Israel’s government has approved the new Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas, paving the way for it to take effect on Sunday.

The decision came after hours of discussions that continued late into the night. Two far-right ministers voted against the deal.

The security cabinet earlier recommended ratifying the agreement, saying it “supports the achievement of the objectives of the war”, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

It came hours after the prime minister’s office and Hamas both said they had finalised the details of the agreement, two days after it was announced by mediators Qatar, the US and Egypt.

Under the deal, 33 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza after 15 months of conflict will be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails during the first phase lasting six weeks.

Israeli forces will also withdraw from densely populated areas of Gaza, displaced Palestinians will be allowed to begin returning to their homes and hundreds of aid lorries will be allowed into the territory each day.

Negotiations for the second phase – which should see the remaining hostages released, a full Israeli troop withdrawal and “the restoration of sustainable calm” – will start on the 16th day.

The third and final stage will involve the reconstruction of Gaza – something which could take years – and the return of any remaining hostages’ bodies.

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Qatar has said the hostages to be released during the first phase will include “civilian women, female soldiers, children, the elderly, and sick and wounded civilians”.

Israel says three hostages are expected to be released on the first day of the ceasefire, with more small groups freed at regular intervals over the next six weeks.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and others – in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

More than 46,870 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. Most of the 2.3 million population has also been displaced, there is widespread destruction, and there are severe shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter due to a struggle to get aid to those in need.

Israel says 94 of the hostages are still being held by Hamas, of whom 34 are presumed dead. In addition, there are four Israelis who were abducted before the war, two of whom are dead.

Ahead of the Israeli government’s vote on the deal, Culture Minister Miki Zohar of Netanyahu’s Likud party said: “It’s a very hard decision, but we decided to support it because it’s very important to us to see all of our children, men and women back home.”

“We hope that in the future we will be able to finish the job in Gaza,” he added.

But far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said he was “horrified” by the details of the agreement, including that “life-sentenced terrorists” would be released in exchange for the hostages, and urged other ministers to join him in voting against it.

On Thursday, Ben-Gvir announced that his Jewish Power party would leave the governing coalition if the deal was approved. But he said he would not bring down the government in parliament and would return “if the war against Hamas resumes with full force”.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, another far-right politician who opposed the deal, has said his Religious Zionism party will quit if the war does not resume after the first phase ends.

The three-phase structure has also caused division and anxiety among some of the hostages’ families. They fear their relatives will be abandoned in Gaza after the first phase is done and are urging the government to ensure the second and third phases are also implemented.

“For 469 days our loved ones have been abandoned in captivity, and now, finally, there’s hope,” said Einav Zangauker, whose 25-year-old son Matan was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz.

“This agreement must be followed through to the end, to bring everyone home and end the war. Ending the war, returning everyone and returning to normalcy is in Israel’s interest.”

The government vote had been expected on Thursday, but the meeting was delayed after Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on parts of the deal – an allegation Hamas denied.

In the early hours of Friday, the prime minister’s office announced that the Israeli negotiating team in Doha had finalised the agreement.

Hamas also put out a statement which said the “obstacles” that emerged in relation to the terms of the deal had been resolved at dawn.

A source close to Hamas told AFP news agency that the first three hostages to be released would be women.

On Friday, the Israeli justice ministry published a list of 95 Palestinian prisoners which it said would be part of the first group to be freed in exchange for hostages. They comprised 69 women, 16 men and 10 minors, according to AFP.

Friday also saw a meeting held in Cairo to discuss mechanisms for implementing the deal, a senior Egyptian official told the BBC.

All necessary arrangements were agreed, including the formation of a joint operations room to ensure compliance, that would include Egyptian, Qatari, US, Palestinian and Israeli representatives, the official said.

Egyptian state-run Al-Qahera News TV also cited a source as saying that they had agreed on facilitating the entry of 600 aid lorries per day during the ceasefire.

That would require a more than 14-fold increase from January’s UN-reported daily average of 43 lorries. But Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization’s Gaza representative, said “the possibility is very much there” if the Rafah crossing with Egypt and other crossings opened.

The WHO also plans to deliver a number of prefabricated hospitals to support the devastated healthcare sector. Half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are not functional, while the others are only partially functional.

There has been no respite for Palestinians on the ground in Gaza since the ceasefire deal was announced on Wednesday night.

Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said a total of 117 Palestinians, including 32 women and 30 children, had been killed in Israeli strikes since then.

Tamer Abu Shaaban said his young niece was killed by missile shrapnel as she played in the yard of a school in Gaza City where her displaced family was sheltering.

“Is this the truce they are talking about?” he told Reuters news agency as he stood beside her body at a mortuary. “What did this young girl, this child, do to deserve this?”

The Israeli military said on Thursday afternoon that it had conducted strikes on 50 “terror targets” across Gaza over the previous day and taken steps to mitigate harm to civilians.

The Israeli and Hamas negotiators never came face to face – but by the end, just one floor separated them.

Ceasefire talks via middlemen from Qatar, Egypt and the US had been dragging on for several months, at times without hope. Now the key players were all inside one building in Doha and the pace was frantic.

A deal was close but things had gone wrong before: one source described a last-minute push to stop the agreement breaking down while a podium was being set up so the Qatari prime minister could announce it.

“Literally, negotiations were up until 10 minutes before the press conference. So that’s how things were stitched up at the last minute,” the source familiar with the talks said.

The BBC has spoken to a number of officials on all sides of the negotiations to piece together how the final fraught days of the secretive process unfolded.

The deal did not come out of the blue.

The overall framework of the agreement reached on 15 January was broadly the same as the proposal set out by President Joe Biden during a White House address last May. It uses the same three-phase approach and will see a ceasefire, Israeli hostages released in return for Palestinian prisoners, and the Israeli military’s gradual withdrawal from Gaza.

But sources familiar with the discussions agreed the dynamics of the talks shifted decisively in mid-December and the pace changed.

Hamas, already reeling from Israel’s killing of its leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza two months earlier, had become increasingly isolated. Its Lebanon-based ally Hezbollah had been decimated and had agreed to a truce with Israel. Bashar al-Assad’s Iran-backed government in Syria had also been swept away.

The view in Washington is that Hamas was forced to abandon the idea that “the cavalry was coming to save it”, as one US official put it.

“It is hard to overstate how fundamentally the equation changed and what that [did] for Hamas’s calculus,” says a senior Biden administration official familiar with the talks.

An Israeli official who wished to remain anonymous said Hamas was “not in a rush” to strike a deal and had been “dictating” rather than negotiating. They said that changed after the death of Sinwar and Israeli operations against Hamas’s allies in the region.

On top of that, the official said, there was “momentum created by both US administrations” – the Biden White House and the incoming Trump team.

“We could not achieve a deal like this until conditions had changed,” the official added.

On 12 December, Biden’s negotiating team visited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Middle East envoy Brett McGurk and CIA director Bill Burns were all in attendance.

A US official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the meeting lasted “multiple hours” and focused on the “new regional equation” and “how we catapult from the Lebanon ceasefire into another round of intensive discussions” on Gaza.

There was also another piece on the chessboard by this stage: Donald Trump.

On 16 December, weeks after Trump’s victory, the BBC spoke to a Hamas official who was unusually optimistic about the ceasefire efforts, suggesting they seemed to be more serious.

The official – who had taken part in every set of talks since November 2023 – appeared reassured by the fact that an adviser to the incoming US president had sent a message to mediators indicating Trump wanted an agreement before his inauguration.

Trump had also warned of “all hell to pay” if Hamas did not agree to release the hostages – but the Palestinian official was bullish.

“This time, the pressure will not be limited to Hamas, as was customary under the Biden administration,” the official said. “There will also be pressure on Netanyahu. He is the one obstructing the deal, and Trump seems to understand that very well.”

However, that same official’s prediction that a deal could be done by Christmas proved to be optimistic.

During December, the process remained beset by problems. Israel publicly ruled out releasing certain high-profile prisoners, while the White House accused Hamas of throwing up roadblocks over the hostage releases.

A Biden administration official said: “Hamas [was] refusing to agree – and this was a breakdown at that point – to the list of hostages that would be released in phase one of the deal.

“That’s just so fundamental. This is a hostage release deal. Unless you agree to the list of hostages who will come out, there’s not going to be a deal.”

The same official said Hamas made “completely untrue” claims about not knowing the location of the hostages, and added: “We held the line and basically left the table until Hamas agreed to the hostage list.”

An anonymous Israeli official said Hamas had sought to conceal the number of living hostages and “tried to dictate that they would send us only dead bodies”.

For its part, Hamas claimed Israel unexpectedly added 11 names to the list of hostages it wanted to be released in the first phase. Hamas considered them reserve soldiers, and therefore not eligible to be released alongside the women, injured and elderly hostages due to be released in phase one.

The door was left open to Qatari and Egyptian mediators to continue their efforts and on 3 January, there was an apparent breakthrough when Hamas proposed the release of 110 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in return.

There were by now well-established terms of reference for such trades. For each hostage Hamas was to release, Israel would have to provide what had become known in the nomenclature of the draft deal as a “key” – meaning an agreed number or even specific identities of Palestinian prisoners.

A US official said: “There’s an equation for how many Palestinian prisoners come out. So for female soldiers, for example, there’s a key. And for elderly males, there’s a key. And for women civilians, there’s a key. And this has all been worked out and the prisoners have been named, hundreds and hundreds of prisoners on the list.”

The exchange file in the negotiations – Palestinian prisoners for hostages held by Hamas – became known as “the keys”.

During this phase of the talks, Hamas also relented on two long-standing demands: the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza in the first phase and a formal Israeli commitment to a total ceasefire.

Sensing a breakthrough, the Egyptian mediator urgently dispatched Major General Ahmed Abdel Khaleq – who oversees the Palestinian portfolio in Egyptian intelligence – to Doha. After meeting with Hamas representatives, he secured confirmation the group would make what a senior Hamas official described as “painful concessions.”

But on 6 January, according to a Palestinian official, Israel rejected the offer put forward by Hamas on the 11 hostages. Hamas responded by sending the BBC and other media outlets a list featuring the names and ages of 34 Israeli hostages. Two days later, the body of one of those on that list – Yosef AlZayadni – was found inside Gaza.

The list included reserve soldiers, which indicated Hamas was willing to release them in the first phase.

This appeared to be an attempt to embarrass Netanyahu and rally hostage families in Israel and around the world to pressure him into accepting the deal.

It was also an indication Hamas had not walked away.

Meetings stretching into the small hours of Doha’s hot evenings became common during the final stretch of the negotiations.

In the last month, they had developed into so-called “proximity talks”, with both sides in the same two-storey building, according to multiple accounts from officials familiar with the details.

A senior US official said Hamas’s delegation was on the first floor and Israel’s on the floor above. Mediators ran pieces of paper between them. Maps of Israeli troop withdrawal proposals and details about hostages or prisoners drafted for release were shuttled back and forth.

“That takes an enormous amount of work and, I have to say, all of that was not fully nailed down, really, until just the [final] hours,” said the official.

Inside the building, the delegations met separately with senior figures from Qatar and Egypt. Among those closely involved in the details was Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.

Two crucial areas were worked on in the final phases of the talks: the lists for release of hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and the positions for Israeli troop withdrawals from populated areas in Gaza during phase one.

By 9 January, the pressure had escalated. Trump’s envoy, Biden’s envoy, and the Egyptian intelligence chief convened in Doha for a serious eight-hour negotiation session.

A senior Egyptian official told the BBC: “We are at the closest point to reaching an agreement.”

Agreement had been reached on 90% of the outstanding issues, but further talks were required.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s recently appointed Middle East envoy, was dispatched to Tel Aviv to meet Netanyahu. Though not yet officially in post, the New York property tycoon had become more and more involved in the talks, which Trump was taking a keen interest in.

He was about to be sent on an assignment that proved to be pivotal.

When Trump’s man in the Middle East arrived in Israel on 11 January, it was the sabbath.

Witkoff was asked to wait until the sabbath had ended before he met Netanyahu but, in a breach of custom, the envoy refused and demanded to meet the prime minister immediately.

Netanyahu appears to have come under serious strong-arming during the meeting and the intervention from the Trump camp to get the Israeli government to set aside its final reservations seems to have been critical.

The meeting was reportedly fractious and the message to Netanyahu from the incoming president was clear: Trump wants a deal – now get it done.

Commenting on those talks, an Israeli official who asked to remain anonymous said it was a “very important meeting”.

When Witkoff returned to Doha, he remained in the room with the talks, spending time with Biden’s envoy Mr McGurk, in what two US officials called a “near unprecedented” transition effort in American diplomacy.

This week, Hamas official Bassem Naim told Al Arabiya he “couldn’t imagine that [the deal] could be possible without the pressure of the incoming administration led by President Trump” – and specifically cited Witkoff’s presence at the talks.

By now, the fact a deal could be imminent was out in the open and public expectation was building – not least among the families of those being held hostage and Palestinians displaced inside Gaza.

The final 72 hours of talks involved a constant back and forth over the finer points of how the deal would be implemented, according to one account.

One source close to the negotiations described the hammering out of “arrangements and logistics” for how the hostages would be released in Gaza and for the withdrawal movements of Israeli troops.

On 12 January, a senior Palestinian official familiar with the negotiations said “all the officials are here in the same building”, adding: “Tonight is decisive. We are only a few steps away from an agreement.”

That meeting lasted six hours – but, like so many times before, an impasse was reached.

This time the disagreement that arose was over the mechanism for the return of displaced individuals from southern Gaza to the north.

Israel wanted to search returnees and their vehicles to ensure no militants or military equipment were being transported – which Hamas refused to accept.

Mediators proposed that Qatari and Egyptian technical teams conduct the searches instead. Both sides agreed and one of the final remaining stalemates was resolved.

On 15 January shortly after 18:00, a Hamas negotiator wrote in a message to the BBC: “Everything is finished.”

The podium was being readied.

A deal which once looked impossible had taken shape.

Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan has been sentenced to 14 years in prison over a corruption case, in the latest of a series of charges laid against him.

It is the longest valid jail sentence the cricket star-turned-politician, who has been detained since August 2023, has received.

He has faced charges in over 100 cases, ranging from leaking state secrets to selling state gifts – all of which he has decried as politically motivated.

The latest case has been described by Pakistani authorities as the largest the country has seen, though the country has seen huge financial scandals in the past, some of which involved former leaders.

Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi were accused of receiving a parcel of land as a bribe from a real estate tycoon through the Al-Qadir Trust, which the couple had set up while he was in office.

In exchange, investigators said, Khan used £190m ($232m) repatriated by the UK’s National Crime Agency to pay the tycoon’s court fines.

Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party argued that the land was donated to the trust for a spiritual education centre and was not used for Khan’s personal gain.

In a post on X, PTI chairman Gohar Ali Khan said that the former prime minister “has done no wrong” and that this was a “politically motivated unfair trial”.

“But [Imran Khan] will not give in, he will not give up, he will not break,” he wrote.

Friday’s verdict comes after multiple delays as Khan’s party held talks with the government.

After his conviction on Friday, Khan told reporters in the courtroom that he would “neither make any deal nor seek any relief.”

Khan’s prison sentence of 14 years is the maximum that could be given in the case. He has also been fined more than £4,000.

His wife has been sentenced to seven years and fined more than £2,000. Bibi, who has been out on bail since last October, was taken into custody in court after her sentence was announced.

In 2023, Khan was sentenced to three years in prison for not declaring money earned from selling gifts he had received while in office.

Last year, Khan received a 14-year jail sentence over the selling of state gifts, and another 10 years for leaking state secrets. Both those sentences were suspended months later.

Despite being in jail and barred from holding public office, Khan still looms large over Pakistan’s political scene. Last year’s election saw candidates backed by Imran Khan winning the most number of seats out of all the parties.

Khan’s prosecution has triggered large-scale protests by his supporters – which have been met with a crackdown from authorities. Thousands of protesters have been arrested and many injured in clashes with the police.

TikTok has said it will be forced to “go dark” in the US on Sunday unless the government steps in before a ban takes effect.

In a statement, it said “both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability”.

It said unless the government immediately stepped in to assure the video app it would not be punished for violating the looming ban, it would be “forced to go dark on January 19”.

TikTok’s statement follows a Supreme Court ruling earlier on Friday which upheld a law banning the app in the US unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform by Sunday.

TikTok challenged the law, arguing it violates free speech protections for its 170 million users in the country.

But the Supreme Court’s ruling means the US version of the app will be removed from app stores and web hosting services, unless a buyer is found in the coming days.

It had been thought the ban would not impact TikTok users who already have the app downloaded on their phones.

But TikTok’s fresh statement late on Friday suggests it may immediately become unavailable to all existing users as well as those seeking to download it.

President Joe Biden’s term is due to end on Monday, with Donald Trump due to be sworn in as the next president on that day. The White House earlier said it would therefore fall on the incoming president to enforce the law.

Trump has indicated he is against the ban, after initially supporting the move. “My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation,” he said on Friday.

ByteDance has vowed not to sell TikTok and said it planned to shut US operations of the app on Sunday unless there is a reprieve.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers voted to ban the video-sharing app last year, over concerns about its links to the Chinese government. TikTok has repeatedly stated it does not share information with Beijing.

China is sending Vice-President Han Zheng to US President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday – the first time a senior Chinese leader will witness a US president being sworn in.

Trump had invited Chinese President Xi Jinping, among other leaders – a break with tradition given foreign leaders traditionally do not attend US presidential inaugurations.

China has said it wants to work with the new US government to “find the right way for the two countries to get along with each other in the new era”.

But Beijing is also preparing for a Trump presidency that is expected to include new tariffs on Chinese-made imports and more combative rhetoric – Marco Rubio, the nominee for Secretary of State, has described China as “the largest, most advanced adversary America has ever faced”.

As president, Xi has never attended an inauguration or coronation ceremony, choosing instead to send a representative on his behalf. The Chinese ambassador to the US attended the last two presidential inaugurations, in 2017 and 2021.

Beijing has sent vice-presidents to such ceremonies elsewhere, though – Han attended Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s inauguration in October 2023. And his predecessor, Wang Qishan, was present for the inauguration of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr in 2022 and Brazil’s President Lula da Silva in 2023.

Xi’s decision to send Han to the US is a sign that he “wants to get Trump into deal-making mode, but [he] does not want to be a supporting actor in the Trump show on January 20,” says Neil Thomas, a fellow in Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

Other foreign leaders that have been invited to the inauguration include Argentinian President Javier Milei and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told US media that the invitation to Xi was an “example of Trump creating an open dialogue with leaders of countries that are not just our allies but our adversaries and our competitors”.

