ABC News has agreed to pay $15m (£12m) to US President-elect Donald Trump to settle a defamation lawsuit after its star anchor falsely said he had been found “liable for rape”.

George Stephanopoulos made the statements repeatedly during an interview on 10 March this year while challenging a congresswoman about her support for Trump.

A jury in a civil case last year determined Trump was liable for “sexual abuse”, which has a specific definition under New York law.

As part of Saturday’s settlement, first reported by Fox News Digital, ABC will also publish a statement expressing its “regret” for the statements by Stephanopoulos.

According to the settlement, ABC News will pay $15m as a charitable contribution to a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff, as Presidents of the United States of America have established in the past”.

The network also agreed to pay $1m towards Trump’s legal fees.

Under the settlement, the network will post an editor’s note to the bottom of its 10 March 2024 online news article about the story.

It will say: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”

An ABC News spokesperson said in a statement the company was “pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing”.

In 2023, a New York civil court found Trump sexually abused E Jean Carroll in a dressing room at a department store in 1996. He was also found guilty of defaming the magazine columnist.

Judge Lewis Kaplan said the jury’s conclusion was that Ms Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law”.

Judge Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries and in criminal statutes elsewhere.

In a separate case, also presided over by the same judge, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3m to Ms Carroll for additional defamatory statements.

During the 10 March broadcast, Stephanopoulos asked South Carolina Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace how she could endorse Trump.

The anchor falsely said “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape”.

Stephanopoulos repeated the claim 10 times throughout the broadcast.

Ahead of the ruling, a federal magistrate judge had ordered Trump and Stephanopoulos to give sworn evidence at depositions next week.

Trump has also sued CBS, the BBC’s US broadcast partner, for “deceptive conduct” over an interview with Kamala Harris.

In 2023, a judge threw out his defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which he alleged the network had likened him to Adolf Hitler.

He has also had lawsuits filed against the New York Times and the Washington Post dismissed.

The US has made “direct contact” with the HTS rebels who now control Syria after toppling the Assad regime, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.

It is the first acknowledgement of direct American contact with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which the US currently still designates as a terrorist organisation.

Blinken was speaking in Jordan after talks with representatives from several Arab countries, Turkey and Europe to discuss the future of Syria.

Officials agreed to support a peaceful transition process in the country, with Jordan’s foreign minister saying that regional powers did not want to see it “descend into chaos”.

A joint communique called for an inclusive Syrian government that respects the rights of minorities and does not offer a base for “terrorist groups”.

The talk both inside and outside Syria after the tumultuous events of recent weeks has been of the vital importance of setting up new governance that represents all Syrians.

At the meeting in Jordan, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein expressed concern over Syria’s future shared across the Middle East and beyond.

He said regional players did not want to see another Libya – referring to the chaos that ensued after Colonel Gaddafi’s removal from power.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said existing Syrian institutions must be preserved and reformed.

“Never allow terrorism to take advantage of the transition period. And we have to coordinate our efforts and learn from the mistakes of the past,” Fidan said according to Reuters news agency.

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The most powerful rebel group, HTS, has indicated that it is seeking an inclusive government. But the group’s violent jihadist past has left some doubting whether it will live up to such promises.

Blinken has said that Washington has been in direct contact with HTS – in particular over the fate of the long missing American journalist, Austin Tice.

“We’ve been in contact with HTS and with other parties,” Blinken told reporters in Jordan.

Missing from the talks in Jordan was any representative from Syria. The foreign ministers from eight Arab countries that did attend the meeting said they wanted to ensure that Syria was unified and not split along sectarian lines.

Also absent were the two countries that gave financial support to Assad that enabled him to survive in power for so long – Iran and Russia.

The shadow of all the outside forces that battled over Syria for so long hangs heavy on the country’s future.

The emerging political entities in Syria will need cohesion not just inside the country but outside, too, if there is to be any real hope for the Syrian people to build on the heady taste of freedom that they have experienced in the past week.

Syrian rebels ended Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year-long rule, with opposition forces taking the capital and forcing the president to flee to Russia on 8 December.

The overthrow followed a 13-year civil war, which started after Assad crushed pro-democracy protests. The fighting killed more than half a million people, displaced millions more, and embroiled international powers and their proxies.

HTS rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who previously used the name Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has appointed Mohammed al-Bashir as Syria’s interim prime minister, and the world is now watching to see how Syria’s political landscape shapes up after the end of the Assad family’s half-century rule.

HTS was set up under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusra, in 2011 as a direct al-Qaeda affiliate. It was considered to be one of the most effective and deadly groups opposing President Assad.

It was proscribed as a terrorist group by the UN, the US, Turkey and other countries – and currently remains so.

But al-Sharaa has publicly broken ranks with al-Qaeda and HTS’s recent messaging has been one of inclusiveness and a rejection of violence or revenge.

Adra is a strange kind of neighbourhood cemetery – two lone graves sit in an empty expanse of bumpy earth, sparsely covered with grass.

For years, this was an area tightly controlled by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Now, a week after they fled, a concrete slab in one corner of this empty cemetery has been moved to reveal a shallow grave containing at least half a dozen white bags, labelled with names and prison numbers.

Khaled al Hamad, a nearby resident, was desperately pulling the bags out when we arrived.

He shows us the three he has already opened. Each contains a human skull and bones. The writing on the sacks suggest they are the remains of two female prisoners, and one male.

It is not clear how they died, or whether this is evidence of criminal abuse by Assad’s regime.

But Khaled needs no convincing. He’s searching for his two brothers, Jihad and Hussein, taken by Assad’s notorious air force intelligence a decade ago. They haven’t been heard of since.

“Some people were taken to an area called ‘the driving school’ and liquidated there,” he said. “I expect this happened to my brothers. Maybe they are in some of these bags buried here.”

We shared this information with Human Rights Watch in Syria, who said they were investigating reports of prisoners’ remains dumped in similar bags elsewhere.

Assad’s fall has unleashed a tsunami of hope from families who were left for decades without any way of finding out what happened to their loved ones.

“If you ever came past here [in Assad’s time], you couldn’t stop, you couldn’t look up,” Khaled said.

“Cars used to speed past. If you stopped, they would come to you, put a plastic bag on your head and take you away.”

Tens of thousands of families like his are now searching for relatives who disappeared into Assad’s notorious prison system, or into its military interrogation centres.

Some were taken to the Mazzeh military airbase in Damascus.

This site, once a key buffer between Assad and rebel forces, is deserted. Discarded military boots are strewn on the runway, a live rocket lies on the ground, the only signs of life are the new guards at the gate: young militia men from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that took control of Syria last week.

They show us the torture room used by Assad’s forces – including a metal pole to secure prisoners’ feet for beating, and a set of wires next to an electrical switchboard.

“Here they electrocuted prisoners,” the guards’ commander, Abu Jarrah, tells me. “These are electric cables – the investigator sits here, the guards put them on the prisoner’s body and turn on the power.

“The prisoner loses his mind and confesses everything. They tell the interrogator to write whatever he wants, in the hope it will stop.”

Abu Jarrah also said that the 400 women held here were routinely raped, and that children were born into the prison.

The only thing more painful than finding your parent or child among the records here is not finding them at all.

In the building next door, families scratch desperately through thumbnail photos scattered in piles on the concrete floor – face after face staring grim and blank, silent witnesses to the years of Assad’s rule.

Sobbing among them was the mother of Mahmoud Saed Hussein, a Kurd from al-Qamishli.

“Yesterday, we saw he was registered at the airbase prison,” she told me. “We came but couldn’t find him. I’ve been looking for him for 11 years, searching from one prison to another.”

“These are all like my son,” she wept, gesturing at the piles of photos on the floor. “May God burn Assad’s heart, as he has burned ours.”

Beyond them, three rooms packed to the rafters with files open out on each other, one after the other. Several people are crouching on a mountain of documents several feet high covering the floor.

Assad’s regime was meticulous in documenting its brutality – a vast bureaucracy of terror that makes the scale of its actions all too clear, but in which the stories of individuals are often lost or submerged.

“What are these notes?” one woman raged. “Nobody is helping us. We want someone to come and check these documents with us. How can I find him among this many prison files?”

The lack of any ordered system means critical evidence is being lost each day at sites across Syria – information about the missing, but also potentially, any links between Assad’s regime and foreign governments like the US or the UK, both of which have been accused of benefitting from the American policy of extraordinary rendition, in which terrorist suspects were sent for interrogation to countries that used torture.

Human rights groups have accused the UK government of turning a blind eye to the US practice during the so-called war on terror, when America sent detainees to several countries in the Middle East, including Syria.

Outside, the silent hangars of the airbase are dotted with the charred remains of Russian-made planes and radar, hit by repeated Israeli airstrikes over the past week.

Assad’s departure has shifted the delicate balance of power between conflicting groups in Syria, and their various international backers, including Turkey, Iran and the US.

This was never just Syria’s war and outside powers still have a stake in what happens here.

Syrians are adamant that the time has come for them to govern themselves without anyone dictating what they should do.

As we leave, a young HTS fighter climbs up on a roof to slash at the portrait of Assad hanging above the interrogation building.

He grins down to the comrades watching from below, as photos and documents from the regime’s military files flutter around their boots.

Assad’s fall has posed as-yet-unanswered questions about Syria’s future, but it has also left unanswered many questions from the past.

Isak Andic, the billionaire founder of high street fashion chain Mango, died in an accident on Saturday while exploring caves near Barcelona.

Spanish media reported the 71-year-old fell down a ravine to his death while hiking in caves that are part of a mountain range.

Andic was with his son and other family members when he fell, according to the El Pais newspaper, triggering a large emergency response.

The Turkish-born businessman founded Mango with the help of his brother, Nahman, in Barcelona in 1984 and the chain now operates almost 3,000 outlets in 120 countries. Forbes estimated Andic’s net worth to be $4.5bn (£3.6bn).

Andic reportedly fell down a 150-metre ravine while hiking in an area of the Montserrat mountains known for its deep caves.

Police were called at around 13:00 local time (12:00 GMT), and a helicopter and specialised mountain unit was sent to the scene, El Pais reported.

Mango CEO Toni Ruiz said in a statement: “His departure leaves a huge void but all of us are, in some way, his legacy and the testimony of his achievements.

“It is up to us, and this is the best tribute we can make to Isak and which we will fulfil, to ensure that Mango continues to be the project that Isak aspired to and of which he would feel proud.”

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez confirmed Andic died in an accident at the Salnitre de Collbató caves.

“All my love and recognition for your great work and business vision, which has turned this Spanish firm into a world leader in fashion,” Sanchez said.

The president of Catalonia’s government, Salvador Illa Roca, said he was “dismayed by the loss” and described Andic as a “committed businessman” who “contributed to making Catalonia great and projecting it to the world”.

Andic moved to north-eastern Spain’s Catalonia region in the 1960s with his family and was a non-executive chairman of the company when he died. Mango had a turnover of €3.1bn (£2.6bn) in 2023.

He was seen as having a rivalry with Zara founder Amancio Ortega, another Spanish fashion billionaire.

The brand’s popularity in the UK was boosted in 2011 when British model Kate Moss was announced as the face of Mango.

At least three people have been killed and dozens more wounded after an explosive was thrown into a crowd at a festival in Thailand.

The attack took place shortly before midnight local time on Friday at the Red Cross Doi Loyfa fair, held annually in the Umphang district in the northern Tak province.

Two suspects are being held in custody, but no charges have been pressed, the Associated Press and local media report, citing Thai police.

At least 48 people have been wounded, six of whom are critically injured, police said.

Police were alerted to the incident at 23:30 local time (16:30 GMT) on Friday.

In a statement, the Umphang rescue team said the explosive was thrown and landed at the foot of an outdoor stage where people had been dancing.

Some of the wounded were taken to a nearby hospital, it added.

Several reports suggest the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device (IED).

Footage said to be from the scene, posted on social media, shows scenes of panic as emergency workers and festivalgoers tend to the wounded.

One video appears to show at least two people lying in close proximity being given CPR, as crowds rush around them in a state of confusion.

The camera then pans to a person cutting the trousers off a man to reveal a wound on his leg pouring out blood.

Images taken in the aftermath, shared by the rescue team, show a cordon in place around an area strewn with rubbish and strung with lights.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra shared her condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the bombing in a post on X.

She said she had ordered the police and security agencies to investigate the cause of the explosion and help those affected. She also directed an increase in police officers to oversee all festival events.

According to the Bangkok Post, between 8,000 and 9,000 people attended the week-long festival this year, and the attack took place on the penultimate night of the event.

Umphang is the southernmost district in Thailand’s northern Tak province, which shares a border with Myanmar to the west.

It was November 2011, and Gisèle Pelicot was sleeping too much.

She spent most of her weekends in a slumber. She was annoyed, because during the week she worked hard as a supply chain manager, and her time off was precious.

Yet she could not seem to stay awake, often drifting off without even realising it and waking hours later with no memory of having gone to bed.

Despite this, Gisèle, 58, was happy. She counted herself lucky to have her husband of 38 years, Dominique, by her side. Now their three children Caroline, David and Florian were grown, the couple were planning to soon retire and move to Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in France’s idyllic southern region of Provence, where Mr Pelicot could go on bike rides and she could take Lancôme, their French bulldog, on long walks.

She had loved Dominique since they met in the early 1970s. “When I saw that young man in a blue jumper it was love at first sight,” Gisèle would reflect, much later. They both had complicated family histories marked by loss and trauma, and had found peace with one another. Their four decades together had hit rough patches – frequent financial troubles and her affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s – but they had made it through.

Years later, when asked by a lawyer to sum up their relationship, she said: “Our friends used to say we were the perfect couple. And I thought we would see our days through together.”

By that point, Gisèle and Dominique were sitting on opposite sides of a courtroom in Avignon, not far from Mazan: she surrounded by their children and her lawyers, and he, dressed in grey, prison-issue clothes, in the defendants’ glass box.

He was facing the maximum jail term for aggravated rape and was rapidly becoming known in France and beyond as – in his own daughter’s words – “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years”.

But in 2011, when Gisèle felt she was sleeping too much, she couldn’t have guessed that was how things would play out.

She had no idea that, in his late 50s and nearing retirement, her husband Dominique Pelicot had been spending a lot of time on the internet, often talking to users on open forums and chatrooms where sexual material – often extreme or illegal – was freely available.

In court, he would later pinpoint that phase as the trigger for his “perversion” after a childhood trauma of rape and abuse: “We become perverted when we find something that gives us the means: the internet.”

Sometime between 2010 and 2011, a man claiming to be a nurse sent Mr Pelicot photos of his wife, drugged with sleeping pills to the point of unconsciousness. He also shared precise instructions with Mr Pelicot so that he could do the same to Gisèle.

At first he hesitated – but not for long.

Through trial and error he realised that with the right dosage of pills he could plunge his wife into a sleep so deep nothing would wake her. They had been lawfully prescribed by his doctor, who thought Mr Pelicot suffered from anxiety due to financial troubles.

He would then be able to dress her in lingerie she refused to wear, or put her through sexual practices she would have never accepted while conscious. He could film the scenes, which she would not have allowed while awake.

Initially, he was the only one raping her. But by the time the couple had settled in Mazan in 2014, he had perfected and expanded his operation.

He kept tranquilisers in a shoebox in the garage, and switched brands because the first tasted “too salty” to be surreptitiously added to his wife’s food and drink, he said later.

On a chatroom called “without her knowledge” he recruited men of all ages to come and abuse his wife.

He would film them too.

He told the court his wife’s unconscious state was clear to the 71 men who came to their house over the course of a decade. “You’re just like me, you like rape mode,” he told one of them in the chat.

As the years went by, the effects of the abuse Ms Pelicot was subjected to at night increasingly began to seep into her waking life. She lost weight, clumps of hair fell out and her blackouts became more frequent. She was riddled with anxiety, certain that she was nearing death.

