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.

Two wounded North Korean soldiers have been captured as prisoners of war by Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

The two men are receiving “necessary medical assistance” and are in the custody of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Kyiv, according to Zelensky.

The president said he was “grateful” to Ukrainian paratroopers and soldiers from the Special Operation Forces for capturing the North Koreans.

He added that “this was not an easy task”, claiming that Russian and North Korean soldiers usually execute wounded North Koreans “to erase any evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the war against Ukraine”.

The Ukrainian intelligence service said in a statement that the prisoners were captured on 9 January and immediately after were “provided with all the necessary medical care as stipulated by the Geneva Convention” and taken to Kyiv.

“They are being held in appropriate conditions that meet the requirements of international law,” the intelligence service’s statement read.

The intelligence service said the prisoners do not speak Ukrainian, English or Russian, “so communication with them is carried out through interpreters of Korean, in cooperation with South Korean NIS (National Intelligence Service)”.

In a statement posted on Telegram and X, Zelensky said the soldiers were “talking to SBU investigators” and he had instructed the Security Service of Ukraine to grant journalists access to them.

“The world needs to know the truth about what is happening,” he added.

Zelensky also posted four photographs alongside his statement. Two show wounded men. One of the photos showed a red Russian military card.

The place of birth on the document is given as Turan, in the Tuva Republic, which is close to Mongolia.

The intelligence service said that when the prisoners were captured, one of the soldiers had a Russian military ID card issued in the name of another person with registration in the Tuva Republic. The other had no documents at all.

The intelligence service said that during interrogation, the soldier with the ID card told security personnel that he had been issued the document in Russia during the autumn of 2024.

He is alleged to have stated that at that time, some of North Korea’s combat units had one-week interoperability training.

“It is noteworthy that the prisoner…emphasises that he was allegedly going for training, not to fight a war against Ukraine,” the SBU statement said.

The intelligence service reported that he said he was born in 2005 and had been serving North Korea as a rifleman since 2021.

The second prisoner is reported to have given some of his answers in writing because he had an injured jaw, according to SBU. The intelligence service said it believed he was born in 1999 and had been serving North Korea as a scout sniper since 2016.

The Geneva Convention states that the questioning of prisoners should be carried out in a language they understand and prisoners must be protected against public curiosity.

Zelensky’s office said in a statement that the Russians “are trying to hide the fact that these are soldiers from North Korea by giving them documents claiming they are from Tuva or other territories under Moscow’s control”.

“But these people are actually Koreans, they are from North Korea,” the statement from the president’s office said.

In 2014, Russian forces operating in Ukraine – despite Kremlin denials – were sent without identifying markings on their uniforms.

Last year, when President Vladimir Putin was asked about Russia using North Korean troops in its war on Ukraine, he did not deny it. He said it was Russia’s “sovereign decision”.

In December, South Korea’s intelligence agency reported that a North Korean soldier believed to have been the first to be captured while supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine had died after being taken alive by Ukrainian forces.

Separately, the White House said North Korean forces were experiencing mass casualties.

The Security Service of Ukraine said it “is currently conducting the necessary investigative measures to establish all the circumstances of the DPRK military’s participation in Russia’s war against Ukraine”.

“The investigation is being conducted under the procedural guidance of the Prosecutor General’s Office under Article 437 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (planning, preparation, unleashing and waging an aggressive war).”

Flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the South Korean passenger plane that crashed last month stopped recording four minutes before the disaster, the country’s transport ministry has said.

The crash of the Jeju Air flight killed 179 people, making it the deadliest air accident on Korean soil. Two cabin crew members were the only survivors.

Investigators had hoped that data on the recorders would provide insights about the crucial moments before the tragedy.

The ministry said it would analyse what caused the “black boxes” to stop recording.

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The recorders were originally examined in South Korea, the ministry said.

When the data was found to be missing, they were taken to the US and analysed by American safety regulators.

The plane was travelling from Bangkok on 29 December when it crash-landed at Muan International Airport and slid into a wall off the end of the runway, bursting into flames.

Sim Jai-dong, a former transport ministry accident investigator, told Reuters news agency that the loss of data from the crucial final minutes was surprising and suggested that all power, including back-up, could have been cut.

Many questions remain unanswered. Investigators have been looking at the role that a bird strike or weather conditions may have played.

They have also focused on why the Boeing 737-800 did not have its landing gear down when it hit the runway.

It was 20:25 on a Monday evening in November 2020 when Caroline Darian got the call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was her mother, Gisèle Pelicot.

“She announced to me that she discovered that morning that [my father] Dominique had been drugging her for about 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Ms Darian recalls in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme’s Emma Barnett.

“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” says Ms Darian, now 46.

“I remember I shouted, I cried, I even insulted him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”

Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in jail at the end of a historic three-and-a-half month trial in December.

More than four years later, Ms Darian says that her father “should die in prison”.

Fifty men who Dominique Pelicot recruited online to come rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Gisèle were also sent to jail.

He was caught by police after upskirting in a supermarket, leading investigators to look closer at him. On this seemingly innocuous retired grandfather’s laptop and phones, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Gisèle, clearly unconscious, being raped by strangers.

On top of pushing issues of rape and gender violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted the little-known issue of chemical submission – drug-facilitated assault.

Caroline Darian has made it her life’s struggle to fight chemical submission, which is thought to be under-reported as most victims have no recollection of the assaults and may not even realise they were drugged.

In the days that followed Gisèle’s fateful phone call, Caroline Darian and her brothers, Florian and David, travelled to the south of France where their parents had been living to support their mother as she absorbed the news that – as Ms Darian now puts it – her husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years”.

Soon afterwards, Ms Darian herself was called in by police – and her world shattered again.

She was shown two photos they found on her father’s laptop. They showed an unconscious woman on a bed, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

At first, she couldn’t tell the woman was her. “I lived a dissociation effect. I had difficulties recognising myself from the start,” she says.

“Then the police officer said: ‘Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek… it’s you.’ I looked at those two photos differently then… I was laying on my left side like my mother, in all her pictures.”

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Ms Darian says she is convinced her father abused and raped her too – something he has always denied, although he has offered conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know that he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse. But I don’t have any evidence,” she says.

Unlike in the case of her mother, there is no proof of what Pelicot may have done to Ms Darian.

“And that’s the case for how many victims? They are not believed because there’s no evidence. They’re not listened to, not supported,” she says.

Soon after her father’s crimes came to light, Ms Darian wrote a book.

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again explores her family’s trauma.

It also delves deeper into the issue of chemical submission, in which the drugs typically used “come from the family’s medicine cabinet”.

“Painkillers, sedatives. It’s medication,” Ms Darian says. As is the case for almost half of victims of chemical submission, she knew her abuser: the danger, she says, “is coming from the inside.”

She says that in the midst of the trauma of finding out she had been raped more than 200 times by different people, her mother Gisèle found it difficult to accept that her husband may have also assaulted their daughter.

“For a mum it’s difficult to integrate that all in one go,” she says.

Yet when Gisèle decided to open up the trial to the public and the media so as to expose what had been done to her by her husband and dozens of men, mother and daughter were in agreement: “I knew we went through something… horrible, but that we had to go through it with dignity and strength.”

Now, Ms Darian needs to understand how to live knowing she is the daughter of both the torturer and the victim – something she calls “a terrible burden”.

She is now unable to think back to her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, only occasionally slipping back into the habit of referring to him as her father.

“When I look back I don’t really remember the father that I thought he was. I look straight to the criminal, the sexual criminal he is,” she says.

“But I have his DNA and the main reason why I am so engaged for invisible victims is also for me a way to put a real distance with this guy,” she tells Emma Barnett. “I am totally different from Dominique.”

Ms Darian adds she doesn’t know whether her father was a “monster,” as some have called him. “He knew perfectly well what he did, and he’s not sick,” she says.

“He is a dangerous man. There is no way he can get out. No way.”

It will be years before Dominique Pelicot, 72, is eligible for parole, so it is possible he will never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Pelicots are rebuilding themselves. Gisèle, Caroline Darian says, is exhausted from the trial, but also “recovering… She is doing well”.

As for Ms Darian, the only question she is interested in now is to raise awareness of chemical submission – and to educate children on sexual abuse.

She derives strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old – her “lovely son”, she says with a smile, her voice full of affection.

The events that were unleashed on that November day made her who she is today, Ms Darian says. Now she is trying to look ahead.

In recent weeks, US President-elect Donald Trump has shown renewed interest in taking control of Greenland, a largely autonomous territory of Denmark in the Arctic and the world’s largest island.

He first indicated an intention to buy Greenland in 2019, during his first term as president, but this week he went further, refusing to rule out economic or military force to take control of it.

Danish and European officials have responded negatively, saying Greenland is not for sale and its territorial integrity must be preserved.

So how could this unusual situation play out, with two Nato allies at odds over a huge territory which is 80% covered with ice but has considerable untapped mineral wealth?

And how could the aspirations for independence among Greenland’s population of 56,000, under Danish control for 300 years, affect the final outcome?

Here we look at four possible scenarios for Greenland’s future.

There is some speculation that Trump’s move is just bluster, a move to get Denmark to boost Greenland’s security in the face of the threat of both Russia and China seeking influence in the region.

Last month, Denmark announced a new $1.5bn (£1.2bn) military package for the Arctic. It had been prepared before Trump’s remarks but the announcement just hours after them was described by the Danish defence minister as an “irony of fate”.

