From behind his desk in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders and decrees aimed at cracking down on immigration.

From an order tackling the definition of birthright citizenship, to an order declaring the illegal immigration at the border a national emergency, Trump swiftly made moves on his promises to tighten the US-Mexico border.

But some of those orders – particularly any order that aims to change the definition of birthright citizenship – are likely to face steep legal opposition.

Trump had previously vowed that the “destructive” policies of the Biden White House would be gone “within five minutes”.

Hours earlier, thousands of would-be migrants had their immigration appointments cancelled after the new administration scrapped CBP One, an app used to book appearances at ports of entry at the border.

In his inaugural address, Trump vowed that “all illegal entry will be halted” and that millions of “criminal aliens” will be deported.

He also signed an order declaring Mexican drug cartels terrorist organisations.

At a previous event at Washington’s Capital One Arena, Trump formally revoked nearly 80 executive actions – which he described as “radical” – from the Biden administration.

“I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions,” Trump said in his inaugural address at the US Capitol earlier in the day.

As part of the broader plan, Trump administration officials said the president would direct the Department of Defense to “seal the border” and devote additional resources and personnel, including counter-drone capabilities.

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• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks

Earlier, incoming Trump administration officials said that the moves amounted to the creation of “common sense immigration policy”.

Although the details of the order are not yet known, officials have said that Trump plans to end birthright citizenship, meaning that the children of undocumented migrants living in the US will no longer automatically be considered US citizens.

Birthright citizenship, however, is enshrined in the US constitution and would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress to change. The official provided no further detail on how Trump plans to accomplish this.

The new administration also moved to swiftly scrap CBP One, a mobile application used by migrants to book appointments to appear at a port of entry.

Biden administration officials had credited the app with helping reduce the number of detentions at the border since it was first introduced in January 2023. It was the only legal pathway to request asylum at the US-Mexico border.

Now, the Customs and Border Protection website notes that the app is “no longer available”.

App users also now are shown a message noting that “existing appointments scheduled through CBP One are no longer valid”.

According to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, the Biden administration had scheduled roughly 30,000 appointments via CBP One for migrants to enter the US in the next three weeks.

Other estimates had suggested that as many as 270,000 migrants were in Mexico waiting for an opportunity to enter the US using CBP One.

In the Mexican border city of Tijuana, some migrants reported feeling defeated and deflated after learning of CBP One’s demise.

“I hope God touches his [Trump’s] heart,” said Oralia, a Mexican woman who fled cartel violence in her home state along with her epileptic son. “We really do need the help.”

She had been waiting for an appointment through CBP One for seven months.

The new administration’s decision to scrap CBP One was immediately met with a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed court documents requesting an immediate status conference on the matter.

Immigration advocacy groups have also reacted furiously to Trump’s immigration orders.

In a statement, Jennie Murray, the president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, said that the orders are “disappointing but not surprising”.

“The expected orders would separate families and weaken our economy,” Ms Murray said. “They do not uphold American values.”

Greisa Martinez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream – a national immigrant youth organisation – said that the orders show that the administration “will spend the next four years actively trying to destroy our lives”.

“Trump’s pledges to carry out mass raids and deportations will have devastating consequences on communities nationwide, leaving millions of families and individuals in disarray if immediate action is not taken by our elected officials to publicly fight back,” she added.

President Donald Trump has once again vowed to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, the world’s most important effort to tackle rising temperatures.

The first Trump administration made a similar move in 2017, but that step was promptly reversed on President Joe Biden’s first day in office in 2021.

The US will now have to wait a year before it will be officially out of the pact. The White House announced a “national energy emergency”, outlining a raft of changes that will reverse US climate regulations and boost oil and gas production.

It comes after global temperatures in 2024 rose more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in a calendar year.

While the Paris agreement is not a legally binding treaty, it is the document that drives global co-operation to limit the causes of global warming.

President Trump’s antipathy to this co-operative approach was echoed in his statement in 2017 that he had been elected to “represent the people of Pittsburgh and not Paris”.

This temperature threshold was established in the Paris agreement as a level beyond which the world would face extremely dangerous impacts.

The US will now join Iran, Yemen and Libya as the only countries to currently stand outside the agreement, which was signed 10 years ago in the French capital.

At the White House on Monday evening, Trump signed the order to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, including a letter to the United Nations explaining the decision.

He also announced a “national energy emergency” to reverse many of the Biden-era environmental regulations.

Trump called the Paris agreement a “ripoff” during a speech at the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC, following his swearing-in.

“We will drill, baby, drill,” he said earlier in his inaugural address.

The new president also vowed the US would embark on a new age of oil and gas exploration.

“We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” he told the audience.

“We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”

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FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks

However, US fossil fuels are already flowing like never before.

Since 2016, production of American oil has gone up by 70%, and the US is now the world’s dominant producer and exporter.

Similarly Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) exports have gone from almost zero in 2016 to the US becoming the global lead.

The new administration says the president will also end the “green new deal”, a reference to the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate policy that channelled billions into clean energy.

The president says he will also cancel efforts to boost ownership of electric vehicles, what he terms the Biden “EV mandate”, and he will strengthen efforts to save the US car industry.

He will also end the leasing of federal lands and waters to “massive wind farms that degrade our national landscape”.

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said that America risks missing out on a global clean energy boom that was worth $2tn last year.

“Embracing it will mean massive profits, millions of manufacturing jobs and clean air,” he said in a statement.

“Ignoring it only sends all that vast wealth to competitor economies, while climate disasters like droughts, wildfires and superstorms keep getting worse, destroying property and businesses, hitting nationwide food production, and driving economy-wide price inflation.”

President Trump’s previous effort to pull the US out of the Paris agreement served as a rallying cry for many Americans who were dismayed by leaving.

Internationally the US withdrawal was also a unifying force for countries.

This time round though the pull-out may be far more damaging to the global effort to limit emissions, as climate change has dropped down the list of priorities for governments.

There are other countries such as Argentina, who might follow in the US footsteps.

Developing nations are also fuming after COP29 in Azerbaijan when the richer world struggled to improve funding support.

But having survived the previous Trump attack, there is also a sense that this may not be the last US word on the Paris pact.

“The door remains open to the Paris agreement, and we welcome constructive engagement from any and all countries,” said the UN’s Simon Stiell.

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

President Trump has signed an executive order granting TikTok a 75-day extension to comply with a law that requires a sale or ban of the platform.

He says during that time, the US will not enforce the law passed by Congress last year and signed by former President Joe Biden.

The order was among a slew of directives Trump signed on Monday evening.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, he said: “I tell you what. Every rich person has called me about TikTok.”

When asked by a reporter why he’s had a change of heart since trying to ban TikTok in 2020, Trump responded: “Because I got to use it.”

He also floated the possibility of a joint venture, saying he was seeking a 50-50 partnership between “the United States” and its Chinese owner ByteDance. But he did not give any further details on how that might work.

On Saturday evening, the Chinese-owned app stopped working for American users, after a law banning it on national security grounds came into effect.

It resumed services to its 170 million users in the US after Trump said he would issue an executive order to give the app a reprieve when he took office.

The Biden administration had argued that TikTok could be used by China as a tool for spying and political manipulation.

Opponents of a ban have cited freedom of speech as a reason for keeping the platform open.

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, previously ignored a law requiring it to sell its US operations to avoid a ban.

The law was upheld by Supreme Court on Friday and went into effect on Sunday, but the Biden White House said it would leave implementing the law to the incoming administration given the timing.

Trump had backed a ban of the platform during his first term in office.

The newly signed executive order places him at odds with many members of Congress from his own party.

On Sunday in a post on X, Republican Senator Tom Cotton said any company that “hosts, distributes, services or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok” could face hundreds of billions of dollars in fines.

Cotton said liability could stem not just from the Department of Justice, “but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs [attorneys general]. Think about it”.

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew attended Trump’s inauguration on Monday along with other big technology bosses, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

Earlier on Monday, YouTube star Mr Beast posted a TikTok video of him apparently from a private jet on his way to make an official offer to buy the short video platform.

The post gave no other details about the offer, only that it would be “crazy”.

Other companies, billionaires and celebrities have expressed interest in buying TikTok, including X owner Musk and an investor from the TV show Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary.

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage
• ANALYSIS: The promise and peril of Trump’s speech
• IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration
• WATCH: The new president’s day so far
• EXPLAINED: What Trump is doing on day one
• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks
• VIRAL MOMENTS: Carrie Underwood goes a cappella and other moments
• Trump moves to make ‘two genders’ and anti-DEI policy official
• Trump vows to leave Paris climate agreement and ‘drill, baby, drill’

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Oooh, that’s a big one,” the newly inaugurated US president said as he approved the document after arriving back at the White House. It was one of dozens of executive actions he put his signature to on day one in office.

This marks the second time Trump has ordered the US be pulled out of the WHO.

Trump was critical of how the international body handled Covid-19 and began the process of pulling out from the Geneva-based institution during the pandemic. President Joe Biden later reversed that decision.

Carrying out this executive action on day one makes it more likely the US will formally leave the global agency.

“They wanted us back so badly so we’ll see what happens,” Trump said in the Oval Office, referring to the WHO, perhaps hinting the US might return eventually.

• Trump moves to make ‘two genders’ and anti-DEI policy official
• Trump vows to leave Paris climate agreement and ‘drill, baby, drill’

The order said the US was withdrawing “due to the organization’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states”.

The executive order also said the withdrawal was the result of “unfairly onerous payments” the US made to the WHO, which is part of the United Nations.

When Trump was still in office the first time around he was critical of the organization for being too “China-centric” in its tackling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump accused the WHO of being biased towards China in how it issued guidance during the outbreak.

Under the Biden administration the US continued to be the largest funder of the WHO and in 2023 it contributed almost one-fifth of the agency’s budget.

The organization’s annual budget is $6.8 billion (£5.5 billion).

Public health experts have been critical of Trump’s decision to leave the WHO, warning there could be consequences for Americans’ health.

Some have suggested the move could reverse progress made on fighting infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and Hiv & Aids.

Ashish Jha, who formerly worked as Covid-19 response co-ordinator under President Biden, previously warned leaving would “harm not only the health of people around the world, but also US leadership and scientific prowess”.

“It’s a cataclysmic presidential decision. Withdrawal is a grievous wound to world health, but a still deeper wound to the US,” Lawrence Gostin, a global public health expert and Georgetown University professor said.

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage
• ANALYSIS: The promise and peril of Trump’s speech
• IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration
• WATCH: The new president’s day so far
• EXPLAINED: What Trump is doing on day one
• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks
• VIRAL MOMENTS: Carrie Underwood goes a cappella and other moments

Donald Trump, who rode back into power on a wave of voter dissatisfaction with the status quo, promised a new “golden age” for America in his inaugural address.

The speech was a mix of promises – and contradictions – that underlined some of the opportunities and challenges the new president will face in his second term in office.

He started talking at a little after noon on Monday, and it seemed at times like he didn’t stop talking – at ad-libbed remarks later at the Capitol, at his indoor parade rally at a downtown sports arena and at the White House executive order signing – until well into the evening.

Through it all, Trump demonstrated the kind of dramatic flair and penchant for controversy and confrontation that has energised his supporters and infuriated his critics.

During his inaugural address, Trump paid particular attention to immigration and the economy – issues that polls suggest American voters cared about most last year. He also promised to end government-promoted diversity programmes and noted that US official policy would only recognise two genders, male and female.

That last line generated an enthusiastic response at the Capitol and wild cheers from his crowd of supporters gathered at a nearby sport arena. It’s a sign that cultural issues – where he drew the most vivid contrasts with Democrats in last year’s election – will continue to be one of Trump’s most powerful ways the new president connects with his base.

Before he outlined what this new age would entail, however, Trump painted a dark picture of the current American political climate.

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As his predecessor, Joe Biden, and other Democrats sat stone-faced to one side, Trump said the government faces a “crisis of trust”. He condemned the “vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation” of the US Justice Department, which had investigated and attempted to prosecute him for contesting the 2020 election results.

He claimed a mandate to reverse “horrible betrayals” and lashed out at a “radical and corrupt establishment” that he said extracted power and wealth from America’s citizens.

It was the kind of populist, anti-elite rhetoric that has been a staple of Trump’s speeches for a decade. Unlike when Trump first began his ascent to the pinnacles of US political power in 2015, however, Trump represents the current emerging establishment as much as any one man. And sitting behind him on the dais were a collection of some of the wealthiest, and most influential, corporate leaders in the world.

On the day of his inauguration, Trump has the attention – and the initiative. His aides have promised hundreds of executive actions – on a range of subjects, including immigration, energy, trade, education and hot-button cultural issues.

In his inaugural address, he detailed a handful of them. He pledged to declare national emergencies on energy and immigration, allowing him to put the US military on the border, drastically limit the rights of asylum-seekers and reopen large swaths of federal land to energy extraction. He repeated his pledge to change the name of Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” and to take back the Panama Canal.

He made an unfounded claim that China was running the key waterway and said that US ships, including naval vessels, were paying too much in transit fees – perhaps a hint at the real objective in future negotiations with the Panamanian government.

“The US will once again consider itself a growing nation,” he said, pledging to increase American wealth and expand “our territory”.

That last bit might catch the ear of US allies, who have already been concerned by Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland and quips about making Canada the 51st US state.

On the campaign trail, and in this speech, Trump made a series of big promises. Now that he is president, he will be challenged to deliver – and show what the “golden age” he heralds actually means.

After Trump concluded his speech and saw Biden depart via a Marine helicopter, he gave off-the-cuff remarks at a gathering of supporters elsewhere in the Capitol. It was there that the more unscripted Trump – the one who frequently generates headlines and turns American politics on its head – reemerged.

The 2020 election was “rigged”, he said. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was criminally responsible for the 6 January, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. He boasted about the size of his 2024 election victory and said he grudgingly agreed to talk about “unity” in his inaugural address.

It was just a taste of what was in store for the rest of the day – and for the next four years.

At a signing ceremony in the evening, Trump took an ordinary presidential act – rescinding orders from a previous administration of different party – and turned it into spectacle.

After giving another winding speech – his third of the day – Trump moved to a small desk on the stage at the downtown sport arena where his indoor inaugural parade had just concluded. Then he went to work freezing new federal regulations and hiring, reversing Biden administration directives, mandating federal workers work in-office full-time and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords.

“Can you imagine Joe Biden doing this?” he asked after signing the regulation freeze – but that applied to the moment as much as the content of the orders.

He also signed more symbolic orders to end the “weaponisation of government” and instruct his administration to address the higher cost of living.

After the arena ceremony, Trump tossed the pens he used into the crowd – another Trumping flourish.

Then he went back to the White House, and executive orders continued – pardoning nearly all of the 1,600-plus supporters arrested in the 6 January Capitol riot, temporarily suspending the TikTok ban and withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation. He also reinterpreted a key constitutional amendment and instructed his administration to cease granting citizenship to US-born children of undocumented migrants. All the while, he offered a running commentary – including proposing a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada starting on 1 February, accusing Democrats of cheating in the 2020 election and expressing doubt about the Gaza War ceasefire.

Trump returns to power with a team that has a detailed strategy for governing and an aggressive agenda to pursue. Trump himself, however, can still be as unpredictable and unfocused as ever – making remarks that could represent new policy or just a momentary distraction.

The second Trump era has truly begun.

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage
• IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration
• WATCH: The new president’s day so far
• EXPLAINED: What Donald Trump could do on day one
• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks

On the first full day of peace in Gaza on Monday, rescue workers and civilians began to reckon with the sheer scale of the destruction to the Strip.

Gaza’s Civil Defence agency – the strip’s main emergency response service – said it feared there were more than 10,000 bodies still buried under the vast sea of rubble.

Spokesman Mahmoud Basal told the BBC that they hoped to recover the dead within 100 days, but were likely to be delayed by a deficit of bulldozers and other essential equipment.

New images from Gaza following Sunday’s ceasefire showed scenes of total devastation wrought during 15 months of Israeli offensive, particularly in the north of the enclave.

The UN has previously estimated that 60% of structures across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

Though the sounds of bombing were replaced by celebrations as the ceasefire began on Sunday, the reality facing people across Gaza remains desperate.

According to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), the war has left more than two million Gazans homeless, without income, and completely dependent on food aid to survive.

That aid began to enter Gaza immediately after the ceasefire on Sunday and the UN said at least 630 lorries went into the Strip before the end of the day.

On Monday, a further 915 lorries entered the enclave, the UN said, the highest number since the start of the war 15 months ago.

Sam Rose, acting director of Unrwa, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza, said the aid supplies were just the beginning in the challenge of bringing the strip back to life.

“We’re not just talking about food, healthcare, buildings, roads, infrastructure, we’ve got individuals, families, communities that need to be rebuilt,” he said.

“The trauma that they’ve gone through, the suffering, the loss, the grief, the humiliation, and the cruelty that they’ve endured over the past 16 months – this is going to be a very, very long road.”

In Israel, the families of the three hostages who were freed in the first exchange spoke at a news conference in Tel Aviv on Monday night. Mandy Damari, the mother of dual Israeli-British citizen Emily Damari, said Emily was in “high spirits” and “on the road to recovery” despite losing two fingers in the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.

Meirav Leshem Gonen, the mother of Romi Gonen, said: “We got our Romi back, but all families deserve the same outcome, both the living and the dead. Our hearts go out to the other families.”

Before the news conference, Israeli authorities released new footage showing Damari, 28, Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31 tearfully greeting their mothers on Sunday just moments after being taken out of Gaza.

If the first phase of the ceasefire holds, 30 more hostages will be released from Gaza over the next 40 days in return for about 1,800 Palestinians freed from Israeli jails.

Palestinian health authorities estimate that more than 46,900 people were killed in Gaza during the more than 15 months of war and more than 110,700 were wounded.

The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but it says the majority of the dead are women and children – an assertion backed by the UN.

A UK-led study published by the medical journal The Lancet this month suggested that the health ministry figures may underestimate the death toll by more than 40%.

The Gaza Civil Defence agency said in a statement on Monday that 48% of its own personnel had been killed, injured or detained during the conflict, and 85% of its vehicles and 17 out of 21 facilities had been damaged or destroyed.

Though the risk from air strikes is gone, for now, the grim work continues for the remaining Civil Defence workers. Pictures shared with the BBC by members of the agency in northern Gaza on Monday showed them performing harrowing work, including the recovery of dead babies and of human remains in poor condition.

“In every street there are dead. In every neighbourhood there are people under the buildings,” said Abdullah Al-Majdalawi, a 24-year-old Civil Defence worker in Gaza City.

“Even after the ceasefire we received many calls from people saying please come, my family is buried under the rubble.”

• Joy fades as Gazans return to destroyed homes
• How 15 months of war has devastated Gaza
• ‘I want to fulfil my dead brother’s dream’ – rebuilding life in Gaza’s ruins

Malaak Kasab, a 23-year-old recent graduate displaced from Gaza City, told the BBC on Monday that members of her own family were among those yet to be recovered.

“We have lost a lot of members of our family and some are still under the destroyed buildings,” she said. “There are a lot of people under the rubble – everybody knows about this.”

Kasab’s family home in an apartment building was not completely destroyed, she said, but very badly damaged. “There are no doors, no windows, no water, no electricity, nothing. Not even wood to make a fire. It is unliveable.”

Movement is still dangerous for displaced Gazans as the Israeli military begins the process of withdrawing from populated areas of the Strip.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has warned people not to approach its personnel or installations, nor enter a buffer zone it created around the border of Gaza and around the Netzarim corridor, which bisects Gaza separating north from south.

But many residents were eager to see what was left of their homes sooner than they had been advised. Hatem Eliwah, a 42-year-old factory supervisor from Gaza City, said he was considering setting out on foot from his shelter in Khan Younis in the south.

“We have been waiting for this ceasefire like people waiting to enter heaven,” Eliwah said. “I lost two of my brothers and their families. I lost cousins, uncles. The only thing I still hope for is to go home.”

There are grave concerns on both sides that the deal could collapse even before the first phase is complete in roughly six weeks, and Israel has stressed it reserves the right to resume military action in Gaza at any time.

Speaking at a meeting of the UN Security Council on Monday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres welcomed the deal as a “ray of hope” and said its obligations must be met.

But Guterres warned of a worsening situation in the occupied West Bank, which has seen a huge rise in Israeli settler attacks against Palestinian villages since the Hamas attack on Israel of 7 October 2023.

“Senior Israeli officials openly speak of formally annexing all or part of the West Bank in the coming months,” Guterres said, adding: “Any such annexation would constitute a most serious violation of international law.”

Niluper says she has been living in agony.

A Uyghur refugee, she has spent the past decade hoping her husband would join her and their three sons in Turkey, where they now live.

The family was detained in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing increasing repression in their hometown in China’s Xinjiang province. She and the children were allowed to leave Thailand a year later. But her husband remained in detention, along with 47 other Uyghur men.

Niluper – not her real name – now fears she and her children may never see him again.

Ten days ago, she learned that Thai officials had tried to persuade the detainees to sign forms consenting to be sent back to China. When they realised what was in the forms, they refused to sign them.

The Thai government has denied having any immediate plans to send them back. But human rights groups believe they could be deported at any time.

“I don’t know how to explain this to my sons,” Niluper told the BBC on a video call from Turkey. Her sons, she says, keep asking about their father. The youngest has never met him.

“I don’t know how to digest this. I’m living in constant pain, constant fear that at any moment I may get the news from Thailand that my husband has been deported.”

The last time Thailand deported Uyghur asylum seekers was in July 2015. Without warning, it put 109 of them onto a plane back to China, prompting a storm of protest from governments and human rights groups.

