The memories began rushing back as Kenneth strolled through Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, once a focal point for the city’s resistance to China.

As a child, Kenneth would buy calligraphy posters from pro-democracy politicians at the annual Lunar New Year fair.

Then there were the protest marches he joined as a teenager, that would always start here before winding their way through the city. When he was just 12, he began attending the park’s massive vigils for the Tiananmen massacre – a taboo in mainland China, but commemorated openly in Hong Kong.

Those vigils have ended now. The politicians’ stalls at the fair are gone, protests have been silenced and pro-democracy campaigners jailed. Kenneth feels his political coming-of-age – and Hong Kong’s – is being erased.

“People still carry on with life… but you can feel the change bit by bit,” said the former activist, who did not want to reveal his real name when he spoke to us.

“Our city’s character is disappearing.”

On the surface Hong Kong appears to be the same, its packed trams still rumbling down bustling streets, its vibrant neon-lit chaos undimmed.

But look closer and there are signs the city has changed – from the skyscrapers lighting up every night with exultations of China, the motherland, to the chatter of mainland Mandarin increasingly heard alongside Hong Kong’s native Cantonese.

It’s impossible to know how many of Hong Kong’s more than seven million people welcome Beijing’s grip. But hundreds of thousands have taken part in protests in the past decade since a pro-democracy movement erupted in 2014.

Not everyone supported it, but few would contest that Beijing crushed it. As a turbulent decade draws to a close, hopes for a freer Hong Kong have withered.

China says it has steadied a volatile city. Hundreds have been jailed under a sweeping national security law (NSL), which also drove thousands of disillusioned and wary Hongkongers abroad, including activists who feared or fled arrest. Others, like Kenneth, have stayed and keep a low profile.

But in many of them lives the memory of a freer Hong Kong – a place they are fighting to remember in defiance of Beijing’s remaking of their city.

When Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to China in 1997, it was under the assurance that the city would keep some rights, including free speech, freedom of assembly and rule of law for 50 years. But as Beijing’s power grew, so did the disquiet within the city’s pro-democracy camp.

In September 2014, tens of thousands of protesters began to stage mass sit-ins in downtown Hong Kong, demanding fully democratic elections. It propelled a new generation of pro-democracy campaigners to prominence – such as Joshua Wong, then a 17-year-old student, and Benny Tai, a college professor, who called the movement Occupy Central.

It also seeded the ground for more explosive protests in 2019, which were triggered by Beijing’s proposal to extradite locals to the mainland. The plan was scrapped but the protests intensified over several months as calls grew for more democracy, becoming the most serious challenge to Beijing’s authority in Hong Kong.

“Without Benny Tai, there would have been no Occupy Central,” says Chan Kin-man, who co-founded the campaign with Tai and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming.

“He had the temper of scholars and spoke his mind… that’s why he was bold enough to push for changes and think about big ideas. It is always people [like this] who change history.”

Chan and Rev Chu are both exiles in Taiwan now. Chan moved to Taipei in 2021, after serving 11 months in jail for inciting public nuisance in his role in Occupy Central. He is now a fellow at a local research institute.

Tai is still in Hong Kong, where he will spend the next decade behind bars.

In November, he was sentenced to jail for subversion, along with more than 40 other pro-democracy campaigners including Wong, many of whom have been in jail since their arrest in early 2021. As Wong left the courtroom, he shouted: “I love Hong Kong.”

The following day 76-year-old billionaire Jimmy Lai, a fierce critic of China, testified at his trial for allegedly colluding with foreign forces. Frail but defiant, he told the court his now-defunct newspaper Apple Daily had only espoused the values of Hong Kong’s people: “Pursuit of democracy and freedom of speech”.

The trials have passed quietly, in stark contrast to the events that led to them. Small signs of protest outside the court were quickly shut down – a woman sobbing about her son’s sentence was taken away by police.

Beijing defends the restrictions – including the NSL under which the trials are happening – as essential for stability. It says the West or its allies have no right to question its laws or how it applies them.

But critics accuse China of reneging on the deal it struck in 1997. They say it has weakened the city’s courts and muzzled the once resounding cry for democracy in Hong Kong.

Chan has watched these events unfold from afar with a heavy heart.

After 2014, there had still been the possibility of change, he said. Now, “a lot of things have become impossible… Hong Kong has become no different from other Chinese cities”.

Faced with this reality after campaigning for democracy for more than a decade, “you can say that I have failed in everything I have done in my life”, he said with a wry smile.

But still he perseveres. Besides teaching classes on Chinese society, he is writing a book about Occupy Central, collecting items for an archive of Hong Kong’s protest scene, organising conferences, and giving virtual lectures on democracy and politics.

These efforts “make me feel that I haven’t given up on Hong Kong. I don’t feel like I have abandoned it”.

Yet, there are moments when he grapples with his decision to leave. He is happier in Taiwan, but he also feels “a sense of loss”.

“Am I still together with other Hongkongers, facing the same challenges as them?”

“If you are not breathing the air here, you don’t really know what’s happening… if you don’t feel the pulse here, it means you are truly gone,” said Kenneth, as he continued his walk through Victoria Park.

With friends leaving the city in droves in the last few years, he has lost count of the number of farewell parties he’s attended. Still, he insists on staying: “This is where my roots are.”

What irritates him is the rhetoric from those who leave, that the Hong Kong they knew has died. “Hong Kong continues to exist. Its people are still here! So how can they say that Hong Kong is dead?”

But, he acknowledged, there have been dramatic changes. Hongkongers now have to think twice about what they say out loud, Kenneth said.

Many are now adapting to a “normalised state of surveillance”. There are red lines, “but it is very difficult to ascertain them”.

Instead of campaigning openly, activists now write petition letters. Rallies, marches and protests are definitely off-limits, he added. But many, like Kenneth, are wary of taking part in any activism, because they fear they’ll be arrested.

A t-shirt, social media posts and picture books have fallen foul of the law recently, landing their owners in jail for sedition.

These days Kenneth goes out less frequently. “The contrast is so drastic now. I don’t want to remember what happened in the past.”

Still, as he walked out of the park and headed to the Admiralty district, more memories unspooled.

As he neared the government headquarters, he pointed to the spot where he choked on tear gas for the first time, on 28 September 2014.

That day, the police fired 87 rounds of tear gas on unarmed protesters, an act that enraged demonstrators and galvanised the pro-democracy movement.

As the protests deepened and tear gas became a common sight, many sheltered behind umbrellas, spawning a new moniker – the Umbrella Movement.

The final stop was his alma mater, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, also known as PolyU. It was a key battleground during the 2019 demonstrations that saw protesters battling police on the streets, hurling projectiles against tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.

Five years on, the PolyU entrance where students fended off the police with bricks and petrol bombs in a fiery showdown has been reconstructed. A fountain which saw the most intense clashes has been demolished.

Like elsewhere in Hong Kong, the campus seemed to have been scrubbed of its disobedient past. Kenneth believed it was because the university “doesn’t want people to remember certain things”.

Then, he darted away to a quiet corner. Hidden beneath the bushes was a low wall pockmarked with holes and gobs of concrete. It was impossible to tell what they were. But Kenneth believes these were traces of the battles which escaped the purge of memories.

“I don’t believe we will forget what happened,” he said. “Forgetting the past is a form of betrayal.”

At a Tesco’s café in Watford in the UK, Kasumi Law remembered what she missed about her old home.

“I never thought I’d love the sea in Hong Kong so much. I only realised this when I arrived in the UK,” she said, as she tucked into a full English breakfast. Unlike the cold and dark ocean surrounding Britain, “in Hong Kong the sea is so shiny, because there are so many buildings… I didn’t realise how beautiful our city is”.

Kasumi’s decision to move to the UK with her husband and young daughter had stemmed from an unease that crept up on her over the previous decade. The Occupy Central protests began just months after her daughter was born in 2014.

In the following years, as Beijing’s grip appeared to tighten – student activists were jailed and booksellers disappeared – Kasumi’s discomfort grew.

“Staying in Hong Kong was, I wouldn’t say, unsafe,” she said. “But every day, little by little, there was a feeling of something not being right.”

Then Hong Kong erupted in protest again in 2019. As Beijing cracked down, the UK offered a visa scheme for Hongkongers born before the 1997 handover, and Kasumi and her husband agreed it was time to go for the sake of their daughter.

They settled in the town of Watford near London, where her husband found a job in IT while Kasumi became a stay-at-home mum.

But she had never lived abroad before, and she struggled with a deep homesickness which she documented in emotional video diaries on YouTube. One of them even went viral last year, striking a chord with some Hongkongers while others criticised her for choosing to emigrate.

Eventually it was too much to bear, and she returned to Hong Kong for a visit last year. Over two months she visited childhood haunts like a theme park and a science museum, scoffed down her mum’s homecooked fuzzy melon with vermicelli and stir fried clams, and treated herself to familiar delights such as egg tarts and melon-flavoured soy milk.

But the Hong Kong she remembered had also changed. Her mum looked older. Her favourite shops in the Ladies Market had closed down.

Sitting by the harbour at Tsim Sha Tsui one night, she was happy to be reunited with the twinkling sea she had missed so much. Then she realised most of the people around her were speaking in Mandarin.

Tears streamed down her face. “When I looked out at the sea it looked familiar, but when I looked around at the people around me, it felt strange.”

Kasumi wonders when she would visit again. With the passing of a new security law this year – Article 23 – her friends have advised her to delete social media posts from past protests before returning.

It is a far cry from the fearlessness she remembers from 2019, when she brought her daughter to the protests and they marched on the streets with thousands of people, united in their defiance.

“It’s too late to turn back,” she said. “I feel if I go back to Hong Kong I might not be used to life there, to be honest.

“My daughter is happy here. When I see her, I think it’s worth it. I want her world to be bigger.”

Kasumi’s world is bigger too – she has found a job and made new friends. But even as she builds a new life in the UK, she remains determined to preserve the Hongkonger in her – and her child.

Kasumi and her husband only speak in Cantonese to their daughter, and the family often watches Cantonese films together. Her daughter doesn’t yet understand the significance of the 2019 protests she marched in, nor the movement that began in 2014, when she was born. But Kasumi plans to explain when she is older.

The seeds Kasumi is planting are already taking root. She is particularly proud of the way her daughter responds to people who call her Chinese. “She gets angry, and she will argue with them,” Kasumi said, with a smile.

“She always tells people, ‘I’m not Chinese, I’m a Hongkonger’.”

After nights of large-scale street demonstrations and a string of public resignations, Georgia’s prime minister has rejected calls for new elections and said protesters have fallen victim to opposition lies.

Irakli Kobakhidze confirmed reports that Georgia’s ambassador to the US, David Zalkaliani, had become the latest senior diplomat to stand down, stressing that he had come under considerable pressure.

Protests were set to continue on Sunday for a fourth night running, as Georgians vented their anger at the ruling party’s decision to suspend talks on joining the European Union.

Kobakhidze sought to deny the reason for the protests, saying on Sunday that “we have not suspended anything, it’s a lie”.

Only three days before, his party Georgian Dream had accused the EU of using talks on joining the union as “blackmail” and said the government had decided not to put the issue on the agenda until the end of 2028.

It is part of Georgia’s constitution to ensure that “all measures” are taken to bring the country into both the EU and Nato.

However, Georgia’s increasingly authoritarian government has been accused by the EU and US of democratic backsliding. On Saturday, the US said it was suspending its strategic partnership with Georgia.

Kobakhidze told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg at a news conference that Georgian Dream was still “committed to European integration… and we are continuing on our path to the European dream”.

And yet an increasing array of public officials do not appear to believe that is the case. Several ambassadors have resigned, and hundreds of civil servants and 2,800 teachers have signed letters condemning the decision to put EU accession on hold.

Many Georgians have been shocked by the level of violence directed at Georgian journalists as well as protesters. Dozens of reporters have been beaten or pepper sprayed and some have needed hospital treatment.

Georgia’s human rights ombudsman Levan Ioseliani said “this is brutality”, and he appealed to police not to abuse their power. On Sunday, the prime minister said it was opposition groups and not the police that had meted out “systemic violence”.

Georgian ex-ambassador to the EU Natalie Sabanadze, now at Chatham House in the UK, believes the level of violence, the string of resignations and civil disobedience indicate a “qualitative change” to the protests now taking place.

“Maybe [the government] thought people would be scared, but it’s not working out like this,” she told the BBC. “Yesterday civil society activists and artists went to the public broadcaster and took it over and forced their way into the live stream. I’ve seen this before, in pre-revolutionary Georgia [in 2003].”

Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, is due to step down in a matter of weeks, however since last month’s contested parliamentary elections which opposition parties have denounced as rigged, she has become a powerful figurehead, rallying protesters against the government and calling for a new vote.

She and the protesters accuse the government of aiming to drag their country back into Russia’s sphere of influence, even though an overwhelming majority of the population backs joining the EU.

Georgia has a population of some 3.7 million and 20% of its territory is under Russian military occupation in two breakaway regions.

After a third night of protests in Tbilisi and other Georgian cities such as Batumi, Zugdidi and Kutaisi, smaller groups occupied a traffic intersection during the day on Sunday in front of Tbilisi State University.

“I’m here for my country’s future and the future of my three-year-old son,” said one protester called Salome, aged 29. “I don’t want him to spend his life at protests and I don’t want a Russian government.”

While Georgian Dream flatly denies any links to the Kremlin, it has in the past year adopted Russian-style laws that target civil society groups with funding from abroad as well as LGBT rights.

Half an hour’s walk away from the daylight protest, a small army of cleaners were trying to scrub off graffiti from a wall in front of the Georgian parliament.

Some of the windows of the building were smashed overnight, and an effigy was set alight of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire seen as the driving force behind Georgian Dream’s 12 years in power.

The question now is what will happen next in Georgia’s deepening political and constitutional crisis.

The Georgian Dream government’s relations with its Western partners are very badly damaged.

The EU’s new foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, warned on Sunday that the government’s actions would “have direct consequences from EU side”, and the US decision to suspend its strategic partnership will also be widely felt.

The Georgian prime minister had little time for the president or her call for new elections.

“Mrs Salome Zourabichvili has four Fridays left [as president] and she can’t get used to it. I understand her emotional state, but of course on 29 December she’ll have to leave.”

“The fight game awaits!” Conor McGregor proclaimed to his millions of social media followers on Tuesday, while retailers pulled products linked to him from shelves, murals of him were erased and brands announced they had cut ties.

It followed a 12-person jury in Dublin finding McGregor guilty of sexual assault in a civil case brought by Nikita Hand, who accused him of raping her at a Dublin hotel in December 2018. She was awarded nearly €250,000 (£208,000) in damages. In a social media post, McGregor said he would appeal the decision.

Ms Hand’s case was one of several legal issues and controversies that McGregor, one of Ireland’s most famous athletes, has faced over the past few years.

In 2018, he was arrested in New York for throwing a metal dolly at the window of a bus which had a group of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) staff and athletes on board. A year later, he was convicted and fined €1,000 (£850) for punching a man who rejected his offer of a drink in a Dublin pub.

Some commentators argue that support for McGregor within Ireland, where he had been thought of as a trailblazer, has been dwindling for some time – but the shift after Ms Hand’s civil case was seismic.

Within a week, hundreds of supermarkets in both the UK and Ireland removed brands associated with him. Proximo Spirits, the company that bought McGregor’s Proper No Twelve whiskey brand in 2021, said it did not plan to use his name or likeness in its marketing going forward.

• Woman wins civil rape case against Conor McGregor

IO Interactive, the creators of the Hitman video game, said it would cease its collaboration with McGregor in light of the court ruling. Ireland’s National Wax Museum also said it removed its figure of McGregor two weeks ago.

He built his brand on his patriotism and brash persona. But the controversies surrounding him have turned some former supporters against him and become an increasing distraction from his career.

Petesy Carroll, a mixed martial arts (MMA) journalist, credits McGregor and his team for bringing MMA to Ireland, but says they have “also destroyed it as a sport here”.

Now, after the civil case, it’s unclear what comes next.

McGregor’s rise to sporting stardom has often been described as a rags-to-riches tale. As a teenager, living in Lucan, Dublin, he quit his job as an apprentice plumber to pursue a career in a sport that was relatively unknown in Ireland.

“The Irish mentality is when you’re finished school, if you’re not going to college or anything you need to get a job straight away. There’s no chasing your dreams,” he said in a 2013 interview with RTÉ’s Late Late Show, where he was 24 years old and almost unrecognisable.

The brash, confident, boisterous traits his “notorious” brand is now synonymous with with were untraceable.

“I thought I could do something with my life. I knew I had the ability to make it in this game,” he said.

Carroll, who has been covering McGregor since the beginning of his career, says McGregor burst on to the mainstream at a time when Ireland was grappling with the impact of the 2008 recession.

“There are no opportunities, everybody’s leaving for Australia or Canada, and here’s this guy saying ‘No, be proud to be Irish. It’s cool to be Irish,’” Carroll says.

“I used to think this guy, it’s great, he’s the same age as me, I’m a college graduate, I’ve walked out of college into a country that cannot afford me any opportunity, and here’s this guy blazing a trail.”

McGregor made his UFC debut in Stockholm in 2013, aged 25, defeating Marcus Brimage and winning a knockout of the night award, which came with a $60,000 bonus. In a press conference after the event, McGregor said it was the best moment of his career yet.

“I didn’t have money before this,” he said, “I was collecting €188-a-week off the social welfare, and now here I am with a 60 G’s bonus and then my own pay.”

Carroll says money changed McGregor’s life “to the point that everyone stopped treating him like a human”.

“Everyone panders to him,” he adds.

In 2015, McGregor beat Chad Mendes in the interim featherweight championship. The bout attracted a sold-out crowd of more than 16,000 at an arena in Las Vegas.

“People don’t give him credit,” Luke Keeler, a professional boxer from Dublin, says of the win. “It was a huge impact that he made. He was dedicated and had great belief at the time.”

By then, it was clear his fame – and bank account – was reaching new heights.

One of the biggest moments in his career came later that year, when he defeated José Aldo to win the featherweight title. His first loss was against Nate Diaz in 2016. A rematch a few months later, which McGregor won, sold a record-breaking 1.6 million pay-per-view buys.

That year, on the US chat show Jimmy Kimmel Live, McGregor was asked at what age he realised he was good at fighting. “I’m Irish, we’re all good at fighting,” he told Kimmel. “Where I come from, where I grew up, you had to be aware, you had to be able to defend yourself, so that’s how I got into it.”

Back on home soil, McGregor was named Sportsperson of the Year at the RTÉ Sport Awards. Sinéad O’Carroll, an Irish journalist and editor who covered the recent trial, says this was seen as a “remarkable feat” as it happened in the same year as the Olympics and Ireland’s Euro 2016 victory over Italy.

“It was divisive though,” she adds. “Some people thought that he wasn’t so much a sportsperson, that he was more a celebrity and people looked up to him because of his attitude and his fame.

“He’s never been a very clear-cut, popular figure in Ireland, but he would have been part of that establishment, winning that award, being invited onto the Late Late Show and would have been highly regarded for his feats in the cage, if nothing else,” she says.

Carroll, the MMA journalist, says it was around this time McGregor “started showing everyone who he was”.

“It was kind of like one of those moments when you’re like, ‘oh, he is what we think he is’.”

His next bout was with Eddie Alvarez, beating him to become the first fighter in MMA history to hold belts in two weight divisions simultaneously.

McGregor stepped away from the UFC in 2017, spending much of that year campaigning for a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather. He fought Mayweather in August of that year, having faced accusations of racism during the promotional tour, which McGregor rejected. Mayweather stopped him in the 10th round.

Ms Carroll says some people did not like the antics in the lead up to the fight or the mixing of genres from MMA to boxing.

“But he still would have had a huge support base, and I remember that fight. It was in the middle of the night, but huge numbers of people would have gotten up in the morning to watch it and it would have been headline news,” she adds.

Carroll says the Mayweather fight marked a change in McGregor’s behaviour.

“He became an icon and he earned so much money, I don’t think he had to be as invested,” he says. “He became a spectacle”.

McGregor returned to the Octagon in October 2018 – two months before the night when a jury found he had assaulted Ms Hand – and lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov.

He has not fought since 2021, but in a statement on Tuesday, he indicated that he was preparing his return.

“It was amazing what he’d done [in sport],” says Keeler, the boxer.

“But he lost the run of himself… I don’t think he had any role models or anyone he was willing to listen to. I think that was his downfall. No one could actually tell him to cop on.”

BBC News has approached McGregor for comment for this story.

Ms Hand, a 35-year-old hair colourist, made a statement to Irish police in early 2019 alleging McGregor had raped her. After an investigation into the claim, police referred the case to Ireland’s Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Irish media reported on the allegations without naming McGregor, but news reports revealing him as the suspect emerged in the US a few months later. The DPP decided not to criminally prosecute McGregor due to insufficient evidence.

Ms Hand then took civil action against McGregor, suing him for damages for assault. Her lawsuit also alleged that McGregor’s friend, James Lawrence, assaulted her by having sex with her without her consent.

The jury found she had been assaulted by McGregor, but not by Mr Lawrence.

Dr Daniel Kane, a gynaecologist and forensic examiner, told the court how he had to use forceps to remove a tampon Ms Hand said she had been wearing on the night of the assault, which had been “wedged inside”. A paramedic who examined Ms Hand on the day after the alleged attacks said she had not seen a patient as bruised as Ms Hand was in a long time.

McGregor said he and Ms Hand had athletic but consensual sex.

The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) said calls over the six hours after the verdict was delivered surged by 150%.

Rachel Morrogh, DRCC’s chief executive, said that given the case involved McGregor, an international celebrity, interest was high and news reporting within Ireland was “slightly different”.

“There was rolling news coverage, live updates from the court, and it was the most read news items in many of our national media platforms,” she says.

