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.

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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.

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.

A court in India has convicted a man of the rape and murder of a trainee doctor – a crime that sparked nationwide outrage.

Sanjay Roy, a hospital volunteer worker, was found guilty over the attack, which happened in August last year at a hospital in Kolkata city in West Bengal state.

The incident caused shockwaves across the country, leading to widespread protests and concerns over the safety of healthcare workers in India, especially women.

Judge Anirban Das said the sentence, which will be announced on Monday, would range from life in prison to the death penalty. Roy has maintained his innocence and said previously that he was being framed.

The victim’s mother told the AFP news agency that people would lose faith in India’s legal system if Roy was not handed the death penalty.

The body of the 31-year-old doctor, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was found on 9 August 2024 at at the busy, state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata.

After a gruelling 36-hour shift, she had gone to sleep in the hospital’s seminar hall. Her half-naked, severely injured, body was later discovered near a podium by a colleague.

• Women lead night protests after doctor’s rape and murder
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• Rape and murder of doctor sparks protests

The post-mortem examination found the victim had been strangled and had injuries showing she fought back.

According to the charge sheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which the BBC has seen, Roy went to the hospital in a drunken state and found the female doctor sleeping alone.

He was arrested a day after the crime.

The case was initially being investigated by the Kolkata police but later the court handed over the probe to the CBI after state officials were accused of mishandling it.

For weeks after the incident, doctors and medical students across India held protests and rallies demanding justice and better security for doctors.

One such protest, the “Reclaim the Night” march, saw tens of thousands of women walk through the streets at night in Kolkata and other cities on 14 August, the eve of India’s Independence Day.

In December, the victim’s parents petitioned the Calcutta High Court for a fresh investigation, expressing a lack of faith in the CBI’s investigation.

They argued that Roy alone could not have committed the crime and stated they would be satisfied only when all those involved were brought to justice. The high court has said it will consider the plea only if the Supreme Court – which is monitoring the case – directs it to do so.

The incident raised concerns about rising cases of violence against health workers in India – many of whom face physical abuse by angry patients or their relatives.

A 2017 survey by the Indian Medical Association found that over 75% of doctors in India have experienced some form of violence. The survey also revealed that nearly 63% of doctors fear potential violence while treating patients.

Meanwhile, sexual violence against women remains a widespread problem in India. More than 31,000 rapes were reported in India in 2022, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

Many rape cases in India go unreported, mostly due to social stigma around sexual violence and a lack of trust in the police and judicial system. Activists say this often results in the victim being shamed instead of the perpetrator, especially in rural areas.

In 2012, the rape and murder of a medical student by a group of men in India’s capital Delhi drew global attention and triggered similar, wider protests.

The public anger prompted authorities to amend rape laws in 2013. The changes broadened the definition of the crime, set strict punishments for sexual assault and lowered the age at which a person can be tried from 18 to 16.

Raids to detain and deport migrants living in the US without permission are set to begin on the first full day of the new Trump administration, US media report.

The operations – threatened by Donald Trump’s “border tsar” Tom Homan – could begin in Chicago, a city with a large migrant population, as early as Tuesday, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal say.

Trump has said he will oversee the largest deportation programme in US history.

In an interview with Fox News this week, Homan promised a “big raid” across the country. He has previously said Chicago will be “ground zero” for the mass deportations.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency deports illegal migrants all the time. However, the operation it is expected to launch after Trump’s inauguration on Monday is expected to target so-called “sanctuary” cities that limit co-operation with federal immigration officials.

Along with Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles are among the scores of US cities that have adopted “sanctuary” policies.

“January 21st, you’re going to look for a lot of ICE agents in your city looking for criminals and gang members,” Homan told a Republican gathering in Chicago last month. “Count on it. It will happen.”

New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Miami are also due to be targeted with raids, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing unnamed sources familiar with the plans.

Under Democratic President Joe Biden, ICE generally prioritised the arrest of illegal migrants who were serious criminals, had crossed the border recently or posed a national security threat.

While Trump’s team has signalled that it will begin with migrants who had committed crimes, all illegal migrants – including those who have lived and worked in the US for many years and have no criminal history – are more likely to be arrested and deported.

Immigration raids at construction sites where undocumented migrants are often employed are also expected to resume, after being discontinued by the Biden administration, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Ahead of the expected hardening of US policy, more migrant farm workers have been seeking advice on dealing with immigration officials and assigning temporary guardians for their children.

“The administration is not yet sworn in, but people are already afraid,” Sarait Martinez, executive director of the Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, which supports Mexican farm workers in California, told Reuters news agency.

As well as pledging to deport millions of illegal migrants and threatening workplace raids, some reports suggest that Trump could also do away with a longstanding policy that has made churches off-limits for ICE arrests.

However, the upcoming raids are likely to pose significant difficulties for officials – with limited custody space to hold those detained.

At the same time, the Laken Riley Act – named after a college student who was murdered last year in Georgia by a Venezuelan man previously arrested for shoplifting – is expected to be passed by US lawmakers next week.

The proposed legislation will require the federal government to detain migrants living in the US illegally who are suspected of criminal activity – even if they are not charged with any crime.

Three people have been killed in a Russian air strike on Kyiv overnight, Ukrainian officials have said.

