In the end the Assad regime was so hollow, corrupt and decayed that it collapsed in less than a fortnight.

No one I have spoken to has been anything other than astonished by the speed with which the regime turned to dust.

In the spring of 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, it was different, when Syrians tried to grab some of the revolutionary magic that had swept away the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the veteran strongmen of Libya and Yemen.

By 2011, the regime created by Hafez al-Assad and passed to his son Bashar on his death in 2000 was already corrupt and decadent.

But the system that Hafez built still had much of the brutal, ruthless strength that he believed was necessary to control Syria. Assad senior had seized power in a country that was prone to coups and delivered it to his son and heir without a significant challenge.

Bashar al-Assad went back to his father’s playbook in 2011.

It is hard to imagine now, but back then he had more legitimacy among some of Syria’s population than the old dictators swept away by crowds chanting the slogan of that year – “The people want the fall of the regime”.

Bashar al-Assad was a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and of Hezbollah during its successful fight against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war. He was younger than the ex and soon to be former Arab leaders.

Since his father’s death he had been promising reform. Some Syrians still wanted to believe him in 2011, hoping demonstrations were the spur he needed for the change that he had promised, until he ordered his men to shoot peaceful demonstrators dead in the streets.

A British ambassador in Syria once told me that the way to understand the Assad regime was to watch Mafia films like The Godfather. The obedient could be rewarded.

Anyone who went against the head of the family or his closest lieutenants would be eliminated. In Syria’s case that could mean the gallows, or a firing squad, or indefinite incarceration in some underground cell.

We’re seeing them now, emaciated and pale, blinking into the light, filmed on the mobiles of the rebel fighters who have freed thousands of them from years behind bars.

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The weakness of the regime, to the point that it collapsed like a soggy paper bag, was disguised by the fearsome and repressive gulag it still maintained.

The international consensus was that Bashar al-Assad was weak, dependent on Russia and Iran, and presiding over a country he had fractured to preserve his family’s rule – but still strong enough to be regarded as a fact of Middle Eastern life, who could even be useful.

In the last days before rebels burst out of Idlib, it was widely reported that the US, Israel and the United Arab Emirates were trying to detach Assad’s Syria from Iran.

Israel had been launching increasingly heavy airstrikes against targets inside Syria it said were part of the supply chain Iran used to get weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel’s offensive in Lebanon had dealt severe blows to Hezbollah, but the idea was to stop it regenerating. At the same time the UAE and the US were trying to find incentives for him to break the alliance with Tehran, relaxing sanctions and allowing Assad to continue his international rehabilitation.

Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden have claimed credit for the fall of the Assad regime. There is something in that.

The damage Israel inflicted on Hezbollah and Iran with US weapons and constant support, and Biden’s supply of arms for Ukraine, made it impossible, even undesirable, for Assad’s closest allies to save him.

But the fact that they saw Assad as part of their strategy to contain and damage Iran until days before his fall indicates clearly that they did not for a moment believe him to be days away from a midnight flit to Russia.

They did contribute to his end, more by accident than design.

The fall of the regime might have ended Iran’s supply chain, if Syria’s new rulers decide their deals with others are more useful than the Iranian alliance.

All sides are thinking hard and thinking again about what comes next, and it is too soon to draw definite conclusions. Syrians, their neighbours, and the wider world are now confronted by another geopolitical earthquake, the biggest of the series that has followed the Hamas attacks on Israel in October last year. It might not be the last.

Iran is seeing the final collapse of the main planks of the network it called the axis of resistance. Its most important components have been transformed; Hezbollah badly damaged and the Assad regime gone.

Iran’s rulers might want to follow up on hints of talks on a deal with Donald Trump once he takes office. Or its new strategic nakedness might push it into a fateful decision to turn its highly enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon.

Syrians have every reason to rejoice. In the years after 2011, for all the repression and brutality of the regime, Assad and his acolytes could still find men who would fight. Many of the troops I met on front lines told me that Assad was a better option than the jihadist extremists of Islamic State group.

In 2024, faced by a well-organised rebel force that insisted it was nationalist, Islamist but no longer jihadist, the army’s reluctant conscripts refused to fight, stripped off their uniforms and went home.

The best scenario is that Syrians, helped by the big players in the region, will find a way to create a postwar mood of national reconciliation, not a wave of looting and revenge that will drag the country into a new war. Abu Mohammad al Joulani, the leader of victorious HTS, has called for his men and all of Syria’s sects to respect each other.

His men have removed the regime, and he is the closest Syria has to a de facto leader.

Syria, though, has dozens of armed groups that do not necessarily agree with him and will want to grab power in their own areas. In southern Syria, tribal militias did not recognise the writ of the Assads. They will not follow orders they don’t like from the new set up in Damascus.

In the eastern desert, the US saw a big enough threat from remnants of the Islamic State group to launch waves of air strikes. The Israelis, alarmed by the prospect of an Islamist state on their border, are pounding the military infrastructure of Syria’s armed forces.

It might be better to find a way to make a reformed Syrian Arab Army part of the solution in a country without much law or order. The reckless decision by the US in 2003 to dissolve the Iraqi armed forces had disastrous consequences.

In Turkey, President Erdogan must be satisfied by what he sees.

Erdogan’s Turkey did more than any other power to preserve the autonomy of Idlib province, where HTS was transforming itself into a fighting force when Syria seemed to be in the deep freeze.

Erdogan might see his influence lapping Israel’s borders, at a time when Israel-Turkey relations have been poisoned by the war in Gaza.

The worst scenario for Syrians is that their country will follow the example of two Arab dictatorships that spun into violent chaos after the fall of their regimes.

Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq were removed without a ready-made replacement waiting in the wings. Ill-considered foreign intervention did much to create two catastrophes.

The vacuum left by the dictators was filled by waves of looting, revenge, power grabs and civil war.

Syrians have not been in charge of their own destiny for generations. Individuals were robbed of it by the two Assad presidents and their followers. The country lost it after war left it so weakened that bigger foreign powers used it to increase and preserve their own power.

Syrians still do not have agency over their lives. They might have a chance of creating a new and better country if they did.

Syrian media reports say Israeli warplanes have carried out dozens of attacks across the country, including in the capital, Damascus.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said there were more than 100 strikes on military targets.

A research centre with suspected links to chemical weapon production was among the sites hit, according local media reports.

Israel says it is acting to stop weapons falling “into the hands of extremists” following the overthrow of the Assad regime.

On Monday, the UN Security Council met to discuss the situation in the country following the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad, and said they will work on a statement in the coming days.

“The council, I think, was more or less united on the need to preserve the territorial integrity and unity of Syria, to ensure the protection of civilians, to ensure that humanitarian aid is coming to the needy population,” Russian UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters.

The SOHR says there have been hundreds of Israeli air strikes in the past two days, including on a site in Damascus said to have been used for rocket development by Iranian scientists.

The strikes come as the UN’s chemical watchdog warns authorities in Syria to ensure that suspected stockpiles of chemical weapons are safe.

According to the UN’s chemical watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a chemical weapon is a chemical used to cause intentional death or harm through its toxic properties, external.

The use of chemical weapons is prohibited under international humanitarian law regardless of the presence of a valid military target, as the effects of such weapons are indiscriminate by nature.

It is not known where or how many chemical weapons Syria has, but former President Bashar al-Assad is believed to have kept stockpiles and that the declaration he had made was incomplete.

Syria signed the OPCW’s Chemical Weapons Certificate in 2013, a month after a chemical weapons attack on suburbs of the capital, Damascus, that involved the nerve agent sarin and left more than 1,400 people dead.

The horrific pictures of victims convulsing in agony shocked the world. Western powers said the attack could only have been carried out by the government, but Assad blamed the opposition.

Despite the OPCW and the UN destroying all 1,300 tonnes of chemicals that the Syrian government declared, chemical weapons attacks in the country still continued.

BBC analysis in 2018 confirmed that between 2014 and 2018, chemical weapons were used in the Syrian civil war at least 106 times.

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• Analysis: End of Assad rule will reshape region’s balance of power
• From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician: How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself

On Monday, the OPCW said it had contacted Syria “with a view to emphasising the paramount importance of ensuring the safety and security of all chemical weapons related materials and facilities” in the country.

Also on Monday, the Israeli military released photos of its troops who crossed from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights into the demilitarised buffer zone in Syria where UN peacekeepers are based.

It comes a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the military had temporarily seized control of the so-called Area of Separation, saying the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria had “collapsed” with the rebel takeover of the country.

The Golan Heights is a rocky plateau about 60km (40 miles) south-west of Damascus.

Israel seized the Golan from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed it in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so unilaterally in 2019.

Speaking at a news conference on Monday, Saar said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was only making “a very limited and temporary step” taken for “security reasons”.

He also claimed that Israel had no interest in meddling in internal Syrian affairs and was concerned only with defending its citizens.

Defence Minister Israel Katz meanwhile said the Israeli military would “destroy heavy strategic weapons” – including missile and air defence systems.

The latest moves by Israel come after Syrian rebel fighters captured the capital, Damascus, and toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. He and his father had been in power in the country since 1971.

Forces led by the Islamist opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered Damascus in the early hours of Sunday, before appearing on state television to declare that Syria was now “free”.

On Tuesday, HTS said incoming authorities will publish a list with the “names of the most senior officials involved in torturing the Syrian people”.

The group said it will offer rewards in exchange for information on “senior army and security officers involved in war crimes.”

The Assad regime received much support from Hezbollah and Russia in the country’s brutal civil war. With Hezbollah involved in the Israel-Gaza war and cross-border air strikes between Israel and Lebanon, and Russia expending huge resources on its invasion of Ukraine, HTS, along with other rebel groups in Syria, were able to seize on the occasion and were ultimately able to capture large swathes of Syria.

During the 2011 Syrian uprising, Israel made the calculation that Assad, despite being an ally of both Iran and Hezbollah, was a better bet than what might follow his regime.

On Sunday, Netanyahu branded the collapse of the Assad regime a “historic day in the Middle East” and insisted Israel would “send a hand of peace” to Syrians who wanted to live in peace with Israel.

He said the IDF presence in the buffer zone was a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found”.

“If we can establish neighbourly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that’s our desire. But if we do not, we will do whatever it takes to defend the State of Israel and the border of Israel,” he said.

Israel is likely to be more sensitive over the Golan Heights, since HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani’s family has roots there. Thousands of Israeli settlers now live in the area alongside about 20,000 Syrians, most of them Druze, who stayed on after it was captured.

Israeli strikes in Syria are nothing new. It has previously acknowledged carrying out hundreds of strikes in recent years on targets in Syria that it says are linked to Iran and allied armed groups such as Hezbollah.

The Israeli strikes in Syria have reportedly been more frequent since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, in response to cross-border attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah and other groups in Lebanon and Syria.

Just last month, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, reported that a set of strikes hit a weapons depot and other locations in and around an area near Palmyra where families of Iran-backed militia fighters were, killing 68 Syrian and foreign fighters.

“They look like chocolate truffles, just don’t eat them,” jokes Jean Mason, the curator of the Cook Islands Library and Museum as she reaches into a display cabinet and pulls out a black, knobbly rock.

The “rock” she is holding may well determine the future of this Pacific nation.

It is what scientists call a polymetallic nodule, created over millennia as minerals accumulate on the seabed.

Packed full of cobalt, nickel and manganese, these ancient formations are now valuable: the metals go into batteries that power modern life, from electric cars to mobile phones.

They have become a source of friction in the low-lying Pacific Islands, which are among the nations most vulnerable to climate change.

With rising sea levels, the ocean – or Moana, as it’s called in Māori and many other Polynesian languages – remains their greatest threat, but it is also their biggest provider.

They fish in it and they live off the tourists drawn to their turquoise waters, but now the Cook Islands wants to dig deeper, up to 6,000m (19,685 ft), where the nodules lie.

It’s a pet project for Prime Minister Mark Brown, who believes it will reshape this country of 15 volcanic islands in the southern Pacific.

The hope is that the income from these metals could lead to more prosperity than the islanders had ever imagined.

Except the promise of deep sea mining may carry an environmental price.

Proponents say that harvesting these nodules for use in renewables will help the world transition from fossil fuels. They also believe that it is less invasive than mining on land.

But critics argue so much is still unknown about the impact of extracting what is one of the last untouched parts of the planet. They say there should be a pause on deep sea mining until there is more research on its effects on marine life and the oceanic ecosystem.

When Jean was growing up, she says, the nodules were only thought to be useful for making knife blades.

“We had no idea that cell phones were going to come, and wind turbines and electric cars.”

Nodules are a family conversation here and Jean is firmly in favour of mining them. Her husband is a lawyer for one of the companies given exploration licences by the government.

The library where she works is stacked full of holiday reads left or donated by tourists – tourism is the country’s biggest earner, accounting for more than 70% of its GDP.

It includes a newspaper archive.

Jean shoves a photocopy of an article from the Cook Islands News into my hand. It’s from 1974 and the headline reads “100% concentration of manganese nodules”.

“My point is, we’ve been talking about this for 50-plus years – I think the moratorium time is over.”

The Pacific Ocean covers close to a third of the planet. And the nodules buried in it have been known about since the 19th Century.

But in the 1960s, American geologist John L Mero published a book setting out the case that the seabed could provide many of the world’s mineral needs.

It’s not an easy process – nor a cheap one. But when prices of metals like nickel soared in 2008, it looked more appealing.

Then Covid hit. Tourists left and the money dried up.

Together with the impact of climate change – rising sea levels and unpredictable weather patterns – the country quickly realised it needed something else to rely on.

The Cook Islands’ Seabeds Minerals Authority estimates there are 12 billion wet tonnes of polymetallic nodules in their waters.

Some people argue mining the seabed is not financially viable. With technology moving so fast, these metals may not even be in demand by the time it gets going.

But there are takers. And in 2022, the Cook Islands gave out three licences to companies to start exploring the possibility of deep-sea mining.

They’re now working with scientists in researching the environmental impact.

“Nothing we do in life is risk-free. So, if you want zero risk you need to go and sit in a little room with cotton wool around you,” says Hans Smit, who runs Moana Minerals, one of the firms that has an exploration licence.

“We have this lifestyle, this lifestyle has a price. If we don’t want mining and we don’t want to get all these metals, we need to stop doing just about everything we’re doing.”

Hans is from South Africa and moved here to be part of the community. To him, the deep-sea metals are an “incredible resource” that could benefit the islanders.

While there’s a growing call to delay deep-sea mining until regulations by the International Seabed Authority are drawn up, this only applies to international waters.

The Cook Islands still have huge reserves of their own in their national waters – their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – so, they can crack on regardless.

“We’re known as small-island developing states, but we like to call ourselves large ocean states,” says Rima Brown, a young Cook Islander with a geography degree who jokingly calls herself the poster child for deep-sea mining.

Rima works for the Seabed Minerals Authority and much of her time is spent mapping the sea bed.

“While we’re only about 200 square kilometers in land mass, we have an exclusive economic zone of almost 2 million square kilometres,” she says.

That’s the equivalent of Mexico.

“It’s the only resource we’ve got,” Jean says.

“[Industrialised nations] destroy our atmosphere and then they’ve got a nerve to tell us, let’s leave your stuff in the seabed. How dare they tell us we can’t touch our resources?”

But it’s not just outsiders who are opposed to deep-sea mining in the Cook Islands.

Off the coast of Rarotonga, the largest and most populous of the Cook Islands, a crowd of surfers, kayakers and swimmers gather around a large vaka, a traditional Polynesian catamaran.

“Te Moana, Te Moana, Paruru ia ra, Paruru ia ra,” the people on board repeat – “Protect our ocean”, they are chanting in Māori.

“We are asking for more time for robust independent research, more time for our people to be made better aware of what potential risk might look like,” says Alanah Matamaru Smith from the Te Ipukarea Society, an environmental organisation based in Rarotonga.

“We’re seeing infrastructure being put up here on Rarotonga, accommodation for offshore mining companies to reside here, we’ve got draft mining regulations already in place. Actions are speaking a lot louder than words at the moment.”

Prime Minister Mark Brown, who is driving this, also happens to be the tourism minister and the seabed minerals minister. He’s made it clear he wants the Cook Islands to be a leader in the industry.

“It provides the opportunity for our kids to be able to study at any university in the world without having to incur a student loan,” says Brown, who has a vision of following the lead of Norway in establishing a sovereign wealth fund.

“It allows us to have the type of health care that our people have to go to New Zealand or Australia for. It allows our young people the opportunity to live fulfilling lives here in our country, without having to go to other countries to ply their trade in an industry that doesn’t exist here.”

To those who say a country threatened by climate change risks becoming part of the problem, he argues he’s trying to find solutions.

“We know that for the last 20 years we haven’t been able to get the financing from the larger emitting countries, so we’ve got to look for ways to protect ourselves.”

But activist June Hosking isn’t convinced.

She’s from one of the outer islands, Mauke, with a population of just 300 people.

While the government has organised consultations with residents across the islands as well as the large diaspora in New Zealand, she says the potential downsides of the industry are not being discussed.

“People don’t like to rock the boat in the outer islands,” she says. “So, when we have these consultations, there’s only maybe three of us who would speak up.”

June says such is island life, many refer to the PM as just Mark. She also says his wife is married to her husband’s cousin.

But family connections don’t stop her being seen as a bit of a trouble-maker in asking questions.

“When locals say ‘Oh no, I stay neutral on [deep-sea mining]’, I say ‘you can’t drive very far in neutral’,” she laughs.

“There are times in your life when you need to actually make a stand for something – we are talking about our future here.”

Donald Trump has described the Prince of Wales as a “good-looking guy” after a meeting with him in Paris at the weekend.

“He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person. He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that,” the US president-elect told the New York Post.

The incoming US president also said the pair had touched on health problems in the Royal Family, adding that they had a “great, great talk”.

Prince William met Trump after the re-opening of the Notre-Dame cathedral.

“And I asked him about his wife and he said she’s doing well,” the president-elect said.

“I asked him about his father and his father is fighting very hard, and he loves his father and he loves his wife, so it was sad.”

The reference to the King “fighting hard” was described by royal sources as being about his efforts to continue living actively, rather than a health update.

The King has been receiving cancer treatment, but has wanted to keep focusing on his work, with overseas trips expected for next year.

“We had a great talk for half an hour, a little more than half an hour. We had a great, great talk,” Trump said.

Kensington Palace did not comment on the account of the conversation.

Prince William and Trump held their meeting, arranged at short notice, alongside the international gathering that marked the re-opening of Notre-Dame, the Paris cathedral damaged in a fire five years ago.

UK and US leaders have continued to speak warmly of the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Prince William’s diplomatic trip to meet Trump may help build bridges between the incoming Republican administration and the UK government.

Trump is an avowed fan of the royals. After a meeting with the late Queen Elizabeth II, he described how he unsuccessfully tried to get her to reveal who was her favourite US president or UK prime minister.

“I liked them all,” Trump said the late Queen had insisted to him, although he added: “Many people have said I was her favourite president.”

The NY Post’s account of the interview also includes Trump’s comments about what he said to President Emmanuel Macron of France, who had hosted the event at the restored cathedral.

“He’s a good man, he did a good job. I told him: ‘You have no idea how good a job you did’ on that chapel. That’s very hard to do. Painstaking’.”

A real-life “Succession” battle for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has ended with a Nevada court commissioner denying the billionaire’s bid to change a family trust and give control to his eldest son.

The case pitted the 93-year-old against three of his children over who would gain the power to control News Corp and Fox News when he dies.

It has been reported that Mr Murdoch wanted to amend a family trust created in 1999 to allow his son Lachlan to take control without “interference” from his siblings Prudence, Elisabeth and James.

A Nevada commissioner ruled Mr Murdoch and Lachlan had acted in “bad faith” and called the efforts a “carefully crafted charade”, according to the New York Times.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Prudence, Elisabeth and James said: “We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members.”

Adam Streisand, a lawyer for Mr Murdoch, told the New York Times they were disappointed and planned to appeal.

A spokesperson for Mr Murdoch declined to comment to the BBC. Mr Streisand did not immediately respond to inquires.

The famous family was one of the inspirations behind the hugely popular TV series Succession – something the Murdochs have always refused to comment on.

But according to the New York Times report, which is based on a copy of the sealed court ruling, the billionaire’s children had started discussing their father’s death and how they would handle it after an episode of the HBO series where “the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos”.

The episode led to Elisabeth’s representative to the trust writing a “‘Succession’ memo” that sought to prevent this from happening in real life, said reports.

The case has played out behind closed doors in Nevada, a state that offers one of the most confidential legal settings for matters including family trust disputes.

It has a “close on demand” statute that allows parties involved in certain sensitive cases to request that court proceedings be sealed from public access, ensuring complete privacy.

Mr Murdoch, who has been married five times, also has two younger children, Grace and Chloe, who do not have any voting rights under the trust agreement.

The case was launched after Mr Murdoch decided to change the trust over worries about a “lack of consensus” among the children, the Times reported.