It also could be an attempt by Trump to show the world “he has the ability to influence Xi’s decision-making and they have a special relationship”, says Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

Earlier reports suggested that some Trump advisers wanted Cai Qi to attend. Widely seen as Xi’s right-hand man, 66-year-old Cai sits on the Communist Party’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, China’s equivalent of a cabinet.

The Financial Times quoted an unnamed insider saying that Trump would be “unhappy” if the Chinese envoy in attendance was “only at the level of Han or [Foreign Minister] Wang Yi”. The BBC has been unable to verify these claims.

But as vice-president, 70-year-old Han occupies a “very senior role in the Chinese state system” and the decision to send him “accords courtesy to Trump”, says Chong Ja-Ian, a non-resident scholar at Carnegie China.

Han, who was appointed vice-president in March 2023, is known as “number eight” – the most senior leader after the seven men in the Politburo Standing Committee.

Han too had been a member until October 2022, when Xi began a historic third term in power and appointed his most trusted deputies to the top jobs.

Prior to that Han spent most of his political career in Shanghai, where he was born. In 2007, he served as Xi’s aide when the latter was the party secretary in Shanghai, before later assuming the post himself in 2012.

Foreign affairs has been a key focus for him in his stint as vice-president. He led a group to promote the Belt and Road initiative – a key Chinese trade and infrastructure project – and headed a steering committee on the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

But the fact that Han no longer sits on the Politburo Standing Committee may have been a key consideration in Beijing’s decision to send him.

“Should US-China relations take a turn for the worse from the party’s perspective, Xi and the party will be able to show that they maintained some distance from Trump,” Prof Chong said.

And it also helps that Han is not considered a part of Xi’s inner circle, according to Mr Thomas.

“Xi trusts Han enough to undertake this mission but Han is not a key ally and could be safely blamed if it goes embarrassingly wrong.”

A looming TikTok ban has connected Chinese and American citizens like never before, as they swap jokes and memes in what one user described as a “historic moment”.

It’s all unfolding on a popular Chinese social media app called RedNote, or Xiaohongshu (literally translates as Little Red Book), which doesn’t have the usual internet firewall that separates China from the rest of the world.

It has been drawing self-professed US “TikTok refugees” seeking a new home on the internet – despite the fact that their own government is seeking a TikTok ban because of national security concerns.

Americans now find themselves in direct contact with 300 million Mandarin speakers in China and elsewhere – while in the real world, Beijing is bracing for a tumultuous Trump presidency that could strain its fragile ties with Washington.

At the heart of the US ban is the fear that China is using TikTok to spy on Americans.

The app has faced accusations that user data is ending up in the hands of the Chinese government – because of a Beijing law that requires local companies to “support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work”. TikTok denies this has ever happened, or that it would happen.

But the possibility doesn’t seem to worry some US users – 700,000 new users have signed on to RedNote in the last two days, making it the most downloaded free app in the US App store.

“The reason that our government is telling us that they are banning TikTok is because they’re insisting that it’s owned by you guys, the Chinese people, government, whatever,” said one new RedNote user, Definitelynotchippy.

She goes on to explain why she is on RedNote: “A lot of us are smarter than that though so we decided to piss off our government and download an actual Chinese app. We call that trolling, so in short we’re here to spite our government and to learn about China and hang out with you guys.”

TikTok, although owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is headquartered in Singapore and says it is run independently. In fact, China’s version of TikTok is another app called Douyin. RedNote, on the other hand, is a Chinese company based in Shanghai and among the few social media apps available both in China and outside.

So Washington’s fears over TikTok would extend to RedNote as well.

That’s why American users on RedNote are referring to themselves as “Chinese spies” – continuing a TikTok trend where people have been bidding farewell to their “personal Chinese spy” who has allegedly been surveilling them over the years.

RedNote is now full of posts where ex-TikTok users are in search of a replacement. One post says: “I’m looking for my Chinese spy. I miss you. Please help me find him.”

And Chinese users have answered: “I’m here!”

The honest, funny conversations on RedNote may not be what Chinese President Xi Jinping had in mind when he spoke about “strengthening people-to-people cultural exchanges” between China and the US.

But that is certainly what is happening as excited Chinese users welcome curious Americans to the app.

“You don’t even need to travel abroad, you can just talk to foreigners here,” said one Chinese RedNote user in a video that has received more than 6,000 likes.

“But it’s honestly insane, no-one would have expected that we could meet like this one day, openly communicate like this.”

Food, streaming shows and jobs have been the most popular topics: “Is life in America similar to how it looks on [the US TV show] Friends?”

Other Chinese users demanded a “tax” for using the platform – cat photos.

“Cat tax from California,” reads one post in response. “Here’s my offering – the shorthair is a boy named Bob and the calico is a girl named Marley.”

Still others are using the platform to ask Americans for help with their English homework.

One post reads: “Dear TikTok refugees, could you please tell me the answer to question 53? Is the answer T (true) or F (false)?”

Help came quickly: some 500 people have since answered.

The flood of new American users appears to have caught RedNote off guard – reports say the company is hiring English moderators.

And others are trying to cash in on RedNote’s new-found US stardom as well: language-learning app Duolingo put out a graph showing a 216% jump in its user base, compared to this time last year.

RedNote’s rising popularity is not guaranteed to last though.

There is no reason to assume it won’t face blowback for the same reasons as TikTok: concerns that it could be used by China to spy on Americans.

It’s unclear how long Beijing would be open to such unfettered exchanges – control of the internet is key to its repressive regime.

The irony of the situation was flagged by one Chinese user, who posted: “Don’t we have a (fire)wall? How come so many foreigners can enter, when clearly I can’t leave?”

Typically, Chinese internet users have been unable to directly interact with foreigners. Global platforms like Twitter and Instagram and search engines like Google are blocked in China, though people use VPNs to circumvent these restrictions. Sensitive topics – from history to dissent – or anything seen as critical of China’s government and ruling Communist party is swiftly censored.

It’s unclear how much RedNote is censored – it’s largely used by younger and middle-aged women in China, where they share images and videos. It’s not like Weibo, another Chinese app, where discussions and airing of grievances is far more common, leading to posts often being taken down.

But a handful of new RedNote users say they have already received reports that their posts have violated guidelines, including one who asked in a post if the app was “LGBT friendly”.

Another said they had asked “What [sic] Chinese think about gay people?” and received a similar notification, that they had violated “public moral order” guidelines.

And Chinese users keep reminding Americans on the app “not to mention sensitive topics, such as politics, religion and drugs”.

One Chinese user also advised them to stick to the “One China policy”, the diplomatic pillar of the US-China relationship – according to which the US recognises and has formal ties with China rather than Taiwan, the self-governed island Beijing claims as its own.

The US government has not commented on RedNote so far, and neither has Beijing.

But Chinese state media seems upbeat about it, with Global Times even interviewing a US user who said she would “love to interact with Chinese users”.

RedNote’s American fate is anyone’s guess – but for now, at least online, the US-China rivalry is taking a break. Thanks to cat pictures.

It’s 1000 CE – the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is in flux. The powerful nations we know today – like Norman-ruled England and the fragmented territories that will become France – do not yet exist. Towering Gothic cathedrals have yet to rise. Aside from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, few great urban centres dominate the landscape.

Yet that year, on the other side of the globe, an emperor from southern India was preparing to build the world’s most colossal temple.

Completed just 10 years later, it was 216ft (66m) tall, assembled from 130,000 tonnes of granite: second only to Egypt’s pyramids in height. At its heart was a 12ft tall emblem of the Hindu god Shiva, sheathed in gold encrusted with rubies and pearls.

In its lamplit hall were 60 bronze sculptures, adorned with thousands of pearls gathered from the conquered island of Lanka. In its treasuries, several tonnes of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewels, trumpets and drums torn from defeated kings across India’s southern peninsula, making the emperor the richest man of the era.

He was called Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and he belonged to one of the most astonishing dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas.

His family transformed how the medieval world worked – yet they are largely unknown outside India.

Prior to the 11th Century, the Cholas had been one among the many squabbling powers that dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the great body of silt that flows through India’s present-day state of Tamil Nadu. But what set the Cholas apart was their endless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, Chola queens were also remarkably prominent, serving as the dynasty’s public face.

Travelling to Tamil villages and rebuilding small, old mud-brick shrines in gleaming stone, the Chola dowager Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja’s great-aunt – effectively “rebranded” the family as the foremost devotees of Shiva, winning them a popular following.

Sembiyan prayed to Nataraja, a hitherto little-known form of Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, and all her temples featured him prominently. The trend caught on. Today Nataraja is one of the most recognisable symbols of Hinduism. But to the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja was really a symbol of the Cholas.

The emperor Rajaraja Chola shared his great-aunt’s taste for public relations and devotion – with one significant difference.

Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his armies over the Western Ghats, the range of hills that shelter India’s west coast, and burned the ships of his enemies while they were at port. Next, exploiting the internal turmoil of the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to set up a lasting presence on the island. At last, he broke into the rugged Deccan Plateau – the Germany to the Tamil coast’s Italy – and seized a portion of it for himself.

The loot of conquest was lavished on his great imperial temple, known today as the Brihadishvara.

In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tonnes of rice annually, from conquered territory across southern India (you’d need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to carry that much rice today).

This allowed the Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja’s vast fortunes into new irrigation systems, into expanding cultivation, into vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few states in the world could have conceived of economic control at such scale and depth.

The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, built alliances with Tamil merchant corporations: a partnership between traders and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company – a powerful British trading corporation that later ruled large parts of India – that was to come more than 700 years later.

In 1026, Rajendra put his troops on merchants’ ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the global trade in precious woods and spices.

While some Indian nationalists have proclaimed this to be a Chola “conquest” or “colonisation” in Southeast Asia, archaeology suggests a stranger picture: the Cholas didn’t seem to have a navy of their own, but under them, a wave of Tamil diaspora merchants spread across the Bay of Bengal.

By the late 11th Century, these merchants ran independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they were deep in present-day Myanmar and Thailand, and worked as tax collectors in Java.

In the 13th Century, in Mongol-ruled China under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants ran successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou, and even erected a temple to Shiva on the coast of the East China Sea. It was no coincidence that, under the British Raj in the 19th Century, Tamils made up the largest chunk of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia.

Conquests and global connections made Chola-ruled south India a cultural and economic behemoth, the nexus of planetary trade networks.

Chola aristocrats invested war-loot into a wave of new temples, which sourced fine goods from a truly global economy linking the farthest shores of Europe and Asia. Copper and tin for their bronzes came from Egypt, perhaps even Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the gods were sourced from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples grew into vast complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and endowed with rice-estates. In the Chola capital region on the Kaveri, corresponding to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple-towns supported populations of tens of thousands, possibly outclassing most cities in Europe at the time.

These Chola cities were astonishingly multicultural and multireligious: Chinese Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews, Bengali tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today the state of Tamil Nadu is one of India’s most urbanised. Many of the state’s towns grew around Chola-period shrines and markets.

These developments in urbanism and architecture were paralleled in art and literature.

Medieval Tamil metalwork, produced for Chola-period temples, is perhaps the finest ever made by human hand, the artists rivalling Michelangelo or Donatello for their appreciation of the human figure. To praise Chola kings and adore the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of sainthood, history and even magical realism. The Chola period was what you’d get if the Renaissance had happened in south India 300 years before its time.

It is not a coincidence that Chola bronzes – especially Nataraja bronzes – can be found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered across the world, they are the remnants of a period of brilliant political innovations, of maritime expeditions that connected the globe; of titanic shrines and fabulous wealth; of merchants, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live in today.

Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian writer and author, most recently of

Police in the Indian city of Mumbai have detained a man in connection with the knife attack on Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan, according to media reports

Khan was stabbed during a scuffle at his residence with an unidentified man on Thursday morning. The actor is recovering after surgery.

Police have seized CCTV footage from the actor’s residence in the upscale neighbourhood of Bandra and initial reports suggest the attack may have been intended as a theft.

It is not clear whether the detained man was the intruder.

The BBC has accessed a statement given by a nurse who works in Khan’s home to the police, which provides some details about the events that unfolded on the night of the incident.

Eliyama Philip, who takes care of Khan’s son, said she first noticed the shadow of a man near the bathroom door late at night while she was in the child’s room with the nanny.

Ms Philip said a man appeared holding a wooden object in one hand and a long blade in another and warned the two against making any noise. He demanded 10m rupees ($115,477; £94,511), she said.

A scuffle soon broke out, during which Ms Philip was injured. Meanwhile, the nanny fled the room.

According to the nurse’s statement, Khan and his wife, actress Kareena Kapoor, rushed to the room after hearing the commotion. She said the attacker struck Khan with a blade when he confronted him, then fled the house.

Khan suffered several injuries – including one on the back of his neck – in the attack.

Dr Nitin Dange of Lilavati Hospital, where Khan is being treated, said that when the actor arrived, he was bleeding from his spine with a knife fragment embedded. The fragment was surgically removed, and fluid leakage was controlled. Doctors said that timely treatment prevented severe spinal damage.

Dr Dange said on Friday that Khan is “better now”.

“We made him walk, and he walked well. Looking at his parameters, his wounds and all the other injuries, he is safe to be shifted out of the ICU. He has to take several precautions. He has to take rest and his movement has been restricted for a week,” he said.

Deputy Commissioner of Mumbai police Dixit Gadam said that the weapon used for the attack has not been found and that they have registered a complaint based on the nurse’s statement.

“The accused used the fire escape ladder to enter,” he said. “The investigation is going on to determine how the house’s door was opened or how the intruder gained access.”

Khan, 54, is also a producer, who has appeared in several films and TV shows over the years. He is known for his quick wit and comic timing.

His portrayal of the antagonist in the 2006 critically acclaimed Omkara was widely praised. He has won multiple awards, including the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honour, in 2010.

Khan is the son of former Indian cricket captain Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi and actor Sharmila Tagore.

For online sensation Erika Thompson, TikTok is the most powerful social media platform to educate her 11 million followers about her life’s passion: bees.

The loss of the platform in the US – made more likely after the Supreme Court upheld a ban that is set to be enacted next week – will be “substantive” financially for Ms Thompson, a Texas beekeeper, but it is also a loss of an educational tool.

“There are a lot of other people on the platform offering educational content or informative content,” she told the BBC. “That’s the biggest loss and that’s what should be focused on, beyond the financial aspect, is the loss that we as a society – the people who use TikTok – will certainly feel.”

Some 170 million Americans use the app and website. Unless its China-based parent company ByteDance sells the platform or intervention comes from the executive branch, the platform is set to go dark in the US on Sunday.

The fate of the social media giant was left in the hands of the US Supreme Court after both Democratic and Republican lawmakers voted to ban the video-sharing app last year, over concerns about its links to the Chinese government and worries about the app being a national security risk.

TikTok has repeatedly stated it does not share information with Beijing.

But users and content creators say the social media platform has grown to become a fixture in society – and has helped regular users capture the limelight with millions of followers. It’s quickly become a preferred social media outlet to some and a key revenue stream for others.

Now they worry what will happen if the ban is not stopped.

Creators who make a living off social media apps told the BBC that TikTok is the superior platform.

That was true for Ms Thomspon whose first TikTok video received more than 50 million views in the first 24 hours after it was posted.

“I have not experienced the same success on other platforms,” she said. “I can post the exact same video on Instagram, for example, and receive not even close to the engagement.”

Ross Smith who shares funny videos with his 98-year-old grandmother to more than 24 million followers on TikTok described it as one of the few platforms where it is easy to become a creator.

On TikTok, he said, “you can find success overnight”.

Other platforms trying to replicate the short-form scroll format featured on TikTok have yet to find success, Mr Smith told the BBC. Ms Thompson agreed.

“I rarely hear of people going viral on Instagram or someone being an Instagram sensation but those are words you hear frequently on TikTok,” Ms Thompson said.

Codey James, a fashion influencer with tens of thousands of follower on TikTok, told the BBC that audiences do not necessarily transfer from one platform to another.

“I know someone who has hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers and maybe only ten thousand Instagram followers,” Mr James told the BBC.

Many content creators survive off the income they earn on TikTok.

Some told the BBC that their lives would change inordinately without the platform.

When brands and companies want advertisement content from a creator, they want those creators to post on TikTok, Nicole Bloomgarden, a fashion designer and artist, told the BBC.

“Indirectly, TikTok was the majority of my income because all brands want their stuff to be promoted on the app,” Ms Bloomgarden said.

It is not clear statistically if creators’ most lucrative source of income is TikTok, but many told the BBC that it makes up a substantial portion of their revenue.

A 2022 survey from the creator-focused start-up Linktree, found some 12% of full-time creators made more than $50,000 a year from their social media platforms.

Some 46% said they made less than $1,000, the survey of 9,500 people found.

This is not the first time a major social media platform has disappeared.

In 2017, Vine – a platform where users could share up to six-second-long video clips – shut down.

For creators at the time, it was a shock.

Q Park, a content creator with 37.7 million followers on TikTok, was one of those people.

He spent years building a following on Vine – the only platform he used at the time – and when it disappeared, he said it “felt like my whole business was shutting down”.

But in some ways, it was good for him, too. It forced him to learn how to create different content for different audiences.

“That experience showed me that if you have faith in your ability to create content, you’ll build a following somewhere else,” Mr Park told the BBC.

As the ban approaches, some creators have started flocking to another Chinese platform, RedNote – a TikTok competitor popular with young people in China, Taiwan and other Mandarin-speaking populations.

RedNote was the most downloaded app on Apple’s US App Store earlier this week.

While some creators are diversifying where they post in hopes of growing audiences elsewhere, others are hoping the ban won’t come to fruition.

“TikTok is a beast,” Park said. “Part of me thinks it might be too big to fail.”

“It will be revived somehow, it’s too big of an economy now.”

Civilians in Gaza are waiting anxiously for a pause in 15 relentless months of war, after Israel’s cabinet approved a temporary ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas.

Israel has pounded the strip with air strikes, killing at least 113 people since the deal was first agreed in principle on Wednesday night, according to the Hamas-run civil defence agency in Gaza.

The deal, finalised on Friday afternoon, is due to come into effect on Sunday, leaving a little over 24 hours more for the people of Gaza to hang on for respite.

“Time is moving slower than ever,” said Dr Abdallah Shabir, 27, an emergency doctor at the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. “Any moment you can lose your life,” he said. “Sitting at home, walking in the street – there is no warning.”

Dr Shabir was on shift at the hospital on Wednesday night when the news of the ceasefire agreement came through. There was a brief moment of joy, he said, but less than an hour separated the announcement from the beginning of a wave of air strikes that sent a flood of dead and wounded to the Baptist.