Residents in the city first heard two loud explosions and only then the wail of the air raid siren, around 06:00 (04:00 GMT). The missiles had already hit by the time the ballistic threat warning was issued, urging residents to head for shelter.

The main destruction occurred in the central Shevchenkivskyi district, where there is now a deep crater in the road outside a business centre.

A military factory in the neighbourhood has been targeted repeatedly by Russia, but the damage we saw was to civilian buildings. An official said a couple had been killed on the street inside their vehicle.

Officials earlier reported four people had died in the attack.

The metro station, nearby restaurants and businesses are also very badly damaged, and emergency workers are removing the burned wreckage of cars from the scene.

Already damaged in previous attacks on this area, the business centre’s tall glass tower and main building are now a shell after being hit by either a second missile or very large fragment. It was empty when the missile struck.

Beside the main crater, a Ukrainian forensics expert examined fragments of missile collected into a heap of twisted grey metal on the pavement.

Andriy Kulchytskyy, the head of the Military Research Laboratory of the Kyiv Institute of Scientific Expertise, told the BBC the crater was from a direct hit with an Iskander-M ballistic missile, based on markings on the missile fragments.

“This specific site shows one impact,” he explained. “There are additional strikes, and we have collected debris. Here, the missile directly hit the road.”

Mr Kulchytskyy said the projectile landed before the warning sirens sounded because ballistic missiles travel so quickly that the sirens cannot react in time.

Beside the road, a cake shop has had its front blown off, covering pastries and pies in shattered glass.

A dental clinic next door has been destroyed in the blast. Inside, staff are trying to recover what’s still intact among the wreckage.

One woman was removing baubles from a plastic Christmas tree that was still standing.

“It’s happened before,” she told the BBC, “but never as badly as this”.

Asked how she felt, she shrugged: “We got used to it. It’s the third year of war.“

“There were three explosions in a row, then a big fire glow in the sky – and the building shook. It was very loud,” a young man called Oleksandr said while exiting a nearby block of flats.

“I woke up immediately – I even felt the wall shaking. When the third strike came, it was pretty scary.”

On Saturday morning, the main road has been cordoned off – but a few hours after the strike the neighbouring streets nearby are already busy with traffic. Old ladies are selling chickens and gherkins outside the market, and there are joggers and people walking their dogs.

But a pensioner passing by told us she was terrified.

“I didn’t know where to run, because you normally go to the metro for shelter – but it was on fire.”

It is the second fatal attack on Kyiv this month, following a strike on the city on New Year’s Day that left two people dead.

Meanwhile, in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, local authorities say 10 people were wounded in a Russian strike on Saturday. One woman is said to be in a serious condition.

These strikes are the latest in the war that began following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

They follow several Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory earlier in the week.

The latest strikes take place just days before the imminent inauguration of Donald Trump in the US, with many Ukrainians concerned by Trump’s pledge to reduce US military and financial aid to the embattled country.

The president-elect had claimed during the campaign that he would end the conflict on the first day of his presidency, though he has since said that he may need six months.

In recent days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has reiterated the country’s dependence on US support as Russian air strikes and fighting on the front line continue.

At least 30 people are reported to have been injured, 17 of whom seriously, after a ski lift collapsed in northern Spain.

The Astún resort in the Spanish Pyrenees, where the incident happened, has been closed and rescue services are at the scene.

Images and video circulating on social media appear to show a number of people lying on the snow beneath the ski lift.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he was “shocked” by the news of the incident.

Ambulances and helicopters have been ferrying the injured to nearby hospitals.

One of Spain’s public broadcasters reports that dozens of people remain hanging from the 15-metre-high chairlift awaiting rescue.

A witness told local media that it looked like a cable had come off, the chairs had bounced and people were thrown from the lift.

“We are talking about around 30 to 35 people injured, including serious, very serious and less serious injuries,” Miguel Ángel Clavero, the director of emergencies for the Aragon region, where the incident occurred, told public television TVE, according to AFP.

“Apparently, there was a failure in the return pulley of one of the chairlifts and this caused the cable to lose tension, causing some chairs to fall and others to remain hanging,” he said.

Images on social media purport to show one of the chairlift’s flywheels off its spoke.

The cause of the cable failure is currently unknown.

An eyewitness, Jamie Pelegri, said on social media that it was the Canal Roya chairlift was the one that had collapsed.

“Luckily we are fine but there are injured people, we have seen several stretchers coming down,” the Spotify commercial director said.

Video posted by Spain’s Guardia Civil shows a helicopter flying past the scene before landing to allow emergency workers to disembark.

Regional president Jorge Azcón and Spain’s Minister of the Interior Roberto Bermúdez de Castro are on their way to the ski resort to understand the extent of the accident.

Azcón wrote on X: “All the necessary services of the [government] are working to assist the affected and injured people.”

The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said he had spoken with Azcón “to offer him the “full support” of the government.

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 followers 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,” Mr 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.”

Two senior Iranian judges have been shot dead in an apparent assassination in the country’s supreme court.

Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghiseh were killed after an armed man entered the court, in the capital Tehran, on Saturday morning.

The attacker is said to have then killed themselves while fleeing the scene, according to the judiciary’s news website, Mizan. A bodyguard was also injured in the attack.

