A woman in Australia has annulled her marriage after realising that a fake wedding ceremony she took part in for a social media stunt was in fact real.

The unknowing bride said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to take part in the ceremony as a “prank” for his Instagram account.

She only discovered the marriage was genuine when he tried to use it to gain permanent residency in Australia.

A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after accepting the woman was tricked into getting married, in a judgement published on Thursday.

The bizarre case began in September 2023 when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They began seeing each other regularly in Melbourne, where they lived at the time.

In December that year, the man proposed to the woman and she accepted.

Two days later, the woman attended an event with the man in Sydney. She was told it would be a “white party” – where attendees would wear white-coloured clothing – and was told to pack a white dress.

But when they arrived she was “shocked” and “furious” to find no other guests present except for her partner, a photographer, the photographer’s friend and a celebrant, according to her deposition quoted in court documents.

“So when I got there, and I didn’t see anybody in white, I asked him, ‘What’s happening?’. And he pulled me aside, and he told me that he’s organising a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content, and wants to start monetising his Instagram page,” she said.

She said she had accepted his explanation as “he was a social media person” who had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that a civil marriage would be valid only if it were held in a court.

Still, she remained concerned. The woman rang a friend and voiced her worries, but the friend “laughed it off” and said it would be fine because, if it were real, they would have had to file a notice of intended marriage first, which they had not.

Reassured, the woman went through the ceremony where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of a camera. She said she was happy at that time to “play along” to “make it look real”.

Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependant in her application for permanent residency in Australia. Both of them are foreigners.

When she told him she could not as they were technically not married, he then revealed that their Sydney wedding ceremony had been genuine, according to the woman’s testimony.

The woman later found their marriage certificate, and discovered a notice of intended marriage which had been filed the month before their Sydney trip – before they even got engaged – which she said she did not sign. According to the court documents, the signature on the notice bears little resemblance to the woman’s.

“I’m furious with the fact that I didn’t know that that was a real marriage, and the fact that he also lied from the beginning, and the fact that he also wanted me to add him in my application,” she said.

In his deposition, the man claimed they had “both agreed to these circumstances” and that following his proposal the woman had agreed to marry him at an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney.

The judge ruled that the woman was “mistaken about the nature of the ceremony performed” and “did not provide real consent to her participation” in the marriage.

“She believed she was acting. She called the event ‘a prank’. It made perfect sense for her to adopt the persona of a bride in all things at the impugned ceremony so as to enhance the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage,” he stated in the judgement.

The marriage was annulled in October 2024.

A hardline Sri Lankan monk who is a close ally of ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has been sentenced to nine months in prison for insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred.

Galagodaatte Gnanasara was convicted on Thursday for the remarks, which date back to 2016.

Sri Lanka rarely convicts Buddhist monks, but this marks the second time that Gnanasara, who has repeatedly been accused of hate crimes and anti-Muslim violence, has been jailed.

The sentence, handed down by the Colombo Magistrate’s Court, comes after a presidential pardon he received in 2019 for a six-year sentence related to intimidation and contempt of court.

Gnanasara was arrested in December for remarks he made during a 2016 media conference, where he made several derogatory remarks against Islam.

On Thursday, the court said that all citizens, regardless of religion, are entitled to the freedom of belief under the Constitution.

He was also given a fine of 1,500 Sri Lankan rupees ($5; £4). Failure to pay the fine would result in an additional month of imprisonment, the court’s ruling added.

Gnanasara has filed an appeal against the sentence. The court rejected a request from his lawyers to free him on bail until a final judgment was made on the appeal.

He was a trusted ally of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was forced to resign and flee abroad following mass protests over the island nation’s economic crisis in 2022.

During Rajapaksa’s presidency, Gnanasara, who also leads a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist group, was appointed head of a presidential task force on legal reforms aimed at protecting religious harmony.

After Rajapaksa’s ouster, Gnanasara was jailed last year for a similar charge related to hate speech against the country’s Muslim minority but was granted bail while appealing his four-year sentence.

In 2018, he was sentenced to six years for contempt of court and intimidating the wife of a political cartoonist who is widely believed to have been disappeared. However, he only served nine months of that sentence because he received a pardon by Maithripala Sirisena who was the country’s president at the time.

It’s been four days since Los Angeles became an inferno – and my home became a pile of smouldering embers.

I’m now staying at a friend’s house in La Crescenta, north of the city, after evacuating my condo in the Palisades, 30 miles (48km) away from where the fires first started on Tuesday morning.

I thought we’d be safe here, but with six active fires now burning across the city, nowhere feels safe. So far, LA’s fires have forced more than 179,000 people including myself to evacuate.

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• Striking images of destruction, loss and heroism

Many people I know thought they had found refuge, only to have to flee again.

We’ve had our bags packed by the door, just in case we were ordered to leave for the second time in 48 hours.

On Thursday afternoon, the moment we were dreading happened – we got an emergency evacuation notice.

We panicked, and ran to load the cars again. I checked my car – low on gas – and sent my partner out to find some. He had to drive to four different stations before he found one with any supply.

The alarm, it turned out, was false, a mistake that rattled America’s second-largest city, which was already on edge.

As a climate reporter, I am used to covering extreme weather events. Just a few weeks ago I was interviewing residents who had fled the Malibu fires. Now I’m on the other side of the story.

The Palisades Fire has already been dubbed a historic wildfire. And it will forever be burnished in my memory because it’s the wildfire that burned down my community and my home.

It began on the morning of 7 January. Small flames on the Santa Monica mountain-side that I could see from the Palisades Village. I watched it for a short while, the smoke stretching across the clear blue sky. Locals were taking photos of it.

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An hour later, the flames had jumped across the ridgelines and descended down the mountain. I watched as the fire began to engulf homes and smoke billowed across the sky.

I was already extremely concerned about the Santa Ana wind warnings we’d received two days prior – up to 80mph (129km/h) wind gusts were forecast. Those, and the lack of rain we’d had made ideal conditions for a fire to spread quickly and intensely.

I felt how quickly the wind was changing, blowing embers and smoke across the town. And I could see the fire spreading, jumping from spot to spot so that it was soon surrounding the Palisades.

The scene was truly apocalyptic – a bright red Sun cast an orange glow over us, and ash rained down like snow.

I ran back home and started making plans if I needed to evacuate. There didn’t feel much point in leaving right at that moment because the one road out, Sunset Blvd, was gridlocked.

I packed the important stuff first – passports, birth certificates – and then when I felt I had a bit more time, I hosed down the front of the house, hoping the water would keep my condo, one of several terraced buildings in a small development, from succumbing to the fire.

I finally decided to leave when we were told there was a mandatory evacuation order for the entirety of the Palisades. I was also getting more concerned as the fire had spread to the mountains directly in front of my house, and I had heard the winds were only going to get stronger going into the evening.

I never received a message about any evacuations or fire warnings on that first terrible day and nor did my partner. I was informed by neighbours.

I’m lucky I have a press pass and I could approach emergency services to find out what news I could. I’m so grateful that everyone I know managed to get out on time. A lot of us didn’t realise how close the flames were to our homes, due to the lack of communication and information available.

It took a while to get out. There were thousands of cars trying to leave, all desperate to flee the flames. The frustration and fear was palpable.

I thought my home would be safe as it sits on the other side of Sunset Blvd, across from the mountains. I didn’t think the fire would jump the road.

• WATCH: Man escapes fires with elderly father-in-law

But when I got a text from a neighbour to say she saw Palisades High School on fire as she was evacuating, I knew that the fire was spreading further than anyone could have predicted. I had been watching the news – it was hard to look away – and it has been heartbreaking to see the school in flames, as well as some of our cultural landmarks, such as our local theatre.

Knowing that the wind speeds were only going to pick up as night fell, and it’s much harder to fight a fire in the dark, I realised in that moment that my home might not make it. It was a sobering thought that I might be six months pregnant and homeless.

We arrived in La Crescenta on Tuesday evening. The next morning I received the news from a neighbour that our house had made it through the night. I cried with relief.

When we started to read about looting that was happening in the Palisades, we decided we would go and check on our house, and retrieve some of the irreplaceable belongings we’d left behind – photographs, journals and family jewellery.

We returned on Wednesday afternoon and were allowed to drive in because of my press credentials. When we reached Sunset Blvd, our road, we saw flames and fire engines and in front of our block of condos. My heart sank.

We drove past and saw our entire cluster of condos had been levelled.

We parked the car, and raced around the back. As soon as I saw the scene I doubled up like I’d been hit. Where about 20 condos once stood there was a pile of burning rubble. The firefighters, their faces covered in ash, kept apologising that they couldn’t save our home. I was sobbing and thanking them for doing so much already.

I had to call and tell all of my neighbours that their homes were gone. I could barely get the words out.

• Mel Gibson one of a host of celebrities whose homes have burned
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Most of my village, I’d say about 90%, has been razed to the ground. It’s all gone. I’m reeling from the shock, from the devastation and from everything my community has lost.

I’m planning to leave the city and stay with friends further north where it’s safe and there’s no smoke. I think it will be a while before I want to come back to LA.

It’s surreal to think there’s literally nothing to go back to. No home, no library, no stores, no kids’ karate dojo, no theatre, no community centre. It’s all just gone. I keep thinking “I should have grabbed more of my stuff before I fled”.

But then I think back to one crystal-clear moment before I fled my house: standing in my bedroom, trying to choose which pair of earrings to take with me – a gold pair of hoops my sisters had gifted me for my 30th, or a pair of handmade abalone shell earrings that a Native American woman had given me after reporting on her community.

I told myself, out loud: “Only take what you need. What do you need?” And I realised in a moment of clarity, whilst I was frantically scanning all of my favourite clothes, shoes, and jewellery, that I really didn’t need any of it.

I grabbed my grandmother’s ring, passports, birth certificates, and left everything else to burn.

Three decades ago, the world was on the brink of a nuclear showdown – until Jimmy Carter showed up in North Korea.

In June 1994, the former US president arrived for talks in Pyongyang with then leader Kim Il-sung. It was unprecedented, marking the first time a former or sitting US president had visited.

But it was also an extraordinary act of personal intervention, one which many believe narrowly averted a war between the US and North Korea that could have cost millions of lives. And it led to a period of greater engagement between Pyongyang and the West.

All this may not have happened if not for a set of diplomatic chess moves by Carter, who died aged 100 on 29 December.

“Kim Il-sung and Bill Clinton were stumbling into a conflict, and Carter leapt into the breach, successfully finding a path for negotiated resolution of the standoff,” North Korean expert John Delury, of Yonsei University, told the BBC.

In early 1994, tensions were running high between Washington and Pyongyang, as officials tried to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear programme.

US intelligence agencies suspected that despite ongoing talks, North Korea may have secretly developed nuclear weapons.

Then, in a startling announcement, North Korea said it had begun withdrawing thousands of fuel rods from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor for reprocessing. This violated an earlier agreement with the US under which such a move required the presence of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear watchdog.

North Korea also announced it would withdraw from the IAEA.

American suspicion spiked as Washington believed Pyongyang was preparing a weapon, and US officials broke off negotiations. Washington began preparing several retaliatory measures, including initiating UN sanctions and reinforcing troops in South Korea.

In subsequent interviews, US officials revealed they also contemplated dropping a bomb or shooting a missile at Yongbyon – a move which they knew would have likely resulted in war on the Korean peninsula and the destruction of the South’s capital, Seoul.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Carter made his move.

For years, he had been quietly wooed by Kim Il-sung, who had sent him personal entreaties to visit Pyongyang. In June 1994, upon hearing Washington’s military plans, and following discussions with his contacts in the US government and China – North Korea’s main ally – Carter decided to finally accept Kim’s invitation.

“I think we were on the verge of war,” he told the US public broadcaster PBS years later. “It might very well have been a second Korean War, within which a million people or so could have been killed, and a continuation of the production of nuclear fissile material… if we hadn’t had a war.”

Carter’s visit was marked by skillful diplomatic footwork – and brinkmanship.

First, Carter had to test Kim’s sincerity. He made a series of requests, all of which were agreed to, except the last: Carter wanted to travel to Pyongyang from Seoul across the demilitarised zone (DMZ), a strip of land that acts as a buffer between the two Koreas.

“Their immediate response was that no-one had ever done this for the last 43 years, that even the United Nations secretary-general had to go to Pyongyang through Beijing. And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going, then’,” he said.

A week later, Kim caved.

The next step for Carter was harder – convincing his own government to let him go. Robert Gallucci, the chief US negotiator with North Korea at the time, later said there was “discomfort in almost all quarters” about the US essentially “subcontracting its foreign policy” to a former president.

Carter first sought permission from the State Department, who blanked him. Unfazed, he decided to simply inform then-US president Bill Clinton that he was going, no matter what.

He had an ally in vice-president Al Gore, who intercepted Carter’s communication to Clinton. “[Al Gore] called me on the phone and told me if I would change the wording from “I’ve decided to go” to “I’m strongly inclined to go” that he would try to get permission directly from Clinton… he called me back the next morning and said that I had permission to go.”

The trip was on.

On 15 June 1994, Carter crossed over to North Korea, accompanied by his wife Rosalyn, a small group of aides and a TV crew.

Meeting Kim was a moral dilemma for Carter.

“I had despised Kim Il-sung for 50 years. I was in a submarine in the Pacific during the Korean War, and many of my fellow servicemen were killed in that war, which I thought was precipitated unnecessarily by him,” he told PBS.

“And so I had very serious doubts about him. When I arrived, though, he treated me with great deference. He was obviously very grateful that I had come.”

Over several days, the Carters had meetings with Kim, were taken on a sightseeing tour of Pyongyang and went on a cruise on a luxury yacht owned by Kim’s son, Kim Jong-il.

Carter discovered his hunch was right: North Korea not only feared a US military strike on Yongbyon, but was also ready to mobilise.

“I asked [Kim’s advisers] specifically if they had been making plans to go to war. And they responded very specifically, ‘Yes, we were’,” he said.

“North Korea couldn’t accept the condemnation of their country and the embarrassment of their leader and that they would respond.

“And I think this small and self-sacrificial country and the deep religious commitments that you had, in effect, to their revered leader, their Great Leader as they called him, meant that they were willing to make any sacrifice of massive deaths in North Korea in order to preserve their integrity and their honour, which would have been a horrible debacle in my opinion.”

Carter presented a list of demands from Washington as well as his own suggestions. They included resuming negotiations with the US, starting direct peace talks with South Korea, a mutual withdrawal of military forces, and helping the US find remains of US soldiers buried in North Korean territory.

“He agreed to all of them. And so, I found him to be very accommodating,” Carter said. “So far as I know then and now, he was completely truthful with me.”

Crucially, Carter came up with a deal where North Korea would stop its nuclear activity, allow IAEA inspectors back into its reactors, and eventually dismantle Yongbyon’s facilities. In return, the US and its allies would build light-water reactors in North Korea, which could generate nuclear energy but not produce material for weapons.

While enthusiastically embraced by Pyongyang, the deal was met with reluctance from US officials when Carter suggested it in a phone call. He then told them he was going on CNN to announce details of the deal – leaving the Clinton administration little choice but to agree.

Carter would later justify forcing his own government’s hand by saying he had to “consummate a resolution of what I considered to be a very serious crisis”. But it did not go down well back home – officials were unhappy at Carter’s “freelancing” and attempt to “box in” Clinton, according to Mr Gallucci.

Near the end of the trip, they told him to convey a statement to the North Koreans, reiterating Clinton’s public position that the US was continuing to press for UN sanctions. Carter disagreed, according to reports at that time.

Hours later, he got on the boat with Kim, and promptly went off-script. As TV cameras rolled, he told Kim the US had stopped work on drafting UN sanctions – directly contradicting Clinton.

An annoyed White House swiftly disowned Carter. Some openly expressed frustration, painting a picture of a former president going rogue. “Carter is hearing what he wants to hear… he is creating his own reality,” a senior official complained at the time to The Washington Post.

Many in Washington also criticised him for the deal itself, saying the North Koreans had used him.

But Carter’s savvy use of the news media to pressure the Clinton administration worked. By broadcasting his negotiations almost instantaneously, he gave the US government little time to react, and immediately after his trip “it was possible to see an almost hour-by-hour evolution in US policy towards North Korea” where they ratcheted down their tone, wrote CNN reporter Mike Chinoy who covered Carter’s trip.

Though Carter later claimed he had misspoken on the sanctions issue, he also responded with typical stubbornness to the blowback.

“When I got back to Seoul, I was amazed and distressed at the negative reaction that I had from the White House. They urged me not to come to Washington to give a briefing, urged me to go directly to… my home,” he said.

But he went against their wishes.

“I decided that what I had to offer was too important to ignore.”

A final dramatic coda to the episode happened a month later.

On 9 July 1994, on the same day as US and North Korean officials sat down in Geneva to talk, state media flashed a stunning announcement: Kim Il-sung had died of a heart attack.

Carter’s deal was immediately plunged into uncertainty. But negotiators ploughed through, and weeks later hammered out a formal plan known as the Agreed Framework.

Though the agreement broke down in 2003, it was notable for freezing Pyongyang’s nuclear programme for nearly a decade.

Robert Carlin, a former CIA and US state department official who led delegations in negotiations with North Korea, noted that Carter’s real achievement was in getting the US government to co-operate.

“Carter was, more or less, pushing on an open door in North Korea. It was Washington that was the bigger challenge… if anything, Carter’s intervention helped stop the freight train of US decision-making that was hurtling toward a cliff,” he told the BBC.

Carter’s visit was also significant for opening a path for rapprochement, which led to several trips later, including one in 2009 when he travelled with Clinton to bring home captured US journalists.

