It was late at night, and Darim’s animation studio had just finished designing a new look for a character in one of South Korea’s most popular video games, MapleStory.

Darim was proud of her work. So, sitting alone on the floor of her small studio apartment, she posted the trailer on social media. Almost immediately, she was flooded with thousands of abusive messages, including death and rape threats.

Young male gamers had taken issue with a single frame in the trailer, in which the female character could be seen holding her thumb and forefinger close together.

They thought it resembled a hand gesture used by a radical online feminist community almost a decade ago to poke fun at the size of Korean men’s penises.

“There were insults I’d never heard before, they were disgusting and inhumane,” said Darim, which is not her real name. One read: “You’ve just sabotaged your job.”

Messages then started piling into Darim’s studio and the game developer claiming she was a feminist and demanding she be fired. Within hours, the company pulled the promotional video.

Darim had become the latest victim in a series of vicious online witch hunts, in which men in South Korea attack women they suspect of having feminist views. They bombard them with abuse and try to get them sacked.

This is part of a growing backlash to feminism, in which feminists have been branded man-haters who deserve to be punished. The witch hunts are having a chilling effect on women, with many now scared to admit they are feminists.

This is forcing the movement underground, in a country where gender discrimination is still deeply entrenched. South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the OECD, a group of the world’s rich countries.

The hunts are often spearheaded by young male video gamers, and target women who work in the industry, like Darim, though recently they have spread to other professions.

They look for anything that resembles what they term the ‘finger-pinching gesture’ and use it as proof that men-hating women are surreptitiously mocking them.

Once they spot a supposed sign, the hunt begins. “They decide that a dark, evil feminist is hiding in the company, and her life should be ruined,” explained Minsung Kim, a 22-year-old male gamer who, concerned by these witch hunts, set up an organisation to support the victims.

The witch hunters track down all female employees at the company in question, and trawl their social media accounts, searching for any evidence of feminism. Way back on Darim’s timeline, they found an ‘offending’ post.

Darim in fact had nothing to do with the disputed part of the animation, but her studio was rattled by the torrent of abuse – especially after Nexon, the gaming company, suddenly removed all the studio’s artwork from their roster and issued an apology to customers.

“My company and CEO were in a panic,” said Darim. “I thought I was going to be fired, and I’d never be able to work in animation again.”

Then Minsung’s organisation stepped in. They urged her studio to ignore the gamers and offered to pay Darim’s legal fees so she could report the abuse. “We said these demands will never end, you need to nip this in the bud now,” he said. The studio listened, and Darim kept her job.

But similar witch hunts have worked, in the gaming industry and beyond, and they are becoming more frequent. In one case, a young illustrator lost her job after a handful of disgruntled gamers stormed the company’s office demanding she be removed.

And it is not just Korean companies that have capitulated. Last year, the international car maker Renault suspended one of its female employees after she was accused of making the finger-pinching gesture while moving her hands in a promotional presentation.

“These anti-feminists are getting more organised; their playbook is getting more specific,” said Minsung. “By taking a hand gesture that everyone makes and turning it into a scarlet letter they can brand literally anyone an evil feminist,” he said.

Because the companies are folding to these baseless accusations, the instigators of these hunts have become emboldened, he said. “They are confident now that when you accuse someone of feminism, you can ruin their career.”

Minsung knows, because not long ago he was one of these men. He used to belong to the anti-feminist forums. “We are exposed to the uncensored internet unimaginably young,” he said, having joined the forums aged nine.

It was only when Minsung traded video games for playing real-life games, including Dungeons and Dragons, that he met women, and his views shifted. He became, in his words, an “ardent feminist”.

In South Korea, women commonly suffer discrimination and misogyny both at work and at home. But as they have fought to improve their rights, many young men have started to believe they are the ones being discriminated against.

The backlash began in the mid-2010s, following a surge of feminist activism. During this time, women took to the streets in protest at sexual violence and the widespread use of hidden cameras that secretly film women using toilets and changing rooms – around 5,000 to 6,000 cases are reported annually.

“Young men saw women becoming vocal and were threatened by their rise,” said Myungji Yang, a professor of sociology at the University of Hawai’i Manoa, who has interviewed dozens of young Korean men. “They learn about feminism from online forums, which carry the most radical caricature of feminists,” she said. “This has given them a distorted idea of what feminism is.”

One of their grievances is the 18-month military service men must complete. Once they leave the military they often “feel entitled” to a good job, said Hyun Mee Kim, a professor of cultural anthropology at Yonsei University in Seoul, who studies feminism.

As more women have entered the workforce, and jobs have become harder to get, some men feel their opportunities are being unfairly taken away.

These feelings have been validated by South Korea’s now disgraced and suspended President, Yoon Suk Yeol, who came to power in 2022 on an anti-feminist platform, claiming gender discrimination no longer existed, and has since tried to dismantle the government’s gender equality ministry.

More surprising than these views themselves, is that the men who hold them have such power over major companies.

I travelled to Pangyo, the Silicon Valley of South Korea, to meet a woman who has worked in the gaming industry for 20 years. After Darim’s case, her company started to edit all its games, removing the fingers from characters’ hands, turning them into fists, to avoid complaints.

“It’s exhausting and frustrating” to work like this, she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The idea that a hand gesture can be seen as an attack on men is absurd and companies should be ignoring it.”

When I asked why they were not, she told me that many developers share the gamers’ anti-feminist views. “For all those outside yelling, there are those on the inside who also believe things are bad.”

Then there is the financial cost. The men threaten to boycott the games unless the companies act.

“The gaming companies think the anti-feminists are the largest source of their revenue,” said Minsung. After Darim’s company, Studio Ppuri, was targeted, it said it lost nearly two thirds of its contracts with gaming companies.

Studio Ppuri, did not respond to our questions, but both Nexon, the game developer, and Renault Korea told us they stood against all forms of discrimination and prejudice.

There is evidence the authorities are also capitulating to the anti-feminists’ demands. When Darim reported her abuse to the police, they refused to take her case.

They said because the finger-pinching gesture was taboo, it was “logical” that she, as a feminist, had been attacked. “I was astonished,” she said. “Why would the authorities not protect me?”

Following outrage from feminist organisations, the police backtracked and are now investigating. In a statement, Seocho district police told the BBC their initial decision to close the case had been “insufficient” and they were “making all efforts to identify the suspects”.

The case left Darim’s lawyer, Yu-kyung Beom, dumbfounded. “If you want to say that you’re a feminist in South Korea, you have to be very brave or insane,” she said.

In November 2023, the violence spilled offline and into real life. A young woman, who we are calling Jigu, was working alone in a convenience store late at night, when a man walked in and started attacking her.

“He said ‘hey, you’re a feminist, right? You look like a feminist with your short hair’,” Jigu told me as she apprehensively recounted the night. The man pushed her to the ground and started kicking her. “I kept going in and out of consciousness. I thought I could die.”

Jigu did not consider herself a feminist. She just liked having short hair and thought it suited her. The attack has left her with permanent injuries. Her left ear is damaged, and she wears a hearing aid.

“I feel like I’ve become a completely different person,” she said. “I don’t smile as much. Some days it is agony just to stay alive, the memory of that day is still so clear.”

Her assailant was sent to prison for three years, and for the first time a South Korean court ruled this was a misogynistically motivated crime: in effect, that Jigu had been attacked for looking like a feminist.

During the attack, the man said he belonged to an extreme anti-feminist group, New Men’s Solidarity. Its leader, In-kyu Bae, has called on men to confront feminists. So, one evening, as he held a live-streaming event in Gangnam, a flashy neighbourhood in Seoul, I went to try to talk to him.

“I’m here to tell you these feminists are staining the country with hatred,” he shouted from the roof of a black van kitted out with loudspeakers.

“That psychopath [who attacked Jigu] was not a member of our group. We don’t have members, we are a YouTube channel,” he told me as he simultaneously broadcast to thousands of subscribers. A small group of young men who had come to watch in person were cheering along.

“We’ve never encouraged anyone to use violence. In fact, the violent ones are the feminist groups. They’re shaming men’s genitals,” he added.

Last year, Mr Bae and several of his supporters were convicted of defaming and insulting a feminist activist after harassing her for more than two years.

Anti-feminist views have become so widespread that Yuri Kim, the director of Korea Women’s Trade Union, recently established a committee to track cases of what she describes as “feminism censorship”. She found that some women have been questioned about their stance on feminism in job interviews, while at work women commonly face comments like “all feminists need to die”.

According to Prof Kim, the feminism academic, men are using now feminist threats in the office as a way to harass and control their female colleagues – it is their way of saying ‘we are watching you; you should behave yourself’.

Such harassment is proving effective. Last year, a pair of scholars coined the phrase “quiet feminism”, to describe the impact of what they say is a “pervasive everyday backlash”.

Gowoon Jung and Minyoung Moon found that although women held feminist beliefs they did not feel safe disclosing them in public. Women I spoke to said they were even afraid to cut their hair short, while others said feminism had become so synonymous with hating men they did not associate with the cause.

A 2024 IPSOS poll of 31 countries found only 24% of women in South Korea defined themselves as feminist, compared to an average of 45%, and down from 33% in 2019.

Prof Kim worries the consequences will be severe. By being forced to conceal their feminist values, she argues women are being stripped of their ability to fight against gender inequality, which penetrates workplaces, politics and public life.

Feminists are now busy brainstorming ways to put an end to the witch hunts. One clear answer is legal change. In South Korea there is no blanket anti-discrimination law to protect women and prevent them being fired for their views.

It has been repeatedly blocked by politicians, largely because it would support gay and transgender people, with anti-feminists, and even some trans-exclusionary feminists, now lobbying against it.

Minsung believes the only way to strip the witch hunters of their powers is for the companies and the authorities to stand up to them. They make up a small fraction of men in South Korea, they just have loud voices and a bizarrely oversized influence, he argues.

Since her attack, Jigu now proudly calls herself a feminist. “I want to reach out to other victims like me, and if even one woman has the strength to grab my hand, I want to help.”

Firefighters are making an all-out assault to prevent the largest of the deadly wildfires that is threatening Los Angeles from spreading into one of the city’s most exclusive neighbourhoods.

Aerial crews have been bombarding the flaming hills with water and fire retardant to hold back the Palisades fire, which has expanded an additional 1,000 acres and is now menacing Brentwood.

Officials have been on the defensive amid mounting anger at how hydrants ran dry as firefighters struggled to contain the fast-moving blazes.

Winds are expected to pick up again overnight, further fanning the flames that have already left at least 16 people dead.