Lachan is thought to be more conservative than his siblings and would preserve the legacy of his media brands.

From the 1960s, Mr Murdoch built a global media giant with major political and public influence.

His two companies are News Corporation, which owns newspapers including the Times and the Sun in the UK and the Wall Street Journal in the US, and Fox, which broadcasts Fox News.

Mr Murdoch had been preparing his two sons to follow in his footsteps, beginning when they were teenagers, journalist Andrew Neil told the 2020 BBC documentary The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty.

“Family has always been very important to Rupert Murdoch, particularly from the point of view of forming a dynasty,” the former Sunday Times editor said.

In 1999, the Murdoch Family Trust, which owns the media companies, was supposed to largely settle the succession plans.

It led to Mr Murdoch giving his eldest children various jobs within his companies.

The trust gives the family eight votes, which it can use to have a say on the board of News Corp and Fox News. Mr Murdoch currently controls four of those votes, with his eldest children being in charge of one each.

The trust agreement said that once Mr Murdoch died, his votes would be passed on to his four eldest children equally.

However, differences in opinions and political views were said to lead to a family rift.

The battle over changes to the trust were not about money, but rather power and control over the future of the Murdoch empire.

The commissioner’s ruling is not final. The court filing acts as a recommended resolution but a district judge will still weigh in and could choose to rule differently.

The judge could take weeks or months to make a decision, which will not be available to the public.

A 26-year-old man has been charged with murder over last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.

Luigi Mangione was taken into custody at a McDonald’s in the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 280 miles (450km) west of New York City on Monday after a customer at the fast-food outlet recognised him.

He was found in possession of a 3D-printed gun and a handwritten document that indicated “motivation and mindset”, according to police.

Mr Mangione then appeared in a Pennsylvania court to be arraigned on five initial counts and was denied bail.

Just hours later, New York investigators charged Mr Mangione with murder and four other counts including firearms charges.

Mr Thompson, 50, was fatally shot in the back last Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan where UnitedHealthcare, the medical insurance giant he led, was holding an investors’ meeting.

Police say he was targeted in a pre-planned killing.

Bribery charges by a US court against the Adani Group are unlikely to significantly upset India’s clean energy goals, industry leaders have told the BBC.

Delhi has pledged to source half of its energy needs or 500 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from renewable sources by 2032, key to global efforts to combat climate change.

The Adani Group is slated to contribute to a tenth of that capacity.

The legal troubles in the US could temporarily delay the group’s expansion plans but will not affect the government’s overall targets, analysts say.

India has made impressive strides in building clean energy infrastructure over the last decade.

The country is growing at the “fastest rate among major economies” in adding renewables capacity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Installed clean energy capacity has grown five-fold, with some 45% of the country’s power-generation capacity – of nearly 200GW – coming from non-fossil fuel sources.

Charges against the Adani Group – crucial to India’s clean energy ambitions – are “like a passing dark cloud”, and will not meaningfully impact this momentum, a former CEO of a rival firm said, wanting to remain anonymous.

Gautam Adani has vowed to invest $100bn (£78.3bn) in India’s energy transition. Its green energy arm is the country’s largest renewable energy company, producing nearly 11GW of clean energy through a diverse portfolio of wind and solar projects.

Adani has a target to scale that to 50GW BY 2030, which will make up nearly 10% of the country’s own installed capacity.

Over half of that, or 30GW, will be produced at Khavda, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. It is the world’s biggest clean energy plant, touted to be five times the size of Paris and the centrepiece in Adani’s renewables crown.

But Khavda and Adani’s other renewables facilities are now at the very centre of the charges filed by US prosecutors – they allege that the company won contracts to supply power to state distribution companies from these facilities, in exchange for bribes to Indian officials. The group has denied this.

But the fallout at the company level is already visible.

When the indictment became public, Adani Green Energy immediately cancelled a $600m bond offering in the US.

France’s TotalEnergies, which owns 20% of Adani Green Energy and has a joint venture to develop several renewables projects with the conglomerate, said it will halt fresh capital infusion into the company.

Major credit ratings agencies – Moody’s, Fitch and S&P – have since changed their outlook on Adani group companies, including Adani Green Energy, to negative. This will impact the company’s capacity to access funds and make it more expensive to raise capital.

Analysts have also raised concerns about Adani Green Energy’s ability to refinance its debt, as international lenders grow weary of adding exposure to the group.

Global lenders like Jeffries and Barclays are already said to be reviewing their ties with Adani even as the group’s reliance on global banks and international and local bond issues for long-term debt has grown from barely 14% in financial year 2016 to nearly 60% as of date, according to a note from Bernstein.

Japanese brokerage Nomura says new financing might dry up in the short term but should “gradually resume in the long term”. Meanwhile, Japanese banks like MUFG, SMBC, Mizuho are likely to continue their relationship with the group.

The “reputational and sentimental impact” will fade away in a few months, as Adani is building “solid, strategic assets and creating long-term value”, the unnamed CEO said.

A spokesperson for the Adani Group told the BBC that it was “committed to its 2030 targets and confident of delivering 50 GW of renewable energy capacity”.

Adani stocks have recovered sharply from the lows they hit post the US court indictment.

Some analysts told the BBC that a possible slowdown in funding for Adani could in fact end up benefitting its competitors.

While Adani’s financial influence has allowed it to rapidly expand in the sector, its competitors such as Tata Power, Goldman Sachs-backed ReNew Power, Greenko and state-run NTPC Ltd are also significantly ramping up manufacturing and generation capacity.

“It’s not that Adani is a green energy champion. It is a big player that has walked both sides of the street, being the biggest private developer of coal plants in the world,” said Tim Buckley, director at Climate Energy Finance.

A large entity, “perceived to be corrupt” possibly slowing its expansion, could mean “more money will start flowing into other green energy companies”, he said.

According to Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director at Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), market fundamentals also continue to remain strong with demand for renewable energy outpacing supply in India – which is likely to keep the appetite for big investments intact.

What could in fact slow the pace of India’s clean energy ambitions is its own bureaucracy.

“Companies we track are very upbeat. Finance isn’t a problem for them. If anything, it is state-level regulations that act as a kind of deterrent,” says Ms Garg.

Most state-run power distribution companies continue to face financial constraints, opting for cheaper fossil fuels, while dragging their feet on signing purchase agreements.

According to Reuters, the controversial tender won by Adani was the first major contract issued by state-run Solar Energy Corp of India (SECI) without a guaranteed purchase agreement from distributors.

SECI’s chairman told Reuters that there are 30GW of operational green energy projects in the market without buyers.

Experts say the 8GW solar contract at the heart of Adani’s US indictment also sheds light on the messy tendering process, which required solar power generation companies to manufacture modules as well – limiting the number of bidders and leading to higher power costs.

The court indictment will certainly lead to a “tightening of bidding and tendering rules”, says Ms Garg.

A cleaner tendering process that lowers risks both for developers and investors will be important going ahead, agrees Mr Buckley.

Former world champion cyclist Rohan Dennis has pleaded guilty over a car incident in Australia which killed his wife, fellow Olympian Melissa Hoskins.

Hoskins died in hospital on 30 December 2023, after being struck by a vehicle being driven by Dennis outside their home in Adelaide.

The 34-year-old was initially charged with dangerous driving causing death and driving without due care, but on Tuesday he admitted a lesser charge – one aggravated count of creating the likelihood of harm.

Dennis – who has two children with Hoskins – will be sentenced at a later date.

Few details are known about the circumstances leading up to Hoskins’s death.

However, Dennis’s guilty plea means he has admitted to driving a car when Hoskins was in close proximity, knowing that act was likely to cause harm or being recklessly indifferent to whether it would.

“There was no intention of Mr Dennis to harm his wife and this charge does not charge him with responsibility for her death,” the retired athlete’s lawyer told the court.

Hoskins was a world champion in the team pursuit in 2015 and a two-time Olympian, and her death triggered a wave of tributes from around the world.

She and Dennis married in 2018.

Dennis retired at the end of the 2023 season after a career in which he won stages at the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana.

A multiple world champion on both road and track, he won road time trial bronze at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, having won team pursuit silver at London 2012. He also won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2022.

Shares in US chocolate maker Hershey have jumped by more than 10% after a report that Mondelez International, which owns UK-based Cadbury, has approached the firm about a potential buyout.

A deal could create a snack food giant with combined sales of almost $50bn (£39.2bn) a year.

Both Mondelez and Hershey declined to comment on the report when contacted by BBC News.

In 2016, Hershey rejected a $23bn takeover offer from Mondelez.

The approach is still in the preliminary stages and it is not certain that talks will lead to a deal, according to Bloomberg.

Any deal would need the approval of the Hershey Trust Company, a charitable trust, that maintains voting control over the business. It has previously blocked the takeover of the firm.

A merger of the two companies could bring some of the world’s best-known confectionary and snack foods under one roof.

Hershey is known for brands including Hershey’s Kisses and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

As well as owning Cadbury, Mondelez brands include Ritz crackers, Oreo biscuits and Toblerone chocolate.

The packaged food industry has faced slowing growth as consumers feel the pinch from years of rising prices.

Chocolate companies in particular have had to transfer costs from higher cocoa prices to their customers.

Last month, Hershey cut its revenue and profit forecasts. Its chief financial officer, Steve Voskuil, said high cocoa prices will be the “biggest source of inflation” for the firm going forward.

Another food giant, Kraft Heinz, also recently cut its annual sales and profit forecasts as customers cut back on purchases after several rounds of price rises.

Some companies have looked for deals to secure new markets and boost growth.

In August, confectionery giant Mars struck a deal to snap up Pringles and Pop-Tart-maker Kellanova for almost $36bn.

The couple who run PinkNews, the world’s largest LGBT news website, have been accused by staff of multiple incidents of sexual misconduct.

Several former staff members told the BBC they saw Anthony James, a director at the company and husband of its founder, kissing and touching a junior colleague who they say appeared too drunk to consent.

And more than 30 current and former members of staff said a culture of heavy drinking led to instances when founder Benjamin Cohen and his husband behaved inappropriately towards younger male employees.

Representatives for Mr Cohen and Dr James told the BBC they were not able to provide a statement at this time, but that their position is that the allegations are false.

Run by family members of Mr Cohen – his husband and former GP Dr James is chief operating officer, and his father Richard is the chief lawyer – PinkNews says its mission is “to inform, inspire change and empower people to be themselves”.

It played an influential role in the campaign for marriage equality in the UK and its annual awards ceremony has attracted prime ministers and other politicians.

Away from the cameras and red carpets, however, multiple former staff members have told the BBC they had experienced bullying and sexual misconduct which made some of them feel unsafe to be alone around Mr Cohen and Dr James. Allegations of misogyny have also emerged and several people told us that some young female members of staff had been asked to act as the couple’s surrogates.

As well as interviewing 33 people who worked at PinkNews between 2017 and 2024, we have also seen a variety of evidence including official written complaints, private emails and WhatsApp messages sharing staff members’ concerns, plus doctors’ records referring to stress and mental health struggles attributed to the work environment at PinkNews.

Five former members of staff told the BBC they had witnessed Dr James groping and kissing a junior member of staff, who they said was “too drunk to stand or talk” and “unable to consent”.

The alleged incident happened outside a central London pub, where staff had gathered after a PinkNews event.

A former PinkNews staff member, who we are calling Gary, said Dr James had led the junior colleague behind a tree. “Anthony was just forcing himself on somebody who wasn’t able to make that decision for themselves because of how intoxicated they were,” he said.

People at the event said they helped the alleged victim get home in a taxi.

But several former members of staff who said they witnessed the incident told us they were too scared to complain. One person said: “It’s the CEO’s husband, what are you going to do? Lose your job?”

A complaint about the incident was made later by a staff member, and was shared with several members of the senior leadership team at PinkNews. The BBC has been shown multiple copies of the complaint but has been unable to establish whether any action was taken as a result.

Many of the former employees said staff socials or awaydays often involved drinking until the early hours of the morning and that “Prosecco Friday” – where staff would be given free wine and crisps – was introduced in the office in an effort to boost staff morale.

Another former staff member we are calling Damian said he personally experienced inappropriate behaviour from Mr Cohen during an evening at the pub after work.

“Ben was extremely drunk to the point he fell off his chair, and then asked me out of earshot of my other colleagues whether I wanted to go back to his […] because Anthony his husband wasn’t there,” Damian said.

“He said something along the lines of ‘Anthony is always getting with other men’ and the suggestion was we would do something sexually. I was extremely uncomfortable.”

Damian said after that night, he avoided being alone with Mr Cohen for the rest of his time at PinkNews.

“I never heard about it again, no apology,” he said. “It put me on alert because it made me realise it was a boundary he thought he could cross.”

Stephan Kyriacou, who worked at PinkNews between 2019 and 2021, said the job had started as a “dream come true” where he did not have to “hide who I was or pretend”, but the dream was soon “shattered”.

During a Christmas party, Mr Kyriacou said, Mr Cohen had slapped him on the bottom in front of everyone else.

“I just shut down for a minute. I didn’t know what to say. I was in shock. I remember turning to my friends and saying, ‘What the hell just happened?'”

Mr Kyriacou said he no longer felt comfortable enough to be alone around his boss.

He said: “That just made me completely avoid him. I don’t remember ever speaking to him one-on-one after that.”

Other staff also voiced their concerns about Mr Cohen, Mr Kyriacou said, with several messages in a group chat describing him as a “creep” and staff saying they did not feel comfortable around him.

“None of us really felt like we could complain because we didn’t know what was going to happen to us. Ben is very well-known and we didn’t know whether he was going to badmouth us to people,” Mr Kyriacou said.

Staff have told us they were shouted at and belittled by Mr Cohen, and that there was a “toxic” culture at the company.

“He can be quite brutal in the way he speaks to you,” said Damian. “When things go wrong he’d come down on you like a tonne of bricks and so you were just in this constant state of emotional flux.

“He put extreme pressures on me to the point I would go home and cry. It caused issues in my own personal relationship with my partner, and then [Benjamin] would love-bomb me and I would think everything was alright.”

Cai Wilshaw, former head of external affairs at PinkNews, said: “You had this sort of dark cloud in the office sometimes when Ben was there, that made it really difficult to actually enjoy working there.

“We worked together quite well, but it is clear that he is a very, very difficult character, and sometimes overly so in a way that really impacted people who worked with him.”

Some staff members also said they had witnessed what they called “misogynistic” behaviour.

Several people said that on occasions young, female members of staff had been asked to act as a surrogate for Mr Cohen and Dr James.

They say that often the request was delivered as a joke, but that it had made people feel “awkward and uncomfortable”.

One anonymous staff member called it “creepy and sleazy”, while another called it “part and parcel” of how “misogynistic” PinkNews was.

Many of the staff who spoke to the BBC said they hope the culture at PinkNews can change so it can continue to tell stories relevant to the LGBT community.

“It’s important because the mainstream media doesn’t often report on whatever’s happening to trans or queer people,” said Stephan Kyriacou. “I think if it can be overhauled, that will make a massive difference.”

Gary said there was a need for “authentic queer-led journalism and queer-led stories” but said “unfortunately PinkNews has kind of lost its credibility in that arena”.

Damian told us he believed PinkNews’ future could only be secured if Mr Cohen and Dr James took a step back.

“The fact you cannot separate the two is extremely problematic,” he said. “Ben needs to be held to account. Until the day that happens, I don’t know if there’s a future for PinkNews.”

The BBC was informed that Mr Cohen and Dr James were not able to provide a statement at this time, but we understand that their position is that the allegations made against them are false.

At least 110 mostly elderly people have been brutally murdered by gang members in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, according to a human rights group.

The National Human Rights Defence Network (RNDDH) said a local gang leader had targeted them after his son fell ill and subsequently died.

The gang leader reportedly consulted a voodoo priest who blamed elderly locals practising “witchcraft” for the boy’s mystery illness.

The United Nations said the number of people killed in Haiti so far this year in spiralling gang violence had reached “a staggering 5,000”.

While details from the massacre are still emerging, the UN’s human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday put the number of people killed over the weekend “in violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang” at 184.

The killings happened in the Cité Soleil neighbourhood of the capital.

According to reports, gang members seized scores of residents aged over 60 from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie area, rounded them up and then shot or stabbed them to death with knives and machetes.

Residents reported seeing mutilated bodies being burned in the streets.

RNDDH estimated 60 were killed on Friday while another 50 were rounded up and murdered on Saturday, after the gang leader’s son had died of his illness.

While RNDDH said that all the victims were over 60, another rights group said some younger people who had tried to protect the elderly had also been killed.

Local media said that elderly people believed to be practitioners of voodoo had been singled out because the gang leader had been told his son’s illness had been caused by them.

Rights groups said the man who had ordered the killings was Monel Felix, also known as Mikano.

Mikano is known to control Wharf Jérémie, a strategic area in the port of the capital.

According to Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, a Haiti expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational Crime (GI-TOC), the area is small but hard for the security forces to penetrate.

Local media said that residents had been prevented from leaving Wharf Jérémie by Mikano’s gang, so news of the deadly killings was slow to spread.

The group forms part of the Viv Ansanm gang alliance, which controls much of the Haitian capital.

Haiti has been engulfed in a wave of gang violence since the assassination in 2021 of the then-president, Jovenel Moïse.

Data gathered by GI-TOC shows there was a decline in the murder rate between May and September of this year, after rival gangs had reached an uneasy truce.

But attempts by the gangs to expand their territory beyond their strongholds in the capital have led to particularly bloody incidents in the past two months, with ordinary residents rather than rival gang members being increasingly targeted.

On 3 October, 115 locals were killed in the small town of Pont-Sondé in the Artibonite department.

That massacre was reportedly carried out by the Gran Grif gang in retaliation for some residents joining a vigilante group to resist attempts by Gran Grif to extort locals.

If confirmed, the death toll given by the UN for this weekend’s killings in Cité Soleil, would make it the deadliest incident so far this year.

With gangs in control of an estimated 85% of Port-au-Prince and increasingly large swathes of the countryside, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been forced to flee their homes.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 700,000 people – half of them children – are internally displaced across the country.

Gang members often use sexual abuse, including gang rape, to sow terror among the local population.

In a report published two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch researcher Nathalye Cotrino wrote that “the rule of law in Haiti is so broken that members of criminal groups rape girls of women without fearing any consequences”.

Attempts by the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission to quell the violence have so far failed.

The international police force arrived in Haiti in June to bolster the Haitian National Police but is underfunded and lacks the necessary equipment to take on the heavily armed gangs.

Meanwhile, the Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) – the body created to organise elections and re-establish democratic order – appears to be in turmoil.

The TPC replaced the interim prime minister last month and seems to have made little progress towards organising elections.

“They reign over a mountain of ashes,” GI-TOC’s Romain Le Cour Grandmaison writes of the council in his report.

Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are among the stars who have scored nominations for the Golden Globes, as the Hollywood award season kicks off in earnest.

British actress Erivo is shortlisted for best female actor in a comedy or musical film for her role as Elphaba, while co-star Grande is in the running for best supporting female actor for playing Glinda.

Angelina Jolie, Hugh Grant, Timothee Chalamet, Sebastian Stan, Demi Moore, Pamela Anderson, Kate Winslet and Selena Gomez are among the other big names in contention.

The Golden Globes have been through controversy in recent years but remain the first major awards in the film calendar, and provide pointers for who could do well at next year’s Oscars.

• See the nominations in full
• How to watch this year’s awards-tipped films

Netflix musical Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican drug lord who changes gender, leads the nominations overall with 10, including one for Gomez.

Other prominent films include heavyweight dramas The Brutalist, about a Hungarian architect who tries to build a new life in the US after World War Two, and Conclave, about a group of scheming cardinals who gather to select the new Pope.

The top film nominees:

• Emilia Perez – 10
• The Brutalist – 7
• Conclave – 6
• Anora – 5
• The Substance – 5

Unlike the Oscars, the Golden Globes also have awards for TV shows, with The Bear, Only Murders in the Building, Shogun and Baby Reindeer the main contenders in those categories.

Jolie is the frontrunner to win best female actor in a drama film for playing legendary opera singer Maria Callas in Maria.

She will face competition from Nicole Kidman for Babygirl, as well as Anderson for playing a veteran Las Vegas showgirl in The Last Showgirl.

British stars Winslet and Tilda Swinton are also in that category, as is Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres.

Winslet has two nominations in total – one on the film side for playing war photographer Lee Miller in Lee, and one for portraying a fictional dictator in her TV show The Regime.

In the race for best male actor in a drama film, The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody and Conclave’s Ralph Fiennes are seen as the main contenders.

Meanwhile, Stan is nominated for playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice, about the incoming US president’s early years, and Chalamet is recognised for portraying singer Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.

They are joined on the shortlist by former James Bond star Daniel Craig for playing a US expat in 1950s South America in Queer, and Colman Domingo for his role in Sing Sing, about a prison theatre group.

All will also have a shot of receiving Oscar nominations when they are announced in January.