He is also credited with paving the way for Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un – Kim Il-sung’s grandson – in 2018, as “Carter made it imaginable” that a sitting US president could meet with a North Korean leader, Dr Delury said.

That summit failed, and of course, in the long run Carter’s trip did not succeed in removing the spectre of nuclear war, which has only grown – these days North Korea has missiles regarded as capable of hitting the US mainland.

But Carter was lauded for his political gamble. It was in sharp contrast to his time in office, when he was criticised for being too passive on foreign policy, particularly with his handling of the Iran hostage crisis.

His North Korea trip “was a remarkable example of constructive diplomatic intervention by a former leader,” Dr Delury said.

His legacy is not without controversy, given the criticism that he took matters in his own hands. His detractors believe he played a risky and complicated game by, as CNN’s Mike Chinoy put it, “seeking to circumvent what he viewed as a mistaken and dangerous US policy by pulling the elements of a nuclear deal together himself”.

But others believe Carter was the right man for the job at the time.

He had “a very strong will power”, but was also “a man of peace inside and out,” said Han S Park, one of several people who helped Carter broker the 1994 trip.

Though his stubbornness also meant that he “did not get along with a lot of people”, ultimately this combination of attributes meant he was the best person “to prevent another occurrence of a Korean War”, Prof Park said.

More than anything, Carter was convinced he was doing the right thing.

“He didn’t let US government clucking and handwringing stop him,” says Robert Carlin. “Carter had guts.”

A judge has sentenced US President-elect Donald Trump to an “unconditional discharge,” bringing to an end the first criminal trial of a former US president.

The sentence in the hush-money payment case means the incoming president has been spared any penalty, including jail time or a fine, but he will still take office as the first US president with a felony conviction.

“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” Justice Juan Merchan said shortly before announcing the sentence, calling it a “truly extraordinary case”.

Appearing via video call from Florida and flanked by his attorney and two prominent American flags, Trump declared he was “totally innocent”.

• Trump hush-money sentencing live updates

It was the first time in this year-and-half long legal saga that Trump had uttered more than a “not guilty” or given a brief affirmative answer.

Granted the chance to speak ahead of his sentencing, Trump railed against the case for several minutes.

“This has been a very terrible experience,” he said.

He claimed there had been a “weaponisation” of the judicial system and claimed the case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for political reasons.

“I would like to explain that I was treated very, very unfairly, and I thank you very much,” he said, before falling silent.

As Bragg watched Trump address him directly for the first time, he maintained a mostly stoic expression. He did, however, chuckle when Trump claimed Bragg had never wanted to bring the case.

After Trump had his say, Justice Merchan then took several moments to reflect on the “paradox” of the trial.

Justice Merchan noted that despite the media and political circus outside, “once the courtroom doors were closed, it was no more unique than all the other cases taking place at the same time”.

But he added that after Trump was convicted, the case took another turn when the American people elected him in November to a second presidential term.

After careful consideration, he had determined that “the only lawful sentence, without encroaching upon the highest office of the land”, was unconditional discharge – a sentence that would allow the American people a president unencumbered by pending court proceedings.

Trump was found guilty by a New York jury of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in May 2024. His sentencing was delayed multiple times due to Supreme Court rulings and the November presidential election.

The charges stemmed from a plot to cover up a hush-money payment to an adult film star in the waning days of the 2016 election. Prosecutors argued the payment was a form of election interference aimed at keeping vital information from voters, and therefore broke the law.

In October 2016, Trump’s then-attorney, Michael Cohen, paid a woman named Stormy Daniels $130,000 (£106,000) to remain silent about a years-old alleged sexual encounter with the soon-to-be president.

After he was elected, Trump reimbursed Cohen in installments – and then falsely recorded them as legal expenses. Each of Trump’s guilty verdicts correlates to a false document related to the cover-up.

Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied the sexual encounter with Ms Daniels. He repeatedly claimed the case was politically motivated persecution.

The six-week trial became a legal, political and media firestorm. Larger-than-life characters like Cohen and Daniels took the stand to face questioning from Trump’s attorneys.

Trump brought a string of family members and Republican allies to court with him each day to fill the benches behind his defence table. Each day, he turned a small media pen in the hallway outside the courtroom into his personal pulpit, using the opportunities to rail against the justice system, the press, and other adversaries.

Trump also used the furore of the trial to raise millions from supporters for his legal battles, and his campaign to retake the White House.

In the four years between his terms in office, Trump was indicted in four separate criminal cases, including his New York case. In the end, this was the only one to go to trial.

On the campaign trail and social media, Trump used his legal quagmires to portray himself – and his supporters – as victims of a rigged justice system.

Despite the multiple indictments, including two that centred on his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Trump decisively defeated Vice-President Kamala Harris in November.

His victory quashed the two federal prosecutions against him, including his federal election interference case and one involving alleged mishandling of classified documents. The third, an election interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, has been stuck in a series of delays and side dramas for months.

Only Trump’s hush-money trial ever reached its conclusion, after Justice Merchan dug his heels in early January and demanded Trump appear virtually or in person for his sentencing.

The battles did not stop there, however. Trump’s lawyers frantically filed appeals and even petitioned the US Supreme Court to halt the Friday hearing.

The Supreme Court rejected him in a brief order issued Thursday night.

They also fought to have the case dismissed by arguing that presidents-elect have immunity from criminal prosecution, an argument Justice Merchan rejected but they have continued to argue to higher courts.

When Trump’s New York trial adjourned with a final bang of the gavel on Friday, it also brought to a close this particularly fraught chapter in his personal and political history.

When he is sworn in 10 days from now, he will do so as the first US president to have ever been convicted of a felony.

As he concluded his sentencing on Friday, Justice Merchan had one final message for Trump.

“I wish you Godspeed as you assume your second term in office,” he said.

Sitting on the front row of a war court on the US’s Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the world’s most notorious defendants, appeared to listen intently.

“Can you confirm that Mr Mohammed is pleading guilty to all charges and specifications without exceptions or substitutions?” the judge asked his lawyer as Mohammed watched on.

“Yes, we can, Your Honour,” the lawyer responded.

Sitting in court, 59-year-old Mohammed, his beard dyed bright orange and wearing a headdress, tunic and trousers, bore little resemblance to a photo circulated shortly after his capture in 2003.

Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US, had been due to plead guilty this week – more than 23 years after almost 3,000 people were killed in what the US government has described as “the most egregious criminal act on American soil in modern history”.

But two days later, just as Mohammed had been set to formally enter his decision – the product of a controversial deal he struck with US government prosecutors – he instead watched silently as the judge said the proceedings had been paused under the orders of a federal appeals court.

It was expected to be a landmark week for a case that has faced a decade of delays. Now, with a new complication, it continues into an uncertain future.

“It’s going to be the forever trial,” the relative of one of the 9/11 victims said.

Mohammed has previously said that he planned the “9/11 operation from A-to-Z” – conceiving the idea of training pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, leader of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda.

But he has not yet been able to formally admit guilt to the court. This week’s pause comes amid a dispute over a deal reached last year between US prosecutors and his legal team, under which Mohammed would not face a death penalty trial in exchange for his guilty plea.

The US government has for months tried to rescind the agreement, saying that allowing the deal to go ahead would cause “irreparable” harm to both it and the American public. Those in support of the deal see it as the only way forward in a case that has been complicated by the torture that Mohammed and others faced in US custody and questions over whether this taints the evidence.

After a last-minute appeal by prosecutors, a three-judge panel at the federal appeals court called for the delay to give them time to consider the arguments before they would make a decision.

But families of victims had already flown on a once-weekly flight to the base to watch the pleas in a viewing gallery, where thick glass separated them and members of the press from the rest of the sprawling high-security courtroom.

The attendees had won their place at this week’s proceedings through a lottery system. They arranged child care and paid for kennels for their pets to attend – knowing that they could be called off at any minute. They learnt Thursday night while speaking to the media at a hotel on the base that the pleas would no longer go ahead.

Elizabeth Miller, whose father, New York City firefighter Douglas Miller, died in the attacks when she was six years old, said she was in favour of the deal going forward to “bring finality”, but recognised that there were other families who felt it was too lenient.

“What’s so frustrating is that every time this goes back and forth, each camp gets their hopes up and then gets their hopes crushed again,” she said, as other relatives nodded in agreement.

“It’s like a perpetual limbo… It’s like constant whiplash.”

This week’s pause is just the latest in a series of delays, complications and controversies on the base, where the US military has now been holding detainees for 23 years.

The military prison on Guantanamo Bay was established during the “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks that Mohammed is accused of orchestrating. The first detainees were brought there on 11 January 2002.

Then-President George Bush had issued a military order establishing military tribunals to try non-US citizens, saying they could be held without charge indefinitely and could not legally challenge their detention.

Dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, the 20 men were brought to a temporary detention camp called X-Ray, where the cells were exposed cages and the beds mats on the floor.

The camp, surrounded by barbed wire, is now long abandoned and overgrown – weeds are growing on wooden watchtowers and signs along the fence say “off limits” in red text.

While conditions have improved at Guantanamo, it continues to face criticism from the United Nations and rights groups over its treatment of detainees. And it continues to challenge US officials and advocates who hope to see it closed.

As president, Barack Obama pledged to close the prison during his terms, saying it was contrary to US values. These efforts were revived under the Biden administration.

Unlike Mohammed, most people held there since its creation were never charged with any crimes.

The current detention facilities are off limits to journalists, with access only granted to those with security clearance.

A short drive away, there is an Irish pub, a McDonald’s, a bowling alley and a museum, serving military personnel and contractors on the base – the majority of whom have never been inside the prison zone.

As legal teams, journalists and families gathered on the base for Mohammed’s scheduled pleas, a secret early morning operation was conducted to fly a group of 11 Yemeni detainees off of the base for resettlement in Oman.

With that transfer, the base, which once held almost 800 detainees, now holds just 15 – the lowest number in its history.

Of those remaining, all but six have been charged or convicted of war crimes, with lawyers arguing their cases in complex legal battles at the base’s high-security courtrooms.

As the court was dismissed on Friday, the judge said that Mohammed’s pleas, if allowed to go ahead, would now fall into the next US administration.

Meta and Amazon are axing their diversity programmes, joining firms across corporate America that are rolling back hiring and training initiatives criticised by conservatives, citing legal and political risks.

The move comes just days after Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it was ending a fact-checking programme criticised by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.

In a memo to staff about its decision, which affects, hiring, supplier and training efforts, Meta cited a “shifting legal and policy landscape”.

Walmart and McDonalds are among the other companies to have made similar decisions regarding diversity efforts since Trump won re-election.

In its memo to staff, which was first reported by Axios and confirmed by the BBC, Meta – the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – cited a Supreme Court ruling concerning race in college admissions, while also noting that the term “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) had become “charged”.

The tech giant said it would continue to look for diverse staff, but end its current approach, which seeks to make selections from a pool of diverse candidates.

In a December memo to employees, Amazon said it was “winding down outdated programs and materials” related to representation and inclusion, aiming to complete the process by the end of 2024.

“Rather than have individual groups build programs, we are focusing on programs with proven outcomes — and we also aim to foster a more truly inclusive culture,” Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s VP of inclusive experiences and technology, wrote in the note which was first reported by Bloomberg on Friday.

Financial firms JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock, also pulled out of groups focused on risks from climate change this week.

The moves are a sign of the acceleration of a retreat that started two years ago, as Republicans ramped up attacks on firms such as BlackRock and Disney, accusing them of “woke” progressive activism and threatening political punishment.

Big brands such as Bud Light and Target also faced backlash and boycotts related to their efforts to appeal to LGBTQ customers.

Many of the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives were put in place after the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police.

Recent court decisions have bolstered critics of the programmes, who said that they were discriminatory.

The Supreme Court in 2023 struck down the right for private universities to consider race in admissions decisions.

Another court of appeals ruling invalidated a Nasdaq policy that would have required companies listed on that stock exchange to have at least one woman, racial minority or LGBTQ person on their board or explain why not.

Meta said it was also ending its efforts to work with suppliers who are “diverse” but will instead focus on small and medium-sized companies.

It also plans to stop offering “equity and inclusion” training and instead offer programmes that “mitigate bias for all, no matter your background”.

Meta declined to comment on the memo, news of which was immediately met with both criticism and celebration.

“I’m sitting back and enjoying every second of this,” said conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who has taken credit for successfully campaigning against the policies at companies such as Ford, John Deere and Harley-Davidson.

LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign said workplace inclusion policies help to attract and retain top staff and had been “directly tied to long-term business growth”.

“Those who abandon these commitments are shirking their responsibility to their employees, consumers, and shareholders” RaShawn “Shawnie” Hawkins, the senior director of the HRC Foundation’s Workplace Equality Program said.

Meta’s move comes just days after the tech giant said it was ending a fact-checking programme criticised by Trump and Republicans and elevated conservatives to key leadership positions.

In a nearly three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said he had always been concerned about being the arbiter of “truth” and was “ill-prepared” when the issue first heated up after the 2016 election.

He said the demands to take down information became unreasonable under the Biden administration. For example, he said the company faced pressure during the pandemic to remove content like statements about vaccine side effects.

That helped to generate a wider political backlash, he said, including his own.

“I feel like I have much greater command now of what I think the policies should be,” he said, adding that he felt the US government “should be defending its companies … not be the tip of the spear attacking”.

“When the US does that to its tech industry, it’s basically just open season around the rest of the world,” he added.

Copenhagen’s gloomy January weather matches the mood among Denmark’s politicians and business leaders.

“We take this situation very, very seriously,” said Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen of Donald Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland – and punish Denmark with high tariffs if it stands in the way.

But, he added, the government had “no ambition whatsoever to escalate some war of words.”

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen downplayed Trump’s own suggestion that the US might use military force to seize Greenland. “I don’t have the fantasy to imagine that it’ll ever get to that,” she told Danish TV.

And Lars Sandahl Sorensen, CEO of Danish Industry, also said there was “every reason to stay calm… no-one has any interest in a trade war.”

But behind the scenes, hastily organised high-level meetings have been taking place in Copenhagen all week, a reflection of the shock caused by Trump’s remarks.

Greenland PM Mute Egede flew in to meet both the prime minister and King Frederik X on Wednesday.

And on Thursday night, party leaders from across the political spectrum gathered for an extraordinary meeting on the crisis with Mette Frederiksen in Denmark’s parliament.

Faced with what many in Denmark are calling Trump’s “provocation,” Frederiksen has broadly attempted to strike a conciliatory tone, repeatedly referring to the US as “Denmark’s closest partner”.

It was “only natural” that the US was preoccupied by the Arctic and Greenland, she added.

Yet she also said that any decision on Greenland’s future should be up to its people alone: “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders… and it’s the Greenlanders themselves who have to define their future.”

Her cautious approach is twofold.

On the one hand, Frederiksen is keen to avoid escalating the situation. She’s been burned before, in 2019, when Trump cancelled a trip to Denmark after she said his proposal to buy Greenland was “absurd”.

“Back then he only had one more year in office, then things went back to normal,” veteran political journalist Erik Holstein told the BBC . “But maybe this is the new normal.”

But Frederiksen’s comments also speak to the Danish resolve not to meddle in the internal affairs of Greenland – an autonomous territory with its own parliament and whose population is increasingly leaning towards independence.

“She should’ve been much clearer in rejecting the idea,” said opposition MP Rasmus Jarlov.

“This level of disrespect from the coming US president towards very, very loyal allies and friends is record-setting,” he told the BBC, although he admitted Trump’s forcefulness had “surprised everybody.”

The conservative MP believed Frederiksen’s insistence that “only Greenland… can decide and define Greenland’s future” placed too much pressure on the island’s inhabitants. “It would’ve been prudent and clever to stand behind Greenland and just clearly state that Denmark doesn’t want [a US takeover].”

The Greenland question is a delicate one for Denmark, whose prime minister officially apologised only recently for spearheading a 1950s social experiment which saw Inuit children removed from their families to be re-educated as “model Danes”.

Last week, Greenland’s leader said the territory should free itself from “the shackles of colonialism.”

By doing so he tapped into growing nationalist sentiment, fuelled by interest among Greenland’s younger generations in the indigenous culture and history of the Inuit.

Most commentators now expect a successful independence referendum in the near future. While for many it would be seen as a victory, it could also usher in a new set of problems, as 60% of Greenland’s economy is dependent on Denmark.

An independent Greenland “would need to make choices,” said Karsten Honge. The Green Left MP now fears his preferred option of a new Commonwealth-style pact “based on equality and democracy” is unlikely to come about.

Sitting in his parliamentary office decorated with poems and drawings depicting scenes of Inuit life, Honge said Greenland would need to decide “how much it values independence”. It could sever ties with Denmark and turn to the US, Honge said, “but if you treasure independence then that doesn’t make sense.”

Opposition MP Jarlov argues that while there is no point in forcing Greenland to be part of Denmark, “it is very close to being an independent country already”.

Its capital Nuuk is self-governed, but relies on Copenhagen for management of currency, foreign relations and defence – as well as substantial subsidies.

“Greenland today has more independence than Denmark has from the EU,” Jarlov added. “So I hope they think things through.”

As Mette Frederiksen has the awkward task of responding firmly while not offending Greenland or the US, the staunchest rebuttal to Trump’s comments so far has come from outside Denmark.

The principle of the inviolability of borders “applies to every country… no matter whether it’s a very small one or a very powerful one,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warned, while French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the EU would not let other nations “attack its sovereign borders”.