“It meant that the survivors and victims of sexual violence couldn’t really avoid this news – it was everywhere.

“That includes across social media as well, and on social media people were giving their own views and interpretations of what was happening in court. That was difficult for people that we work with.”

Many people were calling to congratulate Ms Hand, she says, adding: “Many of them were just expressing relief at the verdict, and others were calling because they were either considering taking a legal case or were in the middle of one themselves.”

After the trial concluded, journalists swarmed around Ms Hand as she made a statement outside the courthouse. She fought back tears as she spoke, but her voice grew stronger as she told journalists she hoped her story would encourage all sexual assault victims to speak up, “no matter how afraid you might be”.

“You have a voice, keep on fighting for justice,” she said.

Ms Hand’s case has challenged perceptions in Ireland around how sexual assault victims should behave, Carroll says.

“We’re having much more nuanced conversations, I feel, in Ireland about this. It honestly feels like a cultural milestone.”

Now, a gym in Corrandulla, Galway, paints over a mural imprinted on its walls since 2016 depicting McGregor, the Irish tricolour behind him, with his fists punching the air.

“With the court ruling last week, I was actually in the car driving and it came on the radio and I straight away just rang a couple of my staff and was like ‘okay, we have to take that down,’” Gary Scully, the owner of Scully Fitness, says.

A video of Mr Scully’s staff brushing white paint over the artwork went viral. He says the response has mostly been positive, but some disagreed with the move.

“Some of them are like, ‘Typical Irish, build someone up and the second they have a wobble, knock them down.’ But I think the case and the ruling was a bit more than a wobble,” he says.

He says McGregor is “no longer a role model to the general public” after the ruling.

“People want nothing to do with him, they don’t want to see him, they don’t want anything to do with putting money his way. The way he’s behaved is just absolutely terrible,” Mr Scully says.

“He feels like he’s above the law, and now it’s proved he isn’t.”

Rebel forces launched the largest offensive against the Syrian government in years on Wednesday.

By Sunday, they had taken control of “large parts” of the country’s second-biggest city, Aleppo and were advancing towards Hama in the south.

The surprise offensive prompted the first Russian strikes on Aleppo since 2016, and saw Syria’s military withdraw its troops from the city.

The attack was led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – which has a long and involved history in the Syrian conflict.

• Live updates on this story

HTS was set up under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusra, in 2011 as a direct affiliate of Al Qaeda.

The leader of the self-styled Islamic State (IS) group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was also involved in its formation.

It was regarded as one of the most effective and deadly of the groups ranged against President Assad.

But its jihadist ideology appeared to be its driving force rather than revolutionary zeal – and it was seen at the time as at odds with the main rebel coalition under the banner of Free Syria.

And in 2016, the group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, publicly broke ranks with Al Qaeda, dissolved Jabhat al-Nusra and set up a new organisation, which took the name Hayat Tahrir al-Sham when it merged with several other similar groups a year later.

The war in Syria has for the past four years felt as if it were effectively over.

President Bashar al-Assad’s rule is essentially uncontested in the country’s major cities, while some other parts of Syria remain out of his direct control.

These include Kurdish majority areas in the east, which have been more or less separate from Syrian state control since the early years of the conflict.

There has been some continued, though relatively muted unrest, in the south where the revolution against Assad’s rule began in 2011.

In the vast Syrian desert, holdouts from the group calling themselves Islamic State still pose a security threat, particularly during the truffle hunting season when people head to the area to find the highly profitable delicacy.

And in the north-west, the province of Idlib has been held by militant groups driven there at the height of the war.

HTS, the dominant force in Idlib, is the one that has launched the surprise attack on Aleppo.

For several years, Idlib remained a battleground as Syrian government forces tried to regain control.

But a ceasefire deal in 2020 brokered by Russia, which has long been Assad’s key ally, and Turkey, which has backed the rebels, has largely held.

About four million people live there – most of them displaced from towns and cities that Assad’s forces won back from rebels in a brutal war of attrition.

Aleppo was one of the bloodiest battlegrounds and represented one of the rebels’ biggest defeats.

To achieve victory, President Assad could not depend on the country’s under-equipped and poorly motivated conscript army alone, which soon became dangerously stretched and regularly unable to hold positions against rebel attacks.

Instead, he came to rely heavily on Russian airpower and Iranian military help on the ground – mainly through militias sponsored by Tehran.

These included Hezbollah.

There is little doubt that the setback Hezbollah has suffered recently from Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, as well as Israeli strikes on Iranian military commanders in Syria, has played a significant part in the decision by jihadist and rebel groups in Idlib to make their sudden, unexpected move on Aleppo.

In the past few months, Israel has intensified its attacks on Iranian-linked groups as well as their supply lines, inflicting serious damage on the networks that have kept these militias, including Hezbollah, operative in Syria.

Without them, President Assad’s forces have been left exposed.

For some time now, HTS has established its power base in Idlib where it is the de facto local administration, although its efforts towards legitimacy have been tarnished by alleged human rights abuses.

It has also been involved in some bitter infighting with other groups.

Its ambitions beyond Idlib had become unclear.

Since breaking with Al Qaeda, its goal has been limited to trying to establish fundamentalist Islamic rule in Syria rather than a wider caliphate, as IS tried and failed to do.

It had shown little sign of attempting to reignite the Syrian conflict on a major scale and renew its challenge to Assad’s rule over much of the country – until now.

Tamuna Museridze took a deep breath and made the phone call she had dreamed of since finding out that she might be adopted.

She was calling the woman she believed was her biological mother. She knew it might not lead to a fairy tale reunion – but she didn’t expect the response to be cold and angry.

“She started screaming, shouting – she said she hadn’t given birth to a child. She didn’t want anything to do with me,” Tamuna recalls, explaining she felt more surprised than upset by the response.

“I was ready for anything, but her reaction was beyond anything I could imagine.”

Tamuna wasn’t prepared to walk away just yet. She wanted to know the circumstances of her adoption, and there was something else she wanted that only her mother could give her – the name of her father.

Tamuna’s search had begun in 2016, after the woman who raised her died. Clearing out her house, Tamuna found a birth certificate with her own name on it but the wrong birth date, and she started to suspect she was adopted. After doing some research, she set up a Facebook group called Vedzeb, or I’m Searching, hoping to find her birth parents.

Instead, she uncovered a baby trafficking scandal in Georgia that has affected tens of thousands of lives. Over many decades, parents were lied to and told their newborn babies had died – the infants were then sold.

Tamuna is a journalist and her work has reunited hundreds of families, yet – until now – she couldn’t solve the mystery of her own origins and wondered if she too had been stolen as a child.

“I was a journalist on this story, but it was a personal mission for me as well,” she says.

The breakthrough in her search had come in the summer, when she received a message through her Facebook group. It was from someone who lived in rural Georgia, who said they knew a woman who had concealed a pregnancy and given birth in Tbilisi in September 1984. That’s around the time Tamuna was born – a date she had shared publicly.

The person believed the woman was Tamuna’s birth mother – and crucially they gave a name.

• Georgia’s stolen children: Twins sold at birth reunited by TikTok video

Tamuna immediately searched for her online but when she couldn’t find anything, she decided to post an appeal on Facebook asking if anyone knew her.

A woman soon responded, saying the woman who had concealed the pregnancy was her own aunt. She asked Tamuna to take the post down but she agreed to do a DNA test.

While they were waiting for the results, Tamuna made the phone call to her mother.

A week later, the DNA results arrived, indicating that Tamuna and the woman on Facebook were indeed cousins. Armed with this evidence, Tamuna managed to convince her mother to acknowledge the truth and reveal the name of her father. It was a man called Gurgen Khorava.

“The first two months were shocking, I couldn’t believe these things were happening to me,” she recalls, “I couldn’t believe I had found them.”

Once Tamuna had Gurgen’s name, she quickly tracked him down on Facebook. It turned out that he had been following her story on social media – her work reconnecting families is widely known across Georgia.

Tamuna was amazed to find that he had “been in my friend list for three years”. He just hadn’t realised he was a part of her story.

“He didn’t even know my birth mother had been pregnant,” says Tamuna. “It was a huge surprise for him.”

They soon arranged to meet in his hometown of Zugdidi in western Georgia – about 160 miles (260km) from where she lives in Tbilisi.

Looking back, Tamuna thinks she was in a state of shock, but as she walked up to Gurgen’s garden gate, she felt surprisingly calm.

When the 72-year-old appeared, they hugged, then stopped to take a moment to look at each other, smiling.

“It was strange, the moment he looked at me, he knew that I was his daughter,” she recalls. “I had so many mixed emotions.”

She had a lot of questions and didn’t know where to start. “We just sat together, watching each other and trying to find something in common,” she says.

As the two of them chatted, they realised they shared a lot of interests – Gurgen had once been a renowned dancer at the State Ballet of Georgia, and was delighted to learn that Tamuna’s daughters – his granddaughters – shared his passion.

“They both love dancing, and so does my husband,” she says with a smile.

Gurgen invited his entire family to his home to meet Tamuna, introducing her to a large group of new relatives – half siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. The family agreed there was a strong resemblance between them. “Out of all his children, I look the most like my father,” she says.

They spent an evening sharing stories, eating traditional Georgian food, and singing while Gurgen played the accordion.

Even though she had now met her father, Tamuna still had a niggling question: had she – like thousands of other Georgians – been stolen from her mother at birth and sold? Her adoptive parents were no longer alive so she couldn’t turn to them for answers.

She finally got a chance to ask her birth mother in October. A Polish TV company was filming a documentary about Tamuna and took her to meet her mother, who agreed to talk to her in private.

Unlike many people Tamuna has helped to reunite, she discovered that she had not been a stolen child herself. Instead, her mother had given her up and kept the secret for 40 years.

Her mother and father were not in a relationship and had only had a brief encounter. Her mother – overwhelmed by shame – chose to hide her pregnancy. In September 1984, she travelled to Tbilisi, telling people she was going for surgery, and instead gave birth to a daughter. She stayed there until arrangements were made for Tamuna’s adoption.

“It was painful to learn that I spent 10 days alone with her before the adoption. I try not to think about that,” Tamuna reflects.

She says that her mother asked her to lie and tell people she had been stolen. “She told me that if I would not say that I was stolen, everything would end between us… and I said that I couldn’t do that.”

Tamuna feels this would be unfair to all the parents whose babies were stolen. “If I lie, nobody’s going to believe those mothers any more,” she explains.

Her mother then asked her to leave the house and they have not spoken since.

“Would I do it all again?” she reflects. “Of course I would, I found out so much about my new family.”

Georgia’s Stolen Children

Twins Amy and Ano were taken from their mother as babies and sold. They found out about each other by chance and soon discovered thousands of others in Georgia who were also stolen from hospitals.

Watch more on this story on the BBC iPlayer (UK only).

You can also watch the documentary on YouTube.

For nearly 300 years, a family’s ancestral house in India’s southern state of Kerala has been the stage for theyyam, an ancient folk ritual.

Rooted in ancient tribal traditions, theyyam predates Hinduism while weaving in Hindu mythology. Each performance is both a theatrical spectacle and an act of devotion, transforming the performer into a living incarnation of the divine.

The predominantly male performers in Kerala and parts of neighbouring Karnataka embody deities through elaborate costumes, face paint, and trance-like dances, mime and music.

Each year, nearly a thousand theyyam performances take place in family estates and venues near temples across Kerala, traditionally performed by men from marginalised castes and tribal communities.

It is often called ritual theatre for its electrifying drama, featuring daring acts like fire-walking, diving into burning embers, chanting occult verses, and prophesying.

Historian KK Gopalakrishnan has celebrated his family’s legacy in hosting theyyam and the ritual’s vibrant traditions in a new book, Theyyam: An Insider’s Vision.

The theyyams are performed in the courtyard of Mr Gopalakrishnan’s ancient joint family house (above) in Kasaragod district. Hundreds of people gather to witness the performances.

The theyyam season in Kerala typically runs from October to April, aligning with the post-monsoon and winter months. During this time, numerous venues near temples and family estates, especially in northern Kerala districts like Kannur and Kasaragod, host performances.

The themes of performances at Mr Gopalakrishnan’s house include honouring a deified ancestor, venerating a warrior-hunter deity, and worshipping tiger spirits symbolising strength and protection.

Before the performance honouring a local goddess, a ritual is conducted in a nearby forest, revered as the deity’s earthly home.

Following an elaborate ceremony (above), the “spirit of the goddess” is then transported to the house.

Mr Gopalakrishnan is a member of the Nambiar community, a matrilineal branch of the Nair caste, where the senior-most maternal uncle oversees the arrangements. If he is unable to fulfil this role due to age or illness, the next senior male member steps in.

Women in the family, especially the senior-most among them, play a crucial role in the rituals.

They ensure traditions are upheld, prepare for the rituals, and oversee arrangements inside the house.

“They enjoy high respect and are integral to maintaining the family’s legacy,” says Mr Gopalakrishnan.

The spectacle is a blend of loud cries, fiery torches, and intense scenes from epics or dances.

Performers sometimes bear the physical toll of these daring feats, with burn marks or even the loss of a limb.

“Fire plays a significant role in certain forms of theyyam, symbolising purification, divine energy, and the transformative power of the ritual. In some performances, the theyyam dancer interacts directly with fire, walking through flames or carrying burning torches, signifying the deity’s invincibility and supernatural abilities,” says Mr Gopalakrishnan.

“The use of fire adds a dramatic and intense visual element, further heightening the spiritual atmosphere of the performance and illustrating the deity’s power over natural forces.”

The deities can be manifestations of gods and goddesses, ancestral spirits, animals, or even forces of nature.

Here, the theyyam performer (above) embodies Raktheswari, a fierce manifestation of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction.

She is portrayed drenched in blood, a powerful symbol of her raw energy and destructive force.

This intense ritual delves into themes of sorcery, voodoo, and divine wrath.

Through dramatic costume and ritualistic dance, the performance channels Kali’s potent energy, invoking protection, justice, and spiritual cleansing.

During the performance, the artist (or kolam) transforms into these deities, through elaborate costumes and body paint, their striking colours bringing the deities to life.

Here, a performer meticulously adjusts his goddess attire, checking his look in the mirror before stepping into the ritual. The transformation is as much an act of devotion as it is a preparation for the electrifying performance ahead.

Distinct facial markings, intricate designs, and vibrant hues – especially vermillion -define the unique makeup and costumes of theyyam.

Each look is carefully crafted to symbolise the deity being portrayed, showcasing the rich diversity and detail that distinguishes this ritual art. Some theyyams do not require face painting but use only masks.

Theyyam’s animistic roots shine through in its reverence for nature and its creatures.

This crawling crocodile theyyam deity symbolises the power of reptiles and is venerated as a protector against their dangers.

With its detailed costume and lifelike movements, it highlights humanity’s deep-rooted connection to nature.

The deity will bless a large congregation of devotees after a performance.

Here, a female devotee unburdens her troubles before a theyyam deity, seeking solace and divine intervention.

As she offers her prayers, the sacred space becomes a moment of spiritual release, where devotion and vulnerability intertwine.

Huge flooding caused by heavy rain in Malaysia and neighbouring Thailand has killed at least 12 people, officials say.

More than 122,000 people have been forced out of their homes in northern Malaysia, while in southern Thailand, around 13,000 others have also been displaced.

There are fears the number could rise, as heavy rain and storm warnings remain in place.

Emergency services personnel have been deployed to help rescue stranded residents and shelters are being provided.

The flooding, which began earlier in the week, has seen thousands of residents evacuated in both nations.

Videos on social media and local news show cars and houses submerged, and people wading through waist-deep water.

One video, filmed in Thailand’s Sateng Nok district, showed rescuers carrying a baby out from a roof of a flooded home.

Flooding has impacted nearly 534,000 households in southern Thailand, disaster officials said, and two hospitals had to close to prevent floodwaters from damaging medical facilities.

Six provinces have declared a disaster due to the floods.

The government has designated 50 million baht ($1.7m; £1.3m) in flood relief for each province, with Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra saying the goal is to “restore normalcy as quickly as possible”.

In Malaysia, the flooding is mostly concentrated on the north-eastern state of Kelantan, which borders Thailand.

There, the National Disaster Management Agency says the evacuees account for 63% of the total number.

One resident in the town of Pasir Puteh in Kelantan said her area had been flooded since Wednesday.

“The water has already reached my house corridor and is just two inches away from coming inside,” Zamrah Majid told AFP news agency.

Another resident of the same town said he and his family have been isolated by the floods.

“There’s no way in or out of for any vehicles to enter my neighbourhood,” Muhammad Zulkarnain told AFP.

Another eight states in Malaysia have also been affected.

So far, the number of those displaced surpasses that of 2014, which saw one of the worst floods in the country.

Provisions for disaster management have been sent to Terengganu and Kelantan State Governments, according to the prime minister’s office.

On Friday, he barred his cabinet members from going on leave so they can focus on the disaster.

The Malaysian Meteorological Department warned that heavy rains will continue until Sunday in some states, while its Thai counterpart warned that “very heavy rain” could continue through next week.

Both countries experience monsoon rains around this time of the year, and flooding isn’t uncommon.

In 2021, Malaysia faced some of its worse flooding in decades, which killed at least 14 people.

Ten years earlier, in 2011, widespread flooding across Thailand killed at least 500 people and damaged millions of homes.

Warning – this article contains details that some readers may find disturbing

On the evening of 20 August 1989, brothers Erik and Lyle Menendez walked into the den of their home in Beverly Hills, where their parents were watching a film, The Spy Who Loved Me, and they shot them at close range with a shotgun. They were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole and, for years, their story largely faded from the spotlight.

Then, in September, they returned to the headlines following the release of a Netflix drama series and documentary about what happened. Now their case is under review because of new evidence that was not presented at their trial.

Last Monday, 28 years after their last courtroom appearance, the brothers teleconferenced into a hearing from prison, during which their aunt pleaded for their release. “I think it is time for them to go home,” she said.

Their uncle, meanwhile, has called the brothers “cold-blooded” and believes they belong behind bars for life.

What struck me, as I watched all of this unfold, were the opposing ways that different people, even their own family members, portrayed them. Are the Menendez brothers, to borrow the name of the Netflix drama, really “monsters”? Or is it possible that they have changed, as their aunt claims?

In my 30 years as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist working in psychiatric hospitals and prisons across the UK, including Broadmoor, I have spoken to hundreds of criminals who have committed terrible offences in an attempt to help them take responsibility.

Some people assume that this is an impossible task. I’ve been asked: “But surely they can’t be helped? Aren’t they born that way?” The implication being that only an abnormal monster could inflict dreadful damage on another person – or that killers, from Rose West to Harold Shipman, Lucy Letby to Peter Sutcliffe, are somehow not human.

Certainly, when I first started working in this field, I assumed that people who have committed violent and murderous acts are very different from the rest of us.

But I no longer think this.

What I’ve learnt is that the real causes of violent minds – a subject I examine in The Reith Lectures, which are broadcast in four episodes on Radio 4 – aren’t depicted in true-crime dramas or courtroom transcripts.

The reality is far more complex than labelling someone as simply ‘evil’, as I discovered firsthand.

In 1996, soon after I’d started at Broadmoor while completing my psychotherapy training, I took on a patient called Tony. He had killed three men and decapitated one of them.

I’d read a lot of lurid reports about serial killers but at the time there was little advice available on how to talk to one or offer them therapy, and part of me wondered if there was any point. How would we know if he was “better”?

He was 10 years into his sentence and had recently been stabbed with a sharpened toothbrush by three other prisoners. A suicide attempt had followed.

In our first session, there was silence. He folded his arms and avoided meeting my eyes. When he looked up, his eyes were so dark they appeared almost black. He was suffering from depression and nightmares. “I was thinking that it’s peaceful in here,” he said eventually, breaking the silence. “There’s a man in the room next to mine who keeps shouting in the night.”

It took him months to open up about his recurring nightmare. In it, he was strangling a young man who morphed into his father. It led us to discuss his offences and his family and how, as a child, Tony had suffered violent abuse at the hands of his father; in turn, he began to bully others.

Later I learnt that the man “in the next room” who shouted at night was Tony himself. I suggested that perhaps he was shouting the things that he could not express. He dropped his face in his hands, muffling his voice. “No… I don’t want to,” he admitted. “I can’t be so weak.”

I worked with Tony for 18 months and came to feel compassion and respect for his honesty, even as I still held in mind the terrible trail of destruction he had caused. The fact he’d requested this therapy himself was also a sign that part of him was ready to be vulnerable.

That early experience taught me that no matter their history, if people – including serial killers – are able to be curious about their minds, there’s a chance that we can make meaning out of disorder.

When it comes to serial killers it is generally assumed that they are psychopaths, but I wasn’t convinced that applied to Tony. Psychopaths are unlikely to request help as they don’t want to do anything they’d consider to be demeaning, so on that basis alone Tony wouldn’t have met the criteria, as he had asked for therapy.

The psychopaths I’ve encountered in my career have been neither exceptionally bright nor socially able, nor at all charming. They are usually so lacking in empathy that they cannot see the effect they have on others.

And contrary to common belief, very few killers are in fact psychopaths, especially domestic homicide perpetrators like the Menendez brothers.

Tony’s story also highlighted the role that childhood adversity can play in violent crime. The Menendez brothers argued that they were victims of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their father, a defence that was challenged in court before they were handed life sentences.

Yet a significant proportion of the population have experienced severe childhood trauma – as many as 10-12% of people in the UK according to some studies – but a far smaller number commit acts of criminal violence.

Which begs the question, what makes some people respond to childhood trauma with violence, while others do not? Could it be that those people are indeed “monsters”? Or, as some of my patients previously put it: “I have done evil things, but does that make me evil?”

There is no scientific evidence that people are born “evil”. And in my experience, there is no such a thing as an evil person – instead, there are evil states of mind.

