South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered the arrest of his own ruling party’s leader Han Dong-hoon when he declared martial law on Tuesday night.

The arrest list also included the leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, as well as three opposition lawmakers, the National Intelligence Service deputy director said.

The president tried to “use this chance to arrest them and wipe them out”, said director Hong Jang-won.

The revelation came as the country’s political parties held emergency meetings throughout Friday, with MPs planning to bring a vote to impeach Yoon. The motion, which is scheduled for Saturday, will pass if two-thirds of MPs vote for it.

• Why did South Korea’s president declare martial law?
• Who is Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s scandal-hit president?
• Fear, fury and triumph: Six hours that shook South Korea
• How two hours of martial law unfolded in South Korea
• ‘We had to stop this’: Woman who grabbed South Korean soldier’s gun speaks to BBC

The opposition have a majority in the 300-seat parliament but need the support of at least eight ruling party MPs to secure the 200 votes required for the impeachment motion to pass.

In the first clear sign his own party may now vote with the opposition, the leader of Yoon’s ruling party called for his swift suspension on Friday, saying he posed a “great danger” to democracy if he remained in power.

Han Dong-hoon, chief of the People Power Party (PPP), had earlier in the week said his party would not support the opposition’s impeachment motion.

But on Friday he announced there was “credible evidence” that Yoon had ordered the arrest of key politicians – including himself- on “anti-state charges” on Tuesday.

Han said Yoon had planned to jail arrested politicians in a detention centre in Gwacheon, a city south of Seoul.

He expressed concern that “extreme actions”, such as the martial law declaration, could be repeated if Yoon remained in office.

“[These are] putting the Republic of Korea and its people at great risk.

South Koreans spent another day waiting to hear about the fate of their president on Friday, as the impeachment vote loomed.

In the afternoon, there were reports the president was heading to parliament, which his office denied. But opposition MPs lined up to block entry to the assembly, chanting “impeach, impeach”.

Earlier, special forces commander Kwak Jong-kuen had assured parliament he would refuse to follow such an order if martial law was declared again, as the opposition have been suggesting it might be.

Kwak said on Tuesday night he had rejected orders to remove MPs from the assembly floor when they were gathering to vote down the martial law declaration.

“I ordered soldiers not to enter the floor… I ordered that no live ammunition be given out [and] that no harm must come to the civilians,” he said.

• Listen: Democracy in crisis in South Korea

Later in the day, he and other two other commanders were suspended for executing the martial law order before it was revoked.

Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law shocked the country and unnerved South Korea’s allies and financial markets.

He cited threats from “anti-state forces” and North Korea. But it soon became clear that his move had been spurred not by external threats but by his own domestic political troubles.

The order was abruptly reversed hours later after 190 MPs managed to make it into the parliament and vote it down – some of them climbing fences and breaking barricades to get into the chamber.

Opposition lawmakers are concerned that there will be another attempt to impose martial law. Some of them earlier told BBC they have been staying close to the National Assembly grounds so they could get there quickly to vote down any such declaration.

The capital, Seoul, has seen more than two days of street protests demanding Yoon’s resignation, while police said he is being investigated for “insurrection”.

People have also been flooding PPP lawmakers with text messages, urging them to vote for Yoon’s impeachment, according to South Korean media reports.

One MP, Shin Sung-bum, received more than 4,000 such messages on Facebook, The Chosun Daily reported.

Cho Kyung-tae was the first ruling party MP to publicly voice support for Yoon’s impeachment.

“The choice between standing on the side of the people by suspending the president’s duties or becoming an ally of the forces that imposed martial law is a matter for politicians to judge,” Cho said on Friday.

“I hope that all the politicians of the People’s Power will stand on the side of the people,” he added.

More than seven out of 10 South Koreans were in favour of the impeachment, a survey by local pollster Realmeter showed on Thursday.

Yoon has not been seen or spoken publicly since reversing the martial law order early on Wednesday. A survey conducted from Tuesday to Thursday this week showed his approval rating had tumbled to a record low of 13%.

Before his attempt to place the country under military rule, the president had already been beset by low popularity ratings, corruption allegations and an opposition-led legislature that reduced him to a lame-duck leader.

Japanese actor Miho Nakayama was found dead in a bathtub in her Tokyo home on Friday. She was 54.

Ms Nakayama found success as a singer in the 1980s and 90s – at the height of J-pop’s influence – but was best known for starring in the 1995 film Love Letter.

An acquaintance discovered Ms Nakayama on Friday after she failed to show up for work. They called the paramedics, who confirmed her death at the scene, local media reported.

The cause of her death is under investigation.

Ms Nakayama had originally been scheduled to perform a Christmas show in Osaka on Friday, but cancelled her appearance, citing poor health.

A statement on her website, published by her agency, confirmed her death on Friday.

“We are stunned by the sudden occurrence of this event,” the statement said, adding that her cause of death was not confirmed.

Ms Nakayama, who was one of Japan’s most popular teen idols in the 1980s, also enjoyed an illustrious acting career – most notably as the lead actor in Love Letter, a 1995 film about a grieving widow’s letters with a stranger.

The film became a massive box office hit and garnered critical acclaim both domestically and internationally. Ms Nakayama’s performance earned her several best actress awards.

Ms Nakayama leaves behind a son, who is in the custody of her ex-husband, musician Hitonari Tsuji.

A Florida jury has ordered an amusement ride manufacturer pay $310m (£243m) to the family of a teenage boy who fell to his death on their drop ride at an Orlando theme park in 2022.

Tyre Sampson weighed 43kg (94lbs) more than the ride’s 129kg limit, when he plunged 30m (98ft) from the ride, which had no seat belts.

His family’s lawyers argued his death was a result of safety failures and negligence by the ride operators and maker.

The Austrian manufacturer, Funtime Handels GMBH, did not send a representative to court and no lawyer was listed in the court records.

Tyre, 14, was visiting ICON theme park in Orlando with his American football team during spring break.

After falling from the ride, he was taken to a nearby children’s hospital where he died from his injuries.

In awarding damages this week, the jury said the amount was for the “pain and suffering as a result of Tyre Sampson’s injury and death”.

“Tyre’s death was the result of blatant negligence and a failure to prioritise safety over profits,” the family’s lawyer, Ben Crump said.

The damages have been split equally between Tyre’s mother and father, who launched the civil suit in March 2022, a month after their son’s death.

Last year, they settled for an undisclosed amount with two other defendants, the ride’s owner, Eagle Drop Slingshot, and ICON Park, where it operated.

At the time, Tyre’s uncle Carl Sampson described him as a “really good kid” and “very intelligent”.

His death has prompted safety reforms in Florida, which is home to several of the country’s most famous amusement parks.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Tyre Simpson Act into law in May 2023.

It strengthens the safety standards for theme park rides, including mandatory seat belts and harnesses for any ride taller than 100 feet (30m).

“This verdict is a step forward in holding corporations accountable for the safety of their products,” Mr Crump said on Thursday.

The speed with which the status quo in Syria – however unresolved and unsatisfactory – has been turned on its head in recent days has been extraordinary.

Syrian government officials and supporters were still asserting the army would hold the line at Hama, even as insurgent fighters were entering the city.

Shortly afterwards, the Syrian military acknowledged that it had pulled out of Hama, ceding control of the city for the first time to rebel factions.

After capturing two major cities within a week, the next target for the insurgents led by the Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is Homs.

Tens of thousands of people are fleeing the city in anticipation of what looks likely to be the next major battle.

The stakes have risen precipitously for President Bashar al-Assad and his key backers, Russia and Iran.

Homs is strategically considerably more significant than either Aleppo or Hama. It straddles a crossroads that leads west to the heartland of support for the Assad dynasty and south towards the capital, Damascus.

Whatever the previous strategy of HTS may have been, as it spent years building its power base in the north-western province of Idlib, the momentum of the past week now seems to be leading inexorably towards a direct challenge to the continuing rule of Assad.

In an interview with CNN, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani confirmed the rebels do indeed aim to overthrow the Assad regime

So, attention is now focusing on whether the Syrian leader has the capacity to see off this renewed attempt to topple him from power.

The Syrian army – which is largely made up of conscripts – might have lost the war years ago if outside forces had not come to Assad’s aid.

Soldiers are underpaid, under-equipped and often have poor morale, with desertion having long been an issue.

• Live: Follow the latest updates in Syria

As his military failed to hold Aleppo and then Hama, Assad issued an order raising soldiers’ salary by 50% – but that in itself is unlikely to turn the tide.

Russian planes backed up Syrian forces in Hama, but clearly not strongly enough to make an impact.

The lack of all out Russian military support has fuelled speculation that Moscow may be less able to play the game changing role that it performed in Syria in 2015. That would be down to almost three years of war in Ukraine, draining its reserves of manpower and military hardware.

But Russia still has compelling reasons to stay the course with Assad. President Putin’s decisive, full-scale military intervention, which kept the Syrian leader in power when he was close to defeat, showed up the failure of Western allies – the US in particular – to honour their promises of support to the rebels.

The naval base that Russia has maintained for decades in the Syrian port of Tartus gives Moscow its only military hub in the Mediterranean. If the insurgents are able to take Homs, that could potentially open up a route towards the Syrian coast that could put the base at risk.

It still seems unlikely that Russia would not feel a political and strategic imperative to refocus its firepower on the rebels to keep Assad in power, even if only in control of a diminished rump of Syria drastically shrunk from the 60% he currently controls.

The other big question mark is over Iran and the militias it has backed – including Hezbollah- and the military expertise it has provided, which have been the other key element in keeping Assad in power.

Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem – who took over after Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah – has declared that the group will stand by the Syrian government, against what he has described as jihadist aggression orchestrated by the US and Israel.

But with its leadership decimated and its fighters still regrouping after Israel’s ground and air offensive against the group in Lebanon in recent months, Hezbollah may be nowhere near the strength it had when it battled on the frontline against Syrian rebel factions.

However, it clearly is still committed to playing its part, with security sources in Lebanon and Syria saying that elite forces from Hezbollah have crossed over into Syria and taken up positions in Homs.

As for Tehran, it currently seems to be edging away from both direct and proxy confrontations in the region, in contrast to its far more aggressive strategy in the past few years.

That may limit its appetite for the kind of full-scale military support for Assad that it has provided in the past.

There has been speculation that Iranian-backed militias in Iraq may enter the fray – but both the Iraqi government and one of the most powerful Shia leaders, Moqtada al-Sadr, have warned against this.

Assad’s chances of political survival will depend not only on the capabilities of his armed forces and his key allies, but also on the existing divisions between the various groups that oppose him.

Beyond HTS and the factions from Idlib, there are the Kurdish-led forces in the north-east, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army in the north and a host of other groups that still have some purchase in various regions of the country.

Among them is the Islamic State (IS) group, which could take advantage of the latest conflict to try to make gains beyond the remote desert regions where it still has a toehold.

The failure of rebel factions to unite was one of the key factors in Assad’s political survival. He and his supporters will be hoping that events play out in the same way again.

For now, support for the Syrian president as the least worst alternative still seems to be holding among several minority groups – including of course the Assads’ own minority Alawite sect.

They fear what they view as a jihadist force taking over their towns and cities. HTS may have renounced its previous affiliation with al-Qaeda, but many still see it as an extremist organisation.

In the end, what Assad’s fate seems most likely to hinge on is what the main outside players in Syria decide.

Russia, Iran and Turkey have come to agreements before over conflict zones in Syria, most notably in Idlib four years ago – but the rapid surprise escalation in Syria may have blindsided them all.

They may all soon have to reassess and come to a decision on what suits their interests – a Syria with Assad or without.

Romania’s constitutional court has annulled the result of the first round of voting in the presidential election just days before the second round was due to take place.

It means the process will be restarted from scratch, with the government due to decide a date for a new vote.

The first round was won by Calin Georgescu, an almost unknown far-right Nato-sceptic who has previously praised Vladimir Putin.

The court’s decision comes after intelligence documents were declassified, suggesting Georgescu benefitted from a mass influence operation – conducted from abroad – to interfere with the result of the vote.

Outgoing Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said the court’s decision to annul was “the only correct solution after the declassification of the documents… which show that the result of the Romanians’ vote was blatantly distorted as a result of Russia’s intervention”.

The judges of the court met on Friday morning, despite having announced the previous night that they would not discuss new information regarding possible external influence on the elections until the second round of voting.

The law stipulates that, in the event of the annulment of the elections, they should resume on the second Sunday after the date of the annulment – which would have meant on 22 December.

However, the court has decided to ask the government to rerun the entire electoral process, and therefore the electoral campaign.

Last week, the court had ordered a recount of votes cast in Sunday’s first round following allegations that social media platform TikTok gave “preferential treatment” to the surprise winner, Calin Georgescu.

Georgescu, a radical with no party of his own, campaigned mainly on TikTok. The platform said it was “categorically false to claim his account was treated differently to any other candidate”.

He won 23% of the vote, with 19% for the runner-up, Elena Lasconi, of the opposition Save Romania Union and Ciolacu of the governing Social Democrats in third.

Lasconi condemned the court’s ruling as “illegal” and “immoral”, saying “today is the moment when the Romanian state has trampled on democracy”.

“Whether we like it or not, from a legal and legitimate point of view, nine million Romanian citizens, both in the country and in the diaspora, have expressed their preference for a certain candidate. We cannot ignore their will!” she said.

She had been hoping to win the second round run-off on Sunday, which has now been cancelled.

The Constitutional Court also rejected claims filed by two of the losing candidates who accused Georgescu of illegal campaign financing.

This week, Georgescu denied to the BBC that he was Moscow’s man.

He claimed the political establishment could not cope with his success and was trying to block him.

The country is now in totally new territory, politically. And no-one is quite sure what comes next.

A Muslim couple in India have been hounded out of their newly-purchased home by their Hindu neighbours who said they would not allow them to live there because of their religion.

Hindu residents of the posh TDI City – an upscale residential bloc in the northern city of Moradabad – began protesting on Tuesday night after news of the sale became public.

The incident resulted in a huge outrage in India after a video from the protest went viral. It showed one of the residents Megha Arora saying that Dr Ashok Bajaj, a resident, had sold his house to a Muslim family without consulting them.

“We cannot tolerate a Muslim family living right in front of our local temple. This is also a question of the safety of our women,” she said.

“We want the sale to be revoked and are asking the administration to cancel the registration of the house in the name of its new owners. We cannot allow people from another faith to come and live here. We will not allow them to enter and continue to protest as long as they don’t go away,” she added.

Many of the residents also visited the district magistrate’s office to lodge a complaint. Outside, they shouted slogans against Dr Bajaj and the Muslim couple.

The protests have had their intended effect. On Friday, Dr Bajaj told the BBC that a resolution, mediated by the city’s elected representative, had been reached and the new Muslim owners would re-sell the house to a Hindu family already living in the housing society.

Dr Bajaj, who runs an eye hospital in the city and had lived in the society for more than six years, said he had sold the house to the Muslim couple who are both doctors and that their families had known each other for 40 years. The Muslim couple, he said, were no longer comfortable moving into the house.

He added that the furore over the sale was “uncalled for” and that he had not expected it to become national news.

But there is evidence that incidents of violence and discrimination against India’s Muslim community have grown in the past decade under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Anti-Muslim hate speech incidents have surged, with a majority reported from states ruled by the BJP – Moradabad is also located in the BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh. The BJP has consistently denied these claims.

Tanvir Aeijaz, professor of politics and public policy at Delhi University, says the incident in Moradabad “shows that religious polarisation has sunk in, that it’s working at the ground level”.