Their comments gave away the deep concern within the EU about how to handle the upcoming Trump presidency. “This is not just very serious for Greenland and Denmark – it is serious to the whole world and to Europe as a whole,” MP Karsten Honge said.

“Imagine a world – which we may be facing in just a few weeks – where international agreements don’t exist. That would shake everything up, and Denmark would just be a small part of it.”

The Danish trade sector has similarly been engulfed by deep nervousness after Trump said he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it refused to give up Greenland to the US.

A 2024 Danish Industry study showed that Denmark’s GDP would fall by three points if the US imposed 10% tariffs on imports from the EU to the US as part of a global trade war.

Singling out Danish products from the influx of EU goods would be near-impossible for the US, and would almost certainly result in retaliatory measures from the EU. But trade industry professionals are taking few chances, and in Denmark as elsewhere on the continent huge amounts of resources are being spent internally to plan for potential outcomes of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

As his inauguration approaches, Danes are preparing as they can to weather the storm. There is guarded hope that the president-elect could soon shift his focus to grievances towards other EU partners, and that the Greenland question could be temporarily shelved.

But the disquiet brought on by Trump’s refusal to rule out military intervention to seize Greenland remains.

Karsten Honge said Denmark would have to suffer whatever decision the US takes.

“They just need to send a small battleship to travel down the Greenland coast and send a polite letter to Denmark,” he said, only partly in jest.

“The last sentence would be: well, Denmark, what you gonna do about it?

“That’s the new reality with regards to Trump.”

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.

The Palestinian death toll from the war in Gaza could be substantially higher than official figures reported by the Hamas-run health ministry, research published in The Lancet medical journal suggests.

The UK-led study covered the first nine months of the war, which began when Hamas gunmen attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.

It used data from the ministry, an online survey of relatives reporting fatalities, and obituaries. It estimated that up until 30 June 2024, 64,260 Palestinians died from traumatic injury, meaning an under-reporting of deaths by 41%.

The Israeli embassy in the UK said “any information that derives from Gaza cannot be trusted” and served Hamas.

The UN treats the health ministry’s figures as reliable.

The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but a recent report by the UN said the majority of verified victims over a six month period were women and children.

Israel says Hamas’s figures cannot be trusted. In August, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had “eliminated over 17,000 terrorists”, though it is unclear how it arrived at this figure. The IDF insists it only targets combatants and tries to avoid or minimise civilian casualties.

Israel is not allowing international journalists from media organisations, including the BBC, independent access to Gaza, making it difficult to verify the facts on the ground.

The team behind the latest study used a statistical method called “capture-recapture”, a technique which has been used to evaluate deaths in other conflicts.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine looked at how many people turned up repeatedly in different attempts to count deaths. The level of overlap between those lists suggested that the number of deaths directly caused by traumatic injury in the conflict could be significantly higher than hospital figures published by the Ministry of Health.

Gaza’s health ministry issues updated death tolls from the war daily. It compiles the figures from deaths recorded in hospitals, deaths reported by family members, and deaths from “reliable media reports”.

The report in The Lancet estimated a death toll between 55,298–78,525 people, compared to 37,877 reported by the health ministry.

The report’s figures could be meaningfully higher or lower depending on the technical details of the analysis.

For example, identifying deaths by “traumatic injury” in each set of data could be tricky. Getting it wrong could push the study’s estimates higher or lower.

The research also said 59% of those killed for whom data on sex and age was available were women, children and the elderly.

The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s attack in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Israel launched a massive military offensive on Gaza in response.

The health ministry says 46,006 people, most of them civilians, have been killed by the Israeli campaign.

At least 11 people have died as wildfires rage in Los Angeles – and there are fears that number will rise.

Officials say it may take several weeks to identify victims as traditional methods – such as fingerprinting and visual identification – may not be possible.

Here is what we know about those who are reported to have died after their family members spoke to US media.

Anthony Mitchell and his adult son Justin died at their home in Altadena as they tried to escape the wildfires, their family said.

Hajime White told the Washington Post she received a call from her 67-year-old father, in which he said “the fire’s in the yard”.

Mr Mitchell, a 67-year-old retired salesman and amputee, lived with his son Justin, who was in his early 20s and had cerebral palsy, the newspaper reported.

Another one of Mr Mitchell’s sons, Jordan, lived with the pair but he was in hospital with an infection, the Washington Post reported.

Ms White told the newspaper she had received the news that Mr Mitchell and Justin had died, adding: “It’s like a ton of bricks just fell on me.”

Mr Mitchell was a father of four, grandfather of 11 and great-grandfather of 10, Ms White said.

Victor Shaw died trying to defend his home from the wildfire in Altadena, his family said.

The 66-year-old’s body was found on the side of the road by his property, with a garden hose in his hand, according to TV network KTLA. The property had been in Mr Shaw’s family for nearly 55 years, it reported.

Mr Shaw lived at the home with his younger sister Shari, who said she tried to get him to evacuate with her on Tuesday night as the fire moved closer.

She told KTLA that he refused because he wanted to try to fight the fire, adding that she had to flee because “the embers were so big and flying like a firestorm”.

Ms Shaw told CBS News she would miss her big brother.

“I’ll miss talking to him, joking about, traveling with him and I’ll just miss him to death,” she said. “I just hate that he had to go out like that.”

• Follow live updates on the LA wildfires
• What’s the latest on the fires and what caused them?
• In maps: Thousands of acres on fire in LA
• Mel Gibson latest celebrity to lose home in wildfires

Rodney Nickerson died at his home in Altadena, according to his daughter, who said her father believed the wildfire would “pass over”.

Kimiko Nickerson told KTLA her father had bought the property in 1968 and had experienced previous fires over the decades.

She said Mr Nickerson “felt this was going to pass over” and that he would remain at his home.

Ms Nickerson told CBS News that the last comment her father made to her was: “I’ll be here tomorrow.” She confirmed to the broadcaster that his body had been found.

The family of 83-year-old Erliene Kelley have voiced fears she is among the victims, telling the Los Angeles Times it had been more than 48 hours since they last heard from her.

According to the newspaper, Briana Navarro said her grandmother was “adamant” she did not want to evacuate because previous fires had never reached the house in Altadena.

Ms Navarro said her mother had seen a social media post by LA Fire Alerts which included Ms Kelley’s address and stated a person was trapped inside the burning home.

Ms Navarro said her mother “just broke down” and “knew that my grandma most likely didn’t make it out”.

“And that kind of confirmed it for me as well,” she added.

Actress Jennifer Garner told MSNBC on Friday that she lost a friend in the fires.

“I did lose a friend who did not get out in time,” she said.

Garner, who says she’s lived in and around the Palisades for 25 years, did not share any more details about the identify of her friend.

Wildfires are ripping across parts of Los Angeles, leading to at least 11 deaths, burning down hundreds of buildings, and prompting evacuation orders for tens of thousands across the county.

Despite the efforts of thousands of firefighters, the biggest blazes remain mostly uncontained.

Weather conditions and the underlying impact of climate change are expected to continue fanning the flames for days to come, and there is intense scrutiny of officials’ preparedness for the disaster.

Authorities say they expect the death toll will increase.

In Los Angeles County, some 153,000 people are under evacuation orders as of Friday. Many of them fled their homes with just the belongings they could carry.

Another 166,000 residents are under evacuation warning, meaning they may need to leave their homes soon.

More than 10,000 buildings have been razed by the fires, which are the most destructive in the history of LA.

A further 60,000 are also at risk. Insured losses are expected to be above $8bn (£6.5bn) because of the high value of the properties damaged.

A man was arrested on Thursday afternoon after residents suspected that he was attempting to start a new fire.

Police said he was charged with a probation violation but that there was not enough probable cause to charge him with arson, and an investigation continues.

The causes of the original fires are not yet known.

National Guard troops have been deployed in some parts of the city to prevent looting in evacuated areas, with more set to be deployed, and there have been 20 arrests, according to police.

Celebrities who have lost their homes include Mel Gibson, Leighton Meester and Adam Brody, who attended the Golden Globes just days ago, actor James Woods and Paris Hilton.

• Follow live updates as fierce winds threaten more fire destruction
• Watch: Man films escape from fires with elderly father-in-law
• What’s the latest on the LA fires, and why can’t they be put out?
• Maps and images reveal scale of wildfire devastation

There are at least five fires raging in the wider area, according to California fire officials:

• Palisades: The first fire to erupt on Tuesday and the biggest in the region, which could become the most destructive fire in state history. It has scorched a sizable part of land, covering more than 21,000 acres, including the upmarket Pacific Palisades neighbourhood. It was 8% contained as of Friday morning
• Eaton: It has struck the northern part of Los Angeles, blazing through cities such as Altadena. It’s the second biggest fire in the area, burning nearly 14,000 acres. It is 3% contained
• Hurst: Located just north of San Fernando, it began burning on Tuesday night and has grown to 771 acres, and is 70% contained
• Lidia: It broke out on Wednesday afternoon in the mountainous Acton area north of Los Angeles and grew to cover almost 400 acres. Authorities say it has been 98% contained
• Kenneth: This new fire broke out on Thursday on the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It so far covers more than 1,000 acres. Authorities said its progress has been stopped and it has been 50% contained, with no structures damaged or destroyed

The earlier Sunset, Woodley and Olivas fires have been contained.

A political row about the city’s preparedness has erupted after reports that some firefighters’ hoses ran dry, provoking criticism from US President-elect Donald Trump.

• Fact-checking criticism of California Democrats over fires

In Pasadena, around 11 miles (18km) north-east of downtown LA, Fire Chief Chad Augustin said the area experienced a short period of time where pressure was low on a small amount of hydrants. All issues had been resolved, he said.

He attributed the issue to multiple fire engines drawing water at the same time, as well as a loss of power lowering pressure.

Hydrants also ran out of water for a time in the more elevated parts of Pacific Palisades.

California Governor Gavin Newsom said Friday he was ordering an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure and the closure of a reservoir in Pacific Palisades, which was shut for maintenance before the fires began.

Mayor Karen Bass returned to the city from a previously arranged trip to Ghana to find it on fire. She has faced intense questions about the region’s preparedness, her leadership in this crisis, and the water issues.

Before the fires broke out, LA’s fire chief warned in a memo that budget cuts were hampering the department’s ability to respond to emergencies.

Dismay over the fire threat was worsened by an alert that was mistakenly sent to every mobile phone in Los Angeles on Thursday, residents say, prompting anger from some. About 10 million people live in the county.

A second emergency alert warning residents to prepare to evacuate was mistakenly sent out to residents in the early hours of Friday.

During a news conference Friday morning, city authorities said they were investigating why the mass alert was sent out, and urged people not to disable the alert function on their phones, which they said was vital to provide up-to-the-minute emergency information.

A combination of an exceptionally dry period – downtown Los Angeles has only received 0.16 inches (0.4cm) of rain since October – and powerful offshore gusts known as the Santa Ana winds have created ripe conditions for wildfires.

Santa Ana winds flow east to west through southern California’s mountains, according to the National Weather Service.

The winds can also be responsible for the scale of destruction that follows.

Blowing across the deserts further inland, they create conditions where humidity drops, which dries out vegetation. If a fire does start, the winds can fan smouldering embers into an inferno in minutes.

Speeds of 60 to 80mph (95-130km/h) are common, but gusts of up to 100mph (160km/h) can occur.

Although the strongest wind gusts have passed through the region, forecasters have warned another “traditional Santa Ana wind event” will move in on Thursday night local time, according to CBS News.

Investigations into what initially sparked the fires are continuing.

LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman said that the focus of law enforcement is currently on saving lives and homes and assisting firefighters, but that eventually they would turn towards investigating the causes of the fires.

“If it is determined that there is a man-made and intentional setting of any of the fires involved in this situation, the people who committed this arson will be arrested, they will be prosecuted and they will be punished to the full extent of the law,” he said.

Hochman also warned people against looting and flying drones – one struck a firefighting plane, which was damaged but able to land without any injuries – and warned of scams targeting fire victims.

Authorities said a curfew in the evacuation zones will be in place from 18:00 local time to 06:00 Saturday.

Arson is not the only cause of deadly wildfires. Power lines and other utility equipment have sparked some of the most destructive blazes in California’s history. In 2018, the so-called Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, many of whom died in their cars trying to flee.

There is a glimmer of hope for firefighters, as the fire weather outlook for southern California has been downgraded from “extremely critical” to “critical”.

But BBC weather forecaster Sarah Keith-Lucas says there is no rain forecast in the area for at least the next week, so conditions remain ripe for fire.

Although winds were expected to ease slightly later Friday into Saturday, forecasters warned that they would pick up again on Sunday into Monday.

• ‘Where do I go?’ Chaos as people flee flames
• What are the Santa Ana winds?
• Before and after: How wildfires tore through LA

Although strong winds and lack of rain are driving the blazes, experts say climate change is altering the background conditions and increasing the likelihood of such fires.

Much of the western United States including California experienced a decades-long drought that ended just two years ago, making the region vulnerable.

“Whiplash” swings between dry and wet periods in recent years created a massive amount of tinder-dry vegetation that was ready to burn.

US government research is unequivocal in linking climate change to larger and more severe wildfires in the western US.

“Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says.

Fire season in southern California is generally thought to stretch from May to October – but Gov Newsom has pointed out earlier that blazes had become a perennial issue. “There’s no fire season,” he said. “It’s fire year.”

• A simple guide to climate change
• Stuck in traffic as flames approached: Why LA is hard to evacuate

Have you been affected by the fires in California? Get in touch here.

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to get exclusive insight on the latest climate and environment news from the BBC’s Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, delivered to your inbox every week. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

Firefighters are battling to control huge wildfires in Los Angeles that have killed at least 10 people, devoured thousands of buildings and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes.

It’s a rapidly changing situation – these maps and pictures show the scale of the challenge, where the fires are and the damage they have caused.

The largest blaze, in the Pacific Palisades area is the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history. Almost 20,000 acres have now burnt.

Placing the area affected on to maps of New York and London gives a sense of how big that is, stretching from Clapham to Greenwich in the UK’s capital, or across large areas of lower Manhattan and Queens.

Five fires are currently burning in the Los Angeles area.

• Palisades fire: The largest active fire is burning between Santa Monica and Malibu. Burnt area: 20,438 acres. More than 5,300 structures destroyed. At least 30,000 people evacuated.

• Eaton fire: Second largest fire burning north of Pasadena. Burnt area: 13,956 acres. Potentially more than 4,000 structures damaged or destroyed. Five deaths reported.

• Kenneth fire: In the West Hills area, just north of the Palisades. Began on Thursday afternoon and has so far burned 1,000 acres.

• Hurst fire: To the north east of the city. Burnt area: 771 acres.

• Lidia fire: Reported in the hills north of Los Angeles. Burnt area: 395 acres.

But three fires have been contained.

Woodley fire: Small fire reported in local parkland. Burnt area: 30 acres.

Olivas fire: Small fire first reported in Ventura county about 50 miles (80km) east of Los Angeles. Burnt area: 11 acres.

Sunset fire: Reported in the historic Hollywood Hills area near many famous landmarks, including the Hollywood sign. Burnt area: 43 acres.

Officials say more than 10,000 structures have been destroyed by the two biggest fires – about 5,000 each in the Palisades and Eaton blazes.

As the maps below show, the fires are largely burning uninhabited areas but they have spread into populated areas and many more buildings could be at risk depending on how the infernos spread.

Among the buildings already destroyed in the Palisades blaze are many of the exclusive properties that line the Malibu waterfront.

Slide your cursor across the image below to see an aerial view of what the area used to look like and what it looks like now.

Both the Palisades and Eaton fires can be seen from space, as shown in the satellite image below.

A combination of an exceptionally dry period – downtown Los Angeles has only received 0.16 inches (0.4cm) of rain since October – and powerful offshore gusts known as the Santa Ana winds have created ripe conditions for wildfires.

Santa Ana winds flow east to west through southern California’s mountains, according to the National Weather Service.

Blowing across the deserts further inland, they create conditions where humidity drops, which dries out vegetation. If a fire does start, the winds can fan smouldering embers into an inferno in minutes.

The map below shows just how rapidly the Palisades fire spread, intensifying in a matter of hours. At just after 14:00 on Tuesday it covered 772 acres and within four hours it had approximately tripled in size.

The Palisades fire now covers almost 20,000 acres and thousands of people have been forced to evacuate the area, as more than 1,400 firefighters try to tackle the blaze.

The Eaton fire has also grown rapidly from about 1,000 acres on Tuesday to more than 13,000 acres, forcing thousands more people to flee.

• Follow latest updates on the LA wildfires
• What’s the latest on the fires, and what caused them?
• Watch: Smoke billows as thousands evacuate in LA
• Timelapse shows rapid spread of Palisades wildfire
• Watch: Inside a neighbourhood totally lost in inferno
• Pacific Palisades: The celebrity LA area ravaged by wildfire

Photographers have also been capturing the heartbreaking level of damage the fires have caused on the ground – as these before-and-after photos demonstrate.

The Jewish Temple in Pasadena was destroyed by the Eaton fire. The Centre’s website says it has been in use since 1941 and has a congregation of more than 400 families.

With authorities still working to contain the fires, the scope of the losses is still unfolding but they are on track to be among the costliest in US history, with losses already expected to exceed $135bn (£109.7bn).

There is a glimmer of hope for firefighters, as the fire weather outlook for southern California has been downgraded from “extremely critical” to “critical”.

But BBC weather forecaster Sarah Keith-Lucas says there is no rain forecast in the area for at least the next week, so conditions remain ripe for fire.

Three decades ago, the world was on the brink of a nuclear showdown – until Jimmy Carter showed up in North Korea.