“What was important in what Trump said was that Denmark has to fulfil its obligations in the Arctic or it’s got to let the US do it,” says Elisabet Svane, chief political correspondent for Politiken newspaper.

Marc Jacobsen, associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College, believes that this is a case of Trump “positioning himself before entering office” while Greenland is using the occasion to gain more international authority, as an important step towards independence.

So even if Trump were to lose further interest in Greenland now, which Professor Jacobsen thinks is the most likely scenario, he has certainly put the spotlight on the issue.

But independence for Greenland has been on the agenda for many years, and some say the debate could even go in the opposite direction.

“I noticed in the last few days the Greenland PM is calmer in his comments – ie. yes, we want independence but in the long run,” says Svane.

There is a general consensus in Greenland that independence will happen eventually, and also that if Greenland votes for it, Denmark will accept and ratify it.

However, it is also unlikely that Greenland would vote for independence unless its people are given guarantees that they can keep the subsidies they currently get from Denmark to pay for things like healthcare and the welfare system.

“The Greenland PM may be up in arms now, but in the event that he actually calls a referendum, he will need some kind of convincing narrative about how to save the Greenland economy and welfare system,” Ulrik Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told the BBC.

One possible next step is a free association – something like the US currently has with Pacific states the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.

Denmark has previously opposed this status both for Greenland and for the Faroe Islands, but according to Dr Gad, current Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is not categorically against it.

“Danish understanding of the Greenland historical experience is way better than it was 20 years ago,” he says, with Denmark accepting colonial responsibility.

The recent discussions “might persuade [Frederiksen] to say – better to keep Denmark in the Arctic, keep some kind of connection to Greenland, even if it’s a looser one”, he adds.

But even if Greenland is able to get rid of Denmark, it has become clear in recent years that it can’t get rid of the US. The Americans never really left after taking control of the island in World War Two, and see it as vital for their security.

An agreement in 1951 affirmed Denmark’s basic sovereignty of the island but, in effect, gave the US whatever it wanted.

Dr Gad said that Greenland officials had been in contact with the last two US administrations about Washington’s role.

“They now know the US will never leave,” he said.

There has been speculation that Trump’s economic rhetoric is potentially the biggest threat to Denmark – with the US drastically increasing tariffs on Danish, or even EU, goods, forcing Denmark into concessions of some kind over Greenland.

Professor Jacobsen says Danish governments have been preparing for that, and not just because of the Arctic territory.

Trump has been threatening universal 10% tariffs on all US imports which could, among other things, significantly disrupt European growth, and some Danish and other European companies are now considering setting up manufacturing bases in the US.

Possible options for raising tariffs include by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Benjamin Cote of international law firm Pillsbury told the website MarketWatch.

One of the main Danish industries potentially affected by this is pharmaceuticals. The US receives products such as hearing aids and most of its insulin from Denmark, as well as the diabetes drug Ozempic, made by the Danish company Novo Nordisk.

Analysts say the hike in prices that would result from these measures would not find favour with the US public.

The “nuclear option” seems far-fetched, but with Trump failing to rule out military action it has to be considered.

Essentially, it wouldn’t be hard for the US to take control, given that they already have bases and plenty of troops in Greenland.

“The US has de facto control already,” says Professor Jacobsen, adding that Trump’s remarks seemed ill-informed and he didn’t understand the point of them.

That said, any use of military force by Washington would create an international incident.

“If they invade Greenland, they invade Nato,” says Svane. “So that’s where it stops. Article 5 would have to be triggered. And if a Nato country invades Nato then there’s no Nato.”

Dr Gad says Trump sounds like Chinese President Xi Jinping talking about Taiwan or Russia’s Vladimir Putin talking about Ukraine.

“He’s saying it’s legitimate for us to take this piece of land,” he says. “If we take him really seriously this is a bad omen for the whole of the Western alliance.”

Last autumn Hania Zataari, a mechanical engineer who works for Lebanon’s Ministry of Industry put her skills to use as war in the country raged on. Hailing from Sidon, South Lebanon, she created a chatbot on WhatsApp that simplified access to much-needed aid.

“They lost their houses, their savings, their work, everything they had built,” Hania says, referring to those forced from their homes by war.

On 23 September, Israel dramatically escalated its offensive against the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, with which it had been fighting a spiralling conflict since Hezbollah attacked Israel in October 2023.

According to the Lebanese government, at least 492 people were killed in one of Lebanon’s deadliest days of conflict in almost 20 years.

Thousands of families fled to Sidon after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) hit what it said was 1,600 Hezbollah strongholds inside Lebanon.

Hania says many displaced people sought shelter in schools and other public buildings, but many others who fled their homes were forced to rent elsewhere or stay with members of their family.

It is these people who weren’t directly receiving support from the government that she wanted to help. Drawing on her programming skills, Hania created the “aidbot” to narrow the gap between the demand and supply of aid.

The aidbot is a chatbot – a type of AI system designed to communicate with its users online – that links to WhatsApp. It is programmed to ask simple questions about the types of aid people require along with their names and locations.

This information is then recorded onto a Google spreadsheet which Hania and her team of unpaid volunteers, made up of friends and family, access to distribute aid such as food, blankets, mattresses, medicine and clothes.

Hania used her spare time to build the bot using the website Callbell.eu, which is commonly used by businesses to engage with customers on Meta’s platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook messenger.

She explains that the bot, which is still being used today, makes distributing aid more efficient as it cuts down the amount of time she spends responding to requests for aid over WhatsApp.

“I’m not really interested in knowing their names. I just need to know where they are so I can manage the delivery,” she says.

Take, for example, a request for baby formula. Hania says the bot will ask for the age of the baby and the quantity needed so that she and her team can provide it.

The project, she says, is funded by donations coming from Lebanese people living abroad. She’s created a publicly available dashboard to record what the project has spent money on and how much aid she and her team have distributed.

At the time of writing they have delivered 78 food parcels to families of 5 or 10 people, 900 mattresses, and 323 blankets across Sidon and other parts of Lebanon.

Last October, 47 year-old Khaldoun Abbas and his family fled their homes in Najjarieh after they received calls from the IDF urging them to leave for their own safety.

Seventeen people, ranging in age from nine to 78, slept under one roof in a rented three bed apartment in Sidon.

Khaldoun says he, his wife and their children, as well as his brother’s family slept on mattresses they requested using the aidbot in the hallway of the flat. They also requested blankets, food and cleaning detergents.

Unlike his neighbours, he’s not been able to return to his home. It was destroyed in a confirmed Israeli strike 11 days later. The IDF told the BBC it “struck a terror infrastructure”.

When we put this allegation to Khaldoun, he denied having any connection to Hezbollah or any other party.

“This isn’t the first time Sidon has opened its doors to displaced people,” Hania explains, referring to the wave of people who have arrived in the city.

Sidon has a long-standing reputation for taking in internally displaced people driven from their homes along the Lebanon-Israel border.

The most recent conflict began in October 2023 after the war between Israel and Hamas spilled over into Lebanon when Hezbollah, Hamas’ ally, fired rockets into Israel in support of Gaza.

The Lebanese healthy ministry says nearly 4,000 people have been killed and over a million have been displaced. The ministry does not say how many of these are civilians or combatants.

In Israel around 60,000 people have been evacuated from Northern Israel and authorities say more than 80 soldiers and 47 civilians have been killed.

Last November a ceasefire was agreed between Israel and Lebanon. Despite some skirmishes it has largely been upheld. But people on the ground say the provision of aid has not improved.

International NGO Islamic Relief told the BBC that the “conflict, destruction, and evacuation orders have fuelled ongoing displacement in Lebanon which has made it difficult to assess and address the needs of the population amid the changing situation.”

But it is not just the war that is hindering aid distribution.

Bilal Merie, a volunteer working with Hania says many of the problems they face are due to the “high demand but short supply” of aid.

He puts it down to the deep economic turmoil that has gripped the country since 2019, meaning the Lebanese government has had to rely heavily on funding from creditors and aid organisations for goods.

But even NGOs are feeling the crunch. Unicef Lebanon says that with only 20% of the funding they need, it “continues to face an enormous funding gap,” meaning the charity is unable to support families when they need it most.

In a country overrun with financial woes and by war, could this aidbot make a tangible difference?

It is the first time researcher John Bryant from the think tank Overseas Development Institute has heard of a chatbot being used in such a way in the humanitarian sector.

He says the cultural context in which it is being used is commendable. That is, with knowledge of “the channels people are using to talk to each other and meeting them in their own language”.

However he is unsure of its scalability, as what works in Lebanon cannot easily be replicated in other parts of the world.

“What tech offers a lot of the time is a standard cookie cutter approach.

“It’s the local designers, the local translators, the trusted human interlocutors and elements within that system that elevate digital tools into something useful,” he says.

The aidbot might not be able to offer the solution to all Lebanon’s problems, but to the families using it, it has made life a little easier.

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.”

Even by the standards of the Reform UK party, it has been an interesting few weeks.

In December, its leader Nigel Farage flew to Florida to meet Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire, where they discussed a possible donation.

On Boxing Day, it announced its membership figures had surpassed those of the Conservatives. There was then a spat with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch over whether those numbers were correct.

Last Sunday in a post on his social media site X, Musk unexpectedly appeared to withdraw support from Farage saying he “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party.

And on Friday, 10 Reform UK councillors in Derbyshire resigned from the party, in protest at Farage’s leadership.

Reform UK members gathering on an icily cold Friday evening at Sandown Racecourse for the party’s South East conference weren’t disheartened by the possible loss of a rich and influential backer.

“I don’t like this Musk chap,” says Gloria Jane Martin.