• Why segregated housing is thriving in India
• Beaten and humiliated by Hindu mobs for being a Muslim in India

Dr Bajaj says the protest started after he introduced the Muslim couple to his neighbours as a gesture of goodwill.

The backlash to the sale of the house, he said, “has come out of nowhere” as there are other Muslim families already living in the colony and that “we had always had a good rapport with our neighbours”.

“The controversy is changing the fabric of the city. Our intention was not to create any kind of unrest with this transaction,” he said, adding that “there is no law” against this transaction.

The colony also did not have a residents’ association that would need to approve the sale, he said. “Now they have woken up to make it.”

This is not the first time Muslim residents have faced backlash in Moradabad for buying homes in a Hindu-majority area. In 2021, residents and Hindu hardline organisations had protested after two Muslim families had purchased houses from Hindus.

Segregated living has existed in rural India for a long time where different castes and religions lived apart. The urban centres were meant to be the melting pots where people could live together, irrespective of their differences. However, in reality, many urban areas continue to experience segregation.

Discrimination against minority communities, especially Muslims, is common in many Indian cities where many housing societies insist on food habits such as vegetarianism to keep them out.

Muslims in states like Gujarat and Maharashtra and even in the capital, Delhi, have often said they are unable to buy or rent homes in Hindu neighbourhoods. A few years ago, a Bollywood actor Emraan Hashmi had made headlines for alleging he was refused a flat in Mumbai because of his Muslim faith.

Prof Aeijaz says denying the Muslim couple in Moradabad the choice to buy the house they wanted is “discriminatory and completely unconstitutional”.

“It’s a violation of their fundamental and legal rights. This is a violation of a person’s right to equality and freedom and if such cases increase, they endanger the constitution of India.”

Prof Aeijaz says there are special rights to protect Dalits (formerly known as untouchables) and women who are considered vulnerable groups, “but how come there are no rights to protect Muslims who are the most vulnerable group in India”? he asks.

This incident has also resulted in a huge outrage with many taking to social media to express their anger.

“Welcome to #NewIndia,” comedian Akash Banerjee wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “A doctor sold his house to a fellow doctor… Why on earth would that lead to a massive protest/uproar in a posh housing society in Moradabad?” he asked.

“As a nation we always boast about unity in diversity. We should be ashamed about these incidents,” wrote John Brittas, an MP from the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Those protesting against the couple “were not nameless, faceless individuals”, another user wrote on X. “They were people unafraid and unashamed of publicly displaying their bigotry and lsIamophobia.”

Prof Aeijaz, however, says he feels hopeful that things will change for the better.

“Hinduism is based on pluralism. Most people I meet understand that hate is against their religion. And that gives me hope.”

Worshippers were forced to flee an Australian synagogue after it was set on fire in what the prime minister condemned as an “act of hate”.

Firefighters were called to Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue just after 04:00 local time on Friday (17:00 GMT Thursday) and arrived to find the building fully ablaze.

Community leaders told local media that “a few people” were inside at the time for morning prayers, and they had reported seeing firebombs thrown. One person was injured and the fire caused extensive damage.

Police say they believe the fire was deliberately lit but are keeping an “open mind” on a motive.

In a statement, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the incident in Ripponlea, in the city’s south-east, was “clearly aimed at creating fear in the community”.

“This violence and intimidation and destruction at a place of worship is an outrage,” he wrote.

“I have zero tolerance for antisemitism.”

He added that he had been briefed by the Australian Federal Police, who would provide support to authorities in the state of Victoria.

“The people involved must be caught and face the full force of the law.”

Victoria Police said the exact cause of the fire had not yet been determined and an arson chemist would visit the site.

However Det Insp Chris Murray said a witness had told them two people in masks appeared to have spread accelerant inside the building.

“We believe it was deliberate. We believe it has been targeted,” he added. “What we don’t know is why.”

He appealed for anyone who may have witnessed the incident, or who may have CCTV or dashcam footage from the local area, to contact police.

Synagogue board member Benjamin Klein told The Age newspaper that people inside “heard banging on the door and the window, and some liquids came through which were lit”.

“The whole thing took off pretty quickly,” he said.

A man who was inside at the time, Yumi Friedman, added that a window had been smashed, sending “glass flying”.

Mr Friedman told reporters his hand was burned on a door knob when he tried to return to the synagogue to fight the blaze.

Det Insp Murray – who was confronted by an angry worshipper while updating the press – said police would be committing significant resources to the investigation and increasing patrols around the area.

“We’re going to do our best to make sure that they can return, as they should, to their local synagogues, doing what is absolutely Australian – that is to be able to worship without fear.”

Jewish community leaders have said they believe the attack is an escalation of a recent documented increase in antisemitism in Australia.

“None of the Jewish community is surprised. We’ve known this has been coming,” Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion said.

Lizzo has won a key ruling in her ongoing legal battle with a stylist who claims she was subjected to racial and sexual harassment and a hostile work environment by members of the singer’s management team while on tour in 2023, as well as unpaid over time.

A Los Angeles federal judge ruled on Monday that wardrobe assistant Asha Daniels could not sue the Grammy winner as an individual, after identifying the singer’s touring and payroll companies as her employers. But Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc remains a defendant in the ongoing case.

US district judge Fernando L Aenlle-Rocha dismissed all seven causes of action against Lizzo, and those regarding her tour manager Carlina Gugliotta.

The judge also granted a partial motion to dismiss several of the claims due to the fact that Daniels worked for the company while on tour in Europe, where American employment laws do not apply.

Fashion designer Daniels claims Lizzo oversaw an “unsafe, sexually charged workplace culture”, which the singer has denied.

She accused the star’s wardrobe manager of making “racist and fatphobic” comments and mocking black women in the entourage.

A spokesperson for the singer called the case an “absurd publicity stunt”.

Her lawyers described Daniels as a “disgruntled” former employee with “meritless and salacious” claims.

Lizzo, known for tracks like Truth Hurts and Juice, built her reputation on body positivity, but last year found herself the subject of several similar accusations.

Daniels’ case echoed previous allegations made by three of Lizzo’s former tour dancers, who sued the star in August last year, accusing her of sexual harassment and fat-shaming over multiple incidents in 2021 and 2023.

In a statement at the time, Lizzo denied the allegations, saying: “These sensationalised stories are coming from former employees who have already publicly admitted that they were told their behaviour on tour was inappropriate and unprofessional.”

The star and her Big Grrrl Big Touring company have requested that the court dismiss the dancers’ allegations. The dancers are requesting a jury trial.

In April this year, Lizzo – real name Melissa Viviane Jefferson – assured her fans online that she would not be leaving the limelight anytime soon.

She previously wrote: “I quit”, saying she was fed up of being targeted for her looks and character online.

But she later clarified in a new video: “When I say ‘I quit’, I mean I quit giving any negative energy attention.”

A notorious far-right extremist, convicted of murdering South African anti-apartheid hero Chris Hani, is set to be deported to his native Poland, the government has said.

Janusz Walus, 71, gunned down Hani outside his home in 1993 at a tense time when the country was preparing its first multi-racial elections.

He spent almost three decades in prison in South Africa before being freed on parole in 2022, sparking protests and an outcry, in a nation still grappling with racism and apartheid’s legacy.

Walus is set to leave South Africa on Friday night and the Polish government will pay for the deportation, said Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber.

South African Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said the decision wasn’t one the government had made, but they were adhering to the decision made by the Constitutional Court.

Schreiber said on X it was a “painful day” and a reminder of the “dark time” of apartheid for South Africans.

• Why far-right Polish football fans idolise a murderer in South Africa

Hani’s widow, Limpho Hani, voiced her anguish, condemning the government and the South African Communist Party (SACP) for only notifying her at the last minute. She said she was only informed of Walus’s release on Thursday.

Hani was a key member of the African National Congress (ANC), which led the fight against white-minority rule and has been in power ever since, and also head of the South African Communist Party. Since his murder, he has become revered as a hero of the fight for freedom and equality in the country.

The ANC reflected on the pain caused by Hani’s assassination and said the release was a reminder of “the bullet that pierced through our hearts, assassinating a father and comrade”.

“Your dastardly hand drips of the blood of a martyr and freedom fighter who paid the ultimate price for the freedom and love for humanity, democracy, and justice,” it read.

Walus moved from Poland to South Africa in 1981 and was granted citizenship, which was revoked after his murder conviction.

He was initially sentenced to death, along with his co-defendant Clive Derby-Lewis, but the sentence was commuted to life sentence after South Africa abolished the death penalty.

He told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission tribunal in 1997 he had killed Hani to “to plunge the country into a state of chaos which would allow the right to take over”.

Walus said that his experiences under communist Poland contributed to his decision to murder Hani.

The country was on tenterhooks at the time, as South Africa was nearing the end of apartheid, the racist system of white-minority rule.

ANC leader Nelson Mandela had been released from prison in 1990 and was in talks with apartheid leaders about how to end white rule and hold elections, while some members of the white community feared a breakdown in law and order and civil unrest.

Many feared the assassination of Hani would start a race war. Some say it nearly derailed South Africa’s transition to democracy, which happened the following year.

ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula said at a press briefing that Walus had “deprived South Africa of one of its greatest leaders”.

He added that his deportation without a “full confession of his actions and conspiracies is an injustice”.

Mbalula called for a comprehensive inquiry into the killing to “expose the full scope of the crime”. The South African Communist Party has echoed the same sentiments.

Walus has become an infamous figure for the far-right spaces in Poland. His face has been printed on scarves, T-shirts and posters. This merchandise has even been sold in South Africa.

A journalist who interviewed Walus for a book said extremists in the country saw him as “the great hope of the white race”.

Walus has never expressed remorse for the killing of Hani.

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Haliey Welch, known mostly as the star of the viral “Hawk Tuah” meme, is facing criticism after her newly launched cryptocurrency nosedived in value.

Her “Hawk” digital coin hit a $490m market cap shortly after it launched on Wednesday, before suddenly losing more than 95% of its value within hours.

This has led some, including YouTube cryptocurrency investigator Coffeezilla, to accuse Ms Welch of scamming investors with a “pump and dump” – where the people behind a coin hype up its price before launch, then sell it for profit.

She has denied allegations that her team sold any of the tokens they owned.

The BBC has approached Ms Welch’s representatives for comment.

“Team hasn’t sold one token,” she wrote in a copy and pasted post on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday.

She added that no “KOL” (key opinion leaders) were gifted a free token.

Ms Welch had previously distributed free Hawk tokens to some fans ahead of the launch across social media.

Hawk launched on the Solana blockchain at around 22:00 GMT on Wednesday, and its market capitalisation soared to highs of $490m shortly after.

However it fell sharply from this high to around $60m just 20 minutes later.

Fans and investors have accused Ms Welch and her team of “misleading” and “betraying” them and suggested the launch had been a “rug pull” – where promoters of a cryptocurrency draw in buyers, only to stop trading activity and make off with money raised from sales.

A community note on Ms Welch’s X post contests her explanation, saying her team had been selling their Hawk coins since launch.

Coffeezilla, real name Stephen Findeisen, also claimed that Hawk gave “insiders” an advantage.

“Unfortunately with situations like this, they’re not targeting crypto bros, they’re mostly targeting actual fans who have never been involved in the crypto space before,” he said in a video viewed more than 1.4 million times.

He accused Ms Welch’s team of “profiting from a rug pull”.

“These people were unwilling to take any accountability” of the “Hawk Tuah scam”, he claimed, after sharing a clip of him speaking to some of the people behind the cryptocurrency.

Ms Welch’s post on X claimed that her team attempted to prevent so-called “snipers”, who buy and sell cryptocurrencies quickly at moments when they are likely to make the most money from a gap in buy and sell price – sometimes using automated trading tools – by imposing higher fees on one exchange.

The team behind the cryptocurrency, OverHere, has dismissed other claims about the launch in an X post.

It stressed that “Haliey’s Team has sold absolutely no tokens whatsoever”.

Meme coins such as this have been booming in popularity due to their jokey, cheap appeal for investors.

They are often viewed as being less risky than more high profile crypto assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but carry the same dangers – with often no protection for those who lose money on them.

Carol Alexander, professor of finance at Sussex University, told the BBC on Thursday that while more young people are investing in meme coins, many of them are losing money.

Several celebrities or influencers who have ventured into the crypto market have faced similar backlashes.

In 2021, Kim Kardashian was fined $1.26m by US regulators after she failed to disclose that she had been paid to post an advert for a cryptocurrency scheme called EthereumMax.

More recently, YouTuber Logan Paul was accused of misleading fans by promoting crypto coins or investments without divulging his own financial interest in them.

Known online as the “Hawk Tuah girl”, Ms Welch went viral after speaking the onomatopoeia “hawk tuah” – imitating the sound of someone spitting – during an interview in June.

It made the 22-year-old, from Belfast, Tennessee, an overnight internet sensation.

She amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across various social platforms and launched her own merchandise and a podcast called “Talk Tuah”.

Her manager told the Hollywood Reporter in July that she was unique in not having sought out internet fame, having been off social media for mental health reasons for several months before appearing in the now-viral “Hawk Tuah” video.

Rolling Stone has likened her funny, small-town personality to a “Gen Z Dolly Parton”.

Ms Welch told outlet TMZ ahead of Hawk’s launch on Wednesday that she launched it to tackle “a bunch of imposters” pretending to be her and selling their own coins.

“It’s a really good way to get all my fans and community to interact and come together,” she said.

French President Emmanuel Macron has said he will name a new prime minister “in the coming days”, after Michel Barnier resigned following a no-confidence vote in parliament.

In a 10-minute address to the nation on Thursday, he rejected opposition pressure to stand down, vowing to stay in his post “fully, until the end of the mandate” in 2027.

Macron was holding talks on Friday with leaders of the Socialists, who said they were ready for a compromise in forming a “fixed-term” government, but not under a prime minister from a right-wing party.

The Socialists joined colleagues on the left and far right in voting to remove Michel Barnier on Wednesday, only three months after he was appointed by Macron.

The president thanked Barnier for his dedication during his brief term as prime minister, and accused MPs of collaborating in an “anti-republican front” to bring down the government.

The vote was the first time a French government had been voted down by parliament in more than 60 years, a move Macron labelled “unprecedented”.

In France, it is the president who chooses the prime minister who then runs the government. But the prime minister must answer to parliament and Barnier lasted only three months before he was ousted in a no-confidence vote.

Finding someone who will not be immediately rejected by parliament could be difficult for Macron, whose decision in June to call snap elections led to a deadlocked parliament.

The National Assembly is now split into three big voting blocs – the left, centre and far right. If Macron’s next choice of prime minister is to last, it is thought at least part of the left bloc will need to be persuaded to join the next government.

The president held talks with several political leaders on Friday, having told the French people he would “appoint in the coming days a prime minister who will form a government of general interest”.

He first spoke to centrists in the “Macron camp”, before meeting Socialist leaders, who are part of a broader left-wing bloc, the New Popular Front. He will also talk to the right-wing Republicans.

Socialist leader Olivier Faure said ahead of the talks that he was open to discussion and “compromises on every issue” towards forming a government based on a “fixed term contract”. But he made clear he had little desire to “ensure the continuity of Macronism”.

No new parliamentary elections can be held until July 2025, which might explain Faure’s remarks on being open to a limited term for the next government.

Faure said after the talks Macron had “absolutely not” asked the Socialists to split from the wider New Popular Front (NFP). However, the biggest member of the NFP, the far-left France Unbowed, said Faure had been given no mandate to speak on the Popular Front’s behalf.

