US President Joe Biden has issued an official pardon for his son Hunter, who was facing sentencing for two criminal cases, despite previously ruling it out.

In a statement, the president said his son had been “singled out” and called his cases “a miscarriage of justice”.

Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges earlier in September, and was found guilty of being an illegal drug user in possession of a gun in June – becoming the first child of a sitting president to be a convicted of a crime.

Reacting to the pardon, President-elect Donald Trump said: “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the [6 January] Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”

Trump was referring to his supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in a bid to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.

Joe Biden’s full and unconditional pardon for his son comes after the president had previously said he would not give him clemency.

Just a couple of months ago, in September, the White House press secretary said that Biden would not issue a pardon for his son.

But on Sunday evening, President Biden said although he believed in the justice system, “politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice”.

“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” he said.

Biden said he wrestled with the decision, and added: “once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further.”

“I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” he said.

In a reaction statement, Hunter Biden said mistakes he made during the darkest days of his addiction had been “exploited to publicly humiliate and shame” his family for political sport.

“I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering,” the 54-year-old added.

The younger Biden has been sober for five-and-a-half years, his father said.

This is not the first time a US president has pardoned a member of their family.

Bill Clinton pardoned his younger half-brother, Roger Clinton, for a 1985 cocaine-related offence in 2001.

In 2020, Donald Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of his daughter Ivanka. President-elect Trump has recently announced Kushner as ambassador to France in his new cabinet.

Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to nine counts of federal tax fraud in September, for which he had been facing up to 17 years in prison.

He was also convicted of three felonies in connection with a gun purchase in June, for which he had been facing up to 25 years in prison.

Sentencing for these cases had been scheduled for 12 and 16 December.

His legal troubles had been a dark cloud over his father’s presidential campaign, which came to an end in July after Biden pulled out of the election race.

Biden endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him as the Democratic candidate, who lost the election to Republican Donald Trump in November.

Trump is set to take over the Oval Office from Biden on 20 January 2025 – Inauguration Day.

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’.”

The boss of car making giant Stellantis – which owns brands including Chrysler, Vauxhall, Jeep, Fiat and Peugeot – has stepped down with immediate effect.

Carlos Tavares’ abrupt exit comes two months after Stellantis issued a profit warning.

Last week, the firm also announced plans to close its Vauxhall van making factory in Luton, putting about 1,100 jobs at risk.

In a statement announcing Mr Tavares’ departure, Henri de Castries, Stellantis’ senior independent director said “in recent weeks different views have emerged which have resulted in the Board and the CEO coming to today’s decision.”

Before his resignation, Mr Tavares was one of the most powerful people in the global motor industry.

He had a reputation as a ruthless cost-cutter, first at the French group PSA – then, following its merger with Fiat Chrysler in 2021 – at Stellantis.

Mr Tavares frequently made headlines in the UK by casting doubt over the future of Vauxhall operations in the UK, linking it to issues such as Brexit and government plans to force car makers to build more electric cars.

It is not yet clear whether his departure will affect the planned closure of Stellantis’ Luton plant.

Mr Tavares’ position had been undermined recently by a dramatic fall in sales and profits at the company.

Stellantis’ share price has fallen by 40% since the start of this year.

In September, the company said it had started to look for Mr Tavares’ successor, but he was expected to stay in his role until at least 2026.

Stellantis said it now expected to appoint a new chief executive by the middle of next year.

In the meantime it said it will set up a new interim executive committee, led by the firm’s chairperson John Elkann.

The reignited war in Syria is the latest fallout from the turmoil that has gripped the Middle East since the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October last year.

The attacks, and Israel’s response, upended the status quo. Events in Syria in the last few days are more proof that the war gripping the Middle East is escalating, not subsiding.

During a decade of war after 2011, Bashar al-Assad’s rule survived because he was prepared to break Syria to save the regime he had inherited from his father.

To do that he relied on powerful allies, Russia, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah. They intervened on his side against rebel groups that ranged from the jihadist extremists of Islamic State to militias supported by the US and the rich Gulf monarchies.

Now Iran is reeling from severe blows inflicted by Israel, with US support, on its security in the Middle East. Its ally Hezbollah, which used to send its best men to fight for the Assad regime in Syria, has been crippled by Israel’s attacks. Russia has launched air strikes in the last few days against the rebel offensive in Syria – but its military power is almost entirely earmarked to fight the war in Ukraine.

The war in Syria did not end. It dropped out of the place it used to occupy in headline news, partly because of turbulence across the Middle East and beyond, and because it is almost impossible for journalists to get into the country.

In places the war was suspended, or frozen, but Syria is full of unfinished business.

The Assad regime has never regained the power it had used to control Syria before 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, though it still kept a gulag of Syrian prisoners in its jails.

Even so, until the last few days, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad controlled the major cities, their surrounding countryside and the main highways connecting them.

Now a coalition of rebel groups, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has broken out of Idlib, the province along the border with Turkey that it controls, and in only a few days since 27 November swept away Syrian troops in a series of “astonishing” events, as one senior international diplomat told me.

Two days into the offensive, they were posting photos of fighters who had taken the ancient citadel of Aleppo, which had been an impregnable base for government troops between 2012 and 2015, when the city was divided between rebels and regime forces.

The atmosphere in Aleppo seems calm after the rout of government troops. One photo on social media showed uniformed and armed rebel fighters queuing for fried chicken at a fast-food outlet.

HTS has roots in al-Qaeda, though it broke with the group in 2016 and at times has fought its rump loyalists. But HTS is still designated as a terrorist group by the UN Security Council and countries including the US, the European Union, Turkey and the UK. (The Syrian regime calls all its opponents terrorists.)

The leader of HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Jawlani, has a long history as a jihadist leader in Iraq and Syria. In recent years, though, he has moved away from strict jihadist ideology to try to broaden the appeal of his group.

The rebranding is also being used to attract support for the offensive, which HTS calls Operation Repelling the Aggression. That name, and its official announcements, avoid jihadist language and Islamist references.

Neutral language, according to Mina al-Lami, the jihadist media specialist at BBC Monitoring, is designed to distance what’s happening from the jihadist past of HTS and present the offensive as a joint rebel enterprise against the regime.

Syrians are generally repelled by extreme religious rhetoric. As jihadist groups came to dominate the rebellion after pro-democracy demonstrations were crushed after the first year or so of war after 2011, many Syrians either stayed neutral or sided reluctantly with the regime because they feared the murderous jihadist ideology of Islamic State.

The offensive led by HTS comes out of the splintered political landscape of northern Syria. Much of the north-east is controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group led by Kurds and supported by the United States, which stations around 900 troops in the area.

Turkey is a big player, controlling borderlands where it has deployed its own regular troops as well as the militias it sponsors. Sleeper cells drawn from the remnants of Islamic State sometimes mount deadly ambushes on roads through the Syrian desert.

Reports from Syria say that the rebel forces have captured significant supplies of military equipment, including helicopters, and are pressing on towards Hama, the next significant city on the road to Damascus.

Without a doubt the regime and its allies will be working to steady themselves and to hit back, especially with air power. The rebels do not have an air force, though in another sign of the way that unmanned aerial vehicles are revolutionising warfare, there are reports that they used a drone to kill a senior regime intelligence official.

The renewed fighting in Syria is causing international alarm. The UN envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, issued a statement saying that “the latest developments pose severe risks to civilians and have serious implications for regional and international security… No Syrian party or existing group of actors can resolve the Syrian conflict via military means”.

Pedersen added that there had been “a collective failure to bring about a genuine political process” to implement UN Security Council resolution 2254, which was passed in 2015. That laid out a roadmap for peace, with the principle in the text that “the Syrian people will decide the future of Syria”.

The objective was a future shaped by free elections and a new constitution. But that meant Assad and his family giving up a country that they treated for years as their personal fief. More than half a million dead attest to their determination not to let that happen.

It is too soon to write the Assad regime off. It has a core of genuine support. Some Syrians see it as the least bad option – better than the jihadists who came to dominate the rebellion. But if other anti-Assad groups – and there are many – rise up, his regime will once again be in mortal danger.

“Italian” tomato purees sold by several UK supermarkets appear to contain tomatoes grown and picked in China using forced labour, the BBC has found.

Some have “Italian” in their name such as Tesco’s “Italian Tomato Purée”. Others have “Italian” in their description, such as Asda’s double concentrate which says it contains “Puréed Italian grown tomatoes” – and Waitrose’s “Essential Tomato Purée”, describing itself as “Italian tomato puree”.

A total of 17 products, most of them own-brands sold in UK and German retailers, are likely to contain Chinese tomatoes – testing commissioned by the BBC World Service shows.

Most Chinese tomatoes come from the Xinjiang region, where their production is linked to forced labour by Uyghur and other largely Muslim minorities. The UN accuses the Chinese state – which views these minorities as a security risk – of torture and abuse. China denies it forces people to work in the tomato industry and says workers’ rights are protected by law. It says the UN report is based on “disinformation and lies”.

All the supermarkets whose products we tested dispute our findings.

China grows about a third of the world’s tomatoes. The north-western region of Xinjiang has the perfect climate for growing the fruit.