Unlike the Oscars, the Golden Globe split most of their categories in two, with one award for dramas and a separate prize for musicals/comedies.

Newcomer Mikey Madison is hotly tipped for the award for best female actor in a musical/comedy film for playing a New York stripper who falls for the son of a Russian oligarch in Anora.

She will take on others including Demi Moore, who has won praise for her role as a veteran Hollywood star who goes to extreme lengths to recapture her youth in body horror The Substance. It is Moore’s first nomination for 28 years.

Zendaya, Amy Adams and Karla Sofía Gascón are in the same category, as is Erivo, one of four nominations in total for Wicked.

The film, based on the Broadway musical about the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, will hope to combine awards acclaim with commercial success after making $455m (£356m) so far at the box office.

Grande will go up against fellow singer and former children’s TV star Gomez, who plays the wife of the drug lord in Emilia Pérez.

Gomez is a double nominee, also being shortlisted for TV comedy Only Murders in the Building.

A number of British stars have made it on to the shortlists.

Grant has the seventh Golden Globe nomination of his career, for horror film Heretic, while Felicity Jones has her second for The Brutalist, a decade after her first for The Theory of Everything.

Her co-star in the latter, Eddie Redmayne, is also hoping for a Golden Globe this year, for his TV show The Day of the Jackal.

He will go up against Gary Oldman for Slow Horses, while his co-star Jack Lowden is listed in one of the supporting categories.

Elsewhere, Keira Knightley is nominated for her new spy drama Black Doves. Her competitors include Emma D’Arcy, who has House of the Dragon’s only citation.

Richard Gadd stands a strong chance of winning best male actor in a limited series for Baby Reindeer. His rivals include fellow Scot Ewan McGregor, for A Gentleman in Moscow.

Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning is in the running for best supporting female TV actor.

Pop star Robbie Williams is up for the best song award for Forbidden Road, from his forthcoming film biopic Better Man.

However, there was no nomination for Britain’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who had been tipped to be recognised for her role in director Mike Leigh’s hard-hitting film Hard Truths.

And there was nothing for British film Blitz or Saoirse Ronan, who had been in contention for that film and another acclaimed drama, The Outrun.

Fellow Irish star Paul Mescal missed out on a nod for Gladiator II, which only received two nominations – one for Denzel Washington in the acting categories, and a nod for cinematic and box office achievement, which was introduced last year to recognise popular films.

There were also two nominations for Dune: Part Two – best drama film and best original score. But voters overlooked Chalamet’s lead performance and Denis Villeneuve’s direction.

And there was no room for the Dune sequel on the eight-strong shortlist for the cinematic and box office achievement prize despite it being fourth on the global list of the most successful releases of 2024.

Wicked is among the hits up for that award this year, although its mastermind Jon M Chu missed out on a nomination for best director.

The Golden Globe winners, chosen by 300 international critics, will be announced at a ceremony in Los Angeles on 5 January, followed by the Oscars on 2 March.

The Globes host, Nikki Glaser, has been nominated herself for best TV stand-up for Nikki Glaser: Someday You’ll Die.

The body that used to be behind the Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, was criticised in 2021 for corruption and a lack of diversity in its voting body, and was accused of accepting “freebies” in exchange for nominations and other ethical lapses.

As a result, the body expanded and diversified its membership, implemented a new code of conduct, and changed its name.

Read more about the Golden Globe nominees:

• Ariana Grande channelled her loss into Wicked role
• Selena Gomez ‘shines’ in new musical Emilia Perez
• Mikey Madison leads Oscars race for Anora
• Colman Domingo wins Gotham prize for Sing Sing
• Angelina Jolie ‘spellbinding’ as opera star Callas
• Daniel Craig’s new film ‘smug’ but ‘beautiful’
• Demi Moore says role in The Substance was ‘risky and juicy’

Google has unveiled a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.

The chip is the latest development in a field known as quantum computing – which is attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of mind-bogglingly powerful computer.

Google says its new quantum chip, dubbed “Willow”, incorporates key “breakthroughs” and “paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.”

However experts say Willow is, for now, a largely experimental device, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years – and billions of dollars – away.

Quantum computers work in a fundamentally different way to the computer in your phone or laptop.

They harness quantum mechanics – the strange behaviour of ultra-tiny particles – to crack problems far faster than traditional computers.

It’s hoped quantum computers might eventually be able to use that ability to vastly speed up complex processes, such as creating new medicines.

There are also fears it could be used for ill – for example to break some types of encryption used to protect sensitive data.

In February Apple announced that the encryption that protects iMessage chats is being made “quantum proof” to stop them being read by powerful future quantum computers.

Hartmut Neven leads Google’s Quantum AI lab that created Willow and describes himself as the project’s “chief optimist.”

He told the BBC that Willow would be used in some practical applications – but declined, for now, to provide more detail.

But a chip able to perform commercial applications would not appear before the end of the decade, he said.

Initially these applications would be the simulation of systems where quantum effects are important

“For example, relevant when it comes to the design of nuclear fusion reactors to understand the functioning of drugs and pharmaceutical development, it would be relevant for developing better car batteries and another long list of such tasks”.

Mr Neven told the BBC Willow’s performance meant it was the “best quantum processor built to date”.

But Professor Alan Woodward, a computing expert at Surrey University, says quantum computers will be better at a range of tasks than current “classical” computers, but they will not replace them.

He warns against overstating the importance of Willow’s achievement in a single test.

“One has to be careful not to compare apples and oranges” he told the BBC.

Google had chosen a problem to use as a benchmark of performance that was, “tailor-made for a quantum computer” and this didn’t demonstrate “a universal speeding up when compared to classical computers”.

Nonetheless, he said Willow represented significant progress, in particular in what’s known as error correction.

In very simple terms the more useful a quantum computer is, the more qubits it has.

However a major problem with the technology is that it is prone to errors – a tendency that has previously increased the more qubits a chip has.

But Google researchers say they have reversed this and managed to engineer and program the new chip so the error rate fell across the whole system as the number of qubits increased.

It was a major “breakthrough” that cracked a key challenge that the field had pursued “for almost 30 years”, Mr Neven believes.

He told the BBC it was comparable to “if you had an airplane with just one engine – that will work, but two engines are safer, four engines is yet safer”.

Errors are a significant obstacle in creating more powerful quantum computers and the development was “encouraging for everyone striving to build a practical quantum computer” Prof Woodward said.

But Google itself notes that to develop practically useful quantum computers the error rate will still need to go much lower than that displayed by Willow.

Willow was made in Google’s new, purpose-built manufacturing plant in California.

Countries around the world are investing in quantum computing.

The UK recently launched the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).

Its director, Michael Cuthbert, told the BBC he was wary of language that fuelled the “hype cycle” and thought Willow was more a “milestone rather than a breakthrough”.

Nevertheless, it was “clearly a highly impressive piece of work”.

Eventually quantum computers would help with a range of tasks including “logistics problems such as cargo freight distribution on aircraft or routing of telecoms signals or stored energy throughout the national grid”, he said.

And there were already 50 quantum businesses in the UK, attracting £800m in funding and employing 1300 people.

On Friday, researchers from Oxford University and Osaka University in Japan published a paper showcasing the very low error rate in a trapped-ion qubit.

Theirs is a different approach to making a quantum computer that’s capable of working at room temperature – whereas Google’s chip has to be stored at ultra low temperatures to be effective.

Scientific findings from Google’s development of Willow have been published in the journal Nature

Eleven years ago, I left Damascus not knowing if I would ever be back.

Back then, the city was in the grip of war. Intense violence, which followed President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests, engulfed the capital. At any moment you could be shot dead on the streets.

I reported for the BBC from inside Syria on the very first protests in 2011. I reported on the “day of rage”, then on shootings, killings, disappearances, air strikes and barrel bombs – until I myself became numb and lost hope.

I was arrested several times. The regime limited my movements and threatened me, and in 2013 I had to leave.

Over the past decade, I’ve lived through a rollercoaster of hope and despair, watching my country ripped apart from abroad. Death, destruction, detention. Millions fleeing and becoming refugees.

Like many Syrians, I felt as though the world had forgotten about our country. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

When people took to the streets back then to call for the toppling of the regime, I never imagined it would actually happen, given President Assad’s powerful backers in Russia and Iran.

But on Sunday, at the blink of an eye, everything changed.

• Follow live updates on the situation in Syria

Last week, I was in Beirut reporting on the fall of Aleppo and Hama to anti-Assad militants, but I didn’t really think that would bring about change. I thought Syria would be split in two, with Damascus and the coastal cities remaining in Assad’s hands.

After midnight on Saturday, things suddenly turned around. By 04:00, it was announced that the regime had fallen and Assad had gone. As I’m writing these words now, I still can’t believe that this is a reality.

• What just happened in Syria and who’s in charge?
• Listen to The Global Story podcast: The final hours of the Assad regime

I had been trying over the weekend to get clearance to enter the country from one of the most feared secret police organisations in Syria, called the Palestine Branch. They had an arrest warrant in my name, due to my reporting on the protests.

I couldn’t forget being detained during the first week of the uprising in 2011. I had witnessed men lined up to be beaten, fresh blood on the floor and screams of torture. A security officer grabbed my mouth and said he would “cut it for [me]” if I said a word.

On Sunday, I rushed with my colleagues down to the Syrian border. Now there was no-one at Palestine Branch – neither the security officers nor the investigator who threatened me when I last tried to enter Syria in January. He told me he could bury me seven floors underground and no-one would know. I wondered where he was now. How did he feel about the thousands he interrogated and threatened? Or those tortured to death in Assad’s prisons?

I crossed the border into Syria without fear of being detained. As I went on air for the BBC from Damascus, I reported without fearing for my safety.

There’s a sense of joy in the air in Damascus, despite worries about Islamist rebels being in control and whether they’ll ensure safety in the country. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) fighters have protected public institutions from looting after mobs stormed the presidential palace, and prisoners have been freed.

An HTS group met with Christian residents of Bab Touma, a neighbourhood in Damascus, to give assurances they were not seeking to limit their freedoms.

Some in the Alawite community – who long supported Assad – are worried about what will happen to them, but so far there haven’t been any reports of sectarian violence.

Since Sunday, friends and family members who fled have been texting me, saying they are coming back. It seems everyone wants to return home.

My central Damascus apartment was destroyed in 2013 when I left, after authorities deemed me a traitor and banned me from living there. Security forces and local officials broke in and destroyed its walls and ceilings.

Last month I was able to regain ownership of it after paying thousands of dollars in bribes. It will take time to rebuild it, but that’s what I will do.

And perhaps when it is ready, Syria will be ready for all of us to come back.

In just two weeks, Syrian rebels have swept from their enclave in the northwest to capture a string of major cities, before reaching the capital Damascus and toppling President Bashar al-Assad 13 years after the start of the country’s civil war.

In convoys of small vehicles and motorbikes, fighters led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) moved rapidly along a north-south highway which forms the country’s main spine to take Damascus without resistance.

But while many in the country are celebrating the downfall of a family dynasty that ruled Syria with an iron fist, the future is uncertain and the situation on the ground remains in flux, with a number of different rebel groups controlling different parts of the country.

• Live updates on the downfall of Assad
• Watch: BBC reports from inside Damascus
• What has just happened in Syria?
• Analysis: End of Assad rule will reshape region’s balance of power

After years locked behind frozen frontlines, the rebels mounted a lightning advance, culminating in the toppling of the president and takeover of the capital on the weekend.

After taking Syria’s second city Aleppo at the end of November, the rebels continued their offensive, moving south to take control of the city of Hama last Thursday.

The advance continued at pace, with Syria’s third city, Homs, falling on Saturday shortly before government forces also lost control of the capital.

The fall of the Assad regime was brought about by the sudden and unexpected advance by HTS rebels, but although the group controls Syria’s main cities, it does not govern the whole country.

Syria has for years been controlled by a patchwork of rebel groups including HTS in Idlib and Kurdish-led groups in the country’s northeast, some of which have also taken territory in recent days and weeks.

None of the rebel groups will mourn the falling of the Assad regime, but finding a consensus over how to run the country could still prove difficult and in the north of the country there have been clashes between competing factions.

In the northern city of Manbij there have been clashes between Turkish-backed forces and Kurdish-led rebels.

Both sides claimed to have taken parts of the city and fighting is reported to be ongoing in some neighbourhoods.

Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War said they could not yet ascertain who was in control of Manbij.

Syria, with a population of about 22 million people, is located on the east coast of the Mediterranean sea. It borders Turkey to the north, Lebanon and Israel to the west and southwest, Iraq to the east and Jordan to the south.

Turkey, Western powers and several Gulf Arab states have backed varying elements of the Syrian opposition to varying degrees during the conflict.

The Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement, backed by Iran, has fought alongside the Syrian regime army but has been severely weakened by its conflict with Israel. This has been seen as a key reason why the rebel advance was so successful.

Israel, concerned by what it calls Iran’s “military entrenchment” in Syria, has launched air strikes against Syria’s military.

Some of Syria’s neighbours have already responded militarily, and on Monday Israel said it is carrying out air strikes on Syria to target suspected chemical weapons and missile sites.

Israel also said it had temporarily seized control of a demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, saying the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria had “collapsed” with the rebel takeover of the country.

The Golan Heights is a rocky plateau about 60km (40 miles) south-west of Damascus.

Israel seized the territory from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed it in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so unilaterally in 2019.

A number of European countries, including the UK, have suspended the processing of asylum applications for Syrians, after the downfall of former president Bashar al-Assad.

Austria’s caretaker government has stopped all asylum claims from Syrians and says it is making plans to repatriate or deport people back to their homeland, arguing that the situation in the country has changed fundamentally.

Germany (home to a million Syrians), the United Kingdom, France, and Greece have all said they will halt asylum decisions for now.

The moves potentially leave thousands of Syrians in limbo, following the collapse of the Assad regime after 50 years of brutal rule.

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Since 2011, the UN says more than 14 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes in search of safety.

Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer, a conservative who is a hardliner on immigration, said in a post on X that the government would “support all Syrians who have found refuge in Austria and want to return to their home country”.

He added that the “security situation in Syria must also be reassessed in order to make deportations possible again in the future”.

In a statement, Austria’s Interior Ministry said “the political situation in Syria has changed fundamentally and, above all, rapidly in recent days”.

Around 95,000 Syrians live in Austria, many of whom arrived during the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016. A backlash against them has fuelled support for the far right and conservatives in Austria.

Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has put on hold all pending applications from Syrian asylum seekers.

Officials say the political situation is so uncertain in Syria, that it is not possible to reach a proper decision about whether the country is safe or not.

At the moment 47,270 Syrians in Germany are waiting for an answer to their asylum applications. Those who have already been granted asylum are not affected.

Germany has the largest Syrian diaspora population outside of the Middle East, with about one million Syrians living in Germany. About 700,000 are classed as refugees.

British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper confirmed that the UK has “paused asylum decisions on cases from Syria while the Home Office reviews and monitors the current situation”.

Cooper said the situation in the country is “moving extremely fast after the fall of the Assad regime” and added that some people are already returning to Syria.

Between 2011 and 2021 more than 30,000 Syrians were granted asylum in the UK.

Most of these were resettled under humanitarian schemes and came directly from other countries they had fled to, such as Turkey and Lebanon.

In 2019, it was calculated that around 47,000 Syrians were living in the UK, but that number is thought to have since fallen to around 30,000.

France is working on a policy similar to the one put forward by Germany, with a decision expected in the next few hours, according to the Reuters news agency.

Meanwhile, thousands of Syrians exiled in Lebanon and Jordan have been returning home. But on the Lebanese border, the flow has been in both directions.

A BBC correspondent there said an increasing number of Syrians were trying to get into Lebanon, prompting Lebanese military reinforcements. He says some feared an increase in chaos or crime at home, though they also say they have received reassurances this will not happen.

Lebanon hosts more than one million Syrian refugees but has been tightening up the rules for them to enter the country.

In the hours after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, hundreds have descended on the site which for many most encapsulated his oppressive rule: the Saydnaya prison.

The notorious military complex has been used to detain tens of thousands of people who fell foul of the Syrian government over the decades.

Among those searching for people who have vanished inside its walls was Jwan Omar, a Syrian living in Turkey.

He travelled to Saydnaya prison on Sunday to search for his father-in-law who disappeared in 2013, after being arrested by the regime who accused him of helping the opposition.

“I went to the prison and showed photos of my father-in-law but nobody recognised him,” Omar told the BBC.

“My wife dreamed for 11 years of finding her father. Our hopes were raised when we heard the prisoners were released, but my wife has been crying since yesterday.”

He was disappointed to be told that many prisoners had been moved to another location.

Omar travelled to the prison with his friend Dr Sharvan Ibesh, chief executive of the Syrian aid group Bahar, who has been helping with the search.

Dr Ibesh described scenes of “chaos” at the prison, with hundreds of people trying to find their loves ones.

Dr Ibesh continued: “Hundreds of people were coming out of the prison and we were told we could not come in because so many people were getting in the way of the rescuers.”

Syrian civil defence group, the White Helmets, has been searching for inmates at Saydnaya following accounts from prisoners of secret entrances to underground cells, though none have been found.

Since the fall of Assad, many families have had renewed hope that they might find loved ones missing in prisons.

One such family is the Nadaf family from Idlib, who are currently searching for Thaer Nadaf who was arrested and sent to Saydnaya in 2011.

Thaer had two children – a baby and a two-year-old – at the time he was arrested.

His son Mustafa, who is now 12, told the BBC: “I hope he comes back. I swear I miss him, I have never heard his voice.”

Thaer’s mother Fayzah Nadaf said “nobody knows the reason why he was arrested”.

She has sent her other son – Mohammad – to the prison in Damascus to find him.

A doctor who left the prison two months ago informed them that he was still alive. They believe he is being held in the underground section of the Saydnaya complex.

“I am looking forward to seeing my son again,” Fayzah said. He has been missing for 12 years, and all the time I prayed that he could see his children again.”

A mosque 20km away is being used as a meeting place for released prisoners and their families.

When Ibesh visited there on Sunday, he saw several newly freed people clearly in a traumatised state, he told the BBC.

A group of people surrounded two men who had just been released, trying to help them.

“[They] had been held in the prison for several years and they were disorientated,” Ibesh said. “They didn’t even know the time zone.”

“People around them were asking ‘what’s your name’ and ‘how old are you?’, but they could not even answer those questions.”

It was hard to tell how old they were from looking at them, Ibesh said, adding: “The men were totally lost, they were just staring ahead.”

While there have been many family reunions since the prisoners were released, the search continues for many others.

The Assad regime imprisoned hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. The Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP) group described Saydnaya as a “death camp”.

Throughout the civil war, which began in 2011, government forces held hundreds of thousands of people in detention camps, where human rights groups say torture was common.

The Assad family ruled Syria for more than 50 years with an iron fist. Now that has come to an end.

Bashar al-Assad became president after the death in 2000 of his father Hafez, who had ruled for almost three decades.

In 2011, he brutally crushed a peaceful, pro-democracy uprising, sparking a devastating civil war in which more than half a million people have been killed and 12 million others have been forced to flee their homes.

Thirteen days ago, the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied rebel factions launched a major offensive in north-western Syria.

The rebels quickly captured the country’s second-largest city, Aleppo, then swept southwards down the highway to the capital, Damascus, as the military collapsed.

Russia announced that Assad had stepped down and left Syria on Sunday, hours after the rebels entered Damascus and crowds gathered on the streets to celebrate. It later emerged that Assad had flown to Moscow and been granted asylum.

HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani meanwhile arrived in Damascus and told Syrians: “The future is ours.”

For the past four years, it had felt like the civil war was effectively over.

Assad’s government had regained control over most of Syria’s cities with the help of Russia, Iran and Iranian-backed militias like Hezbollah, and the front lines were largely frozen.

However, large parts of the country were still out of the government’s control.

The rebels’ last stronghold was in Aleppo and Idlib provinces, which border Turkey and where more than four million people were living, many of them displaced. It was dominated by HTS, but a number of allied rebel groups and jihadist groups were also based there. Turkish-backed rebel factions also controlled territory with the support of Turkish troops.

On 27 November, HTS and its allies launched their surprise offensive.

After three days, they took control of most of Aleppo – Syria’s second-largest city. They said they faced little resistance on the ground after the government rapidly withdrew its troops and security forces.

• Syria’s Assad falls – follow live updates
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The Turkish-backed rebel factions meanwhile capitalised on the government’s retreat by launching a separate offensive on territory north of Aleppo controlled by a Kurdish-led militia alliance supported by the United States, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Assad vowed to “crush” the rebels with the help of his allies. Russian warplanes intensified strikes on rebel-held areas and Iran-backed militias sent reinforcements to help the military near Hama – the next city south on the way to Damascus.

But Hama fell to the rebels on Thursday, after several days of fierce battles that eventually prompted the military to withdraw.

The rebels declared their next goal was to take Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, and achieved that on Saturday night after only a day of fighting. At the same time, other rebel factions reached the suburbs of Damascus.