Responding to Macron’s speech on Thursday, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), posted social media: “A little reminder to President Macron, who is supposed to be the guarantor of the Constitution: censure is not anti-republican, it is provided for in the Constitution of our Fifth Republic.”

The no-confidence vote that toppled Barnier’s leadership had been tabled by both the New Popular Front (NFP) left-wing alliance, and Le Pen’s RN.

They united to censure the government after the former Brexit negotiator used special powers to force through his budget without a vote.

A total of 331 MPs voted in support of the motion against Barnier, far more than the 288 required for it to pass.

Barnier resigned on Thursday, and the budget was automatically withdrawn. He will remain in office on a caretaker basis with his ministers until a new government is appointed. Macron’s role is unaffected.

Macron has been heavily criticised for deciding to call snap elections, creating a deadlock in parliament and an escalating political crisis.

He admitted in his address that his decision “was not understood”: “Many have blamed me for it and, I know, many continue to blame me. It’s a fact and it’s my responsibility.”

Addressing voters directly, he said some of his political opponents had chosen “chaos over responsibility” and that they were not thinking “about you, the voters”, suggesting their focus was on the next presidential elections.

Macron gave no indication of who the next prime minister would be, but said their immediate focus would be the budget for 2025.

Speculation has been swirling over who could be named, with potential candidates including Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, and centrist former presidential candidate François Bayrou.

Before Macron chose Barnier as prime minister, he asked his predecessor Gabriel Attal to stay on as caretaker for two months after the summer elections.

It seems highly unlikely that the next government can be in place before Saturday, when world leaders including US President-elect Donald Trump are due to attend the opening ceremony of the rebuilt Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

The building was devastated by fire in April 2019, and its reconstruction little more than five years later has drawn worldwide praise.

Macron said the rebuilding of the ravaged cathedral, plus France’s successful hosting of the 2024 Olympics, were “proof that we can do great things”.

“We can do the impossible,” he said. “The world admires us for that.”

One of the biggest questions on people’s minds in Seoul on Wednesday is: what was the president thinking?

In a late-night address that threw South Korea’s parliament into chaos and tested the country’s commitment to democracy, President Yoon Suk Yeol declared that he was imposing martial law.

Less than 24 hours later, his political future is on the brink, with protests on the streets and impeachment proceedings against him under way.

So, what happened?

• What is martial law and why was it declared?
• Woman who grabbed South Korean soldier’s gun speaks to BBC
• How two hours of martial law chaos unfolded

Martial law was last introduced in South Korea in 1979, sparked by the assassination of the then-military ruler in a coup. Today’s South Korea, however, is a far cry from that, and the repressive years that followed.

It is a stable, prosperous democracy – yet Yoon claimed he was introducing military rule to save the country from dark forces. He called the opposition-controlled National Assembly a “den of criminals” that was “attempting to paralyse” the government.

Hours later, he was forced to back down as furious protesters and lawmakers gathered outside the National Assembly – the MPs made it inside and voted down the order.

His shock declaration was, in fact, a bid to get the kind of grip on power that has eluded him since he won the presidency in 2022 by the slimmest margin in South Korea’s history.

And barely a month has passed since then without controversy.

In late 2022, he was criticised for his government’s response to the horrific crowd crush during Halloween, which killed 159 young people in Seoul.

Then there were calls to investigate his wife after she was caught accepting a Dior handbag as a gift – a scandal that is always hovering close to the headlines.

In April this year, his party was defeated in parliamentary elections, leaving him in a lame-duck position. This week alone he has been locked in a political battle with opposition lawmakers over the country’s budget.

Even before he told South Koreans he was suspending their rights, his approval rate was below 20%.

There are some clues in Yoon’s address as to what he was thinking.

What was immediately evident was that he was frustrated with the opposition-controlled parliament. In his Tuesday night address, he called the assembly where they exercise their mandate a “monster that destroys the liberal democratic system”.

The reference to a threat from North Korea and “anti-state forces” suggests he was also hoping to garner support from the kind of right-wing conservatives in South Korea who label liberal politicians “communists”.

But the president misread his country and its politics.

His declaration was a chilling reminder of a period many in South Korea have tried to forget. On television, newsreaders were seen shaking.

In 1980, when pro-democracy activists, many of them students, took to the streets of the city of Gwangju to protest at martial law, the army responded with violence and around 200 people were killed.

While martial law lasted three years – 1979 to 1981 – there had been military rule for decades before, and it continued until 1987. And in those years South Korea was rife with suspicion, when anti-government activists were dubbed Communist spies and arrested or killed.

Yet, during his election campaign Yoon praised authoritarian general Chun Doo-hwan and said he had managed government affairs well – except for his suppression of pro-democracy activists.

He was later forced to apologise and said he “certainly did not defend or praise Chun’s government”.

But it does provide some insight into the president’s view of what constitutes power.

There have been rumours in South Korean political circles for months that Yoon was considering imposing martial law. In September, opposition leaders and party members declared it was a possibility. Most dismissed it as too extreme an option.

But he may well have been driven by something more: the fear of prosecution.

Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female leader, was jailed after being found guilty of abuse of power and corruption. Her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, was investigated over allegations he was involved in stock price manipulation. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison for corruption and bribery in 2020.

Another former president, Roh Moo-hyun, took his own life in 2009 while under investigation for allegedly receiving millions in bribes.

In South Korea, prosecutions have almost become a political tool – a threat for the opposition to wield. It may partly explain why President Yoon took such drastic action.

Whatever his motives, Yoon’s career will struggle to recover from this. He is also facing calls to resign, and some local media reported that members of his own People Power Party were discussing expelling him from the party.

South Korea is a stable democracy – but it is a noisy one. And it refused to accept another authoritarian diktat.

President Yoon will now face the judgement of a parliament and a people after they rejected the most serious challenge to the country’s democracy since the 1980s.

Nineteen-year-old Hwang was watching the protests in Georgia on Tuesday night’s news when the images on TV suddenly changed – the spotlight was on his country after South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol announced martial law.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said the student, who wished to be identified only by his surname.

By Wednesday afternoon, he was among the protesters standing before the National Assembly, still stunned about what had happened the night before.

“It’s important for me to be here to show that we are against what Yoon tried to do,” Hwang said.

In a little less than six hours, Yoon was forced to walk back his shock announcement after lawmakers scrambled to block it.

But those were chaotic hours, sparking protests, fear and uncertainty in the country that had elected him.

On Tuesday night, at 23:00 local time (14:00 GMT) President Yoon, seated in front of blue creaseless curtains, made an unexpected address to the nation.

He said he was imposing martial law to protect the country from “anti-state” forces that sympathised with North Korea. The embattled leader is in a deadlock over a budget bill, dogged by corruption scandals and investigations into his cabinet members.

What followed was a sleepless night for Seoul.

Shortly after Yoon’s announcement, police lined the white metal gates outside the National Assembly building in the heart of Seoul, the building that the country’s tourism authorities have framed as “the symbol of Korean democracy”.

The military then announced that all parliamentary activity was suspended under martial law. But neither that nor the heavy security presence stopped thousands from gathering in front of the assembly in concern and fury.

It is easy to forget that South Korea – now a vibrant democracy – had its last brush with authoritarianism in the not-too-distant past – it only emerged from military rule in 1987. Martial law was last imposed in 1979.

This was “a move I never expected to see in the 21st century in South Korea,” university student Juye Hong told BBC World Service’s OS programme from Seoul.

Soon after Yoon’s shock announcement, the opposition’s Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, hosted a live stream urging people to assemble at the National Assembly and protest there.

He also asked his fellow lawmakers to make their way to the assembly to vote down the order.

Hundreds of South Koreans responded.

Tensions rose quickly as a sea of dark, puffy winter coats pushed up against lines of police in neon jackets, chanting “no to martial law”.

And as vehicles arrived with military units, crowds blocked them. One woman lay defiantly between the wheels of a vehicle.

In stark contrast, there was a façade of normalcy across the rest of Seoul. Still, confusion enveloped the city.

“The streets look normal, people here are certainly bewildered,” John Nilsson-Wright, an associate professor at the University of Cambridge, told BBC World Service from Seoul.

The policeman he spoke to was “as mystified as I am,” he added.

• The president’s gamble backfired: What was he thinking?
• What is martial law and why was it declared?
• Woman who grabbed South Korean soldier’s gun speaks to BBC
• How two hours of martial law chaos unfolded

It was a sleepless night for some. “At first I was excited at the thought of not going to school today,” 15-year-old Kwon Hoo told the BBC in Seoul on Wednesday. “But then overwhelmingly the sense of fear settled in, that kept me up all night.”

“No words can express how afraid I am that things might turn out like North Korea for our people,” a South Korean who did not want to be named told BBC OS.

Meanwhile, word was spreading that special forces had been deployed to the assembly building. Helicopters were heard overhead as they circled the skies before landing on the parliament’s roof.

Reporters jostled in the crowd outside the gates, clicking away with their cameras.

As concerns grew that the government might restrict the media, journalists in Seoul stayed in touch with one another, exchanging advice on how to stay safe.

Ahn Gwi-ryeong, the 35-year-old spokesperson for the opposition Democratic Party found herself facing down soldiers at gunpoint. A video of the moment, where she is tugging at the barrel of a soldier’s rifle, has since gone viral.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything intellectual or rational, I was just like, ‘We have to stop this, if we don’t stop this, there’s nothing else,’’ she told the BBC.

“To be honest, I was a bit scared at first when I first saw the martial law troops. I thought, ‘Is this something that can happen in 21st century Korea, especially in the National Assembly?”

“After such a storm last night, it was hard to get back to reality,” she added, recalling the previous night. “I felt like I was witnessing the regression of history.”

As Ahn was confronting the soldiers, the clock was ticking for opposition lawmakers, who rushed to get into the assembly to block the order. Once that happened, the president would have to withdraw it.

But first, MPs and their aides had to get inside. Some crawled through the legs of security forces, others shoved and screamed at armed soldiers; many frantically clambered over fences and walls.

Hong Kee-won from the Democratic Party told the BBC that he had to scale a 1.5m (4.9ft)-high fence to enter the building, with the police blocking him even after he had shown them identification that proved he was a lawmaker.

Hong said that protesters helped to hoist him over the wall. He had been asleep when Yoon made the announcement – when his wife woke him, he raced to parliament.

“Democracy is strong here,” Hong said. “The military needs to listen to us, to the constitution, and not to the president.”

Lawmakers who made it into the building huddled together, only slightly calmer than the people outside. Hastily, they barricaded the entrances with whatever they could find: cushioned benches, long tables, sofas.

Some tried to push back soldiers who had made their way into the assembly building.

By 01:00 local time, National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-sik submitted a resolution requesting martial law to be lifted.

With that, less than two hours after Yoon’s shock declaration, 190 lawmakers who gathered, including some from Yoon’s party, voted unanimously to block it.

After the vote, opposition leader Lee told reporters that this was “a decisive opportunity to break the vicious cycle and return to normal society”.

By 04:30, Yoon was back on TV, in front of the same blue curtains, saying he would withdraw martial law. But this would only be made official, he said, when he could assemble enough of his cabinet to lift the order.

The announcement was met with cheers outside the assembly. In the hours before dawn, more people emerged from the building, from behind the barricades they had haphazardly put together.

With holes in the doors and broken windows, the stately building already bears scars of the night when South Koreans saved their democracy.

Schools, local businesses and banks opened as usual on Wednesday morning – and flights continued to land uninterrupted in South Korea’s buzzing capital.

But public anger – and the political fallout – was not spent.

As the sun rose on Wednesday, thousands gathered to call for Yoon’s resignation. The president is also facing impeachment proceedings.

“We are a strong democracy…But Korean people want to be safe – President Yoon must resign or be impeached,” Yang Bu-nam, a Democratic Party politician, told the BBC.

South Korea’s president shocked the country on Tuesday night when, out of the blue, he declared martial law in the Asian democracy for the first time in nearly 50 years.

Yoon Suk Yeol’s drastic decision – announced in a late-night TV broadcast – mentioned “anti-state forces” and the threat from North Korea.

But it soon became clear that it had not been spurred by external threats but by his own desperate political troubles.

Still, it prompted thousands of people to gather at parliament in protest, while opposition lawmakers rushed there to push through an emergency vote to remove the measure.

Defeated, Yoon emerged a few hours later to accept the parliament’s vote and lift the martial law order.

Now, lawmakers will vote on whether to impeach him over what the country’s main opposition has called his “insurrectionary behaviour”.

• The president’s gamble backfired: What was he thinking?
• Woman who grabbed South Korean soldier’s gun speaks to BBC
• How two hours of martial law chaos unfolded

Yoon has acted like a president under siege, observers say.

In his address on Tuesday night, he recounted the political opposition’s attempts to undermine his government before saying he was declaring martial law to “crush anti-state forces that have been wreaking havoc”.

His decree temporarily put the military in charge – with helmeted troops and police deployed to the National Assembly parliament building where helicopters were seen landing on the roof.

Local media also showed scenes of masked, gun-toting troops entering the building while staffers tried to hold them off with fire extinguishers.

Around 23:00 local time on Tuesday (14:00 GMT), the military issued a decree banning protests and activity by parliament and political groups, and putting the media under government control.

But South Korean politicians immediately called Yoon’s declaration illegal and unconstitutional. The leader of his own party, the conservative People’s Power Party, also called Yoon’s act “the wrong move”.

Meanwhile, the leader of the country’s largest opposition party, Lee Jae-myung of the liberal Democratic Party, called on his MPs to converge on parliament to vote down the declaration.

He also called on ordinary South Koreans to show up at parliament in protest.

“Tanks, armoured personnel carriers and soldiers with guns and knives will rule the country… My fellow citizens, please come to the National Assembly.”

Thousands heeded the call, rushing to gather outside the now heavily guarded parliament. Protesters chanted: “No martial law!” and “strike down dictatorship”.

Local media broadcasting from the site showed some scuffles between protesters and police at the gates. But despite the military presence, tensions did not escalate into violence.

And lawmakers were also able to make their way around the barricades – even climbing fences to make it to the voting chamber.

Shortly after 01:00 on Wednesday, South Korea’s parliament, with 190 of its 300 members present, voted down the measure. President Yoon’s declaration of martial law was ruled invalid.

Martial law is temporary rule by military authorities in a time of emergency, when civil authorities are deemed unable to function.

The last time it was declared in South Korea was in 1979, when the country’s then long-term military dictator Park Chung-hee was assassinated during a coup.

It has never been invoked since the country became a parliamentary democracy in 1987.

But on Tuesday, Yoon pulled that trigger, saying in a national address he was trying to save South Korea from “anti-state forces”.

Yoon, who has taken a noticeably more hardline stance on North Korea than his predecessors, described the political opposition as North Korea sympathisers – without providing evidence.

Under martial law, extra powers are given to the military and there is often a suspension of civil rights for citizens and rule of law standards and protections.

Despite the military announcing restrictions on political activity and the media, protesters and politicians defied those orders. And there was no sign of the government seizing control of free media – Yonhap, the national broadcaster, and other outlets kept reporting as normal.

Yoon was voted into office in May 2022 as a hardline conservative, but has been a lame duck president since April when the opposition won a landslide in the country’s general election.

His government since then has not been able to pass the bills they wanted and have been reduced instead to vetoing bills passed by the liberal opposition.

