Jimmy Carter: From peanut farmer to one-term president and Nobel winner
Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, swept to power promising never to lie to the American people.
In the turbulent aftermath of Watergate, the former peanut farmer from Georgia pardoned Vietnam draft evaders and became the first US leader to take climate change seriously.
On the international stage, he helped to broker an historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, but he struggled to deal with the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
After a single term in office, he was swept aside by Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, winning just six states.
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Having left the White House, Carter did much to restore his reputation: becoming a tireless worker for peace, the environment and human rights, for which he was recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize.
The longest-lived president in US history, he celebrated his 100th birthday in October 2024. He had been treated for cancer and had spent the last 19 months in hospice care.
James Earl Carter Jr was born on 1 October 1924 in the small town of Plains, Georgia, the eldest of four children.
His segregationist father had started the family peanut business, and his mother, Lillian, was a registered nurse.
Carter’s experience of the Great Depression and staunch Baptist faith underpinned his political philosophy.
A star basketball player in high school, he went on to spend seven years in the US Navy – during which time he married Rosalynn, a friend of his sister – and became a submarine officer. But on the death of his father in 1953, he returned to run the ailing family farm.
The first year’s crop failed through drought, but Carter turned the business around and made himself wealthy in the process.
He entered politics on the ground floor, elected to a series of local school and library boards, before running for the Georgia Senate.
Civil rights campaigner
American politics was ablaze following the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools.
With his background as a farmer from a southern state, Carter might have been expected to oppose reform – but he had different views to his father.
While serving two terms in the state Senate, he avoided clashes with segregationists – including many in the Democratic party.
But on becoming Georgia governor in 1970, he became more overt in his support of civil rights.
“I say to you quite frankly,” he declared in his inaugural speech, “that the time for racial discrimination is over.”
He placed pictures of Martin Luther King on the walls of the capitol building, as the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated outside.
He made sure that African Americans were appointed to public offices.
However, he found it difficult balancing his strong Christian faith with his liberal instincts when it came to abortion law.
Although he supported the rights of women to terminate pregnancy, he refused to increase funding to make this possible.
As Carter launched his campaign for the presidency in 1974, the nation was still reeling from the Watergate scandal.
He put himself forward as a simple peanut farmer, untainted by the questionable ethics of professional politicians on Capitol Hill.
‘Adultery in my heart’
His timing was excellent. Americans wanted an outsider and Carter fitted the bill.
There was surprise when he admitted (in an interview with Playboy magazine) that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times”. But there proved to be no skeletons in his closet.
In the beginning, polls suggested he was only supported by around 4% of Democrats.
Yet, just nine months later, he toppled the incumbent president Gerald Ford, a Republican.
On his first full day in office, he pardoned hundreds of thousands of men who had evaded service in Vietnam – either by fleeing abroad or failing to register with their local draft board.
One Republican critic, Senator Barry Goldwater, described the decision as “the most disgraceful thing that a president has ever done”.
Carter confessed that it was the hardest decision he had made in office.
He appointed women to key positions in his administration and encouraged Rosalynn to maintain a national profile as First Lady.
He championed (unsuccessfully) an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution which would have promised legal protection against discrimination on the grounds of sex.
One of the first international leaders to take climate change seriously, Carter wore jeans and sweaters in the White House, and turned down the heating to conserve energy.
He installed solar panels on the roof – which were later taken down by President Ronald Reagan – and passed laws to protect millions of acres of unspoiled land in Alaska from development.
A disastrous rescue mission
His televised “fireside chats'” were consciously relaxed, but this approach seemed too informal as problems mounted.
As the American economy slipped into recession, Carter’s popularity began to fall.
He tried to persuade the country to accept stringent measures to deal with the energy crisis – including gasoline rationing – but faced bitter opposition in Congress.
Plans to introduce a universal healthcare system also foundered in the legislature, while unemployment and interest rates both soared.
His Middle East policy began in triumph, with President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel signing the Camp David accords in 1978.
But success abroad was short-lived.
The revolution in Iran, which led to the taking of American hostages, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were severe tests.
Carter broke off diplomatic relations with Tehran and implemented trade sanctions in a desperate effort to free the Americans.
An attempt to rescue them by force was a disaster, leaving eight American servicemen dead.
The incident almost certainly put an end to any hope of re-election.
Defeat by Reagan
Carter fought off a serious challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, and achieved 41% of the popular vote in the subsequent election.
But it was not nearly enough to see off his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan.
The former actor swept into the White House with an electoral college landslide.
On the last day of his presidency, Carter announced the successful completion of the negotiations for the release of the hostages.
Iran had delayed the time of their departure until after President Reagan was sworn in.
On leaving office, Carter had one of the lowest approval ratings of any US president. But in subsequent years, he did much to restore his reputation.
On behalf of the US government, he undertook a peace mission to North Korea which ultimately resulted in the Agreed Framework, an early effort to reach an accord on dismantling its nuclear arsenal.
His library, the Carter Presidential Center, became an influential clearing house of ideas and programmes intended to solve international problems and crises.
In 2002, Carter became the third US president, after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to win the Nobel Peace Prize – and the only one to earn it for his post-presidency work.
“The most serious and universal problem,” he said in his Nobel lecture, “is the growing chasm between the richest and the poorest people on earth.”
With Nelson Mandela, he founded The Elders, a group of global leaders who committed themselves to work on peace and human rights.
Modest lifestyle
In retirement, Carter opted for a modest lifestyle.
He eschewed lucrative speaking appearances and seats on corporate boards for a simple life with Rosalynn in Plains, Georgia, where both were born.
Carter did not want to make money from his time in the Oval Office.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” he told the Washington Post. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”
He was the only modern president to return full-time to the house he had lived in before he entered politics, a single-floor, two-bedroom home.
According to the Post, the Carters’ home was valued at $167,000 – less than the Secret Service vehicles parked outside to protect them.
In 2015, he announced that he was being treated for cancer, the disease that killed both his parents and three sisters.
Just a few months after surgery for a broken hip, he was back to work as a volunteer builder with Habitat for Humanity.
The former president and his wife began work with the charity in 1984, and helped to repair more than 4,000 homes in the years since.
He continued to teach at a Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, sometimes welcoming Democratic presidential hopefuls to his class.
In November 2023, Rosalynn Carter died. In tribute, the former president said that his wife of 77 years was “my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished”.
Celebrating his centenary a year later, Carter proved that he still had political antennae.
“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris” in November’s election, he said.
He did manage to cast a ballot for her, although his home state of Georgia ultimately voted for Donald Trump.
Carter’s political philosophy contained the sometimes conflicting elements of a conservative small-town upbringing, and his natural liberal instincts.
But what really drove his lifetime of public service were his deeply held religious beliefs.
“You cannot divorce religious belief and public service,” he said.
“I’ve never detected any conflict between God’s will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.”
How India’s food shortage filled American libraries
In 1996, Ananya Vajpeyi, a doctoral student, discovered the fabled South Asia collection of books at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library.
“I’ve spent time in some of the leading South Asia libraries of the world, at Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia. But nothing has ever matched the unending riches held at the University of Chicago,” Ms Vajpeyi, a fellow at India’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), told me.
The 132-year-old University of Chicago houses more than 800,000 volumes related to South Asia, making it one of the world’s premier collections for studies on the region. But how did such a treasure trove of South Asian literature end up there?
The answer lies in a programme called PL-480, a US initiative launched in 1954 under Public Law 480, also known as the Food for Peace, a hallmark of Cold War diplomacy.
Signed into law by President Dwight D Eisenhower, PL-480 allowed countries like India to buy US grain with local currency, easing their foreign exchange burden and reducing US surpluses. India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages.
The local currency funds were provided at minimal cost to participating US universities. These funds were used to purchase local books, periodicals, phonograph records, and “other media” in multiple Indian languages, enriching collections at over two dozen universities. Institutions like the University of Chicago became hubs for South Asian studies as a result. (Manuscripts were excluded due to Indian antiquity laws.)
“PL-480 has had amazing and unexpected consequences for the University of Chicago and for more than 30 other US collections,” James Nye, director of the Digital South Asia library at University of Chicago, told the BBC.
The process of building an impressive library collection from South Asia was no simple task.
A special team staffed by 60 Indians was established in Delhi in 1959. Initially focused on picking up government publications, the programme expanded over five years to include books and periodicals. By 1968, 20 US universities were receiving materials from the growing collection, as noted by Maureen LP Patterson, a leading bibliographer of South Asian studies.
In a paper published in 1969, Patterson recounted that in the early days of the PL-480, the team in India faced the challenge of sourcing books from a vast, diverse country with an intricate network of languages.
They needed the expertise of booksellers with a reputation for good judgement and efficiency. Given India’s size and the complexity of its literary landscape, no single dealer could handle the procurement on their own, Patterson, who died in 2012, wrote.
Instead, dealers were selected from various publishing hubs, each focusing on specific languages or groups of languages. This collaboration worked seamlessly, with dealers sending titles they were not certain about for approval. The final selection rested with the Delhi office, Patterson noted.
The programme was keen on picking up a comprehensive collection of Indian fiction in all languages. “The policy netted a huge number of detective stories and novels of no lasting value,” wrote Patterson.
In 1963, the choice for acquiring books was narrowed down to “research level material” – and intake of fiction in many languages was halved. By 1966, more than 750,000 books and periodicals were sent to American universities from India, Nepal and Pakistan, with India contributing more than 633,000 items.
“We’ve sent works like History of India from 1000 to 1770 AD, Handicrafts in India, Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psychoanalytic Study, and more,” a report on a meeting in an US library on the programme in 1967 said.
Todd Michelson-Ambelang, librarian for South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wonders if vast collections from the region in US and other Western libraries took away literary resources from the Indian sub-continent.
Founded during Cold War tensions and funded by PL-480, his university’s South Asia centre grew its library to more than 200,000 titles by the 21st Century.
Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 “creates knowledge gaps”, as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources.
It is unclear whether all the books acquired by US universities from India at that time are still available there. According to Maya Dodd, of India’s FLAME University, many books now unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago’s library collections, all marked with the stamp saying “PL-480”.
“For the most part, books that came through the PL-480 programme are still available in South Asia. But preservation is often a challenge due to white ants, pests, and a lack of temperature and humidity control. In contrast, most materials in the West remain well-preserved thanks to the preservation and conservation efforts in our libraries,” Mr Michelson-Ambelang says.
Another reason why Mr Michelson-Ambelang calls the Western libraries colonial archives “partly is because they serve academics, often excluding those outside their institutions. While librarians understand the disparities in access to South Asian materials, copyright laws limit sharing, reinforcing these gaps”.
So, what happened when the PL-480 programme ended?
Mr Nye says the end of the programme in the 1980s, shifted the financial burden to American libraries. “Libraries in the US have had to pay for the selection, acquisition, collection, and delivery of resources,” he said. For example, the University of Chicago now spends more than $100,000 annually on buying books and periodicals through the Library of Congress field office in Delhi.
Ms Vajpeyi believes the books-for-grain deal had a positive outcome. She studied Sanskrit, but her research in University of Chicago spanned Indian and European languages – French, German, Marathi, and Hindi – and touched on linguistics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and more. “At the Regenstein Library, I never failed to find the books I needed or get them quickly if they weren’t already there,” she says.
“The books are safe, valued, accessible and used. I’ve visited libraries, archives and institutions in every part of India and the story in our country is universally dismal. Here they were lost or destroyed or neglected or very often made inaccessible.”
‘It’s unbearable’: Families mourn after S Korea plane crash
A festive trip to Thailand was supposed to be a celebration for Maeng Gi-Su’s nephew and his nephew’s two sons, who were marking the end of their college entrance exams.
Instead, it ended in tragedy when all three died on the Jeju Air plane that crash-landed in South Korea on Sunday morning, killing 179 of the 181 people onboard.
“I can’t believe the entire family has just disappeared,” Maeng, 78, told the BBC.
“My heart aches so much.”
The family were travelling from Bangkok to Muan International Airport, which skidded off the runway after touching down and crashed into a wall shortly after 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT) on Sunday.
All of the passengers on the Boeing 737-800 died, making it the deadliest plane crash on South Korean soil.
Four crew members were among the victims, while two were rescued from the wreckage alive.
The 179 passengers on flight 7C2216 were aged between three and 78 years old, although most were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, according to Yonhap news agency reported. Two Thai nationals are among the dead and the rest are believed to be South Korean, authorities have said.
Five of the people who died were children under the age of 10, with the youngest passenger being a three-year-old boy.
One man in his sixties said five of his family members spanning three generations had been on the plane, including his sister-in-law, his daughter, her husband and their young children, according to Yonhap news agency.
Many of the passengers had been celebrating the Christmas holidays in Thailand and were returning home.
The cousin of one victim, Jongluk Doungmanee, told BBC Thai she was “shocked” when she heard the news.
“I had goosebumps. I couldn’t believe it,” Pornphichaya Chalermsin said.
Jongluk had been living in South Korea for the past five years working in the agriculture industry. She usually travelled to Thailand twice a year during the holidays to visit her ailing father and two children – aged 7 and 15 – from a former marriage.
She had spent over two weeks this time with her husband, who had returned to South Korea earlier in December.
Her father, who suffers from a heart disease, was “devastated” when he found out about her death, said Pornphichaya.
“It is unbearable for him. This was his youngest daughter”, she said, adding that all three of his children work abroad.
- Did bird strike contribute to South Korea plane crash? What we know so far
Another 71-year-old father, Jeon Je-young, told the Reuters news agency that his daughter Mi-Sook, who was identified by her fingerprints, had been on her way home after travelling with friends to Bangkok for the festivities.
“My daughter, who is only in her mid-40s, ended up like this,” he said, adding that he had last seen her on 21 December, when she brought some food and next year’s calendar to his house – that would become their last moment together.
Mi-Sook leaves behind a husband and teenage daughter.
“This is unbelievable”, said Jeon.
One woman said her sister, who had been having a tough time decided to visit Thailand as life began to improve for her.
“She’s had so many hardships and gone traveling because her situation was only just beginning to improve,” she told Yonhap news agency.
The two flight attendants who survived the crash were found in the tail end of the plane, the most intact part of the wreckage.
One was a 33-year-old man, with the surname Lee, who was rushed to a hospital in Mokpo, about 25km (15.5 mi) south of the airport, but was later transferred to Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital in the capital, Yonhap news agency reported.
“When I woke up, I had already been rescued,” he told doctors at the hospital, according to its director Ju Woong, who spoke during a press briefing.
The survivor, who suffered multiple fractures, is receiving special care due to the risk of after-effects, including total paralysis, Ju said.
The other survivor, a 25-year-old female flight attendant with the surname Koo, is being treated at Asan Medical Center in eastern Seoul, Yonhap added.
She has sustained head and ankle injuries but is reportedly in a stable condition.
‘I saw thick, dark smoke – then an explosion’
It’s not yet known exactly what caused the disaster, but a number of eye witnesses say they could see that the plane was in trouble before the crash.
Restaurant owner Im Young-Hak said he initially thought it was an oil tanker accident.
“I went outside and saw thick, dark smoke. After that, I heard a loud explosion, not from the crash itself. Then there were more explosions – at least seven,” he told Reuters.
“We feel bad when accidents happen on the other side of the world, but this happened right here. It’s traumatic.”
Yoo Jae-yong, 41, who was staying near to the airport, told local media he saw a spark on the right wing shortly before the crash.
Kim Yong-cheol, 70, said the plane failed to land initially and circled back to try again.
He added that he witnessed “black smoke billowing into the sky” after hearing a “loud explosion”, Yonhap agency reported.
One firefighter who was dispatched to the scene told Reuters he had never seen something “on this scale”.
BBC reporters on the ground have said the sounds of family members crying echoed through the terminal on Sunday evening, while others are angry at how long it is taking to identify the bodies.
Hundreds remain at Muan International Airport waiting for loved ones to be identified.
Some have given DNA saliva samples to officials to help identify the bodies of victims, and the government has offered funeral services and temporary housing to bereaved families.
A national period of mourning has also been declared for the next seven days.
But for all the loved ones of those who died, many questions still remain – not least the cause of the crash, and whether it could have been averted.
“The water near the airport is not deep,” Jeon told Reuters.
“(There) are softer fields than this cement runway. Why couldn’t the pilot land there instead?”
His daughter Mi-Sook was almost home, so saw no reason to call and leave a final message, he says.
“She was almost home – she thought she was coming home”.
Did bird strike contribute to South Korea plane crash? What we know so far
More than 170 people have died after a plane crashed as it was landing in South Korea on Sunday morning.
The Jeju Air plane came off the runway before colliding with a wall at Muan International Airport in the south west of the country.
The plane, which was returning from Bangkok, in Thailand, was carrying 181 people – 179 of whom have died, while two crew members were rescued from the wreckage.
Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash, which fire officials have indicated may have occurred due to a bird strike and bad weather. However experts have warned the crash could have been caused by a number of factors.
Was bird strike a factor in the crash?
The flight, 7C2216, was a Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air, Korea’s most popular budget airline.
The plane arrived in Muan at about 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT).
A South Korean transport official said that the plane had been attempting to land but was forced to hold off after air traffic control gave a bird strike warning – an alert about the risk of a collision with birds.
About two minutes later, the pilot called in a Mayday and air traffic command gave permission for the plane to land from the opposite direction, the official said.
One video appears to show the plane touching down without using its wheels or any other landing gear. It skidded down the runway and crashed into a wall before erupting into flames.
A witness told the South Korean news agency Yonhap that they heard a “loud bang” followed by a “series of explosions”.
Videos from the scene show the plane ablaze with smoke billowing into the sky. Fire crews have since extinguished the fire.
Lee Jeong-hyun, the chief of the Muan fire department, told a televised briefing that the tail section of the plane was identifiable but “one cannot recognise the shape of the rest of the plane”.
He said that the bird strike and bad weather may have caused the crash – but that the exact cause is still being investigated. The flight and voice recorders from the plane have been recovered, though the Yonhap news agency reported that the former was damaged.
One passenger on the flight messaged a relative, saying that a bird “was stuck in the wing” and that the plane could not land, local media reported.
Officials, however, have not confirmed whether the plane did actually collide with any birds.
The head of Jeju Air’s management said that the crash was not due to “any maintenance issues”, Yonhap reported.
The South Korean transport department said that the head pilot on the flight had held the role since 2019 and had more than 6,800 hours of flight experience.
Geoffrey Thomas, an aviation expert and editor of Airline News, told the BBC that South Korea and its airlines were considered “industry best practice” and that both the aircraft and the airline have an “excellent safety record”.
He added: “A lot of things about this tragedy don’t make sense.”
What is a bird strike?
A bird strike is a collision between a plane in flight and a bird. They are very common – in the UK, there were more than 1,400 bird strikes reported in 2022, only about 100 of which affected the plane, according to data from the Civil Aviation Authority.
The best known bird strike occurred in 2009, when an Airbus plane made an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River after colliding with a flock of geese. All 155 passengers and crew survived.
Professor Doug Drury, who teaches aviation at CQUniversity Australia, wrote in an article for The Conversation this summer that Boeing planes have turbofan engines, which can be severely damaged in a bird strike.
He said that pilots are trained to be especially vigilant during the early morning or at sunset, when birds are most active.
But some aviation experts are sceptical about whether a bird strike could have caused the crash at Muan Airport.
“Typically they [bird strike] don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves,” Mr Thomas told Reuters.
Australian airline safety expert Geoffrey Dell also told the news agency: “I’ve never seen a bird strike prevent the landing gear from being extended.”
Who was on board?
