A Chinese state-sponsored hacker has broken into the US Treasury Department’s systems, accessing employee workstations and some unclassified documents, American officials said on Monday.

The breach occurred in early December and was made public in a letter penned by the Treasury Department to lawmakers notifying them of the incident.

The US agency characterised the breach as a “major incident”, and said it had been working with the FBI and other agencies to investigate the impact.

A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington DC told BBC News that the accusation is part of a “smear attack” and was made “without any factual basis”.

The Treasury Department said in its letter to lawmakers that the China-based actor was able to override security via a key used by a third-party service provider that offers remote technical support to its employees.

The compromised third-party service – called BeyondTrust – has since been taken offline, officials said. They added that there is no evidence to suggest the hacker has continued to access Treasury Department information since.

Along with the FBI, the department has been working with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and third-party forensic investigators to determine the breach’s overall impact.

Based on evidence it has gathered so far, officials said the hack appears to have been carried out by “a China-based Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor”.

“In accordance with Treasury policy, intrusions attributable to an APT are considered a major cybersecurity incident,” Treasury Department officials wrote in their letter to lawmakers.

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The department was made aware of the hack on 8 December by BeyondTrust, a spokesperson told the BBC. According to the company, the suspicious activity was first spotted on 2 December, but it took three days for the company to determine that it had been hacked.

The spokesperson added that the hacker was able to remotely access several Treasury user workstations and certain unclassified documents that were kept by those users.

The department did not specify the nature of these files, or when and for how long the hack took place. They also did not specify the level of confidentiality of the computer systems. For instance, access to 100 low-level workers would likely be less valuable then access to only 10 computers at a higher echelon within the department.

The hackers may have been able to create accounts or change passwords in the three days that they were being watched by BeyondTrust.

As espionage agents, the hackers are believed to have been seeking information, rather than attempting to steal funds.

The spokesperson said the Treasury Department “takes very seriously all threats against our systems, and the data it holds”, and that it will continue to work on protecting its data from outside threats.

The department letter states that a supplemental report on the incident will be provided to lawmakers in 30 days.

Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu denied the department’s report, saying in a statement that it can be difficult to trace the origin of hackers.

“We hope that relevant parties will adopt a professional and responsible attitude when characterizing cyber incidents, basing their conclusions on sufficient evidence rather than unfounded speculation and accusations,” he said.

“The US needs to stop using cyber security to smear and slander China, and stop spreading all kinds of disinformation about the so-called Chinese hacking threats.”

This is the latest high-profile and embarrassing US breach blamed on Chinese espionage hackers.

It follows another hack of telecoms companies in December that potentially breached phone record data across large swathes of American society.

On Christmas Eve, an autonomous spacecraft flew past the Sun, closer than any human-made object before it. Swooping through the atmosphere, Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe was on a mission to discover more about the Sun, including how it affects space weather at Earth.

This was a landmark moment for humanity – but one without any human directly involved, as the spacecraft carried out its pre-programmed tasks by itself as it flew past the sun, with no communication with Earth at all.

Robotic probes have been sent across the solar system for the last six decades, reaching destinations impossible for humans. During its 10-day flyby, the Parker Solar Probe experienced temperatures of 1000C.

But the success of these autonomous spacecraft – coupled with the rise of new advanced artificial intelligence – raises the question of what role humans might play in future space exploration.

Some scientists question whether human astronauts are going to be needed at all.

“Robots are developing fast, and the case for sending humans is getting weaker all the time,” says Lord Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal. “I don’t think any taxpayer’s money should be used to send humans into space.”

He also points to the risk to humans.

“The only case for sending humans [there] is as an adventure, an experience for wealthy people, and that should be funded privately,” he argues.

Andrew Coates, a physicist from University College London, agrees. “For serious space exploration, I much prefer robotics,” he says. “[They] go much further and do more things.”

They are also cheaper than humans, he argues. “And as AI progresses, the robots can be cleverer and cleverer.”

But what does that mean for future generations of budding astronauts – and surely there are certain functions that humans can do in space but which robots, however advanced, never could?

Robotic spacecraft have visited every planet in the solar system, as well as many asteroids and comets, but humans have only gone to two destinations: Earth’s orbit and the Moon.

In all, about 700 people have been to space, since the earliest in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin from the then-Soviet Union became the first cosmic explorer. Most of those have been into orbit (circling the Earth) or suborbit (short vertical hops into space lasting minutes, on vehicles like the US company Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket).

“Prestige will always be a reason that we have humans in space,” says Dr Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist at Rice University, Texas and co-author of A City on Mars. “It seems to have been agreed upon as a great way to show that your political system is effective and your people are brilliant.”

But aside from an innate desire to explore, or a sense of prestige, humans also carry out research and experiments in Earth’s orbit, such as on the International Space Station, and use these to advance science.

Robots can contribute to that scientific research, with the ability to travel to locations inhospitable to humans, where they can use instruments to study and probe the atmospheres and surfaces.

“Humans are more versatile and we get stuff done faster than a robot, but we’re really hard and expensive to keep alive in space,” says Dr Weinersmith.

In her 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, author Samantha Harvey puts it more lyrically: “A robot has no need for hydration, nutrients, excretion, sleep… It wants and asks for nothing.”

But there are downsides. Many robots are slow and methodical – for example on Mars, the rovers (remote-controlled motor vehicles) trundle along at barely 0.1mph.

“AI can beat human beings at chess, but does that mean they’ll be able to beat human beings in exploring environments?” asks Dr Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at the University of London. “I just don’t think we know.”

He does, however, believe that AI algorithms might enable rovers to be “more efficient”.

Technology can play a part in complementing human space travel by freeing up astronauts from certain tasks to allow them to focus on more important research.

“[AI could be used to] automate tedious tasks,” explains Dr Kiri Wagstaff, a computer and planetary scientist in the US who previously worked at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “On the surface of a planet, humans get tired and lose focus, but machines won’t.”

The challenge is that vast amounts of power are needed to operate systems like large language models (LLM), which can understand and generate human language by processing vast amounts of text data. “We are not at the point of being able to run an LLM on a Mars rover,” says Dr Wagstaff.

“The rovers’ processors run at about a tenth [of the speed] that your smartphone has” – meaning they are unable to cope with the intense demands of running an LLM.

Complex humanoid machines with robotic arms and limbs are another form of technology that could take on basic tasks and functions in space, particularly as they more closely mimic the physical capabilities of humans.

Nasa’s Valkyrie robot was built by the Johnson Space Center to compete in a 2013 robotics challenge trial. Weighing 300lb and standing at 6ft2in, it looks not unlike a Star Wars Stormtrooper, but it is one of an increasing number of human-like machines with superhuman abilities.

Long before the Valkyrie was created, Nasa’s Robonaut was the first humanoid robot designed for use in space, taking on tasks that were otherwise performed by humans.

Its specially designed hands meant it could use the same tools as astronauts and carry out complex, delicate tasks like grasping objects or flicking switches, that were too challenging for other robotic systems.

A later model of the Robonaut was flown to the International Space Station on the space shuttle Discovery in 2011, where it helped with maintenance and assembly.

“If we need to change a component or clean a solar panel, we could do that robotically,” says Dr Shaun Azimi, lead of the dexterous robotics team at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. “We see robots as a way to secure these habitats when humans aren’t around.”

He argues that robots could be useful, not to replace human explorers but to work alongside them.

Some robots are already working on other planets without humans, sometimes even making decisions on their own. Nasa’s Curiosity rover, for example, is exploring a region called Gale Crater on Mars and autonomously performs some of its science without human input.

“You can direct the rover to take pictures of a scene, look for rocks that might fit science priorities for the mission, and then autonomously fire its laser at that target,” says Dr Wagstaff.

“It can get a reading of a particular rock and send it back to Earth while the humans are still asleep.”

But the capabilities of rovers like Curiosity are limited by their slow pace. And there is something else they cannot compete with too. That is, humans have the added bonus of inspiring people back on Earth in a way that machines cannot.

“Inspiration is something that is intangible,” argues Prof Coates.

Leroy Chiao, a retired Nasa astronaut who went on three flights to space in the 1990s and 2000s on Nasa’s Space Shuttle and to the International Space Station, agrees. “Humans relate when humans are doing something.

“The general public is excited about robotic missions. But I would expect the first human on Mars to be even bigger than the first Moon landing.”

Humans have not travelled further than Earth’s orbit since December 1972, when the last Apollo mission visited the Moon. Nasa is hoping to return humans there this decade with its Artemis programme.

The next crewed mission will see four astronauts fly around the Moon in 2026. A further mission, scheduled for 2027, will see Nasa astronauts land on the Moon’s surface.

The Chinese space agency, meanwhile, also wants to send astronauts to the Moon.

Elsewhere Elon Musk, CEO of the US company SpaceX, has his own plans related to space. He has said that his long-term plan is to create a colony on Mars, where humans could land.

His idea is to use Starship, a vast new vehicle that his company is developing, to transport up to 100 people there at a time, with the aim for there to be a million people on Mars in 20 years.

“Musk is arguing we need to move to Mars because that could be a backup for humanity if something catastrophic happens on Earth,” explains Dr Weinersmith. “If you buy that argument, then sending humans into space is necessary.”

However, there are large unknowns about living on Mars, including myriad technical challenges that she says remain unsolved.

“Maybe babies can’t develop in that environment,” she says. “There [are] ethical questions [like this] that we don’t have the answers to.

“I think we should be slowing down.”

Lord Rees has a vision of his own, though, in which human and robotic exploration might merge to the point that humans themselves are part-machine to cope with extreme environments. “I can imagine they will use all of the techniques of genetic modification, cyborg add-ons, and so on, to cope with very hostile environments,” he says.

“We may have a new species that will be happy to live on Mars.”

Until then, however, humans are likely to continue their small steps into the cosmos, on a path long trodden by robotic explorers before them.

There will be multiple days of ceremonies and services in Washington, DC to mourn the passing of US president Jimmy Carter, who died at age 100.

Former President Carter will be honoured at a state funeral on 9 January before he is buried in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, alongside his wife, Rosalynn, who died last year at 96.

Carter passed away on Sunday two years after entering into hospice care.

Here’s what to know about the upcoming service.

Carter – who served as president from 1977 to 1981 – will be commemorated at a state funeral in Washington, DC on 9 January.

The former president’s family accepted an invitation on Monday for Carter to lie in state at the US Capitol Rotunda, with a service to be held at Washington National Cathedral.

Carter’s remains will be at the Capitol beginning on the afternoon of 7 January, and they will be kept there until the morning of 9 January. The building will be open to the public during “designated times” for those who wish to pay their respects.

The US federal government will be closed on 9 January for a national day of mourning “as a mark of respect for James Earl Carter, Jr”, President Joe Biden said in an executive order.

The state funeral will not be the only service for the 39th president.

On 4 January, a motorcade will drive through Carter’s small hometown of Plains, Georgia, and stop by his childhood home before proceeding to Atlanta for a public service at the Carter Presidential Center.

Carter’s remains will be at the presidential library on 5 January and 6 January.

After both the Georgia and Washington, DC services, the former president will be laid to rest for a final time in Plains during a private ceremony.

Biden will be delivering the eulogy at Carter’s Washington, DC funeral, after the 39th president asked him to in March 2023, according to Biden.

Former presidents and first ladies typically attend funerals of former presidents, so First Lady Jill Biden and others like former Democratic President Barack Obama could be in attendance. Hillary and Bill Clinton are also expected to attend.

President-elect Donald Trump’s plans are unclear. He did not attend Rosalyn Carter’s funeral last year, but his wife Melania did – along with all the former first ladies.

He did, however, attend the Washington service for George HW Bush, the last former president to die, in 2018.

On a bright January morning in 1979, then US president Jimmy Carter greeted a historic guest in Washington: Deng Xiaoping, the man who unlocked China’s economy.

The first leader of Communist China to visit the United States, Deng had arrived the previous evening, to light snow and a welcome by the US vice-president, the secretary of state and their spouses.

It was the start of a diplomatic relationship that would forever change the world, setting the stage for China’s economic ascent – and later, its rivalry with the US.

Establishing formal ties with China was among Carter’s more remarkable legacies, during a turbulent presidency that ended with one term.

Born on 1 October, the same date as the founding of the People’s Republic of China, “he liked to say it was destiny that brought him and China together”, said Yawei Liu, a close friend of Carter’s.

Even after leaving office, he painstakingly cultivated a close bond with the Chinese people – but that was affected as ties between Washington and Beijing cooled.

Yet he remains one of a small group of US statesmen cherished by Beijing for helping to bring Communist China out of isolation in the 1970s.

Beijing has expressed its condolences, calling Carter the “driving force” behind the 1979 agreement. But the Chinese internet has gone much further, referring to him as “Meirenzong” or the “benevolent American”, giving him a title that was once reserved for emperors.

• What to know about Jimmy Carter’s funeral
• Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s legendary 77-year marriage

Carter’s first encounter with China was in 1949, while the country was suffering the final convulsions of a bloody decades-long civil war.

As a young US naval officer, his submarine unit was dispatched to Qingdao in eastern China. They were to aid Kuomintang troops who were fending off a Communist siege by Mao Zedong’s army.

Just kilometres away behind enemy lines was a Chinese commander named Deng Xiaoping.

When they finally met decades later, it was as leaders of their respective countries.

It was an earlier US President, Richard Nixon, and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger who had laid the groundwork for wooing what was then Mao’s China. With Beijing and Moscow at loggerheads, they had sensed an opportunity to draw away a Soviet ally.

But those efforts culminated under Carter – and Deng – who pushed for deeper ties. For months, the US president dispatched trusted negotiators for secret talks with Beijing.

The breakthrough came in late 1978. In the middle of December, the two countries announced that they would “recognise each other and establish diplomatic relations from January 1, 1979”.

The world was surprised and Beijing was elated, but the island of Taiwan, which had long relied on US support against Chinese claims, was crushed. Carter is still a controversial figure there.

Previously, the US had only recognised the government of Taiwan, which China viewed as a renegade province. And for years US support for Taiwan had been the sticking point in negotiations.

Switching recognition to Beijing meant the US had finally acknowledged China’s position that there was only one Chinese government – and it was in Beijing. This is the One China policy, which, to this day, forms the cornerstone of US-China relations.

But the pivot raised inevitable questions about US commitment to its allies. Uneasy with Carter’s decision, Congress eventually forced through a law codifying its right to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons, thus creating a lasting contradiction in US foreign policy.

Still historians agree that 1979 signalled an extraordinary set of moves that reoriented global power: not only did it unite the US and China against the Soviet Union, but also paved the way for peace and rapid economic growth in East Asia.

But Carter could not have done it without his special relationship with Deng Xiaoping. “It’s a pleasure to negotiate with him,” Carter wrote in his diary after spending a day with Deng during his January visit, according to Deng’s biographer Ezra Vogel.

“The two of them followed common sense, there were actually significant similarities in their no-nonsense personalities,” said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “There was something really unique between the two men that really established trust.”

Deng Xiaoping had survived three political purges under Mao to emerge as one of China’s most consequential leaders. Historians credit his vision, self-assurance, frankness and sharp wit in no small part for this crucial diplomatic win.