She worked in cabin crew for British Airways until she reached the point where “I never wanted to meet passengers again” and started investing in property and campaigning in politics instead.

“He [Musk] has been dangling the money. I’m worried there would be strings attached, that he would demand some policies.

“I think Reform got away lightly… Nigel has handled it diplomatically. I don’t think he can afford to have Musk too close.

“He is destructive, he could destroy Reform.”

There are about 850 attendees at Sandown, according to the organisers, who say it was a sold out event.

Among them is Howard Ward from Winchester, who has switched to Reform from the Conservatives.

Like many here he is not bothered about Musk. “Let him talk away,” he says.

Kevin Burrell doesn’t think Musk is “being serious” and even if he is, it doesn’t matter. “We’ve got Candy… he is going to do wonders.”

Nick Candy is the party’s new treasurer. He is a property tycoon, the husband of former pop singer Holly Valance and until recently was a donor to the Tories.

Beverley Newman is here with her partner Eve Wilkinson. She agrees that Candy will be important but adds that the party can raise a lot from the membership.

“Musk won’t make any difference to his [Farage’s] popularity,” says Kirshanda from West Sussex. “I thought he handled that beautifully. He wasn’t prepared to bend.”

Musk hasn’t explained his reasoning, but Farage said the pair had a disagreement because Musk wanted Reform to “come out strongly in support” of Tommy Robinson.

Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.

The former head of the far-right English Defence League admitted in court to breaching an injunction against repeating claims about a Syrian refugee schoolboy after losing a 2021 libel case.

Farage left his former party UKIP in 2018 saying its association with Robinson had brought “scuffles” and “violence” to the party.

He has ruled out Robinson being allowed to join Reform UK.

Party members at the event at Sandown talk seriously about electoral success, and while many express sympathy for Robinson, they understand why he might be politically unpalatable.

“Whatever happens with Tommy, his heart is in the right place but he will never be forgiven by the mainstream media,” says Kevin Burrell.

“Much as I admire what he’s doing I can understand why Reform don’t support him.

“If you end up in a slanging match over that, you will end up with the Tories or Labour.”

Jackie Collett says she doesn’t know “what is making Nigel dig is heels in” but adds that Robinson is a “loose canon”.

She says she is a realist and acknowledges that Reform might “disappear into the wilderness” but for now she says it is “the only party that gives me hope to go out in the morning”.

As the evening progresses, news emerges about the 10 Reform UK councillors in Derbyshire who resigned, arguing the party was being run in an “increasingly autocratic manner” and had “lost its sense of direction” since Farage took over.

Farage later told BBC Newsnight the group were a “rogue branch” of the party who had not “passed vetting”.

The group’s leader, Councillor Alex Stevenson, who was suspended as a member in December, and who stood for Reform UK in Amber Valley in the general election, did not deny that some of the candidates he put forward for local elections had not passed the party’s vetting process.

There is no mention of the resignations at the conference, instead members are invited to cheer two councillor defections from the Conservatives to Reform.

And there is little public sign of discontent with Farage, although one member whispers his unease.

Preferring not to be named, (“I don’t want to be thrown out”) he says, “Farage doesn’t necessarily have what is needed”.

“He’s quite egotistical. Rupert Lowe would be my preference. He’s been hard at work, asking questions in Parliament. Nigel isn’t around as much.”

On Robinson, he suggests Farage “shouldn’t be quite so critical”.

Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, isn’t a household name but it is one that crops up unprompted throughout the evening.

Graham Croft-Smith expresses a little disappointment that Lowe isn’t speaking at the event. “He’s a true statesman,” he says.

Lowe is not there but some of the party’s other big names are, including MP and party founder Richard Tice and Chair Zia Yusuf.

Yusuf begins his speech by welcoming “all you fake Reform members” – a reference to Kemi Badenoch’s scepticism over the membership numbers.

London Assembly Member Alex Wilson asks how many in the audience spent Boxing Day watching the party’s membership counter tick over.

“Yes!’ shouts a woman from the audience.

Last month, a digital tracker on Reform’s website showed its membership numbers overtook the 131,680 figure declared by the Conservatives in 2024.

Reform UK was originally called the Brexit Party but these days Brexit only gets a few mentions.

The big themes include opposition to net-zero policies, support for a national inquiry into grooming gangs, the economy and the possible postponement of local elections in May.

More than half of the county councils due to have elections could ask ministers to delay the ballots, following a major shake-up of local government.

Earlier this week, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said it would be “ludicrous” to hold elections for councils that were due to be reorganised.

However, the subject has infuriated Reform UK members, many of whom hope the May elections could see the party make electoral gains.

Blogger Liza Martin-Pope says it is why she decided to attend the conference this evening adding: “I’m missing my dancing for this.”

She argues that the potential delays amount to “removing access to local democracy for local people.”

“These authorities are running scared.”

Eve Wilkinson is similarly furious. “It’s disgusting, totally undemocratic, absolutely out of order. It incenses me,” she says.

Caroline Burford-Pugh, her husband Richard and their friends Charlotte and Matthew Lubbe have come to the event together.

They are new members, new to politics and Caroline says she puts the chances of Farage being prime minister after the next election at 10 out of 10.

The party has prospered because of dissatisfaction with the Conservatives and disappointment with the early signs from Labour, says Luke Tryl from the research group More In Common, with ratings up from around 15 to 20%. But a general election is years away.

Whether the party can go from five MPs in 2024 to government remains to be seen, but whatever happens, it’s clear there are party members still enthused by Reform’s offer.

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 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.

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, according to their family members.

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

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.

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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 32-year-old Australian citizen died when the Palisades fire broke out on Tuesday, his mother Shelley Sykes said in a post on X.

Shelley said she was with her son, who had cerebral palsy, in their 17-acre Malibu estate during the fire.

She added that Rory was in a cottage on the estate and that she had tried to put out the flames, but there was no water coming out of the hose.

“I’m totally heartbroken,” she said.

British-born Rory was born blind and had difficulty walking, but was able to regain his sight and learn to walk with the help of surgeries, going on to become an “inspirational speaker”, she shared.

Shelley told Australian outlet 9News that she could not lift her son because she had a broken arm.

The family of 83-year-old Erliene Kelley found out late on Thursday that she was among the victims, the Los Angeles Times reports.

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

On Thursday evening, the family learned that authorities had found a body in the rubble of the home. It had been more than 48 hours since Ms Navarro last heard from her grandmother.

For thousands of residents of Los Angeles, the fires took almost everything they had.

At least 10 people are dead, and thousands of homes destroyed, after five days of burning.

But as the embers cooled, some residents of Altadena, which was ravaged by the Eaton Fire, returned to see what remained: An artifact from their lives before this disaster. From the rubble, many found small trinkets that brought them smiles and, occasionally, a moment of joy amid the hellish ordeal.

This is what they found.

When Henry Giles, age six, returned to his home in Altadena with his parents, he knew exactly where to look.

The front gate and wall on the property is all that has survived untouched, with intact mail still in the letter box. Behind it, two burned out cars sit in the driveway, and in the back a swing set is destroyed. But tucked into some bushes was a bucket and a toy lawn mower.

“Mommy look, they survived! We hid them in the bushes because we knew there would be a fire!” Henry excitedly yelled

Henry and his brother Lucas inspected the remaining plants: “This one survived! This didn’t. Our tomato plant is dead.”

Few other treasures survived. Henry’s family had packed light, not wanting to overload their car in case they had to sleep in it. Just a few essentials and the family dogs.

“Henry was sad. He got a new 3D printer and it was destroyed. He asked me why I didn’t take it and I said because we could only grab stuff that was important. He said ‘well it was important to me,'” his mother Deisy told the BBC.

“That’s my book,” said Deisy, as she sifted through the rubble of what was her dream home, a place she said she sacrificed a lot to buy.

“This must have been on my nightstand. I read a lot of books on self growth and empowerment. This must be a divine message for me to keep going, I believe that,” she added.

The wreckage of the home is still smoldering days later. Keith, her husband, wades in: “I’m looking at what’s left of my kitchen.” The family has lived in this house for three years. Keith is originally from England but has been in the US for 40 years.

Deisy and Keith are sending Henry and Lucas to family in Florida while they figure out what to do. They’ve been staying in a hotel. Deisy said it’s hard for them all to be separated, but it’s what is best.

“After a week they get homesick and start crying ‘I want to come back to California.’ But they have no home to come back to. And I wanted them to see there was no home left so they understood.”

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Larry Villescas, 52, was rummaging through what was left of his home.

His wife and their three children scoured for anything that may have survived. They found a Christmas ornament, a Dr Suess book that was unscathed and something that nearly brought him to tears:

“We found a dish and a bowl that’s part of a dish set that my great aunt gave us on our wedding day. It’s lasted 24 years. We’ve been together 29 and we got married four years later, and so 24 years old that bowl and that plate, believe it or not.”

He added later… “There’s barely anything here that survived. You can tell how hot it burned. Everything is basically gone, so the small things you do find become even more special.”

Daron Anderson stepped around the charred chunks of his roof that now sits where his patio once stood.

“Woah, there is some of my mom’s pottery,” he said.

His mother stored some of the ceramic pots she made on the patio.

“If we find something that’s intact, I can take it back to my mom. Everything is breaking,” he said.

Each piece he grabbed seemed to disintegrate in his hands. Finally, he pulled a white and blue flowered vase from the pile of debris that stayed together.

“Oh man, little crap like this. I know my mom will like it,” he said. “It’s small, but it’s something.”