The motive for the attack is unclear, but both judges are said to have played a role in the persecution and killing of opponents of the Islamic regime throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In a statement to state news agency IRNA, the judiciary’s media office described the attack as premeditated assassination.

It also said that, according to initial findings, the attacker had not been involved in any case considered by the supreme court, and an investigation had been launched to identify and arrest any further people who may have been involved in the attack.

The judiciary’s spokesman, Asghar Jahangir, told Iranian state TV that the attacker had entered the court carrying a handgun before opening fire.

One of the judges, Razini, had survived an assassination attempt in 1998. He was one of the most senior judicial figures in Iran.

The other, Moghiseh, was sanctioned by the US in 2019, with the treasury department accusing him of having “overseen countless unfair trials, during which charges went unsubstantiated and evidence was disregarded”.

At that time, he was a judge in the Tehran Revolutionary Court. He was reportedly named to the supreme court in 2020.

Moghiseh was also among seven Iranian judges sanctioned by Canada in 2023 for what the country described as “their role in gross and systematic human rights violations”.

President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural address on 20 January will take place indoors due to dangerously cold weather being forecast next week in Washington, he has confirmed.

The address, as well as other speeches, will now take place inside the US Capitol’s rotunda, rather than outside the building.

The inaugural parade will also be held indoors at Washington’s Capital One Arena in downtown Washington about one mile (1.6km) away, along with all three inaugural balls.

The last president to be sworn-in indoors was Ronald Reagan in 1985, when cold weather also plagued the US Capitol.

In a statement posted to his Truth Social social media platform, Trump said that he does not “want to see people hurt, or injured, in any way” amid the freezing temperatures.

“It is dangerous conditions for the tens of thousands of law enforcement, first responders, police K9s and even horses” as well as “hundreds of thousands” of supporters.

“In any event, if you decide to come, dress warmly,” he added.

The Capital One Arena will also be open for a live viewing of the inaugural address.

BBC Weather: Inauguration Day may be one of the coldest in US history

Trump – who has a rally planned there on Sunday – said he would visit the arena after being sworn-in at the Capitol.

A planned parade will now take place in a modified form. It is unclear whether it will now take place inside.

Extreme cold has been forecast in Washington DC on inauguration day, with temperatures expected to hit a low of -11C (12F) and a high of -5C (23F). With wind chill factored in, the temperature will feel significantly colder.

The weather forms part of a larger polar vortex that will send temperatures plummeting across the US.

“Everyone will be safe, everyone will be happy, and we will, together, Make America Great Again,” Trump wrote.

Ahead of the inauguration, organisers had said that about 220,000 tickets would be distributed to watch the event’s on the grounds of the US Capitol.

Those without tickets would also have been able to view the ceremonies on the National Mall.

Alternate plans will now be required for those visitors, as well as the tens of thousands of others expected in the city.

“I think people should be able to make their own decisions,” one man planning to attend the inauguration told the BBC. “They should dress warmly to come out because it’s a historical event and it should be outside.”

Another supporter said of Trump: “I would stand in the [cold] weather in order to support what he’s going to do, what he did in the past, and what he’s going to do in the future.”

Trump said that other inaugural events, including his rally on Sunday and three separate official inaugural balls on Monday evening, would take place as planned.

The move indoors means a much more limited capacity at Monday’s swearing-in for Trump, who is known to closely track attendance figures at his public events.

After his first inauguration, he claimed a “million and half people” had attended on the National Mall.

But crowd-size experts said the numbers were about a third of the estimated 800,000 to one million people who attended Barack Obama’s one in 2009.

Only about 1,000 people attended Joe Biden’s inauguration on the Capitol grounds because of Covid-19 restrictions.

In 1841, then-President William Henry Harrison, 68, gave the longest inauguration speech in US history in cold, wet conditions.

He caught a cold and subsequently pneumonia, and died exactly one month later, making his presidency the shortest in US history.

As Mzwandile Mkwayi was lowered into the South African mine in a red metal cage attached to a hoist above ground, the first thing that struck him was the smell.

“Let me tell you something,” he tells the BBC, “those bodies really smelled bad”.

When he got home later that day, he told his wife he could not eat the meat she had cooked.

“It’s because when I spoke to the miners, they told me some of them had to eat other [people] inside the mine because there was no way they could find food. And they were also eating cockroaches,” he said on a phone call from his home.

Allegations that the miners resorted to eating human flesh in order to survive were also made by other miners who were rescued in December, in statements submitted to the high court.

Mkwayi, a former convict, known locally as Shasha, lives in the township of Khuma that was close to the disused mine in Stilfontein. The 36-year-old, who had served seven years in prison for robbery, volunteered to go down to help with the rescue effort.

“I’m being rehabilitated by the correctional services and I volunteered because people in our community were seeking help for their children and brothers.

“The rescue company said they didn’t have anyone who wanted to go down. So my friend Mandla and I agreed to volunteer so we could help our brothers to resurface and bring up the dead bodies.”

But even though he wanted to help, the 25-minute journey down the 2km (1.2 mile)-deep shaft filled him with terror.

The crane would occasionally stop and start, leaving him dangling in the darkness. Once he got down into the mine, he was shocked by what he saw.

“There were lots of bodies, over 70 bodies, and around 200 or so people that were dehydrated.