On Saturday evening, the LA County coroner’s office announced that 11 of the deaths were attributed to the Eaton fire and five to the Palisades fire.

“LA County had another night of unimaginable terror and heartbreak,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath on Saturday.

Firefighters have made modest progress against the worst of the infernos, the Palisades fire, which has scorched nearly 23,000 acres and is 11% contained.

But the conflagration has spread into the Mandeville Canyon neighbourhood, sparking evacuation orders for swathes of Brentwood, a ritzy enclave where Arnold Schwarzenegger, Disney chief executive Bob Iger and NBA star LeBron James have homes.

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Also in the evacuation zone is the Getty Center, a hilltop museum that holds more than 125,000 artworks, including masterpieces by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Rubens, Monet and Degas. The building is undamaged so far.

The second-biggest blaze, the Eaton fire, has razed more than 14,000 acres and was 15% contained. Firefighters have mostly contained two smaller blazes, the Kenneth and Hurst fires.

But the National Weather Service warned that the gusty Santa Ana winds that whipped up the fires at the outset would increase again on Saturday and into Sunday.

Seven neighbouring states, the federal government and Canada and Mexico have rushed resources to California.

No cause has yet been established for the fires. The two biggest ones combined have razed an area more than twice the size of Manhattan.

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Some 153,000 residents are under mandatory evacuation orders and another 166,000 have been warned they may have to flee, too.

The political repercussions have begun.

On Friday, Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat with rumoured White House aspirations, ordered an investigation into why a key reservoir was out of service and some fire hydrants ran dry.

Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley complained about the shortage.

“When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there’s going to be water,” she said.

Chief Crowley has also attacked city leadership for cutting her department’s budget and eliminating mechanic positions, which she said had resulted in more than 100 fire apparatuses being out of service.

On Saturday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass – who has been criticised for being in Ghana attending the inauguration of the African country’s president when the fires erupted in LA on Tuesday, hinted at her tensions with Chief Crowley.

“Let me be clear about something,” Bass told a news conference, “the fire chief and I are focused on fighting these fires and saving lives, and any differences that we might have will be worked out in private.”

More than 70,000 people have signed a change.org petition demanding the mayor’s immediate resignation.

As fears of looting grow, a sunset-to-sunrise curfew is being strictly enforced in evacuated areas, official said.

Newsom announced on Saturday that he would double the number of National Guard on the ground to “keep communities safe”, deploying 1,680 troops.

About two dozen arrests have been made, including for burglary, looting and curfew violations.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said cadaver dogs are helping 40 search and rescue team scour razed neighbourhoods.

The death toll is expected to rise once house-to-house searches are conducted.

The fires were so intense that wheel alloys on cars were melted to puddles of liquid metal.

Rick McGeagh, an estate agent, told Reuters news agency that in his Pacific Palisades neighbourhood only six out of 60 homes survived.

All that remained standing at his house was a statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Everything else is ash and rubble,” said the 61-year-old father-of-three.

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.

At least 30 people have been injured after two trams collided at Strasbourg’s central station on Saturday, authorities said.

Videos and photos posted on social media showed two trams containing dozens of people inside. One video shows smoke rising and chaotic scenes as an alarm sounds.

Local media reported that the crash occurred after one of the trams switched tracks and collided with a stationary tram. Other reports said one tram was reversing at the time.

A spokesman for the prefecture said an investigation into the cause of the accident has been opened and no fatalities have been confirmed.

Strasbourg’s mayor Jeanne Barseghian told reporters at the scene there had been a collision involving a tram, but the cause was not known.

According to BFM TV, Barseghian called on people to wait for the results of the investigation.

One eyewitness named Johan told AFP news agency that he saw one of the trams reversing at speed, adding: “We heard a big impact, a big bang.”

Another eyewitness told BFM TV that the doors of the tram flew off on impact.

The outlet reported that a large security perimeter was set up in front of the station.

The Bas-Rhin region’s Fire and Rescue Service posted on X urging people to avoid the area to allow emergency services to access the area.

The service’s director Rene Cellier said some of the non-fatal injuries reported were “mostly trauma”, but also include scalp wounds, clavicle fractures, and knee sprains.

“There are also around 100 people who have no particular injuries but are being seen by the doctors,” Cellier said.

He added that around 50 vehicles and 130 firefighters were dispatched to the scene and that the situation “could have been much more serious”.

Emmanuel Auneau, the director of the CTS – which is responsible for managing public transport in Strasbourg – said the two tram drivers were “not physically injured, but are very shocked”.

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

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.

Actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, winner of two Oscars for The Silence of the Lambs and The Father, and his wife lost two homes in the Pacific Palisades fire, sources confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter.

In a message posted on Instagram, he said “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 on CBS Evening News returning to his burnt-out house.

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 an Instagram post on Friday, Hilton uploaded a video of what was left of her home. “The heartbreak is truly indescribable,” she said, adding that her family was safe.

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

Some of the worst devastation was in the scenic enclave of Pacific Palisades, where hundreds of homes have been 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.”

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.

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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 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: “Miraculously, the main part of our house is still standing. For now.”

She said the house in the surburb of Altadena is “not livable but mostly intact”.

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 Teller, lost their home in the Pacific Palisades.

Posting on Instagram, Keleigh Teller shared a before-and-after picture of razed property, adding: “I wish I grabbed my wedding dress.”

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

Actor James Woods, who starred in Casino and Oppenheimer, said his Pacific Palisades house was not actually destroyed as he had believed.

“A miracle has happened,” he posted Friday on X. “We managed to get to our property and our home, that we were told is gone forever, is still standing.”

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

Curtis and her husband, fellow actor Christopher Guest, pledged $1m (£800,000) to fire relief.

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.

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.

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.

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).”

It looked like an ordinary murder.

One hundred years ago on this day – 12 January 1925 – a group of men attacked a couple on a car ride in a upmarket suburb in Bombay (now Mumbai) in colonial India, shooting the man dead and slashing the woman’s face.

But the story that unfolded brought global spotlight on the case, while its complexity put the country’s then British rulers in a spot of bother, and eventually forced an Indian king to abdicate.

Newspapers and magazines described the murder as “perhaps the most sensational crime committed in British India”, and it became “the talk of the city” during the investigation and subsequent trial.

The victim, Abdul Kadir Bawla, 25, was an influential textile businessman and the city’s youngest municipal official. His female companion, Mumtaz Begum, 22, was a courtesan on the run from the harem of a princely state and had been staying with Bawla for the last few months.

On the evening of the murder, Bawla and Mumtaz Begum were in the car with three others, driving in Malabar Hill, an affluent area along the shore of the Arabian Sea. Cars were a rarity in India at the time, and only the rich owned them.

Suddenly, another car overtook them. Before they could react, it collided with theirs, forcing them to stop, according to intelligence and newspaper reports.

The attackers showered expletives on Bawla and shouted “get the lady out”, Mumtaz Begum later told the Bombay High Court.

They then shot Bawla, who died a few hours later.

A group of British soldiers, who had inadvertently taken a wrong turn on their way back from a golf game, heard the gunshots and rushed to the scene.

They managed to catch one of the culprits, but one officer suffered gunshot wounds when an attacker opened fire at them.

Before fleeing, the remaining attackers made two attempts to snatch the injured Mumtaz Begum from the British officers, who were trying to rush her to the hospital.

The newspapers suggested that attackers’ aim was likely abducting Mumtaz Begum, as Bawla – whom she had met while performing in Mumbai a few months earlier and had been living with since – had earlier received several threats for sheltering her.

The Illustrated Weekly of India promised readers exclusive photographs of Mumtaz Begum, while the police planned to issue a daily bulletin to the press, Marathi newspaper Navakal reported.

Even Bollywood found the case compelling enough to adapt it into a silent murder thriller within months.

“The case went beyond the usual murder mystery as it involved a rich and young tycoon, a slighted king, and a beautiful woman,” says Dhaval Kulkarni, author of The Bawla Murder Case: Love, Lust and Crime in Colonial India.

The attackers’ footprints, as speculated in the media, led investigators to the influential princely state of Indore, which was a British ally. Mumtaz Begum, a Muslim, had lived in the harem of its Hindu king, Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar III.

Mumtaz Begum was famed for her beauty. “In her own class, it was said, Mumtaz was without a peer,” KL Gauba wrote in his 1945 book, Famous Trials for Love and Murder.

But the Maharaja’s (king’s) attempts to control her – preventing her from seeing her family alone and keeping her under constant surveillance – soured their relationship, says Kulkarni.

“I was kept under surveillance. I was allowed to see visitors and my relations but somebody always accompanied me,” Mumtaz Begum testified in the court.

In Indore, she gave birth to a baby girl, who died soon after.

“After my child was born, I was unwilling to stay at Indore. I was unwilling because the nurses killed the female child that was born,” Mumtaz Begum told the court.

Within months, she escaped to the northern Indian city of Amritsar, her mother’s place of birth, but troubles followed.

She was watched there too. Mumtaz Begum’s stepfather told the court that the Maharaja wept and begged her to return. But she refused and moved to Bombay, where the surveillance continued.

The trial confirmed what media had speculated following the murder: representatives of the Maharaja had indeed threatened Bawla with dire consequences if he continued to shelter Mumtaz Begum, but he had ignored the warnings.

Following a lead given by Shafi Ahmed, the only attacker captured at the scene, the Bombay police arrested seven men from Indore.

The investigation revealed links to the Maharaja that were hard to ignore. Most of the arrested men were employed by the Indore princely state, had applied for leave around the same time and were in Bombay at the time of the crime.

The murder put the British government in a tough spot. Though it happened in Bombay, the investigation clearly showed the plot was planned in Indore, which had strong ties to the British.

Terming it “the most awkward affair” for the British government, The New Statesman wrote that if it were a minor state, “there would be no particular cause for anxiety”.

“But Indore has been a powerful feudatory of the Raj,” it said.

The British government initially tried to keep mum about the murder’s Indore connection in public. But in private, it discussed the issue with much alarm, communication between the governments of Bombay and British India shows.

Bombay police commissioner Patrick Kelly told the British government that all evidence “points at present to a conspiracy hatched in Indore or by instigation from Indore to abduct Mumtaj [sic] through hired desperadoes”.

The government faced pressure from different sides. Bawla’s community of wealthy Memons, a Muslim community with roots in modern-day Gujarat, raised the issue with the government. His fellow municipal officials mourned his death, saying, “there surely must be something more behind the scene”.