He sensed the opportunity Carter offered, Vogel writes – to both thwart Soviet power and to kickstart the modernisation that had begun in Japan, Taiwan and even South Korea. He knew it would elude China without US help.

Deng’s visit to the US began with a warm first meeting at the White House, where he chuckled while revealing his Qingdao connection to Carter, according to Chinese reports. He was exuberant as the two clasped hands in front of cameras in the Rose Garden, saying: “Now our two countries’ peoples are shaking hands.”

Over the next few days, Deng staged a whirlwind charm offensive on the Americans as he toured several states with Carter. In one famous image, Deng is seen grinning as he dons a cowboy hat at a Texan rodeo. “Deng avoids politics, goes Texan,” read a local newspaper headline.

Carter described Deng as “smart, tough, intelligent, frank, courageous, personable, self-assured, friendly”, according to Vogel.

He later wrote in his diary the trip was “one of the delightful experiences of my Presidency… to me, everything went right, and the Chinese leader seemed equally pleased.”

“Carter was really a catalytic agent for what was more than a diplomatic rapprochement – it was a dramatic moment of signalling,” said Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Centre on US-China Relations who, as a journalist in 1979, covered Deng’s trip.

“He introduced Deng to the country and actually to the world. It made what had been a contentious relationship to something very congenial. The way Carter and Deng interacted, these were signals that it was okay to both peoples to set history aside and start a new relationship.”

Under Carter, China was granted “most favoured nation” trade status, boosting its economy and creating jobs. Within a year, two-way trade between the two countries doubled.

Throughout the next decade China became an important trade partner not just for the US but also the world, which was “extraordinarily important” for China’s growth, noted Prof Yang.

Carter’s connection with China endured long after his presidency ended.

In the 1990s his non-profit group The Carter Center played a significant role in China’s nascent grassroots democracy where – on the invitation of the Chinese government – it observed village elections, trained officials and educated voters.

Unusually for a former US president, Carter returned several times to China on personal visits. On one trip, he and his wife Rosalynn helped to build shelters for victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

His commitment to humanitarian work, his humble background as the son of a peanut farmer, and “folksy style” – which stood in contrast to the formal public personas of Chinese leaders – endeared him to many Chinese, according to Prof Yang: “He will be seen as a role model of a leader who cares, not just in rhetoric but also in actions.”

“Everywhere he travelled in China, people showed their warm feelings for him… The Chinese people really liked him for his courage and his honesty,” said Dr Liu, a senior adviser with the Carter Center. He accompanied Carter on several trips, including a 2014 tour where he was fêted by local officials and universities.

In Qingdao, the city put on a surprise fireworks show for his 90th birthday. In Beijing, Deng’s daughter hosted a banquet and presented a gift – a copy of the People’s Daily front page of the 1979 communique. “Both were moved to tears,” Dr Liu recalled.

That was to be his last visit. As the US-China relationship grew rockier, so too did Carter’s ties with the Chinese leadership, particularly after Xi Jinping took power.

On the eve of his 2014 visit, top government officials instructed universities not to sponsor his events, prompting a last-minute scramble to change venues, Carter noted.

A state dinner held for him at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing was sparsely attended, recalled Mr Schell. Notably, it was hosted by then vice-president Li Yuanchao, while Xi was said to be entertaining another dignitary elsewhere in the complex.

“He wouldn’t even come to tip his hat to Carter. That really showed the state of relations,” Mr Schell said. “Carter was really very angry. Two of his aides told me he even felt like leaving early because he felt disrespected.”

The Carter Center’s activities in China were eventually curtailed, and a website they maintained to document the village elections was taken offline. No clear explanation was given at the time, but Dr Liu attributed this to China’s growing suspicion of foreign organisations following the 2010 Arab Spring.

Though Carter said little about the snub publicly, it would have been felt no less acutely, given the lengths he had gone to advocate for engagement.

It has also raised questions whether his approach on human rights with China – he characterised it as “patience” but others criticised it as soft-pedalling – was justified in the end.

Carter often “made a tremendous effort… not to stick fingers into China’s eyes on the human rights question,” Mr Schell noted. “He did temper himself even when he was out of office, as The Carter Center had a real stake in the country.”

Some see his decision to engage with Communist China as born out of an American sincerity at the time. Following the violent chaos of the Cultural Revolution, there was “a disbelief among many Americans – how could the Chinese be living in angry isolation?” Prof Yang said. “There was a genuine desire among American leaders to really help.”

Others say that in attempting to shore up support against the Soviets, the US set the course for China’s rise and ended up creating one of its greatest rivals.

But these actions also benefited millions of Chinese, helping to lift them out of poverty and – for a time – widening political freedom at the local level.

“I think all of us from that generation were children of engagement,” Mr Schell said. “We were hoping Carter would find the formula that would slowly bring China into a comfortable relationship with [the] US and the rest of the world.”

Toward the end of his life, Carter grew more alarmed about the growing distrust between the US and China, and frequently warned of a possible “modern Cold War”.

“In 1979, Deng Xiaoping and I knew we were advancing the cause of peace. While today’s leaders face a different world, the cause of peace remains just as important,” he wrote on the 40th anniversary of normalisation of relations.

“[Leaders] must accept our conviction that the United States and China need to build their futures together, for themselves and for humanity at large.”

Sila was less than three weeks old when her mother Nariman realised she wasn’t moving.

“I woke up in the morning and told my husband that the baby hadn’t stirred for a while. He uncovered her face and found her blue, biting her tongue, with blood coming out of her mouth,” says Nariman al-Najmeh.

In their tent situated on the beach in southern Gaza, Nariman is sitting with her husband, Mahmoud Fasih, and their two young children – Rayan, who is four years old, and Nihad, who is two and a half.

The family say they have been displaced more than 10 times during the 14-month war.

“My husband is a fisherman, we’re from the north and left without anything but we did it for our children,” says Nariman in an interview with a freelance cameraman working with the BBC. Israel prevents international media from entering and freely working on the ground in Gaza.

“When I was pregnant, I used to think about how I was going to get clothes for the baby. I was really worried because my husband doesn’t have work.”

During her 20 days of life, Sila’s home was the small and overcrowded campsite in the al-Mawasi “humanitarian area”, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from elsewhere in the territory have been ordered to move by the Israeli military.

The area suffers from poor infrastructure and sanitation, as well as flooding caused by both rain and waves from the Mediterranean Sea.

“The cold is bitter and harsh. All night, because of the cold, we huddle together, curling up next to each other,” says Sila’s father, Mahmoud.

“Our life is hell. It’s hell because of the effects of the war, my family was martyred, and our situation is unbearable.”

Despite telling civilians to head to the area, the Israeli military has struck al-Mawasi repeatedly during its campaign against Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza.

Sila’s death was not by bombardment – but still caused by the punishing conditions that the war is imposing upon civilians.

She is one of six newborns who have died from hypothermia within a two-week period in Gaza – where night-time temperatures have fallen to 7C (45F) – according to the local health authorities, who have also reported that many thousands of tents have been damaged by the weather.

Nariman says Sila was born at a British field hospital established in the Khan Younis area.

“After I gave birth… I started thinking about how I could secure her milk, nappies. Everything I got, I got with great difficulty.”

“I never thought I would give birth living in a tent, in such cold and freezing conditions, with water dripping on us. Water would leak into the tent, pouring down on us. At times, we had to run to escape the water – for the baby’s sake,” says Nariman.

Still, Sila was born without complications.

“Her health was good, thank God, Suddenly, she started to be affected by the cold,” says Nariman. “I noticed she was sneezing and seemed to get sick from the cold, but I never expected she would die because of it.”

Sila was admitted last Wednesday to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where Dr Ahmad al-Farra, the director of its paediatric department, said she had suffered from “severe hypothermia, leading to the cessation of vital signs, cardiac arrest, and eventually death”.

“[On the previous day] as well, two cases were brought in: one was a three-day-old baby and the other was less than a month old. Both cases involved severe hypothermia, resulting in death,” says Dr Farra.

Babies have an underdeveloped mechanism for maintaining their own body temperature and may develop hypothermia easily in a cold environment. Premature babies are especially vulnerable, and Dr Farra says Gaza’s medics have observed an increase in the number of premature births during the war.

Mothers are also suffering from malnutrition, leaving to them unable to breastfeed their babies sufficiently. There is also a scarcity of infant formula because of humanitarian aid deliveries being restricted, according to Dr Farra.

Then on Sunday, another, tragic case.

Outside al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, a second local cameraman working with the BBC met Yehia al-Batran, who couldn’t contain his anguish as he carried his dead baby son, Jumaa. Like Sila, he was also only 20 days old and was blue with cold.

“Touch him with your hand, he’s frozen,” said Yehia. “All eight of us, we don’t have four blankets between us. What can I do? I see my children dying in front of me.”

“These preventable deaths lay bare the desperate and deteriorating conditions facing families and children across Gaza,” Unicef regional director Edouard Beigbeder said in a statement on Thursday.

“With temperatures expected to drop further in the coming days, it is tragically foreseeable that more children’s lives will be lost to the inhumane conditions they are enduring.”

Under the sound of Israeli drones flying ahead, Sila’s father Mahmoud carried her lifeless body from Nasser hospital to a makeshift graveyard in Khan Younis. There, he dug a small grave in the sand.

After laying Sila to rest, Mahmoud comforted Nariman.

“Her siblings are sick, exhausted. We’re all sick. Our chests hurt, and we have colds from the cold and rain,” says Nariman. “If we don’t die from the war, we’re dying from the cold.”

A Seoul court has issued an arrest warrant against South Korea’s suspended president Yoon Suk Yeol over his attempt to impose martial law on 3 December.

The warrant comes after Yoon, who is facing several investigations on insurrection and treason charges, ignored three summonses to appear for questioning over the past two weeks.

On Sunday night, investigators sought an arrest warrant for Yoon on charges of insurrection and abuse of power – a move that his lawyer described as “illegal”.

South Korea has been in political crisis since the short-lived martial law declaration, with Yoon and a successor both impeached by parliament.

Yoon is South Korea’s first sitting president to face an arrest.

Investigators have until 6 January to execute the warrant and can request for an extension.

It is unclear, however, if investigators will be able to execute the warrant as they may be thwarted by his security team and protesters.

The presidential security service had earlier blocked investigators from entering the presidential office grounds and Yoon’s private residence to conduct court-approved searches.

In the past, South Korean authorities have given up arrest attempts against prominent politicians after their aides and supporters have physically blocked the police.

On Monday, Yoon’s legal team said that investigators had no authority to arrest him, as declaring martial law was within the president’s constitutional authority.

Yoon had earlier defended his decision to declare martial law and vowed to “fight to the end” – though he also said that he would not avoid his legal and political responsibilities.

His lawyer, Yun Gap-geun, said that Yoon’s failure to comply with the earlier three summonses was due to “legitimate concerns”.

Yoon’s whereabouts are not publicly known, but he has been banned from leaving the country.

While he has been suspended from presidential duties since 14 December after lawmakers voted to impeach him, he can only be removed from office if his impeachment is sustained by the country’s constitutional court.

There are currently only six judges on the constitutional court’s nine-member bench. This means a single rejection would save Yoon from being removed.

Opposition lawmakers had hoped the nomination of three additional judges would improve the odds of Yoon getting impeached, but their proposal was vetoed by prime minister Han Duck-soo last week.

The opposition has since then voted to impeach Han, who had stepped in as acting leader after Yoon was suspended.

Now, they are threatening to do the same to finance minister Choi Sang-mok, who currently serves as both acting president and acting prime minister.

Aviation experts have raised questions about an “unusual” concrete wall near the runway and its role in the South Korea plane crash that killed 179 people.

Footage shows the Jeju Air plane coming off the runway before colliding with the wall and bursting into flames at Muan International Airport.

Authorities investigating the cause of South Korea’s worst-ever plane crash are considering the significance of the concrete wall’s location about 250m (820ft) off the end of the runway.

Air safety expert David Learmount said that, had the “obstruction” not been there, the plane “would have come to rest with most – possibly all – those on board still alive”.

The pilot reported that the plane had struck a bird and then aborted the original landing and requested permission to land from the opposite direction.

The plane came down some distance along the 2,800m runway and appeared to land without using its wheels or any other landing gear.

Mr Learmount said the landing was “as good as a flapless/gearless touchdown could be: wings level, nose not too high to avoid breaking the tail” and the plane had not sustained substantial damage as it slid along the runway.

“The reason so many people died was not the landing as such, but the fact that the aircraft collided with a very hard obstruction just beyond the runway end,” he said.

Christian Beckert, a Lufthansa pilot based in Munich, called the concrete structure “unusual”, telling Reuters news agency: “Normally, on an airport with a runway at the end, you don’t have a wall.”

The concrete structure holds a navigation system that assists aircraft landings – known as a localiser – according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.

At 4m high, it is covered with dirt and was raised to keep the localiser level with the runway to ensure it functions properly, Yonhap reported.

South Korea’s transport ministry has said that other airports in the country and some overseas have the equipment installed with concrete structures. However officials will examine whether it should have been made with lighter materials that would break more easily upon impact.

Chris Kingswood, a pilot with 48 years’ experience who has flown the same type of aircraft involved in the crash, told BBC News: “Obstacles within a certain range and distance of the runway are required to be frangible, which means that if an aircraft strikes them that they do break.

“It does seem unusual that it’s such a rigid thing. The aircraft, from what I understand, was travelling very fast, landed a long way down the runway, so it will have gone a long way past the end of the runway… so where will you draw the line with that? That’s certainly something that will be investigated.

“Aeroplanes are not strong structures – they are, by design, light to make them efficient in flight. They’re not really designed to go high-speed on its belly so any kind of structure could cause the fuselage to break up and then be catastrophic.

• Could a bird strike have caused S Korea plane crash?
• ‘It’s unbearable’: Families criticise lack of updates
• What we know about the South Korea plane crash so far

“The fuel is kept in the wings so once the wing ruptures, then the potential for fire is significant.

“So it’s not a given that if the wall had not been there, it would have been a completely different outcome.”

Mr Kingswood said he would be “surprised if the airfield hadn’t met all the requirements in accordance with industry standards”.

“I suspect if we went around the airfields at a lot of major international airports… we would find a lot of obstacles that could similarly be accused of presenting a hazard,” he added.

Aviation analyst Sally Gethin questioned whether the pilot knew the barrier was there, particularly given the plane was approaching from the opposite direction from the usual landing approach.

She told BBC News: “We need to know, were (the pilots) aware there was this hard boundary at the end?

“If they were directed by the control tower to reverse the use of the runway the second time around, that should come out in the investigation of the black boxes.

“I think there are so many questions.”

The World Health Organization has urged China to share data on the origins of the Covid pandemic, five years on from its start in the city of Wuhan.

“This is a moral and scientific imperative,” the WHO said in a statement to mark what it called the “milestone” anniversary.

“Without transparency, sharing, and co-operation among countries, the world cannot adequately prevent and prepare for future epidemics and pandemics,” it added.

Many scientists think the virus transferred naturally from animals to humans, but some suspicions persist that it escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

China has not responded to Monday’s WHO statement. In the past it has strongly rejected the lab leak theory.

