Forty-four years elapsed between the time Jimmy Carter left the presidency and the day he died.

Four decades seems like a long time – a record for a former US president – yet many of the challenges facing America in 2024 are not that different from the ones Carter faced, and at times succumbed to, in the late 1970s.

The US during the Carter years faced a crisis of confidence. Americans were grappling with economic turmoil at home and a range of challenges to US power abroad. Fast forward four decades, and the players and issues are strikingly familiar – the economy and the environment, Russia, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Years have passed, the leaders have changed, but the challenges linger.

Carter celebrated the power of US diplomacy by brokering the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978, but the glow of success was fleeting. The limits of American power were painfully apparent during the Iranian hostage crisis a year later, after US embassy staff in Tehran were taken prisoner.

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It took more than 12 months of intense efforts – diplomatic and military – to free them. The sense of American helplessness contributed to Carter’s resounding election loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, with the prisoners’ eventual release coming just hours after Carter left office.

The inability to shape global events even from the world’s most powerful office continues to haunt US leaders. Current President Joe Biden’s dose of this cold reality first came during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which lowered the curtain on two decades of futile American nation-building and saw the Taliban sweep back into power.

More recently, Biden and his diplomatic team proved unable to prevent the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel from spreading into a regional conflagration and a devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Both Carter and Biden, humbled by seemingly outmatched regional forces in Iran and Afghanistan, were also confronted by the territorial ambitions of global powers. Carter was lambasted for inadequately responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then widely denounced for the move he did make – ordering a boycott by US athletes of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

Biden has had greater early success countering the invasion of Ukraine, uniting allies to support and supply Kyiv’s forces in resisting the Russian advance. But as the war drags on, American resolve has been tested. Extended bloody conflict turned Afghanistan into a cauldron of instability that eventually gave birth to al-Qaeda and a global jihad.

The lasting impact of the war in Ukraine could have its own unexpected, and deadly, consequences – all of which could be laid at this president’s feet.

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In the Middle East, Carter’s Camp David triumph has proven to be an incomplete accomplishment, securing peace between Israel and Egypt but failing to resolve the Palestinian question which, with the Gaza war, has once again become an urgent global concern. For more than a  year, the war has been a constant reminder of the limits of American – and Biden’s – power.

The US was unable to prevent the conflict from expanding into Lebanon and including, for the first time, direct hostilities between Iran and Israel. The latter, America’s closest ally in the region, has time and again seemingly disregarded Biden’s counsel and forged a more aggressive path on its own.

Biden also has had to handle a tense relationship with an ascendant China, whose current place in the world is due in no small part to Carter’s decision to normalise US relations with the country in 1979.

That watershed moment set a course for the country to become a major economic, and military, power – ultimately creating the geopolitical rivalry with the US with which Mr Biden has had to contend.

Foreign crises have a tendency to spill into domestic affairs as well, and four decades ago Carter faced environmental and energy challenges in part instigated by turmoil abroad.

While the current threat of global climate change is different than the Mid East oil embargo Carter faced, many of his policy approaches – conservation, a transition to renewable energy and government investment – served as the backbone of the environmental programme Biden helped shepherd through Congress in 2022.

The spectre of runaway inflation that the US recently faced also harkens back to the Carter years. The double-digit spikes in consumer prices over the first two years of Biden’s presidency, enflamed by the shock of the global Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, was a reminder of the darkest days of the late 1970s.

The one key difference was that, unlike Carter’s situation, job growth remained robust and the US economy has, except for one quarter, continued to grow. That fact may be cold comfort to Biden, however, whose popularity has still not recovered from the inflation-related public anger.

Carter also was one of the first modern US presidents to grapple with an issue that has become an undeniable political reality for every one of his successors – the American public’s often debilitating distrust of US government and institutions.

Carter, in a July 1979 speech, called it a “crisis of confidence”.

“Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy,” he said.

Public trust in his government to do the right thing at least “most of the time” was at 34% at the start of his presidency and dropped to 27% in March 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. That number has climbed above 50% only once since Carter – in the month after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

For a time it may have seemed like the public’s low esteem in the Carter years was a consequence of the immediate aftermath of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, when those net approval numbers first dipped into negative territory.

The reality, however, is that a lack of faith in government is now a fact of life in American politics. During the Donald Trump presidency, the percent of the public that believed the government would do the right thing regularly registered in the high teens. Biden was unable to reverse this trend during his time in office – a fact that Trump was able to turn against the man who defeated him in his relentless march back to the White House.

It is difficult to avoid comparisons between Carter and the most recent one-term president, Biden.

It’s something twice-winner Trump frequently invites. His political views were crystallised in the 1970s and 1980s and he sometimes references Carter as a way to needle Democrats.

“I see that everybody is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter,” Trump wrote in one of his tweet-like press releases in 2021. “It would seem to me that is very unfair to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but Biden has created crisis after crisis.”

Carter himself was not silent about the 45th president, telling the Washington Post that Trump was a disaster “in human rights and taking care of people and treating people equal”.

At the very least, the two make for an interesting contrast. Both were political upstarts who won their presidential terms against high odds. Both struggled with insider Washington politics.

Carter sought to serve in the White House with humility. He wore cardigan sweaters, carried his own luggage on Air Force One and prohibited the presidential anthem Hail to the Chief being played when he entered the room. Trump seemed to relish the pageantry and trappings of power, from the lavish Fourth of July celebrations to using Air Force One as a backdrop for his re-election rallies.

Then there is the post-presidency – or, in Trump’s case, a presidential interregnum. Following his re-election loss, Carter returned to his two-bedroom house in Plains, Georgia. He withdrew from domestic politics and worked on charities such as Habitat for Humanity. He founded the Carter Center, tasked with combating global diseases, promoting human rights and serving as an independent monitor for democratic elections. In 2002, he won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump spent his immediate post-presidency fixated on disputing his 2020 election defeat and setting the stage for his 2024 presidential campaign. His election win and now imminent return to the White House was a plot twist that Carter never publicly contemplated, as he decisively closed the door behind him when he left office.

Carter was only 56 when he left the White House, and his obituaries reflect as much his accomplishments after his time in office as during it. And they are also a reflection of how America has changed in four decades – and how much it hasn’t.

The head of the World Health Organization has called for an end to attacks on hospitals in Gaza.

“Hospitals in Gaza have once again become battlegrounds and the health system is under severe threat,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

His warning came after the last functioning hospital in besieged northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan, was raided and forcibly evacuated by the Israeli military on Friday and two hospitals in Gaza City were attacked on Sunday. The military said two of the sites were being used as Hamas command centres.

Dr Tedros also joined rights groups and relatives calling for the immediate release of Kamal Adwan’s director, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, who was detained by Israeli forces.

The Israeli military said on Saturday that his hospital was a Hamas “stronghold” and that troops had killed about 20 “terrorists” and detained 240 others during the raid. It added that Dr Abu Safiya was among those taken for questioning and that he was “suspected of being a Hamas terrorist operative”.

The military did not provide evidence for the allegations, which Hamas dismissed as “lies”.

US-based MedGlobal condemned the detention of Dr Abu Safiya, who was its lead physician in Gaza, as “not only unjust” but also “a violation of international humanitarian law, which upholds the protection of medical personnel in conflict zones”.

Dr Abu Safiya’s family expressed concern about his health, saying he was still recovering from severe injuries sustained in an attack last month and that he was likely to be suffering from the cold because he had been forced to strip off his clothes.

Hamas also dismissed the Israeli allegations as “lies”.

Dr Tedros said Kamal Adwan was out of service following the raid and that its critically ill patients had been transferred to the “out of function” Indonesian hospital, which he warned was severely damaged and had no ability to provide care.

“Amid ongoing chaos in northern Gaza, WHO and partners today delivered basic medical and hygiene supplies, food and water to Indonesian hospital and transferred 10 critical patients to al-Shifa Hospital [in Gaza City],” he said.

“Four patients were detained during the transfer. We urge Israel to ensure their health care needs and rights are upheld.”

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said one of those detained patients was in a critical condition, and that seven patients and 10 medical staff remained at the Indonesian hospital.

Israeli forces launched a major ground offensive in the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun on 6 October, saying it was stopping Hamas from regrouping there. The UN says the areas are under near-total siege and that humanitarian assistance has been largely denied by Israeli forces for more than 11 weeks.

Dr Tedros also said al-Ahli hospital and al-Wafa Rehabilitation hospital in Gaza City “also faced attacks” and were both damaged.