Early on Sunday, HTS-led rebels announced they had entered Damascus and released detainees at the country’s most notorious military prison, Saydnaya.

Less than two hours later, they declared: “The tyrant Bashar al-Assad has fled.”

The rebels also promised to build a “homeland for all, including all sects and social classes”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, reported that at least 910 people had been killed, including 138 civilians, since the start of the rebel offensive.

The Islamist militant group that led the offensive against Assad was set up in 2012 under a different name, al-Nusra Front.

Al-Nusra Front, which pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda the following year, was regarded as one of the most effective and deadly groups fighting President Assad.

But it was feared for its jihadist ideology, and was seen as being at odds with the largely secular main rebel coalition – the Free Syrian Army.

In 2016, Al-Nusra broke ties with al-Qaeda and took the name Hayat Tahrir al-Sham when it merged with other factions a year later.

However, the UN, US, UK and a number of other countries continue to consider HTS as an al-Qaeda affiliate and frequently refer to it as al-Nusra Front. The US named Abu Mohammed al-Jolani as a specially designated global terrorist and offered a $10m reward for information that led to his capture.

HTS consolidated its power in Idlib and Aleppo provinces by crushing its rivals, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS) group cells. It set up the so-called Syrian Salvation Government to administer the territory according to Islamic law.

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

But in 2020, Turkey and Russia brokered a ceasefire to halt a push by the government to retake Idlib. The ceasefire largely held despite sporadic fighting.

HTS and its allies said on 27 November that they had launched an offensive to “deter aggression”, accusing the government and allied Iran-backed militias of escalating attacks on civilians.

But it came at a time when the government had been weakened by years of war, sanctions and corruption – with allies Russia and Iran preoccupied by other conflicts.

The Iran-backed group Hezbollah had recently suffered from Israel’s offensive in Lebanon. Israeli strikes had eliminated Iranian military commanders in Syria, and Russia was distracted by the war in Ukraine.

Without them, Assad’s forces were left exposed.

Outgoing prime minister Mohammed al-Jalili said on Monday that most members of his former cabinet were working with the rebels “so that the transitional period is quick and smooth”.

The rebels said in a brief statement that their forces were close to establishing complete control of Damascus and preserving public property. They also said Syria’s new government would begin its work as soon as it was formed.

The National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, which represents now-former opposition groups, said on Sunday that it was committed to “completing the transfer of power to a transitional governing body with full executive powers, paving the way for a free, democratic and pluralistic Syria”.

The statement made no mention of HTS, but its vice-president, Dima Moussa, told the BBC that the “transition requires coming together of all Syrian people, including those who are carrying arms”.

Meanwhile, the war continued in other parts of Syria.

HTS and its allies said their forces were advancing in the western countryside of Deir al-Zour, the largest city in eastern Syria.

Turkish-backed rebel factions fighting under the banner of the Syrian National Army were also advancing north-west of Aleppo into territory held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

Israel confirmed it was attacking suspected government chemical weapon and missile sites in Syria, saying this was to stop them falling into the hands of extremists. It also said it would keep a “limited” troop presence in what had been a demilitarised buffer zone in part of the Golan Heights because Syrian troops had abandoned their posts there.

Former Assad loyalists also appeared to be still in control of the Mediterranean coast and mountains in the west of the country. The region is a stronghold of Assad’s minority Alawite sect and also the location of two key Russian military bases – Hmeimim airbase and the naval base in Tartous.

Russian media said Bashar al-Assad and his family had been granted asylum. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia had been as “surprised” as everyone else by what had happened and that Syria was “going through a very difficult period now, due to instability”.

Iran expressed a hope for “the swift end of military conflicts, the prevention of terrorist actions, and the commencement of national dialogue” with all parts of Syrian society.

Turkey said Syria was now at a stage “where the Syrian people will shape the future of their own country”. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said the new government “must be established in an orderly manner” and warned that “the principle of inclusiveness must never be compromised”.

US President Joe Biden said the collapse of the Assad government was a “fundamental act of justice” after decades of repression, but cautioned that the takeover by Islamist rebels created a moment of “risk and uncertainty”.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the collapse of the Assad government was the “direct result” of his country’s action against Hezbollah and Iran.

Iraq, where powerful Iran-backed militias sent fighters to support the Syrian military in the civil war, said it supported efforts to open a dialogue in Syria “leading to the adoption of a pluralistic constitution that preserves the human and civil rights of Syrians”.

Jordan’s King Abdullah, whose country backed rebel factions at the start of the war, said Jordan respected the will and choices of the Syrian people. He stressed the importance of avoiding “any conflict that could lead to chaos”.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, called Assad’s fall “a positive and long-awaited development”, and said the bloc’s priority was to ensure security in the region.

Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani has dropped that nom de guerre associated with his jihadist past, and been using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in official communiques issued since Thursday, ahead of the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.

This move is part of Jolani’s effort to bolster his legitimacy in a new context, as his Islamist militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), leading other rebel factions, announces the capture of the Syrian capital, Damascus, solidifying its control over much of the country.

Jolani’s transformation is not recent, but has been carefully cultivated over the years, evident not only in his public statements and interviews with international outlets but also in his evolving appearance.

Once clad in traditional jihadist militant attire, he has adopted a more Western-style wardrobe in the past years. Now, as he leads the offensive, he has donned military fatigues, symbolising his role as the commander of the operations room.

But who is Jolani – or Ahmed al-Sharaa – and why and how has he changed?

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A 2021 PBS interview with Jolani revealed that he was born in 1982 in Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as an oil engineer until 1989.

In that year, the Jolani family returned to Syria, where he grew up and lived in the Mezzeh neighbourhood of Damascus.

Jolani’s journey as a jihadist began in Iraq, linked to al-Qaeda through the Islamic State (IS) group’s precursor – al-Qaeda in Iraq and, later, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).

After the 2003 US-led invasion, he joined other foreign fighters in Iraq and, in 2005, was imprisoned at Camp Bucca, where he enhanced his jihadist affiliations and later on was introduced to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the quiet scholar who would later go on to lead IS.

In 2011, Baghdadi sent Jolani to Syria with funding to establish al-Nusra Front, a covert faction tied to ISI. By 2012, Nusra had become a prominent Syrian fighting force, hiding its IS and al-Qaeda ties.

Tensions arose in 2013 when Baghdadi’s group in Iraq unilaterally declared the merger of the two groups (ISI and Nusra), declaring the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), and publicly revealing for the first time the links between them.

Jolani resisted, as he wanted to distance his group from ISI’s violent tactics, leading to a split.

To get out of that sticky situation, Jolani pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, making Nusra Front its Syrian branch.

From the start, he prioritised winning Syrian support, distancing himself from IS’s brutality and emphasising a more pragmatic approach to jihad.

• Syria’s Assad falls – follow live updates

In April 2013, al-Nusra Front became al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, putting it at odds with IS.

While Jolani’s move was partly an attempt to maintain local support and avoid alienating Syrians and rebel factions, the al-Qaeda affiliation ultimately did little to benefit this effort.

It became a pressing challenge in 2015 when Nusra and other factions captured Idlib province, forcing them to co-operate in its administration.

In 2016, Jolani severed ties with al-Qaeda, rebranding the group as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and later as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.

While initially appearing superficial, the split revealed deeper divisions. Al-Qaeda accused Jolani of betrayal, leading to defections and the formation of Hurras al-Din, a new al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, which HTS later crushed in 2020. Members of Hurras al-Din, however, have remained cautiously present in the region.

HTS also targeted IS operatives and foreign fighters in Idlib, dismantling their networks and forcing some to undergo “deradicalisation” programmes.

These moves, justified as efforts to unify militant forces and reduce infighting, signalled Jolani’s strategy to position HTS as a dominant and politically viable force in Syria.

Despite the public split from al-Qaeda and name changes, HTS continued to be designated by the UN, US, UK and other countries as a terrorist organisation, and the US maintained a $10m reward for information about Jolani’s whereabouts. Western powers considered the break-up to be a façade.

Under Jolani, HTS became the dominant force in Idlib, north-west Syria’s largest rebel stronghold and home to about four million people, many of whom were displaced from other Syrian provinces.

To address concerns about a militant group governing the area, HTS established a civilian front, the so-called “Syrian Salvation Government” (SG) in 2017 as its political and administrative arm.

The SG functioned like a state, with a prime minister, ministries and local departments overseeing sectors such as education, health and reconstruction, while maintaining a religious council guided by Sharia, or Islamic law.

To reshape his image, Jolani actively engaged with the public, visiting displacement camps, attending events, and overseeing aid efforts, particularly during crises like the 2023 earthquakes.

HTS highlighted achievements in governance and infrastructure to legitimise its rule and demonstrate its ability to provide stability and services.

It has previously praised the Taliban, upon their return to power in 2021, lauding them as an inspiration and a model for effectively balancing jihadist efforts with political aspirations, including making tactical compromises to achieve their goals.

Jolani’s efforts in Idlib reflected his broader strategy to demonstrate HTS’s ability not only to wage jihad but also to govern effectively.

By prioritising stability, public services and reconstruction, he aimed to showcase Idlib as a model of success under HTS rule, enhancing both his group’s legitimacy and his own political aspirations.

But under his leadership, HTS has crushed and marginalised other militant factions, both jihadists and rebel ones, in its effort to consolidate its power and dominate the scene.

For over a year leading up to the HTS-led rebel offensive on 27 November, Jolani faced protests in Idlib from hardline Islamists as well as Syrian activists.

Critics compared his rule to Assad’s, accusing HTS of authoritarianism, suppressing dissent and silencing critics. Protesters labelled HTS’s security forces as “Shabbiha”, a term used to describe Assad’s loyalist henchmen.

They further alleged that HTS deliberately avoided meaningful combat against government forces and marginalised jihadists and foreign fighters in Idlib to prevent them from engaging in such actions, all to appease international actors.

Even during the latest offensive, activists have persistently urged HTS to release individuals imprisoned in Idlib allegedly for expressing dissent.

In response to these criticisms, HTS initiated several reforms over the past year. It disbanded or rebranded a controversial security force accused of human rights violations and established a “Department of Grievances” to allow citizens to lodge complaints against the group. Its critics said these measures were just a show to contain dissent.

To justify its consolidation of power in Idlib and the suppression of plurality among militant groups, HTS argued that unifying under a single leadership was crucial for making progress and ultimately overthrowing the Syrian government.

HTS and its civilian arm, the SG, walked a tightrope, striving to project a modern, moderate image to win over both the local population and the international community, while simultaneously maintaining their Islamist identity to satisfy hardliners within rebel-held areas and HTS’s own ranks.

For instance, in December 2023, HTS and the SG faced a backlash after a “festival” held at a glossy new shopping mall was criticised by hardliners as “immoral”.

And this August, a Paralympic Games-inspired ceremony drew sharp criticism from hardliners, prompting the SG to review the organisation of such events.

These incidents illustrate the challenges HTS faces in reconciling the expectations of its Islamist base with the broader demands of the Syrian population, who are seeking freedom and coexistence after years of authoritarian rule under Assad.

As the latest offensive unfolded, global media focused on Jolani’s jihadist past, prompting some rebel supporters to call for him to step back, viewing him as a liability.

Although he previously expressed willingness to dissolve his group and step aside, his recent actions and public appearances tell a different story.

HTS’s success in uniting rebels and nearly capturing the whole country in under two weeks has strengthened Jolani’s position, quieting hardline critics and accusations of opportunism.

Jolani and the SG have since reassured domestic and international audiences.

To Syrians, including minorities, they promised safety; to neighbours and powers like Russia, they pledged peaceful relations. Jolani even assured Russia its Syrian bases would remain unharmed if attacks ceased.

This shift reflects HTS’s “moderate jihad” strategy since 2017, emphasising pragmatism over rigid ideology.

Jolani’s approach could signal the decline of global jihad movements like IS and al-Qaeda, whose inflexibility is increasingly seen as ineffective and unsustainable.

His trajectory might inspire other groups to adapt, marking either a new era of localised, politically flexible “jihadism” or just a temporary divergence from the traditional path in order to make political and territorial gains.

The speed and magnitude of Bashar al-Assad’s “historic” downfall has stunned the White House. But President Biden is also taking part of the credit.

In his statement, he portrayed the extraordinary shift in Syria’s control as a result of US strategy which has fundamentally weakened the roles of Russia and Iran in the region, helping precipitate Assad’s demise.

In reality, Washington never foresaw that its military support for Israel since the Hamas attacks last October and for Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 would contribute to the collapse of half a century of Assad rule in Syria.

But it has, and now the US has to deal with the aftermath – a “historic opportunity” but a moment of “risk and uncertainty”, according to Biden.

Washington is trying to work out what comes next. Who rules Syria? The president met his national security team at the White House on Sunday morning.

The administration will not mourn Assad’s end, Iran’s emasculation or Russia’s humiliation in Syria.

Its fear is about a vacuum in which what it saw as an undesirable but relatively stabilised balance of forces could be filled by something it wants even less: a power grab by Islamist insurgents, including factions designated as terrorists by the US, unresponsive to the breadth of Syria’s wider population, potentially triggering further chaos and new risks for the region.

• Watch: BBC sees looting at Bashar al-Assad’s residence
• Steve Rosenberg: Fall of Assad is a blow to Russia’s prestige
• HTS leader not only player in Syria’s fast-changing future

As Damascus echoes with celebratory gunfire at Assad’s downfall, most Syrians won’t share the American handwringing. The US will briefly join in on a moment to hail the demise of a brutal autocrat – but more profoundly it will fret about what fills the gap.

The Pentagon is already making clear American troops will stay put in eastern Syria, where it has a small number of forces officially to counter the Islamic State group.

Deputy US Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Daniel Shapiro has called on all parties to protect civilians, particularly minorities, and to respect international norms.

“We are aware that the chaotic and dynamic circumstances on the ground in Syria could give Isis space to find the ability to become active, to plan external operations, and we’re determined to work with those partners to continue to degrade their capabilities,” he said.

US troops also train and equip what Washington sees as moderate Arab and Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates River and at the al-Tanf military base, close to the border with Iraq and Jordan.

We don’t know yet what approach Damascus will take to the US presence in Syria, but it seems likely Washington will now push for a negotiated stabilisation of the country leaning heavily on its favoured factions.

Earlier in Syria’s civil war, President Obama gave his permission for limited backing for what the US saw as moderate rebels elsewhere in the country. That was later abandoned as extremists began dominating the battlefield and Russia entered the war on Assad’s behalf.

Washington had since backed a United Nations process for a negotiated settlement between Assad and opposition forces. It’s likely this will transition into US calls for a mediated outcome between the rebels and the remnants of Assad’s regime.

The group that led the fortnight-long charge to Damascus – Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – has repeatedly signalled its apparent rebrand, rejecting violent revenge and abandoning its former links to al-Qaeda. Washington will be deeply distrustful of the group, which it has designated as a foreign terrorist organisation.

But some from the region in close contact with US officials see this approach as reductive, even cynical. They urge Washington to embrace a process of transition in Damascus taking account of the breadth of Syrian opposition.

Mouaz Moustafa from the Washington-based Syrian Emergency Task Force – which coordinates with the US military and partner forces in Syria – has described what is unfolding as an “indescribable good” that the Americans must not reduce to the actions of one faction.

“There is an operations room that has multiple factions of different political stripes – some are secular, some are conservative – but they agree on one thing. They are going to liberate Syria from al-Qaeda, Isis, Iran, Russia, and they will allow people to have their country back,” he told the BBC.

In his statement, President Biden said some of the groups in Syria were “saying the right things now” but he would judge them on their actions.

Meanwhile President-elect Trump has been posting about Syria, describing it as a “mess” that the US should stay out of. “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,” he said.

In his comments he points blame at Obama and says Russia should now wash its hands of the country, apparently using its “weakened state” as a reason Moscow and Kyiv should engage in a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine.

“I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act,” says Trump.

As president in 2019, Trump famously made a surprise announcement withdrawing US troops from Syria. His officials gradually rowed that back, fearing ceding control to Russia and a resurgence of the Islamic State group.

Trump may well have an eye to resuming his previous position.

“I get a lot of hate”. The words of content creator Winta Zesu, who last year made $150,000 (£117,000) from posting on social media.

What separates Winta from other influencers? The people commenting on her posts and driving traffic to her videos are often doing so out of anger.

“Every single video of mine that has gained millions of views is because of hate comments,” the 24-year-old explains.

In those videos, she documents the life of a New York City model, whose biggest problem is being too pretty. What some in the comments don’t realise, is that Winta is playing a character.

“I get a lot of nasty comments, people say ‘you’re not the prettiest girl’ or ‘please bring yourself down, you have too much confidence’,” she says to the BBC from her New York City apartment.

Winta is part of a growing group of online creators making ‘rage bait’ content, where the goal is simple: record videos, produce memes and write posts that make other users viscerally angry, then bask in the thousands, or even millions, of shares and likes.

It differs from its internet-cousin clickbait, where a headline is used to tempt a reader to click through to view a video or article.

As marketing podcaster Andrea Jones notes: “A hook reflects what’s in that piece of content and comes from a place of trust, whereas rage-baiting content is designed to be manipulative.”

But the grip negative content has on human psychology is something that is hardwired into us, according to Dr William Brady, who studies how the brain interacts with new technologies.

“In our past, this is the kind of content that we really needed to pay attention to,” he explains, “so we have these biases built into our learning and our attention.”

The growth in rage baiting content has coincided with the major social media platforms paying creators more for their content.

These creator programs – which reward users for likes, comments and shares, and allow them to post sponsored content – have been linked to its rise.

“If we see a cat, we’re like ‘oh, that’s cute’ and scroll on. But if we see someone doing something obscene, we may type in the comments ‘this is terrible’, and that sort of comment is seen as a higher quality engagement by the algorithm,” explains marketing podcaster Andréa Jones.

“The more content a user creates the more engagement they get, the more that they get paid.

“And so, some creators will do anything to get more views, even if it is negative or inciting rage and anger in people,” she says with a note of concern. “It leads to disengagement.”

Rage bait content comes in many forms, from outrageous food recipes, to attacks on your favourite popstar. But in a year of global elections, particularly in the US, rage baiting has spread to politics too.

As Dr Brady observes: “There has been a spike in the build up to elections, because it’s an effective way to mobilize your political group to potentially vote and take action.”

He notes the American election was light on policy, and instead centred around outrage, adding, “it was hyper-focused on ‘Trump is horrible for this reason’ or ‘Harris is horrible for that reason’.”

An investigation from BBC social media investigations correspondent Marianna Spring found some users on X were being paid “thousands of dollars” by the social media site, for sharing content including misinformation, AI-generated images and unfounded conspiracy theories.

Some who study the trends are concerned that too much negative content can lead to the average person “switching off”.

“It can be draining to have such high emotions all the time,” says Ariel Hazel, assistant professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan.

“It turns them off the news environment and we’re seeing increased amounts of active news avoidance around the world.”

Others worry about normalising anger offline and the eroding effects on people’s trust in the content they view.

“Algorithms amplify outrage, it makes people think it’s more normal,” says social psychologist Dr William Brady.

He adds: “What we know from certain platforms like X is that politically extreme content is actually produced by a very small fraction of the user base, but algorithms can amplify it as if they were more of a majority.”

The BBC contacted the main social media platforms about rage bait on their sites, but had no responses.

In October 2024, Meta executive Adam Mosseri posted on Threads about “an increase in engagement-bait” on the platform, adding, “we’re working to get it under control.”

While Elon Musk’s rival platform X, recently announced a change to its Creator Revenue Sharing Program which will see creators compensated based on engagement from the site’s premium users – such as likes, replies, and reposts. Previously compensation was based on ads viewed by premium users.

TikTok and YouTube allow users to make money from their posts or to share sponsored content too, but have rules which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post misinformation. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.

Back in Winta Zesu’s New York City apartment, the conversation – which is taking place days before the US election – turns to politics.

“Yeah, I don’t agree with people using rage bait for political reasons,” the content creator says.

“If they’re using it genuinely to educate and inform people, it’s fine. But if they’re using it to spread misinformation, I totally do not agree with that.

“It’s not a joke anymore.”

Last month, Rishabh Pant became the most expensive player in the history of the Indian Premier League (IPL) as he was signed by Lucknow SuperGiants for 27 crore rupees (£2.54m) at the mega auction in Saudi Arabia.

But it was the news of Prithvi Shaw – Pant’s Delhi Capitals teammate – going unsold that grabbed more attention.

Among those seated in the auction in positions to make bids were Sourav Ganguly and Ricky Ponting, who had been closely associated with Shaw in his years with Capitals, as also Rahul Dravid, who was coach when India won the under-19 World Cup under Shaw in 2018.

Their disinterest was telling. Shaw found no takers.

Ironically, just nine months earlier, before the start of the 2024 IPL season, it was Pant whose career looked in jeopardy.