So, typically, I begin my answer by telling them that it is possible for anyone to get into this state of mind, which is dominated by ordinary emotions of hatred, envy, greed and anger.

Deep down most of us have a capacity for cruelty but the risk factors that make some people act that out with extreme violence are specific. They are a little like the numbers in a bicycle lock. Just as all the numbers have to line up for the bicycle lock to open, multiple risk factors are usually in place before violence erupts.

The most common risk factors are being young and male (with higher rates of aggression and impulsivity); being intoxicated with drugs and alcohol; having a history of family conflict and breakdown; and a history of criminal rule-breaking. Being in a paranoid state of mind caused by mental illness can also be a risk factor, though this is more rare.

The most important risk factor for murder, however, is the nature of the relationship with the victim, especially a history of relationship conflict. It is well known that women are most commonly killed by male partners or family members, and most children are killed by their parents or step-parents. The killing of strangers is rare, and these tend to be cases where perpetrators are severely mentally unwell.

So the first two numbers that align in the bicycle lock could be sociopolitical, and the next two might be specific to the perpetrator.

The final number that causes the lock to spring open can be something that happens between the victim and the perpetrator – whether an offhand comment, an action perceived as a threat, or something as simple as a bad football result. (Domestic abuse soars by 38% when the England team lose, according to research by Lancaster University.)

When the bicycle lock clicks into place, what is unleashed is often a wave of overwhelming emotion that distorts how the person sees everything.

The good news is that over the last 20 years there has been a fall in homicide rates in the UK and elsewhere, which is largely a result of changes in some of these bicycle lock factors.

“The decline of homicide rates since 2004 in the UK – which has also happened in the US, Spain, Italy, and Germany – is partly due to changes in lifestyles such as reductions in binge drinking and cannabis consumption among adolescents,” says Professor Manuel Eisner, director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.

“[It is also] partly the influence of technologies such as mobile phones and CCTV cameras, which add surveillance and opportunities to find help in situations of danger.”

In addition, he attributes the drop to wider shifts including the bolstering of cultural norms opposing bullying, and violence against women, girls and children.

And while there is a minority of people whose minds can’t be changed – who will always be a risk – by paying attention to distorted narratives in the majority of cases, we can find ways to change those violent minds for good.

In 2004 I met a man called Jack who had killed his mother when he was in his 20s. He had been found to be suffering with paranoid schizophrenia at the time, so he was sent to hospital for treatment.

Later, he joined a therapy group that I was running at Broadmoor Hospital. In the hour-long sessions the group members, who had all killed family members while mentally unwell, would talk about how they could avoid violence in future. Jack didn’t always seem engaged but after a year or so, just after another member had talked about past regrets, he spoke abruptly.

“I wish I could say sorry to my mum for what I did,” he said. “I know I was mentally ill, but I wish I could say how sorry I was and that she could forgive me. I hope she understands how much I regret it.”

By seeing themselves in other offenders, some group members were able to learn how it had been possible to delude themselves into thinking that someone had to die; and how waves of anger, shame and fear could lead them to misinterpret actions and words.

Jack seemed more engaged after that day and his mental health improved enough for him to move to a less secure hospital for further rehabilitation.

Group therapy takes time, but afterwards many other men were also considered safe enough to move to less secure treatment facilities, which is a sign of improvement and something we only do if we determine that their risk of reoffending is negligible. Most importantly, they also learnt to take responsibility.

Jack helped me realise that people who kill are not mindless monsters who are born that way. He was an ordinary man who had done an extraordinary thing, as with many others.

None of this is an excuse for violence – and every violent crime is a tragedy for all who are involved – but monstering people is not helpful. It is simply one way to deal with rage and fear. And we miss a chance to reduce and prevent violence if we write off everyone who has murdered or abused in that way.

It takes a radical kind of empathy to sit with a man who has decapitated his partner, or a woman who has stabbed a friend. But trying to comprehend them and gain new insights about ourselves requires going where they walk, and seeing what they see. And that is what ultimately leads to change.

Gregg Wallace has hit back at allegations of historic misconduct, saying they have come from a “handful of middle-class women of a certain age”.

The MasterChef presenter said in a video on Instagram on Sunday morning there had been “13 complaints” from “over 4,000 contestants” he had worked with in 20 years on the BBC One show.

He stepped aside earlier this week after a BBC News investigation revealed a string of allegations of inappropriate sexual comments and inappropriate behaviour against him.

The investigation heard from 13 people across a range of ages, who worked across five different shows, including broadcaster Kirsty Wark who appeared on Celebrity MasterChef.

“I’ve been doing MasterChef for 20 years – amateur, professional and Celebrity MasterChef – and I think in that time I have worked with over 4,000 contestants of all different ages, all different backgrounds, all walks of life,” Wallace told his more than 200,000 followers.

“And apparently now, I’m reading in the paper, there’s been 13 complaints in that time.

“Now, in the newspaper I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age just from Celebrity MasterChef. This isn’t right.”

He finished his statement by saying: “In over 20 years of television, can you imagine how many women, female contestants on MasterChef, have made sexual remarks or sexual innuendo – can you imagine?”

Wallace’s lawyers have strongly denied he engages in sexually harassing behaviour, while the BBC said it will “always listen if people want to make us aware of something directly”.

Responding to Wallace’s video, actress Emma Kennedy who won Celebrity MasterChef in 2012 and says she complained about his behaviour at the time, said “it doesn’t matter what the age of any woman is”.

“If you behave inappropriately, you behave inappropriately,” she told BBC News. “It’s a story as old as the tides that people who have been accused of inappropriate behaviour turn the tables on those pointing it out and try and change the narrative.”

She added: “Playing the ‘they’re having a go at me because I’m working class’ card is ridiculous.”

TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp told BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend about an encounter with Wallace several years ago that left her “so embarrassed”, after he “made a reference to something [he and his partner] did in bed”.

She also called Wallace’s claims on social media on Sunday “unacceptable”, adding: “He is essentially saying this is a class issue and middle-class women don’t understand the type of things he says because he’s working-class.”

Writing on X alongside a link to a BBC News article on Wallace, Baroness Harriet Harman said that women now “feel able to challenge” inappropriate behaviour from men.

She said that specifically “older, middle class women [are] more able to challenge than freelance junior women”, adding: “It’s our duty.”

It comes as the BBC faces fresh questions over its handling of allegations against the 60-year-old, and the fact he continued to present the cooking show, after emails emerged showing it was warned about him in 2017.

Radio host Aasmah Mir said she complained to the corporation that year about inappropriate comments Wallace had allegedly made during filming of the programme.

In an internal email, BBC executive Kate Phillips, who now heads up unscripted programmes for the corporation, said that his behaviour on set was “unacceptable and cannot continue,” the Sunday Times reported.

She added that she would make sure that she was “informed straight away” should further allegations be made against him.

Mir later sent an email that was copied to Phillips, saying: “This must not happen again to another woman.”

Some of the allegations against Wallace in the BBC News investigation relate to events after 2017.

A BBC source commented on Sunday that “it would be wrong to report the BBC has done nothing if or when matters have been raised with us”.

“We continue to urge caution about pre-judging any of this, particularly the involvement of BBC staff members and any inference they have not acted appropriately,” the source told BBC News.

Separately, the Observer says a letter containing multiple claims of inappropriate behaviour by Gregg Wallace was sent to the BBC in 2022, but did not result in further investigation at the time.

On Thursday, MasterChef’s production company Banijay UK said Wallace would step away from presenting the show while allegations of historical misconduct were investigated.

He is “committed to fully co-operating throughout the process”, Banijay added.

It came after BBC News sent a letter to Wallace’s representatives, setting out allegations we have heard from 13 people, across a 17-year period.

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

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

Wallace’s lawyers have said it is entirely false that he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature.

On Saturday evening, Wallace said in an Instagram post: “We are all different.”

Alongside his Instagram statement on Sunday morning, he posted apparent screenshots of supportive messages he had received from people who said they were former contestants on the show.

In his video message he wore a navy T-shirt with the Matt Hampson Foundation written on it – but shortly afterwards the charity, which helps people recover from major sports injuries, posted on X to say “we do not condone the kind of behaviour and comments contained in these allegations”.

Reacting to Wallace’s video, TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall told the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “I understand the instinct when you feel you’re backed in a corner, but I don’t think it’s smart to come out talking like that when at the moment he should probably be listening.”

The BBC said it has “robust processes” in place to deal with issues if they are raised.

Earlier on Saturday, MasterChef producers announced they have appointed a “rigorous” law firm to lead an investigation into Wallace’s alleged misconduct.

On the appointment of London law firm Lewis Silkin, a Banijay UK spokesperson said it was a “highly experienced specialist investigations team which has overseen a broad range of high-profile workplace investigations”.

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te has arrived in the US state of Hawaii for a two-day visit, drawing a furious reaction from China.

The trip is being billed as a stopover as part of a Pacific tour, but comes amid long-running tensions between the US and China and growing concerns about the possibility of conflict over Taiwan.

After arriving in Hawaii, Lai said war would have “no winners” and that “we have to fight together to prevent war”.

China’s foreign ministry said it “strongly condemns” the visit and that it had “lodged serious protests with the US”.

• What is behind China-Taiwan tensions?
• Taiwan’s president vows to resist ‘annexation’

China considers Taiwan – which broke away in 1949 following the Chinese Civil War – to be part of its own territory, and opposes any diplomatic engagement with it by other countries.

The US has long maintained a deliberately ambiguous policy towards the island, declining to recognise its independence but maintaining informal relations with its government.

Speaking before his departure for Hawaii, Lai said the trip marked “the beginning of a new era of value-based diplomacy”.

“Democracy, prosperity and peace are the expectations of the people of Taiwan, and they are also the values that I, as president, must actively promote,” he said.

He said he wanted to show the world that Taiwan is “not only a model of democracy, but also a key force in promoting global peace, stability, and prosperity”.

Speaking at a dinner on Saturday attended by state officials, members of Congress, and Taiwanese residents of Hawaii, he added that a visit that day to Pearl Harbour – whose bombing by Japan in 1941 brought the US into the Second World War – had served as a reminder of “the importance of ensuring peace”.

“Peace is priceless, and war has no winners. We have to fight, fight together to prevent war,” he said.

The rest of the trip will see Lai visit Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and Palau, the only Pacific island nations among the 12 countries that recognise Taiwan’s independence. He will also stop for one night in the US territory of Guam.

In a statement ahead of the trip, a spokesperson for the Chinese defence ministry said China would “firmly oppose official interaction with China’s Taiwan region in any form” and “resolutely crush” attempts secure Taiwanese independence.

The family of beauty-salon owner Fathi Hussein are deep in mourning at their home in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, following her horrific death at sea after a deal she struck with migrant smugglers to take her to the French island of Mayotte went wrong.

“We were told by survivors that she died from hunger,” the 26-year-old’s stepsister Samira tells the BBC by phone.

The family learned from them that Fathi died in one of two small boats, adrift in the Indian Ocean for about 14 days, after being abandoned by the smugglers.

“People were eating raw fish and drinking sea water, which she refused. They [the survivors] said she started hallucinating before she died. And after that they threw her body into the ocean,” Samira tells the BBC.

Fathi’s family learned of her death from fellow Somalis who had been rescued by fishermen off the coast of Madagascar about a week ago.

The International Migration Organization (IMO) said that more than 70 people were on the two boats when they capsized, claiming the lives of 24, while 48 survived.

Hundreds of migrants are believed to die each year trying to make it to the tiny French island, located about 300km (186 miles) north-west of Madagascar.

On 1 November, Fathi flew from Mogadishu to the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa, and a few days later left by boat for Mayotte – a perilous journey of more than 1,100 km across the Indian Ocean.

Samira says they are baffled by Fathi’s decision as she had a successful business in Mogadishu, and lived in the middle-class neighbourhood of Yaqshid.

Fathi hid her plan from the family, sharing her secret only with their younger sister, telling her that she had paid the smugglers money she had made running her beauty salon, Samira says.

“She used to hate the ocean. I don’t know why and how she took that decision. I wish I could give her a hug,” she adds.

Survivors told Fathi’s family that the beauty salon owner and all the other passengers were in one big boat when they left Mombasa.

But during the journey, the smugglers said the boat had developed mechanical problems and would have to turn back.

Then before returning to Kenya, the smugglers put all the migrants on two small boats, assuring them: “You will reach Mayotte in three hours.”

But, says Samira, “it turned into 14 days” and led to the death of her sister and others.

Some of the survivors suspect that the smugglers deliberately left them stranded in the sea as they had already been paid, and had no intention of taking them to Mayotte, says Samira.

IMO regional official Frantz Celestin tells the BBC it is increasingly common for migrants to risk their lives trying to reach the French island.

“Just recently 25 people perished doing the same journey, usually transiting through Comoros and Madagascar. Generally this year has been the deadliest year for migrants,” he says.

The BBC has spoken to five Somali migrants who have tried to reach Mayotte.

They told us there are two primary routes from Somalia to the island.

Some travel by boat from Mombasa via the Comoros islands, which are much closer to Mayotte, while those with more money fly to Ethiopia and then to Madagascar because Somali passport-holders qualify for a visa on arrival.

From there, they take a small boat to Mayotte, hoping it will open the door to gaining a French passport and access to Europe.

One of the lucky few who has survived this perilous route is Khadar Mohamed.

He arrived in Mayotte 11 months ago but clearly remembers the harrowing ordeal he went through to reach the island from Madagascar.

“When I came to Madagascar, I was taken to the boat-owner’s house. We stayed there for 14 days. We were a mix of Somali and Madagascans,” he says.

The group of those waiting grew to 70. They were then put on a boat and taken via a river out to the open ocean.

Khadar says he left Somalia because of the threat posed by al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda affiliate fighting to overthrow the government.

“I left my country for my safety. I was a business owner, and I couldn’t do my work because of al-Shabab,” he says.

The families of some of the victims say the smugglers are paid about $6,000 (£4,700) to travel from Mombasa to Mayotte, with half the money given up front.

The BBC has seen accounts on social media platform TikTok, advertising similar journeys to Mayotte and even further to other parts of Europe.

The adverts claim operators can take people to Mayotte using large tourist boats, but victims’ families say the smugglers are using much smaller fishing boats called “kwassa”.

The French government has not commented on the recent tragedy.

Somalia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, says that his government is making efforts to contact the survivors and to bring them back home.

Fathi’s family say they reported to the authorities a smuggler they suspect their daughter had contact with in Mogadishu and he was arrested, but has since been released on bail.

Samira says the pain of not knowing how her sister felt in her final moments will stay with her forever.

“I wish she could talk to me and tell me about her decision. She could have said bye to me… now, I don’t know how to process her death,” she says.

• Born in France but searching for a future in Africa
• ‘Try or die’ – one man’s determination to get to the Canary Islands
• How sailors say they were tricked into smuggling cocaine by a British man

Earlier this week one of America’s most wanted men was finally arrested in rural north Wales having spent the past 21 years on the run.

Daniel Andreas San Diego, 46, was wanted by the FBI for allegedly bombing two office buildings in San Francisco in 2003.

But why would the suspect, who was born in Berkeley, California, choose to hide out in Maenan in the remote outskirts of the sleepy market town of Llanrwst in the Conwy valley?

And of all the countries in the world, why Wales?

“It’s beautiful… if you’re trying to evade capture, you might as well be somewhere that’s stunning and beautiful,” said former undercover detective Peter Bleksley.

Peter, who is probably best known for his time capturing make-believe fugitives on Channel 4’s TV show Hunted, said picking somewhere so remote had pros and cons.

“Being remote you can be living in a property where neighbours can’t see you, the public’s prying eyes are a long way away and you’re not going to face uncomfortable questions like you might do if you were living in a terraced house in a city, for example,” he said.

He said there would also be benefits to choosing to hide in a big city.

“You could be anonymous because people don’t talk to each other, they sit cheek by jowl on the bus or on the tube and still don’t speak to each other, if you say hello to people they think you’re a nutter, so cities are sometimes favoured because of the anonymity they can offer,” he said.

“The flip side of that, of course, is CCTV is everywhere in our major cities, which is a concern for fugitives.”

Mr San Diego, who the FBI has previously called an “animal rights extremist”, was held after an operation backed by counter terrorist police and North Wales Police on Monday.

He now faces extradition to the US after being arrested at a property in a remote rural area near woodland in north Wales.

Earlier this week Aled Evans told how he unknowingly sold his home to Mr San Diego.

He said in August 2023, using the name Danny Webb, Mr San Diego had paid £425,000 for the white villa with a balcony offering striking views of rolling hills and a well-manicured garden near Llanrwst in August 2023.

Reflecting on recent events he has realised it was the ideal location “if you wanted to keep your head down”.

Peter believes it was most likely the purchase of this property that marked the start of the end of Mr San Diego’s life on the run.

“Maybe purchasing that property created the electronic footprint opportunity for the FBI to exploit, which therefore led to his capture,” he said.

“Gone are the days when drug dealers could walk into an estate agents with carrier bags full of cash and literally go ‘I’ll buy that flat or I’ll buy that house’ because of course we have money laundering regulations, banks have to ask certain questions of people if they transfer a sizable sum of money.

“If anybody involved in that process, be it estate agent bank, solicitors, had any suspicions as to the money trail and they flagged it up to the authorities, that would start an investigation.”

Although he has spent a career hunting down others, Peter has some experience of what it is like to live a life in hiding.

While working at Scotland Yard’s undercover unit his identity was exposed and he had to go into witness protection.

“Living a life continually looking over your shoulder is very unpleasant,” he said.

“You’re always fearful of that knock on the door… it can be very draining, although the longer you do it, the more you get used to it.”

He said living that way for an extended period of time could lead to sloppy mistakes.

“That’s the danger, and, of course, keeping your guard up all the time requires constant vigilance, which is draining… maybe his guard did drop just a little bit.”

Through his career, Peter has had quite the insight into the behaviour of fugitives.

“I’ve caught real ones when I was a detective and I caught many pretend ones when I was the chief in Hunted,” he said.

So having seen the mistakes that lead to capture, what advice would he give to someone who wants to remain in hiding?

“Be nice to people,” he said.

“If you’re nice, they’ll feed you, they’ll clothe you, they’ll take you where you want to go, they’ll give you cash or other financial means.

“If you’re not, if you’re unpleasant and you upset people, they’ll pick up the phone and grass you up.”

He has this theories but Peter is eager to find out the truth about what led to Mr San Diego’s arrest.

“I do hope we get to find out how it was caught, how it all unravelled because it’ll be great,” he said.

“And I suspect Netflix are all over this story already.”

Maenan sits just off the A470, one of the main roads running through north Wales, about 10 miles (16km) from Conwy.

It is a sprawling community of farms and isolated cottages, many of which are now holiday homes or holiday lets. There is no shop or village pub.

Many of the properties that you pass on the way to Llidiart y Coed appear to be holiday homes.

The FBI has accused Mr San Diego of being “an animal rights extremist” involved in a series of bombings in San Francisco.

The first bombing happened in August 2003, outside the Chiron Life Science Center in Emeryville, California.

A second bomb was found at the site by authorities but exploded before it could be defused.

The agency said that raised the possibility the device was planted specifically to target first responders.

Less than a month later, in September 2003, a nail bomb exploded outside a nutritional products corporation based in Pleasanton, California.

He became the first “domestic terrorist” to be added to the agency’s most wanted terrorist list, created by then-President George W Bush in October 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“It’s not just about brewing a good cup of coffee but connecting with customers on a deeper level.”

It was this one thought that made Harmanpreet Singh leave his family bakery to open a specialty coffee shop in the northern Indian city of Jalandhar.

It was an unexpected decision – coffee has always been popular in southern states, traditionally served strong and frothy in a steel tumbler. But it’s still not the first choice of beverage in the vast swathes of north India, where drinking tea is an intrinsic part of the culture.

For Mr Singh, the journey began in 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic when he saw a growing demand for specialty coffee, particularly among the city’s youth and the overseas residents who returned to the country at that time.

Recognising this shift, he moved to the southern city of Bengaluru to learn brewing techniques. “I studied everything – from the way coffee is served to the role things like decor, cutlery, music and even packaging played in the overall experience,” he said.

Three months later, Mr Singh put his learnings to test and opened Buland Café in Jalandhar.

Today, the cafe has 40 outlets across the city and has become a favourite spot for the city’s youth, who come here to relax or work over piping cups of coffee.

The beans, roasted in various blends, are sourced from the famed coffee estates of Karnataka. Mr Singh says he personally trained his staff on how to brew the perfect cuppa and take care of the coffee machine.

“It’s a thriving scene,” he says.

Mr Singh is among a crop of young entrepreneurs that are benefitting from a wave of specialty coffee consumption in small north Indian towns and cities.

India has had a vibrant cafe culture for years – but it has been largely restricted to big cities where homegrown specialty and international coffee chains dominate the market.

However, post-Covid, several tier-two cities are also seeing a boom in demand for such spaces as people embrace practices like remote working and look for new places to meet their friends and families.

Cafe owners say more Indians are now willing to pay more for coffee that’s roasted in smaller batches and customised as per their preferences.

“Clients have become more knowledgeable about the roasts and are interested in the origins of their coffee,” says Bharat Singhal, the founder of Billi Hu roasteries.

In fact, more than 44% of the Indian population now drinks coffee, a 2023 report by CRISIL, a marketing analytical company, shows.

While a lot of it comes from home consumption, the growing demand for specialty coffee in small cities plays a big part, says Bhavi Patel, a coffee consultant and dairy technologist.

Roastery owners say the growth is also evident in numbers. “Subscription based orders have surged by 50% in one year,” says Sharang Sharma, the founder of Bloom Coffee Roasters. “Customers have moved from French presses to pour-over or espresso machines, adopting more sophisticated brewing methods.”

