positions in a number of towns in Aleppo and Idlib provinces, following an offensive launched by Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied factions on Wednesday.

A statement posted on the rebel-affiliated channel on Friday said: “Our forces have begun entering the city of Aleppo”.

Earlier, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which uses a network of sources on the ground in Syria, reported that Syrian and Russian planes carried out 23 air strikes on the Aleppo region on Friday.

The SOHR said 255 people, mostly combatants, had been killed in the fighting, the deadliest between rebels and pro-government forces in Syria for years.

It said opposition forces had taken control of more than 50 towns and villages since Wednesday.

Fighting which had raged since the civil war began in Syria in 2011 had largely wound down by 2020, when Turkey and Russia – Syria’s key ally – brokered a ceasefire to halt a push by the government to retake Idlib.

That led to an extended lull in violence, but sporadic clashes, air strikes and shelling continued.

Idlib is the last remaining opposition stronghold and is home to more than four million people, many of whom have been displaced during the conflict and are living in dire conditions.

France’s Emmanuel Macron has praised workers for achieving the “impossible” task of restoring Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral after a major fire engulfed the Gothic jewel in 2019.

On Friday the world had a first look inside a resplendent new Notre-Dame as Macron conducted a televised tour to mark the cathedral’s imminent re-opening.

Five-and-a-half years after the devastating fire, Paris’s Gothic jewel has been rescued, renovated and refurbished – and it will offer visitors a breathtaking visual treat.

In a speech to the craftsmen and women who worked on the refurbishment, Macron said: “The blaze at Notre-Dame was a national wound, and you have been its remedy through will, through work, through commitment.”

“I am so deeply grateful, France is so deeply grateful,” the president said during his speech, adding: “you have brought Notre-Dame back”.

Macron – accompanied by his wife Brigitte and Archbishop of Paris Laurent Ulrich – kicked off a programme of ceremonies that will culminate with an official “entry” into the cathedral on 7 December and the first Catholic Mass the day after.

• Live: Macron tours Notre-Dame for first look inside rebuilt Paris cathedral

On entering the refurbished cathedral, Macron said it was now “repaired, reinvented and rebuilt”.

“It is sublime,” he said.

He was then shown highlights of the building’s €700m (£582m) renovation – including the massive roof timbers that replaced the medieval frame consumed in the fire.

Before Macron’s visit Notre-Dame’s revamped interior had been kept a closely-guarded secret – with only a few images released over the years marking the progress of the renovation work.

I had a glimpse inside on Friday, and what I saw was enough to convince me that it is a spectacular experience. There is a new, fresh face to this cathedral.

It is not just renovation or a rebuilding of the structure of the roof, it has also been a clean-up of crud and soot in the interior since the last restoration in the 1850s.

On the evening of 15 April 2019, viewers around the world watched aghast as live pictures were broadcast of orange flames spreading along the roof of the cathedral, and then – at the peak of the conflagration – of the 19th Century spire crashing to the ground.

The cathedral – whose structure was already a cause for concern before the inferno – was undergoing external renovation at the time. Among the theories for the cause of the fire are a cigarette left by a worker or an electrical fault.

Some 600 firefighters battled the flames for 15 hours.

No one was killed or injured by the blaze.

At one point, it was feared that the eight bells in the north tower were at risk of falling, which would have brought the tower itself down, and possibly much of the cathedral walls.

In the end the structure was saved.

What was destroyed were the spire, the wooden roof beams (known as the “forest”), and the stone vaulting over the centre of the transept and part of the nave.

There was also much damage from falling wood and masonry, and from water from firehoses.

Thankfully what was saved made a much longer list – including all the stained-glass windows, most of the statuary and artwork, and the holy relic known as the Crown of Thorns. The organ – the second biggest in France – was badly affected by dust and smoke, but reparable.

Cathedral clergy also celebrated certain “miraculés” – miraculous survivors.

These include the 14th Century statue in the choir known as the Virgin of the Pillar, which narrowly avoided being crushed by falling masonry.