On Sunday, seven people were killed and other seriously wounded in an Israeli strike on the upper floor of al-Wafa hospital, according to the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency.

The Israeli military said the strike targeted Hamas fighters who were using the building as a command and control centre. It added that the building was not serving as a hospital at the time.

But a witness told the BBC there were patients and medical staff inside the hospital.

A fourth-year medical student said she had been inside the hospital with her colleagues, getting ready to sit an exam, when it was bombed.

“There was heavy smoke and we nearly suffocated. Glass from destroyed windows fell over us. We took cover under the tables and then fled,” she added.

“As we were coming down the stairs, we saw patients on wheelchairs, others being carried. Our professor suffered a head injury and was bleeding – some other colleagues had minor injuries.”

The wounded were taken to the al-Ahli hospital, which was apparently hit by Israeli shelling earlier on Sunday.

Video footage posted online appeared to show damage to the top floor of one building at the site.

The Israeli military has not commented on the reports.

A displaced man living in the vicinity of the al-Ahli hospital told BBC Arabic that he was afraid that it would be the next to be raided by Israeli forces.

“If they besiege us here, where can we go then? How long will this suffering continue? We have been displaced about six or seven times,” he said. “They have bombed all homes, schools and hospitals. There is no longer a safe place for us to take shelter in.”

Israel launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to the group’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.

More than 45,540 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Trinidad and Tobago has declared a state of emergency as gang violence in the Caribbean nation continues to escalate.

President Christine Carla Kangaloo issued the declaration on the advice of Prime Minister Keith Rowley, who had been under growing pressure to take action over worsening crime figures.

The twin-island republic has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a record murder tally of more than 620 this year so far in a population of 1.5 million people.

Organised crime is responsible for the majority of the murders, many of them linked to the international drug trade.

According to the US state department, the country’s close proximity to Venezuela, porous borders and direct transportation routes to Europe and North America make it “a prime location for narcotics trans-shipment”.

In the latest violent incident, five men were shot dead in a shop in the poverty-stricken Laventille area on Sunday. Police believe the killings were in reprisal for the murder of a prominent gang member the previous day.

Details of the state of emergency have yet to be disclosed, but are expected to be announced at a news conference later on Monday.

The move comes as Trinidad and Tobago gears up for a general election, which must be held by August 2025.

Rowley’s governing People’s National Movement party, in power since September 2015, faces a strong challenge from the opposition United National Congress, led by former Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar.

Russia and Ukraine have exchanged hundreds of prisoners of war in a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The Russian defence ministry said it had swapped 150 Ukrainian soldiers held captive for an equal number of Russian troops.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy said 189 Ukrainians had returned home.

He added that those released included “defenders of Azovstal and Mariupol” and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

In May 2022, Russia declared victory after a months-long battle to conquer the south-eastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, with the last fighters defending the city’s Azovstal steel plant having surrendered.

Russian troops seized Chernobyl in the country’s north-west at the beginning of their invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but later handed back control of the plant to its employees.

Zelensky said two civilians captured in Mariupol were among dozens of soldiers, sergeants, border guards and officers released on Monday.

“We are working to free everyone from Russian captivity. This is our goal. We do not forget anyone,” Zelensky said. He posted photos showing some of the swapped men sitting on a coach holding up yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flags.

On Monday, the Russian defence ministry said newly released Russian troops were in Belarus, an ally of Russia, and were being given medical assistance and the chance to contact their families.

Before the latest swap, there had been just 10 prisoner exchanges between the countries this year, the lowest number since the full-scale invasion began.

Ukraine said Moscow had released 3,956 people, including soldiers and civilians, in deals with Kyiv since the start of the conflict.

In a video posted by Russian human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova, soldiers are seen gathered in front of coaches in military and winter clothing.

“Very soon our guys will hug their families and friends and celebrate the New Year on their native land,” she said in an accompanying message.

Petro Yatsenko from Ukraine’s Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War previously told the BBC that negotiations with Moscow over prisoner swaps had become more difficult since Russian forces began making significant advances on the front line.

Ukraine does not publish numbers of prisoners of war being held by Russia, but the total is thought to be over 8,000.

Russia has made significant gains on the battlefield this year, which has raised fears that the numbers of Ukrainians being captured is on the rise.

Hundreds of grieving people have been camping out at Muan International Airport in South Korea, furious that they have not yet seen the bodies of their loved ones who died after a Jeju Air plane crash-landed on Sunday.

Acting President Choi Sang-mok has asked investigators to promptly disclose their findings to bereaved families. He has ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operations.

At the airport, police superintendent general Na Won-o explained amid angry shouts that the delay was due to officials taking their time to carefully identify all 179 victims, whose bodies were badly damaged in the crash.

“Can you promise that they will be put back together?” a middle-aged man asked, visibly emotional.

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Another person asked for the victims’ remains to be released as they were, but Na said officials wanted to make their best effort to collect and match as many bodies as they could.

These grim details left some family members in tears, while most sat in stunned silence, exhausted.

The Boeing 737-800, which was travelling from Bangkok to Muan International Airport, skidded off the runway after touching down and crashed into a wall shortly after 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT) on Sunday.

The accident killed 179 of the 181 people onboard, 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 acting president’s call for an urgent review of airline operations came as another Jeju Air flight turned back to Seoul shortly after takeoff on Monday, due to an unidentified landing-gear issue.

On Monday, the Jeju Air plane departed from Gimpo International Airport at 06:35 local time (21:35 GMT Sunday) and returned less than an hour later after realising a mechanical defect caused by the landing-gear issue, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.

Landing gear refers to the set of wheels and other parts of the plane which support the plane during takeoff, taxiing and landing.

The aircraft that turned back was a Boeing B737-800, the same model as the one involved in the disaster on Sunday.

Thirty-nine of the 41 aircraft in Jeju Air’s fleet are of this model.

At Muan airport, among the relatives of victims that the BBC spoke to was Shin Gyu-ho, who lost his two grandsons and son-in-law.

Frustrated with how long the identification process was taking, the 64-year-old said he had thought about smashing the PA system used for police briefings in anger.

While the body of Shin’s son-in-law has been identified, he was told that his two grandsons – a high-school sophomore and a senior – were “too scattered to be recognised”.

His daughter and granddaughter have holed up in a privacy tent at the airport because “they cannot hold themselves together”, he said.

For Maeng Gi-su’s nephew and his nephew’s two sons, a celebratory trip to Thailand to mark the end of the college entrance exams ended in tragedy when all three died on the flight.

“I can’t believe the entire family has just disappeared,” Maeng, 78, told the BBC.

“My heart aches so much.”

The 179 people who died 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. 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.

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.

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”.

Five people have been charged in connection with the death of One Direction singer Liam Payne in Argentina, the authorities there say.

The 31-year-old star died on 16 October after falling from the third-floor balcony of a hotel in Buenos Aires.

The hotel’s manager, Gilda Martin, and its receptionist, Esteban Grassi, as well as Payne’s friend Roger Nores have been charged with manslaughter, Argentina’s prosecutor’s office says.

Ezequiel Pereyra – who also worked at the hotel – and Braian Paiz, a waiter, have been charged with supplying drugs.

Under Argentina’s legal system, the prosecutor’s office gathers evidence which it then presents to a judge, who has to decide whether to proceed to trial.

According to a statement released by the prosecutor’s office, Judge Laura Bruniard already took the decision to proceed to the next stage on Friday.

The defendants’ lawyers can appeal against that decision. If their appeals are not successful, the trial phase starts.

In court documents, Judge Bruniard listed the charges against the five suspects, who are referred to by their initials, as is the custom in court documents at this stage of the proceedings.

• Hotel employee EDP is suspected of having sold Liam Payne cocaine on 15 and 16 October
• Waiter BNP is also suspected of having sold cocaine to Liam Payne twice on 14 October
• Payne’s friend RLN is suspected of manslaughter for allegedly “failing to fulfil his duties of care, assistance and help” towards the singer after having “abandoned him to his luck knowing that he was incapable of fending for himself and knowing that he [Payne] suffered from multiple addictions”
• Hotel Manager GAM is suspected of manslaughter for allegedly failing to stop Payne from being taken to his hotel room moments before his death. According to the court papers, given Payne’s state, the room’s balcony posed a “serious threat” and the manager should have ensured Payne was kept in a safe place until medical help arrived
• Chief receptionist ERG is also suspected of manslaughter for allegedly asking three people to “drag” Payne, who could not stand up, to his room, instead of keeping him safe.