A horrific car crash in December 2022 had left him with multiple life-threatening injuries. But showing iron will, great determination and self-discipline, Pant fought his way back from what seemed a dead-end to his career.

Pant faced the challenges of IPL 2024 head-on and excelled, earning a rapid recall to international cricket. He was part of the T20 World Cup-winning squad. Dominating the domestic season, he impressed in the domestic Duleep Trophy, paving the way for a sensational return to Test cricket. Against Bangladesh, he lit up the field with a scorching century.

Shaw, meanwhile, under pressure after a couple of poor IPL seasons, has lurched from one crisis to another.

His indifferent form in IPL 2024 saw him lose his place in the playing XI mid-season. A spate of low scores in the current domestic season saw him lose his place in the Mumbai Ranji Trophy team too. And an outright rejection in the IPL mega auction has brought his career to the precipice of a premature end.

It’s been a mighty tumble for the 25-year-old, who not too long ago, was touted as the ‘next big thing’ in Indian cricket.

Shaw hit the headlines in November 2013 as a 14-year-old when he smashed 546 runs for Rizvi Springfield in the Harris Shield, a prestigious school cricket tournament. It was the highest score in the world in minor cricket then.

Sachin Tendulkar, India’s most celebrated cricketer, had retired only a week earlier, and Shaw earned an instant comparison with the maestro.

Tendulkar’s spectacular rise to eminence following his world record 664-runs partnership with Vinod Kambli in a school game way back in 1987, had inspired quite a few batting prodigies, especially from Mumbai. Shaw was one of them.

A short and stocky opening batsman, Shaw did not have the technical virtuosity Tendulkar had even as a teenager. But he had a gift of timing, and took the attack to the bowlers with such panache that selectors were instantly enamoured.

He was fast-tracked into first-class cricket, like Tendulkar, scoring a century on debut in the domestic Ranji and Duleep Trophy, which hardened comparisons between the two.

In late 2018, he got a Test call-up against the West Indies. Shaw hit 134 off just 154 deliveries, studded with rifle-shot drives, cuts and pulls. He was barely 19. Only Tendulkar among Indians had scored his maiden Test century at a younger age.

Touted as a worthy successor to Tendulkar and Virat Kohli, Shaw had the world at his feet. But he’s been on a slippery slope since.

Six years after his sensational debut he played in only four more Tests. Add six ODIs and a solitary T20i, it still makes for a dismal aggregate of international appearances for a batsman whose precocity had promised a long, dazzling career.

An unfortunate foot injury, which saw him being sent back from the tour of Australia in 2020 was the start of Shaw’s problems. Later that year, he tested positive for a banned substance and was lucky to get away with a light sentence. Thereafter his batting form started declining steadily, touching excellence agonisingly infrequently to impress selectors.

Meanwhile stories of Shaw getting embroiled in wild parties and brawls started to spread. By the middle of IPL 2024, he was on notice, as it were. After the IPL 2025 mega auction, his career seems engulfed in uncertainty.

Injury, illness, and poor form can derail even the best, but those close to Shaw reveal that misfortune has played only a minor role in his precarious downfall.

Ricky Ponting, who as Delhi Capitals coach worked closely with Shaw, says: “There’s only so much [advice] you can give and only so many times you can try [to sort him out] .”

Former India batsman Praveen Amre, who was assistant coach with Delhi Capitals was more direct. “Prithvi’s inability to handle IPL fame and money has been his undoing. I’ve talked to him several times, giving him the example of Vinod Kambli who frittered away his career for the lack of discipline,’’ Amre told a national daily.

The IPL has revolutionised young players’ lives, offering a platform for talent and livelihood. Yet, the challenges of early success, instant fame,and rapid wealth remain pressing. Rahul Dravid, drawing on his experience as U-19 and India A coach, has emphasised the need for stronger junior-level mentoring to keep players on track. Shaw’s struggles underscore the importance of his insight.

What the future holds for Shaw time will tell.

At 25, he still has age on his side. But Indian cricket is overflowing with talent, and competition for places is intense. The path from here is all uphill.

“Some of the greatest sports stories are comeback stories, If Prithvi Shaw has decent people around him who care about his long term success, they’d sit him down, tell him to get off social media & train his absolute backside off in getting super fit. It’ll get him back into the correct path where past success can return. Too talented to throw it all away,” Former England captain Kevin Pietersen posted on X.

The message to Shaw is clear. Redemption lies in his own hands.

“They look like chocolate truffles, just don’t eat them,” jokes Jean Mason, the curator of the Cook Islands Library and Museum as she reaches into a display cabinet and pulls out a black, knobbly rock.

The “rock” she is holding may well determine the future of this Pacific nation.

It is what scientists call a polymetallic nodule, created over millennia as minerals accumulate on the seabed.

Packed full of cobalt, nickel and manganese, these ancient formations are now valuable: the metals go into batteries that power modern life, from electric cars to mobile phones.

They have become a source of friction in the low-lying Pacific Islands, which are among the nations most vulnerable to climate change.

With rising sea levels, the ocean – or Moana, as it’s called in Māori and many other Polynesian languages – remains their greatest threat, but it is also their biggest provider.

They fish in it and they live off the tourists drawn to their turquoise waters, but now the Cook Islands wants to dig deeper, up to 6,000m (19,685 ft), where the nodules lie.

It’s a pet project for Prime Minister Mark Brown, who believes it will reshape this country of 15 volcanic islands in the southern Pacific.

The hope is that the income from these metals could lead to more prosperity than the islanders had ever imagined.

Except the promise of deep sea mining may carry an environmental price.

Proponents say that harvesting these nodules for use in renewables will help the world transition from fossil fuels. They also believe that it is less invasive than mining on land.

But critics argue so much is still unknown about the impact of extracting what is one of the last untouched parts of the planet. They say there should be a pause on deep sea mining until there is more research on its effects on marine life and the oceanic ecosystem.

When Jean was growing up, she says, the nodules were only thought to be useful for making knife blades.

“We had no idea that cell phones were going to come, and wind turbines and electric cars.”

Nodules are a family conversation here and Jean is firmly in favour of mining them. Her husband is a lawyer for one of the companies given exploration licences by the government.

The library where she works is stacked full of holiday reads left or donated by tourists – tourism is the country’s biggest earner, accounting for more than 70% of its GDP.

It includes a newspaper archive.

Jean shoves a photocopy of an article from the Cook Islands News into my hand. It’s from 1974 and the headline reads “100% concentration of manganese nodules”.

“My point is, we’ve been talking about this for 50-plus years – I think the moratorium time is over.”

The Pacific Ocean covers close to a third of the planet. And the nodules buried in it have been known about since the 19th Century.

But in the 1960s, American geologist John L Mero published a book setting out the case that the seabed could provide many of the world’s mineral needs.

It’s not an easy process – nor a cheap one. But when prices of metals like nickel soared in 2008, it looked more appealing.

Then Covid hit. Tourists left and the money dried up.

Together with the impact of climate change – rising sea levels and unpredictable weather patterns – the country quickly realised it needed something else to rely on.

The Cook Islands’ Seabeds Minerals Authority estimates there are 12 billion wet tonnes of polymetallic nodules in their waters.

Some people argue mining the seabed is not financially viable. With technology moving so fast, these metals may not even be in demand by the time it gets going.

But there are takers. And in 2022, the Cook Islands gave out three licences to companies to start exploring the possibility of deep-sea mining.

They’re now working with scientists in researching the environmental impact.

“Nothing we do in life is risk-free. So, if you want zero risk you need to go and sit in a little room with cotton wool around you,” says Hans Smit, who runs Moana Minerals, one of the firms that has an exploration licence.

“We have this lifestyle, this lifestyle has a price. If we don’t want mining and we don’t want to get all these metals, we need to stop doing just about everything we’re doing.”

Hans is from South Africa and moved here to be part of the community. To him, the deep-sea metals are an “incredible resource” that could benefit the islanders.

While there’s a growing call to delay deep-sea mining until regulations by the International Seabed Authority are drawn up, this only applies to international waters.

The Cook Islands still have huge reserves of their own in their national waters – their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – so, they can crack on regardless.

“We’re known as small-island developing states, but we like to call ourselves large ocean states,” says Rima Brown, a young Cook Islander with a geography degree who jokingly calls herself the poster child for deep-sea mining.

Rima works for the Seabed Minerals Authority and much of her time is spent mapping the sea bed.

“While we’re only about 200 square kilometers in land mass, we have an exclusive economic zone of almost 2 million square kilometres,” she says.

That’s the equivalent of Mexico.

“It’s the only resource we’ve got,” Jean says.

“[Industrialised nations] destroy our atmosphere and then they’ve got a nerve to tell us, let’s leave your stuff in the seabed. How dare they tell us we can’t touch our resources?”

But it’s not just outsiders who are opposed to deep-sea mining in the Cook Islands.

Off the coast of Rarotonga, the largest and most populous of the Cook Islands, a crowd of surfers, kayakers and swimmers gather around a large vaka, a traditional Polynesian catamaran.

“Te Moana, Te Moana, Paruru ia ra, Paruru ia ra,” the people on board repeat – “Protect our ocean”, they are chanting in Māori.

“We are asking for more time for robust independent research, more time for our people to be made better aware of what potential risk might look like,” says Alanah Matamaru Smith from the Te Ipukarea Society, an environmental organisation based in Rarotonga.

“We’re seeing infrastructure being put up here on Rarotonga, accommodation for offshore mining companies to reside here, we’ve got draft mining regulations already in place. Actions are speaking a lot louder than words at the moment.”

Prime Minister Mark Brown, who is driving this, also happens to be the tourism minister and the seabed minerals minister. He’s made it clear he wants the Cook Islands to be a leader in the industry.

“It provides the opportunity for our kids to be able to study at any university in the world without having to incur a student loan,” says Brown, who has a vision of following the lead of Norway in establishing a sovereign wealth fund.

“It allows us to have the type of health care that our people have to go to New Zealand or Australia for. It allows our young people the opportunity to live fulfilling lives here in our country, without having to go to other countries to ply their trade in an industry that doesn’t exist here.”

To those who say a country threatened by climate change risks becoming part of the problem, he argues he’s trying to find solutions.

“We know that for the last 20 years we haven’t been able to get the financing from the larger emitting countries, so we’ve got to look for ways to protect ourselves.”

But activist June Hosking isn’t convinced.

She’s from one of the outer islands, Mauke, with a population of just 300 people.

While the government has organised consultations with residents across the islands as well as the large diaspora in New Zealand, she says the potential downsides of the industry are not being discussed.

“People don’t like to rock the boat in the outer islands,” she says. “So, when we have these consultations, there’s only maybe three of us who would speak up.”

June says such is island life, many refer to the PM as just Mark. She also says his wife is married to her husband’s cousin.

But family connections don’t stop her being seen as a bit of a trouble-maker in asking questions.

“When locals say ‘Oh no, I stay neutral on [deep-sea mining]’, I say ‘you can’t drive very far in neutral’,” she laughs.

“There are times in your life when you need to actually make a stand for something – we are talking about our future here.”

Bribery charges by a US court against the Adani Group are unlikely to significantly upset India’s clean energy goals, industry leaders have told the BBC.

Delhi has pledged to source half of its energy needs or 500 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from renewable sources by 2032, key to global efforts to combat climate change.

The Adani Group is slated to contribute to a tenth of that capacity.

The legal troubles in the US could temporarily delay the group’s expansion plans but will not affect the government’s overall targets, analysts say.

India has made impressive strides in building clean energy infrastructure over the last decade.

The country is growing at the “fastest rate among major economies” in adding renewables capacity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Installed clean energy capacity has grown five-fold, with some 45% of the country’s power-generation capacity – of nearly 200GW – coming from non-fossil fuel sources.

Charges against the Adani Group – crucial to India’s clean energy ambitions – are “like a passing dark cloud”, and will not meaningfully impact this momentum, a former CEO of a rival firm said, wanting to remain anonymous.

Gautam Adani has vowed to invest $100bn (£78.3bn) in India’s energy transition. Its green energy arm is the country’s largest renewable energy company, producing nearly 11GW of clean energy through a diverse portfolio of wind and solar projects.

Adani has a target to scale that to 50GW BY 2030, which will make up nearly 10% of the country’s own installed capacity.

Over half of that, or 30GW, will be produced at Khavda, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. It is the world’s biggest clean energy plant, touted to be five times the size of Paris and the centrepiece in Adani’s renewables crown.

But Khavda and Adani’s other renewables facilities are now at the very centre of the charges filed by US prosecutors – they allege that the company won contracts to supply power to state distribution companies from these facilities, in exchange for bribes to Indian officials. The group has denied this.

But the fallout at the company level is already visible.

When the indictment became public, Adani Green Energy immediately cancelled a $600m bond offering in the US.

France’s TotalEnergies, which owns 20% of Adani Green Energy and has a joint venture to develop several renewables projects with the conglomerate, said it will halt fresh capital infusion into the company.

Major credit ratings agencies – Moody’s, Fitch and S&P – have since changed their outlook on Adani group companies, including Adani Green Energy, to negative. This will impact the company’s capacity to access funds and make it more expensive to raise capital.

Analysts have also raised concerns about Adani Green Energy’s ability to refinance its debt, as international lenders grow weary of adding exposure to the group.

Global lenders like Jeffries and Barclays are already said to be reviewing their ties with Adani even as the group’s reliance on global banks and international and local bond issues for long-term debt has grown from barely 14% in financial year 2016 to nearly 60% as of date, according to a note from Bernstein.

Japanese brokerage Nomura says new financing might dry up in the short term but should “gradually resume in the long term”. Meanwhile, Japanese banks like MUFG, SMBC, Mizuho are likely to continue their relationship with the group.

The “reputational and sentimental impact” will fade away in a few months, as Adani is building “solid, strategic assets and creating long-term value”, the unnamed CEO said.

A spokesperson for the Adani Group told the BBC that it was “committed to its 2030 targets and confident of delivering 50 GW of renewable energy capacity”.

Adani stocks have recovered sharply from the lows they hit post the US court indictment.

Some analysts told the BBC that a possible slowdown in funding for Adani could in fact end up benefitting its competitors.

While Adani’s financial influence has allowed it to rapidly expand in the sector, its competitors such as Tata Power, Goldman Sachs-backed ReNew Power, Greenko and state-run NTPC Ltd are also significantly ramping up manufacturing and generation capacity.

“It’s not that Adani is a green energy champion. It is a big player that has walked both sides of the street, being the biggest private developer of coal plants in the world,” said Tim Buckley, director at Climate Energy Finance.

A large entity, “perceived to be corrupt” possibly slowing its expansion, could mean “more money will start flowing into other green energy companies”, he said.

According to Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director at Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), market fundamentals also continue to remain strong with demand for renewable energy outpacing supply in India – which is likely to keep the appetite for big investments intact.

What could in fact slow the pace of India’s clean energy ambitions is its own bureaucracy.

“Companies we track are very upbeat. Finance isn’t a problem for them. If anything, it is state-level regulations that act as a kind of deterrent,” says Ms Garg.

Most state-run power distribution companies continue to face financial constraints, opting for cheaper fossil fuels, while dragging their feet on signing purchase agreements.

According to Reuters, the controversial tender won by Adani was the first major contract issued by state-run Solar Energy Corp of India (SECI) without a guaranteed purchase agreement from distributors.

SECI’s chairman told Reuters that there are 30GW of operational green energy projects in the market without buyers.

Experts say the 8GW solar contract at the heart of Adani’s US indictment also sheds light on the messy tendering process, which required solar power generation companies to manufacture modules as well – limiting the number of bidders and leading to higher power costs.

The court indictment will certainly lead to a “tightening of bidding and tendering rules”, says Ms Garg.

A cleaner tendering process that lowers risks both for developers and investors will be important going ahead, agrees Mr Buckley.

It is among the most delicate and controversial challenges in modern medicine – how to determine whether the benefits of puberty blockers (or drugs that delay puberty) outweigh the potential harms.

This question came to the fore in June 2023 when NHS England proposed that in the future, these drugs would only be prescribed to children questioning their gender as part of clinical research.

Since then, a new government has arrived in Westminster and Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said he is committed to “setting up a clinical trial” to establish the evidence on puberty blockers. The National Institute for Health and Care Research is expected to confirm soon that funding is in place for a trial.

The dilemma that remains is, how will such a trial work?

Eighteen months since the announcement there is still a lack of consensus around how the trial should be conducted. It will also need to be approved by a committee of experts who have to decide, among other things, whether what’s being tested might cause undue physical or psychological harm.

But there is a second unanswered question that some, but by no means all, scientists have that is more pressing than the first: is it right to perform this particular trial on children and young people at all?

When the Gender and Identity Development Service (GIDS) was established at London’s Tavistock Clinic in 1989, it was the only NHS specialist gender clinic for children in England, and those referred there were typically offered psychological and social support.

Over the last 10 years, however, there has been a rapid increase in referrals – with the greatest increase being people registered female at birth. In a separate development, around the same time the approach of typically offering psychological and social support moved to one of onward referrals to services that prescribed hormone drugs, such as puberty blockers.

Known scientifically as gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues, puberty blockers work on the brain to stop the rise in sex hormones – oestrogen and testosterone – that accompany puberty. For years, they were prescribed to young patients with gender dysphoria (those who feel their gender identity is different from their biological sex). But in March 2024, NHS England stopped the routine prescribing of puberty blockers to under 18s, as part of an overhaul of children’s gender identity services.

NHS England said in a policy statement: “There is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of PSH [puberty suppressing hormones] to make the treatment routinely available at this time.”

The ban was later tightened to apply to private clinics as well.

In April 2024, a review of gender identity services for children and young people, led by Dr Hilary Cass, a past president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, published its final report, which called out the “field of gender care” for not taking a cautious and careful approach.

She also reported that the change in practice at GIDS away from one primarily relying on psychological and social support was largely based on a single study that looked at the effect of medical interventions such as puberty blockers on a very narrowly defined group of children and there was a lack of follow up in the longer term.

Elsewhere, some other countries were re-examining puberty blockers too. Scotland paused the use of them while Finland, Sweden, France, Norway, and Denmark have all re-evaluated their positions on medical intervention for under 18s – including puberty blockers – to differing degrees. In other places there is still support for the use of puberty blockers.

In medicine, when there is genuine uncertainty as to whether the benefits of a treatment outweigh the harms – called equipoise – some ethicists argue there’s a moral obligation to scientifically study such treatments. But there are some from across the debate who don’t think there is equipoise in this case.

The BBC has learned details about the arguments going on around the concept of a trial and how it could look. Some argue that there is already evidence that puberty blockers can help with mental health, and that in light of this it would be unethical to perform a trial at all because this would mean some young people experiencing gender distress would not be given them.

The World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) has expressed their concern about the trial for this reason. They support the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery. WPATH, who have faced increasing criticism of their guidelines from some clinicians, say that it is ethically problematic to make participation in a trial the only way to access a type of care that is “evidence based, widely recognised as medically necessary, and often reported as lifesaving.”

Meanwhile other clinicians believe there is no good evidence that puberty blockers can help with mental health at all. They also point to research that questions the negative impact that the drugs might have on brain development among teenagers, as well as evidence around the negative impact on bone density.

Dr Louise Irvine is a GP and co-chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender which says it is cautious about using medical pathways in gender dysphoric children. She says: “Given that puberty blockers by definition disrupt a crucial natural phase of human development, the anticipated benefits must be tangible and significant to justify the risk to children.

“In pushing ahead with a puberty blockers trial, we are concerned that political interests are being prioritised over clinical, ethical and scientific concerns, and over the health and wellbeing of children.”

The NHS adult gender services holds data that tracks 9,000 young people from the youth service. Some argue that this should be scrutinised before any trial goes ahead as it could provide evidence on, among other things, the potential risks of taking puberty blockers.

But there is a third view held by some others, including Gordon Guyatt, a professor at McMaster University in Canada, who points out that randomised trials are done in “life-threatening stuff all the time” where no-one can be sure of the long-term effects of a treatment. In his view it would be “unethical not to do it”.

“With only low quality evidence, people’s philosophies, their attitudes or their politics, will continue to dominate the discussion,” he argues. “If we do not generate better evidence, the destructive, polarised debate will continue.”

– Dr Cass found the existing research in the field was poor quality and that there was not a reliable enough evidence base to base clinical decisions on. Young people involved in many of the existing studies may have also had interventions including psychological support and other medical treatments and so it was not always possible to disentangle the effect of each different treatment.

– When it comes to suppressing puberty by using drugs, the rationale for doing so “remains unclear”, Dr Cass said. One of the original reasons given was to allow time to think by delaying the onset of puberty. But the evidence suggests the vast majority who start on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones – oestrogen or testosterone. It is not clear why but one theory, the Cass report suggests, is that puberty blockers may, in their own right, change the “trajectory” of gender identity development.

– Clinicians “are unable to determine with any certainty” which young people “will go on to have an enduring trans identity”, Dr Cass wrote. In other words, there’s a lack of clarity about which young people might benefit in the long term and which may be harmed overall by the process.