It is also where China began a programme of mass detentions in 2017. Human rights groups allege more than a million Uyghurs have been detained in hundreds of facilities, which China has termed “re-education camps”.

The BBC has spoken to 14 people who say they endured or witnessed forced labour in Xinjiang’s tomato fields over the past 16 years. “[The prison authorities] told us the tomatoes would be exported overseas,” Ahmed (not his real name) said, adding that if the workers did not meet the quotas – as much as 650kg a day – they would be shocked with electric prods.

Mamutjan, a Uyghur teacher who was imprisoned in 2015 for an irregularity in his travel documentation, says he was beaten for failing to meet the high tomato quotas expected of him.

“In a dark prison cell, there were chains hanging from the ceiling. They hung me up there and said ‘Why can’t you finish the job?’ They beat my buttocks really hard, hit me in the ribs. I still have marks.”

It is hard to verify these accounts, but they are consistent, and echo evidence in a 2022 UN report which reported torture and forced labour in detention centres in Xinjiang.

By piecing together shipping data from around the world, the BBC discovered how most Xinjiang tomatoes are transported into Europe – by train through Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and into Georgia, from where they are shipped onwards to Italy.

One company name repeatedly appeared as a recipient in the data. This was Antonio Petti, part of a group of major tomato-processing firms in Italy. It received more than 36 million kg of tomato paste from the company Xinjiang Guannong and its subsidiaries between 2020 and 2023, the data showed.

The Petti group produces tomato goods under its own name, but also supplies others to supermarkets across Europe who sell them as their own branded products.

Our investigation tested 64 different tomato purees sold in the UK, Germany and the US – comparing them in a lab to samples from China and Italy. They included top Italian brands and supermarket own-brands, and many were produced by Petti.

We asked Source Certain, a world-renowned origin verification firm based in Australia, to investigate whether the origin claims on the purees’ labels were accurate. The company began by building what its CEO Cameron Scadding calls a “fingerprint” which is unique to a country of origin – analysing the trace elements which the tomatoes absorb from local water and rocks.

“The first objective for us was to establish what the underlying trace element profile would look like for China, and [what] a likely profile would look like for Italy. We found they were very distinct,” he said.

Source Certain then compared those country profiles with the 64 tomato purees we wanted to test – the majority of which claimed to contain Italian tomatoes or gave the impression they did – and a few which did not make any origin claim.

The lab results suggested many of these products did indeed contain Italian tomatoes – including all those sold in the US, top Italian brands including Mutti and Napolina, and some German and UK supermarket own-brands, including those sold by Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer.

But 17 appeared to contain Chinese tomatoes, 10 of which are made by Petti – the Italian company we found listed repeatedly in international shipping records.

Of those 10 made by Petti, these were for sale in UK supermarkets at the time of testing from April-August 2024:

These were for sale in German supermarkets, during our testing period:

In response, all the supermarkets said they took these allegations very seriously and have carried out internal investigations which found no evidence of Chinese tomatoes. Many have also disputed the testing methodology used by our experts. Tesco suspended supply and Rewe immediately withdrew the products. Waitrose, Morrisons, Edeka and Rewe said they had run their own tests, and that the results contradicted ours and did not show the presence of Chinese tomatoes in the products.

But one major retailer has admitted to using Chinese tomatoes. Lidl told us they were in another version of its Baresa Tomatenmark – made by the Italian supplier Giaguaro – sold in Germany last year “for a short time” because of supply problems and that they are investigating this. Giaguaro said all its suppliers respected workers’ rights and it is currently not using Chinese tomatoes in Lidl products. The BBC understands the tomatoes were supplied by the Xinjiang company Cofco Tunhe, which the US sanctioned in December last year for forced labour.

In 2021, one of the Petti group’s factories was raided by the Italian military police on suspicion of fraud – it was reported by the Italian press that Chinese and other foreign tomatoes were passed off as Italian.

But a year after the raid, the case was settled out of court. Petti denied the allegations about Chinese tomatoes and the issue was dropped.

As part of our investigation into Petti, a BBC undercover reporter posed as a businessman wanting to place a large order with the firm. Invited to tour a company factory in Tuscany by Pasquale Petti, the General Manager of Italian Food, part of the Petti group, our reporter asked him if Petti used Chinese tomatoes.

“Yes… In Europe no-one wants Chinese tomatoes. But if for you it’s OK, we will find a way to produce the best price possible, even using Chinese tomatoes,” he said.

The reporter’s undercover camera also captured a crucial detail – a dozen blue barrels of tomato paste lined up inside the factory. A label visible on one of them read: “Xinjiang Guannong Tomato Products Co Ltd, prod date 2023-08-20.”

In its response to our investigation, the Petti group told us it had not bought from Xinjiang Guannong since that company was sanctioned by the US for using forced labour in 2020, but did say that it had regularly purchased tomato paste from a Chinese company called Bazhou Red Fruit.

This firm “did not engage in forced labour”, Petti told us. However our investigation has found that Bazhou Red Fruit shares a phone number with Xinjiang Guannong, and other evidence, including shipping data analysis, suggests that Bazhou is its shell company.

Petti added that: “In future we will not import tomato products from China and will enhance our monitoring of suppliers to ensure compliance with human and workers’ rights.”

While the US has introduced strict legislation to ban all Xinjiang exports, Europe and the UK take a softer approach, allowing companies simply to self-regulate to ensure forced labour is not used in supply chains.

This is now set to change in the EU, which has committed to stronger laws, says Chloe Cranston, from the NGO Anti-Slavery International. But she warns this will make it even more likely that the UK will become “a dumping ground” for forced labour products.

Outside the UK watch on YouTube from 00:01 Monday

“The UK Modern Slavery Act, sadly, is utterly not fit for purpose,” she says.

A spokesperson for the UK Department for Business and Trade told us: “We are clear that no company in the UK should have forced labour in its supply chain… We keep our approach to how the UK can best tackle forced labour and environmental harms in supply chains under continual review and work internationally to enhance global labour standards.”

Dario Dongo, journalist and food lawyer, says the findings expose a wider problem – “the true cost of food”.

“So when we see [a] low price we have to question ourselves. What is behind that? What is the true cost of this product? Who is paying for that?”

Georgia has seen a fourth night of street demonstrations and a string of public resignations, triggered by the ruling party’s decision to suspend a push to start talks on joining the European Union.

As tens of thousands of Georgians headed back to the streets of several cities, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said they had fallen victim to opposition lies and he rejected calls for new elections.

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

But 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 that issue on the agenda until the end of 2028.

Pro-EU protesters were out in big numbers again on Sunday night, and when fireworks were aimed at the parliament building as well as riot police, the police responded with water cannon. Large groups of riot police huddled in side streets beside parliament, and it was not until late into the night that reports emerged of clashes with demonstrators.

Georgia’s increasingly authoritarian government has been accused by the EU and US of democratic backsliding. On Saturday, the US took the significant step of suspending its strategic partnership with Georgia.

Kobakhidze insisted 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 more than 3,000 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.

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.

During the day on Sunday, a small group of protesters 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 was trying to scrub off graffiti from a wall in front of the Georgian parliament.

Some of the windows of the building were smashed on Saturday night, 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.”

Rihab Faour fled her home. Then she fled again. Then a third time. Then a fourth. And by the fourth time, a year after the first, she had been fleeing Israeli bombs for so long that nowhere in Lebanon felt safe.

Her journey had begun in October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. That prompted Hezbollah, the Lebanese political and militant group, to fire rockets into Israel and Israel to retaliate by bombing southern Lebanon.

The Israeli bombs fell close enough to Rihab’s village that the 33-year-old and her husband Saeed, an employee of the municipal water company, gathered their daughters Tia, eight, and Naya, six, and fled to Rihab’s parents’ house in Dahieh, a suburb of the capital Beirut.

In Dahieh, for a while, life went on almost as normal, with the exception that Naya and Tia missed their friends, their own beds, their toys and all clothes they had had to leave behind.

Most of all they missed going to school, which had been replaced by online learning. They were excited when, back in August, Rihab enrolled them in a new school in Beirut and took them to buy brand new school uniforms.

But before their first day could arrive, Israel expanded its bombing of Lebanon to include parts of Beirut, particularly the Dahieh suburb that the family now called home.

Israel was assassinating senior Hezbollah figures in the suburb, but it was using large, bunker-busting bombs, each capable of destroying a residential building. In some strikes, Israel dropped dozens of these bombs in one go and flattened entire city blocks.

So the Faour family packed up and fled again, this time to a rented house in another Beirut neighbourhood, Jnah. After a powerful air strike in Jnah, they moved to Saeed’s parents’ house in the neighbourhood of Barbour. There, they lived with 17 others in a single house – people piled on people.

For Tia and Naya though, now nine and seven, it was a rare joy to be surrounded by their cousins day and night. So much so that even when Rihab’s father, a retired Lebanese army sergeant, found a rental apartment in the Basta neighbourhood just for the four of them, the girls did not want to go.

“Naya begged us to stay there with all the family,” Rihab recalled. “We told her we just had to go for one sleep in this new house, then we would come straight back to the family and to all the children.”

