Hamas has named four hostages to be released on Saturday under the Gaza ceasefire deal.

It says they are soldiers Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag.

They will be freed in exchange for 180 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

It will be the second such exchange since the ceasefire came into effect last Sunday. Three hostages and 90 prisoners were released in the first swap.

The ceasefire halted the war which began when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to Gaza as hostages.

More than 47,200 Palestinians, the majority civilians, have been killed in Israel’s offensive, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says.

Hamas is also expected to provide information about the remaining 26 hostages due to be released over the next five weeks.

This includes the Bibas family – two parents and two children, one of whom, Kfir, was 10 months old when taken captive and is the youngest hostage. It is unclear if this information will include the names or just the number of living or dead hostages.

• What we know about the ceasefire in Gaza
• Hamas hostages: Stories of the people taken from Israel

The prisoners who will be released are of a more serious category than those freed in the first exchange. They will include those who have killed, some of whom are serving sentences of more than 15 years.

Israel has insisted that no-one who was involved in the 7 October attacks will be freed.

Ariev, Gilboa, Levy and Albag were seized at the Nahal Oz military base which was overrun by Hamas gunmen. Footage showed them among a group of women being tied up with their hands behind their backs. They were seen pleading for help while being taunted by their captors.

The women were part of a unit which surveilled the Israel-Gaza border.

Three weeks ago Hamas released a video of Albag, 19, calling for the Israeli government to reach a deal.

The ceasefire was concluded after months of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, led by the US, Qatar and Egypt.

It will be implemented in three stages, with the second stage due to begin six weeks into the truce. About 1,900 Palestinian prisoners will be released during the first stage in exchange for 33 hostages. Israeli forces will also begin withdrawing from positions in Gaza and hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians will be able to return to areas they had fled or been forced from.

The ceasefire is meant to lead to a permanent end to the war in Gaza.

Ninety-one hostages taken on 7 October 2023 are still held in Gaza. Fifty-seven of them are assumed by Israel to still be alive. Three others – two of whom are alive – have been held for a decade or more.

Australian police are investigating after a statue of Captain James Cook was covered in red paint and disfigured, ahead of the Australia Day weekend.

It is the second time in 12 months that the statue in Sydney has been vandalised.

Australia Day is a national holiday that is held each year on 26 January – the anniversary of Britain’s First Fleet landing at Sydney Cove in 1788. Many Indigenous Australians say the date causes them pain.

The local council in Randwick – the suburb where the statue is located – described the vandalism as “a disservice to the community and a disservice to reconciliation”.

Councillor Carolyn Martin told Sydney radio station 2GB that the vandals had knocked off one hand and parts of the face and nose.

The statue – which was first unveiled in 1874 – was previously targeted in February last year, when it was covered with red paint and had parts of its sandstone damaged. Works to repair and restore it were completed a month later.

There are several Captain Cook statues across Australia, and others have also been vandalised on or around 26 January.

In 2024, one in Melbourne was cut down on the eve of the holiday, while its plinth was spray-painted with the words “the colony will fall”. Two years earlier the same statue had been splashed with red paint, while in 2018 it was graffitied with the words “no pride” and had an Aboriginal flag placed next to it.

Cook charted Australia’s east coast in 1770, laying the groundwork for the later decision to send the First Fleet, which was led by Captain Arthur Phillip.

Australia Day is a contentious holiday for some, particularly among those in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities who view it as a reminder of the dispossession and displacement of their people.

To many Australians though, it is celebrated as a day of nation-building and achievement. Polling suggests a majority of people are supportive of keeping the holiday, despite suggestions it should be changed to a different date.

“It’s like the United States doesn’t actually understand what I did for this country, it’s a betrayal,” Abdullah tells the BBC.

He fled Afghanistan with his parents amid the US withdrawal in August 2021 and is now a paratrooper for the US military. He worries he can’t help his sister and her husband escape too, because of President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending a resettlement programme.

The order cancels all flights and suspends applications for Afghan refugees, without any exemption for families of active servicemembers.

Trump argues the decision addresses “record levels of migration” that threaten “the availability of resources for Americans”.

But Abdullah and several other Afghan refugees have told the BBC they feel the US has “turned its back” on them, despite years of working alongside American officials, troops and non-profit organisations in Afghanistan. We are not using their real names, as they worry doing so could jeopardise their cases or put their families at risk.

As soon as Abdullah heard about the order, he called his sister in Afghanistan. “She was crying, she’s lost all hope,” he said. He believes his work has made her a target of the Taliban government which took power in 2021.

“The anxiety, it’s just unimaginable. She thinks we’ll never be able to see each other again,” he says.

• Trump declares border emergency and seeks to end US birthright citizenship
• 1,500 active-duty troops headed to US-Mexico border

During the war, Abdullah says he was an interpreter for US forces. When he left Afghanistan, his sister and her husband couldn’t get passports in time to board the flight.

Suhail Shaheen, a spokesperson for the Taliban government, told the BBC there is an amnesty for anyone who worked with international forces and all Afghans can “live in the country without any fear”. He claims these refugees are “economic migrants”.

But a UN report in 2023 cast doubt on assurances from the Taliban government. It found hundreds of former government officials and armed forces members were allegedly killed despite a general amnesty.

Abdullah’s sister and her husband had completed the medical exams and interviews required for resettlement in the US. The BBC has seen a document from the US Department of Defense endorsing their application.

Now Abdullah says Trump’s insistence that immigration is too high does not justify his separation from his family. He describes sleepless nights, and says the anxiety is affecting his work in his combat unit, serving the United States.

Babak, a former legal adviser to the Afghan Air Force, is still in hiding in Afghanistan.

“They’re not just breaking their promise to us – they’re breaking us,” he says.

The BBC has seen letters from the United Nations confirming his role, as well as a letter endorsing his asylum claim by a Lt Colonel in the US Air Force. The endorsement adds that he provided advice on strikes targeting militants linked to both the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

Babak can’t understand the president’s decision, given that he worked alongside US troops. “We risked our lives because of those missions. Now we’re in grave danger,” he says.

He has been moving his wife and young son from location to location, desperately trying to stay hidden. He claims his brother was tortured for his whereabouts. The BBC cannot verify this part of his story, given the nature of his claims.

Babak is appealing to Trump and his National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to change their minds.

“Mike Waltz, you served in Afghanistan. Please encourage the president,” he tells us.

Before saying goodbye, he adds: “The one ray of light we’ve been holding onto has been extinguished.”

Ahmad managed to fly out to the US amid the chaos of the withdrawal but is now separated from his family. He felt he had no choice but to leave his father, mother and teenage siblings behind.

If he and his father had not worked with the US, he says, his family would not be targets of the Taliban government. “I can’t sleep knowing I’m one of the reasons they’re in this situation,” he adds.

Before the Taliban takeover, Ahmad worked for a non-profit called Open Government Partnership (OGP), co-founded by the US 13 years ago and headquartered in Washington. He says the work he’s proudest of is establishing a special court to address abuses against women.

But he claims his work at OGP and his advocacy for women made him a target and he was shot by Taliban fighters in 2021 before the Taliban took over the country.

The BBC has seen a letter from a hospital in Pennsylvania assessing “evidence of injury from bullet and bullet fragments” which they say is “consistent with his account of what happened to him in Kabul”.

Making matters worse, he says his family is also in danger because his father was a colonel with the Afghan army and assisted the CIA. The BBC has seen a certificate, provided by the Afghan National Security Forces, thanking his father for his service.

Ahmad says the Taliban government has harassed his parents, brothers and sisters, so they fled to Pakistan. The BBC has seen photos showing Ahmad’s father and brother being treated in a hospital for injuries he claims were inflicted by people from the Taliban government.

His family had completed several steps of the resettlement programme. He says he even provided evidence that he has enough funds to support his family once they arrive in the US, without any government help.

Now Ahmad says the situation is critical. His family are in Pakistan on visas that will expire within months. He has contacted the IOM and has been told to “be patient”.

The head of #AfghanEvac, a non-profit group helping eligible Afghan refugees resettle, said he estimated 10,000-15,000 people were in the late stages of their applications.

Mina, who is pregnant, has been waiting for a flight out of Islamabad for six months. She worries her terror will threaten her unborn child. “If I lose the baby, I’ll kill myself,” she told the BBC.

She says she used to protest for women’s rights, even after the Taliban government took control of Afghanistan. She claims she was arrested in 2023 and detained overnight.

“Even then I didn’t want to leave Afghanistan. I went into hiding after my release, but they called me and said next time, they’d kill me,” she says.

Mina worries the Pakistani government will send her back to Afghanistan. That’s partly because Pakistan will not grant Afghan refugees asylum indefinitely.

The country has taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees from its neighbour, over decades of instability in the region. According to the UN refugee agency, the country hosts three million Afghan nationals, about 1.4 million of whom are documented.

As cross-border tensions with the Taliban government have flared, there has been growing concern over the fate of Afghans in Pakistan, with reports of alleged intimidation and detentions. The UN special rapporteur has said he’s concerned and Afghans in the region deserve better treatment.

Pakistan’s government says it is expelling foreign nationals who are in the country illegally back to Afghanistan and confirmed search raids were conducted in January.

According to the IOM, more than 795,000 Afghans have been expelled from Pakistan since September 2023.

The Afghan refugees we’ve spoken to feel caught between a homeland where their lives are in danger, and a host country whose patience is running out.

They had been pinning their hopes on the US – but what seemed a safe harbour has been abruptly blocked off by the new president until further notice.

A Chinese man has been sentenced to death for fatally stabbing a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy, in a case that sparked concern among Japanese expats living in China.

The sentence for the knife attack in the southern city of Shenzhen in September was handed down on Friday, according to Japanese media reports.

It comes a day after another court handed a death sentence to a Chinese man who attacked a Japanese mother and child and killed a Chinese woman who tried to protect them in Suzhou province in June.

The courts’ decisions come as Chinese authorities carried out several high-profile executions in recent days.

The stabbings in Shenzhen and Suzhou were among three attacks on foreigners in China last year. Just days before the Suzhou incident, four US college instructors were hurt in a knife attack at a public park in Jilin in the country’s north.

After the attack in Shenzhen, Japanese companies, including Toshiba and Toyota, told their staff to take precautions against any possible violence, while Panasonic offered its employees free flights home.

In the Suzhou case, a Chinese court said that Zhou Jiasheng, 52, had carried out the attack outside a Japanese school after he lost the will to live, following the loss of his job and subsequent debts.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters at a press conference that the court ruled that the attack was an “intentional murder” and the penalty was given due to the “significant social impact” the crime had caused.

However, the court made no mention of Japan during the ruling, according to Hayashi, who added that officials from the Japanese consulate in Shanghai had attended the sentencing.

Hayashi added that the crime, which killed and injured “innocent people”, including a child, was “absolutely unforgivable”.

He also paid tribute to Hu Youping, the Chinese bus attendant who was killed by Zhou while trying to protect a Japanese mother and her child.

Earlier on Thursday, Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, briefly commented in a daily press conference that the case was “in judicial process”, adding that China would “as always, act to protect the safety of foreign nationals in China.”

China has been grappling with an uptick in public violence, with many attackers believed to have been spurred by a desire to “take revenge on society” – where perpetrators act on personal grievances by attacking strangers.

There were 19 attacks on pedestrians or strangers last year, a sharp increase from single digits in previous years.

On Monday, a man who killed at least 35 people in a car attack that is thought the be the country’s deadliest attack in a decade was executed.

Last month, a man who killed eight people in a stabbing spree at his university was sentenced to death.

Additionally, in December, a man who injured 30 people by driving into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school was handed a suspended death sentence.

Japan’s central bank has increased the cost of borrowing to its highest level in 17 years after consumer price rises accelerated in December.

The move by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) to raise its short-term policy rate to “around 0.5 per cent” comes just hours after the latest economic data showed prices rose last month at the fastest pace in 16 months.

The BOJ’s last interest rate hike in July, along with a weak jobs report from the US, caught investors around the world by surprise, which triggered a stock market selloff.

The bank’s governor, Kazuo Ueda, signalled this latest rate hike in advance in a bid to avoid another market shock.

According to official figures released on Friday, core consumer prices in Japan increased by 3% in December from a year earlier.

The decision marks the BOJ’s first rate hike since July and came just days after Donald Trump returned to the White House.

During the election campaign Trump threatened to impose tariffs on all imports into the US, which could have an impact on exporting countries like Japan.

By raising rates now the bank will have more scope to cut rates in the future if it needs to boost the economy.

The move highlights the central bank’s plans to steadily increase rates to around 1% – a level seen as neither boosting or slowing the economy.

The BOJ signalled that interest rates will continue to rise from ultra-low levels.

Neil Newman, the head of strategy at Astris Advisory Japan said: “rates will continue to rise as wages increase, inflation remains above 2% and there is some growth in the economy.”

“We look for another 25-basis point hike in six months,” said Stefan Angrick, a Japan economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Last year, the BOJ raised the cost of borrowing for the first time since 2007 after rates had been kept down for years as the country struggled with stagnant price growth.

That hike meant that there were no longer any countries left with negative interest rates.

When negative rates are in force people have to pay to deposit money in a bank. They have been used by several countries as a way of encouraging people to spend their money rather than putting it in a bank.

Ukraine reportedly hit a Russian oil refinery and targeted Moscow during an attack involving a wave of at least 121 drones, one of the largest single operations of its kind during the war.

Video footage verified by the BBC shows a fireball rising over the refinery and pumping station in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow, which Ukrainian officials said was a target.

Russia said it had shot down 121 drones that had targeted 13 regions, including Ryazan and Moscow, but reported no damage.

Elsewhere, Ukrainian authorities said three people were killed and one was injured when a Russian drone hit a residential building in the Kyiv region.

Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s centre for countering disinformation, said on Telegram that an oil refinery in Ryazan had been hit, as well as the Kremniy factory in Bryansk that Kyiv says produces missile components and other weapons.

Bloggers on Telegram posted images and videos of fires raging at the Ryazan facility, which covers around 6sq km (2.3sq miles). Verified footage shows people fleeing from the site in cars and on foot as a fireball rises into the sky.

BBC Verify used video footage to establish the location of two fires at the refinery. One video shows a fire near the northern entrance, whose location was matched by the road layout, signs and fences.

Two other videos show a larger fire on the eastern side of the refinery, around 3km (1.6m) away from the first. The location was identified by matching trees, pylons, road and path layouts.

Russian state-owned news agency RIA cited a statement from the Kremniy factory in Bryansk, which said work had been suspended after an attack by six drones. Pavel Malkov, the regional governor, said emergency services were responding.

