President Emmanuel Macron has named centrist leader François Bayrou as France’s next prime minister, in a bid to end months of political turmoil.

Bayrou, a 73-year-old mayor from the south-west who leads the MoDem party, said everyone realised the difficulty of the task ahead: “I think reconciliation is necessary.”

He is seen by Macron’s entourage as a potential consensus candidate and his task will be to avoid the fate of his predecessor. Ex-Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier lasted just three months and was ousted by MPs nine days ago.

Macron is half-way through his second term as president and Bayrou will be his fourth prime minister this year.

French politics has been deadlocked ever since Macron called snap parliamentary elections during the summer and an opinion poll for BFMTV on Thursday suggested 61% of French voters were worried by the political situation.

Although a succession of allies lined up to praise Bayrou’s appointment, Socialist regional leader Carole Delga said the whole process had become a “bad movie”. Far-left France Unbowed leader Manuel Bompard complained of a “pathetic spectacle”.

The centre-left Socialists said they were ready to talk to Bayrou but would not take part in his government. Leader Olivier Faure said because Macron had chosen someone “from his own camp”, the Socialists would remain in opposition.

President Macron has vowed to remain in office until his second term ends in 2027, despite Barnier’s downfall last week.

He cut short a trip to Poland on Thursday and had been expected to name his new prime minister on Thursday night, but postponed his announcement until Friday.

He then met Bayrou at the Elysée Palace and a final decision was made hours later. But in an indication of the fraught nature of the talks, newspaper suggested that Macron had preferred another ally, Roland Lescure, but changed his mind when Bayrou threatened to withdraw his party’s support.

Bayrou was set to move into the prime minister’s residence at Hôtel Matignon within hours, and a red carpet was rolled out for the transfer of power even before his name was confirmed.

His challenge will be in forming a government that will not be brought down the way his predecessor’s was in the National Assembly.

Macron has already held round-table talks with leaders from all the main political parties, bar the far-left France Unbowed (LFI) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen.

The question is who can be persuaded to join Bayrou’s government, or at least agree a pact so they do not oust him.

When the only possible means of survival for a minority government is to build bridges on left and right, Bayrou has the advantage of having passable relations with both sides, reports BBC Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield.

Michel Barnier was only appointed in September and LFI MPs have already indicated they will propose another vote of no confidence in his successor’s government.

He was voted out when Le Pen’s National Rally joined left-wing MPs in rejecting his plans for €60bn (£50bn) in tax rises and spending cuts. He was seeking to cut France’s budget deficit, which is set to hit 6.1% of economic output (GDP) this year.

His outgoing government has put forward a bill to enable the provisions of the 2024 budget to continue into next year. But a replacement budget for 2025 will have to be approved once the next government takes office.

Barnier wished his successor his best wishes in what he called “this serious period for France and Europe”.

Under the political system of France’s Fifth Republic, the president is elected for five years and names a prime minister whose choice of cabinet is then appointed by the president.

Unusually, President Macron called snap elections for parliament over the summer after poor results in the EU elections in June. The outcome left France in political stalemate, with three large political blocs made up of the left, centre and far right.

Eventually he chose Barnier to form a minority government reliant on Marine Le Pen’s National Rally for its survival. Macron is now hoping to restore stability without depending on her party.

Three centre-left parties – the Socialists, Greens and Communists – broke ranks with the more radical left LFI by taking part in talks with Macron.

However, they made clear they wanted a prime minister from the left, rather than a centrist.

“I told you I wanted someone from the left and the Greens and I think Mr Bayrou isn’t one or the other,” Greens leader Marine Tondelier told French TV on Thursday.

Patrick Kanner of the Socialists said that just because his party was not joining Bayrou’s government, “that doesn’t mean we’re going to bash it”.

Sébastien Chenu, a National Rally MP, said for his party it was less about who Macron picked than the “political line” he chose. If Bayrou wanted to tackle immigration and the cost of living crisis then he would “find an ally in us”.

Relations between the centre left and the radical LFI of Jean-Luc Mélenchon appear to have broken down over the three parties’ decision to pursue talks with President Macron.

After the LFI leader called on his former allies to steer clear of a coalition deal, Olivier Faure of the Socialists told French TV that “the more Mélenchon shouts the less he’s heard”.

Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen has called for her party’s policies on the cost of living to be taken into account by the incoming government, by building a budget that “doesn’t cross each party’s red lines”.

President Macron has turned to a fellow centrist, and one of France’s most experienced politicians, to extricate the country from its crisis of government.

But if François Bayrou commands plenty of respect across the political spectrum, it is hard to see how he can avoid the same man-traps that felled his predecessor Michel Barnier.

Appointed by the president as the constitution dictates, the prime minister can nonetheless only function with the support of parliament.

And as the National Assembly is crippled by the same three-bloc impasse as it has been since July – with no possible change before July 2025 – it would be a rash punter who predicted for Bayrou any degree of success.

Since the fall of Barnier a week ago – after a vote of no confidence supported by left and populist right – Macron has consulted with a range of leaders in the hope of forming a new informal coalition to run the country.

Barnier having been a man of the traditional right, Macron’s first instinct was to turn to the traditional left – and efforts initially focused on prising the Socialist Party (PS) from its alliance with the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI).

However as the PS’s condition was the adoption of leftwing policies that Macron was unwilling to sanction, he was forced to limit his search to his own inner circle.

Bayrou has been a close ally of the president since before Macron’s first stunning election win in 2017. Indeed Bayrou’s decision to stand aside as a candidate that year – and rally behind the younger man – created a vital dynamic behind Macron’s campaign.

A well-known figure on the political stage for more than 40 years, Bayrou – who is 73 – has run the Modem party, which now has 36 deputies, since its formation in 2007. Before that he was the leader of other centrist incarnations.

His beginnings were in the Chistian Democrat tradition of post-war politics, which in general supported but kept a distance from the larger Gaullist component of the French right, led from the late 1970s by Jacques Chirac.

Bayrou, who was a teacher of classical languages in his 20s, served as education minister from 1993 to 1997. But that was his last meaningful experience of government.

Very briefly in 2017 he was Macron’s justice minister, but stepped down after being accused in a party funding scandal.

He was eventually cleared of wrongdoing, but many of his colleagues were convicted. And prosecutors have appealed against his acquittal, meaning he could yet be brought back to court.

An observant Catholic with six children, Bayrou’s political base is in the Pyrenean city of Pau where he has been mayor since 2014. He speaks the local Bearnese language and is a strong believer in decentralisation.

Bayrou has run for the presidency three times, as standard-bearer of the centre. He was closest to victory in 2007, when he came third with nearly 19% of the vote. He then angered the future winner Nicolas Sarkozy by coming out in support of the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal.

When the only possible means of survival for a minority government is to build bridges on left and right, Bayrou has the advantage of having passable relations with both sides.

His backing for Royal and then François Hollande in 2012 has established a certain trust among the Socialists. But his views on debt – and the need to bring it down – help him on the right.

Interestingly his relationship with Marine Le Pen of the populist right is also respectful. In the past he has helped her collect the sponsorships needed to run for the presidency, arguing that it would be an affront to democracy if the leader of the most popular party could not stand.

Similar sentiments led to support for Le Pen, when the prosecutor in her own party funding trial (a similar case to his own) recently demanded she be declared ineligible for public office.

This may mean that Bayrou can avoid an automatic censure from the populist right.

But Le Pen’s National Rally has also warned that if the new prime minister is “Barnier with another face” it will not hesitate to bring him down.

According to France’s veteran political commentator Alain Duhamel, Bayrou is an independent-minded and highly experienced figure who – though allied to Macron – will not hesitate to exert his power at Hotel Matignon, his official residence.

“He will not be easily disciplined,” said Duhamel. “And he will tilt policy more towards the left.”

France’s crisis of government – the most serious in the Fifth Republic – has led to a major shift in power, away from the Elysée and towards the prime minister and parliament.

“The last time we had a situation like this was the (post-war) Fourth Republic when presidents had very little power,” said constitutional expert Christophe Boutin.

“Today again, power rests with the groups in parliament who may or may not come together on certain shared policies.”

Bayrou’s first task will be to name a new government, which could take many days. The composition will be an indication of whether he has managed to build bridges to the Socialists on one side, and Barnier’s conservatives on the other.

But very quickly he will have to draw up a new 2025 budget to replace the one abandoned by the Barnier government; and immediately he will be faced with possible rebellions from the left and far-right.

The idea of some parliamentarians of a kind of non-aggression pact – in which government promises not to push through laws without a vote and MPs promise not to vote a motion of censure – has been backed by Macron, who also said he did not want to dissolve the Assembly again before the end of his term in 2027.

But critics say such a deal would be a licence for inertia, with no possible agreement likely on such important issues as bringing down the country’s spiralling debt.

A popular Indian actor was arrested and later released on bail in connection with a crush that killed a person at the premiere of his film.

Allu Arjun, one of the biggest stars of the Telugu film industry, had made a surprise appearance at the screening last week in Hyderabad city.

A 39-year-old woman was killed and her son critically injured in the crush.

A court initially sentenced the actor to 14 days in police custody but hours later, the high court granted him bail.

Police had filed a case against the actor, his security team and the theatre’s management staff on charges of culpable homicide.

The owner and two employees of the theatre were arrested earlier.

On Friday, the police arrived at the actor’s home and took him into custody, following which he was produced in a local court.

Accidents involving large crowds are often reported in India, where lax safety measures and poor crowd management have led to deaths. But it is unusual for big celebrities to be arrested in cases like these.

Pushpa 2, the highly anticipated sequel to the 2021 blockbuster Pushpa: The Rise, released in theatres earlier this month

Police said Allu Arjun arrived at the theatre at 21:30 local time (16:00GMT) through the main entrance.

“There was no intimation from the side of the theatre management or the actor’s team that they would be visiting,” Hyderabad police chief CV Anand said.

“His personal security team started pushing the public which further aggravated the situation as there was already a huge gathering at the theatre,” a police statement said.

Arjun’s lawyer said in court that the actor could be not held responsible for the incident and that the crush took place on a different floor from where he was.

As chaos broke out, a 39-year-old woman and her nine-year-old son were pulled out of the crowd as they felt “suffocated”, police said.

They were given first aid, before being taken to hospital.

While the woman died there, her son was shifted to a different hospital where he is still being treated.

Shortly after the incident, Allu Arjun wrote on X that he was “heartbroken by the tragic incident”.

“My heartfelt condolences go out to the grieving family during this unimaginably difficult time. I want to assure them they are not alone in this pain and will meet the family personally,” he wrote.

He later announced assistance of 2.5m rupees ($29,480; £23,346) for the woman’s family and promised to take care of the medical expenses for her son.

Mythri Movie Makers, the studio behind the film, also released a statement saying, “We are committed to standing by them and extending all possible support during this difficult time.”

Travis Kelce’s dad has revealed he’s not splashing out on Taylor Swift’s birthday present, explaining that spending $10 (£8) on a personal gift is better than trying to impress her with something expensive.

The US pop star, who turned 35 on Friday, has been dating NFL player Travis since last summer.

His dad Ed Kelce said: “You’re not going to crush Taylor Swift with a gift that cost, you know, $100,000 (£80,000).

“You’ve got to get something that tweaks the strings of her heart that you spend 10 bucks on,” he continued. “Then she’ll just be all gooey. You’ve got to find something that triggers the emotion.”

Speaking to the Baskin and Phelps podcast, Ed said “the amount of money is meaningless” when it came to buying for the singer, and that buying a gift for her was similar to buying for his two sons. “There’s nothing they want that they don’t already have.”

Instead, he explained: “You have to look beyond that. You’ve got to dig down and come up with something special.”

Travis Kelce plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, while his brother Jason Kelce is a retired Philadelphia Eagles player.

Last weekend, Swift reached the end of her Eras world tour, which spanned 152 concerts over 21 months and is said to have made more than $2bn (£1.58bn) in ticket sales.

The singer has described the record-breaking tour as “the most extraordinary chapter of my life so far”.

At the final show on Sunday in Vancouver, Canada, fans began singing Happy Birthday to the singer.

And her birthday came a day after Swift made history as the winner of the most Billboard Music Awards.

“This is like the nicest early birthday present you could have given me, so thank you very much,” Swift said in a pre-recorded acceptance speech. “I love it. It’s exactly what I wanted.”

Swift picked up 10 prizes at Thursday’s event, including top artist and top Billboard 200 album for The Tortured Poets Department.

That brings the total number of Billboard Awards won by Swift to 49, the highest of any artist, overtaking Drake’s 41.

Her other wins this year included top female artist, top Hot 100 artist and top Hot 100 songwriter, prizes Swift said she considered fan-voted awards because they were driven by chart data.

“You guys are the ones who care about our albums and come see us in concert,” she said.

“Everything that has happened with the Eras Tour and The Tortured Poets Department, I just have to say thank you.

“It means the world to me that you guys have embraced the things I’ve made, and the fact that you’ve cared so much about my music.”

The award ceremony also saw wins for British stars Dua Lipa, Coldplay and Charli XCX – the latter of whom scored top dance/electronic artist and album for Brat.

Thousands of Syrians have thronged the streets of the capital, Damascus, and other cities to celebrate the fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

In Damascus people gathered at the iconic Umayyad Mosque for prayers before the jubilant rallies called by the Islamist rebels who led the armed uprising against Assad.

Rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who has now started using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, had urged Syrians “to go to the streets to express their joy” on Friday to mark “the victory of the blessed revolution”.

Assad fled to Russia on Sunday as the regime set up by his father 50 years ago collapsed in just a few tumultuous days.

Damascus’s Umayyad Square had a party-like atmosphere. Speakers were set up, and music played “Raise your head high, you are Syrian.”

People waved the flag of the Syrian opposition and chanted revolutionary songs and slogans.

Among them were men in black combat gear – wearing body armour and carrying guns.

They were members of the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Some paused for pictures with civilians. One of them pulled out a piece of paper and started reading poetry he had written praising the country.

Sara al-Zobi, a university student living in Damascus but originally from Deraa – the city the opposition regard as the birthplace of the revolution – said Syrians had gathered to celebrate on Friday and would proceed to build the future “hand-in hand”.

“We are gathering because we’re happy Syria has been freed, we’re happy to have been liberated from the prison in which we lived,” said another participant, Nour Thi al-Ghina.

• Bowen: Searching for loved ones – and closure
• Inside Aleppo – the first city to fall to Syrian rebels

Away from the celebrations, bereaved families went looking for the bodies of family members who disappeared over the past decade in the notorious prisons of the Assad regime.

At a mortuary in central Damascus, some held up the pictures of relatives trying to compare them to the bodies lying in bags in front of them.

Some have managed to locate their missing fathers, brothers, or sons, while others left sobbing after failing to find any clues.

The mortuary was full of bodies transferred from Saydnaya prison, widely known here as a human slaughterhouse.

“All of the bodies had clear signs of malnourishment, they were so skinny,” Aslan Ibrahim, a forensic expert at the hospital, said.

The body of a journalist bore signs of torture, he said, adding: “His arm was broken, and his leg too, he also had a lot of bruises.”

• Mapping Saydnaya Prison – the Assads’ ‘human slaughterhouse’
• Burying anti-Assad activist tortured to death

Key sites of the sprawling network of intelligence agencies which for decades attempted to brutally crush opposition movements can be found along the same central streets of the Syrian capital.

In the basement of the state security headquarters, in the Kafr Sousa district of the city, stand row after row of tiny cells – each just two metres by one metre and protected by thick steel doors.

Inside, dark stains mark the filthy walls. Detainees could be held in these cells for months while being interrogated and tortured.

They are just below street-level, on a busy road where every day thousands of ordinary Syrians passed by, going about their daily lives just a few metres from where their compatriots were being detained and tortured.

A short distance away is the General Intelligence Directorate, another part of Syria’s former network of spy agencies.

There are a huge numbers of records – evidence of how the Assad regime used to monitor its citizens.

There is row after row of paper files in cabinets and, in some rooms, piles of notebooks stacked from floor to ceiling.

Nearby is a computer server room. The floors and walls are a pristine white and black data storage units hum quietly.

The electricity has been cut to much of Damascus but it seems that this facility was so important it had its own power supply.

Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett is amplifying harmful health misinformation on his number-one ranked podcast, a BBC investigation has found.

Recent claims from guests – including that cancer can be treated by following a keto diet, rather than proven treatments – were allowed by the Dragons’ Den star with little or no challenge. Experts have told us failing to question these disproven claims is dangerous because it creates a distrust of conventional medicine.

In an analysis of 15 health-related podcast episodes, BBC World Service found each contained an average of 14 harmful health claims that went against extensive scientific evidence.

Flight Studio – the podcast production company owned by Mr Bartlett – said guests were offered “freedom of expression” and were “thoroughly researched”.

The podcast launched in 2017 focusing on entrepreneurship and business. It soared in popularity as figures such as influencer Molly Mae and Airbnb founder Brian Chesky shared their tips for success.

But in the past 18 months, Mr Bartlett has concentrated more on health, with guests presented as leading experts in their fields. Their views receive little challenge.

The interviews are also posted to Mr Bartlett’s YouTube channel, which has seven million subscribers. Since this content shift last year, its monthly views have increased from nine million to 15 million.

Mr Bartlett told The Times in April he expected his podcast to make £20m this year, mainly from advertising.

We looked at the 23 health-related episodes released between April and November this year, fact checking – with four medical experts – 15 which contained potentially harmful claims.

The experts we spoke to were cancer research professor David Grimes, public confidence in healthcare professor Heidi Larson, NHS diabetes adviser Dr Partha Kar and surgeon Dr Liz O’Riordan.

We recorded harmful claims as advice that, if followed, could lead to negative health outcomes.

In that eight-month window, some guests billed as health experts shared accurate information, but most were spreading misleading claims. These included:

• Anti-vaccine conspiracies, stating that Covid was an engineered weapon

• Poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, autism and other disorders can be “reversed” with diet

• Evidence-based medication is “toxic” for patients, downplaying the success of proven treatments

Podcasters may claim they are sharing information, but they are actually sharing harmful misinformation, says Prof David Grimes from Trinity College Dublin.

“That’s a very different and not empowering thing. It actually imperils all our health,” he says.

Podcasts in the UK are not regulated by the media regulator Ofcom – which sets rules on accuracy and impartiality. So Mr Bartlett is not breaking any broadcasting rules.