Her family became worried. She had seemed healthy and active when she had visited them.

“We’d ring her but most of the time it was Dominique who picked up. He would tell us Gisèle was asleep, even in the middle of the day,” said her son-in-law Pierre. “But it seemed likely because she was doing so much [when she was with us], especially running after the grandchildren.”

Sometimes, Gisèle came close to having suspicions. Once, she had noticed the green colour of a beer her husband had handed her, and hastily poured it down the sink. Another time, she noticed a bleach stain she couldn’t recall making on a new pair of trousers. “You’re not drugging me by any chance, are you?” she remembered asking him. He broke down in tears: “How can you accuse me of such a thing?”

Mostly, though, she felt lucky to have him with her as she navigated her health issues. She developed gynaecological problems, and underwent several neurological tests to determine if she was suffering from Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour, as she feared, but the results didn’t explain the increasing tiredness and the blackouts.

Several years later, during the trial, Dominique’s brother Joel, a doctor, was asked how it was possible that medical professionals had never put the clues together and understood Gisèle was a victim of the little-known phenomenon of chemical submission – drug-facilitated rape. “In the field of medicine we only find what we’re looking for, and we look for what we know,” he replied.

Gisèle only felt better when she was away from Mazan – an oddity she barely noticed.

It was on her return from one of these trips, in September 2020, that Dominique told her, in floods of tears: “I did something stupid. I was caught filming under women’s clothes in a supermarket,” she recalled during the trial.

She was very surprised, she said, because “in 50 years he had never behaved inappropriately or used obscene words towards women”.

She said she forgave him but asked him to promise her he would seek help.

He acquiesced, “and we left it at that”, she said.

But Dominique must have known the end was near.

Soon after he was arrested in the supermarket, police confiscated his two phones and his laptop, where they would inevitably find more than 20,000 videos and photos of his wife being raped by him and others.

“I watched those videos for hours. It was troubling. Of course it had an impact on me,” Jérémie Bosse Platière, the director of the investigation, told the court.

“In 33 years in the police, I’d never really seen that sort of thing,” his colleague Stéphane Gal said. “It was sordid, it was shocking.”

His team was tasked with tracking down the men in the videos. They cross-checked the faces and names of the men carefully logged by Dominique alongside facial recognition technology.

They were eventually able to identify 54 of them, while another 21 remained nameless.

Some of the men who were unidentified said in conversations with Dominique that they were also drugging their partners. “That, for me, is the most painful part of the case,” Mr Bosse Platière said. “To know that there are some women out there who could still be victims of their husbands.”

On 2 November 2020, Dominique and Gisèle had breakfast together before heading to a police station, where Mr Pelicot had been summoned in relation to the upskirting incident. She was asked by a policeman to follow him into another room. She confirmed Dominque was her husband – “a great guy, a good man” – but denied ever taking part in swinging with him, or engaging in threesomes.

“I will show you something you won’t like,” the police chief warned her, before showing her a picture of a sexual act.

At first, she didn’t recognise any of the two people.

When she did, “I told him to stop… Everything caved in, everything I built for 50 years”.

She was sent home in a state of shock, accompanied by a friend. She had to tell her children what had happened.

Recalling that moment, Gisèle said that her “daughter’s screams are forever etched in my mind”. Caroline, David and Florian came down to Mazan and cleared out the house. Later, photos of a seemingly drugged Caroline were also found on Dominique’s laptop, although he has denied abusing her.

David, the eldest child, said they no longer had any family photos because they “got rid of everything linked to my father there and then”. Within days, Gisèle’s life was reduced to a suitcase and her dog.

Meanwhile, Dominique admitted to his crimes and was formally arrested. He thanked police for “relieving him of a burden”.

He and Gisèle wouldn’t meet again until they sat facing one another in the Avignon courtroom in September 2024.

By then, the story of the husband who drugged his wife for a decade and invited strangers to rape her had started to ripple across the world, aided by Gisèle’s unusual and remarkable decision to waive her anonymity and open the trial to the public and the media.

“I want any woman who wakes up one morning with no memories of the night before to remember what I said,” she stated. “So that no more women can fall prey to chemical submission. I was sacrificed on the altar of vice, and we need to talk about it.”

Her legal team also successfully pushed for the videos taken to be shown in court, arguing they would “undo the thesis of accidental rape” – pushing back against the line of defence that the men had not meant to rape Gisèle as they didn’t realise she was unconscious.

“She wanted shame to change sides and it has,” a woman who came to watch the trial in Avignon said in November. “Gisèle turned everything on its head. We weren’t expecting a woman like this.”

Medical examiner Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve said that in the wake of her husband’s arrest, Gisèle was clearly traumatised but calm and distant – a coping mechanism often employed by survivors of terrorist attacks.

Gisèle herself has said that she is “a field of ruins” and that she fears the rest of her life may not be enough to rebuild herself.

Ms Sainte-Beuve said she had found Gisèle “exceptionally resilient”: “She turned what could have destroyed her into strength.”

Days before the trial started, the Pelicots’ divorce was finalised.

Gisèle has gone back to her maiden name. She went by the name Pelicot for the trial so that her grandchildren could be “proud” of being related to her and not ashamed of being associated to Dominique.

She has since moved to a village far from Mazan. She sees a psychiatrist but doesn’t take any medication, because she no longer wants to ingest any substance. She continues to go on long walks, but is no longer tired.

In the early days of the trial, Caroline’s husband Pierre took the stand.

A defence lawyer asked him about the Mazan years, when Gisèle was suffering from memory loss and her husband was dutifully accompanying her to unfruitful medical appointments. How could the family not have realised what was happening?

Pierre shook his head.

“You are forgetting one thing,” he said. “You cannot imagine the unimaginable.”

South Korean lawmakers have voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol over his failed attempt to impose martial law, which sparked massive protests across the country.

He was suspended after some members of Yoon’s own People Power Party (PPP) voted with the opposition – though the decision still needs be ratified by the constitutional court.

Thousands of anti-Yoon protesters celebrated outside the National Assembly on Saturday evening after the impeachment motion passed, with the crowd singing as fireworks broke out overhead.

Yoon has vowed to fight on and said he “will never give up”, describing the vote as a temporary pause to his presidency.

“I will take your criticism, praise, and support to the heart and do my best for the country until the end,” Yoon added.

His defiant words are a marked change from his apologetic tone earlier this month over his short-lived martial law declaration.

Yoon attempted to impose military rule after months of political deadlock, saying it was necessary to block supposed North Korean efforts to undermine his government – but the declaration was overturned after a matter of hours by MPs.

There has been strong public support for Yoon’s impeachment, with recent polls finding three-quarters of South Koreans wanted to see him go.

Following days of public pressure the PPP had decided to let its lawmakers vote on the motion, after an effort to impeach Yoon last week failed when its lawmakers boycotted the hearing.

On Saturday, the impeachment motion reached the two thirds threshold needed to pass after 12 members of Yoon’s party voted in favour.

“To the people, we hope your end of year will be a little happier now, and all your cancelled year-end celebrations to be restored,” said National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-shik, as he announced the result.

“The future of the Republic of Korea and our hope is in the hands of the people, our hope is strong,” Woo, a member of the main opposition Democratic Party, added.

The constitutional court now has 180 days to rule on whether Yoon’s impeachment should be upheld or whether he can return to office. If it rules in favour of impeachment, an election for the next president must be called within 60 days.

Yoon has been suspended while Prime Minister Han Duck-soo has taken over as acting president.

Han said his focus is to “stabilise the situation” and “bring back normalcy for the people”.

However, both Han and finance minister Choi Sang-mok, who is next in line for the presidency, are both involved in an ongoing police probe over last week’s events.

Outside the National Assembly, where tens of thousands of protesters gathered throughout the day despite the bitter cold, people hailed the vote as a victory for democracy and spoke of their determination to see Yoon permanently leave office.

“I’m so happy that the bill passed… At the same time, the fight is not over,” physical therapist Sim Hee-seon told the BBC as she wiped her tears.

“We’ll have to wait for the court’s judgment for his impeachment to be finalised. We will keep watching.”

Two women decked out in Rudolf costumes held signs that read: “[It will be] a merry Christmas only if Yoon Seok Yul disappears”.

Across town at a pro-Yoon rally in Gwanghwamun Square, it was a different story. His supporters fell silent after hearing the news of the vote. Some people uttered angry insults before leaving the scene.

The success of the vote had depended on the support from the PPP, as the opposition lawmakers who tabled the motion needed just eight more to join them. Last Saturday, when the opposition first tried to impeach Yoon, they fell short by just a few votes as the PPP staged a walkout.

On Saturday, the party held a marathon meeting that began at 10am and lasted till just minutes before the voting session began, as PPP lawmakers struggled to reach a consensus on the party’s stance.

In the end, the party agreed to take part and allowed their lawmakers to vote according to their conscience. It appeared that at least 12 of them crossed the floor. Another 85 voted against impeachment.

South Korea has faced nearly two weeks of chaos and uncertainty since Yoon’s short-lived martial law attempt late last Tuesday.

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

Hours later he reversed the order after 190 MPs voted it down, with many of them climbing fences and breaking barricades to get into the voting chamber.

Yoon later apologised but on Thursday he defended his actions, saying he had sought to protect the country’s democracy and vowed to “fight on until the end”.

That speech galvanised people, and the president’s approval rating tumbled to a record low of 11%, according to a poll by Gallup Korea.

The impeachment of a president is not unchartered territory for South Korea, which last removed former president Park Geun-hye through this process in 2016.

Yoon – then a prosecutor – had led the investigation against Park, which ultimately resulted in her impeachment.

Raj Kapoor, fondly called the “greatest showman of Indian cinema”, was a leading filmmaker, producer and actor whose work continues to shape and inspire Indian films.

Today, almost four decades after his death in 1988, he remains one of India’s most-loved stars.

Kapoor began his film career in India’s post-independence era. His early work often carried a socialistic undertone, mirroring the country’s mood and aspirations of the time.

“Kapoor brought romance, sexuality, song and soul to Indian socialism,” said historian Sunil Khilnani, in Incarnations: India in 50 Lives, a 2015 BBC Radio 4 series on the men and women who made India.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that celebrations to mark what would have been his 100th birthday on Saturday are taking place across the country, honouring his enduring legacy.

Among them is a retrospective showcasing 10 of his iconic films that will screen across 40 cities and 135 cinemas in India at the weekend.

Born as Shrishti Nath Kapoor to actors Prithviraj Kapoor and Ramsarni Kapoor, he later took the name of Ranbir Raj Kapoor and debuted as a child actor in Inquilab (1935).

Before making waves on screen, Kapoor honed his craft behind the scenes – assisting filmmaker Kidar Sharma, working as an art director at his father’s Prithvi Theatre, and appearing in smaller roles.

His breakout came with Neel Kamal (1947), launching a storied career that combined artistic ambition with mass appeal.

In 1948, Kapoor founded the iconic RK Films studio, synonymous with blockbuster films and international acclaim.

He debuted as a director with Aag (1948) and showcased his versatility as an actor and filmmaker in landmark films like Barsaat (1949), Awaara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), and Sangam (1964). Other popular works include Mera Naam Joker (1970), Bobby (1973), Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985).

This week, the surname Mangione became associated with the killing of health-insurance executive Brian Thompson in New York City, when 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was charged with his murder.

But for decades, the name has meant something entirely different: wealth, power, prominence, philanthropy – particularly within the Italian community of Baltimore.

They’re one of, if not the, “most respected” Italian families in the area, according to Giovanna Aquia Blatterman.

Now 77, Ms Aquia Blatterman, who arrived in the US from Sicily in1953, said she has known three generations of Mangiones.

The family is “generous” and “self-made”, she said, while Luigi, who she met briefly about eight years ago, appeared clever, approachable and handsome – “as you can tell”.

“Something has occurred with him,” she mused, referencing the last several days. “He’s two different people.”

She also insisted he’s innocent until proven guilty: “This is one of the greatest honours of being an American citizen.”

The cluster of streets in downtown Baltimore that make up Little Italy, where Ms Blatterman owns one of the neighbourhood’s many Italian restaurants, has been an enclave for Italian immigrants since they flocked there in the 1800s and 1900s.

An Italian tri-colour flag is still proudly displayed. Even fire hydrants are painted green, white and red.

Nicholas Mangione Sr was born there in 1925, starting life in a poor immigrant family. He spent the first eight years of his life in a one-room flat with an outdoor privy toilet, according to the Baltimore Sun.

During World War Two, he served in the Navy in the South Pacific before returning to his Maryland home where he built a series of enterprises as well as, according to local media, a combative – even aggressive – reputation when it came to his business interests.

• The dark fandom behind healthcare CEO murder suspect
• Killing of insurance CEO reveals simmering anger at US health system

In a 1995 story about him titled ‘Fiery builder has softer side’, Mr Mangione recalled buying the Turf Valley resort, which lies to the west of Baltimore, in 1978.

“People thought I needed money from the mafia to buy this place. They asked me what family I belonged to. I told them, ‘I belong to the Mangione family. The Mangione family of Baltimore County.'”

In 1988, Turf Valley was at the centre of a racism row when the then-manager – Mangione Sr’s now deceased nephew – was recorded using a racial slur. The incident made local news.

But within Baltimore’s tight-knit Italian community, there’s loyalty to Nick Mangione and his memory. Life-long Little Italy resident, 83-year-old Mary Ann Campanella, called him an “excellent man”.

“If you went to him (for help),” she said, “and he looked at you – you got it. He helped everyone.”

The family patriarch – who long ago had moved his expanding family out to the suburbs – died in 2008, leaving behind 10 children, and 37 grandchildren, including Luigi Mangione.

When he was arrested, police say Luigi Mangione was carrying a hand-written document detailing his alleged “ill will” towards corporate elites, which US media have reported included the line “these parasites had it coming”.

Unlike his grandfather, Luigi was born into privilege, attending an all-boys private school in a northern Baltimore suburb, where fees can reach $37,690 a year.

From a rainy Baltimore roadside, the sprawling campus of the Gilman School is visible, including its centrepiece, a double-fronted, 1920s red-brick hall behind which are extensive sporting grounds.

One family associate likened it to Eton, the English boys school attended by aristocratic familes and members of the Royal Family.

Many have wondered how this 26-year-old man went from being a young, promising graduate to an alleged fugitive, arrested in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.

• Who is Luigi Mangione, CEO shooting suspect?
• Who was Brian Thompson, healthcare CEO gunned down in New York?
• How Luigi Mangione’s legal defence could take shape

The Mangiones boast a wealth of cousins, aunts and uncles, who have spread well beyond Little Italy. But the family has remained largely silent following Mr Mangione’s arrest, only releasing a short statement via Republican state lawmaker and cousin Nino Mangione to say they are “shocked and devastated”.

Requests to talk to family members were met either with no response or a firm, but polite: “No comment.”

One simply told us: “Everything that needs to be said has been.”

Dylan Segelbaum, a reporter for local news website the Baltimore Banner, said that as Luigi Mangione grew up, his family owned businesses ranging from country clubs and golf courses to assisted living facilities.

“The Mangione family is prominent in the Baltimore area,” he said.

The name is literally imprinted on Baltimore.

A plaque at the entrance to the Family Center at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center reads: “Donated by Nicholas and Mary Mangione.”

“The family’s very philanthropic,” Mr Segelbaum said, noting the family gave more than $1m to the hospital.

But Ms Blatterman insists the Mangiones have remained “relatable” and don’t “showboat”.

Previously a salon stylist, Ms Blatterman said she cut the hair of Luigi Mangione’s grandmother Mary Mangione, who she calls “Miss Mary”, in the early 1970s.

And, before the Covid pandemic, she said she played bocce (an Italian bowling game) with members of the Mangione family, including Luigi Mangione’s parents, Louis and Kathleen Mangione.

“Kathy has a travel agency. She does trips to Italy,” she said.