The Kremlin acknowledged the attacks but made no mention of damage or casualties.

It claimed to have destroyed 121 Ukrainian drones, including six over the Moscow region, 20 in the Ryazan region, and a number over the border region of Bryansk.

Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, said the city’s air defences had intercepted attacks by Ukrainian drones at four locations.

He said air defences southeast of the capital in Kolomna and Ramenskoye had also repelled drones, without specifying how many. He said there was no damage.

Russian news agencies quoted Rosaviatsiya, the federal aviation agency, as saying two Moscow airports, Vnukovo and Domodedovo, had resumed flights after suspending operations for a time. Six flights were redirected to other airports.

In the city of Kursk, Mayor Igor Kutsak said overnight attacks had damaged power lines and cut off electricity to one district.

In Ukraine, officials said that its air defences had destroyed 25 of 58 drones launched overnight by Russia.

The interior ministry said debris from one of the drones had killed two men and a woman in Hlevakha, Kyiv region, and that another person had been injured.

A judge has rejected a US mother’s challenge to extradition over accusations she murdered two of her children in Colorado and “fled” to London.

Kimberlee Singler’s nine-year-old daughter Elianna and seven-year-old son Aden were found dead on 19 December, 2023 in Colorado Springs.

Prosecutors acting on behalf of US officials said Ms Singler, 36, “fled” the US and was arrested in west London 11 days later.

District Judge John Zani told Westminster Magistrates’ Court he rejected Ms Singler’s challenge against extradition and said the case now passed to the home secretary to decide whether the 36-year-old should be sent back to the US.

In his ruling Judge Zani said he was not convinced that the defendant’s rights, particularly her concerns about prison conditions and a possible life sentence without parole, would be infringed on by extradition.

“I am of the firm opinion that the defendant’s extradition to the United States of America to face criminal prosecution complies with all of her Convention Rights within the meaning of the Human Rights Act 1998,” Judge Zani said.

Ms Singler’s legal team has said she intends to appeal against the judge’s decision.

Previously, the court heard in September that Ms Singler’s alleged crimes were “committed against the backdrop of acrimonious court proceedings” relating to the custody of her children with her ex-husband Kevin Wentz.

Prosecutor Joel Smith said on 19 December 2023 the Colorado Springs Police Department responded to a 911 call reporting a burglary at a Colorado residence at 00:29 local time (06:29 GMT).

When officers arrived at the defendant’s address, they found two dead children and a “blood-stained handgun” which was discovered on the floor of the bedroom.

Mr Smith said DNA tests were carried out on the gun and a knife which revealed the presence of mixed profiles matching the children and Ms Singler.

A third child, who has not been named, was found with a serious injury to her neck. She was taken to hospital and survived.

Mr Smith said Ms Singler blamed her husband for the attack, but it was found he had been driving a “GPS-tracked truck” in Denver, giving what the prosecutor described as a “complete and verifiable alibi”.

In the days that followed, the third child was moved into foster care and, on Christmas Day, she told her foster carer that Ms Singler had been responsible for the attack and had asked her to lie to police, Mr Smith said.

The prosecutor said the girl was interviewed by police on 26 December, during which time she recounted how the attack had unfolded after the defendant guided all three children into their bedroom.

The police investigation then led to a warrant being issued by Fourth Judicial District Court in El Paso County, Colorado, for Ms Singler’s arrest.

Mr Smith said Ms Singler was arrested in the Chelsea area of west London on 30 December.

It is not for the court in London to carry out a criminal trial.

However, in his ruling published on Friday Judge Zani said: “I note that the defendant, through counsel, has clearly stated that her defence to the charges is a total denial of liability.”

Google has agreed to make “significant changes to its processes” to help tackle fake reviews of UK businesses, the regulator has announced.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) says the firm – which accounts for 90% of search in the UK – will attach warnings to companies found to have artificially boosted their star rating.

The worst offenders will have their review function deactivated, meaning they cannot receive any new reviews.

Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews will be banned from posting – regardless of where they are in the world.

Consumer group Which? called the changes “a step in the right direction” but said they would need to be backed up with strong enforcement action, potentially including “heavy fines” if Google failed to stick to them.

Sarah Cardell, the Chief Executive of the CMA, said: “The changes we’ve secured from Google ensure robust processes are in place, so people can have confidence in reviews and make the best possible choices.”

The measures only relate to reviews for businesses when searching on Google or on Google maps.

They will not apply to reviews of products.

A spokesperson from Google told the BBC: “Our longstanding investments to combat fraudulent content help us block millions of fake reviews yearly – often before they ever get published.

“Our work with regulators around the world, including the CMA, is part of our ongoing efforts to fight fake content and bad actors.”

It is not the first pledge to tackle fake reviews, a problem which artificial intelligence (AI) is exacerbating.

Amazon and Google have been under investigation by the CMA over fake reviews since June, 2021 – months after the consumer group Which? concluded Google was failing to do enough to combat fake reviews within its business listings.

The CMA has said its investigation into Amazon is ongoing.

Rocio Concha, the director of policy and advocacy at Which?, said: “Which? has repeatedly exposed fake reviews on Google, so the CMA securing these commitments from the tech giant is a step in the right direction.

“The changes should help prevent consumers from being misled by unscrupulous businesses and fake review brokers.

“However, the regulator must monitor the situation closely and be prepared to use new enforcement powers secured through the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act to take strong action, including issuing heavy fines, if Google fails to make improvements.”

The influence of reviews real and fake is enormous – the CMA estimates £23bn of UK consumer spending every year is “potentially influenced” by online reviews.

Google told the BBC it has already started with its restrictions on businesses and reviews, and the CMA says Google will report to it over the next three years to ensure action is being taken.

After this period, Google will be able to change how it deals with fake reviews to reflect any new changes in technology.

Ms Cardell added: “This is a matter of fairness – for both business and consumers – and we encourage the entire sector to take note.”

A man has been jailed for 30 years for attempting to murder two people with a meat cleaver outside the former Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2020.

Zaheer Mahmood, 29, from Pakistan, attacked and badly wounded two employees of the Premieres Lignes news agency, days after Charlie Hebdo had republished cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

He was unaware Charlie Hebdo had moved offices to a secret location after 12 people were killed there in a gun attack claimed by al-Qaeda following the original publication of the cartoons in 2015.

Mahmood was convicted of attempted murder and terrorist conspiracy. He will be banned from France when his sentence is served.

Five other Pakistani men, some of whom were under 18 at the time of their crimes, were jailed for between three and 12 years on terrorist conspiracy charges for supporting Mahmood.

The trial was held in the juvenile court in Paris due to their ages.

The court heard that Mahmood had planned his attack after Charlie Hebdo republished its cartoons of the Prophet in September 2020 to mark the opening of the trial of some of those responsible for the 2015 massacre.

The court was told that Mahmood was influenced by radical Pakistani preacher Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who had urged him to “avenge the Prophet”.

Armed with a meat cleaver, he arrived at Hebdo’s former offices in the French capital’s 11th district, and attacked and seriously wounded two employees of the Premieres Lignes news agency, which has offices nearby.

Witnesses at the time described how they saw their colleagues “bloodied, being chased by a man with a machete”.

His victims, a woman named “Helene”, 32, and a 37-year-old man, were present at the sentencing but did not comment on its outcome.

Neither has accepted Mahmood’s pleas for forgiveness.

“It broke something within me,” the 37-year-old said, as he told the court of his lengthy rehabilitation process.

Mahmood arrived in France illegally in 2017, although initially claimed to arrive in 2019. He also lied about his age, claiming to be 18.

Mahmood’s defence lawyer, Alberic de Gayardon, said his client lived and worked with Pakistanis and felt disconnected from France.

“He does not speak French, he lives with Pakistanis, he works for Pakistanis,” Mr Gayardon added. “In his head he had never left Pakistan.”

President Donald Trump has said the US does not need Canadian energy, vehicles or lumber as he spoke to global business leaders at the World Economic Forum.

Trump also reiterated his threat to impose tariffs on the country, saying it can be avoided if the neighbouring nation chose to “become a state” of the US.

“You can always become a state, and if you’re a state, we won’t have a deficit. We won’t have to tariff you,” he said to gasps in the hall in Davos.

Trump has threatened to impose up to 25% tariffs on Canadian imports, possibly by 1 February.

The renewed threat of tariffs has been met with deep unease by the trade-dependent Canada.

But it has also said it will consider significant countermeasures, including a “dollar-for-dollar” response if the Trump administration follows through.

Roughly 75% of Canada’s exports head south. In contrast, Canada accounts for a much smaller 17% of US exports, though it is the second largest US trading partner, behind Mexico.

Trump in his remarks on Thursday said Canada had been “very tough to deal with over the years”.

“We don’t need them to make our cars, we make a lot of them, we don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests… we don’t need their oil and gas, we have more than anybody,” he told forum attendees via video link from Washington DC.

Trump reiterated the assertion that the US has a trade deficit with Canada of between $200bn and $250bn. It’s not clear where he got that figure.

The trade deficit with Canada – expected to be $45bn in 2024 – is mostly driven by US energy demands.

The North American auto industry also has highly integrated supply chains.

Auto parts can cross the borders between the US and Mexico and Canada multiple time before a vehicle is finally assembled.

Trump has also tied the tariffs to border security, saying it will be imposed unless Canada increases security at the shared border.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly said that everything is on the table in response if the tariffs are imposed.

That includes a tax or embargo on energy exports to the US, though some of Canada’s provincial leaders disagree with that response.

On Thursday, Trudeau told reporters that Canada’s goal is to avoid US tariffs altogether but it will step up its response “gradually” to seek the quick removal of levies if they are imposed.

Canada is also pitching itself as a reliable trading partner and a secure source to the US for energy and critical minerals as it lobbies American lawmakers in a bid to avoid the tariffs.

• Canada offers to help Trump as it scrambles to avert tariff war

• Trudeau says ‘not a snowball’s chance in hell’ Canada will join US

Economists suggest the US depends on Canadian products for energy security.

In 2024, Canadian energy exports came to almost $170bn (C$244bn), according to a recent analysis by TD Bank economists.

Trump also said on Thursday that businesses should make their products in the US if they want to avoid tariffs.

Tariffs are a central part of Trump’s economic vision – he sees them as a way of growing the US economy, protecting jobs and raising tax revenue.

The new president has ordered federal officials to review US trade relationships for any unfair practices by 1 April.

US President Donald Trump has been criticised for launching a meme-coin while saying he “doesn’t know much” about the cryptocurrency.

The digital coin called TRUMP appeared on his social media accounts ahead of his inauguration on Monday and quickly became one of the most valuable crypto coins. The value of a single coin shot up to $75 within a day, but since has fallen to $39.

But the launch of the so-called meme-coin – a cryptocurrency with no utility other than for fun or speculation – has been widely criticised by industry insiders.

“Trump’s comments about not knowing much about the coin back up my opinion that he is making a mockery of the industry. It’s a stunt,” says Danny Scott, CEO of CoinCorner.

The latest dip in value came after Trump told reporters: “I don’t know much about it other than I launched it, other than it was very successful.”

When he was told his coin raised several billion dollars for him, he played it down saying “several billion – that’s peanuts for these guys” pointing to tech billionaires assembled for a press conference about AI.

• Live updates on Trump’s return to power
• Trump tells Putin to end ‘ridiculous war’

Meme-coins are often used by speculators to make money or to allow fans to show support to a celebrity or moment in internet culture.

It’s not the first time Trump has sold crypto products. He made millions from launching a series of NFTs of him in various superhero poses in 2022.

Some industry analysts say the president having his own meme coin is a sign that others should follow.

“TRUMP token just signaled to every company, municipality, university & individual brand that crypto can now be used as a capital formation and customer bootstrapping mechanism,” Jeff Dorman from investing firm Arca posted online.

However, the overall sentiment seems to be negative towards the president’s meme coin.

Many in the crypto world are waiting for Trump to back up campaign promises to help boost the industry in the US. People like Danny Scott hope to see focused plans, particularly around Bitcoin, from the administration.

On Thursday the president took a first step towards fulfilling those promises by signing an Executive Order to set up a working group to explore changes to crypto regulation and potentially create a national crypto stockpile.

Last year Trump promised Bitcoin fans he would make the US the “crypto capital of the planet”. A few days into his term, the president has not issued executive orders involving cryptocurrency, nor has he mentioned it in his speeches.

TRUMP coin is now the 25th most valuable crypto coin with a value of around $8 billion, according to the website CoinMarketCap.

Trump and the team behind it own 80% of the coins so, in theory, they would make billions of dollars if they sold their shares and the price remained the same.

This set-up has been described by crypto researchers at K33 as outdated for similar tokens.

“There’s no sugar-coating this – these tokenomics are horrendous for a meme-coin,” said David Zimmerman, a K33 analyst.

However, K33 analysts acknowledge that the remaining 80% of coins can’t be dumped on the open market so investors are partially shielded from price shocks.

There are thousands of cryptocurrency coins and anyone can create one.

First Lady Melania Trump launched her own meme-coin on the eve of the inauguration, which now has a value of $700m since slumping from $13 a coin to $2.70.

But many meme-coins have led to big losses for people investing in them.

• YouTube star Logan Paul apologises for CryptoZoo project failure

Dan Hughes, from crypto firm Radix, thinks the president and his wife launching their meme-coins undermines the positives of the industry.

“This pattern of celebrity-driven token launches, particularly from political figures, potentially marks a concerning trend in crypto markets where influence and liquidity manipulation could overshadow fundamental value creation,” he said.

Others in the cryptocurrency world think that launching meme-coins to make money is degrading.

“The introduction of these coins during the presidential inauguration raises concerns about potential conflicts of interest and may undermine the dignity of the president and the first lady,” said Grzegorz Drozdz, market analyst at investment firm Conotoxia.

• ANALYSIS: Six Trump executive orders to watch
• IN DEPTH: Relationship with Europe this time may be very different
• PARDONS: Jan 6 defendants get nearly everything they wanted
• WATCH: Bishop asks Trump to show mercy to LGBT people and migrants

President Donald Trump has said he will ask Saudi Arabia and other Opec nations to “bring down the cost of oil” and doubled-down on his threat to use tariffs.

In a speech to executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, the US president said he was “surprised” that Opec hadn’t brought down the price of oil before the elections.

“Right now the price is high enough that that war will continue,” he said, referring to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and suggesting that the higher crude price was helping to sustain funding for the conflict in Moscow.

“You gotta bring down the oil price,” he said. “That will end that war. You could end that war.”

His remarks follow a conversation he had with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday.

According to Saudi state media, Bin Salman pledged to invest as much as $600bn (£484bn) in the US over the next four years. However, this figure was not mentioned in the White House statement after the call.