“I felt very weak when I saw them, it was a painful thing to see. But Mandla and I decided we needed to be strong and not show them how we felt so we could motivate them.”

The miners who had been waiting for help for months, gave them a hero’s welcome.

“They were very, very happy,” he says.

The miners had been stuck there following a nationwide police operation to end illicit mining at disused sites that had closed, as the industry – once the backbone of the country’s economy – was shrinking.

It was no longer profitable for mining multinationals to operate in many places, but the promise of still finding gold deposits was a magnet for many desperate people – particularly undocumented migrants.

Thousands of shafts were abandoned.

In November, police stepped up efforts at the Buffelsfontein mine in Stilfontein, surrounding the entrance to the shaft and refusing to let food and water go down.

Before the rescue operation began on Monday, the local community had tried to take matters into their own hands by lowering a rope down the shaft to try and pull out some of the men.

They also sent down messages and told the miners that help was coming.

“So when we got there, they were already waiting for the crane. Now when they see us, they see us as their presidents, as their messiahs: the people that came from outside into the hole to help them to resurface.”

The police say the illegal miners were always able to come out on their own but were refusing to do so because they feared arrest. But Mkwayi disagrees: “It’s a lie that people didn’t want to come out. Those people were desperate for help, they were dying.”

While at the mine site on Tuesday, the BBC saw dozens of the rescued men.

They appeared emaciated, their bones visible through their clothes. Some could barely walk and had to be helped by medical staff.

In statements submitted to the high court, the illegal miners describe in graphic details the slow and painful death of their peers. They say many died of starvation.

“From September through October 2024, the absence of even basic sustenance was absolute, and survival became a daily battle against starvation,” one miner was recorded as saying.

Mkwayi says the men he rescued were so frail that the rescue cage that is only meant to carry seven healthy adults could take 13 of them.

“They were very dehydrated and had lost weight so we managed to fit more into the cage, because they wouldn’t have survived another two days down in the hole. They would be dead if we didn’t get them out as soon as possible.”

The volunteers were also in charge of bringing up dead bodies.

“The rescue services gave us bags and told us to put the bodies in them and bring them up in the cage which we did with the help of some of the miners.”

The rescue operation was initially meant to last at least a week, but after just three days, the volunteers said no-one was left underground.

The authorities sent a camera down the shaft to do a final sweep. They say the mine will now be permanently sealed.

But the experience has deeply impacted Mkwayi.

At one point during the call he asks for a question to be repeated, explaining that his hearing has been affected since going down into the mine, presumably by the pressure.

But the hardest impact has been from what he witnessed.

“I have to tell you, I am traumatised. I will never forget the sight of these people for the rest of my life.”

For activists and trade unions helping the community, the death of the 87 people in the mine amounts to a “massacre” perpetrated by the authorities.

The use of the emotive word has drawn comparisons with the shooting dead by police of 34 striking miners in Marikana, some 150km (93 miles) away from Stilfontein, in 2012.

But this time no triggers were pulled. Instead it seems many of the men starved to death.

The authorities reject the idea they were responsible.

The government initiated the crackdown on illicit mining in December 2023 through Operation Vala Umgodi (meaning “close the hole” in isiZulu).

The abandoned mines had been taken over by gangs, often led by former employees, which sold what was found on the black market.

People were co-opted into this illicit trade, either by force or voluntarily, and made to spend months underground digging for minerals. The government says illegal mining cost South Africa’s economy $3.2bn (£2.6bn) in 2024 alone.

As part of the police operation, entry points at various disused mines were blocked, along with food and water supplies, in a bid to flush out the illegal miners, known locally as zama zamas (which translates as “take a chance”).

While Vala Umgodi was largely successful in other provinces, the old Buffelsfontein gold mine presented a unique challenge.

Prior to the police operation, most of the miners were only able to get underground through a makeshift pulley system operated by people at the surface.

But they then abandoned the top of the mineshaft when security officials arrived in large numbers in August, leaving those in the mine stranded.

Community members then stepped in to help, pulling a few people up using ropes, but this was a long, arduous process.

Other difficult and dangerous exits were available and in all nearly 2,000 resurfaced – most were arrested and remain in police custody.

Why others did not come out is not clear – they may have been too weak or were being threatened by gang members in the mine – but they were left in desperate circumstances.

Out of the 87 who died, only two have been identified, police said on Thursday, explaining that the fact that many were undocumented migrants made the process harder.

“We hold the view that government has blood on its hands,” Magnificent Mndebele from the Mining Affected Communities United in Action group (Macua), told the BBC.

He argued that the miners were given no warning about what was about to happen before the police operation began.

Over the past two months, Macua has been at the forefront of the various court battles initiated to compel the government to first allow supplies and then undertake a rescue operation.

Its blaming of the government echoes earlier statements from families who had said that the authorities had killed their loved ones.

They had taken a hard line since the operation intensified. In November, one minister, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, made the now infamous statement during a press briefing that they were going to “smoke them out”.

The state refused to allow food to be sent down or anyone to help retrieve the miners, only caving in after several successful court applications.

In November, small portions of instant maize and water made it down the shaft, but in a court statement, one of the miners said it was not enough for the hundreds of men down below, many of whom were too weak to even chew and swallow them.

More food was delivered in December, but again it could not sustain the men.