He has also seen a fall in approval ratings – hovering around lows of 17% – as he has been mired in several corruption scandals this year, including one involving the First Lady accepting a Dior bag, and another around alleged stock manipulation.

Just last month he was forced to issue an apology on national TV, saying he was setting up an office overseeing the First Lady’s duties. But he rejected a wider investigation, which opposition parties had been calling for.

Then this week, the opposition proposed slashing a major government budget bill – which cannot be vetoed.

At the same time, the opposition also moved to impeach cabinet members and several top prosecutors- including the head of the government’s audit agency – for failing to investigate the First Lady.

The opposition Democratic Party has moved to impeach Yoon.

Parliament will have to vote by Saturday on whether to do this.

The impeachment process is relatively straightforward in South Korea. To succeed, it would require support from more than two-thirds of the 300-member National Assembly – at least 200 votes.

Once an impeachment is approved, a trial is held before the Constitutional Court – a nine-member council that oversees South Korea’s branches of government.

If six of the court’s members vote to sustain the impeachment, the president is removed from office.

If this happens, it wouldn’t be the first time that a South Korean president has been impeached. In 2016, then-President Park Geun-hye was impeached after being accused of helping a friend commit extortion.

In 2004 another president, Roh Moo-hyun, was impeached and suspended for two months. The Constitutional Court later restored him to office.

Yoon’s rash action stunned the country – which views itself as a thriving, modern democracy that has come far since its dictatorship days.

Many see this week’s events as the biggest challenge to that democratic society in decades.

Experts contend it may be more damaging to South Korea’s reputation as a democracy than even the 6 January riots in the US.

“Yoon’s declaration of martial law appeared to be both legal overreach and a political miscalculation, unnecessarily risking South Korea’s economy and security,” one expert, Leif-Eric Easley at Ewha University in Seoul said.

“He sounded like a politician under siege, making a desperate move against mounting scandals, institutional obstruction and calls for impeachment, all of which are now likely to intensify.”

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s future is hanging in the balance after a chaotic night during which he dramatically declared martial law and then withdrew it just as suddenly, plunging the country into turmoil.

Yoon, who won the top job by a whisker in 2022, was already deeply unpopular and under growing pressure since losing parliamentary elections in April, regarded as a vote of confidence on his time in office.

He’s been plagued by personal problems too. Last month he apologised in a televised address to the nation for a string of controversies surrounding his wife that included allegedly accepting a luxury Dior handbag and stock manipulation.

Now he’s facing demands that he resign and lawmakers have said they will move to impeach him.

• The president’s gamble backfired: What was he thinking?
• What is martial law and why was it declared?
• Woman who grabbed South Korean soldier’s gun speaks to BBC
• How two hours of martial law chaos unfolded

Tuesday night’s short-lived attempt to impose martial law took everyone by surprise.

It sent lawmakers scrambling to the National Assembly in Seoul to vote against the order. Outside, police had assembled as thousands of protesters gathered in fury.

The same crowd erupted in cheers when Yoon backtracked within hours and declared he would withdraw the martial law order.

That he would play such a high-stakes game, and then back off so easily, came as a surprise to South Koreans and the rest of the world.

Yoon was a relative newcomer to politics when he won the presidency. He had risen to national prominence for prosecuting the corruption case against disgraced former President Park Geun-hye in 2016.

In 2022, the political novice narrowly beat his liberal opponent Lee Jae-myung by less than 1% of the vote – the closest result the country has seen since direct elections started to be held in 1987.

At a time when South Korean society was grappling with widening divisions over gender issues, Yoon appealed to young male voters by running on an anti-feminism platform.

People had “high hopes” for Yoon when he was elected, said Don S Lee, associate professor of public administration at Sungkyunkwan University. “Those who voted for Yoon believed that a new government under Yoon will pursue such values as principle, transparency and efficiency.”

Yoon has also championed a hawkish stance on North Korea. The communist state was cited by Yoon on Tuesday night when he tried to impose martial law.

He said he needed to protect against North Korean forces and “eliminate anti-state elements”, even though it was apparent from the outset that his announcement was less about the threat from the North and more about his domestic woes.

Yoon is known for gaffes, which haven’t helped his ratings. During his 2022 campaign he had to walk back a comment that authoritarian president Chun Doo-hwan, who declared martial law and was responsible for massacring protestors in 1980, had been “good at politics”.

Later that year he was forced to deny insulting the US Congress in remarks made after meeting US President Joe Biden in New York.

He was caught on a hot mic and seen on camera seemingly calling US lawmakers a Korean word that can be translated as “idiots” or something much stronger. The footage quickly went viral in South Korea.

Yoon has had some success in foreign policy, notably improving ties in his country’s historically fraught relationship with Japan.

Yoon’s presidency has been mired in scandal. Much of it centred around his wife Kim Keon Hee, who was accused of corruption and influence peddling – most notably allegedly accepting a Dior bag from a pastor.

In November, Yoon apologised on behalf of his wife while rejecting calls for an investigation into her activities.

But his presidential popularity remained wobbly. In early November, his approval ratings tumbled to 17%, a record low since he took office.

In April, the opposition Democratic Party won the parliamentary election by a landslide, dealing a crushing defeat for Yoon and his People Power Party.

Yoon was relegated to a lame duck president and reduced to vetoing bills passed by the opposition, a tactic that he used with “unprecedented frequency”, said Celeste Arrington, director of The George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies.

This week, the opposition slashed the budget the government and ruling party had put forward – and the budget bill cannot be vetoed.

Around the same time, the opposition was moving to impeach cabinet members, mainly the head of the government audit agency, for failing to investigate the first lady.

With political challenges pushing his back against the wall, Yoon went for the nuclear option – a move that few, if any, could have predicted.

“Many observers worried in recent weeks about a political crisis because of the confrontation between the president and the opposition-controlled National Assembly,” said Dr Arrington, “though few predicted such an extreme move as declaring martial law.”

President Yoon’s declaration of martial law was a “legal overreach and a political miscalculation”, according to Leif-Eric Easley, professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

“With extremely low public support and without strong backing within his own party and administration, the president should have known how difficult it would be to implement his late-night decree,” Dr Easley told the BBC.

“He sounded like a politician under siege, making a desperate move against mounting scandals, institutional obstruction, and calls for impeachment, all of which are now likely to intensify.”

Yoon has drawn ire from politicians on both sides, as hastily-gathered lawmakers – including some from Yoon’s party – voted to lift martial law on Tuesday night. The opposition Democratic Party is trying to impeach Yoon, and even Yoon’s own party leadership has demanded the president’s withdrawal from the party. Yoon’s senior aides offered to resign en masse on Wednesday, Yonhap news agency reported.

Opposition leader Lee is projecting optimism, telling reporters that Yoon’s “illegal declaration of martial law” is a “decisive opportunity to break the vicious cycle and return to normal society”.

The repercussions of Tuesday night are set to ripple beyond South Korea’s borders. Yoon’s announcement has rattled South Korea’s allies. Officials in the US, a key ally, said they were caught off guard by Yoon’s announcement, and are urging South Korea to resolve the crisis “in accordance with the rule of law”. Japan says that it is monitoring the situation in South Korea with “exceptional and serious concerns”.

Meanwhile, North Korea, which has ratcheted up tensions with the South in recent months, may “attempt to exploit divisions in Seoul,” said Dr Easley.

Anger is still sweeping South Korea. On Wednesday protesters streamed onto the streets condemning Yoon. One of the country’s largest labour unions with over one million members is calling on workers to go on strike until he resigns.

It is unclear what Yoon plans to do. He has yet to make a public appearance since the fiasco.

“He was increasingly unpopular for the way he has dealt with the problems that have been raised with his own conduct and the conduct of the first lady,” former South Korean foreign minister Kang Kyung-wha told the BBC Newsday programme. “The ball is in the president’s court to find a way out of this corner that he has put himself in.”

But no matter how Yoon chooses to play it, his botched martial law declaration may already be shaping up to be the last straw that breaks his shaky presidency.

A chaotic night in South Korea produced scenes most thought were consigned to the nation’s history.

One in particular has caught the attention of many: a woman confronting soldiers who were sent to block lawmakers from entering the National Assembly.

Footage of Ahn Gwi-ryeong, 35, a spokesperson for the opposition Democratic Party, grabbing the weapon of a soldier during the commotion has been shared widely online.

“I didn’t think… I just knew we had to stop this,” she told the BBC Korean Service.

Ahn made her way to the assembly building as soldiers descended on it, shortly after the president declared martial law across South Korea.

Like many in South Korea’s younger generation, the word “martial law” was foreign to her. It was last declared in 1979.

When Ahn first heard the news, she admitted “a sense of panic took over”.

• Fear, fury and triumph: Six hours that shook South Korea
• The president’s gamble backfired: What was he thinking?
• What is martial law and why was it declared?
• How two hours of martial law chaos unfolded

When martial law is declared, political activities like rallies and demonstrations are banned, strikes and labour actions are prohibited, and media and publishing activities are controlled by the authorities. Violators can be arrested or detained without a warrant.

Shortly after the declaration of martial law, opposition leader Lee Jae-myung called on lawmakers to gather in the National Assembly and hold a vote to annul the declaration.

Arriving at the assembly building just past 23:00 local time, Ahn recalled turning off office lights to avoid detection as helicopters circled overhead.

By the time she reached the main building, soldiers were engaged in a stand-off with officials, aides and citizens.

She said: “When I saw the armed soldiers… I felt like I was witnessing the regression of history.”

Ahn and her colleagues were desperate to prevent the troops from entering the main building, where the vote would be held.

They locked the revolving doors from the inside and piled furniture and other heavy objects in front of the doors.

When the military began advancing, Ahn stepped forward.

“Honestly, I was scared at first,” she said, adding: “But seeing such confrontation, I thought, ‘I can’t stay silent’.”

The assembly passed the resolution calling for the lifting of martial law at around 01:00. All 190 members who were present voted to repeal it.

At 04:26, President Yoon announced he was reversing his decision.

After the chaos subsided, Ahn slept for a short time inside the assembly building.

She continued: “I was actually a little scared to go outside the assembly in the morning because there didn’t seem to be any taxis running, and after such a storm last night, it was hard to get back to reality.”

During her conversation with the BBC, Ahn was wearing the same black turtleneck and leather jacket she had been wearing in the footage from the night before.

At times, she was overcome with emotion.

“It’s heartbreaking and frustrating that this is happening in 21st century Korea,” she said.

In the 2016 Bollywood hit Pink, a scene introducing Amitabh Bachchan’s character shows the actor emerging from his home on a winter morning into Delhi’s smog-filled streets, wearing a mask.

The mask and Delhi’s smoggy air feature in other scenes of the film but are of little relevance to its plot.

Yet, it is one of the rare examples of mainstream Indian films taking notice of the deadly air that makes many parts of India dangerous to live in every year.

The toxic air pollution and recurrent winter smog in Indian capital Delhi and other parts of northern India frequently makes headlines, becoming a matter of public concern, political debate and legal censure. But unlike disasters such as the devastating floods in Uttarakhand in 2013, Kerala in 2018 and Mumbai city in 2005 – each of which have inspired films – air pollution is largely missing from Indian pop culture.

Siddharth Singh, author of The Great Smog of India, a book on pollution, says that it is a “big failure” that air pollution is not a prevailing narrative in India’s literature and filmmaking.

Much of the writing on pollution in India remains in the realm of academia and scientific expertise, he points out.

“When you say PM2.5 or NOx or SO2 (all pollutants), what are these words? They mean nothing to [ordinary] people.”

In his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh, who has written extensively about climate change, observed that such stories were missing from contemporary fiction.

“People are weirdly normal about climate change,” he said in a 2022 interview.

The writer described being in India during a heatwave.

“What struck me was the fact that everything seemed to be normal and that was the most unsettling thing,” he said. “It is like we have already learnt to live with these changes.”

Ghosh described climate change as “a slow violence” which made it difficult to write about.

That certainly holds for pollution – it can have devastating health impacts over a long time, but does not lend itself to dramatic visuals.

The subject has, however, been explored in documentaries like Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, which was nominated for the Oscars in 2022.

In the film, Sen explored climate change, pollution and the interconnected nature of human-animal relationships in Delhi’s ecosystem through the story of two brothers who treated wounded black kites that fell from the city’s smoke-filled skies.

Sen says he was interested in exploring how “something as big as the Anthropocene” (a term used to describe the current moment in time when human beings are having a profound impact on the living and physical world) or climate change were connected to petty squabbles and everyday irritability.

A scene in the film shows the two brothers arguing. One of them then points to the sky and at themselves and says, “Yeh sab jo hamare beech mein ho raha hai, ye is sab ki galti hai (What’s happening between us is the fault of all of this).”

“[The effects of climate change] actually pervade through every aspect of our life,” Sen says. “And the job of representation, be it cinema or literature, is to give it that kind of robustness in its representation.”

• Living in Delhi smog is like watching a dystopian film again and again

Environmental films that are pedantic, prescriptive, or hold audiences by the collar to make them feel bad do more disservice than good, he says.

“For me, the best films are those which are Trojan horses which are able to sneak in ideas without the audience fully knowing that they’re engaging in that conversation.”

Filmmaker Nila Madhab Panda, whose work on climate change and environment spans more than 70 films, believes art can make a difference.

Panda, who began telling stories on climate change in 2005 with his documentary Climate’s First Orphan, turned to more mainstream cinema for the message to reach wider audiences.

The filmmaker was born and raised in the Kalahandi Balangir Koraput region of the eastern state of Odisha which was prone to droughts and floods and moved to Delhi in 1995.

“It’s amazing to me that I was living in an ecosystem where you see four seasons, you drink water from the river directly. Natural wealth is free to us – air, water, fire, everything. And I come to Delhi where you buy everything. I buy water, I buy air. Every room has an air filter.”

In 2019, Panda made a short film for an anthology in which he explored the theme of Delhi’s pollution through a courtroom drama about a couple getting a divorce because they couldn’t agree on whether to continue living in the capital.

“You can’t just make anything which is not entertaining and show [it],” Panda says.

• The families fleeing Delhi to escape deadly smog

Creators also deal with the challenge of humanising difficult stories.

Singh, whose 2018 book looked at India’s air pollution crisis, says he struggled to find the people behind the statistics while writing it.

“We always read these news headlines of a million or two million people dying because of pollution every single year. But where are these people? Where are their stories?”

While themes related to the environment have often found place in India’s vast canon of regional literature, a lot of contemporary English writers, including Ghosh, have also highlighted the topic – Delhi’s Bhalswa rubbish dump features in Nilanjana S Roy’s crime novel Black River. In Gigi Ganguly’s Biopeculiar and Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches, the writers explore our relationship with the natural environment.

But there is still a long way to go.

Singh says one of the reasons for the relative shortage of such stories could be that the people creating them are “insulated” due to their privilege.

“They are not the people who are by the bank of the [polluted] Yamuna river, who see the poem in it or write about the stories along its banks.”

These days it’s memes and photos on social media that have been most effective in capturing the gravity of air pollution, he says.

“One meme that was popular a few days ago said something like, ‘Sheikh Hasina [exiled Bangladesh PM who is now in Delhi] spotted on her daily morning walk’. But the accompanying image was completely grey because the joke was not being able to see her because of air pollution!”

The writer hopes such creative outlets find enough momentum to eventually “trigger a response by those who can actually make a difference”.

“I think that’s what we lack at the moment,” he says.

For about two months each year, fisherman Faustino Mauloko da Cunha transforms his home along the South Pacific coast into a whale monitoring station.