When the fires destroyed Peter Mitchell’s home, it took his handy-work with it.

“It was all lined with cabinets and various pieces of furniture,” he told the BBC.

“It was gone. There was stuff I built in the house, just little things, you know?.. I didn’t do a profession. I did it because I really enjoyed it.”

Searching through the remnants of his old tools – from a power saw to antique hand tools – Mr Mitchell said material things could be replaced.

“I can get another one of these. So I mean, as much as I love this saw and I spent hours making cool stuff on it. It can be replaced. It’s it’s now in Valhalla.”

Nearby, his neighbour Tavia Weinmann sifted through charred coins to find two pearls belonging to her mother’s necklace.

Nearly 1,000 incarcerated men and women have joined the frontlines in a battle against record-breaking wildfires burning across southern California.

The number deployed – now 939 – are part of a long-running volunteer programme led by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).

Their numbers have steadily increased since Tuesday, the day the deadly fires began spreading uncontrollably through Los Angeles.

Over 10,000 structures have been destroyed and 37,000 acres burned, as thousands of emergency workers descend on the Los Angeles area to fight the flames.

At least 11 people have been killed in the wildfires, officials said.

The incarcerated firefighters have been drawn from among the 35 conservation fire camps run by the state, minimum-security facilities where inmates serve their time and receive training. Two of the camps are for incarcerated women.

The 900-plus incarcerated firefighters in use account for roughly half of the 1,870 prisoner-firefighters in the scheme.

In the field, they can be seen in prison-orange jumpsuits embedded alongside members of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

The incarcerated firefighters have been working “around the clock cutting fire lines and removing fuel from behind structures to slow fire spread”, CDCR told the BBC in an emailed statement.

The programme, which dates back to 1946, has divided critics, who see it as exploitative, and supporters, who say it is rehabilitative.

The state pays inmates a daily wage between $5.80 and $10.24 (£4.75 and £8.38), and an additional $1 per day when assigned to active emergencies.

Those wages are a fraction of the salaries received by citizen firefighters in California, who can earn upwards of $100,000 annually.

“You’re getting pennies compared to the other folks that’s alongside of you. You’re just cheap labour,” Royal Ramey, a former incarcerated firefighter and co-founder of the non-profit Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program (FFRP), told the BBC.

“And if you do pass away while fighting fires, you don’t get any benefits from that,” he continued.

“You’re not gonna get no award. You’re not gonna be recognised as a wildland firefighter,” he said, adding that he would remember in the field that he had already signed his own death certificate.

Still, Mr Ramey said the low pay is more than a California prisoner would otherwise earn performing jobs in the state penitentiaries.

The conservation camps and their “park, picnic-type feel” also offer additional perks like better food, he said, compared to California’s notoriously dangerous and overcrowded prisons.

“It’s a better living situation, definitely,” he said.

Camp participants can also earn time credits that help reduce their prison sentences, CDRC said.

Inmates convicted of crimes categorised as “serious” or “violent” felonies are not eligible to participate.

After incarcerated firefighters are released from prison – having been trained by the state – many try to get hired as citizen firefighters, but are denied, Mr Ramey said.

“There’s a stigma to it. When people think of firefighters they think of some clean-cut guy, a hero, not someone who’s been locked up,” he said.

He launched his nonprofit to help formerly incarcerated firefighters overcome the barriers and help fill the firefighter shortage California has faced for years.

There are currently five wildfires burning through billions of dollars worth of structures in the Los Angeles area, predicted to be one of the most expensive in history.

Strained for resources, the state has called on over 7,500 emergency personnel and first responders, including the state and National Guard and firefighters from as far away as Canada.

The fires have still been difficult to contain and continue to spread, with 35,000 acres from the two largest fires, Palisades and Eaton, already burned.

Jeff Bridges and Mel Gibson are among the celebrities who have lost homes in the deadly wildfires raging in the Los Angeles area.

US actor Bridges, who won an Oscar for Crazy Heart and stars in the TV series The Old Man, has lost his home in Malibu which he and his siblings inherited from their parents.

Oscar-winning film star Gibson also revealed his Malibu home has been “completely toasted” while he was away recording Joe Rogan’s podcast.

A series of major wind-driven fires in California have killed 11 people, ravaged communities, and sent thousands of people frantically fleeing their properties, including in areas dotted with celebrity homes.

Thousands of structures have been destroyed as six separate blazes burn in and around the city.

Actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, winner of two Oscars for The Silence of the Lambs and The Father, also reportedly lost his home in the Pacific Palisades fire.

In a message posted on Instagram, he lamented the “devastation” of the fires, adding “the only thing we take with us is the love we give”.

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Paris Hilton, Billy Crystal, Adam Brody and Milo Ventimiglia are among other celebrities who have lost homes.

Ventimiglia, best known for his roles in Gilmore Girls and Heroes, was filmed returning to his burnt-out home.

“You start thinking about all the memories in the different parts of the house and whatnot,” said Ventimiglia on CBS Evening News. “Then you see your neighbours’ houses and everything around, and your heart just breaks.”

Ventimiglia and his wife left their home on Tuesday and watched on security cameras as the flames took over.

The 47-year-old acknowledged that his character, Jack Pearson, in TV series This Is Us suffers from smoke inhalation after his home burns down in the hit series. “It’s not lost on me, life imitating art,” he said.

Hotel heiress Hilton confirmed earlier this week she had lost her home in Malibu.

In a new Instagram post on Friday, Hilton uploaded a video of what was left of her home. “The heartbreak is truly indescribable,” she said. “It’s devastating beyond words.

“This isn’t just my story,” she continued. “So many people have lost everything. It’s not just walls and roofs – it’s the memories that made those houses homes. It’s the photos, the keepsakes, the irreplaceable pieces of our lives.”

“And yet, in this pain, I know I’m incredibly lucky. My loved ones, my babies, and my pets are safe.”

Hilton also thanked “the firefighters, first responders and volunteers risking their lives to fight these fires”.

Rosie O’Donnell, a former co-host for The View, also lost her home in Malibu.

“On PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) in Malibu – the whole of beach front homes gone – including the one I lived in,” she wrote in a post on TikTok.

Some of the worst devastation was in the scenic enclave of Pacific Palisades, where a wind-whipped inferno exploded from several hundred acres to more than 15,000 in size since Tuesday.

A swathe of the neighbourhood, which is a haven of hillside streets nestled against the Santa Monica Mountains and winding down to beaches along the Pacific Ocean, was reduced to ash.

Actor Billy Crystal said in a statement that he and his wife Janice were “heartbroken” by the loss of their Pacific Palisades home where they had lived since 1979.

The When Harry Met Sally star said in a statement: “We raised our children and grandchildren here.”

“Every inch of our house was filled with love. Beautiful memories that can’t be taken away.

“We are heartbroken of course but with the love of our children and friends we will get through this.”

• Watch: Man films escape from fires with elderly father-in-law
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• Oscar nominations postponed because of LA fires

A home reportedly belonging to Adam Brody, who stars in hit Netflix show Nobody Wants This, and Gossip Girl star wife Leighton Meester, was also destroyed.

Jurassic World actress Daniella Pineda also lost her home, saying she escaped as the fire took over with only her dog and laptop.

“I have one pair of shoes to my name,” she said. “I’m grateful to be alive. People really show up for one another when disaster hits.”

The Hills stars Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag, who are married, also lost their home in the blaze.

“I’m watching our house burn down on the security cameras,” Pratt posted.

Montag said: “So our house is on fire and we were able to get out in time, but I keep going over and over in my mind of the things I should’ve got, but we’re out safe and that is the most important thing, and Spencer is behind me.”

In a later post, she said while tearing up that she was “so sad our house has gone” and they had lost “everything we worked so hard for”.

Singer and This Is Us actress Mandy Moore posted a video of the scene of destruction as she evacuated. “Grateful for my family and pets getting out last night before it was too late (and endless gratitude to friends for taking us in and bringing us clothes and blankets).”

“Honestly, I’m in shock and feeling numb for all so many have lost, including my family. My children’s school is gone.”

“Our favourite restaurants, levelled. So many friends and loved ones have lost everything too. Our community is broken but we will be here to rebuild together.”

TV host Ricki Lake told followers she had lost her “dream home”, adding: “I grieve along with all of those suffering during this apocalyptic event.”

Actors John Goodman, Anna Faris and Cary Elwes also reportedly lost their homes.

Miles Teller, best known for his role in Top Gun: Maverick, and his wife, Keleigh Sperry, reportedly lost their home in the Pacific Palisades.

Posting on Instagram, Sperry shared a picture of the fires and a broken heart emoji.

She urged people to leave bowls of water for animals left behind as they evacuate their homes.

Other stars forced to flee include Star Wars’ actor Mark Hamill and Schitt’s Creek actor Eugene Levy.

In a post on Instagram, Hamill called the blaze the “most horrific” since 1993, when 18,000 acres burned, destroying 323 homes in Malibu.

He said he had evacuated his Malibu house “so last-minute there [were] small fires on both sides of the road”.

Levy described to local media “black and intense” smoke over Temescal Canyon.

“I couldn’t see any flames but the smoke was very dark,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

Jamie Lee Curtis said her home was safe but the situation was “gnarly”.

“Obviously, there have been horrific fires in many places,” she said. “This is literally where I live. Everything the market, I shop in, the schools my kids go to. Friends – many, many, many friends – now have lost their homes.”

Curtis and her husband, fellow actor Christopher Guest, pledged $1m (£800,000) “to start a fund of support for our great city and state and the great people who live and love there”.