Every member of staff was summoned. “It was as bad as we have ever seen,” Dr Shabir said, in a phone call from the hospital. “Severe injuries, severe burns. Many dead, of course.”

Among the dead brought in on Thursday was a colleague, Hala Abu Ahmed, a 27-year-old specialist in internal medicine who two colleagues at the Baptist described as a devoted and promising young doctor and a kind person.

She had worked tirelessly and under extreme pressure for 15 months, since the war began, said Dr Ahmad Eliwah, the chief of the emergency department, and been killed after the ceasefire was agreed.

Among the millions of displaced in the strip, many were waiting on Friday for the moment they could return home for the first time since the war began. Many will find a bombed out wasteland in place of their home.

“My house is completely destroyed, the building is gone,” said Sabreen Doshan, 45, who owned a street kiosk and lived in a residential block in Gaza City.

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Doshan had lost 17 members of her wider family since the war began, she said. She was poised to set out from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where she has been living in a tent, for the ruins of her home.

“Even if I have to put my tent on rubble it will be OK, because I will be home,” she said. “Nowhere can satisfy me now apart from home.”

The destruction of the Gaza Strip is immense. According to a recent analysis by the United Nations Satellite Centre, 69% of all structures and 68% of roads have been destroyed or damaged, as of December. About 46,700 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel set out to destroy Hamas in Gaza in October 2023, after the group attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.

For Gazans, the joy of the long-awaited ceasefire has been tempered by the scale of the death and destruction. “By God, it is a mixed feeling,” said Wael Muhammad, a freelance journalist living in a refugee camp in central Gaza.

“From one moment to another, from joy to pain,” he said. “I am happy that the torrent of blood will stop, but we are living in misery.”

On Friday afternoon, the ceasefire deal was making its way through the Israeli political system for final approval. It paves the way for an initial group of three hostages to come out as early as Sunday, in exchange for some 95 Palestinian prisoners.

But the exchange, which will play out over the next six weeks, is fraught with the possibility of collapse.

“The biggest challenge is whether the ceasefire is going to be successfully implemented,” said Juliette Touma, communications director for the UN refugee agency UNRWA.

“If it is, the challenge ahead remains absolutely huge. The vast majority of shelters are overcrowded. Many are simply living out in the open, or in makeshift structures. They lack basic needs like warm clothes. I would not call these living conditions, they are not conditions fit for human beings.”

In Gaza on Friday, some were focused on Sunday, and whether they would make it to that respite without the deal falling apart.

“We are afraid of any change, any movement,” said Khalil Nateel, 30, whose house in Jabalia in the very north of the Gaza Strip was destroyed early on in the war.

“The news is on,” Nateel said, from a shelter in central Gaza. “We are watching and waiting.”

Anastasiia Fedchenko, 36, wails in anguish – her agony echoing around the gilded walls of St Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv.

She sits with her hands resting on both sides of her stomach. She is heavily pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her husband Andriy Kusmenko is just inches away, in uniform – in an open coffin.

The marine commander was killed in action in eastern Ukraine on 4 January this year. He is now and forever 33. While Andriy fought in the war, Anastasiia wrote about it, as a journalist.

His brothers in arms file past, dropping red roses into his coffin. As funeral prayers come to an end, Anastasiia leans forward and gives “the love of her life” one last kiss.

Outside the cathedral she pays tribute to her “most handsome husband” who died for his country.

“I am sorry my daughter will never see her father,” she tells the BBC, “but she will know that he was a soldier, an officer, and that he did everything he could for Ukraine to exist for her and for other generations.”

“This war will last as long as Russia does. I truly fear our children will inherit it from us and will have to go and fight.”

Not according to Donald Trump, who famously claimed he could end the war in a day, and who returns to the White House next week. He is already pushing for peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

That would dishonour the dead, according to Sgt Dmytro, call sign “Smile”, who fought alongside Andriy and came to the cathedral to mourn him.

“Let the people in power decide, but I don’t think the ones who fell would want them [Ukraine’s leadership] to sit around the table,” he says.

“After the funeral, we are heading back to work. We will fight for every Ukrainian who fell.”

Plenty here believe – like Anastasiia and Dmytro – that far too many Ukrainians have been killed to try to do a deal with Russia. But public opinion is shifting, and others believe there is too much death and destruction not to do a deal.

As Ukraine battles through its third winter of war, one word is now little spoken here – “victory”.

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, we heard it everywhere. It was a rallying cry for a nation suddenly confronted by columns of enemy tanks. But the past is truly a foreign country – and one with more territory.

Moscow now controls almost one-fifth of its neighbour (including the Crimean Peninsula, captured in 2014) and says any peace talks must take that into account.

The Ukraine of 2025 is a place of cold, hard realities – where cities empty, graveyards fill, and plenty of soldiers desert their posts.

Six hours drive from the capital, in the heart of Ukraine, a young soldier is in the dock.

Serhiy Hnezdilov, a burly 24-year-old, is locked in a glass cubicle in a packed courtroom in the city of Dnipro. He is on trial on charges of desertion, and is one of many.

Since 2022, around 100,000 cases have been opened against soldiers who left their units, according to data from Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s office.

When Hnezdilov went absent without leave, he went public with demands for a clear time frame for ending military service. He says he is ready to fight but not without a plan for demobilisation. He has already served for five years, including two before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“We must continue to fight,” he told me during a break in the hearing, “we have no other choice.”

“But soldiers are not slaves. Everyone who has spent three years or more on the front line deserves the right to rest. The authorities have been promising for a very long time to set terms of service, but they have not done it.”

In court he also complained of corruption among commanders, and of deadly incompetence.

After the brief procedural hearing, he was handcuffed for the journey back to prison. If convicted he faces up to 12 years in jail. “Help Ukraine,” he told us, as he was led away.

Many other Ukrainian soldiers are still straining every sinew on the front lines, trying to at least slow the Russian advance.

Mykhailo, 42, the chain-smoking commander of a drone unit, does battle every night fuelled by “Non-Stop” – a Ukrainian energy drink.

He is with the 68th “Jaeger” Brigade, fighting to hold on to the eastern front-line city of Pokrovsk – a key transportation hub. The Russians are closing in on two sides.

Mykhailo drives us to a Ukrainian position – a journey we can only risk after dark, and in an armoured car. The Russians too have eyes in the skies. Their drones are a constant threat. He is watchful, and weary.

“I went to the enlistment office in the first days,” he tells us, “and I hoped everything would go quickly. Honestly, I am tired. Time off is rare [in his case a total of 40 days in three years]. The only thing that saves me is that I can video chat with my family.”

We arrive at a disused house where Mykhailo and his men unload their equipment and set up a pop-up drone position. Screens are carried in, and cables connected.

Outside, troops erect an antenna taller than a two-story building. They work fast under torchlight – using red beams not white as these are harder to detect. Then they assemble bombs to arm their “vampire” – a supersized attack drone.

For the next few hours, we have front-row seats as Mykhailo – call sign “Admin” – pilots the drone, his eyes darting from screen to screen. First, he drops supplies to front-line Ukrainian troops and then drops an anti-tank mine on Russian forces underground. It falls slightly wide of its target.

He is up against high winds and Russian jamming. All the while he is on the look-out for incoming enemy drones.

Mykhailo detects a Russian warplane in the skies. Minutes later we hear the distinct thud of three Russian glide bombs. “It’s far,” he tells us. That turns out to mean two to three kilometres away.

During a lull, I ask Mykhailo if he thinks a peace deal is possible. “Maybe not,” he says. “This [Putin] is a completely unstable person, and that’s putting it very gently.”

“I hope that at some stage the enemy will stop because they tire out, or someone with a sound mind comes to power.”

He won’t comment on President Trump.

While Mykhailo is a veteran of this war, one of his men is a beginner. Twenty-four-year-old David joined up last September as the Russians neared his hometown. He now spends his time handling explosives – though he would prefer to be at college learning languages.

“No-one knows how long the war will last,” he says, “maybe not even the politicians”.

“I would like it to end soon so that civilians won’t suffer, and people won’t die anymore. But considering how things are now on the front line, it won’t be soon.”

He believes that if the guns are silenced, it will be only a pause, before Moscow comes back for more.

The winds get stronger and the vampire drone crash-lands. It’s out of action for now. The unit pack up and leave, as fast as they came. They will be back in action at nightfall, resuming the duels in the sky.

But on the ground the Russians keep inching forward, and the Trump presidency will mean pressure for a deal. And there is one more hard truth here: if it comes it is unlikely to be on Ukraine’s terms.

Toyota subsidiary Hino Motors has agreed to pay $1.6bn (£1.3bn) and plead guilty to deceiving US regulators about the amount of emissions produced by its diesel engines.

The truck company will also be banned from exporting its diesel engines to the country for five years.

It comes after Hino was charged with fraud in a Detroit court for selling 105,000 illegal engines in the US between 2010 and 2022.

The settlement still requires approval by a US court.

According to the US Justice Department, Hino submitted “false and fraudulent” emission testing and fuel consumption data in a “criminal conspiracy” that allowed it to import and sell its engines in the United States.

“Hino Motors engaged in a years-long scheme to alter and fabricate emissions data in order to get a leg up over its competitors and boost their bottom-line,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.

“To further this fraudulent scheme, Hino violated laws and regulations intended to protect American’s health and the environment.”

On top of the five-year diesel engine import ban, Hino has also committed to a compliance and ethics plan during that period.

“We take this resolution seriously and will ensure that the field fix, the Environmental Mitigation Program, and further strengthening of our compliance system … are implemented,” said Satoshi Ogiso, Hino’s chief executive and president in a statement.

“We deeply apologize for the inconvenience caused to our customers and stakeholders.”

The US Environmental Protection Agency said Hino has also agreed to recall some infringing heavy-duty trucks and to replace marine and locomotive engines across the country to offset excess air emissions.

In order to cover costs resulting from its legal problems, Hino said that in its second quarter financial results announced in October, it reported an extraordinary loss of 230 billion yen (£1.2bn, $1.48bn).

In the last decade, several car makers admitted to lying about the emissions produced by their diesel engines.

In what has become known as the dieselgate scandal, brands throughout the Volkswagen corporate empire were implicated, including Audi, Porsche, Seat and Skoda as well as Volkswagen itself.

Volkswagen has spent more than 30 billion euros (£25bn, $30.9bn) paying fines, issuing recalls and compensating its customers.

China’s economy rebounded in the last three months of last year, allowing the government to meet its growth target of 5% in 2024, Beijing announced on Friday.

But it is one of the slowest rates of growth in decades as the world’s second largest economy struggles to shake off a protracted property crisis, high local government debt and youth unemployment.

The head of the country’s statistics bureau said China’s economic achievements in 2024 were “hard won,” after the government launched a slew of stimulus measures late last year.

Beijing has rarely missed its growth targets in the past.

Experts had broadly predicted this rate of growth. The World Bank said lower borrowing costs and rising exports would mean China could achieve annual growth of 4.9%.

Investors, however, are bracing themselves: the threat of President-elect Donald Trump’s tariffs on $500bn (£409bn) worth of Chinese goods looms large.

Yet that is not all that stands in the way of China achieving its growth targets next year.

Business and consumer confidence is low, and the Chinese yuan will continue to weaken as Beijing cuts interest rates in a bid to boost growth.

Here are three reasons why Xi has bigger challenges than Trump’s tariffs:

There is a growing chorus of warnings that China’s economy will slow in 2025. One major driving factor of last year’s growth is now at risk: exports.

China has relied on manufacturing to help exit the slowdown – so, it has been exporting a record number of electric vehicles, 3D printers and industrial robots.

The US, Canada and the European Union have accused China of making too many goods and imposed tariffs on Chinese imports to protect domestic jobs and businesses.

Experts say Chinese exporters may now focus on other parts of the world. But those countries are likely to be in emerging markets, which don’t have the same levels of demand as North America and Europe.

That could impact Chinese businesses that are hoping to expand, in turn hitting suppliers of energy and raw materials.

Xi wants to transform China from the world’s factory for cheap goods into a high-tech powerhouse by 2035 but it’s unclear how manufacturing can continue to be such a big growth driver in the face of rising tariffs.

In China, household wealth is largely invested in the property market. Before the real estate crisis, it accounted for almost a third of China’s economy – employing millions of people, from builders and developers to cement producers and interior designers.

Beijing has implemented a slew of policies to stabilise the property market and the the financial markets watchdog, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), has said it will vigorously support reforms.

But there are still too many empty homes and commercial properties, and that oversupply continues to force down prices.

The property market slump is expected to bottom out this year, but Wall Street banking giant Goldman Sachs says the downturn will be a “multi-year drag” on China’s economic growth.

It’s already hit spending hard – in the last three months of 2024, household consumption contributed just 29% to China’s economic activity, down from 59% before the pandemic.

That is one of the reasons Beijing has stepped up exports. It wants to help offset sluggish domestic spending on new cars, luxury items and almost everything else.

The government has even introduced programmes like consumer goods trade-ins, where people can exchange their washing machines, microwaves and rice cookers.

But experts wonder whether these kinds of measures alone are sufficient without addressing deeper issues in the economy.

They say people will need more money in their pockets before pre-Covid levels for spending return.

“China needs to bring back the animal spirit of the population and we are still far from that,” said Shuang Ding, Chief Economist for Greater China and North Asia at Standard Chartered Bank.

“If the private sector starts to invest and innovate that could increase income and the job outlook, and people will have more confidence to consume.”

Steep public debt and unemployment have also affected savings and spending.

Official figures suggest the youth jobless rate remains high compared to before the pandemic, and that wage rises have stalled.

President Xi has promised to invest in the cutting-edge industries that the government calls “new productive forces”.

Until now, that has helped China become a leader in goods like renewable energy products such as solar panels and electric vehicle batteries.

Last year, China also overtook Japan as the world’s biggest car exporter.

But the lacklustre economic picture, uncertainty over tariffs and other geopolitical uncertainties mean the appetite of foreign businesses for investment in China is subdued.

It’s not about foreign or domestic investment – it’s that businesses don’t see a bright future, said Stephanie Leung from wealth management platform StashAway.

“They would like to see a more diversified set of investors coming in.”

For all of these reasons, experts believe the measures to support the economy will only partially alleviate the impact of potential new US tariffs.

Beijing must either undertake big, bold measures or accept that the economy is not going to grow so fast, Goldman Sachs’ Chief China Economist Hui Shan wrote in a recent report, adding: “We expect them to choose the former.”

“China needs to stabilise property markets and create sufficient jobs to ensure social stability,” Mr Ding from Standard Chartered Bank said.

According to researcher China Dissent Monitor, there were more than 900 protests in China between June and September 2024 led by workers and property owners – 27% more than the same period a year earlier.

These sort of social strains as a result of economic grievances and an erosion of wealth will be a concern for the Chinese Communist Party.

After all, explosive growth turned China into a global power, and the promise of increased prosperity has largely helped its leaders keep a tight lid on dissent.

The Supreme Court did not give TikTok a last-minute stay of execution.

If the popular social media site is going to continue to operate in the US, it will have to be politicians or businessmen, not judges, who save it.

And the politicians – pressed to balance national concerns about China with TikTok’s massive American user base – are taking note. This includes the incoming president, who is both a politician and a businessman.

Shortly after the top court’s ruling, President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social saying he would review the situation, but everyone must respect the Supreme Court decision.

“My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!,” he said.

Trump’s legal team already had weighed in during the Supreme Court’s consideration of this case, asking the justices to delay a decision to give him time to find a solution.

“President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform,” the brief read.

They didn’t get their wish, but several of Trump’s aides have since floated the possibility of a presidential executive order on Monday afternoon delaying implementation of the ban. Trump also spoke to Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the topic of TikTok came up.

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• US Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban law

Trump is stocking his foreign policy team with China hawks like Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz – who represent a popular view on the right that the Chinese communists are more than an economic rival, they are a geopolitical adversary.

But Trump also spent the past year campaigning for the support of social media influencers – and their youthful followers – many of whom are TikTok devotees.

If the incoming president can ultimately find a way to satisfy national security concerns while keeping TikTok up and running in the US, it would provide him with an opportunity to post an early political win in his second term and be celebrated by TikTok’s loyal users.

There is a certain amount of irony to this, as it was conservatives – including Trump – who first championed a ban.

The Biden administration, for its part, seemed happy to drop the TikTok situation into the incoming president’s lap.

It was quick to issue a statement responding to the court’s decision, emphasising that the goal of the law is not to ban TikTok, but to force its sale to American ownership. As had been predicted, however, the outgoing Democratic president punted enforcement of the ban to Donald Trump, who will become president at noon on Monday.

The Supreme Court, in its unsigned opinion with no dissents, avoided weighing in on these kind of political calculations. The justices sided with a lower court that upheld the constitutionality of the law that could ban the popular social media service if it is not sold by midnight on Sunday.

While the court’s opinion is narrow – the justices acknowledge the time pressure they were under to issue this decision – it firmly establishes that the constitutional protections of free speech contained in the First Amendment to the US Constitution do not save TikTok.

In fact, the justices found that the TikTok ban, which Congress justified on the basis of protecting national security by preventing an adversary from collecting troves of data on tens of millions of American users, had a lower bar to clear than laws that directly regulate speech content.

The court sidestepped other tricky issues – such as whether concerns about Chinese influence on TikTok’s algorithm justified a ban. But expect that to come up in future policy debates in Congress.

With the court’s decision, TikTok has exhausted its last legal recourse to avoid the ban from going into effect. For Trump, however, the TikTok ban is his first presidential challenge – but also his first political opportunity.

Donald Trump has promised big changes for the world’s largest economy.

An “end to the devastating inflation crisis”, tariffs and big cuts to taxes, regulation and the size of government are all on the agenda.

This combination, he says, will ignite an economic boom and revive withering faith in the American dream.

“We’re at the beginning of a great, beautiful golden age of business,” he pledged from the podium at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

But looming over the president-elect are warnings that many of his policies are more likely to hurt the economy than help it.

And as he prepares to set his plans in motion, analysts say he is about to run into political and economic realities that will make it hard to deliver all his promises.

“There’s no clear path forward at this time for how to meet all these goals because they’re inherently contradictory,” said Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute.

Here’s a closer look at his key promises.

What Trump promised:

“Prices will come down”, he said repeatedly.

It was a risky pledge – prices rarely fall, unless there is an economic crisis.

Inflation, which measures not price levels but the rate of price increases, has already come down significantly, while proving tough to stamp out completely.

What complicates it:

Trump pinned his claim to promises to expand already-record US oil and gas production, reducing energy costs. But the forces that affect inflation, and energy prices, are mostly outside presidential control.