And she offered the girls a bargain – come to stay at the new apartment and you can choose your dinner. So on the way home they stopped for rotisserie chicken and other treats from the shop, and at about 7.30pm, with the streets still alive with people, the family pulled up to a rundown building in Basta in central Beirut.

Back in 2006, during the previous war between Israel and Hezbollah, the bombing was confined to certain areas of Lebanon – the south, Dahieh, and some infrastructure targets. This time, as senior members of Hezbollah spread out around the country, Israel bombed them where they went.

This brought bombs to places previously thought safe, including parts of central Beirut.

None of that was weighing on Tia and Naya as the family unloaded their belongings into the new apartment. For now, the girls were more concerned with returning to their cousins at the earliest opportunity.

Unlike Saeed’s parents’ house, the new Basta apartment had running water and a generator for electricity. The girls were happy when they saw that the family finally had their own space. Rihab and Saeed relaxed a little. Most likely, there would have been an Israeli drone buzzing overhead, but the sound had become so common over Beirut that it was possible to tune it out.

Rihab put the food and treats on the table. “We sat down to eat and we were talking and laughing,” she said. “And that was it, my last memory of them.”

The bomb was a US-made Jdam. It hit the building on 10 October at about 8pm, half an hour after the family had arrived. It levelled all three storeys and destroyed parts of adjacent buildings and cars, and killed 22 men, women and children, making it the deadliest strike on central Beirut since the beginning of the fighting a year earlier.

The Israeli military issued no warning ahead of the strike, so the building was full of people. Israel was reportedly targeting Wafiq Safa, the head of Hezbollah’s co-ordination and liaison unit, but Safa was never reported to be among the dead. He had either survived, or he wasn’t there to begin with. The IDF declined to comment on the strike or the lack of a warning ahead of it.

Rihab woke up in Beirut’s Zahraa Hospital, unable to move. Her back and arm were badly injured and she needed at least two operations. She drifted in and out of consciousness. Everything in her mind between laughing with her daughters at dinner and waking up in the hospital was blank.

While she lay there that night, her family searched Beirut’s hospitals. By midnight, they knew that Saeed and Tia were dead. DNA tests would be required to confirm that Naya had been killed, as well as another girl her age brought to the same hospital, because their injuries prevented straightforward identification.

Rihab’s doctors advised the family not to tell her any of this. They were worried that, still facing significant surgery, the news would be too much for her. So for two weeks, as she underwent and then recovered from her operations, her mother Basima reassured her that Saeed and the girls were being treated in different hospitals.

But Rihab sensed that something was wrong, and she began to insist on seeing pictures and videos of the girls. “She could feel it in her heart,” Basima said.

Eleven days after the strike, the DNA test confirmed that Tia was dead, and on the 15th day a hospital psychiatrist told Rihab that Saeed and the girls were gone.

Six weeks later, Rihab was sitting in a stiff plastic chair in an apartment in Beirut, her eyes dark and her face drawn. She was still recovering from her surgeries – to install eight screws into her spine and another three into her arm. She had been lying down for a long time, and now she was trying to sit up more and to walk a little, though every movement caused her pain.

Naya’s eighth birthday had been four days earlier. Rihab was passing her time “either crying or sleeping”, she said. But she wanted to talk about her family.

“Naya was very attached to me, she followed me wherever I went. Tia loved her grandparents and she was happy if I left her with them. Both of the girls loved drawing, they loved playing with toys, they missed going to school. They would play teacher and student together for hours.”

Above all they loved to watch videos together on TikTok. Rihab and Saeed thought they were still too young to post their own videos online, so Rihab would film them dancing and playing and tell the girls she was posting them on the app, which seemed to satisfy them, for now.

Saeed had come into Rihab’s life in 2013. Rihab was raised in Beirut but her family would visit the village of Mays El Jabal in the summer, because the air was cooler there and the village was surrounded by countryside, and that summer she met Saeed through mutual friends.

Rihab completed her undergraduate law degree and began studying for a masters, but the couple became engaged and then married, and soon Tia was born, so Rihab put her budding law career on hold.

Now, in the midst of her loss, she has tentatively begun to think of studying again. “I am going to need something to fill my days,” she said.

Saeed and Tia were buried the day after they died, by Rihab’s father and uncles, in temporary wooden caskets in an unmarked grave in Dahieh. Two weeks later, the men of the family dug again in the same spot and buried Naya. Rihab’s uncle placed two sprigs of artificial cherry blossom atop the grave, for the two girls, and later someone else laid a wreath for a stranger buried beside them.

Then an Israeli air strike hit the building directly adjacent to the cemetery and the resultant blast wave and debris smashed gravestones and churned up the earth around them. About the same time, another Israeli air strike hit the family home in Dahieh, destroying several items Rihab had wanted to keep, including two new, unworn school uniforms.

Not long after that, it was all over. A ceasefire announced last week allowed thousands of displaced people to stream back to their villages in the south of Lebanon. Rihab and Saeed’s village was heavily bombed by the Israelis and their family home there destroyed, her uncle said, but Rihab cannot return home anyway, because she will be in a backbrace for several more months and cannot travel.

As joy spread through Lebanon at the news of the ceasefire, new pictures emerged of Wafiq Safa, the reported target of the bomb that killed Saeed, Tea, Naya and 19 others. Safa had not been seen in public since the strike, but he appeared to be alive and well.

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.

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 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.”

Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok? If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year.

It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word’s usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024.

Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a “symptom of the time we’re living in”.

Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing.

Brain rot is defined as the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material considered to be trivial or unchallenging,

The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet – it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden.

He criticises society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort.

It leads him to ask: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”

The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it’s now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media.

Prof Przybylski says “there’s no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing”.

“Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it’s a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media.”

Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, says looking back at the Oxford Word of the Year over the last two decades “you can see society’s growing preoccupation with how our virtual lives are evolving, the way internet culture is permeating so much of who we are and what we talk about”.

“Last year’s winning word, ‘rizz,’ was an interesting example of how language is increasingly formed, shaped, and shared within online communities.

“Brain rot speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time.”

• Demure (adj.): Of a person: reserved or restrained in appearance or behaviour. Of clothing: not showy, ostentatious, or overly revealing
• Dynamic pricing (n.): The practice of varying the price for a product or service to reflect changing market conditions; in particular, the charging of a higher price at a time of greater demand
• Lore (n.): A body of (supposed) facts, background information, and anecdotes relating to someone or something, regarded as knowledge required for full understanding or informed discussion of the subject in question
• Romantasy (n.): A genre of fiction combining elements of romantic fiction and fantasy, typically featuring themes of magic, the supernatural, or adventure alongside a central romantic storyline
• Slop (n.): Art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate

Oxford University dictionary is not the only one to have a word of the year, last month Cambridge Dictionary announced that manifest was its winner.

The traditional definition of manifest included the adjective “easily noticed or obvious” and the noun “to show something clearly through signs or actions”.

It now includes “to manifest” in the sense of “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief doing so will make it more likely to happen”.

It comes off the back of a global wellness trend endorsed by celebrities including singer Dua Lipa who said she manifested her headline slot at Glastonbury.

Collins dictionary also announced in November that its word of the year was brat – a word that has been everywhere over the last couple of months thanks to Charli XCX’s viral album.

Brat is defined as someone with a “confident, independent and hedonistic attitude”.

It started as the name of her number one album, but it has arguably grown into a cultural movement for some, with people adopting the brat way of life.

Another internet phenomenon has inspired the Dictionary.com word of the year which is demure.

The word took off in August after content creator Jools Lebron, posted on TikTok abut her demure work outfit and mindful make-up.

The “very demure, very mindful” trend took off after that and the satirical idea pokes fun at the stereotypical ideas of femininity.

Countries have failed to reach a landmark agreement on tackling plastic pollution after more than two years of negotiations.

More than 200 nations met in South Korea for what was meant to be a final round of talks.

But deep divisions remained between a group of nearly 100 “high ambition” countries calling for plastic to be phased out and oil-producing nations who warned this would affect the world’s development.

“The objective of this treaty is to end plastic pollution not plastic itself, plastic has brought immense benefit to societies worldwide,” said the Kuwait negotiators in the final hours.

In 2022, the world’s nations agreed that a global treaty was needed to tackle the issue of plastic pollution particularly the impacts on the marine environment – and this should be completed within two years given the urgency of the issue.

Since 1950, more than eight billion tonnes of plastic have been produced globally but less than 10% has been recycled, estimates the United Nations.

This has led to millions of tonnes entering the world’s oceans and seas, posing serious risks to wildlife and their environment. Birds, fish and whales can become injured or killed if they become entangled in plastic debris or mistakenly ingest it, leading to starvation.

Plastic is also produced from fossil fuels, and is currently estimated to be responsible for 5% of global emissions – so efforts to restrict it could also help with efforts to tackle climate change.

The meeting in Busan, South Korea, was meant to be the final fifth round of negotiations but after late night talks countries were unable to resolve their differences missing their key two-year deadline.

“A few critical issues prevent us from reaching a comprehensive agreement,” said the talks’ chair Luis Vayas Valdivieso on Sunday – the final day of talks.