Judge Bruniard said that she did not think that Liam Payne’s friend, the hotel manager and the receptionist “had planned or wanted the death of Payne” but that their actions had created a “risk” to his life.

If found guilty, the three could face sentences of between one and five years in prison.

The sentence for supplying drugs is more severe and ranges between four and 15 years in jail.

Judge Bruniard has ordered the two accused of supplying the drugs be remanded in custody.

They have been summoned to appear in court within 24 working hours.

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In November, the prosecutor’s office said toxicology tests revealed traces of alcohol, cocaine and a prescription antidepressant in Payne’s body.

A post-mortem examination determined his cause of death as “multiple trauma” and “internal and external haemorrhage”, as a result of the fall from the hotel balcony.

According to the prosecutor’s office, medical reports also suggested Payne may have fallen in a state of semi or total unconsciousness.

The prosecutor’s office said this ruled out the possibility of a conscious or voluntary act by Payne, and they had concluded the singer did not know what he was doing nor have any comprehension of his actions.

Speaking to US celebrity news outlet TMZ after Payne’s death, Roger Nores said he was a “very good friend” of the singer and they had spent time together on the day the star died.

He said Payne “seemed playful and happy” when he left him about an hour before the musician fell from the balcony.

After Payne’s death, police found substances in his hotel room and objects and furniture that had been damaged.

Hotel staff had made two calls to emergency services saying they had a guest who had taken “too many drugs and alcohol”, and was “trashing the entire room”, it was previously reported.

Payne became one of the most recognisable names in pop after appearing on The X Factor and rising to fame with the boyband One Direction in the 2010s before the band went on an indefinite hiatus in January 2016.

The singer’s funeral was held in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, last month.

His former bandmates Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik were among the mourners, alongside Payne’s girlfriend Kate Cassidy and his former partner Cheryl, with whom he shares a son.

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.

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.

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.

A Chinese court has sentenced two teenagers over the death of their classmate in March.

The teens in Hebei province, identified only by their surnames Zhang and Li, were 13 years old when they conspired to kill their classmate Wang and split his money between them.

After attacking Wang with a shovel, they buried him in an abandoned vegetable greenhouse, the court said in a statement on Monday, adding that their “methods were especially cruel and circumstances especially vile”.

The teenagers were sentenced to life imprisonment and 12 years imprisonment, respectively.

The sentencing draws a line under the brutal case, which triggered intense public anger when it was first reported.

Wang had long been bullied in school by three classmates, his family and lawyer said in March, while the court on Monday noted that he had experienced conflict with Zhang and Li.

A third teen who was also at the scene, identified by his surname Ma, was not handed criminal punishment, according to the court.

On 3 March, Zhang brought Wang to the greenhouse on a scooter, while Li rode on a separate scooter with Ma. Along the way, Li told Ma about the plan Zhang had hatched to kill Wang.

When the four arrived at the greenhouse, Zhang started assaulting Wang with a shovel and Li assisted him. Upon witnessing the attack, Ma left the greenhouse.

Zhang and Li then buried the victim, and the three rode away from the scene.

Afterwards, Zhang used Wang’s phone to transfer money from his WeChat account to Lee and himself. He also took out the SIM card from Wang’s phone and ordered Ma to destroy it.

Zhang, Li and Ma were each approached by police, and Ma eventually led them to the crime scene.

The court said that Zhang was the main culprit as he had planned the crime and instigated others to join in, and his actions directly caused Wang’s death.

Li, meanwhile, was a colluder who actively participated in the act and shared the money with Zhang, the court said.

Authorities said that Ma would undergo correction and education – a method that is commonly applied to minors who have committed crimes.

The teens’ sentencing on Monday was lauded by social media users who had been waiting to hear about the gruesome crime’s punishment. But some suggested that the sentencing was too lenient.

“The one that only got 12 years will be a young man when he is released. Hope he doesn’t take revenge on society when he is out,” reads a popular comment on Weibo, referring to a recent spate of mass killings that have struck fear across the country.

Others mourned Wang’s death. “As a parent, I really feel sorry for the kid,” said another Weibo user. “It’s really heart-breaking.”

An 18-year-old Briton convicted of having sex with an underage 17-year-old British girl in Dubai has handed himself in to authorities there to begin a one-year jail sentence, a charity says.

Marcus Fakana, of Tottenham, north London, began a secretive romance in September with another Londoner, who is now 18, while both were on holiday with their families.

After returning home and seeing pictures and chats between the pair, the girl’s mother reported the relationship to Dubai police, who arrested Fakana at his hotel. Sex with someone under 18 is illegal in Dubai.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was supporting a British man in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Fakana handed himself in to Dubai’s Al Awir prison, according to the UK-based campaign group and charity Detained in Dubai.

He had been on bail and staying in temporary accommodation in Dubai since his arrest in September. His parents had to return to London to resume their jobs in a warehouse and as a cleaner to help pay for their son’s accommodation.

Radha Stirling, chief executive of Detained in Dubai, which helps foreigners abroad and is an international authority on UAE law, said she had spoken with Fakana, who told her he would focus on his physical and mental health while in jail.

“Marcus is hopeful that in beginning his ordeal today, he will be home sooner than he would be if he appealed,” she said.

“It is difficult to have the right words to tell a young man turning himself in for a year in Dubai prison.

“He’s very brave and kind and I truly hope he will be home soon.”

Fakana’s family is being supported by the charity, which said his parents were hoping for a royal pardon and commuted sentence.

They are also pushing the UK government and Foreign Secretary David Lammy “for assistance”.

A Downing Street spokesman said earlier this month: “The prime minister recognises it’s an extremely distressing situation for Marcus and his family.”

Previously, the charity explained both teenagers were on holiday with their parents in the UAE from the UK, where the age of consent is 16.

Fakana had told his family about the romance but the girl had not told hers.

The government of Dubai previously said: “Under UAE law, the girl is legally classified as a minor and, in accordance with procedures recognised internationally, her mother – being the legal guardian – filed the complaint.”

It added: “Dubai’s legal system is committed to protecting the rights of all individuals and ensuring impartial judicial proceedings.”

The parents of a teenage boy who killed nine children and a security guard in a mass shooting at a school in Serbia last year have been jailed.

In the May 2023 attack, the then 13-year-old killed nine children and a security guard at Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school in Belgrade.

The boy’s father, Vladimir Kecmanoviæ, was sentenced to 14-and-a-half years imprisonment on Monday, while his mother, Miljana Kecmanoviæ, was given a three-year prison sentence.

Nemanja Marinkovic, an instructor at the Partizan shooting club who taught the boy how to use a gun, received a sentence of one year and three months.

The boy, who has been held in a psychiatric institution since the attack, cannot be put on trial because he is below the age of criminal responsibility.

However, his parents were accused of a “serious act against general safety” for failing to secure the weapons and ammunition properly. They denied the charges.

Their trial has been held behind closed doors.

At the high court in Belgrade on Monday, Vladimir was found guilty of endangering public safety by teaching his son to shoot and failing to secure his gun. He was also convicted of neglecting a minor.

Miljana was found guilty of neglecting a minor but acquitted of illegally possessing weapons and ammunition.

The boy, who has been identified only as KK, was brought to the court in October by a special escort, leaving the psychiatric hospital for the first time since the attack at Vladislav Ribnikar primary school.

He was questioned as a witness by the judge, the prosecutor and defence and lawyers for the families of the dead and wounded. He also answered questions from the mother of a murdered child.

Parents of the murdered children attended the hearing in the hope of shedding light on the motive for the boy’s mass shooting.

A lawyer representing the families described it as “one of the most harrowing trials I have witnessed in my career”.

Eight of the nine children KK murdered were girls.

Serbia was plunged into further grief less than 48 hours later, when another eight people were shot dead by a 21-year-old man in a village outside the capital.

Following his testimony at his parents’ trial, the family’s lawyer told reporters that the boy had lived a normal life before the shooting and no court process would be able to establish what had led to his attack.

The world’s number one chess player, Magnus Carlsen, has said he will return to a major chess competition after the sport’s governing body agreed to relax its dress code.

Carlsen quit the World Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships in New York on Friday, where he was defending his title, when he was told he could not continue playing while wearing jeans.

The International Chess Federation (Fide) later said that it would relax its dress code to allow for “elegant minor deviations” from its official list of acceptable attire.

