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.”

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.

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.

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Professional chef Daron Anderson always tells people he was “born in the kitchen” – quite literally.

The 45-year-old was delivered by homebirth at 295 West Las Flores Drive, where he lived with his mother until this week.

On Thursday, he stepped over charred debris where his kitchen once stood in Altadena, a tight-knit neighbourhood of north-eastern Los Angeles.

He was looking for his cast-iron pans in the hope they might have survived the blaze, one of several historic fires burning in the area that have killed at least 16 people and decimated multiple communities and left thousands homeless.

Across the street – at number 296 – his friend Rachel’s house also sits in ashes. The house next door – 281 – where he’d enjoyed family parties, is gone.

About three blocks away, on Devirian Place, where his girlfriend lived, some neighbours tried to fend off the roaring flames that would consume their homes with garden hoses.

Now they, too, are searching for treasured items in the rubble, after fire obliterated this entire community nestled in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

It all started on Tuesday night.

The Santa Ana winds had been fierce much of the day.

Daron was in his front yard just after 18:00 local time trying to secure items from flying away.

Across the street at 296 West Las Flores Drive, Rachel Gillespie was taking down Christmas decorations, concerned about her plastic icicles and patio furniture.

They exchanged worried glances. “This doesn’t look good, does it?” she remarked.

At the time, it was only wind that concerned them.

They had no idea that one of the two worst wildfires in LA history had just ignited a few miles away, part of a days-long nightmare that at its peak would see six blazes simultaneously threatening America’s second-largest city

The Eaton fire that tore through Altadena has now ravaged more than 14,000 acres, destroying thousands of homes and businesses, and left 11 dead. By the weekend, Eaton remained only 15% contained.

In west LA, the Palisades fire, which had started that morning, would go on to burn through more than 23,000 acres, reducing much of a vibrant community to ash, and killing at least five people.

Daron’s next-door neighbour at house 281, Dillon Akers, was at work at a donut stand in the Topanga mall – about 40 miles away – as smoke started filling their neighbourhood.

The 20-year-old rushed back when he heard the news, only to find his corner of north-west Altadena pitch black and members of his family frantically evacuating their home.

His uncle leapt over their white picket fence to save precious seconds as he stuffed items into the back of his car.

For the next two hours, Dillon did the same, gathering food, medicine, clothes and toiletries. In the rush, he mislaid his keys, and lost 30 minutes searching in the smoky dark with torches until he found them blown against a fence.

During the desperate search, he kept telling himself that local authorities would be able to handle the fire that was roaring down the mountain towards the home he shared with his mother, grandmother, aunt and two younger cousins.

Dillon had faced windstorms before, and had seen smoke in the mountains, but this time felt different. This time the orange glow in the sky was directly overhead.

“I was fully at a 10 on the scale of scared,” he said.

At 00:30 Wednesday, Dillon said that he and his mother were the last people to leave West Las Flores Drive. They may have been the last to get out alive.

The following day authorities would announce that the remains of a neighbour down the road had been discovered.

Rachel and Daron had left the neighbourhood about two hours before Dillon. Rachel was forced out by a friend who drove over to demand: “You’ve got to leave now.”

Rachel – with her wife, toddler, five cats, and two days of clothing – said goodbye to the home they had bought just one year earlier.

Daron also grabbed what he could: a guitar he purchased when he was 14 with money he earned working as an extra in a karate film and a painting of his family crossing Abbey Road in London, made to look like the cover of the iconic Beatles album.

As those on Las Flores Drive evacuated, Daron’s neighbours a few blocks away tried to fight the flames.

At 417 Devirian Place, Hipolito Cisneros and his close friend and neighbour Larry Villescas, who lived across the street at home number 416, grabbed garden hoses.

The scene outside looked hellish.

The garage of one home was in flames. A car in front of another, too.

They stretched hoses out from multiple homes and doused the structures with water – including the house of Daron’s girlfriend, Sachi.

“The water was just repelling off. It wasn’t even penetrating or nothing,” Hipolito said, referring to the bone-dry earth and brush around the homes.

Over time, they made progress, hosing off embers and spot fires. Larry thought they might be winning.

Then their hoses ran dry – all due to water pressure issues they’d later learn had hampered firefighting efforts across Los Angeles County amid intense demand.

An explosion sounded nearby, another home bursting into flames. By 01:00, both of their families were packing to leave.

“We tried. We really tried,” Hipolito said.

By 02:30 Wednesday morning, police cars rolled down their street with a loudspeaker, telling everyone to leave immediately.

As he turned the corner of his street, Larry watched in his truck’s rear-view mirror as his garage caught fire.

By 03:00, the street was empty.

Much of the Los Angeles region is made up of neighbourhoods and small communities just like Altadena.

On any given morning, people would walk through the lines of homes to get a cup of coffee at The Little Red Hen Coffee Shop, stopping to catch up while leaving for work in the morning.

Many have described decades of tight-knit community here, where they watched neighbours start families and the children who once played in the streets grow up.

But driving through the area for the first time since his world was upended, Daron barely recognises his neighbourhood.

The big blue house that marked one familiar turn is gone. All of the landmarks that once guided him have vanished. He points out each neighbour’s property, gasping as he realises that none are standing.

He takes photos of his and Rachel’s home and the street he shares with Dillon. Outside his girlfriend’s home – which Larry and Hipolito tried to save – he takes videos and chats with their families before calling Sachi to describe the state of her home.

“God, everything is gone,” he says, his voice cracking.

But a few items remain amidst the ruins.

At his sister’s home back on West Las Flores Drive, he finds multi-coloured plastic lawn ornaments stuck in her lawn, somehow untouched by fire.

He plucks each stake from the ground, knowing that while these flower decorations might feel insignificant amid the devastation, they also might make her smile.

Across the street at what was once his house, a red-brick chimney is all that is left standing. Around it is a pile of clay pottery.

With his hands dark black from the soot, he collects what he can, but many pieces disintegrate with his touch.

A scorched lemon tree sits in the lawn, some fruit still warm to the touch.

“If I can get a seed, we can replant one,” he says, grabbing a handful.

“It’s like a way you can start over.”

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.

The sun is rising over the ice-covered mountains of Nuuk fjord and we are travelling along one of the world’s last wild frontiers.

But there are shadows gathering here and across the rest of the frozen spaces of Greenland.

With Donald Trump about to become president of the United States, his refusal to rule out taking Greenland by force is reverberating through conversations across the island.

“He’s welcome to come visit for sure,” says the skipper of the converted fishing boat taking us east. Conscious that he needs to do business with people of all political hues, he asked not to be named, but used a phrase I hear repeatedly here.

“Greenland belongs to Greenlanders. So, Trump can visit but that’s it.”

The waters are flat calm as we pull into the isolated settlement of Kapisillit – population about 40 – where a few hunters are setting out to shoot seals.

It’s -16C (3F), and with wind chill effect feels more like -27C.

But near the harbour I meet a local church elder, Kaaleeraq Ringsted, 73, a great-grandfather, who is out drying fillets of cod caught in the fish-rich waters beside his front door.

When I ask about President-elect Trump buying or invading Greenland, he chuckles at first. Then his tone becomes serious.

“It is not acceptable that he says this. Greenland is not for sale.”

Then he tells me how he learned to fish and hunt here with his father and grandfather, and how he wants to preserve this life for his children and grandchildren.

Crossing the bay, the boat nosed through the broken surface ice. Two eagles perched on a rock, scanning for fish in the clear waters.

We were heading to the farm of Angutimmarik Hansen who keeps sheep as well as hunting seals, wildfowl and rabbits.

All of his winter feed for the sheep needs to be imported from Denmark, a reminder of how a harsh climate defines the possibilities of life here.

Inside his front door is a rack of hunting rifles. He notices me looking at them.

“Those are in case there’s an invasion,” he jokes.

But his attitude to the bellicose rhetoric from Mar-A-Lago is far from relaxed.

“What a stupid person in the world like Trump,” he says. “Never will we sell Greenland.”

This little farm is about 3,000 miles (4,828km) from Florida where the incoming US president gave his now infamous press conference last week.

“But Trump is not the USA. We can work with the people of the USA,” Mr Hansen says.