Recruitment for the trial is due to start in 2025, months later than originally anticipated. Young people will likely be referred after a full assessment by specialist clinicians. A lot is still to be determined, including how many participants there will be.

Ultimately the scientists running the trials will need to establish whether people who get an intervention are better off than those who do not. In this case, do the puberty blocking drugs and their effect make the young people better off?

“Better off” in this instance includes the extent to which a young person’s mental health may be improved if they are happy with their body. Quality of life is determined by various factors including self-confidence and self-esteem. As well as getting the personal views from the young people and parents, the trial could measure actual real life changes, such as time spent in education and time spent with family and friends.

But there are potential harms to study too, such as the possibility of reduced bone density. Some scientists suggest examining the impact on learning using a form of IQ test.

Normal brain development is influenced by both puberty and chronological age, which usually act in tandem during adolescence. It’s not clear how this is affected when puberty is suppressed. Brain scans are one way of understanding any effect.

Some scientists believe it may be possible to simply randomly assign trial participants into two groups where one gets puberty blockers, the other gets a placebo and nobody is aware which group they’re in.

But others believe a placebo group is impossible. They say the placebo group would go through puberty, realise they weren’t on puberty blockers and potentially drop out of the trial or even find other ways to obtain puberty blockers. Either scenario would reduce the validity of the results.

Professor Gordon Guyatt and others have outlined a potential trial where the group of patients not receiving drugs would be made up entirely of children who are keen to socially transition, such as by changing how they dress and altering their name and pronouns. Researchers could then monitor the difference between the groups.

A second possibility is that both trial groups are given puberty blockers but one group gets them after a delay, during which time they receive psychological and emotional support. This would help researchers determine, among other things, whether their gender-related distress subsides during that delay while receiving the support.

Alongside this there would be a “matched” control group that doesn’t take a placebo or puberty blockers, whether for health reasons or because they don’t want to, that get similar tests and scans.

Puberty occurs in stages when different bodily changes occur. A third proposal could involve a second group being given drugs at a later stage in puberty than the first.

This would allow researchers to explore when the right time to give puberty blockers might be. For example, it would enable the researchers to see if starting the drugs early improves wellbeing by reducing gender-specific body changes. They would also be able to see whether starting the drugs earlier has a greater negative impact on bone density and brain development.

Children referred to GIDS also experienced higher rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and autism compared to the general child population. Trial participants would continue to receive treatment related to these conditions but – so we know any differences in the results from the groups are down to the drug – they will need to be balanced for the above conditions.

All these considerations demonstrate the complexity of trying to obtain evidence in this area that is reliable and definitive.

Many parents are watching closely to see how it will play out. Annabel (not her real name) is one of them. She is part of the Bayswater Group, a collection of parents with children who are questioning their gender who say they are “wary of medical solutions to gender dysphoria”. She began looking into puberty blockers when her own daughter began questioning her gender in her early teens, an option put on the table by GIDS.

Ultimately her daughter decided not to take them. Annabel was not convinced there was enough evidence to show they were beneficial and she was unsure what it would mean for her daughter’s long-term physical and psychological health.

Today, she still has unanswered questions – including some further ones around the trial. “A big concern for me is will this new trial, if it gets approval, give us the evidence that we want? Or will we end up with more weak data that Dr Cass said undermined decision making in this area?”

Natacha Kennedy, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London who researches transgender issues, has examined the results of a survey of 97 parents of young people with gender-related distress that took place following the puberty blockers ban. She believes that puberty blockers should be an option available for young people questioning their gender and that many will not accept being part of a placebo group in a trial.

“These parents are desperate and if [they] get to a trial and it turns out their child is not being given the actual puberty blockers, then there is no point in them being there,” she says.

“There may be some parents who would… find another way [to obtain the drugs].”

Whatever trial format is settled on, more scrutiny will follow. And there will no doubt be fierce debate about the merits of the trial and what it can tell us, as many scientists around the world are watching to see what happens in the UK.

But inevitably, there will be a long wait to fully understand the longer term effects on physical and mental health of those who take puberty blockers – and the long-term effects on those with gender-related distress who don’t. Nor do we know how many people detransition, though the Cass report says, “there is suggestion that numbers are increasing”.

“We really need to have long-term follow up,” argues Annabel. “Can a child possibly understand what that means to their fertility and a loss of sexual function and what that will mean for their future life?”

For now, she and the scores of parents, carers and young people, can only watch and wait for the trial to begin and for its verdict – and what that means for whether puberty blockers will be prescribed to children once again in the future.

A section of the American airliner which exploded over Lockerbie 35 years ago is being transported to the US for the trial of the man accused of making the bomb.

The wreckage from the fuselage of Pan Am Flight 103 will form part of the evidence in the case against Abu Agila Masud.

The Libyan has denied making the bomb which destroyed the plane on 21 December 1988.

Relatives of the 270 victims have been informed of the transfer of the fuselage section, which is part of a formal evidence sharing process between Scottish and American prosecutors.

The Boeing 747 Clipper Maid of the Seas broke up at 31,000 ft as it flew from Heathrow to New York.

All 259 passengers and crew on board were killed, along with 11 people in Lockerbie who died when the plane fell on their homes.

The victims included 190 American citizens. It was the worst terror attack against the US until 9/11.

Approximately 319 tons of wreckage from the plane were scattered over 845 square miles.

Air accident investigators reassembled a 65ft long section of the fuselage, showing the “petalling” caused by the explosion.

The bomb had been concealed in a radio cassette player in a suitcase in the hold.

Abu Agila Masud has been accused of making the device and is due to stand trial at a federal court in Washington next May.

The US authorities have accused him of causing the destruction of an aircraft resulting in death.

Laura Buchan leads the team of prosecutors working on the case at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

“The transfer of physical items of evidence from Scotland into US custody is beginning,” she said.

“The transfer includes parts of the fuselage of Pan Am 103 which are a production in the criminal investigation.

“We understand that the fuselage will hold significance for many of the families of those who lost their lives and they have been informed of the transfer plans.”

In 2001, three Scottish judges ruled that Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi had played a key role in the bombing and convicted him of the murder of 270 people.

Megrahi was jailed for life but freed on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government while terminally ill with cancer in 2009.

He had always protested his innocence and died in Libya three years later.

Scotland’s Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC said the verdict from the first Lockerbie trial had been the subject of intense scrutiny and had been upheld twice in the appeal court.

She described the transfer of the fuselage section as “a strong expression of the commitment that Scottish prosecutors and officers of Police Scotland have to bringing all those responsible for this terrible act to justice”.

That message was echoed by Police Scotland chief constable Jo Farrell, whose officers have been involved in building the case against Masud.

She said the force would pursue those involved in bombing the plane “no matter the passage of time”.

With winter nights drawing in across North America, Canadian “snowbirds” – citizens who flee their freezing temperatures for sunnier climes every year – are planning their annual trips to Florida or the Caribbean.

Traditionally, Cuba has been hugely popular among Canadians, drawn to the pristine white sands of beach resorts like Varadero.

They fill the void left by Americans wary of the travel restrictions imposed on them under the continuing US economic embargo of the largest island in the Caribbean.

Figures show that almost one million Canadian tourists visited Cuba last year, the top country of origin for visitors by some margin.

As such, a recent decision by the Canadian tour operator, Sunwing Vacations Group – one of Cuba’s leading travel partners – to remove 26 hotels from its Cuba portfolio is a blow to the island’s struggling tourism industry.

Sunwing took the decision after Cuba endured a four-day nationwide blackout at the end of October, caused by failures with the country’s aging energy infrastructure.

This was followed by another national power cut last month, when Hurricane Rafael barrelled its way across the island, worsening an already-acute electricity crisis.

A third countrywide blackout then happened on Wednesday, 4 Dec, after Cuba’s largest power plant broke down.

“Cuba has had some volatility in the last few weeks and that may shake consumer confidence,” Sunwing’s chief marketing officer, Samantha Taylor told the Pax News travel website last month.

“There are incredible places to go in Cuba,” she stressed, keen to emphasise that the company isn’t pulling out of Cuba altogether. “But we also recognise that if clients are a little uncomfortable, we need to give them options.”

Specifically, that involved drawing up a list of what they called “hidden gems” – alternative holiday destinations in the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and Colombia.

The implications for Cuba are clear.

With tourism now the island’s principal economic motor, and the main source of foreign currency earnings after remittances, that an important tour operator is pointing its customers towards other countries’ beaches over crumbling energy infrastructure is a real concern.

“Our message to Canadians is that tourism is one of the economy’s priorities,” said Lessner Gómez, director of the Cuban Tourism Board in Toronto in a statement. “The Ministry of Tourism has been preparing for the winter season to deliver better services, uninterrupted supplies, a better airport experience, and more and new car rentals.”

While Cuba’s tourism agency tries to ease fears about the extent of the electricity blackouts, few can deny that these have been extremely difficult months on the island. Hurricane Rafael was only the latest storm to hit Cuba in a frenetic Atlantic hurricane season in which more powerful and more frequent storms are the new normal.

Of course, severe weather is a problem across the Caribbean. But for Cuba, there are other complications in play.

Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House and his choice for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, stand to make life even more complicated for Cubans than it already is.

“This is probably the Cuban Revolution’s hardest moment,” says former Cuban diplomat, Jesús Arboleya. “And unfortunately, I see nothing on the horizon whatsoever which allows for an optimistic view of the future of US-Cuba relations.

“Donald Trump has handed US policy towards Cuba to those sectors of the Cuban American right who have essentially lived off anti-Castro policies since their origins.”

Mr Arboleya adds that Marco Rubio, currently a US Senator for Florida, is the leading voice among them. He is a Cuban American long opposed to the communist government in Havana.

His parents were Cubans who moved to the US in 1956, three years before Fidel Castro seized power, but his grandfather fled the Castro-led turn to communism on the island.

“People are horrified by the idea of another Donald Trump presidency. It spells real trouble,” echoes Cuban political commentator and editor of Temas magazine, Rafael Hernández.

Current US policy towards Cuba is “somewhat schizophrenic”, he argues.

“On the one hand, the State Department facilitates support to the private sector, and [pushes for] economic changes in Cuba. But on the other hand, Congress and Senate seem to freeze any advances on those reforms.”

The expectation is, however, that a future Secretary of State Rubio will coalesce the US’s Cuba policy around a single idea – maximum pressure on the island by tightening the already-harsh sanctions.

Cubans fear that could mean the suspension of commercial flights to Cuba, or even the closure of the US Embassy in Havana, which was officially reopened in 2015 after decades of frosty relations.

If implemented, such steps would be deliberately designed to further harm Cuba’s floundering tourism trade, the aim to hit the communist-run nation when it’s down. Tourist numbers to Cuba have almost halved since the high point of nearly five million visitors during the Obama-era détente with Cuba.

Between 2015-2017 US visitors flocked to the island under more relaxed travel restrictions, keen to experience a country that had long been denied them. Around the same time, the Cuban government embarked on a major hotel-building spree, confident that demand would remain strong over the next decade.

However, there followed a double blow to Cuban tourism from which it hasn’t fully recovered. First, the Trump Administration rolled back President Obama’s engagement policies, and then the Covid-19 pandemic sent the industry into freefall.

With many of those hotels now registering much lower occupancy rates than originally predicted, and real difficulties in providing the five-star customer experience as advertised amid the blackouts and shortages, some question the strategy of putting so many eggs in the tourism basket in the first place.

“Why has Cuba invested 38% [of government funds] on average over the past decade in hotels and infrastructure connected to international tourism, but only 8 to 9% on energy infrastructure?” asks economist Ricardo Torres at the American University in Washington DC. “It doesn’t make sense. The hotels run on electricity.”

Even with all the current challenges, most visitors agree that Cuba remains a unique travel experience. The cliches – classic cars, cigars and mojitos – still appeal to many, while others prefer to travel the island absorbing its history, culture and music.

Yet as tour operator Sunwings’ decision to step back shows, some tourists are finding it hard to appreciate Cuba during its energy crisis, especially if it’s about to be exacerbated by a hostile administration – and Secretary of State – in Washington.

A fire which ripped through Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue is being treated as a likely terror attack, Australian police say.

Three suspects are being hunted over Friday’s early-morning blaze, which left one man with a minor burn to his hand and caused extensive damage.

Witnesses say they saw masked figures spreading what appeared to be an accelerant in the building, before setting it alight.

Victoria Police say they have no evidence that further antisemitic attacks are planned, but patrols are being increased to reassure the community.

After a meeting with Australian Federal Police and domestic spy agency Asio, the state police force said additional “intelligence” had led them to conclude the incident should be treated as a probable terror attack.

Commissioner Shane Patton said police had no information before the fire to suggest an arson attack was imminent.

He declined to provide any further details on the investigation while it continued.

Mr Patton’s declaration came a day after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the incident as “quite clearly terrorism” while acknowledging police were still to make up their minds. He called his description a “personal view”.

On Monday, state Premier Jacinta Allan said the terror designation meant police would now have extra resources for their investigation.

Jewish community leaders have said they believe the attack is an escalation of a recent documented increase in antisemitism in Australia, and that it has heightened fears of violence.

A few worshippers were inside the building at the time of the fire, and have described hearing banging and seeing a window smash, before liquids were thrown inside and lit on fire.

“The whole thing took off pretty quickly,” synagogue board member Benjamin Klein, who spoke to witnesses, told The Age newspaper.

After officers at the scene were confronted by angry and scared worshippers on Friday, Mr Patton said police were focused on ensuring their safety.

“We have… extra police officers deployed in those areas where there are high numbers of Jewish persons living and congregating,” he said.

Allan also called for the city to rally behind its Jewish communities.

“We cannot let this conflict overseas continue to be a cloak for behaviour like [this].”

Albanese also on Monday announced a new federal strikeforce to investigate incidents of antisemitism.

The prime minister said a special response was needed to combat the rising threat, pointing to two other recent incidents – the vandalism of a Jewish MP’s office and an attack in Sydney in which a car was torched and buildings graffitied.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to end automatic citizenship for anyone born in the US, starting on his first day back in office next month.

“We have to end it. It’s ridiculous,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press in his first broadcast network interview since winning November’s election.

Attempts to do so would face significant hurdles, however, as it is enshrined in the US Constitution.

In the wide-ranging interview, recorded on Friday, Trump also said he would pardon those involved in the 2021 Capitol riot and promised to issue “a lot” of executive orders on day one, including on the economy, energy, and immigration.

The Republican also reiterated his mass deportation plans for undocumented immigrants living in the US, but offered to work with Democrats to help those who arrived as children.

While he suggested he would not seek a justice department investigation into Joe Biden after he is inaugurated on 20 January, he said that some of his political adversaries, including lawmakers who investigated the Capitol riot, should be jailed.

Trump was asked whether he would seek to pardon the hundreds of people convicted of involvement in that riot, when supporters of his stormed Congress three months after his defeat in the 2020 election.

“We’re going to look at independent cases,” he said. “Yeah, but I’m going to be acting very quickly.”

“First day,” he added.

Trump continued: “You know, by the way, they’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”

The president-elect made other news in the NBC interview aired on Sunday:

• He offered a caveat on whether he would keep the US in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato): “If they’re paying their bills, and if I think they’re doing a fair – they’re treating us fairly, the answer is absolutely, I’d stay with Nato”
• Trump said he would not seek to impose restrictions on abortion pills, though when asked to make a guarantee, he added: “Well, I commit. I mean… things change”
• The Republican said Ukraine should “probably” expect less aid when he returns to the White House
• Trump said he thinks “somebody has to find out” if there is a link between autism and childhood vaccines – an idea that has been ruled out by multiple studies around the world. Trump suggested his nominee for health secretary, vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, would look into the matter
• The president-elect repeated his promise that he will not seek to cut Social Security, nor raise its eligibility age, though he said he would make it “more efficient”, without offering further details
• Pressed on whether his plan to impose tariffs on imports from major US trading partners would raise consumer prices for Americans, he said: “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow”

On the subject of immigration, Trump told NBC he would seek through executive action to end so-called birthright citizenship, which entitles anyone born in the US to an American passport, even if their parents were born elsewhere.

Birthright citizenship stems from the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that “all persons born” in the United States “are citizens of the United States”.

Though he has vowed to end the practice, attempts to do so would face significant legal hurdles, and any executive order attempting to do so would likely immediately be overturned in court.

The bar to amend the Constitution is extremely high and requires approval from two-thirds of Congress, in both the House and Senate. It must also be ratified by three-fourths of states.

In the interview, Trump also said he would follow through on his campaign pledge to deport undocumented immigrants, including those with family members who are US citizens.

“I don’t want to be breaking up families,” he said, “so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”

• A quick guide to Donald Trump
• When will Donald Trump take office as president?
• How Trump pulled off an incredible comeback

Trump also said he wants to work with Congress to help “Dreamers”, undocumented immigrants who were shielded under an Obama-era programme, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which Trump once attempted to scrap.

“I will work with the Democrats on a plan,” he said, adding that some of these immigrants have found good jobs and started businesses.

Trump seemed to offer mixed signals on whether he would follow through on his repeated vows to seek retribution against political adversaries.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden this week issued a sweeping pardon to his criminally convicted son, Hunter. The Democrat is reported to be considering other blanket pardons for political allies before he leaves office next month.

Trump seemed to indicate that he would not seek a special counsel investigation into Biden and his family, as he once vowed.

“I’m not looking to go back into the past,” he said. “I’m looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success.”

But he also said that members of the now-defunct, Democratic-led House of Representatives committee that investigated him “should go to jail”.

One member of the panel, former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, hit back at Trump on Sunday.

She said his comment that members of the committee should be jailed was a “continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic”.

In his NBC interview Trump also said he would not direct the FBI to pursue investigations against his foes.

But he told the network: “If they were crooked, if they did something wrong, if they have broken the law, probably.

“They went after me. You know, they went after me, and I did nothing wrong.”

What Trump could do on day one in the White House

How undocumented migrants feel about deportations

Who has joined Trump’s top team?

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

US rapper Jay-Z has hit back at a lawsuit which alleges that he, along with Sean “Diddy” Combs, drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl at a party in 2000.

The anonymous accuser alleges she was assaulted at a house party after the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) in New York and that an unnamed female celebrity was in the room at the time.

In a statement, Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, dismissed the legal action as a “blackmail attempt”.

Mr Combs – who is in jail awaiting trial after being charged in September with sex-trafficking and other offences – denied the latest accusation.

The lawsuit was originally filed in October, and was refiled on Sunday to list Mr Carter as a defendant.

The BBC has contacted Mr Carter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, and his publicist for comment.

The legal action was filed under New York’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act, by a Texas-based lawyer, Tony Buzbee.

Mr Buzbee has filed several lawsuits in recent months accusing Mr Combs of assault and rape – though none have provided the names of victims. The hip-hop artist is due to face a criminal trial on 5 May.

Mr Carter said in a statement posted to social media: “My lawyer received a blackmail attempt, called a demand letter, from a ‘lawyer’ named Tony Buzbee.

“What he had calculated was the nature of these allegations and the public scrutiny would make me want to settle.

“No sir, it had the opposite effect! It made me want to expose you for the fraud you are in a VERY public fashion. So no, I will not give you ONE RED PENNY!!”

Mr Carter added that he found the allegations “so heinous in nature that I implore you (Tony Buzbee) file a criminal complaint, not a civil one!! Whomever would commit such a crime against a minor should be locked away, would you not agree?”

A statement from Mr Combs’s legal team said this amended lawsuit was the latest in a series of “shameless publicity stunts, designed to extract payments from celebrities who fear having lies spread about them, just as lies have been spread about Mr Combs”.

The statement said that the judicial process would show Mr Combs to be innocent of all the allegations against him. He faces 30 other lawsuits.

Responding to the criticism, Mr Buzbee posted a picture of himself to his Instagram as a younger man in military uniform, with a caption saying he had faced “a coordinated and aggressive effort” to stop him from bringing the case forward.

“I also won’t allow anyone to scare my clients into silence,” he wrote. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant and I am quite certain the sun is coming.”

• The charges against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs explained

The accuser in Sunday’s legal filing, who is identified only as “Jane Doe”, said that in 2000, when she was 13, a friend dropped her off at the VMAs at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.

She approached limousine drivers outside the venue to try to gain access to the show, according to the legal action.

One driver told her that he was employed by Mr Combs and that she “fit what Diddy was looking for”, says the lawsuit.

Later that evening the chauffeur drove her to a party at a white house, according to the legal action.

Jane Doe says when she arrived at the party she was asked to sign a document, which she believes was a non-disclosure agreement, says the lawsuit.

The legal action says she recognised “many celebrities” at the party and observed widespread drug use, including cocaine.

A waitress offered her a drink that made her feel “woozy”, so she went into a room to lie down, according to the lawsuit.

Soon afterwards, the legal action says, Mr Combs and Mr Carter entered the room with a female celebrity, described as Celebrity B. “Plaintiff immediately recognized all three celebrities,” says the lawsuit.