From the morning, villagers and student volunteers gather at the house in Subaun, a village in the north of Timor-Leste. Armed with binoculars and telephoto cameras, they watch the cobalt waters for one of its great treasures – pygmy blue whales.

When there is a sighting, it’s all systems go.

Faustino’s son, Zacarias, dispatches a drone. Then the team’s leader, Australian marine ecologist Karen Edyvane, guides him to take the best photographs. When the drone returns, the team reviews the pictures, taking notes on a white board.

It’s a small and thrifty operation in Timor-Leste, which is part of an archipelago that lies between South East Asia and the South Pacific. But it has generated a wealth of information about pygmy blue whales – one of the largest animals on earth, whose vast habitats and elusive nature make them challenging to study.

These citizen science researchers, all of them locals, have spotted nearly 3,000 pygmy blue whales over the past 10 years – Prof Edyvane considers that a “truly extraordinary” number.

Timor-Leste has one of the world’s highest concentrations of marine mammals.

During the migration season – October and November – hundreds of pygmy blue whales pass through the country’s waters as they make the epic journey spanning thousands of kilometres from the Banda Sea, which lies to the north of Timor-Leste, to southern Australia.

But the area has been under-researched, says Prof Edyvane, who started the citizen science monitoring programme in 2014.

During the last two whale seasons, she has based herself in Subaun, about 50km (31 miles) from the capital Dili, working with fishermen, students and dive tour operators to document the cetaceans.

They have documented “some of the lesser known, intimate reproductive behaviours of blue whales, some for the very first time,” says Prof Edyvane, a researcher at Charles Darwin University and Australian National University.

In 2022, for instance, tourists with a local tour operator invovlved in the programme captured underwater footage of a mother nursing her calf, offering a glimpse into the species’ reproductive behaviours, which have remained largely unknown.

“It’s very, very exciting,” she adds.

The programme started as a Facebook group, inviting local tour operators, fishermen and residents to share sightings of cetaceans.

Prof Edyvane trained them on surveying methods and taught them how to use telephoto cameras and drones so that they could conduct aerial and boat surveys.

“When locals see the whales swimming by, they will post pictures on Facebook and WhatsApp. Updates come on a real-time basis and when someone shares something, everyone gets very excited,” Prof Edyvane says.

In 2016, the team worked with a dive tour operator to launch the first whale-watching tour.

It was only last year that they set up a “research station” outside the da Cunha’s village home – photos show a simple hut overlooking the bay. Outside are two tables, plastic chairs and white boards mounted on the hut’s walls.

During this year’s whale season, undergraduates from the National University of East Timor and University Oriental Timor-Leste gathered at the research station to help with the sightings.

Even such a basic structure has made the task easier.

“We’re able to monitor all day and all night,” Prof Edyvane says. “We’ve also been able to get the most incredible footage. The whales come in so close sometimes we can actually hear their blows.”

Citizen researchers like these have become powerful eyes and ears on the ground for marine scientists, says wildlife scientist Vanessa Pirotta.

“The combination of people having access to tools like drones and social media means we have insights into things that are happening while we may be behind the desk writing grants to fund our work,” she said.

The increase in research activity in Subaun has also led to a rise in tourism.

The demand for whale-watching tours has increased, diving instructor Cassio Schumacher tells the BBC, adding that these tours are “booked up years in advance”.

Local non-profits have warned of the risks of unregulated whale tourism and the government has said it intends to use Prof Edyvane’s research to “fully protect and conserve” the marine life that pass through Timor-Leste’s waters.

Prof Edyvane believes that with regulation, whale tourism has the potential to create jobs and grow Timor-Leste’s economy.

The country is one of the poorest in the world, where average annual incomes in cities hover around $1,500, according to the International Monetary Fund. In Subaun, most villagers work as subsistence fishermen and farmers, earning just about $600 to $900 a year.

The da Cunha family has now started preparing meals from local produce and the day’s catch for the students and tourists – an additional source of income.

“We enjoyed having the guests around and will love to do it again,” Faustino, 51, tells the BBC on a WhatsApp video call. “We will make it a better experience [next season].”

His son, Zacarias, has also been contracted to provide drone services for the project. Prof Edyvane says she plans to train him to give talks about whales in English.

The 26-year-old says what he appreciates is that the visitors are learning to protect the area: “The university students learn fast and well to defend this area.”

As for the tourists, he says the locals are happy to teach them. “We remind tourists not to swim with the whales but instead watch them from a distance.”

Under heavy grey skies and a thin coating of snow, hulking grey and green Cold War relics recall Ukraine’s Soviet past.

Missiles, launchers and transporters stand as monuments to an era when Ukraine played a key role in the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons programme – its ultimate line of defence.

Under the partially raised concrete and steel lid of a silo, a vast intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) peeks out.

But the missile is a replica, cracked and mouldy. For almost 30 years, the silo has been full of rubble.

The whole sprawling base, near the central Ukrainian city of Pervomais’k, has long since turned into a museum.

As a newly independent Ukraine emerged from under Moscow’s shadow in the early 1990s, Kyiv turned its back on nuclear weapons.

But nearly three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion, and with no clear agreement among allies on how to guarantee Ukraine’s security when the war ends, many now feel that was a mistake.

Thirty years ago, on 5 December 1994, at a ceremony in Budapest, Ukraine joined Belarus and Kazakhstan in giving up their nuclear arsenals in return for security guarantees from the United States, the UK, France, China and Russia.

Strictly speaking, the missiles belonged to the Soviet Union, not to its newly independent former republics.

But a third of the USSR’s nuclear stockpile was located on Ukrainian soil, and handing over the weapons was regarded as a significant moment, worthy of international recognition.

“The pledges on security assurances that [we] have given these three nations…underscore our commitment to the independence, the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of these states,” then US President Bill Clinton said in Budapest.

As a young graduate of a military academy in Kharkiv, Oleksandr Sushchenko arrived at Pervomais’k two years later, just as the process of decommissioning was getting under way.

He watched as the missiles were taken away and the silos blown up.

Now he’s back at the base as one of the museum’s curators.

Looking back after a decade of misery inflicted by Russia, which the international community has seemed unable or unwilling to prevent, he draws an inevitable conclusion.

“Seeing what’s happening now in Ukraine, my personal view is that it was a mistake to completely destroy all the nuclear weapons,” he says.

“But it was a political issue. The top leadership made the decision and we just carried out the orders.”

At the time, it all seemed to make perfect sense. No-one thought Russia would attack Ukraine within 20 years.

“We were naive, but also we trusted,” says Serhiy Komisarenko, who was serving as Ukraine’s ambassador to London in 1994.

“When Britain and United States and then France joined,” he says, “we were thinking that’s enough, you know. And Russia as well.”

For a poor country, just emerging from decades of Soviet rule, the idea of maintaining a ruinously expensive nuclear arsenal made little sense.

“Why use money to make nuclear weapons or keep them,” Komisarenko says, “if you can use it for industry, for prosperity?”

But the anniversary of the fateful 1994 agreement is now being used by Ukraine to make a point.

Appearing at the Nato foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels this week, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha brandished a green folder containing a copy of the Budapest Memorandum.

“This document failed to secure Ukrainian and transatlantic security,” he said. “We must avoid repeating such mistakes.”

A statement from his ministry called the Memorandum “a monument to short-sightedness in strategic security decision-making”.

The question now, for Ukraine and its allies, is to find some other way to guarantee the country’s security.

For President Volodymyr Zelensky, the answer has long been obvious.

“The best security guarantees for us are [with] Nato,” he repeated on Sunday.

“For us, Nato and the EU are non-negotiable.”

Despite Zelensky’s frequently passionate insistence that only membership of the Western alliance can ensure Ukraine’s survival against its large, rapacious neighbour, it’s clear Nato members remain divided on the issue.

In the face of objections from several members, the alliance has so far only said that Ukraine’s path to eventual membership is “irreversible”, without setting a timetable.

In the meantime, all the talk among Ukraine’s allies is of “peace through strength”. to ensure that Ukraine is in the strongest possible position ahead of possible peace negotiations, overseen by Donald Trump, some time next year.

“The stronger our military support to Ukraine is now, the stronger their hand will be at the negotiating table,” Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte said on Tuesday.

Unsure what Donald Trump’s approach to Ukraine will be, key providers of military assistance, including the US and Germany, are sending large new shipments of equipment to Ukraine before he takes office.

Looking further ahead, some in Ukraine are suggesting that a country serious about defending itself cannot rule out a return to nuclear weapons, particularly when its most important ally, the United States, may prove unreliable in the near future.

Last month, officials denied reports that a paper circulating in the Ministry of Defence had suggested a simple nuclear device could be developed in a matter of months.

It’s clearly not on the agenda now, but Alina Frolova, a former deputy defence minister, says the leak may not have been accidental.

“That’s obviously an option which is in discussion in Ukraine, among experts,” she says.

“In case we see that we have no support and we are losing this war and we need to protect our people… I believe it could be an option.”

It’s hard to see nuclear weapons returning any time soon to the snowy wastes outside Pervomais’k.

Just one of the base’s 30m-deep command silos remains intact, preserved much as it was when it was completed in 1979.

It’s a heavily fortified structure, built to withstand a nuclear attack, with heavy steel doors and subterranean tunnels connecting it to the rest of the base.

In a tiny, cramped control room at the bottom, accessible by an even more cramped lift, coded orders to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles would have been received, deciphered and acted upon.

Former missile technician Oleksandr Sushchenko shows how two operators would have turned the key and pressed the button (grey, not red), before playing a Hollywood-style video simulation of a massive, global nuclear exchange.

It’s faintly comic, but also deeply sobering.

Getting rid of the largest ICBMs, Oleksandr says, clearly made sense. In the mid-1990s, America was no longer the enemy.

But Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal included a variety of tactical weapons, with ranges between 100 and 1,000km.

“As it turned out, the enemy was much closer,” Oleksandr says.

“We could have kept a few dozen tactical warheads. That would have guaranteed security for our country.”

Prince Harry said his life in the US is what his mother Princess Diana would have “wanted” for him.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex relocated to Montecito, California four years ago, after announcing they would step back as senior royals and work to become financially independent.

Speaking to Andrew Sorkin at The New York Times Dealbook Summit on Wednesday, the prince was asked if he planned to remain in America for good. “I do,” he said, “I very much enjoy living here and bringing my kids up here”.

He added his family were able to access a degree of privacy and freedom they “undoubtedly wouldn’t be able to do in the UK” due to concerns around security.

Harry has pursued legal action over changes to his police protection for when he is in the UK. His security was downgraded when he stopped being a working royal.

In the interview he spoke of the impact of life in the spotlight on his mental health and on his mother, Princess Diana who was killed in a 1997 car crash in Paris while being chased by photographers.

“I think again, when you are kind of trapped within this bubble, it kind of feels like there’s no way out,” Harry said.

He continued: “What happened to my mum and the fact that I was a kid and felt helpless, there comes the inner turmoil. I felt helpless.

“One of my biggest weaknesses is feeling helpless.”

He said what worried him most was “that would happen to me, or to my wife, or to my kids”.

For now, Harry said his focus was on “being the best husband and the best dad that I can be”.

Asked about the press attention he and his wife receive, he made a joke that they had apparently moved house and divorced “10-12 times”.

“It’s just like what? It’s hard to keep up with but that’s why you sort of ignore of it,” he said.

The Duchess of Sussex meanwhile made an appearance at a fundraising gala in Beverly Hills, California, on Wednesday night.

The manhunt for a suspect who gunned down a healthcare chief executive in New York is now entering its third day, with police chasing several different leads.

UnitedHealthcare boss Brian Thompson, 50, was fatally shot in the back on Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Police say Thompson was targeted in a pre-planned killing, for which they do not yet have a motive.

Investigators are also using newly released surveillance photos and bullet casings with cryptic messages written on them to track down the suspect.

Here’s what we know about the suspect and the investigation.

Police are working with “a lot of leads”, said former FBI special agent Michael Tabman.

Police have put together more than 200 images of the suspect from his arrival in New York until he fled Midtown Manhattan after shooting Thompson, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

Police have also shared two images – the clearest ones so far – of the suspect, one of which shows him smiling with his mask pulled down.

A hostel receptionist reportedly told police that the photo was taken when she asked him to show his face, in a flirtatious moment.

• Follow live updates on the manhunt

The man was staying at the hostel on the Upper West Side in New York, where he reportedly used a fake New Jersey license as identification. Police say they have executed a search warrant at the hostel.

Officials are also attempting to make use of DNA evidence, including a water bottle and candy wrapper from the crime scene – as well as a Starbucks coffee cup – that they believe are linked to the suspect.

A mobile phone was also discovered in an alley along the suspect’s escape route.

Police believe the suspect arrived in New York as early as 10 days before the shooting took place.

Law enforcement sources told US media that a surveillance camera at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the city shows the suspect arriving by bus in New York on 24 November.

Investigators believe the suspect took a bus that originated in Atlanta, Georgia, to New York days before the shooting, CBS reports, citing a person briefed on the investigation. It’s unclear whether the person got on the bus at Atlanta or later during a stop.

The suspect then checked into the Upper West Side hostel after arriving in the city.

The hostel is near the Frederick Douglas housing project, where police say surveillance video showed the suspect outside at approximately 05:00 the morning of the crime.

The shooting took place at about 06:45 EST (11:45 GMT) in a busy part of Manhattan close to Times Square and Central Park. Thompson had been scheduled to speak at an investor conference later in the day.

According to police, the suspect – who was clad in a black face mask and light brown or cream-coloured jacket – appeared to be waiting for Thompson for five minutes outside the Hilton hotel where he was expected to speak.

Thompson, who arrived on foot, was shot in the back and leg, and was pronounced dead about half an hour later at a local hospital.

New York Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny has revealed that the suspect’s weapon appeared to jam, but that he was able to quickly fix it and keep shooting.

CCTV footage appears to show the gunman had fitted a suppressor, also known as a silencer, to his pistol, BBC Verify has established.

Investigators reportedly believe the firearm is a BT Station Six 9, a weapon which is marketed as tracing its roots back to pistols used in World War Two.

Police have reportedly visited gun stores in Connecticut to try to determine where the weapon was purchased.

After the shooting, video shows the suspect fleeing the scene on foot. Officials say he later got on an e-bike, which he rode toward Central Park, where he was last seen.

Investigators have so far not identified a motive in the killing, but they are focusing in part on words written in Sharpie on bullet casings discovered at the scene of the crime.

The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were discovered on the casings.

Investigators believe this could be a reference to the “three D’s of insurance” – a known reference made by opponents of the industry.

The terms refer to tactics used by insurance companies to refuse payment claims by patients in America’s complicated and mostly privately run healthcare system.

The words resemble – but are not exactly the same as – the title of a book called Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.

The book, published in 2010, was written by Jay Feinman, a legal scholar at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It’s billed as an exposé of the insurance industry and a how-to guide for Americans on how to navigate the system.

Professor Feinman declined to comment when the BBC contacted him.

Thompson joined UnitedHealth, the biggest private insurer in the US, from accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2004.

He rose through the ranks and became CEO in 2021, leading the company through some very profitable years.

• Who was Brian Thompson?

In an interview with MSNBC, Thompson’s wife said that there had “been some threats” against him earlier, although she was unable to provide details.

“I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him,” she said.

According to police in Thompson’s hometown of Maple Grove, Minnesota, there had previously been one suspicious incident at his home in 2018.

The incident was cleared with no criminal activity detected. No additional details were provided.