The few photos that were released show them hooded and handcuffed, guarded by large numbers of Chinese police officers. Little is known about what happened to them after their return. Other deported Uyghurs have received long prison sentences in secret trials.

The nominee for Secretary of State in the incoming Trump administration, Marco Rubio, has promised to press Thailand not to send the remaining Uyghurs back.

Their living conditions have been described by one human rights defender as “a hell on earth”.

They are all being held in the Immigration Detention Centre (IDC) in central Bangkok, which houses most of those charged with immigration violations in Thailand. Some are there only briefly, while waiting to be deported; others are there much longer.

Driving along the narrow, congested road known as Suan Phlu it is easy to miss the non-descript cluster of cement buildings, and difficult to believe they house an estimated 900 detainees – the Thai authorities give out no precise numbers.

The IDC is known to be hot, overcrowded and unsanitary. Journalists are not allowed inside. Lawyers usually warn their clients to avoid being sent there if at all possible.

There are 43 Uyghurs there, plus another five being held in a Bangkok prison for trying to escape. They are the last of around 350 who fled China in 2013 and 2014.

They are kept in isolation from other inmates and are rarely allowed visits by outsiders or lawyers. They get few opportunities to exercise, or even to see daylight. They have been charged with no crime, apart from entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uyghurs have died in custody.

“The conditions there are appalling,” says Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, an NGO trying to help the Uyghurs.

“There is not enough food – it is mostly just soup made with cucumber and chicken bones. It is crammed in there. The water they get, both for drinking and washing, is dirty. Only basic medicines are provided and these are inadequate. If someone falls ill, it takes a long time to get an appointment with the doctor. And because of the dirty water, the hot weather and bad ventilation, a lot of the Uyghurs get rashes or other skin problems.”

But the worst part of their detention, say those who have experienced it, is not knowing how long they will be imprisoned in Thailand, and the constant fear of being sent back to China.

Niluper says there were always rumours about deportation but it was difficult to find out more. Escaping was hard because they had children with them.

“It was horrible. We were so scared all the time,” recalls Niluper.

“When we thought about being sent back to China, we would have preferred to die in Thailand.”

China’s repression of the Muslim Uyghurs has been well documented by the UN and human rights groups. Up to one million Uyghurs are believed to have been detained in re-education camps, in what human rights advocates say is a state campaign to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture. There are many allegations of torture and enforced disappearances, which China denies. It says it has been running “vocational centres” focused on de-radicalising Uyghurs.

Niluper says she and her husband faced hostility from Chinese state officials over their religiosity – her husband was an avid reader of religious texts.

The couple made the decision to flee when people they knew were being arrested or disappearing. The family were in a group of 220 Uyghurs who were caught by the Thai police trying to cross the border to Malaysia in March 2014.

Niluper was held in an IDC near the border, and then later in Bangkok, until with 170 other women and children, she was allowed in June 2015 to go to Turkey, which usually offers Uyghurs asylum.

But her husband remains in the Bangkok IDC. They were separated when they were detained, and she has had no contact with him since a brief meeting they were permitted in July 2014.

She says she was one of 18 pregnant women and 25 children crammed into a room that was just four by eight metres. The food was “bad and there was never enough for all of us”.

“I was the last one to give birth, at midnight, in the bathroom. The next day the guard saw my condition and that of my baby was not good, so they took us to the hospital.”

Niluper was also separated from her eldest son, who was just two years old at the time and held with his father – an experience which she says has traumatised him, after experiencing “terrible conditions” and witnessing a guard beating an inmate. When the guards brought him back to her, she says, he did not recognise her.

“He was so scared, screaming and crying. He could not understand what had happened. He did not want to talk to anyone.”

It took a long time before he accepted his mother, she says, and after that he would not leave her even for a moment, even after they had arrived in Turkey.

“It took a really, really long time for him to understand that he was finally in a safe place.”

Thailand has never explained why it will not allow the remaining Uyghurs to join their families in Turkey, but it is almost certainly because of pressure from China.

Unlike other inmates in the IDC, the fate of the Uyghurs is not handled by the Immigration Department but instead by Thailand’s National Security Council, a body chaired by the prime minister in which the military has significant influence.

As the influence of the US, Thailand’s oldest military ally, wanes, that of China has been steadily increasing. The current Thai government is keen to build even closer ties to China, to help revive the faltering economy.

The United Nations Refugee Agency has been accused of doing little to help the Uyghurs, but says it is given no access to them, so is unable to do much. Thailand does not recognise refugee status.

Accommodating China’s wish to get the Uyghurs back is not without risk though. Thailand has just taken a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, for which it lobbied hard.

Deporting 48 men who have already endured more than a decade of incarceration would badly tarnish the image the Thai government is trying to project.

Thailand will also be mindful of what happened just a month after the last mass deportation in 2015.

On 17 August that year a powerful bomb exploded at a shrine in Bangkok which was popular with Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed, in what was widely assumed to be a retaliation by Uyghur militants, although the Thai authorities tried to downplay the link.

Two Uyghur men were charged with the bombing, but their trial has lasted for nine years, with no end in sight. One of them, say his lawyers, is almost certainly innocent. A veil of secrecy surrounds the trial; the authorities seem reluctant to let anything from the hearings tying the bomb to the deportation to get out.

Even those Uyghurs who have managed to get to Turkey must then deal with their uncertain status there, and with the severance of all communications with their families in Xinjiang.

“I have not heard my mother’s voice for 10 years,” says Hasan Imam, an Uyghur refugee who now works as a lorry driver in Turkey.

He was in the same group as Niluper caught by the Malaysian border in 2014.

He remembers how the following year the Thai authorities deceived them about their plan to deport some of them to China. He says they were told some men would be moved to a different facility, because the one they were in was too crowded.

This was after some women and children had been sent to Turkey, and, unusually, the men in the camp were also allowed to talk to their wives and children in Turkey on a phone.

“We were all happy, and full of hope,” Hassan says. “They selected them, one by one. At this point they had no idea they would be sent back to China. It was only later, through an illicit phone we had, that we found out from Turkey that they had been deported.”

This filled the remaining detainees with despair, recalls Hasan, and two years later, when he was moved temporarily to another holding camp, he and 19 others made a remarkable escape, using a nail to make a hole in a crumbling wall.

Eleven were recaptured, but Hasan managed to cross the forested border into Malaysia, and from there reached Turkey.

“I do not know what condition my parents are in but for those still detained in Thailand it is even worse,” he says.

They fear being sent back and imprisoned in China – and they also fear that it would mean more severe punishment for their families, he explains.

“The mental strain for them is unbearable.”

Knife attacker Axel Rudakubana has pleaded guilty to murdering three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport.

The 18-year-old stabbed Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, along with 10 others on 29 July last year, in a “meticulously planned rampage”.

As his trial was set to begin at Liverpool Crown Court, Rudakubana, who prosecutors said had “shown no remorse”, unexpectedly entered guilty pleas to all charges, including murder, attempted murder and terror-related offences.

The victims’ families were not in court and the judge apologised to them, saying “we had all assumed” the trial would get under way in earnest on Tuesday.

Before a jury could be sworn in, Stan Reisz KC, defending, asked for the charges to be put to his client again and he pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and 10 of attempted murder, along with two terror-related charges.

Rudakubana, of Banks, a village in west Lancashire, also admitted producing the biological toxin ricin and a charge under the Terrorism Act related to possessing an al-Qaeda training manual.

Merseyside Police said the stabbing attack had not been declared a terrorist incident despite the discovery of the document.

Government sources have told the BBC that Rudakubana was referred to the government’s counter-terrorism Prevent programme several times before the attack over his general obsession with violence and he had been visited by police.

• Father stopped Rudakubana from going to former school a week before attack

The Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced a public inquiry will be held into the attacks.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer earlier said the conviction of the “vile and sick Southport killer” was welcome but also a “moment of trauma for the nation”.

He added: “There are grave questions to answer as to how the state failed in its ultimate duty to protect these young girls.

“Britain will rightly demand answers, and we will leave no stone unturned in that pursuit.”

As each charge was put to him, Rudakubana, who had his face covered with a PPE mask, quietly said “guilty” to each count.

Mr Justice Goose said: “Axel Rudakubana, you can hear me, I know.

“Those who sit with me say you have nodded your head to indicate you can hear what I am saying.”

He told him he would be sentenced on Thursday and a life sentence was “inevitable”.

Rudakubana cannot be sentenced to a whole-life term for his crimes because he is under the age of 21.

The attack took place during a summer holiday dance class for children at the Hart Centre in Southport.

Rudakubana, who was 17 at the time, also stabbed eight other children along with yoga teacher Leanne Lucas, who was instructing the class, and businessman John Hayes, who was one of the first people on the scene.

A peaceful vigil was held in the town the next day, but misinformation spread online about Rudakubana led to a riot breaking out.

Posts claiming he was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK on a small boat were shared widely.

The violent unrest quickly spread around the country.

About 1,200 people have been arrested in connection with the riots in towns and cities across the UK, and more than 400 charged.

Dozens of them have been jailed.

Patrick Hurley, who had become MP for the town less than a month before the attack, said there was “surprise and shock” at the pleas coming before the trial started.

He said: “We are all hoping the families get the outcome and justice they need.”

The Labour MP said he was pleased the victims’ families would not have to sit through the “mental torture” of a lengthy trial.

“This isn’t a day for celebration – it is a day to make sure we remember the victims,” he added.

In the days following the murders, Alice was described by her family as a “perfect dream child” who “moved their world” with her “confidence and empathy”.

Bebe’s parents Lauren and Ben King said she was a “sweet, kind, and spirited girl” who was “full of joy, light and love”.

Elsie Dot was said to be “extraordinary” and an “amazing little girl”.

The corner of the street near to where the attack happened became a sea of flowers, as people from all around the country came to pay their respects, including King Charles.

Rudakubana was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents in 2006, and moved to Banks near Southport in 2013.

He started behaving violently from Year 9 and was excluded from Range High School in Formby in October 2019 at the age of 13.

He had attacked a pupil with a hockey stick and had to be restrained by a teacher.

Rudakubana was prevented from returning to his former school a week before the stabbing murders after his father pleaded with a taxi driver not to take him.

He was wearing the same hooded sweatshirt and surgical mask he wore during the attack one week later.

Speaking after the hearing, Ursula Doyle, deputy chief crown prosecutor for Mersey and Cheshire, described the attack as “unspeakable”.

“At the start of the school holidays, a day which should have been one of carefree innocence; of children enjoying a dance workshop and making friendship bracelets, became a scene of the darkest horror as Axel Rudakubana carried out his meticulously planned rampage,” she said.

Ms Doyle added: “It is clear that this was a young man with a sickening and sustained interest in death and violence.

“He has shown no sign of remorse.”

Stock markets in the Asia-Pacific region gave up early gains after President Donald Trump said he is thinking of imposing new tariffs on Mexico and Canada.

Shares opened higher after Trump pledged in his inaugural address to bring in a new “golden age” for America.

He has promised an ambitious agenda – including trade reforms, lower taxes and cuts to government regulations – which has the potential to boost company profits.

But some economists have warned that the measures may also raise inflation, which in turn could force the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates.

“We’re thinking in terms of 25 percent on Mexico and Canada, because they’re allowing vast numbers of people — Canada’s a very bad abuser also — vast numbers of people to come in, and fentanyl to come in,” Trump said in the Oval Office.

During the election campaign, he also pledged tariffs of 10% on all imports into the US and said he would hit China with a 60% import tax.

Trump has said tariffs will make Americans richer, although critics say the costs are likely to be passed on to consumers.

The President has also said he would create an “External Revenue Service” to collect all tariffs, duties and revenues from foreign sources.

On Tuesday morning, Japan’s Nikkei 225 index was 0.1% higher, South Korea’s Kospi was down 0.1% and Australia’s ASX 200 rose by around 0.6%.

Meanwhile, the dollar regained some ground against some other major currencies, including the pound and the euro.

“Market sentiment was dented during the signing of executive orders by President Trump in the Oval Office,” said Tim Waterer, chief market analyst at financial services firm KCM Trade.

“Investors heard more explicit details regarding the Trump tariff agenda, which sullied the market mood somewhat.”

US markets were closed on Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr Day holiday.

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The first study to assess how weight-loss drugs affect the whole of human health has discovered an “eye-opening” impact on the body, researchers say.

The analysis, involving about two million people, linked the drugs to better heart health, fewer infections, a lower risk of drug abuse and fewer cases of dementia.

The US researchers also warned the drugs were “not without risk” and seemed to increase joint pain and potentially deadly inflammation in the pancreas.

However, the results need very careful interpretation.

Weight-loss drugs have exploded in popularity – but a full understanding of everything they touch in the body is still coming together.

“This is new territory,” said lead researcher Dr Ziyad al-Aly, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University.

Initially, they were a proven treatment for type 2 diabetes. Then, weight loss was noticed as a significant side-effect – and Ozempic and Wegovy became household names.

The study used data on US veterans with type 2 diabetes, some of whom were given Ozempic or Wegovy and some more standard drugs – to measure their effect on 175 other illnesses.

There appeared to be a significant boon to heart health, with lower levels of heart attacks, stroke, heart failure and high blood pressure, in those taking the new weight-loss drugs.

They also cut the risk of substance abuse (including alcohol, opioids and cannabis) as well as reducing schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts and seizures.

Despite the study being short, and people taking the drugs for only 3.5 years because of how new they are, it reported a 12% reduction in Alzheimer’s disease.

There was also less liver cancer, muscle pain and chronic kidney disease as well as a noted reduction in bacterial infections and fever.

On the flip side, people were more likely to have problems in their digestive system. Feeling sick, tummy pain, inflammation in the stomach, diverticulitis (bulges in the intestines that can be painful) and haemorrhoids were more common on Ozempic or Wegovy.

The data, published in the journal Nature Medicine, also showed low blood pressure, including fainting, headaches, disturbed sleep, kidney stones, inflammation in the kidneys and a range of bone or joint pains, including arthritis, became more frequent.

“It was definitely eye-opening for me to see all these different hits in different organ systems,” Dr Aly told BBC News.

The explanations for the drugs’ seemingly wide-ranging impact are both obvious and mysterious.

Losing excess weight would in turn improve health. For example, lower levels of sleep apnoea – when breathing stops and starts while slumbering – is thought to be down to losing weight around the tongue and throat, which can block the airways.

But the drugs also appear to be directly altering the behaviour of cells and tissues in the body.

Dr Aly said: “Obesity is bad for the brain. Obesity is bad for mental health. Obesity is bad for the heart. Obesity could be the mother of all ills.”

Ozempic and Wegovy have the same active ingredient, semaglutide, in different doses, and mimic the hormone glucagon-like peptide-1.

Released by the gut after eating, GLP-1 travels through the blood and sticks to little receptors on the surface of brains cells.

This tells the brain there is food in the stomach and is why people feel less hungry after eating.

However, receptors that respond to GLP-1 are found throughout the body, including in the heart and some parts of the immune system.

“It is very clear this class of drugs seem to suppress reward mechanisms [in the brain so it] inhibits that urge to seek out alcohol, to seek out tobacco, to seek out gambling,” Dr Aly said.

Meanwhile, lower levels of inflammation, the alarm bell of the immune system, could have a wide range of health impacts.

The range of health benefits may strengthen the case for some people using the drugs, Dr Aly said.

“When you add more benefit, for the people who really are at risk of these conditions, that’s an added plus,” he said.

But for those whose weight is not affecting their health, “maybe the risk that they’re buying themselves is actually much higher than the benefit”.

However, the study has drawbacks that limit its findings.

Most of the veterans were white men, so it did not include any female-specific effects, such as the anecdotal phenomenon of improved fertility and unexpected “Ozempic babies”.

And there could be reasons why some had been prescribed Ozempic or Weygovy, rather than other drugs, that could provide alternative explanations for some of the findings.

Thorough clinical trials have already proven benefits to heart health – and nausea is a known side-effect – but other findings will need to go through similar rigorous testing.

Alzheimer’s starts more than a decade before symptoms appear – but this study suggests just a few years on semaglutide has a protective effect.

Trials are already under way to work out if this effect is real.

“Such trials will lead us much closer to the truth,” Prof Naveed Sattar, from the University of Glasgow, said.

“Fortunately… several will report out in the next one to four years.”

And while “interesting”, he said this latest study’s findings were not strong enough to influence how the drugs were prescribed.

Prof Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, from the University of Cambridge, said the study needed to be interpreted “carefully” but provided “useful reassurance” about the drugs’ safety in people with diabetes.

And further studies in other patients were “awaited with interest”.

The “most surprising finding” was the increase in joint pain, since weight loss should reduce pressure on the joints.

But the fact some cells in the immune system had GLP-1 receptors meant the impact of these drugs was “somewhat unpredictable” and while some inflammatory disorders may be eased, “others might conceivably be exacerbated”, Prof O’Rahilly said.

China has executed a man found guilty of killing at least 35 people in a car attack in November, in what is thought to be the deadliest attack in the country for a decade.

Fan Weiqiu, 62, injured dozens more when he drove his car into people exercising outside a stadium in the southern city of Zhuhai.

State media said a second man was executed for a separate attack that came days later. Xu Jiajin, 21, killed eight people in a stabbing spree at his university in the eastern city of Wuxi.

Authorities said Fan was driven by “dissatisfaction” over how his property had been divided following his divorce, while Xu carried out his attack after “failing to obtain his diploma due to poor exam results”.

Fan was detained at the scene on 11 November, where police said he was found with self-inflicted wounds.

In December, he was found guilty of “endangering public safety”, with the Zhuhai Intermediate People’s Court describing his motive as “extremely vile” and the methods used “particularly cruel”.

His execution on Monday comes less than a month after the court sentenced him to death.

In the case of Xu, police said he confessed to his crime “without hesitation” on 16 November. He was sentenced to death on 17 December, with the court hearing that the circumstances of his crime were “particularly bad” and “extremely serious”.

Human rights groups believe China is the world’s leading executioner, killing thousands of people every year. The country does not release details about its use of the death penalty, so reliable numbers are unavailable.

China has been grappling with a spate of public violence, with many attackers believed to have been spurred by a desire to “take revenge on society” – where perpetrators target strangers over their personal grievances.

The number of such attacks across China reached 19 in 2024.

Within days of the Zhuhai and Wuxi attacks, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school in Changde city, injuring 30.

Authorities said the man, Huang Wen, wanted to vent his anger after dealing with investment losses and family conflict.

Huang was handed a suspended death sentence last month, which could be commuted to life imprisonment if he does not commit another crime in the next two years.

Analysts earlier told the BBC that the string of mass killings raised questions about how people in China have been dealing with various sources of stress, such as the country’s sluggish economy.

“The tensions do seem to be building, and it doesn’t look like there is any way it is going to ease up in the near future,” says George Magnus, an economist at Oxford University’s China Centre.

A court in India has sentenced a man to life in prison for the rape and murder of a junior doctor, in a case that sparked nationwide outrage and protests.

The judge rejected demands for the death penalty but said that Sanjay Roy, a hospital volunteer in Kolkata city who was convicted over the weekend, would spend the rest of his life in jail.

Roy has maintained he is innocent and is expected to appeal against the verdict in a higher court.

The victim’s family said they wanted him to be hanged, and that they were “shocked” by the sentence.

“We will continue our fight, and won’t let investigations stop… Come what may, we will fight for justice,” the woman’s father told AFP news agency. Indian law prohibits revealing the identity of victims of sexual violence and that of their family members.

Immediately after the sentencing, dozens of doctors protested outside the court, saying they were not satisfied with the investigation and the sentence.

The trainee doctor’s murder last August at the state-run hospital in Kolkata in West Bengal state sent shockwaves across the country.

The 31-year-old had gone to sleep in the seminar hall of the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital after a night shift. Her half-naked, severely injured body was later discovered near a podium by a colleague.

The autopsy report indicated that the woman had been strangled and had injury marks that showed she fought back.

The crime sparked widespread protests and concerns over the safety of healthcare workers in India, especially women. In Kolkata, doctors went on strike for weeks, demanding action against the accused and officials who they said were complicit in delaying or derailing the investigation.

Roy was arrested a day after the crime. According to the charge sheet filed by federal investigators, which the BBC has seen, Roy went to the hospital in a drunken state and found the female doctor sleeping alone.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – India’s premier crime agency that investigated the case – had demanded the death penalty for Roy.

But on Monday, the judge disagreed, saying he had considered all the evidence and did not consider the case to be a “rarest-of-rare” crime.

Before announcing the sentence, the judge also gave Roy a chance to speak in court. He claimed that he was innocent and was being “falsely implicated” in the case.

Without taking any names, Roy alleged that there were “others involved in the crime”.

The judge dismissed Roy’s claims and said the court had already found him guilty of all charges.

Some politicians and social media users criticised the sentence.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that she was not satisfied with the court’s order. “We want justice. Such criminals should be hanged,” she told reporters.

Mozambique’s main opposition leader Venâncio Mondlane has told the BBC he is prepared to serve in the government if President Daniel Chapo meets his demands to end the political crisis that has hit the country following disputed elections.

Chapo said he had set up a team that was “considering” whether his rival should be invited to join a new “inclusive” government.

The two men outlined their positions in separate interviews with the BBC, giving the impression that they were open to rapprochement after the deaths of about 300 people in post-election unrest.

Mondlane rejected his defeat in October’s election, saying the result was rigged – something that Chapo denied.

Mozambique’s highest court declared Chapo the winner with 65% of the vote to Mondlane’s 24%.