While India is often associated with tea, it also has a long coffee-drinking history.

The culture took shape in the 1900s when Indian Coffee Houses emerged as a hangout spot for the intellectual and elite class. Housed in colonial-styled buildings, these cafes served English breakfasts with steaming hot coffee and offered a space to discuss politics and mobilise support during pivotal periods in history.

A shift occurred in the 1990s when economic reforms opened India to the world, allowing entrepreneurs to open private coffee shops frequented by young peeople, who saw it as a hip experience.

Café Coffee Day (CCD), which opened in 1996, quickly became one of India’s most popular and widespread coffee chains. At its peak, CCD boasted over 1,700 outlets, serving as a popular gathering spot for students and young adults. But mounting debt, management issues and the untimely death of its founder led to a closure of most of its outlets across India.

In 2012, the arrival of international giant Starbucks spurred the rise of homegrown specialty coffee brands like Blue Tokai Roasters, Third Wave Coffee and Subko Coffee.

Mr Singhal says that while big cities like Delhi, Jaipur, Mumbai, and Bengaluru still dominate the scene, smaller cities are quickly catching up.

However, it’s not just changing palettes that’s driving consumption. “Often it’s social media,” Mr Singh says. “People want good coffee but they also want to be in a space that’s trendy and which they can post online.”

Nishant Sinha from Lucknow city is among those who understood the trend early on.

His Roastery Coffee House offers trendy ambience, free wi-fi and cosy seating options along with an array of coffee roasts. While the beans are sourced from coffee estates in the south, the food is distinctively north Indian.

Others like Jatin Khurana in the northern city of Ludhiana are experimenting with flavours.

At his Urban Buhkkad cafe, Mr Khurana serves the “Shadi Wali Coffee [the wedding coffee]” – a wedding favourite in the 1990s, which became famous for its blend of instant coffee, milk, sugar, and a sprinkle of chocolate powder.

But instead of coffee powder, Mr Khurana uses freshly grounded beans, available in different roasts and varieties, to enhance its flavours. “The idea is to capture the essence of the beverage that many Indians grew up drinking,” he says.

It’s an exciting time to be in the business – but growth comes with its own set of challenges.

“Demand is growing, but a smaller coffee shop owners tend to cut corners, whether it’s by opting for substandard machines, serving weaker coffee shots, or hiring inexperienced baristas,” Mr Singhal says.

And running the business is not always profitable given the high price of coffee and the infrastructural costs involved in running such spaces.

When Neha Das and Nishant Ashish opened The Eden’s café in Ranchi in 2021, they wanted to create a safe and relaxed space for young students to get together in the city.

Today, their hazelnut coffee and cold brews have become a favourite of many.

“It took some time but longevity requires more than profit,” Ms Das says.

“It’s about dedication, crafting local flavours, and understanding customers, even if it means working with slim profit margins for the long haul.”

The number of single women going through IVF or artificial insemination in the UK has more than tripled in a decade, according to new figures.

Between 2012 and 2022, the number of women having fertility treatment on their own jumped from 1,400 to 4,800, a report from the fertility regulator shows.

Experts and women who have planned single parenthood say more women putting off children until they are older and not finding stable partner are among the factors fuelling the increase.

But many still face financial barriers when getting treatment and in single parenthood.

We spoke to mothers, who chose to start a family alone, about their experiences.

Gina said she first began “seriously” thinking about becoming a single mum after having a fertility assessment in her mid 30s.

She recalled that after getting the results, she thought to herself “OK, my fertility’s good for my age… this is something that I want to do”.

She added: “I’d dated on-and-off but felt like I’d rather do it by myself than be in a relationship with someone for however long [and deal with] whether you want to have children with them or not, and whether your time runs out and whether you end up being a single parent anyway.”

The community mental health nurse underwent an intrauterine insemination (IUI) using donor sperm – a fertility treatment which involves injecting sperm directly into the womb during ovulation. It cost about £1,500 and she became pregnant in 2021.

She had a close family network, with her sister attending the gender scan, and her mum being her birthing partner. She said she didn’t “remember having any anxiety” about the prospect of single parenthood.

“Doing it on my own terms suited me,” she added.

Since having her now two-year-old son in 2022, she has moved from Yorkshire back home to Northumberland to help with the pressures and costs of childcare.

“It has its moments, it can be hard,” she admitted. “But I just get on with things because I don’t have anyone else to get frustrated with”.

“If you’re at a place in your life where you want to have a child and you’ve got love and support around you, why wait for a man?”

Sophie said she spent most of her 30s living a “really full, fun, happy life”, but fears about never becoming a parent set in as she edged towards 40.

“You realise your clock’s ticking and it hasn’t happened as you’d imagined it might,” she said.

She decided to try for a child on her own, initially through an IUI, but miscarried.

She then froze her eggs and decided to go through IVF alone. When she had a successful frozen embryo transfer in 2021, she was dating a same-sex partner who is Martha’s legal parent.

But Sophie, who spent about £30,000 on the entire process, considers herself “a solo parent”.

During her pregnancy, and the early stages of motherhood, Sophie, who is in the RAF, said she didn’t “ever really have a panic and certainly not any regrets”.

Some scrutinised her decision, including a consultant who told her: “You’re bringing a child into the world who is only going to have one parent. What if that parent dies?”

“I respected his view entirely but I know now that Martha is two turning three that we have the most special bond. She’s got a very stable life,” said Sophie.

While she has already told Martha how she was conceived, Sophie said she would continue to be “open about everything” with her as her understanding deepens.

But she added that the single parenthood she planned had come with difficulties.

“You’re making all the decisions yourself, you’re doing all the worrying yourself, you don’t have someone to bounce ideas around with but …you realise how strong you are when the baby’s sick and you haven’t had any sleep,” she said.

Michelle’s journey to having two children via IUI using a sperm donor began with the end of a relationship.

“I had been with a partner for a long time and I always knew I wanted to have children. He was on the fence about doing so,” said Michelle.

“When that relationship ended, I felt like ‘I’m 38 now, I don’t really have time to find a person and allow that relationship to develop in a natural way.'”

Rather than holding off trying for a baby, Michelle decided to hold off on dating.

“The children part was time limited whereas your ability to find a romantic partner is not time limited,” she said.

She paid £1,800 for IUI using a sperm donor and became pregnant.

Just before giving birth to her son in 2021, she went to stay with her mum for an extended period so that she “actually did sleep and the clothes were washed”, said Michelle.

“There are upsides and downsides to doing it with a partner or without,” she said.

“Every single thing is on your shoulders, you don’t get to go for a coffee with your friend without a baby. You’re always on.”

On the other hand, Michelle was able to “make all the decisions about names, and where we’d live and how I might raise him,” she said.

In 2023, she had a daughter through the same conception method.

The three now live in Milton Keynes, with the children going to nursery four days a week, while Michelle works three days a week.

While there has been a big jump in the number of single women accessing fertility treatments to become pregnant, the numbers are still relatively small.

There are obvious financial obstacles to this route to parenthood. IUI is not routinely offered on the NHS, while the chances of qualifying for funding for IVF depends where a patient lives in the UK.

Scotland does not fund fertility treatment for single women.

In England, there is a “complete patchwork” of access because decisions are made locally about what’s funded, said Dr Catherine Hill from Fertility Network UK.

But in most areas, women have to pay for at least six cycles of artificial insemination before being accepted for NHS-funded IVF. The same is true of Wales.

Dr Hill also noted the financial barriers to bringing up a family alone, with average weekly full-time childcare costs in the UK running into hundreds of pounds.

“But [single women opting for IVF or artificial insemination] is a growing trend,” she said, adding that women who wanted children were increasingly aware of their own “limitations” when it came to fertility, and increasingly taking the issue “into their own hands”.

At the same time, stigma around single parenthood had lessened, said Dr Hill.

“I think societal attitudes have changed about single mums and I think what’s needed now is for policy to catch up with those changes,” she added.

It’s one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year, but for many Canadians, this year’s Black Friday deals may not arrive before Christmas – and that could be a death knell for already hard-hit small businesses.

Two weeks into a national postal service strike at Canada Post, and many businesses say they’ve suffered steep financial losses as customers have had to wait for their orders. Inventory sits in warehouses across the country and shipping costs have increased.

Lorne James, who owns Otter Valley Railway, a model train company in London, Ontario, estimates he’s lost C$120,000 ($85,600; £67,200) in sales since the strike began.

“It’s going to wipe out a good number of businesses,” he told the BBC. He estimated that about 80% of his orders are received online, and up until two weeks ago, 99% of his deliveries were done with Canada Post.

Negotiations between the company and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPOW) have broken down, amid massive financial losses, especially over the issue of allowing temporary workers to help expand the company’s delivery to seven-days-a-week.

Bruce Winder, a Canadian retail analyst, said that while the growth of online shopping has led to new courier companies entering the market, Canada Post is often the most affordable, and has the network to deliver in rural areas many other companies won’t.

The strike could not come at a worse time, Mr Winder said. For companies that sell things that can be gifted, Christmas sales can account for 30-40% of their annual revenue, he told the BBC.

He also predicts that this year, Canadians were already planning on spending less, because of the rise in the cost-of-living.

“It’s a double whammy, you know, because they’ve got the Canada Post strike and they’ve got sort of negative consumer sentiment,” he said.

Mr James said he’s doing better than most, because he negotiated contracts with other delivery services prior to the strike – but shipping overseas with a different carrier was too expensive, which has him losing out on some orders this holiday season.

In an open letter, Canadian company Shopify, which helps businesses set up online stores, urged the government to intervene to “prevent a devastating blow to Canadian small businesses at their most critical time of year”.

The letter came after the federally appointed mediator suspended talks on Wednesday.

“His assessment is that parties remain too far apart on critical issues for mediation to be successful at this time,” said Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon on X.

The union says it is bargaining for inflationary pay rises, better benefits, and for the company to agree to not hire outside-contractors. Meanwhile, Canada Post says it needs to have more flexible work hours – and hire more temporary workers – in order to move to seven-day delivery and be more competitive.

The union told the BBC the current standstill “didn’t need to be this way”.

“[We] only took the difficult decision to call a strike after Canada Post announced the end to the existing collective agreements, an end to health benefits and to lay-offs,” the union said in a statement.

The statement said that postal workers are “deeply aware” of the hurt the strike is causing communities, pointing to its decision to delay contract negotiations so workers could deliver throughout the pandemic.

It said the company is trying to replace full-time unionised jobs with temporary “gig” workers.

In a statement to the BBC, the company said it understands the impact this strike is having on Canadians, but that they could not afford to not make transformative changes.

“With mounting financial losses in the billions, Canada Post requires greater flexibility to its outdated, mail-based delivery model. This is about the future of the postal service and growing revenues by better serving Canadians.”

The union, meanwhile, said it believes the company can be profitable without gig work, and pointed to its proposal to adopt the UK model of having the post office offer low-fee mail banking.

At issue, says Carleton University public policy professor Ian Lee, who has spent several decades researching the country’s postal service, is the very survival of Canada Post itself.

“It’s Armageddon,” he told the BBC, comparing the fate of Canada Post to that of Blockbuster Video.

Canada Post, which is a for-profit company owned by the federal government, posted a C$749m loss during the 2023 fiscal year.

The company’s biggest business used to be delivering letters – but letter volume has dropped from 5.5 billion pieces in 2006 to 2.3 billion in 2022 with the rise of the internet, according to the company’s annual report.

Although parcel delivery has greatly increased with the advent of online shopping, they face stiff competition in the field, especially from Amazon, which uses its own couriers for many of its orders.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has faced similar issues, reporting a $9.5bn net loss during the last fiscal year.

On Friday, the USPS announced it was pausing accepting mail destined for Canada due to Canada Post “indicating that they are unable to process or deliver international mail or services as a result of the ongoing national strike”.

But as the strike has dragged on, Canada Post’s financials have deteriorated even further. The company says it has delivered 10 million fewer parcels since the strike began. It began temporarily laying off striking workers this week, a move the union has called illegal.

Canada Post has said the lay-offs are in accordance with the Canada Labour Code.

Some businesses say the strike has led them to reconsider who they hire to do their deliveries.

“We’re looking very hard at other parcel delivery services for the future,” said John Barrett, director of sales and marketing for Vesey’s Seeds, Canada’s largest mail-order garden business.

“I’d say their future is very dim.”

He said he has 250,000 seed catalogues sitting in a warehouse unable to be delivered, which means he’s not only paying extra to store them, but he’s missing out on big business because his customers don’t have a catalogue to order from.

Earlier this month, the labour minister issued a back-work-order to end a ports strike. But there is no sign that the government is willing to intervene in the postal workers strike.

When the BBC asked for comment, MacKinnon’s office pointed to an interview the minister gave to Radio-Canada, where he said: “This is a turning point for Canada Post and it is essential in my opinion that the employees, their union and the corporation agree on the path to follow for the future.”

On X, MacKinnon also wrote that “as in all disputes, they alone are responsible for the consequences of this conflict, and for its resolution”.

That response isn’t sufficient, said Mr Barrett.

“It’s just remarkable that they’re allowing this to last as long as they’ve had with absolutely no indication whatsoever that they’re going to resolve it at any point in time,” he said.

“It’s time for government to act. I blame government more so than either the post office or [the union].”

Last year, Juliette Sartori decided she wanted to expand her social circle, so she went on a coffee date with three people she had never met before.

“It went really well,” she said.

“We ended up speaking for two hours and I still speak to them today. We all keep in touch.”

Her friendship blind date was part of Dinner with a Stranger, the society Juliette and her flatmates started “on a whim” for fellow Glasgow University students who want to meet new people.

Juliette, 21, had moved to Scotland from the US to study business and management and said it was harder to instantly connect with others as she found people “had a wall up” and were closed off.

With students so plugged in and digital that they spend less time interacting with each other face-to-face, she didn’t have many opportunities to increase her circle of friends.

And so Dinner with a Stranger was born.

“We thought originally only 30 people would join,” Juliette says. “We just didn’t know what to expect.

“It’s an out-there idea and the name throws people off from the start.”

But 200 people – a mixture of undergraduate and postgraduate male, female and non-binary students – signed up in the first month and the society has continued to grow ever since.

Juliette’s friendship lottery is very different to the swipe right culture of the dating apps which dominate the lives of many young people.

Firstly, it is about friendship and not romantic hook-ups. But it is also avoids complicated computer algorithms and relies instead on more traditional personality quizzes shared with members online at the start of every month.

Prospective mate-dates are asked questions on a theme, ranging from their favourite music genre or most-loved Disney movie to their dream holiday destination.

Then Juliette and five others spend hours manually pairing people up and sharing contact details before taking a step back to let the magic happen.

Playing platonic Cupid alongside Juliette, Mary Yiorkadji quickly realised she wasn’t alone in struggling to find friends at university.

Originally from Cyprus, she says: “There are lots of people from different backgrounds and it can be really intimidating feeling like you’re different and people won’t understand you.”

The 22-year-old believes social media has had a negative impact on friendships.

It comes as more and more people nowadays compare their lives to others online.

“It is really easy to get caught up in fake ideas from social media, which can cause loneliness and expectations that are never met,” Mary says.

“People are lonelier now. Our generation is lonelier.”

But Mary says Dinner with a Stranger has introduced her to the beauty of the blind friendship date.

“I think one of the most important parts of university is to meet new people,” says the fourth-year economics and philosophy student.

“In this way you don’t give power to the differences between people, you give power to things that matter in a friendship, which are the similarities you have.”

She describes it as a “unique” way to meet and connect with others from all over the world.

Second-year students Vanya and Hannah, who were paired up by Dinner with a Stranger in December last year, believe they would not have met each other if it wasn’t for the group.

Hannah, 20, from Manchester, says: “Society puts so much emphasis on romance that we forget how important friendships are.”

She says before meeting Vanya she was “miserable” and would spend a lot of time by herself, but now her mental health has improved and she is more confident.

The pair are now best friends and flatmates.

Vanya, 19, says she enjoyed getting to know Hannah without “pre-conceived ideas and expectations”.

“People are talking to so many people online that they’re not properly talking to anyone,” says the economics student, originally from India.

“In this way, you’re going in with a completely open mind and you’re getting to know someone as the conversation moves along.

“You have to show that you’re making a genuine effort.”

For Juliette, going on friendship dates with strangers has helped her to find her “people”.

Confused as to why people think it is not normal to go on friendship dates to meet new people, she believes soon there will be more opportunities to take part in this “fun experiment”.

She said: “It’s more of a modern way of making friends.

“It’s taking the idea of meeting someone online from a dating website and turning it into friendships by seeing how well you mesh with that person.”

Dating apps, such as Bumble, have already started to create similar versions for friendship-making, which Juliette thinks will become more mainstream as the idea expands.

She said: “Now people are working from home and doing uni remotely, it is more common for people to stay at home all the time and you are less likely to go out and meet new people like you would have done five years ago.

“It’s modern but I think it will become more popular in the future.”

Behind a door deep within the lower floors of the National Library of Scotland lies a forgotten street which gives a glimpse of how Edinburgh looked centuries ago.

Libberton’s Wynd, in the heart of the old city, was demolished to make way for George IV Bridge in the 1830s – but part of the street still remains.

It can be found between the bridge walls and the library building, with access through a hidden door.

The corridor – which has been named The Void by library staff – is not open to the public, but BBC Scotland News has been allowed to see inside.

It was discovered by library officials in the 1990s when they broke down a small hatch on a wall behind filing cabinets, then crawled through it.

They found a passage with arches into chambers and rooms which are thought to have once been storage in the bridge.

Bill Jackson, former director of the library, told BBC Scotland News he found old rotten furniture, ledgers, shoes and a slate urinal that were all more than 100 years old, but were waterlogged and damaged.

“My torch was hardly illuminating anything, it was very dark when I went through and a bit scary and I wanted to get out of there.

“It was fascinating though.”

Since then he has fitted lights and another door at the Cowgate end of The Void.

The library’s rooms were built on top of foundations, which can still be seen, of buildings that were demolished in Libberton’s Wynd to make way for George IV Bridge.

Robbie Mitchell, a reference assistant at the library, said that inside the passageway you could see the brickwork of the library’s lower levels and the bridge’s stonework.

“Although not a preserved street like Mary Stair’s Close, this nevertheless offers us a glimpse of the Edinburgh of centuries ago,” he said.

“There are several maps and accounts of the Old Town in the library’s collections which help us build an atmospheric picture of the neighbourhood on which both George IV Bridge and the library now stand, and what was there before The Void.”

George IV Bridge was built as a route to connect the centre of Edinburgh – the Royal Mile – over the Cowgate, which was in a valley, to the south side of the city.

Its arches had chambers built into them on several floors for storage for the shops at the top of the bridge.

Libberton’s Wynd was the route from the Cowgate to Edinburgh’s gallows in a section of the Royal Mile called The Lawnmarket – before it was demolished to make way for the bridge.

Later, The National Library of Scotland was built on top of the bridge, with floors running all the way down into the Cowgate below.

The bridge was built on Libberton Wynd’s foundations, which can still be seen in The Void.

The corridor runs for several hundred feet at a steep gradient.

Officials have widened the entrance so there is now a full-sized door. Some of the chambers are now used to store huge water tanks for the library’s sprinkler system.

Mr Mitchell said that large crowds, often several thousands strong, attended the executions which took place at the city gallows where Libberton’s Wynd joined the Lawnmarket.

One of the most infamous figures to have been executed there was body-snatcher and murderer William Burke in January 1829.

Libberton’s Wynd was also famed for housing one of the city’s best-known taverns, which was called The Mermaid before it became Johnnie Dowie’s Tavern.

Taverns were key features of Edinburgh’s Old Town communities, and patrons often came from various social classes.

John Dowie was described in accounts as “the sleekest and kindest of landlords”. He always wore “a cocked hat, buckles at the knees and shoes, as well as a cross-handled cane, over which he stooped in his gait”.

Mr Mitchell said the most popular drink had been the Edinburgh Ale brewed and supplied by Archibald Younger.

This was described as “a potent fluid which almost glued the lips of the drinker together, and of which few, therefore, could dispatch more than a bottle”.

Mr Mitchell said descriptions of the tavern, which occupied the ground floor of a tall tenement, gave an impression of the claustrophobic confines of the Old Town.

About 14 people could fit in its principal room, which looked to the Wynd, but the other rooms were said to be so small that no more than six people could fit in each of them.

They were described as being “so dingy and dark that, even in broad day, they had to be lighted up by artificial means”.

The Tavern was described as a house of “much respectability” and was a popular meeting place for “the chief wits and men of letters” in Edinburgh.

It was regularly frequented by writers including poet Robert Fergusson, artists and many members of the judiciary.

The smallest of its windowless chambers was an irregular oblong box which was commonly referred to as “the Coffin”, and was believed to be Robert Burns’ favoured seat in the Tavern.

Libberton’s Wynd was first referred to in the late 15th Century, but had been demolished by 1835.

Local historian Jamie Corstorphine said entering The Void had been one of the most exciting things he had experienced.

“The name of the wynd probably came from Henry Libberton, who had a large property on the wynd – or if not him, then his family, who remained in the house for many years after his death in 1501.

“The street had merchants, barbers, a shoemaker, grocers, custom house, vinters, cork-cutters, silver turners, hosiers and glaziers.

“It was a very busy street that would have been full of life at the time.”

The government is facing a backlash from car manufacturers, who claim that current rules designed to promote electric vehicles are too harsh.

They say consumer demand for electric cars has fallen far short of what was expected, meaning they are struggling to sell enough.

Ford insists this was a factor in its recent decision to cut 800 UK jobs.

Vauxhall’s owner Stellantis is to close its van-making plant in Luton – partly, it says, because of the new rules.

So what could be done to encourage more consumers to buy electric?