The Trump effect went into overdrive with the arrival in Greenland of Donald Trump Jr, hot on the heels of his father’s pronouncements. He flew into the capital Nuuk on the family’s 757 jet – Trump Force One – and stayed for four hours and thirty-three minutes, meeting some locals and offering only polite remarks.

“It’s been incredibly nice to meet people, and people were very happy to meet with us,” he said, after lunch at a local hotel. “Dad will have to come here.”

Then it was back to the sunnier climes of Florida.

Trump Jr was welcomed by local businessman Jorgen Boassen, who once campaigned for the president-elect.

He told local media that he was Trump’s “biggest fan” and that “of course they are interested in our country, and they are welcome to come and see what our country is like. It is also about opening up for trade and cooperation.”

The city of Nuuk is the world’s most northerly capital. It has a thriving civil society and a robust press. And there is some satisfaction here that the Trump comments have propelled the debate about Greenland’s independence onto the international stage.

There must be a Greenland that is nobody’s colony, say campaigners like Kuno Fencker, an MP with the governing coalition and member of the local parliament’s Foreign and Security Committee.

We meet by the harbour, under the bronze statue of Hans Egede, the 18th century missionary widely seen here as the man who opened the way to colonisation.

“Donald Trump is a politician,” says Mr Fencker.

“He’s a hard businessman, and we know his rhetoric, and that rhetoric is something we have gotten used to since 2019, and it’s just a matter of talking to a peer, an ally, on how we can solve things here in the Arctic and also in Nato.”

Mr Fencker offers the central argument of pro-independence campaigners.

“What is necessary here is that Greenland as a sovereign state should negotiate directly with the United States and not Denmark doing that for us.”

Independence from Denmark could come at a significant financial cost.

Greenland receives subsidies from Copenhagen worth roughly a fifth of its GDP every year. Mr Fencker suggests, as have other leading figures here, that the island would negotiate with America and Denmark for support.

“We are not naïve in regard to that. We need support in defence, security, and also economic development. We want a sustainable and self-sufficient economy.”

The editor of the local newspaper Sermitsiaq, Maasana Egede, admits he was worried by the implied threat of force from Donald Trump, but wants to see how reality matches the rhetoric.

As for independence, Mr Egede has been frustrated by what he sees as a polarised debate in the media – local and international.

“We are very much telling this story that it has to be about independence or not independence. But there’s all of this story that is in between, that people want independence, but not at any cost. There’s a living standard that has to be maintained. There’s trade that has to be maintained. There are living ways that have to be maintained.”

There is an expectation that at some point – not in the immediate future – there will be a vote in favour and Denmark will accept the result.

The island’s Prime Minister, Mute Egede, addressed a joint press conference with the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, in the wake of the latest Donald Trump comments.

“We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American, we want to be Greenlandic,” he said. The Danish PM took care not to offend anybody, least of all the incoming US president.

“The debate on Greenlandic independence and the latest announcements from the US show us the large interest in Greenland,” she said. “Events which set in motion a lot of thoughts and feelings with many in Greenland and Denmark.”

Ms Frederiksen knows well how deep feelings run in Greenland. Memories of injustice and racism remain fresh here among the indigenous Inuit people.

Scandals like the campaign to insert IUDs (Intrauterine devices) to prevent pregnancies in thousands of Inuit women and girls in the 1960s and 70s, haunt the relationship between Greenland and Denmark.

It’s not known how many of these procedures were carried out without the permission of those involved, but the numbers are considerable. The aim was to reduce the Greenlandic population.

Maliina Abelsen is a former finance minister in Greenland’s government, and now a consultant for companies and organisations working on the island. She’s also worked for UNICEF Denmark and leading Greenland businesses, like the seafood group, Royal Greenland.

Ms Abelsen believes far more needs to be done to address the injustices of the past.

“I think a lot of people are saying, maybe also the Danish government and state have said, ‘Oh well, you know this happened in the past. This is so many years ago. How are we going to be responsible for that? It’s time to move on.’

“But you cannot move on if you have not been healed, and if you have not been acknowledged to what happened to you. That is a job that we have to do together with Denmark, not something Greenland can do on its own.”

And despite her own high profile in civil society and business, Maliina Abelsen says that when it comes to racism – for example jokes about Inuit people – she “can speak for most Greenlanders, that we have all experienced that in our life”.

The issues of self-determination and facing the past are intimately intertwined.

Now the intervention of Donald Trump has placed both before the eyes of the world.

But the message we heard – from the remote settlements on the fjord to the capital city Nuuk – is that Greenland’s destiny must be decided here, among people whose voices have been too long overlooked.

The French Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte has been hit by further heavy rains, leading to flooding and mudslides, one month after Cyclone Chido devastated large parts of the islands and left dozens dead.

The archipelago was put on the highest state of alert as another storm passed by on Sunday morning. Authorities warned of violent winds, flash floods and landslides.

Videos on social media show downed power lines and some flooding. Local TV reported that the southern village of Mbouini, the only settlement left untouched by Cyclone Chido, was under water.

The latest storm, Dikeledi, made landfall in northern Madagascar on Saturday, killing at least three people.

The storm passed approximately 100 km (62 miles) south of Mayotte around 09:00 GMT on Sunday, according to forecaster Météo-France.

“Extremely heavy rains are beginning to trickle down,” François-Xavier Bieuville, the prefect of Mayotte, told French news channel BFMTV.

They were causing the first floods “and relatively significant mudslides” across the territory, he added.

The prefect said it was likely the island would remain on red alert until Monday evening, since heavy rain was expected to continue even after the storm had passed.

At least 14,500 people have taken refuge in emergency shelters set up to protect them from the storm, BFMTV reported.

As of Sunday afternoon, the storm was moving away from Mayotte, Météo-France reported. The system is expected to slowly intensify over the next 24 hours to tropical cyclone status while approaching the coast of Mozambique.

The current forecast does not predict landfall in Mozambique, but the Nampula region is still expected to experience “very degraded conditions”, the forecaster said.

Mozambique is also recovering from Cyclone Chido, which killed 120 people in the country.

• ‘Dozens not thousands’ killed on Mayotte by Cyclone Chido
• Survivors describe Mayotte cyclone horror

In Mayotte, one of the poorest parts of France, many residents live in shanty towns.

Officially the archipelago has 320,000 residents, but authorities estimate about 100,000 to 200,000 undocumented migrants may also be living there.

On 14 December, Cyclone Chido became the worst storm to hit Mayotte in 90 years, bringing winds of up to 260 km/h (160mph) and flattening areas where people lived in shacks with metal roofs.

Initial reports said several hundred people had been killed, but the toll was later revised down to 39.

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 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.

• Judge blocks release of special counsel’s report on Trump
• Trump avoids prison or fine in hush-money case sentencing
• A guide to Donald Trump’s four criminal cases

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.

The army in Sudan says it has captured a key city in the country’s east, one of its biggest gains yet in an almost two-year-long war against rebel forces.

Footage on social media showed people celebrating in the streets as army soldiers entered the city of Wad Madani.

The leader of paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, acknowledged the loss in an audio message.

His admission was angry and rambling, attributing the defeat to the army’s air superiority and use of Iranian-made drones.

But he vowed to continue fighting until victory, even if it took another 20 years.

Wad Madani is the capital of the state of Al Jazira, and is 87 miles (140km) south of the country’s capital, Khartoum.

Wad Madani serves as a strategic crossroads, connecting several states through key supply highways. It is also the closest major town to Khartoum.

Sudan has been ravaged by war since April 2023, when fighting broke out between the RSF and the Sudanese army.

The RSF continues to control nearly all of Sudan’s western Darfur region, as well as significant portions of the country’s south. Meanwhile, the army controls the north and east, as well as parts of Khartoum.

The war has claimed tens of thousands of lives. And in what the United Nations has called one of the world’s “largest displacement crises”, about nine million people have been forced to flee their homes.

The country is also slipping into a famine, with 24.6 million people – about half the population – in urgent need of food aid, experts said.

Earlier this month, the US sanctioned the RSF leader after it accused the group of committing genocide.

Officials said he was being punished for his role in “systematic” atrocities against the Sudanese people during the 20-month conflict.

• What is going on in Sudan? A simple guide
• BBC hears of horror and hunger in rare visit to Darfur massacre town
• Sudan – where more children are fleeing war than anywhere else

UK laws on internet safety are “very uneven” and “unsatisfactory”, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has said, following calls from campaigners to tighten the rules.