Given that the operation to bring up the men and bodies lasted just three days, what is hard for Mr Mndebele to understand is why this could not have been done sooner, when it was clear there was an issue.

“We’re disappointed by our government, frankly put, because this help has come too late.”

While the government is yet to formally respond to these accusations, police have vowed to continue with the wider operations to clear the country’s disused mines until May this year.

Speaking to journalists in Stilfontein on Tuesday, Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe was unapologetic. He said the government would intensify the fight against illegal mining, which he labelled a crime and an “attack on the economy”.

On Thursday, Police Minister Senzo Mchunu was a little more conciliatory.

“I do understand and accept that this is an emotional issue. Everyone wants to judge… but it would help all of us as South Africans to wait until pathologists have done and completed their job,” he said.

The police have defended their actions, saying providing the miners with food would have “allowed criminality to thrive”.

Illegal miners have been accused of fostering criminality in the communities where they operate.

A number of stories have been published in local media linking the zama zamas to various rapes and murders.

But for Mkwayi, who put his own safety on the line to help the miners, the men in the Stilfontein mine were just trying to make a living.

“People went down 2km with a rope and risked their lives to put food on the table for their families.”

He said he wants the government to give licences to artisanal miners who are forced to go into disused mines due to South Africa’s high unemployment rate.

“If your children are hungry, you won’t think twice about going down there because you have to feed them. You’ll risk your life to put food on the table.”

• Inside South Africa’s ‘ruthless’ gang-controlled gold mines
• WATCH: The dangerous world of illegal mining in South Africa
• Illegal trade booms in South Africa’s ‘super-strange looking’ plants
• Gen Z’s ‘love-hate’ relationship with Mandela

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.”

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 go on to 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 were 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 of 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 internal turmoil on 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, expanding cultivation, and 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

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Actress Cameron Diaz has said the decade she spent in retirement from acting was “the best 10 years” of her life.

The Holiday star returned to screens this month in new spy thriller – Back in Action – with actor Jamie Foxx.

It is unclear if this is a permanent return to acting though, as she told BBC One’s The Graham Norton Show “this is maybe the beginning… I don’t know”.

Asked if she liked the anonymity of taking a step back, she said “omg I loved it”, adding she was “free” to be a mom and a wife but that she was “really grateful” to be back.

Her last role was Ms Hannigan in the 2014 remake of Annie – a film which Foxx was also in. However, Diaz only formally confirmed her retirement from acting in 2018.

Foxx, who has worked alongside Diaz twice before, said he persuaded her to come back to the industry by “very humbly” asking if she would return and “grace us with her incredible talent”.

She said she was back in the world of film “at least for this” after 10 years of “not even paying attention”.

When Diaz, 52, received the script for this new project, she and musician husband Benji Madden said “maybe it’s time to switch it up for the family a little bit because, you know, it’s Jamie”.

It would take someone special to “leave my family for 10 hours a day”, she added.

In Back in Action, Diaz and Foxx, 57, play a married couple – with children – and former spies who are forced out of retirement when danger finds them and puts their lives at risk.

Talking about her hiatus, Diaz called it the “best” 10 years of her life.

“I was free to be [like] ‘I’m a mum, I’m a wife, I’m living my life’ – it was so lovely.”

“Ten years in, this made sense for my family,” she explained.

When she first stepped away from acting, Diaz said she was still asked to play roles.

“Everybody would be like: ‘Would you like to -‘ No.

“‘You know, there’s this thing -‘ I don’t care.

“‘Would you like to join us -‘ Nope, and then people stopped asking.”

Now, 10 years on, she told Norton she feels like it’s a “privilege” to act.

“If I just let this go away, all of this goodwill that I got to build over so much time, the passion I have for entertaining people and making movies that people smile and laugh [at] and have a good time… if I don’t engage that again, and give that a chance and participate in it and be grateful for it, then I would be a fool,” she explained.

She added: “Maybe I’ll tip toe in, maybe just go gung-ho, I don’t know.”

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.

• Follow live updates on this story
• What we know about the agreement
• Analysis: Long-overdue deal may end killings but not the conflict
• History of the Israel-Gaza war explained

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.

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’
• US Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban law

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.

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
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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.”

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”.

Croatia’s deputy prime minister has resigned after footage surfaced of him shooting at random from a moving car.

In the video, Josip Dabro can be seen in the passenger seat chatting, laughing and singing along to loud music, before picking up a pistol and shooting through an open window into the dark.

Dabro, who represents hard-right nationalist party Homeland Movement, said the video was several years old and that he fired training bullets.

It is the latest incident to trouble Croatia’s coalition – formed in May 2024 – with the government calling Dabro’s behaviour “inappropriate and irresponsible”.

In a resignation statement posted on Facebook, Dabro, who was also minister for agriculture, forestry and fisheries, said that he did not want to be a distraction to the government.

He said he had been subjected to “significant pressure and threats” over plans to reform the department.

The footage was made public earlier in the week.

Dabro’s party is in a coalition government with Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic’s centre-right Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party.

Last November, Health Minister Vili Bros was sacked ahead of a corruption investigation.

On Monday, Zoran Milanovic was re-elected president for a second term, winning almost three-quarters of votes cast ahead of opponent Dragan Primorac, who was backed by the HDZ party.