Indian lawmakers demanded answers in the upper house of British India’s legislature and the case was even discussed in the British House of Commons.

Rohidas Narayan Dusar, a former police officer, writes in his book on the murder that the investigators were under pressure to go slow, but that then police commissioner Kelly threatened to resign.

The case drew top lawyers for both the defence and the prosecution when it reached the Bombay High Court.

One of them was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would later become the founding father of Pakistan after India’s partition in 1947. Jinnah defended Anandrao Gangaram Phanse, one of the accused and a top general with the Indore army. Jinnah managed to save his client from the death penalty.

The court sentenced three men to death and three to life imprisonment, but it stopped short of holding the Maharaja accountable.

Justice LC Crump, who led the trial, noted, however, that “there were persons behind them [assailants] whom we cannot precisely indicate”.

“But where an attempt is made to kidnap a woman, who was for 10 years the mistress of the Maharaja of Indore, it is not in the least unreasonable to look to Indore as the quarter from which this attack may have emanated,” the judge remarked.

The case’s prominence meant the British government had to act quickly against the Maharaja. They gave him a choice: face a commission of inquiry or abdicate, according to documents presented to parliament in India.

The Maharaja chose to quit.

“I abdicate my throne in favour of my son on the understanding that no further inquiry into my alleged connection with the Malabar Hill Tragedy will be made,” he wrote to the British government.

After abdicating, the Maharaja stirred more controversy by insisting on marrying an American woman against the will of his family and community. Eventually, she converted to Hinduism and they wed, according to a British home department report.

Meanwhile, Mumtaz Begum received offers from Hollywood and later moved to the US to try her luck there. She faded into obscurity after that.

German authorities have said an oil tanker stuck in German waters belongs to Russia’s “shadow fleet”, which Berlin says is used to avoid sanctions.

Germany’s maritime authorities (CCME) said on Friday that the Panamanian-flagged ship, known as Eventin, had lost power and steering, meaning tugboats were deployed to secure the vessel.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock blamed Moscow, accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of “circumventing” sanctions and threatening European security by “ruthlessly deploying a fleet of rusty tankers”.

Russia, which previously declined to respond to accusations that it uses a shadow fleet, has not yet commented on this incident.

The US, UK and the EU have imposed sanctions on Russia’s oil industry following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In its first report of the tanker drifting in German waters, the CCME said the vessel was 274m (898ft) long and 48m (157ft) wide, carrying about 99,000 tonnes of oil.

German maritime authorities said the oil tanker was drifting at a low speed in the coastal waters of the Baltic Sea, north of the German island of Rügen.

A four-person team of specialists was lowered onto the vessel by helicopter on Friday night to establish towing connections, which were secured. Three tugboats took control of the “stricken vessel” that is “unable to manoeuvre”.

Maritime authorities said on Friday night that no oil leaks had been detected.

In its latest update on Saturday evening, German maritime authorities said the towing convoy around the tanker was headed to Sassnitz, a town on the island of Rügen, and would arrive early on Sunday.

Earlier, authorities said the convoy of tugboats working to rescue Eventin remained north of Rügen and was moving eastwards “slowly”, at about 2.5 km per hour (1.5mph).

CCME said they had taken safety measures given the rough seas, as the area where the vessel is located was experiencing 2.5m-high (8ft) waves and strengthening wind gusts.

Although the vessel sports the Panamanian flag, German authorities have blamed Russia for the incident.

“Russia is endangering our European security not only with its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, but also with severed cables, displaced border buoys, disinformation campaigns, GPS jammers and, as we have seen, dilapidated oil tankers,” the German foreign minister said in a statement.

Last December, the European Union said it was working on measures including sanctions to target “Russia’s shadow fleet, which threatens security and the environment, while funding Russia’s war budget”.

The European bloc’s remarks came after undersea cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged by a suspected vessel, which the EU believes was part of Russia’s shadow fleet.

The move was a further step taken by Western countries to hit the Kremlin’s oil industry in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Since tougher embargo measures were put in place to halt Russia from exporting oil, Moscow is believed to be using ships with unclear ownership to transport goods – namely oil – across the globe.

As reported by the Atlantic Council, a US-based think tank, Russia is “instrumentalising the dark fleet, using it especially as a primary conveyor of oil exports”.

The shadow fleet, or dark fleet, is the name given to ageing ships that sail “without the industry’s standard Western insurance, have opaque ownership, frequently change their names and flag registrations, and generally operate outside maritime regulations”, according to the Atlantic Council.

The latest incident in the Baltic Sea comes as Washington and London joined efforts to directly sanction energy companies Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the move to weaken Russian oil companies would “drain Russia’s war chest,” adding that funds taken “from Putin’s hands helps save Ukrainian lives”.

But Gazprom Neft slammed the sanctions as “baseless” and “illegitimate”, as reported by Russian state news agencies.

Also on Friday, the US Department of the Treasury said it had sanctioned 183 vessels that are “part of the shadow fleet as well as oil tankers owned by Russia-based fleet operators”.

Jack Smith, the special counsel who led two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump, has resigned from the Justice Department before the president-elect takes office later this month.

According to a court filing submitted on Saturday, Mr Smith “separated from the Department” on Friday.

CBS News, the BBC’s US media partner, reported in November that Smith would resign from the Justice Department after completing his work.

Mr Smith’s departure comes amid a dispute over the release of his report into the findings of Trump’s classified documents case.

Mr Smith was appointed as special counsel in 2022 to oversee two Justice Department cases into Trump – one over the alleged improper hoarding of classified documents and the other over an alleged attempt to interfere in the 2020 election outcome.

Both cases resulted in criminal charges against Trump, who pleaded not guilty and and sought to cast the prosecutions as politically motivated.

Mr Smith’s cases against the president-elect were closed last year following Trump’s presidential election win. Prosecutors wrote that Justice Department regulations forbid the prosecution of a sitting president.

CBS reported in November that Mr Smith’s resignation was expected as it would allow him to leave his post without being fired by Trump or the incoming president’s attorney general.

His exit means he leaves without either of his criminal prosecutions of Trump seeing trial.

Earlier this week, US District Judge Aileen Cannon – who oversaw the classified documents case and controversially dismissed it last July – temporarily barred Mr Smith and Attorney General Merrick Garland from “releasing, sharing, or transmitting” the report about the case.

Trump’s legal team received a draft copy of the report last weekend and it was expected to be released as soon as Friday.

The move by Judge Cannon came after attorneys for Trump’s former co-defendants in the case – Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveir – called on her to intervene. Both men had pleaded not guilty.

Judge Cannon ordered the release be put on hold until a higher appeals court, the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta, considered an emergency appeal from Mr Nauta and Mr De Oliveir.

By law, special counsels must present the findings of their investigations to the Justice Department, which is headed by the attorney general. Garland has promised to release all reports to the public and has so far done so.

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Trump’s attorneys argued that Mr Smith did not have the legal authority to submit the classified documents report because he was unconstitutionally picked to do the job and was politically motivated.

Trump’s legal team also wrote to Garland not to release the report, and urged him to end the “weaponisation of the justice system”.

On Friday, a judge sentenced Trump to an “unconditional discharge” in a criminal case related to hush money payments, meaning he has been spared jail and a fine, but he will still take office as the first US president with a felony conviction.

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.”

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.

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 cannon”.

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.

At least 16 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, 83, 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.

Rodney worked as a project engineer at Lockheed Martin for 45 years.

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.

He was a former child star, having appeared on the 1998 British TV series “Kiddy Kapers”.

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.

​​”Have we really done it?” Tessa Moura Lacerda asked her mother, in disbelief, as they stood outside a government office on a rainy August morning in 2019.

​​In their hands, a document they fought for years to hold – her father’s death certificate, now correctly stating his cause of death.

​​It read: “unnatural, violent death caused by the State to a missing person […] in the dictatorial regime established in 1964”.

​​Tessa’s father, Gildo Macedo Lacerda, died under torture in 1973 at just 24, during the most brutal years of Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Over more than two decades, at least 434 people were killed or disappeared, with thousands more detained and tortured, a national truth commission found.​​​​

Gildo and Mariluce, Tessa’s mother who was pregnant with her at the time, were arrested on 22 October 1973 in Salvador, Bahia, where they lived in fear of persecution.

​​They were part of a left-wing group that demanded democracy and sought to tear down military rule.

​​The dictatorship targeted opposition politicians, union leaders, students, journalists and almost anyone who voiced dissent.

​​Mariluce was released after being questioned and tortured, but Gildo disappeared.

​​He is believed to have died six days after their arrest, at a military facility in the nearby state of Pernambuco.

​​Former detainees told the truth commission they saw Gildo at the prison, being taken into an interrogation room from which they could hear screams that kept them up at night.

​​The commission also found documents citing his arrest.

​​But newspapers at the time reported that he had been shot on the street following a disagreement with another member of his political group.

​​The government would routinely plant false narratives in newspapers read by huge audiences in Brazil and internationally.

​​Gildo’s original death certificate, issued after a 1995 law allowed families to request the document for the missing, left his cause of death blank.

​​His remains, thought to be in a mass grave with those of other political dissidents, have never been identified.

Tessa, who never got to meet Gildo, said her father’s death had been a constant presence in her life.

​​Growing up, her mother gradually told her more and more about him until she was old enough to learn the brutal details of how he died.​​

​​But the lack of an official acknowledgement, and the fact that the family never got to bury him, had a deep impact on her.

​​”His absence, the absence of his body, brought a series of questions,” Tessa told BBC News.​​

​​”As a child, I thought that maybe he hadn’t died. I had this fantasy that he had managed to escape, that I’m not sure my mother even knew about.”​​

​​Now, as an adult, she said she still feels that there is something “broken” inside of her.​​

​​For years, she experienced nightmares, couldn’t sleep in the dark, and when she became a mother, struggled with panicked thoughts that something would happen to her children.​​

​​”It’s like I have a corporal memory of this fear,” she said.​​

​​”People may find it strange, like something supernatural, but it’s not.

“It’s trauma. I was born with it.”

​​Until the age of 18, Tessa’s own birth certificate didn’t list Gildo as her father, with the family having to go through a lengthy legal battle to prove that he was.

​​This made the correction of her father’s death certificate an even more important endeavour.

​​”It’s part of my duty fulfilled,” she said.

​​”It’s not just for the memory of my father, but in the name of all others who disappeared, were killed or tortured during the dictatorship.”

​​In December, Brazil announced it would rectify the certificates of all recognised victims to acknowledge the state’s role in their deaths.