Chapo was the candidate of the ruling Frelimo party, as his predecessor, Filipe Nyusi, had to step down after serving two terms in office.

Chapo was officially sworn in as president on 15 January, about a week after Mondlane held his own inauguration to declare himself the “people’s president”.

Mondlane told the BBC that Chapo was “forced” on the nation, and was the “president of the defence force”.

Mondlane said that he had, nevertheless, decided to suspend protests for the first 100 days of his rival’s term on condition he did the following:

• unconditionally release about 5,000 people detained for participating in demonstrations against the election result
• pay financial compensation to the families of people killed by police during the protests and
• offer free medical treatment for about 200 people injured by the police.

Mondlane said that if Chapo agreed to this, he would “open a window” for negotiations or else he would call on his supporters to renew protests.

Asked whether he was prepared to work in Chapo’s government, Mondlane replied: “Yes, if he has a genuine interest to work with me. He’s got a chance to invite me to the table of dialogue.”

In his interview with the BBC, Chapo said he wanted to “govern in an inclusive way”, and to introduce reforms to address concerns about the electoral law, human rights and freedom of expression.

He said talks were currently taking place with opposition parties represented in the new parliament, and they would later be widened to include “all segments of society”.

Chapo added that wanted to form a government that was “open to all Mozambicans”, but he wanted to stress that “the profile of the people is very important”.

Asked whether he believed Mondlane qualified to serve in government, Chapo replied: “It will depend… because there is a team that is right now considering that, on the profile of the people, their competencies, their meritocracy, the patriotism – all these pre-requisites that I’m alluding to.

“If the team reaches the conclusion that these people have the right profile, they will be part of the government. Those who do not have that profile, will not take part.”

Aged 47, Chapo was chosen by Frelimo, which has been in power since independence 49 years ago, as its candidate to rally young voters affected by high unemployment, and fed up with the party’s decades-long rule.

• Mozambique at a crossroads as new president sworn in

He told the BBC that he wanted both local and foreign investment to increase in Mozambique in order to make the economy “more dynamic”.

This would help create jobs for young people so that they could “build their homes, establish their families and stabilize their lives”.

Mondlane, 50, was seen to have considerable support among young people after he rallied them during the election campaign with the slogan “Save Mozambique – this country is ours”.

He contested the poll as an independent after breaking away from the main opposition Renamo party.

A small party that backed his candidacy won a few parliamentary seats in the election.

• Children shot dead after joining pot-banging protests in Mozambique
• Why Africa’s governing parties are having a tough time in elections
• The poet who caught the eye of Mozambique’s freedom fighters

TikTok briefly went dark in the US over the weekend, after the Supreme Court denied a bid by Chinese owner ByteDance to overturn a law banning it.

But it was back after a day with a message thanking incoming president Donald Trump for his “efforts” in restoring the app.

On Friday, the Supreme Court upheld a law, passed by Congress, to ban TikTok.

It said the ban was “designed to prevent China – a designated foreign adversary – from leveraging its control over ByteDance to capture the personal data of US TikTok users”.

The law was due to kick in on Sunday, but on Saturday night, the app went dark.

Users in the US who tried to use it were met with a note reading: “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”

Then, on Sunday, the app was back up and running with a message: “Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the US!”

However, that was only for people who already had the app – it was still unavailable to download on app stores in the US.

Posting on Truth Social, a social media platform he owns, Trump said: “I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark!”

Trump said he would issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the ban is introduced, “so that we can make a deal to protect our national security”.

TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew is expected at Trump’s inauguration on Monday afternoon.

An executive order is an instruction from the president which has the weight of the law behind it.

His order, he said, would give the company time to find a US partner to buy half of the company.

“I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to stay up,” he said.

The Biden administration made clear they would not enforce the law – so another option would be for Trump to follow suit and allow the law to stand but tell the Department of Justice (DoJ) to ignore it.

The government would be effectively telling Apple and Google they will not be punished for continuing to allow people to download TikTok onto their devices, meaning the law would remain in place but would essentially be redundant.

Obviously, the firms might be uncomfortable about breaking the law even if they have been told doing so is fine – as it would be effectively requiring them to take the president’s word for it that they will not face punishment.

• TikTok ban will be first test for Trump as dealmaker-in-chief
• Could TikTok ever be banned in the UK too?

Up until now, ByteDance has been resolute that no sale of its prize asset in the US is on the table.

But could that change now that it has actually been banned?

Potential buyers continue to line up – with Bloomberg News reporting on Tuesday that the firm was looking at a sale to billionaire Elon Musk, though TikTok described this as “pure fiction”.

Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and billionaire businessman Frank McCourt are among those who have previously expressed an interest in buying it.

Mr McCourt, a former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, said he had secured $20bn in verbal commitments from a consortium of investors to bid for TikTok.

There is an even more left field – and considerably less serious – proposed owner.

The biggest YouTuber in the world Jimmy Donaldson – AKA MrBeast – has claimed he is now in the running to make a deal after he had billionaires reaching out to him about it.

TikTok was the only ByteDance app which became available again after the ban – though only for people who already had the app.

It’s still unavailable to download from Apple and Google’s app stores.

As of Monday morning, other apps owned by the company are still unavailable to use in the US, The Verge reports.

These include Lemon8, another social media app which has been compared to Pinterest, and CapCut, a video editing app.

Meanwhile Marvel Snap, a digital card game published by a ByteDance subsidiary, also went down – which caught even its US-based developer Second Dinner off guard.

The company posted on X on Sunday that the outage was a “surprise”, and later said it “hoped to have it back online within 24 hours”.

TikTok says it has 170 million users in the US who, on average, spent 51 minutes per day on the app in 2024.

While its future is still a little uncertain, rivals such as Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts may benefit.

Users bring advertisers – so this could be a big financial boost to those platforms.

“Chief marketing officers who we’ve spoken with confirmed that they will divert their media dollars to Meta and Google if they can no longer advertise on TikTok,” said Kelsey Chickering, an analyst at market research company Forrester.

Other potential winners include Twitch, which made its name on hosting livestreams – a popular feature on TikTok. Twitch is well known particularly to gamers, though it continues to grow with other content.

Other Chinese-owned platforms, such as Xiaohongshu – known as RedNote among its US users – have seen rapid growth in the US and the UK.

A far-right organisation should be banned and some members investigated by police, the BBC has been told, after we secretly filmed people in the group saying migrants should be shot.

Former Counter-Extremism Commissioner Dame Sara Khan believes the UK government should urgently change the law to make groups like Patriotic Alternative illegal.

Barrister Ramya Nagesh watched some of the footage and said: “There’s more than enough evidence for the police to investigate and refer to the Crown Prosecution Service.”

An undercover BBC reporter spent a year investigating the far-right group and its members were recorded using racial slurs.

One Patriotic Alternative (PA) member said he believed a race war was inevitable and the organisation should use a similar tactic to the Nazi party to gain power.

The group cannot be banned under current legislation as they do not advocate terrorism but Dame Sara, the UK’s first Counter-Extremism Commissioner, feels they are “creating a climate conducive to terrorism”.

Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett said they are not extremist, do not promote violence and peacefully campaign for the rights of what he calls indigenous British people.

The group, considered to be the UK’s largest far-right group with about 500 members and thousands of followers online, says it exists to “raise awareness” of immigration and promote “family values”.

The BBC Wales Investigates programme found some members making comments that experts say could amount to inciting racial hatred.

Patriotic Alternative have regional branches around the UK and encourage members – including former teachers and nurses – to hold protests, highlight immigration issues, film their activities and share clips online.

A BBC journalist infiltrated the group in Wales using a fake identity, Dan Jones, someone who slept on friends’ sofas in Cardiff and did not have a full-time job.

Posing as a new recruit, the undercover reporter covertly filmed at Patriotic Alternative demonstrations, their summer camp and secretive annual conference over the course of a year and heard some members sharing extreme views.

Dan attended a number of demonstrations in south Wales, including in Merthyr Tydfil where the group protested against the housing of migrants.

He went to banner waving events on busy road bridges where the group would visibly demonstrate against controversial local issues, encouraging drivers to honk horns in support.

These events are legal and often attended by people who are not in Patriotic Alternative.

However it was at these so-called ‘banner drop’ protests where Dan met people like Roger Phillips.

While he said he wasn’t a Patriotic Alternative member, Mr Phillips joined the group at a demonstration and privately told Dan “35 to 40 of us were prepping, arming ourselves” after being at a protest against plans to use a hotel in Llanelli to house asylum seekers.

“I’m buying a pump action shotgun now,” Mr Phillips told the undercover reporter.

“Who do you think is going to fight these migrants? Us lot.”

He discussed modifying ammunition and claimed the weapon he planned to get could “kill you at 150 yards”.

Mr Phillips said afterwards that he had suspected Dan was undercover so fed him false information and that he had been talking about paintballing guns.

Joe Marsh, Patriotic Alternative’s Wales organiser and former leader of the anti-Muslim Welsh Defence League, invited Dan to events.

“If you didn’t have Jamaicans and Africans here stabbing people, we wouldn’t have any knife crime,” the former British National Party (BNP) activist and former football hooligan was filmed saying.

After the stabbing of three young girls in Southport in July 2024, Mr Marsh told his followers: “People shouldn’t be calling demos at mosques… if you are going to do one, outside a migrant hotel or in the town centre.”

The next day, hotels housing migrants near Rotherham and in Tamworth were set on fire. We do not know if any of the protesters were Patriotic Alternative members or followers of Mr Marsh.

Mr Marsh told the BBC he had not incited racial hatred, he had legally protested and had not introduced any new recruits to members with extreme views.

The secret filming exposed how the more extreme views of some members came out, like when Aaron Watkins offered Dan some casual work.

Mr Watkins is now a handyman after losing his tax job at HMRC after being outed for making racist comments online and being spotted at demonstrations.

While the pair were wallpapering a house, Mr Watkins told Dan: “The communities that are the most diverse are the people we want to get rid of, violently preferably.”

“Round them up into camps and if they refuse to leave, we shoot them. The people who come here are parasites.”

Mr Watkins told Dan that anti-terrorism detectives did not find any evidence against him when they investigated him for making racist comments because he had a new phone and had destroyed his old handset.

“I’d burnt the old one, literally on a barbeque,” he privately admitted. “So, they couldn’t get me.”

When the BBC approached Mr Watkins afterwards, he declined to comment.

Our undercover reporter was invited to join social media chatgroups where he got messages daily about how immigrants were “invading” the UK.

Dan was invited to Patriotic Alternative’s summer camp in Derbyshire and to their annual conference where he met Patrick – and the former history teacher from Bristol said the group should mirror the tactic of the Nazi party in 1920s Germany.

“If you look at what the national socialist party did in Germany… community organising, talking to people about local issues, not as politicians… that is what paved the way for them skyrocketing to the elections from 1929 onwards,” he said.

Patrick then told Dan a race war was “inevitable”, and if immigrants did not leave: “The only way to get rid of them will be to kill every single one of them.”

When asked about his comments afterwards, Patrick accused the BBC of having an anti-white bias and “persecuting ordinary British people who care deeply about the safety and wellbeing of our indigenous people”.

Dan shared a conversation with one of the conference guest speakers who was a far-right activist and a convicted criminal from Australia, Blair Cottrell.

He was secretly filmed likening Africans to dogs and suggested that slaves had been happy to work for white people.

“An old lady was stabbed to death by a gang of African kids. When you look at the way things happen in Africa, the only language they understand is violence” he told Dan and other group members.

“The only way to effectively respond to a crime that they’ve committed as heinous as what I described is to literally skin them,” he was filmed saying.

“You hang a few of their bodies up across some traffic lights or something. Just theoretically of course, I can’t condone it.”

The BBC has repeatedly asked Blair Cottrell about his comments – he replied, but did not answer our questions.

Dan has now left Patriotic Alternative and the undercover footage was shown to a leading barrister who said the BBC’s findings should prompt a police investigation because, in her view, some of the comments could incite racial hatred.

“After the Southport riots, we saw prosecutions of individuals who’d posted even just one or two messages on their social media platforms,” said criminal barrister Ramya Nagesh, who has written a book on hate crime.

“And those messages were arguably not as inflammatory as the ones you have shown me.”

Dame Sara said groups like Patriotic Alternative were “attempting to mainstream extremism in our country”.

“They should absolutely not be allowed to operate with impunity,” said Dame Sara.

“We’ve seen their recent activity and their contribution towards public disorder in the summer riots.”

She has now called on the UK government to introduce new laws to ban groups like this.

“It’s incredibly urgent… unless something changes, I’m afraid we’re going to continue to see groups like PA radicalise our children and make us a weaker and less democratic society.”

The UK government said extremism has “no place in society” and was working to “assess and consider the right approach” to tackling the issue.

“We work closely with law enforcement, local communities and our international partners to tackle groups and individuals who sow division and hatred,” said a Home Office spokesperson.

Patriotic Alternative’s leader said any comments were made in private.

“We’re people that advocate for the rights of indigenous Britons and we are people that are campaigning now against what is going on in this country,” said Mark Collett, who formed the group after being press officer for the BNP.

When pressed about the use of racial slurs by his members, Mr Collett said this was prohibited in the group’s code of conduct.

“If people have breached that code of conduct, then we will deal with that in due course,” he added.

Working from home is creating a generation who are “not doing proper work”, the former boss of Marks and Spencer and Asda has warned.

Lord Rose told BBC Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” and employees’ productivity was suffering.

His comments come as some companies are calling time on remote working. Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are just some of the businesses who now require their head office staff to be in every day.

However, work-from-home expert Prof Nicholas Bloom said that while fully remote work can be “quite damaging” to some workers’ productivity, spending three days out of five in the office was as productive as fully office-based work overall.

Lord Rose, who was chief executive of M&S and recently stepped down as the chairman of Asda, said: “We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four.”

In a November 2024 GB snapshot survey by the Office for National Statistics, 26% of people said they had been hybrid-working in the prior seven days, with some days in the workplace and some days at home – while 14% had been fully remote and 41% had commuted to their workplace every day (the remainder were not working in the week surveyed).

The shift to working from home has transformed local economies. Industry estimates indicate that vacant office space has nearly doubled since the pandemic, a quarter of dry-cleaning businesses have shut down, and the number of golf games played during the working week has risen 350% – suggesting some people are mixing work and pleasure.

Working from home is rapidly becoming a major battleground in the culture wars. The government is currently legislating to strengthen the right of employees across the UK to request working from home and says that it intends to make it harder for employers to turn down requests.

But some employers – including government bodies – are battling with staff to get them back into the office, arguing that face-to-face interaction is essential to collaborative working.

In some cases, such as independent record label Hospital Records, this requires negotiation between a young workforce – some of whom may never have worked full-time in an office – and their older bosses.

Company founder Chris Goss, who introduced a new policy requiring staff work three days in the office rather than two, said he had “a nagging feeling” that remote working has affected the company’s bottom line.

“I firmly believe that the music industry is all about relationships, and so the one single way for any of us to be able to build those kind of meaningful relationships is to do it in person.”

Maya, a 25-year-old marketing manager at the company, said she likes being around her more experienced colleagues in the workplace. “There’s a lot of people in my team that are a lot further along in their career, so if I need help with something, you know, I can just ask someone.”

But she believes she would not be able to be in the office five days a week “because my social battery drains and I need sometimes to be just at home and just to smash out loads of admin”.

Prof Bloom, a Stanford University economist, said his research into working from home suggests employees in their teens and early 20s should probably be in the office at least four days a week to maximise their opportunities for being mentored.

However, he said polls of tens of thousands of employees in the UK, US and Europe suggest workers valued the ability to work from home for two days a week about as much as an 8% pay rise.

Employment rights minister Justin Madders told Panorama there was a growing body of evidence that working from home was more productive. He also said it was good for growth because companies will have “a much more motivated workforce” and “if we’re able to get more people into work because flexibility is available for them, that will help us reach our growth ambitions”.

Prof Bloom may not be as optimistic about the effect hybrid working has on productivity, but he does agree that increasing the number of roles which can be done from home could help with economic growth if it encourages more people back into work, such as those with caring responsibilities.

“That is a huge boost” and “kind of a win, win, win”, because people would be able to work in better conditions, contribute to tax revenue and “everyone gains”.

One of the people who could benefit is Harleen, who was made redundant after she had her second child and has been unable to return to work because she cannot find a fully remote role that fits around her autistic son’s routine.

“I am not seeing those jobs advertised. I’m not seeing anything that caters to that flexibility,” she said.

“Every day I wake up and I’m thinking I’m living in Groundhog Day. All I’m doing is being a mother. I enjoy being a mum, but I want productivity. I start to feel like I’m just being brain dead.”

In the public sector, productivity is the lowest it has been since 1997 – except for the pandemic lockdown years – and some blame working from home. Since November 2023, civil servants have been called back in for between two to three days a week.

But in several public bodies, including at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in Newport, South Wales, some staff are refusing to return.

Ed, an IT delivery manager at the ONS and a rep for the PCS trade union, said he has worked almost entirely from home since the pandemic. He says it helps him to get his children to school and nursery and not waste time on commuting.

“We’ve never been told by senior leaders at the ONS that there is a problem with productivity, there’s a problem with quality, there’s a problem with meeting deadlines,” he said.

“We will never see this opportunity again. We have to fight for workers’ rights.”

He and other union members are threatening to strike if they are forced to travel into the office 40% of the time. Civilian staff in the Metropolitan Police and union members at the Land Registry are also in dispute over policies on returning to the office.

The ONS, which is in talks with the union, says it believes “face-to-face interaction” helps to “build working relationships, supports collaboration, and innovation”.

But whatever the outcome of disputes such as this, it is clear that all of us working full-time in the office is now a thing of the past.

In the shadow of Iceland’s largest geothermal power station, a large warehouse houses a hi-tech indoor farm of sorts that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.

Under a strange pink-purple glow, illuminated panels buzz and cylindrical columns of water bubble away, as a futuristic crop of microalgae grows.

It’s here that Iceland’s Vaxa Technologies has developed a system that harnesses energy and other resources from the nearby power plant, to cultivate these tiny aquatic organisms.

“It’s a new way of thinking about food production,” says general manager, Kristinn Haflidason as he gives me a tour of the space-age facility.

For much of our history, humans have consumed seaweed, also know as macroalgae.

But its tiny relative, microalgae has been a less common food source, although it was eaten for centuries in ancient Central America and Africa.

Now scientists and entrepreneurs are increasingly exploring its potential as a nutrition-rich, sustainable food.

About 35 minutes from the capital Reykjavik, the Vaxa site produces the microalgae Nannochloropsis, both as food for people, and for feed in fish and shrimp farming.

It also grows a type of bacteria called Arthospira, also known as blue-green algae, as it shares similar properties with microalgae.

When dried out it’s know as spirulina and is used as a dietary supplements, a food ingredients, and as a bright-blue food colouring.

These tiny organisms photosynthesise, capturing energy from light to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen.

“The algae is eating CO2, or turning the CO2 into biomass,” explains Mr Haflidason. “It’s carbon negative.”

Vaxa’s plant has a unique situation.

It’s the only place where algae cultivation is integrated with a geothermal power station, which supplies clean electricity, delivers cold water for cultivation, hot water for heating, and even pipes across its CO2 emissions.

“You end up with a slightly negative carbon footprint,” says Asger Munch Smidt-Jensen, a food technology consultant at Danish Technology Institute (DTI), who co-authored a study assessing the environmental impact of Vaxa’s spirulina production.

“We also found a relatively low footprint, both in terms of land and water use.”

Round-the-clock renewable energy, plus a stream of CO2, and nutrients with a low carbon footprint, are needed to ensure the setup is climate-friendly, and he thinks that isn’t easily replicated.

“There is a huge input of energy to run these photo-bioreactors, and you have to artificially simulate the sun, so you need a high energy light source,” he explains.

“My main takeaway is that we should utilise these areas [like Iceland] where we have low impact energy sources to make energy intensive products,” adds Mr Munch Smidt-Jensen.

Back at the algae plant, I climb onto an elevated platform, where I’m surrounded by noisy modular units called photo-bioreactors, where thousands upon thousands of tiny red and blue LED lights fuel the microalgae’s growth, in place of sunlight.

They’re also supplied water and nutrients.

“More than 90% of the photosynthesis happens within very specific wavelengths of red and blue light,” explains Mr Haflidason. “We are only giving them the light that they use.”

All the conditions are tightly controlled and optimised by machine learning, he adds.

About 7% of the crop is harvested daily, and rapidly replenished by new growth.

Vaxa’s facility can produce up to 150 metric tonnes of algae annually, and it plans to expand.

As the crops are rich in protein, carbohydrate, omega-3s, fatty-acids, and vitamin B12, Mr Haflidason believes growing microalgae this way, could help tackle global food insecurity.

Many other companies are betting on the potential of microalgae – it’s estimated the market will be worth $25.4bn (£20.5bn) by 2033.

Danish start-up Algiecel has been trialling portable shipping container-sized modules that house photo-bioreactors, and which could link up to carbon-emitting industries to capture their CO2, while simultaneously producing food and feed.

Crops are also being used in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, biofuel and a replacement for plastic.

Perhaps also microalgae could be produced in space.

In a project funded by the European Space Agency, the Danish Technological Institution plans to test if a microalgae can be grown on the International Space Station.

Despite all the investment, there’s some way to go before micro-algae become an everyday part of our diet.

It still needs a lot of development, according to Mr Munch Smidt-Jensen.

He points out that the texture lacks firmness. Meanwhile the taste can be “fishy” if the algae is a saltwater variety.

“But there are ways of coming overcoming this,” he adds.

There’s also the societal question.

“Are people ready for it? How do we make it so that everyone wants to eat this?”