Actor Cameron Mathison also shared a clip of his house reduced to smouldering ruins.

“We are safe. But this is what’s left of our beautiful home,” the General Hospital star wrote.

“Our home where our kids were raised and where they wanted to raise their own someday.”

Legendary songwriter Diane Warren, who composed classic hits including If I Could Turn Back Time and I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing, also lost her home.

She posted a picture of the beachfront near her house, saying that the property she’s had for close to three decades was gone.

Grammy-nominated R&B singer and rapper Jhené Aiko took to Instagram to share that her home was burned to the ground.

“Starting from scratch. My heart is so heavy,” she wrote with a broken heart emoji.

Actor Steve Guttenberg, known for Police Academy, stayed to help firefighters by moving cars to clear a path for incoming fire trucks.

He urged fellow Pacific Palisades residents to leave the keys in their abandoned cars so they could be moved.

Meanwhile, the Palisades Charter High School – used in the 1976 horror classic Carrie – has been devastated.

The Oscar nominations have been postponed by two days because of the fires, and other star-studded events were also cancelled.

Film premieres for Unstoppable, Better Man and Wolfman have been called off, as has the Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations announcement.

Meanwhile, a new blaze broke out on Wednesday night, the Sunset fire, in the Hollywood Hills, near where the world-famous Hollywood sign nestles in the hillside.

Several other celebrities fled the city to escape the fires.

Singer songwriter Dua Lipa revealed in a post on her Instagram stories that she fled the city and is safe.

She described the scene as “absolutely devastating and scary couple of days in LA”

“Thinking of all my friends and the people of the city who had to evacuate their homes,” she wrote.

Take That singer, Mark Owen and his family also fled from the fires. His wife Emma Ferguson said the couple and their children and pets had to evacuate after waking up to “helicopters, thick black smoke, winds howling, and that the uncertainty that our house would survive”.

“I’m not sure what our next step is. Right now, I’m just heavy and tired,” she said.

Other celebrities who have lost their homes, according to reports and social media, include:

• John C Reilly
• Cobie Smulders
• John Goldman
• Tina Knowles
• Rikki Lake
• Anna Faris
• Jennifer Grey
• Denise Crosby
• Melissa Rivers
• Cary Elwes
• Carolyn Murphy
• Sandra Lee
• Ricki Lake
• Bozoma Saint John

It was terrible timing. In the late morning of Tuesday 6 January, a “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm was heading for the northern suburbs of Los Angeles. The local office of the US National Weather Service published a strongly worded alert at roughly 10:30am local time. At almost that exact moment, a fire erupted in the Palisades neighbourhood of LA.

“The fire was able to get started, get a foothold, and then the wind came in and pushed it really, really hard,” says Ellie Graeden, co-chief executive of RedZone Analytics, which makes wildfire modelling products for the insurance industry. “This is really as bad as it can get.”

The fire exploded, followed by other wildfires in nearby areas. Thousands of homes and other buildings have been razed. Sunset Boulevard is in ruins. At the time of writing, LA’s fires have killed at least 10 people. Officials have ordered nearly 180,000 people to evacuate.

The fires now rank as the most destructive in LA’s history, with some estimates of the damage put at between $52bn-57bn (£42bn-£46bn).

We still don’t know why they started, however. It might have been a lightning strike, downed power lines, a carelessly discarded cigarette. There could be a more nefarious reason, arson. Most wildfires are caused by humans.

But as the LA authorities begin to piece together what initially sparked the blazes, the speed with which those first flames became raging, rapidly spreading infernos is symptomatic of something happening far more widely.

In this case, a confluence of environmental conditions came together with devastating timing. A combination of long-term drought and heavy rainfall in the days before provided the fuel, while powerful – and at times hurricane-force – winds fanned the fires into raging infernos.

At the outset, the Santa Ana winds as they are known – strong and gusty winds that blow from inland towards the coast – reached speeds of 80mph (129km/h), supercharging the inferno.

Disastrously, the high winds prevented some firefighting helicopters and planes from taking to the skies in order to dump water on the burning areas.

“Without that air support, we’re basically playing whack-a-mole to prevent losses at specific points,” says Ms Graeden.

These conditions come against the backdrop of climate change, which is not only increasing the risk of wildfires around the world, but also making them particularly explosive. This is when relatively small blazes rapidly “blow up” so suddenly and with such ferocity that they become difficult to control.

In California, the risk of such extremely fast-growing fires has increased by an estimated 25% due to human-caused climate change, according to some models.

Rising temperatures and prolonged periods of drought are stripping vegetation and dead plant material of their moisture, meaning when a fire does start, there can be no stopping it.

Matt Jones, an Earth system scientist at the University of East Anglia, who studies the impact of climate change on wildfires, notes that, in 2022 and 2023, LA received extraordinary amounts of rain. Some 52.46in (133cm) of precipitation hit downtown LA during this period, which was nearly a record.

That excessive rain helped plants in the area to grow but then, in 2024, the weather changed. Last year was extremely dry in contrast to the previous two years. It means that there is currently a large volume of dried-out vegetation scattered around southern California.

“We’re left with a really explosive situation,” says Mr Jones.

There was also the significant influence of the windstorm. The Santa Ana winds go by various names, depending on where you live. Known as the Föhn or Föhnwind in the Alpine regions of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, they are associated in folk belief with a range of symptoms including migraines, depression, sleeplessness, confusion, and increased risk of accidents.

One account published in a scientific journal in 1911 reveals the dramatic effects of the Föhnwind in Innsbruck, Austria: “This wind often blows with great violence, and unless one’s windows are promptly closed everything in the house is speedily covered with a thick layer of dust.”

Climate change is creating hotter conditions in some locations where Santa Ana-like winds occur, meaning that the impact or potential consequences – especially in terms of rapidly escalating wildfires – is worsening.

According to some research, these winds are becoming more common in parts of the world due to climate change.

The effect on wildfires of such an increase could be profound. In Switzerland, for example, researchers found Föhn winds led to fires burning three times as much area than on days where there were no such winds.

Fires that spread very quickly are particularly dangerous – not just because of the threat to human life and property, but also because of how widespread those fires can become.

Research published last year examined the frequency of “blow up” fire events that suddenly escalate. Notably, it was areas where fires burned intensely for relatively short periods of time that ended up burning larger areas overall. “Single-day extreme fire spread events are disproportionately shaping North American landscapes,” the authors wrote.

They estimated that, between 2002 and 2021, North American fires that burned more than 1,704 hectares (4210 acres) in a single day burned an average of 2.3 million hectares (5.7 million acres) annually overall.

Mediterranean California, where LA is located, is especially prone to rapidly escalating, wide-burning fires, according to the study.

While the downslope Santa Ana winds appear to have accelerated the LA wildfires, very different conditions can also cause fires to blow up. In the absence of powerful winds, wildfires can sometimes make their own weather, says Mr Jones.

“They generate their own, strong, localised winds, which can affect both the pace at which the fire spreads but also trigger erratic directional changes,” he explains.

As a blaze heats the air above it, it can create updrafts powerful enough to form huge pyrocumulative clouds in the sky above. The appearance of such a cloud can indicate that a wildfire is about to escalate rapidly, or that this process has already begun, research published in 2021 found.

Such storm clouds can cause lightning strikes, which could ignite yet more fires nearby.

This interplay of wind and fire is a common theme. “You can, in certain parts of the globe, get a rapidly growing fire during [the] passage of a front – a weather system that basically gives you the wind but doesn’t bring you the precipitation,” explains John Abatzoglou, professor of climatology at the University of California, Merced.

Fires tend to run up hillsides in the absence of Santa Ana winds, says Prof Abatzoglou, though in places like California, the Santa Ana winds can push fires down hills instead. Similar downslope winds were also thought to have played a role in the deadly Maui wildfires in Hawaii in 2023.

In either case, fast-developing fires are very problematic when they occur near towns and cities. “Within a matter of hours from ignition you had huge numbers of people that were impacted,” says Prof Abatzoglou, referring to the situation in LA.

A controversial question, especially in highly populated places such as California, is whether it is still safe to live in such close proximity to areas prone to these disasters.

Insurers have gradually backed away from the state in recent years, cutting the number of policies available to homeowners, though last month the California Department of Insurance issued a landmark regulation that aimed to make insurance more accessible.

Some residents have also been looking into ways to attempt to fireproof their homes.

Those with the greatest resources might take inspiration from the Getty Villa, a museum in the Pacific Palisades. (Though perhaps not without irony. The museum was originally built by J Paul Getty, an early 20th-Century oil tycoon.)

Staff routinely trim trees and shrubs in the gardens to ensure there is not an excess of vegetation available to provide fuel for fires. The building’s galleries also have double walls and staff can control, to some extent, the flow of hot air into the villa via the air conditioning system.

But the fact that fires can leapfrog for several miles makes containment difficult. Embers from burning vegetation can be whipped up and carried by the wind, allowing new fires to ignite some distance away. Rather than catching fire from direct contact with flames, many homes begin to burn due to embers that can fly miles, entering through eaves or gable vents.

Homeowners can replace porous vents with fire-resistant ones designed to keep out windswept embers, and install ember-resistant gutter guards that allow rainwater but stop vegetation from piling up on the roofline.

Despite the grandeur of some LA mansions, however, many were left ravaged by the recent fires – including multiple homes belonging to celebrities. The biggest wildfires could likely overwhelm even the most fortified properties.

LA does try to reduce the risk of gigantic fires taking hold. The city rents goats, for instance, so that the animals can graze brush from hillsides.