​​Until now, only a few families like Tessa’s had been able to work with a special commission, which was dissolved in 2022 by the president at the time, Jair Bolsonaro, and reinstated by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2024, to have their certificates amended.

​​”It’s a legitimate settling of accounts with the past,” the head of Brazil’s Supreme Court, Luís Roberto Barroso, said.

In recent weeks, a national conversation has been sparked over this violent history after a new film by BAFTA-winning director Walter Salles brought the realities of the dictatorship to the surface.

I’m Still Here, based on a book with the same name by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, tells the story of the author’s mother Eunice and her fight for justice after his father, former congressman Rubens Paiva, was tortured and killed.

Eunice waited 25 years for her husband’s death certificate.

She had no access to the family’s bank accounts without it, and had to rebuild her life.

She died in 2018 without knowing exactly what happened to her husband in his last hours, and without being able to bury him.

Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice in the film, won Brazil’s first Best Actress Golden Globe Award last week for her part in the film – and many are hoping to see her on the list of Academy Awards nominations later this month.

She told BBC News she had huge admiration for Eunice.

“She is a woman who never spent a second of her life seeking recognition for herself… She wanted the death of her husband to be recognised.

“Despite the world changing, that absence was never cured,” she added.

“How are you going to tell these families: ‘Just forget. Brush your dead under the carpet?'”

Despite I’m Still Here being mostly set during the dictatorship years, it resonates deeply with Brazilians today.

Brazil is an extremely divided country, and its politics has become exceedingly polarised.

Recent years have seen a rise in extreme rhetoric and efforts to re-write the narrative around the dictatorship.

In 2016, a group of protesters stormed Congress calling for a return to military rule. Three years later, Bolsonaro’s education minister ordered the revision of history textbooks, denying the overthrow of the democratic government in 1964 had been a coup.

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has praised the former dictatorship and held events commemorating the coup during his time in office.

More recently, Bolsonaro and some of his closest allies have been formally accused of allegedly plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 presidential election.

The former president never publicly acknowledged his defeat and his supporters, who refused to accept the outcome, stormed Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court on 8 January 2023.

Salles told the BBC the current state of politics in Brazil was part of why now was the right time to make the film.

“What’s extraordinary about literature, music, cinema and the arts, is that they are instruments against forgetting,” he said.

Brazilians with close ties to the story have described leaving cinemas in tears after watching the film.

Marta Costta, whose aunt Helenira was killed in 1972, said she wanted to run out of the screening.

“You imagine that your family were hooded and tortured in that way,” she told BBC News.

“When Eunice is telling her story, she is also telling mine; when I am telling my aunt’s story, I’m also telling theirs. You can’t separate one from the other,” she said.

Marta is making a documentary about Helenira and her years of resistance, but there is much the family still doesn’t know about her disappearance and death. Helenira’s body was also never recovered.

“It’s a cursed inheritance, because we have to keep passing the baton from generation to generation, until we can ensure her memory is preserved, that history is told how it really happened.”

Helenira’s family will now, 52 years after she was killed, receive a certificate that acknowledges the brutal reality of her death.

Its importance, Marta says, is immeasurable.

“The day we receive that certificate, it’s like the state is recognising its role and apologising.

“It’s the first step for us to be able to begin again.”

Though the certificates are a step forward, both Tessa and Marta say the bereaved families have a long way to go in their fight for justice.

An amnesty law, which remains in place, means that none of the military officials in power at the time or those accused of torture and killings have been prosecuted. Many have already died.

There has been no formal apology from the government or the military.

“Brazilian society needs to recognise this history so these deaths weren’t in vain,” Tessa said.

“If we don’t work to clear up this history, to acknowledge our pain,” Marta said, “we will always be under the risk of it happening again.”

The wounds of the dictatorship, in Tessa’s words, are a national trauma.

But for her, as for Marta and Eunice, it is also a deeply personal history.

“I will not stop fighting until the end of my days,” she said.

“I will bury my father.”

“It all started as a small passion project,” says Fabriccio Díaz, 28, who, together with his wife Lucía Ramírez, 25, runs the only fully operational photo film development lab in Central America from their apartment in Guatemala City.

“Now we have over 60 clients a month and have developed over 800 rolls just this year,” he adds.

Arca Film Lab has been in high demand this year and is the only photo film development lab in Central America that develops every type of analogue photography film, which includes the rather complicated process of developing positives in a process known as E-6.

Fabriccio, who studied cinematography, explains that the great inaccessibility of high-quality film development services in Central America gave him the first decisive push to learn how to develop his first film.

“When we started experimenting and developing film in our apartment, friends started asking us to develop film for them and it all just took off somehow,” Lucía recalls.

And so, the Arca Film Lab was born in September 2023 as a simple Instagram page offering film development services in Guatemala.

The couple have taught themselves most of the skills needed to develop film by watching YouTube videos and by reaching out to other film labs internationally and asking for tips.

“We were surprised that so many people responded to our questions. A lot of the veterans in the photo development world helped us out by sharing their experiences and tricks. We are really grateful for that,” says Fabriccio.

Fabriccio and Lucía’s love of photography is not confined to developing film, though. The couple also organise “photo walks” in which a group of people get together in Antigua, the old centre of Guatemala City, to take pictures and experiment with old analogue cameras.

For young analogue photography enthusiasts like Iván Ortiz, 22, snapping photos with a camera which is older than he is gives him something modern cameras cannot compete with.

“It’s like having nostalgia for a generation we were never a part of,” he tells the BBC.

Iván says that older people do not always get the recent hype for old cameras and film. “They just don’t understand our perspective,” he explains.

“We live in a world where everything is digital and fast. Through analogue photography, I have to make conscious decisions about my photos and focus solely on the act of photographing. And the best part of it is that you have something physical afterwards, and not just another data file,” he adds.

Having physical photos to hold is also something that Steven López from the US highlights as an advantage of analogue photography.

The 33-year-old is travelling through Central America to document the last traces of Mayan culture and always carries a 35mm analogue camera with him.

“Photography and especially analogue photography is just the best way to document and experience cultures. Every time I get back from travelling and get the developed film back it’s like Christmas!”, he tells the BBC.

The community of analogue photography enthusiasts in Central America may be growing quickly, but the challenges are greater than in other places.

“It is really hard to get analogue cameras here and it is even harder to get them in good condition,” explains 26-year-old Ronald Ottoniel, who went on the photo walk to buy new rolls of film and turn in others to be developed.

And there are other hurdles, too.

Fabriccio and Lucía explain that the process of buying and importing the chemicals needed to develop positive film has been extremely complicated because the import of these chemicals is closely monitored by the state and requires special permits, which has made it a painstakingly long ordeal.

“Many other labs don’t offer the E-6 processing just because it’s so complicated to import the chemicals,” says Fabriccio.

Their business may be expanding, but Fabriccio and Lucía are determined to make sure it does not lose the personal touch and passion which inspired it in the first place.

Lucía explains how sometimes clients “put little sweets into the packages they send us and sometimes we send a handwritten note back”.

“It’s important to us that this is not a mass-producing business, but that every client is [treated as] an individual,” she adds.

Around the world, photo labs use large machines that develop the film almost completely automatically, but in the humble apartment of Fabriccio and Lucía, the process is very much “hands-on”.

For colour and positive (E-6) film the temperature of the chemicals and the time the film is exposed to them has to be exact, otherwise, the entire film roll will turn out badly.

“The beginning was definitely not easy with this entire process, but after developing over 800 film rolls these processes come like second nature to us,” recalls Fabriccio.

“But the first time we developed the positive films, the E-6 process, we were so nervous because we had invested so much in the chemicals and the roll. But when it came out well and we were able to see these lively colours of the positive film it’s always very exciting,” he adds.

Another indispensable member of the Arca Film Lab is Toto, the four-month-old cat that is, according to Fabriccio and Lucía, in charge of quality control and roves around during the entire development process.

The developed film rolls are then transferred from the kitchen to the bathroom, as it is the most dust-free space in the house.

There they dry, to be later scanned in a high-resolution Nikon scanner, which Fabriccio says is the highest-resolution film scanner in Central America.

Fabriccio and Lucía have now also expanded to El Salvador, where they regularly collect and sell film rolls.

The young couple remains ambitious and in the future, they say they hope to establish a strong relationship with CineStill and Eastman Kodak andto expand to developing cine film rolls, which would include a complicated process known as ECN-2.

“It is my dream to revitalise the classical cinematography scene here in Central America! We have so much talent expertise and enthusiasm to offer the world. (…) with Arca Film Lab we have started a movement that we want to push further and further,” says Fabriccio.

An eerie whizzing sound followed by a big boom startled Kenyan villagers relaxing recently one afternoon with family and friends.

“It sounded like a bomb, I was shocked. I started looking around, also wondering if it was gunshots,” Stephen Mangoka, a 75-year-old farmer from Makueni county’s Mukuku village, told the BBC.

“I looked up in the sky to see if there was smoke. Nothing.

“I rushed to the road to check if there had been an accident. Also, nothing. That is when someone told me that something had fallen from the skies.”

In fact, a massive round metal object had plummeted from above landing on farmland near a dry riverbed – and it was piping hot.

“We found a big piece of metal that was very red so we had to wait for it to cool before anyone could approach it,” said Ann Kanuna, who told us she owns the land where the object fell.

The giant ring took around two hours to cool down and turn grey – but it had already become a sensation with people arriving to look at it.

The rest of that Monday afternoon – with few people working as it was the day before New Year’s Eve – crowds came to view the giant metallic ring.

It was like selfie central, with people coming to pose next to it and great debates about what it could be.

The local authorities in Makueni county – which is around 115km (70 miles) south-east of the capital, Nairobi – were informed.

The Kenya Space Agency (KSA) then heard about it and made arrangements to come and investigate the next day.

But such was the object’s fame that Mukuku villagers feared it would be stolen overnight.

Together with local officers, some of them took it in turns to stand guard, lighting a fire nearby. They wanted to keep away potential scrap dealers and others wanting to make money out of the curiosity.

It is said to weigh more than 500kg (1,102lb) – around the same as an adult horse – and is around 2.5m (8ft) in diameter, roughly the size of child’s four-seater merry-go-round.

With daylight came more onlookers on New Year’s Eve – followed by the KSA team and the media.

Mukuku had never seen such activity. When the object was carted away later that day by the KSA, the buzz gave way to concerns about what the villagers had had in their midst.

The KSA said its preliminary assessments indicated the object was “a separation ring” from a space launch rocket.

“Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” its statement said the next day.