Malene Lihme Olsen, a food scientist at Copenhagen University who researches micro algae, says its nutritional value needs more research.

“Green microalgae [chlorella] have a very robust cell wall, so it can be difficult for us to digest and get all the nutrients,” she says.

For now she says microalgae is better added to other “carrier products” like pasta or bread to help with taste, texture and appearance.

However, Ms Olsen believes microalgae are a promising future food.

“If you compare one hectare of soy in Brazil, and imagine we had one hectare of algae field, you could produce 15 times more protein a year [from the algae].”

Back at the plant I’m looking at an unappetising green sludge. It’s the harvested microalgae with the water squeezed out, ready for further processing.

Mr Haflidason offers me a taste and, after initial reluctance, I try some and find its flavour neutral with a texture like tofu.

“We are absolutely not proposing that anyone should eat green sludge,” jokes Mr Haflidason.

Instead the processed algae is an ingredient for everyday foods, and in Reykjavik one bakery makes bread with Spirulina and a gym puts it in smoothies.

“We’re not going to change what you eat. We’re just going to change the nutritional value of the foods that you eat,” he says.

Nine women separately told police about one of Scotland’s most prolific and predatory romance fraudsters in the years before his arrest, the BBC has found.

Christopher Harkins was finally jailed for 12 years in July 2024 but women who had tried to report him in the previous decade said they felt “dismissed” when they approached Police Scotland.

A BBC Disclosure investigation has revealed that between 2012 and 2019 Police Scotland received nine reports from women who had met Harkins through dating sites including Tinder.

The women said they told police that Harkins had recorded intimate pictures and videos without consent, abused and threatened them and stolen tens of thousands of pounds.

None of the reports resulted in criminal charges at the time and his victims said their original complaints were dismissed as “civil matters”.

Police Scotland told the BBC there were no reports of physical or sexual abuse at that time.

They said they were “mainly around the financial situation” and were each treated in isolation.

The force said its understanding of abuse had progressed since the introduction of new domestic abuse legislation in 2019.

Harkins carried on offending until 2020.

He used dating sites like Tinder to target women, typically singling out successful, career-driven women around Glasgow and the central belt.

On his dating profile, the 38-year-old presented himself as a jet-setting, business-owning, “gym rat”, but in reality he was one of Scotland’s most prolific and predatory romance fraudsters.

Harkins’ scams included pretending to book romantic holidays, asking for money claiming his bank account was temporarily frozen or telling women he was investing their savings for them.

In other cases he pressured women to take out loans of up to £12,000 to give to him and also used their identities to take out loans himself.

One woman was forced into bankruptcy while others spent years paying off debts, suffering mental health issues as a result.

Many of the women who went to the police were too ashamed to tell family and friends of their ordeals.

One victim who tried to report Harkins in 2019, after she transferred £3,247 to him for a holiday booking that didn’t exist, said she felt the women were let down.

“The sheer number of people that came forward, I think it’s clear that there were opportunities to investigate,” said the woman, who we are calling Lisa to protect her privacy.

“There must have been a way that he could have been stopped before he was.”

Dr Jenn Glinski, from Scottish Women’s Aid, said early reports of financial abuse give authorities a chance to intervene.

When Lisa initially went to a police station to ask for help, she said she was told: “There’s not really much we can do if your boyfriend doesn’t want to take you on holiday”.

“It was very dismissive,” she said.

“They seemed to be a little bit unsure of how you would deal with that or how you would categorise that.

“I was asked whether or not I had slept with him at that point, which I didn’t feel was relevant. I remember feeling really frustrated.”

Determined to expose Harkins, Lisa emailed journalist Catriona Stewart, who published an article in Glasgow’s Evening Times newspaper.

It quickly became apparent that Lisa was not the only woman Harkins had targeted.

“Within a few hours of the article going live I had five women who had been in touch with Christopher Harkins phone me,” Ms Stewart said.

“It very quickly became apparent to me that this man had been operating for at least a decade, that his alleged crimes were far more than financial. And that this was an individual who was potentially very dangerous.”

After the newspaper article was published, police revisited the historical reports.

Harkins was charged and stood trial at the High Court in Paisley in May 2024.

One woman, whom we are calling Jane for legal reasons, met Harkins online in late 2018 before progressing into a relationship with him.

He stole from her and recorded an intimate video without consent before suggesting he would send it to her parents.

Giving evidence, Jane also described an incident when Harkins raped her.

“He was trying to have sex with me while I was asleep,” Jane said.

“The only memory I have was discomfort. I remember feeling in pain. I remember feeling uncomfortable. I remember feeling confused. I tried to push him away.

“I remember this was a time where he grabbed me by the neck.”

After a two-week trial, Harkins was convicted of 19 offences including rape, assault, recording an intimate video without consent, threatening and abusive behaviour and four other sexual offences.

He also admitted defrauding nine women, including Lisa and Jane, out of more than £214,000.

The BBC is aware of alleged frauds totalling a further £53,000 that have not been prosecuted and a further nine alleged victims who were not involved in the trial.

DCI Lyndsay Laird led the Police Scotland investigation into Harkins.

She said it was difficult to say why they weren’t investigated earlier.

“Each one was reported at different stages, so they weren’t all reported together, they were reported in different divisions throughout Police Scotland,” she said.

She added: “There was no reports of physical or sexual abuse ever made to the police at that time.

“It was mainly around the financial situation, which when they’re treated in isolation, they have been taken as civil investigations.

“I think it’s safe to say policing has evolved massively since the time those initial reports have come in.”

Asked if Police Scotland would apologise to the victims who tried to report Harkins in the years before he was arrested, DCI Laird said: “I think that’s a very difficult question to answer.

“I think they’ve got a successful court result now, based on the investigation that was conducted.

“I would say with everything that we’ve put in place since then, I would hope that that experience wouldn’t be replicated now.”

Harkins was first arrested and appeared in court in January 2020.

Despite his legal situation he continued his scams and found a new target.

We are calling her Naomi to protect her identity.

Naomi was seeing Harkins in 2020 while he was being investigated by police.

She alleges he stole £500 from her and later pressured her to withdraw £10,000 that he had transferred into her bank account.

She was unaware of the allegations against him.

“[I had] no idea”, she said.

“If I did I wouldn’t have been involved. It wouldn’t have happened.”

After spending a night with Harkins, Naomi said he sent her a still image from a video he’d taken of her while they were intimate, leaving her feeling “absolutely violated”.

In the year up to June 2024, almost £95m was lost to romance fraud in the UK with the average loss per person being £10,774, according to the national fraud intelligence bureau.

In July last year Harkins was sentenced to 12 years in prison and placed on the sex offenders register indefinitely.

Lisa, whose initial media interview sparked the police investigation that led to Harkins being jailed, said she felt vindicated for persevering.

She got her money back from Harkins months later, but most women did not.

Lisa said: “I was just so relieved for everybody that had stood up and told their story that there had been a positive outcome.

“I just think they’re incredibly brave and I’m so glad that they did do it. The result is exactly what should’ve happened years ago.

“I’ve felt for the last five years that I haven’t been able to move on. It’s a story I’m now proud to tell, rather than ashamed to tell.”

Additional reporting by Katie McEvinney

Chappell Roan can’t be stopped.

Over the last 12 months, the 26-year-old has become the buzziest star in pop. A flamboyant, flame-haired sensation, whose songs are as colourful as they are raw.

Her debut album, released to little fanfare in 2023, has just topped the UK charts for a second time. Next week, she’s up for six Grammy awards, including best new artist. And BBC Radio 1 have named her their Sound Of 2025.

Success has been all the sweeter because her former record label refused to release many of the songs that exploded onto the charts last year.

“They were like, ‘This is not gonna work. We don’t get it’,” Roan tells Radio 1’s Jack Saunders.

• Watch Radio 1’s full interview with Sound Of 2025 winner Chappell Roan.

Reaching pop’s A-list isn’t just a vindication but a revolution.

The 26-year-old is the first female pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer person, rather than coming out as part of their post-fame narrative.

On a more personal level, she’s finally got the financial security to move into a house of her own, and acquire a rescue cat, named Cherub Lou.

“She’s super tiny, her breath smells so bad, and she doesn’t have a meow,” the singer dotes.

If kitten ownership is a benefit of fame, Roan has bristled at the downsides.

She has spoken out against abusive fans, calling out “creepy behaviour” from people who harass her in airport queues and “stalk” her parents’ home. Last September, she went viral for cussing a photographer who’d been shouting abuse at stars on the red carpet of the MTV Awards.

“I was looking around, and I was like, ‘This is what people are OK with all the time? And I’m supposed to act normal? This is not normal. This is crazy’,” she recalls.

The incident made headlines. British tabloids called her outburst the “tantrum” of a “spoiled diva”.

But Roan is unapologetic.

“I’ve been responding that way to disrespect my whole life – but now there are cameras on me, and I also happen to be a pop star, and those things don’t match. It’s like oil and water.”

Roan says musicians are trained to be obedient. Standing up for yourself is portrayed as whining or ingratitude, and rejecting convention comes at a cost.

“I think, actually, I’d be more successful if I was OK wearing a muzzle,” she laughs.

“If I were to override more of my basic instincts, where my heart is going, ‘‘, I would be bigger.

“I would be way bigger… And I would still be on tour right now.”

Indeed, Roan rejected the pressure of extending her 2024 tour to protect her physical and mental health. She credits that resolve to her late grandfather.

“There’s something he said that I think about in every move I make with my career. There are always options.”

“So when someone says, ‘Do this concert because you’ll never get offered that much money ever again’, it’s like, who cares?

“If I don’t feel like doing this right now, there are always options. There is not a scarcity of opportunity. I think about that all the time.”

As fans will know by now, Roan was born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz and raised in the Bible Belt town of Willard, Missouri.

The oldest of four children, she aspired to be an actress – but, for a long time, it seemed her future would be in sport. She ran at state-competition level, and almost went to college for cross-country.

Then she entered a singing contest at the age of 13 and won. Before long, she’d written her first song, about a crush on a Mormon boy who wasn’t allowed to date outside his faith.

She took her stage name as a tribute to her grandfather Dennis K Chappell and his favourite song, a Western ballad called The Strawberry Roan.

“He was very funny and very smart,” she recalls. “And I don’t think he ever questioned my ability.

“A lot of people were like, ‘You should go completely country’, or, ‘You should try Christian music’. And he never told me to do anything.

“He was the only person that was like, ‘You don’t need a plan B. Just do it’.”

Eventually, one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, which signed her at the age of just 17.

Moving to LA, she recorded and released her first EP, School Nights, in 2017. It was a solid but unremarkable affair, steeped in the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde.

Roan only found a sound of her own when a group of gay friends took her to a drag bar.

“I walked into that club in West Hollywood and it was like heaven,” she told the BBC last year. “It was amazing to see all these people who were happy and confident in their bodies.

“And the go-go dancers! I was enthralled. I couldn’t stop watching them. I was like, ‘I have to do that’.”

She didn’t become a dancer, but she did write a song imagining what it would be like to be one and how her mother would react. Roan called it Pink Pony Club after a strip bar in her home town.

“That song changed everything,” she says. “It put me in a new category.

“I never thought I could actually be a ‘pop star girl’ and Pink Pony forced me into that.”

Her label disagreed. They refused to release Pink Pony Club for two years. Shortly after they relented, Roan was dropped in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.

Bruised but not broken, she went back home and spent the next year serving coffee in a drive-through doughnut shop.

“It absolutely had a positive impact on me,” she says. “You have the knowledge of what it’s like to clean a public restroom. That’s very important.”

The period was transformational in other ways. She saved her earnings, had her heart broken by a person “with pale blue eyes”, moved back to Los Angeles, and gave herself a year to make it.

It might have taken a little longer than that, but she hit the ground running.

During her exile, Roan had stayed in touch with her Pink Pony Club co-writer, Daniel Nigro.

He was also working with another up-and-coming singer called Olivia Rodrigo and, when her career took off, Roan got a courtside seat, supporting Rodrigo on tour and providing backing vocals on her second album, Guts.

More importantly, Nigro used the momentum to sign Roan to his own record label and ensure the release of her debut album in September 2023.

At first, it seemed like Roan’s original label had been right. Sales were disappointing and audiences were slow to catch on because her in-your-face queer anthems were out of step with the trend for whispery, confessional pop.

But those songs came to life on stage. Big, fun and designed for audience participation, they’re taken to new heights by Roan’s powerhouse voice and flamboyant stage persona.

“A drag queen does not get on stage to calm people down,” she says. “A drag queen does not say things to flatter people. A queen makes you blush, you know what I mean? Expect the same energy at my show.”

Sure enough, it was a live-streamed appearance at last year’s Coachella Festival that pushed her into the upper echelons of pop.

Dressed in a PVC crop top that declared “Eat Me”, she played the packed Gobi tent like a headliner, strutting purposefully across the stage and coaching the audience in the campy choreography for Hot To Go.

Then she stared directly into the camera and dedicated a song to her ex.

“Bitch I know you’re watching… and all those horrible things happening to you are karma.”

The clip went viral and, before long, her career did, too.

By the summer, all of her shows had been upgraded. Festivals kept having to move her to bigger stages. When she played Lollapalooza in August, she drew the event’s biggest ever daytime crowd.

“It just takes a decade,” she says. “That’s what I tell everyone. ‘If you’re OK with it taking 10 years, then you’re good’.”

As fans discovered her debut album, Roan also released a standalone single – a sarcastic slice of synth-pop called Good Luck Babe, which became her breakout hit.

“I don’t even know if I’ve ever said this in an interview, but it was originally called Good Luck, Jane,” she reveals.

“I wanted it to be about me falling in love with my best friend, and then her being like, ‘Ha ha ha, I don’t like you back, I like boys.’

“And it was like, ‘OK, well, good luck with that, ‘.”

A masterclass in pop storytelling, Good Luck Babe has a proper three-act structure, with a killer pay-off in the middle eight and a chorus you just can’t shake.

Still, Roan was shocked by its success.

“I just threw it out, like, I don’t know what this is going to do – and it carried the whole year!”

The question, of course, is what the star does next, now that she’s the Sound of 2025.

She’s already previewed two new songs, The Subway and The Giver, in concert – but all she will reveal about a second album is that she’s “more reluctant to be sad or dark”.

“It feels so good to party,” she explains.

Looking back at the last 12 months, she’s philosophical about what it means to be pop’s hottest new commodity.

“A lot of people think fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you possibly want than adoration?”

Roan does admit that the admiration of strangers is more “addictive” than she’d expected.

“Like, I understand why I’m so scared to lose this feeling.

“It’s so scary to think that one day people will not care about you the same way as they do right now – and I think [that idea] lives in women’s brains a lot different than men’s.”

Ultimately, she decides, success and failure are “out of my control”. Instead, she wants to make good choices.

“If I can look back and say, ‘I did not crumble under the weight of expectation, and I did not stand for being abused or blackmailed’, [then] at least I stayed true to my heart,” she says.

“Like I said before, there are always options.”

• 1) Chappell Roan
• 2) Ezra Collective
• 3) Barry Can’t Swim
• 4) Myles Smith
• 5) English Teacher

As dusk settles over Mbacke Kadior, a village in central Senegal, the rhythmic chants of the Muslim worshippers dressed in patchwork garments fill the air.

Gathered in a tight circle outside a mosque, the Baye Fall followers sway and sing at the top of their lungs, their voices rising and falling in unison. The flames of a small fire flicker in the background, casting dancing shadows on their multi-coloured clothes.

Their dreadlocks swing as they move, and their faces shine with sweat and fervour during this sacred ritual, known as the “saam fall” – both a celebration and an act of devotion.

Participants often appear to be in a trance during the chanting that can last for two hours – and takes place twice a week.

The Baye Fall, a subgroup of Senegal’s large Mouride brotherhood, are unlike any other Muslim group.

They make up a tiny fraction of the 17 million population in Senegal, a mainly Muslim country in West Africa.

But their striking appearance makes them stand out, and their unorthodox practices are believed by some to stray too far from Islamic norms.

For Baye Fall devotees, faith is not expressed through five daily prayers or fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, like most Muslims, but through hard work and community service. In their eyes, heaven is not merely a destination but a reward for those who toil.

They are often misunderstood by other Muslims – and there is also a misconception in the West that some drink alcohol and smoke marijuana, which is not part of their ethos.

“The philosophy of the Baye Fall community is focused on work. It’s a mystical kind of working, where labour itself becomes devotion to God,” Maam Samba, a leader of a Baye Fall group in Mbacke Kadior, tells the BBC.

They feel each task – whether ploughing fields under the relentless sun, building schools, or crafting goods – is imbued with spiritual significance. Work is not merely a duty; it is a meditative act, a form of prayer in motion.

It is here in the village of Mbacke Kadior that the community believes their founder, Ibrahima Fall, first met Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, who in the 19th Century established the Mouride brotherhood, a branch of Sufi Islam, that plays an influential role in Senegal.

Fall is said to have dedicated himself entirely to Bamba’s service and often neglected his own needs, including eating, fasting, praying and taking care of himself.

His followers recount that over time his clothes became worn and patched, reflecting his selfless devotion. This is how the Baye Fall philosophy and tradition of patchwork clothing originated.

This kind of loyalty to a religious leader is what his followers now practise – a concept known as “ndiguel” – many Baye Fall even include the word in their children’s names.

Fall’s work ethic is also reflected in the heart of Mbacke Kadior at a workshop where collaboration and creativity thrive to create beautiful patchwork clothing.

Women work with quiet focus, dipping plain fabrics into vats of vibrant dyes. With each dip, the cloth absorbs layers of rich, bold colours, gradually transforming into striking textiles.

The men, equally meticulous, take the dyed fabrics and skilfully sew them into garments that are both practical and expressive of the Baye Fall’s distinct identity.

The air buzzes with purpose as the clothing takes shape, a blend of artistry and labour that mirrors their dedication. These finished pieces are then distributed to markets across Senegal, where they sustain livelihoods and share the community’s philosophy far and wide.

“The Baye Fall style is original,” explains Mr Samba, whose late father was a respected Baye Fall sheikh, or marabout as religious leaders are known in Senegal.

“The patchwork clothing symbolises universality – you can be Muslim and still maintain your culture. But not everyone understands this. We say if you don’t accept criticism, you can’t progress.”

While other Muslims are fasting from sunrise to sunset during Ramadan, it is the Baye Fall who dedicate themselves to preparing food for the evening iftar meal when the fast is broken at mosques.

This devotion is not limited to manual tasks.

The Baye Fall have established co-operatives, social businesses, and non-governmental organisations aimed at fostering sustainable development in rural Senegal. For them, work is not just a means of survival but an expression of spirituality.

“We have schools, health centres and social enterprises to create work,” Mr Samba explains. “In our philosophy of life, everything must be done with respect, love, and attention to nature. Ecology is central to our sustainable development model.”

But the group has also received criticism for its practice of begging on the streets.

While asking for money is not against the Baye Fall belief system, it is traditionally done with the intention of taking the contributions back to the leader, who redistributes them for the benefit of the community.

“There are real Baye Fall and what we call ‘Baye Faux’- false Baye Fall,” Cheikh Senne, a former vice-chancellor of Alioune Diop University in the town of Bambey and expert on the Mouride brotherhood, tells the BBC.

In urban centres like the capital, Dakar, the presence of these “Baye Faux” has become pervasive.

“These are people who dress like us and beg in the streets but do not contribute to the community. It’s a serious issue that harms our reputation,” says Mr Senne.

The Baye Fall’s emphasis on hard work and community has resonated beyond Senegal’s borders.

Among their followers is Keaton Sawyer Scanlon, an American who joined a community after a visit in 2019. She has since been given the Senegalese name Fatima Batouly Bah and describes her first encounter with a marabout as a life-changing moment.

“It felt like his body was emitting light,” she tells the BBC. “My heart recognised a truth. This was a profound spiritual awakening for me.”

Ms Bah now lives among the Baye Fall, participating in their projects and embodying their ethos of service. She is part of a small but growing number of international adherents who have embraced the group’s unique path.

The Baye Fall play a vital role in Senegalese society and their involvement in a wide range of agricultural activities is important for the economy.

Each year they swear allegiance to the current Mouride leader, known as the caliph or grand marabout, by donating money, cattle and crops to the brotherhood to show their loyalty.

They are also instrumental in maintaining the Grande Mosque in Senegal’s holy city of Touba, the epicentre of Mouridism – and are in charge of its upkeep.

In Touba they serve as unofficial security guards at the Grande Mosque during big events, like the annual Magal pilgrimage when hundreds of thousands of people come to the city.

For example, they make sure people are dressed modestly, no drugs are sold in the area and that the caliph is not disrespected.

“The Baye Fall have always guaranteed the security of the caliph and the city,” says Mr Senne. “Nobody dares act improperly when a Baye Fall is around.”

Despite disapproval from some, the Baye Fall’s impact on Senegal’s cultural and religious landscape is growing – though they do face challenges in balancing tradition with modernity.

Limited resources hinder their ambitious plans.

Yet their vision remains clear: sustainable development, rooted in faith and service, that could also help some of the huge numbers of unemployed young people in Senegal who despair of finding a livelihood.

Many of the thousands of migrants making dangerous sea crossings to Europe come from Senegal.

“We want to do more,” says Mr Samba. “We want to create more employment – because young people need it here in Senegal.

“We need collaboration with governments and international organisations. This is our hope for the future.”

For them, hard work is the answer to both the country’s economic and spiritual needs.