Sixteen massive copper statues of the Apostles and Evangelists, which surrounded the spire, had been brought down for renovation just four days before the fire.

After inspecting the devastation the next day, Macron made what to many at the time seemed a rash promise: to have Notre-Dame re-opened for visitors within five years.

A public body to manage the work was created by law, and an appeal for funds brought an immediate response. In all €846m were raised, much from big sponsors but also from hundreds of thousands of small donors.

Responsibility for the task was given to Jean-Louis Georgelin, a no-nonsense army general who shared Macron’s impatience with committees and the “heritage” establishment.

Georgelin is given universal credit for the project’s undoubted success, but he died in an accident in the Pyrenees in August 2023 and was replaced by Philippe Jost.

An estimated 2,000 masons, carpenters, restorers, roofers, foundry-workers, art experts, sculptors and engineers worked on the project – providing a huge boost for French arts and crafts.

Many trades – such as stone-carving – have seen a big increase in apprenticeships as a result of the publicity.

“[The Notre Dame project] has been the equivalent of a World Fair, in the way it has been a showcase for our craftsmanship. It is a superb shop-window internationally,” said Pascal Payen-Appenzeller, whose association promotes traditional building skills.

The first task of the project was to make the site safe, and then to dismantle the massive tangle of metal scaffolding that had previously surrounded the spire but melted in the fire and fused with the stonework.

Early on a decision had to be made about the nature of renovation: whether to faithfully recreate the medieval building and the 19th Century neo-Gothic changes wrought by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, or to use the opportunity to mark the building with a modern imprint.

An appeal for new designs produced unusual ideas, including a glass roof, a green “eco-roof”, a massive flame instead of a spire, and a spire topped by a vertical laser shooting into the firmament.

In the face of opposition from experts and the public, all were abandoned and the reconstruction is essentially true to the original – though with some concessions to modern materials and safety requirements. The roof timbers, for example, are now protected with sprinklers and partitioning.

The only remaining point of contention is over Macron’s desire for a modern design for stained-glass windows in six side-chapels. Artists have submitted entries for a competition, but there is stiff opposition from many in the French arts world.

Macron has tried to make the renovation of Notre-Dame a theme and a symbol.

He has closely involved himself with the project, and visited the cathedral several times.

At a moment when his political fortunes are at an all-time low – following bruising parliamentary elections in July – the re-opening is a much-needed boost for morale.

Some said he was stealing the limelight by organising Friday’s ceremony – officially to mark the end of the project – a week ahead of the formal re-opening. It means that the first, long-awaited images of the interior will also inevitably focus on him.

In answer, Elysée officials point out that the cathedral – like all French religious buildings under a law of 1905 – belongs to the state, with the Catholic Church its “assigned user”; and that without Macron’s rapid mobilisation, the work would never have been completed so quickly.

“What people will see [in the new Notre Dame] is the splendour and the strength of collective will-power – ” an Elysée insider said.

A Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur has followed through on his promise to eat the banana from a $6.2m (£4.9m) artwork he bought last week.

Justin Sun outbid six others to claim Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous 2019 work Comedian – a banana duct-taped to a wall – at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.

He ate the fruit during a news conference in Hong Kong where he used the moment to draw parallels between the artwork and cryptocurrency.

The banana is regularly replaced before exhibitions, with Mr Sun buying the right to display the installation along with a guide on how to replace the fruit.

It has been eaten twice before – first by a performance artist in 2019 and again by a South Korean student in 2023 – but neither paid any money to do so, let alone $6.2m.

“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” Mr Sun said.

“It’s much better than other bananas,” he added.

The 34-year-old said he was intrigued by the work, admitting he had “dumb questions” about whether the banana rotted.

The New York Times reported a fresh banana was bought for 35 cents on the day of last week’s auction, before becoming possibly one of the most expensive fruits in the world.

Each attendee at the event on Friday was given a banana and a roll of duct tape as a souvenir.