No-one was injured when it had fallen but some in Mukuku began to complain that the impact of the crash had caused damage to nearby houses.

Christine Kionga, who lives about a kilometre from the crash site, showed us cracks in the concrete of some of the buildings in her home compound. She said they had appeared after the crash.

Other neighbours alleged the structural integrity of their homes had also been affected – allegations that are yet to be substantiated.

“The government needs to find the owners of this object, and get compensation for those affected by it,” Mukuku resident Benson Mutuku told the BBC.

There were reports in the local media that some residents had begun to complain of feeling unwell after exposure to the metallic ring though there was no confirmation from those we spoke to when we visited – nor from the authorities or the KSA.

Nonetheless Mr Mutuku said there were concerns about the long-term effects of possible space radiation.

“This is a space object and we have heard in other similar incidents that there have been effects of radiation affecting even future generations and there is that fear in this community.”

However tests run later by the Kenya Nuclear Regulatory Authority revealed that while the metal ring did have higher radiation levels than the area in which it was found, they were not at a level harmful to humans.

Engineers from the KSA, which was established in 2017 to promote, co-ordinate and regulate space-related activities in the East African nation, are continuing to run other tests to find out more about the object.

The KSA director general said it was lucky that no significant damage was done when the object hurtled to Earth.

“The ultimate responsibility for any damage or injury caused by that space object is on the state in whose jurisdiction that operator may have launched the object,” Brigadier Hillary Kipkosgey told the BBC.

According to the Outer Space Treaty, overseen by the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, “states shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects”.

“[The ring] is a common item in many rockets and many space objects so it difficult to attribute it to a specific rocket or space object but we have leads but as I said our investigations are not conclusive,” Brigadier Kipkosgey said.

The BBC showed pictures of the object to the UK Space Agency to get the thoughts of its experts.

“The most plausible object it could be is the upper stage separation ring from an Ariane rocket in 2008,” its launch director, Matt Archer, said.

“The satellites are fine, but the actual rocket body has come through and de-orbited.”

The Ariane was Europe’s main rocket launch vehicle, helping more than 230 satellites into orbit, before it was retired in 2023.

It seems the separation ring may have been orbiting Earth for 16 years before making its unexpected appearance in Mukuku.

This is not the first incident of space junk appearing in East Africa.

Just over a year and a half ago some suspected space debris fell over several villages in western Uganda.

And a few days ago, on 8 January, there were unconfirmed reports of what was believed to be space debris burning brightly in the skies above northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia.

As the space industry grows, it is predicted that such incidents will become more frequent – and African governments may need to invest in ways to better detect this speeding space rubbish.

Nasa estimates there are more than 6,000 tonnes of space debris in orbit at the moment.

There are many different estimates about the chances of such junk hitting someone, but most are in the one-in-10,000 range.

Such statistics are little comfort for Mukuku’s residents, who cannot help thinking of what damage the ring could have caused had it landed in the centre of the village instead of on farmland.

“We need assurances from the government that it won’t happen again,” said Mr Mutuku.

• One woman’s battle to push Africa’s space race
• Why there’s a rush of African satellite launches
• Space junk: What is it and why is it a problem?

It looked like an ordinary murder.

One hundred years ago on this day – 12 January 1925 – a group of men attacked a couple on a car ride in a upmarket suburb in Bombay (now Mumbai) in colonial India, shooting the man dead and slashing the woman’s face.

But the story that unfolded brought global spotlight on the case, while its complexity put the country’s then British rulers in a spot of bother, and eventually forced an Indian king to abdicate.

Newspapers and magazines described the murder as “perhaps the most sensational crime committed in British India”, and it became “the talk of the city” during the investigation and subsequent trial.

The victim, Abdul Kadir Bawla, 25, was an influential textile businessman and the city’s youngest municipal official. His female companion, Mumtaz Begum, 22, was a courtesan on the run from the harem of a princely state and had been staying with Bawla for the last few months.

On the evening of the murder, Bawla and Mumtaz Begum were in the car with three others, driving in Malabar Hill, an affluent area along the shore of the Arabian Sea. Cars were a rarity in India at the time, and only the rich owned them.

Suddenly, another car overtook them. Before they could react, it collided with theirs, forcing them to stop, according to intelligence and newspaper reports.

The attackers showered expletives on Bawla and shouted “get the lady out”, Mumtaz Begum later told the Bombay High Court.

They then shot Bawla, who died a few hours later.

A group of British soldiers, who had inadvertently taken a wrong turn on their way back from a golf game, heard the gunshots and rushed to the scene.

They managed to catch one of the culprits, but one officer suffered gunshot wounds when an attacker opened fire at them.

Before fleeing, the remaining attackers made two attempts to snatch the injured Mumtaz Begum from the British officers, who were trying to rush her to the hospital.

The newspapers suggested that attackers’ aim was likely abducting Mumtaz Begum, as Bawla – whom she had met while performing in Mumbai a few months earlier and had been living with since – had earlier received several threats for sheltering her.

The Illustrated Weekly of India promised readers exclusive photographs of Mumtaz Begum, while the police planned to issue a daily bulletin to the press, Marathi newspaper Navakal reported.

Even Bollywood found the case compelling enough to adapt it into a silent murder thriller within months.

“The case went beyond the usual murder mystery as it involved a rich and young tycoon, a slighted king, and a beautiful woman,” says Dhaval Kulkarni, author of The Bawla Murder Case: Love, Lust and Crime in Colonial India.

The attackers’ footprints, as speculated in the media, led investigators to the influential princely state of Indore, which was a British ally. Mumtaz Begum, a Muslim, had lived in the harem of its Hindu king, Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar III.

Mumtaz Begum was famed for her beauty. “In her own class, it was said, Mumtaz was without a peer,” KL Gauba wrote in his 1945 book, Famous Trials for Love and Murder.

But the Maharaja’s (king’s) attempts to control her – preventing her from seeing her family alone and keeping her under constant surveillance – soured their relationship, says Kulkarni.

“I was kept under surveillance. I was allowed to see visitors and my relations but somebody always accompanied me,” Mumtaz Begum testified in the court.

In Indore, she gave birth to a baby girl, who died soon after.

“After my child was born, I was unwilling to stay at Indore. I was unwilling because the nurses killed the female child that was born,” Mumtaz Begum told the court.

Within months, she escaped to the northern Indian city of Amritsar, her mother’s place of birth, but troubles followed.

She was watched there too. Mumtaz Begum’s stepfather told the court that the Maharaja wept and begged her to return. But she refused and moved to Bombay, where the surveillance continued.

The trial confirmed what media had speculated following the murder: representatives of the Maharaja had indeed threatened Bawla with dire consequences if he continued to shelter Mumtaz Begum, but he had ignored the warnings.

Following a lead given by Shafi Ahmed, the only attacker captured at the scene, the Bombay police arrested seven men from Indore.

The investigation revealed links to the Maharaja that were hard to ignore. Most of the arrested men were employed by the Indore princely state, had applied for leave around the same time and were in Bombay at the time of the crime.

The murder put the British government in a tough spot. Though it happened in Bombay, the investigation clearly showed the plot was planned in Indore, which had strong ties to the British.

Terming it “the most awkward affair” for the British government, The New Statesman wrote that if it were a minor state, “there would be no particular cause for anxiety”.

“But Indore has been a powerful feudatory of the Raj,” it said.

The British government initially tried to keep mum about the murder’s Indore connection in public. But in private, it discussed the issue with much alarm, communication between the governments of Bombay and British India shows.

Bombay police commissioner Patrick Kelly told the British government that all evidence “points at present to a conspiracy hatched in Indore or by instigation from Indore to abduct Mumtaj [sic] through hired desperadoes”.

The government faced pressure from different sides. Bawla’s community of wealthy Memons, a Muslim community with roots in modern-day Gujarat, raised the issue with the government. His fellow municipal officials mourned his death, saying, “there surely must be something more behind the scene”.

Indian lawmakers demanded answers in the upper house of British India’s legislature and the case was even discussed in the British House of Commons.

Rohidas Narayan Dusar, a former police officer, writes in his book on the murder that the investigators were under pressure to go slow, but that then police commissioner Kelly threatened to resign.

The case drew top lawyers for both the defence and the prosecution when it reached the Bombay High Court.

One of them was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would later become the founding father of Pakistan after India’s partition in 1947. Jinnah defended Anandrao Gangaram Phanse, one of the accused and a top general with the Indore army. Jinnah managed to save his client from the death penalty.

The court sentenced three men to death and three to life imprisonment, but it stopped short of holding the Maharaja accountable.

Justice LC Crump, who led the trial, noted, however, that “there were persons behind them [assailants] whom we cannot precisely indicate”.

“But where an attempt is made to kidnap a woman, who was for 10 years the mistress of the Maharaja of Indore, it is not in the least unreasonable to look to Indore as the quarter from which this attack may have emanated,” the judge remarked.

The case’s prominence meant the British government had to act quickly against the Maharaja. They gave him a choice: face a commission of inquiry or abdicate, according to documents presented to parliament in India.

The Maharaja chose to quit.

“I abdicate my throne in favour of my son on the understanding that no further inquiry into my alleged connection with the Malabar Hill Tragedy will be made,” he wrote to the British government.

After abdicating, the Maharaja stirred more controversy by insisting on marrying an American woman against the will of his family and community. Eventually, she converted to Hinduism and they wed, according to a British home department report.

Meanwhile, Mumtaz Begum received offers from Hollywood and later moved to the US to try her luck there. She faded into obscurity after that.

We asked our readers to send in their best pictures on the theme of “agriculture”. Here is a selection of the photographs we received from around the world.

The next theme is “a windy day” and the deadline for entries is 21 January 2024.

The pictures will be published later that week and you will be able to find them, along with other galleries, on the In Pictures section of the BBC News website.

You can upload your entries directly here or email them to yourpics@bbc.co.uk.

Terms and conditions apply.

Further details and themes are at: We set the theme, you take the pictures.

All photographs subject to copyright.

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.

The family of a British mountaineer missing for 10 days in the Dolomites say they are “devastated by their loss” as items belonging to him have been recovered by search teams in the Italian mountain range.

Aziz Ziriat, 36, and Samuel Harris, 35, from London, had not been heard from since 1 January. The alarm was raised after the pair failed to check into their flight home on 6 January.

On Wednesday, rescue teams announced they had found a body, believed to be that of Mr Harris, in the Passo di Conca area, buried under snow.

On Saturday, the cover of Mr Ziriat’s mobile phone and a card were found not far from where Mr Harris’s body was found.