• Senegalese trek to Muslim festival
• Islam’s mystical entrepreneurs
• Senegal election offers hope to frustrated young Africans
• ‘Try or die’ – one man’s determination to leave Senegal
• A quick guide to Senegal

For the second time in the seven years since his death, Mac Miller fans have the chance to listen to a new album.

The US rapper was 26 when he died from an accidental overdose in 2018. Friends say he was lost in his prime and fans’ hunger for new music has remained.

Balloonerism, released on Friday to generally positive reviews, follows the 2020 posthumous release of Circles, made of unfinished work completed after he died.

Collaborators say the studio tracks first laid down more than 10 years ago used in the new album have barely been changed.

Some of those who worked on the new release – who were present at the recording sessions – describe the finished product as haunting, raw, and unpolished.

Circles was a big success but a mixed reception to recent posthumous albums from other artists has caused critics to question whether less is more when it comes to releasing music after death.

Audio engineer Josh Berg was in the LA studio, known as the Sanctuary, where Mac wrote and recorded all his material between 2013-2014.

“I always hoped this day would come,” he says of Ballonerism’s final release.

“And now it’s kind of sad.

“Everything except one thing is amazing about this situation. It really makes me feel his loss.”

Mac Miller, real name Malcolm James McCormick, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and started making music at school.

His debut album, Blue Slide Park, was the first independently released record to top the Billboard 200 chart in 16 years and all of his later albums followed the same path to the top five in the US.

He wrote Balloonerism between labels in 2014 and producer Eric Dan, who worked with Mac since he was a teenager, tells Newsbeat he was “just starting to come into his own”.

“That period was like a creative renaissance for him,” he says. “He was a creation machine.”

Josh says so many projects were started in that time but Balloonerism was among the ones that came closest to release, with Mac even getting to the stage of commissioning artwork.

While Circles was “in pretty rough shape” when he died and finished off by producers, Eric says Balloonerism is largely untouched.

“We made a conscious decision to keep things as they were and not go back and ‘fix’ mistakes, tune things or add anything.

“The rough edges were part of its charm and highlighted where Mac was creatively at that time.”

Josh describes the result of leaving in those imperfections as an album that’s “raw and emotional”, even “extremely haunting” in the context of Mac’s death.

“Once you start pulling everything apart and dusting it off, it starts to lose its magic,” Josh says.

“It’s beautiful to release an album that’s not so scoured of imperfection, that’s authentic and real.”

It’s that question of authenticity which troubles some fans about music released after an artist has died.

In 2024, posthumous albums released by the families of SOPHIE and Juice WRLD had mixed responses. While SOPHIE’s was named Rough Trade’s album of the year, some critics considered it too “safe” for such a pioneering and experimental talent.

Robin Murray, editor-in-chief at Clash magazine, reviewed Juice WRLD’s third posthumous album, The Party Never Ends.

The US rapper died two years after Mac, also from an accidental overdose, leaving a cache of unreleased music but Robin tells Newsbeat the latest album sounded like “unfinished demos that had been stretched”.

“Releasing an album or body of work after an artist has passed away is an incredibly difficult and complex task,” he says.

“There’s no telling how the artist would have proceeded with that work, if they would have proceeded at all.”

Josh and Eric agree it’s fair to question how Mac might have changed Balloonerism but they both believe it was always his plan to be release it when the time was right.

Eric also says that after “bootleg” versions of the album were leaked, it was important an official release, in line with Mac’s most up-to-date track lists, allowed the family to regain control of the album.

“I can certainly see where people have concerns with it,” Josh accepts.

“I was less concerned but now in this process maybe I shared more of that concern as we got closer.

“He would always change the playlist, he would always do something I’d never expect, so it will never really be true to him.”

The release of Balloonerism coincides with what would have been Mac’s 33rd birthday and a companion film was shared alongside it.

At a sold-out screening in London, fan Conor says it felt like the last opportunity to “share thanks for the artist that he was”.

Most of the fans who spoke to Newsbeat say they had no reservations about the album being released but Conor says the passage of more than 10 years “does make it more complex”.

“It’s sad, at some point it does have to end but I’m all here for it for now.”

Another fan, Carolina, says she “didn’t give it too much thought, because I’m just a sucker”.

“I just want more, everything he made and was ready to be released, I’d like to be released.”

Robin says the success of Circles was in part due to how closely Mac’s family worked with people who knew him.

Eric, for example, worked on all his music and knew him for a decade, while Josh “pretty much lived in the studio” with Mac during the writing and recording sessions.

He says the family “really lead the way in showing how tenderness and care can be accomplished within posthumous projects”.

“Circles felt like a very well-judged, well-curated farewell to a special talent.”

Balloonerism will hope to replicate that success and has gone down well with critics, branded “poignant” in a four-star Observer review.

The Independent says it “feels complete and cohesive… a wonderful, albeit unsettling, reminder of a talent lost”.

However Robin says it’s important to know when enough is enough.

“One thing that Mac and SOPHIE had in common was that the evolutionary leaps between their projects were just gargantuan and there’s a temptation for fans to see how these steps were taken,” he says.

But, Robin adds: “There’s a danger of brushing away the myth and over-explaining.

“There is that temptation to open the door once more into the vault but I think less is more, certainly with posthumous albums.”

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

A court in India has sentenced a man to life in prison for the rape and murder of a junior doctor, in a case that sparked nationwide outrage and protests.

The judge rejected demands for the death penalty but said that Sanjay Roy, a hospital volunteer in Kolkata city who was convicted over the weekend, would spend the rest of his life in jail.

Roy has maintained he is innocent and is expected to appeal against the verdict in a higher court.

The victim’s family said they wanted him to be hanged, and that they were “shocked” by the sentence.

“We will continue our fight, and won’t let investigations stop… Come what may, we will fight for justice,” the woman’s father told AFP news agency. Indian law prohibits revealing the identity of victims of sexual violence and that of their family members.

Immediately after the sentencing, dozens of doctors protested outside the court, saying they were not satisfied with the investigation and the sentence.

The trainee doctor’s murder last August at the state-run hospital in Kolkata in West Bengal state sent shockwaves across the country.

The 31-year-old had gone to sleep in the seminar hall of the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital after a night shift. Her half-naked, severely injured body was later discovered near a podium by a colleague.

The autopsy report indicated that the woman had been strangled and had injury marks that showed she fought back.

The crime sparked widespread protests and concerns over the safety of healthcare workers in India, especially women. In Kolkata, doctors went on strike for weeks, demanding action against the accused and officials who they said were complicit in delaying or derailing the investigation.

Roy was arrested a day after the crime. According to the charge sheet filed by federal investigators, which the BBC has seen, Roy went to the hospital in a drunken state and found the female doctor sleeping alone.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – India’s premier crime agency that investigated the case – had demanded the death penalty for Roy.

But on Monday, the judge disagreed, saying he had considered all the evidence and did not consider the case to be a “rarest-of-rare” crime.

Before announcing the sentence, the judge also gave Roy a chance to speak in court. He claimed that he was innocent and was being “falsely implicated” in the case.

Without taking any names, Roy alleged that there were “others involved in the crime”.

The judge dismissed Roy’s claims and said the court had already found him guilty of all charges.

Some politicians and social media users criticised the sentence.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that she was not satisfied with the court’s order. “We want justice. Such criminals should be hanged,” she told reporters.

Tanzania’s president has announced an outbreak of Marburg virus, an Ebola-like virus, just a week after her health minister denied that there were any cases in the country.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan said at a press conference on Monday that health authorities had confirmed one case of Marburg in the north-western region of Kagera.

“We are confident that we will overcome this challenge once again,” Samia said, referring to a previous outbreak in Tanzania two years ago.

On 14 January, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a suspected Marburg outbreak in the country, having recorded nine suspected cases and eight deaths over five days in Kagera.

But Tanzania’s Health Minister Jenista Mhagama said in a statement that after samples had been analysed, all suspected cases were found negative for Marburg.

• What is the Marburg virus and how dangerous is it?

At Monday’s press briefing, which was held jointly with the WHO, President Samia said her government had stepped up its efforts and that a rapid response team had been dispatched to follow up on all suspected cases.

Marburg is highly infectious, with symptoms including fever, muscle pains, diarrhoea, vomiting and, in some cases, death through extreme blood loss.

On average, the virus kills half of the people it infects, according to the WHO.

Tanzania says that along with the one confirmed case, authorities took samples from 24 other people suspected of having Marburg. These all tested negative.

Meanwhile, the cause of the eight deaths reported by the WHO has yet to be revealed.

Tanzania experienced its first Marburg outbreak in March 2023 in the Bukoba district. It killed six people and lasted for nearly two months.

WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the global risk from Tanzania’s current outbreak was “low”.

“Even though there is no approved treatment or vaccines, outbreaks can be stopped quickly,” he said. “WHO advises against restrictions. Now is the time for collaboration.”

On Thursday, Africa CDC, the African Union’s public health agency, said more than 300 contacts had been identified for further testing. Health workers make up 56 of these contacts, while 16 on the list are known to have had direct contact with those suspected to have had Marburg.

The International Health Regulations (IHR) of 2005 require countries to report public health events and emergencies that could cross borders. Kagera is a transit hub with many people travelling to and from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda.

In December, neighbouring Rwanda declared that an outbreak in the country, which had infected 66 people and killed 15, was over.

The Marburg virus is transmitted to humans from fruit bats and then through contact with bodily fluids of infected individuals.

There are no specific treatments or a vaccine for the virus, although trials are under way.

• Tanzania’s fuel revolution slowed down by lack of filling stations
• Why Samia’s hesitant reforms are fuelling Tanzanian political anger
• All aboard the sparkling railway breaking new ground for East Africa

Some of the world’s biggest companies started from humble beginnings, but Games Workshop’s early days were less glamourous than most.

“We ended up having to live in a van,” says Sir Ian Livingstone.

He launched the brand – best known for its Warhammer games – with co-founder Steve Jackson back in 1975.

Sir Ian tells BBC News the pair asked a bank manager for £10,000 to kickstart their business.

They would go on to create popular miniature figures that players around the world collect, paint and battle in complex tabletop clashes.

But it was a rocky start.

“He looked at us rather like a dog watching television, no understanding of what we were talking about, and asked us to leave,” he says.

The pair ended up working out of a small room in the back of an estate agent’s office, and joined a local squash club to access the showers.

“We had no aspirations of it being anything large at all,” says Sir Ian.

“We were following the passion of being gamers wanting to be involved in some sort of fledgling games business.”

That passion has bloomed since then, and Games Workshop is more successful than it’s ever been, recently entering the list of the UK’s top 100 companies.

Headquartered in the Lenton area of Nottingham, it made £126.8m ($154.4m) profit in the second half of 2024, selling its products worldwide.

Miniatures were only part of the equation and a good chunk of its profits came from licensing – allowing its products to be adapted into video games, films and TV series.

Academic Dr Hailey Austin, from Abertay University’s department of games and arts, tells BBC News the company’s always been good at expanding into new areas.

“They’re willing to try new things,” she says.

“They’ve always been pushing the boundaries, going into miniatures, paints as well as books, magazines and even digitising their games.”

Games Workshop believes it’s sitting on “some of the best underexploited intellectual property globally” and has the potential to go further.

The company recently finalised a lucrative deal with Amazon to create Warhammer TV series and films, and lent its name to one of 2024’s best-selling video games.

Space Marine II – based on the hulking galactic soldiers from the sci-fi-inspired Warhammer 40,000 (40K) series – was a surprise runaway success, selling 4.5 million copies in its first month.

Games Workshop boss Kevin Rountree told investors Space Marine II had created “excitement” for its miniatures, and that store staff had told him they’d seen more people coming into the company’s high street stores as a result.

The power of TV and games to give fans more ways to engage with their favourite hobbies is something more companies are leaning into.

Last year, video game adaptation Fallout sent the 10-year-old title flying up the bestseller charts.

Warhammer fans say they noticed a similar effect too.

Katie Foad was first drawn to Warhammer through painting its detailed miniature figurines, but says her interest deepened when she played the 40K-inspired strategy video game Dawn of War.

That led her to the Games Workshop community and she’s now part of Tabletop Tactics – a YouTube channel dedicated to all things Warhammer.

She joined in 2021, when Games Workshop – like other indoor hobbies – was experiencing a boost off the back of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Katie says the channel saw a spike in new subscribers after Space Marine II was launched last year – and videos featuring characters and creatures from the game were especially popular.

“We’re definitely seeing way more of an interest coming in because of the popularity of Space Marine II,” she says.

Warhammer’s also had another boost from inside the entertainment industry – Superman himself, Henry Cavill.

The actor has been described as the “world’s coolest nerd” thanks to his very public interest in video gaming and Warhammer.

Katie thinks this has helped to expose new people to the hobby, and also encouraged them to be more open about their interest in it.

“For those people that were already into Warhammer, they’ve looked at him being so proud about it and gone: ‘Oh, this is something that is cool’,” says Katie.

“‘I can talk to people about it. I can encourage other people to get into the hobby’.

“And I think people that were already into it are now excited to share it.”

Cavill was a key part of the deal with Amazon and is due to executive produce and star in its Games Workshop adaptations.

Adapting the Warhammer universe and its vast tomes of lore – background information about the different races and characters within it – can be a challenge.

It’s something Clive Standen, who plays the lead role of Lieutenant Demetrian Titus in Space Marine II, knows well.

Standen tells BBC Newsbeat his early recording sessions involved negotiating with Games Workshop representatives to inject depth and emotion into his traditionally stoic ultramarine character.

“We have to find small nuances just to get the audience behind him,” says Standen.

“Otherwise, it’s going to be very cold out there.”

In the end, Standen says, they found a “common ground”, and his performance in the game has put him in the running for a Bafta Games Award.

He also voiced Titus in a Space Marine II-themed episode of Secret Level (the Prime Video anthology based on popular video games).

Amazon claims it was the biggest debut for an animated series on its streaming service.

Standen believes streamer’s deep pockets mean it is the right place to do justice to further Warhammer shows.

But he warns it will take a lot of work.

“You’ve got to do a fine balance between pleasing the fans and giving them something that they’ve personally invested in, and also pleasing the mainstream fans,” he says.

“Because if you don’t get enough viewers, it won’t get commissioned for a season two.”

Games Workshop has said it will be some time before its adaptations hit the screen, and cautioned that hits are not guaranteed in the volatile and unpredictable video games business.

Katie thinks the “massive universe” propping up Games Workshop means it will continue to be successful.

But she says she’s excited to see how future works based on Warhammer are received.

“There’s so much to it that I think it’s always going to be successful,” she says.

“But depending on how this Amazon show goes, if that really reaches a wider audience, I think it could go huge.

“It could be Marvel.”

Sir Ian, who sold his stake in Games Workshop in 1991, says he’ll also be watching with interest.

“Standing now, almost like proud parents watching this great British success story kind of conquer the world and become one of the premier games IPs of all time, you can’t help but feel a great sense of pride,” he says.

“And hopefully that will long continue.”

Police in the Indian city of Mumbai have arrested a man in connection with a knife attack on Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan last week.

Khan, one of India’s biggest stars, was stabbed by an intruder at his home, in an attack that shocked the country. He is recovering after surgery.

On Sunday, police said they had arrested the key suspect, Mohammad Shariful Islam Shehzad, adding that he was a citizen of Bangladesh who was staying in India illegally.

Mr Shehzad’s lawyer has denied the allegations and says he is not from Bangladesh.

Police say they arrested Mr Shehzad from Thane, a district in the outskirts of Mumbai.

Preliminary evidence suggests that he came to the city about six months ago and had been working at a housekeeping agency using a fake name and ID, Dixit Gedam, a deputy commissioner of Mumbai police, told a press conference.

Police suspect that Mr Shehzad allegedly broke into Khan’s home with the intention of robbing him, Mr Gedam said.

On Sunday, a court in Mumbai sent Mr Shehzad to five-day police custody.

His lawyer, Sandeep Shikhane, told reporters that his client was being made a “scapegoat”.

“There is no documentary evidence to suggest he is a Bangladeshi citizen,” he said.

The attack on Khan has made national headlines and also raised questions about safety and security in Mumbai, one of India’s most populated cities and its financial capital.

Khan was stabbed six times and suffered several injuries, including one on the back of his neck, in the attack at his home in an upscale neighbourhood.

A nurse, Eliyama Philip, who works in Khan’s home, told the police last week that she first noticed the shadow of a man near the bathroom door late at night while she was in the child’s room with the nanny.

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

A scuffle broke out, during which Ms Philip was injured. She also said that hearing the commotion, Khan and his wife rushed to the room and that the attacker struck the actor with a blade before fleeing.

On Friday, investigators reportedly detained – and later released – at least five other people for questioning in connection with the investigation.

Many of the men were taken into custody because they resembled the attacker, who was captured on CCTV camera while he was exiting the building.

Incoming first lady Melania Trump has launched a cryptocurrency on the eve of her husband’s inauguration as US president.

The announcement comes after President-elect Donald Trump launched the $Trump cryptocurrency. Both coins have risen but have seen volatile trade.

“The Official Melania Meme is live! You can buy $Melania now,” she posted on the social platform X on Sunday.

Disclaimers on the websites of both the $Trump and $Melania coins said they were “not intended to be, or the subject of” an investment opportunity or a security.

According to the CoinMarketCap website, $Trump has a total market valuation of about $12bn (£9.8bn), while $Melania’s stands at around $1.7bn.

• Follow live updates on inauguration day

Trump had previously called crypto a “scam” but during the 2024 election campaign became the first presidential candidate to accept digital assets as donations.

During the campaign, his family launched a cryptocurrency company called World Liberty Financial – which aims to lead “a financial revolution by dismantling the stranglehold of traditional financial institutions”, and is also selling a crypto coin.

The new Trump coin was launched from Trump Organization affiliate CIC Digital LLC, which is linked to previous sales of crypto collectable NFTs launched in 2022 that made millions of dollars but have since fallen dramatically in value for their owners.

According to CoinGecko, the NFTs once sold for more than $1,000 but have since dropped in value to around $300.

On the campaign trail, Trump also said he would create a strategic Bitcoin stockpile and appoint financial regulators that take a more positive stance towards digital assets.

That spurred expectations that he would strip back regulations on the crypto industry.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, Bitcoin jumped to a record high of around $109,000 according to crypto trading platform Coinbase.

On Friday, the incoming artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto tsar David Sacks held a “Crypto Ball” in Washington, DC.

Other cryptocurrencies, including Dogecoin – which has been promoted by high-profile Trump supporter Elon Musk – have also risen sharply this year.

Under President Joe Biden, regulators cited concerns about fraud and money laundering as they cracked down on crypto companies by suing exchanges.

The growth of Dogecoin has significantly increased the interest in so-called “meme coins” – cryptocurrencies typically linked to a viral internet trend or moment.

Melania’s Meme coin has come from her own incorporated company MKT World LLC – a firm she has used since 2021 for various ventures including selling portraits of her as first lady.

Meme coins can be created and launched by anyone, and there are thousands in existence.

With their profile and social media presence, Trump coin and Melania coin have already entered the top 100 coins in terms of value, and Melania’s coin is now worth more than AI entrepreneur Sam Altman’s Worldcoin.

• LIVE: Crowds brave freezing cold as Washington gears up for Trump inauguration
• GUIDE: What we know about the inauguration
• EXPLAINED: What Donald Trump could do on day one
• INSIGHT: Meet the president’s circle of influencers
• ANALYSIS: Trump team’s confidence is sky-high but warning signs abound
• WATCH: Thousands protest in Washington ahead of inauguration
• FEATURE: From snowy US cities to Mexican border – deportations loom

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Sir Keir Starmer will visit Washington for talks with Donald Trump within weeks, the foreign secretary has suggested.

Speaking ahead of Trump’s inauguration as president on Monday, David Lammy said the “strength” of the UK-US relationship meant he was “very confident” the PM would secure an early meeting.

There are several diplomatic challenges looming for the Labour government in its engagement with the new administration, including proposed trade tariffs and growing tensions over the UK’s proposed Chagos Islands deal.

The prime minister has said he believes the “special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States will continue to flourish” under Trump.

Speaking to reporters, Lammy said: “I think that when you look at past prime ministers, it’s taken between a week or up to a month to come to Washington. The importance is the strength of the relationship and the serious discussions that we have.

“In the end, we have war in Europe, we have a ceasefire in the Middle East, but it’s incredibly fragile, and there are important malign actors like Iran that we’ve got to discuss with the United States and, of course, our growing trade relations with the United States.

“So, lots to discuss, and I’m very confident that Keir Starmer will be discussing this with Donald Trump within the next few weeks.”

Ahead of the inauguration, Sir Keir released a statement congratulating the incoming US president – saying the UK and US would “continue to build upon the unshakeable foundations of our historic alliance”.

The PM said they would tackle “global challenges” and “focus on shared opportunities ahead for growth”, adding the “special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States will continue to flourish for years to come”.

Sir Keir and his team have been preparing for Trump’s presidency with increasing intensity for a long time, because of the importance of this bilateral relationship.

Before the US election, Sir Keir and Trump met in New York at Trump Tower as part of a charm offensive by Labour politicians with the new administration over the last year.

Sir Keir added: “I look forward to our next meeting as we continue our shared mission to ensure the peace, prosperity and security of our two great nations.”

Trump’s threat to impose tariffs and what his return to Washington could mean for US support for Ukraine could be among the first issues raised during his second term.

Ministers have been concentrating on policy given it’s unclear precisely what Trump will do, except that he comes at some big issues from a very different perspective to the UK.

He believes China is the west’s biggest strategic threat at a time when British ministers are trying to re-establish some ties with Beijing, and he loathes the European Union, with which the PM is trying to “reset” relations.