“Everyone has a banana to eat,” Mr Sun said.

Mr Sun runs the Tron blockchain network – a service where users can trade in cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies that operate independent of banks, offering the potential of very secure decentralised transactions.

Mr Sun compared the artwork, and other abstract pieces like it, to NFTs.

These “non-fungible tokens” are pieces of digital artwork that have no intrinsic value, other than that prescribed by people.

NFTs can be traded on platforms like Mr Sun’s.

Last year, he was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for offering and selling unregistered security tokens. Mr Sun denies the charges and the case is ongoing.

This week, Mr Sun disclosed he made a $30m investment in a crypto project backed by US President-elect Donald Trump.

Adults in Northern Ireland are more likely to look at pornography online than those in any other part of the UK.

That is according to new research published by the communications regulator Ofcom.

It said that more than 430,000 adults in Northern Ireland visited “pornographic content services” online in May 2024 – more than one third of the adult population.

That was higher than the proportion of adults viewing similar content in Wales, Scotland and England.

The figures come from Ofcom’s Online Nation report for 2024, which looks into the UK’s digital habits.

A Northern Ireland Executive online safety strategy for young people had previously expressed concern over exposure to pornography online.

Overall, according to Ofcom, adults in Northern Ireland spent an average of four hours and 16 minutes a day online, most of it on their smartphones.

Google, referred to by the name of its parent company Alphabet, was the most used website in Northern Ireland and the most popular search engine.

That was followed by Meta, Amazon and websites operated by Microsoft.

The BBC, though, was the fifth most visited online site in Northern Ireland and the UK as a whole, and had the highest daily audience of any news service.

The BBC site reached 86% of adults in Northern Ireland, compared to 83% of adults in both England and Scotland, and 82% of adults in Wales.

The BBC, The Sun and Mail Online featured in the top four news services in all UK nations, but the Belfast Telegraph had the third highest reach of news services in Northern Ireland.

With regard to app use, WhatsApp was the most popular app – used by more than nine in ten adults.

The next most popular apps were Facebook, Google Maps, YouTube and Instagram.

The Candy Crush Saga was still the most popular game app, as it had been in 2022 and 2023.

Twitter – now known as X – did not feature in the top ten apps used by adults, according to Ofcom, but was sixth in the top ten social media sites.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit were more popular.

But overall, according to Ofcom, “YouTube remains the highest-reaching social media service among UK online adults using smartphones, tablets or computers”.

Ofcom’s figures also suggest there is increasing use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

When it comes to which type of smartphone people used, Apple was slightly more popular than Android.

But Apple’s iPhones were more popular with women than men in the UK as a whole.

In Northern Ireland, though, users were more likely to use Android phones than Apple’s iPhones.

The Ofcom report suggested that high numbers of people over the age of 13 reported seeing “potentially harmful online content or behaviour”.

Two-thirds of people in Northern Ireland reported seeing harms like offensive language, scams, unwelcome friend requests, hateful content, trolling or misogynistic content.

Separate research previously carried out in Northern Ireland has suggested that teenage girls are more likely to be asked for nude photos online or be sent pornography or content promoting self-harm than boys.

Uniqlo is facing an online backlash in China after the boss of its parent company said the Japanese clothing retailer does not source cotton from Xinjiang.

Fast Retailing’s chief executive Tadashi Yanai said Uniqlo was “not using” cotton from the western Chinese province in a BBC interview broadcast this week.

Commentators in China picked up on the comment and urged a boycott of the retailer.

Cotton from Xinjiang is controversial because China has been accused of using forced labour by people from the Muslim Uyghur minority in its production. Beijing has consistently denied these allegations.

Following the BBC report, commentators took to social media platform Weibo calling for a boycott of Uniqlo.

Millions of people read posts with hashtags related to the topic: “Controversy over Uniqlo founder’s remarks”.

Related trending hashtags included: “Xinjiang cotton is the best in the world”, “I support Xinjiang cotton”, and “Uniqlo’s results in China sees a slump”.