In a July episode, Mr Bartlett spoke to Aseem Malhotra, a doctor who became known during the pandemic for spreading misinformation about Covid vaccines.

In the episode, Dr Malhotra says the “Covid vaccine was a net negative for society”. Analysis by the World Health Organization shows that it saved many lives during the pandemic.

At the end of the episode, Mr Bartlett, who does not have a health background, justified the airing of the discredited views, saying he aimed to “present some of the other side” as “the truth is usually somewhere in the middle”.

He added that: “Ideas from the suffragettes, Gandhi and Martin Luther King were also received equally horrifically… so we have to be humble that an idea that may be important may trigger us, but it can’t be censored.”

In response to our investigation, Dr Malhotra told the BBC he “completely accept[s] that there are still some people who disagree with [his views]” and said that “does not mean that they have been debunked”.

In many of the podcast episodes, the guests claimed to know a simple solution to health issues which they believed mainstream institutions were hiding from the public. They often also advertised their products on the podcast.

Cancer researcher Dr Thomas Seyfried appeared on the podcast in October. He is a proponent of using the ketogenic diet, a diet low in carbohydrates and high in fat, to treat cancer.

But Prof Grimes told us doctors warned patients against restricting their diet while undergoing cancer treatment.

“You could potentially and very realistically get very, very, sick and have a much worse health outcome than if you followed recommended advice from your oncologists,” he said.

In the podcast, Dr Seyfried also suggested radiotherapy and chemotherapy only improved patients’ lifespan by one-to-two months, comparing modern cancer treatments to “medieval cures”.

Mr Bartlett did not react to this claim.

Cancer Research UK statistics show that UK cancer survival has doubled in the past 50 years. In the US, the cancer death rate has declined 33% since 1990, thanks to modern treatments.

Dr Thomas Seyfried told us he “stands by the statements that he made in the interview”.

The solutions these guests are offering are appealing to listeners as they feel tangible and come without the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs, says Prof Heidi Larson, an expert in public confidence in healthcare.

“But they [the guests] are way overstretching. It sends people away from evidence-based medicine. They stop doing things that might have some side effects, even though it could save their life.”

Cécile Simmons, from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, a think tank specialising in disinformation research, believes this type of content can help to grow audiences.

“Health-related clickbait content with scary titles does really well online with the algorithm amplifying that,” she said.

Mr Bartlett has dabbled in dubious health claims before.

In January, on BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den – where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to five multimillionaire investors, including Mr Bartlett – he invested in “Ear Seeds”, acupuncture beads placed in the ear which falsely claim to cure chronic fatigue condition myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).

After complaints, the BBC has since added a disclaimer in the episode and on iPlayer, stating the “Ear Seeds” are not intended as a cure, and medical guidance should be followed for ME.

A spokesperson for the BBC declined to comment.

He is also an investor in Huel, a meal replacement company – and Zoe, which sells a personalised nutrition programme involving the use of blood sugar monitors.

“He has financial stakes in health and wellness companies. And once you have financial interests, you have then the further interest in focusing on health and nutrition,” says Ms Simmons.

Two Facebook adverts featuring Mr Bartlett were recently banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for promoting two Huel and Zoe products without disclosing he was an investor.

Founders of both companies have previously been invited as guests on The Diary of a CEO podcast.

A spokesperson for Flight Studio, Mr Bartlett’s production company said: “The Diary of a CEO [DOAC] is an open-minded, long-form conversation… with individuals identified for their distinguished and eminent career and/or consequential life experience.”

They heard a range of voices, they said, “not just those Steven and the DOAC team necessarily agree with”.

The BBC investigation had reviewed a “limited proportion of guests” out of the nearly 400 broadcast to date, they added.

The mother of the man police suspect murdered Harshita Brella has said she “cannot believe” he would have killed his wife.

Sunil Devi told the BBC she spoke to the couple on 10 November – the day police believe Harshita was fatally strangled in Corby, Northamptonshire – and they seemed “happy”.

Harshita’s body was discovered in a car boot in east London four days later. Ms Devi’s son, Pankaj Lamba, is the prime suspect in the murder investigation.

He had already been known to police, having been arrested on 3 September and was the subject of a domestic violence protection order.

The order, which had barred him from harassing or intimidating Harshita, ended in September and police believe he tracked her down and strangled her.

“I don’t know anything but I cannot believe this,” Ms Devi told the BBC from her home in in Jhajjar, India.

She hid her face during the interview because of the shame this case has brought to her family.

She said her son and daughter-in-law had sent her photos of food they had cooked on the 10 November and she had thought they were “happy in their lives”.

But earlier this week Harshita’s family told the BBC she feared for her life and believed Mr Lamba “was going to kill her”.

Her family also said Harshita had had a miscarriage in the weeks before her death.

They believe Mr Lamba is in India, but said police there were “not listening” to them. Local police have told the BBC that UK authorities have not requested for them to intervene.

Ms Devi said she does not know where her son is, of if he is even alive.

“Some people even say he’s been killed. We don’t know what people are saying. I can’t understand anything. We’ve left it to God,” she said.

Asked about reports that her son had been hitting his wife, she said: “Only the police know what happened, what do we know? We are continents away.”

“As a mother with just one son, what can I do?” she added, “we are completely finished. We are now left with no support.”

She also said she didn’t know there had been allegations of violence and abuse, as reported by Harshita and her family.

Northamptonshire Police have not confirmed if they are in contact with authorities in India, where Mr Lamba is believed to be.

Indian police have said they have not been able to launch an investigation as the crime took place in the UK.

Mr Lamba had been living on a student visa in the UK. He and Harshita had an arranged marriage and were wed in March in India before moving to the UK in April.

An alleged Chinese spy who formed an “unusual degree of trust” with the Duke of York has been banned from the UK, after a judgement by the UK’s semi-secret national security court.

The man, known only as H6 and described as a “close confidant” to Prince Andrew, brought an appeal against his initial ban but the decision was upheld by the court.

Judges were told the businessman was attempting to leverage Prince Andrew’s influence.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment, saying they do not act for the prince, who is not a working royal.

• ANALYSIS: Questions over Prince Andrew’s judgement and finances raised again

In March 2023 H6 brought his case to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a court set up to consider appeals against decisions to ban or remove someone from the country on national security or related grounds.

In the published ruling, the judge said that the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman, was “entitled to conclude that [H6] represented a risk to the national security of the United Kingdom, and that she was entitled to conclude that his exclusion was justified and proportionate”.

The ruling makes clear that the man had been subjected to the highest levels of national security investigation as someone that the UK’s intelligence agencies feared was seeking influence over a member of the Royal Family.

The court was told that H6 was invited to Prince Andrew’s birthday party in 2020 and was told he could act on his behalf when dealing with potential investors in China.

It’s not clear how H6 became close to the Prince, but in November 2021 police officers stopped and questioned him at the UK border under powers to investigate suspicions of “hostile activity” by a foreign state.

During that stop H6 surrendered a number of electronic devices including a mobile phone.

What officers found on them so concerned the security service MI5, that Braverman used her exceptional powers to ban H6 from the country.

In a letter found on one of his devices, H6 was told by Dominic Hampshire, an adviser to Prince Andrew: “Outside of [the prince’s] closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.”

Mr Hampshire adds: “Under your guidance, we found a way to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house in Windsor.”

No further details about who the “relevant people” were are given in the excerpt from the letter included in the ruling.

Mr Hampshire also confirmed to H6 that he could act for Prince Andrew in talks “with potential partners and investors in China”.

A document listing “main talking points” for a call with Prince Andrew was also found.

It states: “IMPORTANT: Manage expectations. Really important to not set ‘too high’ expectations – he is in a desperate situation and will grab onto anything.”

The court assessed that this meant H6 was in a position “to generate relationships between senior Chinese officials and prominent UK figures which could be leveraged for political interference purposes by the Chinese State”.

Security chiefs feared Beijing was attempting to run an “elite capture” operation to influence the Duke of York because of the pressure he was under, a tactic which aims to appoint high profile individuals to Chinese businesses, think tanks or universities.

H6 was subsequently informed that he was believed by UK authorities to be associated with the United Front Work Department (UFWD), an arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tasked with conducting influence operations.

The ruling said MI5’s Director General, Ken McCallum had expressed concern about the threat posed to the UK by political interference by China and that bodies such as the UFWD were “mounting patient, well-funded, deceptive campaigns to buy and exert influence”.

The Home Office said they believed H6 had been engaged in covert and deceptive activity on behalf of the CCP and that his relationship with Prince Andrew could be used for political interference.

Upholding Braverman’s decision, the judges said H6 had won an “unusual degree of trust from a senior member of the Royal Family who was prepared to enter into business activities with him”.

They added that the relationship had developed at a time when the prince was “under considerable pressure” which “could make him vulnerable to the misuse of that sort of influence”.

The prince faced increasing scrutiny from late 2019 over his friendship with the late US financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which included his infamous Newsnight interview in November of that year.

In a statement, the Chinese embassy in the UK criticised “baseless ‘spy’ stories targeting China”.

“Their purpose is to smear China and disrupt normal exchanges between Chinese and British personnel,” it said.

China supports “normal people-to-people and cultural exchanges with other countries”, it added.

The embassy also urged the UK to “stop creating trouble” and to “stop spreading the so-called ‘China threat’ theory”.

Prince Andrew had previously been the UK’s trade envoy, but gave up the role after 10 years in 2011 after criticism over the company he kept, including Epstein.

He has previously been dogged by questions about his judgement and his finances – an issue that goes back to the loss of his status as a working royal.

In November 2019, Prince Andrew stepped back from royal duties amid growing public anger about his friendship with Epstein.

Questions were subsequently raised about his finances after he reached a settlement – believed to run into the millions – in a civil sexual assault case brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers. The prince has always denied assaulting Ms Giuffre.

His finances have recently come under scrutiny. King Charles is no longer funding him, and there has been speculation about the running costs of Royal Lodge – the security bill alone is believed to be several million pounds per year.

The big picture of Prince Andrew’s finances is full of unknowns, such as how much he might have inherited from his mother or how much private money he might have accumulated in his envoy days.

Former security minister Tom Tugendhat described Prince Andrew’s association with the Chinese businessman as “extremely embarrassing”, but told the BBC the Chinese state’s ambition is “to secure influence over foreign countries at various different points,” including the UK.

He said the UFWD was seeking influence in the UK across social, academic, industrial and financial sectors and China has “engaged very often in espionage”.

He added that it was possible in this case the goal could have been to secure influence and “inspire somebody to say something, do something or perhaps just host an event where you can be close to somebody you want to pressure”.

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Prosecutors reportedly began to share evidence in their case against Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson, with a grand jury on Thursday.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office hopes to move quickly in their effort to obtain an indictment in New York City where Mangione allegedly shot and killed Thompson on 4 December, according CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, reported.

Mr Mangione’s lawyer is continuing to fight his extradition from Pennsylvania – where the suspected shooter was arrested on gun-related charges – to New York.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul said on Thursday that she is also working to get Mr Mangione back to her state from Pennsylvania “because that horrific attack occurred on our streets”.

“The people of our city deserve to have that sense of calm that this perpetrator has been caught and he will never see the light of day again,” she added.

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But Mr Mangione’s lawyer, Thomas Dickey, has said he plans to fight the extradition and maintains he has not seen evidence that link Mr Mangione’s gun with the crime.

“A lot of guns look the same,” he said earlier this week on ABC News.

On Wednesday, however, police found a positive match between Mr Mangione’s fingerprints and those discovered at the scene of the crime, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.

Investigators are also looking at how the suspect may have travelled into and out of New York City. Carlos Nieves, an assistant police commissioner in New York City, told CBS News that his office is working with Pennsylvania police to track Mr Mangione’s alleged movements.

Authorities previously alleged that the suspect took a bike through Central Park after shooting Mr Thompson, and then took a taxi to a bus terminal near the northern point of Manhattan. From there, officials claimed, he boarded a bus that left the island.

They now believe that he may have taken the subway from the bus terminal to Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan. Authorities are looking into whether he may have travelled by train to Pennsylvania, rather than by bus.

While Mr Mangione awaits his fate in the New York court system, he remains in in his own cell under maximum security at Huntingdon State Correctional Institution in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania.

He was denied bail at his hearing on Thursday.

His next court appearance is 30 December.

Russia has launched a huge attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which authorities said was the 12th large-scale attack on energy facilities this year.

Ninety-three missiles and more than 200 drones were used – but 81 of the missiles were shot down, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The strikes targeted sites in western Ukraine, damaging energy facilities in several regions, some seriously. Authorities in Ivano-Frankivsk said it was the worst attack on the region so far.

Moscow said the attack was in response to a Ukrainian strike on a military airbase in south-west Russia using US-made missiles.

In an interview with Time magazine on Thursday, to mark being named Person of the Year, US President-elect Donald Trump said he disagreed “very vehemently” with American-made missiles targeting sites in Russia and branded it “crazy”.

“We’re just escalating this war and making it worse,” he said.

On Friday, the Kremlin said that Trump’s comments were “fully aligned” with Moscow’s position.

“That impresses us,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “It is obvious that Trump understands exactly what is escalating the situation.”

Trump also told Time he wanted to reach an agreement to end the war, and the only way to do that was “not to abandon”.

Last month, US President Joe Biden allowed Ukraine to use US-made ATACMS missiles to strike targets inside Russia.

The first attacks using the long-range missiles occurred the following day, with Russian authorities stating at the time that the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, had been hit.

Kyiv had been using ATACMS missiles since October 2023, but only on Russian-held targets within Ukrainian territory.

Russia’s attacks came on the coldest day of the Ukrainian winter so far, with temperatures around -6C.

Along with the damage caused in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, energy and infrastructure facilities were damaged in the Lviv and Ternopil regions.

No critical or residential infrastructure was hit in the Kyiv region, according to Ruslan Kravchenko, the area’s governor.

Five out of the country’s nine operating nuclear reactor units have been operating with reduced power.

As a result of the attack, the Ukrenergo National Power Company had to increase power supply restrictions on Friday, with rolling blackouts being introduced in all regions.

Ukrenergo added that during the day on Friday, electricity would be imported from Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Moldova.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In total, Russia has captured and retaken about 2,350 sq km of territory (907 sq miles) in eastern Ukraine and in Russia’s western Kursk region.

The end, when it came for the BGP5 barracks, was loud and brutal. First, a crackly speaker calling out for their surrender; then, a thunderous barrage of artillery, rockets and rifle fire that tore chunks out of the buildings in which hundreds of soldiers were hiding.

BGP5 – the letters stand for Border Guard Police – was the Myanmar military junta’s last stand in northern Rakhine State, which lies along the border with Bangladesh.

Video by the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) which was besieging the base shows their rag-tag fighters, many barefoot, firing an assortment of weapons into the base, while air force jets roar over their heads.

It was a ferocious battle – perhaps the bloodiest of the civil war which has consumed Myanmar since the military seized power in a coup in 2021.

“They had dug deep ditches filled with spikes around the base,” an AA source told the BBC.

“There were bunkers and reinforced buildings. They laid more than a thousand mines. Many of our fighters lost limbs, or their lives, trying to get through.”

For the coup leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, this has been yet another humiliating defeat after a year of military setbacks.

For the first time his regime has lost control of an entire border: the 270km (170 miles) dividing Myanmar from Bangladesh now wholly under AA control.

And with only the Rakhine State capital Sittwe still firmly in military hands, though cut off from the rest of the country, the AA is likely to be the first insurgent group to take complete control of a state.

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The army has been in headlong retreat from the Arakan Army since the beginning of the year, losing town after town.

The last army units withdrew in September to BGP5, a compound covering around 20 hectares just outside the border town of Maungdaw, where the AA laid siege.

BGP5 was built on the site of a Muslim Rohingya village, Myo Thu Gyi, which was burned down during the violent expulsion of much of the Rohingya population by the armed forces in 2017.

It was the first of many burned villages I saw on a visit to Maungdaw right after the military operation in September of that year, a mass of charred debris in among the lush tropical vegetation, its inhabitants killed or forced to flee to Bangladesh.

When I returned two years later, the new police complex had already been built, with all the trees removed, giving defenders a clear view of any attacking force.

The AA source told us their advance towards it was painfully slow, requiring the insurgents to dig their own ditches for cover.

It does not publish its own casualties. But judging from the intensity of fighting in Maungdaw, which began in June, it is likely to have lost hundreds of its own troops.

Throughout the siege, the Myanmar air force kept up a constant bombardment of Maungdaw, driving the last civilians out of the town.

Its planes dropped supplies to the besieged soldiers at night, but it was never enough. They had plenty of rice stored in the bunkers, a local source told us, but they could not get any treatment for their injuries, and the soldiers became demoralised.

They started to surrender last weekend.

AA video shows them coming out in a pitiful state, waving white cloths. Some are hobbling on makeshift crutches, or hopping, their injured legs wrapped in rags. Few are wearing shoes.

Inside the wrecked buildings the victorious insurgents filmed piles of bodies.

The AA says more than 450 soldiers died in the siege. It has published images of the captured commander, Brigadier-General Thurein Tun, and his officers kneeling beneath the flagpole, now flying the insurgents’ banner.

Pro-military commentators in Myanmar have been venting their frustration on social media.

“Min Aung Hlaing, you have not asked any of your children to serve in the military,” wrote one. “Is this how you use us? Are you happy seeing all those deaths in Rakhine?”

“At this rate, all that will be left of the Tatmadaw [military] will be Min Aung Hlaing and a flagpole,” wrote another.

The capture of BGP5 also shows the Arakan Army to be one of the most effective fighting forces in Myanmar.

Formed only in 2009 – much later than most of Myanmar’s other insurgent groups – by young ethnic Rakhine men who had migrated to the Chinese border on the other side of the country in search of work, the AA is part of the Three Brotherhood Alliance which has inflicted most of the defeats suffered by the junta since last year.

The other two members of the alliance have stayed on the border, in Shan State.

But the AA moved back to Rakhine eight years ago to start its armed campaign for self-government, tapping into historic resentment among the Rakhine population of the poverty, isolation and central government neglect of their state.

The AA leaders have proven to be smart, disciplined and able to motivate their fighters.

They are already administering the large areas of Rakhine State they control as though they were running their own state.