The plane was carrying 175 passengers and six crew. Two of the passengers were Thai and the rest are believed to have been South Korean, authorities have said. Many are thought to have been returning from a Christmas holiday in Thailand.
The official death toll stands at 179 – making it the deadliest plane crash in South Korean history.
All the passengers and four members of crew died.
Authorities have so far identified at least 88 bodies.
Five of the people who died were children under the age of 10. The youngest passenger was a three-year-old boy and the oldest was 78, authorities said, citing the passenger manifest.
South Korea’s National Fire Agency said two members of flight crew – a man and a woman – survived the crash. They were found in the tail side of the aircraft after the crash and taken to hospital, it said.
More than 1,500 emergency personnel have been deployed as part of recovery efforts, including 490 fire employees and 455 police officers. They have been searching the area around the runway for parts of the plane and those who were onboard.
What’s been the response?
Acting President Choi Sang-mok has declared a special disaster zone in Muan, which makes central government funding available to the local government and victims.
All flights to and from Muan International Airport have been cancelled.
Families of the victims of the crash have been travelling to the airport in the hope of finding out what happened to their relatives. Video footage from Reuters shows officials reading names of the victims out loud.
Airport authorities and the Red Cross have set up more than a dozen tents in the airport for bereaved families to grieve in private.
Sounds of crying echoed through the terminal. Some are frustrated at how long it is taking to identify the bodies.
Jeju Air has apologised to families. Its chief executive said in a news conference that the airline had no history of accidents. It is believed that Sunday’s crash has been the only fatal accident since the airline was launched in 2005.
Plane manufacturer Boeing has offered condolences to those affected.
Choi, South Korea’s acting president, said: “I express my deepest condolences to the many victims in the incident. I will do all I can for the injured to quickly recover.”
The government has declared a period of national mourning for the country for the next seven days, during which flags at government offices will be lowered.
Chlamydia could make koalas extinct. Can a vaccine save them in time?
On the table, unconscious and stretched out on a pillow, Joe Mangy looks deceptively peaceful. The koala’s watery, red-rimmed eyes are the only sign of the disease at war with his body.
Tubes snarl out of a mask covering his face as a vet tech listens to his chest with a stethoscope. He is not healing as well as they had hoped.
Eight days earlier, Joe Mangy – who is about two years old – was found wandering in the middle of a suburban road. Dazed and confused, eyes nearly glued shut with mucus, he was rushed here, to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary’s hospital.
Enveloped by rainforest on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the park is full of koalas like this.
Outside the clinic, in a “Koala Rehab Centre” faintly perfumed by eucalyptus leaves, is a three-year-old recovering from a hysterectomy. “It saved her life… but she can’t reproduce,” the head vet Michael Pyne says.
Another male koala stares blankly through narrowed slits. His left tear duct is so inflamed his eyeball is barely visible.
This hospital is ground zero of a grim chlamydia epidemic which is killing thousands of koalas and making even more sterile, pushing the national icons to the brink of extinction.
But it’s also at the core of desperate bid to save them with a vaccine – frustrated efforts which, after over a decade, are still tied up in regulation and running out of both time and money.
Biggest and deadliest threat
Even a few decades ago, spotting a koala snuggled in a backyard tree was nothing out of the ordinary. They were plentiful on the country’s populous east coast.
But in recent times the species has been in dramatic decline – in some places plummeting by 80% in just 10 years.
Land clearing and urbanisation are leaving the marsupials hungry and homeless, while natural disasters are drowning or cooking them en masse.
“[But] it’s the chlamydia that shot up tremendously – almost exponentially,” says Dr Pyne, who has run the Currumbin clinic for more than 20 years.
“You get days where you’re euthanising heaps of koalas that just come in completely ravaged.”
Estimates vary greatly – koalas are famously difficult to count – but some groups say as few as 50,000 of the animals are left in the wild and the species is officially listed as endangered on most of the eastern seaboard. There are now fears the animals will be extinct in some states within a generation.
Dr Pyne wistfully recounts “the early days” when his hospital only saw a handful of koalas a year.
They now see 400.
So many come through the door that the team has started giving them two names, a vet nurse says, cradling Joe Mangy as he wakes from the anaesthetic. His last name is a nod to the state of his eyes when he first arrived, she explains.
Of the top reasons koalas are brought into wildlife hospitals – vehicle strikes, pet attacks and chlamydia – the bacterial infection is the biggest and deadliest.
It results in conjunctivitis for koalas like Joe Mangy, but presents as an infection of the genitals and urinary system for others. Particularly unlucky animals, get both at the same time.
At its worst, the ocular form can be so bad koalas are blinded and starve to death, while the urogenital infection produces giant fluid-filled cysts so “nasty” everyday bodily functions like passing urine make the animals cry out in pain.
“Their reproductive system falls apart,” Dr Pyne explains.
If caught early enough, treatment is an option, but that in itself is a potentially fatal “nightmare” as the antibiotics destroy the gut bacteria which allow koalas to digest otherwise toxic eucalyptus leaves – their main food source.
On a species level though, the disease, which spreads through bodily fluids, causes even greater ruin.
Chlamydia is not uncommon in other animals – koalas are suspected to have first caught it from livestock – but the spread and intensity of the disease amongst the marsupials is unmatched.
Experts estimate around half of koalas in Queensland and New South Wales could be infected, but just a suburb away from Currumbin, in Elanora, that has climbed beyond 80%.
It is the most diseased population in the region and numbers have been “falling off a cliff”, Dr Pyne says. “It’s a disaster.”
Enter the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and their vaccine, which aims to prevent and treat chlamydia in koalas and has been almost two decades in the making.
Alongside Currumbin, they’re trying to save the Elanora koalas from oblivion: capturing 30 youngsters and vaccinating them, before recatching them at intervals over three years to track their health.
So far only three of the vaccinated koalas in this research trial have contracted the disease, though all recovered, and encouragingly, more than two dozen joeys have been born – bucking the infertility trend.
“There’s generations of koalas now that have come through. We’ve got grand joeys,” Dr Pyne says excitedly.
Currumbin has also been vaccinating every koala which comes through their hospital, and have reached about 400 koalas this way.
But treating and vaccinating each koala with chlamydia costs them about A$7,000 (£3,500, $4,500). Capturing, jabbing, and tracking each wild Elanora koala is basically double that.
Two hours away, researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) are doing their best to flatten the wave of disease too, with a separate vaccine.
They inoculate about 2,000 koalas a year through wildlife hospital trials and tack themselves onto development projects or research studies in the region that involve their capture.
They’ve just wrapped a decade’s-worth of those projects into one study of more than 600 animals – the largest and longest of its kind.
Incredibly, deaths dropped by two thirds among vaccinated koalas.
Molecular biologist Samuel Phillips tells the BBC about one local koala population they studied which was at risk of extinction. Authorities are now looking at translocating some animals so they don’t overpopulate the area.
“It turned it around completely.”
And crucially, the study found that the koalas that did contract chlamydia were doing so later in life, after their peak breeding years had begun.
Dr Phillips and his research partner Peter Timms have now submitted their vaccine to the federal regulator for approval but say they’re keeping their hopes in check.
“There’ll be hurdles,” Dr Timms explains.
In the meantime, for their small, overstretched team, dividing time and funding is an impossible balance. Do they involve themselves in as many trials as possible to help small groups of koalas now, or do they devote their efforts to advancing the tedious research and approval process which could help a huge cohort of them down the track?
“People come to us semi-regularly and say, ‘Can we vaccinate more koalas?’ And the answer at some point is ‘No’, because otherwise we’re just spending all our time and energy doing [that],” Dr Timms says.
‘Death by a thousand cuts’
It has now been a decade since these two research teams first started seeing results, and there is still no real timeline on when a jab will be ready.
And even when it is, there are huge barriers to any roll out.
While making the vaccine isn’t that costly, finding, capturing, and vaccinating wild koalas is extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming.
Dr Phillips says they would have to strategically target select populations, though they’re not yet sure how many koalas in each they’d need to treat to reverse decline.
That challenge will be doubly complicated with the QUT vaccine, though, because it requires two doses, as opposed to UniSC’s single-shot formula.
The QUT team has been developing an implant – inspired by a human contraceptive device – that dissolves after four weeks to provide the booster. It will be trialled on Currumbin’s captive koalas next year.
Then there is the question of funding, which has been, and continues to be, fickle. Both vaccine developers provide their shots to wildlife hospitals and research trials for free, relying on individual donors, generosity from their universities, and the unpredictable whims of election cycles.
State and federal governments are the biggest financial backers of the vaccine projects – last year Canberra gave QUT and UniSC A$750,000 each.
“No-one wants to imagine an Australia without koalas,” Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said at the time.
But government contributions are random, and never quite enough.
“I cannot believe somebody will not come along tomorrow and say ‘You need to vaccinate? Here’s my cheque to cover the next 10 years’. But we can’t find them,” Dr Timms says.
However, the biggest barrier is the mountain of red tape researchers are yet to cut through.
Both groups have conservation charities and wildlife hospitals knocking down the door, desperate for access, but until they go through the “painful” approval process, their hands are largely tied.
“[It’s] a critical step that is just taking too long. It kills me,” Dr Pyne says.
“We’ve kind of passed it being urgent. It was urgent probably 10 years ago.”
Adding to their despondency, is a fact all involved stress repeatedly: the vaccine is simply not enough to save the species.
And so even the lucky koalas like Joe Mangy, who dodge death by chlamydia and return to the wild, still must face off against a myriad of other mortal threats.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts, right?” Dr Timms says.
Georgia’s outgoing president refuses to quit as successor sworn in
Thousands of Georgians protested in the capital Tbilisi as a new president allied with the ruling Georgian Dream party was inaugurated.
Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former pro-footballer, has been sworn in during a critical political period for the country after the government suspended its application to join the European Union.
Georgian Dream won parliamentary elections in October, but the victory was mired in allegations of fraud which have since sparked several street protests.
Outgoing president Salome Zourabichvili refused to step down on Sunday, saying she was the “only legitimate president”.
Addressing crowds gathered outside, Zourabichvili said she would leave the presidential palace but branded her successor illegitimate.
“This building was a symbol only as long as a legitimate president was sitting here,” she said.
A few minutes’ walk away, Kavelashvili was sworn in at a closed-doors ceremony in parliament, where he was accompanied by his family. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze also attended the inauguration.
Speaking after taking the oath, Kavelashvili went on to praise Georgian “traditions, values, national identity, the sanctity of the family, and faith”.
“Our history clearly shows that, after countless struggles to defend our homeland and traditions, peace has always been one of the main goals and values for the Georgian people,” he said.
Georgia’s four main opposition groups have rejected Kavelashvili and boycotted parliament.
Kavelashvili is a former MP with the Georgian Dream party and was the only candidate for the job. Zourabichvili has previously denounced his election as a travesty.
- Zourabichvili: Georgia’s pro-West president refusing to step down
Georgian Dream has become increasingly authoritarian in recent years, passing Russian-style laws targeting media and non-government groups who receive foreign funding, and the LGBT community.
It refused to join Western sanctions on Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and called the West the “global war party”, making a mockery of its stated aim of joining the EU and Nato.
An overwhelming majority of Georgians back the country’s path to the EU and it is part of the constitution.
But in November, the country’s ruling party said the government would not seek EU accession talks until 2028.
The announcement sparked days of protests, and riot police used tear gas and water cannon against protesters, who fought back by throwing fireworks and stones.
On Saturday, protesters waving Georgian and EU flags gathered again ahead of the inauguration, forming a human chain that spanned kilometres.
“I am out in the street together with my whole family trying somehow to tear out this small country out of the claws of the Russian empire,” one protester told the Associated Press.
The US this week imposed sanctions on Georgia’s former prime minister and billionaire founder of Georgian Dream, Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Georgia is a parliamentary democracy with the president the head of state, and the prime minister the head of parliament.
When Zourabichvili became president in 2018 she was endorsed by Georgian Dream, but she has since condemned their contested election victory in late October as a “Russian special operation” and backed nightly pro-EU protests outside parliament.
New elections could take up to four years, Syria rebel leader says
Holding new elections in Syria could take up to four years, rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has said in a broadcast interview.
This is the first time he has given a timeline for possible elections in Syria since his group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) led a rebel offensive that ousted former President Bashar al-Assad.
In the interview with Saudi state broadcaster Al Arabiya on Sunday, he said drafting a new constitution could take up to three years.
He said it could also be a year before Syrians begin to see significant change and improvements to public services following the overthrow of the Assad regime.
Sharaa said Syria needed to rebuild its legal system and would have to hold a comprehensive population census to run legitimate elections.
Sharaa – previously known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani – has led the country’s new authorities after the Assad presidency fell earlier this month.
Since then, questions have been raised over how HTS will govern the multi-ethnic country.
HTS began as a jihadist group – espousing violence to achieve its goal of establishing a state governed by Islamic law (Sharia) – but has distanced itself from that past in recent years.
Sharaa said the group, which was once aligned with Islamic State and al- Qaeda and is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN and many countries, will be “dissolved” at an upcoming national dialogue conference but gave no further details.
The gathering could be the first test of whether Syria’s new leadership can achieve the promised goal of uniting the country after thirteen years of civil war.
Responding to criticism of his transitional government, he said the appointments made were “essential” and not meant to exclude anyone.
Syria is home to many ethnic and religious groups, including Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Christians, Druze, Alawite Shia and Arab Sunnis, the last of whom make up a majority of the Muslim population.
His group have promised to protect the rights and freedoms of minorities in the country.
Meanwhile, nearly 300 people have been arrested in the past week in a crackdown on Assad loyalists, according to a UK-based war monitor.
Those arrested include informants, pro-regime fighters and former soldiers, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
He told AFP news agency the arrests had been taking place “with the cooperation of local populations”.
Syrian state news agency Sana also reported arrests this week targeting “Assad militia members” where weapons and ammunition were seized.
Lost city found by accident and a fly’s brain mapped: 2024’s scientific wins
A total solar eclipse seen by millions, a lost jungle city discovered by accident and hope for the almost extinct northern white rhino – science has given us a lot to get excited about this year.
One of the biggest news stories was about making space travel cheaper and easier, with Elon Musk’s Starship making a giant step towards humanity having a reusable rocket.
Of course it’s not all been positive. In bad news for the planet, for example, it is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the world’s warmest year on record.
But there has been a lot to celebrate. Here are seven of our favourite uplifting science stories of the year.
That ‘chopsticks’ rocket catch
In October, Elon Musk’s Starship rocket completed a world first after part of it was captured on its return to the launch pad.
The SpaceX vehicle’s lower booster rocket flew back to its launch tower, instead of falling into the sea. It was caught in a giant pair of mechanical arms, or “chopsticks” as part of its fifth test flight.
It brought SpaceX’s ambition of developing a fully reusable and rapidly deployable rocket to go to the Moon and maybe even Mars a big step closer.
“A day for the history books,” engineers at SpaceX declared as the booster landed safely.
You can read more about the ‘chopsticks’ moment here.
Mapping the fly brain
They can walk, hover and the males can even sing love songs to woo mates – all this with a brain that’s tinier than a pinhead.
But it wasn’t until October that scientists studying the brain of a fruit fly mapped the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections.
It was the most detailed analysis of the brain of an adult animal ever produced, and one leading brain specialist described the breakthrough as a “huge leap” in our understanding of our own brains.
One of the research leaders said it would shed new light into “the mechanism of thought”. Read more about the story here.
Lost Mayan city found ‘by accident’
Imagine you’ve Googled something, you get to page 16 of the results and: “Hold on, is that a lost Mayan city?”
Well that’s what happened to Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in the US, who came across a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring.
When he processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.
In the city, which had disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico, archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields and amphitheatres.
The complex – which researchers named Valeriana – was revealed using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.
World’s first IVF rhino pregnancy
There are only two northern white rhinos left in the world, but we reported on a fertility breakthrough that offered hope for saving the species.
Scientists achieved the world’s first IVF rhino pregnancy, successfully transferring a lab-created rhino embryo into a surrogate mother.
The procedure was carried out with southern white rhinos, a closely related sub-species of northern whites which still number in the thousands, and took 13 attempts to accomplish.
The mother eventually died of an infection, but a post-mortem revealed that the 6.5cm male foetus was developing well and had a 95% chance of being born alive, showing that a viable pregnancy through rhino IVF is possible.
There are 30 precious northern white rhino embryos in existence. The next step would be repeating the success with some of these embryos.
Conservation slowed nature loss
With human activity driving what conservation charity the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) calls a “catastrophic” loss of species, it can sometimes feel like we don’t hear an awful lot of good news about nature.
But a ten-year study showed conservation actions are effective at reducing global biodiversity loss.
Scientists from dozens of research institutes reviewed 665 trials of conservation measures in different countries and oceans, and found they had had a positive effect in two out of every three cases.
The measures ranged from hatching Chinook salmon to the eradication of invasive algae, and the study’s authors said their findings offered a “ray of light” for those working to protect threatened animals and plants.
Read more about the story here.
The solar eclipse that stunned millions
Tens of millions of people across Mexico, the US and Canada had their heads turned, literally by a total solar eclipse.
This is where the Moon moves between the Earth and the Sun, extinguishing its light.
A total solar eclipse occurs somewhere on Earth roughly every 18 months, but they are often in quite unpopulated areas, whereas this one had major cities including Dallas in its path.
The path of totality – the area where people could see the Moon totally block the Sun – was also much wider this year than it was during the spectacular total solar eclipse of 2017.
For more on the story read here.
New life from beloved Sycamore Gap tree
Millions once visited Sycamore Gap, the famous sycamore tree nestled in a gap in Hadrian’s Wall.
So when it was cut down in 2023, naturally a national outpouring of shock and dismay followed.
But in March, new life sprung from the tree’s rescued seeds and twigs, giving hope that the iconic tree has a future.
BBC News saw the new shoots on a rare visit to the secret National Trust centre protecting the seedlings.
Young twigs and seeds thrown to the ground when the tree toppled were salvaged by the National Trust, which cares for the site with the Northumberland National Park Authority.
The saplings are now being given to charities, groups and individuals as “trees of hope”.
Quiz of the Year, Part 4: Why did 100 couples all say ‘I do’ together?
How well do you remember the stories and people in the news from the year just ending?
Test your memory of 2024 in our four-part Christmas quiz – 52 questions for 52 weeks of the year.
Part four covers October to December.
Catch up with the previous parts.
Part one: January to March
Part two: April to June
Part three: July to September
Fancy some more? Have a go at something from the archives.
Tourist killed in shark attack off Egyptian coast
A shark attack off of Egypt’s Red Sea coastline has left one tourist dead and another injured, officials have said.
In a statement, the north African nation’s environment ministry said Sunday’s incident occurred north of Marsa Alam, a resort town in eastern Egypt popular with divers.
It added that the attack occurred in “deep waters outside of the designated swimming area”.
While the ministry only said that the two victims were foreign, the AFP news agency reported they were Italian nationals, citing an unnamed source at the Italian foreign ministry.
The 48-year-old man who died was a resident of Rome, while the injured man was 69, according to AFP.
Egyptian officials said the two tourists were transported to a hospital in Port Ghalib, around 30 miles north of Marsa Alam.
The swimming area in Marsa Alam will be closed and the incident is being investigated, authorities said.
In the past 10 years, there have been four confirmed fatalities due to shark attacks in the Red Sea, according to data compiled by the independent Shark Research Institute.
The last to occur happened in June 2023 near Hurguda and involved a 24-year-old Russian man.
Did bird strike contribute to South Korea plane crash? What we know so far
More than 170 people have died after a plane crashed as it was landing in South Korea on Sunday morning.