Although many issues are being discussed the key split is around Article 6 – whether there should be a commitment to cutting how much plastic is produced, or just try and reduce plastic waste by increasing efforts to recycle.

A group of 95 countries have emerged, including the UK, European Union, African Group and many South American nations, who are calling for Article 6 to be a legally binding pledge to reduce production levels.

“We carry the weight of expectations of our citizens who are counting on us to protect them and the environment to protect it from the plastic pollution crisis,” said Camila Zepeda, Mexico’s chief negotiator, who spoke on behalf of this group at the final meeting.

“We must do everything in our power to meet this expectation.”

Her speech was meet with strong applause across the room, but a group of oil-producing nations including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and Russia pushed back strongly.

The demand for oil across most sectors is expected to fall from 2026 as countries move to cleaner technologies like electric vehicles – but plastic is seen as one of the remaining growth markets. This may explain why these countries are particularly concerned about any global target to cut production levels.

“Attempting to phase out plastic rather than addressing the issue of plastic production risks undermining global progress and exacerbating economic inequality,” said Salman Alajmi, a Kuwait delegate.

India also voiced its concerns with including any commitments to cut production of plastic on the basis it could impact its right to development.

Environmental charities and scientists expressed their deep disappointment that the talks had collapsed and raised concerns about the influence of the fossil fuel industry.

InfluenceMap, a think tank, found that the petrochemical industry intervened dozens of times on the treaty via company statements, social media and consultation responses, and 93% of those were unsupportive of efforts to cut production levels.

But the report did highlight that these efforts were outweighed by positive support from key manufacturers of plastic products like Unilever, Mars and Nestlé who want consistent global regulation on the issue.

Jodie Roussell, global public affairs lead for sustainability at Nestlé, said of the talks’ collapse: “Disappointingly, consensus among all nations remains elusive, which further delays critical action to end plastic pollution.

“It also fails to deliver the certainty that business needs to mobilise investment and scale solutions.”

It is now expected that countries will reconvene next year to try and get an agreement, but Eirik Lindebjerg, global plastics policy manager at conservation charity the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), told the BBC that the group of 95 should go ahead with their own treaty.

“I think the political reality is that most countries in the world want this – that is the positive thing we can take from this.

“Those countries shouldn’t accept anything less than what they are asking for, there are already so many that a treaty would have a massive impact on ending plastic pollution and that option should be on the table.”

Joe Biden had repeatedly denied that he was going to pardon his son Hunter for his gun and tax evasion convictions or commute what was shaping up to be a substantive prison sentence.

On the Sunday evening after Thanksgiving – at a moment when the American public’s attention was decidedly elsewhere – he announced he had changed his mind.

“There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution,” he wrote in a press statement announcing his decision. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

The president’s explanation might sound familiar to anyone who has listened to Donald Trump rail against America’s system of justice in recent years.

Trump, as he exited the White House in 2021, issued a series of pardons for his close associates and allies who had been swept up in the multiple criminal investigations that encircled him throughout his presidential term. In doing so, he bypassed established White House procedures for exercising the broad presidential pardon power. And although he was criticised for the action at the time, there were little if any political consequences.

Biden may be criticised as well – for breaking his promise and for using his presidential power to protect his son. One Democratic governor, Jared Polis of Colorado, quickly released a statement saying he was “disappointed” and that the move would “tarnish” the outgoing president’s reputation.

With Biden’s political career drawing to a close, however, there is little price he will pay for his action. The national attention will quickly shift back to the incoming Trump presidency.

The rules governing presidential pardoning – or at the very least the processes and established guardrails that had guided its use – appear to have been fundamentally and permanently altered. At this point there may be scarce grounds for anyone to complain, no matter on which side of the political aisle they stand.

The Trump camp was quick to issue a response to the news of the Biden pardon, saying that the president-elect would fix the US justice system and restore due process in his second term.

It’s something to keep in mind when Trump returns to office, as he is expected to again use his pardoning power to aid associates who have been prosecuted during the Biden presidency – and to free many of his supporters who have been convicted during the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

The mysterious detention of Uganda’s opposition leader Kizza Besigye while on a visit to Kenya nearly two weeks ago has sparked widespread condemnation and fears of a clandestine exchange of intelligence between the two neighbours.

Besigye’s allies and wife have come out to reveal harrowing details of how the opposition chief was apparently lured to meet his abductors, said to have disguised themselves as Kenyan security agents.

Reports say he was spied on from the time he boarded a plane at Entebbe airport in Uganda for Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, where he was picked up, before somehow being transferred to a military court back home without any extradition proceedings.

While Kenya insists it played no role and is investigating the incident, Uganda holds that Kenya was fully aware of the plan, citing intelligence correspondence aimed at tracking Besigye down.

As he is due to return to military court in Kampala, we piece together what we know so far.

Besigye has contested and lost four presidential elections against President Yoweri Museveni, who has been in power since 1986.

He has been less active in politics recently, and did not contest the 2021 election.

But earlier this year, he formed a new party, the People’s Front for Freedom (PFF) after breaking away from the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC), which he founded two decades ago.

The opposition politician has for years travelled to Kenya and moved freely, sometimes to attend high-profile events – even while he remained Museveni’s main challenger and biggest critic.

This time, Besigye travelled to Nairobi to attend the launch of a book by Kenyan opposition politician Martha Karua.

The 68-year-old landed in the city on the morning of 16 November and took a taxi to his hotel in the affluent suburb of Hurlingham. He was accompanied by long-term ally Hajj Obeid Lutale.

A few hours later, he left the hotel, boarded a taxi and headed to Riverside Drive, some 5km (three miles) from his hotel, for a private meeting, according to his political allies.

This was the last time he was seen until he re-emerged in Uganda four days later.

His taxi driver said he waited for the veteran politician for more than 12 hours, before deciding to leave when he was unable to phone him.

Besigye’s team in Uganda started relaying distress calls after their leader’s mobile phones went unanswered.

His disappearance hit the headlines and raised eyebrows in the region, with his wife Winnie Byanyima, the head of the UN’s organisation to tackle HIV and Aids, taking to social media to report that her husband had been “kidnapped” in Nairobi.

The next day, his reserved seat at the book launch, where he was expected to be the guest speaker, remained empty with organisers raising the alarm about his absence.

Besigye and his friend Lutale arrived at the apartment along Riverside Drive where he was due to meet an unidentified Ugandan national and another unknown British national, according to Ms Byanyima.

The British national supposedly wanted to introduce Besigye to a group of colleagues and businessmen, who had expressed an interest in financially backing the PFF, she said.

In the room there was a box of what appeared to be a stash of money. One of the hosts had two guns.

Shortly after a brief introduction, eight men in plain clothes who said they were Kenyan police officers knocked on the door and told Besigye and his associate they were under arrest, Ms Byanyima told Kenya’s Citizen TV.

The opposition chief tried to explain he had nothing to do with the items in the room, but the security agents did not listen.

Four of the men bundled Besigye and Lutale into a car with Kenyan number plates and drove them under the cover of night towards the border with Uganda.

“It was clearly an operation well planned,” Ms Byanyima added.

Before crossing over to Uganda, the four men switched from speaking Swahili and started talking in the Ugandan languages, Luganda and Runyankole.

The two held captive were ferried to Uganda without their belongings, including their passports, which were later picked up by Besigye’s party officials from the Nairobi hotel.

PFF spokesperson Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda told Uganda’s Monitor newspaper that Besigye and his friend went through the Malaba border post without stopping for routine security checks.

“They only changed vehicles. The four-wheel drive vehicle with the Kenyan number plate was left at the Malaba border post and moved to another vehicle with [a] Ugandan number plate,” he said.

Uganda’s Information Minister Chris Baryomunsi said detectives had gathered enough intelligence to arrest Besigye while in Nairobi.

He said the Kenyan authorities had enabled the cross-border operation, even though officials in Nairobi insist they knew nothing about it.

Besigye is now being tried in Kampala and not Nairobi because the crime that was planned was “against Uganda and not Kenya”, Ugandan army spokesman Brig Gen Felix Kulayigye told the BBC’s Africa Daily podcast.

“We have a legal framework with our counterparts in Kenya to deal with matters that threaten regional security,” he added.

However, he did not explain why there was no extradition process.

Reports indicate that Besigye’s arrest had been planned for months and was executed with the help of some people who were close to him.

Organisers of the meeting are said to be a British national and a senior official of the Ugandan army, both of whom were well known to Besigye, Ugandan media reported.

His wife alleged the British national who was in the meeting was a “paid operative who tried to plant guns” on Besigye.

Over the decades, hundreds of civilians have been tried in Uganda’s military courts, even though the Constitutional Court has ruled against the practice.

Besigye, who is no stranger to appearing in military courts, is back there because he subjected himself to military law, Brig Kulayigye told the BBC.

Last week, he and his co-accused were arraigned at the Makindye military court after being held incommunicado for four days.

They are facing four charges which include being found with two pistols and ammunition, and seeking to buy weapons from foreigners in the Swiss city of Geneva, the Greek capital, Athens, and Nairobi.