And they also have good weapons, thanks to their links with the older insurgent groups on the Chinese border, and appear to be well-funded.

There is a bigger question, though, over how much the various ethnic insurgent groups are willing to prioritise the goal of overthrowing the military junta.

Publicly they say they do, alongside the shadow government which was deposed by the coup, and the hundreds of volunteer peoples’ defence forces which have sprung up to support it.

In return for the support it is getting from the ethnic insurgents, the shadow government is promising a new federal political system which will give Myanmar’s regions self-rule.

But already the other two members of the Three Brotherhood Alliance have accepted China’s request for a ceasefire.

China is seeking a negotiated end to the civil war which would almost certainly leave the military with much of its power intact.

The opposition insists the military must be reformed and removed from politics. But having already made so many territorial gains at the expense of the junta, the ethnic insurgents may be tempted to strike a deal with China’s blessing rather than keep fighting to oust the generals.

The AA’s victory poses more worrying questions.

The group’s leadership is tight-lipped about its plans. But it takes over a state that was always poor and which has suffered greatly from the intense fighting of the past year.

“Eighty per cent of the housing in Maungdaw and the surrounding villages has been destroyed,” one Rohingya man who left Maungdaw recently for Bangladesh told the BBC.

“The town is deserted. Almost all the shops and houses have been looted.”

Last month the United Nations, whose agencies are being given very little access to Rakhine, warned of looming famine, because of the huge numbers of displaced people and the difficulty of getting any supplies in, past a military blockade.

The AA is trying to set up its own administration, but the BBC has been told by some of those displaced by the fighting that the group cannot feed or shelter them.

It is also unclear how the AA will treat the Rohingya population, still thought to number around 600,000 in Rakhine, even after the expulsion of 700,000 in 2017.

The largest number live in northern Rakhine State and Maungdaw has long been a predominantly Rohingya town. Relations with the ethnic Rakhine majority, the support base for the AA, have long been fraught.

They are now a great deal worse after Rohingya militant groups, which have their power base in the vast refugee camps in Bangladesh, chose to take sides with the military, against the AA, despite the army’s track record of persecuting Rohingyas.

Many Rohingyas do not like these groups, and some say they are happy to live in an AA-run Rakhine State.

But tens of thousands have been expelled by the AA from towns it has conquered, and not been allowed back.

The AA has promised to include all communities in its vision for a future independent of the central government, but it has also denounced the Rohingyas it found itself fighting alongside the army. In August dozens of Rohingyas, many of them women and children trying to cross over to Bangladesh, were killed by bombs, almost certainly dropped from AA drones.

“We cannot deny the fact that Rohingyas have been persecuted by Myanmar governments for many years, and the Rakhine people supported that,” said the Rohingya man we spoke to in Bangladesh.

“The government wants to keep Rohingyas from becoming citizens, but the Rakhine people believe there should be no Rohingyas at all in Rakhine State. Our situation today is even more difficult than it was under the rule of the military junta.”

Niger’s military government has suspended the BBC for three months, accusing it of spreading fake news that could destabilise social peace and demoralise troops fighting jihadists.

Niger’s Minister of Communication Raliou Sidi Mohamed announced that the decision would take effect immediately.

BBC programmes, including in Hausa, the most spoken language in Niger, and French, are broadcast in the country through local radio partners, reaching 2.4 million people in the country this year – about 17% of the adult population.

Although BBC radio programmes have been suspended, the website is not blocked and the radio can still be accessed on shortwave.

Niger’s government did not cite a specific broadcast for the suspension but it follows BBC reports about jihadist attacks in the Tillaberi region on Tuesday, which are said to have killed 91 soldiers and nearly 50 civilians.

The junta called these reports “baseless assertions” and a “campaign of intoxication orchestrated by adversaries of the Nigerien people aimed at undermining the morale of our troops and sowing division”.

The attacks were reported by multiple sources, including security blogs, which said the gunmen, believed to be allied to the Islamic State group, launched two simultaneous attacks in Chatoumane village.

In one of the attacks, the attackers are reported to have disguised themselves as civilians and opened fire at soldiers on patrol in the weekly market. The soldiers could not return fire directly because of the risk of collateral damage.

A BBC spokesperson said: “We stand by our journalism and we will continue to report on the region without fear or favour.”

French outlets, France24 and Radio France Internationale (RFI), have also been suspended in Niger since the military seized power in a coup in July 2023.

• WATCH: How has Niger changed since the coup?
• ‘France takes us for idiots’ – Inside coup-hit Niger

The junta is under pressure for failing to curb militant attacks, one of its justifications for deposing democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum in July 2023.

Niger’s government also announced plans to “file a complaint” against RFI for “incitement to genocide”.

It claimed that RFI was a propaganda mouthpiece for former colonial power France.

RFI described the complaint as “extravagant and defamatory” and said it wasn’t based on any evidence.

Niger did not say where it planned to lodge the complaint against RFI.

West African neighbours Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali have all experienced coups in recent years. All of these military-led governments have suspended foreign media at some point since taking power.

The BBC was also suspended by Burkina Faso over its coverage of a report accusing its army of mass killings.

They are facing an insurgency made up of different jihadist groups which operate across the Sahel region of West Africa. Tillaberi is a particularly volatile area, near the borders with Mali and Burkina Faso.

The Sahel region is considered the new global epicentre of the Islamic State group, while groups linked to al-Qaeda also operate in the region.

The three countries have formed an alliance to fight the jihadists and expelled French troops, turning to Russia and Turkey instead for their security needs.

But the violence has continued.

• How a uranium mine became a pawn in the row between Niger and France
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When Donald Trump sat with world leaders in Paris last weekend to marvel at the restored Notre Dame cathedral, armed Islamist fighters in Syria were in jeeps on the road to Damascus finalising the fall of the Assad regime.

In this split screen moment of global news, the US president-elect, seated between the French first couple, still had an eye on the stunning turn of events in the Middle East.

“Syria is a mess, but is not our friend,” he posted the same day on his Truth Social network.

He added: “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”

This post, and another the next day, were a reminder of the president-elect’s powerful mandate to not intervene in foreign policy.

It also raised big questions about what comes next. Given the way the war has drawn in and affected regional and global powers, can Trump really have “nothing to do” with Syria now that President Bashar al-Assad’s government has fallen?

Will Trump pull US troops out?

Does his policy differ drastically from President Biden’s, and if so, what’s the point of the White House doing anything in the five weeks before Trump takes over?

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The current administration is involved in a frantic round of diplomacy in response to the fall of Assad and the rise to power of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Syrian Islamist armed group that the US designates as a terrorist organisation.

I’m writing this onboard Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s plane, as he shuttles between Jordan and Turkey trying to get key Arab and Muslim countries in the region to back a set of conditions Washington is placing on recognising a future Syrian government.

The US says it must be transparent and inclusive, must not be a “base for terrorism”, cannot threaten Syria’s neighbours, and must destroy any chemical and biological weapons stocks.

For Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for national security adviser, who has yet to be confirmed, there is one guiding principle to his foreign policy.

“President Trump was elected with an overwhelming mandate to not get the United States dug into any more Middle Eastern wars,” he told Fox News this week.

He went on to list America’s “core interests” there as the Islamic State (IS) group, Israel and “our Gulf Arab allies”.

Waltz’s comments were a neat summary of the Trump view of Syria as a small jigsaw piece in his bigger regional policy puzzle.

His goals are to ensure that remnants of IS remain contained and to see that a future government in Damascus can’t threaten Washington’s most important regional ally, Israel.

Trump is also focused on what he sees as the biggest prize: a historic diplomatic and trade deal to normalise relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which he believes would further weaken and humiliate Iran.

The rest, Trump believes, is Syria’s “mess” to work out.

Trump’s rhetoric harkens back to how he talked about Syria during his first term, when he derided the country – which has an extraordinary cultural history dating back millennia – as a land of “sand and death”.

“Donald Trump, himself, I think really wanted very little to do with Syria during his first administration,” said Robert Ford, who served as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Syria from 2011-14, and who argued within that administration for more American intervention in the form of support for Syrian moderate opposition groups to counter Assad’s brutal suppression of his population.

“But there are other people in his circle who are much more concerned about counterterrorism,” he told the BBC.

The US currently has around 900 troops in Syria east of the Euphrates river and in a 55km (34 miles) “deconfliction” zone bordering Iraq and Jordan.

Their official mission is to counter the IS group, now much degraded in desert camps, and to train and equip the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF – Kurdish and Arab allies of the US who control the territory).

The SDF also guards camps containing IS fighters and their families.

In practice, the US presence on the ground has also gone beyond this, helping to block a potential weapons transit route for Iran, which used Syria to supply its ally Hezbollah.

Mr Ford, like other analysts, believes that while Trump’s isolationist instincts play well on social media, the realities on the ground and the views of his own team could end up moderating his stance.

That view is echoed by Wa’el Alzayat, a former adviser on Syria at the US Department of State.

“He is bringing on board some serious people to his administration who will be running his Middle East file,” he told the BBC, specifically noting that Senator Marco Rubio, who has been nominated for secretary of state, “is a serious foreign policy player”.

These tensions – between isolationist ideals and regional goals – also came to a head during his first term, when Trump withdrew remaining CIA funding for some “moderate” rebels, and ordered the withdrawal of US forces from northern Syria in 2019.

At the time, Waltz called the move “a strategic mistake” and, fearing an IS resurgence, Trump’s own officials partially rowed back his decision.

Trump also diverged from his non-interventionist ideals by launching 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield, after Assad allegedly ordered a chemical weapons attack that killed scores of civilians in 2017.

He also doubled down on sanctions against Syria’s leadership.

The blurred lines of Trump’s “it’s not our fight” pledge were summed up by Waltz.

“That doesn’t mean he’s not willing to absolutely step in,” he told Fox News.

“President Trump has no problem taking decisive action if the American homeland is threatened in any way.”

Adding to the possibility of tension is another key figure, Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump has nominated as director of national intelligence. The controversial former Democrat-turned-Trump ally met Assad in 2017 on a “fact-finding” trip, and at the time criticised Trump’s policies.

Her nomination is likely to be heavily scrutinised by US senators amid accusations – that she has denied – of being an apologist for Assad and Russia.

Anxiety over the continuing mission in Syria, and a desire to be able to end it, is not exclusive to Trump.

In January, three American soldiers were killed at a US base in Jordan in a drone strike by Iran-backed militias operating in Syria and Iraq, as the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza threatened to spread farther in the region.

This attack and others have continued to raise questions to the Biden administration over US force levels and their exposure in the area.

In fact, many of the outgoing Biden and incoming Trump administrations’ positions on Syria match more than they diverge.

Despite the sharp differences in the tone and rhetoric, both leaders want Damascus run by a government amenable to US interests.

Both Biden and Trump want to build on Iran and Russia’s humiliation in Syria.

Trump’s “this is not our fight, let it play out” is his equivalent of the Biden administration’s “this is a process that needs to be led by Syrians, not by the United States”.

But the “major” difference, and that which raises the most anxiety among Biden supporters, is in Trump’s approach to US forces on the ground and American backing for the SDF, said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat in Washington who helped opposition figures flee the Assad regime.

“Biden has more sympathy, connection, passion towards [the Kurds]. Historically, he was one of the first senators to visit the Kurdish areas [of northern Iraq] after Saddam Hussein’s Kuwait invasion,” he said.

“Trump and his people they don’t care as much… they take it into consideration not to leave their allies out, they get this, [but] the way they implement it is different.”

Mr Barabandi, who said he supports Trump’s non-interventionist rhetoric, thinks the president-elect will pull out US troops “for sure”, but over a gradual timeframe and with a clear plan in place.

“It will not be like Afghanistan, within 24 hours,” he said. “He will say within six months, or whatever time, a deadline for that and for the arrangement of everything.”

Much may revolve around Trump’s discussions with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom he is thought to have a close relationship.

American backing for the SDF has long been a source of tension with Turkey, which views the People’s Defense Units (YPG) – the Kurdish force that makes up the SDF’s military backbone – as a terrorist organisation.

Since Assad fell, Turkey has been carrying out air strikes to force Kurdish fighters out of strategic areas, including the town of Manbij.

Trump may want to cut a deal with his friend in Ankara that allows him to withdraw US troops and could see Turkey’s hand strengthen further.

But the possibility of Turkish-backed groups taking control of some areas worries many, including Wa’el Alzayat, the former US State Department Syria expert.

“You can’t have different groups running different parts of the country, controlling different resources,” he added.

“There’s either the political process, which I do think the US has a role to play, or something else, and I hope they avoid that latter scenario.”

Warning: This article contains graphic details of torture

“We gave our blood and soul to the revolution,” crowds chanted, as they carried Mazen Al-Hamada’s coffin through the streets of Damascus, draped in the green, white and black flag adopted by protesters back in 2011, now ubiquitous in the city since the fall of Bashar Al-Assad.

As the funeral procession moved forward, more and more people joined it. “Mazen is a martyr,” many shouted, some weeping.

If the world knew before this about the extent of the brutality of Assad’s regime against its own people, it was in part because of Mazen, an activist who was an outspoken critic of the regime.

On Sunday, his body was found in the notorious “slaughterhouse”, Seydnaya prison in Damascus. It bore signs of horrific torture.

A doctor who examined it told the BBC he had fractures, burn marks and contusions all over his body, allegations corroborated by Mazen’s family.

“It’s impossible to count the wounds on his body. His face was smashed and his nose was broken,” his sister Lamyaa said.

A protester when the uprising in Syria began in 2011, Mazen Al-Hamada was arrested and tortured. Released in 2013, he was given asylum in the Netherlands. He began to speak openly about what he was subjected to in prison.

In the documentary Syria’s Disappeared by Afshar Films, Mazen describes how he was raped, his genitals clamped, and how his ribs were broken by a guard jumping on his chest over and over again.

• Syrians celebrate fall of Assad regime – follow live updates

While in asylum, Mazen’s nephew Jad Al-Hamada says he began suffering from severe depression and other mental health issues. During this time, he was seen in a video claiming he was being threatened by members of Syria’s ethnic minority Kurds, and called for violence against them in response. His family says he was not of sound mind at the time.

In 2020, he decided to return to Syria.

“The government told him he had a deal and that he would be safe. He was also told that his family would be arrested and killed if he didn’t return,” Lamyaa said.

He was arrested as soon as he arrived in the country. And his family believes he was killed after rebels took Hama last week, shortly before the regime fell.

“I am happy that we are free, but I wish he had lived to see it. He paid the price for our freedom,” said Lamyaa.

Mazen’s story is just a small glimpse into the atrocities committed by the Assad regime. More than 100,000 people disappeared under his rule, most believed to be dead. Now their families are searching for their bodies.

At the Damascus hospital, the bodies brought from Seydnaya were laid out in a morgue, and when they ran out of space, the most decomposed ones were kept in a shed-like structure just outside. The stench was overwhelming.

One body was decapitated. The others bore marks of severe torture.

In one corner, there was a plastic bag with a human skull and bones. Families were looking through it to identify their loved ones.

Nineteen-year-old Ahmad Sultan Eid’s disfigured body was identified by his mother and brother. His mother nearly collapsed after she saw it, and nurses took her to the emergency room.

“Oh my boy, my baby, you were only 19,” she wailed. “There’s nothing left for us anymore.”

Ahmad’s brother leaned his face against a wall and wept.

All around us, people were holding up the photos of the loved ones they were searching for.

“I haven’t been able to find anything. How can you find anything if you’re looking through skeletons?” said Mustafa Khair-ul-Inam, an elderly man who had come looking for his two sons Omar and Mohammad who disappeared in 2011.

Amhad Masri meanwhile had come looking for his brother Khalil.

“Until now we weren’t allowed to ask where our loved ones are, otherwise we would be arrested. Can you imagine our feelings? They didn’t do anything and just like that they are gone. Maybe they are in a mass grave somewhere. Living in a jungle was better than living in Syria,” he said.

Grief and rage – which couldn’t be expressed openly until just a week ago – were pouring out.

“Every mother who is looking for her son should get revenge against Assad. Putin should not give him refuge. He should send Assad back so we can execute him in a public square,” one woman shouted loudly.

I asked Mazen’s sister Lamyaa what justice she wanted for her brother.

“The perpetrators of the crimes have all escaped. But I want them brought back so we can get justice in a court of law.”

In Aleppo’s city centre, the huge billboard in the main square with a picture of President Bashar al-Assad, which used to be a feature in any Syrian town and village, was set on fire, then removed.

The red, white and black national flags that decorated the lampposts were also taken away and replaced with what is known as “independence flag”. Down the road, outside the city hall, a giant banner with a photo of Assad was taken down; another had his face riddled with bullets, and for whatever reason was being kept there.

Across Aleppo, residents and the new authorities seemed eager to get rid of anything symbolising the Assads – Bashar had come to power in 2000 after the death of his father Hafez, who ruled for 29 years.

I came to Aleppo for the first time as a student, in 2008, and banners with Assad’s face were prominent in public squares, streets and government buildings; all of them seemed to have been either removed or destroyed.

This was the first major city captured by Islamist-led rebels earlier this month, in their astonishing offensive that overthrew Assad and brought freedom to this country after five decades of oppression – at least for now.

One of the first things they did was to topple a large equestrian statue of the former president’s late brother, Bassel; a statue of Hafez was also vandalised.

Once a bustling commercial hub, Aleppo witnessed, and was ravaged by, intense battles between opposition fighters and government forces during the civil war, which started in 2011 when Assad brutally repressed peaceful protests against him.

Thousands were killed. Tens of thousands more fled.

Now, with Assad gone, many are coming back, from other parts of Syria and even abroad.

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Early in the war, East Aleppo, a rebel stronghold, was besieged by forces loyal to the regime and came under intense Russian bombardment. In 2016, government forces reclaimed it, a victory then considered a turning point in the conflict.

To this day, buildings remain destroyed, and piles of rubble wait to be collected. The return of the Assad forces meant that it was too risky for those who had fled to come back – until now.

“When the regime fell, we could raise our heads,” Mahmoud Ali, who is 80, said. He left when fighting there intensified in 2012. He moved with his family to Idlib, in the country’s north-west, which, until two weeks ago, was the rebel enclave in Syria, run by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the anti-Assad offensive.