In September, a team of scientists said it was “beyond reasonable doubt” that the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.

They came to this conclusion after analysing hundreds of samples collected from Wuhan in January 2020.

• Covid origin studies say evidence points to Wuhan market
• Covid origin: Why the Wuhan lab-leak theory is so disputed

In its statement, the WHO went back to the early days of Covid and traced its evolution from a local phenomenon to a global scourge, leading to lockdowns around the world and the ultimately successful race to develop vaccines.

“Five years ago on 31 December 2019, WHO’s Country Office in China picked up a media statement by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission from their website on cases of ‘viral pneumonia’ in Wuhan, China,” the organisation said.

“In the weeks, months and years that unfolded after that, Covid-19 came to shape our lives and our world,” it went on.

The WHO said it “went to work immediately” as 2020 dawned. It recalled how its employees activated emergency systems on 1 January and informed the world three days later.

“By 9-12 January, WHO had published its first set of comprehensive guidance for countries, and on 13 January, we brought together partners to publish the blueprint of the first Sars-CoV-2 laboratory test,” it added.

The WHO said it wanted to “honour the lives changed and lost, recognise those who are suffering from Covid-19 and long Covid, express gratitude to the health workers who sacrificed so much to care for us, and commit to learning from Covid-19 to build a healthier tomorrow”.

In May 2023, the WHO declared that Covid-19 no longer represented a “global health emergency”.

Its director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at the time that at least seven million people had died in the pandemic.

But he added that the true figure was “likely” closer to 20 million deaths – nearly three times the official estimate.

Since then, the WHO has repeatedly warned against complacency about the possible emergence of future Covid-like illnesses.

Dr Ghebreyesus has said the next pandemic “can come at any moment” and has urged the world to be prepared.

A fund created by the US government to help compensate victims of the late fraudster Bernard Madoff has begun making its final round of payments, according to a statement by the Department of Justice (DoJ).

The payouts being made by the Madoff Victim Fund (MVF) are worth $131.4m (£104.6m) and will bring the total amount it has returned to 40,930 claimants to $4.3bn.

Madoff, a Wall Street financier disgraced after he admitted to one of the biggest frauds in US financial history, died in prison in 2021.

He had been serving a 150-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2009 to running a so-called Ponzi scheme, which paid investors with money from new clients rather than actual profits.

“MVF’s distributions offset one of the most monstrous financial crimes ever committed,” said Richard C Breeden, who runs the MVF.

Mr Breeden is a former chairman of the US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“We have brought tens of thousands of victims to the greatest recovery we could achieve,” he added.

Madoff’s victims were a mixture of wealthy individuals, less well-off people and companies – both large and small – as well as schools, charities and pension funds.

The MFV estimates it will have recovered nearly 94% of the victims’ proven losses when it completes its mission in 2025.

Another $14.7bn has been returned through bankruptcy proceedings to Madoff customers.

Madoff’s investment firm collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis.

Set up in 1960, Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities became one of Wall Street’s largest market-makers – matching buyers and sellers of stocks – and Madoff served as chairman of the Nasdaq stock trading platform.

Over the years, the firm was investigated eight times by the SEC because it made exceptional returns.

But it was the global recession which prompted the firm’s demise as Madoff investors, hit by the downturn, tried to withdraw about $7bn and he could not find the money to cover it.

The list of those scammed included actor Kevin Bacon, Hall of Fame baseball player Sandy Koufax and film director Steven Spielberg’s charitable foundation, Wunderkinder.

UK banks were also among those who lost money, with HSBC Holdings saying it had exposure of around $1bn. Other corporate victims were Royal Bank of Scotland and Man Group and Japan’s Nomura Holdings.

Two men were found dead in a remote forest while searching for Sasquatch, also commonly known as Bigfoot, according to authorities in Washington State.

The two men from Portland, Oregon, were found dead after a three-day search was launched on Christmas Day after a family member reported that the pair had not returned from a trip to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to search for proof of the mythical hairy, forest-dwelling, bi-pedal primates.

The “grueling” search involved over 60 volunteers searching with aircrafts and dogs in heavily wooded terrain and brutally-cold weather conditions, the Skamania County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.

“Both deaths appear to be due to exposure, based on weather conditions and ill-preparedness,” the statement said.

• The true origin of Sasquatch

The sheriff’s office found a car belonging to the victims near the town of Willard, the statement said, and the search re-focused to that area. Drones were also used, and a Coast Guard helicopter team was called in to help with the search.

Officials have not provided the names of the two victims, aged 37 and 59.

Weather conditions in the Cascade mountains had been frigid in the days before and during the search, which included snow, freezing rain and temperatures falling below freezing.

Rescuers also had to battle high water levels in rivers and fallen trees.

Hundreds of sightings of Sasquatch have been reported in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and western Canada. Alongside the Loch Ness Monster, the creature is one of the world’s most famous cryptids.

There have been so many alleged sightings that some communities have taken humorous measures to protect the hairy mythic creature. In Skamania County, where the pair went missing, a person could get a year in jail or a $1,000 fine if one of the folklore creatures are harmed.

Former England football manager Gareth Southgate and actor Stephen Fry have both been knighted in a New Year Honours list that also recognises the stars of the Olympic Games.

800m champion Keely Hodgkinson, who receives an MBE, is one of several medallists to be honoured following the summer games in Paris.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and former West Midlands mayor Andy Street are also awarded knighthoods, while Labour MP Emily Thornberry is made a dame.

Other notable names on the 2025 list include musician Myleene Klass, gardener Alan Titchmarsh, and actresses Carey Mulligan and Sarah Lancashire.

And four former sub-postmasters – Lee Castleton, Jo Hamilton, Christopher Head and Seema Misra – are appointed OBEs for services to justice after taking the Post Office to court over the Horizon IT scandal.

Southgate, now Sir Gareth, is recognised for guiding the England football team to back-to-back Euros finals, while Fry, who becomes Sir Stephen, is cited for his work on mental health awareness and the environment.

Sir Stephen said he was “startled and enchanted” after receiving the letter informing him of his knighthood.

“I think the most emotional thing is when I think of my childhood, and my dreadful unhappiness and misery and stupidity, and everything that led to so many failures as a child,” he said.

“And for my parents, really, what a disaster. I mean every time the phone rang, they thought, ‘Oh God, what has Stephen done now’. It was a sort of joke in the family.”

Before going to the University of Cambridge and starting his career in the arts, Sir Stephen was sent to prison for stealing credit cards and was expelled from several schools.

Lancashire, known for roles including a no-nonsense police sergeant in BBC series Happy Valley, said it was an “unexpected delight” to be appointed a CBE for services to drama.

Mulligan and Titchmarsh were also appointed CBEs for services to drama and horticulture respectively.

The gardener said it had been a “teary moment” telling his wife Alison and their daughters about the honour, but that he was “thrilled to bits” to be recognised.

Klass, who is an ambassador for the pregnancy and baby loss charity Tommy’s, said she was “over the moon” to be become a MBE for her work on women’s health and miscarriage awareness.

“When I think back to how all of this started, it all came from a very dark place,” she said.

“Anyone that’s suffered the pain of baby loss or miscarriage, you just go into survival mode, and then to have recurring miscarriages again – the only way you can see forward is just one breath at a time, one day at a time.”

More than 1,200 people from fields including sport, business, entertainment and politics are recognised in this year’s list.

As well as celebrating the success of people already in the public eye, it also highlights the unsung achievements of people who make major contributions to their local communities, to charities and to fields such as education and healthcare.

This includes Anne Croucher, a Tesco worker who raised money to provide Easter chocolates to hundreds of care home residents in Dumfries; Malcolm Fletcher, a saxophonist who helped found the Ely Military Band in 1962; and Joan Lockley, who set up West Midlands Hedgehog Rescue.

All three have been awarded the Medal of the Order of the British Empire.

The New Year Honours are awarded by the King following recommendations by the prime minister or senior government ministers. Members of the public can also recommend people for an award.

Honours are also given out to mark the King’s birthday in June.

The majority of people on the honours list are appointed as an MBE, OBE or CBE but a few are conferred with more prestigious awards.

In this New Year Honours list seven people are made Companion of the Order of the Bath, while 35 are made either Knight Bachelor or Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In recognition of their public service, MI5 director general Ken McCallum is made Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath and Tamara Finkelstein, a senior civil servant, is made Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath.

Author Dame Jacqueline Wilson is made Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire and the scientist Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, who was chairman of Cancer Research UK until last year, is made Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.

Rarer still, the novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is made a Companion of Honour, a select group which is limited to 65 people at any one time.

They are awarded to those who have made a significant contribution to the arts, science, medicine or the government over a long period of time.

Sir Kazuo, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, has written works including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.

Past recipients include physicist Stephen Hawking, former prime minister Sir Winston Churchill and naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

Lee Castleton, Jo Hamilton, Christopher Head and Seema Misra began campaigning against the Post Office after they were prosecuted by the company.

The four former sub-postmasters were among the 700 or so people who the company took legal action against between 1999 and 2015.

This happened after the Post Office’s faulty computer system Horizon appeared to show money was missing from branch accounts.

More than 100 convictions have been overturned, with legal actions and police investigations still taking place.

The scandal has been described as the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice.

Hundreds of sub-postmasters took legal action against the Post Office in 2017 in a campaign led by Sir Alan Bates, who was knighted in the King’s Birthday Honours in June.

Their story inspired the award-winning ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which was broadcast in January.

On becoming an OBE, Seema Misra said: “I wasn’t expecting it but, as we know, the fight is still on.

“I’m very honoured, at least they have realised that the scandal happened.”

Rebecca Thomson, the journalist who broke the story for Computer Weekly, is appointed an OBE for services to justice.

Hodgkinson is among several athletes to be recognised for their medal-winning efforts this summer.

Kitesurfer Ellie Aldridge and heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson are also appointed MBEs, while cyclist Tom Pidcock and rower Helen Glover become OBEs.

Swimmer Duncan Scott is appointed an OBE after becoming Scotland’s most decorated Olympian with eight medals, including two in Paris.

Paralympic swimmers Tully Kearney and Alice Tai also become OBEs, along with rower Erin Kennedy and cyclist Jaco van Gass.

Hannah Cockroft is appointed a CBE after winning a gold medal in each of the last four Paralympic Games.

Penny Briscoe, the chef de mission for Paralympics GB, is also appointed a CBE.

Former Coronation Street cast member Anne Reid, known to millions as Valerie Barlow, is among those who have starred on stage and television to be honoured.

She is appointed a CBE, while former Doctor Who star Tom Baker becomes a MBE.

Kevin Whately, who was the lead actor in Lewis, and West End actress Jill Nalder are appointed OBEs, the latter for her activism around HIV and Aids.

Among the other people from arts and culture recognised for their work is the DJ Steve Lamacq, who said becoming a MBE was an “incredible shock”.

The BBC Radio 6 Music host added: “If I could, I’d dedicate this honour to all the venues and artists and promoters across the country, especially the ones at grassroots level, who have given me such joy over the years, and I’m proud to be one of their champions.”

Actress Anne-Marie Duff is appointed an OBE while Loyd Grossman, author and chairman of The Royal Parks who is also known for his cooking sauces, is knighted for services to heritage.

Commonly-awarded ranks

• Companion of Honour – Limited to 65 people. Recipients wear the initials CH after their name
• Knight or Dame
• CBE – Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• OBE – Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• MBE – Member of the Order of the British Empire
• BEM – British Empire Medal

The honours list also recognises people who have campaigned against domestic violence and sexual abuse.

Among them are Julie Devey and Carole Gould, who are co-founders of Killed Women, a group for people whose female relatives have been killed by men. They become OBEs.

Nicholas Gazzard, founder of the Hollie Gazzard Trust, which supports people experiencing domestic abuse, is also appointed an OBE.

He set up the charity in memory of his daughter after she was murdered in 2014 by her ex-boyfriend.

“We didn’t want her to be another statistic and our aim was to use her story to help others avoid what she went through,” he said.

“I’m sure she’s looking down on us with that huge smile, and proud about what is being achieved in her name.”

Soma Sara, founder of Everyone’s Invited, an anti-rape charity, is appointed a MBE.

The oldest person on the list is 103-year-old Colin Bell. He flew Mosquito combat aircraft in World War Two and he is awarded a Medal of the Order of the British Empire for his charity work.

The medal is also given to one of the two youngest people on the list, Mikayla Beames, who is recognised for her fundraising efforts supporting children with cancer.

She is 18, as is para-swimmer William Ellard who becomes a MBE after winning gold in the S14 200m freestyle at the Paralympics.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s 77-year marriage has become part of the couple’s political lore.

“Yours is a love like everyone would wish that they would have,” US broadcasting star Oprah Winfrey told the former president in 2015.

But their partnership was not only a romantic union – it was a political alliance as well, one that propelled the couple to the White House and afterward, to a life of public service around the world.

“I’ve been very happy,” Jimmy Carter told the New York Times in 2021.

“And I love her more now than I did to begin with – which is saying a lot, because I loved her a lot.”

President Carter died on Sunday at the age of 100 after spending several months in hospice.

Rosalynn Carter died at age 96 in November 2023, after being diagnosed with dementia.

• What to know about Jimmy Carter’s funeral
• US to hold national day of mourning for Jimmy Carter

Here are four key things to known about the Carters’ decades-long marriage.

Jimmy Carter has told the story of how he met his wife many times, over many interviews.

The way he recounted it, he was supposed to go on a date with a Georgia pageant queen the night he met his future wife.

But his date had a family obligation and – like so many dates throughout human history – she bailed.

So Carter, who was on a break from the US Naval Academy at the time, drove around his hometown of Plains, Georgia, instead.

That was how he spotted the woman who would change the course of his life.

He saw Rosalynn Smith on the steps of a local Methodist church that evening and asked her out to see a movie, he told Winfrey.

The next day, his mother asked him how the evening had gone

“I said: ‘She’s the one I’m going to marry,'” Carter said.

“There was just something about her,” he told Winfrey – who then interrupted the interview to tell the elderly Carter that he was blushing.

Carter had actually caught Rosalynn’s eye years earlier, when she visited his sister Ruth and saw a photo of a young Jimmy.

“I fell in love with that picture,” she told the New York Times in 2021, in an interview timed to their 75th wedding anniversary.

But, as he recounted, Rosalynn took a little longer to conclude they should wed. She initially said no when he proposed over Christmas break.

They eventually did marry in 1946, when Jimmy was 21 and Rosalynn was 18. They were not to be separated until her death last year.

Rosalynn Carter played an active role in her husband’s political and public service career.

When asked by the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper to name their biggest accomplishment as a couple, the former president replied: “Having been elected president with Rosa’s good help.”

“In the campaign we worked closely together, and in the White House we worked closely together.”

Rosalynn Carter expanded and formalised the role of the First Lady, establishing the Office of the First Lady in the White House.

The couple would hold policy lunches together in the White House, and the First Lady sat in on Cabinet meetings and briefings.

In 1977, she went on a tour of Central and South America to discuss major policy initiatives.