Despite the cordial exchange, Trump said he would be asking “the Crown Prince, who’s a fantastic guy, to round it out to around $1 trillion”.

Saudi Arabia is the leading member of Opec, a cartel of 12 oil-producing nations which has a remit to “work together to ensure stable oil prices”.

The price of crude fell by 1% after Trump spoke.

David Oxley, chief climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics, said his comments are in keeping with the president’s desire for lower gasoline prices.

“[It’s] his clear intention to use energy as leverage over Russia to end the war in Ukraine. That said, lower oil prices will certainly not incentivise US oil producers to ‘drill, baby, drill’ – particularly in high-cost Alaska.

“Of course, Saudi Arabia would not be guaranteed to heed a request by President Trump to expand oil production and to bring down global oil prices.”

The US president’s appearance via video link at the World Economic Forum marked his first address to a global audience since his inauguration earlier this week.

He used the platform to insist that companies around the world manufacture their products in the US or face bruising tariffs on imported goods entering the American market.

There were a few stony faces as executives left the hall after the speech, but some were happy.

“A very powerful speech,” said one.

“I liked it, I thought it was really good,” said a delegate from the US. “A lot of it made sense, common sense. He’s just looking for fair trade.”

One Swiss executive though was pretty downbeat. “It’s nothing new but it’s clear what he wants to do,” he said.

“Am I happy? No, I’m not happy. I think it’s bad for the world.”

Trump also said he would demand an immediate drop in interest rates, which he said had led to deeper deficits and resulted in what he described as economic calamity under the tenure of his predecessor, President Joe Biden.

“This begins with confronting the economic chaos caused by the failed policies of the last administration,” he said.

“Over the past four years, our government racked up $8 trillion in wasteful deficit spending and inflicted nation-wrecking energy restrictions, crippling regulations and hidden taxes like never before.”

Interest rates are decided by the US Federal Reserve, the central bank which is independent from the government.

Trump also spoke of “good, clean, coal” to power data centres needed for artificial intelligence (AI).

Earlier this week, he announced that a number of firms, including ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, would invest $500bn to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US.

“We need double the energy we currently have in the US for AI to be as big as we want to have it,” Trump told delegates at Davos, adding that he would use emergency decrees to speed up the construction of new power plants.

“Nothing can destroy coal – not the weather, not a bomb, nothing,” he said.

A federal judge in Seattle has temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship in the US.

US District Court Judge John Coughenour called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional” and issued a restraining order blocking it from going into force after a 25-minute hearing on Thursday.

Under a long-standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, nearly anyone born inside the US is automatically given citizenship.

Trump hopes to end that rule for children born to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily.

Four states – Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon – asked for the order to be paused while the federal court considers the states’ legal challenge.

During arguments, Judge Coughenour asked a lawyer for the Trump administration “where were the lawyers” when the executive order was drafted by Trump’s team, and chastised him for his claim that the order is constitutional.

“It boggles my mind,” the judge said.

The executive order will be put on hold for 14 days pending further legal proceedings.

Trump, who has issued a range of unilateral actions since returning to the US presidency on Monday, has long vowed to make this particular change.

His executive order called on US government departments and agencies to deny the granting of citizenship to the children of migrants who are either in the US illegally or on temporary visas.

It would have applied to children born on 19 February and onwards, according to legal filings in the case by the Department of Justice (DoJ).

There have been reports that the administration was planning to enforce the order by withholding documents, such as passports, from people it deems ineligible for citizenship.

The judge’s order also put a temporary stop to any enforcement of the order by federal agencies.

In their lawsuit, the four states challenging the order argue that the 14th Amendment and US law “automatically confer citizenship upon individuals born in the United States” and that the president does not have the power to amend the Constitution.

They add that if the order is implemented, residents of those states will “suffer immediate and irreparable harm”.

“The individuals who are stripped of their United States citizenship will be rendered undocumented, subject to removal or detention, and many will be stateless,” the lawsuit states.

Trump’s Department of Justice argued that the case brought by the states does not warrant the “extraordinary measure” of a temporary restraining order, but the judge disagreed.

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, states in part: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States”.

The DoJ argued that the clause “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, excludes children of non-citizens who are in the US unlawfully, and added that the order is “an integral part” of Trump’s goal to address the country’s “broken immigration system and the ongoing crisis at the southern border”.

There were 255,000 children born to undocumented mothers in the US in 2022, according to the states’ legal challenge.

The amendment has been interpreted by courts as granting citizenship to anyone born on US territory, with very limited exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats.

Without a direct amendment to the US Constitution – which requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress, plus the approval by America’s states – experts say the issue is likely to be ultimately decided by the courts.

Lawyers for the federal government said they planned to appeal the ruling, and that they expected the case to end up in front of the US Supreme Court.

The birthright citizenship amendment dates back to the days after the US Civil War, and settled the question of the citizenship of freed, American-born former slaves.

Lane Polozola, a lawyer for Washington state, argued in court that Trump’s order would bring the nation back “to one of our… darkest chapters”.

Judge Coughenour, who paused the executive order, has served in the Western District of Washington court since 1981 after he was appointed by then-president Ronald Reagan, a Republican.

A group of 18 other Democratic-led states, along with the District of Columbia and the city of San Francisco, have filed a separate challenge to the executive order.

Trump’s order is also facing a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

More than 100 Reddit communities have banned users from posting links to X in protest at owner Elon Musk’s controversial arm gesture at a rally celebrating Donald Trump’s return to office.

The billionaire twice extended his arm out straight as he thanked the crowd for “making it happen.”

Critics, including some historians, said it was a Nazi salute – Mr Musk has dismissed that, saying comparisons with Hitler were “tired” and “dirty tricks.”

However many Reddit users have been unpersuaded by his response describing his actions as “hateful”, leading the moderators of scores of communities – or subreddits – to stop content being shared on X.

X has not commented but Reddit has stressed there is no sitewide ban on X links, telling the BBC in a statement it “has a longstanding commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of association”.

However the platform relies heavily on community moderation, where unpaid individuals known as Redditors decide what is – and isn’t – allowed to be published on their own corner of the website.

In many instances, those Redditors have reached a different conclusion, deciding Mr Musk’s actions were so offensive that they won’t link to content from their subreddits on X, potentially reducing traffic, engagement and – ultimately – revenue.

The biggest subreddits to have enforced the ban include basketball community r/NBA, which has 15 million members, female-focused community r/TwoXChromosomes, which has 14 million members, and American football community r/NFL, which has 12 million members.

It is worth remembering that subreddits are almost always run by fans – it does not mean that the NFL or NBA organisations are taking a stance against Musk.

The BBC has independently verified that at least 100 subreddits have banned X posts.

Of this number, more than 60 have at least 100,000 members.

But the actual number that have instituted the ban will likely be significantly higher by taking into account smaller subreddits with only a few thousand members.

And there are many more communities discussing a potential blacklisting.

The subreddits run by fans of football clubs Liverpool, Celtic and Tottenham Hotspur have all instituted the bans, as have communities for many US sports sides as well as Formula 1.

The subreddits where residents of many cities and countries gather around the world – ranging from New Jersey to South Korea – have also blocked posts to X.

And gamers are also amongst those to bring in the ban for video games including Baldur’s Gate 3 and World of Warcraft.

But while the blacklisting may have first started in some of these communities, it is popping up in a variety of places now where people gather to discuss all sorts of topics, ranging from RuPaul’s Drag Race to Disneyland and even the military.

While the vast majority of subreddits discussing a ban are in favour of it, there are some that have refused.

The moderators of the Maine community for example say they won’t institute a ban so long as “the state maintain official accounts there”.

And those running a group for people in British Columbia said they simply aren’t “doing censorship here”.

Though there are many subreddits which already disallow posts from social media, those built around professional sports in particular may have a big impact on referrals to X.

That’s because sports subreddits generally get a lot of content from links to athletes, analysts and journalists who spend a lot of time posting online.

For example, the top two most popular posts of all time on the NBA subreddits are screenshots taken from X, while three of the top ten most popular posts of all time on the AEW wrestling subreddit are screenshots from the platform.

And gaming subreddits have a similar story, with the top posts on the Animal Crossing and Kingdom Hearts communities both screenshots from X.

But that is not to say the bans will necessarily be permanent – Reddit is known for this sort of community movement to protest against wider issues, which doesn’t always work out.

In 2023, thousands of communities “went dark” to contest changes to how the platform was being run.

Some of the biggest Reddit communities then began only allowing photos and videos of comedian John Oliver, following comments from disgruntled users.

But this proved to be short-lived.

Eventually the communities mostly became publicly available again, and Reddit’s plan ultimately proved financially beneficial – the platform subsequently successfully listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Julia Ramadan was terrified – the war between Israel and Hezbollah was escalating and she’d had a nightmare that her family home was being bombed. When she sent her brother a panicked voice note from her apartment in Beirut, he encouraged her to join him in Ain El Delb, a sleepy village in southern Lebanon.

“It’s safe here,” he reassured her. “Come stay with us until things calm down.”

Earlier that month, Israel intensified air campaigns against Hezbollah in Lebanon, in response to escalating rocket attacks by the Iran-backed armed group which had killed civilians, and displaced tens of thousands more from homes in northern Israel.

Ashraf was confident their family’s apartment block would be a haven, so Julia joined him. But the next day, on 29 September, it was subject to this conflict’s deadliest single Israeli attack. Struck by Israeli missiles, the entire six-storey building collapsed, killing 73 people.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says the building was targeted because it was a Hezbollah “terrorist command centre” and it “eliminated” a Hezbollah commander. It added that “the overwhelming majority” of those killed in the strike were “confirmed to be terror operatives”.

But a BBC Eye investigation verified the identity of 68 of the 73 people killed in the attack and uncovered evidence suggesting just six were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing. None of those we identified appeared to hold a senior rank. The BBC’s World Service also found that the other 62 were civilians – 23 of them children.

Among the dead were babies only a few months old, like Nouh Kobeissi in apartment -2B. In apartment -1C, school teacher Abeer Hallak was killed alongside her husband and three sons. Three floors above, Amal Hakawati died along with three generations of her family – her husband, children and two granddaughters.

Ashraf and Julia had always been close, sharing everything with each other. “She was like a black box, holding all my secrets,” he says.

On the afternoon of 29 September, the siblings had just returned home from handing out food to families who had fled the fighting. Hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon had been displaced by the war.

Ashraf was in the shower, and Julia was sitting in the living room with their father, helping him upload a video to social media. Their mother, Janan, was in the kitchen, clearing up.

Then, without warning, they heard a deafening bang. The entire building shook, and a massive cloud of dust and smoke poured into their apartment.

“I shouted, ‘Julia! Julia!,'” says Ashraf.

“She replied, ‘I’m here.’

“I looked at my dad, who was struggling to get up from the sofa because of an existing injury to his leg, and saw my mother running toward the front door.”

Julia’s nightmare was playing out in real life.

“Julia was hyperventilating, crying so hard on the sofa. I was trying to calm her down and told her we needed to get out. Then, there was another attack.”

Video footage of the strike, shared online and verified by the BBC, reveals four Israeli missiles flying through the air towards the building. Seconds later, the block collapses.

Ashraf, along with many others, was trapped under the rubble. He began calling out, but the only voice he could hear was that of his father, who told him he could still hear Julia and that she was alive. Neither of them could hear Ashraf’s mother.

Ashraf sent a voice note to friends in the neighbourhood to alert them. The next few hours were agonising. He could hear rescuers sifting through the debris – and residents wailing as they discovered loved ones dead. “I just kept thinking, please, God, not Julia. I can’t live this life without Julia.”

Ashraf was finally pulled from the rubble hours later, with only minor injuries.

He discovered his mother had been rescued but died in hospital. Julia had suffocated under the rubble. His father later told him Julia’s last words were calls for her brother.

In November, a ceasefire deal was agreed between Israel and Hezbollah with the aim of ending the conflict. The deal gives a 60-day deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw from southern Lebanon and for Hezbollah to withdraw its forces and weapons north of the Litani River. As this 26 January deadline approaches, we sought to find out more about the deadliest single Israeli attack on Lebanon in years.

In the apartment below Julia and Ashraf’s, Hawraa and Ali Fares had been hosting family members displaced by the war. Among them was Hawraa’s sister Batoul, who, like Julia, had arrived the previous day – with her husband and two young children. They had fled intense bombardment near the Lebanon-Israel border, in areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

“We hesitated about where to go,” says Batoul. “And then I told my husband, ‘Let’s go to Ain El Delb. My sister said their building was safe and that they couldn’t hear any bombing nearby.'”

Batoul’s husband Mohammed Fares was killed in the Ain El Delb attack. A pillar fell on Batoul and her children. She says no-one responded to her calls for help. She finally managed to lift it alone, but her four-year-old daughter Hawraa had been fatally crushed. Miraculously, her baby Malak survived.

Three floors below Batoul lived Denise and Moheyaldeen Al-Baba. That Sunday, Denise had invited her brother Hisham over for lunch.

The impact of the strike was brutal, says Hisham.

“The second missile slammed me to the floor… the entire wall fell on top of me.”

He spent seven hours under the rubble.

“I heard a voice far away. People talking. Screams and… ‘Cover her. Remove her. Lift the stone. He’s still alive. It’s a child. Lift this child.’ I mean… Oh my God. I thought to myself, I’m the last one deep underground. No-one will know about me. I will die here.”

When Hisham was finally rescued, he found his niece’s fiance waiting to hear if she was alive. He lied to him and told him she was fine. They found her body three days later.

Hisham lost four members of his family – his sister, brother-in-law and their two children. He told us he had lost his faith and no longer believes in God.

To find out more about who died, we have analysed Lebanese Health Ministry data, videos, social media posts, as well as speaking to survivors of the attack.

We particularly wanted to interrogate the IDF’s response to media – immediately following the attack – that the apartment block had been a Hezbollah command centre. We asked the IDF multiple times what constituted a command centre, but it did not give clarification.

So we began sifting through social media tributes, gravesites, public health records and videos of funerals to determine whether those killed in the attack had any military affiliation with Hezbollah.

We could only find evidence that six of the 68 dead we identified were connected to Hezbollah’s military wing.

Hezbollah memorial photos for the six men use the label “Mujahid”, meaning “fighter”. Senior figures, by contrast, are referred to as “Qaid”, meaning “commander” – and we found no such labels used by the group to describe those killed.

We asked the IDF whether the six Hezbollah fighters we identified were the intended targets of the strike. It did not respond to this question.