The Jeju Air plane came off the runway before colliding with a wall at Muan International Airport in the south west of the country.
The plane, which was returning from Bangkok, in Thailand, was carrying 181 people – 179 of whom have died, while two crew members were rescued from the wreckage.
Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash, which fire officials have indicated may have occurred due to a bird strike and bad weather. However experts have warned the crash could have been caused by a number of factors.
Was bird strike a factor in the crash?
The flight, 7C2216, was a Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air, Korea’s most popular budget airline.
The plane arrived in Muan at about 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT).
A South Korean transport official said that the plane had been attempting to land but was forced to hold off after air traffic control gave a bird strike warning – an alert about the risk of a collision with birds.
About two minutes later, the pilot called in a Mayday and air traffic command gave permission for the plane to land from the opposite direction, the official said.
One video appears to show the plane touching down without using its wheels or any other landing gear. It skidded down the runway and crashed into a wall before erupting into flames.
A witness told the South Korean news agency Yonhap that they heard a “loud bang” followed by a “series of explosions”.
Videos from the scene show the plane ablaze with smoke billowing into the sky. Fire crews have since extinguished the fire.
Lee Jeong-hyun, the chief of the Muan fire department, told a televised briefing that the tail section of the plane was identifiable but “one cannot recognise the shape of the rest of the plane”.
He said that the bird strike and bad weather may have caused the crash – but that the exact cause is still being investigated. The flight and voice recorders from the plane have been recovered, though the Yonhap news agency reported that the former was damaged.
One passenger on the flight messaged a relative, saying that a bird “was stuck in the wing” and that the plane could not land, local media reported.
Officials, however, have not confirmed whether the plane did actually collide with any birds.
The head of Jeju Air’s management said that the crash was not due to “any maintenance issues”, Yonhap reported.
The South Korean transport department said that the head pilot on the flight had held the role since 2019 and had more than 6,800 hours of flight experience.
Geoffrey Thomas, an aviation expert and editor of Airline News, told the BBC that South Korea and its airlines were considered “industry best practice” and that both the aircraft and the airline have an “excellent safety record”.
He added: “A lot of things about this tragedy don’t make sense.”
What is a bird strike?
A bird strike is a collision between a plane in flight and a bird. They are very common – in the UK, there were more than 1,400 bird strikes reported in 2022, only about 100 of which affected the plane, according to data from the Civil Aviation Authority.
The best known bird strike occurred in 2009, when an Airbus plane made an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River after colliding with a flock of geese. All 155 passengers and crew survived.
Professor Doug Drury, who teaches aviation at CQUniversity Australia, wrote in an article for The Conversation this summer that Boeing planes have turbofan engines, which can be severely damaged in a bird strike.
He said that pilots are trained to be especially vigilant during the early morning or at sunset, when birds are most active.
But some aviation experts are sceptical about whether a bird strike could have caused the crash at Muan Airport.
“Typically they [bird strike] don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves,” Mr Thomas told Reuters.
Australian airline safety expert Geoffrey Dell also told the news agency: “I’ve never seen a bird strike prevent the landing gear from being extended.”
Who was on board?
The plane was carrying 175 passengers and six crew. Two of the passengers were Thai and the rest are believed to have been South Korean, authorities have said. Many are thought to have been returning from a Christmas holiday in Thailand.
The official death toll stands at 179 – making it the deadliest plane crash in South Korean history.
All the passengers and four members of crew died.
Authorities have so far identified at least 88 bodies.
Five of the people who died were children under the age of 10. The youngest passenger was a three-year-old boy and the oldest was 78, authorities said, citing the passenger manifest.
South Korea’s National Fire Agency said two members of flight crew – a man and a woman – survived the crash. They were found in the tail side of the aircraft after the crash and taken to hospital, it said.
More than 1,500 emergency personnel have been deployed as part of recovery efforts, including 490 fire employees and 455 police officers. They have been searching the area around the runway for parts of the plane and those who were onboard.
What’s been the response?
Acting President Choi Sang-mok has declared a special disaster zone in Muan, which makes central government funding available to the local government and victims.
All flights to and from Muan International Airport have been cancelled.
Families of the victims of the crash have been travelling to the airport in the hope of finding out what happened to their relatives. Video footage from Reuters shows officials reading names of the victims out loud.
Airport authorities and the Red Cross have set up more than a dozen tents in the airport for bereaved families to grieve in private.
Sounds of crying echoed through the terminal. Some are frustrated at how long it is taking to identify the bodies.
Jeju Air has apologised to families. Its chief executive said in a news conference that the airline had no history of accidents. It is believed that Sunday’s crash has been the only fatal accident since the airline was launched in 2005.
Plane manufacturer Boeing has offered condolences to those affected.
Choi, South Korea’s acting president, said: “I express my deepest condolences to the many victims in the incident. I will do all I can for the injured to quickly recover.”
The government has declared a period of national mourning for the country for the next seven days, during which flags at government offices will be lowered.
Barbados fishing industry still reeling from hurricane aftermath
There are few clearer signs of the destructive power that Hurricane Beryl unleashed on Barbados in July than the scene at the temporary boatyard in the capital, Bridgetown.
Scores of mangled and cracked vessels sit on stacks, gaping holes in their hulls, their rudders snapped off and cabin windows broken.
Yet these were the lucky ones.
At least they can be repaired and put back out to sea. Many others sank, taking entire family incomes with them.
When Beryl lashed Barbados, the island’s fishing fleet was devastated in a matter of hours. About 75% of the active fleet was damaged, with 88 boats totally destroyed.
Charles Carter, who owns a blue-and-black fishing vessel called Joyce, was among those affected.
“It’s been real bad, I can tell you. I had to change both sides of the hull, up to the waterline,” he says, pointing at the now pristine boat in front of us.
It has taken months of restoration and thousands of dollars to get it back to this point, during which time Charles has barely been able to fish.
“That’s my living, my livelihood, fishing is all I do,” he says.
“The fishing industry is mash up,” echoes his friend, Captain Euride. “We’re just trying to get back the pieces.”
Now, six months after the storm, there are signs of calmer waters. On a warm Saturday, several repaired vessels were put back into the ocean with the help of a crane, a trailer and some government support.
Seeing Joyce back on the water is a welcome sight for all fishermen in Barbados.
But Barbadians are acutely aware that climate change means more active and powerful Atlantic hurricane seasons – and it may be just another year or two before the fishing industry is struck again. Beryl, for example, was the earliest-forming Category 5 storm on record.
Few understand the extent of the problem better than the island’s Chief Fisheries Officer, Dr Shelly Ann Cox.
“Our captains have been reporting that sea conditions have changed,” she explains. “Higher swells, sea surface temperatures are much warmer and they’re having difficulty getting flying fish now at the beginning of our pelagic season.”
The flying fish is a national symbol in Barbados and a key part of the island’s cuisine. But climate change has been harming the stocks for years.
At the Oistins Fish Market in Bridgetown, flying fish are still available, along with marlin, mahi-mahi and tuna, though only a handful of stalls are open.
At one of them, Cornelius Carrington, from the Freedom Fish House. fillets a kingfish with the speed and dexterity of a man who has spent many years with a fish knife in his hands.
“Beryl was like a surprise attack, like an ambush,” says Cornelius, in a deep baritone voice, over the market’s chatter, reggae and thwack of cleavers on chopping boards.
Cornelius lost one of his two boats in Hurricane Beryl. “It’s the first time a hurricane has come from the south like that, normally storms hit us from the north,” he said.
Although his second boat allowed him to stay afloat financially, Cornelius thinks the hand of climate change is increasingly present in the fishermen’s fate.
“Right now, everything has changed. The tides are changing, the weather is changing, the temperature of the sea, the whole pattern has changed.”
The effects are also being felt in the tourism industry, he says, with hotels and restaurants struggling to find enough fish to meet demand each month.
For Dr Shelly Ann Cox, public education is key and, she says, the message is getting through.
“Perhaps because we are an island and we’re so connected to the water, people in Barbados can speak well on the impact on climate change and what that means for our country,” she says.
“I think if you speak to children as well, they’re very knowledgeable about the topic.”
To see for myself, I visited a secondary school – Harrison College – as a member of a local NGO, the Caribbean Youth Environmental Network (CYEN), talked to members of the school’s Environmental Club about climate change.
The CYEN representative, Sheldon Marshall, is an energy expert who quizzed the pupils about greenhouse gases and the steps they could take at home to help reduce carbon emissions on the island.
“How can you, as young people in Barbados, help make a difference on climate change?” he asked them.
Following an engaging and lively debate, I asked the pupils how they felt about Barbados being on the front line of global climate change, despite having only a small carbon footprint itself.
“Personally, I take a very pessimistic view,” said 17-year-old Isabella Fredricks.
“We are a very small country. No matter how hard we try to change, if the big countries – the main producers of pollution like America, India and China – don’t make a change, everything we do is going to be pointless.”
Her classmate, Tenusha Ramsham, is slightly more optimistic.
“I think that all great big leaps in history were made when people collaborated and innovated,” she argues. “I don’t think we should be completely disheartened because research, innovation, creating technology and education will ultimately lead to the future that we want.”
“I feel if we can communicate to the global superpowers the pain that we feel seeing this happen to our environment,” adds 16-year-old Adrielle Baird, “then it would help them to understand and help us collaborate to find ways to fix the issues that we’re seeing.”
For the island’s young people, their very futures are at stake. Rising sea levels now pose an existential threat to the small islands of the Caribbean.
It is a point on which the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, has become a global advocate for change – urging greater action over an impending climate catastrophe in her speech at COP29 and calling for economic compensation from the world’s industrialised nations.
On its shores and in its seas, it feels like Barbados is under siege – dealing with issues from coral bleaching to coastal erosion. While the impetus for action comes from the island’s youth, it is the older generations who have borne witness as the changes unfold.
Steven Bourne has fished the waters around Barbados his whole life and lost two boats in Hurricane Beryl. As we look out at the coastline from a dilapidated beach-hut bar, he says the island’s sands have shifted before his very eyes.
“It’s an attack from the elements. You see it taking the beaches away, but years ago you’d be sitting here, and you could see the water’s edge coming upon the sand. Now you can’t because the sand’s built up so much.”
By coincidence, in the same bar where I chatted to Steven was Home Affairs Minister Wilfred Abrahams, who has responsibility for national disaster management.
I put it to him that it must be a a difficult time for disaster management in the Caribbean.
“The whole landscape has changed entirely,” he replied. “Once upon a time, it was rare to get a Category Five hurricane in any year. Now we’re getting them every year. So the intensity and the frequency are cause for concern.”
Even the duration of the hurricane season has changed, he says.
“We used to have a rhyme that went: June, too soon; July, standby; October, all over,” he tells me. Extreme weather events like Beryl have rendered such an idea obsolete.
“What we can expect has changed, what we’ve prepared for our whole lives and what our culture is built around has changed,” he adds.
Fisherman Steven Bourne had hoped to retire before Beryl. Now, he says, he and the rest of the islanders have no choice but to keep going.
“Being afraid or anything like that don’t make no sense. Because there’s nowhere for we to go. We love this rock. And we will always be on this rock.”
How feminism, not Bollywood, drew global audiences to Indian cinema in 2024
In 2024, as Bollywood struggled to find its footing, smaller films by Indian women that told nuanced stories made headlines in the country and across the world.
In May, Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light made history by winning the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival.
In the months since then, All We Imagine As Light has become a juggernaut of indie cinema, sweeping through film festivals and the awards circuit. It has been judged the Best International film by prestigious associations including the New York Film Critics Circle and the Toronto Film Critics Association. It has also picked up two Golden Globe nominations, including for Ms Kapadia as best director.
It is also on several best films of the year list, including that of the BBC and the New York Times.
And it has company.
Director Shuchi Talati’s coming-of-age drama Girls Will Be Girls won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival. Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies) spent at least two months on the top 10 list of Netflix in India and was picked as the country’s official Oscar entry (a controversial decision). Laapataa Ladies didn’t make it to the Academy’s shortlist. What did make it was British-Indian director Sandhya Suri’s Hindi film Santosh, which had been picked as the UK’s submission to the Oscars.
Is this sudden wave of success for Indian films an aberration or a long-awaited shift in global consciousness?
“It’s a culmination of both,” says film critic Shubhra Gupta, pointing out that these films were not “made overnight”.
For instance, Shuchi Talati, the director of Girls Will Be Girls, and its co-producer Richa Chadha were in college together when they first came up with the idea for the film. “They have been working on it for years,” Gupta says.
“It’s pure serendipity that 2024 became the year these films were released, igniting conversations together.”
This fortunate alignment has been a cinematic dream. The global impact of these films is rooted in their quality and exploration of universal themes like loneliness, relationships, identity, gender and resilience. With strong female voices and unconventional feminist narratives, these stories venture into territories unexplored by mainstream Indian cinema.
In All We Imagine As Light, a film made in the Hindi, Marathi and Malayalam languages, three migrant women in Mumbai navigate empathy, resilience and human connection. The narrative delves into themes of loneliness and the socio-political landscape, notably the scrutiny of interfaith Hindu-Muslim relationships as seen with the character Anu (Divya Prabha) and her bond with Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon).
Kapadia told the BBC that while the women in her films are financially independent, they still face limitations in their personal lives, particularly when it comes to matters of love.
“For me, love in India is very political… women seem to hold a lot of the so-called honour of the family and the protection of the caste lineage. So if she marries somebody who is of a different religion or of a different caste, that becomes an issue. For me, it is really a method to control women and infantilise them,” she says.
Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls explores female adolescence, rebellion and intergenerational conflict through the story of a 16-year-old girl studying at a strict boarding school in the Himalayas and her fractured relationship with her mother, Anila, who struggles with her own vulnerabilities and unresolved emotions.
“It is the kind of coming-of-age film that we don’t do in India at all,” Gupta says. “It looks at women from a very empathetic, very warm gaze.”
“The age where people experience emotions with and without their bodies, their minds, that exploration but without infantilising the experience – it was never part of Indian mainstream cinema,” she adds.
Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies did not perform well at the box-office but got warm reviews from viewers and critics. At a BAFTA screening in London this month, Ms Rao described the current moment as “really special for women from India”, expressing hope for a continued wave of such stories.
Her film is a satirical comedy about two newlywed brides getting accidentally swapped on a train because of their veils. It offers a sharp commentary on patriarchy, identity and gender roles, a shift from decades of male-centred mainstream Indian films.
“A lot of us who are very patriarchal in our thinking are often that way because that’s how we have been brought up,” Bollywood star Aamir Khan, a co-producer of the film, said after the screening. “But we need to be understanding, at least try and help each other even to come out of this kind of thinking.”
The biggest surprise this year came from the UK, which selected the Hindi-language film Santosh, directed by British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri, as its Oscar entry. Shot entirely in India over a 44-day schedule, it featured a largely female crew. Starring Indian actors Shahana Goswami and Sunita Rajbhar, Santosh was co-produced by people and companies across the UK, India, Germany and France.
The film is intrinsically an Indian story about violence against women, set as a taut thriller.
Goswami says the success of Santosh and All We Imagine as Light points to the merging of borders and expansion of film industries, creating space for cross-pollination and exchange.
“We often think these Indian films require [specific] cultural context, but they don’t. Any film driven by emotion will resonate universally, regardless of its origins,” she told the BBC.
Three of the films – All We Imagine as Light, Girls Will Be Girls and Santosh – share one more common trait: they are cross-country co-productions.
Goswami agrees that this could this be a formula for the future.
“With a French producer, for example, a film gains the opportunity to be seen by a French audience who may follow that producer or the broader film industry. This is how it becomes more globally accessible and relevant,” she says.
Even in Bollywood, some women-led films have had huge success this year. Stree 2, a horror-comedy about a mysterious woman battling a monster who abducts free-thinking women, was the year’s second-biggest hit, playing in cinemas for months.
On streaming platforms, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s opulent Netflix series Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, an exploration of the misogyny and exploitation in the lives of courtesans in pre-independent India, was among Google’s top-searched TV shows of the year.
Their success seems to signal a growing appetite for such stories, their broad appeal demonstrating that mainstream cinema can address important themes without sacrificing entertainment value.
Despite systemic challenges, 2024 has highlighted the global power of female voices from India and the demand for diverse stories. The momentum could be crucial for the Indian film industry in getting wider distribution for its independent films and pave the way for a more diverse and equitable film landscape.
GTA 6, Nintendo’s new console and what else to watch out for in 2025 gaming
Even if you were lucky enough to get a new console or games this Christmas, you’ve probably got your eye on some upcoming releases.
And 2025 is shaping up to be a big one.
Most agree that 2024 was a painful year for the games industry, with tens of thousands of layoffs and worldwide studio closures.
There’s a hope that things will bounce back – at least in part – next year.
And two huge releases in particular are likely to cut through in a big way.
Grand Theft Auto 6
A cultural moment, a day millions of gamers have been awaiting for a very, very long time.
The release of Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6).
It’s due to land in autumn, 12 years after prequel GTA 5 arrived on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, breaking launch records.
The sequel already broke records with its first trailer, which racked up an astonishing 90 million views in 24 hours when it debuted last December.
And that probably won’t be the last record that will be broken.
“The anticipation for this is impossible to measure,” says James Batchelor, editor-in-chief of GamesIndustry.biz.
“It’s undoubtedly going to be one of, if not the biggest, game launches of all time.”
Developer Rockstar hasn’t revealed a huge amount about the new game beyond its dual protagonists and scenes from its fictional, Florida-inspired setting Leonida.
The big question on most fans’ minds is whether the release date will slip, as has happened for previous big releases from Rockstar.
James says he’s seen nothing to suggest that it will – yet – but if things stay quiet it’s time to start worrying.
“If we still have seen absolutely nothing by summer, and certainly if we’ve seen nothing of it by, say, end of August, then yeah, that’s going to 2026,” he says.
Why is GTA 6 so important?
The release of GTA 6 is expected to have an impact on the wider games industry.
“I think it will probably be one of those moments where the rising tide is going to lift all of the boats,” says George Osborn, consultant and author of the Video Games Industry Memo newsletter.
He says a big hit – especially one with the cultural resonance of GTA – can get more people “in the mood to buy video games” and publishers want to capitalise on that.
There are other big releases planned for this year – Assassin’s Creed Shadows from French publisher Ubisoft, Ghost of Yōtei from Sony and strategy game Civilization VII, to name just three.
“The challenge for the developers is how do you keep yourself out of the Grand Theft Auto window?,” says George.
Avoiding the juggernaut of GTA 6 will likely mean other publishers launch their new games early in the year or even hold them back to early 2026.
One more thing we do know is that the game will release first on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, with a PC release to follow later.
Many gamers are still sticking with their previous-generation machines, and Sony and Microsoft will be hoping GTA 6 will finally inspire them to upgrade.
“If anything is going to convince people to jump to a new console if they haven’t already it’s going to be GTA 6,” says James, who estimates that PlayStation 4 users still count for 50% of Sony’s active players.
But if we’re talking hardware upgrades, there could be some competition.
A new Nintendo Switch?
Here’s what we know, officially, about Nintendo’s next console.
It exists.
Your current Switch games will work on it.
And that’s it.
There’s no official name yet, but fans have been calling it the Nintendo Switch 2.
Despite unconfirmed leaks and rumours the machine’s capabilities remain a mystery and the company’s promised some sort of official announcement by the end of March.
There’s a feeling, though, that Nintendo won’t want to change the winning formula of the original Switch, which has sold 146 million units since its 2017 launch.
“The sensible money is on just a bigger, better Switch,” says James.
Expect it to look similar with more processing power under the bonnet.
“That might sound reductive,” he adds.