While she expressed sympathy for the family of Mr Thompson, 50, the health-executive fatally shot on 4 December, Ms Blatterman said her thoughts are also with the Mangiones.

• New York grand jury begins hearing Mangione case – report

“I can’t imagine what the family’s going through. I’m sorry about Mr Thompson, they’re going through hell, too – but so is this family going through hell.”

Prince Andrew has said he “ceased all contact” with a businessman accused of being a Chinese spy after receiving advice from the government.

In a statement, his office said Prince Andrew had met the man “through official channels” and there was “nothing of a sensitive nature ever discussed”.

The alleged spy, known only as H6, was described in court as having formed an “unusual degree of trust” with the duke and has since been banned from the UK following a judgement by the UK’s semi-secret national security court.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the government would “always stand ready to take action” on “any kind of challenge or threat to UK national security”.

In 2023, H6 brought an appeal against his initial ban but the decision has been upheld by the court.

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

The duke’s office said he was “unable to comment further on matters relating to national security”.

His statement did not specify when he ceased contact with the man, who was described as a “close confidant” of Prince Andrew, nor the duration of their communications.

It has also been reported by the Times that H6 was invited to and attended events at Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace and Windsor Castle at the duke’s request.

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

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

China’s embassy in the UK has denied the espionage claim saying “some individuals in the UK are always eager to fabricate baseless ‘spy’ stories targeting China”.

“Their purpose is to smear China and disrupt normal exchanges between Chinese and British personnel,” a spokesperson for the embassy said.

The former Home Secretary Suella Braverman banned H6 from the UK in March 2023.

He then 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 judges upheld Braverman’s decision.

Speaking to broadcasters on Saturday, Cooper said: “Our security and intelligence agencies are continually vigilant for any threat to UK national security.

“Whether that be around foreign influence, whether it be around espionage, whether it be around any security threat. We won’t hesitate to take action in individual cases or more widely wherever any challenge arises.”

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 is 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”.

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.

He stepped back from royal duties in November 2019 and the prince has since been dogged by questions about his judgement and his finances.

Questions were raised about the prince’s 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.

Isabel Hilton, editor at China Dialogue, told BBC News that Chinese state agents would typically look to target “members of the House of Lords or prominent business people, or people who have a voice in the community”.

She added that it was “quite ambitious” to target a royal and “quite unwise for a member of the Royal Family to allow himself to be targeted”.

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 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.

Suella Braverman has now called for H6 to lose his anonymity and she told The Daily Telegraph that “disclosing the identity of this person will have a deterrent effect”.

However, when asked whether the anonymity should be lifted, the home secretary said: “We always respect the decisions of the courts and also don’t comment on individual cases.”

France’s Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte has been struck by the worst cyclone to hit the islands in nearly a century.

At least two people were reportedly killed when Cyclone Chido made landfall on Saturday, causing wind gusts of more than 225km/h (140mph), and it is feared more may have died.

French President Emmanuel Macron said France would “be there” for the people of Mayotte, while French officials said 250 firefighters and security personnel would be sent to the islands, with some having already arrived.

France’s interior minister Bruno Retailleau said “all makeshift homes have been completely destroyed” and he feared a “heavy” death toll.

Located north-west of Madagascar, Mayotte is an archipelago comprised of one main island, Grand-Terre, and several smaller ones.

Even before the cyclone hit with full force on Saturday morning, there were reports of trees being uprooted, roofs being ripped off buildings and power lines being downed.

The head of Mayotte’s firefighters’ union, Abdoul Karim Ahmed Allaoui, told the BFM news channel on Saturday morning “even emergency responders are locked down”.

He continued: “There’s no mobile phone service and we can’t reach people on the island.

“Even buildings built to earthquake standards haven’t held up.

“The emergency services command centre has been evacuated and is functioning at partial capacity.”

The island’s Pamandzi airport “suffered major damage, especially to the control tower,” acting French Transport Minister Francois Durovray wrote on X.

Air traffic “will be restored initially with military aid planes. Ships are on the way to ensure resupply,” he added.

Interior Minister Retailleau wrote in a statement on X: “I offer my full support to the people of Mayotte. The state and local emergency services are fully mobilized. 110 civil security personnel and firefighters have already been sent and are on site. A second dispatch will be made tomorrow with 140 additional personnel.”

French Prime Minister François Bayrou, who took up the post on Friday, said the cyclone was of “exceptional severity” and he was being updated on the situation “hour by hour”.

Mayotte was initially placed under a purple alert – the highest level – and a “strict lockdown for the whole population, including emergency services” was imposed. It has since been lowered to red to allow emergency services to leave their bases.

Retailleau said the island had not experienced such severe weather since 1934.

Cyclone Chido is also expected to hit Mozambique on the African mainland.

A former Manchester City footballer has been appointed president by Georgia’s disputed parliament, after 17 days of pro-EU protests that have swept this country’s towns and cities.

Mikheil Kavelashvili, now 53, is a former MP from the increasingly authoritarian ruling Georgian Dream party and was the only candidate for the job.

On Saturday, 224 out of 225 members of Georgia’s electoral college voted for him.

The four main opposition groups have rejected Kavelashvili and have boycotted parliament, insisting that the elections held in October were rigged.

Large crowds of protesters, facing freezing temperatures, gathered outside parliament from the early hours of Saturday morning ahead of the vote.

Georgia’s outgoing pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has condemned Kavelashvili’s election as a travesty, insisting she holds Georgia’s only remaining legitimate institution.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has accused Zourabichvili of trying to harm Georgia’s interests, emphasising that when her term of office ends on 29 December, she will have to retire.

“We have very strong state institutions, so we certainly have no difficulty in bringing the situation under full control,” he was quoted as saying on Friday.

Party colleague Nino Tsilosani told reporters that Zourabichvili was no longer president in the eyes of the public.

Georgia is a parliamentary democracy with the president the head of state, and the prime minister the head of Parliament.

Protests against Georgian Dream began immediately after the October elections but they burst into life on 28 November when the government announced it was putting EU accession negotiations on hold until 2028.

An overwhelming majority of Georgians back the country’s path to the European Union and it is part of the constitution.

Every night, the main avenue outside parliament fills with protesters draped in EU flags, demanding new elections.

The night before the vote, the capital Tbilisi was convulsed by pop-up protests involving IT specialists, public sector workers, creative industry professionals, actors and lawyers.

“We are standing here to create a legal state once and for all, to respect the provisions of the constitution and human rights,” said lawyer Davit Kikaleishvili, 47.

Kavelashvili is a founder of the People’s Power party, known for being the main voice for anti-Western propaganda in Georgia.

He has accused opposition parties of acting as a “fifth column” directed from abroad, and described President Zourabichvili as a “chief agent”.

Kavelashvili moved into politics after he was disqualified from seeking the leadership of the Georgian football federation because he lacked the qualifications.

Although his party ran alongside Georgian Dream in the October elections, it has now decided to act in parliament as a “healthy opposition”, to fill the place of the “so-called radical opposition funded by foreign forces”.

A People’s Power party MP, Guram Macharashvili, who announced on 13 December that his faction would leave the ruling parliamentary majority, told the BBC that what was happening in the country was an “artificially created crisis characterised by the influence of foreign powers”.

Macharashvili and Kavelashvili are the architects of Georgia’s controversial “foreign agents” law, seen by the country’s opposition as Russian-style legislation.

When asked what “healthy opposition” means, Macharashvili said: “Opposition does not necessarily mean opposition on all issues, it does not mean only cooperation with foreigners. It means competition with the ruling party to make better proposals on what’s best for Georgia’s future.”

Georgian Dream, founded by billionaire businessman and former Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili, has been accused of dragging the country back into Russia’s sphere of influence.

Both the EU and US have condemned the government for democratic backsliding and more than 460 people have been detained across Georgia over the past two weeks, according to Transparency International.

More than 300 have been ill-treated or tortured, the organisation says, including dozens of people from Georgian media. Last weekend, thugs were filmed attacking a TV reporter and cameraman.

The EU has condemned the “brutal, unlawful force from the police” and foreign ministers are due to consider measures against the government when they meet on Monday.

The US state department has already imposed visa restrictions on Georgian officials, including government ministers and police.

Protesters have called on the international community to impose sanctions on top government officials as well as Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s most powerful man.

Pro-government groups have also waged a campaign of harassment towards civil society activists, beating them outside homes, and carrying out arbitrary arrests.

“There is systematic torture, inhuman and degrading treatment of citizens,” said former public rights defender Nino Lomjaria.

Theatre workers who joined the protests on Friday chanted: “The police are everywhere, justice is nowhere.”

The world’s biggest iceberg is on the move again after being trapped in a vortex for most of the year.

A23a is 3,800 sq km (1,500 sq miles), which is more than twice the size of Greater London, and is 400m (1,312ft) thick. It broke free of Antarctica in 1986 though soon became stuck just off the coast.

The depth of the iceberg meant its bottom became lodged on the floor of the Weddell Sea, part of the Southern Ocean, where it remained static for more than 30 years.

It began to move northwards in 2020 but, since the spring, has been spinning on the spot after it was caught in a rotating column of water near the South Orkney Islands.

On Friday the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said it was now drifting further north.

Dr Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer at the BAS, said: “It’s exciting to see A23a on the move again after periods of being stuck.

“We are interested to see if it will take the same route the other large icebergs that have calved off Antarctica have taken.”

• A23a: Tracking the world’s biggest iceberg as it drifts towards oblivion

It is thought A23a will eventually leave the Southern Ocean and enter the Atlantic Ocean where it will encounter warmer waters and likely break up into smaller icebergs and eventually melt.

Dr Meijers and the BAS are examining the impact of icebergs on local ecosystems after they pass through them.

A year ago researchers aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough collected data from the water around A23a.

Laura Taylor, a biogeochemist who was part of the crew, said: “We know that these giant icebergs can provide nutrients to the waters they pass through, creating thriving ecosystems in otherwise less productive areas.

“What we don’t know is what difference particular icebergs, their scale, and their origins can make to that process.”

Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan is known for some of India’s most popular films, including Lagaan and 3 Idiots, and can barely walk down the street without getting mobbed by fans.

What’s less well known is that he secretly quit films during the Covid pandemic in order to spend more time with his loved ones.

“I told my family I’m done with acting and films,” he tells BBC News.

“I [didn’t] want to produce or direct or act. I just wanted to be with the family.”

You’d imagine a major star like Khan deciding to quit the industry would have sent shockwaves through India, a nation that is fully obsessed with films.

But, he explains, his decision went unnoticed at the time because so few movies were being made due to the pandemic.

“No-one knew about it,” he says.

Fans can breathe a sigh of relief, though.

Khan didn’t quit for long. And now he’s back and is promoting Laapataa Ladies – or Lost Ladies – a film he’s produced. It is India’s official pick for the Oscars in the best international feature film category.

Khan says it was his children who convinced him to go back to work.

“They were like, ‘But we can’t spend 24 hours with you. So get real and get a life.’ So they gently nudged me back into the films,” he says.

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At 59, Khan has worked as an actor, director and producer for three decades.

He’s known as one of the three “Khans of Bollywood” – the others being fellow megastars Shah Rukh and Salman.

Known for tackling social issues, Aamir’s films are widely acclaimed as well as breaking box office records.

He is also no stranger to the Oscars. Lagaan, a film about cricket set in the 19th Century during the British Empire, was nominated for best foreign language film in 2002.

Khan is now trying to make history with Laapataa Ladies. If it succeeds, it would be the first Indian film to win the coveted international prize. He will find out whether it has made the shortlist on Tuesday.

Khan said he’s “not quite sure how seriously” to take awards. “Cinema is so subjective,” he says.

But he admits a win would mean a lot to India.

“I think Indians are so film crazy and we’ve been dying to win the Academy Award for an Indian film, which hasn’t happened till now. So the country will go ballistic. They’ll just go mad if we win,” he says.

“So just for the people of our country and for our country, I would be really happy if we win the award.”

Set in rural India, Laapataa Ladies tells the story of a young man bringing the wrong bride home. Meanwhile, his wife ends up lost, having to fend for herself.

It’s a satire looking at the treatment of women, including touching on the sensitive topic of domestic violence.

Khan describes the plot as “a bit Shakespearean”, with its focus on humour and mistaken identities.

But, he adds, it’s saying “a lot of important things about women’s issues, their independence, their right to decide for themselves what they want to do”.

It was these issues that drew him to the film in the first place, he explains.

“Every now and then you get an opportunity as a creative person to actually also sensitise people about certain issues that we face in society,” he says.

“Women all over the world have been subjected to a lot of challenges in their lives. Women have a raw deal in life. So I felt that here is a story which really brings that out well in such a nice way, which is why I wanted to produce it.”

Khan was also “very keen” that his ex-wife, Kiran Rao, should direct the film.

The pair, who married in 2005, announced their separation in 2021. But they have remained close, both professionally and personally.

“I think the reason I chose Kiran was because I knew that she would be very honest with it and that’s what I wanted,” he says.

“We get along really well. We really love each other, we respect each other.

“Our relationship may have changed slightly – but that doesn’t mean what we feel for each other has gone down or something.”

That’s not to say it’s all been plain sailing, however.

Khan admits there were arguments on set.

“We can’t make a film without an argument. So we argue every point and we have strong opinions,” he says.

“But our sensibilities are very similar. We are not talking about fundamental things. We are just trying to sometimes convince the other person a better way of conveying something.”

Bollywood produces hundreds of films every year and has a huge following among Indians globally.

The sway the films and stars have on their fans’ imagination cannot be overstated.

It has had recent success at the Academy Awards, with Naatu Naatu from RRR winning best original song and The Elephant Whisperers awarded best documentary short film.

But victory in the international film category has so far eluded it, something Khan attributes to the competition.

“India has made really great films over the years. Occasionally it’s a matter of the right film not getting sent or the best film not getting sent,” he says.

“But otherwise we have to understand that the films you’re competing against – you’re not competing against five or six films, you’re competing against almost 80 or 90 films, which are the best in the world.”

As to whether a Bollywood film could one day scoop the best overall film award, Khan says it is “possible”.

But Indian film-makers would first need to start making movies for a global market, he adds.

“I’ve never really looked at an international audience,” he says. “We have such a large audience of our own that it doesn’t come in to our mind.

“That will only happen when Indians start making films for a world audience. I don’t think we have the bandwidth for it right now.”

For now, Khan is focusing on a range of projects alongside Laapataa Ladies, which also include his next film Sitaare Zameen Par, due for release in 2025.

Looking further out, he’s hoping to make one film a year, while his “dream project” is to take on Mahabharat – the ancient Indian epic.

But since unretiring from film, he is determined to do things differently. Again, this was influenced by his children.

“My son said, ‘You’re an extreme person’,” he says.

“He said, ‘You’re like a pendulum. You only did films, films, films. And now you want to swing to the other side and do no films and be with family, family, family. There is a middle place also you can think about’.”

Khan says his son told him to “try and bring some balance” into his life.

“And I thought he was right. So since then, that’s what I’ve been trying to do – living a balanced life where I’m working really hard, in fact I’m doing much more work that I ever did, but I don’t work after 6 o’clock any more.”

Khan says he has also started therapy in recent years, inspired by his daughter Ira, who works in mental health.

“I think that’s something that’s really helped me. That’s really helped me understand myself better.

“I’m actually finding that balance between work and a personal life. So I feel that I’ve reached that space now.”

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.”

It was a defining moment of the fall of the Syrian regime – rebels freeing inmates from the country’s most notorious prison. A week on, four men speak to the BBC about the elation of their release, and the years of horror that preceded it.

Warning: This article contains descriptions of torture

The prisoners fell silent when they heard the shouting outside their cell door.

A man’s voice called: “Is there anyone in there?” But they were too afraid to answer.

Over years, they had learnt that the door opening meant beatings, rapes and other punishments. But on this day, it meant freedom.