On Saturday, Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell, who took her own life at 14 after seeing harmful content online, said the UK was “going backwards”.

In a letter to the PM, Mr Russell argued that the Online Safety Act, which aims to force tech giants to take more responsibility for their sites’ content, needed fixing and said a “duty of care” should be imposed on the firms.

Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, Kyle expressed his “frustration” with the Online Safety Act, which was passed by the previous Conservative government in 2023.

The Conservative government had originally included in the legislation plans to compel social media companies to remove some “legal-but-harmful” content such as posts promoting eating disorders.

However the proposal triggered a backlash from critics, including the current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, concerned it could lead to censorship.

In July 2022, Badenoch, who was not then a minister, said the bill was in “no fit state to become law” adding: “We should not be legislating for hurt feelings.”

Another Conservative MP, David Davis, said it risked “the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history”.

The plan was dropped for adult social media users and instead companies were required to give users more control to filter out content they did not want to see. The law still expects companies to protect children from legal-but-harmful content.

Kyle said the section on legal-but-harmful content had been taken out of the bill adding: “So I inherited a landscape where we have a very uneven, unsatisfactory legislative settlement.”

He did not commit to making changes to the current legislation but said he was “very open-minded” on the subject.

He also said the act contained some “very good powers” he was using to “assertively” tackle new safety concerns and that in the coming months ministers would get the powers to make sure online platforms were providing age-appropriate content.

Companies that did not comply with the law would face “very strident” sanctions, he said.

Following the interview, a Whitehall source told the BBC the government was not planning to repeal the Online Safety Act, or pass a second act, but to work within what ministers believe are its limitations.

Ministers are not ruling out further legislation but wanted “to be agile and quick” to keep up with fast-moving trends, a source said.

In his letter, Ian Russell argued that “ominous” changes in the tech industry put greater pressure on the government to act.

He said Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta which owns Facebook and Instagram, and Elon Musk, owner of the social media site X, were “at the leading edge of a wholesale recalibration of the industry”.

He accused Zuckerberg of moving away from safety towards a “laissez-faire, anything-goes model” and “back towards the harmful content that Molly was exposed to”.

Earlier this week, Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be getting rid of fact checkers, and instead adopt a system – introduced by X – of allowing users to add “community notes” to social media posts they deemed to be untrue.

This marked a change from Meta’s previous approach, introduced in 2016, whereby third party moderators would check posts on Facebook and Instagram that appeared to be false or misleading.

Content flagged as inaccurate would be moved lower in users’ feeds and accompanied by labels offering viewers more information on the subject.

Defending the new system, Zuckerberg said moderators were “too politically biased” and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression”.

The step comes as Meta seeks to improve relations with incoming US President Donald Trump who has previously accused the company of censoring right-wing voices.

Zuckerberg said the change – which only applies in the US – would mean content moderators would “catch less bad stuff” but would also reduce the number of “innocent” posts being removed.

Responding to Russell’s criticism, a Meta spokesperson told the BBC there was “no change to how we treat content that encourages suicide, self-injury, and eating disorders” and said the company would “continue to use our automated systems to scan for that high-severity content”.

Asked about the change, Kyle said the announcement was “an American statement for American service users” adding: “There is one thing that has not changed and that is the law of this land.”

“If you come and operate in this country you abide by the law, and the law says illegal content must be taken down,” he said.

Rules in the Online Safety Act, due to come into force later this year, compel social media firms to show that they are removing illegal content – such as child sexual abuse, material inciting violence and posts promoting or facilitating suicide.

The law also says companies have to protect children from harmful material including pornography, material promoting self-harm, bullying and content encouraging dangerous stunts.

Platforms will be expected to adopt “age assurance technologies” to prevent children from seeing harmful content.

The law also requires companies to take action against illegal, state-sponsored disinformation. If their services are likely to be accessed by children they should also take steps to protect users against misinformation.

​​”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.”

Firefighters are battling to control huge wildfires in Los Angeles that have killed at least 16 people, devoured thousands of buildings and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes.

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

The largest blaze, in the Pacific Palisades area is the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history. More than 23,000 acres have now burnt.

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

Four fires are currently burning in the Los Angeles area.

• Palisades fire: The largest active fire is burning between Santa Monica and Malibu. Burnt area: 23,706 acres.

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

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

• Hurst fire: To the north east of the city. Burnt area: 799 acres.

But other five fires have been contained.

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

Archer fire: Small fire that started on Friday and burned through 19 acres.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wildfires raging in Los Angeles have led to claims that officials there have mismanaged the city’s preparation for such events.

President-elect Donald Trump has pointed the finger of blame at California Governor Gavin Newsom, who he says is responsible for LA’s struggling water supply.

Others have blamed LA Mayor Karen Bass for cutting the city’s fire department budget.

BBC Verify looked into the facts behind the political fallout.

In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said Governor Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water” to put out the fires.

But the specific declaration he mentions doesn’t appear to exist.

In an interview with Pod Save America on Saturday, Newsom said Trump’s statements were “made up”.

“It’s delusional,” he said. “And it’s reinforced over and over and over within the right wing. And so it’s become gospel. And it’s so profoundly ignorant. And yet he absolutely believes it.”

Hours after Newsom’s comments Saturday, continued to blame California’s leaders.

“The fires are still raging in LA. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost,” he wrote on Truth Social.

“They just can’t put out the fires,” he added. “What’s wrong with them?”

We’ve also searched for this document and been unable to find it.

Newsom, a Democrat, has previously opposed efforts to redirect more water to southern California.

This includes a 2020 presidential memorandum in which Trump sought to divert water away from Northern California to farmland further south.

• Anger after fire evacuation alert sent in error to millions in LA
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Newsom opposed this at the time, saying he wanted to protect “highly imperilled fish species close to extinction”.

That is what Trump is referencing in his post blaming Newsom for the response to the wildfires, where he says the governor “wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish”, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has confirmed.

California’s attorney general ultimately blocked the measure, citing potential harm to endangered species and saying that it was not scientifically justified.

Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center, said: “The federal government does not deliver water from northern California to southern California.

“While efforts to save Delta smelt, along with salmon and steelhead trout, do reduce the amount of water that is moved from northern California by the state at certain times, it has no bearing on the current availability of water for fire-fighting.”

Although southern California is currently experiencing a drought, data shows its reservoirs are almost all currently above the historic average for this time of the year. None are at significantly low levels.

However, one large reservoir in Pacific Palisades, the Santa Ynez Reservoir, was closed for maintenance and empty when the fire broke out.

Officials from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) said that if the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been operational, it might have increased the supply of water, but that it’s unclear what the ultimate effect might have been.

On Friday, Newsom confirmed Trump’s claim that there had been no water for some fire hydrants, which hampered the emergency response.

Firefighters in Los Angeles have told the BBC firsthand that they experienced shortages.

Newsom called for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to hydrants and “the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir”.

In a letter addressed to the heads of the LA Department of Water and Power and LA County Public Works, Newsom said that reports of inadequate water supplies were “deeply troubling” .

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

“We need answers to how that happened,” he continued, adding that he expects the agencies to “fully and transparently” share information and records for the state’s probe.

Adam Van Gerpen, a captain with the Los Angeles fire department, confirmed to the BBC that his crew, which has been tackling the Pacific Palisades blaze, and other crews battling other wildfires, ran out of water, forcing them to “improvise”.

As of 06:30 local time (14:30 GMT), Cal Fire data showed firefighters had almost contained one of the remaining fires, the Kenneth fire, and had made significant progress with another, known as the Hurst fire. However, the containment of the largest fire in Palisades remained at 11%, while the Eaton fire was 27% contained.

LA Mayor Karen Bass has faced criticism over cuts to the city’s fire department budget.

For the latest financial year, the LA Fire Department (LAFD) budget was reduced by $17.6m (£14.3m).

LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley told CNN that the budget cut had “severely” affected the department’s ability to respond to the disaster.

She said the department was already under-staffed and the elimination of civilian positions, like mechanics, had meant that 100 fire apparatuses were out of service.

Mayor Bass responded to the criticism, saying: “There were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days.”

According to the LA Times, after the 2024-25 budget was passed, the city council approved $53m in pay raises for firefighters and $58m for new kit, such as firetrucks.

Once that funding is taken into account, the fire department’s operating budget technically grew this year, according to the newspaper.