To the extent that White House policies make a difference, analysts have warned that many of Trump’s ideas – including tax cuts, tariffs and migrant deportations – risk making the problem worse.

Economist John Cochrane of the right-leaning Hoover Institution said the big question facing the economy is how Trump will juggle “tension” between the more traditional pro-business parts of his coalition and the “nationalists” who are focused on issues such as border control and rivalry with China.

“Clearly both camps can’t get what they want,” he said. “That’s going to be the fundamental story and that’s why we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

What Trump voters want:

Inflation promises were key to Trump’s victory but by many measures, such as growth and job creation, the economy overall was not in the dire straits he painted on the campaign trail.

Since his win, he has tried to lower expectations, warning it would be “very hard” to bring down prices.

Amanda Sue Mathis, 34, of Michigan, says she thinks Trump’s promises are feasible but could take time.

“If anybody can make better deals to make things more affordable for Americans, it’s Donald Trump,” she said. “He literally wrote the book on the art of deal making.”

What Trump promised:

Trump’s most unorthodox economic promise was his vow to place tariffs – a border tax – of at least 10% on all goods coming into the US, which would rise to more than 60% for products from China.

He has since ramped up the threats against specific countries, including allies such as Canada, Mexico and Denmark.

Some of Trump’s advisers have suggested the tariffs are negotiating tools for other issues, like border security, and he will ultimately settle for a more targeted, or gradual approach.

What complicates it:

The debate has raised speculation about how aggressive Trump will decide to be, given the potential economic risks.

Analysts say tariffs are likely to lead to higher prices for Americans and pain for companies hit by foreign retaliation.

And unlike Trump’s first term, any measures will arrive at a delicate moment, as the long-running US economic expansion appears to be in its final stages.

Even if the toughest tariffs never materialise, the policy debate alone is generating uncertainty that could depress investment and reduce growth in the US by as much as 0.6% by mid-2025, according to Oxford Economics.

“They’ve got a very limited margin for error,” Michael Cembalest, the chairman of market and investment strategy for JP Morgan Asset Management said in a recent podcast. He warned the desire for a major overhaul was likely to “break something”, though what remains to be seen.

Trade lawyer Everett Eissenstat, who served as a White House economic adviser during Trump’s first term, said he was expecting an across-the-board tariff, but acknowledged the plan would compete with other goals.

“There’s always tensions. There’s never perfection in the policy world. And obviously one of the reasons that I think he was re-elected is concerns over inflation,” he said.

“We’re in a different world [than the first term] and we’ll have to see how that plays out,” he said.

What Trump voters want:

Lifelong Republican Ben Maurer said he wanted Trump to focus on the wider goal of reviving manufacturing in the US, rather than tariffs per se.

“I feel like it’s more of a negotiation tactic than an actual policy route,” said the 38-year-old, who lives in Pennsylvania.

“Not saying he won’t put tariffs on anything – I think he will – but I think it’s going to be more strategic of exactly what he puts tariffs on. I support that and I feel like his judgement is good enough to decide what to tariff.”

What Trump promised:

He has put forward a growth plan – lower taxes, less regulation and a smaller government, which he says will unleash American business.

What complicates it:

But analysts say cutting regulation might take longer than expected. And Trump is widely expected to prioritise extending expiring tax cuts above cutting spending.

Ms Boccia of the Cato Institute said she expected borrowing to surge under the Trump administration and the rise to add to inflation pressures.

In financial markets, those concerns have already helped to drive up interest rates on government debt in recent weeks, she noted.

• What is the debt ceiling?

Though Trump will also face some resistance from those inside his party worried about already high US debt, Ms Boccia said extending the tax cuts – projected to add more than $4.5tn to US debt over the next decade – seemed all but certain.

By contrast, Trump ruled much of the budget off limits during his campaign when he promised to leave big programmes, such as Social Security, unchanged.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy has also publicly scaled back its ambitions.

“The signals that the market is sending right now are getting picked up by economists but not really by Washington,” she said. “In the end, it is politically taking the path of least resistance.”

What Trump voters want:

Mr Maurer said shrinking the bureaucracy was key to his hopes for the administration.

“Government spending is absolute insanity,” he said.

“I don’t think Mark, in the wildest reaches of his imagination, thought his company could do something as nefarious as faking a death,” says actor Adam Scott of his character in Apple TV’s Severance.

But Mark’s is an unusual workplace, to put it mildly.

Employees at biotech conglomerate Lumon Industries are offered the company’s pioneering severance programme, a concept inspired by series creator Dan Erickson’s desire to escape the mind-numbing drudgery of his office jobs.

Sold as the ultimate work-life balance, the firm’s brain microchip procedure splits a person’s consciousness and memory into dual existences.

This means when “severed” grieving widower Mark Scout and his colleagues take the office lift each morning, their work-self – or “innie” – awakens for duty. Once they clock off, their “outie” re-emerges, returning to home life blissfully unaware.

But series one’s cliffhanger finale – the work of executive producer and director Ben Stiller – saw Mark discover his late wife Gemma may actually still be alive amid a rebellion by his team against their shadowy employers.

The group managed to outsmart floor managers Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) and Milchick (Tramell Tillman) and override the severance system, briefly awakening their real-world bodies. Rebellious sceptic Helly (Britt Lowery) also learned a shattering truth about her outie’s company ties.

Fans have been waiting almost three years to find out what happens next, and on Friday, Severance returned to Apple TV for its anticipated second season.

The show got critical acclaim in 2022 to become one of Apple’s breakout hits – earning 14 Emmy nominations and a Writers Guild award. It helped, too, that the show arrived at a time when the pandemic had fundamentally shifted the audience’s own relationship with office life.

But the Hollywood writers’ strike and behind-the scenes issues (resolved for Stiller to return to produce and direct), forced the wait that left audiences hungry for answers.

I ask Scott, who, fittingly, has never worked a real office job but played many office on-screen roles, how that cliffhanger has affected his latest character’s psyche on the show’s return.

“Mark is far more self-possessed and septical, possibly, of this company,” says the 51-year-old, who played manager Ben Wyatt in comedy Parks and Recreation.

Last season, trapped inside Lumon’s brutalist architecture and sanitised walls, crunching mysterious numbers for the “Macrodata Refinement team”, the team was fed cultish Soviet-esque propaganda about company founder Kier Eagan and his family.

Where previously, “Lumon and Kier and all of its rules and and regulations made up [the innies’] identities”, Scott says their brief escape into the outside world and the chance to taste their alternate existences has “filled them up”.

If season one darkly satirised corporate greed and rebellion, season two lays bare disingenuous corporation damage control and co-option, in ways once again sure to spark Reddit theories. Nothing is quite as it seems.

Apple need the series to be popular, too, with each episode costing $20m (£16m) to make according to Bloomberg – a big investment given plans to rein in spending after years of streaming services disrupting the market.

In yesterday’s season opener, we saw Mark’s innie (newly sentient after his team’s brief escape into the outside world) return to work to find his team replaced.

Floor manager Milchick explains that in the five months since the uprising, fellow manager Harmony (known to workers as Ms. Cobel) has been fired, with himself promoted in her place. The team is also being promised workplace reform – including improved staff perks.

After all, nothing better conveyed Lumon’s unnerving forced fun than its heavily rationed waffle, melon and single-track dance parties. An HR video even reframes the team’s rebellion positively, encouraging staff to “praise Kier” for the uprising.

Mark’s attempts to reunite his team are thwarted by Milchick. But newly empowered by his trip to the outside world, he decides to challenge the shadowy forces that run the company directly.

This push and pull between Mark and a faceless employer may strike a chord with those being forced to go back into the office as companies clamp down on remote working post-pandemic. This month, the bank JPMorgan Chase reportedly closed comments on an intranet page announcing its return-to-work edict, following a tide of negative responses.

This new series comes at a time when the balance of power is arguably shifting in favour of employers again, after a total of 100 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021 and 2022 in what Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom called the Great Resignation.

Disillusionment has sparked cultural shifts amongst office workers. The term ‘quiet quitting’ has emerged, referring to doing the bare minimum in a job. Similarly “late-stage capitalism” has gained traction on social media, not for its Marxist roots, but to describe perceived inequalities, societal burnout and a faltering system.

In series two, we see how Lumon’s disorientating, unforgiving corporate culture and its deceptive pleasantries affects those with power too. Floor managers Milchick and newly-demoted Harmony become victims as well as enforcers.

Arquette, who won an Oscar for Richard Linklater’s 2014 film Boyhood, says her character is “furious” that the corporation, in demoting her, has failed to recognise her loyalty.

Tillman similarly adds that whilst it is unclear whether Milchick betrayed Harmony, he bears a “heavy responsibility” on his shoulders. As her replacement, he must now both placate the innies and please a board who “do not understand what it takes to do the job”.

Unlike Scott, Tillman worked in corporate office roles prior to becoming an actor and landing his breakthrough role as company man Milchick. He says he was never as “arrogant or ambitious” as his character, but admits to occasionally being “adventurous” in navigating office politics. This either worked well or, sometimes, landed him “flat on my face”.

Tillman equally recognises Milchick’s isolated experience as the sole black managerial figure. Steering clear of spoilers, he says we begin to understand Milchick’s experience of being “othered by the company he serves”.

“It really speaks to how some organisations and some corporations, in their attempt to be inclusive, miss the boat,” he adds.

Arquette continues: “I feel every few years there’s a new doctrine throughout the corporate space – some kind of PR switcharoo [about] how to be current and different than we were in the past.

“I think a lot of times things do need to change, but sometimes it doesn’t really feel genuine.”

Anyone for a melon party?

Every week, Rajesh PN Rao, a computer scientist, gets emails from people claiming they’ve cracked an ancient script that has stumped scholars for generations.

These self-proclaimed codebreakers – ranging from engineers and IT workers to retirees and tax officers – are mostly from India or of Indian origin living abroad. All of them are convinced they’ve deciphered the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation, a blend of signs and symbols.

“They claim they’ve solved it and that the ‘case is closed’,” says Mr Rao, Hwang Endowed Professor at the University of Washington and author of peer-reviewed studies on the Indus script.

Adding fuel to the race, MK Stalin, the chief minister of southern India’s Tamil Nadu state, recently upped the stakes, announcing a $1m prize for anyone who can crack the code.

The Indus, or Harappan, civilisation – one of the world’s earliest urban societies – emerged 5,300 years ago in present-day northwest India and Pakistan. Its austere farmers and traders, living in walled, baked-brick cities, thrived for centuries. Since its discovery a century ago, around 2,000 sites have been uncovered across the region.

The reasons behind the society’s sudden decline remain unclear, with no apparent evidence of war, famine or a natural disaster. But its greatest mystery is its undeciphered script, leaving its language, governance and beliefs shrouded in secrecy.

For over a century, experts – linguists, scientists and archaeologists – have tried to crack the Indus script. Theories have linked it to early Brahmi scripts, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages, Sumerian, and even claimed it’s just made up of political or religious symbols.

Yet, its secrets remain locked away. “The Indus script is perhaps the most important system of writing that is undeciphered,” says Asko Parpola, a leading Indologist.

These days, the more popular spectacular theories equate the script with content from Hindu scriptures and attribute spiritual and magical meanings to the inscriptions.

Most of these attempts ignore that the script, made up of signs and symbols, mostly appears on stone seals used for trade and commerce, making it unlikely they contain religious or mythological content, according to Mr Rao.

There are many challenges to deciphering the Indus script.

First, the relatively small number of scripts – about 4,000 of them, almost all on small objects such as seals, pottery and tablets.

Then there’s the brevity of each script – average length of about five signs or symbols – with no long texts on walls, tablets or upright stone slabs.

Consider the commonly found square seals: lines of signs run along their top, with a central animal motif – often a unicorn – and an object beside it, whose meaning remains unknown.

There’s also no bilingual artefact like the Rosetta Stone, which helped scholars decode Egyptian hieroglyphs. Such artefacts contain text in two languages, offering a direct comparison between a known and unknown script.

Recent advancements in deciphering the Indus script have used computer science to tackle this ancient enigma. Researchers have used machine learning techniques to analyse the script, trying to identify patterns and structures that could lead to its understanding.

Nisha Yadav, a researcher at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), is one of them. In collaboration with scientists like Mr Rao, her work has focused on applying statistical and computational methods to analyse the undeciphered script.

Using a digitised data set of Indus signs from the script, they have found interesting patterns. A caveat: “We still don’t know whether the signs are complete words, or part of words or part of sentences,” says Ms Yadav.

Ms Yadav and co-researchers found 67 signs that account for 80% of the writing on the script. A sign which looks like a jar with two handles turned out to be the most frequently used sign. Also, the scripts began with a large number of signs and ended with fewer of them. Some sign patterns appear more often than expected.

Also, a machine-learning model of the script was created to restore the illegible and damaged texts, paving the way for further research.

“Our understanding is that the script is structured and there is an underlying logic in the writing,” says Ms Yadav.

To be sure, several ancient scripts remain undeciphered, facing challenges similar to the Indus script.

Mr Rao cites scripts like Proto-Elamite (Iran), Linear A (Crete), and Etruscan (Italy), whose underlying language is unknown.

Others, like Rongorongo (Easter Island) and Zapotec (Mexico), have known languages, “but their symbols remain unclear”. The Phaistos Disc from Crete – a mysterious, fired clay disc from the Minoan civilisation – “closely mirrors the Indus script’s challenges – its language is unknown, and only one known example exists”.

Back in India, it is not entirely clear why Mr Stalin of Tamil Nadu announced a reward for deciphering the script. His announcement followed a new study linking Indus Valley signs to graffiti found in his state.

K Rajan and R Sivananthan analysed over 14,000 graffiti-bearing pottery fragments from 140 excavated sites in Tamil Nadu, which included more than 2,000 signs. Many of these signs closely resemble those in the Indus script, with 60% of the signs matching, and over 90% of south Indian graffiti marks having “parallels” with those from the Indus civilisation, the researchers claim.

This “suggests a kind of cultural contact” between the Indus Valley and south India, Mr Rajan and Mr Sivananthan say.

Many believe Mr Stalin’s move to announce an award positions him as a staunch champion of Tamil heritage and culture, countering Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules in Delhi.

But researchers are confident that there will be no claimants for Mr Stalin’s prize soon. Scholars have compiled complete, updated databases of all known inscribed artefacts – crucial for decipherment. “But what did the Indus people write? I wish we knew,” says Ms Yadav.

Whitney Houston may have been one of the most acclaimed singers of her generation but when David Roberts was asked to be her bodyguard he wasn’t exactly star-struck.

“I said ‘Whitney Houston, who’s he?’,” recalled the former police sergeant turned close protection officer.

He went on to spend six years protecting the late superstar as she toured the world and believes he was the inspiration for the 1992 film The Bodyguard, starring Houston and Kevin Costner.

“It was an eye-opener, bearing in mind I’m from a farming community on the tip of north Wales, the Llyn Peninsula.

“And here I am travelling the world right with arguably one of the most famous people in the world so it was quite an interesting experience,” said the 72-year-old, speaking from his home in Palm Beach, Florida.

Twenty-five years on he has written a book about his time with the star who died aged 48 in 2012.

David joined the RAF Police in 1968 and served in Northern Ireland before joining North Wales Police in 1972.

He later transferred to the Met Police, concluding his service in 1988 as a sergeant providing protection for visiting dignitaries and heads of state.

It was while working for the American embassy in London in 1988 he first met Houston after she flew into the UK.

He recalled meeting a “most sophisticated, educated, intelligent, shy young lady”.

“I was singularly impressed,” he said.

“Her beauty was outstanding, even after the long flight from New York to London.”

Ahead of the meeting his daughter had brought him up to speed on her career and he had been out and bought some of her music.

“She had the voice of an angel, clearly,” he said.

He and Whitney “got on famously” from the get-go.

The initial job was for three months but he was later asked to be the director of security for her Far East tour.

“I can’t imagine a high-profile personality in so much demand being easier to look after,” he said.

He said she spent most of their time in her hotel room on the phone to her then boyfriend, comedian Eddie Murphy.

“He is just as funny off stage as he is on stage, a great chap, I like him,” said David.

He would later witness her tumultuous relationships with singer Bobby Brown who she married in 1992.

They remained married for 15 years.

“It’s remarkable to me it lasted as long as it did,” said David.

“In fact, the day of the wedding all the people who were involved in the security there said, ‘OK guys, we’ll be back here next year for the divorce party – we really did not think it would last and yet she proved us all wrong.”

As for his own relationship with the megastar, he said he got to know her “to the extent that there was very little need for conversation when we were out in public”.

“I’d look at her and know what she’s thinking and what she wanted or if we were in a crowd or I’d feel a tug on the back of my jacket we had to go.”

“There is always that level of synergy between the protector and the protectee,” he said.

He would check Houston into hotels using the name Rachel Marron – the name of the character Houston would go on to play in The Bodyguard.

But he insisted not everything in the film is as true to life.

In the film Costner and Houston’s characters develop a romance but he insisted he was “more like a “kindly uncle” to the star.

When asked if he would have died for her he is unequivocal.

“Of course,” he said.

“If I did my homework wrong, if I got the threats assessment or the risk management or the preparation wrong, then yes, I would have paid for that, yes.”

And there was plenty of risk to assess.

During the Far East tour he said there were about 50 fans who were considered a potential threat.

“The obsessed fans were not just happy to see her, not just happy to be in her presence, they wanted a piece of her, and that’s when it becomes a little bit tedious from my perspective,” he said.

“We had one that would write reams and reams and reams of all manner of mentally disturbed comments on toilet paper.

“There was a chap in Australia who used to send his soiled underwear and socks.”

He said the man had written he was going to be at her show in Sydney.

“He gave us his seat number and advised that when she sang the encore Greatest Love of All he was going to come on stage and ‘take her to meet his mother in heaven’.”

He was surrounded by undercover officers but the concert finished without issue.

“He didn’t move, he didn’t show one sign of emotion at all,” said David.

“She finished singing, he stood up, he walked out, we’ve never heard from him since.”

This insight into the world of the mega-famous left David questioning why so many young people chase stardom.

“It was patently obvious to me from the very beginning that that level of fame is too expensive a price to pay,” he said.

He said the only time she could achieve any type of normal life was when she was with friends and family or in a hotel room “otherwise, nothing was normal”.

He said years spent following Houston around the world “came at a cost” to him too.

When asked if that cost was to his own personal relationships he said: “You’d have to ask any one of my three wives, I’m not entirely sure.”

The job came to an abrupt end in 1995.

He said for the last nine months they were together he witnessed Houston’s “gradual but obvious deterioration”.

He said he never saw drugs paraphernalia but frequently witnessed the star in emotional distress.