She took on significant diplomatic responsibilities and was at her husband’s side as he negotiated the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, and she advised her husband through the most turbulent moments of his one-term presidency.

Rosalynn Carter became an advocate for mental health, and worked to push funding for mental healthcare through Congress.

She also spoke up for those caring for people who are aging, ill, or disabled.

“There are only four kinds of people in the world – those that have been caregivers, those that are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers,” she once famously declared.

Like everything else, the Carters embarked hand-in-hand in their post-White House era.

They co-founded the Carter Center, a non-profit organisation that champions human rights.

The couple helped build homes around the world with Habitat for Humanity – a non-profit that builds affordable housing – and were often photographed together in coordinating work attire on building sites.

The pair also volunteered to observe elections in developing nations as part of their commitment to human rights and democracy.

Modern US presidents often find wealth after leaving office, signing multi-million dollar book contracts or commanding five- or six-figure speaking fees. Sometimes, they sell branded merchandise.

Not the Carters.

They returned to the the small Georgia home where they resided before Carter went to the White House – assessed at just $167,000 (£133,000), according to a Washington Post report from 2018.

The decision to return to Plains, Georgia, where they were born and fell in love, became part of the couple’s post-presidential story.

In their elder years they eschewed private jets for commercial air travel, and the former president was known to greet fellow passengers and take selfies with them, according to the Post.

Jimmy Carter also cost the government the least of any former living president in terms of pensions, office staff, and related expenses.

In fiscal year 2023, Carter’s budget request was $426,000, according to the General Services Administration. By comparison, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Donald Trump all requested more than one million dollars.

Their modest approach to life continued until their deaths.

President Carter will lie in state at the US Capitol and receive a state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on 9 January.

But according to his wishes, he will be buried next to Rosalynn on a hill looking over a willow-shaded pond in Plains.

On a bright January morning in 1979, then US president Jimmy Carter greeted a historic guest in Washington: Deng Xiaoping, the man who unlocked China’s economy.

The first leader of Communist China to visit the United States, Deng had arrived the previous evening, to light snow and a welcome by the US vice-president, the secretary of state and their spouses.

It was the start of a diplomatic relationship that would forever change the world, setting the stage for China’s economic ascent – and later, its rivalry with the US.

Establishing formal ties with China was among Carter’s more remarkable legacies, during a turbulent presidency that ended with one term.

Born on 1 October, the same date as the founding of the People’s Republic of China, “he liked to say it was destiny that brought him and China together”, said Yawei Liu, a close friend of Carter’s.

Even after leaving office, he painstakingly cultivated a close bond with the Chinese people – but that was affected as ties between Washington and Beijing cooled.

Yet he remains one of a small group of US statesmen cherished by Beijing for helping to bring Communist China out of isolation in the 1970s.

Beijing has expressed its condolences, calling Carter the “driving force” behind the 1979 agreement. But the Chinese internet has gone much further, referring to him as “Meirenzong” or the “benevolent American”, giving him a title that was once reserved for emperors.

• What to know about Jimmy Carter’s funeral
• Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s legendary 77-year marriage

Carter’s first encounter with China was in 1949, while the country was suffering the final convulsions of a bloody decades-long civil war.

As a young US naval officer, his submarine unit was dispatched to Qingdao in eastern China. They were to aid Kuomintang troops who were fending off a Communist siege by Mao Zedong’s army.

Just kilometres away behind enemy lines was a Chinese commander named Deng Xiaoping.

When they finally met decades later, it was as leaders of their respective countries.

It was an earlier US President, Richard Nixon, and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger who had laid the groundwork for wooing what was then Mao’s China. With Beijing and Moscow at loggerheads, they had sensed an opportunity to draw away a Soviet ally.

But those efforts culminated under Carter – and Deng – who pushed for deeper ties. For months, the US president dispatched trusted negotiators for secret talks with Beijing.

The breakthrough came in late 1978. In the middle of December, the two countries announced that they would “recognise each other and establish diplomatic relations from January 1, 1979”.

The world was surprised and Beijing was elated, but the island of Taiwan, which had long relied on US support against Chinese claims, was crushed. Carter is still a controversial figure there.

Previously, the US had only recognised the government of Taiwan, which China viewed as a renegade province. And for years US support for Taiwan had been the sticking point in negotiations.

Switching recognition to Beijing meant the US had finally acknowledged China’s position that there was only one Chinese government – and it was in Beijing. This is the One China policy, which, to this day, forms the cornerstone of US-China relations.

But the pivot raised inevitable questions about US commitment to its allies. Uneasy with Carter’s decision, Congress eventually forced through a law codifying its right to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons, thus creating a lasting contradiction in US foreign policy.

Still historians agree that 1979 signalled an extraordinary set of moves that reoriented global power: not only did it unite the US and China against the Soviet Union, but also paved the way for peace and rapid economic growth in East Asia.

But Carter could not have done it without his special relationship with Deng Xiaoping. “It’s a pleasure to negotiate with him,” Carter wrote in his diary after spending a day with Deng during his January visit, according to Deng’s biographer Ezra Vogel.

“The two of them followed common sense, there were actually significant similarities in their no-nonsense personalities,” said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “There was something really unique between the two men that really established trust.”

Deng Xiaoping had survived three political purges under Mao to emerge as one of China’s most consequential leaders. Historians credit his vision, self-assurance, frankness and sharp wit in no small part for this crucial diplomatic win.

He sensed the opportunity Carter offered, Vogel writes – to both thwart Soviet power and to kickstart the modernisation that had begun in Japan, Taiwan and even South Korea. He knew it would elude China without US help.

Deng’s visit to the US began with a warm first meeting at the White House, where he chuckled while revealing his Qingdao connection to Carter, according to Chinese reports. He was exuberant as the two clasped hands in front of cameras in the Rose Garden, saying: “Now our two countries’ peoples are shaking hands.”

Over the next few days, Deng staged a whirlwind charm offensive on the Americans as he toured several states with Carter. In one famous image, Deng is seen grinning as he dons a cowboy hat at a Texan rodeo. “Deng avoids politics, goes Texan,” read a local newspaper headline.

Carter described Deng as “smart, tough, intelligent, frank, courageous, personable, self-assured, friendly”, according to Vogel.

He later wrote in his diary the trip was “one of the delightful experiences of my Presidency… to me, everything went right, and the Chinese leader seemed equally pleased.”

“Carter was really a catalytic agent for what was more than a diplomatic rapprochement – it was a dramatic moment of signalling,” said Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Centre on US-China Relations who, as a journalist in 1979, covered Deng’s trip.

“He introduced Deng to the country and actually to the world. It made what had been a contentious relationship to something very congenial. The way Carter and Deng interacted, these were signals that it was okay to both peoples to set history aside and start a new relationship.”

Under Carter, China was granted “most favoured nation” trade status, boosting its economy and creating jobs. Within a year, two-way trade between the two countries doubled.

Throughout the next decade China became an important trade partner not just for the US but also the world, which was “extraordinarily important” for China’s growth, noted Prof Yang.

Carter’s connection with China endured long after his presidency ended.

In the 1990s his non-profit group The Carter Center played a significant role in China’s nascent grassroots democracy where – on the invitation of the Chinese government – it observed village elections, trained officials and educated voters.

Unusually for a former US president, Carter returned several times to China on personal visits. On one trip, he and his wife Rosalynn helped to build shelters for victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

His commitment to humanitarian work, his humble background as the son of a peanut farmer, and “folksy style” – which stood in contrast to the formal public personas of Chinese leaders – endeared him to many Chinese, according to Prof Yang: “He will be seen as a role model of a leader who cares, not just in rhetoric but also in actions.”

“Everywhere he travelled in China, people showed their warm feelings for him… The Chinese people really liked him for his courage and his honesty,” said Dr Liu, a senior adviser with the Carter Center. He accompanied Carter on several trips, including a 2014 tour where he was fêted by local officials and universities.

In Qingdao, the city put on a surprise fireworks show for his 90th birthday. In Beijing, Deng’s daughter hosted a banquet and presented a gift – a copy of the People’s Daily front page of the 1979 communique. “Both were moved to tears,” Dr Liu recalled.

That was to be his last visit. As the US-China relationship grew rockier, so too did Carter’s ties with the Chinese leadership, particularly after Xi Jinping took power.

On the eve of his 2014 visit, top government officials instructed universities not to sponsor his events, prompting a last-minute scramble to change venues, Carter noted.

A state dinner held for him at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing was sparsely attended, recalled Mr Schell. Notably, it was hosted by then vice-president Li Yuanchao, while Xi was said to be entertaining another dignitary elsewhere in the complex.

“He wouldn’t even come to tip his hat to Carter. That really showed the state of relations,” Mr Schell said. “Carter was really very angry. Two of his aides told me he even felt like leaving early because he felt disrespected.”

The Carter Center’s activities in China were eventually curtailed, and a website they maintained to document the village elections was taken offline. No clear explanation was given at the time, but Dr Liu attributed this to China’s growing suspicion of foreign organisations following the 2010 Arab Spring.

Though Carter said little about the snub publicly, it would have been felt no less acutely, given the lengths he had gone to advocate for engagement.

It has also raised questions whether his approach on human rights with China – he characterised it as “patience” but others criticised it as soft-pedalling – was justified in the end.

Carter often “made a tremendous effort… not to stick fingers into China’s eyes on the human rights question,” Mr Schell noted. “He did temper himself even when he was out of office, as The Carter Center had a real stake in the country.”

Some see his decision to engage with Communist China as born out of an American sincerity at the time. Following the violent chaos of the Cultural Revolution, there was “a disbelief among many Americans – how could the Chinese be living in angry isolation?” Prof Yang said. “There was a genuine desire among American leaders to really help.”

Others say that in attempting to shore up support against the Soviets, the US set the course for China’s rise and ended up creating one of its greatest rivals.

But these actions also benefited millions of Chinese, helping to lift them out of poverty and – for a time – widening political freedom at the local level.

“I think all of us from that generation were children of engagement,” Mr Schell said. “We were hoping Carter would find the formula that would slowly bring China into a comfortable relationship with [the] US and the rest of the world.”

Toward the end of his life, Carter grew more alarmed about the growing distrust between the US and China, and frequently warned of a possible “modern Cold War”.

“In 1979, Deng Xiaoping and I knew we were advancing the cause of peace. While today’s leaders face a different world, the cause of peace remains just as important,” he wrote on the 40th anniversary of normalisation of relations.

“[Leaders] must accept our conviction that the United States and China need to build their futures together, for themselves and for humanity at large.”

Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, swept to power promising never to lie to the American people.

In the turbulent aftermath of Watergate, the former peanut farmer from Georgia pardoned Vietnam draft evaders and became the first US leader to take climate change seriously.

On the international stage, he helped to broker an historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, but he struggled to deal with the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

After a single term in office, he was swept aside by Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, winning just six states.

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Having left the White House, Carter did much to restore his reputation: becoming a tireless worker for peace, the environment and human rights, for which he was recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize.

The longest-lived president in US history, he celebrated his 100th birthday in October 2024. He had been treated for cancer and had spent the last 19 months in hospice care.

James Earl Carter Jr was born on 1 October 1924 in the small town of Plains, Georgia, the eldest of four children.

His segregationist father had started the family peanut business, and his mother, Lillian, was a registered nurse.

Carter’s experience of the Great Depression and staunch Baptist faith underpinned his political philosophy.

A star basketball player in high school, he went on to spend seven years in the US Navy – during which time he married Rosalynn, a friend of his sister – and became a submarine officer. But on the death of his father in 1953, he returned to run the ailing family farm.

The first year’s crop failed through drought, but Carter turned the business around and made himself wealthy in the process.

He entered politics on the ground floor, elected to a series of local school and library boards, before running for the Georgia Senate.

American politics was ablaze following the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate schools.

With his background as a farmer from a southern state, Carter might have been expected to oppose reform – but he had different views to his father.

While serving two terms in the state Senate, he avoided clashes with segregationists – including many in the Democratic party.

But on becoming Georgia governor in 1970, he became more overt in his support of civil rights.

“I say to you quite frankly,” he declared in his inaugural speech, “that the time for racial discrimination is over.”

He placed pictures of Martin Luther King on the walls of the capitol building, as the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated outside.

He made sure that African Americans were appointed to public offices.

However, he found it difficult balancing his strong Christian faith with his liberal instincts when it came to abortion law.

Although he supported the rights of women to terminate pregnancy, he refused to increase funding to make this possible.

As Carter launched his campaign for the presidency in 1974, the nation was still reeling from the Watergate scandal.

He put himself forward as a simple peanut farmer, untainted by the questionable ethics of professional politicians on Capitol Hill.

His timing was excellent. Americans wanted an outsider and Carter fitted the bill.

There was surprise when he admitted (in an interview with Playboy magazine) that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times”. But there proved to be no skeletons in his closet.

In the beginning, polls suggested he was only supported by around 4% of Democrats.

Yet, just nine months later, he toppled the incumbent president Gerald Ford, a Republican.

On his first full day in office, he pardoned hundreds of thousands of men who had evaded service in Vietnam – either by fleeing abroad or failing to register with their local draft board.

One Republican critic, Senator Barry Goldwater, described the decision as “the most disgraceful thing that a president has ever done”.

Carter confessed that it was the hardest decision he had made in office.

He appointed women to key positions in his administration and encouraged Rosalynn to maintain a national profile as First Lady.

He championed (unsuccessfully) an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution which would have promised legal protection against discrimination on the grounds of sex.

One of the first international leaders to take climate change seriously, Carter wore jeans and sweaters in the White House, and turned down the heating to conserve energy.

He installed solar panels on the roof – which were later taken down by President Ronald Reagan – and passed laws to protect millions of acres of unspoiled land in Alaska from development.

His televised “fireside chats'” were consciously relaxed, but this approach seemed too informal as problems mounted.

As the American economy slipped into recession, Carter’s popularity began to fall.

He tried to persuade the country to accept stringent measures to deal with the energy crisis – including gasoline rationing – but faced bitter opposition in Congress.

Plans to introduce a universal healthcare system also foundered in the legislature, while unemployment and interest rates both soared.

His Middle East policy began in triumph, with President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel signing the Camp David accords in 1978.

But success abroad was short-lived.

The revolution in Iran, which led to the taking of American hostages, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were severe tests.

Carter broke off diplomatic relations with Tehran and implemented trade sanctions in a desperate effort to free the Americans.

An attempt to rescue them by force was a disaster, leaving eight American servicemen dead.

The incident almost certainly put an end to any hope of re-election.

Carter fought off a serious challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, and achieved 41% of the popular vote in the subsequent election.

But it was not nearly enough to see off his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan.

The former actor swept into the White House with an electoral college landslide.

On the last day of his presidency, Carter announced the successful completion of the negotiations for the release of the hostages.

Iran had delayed the time of their departure until after President Reagan was sworn in.

On leaving office, Carter had one of the lowest approval ratings of any US president. But in subsequent years, he did much to restore his reputation.

On behalf of the US government, he undertook a peace mission to North Korea which ultimately resulted in the Agreed Framework, an early effort to reach an accord on dismantling its nuclear arsenal.