“Repression is what I saw all my life in the hands of the Assad family. Anyone demanding any rights would be sent to jail. We protested because there was a lot of repression, especially on us, the poor people.”

His daughter, 45-year-old Samar, is one of millions in Syria who had only known this country being ruled by the Assads.

“Up until, nobody dared to speak up because of the terror of the regime,” she said.

“Our children were deprived of everything. They didn’t have their childhood.”

It is remarkable that these feelings were being shared so freely in a country where opposition was not tolerated; the secret police, known as the Mukhabarat, seemed to be everywhere and spying on everyone, and critics were disappeared or sent to jail, where they were tortured and killed.

Across Aleppo, the new authorities installed billboards with the image of chains around two wrists saying, “Freeing detainees is a debt upon our necks”.

“We’re happy, but there’s still fear,” Samar said. “Why are we still afraid? Why isn’t our happiness full? It’s because of the fear they [the regime] planted inside us”.

Her brother, Ahmed, agreed. “You could be sent to jail for saying simple things. I’m happy, but I’m still concerned. But we’ll never live under repression again”.

His father intervened, to agree with him. “That’s impossible.”

The family lived in a small flat, where electricity was intermittent and heating, inexistent.

Now that they had returned, they did not know what to do, like many others here. More than 90% of Syria’s population is estimated to live in poverty, and there are broader concerns about how HTS, which started as an al-Qaeda affiliate, will run the country.

A woman who lived in a flat nearby said, “No-one could take away my happiness. I still can’t believe that we came back. May God protect those who took the country back.”

At the main square, a man told me, “I really hope we get it right, and there isn’t a return to violence and oppression.”

At Mahmoud Ali’s flat, an “independence flag”, with its three red stars in the middle, had been drawn on a white paper, and put on the coffee table in the living room.

Samar, one of his daughters, told me, “We still can’t believe that Assad is gone.”

The end, when it came for the BGP5 barracks, was loud and brutal. First, a crackly speaker calling out for their surrender; then, a thunderous barrage of artillery, rockets and rifle fire that tore chunks out of the buildings in which hundreds of soldiers were hiding.

BGP5 – the letters stand for Border Guard Police – was the Myanmar military junta’s last stand in northern Rakhine State, which lies along the border with Bangladesh.

Video by the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) which was besieging the base shows their rag-tag fighters, many barefoot, firing an assortment of weapons into the base, while air force jets roar over their heads.

It was a ferocious battle – perhaps the bloodiest of the civil war which has consumed Myanmar since the military seized power in a coup in 2021.

“They had dug deep ditches filled with spikes around the base,” an AA source told the BBC.

“There were bunkers and reinforced buildings. They laid more than a thousand mines. Many of our fighters lost limbs, or their lives, trying to get through.”

For the coup leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, this has been yet another humiliating defeat after a year of military setbacks.

For the first time his regime has lost control of an entire border: the 270km (170 miles) dividing Myanmar from Bangladesh now wholly under AA control.

And with only the Rakhine State capital Sittwe still firmly in military hands, though cut off from the rest of the country, the AA is likely to be the first insurgent group to take complete control of a state.

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The army has been in headlong retreat from the Arakan Army since the beginning of the year, losing town after town.

The last army units withdrew in September to BGP5, a compound covering around 20 hectares just outside the border town of Maungdaw, where the AA laid siege.

BGP5 was built on the site of a Muslim Rohingya village, Myo Thu Gyi, which was burned down during the violent expulsion of much of the Rohingya population by the armed forces in 2017.

It was the first of many burned villages I saw on a visit to Maungdaw right after the military operation in September of that year, a mass of charred debris in among the lush tropical vegetation, its inhabitants killed or forced to flee to Bangladesh.

When I returned two years later, the new police complex had already been built, with all the trees removed, giving defenders a clear view of any attacking force.

The AA source told us their advance towards it was painfully slow, requiring the insurgents to dig their own ditches for cover.

It does not publish its own casualties. But judging from the intensity of fighting in Maungdaw, which began in June, it is likely to have lost hundreds of its own troops.

Throughout the siege, the Myanmar air force kept up a constant bombardment of Maungdaw, driving the last civilians out of the town.

Its planes dropped supplies to the besieged soldiers at night, but it was never enough. They had plenty of rice stored in the bunkers, a local source told us, but they could not get any treatment for their injuries, and the soldiers became demoralised.

They started to surrender last weekend.

AA video shows them coming out in a pitiful state, waving white cloths. Some are hobbling on makeshift crutches, or hopping, their injured legs wrapped in rags. Few are wearing shoes.

Inside the wrecked buildings the victorious insurgents filmed piles of bodies.

The AA says more than 450 soldiers died in the siege. It has published images of the captured commander, Brigadier-General Thurein Tun, and his officers kneeling beneath the flagpole, now flying the insurgents’ banner.

Pro-military commentators in Myanmar have been venting their frustration on social media.

“Min Aung Hlaing, you have not asked any of your children to serve in the military,” wrote one. “Is this how you use us? Are you happy seeing all those deaths in Rakhine?”

“At this rate, all that will be left of the Tatmadaw [military] will be Min Aung Hlaing and a flagpole,” wrote another.

The capture of BGP5 also shows the Arakan Army to be one of the most effective fighting forces in Myanmar.

Formed only in 2009 – much later than most of Myanmar’s other insurgent groups – by young ethnic Rakhine men who had migrated to the Chinese border on the other side of the country in search of work, the AA is part of the Three Brotherhood Alliance which has inflicted most of the defeats suffered by the junta since last year.

The other two members of the alliance have stayed on the border, in Shan State.

But the AA moved back to Rakhine eight years ago to start its armed campaign for self-government, tapping into historic resentment among the Rakhine population of the poverty, isolation and central government neglect of their state.

The AA leaders have proven to be smart, disciplined and able to motivate their fighters.

They are already administering the large areas of Rakhine State they control as though they were running their own state.

And they also have good weapons, thanks to their links with the older insurgent groups on the Chinese border, and appear to be well-funded.

There is a bigger question, though, over how much the various ethnic insurgent groups are willing to prioritise the goal of overthrowing the military junta.

Publicly they say they do, alongside the shadow government which was deposed by the coup, and the hundreds of volunteer peoples’ defence forces which have sprung up to support it.

In return for the support it is getting from the ethnic insurgents, the shadow government is promising a new federal political system which will give Myanmar’s regions self-rule.

But already the other two members of the Three Brotherhood Alliance have accepted China’s request for a ceasefire.

China is seeking a negotiated end to the civil war which would almost certainly leave the military with much of its power intact.

The opposition insists the military must be reformed and removed from politics. But having already made so many territorial gains at the expense of the junta, the ethnic insurgents may be tempted to strike a deal with China’s blessing rather than keep fighting to oust the generals.

The AA’s victory poses more worrying questions.

The group’s leadership is tight-lipped about its plans. But it takes over a state that was always poor and which has suffered greatly from the intense fighting of the past year.

“Eighty per cent of the housing in Maungdaw and the surrounding villages has been destroyed,” one Rohingya man who left Maungdaw recently for Bangladesh told the BBC.

“The town is deserted. Almost all the shops and houses have been looted.”

Last month the United Nations, whose agencies are being given very little access to Rakhine, warned of looming famine, because of the huge numbers of displaced people and the difficulty of getting any supplies in, past a military blockade.

The AA is trying to set up its own administration, but the BBC has been told by some of those displaced by the fighting that the group cannot feed or shelter them.

It is also unclear how the AA will treat the Rohingya population, still thought to number around 600,000 in Rakhine, even after the expulsion of 700,000 in 2017.

The largest number live in northern Rakhine State and Maungdaw has long been a predominantly Rohingya town. Relations with the ethnic Rakhine majority, the support base for the AA, have long been fraught.

They are now a great deal worse after Rohingya militant groups, which have their power base in the vast refugee camps in Bangladesh, chose to take sides with the military, against the AA, despite the army’s track record of persecuting Rohingyas.

Many Rohingyas do not like these groups, and some say they are happy to live in an AA-run Rakhine State.

But tens of thousands have been expelled by the AA from towns it has conquered, and not been allowed back.

The AA has promised to include all communities in its vision for a future independent of the central government, but it has also denounced the Rohingyas it found itself fighting alongside the army. In August dozens of Rohingyas, many of them women and children trying to cross over to Bangladesh, were killed by bombs, almost certainly dropped from AA drones.

“We cannot deny the fact that Rohingyas have been persecuted by Myanmar governments for many years, and the Rakhine people supported that,” said the Rohingya man we spoke to in Bangladesh.

“The government wants to keep Rohingyas from becoming citizens, but the Rakhine people believe there should be no Rohingyas at all in Rakhine State. Our situation today is even more difficult than it was under the rule of the military junta.”

The news is moving so quickly in South Korea, the papers can no longer keep up. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s shock attempt to impose martial law last Tuesday night was so short-lived it failed to make the front page.

By the time he despatched the troops, the press had already gone to print. By the following day’s editions, the failed power-grab had already been defeated.

Within the week, the president has morphed from being contrite and apologetic, hoping to avoid impeachment, to brazenly defiant, vowing to fight on as the net closed in on him.

Banned from leaving the country while he is investigated for treason – a crime punishable by death – he is facing a second impeachment vote this weekend, as support from his party trickles away. Meanwhile, the roars of anger from the thousands of people on the street every night are getting louder.

For a short while this week it looked as if he had struck a deal with his party to stand down early, in return for them not booting him out of office in last Saturday’s vote. But as the week sped by, there was no sign of the president nor the details of such a plan, and it gradually became obvious Yoon had zero intention of resigning.

On Thursday, he emerged obstinate. “I will fight until the end,” he declared, as he defended his decision to seize control of the country.

His speech was rambling and filled with unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, including a vague suggestion that North Korea could have rigged the previous elections, in which he had failed to win control of parliament. The parliament was a “monster”, he said; the opposition party “dangerous”, and he, by declaring martial law, was trying to protect the people and save democracy.

Yoon spent much of this week in hiding, while police attempted to raid his offices to gather evidence. To try and temper public anger, his party announced that he would not be allowed to make decisions going forward – even though legal experts agreed there was nothing in the constitution that allowed for this.

This has left everyone with the same, pressing question – who is running the country? – especially as senior commanders of Yoon’s army have said they would defy his orders if he tried to impose martial law again.

There is now an unnerving power vacuum in a country that lives with the continuous threat of being attacked by North Korea. “There is no legal basis for this arrangement. We are in a dangerous and chaotic situation,” said Lim Ji-bong, a law professor at Sogang University.

It was evident to all those on the outside that this destabilising and bizarre situation could not be allowed to continue much longer. But it took the president’s party, the People Power Party (PPP), some time to realise Yoon’s impeachment was unavoidable.

Initially his party members protected him, eager to save their own political skins, and consumed by their hatred of South Korea’s opposition leader, Lee Jae-myung, who they fear will become president if Yoon is removed. But on Thursday, after stalling for days, the PPP leader, Han Dong-hoon, came out to urge all MPs to impeach him. “The president must be suspended from office immediately,” he said.

For the impeachment to pass, two-thirds of parliament must vote in favour, meaning eight ruling party MPs must join the opposition. A handful have so far declared their intention to do so. One of the first to change his mind was Kim Sang-wook. “The president is no longer qualified to lead the country, he is totally unfit,” he told the BBC from his office at the National Assembly.

But Kim said not all MPs would follow his lead; there is a core that will stay loyal to Yoon. In his very conservative constituency, Kim said he had received death threats for switching sides. “My party and supporters have called me a traitor,” he said, labelling South Korean politics as “intensely tribal”.

The vast majority of anger, however, has been directed at the MPs who have shielded Yoon up to this point.

At a protest on Wednesday night the chants had changed from merely “impeach Yoon” to “impeach Yoon, dissolve the party”.

“I hate them both so much right now, but I think I hate the MPs even more than the president,” said a 31-year-old graduate student Chang Yo-hoon, who had joined tens of thousands of others, in freezing temperatures, to voice his disillusionment.

All week, lawmakers have been bombarded with thousands of abusive messages and phone calls from the public, in what one member of parliament described to me as “phone terrorism”, while some have been sent funeral flowers.

Even if enough MPs vote to impeach Yoon this weekend, his party, now divided and widely detested, faces political oblivion. “We don’t even know who we are or what we stand for anymore,” one exasperated party official told me.

The defecting lawmaker Kim Sang-wook thinks it will take time to regain voters’ trust. “We will not disappear, but we need to rebuild ourselves from scratch,” he said. “There is a saying that South Korea’s economy and culture are first class, but its politics are third class. Now is the chance to reflect on that.”

Yoon has dealt a severe blow to South Korea’s reputation as a well-established, albeit young, democracy. There was pride when MPs swiftly overturned the president’s martial law decision, that the country’s democratic institutions were functioning after all. But the fragility of the system was exposed again, as the party manoeuvred to keep him in office, with the opposition branding this a “second coup”.

But Professor Yun Jeong-in, a research professor at Korea University’s Legal Research Institute, insisted the country was dealing with “an aberration, not a systemic failure of democracy”, pointing to the mass protests every night. “People are not panicking; they are fighting back. They see democracy as something that is rightfully theirs,” she said.

Damage has also been done to South Korea’s international relationships, and ironically to much of what Yoon wanted to achieve. He had a vision that South Korea would become a “global pivotal state”, playing a bigger role on the world stage. He even hoped to earn Seoul an invitation to join the elite group of G7 countries.

A Western diplomat told me they were hoping for a “swift resolution” to the crisis. “We need South Korea to be a stable partner. Impeachment would be a step in the right direction.”

If Yoon is suspended from office on Saturday, he will not leave without a fight. A prosecutor by trade, who knows the law inside out, he has decided he would rather be impeached, and challenge the decision when it goes to court, than go quietly. And the shockwaves he has set off are going to ripple through the country for years, perhaps decades, to follow.

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A sombre mood engulfed a village in Kenya’s Rift Valley last week as dozens of medical interns joined other mourners at the burial of their colleague who had taken his own life.

Speaker after speaker lamented the loss of Francis Njuki, a 29-year-old trainee pharmacist, whose family told the BBC about his feelings of exhaustion and frustration over the non-payment of his salary by the government since he started working as an intern in August.

He is the fifth medic to kill themselves in Kenya in the last two months because of “work-stress hardships and lack of responsive insurance cover”, according to Dr Davji Atellah, the secretary of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Union (KMPDU) – adding it was not something the union had ever recorded before.

There had also been five attempted suicides by KMPDU members this year, the medical body said.

No figures are yet available on the number of suicides nationwide in Kenya this year.

Njuki was doing his internship at a public hospital in Thika town near the capital, Nairobi, when he took his life last month.

He had reported hallucinations and depression due to sleep deprivation, his uncle Tirus Njuki told BBC.

“In his suicide note he mentioned that the four-month salary delay was among issues that aggravated his mental illness, pushing him to end his life,” the uncle added.

The first-born in his family, the intern had been battling depression and had been receiving treatment, according to a police report.

Njuki was among hundreds of interns who were posted to health facilities in August to do their mandatory one-year training to qualify.

But the interns say they had not received their salaries for the first four months, with the government citing financial constraints.

This is despite the fact that interns are a crucial part of the workforce in public hospitals – used by many Kenyans who cannot afford private medical insurance.

Trainees make up about 30% of doctors in the state health sector.

They do most of the work in public hospitals, but under close supervision. They are on call, sometimes for 36 hours, and provide most of the health services that patients need.

“Like many of his colleagues, Dr Njuki faced insurmountable challenges in meeting basic needs such as rent and utility bills,” KMPDU said in a statement.

The government has been in a long-running dispute with unions over the pay and working conditions of interns.

The government has proposed cutting the monthly salary of interns to $540 (£430).

The union wants it to remain at $1,600 as had been agreed with the government in 2017.

But President William Ruto has said that the government cannot afford to pay such an amount, and “we must live within our means”.

“We cannot continue to spend money we don’t have,” Ruto said in early April.

Following mounting pressure and strike threats, the government last month released $7.4m to pay more than 1,200 interns who had not received their salaries since August.

Some of the interns say they are being paid “peanuts”.

“After spending six to seven years of study, we had to wait for several months to get internship. And then with all the long working hours, the government decided to pay us peanuts. We are really suffering,” Dr Abdi Adow, an intern at Mbagathi hospital in Nairobi, told the BBC.

Dr Adow is among hundreds of young medics who are torn between leaving the country to seek jobs overseas or abandoning their profession for better-paid careers.

Another intern, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said: “I have sworn to save life, at the very least, and restore health, at the very best, but the government is doing everything to kill my zeal and undermine my oath of service.”

Experts point to the death last month of Dr Timothy Riungu as an example of how stressful working conditions are for medics.

He was a paediatrician at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, who collapsed and died at home after a round-the-clock shift; he had repeatedly complained of exhaustion to his supervisor that day, local media reported.

The 35-year-old was diabetic and had not taken leave for the two years, according to his family.

A post-mortem revealed Dr Riungu had died of hypoglycaemia, caused by the blood sugar level dropping below normal. It also showed he had not eaten anything for more than 48 hours prior to his death.

In May, Kenya’s government reached a deal with one medical union to end a 56-day strike, but the key issue of the salaries of interns remained unresolved.

The strike had halted operations in public hospitals, with dozens of patients reportedly losing their lives.

Several rounds of talks have collapsed over the pay and working conditions of interns.

Last week, the KMPDU ordered all intern doctors to stay home as it issued a fresh 21-day nationwide strike notice, accusing the government of reneging on the agreement reached in May.

In September, a 27-year-old medical intern at the Gatundu Level 5 Hospital in central Kiambu county took her own life.

Dr Desree Moraa Obwogi had just finished a gruelling 36-hour shift that had taken a toll on her mental-health status, according to her workmates.

They said she too struggled to pay her rent and utility bills.

Dr Muinde Nthusi, the chair of KMPDU’s Internship Liaison Committee, blamed financial hardships and a “toxic” work environment for her death.

During the burial, Obwogi’s family asked the government to take responsibility and account for the life lost, local media reported.

The other recent suicide cases noted by the KMPDU include Vincent Bosire Nyambunde, an intern at Kisii Teaching and Referral Hospital; Collins Kiprop Kosgei, a fifth-year medical student at the University of Nairobi and Keith Makori, a 30-year-old medic in central Kiambu county.