In June 1994, the former US president arrived for talks in Pyongyang with then leader Kim Il-sung. It was unprecedented, marking the first time a former or sitting US president had visited.

But it was also an extraordinary act of personal intervention, one which many believe narrowly averted a war between the US and North Korea that could have cost millions of lives. And it led to a period of greater engagement between Pyongyang and the West.

All this may not have happened if not for a set of diplomatic chess moves by Carter, who died aged 100 on 29 December.

“Kim Il-sung and Bill Clinton were stumbling into a conflict, and Carter leapt into the breach, successfully finding a path for negotiated resolution of the standoff,” North Korean expert John Delury, of Yonsei University, told the BBC.

In early 1994, tensions were running high between Washington and Pyongyang, as officials tried to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear programme.

US intelligence agencies suspected that despite ongoing talks, North Korea may have secretly developed nuclear weapons.

Then, in a startling announcement, North Korea said it had begun withdrawing thousands of fuel rods from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor for reprocessing. This violated an earlier agreement with the US under which such a move required the presence of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear watchdog.

North Korea also announced it would withdraw from the IAEA.

American suspicion spiked as Washington believed Pyongyang was preparing a weapon, and US officials broke off negotiations. Washington began preparing several retaliatory measures, including initiating UN sanctions and reinforcing troops in South Korea.

In subsequent interviews, US officials revealed they also contemplated dropping a bomb or shooting a missile at Yongbyon – a move which they knew would have likely resulted in war on the Korean peninsula and the destruction of the South’s capital, Seoul.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Carter made his move.

For years, he had been quietly wooed by Kim Il-sung, who had sent him personal entreaties to visit Pyongyang. In June 1994, upon hearing Washington’s military plans, and following discussions with his contacts in the US government and China – North Korea’s main ally – Carter decided to finally accept Kim’s invitation.

“I think we were on the verge of war,” he told the US public broadcaster PBS years later. “It might very well have been a second Korean War, within which a million people or so could have been killed, and a continuation of the production of nuclear fissile material… if we hadn’t had a war.”

Carter’s visit was marked by skillful diplomatic footwork – and brinkmanship.

First, Carter had to test Kim’s sincerity. He made a series of requests, all of which were agreed to, except the last: Carter wanted to travel to Pyongyang from Seoul across the demilitarised zone (DMZ), a strip of land that acts as a buffer between the two Koreas.

“Their immediate response was that no-one had ever done this for the last 43 years, that even the United Nations secretary-general had to go to Pyongyang through Beijing. And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going, then’,” he said.

A week later, Kim caved.

The next step for Carter was harder – convincing his own government to let him go. Robert Gallucci, the chief US negotiator with North Korea at the time, later said there was “discomfort in almost all quarters” about the US essentially “subcontracting its foreign policy” to a former president.

Carter first sought permission from the State Department, who blanked him. Unfazed, he decided to simply inform then-US president Bill Clinton that he was going, no matter what.

He had an ally in vice-president Al Gore, who intercepted Carter’s communication to Clinton. “[Al Gore] called me on the phone and told me if I would change the wording from “I’ve decided to go” to “I’m strongly inclined to go” that he would try to get permission directly from Clinton… he called me back the next morning and said that I had permission to go.”

The trip was on.

On 15 June 1994, Carter crossed over to North Korea, accompanied by his wife Rosalyn, a small group of aides and a TV crew.

Meeting Kim was a moral dilemma for Carter.

“I had despised Kim Il-sung for 50 years. I was in a submarine in the Pacific during the Korean War, and many of my fellow servicemen were killed in that war, which I thought was precipitated unnecessarily by him,” he told PBS.

“And so I had very serious doubts about him. When I arrived, though, he treated me with great deference. He was obviously very grateful that I had come.”

Over several days, the Carters had meetings with Kim, were taken on a sightseeing tour of Pyongyang and went on a cruise on a luxury yacht owned by Kim’s son, Kim Jong-il.

Carter discovered his hunch was right: North Korea not only feared a US military strike on Yongbyon, but was also ready to mobilise.

“I asked [Kim’s advisers] specifically if they had been making plans to go to war. And they responded very specifically, ‘Yes, we were’,” he said.

“North Korea couldn’t accept the condemnation of their country and the embarrassment of their leader and that they would respond.

“And I think this small and self-sacrificial country and the deep religious commitments that you had, in effect, to their revered leader, their Great Leader as they called him, meant that they were willing to make any sacrifice of massive deaths in North Korea in order to preserve their integrity and their honour, which would have been a horrible debacle in my opinion.”

Carter presented a list of demands from Washington as well as his own suggestions. They included resuming negotiations with the US, starting direct peace talks with South Korea, a mutual withdrawal of military forces, and helping the US find remains of US soldiers buried in North Korean territory.

“He agreed to all of them. And so, I found him to be very accommodating,” Carter said. “So far as I know then and now, he was completely truthful with me.”

Crucially, Carter came up with a deal where North Korea would stop its nuclear activity, allow IAEA inspectors back into its reactors, and eventually dismantle Yongbyon’s facilities. In return, the US and its allies would build light-water reactors in North Korea, which could generate nuclear energy but not produce material for weapons.

While enthusiastically embraced by Pyongyang, the deal was met with reluctance from US officials when Carter suggested it in a phone call. He then told them he was going on CNN to announce details of the deal – leaving the Clinton administration little choice but to agree.

Carter would later justify forcing his own government’s hand by saying he had to “consummate a resolution of what I considered to be a very serious crisis”. But it did not go down well back home – officials were unhappy at Carter’s “freelancing” and attempt to “box in” Clinton, according to Mr Gallucci.

Near the end of the trip, they told him to convey a statement to the North Koreans, reiterating Clinton’s public position that the US was continuing to press for UN sanctions. Carter disagreed, according to reports at that time.

Hours later, he got on the boat with Kim, and promptly went off-script. As TV cameras rolled, he told Kim the US had stopped work on drafting UN sanctions – directly contradicting Clinton.

An annoyed White House swiftly disowned Carter. Some openly expressed frustration, painting a picture of a former president going rogue. “Carter is hearing what he wants to hear… he is creating his own reality,” a senior official complained at the time to The Washington Post.

Many in Washington also criticised him for the deal itself, saying the North Koreans had used him.

But Carter’s savvy use of the news media to pressure the Clinton administration worked. By broadcasting his negotiations almost instantaneously, he gave the US government little time to react, and immediately after his trip “it was possible to see an almost hour-by-hour evolution in US policy towards North Korea” where they ratcheted down their tone, wrote CNN reporter Mike Chinoy who covered Carter’s trip.

Though Carter later claimed he had misspoken on the sanctions issue, he also responded with typical stubbornness to the blowback.

“When I got back to Seoul, I was amazed and distressed at the negative reaction that I had from the White House. They urged me not to come to Washington to give a briefing, urged me to go directly to… my home,” he said.

But he went against their wishes.

“I decided that what I had to offer was too important to ignore.”

A final dramatic coda to the episode happened a month later.

On 9 July 1994, on the same day as US and North Korean officials sat down in Geneva to talk, state media flashed a stunning announcement: Kim Il-sung had died of a heart attack.

Carter’s deal was immediately plunged into uncertainty. But negotiators ploughed through, and weeks later hammered out a formal plan known as the Agreed Framework.

Though the agreement broke down in 2003, it was notable for freezing Pyongyang’s nuclear programme for nearly a decade.

Robert Carlin, a former CIA and US state department official who led delegations in negotiations with North Korea, noted that Carter’s real achievement was in getting the US government to co-operate.

“Carter was, more or less, pushing on an open door in North Korea. It was Washington that was the bigger challenge… if anything, Carter’s intervention helped stop the freight train of US decision-making that was hurtling toward a cliff,” he told the BBC.

Carter’s visit was also significant for opening a path for rapprochement, which led to several trips later, including one in 2009 when he travelled with Clinton to bring home captured US journalists.

He is also credited with paving the way for Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un – Kim Il-sung’s grandson – in 2018, as “Carter made it imaginable” that a sitting US president could meet with a North Korean leader, Dr Delury said.

That summit failed, and of course, in the long run Carter’s trip did not succeed in removing the spectre of nuclear war, which has only grown – these days North Korea has missiles regarded as capable of hitting the US mainland.

But Carter was lauded for his political gamble. It was in sharp contrast to his time in office, when he was criticised for being too passive on foreign policy, particularly with his handling of the Iran hostage crisis.

His North Korea trip “was a remarkable example of constructive diplomatic intervention by a former leader,” Dr Delury said.

His legacy is not without controversy, given the criticism that he took matters in his own hands. His detractors believe he played a risky and complicated game by, as CNN’s Mike Chinoy put it, “seeking to circumvent what he viewed as a mistaken and dangerous US policy by pulling the elements of a nuclear deal together himself”.

But others believe Carter was the right man for the job at the time.

He had “a very strong will power”, but was also “a man of peace inside and out,” said Han S Park, one of several people who helped Carter broker the 1994 trip.

Though his stubbornness also meant that he “did not get along with a lot of people”, ultimately this combination of attributes meant he was the best person “to prevent another occurrence of a Korean War”, Prof Park said.

More than anything, Carter was convinced he was doing the right thing.

“He didn’t let US government clucking and handwringing stop him,” says Robert Carlin. “Carter had guts.”

Known in Ghana as the Maths Queen, Dr Angela Tabiri is the first African to win The Big Internet Math Off competition – quite an achievement for someone who had not initially planned to study mathematics.

The 35-year-old Ghanaian “finds joy in solving puzzles and mathematical questions” and hopes her 2024 win will open up the world of mathematics to other African women – who have traditionally been discouraged from taking the subject.

Sixteen mathematicians were invited to compete for the tongue-in-cheek title of “the world’s most interesting mathematician” – a public vote event started in 2018 by The Aperiodical blog.

The first winner was Dr Nira Chamberlain, the first black mathematician to be included in the British reference book Who’s Who and a vice-president of the professional body, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

During the event they all compete against each other – so two in each match – and then it goes to quarter-finals and semi-finals until the big match to decide who has explained their chosen mathematical concept in the most illuminating way.

Dr Tabiri’s passion is quantum, or non-commutative, algebra, which she researches at the Ghana branch of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (Aims).

Aims started in South Africa and then expanded to Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon and Rwanda – to provide post-graduate training and research in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Dr Tabiri is also the academic manager for the Girls in Mathematical Sciences Programme, a mentoring and support scheme for high or secondary school girls in Ghana.

It was set up by Aims-Ghana in 2020 to “ensure that we have a pipeline of young girls who will be leading in research and innovation in the mathematical sciences – in academia and also industry”.

Dr Tabiri says the numbers of girls and boys studying maths at high school is roughly equal but then drops off at university level.

This is partly because, she says, female students assume is that if they do maths, the only job they can do is teach, because maths is still seen as a “boy’s subject” – and there are very few female role models.

This is something Dr Tabiri is trying to change.

But her journey into maths was not straightforward.

She grew up in Ashaiman, one of the poorer, densely populated neighbourhoods of Tema, an industrial hub and port an hour’s drive east of the capital, Accra.

Her family home was happy but noisy – she has four sisters – and Dr Tabiri would often seek out the peace and quiet of the local youth community centre so that she could study.

She wanted to follow in the footsteps of two sisters and study business administration at university.

But her grades, although high, were not high enough – and so she was accepted instead for mathematics and economics.

“It was a blessing in disguise,” Dr Tabiri says. “Numbers and puzzles fascinated me – but I never thought a career in maths was for me.”

In 2015, Dr Tabiri got a scholarship to do her PhD at Glasgow University in Scotland. It was hard work, she says – and it was there that she experienced a seminal moment.

She went to see Hidden Figures, the film about black American women mathematicians who worked at the US space agency, Nasa, in the 1950s, during the era of segregation in the US.

“It was amazing seeing the story of these black women told on that global stage,” she remembers. “I had a lot of goose bumps watching it.”

She was particularly inspired by Katherine Johnson, whose extraordinary mathematical skills and calculations were so crucial to the success of US space flights.

“Katherine Johnson worked so hard – and for a long time her work was hidden. She made me realise that I just have to keep going.

“If your work is not even recognised now, it will be recognised sometime in future. It was a real turning-point for me.”

Ghana reached an historic milestone in 2024 when Dr Gloria Botchway became the first woman to graduate from the University of Ghana with a PhD in maths.

It was a journey full of hardships – including selling water and yams at the roadside as a six-year-old.

Dr Tabiri is trying to support other African girls and women from less privileged backgrounds to follow their maths dreams through her FemAfricMaths non-profit organisation.

Along with other volunteers, she gives lessons to the youngest high-school students in person and online.

She also posts on social media interviews she does with leading female mathematicians from all over the world.

Dr Tabiri is also hugely passionate about the potential of quantum science and technology – for which mathematics is essential.

She is proud that Ghana, backed by Mexico, spearheaded proposals that 2025 be declared the UN International Year of Quantum Science and Technology – on the 100th anniversary of the discovery of modern quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics emerged from studies to uncover how ultra-tiny particles – the most fundamental bits of matter, energy and light – interact with each other to make up the world.

It led to the development of the internet, solar cells, and global navigation satellite systems.

Researchers and big tech companies from across the world – including China, the US, the UK, Australia and South Africa – are now racing to develop quantum technologies, including quantum computers and ultra-precising measuring and sensor devices.

The hope is that complex problems will be solved at lightning speeds – and there will be huge innovations in areas like medicine, environmental sciences, food production and cyber-security.

“There are lots of conversations now – the advantages and disadvantages – the jobs that will be created,” says Dr Tabiri.

Africa’s fast-growing population, already the youngest in the world, will be the world’s largest workforce by 2040, according to the UN.

“But that doesn’t mean that we will get the jobs,” says Dr Tabiri.

She hopes to organise a “quantum road show” as a first step in introducing schoolchildren to quantum science at a much earlier age that she was.

“We want young people to start developing an interest in and building all the relevant skills during their basic schooling,” she says.

The road show will be based on a recent quantum computing course she held for secondary-school girls who attend classes at Aims-Ghana during their holidays.

The course discussed what it takes to build a quantum computer, its current fragilities – and the challenges quantum computing poses to current systems, such as cryptography.

Working with Unesco, Dr Tabiri will also host a week-long “Quantum Hackathon” in July at Aims-Ghana for about 40 post-graduate students from different African countries.

“We want them to use their quantum skills to solve some of the greatest challenges that we face, real-life problems,” says Dr Tabiri.

“It’s very urgent that we position our youth for this next big revolution.”

• Grandma with chunky sunglasses becomes unlikely fashion icon
• Music stars sing praises of team sweeping Ghana clean
• Ground-breaking Somali TV drama shatters taboos

This week saw Hollywood’s awards season kick off in style with the Golden Globes and rumours of a celebrity engagement.

But how much attention did you pay to what else had been going on in the world over the past seven days?

Quiz compiled by Ben Fell.

Fancy some more? Try last week’s quiz, have a go at something from the archives, or take on the 2024 Quiz of the Year.

Part one: January to March

Part two: April to June

Part three: July to September

Part four: October to December

The planet has moved a major step closer to warming more than 1.5C, new data shows, despite world leaders vowing a decade ago they would try to avoid this.

The European Copernicus climate service, one of the main global data providers, said on Friday that 2024 was the first calendar year to pass the symbolic threshold, as well as the world’s hottest on record.

This does not mean the international 1.5C target has been broken, because that refers to a long-term average over decades, but does bring us nearer to doing so as fossil fuel emissions continue to heat the atmosphere.

Last week UN chief António Guterres described the recent run of temperature records as “climate breakdown”.

“We must exit this road to ruin – and we have no time to lose,” he said in his New Year message, calling for countries to slash emissions of planet-warming gases in 2025.

Global average temperatures for 2024 were around 1.6C above those of the pre-industrial period – the time before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels – according to Copernicus data.

This breaks the record set in 2023 by just over 0.1C, and means the last 10 years are now the 10 warmest years on record.

The Met Office, Nasa and other climate groups are due to release their own data later on Friday. All are expected to agree that 2024 was the warmest on record, although precise figures vary slightly.

Last year’s heat is predominantly due to humanity’s emissions of planet-warming gases, such as carbon dioxide, which are still at record highs.

Natural weather patterns such as El Niño – where surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean become unusually warm – played a smaller role.

“By far and away the largest contribution impacting our climate is greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, tells the BBC.

The 1.5C figure has become a powerful symbol in international climate negotiations ever since it was agreed in Paris in 2015, with many of the most vulnerable countries considering it a matter of survival.

The risks from climate change, such as intense heatwaves, rising sea-levels and loss of wildlife, would be much higher at 2C of warming than at 1.5C, according to a landmark UN report from 2018.

Yet the world has been moving closer and closer to breaching the 1.5C barrier.

“When exactly we will cross the long-term 1.5C threshold is hard to predict, but we’re obviously very close now,” says Myles Allen of the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and an author of the UN report.

The current trajectory would likely see the world pass 1.5C of long-term warming by the early 2030s. This would be politically significant, but it wouldn’t mean game over for climate action.

“It’s not like 1.49C is fine, and 1.51C is the apocalypse – every tenth of a degree matters and climate impacts get progressively worse the more warming we have,” explains Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a research group in the US.

Even fractions of a degree of global warming can bring more frequent and intense extreme weather, such as heatwaves and heavy rainfall.

In 2024, the world saw blistering temperatures in west Africa, prolonged drought in parts of South America, intense rainfall in central Europe and some particularly strong tropical storms hitting north America and south Asia.

These events were just some of those made more intense by climate change over the last year, according to the World Weather Attribution group.