Billionaire and X owner Elon Musk could become a “political puppet master” in the US, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has said.

Clegg, who is now Mark Zuckerberg’s second-in-command at Meta, where he is the president for global affairs, made the comments to Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast.

When asked whether Musk was a threat to democracy, Clegg said the entrepreneur had been “playing an outsized role” in the US election and in the formation of the new Trump administration.

He also stood by comments labelling Meta’s social media rival, X, a “one-man, hyper-partisan, ideological hobbyhorse”.

The former Liberal Democrat leader, who served as deputy PM to David Cameron in 2010’s coalition government, swapped Westminster for Silicon Valley after losing his Sheffield Hallam seat to Labour in the 2017 general election.

In 2022, he was promoted to a senior role by Zuckerberg, with responsibility for policy as well as communication and a reported bonus of £10m on top of his £2.7m annual salary.

He has been the voice of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, on a range of highly controversial issues since then.

In his interview with Nick Robinson, he spoke about how his role was making judgements about how to balance freedom of expression with protecting audiences from harmful content on Meta.

In contrast, Musk has spoken of his mission to “remove all the censorship” from X, with Clegg saying “you can’t move [on X]… for want of tripping over stuff from the person who now privately owns it”.

When asked if Musk was “a threat to democracy”, Clegg said: “I think Elon Musk is obviously now playing an outsized role in both the election and now the formation of the new US administration.

“And I think it will see he has a choice – he can be either an avid and well-heeled supporter… Or he can try and become a sort of political…puppet master, going well beyond Trump, deciding who the next Republican candidate should be and the one after that, and so on, so forth.”

He added people were familiar with the former because “people with means” often get involved in politics, but the latter “is is quite different to the general tradition of American democracy”.

The former Lib Dem leader also highlighted the benefits of generative AI, mocking the idea the technology would “turn us all into paperclips by next Tuesday”.

He claimed fears that “AI was going to destroy democracy” were over-egged, particularly fears that democracy would “up-ended by AI deep fakes” in 2024, the year with the most elections around the world in history.

Although he conceded that didn’t mean there weren’t deep fakes or attempts to use AI to spread misinformation this year, he said “the dog that, broadly, has not barked is AI” and safeguards within the industry meant it wasn’t “the end of the world”.

He added “it has a paralysing effect when we talk about almost fictional fears” and urged a renewed focus on dealing with “real” issues around child sex abuse, deep fakes and disinformation.

Responding to criticism from campaigners and governments that Meta is not doing enough to tackle harmful content on its platforms, Clegg said: “I don’t think anyone’s ever doing enough.

“And I think this issue of how kids interact with the online world, how much they use smartphones, how they use social media apps is something that you should never, ever think that the job is done.”

A selection of the week’s best photos from across the African continent and beyond:

• From freedom fighter to Namibia’s first female president
• Biden’s Angola visit aims to showcase his attempts to rival China
• Ivory Coast’s beloved staple food gains UN cultural heritage status
• Why voters are giving Africa’s governing parties a bloody nose

A man has broken the British record for running 2,684 miles (4,320km) across Australia.

Jack Pitcher, 28, from Bracknell, Berkshire, set off from Perth on 6 October and ended his adventure at Sydney’s Bondi Beach early on Thursday.

He completed the challenge in 61 days, beating the previous record set last year by Nikki Love, from Nottingham, by 16 days.

Mr Pitcher had started the challenge with 21-year-old Joshua Smith, from Reading, but Mr Smith was forced to stop running and completed some of the route by bike before flying home.

“I’m over the moon,” Mr Pitcher said.

“To have a round number of 60 days would have been nice but I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve done.”

He was aiming to finish on Wednesday but was forced to pause a final 93.2-mile (150km) run because he was hallucinating following an earlier 74.6-mile (120km) run.

He had taken a 45-minute break between the two.

“I went through the night and I got to Sydney and started to hallucinate,” he told BBC Radio Berkshire.

“I was very dizzy on the road, it was not safe.

“I wasn’t even enjoying it. I really needed to sleep so I thought I’d get a load of calories in me and got my head down for four to five hours, and then pushed on.”

Mr Pitcher, who has previously suffered with depression, said he hoped the run would inspire others who are struggling with mental health issues.

“When I get home I’m just going to see what comes my way,” he said.

“I’m very keen to get into motivational speaking and working in mental health.

“I’m just going to see what opportunities come my way after this run.

“If something comes my way, great. But I’m certainly going to have a rest and eat as many calories as I can.”

Mr Pitcher and Mr Smith set out to raise money for SSAFA, the Armed Forces charity, and ARC Wokingham, a volunteer-run counselling service.

In 2022, Australian ultra-marathon runner Nedd Brockmann managed the feat in just 46 days and 12 hours.

US space agency Nasa has announced a further delay to its plans to send astronauts back to the Moon.

The agency’s chief, Bill Nelson, said the second mission in the Artemis programme was now due for launch in April 2026.

The plan had been to send astronauts around the Moon but not land in September 2025. The date had already slipped once before, from November of this year.

That will mean that a Moon landing will not take place until at least 2027, a year later than originally planned.

The delay is needed to fix an issue with the capsule’s heat shield, which returned from the previous test flight excessively charred and eroded, with cracks and some fragments broken off.

Mr Nelson told a news conference that “the safety of our astronauts is our North Star”.

“We do not fly until we are ready. We need to do the next test flight, and we need to do it right. And that’s how the Artemis programme proceeds.”

Mr Nelson said that engineers had got to the root of the problem and believed that it could be fixed by changing the trajectory of the capsule’s re-entry – but it would take time to carry out a thorough assessment.

Nasa is in a race with the Chinese space agency, which has its own plans to send astronauts to the Moon. Mr Nelson said he was confident that the Artemis programme would reach the lunar surface first, but he called on Nasa’s commercial and international partners to “double down to meet and improve this schedule”.

“We plan to launch Artemis 3 in mid-2027. That will be well ahead of the Chinese government’s announced intention that they have already publicly stated is 2030.”

The added delay, however, will increase the pressure on government-run Nasa – whose rocket system for sending astronauts to the Moon, the Space Launch System (SLS), has been criticised as being expensive and slow to develop.

This is in stark contrast to Elon Musk’s private sector firm, SpaceX, which is surging ahead in its efforts to build its own, eventually much cheaper and reusable Starship rocket.

The nomination of Jared Isaacman by President-elect Donald Trump to take over from Mr Nelson as Nasa’s head has added to growing concerns that big changes are in store for Nasa’s Moon programme.

Mr Isaacman is a billionaire and close collaborator with Mr Musk, who has paid for two private sector missions which have taken him to space. His entrepreneurial approach might prove a shock to Nasa’s system, according to Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist at the Open University.

“SLS is an old-school rocket. It is not reusable like Starship, hence very expensive, and it has taken a long time to get it operational. And slow and expensive is a precarious position to be in when the incoming president, we expect, is looking to save costs.

“Isaacman is going to bring a new pair of eyes over how Nasa operates. And it’s hard to predict what this combination of Isaacman, Musk and Trump might mean for Nasa as we know it.”

A gunman in the US state of California who shot and injured two children aged six and five at a school before fatally shooting himself used a “guise” to gain access to the school.

The children are in critical but stable condition and were being treated at a trauma centre, officials said on Thursday.

The attack happened on Wednesday at a school affiliated with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church near Oroville, California, about 55 miles (89km) from Sacramento.

Investigators said they believe the gunman targeted the school because of its affiliation with the church and was motivated as a response to the war in Gaza.

The sheriff on Thursday said a note was found detailing the gunman’s motive. The note said he sought to carry out the “child executions” as a “response to America’s involvement with Genocide and Oppression of Palestinians along with the attacks towards Yemen”.

Authorities said the gunman had a lengthy mental health and criminal history, which included charges of theft, fraud and forgery over the years.

The shooting occurred shortly after 13:00 local time (21:00 GMT) at the Feather River School of Seventh-Day Adventists.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said the gunman, Glenn Litton, 56, had scheduled a meeting with a school administrator to discuss enrolling a student – the ruse police say he used to get into the school.

The meeting was seemingly cordial and Litton went on a tour, Sheriff Honea said, but things took a turn when the gunman walked towards a bathroom and started opening fire. The gunfire hit students outside a classroom, striking two kindergarten-aged children.

The gunman then turned the handgun on himself, police said. He was found dead by first responders with the firearm near his body.

The school’s remaining 35 children were later transferred to a church, where they were reunited with their families.

Sheriff Honea said on Wednesday that the young victims had “very, very serious” injuries.

“I’m thankful that they are still alive but they have a long road ahead of them.”

Sheriff Honea previously said investigators “have received some information that leads us to believe that the subject responsible for the shooting targeted this school because of its affiliation with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church”.

He previously noted authorities believed the shooting was an isolated incident, but a state-wide alert was sent to other schools affiliated with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church out of an abundance of caution.

The church is a Protestant Christian denomination with over 21 million members worldwide. There are one million members of the church in North America, according to the North American Division of Seventh-Day Adventists.

Japanese actor Miho Nakayama was found dead in a bathtub in her Tokyo home on Friday. She was 54.

Ms Nakayama found success as a singer in the 1980s and 90s – at the height of J-pop’s influence – but was best known for starring in the 1995 film Love Letter.

An acquaintance discovered Ms Nakayama on Friday after she failed to show up for work. They called the paramedics, who confirmed her death at the scene, local media reported.

The cause of her death is under investigation.

Ms Nakayama had originally been scheduled to perform a Christmas show in Osaka on Friday, but cancelled her appearance, citing poor health.

A statement on her website, published by her agency, confirmed her death on Friday.

“We are stunned by the sudden occurrence of this event,” the statement said, adding that her cause of death was not confirmed.

Ms Nakayama, who was one of Japan’s most popular teen idols in the 1980s, also enjoyed an illustrious acting career – most notably as the lead actor in Love Letter, a 1995 film about a grieving widow’s letters with a stranger.

The film became a massive box office hit and garnered critical acclaim both domestically and internationally. Ms Nakayama’s performance earned her several best actress awards.

Ms Nakayama leaves behind a son, who is in the custody of her ex-husband, musician Hitonari Tsuji.

Iceland has authorised whale hunting for the next five years, despite welfare concerns.

Under the new permits, 209 fin whales and 217 minke whales can be caught during each year’s whaling season, which runs from June to September.

Animal rights and environmental groups have denounced the move by Iceland’s outgoing conservative government.

But an official notice for the permits said the licences ensured “some predictability” for the industry, while limits to the number of whales that can be hunted had been set based on advice.

The country is one of only three in the world that still allows whaling – where whales are hunted for their meat, blubber and oil – along with Japan and Norway.

Only fin and minke whales are allowed to be hunted off Iceland, while other whale populations are protected.

Permits are normally delivered for five-year periods, but the previous ones expired in 2023.

The shortened 2023 season, which lasted three weeks, saw 24 fin whales killed. The quota covered a total of 209 whales.

• What is whaling and why’s it controversial?
• Whale hunting resumes in Iceland under strict rules

In the same year, whaling was suspended in Iceland for two months after a government-commissioned inquiry concluded the methods used did not comply with animal welfare laws.

Monitoring by the government’s veterinary agency showed that explosive harpoons were causing whales prolonged agony.

The Hvalur, Iceland’s only remaining active whaling ship, had instead been reliant on licence renewals on an annual basis.

Iceland’s environment association said the issuing of news permits “violates the interests of the climate, of nature and of the well-being of animals”.

Sharon Livermore, director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s marine conservation programmes, said: “The few wealthy whalers of the country continue to exert their influence even in the dying hours of this interim government.

“This government should simply be holding the fort, but instead it has made a highly controversial and rushed decision.”

Iceland’s ruling Independence Party lost out to the centre-left Social Democratic Alliance in snap elections on Saturday.

The Icelandic government notice said the total allowable catch followed advice from Iceland’s Marine and Freshwater Research Institute “which is based on sustainable use and a precautionary approach”.

A Boeing plea deal intended to resolve a case related to two fatal crashes of its planes has been rejected by a US judge.

The plane maker agreed with the US government in July to plead guilty to one count of criminal fraud, face independent monitoring and pay a $243m (£191m) fine.

However, Judge Reed O’Connor struck down the agreement on Thursday, saying it undermined the court and that diversity requirements for hiring the monitor were “contradictory”.

Family members of the 346 people killed in the crashes welcomed the ruling, describing the plea deal as a “get-out-of-jail-free card for Boeing”.

The Department of Justice said it was reviewing the decision. Boeing did not immediately comment.

In his decision, Judge O’Connor said the government’s previous years of overseeing the firm had “failed”.

“At this point, the public interest requires the court to step in,” he wrote.

He said the proposed agreement did not require Boeing to comply with the monitor’s recommendations and gave the company a say in selecting a candidate.

Those issues had also been raised by some families of those killed on the flights, who had criticised it as a “sweetheart” arrangement that did not properly hold the firm to account for the deaths.

Judge O’Connor also focused on the deal’s requirements that race be considered when hiring the monitor, which he said would undermine confidence in the person hired.

“In a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency,” he wrote.

“The parties’ DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] efforts only serve to undermine this confidence in the government and Boeing’s ethics and anti-fraud efforts.”

Ike and Susan Riffel of California, who lost their two sons, Melvin and Bennett, said the judge had done “the right thing” in rejecting the proposed agreement.

“This deal didn’t hold anyone accountable for the deaths of 346 people and did nothing to protect the flying public,” they said in a statement supplied by their lawyer.

They said they hoped the ruling would pave the way for “real justice”.

Boeing and the Department of Justice have 30 days to develop a new plan in response to the ruling.

The plane maker has been struggling to emerge from the shadow cast by two, near-identical crashes of its 737 Max planes in 2018 and 2019.

The aerospace giant faced fresh crisis in January when a door panel on a new Boeing plane operated by Alaska Airlines blew out soon after take-off.

The incident reignited questions about what Boeing had done to improve its safety and quality record since the accidents, which were tied to the company’s flight control system.

The door panel malfunction happened shortly before the end of a three-year period of increased monitoring and reporting.

Boeing had agreed to the monitoring as part of a 2021 plea deal to resolve a charge it had deceived regulators over the flight control system.

In May, the Department of Justice said Boeing had violated the terms of that agreement, opening up the possibility of prosecution.

Instead, the two sides struck another deal, angering families who had hoped to see the company brought to trial.

In the ruling, Judge O’Connor wrote it was “not clear what all” Boeing had done to breach the 2021 agreement.

Nonetheless, he wrote, “taken as true that Boeing breached the [deal], it is fair to say that the government’s attempt to ensure compliance has failed”.

Erin Appelbaum, partner at Kreindler & Kreindler, which represents some families of those killed on the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, called Thursday’s ruling an “excellent decision and a significant victory” for the victims’ families.

“We anticipate a significant renegotiation of the plea deal that incorporates terms truly commensurate with the gravity of Boeing’s crimes,” she said.

“It’s time for the [Department of Justice] to end its lenient treatment of Boeing and demand real accountability.”

South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered the arrest of his own ruling party’s leader Han Dong-hoon when he declared martial law on Tuesday night.

The arrest list also included the leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, as well as three opposition lawmakers, the National Intelligence Service deputy director said.

The president tried to “use this chance to arrest them and wipe them out”, said director Hong Jang-won.

The revelation came as the country’s political parties held emergency meetings throughout Friday, with MPs planning to bring a vote to impeach Yoon. The motion, which is scheduled for Saturday, will pass if two-thirds of MPs vote for it.