“The reception is overwhelmingly positive wherever we go,” goat herder Michael Choi said in a recent interview. “It’s a win-win scenario as far as I can tell.”

There are also efforts to use high-tech camera-based surveillance systems to watch for developing wildfires, and supercomputers that try to predict when fires are most likely to occur. That said, these systems were in place in LA last week but that did not stop the latest fires claiming lives and leaving vast areas in ruins.

Homeowners who live in wildfire-prone locations need to think about their own vulnerability, says Ms Graeden: “This is a risk that is not necessarily seasonal anymore. This is the type of risk that people need to be taking very seriously at all times.”

She recommends clearing as much vegetation from around residential properties as possible, and installing a fire-resistant roof or a sprinkler system. Having an evacuation plan in place could also save lives.

When efforts to repair and rebuild homes in LA eventually get underway, it is possible some may turn to fire-resistant materials such as bricks made of earth.

But at the heart of it is a deeper question. “We built civilisation that [functions] in one climate and now we are, through burning fossil fuels, fundamentally changing [that climate],” argues Margaret Klein Salamon, a climate activist and leader of the Climate Emergency Fund, a non-profit that funds climate activism.

“This is what the future looks like unless we make drastic changes,” she adds, arguing that the problem of climate change will not go away simply by relocating from some of the worst-affected places.

• Five images that explain why the LA fires spread so fast
• The goats fighting fires in Los Angeles
• ‘I have nothing to go back to’ – fires heartbreak

As the world gets hotter, and as rainfall patterns become more erratic, we may see fires like those in LA erupt with increasing frequency. Abatzoglou highlights the 2024 wildfires in Chile and Greece as key examples in which very dry conditions set the stage for catastrophe.

In 2023 fires hit Canada and burned an area larger than England – these were also fuelled by high temperatures and drought.

Climate change brings dangerous variability, notes Abatzoglou. That swing in weather we’ve seen in southern California, from a period of heavy rainfall to suddenly hot, dry, fire-sparking conditions – known as “hydroclimate whiplash” – is clearly very problematic.

“It’s really these sequences that I think are important when it comes to fire,” says Abatzoglou.

“Rapid swings between unusually wet to unusually dry conditions. That’s something we are seeing across the globe.”

A selection of news photographs from around the world.

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

Catch one of the most elusive wild cat species, which has been 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 doors that closed once the cats were 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 but on Saturday it was confirmed one of the lynx had died overnight.

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

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.

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

Much of the UK endured below freezing temperatures into Saturday morning, with snow, frost and ice pictured across the country.

The UK had its coldest January night in 15 years on Friday, as temperatures in a hamlet in northern Scotland dropped to -18.9C

For most of the UK, Saturday’s temperatures will not be much above freezing again but Sunday’s temperatures will not be as cold.

• Temperature drops to -18.9C in Highland village

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has been asked what checks are in place to vet firms after fast-fashion retailer Shein refused to answer “basic questions” over its supply chain.

Liam Byrne, chair of the Business and Trade Committee, wrote to Dame Julia Hoggett asking if the stock market had tests in place to “authenticate statements” by firms seeking to list, “with particular regard to their safeguards against the use of forced labour in their products”.

It comes after MPs branded the evidence of a Shein lawyer “ridiculous” when she refused to say if the company sold products containing cotton from China.

Byrne told Dame Julia that MPs were “profoundly concerned at the lack of candid and open answers”.

“The committee would like to draw your attention to the concerning evidence we heard,” he said in a letter to the LSE chief executive on Friday.

The BBC understands Shein, founded in China but now headquartered in Singapore, has filed initial paperwork to list in the UK, which could value it at £50bn. It follows the retailers rapid rise to one of the biggest fast fashion firms globally, shipping to customers in 150 countries.

But questions remain over the company’s supply chain amid allegations of forced labour and human rights abuses.

During an appearance in front of the Commons’ Business and Trade Committee on Tuesday, a senior lawyer representing Shein, Yinan Zhu, 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. Shein has denied the claims.

Ms Zhu declined to answer and asked if she could write to the committee following the hearing.

Her repeated refusal to answer questions about supply chains and a potential UK listing, was met with backlash from the committee of MPs, who accused her of “wilful ignorance”.

She told MPs that the Shein does not own any factories or manufacturing facilities, but works with a large network of suppliers, mostly in China, but also in Turkey and Brazil.

She added that the firm complied with “laws and regulations in the countries we operate in”.

China has been accused of subjecting members of the Uighur, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority, to forced labour. In December 2020, research seen by the BBC showed that up to half a million people were being forced to pick cotton in Xinjiang, but Beijing has denied any rights abuses.

The allegations have led to some big fashion brands, including H&M, Nike, Burberry and Adidas, removing products using Xinjiang cotton, which has led to a backlash in China, and boycotts of the companies.

In his letter to the LSE, Byrne, a Labour MP, said: “The committee was profoundly concerned at the lack of candid and open answers to some extremely simple, basic questions about the integrity of Shein’s supply chain.

“In the light of this I would be grateful if you would let me know what checks, if any, the London Stock Exchange has in place to authenticate statements by firms seeking to list, with particular regard to their safeguards against the use of forced labour in their products.”

The LSE told the BBC it would respond to the committee’s letter “in due course”.

Byrne also wrote to the boss of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Nikhil Rathi, to ask what checks the watchdog itself has in place to ensure UK-listed companies disclose “legal risks”. It is understood the FCA sets the listing rules for the London Stock Exchange.

Shein has been contacted for comment following the letters.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has defended her decision to travel to China to improve economic ties at a time when soaring government borrowing costs threaten to squeeze UK public finances.

She says she wants a long-term relationship with China that is “squarely in our national interest” and on Saturday said agreements reached in Beijing would be worth £600m to the UK over the next five years.

Her 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 insisted she would not alter her economic plans.

Reeves met Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng in Beijing, discussing trade and investment opportunities as part of efforts to grow the UK economy and raise living standards.

Following the talks, the UK Treasury said both countries had agreed to deeper co-operation in trade, financial services, investment and climate issues.

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.

Reeves told reporters in Beijing she would “take action” to ensure she met her fiscal rules following a rise in borrowing costs.

She said: “I have been really clear that our fiscal rules are non-negotiable, that we will pay for day-to-day spending through tax receipts and we will get debt down as a share of GDP.”

But the market movements create a potential problem for Reeves if she wants to meet her self-imposed rules.

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.

BBC economics editor Faisal Islam said other European nations such as Spain have encouraged China not just to set up factories but to transfer its advanced battery technology, for example, into Europe.

He said the UK now risks upsetting the new US administration of Donald Trump if it encourages China’s role as part of its own green growth strategy.

During Saturday’s meeting with the Chinese vice-premier, Reeves discussed Hong Kong and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

She said: “We discussed that there will need to be areas where we disagree and it is important that we can have open and frank exchange on these issues.

“That includes concerns on national and economic security, market access and impacts of subsidies and industrial policy to ensure a level playing field exists.”

Tory MP and former security minister Tom Tugendhat told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the timing of Reeves’ visit to China was questionable.

“She’s going at a time when her Budget has sacked the economy, we’ve got debt rates going up, and she looks like she’s going with a begging bowl, not with a trading deal,” he said. “That’s a real problem because actually it makes the UK look more vulnerable, and others around the world will see it too.”

Tugendhat said Reeves had not made it “clear at all” what she has hoping to gain through her visit.

“We don’t use the second most important person in government to do anything other than to fundamentally change a relationship,” he said. “Well, she hasn’t told us what that change is.”

Liberal Democrat deputy leader and Treasury spokesperson Daisy Cooper urged the chancellor to return to the UK “to urgently address the ongoing crisis in the markets and announce a serious plan for growth”.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the UK had “blown hot and cold” in its relations with China over recent decades, suggesting the Chinese government might be “pretty sceptical” about British policies towards it.

On the chancellor’s fiscal rules, Mr Johnson said it would be very difficult for her to abandon them.

He said: “She’s really nailed her colours to the mast there and we have seen that the markets are pretty concerned about the UK position. That is partly because we are so dependent on international flows of finance to finance our debt and trade deficit.”

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

Reeves is joined by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, Financial Conduct Authority chief executive 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.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, chairman of the China-British Business Council, said the chancellor was right to travel to China.

“She is doing exactly the right thing in the right way with her eyes wide open, stressing national security, stressing our [UK] values, stressing human rights,” he said.

He told the Today programme: “A grown-up, confident country engages with serious players around the world, we agree to disagree, we stand up for our values.”

He said the government’s approach “is very similar to the last government’s policy which is to compete, to challenge and to co-operate. That’s what we need to do.

“China has 800 million middle-class people who want to buy British products, are interested in British savings and pension products – it’s madness not to engage.”

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.”

The Biden administration has imposed some of its toughest sanctions yet on Russia, in a move designed to hit Moscow’s energy revenue that is fuelling its war in Ukraine.

The measures target more than 200 entities and individuals ranging from traders and officials to insurance companies, as well as hundreds of oil tankers.

In a first since Moscow’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, the UK will join the US in directly sanctioning energy companies Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas.

“Taking on Russian oil companies will drain Russia’s war chest – and every ruble we take from Putin’s hands helps save Ukrainian lives,” said Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

Some of the measures announced by the US Treasury on Friday will be put into law, meaning the incoming Trump administration will need to involve Congress if it wants to lift them.