Electric vehicles (EVs) are generally more expensive to buy than their petrol or diesel equivalents. This is partly because they still represent a relatively small proportion of cars being built, so economies of scale – when the cost comes down the more you build – have not yet properly kicked in.

The government already offers some subsidies to make EVs cheaper. They attract a low rate of company car tax, for example. Salary sacrifice schemes allow workers to lease cars cheaply through their employers, using their untaxed income, which can offer significant savings.

But since the abolition of the plug-in grant for cars in 2022, there has not been a similar incentive for people who cannot get a car through their company. People within the industry believe that should change.

Automotive journalist Quentin Willson, who now fronts the campaign group FairCharge, thinks the government should consider “interest free loans on used electric vehicles for lower income drivers and halve the VAT on new cars”. This, he suggests, could be funded by abandoning the current freeze on fuel duty.

The price of electric cars is coming down, partly due to cheaper battery packs. Despite sharp fluctuations in the value of metals used to make them, such as lithium and cobalt, battery pack prices have fallen by about 70% since 2015.

This has helped reduce the price gap between electric and conventional cars. Earlier this year, Stellantis began offering the electric version of its Frontera model at the same price as the petrol hybrid model.

However, that doesn’t mean it is easy to find a low-budget electric car. There is a shortage of truly cheap options on the market.

That is partly because a number of manufacturers have preferred to focus on more expensive and potentially more profitable models. But as Roger Atkins, founder of the Electric Vehicles Outlook consultancy, puts it, “cars that cost £50,000 to £60,000 are not the kind of cars everyone can buy”.

However, change is around the corner. The Dacia Spring went on sale in the UK a few weeks ago, with a starting price of £14,995. The newly launched Leapmotor T03 costs very little more, while Chinese giant BYD has said it will bring a version of its super-budget Seagull model to the UK next year.

The government says the sale of new petrol and diesel cars will be banned in 2030 – but will it?

Plans to force conventional cars off the market were originally meant to take effect in 2040, under plans introduced by Theresa May’s government. But the target was brought forward to 2030 under Boris Johnson, then delayed to 2035 under Rishi Sunak.

People within the industry claim the changing target has sent out mixed messages and confused consumers, leading some people to delay buying an electric car until the situation becomes clearer.

According to Melanie Shufflebotham, co-founder of electric charging guide Zapmap, many drivers are “confused about dates, concerned on costs and have questions about charging.” She says “a consistent factual communication programme” is needed, supported by government.

Although the cost of using public charging points can vary widely depending on the provider and the charging speed you choose, public chargers are usually more expensive than charging at home.

This is partly due to tax. An EV owner charging a car on their drive will pay 5% VAT on the electricity they consume. But if they use a public charger they will pay 20%. People who are unable to charge at home are left with no choice but to pay the higher rate.

The industry, EV advocates and even a House of Lords committee have called for the public rate to be reduced to 5%

Consultant Roger Atkins claims the current policy is “divisive”, because it “favours better-off people who can charge at home on their driveways”.

Read any survey of potential buyers’ attitudes towards electric cars, and concerns about charging infrastructure will be at or near the top. People worry about whether they will be able to find a charger at a busy service station, or in a rural area.

The number of charging points is growing. According to ZapMap, as of October this year, there were 71,459 charging points across the UK, at 36,060 locations. This was a 38% increase on the year before.

But not everyone is happy. Complaints from existing owners struggling to find a charging point, having to queue for a long time or arriving to find it broken are not hard to find.

As more EVs come onto the roads, many more charging points will be needed. The government wants 300,000 in place by 2030 – but the current rate of expansion is not fast enough to reach it.

Part of the blame appears to lie with local authorities, who are responsible for granting planning permission for new rapid charging hubs. According to Roger Atkins, the process simply takes too long.

Simon Smith, of charging firm Instavolt agrees that red tape is a problem. He thinks that difficulties getting grid connections for rapid charging stations is also a “critical barrier” to expanding the network.

“We need greater support to address planning delays, local council resistance and grid connectivity challenges”, he says.

For nearly 300 years, a family’s ancestral house in India’s southern state of Kerala has been the stage for theyyam, an ancient folk ritual.

Rooted in ancient tribal traditions, theyyam predates Hinduism while weaving in Hindu mythology. Each performance is both a theatrical spectacle and an act of devotion, transforming the performer into a living incarnation of the divine.

The predominantly male performers in Kerala and parts of neighbouring Karnataka embody deities through elaborate costumes, face paint, and trance-like dances, mime and music.

Each year, nearly a thousand theyyam performances take place in family estates and venues near temples across Kerala, traditionally performed by men from marginalised castes and tribal communities.

It is often called ritual theatre for its electrifying drama, featuring daring acts like fire-walking, diving into burning embers, chanting occult verses, and prophesying.

Historian KK Gopalakrishnan has celebrated his family’s legacy in hosting theyyam and the ritual’s vibrant traditions in a new book, Theyyam: An Insider’s Vision.

The theyyams are performed in the courtyard of Mr Gopalakrishnan’s ancient joint family house (above) in Kasaragod district. Hundreds of people gather to witness the performances.

The theyyam season in Kerala typically runs from October to April, aligning with the post-monsoon and winter months. During this time, numerous venues near temples and family estates, especially in northern Kerala districts like Kannur and Kasaragod, host performances.

The themes of performances at Mr Gopalakrishnan’s house include honouring a deified ancestor, venerating a warrior-hunter deity, and worshipping tiger spirits symbolising strength and protection.

Before the performance honouring a local goddess, a ritual is conducted in a nearby forest, revered as the deity’s earthly home.

Following an elaborate ceremony (above), the “spirit of the goddess” is then transported to the house.

Mr Gopalakrishnan is a member of the Nambiar community, a matrilineal branch of the Nair caste, where the senior-most maternal uncle oversees the arrangements. If he is unable to fulfil this role due to age or illness, the next senior male member steps in.

Women in the family, especially the senior-most among them, play a crucial role in the rituals.

They ensure traditions are upheld, prepare for the rituals, and oversee arrangements inside the house.

“They enjoy high respect and are integral to maintaining the family’s legacy,” says Mr Gopalakrishnan.

The spectacle is a blend of loud cries, fiery torches, and intense scenes from epics or dances.

Performers sometimes bear the physical toll of these daring feats, with burn marks or even the loss of a limb.

“Fire plays a significant role in certain forms of theyyam, symbolising purification, divine energy, and the transformative power of the ritual. In some performances, the theyyam dancer interacts directly with fire, walking through flames or carrying burning torches, signifying the deity’s invincibility and supernatural abilities,” says Mr Gopalakrishnan.

“The use of fire adds a dramatic and intense visual element, further heightening the spiritual atmosphere of the performance and illustrating the deity’s power over natural forces.”

The deities can be manifestations of gods and goddesses, ancestral spirits, animals, or even forces of nature.

Here, the theyyam performer (above) embodies Raktheswari, a fierce manifestation of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction.

She is portrayed drenched in blood, a powerful symbol of her raw energy and destructive force.

This intense ritual delves into themes of sorcery, voodoo, and divine wrath.

Through dramatic costume and ritualistic dance, the performance channels Kali’s potent energy, invoking protection, justice, and spiritual cleansing.

During the performance, the artist (or kolam) transforms into these deities, through elaborate costumes and body paint, their striking colours bringing the deities to life.

Here, a performer meticulously adjusts his goddess attire, checking his look in the mirror before stepping into the ritual. The transformation is as much an act of devotion as it is a preparation for the electrifying performance ahead.

Distinct facial markings, intricate designs, and vibrant hues – especially vermillion -define the unique makeup and costumes of theyyam.

Each look is carefully crafted to symbolise the deity being portrayed, showcasing the rich diversity and detail that distinguishes this ritual art. Some theyyams do not require face painting but use only masks.

Theyyam’s animistic roots shine through in its reverence for nature and its creatures.

This crawling crocodile theyyam deity symbolises the power of reptiles and is venerated as a protector against their dangers.

With its detailed costume and lifelike movements, it highlights humanity’s deep-rooted connection to nature.

The deity will bless a large congregation of devotees after a performance.

Here, a female devotee unburdens her troubles before a theyyam deity, seeking solace and divine intervention.

As she offers her prayers, the sacred space becomes a moment of spiritual release, where devotion and vulnerability intertwine.

At least 54 bodies have now been recovered from Nigeria’s River Niger after a boat, that may have been carrying more than 200 passengers, capsized in the early hours of Friday, the authorities say.

Twenty-four of those on board were rescued, some of whom are still in hospital, but dozens of others may be missing.

Divers are still searching the waters but hope is fading on the possibility of finding more survivors.

This is just the latest in a long series of boat accidents on the country’s inland waterways. Despite safety recommendations being made, rules are rarely followed and few are held accountable.

The boat was travelling from Kogi state, central Nigeria, to a weekly market in neighbouring Niger state when it went down.

Market traders and farm labourers were thought to have been among the passengers.

The cause of the accident is not yet known but there are indications that many of the travellers may not have been wearing life jackets as required.

Getting accurate details about who exactly had boarded the boat is difficult because there was no record keeping, the local official in charge told the BBC.

“The problem is that there’s no passenger manifest and because of the time the accident occurred, giving an accurate account of persons, survivors and those missing, is very difficult,” Justin Uche, who is head of the Kogi state office of the National Emergency Management Agency said.

Meanwhile Kogi state’s governor Usman Ododo ordered all hospitals where survivors are receiving treatment to ensure that they get adequate care including food.

He also urged stricter enforcement of safety regulations to ensure that such incidents are avoided in future.

This is the third time a passenger boat has gone down in Nigeria in the last 60 days.

Last month, a wooden dugout canoe, packed with nearly 300 passengers, overturned and sank in the middle of the River Niger killing nearly 200 people.

Just last week, five people died when two boats collided in southern Nigeria’s Delta state.

• Nigerian star’s drowning forces Nollywood to look at safety
• Africa’s patchy transport network gets a tech boost
• Should I stay or should I go? The dilemma for young Nigerians

US President-elect Donald Trump has picked a former aide, Kash Patel, to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an agency Patel has often criticised.

A former US defence department chief of staff in the first Trump administration, Patel has been a steadfast supporter of the incoming Republican president.

For Patel to take the job, the current FBI director Christopher Wray would need to resign or be fired – although Trump did not call on him to do so in his post.

Separately, Trump said he plans to nominate Chad Chronister, sheriff of Florida’s Hillsborough County, as head of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Patel and Chronister join Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi in filling out Trump’s law enforcement picks.

Also on Saturday, Trump announced he has selected Charles Kushner to be ambassador to France.

Mr Kushner is a real-estate developer and the father of Jared Kushner, husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

The nomination appears to be the first administration position that Trump has formally offered to a relative since his re-election.

All three choices will have to be confirmed by a majority vote in the US Senate.

Patel is Trump loyalist who shares the president-elect’s suspicion of government institutions.

“Kash is a brilliant lawyer, investigator, and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending justice, and protecting the American people,” Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media platform, adding that Patel was “an advocate for truth, accountability, and the constitution”.

His past proposals have included “dramatically” limiting the FBI’s authority. In his memoir, Government Gangsters, Patel called for an eradication of what he called “government tyranny” within the FBI by firing “the top ranks”.

Patel would replace current FBI director Christopher Wray, who Trump appointed in 2017 for a 10-year term.

But Wray fell out of favour with the president elect when the FBI assisted with a federal probe into Trump’s handling of classified records, a case that has since been dropped.

In a statement following Trump’s announcement, the FBI said: “Every day, the men and women of the FBI continue to work to protect Americans from a growing array of threats.

“Director Wray’s focus remains on the men and women of the FBI, the people we do the work with, and the people we do the work for.”

The son of Indian immigrants, Patel is a former defence lawyer and federal prosecutor who caught Trump’s eye after he became a senior counsel to the House of Representatives intelligence committee in 2017.

He was hired by Trump as a national security aide in 2019 and a year later was appointed chief of staff to the head of the Pentagon.

As well as his 2023 memoir, he has published two pro-Trump children’s books.

One of the titles, The Plot Against the King, features a villain, Hillary Queenton, trying to depose King Donald, who is aided by a wizard called Kash the Distinguished Discoverer.

Another villain is called Keeper Komey – a thinly-veiled reference to former FBI Director James Comey – and his “spying slugs”, according to the book’s blurb.

Patel has often railed against the so-called “deep state”, which some Americans believe is an unelected bureaucratic machine that secretly runs the country for sinister purposes.

Patel has also excoriated the media, which he has called “the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen”.

He is also on the board of Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns the incoming president’s social media platform Truth Social.

Patel reportedly has had a consulting contract with the company that paid him at least $120,000 a year.

Chronister also comes with a long background in law enforcement.

He has worked in law enforcement in Florida for 32 years, according to his official bio, and he has served as the top law enforcement officer in Hillsborough County, Florida, since 2017.

On social media, Trump praised Chronister’s experience and reiterated his focus on drugs and the US border.

“As DEA Administrator, Chad will work with our great Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to secure the border, stop the flow of fentanyl, and other illegal drugs, across the southern border, and SAVE LIVES”, Trump wrote.

Writing on social media, Chronister said it was “the honor of a lifetime to be nominated” by Trump.

“I am deeply humbled by this opportunity to serve our nation.”

Bob Bryar, former drummer for American rock band My Chemical Romance (MCR), has died aged 44 at his Tennessee home, according to US media.

He was the longest-serving drummer for the group, playing with the band from 2004 to 2010.

A spokesperson for the band told US outlets that the “band asks for your patience and understanding as they process the news of Bob’s passing”.

Bryar joined MCR after the release of their second album and helped write songs for the acclaimed record The Black Parade, deemed a “defining album” by NPR Music.

Bryar was born in Chicago, Illinois and studied sound engineering at the University of Florida.

He met the band whilst working as a sound engineer for a support band on an MCR tour in 2004.

After befriending them, he replaced the original drummer Matt Pelissier.

They went on to release two albums whilst he remained in the band.

However, he suffered third-degree burns in an accident whilst on the set of a music video in 2006, which led to infection.

Bryar went on to face multiple complications from the injuries, and was hospitalised for a staph infection.

The band cancelled multiple shows as he recovered, but began a world tour in February 2007.

By November, Bryar began having issues with his wrist, and was temporarily replaced and returned for the last leg of the tour in early 2008.

In 2010, the band posted a statement that Bryar had left, calling it a “painful decision”.

They released their fourth studio album shortly after, which Bryar has five song writing credits for.

He officially retired from the music scene in 2021 and auctioned off some of his band memorabilia in aid of various animal charities.

At the time he told radio network ABC Audio: “I have too many wrist issues… it’s time for something new”.

MCR split up in 2013, but reunited in 2019.

They are due to go on a US stadium tour in 2025.

“If it can happen to her, it can happen to anybody”, the mother of British lawyer Simone White, who died in a suspected poisoning in Laos, has warned.

The 28-year-old, from Orpington, south-east London, was one of a number of people taken to hospital after drinking alcohol suspected to have been laced with methanol in the backpacking hotspot Vang Vieng.

Six tourists died in the incident.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, her mother Sue White urged those travelling abroad: “Please be careful when it comes to drinks.”

“Simone was a university-educated, highly intelligent person,” she said.

“If it can happen to her, it can happen to anybody.”

• What is methanol and how does it affect the body?

Ms White told the paper she received a call from the hospital caring for Simone to say she was in a critical condition after drinking contaminated vodka and needed urgent brain surgery.

“I knew when I had that phone call — I don’t know what it was, call it a mother’s intuition — but I knew that she was going to die,” she said.

She described how she set off on a 16-hour journey to her daughter’s bedside, which she said was a “terrible, terrible journey”.

“I had to go through the whole flight thinking she was going through brain surgery.”

Ms White said she arrived at the hospital just as Simone was being taken in for the operation.

“It was horrendous. Absolutely horrendous.

“She had such beautiful long blonde hair, which had all been shaved off for the operation. It was the worst experience of my life. There are no words, really.”

It later became clear that her brain function had gone, and she died on 21 November.

Her body is reportedly due to be repatriated this weekend, ahead of her funeral.

On the night she fell ill, Simone and her friends drank six vodka shots served by Nana Backpackers hostel, according to the newspaper.

Their drinks are thought to have contained methanol – a deadly substance often found in bootleg alcohol.

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

Simone’s two childhood friends who were travelling with her survived the experience, but are said to be traumatised.

Police in Laos have detained several people in connection with the death of Simone White and five others.

However, officials in the country have released almost no details about the case, with the government keeping a tight lid on information.

Laos is a one-party communist state with no organised opposition.

Simone was a lawyer with global law firm Squire Patton Boggs.

Huge flooding caused by heavy rain in Malaysia and neighbouring Thailand has killed at least 12 people, officials say.

More than 122,000 people have been forced out of their homes in northern Malaysia, while in southern Thailand, around 13,000 others have also been displaced.

There are fears the number could rise, as heavy rain and storm warnings remain in place.

Emergency services personnel have been deployed to help rescue stranded residents and shelters are being provided.

The flooding, which began earlier in the week, has seen thousands of residents evacuated in both nations.

Videos on social media and local news show cars and houses submerged, and people wading through waist-deep water.

One video, filmed in Thailand’s Sateng Nok district, showed rescuers carrying a baby out from a roof of a flooded home.

Flooding has impacted nearly 534,000 households in southern Thailand, disaster officials said, and two hospitals had to close to prevent floodwaters from damaging medical facilities.

Six provinces have declared a disaster due to the floods.

The government has designated 50 million baht ($1.7m; £1.3m) in flood relief for each province, with Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra saying the goal is to “restore normalcy as quickly as possible”.

In Malaysia, the flooding is mostly concentrated on the north-eastern state of Kelantan, which borders Thailand.

There, the National Disaster Management Agency says the evacuees account for 63% of the total number.

One resident in the town of Pasir Puteh in Kelantan said her area had been flooded since Wednesday.

“The water has already reached my house corridor and is just two inches away from coming inside,” Zamrah Majid told AFP news agency.

Another resident of the same town said he and his family have been isolated by the floods.

“There’s no way in or out of for any vehicles to enter my neighbourhood,” Muhammad Zulkarnain told AFP.

Another eight states in Malaysia have also been affected.

So far, the number of those displaced surpasses that of 2014, which saw one of the worst floods in the country.

Provisions for disaster management have been sent to Terengganu and Kelantan State Governments, according to the prime minister’s office.

On Friday, he barred his cabinet members from going on leave so they can focus on the disaster.

The Malaysian Meteorological Department warned that heavy rains will continue until Sunday in some states, while its Thai counterpart warned that “very heavy rain” could continue through next week.

Both countries experience monsoon rains around this time of the year, and flooding isn’t uncommon.

In 2021, Malaysia faced some of its worse flooding in decades, which killed at least 14 people.

Ten years earlier, in 2011, widespread flooding across Thailand killed at least 500 people and damaged millions of homes.

“I had to work while I was nine months pregnant,” says Sophie, a sex worker in Belgium. “I was having sex with clients one week before giving birth.”

She juggles her job with being a mother of five – which is “really hard”.

When Sophie had her fifth child by Caesarean, she was told she needed bed rest for six weeks. But she says that wasn’t an option, and she went back to work immediately.

“I couldn’t afford to stop because I needed the money.”

Her life would have been much easier had she had a right to maternity leave, paid by her employer.

Under a new law in Belgium – the first of its kind in the world – this will now be the case. Sex workers will be entitled to official employment contracts, health insurance, pensions, maternity leave and sick days. Essentially, it will be treated like any other job.

“It’s an opportunity for us to exist as people,” Sophie says.

There are tens of millions of sex workers worldwide. Sex work was decriminalised in Belgium in 2022 and is legal in several countries including Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and Turkey. But establishing employment rights and contracts is a global first.

“This is radical, and it’s the best step we have seen anywhere in the world so far,” says Erin Kilbride, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “We need every country to be moving in that direction.”

Critics say the trade causes trafficking, exploitation and abuse – which this law will not prevent.

“It is dangerous because it normalises a profession that is always violent at its core,” says Julia Crumière, a volunteer with Isala – an NGO that helps sex workers on the streets in Belgium.

For many sex workers, the job is a necessity, and the law could not come soon enough.

Mel was horrified when she was forced to give a client oral sex without a condom, when she knew a sexually transmitted infection (STI) was going round the brothel. But she felt she had no option.

“My choice was either to spread the disease, or make no money.”

She had become an escort when she was 23 – she needed money, and quickly started earning beyond expectations. She thought she had struck gold, but the experience with the STI brought her sharply back to earth.

Mel will now be able to refuse any client or sexual act she feels uncomfortable with – meaning she could have handled that situation differently.

“I could have pointed the finger at my madam [employer] and said: ‘You’re violating these terms and this is how you should treat me.’ I would have been legally protected.”

Belgium’s decision to change the law was the result of months of protests in 2022, prompted by the lack of state support during the Covid pandemic.

One of those at the forefront was Victoria, president of the Belgian Union of Sex Workers (UTSOPI) and previously an escort for 12 years.

For her, it was a personal fight. Victoria regards prostitution as a social service, with sex being only about 10% of what she does.

“It’s giving people attention, listening to their stories, eating cake with them, dancing to waltz music,” she explains. “Ultimately, it’s about loneliness.”

But the illegality of her job before 2022 raised significant challenges. She worked in unsafe conditions, with no choice over her clients and her agency taking a big cut of her earnings.

In fact, Victoria says she was raped by a client who had become obsessed with her.

She went to a police station, where she says the female officer was “so hard” on her.

“She told me sex workers can’t be raped. She made me feel it was my fault, because I did that job.” Victoria left the station crying.

Every sex worker we spoke to told us that at some point they had been pressured to do something against their will.

Because of that, Victoria fiercely believes this new law will improve their lives.

“If there is no law and your job is illegal, there are no protocols to help you. This law gives people the tools to make us safer.”