At the shout of “Allahu Akbar”, the men inside the cell peered through a small opening in the centre of the heavy metal door.

They saw rebels in the prison’s corridor instead of guards.

“We said ‘We are here. Free us,'” one of the inmates, 30-year-old Qasem Sobhi Al-Qabalani, recalls.

As the door was shot open, Qasem says he “ran out with bare feet”.

Like other inmates, he kept running and didn’t look back.

“When they came to start liberating us and shouting ‘all go out, all go out’, I ran out of the prison but I was so terrified to look behind me because I thought they’d put me back,” says 31-year-old Adnan Ahmed Ghnem.

They did not yet know that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad had fled the country and that his government had fallen. But the news soon reached them.

“It was the best day of my life. An unexplainable feeling. Like someone who had just escaped death,” Adnan remembers.

Qasem and Adnan are among four prisoners the BBC has spoken to who were released this week from Saydnaya prison – a facility for political prisoners nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse”.

All gave similar accounts of years of mistreatment and torture at the hands of guards, executions of fellow inmates, corruption by prison officials, and forced confessions.

We were also shown inside the prison by a former inmate who had a similar account, and heard from families of missing people held at Saydnaya who are desperately looking for answers.

We have seen bodies found by rebel fighters in the mortuary of a military hospital, believed to be Saydnaya detainees, that medics say bear signs of torture.

Rights group Amnesty International, whose 2017 report on the prison accuses authorities of murder and torture there, has called for “justice and reparations for crimes under international law in Syria”, including its treatment of political prisoners.

Saydnaya prison, a sprawling complex located atop a hill of barren land and surrounded by barbed wire, was established in the early 1980s and for decades has been used to hold opponents of the Assad family regime.

It has been described as the country’s main political prison since the 2011 uprising, when the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison says it effectively became a “death camp”.

The prisoners we spoke to say they were sent to Saydnaya because of real or perceived links with the rebel Free Syrian Army, their opposition to Assad, or simply because they lived in an area known to oppose him.

Some had been accused of kidnapping and killing regime soldiers and convicted of terrorism.

All said they had given confessions under “pressure” and “torture”.

They were given lengthy sentences or sentenced to death. One man said he had been detained at the prison for four years but had not yet been to court.

The men were held in the prison’s main Red Building, for opponents of the regime.

Qasem says he was arrested while passing through a road block in 2016, accused of terrorism with the Free Syrian Army, and sent for short stints at several detention facilities before being transferred to Saydnaya.

“After that door, you are a dead person,” he says softly in an interview at his family home in a town south of Damascus, as relatives gather around sipping coffee and nodding in grim captivation.

“This is where the torture began.”

He recalls being stripped naked and told to pose for a photograph before being beaten for looking at the camera.

He says he was then put onto a chain with other inmates and led, with their faces staring at the ground, to a tiny solitary confinement cell where he and five other men were crammed in and given uniforms to wear but deprived of food and water for several days.

They were then taken to the prison’s main cells, where the rooms have no beds, a single lightbulb and a small toilet area in the corner.

When we visited the prison this week, we saw blankets, clothes and food strewn on the floors of cells.

Our guide, a former inmate from 2019-2022, walked us through the corridors searching for his cell.

Two of his fingers and a thumb were chopped off at the prison, he says.

Finding scratch marks on a cell wall that he believes he made, he knelt down and began to cry.

About 20 men would sleep in each room, but the inmates tell us it was difficult to get to know each other – they could speak only in hushed voices and knew that guards were always watching and listening.

“Everything was banned. You’re just allowed to eat and drink and sleep and die,” says Qasem.

Punishments at Saydnaya were frequent and brutal.

All of the people we spoke to described being beaten with different implements – metal staffs, cables, electric sticks.

“They would enter the room and start to beat us all over our bodies. I would stay still, watching and waiting for my turn,” Adnan, who was arrested in 2019 on accusations of kidnapping and killing a regime soldier, recalls.

“Every night, we would thank God that we were still alive. Every morning, we would pray to God, please take our souls so we can die in peace.”

Adnan and two of the other newly released inmates said they were sometimes forced to sit with their knees towards their foreheads and a vehicle tyre placed over their bodies with a stick wedged inside so they couldn’t move, before beatings were administered.

Forms of punishment were varied.

Qasem says he was held upside down by two prison officers in a barrel of water until he thought he was going to “choke and die”.

“I saw death with my own eyes,” he says. “They would do this if you woke up in the night, or we spoke in a loud voice, or if we had a problem with any of the other prisoners.”

Two of the prisoners released this week and the former inmate at Saydnaya described witnessing sexual assaults by guards, who they said would anally rape inmates with sticks.

One man said inmates would offer oral sex to the guards in their desperation for more food.

Three described guards jumping on their bodies as part of the abuse.

In a hospital in central Damascus, we were introduced to 43-year-old Imad Jamal, who grimaced in pain at each touch from his mother who was tending to him at his bedside.

Asked to describe his time in Saydnaya, he smiled and responded slowly in English: “No eat. No sleep. Hit. Cane. Fighting. Sick. Everything not normal. Nothing normal. Everything abnormal.”

He says he was detained in 2021 under what he described as a “political arrest” because of the area he was from.

Speaking again in Arabic, he says his back was broken when he was made to sit on the ground with his knees against his chest as a guard jumped from a ledge on top of him as a punishment for stealing medication from another inmate to give to a friend.

But for Imad, the hardest thing about life in the prison was the cold. “Even the wall was cold,” he says. “I became a breathing corpse”.

There were few things to look forward to in the prison, but three of the inmates said anything positive was met afterwards with punishment.

“Every time we had a shower, every time we had a visitor, every time we went out into the sun, every time we left the cell door we would be punished,” says 30-year-old Rakan Mohammed Al Saed, who says he was detained in 2020 on allegations of killing and kidnapping from his former days in the rebel Free Syrian Army but had never faced trial.

He bares his broken teeth, saying they were knocked out when he was hit in the mouth by a guard with a stick.

All of the men we spoke to said they believed people in their cells had been executed.

Guards would come in and call names of people who would be led away and never seen again.

“People wouldn’t be executed in front of us. Every time they would call names at 12am, we knew that those people were going to be killed,” Adnan says.

Others gave similar accounts, explaining there was no way of them knowing what happened to these men.

Qasem’s father and other relatives say the family were made to pay prison officials more than $10,000 to stop him from being executed – at first to be converted to life in prison and then to a 20-year sentence.

Qasem says his treatment by guards improved a bit after this.

But, his dad says, “they refused any amount to let him free”.

Families sent loved ones money for food in the prison but they say corrupt officials would keep much of it and give the inmates only limited rations.

In some of the cells, inmates would pool all of the food together. But it wasn’t enough.

Adnan found the hunger even harder than the beatings. “I would go to sleep and wake up hungry,” he says.

“There was a punishment that we received one month where one day they would pass us a slice of bread, the next day half a slice, until it was a tiny crumb. Then it was nothing. We got no bread.”

Qasem says one day guards covered the face of his cell’s de-facto leader with yoghurt and made others lick it off.

The men said the behaviour of guards was as much about inflicting humiliation as pain.

All described losing significant amounts of weight in the prison because of malnourishment.

“My biggest dream was to eat and be full,” Qasem says.

His family paid officers bribes for visitation rights. He would sometimes be brought down on a wheelchair because he was too weak to walk, his father says.

Diseases were rife and the inmates had no way of stopping them from spreading.

Two of the men we spoke to who were released on Sunday say they had contracted tuberculosis in Saydnaya – one said medication was frequently withheld as a form of punishment.

But Adnan says the “diseases from fear” were even worse than the physical ones.

At a hospital in Damascus this week, an official said brief medical checks of the detainees that were sent there had found “mainly psychological problems”.

These accounts paint a picture of a place with no hope, only pain.

The prisoners spent much of their time in silence with no access to the outside world, so it is no surprise that they say they knew nothing of the rebel Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) rapid advance in Syria until they were broken free that morning.

Qasem said they could hear what sounded like a helicopter taking off from the prison grounds before the men’s shouts in the corridors. But in the windowless cell they couldn’t be sure.

Then the doors opened, and the freed inmates began running as fast as they could.

“We ran out of the prison. We ran from fear too,” Rakan says, his thoughts on his young children and wife.

At one point in the chaos, he says, “I was hit by a car. But I didn’t mind. I got up and carried on running.”

He says he will never go back to Saydnaya again.

Adnan, too, says he couldn’t look back at the prison, as he ran crying towards Damascus.

“I just kept going. I can’t describe it. I just headed for Damascus. People were taking us from the road in their cars.”

He now fears each night when he goes to sleep that he will wake in the prison, and find it was all a dream.

Qasem ran to a town called Tal Mneen. It was there that a woman who provided the freed prisoners with food, money and clothing told them: “Assad has fallen”.

He was brought to his hometown where celebratory gunfire rang out and his tearful family embraced him.

“It’s like I am born again. I can’t describe it to you,” he says.

When Bashar al-Assad was toppled on Sunday, it turned the page on not only his 24-year presidency but on more than 50 years of his family ruling Syria.

Before Assad took office in 2000, his late father Hafez was president for three decades.

Now, with rebels led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir-al Sham (HTS) forming a transitional government, the future of the deposed president, his wife and their three children is uncertain.

They are now in Russia, where they have been offered asylum, but what lies ahead for them?

Russia was a staunch ally of Assad during Syria’s civil war and has two key military bases in the Middle Eastern country.

In 2015, Russia launched an air campaign in support of Assad that turned the tide of the war in the government’s favour.

A UK-based monitoring group reported that more than more than 21,000 people, including 8,700 civilians, were killed in Russian military operations over the following nine years.

However, distracted by its war in Ukraine, Russia was either unwilling or unable to help Assad’s government stop the rebel’s lightning offensive after it began in late November.

Hours after rebel forces seized control of Damascus, it was reported by Russian state media that Assad and his family had arrived in Moscow and that they would be granted asylum on “humanitarian grounds”.

But when Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about Assad’s whereabouts and asylum claim by reporters on Monday, he said: “I have nothing to tell you… right now. Of course, such a decision [on granting asylum] cannot be made without the head of state. It is his decision.”

The Assads’ ties to Russia, specifically Moscow, are well-documented.

A 2019 investigation by the Financial Times found that Assad’s extended family had purchased at least 18 luxury apartments in the Russian capital, in a bid to keep tens of millions of dollars out of Syria during the civil war.

Meanwhile, Assad’s eldest son, Hafez, is a PhD student in the city – with a local newspaper reporting just last week about the 22-year-old’s doctoral dissertation.

Amid the chaos at the weekend, Russian state TV reported that officials in Moscow were in talks with “the Syrian armed opposition” to secure Russia’s bases and diplomatic missions.

Assad is married to a dual British-Syrian national, Asma, who was born and raised in west London to Syrian parents.

She attended school and university in London before becoming an investment banker.

Asma moved to Syria full-time in 2000 and married Assad around the time he succeeded his father as president.

Dr Nesrin Alrefaai, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), told BBC News that Asma “holds a British passport, so could return to the UK” instead of remaining in Russia.

“However, the USA [has] imposed sanctions on her father, Dr Fawaz al-Akhras, who is also reported to be in Russia,” she said – suggesting Asma may want to stay put in Moscow for now.

In a report by the Mail Online, neighbours were quoted as saying Asma’s father, a cardiologist, and mother Sahar, a retired diplomat, wanted to be in Moscow to “console” their daughter and son-in-law.

Assad and his wife have three children: Hafez, the PhD student, Zein and Karim.

A 2022 US State Department report to Congress said the extended Assad family’s net worth was between $1bn (£790m) and $2bn (£1.6bn) – though it noted that it was difficult to estimate because their assets are “believed to be spread out and concealed in numerous accounts, real estate portfolios, corporations, and offshore tax havens”.

According to the report, Bashar and Asma maintained “close patronage relationships with Syria’s largest economic players, using their companies to launder money from illicit activities and funnel funds to the regime”.

It also said that Asma had “influence over the economic committee that manages Syria’s ongoing economic crisis” – and had made key decisions on Syria’s “food and fuel subsidies, trade and currency issues”.

She also exerted influence over the Syria Trust for Development, through which most foreign aid for reconstruction in regime-held areas was channelled.

In 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged that Asma had “become one of Syria’s most notorious war profiteers” with the help of her husband and her family.

Another senior Trump administration official described her as the “business head of the family” and an “oligarch” who had been competing with Bashar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf.

He is one of Syria’s richest men and the family rift became public knowledge after he posted videos on social media complaining about his treatment.

Following the fall of the Assad dynasty, Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard said Syrians had been subjected to what she called “a horrifying catalogue of human rights violations that caused untold human suffering on a vast scale”.

This includes “attacks with chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and other war crimes, as well as murder, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination that amount to crimes against humanity”.

She called on the international community to ensure that people suspected of breaking international law and other serious human rights violations must be investigated and prosecuted for their crimes.

On Tuesday, the Islamist rebel leader in Syria said any of the ousted regime’s senior officials found to have been involved in torturing political prisoners would be named.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani also said his so-called Syrian Salvation Government would seek to repatriate officials it identified who fled to another country.

In France, investigative judges have sought an arrest warrant for Assad for alleged complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes, in connection with a deadly chemical attack in Syria in 2013 under the legal concept of universal jurisdiction.

Russia does not extradite its own nationals – a legal process whereby someone is returned to another country or state to face trial for a suspected crime.

Assad is unlikely to leave Russia to go to a country where he could be extradited back to Syria or any other that might charge him with a crime.

With awareness of our carbon footprints growing all the time, some people striving to lead eco-friendly lives are turning their attention to what happens when they die.

“I don’t want my last act on this planet to be a polluting act, if I can help that,” Rachel Hawthorn explains.

She is getting ready to make her own burial shroud because she is concerned about the environmental impact of traditional burials and cremations.

“I try so hard in my life to recycle and to use less, and to live in an environmentally friendly way, so I want my death to be that as well,” she adds.

A gas cremation produces the estimated equivalent carbon dioxide emissions of a return flight from London to Paris and around 80% of those who die in the UK are cremated each year, according to a report from carbon consultancy firm, Planet Mark.

But traditional burials can pollute too. Non-biodegradable coffins are often made with harmful chemicals and bodies are embalmed using formaldehyde: a toxic substance which can leach into soil.

In a recent survey from Co-op Funeralcare, conducted by YouGov, one person in 10 said they would want a more ‘eco-friendly’ funeral.

Rachel, from Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, made a burial shroud for a friend from locally-sourced wool, willow, bramble and ivy, as part of her work as an artist.

For years she has explored the themes of death, dying, grief and nature through crafts and functional objects.

But the 50-year-old sees the shroud, which can also remove the need for a coffin, as more than just artwork – and has since decided to make her own.

A common reaction from those who have seen the creation is to ask if they can touch it, to feel how soft it is.

For Rachel, it is the perfect way of helping people address the taboo topic of death.

She also works as a death doula, which involves supporting people who are dying, as well as their loved ones, to make informed funeral care choices.

“I find that when we talk about death, everybody I’ve met finds it a helpful and healthy thing, and something that is life-enriching,” she says.

“When somebody dies it is often so shocking. We just get on a treadmill of ‘this is what happens’, so I want to open up those conversations.

“I want more people to know there are options and that we don’t have to end up in a box.”

The practice of digging graves to a depth of 6ft (1.82m) dates back at least to the 16th Century and is believed to have been a precaution against plague.

When Rachel’s time comes, she wants a natural burial, which means using a biodegradable coffin or shroud in a shallower grave. The upper layers of soil contain more active microbes, so bodies can decompose in about 20 to 30 years, rather than up to 100 in a traditional grave.

Natural burial grounds are dotted across the UK and bear little resemblance to normal cemeteries – trees and wildflowers replace man-made grave markings, and no pesticides are used.

Embalming, headstones, ornaments, and plastic flowers are not allowed.