One user wrote: “With this kind of attitude from Uniqlo, and their founder being so arrogant, they’re probably betting that mainland consumers will forget about it in a few days and continue to buy. So, can we stand firm this time?”

The online reaction came after Mr Yanai told the BBC: “We’re not using [cotton from Xinjiang].”

“By mentioning which cotton we’re using…” he continued, before pausing and ending his answer with: “Actually, it gets too political if I say anymore so let’s stop here”.

China is very important for Uniqlo not only as a huge market but also as a major manufacturing hub.

Beijing has consistently denied allegations of forced labour made by organisations including the US government.

The BBC has published reports of forced labour allegations.

In June 2022, firms started to have to prove that imports into the US are not produced using forced labour.

Sweden’s H&M saw its clothing pulled from major e-commerce stores in China after it refused to source cotton from Xinjiang.

Many global brands such as Nike, Burberry, Esprit and Adidas were boycotted after getting caught up in the controversy.

Part of the reason Uniqlo avoided the controversy was because Mr Yanai declined to take a stance at the time.

Western firms continue to get embroiled in the controversial topic.

In September, China’s commerce ministry launched an investigation into the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, PVH, saying it was suspected of “unjustly boycotting” Xinjiang cotton and other products “without factual basis”.

PVH has said it will respond in accordance with relevant regulations, according to media reports.

When a sitting vice-president says she has hired assassins to kill the president, and dreams of cutting off his head, you might think that country was in serious trouble.

But then this is the Philippines, where politics and melodrama go hand in hand.

“I have talked to a person,” Vice-president Sara Duterte said on her Facebook page last weekend. “I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM [President Marcos], [First Lady] Liza Araneta, and [House Speaker] Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke. I said, do not stop until you kill them, and then he said yes.”

Last month she told reporters her relationship with President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos had become toxic, and she dreamed of cutting off his head.

She also threatened to dig up the body of the president’s father from the Heroes’ Cemetery in Manila and dump the ashes in the sea.

Behind all this drama is a once powerful political alliance which has spectacularly unravelled.

The decision by the Marcos and Duterte clans to join forces in the 2022 presidential election was a marriage of convenience. Both candidates were the offspring of presidents – Sara Duterte’s father Rodrigo was the incumbent then – and had strong support in different regions of the Philippines. Both had populist appeal.

However, having both run for president risked dividing their supporters and losing to a third candidate.

So she agreed that Marcos would go for president, while she went for vice-president – the two posts are elected separately – but that they would form one team on the campaign trail.

The assumption was that the younger Duterte would then be in prime position to contest the next presidential election in 2028.

It proved a very effective strategy. The UniTeam, as they branded themselves, won by a landslide.

However, as any of her predecessors could have told Duterte, the vice-presidency is largely ceremonial, and has few powers.

The Dutertes had wanted the influential defence portfolio; President Marcos instead gave her Education, an early sign he was wary of letting his vice-president build up her power base.

He also made an abrupt turn away from the politics of his predecessor.

He ordered the Philippines navy and coastguard to stand up to China in disputed areas of the South China Sea. This was a marked contrast to President Rodrigo Duterte who had refused to challenge China’s dominant presence there, and even declared that he loved Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Marcos also toned down President Duterte’s infamous war on drugs, in which thousands of suspected drug dealers were gunned down.

He has hinted at the possibility of rejoining the International Criminal Court, which has issued an indictment for crimes against humanity against Rodrigo Duterte. The former president has also found himself in front of the Philippines Senate being grilled about the extrajudicial killings that happened during his presidency.

Relations between the two camps soured further when Marcos’s allies in the lower house launched an investigation into Sara Duterte’s use of the confidential funds she was allocated when she got the job.

In July, the vice-president resigned as education secretary, and her language became increasingly inflammatory.

Sara Duterte is no stranger to controversy. Thirteen years ago, when she was mayor of Davao City, she was filmed repeatedly punching a court official.