The legal action says Mr Combs approached her “with a crazed look in his eyes”, grabbed her and said: “You are ready to party!”

Mr Carter held her down and raped her, before Mr Combs did the same, all while Celebrity B watched, according to the lawsuit.

Jane Doe fought back during the assault and when Mr Combs backed away in surprise she escaped, the legal action says.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, says the plaintiff still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression as a result of the alleged rapes.

In his statement, Mr Carter, who is married to Beyoncé, with whom he has three children, said: “My only heartbreak is for my family.

“My wife and I will have to sit our children down, one of whom is at the age where her friends will surely see the press and ask questions about the nature of these claims, and explain the cruelty and greed of people.”

South Korean authorities have imposed a travel ban on President Yoon Suk Yeol, who is under investigation for his short-lived martial law declaration last Tuesday.

Yoon narrowly survived an impeachment motion against him over the weekend, after MPs from his ruling People Power Party (PPP) boycotted the vote.

PPP members said they had decided not to support the motion after Yoon agreed to shorten his term and not get involved in foreign and domestic affairs.

However, the opposition Democratic Party, which commands a majority in the parliament have criticised the deal, with floor leader Park Chan-dae calling it “an illegal, unconstitutional second insurrection and a second coup”.

Tens of thousands of people have come out in protest since Yoon’s short-lived martial law order, calling for him to resign or be impeached.

Since then, despite the failed impeachment motion, several key figures involved in the martial law order have also seen action taken against them.

Former Defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun, who reportedly proposed the martial law declaration to Yoon, was arrested on Sunday. He had earlier resigned on Wednesday after apologising and saying he would take “full responsibility”.

Travel bans have been placed on Kim, Lee, Defence Counterintelligence Commander Yeo In-hyung, and Army Chief of Staff Park An-su.

Many others have stepped down from their posts.

These include former Interior Minister Lee Sang-min who resigned on Sunday, saying he would take responsibility for “failing to serve the public and the president well”.

And on Wednesday, senior aides of Yoon’s office, including his chief of staff, tendered mass resignations hours after the martial law declaration was lifted.

In a public address on Sunday, PPP leader Han Dong-hoon said Yoon will no longer be involved in foreign and domestic affairs until his early resignation – adding that Prime Minister Han Duck-soo would manage government affairs in the meantime.

“The President will not be involved in any state affairs including diplomacy before his exit,” said party leader Han.

However, Democratic Party floor leader Park Chan-dae described the proposed plan as “an illegal, unconstitutional second insurrection and a second coup”.

Representative Kim Min-seok of the Democratic Party similarly criticised the plan, saying “nobody gave” PPP leader Han the power to make such decisions.

“The prime minister and the ruling party’s announcement that they would jointly exercise the powers of the president, which no one has given them, is clearly unconstitutional,” he said, according to a report on The Korea Herald.

The Ministry of National Defence confirmed at a briefing on Monday that the president retains command of the armed forces. That means in the event of any foreign policy incidents, including any possible threat from North Korea, Yoon is still, in theory, able to make executive decisions.

“The president can take the lead again any time he changes his mind,” political science professor Shin Yul of Myongji University told The Korea Herald.

“No one will be able to stop him, if Yoon insists.”

On Saturday Yoon apologised to the nation in what was his first appearance since the martial law declaration. He pledged not to impose another martial law order, and apologised for the “anxiety and inconvenience” he had caused.

However, the opposition has insisted that they “will not give up” on impeaching Yoon and has vowed to hold impeachment votes against Yoon every Saturday.

“We will definitely return this country to normal by Christmas and the end of the year and give it to you as a Christmas and end-of-year gift,” Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung told a disappointed crowd after Saturday’s failed impeachment attempt.

He again urged Yoon to resign on Monday, telling a press conference that Yoon’s actions were “destroying” South Korea and its economy.

Taylor Swift thanked her fans for making the Eras Tour “the most exciting, powerful, electrifying, intense, most challenging” experience of her life, as she played the closing show in Vancouver on Sunday.

Prior to playing All Too Well, Swift told the audience in Canada that she had been “touring since I was 15 years old”, but the experiences of the past 21 months had been “completely unrecognisable” from anything she’d ever done before.

“I never thought that writing one line about friendship bracelets would have you guys all making friendship bracelets, making friends and bringing joy to each other.

“That is the lasting legacy of this tour,” she added. “I couldn’t be more proud of you.”

The lyric about friendship bracelets, from the song You’re On Your Own Kid, spawned a cottage industry of hand-crafted accessories, which were swapped and traded by the millions of fans who attended the tour – including, at one London show, Sir Paul McCartney.

Swift said the community her fans had created would always be “what I think about when I think about this tour”.

They responded by serenading Swift with a chorus of Happy Birthday – ahead of her turning 35 next Friday.

“You guys even sang a happy early birthday to Taylor?” noted the tour’s official social media account. “We love you so much!”

The Eras Tour kicked off in Arizona in March 2023 with an epic, 44-song setlist that lasted more than three hours.

The appetite for tickets was so great that Ticketmaster’s systems broke down, prompting a hearing into the company in the US Senate.

Despite that, more than 10.1 million tickets were sold for the tour’s 149 shows, spanning five continents, over almost two years.

Last December, it became the first tour in history to surpass $1bn (£786m) in ticket sales. At its conclusion, that figure totalled $2,077,618,725 (£1.63 billion), said Taylor Swift Touring, the star’s production company.

Merchandise has also proven to be a lucrative source of revenue, with estimates that it has brought in an extra $400m (£314m).

The final stop was watched by more than 60,000 fans in Vancouver’s BC Place stadium. One fan-hosted live-stream from the venue was followed by another 389,000 people on YouTube.

Swift was in a nostalgic mood throughout, calling the show “one last grand adventure” with her fans.

As she played Cardigan, from her pandemic-era album Folklore, the reality of the situation started to sink in.

“It’s just crazy to think I’m going to sing the last song I ever sing in the Folklore cabin,” she said. “That’s wild. Oh my God!”

And she paid tribute to her band, dancers and crew, “who all left their families” behind and “performed when they were sick [or] anything was going on in their lives” to keep the show on the road.

For the acoustic set – which showcases songs missing from the standard setlist – the star said she had tried to choose tracks that “really encapsulate how I feel” about the final show.

On guitar, she played a mash-up of A Place In This World, from her debut album, and 1989’s New Romantics, with the apposite lyric: “.”

Moving to the piano, she played Long Live, tweaking the words from “” to “prompting a huge cheer from the audience.

Continuing the theme, she added elements of New Year’s Day, a song about holding on to memories, and The Manuscript, whose story of heartbreak became a metaphor for the tour coming to an end.

““

Fans noted that the selection meant the acoustic sets had kicked off in 2023 with Tim McGraw, the first song in her discography, and ended with The Manuscript, the most recent.

Only six songs from her 11 studio albums were not performed on the tour: That’s When, Bye Bye Baby, Girl At Home, Ronan, Forever Winter and Soon You’ll Get Better.

Swift was watched from the audience by her mother Andrea – but her boyfriend, American football player Travis Kelce, had to miss the show to play (and win) a home game with his team, the Kansas City Chiefs.

Fans had predicted she would use the last concert to announce her next career move. Top of their wish-list was the reveal of Reputation (Taylor’s Version) – the latest in the star’s plan to re-record the first six albums in her discography.

In the end, there were no big surprises or special guests.

Instead, the Eras Tour got to bow out on its own terms – celebrating 18 years of music that has united people around the world.

As she cued up the set-closer, Karma, Swift thanked her fans one last time.

“I want to thank every single one of you for being a part of the most thrilling chapter of my entire life to date – my beloved Eras Tour.”

She dedicated the song to Kelce, changing the lyrics to ““, as she has done several times since they started dating last year.

Over the dying notes of the song, Swift shared an emotional hug with her dancers and backing singers. And rather than making her traditional exit of being lowered beneath the stage, she opted to walk out with her team.

It was, quite literally, the end of an era. We’re unlikely to see another tour on this scale for a long time.

A 26-year-old man has been charged with murder over last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.

Luigi Mangione was taken into custody at a McDonald’s in the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 280 miles (450km) west of New York City on Monday after a customer at the fast-food outlet recognised him.

He was found in possession of a 3D-printed gun and a handwritten document that indicated “motivation and mindset”, according to police.

Mr Mangione then appeared in a Pennsylvania court to be arraigned on five initial counts and was denied bail.

Just hours later, New York investigators charged Mr Mangione with murder and four other counts including firearms charges.

Mr Thompson, 50, was fatally shot in the back last Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan where UnitedHealthcare, the medical insurance giant he led, was holding an investors’ meeting.

Police say he was targeted in a pre-planned killing.

A profile is emerging of the 26-year-old man being held in connection with last week’s fatal shooting of United Healthcare’s chief executive in New York City.

Police announced on Monday they had arrested Luigi Mangione on firearms charges after he was recognised at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

The Baltimore, Maryland, native had a three-page handwritten document that mentioned grievances with the US healthcare system and indicated “motivation and mindset”, officials said.

Mr Mangione is so far facing weapon and fake ID charges in Pennsylvania, with murder charges from New York expected to be filed soon.

Here’s all that we’ve learned so far about the suspect.

Mr Mangione was born and raised in Maryland and has ties to San Francisco, California, according to New York Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.

He has no prior arrests in New York and his last previous address was in Honolulu, Hawaii, police said.

He attended a private, all-boys high school in Baltimore, called the Gilman School, according to school officials. Mr Mangione was named as the valedictorian, which is usually the student with the highest academic achievements in a class.

A former classmate, Freddie Leatherbury, told the Associated Press news agency that Mr Mangione came from a wealthy family, even by that private school’s standards.

“Quite honestly, he had everything going for him,” Mr Leatherbury said.

Mr Mangione is also a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science, according to the school, and founded a video game development club.

A friend who attended the Ivy League college at the same time as Mr Mangione described him as a “super normal” and “smart person”.

Mr Mangione was employed as a data engineer for TrueCar, a digital retailing website for new and used cars, according to his social media profiles. A company spokesman told the BBC he had not worked there since 2023.

According to the LinkedIn profile, Mr Mangione previously worked as a programming intern for Firaxis, a video game developer.

He comes from a prominent family in the Baltimore area whose businesses include a country club and nursing homes, according to local media.

He is reportedly the cousin of Republican state lawmaker Nino Mangione.

Mr Mangione was taken into custody at a McDonald’s after a customer informed an employee, who tipped off authorities.

At the time, he was in possession of a 3D-printed black pistol, a 3D-printed silencer and a loaded magazine with six rounds of 9mm ammunition.

Police said he was carrying several IDs, including one with his real identity and another that was fake.

These IDs included a US passport and a fraudulent New Jersey ID that was used to check into the New York City hostel, where the suspect was seen before the shooting.

When he was told he would be arrested if he had lied about his name, he admitted he was Luigi Mangione.

He “became quiet and started to shake” when asked if he had recently been to New York, according to the criminal complaint filed in Pennsylvania.

Police say he was also found with three pages of handwritten documents in which he seemed to express “ill will towards corporate America”.

The document also said “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done”, a senior law enforcement official told the New York Times.

Social media profiles provide some possible clues about Mr Mangione’s thinking.

A person matching his name and photo had an account on Goodreads, a user-generated book review site, where he gave four stars to a text called Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski – also known as the Unabomber manifesto.

Starting in 1978, Kaczynski carried out a bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens of others, until he was arrested in 1996.

In his review, Mr Mangione wrote: “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless[ly] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic.

“He was a violent individual – rightfully imprisoned – who maimed innocent people.

“While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.”

In the end the Assad regime was so hollow, corrupt and decayed that it collapsed in less than a fortnight.

No one I have spoken to has been anything other than astonished by the speed with which the regime turned to dust.

In the spring of 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, it was different, when Syrians tried to grab some of the revolutionary magic that had swept away the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the veteran strongmen of Libya and Yemen.

By 2011, the regime created by Hafez al-Assad and passed to his son Bashar on his death in 2000 was already corrupt and decadent.

But the system that Hafez built still had much of the brutal, ruthless strength that he believed was necessary to control Syria. Assad senior had seized power in a country that was prone to coups and delivered it to his son and heir without a significant challenge.

Bashar al-Assad went back to his father’s playbook in 2011.

It is hard to imagine now, but back then he had more legitimacy among some of Syria’s population than the old dictators swept away by crowds chanting the slogan of that year – “The people want the fall of the regime”.

Bashar al-Assad was a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and of Hezbollah during its successful fight against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war. He was younger than the ex and soon to be former Arab leaders.

Since his father’s death he had been promising reform. Some Syrians still wanted to believe him in 2011, hoping demonstrations were the spur he needed for the change that he had promised, until he ordered his men to shoot peaceful demonstrators dead in the streets.

A British ambassador in Syria once told me that the way to understand the Assad regime was to watch Mafia films like The Godfather. The obedient could be rewarded.

Anyone who went against the head of the family or his closest lieutenants would be eliminated. In Syria’s case that could mean the gallows, or a firing squad, or indefinite incarceration in some underground cell.

We’re seeing them now, emaciated and pale, blinking into the light, filmed on the mobiles of the rebel fighters who have freed thousands of them from years behind bars.

• From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician: How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself
• Assad’s police threatened to bury me and my reporting. Now I’m back, and free
• Saydnaya Prison: Mapping the Assads’ ‘human slaughterhouse’
• Syria in maps: How did anti-Assad rebels take control?

The weakness of the regime, to the point that it collapsed like a soggy paper bag, was disguised by the fearsome and repressive gulag it still maintained.

The international consensus was that Bashar al-Assad was weak, dependent on Russia and Iran, and presiding over a country he had fractured to preserve his family’s rule – but still strong enough to be regarded as a fact of Middle Eastern life, who could even be useful.

In the last days before rebels burst out of Idlib, it was widely reported that the US, Israel and the United Arab Emirates were trying to detach Assad’s Syria from Iran.

Israel had been launching increasingly heavy airstrikes against targets inside Syria it said were part of the supply chain Iran used to get weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel’s offensive in Lebanon had dealt severe blows to Hezbollah, but the idea was to stop it regenerating. At the same time the UAE and the US were trying to find incentives for him to break the alliance with Tehran, relaxing sanctions and allowing Assad to continue his international rehabilitation.

Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden have claimed credit for the fall of the Assad regime. There is something in that.

The damage Israel inflicted on Hezbollah and Iran with US weapons and constant support, and Biden’s supply of arms for Ukraine, made it impossible, even undesirable, for Assad’s closest allies to save him.

But the fact that they saw Assad as part of their strategy to contain and damage Iran until days before his fall indicates clearly that they did not for a moment believe him to be days away from a midnight flit to Russia.

They did contribute to his end, more by accident than design.

The fall of the regime might have ended Iran’s supply chain, if Syria’s new rulers decide their deals with others are more useful than the Iranian alliance.

All sides are thinking hard and thinking again about what comes next, and it is too soon to draw definite conclusions. Syrians, their neighbours, and the wider world are now confronted by another geopolitical earthquake, the biggest of the series that has followed the Hamas attacks on Israel in October last year. It might not be the last.

Iran is seeing the final collapse of the main planks of the network it called the axis of resistance. Its most important components have been transformed; Hezbollah badly damaged and the Assad regime gone.

Iran’s rulers might want to follow up on hints of talks on a deal with Donald Trump once he takes office. Or its new strategic nakedness might push it into a fateful decision to turn its highly enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon.

Syrians have every reason to rejoice. In the years after 2011, for all the repression and brutality of the regime, Assad and his acolytes could still find men who would fight. Many of the troops I met on front lines told me that Assad was a better option than the jihadist extremists of Islamic State group.

In 2024, faced by a well-organised rebel force that insisted it was nationalist, Islamist but no longer jihadist, the army’s reluctant conscripts refused to fight, stripped off their uniforms and went home.

The best scenario is that Syrians, helped by the big players in the region, will find a way to create a postwar mood of national reconciliation, not a wave of looting and revenge that will drag the country into a new war. Abu Mohammad al Joulani, the leader of victorious HTS, has called for his men and all of Syria’s sects to respect each other.

His men have removed the regime, and he is the closest Syria has to a de facto leader.

Syria, though, has dozens of armed groups that do not necessarily agree with him and will want to grab power in their own areas. In southern Syria, tribal militias did not recognise the writ of the Assads. They will not follow orders they don’t like from the new set up in Damascus.

In the eastern desert, the US saw a big enough threat from remnants of the Islamic State group to launch waves of air strikes. The Israelis, alarmed by the prospect of an Islamist state on their border, are pounding the military infrastructure of Syria’s armed forces.

It might be better to find a way to make a reformed Syrian Arab Army part of the solution in a country without much law or order. The reckless decision by the US in 2003 to dissolve the Iraqi armed forces had disastrous consequences.

In Turkey, President Erdogan must be satisfied by what he sees.

Erdogan’s Turkey did more than any other power to preserve the autonomy of Idlib province, where HTS was transforming itself into a fighting force when Syria seemed to be in the deep freeze.

Erdogan might see his influence lapping Israel’s borders, at a time when Israel-Turkey relations have been poisoned by the war in Gaza.

The worst scenario for Syrians is that their country will follow the example of two Arab dictatorships that spun into violent chaos after the fall of their regimes.

Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq were removed without a ready-made replacement waiting in the wings. Ill-considered foreign intervention did much to create two catastrophes.

The vacuum left by the dictators was filled by waves of looting, revenge, power grabs and civil war.

Syrians have not been in charge of their own destiny for generations. Individuals were robbed of it by the two Assad presidents and their followers. The country lost it after war left it so weakened that bigger foreign powers used it to increase and preserve their own power.

Syrians still do not have agency over their lives. They might have a chance of creating a new and better country if they did.

Google has unveiled a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.

The chip is the latest development in a field known as quantum computing – which is attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of mind-bogglingly powerful computer.

Google says its new quantum chip, dubbed “Willow”, incorporates key “breakthroughs” and “paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.”

However experts say Willow is, for now, a largely experimental device, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years – and billions of dollars – away.

Quantum computers work in a fundamentally different way to the computer in your phone or laptop.

They harness quantum mechanics – the strange behaviour of ultra-tiny particles – to crack problems far faster than traditional computers.

It’s hoped quantum computers might eventually be able to use that ability to vastly speed up complex processes, such as creating new medicines.

There are also fears it could be used for ill – for example to break some types of encryption used to protect sensitive data.

In February Apple announced that the encryption that protects iMessage chats is being made “quantum proof” to stop them being read by powerful future quantum computers.

Hartmut Neven leads Google’s Quantum AI lab that created Willow and describes himself as the project’s “chief optimist.”

He told the BBC that Willow would be used in some practical applications – but declined, for now, to provide more detail.

But a chip able to perform commercial applications would not appear before the end of the decade, he said.

Initially these applications would be the simulation of systems where quantum effects are important

“For example, relevant when it comes to the design of nuclear fusion reactors to understand the functioning of drugs and pharmaceutical development, it would be relevant for developing better car batteries and another long list of such tasks”.

Mr Neven told the BBC Willow’s performance meant it was the “best quantum processor built to date”.

But Professor Alan Woodward, a computing expert at Surrey University, says quantum computers will be better at a range of tasks than current “classical” computers, but they will not replace them.

He warns against overstating the importance of Willow’s achievement in a single test.

“One has to be careful not to compare apples and oranges” he told the BBC.

Google had chosen a problem to use as a benchmark of performance that was, “tailor-made for a quantum computer” and this didn’t demonstrate “a universal speeding up when compared to classical computers”.

Nonetheless, he said Willow represented significant progress, in particular in what’s known as error correction.

In very simple terms the more useful a quantum computer is, the more qubits it has.

However a major problem with the technology is that it is prone to errors – a tendency that has previously increased the more qubits a chip has.

But Google researchers say they have reversed this and managed to engineer and program the new chip so the error rate fell across the whole system as the number of qubits increased.

It was a major “breakthrough” that cracked a key challenge that the field had pursued “for almost 30 years”, Mr Neven believes.

He told the BBC it was comparable to “if you had an airplane with just one engine – that will work, but two engines are safer, four engines is yet safer”.

Errors are a significant obstacle in creating more powerful quantum computers and the development was “encouraging for everyone striving to build a practical quantum computer” Prof Woodward said.

But Google itself notes that to develop practically useful quantum computers the error rate will still need to go much lower than that displayed by Willow.

Willow was made in Google’s new, purpose-built manufacturing plant in California.

Countries around the world are investing in quantum computing.

The UK recently launched the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).

Its director, Michael Cuthbert, told the BBC he was wary of language that fuelled the “hype cycle” and thought Willow was more a “milestone rather than a breakthrough”.

Nevertheless, it was “clearly a highly impressive piece of work”.

Eventually quantum computers would help with a range of tasks including “logistics problems such as cargo freight distribution on aircraft or routing of telecoms signals or stored energy throughout the national grid”, he said.