In a statement released on Saturday afternoon, Mr Ziriat’s family said: “We have been devastated by the loss of our beloved Aziz.

“Our appreciation for the co-ordinated work and expertise of the Alpine Rescue, emergency services and volunteers in Italy is immeasurable.

“The work they have been doing, battling against challenging terrain and weather conditions, and their commitment to finding Aziz has been outstanding.

“We are also incredibly grateful for the overwhelmingly kind and generous ongoing support from family and friends, Aziz is continuing to be loved and prayed for.

“We hope, with all our hearts, he will be found and brought home soon.”

More than 140 people, from Alpine Rescue, Guardia di Finanza Rescue, Carabinieri and the local fire brigade, took part in the search for Mr Ziriat on Saturday.

Of these, about 110, including dogs, went up to altitude to clear a large area at the base of the south face of Carè Alto.

Earlier, Joe Stone, a university friend of Mr Ziriat, said authorities were “trying everything” to find him.

“There is an acceptance among us that it’s not going to be good news,” Mr Stone said on Saturday.

“But it would be really nice to find him and be put out of this limbo.”

The pair’s last known location had been a mountain hut called Casina Dosson, close to the town of Tione Di Trento, near Riva Del Garda on Lake Garda.

In a statement on Friday, the Italian rescue services said the search where the body believed to be Mr Harris was found had not led to the discovery of Mr Ziriat.

Thick fog forced the search operation to stop on Friday afternoon.

Mr Harris was found on Wednesday under snow at the foot of a rock face on Carè Alto mountain near Trento.

His cause of death is unclear but one possible reason given by authorities was a fall “from above”.

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”.

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.

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

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 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.”

Firefighters are making an all-out assault to prevent the largest of the deadly wildfires that is threatening Los Angeles from spreading into one of the city’s most exclusive neighbourhoods.

Aerial crews have been bombarding the flaming hills with water and fire retardant to hold back the Palisades fire, which has expanded an additional 1,000 acres and is now menacing Brentwood.

Officials have been on the defensive amid mounting anger at how hydrants ran dry as firefighters struggled to contain the fast-moving blazes.

Winds are expected to pick up again overnight, further fanning the flames that have already left at least 16 people dead.

On Saturday evening, the LA County coroner’s office announced that 11 of the deaths were attributed to the Eaton fire and five to the Palisades fire.

“LA County had another night of unimaginable terror and heartbreak,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath on Saturday.

Firefighters have made modest progress against the worst of the infernos, the Palisades fire, which has scorched nearly 23,000 acres and is 11% contained.

But the conflagration has spread into the Mandeville Canyon neighbourhood, sparking evacuation orders for swathes of Brentwood, a ritzy enclave where Arnold Schwarzenegger, Disney chief executive Bob Iger and NBA star LeBron James have homes.

• What LA fire survivors went back for
• What caused the LA wildfires?
• Prison inmates fight wildfires – and stigma

Also in the evacuation zone is the Getty Center, a hilltop museum that holds more than 125,000 artworks, including masterpieces by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Rubens, Monet and Degas. The building is undamaged so far.

The second-biggest blaze, the Eaton fire, has razed more than 14,000 acres and was 15% contained. Firefighters have mostly contained two smaller blazes, the Kenneth and Hurst fires.

But the National Weather Service warned that the gusty Santa Ana winds that whipped up the fires at the outset would increase again on Saturday and into Sunday.

Seven neighbouring states, the federal government and Canada and Mexico have rushed resources to California.

No cause has yet been established for the fires. The two biggest ones combined have razed an area more than twice the size of Manhattan.

• Which celebrities lose homes to wildfires?
• Startling images of the infernos

Some 153,000 residents are under mandatory evacuation orders and another 166,000 have been warned they may have to flee, too.

The political repercussions have begun.

On Friday, Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat with rumoured White House aspirations, ordered an investigation into why a key reservoir was out of service and some fire hydrants ran dry.

Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley complained about the shortage.

“When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there’s going to be water,” she said.

Chief Crowley has also attacked city leadership for cutting her department’s budget and eliminating mechanic positions, which she said had resulted in more than 100 fire apparatuses being out of service.

On Saturday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass – who has been criticised for being in Ghana attending the inauguration of the African country’s president when the fires erupted in LA on Tuesday, hinted at her tensions with Chief Crowley.

“Let me be clear about something,” Bass told a news conference, “the fire chief and I are focused on fighting these fires and saving lives, and any differences that we might have will be worked out in private.”

More than 70,000 people have signed a change.org petition demanding the mayor’s immediate resignation.

As fears of looting grow, a sunset-to-sunrise curfew is being strictly enforced in evacuated areas, official said.

Newsom announced on Saturday that he would double the number of National Guard on the ground to “keep communities safe”, deploying 1,680 troops.

About two dozen arrests have been made, including for burglary, looting and curfew violations.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said cadaver dogs are helping 40 search and rescue team scour razed neighbourhoods.

The death toll is expected to rise once house-to-house searches are conducted.

The fires were so intense that wheel alloys on cars were melted to puddles of liquid metal.

Rick McGeagh, an estate agent, told Reuters news agency that in his Pacific Palisades neighbourhood only six out of 60 homes survived.

All that remained standing at his house was a statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Everything else is ash and rubble,” said the 61-year-old father-of-three.

Eleven people are dead and 13 others are reported missing as the two largest wildfires ripping across the Los Angeles area remain mostly uncontained.

Firefighters are winning the battle against two other wildfires in the nation’s second-largest city.

Cadaver dogs and search crews are scouring the scorched rubble of neighbourhoods after the most destructive wildfire in the city’s history.

Residents have been told to stay out of the water on beaches across a swathe of the coastline because of contamination from the fires.

The largest fire in the Palisades grew by 1,000 acres overnight, although firefighters made modest progress in increasing containment.

The fire is moving east, threatening the exclusive neighbourhood of Brentwood, home to the Getty Center, a world-famous art museum that has now been evacuated. About 3,700 firefighters are on scene.

Students at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles are awaiting updates from officials.

Eight deaths have been confirmed in the Eaton fire and another three in the Palisades fire. Officials say they are investigating reports of another 13 people missing.

More than 153,000 people are under evacuation orders in Los Angeles county, according to local authorities, as of Saturday. Another 166,000 are under evacuation warnings.

More than 12,000 structures have been razed by the fires. By structures, officials mean homes, outbuildings, sheds, mobile homes and cars.

More than 7,000 structures have been destroyed by the Eaton fire.

The Palisades fire has destroyed about 5,300 structures, including at least 426 houses.

Authorities say a curfew that is in place from 18:00 local time (02:00 GMT) to 06:00 within the areas affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires after reports of looting is being “strictly enforced”.

There have been 22 arrests – 19 in the Eaton fire area and three in the Palisades fire zone. Two arrests were for curfew violations and these individuals were taken into custody.

The others were held on suspicion of burglary, looting, ID theft, possession of narcotics. One individual was on parole and in possession of a concealed firearm.

About 400 National Guard members are deployed around the region helping with road closures and critical infrastructure missions, say officials.

The fires could turn out to be the costliest in US history, potentially wreaking between $135bn and $150bm, according to a preliminary estimate by AccuWeather.

Insured losses are expected to be above $8bn (£6.5bn) because of the high value of the properties damaged.

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 four 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 more than 22,660 acres, including the upmarket Pacific Palisades neighbourhood. It was 11% contained as of midday Saturday
• Eaton: It has struck the northern part of Los Angeles, blazing through areas such as Altadena. It is the second biggest fire in the area, burning nearly 14,000 acres. It is 15% contained
• Hurst: Located just north of San Fernando, it began burning on Tuesday night and has grown to 799 acres, and is 76% contained
• Kenneth: This fire broke out on Thursday on the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It so far covers more than 1,052 acres. Authorities say its progress has been stopped and it has been 80% contained, with no structures damaged or destroyed

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

A political row about the city’s preparedness has erupted after it emerged that some fire crews’ hoses ran dry.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has called for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to hydrants and why the Santa Ynez Reservoir was closed for maintenance and empty when the fire broke out.

“Losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors,” he wrote.

• Fact-checking criticism of California Democrats over fires

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.

On Saturday, she deflected questions about her handling of the emergency, telling a news conference: “Right now, our first and most important obligation to Angelenos is to get through this crisis.”

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

Also on Saturday, LA County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone separately denied that his department had been unprepared.

“I did everything in my power to make sure that we had enough personnel and resources before the first fire started,” he said.

“It wasn’t for a lack of preparation or decision-making that resulted in this catastrophe. It was a natural disaster,” Marrone added.

Dismay over the fire threat was worsened by alerts 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.

During a news conference on Saturday morning, city authorities blamed a software glitch, which they said was “frustrating, unacceptable”. They said they were changing their alerts system to partner with the California state emergency notification system.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said detectives are continuing to investigate the possible causes.

“Everything is absolutely on the table,” he said.

Lightning – the most common source of fires in the US – has been ruled out as a cause for the Palisades and Eaton fires.

Nor has there been any official indication so far that arson or utility lines – the next two biggest culprits in sparking fires – caused any of the conflagrations.

California’s very wet years of 2022-23 brought about a huge growth of vegetation, which dried out in the drought of last year, creating abundant kindling.

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 also created ripe conditions for wildfires.

BBC weather forecaster Sarah Keith-Lucas says there is no rain forecast in the area for at least the next week.

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 the governor has pointed out earlier that blazes had become a perennial issue. “There’s no fire season,” he said. “It’s fire year.”

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

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

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

It looked like an ordinary murder.

One hundred years ago on this day – 12 January 1925 – a group of men attacked a couple on a car ride in a upmarket suburb in Bombay (now Mumbai) in colonial India, shooting the man dead and slashing the woman’s face.

But the story that unfolded brought global spotlight on the case, while its complexity put the country’s then British rulers in a spot of bother, and eventually forced an Indian king to abdicate.

Newspapers and magazines described the murder as “perhaps the most sensational crime committed in British India”, and it became “the talk of the city” during the investigation and subsequent trial.

The victim, Abdul Kadir Bawla, 25, was an influential textile businessman and the city’s youngest municipal official. His female companion, Mumtaz Begum, 22, was a courtesan on the run from the harem of a princely state and had been staying with Bawla for the last few months.

On the evening of the murder, Bawla and Mumtaz Begum were in the car with three others, driving in Malabar Hill, an affluent area along the shore of the Arabian Sea. Cars were a rarity in India at the time, and only the rich owned them.