Young doctors have been mobilising on X under the hashtag #PayMedicalInterns to push for better pay and working conditions. They marched to the offices of the Ministry of Health last week to vent their frustrations.

“Our doctors and nurses shoulder the weight of a broken system, yet their cries are drowned by the greed of those in power,” Dr Kipkoech Cheruiyot posted on X platform.

Health officials did not respond to a BBC request for comment.

But reacting to the increasing suicide cases in September, Health Minister Deborah Barasa said it was “a stark reminder of the silent struggles that many, including those in the healthcare profession, often endure”.

The minister announced plans to introduce “robust workplace mental wellness” programmes for healthcare workers nationwide to “ensure that support systems are strengthened and that those facing challenges don’t feel alone”.

Medical experts said many young doctors also experience “moral injury”, or psychological trauma as they feel guilty for not doing enough to treat patients, even though they tried their best under difficult conditions.

“The thought that you could have done something to save a patient’s life but you couldn’t, can lead to feelings of guilt, shame, and helplessness, contributing to mental health issues,” Dr Chibanzi Mwachonda, a psychiatrist, told Kenya’s Standard newspaper.

Trainee doctors told the BBC that most medical schools do not adequately address the topic of suicide, leaving new and fatigued physicians poorly equipped to deal with traumatic ordeals – and this is compounded by poor pay.

“A healthy doctor builds a healthy nation. When I am stressed or depressed as a doctor, I might even forget how to perform resuscitation on a patient, which could lead to loss of life,” said one intern doctor.

“A demotivated doctor is a dangerous person to serve you. It’s becoming a thankless job.”

About 1,400 Kenyans die by suicide each year, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. But some analysts believe that the actual numbers might be higher.

Suicide remains criminalised in Kenya, where those found guilty of attempted suicide can face up to two years imprisonment, a fine, or both.

This law has been widely criticised, with some rights groups calling for its repeal, arguing that it further stigmatises mental-health issues and prevents people from seeking help.

“How many doctors are we going to bury for the government to act?” asked Dr Adow.

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On a painted wall outside Damascus’s Mustahed Hospital are photographs of the faces of dead men.

A constantly changing crowd of people examine them, squinting against the low winter sun at men who look as if they died in great pain. Noses, mouths and eye sockets are twisted, damaged and squashed.

Their bodies are in the hospital, brought to the city centre from another on the outskirts of Damascus. The medics say the dead were all prisoners.

A stream of wives, brothers, sisters and fathers come to the hospital looking for information. They’re hoping most of all to find a body to bury.

They get as close as possible to the photos looking hard for anything on the faces that they recognise. Some of them video each picture to take home for a second opinion.

It is a brutal job. A few of the men had been dead for weeks judging by the way faces have decomposed.

From the wall of photos, relatives go on to the mortuary.

Mustahed Hospital received 35 bodies, so many that the mortuary is full and the overflow room packed with trolleys loaded with body bags.

Inside the mortuary, bodies were laid out on a bare concrete floor under a line of refrigerated trays.

Body bags had been opened as families peered inside and opened the refrigerators.

Some corpses were wrapped loosely in shrouds that had fallen away to expose faces, or tattoos or scars that could identify someone.

One of the dead men was wearing a diaper. Another had sticky tape across his chest, scrawled with a number. Even as they killed him, his jailors denied him the dignity of his own name.

All the bodies were emaciated. The doctors who examined them said they had signs of beating including severe bruising and multiple fractures.

Dr Raghad Attar, a forensic dentist, was checking dental records left by families to try to identify bodies. She spoke calmly about how she was assembling a bank of evidence that could be used for DNA tests, then broke down when I asked her how she was coping.

“You hear always that prisoners are lost for a long time, but seeing it is very painful.

“I came here yesterday. It was very difficult for me. We hope the future will be better but this is very hard. I am really sorry for these families. I am very sorry for them.”

Tears rolled down her face when I asked her if Syria could recover from 50 years of the Assads.

“I don’t know. I hope so. I have the feeling that good days are coming but I want to ask all countries to help us.”

“Anything to help us. Anything, anything…”

The families and friends coming in went silently from body to body, hoping to find some end to the pain that started when their loved ones were picked up at one of the regime’s checkpoints or in a raid on their homes and thrown into the Assads’ gulag.

A woman called Noor, holding a facemask over her mouth and nose, said her brother was taken in 2012, when he was 28.

All they had heard since was a mention in a Facebook post that he had been in the notorious Sednaya prison, where the regime left prisoners to rot for decades.

“It is painful,” said Noor. “At the same time, we have hope. Even if we find him between the bodies. Anything so long as he’s not missing. We want to find something of him. We want to know what happened to him. We need an end to this.”

One couple told a doctor their son was hauled away for refusing to open his laptop for inspection.

That was 12 years ago. He hasn’t been heard from since.

During the years I have reported from Syria I have heard many similar stories.

On my phone I have a photo of the haunted face of a woman I met in July 2018 at a camp for people displaced just after the rebel stronghold of Douma in the Damascus suburbs was forced to surrender.

Her son, a young teenager, disappeared after he was taken at a checkpoint by one of the intelligence agencies.

More than 50 years of the Assads means 50 years of disappearances, of incarceration, of killing.

It means pitiless cruelty to the prisoners, to the families trying to find them and to the Syrian people who were outside the Assads’ circle of trust.

At the photo wall and in the mortuary at Mustahed hospital they wanted to find what had happened, some information and if they were very lucky, a body.

They needed a reckoning and many wanted revenge. Most of all, they dreamed and hoped for a life without fear.

A woman at the hospital said that even though she knew Bashar al-Assad was in Russia, the regime had drilled so much fear into her that she was still terrified of what it might do.

Maybe every Syrian who feels like her should go to the crag overlooking Damascus where Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, ordered the construction of a presidential palace, to check that the monumental, marble edifice is empty.

Our driver gathered his own video evidence. He took out his phone to start filming when the car turned into the palace’s long ceremonial driveway.

During the years of the regime, ordinary Syrians made sure they did not slow down near the palace gates in case they were arrested and thrown into prison as a threat to the president.

Mobile phones stopped working as you approached the palace’s security bubble.

The palace looks down on Damascus, visible from most of the city. It told the people that the Assads were always present and always watching via the regime’s web of intelligence agencies.

The system was designed by Hafez, the first Assad president. His secret police spied on each other and spied on the people.

A businessman I knew in Homs told me once that one intelligence branch approached him when he was developing a hotel, asking for the designs early in the project so they could incorporate all the listening devices they needed into the rooms. They explained it was easier than retrofitting them after the building was finished.

The Assad family never lived at the palace. It was for ceremonial occasions, and upstairs there were some workaday offices.

I went there a lot in 2015, to negotiate the terms of an interview with Bashar al-Assad. I had interviewed him twice before, some years before the uprising against him started in 2011.

That was when he was still tantalising Syrians with talk of reform, which turned out to be lies.

He was also encouraging western leaders to believe he might be separated from Iran and if not join the western camp exactly, then be persuaded that it was worth his while not to oppose it.

The US, Israel and the UAE were still trying to persuade him to dump Iran in the weeks before he was forced to flee to Moscow.

Now that Assad has gone, my target at the palace was an opulent villa in the grounds. I wanted to go there because it was where I met Assad for the interviews.

The villa, much more luxurious than the state rooms at the palace, was built, I was told, as a private residence for the Assad family.

Its floors and tables are marble, the wood is polished walnut and the chandeliers are crystal.

The Assads did not like it, so it was used as a guest house and for Bashar’s rare interviews.

I could see why they might have preferred their existing residence, a beautiful French colonial mansion that stands behind a screen of pine trees. It feels like an aristocrat’s retreat on the Riviera.

Until less than two weeks ago in the souk in old Damascus you could buy fridge magnets of Bashar al-Assad and his siblings as children, playing on bikes in a garden as their indulgent parents looked on.

Presumably the photo was taken on the villa’s spacious, immaculate lawns.

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The extended Assad family treated Syria as their own personal possession, enriching themselves and buying trust with their followers at the expense of Syrians who could be thrown into jail or killed if they stepped out of line, or even if they didn’t.

A fighter called Ahmed, who had taken up arms against the regime in 2011, survived the rebel defeat in Damascus, and fought his way back from Idlib with the rebels of Hayat Tahrir al Sham was inspecting the way the Assads lived with his three brothers, all rebel fighters.

“People were living in hell and he was in his palace,” Ahmed said calmly.

“He didn’t care about what they were going through. He made them live in fear, hunger and humiliation. Even after we entered Damascus people would only whisper to us, because they were still afraid.”

I found the marble guesthouse, and walked through the walnut-panelled, marble-floored library where I had interviewed Assad when the regime was fighting for survival in February 2015.

The highlight of the interview were his denials that his forces were killing civilians. He even tried to joke about it.

Now, rebel fighters were on the door and patrolling the corridors. Some of the books had fallen off the library shelves, but the building was intact.

I walked across to an ante room where Assad would grant 10 or 15 minutes of private conversation before the interview.

He was unfailingly polite, even solicitous, enquiring about my family, and the journey to Syria.

Bashar al-Assad’s slightly awkward demeanour made some western observers believe he was a lightweight who might bend to pressure.

In private I found him self-confident to the point of arrogance, convinced he was the all-knowing spider at the heart of the Middle East web, tracking his enemies’ malign intentions and ready to strike.

His father Hafez al-Assad was a kingpin of the Middle East. He was a ruthless man who built the police state that lasted for over fifty years, using fear, guile and a willingness to destroy any threat to impose stability on Syria, a country that had been a byword for violent changes of government until he seized sole power in 1970.

I had the impression that Bashar wanted to be his father’s son, perhaps even to outdo him.

He killed many more Syrians than Hafez and broke the country to try to save the regime.

But Bashar’s stubbornness, refusal to reform or negotiate and his willingness to kill sealed his fate and condemned him to a last terrified drive to the airport with his wife and children on their last flight out of Syria to Moscow.

In a scruffy, bustling neighbourhood not far from the grace and beauty of the old city of Damascus, I had a front row seat as some of the pressures facing Syria and its new rulers surged through an excited crowd.

They had heard that the man who until less than a week ago was the local boss, the mafia-style godfather of their suburb was going to be executed.

The man, known as Abu Muntaja, was one of the military intelligence officers considered responsible for the Tadamon massacre in 2013 of at least 41 local men.

The crowd grew until thousands blocked the streets, delighted that a notorious regime killer was going to be executed in in front of them in the main square that he used to swagger across.

The atmosphere throbbed with excitement, expectation and anger.

Justice meant watching their enemy die, not just because of his crimes, but because of the boundless cruelty of the Assad regime.

An elderly women called Muna Sakar, dressed in a neat coat and hat, was there to see him die as a thief as well as a killer.

“He stole my house and money. Of course I want to see him dead. I would have done it myself with my own hands. But I couldn’t find a way. I wanted to kill him.”

When rumours flew around that the execution was starting, the crowd surged back and forth, jostling for the best position, phones held high in outstretched arms for the video.

No one wanted to miss a thing. When they decided the execution was happening down the street, they stampeded over fences and cars stuck in traffic to get there.

In the end there was no execution, at least not yet. It was probably a rumour, that thousands wanted to be true.

If Syria’s new rulers do not want change to be measured in blood, they will need to control the desire for revenge.

When the weight of dictatorship is lifted, powerful forces are unleashed.

How Syria’s new rulers deal with them will shape what comes next.

Indian teenager Gukesh Dommaraju shocked the world of chess on Thursday when he became the youngest world champion at the age of just 18.

The Chennai-born prodigy defeated defending champion, China’s Ding Liren, in a dramatic match staged in Singapore which he had entered as the challenger. The FIDE World Chess Championship carries a $2.5m (£1.96m) prize fund.

It marked the peak to date of his career, his greatest moment in a long string of achievements.

Gukesh became a grandmaster aged 12 years and seven months and even then, he was upfront about the fact that he dreamt of being the world champion.

In fact, he said he had harboured such ambitions since he was seven when he was a spectator at a World Title match between Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen in 2013.

As he confessed at the press conference following his dramatic win against Ding, he just didn’t think it would happen so soon.

“Throughout the match I had several chances to clinch victories and many of the games which would have put me in the front foot quite seriously. But once I was getting close I was getting nervous and I was not able to finish him off,” Gukesh told the BBC after the win.

“…And then all of a sudden…it was a sudden change and I could not process all the new information so quickly.”

Gukesh is the 18th world champion since Wilhelm Steinitz won what is considered the first title match way back in 1886.

Born in May 2006, Gukesh is also, by far, the youngest player to have ascended this pinnacle.

He comfortably improved upon the prior record held by Garry Kasparov (born April 1963) who was 22 when he won the title in Moscow in November 1985 by beating Anatoly Karpov.

The 14-game match was tied with two wins each after 13 games. It looked as though the 14th game was heading for a draw.

In that case, there would have been tiebreaks played at progressively shorter time controls.

But Ding blundered on move 55 and Gukesh exploited the error to clinch the title.

Over the last three years the young player has made a string of extraordinary achievements, culminating in this victory.

Gukesh won the individual gold medal for best performance in the last two Olympiads. He led India to a team bronze at Chennai in 2022 and the gold medal in 2024 in Budapest.

He also won the Candidates – the tournament that earned him the right to challenge Ding Liren.

Earlier in his teens, Gukesh was ruled out as a prospective challenger by his mentor, the former world champion Viswanathan Anand, or “Vishy Sir” as Gukesh calls him. He thought Gukesh simply didn’t have enough experience.

Indeed, Gukesh suffered an apparently catastrophic loss at the midway stage, but then he pulled himself together to win in the next round and eventually took the event.

In the title match Gukesh lost the first game, and equalised with a win in game three, he then took the lead in game eleven and Ding equalised with a win in game 12.

Game 14 was obviously high-tension with the title and a prize fund at stake, but the teenager controlled his nerves.

Gukesh is obviously an extraordinary talent but this is not the romantic story of a lone ranger surprising the world. The Chennai GM is at the apex of a robust chess ecosystem, which is one of the best, perhaps the best, in the world.

Gukesh has also been strongly supported by his parents, by the chess establishment in India, and by his school.

India has over 85 grandmasters, many of whom are not yet of driving age.

Indian teams have succeeded recently, winning both the Open Gold (with Gukesh on top board) and the Women’s gold at the last Olympiad in Budapest.

Those grandmasters are at the tip of a pyramid with over 30,000 rated players, because a huge number of Indians play officially sanctioned tournaments.

Gukesh has been a professional player since he was around 10 years old. He is mentored by Viswanathan Anand, who is himself a five-time world champion.

He is sponsored by Westbridge Capital, which supports the Westbridge Anand Chess Academy, a premier coaching centre run by Anand.

Gukesh’s parents are both doctors, his father Rajinikanth is a surgeon and mother Padma is a microbiologist. Both put their careers on hold to push their son.

“Initially I just used to watch my family members play chess at home, just as a hobby, just like any other board game. But then I got interested in the game and I happened to enrol in a chess summer camp in my school… there one of the coaches spotted I had good talent for that,” Gukesh told the BBC.

Chess becomes an expensive game when a child has to travel abroad for several months of every year, so his parents not only put their own earnings into supporting their son, they also asked friends to help crowd-fund Gukesh’s career until it took off.

Importantly, he also received support from his school, Velammal Vidyalaya in Mogappair, which allowed him to take leave.

Gukesh has interests outside of chess too – he meditates, swims and plays tennis.

His stated goals are simple – he wants to be the best chess player in the World – supplanting the current number one, Magnus Carlsen.

He also wants to have a “very long career at the top”. As he sees it, the title is only one step, albeit a very important one in that life journey.

“If I see someone tapping their fingers on a desk, my immediate thought is to chop their fingers off with a knife,” an anonymous patient confides to a researcher.

Another shares: “When I see someone making really small repetitive movements, such as my husband bending his toes, I feel physically ill. I hold it back but I want to vomit.”

Sound familiar? If so, perhaps you too have a condition called misokinesia – a diagnosible hatred of fidgeting.

Scientists are striving to understand more about the phenomenon that has no known cause, as yet.

For the latest research, featured in the journal PLoS One, experts carried out indepth interviews with 21 people belonging to a misokinesia support group.

Common triggers were leg, hand or foot movements – jiggling thighs, twitchy fingers and shuffling shoes.

Pen clicking and hair twiddling were also triggers, though not quite as frequently.

Often people reported some overlap with another more recognised condition called misophonia – an intense dislike of other people’s noises, such as heavy breathing or loud eating.

It’s impossible to know exactly how many people might be experiencing misokinesia. One recent Canadian study suggested perhaps one in three of us might be adversely affected by other people fidgeting, experiencing intense feelings of rage, torture and disgust.

I spoke with Dr Jane Gregory, a clinical psychologist at Oxford University in the UK, who has been studying and treating both misokinesia and misophonia.

She told BBC News: “The two go alongside each other very frequently. Often people have both at the same time.”

Although there is no good data, Dr Gregory says the conditions are probably suprisingly common.

“Obviously, people have been experiencing it for a long time but just didn’t have a name for it.”

The severity of people’s aversion to fidgeting varies, she tells me.

“Some people might get really annoyed by fidgeting or repetitive movements but it doesn’t impact massively on day-to-day life,” she says.

Others, however, may “get a really strong emotional reaction – anger, panic or distress – and just can’t filter them out”.

Through Dr Gregory’s work, she tends to meet people with more extreme symptoms. Many are adults who have endured misokinesia for years, but some are in their early teens and experiencing it for the first time.

Andrea, 62 and from the UK, says she developed misophonia and misokinesia at 13 but that it wasn’t recognised at the time.

One of her earliest memories of the condition is being distressed by a girl at school who was picking her nails.

“Most of misokinesia tends to focus around people’s hands – what they are doing with their hands and what they are touching,” she says.

Another trigger for her is when people partially cover their mouth with their hand while speaking – she struggles to watch and feels like her own mouth is becoming sore when she does.

Andrea says the anger she experiences is explosive and instantaneous.

“There’s no thought process in it. There’s no rationale. It just explodes inside you, which is why it is so distressing.”

She tells me she has tried different strategies to manage her condition, but can’t block it out.

Now she shields herself from society, living alone and working from home, and says her whole life is designed around avoiding the things that could distress her.