The 34-year-old has since said he will return to the contest on Monday and will continue to wear jeans when he plays.

Carlsen, a five-time chess champion, was fined $200 (£159) last week for breaching the tournament’s dress code.

He said he had been wearing jeans for a lunch meeting, and “didn’t even think about” swapping them for a different pair of trousers when heading to the tournament.

He had already played a few rounds wearing a shirt, a blazer, and jeans when he was told he had breached dress code regulations.

The Fide dress code for the championships states only that “dark coloured trousers” must be worn by men, but jeans are not allowed if business casual dress is being used.

The grandmaster said he had offered to change his trousers for the next day, but was told he needed to change immediately, which he refused to do.

Carlsen then withdrew from the competition and said he would leave the city.

“Nobody wants to back down… I’ll probably head off to somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer than here,” he said.

Announcing the changes to its dress code on Sunday, Fide president Arkadi Dvorkovitch said: “The principle is simple: it is still required to follow the official dress-code, but elegant minor deviations (that may, in particular, include appropriate jeans matching the jacket) are allowed.”

He said tournament staff will be required to help judge whether outfits fit the relaxed code, and added that he hoped players would not “undermine the festive mood” at the tournament on New Year’s Eve by “abusing this additional flexibility”.

In a social media post on Sunday, Carlsen said: “Oh, I am definitely playing in jeans tomorrow.”

Fide had previously said its dress code regulations were designed to “ensure fairness and professionalism for all participants”.

Carlsen is a high-profile figure in chess who has attracted some controversy in recent years.

The Norwegian became a grandmaster – the top title in chess – at the age of 13, and has long been considered a maverick in the chess world.

In 2023, he settled a long-running legal dispute after accusing an American rival of cheating.

Carlsen had made the accusation after he was unexpectedly beaten by 19-year-old chess prodigy Hans Niemann in a 2022 match.

Niemann denied the allegations and filed a $100m (£79m) defamation lawsuit against Carlsen, the website Chess.com and another US grandmaster.

Last August, Chess.com said the suit had been settled out of court, and that Carlsen now accepted Niemann had not cheated.

More than 170 people have died after a plane crashed as it was landing in South Korea on Sunday morning.

Harrowing video footage shows the Jeju Air plane coming off the runway before colliding with a barrier and bursting into flames at Muan International Airport.

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.

The flight, 7C2216, was a Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air, Korea’s most popular budget airline.

Air traffic control authorised the plane to land at Muan International Airport at about 08:54 local time on Sunday (23:54 GMT) – just three minutes before issuing a warning about bird activity in the area.

• Could a bird strike have caused the crash?
• ‘It’s unbearable’: Families criticise lack of updates as investigators search debris
• Video captures moments before crash
• Watch: At the scene of the investigation

At 08:59, the pilot reported that the plane had struck a bird, declaring “mayday mayday mayday” and “bird strike, bird strike, go-around”. The pilot then aborted the original landing and requested permission to land from the opposite direction.

Air traffic control authorised the alternative landing at 09:01 – and at 09:02 the plane made contact with the ground, coming down at roughly the halfway point of the 2,800m runway.

One video appears to show the plane touching down without using its wheels or any other landing gear. It skidded down the runway, overshot it 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 later extinguished the fire.

The first of two survivors was rescued from the crash at about 09:23, with the second being rescued from inside the tail section of the plane at about 09:50.

Lee Jeong-hyun, the chief of the Muan fire department, told a televised briefing 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.

An investigator told the news agency that the black boxes could take up to a month to decode.

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”.

Mr Thomas separately told the Reuters news agency that he was sceptical that a bird strike alone could have caused the crash.

“A bird strike is not unusual. Problems with an undercarriage are not unusual. Bird strikes happen far more often, but typically they don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves,” he said.

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 on South Korean soil.

All the passengers and four members of crew died.

Officials have been collecting saliva samples from family members gathered at Muan Airport to help identify bodies of victims. Other victims have been identified by their fingerprints.

Authorities have so far identified 141 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.

“I can’t believe the entire family has just disappeared,” Maeng Gi-Su, 78, whose nephew and grand-nephews were on the flight, told the BBC. “My heart aches so much.”

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 of the aircraft after the crash and taken to hospital, it said.

The man has woken up and is “fully able to communicate,” according to Yonhap, which cites the director of the Seoul hospital where he is being treated.

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.

Acting President Choi Sang-mok has has ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operations.

Muan has also been declared a special disaster zone, which makes central government funding available to the local government and victims.

All flights to and from Muan International Airport have been cancelled.

A national seven-day period of mourning has been declared, and New Year’s Day celebrations in the country are likely to be cancelled or scaled down.

Aircraft maker Boeing has said it is in touch with Jeju Air and stands “ready to support them”.

Jeju Air has apologised to families, with its chief executive saying in a news conference that the airline had no history of accidents. It is believed that Sunday’s crash has been the airline’s only fatal accident since it was launched in 2005.

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 – like Airbus and Embraer – 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 strikes] 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.”

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.

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.

South Korean officials are conducting an emergency safety investigation after 179 people died in the country’s worst-ever plane crash on Sunday.

Moments before the flight was due to land, air traffic control issued a bird strike warning – an alert about the risk of colliding with birds.

The investigation will look to confirm if a bird strike did lead to the crash, or if other factors could have been involved.

A bird strike is a collision between a bird and an aircraft in flight.

They pose a danger to planes because jet engines can lose power if birds are sucked into them.

Bird strikes are very common.

In the US, more than 19,600 wildlife strikes were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration in 2023, the majority of which involved birds.

And there were over 1,400 bird strikes in the UK in 2022, only about 100 of which affected planes, according to data from the Civil Aviation Authority.

Bird strikes are very rarely linked to fatal plane crashes.

Engines could stall or shut down if birds are sucked into them, but pilots typically have time to account for this and make an emergency landing.

Pilots are trained to be especially vigilant during the early morning or at sunset, when birds are most active, according to aviation expert Professor Doug Drury, writing in an article for The Conversation this summer.

But deadly accidents involving bird strikes do happen.

Between 1988 and 2023, some 76 people died in the US after planes collided with wildlife, according to the FAA.

One notable incident is a 1995 crash near an Air Force base in Alaska. Some 24 Canadian and American airmen were killed after an aircraft collided with a flock of geese.

A bird strike also caused the famous “Miracle on the Hudson” incident in 2009, when an Airbus plane ditched onto New York’s Hudson River after colliding with a flock of geese. All 155 passengers and crew survived.

The events were dramatised in the 2016 film Sully, which starred Tom Hanks as the plane’s captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.

Officials have not confirmed whether the plane did in fact collide with any birds.

But a 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.

Lee Jeong-hyun, the chief of the Muan fire department, said a bird strike and bad weather may have contributed to the crash – but that the exact cause was still being investigated.

Aviation expert Chris Kingswood, a pilot who has over 40 years’ experience and has flown the same type of aircraft involved in the crash, says video footage doesn’t clearly show the cause of the incident.

However, he noted the plane was without its landing gear and wasn’t using its flaps in the expected way, suggesting that “everything happened really quite quickly”.

“You would normally be forced into that kind of situation if you lose both engines,” he told the BBC. “A commercial aeroplane can fly reasonably well and safely on one engine.”

He added that altitude is crucial if a bird strike damages both engines, as pilots at low altitude would face “a huge number of decisions in a very short space of time”.

He said there is an alternative system to operate both the landing gear and flaps if the engines fail.

But according to Kingswood: “If they were at a relatively low altitude, just several thousand feet, then they’ve really got to focus on flying the aeroplane and finding somewhere safe to put it down.”

Other experts have questioned whether a bird strike alone could have caused the crash.

“A bird strike is not unusual, problems with an undercarriage are not unusual,” Geoffrey Thomas, the editor of Airline News, told Reuters.

“Bird strikes happen far more often, but typically they don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves,” he added.

Australian airline safety expert Geoffrey Dell told the news agency: “I’ve never seen a bird strike prevent the landing gear from being extended.”

He said a bird strike could have impacted the plane’s engines if a flock had been sucked in, but it would not have shut them down straight away, meaning pilots would have had time to deal with the situation.

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.”

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.”

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In the lush, volcanic highlands of Komothai in central Kenya, 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 higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns mean a decreasing water supply for coffee farmers in Kiambu County.

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.