She comes from the same political mould as her outspoken father, both of them known for tough talking. He called the Pope a “son of a whore” and boasted of having killed people.

He describes her as the “alpha” character of the family who always gets her way; she says he is hard to love. Like her father she likes riding big motorbikes.

Her latest threats to her one-time ally President Marcos, though, may prove to be one verbal indiscretion too far.

Marcos has responded by calling Duterte’s comments “reckless” and “troubling”. The Philippines National Bureau of Investigation – its equivalent of the American FBI – has summoned the vice-president to explain her threats on Friday.

She has now walked them back, denying they were real. “This is a plan without flesh,” she explained, accusing Marcos of being a liar who was leading the country to hell.

Perhaps it was inevitable that two such powerful families would become rivals in the maelstrom of Filipino politics, which is still largely about personalities, big families and regions.

Political loyalties are fluid; senators and members of congress constantly shift their party allegiances. Power inevitably concentrates around the president, with his authority to dispense government funds. Former presidents are routinely investigated for corruption or abuses of power once they leave office.

President Marcos wants to rehabilitate the reputation of his family, after his father’s shameful ejection by a popular uprising in 1986, and will be keen to influence the choice of his successor in 2028. The Dutertes have their own dynastic ambitions.

For now Sara Duterte is still vice-president. She could be removed through impeachment by the Senate, but that would be a risky move for President Marcos.

She enjoys strong popular support in the south, and among the millions of overseas Filipino workers, and getting sufficient support in the Senate for impeachment could be difficult.

Mid-term elections are due in May next year, in which the entire lower house and half of the 24 senatorial seats will be contested. They will be seen as a test of the strength for each of the rival camps.

Duterte’s explosive break with the president is an opportunity for her to back her own candidates, and present herself as an alternative to a government which has lost popularity over the lacklustre performance of the economy.

That could give her a better launching pad for the 2028 presidential race than staying shackled to the Marcos administration.

But after her incendiary comments of the past few weeks, Filipinos must be wondering: what will she say next?

Former British army soldier Daniel Khalife has been found guilty of spying for Iran.

Khalife, who escaped prison while awaiting trial, collected information and passed it to Tehran and was found to have gathered the names of special forces soldiers. He was cleared of a charge of perpetrating a bomb hoax at his army barracks.

The 23-year-old admitted breaking out of Wandsworth prison in London in September 2023 by strapping himself to the underside of a food delivery lorry during his Woolwich Crown Court trial.

Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb told his trial at Woolwich Crown Court that Khalife would face “a long custodial sentence” when he is sentenced early next year.

Khalife, whose actions breached the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act, did not show any emotion as the verdicts were read out.

Prosecutors said Khalife played a “cynical game” after he contacted a man linked to Iranian intelligence soon after joining the army in September 2018, before later telling MI6 he wanted to be a double agent.

He collected sensitive information that posed a real danger in the wrong hands, the court heard.

Khalife contacted a man linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Facebook.

He built a relationship with Iranian contacts – at one point being sent to collect $2,000 (£1,500) left in a dog poo bag in a north London park.

Bethan David, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s counter terrorism division, said that as a soldier, Khalife was “employed and entrusted to uphold and protect the national security of this country”.

“But, for purposes of his own, Daniel Khalife used his employment to undermine national security.”

She added that his information sharing “could have exposed military personnel to serious harm, or a risk to life, and prejudiced the safety and security of the United Kingdom”.

• Daniel Khalife was a British soldier who spied for Iran and dreamed of fame
• Daniel Khalife pleads guilty to prison escape

During his time in the army, Khalife gathered the names of 15 serving soldiers – including some from the special forces.

Prosecutors believe he sent the list to Iran before deleting any evidence.

He denied ever having sent it and claimed the information he did pass on was mostly fake. However, he seemingly sent at least two classified documents – one on drones and another on “Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance”.

The UK will never know what the most sensitive material Khalife handed over – most of the messages he exchanged with contacts on the encrypted communication app Telegram were deleted.

