Nineteen-year-old Liri Albag rushes into her parents’ arms, igniting screams of joy.

“My beauty. You’re a hero. You’re home. That’s it,” her mother says as the three laugh and cry together.

The moment, filmed by the Israeli military, was the first time the family had seen each other in more than 15 months.

Liri was among the first Israelis to be taken hostage in the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, when the military base on the Gaza border where she was serving was overrun.

She was among four female soldiers to be returned to Israel on Saturday as part of the first phase of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. Two hundred Palestinian prisoners were released in return.

“The feeling of relief and happiness envelops us after 477 long and unbearable days of nerve-wracking waiting,” her family said in a statement shortly after her return.

Crowds had gathered in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday morning, watching a live news feed from Gaza on a large screen as they waited for the group to be brought back to Israel.

Released alongside Liri were soldiers Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa and Naama Levy, all aged 20.

Cheers erupted as the women appeared, flanked by masked gunmen from Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, for a staged handover in Gaza City’s Palestine Square. They held hands and waved, before being taken away in Red Cross vehicles.

“It’s amazing. They’re amazing. Did you see them stand and smile?” one woman watching the live feed with the crowd in Tel Aviv said.

In the crowd watching in Gaza, one man told the BBC Hamas was returning the hostages in an “honourable way” and declared the moment a victory for the group.

The women were then transferred to the Israeli military and later brought by helicopter to a hospital.

• Who are the released hostages?
• Row over Israeli civilian blocks Palestinians’ return
• What we know about the ceasefire deal

In a press briefing, the director of Beilinson Hospital, Dr Lena Koren Feldman, described the released hostages as being in a “stable condition”, but said they would continue to be given a “comprehensive medical and emotional evaluation”.

They were the second group of hostages to be released under a ceasefire deal, aimed at bringing a permanent end to the war, which began a week ago following months of negotiations.

The four women were taken hostage on 7 October from the Nahal Oz military base, about a kilometre from the Gaza border fence.

They were part of an unarmed all-female unit of observers, known as tatzpitaniyot in Hebrew, whose role was to study live surveillance footage captured by cameras along the high-tech fence and look out for signs of anything suspicious.

Several conscripts from the unit and families of those who were killed have said that they had been warning that an attack was coming in the months before 7 October.

It was clear there was a “balloon that was going to burst”, one told the BBC.

The Israeli military has previously said it is in the midst of a “thorough investigation into the events of 7 October, including those in Nahal Oz, and the circumstances preceding”.

One woman from the unit, Agam Berger, remains in Gaza. In a statement on Saturday, her family said they were “overjoyed and moved” by the return of the four others, while they continued to “eagerly await embracing Agam, God willing, in the coming week”.

Another woman who served in the unit with them, but was not on shift on 7 October, told the BBC: “I have been very emotional… This feels like sisters coming home.”

“God willing, we will all sit together and talk, but of course no pressure. They have to heal first.”

For families of the observers who were killed on 7 October, it was a bittersweet moment.

“This is a very emotional day for us,” said Elad Levy, whose niece Roni served alongside the four women but was killed in the attacks.

“We are very happy to see Karina, Daniella, Liri and Naama coming back home to their families. At the same time, we remember that there are hostages still in Gaza. And for us, we remember Roni who will never come back home.”

Israel had expected female civilian hostage Arbel Yehud to be included in Saturday’s release, and accused Hamas of breaching the terms of the ceasefire to prioritise female civilians. Hamas said Ms Yehud would be released next weekend.

Another female civilian who is yet to be released is Shiri Bibas, who was taken hostage with her husband and two young children, Ariel and Kfir.

Thousands of displaced Palestinians have been prevented from returning to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip, after Israel blocked a main road, accusing Hamas of breaching the terms of the ceasefire deal.

The dispute came after Hamas released four Israeli female soldiers – and Israel freed 200 Palestinian prisoners.

But the Israeli government said Gazans would not be allowed to travel north until plans were in place for the release of Israeli civilian Arbel Yehud. Hamas has insisted that she is alive and will be freed next week.

According to the deal, Hamas was to release civilians before soldiers.