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Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot has revealed her youngest daughter was born during emergency surgery after a “massive” blood clot was discovered in the actress’s brain during pregnancy.

The 39-year-old said she received the “terrifying” diagnosis in her eighth month of pregnancy, in February, after she had suffered weeks of “excruciating” headaches.

“We rushed to the hospital, and within hours, I underwent emergency surgery,” she wrote on Instagram.

“My daughter, Ori, was born during that moment of uncertainty and fear.”

The Israeli actress said she chose the name, which means “my light” in Hebrew, because her daughter “would be the light waiting for me at the end of this tunnel”.

Gadot added that she was now “fully healed and filled with gratitude for the life I’ve been given back”.

Ori is her fourth daughter with husband Jaron Varsano.

Writing on Instagram, Gadot said the past year had been “one of profound challenges and deep reflections”, and that she had been unsure whether to share details of her health emergency.

“Perhaps this is my way of processing everything, of pulling back the curtain on the fragile reality behind the curated moments we share on social media,” she wrote.

“Most of all, I hope that by sharing, I can raise awareness and support others who may face something similar.”

She explained: “In February, during my eighth month of pregnancy, I was diagnosed with a massive blood clot in my brain.

“For weeks, I had endured excruciating headaches that confined me to bed, until I finally underwent an MRI that revealed the terrifying truth.

“In one moment, my family and I were faced with how fragile life can be. It was a stark reminder of how quickly everything can change, and in the midst of a difficult year, all I wanted was to hold on and live.”

She thanked the “extraordinary team” of doctors who did the emergency surgery, and said the “journey has taught me so much”.

“First, it’s vital to listen to our bodies and trust what it’s telling us,” she said. “Pain, discomfort, or even subtle changes often carry deeper meaning, and being attuned to your body can be life saving.

“Second, awareness matters. I had no idea that 3 in 100,000 pregnant women in the 30s+ age group are diagnosed with CVT (develop a blood clot in the brain).”

CVT stands for cerebral venous thrombosis.

“It’s so important to identify early because it’s treatable,” Gadot continued. “While rare, it’s a possibility, and knowing it exists is the first step to addressing it.

“Sharing this is not meant to frighten anyone but to empower. If even one person feels compelled to take action for their health because of this story, it will have been worth sharing.”

A blood clot is rare in pregnancy, but the slowing of blood flow during pregnancy and just after giving birth increases the risk.

A 2020 study published in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Neurological Disorders said one adult per 100,000 is diagnosed with CVT every year – rising to three per 100,000 among women aged between 31 and 50.

The study suggested there are a number of factors for the increase, mainly the use of oral contraceptives, but being heavily pregnant or being within six weeks after giving birth are also possible factors (between 5% and 20% of cases).

Pregnancy also increases the risk of other forms of clots such as deep vein thrombosis (DVT), usually in the legs, and pulmonary embolism, when part of a clot travels to the lungs.

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.

Billionaire Charles Dolan, a trailblazer in bringing cable television to a large part of the US who created what became HBO, has died at age 98.

He was also the head of a family with an “empire” of media and sports properties that includes Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks and Rangers teams, and AMC Networks. BBC America is a part of AMC.

Dolan’s death was announced in the family’s Long Island newspaper, Newsday, on Sunday.

A native of Ohio, Dolan started out distributing sport and industrial films before moving to New York and realising that, because tall buildings interrupted broadcast signals in the air, Manhattan needed cable.

At the time, he was selling special programming to hotels through his Teleguide service, while cable television was taking off in rural areas.

In 1964 Dolan made a deal with New York to wire some Manhattan buildings with cable and a few years later, hoping to attract viewers, he made a deal to show the Knicks and Rangers play-offs on cable, according to Variety.

He then went on to create Home Box Office for movies, and then sold both his cable service and HBO to build up Cablevision, which ended up providing television and internet to households across the north-eastern United States.

In 2015, the Dolan family sold Cablevision to European company Altice for nearly $18bn (£14.3bn).

By then Dolan’s son James was running what the New York Times called the family’s empire.

And the Dolans had become “the family that New Yorkers often loved to hate”, according to the New York Times, over frustration over the Knicks’ performance and fights with networks over their programming that had threatened to keep customers from watching the Academy Awards and the World Series.

Dolan was worth $5.4bn (£4.3bn) at the time of his death, according to Forbes.

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.”

The government has urged video platforms like YouTube to feature “high-quality” children’s content more prominently on their websites.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy warned young people are less likely to see programmes which are educational or provide “emotional and mental wellbeing” development as they increasingly watch via online platforms rather than traditional television.

Nandy said she had written to YouTube and similar platforms, as well as the regulator Ofcom, urging them to increase the visibility of suitable children’s material.

A YouTube spokesperson said it “provides kids and teens with safe, age appropriate online experiences that allow them to learn, grow and explore”.

But Nandy, who has a nine-year-old child, said online platforms were failing to promote the “widest range” of material. “[It’s] something that affects my family, like every family around the country,” she added.

She was speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, which was guest-edited on Monday by actor and Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Floella Benjamin, who has starred in several children’s shows over a decades-long entertainment career.

Nandy praised UK-produced children’s TV, saying it “helps inform [children] about the world”, but said online users often do not see it because it is not promoted by popular websites.

She said the government is ready to support the UK’s “crown jewels” children’s TV industry but a previous government-led funding scheme found that while more quality content was created, children “weren’t necessarily watching it and we think that’s because children were not able to find it”.

The government is seeking a voluntary agreement with online platforms, Nandy said, but signalled the government would be willing to take further action if one can not be reached.

She continued: “The intention is that we would much prefer for them to work with us to make sure children are able to see and find high-quality content much more easily.

“There’s something great about YouTube. It’s democratising, you’ve got these people who can start their careers from their bedrooms – and we’re very well aware of that but there is a balance to be struck here.”

She urged Ofcom to “prioritise children’s television” as part of their public service broadcasting review, which is due to report in the summer.

Benjamin said “television influences children’s thinking and behaviour” but warned its “quality and quantity” are in decline.

She used her guest editorship of Today to call for more emphasis on ensuring children have access to suitable entertainment, and said there was “crisis” and “turmoil” in the industry caused by children moving over to online platforms.

On a cold February night in 1946, a 15-year-old schoolboy made a surprising discovery as he peered out of his bedroom window.

Michael Woodman, a keen amateur astronomer from Newport, had stayed up late waiting for his father to come home when he noticed something strange in the night sky.

“There was the constellation of Corona Borealis, but in the ring of the Corona, the second star down was bright – very bright,” he explains.

“And I thought ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before.'”

The next morning he wrote to the Astronomer Royal. The now 94-year-old smiles as he recalls the memory, surprised that his teenage self would be so bold.

“And bless me if the Astronomer Royal didn’t reply, with a letter I’ve still got.”

Michael Woodman had witnessed a rare celestial event that briefly dazzled the heavens. Not only that, the Astronomer Royal informed him that he was the first person in the country to have seen this.

He’d spotted a star system, about 3,000 light years away, called T Corona Borealis – or T Cor Bor for short – exploding into brightness, becoming visible in the night sky for a few short days.

“I hit the jackpot,” he says.

Now a whole new generation of stargazers are scanning the skies again because scientists believe T Cor Bor ignites about every 80 years or so.

On a crystal clear night, in the Dark Skies Reserve of Bannau Brycheiniog, also known as the Brecon Beacons, astronomers are setting up their telescopes.

“T Cor Bor is dim at the minute – it’s magnitude 10, well below what you can see with the naked eye,” explains Dr Jenifer Millard from Fifth Star Labs.

To find the area of sky where it should appear, she advises to first locate the plough and follow its handle to Arcturus. To the west of this star is the curved constellation of Corona Borealis, made up of seven stars, and where T Cor Bor will at some point light up.

“It is only going to be visible to the naked eye for a couple of days,” she says.

“Of course, if you’ve got a small pair of binoculars or a small telescope, you’ll be able to see it for a little bit longer because you’ve got that magnifying tool. But I do think that it is the short stint in the sky that makes it really special.”

The astronomical phenomenon is caused by the interaction between two stars orbiting each other.

A small white dwarf, which is a dead star, is locked in a cosmic dance with a much larger red giant – a star that’s reaching the end of its life.

The compact white dwarf has an immense gravitational pull, so great that it steals material away from its larger neighbour.