Andrea says she has lots of supportive friends who understand that she sometimes needs to modify how she interacts with them.

“It’s easier to just withdraw. To try and survive it. You can’t keep asking other people not to do things.”

She explains that she doesn’t blame people for their fidgeting and understands that most people’s actions are unintentional and done out of habit.

Andrea says sharing her experiences with a Facebook support group has been a real help.

Jill, who is 53 and from Kent, is another member of that group.

She says her misokinesia makes her heart race.

“Anything can trigger me, from leg bouncing to how someone looks and holds their fork.

“I get anger, so much anger.

“My heart starts beating too fast. It’s like a fight for flight.”

Julie, who is 54 and from Hull, says the main feeling she experiences with her misokinesia is angst.

“The other day, I was on the bus and there was a lady walking by and both her arms were swinging. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was getting really anxious with it, not angry.

“It’s silly things like someone is making me a cup of tea and they get the teabag and bounce it up and down, up and down, up and down. Why?

“Or if someone is sat there wobbling their leg. I can’t take my eyes off it. Or if I do look away, I have to look back to see if they are still doing it.”

She tells the BBC the unpleasant feeling afterwards can eat away at her for hours.

“I’m not an angry person. It just makes me feel like there is a ball in my stomach that wants to explode. It’s not anger, it’s feeling really anxious inside.”

Julie says she is not afraid to ask people to stop doing something that she is finding distressing, but tends to walk away instead.

Her misokinesia makes her unhappy, she tells me.

“It makes me internalise it. I don’t like myself for feeling like this.”

Dr Gregory says the condition can be extremely debilitating and prevent people from focusing and doing normal things.

“Part of their brain is constantly thinking about this movement,” she explains.

“Violent images might pop into their head. They want to grab the person and force them to stop… even though they are not angry in their normal lives.”

In terms of why some people are triggered, Dr Gregory says it might be a heightened basic survival instinct – like a meerkat on the lookout for danger.

She likens the feeling to seeing “someone scurrying in the distance” or “tuning into footsteps behind you”.

“For some people, you don’t tune it out again. Your brain is continually monitoring.”

In noisy, hectic modern life, it’s not very useful, she says.

And if you keep getting triggered, the frustration and anger can build.

For some people, it’s strangers’ habits that are most irksome, while for others, it’s loved ones.

One common way people try to manage the condition is by avoiding looking at fidgeting or by distracting themselves, Dr Gregory says.

Others may try to avoid people entirely, as much as they can.

If there is only one isolated visual trigger – such as hair twirling – the expert says it is sometimes possible to use reframing therapy to help the person view the situation in a more positive way.

“You might look at it deliberately and create a new backstory for why someone is doing that movement.”

That can help reduce the anger and anxiety, she says.

“A lot of people feel really embarrased or ashamed that they get such strong reactions,” Dr Gregory adds.

“That, itself, can be a problem because suppressing your emotions can intensify them and make them worse.”

Astro Bot has won the top prize at the videogame industry’s biggest awards ceremony.

The cute and colourful PlayStation platformer beat Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Black Myth: Wukong, Metaphor: Refantazio Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree and Balatro to be named Game of the Year at The Game Awards .

Accepting the trophy, Nicolas Doucet, studio head of developer Team Asobi, appeared to pay tribute to rival Nintendo.

Astro Bot also picked up three other awards – Best Family Game, Best Action/Adventure and Best Game Direction.

It was also a good night for the poker-themed indie hit Balatro, which won three awards including Best Mobile Game.

Role-playing game Metaphor: ReFantazio also won three awards, in what was a strong night for Japanese game developers.

Black Myth: Wukong, based on Chinese legends, proved once again to be hugely popular with fans, winning the publicly voted Player’s Voice Award.

It was a disappointing night for Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, which had been nominated in seven categories but only took home the best music trophy.

Melina Juergens, from Cambridge, UK-based studio Ninja Theory, won the best perfomance prize for playing the title role in Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga.

There aren’t many events where you can get performances from a full orchestra and Snoop Dogg.

The rapper dropped by to present the Best Ongoing Game Award to Helldivers 2, and perform a new song.

And it wouldn’t be gaming’s biggest night without some surprise celebrity appearances.

Harrison Ford took to the stage alongside Troy Baker, the man who plays Indiana Jones in the recent game based on the film series.

The Game Awards – sometimes called “the Oscars of gaming” – is often criticised for spending more time showing commercials and trailers for new games than it does on handing out awards.

However, last year organisers claimed the event attracted 118 million livestream viewers, and those previews are one of the biggest draws for gaming fans.

In more recent years, bigger publishers have tended to save their biggest announcements for their own separate live events.

As expected, there was no new information on Grand Theft Auto 6 or Nintendo’s next console – two of the most anticipated upcoming releases.

But that did leave room for a brand new game from Naughty Dog, the PlayStation studio known for hits including The Last of Us, Uncharted and Crash Bandicoot.

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, launched with a glossy trailer mixed to It’s a Sin by the Pet Shop Boys.

A sequel to Capcom’s Okami was also revealed, and Polish developer CD Projekt Red confirmed The Witcher 4 was in development.

A common complaint about The Game Awards is that it often fails to acknowledge wider issues in the industry.

Against a backdrop of widespread layoffs worldwide – a trend that has continued this year – critics of the 2023 show called for winners to be given more time on-stage to speak out.

This year’s the event introduced the Game Changers Award.

The winner, Amir Satvat, a director at Tencent Games in the US, set up a personal project to help recently laid-off game developers find new work.

In an emotional acceptance speech, he said “growing up, all I ever wanted was to be a part of the video game industry”.

He also thanked his parents, who he said “taught me that my value lies in how I treat other people”.

Larian Studios boss Swen Vincke, who presented the Game of the Year award after his team’s Baldur’s Gate 3 won the title last year, was also praised for his remarks.

He took aim at chasing market share and “arbitrary sales targets” and mourned the “lost art” of studios making “a game they want to play themselves”.

This year’s ceremony took place as a strike by video game actors over AI protections and working conditions rumbled on.

Acting union SAG-Aftra and Game Workers of Southern California announced plans to distribute leaflets outside the Peacock Theatre venue, where the ceremony is held, this year.

Other controversies this year have included the nomination of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree in the Game of the Year category.

Some fans argued the expansion pack – an add-on for 2022 Game of the Year Elden Ring – shouldn’t have been eligible.

And others were upset when three of five nominations for the Player’s Choice prize – the only award entirely voted for by fans – went to free-to-play mobile games including Genshin Impact.

The rest of the winners are decided by a panel of industry experts and a fan vote which counts for 10% of the final score.

There are 30 awards in total across a wide range of categories including audio design, best independent game and accessibility and innovation.

The full list of winners is on the Game Awards website.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

A pilot who caused a deadly light plane crash on an island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been spared a jail sentence.

British tourist Jocelyn Spurway, 29, was killed and 21-year-old Irish woman Hannah O’Dowd seriously injured when the aircraft hit the sand on Middle Island in January 2017.

A jury found pilot Leslie Woodall guilty of dangerously operating a vehicle causing death and grievous bodily harm, after a short trial which focused on his actions after the plane’s engine suddenly failed.

Woodall was given a two-year sentence, wholly suspended – which means he will remain free as long as he complies with certain conditions.

The three-day trial in the Brisbane District Court was shown footage filmed by one of the three passengers inside the plane, which captured the moment the engine stopped and Woodall sharply turned the plane to the left.

The Cessna 172N then rapidly lost altitude, before a wing hit the sand and it rolled.

Ms Spurway suffered fatal spinal injuries, and her friend Ms O’Dowd was left with a traumatic brain injury and a series of fractures. Woodall also sustained serious injuries, and a 13-year-old boy who was on board suffered a broken ankle.

Prosecutors argued it was not the engine failure that caused the crash, but rather Woodall’s response to it.

Aviation experts who gave evidence during the trial agreed that Woodall, an experienced pilot, went against flight training and best practice. He should have kept the wings level in order to glide and safely land, they said.

However Woodall’s defence team argued he had little other options available to him in a highly stressful situation.

In a 2019 police interview played to the court he told officers he was trying to reach a sandbank, according to reports by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“I decided not to land in the water as it was deep, and I was concerned about the risks of drowning and the risk of bull sharks,” the pilot said.

“I truly believe I did everything I could to ensure the safety of those on board.”

The former coach of the Chinese national men’s football team has been sentenced to 20 years in jail for bribery, state media reported.

Li Tie, who also played for Everton in the English Premier League, confessed earlier this year to fixing matches, accepting bribes, and offering bribes to get the top coaching job.

The case shows how President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown has cut through sport, banking and the military.

Earlier this week, three former officials from the Chinese Football Association (CFA) were also handed jail sentences for bribery. More than a dozen coaches and players have been investigated.

Li, who was the national team’s head coach from January 2020 to December 2021, pleaded guilty in March to taking over $16 million in bribes.

The court said that this happened from 2015, when he was an assistant coach at the Hebei China Fortune Club, until 2021, when he quit as the national coach.

In exchange for the bribes, Li would select certain individuals for the national team and help football clubs win competitions.

The 47-year-old was featured in an anti-corruption documentary aired by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV early this year, wherein he apologised for his offences.

“I’m very sorry. I should have kept my head to the ground and followed the right path,” he said. “There were certain things that at the time were common practices in football.”

Li had made 92 appearances for China and played at the 2002 World Cup – the country’s only appearance in the finals so far.

His former boss, the former CFA president Chen Xuyuan, was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year for accepting bribes worth $11 million.

Xi had in the past voiced his ambition to turn China into a major football power.

In 2011, he spoke of his “three wishes” for Chinese football: to qualify for the World Cup again, to host the tournament and to one day win the trophy.

But the recent detentions and convictions of major football figures – some of whom were officials tasked to lead the football revolution – have dealt another setback to the country’s football ambitions.

This latest anti-graft campaign echoes an earlier crackdown in Chinese football in 2010, when several officials, national team players and referees were jailed for corruption.

That was also led by Xi, who was then China’s vice-president.

Rowan Simons, who authored the book Bamboo Goalposts, on his long-term efforts to develop grassroots football in China, told BBC Chinese earlier this year: “In many ways, [the current campaign] looks exactly the same as it was 10 years ago with a different set of characters.

“How is it different? There’s much more money involved.”

Israel’s defence minister has instructed troops to prepare to stay for winter on the peak of Mount Hermon, which sits on the border between Syria, Lebanon and a UN demilitarised buffer zone in the Golan Heights.

The announcement comes after Israel seized control of the zone on 8 December after the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Defence Minister Israel Katz’s office said in a statement that “due to what is happening in Syria, there is enormous security importance to our holding on to the peak”.

Katz posted a picture on X showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu using binoculars with the words: “Overlooking the Syrian peak of Mount Hermon, which returned to Israeli control after 51 years.”

The UN has called on Israel to withdraw from the buffer zone, which sits between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

UN Secretary General António Guterres said in a statement that he was “deeply concerned by the recent and extensive violations of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

The UN has said Israel is in violation of a 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria that established the buffer zone.

Israel has said the 1974 disengagement agreement “collapsed” with the fall of the Syrian government.

The summit of Mt Hermon is on the Syria-Lebanon border. The UN base near the summit is within the buffer zone.

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

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

After rebel forces overthrew the Assad regime in Syria, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) seized control of the buffer zone and moved into new positions in the Golan Heights, including the top of Mt Hermon.

The statement from Katz’s office said that “everything must be done to ensure the IDF’s readiness on site in order to allow the fighters to stay there in the severe weather conditions”.

Guterres said on Thursday that the 1974 agreement “remains in force” and condemned any actions inconsistent with it. He called on its parties to uphold their obligations, including “by ending all unauthorised presence in the area of separation”.

Guterres also said he was “particularly concerned” about the hundreds of Israeli airstrikes on several locations in Syria.

The IDF said its air force and navy conducted more than 350 strikes this week, targeting Syrian military assets.

Israel said it was acting to stop weapons falling “into the hands of extremists”.

A federal court in St Louis has indicted 14 North Koreans for allegedly being part of a long-running conspiracy aimed at extorting funds from US companies and funneling money to Pyongyang’s weapons programmes.

The wider scheme allegedly involves thousands of North Korean IT workers who use false, stolen, and borrowed identities from people in the US and other countries to get hired and work remotely for US firms.

The indictement says the defendants and others working with them generated at least $88m (£51.5m) for the North Korean regime over a six-year period.

North Korea’s mission to the UN did not immediately reply to a request for comment from BBC News.

The prosecutors say the suspects worked for two North Korean-controlled companies – China-based Yanbian Silverstar and Russia-based Volasys Silverstar.

They were among a group of 130 North Korean IT workers employed by the two firms where they were internally referred to as “IT Warriors”, according to the US Department of Justice.

The suspects were allegedly ordered to seek salaries of $10,000 a month from their US employers.

On top of the monthly wage, they would also raise funds for the North Korean regime by stealing valuable company information and threatening to leak it unless the employer made an extortion payment.

The group is now facing wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft and other charges.

Aside from using stolen identities to avoid detection, prosecutors said they paid people residing in the US to receive, set up, and host laptops provided by the US employers.

They would then instruct those US residents to install remote access software allowing them to appear to be working from the US when they were actually overseas.

Investigators believe the suspects are in North Korea making it unlikely that they will ever face justice.

Still, the US State Department has announced that it will offer a reward of up to $5m for anyone who can provide more information on the suspects as well as Yanbian and Volasys.

US officials have not named the American companies targeted in the scheme.

“While we have disrupted this group and identified its leadership, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Ashley T. Johnson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in St Louis.

“The government of North Korea has trained and deployed thousands of IT workers to perpetrate this same scheme against US companies every day.”

A former Syrian government official has been charged with torture in the United States, authorities said on Thursday.

Samir Ousman Alsheikh, who oversaw the Damascus Central Prison between 2005 and 2008, was charged by a federal grand jury with several counts of torture and conspiracy to commit torture.

US authorities said the allegations against Alsheikh were “chilling”.

He was arrested earlier this year at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on two immigration fraud charges, and had purchased a one-way ticket from LAX to Beirut, Lebanon.

According to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office, Central District of California, Alsheikh concealed his employment at the prison and denied persecuting anyone in his US visa and citizenship applications.

US officials say Alsheikh personally inflicted “severe physical and mental pain and suffering on political and other prisoners” in his role under ousted President Bashar al-Assad.

He allegedly ordered detainees to the “Punishment Wing” in the prison, where they would be beaten while suspended from the ceiling and subject to a device which would cause “excruciating pain”, sometimes resulting in fractured spines.

“Almost 20 years ago, the defendant was accused of torturing prisoners in Syria and, today, we are one step closer to holding him accountable for those heinous crimes”, the Special Agent in Charge of the HSI Los Angeles Field office, Eddy Wang, said in a statement.

If convicted, Alsheikh faces up to 20 years in prison for the conspiracy to commit torture charge; up to 20 years for each of the three torture charges; and up to 10 years for each of the two immigration fraud charges.

In a statement to the Associated Press, Alsheikh’s lawyer says he “vehemently denies these politically motivated and false accusations”.

• Syrians celebrate fall of Assad regime – follow live updates

The 72-year-old moved to the US in 2020 and had been living in Lexington, South Carolina, court documents showed.

This comes after thousands of prisoners were liberated by rebel forces across Syria after the fall of the Assad regime.

Videos showed dozens of detainees being freed, while other footage also showed people running towards the prisons in hopes of finding their missing loved ones.

Human rights groups and United Nations officials have previously accused the former Syrian government of widespread abuse in prisons.

The UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said almost 60,000 people were tortured and killed in the prisons run by Assad.

On Thursday, Syrian rebel forces said they plan to close the notoriously harsh prisons and hunt those involved in the killing or torture of detainees.

Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett is amplifying harmful health misinformation on his number-one ranked podcast, a BBC investigation has found.

Recent claims from guests – including that cancer can be treated by following a keto diet, rather than proven treatments – were allowed by the Dragons’ Den star with little or no challenge. Experts have told us failing to question these disproven claims is dangerous because it creates a distrust of conventional medicine.

In an analysis of 15 health-related podcast episodes, BBC World Service found each contained an average of 14 harmful health claims that went against extensive scientific evidence.

Flight Studio – the podcast production company owned by Mr Bartlett – said guests were offered “freedom of expression” and were “thoroughly researched”.

The podcast launched in 2017 focusing on entrepreneurship and business. It soared in popularity as figures such as influencer Molly Mae and Airbnb founder Brian Chesky shared their tips for success.

But in the past 18 months, Mr Bartlett has concentrated more on health, with guests presented as leading experts in their fields. Their views receive little challenge.

The interviews are also posted to Mr Bartlett’s YouTube channel, which has seven million subscribers. Since this content shift last year, its monthly views have increased from nine million to 15 million.

Mr Bartlett told The Times in April he expected his podcast to make £20m this year, mainly from advertising.

We looked at the 23 health-related episodes released between April and November this year, fact checking – with four medical experts – 15 which contained potentially harmful claims.

The experts we spoke to were cancer research professor David Grimes, public confidence in healthcare professor Heidi Larson, NHS diabetes adviser Dr Partha Kar and surgeon Dr Liz O’Riordan.

We recorded harmful claims as advice that, if followed, could lead to negative health outcomes.

In that eight-month window, some guests billed as health experts shared accurate information, but most were spreading misleading claims. These included:

• Anti-vaccine conspiracies, stating that Covid was an engineered weapon

• Poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, autism and other disorders can be “reversed” with diet

• Evidence-based medication is “toxic” for patients, downplaying the success of proven treatments

Podcasters may claim they are sharing information, but they are actually sharing harmful misinformation, says Prof David Grimes from Trinity College Dublin.

“That’s a very different and not empowering thing. It actually imperils all our health,” he says.

Podcasts in the UK are not regulated by the media regulator Ofcom – which sets rules on accuracy and impartiality. So Mr Bartlett is not breaking any broadcasting rules.

In a July episode, Mr Bartlett spoke to Aseem Malhotra, a doctor who became known during the pandemic for spreading misinformation about Covid vaccines.

In the episode, Dr Malhotra says the “Covid vaccine was a net negative for society”. Analysis by the World Health Organization shows that it saved many lives during the pandemic.

At the end of the episode, Mr Bartlett, who does not have a health background, justified the airing of the discredited views, saying he aimed to “present some of the other side” as “the truth is usually somewhere in the middle”.