One of the Hezbollah fighters we identified was Batoul’s husband, Mohammed Fares. Batoul told us that her husband, like many other men in southern Lebanon, was a reservist for the group, though she added that he had never been paid by Hezbollah, held a formal rank, or participated in combat.

Israel sees Hezbollah as one of its main threats and the group is designated a terrorist organisation by Israel, many Western governments and Gulf Arab states.

But alongside its large, well-armed military wing, Hezbollah is also an influential political party, holding seats in Lebanese parliament. In many parts of the country it is woven into the social fabric, providing a network of social services.

In response to our investigation, the IDF stated: “The IDF’s strikes on military targets are subject to relevant provisions of international law, including taking feasible precautions, and are carried out after an assessment that the expected collateral damage and civilian casualties are not excessive in relation to the military advantage expected from the strike.”

It had earlier also told the BBC it had executed “evacuation procedures” for the strike on Ain El Delb, but everyone we spoke to said they had received no warning.

Watch on YouTube if outside the UK

UN experts have raised concerns about the proportionality and necessity of Israeli air strikes on residential buildings in densely populated areas in Lebanon.

This pattern of targeting entire buildings – resulting in significant civilian casualties – has been a recurring feature of Israel’s latest conflict with Hezbollah, which began when the group escalated rocket attacks in response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Between October 2023 and November 2024, Lebanese authorities say more than 3,960 people were killed in Lebanon by Israeli forces, many of them civilians. Over the same time period, Israeli authorities say at least 47 civilians were killed by Hezbollah rockets fired from southern Lebanon. At least 80 Israeli soldiers were also killed fighting in southern Lebanon or as a result of rocket attacks on northern Israel.

The missile strike in Ain El Delb is the deadliest Israeli attack on a building in Lebanon for at least 18 years.

The village remains haunted by its impact. When we visited, more than a month after the strike, a father continued to visit the site every day, hoping for news of his 11-year-old son, whose body had yet to be found.

Ashraf Ramadan, too, returns to sift through the rubble, searching for what remains of the memories his family built over the two decades they lived there.

He shows me the door of his wardrobe, still adorned with pictures of footballers and pop stars he once admired. Then, he pulls a teddy bear from the debris and tells me it was always on his bed.

“Nothing I find here will make up for the people we lost,” he says.

After being delayed twice because of the recent devastating wildfires around Los Angeles, this week saw the nominations announced for the film industry’s biggest awards, and Donald Trump move into the White House for a second time.

But how much attention did you pay to what else had been going on in the world over the past seven days?

Quiz compiled by Ben Fell.

Fancy some more? Try last week’s quiz or have a go at something from the archives.

The reported disappearance of more than 80 government critics over the last six months has caused a huge public backlash in Kenya.

A judge has warned he will imprison top security officials for contempt of court on Monday if they fail to appear for a third time to account for a recent string of alleged abductions.

The case is linked to the disappearances documented by Kenya’s National Commission on Human Rights since nationwide protests against proposed tax hikes began last June.

At least 24 are said to still be missing.

The police and government deny kidnapping and illegally detaining protesters, but the country has a history of state-sponsored abductions, and some Kenyans fear they are returning to that dark past.

The Inspector General of Police Douglas Kanja and Directorate of Criminal Investigations Director Mohamed Amin were ordered to produce in court seven social media influencers who disappeared in December.

Five suddenly reappeared in early January at various locations across the country.

Mr Kanja’s lawyers asked the court for more time to record statements from them and file a report.

Billy Mwangi is one of the five. The 24-year-old was dropped off by his alleged abductors 75km (46 miles) from his hometown in Embu, in central Kenya, in an apparent act of intimidation.

Billy’s father, Gerald Mwangi Karicha, told the BBC his son was traumatised.

“The boy has not shared a lot,” he said. “All I can say is that when he came, he was not his usual self. He looked to be in shock.”

Billy, a college student who had been a vocal critic of the government on social media, disappeared on 21 December 2024 while at a barbers’ shop in Embu.

According to witnesses, hooded men arrived in a Toyota Fielder and a double-cabin pick-up, bundled him into one of the vehicles and sped off.

Within hours, his family’s worst fears began to unfold.

“Most weekends, we are together watching football. His club is Chelsea; mine is Arsenal,” Gerald said.

He called Billy to discuss a football match on the evening of his disappearance, only to find his son’s phone switched off.

The barbers’ shop owner later informed him of the abduction, triggering a frantic search.

Billy’s mother collapsed when she heard the news and the weeks that followed were agonising for the family.

As soon as he was found, Billy was taken to hospital for a routine check-up. His family says he is still recovering from the trauma, but his release has brought them some measure of relief.

Like many who have reappeared after alleged abductions, Billy has said little about his ordeal, perhaps out of fear.

Jamil and Aslam Longton also kept quiet after they were released in September from 32 days in captivity.

The brothers were warned, says Jamil, that they would be killed if they went to the media.

Three months later, a government official publicly referred to their case as a lawful arrest.

The siblings took this as confirmation that a government agency was responsible for what they had been through and found the courage to speak out.

“The constitution of Kenya is very clear,” says Jamil. “You should be arrested and taken to court within 24 hours. Ours was 32 days. We were never given a lawyer to represent us anywhere.

“We were not allowed to see our family or communicate to our family. So this is not an arrest, this is an abduction.”

The brothers told the BBC that Aslam had helped organise protests against tax rises in the town of Kitengela near the capital, Nairobi, and had been warned by security agents to stop his activism.

One day in August the two were pulled into a car by their home, hooded and handcuffed, and taken to an unknown location where they were held in small dark cells.

Aslam says he was regularly beaten, his tormenter demanding to know who was funding the protests.

“I was very scared,” he says. “When the door was opened that man would come with a fibre cable and a metal rod.

“I was scared he had come to beat me or finish me off – there were only two options to beat me or to kill me.”

Jamil describes their abductors as heavily armed, able to track their mobiles phones and confident enough to pick them up in broad daylight, operating with a level of resources and degree of flexibility that human rights groups have reported in many cases.

But this does not mean they are official security operatives, says government spokesman Isaac Mwaura, denying that the state is behind abductions.

“Organised security may also be part of organised crime,” he told the BBC.

“It could also be for political reasons… Our political detractors have really railed on this issue. They actually run with it just to settle up political scores.”

Mr Mwaura declined to comment on the case of government minister Justin Muturi, one of the most damning indictments of Kenya’s security agencies.

Muturi says his son was picked up by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) and only released after he made a direct appeal to President William Ruto.

“That is a matter of investigation, because that is his side of the story,” said Mr Mwaura. “But what is a counter-story of the National Intelligence Service?

“I would want to say categorically that the president of the republic of Kenya, who is the head of government, has not sanctioned any forms of abduction whatsoever, because he is a man who believes in the rule of law.”

In fact, Ruto has publicly promised to stop the abductions, forced to respond to public outrage, and to concern from Western allies.

Many are distressed that the apparently systematic disappearance of anti-government activists has resurfaced in this way, recalling similar methods under the authoritarian leadership of Daniel arap Moi in the 1980s and 1990s.

Gitobu Imanyara, a journalist and activist who campaigned for multi-party politics in the early 1990s, was arrested and beaten by Moi’s regime. He has no doubt he is seeing the “Moi playbook” in action now.

But, he says, times have changed. Constitutional amendments have established more mechanisms of accountability and “there is a greater segment of Kenyan society that will not be intimidated”.

“The democratic space has expanded so much the government cannot wish away democratic voices of dissent,” he told the BBC.

Plus with social media, “the word spreads out almost instantaneously”, he said.

“We cannot be censored the way we used to be censored in those days when we could only use landlines.”

Reports of disappearances have tapered off in recent weeks.

But despite the announcement of police investigations, no-one has been charged, let alone convicted, for carrying them out.

Several advocacy groups have petitioned the attorney general asking that abduction cases be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

As for the families of those still missing, the nightmare continues.

“We are so depressed, so devastated,” says Stacey Mutua, the sister of Steve Mbisi, one of the seven who disappeared in December.

“We are hoping they’ll release him. [Most] of the abductees were freed, but he is still missing. We’re praying he’ll be found.”

• Ruto’s humbling shows power of Kenya’s youth
• How a Ugandan politician disappeared in Kenya and ended up in military court
• ‘We live in fear’ – forced expulsions taint Kenya’s safe haven image

Satellite images reviewed by BBC Verify have shown a major oil slick spreading across the Kerch Strait that separates Russia from annexed Crimea, a month after two oil tankers were badly damaged in the Black Sea.

Oil has leaked into the strait from two ships which ran into trouble during bad weather on 15 December. Volgoneft-239 ran aground following the storm, while Volgoneft-212 sank.

​​Up to 5,000 tonnes of oil has now leaked, and media reports and official statements analysed by BBC Verify suggest the spill has spread across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

A senior Russian scientist called the spill the country’s worst “environmental catastrophe” of the 21st Century.

“This is the first time fuel oil has been spilled in such quantities,” Viktor Danilov-Danilyan – the head of science at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) – said in a 17 January interview with a Russian newspaper.

Russian scientists said in December that this spill could be more than twice the size of a similar disaster in the strait in 2007, which saw up to 1,600 tonnes of heavy oil leak into the sea. Ukraine’s ministry of ecology has estimated that the clear up from the latest spill could cost the Russian state up to $14bn (£11.4bn).

Paul Johnston, a scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories, said “there’s always an element of uncertainty around oil spills”, but a lack of timely information has heightened this uncertainty further.

“I’m not entirely optimistic we’ll ever know the full extent of the problem,” he added.

Satellite images reviewed by BBC Verify on 10 January – the most recent available high-resolution photos – showed a massive oil slick running through the strait, measuring at least 25km (15 miles) long. A second, smaller slick measuring around 5.7km (3.5 miles) long is also visible.

Mr Danilov-Danilyan said that oil could “by late January reach Odesa” in southern Ukraine and “one cannot rule out” it travelling as far as the coasts of Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.

In a statement to BBC Verify, a spokesperson for Greenpeace said the group estimated that oil from the spill now covered an area totalling up to 400 sq km.

The spill appears to have moved quickly after the initial incident. On 24 December, satellite images reviewed by BBC Verify showed oil accumulating on a beach in Anapa – some 40 miles from the strait.

BBC Verify has analysed reports in Russian media, statements from officials and Greenpeace releases from this month that talk about oil being found or cleared up on various beaches.

The reports suggest that the oil has now spread as far north as the occupied city of Berdyansk in Ukraine and as far south-west as Lake Donuzlav on the Crimean Peninsula, which Russian illegally annexed in 2014.

The leak involves heavy M100-grade fuel oil that solidifies at a temperature of 25 degrees Celsius.

A Greenpeace spokesperson told the BBC that M100 doesn’t stay on the water’s surface for long. Once underwater, it is “technically impossible to neutralise”, and can take decades to be biodegraded by marine micro-organisms.

Footage recorded by the Russian NGO The Earth Touches Everyone and included below appeared to show large amounts of heavy oil accumulating on the seabed.

Some experts have warned that the leak has heavily impacted marine life in the region. Footage authenticated by BBC Verify has shown birds covered in oil.

It is not known exactly how many animals have been harmed by the spill.

Overall, Russian officials say about 6,000 birds have been delivered to “rehabilitation centres” on the Russian mainland, but it is unclear how many of them will survive. A local bird sanctuary in Stavropol territory said of 1,051 birds affected by the oil spill that have been delivered to them only about 17% have survived.

Greenpeace told BBC Verify that the final number of dead birds could be far higher, citing the 12,000-13,000 killed by the 2007 spill in the strait.

A dolphin rehabilitation centre in Russia’s Krasnodar Territory told Interfax news agency that around 70 dead dolphins have been discovered on the shores following the latest oil spill.

“This is a horrific blow to the ecosystem,” Mr Danilov-Danilyan told Russia media. He predicted the death of “tens of thousands of birds, many dolphins, [and] big losses in the coastal flora and fauna”.

“Practically nothing, other than microorganisms that feed on fuel oil and break it up, can live in that sort of environment, even in salt water. The removal of 200,000–500,000 tonnes, at least, of contaminated soil too will not go without consequences, and will certainly lead to a reshaping of the coast,” he said.

Dmitry Lisitsyn, Executive Fellow at Yale University’s School of the Environment, told BBC Verify that under Russian safety regulations these types of tankers are barred from leaving rivers in winter.

“Those ships are not intended for high waves, they are very long with a shallow draught,” he said.

Questions have also been raised about the seaworthiness of the vessels, which are both over 50 years old, according to Marine Traffic.

Footage released by Russian authorities showed the bow of one tanker completely broken off during the incident, with streaks of oil visible in the water. The captains of both vessels have been arrested and criminal investigations have been opened into the incident.

Ukrainian activists have accused the ships of being part of Russia’s so-called shadow oil fleet. Moscow has been accused of using the so-called ghost fleet of tankers, which are often poorly maintained and lack proper insurance, to move oil and circumvent sanctions, though analysts the BBC has spoken to could not confirm the claims.

Experts say the long-term fallout from the spill may not be limited to just Russia.

“In general, Russia has suffered more than any other country so far from the Kerch Strait accident,” Dmitry Markin of Greenpeace said.

“However, the majority of the leaked fuel oil is still in the sea. Therefore, the long-term consequences for the occupied territories of Ukraine may be no less severe.”

What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya refuses to call what’s happening this weekend in Belarus an election.

“It’s a sham,” the exiled opposition leader says. “This is a military-style operation; a performance staged by the regime to hold on to power.”

For three decades, the country has been led by an increasingly authoritarian Alexander Lukashenko, now firmly backed by Vladimir Putin who makes use of his neighbour in his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

This Sunday, Belarusians will see Lukashenko’s name on the ballot paper once again, with four other names chosen carefully to be no challenge.

No independent observers are allowed.

The tight controls have been put in place because last time Belarusians voted for a president, the country was swept by giant protests.

In 2020, Alexander Lukashenko allowed Svetlana Tikhanovskaya to run against him, thinking that a political novice – and a woman – would make no impact.

It was a massive miscalculation.

Tikhanovskaya, who decided to stand in place of her husband after Lukashenko put him in jail, claimed victory.

When Lukashenko was awarded 80% of the vote, crowds took to the streets in the biggest ever threat to his rule. The protests were ultimately crushed by riot police with mass arrests and brute force.

The European Union then refused to recognise Lukashenko’s legitimacy as president.

Today, all the key opposition figures from that period are in prison or have fled abroad, like Tikhanovskaya. Former protesters still in Belarus have been scared into silence.

So the opposition leader is not urging them to take to the streets again on Sunday.

“We call on Belarusians to reject this sham and on the international community to reject the result,” she tells the BBC. “But I say to Belarusians, you have to keep safe until the real moment of possibility.