“There was a problem that needed to be addressed by those who cared for her, not just the family and friends, but the executives who were making millions from exploiting her to the extent that they did,” he said.

“But the general consensus at the time was that Houston could not possibly go to rehabilitation as it would be detrimental to her reputation and career.”

He said he raised concerns.

“I was told ‘Miss Houston has decided she’s not going to travel internationally anymore, so she doesn’t need someone of your expertise, but if ever she decides to travel again, we will call you’,” he recalled.

“So that was the end of that.

“That was technically my swan song, that was the bullet that I did take for her.”

In 2012 at just 48 Houston died in her room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel of accidental drowning due to the effects of cocaine use and heart disease.

“It hurt. It was dreadful,” said David.

“You get over the initial shock and then the anger takes over because it shouldn’t have been.”

Then in 2015, Bobbi Kristina Brown, the only daughter of Houston and R&B singer Bobby Brown, was found unresponsive in a bathtub at her home in Georgia and died six months later.

David remembered Houston being wheeled out of the livery room with Bobbi in her arms and as she grew, watching her run around playing games.

“The only solace you get from the entire affair is believing that she [Houston], her father, her mother and her daughter are reconciled in a place that no-one could hurt them anymore,” said David.

He said he had written his book, Whitney: The Memoir of Her Bodyguard, to “dissipate the anger” he has carried ever since Houston’s death.

“The entertainment industry is a beast. It has demands that are unrealistic. You take a young 20-odd year old girl and you make them this famous, there are demands, you’ve got to produce 10 albums in the next five years – but where’s the normal life? You haven’t got time for that,” he said.

“You’re part of our money-making machine and that’s what she was”.

The Traitors is one of the few things getting us through a miserable January. For three nights a week, it feels as if the whole country is living and breathing the cloaks-and-daggers drama.

For the other four painstaking days when the show isn’t on air, we’re sharing our opinions and theories with everyone from colleagues to strangers online.

But it’s not just tactics and contestants viewers are talking about – my group chats are incessantly pinging with questions about what happens behind the scenes, where the cast go once they leave the castle, and whether Charlotte will ever reveal her real accent.

Luckily, we no longer need to ponder of these questions, as former contestants have been speaking to BBC News about the secret workings of the Traitors castle.

The order in which the contestants arrive at breakfast is a source of tension and speculation on the show.

Series one faithful Maddy Smedley explains that contestants are kept in separate holding rooms when they come to the castle in the morning and are called to go into breakfast individually or as a group.

Similarly, in the evenings, contestants wait in a holding room until a runner comes to individually escort them out of the building and into a car.

Traitor and series two champion Harry Clark says there are no clocks in the castle and contestants have no sense of time.

“You get picked up in the morning and when filming is over, you get dropped back to the lodgings,” he explains.

“I don’t know what time the mission starts or when lunch is – we rely on the production team to direct us and in between, we all just sit around and chat.”

Unlike the hour-long episodes we see, Harry says the days aren’t filled with wall-to-wall traitor speculation.

“I spent most the day talking to Paul about Liverpool and Chelsea or finding out if everyone believes in aliens and obviously that stuff doesn’t make the final edit because it’s not relevant to the game.”

Series one faithful Dr Amos Ogunkoya describes his days in the castle as “a really nice holiday camp, until the roundtable”.

“Most of the day we’re just learning about each others lives and so you become really close to everyone there.”

Matt Harris, another faithful in series one, says that, while the castle is huge, “you’re not allowed out of sight from the cameras so you can’t walk around the grounds”.

“They set up the rooms like the library and bar especially for the show and you’re told by producers which rooms you can go into.”

The lack of clocks make it hard to know exactly how long lasts but the roundtable surely far surpasses its 10 minutes of screen time.

“At the beginning, there are 22 people,” says Harry. “Even if everyone only speaks for 10 minutes, that’s more than three hours.”

As viewers, it can be hard to understand why contestants are so emotional during and after the roundtable, but Harry says it’s “really intense”.

“Everyone has their own story and you’re taking someone’s chance of winning money away if they are banished.”

Maddy says she cried so much on the show that “the security guards would give me ice every morning to help the puffiness of my face go down”.

The exact location of contestants’ lodgings remains a mystery to us, and apparently to the cast as well.

“It’s about a 30-minute drive from the castle but you’re blindfolded as you approach, so you can’t see the car in front or figure out exactly where you are,” Maddy says.

She explains that the whole production team and cast stay in private lodgings but you’re kept apart from everyone “with military precision”.

“You’re allowed to go for a walk but you have to be accompanied by a runner and each floor is manned by two security guards who ensure you don’t leave your room unaccompanied.

“At first, I was really scared of them because I had watched the Dutch version of the show and in that, the faithful are murdered in their hotel room so every time the guard knocked on my door I thought I was going to leave the game,” she says.

Harry explains he felt lonely at times in the accommodation, especially as contestants have their phones taken away. “But I can’t complain because I slept easy every night knowing I’d be turning up for breakfast!”

Every now and then viewers get a quick glimpse of a bowl of fruit at breakfast or someone piling carrots onto their plate at dinner time.

The contestants we spoke to gave the food provided on the show mixed reviews.

Dr Amos says “the breakfast was horrible, you definitely would not want to eat much of it” but Matt was more generous and described it as “decent”.

Harry says “there was a lot of Scottish food like haggis” adding that as a fussy eater, he “wouldn’t touch it”.

But luckily for Harry, there was the option to request food.

During the day, he says he ate “a lot of chicken nuggets and chips” and, in the evening, he would ask for the “perfect traitor fuel” to be delivered to his lodgings – a crisp sandwich.

If a contestant is banished at the roundtable, they “really do leave immediately”, according to Maddy.

“You’re taken to do an exit interview straight away and then driven to your hotel to pack your stuff. The next day, I was escorted by security in the morning to the airport and was given my phone back.”

Maddy says the more stressful way of leaving the show is through murder.

“You turn up in the morning like you’re going to breakfast and you are all waiting in these holding rooms. Eventually, you get called as if you’re going to breakfast but instead, they take you to another room where the murder letter is sitting on a chair.

“It was so stressful.”

“The biggest shock was how unscripted everything is,” Dr Amos says.

Maddy says the only time producers intervened was to tell her to announce that she was an actor over breakfast.

She explains she’d already shared this with her fellow contestants when they were waiting to be taken back to the hotel and had taken their mics off.

Matt says there were some moments that were guided by producers.

“Occasionally, people were pulled out and told to go and speak to some other people – it’s natural that they guide you into a position to make good TV.”

“It’s weird at first because there are cameras in your face but after a while, you forget they’re there and producers don’t ever step in,” Harry adds.

“Most rooms also just have cameras in the corner and you have a mic attached to you so sometimes, you don’t see any of the producers until the end of the day when they check in on you.”

Mike Cotton, creative director of the studio that makes The Traitors, explains that there are cameras “dotted around every single room”.

“I’d say there’s probably about 50 or 60 of those throughout the the living space within the castle.”

He says a team of camera operators works in pairs to follow the cast around into different rooms – but at a distance.

At the roundtable, he says the cameras are hidden and some are built into the table itself.

“The contestants can’t see any cameras and that’s to keep them immersed as they can only see each other,” he explains.

“When I met Claudia, I was so nervous because she’s so powerful,” says Harry.

“I wanted to be a traitor so badly and I thought she’d take no notice of us but actually, she knew everything about everyone.

“She gets really involved and makes you feel really comfortable.”

How much does Claudia Winkleman know about the challenges?

“Very little,” according to Harry.

“There’s a team that create the missions and everyone else is in the dark about them. I would try off-camera to get them to tell me about it or I’d give them ideas but they wouldn’t listen.”

Claudia recently said her biggest fear is accidentally giving away the traitors’ identities while filming the roundtables.

“I am absolutely paranoid about ever looking at the traitors, so I sort of look just above everybody’s head,” she explained.

Speaking to BBC News and other press last month, Claudia explained there’s a team of people who make the decision.

“We talk to all of them, and then six of us go up to a room, the brilliant casting people, and we get through seven packets of biscuits.

“I’m the smallest voice in the room, but you decide while having had those chats who it’s going to be.”

The team take the players’ wishes into consideration and if someone asks not to be a traitor, they wouldn’t be picked.

Dr Amos says he made it very clear that he wouldn’t appear on the show if he wasn’t a faithful.

“I wanted to take part in the show but as a doctor I think being a traitor and lying to people has real-life consequences as my patients might not trust me.”

One thing that’s clear from speaking to the contestants is applying for the show is hard work.

After firing off your initial written and video applications, you have a number of audiences with producers.

“They ask you to mainly tell them stories about yourself and your life,” Dr Amos says.

“Eventually, if they like you, then you get a phone call a few weeks before [filming starts] to say you’re off to Scotland,” adds Harry.

The Traitors is filmed in Ardross Castle, a 19th Century building about 30 miles north of Inverness.

It is set in about 100 acres of gardens and parkland and has been owned by the McTaggart family since 1983.

Fun fact: its previous owner was Charles William Dyson Perrins whose grandfather, William Perrins (in partnership with John Wheeley Lea) created the recipe for Worcestershire Sauce.

Mike Cotton says the crew on location is made up of more than 200 people.

“It sounds absolutely huge but we film one episode a day,” he says.

He explains that this team includes everyone from producers and camera operators to the art department who work their magic on interior designing the rooms.

He likens the production to one you might find on set for a Hollywood film.

Dr Amos says that every member of the crew knew who the traitors were.

“It looks like the faithful are in the majority on the show but in reality, you massively feel in the minority – everyone down to the psychologist who is there to support you knows who the traitors are.”

In a remote village in western Nepal, thousands of miles from Israel, Mahananda Joshi was sitting restlessly at home on Thursday, his phone in his hand.

The phone is never far from his hand now. And never on silent. He is waiting for news of his son, Bipin Joshi, a 23-year-old Nepalese agriculture student who was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza.

Any time the phone rings, Mahananda, a local schoolteacher, thinks it might bring news of Bipin, or even – his deepest hope – his son’s voice on the line.

“Sadly, it is always someone else,” Mahananda said.

Bipin was one of dozens of foreign workers kidnapped alongside Israelis when Hamas attacked on 7 October 2023.

Twenty-four were subsequently released – 23 from Thailand and one from the Philippines – but Bipin and nine others remained.

It was never clear why.

• Follow live updates on this story
• Dozens killed as Israeli strikes continue ahead of ceasefire
• What we know about the agreement
• Analysis: Long-overdue deal may end killings but not the conflict
• History of the Israel-Gaza war explained

The last time Bipin’s mother Padma spoke to him was 6 October, she said, the day before he was kidnapped.

He assured her he was eating well, and showed off the clothes he was wearing.

The next time the family saw him was on video footage taken from the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, shown to them by Israeli officials, who asked them to identify him.

It was the confirmation that he had been taken alive.

The BBC now understands that Bipin is believed to still be alive, but Nepal’s ambassador to Israel, Dhan Prasad Pandit, said he had “no concrete information” yet about Bipin’s condition or whereabouts.

Mahananda, Bipin’s mother Padma and 18-year-old sister Puspa live in a small white, one-storey home in the village of Bispuri Mahendranagar, close to the border with India.

As of Thursday, they had not heard anything from officials, they said, only the headlines announcing a ceasefire agreement.

The news had given them all renewed hope.

“I feel like he will message me today or tomorrow saying mummy, I am free now and I will return home immediately,” Padma said.

But the Joshi family’s relief, if it comes, will not be that fast.

Along with the nine other foreign workers who remain hostages, Bipin is not expected to be released in the first phase of the ceasefire, which will prioritise the release of elderly men, women and children.

The fear for the family is that, while they wait, everything can change.

“Everything could fall apart,” Padma said, with tears in her eyes.

The family’s ordeal began on the day of the attack.

Bipin was one of several Nepalese students in Kibbutzim in southern Israel that day, and Mahananda, a teacher at a local school, got a call from one of them to say that Bipin had been kidnapped.

At that point, Mahananda did not know anything of Hamas’s attack nor the situation unfolding in Israel, and he struggled to make sense of what he was hearing.

He would later learn that 10 Nepalese students had been killed in the attack, and that one – his son – appeared to have been taken hostage.

That feeling of disconnection has persisted for 15 agonising months, Mahananda and Padma said on Thursday.

Every hostage family’s pain has been great, but for some of those far away from Israel there has been an added sense of isolation.

“It has been a very lonely experience,” Mahananda said.

Mr Pandit, Nepal’s ambassador to Israel, told the BBC that he had been in regular contact with the family and visited the village.

Mahananda painted a slightly different picture, saying that early on in the war the family did receive many visits from officials, but as it dragged on they were increasingly left alone.

“Since the new ceasefire agreement, no-one has come to see us or communicated with us at all,” he said.

“Everything we know comes from the news.”

A spokesperson for the office of the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, who has been working with hostage families over the past 15 months, said that it treated all hostages the same, either Israeli or from abroad, and was working diligently to get them all freed.

For some of the families, the ceasefire news brings hope that their 15-month ordeal is coming to a close and they will see their loved ones again within weeks.

For others, like the Joshis, any hope must be tempered.

The longer they have to wait, the more likely the ceasefire deal could fall apart.

At home in Bispuri Mahendranagar on Thursday, Bipin’s sister Puspa was holding a photo of her brother as she spoke.

Tears filled her eyes when she talked about him coming home. She was confident he would.

“And when I see him again, I’m going to hug him,” she said. “And cry.”

Scientists who recently discovered that metal lumps on the dark seabed make oxygen, have announced plans to study the deepest parts of Earth’s oceans in order to understand the strange phenomenon.

Their mission could “change the way we look at the possibility of life on other planets too,” the researchers say.

The initial discovery confounded marine scientists. It was previously accepted that oxygen could only be produced in sunlight by plants – in a process called photosynthesis.

If oxygen – a vital component of life – is made in the dark by metal lumps, the researchers believe that process could be happening on other planets, creating oxygen-rich environments where life could thrive.

Lead researcher Prof Andrew Sweetman explained: “We are already in conversation with experts at Nasa who believe dark oxygen could reshape our understanding of how life might be sustained on other planets without direct sunlight.

“We want to go out there and figure out what exactly is going on.”

The initial discovery triggered a global scientific row – there was criticism of the findings from some scientists and from deep sea mining companies that plan to harvest the precious metals in the seabed nodules.

If oxygen is produced at these extreme depths, in total darkness, that calls into question what life could survive and thrive on the seafloor, and what impact mining activities could have on that marine life.

That means that seabed mining companies and environmental organisations – some of which claimed that the findings provided evidence that seafloor mining plans should be halted – will be watching this new investigation closely.

The plan is to work at sites where the seabed is more than 10km (6.2 miles) deep, using remotely-operated submersible equipment.

“We have instruments that can go to the deepest parts of the ocean,” explained Prof Sweetman. “We’re pretty confident we’ll find it happening elsewhere, so we’ll start probing what’s causing it.”

Some of those experiments, in collaboration with scientists at Nasa, will aim to understand whether the same process could allow microscopic life to thrive beneath oceans that are on other planets and moons.

“If there’s oxygen,” said Prof Sweetman, “there could be microbial life taking advantage of that.”

The initial, biologically baffling findings were published last year in the journal Nature Geoscience. They came from several expeditions to an area of the deep sea between Hawaii and Mexico, where Prof Sweetman and his colleagues sent sensors to the seabed – at about 5km (3.1 miles) depth.

That area is part of a vast swathe of seafloor that is covered with the naturally occurring metal nodules, which form when dissolved metals in seawater collect on fragments of shell – or other debris. It’s a process that takes millions of years.

Sensors that the team deployed repeatedly showed oxygen levels going up.

“I just ignored it, Prof Sweetman told BBC News at the time, “because I’d been taught that you only get oxygen through photosynthesis”.

Eventually, he and his colleagues stopped ignoring their readings and set out instead to understand what was going on. Experiments in their lab – with nodules that the team collected submerged in beakers of seawater – led the scientists to conclude that the metallic lumps were making oxygen out of seawater. The nodules, they found, generated electric currents that could split (or electrolyse) molecules of seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.

Then came the backlash, in the form of rebuttals – posted online – from scientists and from seabed mining companies.

One of the critics, Michael Clarke from the Metals Company, a Canadian deep sea mining company, told BBC News that the criticism was focused on a “lack of scientific rigour in the experimental design and data collection”. Basically, he and other critics claimed there was no oxygen production – just bubbles that the equipment produced during sample collection.

“We’ve ruled out that possibility,” Prof Sweetman responded. “But these [new] experiments will provide the proof.”

This might seem a niche, technical argument, but several multi-billion pound mining companies are already exploring the possibility of harvesting tonnes of these metals from the seafloor.

The natural deposits they are targeting contain metals vital for making batteries, and demand for those metals is increasing rapidly as many economies move from fossil fuels to, for example, electric vehicles.

The race to extract those resources has caused concern among environmental groups and researchers. More than 900 marine scientists from 44 countries have signed a petition highlighting the environmental risks and calling for a pause on mining activity.

Talking about his team’s latest research mission at a press conference on Friday, Prof Sweetman said: “Before we do anything, we need to – as best as possible – understand the [deep sea] ecosystem.

“I think the right decision is to hold off before we decide if this is the right thing to do as a a global society.”

It’s 1000 CE – the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is in flux. The powerful nations we know today – like Norman-ruled England and the fragmented territories that will become France – do not yet exist. Towering Gothic cathedrals have yet to rise. Aside from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, few great urban centres dominate the landscape.

Yet that year, on the other side of the globe, an emperor from southern India was preparing to build the world’s most colossal temple.

Completed just 10 years later, it was 216ft (66m) tall, assembled from 130,000 tonnes of granite: second only to Egypt’s pyramids in height. At its heart was a 12ft tall emblem of the Hindu god Shiva, sheathed in gold encrusted with rubies and pearls.

In its lamplit hall were 60 bronze sculptures, adorned with thousands of pearls gathered from the conquered island of Lanka. In its treasuries, several tonnes of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewels, trumpets and drums torn from defeated kings across India’s southern peninsula, making the emperor the richest man of the era.

He was called Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and he belonged to one of the most astonishing dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas.

His family transformed how the medieval world worked – yet they are largely unknown outside India.

Prior to the 11th Century, the Cholas had been one among the many squabbling powers that dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the great body of silt that flows through India’s present-day state of Tamil Nadu. But what set the Cholas apart was their endless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, Chola queens were also remarkably prominent, serving as the dynasty’s public face.

Travelling to Tamil villages and rebuilding small, old mud-brick shrines in gleaming stone, the Chola dowager Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja’s great-aunt – effectively “rebranded” the family as the foremost devotees of Shiva, winning them a popular following.