He added that: “Ideas from the suffragettes, Gandhi and Martin Luther King were also received equally horrifically… so we have to be humble that an idea that may be important may trigger us, but it can’t be censored.”

In response to our investigation, Dr Malhotra told the BBC he “completely accept[s] that there are still some people who disagree with [his views]” and said that “does not mean that they have been debunked”.

In many of the podcast episodes, the guests claimed to know a simple solution to health issues which they believed mainstream institutions were hiding from the public. They often also advertised their products on the podcast.

Cancer researcher Dr Thomas Seyfried appeared on the podcast in October. He is a proponent of using the ketogenic diet, a diet low in carbohydrates and high in fat, to treat cancer.

But Prof Grimes told us doctors warned patients against restricting their diet while undergoing cancer treatment.

“You could potentially and very realistically get very, very, sick and have a much worse health outcome than if you followed recommended advice from your oncologists,” he said.

In the podcast, Dr Seyfried also suggested radiotherapy and chemotherapy only improved patients’ lifespan by one-to-two months, comparing modern cancer treatments to “medieval cures”.

Mr Bartlett did not react to this claim.

Cancer Research UK statistics show that UK cancer survival has doubled in the past 50 years. In the US, the cancer death rate has declined 33% since 1990, thanks to modern treatments.

Dr Thomas Seyfried told us he “stands by the statements that he made in the interview”.

The solutions these guests are offering are appealing to listeners as they feel tangible and come without the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs, says Prof Heidi Larson, an expert in public confidence in healthcare.

“But they [the guests] are way overstretching. It sends people away from evidence-based medicine. They stop doing things that might have some side effects, even though it could save their life.”

Cécile Simmons, from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, a think tank specialising in disinformation research, believes this type of content can help to grow audiences.

“Health-related clickbait content with scary titles does really well online with the algorithm amplifying that,” she said.

Mr Bartlett has dabbled in dubious health claims before.

In January, on BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den – where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch business ideas to five multimillionaire investors, including Mr Bartlett – he invested in “Ear Seeds”, acupuncture beads placed in the ear which falsely claim to cure chronic fatigue condition myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME).

After complaints, the BBC has since added a disclaimer in the episode and on iPlayer, stating the “Ear Seeds” are not intended as a cure, and medical guidance should be followed for ME.

A spokesperson for the BBC declined to comment.

He is also an investor in Huel, a meal replacement company – and Zoe, which sells a personalised nutrition programme involving the use of blood sugar monitors.

“He has financial stakes in health and wellness companies. And once you have financial interests, you have then the further interest in focusing on health and nutrition,” says Ms Simmons.

Two Facebook adverts featuring Mr Bartlett were recently banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for promoting two Huel and Zoe products without disclosing he was an investor.

Founders of both companies have previously been invited as guests on The Diary of a CEO podcast.

A spokesperson for Flight Studio, Mr Bartlett’s production company said: “The Diary of a CEO [DOAC] is an open-minded, long-form conversation… with individuals identified for their distinguished and eminent career and/or consequential life experience.”

They heard a range of voices, they said, “not just those Steven and the DOAC team necessarily agree with”.

The BBC investigation had reviewed a “limited proportion of guests” out of the nearly 400 broadcast to date, they added.

A popular Indian actor was arrested and later released on bail in connection with a crush that killed a person at the premiere of his film.

Allu Arjun, one of the biggest stars of the Telugu film industry, had made a surprise appearance at the screening last week in Hyderabad city.

A 39-year-old woman was killed and her son critically injured in the crush.

A court initially sentenced the actor to 14 days in police custody but hours later, the high court granted him bail.

Police had filed a case against the actor, his security team and the theatre’s management staff on charges of culpable homicide.

The owner and two employees of the theatre were arrested earlier.

On Friday, the police arrived at the actor’s home and took him into custody, following which he was produced in a local court.

Accidents involving large crowds are often reported in India, where lax safety measures and poor crowd management have led to deaths. But it is unusual for big celebrities to be arrested in cases like these.

Pushpa 2, the highly anticipated sequel to the 2021 blockbuster Pushpa: The Rise, released in theatres earlier this month

Police said Allu Arjun arrived at the theatre at 21:30 local time (16:00GMT) through the main entrance.

“There was no intimation from the side of the theatre management or the actor’s team that they would be visiting,” Hyderabad police chief CV Anand said.

“His personal security team started pushing the public which further aggravated the situation as there was already a huge gathering at the theatre,” a police statement said.

Arjun’s lawyer said in court that the actor could be not held responsible for the incident and that the crush took place on a different floor from where he was.

As chaos broke out, a 39-year-old woman and her nine-year-old son were pulled out of the crowd as they felt “suffocated”, police said.

They were given first aid, before being taken to hospital.

While the woman died there, her son was shifted to a different hospital where he is still being treated.

Shortly after the incident, Allu Arjun wrote on X that he was “heartbroken by the tragic incident”.

“My heartfelt condolences go out to the grieving family during this unimaginably difficult time. I want to assure them they are not alone in this pain and will meet the family personally,” he wrote.

He later announced assistance of 2.5m rupees ($29,480; £23,346) for the woman’s family and promised to take care of the medical expenses for her son.

Mythri Movie Makers, the studio behind the film, also released a statement saying, “We are committed to standing by them and extending all possible support during this difficult time.”

An alleged Chinese spy who formed an “unusual degree of trust” with the Duke of York has been banned from the UK, after a judgement by the UK’s semi-secret national security court.

The man, known only as H6 and described as a “close confidant” to Prince Andrew, brought an appeal against his initial ban but the decision was upheld by the court.

Judges were told the businessman was attempting to leverage Prince Andrew’s influence.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment, saying they do not act for the prince, who is not a working royal.

• ANALYSIS: Questions over Prince Andrew’s judgement and finances raised again

In March 2023 H6 brought his case to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a court set up to consider appeals against decisions to ban or remove someone from the country on national security or related grounds.

In the published ruling, the judge said that the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman, was “entitled to conclude that [H6] represented a risk to the national security of the United Kingdom, and that she was entitled to conclude that his exclusion was justified and proportionate”.

The ruling makes clear that the man had been subjected to the highest levels of national security investigation as someone that the UK’s intelligence agencies feared was seeking influence over a member of the Royal Family.

The court was told that H6 was invited to Prince Andrew’s birthday party in 2020 and was told he could act on his behalf when dealing with potential investors in China.

It’s not clear how H6 became close to the Prince, but in November 2021 police officers stopped and questioned him at the UK border under powers to investigate suspicions of “hostile activity” by a foreign state.

During that stop H6 surrendered a number of electronic devices including a mobile phone.

What officers found on them so concerned the security service MI5, that Braverman used her exceptional powers to ban H6 from the country.

In a letter found on one of his devices, H6 was told by Dominic Hampshire, an adviser to Prince Andrew: “Outside of [the prince’s] closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.”

Mr Hampshire adds: “Under your guidance, we found a way to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house in Windsor.”

No further details about who the “relevant people” were are given in the excerpt from the letter included in the ruling.

Mr Hampshire also confirmed to H6 that he could act for Prince Andrew in talks “with potential partners and investors in China”.

A document listing “main talking points” for a call with Prince Andrew was also found.

It states: “IMPORTANT: Manage expectations. Really important to not set ‘too high’ expectations – he is in a desperate situation and will grab onto anything.”

The court assessed that this meant H6 was in a position “to generate relationships between senior Chinese officials and prominent UK figures which could be leveraged for political interference purposes by the Chinese State”.

Security chiefs feared Beijing was attempting to run an “elite capture” operation to influence the Duke of York because of the pressure he was under, a tactic which aims to appoint high profile individuals to Chinese businesses, think tanks or universities.

H6 was subsequently informed that he was believed by UK authorities to be associated with the United Front Work Department (UFWD), an arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tasked with conducting influence operations.

The ruling said MI5’s Director General, Ken McCallum had expressed concern about the threat posed to the UK by political interference by China and that bodies such as the UFWD were “mounting patient, well-funded, deceptive campaigns to buy and exert influence”.

The Home Office said they believed H6 had been engaged in covert and deceptive activity on behalf of the CCP and that his relationship with Prince Andrew could be used for political interference.

Upholding Braverman’s decision, the judges said H6 had won an “unusual degree of trust from a senior member of the Royal Family who was prepared to enter into business activities with him”.

They added that the relationship had developed at a time when the prince was “under considerable pressure” which “could make him vulnerable to the misuse of that sort of influence”.

The prince faced increasing scrutiny from late 2019 over his friendship with the late US financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which included his infamous Newsnight interview in November of that year.

In a statement, the Chinese embassy in the UK criticised “baseless ‘spy’ stories targeting China”.

“Their purpose is to smear China and disrupt normal exchanges between Chinese and British personnel,” it said.

China supports “normal people-to-people and cultural exchanges with other countries”, it added.

The embassy also urged the UK to “stop creating trouble” and to “stop spreading the so-called ‘China threat’ theory”.

Prince Andrew had previously been the UK’s trade envoy, but gave up the role after 10 years in 2011 after criticism over the company he kept, including Epstein.

He has previously been dogged by questions about his judgement and his finances – an issue that goes back to the loss of his status as a working royal.

In November 2019, Prince Andrew stepped back from royal duties amid growing public anger about his friendship with Epstein.

Questions were subsequently raised about his finances after he reached a settlement – believed to run into the millions – in a civil sexual assault case brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers. The prince has always denied assaulting Ms Giuffre.

His finances have recently come under scrutiny. King Charles is no longer funding him, and there has been speculation about the running costs of Royal Lodge – the security bill alone is believed to be several million pounds per year.

The big picture of Prince Andrew’s finances is full of unknowns, such as how much he might have inherited from his mother or how much private money he might have accumulated in his envoy days.

Former security minister Tom Tugendhat described Prince Andrew’s association with the Chinese businessman as “extremely embarrassing”, but told the BBC the Chinese state’s ambition is “to secure influence over foreign countries at various different points,” including the UK.

He said the UFWD was seeking influence in the UK across social, academic, industrial and financial sectors and China has “engaged very often in espionage”.

He added that it was possible in this case the goal could have been to secure influence and “inspire somebody to say something, do something or perhaps just host an event where you can be close to somebody you want to pressure”.

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The end, when it came for the BGP5 barracks, was loud and brutal. First, a crackly speaker calling out for their surrender; then, a thunderous barrage of artillery, rockets and rifle fire that tore chunks out of the buildings in which hundreds of soldiers were hiding.

BGP5 – the letters stand for Border Guard Police – was the Myanmar military junta’s last stand in northern Rakhine State, which lies along the border with Bangladesh.

Video by the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) which was besieging the base shows their rag-tag fighters, many barefoot, firing an assortment of weapons into the base, while air force jets roar over their heads.

It was a ferocious battle – perhaps the bloodiest of the civil war which has consumed Myanmar since the military seized power in a coup in 2021.

“They had dug deep ditches filled with spikes around the base,” an AA source told the BBC.

“There were bunkers and reinforced buildings. They laid more than a thousand mines. Many of our fighters lost limbs, or their lives, trying to get through.”

For the coup leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, this has been yet another humiliating defeat after a year of military setbacks.

For the first time his regime has lost control of an entire border: the 270km (170 miles) dividing Myanmar from Bangladesh now wholly under AA control.

And with only the Rakhine State capital Sittwe still firmly in military hands, though cut off from the rest of the country, the AA is likely to be the first insurgent group to take complete control of a state.

• ‘My 17-year-old was brutally killed, but I’m glad she fought for freedom’
• Young people attempt to flee Myanmar ahead of conscription order

The army has been in headlong retreat from the Arakan Army since the beginning of the year, losing town after town.

The last army units withdrew in September to BGP5, a compound covering around 20 hectares just outside the border town of Maungdaw, where the AA laid siege.

BGP5 was built on the site of a Muslim Rohingya village, Myo Thu Gyi, which was burned down during the violent expulsion of much of the Rohingya population by the armed forces in 2017.

It was the first of many burned villages I saw on a visit to Maungdaw right after the military operation in September of that year, a mass of charred debris in among the lush tropical vegetation, its inhabitants killed or forced to flee to Bangladesh.

When I returned two years later, the new police complex had already been built, with all the trees removed, giving defenders a clear view of any attacking force.

The AA source told us their advance towards it was painfully slow, requiring the insurgents to dig their own ditches for cover.

It does not publish its own casualties. But judging from the intensity of fighting in Maungdaw, which began in June, it is likely to have lost hundreds of its own troops.

Throughout the siege, the Myanmar air force kept up a constant bombardment of Maungdaw, driving the last civilians out of the town.

Its planes dropped supplies to the besieged soldiers at night, but it was never enough. They had plenty of rice stored in the bunkers, a local source told us, but they could not get any treatment for their injuries, and the soldiers became demoralised.

They started to surrender last weekend.

AA video shows them coming out in a pitiful state, waving white cloths. Some are hobbling on makeshift crutches, or hopping, their injured legs wrapped in rags. Few are wearing shoes.

Inside the wrecked buildings the victorious insurgents filmed piles of bodies.

The AA says more than 450 soldiers died in the siege. It has published images of the captured commander, Brigadier-General Thurein Tun, and his officers kneeling beneath the flagpole, now flying the insurgents’ banner.

Pro-military commentators in Myanmar have been venting their frustration on social media.

“Min Aung Hlaing, you have not asked any of your children to serve in the military,” wrote one. “Is this how you use us? Are you happy seeing all those deaths in Rakhine?”

“At this rate, all that will be left of the Tatmadaw [military] will be Min Aung Hlaing and a flagpole,” wrote another.

The capture of BGP5 also shows the Arakan Army to be one of the most effective fighting forces in Myanmar.

Formed only in 2009 – much later than most of Myanmar’s other insurgent groups – by young ethnic Rakhine men who had migrated to the Chinese border on the other side of the country in search of work, the AA is part of the Three Brotherhood Alliance which has inflicted most of the defeats suffered by the junta since last year.

The other two members of the alliance have stayed on the border, in Shan State.

But the AA moved back to Rakhine eight years ago to start its armed campaign for self-government, tapping into historic resentment among the Rakhine population of the poverty, isolation and central government neglect of their state.

The AA leaders have proven to be smart, disciplined and able to motivate their fighters.

They are already administering the large areas of Rakhine State they control as though they were running their own state.

And they also have good weapons, thanks to their links with the older insurgent groups on the Chinese border, and appear to be well-funded.

There is a bigger question, though, over how much the various ethnic insurgent groups are willing to prioritise the goal of overthrowing the military junta.

Publicly they say they do, alongside the shadow government which was deposed by the coup, and the hundreds of volunteer peoples’ defence forces which have sprung up to support it.

In return for the support it is getting from the ethnic insurgents, the shadow government is promising a new federal political system which will give Myanmar’s regions self-rule.

But already the other two members of the Three Brotherhood Alliance have accepted China’s request for a ceasefire.

China is seeking a negotiated end to the civil war which would almost certainly leave the military with much of its power intact.

The opposition insists the military must be reformed and removed from politics. But having already made so many territorial gains at the expense of the junta, the ethnic insurgents may be tempted to strike a deal with China’s blessing rather than keep fighting to oust the generals.

The AA’s victory poses more worrying questions.

The group’s leadership is tight-lipped about its plans. But it takes over a state that was always poor and which has suffered greatly from the intense fighting of the past year.

“Eighty per cent of the housing in Maungdaw and the surrounding villages has been destroyed,” one Rohingya man who left Maungdaw recently for Bangladesh told the BBC.

“The town is deserted. Almost all the shops and houses have been looted.”

Last month the United Nations, whose agencies are being given very little access to Rakhine, warned of looming famine, because of the huge numbers of displaced people and the difficulty of getting any supplies in, past a military blockade.

The AA is trying to set up its own administration, but the BBC has been told by some of those displaced by the fighting that the group cannot feed or shelter them.

It is also unclear how the AA will treat the Rohingya population, still thought to number around 600,000 in Rakhine, even after the expulsion of 700,000 in 2017.

The largest number live in northern Rakhine State and Maungdaw has long been a predominantly Rohingya town. Relations with the ethnic Rakhine majority, the support base for the AA, have long been fraught.

They are now a great deal worse after Rohingya militant groups, which have their power base in the vast refugee camps in Bangladesh, chose to take sides with the military, against the AA, despite the army’s track record of persecuting Rohingyas.

Many Rohingyas do not like these groups, and some say they are happy to live in an AA-run Rakhine State.

But tens of thousands have been expelled by the AA from towns it has conquered, and not been allowed back.

The AA has promised to include all communities in its vision for a future independent of the central government, but it has also denounced the Rohingyas it found itself fighting alongside the army. In August dozens of Rohingyas, many of them women and children trying to cross over to Bangladesh, were killed by bombs, almost certainly dropped from AA drones.

“We cannot deny the fact that Rohingyas have been persecuted by Myanmar governments for many years, and the Rakhine people supported that,” said the Rohingya man we spoke to in Bangladesh.

“The government wants to keep Rohingyas from becoming citizens, but the Rakhine people believe there should be no Rohingyas at all in Rakhine State. Our situation today is even more difficult than it was under the rule of the military junta.”

When Donald Trump sat with world leaders in Paris last weekend to marvel at the restored Notre Dame cathedral, armed Islamist fighters in Syria were in jeeps on the road to Damascus finalising the fall of the Assad regime.

In this split screen moment of global news, the US president-elect, seated between the French first couple, still had an eye on the stunning turn of events in the Middle East.

“Syria is a mess, but is not our friend,” he posted the same day on his Truth Social network.

He added: “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”

This post, and another the next day, were a reminder of the president-elect’s powerful mandate to not intervene in foreign policy.

It also raised big questions about what comes next. Given the way the war has drawn in and affected regional and global powers, can Trump really have “nothing to do” with Syria now that President Bashar al-Assad’s government has fallen?

Will Trump pull US troops out?

Does his policy differ drastically from President Biden’s, and if so, what’s the point of the White House doing anything in the five weeks before Trump takes over?

• Inside Aleppo, the first city to fall to Syrian rebel
• What just happened in Syria and who’s in charge
• Syria in maps: Who controls the country now Assad has gone?
• Syrians celebrate fall of Assad regime – follow live updates

The current administration is involved in a frantic round of diplomacy in response to the fall of Assad and the rise to power of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Syrian Islamist armed group that the US designates as a terrorist organisation.