“But given the level of success this has had they would be daft to not just build on the foundation they’ve made here.”
James argues that confirmation of backwards compatibility – being able to play games originally made for the first Switch – strongly suggests the new machine won’t be a million miles away from its younger sibling.
He says there is a danger that, as has happened with previous Nintendo consoles, customers might not understand that the new machine is different to what they’ve already got at home.
But James isn’t sure it will experience the same fate.
“That was a long time ago,” he says. “I think they’ve learned a lot of lessons since then.”
More breakout hits
Some of 2024’s biggest success stories came from small, independent developers.
The most notable was Balatro – an addictive, poker-inspired card game that ended the year in the running for high-profile game of the year awards.
Journalist Rachel Watts, who hosts the Indieventure podcast, feels that has helped to set the stage for more breakout success this year.
“There’s been so many great indies this year,” she says.
“On the triple-A side a lot of critics and players have said ‘it’s such a quiet year, there’s not many big releases’, but for indie games, there’s always so many cool things to play.”
A success like Balatro is incredibly rare, and one of the big issues for indie developers in 2024 has been discoverability – getting players to actually find your game.
Rachel says the number of releases on Steam – the online store where most PC games are bought – is “frankly bonkers” and getting noticed is “one of the most difficult things”.
“I just don’t see that becoming any easier,” she says.
Rachel says indie developers are also struggling to find investment and the financial outlook is “pretty bleak” going into 2025.
But she does think that more gamers are starting to recognise the creativity that exists in the sector – and more breakout hits will follow.
“The indie space is a place where I retreat to just play games that get me excited about gaming again,” says Rachel.
“If Balatro can knock elbows with some of the biggest titles of the year, then I’m hoping other other indies will.”
esports Olympics
There’s another big moment to watch in 2025: the first Olympic Esports Games will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
“I think it’s an important moment because the Olympic movement has traditionally not been too keen on esports,” says George.
After years of campaigning the International Olympics Committee agreed a 12-year deal with Saudi Arabia to host the gaming version.
The first esports World Cup took place in the kingdom this summer, and George says the event “didn’t really cut through” to a wider audience.
“It’ll be interesting to see whether or not the eSports Olympics with the official IOC branding and the official Olympic movement branding behind it has a different impact,” says George.
Some fans, players and commentators boycotted the World Cup in protest over Saudi Arabia’s human rights records.
George says the esports Olympics will revive conversations about sportswashing – the idea that Saudi Arabia uses its vast wealth to invest in sports and entertainment to improve its international reputation – something it’s denied.
“You have this really interesting thing,” says George.
“Your big esports moment – esports becomes an Olympic sport.
“That’s really interesting. But the only way it’s basically been able to happen is because Saudi Arabia’s bankrolled it.
“So, you know, what do people feel about that?”
Other things to watch
- Video game actors’ strike – The dispute between performers and some of the industry’s biggest companies continues to rumble on
- Ubisoft – The release of Japan-set Assassin’s Creed Shadows in February could be a make-or-break moment for the French publisher after a tough 2025
- Fortnite – Epic Games’ battle royale multiplayer remains one of the most-played games globally and the company’s expected to continue efforts to get its products back on to more mobile phones
- Generative AI – Discussions about using the tech to make games continue, but questions over copyright, environmental impacts and scepticism from workers will need strong responses.
Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.
Kenya’s celebrated coffee under threat as farmers hit by climate change
In the lush, volcanic highlands of Komothai in Kenya’s Rift Valley, farmers like Simon Macharia produce coffee on small plantations scattered across the hillsides.
Along with other farmers, Mr Macharia brings sacks of his bright red coffee cherries to the local processing plant, where they are weighed and treated.
A machine removes the red husks, and the pale beans inside are washed and passed along concrete channels, ending up on lines of drying platforms that sweep across the valley.
Here, workers categorise the beans into grades, the highest destined for the coffee houses of Europe.
“We call coffee the black gold around here,” Mr Macharia, whose farm covers 2.5 hectares (six acres) , told the BBC.
He grows the Kenya AA coffee beans, which are prized worldwide for their high quality, full body, deep aromas and fruity flavour.
The crop has been part of these lush highlands since the late 1890s, when British colonial settlers introduced it.
Now, the area is famous for its unique, top-rated coffee.
Growing the berries is labour intensive – picking, pruning, weeding, spraying, fertilising and transporting the products.
“Coffee requires your full-time concentration, especially when it starts to bloom,” Mr Macharia said.
“From that moment up until the day that you are going to harvest – those six months, your full-time job is on the farm.”
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A coffee tree is a huge investment for cash-strapped farmers, as it can take four years for the fruits to mature.
The price of a single cup of coffee in a chic European café, typically $4 (£3.20), highlights a stark disparity when compared to the earnings of many Kenyan coffee labourers, who make at most $2.30 a day.
Edita Mwangi, who harvests coffee cherries on the red earth hillside overlooking the processing plant, confirms this.
“They don’t know the poverty we suffer. You have to struggle day and night just to survive,” she said.
With four children depending on her, Ms Mwangi works six days a week, earning about $1.40 a day.
She has to walk 5km (three miles) to reach the farm where she works.
Farmers feel the trading system between Kenya and Europe – the world’s largest coffee market – has been stacked against them for many years.
But now, a new threat looms, jeopardising farmers’ ability to make a living – climate change.
Coffee trees are extremely sensitive to small differences in temperature and weather conditions.
They also need specific climatic conditions like humid temperatures and ample rainfall to grow.
“Climate change is a major challenge for our coffee farmers,” says John Murigi, the chairman of the Komothai Coffee Society, which represents 8,000 coffee farmers like Mr Macharia.
Cold temperatures and erratic rainfall are having a devastating impact on the delicate coffee plants, said Mr Murigi.
As a result, “coffee production has decreased over the last few years”.
He added that climate change was intensifying the spread of diseases in coffee plants.
Mr Murigi said there had been a significant increase in coffee leaf miners, bugs that feed on coffee leaves, and coffee berry disease, a destructive fungal infection that can wipe out more than 80% of crops.
To deal with the increasing outbreaks, farmers are resorting to using herbicides and insecticides that can damage soil quality in the long term and also pose health risks.
Farmers use dangerous herbicides like Roundup, which contain glyphosates known to cause cancers – banned in some European countries – to ensure they get a good harvest.
Pest Control Products Board (PCPB) of Kenya, in charge of regulating the use of these products, did not respond to a BBC request for comment.
To produce a single cup of coffee can require up to 140 litres of water – including the water to grow the plants.
But in Kenya’s fertile Rift Valley, higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns mean a decreasing water supply for coffee farmers.
Farmer Joseph Kimani told the BBC that the “river levels have gone down a lot” due to erratic weather, such as periods of drought and heavy rains.
He said that because of the lack of rain, farmers are forced to use more river water.
But this increased reliance on river water, driven by the lack of rainfall, may be further straining the already limited water supply.
While Mr Murigi acknowledges the rise in water use by coffee farmers, he denies this is why the river is drying up.
However, with 23 coffee societies in this region, a significant amount of water is clearly being used in the coffee growing process in Kiambu County.
Komothia’s story is not unique. As global temperatures and droughts increase, good coffee will become difficult to grow in all parts of the world.
Coffee can only be grown in the “coffee belt” – tropical regions around the world in areas typically located at an altitude of between 1,000m and 2,000m.
In recent years, climate change has led to a shortage of global coffee supplies and an increase in the price of coffee due to drought and crop failures in several key coffee-producing nations such as Brazil and Vietnam.
A survey by Fairtrade International, the organisation behind Fairtrade labels, found that 93% of Kenyan coffee farmers are already experiencing the effects of climate change.
The coffee industry in Kenya is a key source of employment, providing jobs for an estimated 150,000 people.
To protect the industry, coffee farmers in areas like Komothai are experimenting with climate adaptation techniques, such as planting trees to provide extra shade for the coffee plants.
Mr Murigi said it is only through addressing both the climate and economic challenges faced by Kenyan coffee farmers that they can have a sustainable future.
However, coffee farmers like Mr Macharia are pessimistic about the industry’s future.
“Right now, as things stand, I don’t think any parent wants their child here farming coffee,” he said.
You may also be interested in:
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‘I can’t go on like this’: US asks what’s next for healthcare
Special education teacher Robin Ginkel has spent almost two years fighting with her insurance company to try to get it to pay for back surgery that her doctors recommended after a work injury left her with a herniated disc and debilitating pain.
The plan didn’t seem “ridiculous”, she said: “I’m asking to get healthcare to return to a normal quality of life and return to work.”
Initially rejected, the 43-year-old from Minnesota spent hours on hold appealing the decision – even lodging a complaint with the state – only to see her claims denied three times.
Now she is bracing for the battle to start again, after deciding her best option was to try her luck with a new insurance company.
“It’s exhausting,” she said. “I can’t keep going like this.”
Ms Ginkel is not alone in throwing up her hands.
Roughly one in five Americans covered by private health insurance reported their provider refused to pay for care recommended by a doctor last year, according to a survey by health policy foundation KFF.
Brian Mulhern, a 54-year-old from Rhode Island, said his health insurance firm recently rejected a request to pay for a colonoscopy after polyps were discovered on his colon – a discovery that prompted his doctor to advise a follow-up exam within three years instead of the typical five.
Faced with $900 in out-of-pocket costs, Mr Mulhern put off the procedure.
Long simmering anger about insurance decisions exploded into public view earlier this month after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered – and the killing unleashed a startling wave of public outrage at the industry.
The crime sent shockwaves through the system, prompting one insurance company to reverse a controversial plan to limit anaesthesia coverage, and hit the share prices of major firms.
Though the reaction raised the possibility that scrutiny might force change, experts said addressing the frustration would require action from Washington, where there is little sign of a change in momentum.
On the contrary: just in the last few weeks, Congress again failed to move forward long-stalled measures aimed at making it easier for people on certain government-backed insurance plans to get their claims approved.
Many advocates are also concerned about problems worsening, as Donald Trump returns to the White House.
The president-elect has pledged to protect Medicare, which is government health insurance for over-65s and some younger people. He is known for longstanding criticism of parts of the health industry, such as high prices for medicines.
But he has also vowed to loosen regulation, pursue privatisation and add work requirements to publicly available insurance and cut government spending, of which healthcare is a major part.
“The way things stand today, healthcare is a target,” said David Lipschutz, co-director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a non-profit that seeks to advance comprehensive Medicare coverage.
“They’re going to try to take people’s health insurance away or diminish people’s access to it and that’s going in the opposite direction of some of these frustrations and would only make problems worse.”
Republicans, who control Congress, have historically backed reforms aimed at making the health system more transparent, cutting regulation and reducing the government’s role.
“If you take government bureaucrats out of the healthcare equation and you have doctor-patient relationships, it’s better for everybody,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a video obtained by NBC News last month. “More efficient, more effective,” he said. “That’s the free market. Trump’s going to be for the free market.”
Unhappiness with the health system is longstanding in the US, where experts – including at KFF – point out that care is more expensive than in other countries and performance is worse on basic metrics such as life expectancy, infant mortality and safety during childbirth.
The US spent more than $12,000 (£9,600) per person on healthcare in 2022 – almost twice the average of other wealthy countries, according to the Peter G Peterson Foundation.
The last major reform, under former president Barack Obama in 2010, focused on expanding health insurance in hopes of making care more accessible.
The law included measures to widen eligibility for Medicaid, another government programme that helps cover medical costs for people with limited incomes. It also forbid insurers from rejecting patients with “pre-existing conditions”, successfully reducing the share of the population without insurance from about 15% to roughly 8%.
Today, about 40% of the population in the US gets insurance from taxpayer-funded government plans – mostly Medicare and Medicaid – with coverage increasingly contracted out to private companies.
The remainder are enrolled in plans from private companies, which are typically selected by employers and paid for with a mix of personal contributions and employer funds.
Even though more people are covered than ever before, frustrations remain widespread. In a recent Gallup poll, just 28% of respondents rated health care coverage excellent or good, the lowest level since 2008.
Public data on the rate of insurance denials – which can also happen after care has been received, leaving patients with hefty bills – is limited.
But surveys of patients and medical professionals suggest insurance companies are requiring more “prior authorisation” for procedures – and rejections by insurance companies are on the rise.
In the state of Maryland, for example, the number of claim denials disclosed by insurers has jumped more than 70% over five years, according to reports from the state attorney general’s office.
“The fact that we pay into the system and then when we need it, we can’t access the care we need makes no sense,” said Ms Ginkel. “As I went through the process, it felt more and more like [the insurance companies] do this on purpose in hopes you’re going to give up.”
Brian Mulhern, the Rhode Islander who put off his colonoscopy, compared the industry to the “legal mafia” – offering protection “but on their terms”. He added: “It increasingly seems to be that you can pay more and more and get nothing.”
AHIP, a lobby group for health insurers, said claims denials often reflected faulty submissions by doctors, or pre-determined decisions about what to cover that had been made by regulators and employers.
UnitedHealthcare did not respond to a BBC request for comment for this article. But in an opinion piece written after the killing of its CEO Brian Thompson, Andrew Witty, head of the firm’s parent company, defended the industry’s decision-making.
He said it was based on a “comprehensive and continually updated body of clinical evidence focused on achieving the best health outcomes and ensuring patient safety”.
But critics complain that a for-profit health system will always be focused on its shareholders and bottom line, and have linked the surge in claims denial to the rising using of allegedly error-prone artificial intelligence (AI) to review requests.
One developer said last year its AI tool was not being used to inform coverage decisions – only to help guide providers on how to aid patients.
Derrick Crowe, communications and digital director of People’s Action, a non-profit that advocates for insurance reform, said he was hopeful the shock of the murder would force change on the industry.
“This is a moment to take a moment of private pain and turn it into a public collective power to ensure companies stop denying our care,” he said.
Whether the murder will strengthen appetite for reform remains to be seen.
Politicians from both parties in Washington have expressed interest in efforts that might rein in the industry, such as toughening oversight of algorithms and rules that would require the break-up of big firms.
But there is little sign the proposals have meaningful traction.
Trump’s nominee to run the powerful Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), TV doctor Mehmet Oz, has previously endorsed expanding coverage by Medicare Advantage – which offers Medicare health plans through private companies.
“These plans are popular among seniors, consistently provide quality care and have a needed incentive to keep costs low,” he explained in 2022.
Prof Buntin said Republican election gains indicate that the US is not about to embrace the alternative – a publicly run scheme like the UK’s National Health Service – anytime soon.
“There’s a distrust of people who seem to be profiting or benefiting off of illness – and yet that’s the basis of the American system,” she said.
‘My autistic sons have taught me so much’
James Hunt used to spend his days commuting to London, where he ran a successful marketing firm.
But his children Jude and Tommy were diagnosed as autistic when they were toddlers, and he later decided to care for them and his parents full-time.
James, from Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex, started blogging about their lives nine years ago and now has more than a million followers on social media.
Here, in his own words, James speaks about his hopes for the future for his teenage sons.
‘It was the hardest period of my life’
When my eldest son Jude was a baby, he was slow to crawl and didn’t respond to his name. He used to stare out of the window, he was quite distant and almost in a different world.
His mum Charlotte, my ex-wife, first raised concerns when he was eight months old but I just thought he was a bit behind because he was premature.
We went back to the doctor quite a few times before we got an autism diagnosis in 2009 when he was 18 months old.
At the time, the information out there was very clinical, most things we were reading were from the NHS website and medical journals. I felt like I couldn’t take it in and I had so many unanswered questions.
Three years later we went through the same diagnosis with Tommy at a similar age.
I knew a lot more about autism than when we had Jude, but the boys have always been so different.
I didn’t enjoy the first year of Tommy’s life as much as I could have done because I spent so much time watching him and looking for signs.
He hit certain milestones much quicker than Jude but he wouldn’t make eye contact and would get easily frustrated and enjoyed playing alone.
Around the same time, when Jude was four, he started having huge meltdowns and was physically hurting himself.
Jude is non-speaking, so it’s very difficult for him to explain what’s wrong. That was the hardest period of my life.
He used to wake up in the night screaming and hitting himself. Thankfully as Jude has gotten older, and we’ve learnt more about how to meet his needs, this has got much better.
‘We decided to split the boys up’
Unfortunately at the time Tommy was a huge trigger for him because he was loud and unpredictable. His self-harming would scare Tommy so we used to have to keep them apart a lot.
In 2016, my wife Charlotte and I sadly decided to separate. We took the incredibly difficult decision to split Jude and Tommy up and we felt guilty, like we were failing.
But Jude was immediately like a different child, you could sense his anxiety going, so we knew it was the right decision.
I live in an annexe at my parents’ house and help care for my dad who has Parkinson’s and my mum, who has dementia, though she is now in a home.
It’s opposite my ex-wife’s home and I have one of the boys for several nights a week and then we swap over, and I have the other one. They both need one-to-one care and it’s impossible for them to live together.
You never imagine life like that. I don’t know if they will ever be able to live together but they will always be part of each other’s lives.
I wish I could be with both of them at the same time, and I don’t get much free time, but this is the best thing for them right now. It has probably made being a single parent easier for me because I’m never alone.
Their school is helping them to do more fun things together like trampolining and eating lunch together.
‘I’ve just had one of my best ever days with them’
Jude is now 16 and loves music so we go on long car drives listening to the radio. It’s one of the few places where he feels safe and can relax.
There have been times he’s been too anxious to do that and we were housebound but at the moment he’s doing OK.
Tommy is 13, and he is cheeky, mischievous, funny, and curious about everything around him. He loves looking at books and puzzles. He isn’t fully verbal but he uses a communication device.
I recently had one of the best days I’ve ever had with Jude and Tommy.
In the past, when we have tried to do anything to celebrate Christmas, it has never gone well, it was too overwhelming for them. But we went to see Father Christmas and made such special memories.
‘I’ve connected with people from all over the world’
Nine years ago I began sharing stories from our lives online, on a weekly blog. Then I started Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok accounts.
It was initially a way to show friends and family what our life was really like. Jude and Tommy struggled with social occasions, so we stopped going.
I could never find the words to explain, and I wanted to show how proud I was of them, so I started writing instead.
I didn’t realise how much our stories would resonate with others, or how much it would help me.
I learned so much more about autism, connected with people all over the world and discovered a passion for helping other families.
I’ve been lucky that I’ve been able to make a living through social media. I had to give up my previous job to be there for the boys.
I started a clothing line last year, with positive messaging around autism, disabilities and neurodivergence. I love getting messages from people saying they have bumped into someone wearing one of the hoodies, and it started a conversation.
I opened a shop in Burnham-on-Crouch where we stock the clothes and wrap and pack and send out the orders.
It’s somewhere for people in the community to visit, we have a sensory room in the shop and we get lots of parents coming in who want to have a chat.
Everyone working in the shop is a parent, carer or is autistic, so they can share their experiences with customers.
‘I’ve learned to cherish the simple things’
I always try to focus on the positives and not think too far ahead but there are days when my mind runs away with me.
It will be a huge challenge when the boys leave school when they are 19.
That’s massively scary because suddenly you have to trust a whole new bunch of people.
There is a part-time college I hope they can go to but it’s a huge unknown and there will be big decisions to make.
You feel like you have to live forever to look after them, and that is the biggest fear for many parents.
Jude and Tommy will need life-long support, and I’ve started to realise I might not always be able to provide that for them.
I don’t know what the future will look like, but I know I need to think about how to help them live as independently as they can, and prepare for the days when I’m not here.
Autism has meant we’ve had some of the highest highs, and experienced some lows far lower than I ever knew were imaginable.