“The gravity on the surface of the white dwarf is a million times the gravity we feel on Earth, so if we stood on it, we would be crushed instantly,” explains Dr Jane Clark, from the Cardiff Astronomical Society.

Over time, the material it grabs from the other star gets crushed and compressed – until eventually it triggers a nuclear explosion, releasing a huge amount of energy – a process known as going nova.

“And when that happens, it will shine like the best Christmas tree in town,” says Dr Clark.

Astronomers think this process happens on repeat, with an outburst from T Cor Bor occurring about every 80 years.

But there aren’t many records of this. And there have already been a few false alarms that T Cor Bor was about to appear – followed by a disappointing no show.

But Dr Chris North from Cardiff University says astronomers around the world are poised to catch the light show, which will allow them to study this star in more detail than ever before.

And he’s hopeful it could appear soon.

“It seems that in the past, this has dimmed a little bit before it’s actually erupted, and there are signs that maybe, at the moment, it’s just dipping a little bit in brightness,” he says.

“So maybe that’s a hint that it’s getting close to its eruption.”

Michael Woodman certainly wants to see T Cor Bor again.

“Somebody will get me into a car and drive me out into the wild somewhere so I can have a decent look. That’s what we are hoping for,” he says.

And if he catches another glimpse of the light show, he believes it will put him in a very exclusive club – of just one.

“Eighty years on, we’re all looking at the skies again, not only me, but the whole world apparently,” he says.

“If I’m alive, if I see it, I will be the only one who’s seen it twice.”

Then with a big broad smile and a little chuckle, he adds: “Got to keep breathing!”

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.

More than 170 people have died after a plane crashed as it was landing in South Korea on Sunday morning.

Harrowing video footage shows the Jeju Air plane coming off the runway before colliding with a barrier and bursting into flames at Muan International Airport.

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.

The flight, 7C2216, was a Boeing 737-800 operated by Jeju Air, Korea’s most popular budget airline.

Air traffic control authorised the plane to land at Muan International Airport at about 08:54 local time on Sunday (23:54 GMT) – just three minutes before issuing a warning about bird activity in the area.

• Could a bird strike have caused the crash?
• ‘It’s unbearable’: Families criticise lack of updates as investigators search debris
• Video captures moments before crash
• Watch: At the scene of the investigation

At 08:59, the pilot reported that the plane had struck a bird, declaring “mayday mayday mayday” and “bird strike, bird strike, go-around”. The pilot then aborted the original landing and requested permission to land from the opposite direction.

Air traffic control authorised the alternative landing at 09:01 – and at 09:02 the plane made contact with the ground, coming down at roughly the halfway point of the 2,800m runway.

One video appears to show the plane touching down without using its wheels or any other landing gear. It skidded down the runway, overshot it 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 later extinguished the fire.

The first of two survivors was rescued from the crash at about 09:23, with the second being rescued from inside the tail section of the plane at about 09:50.

Lee Jeong-hyun, the chief of the Muan fire department, told a televised briefing 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.

An investigator told the news agency that the black boxes could take up to a month to decode.

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”.

Mr Thomas separately told the Reuters news agency that he was sceptical that a bird strike alone could have caused the crash.

“A bird strike is not unusual. Problems with an undercarriage are not unusual. Bird strikes happen far more often, but typically they don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves,” he said.

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 on South Korean soil.

All the passengers and four members of crew died.

Officials have been collecting saliva samples from family members gathered at Muan Airport to help identify bodies of victims. Other victims have been identified by their fingerprints.

Authorities have so far identified 141 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.

“I can’t believe the entire family has just disappeared,” Maeng Gi-Su, 78, whose nephew and grand-nephews were on the flight, told the BBC. “My heart aches so much.”

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 of the aircraft after the crash and taken to hospital, it said.

The man has woken up and is “fully able to communicate,” according to Yonhap, which cites the director of the Seoul hospital where he is being treated.

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.

Acting President Choi Sang-mok has has ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operations.

Muan has also been declared a special disaster zone, which makes central government funding available to the local government and victims.

All flights to and from Muan International Airport have been cancelled.

A national seven-day period of mourning has been declared, and New Year’s Day celebrations in the country are likely to be cancelled or scaled down.

Aircraft maker Boeing has said it is in touch with Jeju Air and stands “ready to support them”.

Jeju Air has apologised to families, with its chief executive saying in a news conference that the airline had no history of accidents. It is believed that Sunday’s crash has been the airline’s only fatal accident since it was launched in 2005.

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 – like Airbus and Embraer – 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 strikes] 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.”

Five people have been charged in connection with the death of One Direction singer Liam Payne in Argentina, the authorities there say.

The 31-year-old star died on 16 October after falling from the third-floor balcony of a hotel in Buenos Aires.

The hotel’s manager, Gilda Martin, and its receptionist, Esteban Grassi, as well as Payne’s friend Roger Nores have been charged with manslaughter, Argentina’s prosecutor’s office says.

Ezequiel Pereyra – who also worked at the hotel – and Braian Paiz, a waiter, have been charged with supplying drugs.

Under Argentina’s legal system, the prosecutor’s office gathers evidence which it then presents to a judge, who has to decide whether to proceed to trial.

According to a statement released by the prosecutor’s office, Judge Laura Bruniard already took the decision to proceed to the next stage on Friday.

The defendants’ lawyers can appeal against that decision. If their appeals are not successful, the trial phase starts.

In court documents, Judge Bruniard listed the charges against the five suspects, who are referred to by their initials, as is the custom in court documents at this stage of the proceedings.

• Hotel employee EDP is suspected of having sold Liam Payne cocaine on 15 and 16 October
• Waiter BNP is also suspected of having sold cocaine to Liam Payne twice on 14 October
• Payne’s friend RLN is suspected of manslaughter for allegedly “failing to fulfil his duties of care, assistance and help” towards the singer after having “abandoned him to his luck knowing that he was incapable of fending for himself and knowing that he [Payne] suffered from multiple addictions”
• Hotel Manager GAM is suspected of manslaughter for allegedly failing to stop Payne from being taken to his hotel room moments before his death. According to the court papers, given Payne’s state, the room’s balcony posed a “serious threat” and the manager should have ensured Payne was kept in a safe place until medical help arrived
• Chief receptionist ERG is also suspected of manslaughter for allegedly asking three people to “drag” Payne, who could not stand up, to his room, instead of keeping him safe.

Judge Bruniard said that she did not think that Liam Payne’s friend, the hotel manager and the receptionist “had planned or wanted the death of Payne” but that their actions had created a “risk” to his life.

If found guilty, the three could face sentences of between one and five years in prison.

The sentence for supplying drugs is more severe and ranges between four and 15 years in jail.

Judge Bruniard has ordered the two accused of supplying the drugs be remanded in custody.

They have been summoned to appear in court within 24 working hours.

• Liam Payne’s girlfriend says Christmas a ‘time of grief and sadness’
• Zayn Malik pays tribute in Liam Payne’s hometown
• What we know about Liam Payne’s death

In November, the prosecutor’s office said toxicology tests revealed traces of alcohol, cocaine and a prescription antidepressant in Payne’s body.

A post-mortem examination determined his cause of death as “multiple trauma” and “internal and external haemorrhage”, as a result of the fall from the hotel balcony.

According to the prosecutor’s office, medical reports also suggested Payne may have fallen in a state of semi or total unconsciousness.

The prosecutor’s office said this ruled out the possibility of a conscious or voluntary act by Payne, and they had concluded the singer did not know what he was doing nor have any comprehension of his actions.

Speaking to US celebrity news outlet TMZ after Payne’s death, Roger Nores said he was a “very good friend” of the singer and they had spent time together on the day the star died.

He said Payne “seemed playful and happy” when he left him about an hour before the musician fell from the balcony.

After Payne’s death, police found substances in his hotel room and objects and furniture that had been damaged.

Hotel staff had made two calls to emergency services saying they had a guest who had taken “too many drugs and alcohol”, and was “trashing the entire room”, it was previously reported.

Payne became one of the most recognisable names in pop after appearing on The X Factor and rising to fame with the boyband One Direction in the 2010s before the band went on an indefinite hiatus in January 2016.

The singer’s funeral was held in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, last month.

His former bandmates Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik were among the mourners, alongside Payne’s girlfriend Kate Cassidy and his former partner Cheryl, with whom he shares a son.

An 18-year-old Briton convicted of having sex with an underage 17-year-old British girl in Dubai has handed himself in to authorities there to begin a one-year jail sentence, a charity says.