His lawyer Gul Nawaz Hussain KC had claimed that the double agent plot was “hapless” and more “Scooby-Doo” than “007”.

Khalife became the subject of a high-profile manhunt after breaking out of prison, before being arrested 75 hours later when he was spotted cycling on a canal tow path. He made an attempt to contact the Iranians before he was found, sending a Telegram message which said simply: “I wait.”

His escape came while he was on remand for offences under the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act, and with perpetrating a bomb hoax.

His arrest came after fled his army base, Beacon Barracks in Stafford, in January 2023 after realising he would likely face charges over allegations of passing on classified information.

During his trial, the jury heard how an unrealistic, fake bomb, in the form of three nitrous oxide canisters taped together, was found on his desk after he failed to report for duty.

Officers who visited the site believed the device to be fake. However, a bomb disposal unit was called, and five housing blocks were evacuated.

After his arrest, Khalife told police he had wanted to offer himself to UK security agencies, having emailed MI6 as far back as 2019.

Speaking after the verdict, Commander Dominic Murphy, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command, said: “The threat to the UK from states such as Iran is very serious, so for a soldier in the army to be sharing sensitive military material and information with them is extremely reckless and dangerous”.

Khalife’s escape from Wandsworth also raised serious questions about security and staffing at the prison, with 40 inmates temporarily transferred to other sites while an investigation into the breakout took place.

Damien Hinds, a former prisons minister, said about 40% of prison officers did not turn up for their shift at Wandsworth on the day of Khalife’s escape, but the Ministry of Justice insisted it had been adequately staffed.

A spokesman for Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, said that while Khalife’s case was “an isolated incident”, such matters were taken “extremely seriously, and more broadly, it is why we continue to take strong action and hold the Iranian regime to account”.

Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s controversial 2017 meeting with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and past statements on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have drawn fresh scrutiny after President-elect Donald Trump picked her to oversee America’s spy agencies.

If confirmed as US director of national intelligence (DNI), Gabbard would act as a steward of the nation’s most important secrets, oversee 18 US spy agencies and serve as a close adviser to the president.

But former US national security officials and lawmakers have raised concerns that the choice of Gabbard – a fierce opponent of America’s involvement in foreign wars and whom critics accuse of echoing Kremlin narratives – could negatively affect intelligence co-operation.

Lewis Luken, a retired diplomat who served as the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in London during the first Trump administration, told the BBC that Gabbard’s “dubious judgement” could give allies “reason to question how safe it is to share intelligence with the US”.

Gabbard, who recently joined the Republican Party, has previously said her detractors are “warmongers” who seek to smear any critic of Washington’s establishment.

Trump has also defended his pick, saying that Gabbard – a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who deployed to Iraq and Kuwait – “will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our intelligence community”.

But in an odd twist for a DNI appointment, Russian state media praised the Gabbard choice, which only added to the alarm among national security officials in the US capital.

Prominent talk show host Olga Skabeyeva said on 14 November that “virtually from the first days of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, she [Gabbard] explained its reasons, criticised the actions of the Biden administration, and also personally met none other than Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and supported his fight against terrorists.”

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For as long as she has been in politics, Gabbard’s positions have earned her praise and scorn from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Her views have been generally anti-war, opposed to American intervention and deeply critical of the US intelligence community.

But it was her January 2017 “fact-finding” trip to Syria as a congresswoman that first sparked outrage – particularly when she later raised doubt about the US intelligence assessment that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons on civilians.

After the Trump administration launched a series of strikes on Syria in April that year following a chemical attack that killed more than 80 people, Gabbard called the strikes “reckless and short-sighted”, saying they would escalate the civil war and hamper the collection of evidence about what had happened.

The US launched missiles at a Syrian Air Force base where the Pentagon said a warplane had taken off before dropping bombs filled with the nerve agent sarin on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun.

A UN panel later came to the same conclusion as the US, saying it was confident that the Syrian government was responsible for the release of sarin in the town.