Louise McManus’ mother was buried last year at Tarn Moor Memorial Woodland, a natural site near Skipton. The funeral included an electric hearse, locally made wool coffin and flowers from her garden.

“She loved nature and being outside. She was concerned about what is happening to the environment and asked for her funeral to be as sustainable as possible,” Louise says.

Sarah Jones, the Leeds-based funeral director who organised the send-off, says demand for sustainability is growing.

Her business has expanded to four premises since opening in 2016 with a rise in sustainable funerals helping to drive that expansion.

She said from a “handful” of eco burials, such requests now make up about 20% of her business.

“More and more people are asking about it and want to make choices that are better for the planet. They often feel it reflects the life of the person who has died because it was important to them,” she says.

As with many eco-friendly industries, natural burials can cost more. Many grounds, including Tarn Moor, offer cheaper plots to locals. One in Speeton, North Yorkshire, is community-run and puts profits back into the village playground.

At Tarn Moor, a plot plus maintenance for Skipton residents costs £1,177. Non-locals are charged £1,818. The nearest council cemetery charges £1,200 for a grave while cremation costs here start at £896.

Often away from urban areas and transport links, travelling to natural grounds for funerals, or to visit a grave, can involve a higher carbon footprint than more traditional sites, Planet Mark’s report points out.

Shroud-maker Rachel recognises these challenges but hopes for long-term change. She wants to see more local natural grounds and to normalise eco-friendly deathcare, while being respectful of others’ choices.

“In times gone by, women would arrive in their marital home with their shrouds as part of their dowry and they would be kept in the bottom drawer until they were needed,” she says.

“I don’t see why people can’t have their burial shroud just ready and waiting for them.

“I think it could be that normal, but everybody does need to have their own choices around it. It doesn’t have to be a certain way.”

West African leaders are gearing up for a crucial summit on Sunday in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, where they will focus on the morale-sapping departure of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger from their 15-member bloc Ecowas.

Few think the military rulers of the three dissident states can be persuaded to pause or reverse their decision.

While faced with this blow to regional unity, West Africa is also poised to start work on a 1,028km (689 miles) highway from Ivory Coast’s main city Abidjan – through Ghana, Togo and Benin – to Nigeria’s biggest city Lagos.

Construction is supposed to start in 2026 and pledges of $15.6bn (£12.3bn) have already been mobilised from a range of funders and investors.

Just as Western Europe matched the Soviet-led communist bloc with a “Common Market” that later evolved into today’s trading powerhouse, the European Union (EU), so Ecowas may find that a drive for prosperity and growth proves to be its most effective response to the wave of military coups and nationalism that have swept across the region since 2020.

The plan to build a modern transport corridor along the West African coast was originally approved eight years ago – long before the coups that have overturned civilian rule in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Preparatory studies, led by the African Development Bank, were commissioned.

But when these were presented last month, the timing could hardly have come at a better moment for reinvigorating the battered self-confidence of Ecowas (Economic Community of West African States).

Neither traditional diplomacy, nor sanctions, nor even the threat of military intervention in Niger, had managed to push the juntas into organising elections and restoring civilian government, as required by Ecowas governance rules.

The defiant regimes declared they would leave the 15-member bloc altogether.

They have subsequently spurned the remaining members’ efforts to persuade them to stay, although the Ecowas envoy, Senegal’s new, young President Bassirou Diomaye Faye, who shares their nationalistic outlook, is still trying.

Until this crisis, Ecowas was Africa’s most cohesive and politically integrated regional grouping, with a creditable record of crisis management and even the deployment of peacekeepers in troubled member states.

With the departure of Mali, Burkina and Niger, the bloc will lose 76 million of its 446 million people and more than half its total geographical land area, with the loss of vast tracts of the Sahara – a painful blow to prestige and self-belief.

The shock of the three countries’ withdrawal may boost those pushing for tougher governance and democracy rules.

Meanwhile, the ambitious coastal transport corridor project, conceived to support economic development, will also serve a political purpose – demonstrating the remaining member countries’ capacity to work together and accelerating the trade growth and investment attraction of coastal urban West Africa, already the most prosperous part of this vast region.

And just as the EU’s wealth and dynamism proved a powerful attraction for former communist states, perhaps rising prosperity across Ecowas will eventually entice the now disenchanted further north states into rejoining the bloc.

Construction of the proposed four-to-six lane motorway is forecast to create 70,000 jobs, with completion ambitiously targeted for 2030.

And the plan is to acquire a sufficiently broad strip of land along the route to later accommodate a new railway line, linking the big port cities along the Gulf of Guinea. Existing rail routes extend inland, but there is no rail line along the coast.

The road will connect many of West Africa’s largest cities – Abidjan, with 8.3 million people, Accra (4 million), Lomé (2 million), Cotonou (2.6 million) and Lagos, estimated at close to 20 million or perhaps even more.

Several of the cities are key gateway ports for the flow of trade in and out of the region.

Already the bureaucratic hassles and risks of petty corruption that have so often complicated life for drivers passing from one country to the next are beginning to wane.

At many border crossings, modern one-stop frontier posts, where officials from both countries work side by side to check passports and transit documents, have replaced the assorted huts where drivers and passengers queued at a succession of counters while one set of border police and customs officers after another laboriously worked their way through the formalities.

And now the proposed highway and rail line promise to further speed the flow of trade and travel between the coastal economies, boosting competitiveness and integration and transforming the region’s attraction for investors – just as the EU transformed trade and development across the European continent.

And that process of economic and administrative integration of course had enormous political consequences.

It acted as a powerful incentive for countries still outside the bloc to improve economic governance, strengthen democracy and tackle corruption, in the hope of qualifying for membership.

Perhaps Ecowas can emulate this precedent, and lure the dissident states into re-joining, particularly if flagship projects such as the transport corridor give a real fillip to growth.

For not only do Mali, Niger and Burkina face severe development and security challenges, but they are also all landlocked, and heavily dependent on their coastal neighbours, through transport, trade and labour migration.

Huge volumes of trade, formal and informal, flow across the borders.

Livestock from the three countries in the Sahel is exported on the hoof to feed city dwellers in Dakar, Abidjan and Lagos.

Onions and potatoes grown in Niger’s arid climate are prized by coastal household shoppers, while Ivorian, Ghanaian and Nigerian manufactured goods are exported in the opposite direction.

Millions of Burkinabès and Malians are settled in Ivory Coast, a mainstay of the workforce for its cocoa plantations.

Moreover, the coup leaders are not pulling out of the West African CFA franc, an eight-country single currency, backed by France, that hampers competitiveness but provides a solid defence against inflation and monetary instability.

Yet these deep ties between the Sahelian countries and coastal West Africa were not sufficient to deter the military regimes in Mali, Burkina and Niger from announcing their withdrawal from Ecowas.

Hostility to the bloc, which they portray as bullying and arrogant, has paid political dividends, boosting their popularity at home. And Morocco talks of opening up an alternative trade corridor to its Atlantic ports, which could broaden the options.

But if the remaining Ecowas countries can accelerate their own drive for prosperity, pruning back trade barriers and pressing forward with breakthrough projects such as the coastal highway and rail line, then gradually they may salve today’s political bruises and mistrusts and draw the Sahel states back into a reunified West African regional identity.

• How a uranium mine became a pawn in the row between Niger and France
• Why West Africa’s united front is in tatters
• Bola Tinubu’s U-turn on Niger sanctions received with relief

Mystery continues to swirl after nearly a month of drone sightings over New Jersey, sparking fear among residents and furious debate about what the flying objects are – and if they are drones at all.

US authorities have been unable to provide definitive answers, saying only that the objects are not believed to pose a danger to the public or national security.

On Thursday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters that available images suggested that many of the reported drone sightings were actually manned aircraft.

But some lawmakers have criticised the government’s handling of the drones and the lack of information available to the public.

Here’s what we know.

Dozens of drone sightings have been reported over New Jersey since 18 November, according to local authorities.

The drones were initially spotted near the Raritan river, a waterway which feeds into the Round Valley Reservoir – the largest in New Jersey, the Associated Press reported.

The sightings soon spread to other parts of the state, including New Jersey’s coast.

Some of the flights were spotted near Picatinny Arsenal – a sensitive military research facility – as well as near President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course in the town of Bedminster, New Jersey.

In nearby New York City, several drones were reported flying over the Bronx on 12 December, a police official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Officers who responded to the incident saw the drones flying overhead, but they disappeared soon afterwards.

Drones have also been reported in other parts of the state, according to New York State Police.

Police in Connecticut have also confirmed that “suspicious drone activity” has taken place in various parts of the state. A drone detection system has been deployed around the towns of Groton and New London.

• FBI investigates possible drones seen over Trump golf course

In Maryland, former Republican Governor Larry Hogan claimed he saw what appeared to be “dozens” of drones over his residence in Davidsonville, about 25 miles (40km) from Washington DC.

“Like many who have observed these drones, I do not know if this increasing activity over our skies is a threat to public safety or national security,” he wrote on X. “But the public is growing increasingly concerned and frustrated with the complete lack of transparency and the dismissive attitude of the federal government.”

In late November, the United States Air Force also confirmed that unidentified drones were spotted over three US airbases in the UK: RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk and RAF Feltwell in Norfolk.

UK defence sources told the BBC that suspicion had fallen on a “state actor” being responsible for the incursions.

In October, the Wall Street Journal also reported that mysterious drones were seen for 17 days near US military facilities in Virginia.

In a call with reporters, officials from several US agencies attempted to assure people that the drones were not the work of a foreign actor or a national security threat.

“I think there has been a slight overreaction” an official from the FBI said.

While downplaying public concern, the authorities were keen to reiterate that investigations into the drone sightings were still underway.

“We certainly understand why people are concerned. That’s one of the reasons we’re devoting significant resources,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said.

“At the same time, it’s important to understand that we don’t have any current evidence that there’s a threat to public safety” the DHS added.

Both federal and state authorities have said that they do not believe the drones are dangerous or pose a threat to US national security.

Following a briefing with the Department of Homeland Security on 11 December, New Jersey assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia said the drones appear to avoid detection by traditional methods such as helicopter and radio.

Fantasia said the drones are up to 6ft (1.8m) in diameter, travel with lights turned off and “operate in a co-ordinated manner”.

Her comments stand in stark contrast to the White House, which has suggested that these are “manned aircraft”.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also said that the majority of sightings appear to be lawful, manned flights.

None have been reported in restricted airspace, the statement added.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a statement on Friday saying more and more people are using drones, meaning more people are noticing them in the sky.

It added that while drones can be flown in most locations below 400ft (121m), drones can’t be flown within controlled airspace around an airport without FAA authorisation; over designated, national security-sensitive facilities; in certain military bases, infrastructure and national landmarks; and in airspace covered by temporary flight restrictions.

If the objects are confirmed to be drones – which at this point is unconfirmed – it is unclear who might be operating them.

Citing anonymous “high sources”, New Jersey Republican representative Jeff Van Drew said that they were coming from an Iranian “mothership” in the Atlantic.

The Pentagon swiftly dismissed the comment, saying “there is no truth to that”.

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” deputy spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters.

Another lawmaker, Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi – who is on a congressional committee that looks at China’s Communist Party – told media outlet NewsNation that there is a “non-trivial” chance that China could be involved.

“It’s definitely a possibility and the likelihood that they can then access data that is collected by these drones is very high,” he said.

The Pentagon and White House have both insisted that there is no foreign origin for the objects.

Van Drew and other lawmakers have pushed back on those denials.

“Here’s the deal: they don’t know what it is. They don’t know what it’s about,” Van Drew told Fox News. “They have no idea where it comes from, but they know what it’s not about? That’s nonsense.”

In a separate incident across the country, a northern California man was charged on 11 December with flying a drone over and taking pictures of Vandenberg Space Force Base, located near Santa Barbara.

The incident is alleged to have taken place on 30 November, according to prosecutors.

The man, 39-year-old Chinese national Yinpiao Zhou was arrested just before he boarded a flight to China. He appeared in court on Tuesday and no plea was was taken.

There has been no suggestion that the incident is related to the spate of reported drone sightings on the east coast.

Several lawmakers have suggested that the drones should be shot down and analysed to determine their origin and intentions.

Among them is President-elect Donald Trump, who took to his Truth Social media platform to suggest that drones couldn’t be flying without the government’s knowledge.

“Let the public know, and now,” he wrote. “Otherwise, shoot them down”.

The US Federal Aviation Administration has also established temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drone flights over Bedminster and Picatinny.

In a statement, the FAA also warned that drone operators who conduct unsafe or dangerous operations could face fines of up to $75,000 (£59,000) and have their drone pilot certificates revoked.

In a letter to US President Joe Biden published on 13 December, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy urged federal agencies to “work together” to solve the mystery, as well as push Congress to extend counter-drone capabilities to local law enforcement.

Some residents have suggested they may take action against the drones themselves – something authorities have strongly warned against doing, as it is illegal.

“A good shotgun will fix that problem,” a man commented on a video of a drone on social media.

Life might be unfair but for Malcolm in the Middle fans things are looking up – the TV sitcom is making a comeback.

With familiar shouts of “Malcolm!”, actors Bryan Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek introduced a video posted on social media announcing the show’s return on Friday.

They played the comedically dysfunctional parents of the highly intelligent teenager who first appeared on our screens nearly 25 years ago.

The sitcom ended in 2006 after 151 episodes, during which it won several Emmy awards. A Grammy award was also given to the band behind the show’s opening theme song Boss of Me, which ends on the lyric “life is unfair”.

Frankie Muniz, who reprises his role as the show’s protagonist, said: “I have been waiting for this moment for 18 years. Let’s find out where Malcolm and his family are now.”

Four new episodes have been commissioned by Disney+ with the storyline based on Malcolm and his daughter being drawn back “into the family’s chaos when Hal (Cranston) and Lois (Kaczmarek) demand his presence for their 40th wedding anniversary party”.

Cranston, who received critical acclaim following the show for his performance in crime drama series Breaking Bad, said he was excited to return.

Kaczmarek added: “What a delight I get to yell at that kid again!

“We’re very excited about coming back together and seeing what this family has been up to.”

A date is yet to be set for when the new episodes will air.

Ayo Davis, president of Disney’s branded television unit, said she hoped fans would be glad of the show’s new run given how relatable it was when it first aired.

“Its hilarious and heartfelt portrayal of a lovably chaotic family resonated with audiences of all ages and we’re so excited to welcome the original cast back to bring that magic to life again.”

A former Love Island contestant says it “took her breath away” to discover that someone removing a condom during sex is classified as rape.

Stealthing, as it is known, happens when someone removes a condom during consensual sex without informing the other person.

Megan Barton-Hanson says she experienced this up to six times, with a man claiming the condom had split on each occasion, leading to her having an abortion.

“I didn’t know it was a crime,” the 30-year-old tells the BBC.

“I just thought that’s something between partners that you have to discuss with them.”

Megan added that she knew his actions were “unfair and unjust” but it was only in a recording of the We Need to Talk podcast, when host Paul C Brunson told her, that she realised the man’s actions were rape.

“I’d never heard of stealthing, ever,” she says.

“When we started to have sex, the condom was obviously on – that was fine – and then at the end, he’d removed it intentionally but his excuse was ‘it split and it broke’.

“It was shocking.”

The Metropolitan Police says stealthing is a slang word but the practice is legally considered rape, although prosecutions are rare due to under-reporting, as many do not realise it is an offence.

In October, a University College London (UCL) survey showed just over one in 10 people aged 18-25 did not consider non-consensual condom removal to be sexual assault.

Andrea Simon, executive director of End Violence Against Women and Girls, says although sex can start off consensually, if someone violates that consent by removing a condom, it is considered rape and it can be prosecuted as rape.

“It’s very hard to know the prevalence of stealthing, as not many people may understand it as actually an act of sexual violence or a crime,” she explains.