The LAFD has an overall budget of approaching $1bn, and it isn’t the only department responding to the fires.

For example, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the Los Angeles County Fire Department are part of the relief efforts, along with the federal government.

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

At least 16 people have died in the Los Angeles fires as four blazes continue to cause devastation across the sprawling Californian city.

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

About 35,000 homes and businesses are without electricity, according to Poweroutage.us, an outage monitor that tracks blackouts across the US.

It comes as police confirmed more than 20 arrests have been made for looting after two individuals were caught posing as firefighters and entering properties.

The largest fire in the Palisades is now more than 20,000 acres, although firefighters have 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.

Students at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles are awaiting updates from officials, while classes are being held remotely.

Eleven deaths have been confirmed in the Eaton fire and another five in the Palisades fire.

As of Saturday, more than 153,000 people were under evacuation orders in Los Angeles County, according to local authorities. Another 166,000 were 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 $150bn, 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
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• 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 23,654 acres, including the upmarket Pacific Palisades neighbourhood. It was 11% contained as of Sunday morning
• 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 more than 14,000 acres. It is 15% contained
• Hurst: Located just north of San Fernando, it began burning on Tuesday night. It has grown to 799 acres, and is almost fully contained
• Kenneth: This fire broke out on Thursday on the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It so far covers 1,052 acres. Authorities say its progress has been stopped and it is also almost fully contained

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.

Sinead and Michael Lysaght thought their wedding might cost as much as £40,000 – such were the expectations of others.

“Ten years ago our vision would have been a big, contemporary tuxedo wedding with 120 guests,” he told the BBC. “Given the cost of living crisis, we kind of asked ourselves ‘who are we doing that for?'”

A survey of 1,800 couples by the wedding planning app Hitched found the average cost of a wedding was £20,000 with around half saying the state of the economy affected the budget for their ceremony.

Michael recalls one caterer telling him it would cost £25,000 to provide food and drink to all their guests at the wedding he and Sinead had originally envisaged.

Data collected from Hitched users also shows that hundreds of couples have organised their nuptials to take place over Christmas and New Year in each of the last four years.

This is part of the wedding off-season, which lies between December and February, when only 11% of nuptials take place, according to US wedding planning website The Knot.

For Sinead the prospect of organising such a large and expensive event was daunting – it was her idea to get married in a forest instead.

“I thought she’d gone absolutely bonkers,” says Michael, upon first hearing the suggestion. After Sinead won him over a few days later, the pair began organising a surprise wedding to take place on Christmas Eve.

They lured 13 unsuspecting loved ones to the Forest of Dean with the help of her mother.

Under the pretence of going to see a light show in the forest, the wedding party happened upon a clearing adorned with candles and fairy lights.

A celebrant appeared to conduct the marriage ceremony and, while the surprised guests regathered their wits, Sinead and Michael did a quick costume change.

The couple, who have been together for 11 years, exchanged vows before an array of conifer branches and lights – their two young sons had front row seats.

“We’ve created a unique memory that a £40,000 wedding wouldn’t have created,” says Michael, 41. “It wouldn’t have had that surprise element, that moment in the forest.”

Planning the wedding took five weeks and the cost was about a tenth of what they had thought they might have spent on a more conventional wedding.

“My primary reason for the idea wasn’t to save money, though that was important, it was more to do with the actual planning of a wedding attended by so many people,” says Sinead, 40. “It was just overwhelming.”

The couple credit enthusiastic staff for going “above and beyond” in arranging the clearing at such short notice.

They weaved in Sinead’s favourite Christmas themes, made mulled wine and played songs from the film Love Actually.

“It felt like the stars were aligned,” Sinead tell us. “Everything just fell into place.”

The love of Christmas was also partly why Lucy Holliday, 36, chose a winter wedding – Father Christmas even turned up to the reception.

She and her partner Lee, 46, have been together for 18 years and have three sons. “It was a long engagement,” jokes Lucy.

They decided to wed on 21 December because they didn’t want to wait until 2026 for a date at their preferred venue.

It allowed them to save some money on the booking fee and infuse their nuptials with Christmas spirit.

A decorated tree and sleigh greeted guests at the entrance to the country house which had holly, ivy, mistletoe and lanterns hung throughout.

The three flower girls were dressed as Christmas tree angels for the marriage ceremony and the wedding favours at the reception were shaped as crackers.

Father Christmas was announced to guests by an elf – the couple’s youngest son.

Mulled wine and cider were available and the reception DJ was armed with a string of Christmas hits, including Lucy’s favourite Fairytale of New York.

“It was absolutely fantastic,” she tells us, saying the day couldn’t have gone smoother. There were 80 guests for the wedding with another 40 at the reception.

“I think the adults enjoyed having Father Christmas there more than the kids!”

Wedding venue and supplier costs were cheaper in winter but, given the number of guests, the expense of the event meant Lucy and Lee’s children received more modest gifts on Christmas Day than usual.

“They did say that me now having the same surname as them was the best present they could have asked for,” says Lucy.

Sam White, 48, is a celebrant who acts as a master of ceremonies for milestone family events like weddings.

She says the festive period has been her busiest time for work this year and thinks people are increasingly considering winter weddings for several reasons.

Historically it was quite common for people to wed on Christmas Day with couples in inner-city areas of Britain married off in batches during the Victorian era.

There could be up to 40 weddings on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day at the turn of the 19th Century, according to research by Reverend Kelvin Woolmer.

Writing in the Church Times, he explains there were so many because for lots of working class people they were the only days they had off work each year.

Sam thinks the reasons today are more to do with hiring wedding venues at discounted rates, loved ones less likely to be away on holiday and weddings becoming more personalised.

“They want more warmth and joy and love – and their story incorporated into the ceremony,” she tells us.

“We talk about what they love about each other and, through that, we’re able to evoke so many different emotions.”

Another benefit of her winter wedding, says Lucy, is that it’s also helped her single friends embrace Christmas when they haven’t wanted to previously.

She says one of her bridesmaids has never much enjoyed it but that the wedding prompted her to put up lots of Christmas decorations in her home. “She’s been so excited,” says Lucy. “It’s really brought us all together.”

The cast of this year’s Love Island All Stars, a spin-off featuring former contestants, has been described as “dating royalty” by its makers.

More than half of the 12 islanders heading to the South African villa were finalists on their respective series, while 2022 winner Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu is also rumoured to be entering later on.

Appearing on Love Island was once seen as a route to independent fame and success.

But could the return of names from some of the show’s most popular series be a sign that the once-profitable pipeline from Islander to influencer or TV star is coming to an end?

Becoming an influencer is a well-worn career path for those leaving Love Island, and past contestants have been paid by brands to sell everything from cosmetics to cars to social media users.

Perhaps the highest achiever in this role has been 2019 series runner-up Molly-Mae Hague, who went on to work as a creative director for fast fashion brand Pretty Little Thing, and has recently launched her own fashion company.

But Molly-Mae appeared on Love Island at the peak of its popularity. The episode in which she and Tommy Fury lost out to winners Amber Gill and Greg O’Shea is still the show’s most watched ever, attracting over six million viewers.

Hitting these heights isn’t possible for every former cast member, something more recent contestant Tanyel Revan believes aspiring influencers need to be aware of.

“One thing about this industry that people have to remember is that if you don’t maintain it 24/7, which is very hard because it is a bit of a fake lifestyle, you can easily be forgotten,” she tells the BBC.

“I think a lot of influencers go back on All Stars because they need to keep up and have that boost,” she adds.

Tanyel, 28, appeared on a winter series of the show in 2023, when interest was still high (its final was watched by over a million people), but not at the levels Molly-Mae experienced in 2019.

The hairdresser says while she has earned some “extra income” from social media influencing, the haircare company she started before entering the villa is what gives her “stability”.

“I am a businesswoman who has got my own salon,” Tanyel adds.

A lot has changed since Love Island first aired in its current form in 2015. More than 300 people have now appeared on the UK edition of the show – being an ex-Islander is no longer an exclusive club.

For a while, finalists enjoyed rumoured six-figure brand deals with fast fashion companies and sponsored Instagram posts that could earn them thousands.

But according to social media expert and co-founder of Sloane House Marketing, Bryleigh Flack, the appetite for this type of content no longer exists.