Pimps who control sex work will be allowed to operate legally under the new law – provided they follow strict rules. Anyone who has been convicted of a serious crime will not be allowed to employ sex workers.

“I think many businesses will have to shut down, because a lot of employers have a criminal record,” says Kris Reekmans. He and his wife Alexandra run a massage parlour on Love Street in the small town of Bekkevoort.

The massages they offer clients include “tantra” and “double pleasure”.

It is fully booked when we visit – not what we were expecting for a Monday morning. We are shown meticulously furnished rooms with massage beds, fresh towels and robes, hot tubs and a swimming pool.

Kris and his wife employ 15 sex workers, and pride themselves on treating them with respect, protecting them and paying them good salaries.

“I hope the bad employers will be shut out and the good people, who want to do this profession honestly, will stay – and the more the better,” he says.

Erin Kilbride from Human Rights Watch is of similar mind – and says, by putting restrictions on employers, the new law will significantly “cut away at the power they have over sex workers”.

But Julia Crumière says the majority of the women she helps just want help to leave the profession and get a “normal job” – not labour rights.

“It’s about not being outside in the freezing weather and having sex with strangers who pay to access your body.”

Under Belgium’s new law, each room where sexual services take place must be equipped with an alarm button that will connect a sex worker with their “reference person”.

But Julia believes there is no way to make sex work safe.

“In what other job would you need a panic button? It’s not the oldest profession in the world, it’s the oldest exploitation in the world.”

How to regulate the sex industry remains a divisive issue globally. But for Mel, bringing it out of the shadows can only help women.

“I am very proud that Belgium is so far ahead,” she says. “I have a future now.”

A 20-year-old British man has died after being found fatally injured in a lift shaft while on a family holiday in Turkey.

Tyler Kerry, from Basildon, Essex, was discovered on Friday morning at the hotel he was staying at near Lara Beach in Antalya.

The holidaymaker was described by his family as “a young man full of personality, kindness and compassion with his whole life ahead of him”.

Holiday company Tui said it was supporting his relatives but could not comment further as a police investigation was under way.

A UK government spokeswoman said: “We are assisting the family of a British man who has died in Turkey.”

More than £4,500 has been pledged to a fundraiser set up to cover Mr Kerry’s funeral costs.

He was holidaying in the seaside city with his grandparents, Collette and Ray Kerry, girlfriend Molly and other relatives.

Mr Kerry’s great uncle, Alex Price, said he was found at the bottom of the lift shaft at 07:00 local time (04:00 GMT).

It followed a search led by his brother, Mason, and cousin, Nathan, Mr Price said.

Mr Kerry had been staying on the hotel’s first floor.

“An ambulance team attended and attempted to resuscitate him but were unsuccessful,” Mr Price told the BBC.

“We are unclear about how he came to be in the lift shaft or the events immediately preceding this.”

Mr Price said the family was issued with a death certificate after a post-mortem examination was completed.

They hoped his body would be repatriated by Tuesday.

Writing on a GoFundMe page, Mr Price added the family was “completely devastated”.

He thanked people for their “kindness and consideration” following his nephew’s death.

Holiday company Tui expressed its “sincere condolences” to Tyler Kerry’s family.

“We will continue to provide around-the-clock support to Tyler’s family during this difficult time,” a spokeswoman said.

“As there is now a police investigation we are unable to comment further.”

“The fight game awaits!” Conor McGregor proclaimed to his millions of social media followers on Tuesday, while retailers pulled products linked to him from shelves, murals of him were erased and brands announced they had cut ties.

It followed a 12-person jury in Dublin finding McGregor guilty of sexual assault in a civil case brought by Nikita Hand, who accused him of raping her at a Dublin hotel in December 2018. She was awarded nearly €250,000 (£208,000) in damages. In a social media post, McGregor said he would appeal the decision.

Ms Hand’s case was one of several legal issues and controversies that McGregor, one of Ireland’s most famous athletes, has faced over the past few years.

In 2018, he was arrested in New York for throwing a metal dolly at the window of a bus which had a group of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) staff and athletes on board. A year later, he was convicted and fined €1,000 (£850) for punching a man who rejected his offer of a drink in a Dublin pub.

Some commentators argue that support for McGregor within Ireland, where he had been thought of as a trailblazer, has been dwindling for some time – but the shift after Ms Hand’s civil case was seismic.

Within a week, hundreds of supermarkets in both the UK and Ireland removed brands associated with him. Proximo Spirits, the company that bought McGregor’s Proper No Twelve whiskey brand in 2021, said it did not plan to use his name or likeness in its marketing going forward.

• Woman wins civil rape case against Conor McGregor

IO Interactive, the creators of the Hitman video game, said it would cease its collaboration with McGregor in light of the court ruling. Ireland’s National Wax Museum also said it removed its figure of McGregor two weeks ago.

He built his brand on his patriotism and brash persona. But the controversies surrounding him have turned some former supporters against him and become an increasing distraction from his career.

Petesy Carroll, a mixed martial arts (MMA) journalist, credits McGregor and his team for bringing MMA to Ireland, but says they have “also destroyed it as a sport here”.

Now, after the civil case, it’s unclear what comes next.

McGregor’s rise to sporting stardom has often been described as a rags-to-riches tale. As a teenager, living in Lucan, Dublin, he quit his job as an apprentice plumber to pursue a career in a sport that was relatively unknown in Ireland.

“The Irish mentality is when you’re finished school, if you’re not going to college or anything you need to get a job straight away. There’s no chasing your dreams,” he said in a 2013 interview with RTÉ’s Late Late Show, where he was 24 years old and almost unrecognisable.

The brash, confident, boisterous traits his “notorious” brand is now synonymous with with were untraceable.

“I thought I could do something with my life. I knew I had the ability to make it in this game,” he said.

Carroll, who has been covering McGregor since the beginning of his career, says McGregor burst on to the mainstream at a time when Ireland was grappling with the impact of the 2008 recession.

“There are no opportunities, everybody’s leaving for Australia or Canada, and here’s this guy saying ‘No, be proud to be Irish. It’s cool to be Irish,’” Carroll says.

“I used to think this guy, it’s great, he’s the same age as me, I’m a college graduate, I’ve walked out of college into a country that cannot afford me any opportunity, and here’s this guy blazing a trail.”

McGregor made his UFC debut in Stockholm in 2013, aged 25, defeating Marcus Brimage and winning a knockout of the night award, which came with a $60,000 bonus. In a press conference after the event, McGregor said it was the best moment of his career yet.

“I didn’t have money before this,” he said, “I was collecting €188-a-week off the social welfare, and now here I am with a 60 G’s bonus and then my own pay.”

Carroll says money changed McGregor’s life “to the point that everyone stopped treating him like a human”.

“Everyone panders to him,” he adds.

In 2015, McGregor beat Chad Mendes in the interim featherweight championship. The bout attracted a sold-out crowd of more than 16,000 at an arena in Las Vegas.

“People don’t give him credit,” Luke Keeler, a professional boxer from Dublin, says of the win. “It was a huge impact that he made. He was dedicated and had great belief at the time.”

By then, it was clear his fame – and bank account – was reaching new heights.

One of the biggest moments in his career came later that year, when he defeated José Aldo to win the featherweight title. His first loss was against Nate Diaz in 2016. A rematch a few months later, which McGregor won, sold a record-breaking 1.6 million pay-per-view buys.

That year, on the US chat show Jimmy Kimmel Live, McGregor was asked at what age he realised he was good at fighting. “I’m Irish, we’re all good at fighting,” he told Kimmel. “Where I come from, where I grew up, you had to be aware, you had to be able to defend yourself, so that’s how I got into it.”

Back on home soil, McGregor was named Sportsperson of the Year at the RTÉ Sport Awards. Sinéad O’Carroll, an Irish journalist and editor who covered the recent trial, says this was seen as a “remarkable feat” as it happened in the same year as the Olympics and Ireland’s Euro 2016 victory over Italy.

“It was divisive though,” she adds. “Some people thought that he wasn’t so much a sportsperson, that he was more a celebrity and people looked up to him because of his attitude and his fame.

“He’s never been a very clear-cut, popular figure in Ireland, but he would have been part of that establishment, winning that award, being invited onto the Late Late Show and would have been highly regarded for his feats in the cage, if nothing else,” she says.

Carroll, the MMA journalist, says it was around this time McGregor “started showing everyone who he was”.

“It was kind of like one of those moments when you’re like, ‘oh, he is what we think he is’.”

His next bout was with Eddie Alvarez, beating him to become the first fighter in MMA history to hold belts in two weight divisions simultaneously.

McGregor stepped away from the UFC in 2017, spending much of that year campaigning for a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather. He fought Mayweather in August of that year, having faced accusations of racism during the promotional tour, which McGregor rejected. Mayweather stopped him in the 10th round.

Ms Carroll says some people did not like the antics in the lead up to the fight or the mixing of genres from MMA to boxing.

“But he still would have had a huge support base, and I remember that fight. It was in the middle of the night, but huge numbers of people would have gotten up in the morning to watch it and it would have been headline news,” she adds.

Carroll says the Mayweather fight marked a change in McGregor’s behaviour.

“He became an icon and he earned so much money, I don’t think he had to be as invested,” he says. “He became a spectacle”.

McGregor returned to the Octagon in October 2018 – two months before the night when a jury found he had assaulted Ms Hand – and lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov.

He has not fought since 2021, but in a statement on Tuesday, he indicated that he was preparing his return.

“It was amazing what he’d done [in sport],” says Keeler, the boxer.

“But he lost the run of himself… I don’t think he had any role models or anyone he was willing to listen to. I think that was his downfall. No one could actually tell him to cop on.”

BBC News has approached McGregor for comment for this story.

Ms Hand, a 35-year-old hair colourist, made a statement to Irish police in early 2019 alleging McGregor had raped her. After an investigation into the claim, police referred the case to Ireland’s Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Irish media reported on the allegations without naming McGregor, but news reports revealing him as the suspect emerged in the US a few months later. The DPP decided not to criminally prosecute McGregor due to insufficient evidence.

Ms Hand then took civil action against McGregor, suing him for damages for assault. Her lawsuit also alleged that McGregor’s friend, James Lawrence, assaulted her by having sex with her without her consent.

The jury found she had been assaulted by McGregor, but not by Mr Lawrence.

Dr Daniel Kane, a gynaecologist and forensic examiner, told the court how he had to use forceps to remove a tampon Ms Hand said she had been wearing on the night of the assault, which had been “wedged inside”. A paramedic who examined Ms Hand on the day after the alleged attacks said she had not seen a patient as bruised as Ms Hand was in a long time.

McGregor said he and Ms Hand had athletic but consensual sex.

The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) said calls over the six hours after the verdict was delivered surged by 150%.

Rachel Morrogh, DRCC’s chief executive, said that given the case involved McGregor, an international celebrity, interest was high and news reporting within Ireland was “slightly different”.

“There was rolling news coverage, live updates from the court, and it was the most read news items in many of our national media platforms,” she says.

“It meant that the survivors and victims of sexual violence couldn’t really avoid this news – it was everywhere.

“That includes across social media as well, and on social media people were giving their own views and interpretations of what was happening in court. That was difficult for people that we work with.”

Many people were calling to congratulate Ms Hand, she says, adding: “Many of them were just expressing relief at the verdict, and others were calling because they were either considering taking a legal case or were in the middle of one themselves.”

After the trial concluded, journalists swarmed around Ms Hand as she made a statement outside the courthouse. She fought back tears as she spoke, but her voice grew stronger as she told journalists she hoped her story would encourage all sexual assault victims to speak up, “no matter how afraid you might be”.

“You have a voice, keep on fighting for justice,” she said.

Ms Hand’s case has challenged perceptions in Ireland around how sexual assault victims should behave, Carroll says.

“We’re having much more nuanced conversations, I feel, in Ireland about this. It honestly feels like a cultural milestone.”

Now, a gym in Corrandulla, Galway, paints over a mural imprinted on its walls since 2016 depicting McGregor, the Irish tricolour behind him, with his fists punching the air.

“With the court ruling last week, I was actually in the car driving and it came on the radio and I straight away just rang a couple of my staff and was like ‘okay, we have to take that down,’” Gary Scully, the owner of Scully Fitness, says.

A video of Mr Scully’s staff brushing white paint over the artwork went viral. He says the response has mostly been positive, but some disagreed with the move.

“Some of them are like, ‘Typical Irish, build someone up and the second they have a wobble, knock them down.’ But I think the case and the ruling was a bit more than a wobble,” he says.

He says McGregor is “no longer a role model to the general public” after the ruling.

“People want nothing to do with him, they don’t want to see him, they don’t want anything to do with putting money his way. The way he’s behaved is just absolutely terrible,” Mr Scully says.

“He feels like he’s above the law, and now it’s proved he isn’t.”

Shaun Flores was 11 years old when he first started watching porn, after being introduced to it by a friend.

“I was hooked almost immediately,” the now 30-year-old says.

“It was just like, wow, what is this that people are doing where they look like they’re just having the time of their lives.”

Shaun’s curiosity quickly turned into something that he found difficult to stop.

He describes watching porn morning, noon and night, saying it became as “common as brushing your teeth”.

Shaun has shared his story in a new BBC iPlayer series, Sex After.

“I realised there was an issue when I had no energy to do anything,” he says. “I didn’t want to play football, I just wanted to be inside.

“But there was the guilt and the shame that came with it, and no matter what I tried to do, I couldn’t stop watching it.

“That’s when I knew there was something up.”

While not everyone who watches porn will develop an unhealthy relationship with it, Shaun isn’t alone in his viewing habits.

Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 report suggests 29% of UK adults accessed online porn in May 2024. Additionally, new research from addiction treatment centre, UKAT, suggests that millions of Britons are viewing pornography regularly – with 1.8 million watching daily, some multiple times a day.

According to treatment providers, more people are seeking help for problematic porn use.

Dr Paula Hall, a UKCP-accredited sexual and relationship psychotherapist at The Laurel Centre, in London, specialises in helping people affected by sex addiction and porn addiction.

“The numbers of clients seeking help with pornography problems at The Laurel Centre have doubled over recent years, as have our requests from health professionals for further training,” she tells the BBC.

Dr Hall explains that they have also seen a growing number of younger people seeking help.

“Ten years ago the majority of our clients would have been married men in their 40s and 50s who were seeking help because their partner had discovered their use of sex workers,” she says.

“But increasingly, our clients are in their 20s and 30s, many of whom are single, who are recognising the growing toll of porn use on their lives and on their ability to get or maintain a relationship.”

Lee Fernandes, lead therapist at the UKAT Group, also says the number of people they treat for problematic porn use has risen “significantly” in recent years.

They now receive multiple enquiries for help from people struggling with their porn use every single day. Prior to 2020, it was one or two enquiries a week

Fernandes explains that advancements in technology and the subsequent easy accessibility of porn is making it easier for people of all ages to access sexual content online. He believes his is contributing to the increase in people seeking help that he has experienced.

“It’s not very hard for someone to pull out their phone, go onto a site and look at porn, whether they’re 12 years old or 60 years old,” he says. “It is quite troubling.”

According to Fernandes, other reasons for people watching porn online include curiosity, boredom, stress relief and lack of sexual satisfaction.

While porn use might start for these reasons, Fernandes describes it as being “very addictive”.

“It fulfils that dopamine reward system,” he explains. “Once you start it’s quite difficult to stop.”

However, while problematic porn use might mimic an addiction, it isn’t diagnostically recognised as such.

Instead, it is categorised as problematic online pornography use (POPU), or compulsive behaviour.

For people who develop this relationship with porn, the effects can be negative.

And for the youngest in society who are growing up with free, hardcore content at their fingertips, the impact of early overexposure can be far reaching.

The Children’s Commissioner for England promotes and protects the rights of children.

Recent research from their office found that, in 2023, 10% of children had seen porn by the age of nine and 27% had seen it by age 11.

“Young people tell me their exposure to pornography is widespread and normalised – with the average age at which children first seeing pornography being 13 years old,” Dame Rachel de Souza, the current Children’s Commissioner, tells the BBC.

“Pornography is no longer confined to dedicated adult sites – children tell me they can see violent content, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sexual acts on social media.

“The implications of seeing this kind of material are vast – my research has found that frequent users of pornography are more likely to engage in physically aggressive sex acts.”

De Souza adds that it is “vital” for high-quality relationship and sex education to be given parity of importance with other subjects to help young people understand that pornography is unrealistic.

Silva Neves, a psychotherapist who specialises in the treatment of compulsive sexual behaviours, agrees that viewing porn at a young age can have a negative impact.

However, he emphasises that the lack of quality sex education for young people leads to them looking for information elsewhere.

“They’re then going to see hairless vulvas,” he says. “They’re going to see 9in penises.

“They’re going to see hard intercourse lasting for 30 minutes and choking, and all these things, and they’re going to think, ‘ok, so this is sex’.

“But it’s much easier to point the finger at porn and say porn is the problem.”

Courtney Daniella Boateng, 26, first started watching porn when she was at primary school.

For her, it was partly driven by the lack of proper sex education available to her. She explains that her classes at school were focussed on the biology of reproduction, rather than the experience of sex.

She says that the taboo that seemed to exist around it made it even more fascinating to try and understand it.

“I ended up searching for sex videos,” she explains. “It was a very wide door that had just blown open into a whole new world.”

Courtney started off watching sporadically, sometimes on the weekends or occasionally before school. But then, she says, it turned into almost every day.

“That was when I started to realise this is having a negative effect on me because I’m doing this way too often,” she says.

Courtney lost her virginity when she was 18 – a moment she describes as “terrible”.

“It never felt like real life matched up to the hype…that I got from watching porn or masturbating,” she says.

Courtney eventually realised that she had an unhealthy dependency on porn.

“I would always find myself fighting whether I could actually stop and it would literally just leave me feeling so powerless,” she said.

She stopped watching porn in her early 20s and decided to become celibate. Along with her fiancé, they have committed to abstinence until after their wedding.

For Shaun, his excessive porn habit led to him being “exhausted” from masturbating.

“I think the role that it [porn] had to play was that it distorted my sense of self, and gave me a dysmorphia around sex, or my body, or my penis,” he says.

However, experts say it is important to recognise that, for many people, it is possible to have a healthy relationship with porn. For some, there may even be benefits.

For example, research conducted by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) suggests that porn provides a way for young people unsure of their sexuality to understand themselves better.

‘’We must remember that an unhealthy relationship with porn only occurs when the individual has lost the power of choice; they cannot function normally in their day to day lives without watching porn,” concludes Fernandes.

“We would urge anyone who thinks they fall into this category to seek professional help.”

“It’s left me with a lot of unlearning to do,” says Courtney. “I have had to learn what realistic sex was.

“I have had to learn to love my body and not compare it to other women’s bodies.

“I have had to learn to love and not objectify people, men and women. And not just see them as sexual objects, but actually see them as people.

“If I could rewind the clock, I wouldn’t have started it.”

For Shaun, giving up is one of the “best decisions” he’s ever made.

“The addiction made me lose connections and now I’m trying to be connected to people that I generally love and I really care about,” he says.

Earlier this week one of America’s most wanted men was finally arrested in rural north Wales having spent the past 21 years on the run.

Daniel Andreas San Diego, 46, was wanted by the FBI for allegedly bombing two office buildings in San Francisco in 2003.

But why would the suspect, who was born in Berkeley, California, choose to hide out in Maenan in the remote outskirts of the sleepy market town of Llanrwst in the Conwy valley?

And of all the countries in the world, why Wales?

“It’s beautiful… if you’re trying to evade capture, you might as well be somewhere that’s stunning and beautiful,” said former undercover detective Peter Bleksley.

Peter, who is probably best known for his time capturing make-believe fugitives on Channel 4’s TV show Hunted, said picking somewhere so remote had pros and cons.

“Being remote you can be living in a property where neighbours can’t see you, the public’s prying eyes are a long way away and you’re not going to face uncomfortable questions like you might do if you were living in a terraced house in a city, for example,” he said.

He said there would also be benefits to choosing to hide in a big city.

“You could be anonymous because people don’t talk to each other, they sit cheek by jowl on the bus or on the tube and still don’t speak to each other, if you say hello to people they think you’re a nutter, so cities are sometimes favoured because of the anonymity they can offer,” he said.

“The flip side of that, of course, is CCTV is everywhere in our major cities, which is a concern for fugitives.”

Mr San Diego, who the FBI has previously called an “animal rights extremist”, was held after an operation backed by counter terrorist police and North Wales Police on Monday.

He now faces extradition to the US after being arrested at a property in a remote rural area near woodland in north Wales.

Earlier this week Aled Evans told how he unknowingly sold his home to Mr San Diego.

He said in August 2023, using the name Danny Webb, Mr San Diego had paid £425,000 for the white villa with a balcony offering striking views of rolling hills and a well-manicured garden near Llanrwst in August 2023.

Reflecting on recent events he has realised it was the ideal location “if you wanted to keep your head down”.

Peter believes it was most likely the purchase of this property that marked the start of the end of Mr San Diego’s life on the run.

“Maybe purchasing that property created the electronic footprint opportunity for the FBI to exploit, which therefore led to his capture,” he said.

“Gone are the days when drug dealers could walk into an estate agents with carrier bags full of cash and literally go ‘I’ll buy that flat or I’ll buy that house’ because of course we have money laundering regulations, banks have to ask certain questions of people if they transfer a sizable sum of money.

“If anybody involved in that process, be it estate agent bank, solicitors, had any suspicions as to the money trail and they flagged it up to the authorities, that would start an investigation.”

Although he has spent a career hunting down others, Peter has some experience of what it is like to live a life in hiding.

While working at Scotland Yard’s undercover unit his identity was exposed and he had to go into witness protection.

“Living a life continually looking over your shoulder is very unpleasant,” he said.