The two denied all charges.

Besigye objected to being tried by a court martial, saying that if there were any charges against him, he should be tried in a civilian court.

His lawyers also argued that the alleged offences were committed outside Uganda and therefore they were arraigned in the court martial illegally.

But the court overruled the lawyers and allowed the hearing to continue.

The accused were remanded at Luzira maximum prison until 2 December.

Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan lawyer and a human rights activist, told the BBC that Kenya should have arrested Besigye and extradited him to Uganda following the laws that govern the process.

Ms Byanyima said she did not expect her husband to get justice.

But Brig Kulayigye said the court martial “is not a kangaroo court”.

“Justice will be served.”

Kenyan authorities have swung between denying any knowledge of the operation and remaining silent, while Ugandan officials say that a lot of intelligence was shared between the two countries.

“The government of Uganda was in touch with the government of Kenya. Otherwise, how would you arrest somebody in the middle of Nairobi and then bring him back to Uganda, whether through the airport or land, without the full knowledge and support of the state there in Kenya?” Information Minister Baryomunsi told Uganda’s NBS TV.

Many Kenyans are asking about the nature of security ties between the two countries and if there was a full disclosure that Besigye would be charged in a military court.

Last Tuesday, Kenya’s acting Foreign Affairs Minister Musalia Mudavadi refrained from giving clear answers to journalists, pleading that his country should not be judged “too harshly”.

Mudavadi, who is also the acting interior minister, said Kenya was an open country, which allowed “a lot of latitude”. But he warned foreigners against causing a rift between Kenya and their home countries.

He said Besigye’s matter would be resolved diplomatically, describing Uganda as Kenya’s “strong partner”.

The acknowledgement by Uganda that Kenya was involved in the abduction has left the Kenyan government facing a backlash both in Uganda and back home.

Some Ugandans have held protests outside the Kenyan embassy in Kampala while others have threatened to boycott Kenyan brands.

Besigye’s detention follows a string of high-profile abductions and disappearances in Kenya, including the forced deportation of four Turkish refugees to Ankara, where they faced allegations of conspiring against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

• ‘We live in fear’ – forced expulsions taint Kenya’s safe haven image
• Who is Kizza Besigye?
• TikToker jailed for 32 months for insulting Uganda’s president
• Uganda’s Stella Nyanzi bares breasts in protest at jail sentence
• Top designer vows to regrow dreadlocks cut after Uganda arrest

It may be the start of a new week but you’ll still find plenty of Black Friday sales as the event goes online for Cyber Monday.

It can be easy to get swept up in the shopping frenzy and end up out of pocket – instead of bagging a bargain.

The vast majority of Black Friday or Cyber Monday offers can be found even cheaper – or the same price – at other times of the year, consumer group Which? has warned.

We’ve spoken to some experts who have shared tips on how to shop both Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales without getting ripped off.

“It’s only a deal if it’s something you genuinely wanted or needed before seeing the discount,” said Sarah Johnson, director of merchandise consultancy Flourish Retail.

She recommends making a list and budget to stick to in order to avoid impulse buys.

“Make the deals work for you by using Black Friday to save on products you already planned to buy,” she said.

“If you stick to your list and stay within your budget, you’ll maximise your savings without unnecessary splurges.”

“When looking to make a purchase, it’s worth comparing the price at multiple retailers,” said Harry Rose, editor of Which? Magazine.

He also recommended using websites that allow you to check a product’s price history over the previous 12 months.

“That way you’ll know a good deal when you see one,” he said.

Which? investigated deals on 227 products at eight of the biggest home and tech retailers in the UK in last year’s Black Friday “fortnight” between 20 November and 1 December.

Its research suggested nine in 10 of the deals analysed were the same price or cheaper at other times of the year.

Mr Rose said you should not feel “pressured to splash out on Black Friday or Cyber Monday purchases as those deals are usually repeated – if not beaten – at other times of the year”.

If you spot something you want to buy in the Black Friday or Cyber Momday sales, search for it on a second-hand platform where you might find it even cheaper, says resale influencer, Jess.

Many resale platforms give you the option of offering a price that matches your budget, she said.

“If you make an offer and it’s reasonable most sellers will accept,” she said. “So not only are you likely to get a good deal in the first place because it’s not new from a shop but you can offer a lower price.”

Vintage clothing influencer Vivien Tang also buys and sells on resale websites.

“I think it is very easy to find almost new or brand new items on second-hand platforms,” she said. “The condition option on listings is now compulsory so it makes it easier to filter for newer items.”

If you’re using the sales to buy Christmas presents you should not rule out buying second hand, according to a new report.

Some 63% of people would be comfortable receiving second-hand Christmas gifts and a further 26% felt neutral about the idea, according to a survey by research consultancy Retail Economics for second-hand marketplace Vinted.

Many people will use a credit card, or may dip into their overdraft, when buying what they consider bargain items on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

But if you end up paying interest, this could outstrip any savings made on the promotions.

Using a typical credit card to make a £300 purchase, then paying back at £20 a month would take more than a year to pay off and mean having to pay £55 in interest, according to the financial information service Moneyfacts.

Using an overdraft would usually lead to an even bigger interest bill.

A credit card offers more protection when buying something over £100, so there is greater chance of a refund if something goes wrong.

Financial experts say paying off a credit card immediately, perhaps from savings, before any interest is accrued, is the safest option.

Criminals use the hype around Black Friday and Cyber Monday to try to steal from online shoppers.

Purchase scams are when someone is tricked into sending money via a bank transfer to buy something – often advertised online or via social media – that doesn’t exist.

The number of purchase scams soared by 29% around Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, according to analysis by Lloyds Bank.

The bank’s fraud prevention director, Liz Ziegler, said: “When shopping online, the best way stay safe is to buy from a trusted retailer, and always pay by card for the greatest protection.

“If you’re unable to do those things, that should be a big red flag that you’re about to get scammed.”

You should be wary of fake websites and check the web address belongs to the official brand before you enter any financial or personal information, according to Which?.

Beware of posts from a newly-created social media accounts, or links to a recently-created website. You can use verified domain checkers to confirm when a website was created, Which? said.

It warned against buying at “too good to be true” prices because if something seems too good to be true, it likely is.

Sir Elton John said he has been unable to watch the musical he wrote the lyrics for due to losing his eyesight.

Speaking at the gala performance of The Devil Wears Prada: The Musical he said: “I have lost my sight and I haven’t been able to see the performance but I have enjoyed listening to it.”

The West End show hosted a charity gala for the Elton John AIDS Foundation on Sunday evening.

The star-studded event attracted a host of famous faces including Anna Wintour, Lily Collins and Donatella Versace.

Speaking to the BBC on the red carpet, Vogue’s editor-in-chief said she was looking forward to supporting Elton and described the musical as “entertaining”.

Asked whether the film and musical is at all representative of what the fashion industry is actually like, she said it was “for audiences to decide”.

“It’s for the audience and for the people I work with to decide if there are any similarities between me and Miranda Priestly,” she added.

It has often been rumoured that the character of Priestly was based loosely on Wintour.

The Devil Wears Prada tells the story of an aspirational young journalist, Andy, who become the assistant to one of New York’s most infamous fashion magazine editors, Miranda Priestly.

American fashion designer Betsey Johnson said “everyone in the fashion industry loves the show”.

The 82-year-old said she was “lucky” she get through the industry without having to “play the game”.

“When I saw the film for the first time, I thought thank god I missed all that stuff because I would not want to have gone through all that.”

The production sees American singer and actress Vanessa Williams step into the iconic role of feared fashion magazine editor Miranda.

TV personality Michelle Visage said Williams, best known for her roles in Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, has “absolutely” always been the perfect person to play Priestly.

Visage also spoke to the BBC about the progress the fashion industry is making.

“I can’t believe in the film that Andy was called fat when she was a size six,” she said.

“I would hope things have changed – we have seen some more inclusion and I hope we always hope to progress.”

Model Elizabeth Hurley said she thought “every woman’s body is now celebrated” and was keen to see “how that is shown in this theatre show”.

However, singer Beverley Knight said she doesn’t think “the fashion industry has moved on leaps and bounds” in terms of how it views women of different sizes.

Beauty and the Beast actor Luke Evans said he loves the film because it’s “full of characters and ego” but he has “no idea” why it’s such a cultural phenomenon.

“It’s probably because fashion changes all the time but the people at the top never do and this is sort of an insider, behind the scenes version,” he said.

He added he doesn’t think there are many similarities between Priestly and Wintour as he’s met “Anna many times and she’s very lovely so I don’t think they’re similar”.

Comedian David Walliams was also in attendance with his mother and they both said they “know it’s going to be brilliant and we haven’t even seen it”.

“We’re missing Strictly Come Dancing for this, that’s how much we love Elton,” the pair joked.

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 King’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 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’.”

The majority of seats in the Irish parliament have been filled, with the Fianna Fáil party leading a tight three-way battle in the country’s general election.

With all 43 constituencies’ initial counts in, first preference percentage share for the largest three parties was: Fianna Fáil 21.9%, Fine Gael 20.8%, Sinn Féin 19.0%.