Sembiyan prayed to Nataraja, a hitherto little-known form of Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, and all her temples featured him prominently. The trend caught on. Today Nataraja is one of the most recognisable symbols of Hinduism. But to the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja was really a symbol of the Cholas.

The emperor Rajaraja Chola shared his great-aunt’s taste for public relations and devotion – with one significant difference.

Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his armies over the Western Ghats, the range of hills that shelter India’s west coast, and burned the ships of his enemies while they were at port. Next, exploiting the internal turmoil of the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to set up a lasting presence on the island. At last, he broke into the rugged Deccan Plateau – the Germany to the Tamil coast’s Italy – and seized a portion of it for himself.

The loot of conquest was lavished on his great imperial temple, known today as the Brihadishvara.

In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tonnes of rice annually, from conquered territory across southern India (you’d need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to carry that much rice today).

This allowed the Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja’s vast fortunes into new irrigation systems, into expanding cultivation, into vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few states in the world could have conceived of economic control at such scale and depth.

The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, built alliances with Tamil merchant corporations: a partnership between traders and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company – a powerful British trading corporation that later ruled large parts of India – that was to come more than 700 years later.

In 1026, Rajendra put his troops on merchants’ ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the global trade in precious woods and spices.

While some Indian nationalists have proclaimed this to be a Chola “conquest” or “colonisation” in Southeast Asia, archaeology suggests a stranger picture: the Cholas didn’t seem to have a navy of their own, but under them, a wave of Tamil diaspora merchants spread across the Bay of Bengal.

By the late 11th Century, these merchants ran independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they were deep in present-day Myanmar and Thailand, and worked as tax collectors in Java.

In the 13th Century, in Mongol-ruled China under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants ran successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou, and even erected a temple to Shiva on the coast of the East China Sea. It was no coincidence that, under the British Raj in the 19th Century, Tamils made up the largest chunk of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia.

Conquests and global connections made Chola-ruled south India a cultural and economic behemoth, the nexus of planetary trade networks.

Chola aristocrats invested war-loot into a wave of new temples, which sourced fine goods from a truly global economy linking the farthest shores of Europe and Asia. Copper and tin for their bronzes came from Egypt, perhaps even Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the gods were sourced from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples grew into vast complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and endowed with rice-estates. In the Chola capital region on the Kaveri, corresponding to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple-towns supported populations of tens of thousands, possibly outclassing most cities in Europe at the time.

These Chola cities were astonishingly multicultural and multireligious: Chinese Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews, Bengali tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today the state of Tamil Nadu is one of India’s most urbanised. Many of the state’s towns grew around Chola-period shrines and markets.

These developments in urbanism and architecture were paralleled in art and literature.

Medieval Tamil metalwork, produced for Chola-period temples, is perhaps the finest ever made by human hand, the artists rivalling Michelangelo or Donatello for their appreciation of the human figure. To praise Chola kings and adore the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of sainthood, history and even magical realism. The Chola period was what you’d get if the Renaissance had happened in south India 300 years before its time.

It is not a coincidence that Chola bronzes – especially Nataraja bronzes – can be found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered across the world, they are the remnants of a period of brilliant political innovations, of maritime expeditions that connected the globe; of titanic shrines and fabulous wealth; of merchants, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live in today.

Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian writer and author, most recently of

Pakistan’s flag carrier has drawn widespread criticism for putting out an advertisement that showed a plane flying towards the Eiffel Tower.

The ad was meant to promote the resumption of Pakistan International Airlines’ flights to the French capital and had the caption “Paris, we’re coming today”.

Some social media users noted the ad’s resemblance to the terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September 2001.

“Is this an advertisement or a threat?” one user wrote on X. Another called for the company to “fire your marketing manager”.

The image has been viewed more than 21 million times on X since it was published last week and has drawn swift backlash.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has ordered an investigation into the matter, while Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar has also criticised the ad, Pakistan’s Geo News reported.

The 9/11 attacks saw hijackers crash passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, killing nearly 3,000 people.

The alleged mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was arrested in Pakistan in 2003.

Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaeda extremist network which planned the attacks, was killed by US troops in Pakistan in 2011.

Pakistani journalist Omar Quraishi said PIA’s ad left him “truly speechless”.

“Did the airline management not vet this?

“Do they not know about the 9/11 tragedy – which used planes to attack buildings? Did they not think that this would be perceived in similar fashion,” he wrote on X.

The airline has not commented on the incident.

The PIA, however, is no stranger to controversy.

Some X users pointed out that in 1979, the airline published an advertisement showing a passenger jet’s shadow over the twin towers.

In 2017, the airline was mocked after staff sacrificed a goat to ward off bad luck following one of the country’s worst air disasters.

And in 2019, PIA caused a stir when it told flight attendants to slim down or get grounded. Staff were told they had had six months to shed “excess weight”.

Dame Joan Plowright, one of Britain’s most celebrated stage and screen stars and the widow of Sir Laurence Olivier, has died at the age of 95.

Her career spanned 60 years and included an Oscar nomination for the 1991 film Enchanted April.

She married Olivier in 1961 after starring opposite him as his daughter in The Entertainer, and became a leading member of the National Theatre, which he set up.

In a statement, her family said they were “so proud of all Joan did and who she was as a loving and deeply inclusive human being”.

• Obituary: Acting star whose first love was theatre

Her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on January 16 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95.

“She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire.

“She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories.”

They added: “She survived her many challenges with Plowright grit and courageous determination to make the best of them, and that she certainly did.

“Rest in peace, Joan…”

She had been retired for a decade, having lost her eyesight and been registered blind.

Born in Scunthorpe, Plowright became a leading lady in London’s West End in the 1950s, and first appeared opposite Olivier in John Osborne’s The Entertainer at the Royal Court in 1957.

He was still married to Gone With The Wind star Vivien Leigh at the time, and Plowright was married to her first husband Roger Gage.

Plowright and Olivier fell in love, and their acting partnership earned them both Bafta nominations for the film version of The Entertainer, which came out in 1960.

That year, Plowright also made her breakthrough in the US in A Taste of Honey on Broadway, winning a Tony Award for her performance.

Her other notable plays included George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, about Joan of Arc, in 1963, which for which she was named best actress at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

And she won a Society of West End Theatre Award – later renamed the Olivier Awards after her husband – in 1978 for Filumena.

She received another Bafta nomination that same year for her performance in the film version of Equus alongside Richard Burton.

In Enchanted April, her role as the elegant but peevish Mrs Fisher earned her a Golden Globe as well as a nomination for the Oscar for best supporting actress in 1993.

Dame Joan was one of a generation of great acting dames, and appeared opposite Dame Judi Dench and Dame Maggie Smith in the 1999 film Tea with Mussolini.

More recently, she was famously seen reminiscing and enjoying repartee with Dame Judi, Dame Maggie and Dame Eileen Atkins in the 2018 BBC documentary Nothing Like A Dame.

In a clip from the show, which went viral online, a slightly disguntled Dame Maggie is seen telling Dame Judi she was “always asked first” when acting roles were offered.

The exchange was initially missed by Dame Joan because one of her hearing aids had fallen out, but she then joined in the joke, also recounting a similar story. She was then offered a spare hearing aid by the late Dame Maggie, who died in September 2024.

Dame Joan was part of an “extraordinary” acting company that her husband assembled when the National Theatre began life at the Old Vic theatre in the early 1960s, according to playwright David Hare.

Others included Maggie Smith, Michael Redgrave, Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon.

“She represented, at that point, a new realism in the theatre – a working class background, obviously, like many of her contemporaries,” Hare told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One.

“And she had the not very easy task of being Laurence Olivier’s wife while Laurence Olivier was running the theatre, and she handled that situation extremely well.”

Hare added: “I’ll also remember her as an incredibly wise and witty woman. She was very good fun, and she liked to laugh, and she used humour all the time to defuse some of the tensions that grew up around her husband.”

When he first worked with her at the age of 23, Hare said he was “totally out of my depth, and she never treated me with anything but friendliness, courtesy and wit”.

The National Theatre’s current director, Rufus Norris, said Dame Joan’s “contribution as one of the central pillars of the National Theatre cannot be overstated”.

She delivered “an extraordinary series of celebrated performances” in plays including Uncle Vanya, Saint Joan, The Master Builder, Much Ado About Nothing and Three Sisters, he said.

“In many of these she acted alongside Sir Laurence Olivier, her partner in art and life.

“Joan’s influence offstage on the nascent National Theatre was similarly profound, and her remarkable talent and dedication to her craft have left an enduring legacy as an actor.

“She remained a personal friend to and champion of the National Theatre throughout its history.”

West End theatres will dim their lights for two minutes in tribute to Dame Joan on Tuesday.

UK Theatre and Society Of London Theatre co-chief executive Hannah Essex said: “Dame Joan Plowright was an iconic and deeply respected figure in the world of theatre, leaving an indelible mark on the industry she shaped with her talent and dedication.

“We are honoured to contribute to the celebration of her extraordinary career and extend our heartfelt condolences to her family and loved ones.”

There was also a tribute from the operators of the Plowright Theatre in Scunthorpe, which was named after her in the 1990s.

“We are saddened to hear that Dame Joan Plowright, the esteemed British actress whose career spanned over six decades, has passed away at the age of 95,” a statement said.

“Born in Brigg she became one of the most distinguished actors of her generation.”

Plowright’s father Bill founded the Scunthorpe Little Theatre Club, which still performs at the venue.

TikTok has said it will be forced to “go dark” in the US on Sunday unless the government intervenes before a ban takes effect.

In a statement late on Friday, it said the White House and the Department of Justice had “failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to the service providers that are integral to maintaining TikTok’s availability”.

It said that unless the government immediately stepped in to assure the video app it would not be punished for violating the looming ban, it would be “forced to go dark on January 19”.

The statement follows a Supreme Court ruling earlier on Friday which upheld a law banning the app in the US unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform by Sunday.

Passed in April last year, the law says ByteDance must sell the US version of the platform to a neutral party to avert an outright ban.

TikTok challenged the law, arguing it violates free speech protections for its 170 million users in the country.

But the Supreme Court’s ruling means the US version of the app will be removed from app stores and web hosting services unless a buyer is found in the coming days.

It had been thought the ban would not impact TikTok users who already have the app downloaded on their phones.

But given updates would become unavailable once the ban comes into force, the app would eventually degrade and become unusable over time.

TikTok’s fresh statement on Friday, however, suggests it may immediately become unavailable to all existing users as well as those seeking to download it.

Influencers and content creators have been posting videos on the app bidding farewell to their followers ahead of the impending ban.

One creator, Nicole Bloomgarden, told the BBC not being on TikTok would amount to a significant salary cut, while another, Erika Thompson, said the educational content on the platform would be the “biggest loss” for the community.

Some users have been announcing where their content will be available to view next, including on the Chinese video app, Red Note, which has been little used by American users up until now.

• Is TikTok banned? What to know after Supreme Court decision
• Americans and Chinese share jokes on ‘alternative TikTok’

President Joe Biden’s term is due to end on Monday, with Donald Trump due to be sworn in as the next president on that day. The White House earlier said it would therefore fall on the incoming president to enforce the law.

Trump has indicated he is against the ban, after initially supporting the move. “My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation,” he said on Friday.

He also revealed he had spoken to China’s President Xi Jinping and discussed TikTok, among other issues.

In December Trump said he had a “warm spot” for the app as it helped him with young voters in the 2024 election.

Trump’s comments marked a U-turn on his stance in his first term as president when he aimed to enact a similar ban through an executive order.

ByteDance has vowed not to sell TikTok and said it planned to shut US operations of the app on Sunday unless there is a reprieve.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers voted to ban the video-sharing app last year, over concerns about its links to the Chinese government. TikTok has repeatedly stated it does not share information with Beijing.

The potential ban comes at a time of heightened concern in the US about Chinese espionage.

Cybersecurity firms have suggested that the app is capable of collecting users’ data beyond what they look at on TikTok.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland said authoritarian regimes should not have “unfettered access” to Americans’ data and that the decision prevented China from “weaponising TikTok to undermine America’s national security”.

China enacted a law in 2017 that compels Chinese nationals living abroad to co-operate with its intelligence apparatus.

But Beijing has denied it pressures companies to collect information on its behalf and criticised the ban. TikTok has repeatedly stressed it has not been asked for its data.

The app argued the law endangers free speech and would hit its users, advertisers, content creators and employees. TikTok has 7,000 US employees.

24 April 2024: Biden signs bipartisan TikTok bill, which gave Chinese parent company, ByteDance, six months to sell its controlling stake or be blocked in the US.

7 May 2024: TikTok files a lawsuit aiming to block the law, calling it an “extraordinary intrusion on free speech rights”.

2 August 2024: The US government files a lawsuit against TikTok, accusing the social media company of unlawfully collecting children’s data and failing to respond when parents tried to delete their children’s accounts.

6 December 2024: TikTok’s bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 is rejected by a federal appeals court.

27 December 2024: President-elect Donald Trump asks the US Supreme Court to delay the upcoming ban while he works on a “political resolution”.

10 January 2025: The Supreme Court’s nine justices hear from lawyers representing TikTok and content creators that the ban would be a violation of free speech protections for the platform’s more than 170 million users in the US.

17 January 2025: The US Supreme Court upholds the law that could lead to TikTok being banned within days over national security concerns.

19 January 2025: The deadline for TikTok to sell its US stake or face a ban. TikTok has indicated it will “go dark” on this day.

Israel’s government has approved the new Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal with Hamas, paving the way for it to take effect on Sunday.

The decision came after hours of discussions that continued late into the night. Two far-right ministers voted against the deal.

The security cabinet earlier recommended ratifying the agreement, saying it “supports the achievement of the objectives of the war”, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

It came hours after the prime minister’s office and Hamas both said they had finalised the details of the agreement, two days after it was announced by mediators Qatar, the US and Egypt.

Under the deal, 33 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza after 15 months of conflict will be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails during the first phase lasting six weeks.

Israeli forces will also withdraw from densely populated areas of Gaza, displaced Palestinians will be allowed to begin returning to their homes and hundreds of aid lorries will be allowed into the territory each day.

Negotiations for the second phase – which should see the remaining hostages released, a full Israeli troop withdrawal and “the restoration of sustainable calm” – will start on the 16th day.

The third and final stage will involve the reconstruction of Gaza – something which could take years – and the return of any remaining hostages’ bodies.

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Qatar has said the hostages to be released during the first phase will include “civilian women, female soldiers, children, the elderly, and sick and wounded civilians”.

Israel says three hostages are expected to be released on the first day of the ceasefire, with more small groups freed at regular intervals over the next six weeks.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and others – in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

More than 46,870 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. Most of the 2.3 million population has also been displaced, there is widespread destruction, and there are severe shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter due to a struggle to get aid to those in need.

Israel says 94 of the hostages are still being held by Hamas, of whom 34 are presumed dead. In addition, there are four Israelis who were abducted before the war, two of whom are dead.

Ahead of the Israeli government’s vote on the deal, Culture Minister Miki Zohar of Netanyahu’s Likud party said: “It’s a very hard decision, but we decided to support it because it’s very important to us to see all of our children, men and women back home.”

“We hope that in the future we will be able to finish the job in Gaza,” he added.

But far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said he was “horrified” by the details of the agreement, including that “life-sentenced terrorists” would be released in exchange for the hostages, and urged other ministers to join him in voting against it.

On Thursday, Ben-Gvir announced that his Jewish Power party would leave the governing coalition if the deal was approved. But he said he would not bring down the government in parliament and would return “if the war against Hamas resumes with full force”.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, another far-right politician who opposed the deal, has said his Religious Zionism party will quit if the war does not resume after the first phase ends.

The three-phase structure has also caused division and anxiety among some of the hostages’ families. They fear their relatives will be abandoned in Gaza after the first phase is done and are urging the government to ensure the second and third phases are also implemented.

“For 469 days our loved ones have been abandoned in captivity, and now, finally, there’s hope,” said Einav Zangauker, whose 25-year-old son Matan was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz.

“This agreement must be followed through to the end, to bring everyone home and end the war. Ending the war, returning everyone and returning to normalcy is in Israel’s interest.”

The government vote had been expected on Thursday, but the meeting was delayed after Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on parts of the deal – an allegation Hamas denied.

In the early hours of Friday, the prime minister’s office announced that the Israeli negotiating team in Doha had finalised the agreement.

Hamas also put out a statement which said the “obstacles” that emerged in relation to the terms of the deal had been resolved at dawn.

A source close to Hamas told AFP news agency that the first three hostages to be released would be women.

On Friday, the Israeli justice ministry published a list of 95 Palestinian prisoners which it said would be part of the first group to be freed in exchange for hostages. They comprised 69 women, 16 men and 10 minors, according to AFP.

Friday also saw a meeting held in Cairo to discuss mechanisms for implementing the deal, a senior Egyptian official told the BBC.

All necessary arrangements were agreed, including the formation of a joint operations room to ensure compliance, that would include Egyptian, Qatari, US, Palestinian and Israeli representatives, the official said.

Egyptian state-run Al-Qahera News TV also cited a source as saying that they had agreed on facilitating the entry of 600 aid lorries per day during the ceasefire.

That would require a more than 14-fold increase from January’s UN-reported daily average of 43 lorries. But Rik Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization’s Gaza representative, said “the possibility is very much there” if the Rafah crossing with Egypt and other crossings opened.

The WHO also plans to deliver a number of prefabricated hospitals to support the devastated healthcare sector. Half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are not functional, while the others are only partially functional.

There has been no respite for Palestinians on the ground in Gaza since the ceasefire deal was announced on Wednesday night.

Gaza’s Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said a total of 117 Palestinians, including 32 women and 30 children, had been killed in Israeli strikes since then.

Tamer Abu Shaaban said his young niece was killed by missile shrapnel as she played in the yard of a school in Gaza City where her displaced family was sheltering.

“Is this the truce they are talking about?” he told Reuters news agency as he stood beside her body at a mortuary. “What did this young girl, this child, do to deserve this?”

The Israeli military said on Thursday afternoon that it had conducted strikes on 50 “terror targets” across Gaza over the previous day and taken steps to mitigate harm to civilians.

The Israeli and Hamas negotiators never came face to face – but by the end, just one floor separated them.

Ceasefire talks via middlemen from Qatar, Egypt and the US had been dragging on for several months, at times without hope. Now the key players were all inside one building in Doha and the pace was frantic.

A deal was close but things had gone wrong before: one source described a last-minute push to stop the agreement breaking down while a podium was being set up so the Qatari prime minister could announce it.