And there were already 50 quantum businesses in the UK, attracting £800m in funding and employing 1300 people.

On Friday, researchers from Oxford University and Osaka University in Japan published a paper showcasing the very low error rate in a trapped-ion qubit.

Theirs is a different approach to making a quantum computer that’s capable of working at room temperature – whereas Google’s chip has to be stored at ultra low temperatures to be effective.

Scientific findings from Google’s development of Willow have been published in the journal Nature

A 26-year-old man has been arrested in connection with last week’s fatal shooting in New York City of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Luigi Mangione was taken into custody at a McDonald’s in the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, about 280 miles (450km) west of New York City on Monday after a customer at the fast-food outlet recognised him.

He was found in possession of a handwritten document that indicated “motivation and mindset”, according to police.

Mr Mangione appeared later in a Pennsylvania court to be arraigned on five initial counts and was denied bail. A prosecutor said he expected a homicide charge to be filed soon.

Mr Mangione was formally charged on Monday evening with forgery, carrying firearms without a licence, tampering with records or identification, possessing instruments of crime and providing a false identification to police.

Pete Weeks, a district attorney in Pennsylvania’s Blair County, said that homicide charges from New York would be filed “tonight or tomorrow” or in the “near future”.

Mr Mangione stopped co-operating after he was detained, officials said.

Handcuffed at the wrists and ankles, he appeared in court on Monday wearing jeans and a dark blue jersey. He appeared calm during the hearing, occasionally looking around at those present, including the media.

Mr Thompson, 50, was fatally shot in the back last Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan where UnitedHealthcare, the medical insurance giant he led, was holding an investors’ meeting.

Police say he was targeted in a pre-planned killing.

The words “deny”, “defend” and “depose” were written on shell casings found at the scene.

Investigators believe they could be a reference to what critics call the “three Ds of insurance” – tactics used by insurance companies to reject payment claims by patients in America’s complicated and mostly privately run healthcare system.

New York City investigators used one of the world’s largest digital surveillance systems, police dogs, drones and divers in a Central Park lake in the search for clues before the manhunt spread to neighbouring states.

But it was ultimately a McDonald’s customer that recognised the suspect from media coverage and alerted an employee, who tipped off the police.

When police arrived, Mr Mangione showed them a fake New Jersey driver’s licence with the name Mark Rosario, said court papers.

He “became quiet and started to shake” when an officer asked if he had been to New York recently, the criminal complaint adds.

When he was told he would be arrested if he lied about his name, he gave his real name, according to the court papers.

Asked why he lied, he told officers that “I clearly shouldn’t have”.

A search of his backpack uncovered a 3D-printed pistol, a 3D-printed silencer and a loaded magazine with six rounds of 9mm ammunition.

Prosecutors said he was also carrying a US passport and $10,000 cash, $2,000 of it in foreign currency, though Mr Mangione disputed the amount in court.

Investigators revealed that finding him was a complete surprise, as they did not have his name on a list of suspects before Monday.

• What we know about the suspect
• Killing of insurance CEO reveals simmering anger at US health system
• Who was Brian Thompson, healthcare CEO gunned down in New York?

Earlier in the day, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the weapon and suppressor seized by investigators from the suspect were “both consistent with the weapon used in the murder”.

If charges in New York are filed, Mr Mangione will be presented with the option of waiving his extradition to the state or contesting it.

If he waives it, he will immediately be made available to New York authorities. If he contests it, the process could take between 30 and 45 days.

A three-page handwritten document found on Mr Mangione’s possession suggested he harboured “ill will towards corporate America”, said New York Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.

Mr Kenny said that Mr Mangione was born and raised in Maryland and has ties to San Francisco, California. His last known address was in Honolulu, Hawaii.

TrueCar, a website for car buyers, confirmed that he had been employed there but left in 2023.

As a teenager, Mr Mangione attended a private all-boys school in Maryland, where he was class valedictorian, a title usually awarded to students with the best grades.

A LinkedIn account that appears to belong to him says he worked as a data engineer in California, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a teaching assistant and founded a video game development club.

Several posts to an account on X, formerly Twitter, that appeared to belong to him suggested that friends had been trying to reach him, with one person posting in October that “nobody has heard from you in months”.

A real-life “Succession” battle for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has ended with a Nevada court commissioner denying the billionaire’s bid to change a family trust and give control to his eldest son.

The case pitted the 93-year-old against three of his children over who would gain the power to control News Corp and Fox News when he dies.

It has been reported that Mr Murdoch wanted to amend a family trust created in 1999 to allow his son Lachlan to take control without “interference” from his siblings Prudence, Elisabeth and James.

A Nevada commissioner ruled Mr Murdoch and Lachlan had acted in “bad faith” and called the efforts a “carefully crafted charade”, according to the New York Times.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Prudence, Elisabeth and James said: “We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members.”

Adam Streisand, a lawyer for Mr Murdoch, told the New York Times they were disappointed and planned to appeal.

A spokesperson for Mr Murdoch declined to comment to the BBC. Mr Streisand did not immediately respond to inquires.

The famous family was one of the inspirations behind the hugely popular TV series Succession – something the Murdochs have always refused to comment on.

But according to the New York Times report, which is based on a copy of the sealed court ruling, the billionaire’s children had started discussing their father’s death and how they would handle it after an episode of the HBO series where “the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos”.

The episode led to Elisabeth’s representative to the trust writing a “‘Succession’ memo” that sought to prevent this from happening in real life, said reports.

The case has played out behind closed doors in Nevada, a state that offers one of the most confidential legal settings for matters including family trust disputes.

It has a “close on demand” statute that allows parties involved in certain sensitive cases to request that court proceedings be sealed from public access, ensuring complete privacy.

Mr Murdoch, who has been married five times, also has two younger children, Grace and Chloe, who do not have any voting rights under the trust agreement.

The case was launched after Mr Murdoch decided to change the trust over worries about a “lack of consensus” among the children, the Times reported.

Lachan is thought to be more conservative than his siblings and would preserve the legacy of his media brands.

From the 1960s, Mr Murdoch built a global media giant with major political and public influence.

His two companies are News Corporation, which owns newspapers including the Times and the Sun in the UK and the Wall Street Journal in the US, and Fox, which broadcasts Fox News.

Mr Murdoch had been preparing his two sons to follow in his footsteps, beginning when they were teenagers, journalist Andrew Neil told the 2020 BBC documentary The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty.

“Family has always been very important to Rupert Murdoch, particularly from the point of view of forming a dynasty,” the former Sunday Times editor said.

In 1999, the Murdoch Family Trust, which owns the media companies, was supposed to largely settle the succession plans.

It led to Mr Murdoch giving his eldest children various jobs within his companies.

The trust gives the family eight votes, which it can use to have a say on the board of News Corp and Fox News. Mr Murdoch currently controls four of those votes, with his eldest children being in charge of one each.

The trust agreement said that once Mr Murdoch died, his votes would be passed on to his four eldest children equally.

However, differences in opinions and political views were said to lead to a family rift.

The battle over changes to the trust were not about money, but rather power and control over the future of the Murdoch empire.

The commissioner’s ruling is not final. The court filing acts as a recommended resolution but a district judge will still weigh in and could choose to rule differently.

The judge could take weeks or months to make a decision, which will not be available to the public.

Syrian media reports say Israeli warplanes have carried out dozens of attacks across the country, including in the capital, Damascus.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said there were more than 100 strikes on military targets.

A research centre with suspected links to chemical weapon production was among the sites hit, according local media reports.

Israel says it is acting to stop weapons falling “into the hands of extremists” following the overthrow of the Assad regime.

On Monday, the UN Security Council met to discuss the situation in the country following the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad, and said they will work on a statement in the coming days.

“The council, I think, was more or less united on the need to preserve the territorial integrity and unity of Syria, to ensure the protection of civilians, to ensure that humanitarian aid is coming to the needy population,” Russian UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters.

The SOHR says there have been hundreds of Israeli air strikes in the past two days, including on a site in Damascus said to have been used for rocket development by Iranian scientists.

The strikes come as the UN’s chemical watchdog warns authorities in Syria to ensure that suspected stockpiles of chemical weapons are safe.

According to the UN’s chemical watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a chemical weapon is a chemical used to cause intentional death or harm through its toxic properties, external.

The use of chemical weapons is prohibited under international humanitarian law regardless of the presence of a valid military target, as the effects of such weapons are indiscriminate by nature.

It is not known where or how many chemical weapons Syria has, but former President Bashar al-Assad is believed to have kept stockpiles and that the declaration he had made was incomplete.

Syria signed the OPCW’s Chemical Weapons Certificate in 2013, a month after a chemical weapons attack on suburbs of the capital, Damascus, that involved the nerve agent sarin and left more than 1,400 people dead.

The horrific pictures of victims convulsing in agony shocked the world. Western powers said the attack could only have been carried out by the government, but Assad blamed the opposition.

Despite the OPCW and the UN destroying all 1,300 tonnes of chemicals that the Syrian government declared, chemical weapons attacks in the country still continued.

BBC analysis in 2018 confirmed that between 2014 and 2018, chemical weapons were used in the Syrian civil war at least 106 times.

• What just happened in Syria?
• Who are the rebels in Syria?
• Analysis: End of Assad rule will reshape region’s balance of power
• From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician: How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself

On Monday, the OPCW said it had contacted Syria “with a view to emphasising the paramount importance of ensuring the safety and security of all chemical weapons related materials and facilities” in the country.

Also on Monday, the Israeli military released photos of its troops who crossed from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights into the demilitarised buffer zone in Syria where UN peacekeepers are based.

It comes a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the military had temporarily seized control of the so-called Area of Separation, saying the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria had “collapsed” with the rebel takeover of the country.

The Golan Heights is a rocky plateau about 60km (40 miles) south-west of Damascus.

Israel seized the Golan from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed it in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so unilaterally in 2019.

Speaking at a news conference on Monday, Saar said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was only making “a very limited and temporary step” taken for “security reasons”.

He also claimed that Israel had no interest in meddling in internal Syrian affairs and was concerned only with defending its citizens.

Defence Minister Israel Katz meanwhile said the Israeli military would “destroy heavy strategic weapons” – including missile and air defence systems.

The latest moves by Israel come after Syrian rebel fighters captured the capital, Damascus, and toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. He and his father had been in power in the country since 1971.

Forces led by the Islamist opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered Damascus in the early hours of Sunday, before appearing on state television to declare that Syria was now “free”.

On Tuesday, HTS said incoming authorities will publish a list with the “names of the most senior officials involved in torturing the Syrian people”.

The group said it will offer rewards in exchange for information on “senior army and security officers involved in war crimes.”

The Assad regime received much support from Hezbollah and Russia in the country’s brutal civil war. With Hezbollah involved in the Israel-Gaza war and cross-border air strikes between Israel and Lebanon, and Russia expending huge resources on its invasion of Ukraine, HTS, along with other rebel groups in Syria, were able to seize on the occasion and were ultimately able to capture large swathes of Syria.

During the 2011 Syrian uprising, Israel made the calculation that Assad, despite being an ally of both Iran and Hezbollah, was a better bet than what might follow his regime.

On Sunday, Netanyahu branded the collapse of the Assad regime a “historic day in the Middle East” and insisted Israel would “send a hand of peace” to Syrians who wanted to live in peace with Israel.

He said the IDF presence in the buffer zone was a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found”.

“If we can establish neighbourly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that’s our desire. But if we do not, we will do whatever it takes to defend the State of Israel and the border of Israel,” he said.

Israel is likely to be more sensitive over the Golan Heights, since HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani’s family has roots there. Thousands of Israeli settlers now live in the area alongside about 20,000 Syrians, most of them Druze, who stayed on after it was captured.

Israeli strikes in Syria are nothing new. It has previously acknowledged carrying out hundreds of strikes in recent years on targets in Syria that it says are linked to Iran and allied armed groups such as Hezbollah.

The Israeli strikes in Syria have reportedly been more frequent since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, in response to cross-border attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah and other groups in Lebanon and Syria.

Just last month, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, reported that a set of strikes hit a weapons depot and other locations in and around an area near Palmyra where families of Iran-backed militia fighters were, killing 68 Syrian and foreign fighters.

Former world champion cyclist Rohan Dennis has pleaded guilty over a car incident in Australia which killed his wife, fellow Olympian Melissa Hoskins.

Hoskins died in hospital on 30 December 2023, after being struck by a vehicle being driven by Dennis outside their home in Adelaide.

The 34-year-old was initially charged with dangerous driving causing death and driving without due care, but on Tuesday he admitted a lesser charge – one aggravated count of creating the likelihood of harm.

Dennis – who has two children with Hoskins – will be sentenced at a later date.

Few details are known about the circumstances leading up to Hoskins’s death.

However, Dennis’s guilty plea means he has admitted to driving a car when Hoskins was in close proximity, knowing that act was likely to cause harm or being recklessly indifferent to whether it would.

“There was no intention of Mr Dennis to harm his wife and this charge does not charge him with responsibility for her death,” the retired athlete’s lawyer told the court.

Hoskins was a world champion in the team pursuit in 2015 and a two-time Olympian, and her death triggered a wave of tributes from around the world.

She and Dennis married in 2018.

Dennis retired at the end of the 2023 season after a career in which he won stages at the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana.

A multiple world champion on both road and track, he won road time trial bronze at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, having won team pursuit silver at London 2012. He also won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2022.

The couple who run PinkNews, the world’s largest LGBT news website, have been accused by staff of multiple incidents of sexual misconduct.

Several former staff members told the BBC they saw Anthony James, a director at the company and husband of its founder, kissing and touching a junior colleague who they say appeared too drunk to consent.

And more than 30 current and former members of staff said a culture of heavy drinking led to instances when founder Benjamin Cohen and his husband behaved inappropriately towards younger male employees.

Representatives for Mr Cohen and Dr James told the BBC they were not able to provide a statement at this time, but that their position is that the allegations are false.

Run by family members of Mr Cohen – his husband and former GP Dr James is chief operating officer, and his father Richard is the chief lawyer – PinkNews says its mission is “to inform, inspire change and empower people to be themselves”.

It played an influential role in the campaign for marriage equality in the UK and its annual awards ceremony has attracted prime ministers and other politicians.

Away from the cameras and red carpets, however, multiple former staff members have told the BBC they had experienced bullying and sexual misconduct which made some of them feel unsafe to be alone around Mr Cohen and Dr James. Allegations of misogyny have also emerged and several people told us that some young female members of staff had been asked to act as the couple’s surrogates.

As well as interviewing 33 people who worked at PinkNews between 2017 and 2024, we have also seen a variety of evidence including official written complaints, private emails and WhatsApp messages sharing staff members’ concerns, plus doctors’ records referring to stress and mental health struggles attributed to the work environment at PinkNews.

Five former members of staff told the BBC they had witnessed Dr James groping and kissing a junior member of staff, who they said was “too drunk to stand or talk” and “unable to consent”.

The alleged incident happened outside a central London pub, where staff had gathered after a PinkNews event.

A former PinkNews staff member, who we are calling Gary, said Dr James had led the junior colleague behind a tree. “Anthony was just forcing himself on somebody who wasn’t able to make that decision for themselves because of how intoxicated they were,” he said.

People at the event said they helped the alleged victim get home in a taxi.

But several former members of staff who said they witnessed the incident told us they were too scared to complain. One person said: “It’s the CEO’s husband, what are you going to do? Lose your job?”

A complaint about the incident was made later by a staff member, and was shared with several members of the senior leadership team at PinkNews. The BBC has been shown multiple copies of the complaint but has been unable to establish whether any action was taken as a result.

Many of the former employees said staff socials or awaydays often involved drinking until the early hours of the morning and that “Prosecco Friday” – where staff would be given free wine and crisps – was introduced in the office in an effort to boost staff morale.

Another former staff member we are calling Damian said he personally experienced inappropriate behaviour from Mr Cohen during an evening at the pub after work.

“Ben was extremely drunk to the point he fell off his chair, and then asked me out of earshot of my other colleagues whether I wanted to go back to his […] because Anthony his husband wasn’t there,” Damian said.

“He said something along the lines of ‘Anthony is always getting with other men’ and the suggestion was we would do something sexually. I was extremely uncomfortable.”

Damian said after that night, he avoided being alone with Mr Cohen for the rest of his time at PinkNews.

“I never heard about it again, no apology,” he said. “It put me on alert because it made me realise it was a boundary he thought he could cross.”

Stephan Kyriacou, who worked at PinkNews between 2019 and 2021, said the job had started as a “dream come true” where he did not have to “hide who I was or pretend”, but the dream was soon “shattered”.

During a Christmas party, Mr Kyriacou said, Mr Cohen had slapped him on the bottom in front of everyone else.

“I just shut down for a minute. I didn’t know what to say. I was in shock. I remember turning to my friends and saying, ‘What the hell just happened?'”

Mr Kyriacou said he no longer felt comfortable enough to be alone around his boss.

He said: “That just made me completely avoid him. I don’t remember ever speaking to him one-on-one after that.”

Other staff also voiced their concerns about Mr Cohen, Mr Kyriacou said, with several messages in a group chat describing him as a “creep” and staff saying they did not feel comfortable around him.

“None of us really felt like we could complain because we didn’t know what was going to happen to us. Ben is very well-known and we didn’t know whether he was going to badmouth us to people,” Mr Kyriacou said.

Staff have told us they were shouted at and belittled by Mr Cohen, and that there was a “toxic” culture at the company.

“He can be quite brutal in the way he speaks to you,” said Damian. “When things go wrong he’d come down on you like a tonne of bricks and so you were just in this constant state of emotional flux.

“He put extreme pressures on me to the point I would go home and cry. It caused issues in my own personal relationship with my partner, and then [Benjamin] would love-bomb me and I would think everything was alright.”

Cai Wilshaw, former head of external affairs at PinkNews, said: “You had this sort of dark cloud in the office sometimes when Ben was there, that made it really difficult to actually enjoy working there.

“We worked together quite well, but it is clear that he is a very, very difficult character, and sometimes overly so in a way that really impacted people who worked with him.”

Some staff members also said they had witnessed what they called “misogynistic” behaviour.

Several people said that on occasions young, female members of staff had been asked to act as a surrogate for Mr Cohen and Dr James.

They say that often the request was delivered as a joke, but that it had made people feel “awkward and uncomfortable”.

One anonymous staff member called it “creepy and sleazy”, while another called it “part and parcel” of how “misogynistic” PinkNews was.

Many of the staff who spoke to the BBC said they hope the culture at PinkNews can change so it can continue to tell stories relevant to the LGBT community.

“It’s important because the mainstream media doesn’t often report on whatever’s happening to trans or queer people,” said Stephan Kyriacou. “I think if it can be overhauled, that will make a massive difference.”

Gary said there was a need for “authentic queer-led journalism and queer-led stories” but said “unfortunately PinkNews has kind of lost its credibility in that arena”.

Damian told us he believed PinkNews’ future could only be secured if Mr Cohen and Dr James took a step back.

“The fact you cannot separate the two is extremely problematic,” he said. “Ben needs to be held to account. Until the day that happens, I don’t know if there’s a future for PinkNews.”

The BBC was informed that Mr Cohen and Dr James were not able to provide a statement at this time, but we understand that their position is that the allegations made against them are false.

Donald Trump has described the Prince of Wales as a “good-looking guy” after a meeting with him in Paris at the weekend.

“He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person. He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that,” the US president-elect told the New York Post.

The incoming US president also said the pair had touched on health problems in the Royal Family, adding that they had a “great, great talk”.

Prince William met Trump after the re-opening of the Notre-Dame cathedral.

“And I asked him about his wife and he said she’s doing well,” the president-elect said.

“I asked him about his father and his father is fighting very hard, and he loves his father and he loves his wife, so it was sad.”

The reference to the King “fighting hard” was described by royal sources as being about his efforts to continue living actively, rather than a health update.

The King has been receiving cancer treatment, but has wanted to keep focusing on his work, with overseas trips expected for next year.

“We had a great talk for half an hour, a little more than half an hour. We had a great, great talk,” Trump said.

Kensington Palace did not comment on the account of the conversation.

Prince William and Trump held their meeting, arranged at short notice, alongside the international gathering that marked the re-opening of Notre-Dame, the Paris cathedral damaged in a fire five years ago.

UK and US leaders have continued to speak warmly of the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Prince William’s diplomatic trip to meet Trump may help build bridges between the incoming Republican administration and the UK government.

Trump is an avowed fan of the royals. After a meeting with the late Queen Elizabeth II, he described how he unsuccessfully tried to get her to reveal who was her favourite US president or UK prime minister.

“I liked them all,” Trump said the late Queen had insisted to him, although he added: “Many people have said I was her favourite president.”

The NY Post’s account of the interview also includes Trump’s comments about what he said to President Emmanuel Macron of France, who had hosted the event at the restored cathedral.

“He’s a good man, he did a good job. I told him: ‘You have no idea how good a job you did’ on that chapel. That’s very hard to do. Painstaking’.”