On Saturday evening, as crowds gathered along al-Rashid road in central Gaza to return home, gunshots were reportedly fired.

Reuters news agency, citing the Hamas-run health ministry, and Palestinian media reported one person had been killed and some injured.

Four gunshots can be heard in a video reportedly of the incident that was posted online. BBC Verify has authenticated the location of footage, but the BBC has not been able to independently verify reports of a casualty.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said troops in central Gaza had fired shots after “several gatherings of dozens of suspects were identified who posed a threat to the forces”.

“Contrary to reports emerging in recent hours, all of the shooting in the area was carried out for the purpose of distancing and not aimed at harm. We emphasise that as of this stage, no injuries to the suspects are known to have occurred as a result of the shooting.”

• ‘My beauty, you’re home’: Israeli women soldiers reunited with families
• What we know about the ceasefire deal

Earlier on Saturday, Muhammad Emad Al-Din was one of the thousands waiting to return home to northern Gaza.

“I know my house might be destroyed, but I’ll pitch a tent over its remains. I just want to go back,” he told the BBC over the phone.

“I need to reclaim my work. I am a barber in Gaza, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to repair the damage to my salon and restart my business. I’ve become indebted to so many people, and I can’t afford to buy the simplest things for my children,” he added.

“All I wish for is for this dispute between Hamas and Israel to end and for us to be allowed to move back to our homes in the north. We haven’t seen our loved ones for more than 15 months.”

The Netzarim Corridor is a seven-kilometre (4.3-mile) strip of land controlled by Israel that cuts off north Gaza from the rest of the territory.

Lubna Nassar arrived with her two daughters and son on a donkey cart in the afternoon, hoping to return to her home and reunite with her husband, Sultan, whom she has not seen in 11 months.

“I will stay here, as close as possible to the Israeli checkpoint. For months, my daughters have been waiting for the moment to meet their father. I want to be among the first to return to Gaza,” she said.

Qatari and Egyptian mediators are making progress in their efforts to allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return back to the north.

But Israeli tanks are still blocking the coastal road where people were supposed to walk into the north.

The Israelis have asked the mediators for proof of life from Hamas for Ms Yehud, and it seems that Hamas has given this to the Egyptians.

Four female Israeli soldiers taken hostage by Hamas on 7 October 2023 were released on Saturday as part of the ceasefire agreement which also saw 200 Palestinian prisoners freed.

Meanwhile, many Gazans watch anxiously for any breakthrough that could allow them to return.

For many, the hope of returning outweighs the reality of what awaits them – ruins and destruction.

Yet the dream of reclaiming their lives, rebuilding their homes and reuniting with their families are keeping their spirits alive.

Thirteen soldiers serving with peacekeeping forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been killed in clashes with rebels from the M23 group.

The South African military said nine of its soldiers died helping to push back a rebel advance on the city of Goma, in eastern DR Congo, while three Malawians and a Uruguayan were also killed.

French President Emmanuel Macron said he had spoken to the leaders of both DR Congo and Rwanda amid global calls for the violence to end.

The United Nations is pulling all non-essential staff out of Goma – a city of more than one million people – as the fighting intensifies.

A UN Security Council meeting about the deadly clashes, originally set for Monday, has been moved to Sunday due to the escalating conflict.

The M23 group has called on Congolese troops in Goma to surrender in order to avoid bloodshed. While DR Congo has severed diplomatic ties with neighbouring Rwanda, accusing the country of being behind the rebellion.

The move comes after M23 fighters killed a Congolese military governor who was visiting the frontline on Thursday. Earlier in January, they captured the key eastern Congolese towns of Minova and Masisi.

Macron called for an end to the fighting in separate calls with the leaders of DR Congo and Rwanda on Saturday, his office said.

The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas urged the M23 to halt its advance and condemned Rwanda’s support for the group, the AFP news agency reports.

Further condemnation came from Angolan President Joao Lourenco, the African Union’s mediator between Rwanda and DR Congo, who denounced “irresponsible actions by the M23 and its supporters” and called for the “immediate cessation” of fighting to preserve civilian lives, according to the AFP news agency.