“It’s really important that men, in particular, understand that it’s criminal behaviour to intentionally remove a condom during sex without consent and we know that it speaks very much to men’s sense of entitlement over women’s bodies and it’s a violation of women’s bodily autonomy.”

The issue was explored in the fourth episode of BBC drama I May Destroy You in 2020, where the main character Arabella has sex with a man who removes the condom without her knowledge.

Arabella doesn’t realise it’s rape until she hears it discussed on a podcast.

The seriousness of this form of sexual violence is accurately reflected in the language we use to talk about it, according to Ciara Bergman, chief executive of Rape Crisis England and Wales.

“So-called stealthing is a form of rape under English and Welsh law,” she says.

“If someone has received consent for sex on the basis that they will wear a condom and they then remove the condom without the other person’s knowledge or permission, consent for sex from that point is lost.”

Megan’s advice to someone who may have concerns is clear.

She says: “I think if you’ve got any kind of suspicions, red flags, tell a friend, tell someone and then you can go together and share to the police.

“You don’t have to make it a big old deal; you can call from the comfort of your own home, but I think definitely reach out to somebody because it’s not fair and it’s not OK.”

A Liverpool FC staff Christmas party in the city’s Anglican cathedral was shut down early amid reports that suspected drugs paraphernalia were found.

The football club confirmed an “incident” had taken place on Thursday night, adding: “We do not condone or tolerate the use of illegal substances at any of our sites or events.”

None of the club’s players or first team manager Arne Slot were in attendance at the event, which was held for non-footballing staff.

The party was ended by staff at the cathedral, which said in a statement that an “incident” occurred “that was not in line with our values”.

The details emerged in newspaper reports, which said a search was prompted by one of the attendees suffering a “medical episode”.

Liverpool FC said the staff member was “recovering well” after hospital treatment and the medical incident was “unrelated” to the other concerns.

Photographs shared on X by club staff showed a lavish arrangement with dining tables bathed in red light and the Liverpool club crest projected on to the cathedral’s inner walls.

A Liverpool FC statement said: “We do not condone or tolerate the use of illegal substances at any of our sites or events.

“We thank the events team at the venue for their swift action and professional response to the medical emergency which was unrelated.

“‘The member of staff is recovering well.”

Liverpool Cathedral, the largest in Britain and fifth largest in the world, said it hosts such events to help keep the site open and free to enter for the public.

A representative added: “During an event in the last week, an incident occurred that was not in line with our core values.

“The team on duty followed the correct procedures to bring the event to an early close.

“We want to thank our staff and Liverpool FC for the swift actions taken and partnership working, and will continue to review our procedures and mitigation measures for future events.”

US President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to end daylight saving time (DST), arguing it is “inconvenient” and “very costly” to Americans.

In a post on his platform Truth Social, Trump said DST had “a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t” and that his Republican party would work to end it.

DST is the practice of moving the clock ahead by one hour in the spring and back an hour in the autumn to make better use of natural daylight.

It is observed in a third of the world’s countries, according to Pew Research Center, including most of Europe. Some in the US, however, have long advocated to end the timeworn tradition.

Those who want to stick with standard time say it benefits our health, as it is better to have more light in the morning, paving the way for improved sleep cycles on darker evenings. They say DST can be disorienting to sleep schedules.

But others want to make DST permanent instead, arguing that brighter evenings, especially for those commuting from work or school, would reduce crime, conserve energy and even save lives in terms of reduced road accidents.

Both sides say their preferred option would be better for the economy.

Trump’s plan is not the first attempt to alter the biannual practice of changing clocks seasonally in the US.

• Places around the world that opt out of daylight savings – and why

Making daylight saving time permanent was the aim of a 2022 bill that passed the Democratic-controlled Senate.

But the Sunshine Protection Act, which was introduced by Republican Senator Marco Rubio, never made it to President Joe Biden’s desk.

Rubio has since been picked by Trump for the role of secretary of state under his incoming administration.

The US first began changing its clocks seasonally in 1918 during World War One in an effort to conserve fuel. It was unpopular with farmers, and was repealed after the war.

But DST returned again during World War Two, and was made permanent in 1966, though states could opt out.

Hawaii and most of Arizona currently do not follow time changes under DST.

Research by Joan Costa-i-Font, a professor at the London School of Economics, found that DST has had “detrimental effects on sleep and physical health, and on feelings of fatigue, stress, time stress and mental health”.

Prof Costa-i-Font’s study found that, in monetary terms, an end to DST would lead to an increase in economic output of €754 ($792; £627) per person per year.

Countries that have ended the practice include Mexico in 2022, though DST is still maintained in regions near the US border for economic and logistical reasons. Jordan also ended the practice that year.

Others, like Turkey and Russia, have implemented a permanent DST instead in the past decade.

In a Monmouth University Poll, researchers found that about two-thirds of people in the US want make DST permanent.

A map shown during the draw for the 2026 Fifa World Cup has been criticised by Ukraine as an “unacceptable error” after it appeared to exclude Crimea as part of the country.

The graphic – showing countries that cannot be drawn to play each other for geopolitical reasons – highlighted Ukraine but did not include the peninsula that is internationally recognised to be part of it.

Crimea has been under Russian occupation since 2014 and just a handful of countries recognise the peninsula as Russian territory.

Ukraine Foreign Ministry spokesman Heorhiy Tykhy said that the nation expects “a public apology”.

Fifa said it was “aware of an issue” and the image had been removed.

Writing on X, Tykhy said that Fifa had not only “acted against international law” but had also “supported Russian propaganda, war crimes, and the crime of aggression against Ukraine”.

He added a “fixed” version of the map to his post, highlighting Crimea as part of Ukraine’s territory.

Among the countries that cannot play each other are Ukraine and Belarus, Spain and Gibraltar and Kosovo versus either Bosnia and Herzegovina or Serbia.

The Ukrainian Football Association has also sent a letter to Fifa secretary-general Mathias Grafström and UEFA secretary-general Theodore Theodoridis over the matter.

“We appeal to you to express our deep concern about the infographic map [shown] on December 13, 2024,” the letter reads.

“Taking into account a number of official decisions and resolutions adopted by the Fifa Council and the UEFA executive committee since 2014… we emphasize that today’s version of the cartographic image of Ukraine… is completely unacceptable and looks like an inconsistent position of Fifa and UEFA.”

The 2026 World Cup will start on 11 June that year in Mexico City and end on 19 July in New Jersey.

The expanded 48-team tournament will last a record 39 days.

Ukraine were placed in Group D alongside Iceland, Azerbaijan and the yet-to-be-determined winners of France’s Nations League quarter-final against Croatia.

An OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower has been found dead in an apartment in San Francisco, authorities said.

The body of Suchir Balaji, 26, was discovered on 26 November after police said they received a call asking officers to check on his wellbeing.

The San Francisco medical examiner’s office determined his death to be suicide and police found no evidence of foul play.

In recent months Mr Balaji had publicly spoken out against artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s practices, which has been fighting a number of lawsuits relating to its data-gathering practices.

In October, the New York Times published an interview with Mr Balaji in which he alleged that OpenAI had violated US copyright law while developing its popular ChatGPT online chatbot.

The article said that after working at the company for four years as a researcher, Mr Balaji had come to the conclusion that “OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data to build ChatGPT violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet”.

OpenAI says its models are “trained on publicly available data”.

Mr Balaji left the company in August, telling the New York Times he had since been working on personal projects.

He grew up in Cupertino, California, before going to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement cited by CNBC News that it was “devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time”.

US and Canadian news publishers, including the New York Times, and a group of best-selling writers, including John Grisham, have filed lawsuits claiming the company was illegally using news articles to train its software.

OpenAI told the BBC in November its software is “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.

BBC Action Line, , or contact Samaritans.

If you’re in the US, call 988, or contact Lifeline.

Two off-duty gardaí (Irish police officers) have been injured in an attack in Dublin.

The incident occurred at the junction of Dame Street and Eustace Street at approximately 01:30 local time on Saturday.

One of the men, in his 40s, has been taken to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin where he is in a critical condition.

A second man was taken to St James’s Hospital in Dublin for medical treatment but has since been discharged. No arrests have been made.

Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Simon Harris said on social media that his thoughts are with the injured men.

He said on X: “The perpetrators of this attack will face the full rigours of the law.”

Tánaiste (Irish deputy prime minister) Micheál Martin said that he was appalled by the attack on the two men.

“My thoughts are with both men and their families, especially the Garda who remains in hospital,” he wrote on X.

Minister for Justice Helen McEntee wrote on X that “the attack on off-duty members of An Garda Síochána in Temple Bar last night was appalling”.

She said her thoughts are with the officer who remains in hospital.

An incident room has been established at Pearse Street Garda Station.

Gardaí have appealed for witnesses.

Anyone who may have camera footage from the Dame Street and Temple Bar area, between 01:00 local and 01:45 are asked to make this footage available to police.

Gardaí also want to speak to any taxi drivers who were driving in the Dame Street area at the time and may have footage.

It was November 2011, and Gisèle Pelicot was sleeping too much.

She spent most of her weekends in a slumber. She was annoyed, because during the week she worked hard as a supply chain manager, and her time off was precious.

Yet she could not seem to stay awake, often drifting off without even realising it and waking hours later with no memory of having gone to bed.

Despite this, Gisèle, 58, was happy. She counted herself lucky to have her husband of 38 years, Dominique, by her side. Now their three children Caroline, David and Florian were grown, the couple were planning to soon retire and move to Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in France’s idyllic southern region of Provence, where Mr Pelicot could go on bike rides and she could take Lancôme, their French bulldog, on long walks.

She had loved Dominique since they met in the early 1970s. “When I saw that young man in a blue jumper it was love at first sight,” Gisèle would reflect, much later. They both had complicated family histories marked by loss and trauma, and had found peace with one another. Their four decades together had hit rough patches – frequent financial troubles and her affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s – but they had made it through.

Years later, when asked by a lawyer to sum up their relationship, she said: “Our friends used to say we were the perfect couple. And I thought we would see our days through together.”

By that point, Gisèle and Dominique were sitting on opposite sides of a courtroom in Avignon, not far from Mazan: she surrounded by their children and her lawyers, and he, dressed in grey, prison-issue clothes, in the defendants’ glass box.

He was facing the maximum jail term for aggravated rape and was rapidly becoming known in France and beyond as – in his own daughter’s words – “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years”.

But in 2011, when Gisèle felt she was sleeping too much, she couldn’t have guessed that was how things would play out.

She had no idea that, in his late 50s and nearing retirement, her husband Dominique Pelicot had been spending a lot of time on the internet, often talking to users on open forums and chatrooms where sexual material – often extreme or illegal – was freely available.

In court, he would later pinpoint that phase as the trigger for his “perversion” after a childhood trauma of rape and abuse: “We become perverted when we find something that gives us the means: the internet.”

Sometime between 2010 and 2011, a man claiming to be a nurse sent Mr Pelicot photos of his wife, drugged with sleeping pills to the point of unconsciousness. He also shared precise instructions with Mr Pelicot so that he could do the same to Gisèle.

At first he hesitated – but not for long.

Through trial and error he realised that with the right dosage of pills he could plunge his wife into a sleep so deep nothing would wake her. They had been lawfully prescribed by his doctor, who thought Mr Pelicot suffered from anxiety due to financial troubles.

He would then be able to dress her in lingerie she refused to wear, or put her through sexual practices she would have never accepted while conscious. He could film the scenes, which she would not have allowed while awake.

Initially, he was the only one raping her. But by the time the couple had settled in Mazan in 2014, he had perfected and expanded his operation.

He kept tranquilisers in a shoebox in the garage, and switched brands because the first tasted “too salty” to be surreptitiously added to his wife’s food and drink, he said later.

On a chatroom called “without her knowledge” he recruited men of all ages to come and abuse his wife.

He would film them too.

He told the court his wife’s unconscious state was clear to the 71 men who came to their house over the course of a decade. “You’re just like me, you like rape mode,” he told one of them in the chat.

As the years went by, the effects of the abuse Ms Pelicot was subjected to at night increasingly began to seep into her waking life. She lost weight, clumps of hair fell out and her blackouts became more frequent. She was riddled with anxiety, certain that she was nearing death.

Her family became worried. She had seemed healthy and active when she had visited them.

“We’d ring her but most of the time it was Dominique who picked up. He would tell us Gisèle was asleep, even in the middle of the day,” said her son-in-law Pierre. “But it seemed likely because she was doing so much [when she was with us], especially running after the grandchildren.”

Sometimes, Gisèle came close to having suspicions. Once, she had noticed the green colour of a beer her husband had handed her, and hastily poured it down the sink. Another time, she noticed a bleach stain she couldn’t recall making on a new pair of trousers. “You’re not drugging me by any chance, are you?” she remembered asking him. He broke down in tears: “How can you accuse me of such a thing?”

Mostly, though, she felt lucky to have him with her as she navigated her health issues. She developed gynaecological problems, and underwent several neurological tests to determine if she was suffering from Alzheimer’s or a brain tumour, as she feared, but the results didn’t explain the increasing tiredness and the blackouts.

Several years later, during the trial, Dominique’s brother Joel, a doctor, was asked how it was possible that medical professionals had never put the clues together and understood Gisèle was a victim of the little-known phenomenon of chemical submission – drug-facilitated rape. “In the field of medicine we only find what we’re looking for, and we look for what we know,” he replied.

Gisèle only felt better when she was away from Mazan – an oddity she barely noticed.

It was on her return from one of these trips, in September 2020, that Dominique told her, in floods of tears: “I did something stupid. I was caught filming under women’s clothes in a supermarket,” she recalled during the trial.

She was very surprised, she said, because “in 50 years he had never behaved inappropriately or used obscene words towards women”.

She said she forgave him but asked him to promise her he would seek help.

He acquiesced, “and we left it at that”, she said.

But Dominique must have known the end was near.

Soon after he was arrested in the supermarket, police confiscated his two phones and his laptop, where they would inevitably find more than 20,000 videos and photos of his wife being raped by him and others.

“I watched those videos for hours. It was troubling. Of course it had an impact on me,” Jérémie Bosse Platière, the director of the investigation, told the court.

“In 33 years in the police, I’d never really seen that sort of thing,” his colleague Stéphane Gal said. “It was sordid, it was shocking.”

His team was tasked with tracking down the men in the videos. They cross-checked the faces and names of the men carefully logged by Dominique alongside facial recognition technology.

They were eventually able to identify 54 of them, while another 21 remained nameless.

Some of the men who were unidentified said in conversations with Dominique that they were also drugging their partners. “That, for me, is the most painful part of the case,” Mr Bosse Platière said. “To know that there are some women out there who could still be victims of their husbands.”

On 2 November 2020, Dominique and Gisèle had breakfast together before heading to a police station, where Mr Pelicot had been summoned in relation to the upskirting incident. She was asked by a policeman to follow him into another room. She confirmed Dominque was her husband – “a great guy, a good man” – but denied ever taking part in swinging with him, or engaging in threesomes.

“I will show you something you won’t like,” the police chief warned her, before showing her a picture of a sexual act.

At first, she didn’t recognise any of the two people.

When she did, “I told him to stop… Everything caved in, everything I built for 50 years”.

She was sent home in a state of shock, accompanied by a friend. She had to tell her children what had happened.

Recalling that moment, Gisèle said that her “daughter’s screams are forever etched in my mind”. Caroline, David and Florian came down to Mazan and cleared out the house. Later, photos of a seemingly drugged Caroline were also found on Dominique’s laptop, although he has denied abusing her.

David, the eldest child, said they no longer had any family photos because they “got rid of everything linked to my father there and then”. Within days, Gisèle’s life was reduced to a suitcase and her dog.

Meanwhile, Dominique admitted to his crimes and was formally arrested. He thanked police for “relieving him of a burden”.

He and Gisèle wouldn’t meet again until they sat facing one another in the Avignon courtroom in September 2024.