“You’re always fearful of that knock on the door… it can be very draining, although the longer you do it, the more you get used to it.”

He said living that way for an extended period of time could lead to sloppy mistakes.

“That’s the danger, and, of course, keeping your guard up all the time requires constant vigilance, which is draining… maybe his guard did drop just a little bit.”

Through his career, Peter has had quite the insight into the behaviour of fugitives.

“I’ve caught real ones when I was a detective and I caught many pretend ones when I was the chief in Hunted,” he said.

So having seen the mistakes that lead to capture, what advice would he give to someone who wants to remain in hiding?

“Be nice to people,” he said.

“If you’re nice, they’ll feed you, they’ll clothe you, they’ll take you where you want to go, they’ll give you cash or other financial means.

“If you’re not, if you’re unpleasant and you upset people, they’ll pick up the phone and grass you up.”

He has this theories but Peter is eager to find out the truth about what led to Mr San Diego’s arrest.

“I do hope we get to find out how it was caught, how it all unravelled because it’ll be great,” he said.

“And I suspect Netflix are all over this story already.”

Maenan sits just off the A470, one of the main roads running through north Wales, about 10 miles (16km) from Conwy.

It is a sprawling community of farms and isolated cottages, many of which are now holiday homes or holiday lets. There is no shop or village pub.

Many of the properties that you pass on the way to Llidiart y Coed appear to be holiday homes.

The FBI has accused Mr San Diego of being “an animal rights extremist” involved in a series of bombings in San Francisco.

The first bombing happened in August 2003, outside the Chiron Life Science Center in Emeryville, California.

A second bomb was found at the site by authorities but exploded before it could be defused.

The agency said that raised the possibility the device was planted specifically to target first responders.

Less than a month later, in September 2003, a nail bomb exploded outside a nutritional products corporation based in Pleasanton, California.

He became the first “domestic terrorist” to be added to the agency’s most wanted terrorist list, created by then-President George W Bush in October 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Behind a door deep within the lower floors of the National Library of Scotland lies a forgotten street which gives a glimpse of how Edinburgh looked centuries ago.

Libberton’s Wynd, in the heart of the old city, was demolished to make way for George IV Bridge in the 1830s – but part of the street still remains.

It can be found between the bridge walls and the library building, with access through a hidden door.

The corridor – which has been named The Void by library staff – is not open to the public, but BBC Scotland News has been allowed to see inside.

It was discovered by library officials in the 1990s when they broke down a small hatch on a wall behind filing cabinets, then crawled through it.

They found a passage with arches into chambers and rooms which are thought to have once been storage in the bridge.

Bill Jackson, former director of the library, told BBC Scotland News he found old rotten furniture, ledgers, shoes and a slate urinal that were all more than 100 years old, but were waterlogged and damaged.

“My torch was hardly illuminating anything, it was very dark when I went through and a bit scary and I wanted to get out of there.

“It was fascinating though.”

Since then he has fitted lights and another door at the Cowgate end of The Void.

The library’s rooms were built on top of foundations, which can still be seen, of buildings that were demolished in Libberton’s Wynd to make way for George IV Bridge.

Robbie Mitchell, a reference assistant at the library, said that inside the passageway you could see the brickwork of the library’s lower levels and the bridge’s stonework.

“Although not a preserved street like Mary Stair’s Close, this nevertheless offers us a glimpse of the Edinburgh of centuries ago,” he said.

“There are several maps and accounts of the Old Town in the library’s collections which help us build an atmospheric picture of the neighbourhood on which both George IV Bridge and the library now stand, and what was there before The Void.”

George IV Bridge was built as a route to connect the centre of Edinburgh – the Royal Mile – over the Cowgate, which was in a valley, to the south side of the city.

Its arches had chambers built into them on several floors for storage for the shops at the top of the bridge.

Libberton’s Wynd was the route from the Cowgate to Edinburgh’s gallows in a section of the Royal Mile called The Lawnmarket – before it was demolished to make way for the bridge.

Later, The National Library of Scotland was built on top of the bridge, with floors running all the way down into the Cowgate below.

The bridge was built on Libberton Wynd’s foundations, which can still be seen in The Void.

The corridor runs for several hundred feet at a steep gradient.

Officials have widened the entrance so there is now a full-sized door. Some of the chambers are now used to store huge water tanks for the library’s sprinkler system.

Mr Mitchell said that large crowds, often several thousands strong, attended the executions which took place at the city gallows where Libberton’s Wynd joined the Lawnmarket.

One of the most infamous figures to have been executed there was body-snatcher and murderer William Burke in January 1829.

Libberton’s Wynd was also famed for housing one of the city’s best-known taverns, which was called The Mermaid before it became Johnnie Dowie’s Tavern.

Taverns were key features of Edinburgh’s Old Town communities, and patrons often came from various social classes.

John Dowie was described in accounts as “the sleekest and kindest of landlords”. He always wore “a cocked hat, buckles at the knees and shoes, as well as a cross-handled cane, over which he stooped in his gait”.

Mr Mitchell said the most popular drink had been the Edinburgh Ale brewed and supplied by Archibald Younger.

This was described as “a potent fluid which almost glued the lips of the drinker together, and of which few, therefore, could dispatch more than a bottle”.

Mr Mitchell said descriptions of the tavern, which occupied the ground floor of a tall tenement, gave an impression of the claustrophobic confines of the Old Town.

About 14 people could fit in its principal room, which looked to the Wynd, but the other rooms were said to be so small that no more than six people could fit in each of them.

They were described as being “so dingy and dark that, even in broad day, they had to be lighted up by artificial means”.

The Tavern was described as a house of “much respectability” and was a popular meeting place for “the chief wits and men of letters” in Edinburgh.

It was regularly frequented by writers including poet Robert Fergusson, artists and many members of the judiciary.

The smallest of its windowless chambers was an irregular oblong box which was commonly referred to as “the Coffin”, and was believed to be Robert Burns’ favoured seat in the Tavern.

Libberton’s Wynd was first referred to in the late 15th Century, but had been demolished by 1835.

Local historian Jamie Corstorphine said entering The Void had been one of the most exciting things he had experienced.

“The name of the wynd probably came from Henry Libberton, who had a large property on the wynd – or if not him, then his family, who remained in the house for many years after his death in 1501.

“The street had merchants, barbers, a shoemaker, grocers, custom house, vinters, cork-cutters, silver turners, hosiers and glaziers.

“It was a very busy street that would have been full of life at the time.”

Rebel forces launched the largest offensive against the Syrian government in years on Wednesday.

By Sunday, they had taken control of “large parts” of the country’s second-biggest city, Aleppo and were advancing towards Hama in the south.

The surprise offensive prompted the first Russian strikes on Aleppo since 2016, and saw Syria’s military withdraw its troops from the city.

The attack was led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – which has a long and involved history in the Syrian conflict.

• Live updates on this story

HTS was set up under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusra, in 2011 as a direct affiliate of Al Qaeda.

The leader of the self-styled Islamic State (IS) group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was also involved in its formation.

It was regarded as one of the most effective and deadly of the groups ranged against President Assad.

But its jihadist ideology appeared to be its driving force rather than revolutionary zeal – and it was seen at the time as at odds with the main rebel coalition under the banner of Free Syria.

And in 2016, the group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, publicly broke ranks with Al Qaeda, dissolved Jabhat al-Nusra and set up a new organisation, which took the name Hayat Tahrir al-Sham when it merged with several other similar groups a year later.

The war in Syria has for the past four years felt as if it were effectively over.

President Bashar al-Assad’s rule is essentially uncontested in the country’s major cities, while some other parts of Syria remain out of his direct control.

These include Kurdish majority areas in the east, which have been more or less separate from Syrian state control since the early years of the conflict.

There has been some continued, though relatively muted unrest, in the south where the revolution against Assad’s rule began in 2011.

In the vast Syrian desert, holdouts from the group calling themselves Islamic State still pose a security threat, particularly during the truffle hunting season when people head to the area to find the highly profitable delicacy.

And in the north-west, the province of Idlib has been held by militant groups driven there at the height of the war.

HTS, the dominant force in Idlib, is the one that has launched the surprise attack on Aleppo.

For several years, Idlib remained a battleground as Syrian government forces tried to regain control.

But a ceasefire deal in 2020 brokered by Russia, which has long been Assad’s key ally, and Turkey, which has backed the rebels, has largely held.

About four million people live there – most of them displaced from towns and cities that Assad’s forces won back from rebels in a brutal war of attrition.

Aleppo was one of the bloodiest battlegrounds and represented one of the rebels’ biggest defeats.

To achieve victory, President Assad could not depend on the country’s under-equipped and poorly motivated conscript army alone, which soon became dangerously stretched and regularly unable to hold positions against rebel attacks.

Instead, he came to rely heavily on Russian airpower and Iranian military help on the ground – mainly through militias sponsored by Tehran.

These included Hezbollah.

There is little doubt that the setback Hezbollah has suffered recently from Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, as well as Israeli strikes on Iranian military commanders in Syria, has played a significant part in the decision by jihadist and rebel groups in Idlib to make their sudden, unexpected move on Aleppo.

In the past few months, Israel has intensified its attacks on Iranian-linked groups as well as their supply lines, inflicting serious damage on the networks that have kept these militias, including Hezbollah, operative in Syria.

Without them, President Assad’s forces have been left exposed.

For some time now, HTS has established its power base in Idlib where it is the de facto local administration, although its efforts towards legitimacy have been tarnished by alleged human rights abuses.

It has also been involved in some bitter infighting with other groups.

Its ambitions beyond Idlib had become unclear.

Since breaking with Al Qaeda, its goal has been limited to trying to establish fundamentalist Islamic rule in Syria rather than a wider caliphate, as IS tried and failed to do.

It had shown little sign of attempting to reignite the Syrian conflict on a major scale and renew its challenge to Assad’s rule over much of the country – until now.

Tamuna Museridze took a deep breath and made the phone call she had dreamed of since finding out that she might be adopted.

She was calling the woman she believed was her biological mother. She knew it might not lead to a fairy tale reunion – but she didn’t expect the response to be cold and angry.

“She started screaming, shouting – she said she hadn’t given birth to a child. She didn’t want anything to do with me,” Tamuna recalls, explaining she felt more surprised than upset by the response.

“I was ready for anything, but her reaction was beyond anything I could imagine.”

Tamuna wasn’t prepared to walk away just yet. She wanted to know the circumstances of her adoption, and there was something else she wanted that only her mother could give her – the name of her father.

Tamuna’s search had begun in 2016, after the woman who raised her died. Clearing out her house, Tamuna found a birth certificate with her own name on it but the wrong birth date, and she started to suspect she was adopted. After doing some research, she set up a Facebook group called Vedzeb, or I’m Searching, hoping to find her birth parents.

Instead, she uncovered a baby trafficking scandal in Georgia that has affected tens of thousands of lives. Over many decades, parents were lied to and told their newborn babies had died – the infants were then sold.

Tamuna is a journalist and her work has reunited hundreds of families, yet – until now – she couldn’t solve the mystery of her own origins and wondered if she too had been stolen as a child.

“I was a journalist on this story, but it was a personal mission for me as well,” she says.

The breakthrough in her search had come in the summer, when she received a message through her Facebook group. It was from someone who lived in rural Georgia, who said they knew a woman who had concealed a pregnancy and given birth in Tbilisi in September 1984. That’s around the time Tamuna was born – a date she had shared publicly.

The person believed the woman was Tamuna’s birth mother – and crucially they gave a name.

• Georgia’s stolen children: Twins sold at birth reunited by TikTok video

Tamuna immediately searched for her online but when she couldn’t find anything, she decided to post an appeal on Facebook asking if anyone knew her.

A woman soon responded, saying the woman who had concealed the pregnancy was her own aunt. She asked Tamuna to take the post down but she agreed to do a DNA test.

While they were waiting for the results, Tamuna made the phone call to her mother.

A week later, the DNA results arrived, indicating that Tamuna and the woman on Facebook were indeed cousins. Armed with this evidence, Tamuna managed to convince her mother to acknowledge the truth and reveal the name of her father. It was a man called Gurgen Khorava.

“The first two months were shocking, I couldn’t believe these things were happening to me,” she recalls, “I couldn’t believe I had found them.”

Once Tamuna had Gurgen’s name, she quickly tracked him down on Facebook. It turned out that he had been following her story on social media – her work reconnecting families is widely known across Georgia.

Tamuna was amazed to find that he had “been in my friend list for three years”. He just hadn’t realised he was a part of her story.

“He didn’t even know my birth mother had been pregnant,” says Tamuna. “It was a huge surprise for him.”

They soon arranged to meet in his hometown of Zugdidi in western Georgia – about 160 miles (260km) from where she lives in Tbilisi.

Looking back, Tamuna thinks she was in a state of shock, but as she walked up to Gurgen’s garden gate, she felt surprisingly calm.

When the 72-year-old appeared, they hugged, then stopped to take a moment to look at each other, smiling.

“It was strange, the moment he looked at me, he knew that I was his daughter,” she recalls. “I had so many mixed emotions.”

She had a lot of questions and didn’t know where to start. “We just sat together, watching each other and trying to find something in common,” she says.

As the two of them chatted, they realised they shared a lot of interests – Gurgen had once been a renowned dancer at the State Ballet of Georgia, and was delighted to learn that Tamuna’s daughters – his granddaughters – shared his passion.

“They both love dancing, and so does my husband,” she says with a smile.

Gurgen invited his entire family to his home to meet Tamuna, introducing her to a large group of new relatives – half siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles. The family agreed there was a strong resemblance between them. “Out of all his children, I look the most like my father,” she says.

They spent an evening sharing stories, eating traditional Georgian food, and singing while Gurgen played the accordion.

Even though she had now met her father, Tamuna still had a niggling question: had she – like thousands of other Georgians – been stolen from her mother at birth and sold? Her adoptive parents were no longer alive so she couldn’t turn to them for answers.

She finally got a chance to ask her birth mother in October. A Polish TV company was filming a documentary about Tamuna and took her to meet her mother, who agreed to talk to her in private.

Unlike many people Tamuna has helped to reunite, she discovered that she had not been a stolen child herself. Instead, her mother had given her up and kept the secret for 40 years.

Her mother and father were not in a relationship and had only had a brief encounter. Her mother – overwhelmed by shame – chose to hide her pregnancy. In September 1984, she travelled to Tbilisi, telling people she was going for surgery, and instead gave birth to a daughter. She stayed there until arrangements were made for Tamuna’s adoption.

“It was painful to learn that I spent 10 days alone with her before the adoption. I try not to think about that,” Tamuna reflects.

She says that her mother asked her to lie and tell people she had been stolen. “She told me that if I would not say that I was stolen, everything would end between us… and I said that I couldn’t do that.”

Tamuna feels this would be unfair to all the parents whose babies were stolen. “If I lie, nobody’s going to believe those mothers any more,” she explains.

Her mother then asked her to leave the house and they have not spoken since.

“Would I do it all again?” she reflects. “Of course I would, I found out so much about my new family.”

Georgia’s Stolen Children

Twins Amy and Ano were taken from their mother as babies and sold. They found out about each other by chance and soon discovered thousands of others in Georgia who were also stolen from hospitals.

Watch more on this story on the BBC iPlayer (UK only).

You can also watch the documentary on YouTube.

Gregg Wallace has hit back at allegations of historic misconduct, saying they have come from a “handful of middle-class women of a certain age”.

The MasterChef presenter said in a video on Instagram on Sunday morning there had been “13 complaints” from “over 4,000 contestants” he had worked with in 20 years on the BBC One show.

He stepped aside earlier this week after a BBC News investigation revealed a string of allegations of inappropriate sexual comments and inappropriate behaviour against him.

The investigation heard from 13 people across a range of ages, who worked across five different shows, including broadcaster Kirsty Wark who appeared on Celebrity MasterChef.

“I’ve been doing MasterChef for 20 years – amateur, professional and Celebrity MasterChef – and I think in that time I have worked with over 4,000 contestants of all different ages, all different backgrounds, all walks of life,” Wallace told his more than 200,000 followers.

“And apparently now, I’m reading in the paper, there’s been 13 complaints in that time.

“Now, in the newspaper I can see the complaints coming from a handful of middle-class women of a certain age just from Celebrity MasterChef. This isn’t right.”

He finished his statement by saying: “In over 20 years of television, can you imagine how many women, female contestants on MasterChef, have made sexual remarks or sexual innuendo – can you imagine?”

Wallace’s lawyers have strongly denied he engages in sexually harassing behaviour, while the BBC said it will “always listen if people want to make us aware of something directly”.

Responding to Wallace’s video, actress Emma Kennedy who won Celebrity MasterChef in 2012 and says she complained about his behaviour at the time, said “it doesn’t matter what the age of any woman is”.

“If you behave inappropriately, you behave inappropriately,” she told BBC News. “It’s a story as old as the tides that people who have been accused of inappropriate behaviour turn the tables on those pointing it out and try and change the narrative.”

She added: “Playing the ‘they’re having a go at me because I’m working class’ card is ridiculous.”

TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp told BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend about an encounter with Wallace several years ago that left her “so embarrassed”, after he “made a reference to something [he and his partner] did in bed”.

She also called Wallace’s claims on social media on Sunday “unacceptable”, adding: “He is essentially saying this is a class issue and middle-class women don’t understand the type of things he says because he’s working-class.”

Writing on X alongside a link to a BBC News article on Wallace, Baroness Harriet Harman said that women now “feel able to challenge” inappropriate behaviour from men.

She said that specifically “older, middle class women [are] more able to challenge than freelance junior women”, adding: “It’s our duty.”

It comes as the BBC faces fresh questions over its handling of allegations against the 60-year-old, and the fact he continued to present the cooking show, after emails emerged showing it was warned about him in 2017.

Radio host Aasmah Mir said she complained to the corporation that year about inappropriate comments Wallace had allegedly made during filming of the programme.

In an internal email, BBC executive Kate Phillips, who now heads up unscripted programmes for the corporation, said that his behaviour on set was “unacceptable and cannot continue,” the Sunday Times reported.

She added that she would make sure that she was “informed straight away” should further allegations be made against him.

Mir later sent an email that was copied to Phillips, saying: “This must not happen again to another woman.”

Some of the allegations against Wallace in the BBC News investigation relate to events after 2017.

A BBC source commented on Sunday that “it would be wrong to report the BBC has done nothing if or when matters have been raised with us”.

“We continue to urge caution about pre-judging any of this, particularly the involvement of BBC staff members and any inference they have not acted appropriately,” the source told BBC News.

Separately, the Observer says a letter containing multiple claims of inappropriate behaviour by Gregg Wallace was sent to the BBC in 2022, but did not result in further investigation at the time.

On Thursday, MasterChef’s production company Banijay UK said Wallace would step away from presenting the show while allegations of historical misconduct were investigated.

He is “committed to fully co-operating throughout the process”, Banijay added.

It came after BBC News sent a letter to Wallace’s representatives, setting out allegations we have heard from 13 people, across a 17-year period.

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

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

Wallace’s lawyers have said it is entirely false that he engages in behaviour of a sexually harassing nature.

On Saturday evening, Wallace said in an Instagram post: “We are all different.”

Alongside his Instagram statement on Sunday morning, he posted apparent screenshots of supportive messages he had received from people who said they were former contestants on the show.

In his video message he wore a navy T-shirt with the Matt Hampson Foundation written on it – but shortly afterwards the charity, which helps people recover from major sports injuries, posted on X to say “we do not condone the kind of behaviour and comments contained in these allegations”.

Reacting to Wallace’s video, TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall told the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “I understand the instinct when you feel you’re backed in a corner, but I don’t think it’s smart to come out talking like that when at the moment he should probably be listening.”

The BBC said it has “robust processes” in place to deal with issues if they are raised.

Earlier on Saturday, MasterChef producers announced they have appointed a “rigorous” law firm to lead an investigation into Wallace’s alleged misconduct.

On the appointment of London law firm Lewis Silkin, a Banijay UK spokesperson said it was a “highly experienced specialist investigations team which has overseen a broad range of high-profile workplace investigations”.

Huge flooding caused by heavy rain in Malaysia and neighbouring Thailand has killed at least 12 people, officials say.

More than 122,000 people have been forced out of their homes in northern Malaysia, while in southern Thailand, around 13,000 others have also been displaced.

There are fears the number could rise, as heavy rain and storm warnings remain in place.

Emergency services personnel have been deployed to help rescue stranded residents and shelters are being provided.

The flooding, which began earlier in the week, has seen thousands of residents evacuated in both nations.

Videos on social media and local news show cars and houses submerged, and people wading through waist-deep water.

One video, filmed in Thailand’s Sateng Nok district, showed rescuers carrying a baby out from a roof of a flooded home.

Flooding has impacted nearly 534,000 households in southern Thailand, disaster officials said, and two hospitals had to close to prevent floodwaters from damaging medical facilities.

Six provinces have declared a disaster due to the floods.

The government has designated 50 million baht ($1.7m; £1.3m) in flood relief for each province, with Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra saying the goal is to “restore normalcy as quickly as possible”.

In Malaysia, the flooding is mostly concentrated on the north-eastern state of Kelantan, which borders Thailand.

There, the National Disaster Management Agency says the evacuees account for 63% of the total number.

One resident in the town of Pasir Puteh in Kelantan said her area had been flooded since Wednesday.

“The water has already reached my house corridor and is just two inches away from coming inside,” Zamrah Majid told AFP news agency.

Another resident of the same town said he and his family have been isolated by the floods.

“There’s no way in or out of for any vehicles to enter my neighbourhood,” Muhammad Zulkarnain told AFP.

Another eight states in Malaysia have also been affected.

So far, the number of those displaced surpasses that of 2014, which saw one of the worst floods in the country.

Provisions for disaster management have been sent to Terengganu and Kelantan State Governments, according to the prime minister’s office.