“The way we digest content is completely different to how we did even five years ago,” she says.

“There are so many adverts, not even just influencer ads but when you are scrolling, even through your friends’ [Instagram] stories, you’re hit with them, it’s very saturated,” she says.

Bryleigh says big-brand partnerships used to be the best way to make money, but “appealing to the masses” is no longer the best strategy for influencers, thanks to newer platforms like TikTok, which use a different algorithm to choose content for users.

She says there is a new type of content creator in 2025 – the “micro influencer” – who may not have loads of followers, but has a really engaged and specific audience.

These creators “really hone in on their audience and know them”, she adds. “For example, mums with young families or girls that love to go out every weekend, they’re completely different people so trying to market to them both won’t work.”

Billy Brown, who appeared on series eight of Love Island in 2022, says many of the people he was on the show with saw it as an easy route to becoming an influencer.

“I know a lot of people who came out, quit their job and thought that’s it now, but it’s not.

“You can earn a lot of money from that show but if you don’t do well, it’s not the case,” says the 25-year-old, who entered the main villa after impressing fellow contestant Tasha Ghouri in second villa Casa Amor.

Billy, who owns businesses in construction and property development, says that days after leaving the show, he was “getting up at half four in the morning [for work] and then going to a movie premiere at night”.

“I didn’t let it get to my head, I think I was one of the only people who could say ‘look, it’s not all glitz and glam’,” he adds.

Billy has maintained a social media presence in the years since, featuring content on his construction work alongside more lifestyle and sports-focused material.

He says he still earns some money from influencing but thinks that’s due to his personality, rather than his follower count, a relatively modest 115,000. In contrast, Molly-Mae has over eight million.

“People [who go on the show] need to focus on what they like, instead of just being known for being on Love Island.

“You have to have something about you, just being good looking is not going to get you much,” he adds.

Love Island’s cultural relevance has become a topic of conversation in recent years due to falling viewing figures.

At the show’s peak in 2019, it achieved an average of nearly six million viewers, with more recent series in 2023 and 2024 attracting around one to two million.

With the reality TV dating genre’s recent boost from Netflix shows such as Love is Blind, The Ultimatum and Too Hot to Handle, audiences now have more options than ever at their disposal.

Jake Lee, who runs Alpha Talent Group, represents stars from across sport, entertainment and social media.

He manages boxer Tommy Fury and sports presenter Mac Griffiths (known as Michael on Love Island), who both appeared on the aforementioned 2019 series of the show.

“People would come off a show and do adverts for every single company, because these companies would want to take advantage of the quick exposure they could get,” he tells the BBC.

“But four or five months down the line you’d be harming your own career, because you’d used your platform the wrong way and there’d be no credibility there,” he adds.

Jake says more recent reality TV contestants have learnt a lot from the mistakes of their predecessors, who were leaving shows with no real strategy.

“My biggest piece of advice is to go in with your eyes wide open,” he cautions.

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.

“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.

Intrusive interrogations, the shame of dishonourable discharge, criminal convictions that impacted their lives for years.

This is what many LGBT people who served their country were subjected to.

That is, until 12 January 2000 – exactly 25 years ago today – when a long-standing ban on LGBT people serving in the military was lifted.

Now, a quarter of a century later, the final design for a monument being erected in these veterans’ honour has been revealed.

The large-scale sculpture, designed by Norfolk-based artist collective Abraxas Academy, will stand in the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire after it’s unveiled later this year. It’s a bronze model of a crumpled letter, made up of words taken from evidence given by LGBT personnel affected by the ban.

Pte Carol Morgan, who was forced out of the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) for being lesbian in 1982, says the design is “a fantastic piece of art”.

“It shows that we exist, when we’ve always existed… And now they acknowledge that we exist.”

A monument was one of 49 recommendations made by a landmark report from Lord Etherton, published in 2023, into the long-standing impact of the ban on LGBT veterans. The search for a design began last October – 38 designs were submitted, and five were shortlisted. The winning design was selected on Friday.

While the process of decriminalising homosexuality in the UK started in 1967, it was another 33 years before gay people were legally allowed to serve in the Army, Navy and RAF.

Those who fought for the ban to be repealed tell the BBC that they could never have imagined that they’d one day see a monument in their honour.

When Lt Cdr Duncan Lustig-Prean was serving in the Navy, he became accustomed to hiding who he was from his colleagues. He used to practise saying “Phyllis”, so he didn’t accidentally say his partner’s real name, Phil, after a few drinks.

He and his boyfriend would never sign letters with their full names, just initials. He’d even periodically put up pictures of a woman on his wall – “an assumed girlfriend”.

And when going on lengthy deployments, his partner could never join his colleagues’ loved ones to wave the ship off. At least, not in the open.

“The families would be there on the Round Tower in Portsmouth, waving us off,” he recalls. “If I was lucky, my partner would appear, hidden on the sea wall in Southsea somewhere, discreetly waving as I departed for eight months.”

The secrecy was necessary – but hard.

“When you are lying to people who will die for you and you know that you will die for them – that bond is very close, and it is a very difficult and painful thing to lie about your whole existence.”

For Lt Cdr Craig Jones, who served in the Royal Navy for 19 years, being gay “didn’t become too much of a problem – until I found something that I needed to hide. Almost 30 years ago, I met my then-boyfriend, now-husband”.

He met Adam while on leave, after finding the courage to go to a gay bar for the first time – and at that moment, he says, “life turned from monochrome to technicolour”.

The couple moved to Brighton together and “effectively hid” there, he says. They were “a couple, in many ways, at war with the world around us”.

He took similar measures to try and protect himself. He’d lie to colleagues about where he was spending his weekends, and change the names of his gay friends in his Filofax – George and John became George and Joan, for example.

Meanwhile, his Brighton friends didn’t know he was in the Navy; to explain his long absences, he told them he worked on an oil tanker in the Gulf.

“I remember one of my Commanding Officers writing in a confidential report about me in ’96: ‘Jones is an intensely private man.’ And I was an intensely private man, because the consequences of not being private were extremely severe,” he says.

“I saw so many of my amazing colleagues marched down the gangway of the ships in which I served, by the Military Police, to what was then a fate unknown – and to what I now know to have been a dreadful fate.”

Lt Cdr Jones is referring to the horrors that faced many military personnel after they were suspected of being gay. Some were sexually assaulted during interrogations, some were imprisoned and some even took their own lives.

Pte Morgan tried to be careful when she fell in love with another woman in the Women’s Royal Army Corps. They’d avoid ever being seen on their own together, and although they’d write each other love letters, they’d sign-off with male names instead of their own.

Despite going to these lengths, she was still reported to a superior.

What followed was a probing investigation, which included having all of her letters and photographs seized, being repeatedly asked intimate questions, and being referred to a male psychiatrist for further intrusive questioning. Eventually Pte Morgan “just broke down and cried, and admitted I was gay”.

She was dismissed from the Army in 1982 after four years of service – carrying with her not just the loss of her career, but intense feelings of worthlessness and shame in who she was. She bore the weight of these emotions for decades.

“I went and hid in the closet for 35 years,” she says. “I literally couldn’t come to terms with the fact I was gay.”

It was January 1994, 15 years into his Naval career, when Lt Cdr Lustig-Prean was blackmailed by a man he didn’t know, but who had somehow found out he was gay.

He told the man to “eff off”, and that he was going to go to the military police himself to report the conversation.

“I made an appointment first thing on Monday morning with the head of the Special Investigation Branch,” Lt Cdr Lustig-Prean says. The Special Investigation Branch (SIB) was made up of the military police forces from the Army, the Navy and the RAF. “He had been my subordinate in my previous job and I knew him well.”

The SIB head gave him a warm, friendly reception, ushering him into a room where there was fresh coffee and a plate of chocolate biscuits laid out on the table.

When Lt Cdr Lustig-Prean confided that he was being blackmailed, the SIB head was outraged on his behalf: “Give me the so-and-so’s name and I’ll sort it out for you. Why is he trying to blackmail you?”

Lt Cdr Lustig-Prean told him the truth – that it was because he was gay.

“At this point, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife,” he says.

The SIB head moved the coffee and biscuits to one side, and told him matter-of-factly that he was not obliged to say anything, but anything he did say could be taken down and given in evidence.

“He pushed me towards a police interview room, with somebody else in the room as well, to interrogate me about my private and sexual life,” Lt Cdr Lustig-Prean says.