By then, the story of the husband who drugged his wife for a decade and invited strangers to rape her had started to ripple across the world, aided by Gisèle’s unusual and remarkable decision to waive her anonymity and open the trial to the public and the media.

“I want any woman who wakes up one morning with no memories of the night before to remember what I said,” she stated. “So that no more women can fall prey to chemical submission. I was sacrificed on the altar of vice, and we need to talk about it.”

Her legal team also successfully pushed for the videos taken to be shown in court, arguing they would “undo the thesis of accidental rape” – pushing back against the line of defence that the men had not meant to rape Gisèle as they didn’t realise she was unconscious.

“She wanted shame to change sides and it has,” a woman who came to watch the trial in Avignon said in November. “Gisèle turned everything on its head. We weren’t expecting a woman like this.”

Medical examiner Anne Martinat Sainte-Beuve said that in the wake of her husband’s arrest, Gisèle was clearly traumatised but calm and distant – a coping mechanism often employed by survivors of terrorist attacks.

Gisèle herself has said that she is “a field of ruins” and that she fears the rest of her life may not be enough to rebuild herself.

Ms Sainte-Beuve said she had found Gisèle “exceptionally resilient”: “She turned what could have destroyed her into strength.”

Days before the trial started, the Pelicots’ divorce was finalised.

Gisèle has gone back to her maiden name. She went by the name Pelicot for the trial so that her grandchildren could be “proud” of being related to her and not ashamed of being associated to Dominique.

She has since moved to a village far from Mazan. She sees a psychiatrist but doesn’t take any medication, because she no longer wants to ingest any substance. She continues to go on long walks, but is no longer tired.

In the early days of the trial, Caroline’s husband Pierre took the stand.

A defence lawyer asked him about the Mazan years, when Gisèle was suffering from memory loss and her husband was dutifully accompanying her to unfruitful medical appointments. How could the family not have realised what was happening?

Pierre shook his head.

“You are forgetting one thing,” he said. “You cannot imagine the unimaginable.”

ABC News has agreed to pay $15m (£12m) to US President-elect Donald Trump to settle a defamation lawsuit after its star anchor falsely said he had been found “liable for rape”.

George Stephanopoulos made the statements repeatedly during an interview on 10 March this year while challenging a congresswoman about her support for Trump.

A jury in a civil case last year determined Trump was liable for “sexual abuse”, which has a specific definition under New York law.

As part of Saturday’s settlement, first reported by Fox News Digital, ABC will also publish a statement expressing its “regret” for the statements by Stephanopoulos.

According to the settlement, ABC News will pay $15m as a charitable contribution to a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff, as Presidents of the United States of America have established in the past”.

The network also agreed to pay $1m towards Trump’s legal fees.

Under the settlement, the network will post an editor’s note to the bottom of its 10 March 2024 online news article about the story.

It will say: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”

An ABC News spokesperson said in a statement the company was “pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing”.

In 2023, a New York civil court found Trump sexually abused E Jean Carroll in a dressing room at a department store in 1996. He was also found guilty of defaming the magazine columnist.

Judge Lewis Kaplan said the jury’s conclusion was that Ms Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her “within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law”.

Judge Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was “far narrower” than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries and in criminal statutes elsewhere.

In a separate case, also presided over by the same judge, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3m to Ms Carroll for additional defamatory statements.

During the 10 March broadcast, Stephanopoulos asked South Carolina Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace how she could endorse Trump.

The anchor falsely said “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape”.

Stephanopoulos repeated the claim 10 times throughout the broadcast.

Ahead of the ruling, a federal magistrate judge had ordered Trump and Stephanopoulos to give sworn evidence at depositions next week.

Trump has also sued CBS, the BBC’s US broadcast partner, for “deceptive conduct” over an interview with Kamala Harris.

In 2023, a judge threw out his defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which he alleged the network had likened him to Adolf Hitler.

He has also had lawsuits filed against the New York Times and the Washington Post dismissed.

Isak Andic, the billionaire founder of high street fashion chain Mango, died in an accident on Saturday while exploring caves near Barcelona.

Spanish media reported the 71-year-old fell down a ravine to his death while hiking in caves that are part of a mountain range.

Andic was with his son and other family members when he fell, according to the El Pais newspaper, triggering a large emergency response.

The Turkish-born businessman founded Mango with the help of his brother, Nahman, in Barcelona in 1984 and the chain now operates almost 3,000 outlets in 120 countries. Forbes estimated Andic’s net worth to be $4.5bn (£3.6bn).

Andic reportedly fell down a 150-metre ravine while hiking in an area of the Montserrat mountains known for its deep caves.

Police were called at around 13:00 local time (12:00 GMT), and a helicopter and specialised mountain unit was sent to the scene, El Pais reported.

Mango CEO Toni Ruiz said in a statement: “His departure leaves a huge void but all of us are, in some way, his legacy and the testimony of his achievements.

“It is up to us, and this is the best tribute we can make to Isak and which we will fulfil, to ensure that Mango continues to be the project that Isak aspired to and of which he would feel proud.”

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez confirmed Andic died in an accident at the Salnitre de Collbató caves.

“All my love and recognition for your great work and business vision, which has turned this Spanish firm into a world leader in fashion,” Sanchez said.

The president of Catalonia’s government, Salvador Illa Roca, said he was “dismayed by the loss” and described Andic as a “committed businessman” who “contributed to making Catalonia great and projecting it to the world”.

Andic moved to north-eastern Spain’s Catalonia region in the 1960s with his family and was a non-executive chairman of the company when he died. Mango had a turnover of €3.1bn (£2.6bn) in 2023.

He was seen as having a rivalry with Zara founder Amancio Ortega, another Spanish fashion billionaire.

The brand’s popularity in the UK was boosted in 2011 when British model Kate Moss was announced as the face of Mango.

An OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower has been found dead in an apartment in San Francisco, authorities said.

The body of Suchir Balaji, 26, was discovered on 26 November after police said they received a call asking officers to check on his wellbeing.

The San Francisco medical examiner’s office determined his death to be suicide and police found no evidence of foul play.

In recent months Mr Balaji had publicly spoken out against artificial intelligence company OpenAI’s practices, which has been fighting a number of lawsuits relating to its data-gathering practices.

In October, the New York Times published an interview with Mr Balaji in which he alleged that OpenAI had violated US copyright law while developing its popular ChatGPT online chatbot.

The article said that after working at the company for four years as a researcher, Mr Balaji had come to the conclusion that “OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data to build ChatGPT violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet”.

OpenAI says its models are “trained on publicly available data”.

Mr Balaji left the company in August, telling the New York Times he had since been working on personal projects.

He grew up in Cupertino, California, before going to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said in a statement cited by CNBC News that it was “devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time”.

US and Canadian news publishers, including the New York Times, and a group of best-selling writers, including John Grisham, have filed lawsuits claiming the company was illegally using news articles to train its software.

OpenAI told the BBC in November its software is “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.

BBC Action Line, , or contact Samaritans.

If you’re in the US, call 988, or contact Lifeline.

When Bashar al-Assad was toppled on Sunday, it turned the page on not only his 24-year presidency but on more than 50 years of his family ruling Syria.

Before Assad took office in 2000, his late father Hafez was president for three decades.

Now, with rebels led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir-al Sham (HTS) forming a transitional government, the future of the deposed president, his wife and their three children is uncertain.

They are now in Russia, where they have been offered asylum, but what lies ahead for them?

Russia was a staunch ally of Assad during Syria’s civil war and has two key military bases in the Middle Eastern country.

In 2015, Russia launched an air campaign in support of Assad that turned the tide of the war in the government’s favour.

A UK-based monitoring group reported that more than more than 21,000 people, including 8,700 civilians, were killed in Russian military operations over the following nine years.

However, distracted by its war in Ukraine, Russia was either unwilling or unable to help Assad’s government stop the rebel’s lightning offensive after it began in late November.

Hours after rebel forces seized control of Damascus, it was reported by Russian state media that Assad and his family had arrived in Moscow and that they would be granted asylum on “humanitarian grounds”.

But when Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about Assad’s whereabouts and asylum claim by reporters on Monday, he said: “I have nothing to tell you… right now. Of course, such a decision [on granting asylum] cannot be made without the head of state. It is his decision.”

The Assads’ ties to Russia, specifically Moscow, are well-documented.

A 2019 investigation by the Financial Times found that Assad’s extended family had purchased at least 18 luxury apartments in the Russian capital, in a bid to keep tens of millions of dollars out of Syria during the civil war.

Meanwhile, Assad’s eldest son, Hafez, is a PhD student in the city – with a local newspaper reporting just last week about the 22-year-old’s doctoral dissertation.

Amid the chaos at the weekend, Russian state TV reported that officials in Moscow were in talks with “the Syrian armed opposition” to secure Russia’s bases and diplomatic missions.

Assad is married to a dual British-Syrian national, Asma, who was born and raised in west London to Syrian parents.

She attended school and university in London before becoming an investment banker.

Asma moved to Syria full-time in 2000 and married Assad around the time he succeeded his father as president.

Dr Nesrin Alrefaai, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), told BBC News that Asma “holds a British passport, so could return to the UK” instead of remaining in Russia.

“However, the USA [has] imposed sanctions on her father, Dr Fawaz al-Akhras, who is also reported to be in Russia,” she said – suggesting Asma may want to stay put in Moscow for now.

In a report by the Mail Online, neighbours were quoted as saying Asma’s father, a cardiologist, and mother Sahar, a retired diplomat, wanted to be in Moscow to “console” their daughter and son-in-law.

Assad and his wife have three children: Hafez, the PhD student, Zein and Karim.

A 2022 US State Department report to Congress said the extended Assad family’s net worth was between $1bn (£790m) and $2bn (£1.6bn) – though it noted that it was difficult to estimate because their assets are “believed to be spread out and concealed in numerous accounts, real estate portfolios, corporations, and offshore tax havens”.

According to the report, Bashar and Asma maintained “close patronage relationships with Syria’s largest economic players, using their companies to launder money from illicit activities and funnel funds to the regime”.

It also said that Asma had “influence over the economic committee that manages Syria’s ongoing economic crisis” – and had made key decisions on Syria’s “food and fuel subsidies, trade and currency issues”.

She also exerted influence over the Syria Trust for Development, through which most foreign aid for reconstruction in regime-held areas was channelled.

In 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged that Asma had “become one of Syria’s most notorious war profiteers” with the help of her husband and her family.

Another senior Trump administration official described her as the “business head of the family” and an “oligarch” who had been competing with Bashar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf.

He is one of Syria’s richest men and the family rift became public knowledge after he posted videos on social media complaining about his treatment.

Following the fall of the Assad dynasty, Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard said Syrians had been subjected to what she called “a horrifying catalogue of human rights violations that caused untold human suffering on a vast scale”.

This includes “attacks with chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and other war crimes, as well as murder, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination that amount to crimes against humanity”.

She called on the international community to ensure that people suspected of breaking international law and other serious human rights violations must be investigated and prosecuted for their crimes.

On Tuesday, the Islamist rebel leader in Syria said any of the ousted regime’s senior officials found to have been involved in torturing political prisoners would be named.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani also said his so-called Syrian Salvation Government would seek to repatriate officials it identified who fled to another country.

In France, investigative judges have sought an arrest warrant for Assad for alleged complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes, in connection with a deadly chemical attack in Syria in 2013 under the legal concept of universal jurisdiction.

Russia does not extradite its own nationals – a legal process whereby someone is returned to another country or state to face trial for a suspected crime.

Assad is unlikely to leave Russia to go to a country where he could be extradited back to Syria or any other that might charge him with a crime.

This week, the surname Mangione became associated with the killing of health-insurance executive Brian Thompson in New York City, when 26-year-old Luigi Mangione was charged with his murder.

But for decades, the name has meant something entirely different: wealth, power, prominence, philanthropy – particularly within the Italian community of Baltimore.

They’re one of, if not the, “most respected” Italian families in the area, according to Giovanna Aquia Blatterman.

Now 77, Ms Aquia Blatterman, who arrived in the US from Sicily in1953, said she has known three generations of Mangiones.

The family is “generous” and “self-made”, she said, while Luigi, who she met briefly about eight years ago, appeared clever, approachable and handsome – “as you can tell”.

“Something has occurred with him,” she mused, referencing the last several days. “He’s two different people.”

She also insisted he’s innocent until proven guilty: “This is one of the greatest honours of being an American citizen.”

The cluster of streets in downtown Baltimore that make up Little Italy, where Ms Blatterman owns one of the neighbourhood’s many Italian restaurants, has been an enclave for Italian immigrants since they flocked there in the 1800s and 1900s.

An Italian tri-colour flag is still proudly displayed. Even fire hydrants are painted green, white and red.

Nicholas Mangione Sr was born there in 1925, starting life in a poor immigrant family. He spent the first eight years of his life in a one-room flat with an outdoor privy toilet, according to the Baltimore Sun.

During World War Two, he served in the Navy in the South Pacific before returning to his Maryland home where he built a series of enterprises as well as, according to local media, a combative – even aggressive – reputation when it came to his business interests.

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In a 1995 story about him titled ‘Fiery builder has softer side’, Mr Mangione recalled buying the Turf Valley resort, which lies to the west of Baltimore, in 1978.

“People thought I needed money from the mafia to buy this place. They asked me what family I belonged to. I told them, ‘I belong to the Mangione family. The Mangione family of Baltimore County.'”

In 1988, Turf Valley was at the centre of a racism row when the then-manager – Mangione Sr’s now deceased nephew – was recorded using a racial slur. The incident made local news.

But within Baltimore’s tight-knit Italian community, there’s loyalty to Nick Mangione and his memory. Life-long Little Italy resident, 83-year-old Mary Ann Campanella, called him an “excellent man”.

“If you went to him (for help),” she said, “and he looked at you – you got it. He helped everyone.”

The family patriarch – who long ago had moved his expanding family out to the suburbs – died in 2008, leaving behind 10 children, and 37 grandchildren, including Luigi Mangione.

When he was arrested, police say Luigi Mangione was carrying a hand-written document detailing his alleged “ill will” towards corporate elites, which US media have reported included the line “these parasites had it coming”.

Unlike his grandfather, Luigi was born into privilege, attending an all-boys private school in a northern Baltimore suburb, where fees can reach $37,690 a year.

From a rainy Baltimore roadside, the sprawling campus of the Gilman School is visible, including its centrepiece, a double-fronted, 1920s red-brick hall behind which are extensive sporting grounds.

One family associate likened it to Eton, the English boys school attended by aristocratic familes and members of the Royal Family.

Many have wondered how this 26-year-old man went from being a young, promising graduate to an alleged fugitive, arrested in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.

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The Mangiones boast a wealth of cousins, aunts and uncles, who have spread well beyond Little Italy. But the family has remained largely silent following Mr Mangione’s arrest, only releasing a short statement via Republican state lawmaker and cousin Nino Mangione to say they are “shocked and devastated”.

Requests to talk to family members were met either with no response or a firm, but polite: “No comment.”

One simply told us: “Everything that needs to be said has been.”

Dylan Segelbaum, a reporter for local news website the Baltimore Banner, said that as Luigi Mangione grew up, his family owned businesses ranging from country clubs and golf courses to assisted living facilities.

“The Mangione family is prominent in the Baltimore area,” he said.

The name is literally imprinted on Baltimore.

A plaque at the entrance to the Family Center at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center reads: “Donated by Nicholas and Mary Mangione.”

“The family’s very philanthropic,” Mr Segelbaum said, noting the family gave more than $1m to the hospital.

But Ms Blatterman insists the Mangiones have remained “relatable” and don’t “showboat”.

Previously a salon stylist, Ms Blatterman said she cut the hair of Luigi Mangione’s grandmother Mary Mangione, who she calls “Miss Mary”, in the early 1970s.