So far, 138 of 174 seats have been filled, with counting having resumed on Sunday morning.

Fianna Fáil, who had been in a coalition government with Fine Gael and the Green Party, is projected to win the most seats.

Counting resumed on Sunday morning in the election which had a turnout of 59.7% – the lowest in more than a century.

The leaders of the three main Irish political parties were all re-elected on Saturday to serve in the Dáil (lower house of Irish parliament).

Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil, Simon Harris of Fine Gael, and the Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald have overcome their first obstacles by retaining their seats.

Now, they all face an even bigger challenge – to try to form the next government.

Labour Party leader Ivana Bacik has also been re-elected in the Dublin Bay South constituency.

Social Democrats party leader Holly Cairns and Independent Ireland leader Michael Collins retained their seats in the Cork South West constituency, and

Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín has been re-elected in West Meath and Richard Boyd Barrett from People Before Profit-Solidarity has been returned for the Dún Laoghaire constituency.

The Green Party’s Roderic O’Gorman was the last major party leader re-elected, for Dublin West.

He was the only one of the Greens’ 12 sitting TDs to retain their seats, with former Green party deputy leader and government minister Catherine Martin eliminated in the Dublin Rathdown race earlier.

O’Gorman said Green candidates got “very few transfers” from either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, the party’s former coalition partners.

“I don’t think they did us any favours, but I wasn’t expecting them to do us favours,” he said.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have served together in the outgoing government, and after the first day of counting votes, they seem well placed to return to government.

If they agree to do so, they may need the support of one of the smaller parties or a number of the many independent TDs who are expected to be elected as the counting of votes continues on Sunday.

Sinn Féin says it also wants to be in the next government, and the party is ready to speak to other parties and independents.

But, based on current predictions, the scale of the challenge facing Sinn Féin is enormous.

Political pundits are currently predicting that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael could secure a combined total of more than 80 seats – within touching distance of the golden figure of 88 TDs needed to secure a majority in the Dáil.

The same pundits believe Sinn Féin could secure around 40 seats.

But even if it achieves that, it will still be well short of what is required for a Dáil majority.

In that case, Sinn Féin would have to look towards the smaller parties and independents.

However the smaller parties are expected to be in single figures when all their TDs are finally confirmed.

If Sinn Féin turns to independents, it will find a very disparate cohort of TDs.

To find common cause in such a situation will be another big challenge for the party.

To compound matters, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have insisted that they are not interested in sharing power with Sinn Féin because of fundamental policy differences on a range of issues.

There is a widespread belief that negotiations to form a new government may go beyond Christmas and into the new year.

After being one of the most hotly talked about stories of this election, independent candidate Gerry Hutch has officially lost out in the constituency of Dublin Central.

At one point he had a 2,000 vote lead on Labour’s Marie Sherlock, but she overtook him after a series of transfers from eliminated Green Party and Fianna Fáil candidates.

A win for Hutch would have been highly notable – last year he was acquitted of a high-profile murder when a man was shot dead at a boxing weigh-in event. A judge has described him as having been involved in serious criminal conduct in the past.

Analysis – BBC News NI political editor Enda McClafferty

Gerry Hutch may feel robbed after being hotly tipped to secure a seat in Dublin Central.

But he didn’t appear sore about his defeat when he arrived at the count centre at the RDS.

Besieged by journalists, the gangland figure made his way through the hall to congratulate Labour’s Marie Sherlock who pipped him to the final seat.

He is known as a man of few words, but when asked by BBC NI if he planned to run again for election he said he would.

“I have been running all my life so yes I would go again,” he said

He also said he wasn’t surprised by the more than 3,000 first preference votes he received.

“I expected more to be honest,” he said

He was challenged about his criminal past but refused to answer any questions.

After shaking hands with Sherlock, he left the centre surrounded by journalists and ended up running away from the building to escape the media attention.

So where did it go wrong for the man poised to be the story of the Irish general election?

The key moment came when Social Democratic candidate Gary Gannon got elected much earlier than expected.

Transfers from the eliminated People Before Profit candidate propelled him to the quota.

That set in motion a series of transfers from eliminated Green and Fianna Fáil candidates which allowed Labour’s Marie Sherlock to close the gap with Hutch.

The surplus from Paschal Donohoe was finally enough to push her past Hutch securing the last seat.

But as one tally expert suggested it could easily have turned in favour of Hutch and while there was a narrow path to victory for Sherlock no-one expected her to find it.

Two of Gregg Wallace’s accusers have criticised his response to allegations of historical misconduct, after he said they had come from a “handful of middle-class women of a certain age”.

One of his accusers said the comments showed he “clearly hasn’t learnt his lesson”, while another said he wrongly “seems to be saying he’s the victim of classism”.

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

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

The investigation heard from 13 people spanning a range of ages, who worked across five different shows.

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”.

The 60-year-old told his more than 200,000 followers earlier on Sunday: “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.

“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 also reposted screenshots of supportive messages received from people who said they were former contestants on the show or had worked with him.

Anna, not her real name, was part of a group that raised a complaint about Wallace in 2018 after working with him.

Reacting to the Instagram video, she told BBC News she was “not surprised he’s trying to minimise and dismiss the people who have bravely come forward”.

“He clearly hasn’t learnt his lesson,” she added. “I’m interested to see what consequences he’ll finally be facing from the BBC and [MasterChef production company] Banijay UK for his behaviour towards women of all ages.

“While they decide, maybe Gregg should use this time to reflect on and take some accountability for how he abused his position of power instead of adding flames to the fire on social media.”

Another accuser, James, also not his real name, said Wallace’s video response “seems to be saying he’s the victim of classism”.

“His humour isn’t typically working-class or prone to misinterpretation: from my perspective, its main purpose is to test boundaries, make other people (especially women) uncomfortable, and display his power within the room,” he said.

“And it’s not just women who are offended – plenty of men are too, it’s just that far too few of them have the host called out on his bad behaviour.”

Another woman, who previously worked with Wallace but is not one of the 13 people involved in the BBC News investigation, called the video “so dismissive of the people that have come forward”, especially younger women.

“I don’t know what class and age have to do with it,” she added.

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

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 said Wallace’s latest comments were “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.”

On Thursday, 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 broadcaster Kirsty Wark, a Celebrity MasterChef contestant in 2011, who said he told “sexualised” jokes during filming.

It comes as broadcasters and production companies face fresh questions over their handling of allegations against Wallace.

Radio host Aasmah Mir said she initially complained to Banijay in 2017 about inappropriate comments Wallace had allegedly made during filming of the programme. It is believed she then had to take her complaint to the BBC.

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

She added 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.

There was another complaint in 2018, which our investigation revealed, relating to a different show called Impossible Celebrities.

A BBC probe at the time found his behaviour was “unacceptable and unprofessional” and he got a 90-minute talking to by Ms Phillips.

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.

A BBC source said on Sunday “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.

On Saturday, Banijay UK announced it had appointed “rigorous” law firm Lewis Silkin to lead an investigation into Wallace’s alleged misconduct.

US President Joe Biden has issued an official pardon for his son Hunter, who was facing sentencing for two criminal cases, despite previously ruling it out.

In a statement, the president said his son had been “singled out” and called his cases “a miscarriage of justice”.

Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges earlier in September, and was found guilty of being an illegal drug user in possession of a gun in June – becoming the first child of a sitting president to be a convicted of a crime.

Reacting to the pardon, President-elect Donald Trump said: “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the [6 January] Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”

Trump was referring to his supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in a bid to overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.

Joe Biden’s full and unconditional pardon for his son comes after the president had previously said he would not give him clemency.

Just a couple of months ago, in September, the White House press secretary said that Biden would not issue a pardon for his son.

But on Sunday evening, President Biden said although he believed in the justice system, “politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice”.

“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted,” he said.

Biden said he wrestled with the decision, and added: “once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further.”

“I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” he said.

In a reaction statement, Hunter Biden said mistakes he made during the darkest days of his addiction had been “exploited to publicly humiliate and shame” his family for political sport.

“I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering,” the 54-year-old added.

The younger Biden has been sober for five-and-a-half years, his father said.

This is not the first time a US president has pardoned a member of their family.

Bill Clinton pardoned his younger half-brother, Roger Clinton, for a 1985 cocaine-related offence in 2001.

In 2020, Donald Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of his daughter Ivanka. President-elect Trump has recently announced Kushner as ambassador to France in his new cabinet.

Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to nine counts of federal tax fraud in September, for which he had been facing up to 17 years in prison.

He was also convicted of three felonies in connection with a gun purchase in June, for which he had been facing up to 25 years in prison.

Sentencing for these cases had been scheduled for 12 and 16 December.

His legal troubles had been a dark cloud over his father’s presidential campaign, which came to an end in July after Biden pulled out of the election race.

Biden endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him as the Democratic candidate, who lost the election to Republican Donald Trump in November.

Trump is set to take over the Oval Office from Biden on 20 January 2025 – Inauguration Day.

“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.”

The boss of car making giant Stellantis – which owns brands including Chrysler, Vauxhall, Jeep, Fiat and Peugeot – has stepped down with immediate effect.