Marcus Fakana, of Tottenham, north London, began a secretive romance in September with another Londoner, who is now 18, while both were on holiday with their families.

After returning home and seeing pictures and chats between the pair, the girl’s mother reported the relationship to Dubai police, who arrested Fakana at his hotel. Sex with someone under 18 is illegal in Dubai.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was supporting a British man in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Fakana handed himself in to Dubai’s Al Awir prison, according to the UK-based campaign group and charity Detained in Dubai.

He had been on bail and staying in temporary accommodation in Dubai since his arrest in September. His parents had to return to London to resume their jobs in a warehouse and as a cleaner to help pay for their son’s accommodation.

Radha Stirling, chief executive of Detained in Dubai, which helps foreigners abroad and is an international authority on UAE law, said she had spoken with Fakana, who told her he would focus on his physical and mental health while in jail.

“Marcus is hopeful that in beginning his ordeal today, he will be home sooner than he would be if he appealed,” she said.

“It is difficult to have the right words to tell a young man turning himself in for a year in Dubai prison.

“He’s very brave and kind and I truly hope he will be home soon.”

Fakana’s family is being supported by the charity, which said his parents were hoping for a royal pardon and commuted sentence.

They are also pushing the UK government and Foreign Secretary David Lammy “for assistance”.

A Downing Street spokesman said earlier this month: “The prime minister recognises it’s an extremely distressing situation for Marcus and his family.”

Previously, the charity explained both teenagers were on holiday with their parents in the UAE from the UK, where the age of consent is 16.

Fakana had told his family about the romance but the girl had not told hers.

The government of Dubai previously said: “Under UAE law, the girl is legally classified as a minor and, in accordance with procedures recognised internationally, her mother – being the legal guardian – filed the complaint.”

It added: “Dubai’s legal system is committed to protecting the rights of all individuals and ensuring impartial judicial proceedings.”

South Korean officials are conducting an emergency safety investigation after 179 people died in the country’s worst-ever plane crash on Sunday.

Moments before the flight was due to land, air traffic control issued a bird strike warning – an alert about the risk of colliding with birds.

The investigation will look to confirm if a bird strike did lead to the crash, or if other factors could have been involved.

A bird strike is a collision between a bird and an aircraft in flight.

They pose a danger to planes because jet engines can lose power if birds are sucked into them.

Bird strikes are very common.

In the US, more than 19,600 wildlife strikes were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration in 2023, the majority of which involved birds.

And there were over 1,400 bird strikes in the UK in 2022, only about 100 of which affected planes, according to data from the Civil Aviation Authority.

Bird strikes are very rarely linked to fatal plane crashes.

Engines could stall or shut down if birds are sucked into them, but pilots typically have time to account for this and make an emergency landing.

Pilots are trained to be especially vigilant during the early morning or at sunset, when birds are most active, according to aviation expert Professor Doug Drury, writing in an article for The Conversation this summer.

But deadly accidents involving bird strikes do happen.

Between 1988 and 2023, some 76 people died in the US after planes collided with wildlife, according to the FAA.

One notable incident is a 1995 crash near an Air Force base in Alaska. Some 24 Canadian and American airmen were killed after an aircraft collided with a flock of geese.

A bird strike also caused the famous “Miracle on the Hudson” incident in 2009, when an Airbus plane ditched onto New York’s Hudson River after colliding with a flock of geese. All 155 passengers and crew survived.

The events were dramatised in the 2016 film Sully, which starred Tom Hanks as the plane’s captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger.

Officials have not confirmed whether the plane did in fact collide with any birds.

But a 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.

Lee Jeong-hyun, the chief of the Muan fire department, said a bird strike and bad weather may have contributed to the crash – but that the exact cause was still being investigated.

Aviation expert Chris Kingswood, a pilot who has over 40 years’ experience and has flown the same type of aircraft involved in the crash, says video footage doesn’t clearly show the cause of the incident.

However, he noted the plane was without its landing gear and wasn’t using its flaps in the expected way, suggesting that “everything happened really quite quickly”.

“You would normally be forced into that kind of situation if you lose both engines,” he told the BBC. “A commercial aeroplane can fly reasonably well and safely on one engine.”

He added that altitude is crucial if a bird strike damages both engines, as pilots at low altitude would face “a huge number of decisions in a very short space of time”.

He said there is an alternative system to operate both the landing gear and flaps if the engines fail.

But according to Kingswood: “If they were at a relatively low altitude, just several thousand feet, then they’ve really got to focus on flying the aeroplane and finding somewhere safe to put it down.”

Other experts have questioned whether a bird strike alone could have caused the crash.

“A bird strike is not unusual, problems with an undercarriage are not unusual,” Geoffrey Thomas, the editor of Airline News, told Reuters.

“Bird strikes happen far more often, but typically they don’t cause the loss of an airplane by themselves,” he added.

Australian airline safety expert Geoffrey Dell told the news agency: “I’ve never seen a bird strike prevent the landing gear from being extended.”

He said a bird strike could have impacted the plane’s engines if a flock had been sucked in, but it would not have shut them down straight away, meaning pilots would have had time to deal with the situation.

A Chinese court has sentenced two teenagers over the death of their classmate in March.

The teens in Hebei province, identified only by their surnames Zhang and Li, were 13 years old when they conspired to kill their classmate Wang and split his money between them.

After attacking Wang with a shovel, they buried him in an abandoned vegetable greenhouse, the court said in a statement on Monday, adding that their “methods were especially cruel and circumstances especially vile”.

The teenagers were sentenced to life imprisonment and 12 years imprisonment, respectively.

The sentencing draws a line under the brutal case, which triggered intense public anger when it was first reported.

Wang had long been bullied in school by three classmates, his family and lawyer said in March, while the court on Monday noted that he had experienced conflict with Zhang and Li.

A third teen who was also at the scene, identified by his surname Ma, was not handed criminal punishment, according to the court.

On 3 March, Zhang brought Wang to the greenhouse on a scooter, while Li rode on a separate scooter with Ma. Along the way, Li told Ma about the plan Zhang had hatched to kill Wang.

When the four arrived at the greenhouse, Zhang started assaulting Wang with a shovel and Li assisted him. Upon witnessing the attack, Ma left the greenhouse.

Zhang and Li then buried the victim, and the three rode away from the scene.

Afterwards, Zhang used Wang’s phone to transfer money from his WeChat account to Lee and himself. He also took out the SIM card from Wang’s phone and ordered Ma to destroy it.

Zhang, Li and Ma were each approached by police, and Ma eventually led them to the crime scene.

The court said that Zhang was the main culprit as he had planned the crime and instigated others to join in, and his actions directly caused Wang’s death.

Li, meanwhile, was a colluder who actively participated in the act and shared the money with Zhang, the court said.

Authorities said that Ma would undergo correction and education – a method that is commonly applied to minors who have committed crimes.

The teens’ sentencing on Monday was lauded by social media users who had been waiting to hear about the gruesome crime’s punishment. But some suggested that the sentencing was too lenient.

“The one that only got 12 years will be a young man when he is released. Hope he doesn’t take revenge on society when he is out,” reads a popular comment on Weibo, referring to a recent spate of mass killings that have struck fear across the country.

Others mourned Wang’s death. “As a parent, I really feel sorry for the kid,” said another Weibo user. “It’s really heart-breaking.”

Hundreds of grieving people have been camping out at Muan International Airport in South Korea, furious that they have not yet seen the bodies of their loved ones who died after a Jeju Air plane crash-landed on Sunday.

Acting President Choi Sang-mok has asked investigators to promptly disclose their findings to bereaved families. He has ordered an emergency safety inspection of the country’s entire airline operations.

At the airport, police superintendent general Na Won-o explained amid angry shouts that the delay was due to officials taking their time to carefully identify all 179 victims, whose bodies were badly damaged in the crash.

“Can you promise that they will be put back together?” a middle-aged man asked, visibly emotional.

• What we know so far about the crash
• Could a bird strike have caused it?
• Video captures moments before crash
• Watch: At the scene of the investigation

Another person asked for the victims’ remains to be released as they were, but Na said officials wanted to make their best effort to collect and match as many bodies as they could.

These grim details left some family members in tears, while most sat in stunned silence, exhausted.

The Boeing 737-800, which was travelling from Bangkok to Muan International Airport, skidded off the runway after touching down and crashed into a wall shortly after 09:00 local time (00:00 GMT) on Sunday.