It has taught me to cherish and enjoy the simple things and I just want the boys to be happy.
Looking back at how I felt when they were diagnosed, I would like to tell myself it’s all going to be OK.
Those first few years can be a really scary and emotional time. You feel like you have no idea what you’re doing.
Don’t bottle everything up, find people to open up to. Your friends and family want to help, they just don’t know how to yet.
You will go through the most challenging and difficult days of your life but you will learn so much from your boys and your love for them will get you through.
Toddler nearly runs off cliff at Hawaii volcano
A Hawaii national park has issued a new warning to tourists after a toddler was grabbed “in the nick of time” from falling off the rim of an erupting volcano.
The little boy wandered off from his family and “in a split second, ran straight toward the 400ft cliff edge” of the Kilauea volcano, the park said.
“His mother, screaming, managed to grab him”, the park added in its statement, when the toddler was “just a foot or so away from a fatal fall”.
Park ranger Jessica Ferracane, who observed the incident, told the BBC she hopes sharing details of the incident will help “prevent future tragedies”.
Kilauea, on Hawaii’s Big Island, is one of the world’s most active volcanoes.
It routinely erupts, and the latest eruption began on 23 December with lava pictured gushing to the surface.
The eruption is continuing at a low level within a closed area of the national park, the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said in its latest update on Saturday.
The park said the incident happened on Christmas Day in a closed area of the park where families had gathered to watch the lava.
It was in an area overlooking the caldera – the large crater of the volcano – and the boy would not have survived the fall, Ms Ferracane said.
Park rangers said they want to remind visitors to stay on trail and out of closed areas, and to keep their children close.
“Those who ignore the warnings, walk past closure signs, lose track of loved ones, and sneak into closed areas to get a closer look do so at great risk.”
Ms Ferracane added: “Hopefully sharing the news will prevent future tragedies and near-misses.”
School chaplain killed in shark attack on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
A 40-year-old man has died after being attacked by a shark on the edge of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, local police said.
Luke Walford, a youth pastor, had been spearfishing with his family when he was bitten on Saturday afternoon.
He sustained “life-threatening injuries” and despite paramedics’ efforts, he died at the scene about an hour later, authorities said.
He and his family had been in the water at Humpy Island, in the Great Barrier Reef’s Keppel Bay Islands National Park, when the attack happened. The area is a popular spot for diving and snorkelling.
Walford had been a school chaplain and pastor at the Cathedral of Praise church in Rockhampton, Queensland.
Donna Kirkland, his local MP, said she was in shock, and that Walford was a friend to her and “countless others.”
“My prayers and heartfelt condolences are with his beautiful family and indeed the many who will be devastated, as I am, at this news”, she added.
A family friend told ABC News he had watched the rescue helicopter fly over his house, unaware it was for his friend.
“I always say a little tribute for whoever it may be, but to find out it was Luke was a very sad day,” Doug Webber said.
Queensland police said a report would be prepared for the coroner.
Australia’s last fatal shark attack happened in December 2023, when a teenage boy was killed in the south.
Just this year, there have been four other shark incidents in Australia, according to a local database.
In general, Australia sees more shark attacks than any other country except the US.
Trump sides with tech bosses in Maga fight over immigrant visas
President-elect Donald Trump appeared to side with technology bosses Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in a row over a visa programme that brings skilled workers to the US.
Trump told the New York Post on Saturday that he “always liked” H-1B visas and hired guest workers under the scheme – even though he’s previously been critical of the programme.
He was wading into a debate that has pitted his advisors from the tech world against Republicans who want a harder line on all forms of immigration.
The argument broke out after Ramaswamy, tapped by Trump along with Musk to slash government spending, blamed American culture for US firms deciding to hire skilled workers from other countries.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence,” Ramaswamy wrote in a long X post that argued that foreign workers improve the US economy.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian [the top student in a class], will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote.
The post attracted backlash from anti-immigrant Trump supporters, and Ramaswamy later clarified that he believed “the H-1B system is badly broken & should be replaced”.
After the argument raged online for days, Trump told the Post: “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favour of the visas. That’s why we have them.”
“I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program,” he said.
Trump moved to restrict access to the H-1B programme during his first term.
Both the president-elect and his running mate JD Vance have been critical of the visas in the past, although Vance has close ties to the tech world and in his previous career as a venture capitalist funded start-ups that hired workers with H-1B visas.
Ramaswamy’s assertions led to a full-blown row online over the holidays, as mainstream Republicans and far-right influencers joined in criticising him and other wealthy figures in Trump’s inner circle.
“If we are going to have a throwdown, let’s have it now,” prominent Trump supporter Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast on Friday. He went on to call the Republican claims of support of the H-1B programme a “total scam”.
Ramaswamy’s perceived view of skilled worker visas was backed by Elon Musk, the X, Tesla and SpaceX boss selected to co-direct Trump’s proposed “Department of Government Efficiency”.
Musk defended the H-1B visa programme as attracting the “top ~0.1%” of engineering talent”.
“Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct,” he wrote.
Critics online posted screenshots of job postings at Musk’s companies filled by people with H1-B visas, showing salaries of $200,000 and much less, and argued these hires did not constitute an elite talent pool but rather a way to hold down the wages of US-born workers.
Musk then shot back at “contemptible fools”, saying he was referring to “those in the Republican Party who are hateful, unrepentant racists”.
“They will absolutely be the downfall of the Republican Party if they are not removed,” he wrote.
He later swore at one of his critics and said he would “go to war” to defend the visa programme.
Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations and a former Republican presidential candidate, became a prominent voice arguing against Ramaswamy and Musk.
“There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture,” she wrote in response on X. “All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
Haley, who like Ramaswamy was born to Indian immigrants, was joined in opposing the visa programme by far-right accounts online.
Laura Loomer, an anti-Islam activist who regularly spreads conspiracy theories but is also known for her unwavering support of Trump, led the online charge with posts viewed millions of times.
Earlier in the week, Loomer criticised Trump’s choice of Sriram Krishnan, an India-born entrepreneur, as the White House senior advisor on artificial intelligence. Loomer wrote that Krishnan was a “career leftist” who is “in direct opposition to Trump’s America First agenda”.
Cheered on by far-right X accounts, she also called Indian immigrants “invaders” and directed racist tropes at Krishnan.
Loomer then accused Musk, who owns X, of “censorship” for allegedly restricting replies to her posts on the network and removing her from a paid premium programme.
Echoing criticisms of Trump about the influence of the X boss, she wrote: “‘President Musk’ is starting to look real… Free speech is an illusion.”
On Friday and Saturday, a number of other conservative and far-right accounts also complained that the reach of their messages had been throttled on X.
- Laura Loomer: Who is conspiracy theorist travelling with Trump?
The number of H-1B visas issued is capped at 65,000 per year plus an additional 20,000 for people with a master’s from US institutions.
Recent research by Boundless, an immigration consultancy, indicates that around 73% of the H-1B visas are issued to Indian nationals, with 12% issued to Chinese citizens.
Trump promised that mass deportations of undocumented immigrants will start immediately after he takes office.
In recent days the president-elect also denied that he’s unduly under the influence of Musk and the other billionaires who backed his campaign.
On Sunday, Trump told a conservative conference in Arizona that he was not under Musk’s thumb.
“You know, they’re on a new kick,” he told the crowd at AmericaFest, organised by Turning Point USA. “All the different hoaxes. The new one is that President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk.”
“No, no, that’s not happening,” he said. “He’s not gonna be president.”
Rebel Wilson marries Ramona Agruma in Sydney ceremony
Australian actor and comedian Rebel Wilson has legally married Ramona Agruma in Sydney, the star has announced on social media.
The couple had a wedding ceremony in Sardinia in September but have since married again in a service officiated by Wilson’s sister.
The actress proposed to Agruma, a fashion and jewellery designer, at Disneyland in 2023.
Among well-wishers commenting on social media were Pitch Perfect co-stars Adam Devine and Elizabeth Banks, who offered their congratulations to the couple.
Wilson, 44, said it felt “right” to have the wedding in her hometown. “It meant my 94-year-old grandmother Gar could come which was very special to us to have her included,” she wrote on Instagram.
Agruma also shared photos from the day adding: “Married officially in Australia to my Australian princess.”
The couple are pictured beaming with the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge serving as the backdrop.
The Bridesmaids actress announced the birth of her first child via surrogate in November 2022. Sharing a picture of daughter Royce Lilly, she described her as a “beautiful miracle”.
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The star made headlines earlier this year when the US version of her memoir, Rebel Rising, about Wilson’s sexuality, weight and fertility, was released, and made allegations against Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen.
The British edition of the book, published on 25 April, blacked out text believed to be relating to him.
A spokesman for Baron Cohen at the time said the redactions represented a “clear victory”, and reiterated his position that Wilson’s claims were “demonstrably false”.
In her memoir, Wilson also talked about being a “late bloomer” and losing her virginity at 35.
Kiefer Sutherland grew up unaware of dad Donald’s success
Growing up, actor Kiefer Sutherland “wasn’t aware” of his father Donald’s success.
And it was only when he moved to Hollywood to pursue his own career, aged 17, that he realised what a “special and great” actor his father was.
“I phoned my dad and I said, ‘I feel so terrible,'” Kiefer says, in an interview being shown on BBC Two’s Lives Well Lived programme at 18:00 GMT on Sunday 29 December.
Donald Sutherland, who appeared in more than 200 screen roles, died in June, aged 88.
“So I’m 17 years old, I’ve moved to Los Angeles and a friend had this incredible collection of all of my father’s films on VHS [Video Home System],” Kiefer says.
Over two or three days, the teenager binge-watched his father’s work.
“When I see his work, it’s just astounding,” Kiefer says.
He told his father: “I didn’t realise how special and great you are as an actor.”
“And he was so sweet – he kind of almost cried and said, ‘Well, how could you? You were just a boy.’
“And that was a really special moment for both of us and our relationship kind of took a turn at that point.”
When the pair later worked together, on 2016 western Forsaken, “It was a great time to spend together,” Kiefer says.
Set in 1872, Forsaken focuses on embittered gunslinger John Henry Clayton’s return to his hometown and his attempts to build bridges with his estranged father.
Their on-screen characters are in fierce conflict – but the off-screen relationship between the two actors was harmonious.
“I just loved watching him do his thing,” Kiefer says.
Engineering degree
Known for an array of major parts, including in The Dirty Dozen, M*A*S*H, Don’t Look Now, Klute and Six Degrees of Separation, Donald Sutherland was not always destined for an acting career.
From a small fishing village in eastern Canada, he was part way through an engineering degree at the University of Toronto when he quit and went to England to follow his dream of becoming an actor.
“The courage to do that is extraordinary,” Kiefer says.
An early appearance on British television came in a 1960s production of Hamlet, with a young Michael Caine.
Incredibly proud
But his big break was in The Dirty Dozen, in which, at first, he had a non-speaking part but was picked for something far bigger, apparently at random, by director Bob Aldrich.
“He didn’t even know my name,” Sutherland said.
“We’d all had our hair shaved off. He looked around the table and he said, ‘You with the big ears, you do it.'”
Kiefer describes this as “a real breakout moment for my father”.
But the fact he then “managed to be in films that were incredibly important each decade, is a testament to his capabilities as an actor – and I’m incredibly proud of him for it”, he says.
‘Superhuman skill’
Never nominated for an Oscar, Donald Sutherland received an Academy Honorary Award in 2017 for his lifetime contribution to cinema.
“His love and his humour and his kindness were huge,” Kiefer says.
“He had, I think, superhuman skill as an actor and it’s wonderful to have it.
“I’m very lucky as a son, you know, to be able to throw on a film and, you know, get to see my dad.”
Lives Well Lived is on BBC Two at 18:00 GMT on Sunday 29 December.
Nigerians take to the streets for Calabar Carnival
Christmas revellers descended on Nigeria’s southern port city of Calabar this weekend for its festive carnival dubbed “Africa’s biggest street party”.
The glitzy parade had floats and dancers from many of Nigeria’s different ethnic groups taking part.
A month of celebrations in December draws many partygoers to Calabar, the capital of Cross River state and home to many Christian communities. The organisers say up to two million people attend, the AFP news agency reports.
At least 14 bands have reportedly taken part in performances and competitions this year.
Most of the carnival goers danced to Afrobeats hits, blaring from giant speakers.
The carnival is marking two decades since it was started. “We are seeing different designs, different costumes,” attendee Grace Job told AFP. “The energy is so much.”
The carnival draws a wide variety of people to the streets. The troupe pictured below is from the University of Calabar – with costumes printed with the institution’s logo.
Some of the costumes referenced the city’s links to the Atlantic slave trade. The one below depicts manillas – the brass bracelets introduced as a form of currency by Portuguese traders and used from the 16th to the 19th Centuries.
This woman’s outfit harks back to colonial times and is dressed as a giant British West Africa penny from the reign of UK monarch George VI. Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960.
“Everyone is trying to showcase the tradition and the culture,” 25-year-old dancer and civil engineering undergraduate Rejoice Elemi told AFP
At a stadium in Calabar on Friday night Nigerian music stars Runtown and Iyanya performed at a carnival concert. Calas Vegas went on to won the coveted title of best carnival band – for the second year running.
Cross River State state sees the carnival – now Nigeria’s biggest – as a way to draw visitors not just from across Nigeria – but also those from the diaspora.
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Three migrants die attempting to cross Channel
Three people have died attempting to cross the English Channel in a small boat on Sunday morning, the French coastguard says.
People ended up in the water after trying to board a boat off the coast of Sangatte, near Calais, at about 06:00 local time (05:00 GMT).
The three people later declared dead were recovered from the water by helicopter, while a further 45 were given treatment on the beach, many suffering from hypothermia. Four were taken to hospital.
It has been the deadliest year on record for Channel crossings.
Dame Angela Eagle, minister for border security and asylum, said lives had been lost because “ruthless criminals running the small boat trade are overloading people into unseaworthy vessels”.
She said the government was “committed to smashing these gangs” and was supporting the French authorities.
“It never stops,” the mayor of Sangatte Guy Allemand told AFP. “It’s crossing after crossing, without any let-up.”
He said seven people had needed intensive care after the incident.
The French coastguard said a search was ongoing at sea for any other survivors.
The Home Office confirmed there had been an incident in French waters, with French authorities leading the response and investigation.
Pierre-Henri Dumont, MP for the Pas-de-Calais region, told the BBC: “Any attempt to cross the Channel in this way is very, very dangerous – but at this time of year, it is even more deadly.”
He said rescue teams can respond quickly, but current temperatures mean “spending even a few minutes in the water” can be fatal.
The incident follows four days in which 1,485 people made the journey, meaning it has been the busiest Christmas period since records began in 2018.
More than 36,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats so far this year, surpassing the 2023 total of 29,437, government figures suggest.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency which tracks the number of people who die crossing the Channel, says 77 people have died attempting to make the journey this year.
A number of other boats were reported to have departed from the coast on Sunday, the French coastguard said in its statement.
‘It’s unbearable’: Families mourn after S Korea plane crash
A festive trip to Thailand was supposed to be a celebration for Maeng Gi-Su’s nephew and his nephew’s two sons, who were marking the end of their college entrance exams.
Instead, it ended in tragedy when all three died on the Jeju Air plane that crash-landed in South Korea on Sunday morning, killing 179 of the 181 people onboard.
“I can’t believe the entire family has just disappeared,” Maeng, 78, told the BBC.
“My heart aches so much.”
The family were travelling from Bangkok to Muan International Airport, which skidded off the runway after touching down and crashed into a wall shortly after 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT) on Sunday.
All of the passengers on the Boeing 737-800 died, making it the deadliest plane crash on South Korean soil.
Four crew members were among the victims, while two were rescued from the wreckage alive.
The 179 passengers on flight 7C2216 were aged between three and 78 years old, although most were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, according to Yonhap news agency reported. Two Thai nationals are among the dead and the rest are believed to be South Korean, authorities have said.
Five of the people who died were children under the age of 10, with the youngest passenger being a three-year-old boy.
One man in his sixties said five of his family members spanning three generations had been on the plane, including his sister-in-law, his daughter, her husband and their young children, according to Yonhap news agency.
Many of the passengers had been celebrating the Christmas holidays in Thailand and were returning home.
The cousin of one victim, Jongluk Doungmanee, told BBC Thai she was “shocked” when she heard the news.
“I had goosebumps. I couldn’t believe it,” Pornphichaya Chalermsin said.
Jongluk had been living in South Korea for the past five years working in the agriculture industry. She usually travelled to Thailand twice a year during the holidays to visit her ailing father and two children – aged 7 and 15 – from a former marriage.
She had spent over two weeks this time with her husband, who had returned to South Korea earlier in December.
Her father, who suffers from a heart disease, was “devastated” when he found out about her death, said Pornphichaya.
“It is unbearable for him. This was his youngest daughter”, she said, adding that all three of his children work abroad.
- Did bird strike contribute to South Korea plane crash? What we know so far
Another 71-year-old father, Jeon Je-young, told the Reuters news agency that his daughter Mi-Sook, who was identified by her fingerprints, had been on her way home after travelling with friends to Bangkok for the festivities.
“My daughter, who is only in her mid-40s, ended up like this,” he said, adding that he had last seen her on 21 December, when she brought some food and next year’s calendar to his house – that would become their last moment together.
Mi-Sook leaves behind a husband and teenage daughter.
“This is unbelievable”, said Jeon.
One woman said her sister, who had been having a tough time decided to visit Thailand as life began to improve for her.
“She’s had so many hardships and gone traveling because her situation was only just beginning to improve,” she told Yonhap news agency.
The two flight attendants who survived the crash were found in the tail end of the plane, the most intact part of the wreckage.
One was a 33-year-old man, with the surname Lee, who was rushed to a hospital in Mokpo, about 25km (15.5 mi) south of the airport, but was later transferred to Ewha Womans University Seoul Hospital in the capital, Yonhap news agency reported.
“When I woke up, I had already been rescued,” he told doctors at the hospital, according to its director Ju Woong, who spoke during a press briefing.
The survivor, who suffered multiple fractures, is receiving special care due to the risk of after-effects, including total paralysis, Ju said.
The other survivor, a 25-year-old female flight attendant with the surname Koo, is being treated at Asan Medical Center in eastern Seoul, Yonhap added.
She has sustained head and ankle injuries but is reportedly in a stable condition.
‘I saw thick, dark smoke – then an explosion’
It’s not yet known exactly what caused the disaster, but a number of eye witnesses say they could see that the plane was in trouble before the crash.
Restaurant owner Im Young-Hak said he initially thought it was an oil tanker accident.
“I went outside and saw thick, dark smoke. After that, I heard a loud explosion, not from the crash itself. Then there were more explosions – at least seven,” he told Reuters.
“We feel bad when accidents happen on the other side of the world, but this happened right here. It’s traumatic.”
Yoo Jae-yong, 41, who was staying near to the airport, told local media he saw a spark on the right wing shortly before the crash.
Kim Yong-cheol, 70, said the plane failed to land initially and circled back to try again.
He added that he witnessed “black smoke billowing into the sky” after hearing a “loud explosion”, Yonhap agency reported.
One firefighter who was dispatched to the scene told Reuters he had never seen something “on this scale”.
BBC reporters on the ground have said the sounds of family members crying echoed through the terminal on Sunday evening, while others are angry at how long it is taking to identify the bodies.
Hundreds remain at Muan International Airport waiting for loved ones to be identified.
Some have given DNA saliva samples to officials to help identify the bodies of victims, and the government has offered funeral services and temporary housing to bereaved families.
A national period of mourning has also been declared for the next seven days.