After the result, Plenkovic said that “Milanovic offers nothing” and declined to congratulate him. Presidents in Croatia fulfil a largely ceremonial role.

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.”

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, eyebrow 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.”

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.

• Follow updates on this story
• How the historic deal was sealed with 10 minutes to spare
• Gazans anxiously await ceasefire, fearing last-minute catastrophes
• Bowen: Israel has changed since Donald Trump’s last term – has he?

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.

Two senior Iranian judges have been shot dead in an apparent assassination in the country’s supreme court.

Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghiseh were killed after an armed man entered the court, in the capital Tehran, on Saturday morning.

The attacker is said to have then killed themselves while fleeing the scene, according to the judiciary’s news website, Mizan. A bodyguard was also injured in the attack.

The motive for the attack is unclear, but both judges are said to have played a role in the persecution and killing of opponents of the Islamic regime throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In a statement to state news agency IRNA, the judiciary’s media office described the attack as premeditated assassination.

It also said that, according to initial findings, the attacker had not been involved in any case considered by the supreme court, and an investigation had been launched to identify and arrest any further people who may have been involved in the attack.

The judiciary’s spokesman, Asghar Jahangir, told Iranian state TV that the attacker had entered the court carrying a handgun before opening fire.

One of the judges, Razini, had survived an assassination attempt in 1998. He was one of the most senior judicial figures in Iran.

The other, Moghiseh, was sanctioned by the US in 2019, with the treasury department accusing him of having “overseen countless unfair trials, during which charges went unsubstantiated and evidence was disregarded”.

At that time, he was a judge in the Tehran Revolutionary Court. He was reportedly named to the supreme court in 2020.

Moghiseh was also among seven Iranian judges sanctioned by Canada in 2023 for what the country described as “their role in gross and systematic human rights violations”.

At least 30 people are reported to have been injured, 17 of whom seriously, after a ski lift collapsed in northern Spain.

The Astún resort in the Spanish Pyrenees, where the incident happened, has been closed and rescue services are at the scene.

Images and video circulating on social media appear to show a number of people lying on the snow beneath the ski lift.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he was “shocked” by the news of the incident.

Ambulances and helicopters have been ferrying the injured to nearby hospitals.

One of Spain’s public broadcasters reports that dozens of people remain hanging from the 15-metre-high chairlift awaiting rescue.

A witness told local media that it looked like a cable had come off, the chairs had bounced and people were thrown from the lift.

“We are talking about around 30 to 35 people injured, including serious, very serious and less serious injuries,” Miguel Ángel Clavero, the director of emergencies for the Aragon region, where the incident occurred, told public television TVE, according to AFP.

“Apparently, there was a failure in the return pulley of one of the chairlifts and this caused the cable to lose tension, causing some chairs to fall and others to remain hanging,” he said.

Images on social media purport to show one of the chairlift’s flywheels off its spoke.

The cause of the cable failure is currently unknown.

An eyewitness, Jamie Pelegri, said on social media that it was the Canal Roya chairlift was the one that had collapsed.

“Luckily we are fine but there are injured people, we have seen several stretchers coming down,” the Spotify commercial director said.

Video posted by Spain’s Guardia Civil shows a helicopter flying past the scene before landing to allow emergency workers to disembark.

Regional president Jorge Azcón and Spain’s Minister of the Interior Roberto Bermúdez de Castro are on their way to the ski resort to understand the extent of the accident.

Azcón wrote on X: “All the necessary services of the [government] are working to assist the affected and injured people.”

The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said he had spoken with Azcón “to offer him the “full support” of the government.

Raids to detain and deport migrants living in the US without permission are set to begin on the first full day of the new Trump administration, US media report.

The operations – threatened by Donald Trump’s “border tsar” Tom Homan – could begin in Chicago, a city with a large migrant population, as early as Tuesday, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal say.

Trump has said he will oversee the largest deportation programme in US history.

In an interview with Fox News this week, Homan promised a “big raid” across the country. He has previously said Chicago will be “ground zero” for the mass deportations.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency deports illegal migrants all the time. However, the operation it is expected to launch after Trump’s inauguration on Monday is expected to target so-called “sanctuary” cities that limit co-operation with federal immigration officials.

Along with Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles are among the scores of US cities that have adopted “sanctuary” policies.

“January 21st, you’re going to look for a lot of ICE agents in your city looking for criminals and gang members,” Homan told a Republican gathering in Chicago last month. “Count on it. It will happen.”

New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Miami are also due to be targeted with raids, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing unnamed sources familiar with the plans.

Under Democratic President Joe Biden, ICE generally prioritised the arrest of illegal migrants who were serious criminals, had crossed the border recently or posed a national security threat.

While Trump’s team has signalled that it will begin with migrants who had committed crimes, all illegal migrants – including those who have lived and worked in the US for many years and have no criminal history – are more likely to be arrested and deported.

Immigration raids at construction sites where undocumented migrants are often employed are also expected to resume, after being discontinued by the Biden administration, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Ahead of the expected hardening of US policy, more migrant farm workers have been seeking advice on dealing with immigration officials and assigning temporary guardians for their children.

“The administration is not yet sworn in, but people are already afraid,” Sarait Martinez, executive director of the Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, which supports Mexican farm workers in California, told Reuters news agency.