Assad’s government and its ally Russia rejected the report and alleged that the Syrian Air Force strike hit a rebel depot full of chemical munitions.

Gabbard’s comments, and her controversial meeting with Assad, hung over her run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019.

Defending her actions, she told an interviewer that Assad, who is also backed by Iran, was “not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States”.

The Trump transition team has not responded to a request for comment from the BBC.

She drew further attention during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when she made statements seen by some as echoing Putin’s justifications for the war.

Gabbard said that the war could have been avoided if the Biden administration and the Nato military alliance “had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns” about Ukraine eventually becoming a member.

Weeks later, she released a video commenting that US-funded biolabs in Ukraine could be breached and “release and spread deadly pathogens”. It came as Russia, defending its invasion, spread unevidenced claims that the US was helping Ukraine to develop biological weapons.

In response, Republican Senator Mitt Romney posted on social media that Gabbard was “parroting false Russian propaganda” and spreading “treasonous lies”. Gabbard sent a cease-and-desist letter to Romney over his remarks.

And during the 2024 presidential campaign, Gabbard alleged that Vice-President Kamala Harris was the “main instigator” of the conflict in Ukraine for having supported Kyiv’s Nato aspirations.

Nikki Haley, Trump’s UN ambassador during his first term and a politician who challenged him for the Republican nomination in the 2024 election, said recently that Gabbard could not be entrusted with such a high-level intelligence role.

“This is not a place for a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathiser,” Haley said.

Some worry that Gabbard taking the position could affect trust between US intelligence agencies and their foreign counterparts.

A former senior White House official said Gabbard’s appointment could have “real effects on our ability to have intelligence diplomacy with close allies”.

“It certainly will raise real questions in the minds of foreign counterparts if the person sitting across from them – Tulsi Gabbard – has fundamentally differing assumptions about Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin,” the official told the BBC.

A former Nato official in London echoed that concern, saying that Gabbard’s nomination would raise serious questions about how the UK and other American allies approach the US intelligence community under Trump.

“I think there’s an extreme level of discomfort because why would you appoint somebody who has got no background and wacky views to such a responsible position?” the former official said.

But others did not expect any change to their country’s intelligence relationship with the US.

Duncan Lewis led Australia’s domestic spy agency – the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation – through the early years of the first Trump administration. He said he did not know Gabbard, but stressed that the Australian-American alliance was more powerful than any individual.

“Our bilateral security relationship is strong and long-standing, and I expect that to continue,” he told the BBC.

Each morning the DNI oversees what is included in the president’s daily briefing, giving them power to shape the US leader’s perceptions of the world and its threats.

That is something that US senators will keep in mind when they consider Gabbard’s nomination, and that is what could make her Senate confirmation process contentious.

Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA officer and Democrat who served with Gabbard in the House of Representatives, told media outlet Puck that Trump’s DNI nominee “has expressed views that seem to preference adversaries”.

“Certainly, it gave me pause, when I heard the nomination,” added Slotkin, who will vote on Gabbard’s confirmation as a newly-elected Michigan senator.

James Lankford, a Republican who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the BBC that he and other senators would have many questions about Gabbard’s past views.

But another Republican senator, Eric Schmitt of Missouri, said some of the criticism of Gabbard from Democratic colleagues – including that she was “compromised” – had been “totally ridiculous”.

“It’s insulting. It’s a slur, quite frankly. There’s no evidence that she’s a asset of another country,” he told NBC.

And Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin said that Gabbard was a “solid choice”, whom allies would find “extremely capable”.

“There’s some questions on the Republican side; there’s some questions on the Democrat side,” he told the BBC.

“What I’ve been telling everybody is just sit down and talk to her.”

• How these new recruits will be vetted
• What Trump can and can’t do on day one
• How undocumented migrants feel about deportations
• Can RFK Jr make America healthy again?
• The rise and fall of Matt Gaetz, in eight wild days

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

A New Zealand naval ship which crashed into a coral reef before it caught fire and sank had been left on autopilot, an official inquiry has found.