• Why did South Korea’s president declare martial law?
• Who is Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s scandal-hit president?
• Fear, fury and triumph: Six hours that shook South Korea
• How two hours of martial law unfolded in South Korea
• ‘We had to stop this’: Woman who grabbed South Korean soldier’s gun speaks to BBC

The opposition have a majority in the 300-seat parliament but need the support of at least eight ruling party MPs to secure the 200 votes required for the impeachment motion to pass.

In the first clear sign his own party may now vote with the opposition, the leader of Yoon’s ruling party called for his swift suspension on Friday, saying he posed a “great danger” to democracy if he remained in power.

Han Dong-hoon, chief of the People Power Party (PPP), had earlier in the week said his party would not support the opposition’s impeachment motion.

But on Friday he announced there was “credible evidence” that Yoon had ordered the arrest of key politicians – including himself- on “anti-state charges” on Tuesday.

Han said Yoon had planned to jail arrested politicians in a detention centre in Gwacheon, a city south of Seoul.

He expressed concern that “extreme actions”, such as the martial law declaration, could be repeated if Yoon remained in office.

“[These are] putting the Republic of Korea and its people at great risk.

South Koreans spent another day waiting to hear about the fate of their president on Friday, as the impeachment vote loomed.

In the afternoon, there were reports the president was heading to parliament, which his office denied. But opposition MPs lined up to block entry to the assembly, chanting “impeach, impeach”.

Earlier, special forces commander Kwak Jong-kuen had assured parliament he would refuse to follow such an order if martial law was declared again, as the opposition have been suggesting it might be.

Kwak said on Tuesday night he had rejected orders to remove MPs from the assembly floor when they were gathering to vote down the martial law declaration.

“I ordered soldiers not to enter the floor… I ordered that no live ammunition be given out [and] that no harm must come to the civilians,” he said.

• Listen: Democracy in crisis in South Korea

Later in the day, he and other two other commanders were suspended for executing the martial law order before it was revoked.

Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law shocked the country and unnerved South Korea’s allies and financial markets.

He cited threats from “anti-state forces” and North Korea. But it soon became clear that his move had been spurred not by external threats but by his own domestic political troubles.

The order was abruptly reversed hours later after 190 MPs managed to make it into the parliament and vote it down – some of them climbing fences and breaking barricades to get into the chamber.

Opposition lawmakers are concerned that there will be another attempt to impose martial law. Some of them earlier told BBC they have been staying close to the National Assembly grounds so they could get there quickly to vote down any such declaration.

The capital, Seoul, has seen more than two days of street protests demanding Yoon’s resignation, while police said he is being investigated for “insurrection”.

People have also been flooding PPP lawmakers with text messages, urging them to vote for Yoon’s impeachment, according to South Korean media reports.

One MP, Shin Sung-bum, received more than 4,000 such messages on Facebook, The Chosun Daily reported.

Cho Kyung-tae was the first ruling party MP to publicly voice support for Yoon’s impeachment.

“The choice between standing on the side of the people by suspending the president’s duties or becoming an ally of the forces that imposed martial law is a matter for politicians to judge,” Cho said on Friday.

“I hope that all the politicians of the People’s Power will stand on the side of the people,” he added.

More than seven out of 10 South Koreans were in favour of the impeachment, a survey by local pollster Realmeter showed on Thursday.

Yoon has not been seen or spoken publicly since reversing the martial law order early on Wednesday. A survey conducted from Tuesday to Thursday this week showed his approval rating had tumbled to a record low of 13%.

Before his attempt to place the country under military rule, the president had already been beset by low popularity ratings, corruption allegations and an opposition-led legislature that reduced him to a lame-duck leader.

Japanese actor Miho Nakayama was found dead in a bathtub in her Tokyo home on Friday. She was 54.

Ms Nakayama found success as a singer in the 1980s and 90s – at the height of J-pop’s influence – but was best known for starring in the 1995 film Love Letter.

An acquaintance discovered Ms Nakayama on Friday after she failed to show up for work. They called the paramedics, who confirmed her death at the scene, local media reported.

The cause of her death is under investigation.

Ms Nakayama had originally been scheduled to perform a Christmas show in Osaka on Friday, but cancelled her appearance, citing poor health.

A statement on her website, published by her agency, confirmed her death on Friday.

“We are stunned by the sudden occurrence of this event,” the statement said, adding that her cause of death was not confirmed.

Ms Nakayama, who was one of Japan’s most popular teen idols in the 1980s, also enjoyed an illustrious acting career – most notably as the lead actor in Love Letter, a 1995 film about a grieving widow’s letters with a stranger.

The film became a massive box office hit and garnered critical acclaim both domestically and internationally. Ms Nakayama’s performance earned her several best actress awards.

Ms Nakayama leaves behind a son, who is in the custody of her ex-husband, musician Hitonari Tsuji.

The speed with which the status quo in Syria – however unresolved and unsatisfactory – has been turned on its head in recent days has been extraordinary.

Syrian government officials and supporters were still asserting the army would hold the line at Hama, even as insurgent fighters were entering the city.

Shortly afterwards, the Syrian military acknowledged that it had pulled out of Hama, ceding control of the city for the first time to rebel factions.

After capturing two major cities within a week, the next target for the insurgents led by the Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is Homs.

Tens of thousands of people are fleeing the city in anticipation of what looks likely to be the next major battle.

The stakes have risen precipitously for President Bashar al-Assad and his key backers, Russia and Iran.

Homs is strategically considerably more significant than either Aleppo or Hama. It straddles a crossroads that leads west to the heartland of support for the Assad dynasty and south towards the capital, Damascus.

Whatever the previous strategy of HTS may have been, as it spent years building its power base in the north-western province of Idlib, the momentum of the past week now seems to be leading inexorably towards a direct challenge to the continuing rule of Assad.

In an interview with CNN, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani confirmed the rebels do indeed aim to overthrow the Assad regime

So, attention is now focusing on whether the Syrian leader has the capacity to see off this renewed attempt to topple him from power.

The Syrian army – which is largely made up of conscripts – might have lost the war years ago if outside forces had not come to Assad’s aid.

Soldiers are underpaid, under-equipped and often have poor morale, with desertion having long been an issue.

• Live: Follow the latest updates in Syria

As his military failed to hold Aleppo and then Hama, Assad issued an order raising soldiers’ salary by 50% – but that in itself is unlikely to turn the tide.

Russian planes backed up Syrian forces in Hama, but clearly not strongly enough to make an impact.

The lack of all out Russian military support has fuelled speculation that Moscow may be less able to play the game changing role that it performed in Syria in 2015. That would be down to almost three years of war in Ukraine, draining its reserves of manpower and military hardware.

But Russia still has compelling reasons to stay the course with Assad. President Putin’s decisive, full-scale military intervention, which kept the Syrian leader in power when he was close to defeat, showed up the failure of Western allies – the US in particular – to honour their promises of support to the rebels.

The naval base that Russia has maintained for decades in the Syrian port of Tartus gives Moscow its only military hub in the Mediterranean. If the insurgents are able to take Homs, that could potentially open up a route towards the Syrian coast that could put the base at risk.

It still seems unlikely that Russia would not feel a political and strategic imperative to refocus its firepower on the rebels to keep Assad in power, even if only in control of a diminished rump of Syria drastically shrunk from the 60% he currently controls.

The other big question mark is over Iran and the militias it has backed – including Hezbollah- and the military expertise it has provided, which have been the other key element in keeping Assad in power.

Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem – who took over after Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah – has declared that the group will stand by the Syrian government, against what he has described as jihadist aggression orchestrated by the US and Israel.

But with its leadership decimated and its fighters still regrouping after Israel’s ground and air offensive against the group in Lebanon in recent months, Hezbollah may be nowhere near the strength it had when it battled on the frontline against Syrian rebel factions.

However, it clearly is still committed to playing its part, with security sources in Lebanon and Syria saying that elite forces from Hezbollah have crossed over into Syria and taken up positions in Homs.

As for Tehran, it currently seems to be edging away from both direct and proxy confrontations in the region, in contrast to its far more aggressive strategy in the past few years.

That may limit its appetite for the kind of full-scale military support for Assad that it has provided in the past.

There has been speculation that Iranian-backed militias in Iraq may enter the fray – but both the Iraqi government and one of the most powerful Shia leaders, Moqtada al-Sadr, have warned against this.

Assad’s chances of political survival will depend not only on the capabilities of his armed forces and his key allies, but also on the existing divisions between the various groups that oppose him.

Beyond HTS and the factions from Idlib, there are the Kurdish-led forces in the north-east, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army in the north and a host of other groups that still have some purchase in various regions of the country.

Among them is the Islamic State (IS) group, which could take advantage of the latest conflict to try to make gains beyond the remote desert regions where it still has a toehold.

The failure of rebel factions to unite was one of the key factors in Assad’s political survival. He and his supporters will be hoping that events play out in the same way again.

For now, support for the Syrian president as the least worst alternative still seems to be holding among several minority groups – including of course the Assads’ own minority Alawite sect.

They fear what they view as a jihadist force taking over their towns and cities. HTS may have renounced its previous affiliation with al-Qaeda, but many still see it as an extremist organisation.

In the end, what Assad’s fate seems most likely to hinge on is what the main outside players in Syria decide.

Russia, Iran and Turkey have come to agreements before over conflict zones in Syria, most notably in Idlib four years ago – but the rapid surprise escalation in Syria may have blindsided them all.

They may all soon have to reassess and come to a decision on what suits their interests – a Syria with Assad or without.

A Muslim couple in India have been hounded out of their newly-purchased home by their Hindu neighbours who said they would not allow them to live there because of their religion.

Hindu residents of the posh TDI City – an upscale residential bloc in the northern city of Moradabad – began protesting on Tuesday night after news of the sale became public.

The incident resulted in a huge outrage in India after a video from the protest went viral. It showed one of the residents Megha Arora saying that Dr Ashok Bajaj, a resident, had sold his house to a Muslim family without consulting them.

“We cannot tolerate a Muslim family living right in front of our local temple. This is also a question of the safety of our women,” she said.

“We want the sale to be revoked and are asking the administration to cancel the registration of the house in the name of its new owners. We cannot allow people from another faith to come and live here. We will not allow them to enter and continue to protest as long as they don’t go away,” she added.

Many of the residents also visited the district magistrate’s office to lodge a complaint. Outside, they shouted slogans against Dr Bajaj and the Muslim couple.

The protests have had their intended effect. On Friday, Dr Bajaj told the BBC that a resolution, mediated by the city’s elected representative, had been reached and the new Muslim owners would re-sell the house to a Hindu family already living in the housing society.

Dr Bajaj, who runs an eye hospital in the city and had lived in the society for more than six years, said he had sold the house to the Muslim couple who are both doctors and that their families had known each other for 40 years. The Muslim couple, he said, were no longer comfortable moving into the house.

He added that the furore over the sale was “uncalled for” and that he had not expected it to become national news.

But there is evidence that incidents of violence and discrimination against India’s Muslim community have grown in the past decade under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Anti-Muslim hate speech incidents have surged, with a majority reported from states ruled by the BJP – Moradabad is also located in the BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh. The BJP has consistently denied these claims.

Tanvir Aeijaz, professor of politics and public policy at Delhi University, says the incident in Moradabad “shows that religious polarisation has sunk in, that it’s working at the ground level”.

• Why segregated housing is thriving in India
• Beaten and humiliated by Hindu mobs for being a Muslim in India

Dr Bajaj says the protest started after he introduced the Muslim couple to his neighbours as a gesture of goodwill.

The backlash to the sale of the house, he said, “has come out of nowhere” as there are other Muslim families already living in the colony and that “we had always had a good rapport with our neighbours”.

“The controversy is changing the fabric of the city. Our intention was not to create any kind of unrest with this transaction,” he said, adding that “there is no law” against this transaction.

The colony also did not have a residents’ association that would need to approve the sale, he said. “Now they have woken up to make it.”

This is not the first time Muslim residents have faced backlash in Moradabad for buying homes in a Hindu-majority area. In 2021, residents and Hindu hardline organisations had protested after two Muslim families had purchased houses from Hindus.

Segregated living has existed in rural India for a long time where different castes and religions lived apart. The urban centres were meant to be the melting pots where people could live together, irrespective of their differences. However, in reality, many urban areas continue to experience segregation.

Discrimination against minority communities, especially Muslims, is common in many Indian cities where many housing societies insist on food habits such as vegetarianism to keep them out.

Muslims in states like Gujarat and Maharashtra and even in the capital, Delhi, have often said they are unable to buy or rent homes in Hindu neighbourhoods. A few years ago, a Bollywood actor Emraan Hashmi had made headlines for alleging he was refused a flat in Mumbai because of his Muslim faith.

Prof Aeijaz says denying the Muslim couple in Moradabad the choice to buy the house they wanted is “discriminatory and completely unconstitutional”.

“It’s a violation of their fundamental and legal rights. This is a violation of a person’s right to equality and freedom and if such cases increase, they endanger the constitution of India.”

Prof Aeijaz says there are special rights to protect Dalits (formerly known as untouchables) and women who are considered vulnerable groups, “but how come there are no rights to protect Muslims who are the most vulnerable group in India”? he asks.

This incident has also resulted in a huge outrage with many taking to social media to express their anger.

“Welcome to #NewIndia,” comedian Akash Banerjee wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “A doctor sold his house to a fellow doctor… Why on earth would that lead to a massive protest/uproar in a posh housing society in Moradabad?” he asked.

“As a nation we always boast about unity in diversity. We should be ashamed about these incidents,” wrote John Brittas, an MP from the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Those protesting against the couple “were not nameless, faceless individuals”, another user wrote on X. “They were people unafraid and unashamed of publicly displaying their bigotry and lsIamophobia.”

Prof Aeijaz, however, says he feels hopeful that things will change for the better.

“Hinduism is based on pluralism. Most people I meet understand that hate is against their religion. And that gives me hope.”

Romania’s constitutional court has annulled the result of the first round of voting in the presidential election just days before the second round was due to take place.

It means the process will be restarted from scratch, with the government due to decide a date for a new vote.

The first round was won by Calin Georgescu, an almost unknown far-right Nato-sceptic who has previously praised Vladimir Putin.

The court’s decision comes after intelligence documents were declassified, suggesting Georgescu benefitted from a mass influence operation – conducted from abroad – to interfere with the result of the vote.

Outgoing Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said the court’s decision to annul was “the only correct solution after the declassification of the documents… which show that the result of the Romanians’ vote was blatantly distorted as a result of Russia’s intervention”.

The judges of the court met on Friday morning, despite having announced the previous night that they would not discuss new information regarding possible external influence on the elections until the second round of voting.

The law stipulates that, in the event of the annulment of the elections, they should resume on the second Sunday after the date of the annulment – which would have meant on 22 December.

However, the court has decided to ask the government to rerun the entire electoral process, and therefore the electoral campaign.

Last week, the court had ordered a recount of votes cast in Sunday’s first round following allegations that social media platform TikTok gave “preferential treatment” to the surprise winner, Calin Georgescu.

Georgescu, a radical with no party of his own, campaigned mainly on TikTok. The platform said it was “categorically false to claim his account was treated differently to any other candidate”.

He won 23% of the vote, with 19% for the runner-up, Elena Lasconi, of the opposition Save Romania Union and Ciolacu of the governing Social Democrats in third.

Lasconi condemned the court’s ruling as “illegal” and “immoral”, saying “today is the moment when the Romanian state has trampled on democracy”.