He may well impose significant tariffs on countries including the UK, which would have a huge impact on the British economy.

On the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones suggested the UK could dodge Trump’s pledge for a 20% tax on all imports into the US due to not being in a “trade deficit”, adding ministers have “prepared for all scenarios”.

He said the government “need to see what the Trump administration do” but also that Trump is “well known for wanting to do a good deal”.

The government is also hoping to avoid a diplomatic row over a proposed deal to hand over the Chagos Islands – where there is a joint US-UK military base – to Mauritius.

The deal, which has been greenlit by the Biden administration, is now on hold to allow the incoming Trump administration to review the details.

Marco Rubio, the incoming US Secretary of State, has called the deal a risk due to concerns that Mauritius’s links to China might compromise the safety of the American base on Diego Garcia.

Lammy told the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he expects Trump to back the deal.

“It’s right and proper that the new administration is able to consider” the deal, Lammy said.

“But having gone through the deal in detail, it is the right deal to keep the global community safe.”

In a departure from tradition, Trump has invited several world leaders to his inauguration.

Dame Karen Pierce, the outgoing UK ambassador, will represent the government at Trump’s inauguration.

Labour have picked Lord Peter Mandelson, one of the best-known figures in British politics who served under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, to be the next US ambassador. He is due to replace Dame Karen in the next few weeks.

Lord Mandelson’s nomination has caused some controversy in the US due to his past remarks calling Trump a “danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist”.

The government is awaiting final sign-off of his appointment by Trump, and says it remains confident Lord Mandelson is the right choice to serve as the key link between Downing Street and the White House.

On Monday, the prime minister’s official spokesman praised Lord Mandelson as an “excellent” candidate with “considerable expertise”.

Conservative shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel has flown to Washington to attend a Republican-hosted event at the inauguration.

Speaking to the BBC she said there were “hopes for his [Trump’s] administration”.

“We need to continue to build upon that and at a time when our world is facing so many global challenges… we need to ensure that our strongest and closest ally is really in lock step with us,” she said, adding that meant reopening trade deal discussions.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the government needs to “think outside the box” when dealing with the Trump administration.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The Westminster Hour, Farage said: “I think what this government does, is what all governments do – they stick with the established, status quo methods of appointing people.

“This guy [Trump] does business differently to anybody else we’ve seen in global politics before.”

Farage, a long-time supporter of Trump, has previously offered to act as a go-between in negotiations with the president-elect but has so far been rejected by the government.

“They don’t think they need me – but they might find in short order that maybe they do,” he said.

Elsewhere, Liberal Democrats leader Sir Ed Davey said that Trump’s return to the White House would be “deeply worrying for millions of people in the UK and around the world.”

He said: “With a president who promises trade wars, undermines Nato and praises Vladimir Putin, the threats to our national security and our economy are clear.”

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At least seven people have been killed in a clash with soldiers on duty at a mine in the central Ashanti region, according to the army.

The Ghana Armed Forces said about 60 illegal miners, armed with among others things “pump action guns”, had forced their way into the mine run by global giant AngloGold Ashanti and fired at the soldiers when they were intercepted.

This prompted the soldiers “to retaliate in self-defence”, leading to the deaths and injuries, it said in a statement.

A representative of the miners denied that they had been armed.

Following news of the deaths, there were protests in Obuasi town where several buses were set on fire.

Angry residents poured onto the company’s grounds following the killings, burning at least three vehicles and other equipment belonging to AngloGold Ashanti.

President John Mahama has ordered investigations into the matter, saying anyone found to have acted unlawfully will be brought to justice.

A statement from the presidency indicated that eight people had died.

• We are poisoning ourselves’: Ghana gold rush sparks environmental disaster

The government has asked AngloGold Ashanti to cover the medical expenses of the injured and the burial costs, while requiring security agencies to ensure peace in the area.

The company said the situation had since calmed down and it was working closely with the authorities.

It said its main concern was “the safety and health of our employees and those in our community” who were affected by the incident.

The local chairman of the Ghana National Association of Small Scale Miners, Kofi Adams, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying that the violence was “unprecedented”.

He said that nine people had died and 14 severely injured adding that it was “difficult to understand why it had happened”.

In the past, he said, warning shots had been fired to ward off intruders. He also disputed the allegation by the military that the people had been armed.

The army said the “illegal miners were wielding locally manufactured rifles, pump action guns” and other weapons. It said it had a duty to defend itself, innocent civilians and property, including by using lethal force.

There have been tensions between AngloGold Ashanti and residents who accuse them of exploiting mineral resources without doing much to develop the area or create jobs.

Some local small-scale mining associations have been asking to be given some of the company’s mining concessions.

The company insists it has been doing a lot for the local communities.

On Monday, some schools built and managed by the company in the area announced a two-day shutdown following the disturbances.

There have been several conflicts between security officers and mining communities in the past, but the situation has been exacerbated by the country’s current economic problems.

Ghana is going through its worst economic crisis in a generation with high public debt, high inflation and unemployment.

Amid the economic crisis, there has been a rise in small-scale mining, including unregulated sites that have been accused of having a devastating impact on the environment.

• Can Ghana’s new president meet the voters’ high expectations?
• Podcast: How illegal gold mining impacts Ghana
• Watch: The illegal gold mines killing rivers and livelihoods in Ghana
• Ghana IMF loan: Will $3bn solve the economic crisis?

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Oooh, that’s a big one,” the newly inaugurated US president said as he approved the document after arriving back at the White House. It was one of dozens of executive actions he put his signature to on day one in office.

This marks the second time Trump has ordered the US be pulled out of the WHO.

Trump was critical of how the international body handled Covid-19 and began the process of pulling out from the Geneva-based institution during the pandemic. President Joe Biden later reversed that decision.

Carrying out this executive action on day one makes it more likely the US will formally leave the global agency.

“They wanted us back so badly so we’ll see what happens,” Trump said in the Oval Office, referring to the WHO, perhaps hinting the US might return eventually.

• Trump moves to make ‘two genders’ and anti-DEI policy official
• Trump vows to leave Paris climate agreement and ‘drill, baby, drill’

The order said the US was withdrawing “due to the organization’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China, and other global health crises, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states”.

The executive order also said the withdrawal was the result of “unfairly onerous payments” the US made to the WHO, which is part of the United Nations.

When Trump was still in office the first time around he was critical of the organization for being too “China-centric” in its tackling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump accused the WHO of being biased towards China in how it issued guidance during the outbreak.

Under the Biden administration the US continued to be the largest funder of the WHO and in 2023 it contributed almost one-fifth of the agency’s budget.

The organization’s annual budget is $6.8 billion (£5.5 billion).

Public health experts have been critical of Trump’s decision to leave the WHO, warning there could be consequences for Americans’ health.

Some have suggested the move could reverse progress made on fighting infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and Hiv & Aids.

Ashish Jha, who formerly worked as Covid-19 response co-ordinator under President Biden, previously warned leaving would “harm not only the health of people around the world, but also US leadership and scientific prowess”.

“It’s a cataclysmic presidential decision. Withdrawal is a grievous wound to world health, but a still deeper wound to the US,” Lawrence Gostin, a global public health expert and Georgetown University professor said.

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage
• ANALYSIS: The promise and peril of Trump’s speech
• IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration
• WATCH: The new president’s day so far
• EXPLAINED: What Trump is doing on day one
• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks
• VIRAL MOMENTS: Carrie Underwood goes a cappella and other moments

Donald Trump, who rode back into power on a wave of voter dissatisfaction with the status quo, promised a new “golden age” for America in his inaugural address.

The speech was a mix of promises – and contradictions – that underlined some of the opportunities and challenges the new president will face in his second term in office.

He started talking at a little after noon on Monday, and it seemed at times like he didn’t stop talking – at ad-libbed remarks later at the Capitol, at his indoor parade rally at a downtown sports arena and at the White House executive order signing – until well into the evening.

Through it all, Trump demonstrated the kind of dramatic flair and penchant for controversy and confrontation that has energised his supporters and infuriated his critics.

During his inaugural address, Trump paid particular attention to immigration and the economy – issues that polls suggest American voters cared about most last year. He also promised to end government-promoted diversity programmes and noted that US official policy would only recognise two genders, male and female.

That last line generated an enthusiastic response at the Capitol and wild cheers from his crowd of supporters gathered at a nearby sport arena. It’s a sign that cultural issues – where he drew the most vivid contrasts with Democrats in last year’s election – will continue to be one of Trump’s most powerful ways the new president connects with his base.

Before he outlined what this new age would entail, however, Trump painted a dark picture of the current American political climate.

• LIVE – latest updates and analysis

As his predecessor, Joe Biden, and other Democrats sat stone-faced to one side, Trump said the government faces a “crisis of trust”. He condemned the “vicious, violent and unfair weaponisation” of the US Justice Department, which had investigated and attempted to prosecute him for contesting the 2020 election results.

He claimed a mandate to reverse “horrible betrayals” and lashed out at a “radical and corrupt establishment” that he said extracted power and wealth from America’s citizens.

It was the kind of populist, anti-elite rhetoric that has been a staple of Trump’s speeches for a decade. Unlike when Trump first began his ascent to the pinnacles of US political power in 2015, however, Trump represents the current emerging establishment as much as any one man. And sitting behind him on the dais were a collection of some of the wealthiest, and most influential, corporate leaders in the world.

On the day of his inauguration, Trump has the attention – and the initiative. His aides have promised hundreds of executive actions – on a range of subjects, including immigration, energy, trade, education and hot-button cultural issues.

In his inaugural address, he detailed a handful of them. He pledged to declare national emergencies on energy and immigration, allowing him to put the US military on the border, drastically limit the rights of asylum-seekers and reopen large swaths of federal land to energy extraction. He repeated his pledge to change the name of Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” and to take back the Panama Canal.

He made an unfounded claim that China was running the key waterway and said that US ships, including naval vessels, were paying too much in transit fees – perhaps a hint at the real objective in future negotiations with the Panamanian government.

“The US will once again consider itself a growing nation,” he said, pledging to increase American wealth and expand “our territory”.

That last bit might catch the ear of US allies, who have already been concerned by Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland and quips about making Canada the 51st US state.

On the campaign trail, and in this speech, Trump made a series of big promises. Now that he is president, he will be challenged to deliver – and show what the “golden age” he heralds actually means.

After Trump concluded his speech and saw Biden depart via a Marine helicopter, he gave off-the-cuff remarks at a gathering of supporters elsewhere in the Capitol. It was there that the more unscripted Trump – the one who frequently generates headlines and turns American politics on its head – reemerged.

The 2020 election was “rigged”, he said. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was criminally responsible for the 6 January, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. He boasted about the size of his 2024 election victory and said he grudgingly agreed to talk about “unity” in his inaugural address.

It was just a taste of what was in store for the rest of the day – and for the next four years.

At a signing ceremony in the evening, Trump took an ordinary presidential act – rescinding orders from a previous administration of different party – and turned it into spectacle.

After giving another winding speech – his third of the day – Trump moved to a small desk on the stage at the downtown sport arena where his indoor inaugural parade had just concluded. Then he went to work freezing new federal regulations and hiring, reversing Biden administration directives, mandating federal workers work in-office full-time and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords.

“Can you imagine Joe Biden doing this?” he asked after signing the regulation freeze – but that applied to the moment as much as the content of the orders.

He also signed more symbolic orders to end the “weaponisation of government” and instruct his administration to address the higher cost of living.

After the arena ceremony, Trump tossed the pens he used into the crowd – another Trumping flourish.

Then he went back to the White House, and executive orders continued – pardoning nearly all of the 1,600-plus supporters arrested in the 6 January Capitol riot, temporarily suspending the TikTok ban and withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation. He also reinterpreted a key constitutional amendment and instructed his administration to cease granting citizenship to US-born children of undocumented migrants. All the while, he offered a running commentary – including proposing a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada starting on 1 February, accusing Democrats of cheating in the 2020 election and expressing doubt about the Gaza War ceasefire.

Trump returns to power with a team that has a detailed strategy for governing and an aggressive agenda to pursue. Trump himself, however, can still be as unpredictable and unfocused as ever – making remarks that could represent new policy or just a momentary distraction.

The second Trump era has truly begun.

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage
• IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration
• WATCH: The new president’s day so far
• EXPLAINED: What Donald Trump could do on day one
• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks

Donald Trump has been sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, beginning his second term in the White House after a decisive comeback in November’s election.

In his 29-minute inauguration speech, Trump promised to restore the American dream while also warning of what he described as chaos and destruction left by the previous administration.

In case you missed it, here is a look at the highlights.

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage

Trump opened with optimism.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” he declared. “From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected.”

It was a far cry from his speech eight years ago, when the Republican painted a dark picture of a wounded American industry and economy taken advantage of by foreign exploitation.

But as Monday’s address progressed, Trump’s tone turned.

The president offered a grim assessment of today’s America, describing a “radical and corrupt establishment” that “cannot manage even a simple crisis at home”, an apparent nod to the wildfires that have been ravaging Los Angeles.

“We will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer,” Trump said.

Presidents tend to use their inaugural addresses as a chance to call for unity, making broad and lofty pledges and steering away from detailed policy.

Not Donald Trump.

The Republican got right down to specifics, running through a laundry list of policy promises and actions he would take in the first 100 days.

Trump said he would declare a national emergency at the southern border (something he did in 2019) and deploy national troops for immigration enforcement, action he promised on the campaign trail.

And he said he would sign an executive order meant to “immediately stop censorship and bring back free speech in America”.

• Read more about the executive orders expected from President Trump

Trump took us back to perhaps the most stunning moment of a chaotic and tumultuous presidential campaign: his attempted assassination.

“Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed take my life,” he said.

“Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear, but I felt then and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason,” he said.

“I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Trump also looked abroad – promising dramatic action overseas – and to the sky.

The Republican said he wanted the Panama Canal under US control, falsely claiming it is currently operated by China. Panama has sovereignty over the waterway.

“We’re taking it back,” Trump said.

And he prompted a laugh from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who appeared to crack up when the president said he would change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”.

Trump also looked upwards, vowing to “pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars”.

This remark was met with a bright smile from tech billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who has long said he wants humans to colonise the faraway planet.

For Trump supporters watching the address in the Capitol One arena in Washington DC, one of the biggest applause lines came when the president said: “It will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

Trump vowed to thwart efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”.

He promised to create a country that is “colour-blind and merit-based”.

• ANALYSIS: The promise and peril of Trump’s speech
• IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration
• WATCH: The new president’s day so far
• EXPLAINED: What Trump is doing on day one
• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks
• VIRAL MOMENTS: Carrie Underwood goes a cappella and other moments

From behind his desk in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders and decrees aimed at cracking down on immigration.

From an order tackling the definition of birthright citizenship, to an order declaring the illegal immigration at the border a national emergency, Trump swiftly made moves on his promises to tighten the US-Mexico border.

But some of those orders – particularly any order that aims to change the definition of birthright citizenship – are likely to face steep legal opposition.

Trump had previously vowed that the “destructive” policies of the Biden White House would be gone “within five minutes”.

Hours earlier, thousands of would-be migrants had their immigration appointments cancelled after the new administration scrapped CBP One, an app used to book appearances at ports of entry at the border.

In his inaugural address, Trump vowed that “all illegal entry will be halted” and that millions of “criminal aliens” will be deported.

He also signed an order declaring Mexican drug cartels terrorist organisations.

At a previous event at Washington’s Capital One Arena, Trump formally revoked nearly 80 executive actions – which he described as “radical” – from the Biden administration.

“I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions,” Trump said in his inaugural address at the US Capitol earlier in the day.

As part of the broader plan, Trump administration officials said the president would direct the Department of Defense to “seal the border” and devote additional resources and personnel, including counter-drone capabilities.

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage
• IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration
• WATCH: The new president’s day so far
• EXPLAINED: Can Trump end birthright citizenship?
• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks

Earlier, incoming Trump administration officials said that the moves amounted to the creation of “common sense immigration policy”.

Although the details of the order are not yet known, officials have said that Trump plans to end birthright citizenship, meaning that the children of undocumented migrants living in the US will no longer automatically be considered US citizens.

Birthright citizenship, however, is enshrined in the US constitution and would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress to change. The official provided no further detail on how Trump plans to accomplish this.

The new administration also moved to swiftly scrap CBP One, a mobile application used by migrants to book appointments to appear at a port of entry.

Biden administration officials had credited the app with helping reduce the number of detentions at the border since it was first introduced in January 2023. It was the only legal pathway to request asylum at the US-Mexico border.

Now, the Customs and Border Protection website notes that the app is “no longer available”.

App users also now are shown a message noting that “existing appointments scheduled through CBP One are no longer valid”.

According to CBS, the BBC’s US partner, the Biden administration had scheduled roughly 30,000 appointments via CBP One for migrants to enter the US in the next three weeks.

Other estimates had suggested that as many as 270,000 migrants were in Mexico waiting for an opportunity to enter the US using CBP One.

In the Mexican border city of Tijuana, some migrants reported feeling defeated and deflated after learning of CBP One’s demise.

“I hope God touches his [Trump’s] heart,” said Oralia, a Mexican woman who fled cartel violence in her home state along with her epileptic son. “We really do need the help.”

She had been waiting for an appointment through CBP One for seven months.

The new administration’s decision to scrap CBP One was immediately met with a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed court documents requesting an immediate status conference on the matter.

Immigration advocacy groups have also reacted furiously to Trump’s immigration orders.

In a statement, Jennie Murray, the president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, said that the orders are “disappointing but not surprising”.

“The expected orders would separate families and weaken our economy,” Ms Murray said. “They do not uphold American values.”

Greisa Martinez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream – a national immigrant youth organisation – said that the orders show that the administration “will spend the next four years actively trying to destroy our lives”.

“Trump’s pledges to carry out mass raids and deportations will have devastating consequences on communities nationwide, leaving millions of families and individuals in disarray if immediate action is not taken by our elected officials to publicly fight back,” she added.

President Donald Trump has said he plans to end “birthright citizenship”, which refers to automatic American citizenship granted to anyone born in the US.

On Monday, he signed an executive order addressing the definition of birthright citizenship, though the details so far are unclear.

Birthright citizenship stems from the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that “all persons born” in the United States “are citizens of the United States”.

Though Trump has vowed to end the practice, attempts to do so would face significant legal hurdles. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups immediately sued the Trump administration over the executive order.

The first sentence of the 14th Amendment to the US constitution establishes the principle of “birthright citizenship”:

Immigration hardliners argue that the policy is a “great magnet for illegal immigration”, and that it encourages undocumented pregnant women to cross the border in order to give birth, an act that has been pejoratively called “birth tourism” or having an “anchor baby”.

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, after the close of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment had abolished slavery in 1865, while the 14th settled the question of the citizenship of freed, American-born former slaves.

Previous Supreme Court decisions, like Dred Scott v Sandford in 1857, had decided that African Americans could never be US citizens. The 14th Amendment overrode that.

In 1898, the US Supreme Court affirmed that birthright citizenship applies to the children of immigrants in the case of Wong Kim Ark v United States.

Wong was a 24-year-old child of Chinese immigrants who was born in the US, but denied re-entry when he returned from a visit to China. Wong successfully argued that because he was born in the US, his parents’ immigration status did not affect the application of the 14th Amendment.

“Wong Kim Ark vs United States affirmed that regardless of race or the immigration status of one’s parents, all persons born in the United States were entitled to all of the rights that citizenship offered,” writes Erika Lee, director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. “The court has not re-examined this issue since then.”

• LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage
• ANALYSIS: The promise and peril of Trump’s speech
• IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration
• WATCH: The new president’s day so far
• EXPLAINED: What Trump is doing on day one
• FASHION: Melania’s striking hat and other eye-catching looks
• VIRAL MOMENTS: Carrie Underwood goes a cappella and other moments

Most legal scholars agree that President Trump cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order.

“He’s doing something that’s going to upset a lot of people, but ultimately this will be decided by the courts,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional expert and University of Virginia Law School professor. “This is not something he can decide on his own.”

Mr Prakash said that while the president can order employees of federal agencies to interpret citizenship more narrowly – agents with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for example – that would trigger legal challenges from anyone whose citizenship is denied.

That could lead to a lengthy court battle ultimately winding up at the US Supreme Court.

A constitutional amendment could do away with birthright citizenship, but that would require a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and approval by three quarters of US states.

According to Pew Research, about 250,000 babies were born to unauthorised immigrant parents in the United States in 2016, which is a 36% decrease from a peak in 2007. By 2022, the latest year that data is available, there are 1.2m US citizens born to unauthorised immigrant parents, Pew found.

But as those children also have children, the cumulative effect of ending birthright citizenship would increase the number of unauthorised immigrants in the country to 4.7m in 2050, the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, found.

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump said he thought the children of unauthorised immigrants should be deported alongside their parents – even if they were born in the US.

“I don’t want to be breaking up families,” Trump said last December. “So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”

More than 30 countries – including Canada, Mexico, Malaysia and Lesotho – practise automatic “jus soli”, or “right of the soil” without restriction.

Other countries, like the UK and Australia, allow for a modified version where citizenship is automatically granted if one parent is a citizen or permanent resident.

Inauguration Day is all about pomp, pageantry – and pictures.

The clothes worn on this world stage – the colour, cut and details – take the spotlight. From Melania’s striking hat to Usha’s fashion forward overcoat, here’s a quick roundup of some of the day’s most memorable looks.

Melania Trump kicked off Inauguration Day with an outfit that has all the hallmarks of her favoured first lady style: sharply cut, with spiked heels and a dramatic flourish via the headgear. It is simultaneously serious and chic.