Crew members of HMNZS Manawanui had thought the ship was under manual control while sailing in Samoan waters.

All 75 people aboard were evacuated safely. But the submerged ship started leaking oil into the ocean, prompting fears in nearby coastal villages.

HMNZS Manawanui was the first ship New Zealand had lost since World War Two. It was one of nine ships in the country’s small navy fleet.

The first report from an inquiry into the incident was released on Friday. It found that crew members had believed there were problems with the ship’s thruster when they could not change the vessel’s direction.

But none of the crew had bothered to check whether the ship was still on autopilot, before it crashed.

Navy chief Garin Golding told reporters that “the direct cause of the grounding has been determined as a series of human errors”.

“Muscle memory from the person in control should have leaned over to that panel and checked whether the screen said autopilot or not.”

The inquiry is expected to finish next year. Golding said that following the inquiry’s completion, officials would start a separate disciplinary process involving three unnamed crew members.

“I want to reassure the public of New Zealand that we will learn from this situation and that it is on me, as the Chief of Navy, to earn back your trust,” he said.

He added that divers were monitoring the “persistent slow leak”.

While equipment is set to be transported to Samoa this week to remove fuel and other pollutants from the ship, New Zealand authorities have not announced plans to remove the ship.

The ship was conducting a survey of waters off the island of Upolu when it struck a reef and caught fire during a bout of rough and windy weather. It sank shortly after that.

In the following days, social media users started trolling the ship’s female captain, claiming that her gender was to blame.

These commenters were denounced at the time by New Zealand’s defence minister as “armchair admirals”.

The Israeli military has warned Lebanese citizens not to return to 60 villages in the south of the country, three days into a ceasefire after more than a year of fighting with the Shia armed group Hezbollah.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) published a map showing a swathe of territory several miles deep, which it said residents must not return to. Anyone who did, it said, would be putting themselves in danger.

More than a million Lebanese have been displaced by the fighting, mostly from the south. Tens of thousands of Israelis have also been displaced.

The truce came into effect on Wednesday morning, though officials in Israel and Lebanon have accused each other of already breaching it.

On Thursday, the IDF said its forces fired artillery and carried out air strikes against targets in southern Lebanon. It added that it had fired at suspects after spotting activity at a Hezbollah weapons facility, and vehicles arriving in several areas, which it said breached the ceasefire.

Lebanon accused Israel of violating the agreement “multiple times” and said it was monitoring the situation.

A multinational monitoring group which includes representatives from the US, France, and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) was set up as part of the ceasefire to oversee compliance with its terms.

In his first interview since the ceasefire was declared, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had instructed the IDF to wage “an intensive war” should Hezbollah commit a “massive violation” of the ceasefire.

The ceasefire “can be short”, he said in the interview with Israel’s Channel 14.

Under the terms of the agreement, which was brokered by the US and France, Israeli forces will withdraw from south Lebanon as the Lebanese army deploys there simultaneously with no other armed groups allowed to operate in the area. This is meant to happen within 60 days from the start of the ceasefire.

The zone which the IDF said residents should not yet return to stretches from Mansouri on the coast to Shebaa in the east.

On Wednesday, the Lebanese army warned residents not to return to areas where Israeli forces were before they had withdrawn.

Israel invaded southern Lebanon at the start of last month after the IDF intensified military action against Hezbollah.

Hezbollah began the current conflict with Israel by firing rockets in and around northern Israel on 8 October 2023, a day after Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel from Gaza which killed about 1,200 people.

Hezbollah said it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinians after Israel responded to the Hamas attack with a massive military campaign in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry says at least 44,330 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive.

Since 8 October, Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire with increasing intensity. The Lebanese health ministry said Israeli strikes had killed at least 3,961 people and injured 16,520 others in that period. The figures do not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Hezbollah’s attacks have killed 31 soldiers and 45 civilians inside Israel, Israeli authorities say. Another 45 Israeli soldiers have been killed fighting in southern Lebanon.