“Whether we like it or not, from a legal and legitimate point of view, nine million Romanian citizens, both in the country and in the diaspora, have expressed their preference for a certain candidate. We cannot ignore their will!” she said.

She had been hoping to win the second round run-off on Sunday, which has now been cancelled.

The Constitutional Court also rejected claims filed by two of the losing candidates who accused Georgescu of illegal campaign financing.

This week, Georgescu denied to the BBC that he was Moscow’s man.

He claimed the political establishment could not cope with his success and was trying to block him.

The country is now in totally new territory, politically. And no-one is quite sure what comes next.

The Met Office has issued a rare red weather warning for wind as Storm Darragh approaches the UK.

Red weather warnings are the most serious type. The Met Office only issues them when meteorologists believe that dangerous, potentially life-threatening weather is expected imminently.

It is in place from 03:00 to 11:00 GMT on Saturday, covering western and southern coastal regions of Wales, as well as the Bristol Channel including parts of Bristol and Cardiff.

The last red warning was issued in January for winds in north-east Scotland.

The areas under the red warning are forecast wind gusts of 90mph (144kmph) or more, which could lead to flying debris and falling trees, posing a danger to life, the Met Office said.

Amber warnings covering Northern Ireland, Wales and the west coast of England are in place on Saturday morning.

The winds are also expected to cause large waves, power cuts affecting mobile phone services, as well as damage to buildings and homes. Transport networks are also anticipated to be affected.

Heavy rain and strengthening winds will be felt across western parts of the UK from late on Friday.

This weather pattern will turn into Storm Darragh moving into Saturday.

The Met Office said the strongest winds would subside by late Saturday morning, but that it would remain very windy until the evening, with amber warnings remaining in place until then.

A yellow rain warning, indicating a risk of flooding, is also in place in parts of the western UK.

In the north of Scotland, a yellow warning for snow is in place, with areas above 400m (1,300ft) getting up to 20cm (8in) of snow. Snow will affect higher parts of the A9 and A83, and may lead to disruption and potential closures.

The Irish Meteorological Service has also issued a red warning for wind from 22:00 on Friday across parts of counties Donegal, Leitrim and Sligo.

Some travel providers have warned that services were likely to be affected.

Stena Line ferries said some services across the Irish Sea on Saturday would be cancelled, while the Scottish CalMac operator said some routes could face disruption at short notice.

National Rail said some train journeys in the south west would face disruption, and urged users to check their journey before setting off.

Bristol Airport warned passengers that “disruption is expected” and passengers should check with their airline before travelling.

SP Energy Networks, a Scottish energy firm, said it was mobilising engineers to respond to power cuts “as quickly as possible” but added that customers should tell them if they lose power.

“If you experience a power outage … please don’t assume we know about it.”

Several events have also been cancelled for this weekend, including the Enchanted Winter Garden at Antrim Castle in Northern Ireland, as well as Christmas events across England including in Shropshire, Cambridge and Cornwall.

The RAC has advised motorists to postpone their journeys due to the “highly unusual” red weather warning.

Spokeswoman Alice Simpson told the BBC: “Exposed rural and coastal routes will be particularly treacherous.

“Drivers in these areas should be wary of any high-sided vehicles as they are at risk of being buffeted off course or, worse still, blown over.”

Storm Darragh is the fourth named storm of the year, after Ashley, Bert and Conall.

Some parts of the UK are still recovering from Storm Bert, which caused extreme flooding and led to the deaths of five people in November.

Scientists say as the Earth’s climate warms, extreme weather events will become more frequent. For every 1C rise in average temperature, the atmosphere can hold up to around 7% more moisture.

Globally, heavy rainfall events have become more frequent and intense over most land regions, according to the UN’s climate body, which says the pattern will intensify with further warming.

The manhunt for a suspect who gunned down a healthcare chief executive in New York is now entering its third day, with police chasing several different leads.

UnitedHealthcare boss Brian Thompson, 50, was fatally shot in the back on Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Police say Thompson was targeted in a pre-planned killing, for which they do not yet have a motive.

Investigators are also using newly released surveillance photos and bullet casings with cryptic messages written on them to track down the suspect.

Here’s what we know about the suspect and the investigation.

Police are working with “a lot of leads”, said former FBI special agent Michael Tabman.

Police have put together more than 200 images of the suspect from his arrival in New York until he fled Midtown Manhattan after shooting Thompson, according to the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

Police have also shared two images – the clearest ones so far – of the suspect, one of which shows him smiling with his mask pulled down.

A hostel receptionist reportedly told police that the photo was taken when she asked him to show his face, in a flirtatious moment.

• Follow live updates on the manhunt

The man was staying at the hostel on the Upper West Side in New York, where he reportedly used a fake New Jersey license as identification. Police say they have executed a search warrant at the hostel.

Officials are also attempting to make use of DNA evidence, including a water bottle and candy wrapper from the crime scene – as well as a Starbucks coffee cup – that they believe are linked to the suspect.

A mobile phone was also discovered in an alley along the suspect’s escape route.

Police believe the suspect arrived in New York as early as 10 days before the shooting took place.

Law enforcement sources told US media that a surveillance camera at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the city shows the suspect arriving by bus in New York on 24 November.

Investigators believe the suspect took a bus that originated in Atlanta, Georgia, to New York days before the shooting, CBS reports, citing a person briefed on the investigation. It’s unclear whether the person got on the bus at Atlanta or later during a stop.

The suspect then checked into the Upper West Side hostel after arriving in the city.

The hostel is near the Frederick Douglas housing project, where police say surveillance video showed the suspect outside at approximately 05:00 the morning of the crime.

The shooting took place at about 06:45 EST (11:45 GMT) in a busy part of Manhattan close to Times Square and Central Park. Thompson had been scheduled to speak at an investor conference later in the day.

According to police, the suspect – who was clad in a black face mask and light brown or cream-coloured jacket – appeared to be waiting for Thompson for five minutes outside the Hilton hotel where he was expected to speak.

Thompson, who arrived on foot, was shot in the back and leg, and was pronounced dead about half an hour later at a local hospital.

New York Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny has revealed that the suspect’s weapon appeared to jam, but that he was able to quickly fix it and keep shooting.

CCTV footage appears to show the gunman had fitted a suppressor, also known as a silencer, to his pistol, BBC Verify has established.

Investigators reportedly believe the firearm is a BT Station Six 9, a weapon which is marketed as tracing its roots back to pistols used in World War Two.

Police have reportedly visited gun stores in Connecticut to try to determine where the weapon was purchased.

After the shooting, video shows the suspect fleeing the scene on foot. Officials say he later got on an e-bike, which he rode toward Central Park, where he was last seen.

Investigators have so far not identified a motive in the killing, but they are focusing in part on words written in Sharpie on bullet casings discovered at the scene of the crime.

The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were discovered on the casings.

Investigators believe this could be a reference to the “three D’s of insurance” – a known reference made by opponents of the industry.

The terms refer to tactics used by insurance companies to refuse payment claims by patients in America’s complicated and mostly privately run healthcare system.

The words resemble – but are not exactly the same as – the title of a book called Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.

The book, published in 2010, was written by Jay Feinman, a legal scholar at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It’s billed as an exposé of the insurance industry and a how-to guide for Americans on how to navigate the system.

Professor Feinman declined to comment when the BBC contacted him.

Thompson joined UnitedHealth, the biggest private insurer in the US, from accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2004.

He rose through the ranks and became CEO in 2021, leading the company through some very profitable years.

• Who was Brian Thompson?

In an interview with MSNBC, Thompson’s wife said that there had “been some threats” against him earlier, although she was unable to provide details.

“I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him,” she said.

According to police in Thompson’s hometown of Maple Grove, Minnesota, there had previously been one suspicious incident at his home in 2018.

The incident was cleared with no criminal activity detected. No additional details were provided.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden is considering pre-emptive pardons for prominent critics of his successor Donald Trump, multiple people familiar with the discussions have told CBS, the BBC’s US partner.

That is in a bid to shield them from potential retribution after Trump – who has vowed to take revenge against those who have opposed him – takes office.

CBS reports that while Biden is said to have debated the possibility of issuing the pardons with senior White House aides, no specific names had been formally recommended to him.

Sources have told AFP that officials are also considering the message it would send to pardon people who have not committed crimes.

That is in the wake of the controversy surrounding Biden’s unconditional pardoning of his son Hunter, who was set to face sentencing this month on federal felony gun and tax convictions.

Republicans and some Democrats have criticised the move, which came after the president previously said he would not take such a step.

• What did Hunter Biden do and what is a presidential pardon?
• White House defends pardon of Hunter Biden amid backlash
• The awkward parallels between the Biden and Trump convictions

US media reports that those who could be in line for the potential pre-emptive pardons from Biden include Dr Anthony Fauci, who has been critical of Trump’s Covid response, and California’s Senator-elect Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment effort against Trump.

Other Democrats who, like Schiff, had a role in the Trump impeachment cases, or who investigated the 2021 US Capitol riots, could also be granted them.

In an interview with NPR last month, Schiff said he did not think pre-emptive pardons were a good idea because he believed the courts were capable of withstanding threats from Donald Trump.

“I think this is frankly so implausible as not to be worthy of much consideration,” he said of the reports that such pardons were being considered.

“I would urge the president not to do that. I think it would seem defensive and unnecessary.”

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier this week that more pardons could be expected from President Biden before the end of his term in January but did not give further details.

“He’s thinking through that process very thoroughly.”

Among those who could be given the more traditional presidential pardons for crimes committed are nonviolent drug offenders or others who’ve served time for various offences, CBS reports.

Donald Trump is not the only person to threaten retribution against those perceived to have opposed him in the past. His nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has said he would go after politicians and members of the media who he alleges without evidence helped overturn the 2020 US presidential election results.

“We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said.

“We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice… We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”

Democratic Congressman Brendan Boyle said in response that he thought Biden should issue blanket pardons to those targeted on what he called Donald Trump’s “enemies list”.

“By choosing Kash Patel as his FBI Director, Trump has made it clear that he is more focused on settling personal scores than on protecting the American people or upholding the rule of law,” said Boyle.

Lizzo has won a key ruling in her ongoing legal battle with a stylist who claims she was subjected to racial and sexual harassment and a hostile work environment by members of the singer’s management team while on tour in 2023, as well as unpaid over time.

A Los Angeles federal judge ruled on Monday that wardrobe assistant Asha Daniels could not sue the Grammy winner as an individual, after identifying the singer’s touring and payroll companies as her employers. But Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc remains a defendant in the ongoing case.

US district judge Fernando L Aenlle-Rocha dismissed all seven causes of action against Lizzo, and those regarding her tour manager Carlina Gugliotta.

The judge also granted a partial motion to dismiss several of the claims due to the fact that Daniels worked for the company while on tour in Europe, where American employment laws do not apply.

Fashion designer Daniels claims Lizzo oversaw an “unsafe, sexually charged workplace culture”, which the singer has denied.

She accused the star’s wardrobe manager of making “racist and fatphobic” comments and mocking black women in the entourage.

A spokesperson for the singer called the case an “absurd publicity stunt”.

Her lawyers described Daniels as a “disgruntled” former employee with “meritless and salacious” claims.

Lizzo, known for tracks like Truth Hurts and Juice, built her reputation on body positivity, but last year found herself the subject of several similar accusations.

Daniels’ case echoed previous allegations made by three of Lizzo’s former tour dancers, who sued the star in August last year, accusing her of sexual harassment and fat-shaming over multiple incidents in 2021 and 2023.

In a statement at the time, Lizzo denied the allegations, saying: “These sensationalised stories are coming from former employees who have already publicly admitted that they were told their behaviour on tour was inappropriate and unprofessional.”

The star and her Big Grrrl Big Touring company have requested that the court dismiss the dancers’ allegations. The dancers are requesting a jury trial.

In April this year, Lizzo – real name Melissa Viviane Jefferson – assured her fans online that she would not be leaving the limelight anytime soon.

She previously wrote: “I quit”, saying she was fed up of being targeted for her looks and character online.

But she later clarified in a new video: “When I say ‘I quit’, I mean I quit giving any negative energy attention.”

The regular British army could be wiped out in as little as six months if forced to fight a war on the scale of the Ukraine conflict, a defence minister has warned.

Alistair Carns said a rate of casualties similar to that prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would lead to the army being “expended” within six to 12 months.

He said it illustrated the importance of having reserves in order to be able to fight in a “war of scale”.

Official figures show the army had 109,245 personnel on 1 October, including 25,814 volunteer reservists.

Carns, a former Royal Marines colonel who is also a reservist, said Russia was suffering losses of around 1,500 soldiers, killed or wounded, a day.

“In a war of scale – not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine – our army for example on the current casualty rates would be expended, as part of a broader multinational coalition, in six months to a year,” he added.

In a speech on reserves at the Royal United Services Institute defence think tank in London, Carns, the minister for veterans and people, said: “That doesn’t mean to say we need a bigger army, but it does mean we must be able to generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis.

“The reserves are critical, absolutely central, to that process.

“Without them we cannot generate mass, we cannot meet the plethora of defence tasks and challenges that we require, and we cannot seamlessly integrate the very best experts into the heart of our armed forces.”

Speaking separately at the same think tank, the head of the armed forces said it was important to note there was only a “remote” chance that Russia would launch a “significant direct attack or invasion” on the UK, or other Nato member.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin added that Russia “knows the response would be overwhelming, whether conventional or nuclear”.

But he added that it showed the need for nuclear deterrence to be “kept strong and strengthened,” warning that the world was entering a “third nuclear age” following the Cold War and subsequent period of disarmament.

This new age would be defined by the “almost total absence of the security architectures that went before,” and more countries having nuclear weapons.

He added that China’s increasing nuclear weapons stockpile meant the United States could face a “two-peer challenge” from Beijing and Moscow, with both countries possessing significant arsenals.

Army reservists serve in their spare time, getting paid to train outside their main jobs.

Carns said the reality of wars such as the one being fought in Ukraine was that they were “attritional in nature”.

He also said the UK needed to “catch up with Nato allies” by placing a greater emphasis on its reserves.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said the UK’s armed forces were “amongst the best in the world and offer a 24/7 defence of the UK, operating alongside our allies and partners to prepare for any event”.

“The Strategic Defence Review will look at the threats we face and the capabilities we need so that our Armed Forces are better ready to fight, more integrated and more innovative,” they added.

“Our Reserves are an essential and extremely valued element of the Armed Forces and the contributions they make to our resilience and our ability to call on additional personnel when required are vital.”

Earlier, the prime minister’s official spokesman said the Budget had “invested billions of pounds into defence”.

Last month, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff Lieutenant General Sir Rob Magowan told MPs on the Defence Select Committee: “If the British Army was asked to fight tonight, it would fight tonight.

“I don’t think anybody in this room should be under any illusion that if the Russians invaded eastern Europe tonight, then we would meet them in that fight.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Foreign Secretary David Lammy urged Nato’s European members to step up their defence spending ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

The US president-elect has accused European countries of relying on American taxpayers for their security.

At a meeting of Nato’s foreign ministers in Brussels, Lammy said “the time to act is now” – although the UK government has yet to set out its own plans for increasing its spending on defence to 2.5% of national output.

He highlighted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its involvement in conflicts around the world, including the Middle East.

“In the United Kingdom, we are at 2.3%, heading to 2.5% as soon as we can get there, and we urge all allies across the Nato family to get serious about defence spending.

“All of our populations require us to understand the tremendous security challenges that we are facing at this time,” he added.