Even this week, as the new figures are released, Los Angeles has been overwhelmed with destructive wildfires fuelled by high winds and a lack of rain.

While there are many contributing factors to this week’s events, experts say conditions conducive to fires in California are becoming more likely in a warming world.

It wasn’t only air temperatures that set new marks in 2024. The world’s sea surface also reached a new daily high, while the total amount of moisture in the atmosphere reached record levels.

That the world is breaking new records is not a surprise: 2024 was always expected to be hot, because of the effect of the El Niño weather pattern – which ended around April last year – on top of human-caused warming.

But the margin of several records in recent years has been less expected, with some scientists fearing it could represent an acceleration of warming.

“I think it’s safe to say that both 2023 and 2024 temperatures surprised most climate scientists – we didn’t think we’d be seeing a year above 1.5C this early,” says Dr Hausfather.

“Since 2023 we’ve had around 0.2C of extra warming that we can’t fully explain, on top of what we had expected from climate change and El Niño,” agrees Helge Gößling, a climate physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

Various theories have been suggested to explain this ‘extra’ warmth, such as an apparent reduction in the low-level cloud cover that tends to cool the planet, and prolonged ocean heat following the end of El Niño.

“The question is whether this acceleration is something persistent linked to human activities that means we will have steeper warming in the future, or whether it is a part of natural variability,” Dr Gößling adds.

“At the moment it’s very hard to say.”

Despite this uncertainty, scientists stress that humans still have control over the future climate, and sharp reductions in emissions can lessen the consequences of warming.

“Even if 1.5 degrees is out the window, we still can probably limit warming to 1.6C, 1.7C or 1.8C this century,” says Dr Hausfather.

“That’s going to be far, far better than if we keep burning coal, oil and gas unabated and end up at 3C or 4C – it still really matters.”

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On the face of it, it seems a near-impossible task.

Catch one of the most elusive wild cat species set loose in a landscape twice the size of the Lake District National Park.

But this week experts were faced with this challenge not once, but twice.

Barely 24-hours after two escaped cats were captured in the Cairngorms, wildlife authorities were hot on the trail of two more after they were spotted in the same area.

This curious tale began on Wednesday night.

Police Scotland posted on social media a warning that two lynx had been spotted near Kingussie, a town of roughly 1,400 people, south of Aviemore.

The public were asked not to approach the animals if they encountered them.

A search was launched involving Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) keepers from the nearby Highland Wildlife Park.

They were faced with a few challenges.

The Cairngorms National Park is the UK’s biggest national park, sprawling across 1,748 sq miles and includes parts of five local authorities – Aberdeenshire, Angus, Highland, Moray and Perth and Kinross.

To put that in perspective, the Lake District National Park is about 912 sq miles, while the country of Luxembourg is less than 1,000.

It is a place of farms, crofts, forests and rugged hills, vast upland moors and mountains but few people. About 18,000 in total call the park home.

The cats were spotted near RSPB Scotland’s Insh Marshes reserve, an area of wetlands and woods on the fringes of some of the Cairngorms’ highest mountains.

It is also the depth of winter and it has been snowing – a lot – in the Scottish Highlands these past few weeks.

Then there are lynx themselves.

WWF describes them as solitary, elusive and nocturnal and rarely spotted by humans.

Despite these seemingly impossible odds, the two lynx were captured successfully on Thursday – just hours after they were spotted.

RZSS used cage-type traps baited with venison and quail, a small game bird.

The traps were fitted with a pedal that when stepped on triggered a door to close behind the cats once inside.

The keepers were able to draw on their knowledge of keeping Northern lynx at the Highland Wildlife Park.

They also have past experience of collaring AWOL animals.

Last year, they captured a Japanese macaque that was on the loose for five days after escaping from the park.

Curiously, the lynx appeared to be far from elusive, but tame.

One sat looking back calmly as a headtorch was shone at it, and an RZSS keeper spoke to the lynx and it did not run away.

The pair are now in quarantine at Edinburgh Zoo.

The story was tailing off when on Friday morning Police Scotland dropped another post – two more lynx had been spotted in the same area.

A new search was launched involving police, RZSS, park rangers and Cairngorms Mountain Rescue Team drone.

They were captured later on Friday.

It is a still a mystery, though police are investigating.

A licence is required under the Dangerous Animals Act to keep lynx.

Local authority Highland Council said no premises in the area had applied for, or were operating under a Dangerous Wild Animal (DWA) licence, suggesting they had come from somewhere else.

Scotland’s nature agency NatureScot also said it has not granted any licences for the reintroduction of lynx, a species once native to Britain before dying out hundred of years ago through habitat loss and hunting.

Do a quick internet search to find lynx wild cats to buy and there are links to sellers in the US, but not the UK.

A possible clue to where the “Cairngorms Four” originated from was reportedly found near where they were spotted.

BBC Scotland News understands bedding was discovered with porcupine quills in the straw.

Did whoever release the cats own other exotic animals?

Wildlife groups keen to see lynx one day roam free under legal reintroductions have been highly critical of lynx being let loose.

Lynx to Scotland, a three-charity partnership working to restore lynx to the Scottish Highlands, has raised serious concerns.

Peter Cairns, executive director of Scotland: The Big Picture, one of the charities involved, said: “The Lynx to Scotland Project is working to secure the return of lynx to the Scottish Highlands, and this illegal and grossly irresponsible act comes at the worst possible time, when stakeholders are engaging in good faith with productive discussions about the potential for a fully resourced legal reintroduction.”

Any official reintroduction would likely involve 20 animals released in phases over eight years.

BBC journalist Nicole Murray, who grew up in the area, said there had been a mixture of reactions from people.

She said: “Some are finding it very funny and saying ‘first there was the monkey now this’.

“But also they are feeling really sorry for the poor animals.

“Locals are mainly just concerned with the welfare of the animals and wondering where they have come from.

“It has been bitterly cold this week.”

Robert Macdonald, a local crofter and National Farmers’ Union representative, said farmers were worried for their sheep and lambs.

He said he had spoken to farmers in Norway in recent times who had lost livestock to lynx.

Mr Macdonald said the illegal release in the Cairngorms had led farmers to bring their sheep to fields where it was easier to monitor them.

“It’s caused a lot of anxiety,” he said.

Lynx are just one of a number of animals to be illegally released, or escaped. Others include:

• Feral pigs – Forestry and Land Scotland and NatureScot believe there are a few thousand of them, with the largest numbers in the Highlands and South of Scotland
• Grey squirrels – A non-native species numbering as many as 200,000, according to Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust
• Non-native deer – It has been estimated there could be 10,000 sika and 1,000-2,000 fallow deer

A selection of news photographs from around the world.

A new tablet being developed to cure intestinal worms has shown promising results in trials and could help eradicate the parasitic infection, which affects about 1.5 billion people globally, researchers say.

The mango-flavoured pill is a combination of two existing anti-parasitic drugs that, used together, appear more effective in getting rid of worms.

These worms are caught through contact with food or water that has been infected by soil contaminated with worm eggs and infections cause severe gastrointestinal symptoms, malnutrition and anaemia.

Researchers say the pill could help overcome any future drug resistance problems and better manage the disease on a large scale.

The parasites, also known as soil-transmitted helminths (STHs), include whipworm and hookworm and are endemic in many developing countries where hygiene levels are poor.

Many of those affected are children and there is no preventative treatment other than better sanitation.

According a study, called “ALIVE”, published in the Lancet, this new pill could help countries most affected reach goals set by the World Health Organization to eliminate the diseases.

It would be taken as a fixed-dose of of either one single pill or three tablets over consecutive days.

Researchers from eight European and African institutions say it would be a simple way to cure large numbers of people in mass treatment programmes.

“It is easy to administer, as it is one single pill,” says project leader Prof Jose Muñoz.

“Also, we hope that combining two drugs with different mechanisms of action will reduce the risk of the parasites becoming drug-resistant,” Prof Muñoz says.

Once a person is infected, the parasites root themselves in people’s digestive tracts.

While the drug albendazole is good at treating some species of STH, it appears to be becoming less effective in tackling some others.

During a clinical trial involving 1,001 children aged between 5-18 in Ethiopia, Kenya and Mozambique, it was found to be more effective on more types of infection when combined with the drug ivermectin.

However, researchers said the results were not conclusive on how well it treated threadworm.

Prof. Hany Elsheikha, an expert in parasitology at the University of Nottingham said the pill could be a “significant improvement over other treatments” and could be used against multiple parasites.

“There are some challenges with existing medications…so this could be a major, major addition.”

However, he said that while the study was “promising”, it had “some gaps”.

“We don’t know if the results would be the same for adults, mature people, younger kids, people in other parts of the world.”

The results of the trial have been submitted to regulators in Europe and Africa, with decisions expected in early 2025.

Participants are now being recruited to take part in a further trial on 20,000 people in Kenya and Ghana.

Dr Stella Kepha, a researcher at Kenya Medical Research Institute who worked on the study said the pill had ” great potential for improving the health of affected communities” but that there was still “work to do” to widely roll out the treatment.

Making working people in Britain better off will be at the “forefront” of the chancellor’s mind during her visit to China, the Treasury has said, despite criticism of her decision to make the trip.

Rachel Reeves will meet her opposite number in Beijing this weekend to explore trade and investment opportunities as part of efforts to grow the UK economy and raise living standards.

The trip has been overshadowed by UK borrowing costs hitting a 16-year high and a fall in the value of the pound, with the Conservatives accusing Reeves of having “fled to China”.

Speaking during a visit to UK bike maker Brompton’s Beijing store, Reeves said she would not alter her economic plans.

“Growth is the number one mission of this government,” she said.

“The fiscal rules laid out in the Budget are non-negotiable. Economic stability is the bedrock for economic growth and prosperity.”

But the market movements create a potential problem for Reeves if she wants to meet her self-imposed fiscal rules. She has pledged not to borrow to fund day-to-day spending and to get debt falling as a share of national income by the end of this parliament.

Governments generally spend more than they raise in tax so they borrow money to fill the gap, usually by selling bonds to investors.

But UK borrowing costs have been rising in recent months and this week the cost of borrowing over 10 years hit its highest level since 2008. The pound also dropped on Friday to below $1.22.

The market turbulence also comes as growth in the UK economy has been stagnant and businesses are bracing themselves for tax rises due to come into effect in April.

The Treasury said Reeves’ visit to China delivered on a “commitment to explore deeper economic co-operation” between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and President Xi, made last year.

China is the world’s second largest economy and the UK’s fourth largest single trading partner. According to the Treasury, exports to the country supported more than 455,000 UK jobs in 2020.

But officials said the chancellor would also raise “difficult issues” with her counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, which include urging China to stop its “material and economic support” for Russia’s war against Ukraine, as well as raising concerns about people’s rights and freedoms in Hong Kong.

“By finding common ground on trade and investment while being candid about our differences and upholding national security as the first duty of this government, we can build a long-term economic relationship with China that works in the national interest,” Reeves said in a statement.

In addition to expanding current financial services trade in Shanghai, the government said talks would look to “bring down barriers” that British businesses face in trying to export or expand to China.

Reeves will be joined by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority Nikhil Rathi and other senior representatives from some of Britain’s biggest financial services firms.

But the visit also comes after MPs challenged Chinese-founded fashion retailer Shein over its supply chains amid allegations of forced labour and human rights abuses. Shein has denied the claims.

On Tuesday, a senior lawyer representing Shein repeatedly refused to say whether the company sold products containing cotton from the Xinjiang region, an area in which China has been accused of subjecting Uyghur Muslims to forced labour.

On a clear day, the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv are visible from the hill above Karnei Shomron, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.

“I do feel different from Tel Aviv,” said Sondra Baras, who has lived in Karnei Shomron for almost 40 years. “I’m living in a place where my ancestors lived thousands of years ago. I do not live in occupied territory; I live in Biblical Judea and Samaria.”

For many settlers here, the line between the State of Israel, and the territory it captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war, has been erased from their narrative.

The visitors’ audio-guide at the hill-top viewpoint describes the West Bank as “a region of Israel” and the Palestinian city of Nablus as the place where God promised the land to the Jews.

But formal annexation of this territory has so far remained a dream for settlers like Sondra, even while settlements – viewed as illegal by the UN’s top court and most other countries – have mushroomed year after year.

Now many see an opportunity to go further, with the election of Donald Trump as the next US president.

“I was thrilled that Trump won,” Sondra told me. “I very much want to extend sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. And I feel that’s something Trump could support.”

There are signs that some in his incoming administration might agree with her.

Mike Huckabee, nominated as Trump’s new ambassador to Israel, signalled his support for Israeli claims on the West Bank in an interview last year.

“When people use the term ‘occupied’, I say: ‘Yes, Israel is occupying the land, but it’s the occupation of a land that God gave them 3,500 years ago. It is their land,'” he said.

Yisrael Gantz, head of the regional settlement council that oversees Karnei Shomron, says he has already noticed a change in tone from the incoming Trump administration as a result of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, which triggered the war on Gaza.

“Both here in Israel and in the US, they understand that we must apply sovereignty here,” he told me. “It’s a process. I can’t tell you it will be tomorrow. But in my eyes, the dream of a two-state solution is dead.”

US President Joe Biden has always maintained the US position in support of a future Palestinian state alongside Israel. Asked whether he was hearing something different from the incoming Trump administration, Mr Gantz replied, “Of course, yes.”

But there are also signs that Israelis lobbying for annexation of the West Bank – some of them in cabinet positions – might be disappointed in Trump’s decisions.

Their hopes have been fuelled by memories of his first term as president, during which he broke with decades of US policy – and international consensus – by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which were captured from Syria in 1967.

But supporting annexation of the West Bank would be a much bigger and thornier issue for Trump.

It would likely alienate Washington’s other key ally, Saudi Arabia, complicating Trump’s chances for a wider regional deal.

It could also alienate some moderate Republicans in the US Congress, concerned about the impact on West Bank Palestinians, and their future status under Israeli rule.

Settler leader Sondra Baras told me that West Bank Palestinians who did not want to live in Israel could “go wherever they want”.

Challenged on why they should leave their homeland, she said: “I’m not kicking them out, but things change. How many wars did they start? And they lost.”

“If sovereignty were to go forward, there would be a lot of yelling and screaming, absolutely,” she continued. “But at some point, you create a fact that’s irreversible.”

Shortly after Trump’s election victory last November, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, publicly called for annexing the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“2025 must be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he said.

Whether or not the new US president agrees, many Palestinians say discussion of formal annexation misses the point – that Israel is, in practice, already annexing territory here.

One of them is Mohaib Salameh. He leads me across the rubble of his family home, built on private Palestinian land, on the outskirts of Nablus. The building was ruled illegal by an Israeli court last year and demolished.

Israel has full control over security and planning in 60% of the West Bank on an interim basis, as outlined in the Oslo peace accords three decades ago.

While settlements are expanding, permits for Palestinian homes are almost never granted. And lawyers say demolitions like this are increasing.

“This is all part of policies to force us to leave,” Mohaib said. “It’s a policy of forced migration. What difference does it make to them [Israelis] if I build here or not? We pose no threat to them.”

Palestinians are also increasingly being forced off their land by violent Israeli settlers – who have been sanctioned by the US and UK, but largely left unchallenged by Israeli courts at home.

Activists say more than 20 Palestinian communities in the West Bank have been expelled over the past few years by increasingly violent attacks, and that settlers are now encroaching into new areas outside Israel’s interim civil control.

Mohaib told me that no US president had ever protected Palestinians, and that he doesn’t believe Donald Trump will either.

America’s next president is widely seen as a friend of Israel.

But he’s also a man who also likes closing deals – and avoiding conflicts.

A teenage artist who has already sold works for £23,000 has just passed another milestone – her first ever painting lesson.

Makenzy Beard, 17, made waves back in 2020 when a portrait she painted of her neighbour went viral on social media.

The painting went on to appear at The Royal Academy of Arts, a prestigious London gallery.

She said she had learned “some quite important habits” after the lesson and was determined to continue refining her work.

“I’ve learned a little bit more about impressionism – so, not trying to make everything so realistic all the time, which I find difficult,” she said.

“Up until now, I’ve taught everything myself – just what feels right, what I find easier, watching YouTube videos and stuff like that. I got to a point where I felt like I wasn’t improving anymore.

“So, I went on this course and if I’m honest, I found it so difficult.

“I still had freedom and I could do what I wanted, but there were some things I was told… there is sort of a right and wrong way to do things, or at least, that’s how to make it easier for yourself further down the line.”

Ms Beard first took up painting canvases during lockdown in March 2020, using her mum’s old paints from the comfort of a leaky garden shed.

At the age of just 14 she launched her career as an artist, with her work now being sold to fans across the globe.

Art enthusiasts in the Middle East, the US and the UK have expressed interest in her work.

Her recent exhibition at Blackwater Gallery in Cardiff included ten original artworks as well as a collection of six prints.

The originals attracted buyers paying up to £23,000 for her work.

Since then, Ms Beard has sought to develop her art further – she joined Millfield boarding school on an art and hockey scholarship in 2023, and began painting lessons to help develop her style and technique.

“I’ve picked up some weird little things, like understanding that it’s better to use longer brushes when you want to paint something more freely,” she said.

“These are things you would completely overlook had you not been told to do that.

“I’ve never understood colour theory or anything – I just did whatever I fancied, but it’s helped me to understand that.

“How to mute things down, and more technical things that I was maybe doing intuitively to begin with. It helped me to understand what I was already doing and then making that better.”

As well as improving her own technique, Ms Beard wants to help other young artists develop their craft.

She has donated three paintings to a charity auction taking place on 28 February at the Atkinson Gallery in Street, Somerset.