“Because people live in constant fear, and the regime is now intensifying the repression.”

You feel that fear straight away when you speak to Belarusians.

Many don’t want to talk publicly about politics at all. Others ask you to change their names, then choose their words carefully.

Some still inside Belarus chat only via encrypted messages which they delete immediately.

All say open political activism in the country has been extinguished.

Bysol, a non-profit organisation which helps evacuate those in danger, reports a surge in applications to around 30 or 40 requests a month.

Since 2020, the group has evacuated more than 1,500 people.

It also supports former political prisoners trying to rebuild life in exile after their release.

For Yana Zhuravleva, a vet, that’s been tough.

Prior to 2020 she was devoted to her work and not particularly politically active. But that summer she joined the giant crowds, hopeful of change.

She was later sentenced to three years for a “gross violation of public order”.

“We would get punished for everything,” she recalls of her time in prison.

She calculates that about 1 in 10 of the women were there because of the protests. Like them, Yana was added to the register of those “inclined to extremism and destructive activity”.

“You can’t go to the sports hall, your only letters are from relatives and you get fewer visiting rights. If you complain you always hear the same response: remember what you’re here for,” she tells me from Poland, where she moved after her recent release.

Yana admits it took “titanic” strength not to slide into deep depression.

“In prison, I barely cried. But when I was out, I suddenly wanted to sob all the time, and didn’t know why.”

Several people I contacted have mentioned seeking psychological help after being interrogated, threatened or imprisoned.

They describe a security service that hunts down anyone with the loosest link to the opposition, then demands names from all those it detains.

The pressure has never let up.

One woman inside Belarus, who used to monitor human rights, tells me she’s had to stop attending court hearings because the authorities spotted her.

If they could prove any link to the banned human rights organisation Viasna, she could be charged as an “extremist”.

“I can do some specific acts of support, but I have to be careful,” she told me anonymously.

“You have a very strong sense of helplessness when you see all this injustice.”

Viasna currently lists 1,256 political prisoners in Belarus. Dozens were given amnesties recently, but they were soon replaced.

For those who do escape the pressure-cooker of Belarus, there is the added struggle of knowing they may not return for a long time.

That’s why Natalia, not her real name, decided to stay in Belarus even after she was detained twice for participating in the protests.

“You’re very vulnerable once you’re on the list of the ‘repressed’,” she explains.

“You can’t get work because you are on the police data base and the authorities always have an eye on you.”

For Natalia that meant being arrested again, initially for walking her dog without a lead.

“They claimed I’d been aggressive and cursed loudly and waved my arms,” she remembers, of her detention in 2023. She was held for ten days with up to 14 people in a cell for two, a light on constantly.

For over a week, she slept on the wooden floor.

“It really shook my sense of security, I became much more anxious,” Natalia confides.

She’s abroad for now and plans to return soon, to her cats. But her neighbours say a police officer just visited her house, checking up on all potential protesters ahead of Sunday’s vote.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya believes the ongoing repression shows that Lukashenko and his allies are afraid.

“The trauma of 2020 is still alive and he has to eliminate any possibility of uprising,” the opposition leader argues.

“He knows the Belarusians didn’t accept or forgive him, and they still want change.”

But she admits there’s little sign of that in the short-term.

For a time after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Belarusians hoped their neighbours might succeed in defeating Putin with Western help, and that Lukashenko would be toppled next.

Some headed for the frontline themselves, choosing force after their peaceful protests had failed.

But Ukraine’s military is now struggling to hold ground and President Donald Trump is pushing for peace talks.

“The democratic world can’t make concessions to Putin,” Tikhanovskaya argues, describing Lukashenko as equally dangerous to the world.

He let Russia launch missiles at Ukraine from Belarus and send its tanks through his territory.

He’s also allowed the free flow of migrants to the Polish border and into the EU.

“He allows Putin to deploy nuclear weapons and his army in Belarus, and it’s a very short path to Poland and Lithuania,” Tikhanovskaya points out.

“He and Putin are a pair, and they support other dictators. He’s part of this chain of evil.”

There is little doubt that Sunday’s reinstatement of Alexander Lukashenko will go according to his plan.

“Those people are very capable,” explains Yana, the former political prisoner.

“They really did crush the potential for protest.”

She’s now trying to return to her profession as a vet, but in Poland, and to recover from three tough years behind bars.

Those I spoke to now talk of Lukashenko retiring, or eventually dying, as their greatest hope of seeing democracy.

In the meantime, many are switching focus: there’s been a surge of interest in reviving the Belarusian culture and language, an opposition cause. It’s the most many dare do in such circumstances.

“No-one says it openly, but we feel like there are no prospects. There’s depression,” Natalia admits.

But there are no obvious regrets, even so.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s own life has changed dramatically since she was thrust into politics.

Cut-off from her country, her husband is also a political prisoner – kept in total isolation for almost two years.

The opposition leader insists she still “truly believes” in change.

“2020 was a huge shift in mentality in Belarus. I don’t know how long it will take, but that shift will not disappear.”

Inside a giant sphere, the engineers pored over their equipment. Before them stood a silvery metal contraption swathed in colourful wires – a box that they hope will one day make oxygen on the moon.

Once the team vacated the sphere, the experiment began. The box-like machine was now ingesting small quantities of a dusty regolith – a mixture of dust and sharp grit with a chemical composition mimicking real lunar soil.

Soon, that regolith was gloop. A layer of it heated to temperatures above 1,650C. And, with the addition of some reactants, oxygen-containing molecules began to bubble out.

“We’ve tested everything we can on Earth now,” says Brant White, a program manager at Sierra Space, a private company. “The next step is going to the moon.”

Sierra Space’s experiment unfolded at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center this summer. It is far from the only such technology that researchers are working on, as they develop systems that could supply astronauts living on a future lunar base.

Those astronauts will need oxygen to breathe but also to make rocket fuel for spacecraft that might launch from the moon and head to destinations further afield – including Mars.

Lunar base inhabitants might also require metal and they could even harvest this from the dusty grey debris that litters the lunar surface.

Much depends on whether we can build reactors able to extract such resources effectively or not.

“It could save billions of dollars from mission costs,” says Mr White as he explains that the alternative – bringing lots of oxygen and spare metal to the moon from Earth – would be arduous and expensive.

Luckily, the lunar regolith is full of metal oxides. But while the science of extracting oxygen from metal oxides, for example, is well understood on Earth, doing this on the moon is much harder. Not least because of the conditions.

The huge spherical chamber that hosted Sierra Space’s tests in July and August this year induced a vacuum and also simulated lunar temperatures and pressures.

The company says it has had to improve how the machine works over time so that it can better cope with the extremely jagged, abrasive texture of the regolith itself. “It gets everywhere, wears out all sorts of mechanisms,” says Mr White.

And the one, crucial, thing that you can’t test on Earth or even in orbit around our planet, is lunar gravity – which is roughly one sixth that of the Earth. It might not be until 2028 or later that Sierra Space can test its system on the moon, using real regolith in low gravity conditions.

The moon’s gravity could be a real problem for some oxygen-extracting technologies unless engineers design for it, says Paul Burke at Johns Hopkins University.

In April, he and colleagues published a paper detailing the results of computer simulations that showed how a different oxygen-extracting process might be hindered by the moon’s relatively feeble gravitational pull. The process under investigation here was molten regolith electrolysis, which involves using electricity to split lunar minerals containing oxygen, in order to extract the oxygen directly.

The problem is that such technology works by forming bubbles of oxygen on the surface of electrodes deep within the molten regolith itself. “It is the consistency of, say, honey. It is very, very viscous,” says Dr Burke.

“Those bubbles aren’t going to rise as fast – and may actually be delayed from detaching from the electrodes.”

There could be ways around this. One could be to vibrate the oxygen-making machine device, which might jiggle the bubbles free.

And extra-smooth electrodes might make it easier for the oxygen bubbles to detach. Dr Burke and his colleagues are now working on ideas like this.

Sierra Space’s technology, a carbothermal process, is different. In their case, when oxygen-containing bubbles form in the regolith, they do so freely, rather than on the surface of an electrode. It means there is less chance of them getting stuck, says Mr White.

Stressing the value of oxygen for future lunar expeditions, Dr Burke estimates that, per day, an astronaut would require the amount of oxygen contained in roughly two or three kilograms of regolith, depending on that astronaut’s fitness and activity levels.

However, a lunar base’s life support systems would likely recycle oxygen breathed out by astronauts. If so, it wouldn’t be necessary to process quite as much regolith just to keep the lunar residents alive.

The real use case for oxygen-extracting technologies, adds Dr Burke, is in providing the oxidiser for rocket fuels, which could enable ambitious space exploration.

Obviously the more resources that can be made on the moon the better.

Sierra Space’s system does require the addition of some carbon, though the firm says it can recycle most of this after each oxygen-producing cycle.

Along with colleagues, Palak Patel, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came up with an experimental molten regolith electrolysis system, for extracting oxygen and metal from the lunar soil.

“We’re really looking at it from the standpoint of, ‘Let’s try to minimise the number of resupply missions’,” she says.

When designing their system, Ms Patel and her colleagues addressed the problem described by Dr Burke: that low gravity could impede the detachment of oxygen bubbles that form on electrodes. To counter this, they used a “sonicator”, which blasts the bubbles with sound waves in order to dislodge them.

Ms Patel says that future resource-extracting machines on the moon could derive iron, titanium or lithium from regolith, for example. These materials might help lunar-dwelling astronauts make 3D-printed spare parts for their moon base or replacement components for damaged spacecraft.

The usefulness of lunar regolith does not stop there. Ms Patel notes that, in separate experiments, she has melted simulated regolith into a tough, dark, glass-like material.

She and colleagues worked out how to turn this substance into strong, hollow bricks, which could be useful for building structures on the moon – an imposing black monolith, say. Why not?

Hamas has named four hostages to be released on Saturday under the Gaza ceasefire deal.

It says they are soldiers Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag.

They will be freed in exchange for 180 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

It will be the second such exchange since the ceasefire came into effect last Sunday. Three hostages and 90 prisoners were released in the first swap.

The ceasefire halted the war which began when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to Gaza as hostages.

More than 47,200 Palestinians, the majority civilians, have been killed in Israel’s offensive, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says.

Hamas is also expected to provide information about the remaining 26 hostages due to be released over the next five weeks.

This includes the Bibas family – two parents and two children, one of whom, Kfir, was 10 months old when taken captive and is the youngest hostage. It is unclear if this information will include the names or just the number of living or dead hostages.

• What we know about the ceasefire in Gaza
• Hamas hostages: Stories of the people taken from Israel

The prisoners who will be released are of a more serious category than those freed in the first exchange. They will include those who have killed, some of whom are serving sentences of more than 15 years.

Israel has insisted that no-one who was involved in the 7 October attacks will be freed.

Ariev, Gilboa, Levy and Albag were seized at the Nahal Oz military base which was overrun by Hamas gunmen. Footage showed them among a group of women being tied up with their hands behind their backs. They were seen pleading for help while being taunted by their captors.

The women were part of a unit which surveilled the Israel-Gaza border.

Three weeks ago Hamas released a video of Albag, 19, calling for the Israeli government to reach a deal.

The ceasefire was concluded after months of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, led by the US, Qatar and Egypt.

It will be implemented in three stages, with the second stage due to begin six weeks into the truce. About 1,900 Palestinian prisoners will be released during the first stage in exchange for 33 hostages. Israeli forces will also begin withdrawing from positions in Gaza and hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians will be able to return to areas they had fled or been forced from.

The ceasefire is meant to lead to a permanent end to the war in Gaza.

Ninety-one hostages taken on 7 October 2023 are still held in Gaza. Fifty-seven of them are assumed by Israel to still be alive. Three others – two of whom are alive – have been held for a decade or more.

Ukraine reportedly hit a Russian oil refinery and targeted Moscow during an attack involving a wave of at least 121 drones, one of the largest single operations of its kind during the war.

Video footage verified by the BBC shows a fireball rising over the refinery and pumping station in the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow, which Ukrainian officials said was a target.

Russia said it had shot down 121 drones that had targeted 13 regions, including Ryazan and Moscow, but reported no damage.

Elsewhere, Ukrainian authorities said three people were killed and one was injured when a Russian drone hit a residential building in the Kyiv region.

Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s centre for countering disinformation, said on Telegram that an oil refinery in Ryazan had been hit, as well as the Kremniy factory in Bryansk that Kyiv says produces missile components and other weapons.

Bloggers on Telegram posted images and videos of fires raging at the Ryazan facility, which covers around 6sq km (2.3sq miles). Verified footage shows people fleeing from the site in cars and on foot as a fireball rises into the sky.

BBC Verify used video footage to establish the location of two fires at the refinery. One video shows a fire near the northern entrance, whose location was matched by the road layout, signs and fences.

Two other videos show a larger fire on the eastern side of the refinery, around 3km (1.6m) away from the first. The location was identified by matching trees, pylons, road and path layouts.

Russian state-owned news agency RIA cited a statement from the Kremniy factory in Bryansk, which said work had been suspended after an attack by six drones. Pavel Malkov, the regional governor, said emergency services were responding.

The Kremlin acknowledged the attacks but made no mention of damage or casualties.

It claimed to have destroyed 121 Ukrainian drones, including six over the Moscow region, 20 in the Ryazan region, and a number over the border region of Bryansk.

Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, said the city’s air defences had intercepted attacks by Ukrainian drones at four locations.

He said air defences southeast of the capital in Kolomna and Ramenskoye had also repelled drones, without specifying how many. He said there was no damage.

Russian news agencies quoted Rosaviatsiya, the federal aviation agency, as saying two Moscow airports, Vnukovo and Domodedovo, had resumed flights after suspending operations for a time. Six flights were redirected to other airports.

In the city of Kursk, Mayor Igor Kutsak said overnight attacks had damaged power lines and cut off electricity to one district.

In Ukraine, officials said that its air defences had destroyed 25 of 58 drones launched overnight by Russia.

The interior ministry said debris from one of the drones had killed two men and a woman in Hlevakha, Kyiv region, and that another person had been injured.

US President Donald Trump has ordered officials to make plans to declassify documents related to three of the most consequential assassinations in US history – the killings of John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.

“A lot of people are waiting for this for long, for years, for decades,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “And everything will be revealed.”

The order directs top administration officials to present a plan to declassify the documents within 15 days. That does not make it certain it will happen, however.

President John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas in 1963. His brother Robert F Kennedy was assassinated while running for president in California 1968, just two months after King, America’s most famous civil rights leader, was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.