Suddenly, another car overtook them. Before they could react, it collided with theirs, forcing them to stop, according to intelligence and newspaper reports.

The attackers showered expletives on Bawla and shouted “get the lady out”, Mumtaz Begum later told the Bombay High Court.

They then shot Bawla, who died a few hours later.

A group of British soldiers, who had inadvertently taken a wrong turn on their way back from a golf game, heard the gunshots and rushed to the scene.

They managed to catch one of the culprits, but one officer suffered gunshot wounds when an attacker opened fire at them.

Before fleeing, the remaining attackers made two attempts to snatch the injured Mumtaz Begum from the British officers, who were trying to rush her to the hospital.

The newspapers suggested that attackers’ aim was likely abducting Mumtaz Begum, as Bawla – whom she had met while performing in Mumbai a few months earlier and had been living with since – had earlier received several threats for sheltering her.

The Illustrated Weekly of India promised readers exclusive photographs of Mumtaz Begum, while the police planned to issue a daily bulletin to the press, Marathi newspaper Navakal reported.

Even Bollywood found the case compelling enough to adapt it into a silent murder thriller within months.

“The case went beyond the usual murder mystery as it involved a rich and young tycoon, a slighted king, and a beautiful woman,” says Dhaval Kulkarni, author of The Bawla Murder Case: Love, Lust and Crime in Colonial India.

The attackers’ footprints, as speculated in the media, led investigators to the influential princely state of Indore, which was a British ally. Mumtaz Begum, a Muslim, had lived in the harem of its Hindu king, Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar III.

Mumtaz Begum was famed for her beauty. “In her own class, it was said, Mumtaz was without a peer,” KL Gauba wrote in his 1945 book, Famous Trials for Love and Murder.

But the Maharaja’s (king’s) attempts to control her – preventing her from seeing her family alone and keeping her under constant surveillance – soured their relationship, says Kulkarni.

“I was kept under surveillance. I was allowed to see visitors and my relations but somebody always accompanied me,” Mumtaz Begum testified in the court.

In Indore, she gave birth to a baby girl, who died soon after.

“After my child was born, I was unwilling to stay at Indore. I was unwilling because the nurses killed the female child that was born,” Mumtaz Begum told the court.

Within months, she escaped to the northern Indian city of Amritsar, her mother’s place of birth, but troubles followed.

She was watched there too. Mumtaz Begum’s stepfather told the court that the Maharaja wept and begged her to return. But she refused and moved to Bombay, where the surveillance continued.

The trial confirmed what media had speculated following the murder: representatives of the Maharaja had indeed threatened Bawla with dire consequences if he continued to shelter Mumtaz Begum, but he had ignored the warnings.

Following a lead given by Shafi Ahmed, the only attacker captured at the scene, the Bombay police arrested seven men from Indore.

The investigation revealed links to the Maharaja that were hard to ignore. Most of the arrested men were employed by the Indore princely state, had applied for leave around the same time and were in Bombay at the time of the crime.

The murder put the British government in a tough spot. Though it happened in Bombay, the investigation clearly showed the plot was planned in Indore, which had strong ties to the British.

Terming it “the most awkward affair” for the British government, The New Statesman wrote that if it were a minor state, “there would be no particular cause for anxiety”.

“But Indore has been a powerful feudatory of the Raj,” it said.

The British government initially tried to keep mum about the murder’s Indore connection in public. But in private, it discussed the issue with much alarm, communication between the governments of Bombay and British India shows.

Bombay police commissioner Patrick Kelly told the British government that all evidence “points at present to a conspiracy hatched in Indore or by instigation from Indore to abduct Mumtaj [sic] through hired desperadoes”.

The government faced pressure from different sides. Bawla’s community of wealthy Memons, a Muslim community with roots in modern-day Gujarat, raised the issue with the government. His fellow municipal officials mourned his death, saying, “there surely must be something more behind the scene”.

Indian lawmakers demanded answers in the upper house of British India’s legislature and the case was even discussed in the British House of Commons.

Rohidas Narayan Dusar, a former police officer, writes in his book on the murder that the investigators were under pressure to go slow, but that then police commissioner Kelly threatened to resign.

The case drew top lawyers for both the defence and the prosecution when it reached the Bombay High Court.

One of them was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would later become the founding father of Pakistan after India’s partition in 1947. Jinnah defended Anandrao Gangaram Phanse, one of the accused and a top general with the Indore army. Jinnah managed to save his client from the death penalty.

The court sentenced three men to death and three to life imprisonment, but it stopped short of holding the Maharaja accountable.

Justice LC Crump, who led the trial, noted, however, that “there were persons behind them [assailants] whom we cannot precisely indicate”.

“But where an attempt is made to kidnap a woman, who was for 10 years the mistress of the Maharaja of Indore, it is not in the least unreasonable to look to Indore as the quarter from which this attack may have emanated,” the judge remarked.

The case’s prominence meant the British government had to act quickly against the Maharaja. They gave him a choice: face a commission of inquiry or abdicate, according to documents presented to parliament in India.

The Maharaja chose to quit.

“I abdicate my throne in favour of my son on the understanding that no further inquiry into my alleged connection with the Malabar Hill Tragedy will be made,” he wrote to the British government.

After abdicating, the Maharaja stirred more controversy by insisting on marrying an American woman against the will of his family and community. Eventually, she converted to Hinduism and they wed, according to a British home department report.

Meanwhile, Mumtaz Begum received offers from Hollywood and later moved to the US to try her luck there. She faded into obscurity after that.

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).”

It was late at night, and Darim’s animation studio had just finished designing a new look for a character in one of South Korea’s most popular video games, MapleStory.

Darim was proud of her work. So, sitting alone on the floor of her small studio apartment, she posted the trailer on social media. Almost immediately, she was flooded with thousands of abusive messages, including death and rape threats.

Young male gamers had taken issue with a single frame in the trailer, in which the female character could be seen holding her thumb and forefinger close together.

They thought it resembled a hand gesture used by a radical online feminist community almost a decade ago to poke fun at the size of Korean men’s penises.

“There were insults I’d never heard before, they were disgusting and inhumane,” said Darim, which is not her real name. One read: “You’ve just sabotaged your job.”

Messages then started piling into Darim’s studio and the game developer claiming she was a feminist and demanding she be fired. Within hours, the company pulled the promotional video.

Darim had become the latest victim in a series of vicious online witch hunts, in which men in South Korea attack women they suspect of having feminist views. They bombard them with abuse and try to get them sacked.

This is part of a growing backlash to feminism, in which feminists have been branded man-haters who deserve to be punished. The witch hunts are having a chilling effect on women, with many now scared to admit they are feminists.

This is forcing the movement underground, in a country where gender discrimination is still deeply entrenched. South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the OECD, a group of the world’s rich countries.

The hunts are often spearheaded by young male video gamers, and target women who work in the industry, like Darim, though recently they have spread to other professions.

They look for anything that resembles what they term the ‘finger-pinching gesture’ and use it as proof that men-hating women are surreptitiously mocking them.

Once they spot a supposed sign, the hunt begins. “They decide that a dark, evil feminist is hiding in the company, and her life should be ruined,” explained Minsung Kim, a 22-year-old male gamer who, concerned by these witch hunts, set up an organisation to support the victims.

The witch hunters track down all female employees at the company in question, and trawl their social media accounts, searching for any evidence of feminism. Way back on Darim’s timeline, they found an ‘offending’ post.

Darim in fact had nothing to do with the disputed part of the animation, but her studio was rattled by the torrent of abuse – especially after Nexon, the gaming company, suddenly removed all the studio’s artwork from their roster and issued an apology to customers.

“My company and CEO were in a panic,” said Darim. “I thought I was going to be fired, and I’d never be able to work in animation again.”

Then Minsung’s organisation stepped in. They urged her studio to ignore the gamers and offered to pay Darim’s legal fees so she could report the abuse. “We said these demands will never end, you need to nip this in the bud now,” he said. The studio listened, and Darim kept her job.

But similar witch hunts have worked, in the gaming industry and beyond, and they are becoming more frequent. In one case, a young illustrator lost her job after a handful of disgruntled gamers stormed the company’s office demanding she be removed.

And it is not just Korean companies that have capitulated. Last year, the international car maker Renault suspended one of its female employees after she was accused of making the finger-pinching gesture while moving her hands in a promotional presentation.

“These anti-feminists are getting more organised; their playbook is getting more specific,” said Minsung. “By taking a hand gesture that everyone makes and turning it into a scarlet letter they can brand literally anyone an evil feminist,” he said.

Because the companies are folding to these baseless accusations, the instigators of these hunts have become emboldened, he said. “They are confident now that when you accuse someone of feminism, you can ruin their career.”

Minsung knows, because not long ago he was one of these men. He used to belong to the anti-feminist forums. “We are exposed to the uncensored internet unimaginably young,” he said, having joined the forums aged nine.

It was only when Minsung traded video games for playing real-life games, including Dungeons and Dragons, that he met women, and his views shifted. He became, in his words, an “ardent feminist”.

In South Korea, women commonly suffer discrimination and misogyny both at work and at home. But as they have fought to improve their rights, many young men have started to believe they are the ones being discriminated against.

The backlash began in the mid-2010s, following a surge of feminist activism. During this time, women took to the streets in protest at sexual violence and the widespread use of hidden cameras that secretly film women using toilets and changing rooms – around 5,000 to 6,000 cases are reported annually.

“Young men saw women becoming vocal and were threatened by their rise,” said Myungji Yang, a professor of sociology at the University of Hawai’i Manoa, who has interviewed dozens of young Korean men. “They learn about feminism from online forums, which carry the most radical caricature of feminists,” she said. “This has given them a distorted idea of what feminism is.”

One of their grievances is the 18-month military service men must complete. Once they leave the military they often “feel entitled” to a good job, said Hyun Mee Kim, a professor of cultural anthropology at Yonsei University in Seoul, who studies feminism.

As more women have entered the workforce, and jobs have become harder to get, some men feel their opportunities are being unfairly taken away.

These feelings have been validated by South Korea’s now disgraced and suspended President, Yoon Suk Yeol, who came to power in 2022 on an anti-feminist platform, claiming gender discrimination no longer existed, and has since tried to dismantle the government’s gender equality ministry.

More surprising than these views themselves, is that the men who hold them have such power over major companies.

I travelled to Pangyo, the Silicon Valley of South Korea, to meet a woman who has worked in the gaming industry for 20 years. After Darim’s case, her company started to edit all its games, removing the fingers from characters’ hands, turning them into fists, to avoid complaints.