And, before the Covid pandemic, she said she played bocce (an Italian bowling game) with members of the Mangione family, including Luigi Mangione’s parents, Louis and Kathleen Mangione.

“Kathy has a travel agency. She does trips to Italy,” she said.

While she expressed sympathy for the family of Mr Thompson, 50, the health-executive fatally shot on 4 December, Ms Blatterman said her thoughts are also with the Mangiones.

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“I can’t imagine what the family’s going through. I’m sorry about Mr Thompson, they’re going through hell, too – but so is this family going through hell.”

Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan is known for some of India’s most popular films, including Lagaan and 3 Idiots, and can barely walk down the street without getting mobbed by fans.

What’s less well known is that he secretly quit films during the Covid pandemic in order to spend more time with his loved ones.

“I told my family I’m done with acting and films,” he tells BBC News.

“I [didn’t] want to produce or direct or act. I just wanted to be with the family.”

You’d imagine a major star like Khan deciding to quit the industry would have sent shockwaves through India, a nation that is fully obsessed with films.

But, he explains, his decision went unnoticed at the time because so few movies were being made due to the pandemic.

“No-one knew about it,” he says.

Fans can breathe a sigh of relief, though.

Khan didn’t quit for long. And now he’s back and is promoting Laapataa Ladies – or Lost Ladies – a film he’s produced. It is India’s official pick for the Oscars in the best international feature film category.

Khan says it was his children who convinced him to go back to work.

“They were like, ‘But we can’t spend 24 hours with you. So get real and get a life.’ So they gently nudged me back into the films,” he says.

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At 59, Khan has worked as an actor, director and producer for three decades.

He’s known as one of the three “Khans of Bollywood” – the others being fellow megastars Shah Rukh and Salman.

Known for tackling social issues, Aamir’s films are widely acclaimed as well as breaking box office records.

He is also no stranger to the Oscars. Lagaan, a film about cricket set in the 19th Century during the British Empire, was nominated for best foreign language film in 2002.

Khan is now trying to make history with Laapataa Ladies. If it succeeds, it would be the first Indian film to win the coveted international prize. He will find out whether it has made the shortlist on Tuesday.

Khan said he’s “not quite sure how seriously” to take awards. “Cinema is so subjective,” he says.

But he admits a win would mean a lot to India.

“I think Indians are so film crazy and we’ve been dying to win the Academy Award for an Indian film, which hasn’t happened till now. So the country will go ballistic. They’ll just go mad if we win,” he says.

“So just for the people of our country and for our country, I would be really happy if we win the award.”

Set in rural India, Laapataa Ladies tells the story of a young man bringing the wrong bride home. Meanwhile, his wife ends up lost, having to fend for herself.

It’s a satire looking at the treatment of women, including touching on the sensitive topic of domestic violence.

Khan describes the plot as “a bit Shakespearean”, with its focus on humour and mistaken identities.

But, he adds, it’s saying “a lot of important things about women’s issues, their independence, their right to decide for themselves what they want to do”.

It was these issues that drew him to the film in the first place, he explains.

“Every now and then you get an opportunity as a creative person to actually also sensitise people about certain issues that we face in society,” he says.

“Women all over the world have been subjected to a lot of challenges in their lives. Women have a raw deal in life. So I felt that here is a story which really brings that out well in such a nice way, which is why I wanted to produce it.”

Khan was also “very keen” that his ex-wife, Kiran Rao, should direct the film.

The pair, who married in 2005, announced their separation in 2021. But they have remained close, both professionally and personally.

“I think the reason I chose Kiran was because I knew that she would be very honest with it and that’s what I wanted,” he says.

“We get along really well. We really love each other, we respect each other.

“Our relationship may have changed slightly – but that doesn’t mean what we feel for each other has gone down or something.”

That’s not to say it’s all been plain sailing, however.

Khan admits there were arguments on set.

“We can’t make a film without an argument. So we argue every point and we have strong opinions,” he says.

“But our sensibilities are very similar. We are not talking about fundamental things. We are just trying to sometimes convince the other person a better way of conveying something.”

Bollywood produces hundreds of films every year and has a huge following among Indians globally.

The sway the films and stars have on their fans’ imagination cannot be overstated.

It has had recent success at the Academy Awards, with Naatu Naatu from RRR winning best original song and The Elephant Whisperers awarded best documentary short film.

But victory in the international film category has so far eluded it, something Khan attributes to the competition.

“India has made really great films over the years. Occasionally it’s a matter of the right film not getting sent or the best film not getting sent,” he says.

“But otherwise we have to understand that the films you’re competing against – you’re not competing against five or six films, you’re competing against almost 80 or 90 films, which are the best in the world.”

As to whether a Bollywood film could one day scoop the best overall film award, Khan says it is “possible”.

But Indian film-makers would first need to start making movies for a global market, he adds.

“I’ve never really looked at an international audience,” he says. “We have such a large audience of our own that it doesn’t come in to our mind.

“That will only happen when Indians start making films for a world audience. I don’t think we have the bandwidth for it right now.”

For now, Khan is focusing on a range of projects alongside Laapataa Ladies, which also include his next film Sitaare Zameen Par, due for release in 2025.

Looking further out, he’s hoping to make one film a year, while his “dream project” is to take on Mahabharat – the ancient Indian epic.

But since unretiring from film, he is determined to do things differently. Again, this was influenced by his children.

“My son said, ‘You’re an extreme person’,” he says.

“He said, ‘You’re like a pendulum. You only did films, films, films. And now you want to swing to the other side and do no films and be with family, family, family. There is a middle place also you can think about’.”

Khan says his son told him to “try and bring some balance” into his life.

“And I thought he was right. So since then, that’s what I’ve been trying to do – living a balanced life where I’m working really hard, in fact I’m doing much more work that I ever did, but I don’t work after 6 o’clock any more.”

Khan says he has also started therapy in recent years, inspired by his daughter Ira, who works in mental health.

“I think that’s something that’s really helped me. That’s really helped me understand myself better.

“I’m actually finding that balance between work and a personal life. So I feel that I’ve reached that space now.”

The US has made “direct contact” with the HTS rebels who now control Syria after toppling the Assad regime, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said.

It is the first acknowledgement of direct American contact with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which the US currently still designates as a terrorist organisation.

Blinken was speaking in Jordan after talks with representatives from several Arab countries, Turkey and Europe to discuss the future of Syria.

Officials agreed to support a peaceful transition process in the country, with Jordan’s foreign minister saying that regional powers did not want to see it “descend into chaos”.

A joint communique called for an inclusive Syrian government that respects the rights of minorities and does not offer a base for “terrorist groups”.

The talk both inside and outside Syria after the tumultuous events of recent weeks has been of the vital importance of setting up new governance that represents all Syrians.

At the meeting in Jordan, Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein expressed concern over Syria’s future shared across the Middle East and beyond.

He said regional players did not want to see another Libya – referring to the chaos that ensued after Colonel Gaddafi’s removal from power.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said existing Syrian institutions must be preserved and reformed.

“Never allow terrorism to take advantage of the transition period. And we have to coordinate our efforts and learn from the mistakes of the past,” Fidan said according to Reuters news agency.

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The most powerful rebel group, HTS, has indicated that it is seeking an inclusive government. But the group’s violent jihadist past has left some doubting whether it will live up to such promises.

Blinken has said that Washington has been in direct contact with HTS – in particular over the fate of the long missing American journalist, Austin Tice.

“We’ve been in contact with HTS and with other parties,” Blinken told reporters in Jordan.

Missing from the talks in Jordan was any representative from Syria. The foreign ministers from eight Arab countries that did attend the meeting said they wanted to ensure that Syria was unified and not split along sectarian lines.

Also absent were the two countries that gave financial support to Assad that enabled him to survive in power for so long – Iran and Russia.

The shadow of all the outside forces that battled over Syria for so long hangs heavy on the country’s future.

The emerging political entities in Syria will need cohesion not just inside the country but outside, too, if there is to be any real hope for the Syrian people to build on the heady taste of freedom that they have experienced in the past week.

Syrian rebels ended Bashar al-Assad’s 24-year-long rule, with opposition forces taking the capital and forcing the president to flee to Russia on 8 December.

The overthrow followed a 13-year civil war, which started after Assad crushed pro-democracy protests. The fighting killed more than half a million people, displaced millions more, and embroiled international powers and their proxies.

HTS rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who previously used the name Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has appointed Mohammed al-Bashir as Syria’s interim prime minister, and the world is now watching to see how Syria’s political landscape shapes up after the end of the Assad family’s half-century rule.

HTS was set up under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusra, in 2011 as a direct al-Qaeda affiliate. It was considered to be one of the most effective and deadly groups opposing President Assad.

It was proscribed as a terrorist group by the UN, the US, Turkey and other countries – and currently remains so.

But al-Sharaa has publicly broken ranks with al-Qaeda and HTS’s recent messaging has been one of inclusiveness and a rejection of violence or revenge.

Mystery continues to swirl after nearly a month of drone sightings over New Jersey, sparking fear among residents and furious debate about what the flying objects are – and if they are drones at all.

US authorities have been unable to provide definitive answers, saying only that the objects are not believed to pose a danger to the public or national security.

On Thursday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters that available images suggested that many of the reported drone sightings were actually manned aircraft.

But some lawmakers have criticised the government’s handling of the drones and the lack of information available to the public.

Here’s what we know.

Dozens of drone sightings have been reported over New Jersey since 18 November, according to local authorities.

The drones were initially spotted near the Raritan river, a waterway which feeds into the Round Valley Reservoir – the largest in New Jersey, the Associated Press reported.

The sightings soon spread to other parts of the state, including New Jersey’s coast.

Some of the flights were spotted near Picatinny Arsenal – a sensitive military research facility – as well as near President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course in the town of Bedminster, New Jersey.

In nearby New York City, several drones were reported flying over the Bronx on 12 December, a police official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Officers who responded to the incident saw the drones flying overhead, but they disappeared soon afterwards.

Drones have also been reported in other parts of the state, according to New York State Police.

Police in Connecticut have also confirmed that “suspicious drone activity” has taken place in various parts of the state. A drone detection system has been deployed around the towns of Groton and New London.

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In Maryland, former Republican Governor Larry Hogan claimed he saw what appeared to be “dozens” of drones over his residence in Davidsonville, about 25 miles (40km) from Washington DC.

“Like many who have observed these drones, I do not know if this increasing activity over our skies is a threat to public safety or national security,” he wrote on X. “But the public is growing increasingly concerned and frustrated with the complete lack of transparency and the dismissive attitude of the federal government.”

In late November, the United States Air Force also confirmed that unidentified drones were spotted over three US airbases in the UK: RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk and RAF Feltwell in Norfolk.

UK defence sources told the BBC that suspicion had fallen on a “state actor” being responsible for the incursions.

In October, the Wall Street Journal also reported that mysterious drones were seen for 17 days near US military facilities in Virginia.

In a call with reporters, officials from several US agencies attempted to assure people that the drones were not the work of a foreign actor or a national security threat.

“I think there has been a slight overreaction” an official from the FBI said.

While downplaying public concern, the authorities were keen to reiterate that investigations into the drone sightings were still underway.

“We certainly understand why people are concerned. That’s one of the reasons we’re devoting significant resources,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said.

“At the same time, it’s important to understand that we don’t have any current evidence that there’s a threat to public safety” the DHS added.

Both federal and state authorities have said that they do not believe the drones are dangerous or pose a threat to US national security.

Following a briefing with the Department of Homeland Security on 11 December, New Jersey assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia said the drones appear to avoid detection by traditional methods such as helicopter and radio.

Fantasia said the drones are up to 6ft (1.8m) in diameter, travel with lights turned off and “operate in a co-ordinated manner”.

Her comments stand in stark contrast to the White House, which has suggested that these are “manned aircraft”.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also said that the majority of sightings appear to be lawful, manned flights.

None have been reported in restricted airspace, the statement added.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a statement on Friday saying more and more people are using drones, meaning more people are noticing them in the sky.

It added that while drones can be flown in most locations below 400ft (121m), drones can’t be flown within controlled airspace around an airport without FAA authorisation; over designated, national security-sensitive facilities; in certain military bases, infrastructure and national landmarks; and in airspace covered by temporary flight restrictions.

If the objects are confirmed to be drones – which at this point is unconfirmed – it is unclear who might be operating them.

Citing anonymous “high sources”, New Jersey Republican representative Jeff Van Drew said that they were coming from an Iranian “mothership” in the Atlantic.

The Pentagon swiftly dismissed the comment, saying “there is no truth to that”.

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” deputy spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters.

Another lawmaker, Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi – who is on a congressional committee that looks at China’s Communist Party – told media outlet NewsNation that there is a “non-trivial” chance that China could be involved.

“It’s definitely a possibility and the likelihood that they can then access data that is collected by these drones is very high,” he said.

The Pentagon and White House have both insisted that there is no foreign origin for the objects.

Van Drew and other lawmakers have pushed back on those denials.

“Here’s the deal: they don’t know what it is. They don’t know what it’s about,” Van Drew told Fox News. “They have no idea where it comes from, but they know what it’s not about? That’s nonsense.”

In a separate incident across the country, a northern California man was charged on 11 December with flying a drone over and taking pictures of Vandenberg Space Force Base, located near Santa Barbara.

The incident is alleged to have taken place on 30 November, according to prosecutors.

The man, 39-year-old Chinese national Yinpiao Zhou was arrested just before he boarded a flight to China. He appeared in court on Tuesday and no plea was was taken.

There has been no suggestion that the incident is related to the spate of reported drone sightings on the east coast.

Several lawmakers have suggested that the drones should be shot down and analysed to determine their origin and intentions.

Among them is President-elect Donald Trump, who took to his Truth Social media platform to suggest that drones couldn’t be flying without the government’s knowledge.

“Let the public know, and now,” he wrote. “Otherwise, shoot them down”.

The US Federal Aviation Administration has also established temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drone flights over Bedminster and Picatinny.

In a statement, the FAA also warned that drone operators who conduct unsafe or dangerous operations could face fines of up to $75,000 (£59,000) and have their drone pilot certificates revoked.

In a letter to US President Joe Biden published on 13 December, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy urged federal agencies to “work together” to solve the mystery, as well as push Congress to extend counter-drone capabilities to local law enforcement.

Some residents have suggested they may take action against the drones themselves – something authorities have strongly warned against doing, as it is illegal.

“A good shotgun will fix that problem,” a man commented on a video of a drone on social media.

At least three people have been killed and dozens more wounded after an explosive was thrown into a crowd at a festival in Thailand.

The attack took place shortly before midnight local time on Friday at the Red Cross Doi Loyfa fair, held annually in the Umphang district in the northern Tak province.

Two suspects are being held in custody, but no charges have been pressed, the Associated Press and local media report, citing Thai police.

At least 48 people have been wounded, six of whom are critically injured, police said.

Police were alerted to the incident at 23:30 local time (16:30 GMT) on Friday.

In a statement, the Umphang rescue team said the explosive was thrown and landed at the foot of an outdoor stage where people had been dancing.

Some of the wounded were taken to a nearby hospital, it added.

Several reports suggest the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device (IED).

Footage said to be from the scene, posted on social media, shows scenes of panic as emergency workers and festivalgoers tend to the wounded.

One video appears to show at least two people lying in close proximity being given CPR, as crowds rush around them in a state of confusion.

The camera then pans to a person cutting the trousers off a man to reveal a wound on his leg pouring out blood.

Images taken in the aftermath, shared by the rescue team, show a cordon in place around an area strewn with rubbish and strung with lights.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra shared her condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the bombing in a post on X.

She said she had ordered the police and security agencies to investigate the cause of the explosion and help those affected. She also directed an increase in police officers to oversee all festival events.

According to the Bangkok Post, between 8,000 and 9,000 people attended the week-long festival this year, and the attack took place on the penultimate night of the event.

Umphang is the southernmost district in Thailand’s northern Tak province, which shares a border with Myanmar to the west.