Many of the documents related to the investigations have been released in the years since, although thousands still remain redacted, particularly related to the sprawling JFK investigation.

President John F Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the United States.

A government commission determined that Oswald acted alone.

However, unanswered questions have long dogged the case, and have given rise to alternative theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and other nefarious characters – as well as more outlandish conspiracy theories.

Opinion polls over decades have indicated that most Americans don’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin.

In 1992, Congress passed a law to release all documents related to the investigation within 25 years. Both Trump in his first term and President Joe Biden released piles of JFK-related documents, but thousands – out of a total of millions – still remain partially or fully secret.

Trump promised to declassify all of the files in his first term, but held back on his promise after CIA and FBI officials persuaded him to keep some files secret. Today’s executive order states that continued secrecy “is not consistent with the public interest”.

• Live updates: Trump returns to power

“As a statement of intention it’s great that the president has put his promise into words on paper. That’s important,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post journalist, JFK assassination expert and editor of the online newsletter JFK Facts.

“But the details and implementation are everything. This process is just beginning. How exactly this is going to be carried out is not at all clear,” he said.

Recent document releases have revealed new details about the circumstances surrounding the assassination, including about the CIA’s extensive monitoring of Oswald.

In 2023, Paul Landis, an 88-year-old former Secret Service agent who witnessed the assassination at close range, said he took a bullet from the car after Kennedy was shot.

• The assassination of JFK: One of the US’s biggest mysteries
• Ex-Secret Service agent reveals new JFK assassination detail

Experts say the detail complicates the official story that a single bullet hit both the president and Texas Governor John Connally, who was riding in the motorcade and survived the shooting.

Mr Morley said new information has cast further doubt on the theory that Oswald acted alone and predicted that a full release of all the redacted documents could add significantly to public knowledge.

But he said that there may not be a “smoking gun”, and that CIA and other security officials will push to maintain some level of secrecy.

“This story is not over,” he said.

During the signing ceremony at the White House on Thursday, Trump asked for the pen he used to sign the order to be given to Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is RFK’s son, JFK’s nephew and the president’s nominee for health secretary.

RFK Jr has long cast doubt on the official narratives about his uncle’s assassination as well as that of his father, Robert F Kennedy.

Kennedy Sr was killed in a Los Angeles ballroom by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian man angry at US support for Israel. RFK Jr has spoken to Sirhan in prison and has stated that he does not believe Sirhan killed his father, although other Kennedy family members reject that claim.

Martin Luther King Jr was shot to death by white nationalist James Earl Ray. Members of the King family have alleged Ray did not act alone and was part of a larger conspiracy.

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.

A Chinese man has been sentenced to death for fatally stabbing a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy, in a case that sparked concern among Japanese expats living in China.

The sentence for the knife attack in the southern city of Shenzhen in September was handed down on Friday, according to Japanese media reports.

It comes a day after another court handed a death sentence to a Chinese man who attacked a Japanese mother and child and killed a Chinese woman who tried to protect them in Suzhou province in June.

The courts’ decisions come as Chinese authorities carried out several high-profile executions in recent days.

The stabbings in Shenzhen and Suzhou were among three attacks on foreigners in China last year. Just days before the Suzhou incident, four US college instructors were hurt in a knife attack at a public park in Jilin in the country’s north.

After the attack in Shenzhen, Japanese companies, including Toshiba and Toyota, told their staff to take precautions against any possible violence, while Panasonic offered its employees free flights home.

In the Suzhou case, a Chinese court said that Zhou Jiasheng, 52, had carried out the attack outside a Japanese school after he lost the will to live, following the loss of his job and subsequent debts.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters at a press conference that the court ruled that the attack was an “intentional murder” and the penalty was given due to the “significant social impact” the crime had caused.

However, the court made no mention of Japan during the ruling, according to Hayashi, who added that officials from the Japanese consulate in Shanghai had attended the sentencing.

Hayashi added that the crime, which killed and injured “innocent people”, including a child, was “absolutely unforgivable”.

He also paid tribute to Hu Youping, the Chinese bus attendant who was killed by Zhou while trying to protect a Japanese mother and her child.

Earlier on Thursday, Mao Ning, spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, briefly commented in a daily press conference that the case was “in judicial process”, adding that China would “as always, act to protect the safety of foreign nationals in China.”

China has been grappling with an uptick in public violence, with many attackers believed to have been spurred by a desire to “take revenge on society” – where perpetrators act on personal grievances by attacking strangers.

There were 19 attacks on pedestrians or strangers last year, a sharp increase from single digits in previous years.

On Monday, a man who killed at least 35 people in a car attack that is thought the be the country’s deadliest attack in a decade was executed.

Last month, a man who killed eight people in a stabbing spree at his university was sentenced to death.

Additionally, in December, a man who injured 30 people by driving into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school was handed a suspended death sentence.

“It’s like the United States doesn’t actually understand what I did for this country, it’s a betrayal,” Abdullah tells the BBC.

He fled Afghanistan with his parents amid the US withdrawal in August 2021 and is now a paratrooper for the US military. He worries he can’t help his sister and her husband escape too, because of President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending a resettlement programme.

The order cancels all flights and suspends applications for Afghan refugees, without any exemption for families of active servicemembers.

Trump argues the decision addresses “record levels of migration” that threaten “the availability of resources for Americans”.

But Abdullah and several other Afghan refugees have told the BBC they feel the US has “turned its back” on them, despite years of working alongside American officials, troops and non-profit organisations in Afghanistan. We are not using their real names, as they worry doing so could jeopardise their cases or put their families at risk.

As soon as Abdullah heard about the order, he called his sister in Afghanistan. “She was crying, she’s lost all hope,” he said. He believes his work has made her a target of the Taliban government which took power in 2021.

“The anxiety, it’s just unimaginable. She thinks we’ll never be able to see each other again,” he says.

• Trump declares border emergency and seeks to end US birthright citizenship
• 1,500 active-duty troops headed to US-Mexico border

During the war, Abdullah says he was an interpreter for US forces. When he left Afghanistan, his sister and her husband couldn’t get passports in time to board the flight.

Suhail Shaheen, a spokesperson for the Taliban government, told the BBC there is an amnesty for anyone who worked with international forces and all Afghans can “live in the country without any fear”. He claims these refugees are “economic migrants”.

But a UN report in 2023 cast doubt on assurances from the Taliban government. It found hundreds of former government officials and armed forces members were allegedly killed despite a general amnesty.

Abdullah’s sister and her husband had completed the medical exams and interviews required for resettlement in the US. The BBC has seen a document from the US Department of Defense endorsing their application.

Now Abdullah says Trump’s insistence that immigration is too high does not justify his separation from his family. He describes sleepless nights, and says the anxiety is affecting his work in his combat unit, serving the United States.

Babak, a former legal adviser to the Afghan Air Force, is still in hiding in Afghanistan.

“They’re not just breaking their promise to us – they’re breaking us,” he says.

The BBC has seen letters from the United Nations confirming his role, as well as a letter endorsing his asylum claim by a Lt Colonel in the US Air Force. The endorsement adds that he provided advice on strikes targeting militants linked to both the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

Babak can’t understand the president’s decision, given that he worked alongside US troops. “We risked our lives because of those missions. Now we’re in grave danger,” he says.

He has been moving his wife and young son from location to location, desperately trying to stay hidden. He claims his brother was tortured for his whereabouts. The BBC cannot verify this part of his story, given the nature of his claims.

Babak is appealing to Trump and his National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to change their minds.

“Mike Waltz, you served in Afghanistan. Please encourage the president,” he tells us.

Before saying goodbye, he adds: “The one ray of light we’ve been holding onto has been extinguished.”

Ahmad managed to fly out to the US amid the chaos of the withdrawal but is now separated from his family. He felt he had no choice but to leave his father, mother and teenage siblings behind.

If he and his father had not worked with the US, he says, his family would not be targets of the Taliban government. “I can’t sleep knowing I’m one of the reasons they’re in this situation,” he adds.

Before the Taliban takeover, Ahmad worked for a non-profit called Open Government Partnership (OGP), co-founded by the US 13 years ago and headquartered in Washington. He says the work he’s proudest of is establishing a special court to address abuses against women.

But he claims his work at OGP and his advocacy for women made him a target and he was shot by Taliban fighters in 2021 before the Taliban took over the country.

The BBC has seen a letter from a hospital in Pennsylvania assessing “evidence of injury from bullet and bullet fragments” which they say is “consistent with his account of what happened to him in Kabul”.

Making matters worse, he says his family is also in danger because his father was a colonel with the Afghan army and assisted the CIA. The BBC has seen a certificate, provided by the Afghan National Security Forces, thanking his father for his service.

Ahmad says the Taliban government has harassed his parents, brothers and sisters, so they fled to Pakistan. The BBC has seen photos showing Ahmad’s father and brother being treated in a hospital for injuries he claims were inflicted by people from the Taliban government.

His family had completed several steps of the resettlement programme. He says he even provided evidence that he has enough funds to support his family once they arrive in the US, without any government help.

Now Ahmad says the situation is critical. His family are in Pakistan on visas that will expire within months. He has contacted the IOM and has been told to “be patient”.

The head of #AfghanEvac, a non-profit group helping eligible Afghan refugees resettle, said he estimated 10,000-15,000 people were in the late stages of their applications.

Mina, who is pregnant, has been waiting for a flight out of Islamabad for six months. She worries her terror will threaten her unborn child. “If I lose the baby, I’ll kill myself,” she told the BBC.

She says she used to protest for women’s rights, even after the Taliban government took control of Afghanistan. She claims she was arrested in 2023 and detained overnight.

“Even then I didn’t want to leave Afghanistan. I went into hiding after my release, but they called me and said next time, they’d kill me,” she says.

Mina worries the Pakistani government will send her back to Afghanistan. That’s partly because Pakistan will not grant Afghan refugees asylum indefinitely.

The country has taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees from its neighbour, over decades of instability in the region. According to the UN refugee agency, the country hosts three million Afghan nationals, about 1.4 million of whom are documented.

As cross-border tensions with the Taliban government have flared, there has been growing concern over the fate of Afghans in Pakistan, with reports of alleged intimidation and detentions. The UN special rapporteur has said he’s concerned and Afghans in the region deserve better treatment.

Pakistan’s government says it is expelling foreign nationals who are in the country illegally back to Afghanistan and confirmed search raids were conducted in January.

According to the IOM, more than 795,000 Afghans have been expelled from Pakistan since September 2023.

The Afghan refugees we’ve spoken to feel caught between a homeland where their lives are in danger, and a host country whose patience is running out.

They had been pinning their hopes on the US – but what seemed a safe harbour has been abruptly blocked off by the new president until further notice.

Japan’s central bank has increased the cost of borrowing to its highest level in 17 years after consumer price rises accelerated in December.

The move by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) to raise its short-term policy rate to “around 0.5 per cent” comes just hours after the latest economic data showed prices rose last month at the fastest pace in 16 months.

The BOJ’s last interest rate hike in July, along with a weak jobs report from the US, caught investors around the world by surprise, which triggered a stock market selloff.

The bank’s governor, Kazuo Ueda, signalled this latest rate hike in advance in a bid to avoid another market shock.

According to official figures released on Friday, core consumer prices in Japan increased by 3% in December from a year earlier.

The decision marks the BOJ’s first rate hike since July and came just days after Donald Trump returned to the White House.

During the election campaign Trump threatened to impose tariffs on all imports into the US, which could have an impact on exporting countries like Japan.

By raising rates now the bank will have more scope to cut rates in the future if it needs to boost the economy.

The move highlights the central bank’s plans to steadily increase rates to around 1% – a level seen as neither boosting or slowing the economy.

The BOJ signalled that interest rates will continue to rise from ultra-low levels.

Neil Newman, the head of strategy at Astris Advisory Japan said: “rates will continue to rise as wages increase, inflation remains above 2% and there is some growth in the economy.”

“We look for another 25-basis point hike in six months,” said Stefan Angrick, a Japan economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Last year, the BOJ raised the cost of borrowing for the first time since 2007 after rates had been kept down for years as the country struggled with stagnant price growth.

That hike meant that there were no longer any countries left with negative interest rates.

When negative rates are in force people have to pay to deposit money in a bank. They have been used by several countries as a way of encouraging people to spend their money rather than putting it in a bank.

Julia Ramadan was terrified – the war between Israel and Hezbollah was escalating and she’d had a nightmare that her family home was being bombed. When she sent her brother a panicked voice note from her apartment in Beirut, he encouraged her to join him in Ain El Delb, a sleepy village in southern Lebanon.

“It’s safe here,” he reassured her. “Come stay with us until things calm down.”

Earlier that month, Israel intensified air campaigns against Hezbollah in Lebanon, in response to escalating rocket attacks by the Iran-backed armed group which had killed civilians, and displaced tens of thousands more from homes in northern Israel.

Ashraf was confident their family’s apartment block would be a haven, so Julia joined him. But the next day, on 29 September, it was subject to this conflict’s deadliest single Israeli attack. Struck by Israeli missiles, the entire six-storey building collapsed, killing 73 people.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says the building was targeted because it was a Hezbollah “terrorist command centre” and it “eliminated” a Hezbollah commander. It added that “the overwhelming majority” of those killed in the strike were “confirmed to be terror operatives”.

But a BBC Eye investigation verified the identity of 68 of the 73 people killed in the attack and uncovered evidence suggesting just six were linked to Hezbollah’s military wing. None of those we identified appeared to hold a senior rank. The BBC’s World Service also found that the other 62 were civilians – 23 of them children.

Among the dead were babies only a few months old, like Nouh Kobeissi in apartment -2B. In apartment -1C, school teacher Abeer Hallak was killed alongside her husband and three sons. Three floors above, Amal Hakawati died along with three generations of her family – her husband, children and two granddaughters.

Ashraf and Julia had always been close, sharing everything with each other. “She was like a black box, holding all my secrets,” he says.

On the afternoon of 29 September, the siblings had just returned home from handing out food to families who had fled the fighting. Hundreds of thousands of people in Lebanon had been displaced by the war.

Ashraf was in the shower, and Julia was sitting in the living room with their father, helping him upload a video to social media. Their mother, Janan, was in the kitchen, clearing up.

Then, without warning, they heard a deafening bang. The entire building shook, and a massive cloud of dust and smoke poured into their apartment.

“I shouted, ‘Julia! Julia!,'” says Ashraf.

“She replied, ‘I’m here.’

“I looked at my dad, who was struggling to get up from the sofa because of an existing injury to his leg, and saw my mother running toward the front door.”

Julia’s nightmare was playing out in real life.

“Julia was hyperventilating, crying so hard on the sofa. I was trying to calm her down and told her we needed to get out. Then, there was another attack.”