Fighting between the M23 and DR Congo’s army has intensified since the start of the year, with the rebels seizing control of more territory than ever.

The conflict has already led more than 400,000 people to flee their homes this year, according to the UN.

Local leaders last week said more than 200 civilians had been killed in areas captured by the M23, with hospitals in Goma treating hundreds of patients.

Martin Gordon, an Anglican bishop in Goma, told the BBC fighting in the country had gone on “way too long” and people “will do anything for peace”.

In the past few days, several countries have urged their citizens to leave Goma, including the UK, France, Germany and the US.

Human Rights Watch has warned of escalating risks to civilians as the Congolese army battles the M23 rebels. The humanitarian group has accused both sides of committing grave abuses against civilians.

The UN has warned that the ongoing conflict is worsening the humanitarian crisis in the region.

The M23 has taken control of vast swathes of mineral-rich eastern DR Congo since 2021. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced as a consequence.

DR Congo and the UN say the M23 is backed by Rwanda. The Rwandan authorities have neither confirmed nor denied this.

Rwanda has previously said the authorities in DR Congo were working with some of those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide against ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

The M23 formed as an offshoot of another rebel group in 2012, ostensibly to protect the Tutsi population in the east of DR Congo, which had long complained of persecution and discrimination.

However, Rwanda’s critics accuse it of using the M23 to loot eastern DR Congo’s minerals such as gold, cobalt and tantalum.

The CIA on Saturday offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is “more likely” to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals.

But the intelligence agency cautioned it had “low confidence” in this determination.

A spokesperson said that a “research-related origin” of the pandemic “is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting”.

The decision to release that assessment marks one of the first made by the CIA’s new director John Ratcliffe, appointed by Donald Trump, who took over the agency on Thursday.

Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence during President Trump’s first term, has long favoured the lab leak theory, claiming Covid most likely came from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged.

In an interview with Breitbart News published on Friday, Ratcliffe said he wanted the CIA to abandon its neutral stance on the origins of the virus and “get off the sidelines”.

“One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID,” he said.

“That’s a day-one thing for me.”

But officials told US media that the new assessment was not based on new intelligence and predates the Trump administration. The review was reportedly ordered in the closing weeks of the Biden administration and completed before Trump took office on Monday.

The review offered on Saturday is based on “low confidence” which means the intelligence supporting it is deficient, inconclusive or contradictory.

There is no consensus on the cause of the Covid pandemic.

Some support a “natural origin” theory, which argues the virus spread naturally from animals, without the involvement of any scientists or laboratories.

The lab leak hypothesis specifically has been hotly contested by scientists, including many who say there is no definitive evidence to back it up. And China has in the past dismissed the lab claim as “political manipulation” by Washington.

Still, the once controversial theory has been gaining ground among some intelligence agencies.

In 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News it was his bureau’s assessment that “the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”.

• FBI chief Christopher Wray says China lab leak most likely
• Have we found the ‘animal origin’ of Covid?
• FBI chief Christopher Wray says China lab leak most likely

US President Donald Trump has said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has done a “very good job thus far” and that the pair have a “very good relationship”.

Asked by the BBC on board Air Force One about his relationship with Sir Keir, Trump added that they would be having a call “over the next 24 hours”.

Trump and the Labour leader have met on a number of occasions, including a visit by Sir Keir to Trump Tower in New York during the presidential campaign.

Tech billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk, however, has been strongly critical of Sir Keir and has repeatedly called for his removal from office.

• Can opposites Trump and Starmer find common ground?

“I get along with him well. I like him a lot,” Trump said of Sir Keir.

“He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and I think he’s done a very good job thus far.

“He’s represented his country in terms of philosophy.

“I may not agree with his philosophy, but I have a very good relationship with him.”

Trump was speaking during a visit to the press room on board the presidential plane on Saturday.

He was asked about his relationship with Sir Keir after responding to a question about where he might go for the first international trip of his second term.

“It could be Saudi Arabia, it could be UK. Traditionally it could be UK,” he said.