His library, the Carter Presidential Center, became an influential clearing house of ideas and programmes intended to solve international problems and crises.

In 2002, Carter became the third US president, after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to win the Nobel Peace Prize – and the only one to earn it for his post-presidency work.

“The most serious and universal problem,” he said in his Nobel lecture, “is the growing chasm between the richest and the poorest people on earth.”

With Nelson Mandela, he founded The Elders, a group of global leaders who committed themselves to work on peace and human rights.

In retirement, Carter opted for a modest lifestyle.

He eschewed lucrative speaking appearances and seats on corporate boards for a simple life with Rosalynn in Plains, Georgia, where both were born.

Carter did not want to make money from his time in the Oval Office.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” he told the Washington Post. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

He was the only modern president to return full-time to the house he had lived in before he entered politics, a single-floor, two-bedroom home.

According to the Post, the Carters’ home was valued at $167,000 – less than the Secret Service vehicles parked outside to protect them.

In 2015, he announced that he was being treated for cancer, the disease that killed both his parents and three sisters.

Just a few months after surgery for a broken hip, he was back to work as a volunteer builder with Habitat for Humanity.

The former president and his wife began work with the charity in 1984, and helped to repair more than 4,000 homes in the years since.

He continued to teach at a Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, sometimes welcoming Democratic presidential hopefuls to his class.

In November 2023, Rosalynn Carter died. In tribute, the former president said that his wife of 77 years was “my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished”.

Celebrating his centenary a year later, Carter proved that he still had political antennae.

“I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris” in November’s election, he said.

He did manage to cast a ballot for her, although his home state of Georgia ultimately voted for Donald Trump.

Carter’s political philosophy contained the sometimes conflicting elements of a conservative small-town upbringing, and his natural liberal instincts.

But what really drove his lifetime of public service were his deeply held religious beliefs.

“You cannot divorce religious belief and public service,” he said.

“I’ve never detected any conflict between God’s will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.”

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

An immigration row has erupted between Donald Trump’s supporters over a long-standing US visa programme.

The feud is about H-1B visas, which allow US-based companies to bring in skilled workers from abroad into certain industries.

Some immigration hardliners say the scheme undercuts American workers – but proponents say the visas allow the US to attract the best expertise from around the world.

The president-elect has weighed in, saying he supports the programme – despite being critical of it in the past – and tech billionaire Elon Musk has also defended it, saying it attracts the “top ~0.1% of engineering talent”.

Here’s what the data tell us about who gets into the US on these visas.

The H-1B visas for skilled workers were introduced in 1990. They are typically granted for three years, but can be extended for up to six years.

Since 2004, the number of new H-1B visas issued has been capped at 85,000 per year – 20,000 of which are reserved for foreign students with master’s degrees or higher from US universities.

However, that cap does not apply to some institutions such as universities, think tanks and other non-profit research groups, so more are often issued.

People can only apply for an H-1B visa if they have a job lined up with a US-based sponsor company or institution.

The US government also approves extensions for those already working in the country.

Just over 386,000 H-1B applications were approved in the 2023 fiscal year (October 2022-September 2023), the latest year we have full data for, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) figures.

That includes almost 119,000 new H-1B visas and about 267,000 extensions to existing visas.

The 2023 total is down from more than 474,000 in 2022.

There have been efforts to restrict the H-1B further programme in the past.

In 2017, then-president Trump signed an executive order that increased scrutiny of H-1B visa applications. The order sought to enhance fraud detection within the scheme.

Rejection rates hit an all-time high under the first Trump administration, reaching 24% in the 2018 fiscal year, compared with rejection rates of between 5-8% under the Obama administration and between 2-4% under President Biden.

However, the total number of approved applicants under the Biden administration has been similar to that under Trump’s first.

In the three years that followed President Trump’s executive order (2018-2020), about 1.1 million applications were approved, with about 343,000 of those being first-time applicants.

In the first three years of the Biden administration (2021-2023), about 1.2 million applications were approved, with almost 375,000 being new applicants.

Demand often exceeds the amount of visas granted – in most years there are thousands more applications filed than approved.

In cases in which more applications are received than visas are available, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) effectively runs the H-1B programme as a lottery – which detractors believe highlights a fundamental flaw in the system.

“Ultimately, if you’re going to have a skilled worker programme for ‘skilled’ workers, you don’t award these visas via a lottery,” said Eric Ruark, the director of research at NumbersUSA, an organisation that advocates for tighter immigration controls.

“Obviously, that’s not how you find the best and the brightest.”

We don’t have a full report on the 2024 numbers yet, but preliminary figures suggest applications have increased sharply.

The number of eligible registrations published by the USCIS showed 758,994 applications in the 2024 fiscal year, compared with 474,421 in 2023.

With Trump headed back to the White House in January, Mr Ruark said he believes that the resolution of the H-1B debate will ultimately be among the factors that defines his presidency.

“Is that second term going to be pro-American worker, or revert to the old establishment Republican position that immigration is designed to help employers – at the expense of American workers?” he said.

“That’s going to be a huge fight in the second term.”

The vast majority of approved applicants work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Most are in computer-related occupations – 65% in the 2023 fiscal year.

This was followed by architecture, engineering and surveying – about 10% of people approved in 2023 worked in those sectors.

In terms of companies, Amazon was the top employer of people on H-1B visas in 2024, hiring more than 13,000 staff via the scheme.

Other familiar names like Google, Meta, and Apple feature high on the employer list – ranking 4th, 6th and 8th respectively.

Tesla, one of the companies owned by Elon Musk – who has backed the programme – ranked 22nd, employing more than 1,700 people on an H-1B visa.

California and Texas were the states with the most people working on an H-1B visa in 2024.

The median yearly income of people working in the US on an H-1B visa in 2023 was $118,000 (£94,046).

The median yearly income for people in computer and mathematical occupations across the US is about $113,000 – slightly less than those in similar sectors via the H-1B programme.

The median household income in the US is about $60,000 per year.

While opponents of the H-1B system often make the argument that H-1B holders undercut the salaries of American workers, some immigration lawyers and experts push back on that notion.

The vast majority of H-1B holders earn more than the “prevailing wage” for their occupation – a Department of Labor-determined figure that calculates the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a particular part of the country.

Shev Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the BBC that, while prevailing wages “are not a full labour market test”, they are indicative of the fact that H-1B visa holders aren’t negatively affecting the rest of the workforce.

“Let’s say you’re a software engineer in Washington DC. You look at the going rate for software engineers in DC, and you have to certify that you’re paying at least that amount,” said Ms Dalal-Dheini, who also worked on H-1B issues while as an official at USCIS.

“You’re not really undercutting wages that way.”

Additionally, Ms Dalal-Dheini said that US firms must also pay significant fees to file H-1B petitions, often in addition to lawyer fees.

“Companies that end up sponsoring H-1B [recipients] are looking at costs of up to $5,000 to $10,000 in addition to what you would have to pay an American worker,” she said.

“The bottom line is that if they could find an American worker that was qualified, most companies would probably choose to hire that American worker, because it would be a cost savings.”

The vast majority of those approved come from India.

The latest data showed around 72% of visas were issued to Indian nationals, followed by 12% to Chinese citizens.

About 1% came from the Philippines, Canada and South Korea respectively.

About 70% of those who enter the US on H-1B visas are men, with the average age of those approved being around 33.

Ukraine is losing the battle on the ground. Many of its soldiers are tired and exhausted after three years of fighting. The question – can the country endure another year of war?

Their forces are still resisting Russian advances in the east. But they’re almost surrounded near the town of Kurakhove – scene to some of the most intense fighting in recent weeks.

The Black Pack, a mortar unit, is trying to prevent their encirclement around Kurakhove. The Russian are closing in on three sides.

We meet the team at a safe house, getting a rest from the fighting. They’re not your average soldiers. They include a vegan chef, a mechanic, a web developer and an artist. A group of friends with non-conformist views. Some call themselves anarchists. They all volunteered to fight.

Surt, their 31-year-old commander, joined the army soon after Russia’s full scale invasion. He tells me at the start he thought the war would last three years. Now, he says, he’s mentally preparing himself for another ten years of fighting.

They all know that Donald Trump wants to bring an end to the war. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s president have indicated they’re prepared for talks too, but the idea of workable deal seems hard to imagine.

So far, it is just talk about talks.

Surt is not dismissive of Trump’s goal.

“He is quite an ambitious person and I think he will try to do it,” he says. But he worries about the outcome of any negotiations.

“We are realists, we understand there will be no justice for Ukraine – many will have to swallow the fact that their homes are destroyed by rockets and shells, that their loved ones were killed, and this will be hard.”

When I ask him whether he’d prefer to negotiate or to keep on fighting – Surt replies emphatically: “Keep fighting.”

It’s a view reflected by most of the unit. Serhiy, the vegan chef, believes negotiations would just temporarily freeze the war – “and the conflict will return in a year or two.”

He admits the current situation is “not good” for Ukraine. But he too is ready to carry on fighting. Being killed, he says, “is just an occupational hazard.”

Davyd, the artist, thinks Trump is worryingly unpredictable. “He could be either very good or very bad for Ukraine,” he says.

The unit spends a week on the front and the next resting. But even when they’re resting they continue to train, because, they say, it keeps them motivated.

In a freezing field they go through the drills for firing their mortars. The team have recently been joined by Denys, who voluntarily left the safety of his home in Germany.

“I asked myself the question – could I live in a world where Ukraine doesn’t exist?” he says. He reluctantly admits it now appears to be losing, but adds: “If you don’t try then you will most certainly lose. At least I’ll die trying to win instead of just lying down and taking it”.

But, unlike the others, Denys says he thinks Ukraine should at least consider a ceasefire. He thinks Ukraine’s casualties are higher than those officially admitted – more than 400,000 killed and injured. Mobilising more of the population, he believes, wouldn’t solve the problem.

“I just think a lot of the motivated soldiers are either lost or they’re pretty damn exhausted – and so for me it’s not that we want a ceasefire, but we can’t go on for many more years” he says.

Dnipro, Ukraine’s third largest city, reflects that sense of war weariness too. It’s regularly targeted by Russian missiles and drones. The air-raid sirens wail intermittently, day and night. When they’re silent, Ukrainians try to find some sense of normality in these abnormal times – including by going to the theatre.

At an afternoon performance of a humorous play, called The Kaidash Family, there are still reminders of the war – a minute’s silence to remember the fallen, followed by Ukraine’s national anthem.

But some in the audience admit they’re also hoping for a longer-lasting release. Ludmyla tells me “unfortunately there are fewer of us. We’re getting some help, but it’s not enough – that’s why we have to sit down and negotiate.”

Kseniia says: “There’s no easy answer. A lot of our soldiers have been killed. They fought for something – for our territories. But I want the war to end”.

Opinion polls too suggest there’s increasing support for negotiations.

Some of the strongest calls for a ceasefire come from those who’ve been forced to flee the fighting. In a shelter near the theatre, in former student accommodation, a group of four elderly women reminisce about the homes they’ve left behind.

Eighty-seven-year-old Valentyna says they arrived with nothing, but have been provided with shoes, clothes and food. She says they’ve been treated well. “It’s good to be a guest, but its better to be at home.”

Her home is now in Russian-occupied territory. All four women want negotiations for peace. But Mariia, 89, says she doesn’t know how either side will be able to “look into the eyes of each other after the sheer hell they’ve committed”.

She adds: “It’s already clear no one will win militarily, that is why we need negotiations.”

If there are negotiations these women could end up having to sacrifice the most – as Ukraine may have to sacrifice land for peace.

On 30 December 1952, a double-decker bus drove on to Tower Bridge on its usual route between Shoreditch and Dulwich.

It was late in the evening, dark and the temperature had dipped below freezing.

It was a couple of weeks after the great smog had brought London to a standstill, and although that particularly foul miasma had dispersed, smog still regularly reduced visibility.

The traffic lights were green, there was no ringing of a warning hand-bell.

Albert Gunter, the driver, travelling at a steady 12mph (19km/h), proceeded on to the bridge.

Then he noticed the road in front of him seemed to be falling away.

He, his bus, its 20 passengers and one conductor were on the edge of the southern bascule – a movable section of road – which was continuing to rise.

It was too late to go back, too late to stop.

So the former wartime tank-driver dropped down two gears, and slammed his foot on the accelerator.

Mr Gunter spoke to Time magazine and his interview was published in its “foreign news” section on 12 January 1953.

“Everything happened terribly quickly,” he told Time. “I realised that the part we were on was rising. It was horrifying. I felt we had to keep on or we might be flung into the river.”

One of the passengers, Peter Dunn, said: “Before we knew it, we were going across Tower Bridge – but just as we had gone over the first half of the section that goes up, there was a loud crashing sound and I was thrown on to the floor.”

The superintendent engineer of the bridge said the bus had “sufficient speed to bridge the gap, but the rear wheels must have fallen with quite a jolt”.

Everything was unclear to Mr Dunn, jumbled with other passengers on the floor, until the bus came to a halt.

And then Mr Gunter “came round to invite us to have a look at the gap”.

Passengers, conductor and driver duly filed off the bus to have a look.

Mr Dunn continued: “The driver then told us that as he started to drive across the opening part of the bridge, he realised that the side that the bus was on was going up.

“He said he could only think of two options as to what to do – one was to stop the bus and hope someone would realise what was happening and stop it [the bascules being opened], but that left the possibility of the bus slipping and perhaps toppling into the river; the other was to continue driving and to ‘jump’ the gap.

“He said that he had been a tank-driver during the war and that a tank would have had no trouble getting on to the other side and decided to see if a double-decker could do the same.

“So, thanks to his quick thinking, we were all delivered safe to the other side.”

Nobody on the bus was seriously physically injured – one broken leg for the conductor and one fractured collarbone for a passenger – although all were, obviously, shaken.

One young woman though, found it difficult to resume normal life, as she was too distressed by the incident to board another bus.

May Walshaw, who was one of the people flung to the front of the vehicle, regained her nerve after Mr Gunter helped.

She got on the No. 78, with Mr Gunter driving, and together, they crossed Tower Bridge once more.

In September 1953, Miss Walshaw became Mrs MacDonald – and Mr Gunter, by now a firm friend, was at the wedding.

As the Daily Mail reported on 3 January, four days after the incident: “The main question people were asking today was ‘why did it happen?'”

Why indeed?

The normal warning signals given to traffic when a lift was imminent were red traffic lights and the ringing of a hand-bell by a bridge operator.

The day after the incident, Mr Gunter said the lights had been green and there was no bell.

A City Police inspector insisted that the usual warning signals were given.

After a brief inquiry, the Corporation of London accepted responsibility for the accident.

The Bridge House Estates Committee, which owns and is responsible for the maintenance of several bridges over the Thames, stated “it appeared that the accident was attributable to an error of judgment on the part of the responsible employee at the bridge”.

It added: “The committee will have a report made to them on the incident and will consider whether any further steps should be taken.”

As a reward from London Transport, Mr Gunter was given £10 (the equivalent of about £350 today) and a day off.

He was awarded the cash at a ceremony, and when asked what he would do with the bonus, he said “five for me and five for the missus”.