The designer chosen by the first lady for the inauguration is the subject of fascination – and, again, an opportunity to transmit a message. That Melania Trump chose New York designer Adam Lippes and a coordinating hat by Eric Javits, was a marked shift of gear.

She may have worn the American fashion designer Ralph Lauren to her husband’s last inauguration, but much more frequently turns to the big European houses. Plus, unlike Lauren, neither Lippes nor Javits are such household, starry names.

In a statement, Lippes said the look had been hand-stitched in New York “by some of America’s finest craftsmen.” Fittingly, Lippes recently opened a new boutique in Palm Beach, where the Trump’s live at their home, Mar-a-Lago, or the “southern White House”.

Very much on-brand is the price tag: Melania Trump is known for her extravagant tastes – many of her outfits while previously First Lady had price tags running well into the thousands – and Lippes’ dresses, for example, go from £1,000 up to over £7,500.

It also speaks to her love of hats. The brim is wide enough and the contrast between the cream ribbon and navy hat big enough that it draws the eyes upwards – even if it obscures the eyes of the wearer.

There was a loadedness to its incongruity. As celebrity stylist and fashion expert Lauren Rothman points out, “a boater is traditionally a summer hat. It’s traditionally worn by, you know, in Venice, right?” Not in a freezing cold DC.

“This was just such a spectacular use of signalling and blending Palm Beach and DC with international global fashion aesthetic, while understanding the traditional and political power that is also necessary for your look to communicate,” said Rothman.

First daughter Ivanka Trump matched Melania’s serious colour palette with an emerald green skirt suit with a matching hat.

The hourglass silhouette – the cinched in waist and fuller skirt – felt pointed and intentional. It was reminiscent of Dior’s glamorous New Look, which ushered in a new era in fashion after World War Two.

The asymmetry of the cut, however, sounded a note of continuation: Ivanka wore a white Oscar de la Renta jacket with an asymmetric handkerchief hem for inauguration day in 2017.

The first daughter’s outfit feels like it could be harking back to the work of Adolfo Sardiña, a Cuban-born American fashion designer who started out as an apprentice milliner at Bergdorf Goodman in the late 1940s and went on to be known for his spectacular hats, which were worn by Nancy Reagan to both of her husband’s inaugurations.

For Lauren Rothman, the look had a very international flavour. “We’re seeing a little bit of Princess Kate style,” she said.

It speaks to the idea of a Trump dynasty, in a way more akin to royalty than a democracy. “Her look is really a signal that indicates her strong understanding of the political kingdom,” she said.

Yet for all of its regality, Rothman also identifies an accessibility. She has clients already texting her asking, ‘how can I get that outfit in another color?’ And I’ve already sent a few links.”

Former first lady Jill Biden yet again wore a purplish blue from head to toe – a colour that has come to represent the administration of the last four years.

At her husband’s swearing-in ceremony in 2021, Jill wore a blue coat created by designer/founder Alexandra O’Neill for the New York–based luxury womenswear label Markarian. It reportedly quintupled sales for the designer. It was custom made and embroidered with Swarovski crystals, plus had a pandemic-era matching face mask.

Both Bidens have chosen today to dress in clothes again by Ralph Lauren, whose designs and back story are often seen as synonymous with the American dream.

It comes as no surprise: Jill has worn his clothes throughout the last four years and was at his fashion show in the Hamptons last September.

Her husband recently awarded Lauren the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the nation’s highest civilian honour – and in the process made him the first fashion designer to receive the distinction.

Lauren suits have been a fitting uniform of choice for the outgoing president. On the White House website as he leaves office, it sums up his presidency: “for all Americans, a country for all Americans, a future for all Americans.”

You could argue his Lauren suits are also designed to not leave any Americans out – never straying too far from classic blue and classic lines.

The lawyer and wife of Vice President-elect JD Vance, Usha Vance’s most high profile appearance to date was speaking the 2024 Republican National Convention. For the occasion she chose a cobalt blue off-the-shoulder Badgley Mischka dress, which retails for $495 (£400). According to a spokesperson speaking to industry website WWD, Vance must have bought the garment herself as the brand wasn’t consulted.

But today, there were clear signs of a pivot to more high-fashion choices. She chose an Oscar de la Renta overcoat with a strikingly fashion-forward detail: a scarf intentionally tucked into her waist-height belt. Is it a sign of a more stylised image to come as Vance takes her place as the second lady?

“I would absolutely label her as one to watch,” said Lauren Rothman, “because she is the newest member into the spotlight, she is receiving help – and it’s working.” Plus: “her energy indicates a comfort in it. Like, I was ready for this.”

She sees an authenticity too: “It doesn’t look like a costume. It looks like she’s having fun.” She cited an optimism in the choice of pink, where many of the other figures in Trump’s universe went for more sombre colours.

Suits, ties, shoulder pads, pearls; these are the traditional attire of inauguration day. But John Fetterman, the US senator from Pennsylvania since 2023, has never been one to stick to traditional dress codes – he wore a Carhartt hoodie with a picture of a bow-tie printed onto it for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last year.

Still, if tradition didn’t mean Fetterman opted for a pair of trousers, you would have thought the weather might – temperatures in Washington today are so low that the ceremony has been moved inside for the first time since 1985. Yet Fetterman showed up coatless, in only a hoodie, and wearing shorts.

It is fitting – Fetterman is all about bucking convention – he was, after all, the first Senate Democrat to meet with Trump since the election.

The “tech bros” have been undergoing some interesting style shifts of late. Most recently in Elon Musk’s case, a Belstaff jacket drew the internet’s eyes, while Mark Zuckerberg’s style makeover has seen him transform from “normcore” grey T-shirts and inconspicuous jeans to luxury labels, his own brand of slogan T-shirts with Greek and Latin phrases and million pound watches.

For Lauren Rothman, there was “a sleekness” about the way they looked today, “and they also sort of showed up as a squad, sunglasses and suits.”

But, she said, “the most significant part of how the tech giants showed up was in their significant others. Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan wore “the classic DC look: a short statement necklace and a buttoned up coat”.

The author and fiancée to Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sanchez, by contrast to both the darkly suited tech entrepreneurs surrounding her, as well as to Chan, wore a startling white Alexander McQueen suit with pointed, padded shoulders. Underneath was a lingerie-inspired look that has already drawn some criticism online for a perceived lack of appropriateness on a state occasion.

At Bill Clinton’s 1997 inauguration, Hillary Clinton wore a candy floss-pink outfit by Oscar de la Renta. And to her husband’s first swearing-in ceremony in 1993 she went for an unusually busy look – a checked suit and a blue velour hat.

In 2017 at Trump’s first inauguration, she wore a white and cream Lauren pantsuit – the outfit that clearly makes her feel most battle-ready and professional.

Today, in marked contrast to her previous palette, she has gone for a grave navy. On her coat there is a single brooch.

Its details remain unclear but brooches are often the site of sartorial messaging and Clinton knows it. She recently wore a bald eagle brooch – a national symbol – with the US flag on it for the funeral of Jimmy Carter.

The look was by British sustainable designer Stella McCartney, a move that feels like it could be aimed at the incoming administration’s climate plans.

Trump has confirmed plans to once again pull the US out of the Paris agreement, which tries to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

What the incoming president chose to wear was never going to stray too far from his norm of navy suits.

According to Lauren Rothman, “we’re still seeing, you know, a pretty simple suit” but she said the big difference and a “huge signal that is different, is in his tie.”

“It’s really ultimately a mix of red and blue, which creates a purple effect.

“The more muted tie “kind of signals in my world, I don’t need to scream. I don’t need to project. I have arrived.”

Another big point of interest, particularly on Inauguration Day, is where the president gets his suits.

It is unclear where Trump’s suit came from, but as he used his inauguration speech to talk about increasing American industry, it would be fitting from him to wear an American suit, menswear expert Derek Guy pointed out.

“American manufacturing is on the decline, especially in clothing. Some of the factories that made clothes for previous inaugurations have since shuttered. It would be nice to see more support for American manufacturing, even if it’s only symbolic,” he said.

LIVE: Follow BBC’s live coverage

IN PICTURES: Key moments of the inauguration

WATCH: The new president’s day so far

EXPLAINED: What Donald Trump could do on day one

GUIDE: What we know about the inauguration

ANALYSIS: Trump team’s confidence is sky-high but warning signs abound

FEATURE: From snowy US cities to Mexican border – deportations loom

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Niluper says she has been living in agony.

A Uyghur refugee, she has spent the past decade hoping her husband would join her and their three sons in Turkey, where they now live.

The family was detained in Thailand in 2014 after fleeing increasing repression in their hometown in China’s Xinjiang province. She and the children were allowed to leave Thailand a year later. But her husband remained in detention, along with 47 other Uyghur men.

Niluper – not her real name – now fears she and her children may never see him again.

Ten days ago, she learned that Thai officials had tried to persuade the detainees to sign forms consenting to be sent back to China. When they realised what was in the forms, they refused to sign them.

The Thai government has denied having any immediate plans to send them back. But human rights groups believe they could be deported at any time.

“I don’t know how to explain this to my sons,” Niluper told the BBC on a video call from Turkey. Her sons, she says, keep asking about their father. The youngest has never met him.

“I don’t know how to digest this. I’m living in constant pain, constant fear that at any moment I may get the news from Thailand that my husband has been deported.”

The last time Thailand deported Uyghur asylum seekers was in July 2015. Without warning, it put 109 of them onto a plane back to China, prompting a storm of protest from governments and human rights groups.

The few photos that were released show them hooded and handcuffed, guarded by large numbers of Chinese police officers. Little is known about what happened to them after their return. Other deported Uyghurs have received long prison sentences in secret trials.

The nominee for Secretary of State in the incoming Trump administration, Marco Rubio, has promised to press Thailand not to send the remaining Uyghurs back.

Their living conditions have been described by one human rights defender as “a hell on earth”.

They are all being held in the Immigration Detention Centre (IDC) in central Bangkok, which houses most of those charged with immigration violations in Thailand. Some are there only briefly, while waiting to be deported; others are there much longer.

Driving along the narrow, congested road known as Suan Phlu it is easy to miss the non-descript cluster of cement buildings, and difficult to believe they house an estimated 900 detainees – the Thai authorities give out no precise numbers.

The IDC is known to be hot, overcrowded and unsanitary. Journalists are not allowed inside. Lawyers usually warn their clients to avoid being sent there if at all possible.

There are 43 Uyghurs there, plus another five being held in a Bangkok prison for trying to escape. They are the last of around 350 who fled China in 2013 and 2014.

They are kept in isolation from other inmates and are rarely allowed visits by outsiders or lawyers. They get few opportunities to exercise, or even to see daylight. They have been charged with no crime, apart from entering Thailand without a visa. Five Uyghurs have died in custody.

“The conditions there are appalling,” says Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, an NGO trying to help the Uyghurs.

“There is not enough food – it is mostly just soup made with cucumber and chicken bones. It is crammed in there. The water they get, both for drinking and washing, is dirty. Only basic medicines are provided and these are inadequate. If someone falls ill, it takes a long time to get an appointment with the doctor. And because of the dirty water, the hot weather and bad ventilation, a lot of the Uyghurs get rashes or other skin problems.”

But the worst part of their detention, say those who have experienced it, is not knowing how long they will be imprisoned in Thailand, and the constant fear of being sent back to China.

Niluper says there were always rumours about deportation but it was difficult to find out more. Escaping was hard because they had children with them.

“It was horrible. We were so scared all the time,” recalls Niluper.

“When we thought about being sent back to China, we would have preferred to die in Thailand.”

China’s repression of the Muslim Uyghurs has been well documented by the UN and human rights groups. Up to one million Uyghurs are believed to have been detained in re-education camps, in what human rights advocates say is a state campaign to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture. There are many allegations of torture and enforced disappearances, which China denies. It says it has been running “vocational centres” focused on de-radicalising Uyghurs.

Niluper says she and her husband faced hostility from Chinese state officials over their religiosity – her husband was an avid reader of religious texts.

The couple made the decision to flee when people they knew were being arrested or disappearing. The family were in a group of 220 Uyghurs who were caught by the Thai police trying to cross the border to Malaysia in March 2014.

Niluper was held in an IDC near the border, and then later in Bangkok, until with 170 other women and children, she was allowed in June 2015 to go to Turkey, which usually offers Uyghurs asylum.

But her husband remains in the Bangkok IDC. They were separated when they were detained, and she has had no contact with him since a brief meeting they were permitted in July 2014.

She says she was one of 18 pregnant women and 25 children crammed into a room that was just four by eight metres. The food was “bad and there was never enough for all of us”.

“I was the last one to give birth, at midnight, in the bathroom. The next day the guard saw my condition and that of my baby was not good, so they took us to the hospital.”

Niluper was also separated from her eldest son, who was just two years old at the time and held with his father – an experience which she says has traumatised him, after experiencing “terrible conditions” and witnessing a guard beating an inmate. When the guards brought him back to her, she says, he did not recognise her.

“He was so scared, screaming and crying. He could not understand what had happened. He did not want to talk to anyone.”

It took a long time before he accepted his mother, she says, and after that he would not leave her even for a moment, even after they had arrived in Turkey.

“It took a really, really long time for him to understand that he was finally in a safe place.”

Thailand has never explained why it will not allow the remaining Uyghurs to join their families in Turkey, but it is almost certainly because of pressure from China.

Unlike other inmates in the IDC, the fate of the Uyghurs is not handled by the Immigration Department but instead by Thailand’s National Security Council, a body chaired by the prime minister in which the military has significant influence.

As the influence of the US, Thailand’s oldest military ally, wanes, that of China has been steadily increasing. The current Thai government is keen to build even closer ties to China, to help revive the faltering economy.

The United Nations Refugee Agency has been accused of doing little to help the Uyghurs, but says it is given no access to them, so is unable to do much. Thailand does not recognise refugee status.

Accommodating China’s wish to get the Uyghurs back is not without risk though. Thailand has just taken a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, for which it lobbied hard.

Deporting 48 men who have already endured more than a decade of incarceration would badly tarnish the image the Thai government is trying to project.

Thailand will also be mindful of what happened just a month after the last mass deportation in 2015.

On 17 August that year a powerful bomb exploded at a shrine in Bangkok which was popular with Chinese tourists. Twenty people were killed, in what was widely assumed to be a retaliation by Uyghur militants, although the Thai authorities tried to downplay the link.

Two Uyghur men were charged with the bombing, but their trial has lasted for nine years, with no end in sight. One of them, say his lawyers, is almost certainly innocent. A veil of secrecy surrounds the trial; the authorities seem reluctant to let anything from the hearings tying the bomb to the deportation to get out.

Even those Uyghurs who have managed to get to Turkey must then deal with their uncertain status there, and with the severance of all communications with their families in Xinjiang.

“I have not heard my mother’s voice for 10 years,” says Hasan Imam, an Uyghur refugee who now works as a lorry driver in Turkey.

He was in the same group as Niluper caught by the Malaysian border in 2014.

He remembers how the following year the Thai authorities deceived them about their plan to deport some of them to China. He says they were told some men would be moved to a different facility, because the one they were in was too crowded.

This was after some women and children had been sent to Turkey, and, unusually, the men in the camp were also allowed to talk to their wives and children in Turkey on a phone.

“We were all happy, and full of hope,” Hassan says. “They selected them, one by one. At this point they had no idea they would be sent back to China. It was only later, through an illicit phone we had, that we found out from Turkey that they had been deported.”

This filled the remaining detainees with despair, recalls Hasan, and two years later, when he was moved temporarily to another holding camp, he and 19 others made a remarkable escape, using a nail to make a hole in a crumbling wall.

Eleven were recaptured, but Hasan managed to cross the forested border into Malaysia, and from there reached Turkey.

“I do not know what condition my parents are in but for those still detained in Thailand it is even worse,” he says.

They fear being sent back and imprisoned in China – and they also fear that it would mean more severe punishment for their families, he explains.

“The mental strain for them is unbearable.”

The new team entrusted with delivering Donald Trump’s agenda is taking shape, with several contentious hires in his proposed administration.

Ahead of his return to the White House on 20 January 2025, Trump named Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and military veteran, as his pick for defence secretary. And he wants Robert F Kennedy Jr to be health secretary.

Marco Rubio will be the next secretary of state. And billionaire supporter Elon Musk will play a role in cost-cutting.

Here is a closer look at the posts he has named replacements for, and the names in the mix for the top jobs yet to be filled.

We will start with the cabinet roles, which require approval from the US Senate. If four Republican senators and all the Democrats disagree to any individual, then that nomination will fail. Vice-President JD Vance will be able to step in to confirm a nominee if there is a tie.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio was confirmed as US secretary of state just hours after Trump was sworn into office.

His confirmation by the US Senate by a vote of 99-0 makes him the top US diplomat when representing the country overseas, and also the president’s main adviser on foreign affairs.

Rubio, 53, takes a hawkish view of China. He opposed Trump in the 2016 Republican primary but has since mended fences.

He has long been courting the job of the nation’s top diplomat and is now the first Latino secretary of state in US history.

• Marco Rubio: America’s nominee for top diplomat, in his own words

Pete Hegseth, a military veteran and Fox News host who has never held political office, has been nominated to be the next defence secretary.

His appointment is one of the most highly anticipated in Trump’s cabinet as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza rage on. “Nobody fights harder for the troops,” Trump said.

After Hegseth’s appointment, it emerged that he was investigated in 2017 for an alleged sexual assault. He was never arrested or charged and denies the allegation.

His lawyer also confirmed that he had paid a woman in the same year to stay quiet about an assault claim that he feared would cost him his job at Fox. Again, he denied any wrongdoing.

• Trump defence pick surprises Washington, here’s why

Trump’s first pick for attorney general, former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration for the role earlier in November after a week of controversy over a congressional investigation into sexual misconduct and drug allegations against him.

Gaetz denied all of the claims, but said he wanted to avoid a “needlessly protracted Washington scuffle.”

About six hours after Gaetz withdrew, Trump named Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, as his successor.

“Pam was a prosecutor for nearly 20 years, where she was very tough on Violent Criminals, and made the streets safe for Florida Families,” Trump wrote.

Bondi served during Trump’s first administration as a member of the Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission. And she was on his defence team during his first impeachment trial.

Trump announced during a speech at Mar-a-Lago that he would ask Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, to lead the Department of the Interior.

A software entrepreneur who sold his small company to Microsoft in 2001, Burgum briefly ran in the 2024 Republican primary before dropping out, endorsing Trump and quickly impressing him with his low-drama persona and sizeable wealth.

If confirmed, Burgum will oversee an agency that is responsible for the management and conservation of federal lands and natural resources.

• Trump victory is a major setback for climate action, experts say

RFK Jr, as he is known, an environmental lawyer, vaccine sceptic and the nephew of former President John F Kennedy, is Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Despite having no medical qualifications, Kennedy, 70, would have broad remit over US federal health agencies – including those that oversee approval of vaccines and pharmaceuticals.

There has been speculation about his inability to pass a background check for security clearance due to past controversies, including dumping a bear carcass in New York’s Central Park.

Some of Kennedy’s own stated aims for government are bound up with misinformation – and many medical experts have expressed serious concerns about his nomination, citing his views on vaccines and other health matters.

On other matters he has more support, for example in scrutinising the processing of food and the use of additives.

• Fact-checking RFK Jr’s views on health policy

Trump has nominated Dr. Marty Makary to lead the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA is responsible for the safety of prescription drugs and vaccines as well as oversight of food and cosmetics.

“The Agency needs Dr. Marty Makary, a Highly Respected Johns Hopkins Surgical Oncologist and Health Policy Expert, to course-correct and refocus the Agency,” Trump said in a statement Friday.

Dr Makary is a Johns Hopkins University professor, author and surgeon, and he is a trained cancer specialist. He spoke to conservative media outlets during the Covid-19 pandemic, questioning the need for masks and expressing concerns over the Covid vaccine among young children. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ stance was that even though the Covid death rate was low among young children, vaccinations helped reduce severe disease in children.

Trump announced in his nomination that Dr Makary would be ideal to “course-correct and refocus the Agency”.

“FDA has lost the trust of Americans, and has lost sight of its primary goal as a regulator,” he said.

Dr Makary would require Senate approval and would serve under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, if both are confirmed.

Former Georgia congressman Doug Collins has been chosen to lead the US Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Collins was a Trump loyalist when he served in Congress from 2013-21. He was an outspoken advocate for the president-elect during both impeachment hearings.

An Iraq war veteran who now serves as a chaplain in the US Air Force Reserve, Collins left Congress for an unsuccessful bid for the Senate in his home state of Georgia.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has been nominated for the key role of overseeing US security, including its borders, cyber-threats, terrorism and emergency response.

The agency has a $62bn (£48bn) budget and employs thousands of people. It incorporates a wide variety of agencies under its umbrella, ranging from Customs and Border Protection to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

• Trump lines Kristi Noem and others for top jobs

Former congressman and Fox Business host Sean Duffy has been selected to lead the Department of Transportation.

If confirmed by senators, he will take charge of aviation, automotive, rail, transit and other transportation policies at the transport department, with a roughly $110bn annual budget.

In the role, the incoming secretary can expect to face a number of safety-related aviation issues, including the continued problems at Boeing, as the troubled manufacturer addresses a series of safety and quality issues.

• Trump picks ex-congressman and Fox host as transport secretary

Oil and gas industry executive Chris Wright will lead the Department of Energy, where he is expected to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill” and maximise US energy production.

Wright, the founder-CEO of Liberty Energy, has called climate activists alarmist and likened Democrats’ push for renewables to Soviet-style communism.