“Literally, negotiations were up until 10 minutes before the press conference. So that’s how things were stitched up at the last minute,” the source familiar with the talks said.

The BBC has spoken to a number of officials on all sides of the negotiations to piece together how the final fraught days of the secretive process unfolded.

The deal did not come out of the blue.

The overall framework of the agreement reached on 15 January was broadly the same as the proposal set out by President Joe Biden during a White House address last May. It uses the same three-phase approach and will see a ceasefire, Israeli hostages released in return for Palestinian prisoners, and the Israeli military’s gradual withdrawal from Gaza.

But sources familiar with the discussions agreed the dynamics of the talks shifted decisively in mid-December and the pace changed.

Hamas, already reeling from Israel’s killing of its leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza two months earlier, had become increasingly isolated. Its Lebanon-based ally Hezbollah had been decimated and had agreed to a truce with Israel. Bashar al-Assad’s Iran-backed government in Syria had also been swept away.

The view in Washington is that Hamas was forced to abandon the idea that “the cavalry was coming to save it”, as one US official put it.

“It is hard to overstate how fundamentally the equation changed and what that [did] for Hamas’s calculus,” says a senior Biden administration official familiar with the talks.

An Israeli official who wished to remain anonymous said Hamas was “not in a rush” to strike a deal and had been “dictating” rather than negotiating. They said that changed after the death of Sinwar and Israeli operations against Hamas’s allies in the region.

On top of that, the official said, there was “momentum created by both US administrations” – the Biden White House and the incoming Trump team.

“We could not achieve a deal like this until conditions had changed,” the official added.

On 12 December, Biden’s negotiating team visited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Middle East envoy Brett McGurk and CIA director Bill Burns were all in attendance.

A US official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the meeting lasted “multiple hours” and focused on the “new regional equation” and “how we catapult from the Lebanon ceasefire into another round of intensive discussions” on Gaza.

There was also another piece on the chessboard by this stage: Donald Trump.

On 16 December, weeks after Trump’s victory, the BBC spoke to a Hamas official who was unusually optimistic about the ceasefire efforts, suggesting they seemed to be more serious.

The official – who had taken part in every set of talks since November 2023 – appeared reassured by the fact that an adviser to the incoming US president had sent a message to mediators indicating Trump wanted an agreement before his inauguration.

Trump had also warned of “all hell to pay” if Hamas did not agree to release the hostages – but the Palestinian official was bullish.

“This time, the pressure will not be limited to Hamas, as was customary under the Biden administration,” the official said. “There will also be pressure on Netanyahu. He is the one obstructing the deal, and Trump seems to understand that very well.”

However, that same official’s prediction that a deal could be done by Christmas proved to be optimistic.

During December, the process remained beset by problems. Israel publicly ruled out releasing certain high-profile prisoners, while the White House accused Hamas of throwing up roadblocks over the hostage releases.

A Biden administration official said: “Hamas [was] refusing to agree – and this was a breakdown at that point – to the list of hostages that would be released in phase one of the deal.

“That’s just so fundamental. This is a hostage release deal. Unless you agree to the list of hostages who will come out, there’s not going to be a deal.”

The same official said Hamas made “completely untrue” claims about not knowing the location of the hostages, and added: “We held the line and basically left the table until Hamas agreed to the hostage list.”

An anonymous Israeli official said Hamas had sought to conceal the number of living hostages and “tried to dictate that they would send us only dead bodies”.

For its part, Hamas claimed Israel unexpectedly added 11 names to the list of hostages it wanted to be released in the first phase. Hamas considered them reserve soldiers, and therefore not eligible to be released alongside the women, injured and elderly hostages due to be released in phase one.

The door was left open to Qatari and Egyptian mediators to continue their efforts and on 3 January, there was an apparent breakthrough when Hamas proposed the release of 110 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in return.

There were by now well-established terms of reference for such trades. For each hostage Hamas was to release, Israel would have to provide what had become known in the nomenclature of the draft deal as a “key” – meaning an agreed number or even specific identities of Palestinian prisoners.

A US official said: “There’s an equation for how many Palestinian prisoners come out. So for female soldiers, for example, there’s a key. And for elderly males, there’s a key. And for women civilians, there’s a key. And this has all been worked out and the prisoners have been named, hundreds and hundreds of prisoners on the list.”

The exchange file in the negotiations – Palestinian prisoners for hostages held by Hamas – became known as “the keys”.

During this phase of the talks, Hamas also relented on two long-standing demands: the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza in the first phase and a formal Israeli commitment to a total ceasefire.

Sensing a breakthrough, the Egyptian mediator urgently dispatched Major General Ahmed Abdel Khaleq – who oversees the Palestinian portfolio in Egyptian intelligence – to Doha. After meeting with Hamas representatives, he secured confirmation the group would make what a senior Hamas official described as “painful concessions.”

But on 6 January, according to a Palestinian official, Israel rejected the offer put forward by Hamas on the 11 hostages. Hamas responded by sending the BBC and other media outlets a list featuring the names and ages of 34 Israeli hostages. Two days later, the body of one of those on that list – Yosef AlZayadni – was found inside Gaza.

The list included reserve soldiers, which indicated Hamas was willing to release them in the first phase.

This appeared to be an attempt to embarrass Netanyahu and rally hostage families in Israel and around the world to pressure him into accepting the deal.

It was also an indication Hamas had not walked away.

Meetings stretching into the small hours of Doha’s hot evenings became common during the final stretch of the negotiations.

In the last month, they had developed into so-called “proximity talks”, with both sides in the same two-storey building, according to multiple accounts from officials familiar with the details.

A senior US official said Hamas’s delegation was on the first floor and Israel’s on the floor above. Mediators ran pieces of paper between them. Maps of Israeli troop withdrawal proposals and details about hostages or prisoners drafted for release were shuttled back and forth.

“That takes an enormous amount of work and, I have to say, all of that was not fully nailed down, really, until just the [final] hours,” said the official.

Inside the building, the delegations met separately with senior figures from Qatar and Egypt. Among those closely involved in the details was Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani.

Two crucial areas were worked on in the final phases of the talks: the lists for release of hostages held by Hamas and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, and the positions for Israeli troop withdrawals from populated areas in Gaza during phase one.

By 9 January, the pressure had escalated. Trump’s envoy, Biden’s envoy, and the Egyptian intelligence chief convened in Doha for a serious eight-hour negotiation session.

A senior Egyptian official told the BBC: “We are at the closest point to reaching an agreement.”

Agreement had been reached on 90% of the outstanding issues, but further talks were required.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s recently appointed Middle East envoy, was dispatched to Tel Aviv to meet Netanyahu. Though not yet officially in post, the New York property tycoon had become more and more involved in the talks, which Trump was taking a keen interest in.

He was about to be sent on an assignment that proved to be pivotal.

When Trump’s man in the Middle East arrived in Israel on 11 January, it was the sabbath.

Witkoff was asked to wait until the sabbath had ended before he met Netanyahu but, in a breach of custom, the envoy refused and demanded to meet the prime minister immediately.

Netanyahu appears to have come under serious strong-arming during the meeting and the intervention from the Trump camp to get the Israeli government to set aside its final reservations seems to have been critical.

The meeting was reportedly fractious and the message to Netanyahu from the incoming president was clear: Trump wants a deal – now get it done.

Commenting on those talks, an Israeli official who asked to remain anonymous said it was a “very important meeting”.

When Witkoff returned to Doha, he remained in the room with the talks, spending time with Biden’s envoy Mr McGurk, in what two US officials called a “near unprecedented” transition effort in American diplomacy.

This week, Hamas official Bassem Naim told Al Arabiya he “couldn’t imagine that [the deal] could be possible without the pressure of the incoming administration led by President Trump” – and specifically cited Witkoff’s presence at the talks.

By now, the fact a deal could be imminent was out in the open and public expectation was building – not least among the families of those being held hostage and Palestinians displaced inside Gaza.

The final 72 hours of talks involved a constant back and forth over the finer points of how the deal would be implemented, according to one account.

One source close to the negotiations described the hammering out of “arrangements and logistics” for how the hostages would be released in Gaza and for the withdrawal movements of Israeli troops.

On 12 January, a senior Palestinian official familiar with the negotiations said “all the officials are here in the same building”, adding: “Tonight is decisive. We are only a few steps away from an agreement.”

That meeting lasted six hours – but, like so many times before, an impasse was reached.

This time the disagreement that arose was over the mechanism for the return of displaced individuals from southern Gaza to the north.

Israel wanted to search returnees and their vehicles to ensure no militants or military equipment were being transported – which Hamas refused to accept.

Mediators proposed that Qatari and Egyptian technical teams conduct the searches instead. Both sides agreed and one of the final remaining stalemates was resolved.

On 15 January shortly after 18:00, a Hamas negotiator wrote in a message to the BBC: “Everything is finished.”

The podium was being readied.

A deal which once looked impossible had taken shape.

Anastasiia Fedchenko, 36, wails in anguish – her agony echoing around the gilded walls of St Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv.

She sits with her hands resting on both sides of her stomach. She is heavily pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her husband Andriy Kusmenko is just inches away, in uniform – in an open coffin.

The marine commander was killed in action in eastern Ukraine on 4 January this year. He is now and forever 33. While Andriy fought in the war, Anastasiia wrote about it, as a journalist.

His brothers in arms file past, dropping red roses into his coffin. As funeral prayers come to an end, Anastasiia leans forward and gives “the love of her life” one last kiss.

Outside the cathedral she pays tribute to her “most handsome husband” who died for his country.

“I am sorry my daughter will never see her father,” she tells the BBC, “but she will know that he was a soldier, an officer, and that he did everything he could for Ukraine to exist for her and for other generations.”

“This war will last as long as Russia does. I truly fear our children will inherit it from us and will have to go and fight.”

Not according to Donald Trump, who famously claimed he could end the war in a day, and who returns to the White House next week. He is already pushing for peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.

That would dishonour the dead, according to Sgt Dmytro, call sign “Smile”, who fought alongside Andriy and came to the cathedral to mourn him.

“Let the people in power decide, but I don’t think the ones who fell would want them [Ukraine’s leadership] to sit around the table,” he says.

“After the funeral, we are heading back to work. We will fight for every Ukrainian who fell.”

Plenty here believe – like Anastasiia and Dmytro – that far too many Ukrainians have been killed to try to do a deal with Russia. But public opinion is shifting, and others believe there is too much death and destruction not to do a deal.

As Ukraine battles through its third winter of war, one word is now little spoken here – “victory”.

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, we heard it everywhere. It was a rallying cry for a nation suddenly confronted by columns of enemy tanks. But the past is truly a foreign country – and one with more territory.

Moscow now controls almost one-fifth of its neighbour (including the Crimean Peninsula, captured in 2014) and says any peace talks must take that into account.

The Ukraine of 2025 is a place of cold, hard realities – where cities empty, graveyards fill, and plenty of soldiers desert their posts.

Six hours drive from the capital, in the heart of Ukraine, a young soldier is in the dock.

Serhiy Hnezdilov, a burly 24-year-old, is locked in a glass cubicle in a packed courtroom in the city of Dnipro. He is on trial on charges of desertion, and is one of many.

Since 2022, around 100,000 cases have been opened against soldiers who left their units, according to data from Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s office.

When Hnezdilov went absent without leave, he went public with demands for a clear time frame for ending military service. He says he is ready to fight but not without a plan for demobilisation. He has already served for five years, including two before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“We must continue to fight,” he told me during a break in the hearing, “we have no other choice.”

“But soldiers are not slaves. Everyone who has spent three years or more on the front line deserves the right to rest. The authorities have been promising for a very long time to set terms of service, but they have not done it.”

In court he also complained of corruption among commanders, and of deadly incompetence.

After the brief procedural hearing, he was handcuffed for the journey back to prison. If convicted he faces up to 12 years in jail. “Help Ukraine,” he told us, as he was led away.

Many other Ukrainian soldiers are still straining every sinew on the front lines, trying to at least slow the Russian advance.

Mykhailo, 42, the chain-smoking commander of a drone unit, does battle every night fuelled by “Non-Stop” – a Ukrainian energy drink.

He is with the 68th “Jaeger” Brigade, fighting to hold on to the eastern front-line city of Pokrovsk – a key transportation hub. The Russians are closing in on two sides.

Mykhailo drives us to a Ukrainian position – a journey we can only risk after dark, and in an armoured car. The Russians too have eyes in the skies. Their drones are a constant threat. He is watchful, and weary.

“I went to the enlistment office in the first days,” he tells us, “and I hoped everything would go quickly. Honestly, I am tired. Time off is rare [in his case a total of 40 days in three years]. The only thing that saves me is that I can video chat with my family.”

We arrive at a disused house where Mykhailo and his men unload their equipment and set up a pop-up drone position. Screens are carried in, and cables connected.

Outside, troops erect an antenna taller than a two-story building. They work fast under torchlight – using red beams not white as these are harder to detect. Then they assemble bombs to arm their “vampire” – a supersized attack drone.

For the next few hours, we have front-row seats as Mykhailo – call sign “Admin” – pilots the drone, his eyes darting from screen to screen. First, he drops supplies to front-line Ukrainian troops and then drops an anti-tank mine on Russian forces underground. It falls slightly wide of its target.

He is up against high winds and Russian jamming. All the while he is on the look-out for incoming enemy drones.

Mykhailo detects a Russian warplane in the skies. Minutes later we hear the distinct thud of three Russian glide bombs. “It’s far,” he tells us. That turns out to mean two to three kilometres away.

During a lull, I ask Mykhailo if he thinks a peace deal is possible. “Maybe not,” he says. “This [Putin] is a completely unstable person, and that’s putting it very gently.”

“I hope that at some stage the enemy will stop because they tire out, or someone with a sound mind comes to power.”

He won’t comment on President Trump.

While Mykhailo is a veteran of this war, one of his men is a beginner. Twenty-four-year-old David joined up last September as the Russians neared his hometown. He now spends his time handling explosives – though he would prefer to be at college learning languages.

“No-one knows how long the war will last,” he says, “maybe not even the politicians”.

“I would like it to end soon so that civilians won’t suffer, and people won’t die anymore. But considering how things are now on the front line, it won’t be soon.”

He believes that if the guns are silenced, it will be only a pause, before Moscow comes back for more.

The winds get stronger and the vampire drone crash-lands. It’s out of action for now. The unit pack up and leave, as fast as they came. They will be back in action at nightfall, resuming the duels in the sky.

But on the ground the Russians keep inching forward, and the Trump presidency will mean pressure for a deal. And there is one more hard truth here: if it comes it is unlikely to be on Ukraine’s terms.

Serious. Ominous. A “message picture”.

Those are some of the descriptions of Donald Trump’s newest official portrait, captured by his chief photographer, Daniel Torok. In the photo, the president-elect wears a stern expression, eyes cocked.

“The official portrait of the president is the most printed, most seen image of the president, ever,” former White House photographer Eric Draper told the BBC.

He worked for George W Bush throughout his eight-year presidency, taking both of his official portraits.

Mr Draper’s first impression of Trump’s image was that it was “heavily manipulated” with both studio lighting and retouching after the shoot.

The photo appeared to use “monster” lighting, he added, to dramatically illuminate the president-elect from below and make his eyes pop.

The lighting setup gives the image an “ominous” look often seen in horror films, said Eliska Sky, a portrait photographer with the London Institute of Photography. She compared the portrayal of Trump to a boxer before a fight.

The lighting “suggests seriousness and intent”, according to Paul Duerinckx, a senior documentary photography lecturer at the Swansea College of Art.

This image is striking, he added, because the light source in most photos comes from above, like the sun or ceiling lights, and flipping the source in this photo “tends to really have an effect on us”.

Many on social media compared the photo to Donald Trump’s ‘mug shot’, taken in Fulton County Jail in Georgia after he was charged with attempting to overturn his 2020 election loss – a charge Trump denies.

Photography YouTuber Jared Polin said that he discussed the portrait with Mr Torok and was told the mug shot did provide inspiration.

“The mug shot photo was one of the most searched images, maybe ever,” Polin claims Mr Torok said. Mr Torok did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

The mug shot, taken in 2023, became part of US culture, adorning everything from coffee cups to T-shirts.

The style of Trump’s new portrait is a departure from the look of his 2017 image, and that of past presidents, including George W Bush.

“You definitely make photos to please the client, and in this case, I think this is the type of image they wanted to portray,” Mr Draper told the BBC.

He recalled sitting down with then-President Bush and first lady Laura Bush to pore over a selection of images before they picked their favourite.

“The idea was to have it look like nice, pleasant lighting, have it look like a professional portrait, with a nice expression because these photos are going to be welcoming people as they walk into their post office,” he said.

Andrew Parsons is a political photographer who worked for four British prime ministers from David Cameron to Liz Truss, as well as Boris Johnson for 13 years.

“It’s a message picture, I’m delivering you a message,” he said of Trump’s photo. “It’s not like a candid laugh, it’s a stern, hard, look straight down the barrel of the lens.”

By contrast, Mr Parsons said the 2017 iteration was a “Donald Trump businessman picture”.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of political images like Trump’s, he said. “A picture can make or break a political campaign.”

For online sensation Erika Thompson, TikTok is the most powerful social media platform to educate her 11 million followers about her life’s passion: bees.

The loss of the platform in the US – made more likely after the Supreme Court upheld a ban that is set to be enacted next week – will be “substantive” financially for Ms Thompson, a Texas beekeeper, but it is also a loss of an educational tool.

“There are a lot of other people on the platform offering educational content or informative content,” she told the BBC. “That’s the biggest loss and that’s what should be focused on, beyond the financial aspect, is the loss that we as a society – the people who use TikTok – will certainly feel.”

Some 170 million Americans use the app and website. Unless its China-based parent company ByteDance sells the platform or intervention comes from the executive branch, the platform is set to go dark in the US on Sunday.

The fate of the social media giant was left in the hands of the US Supreme Court after both Democratic and Republican lawmakers voted to ban the video-sharing app last year, over concerns about its links to the Chinese government and worries about the app being a national security risk.

TikTok has repeatedly stated it does not share information with Beijing.

But users and content creators say the social media platform has grown to become a fixture in society – and has helped regular users capture the limelight with millions of followers. It’s quickly become a preferred social media outlet to some and a key revenue stream for others.

Now they worry what will happen if the ban is not stopped.

Creators who make a living off social media apps told the BBC that TikTok is the superior platform.

That was true for Ms Thomspon whose first TikTok video received more than 50 million views in the first 24 hours after it was posted.

“I have not experienced the same success on other platforms,” she said. “I can post the exact same video on Instagram, for example, and receive not even close to the engagement.”