“It’s exhausting and frustrating” to work like this, she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The idea that a hand gesture can be seen as an attack on men is absurd and companies should be ignoring it.”

When I asked why they were not, she told me that many developers share the gamers’ anti-feminist views. “For all those outside yelling, there are those on the inside who also believe things are bad.”

Then there is the financial cost. The men threaten to boycott the games unless the companies act.

“The gaming companies think the anti-feminists are the largest source of their revenue,” said Minsung. After Darim’s company, Studio Ppuri, was targeted, it said it lost nearly two thirds of its contracts with gaming companies.

Studio Ppuri, did not respond to our questions, but both Nexon, the game developer, and Renault Korea told us they stood against all forms of discrimination and prejudice.

There is evidence the authorities are also capitulating to the anti-feminists’ demands. When Darim reported her abuse to the police, they refused to take her case.

They said because the finger-pinching gesture was taboo, it was “logical” that she, as a feminist, had been attacked. “I was astonished,” she said. “Why would the authorities not protect me?”

Following outrage from feminist organisations, the police backtracked and are now investigating. In a statement, Seocho district police told the BBC their initial decision to close the case had been “insufficient” and they were “making all efforts to identify the suspects”.

The case left Darim’s lawyer, Yu-kyung Beom, dumbfounded. “If you want to say that you’re a feminist in South Korea, you have to be very brave or insane,” she said.

In November 2023, the violence spilled offline and into real life. A young woman, who we are calling Jigu, was working alone in a convenience store late at night, when a man walked in and started attacking her.

“He said ‘hey, you’re a feminist, right? You look like a feminist with your short hair’,” Jigu told me as she apprehensively recounted the night. The man pushed her to the ground and started kicking her. “I kept going in and out of consciousness. I thought I could die.”

Jigu did not consider herself a feminist. She just liked having short hair and thought it suited her. The attack has left her with permanent injuries. Her left ear is damaged, and she wears a hearing aid.

“I feel like I’ve become a completely different person,” she said. “I don’t smile as much. Some days it is agony just to stay alive, the memory of that day is still so clear.”

Her assailant was sent to prison for three years, and for the first time a South Korean court ruled this was a misogynistically motivated crime: in effect, that Jigu had been attacked for looking like a feminist.

During the attack, the man said he belonged to an extreme anti-feminist group, New Men’s Solidarity. Its leader, In-kyu Bae, has called on men to confront feminists. So, one evening, as he held a live-streaming event in Gangnam, a flashy neighbourhood in Seoul, I went to try to talk to him.

“I’m here to tell you these feminists are staining the country with hatred,” he shouted from the roof of a black van kitted out with loudspeakers.

“That psychopath [who attacked Jigu] was not a member of our group. We don’t have members, we are a YouTube channel,” he told me as he simultaneously broadcast to thousands of subscribers. A small group of young men who had come to watch in person were cheering along.

“We’ve never encouraged anyone to use violence. In fact, the violent ones are the feminist groups. They’re shaming men’s genitals,” he added.

Last year, Mr Bae and several of his supporters were convicted of defaming and insulting a feminist activist after harassing her for more than two years.

Anti-feminist views have become so widespread that Yuri Kim, the director of Korea Women’s Trade Union, recently established a committee to track cases of what she describes as “feminism censorship”. She found that some women have been questioned about their stance on feminism in job interviews, while at work women commonly face comments like “all feminists need to die”.

According to Prof Kim, the feminism academic, men are using now feminist threats in the office as a way to harass and control their female colleagues – it is their way of saying ‘we are watching you; you should behave yourself’.

Such harassment is proving effective. Last year, a pair of scholars coined the phrase “quiet feminism”, to describe the impact of what they say is a “pervasive everyday backlash”.

Gowoon Jung and Minyoung Moon found that although women held feminist beliefs they did not feel safe disclosing them in public. Women I spoke to said they were even afraid to cut their hair short, while others said feminism had become so synonymous with hating men they did not associate with the cause.

A 2024 IPSOS poll of 31 countries found only 24% of women in South Korea defined themselves as feminist, compared to an average of 45%, and down from 33% in 2019.

Prof Kim worries the consequences will be severe. By being forced to conceal their feminist values, she argues women are being stripped of their ability to fight against gender inequality, which penetrates workplaces, politics and public life.

Feminists are now busy brainstorming ways to put an end to the witch hunts. One clear answer is legal change. In South Korea there is no blanket anti-discrimination law to protect women and prevent them being fired for their views.

It has been repeatedly blocked by politicians, largely because it would support gay and transgender people, with anti-feminists, and even some trans-exclusionary feminists, now lobbying against it.

Minsung believes the only way to strip the witch hunters of their powers is for the companies and the authorities to stand up to them. They make up a small fraction of men in South Korea, they just have loud voices and a bizarrely oversized influence, he argues.

Since her attack, Jigu now proudly calls herself a feminist. “I want to reach out to other victims like me, and if even one woman has the strength to grab my hand, I want to help.”

German authorities have said an oil tanker stuck in German waters belongs to Russia’s “shadow fleet”, which Berlin says is used to avoid sanctions.

Germany’s maritime authorities (CCME) said on Friday that the Panamanian-flagged ship, known as Eventin, had lost power and steering, meaning tugboats were deployed to secure the vessel.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock blamed Moscow, accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of “circumventing” sanctions and threatening European security by “ruthlessly deploying a fleet of rusty tankers”.

Russia, which previously declined to respond to accusations that it uses a shadow fleet, has not yet commented on this incident.

The US, UK and the EU have imposed sanctions on Russia’s oil industry following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In its first report of the tanker drifting in German waters, the CCME said the vessel was 274m (898ft) long and 48m (157ft) wide, carrying about 99,000 tonnes of oil.

German maritime authorities said the oil tanker was drifting at a low speed in the coastal waters of the Baltic Sea, north of the German island of Rügen.

A four-person team of specialists was lowered onto the vessel by helicopter on Friday night to establish towing connections, which were secured. Three tugboats took control of the “stricken vessel” that is “unable to manoeuvre”.

Maritime authorities said on Friday night that no oil leaks had been detected.

In its latest update on Saturday evening, German maritime authorities said the towing convoy around the tanker was headed to Sassnitz, a town on the island of Rügen, and would arrive early on Sunday.

Earlier, authorities said the convoy of tugboats working to rescue Eventin remained north of Rügen and was moving eastwards “slowly”, at about 2.5 km per hour (1.5mph).

CCME said they had taken safety measures given the rough seas, as the area where the vessel is located was experiencing 2.5m-high (8ft) waves and strengthening wind gusts.

Although the vessel sports the Panamanian flag, German authorities have blamed Russia for the incident.

“Russia is endangering our European security not only with its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, but also with severed cables, displaced border buoys, disinformation campaigns, GPS jammers and, as we have seen, dilapidated oil tankers,” the German foreign minister said in a statement.

Last December, the European Union said it was working on measures including sanctions to target “Russia’s shadow fleet, which threatens security and the environment, while funding Russia’s war budget”.

The European bloc’s remarks came after undersea cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged by a suspected vessel, which the EU believes was part of Russia’s shadow fleet.

The move was a further step taken by Western countries to hit the Kremlin’s oil industry in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Since tougher embargo measures were put in place to halt Russia from exporting oil, Moscow is believed to be using ships with unclear ownership to transport goods – namely oil – across the globe.

As reported by the Atlantic Council, a US-based think tank, Russia is “instrumentalising the dark fleet, using it especially as a primary conveyor of oil exports”.

The shadow fleet, or dark fleet, is the name given to ageing ships that sail “without the industry’s standard Western insurance, have opaque ownership, frequently change their names and flag registrations, and generally operate outside maritime regulations”, according to the Atlantic Council.

The latest incident in the Baltic Sea comes as Washington and London joined efforts to directly sanction energy companies Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the move to weaken Russian oil companies would “drain Russia’s war chest,” adding that funds taken “from Putin’s hands helps save Ukrainian lives”.

But Gazprom Neft slammed the sanctions as “baseless” and “illegitimate”, as reported by Russian state news agencies.

Also on Friday, the US Department of the Treasury said it had sanctioned 183 vessels that are “part of the shadow fleet as well as oil tankers owned by Russia-based fleet operators”.

Jack Smith, the special counsel who led two federal criminal cases against Donald Trump, has resigned from the Justice Department before the president-elect takes office later this month.

According to a court filing submitted on Saturday, Mr Smith “separated from the Department” on Friday.

CBS News, the BBC’s US media partner, reported in November that Smith would resign from the Justice Department after completing his work.

Mr Smith’s departure comes amid a dispute over the release of his report into the findings of Trump’s classified documents case.

Mr Smith was appointed as special counsel in 2022 to oversee two Justice Department cases into Trump – one over the alleged improper hoarding of classified documents and the other over an alleged attempt to interfere in the 2020 election outcome.

Both cases resulted in criminal charges against Trump, who pleaded not guilty and and sought to cast the prosecutions as politically motivated.

Mr Smith’s cases against the president-elect were closed last year following Trump’s presidential election win. Prosecutors wrote that Justice Department regulations forbid the prosecution of a sitting president.

CBS reported in November that Mr Smith’s resignation was expected as it would allow him to leave his post without being fired by Trump or the incoming president’s attorney general.

His exit means he leaves without either of his criminal prosecutions of Trump seeing trial.

Earlier this week, US District Judge Aileen Cannon – who oversaw the classified documents case and controversially dismissed it last July – temporarily barred Mr Smith and Attorney General Merrick Garland from “releasing, sharing, or transmitting” the report about the case.

Trump’s legal team received a draft copy of the report last weekend and it was expected to be released as soon as Friday.

The move by Judge Cannon came after attorneys for Trump’s former co-defendants in the case – Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveir – called on her to intervene. Both men had pleaded not guilty.

Judge Cannon ordered the release be put on hold until a higher appeals court, the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta, considered an emergency appeal from Mr Nauta and Mr De Oliveir.

By law, special counsels must present the findings of their investigations to the Justice Department, which is headed by the attorney general. Garland has promised to release all reports to the public and has so far done so.

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Trump’s attorneys argued that Mr Smith did not have the legal authority to submit the classified documents report because he was unconstitutionally picked to do the job and was politically motivated.

Trump’s legal team also wrote to Garland not to release the report, and urged him to end the “weaponisation of the justice system”.

On Friday, a judge sentenced Trump to an “unconditional discharge” in a criminal case related to hush money payments, meaning he has been spared jail and a fine, but he will still take office as the first US president with a felony conviction.

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.

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.