Washington is also moving to severely limit who can legally purchase Russian energy, and going after what it called Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of vessels that ship oil around the world.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the actions were “ratcheting up the sanctions risk associated with Russia’s oil trade, including shipping and financial facilitation in support of Russia’s oil exports.”

President Joe Biden said Russian leader Vladimir Putin was in “tough shape”, adding that “it’s really important that he not have any breathing room to continue to do the god-awful things he continues to do.”

“It is probable that gas prices [in the United States] could increase as much as three or four cents a gallon,” said the president.

But, he added, the measures were likely to “have profound effect on the growth of the Russian economy”.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, thanked the US for what he called its “bipartisan support”.

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, a price cap on oil has been among the key measures designed to curb Russia’s energy exports.

But as Olga Khakova from the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Centre explained, its effectiveness was “diluted” because it was also trying to avoid the volume of Russian oil in the market dropping.

This was due to concerns about the impact reduced supply would have on the global economy.

But experts said the oil market was now in a healthier position.

“US oil production (and exports) are at record levels and rising, and therefore the price impact of taking Russian oil off the market, the objective of today’s sanctions, will be attenuated,” said Daniel Fried, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“The US government has gone after the Russian oil sector in a big way, intending to deal what may turn out to be a body blow,” Fried added.

John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine, said while the steps were “excellent”, their implementation would be critical.

“Which means that it is the Trump administration that will determine if these measures do in fact put pressure on the Russian economy,” he said.

The government should consider repatriating British members of the Islamic State group (IS) who are being held in Syrian detention camps, the government’s independent terrorism legislation reviewer Jonathan Hall KC has said.

Mr Hall’s comments come after Donald Trump’s incoming counter-terrorism chief, Sebastian Gorka, said that if the UK wanted to be seen as a “serious ally” of the US it should take back its citizens who joined IS.

One Briton who travelled to Syria to support the jihadist movement was Shamima Begum, who left London as a teenager in 2015 and was stripped of her UK citizenship in 2019.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy has insisted Ms Begum “will not be coming back to the UK”.

In an interview with the Times, Gorka said that “any nation which wishes to be seen to be a serious ally and friend of the most powerful nation in the world should act in a fashion that reflects that serious commitment” when asked if the UK should be forced to take IS members back.

“That is doubly so for the UK which has a very special place in President Trump’s heart and we would all wish to see the ‘special relationship’ fully re-established,” he said.

Since the fall of IS in 2019, thousands of people linked to the group – mostly women and children – have been detained in camps in northern Syria.

Since the toppling of former President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, there are fears the upheaval could threaten the security of the detention camps.

Ms Begum is among the prisoners in such camps, after travelling to Syria as a 15-year-old to support IS.

She married an Islamic State fighter soon after arriving and went on to have three children, none of whom survived.

Her UK citizenship was stripped on national security grounds in 2019 and she has exhausted her legal means of appeal.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, Mr Hall said that while Ms Begum’s story is a compelling one, politicians should look to the bigger picture about the balance of national security.

“Repatriation would not be moral absolution, if someone came back it wouldn’t prevent them from potentially being prosecuted for what they’ve done,” he said.

“It could be quite a pragmatic decision in the overall interests of national security to bring someone back.

“There is obviously some national security benefit of leaving people there because you don’t have to monitor them,” he told the programme.

“On the other hand, there haven’t yet been any attacks in Europe by anyone who has been repatriated in this way and if they are left there… and then they escape, they would be much more dangerous, actually, to the UK.”

The US and many countries in Europe have repatriated citizens from Syrian detention camps before putting them on trial and imprisoning them.

David Lammy told Good Morning Britain on Thursday that Ms Begum’s case had gone through the courts and that she was “not a UK national”.

He said that the government would “act in our security interests. And many of those in those camps are dangerous, are radicals.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has also said Ms Begum should not return.

“Citizenship means committing to a country and wanting its success. It’s not an international travel document for crime tourism,” she said.

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”.

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.

More than 144,000 people are under evacuation orders in Los Angeles county, according to local authorities, as of Saturday.

A curfew is in place from 18:00 local time (02:00 GMT) to 06:00 on Saturday within the areas affected by the Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires after reports of looting.

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 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, 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 six 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 Saturday 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 say its progress has been stopped and it has been 50% contained, with no structures damaged or destroyed
• Archer: The fire started on Friday, blazing through Sesnon Boulevard, North of Meadowlark Avenue and Granada Hills. It currently covers 19 acres and is 0% contained

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, who has accused California Governor Gavin Newsom of being responsible for the city’s struggling water supply.

• 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.

Adam Van Gerpen, a captain with the LA fire department, told the BBC on Friday that some fire crews had run out of water.

“I have witnessed that,” he said from his fire truck as he and other crews battled the Palisades blaze, adding that in such situations, firefighters transfer water from other fire engines.

Newsom said on 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.

“Losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors,” he said in a post on X.

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.

US President Joe Biden said on Friday that while firefighters were “able to partially prevent” some of the fires from spreading, winds would remain a threat until early next week.

Investigations into what initially sparked the fires are continuing.

LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman said that the focus of law enforcement was 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.

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.

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.

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In recent weeks, US President-elect Donald Trump has shown renewed interest in taking control of Greenland, a largely autonomous territory of Denmark in the Arctic and the world’s largest island.

He first indicated an intention to buy Greenland in 2019, during his first term as president, but this week he went further, refusing to rule out economic or military force to take control of it.

Danish and European officials have responded negatively, saying Greenland is not for sale and its territorial integrity must be preserved.

So how could this unusual situation play out, with two Nato allies at odds over a huge territory which is 80% covered with ice but has considerable untapped mineral wealth?

And how could the aspirations for independence among Greenland’s population of 56,000, under Danish control for 300 years, affect the final outcome?

Here we look at four possible scenarios for Greenland’s future.

There is some speculation that Trump’s move is just bluster, a move to get Denmark to boost Greenland’s security in the face of the threat of both Russia and China seeking influence in the region.

Last month, Denmark announced a new $1.5bn (£1.2bn) military package for the Arctic. It had been prepared before Trump’s remarks but the announcement just hours after them was described by the Danish defence minister as an “irony of fate”.

“What was important in what Trump said was that Denmark has to fulfil its obligations in the Arctic or it’s got to let the US do it,” says Elisabet Svane, chief political correspondent for Politiken newspaper.

Marc Jacobsen, associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College, believes that this is a case of Trump “positioning himself before entering office” while Greenland is using the occasion to gain more international authority, as an important step towards independence.

So even if Trump were to lose further interest in Greenland now, which Professor Jacobsen thinks is the most likely scenario, he has certainly put the spotlight on the issue.

But independence for Greenland has been on the agenda for many years, and some say the debate could even go in the opposite direction.

“I noticed in the last few days the Greenland PM is calmer in his comments – ie. yes, we want independence but in the long run,” says Svane.

There is a general consensus in Greenland that independence will happen eventually, and also that if Greenland votes for it, Denmark will accept and ratify it.

However, it is also unlikely that Greenland would vote for independence unless its people are given guarantees that they can keep the subsidies they currently get from Denmark to pay for things like healthcare and the welfare system.

“The Greenland PM may be up in arms now, but in the event that he actually calls a referendum, he will need some kind of convincing narrative about how to save the Greenland economy and welfare system,” Ulrik Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told the BBC.

One possible next step is a free association – something like the US currently has with Pacific states the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.

Denmark has previously opposed this status both for Greenland and for the Faroe Islands, but according to Dr Gad, current Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is not categorically against it.

“Danish understanding of the Greenland historical experience is way better than it was 20 years ago,” he says, with Denmark accepting colonial responsibility.

The recent discussions “might persuade [Frederiksen] to say – better to keep Denmark in the Arctic, keep some kind of connection to Greenland, even if it’s a looser one”, he adds.

But even if Greenland is able to get rid of Denmark, it has become clear in recent years that it can’t get rid of the US. The Americans never really left after taking control of the island in World War Two, and see it as vital for their security.

An agreement in 1951 affirmed Denmark’s basic sovereignty of the island but, in effect, gave the US whatever it wanted.

Dr Gad said that Greenland officials had been in contact with the last two US administrations about Washington’s role.

“They now know the US will never leave,” he said.

There has been speculation that Trump’s economic rhetoric is potentially the biggest threat to Denmark – with the US drastically increasing tariffs on Danish, or even EU, goods, forcing Denmark into concessions of some kind over Greenland.

Professor Jacobsen says Danish governments have been preparing for that, and not just because of the Arctic territory.

Trump has been threatening universal 10% tariffs on all US imports which could, among other things, significantly disrupt European growth, and some Danish and other European companies are now considering setting up manufacturing bases in the US.

Possible options for raising tariffs include by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Benjamin Cote of international law firm Pillsbury told the website MarketWatch.

One of the main Danish industries potentially affected by this is pharmaceuticals. The US receives products such as hearing aids and most of its insulin from Denmark, as well as the diabetes drug Ozempic, made by the Danish company Novo Nordisk.

Analysts say the hike in prices that would result from these measures would not find favour with the US public.

The “nuclear option” seems far-fetched, but with Trump failing to rule out military action it has to be considered.

Essentially, it wouldn’t be hard for the US to take control, given that they already have bases and plenty of troops in Greenland.

“The US has de facto control already,” says Professor Jacobsen, adding that Trump’s remarks seemed ill-informed and he didn’t understand the point of them.

That said, any use of military force by Washington would create an international incident.

“If they invade Greenland, they invade Nato,” says Svane. “So that’s where it stops. Article 5 would have to be triggered. And if a Nato country invades Nato then there’s no Nato.”