But for all the loved ones of those who died, many questions still remain – not least the cause of the crash, and whether it could have been averted.
“The water near the airport is not deep,” Jeon told Reuters.
“(There) are softer fields than this cement runway. Why couldn’t the pilot land there instead?”
His daughter Mi-Sook was almost home, so saw no reason to call and leave a final message, he says.
“She was almost home – she thought she was coming home”.
Did bird strike contribute to South Korea plane crash? What we know so far
More than 170 people have died after a plane crashed as it was landing in South Korea on Sunday morning.
The Jeju Air plane came off the runway before colliding with a wall at Muan International Airport in the south west of the country.
The plane, which was returning from Bangkok, in Thailand, was carrying 181 people – 179 of whom have died, while two crew members were rescued from the wreckage.
Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash, which fire officials have indicated may have occurred due to a bird strike and bad weather. However experts have warned the crash could have been caused by a number of factors.
Was bird strike a factor in the crash?
The flight, 7C2216, was a Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air, Korea’s most popular budget airline.
The plane arrived in Muan at about 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT).
A South Korean transport official said that the plane had been attempting to land but was forced to hold off after air traffic control gave a bird strike warning – an alert about the risk of a collision with birds.
About two minutes later, the pilot called in a Mayday and air traffic command gave permission for the plane to land from the opposite direction, the official said.
One video appears to show the plane touching down without using its wheels or any other landing gear. It skidded down the runway and crashed into a wall before erupting into flames.
A witness told the South Korean news agency Yonhap that they heard a “loud bang” followed by a “series of explosions”.
Videos from the scene show the plane ablaze with smoke billowing into the sky. Fire crews have since extinguished the fire.
Lee Jeong-hyun, the chief of the Muan fire department, told a televised briefing that the tail section of the plane was identifiable but “one cannot recognise the shape of the rest of the plane”.
He said that the bird strike and bad weather may have caused the crash – but that the exact cause is still being investigated. The flight and voice recorders from the plane have been recovered, though the Yonhap news agency reported that the former was damaged.
One passenger on the flight messaged a relative, saying that a bird “was stuck in the wing” and that the plane could not land, local media reported.
Officials, however, have not confirmed whether the plane did actually collide with any birds.
The head of Jeju Air’s management said that the crash was not due to “any maintenance issues”, Yonhap reported.
The South Korean transport department said that the head pilot on the flight had held the role since 2019 and had more than 6,800 hours of flight experience.
Geoffrey Thomas, an aviation expert and editor of Airline News, told the BBC that South Korea and its airlines were considered “industry best practice” and that both the aircraft and the airline have an “excellent safety record”.
He added: “A lot of things about this tragedy don’t make sense.”
What is a bird strike?
A bird strike is a collision between a plane in flight and a bird. They are very common – in the UK, there were more than 1,400 bird strikes reported in 2022, only about 100 of which affected the plane, according to data from the Civil Aviation Authority.
The best known bird strike occurred in 2009, when an Airbus plane made an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River after colliding with a flock of geese. All 155 passengers and crew survived.
Professor Doug Drury, who teaches aviation at CQUniversity Australia, wrote in an article for The Conversation this summer that Boeing planes have turbofan engines, which can be severely damaged in a bird strike.
He said that pilots are trained to be especially vigilant during the early morning or at sunset, when birds are most active.
But some aviation experts are sceptical about whether a bird strike could have caused the crash at Muan Airport.
“Typically they [bird strike] don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves,” Mr Thomas told Reuters.
Australian airline safety expert Geoffrey Dell also told the news agency: “I’ve never seen a bird strike prevent the landing gear from being extended.”
Who was on board?
The plane was carrying 175 passengers and six crew. Two of the passengers were Thai and the rest are believed to have been South Korean, authorities have said. Many are thought to have been returning from a Christmas holiday in Thailand.
The official death toll stands at 179 – making it the deadliest plane crash in South Korean history.
All the passengers and four members of crew died.
Authorities have so far identified at least 88 bodies.
Five of the people who died were children under the age of 10. The youngest passenger was a three-year-old boy and the oldest was 78, authorities said, citing the passenger manifest.
South Korea’s National Fire Agency said two members of flight crew – a man and a woman – survived the crash. They were found in the tail side of the aircraft after the crash and taken to hospital, it said.
More than 1,500 emergency personnel have been deployed as part of recovery efforts, including 490 fire employees and 455 police officers. They have been searching the area around the runway for parts of the plane and those who were onboard.
What’s been the response?
Acting President Choi Sang-mok has declared a special disaster zone in Muan, which makes central government funding available to the local government and victims.
All flights to and from Muan International Airport have been cancelled.
Families of the victims of the crash have been travelling to the airport in the hope of finding out what happened to their relatives. Video footage from Reuters shows officials reading names of the victims out loud.
Airport authorities and the Red Cross have set up more than a dozen tents in the airport for bereaved families to grieve in private.
Sounds of crying echoed through the terminal. Some are frustrated at how long it is taking to identify the bodies.
Jeju Air has apologised to families. Its chief executive said in a news conference that the airline had no history of accidents. It is believed that Sunday’s crash has been the only fatal accident since the airline was launched in 2005.
Plane manufacturer Boeing has offered condolences to those affected.
Choi, South Korea’s acting president, said: “I express my deepest condolences to the many victims in the incident. I will do all I can for the injured to quickly recover.”
The government has declared a period of national mourning for the country for the next seven days, during which flags at government offices will be lowered.
South Korea plane crash kills 179 with investigation into cause under way
All passengers and most of the crew onboard a Jeju Air flight have died after the plane crash-landed at an airport in South Korea on Sunday.
A total of 179 of the 181 people travelling on the Boeing 737-800 were killed, with just two survivors – both cabin staff – pulled from the burning wreckage.
The plane landed at Muan International Airport in the country’s south, skidding off the runway and crashing into a wall in a fiery explosion.
Flight 2216 had been returning from Bangkok, Thailand with six crew and 175 passengers, many of them holidaymakers.
An investigation into the cause is under way – with experts and officials pointing to a number of possible factors.
Distraught families gathered in the airport’s arrival hall in tears, as they waited for bodies to be identified.
Some of those killed have been identified only by their fingerprints.
Maeng Gi-su, 78, told the BBC his nephew and his nephew’s two sons had been on the plane.
“I can’t believe the entire family has just disappeared,” he said. “My heart aches so much.”
The passengers included 173 South Koreans and two Thai nationals. They were aged between three and 78, although most were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.
- Video captures moments before crash
- What we know so far
Jongluk Doungmanee, 49, had been returning to South Korea from visiting family in Thailand. The mother-of-two lived in South Korea with her husband and worked in agriculture.
In an interview with BBC Thai, her cousin Pornphichaya Chalermsin said she had “only ever seen such news from other countries and never thought it would involve Thai people”, adding: “Watching the video footage made me feel even more distressed.”
Footage of the crash – which happened shortly after 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT) – showed the aircraft landing without wheels, overshooting the runway and crashing into the airport’s perimeter wall, before it exploded into flames.
South Korean transport officials said the plane ran into difficulties approaching landing – with the pilot, who had more than 6,800 hours of flight experience, pulling out of the first attempt due to bird interference.
Soon after, the pilot issued a mayday call and was allowed to land in the opposite direction to usual.
Officials have suggested a bird strike and bad weather may have played a role but aviation experts have questioned whether these were enough to cause such a deadly crash.
One passenger sent a relative a message saying a bird was stuck in the wing, according to the South Korean News1 agency – but officials have not yet confirmed whether the plane was hit by birds.
Geoffrey Thomas, editor of Airline News, told the BBC “a lot of things about this tragedy don’t make sense”.
He said South Korea and its airlines were considered “industry best practice” and that both the aircraft and the airline have an “excellent safety record”.
“At this point there are a lot more questions than we have answers,” Gregory Alegi, an aviation journalist and former teacher at Italy’s air force academy, told the Reuters news agency.
“Why was the plane going so fast? Why were the flaps not open? Why was the landing gear not down?”
The disaster is a national tragedy for South Korea, which has been embroiled in a political crisis after President Yoon Suk Yeol and his temporary successor were both impeached by parliament.
Acting President Choi Sang-mok, who was only appointed on Friday, visited the site of the crash on Sunday.
“I express my deepest condolences to the many victims in the incident. I will do all I can for the injured to quickly recover,” he said.
The crash is the worst for any South Korean airline since the 1997 Korean Air crash in Guam, which killed more than 200 people. Prior to Sunday, the deadliest on South Korean soil was an Air China crash flight that killed 129.
The Muan airport accident also marks the first fatal crash for Jeju Air, one of South Korea’s largest low-cost airlines, which was set up in 2005.
Jeju Air bosses bowed deeply as they gave a public apology at a press conference on Sunday.
“We deeply apologise to all those affected by the incident. We will make every effort to resolve the situation,” the firm said in a statement.
Boeing, which manufactured the 737-800 jet, has said it was in touch with the airline.
New elections could take up to four years, Syria rebel leader says
Holding new elections in Syria could take up to four years, rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has said in a broadcast interview.
This is the first time he has given a timeline for possible elections in Syria since his group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) led a rebel offensive that ousted former President Bashar al-Assad.
In the interview with Saudi state broadcaster Al Arabiya on Sunday, he said drafting a new constitution could take up to three years.
He said it could also be a year before Syrians begin to see significant change and improvements to public services following the overthrow of the Assad regime.
Sharaa said Syria needed to rebuild its legal system and would have to hold a comprehensive population census to run legitimate elections.
Sharaa – previously known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani – has led the country’s new authorities after the Assad presidency fell earlier this month.
Since then, questions have been raised over how HTS will govern the multi-ethnic country.
HTS began as a jihadist group – espousing violence to achieve its goal of establishing a state governed by Islamic law (Sharia) – but has distanced itself from that past in recent years.
Sharaa said the group, which was once aligned with Islamic State and al- Qaeda and is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN and many countries, will be “dissolved” at an upcoming national dialogue conference but gave no further details.
The gathering could be the first test of whether Syria’s new leadership can achieve the promised goal of uniting the country after thirteen years of civil war.
Responding to criticism of his transitional government, he said the appointments made were “essential” and not meant to exclude anyone.
Syria is home to many ethnic and religious groups, including Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Christians, Druze, Alawite Shia and Arab Sunnis, the last of whom make up a majority of the Muslim population.
His group have promised to protect the rights and freedoms of minorities in the country.
Meanwhile, nearly 300 people have been arrested in the past week in a crackdown on Assad loyalists, according to a UK-based war monitor.
Those arrested include informants, pro-regime fighters and former soldiers, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
He told AFP news agency the arrests had been taking place “with the cooperation of local populations”.
Syrian state news agency Sana also reported arrests this week targeting “Assad militia members” where weapons and ammunition were seized.
Jimmy Carter: From peanut farmer to one-term president and Nobel winner
Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, swept to power promising never to lie to the American people.
In the turbulent aftermath of Watergate, the former peanut farmer from Georgia pardoned Vietnam draft evaders and became the first US leader to take climate change seriously.
On the international stage, he helped to broker an historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, but he struggled to deal with the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
After a single term in office, he was swept aside by Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, winning just six states.
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Having left the White House, Carter did much to restore his reputation: becoming a tireless worker for peace, the environment and human rights, for which he was recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize.
The longest-lived president in US history, he celebrated his 100th birthday in October 2024. He had been treated for cancer and had spent the last 19 months in hospice care.
James Earl Carter Jr was born on 1 October 1924 in the small town of Plains, Georgia, the eldest of four children.
His segregationist father had started the family peanut business, and his mother, Lillian, was a registered nurse.
Carter’s experience of the Great Depression and staunch Baptist faith underpinned his political philosophy.
A star basketball player in high school, he went on to spend seven years in the US Navy – during which time he married Rosalynn, a friend of his sister – and became a submarine officer. But on the death of his father in 1953, he returned to run the ailing family farm.
The first year’s crop failed through drought, but Carter turned the business around and made himself wealthy in the process.
He entered politics on the ground floor, elected to a series of local school and library boards, before running for the Georgia Senate.
Civil rights campaigner
American politics was ablaze following the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools.
With his background as a farmer from a southern state, Carter might have been expected to oppose reform – but he had different views to his father.
While serving two terms in the state Senate, he avoided clashes with segregationists – including many in the Democratic party.
But on becoming Georgia governor in 1970, he became more overt in his support of civil rights.
“I say to you quite frankly,” he declared in his inaugural speech, “that the time for racial discrimination is over.”
He placed pictures of Martin Luther King on the walls of the capitol building, as the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated outside.
He made sure that African Americans were appointed to public offices.
However, he found it difficult balancing his strong Christian faith with his liberal instincts when it came to abortion law.
Although he supported the rights of women to terminate pregnancy, he refused to increase funding to make this possible.
As Carter launched his campaign for the presidency in 1974, the nation was still reeling from the Watergate scandal.
He put himself forward as a simple peanut farmer, untainted by the questionable ethics of professional politicians on Capitol Hill.
‘Adultery in my heart’
His timing was excellent. Americans wanted an outsider and Carter fitted the bill.
There was surprise when he admitted (in an interview with Playboy magazine) that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times”. But there proved to be no skeletons in his closet.
In the beginning, polls suggested he was only supported by around 4% of Democrats.
Yet, just nine months later, he toppled the incumbent president Gerald Ford, a Republican.
On his first full day in office, he pardoned hundreds of thousands of men who had evaded service in Vietnam – either by fleeing abroad or failing to register with their local draft board.
One Republican critic, Senator Barry Goldwater, described the decision as “the most disgraceful thing that a president has ever done”.
Carter confessed that it was the hardest decision he had made in office.
He appointed women to key positions in his administration and encouraged Rosalynn to maintain a national profile as First Lady.
He championed (unsuccessfully) an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution which would have promised legal protection against discrimination on the grounds of sex.
One of the first international leaders to take climate change seriously, Carter wore jeans and sweaters in the White House, and turned down the heating to conserve energy.
He installed solar panels on the roof – which were later taken down by President Ronald Reagan – and passed laws to protect millions of acres of unspoiled land in Alaska from development.
A disastrous rescue mission
His televised “fireside chats'” were consciously relaxed, but this approach seemed too informal as problems mounted.
As the American economy slipped into recession, Carter’s popularity began to fall.
He tried to persuade the country to accept stringent measures to deal with the energy crisis – including gasoline rationing – but faced bitter opposition in Congress.
Plans to introduce a universal healthcare system also foundered in the legislature, while unemployment and interest rates both soared.
His Middle East policy began in triumph, with President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel signing the Camp David accords in 1978.
But success abroad was short-lived.
The revolution in Iran, which led to the taking of American hostages, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were severe tests.
Carter broke off diplomatic relations with Tehran and implemented trade sanctions in a desperate effort to free the Americans.
An attempt to rescue them by force was a disaster, leaving eight American servicemen dead.
The incident almost certainly put an end to any hope of re-election.
Defeat by Reagan
Carter fought off a serious challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, and achieved 41% of the popular vote in the subsequent election.
But it was not nearly enough to see off his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan.
The former actor swept into the White House with an electoral college landslide.
On the last day of his presidency, Carter announced the successful completion of the negotiations for the release of the hostages.
Iran had delayed the time of their departure until after President Reagan was sworn in.
On leaving office, Carter had one of the lowest approval ratings of any US president. But in subsequent years, he did much to restore his reputation.
On behalf of the US government, he undertook a peace mission to North Korea which ultimately resulted in the Agreed Framework, an early effort to reach an accord on dismantling its nuclear arsenal.
His library, the Carter Presidential Center, became an influential clearing house of ideas and programmes intended to solve international problems and crises.
In 2002, Carter became the third US president, after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to win the Nobel Peace Prize – and the only one to earn it for his post-presidency work.
“The most serious and universal problem,” he said in his Nobel lecture, “is the growing chasm between the richest and the poorest people on earth.”
With Nelson Mandela, he founded The Elders, a group of global leaders who committed themselves to work on peace and human rights.
Modest lifestyle
In retirement, Carter opted for a modest lifestyle.
He eschewed lucrative speaking appearances and seats on corporate boards for a simple life with Rosalynn in Plains, Georgia, where both were born.
Carter did not want to make money from his time in the Oval Office.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” he told the Washington Post. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”
He was the only modern president to return full-time to the house he had lived in before he entered politics, a single-floor, two-bedroom home.
According to the Post, the Carters’ home was valued at $167,000 – less than the Secret Service vehicles parked outside to protect them.
In 2015, he announced that he was being treated for cancer, the disease that killed both his parents and three sisters.
Just a few months after surgery for a broken hip, he was back to work as a volunteer builder with Habitat for Humanity.
The former president and his wife began work with the charity in 1984, and helped to repair more than 4,000 homes in the years since.
He continued to teach at a Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, sometimes welcoming Democratic presidential hopefuls to his class.
In November 2023, Rosalynn Carter died. In tribute, the former president said that his wife of 77 years was “my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished”.
Celebrating his centenary a year later, Carter proved that he still had political antennae.
“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris” in November’s election, he said.
He did manage to cast a ballot for her, although his home state of Georgia ultimately voted for Donald Trump.
Carter’s political philosophy contained the sometimes conflicting elements of a conservative small-town upbringing, and his natural liberal instincts.
But what really drove his lifetime of public service were his deeply held religious beliefs.
“You cannot divorce religious belief and public service,” he said.
“I’ve never detected any conflict between God’s will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.”
Jimmy Carter, former US president, dies aged 100
Former US President Jimmy Carter has died aged 100, the centre he founded has confirmed.
The former peanut farmer lived longer than any president in history and celebrated his 100th birthday in October.
The Carter Center, which advocates for democracy and human rights around the world, said he died on Sunday afternoon at his home in Plains, Georgia.
The Democrat served as president from 1977 to 1981, a period beset by economic and diplomatic crises.
After leaving the White House with low approval ratings, his reputation was restored through humanitarian work which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.
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- Obituary: The peanut farmer who rose to US president
“My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love,” his son, Chip Carter, said in a statement.
“The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honouring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs.”
Carter – who prior to becoming president was governor of Georgia, a lieutenant in the US navy and a farmer – is survived by his four children, 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.
His wife, Rosalynn, who he was married to for 77 years, died in November 2023.
Since 2018 and the death of George HW Bush, he was the oldest surviving US president.
Carter stopped medical treatment for an undisclosed illness last year and instead began receiving hospice care at his home.
President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden said the world had “lost an extraordinary leader, statesman and humanitarian”.
Describing him as “a dear friend” and “a man of principle, faith and humility”, they added: “He showed that we are a great nation because we are a good people – decent and honorable, courageous and compassionate, humble and strong.”
“The challenges Jimmy faced as president came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans,” President-elect Donald Trump wrote on social media.
“For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”
Carter’s presidency will be remembered for his struggles in dealing with acute economic problems and several foreign policy challenges, including the Iran hostage crisis, which ended with the deaths of eight Americans.
There was, however, a notable foreign policy triumph in the Middle East when he helped broker an accord between Egypt and Israel, signed at Camp David in the US in 1978.
But that seemed a distant memory two years later, when voters overwhelmingly chose Republican Ronald Reagan, who had portrayed the president as a weak leader unable to deal with inflation and interest rates at near record highs.
Carter lost the 1980 election by a landslide, winning only six US states plus Washington DC.
In the aftermath of such a heavy defeat, Carter was frequently held up by Republicans as an example of liberal ineptitude.
Meanwhile, many in his own party either ignored him or viewed his presidential shortcomings as evidence their brand of Democratic politics or policy was a better way.
Today many on the right still deride the Carter years but as the decades passed, his humanitarian efforts and simple lifestyle began to shape a new legacy for many Americans.