Mr Gunter later received a reward of £35 from the City Corporation, and a week’s holiday in Bournemouth. His children were invited to the Lord Mayor’s children’s party.

Tower Bridge opened in 1894, eight years after construction work began. It was originally designed to be a sort of drawbridge, which require ropes or chains to pull up the road. But Tower Bridge’s roads were too heavy to be opened in that way, so it is instead a bascule bridge, in which the roads move like a seesaw and pivot.

It was built because the city needed a bridge downstream from London Bridge without disrupting river traffic.

Opening and closing is done with eight large cogs, 1m in diameter, four on each side, which rotate.

The power required to rotate the cogs was initially supplied by steam and then, after 1976, by electricity.

The bridge was made with caisson foundations – prefabricated hollow substructures designed to be placed on or near the surface of the ground, sunk to the desired depth and then filled with material to weigh it down.

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.

Nearly 180 people died after a plane crashed as it was landing in South Korea on the morning of Sunday 29 December.

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, Thailand, was carrying 181 people – 179 of whom were killed. Two crew members were rescued from the wreckage.

Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash, with fire officials indicating a bird strike and bad weather. However experts have warned the crash could have been caused by a number of factors.

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 (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 they had 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, chief of the Muan fire department, told a televised briefing that a bird strike and bad weather might have caused the crash – but that the exact cause was still being investigated.

The flight and voice recorders from the plane were recovered, though Yonhap reports 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 had been “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 had an “excellent safety record”.

Mr Thomas separately told 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.

Authorities have so far identified 174 bodies and are still checking the remaining five “due to DNA inconsistencies”, according to Yonhap.

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.

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 the flight crew – a man and a woman – had survived the crash.

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 – had turbofan engines, which could be severely damaged in a bird strike.

He said that pilots were trained to be especially vigilant during the early morning or at sunset, when birds were 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.”

Visitors’ books from Downing Street signed by some of the most famous figures in recent history have been made public for the first time.

World leaders and members of the Royal Family are among the names in the three red leather, gilt-tooled volumes being released by the National Archives, spanning 1970 to 2003.

The names of visitors to No 10 are not made public so the books provide a valuable record of who had private conversations with prime ministers.

One of the volumes was offered for sale earlier this year by a London auction house who said it had been rescued from a waterlogged basement by a former civil servant, but the government blocked the sale saying it was Crown property.

Dr Jack Brown, lecturer at King’s College London described the books as “wonderful… historical novelties”.

As the first resident researcher at No 10, he explained the book wasn’t left on a table for everyone to sign, but only offered to special guests.

Some left private messages, especially to Margaret Thatcher, who spent more than a decade in Downing Street from 1979 to 1990.

In 1989, then US President George Bush wrote: “With Respect, Friendship and Gratitude for this Relationship that means so much”.

Dr Brown said he was referring to the so-called special relationship between Britain and the US, rather than a personal bond, but President Bush’s wife Barbara also signed, adding: “Me. Too.”

Relations with fellow EU leaders were not always so smooth.

That same year the French Prime Minister Michel Rocard wrote: “It always is an extraordinary occasion to confront with the Prime Minister, especially when we agree, even when we disagree. Thank you very, very much.”

“That was wonderful,” said Dr Brown, “I think you did confront with Thatcher… particularly if you were a socialist French prime minister, towards the end of her term.”

The visitors’ book seems to have been introduced by the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, who was in office from 1970-1974.

Among the earliest to sign it were members of the Royal Family, who left just their first name, including in March 1971 an entry which reads “Charles”, from the then Prince of Wales, and 12 days later his mother signed “Elizabeth R”.

A fortnight later it was the turn of her sister, “Margaret”.

Many Asian and African leaders signed the first volume. One name from 12 July 1971, in uneven letters reads: “General I Amin Dada” – Idi Amin of Uganda.

Amin had taken power in a coup six months before, and the brutal nature of his regime wasn’t yet clear to Western governments. In 1971 he was invited to Buckingham Palace, as well as Downing Street.

Just a year later, Amin expelled tens of thousands of Ugandan Asians, giving them only 90 days to leave the country. Many held British passports and came to settle in the UK.

Among the world leaders – including Jimmy Carter, Ferdinand Marcos and Indira Gandhi – is an anomaly, four pages packed with signatures of well-known British women of 1978 – Anna Ford, Cleo Laine, Prue Leith and Janet Street-Porter.

The latter was a well-known face on TV, but Janet Street-Porter remembers being intimidated by the event, a reception to mark 50 years of equal suffrage.

“I always appeared cocky and self-assured,” she said, “but to be invited to Downing Street for something so historically important was quite a formidable experience for me.”

While there were many receptions in Downing Street, the book was brought out for very few – including to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Downing Street in 1985.

The Queen and Prince Philip signed, as did six other prime ministers, including the increasingly frail Harold Macmillan, Lord Stockton.

The book captures the changing times: President Mikhail Gorbachev signed in April 1989, when he came for a state visit with his wife, Raisa.

Early the following year, the leaders of the newly independent Eastern European countries visited No 10 – including Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia, who added his trademark little heart.

The book seems to have been rarely used by John Major and Tony Blair, though there is one striking message from early 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani wrote: “Mr. Prime Minister, we are eternally grateful for your support for us at a time of great peril, you will always hold a special place in the minds and hearts of all New Yorkers and Americans.”

Dr Brown said “despite being a seemingly semi-random collection of autographs”, the book was a “story of Britain’s place in the world” told in these signatures over time.

Janet Street-Porter, who has visited Downing Street several times since 1978, thinks all guest lists should be published.

“Then you can see who’s getting close to the centre of government and who has the ear of the prime minister.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jewellery worth more than £10m as well as designer handbags worth £150,000 have been stolen from a house in St John’s Wood in London.

A white man aged in his late 20s to 30s had broken into a house in Avenue Road between 17:00 and 17:30 GMT on 7 December by climbing in through a second-floor window, the Metropolitan Police said.

He took the Hermes Crocodile Kelly handbags, £15,000 in cash as well as items of jewellery worth £10.4m that included unique pieces.

The homeowners have offered a £500,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the suspect.

Police added the suspect had worn a dark hoodie, cargo pants and grey baseball cap and had kept his face covered.

Among the items taken were distinctive pieces such as two De Beers butterfly diamond rings, pink sapphire earrings shaped like butterflies from Katherine Wang, and a gold, diamond and sapphire Van Cleef necklace.

Avenue Road links the Swiss Cottage and Regent’s Park areas and has some of the most expensive properties in London.

Det Con Paulo Roberts said many of the missing items were unique in their design, and therefore easily identifiable.

He said: “This is a brazen offence, where the suspect has entered the property while armed with an unknown weapon and violated the sanctuary of the victims’ home.

“We urge anyone who was in the area of Avenue Road, NW8, and saw anything suspicious to please come forward.

“Also, if you have seen this jewellery since, someone has offered to sell you it, or you have any further information, then please also contact the police or Crimestoppers anonymously.”

A second reward of 10% of the value of any recovered items has been offered by the homeowners for information that leads to the retrieval of the stolen jewellery.

Aviation experts have raised questions about an “unusual” concrete wall near the runway and its role in the South Korea plane crash that killed 179 people.

Footage shows the Jeju Air plane coming off the runway before colliding with the wall and bursting into flames at Muan International Airport.

Authorities investigating the cause of South Korea’s worst-ever plane crash are considering the significance of the concrete wall’s location about 250m (820ft) off the end of the runway.

Air safety expert David Learmount said that, had the “obstruction” not been there, the plane “would have come to rest with most – possibly all – those on board still alive”.

The pilot reported that the plane had struck a bird and then aborted the original landing and requested permission to land from the opposite direction.

The plane came down some distance along the 2,800m runway and appeared to land without using its wheels or any other landing gear.

Mr Learmount said the landing was “as good as a flapless/gearless touchdown could be: wings level, nose not too high to avoid breaking the tail” and the plane had not sustained substantial damage as it slid along the runway.

“The reason so many people died was not the landing as such, but the fact that the aircraft collided with a very hard obstruction just beyond the runway end,” he said.

Christian Beckert, a Lufthansa pilot based in Munich, called the concrete structure “unusual”, telling Reuters news agency: “Normally, on an airport with a runway at the end, you don’t have a wall.”

The concrete structure holds a navigation system that assists aircraft landings – known as a localiser – according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.

At 4m high, it is covered with dirt and was raised to keep the localiser level with the runway to ensure it functions properly, Yonhap reported.

South Korea’s transport ministry has said that other airports in the country and some overseas have the equipment installed with concrete structures. However officials will examine whether it should have been made with lighter materials that would break more easily upon impact.

Chris Kingswood, a pilot with 48 years’ experience who has flown the same type of aircraft involved in the crash, told BBC News: “Obstacles within a certain range and distance of the runway are required to be frangible, which means that if an aircraft strikes them that they do break.

“It does seem unusual that it’s such a rigid thing. The aircraft, from what I understand, was travelling very fast, landed a long way down the runway, so it will have gone a long way past the end of the runway… so where will you draw the line with that? That’s certainly something that will be investigated.

“Aeroplanes are not strong structures – they are, by design, light to make them efficient in flight. They’re not really designed to go high-speed on its belly so any kind of structure could cause the fuselage to break up and then be catastrophic.

• Could a bird strike have caused S Korea plane crash?
• ‘It’s unbearable’: Families criticise lack of updates
• What we know about the South Korea plane crash so far

“The fuel is kept in the wings so once the wing ruptures, then the potential for fire is significant.

“So it’s not a given that if the wall had not been there, it would have been a completely different outcome.”

Mr Kingswood said he would be “surprised if the airfield hadn’t met all the requirements in accordance with industry standards”.

“I suspect if we went around the airfields at a lot of major international airports… we would find a lot of obstacles that could similarly be accused of presenting a hazard,” he added.

Aviation analyst Sally Gethin questioned whether the pilot knew the barrier was there, particularly given the plane was approaching from the opposite direction from the usual landing approach.

She told BBC News: “We need to know, were (the pilots) aware there was this hard boundary at the end?

“If they were directed by the control tower to reverse the use of the runway the second time around, that should come out in the investigation of the black boxes.

“I think there are so many questions.”

A Chinese state-sponsored hacker has broken into the US Treasury Department’s systems, accessing employee workstations and some unclassified documents, American officials said on Monday.

The breach occurred in early December and was made public in a letter penned by the Treasury Department to lawmakers notifying them of the incident.

The US agency characterised the breach as a “major incident”, and said it had been working with the FBI and other agencies to investigate the impact.

A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington DC told BBC News that the accusation is part of a “smear attack” and was made “without any factual basis”.

The Treasury Department said in its letter to lawmakers that the China-based actor was able to override security via a key used by a third-party service provider that offers remote technical support to its employees.

The compromised third-party service – called BeyondTrust – has since been taken offline, officials said. They added that there is no evidence to suggest the hacker has continued to access Treasury Department information since.

Along with the FBI, the department has been working with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and third-party forensic investigators to determine the breach’s overall impact.

Based on evidence it has gathered so far, officials said the hack appears to have been carried out by “a China-based Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor”.

“In accordance with Treasury policy, intrusions attributable to an APT are considered a major cybersecurity incident,” Treasury Department officials wrote in their letter to lawmakers.

• Millions of Americans caught up in Chinese hacking plot – US
• China hits out at US and UK over cyber hack claims

The department was made aware of the hack on 8 December by BeyondTrust, a spokesperson told the BBC. According to the company, the suspicious activity was first spotted on 2 December, but it took three days for the company to determine that it had been hacked.

The spokesperson added that the hacker was able to remotely access several Treasury user workstations and certain unclassified documents that were kept by those users.

The department did not specify the nature of these files, or when and for how long the hack took place. They also did not specify the level of confidentiality of the computer systems. For instance, access to 100 low-level workers would likely be less valuable then access to only 10 computers at a higher echelon within the department.

The hackers may have been able to create accounts or change passwords in the three days that they were being watched by BeyondTrust.

As espionage agents, the hackers are believed to have been seeking information, rather than attempting to steal funds.

The spokesperson said the Treasury Department “takes very seriously all threats against our systems, and the data it holds”, and that it will continue to work on protecting its data from outside threats.

The department letter states that a supplemental report on the incident will be provided to lawmakers in 30 days.

Chinese embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu denied the department’s report, saying in a statement that it can be difficult to trace the origin of hackers.

“We hope that relevant parties will adopt a professional and responsible attitude when characterizing cyber incidents, basing their conclusions on sufficient evidence rather than unfounded speculation and accusations,” he said.

“The US needs to stop using cyber security to smear and slander China, and stop spreading all kinds of disinformation about the so-called Chinese hacking threats.”

This is the latest high-profile and embarrassing US breach blamed on Chinese espionage hackers.

It follows another hack of telecoms companies in December that potentially breached phone record data across large swathes of American society.

A Seoul court has issued an arrest warrant against South Korea’s suspended president Yoon Suk Yeol over his attempt to impose martial law on 3 December.

The warrant comes after Yoon, who is facing several investigations on insurrection and treason charges, ignored three summonses to appear for questioning over the past two weeks.

On Sunday night, investigators sought an arrest warrant for Yoon on charges of insurrection and abuse of power – a move that his lawyer described as “illegal”.

South Korea has been in political crisis since the short-lived martial law declaration, with Yoon and a successor both impeached by parliament.

Yoon is South Korea’s first sitting president to face an arrest.

Investigators have until 6 January to execute the warrant and can request for an extension.

It is unclear, however, if investigators will be able to execute the warrant as they may be thwarted by his security team and protesters.

The presidential security service had earlier blocked investigators from entering the presidential office grounds and Yoon’s private residence to conduct court-approved searches.

In the past, South Korean authorities have given up arrest attempts against prominent politicians after their aides and supporters have physically blocked the police.

On Monday, Yoon’s legal team said that investigators had no authority to arrest him, as declaring martial law was within the president’s constitutional authority.

Yoon had earlier defended his decision to declare martial law and vowed to “fight to the end” – though he also said that he would not avoid his legal and political responsibilities.

His lawyer, Yun Gap-geun, said that Yoon’s failure to comply with the earlier three summonses was due to “legitimate concerns”.

Yoon’s whereabouts are not publicly known, but he has been banned from leaving the country.

While he has been suspended from presidential duties since 14 December after lawmakers voted to impeach him, he can only be removed from office if his impeachment is sustained by the country’s constitutional court.

There are currently only six judges on the constitutional court’s nine-member bench. This means a single rejection would save Yoon from being removed.

Opposition lawmakers had hoped the nomination of three additional judges would improve the odds of Yoon getting impeached, but their proposal was vetoed by prime minister Han Duck-soo last week.

The opposition has since then voted to impeach Han, who had stepped in as acting leader after Yoon was suspended.

Now, they are threatening to do the same to finance minister Choi Sang-mok, who currently serves as both acting president and acting prime minister.

Two men were found dead in a remote forest while searching for Sasquatch, also commonly known as Bigfoot, according to authorities in Washington State.

The two men from Portland, Oregon, were found dead after a three-day search was launched on Christmas Day after a family member reported that the pair had not returned from a trip to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to search for proof of the mythical hairy, forest-dwelling, bi-pedal primates.