I’m writing this onboard Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s plane, as he shuttles between Jordan and Turkey trying to get key Arab and Muslim countries in the region to back a set of conditions Washington is placing on recognising a future Syrian government.

The US says it must be transparent and inclusive, must not be a “base for terrorism”, cannot threaten Syria’s neighbours, and must destroy any chemical and biological weapons stocks.

For Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for national security adviser, who has yet to be confirmed, there is one guiding principle to his foreign policy.

“President Trump was elected with an overwhelming mandate to not get the United States dug into any more Middle Eastern wars,” he told Fox News this week.

He went on to list America’s “core interests” there as the Islamic State (IS) group, Israel and “our Gulf Arab allies”.

Waltz’s comments were a neat summary of the Trump view of Syria as a small jigsaw piece in his bigger regional policy puzzle.

His goals are to ensure that remnants of IS remain contained and to see that a future government in Damascus can’t threaten Washington’s most important regional ally, Israel.

Trump is also focused on what he sees as the biggest prize: a historic diplomatic and trade deal to normalise relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which he believes would further weaken and humiliate Iran.

The rest, Trump believes, is Syria’s “mess” to work out.

Trump’s rhetoric harkens back to how he talked about Syria during his first term, when he derided the country – which has an extraordinary cultural history dating back millennia – as a land of “sand and death”.

“Donald Trump, himself, I think really wanted very little to do with Syria during his first administration,” said Robert Ford, who served as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Syria from 2011-14, and who argued within that administration for more American intervention in the form of support for Syrian moderate opposition groups to counter Assad’s brutal suppression of his population.

“But there are other people in his circle who are much more concerned about counterterrorism,” he told the BBC.

The US currently has around 900 troops in Syria east of the Euphrates river and in a 55km (34 miles) “deconfliction” zone bordering Iraq and Jordan.

Their official mission is to counter the IS group, now much degraded in desert camps, and to train and equip the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF – Kurdish and Arab allies of the US who control the territory).

The SDF also guards camps containing IS fighters and their families.

In practice, the US presence on the ground has also gone beyond this, helping to block a potential weapons transit route for Iran, which used Syria to supply its ally Hezbollah.

Mr Ford, like other analysts, believes that while Trump’s isolationist instincts play well on social media, the realities on the ground and the views of his own team could end up moderating his stance.

That view is echoed by Wa’el Alzayat, a former adviser on Syria at the US Department of State.

“He is bringing on board some serious people to his administration who will be running his Middle East file,” he told the BBC, specifically noting that Senator Marco Rubio, who has been nominated for secretary of state, “is a serious foreign policy player”.

These tensions – between isolationist ideals and regional goals – also came to a head during his first term, when Trump withdrew remaining CIA funding for some “moderate” rebels, and ordered the withdrawal of US forces from northern Syria in 2019.

At the time, Waltz called the move “a strategic mistake” and, fearing an IS resurgence, Trump’s own officials partially rowed back his decision.

Trump also diverged from his non-interventionist ideals by launching 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield, after Assad allegedly ordered a chemical weapons attack that killed scores of civilians in 2017.

He also doubled down on sanctions against Syria’s leadership.

The blurred lines of Trump’s “it’s not our fight” pledge were summed up by Waltz.

“That doesn’t mean he’s not willing to absolutely step in,” he told Fox News.

“President Trump has no problem taking decisive action if the American homeland is threatened in any way.”

Adding to the possibility of tension is another key figure, Tulsi Gabbard, who Trump has nominated as director of national intelligence. The controversial former Democrat-turned-Trump ally met Assad in 2017 on a “fact-finding” trip, and at the time criticised Trump’s policies.

Her nomination is likely to be heavily scrutinised by US senators amid accusations – that she has denied – of being an apologist for Assad and Russia.

Anxiety over the continuing mission in Syria, and a desire to be able to end it, is not exclusive to Trump.

In January, three American soldiers were killed at a US base in Jordan in a drone strike by Iran-backed militias operating in Syria and Iraq, as the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza threatened to spread farther in the region.

This attack and others have continued to raise questions to the Biden administration over US force levels and their exposure in the area.

In fact, many of the outgoing Biden and incoming Trump administrations’ positions on Syria match more than they diverge.

Despite the sharp differences in the tone and rhetoric, both leaders want Damascus run by a government amenable to US interests.

Both Biden and Trump want to build on Iran and Russia’s humiliation in Syria.

Trump’s “this is not our fight, let it play out” is his equivalent of the Biden administration’s “this is a process that needs to be led by Syrians, not by the United States”.

But the “major” difference, and that which raises the most anxiety among Biden supporters, is in Trump’s approach to US forces on the ground and American backing for the SDF, said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat in Washington who helped opposition figures flee the Assad regime.

“Biden has more sympathy, connection, passion towards [the Kurds]. Historically, he was one of the first senators to visit the Kurdish areas [of northern Iraq] after Saddam Hussein’s Kuwait invasion,” he said.

“Trump and his people they don’t care as much… they take it into consideration not to leave their allies out, they get this, [but] the way they implement it is different.”

Mr Barabandi, who said he supports Trump’s non-interventionist rhetoric, thinks the president-elect will pull out US troops “for sure”, but over a gradual timeframe and with a clear plan in place.

“It will not be like Afghanistan, within 24 hours,” he said. “He will say within six months, or whatever time, a deadline for that and for the arrangement of everything.”

Much may revolve around Trump’s discussions with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom he is thought to have a close relationship.

American backing for the SDF has long been a source of tension with Turkey, which views the People’s Defense Units (YPG) – the Kurdish force that makes up the SDF’s military backbone – as a terrorist organisation.

Since Assad fell, Turkey has been carrying out air strikes to force Kurdish fighters out of strategic areas, including the town of Manbij.

Trump may want to cut a deal with his friend in Ankara that allows him to withdraw US troops and could see Turkey’s hand strengthen further.

But the possibility of Turkish-backed groups taking control of some areas worries many, including Wa’el Alzayat, the former US State Department Syria expert.

“You can’t have different groups running different parts of the country, controlling different resources,” he added.

“There’s either the political process, which I do think the US has a role to play, or something else, and I hope they avoid that latter scenario.”

President Emmanuel Macron has named centrist leader François Bayrou as France’s next prime minister, in a bid to end months of political turmoil.

Bayrou, a 73-year-old mayor from the south-west who leads the MoDem party, said everyone realised the difficulty of the task ahead: “I think reconciliation is necessary.”

He is seen by Macron’s entourage as a potential consensus candidate and his task will be to avoid the fate of his predecessor. Ex-Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier lasted just three months and was ousted by MPs nine days ago.

Macron is half-way through his second term as president and Bayrou will be his fourth prime minister this year.

French politics has been deadlocked ever since Macron called snap parliamentary elections during the summer and an opinion poll for BFMTV on Thursday suggested 61% of French voters were worried by the political situation.

Although a succession of allies lined up to praise Bayrou’s appointment, Socialist regional leader Carole Delga said the whole process had become a “bad movie”. Far-left France Unbowed leader Manuel Bompard complained of a “pathetic spectacle”.

The centre-left Socialists said they were ready to talk to Bayrou but would not take part in his government. Leader Olivier Faure said because Macron had chosen someone “from his own camp”, the Socialists would remain in opposition.

President Macron has vowed to remain in office until his second term ends in 2027, despite Barnier’s downfall last week.

He cut short a trip to Poland on Thursday and had been expected to name his new prime minister on Thursday night, but postponed his announcement until Friday.

He then met Bayrou at the Elysée Palace and a final decision was made hours later. But in an indication of the fraught nature of the talks, newspaper suggested that Macron had preferred another ally, Roland Lescure, but changed his mind when Bayrou threatened to withdraw his party’s support.

Bayrou was set to move into the prime minister’s residence at Hôtel Matignon within hours, and a red carpet was rolled out for the transfer of power even before his name was confirmed.

His challenge will be in forming a government that will not be brought down the way his predecessor’s was in the National Assembly.

Macron has already held round-table talks with leaders from all the main political parties, bar the far-left France Unbowed (LFI) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen.

The question is who can be persuaded to join Bayrou’s government, or at least agree a pact so they do not oust him.

When the only possible means of survival for a minority government is to build bridges on left and right, Bayrou has the advantage of having passable relations with both sides, reports BBC Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield.

Michel Barnier was only appointed in September and LFI MPs have already indicated they will propose another vote of no confidence in his successor’s government.

He was voted out when Le Pen’s National Rally joined left-wing MPs in rejecting his plans for €60bn (£50bn) in tax rises and spending cuts. He was seeking to cut France’s budget deficit, which is set to hit 6.1% of economic output (GDP) this year.

His outgoing government has put forward a bill to enable the provisions of the 2024 budget to continue into next year. But a replacement budget for 2025 will have to be approved once the next government takes office.

Barnier wished his successor his best wishes in what he called “this serious period for France and Europe”.

Under the political system of France’s Fifth Republic, the president is elected for five years and names a prime minister whose choice of cabinet is then appointed by the president.

Unusually, President Macron called snap elections for parliament over the summer after poor results in the EU elections in June. The outcome left France in political stalemate, with three large political blocs made up of the left, centre and far right.

Eventually he chose Barnier to form a minority government reliant on Marine Le Pen’s National Rally for its survival. Macron is now hoping to restore stability without depending on her party.

Three centre-left parties – the Socialists, Greens and Communists – broke ranks with the more radical left LFI by taking part in talks with Macron.

However, they made clear they wanted a prime minister from the left, rather than a centrist.

“I told you I wanted someone from the left and the Greens and I think Mr Bayrou isn’t one or the other,” Greens leader Marine Tondelier told French TV on Thursday.

Patrick Kanner of the Socialists said that just because his party was not joining Bayrou’s government, “that doesn’t mean we’re going to bash it”.

Sébastien Chenu, a National Rally MP, said for his party it was less about who Macron picked than the “political line” he chose. If Bayrou wanted to tackle immigration and the cost of living crisis then he would “find an ally in us”.

Relations between the centre left and the radical LFI of Jean-Luc Mélenchon appear to have broken down over the three parties’ decision to pursue talks with President Macron.

After the LFI leader called on his former allies to steer clear of a coalition deal, Olivier Faure of the Socialists told French TV that “the more Mélenchon shouts the less he’s heard”.

Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen has called for her party’s policies on the cost of living to be taken into account by the incoming government, by building a budget that “doesn’t cross each party’s red lines”.

The mother of the man police suspect murdered Harshita Brella has said she “cannot believe” he would have killed his wife.

Sunil Devi told the BBC she spoke to the couple on 10 November – the day police believe Harshita was fatally strangled in Corby, Northamptonshire – and they seemed “happy”.

Harshita’s body was discovered in a car boot in east London four days later. Ms Devi’s son, Pankaj Lamba, is the prime suspect in the murder investigation.

He had already been known to police, having been arrested on 3 September and was the subject of a domestic violence protection order.

The order, which had barred him from harassing or intimidating Harshita, ended in September and police believe he tracked her down and strangled her.

“I don’t know anything but I cannot believe this,” Ms Devi told the BBC from her home in in Jhajjar, India.

She hid her face during the interview because of the shame this case has brought to her family.

She said her son and daughter-in-law had sent her photos of food they had cooked on the 10 November and she had thought they were “happy in their lives”.

But earlier this week Harshita’s family told the BBC she feared for her life and believed Mr Lamba “was going to kill her”.

Her family also said Harshita had had a miscarriage in the weeks before her death.

They believe Mr Lamba is in India, but said police there were “not listening” to them. Local police have told the BBC that UK authorities have not requested for them to intervene.

Ms Devi said she does not know where her son is, of if he is even alive.

“Some people even say he’s been killed. We don’t know what people are saying. I can’t understand anything. We’ve left it to God,” she said.

Asked about reports that her son had been hitting his wife, she said: “Only the police know what happened, what do we know? We are continents away.”

“As a mother with just one son, what can I do?” she added, “we are completely finished. We are now left with no support.”

She also said she didn’t know there had been allegations of violence and abuse, as reported by Harshita and her family.

Northamptonshire Police have not confirmed if they are in contact with authorities in India, where Mr Lamba is believed to be.

Indian police have said they have not been able to launch an investigation as the crime took place in the UK.

Mr Lamba had been living on a student visa in the UK. He and Harshita had an arranged marriage and were wed in March in India before moving to the UK in April.

Russia has launched a huge attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which authorities said was the 12th large-scale attack on energy facilities this year.

Ninety-three missiles and more than 200 drones were used – but 81 of the missiles were shot down, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The strikes targeted sites in western Ukraine, damaging energy facilities in several regions, some seriously. Authorities in Ivano-Frankivsk said it was the worst attack on the region so far.

Moscow said the attack was in response to a Ukrainian strike on a military airbase in south-west Russia using US-made missiles.

In an interview with Time magazine on Thursday, to mark being named Person of the Year, US President-elect Donald Trump said he disagreed “very vehemently” with American-made missiles targeting sites in Russia and branded it “crazy”.

“We’re just escalating this war and making it worse,” he said.

On Friday, the Kremlin said that Trump’s comments were “fully aligned” with Moscow’s position.

“That impresses us,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “It is obvious that Trump understands exactly what is escalating the situation.”

Trump also told Time he wanted to reach an agreement to end the war, and the only way to do that was “not to abandon”.

Last month, US President Joe Biden allowed Ukraine to use US-made ATACMS missiles to strike targets inside Russia.

The first attacks using the long-range missiles occurred the following day, with Russian authorities stating at the time that the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, had been hit.

Kyiv had been using ATACMS missiles since October 2023, but only on Russian-held targets within Ukrainian territory.

Russia’s attacks came on the coldest day of the Ukrainian winter so far, with temperatures around -6C.

Along with the damage caused in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, energy and infrastructure facilities were damaged in the Lviv and Ternopil regions.

No critical or residential infrastructure was hit in the Kyiv region, according to Ruslan Kravchenko, the area’s governor.

Five out of the country’s nine operating nuclear reactor units have been operating with reduced power.

As a result of the attack, the Ukrenergo National Power Company had to increase power supply restrictions on Friday, with rolling blackouts being introduced in all regions.

Ukrenergo added that during the day on Friday, electricity would be imported from Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Moldova.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In total, Russia has captured and retaken about 2,350 sq km of territory (907 sq miles) in eastern Ukraine and in Russia’s western Kursk region.

Buckingham Palace has said “appropriate action” will be taken following reports that one of its Household staff was arrested after a Christmas party at a London bar.

Police are said to have been called to a bar in Victoria, which is near the palace, at 21:21 GMT on Tuesday after reports that a customer had smashed glasses and attempted to assault a member of staff.

A 24-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of common assault, criminal damage, and being drunk and disorderly.

A spokesperson for the Palace said it was aware of an incident involving staff members outside the workplace and that the “facts will be fully investigated”.

The incident unfolded at a pre-arranged event attended up to 50 members of staff at a branch of All Bar One, the Sun reported.

The woman was reportedly given a penalty notice for disorder after being taken into custody and held until the following day.

The spokesperson confirmed that staff had been at a reception at the palace that evening, but stressed that the incident had occurred at an unofficial gathering elsewhere.

In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said: “At 21.21hrs on Tuesday, December 10 officers were called to a bar in Victoria Street, SW1, following reports that a customer had smashed glasses and attempted to assault a member of staff.

“Officers attended and arrested a 24-year-old woman on suspicion of common assault, criminal damage and being drunk and disorderly.

“She was taken into custody and released the following evening having been given a penalty notice for disorder.”

A Palace spokesperson told the BBC: “We are aware of an incident outside the workplace involving a number of Household staff who had previously attended an early evening reception at the Palace.

“While this was an informal social gathering, not an official Palace Christmas party, the facts will be fully investigated, with a robust disciplinary process followed in relation to individual staff and appropriate action taken.”

The BBC has approached the Metropolitan Police for comment.

Travis Kelce’s dad has revealed he’s not splashing out on Taylor Swift’s birthday present, explaining that spending $10 (£8) on a personal gift is better than trying to impress her with something expensive.

The US pop star, who turned 35 on Friday, has been dating NFL player Travis since last summer.

His dad Ed Kelce said: “You’re not going to crush Taylor Swift with a gift that cost, you know, $100,000 (£80,000).

“You’ve got to get something that tweaks the strings of her heart that you spend 10 bucks on,” he continued. “Then she’ll just be all gooey. You’ve got to find something that triggers the emotion.”

Speaking to the Baskin and Phelps podcast, Ed said “the amount of money is meaningless” when it came to buying for the singer, and that buying a gift for her was similar to buying for his two sons. “There’s nothing they want that they don’t already have.”

Instead, he explained: “You have to look beyond that. You’ve got to dig down and come up with something special.”

Travis Kelce plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, while his brother Jason Kelce is a retired Philadelphia Eagles player.

Last weekend, Swift reached the end of her Eras world tour, which spanned 152 concerts over 21 months and is said to have made more than $2bn (£1.58bn) in ticket sales.

The singer has described the record-breaking tour as “the most extraordinary chapter of my life so far”.

At the final show on Sunday in Vancouver, Canada, fans began singing Happy Birthday to the singer.

And her birthday came a day after Swift made history as the winner of the most Billboard Music Awards.

“This is like the nicest early birthday present you could have given me, so thank you very much,” Swift said in a pre-recorded acceptance speech. “I love it. It’s exactly what I wanted.”

Swift picked up 10 prizes at Thursday’s event, including top artist and top Billboard 200 album for The Tortured Poets Department.

That brings the total number of Billboard Awards won by Swift to 49, the highest of any artist, overtaking Drake’s 41.

Her other wins this year included top female artist, top Hot 100 artist and top Hot 100 songwriter, prizes Swift said she considered fan-voted awards because they were driven by chart data.

“You guys are the ones who care about our albums and come see us in concert,” she said.

“Everything that has happened with the Eras Tour and The Tortured Poets Department, I just have to say thank you.

“It means the world to me that you guys have embraced the things I’ve made, and the fact that you’ve cared so much about my music.”

The award ceremony also saw wins for British stars Dua Lipa, Coldplay and Charli XCX – the latter of whom scored top dance/electronic artist and album for Brat.