The accident killed 179 of the 181 people onboard, 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 acting president’s call for an urgent review of airline operations came as another Jeju Air flight turned back to Seoul shortly after takeoff on Monday, due to an unidentified landing-gear issue.

On Monday, the Jeju Air plane departed from Gimpo International Airport at 06:35 local time (21:35 GMT Sunday) and returned less than an hour later after realising a mechanical defect caused by the landing-gear issue, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.

Landing gear refers to the set of wheels and other parts of the plane which support the plane during takeoff, taxiing and landing.

The aircraft that turned back was a Boeing B737-800, the same model as the one involved in the disaster on Sunday.

Thirty-nine of the 41 aircraft in Jeju Air’s fleet are of this model.

At Muan airport, among the relatives of victims that the BBC spoke to was Shin Gyu-ho, who lost his two grandsons and son-in-law.

Frustrated with how long the identification process was taking, the 64-year-old said he had thought about smashing the PA system used for police briefings in anger.

While the body of Shin’s son-in-law has been identified, he was told that his two grandsons – a high-school sophomore and a senior – were “too scattered to be recognised”.

His daughter and granddaughter have holed up in a privacy tent at the airport because “they cannot hold themselves together”, he said.

For Maeng Gi-su’s nephew and his nephew’s two sons, a celebratory trip to Thailand to mark the end of the college entrance exams ended in tragedy when all three died on the flight.

“I can’t believe the entire family has just disappeared,” Maeng, 78, told the BBC.

“My heart aches so much.”

The 179 people who died 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. 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.

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.

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”.

Forty-four years elapsed between the time Jimmy Carter left the presidency and the day he died.

Four decades seems like a long time – a record for a former US president – yet many of the challenges facing America in 2024 are not that different from the ones Carter faced, and at times succumbed to, in the late 1970s.

The US during the Carter years faced a crisis of confidence. Americans were grappling with economic turmoil at home and a range of challenges to US power abroad. Fast forward four decades, and the players and issues are strikingly familiar – the economy and the environment, Russia, Afghanistan and the Middle East. Years have passed, the leaders have changed, but the challenges linger.

Carter celebrated the power of US diplomacy by brokering the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978, but the glow of success was fleeting. The limits of American power were painfully apparent during the Iranian hostage crisis a year later, after US embassy staff in Tehran were taken prisoner.

• Follow live updates as tributes pour in
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It took more than 12 months of intense efforts – diplomatic and military – to free them. The sense of American helplessness contributed to Carter’s resounding election loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, with the prisoners’ eventual release coming just hours after Carter left office.

The inability to shape global events even from the world’s most powerful office continues to haunt US leaders. Current President Joe Biden’s dose of this cold reality first came during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which lowered the curtain on two decades of futile American nation-building and saw the Taliban sweep back into power.

More recently, Biden and his diplomatic team proved unable to prevent the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel from spreading into a regional conflagration and a devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Both Carter and Biden, humbled by seemingly outmatched regional forces in Iran and Afghanistan, were also confronted by the territorial ambitions of global powers. Carter was lambasted for inadequately responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then widely denounced for the move he did make – ordering a boycott by US athletes of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

Biden has had greater early success countering the invasion of Ukraine, uniting allies to support and supply Kyiv’s forces in resisting the Russian advance. But as the war drags on, American resolve has been tested. Extended bloody conflict turned Afghanistan into a cauldron of instability that eventually gave birth to al-Qaeda and a global jihad.

The lasting impact of the war in Ukraine could have its own unexpected, and deadly, consequences – all of which could be laid at this president’s feet.

• Jimmy Carter’s life in pictures

In the Middle East, Carter’s Camp David triumph has proven to be an incomplete accomplishment, securing peace between Israel and Egypt but failing to resolve the Palestinian question which, with the Gaza war, has once again become an urgent global concern. For more than a  year, the war has been a constant reminder of the limits of American – and Biden’s – power.

The US was unable to prevent the conflict from expanding into Lebanon and including, for the first time, direct hostilities between Iran and Israel. The latter, America’s closest ally in the region, has time and again seemingly disregarded Biden’s counsel and forged a more aggressive path on its own.

Biden also has had to handle a tense relationship with an ascendant China, whose current place in the world is due in no small part to Carter’s decision to normalise US relations with the country in 1979.

That watershed moment set a course for the country to become a major economic, and military, power – ultimately creating the geopolitical rivalry with the US with which Mr Biden has had to contend.

Foreign crises have a tendency to spill into domestic affairs as well, and four decades ago Carter faced environmental and energy challenges in part instigated by turmoil abroad.

While the current threat of global climate change is different than the Mid East oil embargo Carter faced, many of his policy approaches – conservation, a transition to renewable energy and government investment – served as the backbone of the environmental programme Biden helped shepherd through Congress in 2022.

The spectre of runaway inflation that the US recently faced also harkens back to the Carter years. The double-digit spikes in consumer prices over the first two years of Biden’s presidency, enflamed by the shock of the global Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, was a reminder of the darkest days of the late 1970s.

The one key difference was that, unlike Carter’s situation, job growth remained robust and the US economy has, except for one quarter, continued to grow. That fact may be cold comfort to Biden, however, whose popularity has still not recovered from the inflation-related public anger.

Carter also was one of the first modern US presidents to grapple with an issue that has become an undeniable political reality for every one of his successors – the American public’s often debilitating distrust of US government and institutions.

Carter, in a July 1979 speech, called it a “crisis of confidence”.

“Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy,” he said.

Public trust in his government to do the right thing at least “most of the time” was at 34% at the start of his presidency and dropped to 27% in March 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. That number has climbed above 50% only once since Carter – in the month after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

For a time it may have seemed like the public’s low esteem in the Carter years was a consequence of the immediate aftermath of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, when those net approval numbers first dipped into negative territory.

The reality, however, is that a lack of faith in government is now a fact of life in American politics. During the Donald Trump presidency, the percent of the public that believed the government would do the right thing regularly registered in the high teens. Biden was unable to reverse this trend during his time in office – a fact that Trump was able to turn against the man who defeated him in his relentless march back to the White House.

It is difficult to avoid comparisons between Carter and the most recent one-term president, Biden.

It’s something twice-winner Trump frequently invites. His political views were crystallised in the 1970s and 1980s and he sometimes references Carter as a way to needle Democrats.

“I see that everybody is comparing Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter,” Trump wrote in one of his tweet-like press releases in 2021. “It would seem to me that is very unfair to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy mishandled crisis after crisis, but Biden has created crisis after crisis.”

Carter himself was not silent about the 45th president, telling the Washington Post that Trump was a disaster “in human rights and taking care of people and treating people equal”.

At the very least, the two make for an interesting contrast. Both were political upstarts who won their presidential terms against high odds. Both struggled with insider Washington politics.

Carter sought to serve in the White House with humility. He wore cardigan sweaters, carried his own luggage on Air Force One and prohibited the presidential anthem Hail to the Chief being played when he entered the room. Trump seemed to relish the pageantry and trappings of power, from the lavish Fourth of July celebrations to using Air Force One as a backdrop for his re-election rallies.

Then there is the post-presidency – or, in Trump’s case, a presidential interregnum. Following his re-election loss, Carter returned to his two-bedroom house in Plains, Georgia. He withdrew from domestic politics and worked on charities such as Habitat for Humanity. He founded the Carter Center, tasked with combating global diseases, promoting human rights and serving as an independent monitor for democratic elections. In 2002, he won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump spent his immediate post-presidency fixated on disputing his 2020 election defeat and setting the stage for his 2024 presidential campaign. His election win and now imminent return to the White House was a plot twist that Carter never publicly contemplated, as he decisively closed the door behind him when he left office.

Carter was only 56 when he left the White House, and his obituaries reflect as much his accomplishments after his time in office as during it. And they are also a reflection of how America has changed in four decades – and how much it hasn’t.

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.”

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.

A female prison officer has been suspended after being arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

It follows reports in The Sun that a custody officer was detained after a video of her having sex with a male inmate was shared with prisoners at HMP Five Wells in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.

The BBC has not been able to verify the nature of the allegations but can confirm she is aged 19 and was suspended from her job at the privately-run prison on 23 December, following her arrest by Northamptonshire Police.

“A prison custody officer has been suspended and arrested by Northamptonshire Police on suspicion of misconduct in a public office,” a spokesperson for HMP Five Wells said.

Both the prison and police said they were unable to comment further.