The pieces will raise money for Millfield’s Discover Brilliance campaign – the very scholarship Ms Beard received to help her on her own artistic path.

“I really want other young people to be given the same opportunity I was, and so this is going to be my way of giving back,” she said.

“I’m in a very fortunate position to be able to go to such a good school, and I wouldn’t have been able to go had I not been financially supported.

“That’s not a reason I want someone else to not reach their full potential.”

Most of the US intelligence community believe it is “very unlikely” an international power is linked to mysterious symptoms experienced by US diplomats and their families.

However, in a new report published on Friday, two of the seven US intelligence agencies and departments say foreign actors could have developed radiofrequency technology associated with “Havana Syndrome” symptoms experienced by US diplomats and their families.

US officials said the two intelligence bodies “changed their judgement” based on new reporting on the progress of international energy research programmes.

The mysterious illness has affected US personnel stationed around the globe in recent years.

One intelligence body (it is not specified which one) said new information makes it “likely” that a foreign actor could use radio frequency to cause “biological effects” consistent with some of the Havana Syndrome symptoms.

In their latest assessment the US intelligence community continue to look into those symptoms, known as “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs).

Those affected have reported unexplained symptoms such as dizziness. The US intelligence community emphasised that it is not calling into question “the experiences or suffering” of US diplomats and their families.

However, the intelligence community said it continues to hold the view that, according to medical research, the symptoms – or AHIs – reported by those affected “do not have a consistent set of physical injuries”.

And five of the seven intelligence agencies and departments deemed it was “very unlikely” that a foreign actor used “a novel weapon or prototype device to harm even a subset” of US personnel and their families.

Havana Syndrome was first publicly reported in 2016, when US diplomats in Cuba reported getting sick and hearing piercing sounds at night.

Other cases have been reported around the world, from Washington to China.

Such reports sparked speculation of an attack by a foreign power using an unspecified sonar weapon.

The reasoning behind the change in stance by two of the US intelligence bodies is laid out in Friday’s report.

One intelligence body said there is a “roughly even chance” that a foreign power used “a novel weapon or prototype device to harm a small, undetermined subset” of US personnel and their families, who then “reported medical symptoms or sensory phenomena as AHIs”, as quoted by the assessment.

The second intelligence community agency or department to make a similar argument agreed that there is a “roughly even chance” that a foreign actor would have developed a novel weapon “that could have harmed a small, undetermined subset” of US personnel and their families.

But the intelligence body stopped short of linking it to the reported Havana Syndrome phenomena, saying it is “unlikely a foreign actor has deployed such a weapon in any events reported as possible AHIs”.

Three women who were left devastated by historical child sexual exploitation in Oldham have told the BBC ministers should have spoken to survivors before deciding not to conduct a government-led inquiry into grooming gangs in the town.

Jane and Amelia, who survived abuse more than 15 years ago, and Sarah, whose son was exploited in the town while he was in care, called on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to meet them and hear their stories.

Ministers rejected Oldham Council’s request to conduct an inquiry, saying the council should lead it.

A government spokesperson said it would “always be guided” by survivors and that Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips would continue to engage with victims.

But they added “many victims have said they do not want to see another national inquiry – they want action now”.

Jane and Amelia said they would like to see a full national inquiry, because they feel it is important to cover the experiences of survivors across the country.

Sarah, whose son was abused in his teens and died more than 10 years later, would have liked a government-led inquiry into abuse in Oldham, but would accept a local one if it is properly funded.

“This isn’t for anyone’s political gain. This is about real human beings,” Amelia said.

The government has resisted calls from the Conservatives and Reform for a new national inquiry, saying that implementing recommendations from a 2022 report conducted by Prof Alexis Jay into child sexual abuse is its priority.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said a new national inquiry would help focus on grooming gangs, where the Jay report did not.

Billionaire Elon Musk has criticised the UK government over its response to grooming gangs on his social media platform X.

Amelia said that, even though she did not agree with many of Musk’s beliefs, she was “glad” he had highlighted the issue.

Last weekend, Phillips and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper confirmed the council had started its own inquiry.

The Greater Manchester authority also undertook an independent review into sex abuse in Oldham in 2022, and found victims had been failed by the council and Greater Manchester Police.

Ministers have suggested they are keeping an open mind about a future national investigation if it becomes clear that survivors want one.

• Victims want action, child abuse inquiry chair says
• All 20 recommendations from national child sex abuse inquiry outstanding

Jane was 12 when she moved to Oldham. She made friends with a girl older than her who introduced her to a man in his late forties.

“He started coming round, buying me phones, telling me not tell my parents,” she said, “then he started introducing me to his friends.”

Now more than a decade later, Jane struggles to recall in detail the number of men involved – but says for six years she was abused by a British-Pakistani grooming gang.

“There was one specific incident when I was plied with alcohol, plied with drugs, and I could not move. There were a group of men coming in and out of the room, I think there must have been four or five, basically raping me.”

Jane told her mum, the police, the council and her social worker about what was going on.

“At one point, when the police had turned up, there was an illegal immigrant with me and they came and arrested me for prostitution,” she said.

Jane left Oldham several years later.

“After a certain amount of time you lose respect for yourself and it becomes a normality,” Jane said, fighting back tears.

“When you are a child, you don’t really understand, but when you get older and you look back, I felt like it was me against the world.”

As far as Jane knows, none of the men who abused her have been jailed.

Amelia was still at school when she was trafficked across the country for sex with multiple men a night.

The people who took her were white British, but she said those who abused her were from every background, race and class.

“There isn’t just one narrative – the Pakistani grooming gangs,” she said. “It is not anything to do with nationality or race.”

Her experience was not reflected in Oldham’s 2022 review on grooming. She strongly feels more work needs to be done to increase awareness of the sexual exploitation of minors.

Amelia described the impact grooming has had on her life. Her children have been taken into care, she has struggled to maintain relationships and has been in and out of psychiatric support.

“I don’t even class myself as a human being anymore,” she said. “I’m damaged goods, I’m broken.”

She has also echoed Jane and Sarah’s desire to meet the government on this issue.

“I’d love the opportunity to speak to those senior people who are making decisions on our lives, to meet or speak to them personally,” she said.

Sarah’s 13-year-old son reported being sexually abused while he was a looked-after child in Oldham in the 2000s.

“He’d gone locally into a business where it was easy to buy cigarettes and alcohol and that is where the grooming started,” she said.

Her son was told he had to pay for the items by doing what the British-Pakistani owner wanted. She added the care home knew about the arrangement but did not question it.

“It totally destroyed him,” she said. “He just wasn’t the child he was to start with. He was a shadow of his former self.”

In 2021, Sarah says he was going through the process of reporting the abuse to police but had a cardiac arrest and died.

“I feel like I let him down in his life and I don’t think it’s right I don’t get justice for him just because he’s not here,” she said. “He is just as important as every other victim.”

Councillor Arooj Shah, leader of Oldham Council, said the new local independent inquiry will build on the findings of the Greater Manchester review.

“We’re working closely with survivors and survivors’ families to ensure they don’t just have a voice, but will have a central role in developing this inquiry. We expect terms of reference to be agreed in the coming months,” Shah said.

Greater Manchester Police Assistant Chief Constable Steph Parker said “we absolutely recognise the lifelong impact of child sexual exploitation, which is why we are so committed to protecting victims and pursuing offenders. This is a tragic example that demonstrates the devastating trauma that comes with such horrific abuse.”

Parker said child protection “is the priority” for the force today, with several ongoing.

“We have several ongoing victim-focused, non-recent CSE investigations being led by specialist investigators, which have led to over 100 arrests. Time is no barrier to action.”

The government spokesperson added: “Because we know there is not a binary approach to this, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women [Jess Phillips] will continue to engage with victims, to ensure their views are represented and justice can be delivered.”

Wildfires are ripping across parts of Los Angeles, leading to at least 11 deaths, burning down hundreds of buildings, and prompting evacuation orders for tens of thousands across the county.

Despite the efforts of thousands of firefighters, the biggest blazes remain mostly uncontained.

Weather conditions and the underlying impact of climate change are expected to continue fanning the flames for days to come, and there is intense scrutiny of officials’ preparedness for the disaster.

Authorities say they expect the death toll will increase.

In Los Angeles County, some 153,000 people are under evacuation orders as of Friday. Many of them fled their homes with just the belongings they could carry.

Another 166,000 residents are under evacuation warning, meaning they may need to leave their homes soon.

More than 10,000 buildings have been razed by the fires, which are the most destructive in the history of LA.

A further 60,000 are also at risk. Insured losses are expected to be above $8bn (£6.5bn) because of the high value of the properties damaged.

A man was arrested on Thursday afternoon after residents suspected that he was attempting to start a new fire.

Police said he was charged with a probation violation but that there was not enough probable cause to charge him with arson, and an investigation continues.

The causes of the original fires are not yet known.

National Guard troops have been deployed in some parts of the city to prevent looting in evacuated areas, with more set to be deployed, and there have been 20 arrests, according to police.

Celebrities who have lost their homes include Mel Gibson, Leighton Meester and Adam Brody, who attended the Golden Globes just days ago, actor James Woods and Paris Hilton.

• Follow live updates as fierce winds threaten more fire destruction
• Watch: Man films escape from fires with elderly father-in-law
• What’s the latest on the LA fires, and why can’t they be put out?
• Maps and images reveal scale of wildfire devastation

There are at least five fires raging in the wider area, according to California fire officials:

• Palisades: The first fire to erupt on Tuesday and the biggest in the region, which could become the most destructive fire in state history. It has scorched a sizable part of land, covering more than 21,000 acres, including the upmarket Pacific Palisades neighbourhood. It was 8% contained as of Friday morning
• Eaton: It has struck the northern part of Los Angeles, blazing through cities such as Altadena. It’s the second biggest fire in the area, burning nearly 14,000 acres. It is 3% contained
• Hurst: Located just north of San Fernando, it began burning on Tuesday night and has grown to 771 acres, and is 70% contained
• Lidia: It broke out on Wednesday afternoon in the mountainous Acton area north of Los Angeles and grew to cover almost 400 acres. Authorities say it has been 98% contained
• Kenneth: This new fire broke out on Thursday on the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It so far covers more than 1,000 acres. Authorities said its progress has been stopped and it has been 50% contained, with no structures damaged or destroyed

The earlier Sunset, Woodley and Olivas fires have been contained.

A political row about the city’s preparedness has erupted after reports that some firefighters’ hoses ran dry, provoking criticism from US President-elect Donald Trump.

• Fact-checking criticism of California Democrats over fires

In Pasadena, around 11 miles (18km) north-east of downtown LA, Fire Chief Chad Augustin said the area experienced a short period of time where pressure was low on a small amount of hydrants. All issues had been resolved, he said.

He attributed the issue to multiple fire engines drawing water at the same time, as well as a loss of power lowering pressure.

Hydrants also ran out of water for a time in the more elevated parts of Pacific Palisades.

California Governor Gavin Newsom said Friday he was ordering an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure and the closure of a reservoir in Pacific Palisades, which was shut for maintenance before the fires began.

Mayor Karen Bass returned to the city from a previously arranged trip to Ghana to find it on fire. She has faced intense questions about the region’s preparedness, her leadership in this crisis, and the water issues.

Before the fires broke out, LA’s fire chief warned in a memo that budget cuts were hampering the department’s ability to respond to emergencies.

Dismay over the fire threat was worsened by an alert that was mistakenly sent to every mobile phone in Los Angeles on Thursday, residents say, prompting anger from some. About 10 million people live in the county.

A second emergency alert warning residents to prepare to evacuate was mistakenly sent out to residents in the early hours of Friday.

During a news conference Friday morning, city authorities said they were investigating why the mass alert was sent out, and urged people not to disable the alert function on their phones, which they said was vital to provide up-to-the-minute emergency information.

A combination of an exceptionally dry period – downtown Los Angeles has only received 0.16 inches (0.4cm) of rain since October – and powerful offshore gusts known as the Santa Ana winds have created ripe conditions for wildfires.

Santa Ana winds flow east to west through southern California’s mountains, according to the National Weather Service.

The winds can also be responsible for the scale of destruction that follows.

Blowing across the deserts further inland, they create conditions where humidity drops, which dries out vegetation. If a fire does start, the winds can fan smouldering embers into an inferno in minutes.

Speeds of 60 to 80mph (95-130km/h) are common, but gusts of up to 100mph (160km/h) can occur.

Although the strongest wind gusts have passed through the region, forecasters have warned another “traditional Santa Ana wind event” will move in on Thursday night local time, according to CBS News.

Investigations into what initially sparked the fires are continuing.

LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman said that the focus of law enforcement is currently on saving lives and homes and assisting firefighters, but that eventually they would turn towards investigating the causes of the fires.

“If it is determined that there is a man-made and intentional setting of any of the fires involved in this situation, the people who committed this arson will be arrested, they will be prosecuted and they will be punished to the full extent of the law,” he said.

Hochman also warned people against looting and flying drones – one struck a firefighting plane, which was damaged but able to land without any injuries – and warned of scams targeting fire victims.

Authorities said a curfew in the evacuation zones will be in place from 18:00 local time to 06:00 Saturday.

Arson is not the only cause of deadly wildfires. Power lines and other utility equipment have sparked some of the most destructive blazes in California’s history. In 2018, the so-called Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 85 people, many of whom died in their cars trying to flee.

There is a glimmer of hope for firefighters, as the fire weather outlook for southern California has been downgraded from “extremely critical” to “critical”.

But BBC weather forecaster Sarah Keith-Lucas says there is no rain forecast in the area for at least the next week, so conditions remain ripe for fire.

Although winds were expected to ease slightly later Friday into Saturday, forecasters warned that they would pick up again on Sunday into Monday.

• ‘Where do I go?’ Chaos as people flee flames
• What are the Santa Ana winds?
• Before and after: How wildfires tore through LA

Although strong winds and lack of rain are driving the blazes, experts say climate change is altering the background conditions and increasing the likelihood of such fires.

Much of the western United States including California experienced a decades-long drought that ended just two years ago, making the region vulnerable.

“Whiplash” swings between dry and wet periods in recent years created a massive amount of tinder-dry vegetation that was ready to burn.

US government research is unequivocal in linking climate change to larger and more severe wildfires in the western US.

“Climate change, including increased heat, extended drought, and a thirsty atmosphere, has been a key driver in increasing the risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says.

Fire season in southern California is generally thought to stretch from May to October – but Gov Newsom has pointed out earlier that blazes had become a perennial issue. “There’s no fire season,” he said. “It’s fire year.”

• A simple guide to climate change
• Stuck in traffic as flames approached: Why LA is hard to evacuate

Have you been affected by the fires in California? Get in touch here.

Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to get exclusive insight on the latest climate and environment news from the BBC’s Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, delivered to your inbox every week. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.

Sitting on the front row of a war court on the US’s Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the world’s most notorious defendants, appeared to listen intently.

“Can you confirm that Mr Mohammed is pleading guilty to all charges and specifications without exceptions or substitutions?” the judge asked his lawyer as Mohammed watched on.

“Yes, we can, Your Honour,” the lawyer responded.

Sitting in court, 59-year-old Mohammed, his beard dyed bright orange and wearing a headdress, tunic and trousers, bore little resemblance to a photo circulated shortly after his capture in 2003.

Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US, had been due to plead guilty this week – more than 23 years after almost 3,000 people were killed in what the US government has described as “the most egregious criminal act on American soil in modern history”.

But two days later, just as Mohammed had been set to formally enter his decision – the product of a controversial deal he struck with US government prosecutors – he instead watched silently as the judge said the proceedings had been paused under the orders of a federal appeals court.

It was expected to be a landmark week for a case that has faced a decade of delays. Now, with a new complication, it continues into an uncertain future.

“It’s going to be the forever trial,” the relative of one of the 9/11 victims said.

Mohammed has previously said that he planned the “9/11 operation from A-to-Z” – conceiving the idea of training pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, leader of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda.

But he has not yet been able to formally admit guilt to the court. This week’s pause comes amid a dispute over a deal reached last year between US prosecutors and his legal team, under which Mohammed would not face a death penalty trial in exchange for his guilty plea.

The US government has for months tried to rescind the agreement, saying that allowing the deal to go ahead would cause “irreparable” harm to both it and the American public. Those in support of the deal see it as the only way forward in a case that has been complicated by the torture that Mohammed and others faced in US custody and questions over whether this taints the evidence.

After a last-minute appeal by prosecutors, a three-judge panel at the federal appeals court called for the delay to give them time to consider the arguments before they would make a decision.

But families of victims had already flown on a once-weekly flight to the base to watch the pleas in a viewing gallery, where thick glass separated them and members of the press from the rest of the sprawling high-security courtroom.

The attendees had won their place at this week’s proceedings through a lottery system. They arranged child care and paid for kennels for their pets to attend – knowing that they could be called off at any minute. They learnt Thursday night while speaking to the media at a hotel on the base that the pleas would no longer go ahead.

Elizabeth Miller, whose father, New York City firefighter Douglas Miller, died in the attacks when she was six years old, said she was in favour of the deal going forward to “bring finality”, but recognised that there were other families who felt it was too lenient.

“What’s so frustrating is that every time this goes back and forth, each camp gets their hopes up and then gets their hopes crushed again,” she said, as other relatives nodded in agreement.

“It’s like a perpetual limbo… It’s like constant whiplash.”

This week’s pause is just the latest in a series of delays, complications and controversies on the base, where the US military has now been holding detainees for 23 years.

The military prison on Guantanamo Bay was established during the “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks that Mohammed is accused of orchestrating. The first detainees were brought there on 11 January 2002.