“It was the sort of interrogation I would expect if I were accused of rape. They were asking probing questions about my private and sexual life in the most gross detail you can imagine.”

He was suspended, and later discharged.

In January 2000, Lt Cdr Jones was his ship’s signal communications officer. This meant that when a signal came in announcing that the ban on LGBT personnel had been lifted, it was his job to tell his commanding officer.

“He said to me that, having read the signal, he was disappointed that he and others would have to serve with people who were, effectively, people like me,” he says.

“My response was quite simple – that I was one of those people.”

This was the first time he had come out to his colleagues. Because the ban had been repealed, his job was safe – but the culture within his unit remained hostile. Some people refused to go into the shower area if he was in there, and some even stopped speaking to him.

But two weeks after the ban was lifted, Lt Cdr Jones went to a Burns Night event with his unit – with his partner Adam on his arm.

“That was a night to be remembered with some remarkable anxieties, but we all survived.”

The ban was repealed after a hard-fought political and legal campaign by a group of veterans called the Rank Outsiders. In recent years, Fighting With Pride has followed in their footsteps, campaigning for both recognition and reparations.

Now, they’ve achieved not just the monument, but the promise of up to £70,000 compensation each, and a public apology from then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, delivered on behalf of the nation in July 2023.

“I didn’t think this day would ever come, even with the campaign,” Pte Morgan says. “I’ve spoken to some of the serving personnel today, and they live a life that we could never live.”

For Lt Cdr Lustig-Prean, seeing the monument will be “an intensely emotional experience – not just because we never expected to get this far, but also because for anyone who serves, remembrance of those who gave their lives is profoundly important to us.

“That’s one of the reasons why I really want to go and see that memorial and contemplate the LGBTQ people who died for this country, as well as those who gave their careers because of this policy.”

Lt Cdr Jones agrees, and says the campaign has “restored [LGBT veterans] from what they felt was a position of shame to being recognised as incredible heroes of the Armed Forces.

“In the traditions of the Royal Navy, I’ll raise a glass of Port and be glad to see the battle behind me.”

Rugby player Ilona Maher has won fans and admirers with her sporting talent.

But it’s her message of body positivity that’s attracted millions of followers on social media.

The US-born athlete, 28, regularly jumps on TikTok and Instagram to talk about body positivity and being a high-profile woman in sport.

Since the Paris Olympics, she’s become one of the biggest rugby players in the world, and there are hopes that her recent move to UK side Bristol Bears could boost the sport’s profile.

Even though she only played for 20 minutes as a substitute, her debut match last weekend drew a record crowd for the team, which relocated the fixture to a bigger venue.

The star hung around after the game for more than 90 minutes to pose for pictures and talk to fans.

Speaking to BBC Newsbeat after her debut match last weekend, Ilona says she’s “honoured” to be a role model for young women and girls.

“My message to [girls] would be to make sure you give yourself grace and are gentle with your body,” she says.

“There are going to be days where it’s tough to love it all the time but give it grace and do things, whether it’s dance, rugby or taking a walk, to show what it’s able to do for you.”

Aspiring players Zara and Millie, who turned up to watch the game, tell Newsbeat Ilona helped them to realise: “Just because you play a sport, it doesn’t define how you can be as a person.”

“Ilona’s changed the perception of body image by showing that you can be muscly and strong and powerful and wear a dress,” says 16-year-old Zara.

“Just because you play a sport it doesn’t define how you can be as a person – how you have to look, how you have to act.

“I know a lot of young girls struggle with that.”

Zara and team-mate Millie, also 16, play for North Bristol Rugby Club.

They both had to move to Bristol when they turned 12 in order to continute playing due to the lack of more local girls’ teams.

“I’ve been playing rugby since I was about six and I used to play with the boys up until I was U12s which is the age limit that you’re not allowed to play with them anymore,” says Zara.

An athletic physique is “always seen as a masculine thing”, adds Millie.

“[Ilona’s] a role model for me because I’m quite tall and she’s also tall and she just shows the beauty in that and she’s not ashamed of it.”

For rugby union journalist and author Jessica Hayden, Ilona’s message of body positivity is breaking down a significant barrier in the women’s game.

“Half of the issue is that they don’t have the opportunity and that clubs don’t have women’s or girls offerings for them,” she tells Newsbeat.

“The other half of the issue is that, when they get to that age, there’s problems around body positivity.”

And while there have been campaigns in the past to promote body confidence, what makes Ilona cut through is her authenticity, Jessica says.

“Personalities are the most important thing in sport because people want to understand who this athlete is,” she says.

“What I really liked was seeing young girls talking to her [after her debut] about what Ilona’s done for them in terms of how they view their own bodies.

“And I’m sure those conversations are happening up and down the country about what she’s doing for the sport.”

Team-mates Millie and Zara say they’re excited to see the boost they think Ilona’s already bringing to the women’s game.

A record-breaking crowd of 9,240 turned out to watch Ilona’s Premiership Women’s Rugby debut as the Bristol Bears took on rivals Gloucester-Hartpury.

The figure is more than double the Bears’ previous record attendance of 4,101- not to mention a new Premiership Women’s Rugby record for a standalone game.

“She’s had a massive effect,” says Zara.

“They might not play rugby, they might not ever have watched a rugby match, but because they follow her on Instagram and TikTok, they want to come and watch her.”

Jessica was also in the crowd and says she’s “never seen anything like it”.

“If you have all those fans who turned up to see Ilona Maher, they might become Bristol Bears fans and then come back the next week and the week after that,” she says.

Ilona’s signed to Bristol on a three month deal and Millie says it’s “a really good opportunity to create more of a platform for women’s rugby”.

Jessica is optimistic that will happen, particularly with the Women’s Rugby World Cup being hosted in England this year and plans to boost female participation in the sport.

“We could be having our Lionesses moment,” Jessica says, referring to the success of England’s women’s football team.

“The attention [Ilona]’s drawing it right now can only be a good thing for the wider game.

“Now is the time to invest in women’s rugby – it’s only going to get bigger.”

After coming on for 20 minutes, the Bristol Bears eventually lost to rivals Gloucester-Hartpury 17-40 and Ilona told Newsbeat she’s “ready for more”.

“I feel happy, but hungry’s the word – I’m ready to do more.”

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

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).”

The family of a British mountaineer missing for 10 days in the Dolomites say they are “devastated by the tragic events of the last few days” 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 tragic events of the last few days.

“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”.

Sir Keir Starmer has been urged to sack anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq after she was named in an investigation into claims her family embezzled up to £3.9bn from infrastructure spending in Bangladesh.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch posted on X on Saturday that it was time for Siddiq to be sacked, adding the PM had “appointed his personal friend as anti-corruption minister and she is accused herself of corruption”.

Siddiq was appointed economic secretary to the Treasury last July and her responsibilities include tackling corruption in UK financial markets.

The 42-year-old MP for Hampstead and Highgate has referred herself to the PM’s standards adviser and insists she has done nothing wrong.

It comes as Bangladesh’s new leader, Muhammad Yunus, told the Sunday Times Siddiq should apologise after reports she had lived in London properties with links to her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, who was deposed as prime minister of Bangladesh last year and is at the centre of a corruption probe.

In a letter to Sir Laurie Magnus, who polices standards among government ministers, Siddiq said: “I am clear that I have done nothing wrong.”

Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle was asked on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show whether the minister should keep her job.

He said: “Tulip has referred herself to the authorities to be investigated. That needs to be completed. But the thing you can guarantee with this government and Keir Starmer as prime minister, is he will abide to the outcome of that inquiry.”

Downing Street previously confirmed Sir Laurie would now conduct a “fact-finding” exercise to determine if “further action” was needed, including a further investigation.

Badenoch said Siddiq had become “a distraction when the government should be focused on dealing with the financial problems it has created”.

She added: “Now the government of Bangladesh is raising serious concerns about her links to the regime of Sheikh Hasina”.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Bangladesh’s leader said that properties used by Siddiq should be investigated and handed back to his government if they were gained through “plain robbery”.

Siddiq is economic secretary to the Treasury and responsible for tackling economic crime, money laundering and illicit finance.

The allegations are part of a wider investigation by Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) into Hasina, who was in charge of Bangladesh for more than 20 years, and was seen as an autocrat whose government ruthlessly clamped down on dissent.