After leaving the White House, he became the first and only president to return full-time to the house he lived in before politics – a humble, two-bedroom ranch-style home.
He chose not to pursue the lucrative after-dinner speeches and publishing deals awaiting most former presidents, telling the Washington Post in 2018 that he never really wanted to be rich.
Instead, he spent his remaining years trying to address global problems of inequality and disease.
He also teamed up with Nelson Mandela to found The Elders, a group of global leaders who committed themselves to work on peace and human rights.
In accepting his Nobel prize in 2002 – only the third US president to receive it – he said: “The most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and the poorest people on Earth.”
In a statement, former President Bill Clinton and wife Hillary Clinton said he “worked tirelessly for a better, fairer world”, noting his humanitarian, environmental and diplomatic efforts.
“Guided by faith, President Carter lived to serve others – until the very end,” they added.
Former President Barack Obama paid tribute to Carter’s “decency” and said “he taught all of us what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service”.
Republican former President George W Bush, meanwhile, said Carter “dignified the office” and that “his efforts to leave behind a better world didn’t end with the presidency”.
President Biden said a state funeral would be held in Washington DC.
Tourist killed in shark attack off Egyptian coast
A shark attack off of Egypt’s Red Sea coastline has left one tourist dead and another injured, officials have said.
In a statement, the north African nation’s environment ministry said Sunday’s incident occurred north of Marsa Alam, a resort town in eastern Egypt popular with divers.
It added that the attack occurred in “deep waters outside of the designated swimming area”.
While the ministry only said that the two victims were foreign, the AFP news agency reported they were Italian nationals, citing an unnamed source at the Italian foreign ministry.
The 48-year-old man who died was a resident of Rome, while the injured man was 69, according to AFP.
Egyptian officials said the two tourists were transported to a hospital in Port Ghalib, around 30 miles north of Marsa Alam.
The swimming area in Marsa Alam will be closed and the incident is being investigated, authorities said.
In the past 10 years, there have been four confirmed fatalities due to shark attacks in the Red Sea, according to data compiled by the independent Shark Research Institute.
The last to occur happened in June 2023 near Hurguda and involved a 24-year-old Russian man.
Lost city found by accident and a fly’s brain mapped: 2024’s scientific wins
A total solar eclipse seen by millions, a lost jungle city discovered by accident and hope for the almost extinct northern white rhino – science has given us a lot to get excited about this year.
One of the biggest news stories was about making space travel cheaper and easier, with Elon Musk’s Starship making a giant step towards humanity having a reusable rocket.
Of course it’s not all been positive. In bad news for the planet, for example, it is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the world’s warmest year on record.
But there has been a lot to celebrate. Here are seven of our favourite uplifting science stories of the year.
That ‘chopsticks’ rocket catch
In October, Elon Musk’s Starship rocket completed a world first after part of it was captured on its return to the launch pad.
The SpaceX vehicle’s lower booster rocket flew back to its launch tower, instead of falling into the sea. It was caught in a giant pair of mechanical arms, or “chopsticks” as part of its fifth test flight.
It brought SpaceX’s ambition of developing a fully reusable and rapidly deployable rocket to go to the Moon and maybe even Mars a big step closer.
“A day for the history books,” engineers at SpaceX declared as the booster landed safely.
You can read more about the ‘chopsticks’ moment here.
Mapping the fly brain
They can walk, hover and the males can even sing love songs to woo mates – all this with a brain that’s tinier than a pinhead.
But it wasn’t until October that scientists studying the brain of a fruit fly mapped the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections.
It was the most detailed analysis of the brain of an adult animal ever produced, and one leading brain specialist described the breakthrough as a “huge leap” in our understanding of our own brains.
One of the research leaders said it would shed new light into “the mechanism of thought”. Read more about the story here.
Lost Mayan city found ‘by accident’
Imagine you’ve Googled something, you get to page 16 of the results and: “Hold on, is that a lost Mayan city?”
Well that’s what happened to Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University in the US, who came across a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring.
When he processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed – a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.
In the city, which had disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico, archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields and amphitheatres.
The complex – which researchers named Valeriana – was revealed using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.
World’s first IVF rhino pregnancy
There are only two northern white rhinos left in the world, but we reported on a fertility breakthrough that offered hope for saving the species.
Scientists achieved the world’s first IVF rhino pregnancy, successfully transferring a lab-created rhino embryo into a surrogate mother.
The procedure was carried out with southern white rhinos, a closely related sub-species of northern whites which still number in the thousands, and took 13 attempts to accomplish.
The mother eventually died of an infection, but a post-mortem revealed that the 6.5cm male foetus was developing well and had a 95% chance of being born alive, showing that a viable pregnancy through rhino IVF is possible.
There are 30 precious northern white rhino embryos in existence. The next step would be repeating the success with some of these embryos.
Conservation slowed nature loss
With human activity driving what conservation charity the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) calls a “catastrophic” loss of species, it can sometimes feel like we don’t hear an awful lot of good news about nature.
But a ten-year study showed conservation actions are effective at reducing global biodiversity loss.
Scientists from dozens of research institutes reviewed 665 trials of conservation measures in different countries and oceans, and found they had had a positive effect in two out of every three cases.
The measures ranged from hatching Chinook salmon to the eradication of invasive algae, and the study’s authors said their findings offered a “ray of light” for those working to protect threatened animals and plants.
Read more about the story here.
The solar eclipse that stunned millions
Tens of millions of people across Mexico, the US and Canada had their heads turned, literally by a total solar eclipse.
This is where the Moon moves between the Earth and the Sun, extinguishing its light.
A total solar eclipse occurs somewhere on Earth roughly every 18 months, but they are often in quite unpopulated areas, whereas this one had major cities including Dallas in its path.
The path of totality – the area where people could see the Moon totally block the Sun – was also much wider this year than it was during the spectacular total solar eclipse of 2017.
For more on the story read here.
New life from beloved Sycamore Gap tree
Millions once visited Sycamore Gap, the famous sycamore tree nestled in a gap in Hadrian’s Wall.
So when it was cut down in 2023, naturally a national outpouring of shock and dismay followed.
But in March, new life sprung from the tree’s rescued seeds and twigs, giving hope that the iconic tree has a future.
BBC News saw the new shoots on a rare visit to the secret National Trust centre protecting the seedlings.
Young twigs and seeds thrown to the ground when the tree toppled were salvaged by the National Trust, which cares for the site with the Northumberland National Park Authority.
The saplings are now being given to charities, groups and individuals as “trees of hope”.
How India’s food shortage filled American libraries
In 1996, Ananya Vajpeyi, a doctoral student, discovered the fabled South Asia collection of books at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library.
“I’ve spent time in some of the leading South Asia libraries of the world, at Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Columbia. But nothing has ever matched the unending riches held at the University of Chicago,” Ms Vajpeyi, a fellow at India’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), told me.
The 132-year-old University of Chicago houses more than 800,000 volumes related to South Asia, making it one of the world’s premier collections for studies on the region. But how did such a treasure trove of South Asian literature end up there?
The answer lies in a programme called PL-480, a US initiative launched in 1954 under Public Law 480, also known as the Food for Peace, a hallmark of Cold War diplomacy.
Signed into law by President Dwight D Eisenhower, PL-480 allowed countries like India to buy US grain with local currency, easing their foreign exchange burden and reducing US surpluses. India was one of the largest recipients of this food aid, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s when it faced severe food shortages.
The local currency funds were provided at minimal cost to participating US universities. These funds were used to purchase local books, periodicals, phonograph records, and “other media” in multiple Indian languages, enriching collections at over two dozen universities. Institutions like the University of Chicago became hubs for South Asian studies as a result. (Manuscripts were excluded due to Indian antiquity laws.)
“PL-480 has had amazing and unexpected consequences for the University of Chicago and for more than 30 other US collections,” James Nye, director of the Digital South Asia library at University of Chicago, told the BBC.
The process of building an impressive library collection from South Asia was no simple task.
A special team staffed by 60 Indians was established in Delhi in 1959. Initially focused on picking up government publications, the programme expanded over five years to include books and periodicals. By 1968, 20 US universities were receiving materials from the growing collection, as noted by Maureen LP Patterson, a leading bibliographer of South Asian studies.
In a paper published in 1969, Patterson recounted that in the early days of the PL-480, the team in India faced the challenge of sourcing books from a vast, diverse country with an intricate network of languages.
They needed the expertise of booksellers with a reputation for good judgement and efficiency. Given India’s size and the complexity of its literary landscape, no single dealer could handle the procurement on their own, Patterson, who died in 2012, wrote.
Instead, dealers were selected from various publishing hubs, each focusing on specific languages or groups of languages. This collaboration worked seamlessly, with dealers sending titles they were not certain about for approval. The final selection rested with the Delhi office, Patterson noted.
The programme was keen on picking up a comprehensive collection of Indian fiction in all languages. “The policy netted a huge number of detective stories and novels of no lasting value,” wrote Patterson.
In 1963, the choice for acquiring books was narrowed down to “research level material” – and intake of fiction in many languages was halved. By 1966, more than 750,000 books and periodicals were sent to American universities from India, Nepal and Pakistan, with India contributing more than 633,000 items.
“We’ve sent works like History of India from 1000 to 1770 AD, Handicrafts in India, Hindu Culture and Personality: A Psychoanalytic Study, and more,” a report on a meeting in an US library on the programme in 1967 said.
Todd Michelson-Ambelang, librarian for South Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wonders if vast collections from the region in US and other Western libraries took away literary resources from the Indian sub-continent.
Founded during Cold War tensions and funded by PL-480, his university’s South Asia centre grew its library to more than 200,000 titles by the 21st Century.
Mr Michelson-Ambelang told the BBC that the removal of books from South Asia through programmes like PL-480 “creates knowledge gaps”, as researchers from there often need to travel to the West to access these resources.
It is unclear whether all the books acquired by US universities from India at that time are still available there. According to Maya Dodd, of India’s FLAME University, many books now unavailable in India can be found in the University of Chicago’s library collections, all marked with the stamp saying “PL-480”.
“For the most part, books that came through the PL-480 programme are still available in South Asia. But preservation is often a challenge due to white ants, pests, and a lack of temperature and humidity control. In contrast, most materials in the West remain well-preserved thanks to the preservation and conservation efforts in our libraries,” Mr Michelson-Ambelang says.
Another reason why Mr Michelson-Ambelang calls the Western libraries colonial archives “partly is because they serve academics, often excluding those outside their institutions. While librarians understand the disparities in access to South Asian materials, copyright laws limit sharing, reinforcing these gaps”.
So, what happened when the PL-480 programme ended?
Mr Nye says the end of the programme in the 1980s, shifted the financial burden to American libraries. “Libraries in the US have had to pay for the selection, acquisition, collection, and delivery of resources,” he said. For example, the University of Chicago now spends more than $100,000 annually on buying books and periodicals through the Library of Congress field office in Delhi.
Ms Vajpeyi believes the books-for-grain deal had a positive outcome. She studied Sanskrit, but her research in University of Chicago spanned Indian and European languages – French, German, Marathi, and Hindi – and touched on linguistics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and more. “At the Regenstein Library, I never failed to find the books I needed or get them quickly if they weren’t already there,” she says.
“The books are safe, valued, accessible and used. I’ve visited libraries, archives and institutions in every part of India and the story in our country is universally dismal. Here they were lost or destroyed or neglected or very often made inaccessible.”
Chlamydia could make koalas extinct. Can a vaccine save them in time?
On the table, unconscious and stretched out on a pillow, Joe Mangy looks deceptively peaceful. The koala’s watery, red-rimmed eyes are the only sign of the disease at war with his body.
Tubes snarl out of a mask covering his face as a vet tech listens to his chest with a stethoscope. He is not healing as well as they had hoped.
Eight days earlier, Joe Mangy – who is about two years old – was found wandering in the middle of a suburban road. Dazed and confused, eyes nearly glued shut with mucus, he was rushed here, to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary’s hospital.
Enveloped by rainforest on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the park is full of koalas like this.
Outside the clinic, in a “Koala Rehab Centre” faintly perfumed by eucalyptus leaves, is a three-year-old recovering from a hysterectomy. “It saved her life… but she can’t reproduce,” the head vet Michael Pyne says.
Another male koala stares blankly through narrowed slits. His left tear duct is so inflamed his eyeball is barely visible.
This hospital is ground zero of a grim chlamydia epidemic which is killing thousands of koalas and making even more sterile, pushing the national icons to the brink of extinction.
But it’s also at the core of desperate bid to save them with a vaccine – frustrated efforts which, after over a decade, are still tied up in regulation and running out of both time and money.
Biggest and deadliest threat
Even a few decades ago, spotting a koala snuggled in a backyard tree was nothing out of the ordinary. They were plentiful on the country’s populous east coast.
But in recent times the species has been in dramatic decline – in some places plummeting by 80% in just 10 years.
Land clearing and urbanisation are leaving the marsupials hungry and homeless, while natural disasters are drowning or cooking them en masse.
“[But] it’s the chlamydia that shot up tremendously – almost exponentially,” says Dr Pyne, who has run the Currumbin clinic for more than 20 years.
“You get days where you’re euthanising heaps of koalas that just come in completely ravaged.”
Estimates vary greatly – koalas are famously difficult to count – but some groups say as few as 50,000 of the animals are left in the wild and the species is officially listed as endangered on most of the eastern seaboard. There are now fears the animals will be extinct in some states within a generation.
Dr Pyne wistfully recounts “the early days” when his hospital only saw a handful of koalas a year.
They now see 400.
So many come through the door that the team has started giving them two names, a vet nurse says, cradling Joe Mangy as he wakes from the anaesthetic. His last name is a nod to the state of his eyes when he first arrived, she explains.
Of the top reasons koalas are brought into wildlife hospitals – vehicle strikes, pet attacks and chlamydia – the bacterial infection is the biggest and deadliest.
It results in conjunctivitis for koalas like Joe Mangy, but presents as an infection of the genitals and urinary system for others. Particularly unlucky animals, get both at the same time.
At its worst, the ocular form can be so bad koalas are blinded and starve to death, while the urogenital infection produces giant fluid-filled cysts so “nasty” everyday bodily functions like passing urine make the animals cry out in pain.
“Their reproductive system falls apart,” Dr Pyne explains.
If caught early enough, treatment is an option, but that in itself is a potentially fatal “nightmare” as the antibiotics destroy the gut bacteria which allow koalas to digest otherwise toxic eucalyptus leaves – their main food source.
On a species level though, the disease, which spreads through bodily fluids, causes even greater ruin.
Chlamydia is not uncommon in other animals – koalas are suspected to have first caught it from livestock – but the spread and intensity of the disease amongst the marsupials is unmatched.
Experts estimate around half of koalas in Queensland and New South Wales could be infected, but just a suburb away from Currumbin, in Elanora, that has climbed beyond 80%.
It is the most diseased population in the region and numbers have been “falling off a cliff”, Dr Pyne says. “It’s a disaster.”
Enter the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and their vaccine, which aims to prevent and treat chlamydia in koalas and has been almost two decades in the making.
Alongside Currumbin, they’re trying to save the Elanora koalas from oblivion: capturing 30 youngsters and vaccinating them, before recatching them at intervals over three years to track their health.
So far only three of the vaccinated koalas in this research trial have contracted the disease, though all recovered, and encouragingly, more than two dozen joeys have been born – bucking the infertility trend.
“There’s generations of koalas now that have come through. We’ve got grand joeys,” Dr Pyne says excitedly.
Currumbin has also been vaccinating every koala which comes through their hospital, and have reached about 400 koalas this way.
But treating and vaccinating each koala with chlamydia costs them about A$7,000 (£3,500, $4,500). Capturing, jabbing, and tracking each wild Elanora koala is basically double that.
Two hours away, researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) are doing their best to flatten the wave of disease too, with a separate vaccine.
They inoculate about 2,000 koalas a year through wildlife hospital trials and tack themselves onto development projects or research studies in the region that involve their capture.
They’ve just wrapped a decade’s-worth of those projects into one study of more than 600 animals – the largest and longest of its kind.
Incredibly, deaths dropped by two thirds among vaccinated koalas.
Molecular biologist Samuel Phillips tells the BBC about one local koala population they studied which was at risk of extinction. Authorities are now looking at translocating some animals so they don’t overpopulate the area.
“It turned it around completely.”
And crucially, the study found that the koalas that did contract chlamydia were doing so later in life, after their peak breeding years had begun.
Dr Phillips and his research partner Peter Timms have now submitted their vaccine to the federal regulator for approval but say they’re keeping their hopes in check.
“There’ll be hurdles,” Dr Timms explains.
In the meantime, for their small, overstretched team, dividing time and funding is an impossible balance. Do they involve themselves in as many trials as possible to help small groups of koalas now, or do they devote their efforts to advancing the tedious research and approval process which could help a huge cohort of them down the track?
“People come to us semi-regularly and say, ‘Can we vaccinate more koalas?’ And the answer at some point is ‘No’, because otherwise we’re just spending all our time and energy doing [that],” Dr Timms says.
‘Death by a thousand cuts’
It has now been a decade since these two research teams first started seeing results, and there is still no real timeline on when a jab will be ready.
And even when it is, there are huge barriers to any roll out.
While making the vaccine isn’t that costly, finding, capturing, and vaccinating wild koalas is extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming.
Dr Phillips says they would have to strategically target select populations, though they’re not yet sure how many koalas in each they’d need to treat to reverse decline.
That challenge will be doubly complicated with the QUT vaccine, though, because it requires two doses, as opposed to UniSC’s single-shot formula.
The QUT team has been developing an implant – inspired by a human contraceptive device – that dissolves after four weeks to provide the booster. It will be trialled on Currumbin’s captive koalas next year.
Then there is the question of funding, which has been, and continues to be, fickle. Both vaccine developers provide their shots to wildlife hospitals and research trials for free, relying on individual donors, generosity from their universities, and the unpredictable whims of election cycles.
State and federal governments are the biggest financial backers of the vaccine projects – last year Canberra gave QUT and UniSC A$750,000 each.
“No-one wants to imagine an Australia without koalas,” Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said at the time.
But government contributions are random, and never quite enough.
“I cannot believe somebody will not come along tomorrow and say ‘You need to vaccinate? Here’s my cheque to cover the next 10 years’. But we can’t find them,” Dr Timms says.
However, the biggest barrier is the mountain of red tape researchers are yet to cut through.
Both groups have conservation charities and wildlife hospitals knocking down the door, desperate for access, but until they go through the “painful” approval process, their hands are largely tied.
“[It’s] a critical step that is just taking too long. It kills me,” Dr Pyne says.
“We’ve kind of passed it being urgent. It was urgent probably 10 years ago.”
Adding to their despondency, is a fact all involved stress repeatedly: the vaccine is simply not enough to save the species.
And so even the lucky koalas like Joe Mangy, who dodge death by chlamydia and return to the wild, still must face off against a myriad of other mortal threats.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts, right?” Dr Timms says.
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When Jurgen Klopp fashioned his great Liverpool team, Mohamed Salah was the final piece in an attacking triumverate that matched anything in Europe.
With Salah on the right providing a blizzard of goals, Brazil’s Roberto Firmino providing silky touches allied to moments of genius through the centre and beyond, plus Sadio Mane delivering selfless brilliance and menace on the left, Liverpool swept up the major prizes.
The trio provided the Reds’ adaptable, unstoppable spearhead – and now head coach Arne Slot’s Liverpool machine has a new three-dimensional threat with echoes of the silver-lined past.