Then-President George Bush had issued a military order establishing military tribunals to try non-US citizens, saying they could be held without charge indefinitely and could not legally challenge their detention.

Dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, the 20 men were brought to a temporary detention camp called X-Ray, where the cells were exposed cages and the beds mats on the floor.

The camp, surrounded by barbed wire, is now long abandoned and overgrown – weeds are growing on wooden watchtowers and signs along the fence say “off limits” in red text.

While conditions have improved at Guantanamo, it continues to face criticism from the United Nations and rights groups over its treatment of detainees. And it continues to challenge US officials and advocates who hope to see it closed.

As president, Barack Obama pledged to close the prison during his terms, saying it was contrary to US values. These efforts were revived under the Biden administration.

Unlike Mohammed, most people held there since its creation were never charged with any crimes.

The current detention facilities are off limits to journalists, with access only granted to those with security clearance.

A short drive away, there is an Irish pub, a McDonald’s, a bowling alley and a museum, serving military personnel and contractors on the base – the majority of whom have never been inside the prison zone.

As legal teams, journalists and families gathered on the base for Mohammed’s scheduled pleas, a secret early morning operation was conducted to fly a group of 11 Yemeni detainees off of the base for resettlement in Oman.

With that transfer, the base, which once held almost 800 detainees, now holds just 15 – the lowest number in its history.

Of those remaining, all but six have been charged or convicted of war crimes, with lawyers arguing their cases in complex legal battles at the base’s high-security courtrooms.

As the court was dismissed on Friday, the judge said that Mohammed’s pleas, if allowed to go ahead, would now fall into the next US administration.

A woman in Australia has annulled her marriage after realising that a fake wedding ceremony she took part in for a social media stunt was in fact real.

The unknowing bride said her partner was a social media influencer who convinced her to take part in the ceremony as a “prank” for his Instagram account.

She only discovered the marriage was genuine when he tried to use it to gain permanent residency in Australia.

A Melbourne judge granted the annulment after accepting the woman was tricked into getting married, in a judgement published on Thursday.

The bizarre case began in September 2023 when the woman met her partner on an online dating platform. They began seeing each other regularly in Melbourne, where they lived at the time.

In December that year, the man proposed to the woman and she accepted.

Two days later, the woman attended an event with the man in Sydney. She was told it would be a “white party” – where attendees would wear white-coloured clothing – and was told to pack a white dress.

But when they arrived she was “shocked” and “furious” to find no other guests present except for her partner, a photographer, the photographer’s friend and a celebrant, according to her deposition quoted in court documents.

“So when I got there, and I didn’t see anybody in white, I asked him, ‘What’s happening?’. And he pulled me aside, and he told me that he’s organising a prank wedding for his social media, to be precise, Instagram, because he wants to boost his content, and wants to start monetising his Instagram page,” she said.

She said she had accepted his explanation as “he was a social media person” who had more than 17,000 followers on Instagram. She also believed that a civil marriage would be valid only if it were held in a court.

Still, she remained concerned. The woman rang a friend and voiced her worries, but the friend “laughed it off” and said it would be fine because, if it were real, they would have had to file a notice of intended marriage first, which they had not.

Reassured, the woman went through the ceremony where she and her partner exchanged wedding vows and kissed in front of a camera. She said she was happy at that time to “play along” to “make it look real”.

Two months later, her partner asked her to add him as a dependant in her application for permanent residency in Australia. Both of them are foreigners.

When she told him she could not as they were technically not married, he then revealed that their Sydney wedding ceremony had been genuine, according to the woman’s testimony.

The woman later found their marriage certificate, and discovered a notice of intended marriage which had been filed the month before their Sydney trip – before they even got engaged – which she said she did not sign. According to the court documents, the signature on the notice bears little resemblance to the woman’s.

“I’m furious with the fact that I didn’t know that that was a real marriage, and the fact that he also lied from the beginning, and the fact that he also wanted me to add him in my application,” she said.

In his deposition, the man claimed they had “both agreed to these circumstances” and that following his proposal the woman had agreed to marry him at an “intimate ceremony” in Sydney.

The judge ruled that the woman was “mistaken about the nature of the ceremony performed” and “did not provide real consent to her participation” in the marriage.

“She believed she was acting. She called the event ‘a prank’. It made perfect sense for her to adopt the persona of a bride in all things at the impugned ceremony so as to enhance the credibility of the video depicting a legally valid marriage,” he stated in the judgement.

The marriage was annulled in October 2024.

Firefighters are battling to control huge wildfires in Los Angeles that have killed at least 10 people, devoured thousands of buildings and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes.

It’s a rapidly changing situation – these maps and pictures show the scale of the challenge, where the fires are and the damage they have caused.

The largest blaze, in the Pacific Palisades area is the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history. Almost 20,000 acres have now burnt.

Placing the area affected on to maps of New York and London gives a sense of how big that is, stretching from Clapham to Greenwich in the UK’s capital, or across large areas of lower Manhattan and Queens.

Five fires are currently burning in the Los Angeles area.

• Palisades fire: The largest active fire is burning between Santa Monica and Malibu. Burnt area: 20,438 acres. More than 5,300 structures destroyed. At least 30,000 people evacuated.

• Eaton fire: Second largest fire burning north of Pasadena. Burnt area: 13,956 acres. Potentially more than 4,000 structures damaged or destroyed. Five deaths reported.

• Kenneth fire: In the West Hills area, just north of the Palisades. Began on Thursday afternoon and has so far burned 1,000 acres.

• Hurst fire: To the north east of the city. Burnt area: 771 acres.

• Lidia fire: Reported in the hills north of Los Angeles. Burnt area: 395 acres.

But three fires have been contained.

Woodley fire: Small fire reported in local parkland. Burnt area: 30 acres.

Olivas fire: Small fire first reported in Ventura county about 50 miles (80km) east of Los Angeles. Burnt area: 11 acres.

Sunset fire: Reported in the historic Hollywood Hills area near many famous landmarks, including the Hollywood sign. Burnt area: 43 acres.

Officials say more than 10,000 structures have been destroyed by the two biggest fires – about 5,000 each in the Palisades and Eaton blazes.

As the maps below show, the fires are largely burning uninhabited areas but they have spread into populated areas and many more buildings could be at risk depending on how the infernos spread.

Among the buildings already destroyed in the Palisades blaze are many of the exclusive properties that line the Malibu waterfront.

Slide your cursor across the image below to see an aerial view of what the area used to look like and what it looks like now.

Both the Palisades and Eaton fires can be seen from space, as shown in the satellite image below.

A combination of an exceptionally dry period – downtown Los Angeles has only received 0.16 inches (0.4cm) of rain since October – and powerful offshore gusts known as the Santa Ana winds have created ripe conditions for wildfires.

Santa Ana winds flow east to west through southern California’s mountains, according to the National Weather Service.

Blowing across the deserts further inland, they create conditions where humidity drops, which dries out vegetation. If a fire does start, the winds can fan smouldering embers into an inferno in minutes.

The map below shows just how rapidly the Palisades fire spread, intensifying in a matter of hours. At just after 14:00 on Tuesday it covered 772 acres and within four hours it had approximately tripled in size.

The Palisades fire now covers almost 20,000 acres and thousands of people have been forced to evacuate the area, as more than 1,400 firefighters try to tackle the blaze.

The Eaton fire has also grown rapidly from about 1,000 acres on Tuesday to more than 13,000 acres, forcing thousands more people to flee.

• Follow latest updates on the LA wildfires
• What’s the latest on the fires, and what caused them?
• Watch: Smoke billows as thousands evacuate in LA
• Timelapse shows rapid spread of Palisades wildfire
• Watch: Inside a neighbourhood totally lost in inferno
• Pacific Palisades: The celebrity LA area ravaged by wildfire

Photographers have also been capturing the heartbreaking level of damage the fires have caused on the ground – as these before-and-after photos demonstrate.

The Jewish Temple in Pasadena was destroyed by the Eaton fire. The Centre’s website says it has been in use since 1941 and has a congregation of more than 400 families.

With authorities still working to contain the fires, the scope of the losses is still unfolding but they are on track to be among the costliest in US history, with losses already expected to exceed $135bn (£109.7bn).

There is a glimmer of hope for firefighters, as the fire weather outlook for southern California has been downgraded from “extremely critical” to “critical”.

But BBC weather forecaster Sarah Keith-Lucas says there is no rain forecast in the area for at least the next week, so conditions remain ripe for fire.

Three decades ago, the world was on the brink of a nuclear showdown – until Jimmy Carter showed up in North Korea.

In June 1994, the former US president arrived for talks in Pyongyang with then leader Kim Il-sung. It was unprecedented, marking the first time a former or sitting US president had visited.

But it was also an extraordinary act of personal intervention, one which many believe narrowly averted a war between the US and North Korea that could have cost millions of lives. And it led to a period of greater engagement between Pyongyang and the West.

All this may not have happened if not for a set of diplomatic chess moves by Carter, who died aged 100 on 29 December.

“Kim Il-sung and Bill Clinton were stumbling into a conflict, and Carter leapt into the breach, successfully finding a path for negotiated resolution of the standoff,” North Korean expert John Delury, of Yonsei University, told the BBC.

In early 1994, tensions were running high between Washington and Pyongyang, as officials tried to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear programme.

US intelligence agencies suspected that despite ongoing talks, North Korea may have secretly developed nuclear weapons.

Then, in a startling announcement, North Korea said it had begun withdrawing thousands of fuel rods from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor for reprocessing. This violated an earlier agreement with the US under which such a move required the presence of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear watchdog.

North Korea also announced it would withdraw from the IAEA.

American suspicion spiked as Washington believed Pyongyang was preparing a weapon, and US officials broke off negotiations. Washington began preparing several retaliatory measures, including initiating UN sanctions and reinforcing troops in South Korea.

In subsequent interviews, US officials revealed they also contemplated dropping a bomb or shooting a missile at Yongbyon – a move which they knew would have likely resulted in war on the Korean peninsula and the destruction of the South’s capital, Seoul.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Carter made his move.

For years, he had been quietly wooed by Kim Il-sung, who had sent him personal entreaties to visit Pyongyang. In June 1994, upon hearing Washington’s military plans, and following discussions with his contacts in the US government and China – North Korea’s main ally – Carter decided to finally accept Kim’s invitation.

“I think we were on the verge of war,” he told the US public broadcaster PBS years later. “It might very well have been a second Korean War, within which a million people or so could have been killed, and a continuation of the production of nuclear fissile material… if we hadn’t had a war.”

Carter’s visit was marked by skillful diplomatic footwork – and brinkmanship.

First, Carter had to test Kim’s sincerity. He made a series of requests, all of which were agreed to, except the last: Carter wanted to travel to Pyongyang from Seoul across the demilitarised zone (DMZ), a strip of land that acts as a buffer between the two Koreas.

“Their immediate response was that no-one had ever done this for the last 43 years, that even the United Nations secretary-general had to go to Pyongyang through Beijing. And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going, then’,” he said.

A week later, Kim caved.

The next step for Carter was harder – convincing his own government to let him go. Robert Gallucci, the chief US negotiator with North Korea at the time, later said there was “discomfort in almost all quarters” about the US essentially “subcontracting its foreign policy” to a former president.

Carter first sought permission from the State Department, who blanked him. Unfazed, he decided to simply inform then-US president Bill Clinton that he was going, no matter what.

He had an ally in vice-president Al Gore, who intercepted Carter’s communication to Clinton. “[Al Gore] called me on the phone and told me if I would change the wording from “I’ve decided to go” to “I’m strongly inclined to go” that he would try to get permission directly from Clinton… he called me back the next morning and said that I had permission to go.”

The trip was on.

On 15 June 1994, Carter crossed over to North Korea, accompanied by his wife Rosalyn, a small group of aides and a TV crew.

Meeting Kim was a moral dilemma for Carter.

“I had despised Kim Il-sung for 50 years. I was in a submarine in the Pacific during the Korean War, and many of my fellow servicemen were killed in that war, which I thought was precipitated unnecessarily by him,” he told PBS.

“And so I had very serious doubts about him. When I arrived, though, he treated me with great deference. He was obviously very grateful that I had come.”

Over several days, the Carters had meetings with Kim, were taken on a sightseeing tour of Pyongyang and went on a cruise on a luxury yacht owned by Kim’s son, Kim Jong-il.

Carter discovered his hunch was right: North Korea not only feared a US military strike on Yongbyon, but was also ready to mobilise.

“I asked [Kim’s advisers] specifically if they had been making plans to go to war. And they responded very specifically, ‘Yes, we were’,” he said.

“North Korea couldn’t accept the condemnation of their country and the embarrassment of their leader and that they would respond.

“And I think this small and self-sacrificial country and the deep religious commitments that you had, in effect, to their revered leader, their Great Leader as they called him, meant that they were willing to make any sacrifice of massive deaths in North Korea in order to preserve their integrity and their honour, which would have been a horrible debacle in my opinion.”

Carter presented a list of demands from Washington as well as his own suggestions. They included resuming negotiations with the US, starting direct peace talks with South Korea, a mutual withdrawal of military forces, and helping the US find remains of US soldiers buried in North Korean territory.

“He agreed to all of them. And so, I found him to be very accommodating,” Carter said. “So far as I know then and now, he was completely truthful with me.”

Crucially, Carter came up with a deal where North Korea would stop its nuclear activity, allow IAEA inspectors back into its reactors, and eventually dismantle Yongbyon’s facilities. In return, the US and its allies would build light-water reactors in North Korea, which could generate nuclear energy but not produce material for weapons.

While enthusiastically embraced by Pyongyang, the deal was met with reluctance from US officials when Carter suggested it in a phone call. He then told them he was going on CNN to announce details of the deal – leaving the Clinton administration little choice but to agree.

Carter would later justify forcing his own government’s hand by saying he had to “consummate a resolution of what I considered to be a very serious crisis”. But it did not go down well back home – officials were unhappy at Carter’s “freelancing” and attempt to “box in” Clinton, according to Mr Gallucci.

Near the end of the trip, they told him to convey a statement to the North Koreans, reiterating Clinton’s public position that the US was continuing to press for UN sanctions. Carter disagreed, according to reports at that time.

Hours later, he got on the boat with Kim, and promptly went off-script. As TV cameras rolled, he told Kim the US had stopped work on drafting UN sanctions – directly contradicting Clinton.

An annoyed White House swiftly disowned Carter. Some openly expressed frustration, painting a picture of a former president going rogue. “Carter is hearing what he wants to hear… he is creating his own reality,” a senior official complained at the time to The Washington Post.

Many in Washington also criticised him for the deal itself, saying the North Koreans had used him.

But Carter’s savvy use of the news media to pressure the Clinton administration worked. By broadcasting his negotiations almost instantaneously, he gave the US government little time to react, and immediately after his trip “it was possible to see an almost hour-by-hour evolution in US policy towards North Korea” where they ratcheted down their tone, wrote CNN reporter Mike Chinoy who covered Carter’s trip.

Though Carter later claimed he had misspoken on the sanctions issue, he also responded with typical stubbornness to the blowback.

“When I got back to Seoul, I was amazed and distressed at the negative reaction that I had from the White House. They urged me not to come to Washington to give a briefing, urged me to go directly to… my home,” he said.

But he went against their wishes.

“I decided that what I had to offer was too important to ignore.”

A final dramatic coda to the episode happened a month later.

On 9 July 1994, on the same day as US and North Korean officials sat down in Geneva to talk, state media flashed a stunning announcement: Kim Il-sung had died of a heart attack.

Carter’s deal was immediately plunged into uncertainty. But negotiators ploughed through, and weeks later hammered out a formal plan known as the Agreed Framework.

Though the agreement broke down in 2003, it was notable for freezing Pyongyang’s nuclear programme for nearly a decade.

Robert Carlin, a former CIA and US state department official who led delegations in negotiations with North Korea, noted that Carter’s real achievement was in getting the US government to co-operate.

“Carter was, more or less, pushing on an open door in North Korea. It was Washington that was the bigger challenge… if anything, Carter’s intervention helped stop the freight train of US decision-making that was hurtling toward a cliff,” he told the BBC.

Carter’s visit was also significant for opening a path for rapprochement, which led to several trips later, including one in 2009 when he travelled with Clinton to bring home captured US journalists.

He is also credited with paving the way for Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un – Kim Il-sung’s grandson – in 2018, as “Carter made it imaginable” that a sitting US president could meet with a North Korean leader, Dr Delury said.

That summit failed, and of course, in the long run Carter’s trip did not succeed in removing the spectre of nuclear war, which has only grown – these days North Korea has missiles regarded as capable of hitting the US mainland.

But Carter was lauded for his political gamble. It was in sharp contrast to his time in office, when he was criticised for being too passive on foreign policy, particularly with his handling of the Iran hostage crisis.

His North Korea trip “was a remarkable example of constructive diplomatic intervention by a former leader,” Dr Delury said.

His legacy is not without controversy, given the criticism that he took matters in his own hands. His detractors believe he played a risky and complicated game by, as CNN’s Mike Chinoy put it, “seeking to circumvent what he viewed as a mistaken and dangerous US policy by pulling the elements of a nuclear deal together himself”.

But others believe Carter was the right man for the job at the time.

He had “a very strong will power”, but was also “a man of peace inside and out,” said Han S Park, one of several people who helped Carter broker the 1994 trip.

Though his stubbornness also meant that he “did not get along with a lot of people”, ultimately this combination of attributes meant he was the best person “to prevent another occurrence of a Korean War”, Prof Park said.

More than anything, Carter was convinced he was doing the right thing.