Carlos Tavares’ abrupt exit comes two months after Stellantis issued a profit warning.

Last week, the firm also announced plans to close its Vauxhall van making factory in Luton, putting about 1,100 jobs at risk.

In a statement announcing Mr Tavares’ departure, Henri de Castries, Stellantis’ senior independent director said “in recent weeks different views have emerged which have resulted in the Board and the CEO coming to today’s decision.”

Before his resignation, Mr Tavares was one of the most powerful people in the global motor industry.

He had a reputation as a ruthless cost-cutter, first at the French group PSA – then, following its merger with Fiat Chrysler in 2021 – at Stellantis.

Mr Tavares frequently made headlines in the UK by casting doubt over the future of Vauxhall operations in the UK, linking it to issues such as Brexit and government plans to force car makers to build more electric cars.

It is not yet clear whether his departure will affect the planned closure of Stellantis’ Luton plant.

Mr Tavares’ position had been undermined recently by a dramatic fall in sales and profits at the company.

Stellantis’ share price has fallen by 40% since the start of this year.

In September, the company said it had started to look for Mr Tavares’ successor, but he was expected to stay in his role until at least 2026.

Stellantis said it now expected to appoint a new chief executive by the middle of next year.

In the meantime it said it will set up a new interim executive committee, led by the firm’s chairperson John Elkann.

The reignited war in Syria is the latest fallout from the turmoil that has gripped the Middle East since the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October last year.

The attacks, and Israel’s response, upended the status quo. Events in Syria in the last few days are more proof that the war gripping the Middle East is escalating, not subsiding.

During a decade of war after 2011, Bashar al-Assad’s rule survived because he was prepared to break Syria to save the regime he had inherited from his father.

To do that he relied on powerful allies, Russia, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah. They intervened on his side against rebel groups that ranged from the jihadist extremists of Islamic State to militias supported by the US and the rich Gulf monarchies.

Now Iran is reeling from severe blows inflicted by Israel, with US support, on its security in the Middle East. Its ally Hezbollah, which used to send its best men to fight for the Assad regime in Syria, has been crippled by Israel’s attacks. Russia has launched air strikes in the last few days against the rebel offensive in Syria – but its military power is almost entirely earmarked to fight the war in Ukraine.

The war in Syria did not end. It dropped out of the place it used to occupy in headline news, partly because of turbulence across the Middle East and beyond, and because it is almost impossible for journalists to get into the country.

In places the war was suspended, or frozen, but Syria is full of unfinished business.

The Assad regime has never regained the power it had used to control Syria before 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, though it still kept a gulag of Syrian prisoners in its jails.

Even so, until the last few days, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad controlled the major cities, their surrounding countryside and the main highways connecting them.

Now a coalition of rebel groups, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has broken out of Idlib, the province along the border with Turkey that it controls, and in only a few days since 27 November swept away Syrian troops in a series of “astonishing” events, as one senior international diplomat told me.

Two days into the offensive, they were posting photos of fighters who had taken the ancient citadel of Aleppo, which had been an impregnable base for government troops between 2012 and 2015, when the city was divided between rebels and regime forces.

The atmosphere in Aleppo seems calm after the rout of government troops. One photo on social media showed uniformed and armed rebel fighters queuing for fried chicken at a fast-food outlet.

HTS has roots in al-Qaeda, though it broke with the group in 2016 and at times has fought its rump loyalists. But HTS is still designated as a terrorist group by the UN Security Council and countries including the US, the European Union, Turkey and the UK. (The Syrian regime calls all its opponents terrorists.)

The leader of HTS, Abu Mohammad al-Jawlani, has a long history as a jihadist leader in Iraq and Syria. In recent years, though, he has moved away from strict jihadist ideology to try to broaden the appeal of his group.

The rebranding is also being used to attract support for the offensive, which HTS calls Operation Repelling the Aggression. That name, and its official announcements, avoid jihadist language and Islamist references.

Neutral language, according to Mina al-Lami, the jihadist media specialist at BBC Monitoring, is designed to distance what’s happening from the jihadist past of HTS and present the offensive as a joint rebel enterprise against the regime.

Syrians are generally repelled by extreme religious rhetoric. As jihadist groups came to dominate the rebellion after pro-democracy demonstrations were crushed after the first year or so of war after 2011, many Syrians either stayed neutral or sided reluctantly with the regime because they feared the murderous jihadist ideology of Islamic State.

The offensive led by HTS comes out of the splintered political landscape of northern Syria. Much of the north-east is controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group led by Kurds and supported by the United States, which stations around 900 troops in the area.

Turkey is a big player, controlling borderlands where it has deployed its own regular troops as well as the militias it sponsors. Sleeper cells drawn from the remnants of Islamic State sometimes mount deadly ambushes on roads through the Syrian desert.

Reports from Syria say that the rebel forces have captured significant supplies of military equipment, including helicopters, and are pressing on towards Hama, the next significant city on the road to Damascus.

Without a doubt the regime and its allies will be working to steady themselves and to hit back, especially with air power. The rebels do not have an air force, though in another sign of the way that unmanned aerial vehicles are revolutionising warfare, there are reports that they used a drone to kill a senior regime intelligence official.

The renewed fighting in Syria is causing international alarm. The UN envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, issued a statement saying that “the latest developments pose severe risks to civilians and have serious implications for regional and international security… No Syrian party or existing group of actors can resolve the Syrian conflict via military means”.

Pedersen added that there had been “a collective failure to bring about a genuine political process” to implement UN Security Council resolution 2254, which was passed in 2015. That laid out a roadmap for peace, with the principle in the text that “the Syrian people will decide the future of Syria”.

The objective was a future shaped by free elections and a new constitution. But that meant Assad and his family giving up a country that they treated for years as their personal fief. More than half a million dead attest to their determination not to let that happen.

It is too soon to write the Assad regime off. It has a core of genuine support. Some Syrians see it as the least bad option – better than the jihadists who came to dominate the rebellion. But if other anti-Assad groups – and there are many – rise up, his regime will once again be in mortal danger.

“Italian” tomato purees sold by several UK supermarkets appear to contain tomatoes grown and picked in China using forced labour, the BBC has found.

Some have “Italian” in their name such as Tesco’s “Italian Tomato Purée”. Others have “Italian” in their description, such as Asda’s double concentrate which says it contains “Puréed Italian grown tomatoes” – and Waitrose’s “Essential Tomato Purée”, describing itself as “Italian tomato puree”.

A total of 17 products, most of them own-brands sold in UK and German retailers, are likely to contain Chinese tomatoes – testing commissioned by the BBC World Service shows.

Most Chinese tomatoes come from the Xinjiang region, where their production is linked to forced labour by Uyghur and other largely Muslim minorities. The UN accuses the Chinese state – which views these minorities as a security risk – of torture and abuse. China denies it forces people to work in the tomato industry and says workers’ rights are protected by law. It says the UN report is based on “disinformation and lies”.

All the supermarkets whose products we tested dispute our findings.

China grows about a third of the world’s tomatoes. The north-western region of Xinjiang has the perfect climate for growing the fruit.

It is also where China began a programme of mass detentions in 2017. Human rights groups allege more than a million Uyghurs have been detained in hundreds of facilities, which China has termed “re-education camps”.

The BBC has spoken to 14 people who say they endured or witnessed forced labour in Xinjiang’s tomato fields over the past 16 years. “[The prison authorities] told us the tomatoes would be exported overseas,” Ahmed (not his real name) said, adding that if the workers did not meet the quotas – as much as 650kg a day – they would be shocked with electric prods.

Mamutjan, a Uyghur teacher who was imprisoned in 2015 for an irregularity in his travel documentation, says he was beaten for failing to meet the high tomato quotas expected of him.

“In a dark prison cell, there were chains hanging from the ceiling. They hung me up there and said ‘Why can’t you finish the job?’ They beat my buttocks really hard, hit me in the ribs. I still have marks.”

It is hard to verify these accounts, but they are consistent, and echo evidence in a 2022 UN report which reported torture and forced labour in detention centres in Xinjiang.

By piecing together shipping data from around the world, the BBC discovered how most Xinjiang tomatoes are transported into Europe – by train through Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and into Georgia, from where they are shipped onwards to Italy.

One company name repeatedly appeared as a recipient in the data. This was Antonio Petti, part of a group of major tomato-processing firms in Italy. It received more than 36 million kg of tomato paste from the company Xinjiang Guannong and its subsidiaries between 2020 and 2023, the data showed.

The Petti group produces tomato goods under its own name, but also supplies others to supermarkets across Europe who sell them as their own branded products.

Our investigation tested 64 different tomato purees sold in the UK, Germany and the US – comparing them in a lab to samples from China and Italy. They included top Italian brands and supermarket own-brands, and many were produced by Petti.

We asked Source Certain, a world-renowned origin verification firm based in Australia, to investigate whether the origin claims on the purees’ labels were accurate. The company began by building what its CEO Cameron Scadding calls a “fingerprint” which is unique to a country of origin – analysing the trace elements which the tomatoes absorb from local water and rocks.