Video footage of the strike, shared online and verified by the BBC, reveals four Israeli missiles flying through the air towards the building. Seconds later, the block collapses.

Ashraf, along with many others, was trapped under the rubble. He began calling out, but the only voice he could hear was that of his father, who told him he could still hear Julia and that she was alive. Neither of them could hear Ashraf’s mother.

Ashraf sent a voice note to friends in the neighbourhood to alert them. The next few hours were agonising. He could hear rescuers sifting through the debris – and residents wailing as they discovered loved ones dead. “I just kept thinking, please, God, not Julia. I can’t live this life without Julia.”

Ashraf was finally pulled from the rubble hours later, with only minor injuries.

He discovered his mother had been rescued but died in hospital. Julia had suffocated under the rubble. His father later told him Julia’s last words were calls for her brother.

In November, a ceasefire deal was agreed between Israel and Hezbollah with the aim of ending the conflict. The deal gives a 60-day deadline for Israeli forces to withdraw from southern Lebanon and for Hezbollah to withdraw its forces and weapons north of the Litani River. As this 26 January deadline approaches, we sought to find out more about the deadliest single Israeli attack on Lebanon in years.

In the apartment below Julia and Ashraf’s, Hawraa and Ali Fares had been hosting family members displaced by the war. Among them was Hawraa’s sister Batoul, who, like Julia, had arrived the previous day – with her husband and two young children. They had fled intense bombardment near the Lebanon-Israel border, in areas where Hezbollah has a strong presence.

“We hesitated about where to go,” says Batoul. “And then I told my husband, ‘Let’s go to Ain El Delb. My sister said their building was safe and that they couldn’t hear any bombing nearby.'”

Batoul’s husband Mohammed Fares was killed in the Ain El Delb attack. A pillar fell on Batoul and her children. She says no-one responded to her calls for help. She finally managed to lift it alone, but her four-year-old daughter Hawraa had been fatally crushed. Miraculously, her baby Malak survived.

Three floors below Batoul lived Denise and Moheyaldeen Al-Baba. That Sunday, Denise had invited her brother Hisham over for lunch.

The impact of the strike was brutal, says Hisham.

“The second missile slammed me to the floor… the entire wall fell on top of me.”

He spent seven hours under the rubble.

“I heard a voice far away. People talking. Screams and… ‘Cover her. Remove her. Lift the stone. He’s still alive. It’s a child. Lift this child.’ I mean… Oh my God. I thought to myself, I’m the last one deep underground. No-one will know about me. I will die here.”

When Hisham was finally rescued, he found his niece’s fiance waiting to hear if she was alive. He lied to him and told him she was fine. They found her body three days later.

Hisham lost four members of his family – his sister, brother-in-law and their two children. He told us he had lost his faith and no longer believes in God.

To find out more about who died, we have analysed Lebanese Health Ministry data, videos, social media posts, as well as speaking to survivors of the attack.

We particularly wanted to interrogate the IDF’s response to media – immediately following the attack – that the apartment block had been a Hezbollah command centre. We asked the IDF multiple times what constituted a command centre, but it did not give clarification.

So we began sifting through social media tributes, gravesites, public health records and videos of funerals to determine whether those killed in the attack had any military affiliation with Hezbollah.

We could only find evidence that six of the 68 dead we identified were connected to Hezbollah’s military wing.

Hezbollah memorial photos for the six men use the label “Mujahid”, meaning “fighter”. Senior figures, by contrast, are referred to as “Qaid”, meaning “commander” – and we found no such labels used by the group to describe those killed.

We asked the IDF whether the six Hezbollah fighters we identified were the intended targets of the strike. It did not respond to this question.

One of the Hezbollah fighters we identified was Batoul’s husband, Mohammed Fares. Batoul told us that her husband, like many other men in southern Lebanon, was a reservist for the group, though she added that he had never been paid by Hezbollah, held a formal rank, or participated in combat.

Israel sees Hezbollah as one of its main threats and the group is designated a terrorist organisation by Israel, many Western governments and Gulf Arab states.

But alongside its large, well-armed military wing, Hezbollah is also an influential political party, holding seats in Lebanese parliament. In many parts of the country it is woven into the social fabric, providing a network of social services.

In response to our investigation, the IDF stated: “The IDF’s strikes on military targets are subject to relevant provisions of international law, including taking feasible precautions, and are carried out after an assessment that the expected collateral damage and civilian casualties are not excessive in relation to the military advantage expected from the strike.”

It had earlier also told the BBC it had executed “evacuation procedures” for the strike on Ain El Delb, but everyone we spoke to said they had received no warning.

Watch on YouTube if outside the UK

UN experts have raised concerns about the proportionality and necessity of Israeli air strikes on residential buildings in densely populated areas in Lebanon.

This pattern of targeting entire buildings – resulting in significant civilian casualties – has been a recurring feature of Israel’s latest conflict with Hezbollah, which began when the group escalated rocket attacks in response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Between October 2023 and November 2024, Lebanese authorities say more than 3,960 people were killed in Lebanon by Israeli forces, many of them civilians. Over the same time period, Israeli authorities say at least 47 civilians were killed by Hezbollah rockets fired from southern Lebanon. At least 80 Israeli soldiers were also killed fighting in southern Lebanon or as a result of rocket attacks on northern Israel.

The missile strike in Ain El Delb is the deadliest Israeli attack on a building in Lebanon for at least 18 years.

The village remains haunted by its impact. When we visited, more than a month after the strike, a father continued to visit the site every day, hoping for news of his 11-year-old son, whose body had yet to be found.

Ashraf Ramadan, too, returns to sift through the rubble, searching for what remains of the memories his family built over the two decades they lived there.

He shows me the door of his wardrobe, still adorned with pictures of footballers and pop stars he once admired. Then, he pulls a teddy bear from the debris and tells me it was always on his bed.

“Nothing I find here will make up for the people we lost,” he says.

Former footballer Joey Barton pushed his wife to the floor before kicking her in the head during a drunken row at their family home, a court has heard.

The former Manchester City and QPR midfielder, 42, is accused of assaulting Georgia Barton, 38, in Kew, south-west London, in June 2021.

The arguing between the couple, who had been drinking with two other couples while their children slept upstairs, started after Mr Barton threatened to fight his wife’s brother and father, Westminster Magistrates’ Court was told.

Mr Barton, of Widnes in Cheshire, denies a single charge of assault by beating.

Prosecutor Helena Duong told the court there had been a “verbal disagreement about a family matter” before Mr Barton “grabbed her and pushed her to the ground and kicked her in the head”.

As a friend tried to intervene, Mr Barton “threw” him off and said “don’t disrespect me”, the trial heard.

Mrs Barton called the police shortly after 23:00 BST to “report she had been hit by her husband”, jurors were told.

The 999 call was played to the court, and a tearful Mrs Barton told the call handler her husband “just hit me in the house,” adding: “He’s in the house, I’m outside.”

Asked if anything similar had happened before, she said: “No, it’s the first time,” adding that she had been hit “in the face”.

Jurors were told that when police officers arrived at about 23:30, Mrs Barton told them: “I’ve been pushed down and kicked about and stuff.

“He said he was going to fight with my brother and my dad.”

The trial continues.

President Donald Trump has said the US does not need Canadian energy, vehicles or lumber as he spoke to global business leaders at the World Economic Forum.

Trump also reiterated his threat to impose tariffs on the country, saying it can be avoided if the neighbouring nation chose to “become a state” of the US.

“You can always become a state, and if you’re a state, we won’t have a deficit. We won’t have to tariff you,” he said to gasps in the hall in Davos.

Trump has threatened to impose up to 25% tariffs on Canadian imports, possibly by 1 February.

The renewed threat of tariffs has been met with deep unease by the trade-dependent Canada.

But it has also said it will consider significant countermeasures, including a “dollar-for-dollar” response if the Trump administration follows through.

Roughly 75% of Canada’s exports head south. In contrast, Canada accounts for a much smaller 17% of US exports, though it is the second largest US trading partner, behind Mexico.

Trump in his remarks on Thursday said Canada had been “very tough to deal with over the years”.

“We don’t need them to make our cars, we make a lot of them, we don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests… we don’t need their oil and gas, we have more than anybody,” he told forum attendees via video link from Washington DC.

Trump reiterated the assertion that the US has a trade deficit with Canada of between $200bn and $250bn. It’s not clear where he got that figure.

The trade deficit with Canada – expected to be $45bn in 2024 – is mostly driven by US energy demands.

The North American auto industry also has highly integrated supply chains.

Auto parts can cross the borders between the US and Mexico and Canada multiple time before a vehicle is finally assembled.

Trump has also tied the tariffs to border security, saying it will be imposed unless Canada increases security at the shared border.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has repeatedly said that everything is on the table in response if the tariffs are imposed.

That includes a tax or embargo on energy exports to the US, though some of Canada’s provincial leaders disagree with that response.

On Thursday, Trudeau told reporters that Canada’s goal is to avoid US tariffs altogether but it will step up its response “gradually” to seek the quick removal of levies if they are imposed.

Canada is also pitching itself as a reliable trading partner and a secure source to the US for energy and critical minerals as it lobbies American lawmakers in a bid to avoid the tariffs.

• Canada offers to help Trump as it scrambles to avert tariff war

• Trudeau says ‘not a snowball’s chance in hell’ Canada will join US

Economists suggest the US depends on Canadian products for energy security.

In 2024, Canadian energy exports came to almost $170bn (C$244bn), according to a recent analysis by TD Bank economists.

Trump also said on Thursday that businesses should make their products in the US if they want to avoid tariffs.

Tariffs are a central part of Trump’s economic vision – he sees them as a way of growing the US economy, protecting jobs and raising tax revenue.

The new president has ordered federal officials to review US trade relationships for any unfair practices by 1 April.

Five new fires have erupted in southern California ahead of US President Donald Trump’s visit to the state.

The blazes – named Laguna, Sepulveda, Gibbel, Gilman and Border 2 – flared up on Thursday in the counties of Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura and Riverside.

Firefighters have made progress in bringing the 10,000-acre Hughes Fire in Los Angeles under control, containing it by 36% since it broke out on Wednesday.

Fires have devastated the US state over the last few weeks, with the Palisades and Eaton fires scorching a combined total of more than 37,000 acres and killing at least 28 people.

This is the current state of the fires, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire):

• The Border 2 fire in San Diego spans 800 acres. Evacuation orders are currently in place
• The Laguna blaze in Ventura covers 94 acres and 70% of it has been brought under control
• The Sepulveda fire in Los Angeles spans 45 acres and is 60% contained. In an update posted on X, the Los Angeles Fire Department said they had stopped the blaze from spreading and evacuation orders had been lifted
• The Gibbel fire erupted in Riverside County, covering 15 acres. Fire crews have managed to stop the fire from progressing
• A bush fire dubbed Gilman in San Diego covers two acres, but the blaze’s progress has been stopped

Trump is set to visit Los Angeles on Friday to examine the wildfire damage, days after his inauguration.

He has been critical of the response to the fires, threatening to withhold federal assistance if California fails to alter the way it manages water supplies.

Trump has pointed the finger of blame at California Governor Gavin Newsom and repeatedly made claims that the state had water issues because it diverted supplies to save a small fish called a smelt.

When asked by US media if he would cut off funding to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), Trump said: “I might have to do that. Sometimes that’s the only thing you can do. California’s a great example of it.

“If you actually poll the people, they don’t want sanctuary cities, but Gavin Newsom does. And these radical left politicians do.”

Brian Rice, the president of the California Professional Firefighters, told the BBC that he hopes Trump does not deny the state federal aid.

“The most important focus we have is getting federal aid into California, into these communities where people have lost their lives, their homes,” he said.

“In the history of this country, federal disaster aid has never been tied to if you do this, you get that. This is the discussion that’s going on, it’s never happened.”

Governor Newsom on Thursday announced a $2.5bn (£2bn) state-level aid package to deal with the fire damage.

The Hughes fire – the third largest blaze in the state after the Palisades and Eaton fires – forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate after it broke out on Wednesday.

According to Cal Fire, crews managed to make progress in containing the fast-moving blaze on Thursday.

Los Angeles is under an elevated fire risk area today with brisk winds, according to BBC Weather.

Rain is expected over the weekend in the county, as well as snow up in the mountains of southern California.

However, while this will aid firefighting efforts, there are concerns that it could also cause flooding and dislodge debris from the fires, creating mudslides.

Specialist crews have been working to try and secure burned areas, while sandbags and other flood prevention supplies have been handed out to locals so that they can protect their properties.

Twenty-three people died in 2018 when mudslides hit the California town of Montecito, one of the areas that had recently been affected by the Thomas Fire.

US President Donald Trump has ordered officials to make plans to declassify documents related to three of the most consequential assassinations in US history – the killings of John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.

“A lot of people are waiting for this for long, for years, for decades,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. “And everything will be revealed.”

The order directs top administration officials to present a plan to declassify the documents within 15 days. That does not make it certain it will happen, however.

President John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas in 1963. His brother Robert F Kennedy was assassinated while running for president in California 1968, just two months after King, America’s most famous civil rights leader, was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.

Many of the documents related to the investigations have been released in the years since, although thousands still remain redacted, particularly related to the sprawling JFK investigation.

President John F Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marine veteran who had defected to the Soviet Union and later returned to the United States.

A government commission determined that Oswald acted alone.

However, unanswered questions have long dogged the case, and have given rise to alternative theories about the involvement of government agents, the mafia and other nefarious characters – as well as more outlandish conspiracy theories.

Opinion polls over decades have indicated that most Americans don’t believe Oswald was the sole assassin.

In 1992, Congress passed a law to release all documents related to the investigation within 25 years. Both Trump in his first term and President Joe Biden released piles of JFK-related documents, but thousands – out of a total of millions – still remain partially or fully secret.

Trump promised to declassify all of the files in his first term, but held back on his promise after CIA and FBI officials persuaded him to keep some files secret. Today’s executive order states that continued secrecy “is not consistent with the public interest”.

• Live updates: Trump returns to power

“As a statement of intention it’s great that the president has put his promise into words on paper. That’s important,” said Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post journalist, JFK assassination expert and editor of the online newsletter JFK Facts.

“But the details and implementation are everything. This process is just beginning. How exactly this is going to be carried out is not at all clear,” he said.

Recent document releases have revealed new details about the circumstances surrounding the assassination, including about the CIA’s extensive monitoring of Oswald.

In 2023, Paul Landis, an 88-year-old former Secret Service agent who witnessed the assassination at close range, said he took a bullet from the car after Kennedy was shot.