Dr Gad says Trump sounds like Chinese President Xi Jinping talking about Taiwan or Russia’s Vladimir Putin talking about Ukraine.

“He’s saying it’s legitimate for us to take this piece of land,” he says. “If we take him really seriously this is a bad omen for the whole of the Western alliance.”

Two wounded North Korean soldiers have been captured as prisoners of war by Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

The two men are receiving “necessary medical assistance” and are in the custody of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in Kyiv, according to Zelensky.

The president said he was “grateful” to Ukrainian paratroopers and soldiers from the Special Operation Forces for capturing the North Koreans.

He added that “this was not an easy task”, claiming that Russian and North Korean soldiers usually execute wounded North Koreans “to erase any evidence of North Korea’s involvement in the war against Ukraine”.

The Ukrainian intelligence service said in a statement that the prisoners were captured on 9 January and immediately after were “provided with all the necessary medical care as stipulated by the Geneva Convention” and taken to Kyiv.

“They are being held in appropriate conditions that meet the requirements of international law,” the intelligence service’s statement read.

The intelligence service said the prisoners do not speak Ukrainian, English or Russian, “so communication with them is carried out through interpreters of Korean, in cooperation with South Korean NIS (National Intelligence Service)”.

In a statement posted on Telegram and X, Zelensky said the soldiers were “talking to SBU investigators” and he had instructed the Security Service of Ukraine to grant journalists access to them.

“The world needs to know the truth about what is happening,” he added.

Zelensky also posted four photographs alongside his statement. Two show wounded men. One of the photos showed a red Russian military card.

The place of birth on the document is given as Turan, in the Tuva Republic, which is close to Mongolia.

The intelligence service said that when the prisoners were captured, one of the soldiers had a Russian military ID card issued in the name of another person with registration in the Tuva Republic. The other had no documents at all.

The intelligence service said that during interrogation, the soldier with the ID card told security personnel that he had been issued the document in Russia during the autumn of 2024.

He is alleged to have stated that at that time, some of North Korea’s combat units had one-week interoperability training.

“It is noteworthy that the prisoner…emphasises that he was allegedly going for training, not to fight a war against Ukraine,” the SBU statement said.

The intelligence service reported that he said he was born in 2005 and had been serving North Korea as a rifleman since 2021.

The second prisoner is reported to have given some of his answers in writing because he had an injured jaw, according to SBU. The intelligence service said it believed he was born in 1999 and had been serving North Korea as a scout sniper since 2016.

The Geneva Convention states that the questioning of prisoners should be carried out in a language they understand and prisoners must be protected against public curiosity.

Zelensky’s office said in a statement that the Russians “are trying to hide the fact that these are soldiers from North Korea by giving them documents claiming they are from Tuva or other territories under Moscow’s control”.

“But these people are actually Koreans, they are from North Korea,” the statement from the president’s office said.

In 2014, Russian forces operating in Ukraine – despite Kremlin denials – were sent without identifying markings on their uniforms.

Last year, when President Vladimir Putin was asked about Russia using North Korean troops in its war on Ukraine, he did not deny it. He said it was Russia’s “sovereign decision”.

In December, South Korea’s intelligence agency reported that a North Korean soldier believed to have been the first to be captured while supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine had died after being taken alive by Ukrainian forces.

Separately, the White House said North Korean forces were experiencing mass casualties.

The Security Service of Ukraine said it “is currently conducting the necessary investigative measures to establish all the circumstances of the DPRK military’s participation in Russia’s war against Ukraine”.

“The investigation is being conducted under the procedural guidance of the Prosecutor General’s Office under Article 437 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (planning, preparation, unleashing and waging an aggressive war).”

Firefighters are battling to control huge wildfires in Los Angeles that have killed at least 11 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. More than 21,000 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.

Six fires are currently burning in the Los Angeles area.

• Palisades fire: The largest active fire is burning between Santa Monica and Malibu. Burnt area: 21,596 acres.

• Eaton fire: Second largest fire burning north of Pasadena. Burnt area: 14,117 acres.

• Kenneth fire: In the West Hills area, just north of the Palisades. Began on Thursday afternoon and has so far burned 1,052 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.

• Archer fire: The newest blaze. Started on Friday and has burnt through 19 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.

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.

Flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the South Korean passenger plane that crashed last month stopped recording four minutes before the disaster, the country’s transport ministry has said.

The crash of the Jeju Air flight killed 179 people, making it the deadliest air accident on Korean soil. Two cabin crew members were the only survivors.

Investigators had hoped that data on the recorders would provide insights about the crucial moments before the tragedy.

The ministry said it would analyse what caused the “black boxes” to stop recording.

• What we know about the South Korea plane crash
• Why was there a wall near runway?

The recorders were originally examined in South Korea, the ministry said.

When the data was found to be missing, they were taken to the US and analysed by American safety regulators.

The plane was travelling from Bangkok on 29 December when it crash-landed at Muan International Airport and slid into a wall off the end of the runway, bursting into flames.

Sim Jai-dong, a former transport ministry accident investigator, told Reuters news agency that the loss of data from the crucial final minutes was surprising and suggested that all power, including back-up, could have been cut.

Many questions remain unanswered. Investigators have been looking at the role that a bird strike or weather conditions may have played.

They have also focused on why the Boeing 737-800 did not have its landing gear down when it hit the runway.

It was 20:25 on a Monday evening in November 2020 when Caroline Darian got the call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was her mother, Gisèle Pelicot.

“She announced to me that she discovered that morning that [my father] Dominique had been drugging her for about 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Ms Darian recalls in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme’s Emma Barnett.

“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” says Ms Darian, now 46.

“I remember I shouted, I cried, I even insulted him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”

Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in jail at the end of a historic three-and-a-half month trial in December.

More than four years later, Ms Darian says that her father “should die in prison”.

Fifty men who Dominique Pelicot recruited online to come rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Gisèle were also sent to jail.

He was caught by police after upskirting in a supermarket, leading investigators to look closer at him. On this seemingly innocuous retired grandfather’s laptop and phones, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Gisèle, clearly unconscious, being raped by strangers.

On top of pushing issues of rape and gender violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted the little-known issue of chemical submission – drug-facilitated assault.

Caroline Darian has made it her life’s struggle to fight chemical submission, which is thought to be under-reported as most victims have no recollection of the assaults and may not even realise they were drugged.

In the days that followed Gisèle’s fateful phone call, Caroline Darian and her brothers, Florian and David, travelled to the south of France where their parents had been living to support their mother as she absorbed the news that – as Ms Darian now puts it – her husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years”.

Soon afterwards, Ms Darian herself was called in by police – and her world shattered again.

She was shown two photos they found on her father’s laptop. They showed an unconscious woman on a bed, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

At first, she couldn’t tell the woman was her. “I lived a dissociation effect. I had difficulties recognising myself from the start,” she says.

“Then the police officer said: ‘Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek… it’s you.’ I looked at those two photos differently then… I was laying on my left side like my mother, in all her pictures.”

• Gisèle Pelicot: How an ordinary woman shook attitudes to rape in France
• Who is Dominque Pelicot?
• Pelicot family torn apart

Ms Darian says she is convinced her father abused and raped her too – something he has always denied, although he has offered conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know that he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse. But I don’t have any evidence,” she says.

Unlike in the case of her mother, there is no proof of what Pelicot may have done to Ms Darian.

“And that’s the case for how many victims? They are not believed because there’s no evidence. They’re not listened to, not supported,” she says.

Soon after her father’s crimes came to light, Ms Darian wrote a book.

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again explores her family’s trauma.

It also delves deeper into the issue of chemical submission, in which the drugs typically used “come from the family’s medicine cabinet”.

“Painkillers, sedatives. It’s medication,” Ms Darian says. As is the case for almost half of victims of chemical submission, she knew her abuser: the danger, she says, “is coming from the inside.”

She says that in the midst of the trauma of finding out she had been raped more than 200 times by different people, her mother Gisèle found it difficult to accept that her husband may have also assaulted their daughter.

“For a mum it’s difficult to integrate that all in one go,” she says.

Yet when Gisèle decided to open up the trial to the public and the media so as to expose what had been done to her by her husband and dozens of men, mother and daughter were in agreement: “I knew we went through something… horrible, but that we had to go through it with dignity and strength.”

Now, Ms Darian needs to understand how to live knowing she is the daughter of both the torturer and the victim – something she calls “a terrible burden”.

She is now unable to think back to her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, only occasionally slipping back into the habit of referring to him as her father.

“When I look back I don’t really remember the father that I thought he was. I look straight to the criminal, the sexual criminal he is,” she says.

“But I have his DNA and the main reason why I am so engaged for invisible victims is also for me a way to put a real distance with this guy,” she tells Emma Barnett. “I am totally different from Dominique.”

Ms Darian adds she doesn’t know whether her father was a “monster,” as some have called him. “He knew perfectly well what he did, and he’s not sick,” she says.

“He is a dangerous man. There is no way he can get out. No way.”

It will be years before Dominique Pelicot, 72, is eligible for parole, so it is possible he will never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Pelicots are rebuilding themselves. Gisèle, Caroline Darian says, is exhausted from the trial, but also “recovering… She is doing well”.

As for Ms Darian, the only question she is interested in now is to raise awareness of chemical submission – and to educate children on sexual abuse.

She derives strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old – her “lovely son”, she says with a smile, her voice full of affection.

The events that were unleashed on that November day made her who she is today, Ms Darian says. Now she is trying to look ahead.

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 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.

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.