Salah is the kingpin, his goal in the 5-0 thrashing of West Ham United racking up another remarkable number as it was his 20th goal in all competitions this season, a figure he has now reached in all of his eight seasons at Liverpool.
Salah’s goal and assist means he has now been involved in 52 goals in all competitions in 2024 – 29 goals and 23 assists – which is more than any other player in Europe’s big five leagues.
He has also scored and assisted in eight different Premier League games this season, already the most any player has achieved in a single campaign.
“Mo and the word ‘extraordinary’ is something I have heard a lot over the last six months and he deserves that,” said Slot. “He also works so hard for the team.”
Salah may be the headline act these days, but he is not working alone as Liverpool cut a swathe through the Premier League, where they have an eight-point lead going into 2025, and Champions League, where they also head the table in this season’s new format.
‘A natural fit all tuned into the same wavelength’
With Firmino and Mane now elsewhere, Slot has teamed Salah up with two potent allies – inherited from Klopp – who are increasingly making this look a season when the Premier League title returns to Anfield.
All three of them scored in the thumping victory at London Stadium.
Luis Diaz, who netted twice in the 6-3 win at Tottenham seven days before this West Ham rout, set them on their way.
A player who was signed and utilised as a wide player when he arrived from Porto in January 2022, Slot now has the Colombian working the central areas to great effect, perhaps without Firmino’s elegance but with real impact, especially as his finishing has become more reliable.
And, on the left, the rangy, dangerous Cody Gakpo has found his natural home, a position where he was one of the stars of Euro 2024 for the Netherlands, a scorer and creator, with an ability to come in off the flank making decisive contributions while also showing a natural finisher’s eye.
Diaz’s natural attraction to the wide areas also increases Liverpool’s options in attack – but what makes them so dangerous is that Salah, Diaz and Gakpo are such a natural fit; three high-class operators tuned in to the same wavelength.
Mane-Firmino-Salah v Gakpo-Diaz-Salah – what the stats say
When Liverpool won the Premier League in 2019-20, Klopp’s front three barely changed throughout – Firmino played a part in all 38 matches, while Mane made 35 appearances and Salah 34.
However, the numbers suggest they were nowhere near as potent as this new-look forward line.
After 18 matches Gakpo, Diaz and Salah already have 30 goals between them, compared to 46 by the title-winning front three.
On average, their shot conversion and big chance conversion rates are superior too.
Individually, however, there are some noticeable differences…
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On the left, Gakpo’s five goals – coming at one goal every 180 minutes – is down on Mane’s, although he is lethal when presented with a big chance.
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Down the middle, Diaz is much more clincal and scoring at a faster rate than Firmino, but is providing fewer assists.
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And, on the right, Salah is just playing better than ever. His 19 goals and 10 assists compares favourably to the 17 goals and 13 assists he managed during the entire title-winning campaign.
It then comes down to longevity.
While their stats stack up over half a season, the 245 goals Salah, Mane and Firmino shared during the five years they spent together at Anfield is nothing short of remarkable.
What information do we collect from this quiz?
‘Goals shared around is pleasing to see’
While it is too soon to put the trio in the same bracket as Salah, Firmino and Mane, there is no doubting the stunning contribution they have made to Liverpool’s remorseless first season under Slot as they race clear at the top of the Premier League, with only one defeat in 18 games.
In partnership with Salah, Firmino and Mane won the Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup, League Cup, Uefa Super Cup and Fifa Club World Cup.
This is what the new breed must live up to – but Salah, Diaz and Gakpo are now pose a thrilling, unless you are in opposition, threat of their own.
And, as if they do not give opponents, not just those as truly abysmal as West Ham United, enough to worry about, Slot can also introduce the man who is arguably Liverpool’s most clinical finisher.
Diogo Jota proved this point with the final goal after Diaz, Gakpo and Salah provided the platform to establish a 3-0 lead by half-time.
“If you see the goals shared around it is pleasing to see,” added Slot. “If you only have one player scoring goals that’s not helpful but it is always good to have someone scoring a lot of goals.
“It was not only who scores the goals, it was the lead up to the goals that was positive, too.”
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First Test, day four of five, Centurion
Pakistan 211 & 237
South Africa 301 & 150-8: Bavuma 40; Abbas 6-54
Scorecard
South Africa secured their place in June’s World Test Championship final by holding their nerve to beat Pakistan by two wickets on an enthralling fourth day of the first Test in Centurion.
Chasing 148 for victory, the Proteas fell from 96-4 to 99-8, including the loss of three wickets for no runs in four balls.
Pakistan seamer Mohammad Abbas, playing his first Test for more than three years, took 6-54 but the hosts found an unlikely batting hero in number 10 Kagiso Rabada.
He crashed 31 not out from 26 balls in a partnership of 51 with Marco Jansen, who finished 16 not out.
The win keeps South Africa top of the Test Championship table and ensures they will contest the final for the first time and face either Australia or India at Lord’s.
Of the victory, captain Temba Bavuma said: “[It was] quite an emotional one.
“It was a good advert for Test cricket, a bit of a rollercoaster. We did it the hard way but are glad we are able to get the result.
“It’s a bad day to be a beer, today. We will enjoy the moment.”
How a dramatic fourth day unfolded
South Africa had the better of most of the first three days but began the fourth day 27-3 with their hopes in the balance.
Experienced pair Bavuma and Aiden Markram settled early nerves until Abbas bowled Markram for 37 for his first wicket of the fourth day.
Abbas, with his immaculate lines and lengths, bowled throughout the 30.3 overs of play either side of lunch on a lively pitch.
The Proteas’ innings hit real strife after Bavuma was given caught behind off the seamer for 40, although replays suggested the ball flicked his pocket rather than bat, potentially saving the South Africa skipper had he chosen to review.
Naseem Shah then bowled Kyle Verreynne for two and Abbas had David Bedingham and Corbin Bosch caught behind in the next over.
At that stage South Africa needed a further 49 with two wickets left as Rabada joined all-rounder Jansen.
First the pair reached lunch at 116-8, calming some of the drama. Afterwards Rabada played the decisive hand.
The left-hander attacked and crashed four of his five fours after the break.
It swung the momentum back to South Africa and when Jansen steered the winning runs behind point there were scenes of jubilation in the stands and obvious emotion among the players.
“There wasn’t much conversation,” said Bavuma, asked about the situation at lunch. “I was still sulking in the toilet. I came out when we needed about 15 runs. It was a tough one.”
South Africa’s route to Lord’s
South Africa are top of the Test Championship table having won seven of their 11 matches.
They began this cycle with a drawn series at home against India but were then beaten 2-0 away in New Zealand.
They sent a weakened side for that series against the Black Caps – a decision that drew some criticism with first-choice players instead kept in South Africa to play in their domestic T20 competition.
Since then, and with their key players returned, they have drawn one Test and won the next six in a row.
Their fixtures have been kind – away series in West Indies, New Zealand and Bangladesh plus Sri Lanka and Pakistan travelling to South Africa after India – but a victory for a side outside the sport’s big three of India, Australia and England should be celebrated.
“It is a big one, not just for myself but the team and the coach as well,” Bavuma said.
“We have always said we weren’t given much of a chance.
“As a team we have overcome a lot. We haven’t been super dominant or ruthless but have always found a way.”
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The Premier League table has a retro feel about it at the halfway stage.
Liverpool’s winning machine under Arne Slot lead the way, but their closest current challengers are the ones that have thrown up the real surprise.
With 19 games played, Nottingham Forest lie second and are tussling with the Reds, similar to when they locked horns for silverware in the late 1970s and during the 80s.
Forest beat Everton 2-0 on Sunday with their fans leaving Goodison Park and heading back to the Midlands singing “we’re gonna win the league”.
Doing ‘a Leicester City’ and claiming the trophy might be a stretch, particularly as it would require a significant collapse from Liverpool.
But, for now, they are drinking in every moment.
“We are enjoying it,” said boss Nuno Espirito Santo of their league position. “We are especially enjoying because our fans are enjoying.
“This is what we have to do together, let’s enjoy the journey, compete in every match. Nothing changes, we have to realise we didn’t achieve anything.”
Here, BBC Sport looks at five reasons why Forest are capable of keeping pace for a top-four finish.
First, a history lesson…
Forest won the First Division title in 1978 with Liverpool coming second, while the final league positions were reversed a year later.
During the 80s, Forest finished third on three occasions and, in those seasons, Liverpool twice ended as champions as well as coming runners-up.
Under Brian Clough, Forest shocked the continent by lifting the European Cup in 1979 and retaining the crown a year later.
They have not competed in that competition since the 1980-81 campaign, but can fans start dreaming of hearing the Champions League anthem at the City Ground next season?
Having 37 points after 19 games shows mixed results in the Premier League era.
For example, Wimbledon finished eighth in 1997 having had the same tally at this stage and Sunderland came seventh three years later, while Chelsea (2003) and Liverpool (2008) both managed to finish in the top four at the end of the campaign.
Wonderful Wood like a ‘prime Vieri’
Chris Wood is a proven Premier League striker, netting double figures in six seasons, previously for Burnley and now Forest.
The New Zealand international scored his 11th league goal of the campaign against Everton with a delightful finish and his goalscoring run is showing no signs of slowing down.
Only the usual suspects of Mohamed Salah, Erling Haaland and Cole Palmer have scored more goals in the league this season than Wood.
The 33-year-old is on course to surpass his best top-flight tally of 14 achieved last term as well as for the Clarets in 2019-20, and his 22 goals under Nuno Espirito Santo is the joint-most by a Forest player under one manager.
He is in fine Forest company with that number, alongside Stan Collymore who netted the same for Frank Clark in the 1990s.
There was high praise for Wood on BBC Sport’s live text commentary of Sunday’s game, when he was compared to a cult hero of Italian football.
Contributor Andrew said: “Wood is running around and scoring like a prime Christian Vieri this season. His abilities have always been under-rated in English football.”
Marvellous Milenkovic
Forest are not just armed with a potent goalscorer, they are solid defensively too having conceded only 19 goals in as many games so far this season.
Only leaders Liverpool (17) and third-placed Arsenal (16) have shipped fewer in the top-flight this term.
Goalkeeper Matz Sels leads the way in the league with eight clean sheets and although he had a comfortable afternoon on Merseyside, he did make a sharp stop off Beto to preserve another shutout.
But Forest’s star of the show in their backline is centre-half Nikola Milenkovic, who will surely be a contender for bargain signing of the season.
Having previously been linked with ‘bigger’ clubs, Forest swooped to sign Milenkovic for just £12m from Fiorentina in the summer and the towering Serbia international is showcasing what other sides are missing out on.
The 27-year-old is the bedrock of Forest’s fine defensive showings and marshals his team-mates with confidence and authority.
Gibbs-White leads supporting cast
Appointed just over a year ago, not even the most optimistic of Forest fans would have expected the impact Nuno has made.
Having been 17th in the table when he took over last December and staring at relegation following a points deduction for breaching financial rules, the ex-Wolves has galvanised the club to leave the fans singing “up the Football League we go”.
Wood and Milenkovic have been highlighted and the side were untroubled at Everton without injured defender Murillo, showing that the Portuguese has an array of talent that act as supporting cast.
The most notable of those is skipper Morgan Gibbs-White.
Like his manager, the midfielder made the move from Molineux and has since broken into the England national team.
It was his ball forward that set up the opener against Everton and the 24-year-old’s goal in the game was coolly taken – receiving a pass from Wood, turning a defender, and converting with aplomb.
Nuno called his skipper a “talented player” who is “fantastic”, while Nevin said he is a “class act”.
Ex-England defender Stephen Warnock said on BBC Radio 5 Live: “The balance that they have up front and the players that they have in those forward areas are wonderful. They have been creative and clinical.”
Big guns faltering
Forest have capitalised on members of the traditional top six faltering this season.
Champions Manchester City’s crisis has been well-documented, and they currently sit in fifth place, while Tottenham and Manchester United are nowhere to be seen, languishing in the bottom half of the table.
Aston Villa’s packed schedule is catching up with them – they are down in ninth place after finishing fourth last season.
“Our expectations are the same,” said Nuno. “We have to prepare for the next one.”
That game in the new year comes against his former club Wolves, who are rejuvenated under Vitor Pereira, and a good result there is another step closer to retro becoming a new reality.
What information do we collect from this quiz?
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Defending champion Luke Humphries is out of the PDC World Darts Championship in the fourth round after an astonishing performance from former winner Peter Wright.
Humphries was far from his fluent best and was eventually beaten 4-1 by the 2020 and 2022 champion.
Wright, who is seeded 17th, has endured a difficult year but said in the build-up that he was confident he could still match the levels of Humphries and teenage prodigy Luke Littler.
And so it proved. He averaged 100.93 – slightly higher than Humphries’ 99.23 – and had a staggering 70% success rate on the checkouts.
Humphries had fought back in the pre-match words – saying if he won this year’s event he would have matched everything Wright had achieved despite being 25 years his junior.
His bare numbers were still at a reasonable level – he was at 56.3% on checkouts himself – but there was a flatness about his performance and he was not able to produce that consistent high-level of scoring that has propelled him to the world’s best player.
His ranking as world number one is safe because the PDC Order of Merit is done over two years and Humphries has won six PDC major finals in that time.
For Wright this is a significant warning to others that he still has plenty of life left in him at 54.
Earlier this year, he endured a torrid Premier League campaign, winning just two of 18 matches, as he finished bottom of the eight-player table.
He will face the winner of eighth-seed Stephen Bunting against unseeded Luke Woodhouse in the last eight.
“Luke gave me a load of chances there, he didn’t play like he can,” Wright told Sky Sports.
“I’ve been struggling for form all year and it’s so annoying because I know I can still play darts.
“I’m a double world champion and I want to win it for a third time. I’m not too old and you only have to play well for two or three weeks the whole year. These three weeks are all that matters and I’m in the quarter-finals.”
Humphries’ exit, in theory, makes Littler’s route to the final easier with Bunting now the highest-seeded player he could play before Friday’s showpiece event.
Price beats Welsh compatriot Clayton
Meanwhile, 2021 champion Gerwyn Price is through to the last eight with a 4-2 win over number seven seed Jonny Clayton.
Price, who is good friends with Clayton and plays alongside him for Wales in the World Cup of Darts, raced into a 2-0 lead with an impressive 107 average.
As has been the case for much of the year, he was unable to produce that level for an entire game, with his average dropping by more than 10 as Clayton levelled at 2-2.
Tenth seed Price found more rhythm to win the fifth and sixth set, and closed out the win to earn a place in the quarter-finals for the fifth time in the past six years.
“I thought the first two sets I blew him away, then I couldn’t hit a barn door. I was trying too hard,” Price told Sky Sports.
“It was a tough game in more senses than one. I wanted to win but he’s a great friend, not that that matters because I’m here to win. I promise I will get better.”
He will face 15th seed Chris Dobey or the unseeded Kevin Doets in the quarter-finals.
Rydz dazzles in shock win over Van den Bergh
England’s Callan Rydz put in a magnificent performance to stun 11th seed Dimitri van den Bergh and reach the fourth round.
Rydz, a quarter-finalist in 2022, stormed to a 4-0 win over the 2020 World Matchplay champion as he recorded an impressive 105.31 average.
That number was at 115.94 after a blistering first two sets in which Rydz hit six 180s and made six of his nine darts at double against a bewildered Van den Bergh.
The Belgian attempted to force his way back into the contest but Rydz’s level was such that any opportunities were soon snatched from Van den Bergh’s grasp.
“I’m over the moon. I didn’t give Dimi a sniff and I’ve got to do the same in the last 16,” Rydz told Sky Sports. “Buzzing with the result and can’t wait to be back here.”
Dutchman Doets survived four match darts as he produced a stirring comeback to beat 31st seed Krzysztof Ratajski.
Doets, who knocked out second seed Michael Smith in the last round, did not have a dart at double in the first set and found himself 2-0 down without winning a leg.
However, he suddenly burst into life to win six of the next seven legs and level the match at 2-2 with a 106 checkout.
Ratajski rallied in the fifth and had four darts to win the match in the sixth but failed to take them.
That allowed Doets to level again before he took the lead for the first time at 2-1 in the seventh and won the next to seal it.
Meanwhile, Sweden’s Jeffrey de Graaf set up a last-16 tie with three-time champion Michael van Gerwen after a convincing 4-1 win over Paolo Nebrida.
Filipino Nebrida took the first set but De Graaf won the next four on the bounce, finishing with a 10-darter, to progress from the third round of the World Championship for the first time.
Sunday’s results
Afternoon Session
Third round
Jeffrey de Graaf 4-1 Paolo Nebrida
Kevin Doets 4-3 Krzysztof Ratajski
Dimitri van den Bergh 0-4 Callan Rydz
Evening Session (19:00)
Third round
Ricky Evans 2-4 Robert Owen
Fourth round
Jonny Clayton 2-4 Gerwyn Price
Luke Humphries 1-4 Peter Wright
Monday’s schedule
Afternoon Session (12:30 GMT)
Fourth round
Kevin Doets v Chris Dobey
Robert Owen v Callan Rydz
Ricardo Pietreczko v Nathan Aspinall
Evening Session (19:00 GMT)
Fourth round
Stephen Bunting v Luke Woodhouse
Michael van Gerwen v Jeffrey de Graaf
Luke Littler v Ryan Joyce
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Pep Guardiola says Manchester City “need help” during the January transfer window after admitting his side have “no chance” of winning the Premier League title this season.
The City boss celebrated 500 games in charge of the club with a nervy 2-0 win over Leicester on Sunday.
City’s victory – just their second in their last 10 Premier League games – lifts them up to fifth, but they are 14 points behind leaders Liverpool.
“We are far away from winning the Premier League,” Guardiola told BBC’s Match of the Day.
“We accept there’s already no chance of that but we have other things to fight for: FA Cup, top four… and winning games helps.”
City have won six of the last seven Premier League titles, but before the win over Leicester, the club had won just one of their previous 13 league games – losing nine.
Guardiola admitted he was relieved to end a five-game winless run.
“Just relief, that is the word to express how all of us feel,” he said.
“We have done incredible things and now we struggle to win games so now it’s just relief.”
Will City be busy in January & how bad is their injury list?
Guardiola believes injuries are the primary reason behind City’s poor form but says there are areas the club need to target in the upcoming transfer window.
“In some positions we need help,” Guardiola said.
“When we’re all together we’re the team we were but with important players out for weeks and months it’s so difficult.”
Ballon d’Or-winning midfielder Rodri is out for the season with a knee injury, while Ruben Dias, John Stones, Ederson, Oscar Bobb and Matheus Nunes also missed the Leicester game.
Guardiola added: “I thought central defenders would be fit all season but we have struggled – holding midfield and central defenders we need help.
“The market is the market – it’s not easy, it’s expensive so we will see what the club can do.”
Are City lacking in intensity?
The scoreline at King Power Stadium on Sunday does not tell the full story.
Against a lively Leicester side, Manchester City were still below par and for the first time this season they had less possession than their opponents (46.4%).
It is just the 14th time Guardiola’s side have had less possession during his 323-game reign in the Premier League.
“It was not the ideal performance but hopefully the victories will give our mood a better position,” Guardiola said.
“We didn’t have enough energy to sustain 90 minutes but hopefully in the new year we can bounce back a bit from a bad moment.”
The stats also show City are lacking the intensity we have become accustomed to seeing in Guardiola’s teams.
Against Leicester, the club won possession in the final third just twice. Last season, City nicked possession in the final third 7.5 times on average per game.
Former Manchester United defender Gary Neville told Sky Sports: “They got the win and the clean sheet but it has been a struggle for them.
“To watch them today it is still unusual, you’re not getting carried away.”