The “grueling” search involved over 60 volunteers searching with aircrafts and dogs in heavily wooded terrain and brutally-cold weather conditions, the Skamania County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.

“Both deaths appear to be due to exposure, based on weather conditions and ill-preparedness,” the statement said.

• The true origin of Sasquatch

The sheriff’s office found a car belonging to the victims near the town of Willard, the statement said, and the search re-focused to that area. Drones were also used, and a Coast Guard helicopter team was called in to help with the search.

Officials have not provided the names of the two victims, aged 37 and 59.

Weather conditions in the Cascade mountains had been frigid in the days before and during the search, which included snow, freezing rain and temperatures falling below freezing.

Rescuers also had to battle high water levels in rivers and fallen trees.

Hundreds of sightings of Sasquatch have been reported in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and western Canada. Alongside the Loch Ness Monster, the creature is one of the world’s most famous cryptids.

There have been so many alleged sightings that some communities have taken humorous measures to protect the hairy mythic creature. In Skamania County, where the pair went missing, a person could get a year in jail or a $1,000 fine if one of the folklore creatures are harmed.

Could the influence of pornography, Only Fans and so-called “natural family planning” techniques explain the drop in teenagers’ use of condoms?

YMCA sexual health educator Sarah Peart said some boys were not willing to use them “because they’re not seeing that in pornography or movies”.

She said young girls were often “targeted on social media” by those endorsing hormone-free, period-tracking apps to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Young people have also said that controversial Only Fans adult content creators set poor examples, who made headlines after bragging of having sex with several young men in a day.

Footage also emerged of one of the Only Fans creators saying she had not used condoms during oral sex, putting her at risk of HIV.

“We’ve had multiple young people say “natural family planning” is their main form of contraception,” said Ms Peart, adding that the lack of positive role models and influencers was a challenge for those providing sex education.

Instead, the YMCA sessions at schools, colleges and youth services attempt to inform, bust myths, discuss healthy relationships, but also hammer home the message that pregnancy is not the only risk.

“It’s such a difficult barrier convincing young people that birth control isn’t enough, and that you do need to protect yourself from STIs (sexually transmitted infections).”

She added they will also explain that “natural family planning” was not always reliable, “especially at that age when maybe periods aren’t regular and young people don’t tend to be the most strict with keeping notes”.

“Our sessions also cover pornography and Only Fans does sometimes come up as a strand of that.

“We try to educate young people to make their own healthy choices – and hopefully that includes not opening an Only Fans account, but we can only provide the education.”

When BBC Wales asked young people for their thoughts, while many were too uncomfortable to speak publicly, most said buying condoms was seen as too embarrassing.

Liz Vieira, 20, from Llandysul, Ceredigion, said the decline in use of condoms – reported by the World Health Organization – did not surprise her given the prominence of adult content creators and their attitudes towards risk.

“I guess it’s up to them, but as long as it’s not meaning women in relationships are having a hard time. Because it sends a message it’s OK to use women as you please. I don’t think that’s a good thing,” she said.

Mason Down and Dylan Steggles, from Cardiff, said sex education in school was also limited.

“We only had two days of it at school,” said 18-year-old Dylan. “And that was only an hour or two each time.”

“There’s more of that content online now (porn) so you can easily access it at a young age, which might influence how young people feel about condoms,” said Mason.

The sessions delivered by YMCA for young people include information on the C-Card scheme which is a supported service across the UK, providing training on sexual health awareness, as well as free condoms, lubrication and dental dams.

“Condoms are really expensive, so it’s a fantastic service to make them accessible, but also acceptable, and not some weird, dark hidden corner of the pub toilets,” said Ms Peart.

She is aware of fears the scheme could be seen as encouraging under-age sex but said research suggested more information at a younger age was likely to delay that.

“We try and persuade them to wait until they’re at least 16. But if they are going to, then we can make sure they can do it in a safe way.”

The World Health Organization recently reported that 56% of 15-year-old girls in Wales, and 49% of boys, had not used a condom the last time they had sex.

It comes amid a rise in STIs in the past year: 22% in chlamydia, 127% in gonorrhoea, and 14% in syphilis.

Ellie Whelan and Megan Grimley, both 21, and from Cardiff said the move away from condoms surprised them given more of their peers had turned away from the pill or coil as forms of contraception.

Use of long-acting, reversible contraception – such as an intra-uterine device or hormonal implant – has fallen 22% in the last five years, with terminations up by a third.

“I think it’s a lot to do with false information or bad experiences – or people are too scared to get information and talk about it,” said Megan.

Testing is the best way to find out if you have a sexually transmitted infection.

The Sexual Health Wales service offers a free test kit for over-16s which can be sent and returned by post, or collected from community venues.

Sexual health clinics across Wales also provide testing and support.

Remember infections can take several weeks after contact to show up in a test.

HIV takes seven weeks to be detected, hepatitis C and B can take 12 weeks or more, and chlamydia and gonorrhoea can show up within a fortnight.

But it is not solely an issue for young adults. Ms Peart said the YMCA sessions explain the range of contraception available, but at the back of most classrooms is a teacher also taking notes, as the gap in STI knowledge in particular is on “a national, societal level”.

It is also reflected in the rise in sexually transmitted infections in the over-40s, according to Public Health Wales’s Zoe Couzens, as people enter new relationships after divorce or bereavement.

“And I’m not putting an upper age on that – we’ve had a 72-year-old with chlamydia,” she said.

“It’s about ensuring the message goes out across all age groups.

“But the issue for the women especially is that pregnancy is not the concern they have any more, so they’re not going to take the precautions.

“So that’s another group that needs to be educated.”

Arguably the rise in cases is a result of increased testing, as the free ‘test and post’ service by Public Health Wales has made that far more accessible.

“Chlamydia is the most common in Wales, followed by gonorrhoea – and while it’s all treatable with antibiotics, gonorrhoea is a nasty little bug that is developing resistance to antibiotics.

“Twenty years ago we had two cases of syphilis in Wales – last year it was 507.

“It tends to be a silent infection, but it can develop into neuro syphilis and cause cardiac problems.”

Given other STIs can cause infertility, pain and pelvic inflammatory disease, the notion they are easily remedied is one many professionals wish to tackle.

• Chlamydia is passed on through unprotected oral, vaginal or anal sex, sharing sex toys, or genital-to-genital contact
• Gonorrhoea can be spread through oral, vaginal or anal sex without a condom, or the sharing of sex toys
• HIV is passed in infected body fluids such as semen, vaginal or rectal secretions, blood and breast milk, and the most common way to pass it on is through sex without a condom or sharing drug equipment
• Syphilis is transmitted during unprotected oral, vaginal or anal sex, or through sharing sex toys, and it is also possible to pass on from mother to baby
• Herpes is highly contagious and is passed by skin-to-skin contact like vaginal, anal or oral sex, sharing sex toys, or oral sex with someone who has a cold sore
• Genital warts is shared by skin-to-skin contact, including vaginal or anal sex and by sharing sex toys.

Chlamydia: often described as a silent infection as most people do not have obvious signs. Symptoms can include pain when urinating, unusual discharge from the vagina, penis or rectum. Women may get pain in the tummy, bleeding during or after sex and in between periods, while men can have pain and swelling in the testicles.

Gonorrhoea: some people have no symptoms, but those who do may have a yellow or green discharge; a burning sensation when they wee and pain or tenderness in the tummy.

Syphilis: many people won’t have symptoms. But for those that do, it will start with a small, painless ulcer in the mouth or genitals, followed by a rash. If left untreated, the infection can result in visual impairment, dementia and death. In pregnancy it can also lead to miscarriages, still births and infant mortality.

Herpes: again, some people have no symptoms, but they can include small blisters that burst to leave red, open sores around the genitals, rectum, thighs and buttocks. Blisters and ulcers can also be on the cervix; it can cause vaginal discharge, pain when having a wee, as well as general flu-like symptoms.

Genital warts: in women they start as small, gritty-feeling lumps that become larger. In men the warts will feel firm and raised, with a rough surface. They can be single warts or grow in clusters.

An immigration row has erupted between Donald Trump’s supporters over a long-standing US visa programme.

The feud is about H-1B visas, which allow US-based companies to bring in skilled workers from abroad into certain industries.

Some immigration hardliners say the scheme undercuts American workers – but proponents say the visas allow the US to attract the best expertise from around the world.

The president-elect has weighed in, saying he supports the programme – despite being critical of it in the past – and tech billionaire Elon Musk has also defended it, saying it attracts the “top ~0.1% of engineering talent”.

Here’s what the data tell us about who gets into the US on these visas.

The H-1B visas for skilled workers were introduced in 1990. They are typically granted for three years, but can be extended for up to six years.

Since 2004, the number of new H-1B visas issued has been capped at 85,000 per year – 20,000 of which are reserved for foreign students with master’s degrees or higher from US universities.

However, that cap does not apply to some institutions such as universities, think tanks and other non-profit research groups, so more are often issued.

People can only apply for an H-1B visa if they have a job lined up with a US-based sponsor company or institution.

The US government also approves extensions for those already working in the country.

Just over 386,000 H-1B applications were approved in the 2023 fiscal year (October 2022-September 2023), the latest year we have full data for, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) figures.

That includes almost 119,000 new H-1B visas and about 267,000 extensions to existing visas.

The 2023 total is down from more than 474,000 in 2022.

There have been efforts to restrict the H-1B further programme in the past.

In 2017, then-president Trump signed an executive order that increased scrutiny of H-1B visa applications. The order sought to enhance fraud detection within the scheme.

Rejection rates hit an all-time high under the first Trump administration, reaching 24% in the 2018 fiscal year, compared with rejection rates of between 5-8% under the Obama administration and between 2-4% under President Biden.

However, the total number of approved applicants under the Biden administration has been similar to that under Trump’s first.

In the three years that followed President Trump’s executive order (2018-2020), about 1.1 million applications were approved, with about 343,000 of those being first-time applicants.

In the first three years of the Biden administration (2021-2023), about 1.2 million applications were approved, with almost 375,000 being new applicants.

Demand often exceeds the amount of visas granted – in most years there are thousands more applications filed than approved.

In cases in which more applications are received than visas are available, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) effectively runs the H-1B programme as a lottery – which detractors believe highlights a fundamental flaw in the system.

“Ultimately, if you’re going to have a skilled worker programme for ‘skilled’ workers, you don’t award these visas via a lottery,” said Eric Ruark, the director of research at NumbersUSA, an organisation that advocates for tighter immigration controls.

“Obviously, that’s not how you find the best and the brightest.”

We don’t have a full report on the 2024 numbers yet, but preliminary figures suggest applications have increased sharply.

The number of eligible registrations published by the USCIS showed 758,994 applications in the 2024 fiscal year, compared with 474,421 in 2023.

With Trump headed back to the White House in January, Mr Ruark said he believes that the resolution of the H-1B debate will ultimately be among the factors that defines his presidency.

“Is that second term going to be pro-American worker, or revert to the old establishment Republican position that immigration is designed to help employers – at the expense of American workers?” he said.

“That’s going to be a huge fight in the second term.”

The vast majority of approved applicants work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Most are in computer-related occupations – 65% in the 2023 fiscal year.

This was followed by architecture, engineering and surveying – about 10% of people approved in 2023 worked in those sectors.

In terms of companies, Amazon was the top employer of people on H-1B visas in 2024, hiring more than 13,000 staff via the scheme.

Other familiar names like Google, Meta, and Apple feature high on the employer list – ranking 4th, 6th and 8th respectively.

Tesla, one of the companies owned by Elon Musk – who has backed the programme – ranked 22nd, employing more than 1,700 people on an H-1B visa.

California and Texas were the states with the most people working on an H-1B visa in 2024.

The median yearly income of people working in the US on an H-1B visa in 2023 was $118,000 (£94,046).

The median yearly income for people in computer and mathematical occupations across the US is about $113,000 – slightly less than those in similar sectors via the H-1B programme.

The median household income in the US is about $60,000 per year.

While opponents of the H-1B system often make the argument that H-1B holders undercut the salaries of American workers, some immigration lawyers and experts push back on that notion.

The vast majority of H-1B holders earn more than the “prevailing wage” for their occupation – a Department of Labor-determined figure that calculates the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a particular part of the country.

Shev Dalal-Dheini, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the BBC that, while prevailing wages “are not a full labour market test”, they are indicative of the fact that H-1B visa holders aren’t negatively affecting the rest of the workforce.

“Let’s say you’re a software engineer in Washington DC. You look at the going rate for software engineers in DC, and you have to certify that you’re paying at least that amount,” said Ms Dalal-Dheini, who also worked on H-1B issues while as an official at USCIS.

“You’re not really undercutting wages that way.”

Additionally, Ms Dalal-Dheini said that US firms must also pay significant fees to file H-1B petitions, often in addition to lawyer fees.

“Companies that end up sponsoring H-1B [recipients] are looking at costs of up to $5,000 to $10,000 in addition to what you would have to pay an American worker,” she said.

“The bottom line is that if they could find an American worker that was qualified, most companies would probably choose to hire that American worker, because it would be a cost savings.”

The vast majority of those approved come from India.

The latest data showed around 72% of visas were issued to Indian nationals, followed by 12% to Chinese citizens.

About 1% came from the Philippines, Canada and South Korea respectively.

About 70% of those who enter the US on H-1B visas are men, with the average age of those approved being around 33.

Nearly 180 people died after a plane crashed as it was landing in South Korea on the morning of Sunday 29 December.

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, Thailand, was carrying 181 people – 179 of whom were killed. Two crew members were rescued from the wreckage.

Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash, with fire officials indicating a bird strike and bad weather. However experts have warned the crash could have been caused by a number of factors.

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 (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 they had 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, chief of the Muan fire department, told a televised briefing that a bird strike and bad weather might have caused the crash – but that the exact cause was still being investigated.

The flight and voice recorders from the plane were recovered, though Yonhap reports 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 had been “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 had an “excellent safety record”.

Mr Thomas separately told 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.

Authorities have so far identified 174 bodies and are still checking the remaining five “due to DNA inconsistencies”, according to Yonhap.

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.

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 the flight crew – a man and a woman – had survived the crash.

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 – had turbofan engines, which could be severely damaged in a bird strike.

He said that pilots were trained to be especially vigilant during the early morning or at sunset, when birds were 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.”

On a bright January morning in 1979, then US president Jimmy Carter greeted a historic guest in Washington: Deng Xiaoping, the man who unlocked China’s economy.

The first leader of Communist China to visit the United States, Deng had arrived the previous evening, to light snow and a welcome by the US vice-president, the secretary of state and their spouses.

It was the start of a diplomatic relationship that would forever change the world, setting the stage for China’s economic ascent – and later, its rivalry with the US.

Establishing formal ties with China was among Carter’s more remarkable legacies, during a turbulent presidency that ended with one term.

Born on 1 October, the same date as the founding of the People’s Republic of China, “he liked to say it was destiny that brought him and China together”, said Yawei Liu, a close friend of Carter’s.

Even after leaving office, he painstakingly cultivated a close bond with the Chinese people – but that was affected as ties between Washington and Beijing cooled.