“The first objective for us was to establish what the underlying trace element profile would look like for China, and [what] a likely profile would look like for Italy. We found they were very distinct,” he said.

Source Certain then compared those country profiles with the 64 tomato purees we wanted to test – the majority of which claimed to contain Italian tomatoes or gave the impression they did – and a few which did not make any origin claim.

The lab results suggested many of these products did indeed contain Italian tomatoes – including all those sold in the US, top Italian brands including Mutti and Napolina, and some German and UK supermarket own-brands, including those sold by Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer.

But 17 appeared to contain Chinese tomatoes, 10 of which are made by Petti – the Italian company we found listed repeatedly in international shipping records.

Of those 10 made by Petti, these were for sale in UK supermarkets at the time of testing from April-August 2024:

These were for sale in German supermarkets, during our testing period:

In response, all the supermarkets said they took these allegations very seriously and have carried out internal investigations which found no evidence of Chinese tomatoes. Many have also disputed the testing methodology used by our experts. Tesco suspended supply and Rewe immediately withdrew the products. Waitrose, Morrisons, Edeka and Rewe said they had run their own tests, and that the results contradicted ours and did not show the presence of Chinese tomatoes in the products.

But one major retailer has admitted to using Chinese tomatoes. Lidl told us they were in another version of its Baresa Tomatenmark – made by the Italian supplier Giaguaro – sold in Germany last year “for a short time” because of supply problems and that they are investigating this. Giaguaro said all its suppliers respected workers’ rights and it is currently not using Chinese tomatoes in Lidl products. The BBC understands the tomatoes were supplied by the Xinjiang company Cofco Tunhe, which the US sanctioned in December last year for forced labour.

In 2021, one of the Petti group’s factories was raided by the Italian military police on suspicion of fraud – it was reported by the Italian press that Chinese and other foreign tomatoes were passed off as Italian.

But a year after the raid, the case was settled out of court. Petti denied the allegations about Chinese tomatoes and the issue was dropped.

As part of our investigation into Petti, a BBC undercover reporter posed as a businessman wanting to place a large order with the firm. Invited to tour a company factory in Tuscany by Pasquale Petti, the General Manager of Italian Food, part of the Petti group, our reporter asked him if Petti used Chinese tomatoes.

“Yes… In Europe no-one wants Chinese tomatoes. But if for you it’s OK, we will find a way to produce the best price possible, even using Chinese tomatoes,” he said.

The reporter’s undercover camera also captured a crucial detail – a dozen blue barrels of tomato paste lined up inside the factory. A label visible on one of them read: “Xinjiang Guannong Tomato Products Co Ltd, prod date 2023-08-20.”

In its response to our investigation, the Petti group told us it had not bought from Xinjiang Guannong since that company was sanctioned by the US for using forced labour in 2020, but did say that it had regularly purchased tomato paste from a Chinese company called Bazhou Red Fruit.

This firm “did not engage in forced labour”, Petti told us. However our investigation has found that Bazhou Red Fruit shares a phone number with Xinjiang Guannong, and other evidence, including shipping data analysis, suggests that Bazhou is its shell company.

Petti added that: “In future we will not import tomato products from China and will enhance our monitoring of suppliers to ensure compliance with human and workers’ rights.”

While the US has introduced strict legislation to ban all Xinjiang exports, Europe and the UK take a softer approach, allowing companies simply to self-regulate to ensure forced labour is not used in supply chains.

This is now set to change in the EU, which has committed to stronger laws, says Chloe Cranston, from the NGO Anti-Slavery International. But she warns this will make it even more likely that the UK will become “a dumping ground” for forced labour products.

Outside the UK watch on YouTube from 00:01 Monday

“The UK Modern Slavery Act, sadly, is utterly not fit for purpose,” she says.

A spokesperson for the UK Department for Business and Trade told us: “We are clear that no company in the UK should have forced labour in its supply chain… We keep our approach to how the UK can best tackle forced labour and environmental harms in supply chains under continual review and work internationally to enhance global labour standards.”

Dario Dongo, journalist and food lawyer, says the findings expose a wider problem – “the true cost of food”.

“So when we see [a] low price we have to question ourselves. What is behind that? What is the true cost of this product? Who is paying for that?”

US President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to impose 100% tariffs on a bloc of nine nations if they were to create a rival currency to the US dollar.

“The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER,” Trump wrote on social media on Saturday.

Major world powers China and Russia are part of the Brics alliance, along with Brazil, India, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates.

During the US election, Trump campaigned on implementing widespread tariffs. He has escalated threats of steep levies in recent days.

This latest message from Trump, who will take office next year on 20 January, was aimed at the Brics, a bloc of mostly emerging economies.

Leading politicians in Brazil and Russia have suggested creating a Brics currency to reduce the US dollar’s dominance in global trade. But internal disagreement has slowed any progress.

“We require a commitment from these countries that they will neither create a new Brics currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or they will face 100% tariffs and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US economy,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

“They can go find another sucker,” he said.

But some Trump allies have suggested his recent announcements have been negotiation tactics, meant as more of an opening bid than a promise.

Asked about the president-elect’s proposed use of tariffs, Republican Senator Ted Cruz responded by noting the “importance of leverage”.

“You look at the threat of tariffs against Mexico and Canada, immediately has produced action,” the Texan said on CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday.

On Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an unscheduled trip to Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, seemingly to head off a potential 25% tariff on Canadian goods heading south.

Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has previously suggested that the president-elect’s threats to impose major tariff hikes were part of his negotiating strategy.

“My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” Bessent said of Trump in an interview with the Financial Times before he was nominated for the role.

“It’s escalate to de-escalate.”

A tariff is a domestic tax levied on goods as they enter the country, proportional to the value of the import. So a car imported to the US with a value of $50,000 subject to a 25% tariff, would face a $12,500 charge.

Tariffs are a central part of Trump’s economic vision – he sees them as a way of growing the US economy, protecting jobs and raising tax revenue.

He has previously claimed that these taxes are “not going to be a cost to you, it’s a cost to another country”.

This is almost universally regarded by economists as misleading.

The charge is physically paid by the domestic company that imports the goods, not the foreign company that exports them.

So, in that sense, it is a straightforward tax paid by domestic US firms to the US government.

Trump imposed a number of tariffs in his first term of office, many of which have been kept in place by his successor, President Joe Biden. Economic studies suggest most of the economic burden was ultimately borne by US consumers.

• Brics: What is the group and which countries have joined?
• ‘Trump tariffs may backfire’
• US firms race to get ahead of Trump tariffs

Georgia has seen a fourth night of street demonstrations and a string of public resignations, triggered by the ruling party’s decision to suspend a push to start talks on joining the European Union.

As tens of thousands of Georgians headed back to the streets of several cities, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said they had fallen victim to opposition lies and he rejected calls for new elections.

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

But 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 that issue on the agenda until the end of 2028.

Pro-EU protesters were out in big numbers again on Sunday night, and when fireworks were aimed at the parliament building as well as riot police, the police responded with water cannon. Large groups of riot police huddled in side streets beside parliament, and it was not until late into the night that reports emerged of clashes with demonstrators.

Georgia’s increasingly authoritarian government has been accused by the EU and US of democratic backsliding. On Saturday, the US took the significant step of suspending its strategic partnership with Georgia.

Kobakhidze insisted 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 more than 3,000 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.

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.

During the day on Sunday, a small group of protesters 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 was trying to scrub off graffiti from a wall in front of the Georgian parliament.

Some of the windows of the building were smashed on Saturday night, 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.”

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 King’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.”

Joe Biden had repeatedly denied that he was going to pardon his son Hunter for his gun and tax evasion convictions or commute what was shaping up to be a substantive prison sentence.

On the Sunday evening after Thanksgiving – at a moment when the American public’s attention was decidedly elsewhere – he announced he had changed his mind.

“There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution,” he wrote in a press statement announcing his decision. “In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

The president’s explanation might sound familiar to anyone who has listened to Donald Trump rail against America’s system of justice in recent years.

Trump, as he exited the White House in 2021, issued a series of pardons for his close associates and allies who had been swept up in the multiple criminal investigations that encircled him throughout his presidential term. In doing so, he bypassed established White House procedures for exercising the broad presidential pardon power. And although he was criticised for the action at the time, there were little if any political consequences.

Biden may be criticised as well – for breaking his promise and for using his presidential power to protect his son. One Democratic governor, Jared Polis of Colorado, quickly released a statement saying he was “disappointed” and that the move would “tarnish” the outgoing president’s reputation.

With Biden’s political career drawing to a close, however, there is little price he will pay for his action. The national attention will quickly shift back to the incoming Trump presidency.

The rules governing presidential pardoning – or at the very least the processes and established guardrails that had guided its use – appear to have been fundamentally and permanently altered. At this point there may be scarce grounds for anyone to complain, no matter on which side of the political aisle they stand.

The Trump camp was quick to issue a response to the news of the Biden pardon, saying that the president-elect would fix the US justice system and restore due process in his second term.

It’s something to keep in mind when Trump returns to office, as he is expected to again use his pardoning power to aid associates who have been prosecuted during the Biden presidency – and to free many of his supporters who have been convicted during the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol.

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 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.”