On Friday, he barred his cabinet members from going on leave so they can focus on the disaster.

The Malaysian Meteorological Department warned that heavy rains will continue until Sunday in some states, while its Thai counterpart warned that “very heavy rain” could continue through next week.

Both countries experience monsoon rains around this time of the year, and flooding isn’t uncommon.

In 2021, Malaysia faced some of its worse flooding in decades, which killed at least 14 people.

Ten years earlier, in 2011, widespread flooding across Thailand killed at least 500 people and damaged millions of homes.

The memories began rushing back as Kenneth strolled through Hong Kong’s Victoria Park, once a focal point for the city’s resistance to China.

As a child, Kenneth would buy calligraphy posters from pro-democracy politicians at the annual Lunar New Year fair.

Then there were the protest marches he joined as a teenager, that would always start here before winding their way through the city. When he was just 12, he began attending the park’s massive vigils for the Tiananmen massacre – a taboo in mainland China, but commemorated openly in Hong Kong.

Those vigils have ended now. The politicians’ stalls at the fair are gone, protests have been silenced and pro-democracy campaigners jailed. Kenneth feels his political coming-of-age – and Hong Kong’s – is being erased.

“People still carry on with life… but you can feel the change bit by bit,” said the former activist, who did not want to reveal his real name when he spoke to us.

“Our city’s character is disappearing.”

On the surface Hong Kong appears to be the same, its packed trams still rumbling down bustling streets, its vibrant neon-lit chaos undimmed.

But look closer and there are signs the city has changed – from the skyscrapers lighting up every night with exultations of China, the motherland, to the chatter of mainland Mandarin increasingly heard alongside Hong Kong’s native Cantonese.

It’s impossible to know how many of Hong Kong’s more than seven million people welcome Beijing’s grip. But hundreds of thousands have taken part in protests in the past decade since a pro-democracy movement erupted in 2014.

Not everyone supported it, but few would contest that Beijing crushed it. As a turbulent decade draws to a close, hopes for a freer Hong Kong have withered.

China says it has steadied a volatile city. Hundreds have been jailed under a sweeping national security law (NSL), which also drove thousands of disillusioned and wary Hongkongers abroad, including activists who feared or fled arrest. Others, like Kenneth, have stayed and keep a low profile.

But in many of them lives the memory of a freer Hong Kong – a place they are fighting to remember in defiance of Beijing’s remaking of their city.

When Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to China in 1997, it was under the assurance that the city would keep some rights, including free speech, freedom of assembly and rule of law for 50 years. But as Beijing’s power grew, so did the disquiet within the city’s pro-democracy camp.

In September 2014, tens of thousands of protesters began to stage mass sit-ins in downtown Hong Kong, demanding fully democratic elections. It propelled a new generation of pro-democracy campaigners to prominence – such as Joshua Wong, then a 17-year-old student, and Benny Tai, a college professor, who called the movement Occupy Central.

It also seeded the ground for more explosive protests in 2019, which were triggered by Beijing’s proposal to extradite locals to the mainland. The plan was scrapped but the protests intensified over several months as calls grew for more democracy, becoming the most serious challenge to Beijing’s authority in Hong Kong.

“Without Benny Tai, there would have been no Occupy Central,” says Chan Kin-man, who co-founded the campaign with Tai and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming.

“He had the temper of scholars and spoke his mind… that’s why he was bold enough to push for changes and think about big ideas. It is always people [like this] who change history.”

Chan and Rev Chu are both exiles in Taiwan now. Chan moved to Taipei in 2021, after serving 11 months in jail for inciting public nuisance in his role in Occupy Central. He is now a fellow at a local research institute.

Tai is still in Hong Kong, where he will spend the next decade behind bars.

In November, he was sentenced to jail for subversion, along with more than 40 other pro-democracy campaigners including Wong, many of whom have been in jail since their arrest in early 2021. As Wong left the courtroom, he shouted: “I love Hong Kong.”

The following day 76-year-old billionaire Jimmy Lai, a fierce critic of China, testified at his trial for allegedly colluding with foreign forces. Frail but defiant, he told the court his now-defunct newspaper Apple Daily had only espoused the values of Hong Kong’s people: “Pursuit of democracy and freedom of speech”.

The trials have passed quietly, in stark contrast to the events that led to them. Small signs of protest outside the court were quickly shut down – a woman sobbing about her son’s sentence was taken away by police.

Beijing defends the restrictions – including the NSL under which the trials are happening – as essential for stability. It says the West or its allies have no right to question its laws or how it applies them.

But critics accuse China of reneging on the deal it struck in 1997. They say it has weakened the city’s courts and muzzled the once resounding cry for democracy in Hong Kong.

Chan has watched these events unfold from afar with a heavy heart.

After 2014, there had still been the possibility of change, he said. Now, “a lot of things have become impossible… Hong Kong has become no different from other Chinese cities”.

Faced with this reality after campaigning for democracy for more than a decade, “you can say that I have failed in everything I have done in my life”, he said with a wry smile.

But still he perseveres. Besides teaching classes on Chinese society, he is writing a book about Occupy Central, collecting items for an archive of Hong Kong’s protest scene, organising conferences, and giving virtual lectures on democracy and politics.

These efforts “make me feel that I haven’t given up on Hong Kong. I don’t feel like I have abandoned it”.

Yet, there are moments when he grapples with his decision to leave. He is happier in Taiwan, but he also feels “a sense of loss”.

“Am I still together with other Hongkongers, facing the same challenges as them?”

“If you are not breathing the air here, you don’t really know what’s happening… if you don’t feel the pulse here, it means you are truly gone,” said Kenneth, as he continued his walk through Victoria Park.

With friends leaving the city in droves in the last few years, he has lost count of the number of farewell parties he’s attended. Still, he insists on staying: “This is where my roots are.”

What irritates him is the rhetoric from those who leave, that the Hong Kong they knew has died. “Hong Kong continues to exist. Its people are still here! So how can they say that Hong Kong is dead?”

But, he acknowledged, there have been dramatic changes. Hongkongers now have to think twice about what they say out loud, Kenneth said.

Many are now adapting to a “normalised state of surveillance”. There are red lines, “but it is very difficult to ascertain them”.

Instead of campaigning openly, activists now write petition letters. Rallies, marches and protests are definitely off-limits, he added. But many, like Kenneth, are wary of taking part in any activism, because they fear they’ll be arrested.

A t-shirt, social media posts and picture books have fallen foul of the law recently, landing their owners in jail for sedition.

These days Kenneth goes out less frequently. “The contrast is so drastic now. I don’t want to remember what happened in the past.”

Still, as he walked out of the park and headed to the Admiralty district, more memories unspooled.

As he neared the government headquarters, he pointed to the spot where he choked on tear gas for the first time, on 28 September 2014.

That day, the police fired 87 rounds of tear gas on unarmed protesters, an act that enraged demonstrators and galvanised the pro-democracy movement.

As the protests deepened and tear gas became a common sight, many sheltered behind umbrellas, spawning a new moniker – the Umbrella Movement.

The final stop was his alma mater, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, also known as PolyU. It was a key battleground during the 2019 demonstrations that saw protesters battling police on the streets, hurling projectiles against tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets.

Five years on, the PolyU entrance where students fended off the police with bricks and petrol bombs in a fiery showdown has been reconstructed. A fountain which saw the most intense clashes has been demolished.

Like elsewhere in Hong Kong, the campus seemed to have been scrubbed of its disobedient past. Kenneth believed it was because the university “doesn’t want people to remember certain things”.

Then, he darted away to a quiet corner. Hidden beneath the bushes was a low wall pockmarked with holes and gobs of concrete. It was impossible to tell what they were. But Kenneth believes these were traces of the battles which escaped the purge of memories.

“I don’t believe we will forget what happened,” he said. “Forgetting the past is a form of betrayal.”

At a Tesco’s café in Watford in the UK, Kasumi Law remembered what she missed about her old home.

“I never thought I’d love the sea in Hong Kong so much. I only realised this when I arrived in the UK,” she said, as she tucked into a full English breakfast. Unlike the cold and dark ocean surrounding Britain, “in Hong Kong the sea is so shiny, because there are so many buildings… I didn’t realise how beautiful our city is”.

Kasumi’s decision to move to the UK with her husband and young daughter had stemmed from an unease that crept up on her over the previous decade. The Occupy Central protests began just months after her daughter was born in 2014.

In the following years, as Beijing’s grip appeared to tighten – student activists were jailed and booksellers disappeared – Kasumi’s discomfort grew.

“Staying in Hong Kong was, I wouldn’t say, unsafe,” she said. “But every day, little by little, there was a feeling of something not being right.”

Then Hong Kong erupted in protest again in 2019. As Beijing cracked down, the UK offered a visa scheme for Hongkongers born before the 1997 handover, and Kasumi and her husband agreed it was time to go for the sake of their daughter.

They settled in the town of Watford near London, where her husband found a job in IT while Kasumi became a stay-at-home mum.

But she had never lived abroad before, and she struggled with a deep homesickness which she documented in emotional video diaries on YouTube. One of them even went viral last year, striking a chord with some Hongkongers while others criticised her for choosing to emigrate.

Eventually it was too much to bear, and she returned to Hong Kong for a visit last year. Over two months she visited childhood haunts like a theme park and a science museum, scoffed down her mum’s homecooked fuzzy melon with vermicelli and stir fried clams, and treated herself to familiar delights such as egg tarts and melon-flavoured soy milk.

But the Hong Kong she remembered had also changed. Her mum looked older. Her favourite shops in the Ladies Market had closed down.

Sitting by the harbour at Tsim Sha Tsui one night, she was happy to be reunited with the twinkling sea she had missed so much. Then she realised most of the people around her were speaking in Mandarin.

Tears streamed down her face. “When I looked out at the sea it looked familiar, but when I looked around at the people around me, it felt strange.”

Kasumi wonders when she would visit again. With the passing of a new security law this year – Article 23 – her friends have advised her to delete social media posts from past protests before returning.

It is a far cry from the fearlessness she remembers from 2019, when she brought her daughter to the protests and they marched on the streets with thousands of people, united in their defiance.

“It’s too late to turn back,” she said. “I feel if I go back to Hong Kong I might not be used to life there, to be honest.

“My daughter is happy here. When I see her, I think it’s worth it. I want her world to be bigger.”

Kasumi’s world is bigger too – she has found a job and made new friends. But even as she builds a new life in the UK, she remains determined to preserve the Hongkonger in her – and her child.

Kasumi and her husband only speak in Cantonese to their daughter, and the family often watches Cantonese films together. Her daughter doesn’t yet understand the significance of the 2019 protests she marched in, nor the movement that began in 2014, when she was born. But Kasumi plans to explain when she is older.

The seeds Kasumi is planting are already taking root. She is particularly proud of the way her daughter responds to people who call her Chinese. “She gets angry, and she will argue with them,” Kasumi said, with a smile.

“She always tells people, ‘I’m not Chinese, I’m a Hongkonger’.”

Bob Bryar, former drummer for American rock band My Chemical Romance (MCR), has died aged 44 at his Tennessee home, according to US media.

He was the longest-serving drummer for the group, playing with the band from 2004 to 2010.

A spokesperson for the band told US outlets that the “band asks for your patience and understanding as they process the news of Bob’s passing”.

Bryar joined MCR after the release of their second album and helped write songs for the acclaimed record The Black Parade, deemed a “defining album” by NPR Music.

Bryar was born in Chicago, Illinois and studied sound engineering at the University of Florida.

He met the band whilst working as a sound engineer for a support band on an MCR tour in 2004.

After befriending them, he replaced the original drummer Matt Pelissier.

They went on to release two albums whilst he remained in the band.

However, he suffered third-degree burns in an accident whilst on the set of a music video in 2006, which led to infection.

Bryar went on to face multiple complications from the injuries, and was hospitalised for a staph infection.

The band cancelled multiple shows as he recovered, but began a world tour in February 2007.

By November, Bryar began having issues with his wrist, and was temporarily replaced and returned for the last leg of the tour in early 2008.

In 2010, the band posted a statement that Bryar had left, calling it a “painful decision”.

They released their fourth studio album shortly after, which Bryar has five song writing credits for.

He officially retired from the music scene in 2021 and auctioned off some of his band memorabilia in aid of various animal charities.

At the time he told radio network ABC Audio: “I have too many wrist issues… it’s time for something new”.

MCR split up in 2013, but reunited in 2019.

They are due to go on a US stadium tour in 2025.

“The fight game awaits!” Conor McGregor proclaimed to his millions of social media followers on Tuesday, while retailers pulled products linked to him from shelves, murals of him were erased and brands announced they had cut ties.

It followed a 12-person jury in Dublin finding McGregor guilty of sexual assault in a civil case brought by Nikita Hand, who accused him of raping her at a Dublin hotel in December 2018. She was awarded nearly €250,000 (£208,000) in damages. In a social media post, McGregor said he would appeal the decision.

Ms Hand’s case was one of several legal issues and controversies that McGregor, one of Ireland’s most famous athletes, has faced over the past few years.

In 2018, he was arrested in New York for throwing a metal dolly at the window of a bus which had a group of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) staff and athletes on board. A year later, he was convicted and fined €1,000 (£850) for punching a man who rejected his offer of a drink in a Dublin pub.

Some commentators argue that support for McGregor within Ireland, where he had been thought of as a trailblazer, has been dwindling for some time – but the shift after Ms Hand’s civil case was seismic.

Within a week, hundreds of supermarkets in both the UK and Ireland removed brands associated with him. Proximo Spirits, the company that bought McGregor’s Proper No Twelve whiskey brand in 2021, said it did not plan to use his name or likeness in its marketing going forward.

• Woman wins civil rape case against Conor McGregor

IO Interactive, the creators of the Hitman video game, said it would cease its collaboration with McGregor in light of the court ruling. Ireland’s National Wax Museum also said it removed its figure of McGregor two weeks ago.

He built his brand on his patriotism and brash persona. But the controversies surrounding him have turned some former supporters against him and become an increasing distraction from his career.

Petesy Carroll, a mixed martial arts (MMA) journalist, credits McGregor and his team for bringing MMA to Ireland, but says they have “also destroyed it as a sport here”.

Now, after the civil case, it’s unclear what comes next.

McGregor’s rise to sporting stardom has often been described as a rags-to-riches tale. As a teenager, living in Lucan, Dublin, he quit his job as an apprentice plumber to pursue a career in a sport that was relatively unknown in Ireland.

“The Irish mentality is when you’re finished school, if you’re not going to college or anything you need to get a job straight away. There’s no chasing your dreams,” he said in a 2013 interview with RTÉ’s Late Late Show, where he was 24 years old and almost unrecognisable.

The brash, confident, boisterous traits his “notorious” brand is now synonymous with with were untraceable.

“I thought I could do something with my life. I knew I had the ability to make it in this game,” he said.

Carroll, who has been covering McGregor since the beginning of his career, says McGregor burst on to the mainstream at a time when Ireland was grappling with the impact of the 2008 recession.

“There are no opportunities, everybody’s leaving for Australia or Canada, and here’s this guy saying ‘No, be proud to be Irish. It’s cool to be Irish,’” Carroll says.

“I used to think this guy, it’s great, he’s the same age as me, I’m a college graduate, I’ve walked out of college into a country that cannot afford me any opportunity, and here’s this guy blazing a trail.”

McGregor made his UFC debut in Stockholm in 2013, aged 25, defeating Marcus Brimage and winning a knockout of the night award, which came with a $60,000 bonus. In a press conference after the event, McGregor said it was the best moment of his career yet.

“I didn’t have money before this,” he said, “I was collecting €188-a-week off the social welfare, and now here I am with a 60 G’s bonus and then my own pay.”

Carroll says money changed McGregor’s life “to the point that everyone stopped treating him like a human”.

“Everyone panders to him,” he adds.

In 2015, McGregor beat Chad Mendes in the interim featherweight championship. The bout attracted a sold-out crowd of more than 16,000 at an arena in Las Vegas.

“People don’t give him credit,” Luke Keeler, a professional boxer from Dublin, says of the win. “It was a huge impact that he made. He was dedicated and had great belief at the time.”

By then, it was clear his fame – and bank account – was reaching new heights.

One of the biggest moments in his career came later that year, when he defeated José Aldo to win the featherweight title. His first loss was against Nate Diaz in 2016. A rematch a few months later, which McGregor won, sold a record-breaking 1.6 million pay-per-view buys.

That year, on the US chat show Jimmy Kimmel Live, McGregor was asked at what age he realised he was good at fighting. “I’m Irish, we’re all good at fighting,” he told Kimmel. “Where I come from, where I grew up, you had to be aware, you had to be able to defend yourself, so that’s how I got into it.”

Back on home soil, McGregor was named Sportsperson of the Year at the RTÉ Sport Awards. Sinéad O’Carroll, an Irish journalist and editor who covered the recent trial, says this was seen as a “remarkable feat” as it happened in the same year as the Olympics and Ireland’s Euro 2016 victory over Italy.

“It was divisive though,” she adds. “Some people thought that he wasn’t so much a sportsperson, that he was more a celebrity and people looked up to him because of his attitude and his fame.

“He’s never been a very clear-cut, popular figure in Ireland, but he would have been part of that establishment, winning that award, being invited onto the Late Late Show and would have been highly regarded for his feats in the cage, if nothing else,” she says.

Carroll, the MMA journalist, says it was around this time McGregor “started showing everyone who he was”.

“It was kind of like one of those moments when you’re like, ‘oh, he is what we think he is’.”

His next bout was with Eddie Alvarez, beating him to become the first fighter in MMA history to hold belts in two weight divisions simultaneously.

McGregor stepped away from the UFC in 2017, spending much of that year campaigning for a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather. He fought Mayweather in August of that year, having faced accusations of racism during the promotional tour, which McGregor rejected. Mayweather stopped him in the 10th round.

Ms Carroll says some people did not like the antics in the lead up to the fight or the mixing of genres from MMA to boxing.

“But he still would have had a huge support base, and I remember that fight. It was in the middle of the night, but huge numbers of people would have gotten up in the morning to watch it and it would have been headline news,” she adds.

Carroll says the Mayweather fight marked a change in McGregor’s behaviour.

“He became an icon and he earned so much money, I don’t think he had to be as invested,” he says. “He became a spectacle”.

McGregor returned to the Octagon in October 2018 – two months before the night when a jury found he had assaulted Ms Hand – and lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov.

He has not fought since 2021, but in a statement on Tuesday, he indicated that he was preparing his return.

“It was amazing what he’d done [in sport],” says Keeler, the boxer.

“But he lost the run of himself… I don’t think he had any role models or anyone he was willing to listen to. I think that was his downfall. No one could actually tell him to cop on.”

BBC News has approached McGregor for comment for this story.

Ms Hand, a 35-year-old hair colourist, made a statement to Irish police in early 2019 alleging McGregor had raped her. After an investigation into the claim, police referred the case to Ireland’s Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Irish media reported on the allegations without naming McGregor, but news reports revealing him as the suspect emerged in the US a few months later. The DPP decided not to criminally prosecute McGregor due to insufficient evidence.

Ms Hand then took civil action against McGregor, suing him for damages for assault. Her lawsuit also alleged that McGregor’s friend, James Lawrence, assaulted her by having sex with her without her consent.

The jury found she had been assaulted by McGregor, but not by Mr Lawrence.

Dr Daniel Kane, a gynaecologist and forensic examiner, told the court how he had to use forceps to remove a tampon Ms Hand said she had been wearing on the night of the assault, which had been “wedged inside”. A paramedic who examined Ms Hand on the day after the alleged attacks said she had not seen a patient as bruised as Ms Hand was in a long time.

McGregor said he and Ms Hand had athletic but consensual sex.

The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) said calls over the six hours after the verdict was delivered surged by 150%.

Rachel Morrogh, DRCC’s chief executive, said that given the case involved McGregor, an international celebrity, interest was high and news reporting within Ireland was “slightly different”.

“There was rolling news coverage, live updates from the court, and it was the most read news items in many of our national media platforms,” she says.

“It meant that the survivors and victims of sexual violence couldn’t really avoid this news – it was everywhere.

“That includes across social media as well, and on social media people were giving their own views and interpretations of what was happening in court. That was difficult for people that we work with.”

Many people were calling to congratulate Ms Hand, she says, adding: “Many of them were just expressing relief at the verdict, and others were calling because they were either considering taking a legal case or were in the middle of one themselves.”

After the trial concluded, journalists swarmed around Ms Hand as she made a statement outside the courthouse. She fought back tears as she spoke, but her voice grew stronger as she told journalists she hoped her story would encourage all sexual assault victims to speak up, “no matter how afraid you might be”.

“You have a voice, keep on fighting for justice,” she said.

Ms Hand’s case has challenged perceptions in Ireland around how sexual assault victims should behave, Carroll says.

“We’re having much more nuanced conversations, I feel, in Ireland about this. It honestly feels like a cultural milestone.”

Now, a gym in Corrandulla, Galway, paints over a mural imprinted on its walls since 2016 depicting McGregor, the Irish tricolour behind him, with his fists punching the air.

“With the court ruling last week, I was actually in the car driving and it came on the radio and I straight away just rang a couple of my staff and was like ‘okay, we have to take that down,’” Gary Scully, the owner of Scully Fitness, says.

A video of Mr Scully’s staff brushing white paint over the artwork went viral. He says the response has mostly been positive, but some disagreed with the move.

“Some of them are like, ‘Typical Irish, build someone up and the second they have a wobble, knock them down.’ But I think the case and the ruling was a bit more than a wobble,” he says.

He says McGregor is “no longer a role model to the general public” after the ruling.

“People want nothing to do with him, they don’t want to see him, they don’t want anything to do with putting money his way. The way he’s behaved is just absolutely terrible,” Mr Scully says.

“He feels like he’s above the law, and now it’s proved he isn’t.”