Since fleeing the country Sheikh Hasina has been accused of multiple crimes by the new Bangladeshi government.

In her letter to Sir Laurie Magnus following the allegations Siddiq said: “In recent weeks I have been the subject of media reporting, much of it inaccurate, about my financial affairs and my family’s links to the former government of Bangladesh.”

“I am clear that I have done nothing wrong,” she said, adding: “However, for the avoidance of doubt, I would like you to independently establish the facts about these matters.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir told reporters he had confidence in his minister, adding Siddiq had “acted entirely properly” by referring herself for investigation.

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

At least 16 people have died in the Los Angeles fires as four blazes continue to cause devastation across the sprawling Californian city.

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

About 35,000 homes and businesses are without electricity, according to Poweroutage.us, an outage monitor that tracks blackouts across the US.

It comes as police confirmed more than 20 arrests have been made for looting after two individuals were caught posing as firefighters and entering properties.

The largest fire in the Palisades is now more than 20,000 acres, although firefighters have 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.

Students at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles are awaiting updates from officials, while classes are being held remotely.

Eleven deaths have been confirmed in the Eaton fire and another five in the Palisades fire.

As of Saturday, more than 153,000 people were under evacuation orders in Los Angeles County, according to local authorities. Another 166,000 were 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 $150bn, 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 23,654 acres, including the upmarket Pacific Palisades neighbourhood. It was 11% contained as of Sunday morning
• 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 more than 14,000 acres. It is 15% contained
• Hurst: Located just north of San Fernando, it began burning on Tuesday night. It has grown to 799 acres, and is almost fully contained
• Kenneth: This fire broke out on Thursday on the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It so far covers 1,052 acres. Authorities say its progress has been stopped and it is also almost fully contained

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.

Firefighters are battling to control huge wildfires in Los Angeles that have killed at least 16 people, devoured thousands of buildings and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes.

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

The largest blaze, in the Pacific Palisades area is the most destructive fire in Los Angeles history. More than 23,000 acres have now burnt.

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

Four fires are currently burning in the Los Angeles area.

• Palisades fire: The largest active fire is burning between Santa Monica and Malibu. Burnt area: 23,706 acres.

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

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

• Hurst fire: To the north east of the city. Burnt area: 799 acres.

But other five fires have been contained.

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

Archer fire: Small fire that started on Friday and burned through 19 acres.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

The sun is rising over the ice-covered mountains of Nuuk fjord and we are travelling along one of the world’s last wild frontiers.

But there are shadows gathering here and across the rest of the frozen spaces of Greenland.

With Donald Trump about to become president of the United States, his refusal to rule out taking Greenland by force is reverberating through conversations across the island.

“He’s welcome to come visit for sure,” says the skipper of the converted fishing boat taking us east. Conscious that he needs to do business with people of all political hues, he asked not to be named, but used a phrase I hear repeatedly here.

“Greenland belongs to Greenlanders. So, Trump can visit but that’s it.”

The waters are flat calm as we pull into the isolated settlement of Kapisillit – population about 40 – where a few hunters are setting out to shoot seals.

It’s -16C (3F), and with wind chill effect feels more like -27C.

But near the harbour I meet a local church elder, Kaaleeraq Ringsted, 73, a great-grandfather, who is out drying fillets of cod caught in the fish-rich waters beside his front door.

When I ask about President-elect Trump buying or invading Greenland, he chuckles at first. Then his tone becomes serious.

“It is not acceptable that he says this. Greenland is not for sale.”

Then he tells me how he learned to fish and hunt here with his father and grandfather, and how he wants to preserve this life for his children and grandchildren.

Crossing the bay, the boat nosed through the broken surface ice. Two eagles perched on a rock, scanning for fish in the clear waters.

We were heading to the farm of Angutimmarik Hansen who keeps sheep as well as hunting seals, wildfowl and rabbits.

All of his winter feed for the sheep needs to be imported from Denmark, a reminder of how a harsh climate defines the possibilities of life here.

Inside his front door is a rack of hunting rifles. He notices me looking at them.

“Those are in case there’s an invasion,” he jokes.

But his attitude to the bellicose rhetoric from Mar-A-Lago is far from relaxed.

“What a stupid person in the world like Trump,” he says. “Never will we sell Greenland.”

This little farm is about 3,000 miles (4,828km) from Florida where the incoming US president gave his now infamous press conference last week.

“But Trump is not the USA. We can work with the people of the USA,” Mr Hansen says.

The Trump effect went into overdrive with the arrival in Greenland of Donald Trump Jr, hot on the heels of his father’s pronouncements. He flew into the capital Nuuk on the family’s 757 jet – Trump Force One – and stayed for four hours and thirty-three minutes, meeting some locals and offering only polite remarks.

“It’s been incredibly nice to meet people, and people were very happy to meet with us,” he said, after lunch at a local hotel. “Dad will have to come here.”

Then it was back to the sunnier climes of Florida.

Trump Jr was welcomed by local businessman Jorgen Boassen, who once campaigned for the president-elect.

He told local media that he was Trump’s “biggest fan” and that “of course they are interested in our country, and they are welcome to come and see what our country is like. It is also about opening up for trade and cooperation.”

The city of Nuuk is the world’s most northerly capital. It has a thriving civil society and a robust press. And there is some satisfaction here that the Trump comments have propelled the debate about Greenland’s independence onto the international stage.

There must be a Greenland that is nobody’s colony, say campaigners like Kuno Fencker, an MP with the governing coalition and member of the local parliament’s Foreign and Security Committee.

We meet by the harbour, under the bronze statue of Hans Egede, the 18th century missionary widely seen here as the man who opened the way to colonisation.

“Donald Trump is a politician,” says Mr Fencker.

“He’s a hard businessman, and we know his rhetoric, and that rhetoric is something we have gotten used to since 2019, and it’s just a matter of talking to a peer, an ally, on how we can solve things here in the Arctic and also in Nato.”

Mr Fencker offers the central argument of pro-independence campaigners.

“What is necessary here is that Greenland as a sovereign state should negotiate directly with the United States and not Denmark doing that for us.”

Independence from Denmark could come at a significant financial cost.

Greenland receives subsidies from Copenhagen worth roughly a fifth of its GDP every year. Mr Fencker suggests, as have other leading figures here, that the island would negotiate with America and Denmark for support.

“We are not naïve in regard to that. We need support in defence, security, and also economic development. We want a sustainable and self-sufficient economy.”

The editor of the local newspaper Sermitsiaq, Maasana Egede, admits he was worried by the implied threat of force from Donald Trump, but wants to see how reality matches the rhetoric.

As for independence, Mr Egede has been frustrated by what he sees as a polarised debate in the media – local and international.

“We are very much telling this story that it has to be about independence or not independence. But there’s all of this story that is in between, that people want independence, but not at any cost. There’s a living standard that has to be maintained. There’s trade that has to be maintained. There are living ways that have to be maintained.”

There is an expectation that at some point – not in the immediate future – there will be a vote in favour and Denmark will accept the result.

The island’s Prime Minister, Mute Egede, addressed a joint press conference with the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, in the wake of the latest Donald Trump comments.

“We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American, we want to be Greenlandic,” he said. The Danish PM took care not to offend anybody, least of all the incoming US president.

“The debate on Greenlandic independence and the latest announcements from the US show us the large interest in Greenland,” she said. “Events which set in motion a lot of thoughts and feelings with many in Greenland and Denmark.”

Ms Frederiksen knows well how deep feelings run in Greenland. Memories of injustice and racism remain fresh here among the indigenous Inuit people.

Scandals like the campaign to insert IUDs (Intrauterine devices) to prevent pregnancies in thousands of Inuit women and girls in the 1960s and 70s, haunt the relationship between Greenland and Denmark.

It’s not known how many of these procedures were carried out without the permission of those involved, but the numbers are considerable. The aim was to reduce the Greenlandic population.

Maliina Abelsen is a former finance minister in Greenland’s government, and now a consultant for companies and organisations working on the island. She’s also worked for UNICEF Denmark and leading Greenland businesses, like the seafood group, Royal Greenland.

Ms Abelsen believes far more needs to be done to address the injustices of the past.

“I think a lot of people are saying, maybe also the Danish government and state have said, ‘Oh well, you know this happened in the past. This is so many years ago. How are we going to be responsible for that? It’s time to move on.’