As well as pledging to deport millions of illegal migrants and threatening workplace raids, some reports suggest that Trump could also do away with a longstanding policy that has made churches off-limits for ICE arrests.

However, the upcoming raids are likely to pose significant difficulties for officials – with limited custody space to hold those detained.

At the same time, the Laken Riley Act – named after a college student who was murdered last year in Georgia by a Venezuelan man previously arrested for shoplifting – is expected to be passed by US lawmakers next week.

The proposed legislation will require the federal government to detain migrants living in the US illegally who are suspected of criminal activity – even if they are not charged with any crime.

A craft hub in Derbyshire has closed after the business, which was founded by Dragons’ Den star Sara Davies, went into administration.

The Crafter’s Companion store in Barlborough, near Chesterfield, was shut by administrators on 7 January, leaving 10 people redundant, but the Evesham base, in Worcestershire, has remained open.

The company was founded by Ms Davies in 2005, while at university.

She said she later sold the majority of it, but bought it from administrators on 7 January and is a major shareholder again.

She said: “It’s never easy making staff redundant, and I understand why it has come as a shock to employees but there was no way this could be avoided.”

The entrepreneur said: “The decision to close the loss-making Chesterfield store was taken by the administrators in preparation for the sale of the business to us.”

“The actual closure happened after we acquired the business,” she added.

Ms Davies said the store had not traded profitably “for quite some time, and it couldn’t remain part of the Crafter’s Companion family going forwards”.

The company – which sells crafts supplies – has a head office and warehouse in County Durham, a store in Evesham and the former shop in Chesterfield.

She said: “I’m proud that we have saved over a hundred jobs in the North but I’m very sorry that these colleagues had to leave the family.”

Ms Davies added as the business has been rescued from administration, saving more than a hundred jobs, it was “important to make sure that we focus our efforts” on the remaining store and website, “to ensure Crafter’s Companion’s future success”.

She added: “I have invested my own money back into the business, and alongside a new financial partner who has also invested, I am now a major shareholder again.”

Ms Davies became the youngest ever female dragon to join BBC One’s Dragons’ Den and was awarded an MBE for services to the economy in 2016.

She receive an honorary degree from the University of York in 2024 in recognition of her “outstanding contribution to society”.

The accounts for Crafter’s Companion Limited for the 2024 financial year were overdue before the company went into administration.

The most recent filed accounts show its revenue fell from £37.8m in 2022 to £29.9m in the 2023 financial year, a drop of 21%.

All websites on which pornographic material can be found, including social media platforms, must introduce “robust” age-checking techniques such as demanding photo ID or running credit card checks for UK users by July.

The long-awaited guidance, issued by regulator Ofcom, has been made under the Online Safety Act (OSA), and is intended to prevent children from easily accessing pornography online.

Research indicates the average age at which young people first see explicit material online in the UK is 13 – with many being exposed to it much earlier.

“For too long, many online services which allow porn and other harmful material have ignored the fact that children are accessing their services”, said Ofcom boss Melanie Dawes, adding: “today, this starts to change.”

Ofcom confirmed to the BBC this meant user-to-user services such as social media platforms must implement “highly effective checks” – which in some cases might mean “preventing children from accessing the entire site”.

However, some porn sites and privacy campaigners have warned the move will be counterproductive, saying introducing beefed-up age verification will only push people to “darker corners” of the internet.

The media regulator estimates that approximately 14 million people watch online pornography in the UK.

But it is so readily available that campaign groups have raised concerns that children see it at a young age – with one in 10 children seeing it by age nine, according to a survey by the Children’s Commissioner.

“As age checks start to roll out in the coming months, adults will start to notice a difference in how they access certain online services,” said Dame Melanie.

The rules also require services which publish their own pornographic content – including with generative AI tools – to begin introducing age checks immediately.

Age verification platform Yoti called such technology “essential” for creating safe spaces online.

“It is important that age assurance is enforced across pornographic sites of all sizes, creating a level playing field, and providing age-appropriate access for adults,” said chief regulatory and policy officer Julie Dawson.

However Aylo, parent company of the website Pornhub, told the BBC this sort of age verification was “ineffective, haphazard and dangerous”.

It claimed pornography use changed significantly in US state Louisiana after similar age verification controls came into force, with its website’s traffic dropping 80% in the state.

“These people did not stop looking for porn, they just migrated to darker corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age,” it claimed.

“In practice, the laws have just made the internet more dangerous for adults and children.”

Ofcom has published what it calls a “non-exhaustive” list of technologies that may be used to verify ages, which includes:

• Open banking
• Photo ID matching
• Facial age estimation
• Mobile network operator age checks
• Credit card checks
• Digital identity services
• Email-based age estimation

The rules specifically state that “self-declaration of age” is no longer considered a “highly effective” method of checking ages – and therefore is not acceptable.

It also states that pornographic content should not be accessible to users before they have completed an age check.

Other age verification firms have responded positively to the news.

“The regulator’s long-awaited guidance on age assurance means adult content providers now have the clarity they need to get their houses in order and put in place robust and reliable methods to keep explicit material well away from underage users,” said Lina Ghazal, head of regulatory and public affairs at Verifymy.

But privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch warned that many age-checking methods could be circumvented, and should not be seen as a panacea.