“He didn’t let US government clucking and handwringing stop him,” says Robert Carlin. “Carter had guts.”

A hardline Sri Lankan monk who is a close ally of ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has been sentenced to nine months in prison for insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred.

Galagodaatte Gnanasara was convicted on Thursday for the remarks, which date back to 2016.

Sri Lanka rarely convicts Buddhist monks, but this marks the second time that Gnanasara, who has repeatedly been accused of hate crimes and anti-Muslim violence, has been jailed.

The sentence, handed down by the Colombo Magistrate’s Court, comes after a presidential pardon he received in 2019 for a six-year sentence related to intimidation and contempt of court.

Gnanasara was arrested in December for remarks he made during a 2016 media conference, where he made several derogatory remarks against Islam.

On Thursday, the court said that all citizens, regardless of religion, are entitled to the freedom of belief under the Constitution.

He was also given a fine of 1,500 Sri Lankan rupees ($5; £4). Failure to pay the fine would result in an additional month of imprisonment, the court’s ruling added.

Gnanasara has filed an appeal against the sentence. The court rejected a request from his lawyers to free him on bail until a final judgment was made on the appeal.

He was a trusted ally of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was forced to resign and flee abroad following mass protests over the island nation’s economic crisis in 2022.

During Rajapaksa’s presidency, Gnanasara, who also leads a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist group, was appointed head of a presidential task force on legal reforms aimed at protecting religious harmony.

After Rajapaksa’s ouster, Gnanasara was jailed last year for a similar charge related to hate speech against the country’s Muslim minority but was granted bail while appealing his four-year sentence.

In 2018, he was sentenced to six years for contempt of court and intimidating the wife of a political cartoonist who is widely believed to have been disappeared. However, he only served nine months of that sentence because he received a pardon by Maithripala Sirisena who was the country’s president at the time.

Meta and Amazon are axing their diversity programmes, joining firms across corporate America that are rolling back hiring and training initiatives criticised by conservatives, citing legal and political risks.

The move comes just days after Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it was ending a fact-checking programme criticised by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.

In a memo to staff about its decision, which affects, hiring, supplier and training efforts, Meta cited a “shifting legal and policy landscape”.

Walmart and McDonalds are among the other companies to have made similar decisions regarding diversity efforts since Trump won re-election.

In its memo to staff, which was first reported by Axios and confirmed by the BBC, Meta – the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – cited a Supreme Court ruling concerning race in college admissions, while also noting that the term “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) had become “charged”.

The tech giant said it would continue to look for diverse staff, but end its current approach, which seeks to make selections from a pool of diverse candidates.

In a December memo to employees, Amazon said it was “winding down outdated programs and materials” related to representation and inclusion, aiming to complete the process by the end of 2024.

“Rather than have individual groups build programs, we are focusing on programs with proven outcomes — and we also aim to foster a more truly inclusive culture,” Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s VP of inclusive experiences and technology, wrote in the note which was first reported by Bloomberg on Friday.

Financial firms JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock, also pulled out of groups focused on risks from climate change this week.

The moves are a sign of the acceleration of a retreat that started two years ago, as Republicans ramped up attacks on firms such as BlackRock and Disney, accusing them of “woke” progressive activism and threatening political punishment.

Big brands such as Bud Light and Target also faced backlash and boycotts related to their efforts to appeal to LGBTQ customers.

Many of the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives were put in place after the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police.

Recent court decisions have bolstered critics of the programmes, who said that they were discriminatory.

The Supreme Court in 2023 struck down the right for private universities to consider race in admissions decisions.

Another court of appeals ruling invalidated a Nasdaq policy that would have required companies listed on that stock exchange to have at least one woman, racial minority or LGBTQ person on their board or explain why not.

Meta said it was also ending its efforts to work with suppliers who are “diverse” but will instead focus on small and medium-sized companies.

It also plans to stop offering “equity and inclusion” training and instead offer programmes that “mitigate bias for all, no matter your background”.

Meta declined to comment on the memo, news of which was immediately met with both criticism and celebration.

“I’m sitting back and enjoying every second of this,” said conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who has taken credit for successfully campaigning against the policies at companies such as Ford, John Deere and Harley-Davidson.

LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign said workplace inclusion policies help to attract and retain top staff and had been “directly tied to long-term business growth”.

“Those who abandon these commitments are shirking their responsibility to their employees, consumers, and shareholders” RaShawn “Shawnie” Hawkins, the senior director of the HRC Foundation’s Workplace Equality Program said.

Meta’s move comes just days after the tech giant said it was ending a fact-checking programme criticised by Trump and Republicans and elevated conservatives to key leadership positions.

In a nearly three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said he had always been concerned about being the arbiter of “truth” and was “ill-prepared” when the issue first heated up after the 2016 election.

He said the demands to take down information became unreasonable under the Biden administration. For example, he said the company faced pressure during the pandemic to remove content like statements about vaccine side effects.

That helped to generate a wider political backlash, he said, including his own.

“I feel like I have much greater command now of what I think the policies should be,” he said, adding that he felt the US government “should be defending its companies … not be the tip of the spear attacking”.

“When the US does that to its tech industry, it’s basically just open season around the rest of the world,” he added.

The US has announced an increased $25m (£20.4m) reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on the day he was sworn in for a third six-year term in office.

The inauguration ceremony was overshadowed by recrimination from the international community and Venezuelan opposition leaders.

Rewards have also been offered for information leading to the arrest and or conviction of Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. A new reward of up to $15m for Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino has also been offered.

The UK also issued sanctions on 15 top Venezuelan officials, including judges, members of the security forces and military officials.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said those sanctioned were responsible for “undermining democracy, the rule of law, and human rights violations”.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy went on to describe Maduro’s regime as “fraudulent”.

Also on Friday, the EU said it was extending “restrictive measures” against Venezuela because of “the lack of progress… leading to the restoration of democracy and the rule of law”. The bloc also sanctioned a further 15 Venezuelan officials.

Canada also imposed fresh sanctions in what Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly called Maduro’s “shameless actions”.

Joly said Canada “will not tolerate the erosion of the democratic process or the repression of citizens seeking to express their rights”.

Maduro and his government have repeatedly denounced many of the allegations made by Western countries and opposition leaders.

The reward from the US cites narcotics and corruption charges dating back to 2020.

In 2020, the US charged Maduro, and other senior officials in the country with “narco-terrorism”.

It accused them of flooding the US with cocaine and using drugs as a weapon to undermine the health of Americans.

Maduro has rejected the accusations. The US also re-imposed oil sanctions last year, after temporarily easing them in the hope Maduro could be incentivised to hold free and fair elections.

The Venezuelan president has blamed an economic collapse in his country on US-led sanctions he calls illegitimate and imperial. His critics blame corruption and economic mismanagement.

On Friday, President Maduro took the oath of office, vowing his third six-year term in office would be a “period of peace”.

“This new presidential term will be the period of peace, prosperity, equality, and the new democracy,” he said.

“I swear by history, I swear by my life, and I will fulfil it,” he added.

The 28 July election results were widely rejected by the international community, including by Brazil and Colombia, some of Venezuela’s left-wing neighbours.

The inauguration itself was a tightly controlled affair. Most accredited Venezuelan media were not allowed inside and foreign journalists were not allowed in the country.

Maduro has a few allies remaining including Iran, China and Russia but is increasingly isolated on the world stage.

The Cuban and Nicaraguan presidents were the only leaders present at the inauguration.

The 62-year-old was declared the winner of last July’s presidential election but the opposition and many countries, including the US, rejected the result and recognised the exiled opposition candidate Edmundo González as the legitimate president-elect.

González fled Venezuela in September and has been living in Spain, but this month he went on a tour of the Americas to rally international support.

The Maduro government has issued an arrest warrant for him, offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to his detention.

On Friday, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for the release of all who have been “arbitrarily detained” since the elections.

Copenhagen’s gloomy January weather matches the mood among Denmark’s politicians and business leaders.

“We take this situation very, very seriously,” said Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen of Donald Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland – and punish Denmark with high tariffs if it stands in the way.

But, he added, the government had “no ambition whatsoever to escalate some war of words.”

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen downplayed Trump’s own suggestion that the US might use military force to seize Greenland. “I don’t have the fantasy to imagine that it’ll ever get to that,” she told Danish TV.

And Lars Sandahl Sorensen, CEO of Danish Industry, also said there was “every reason to stay calm… no-one has any interest in a trade war.”

But behind the scenes, hastily organised high-level meetings have been taking place in Copenhagen all week, a reflection of the shock caused by Trump’s remarks.

Greenland PM Mute Egede flew in to meet both the prime minister and King Frederik X on Wednesday.

And on Thursday night, party leaders from across the political spectrum gathered for an extraordinary meeting on the crisis with Mette Frederiksen in Denmark’s parliament.

Faced with what many in Denmark are calling Trump’s “provocation,” Frederiksen has broadly attempted to strike a conciliatory tone, repeatedly referring to the US as “Denmark’s closest partner”.

It was “only natural” that the US was preoccupied by the Arctic and Greenland, she added.

Yet she also said that any decision on Greenland’s future should be up to its people alone: “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders… and it’s the Greenlanders themselves who have to define their future.”

Her cautious approach is twofold.

On the one hand, Frederiksen is keen to avoid escalating the situation. She’s been burned before, in 2019, when Trump cancelled a trip to Denmark after she said his proposal to buy Greenland was “absurd”.

“Back then he only had one more year in office, then things went back to normal,” veteran political journalist Erik Holstein told the BBC . “But maybe this is the new normal.”

But Frederiksen’s comments also speak to the Danish resolve not to meddle in the internal affairs of Greenland – an autonomous territory with its own parliament and whose population is increasingly leaning towards independence.

“She should’ve been much clearer in rejecting the idea,” said opposition MP Rasmus Jarlov.

“This level of disrespect from the coming US president towards very, very loyal allies and friends is record-setting,” he told the BBC, although he admitted Trump’s forcefulness had “surprised everybody.”

The conservative MP believed Frederiksen’s insistence that “only Greenland… can decide and define Greenland’s future” placed too much pressure on the island’s inhabitants. “It would’ve been prudent and clever to stand behind Greenland and just clearly state that Denmark doesn’t want [a US takeover].”

The Greenland question is a delicate one for Denmark, whose prime minister officially apologised only recently for spearheading a 1950s social experiment which saw Inuit children removed from their families to be re-educated as “model Danes”.

Last week, Greenland’s leader said the territory should free itself from “the shackles of colonialism.”

By doing so he tapped into growing nationalist sentiment, fuelled by interest among Greenland’s younger generations in the indigenous culture and history of the Inuit.

Most commentators now expect a successful independence referendum in the near future. While for many it would be seen as a victory, it could also usher in a new set of problems, as 60% of Greenland’s economy is dependent on Denmark.

An independent Greenland “would need to make choices,” said Karsten Honge. The Green Left MP now fears his preferred option of a new Commonwealth-style pact “based on equality and democracy” is unlikely to come about.

Sitting in his parliamentary office decorated with poems and drawings depicting scenes of Inuit life, Honge said Greenland would need to decide “how much it values independence”. It could sever ties with Denmark and turn to the US, Honge said, “but if you treasure independence then that doesn’t make sense.”

Opposition MP Jarlov argues that while there is no point in forcing Greenland to be part of Denmark, “it is very close to being an independent country already”.

Its capital Nuuk is self-governed, but relies on Copenhagen for management of currency, foreign relations and defence – as well as substantial subsidies.

“Greenland today has more independence than Denmark has from the EU,” Jarlov added. “So I hope they think things through.”

As Mette Frederiksen has the awkward task of responding firmly while not offending Greenland or the US, the staunchest rebuttal to Trump’s comments so far has come from outside Denmark.

The principle of the inviolability of borders “applies to every country… no matter whether it’s a very small one or a very powerful one,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warned, while French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the EU would not let other nations “attack its sovereign borders”.

Their comments gave away the deep concern within the EU about how to handle the upcoming Trump presidency. “This is not just very serious for Greenland and Denmark – it is serious to the whole world and to Europe as a whole,” MP Karsten Honge said.

“Imagine a world – which we may be facing in just a few weeks – where international agreements don’t exist. That would shake everything up, and Denmark would just be a small part of it.”

The Danish trade sector has similarly been engulfed by deep nervousness after Trump said he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it refused to give up Greenland to the US.

A 2024 Danish Industry study showed that Denmark’s GDP would fall by three points if the US imposed 10% tariffs on imports from the EU to the US as part of a global trade war.

Singling out Danish products from the influx of EU goods would be near-impossible for the US, and would almost certainly result in retaliatory measures from the EU. But trade industry professionals are taking few chances, and in Denmark as elsewhere on the continent huge amounts of resources are being spent internally to plan for potential outcomes of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

As his inauguration approaches, Danes are preparing as they can to weather the storm. There is guarded hope that the president-elect could soon shift his focus to grievances towards other EU partners, and that the Greenland question could be temporarily shelved.

But the disquiet brought on by Trump’s refusal to rule out military intervention to seize Greenland remains.

Karsten Honge said Denmark would have to suffer whatever decision the US takes.

“They just need to send a small battleship to travel down the Greenland coast and send a polite letter to Denmark,” he said, only partly in jest.

“The last sentence would be: well, Denmark, what you gonna do about it?

“That’s the new reality with regards to Trump.”

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.

A judge has sentenced US President-elect Donald Trump to an “unconditional discharge,” bringing to an end the first criminal trial of a former US president.

The sentence in the hush-money payment case means the incoming president has been spared any penalty, including jail time or a fine, but he will still take office as the first US president with a felony conviction.

“Never before has this court been presented with such a unique and remarkable set of circumstances,” Justice Juan Merchan said shortly before announcing the sentence, calling it a “truly extraordinary case”.

Appearing via video call from Florida and flanked by his attorney and two prominent American flags, Trump declared he was “totally innocent”.

• Trump hush-money sentencing live updates

It was the first time in this year-and-half long legal saga that Trump had uttered more than a “not guilty” or given a brief affirmative answer.

Granted the chance to speak ahead of his sentencing, Trump railed against the case for several minutes.

“This has been a very terrible experience,” he said.

He claimed there had been a “weaponisation” of the judicial system and claimed the case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for political reasons.

“I would like to explain that I was treated very, very unfairly, and I thank you very much,” he said, before falling silent.

As Bragg watched Trump address him directly for the first time, he maintained a mostly stoic expression. He did, however, chuckle when Trump claimed Bragg had never wanted to bring the case.

After Trump had his say, Justice Merchan then took several moments to reflect on the “paradox” of the trial.

Justice Merchan noted that despite the media and political circus outside, “once the courtroom doors were closed, it was no more unique than all the other cases taking place at the same time”.

But he added that after Trump was convicted, the case took another turn when the American people elected him in November to a second presidential term.

After careful consideration, he had determined that “the only lawful sentence, without encroaching upon the highest office of the land”, was unconditional discharge – a sentence that would allow the American people a president unencumbered by pending court proceedings.

Trump was found guilty by a New York jury of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in May 2024. His sentencing was delayed multiple times due to Supreme Court rulings and the November presidential election.

The charges stemmed from a plot to cover up a hush-money payment to an adult film star in the waning days of the 2016 election. Prosecutors argued the payment was a form of election interference aimed at keeping vital information from voters, and therefore broke the law.

In October 2016, Trump’s then-attorney, Michael Cohen, paid a woman named Stormy Daniels $130,000 (£106,000) to remain silent about a years-old alleged sexual encounter with the soon-to-be president.

After he was elected, Trump reimbursed Cohen in installments – and then falsely recorded them as legal expenses. Each of Trump’s guilty verdicts correlates to a false document related to the cover-up.

Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and denied the sexual encounter with Ms Daniels. He repeatedly claimed the case was politically motivated persecution.

The six-week trial became a legal, political and media firestorm. Larger-than-life characters like Cohen and Daniels took the stand to face questioning from Trump’s attorneys.

Trump brought a string of family members and Republican allies to court with him each day to fill the benches behind his defence table. Each day, he turned a small media pen in the hallway outside the courtroom into his personal pulpit, using the opportunities to rail against the justice system, the press, and other adversaries.

Trump also used the furore of the trial to raise millions from supporters for his legal battles, and his campaign to retake the White House.

In the four years between his terms in office, Trump was indicted in four separate criminal cases, including his New York case. In the end, this was the only one to go to trial.

On the campaign trail and social media, Trump used his legal quagmires to portray himself – and his supporters – as victims of a rigged justice system.

Despite the multiple indictments, including two that centred on his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Trump decisively defeated Vice-President Kamala Harris in November.

His victory quashed the two federal prosecutions against him, including his federal election interference case and one involving alleged mishandling of classified documents. The third, an election interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, has been stuck in a series of delays and side dramas for months.

Only Trump’s hush-money trial ever reached its conclusion, after Justice Merchan dug his heels in early January and demanded Trump appear virtually or in person for his sentencing.

The battles did not stop there, however. Trump’s lawyers frantically filed appeals and even petitioned the US Supreme Court to halt the Friday hearing.

The Supreme Court rejected him in a brief order issued Thursday night.

They also fought to have the case dismissed by arguing that presidents-elect have immunity from criminal prosecution, an argument Justice Merchan rejected but they have continued to argue to higher courts.

When Trump’s New York trial adjourned with a final bang of the gavel on Friday, it also brought to a close this particularly fraught chapter in his personal and political history.

When he is sworn in 10 days from now, he will do so as the first US president to have ever been convicted of a felony.

As he concluded his sentencing on Friday, Justice Merchan had one final message for Trump.

“I wish you Godspeed as you assume your second term in office,” he said.