• The assassination of JFK: One of the US’s biggest mysteries
• Ex-Secret Service agent reveals new JFK assassination detail

Experts say the detail complicates the official story that a single bullet hit both the president and Texas Governor John Connally, who was riding in the motorcade and survived the shooting.

Mr Morley said new information has cast further doubt on the theory that Oswald acted alone and predicted that a full release of all the redacted documents could add significantly to public knowledge.

But he said that there may not be a “smoking gun”, and that CIA and other security officials will push to maintain some level of secrecy.

“This story is not over,” he said.

During the signing ceremony at the White House on Thursday, Trump asked for the pen he used to sign the order to be given to Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is RFK’s son, JFK’s nephew and the president’s nominee for health secretary.

RFK Jr has long cast doubt on the official narratives about his uncle’s assassination as well as that of his father, Robert F Kennedy.

Kennedy Sr was killed in a Los Angeles ballroom by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian man angry at US support for Israel. RFK Jr has spoken to Sirhan in prison and has stated that he does not believe Sirhan killed his father, although other Kennedy family members reject that claim.

Martin Luther King Jr was shot to death by white nationalist James Earl Ray. Members of the King family have alleged Ray did not act alone and was part of a larger conspiracy.

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.

Japan’s central bank has increased the cost of borrowing to its highest level in 17 years after consumer price rises accelerated in December.

The move by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) to raise its short-term policy rate to “around 0.5 per cent” comes just hours after the latest economic data showed prices rose last month at the fastest pace in 16 months.

The BOJ’s last interest rate hike in July, along with a weak jobs report from the US, caught investors around the world by surprise, which triggered a stock market selloff.

The bank’s governor, Kazuo Ueda, signalled this latest rate hike in advance in a bid to avoid another market shock.

According to official figures released on Friday, core consumer prices in Japan increased by 3% in December from a year earlier.

The decision marks the BOJ’s first rate hike since July and came just days after Donald Trump returned to the White House.

During the election campaign Trump threatened to impose tariffs on all imports into the US, which could have an impact on exporting countries like Japan.

By raising rates now the bank will have more scope to cut rates in the future if it needs to boost the economy.

The move highlights the central bank’s plans to steadily increase rates to around 1% – a level seen as neither boosting or slowing the economy.

The BOJ signalled that interest rates will continue to rise from ultra-low levels.

Neil Newman, the head of strategy at Astris Advisory Japan said: “rates will continue to rise as wages increase, inflation remains above 2% and there is some growth in the economy.”

“We look for another 25-basis point hike in six months,” said Stefan Angrick, a Japan economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Last year, the BOJ raised the cost of borrowing for the first time since 2007 after rates had been kept down for years as the country struggled with stagnant price growth.

That hike meant that there were no longer any countries left with negative interest rates.

When negative rates are in force people have to pay to deposit money in a bank. They have been used by several countries as a way of encouraging people to spend their money rather than putting it in a bank.

A selection of the week’s best photos from across the African continent and beyond:

• Stop using my face for AI fraud, warns former first lady
• South Africa’s WW1 servicemen finally honoured at new memorial
• The Nigerian family who have spent five decades as volunteer grave-diggers

An endangered plant known as the “corpse flower” for its putrid stink is blooming in Australia – and captivating the internet in the process, with thousands already tuned in to a livestream to witness its grand debut.

The titan arum plant, housed in the Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney, blooms only once every few years for just 24 hours.

Affectionately dubbed Putricia, it will release a smell described as “wet socks, hot cat food, or rotting possum flesh”.

The long wait to see Putricia fully unfurl has spawned jokes and even a unique lingo in the livestream’s chat, with thousands commenting “WWTF”, or “We Watch the Flower”.

The livestream attracted more than 8,000 simultaneous viewers on Thursday, doubling within hours as the plant’s appearance slowly changed.

John Siemon, director of horticulture and living collections at the gardens, compared the spectacle to Sydney’s 2000 Olympics, saying “we’ve had 15,000 people come through the gates before it [the flower] even opened”.

“This specimen is around 10 years old. We acquired it from our colleagues in LA Botanic Garden at the age of three, and we’ve been nurturing it for the last seven years,” he told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

“[We’re] incredibly excited to have our first bloom in 15 years.”

After days of inaction, the view on the livestream markedly changed on Thursday as Putricia, comfortably ensconced behind a red velvet rope, began to open up.

As she continues to bloom, viewers can expect to see Putricia unfold a vibrant maroon or crimson skirt, known as a spathe, around her spadix which is the large spike in the middle of the plant.

The gardens has said it is “hard to predict exactly when” Putricia will bloom, but that has not stopped the thousands gathered online.

“I’m back again to see how Putricia is going and I can see she’s still taking her time like the queen she is, fair play,” wrote one commenter. “This is the slowest burlesque ever,” said another.

Yet another person wrote: “Overnight I watched, fell asleep, awoke, watched, fell asleep. I am weak, but Putricia is strong. WWTF.”

Other popular acronyms among viewers are WDNRP (We Do Not Rush Putricia) and BBTB (Blessed Be The Bloom).

The plant can only be found in the rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, where it is known as bunga bangkai – or “corpse flower” in Indonesian. Its scientific name is , which is derived from Ancient Greek and means “giant misshapen penis”.

When in bloom, the plant’s long yellow spadix emits a strong odour, often compared to the smell of decaying flesh, to trick pollinators into landing on what they think is rotten meat so they can move pollen between male and female specimens.

It has the world’s largest flowering structure, as it can grow up to 3m (10 feet) tall and weigh up to 150kg. The plant contains several hundred flowers in the base of its spadix.

It is endangered in the wild due to deforestation and land degradation.

Putricia is one of several titan arums in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, which last saw one bloom 15 years ago.

But there have been other corpse flower blooms across Australia in recent years, including Melbourne and Adelaide’s botanic gardens, each time attracting thousands of curious visitors keen on having a whiff.

There are also a few housed in Kew Gardens in London, where one bloomed in June last year. The titan arum first flowered outside of Sumatra in 1889 in Kew.

The Brutalist tells the story of Hungarian immigrant and holocaust survivor László Tóth, who is trying to rebuild his life in post-war America through his work as an architect.

Oscar winner Adrien Brody delved deep into his own family history for his portrayal of the character, reflecting on his mother and grandparents’ experiences in fleeing their native Hungary, which after World War Two was becoming a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

“The wonderful thing is, it’s an opportunity for me to honour my ancestral struggles – my mother and my grandparents’ hardships and loss in fleeing Hungary in the ’50s and emigrating to the United States.

“[It’s] very moving to be reminded of the details and hardships that they experienced that very much parallel the lived experience of my character,” Brody says.

The actor says his character’s drive to create also reflects his own path as an actor.

“Any artistic person, I think, can relate to the struggle and yearnings to leave, create a body of work and leave behind something of great meaning,” he says.

The relationships in the film might be intimate and personal, but they’re set against a backdrop that is in so many ways epic – not least its running time. It clocks in at over three-and-a-half hours – something that might put off some moviegoers.

But director Brady Corbet believes The Brutalist’s length really shouldn’t deter audiences.

“For me, I think that the length of a movie is similar to the length of a book, a double album, a painting with a big canvas.

“I love small portraits and I love Anselm Kiefer (a German artist known for his large-scale installations). There’s a space for both of them, you know. And at the end of the day, especially because the film has an intermission, it’s only 100 minutes on each side, so it’s not so bad.”

Felicity Jones, who plays Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet, says she spends a huge amount of time looking for realistic female characters who are more than just weak offshoots of their husbands.

“I spend most of my life foraging through scripts, trying to find decent characters to play. That’s a huge part of it,” she explains.

“I have to find someone who has some kind of spunk, or has some fight in them. Some sense of defiance is so key, so when I read the script it was an absolute no-brainer.

“I thought this woman is tremendous. But… they are few and far between, for sure. When you get something like this, you just grab it with both hands.”

In the film, Tóth is hired by rich industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren to design and build a vast project as a tribute to his late mother. Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce, is a man who is in awe of the architect’s talent. A useful parallel, then, for the actor.

“I suppose so,” admits the Australian. “I really admire Adrien and his work. I think he’s an extraordinary actor.

“It was really interesting the way Adrien played his role. He plays a man who has almost more sense of self than Van Buren does, which was a great thing for me to work off because I think Van Buren, even though he admires László, he probably is patronising of him.

“He probably expects him to be more subservient than he is, so it was a great dynamic between the two of us.”

On Thursday, the film was nominated for 10 Oscars, including a best-actor nomination for Brody. Even before the Academy Awards shortlists were announced, Brody said how thankful he was for the reception the film had received from awards bodies.

“I’m just really grateful and I’m very appreciative of having had a chance to flourish in a work that I’ve dedicated a life towards. And when that is received with respect and appreciation. It’s very rewarding.”

“It’s like the United States doesn’t actually understand what I did for this country, it’s a betrayal,” Abdullah tells the BBC.

He fled Afghanistan with his parents amid the US withdrawal in August 2021 and is now a paratrooper for the US military. He worries he can’t help his sister and her husband escape too, because of President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending a resettlement programme.

The order cancels all flights and suspends applications for Afghan refugees, without any exemption for families of active servicemembers.

Trump argues the decision addresses “record levels of migration” that threaten “the availability of resources for Americans”.

But Abdullah and several other Afghan refugees have told the BBC they feel the US has “turned its back” on them, despite years of working alongside American officials, troops and non-profit organisations in Afghanistan. We are not using their real names, as they worry doing so could jeopardise their cases or put their families at risk.

As soon as Abdullah heard about the order, he called his sister in Afghanistan. “She was crying, she’s lost all hope,” he said. He believes his work has made her a target of the Taliban government which took power in 2021.

“The anxiety, it’s just unimaginable. She thinks we’ll never be able to see each other again,” he says.

• Trump declares border emergency and seeks to end US birthright citizenship
• 1,500 active-duty troops headed to US-Mexico border

During the war, Abdullah says he was an interpreter for US forces. When he left Afghanistan, his sister and her husband couldn’t get passports in time to board the flight.

Suhail Shaheen, a spokesperson for the Taliban government, told the BBC there is an amnesty for anyone who worked with international forces and all Afghans can “live in the country without any fear”. He claims these refugees are “economic migrants”.

But a UN report in 2023 cast doubt on assurances from the Taliban government. It found hundreds of former government officials and armed forces members were allegedly killed despite a general amnesty.

Abdullah’s sister and her husband had completed the medical exams and interviews required for resettlement in the US. The BBC has seen a document from the US Department of Defense endorsing their application.

Now Abdullah says Trump’s insistence that immigration is too high does not justify his separation from his family. He describes sleepless nights, and says the anxiety is affecting his work in his combat unit, serving the United States.

Babak, a former legal adviser to the Afghan Air Force, is still in hiding in Afghanistan.

“They’re not just breaking their promise to us – they’re breaking us,” he says.

The BBC has seen letters from the United Nations confirming his role, as well as a letter endorsing his asylum claim by a Lt Colonel in the US Air Force. The endorsement adds that he provided advice on strikes targeting militants linked to both the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

Babak can’t understand the president’s decision, given that he worked alongside US troops. “We risked our lives because of those missions. Now we’re in grave danger,” he says.

He has been moving his wife and young son from location to location, desperately trying to stay hidden. He claims his brother was tortured for his whereabouts. The BBC cannot verify this part of his story, given the nature of his claims.

Babak is appealing to Trump and his National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to change their minds.

“Mike Waltz, you served in Afghanistan. Please encourage the president,” he tells us.

Before saying goodbye, he adds: “The one ray of light we’ve been holding onto has been extinguished.”

Ahmad managed to fly out to the US amid the chaos of the withdrawal but is now separated from his family. He felt he had no choice but to leave his father, mother and teenage siblings behind.

If he and his father had not worked with the US, he says, his family would not be targets of the Taliban government. “I can’t sleep knowing I’m one of the reasons they’re in this situation,” he adds.

Before the Taliban takeover, Ahmad worked for a non-profit called Open Government Partnership (OGP), co-founded by the US 13 years ago and headquartered in Washington. He says the work he’s proudest of is establishing a special court to address abuses against women.

But he claims his work at OGP and his advocacy for women made him a target and he was shot by Taliban fighters in 2021 before the Taliban took over the country.

The BBC has seen a letter from a hospital in Pennsylvania assessing “evidence of injury from bullet and bullet fragments” which they say is “consistent with his account of what happened to him in Kabul”.

Making matters worse, he says his family is also in danger because his father was a colonel with the Afghan army and assisted the CIA. The BBC has seen a certificate, provided by the Afghan National Security Forces, thanking his father for his service.

Ahmad says the Taliban government has harassed his parents, brothers and sisters, so they fled to Pakistan. The BBC has seen photos showing Ahmad’s father and brother being treated in a hospital for injuries he claims were inflicted by people from the Taliban government.

His family had completed several steps of the resettlement programme. He says he even provided evidence that he has enough funds to support his family once they arrive in the US, without any government help.

Now Ahmad says the situation is critical. His family are in Pakistan on visas that will expire within months. He has contacted the IOM and has been told to “be patient”.

The head of #AfghanEvac, a non-profit group helping eligible Afghan refugees resettle, said he estimated 10,000-15,000 people were in the late stages of their applications.

Mina, who is pregnant, has been waiting for a flight out of Islamabad for six months. She worries her terror will threaten her unborn child. “If I lose the baby, I’ll kill myself,” she told the BBC.

She says she used to protest for women’s rights, even after the Taliban government took control of Afghanistan. She claims she was arrested in 2023 and detained overnight.

“Even then I didn’t want to leave Afghanistan. I went into hiding after my release, but they called me and said next time, they’d kill me,” she says.

Mina worries the Pakistani government will send her back to Afghanistan. That’s partly because Pakistan will not grant Afghan refugees asylum indefinitely.

The country has taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees from its neighbour, over decades of instability in the region. According to the UN refugee agency, the country hosts three million Afghan nationals, about 1.4 million of whom are documented.

As cross-border tensions with the Taliban government have flared, there has been growing concern over the fate of Afghans in Pakistan, with reports of alleged intimidation and detentions. The UN special rapporteur has said he’s concerned and Afghans in the region deserve better treatment.

Pakistan’s government says it is expelling foreign nationals who are in the country illegally back to Afghanistan and confirmed search raids were conducted in January.

According to the IOM, more than 795,000 Afghans have been expelled from Pakistan since September 2023.

The Afghan refugees we’ve spoken to feel caught between a homeland where their lives are in danger, and a host country whose patience is running out.

They had been pinning their hopes on the US – but what seemed a safe harbour has been abruptly blocked off by the new president until further notice.