“Children must be protected online, but many technological age checking methods are ineffective and introduce additional risks to children and adults alike including security breaches, privacy intrusion, errors, digital exclusion and censorship,” said boss Silkie Carlo.

“We must avoid anything like a digital ID system for the internet that would both eradicate privacy online and fail to keep children safe,” she added.

After finishing university and moving back to Birmingham, Khiefa Gabbidon struggled to make friends when she started work.

The 22-year-old had a job in the tech industry which she described as a male-dominated field and said she did not have any women around her.

“I looked around to see if I could find any female friends but I couldn’t so I thought ‘I’m going to have to create something’,” she added.

Eager to find her clique, Ms Gabbidon created a community group for women in May called Space For Girls.

It encourages like-minded women to meet up and take part in a range of activities such as running sessions, meals out and hiking.

The group has since attracted more than 8,000 followers on Instagram and a WhatsApp community of more than 1,500 women.

Before she started the group, Ms Gabbidon said she “had no-one” adding: “It was a really difficult time to go through.”

But she said she had since realised many women of her age were going through the same thing.

“It’s a common feeling, this emptiness and the loneliness – and to know we’re here to support each other definitely helps,” she added.

The group hold “speed mating” events which use the same concept as speed dating but for people to make friends.

Suzanna Jones went to one of their recent events and said she had found it difficult to make friends as a young person, before joining the group.

“I would never strike up a conversation on the train or in the gym but when you know there are other people looking for friends and are open to get to know you…it makes it easier,” she added.

Katherine Hale started going to Space For Girls events after coming across a video on TikTok.

She regularly attends the running club on Tuesday evenings which she said had helped her with her anxiety and made it easier to meet new people without having long, face-to-face conversations.

“It’s just nice to have that support, even though you don’t necessarily know everybody,” she added.

“Just knowing that if you’re having a bad day, you can pop a message in the group chat or individually and they can help you through it – it’s made a huge difference.”

A recent survey by mental health charity Mind revealed 54% of people across the West Midlands said they preferred to put on a brave face to avoid talking about their mental health.

More than half of those said that made them feel isolated and less able to socialise.

Rachel McNair, from Birmingham Mind, said community groups like Space For Girls were important in helping people to open up.

“There’s a huge gap in services for people who are looking to make meaningful connections, especially for younger people across the city,” she said.

A court in India has convicted a man of the rape and murder of a trainee doctor – a crime that sparked nationwide outrage.

Sanjay Roy, a hospital volunteer worker, was found guilty over the attack, which happened in August last year at a hospital in Kolkata city in West Bengal state.

The incident caused shockwaves across the country, leading to widespread protests and concerns over the safety of healthcare workers in India, especially women.

Judge Anirban Das said the sentence, which will be announced on Monday, would range from life in prison to the death penalty. Roy has maintained his innocence and said previously that he was being framed.

The victim’s mother told the AFP news agency that people would lose faith in India’s legal system if Roy was not handed the death penalty.

The body of the 31-year-old doctor, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was found on 9 August 2024 at at the busy, state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata.

After a gruelling 36-hour shift, she had gone to sleep in the hospital’s seminar hall. Her half-naked, severely injured, body was later discovered near a podium by a colleague.

• Women lead night protests after doctor’s rape and murder
• Raped doctor’s colleague speaks of trauma and pain
• Rape and murder of doctor sparks protests

The post-mortem examination found the victim had been strangled and had injuries showing she fought back.

According to the charge sheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which the BBC has seen, Roy went to the hospital in a drunken state and found the female doctor sleeping alone.

He was arrested a day after the crime.

The case was initially being investigated by the Kolkata police but later the court handed over the probe to the CBI after state officials were accused of mishandling it.

For weeks after the incident, doctors and medical students across India held protests and rallies demanding justice and better security for doctors.

One such protest, the “Reclaim the Night” march, saw tens of thousands of women walk through the streets at night in Kolkata and other cities on 14 August, the eve of India’s Independence Day.

In December, the victim’s parents petitioned the Calcutta High Court for a fresh investigation, expressing a lack of faith in the CBI’s investigation.

They argued that Roy alone could not have committed the crime and stated they would be satisfied only when all those involved were brought to justice. The high court has said it will consider the plea only if the Supreme Court – which is monitoring the case – directs it to do so.

The incident raised concerns about rising cases of violence against health workers in India – many of whom face physical abuse by angry patients or their relatives.

A 2017 survey by the Indian Medical Association found that over 75% of doctors in India have experienced some form of violence. The survey also revealed that nearly 63% of doctors fear potential violence while treating patients.

Meanwhile, sexual violence against women remains a widespread problem in India. More than 31,000 rapes were reported in India in 2022, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

Many rape cases in India go unreported, mostly due to social stigma around sexual violence and a lack of trust in the police and judicial system. Activists say this often results in the victim being shamed instead of the perpetrator, especially in rural areas.

In 2012, the rape and murder of a medical student by a group of men in India’s capital Delhi drew global attention and triggered similar, wider protests.

The public anger prompted authorities to amend rape laws in 2013. The changes broadened the definition of the crime, set strict punishments for sexual assault and lowered the age at which a person can be tried from 18 to 16.

A 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.

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 go on to 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 were 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 of 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 internal turmoil on 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, expanding cultivation, and 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