In a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year, he said: “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

• Trump victory is a major setback for climate action, experts say

Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team and chief executive of financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has been picked to lead the US commerce department.

Trump said Lutnick would spearhead the administration’s “tariff and trade agenda”.

Lutnick had also been in the running for treasury secretary, a more high-profile role.

World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) co-founder and Trump transition co-chair, Linda McMahon, has been appointed as Trump’s nominee for education secretary.

A long-time Trump ally, McMahon led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first presidency and donated millions of dollars to his presidential campaign.

Trump has criticised the Department of Education, and has promised to close the agency down – a job McMahon could be tasked with.

In his statement announcing her nomination, Trump said McMahon would “spearhead” the effort to “send Education BACK TO THE STATES”, in reference to the pledge.

Scott Bessent has been nominated to lead the US Treasury Department, a post with wide oversight of tax policy, public debt, international finance and sanctions.

The selection ends what has proven to be one of the more protracted decisions for the president-elect as he assembles his team for a second term.

Bessent, a Wall Street financier who once worked for liberal billionaire George Soros, was an early backer of Trump’s 2024 bid and would bring a relatively conventional resume to the role.

On the campaign trail, Bessent told voters that Trump would usher in a “new golden age with de-regulation, low-cost energy, [and] low taxes”.

“[He] has long been a strong advocate of the America First Agenda,” Trump said, adding that Bessent would “support my Policies that will drive US Competitiveness, and stop unfair Trade imbalances.”

Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been selected by Trump to lead the US Department of Labor – which oversees worker health and safety, workforce laws and administers unemployment and workers compensation.

Chavez-DeRemer has been serving in the US Congress since 2023 but lost a re-election bid in Oregon in the November election, despite winning strong trade union support.

Scott Turner, an NFL veteran and motivational speaker, has been chosen to lead the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The department oversees America’s housing needs, enforces laws, prevents discrimination and provides assistance to those in need, through both low-income housing and helping Americans avoid foreclosure.

Turner served as the executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council during Trump’s first term. He previously served in the Texas legislature.

Brooke Rollins grew up on a farm, but her most recent job was as co-founder and head of the America First Policy Institute, a Maga-backed think tank.

During the president-elect’s first administration, she served as director of the Office of American Innovation and acting director of the Domestic Policy Council.

According to Trump’s press release, Rollins graduated from the Texas A&M University with a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in agriculture development and later obtained her law degree from the same university.

As agriculture secretary, she will be oversee farm subsidies, federal nutrition programmes, meat inspections and other facets of the country’s agricultural industry.

Outside the 15 department heads who make up the core of the cabinet, there are several other roles that are often given cabinet-rank, like the FBI director and the head of the Environment Protection Agency (EPA). These roles will also require the nominees to be confirmed by the Senate.

However, there will be other key roles in the Trump administration that will not require Senate confirmation and the people filling these roles – like Elon Musk – will not have to be vetted in the same way.

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been tapped to lead what Trump has termed a Department of Government Efficiency, alongside one-time presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

The department – whose acronym Doge is a nod to a cryptocurrency promoted by Musk – will serve in an advisory capacity to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies”, Trump said.

It is unclear what approval process will be necessary for these roles.

• Can Elon Musk cut $2 trillion from US government spending?
• Who is Elon Musk?
• Why is Musk becoming Donald Trump’s efficiency tsar?
• What Musk could gain from Trump’s presidency

This is a critical job because it includes responsibility for Trump’s mass deportations of millions of undocumented migrants, which was a central campaign pledge.

Homan is a former police officer who was acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Trump’s first term and has advocated a zero-tolerance stance on the issue.

“I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said in July.

• How would mass deportations work?
• How will Trump’s new ‘border tsar’ approach immigration?

Russell Vought has been selected to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a post he held during Trump’s first term. The Senate still must confirm his appointment.

Vought previously served as the director of the agency, which helps craft the president’s budget, acts as the central regulatory gatekeeper and executes the president’s agenda across the government.

He also authored a key chapter in Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy wish-list. He also served as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director.

Lee Zeldin, a former New York congressman, has agreed to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), both he and Trump said. The Senate will still need to confirm his appointment.

He will be in charge of tackling America’s climate policy in this role.

While serving in congress from 2015 to 2023, Zeldin voted against expanding a number of environmental policies. He has already said he plans to “roll back regulations” from day one.

New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has been tapped to serve as the US ambassador to the United Nations.

Stefanik has made national headlines with her sharp questioning in congressional committees.

• Who is Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for UN ambassador?

Trump has chosen his former director of national intelligence, ex-Texas congressman John Ratcliffe, to serve as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director.

There are other yet-to-be-appointed key positions running intelligence agencies, including the FBI and director of national intelligence.

Trump has said he would fire FBI Director Chris Wray, whom he nominated in 2017, but has since fallen out with. Jeffrey Jensen, a former Trump-appointed US attorney, has been under consideration to replace Wray.

• John Ratcliffe: Trump picks lawmaker again for US spy boss

Trump has named former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard, as director of national intelligence.

The former US Army Reserve officer once campaigned with Senator Bernie Sanders and ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, but has turned toward the Republicans in recent years.

She campaigned with Trump in 2024 and served on his transition team.

Florida congressman Michael Waltz has been selected as the next national security adviser.

In a statement on Tuesday announcing Waltz’s appointment, Trump noted that Waltz is the first green beret – or member of the US Army Special Forces – to be elected to Congress.

Waltz will have to help navigate the US position on the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Trump has picked real estate investor and philanthropist Steve Witkoff for the role of special envoy to the Middle East.

Witkoff is a close friend of Trump’s, who was with the former president when a man allegedly tried to assassinate him at his Palm Beach golf club in September.

Trump has described him as a “highly respected leader in business and philanthropy, who has made every project and community he has been involved with stronger and more prosperous”.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee will be US ambassador to Israel, as Trump pledges to end the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

“Mike has been a great public servant, governor, and leader in faith for many years,” the president-elect said in a statement.

Huckabee is a staunchly pro-Israel official who has previously rejected the idea of a two-state solution to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

• Trump’s pick of Huckabee and Witkoff a clue to Middle East policy

Kellogg – a former national security adviser and retired lieutenant general in the US military – is likely to be at the centre of negotiations to end the ongoing war in Ukraine, should Russia and Ukraine agree to take part.

Trump has promised to stop the war on his first day back in office – though he has not provided any details on how he plans to do that.

Kellogg has advocated for tough negotiations with both nations.

• What has Kellogg said about ending the war?

Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker has been nominated to be the US Ambassador to Nato – the alliance Trump has regularly criticised, and has even previously threatened to withdraw from completely.

“Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot, who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended,” Trump said in a statement.

“Matt will strengthen relationships with our Nato Allies, and stand firm in the face of threats to Peace and Stability – He will put AMERICA FIRST.”

Whitaker is a high school football star turned lawyer who has served as a US Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa. He has little experience of foreign policy.

Trump has selected Dean John Sauer to be US solicitor general to supervise and conduct government litigation in the US Supreme Court.

Sauer previously served as solicitor general for the Missouri state supreme court for six years, and worked as a clerk for former US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

He also represented Trump earlier this year in several of his court cases, including his US Supreme Court immunity case.

Brendan Carr is a current member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates broadcast and internet use. A longtime establishment Republican, in recent years he has embraced Trump’s priorities and emerged as a supporter of regulation of “big tech”.

“Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and others have played central roles in the censorship cartel,” he wrote on X. “The censorship cartel must be dismantled.”

Trump has previously vowed to strip TV channels he considers biased of their broadcasting licenses.

Mehmet Oz has been chosen to run the powerful agency that oversees the healthcare of millions of Americans. He, too, will need to be confirmed by the US Senate next year before he officially takes charge.

Oz trained as a surgeon before finding fame on The Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s. He later hosted a TV programme of his own.

“There may be no physician more qualified and capable than Dr Oz to make America healthy again,” Trump said.

Oz has been criticised by experts for promoting what they called bad health advice about weight loss drugs and “miracle” cures, and suggesting malaria drugs as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic.

Trump has tapped Jamieson Greer to serve as his trade representative. The position needs confirmation by the US Senate.

The former trade lawyer is a veteran of Trump’s first presidency. He played a key role in imposing tariffs on goods from China during Trump’s first administration.

Greer would be involved in “reining in the country’s massive trade deficit, defending American manufacturing, agriculture, and services, and opening up export markets everywhere,” Trump said in a statement.

The announcement came after Trump threatened new tariffs, which are taxes on imported items, on China, Canada and Mexico to get them to clamp down on the illegal flow of people and drugs to the US.

Kevin Hassett has been named Trump’s top economic adviser, responsible for leading the White House National Economic Council. The position does not require Senate confirmation.

Hassett is a major advocate for tax cuts.

Trump said Hassett “will play an important role in helping American families recover from the inflation that was unleashed by the Biden Administration”.

Hassett served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during Trump’s first term. He previously worked for the conservative American Enterprise Institute before joining the White House in 2017.

Businessman John Phelan is Trump’s pick to serve as secretary of the Navy. The Senate will need to confirm his nomination.

The Navy secretary is responsible for all affairs of the department including its over $200 billion budget. They are also responsible for the Navy’s sailors, marines and civilian personnel.

Phelan is the cofounder and chair of investment firm Rugger Management, which is based in Palm Beach, Florida. He is also the co-founder of a private investment firm for Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell.

He did not serve in the military.

“His incredible knowledge and experience will elevate the lives of the brave Americans who serve our Nation,” Trump said in a statement.

Trump has tapped Jay Bhattacharya, a leading Covid lockdown sceptic to be the next director of a key US public health agency. The Senate will need to confirm his nomination.

The Stanford University-trained physician and economist will lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest government-funded biomedical research entity.

Bhattacharya became the face during the pandemic of a fiercely disputed open letter – known as the Great Barrington Declaration – that opposed widespread lockdowns.

Billionaire investment banker and CEO Warren Stephens is set to become the ambassador to the UK, pending Senate approval.

“Warren has always dreamed of serving the United States full time,” Trump wrote on Truth Social when making the announcement.

“I am thrilled that he will now have that opportunity as the top Diplomat, representing the U.S.A. to one of America’s most cherished and beloved Allies.”

Stephens has led the namesake company, Stephens Inc, an Arkansas based financial firm, for 38 years, succeeding his father in 1986.

Over the years, he has donated millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and Pacs, including the Trump campaign, campaign finance records show.

These jobs are in the West Wing – his key advisers.

Susie Wiles and campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita were the masterminds behind Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris.

The chief of staff is a cabinet member and often a president’s top aide, overseeing daily operations in the West Wing and managing the boss’s staff.

Wiles, 67, has worked in Republican politics for decades, from Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign to electing Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis as governors of Florida.

• Who is Susie Wiles, new chief of staff?
• Seven things Trump says he will do in power

Stephen Miller, who has been Trump’s close adviser and speechwriter since 2015, is Trump’s choice for White House deputy chief of staff for policy.

He will likely shape any plans for mass deportations – and pare back both undocumented and legal immigration.

During Trump’s first term, Miller was involved in developing some of the administration’s strictest immigration policies.

Republican lawyer William McGinley will take on the role of White House counsel, Trump has said.

“Bill is a smart and tenacious lawyer who will help me advance our America First agenda while fighting for election integrity and against the weaponization of law enforcement,” he said in a statement.

McGinley served as White House cabinet secretary during part of Trump’s first term and was the Republican National Committee’s counsel for election integrity in 2024.

Karoline Leavitt, 27, will become the youngest person to serve as White House press secretary in US history when Donald Trump returns to office.

She ran for Congress, winning the Republican nomination for New Hampshire in 2022, only to lose in the general election to Democrat Chris Pappas.

Leavitt also served in the White House press office during the first Trump administration, including as an assistant press secretary, according to the website for her run for Congress.

The public will soon see Leavitt in the iconic spot behind the podium in the White House briefing room – a space that led to countless tense exchanges between members of the press and officials in Trump’s first administration.

• Karoline Leavitt to become youngest White House press secretary

Steven Cheung joined Trump’s team in 2016 as his campaign spokesman, and will soon take on a top communications role in the White House.

Raised by Chinese immigrant parents in California, Cheung started out as an intern under then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He has also been the spokesman for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).

Cheung became known for his fierce, and often offensive, attacks towards Trump’s opponents. He has said Joe Biden “slowly shuffles around like he has a full diaper in his pants” and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis walks like a girl who “discovered heels for the first time”.

During his first administration, Trump had an unusually high turnover of communications directors – six different people. Anthony Scaramucci infamously only lasted 11 days in the role.

Sergio Gor is a business partner of Trump’s son, Donald Jr. He is the president and co-founder of the younger Trump’s publishing company, Winning Team Publishing, which has published a book by the president-elect.

“Steven Cheung and Sergio Gor have been trusted advisers since my first presidential campaign in 2016, and have continued to champion America First principles,” Trump said in a statement.

Patel served as the former US defence department chief of staff in the first Trump administration. He has been a steadfast supporter of the president-elect, sharing his suspicion of government institutions and the so-called “deep state”.

He had previously proposed to “dramatically” limit the FBI’s authority.

In his memoir, Government Gangsters, Patel called for an eradication of what he said was “government tyranny” within the federal law enforcement agency, saying that its “top ranks” should be fired.

When announcing Patel’s appointment as head of the FBI, Trump wrote that he is “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending justice and protecting the American people.”

Trump named his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, as an adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.

Boulous, a Lebanese-American businessman, played a key unofficial role in the Trump campaign, helping him court Arab American and Muslim voters as many of them grew frustrated with the Biden administration over the Israel-Gaza war.

In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that Boulos was “instrumental in building tremendous new coalitions with the Arab American community”.

Donald Trump has moved to change the US government’s policies on gender and diversity, following through on promises he made on the campaign trail.

“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” Trump said during his inaugural address.

The Trump administration indicated he would sign an executive order Monday that would recognise two sexes only – male and female – and declare that they cannot be changed.

The move is part of Trump’s wider promises about what conservatives decry as “woke” culture, gender and diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) progammes.

An administration official said the executive order would “end DEI inside the federal government”, cutting funding to DEI programmes across all agencies and including a review of offices renamed because of DEI initiatives.

The administration did not say whether action would extend to the private sector, with an official saying businesses should “wait and see”.

Several large US companies have ended or scaled back their DEI programmes since Trump was elected, including McDonald’s, Walmart and Facebook parent company Meta.

Others, like Apple and retailers Target and Costco, publicly defended their existing programmes.

DEI supporters see the programmes as a way to correct lingering discrimination based on race, sexuality and other characteristics. The idea received renewed attention in the wake of racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

A far-right organisation should be banned and some members investigated by police, the BBC has been told, after we secretly filmed people in the group saying migrants should be shot.

Former Counter-Extremism Commissioner Dame Sara Khan believes the UK government should urgently change the law to make groups like Patriotic Alternative illegal.

Barrister Ramya Nagesh watched some of the footage and said: “There’s more than enough evidence for the police to investigate and refer to the Crown Prosecution Service.”

An undercover BBC reporter spent a year investigating the far-right group and its members were recorded using racial slurs.

One Patriotic Alternative (PA) member said he believed a race war was inevitable and the organisation should use a similar tactic to the Nazi party to gain power.

The group cannot be banned under current legislation as they do not advocate terrorism but Dame Sara, the UK’s first Counter-Extremism Commissioner, feels they are “creating a climate conducive to terrorism”.

Patriotic Alternative leader Mark Collett said they are not extremist, do not promote violence and peacefully campaign for the rights of what he calls indigenous British people.

The group, considered to be the UK’s largest far-right group with about 500 members and thousands of followers online, says it exists to “raise awareness” of immigration and promote “family values”.

The BBC Wales Investigates programme found some members making comments that experts say could amount to inciting racial hatred.

Patriotic Alternative have regional branches around the UK and encourage members – including former teachers and nurses – to hold protests, highlight immigration issues, film their activities and share clips online.

A BBC journalist infiltrated the group in Wales using a fake identity, Dan Jones, someone who slept on friends’ sofas in Cardiff and did not have a full-time job.

Posing as a new recruit, the undercover reporter covertly filmed at Patriotic Alternative demonstrations, their summer camp and secretive annual conference over the course of a year and heard some members sharing extreme views.

Dan attended a number of demonstrations in south Wales, including in Merthyr Tydfil where the group protested against the housing of migrants.

He went to banner waving events on busy road bridges where the group would visibly demonstrate against controversial local issues, encouraging drivers to honk horns in support.

These events are legal and often attended by people who are not in Patriotic Alternative.

However it was at these so-called ‘banner drop’ protests where Dan met people like Roger Phillips.

While he said he wasn’t a Patriotic Alternative member, Mr Phillips joined the group at a demonstration and privately told Dan “35 to 40 of us were prepping, arming ourselves” after being at a protest against plans to use a hotel in Llanelli to house asylum seekers.

“I’m buying a pump action shotgun now,” Mr Phillips told the undercover reporter.

“Who do you think is going to fight these migrants? Us lot.”

He discussed modifying ammunition and claimed the weapon he planned to get could “kill you at 150 yards”.

Mr Phillips said afterwards that he had suspected Dan was undercover so fed him false information and that he had been talking about paintballing guns.

Joe Marsh, Patriotic Alternative’s Wales organiser and former leader of the anti-Muslim Welsh Defence League, invited Dan to events.

“If you didn’t have Jamaicans and Africans here stabbing people, we wouldn’t have any knife crime,” the former British National Party (BNP) activist and former football hooligan was filmed saying.

After the stabbing of three young girls in Southport in July 2024, Mr Marsh told his followers: “People shouldn’t be calling demos at mosques… if you are going to do one, outside a migrant hotel or in the town centre.”

The next day, hotels housing migrants near Rotherham and in Tamworth were set on fire. We do not know if any of the protesters were Patriotic Alternative members or followers of Mr Marsh.

Mr Marsh told the BBC he had not incited racial hatred, he had legally protested and had not introduced any new recruits to members with extreme views.

The secret filming exposed how the more extreme views of some members came out, like when Aaron Watkins offered Dan some casual work.

Mr Watkins is now a handyman after losing his tax job at HMRC after being outed for making racist comments online and being spotted at demonstrations.

While the pair were wallpapering a house, Mr Watkins told Dan: “The communities that are the most diverse are the people we want to get rid of, violently preferably.”

“Round them up into camps and if they refuse to leave, we shoot them. The people who come here are parasites.”

Mr Watkins told Dan that anti-terrorism detectives did not find any evidence against him when they investigated him for making racist comments because he had a new phone and had destroyed his old handset.

“I’d burnt the old one, literally on a barbeque,” he privately admitted. “So, they couldn’t get me.”

When the BBC approached Mr Watkins afterwards, he declined to comment.

Our undercover reporter was invited to join social media chatgroups where he got messages daily about how immigrants were “invading” the UK.

Dan was invited to Patriotic Alternative’s summer camp in Derbyshire and to their annual conference where he met Patrick – and the former history teacher from Bristol said the group should mirror the tactic of the Nazi party in 1920s Germany.

“If you look at what the national socialist party did in Germany… community organising, talking to people about local issues, not as politicians… that is what paved the way for them skyrocketing to the elections from 1929 onwards,” he said.

Patrick then told Dan a race war was “inevitable”, and if immigrants did not leave: “The only way to get rid of them will be to kill every single one of them.”

When asked about his comments afterwards, Patrick accused the BBC of having an anti-white bias and “persecuting ordinary British people who care deeply about the safety and wellbeing of our indigenous people”.

Dan shared a conversation with one of the conference guest speakers who was a far-right activist and a convicted criminal from Australia, Blair Cottrell.

He was secretly filmed likening Africans to dogs and suggested that slaves had been happy to work for white people.

“An old lady was stabbed to death by a gang of African kids. When you look at the way things happen in Africa, the only language they understand is violence” he told Dan and other group members.

“The only way to effectively respond to a crime that they’ve committed as heinous as what I described is to literally skin them,” he was filmed saying.

“You hang a few of their bodies up across some traffic lights or something. Just theoretically of course, I can’t condone it.”

The BBC has repeatedly asked Blair Cottrell about his comments – he replied, but did not answer our questions.

Dan has now left Patriotic Alternative and the undercover footage was shown to a leading barrister who said the BBC’s findings should prompt a police investigation because, in her view, some of the comments could incite racial hatred.

“After the Southport riots, we saw prosecutions of individuals who’d posted even just one or two messages on their social media platforms,” said criminal barrister Ramya Nagesh, who has written a book on hate crime.

“And those messages were arguably not as inflammatory as the ones you have shown me.”

Dame Sara said groups like Patriotic Alternative were “attempting to mainstream extremism in our country”.

“They should absolutely not be allowed to operate with impunity,” said Dame Sara.

“We’ve seen their recent activity and their contribution towards public disorder in the summer riots.”

She has now called on the UK government to introduce new laws to ban groups like this.

“It’s incredibly urgent… unless something changes, I’m afraid we’re going to continue to see groups like PA radicalise our children and make us a weaker and less democratic society.”

The UK government said extremism has “no place in society” and was working to “assess and consider the right approach” to tackling the issue.

“We work closely with law enforcement, local communities and our international partners to tackle groups and individuals who sow division and hatred,” said a Home Office spokesperson.

Patriotic Alternative’s leader said any comments were made in private.

“We’re people that advocate for the rights of indigenous Britons and we are people that are campaigning now against what is going on in this country,” said Mark Collett, who formed the group after being press officer for the BNP.

When pressed about the use of racial slurs by his members, Mr Collett said this was prohibited in the group’s code of conduct.

“If people have breached that code of conduct, then we will deal with that in due course,” he added.