Yet he remains one of a small group of US statesmen cherished by Beijing for helping to bring Communist China out of isolation in the 1970s.

Beijing has expressed its condolences, calling Carter the “driving force” behind the 1979 agreement. But the Chinese internet has gone much further, referring to him as “Meirenzong” or the “benevolent American”, giving him a title that was once reserved for emperors.

• What to know about Jimmy Carter’s funeral
• Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s legendary 77-year marriage

Carter’s first encounter with China was in 1949, while the country was suffering the final convulsions of a bloody decades-long civil war.

As a young US naval officer, his submarine unit was dispatched to Qingdao in eastern China. They were to aid Kuomintang troops who were fending off a Communist siege by Mao Zedong’s army.

Just kilometres away behind enemy lines was a Chinese commander named Deng Xiaoping.

When they finally met decades later, it was as leaders of their respective countries.

It was an earlier US President, Richard Nixon, and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger who had laid the groundwork for wooing what was then Mao’s China. With Beijing and Moscow at loggerheads, they had sensed an opportunity to draw away a Soviet ally.

But those efforts culminated under Carter – and Deng – who pushed for deeper ties. For months, the US president dispatched trusted negotiators for secret talks with Beijing.

The breakthrough came in late 1978. In the middle of December, the two countries announced that they would “recognise each other and establish diplomatic relations from January 1, 1979”.

The world was surprised and Beijing was elated, but the island of Taiwan, which had long relied on US support against Chinese claims, was crushed. Carter is still a controversial figure there.

Previously, the US had only recognised the government of Taiwan, which China viewed as a renegade province. And for years US support for Taiwan had been the sticking point in negotiations.

Switching recognition to Beijing meant the US had finally acknowledged China’s position that there was only one Chinese government – and it was in Beijing. This is the One China policy, which, to this day, forms the cornerstone of US-China relations.

But the pivot raised inevitable questions about US commitment to its allies. Uneasy with Carter’s decision, Congress eventually forced through a law codifying its right to provide Taiwan with defensive weapons, thus creating a lasting contradiction in US foreign policy.

Still historians agree that 1979 signalled an extraordinary set of moves that reoriented global power: not only did it unite the US and China against the Soviet Union, but also paved the way for peace and rapid economic growth in East Asia.

But Carter could not have done it without his special relationship with Deng Xiaoping. “It’s a pleasure to negotiate with him,” Carter wrote in his diary after spending a day with Deng during his January visit, according to Deng’s biographer Ezra Vogel.

“The two of them followed common sense, there were actually significant similarities in their no-nonsense personalities,” said Dali Yang, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “There was something really unique between the two men that really established trust.”

Deng Xiaoping had survived three political purges under Mao to emerge as one of China’s most consequential leaders. Historians credit his vision, self-assurance, frankness and sharp wit in no small part for this crucial diplomatic win.

He sensed the opportunity Carter offered, Vogel writes – to both thwart Soviet power and to kickstart the modernisation that had begun in Japan, Taiwan and even South Korea. He knew it would elude China without US help.

Deng’s visit to the US began with a warm first meeting at the White House, where he chuckled while revealing his Qingdao connection to Carter, according to Chinese reports. He was exuberant as the two clasped hands in front of cameras in the Rose Garden, saying: “Now our two countries’ peoples are shaking hands.”

Over the next few days, Deng staged a whirlwind charm offensive on the Americans as he toured several states with Carter. In one famous image, Deng is seen grinning as he dons a cowboy hat at a Texan rodeo. “Deng avoids politics, goes Texan,” read a local newspaper headline.

Carter described Deng as “smart, tough, intelligent, frank, courageous, personable, self-assured, friendly”, according to Vogel.

He later wrote in his diary the trip was “one of the delightful experiences of my Presidency… to me, everything went right, and the Chinese leader seemed equally pleased.”

“Carter was really a catalytic agent for what was more than a diplomatic rapprochement – it was a dramatic moment of signalling,” said Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Centre on US-China Relations who, as a journalist in 1979, covered Deng’s trip.

“He introduced Deng to the country and actually to the world. It made what had been a contentious relationship to something very congenial. The way Carter and Deng interacted, these were signals that it was okay to both peoples to set history aside and start a new relationship.”

Under Carter, China was granted “most favoured nation” trade status, boosting its economy and creating jobs. Within a year, two-way trade between the two countries doubled.

Throughout the next decade China became an important trade partner not just for the US but also the world, which was “extraordinarily important” for China’s growth, noted Prof Yang.

Carter’s connection with China endured long after his presidency ended.

In the 1990s his non-profit group The Carter Center played a significant role in China’s nascent grassroots democracy where – on the invitation of the Chinese government – it observed village elections, trained officials and educated voters.

Unusually for a former US president, Carter returned several times to China on personal visits. On one trip, he and his wife Rosalynn helped to build shelters for victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

His commitment to humanitarian work, his humble background as the son of a peanut farmer, and “folksy style” – which stood in contrast to the formal public personas of Chinese leaders – endeared him to many Chinese, according to Prof Yang: “He will be seen as a role model of a leader who cares, not just in rhetoric but also in actions.”

“Everywhere he travelled in China, people showed their warm feelings for him… The Chinese people really liked him for his courage and his honesty,” said Dr Liu, a senior adviser with the Carter Center. He accompanied Carter on several trips, including a 2014 tour where he was fêted by local officials and universities.

In Qingdao, the city put on a surprise fireworks show for his 90th birthday. In Beijing, Deng’s daughter hosted a banquet and presented a gift – a copy of the People’s Daily front page of the 1979 communique. “Both were moved to tears,” Dr Liu recalled.

That was to be his last visit. As the US-China relationship grew rockier, so too did Carter’s ties with the Chinese leadership, particularly after Xi Jinping took power.

On the eve of his 2014 visit, top government officials instructed universities not to sponsor his events, prompting a last-minute scramble to change venues, Carter noted.

A state dinner held for him at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing was sparsely attended, recalled Mr Schell. Notably, it was hosted by then vice-president Li Yuanchao, while Xi was said to be entertaining another dignitary elsewhere in the complex.

“He wouldn’t even come to tip his hat to Carter. That really showed the state of relations,” Mr Schell said. “Carter was really very angry. Two of his aides told me he even felt like leaving early because he felt disrespected.”

The Carter Center’s activities in China were eventually curtailed, and a website they maintained to document the village elections was taken offline. No clear explanation was given at the time, but Dr Liu attributed this to China’s growing suspicion of foreign organisations following the 2010 Arab Spring.

Though Carter said little about the snub publicly, it would have been felt no less acutely, given the lengths he had gone to advocate for engagement.

It has also raised questions whether his approach on human rights with China – he characterised it as “patience” but others criticised it as soft-pedalling – was justified in the end.

Carter often “made a tremendous effort… not to stick fingers into China’s eyes on the human rights question,” Mr Schell noted. “He did temper himself even when he was out of office, as The Carter Center had a real stake in the country.”

Some see his decision to engage with Communist China as born out of an American sincerity at the time. Following the violent chaos of the Cultural Revolution, there was “a disbelief among many Americans – how could the Chinese be living in angry isolation?” Prof Yang said. “There was a genuine desire among American leaders to really help.”

Others say that in attempting to shore up support against the Soviets, the US set the course for China’s rise and ended up creating one of its greatest rivals.

But these actions also benefited millions of Chinese, helping to lift them out of poverty and – for a time – widening political freedom at the local level.

“I think all of us from that generation were children of engagement,” Mr Schell said. “We were hoping Carter would find the formula that would slowly bring China into a comfortable relationship with [the] US and the rest of the world.”

Toward the end of his life, Carter grew more alarmed about the growing distrust between the US and China, and frequently warned of a possible “modern Cold War”.

“In 1979, Deng Xiaoping and I knew we were advancing the cause of peace. While today’s leaders face a different world, the cause of peace remains just as important,” he wrote on the 40th anniversary of normalisation of relations.

“[Leaders] must accept our conviction that the United States and China need to build their futures together, for themselves and for humanity at large.”

A fund created by the US government to help compensate victims of the late fraudster Bernard Madoff has begun making its final round of payments, according to a statement by the Department of Justice (DoJ).

The payouts being made by the Madoff Victim Fund (MVF) are worth $131.4m (£104.6m) and will bring the total amount it has returned to 40,930 claimants to $4.3bn.

Madoff, a Wall Street financier disgraced after he admitted to one of the biggest frauds in US financial history, died in prison in 2021.

He had been serving a 150-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2009 to running a so-called Ponzi scheme, which paid investors with money from new clients rather than actual profits.

“MVF’s distributions offset one of the most monstrous financial crimes ever committed,” said Richard C Breeden, who runs the MVF.

Mr Breeden is a former chairman of the US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“We have brought tens of thousands of victims to the greatest recovery we could achieve,” he added.

Madoff’s victims were a mixture of wealthy individuals, less well-off people and companies – both large and small – as well as schools, charities and pension funds.

The MFV estimates it will have recovered nearly 94% of the victims’ proven losses when it completes its mission in 2025.

Another $14.7bn has been returned through bankruptcy proceedings to Madoff customers.

Madoff’s investment firm collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis.

Set up in 1960, Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities became one of Wall Street’s largest market-makers – matching buyers and sellers of stocks – and Madoff served as chairman of the Nasdaq stock trading platform.

Over the years, the firm was investigated eight times by the SEC because it made exceptional returns.

But it was the global recession which prompted the firm’s demise as Madoff investors, hit by the downturn, tried to withdraw about $7bn and he could not find the money to cover it.

The list of those scammed included actor Kevin Bacon, Hall of Fame baseball player Sandy Koufax and film director Steven Spielberg’s charitable foundation, Wunderkinder.

UK banks were also among those who lost money, with HSBC Holdings saying it had exposure of around $1bn. Other corporate victims were Royal Bank of Scotland and Man Group and Japan’s Nomura Holdings.

Edinburgh’s outdoor Hogmanay celebrations have been cancelled as wind, rain and snow are forecast across the UK in the coming days.

Eight separate weather warnings have been issued across the UK in the coming days, as the Met Office warns of “a wet and windy spell for many up into the new year”.

Much of the country will be braced for stormy conditions including rain and strong winds – with wind gusts of up to 70mph forecast in some areas.

An amber warning for rain is in force in parts of Scotland, as well as flood alerts and flood warnings – including a rare severe flood warning – across the rest of the nation.

Edinburgh’s street party, fireworks display and outdoor concert headlined by Texas were cancelled on public safety grounds after the Met Office’s yellow warnings for wind and rain.

Indoor events, including a candlelit concert at St Giles’ Cathedral, are scheduled to go ahead as planned.

Unique Assembly, which runs the world-renowned Hogmanay festival on behalf of City of Edinburgh Council, said it had taken the “difficult decision” in the interest of public safety.

Al Thomson, festival director of Edinburgh’s Hogmanay, told the BBC the organisers were “deeply disappointed,” adding: “It’s not something that we take lightly”.

However, Mr Thomson said the weather meant “we’re unable to build the infrastructure, the performance stages, and the safety infrastructure” for the event.

Wind gusts on Sunday had already led to the cancellation of the traditional Torchlight Procession, which usually kicks off the Hogmanay events.

Last year, as many as 30,000 people attended Hogmanay festivities in Edinburgh.

American Richard Newton, who travelled from Atlanta in the US with his wife and children to celebrate, said it was “heartbreaking”.

“We travelled over 4,000 miles to be here for this,” he told BBC Radio Scotland.

“We’ve been planning for this for five years,” he said – saying the family had spent savings and taken on extra jobs to pay for it.

Neil Ellis from the Edinburgh Hotels Association said it was “pretty devastating” for the city and the “many thousands of people” who had travelled there.

But pubs and bars are vowing to “bring the party, if the street party can’t,” said Louise Maclean from the Scottish Hospitality Group, which represents venues.

She told BBC Radio Scotland “as far as we’re concerned the party is still happening” – although urged people to stay safe and not take risks.

In Blackpool, the annual seaside fireworks display to welcome in the new year has also been cancelled because of the winds forecast.

While in London, City Hall said it was monitoring the weather forecast ahead of the capital’s sold-out New Year’s Eve display.

A severe flood warning of “danger to life” has been issued to parts of northern Scotland, by Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) – with Aviemore and nearby areas in the Highlands bracing for river flooding on Tuesday morning.

Forecasters expect unsettled conditions more widely across the UK on both New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day,

That will eventually lead to a cold plunge of air from the north, with temperatures dipping below freezing for many.

Rain is forecast across England, Northern Ireland and also in Wales, where it looks set to be particularly heavy.

While it will be windy everywhere, it could be especially blustery in the south of England as the new year is welcomed in, with wind gusts of 43mph forecast in the run-up to midnight in London.

On New Year’s Day, the strongest winds are expected over England and Wales with gusts near 70mph (112km/h) over coasts and hills in the south and west.

The weather warnings in place across the UK include:

• An amber warning for rain is in place for Moray and Highland until 17:00 on Tuesday
• A yellow warning for rain and snow across Scotland for all of Tuesday
• Also on Tuesday, a yellow warning for snow is in place for Orkney and Shetland in Scotland from 05:00 until midnight
• A yellow warning for wind for southern Scotland and northern England from 07:00 until 23:00 on Tuesday
• A separate yellow wind warning covers Northern Ireland from 06:00 until 14:00
• A yellow warning for snow and ice for the north of Scotland from the start of Wednesday until 09:00 on Thursday
• A separate yellow warning for rain covers much of Wales, part of the West Midlands and north-west England from 18:00 on Tuesday and 18:00 on Wednesday
• And also on Wednesday, a yellow warning for wind is in place for southern England from 07:00 until midnight.

The Met Office said there was “potential for the pattern of warnings to shift and possibly escalate in some areas”.

The Environment Agency’s flood duty manager, Stefan Laeger, said continuous rain meant river levels could be high across parts of the Midlands and the north of England between Tuesday and Thursday “when significant inland flooding is possible but not expected”.

Dozens of flood warnings and alerts were in place across Scotland on Monday evening, with two in place in northern England.

Forecasters said up to 20cm of snow is expected in some parts of Scotland with heavier falls over hills with blizzards and drifting.

Disruption is expected to continue on Wednesday night. By the morning of Thursday 2 January arctic air may sweep towards the UK as the area of low pressure clears into Europe.

From Thursday into next weekend it will be much colder everywhere with widespread frosts, forecasters said.

Most places will be dry and sunny during the day but wintry showers will affect northern areas and lead to icy conditions.

Those travelling and with plans over the New Year are being urged to check the latest forecasts.

Network Rail said trains on some lines will need to be slowed down due to the difficult weather conditions.

Passengers on Avanti West Coast routes have been warned they will face a “significantly reduced” service on New Year’s Eve due to a strike by train managers.

Members of the RMT union will walk out on 31 December until 2 January following a dispute over rest days.

The weather warnings come after thick fog caused disruption to hundreds of flights at some of the UK’s major airports over the weekend.

Gatwick Airport reported continued delays on Monday, and flights at Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff were also affected on Friday and Saturday due to poor visibility.