“But you cannot move on if you have not been healed, and if you have not been acknowledged to what happened to you. That is a job that we have to do together with Denmark, not something Greenland can do on its own.”

And despite her own high profile in civil society and business, Maliina Abelsen says that when it comes to racism – for example jokes about Inuit people – she “can speak for most Greenlanders, that we have all experienced that in our life”.

The issues of self-determination and facing the past are intimately intertwined.

Now the intervention of Donald Trump has placed both before the eyes of the world.

But the message we heard – from the remote settlements on the fjord to the capital city Nuuk – is that Greenland’s destiny must be decided here, among people whose voices have been too long overlooked.

Professional chef Daron Anderson always tells people he was “born in the kitchen” – quite literally.

The 45-year-old was delivered by homebirth at 295 West Las Flores Drive, where he lived with his mother until this week.

On Thursday, he stepped over charred debris where his kitchen once stood in Altadena, a tight-knit neighbourhood of north-eastern Los Angeles.

He was looking for his cast-iron pans in the hope they might have survived the blaze, one of several historic fires burning in the area that have killed at least 16 people and decimated multiple communities and left thousands homeless.

Across the street – at number 296 – his friend Rachel’s house also sits in ashes. The house next door – 281 – where he’d enjoyed family parties, is gone.

About three blocks away, on Devirian Place, where his girlfriend lived, some neighbours tried to fend off the roaring flames that would consume their homes with garden hoses.

Now they, too, are searching for treasured items in the rubble, after fire obliterated this entire community nestled in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

It all started on Tuesday night.

The Santa Ana winds had been fierce much of the day.

Daron was in his front yard just after 18:00 local time trying to secure items from flying away.

Across the street at 296 West Las Flores Drive, Rachel Gillespie was taking down Christmas decorations, concerned about her plastic icicles and patio furniture.

They exchanged worried glances. “This doesn’t look good, does it?” she remarked.

At the time, it was only wind that concerned them.

They had no idea that one of the two worst wildfires in LA history had just ignited a few miles away, part of a days-long nightmare that at its peak would see six blazes simultaneously threatening America’s second-largest city

The Eaton fire that tore through Altadena has now ravaged more than 14,000 acres, destroying thousands of homes and businesses, and left 11 dead. By the weekend, Eaton remained only 15% contained.

In west LA, the Palisades fire, which had started that morning, would go on to burn through more than 23,000 acres, reducing much of a vibrant community to ash, and killing at least five people.

Daron’s next-door neighbour at house 281, Dillon Akers, was at work at a donut stand in the Topanga mall – about 40 miles away – as smoke started filling their neighbourhood.

The 20-year-old rushed back when he heard the news, only to find his corner of north-west Altadena pitch black and members of his family frantically evacuating their home.

His uncle leapt over their white picket fence to save precious seconds as he stuffed items into the back of his car.

For the next two hours, Dillon did the same, gathering food, medicine, clothes and toiletries. In the rush, he mislaid his keys, and lost 30 minutes searching in the smoky dark with torches until he found them blown against a fence.

During the desperate search, he kept telling himself that local authorities would be able to handle the fire that was roaring down the mountain towards the home he shared with his mother, grandmother, aunt and two younger cousins.

Dillon had faced windstorms before, and had seen smoke in the mountains, but this time felt different. This time the orange glow in the sky was directly overhead.

“I was fully at a 10 on the scale of scared,” he said.

At 00:30 Wednesday, Dillon said that he and his mother were the last people to leave West Las Flores Drive. They may have been the last to get out alive.

The following day authorities would announce that the remains of a neighbour down the road had been discovered.

Rachel and Daron had left the neighbourhood about two hours before Dillon. Rachel was forced out by a friend who drove over to demand: “You’ve got to leave now.”

Rachel – with her wife, toddler, five cats, and two days of clothing – said goodbye to the home they had bought just one year earlier.

Daron also grabbed what he could: a guitar he purchased when he was 14 with money he earned working as an extra in a karate film and a painting of his family crossing Abbey Road in London, made to look like the cover of the iconic Beatles album.

As those on Las Flores Drive evacuated, Daron’s neighbours a few blocks away tried to fight the flames.

At 417 Devirian Place, Hipolito Cisneros and his close friend and neighbour Larry Villescas, who lived across the street at home number 416, grabbed garden hoses.

The scene outside looked hellish.

The garage of one home was in flames. A car in front of another, too.

They stretched hoses out from multiple homes and doused the structures with water – including the house of Daron’s girlfriend, Sachi.

“The water was just repelling off. It wasn’t even penetrating or nothing,” Hipolito said, referring to the bone-dry earth and brush around the homes.

Over time, they made progress, hosing off embers and spot fires. Larry thought they might be winning.

Then their hoses ran dry – all due to water pressure issues they’d later learn had hampered firefighting efforts across Los Angeles County amid intense demand.

An explosion sounded nearby, another home bursting into flames. By 01:00, both of their families were packing to leave.

“We tried. We really tried,” Hipolito said.

By 02:30 Wednesday morning, police cars rolled down their street with a loudspeaker, telling everyone to leave immediately.

As he turned the corner of his street, Larry watched in his truck’s rear-view mirror as his garage caught fire.

By 03:00, the street was empty.

Much of the Los Angeles region is made up of neighbourhoods and small communities just like Altadena.

On any given morning, people would walk through the lines of homes to get a cup of coffee at The Little Red Hen Coffee Shop, stopping to catch up while leaving for work in the morning.

Many have described decades of tight-knit community here, where they watched neighbours start families and the children who once played in the streets grow up.

But driving through the area for the first time since his world was upended, Daron barely recognises his neighbourhood.

The big blue house that marked one familiar turn is gone. All of the landmarks that once guided him have vanished. He points out each neighbour’s property, gasping as he realises that none are standing.

He takes photos of his and Rachel’s home and the street he shares with Dillon. Outside his girlfriend’s home – which Larry and Hipolito tried to save – he takes videos and chats with their families before calling Sachi to describe the state of her home.

“God, everything is gone,” he says, his voice cracking.

But a few items remain amidst the ruins.

At his sister’s home back on West Las Flores Drive, he finds multi-coloured plastic lawn ornaments stuck in her lawn, somehow untouched by fire.

He plucks each stake from the ground, knowing that while these flower decorations might feel insignificant amid the devastation, they also might make her smile.

Across the street at what was once his house, a red-brick chimney is all that is left standing. Around it is a pile of clay pottery.

With his hands dark black from the soot, he collects what he can, but many pieces disintegrate with his touch.

A scorched lemon tree sits in the lawn, some fruit still warm to the touch.

“If I can get a seed, we can replant one,” he says, grabbing a handful.

“It’s like a way you can start over.”

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.”

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 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.

A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a member of staff, believed to be a nurse, was seriously injured in a stabbing at a hospital.

The woman, aged in her 50s, was left with life-changing injuries in the attack at Royal Oldham Hospital’s A&E department at about 23:30 GMT on Saturday.

Greater Manchester Police said officers believe a member of the public attacked her with a sharp instrument which was not a knife. She remains in hospital for treatment.

A 37-year-old man was arrested and remains in police custody.

Det Sgt Craig Roters appealed for information, adding: “We know that news of this nature will come as a shock.

“The local community can expect to see an increase in police presence while we carry out enquiries, but they are also there to offer reassurance and answer any questions you may have.”

Heather Caudle, the chief nursing officer at Northern Care Alliance NHS Trust – which covers Oldham – said staff were “incredibly shocked and saddened by last night’s incident and our focus is on supporting the colleague involved and their family”.

She added: “Our thoughts are also with colleagues and patients who were there at the time of the incident and for whom this has been distressing and frightening.”

She said they were working with police and all services at the hospital would remain open.

In a social media post, Oldham West MP Jim McMahon, who is also a minister for local government, also expressed his shock at what he described as “a senseless attack”.

He said his thoughts were with the staff member, her family and friends and wished her a full recovery.

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 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.

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.

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

Posting on X, it said the site “remains stable, aside from a hot spots” but that it was “we are acutely aware of our Getty neighbours and hope for their safety”.

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.

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.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has said all of the fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades and LA’s Westside communities were “fully operational” prior to the devastating wildfires, CNN is reporting.

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.