Ross Smith who shares funny videos with his 98-year-old grandmother to more than 24 million followers on TikTok described it as one of the few platforms where it is easy to become a creator.

On TikTok, he said, “you can find success overnight”.

Other platforms trying to replicate the short-form scroll format featured on TikTok have yet to find success, Mr Smith told the BBC. Ms Thompson agreed.

“I rarely hear of people going viral on Instagram or someone being an Instagram sensation but those are words you hear frequently on TikTok,” Ms Thompson said.

Codey James, a fashion influencer with tens of thousands of follower on TikTok, told the BBC that audiences do not necessarily transfer from one platform to another.

“I know someone who has hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers and maybe only ten thousand Instagram followers,” Mr James told the BBC.

Many content creators survive off the income they earn on TikTok.

Some told the BBC that their lives would change inordinately without the platform.

When brands and companies want advertisement content from a creator, they want those creators to post on TikTok, Nicole Bloomgarden, a fashion designer and artist, told the BBC.

“Indirectly, TikTok was the majority of my income because all brands want their stuff to be promoted on the app,” Ms Bloomgarden said.

It is not clear statistically if creators’ most lucrative source of income is TikTok, but many told the BBC that it makes up a substantial portion of their revenue.

A 2022 survey from the creator-focused start-up Linktree, found some 12% of full-time creators made more than $50,000 a year from their social media platforms.

Some 46% said they made less than $1,000, the survey of 9,500 people found.

This is not the first time a major social media platform has disappeared.

In 2017, Vine – a platform where users could share up to six-second-long video clips – shut down.

For creators at the time, it was a shock.

Q Park, a content creator with 37.7 million followers on TikTok, was one of those people.

He spent years building a following on Vine – the only platform he used at the time – and when it disappeared, he said it “felt like my whole business was shutting down”.

But in some ways, it was good for him, too. It forced him to learn how to create different content for different audiences.

“That experience showed me that if you have faith in your ability to create content, you’ll build a following somewhere else,” Mr Park told the BBC.

As the ban approaches, some creators have started flocking to another Chinese platform, RedNote – a TikTok competitor popular with young people in China, Taiwan and other Mandarin-speaking populations.

RedNote was the most downloaded app on Apple’s US App Store earlier this week.

While some creators are diversifying where they post in hopes of growing audiences elsewhere, others are hoping the ban won’t come to fruition.

“TikTok is a beast,” Park said. “Part of me thinks it might be too big to fail.”

“It will be revived somehow, it’s too big of an economy now.”

The Metropolitan Police failed to challenge a claim from Mohamed Al Fayed that he was too ill to respond to a sexual assault allegation, according to an official complaint.

An American woman, Pelham Spong, reported to officers in 2017 that the tycoon had assaulted her a decade before, but the investigation was shut down with police saying they were “unable to obtain an account from the suspect owing to his poor state of health”.

But in a complaint to the UK’s police watchdog, shared with BBC News, Ms Spong’s lawyers say police should have been more thorough in checking the medical evidence provided to them.

The Met said its review of allegations relating to Mohamed Al Fayed remained ongoing and would share its findings as soon as possible.

The complaint said this police failure reflects an “apathy towards victims” or an “institutional desire to insulate Mr Al Fayed from prosecution”.

The BBC has contacted Al Fayed’s estate for comment.

Ms Spong is being represented by the high profile US lawyer, Sigrid McCawley who led legal actions against Jeffrey Epstein – who died in a New York prison cell as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.

“This has gone on too long,” Ms McCawley said. “Too many survivors were victims of Fayed and they reported to police.

“They got zero protection. That’s appalling and it has to stop.”

Ms Spong applied for a job as a PA to Al Fayed in 2008, while living in Paris, aged 23.

She told police later that while in London for interviews, Al Fayed grabbed and kissed her, making clear that sex with the boss was a requirement of the role.

The company also required her to have an intimate medical examination, the results of which, she says, were passed to Al Fayed, who appeared to know she had been diagnosed with a minor infection.

She described what had happened in emails shortly afterwards, to friends and a recruitment consultant, but was too scared of Al Fayed’s power to report him.

Ms Spong finally felt able to come forward nine years later and a Metropolitan Police investigation began.

In June 2018 she was emailed by a detective to say they had been provided with expert evidence about Al Fayed, which would “have an impact” on the investigation.

​​Thirteen days later a more senior officer said the case would be closed, partly because police had been unable to obtain the businessman’s response to the allegations, due to his health.

The Met said the case couldn’t be referred to prosecutors because there wasn’t enough evidence.

Ms Spong’s complaint to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) concludes the decision to terminate the investigation was “premature and flawed”.

The complaint said: “The police… ought to have been more thorough in assessing the substance and veracity” of the medical evidence provided by Al Fayed.

Al Fayed’s son Omar recently told the Mail On Sunday his father had pretended to suffer from dementia so he could evade prosecution for sexual crimes.

Aging suspects in historical abuse cases have been a common challenge for other police forces. However three years before the Al Fayed investigation ended, a disgraced Church of England Bishop, Peter Ball, was successfully prosecuted despite being in his 80s.

The same year an attempt was made to prosecute the Labour peer Lord Janner, despite four doctors agreeing he was suffering from dementia. He died before a trial could take place.

The Met also told Ms Spong that due to the “historic nature of this allegation” no medical evidence, telephone, CCTV, forensics or eyewitness accounts could be gathered”.

However she says she had given them a file of emails, letters and medical records from the application process, which she has also shared with the BBC.

These reveal the names of employees with whom she came in contact, including two doctors involved in the medical examination she was told she had to undergo.

Her IOPC complaint alleges the police failed to obtain formal statements from the doctors, a recruiter who suggested Ms Spong for the job, and other Harrods staff who might have been able to corroborate her claims.

Ms Spong’s lawyers also believe police asked the wrong company for records about her job application – approaching the firm managing the apartment block where she stayed in London, rather than Harrods itself.

The complaint concludes: “These investigative failures, particularly when viewed alongside the now disclosed prior and concurrent accounts from other women and girls alleging similar misconduct by Mr Al Fayed, suggest a concerning pattern of systemic inaction by the Met.”

Ms Spong said she had been told by the police that if more women made allegations against Al Fayed they could continue to investigate.

But an attempt to reopen the case in 2021 stalled within months.

The Met has confirmed that it was aware of 21 allegations against Al Fayed before the BBC broadcast its documentary last year.

Ms Spong said: “More women did, in fact, come forward to tell their stories of abuse to the Met, and others had before me, and it didn’t make any difference. The Met did nothing.”

Her lawyer Ms McCawley asked: “Who were the decision makers who allowed Fayed to get a complete pass here?”

“It’s beyond unacceptable. They wouldn’t do that with any other suspect – they would have been prosecuted.”

Ms Spong and her lawyers hope the IOPC complaint will be the start of a legal campaign by US victims for a wider investigation into the response to the Al Fayed abuse scandal.

Ms McCawley’s battle against Epstein led to a US Department of Justice investigation “of those who did not do their duty,” she said.

She described Ms Spong’s complaint as a “little jab at the Met”, but “part of a much larger and significant event”.

The IOPC can either reject the complaint, hold its own investigation, or pass the case to the Met for investigation overseen by the watchdog.

It can recommend police officers face misconduct proceedings or prosecution.

The Met added it had transformed the way it investigated sexual offences, putting victims at the heart of its response.

Its review of previous Al Fayed investigations is looking for evidence of misconduct or corruption among officers.

The Met is also investigating people who may have enabled Al Fayed’s abusive behaviour.

Donald Trump has promised big changes for the world’s largest economy.

An “end to the devastating inflation crisis”, tariffs and big cuts to taxes, regulation and the size of government are all on the agenda.

This combination, he says, will ignite an economic boom and revive withering faith in the American dream.

“We’re at the beginning of a great, beautiful golden age of business,” he pledged from the podium at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.

But looming over the president-elect are warnings that many of his policies are more likely to hurt the economy than help it.

And as he prepares to set his plans in motion, analysts say he is about to run into political and economic realities that will make it hard to deliver all his promises.

“There’s no clear path forward at this time for how to meet all these goals because they’re inherently contradictory,” said Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute.

Here’s a closer look at his key promises.

What Trump promised:

“Prices will come down”, he said repeatedly.

It was a risky pledge – prices rarely fall, unless there is an economic crisis.

Inflation, which measures not price levels but the rate of price increases, has already come down significantly, while proving tough to stamp out completely.

What complicates it:

Trump pinned his claim to promises to expand already-record US oil and gas production, reducing energy costs. But the forces that affect inflation, and energy prices, are mostly outside presidential control.

To the extent that White House policies make a difference, analysts have warned that many of Trump’s ideas – including tax cuts, tariffs and migrant deportations – risk making the problem worse.

Economist John Cochrane of the right-leaning Hoover Institution said the big question facing the economy is how Trump will juggle “tension” between the more traditional pro-business parts of his coalition and the “nationalists” who are focused on issues such as border control and rivalry with China.

“Clearly both camps can’t get what they want,” he said. “That’s going to be the fundamental story and that’s why we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

What Trump voters want:

Inflation promises were key to Trump’s victory but by many measures, such as growth and job creation, the economy overall was not in the dire straits he painted on the campaign trail.

Since his win, he has tried to lower expectations, warning it would be “very hard” to bring down prices.

Amanda Sue Mathis, 34, of Michigan, says she thinks Trump’s promises are feasible but could take time.

“If anybody can make better deals to make things more affordable for Americans, it’s Donald Trump,” she said. “He literally wrote the book on the art of deal making.”

What Trump promised:

Trump’s most unorthodox economic promise was his vow to place tariffs – a border tax – of at least 10% on all goods coming into the US, which would rise to more than 60% for products from China.

He has since ramped up the threats against specific countries, including allies such as Canada, Mexico and Denmark.

Some of Trump’s advisers have suggested the tariffs are negotiating tools for other issues, like border security, and he will ultimately settle for a more targeted, or gradual approach.

What complicates it:

The debate has raised speculation about how aggressive Trump will decide to be, given the potential economic risks.

Analysts say tariffs are likely to lead to higher prices for Americans and pain for companies hit by foreign retaliation.

And unlike Trump’s first term, any measures will arrive at a delicate moment, as the long-running US economic expansion appears to be in its final stages.

Even if the toughest tariffs never materialise, the policy debate alone is generating uncertainty that could depress investment and reduce growth in the US by as much as 0.6% by mid-2025, according to Oxford Economics.

“They’ve got a very limited margin for error,” Michael Cembalest, the chairman of market and investment strategy for JP Morgan Asset Management said in a recent podcast. He warned the desire for a major overhaul was likely to “break something”, though what remains to be seen.

Trade lawyer Everett Eissenstat, who served as a White House economic adviser during Trump’s first term, said he was expecting an across-the-board tariff, but acknowledged the plan would compete with other goals.

“There’s always tensions. There’s never perfection in the policy world. And obviously one of the reasons that I think he was re-elected is concerns over inflation,” he said.

“We’re in a different world [than the first term] and we’ll have to see how that plays out,” he said.

What Trump voters want:

Lifelong Republican Ben Maurer said he wanted Trump to focus on the wider goal of reviving manufacturing in the US, rather than tariffs per se.

“I feel like it’s more of a negotiation tactic than an actual policy route,” said the 38-year-old, who lives in Pennsylvania.

“Not saying he won’t put tariffs on anything – I think he will – but I think it’s going to be more strategic of exactly what he puts tariffs on. I support that and I feel like his judgement is good enough to decide what to tariff.”

What Trump promised:

He has put forward a growth plan – lower taxes, less regulation and a smaller government, which he says will unleash American business.

What complicates it:

But analysts say cutting regulation might take longer than expected. And Trump is widely expected to prioritise extending expiring tax cuts above cutting spending.

Ms Boccia of the Cato Institute said she expected borrowing to surge under the Trump administration and the rise to add to inflation pressures.

In financial markets, those concerns have already helped to drive up interest rates on government debt in recent weeks, she noted.

• What is the debt ceiling?

Though Trump will also face some resistance from those inside his party worried about already high US debt, Ms Boccia said extending the tax cuts – projected to add more than $4.5tn to US debt over the next decade – seemed all but certain.

By contrast, Trump ruled much of the budget off limits during his campaign when he promised to leave big programmes, such as Social Security, unchanged.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy has also publicly scaled back its ambitions.

“The signals that the market is sending right now are getting picked up by economists but not really by Washington,” she said. “In the end, it is politically taking the path of least resistance.”

What Trump voters want:

Mr Maurer said shrinking the bureaucracy was key to his hopes for the administration.

“Government spending is absolute insanity,” he said.

Every week, Rajesh PN Rao, a computer scientist, gets emails from people claiming they’ve cracked an ancient script that has stumped scholars for generations.

These self-proclaimed codebreakers – ranging from engineers and IT workers to retirees and tax officers – are mostly from India or of Indian origin living abroad. All of them are convinced they’ve deciphered the script of the Indus Valley Civilisation, a blend of signs and symbols.

“They claim they’ve solved it and that the ‘case is closed’,” says Mr Rao, Hwang Endowed Professor at the University of Washington and author of peer-reviewed studies on the Indus script.

Adding fuel to the race, MK Stalin, the chief minister of southern India’s Tamil Nadu state, recently upped the stakes, announcing a $1m prize for anyone who can crack the code.

The Indus, or Harappan, civilisation – one of the world’s earliest urban societies – emerged 5,300 years ago in present-day northwest India and Pakistan. Its austere farmers and traders, living in walled, baked-brick cities, thrived for centuries. Since its discovery a century ago, around 2,000 sites have been uncovered across the region.

The reasons behind the society’s sudden decline remain unclear, with no apparent evidence of war, famine or a natural disaster. But its greatest mystery is its undeciphered script, leaving its language, governance and beliefs shrouded in secrecy.

For over a century, experts – linguists, scientists and archaeologists – have tried to crack the Indus script. Theories have linked it to early Brahmi scripts, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages, Sumerian, and even claimed it’s just made up of political or religious symbols.

Yet, its secrets remain locked away. “The Indus script is perhaps the most important system of writing that is undeciphered,” says Asko Parpola, a leading Indologist.

These days, the more popular spectacular theories equate the script with content from Hindu scriptures and attribute spiritual and magical meanings to the inscriptions.

Most of these attempts ignore that the script, made up of signs and symbols, mostly appears on stone seals used for trade and commerce, making it unlikely they contain religious or mythological content, according to Mr Rao.

There are many challenges to deciphering the Indus script.

First, the relatively small number of scripts – about 4,000 of them, almost all on small objects such as seals, pottery and tablets.

Then there’s the brevity of each script – average length of about five signs or symbols – with no long texts on walls, tablets or upright stone slabs.

Consider the commonly found square seals: lines of signs run along their top, with a central animal motif – often a unicorn – and an object beside it, whose meaning remains unknown.

There’s also no bilingual artefact like the Rosetta Stone, which helped scholars decode Egyptian hieroglyphs. Such artefacts contain text in two languages, offering a direct comparison between a known and unknown script.

Recent advancements in deciphering the Indus script have used computer science to tackle this ancient enigma. Researchers have used machine learning techniques to analyse the script, trying to identify patterns and structures that could lead to its understanding.

Nisha Yadav, a researcher at the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), is one of them. In collaboration with scientists like Mr Rao, her work has focused on applying statistical and computational methods to analyse the undeciphered script.

Using a digitised data set of Indus signs from the script, they have found interesting patterns. A caveat: “We still don’t know whether the signs are complete words, or part of words or part of sentences,” says Ms Yadav.

Ms Yadav and co-researchers found 67 signs that account for 80% of the writing on the script. A sign which looks like a jar with two handles turned out to be the most frequently used sign. Also, the scripts began with a large number of signs and ended with fewer of them. Some sign patterns appear more often than expected.

Also, a machine-learning model of the script was created to restore the illegible and damaged texts, paving the way for further research.

“Our understanding is that the script is structured and there is an underlying logic in the writing,” says Ms Yadav.

To be sure, several ancient scripts remain undeciphered, facing challenges similar to the Indus script.

Mr Rao cites scripts like Proto-Elamite (Iran), Linear A (Crete), and Etruscan (Italy), whose underlying language is unknown.

Others, like Rongorongo (Easter Island) and Zapotec (Mexico), have known languages, “but their symbols remain unclear”. The Phaistos Disc from Crete – a mysterious, fired clay disc from the Minoan civilisation – “closely mirrors the Indus script’s challenges – its language is unknown, and only one known example exists”.

Back in India, it is not entirely clear why Mr Stalin of Tamil Nadu announced a reward for deciphering the script. His announcement followed a new study linking Indus Valley signs to graffiti found in his state.

K Rajan and R Sivananthan analysed over 14,000 graffiti-bearing pottery fragments from 140 excavated sites in Tamil Nadu, which included more than 2,000 signs. Many of these signs closely resemble those in the Indus script, with 60% of the signs matching, and over 90% of south Indian graffiti marks having “parallels” with those from the Indus civilisation, the researchers claim.

This “suggests a kind of cultural contact” between the Indus Valley and south India, Mr Rajan and Mr Sivananthan say.

Many believe Mr Stalin’s move to announce an award positions him as a staunch champion of Tamil heritage and culture, countering Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules in Delhi.

But researchers are confident that there will be no claimants for Mr Stalin’s prize soon. Scholars have compiled complete, updated databases of all known inscribed artefacts – crucial for decipherment. “But what did the Indus people write? I wish we knew,” says Ms Yadav.

A striking Tesla Cybertruck which is illegal to drive in the UK due to safety concerns has been seized by police in Greater Manchester.

Officers spotted the eye-catching vehicle, which carries a price tag of about £48,000, in Whitefield, Bury, and stopped the driver on Thursday night.

In April 2024, Tesla recalled thousands of its new Cybertrucks, which weigh more than three tonnes, after concerns about its accelerator pedals.

In a social media post, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said: “Whilst this may seem trivial to some, legitimate concerns exist around the safety of other road users or pedestrians if they were involved in a collision with the Cybertruck.”

It said the vehicle, which was registered and insured abroad, was confiscated and they had reported the driver, who is a UK resident.

Their post added: “The Tesla Cybertruck is not road-legal in the UK and does not hold a certificate of conformity.”

The Cybertruck, which is made of rocket-like, bullet-proof steel materials, was launched in 2019.

The vehicle has been on a promotional tour across the Middle East and Europe, including at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK in 2024.

However, it has not yet passed UK road safety tests.

GMP said the car that was seized had been referred to Operation Wolverine, which was established in 2007 to target drivers without insurance.

The owner will have to prove ownership and correct insurance prior to release.