“Last time I went to Saudi Arabia because they agreed to buy $450 billion of American United States merchandise.”

Sir Keir and Trump spoke by phone following Trump’s re-election in November, with Downing Street saying at the time that the two had agreed the relationship between the UK and US was “incredibly strong” and would “continue to thrive”.

Last week, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said Sir Keir would visit Washington for talks with Trump “within the next few weeks”.

Several diplomatic challenges loom for the government, including Trump’s pledges to introduce trade tariffs and to cut US support for Ukraine.

It is also unclear whether Trump will agree to the UK’s proposed deal to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, where there is a joint US-UK military base, although the UK has said the new US administration will be given the chance to “consider” the deal.

There have been further questions raised about whether Trump will accept Sir Keir’s nomination of former Labour minister Lord Peter Mandelson as the British ambassador to Washington.

Last month, Chris LaCivita, the co-manager of Trump’s election campaign, called Lord Mandelson “an absolute moron” and said he “should stay home”.

Earlier this month Tesla boss Musk, who is an adviser to the president, criticised Starmer in a series of messages on his X social media platform over the grooming gangs scandal, saying the prime minister was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes”.

In response, Sir Keir, who was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, has accused critics of “spreading lies and misinformation” and says he tackled prosecutions “head on”.

Lammy has described his own criticism of the president, made when he was a backbencher, as “old news”.

In 2018 he described Trump as a “tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” but the foreign secretary has since had dinner with him alongside the prime minister.

President Donald Trump has said he believes the US will gain control of Greenland, after showing renewed interest in acquiring the autonomous Danish territory in recent weeks.

“I think we’re going to have it,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Saturday, adding that the island’s 56,000 residents “want to be with us”.

His comments come after reports that Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen insisted Greenland was not for sale in a fiery phone call with the president last week.

Trump first floated the prospect of buying the territory during his first term in 2019, and has said US control of Greenland is an “absolute necessity” for international security.

“I think the people want to be with us,” Trump said in the press room on board the presidential plane.

“I don’t really know what claim Denmark has to it, but it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for the protection of the free world,” he added.

“I think Greenland we’ll get because it has to do with freedom of the world,” Trump continued.

“It has nothing to do with the United States other than that we’re the one that can provide the freedom. They can’t.”

“Seeing a concentration camp with my own eyes and listening to a survivor who went through it all, that’s really brought it home. It’s important for young people like me. We’ll soon be able to vote. The far right is gaining more and more support in Germany and we need to learn from the past.”

Xavier is a 17-year-old German student. I met him at a Holocaust education centre in Dachau, in southern Germany, just around the corner from what was once a Nazi concentration camp of the same name. He and his classmates were spending two days there, learning about their country’s Nazi past and debating its relevance in today’s world.

Eighteen-year-old Melike admitted she didn’t know much about the Holocaust before coming to Dachau. Listening to Eva Umlauf, a survivor, talk about what happened, touched her heart, she said.

She wished racism and intolerance were spoken about more frequently. “I wear a headscarf and people are often disapproving. We need to learn more about one another so we can all live well together.”

Miguel warned of growing racism and antisemitism on social media platforms, including jokes about the Holocaust. “We need to prevent that,” his 17-year-old friend Ida chimed in.

“We are the last generation who can meet and listen to people who survived that tragedy. We have to make sure everyone is informed to stop anything like that ever happening again.”

They are earnest and hopeful. Some might say naive.

Here in Europe, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, societies seem increasingly divided. There’s a rise in support for political parties, often, but not exclusively on the far right and far left, that are quick to point at the Other. The outsider. The unwanted. Be they migrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people or Jews.

“I want everyone to live together, Jewish, Catholic, black, white or whatever,” says Eva Umlauf, the Holocaust survivor who made such an impression on the German teens.

She describes the Holocaust as a warning of what can happen when prejudice takes over.

“That’s why I dedicate my time to talking, talking, talking,” she says. Now in her 80s, she was the youngest inmate to be freed from the Nazi extermination camp, Auschwitz, eight decades ago this Monday. She has written a book about her experiences and, alongside working as a child psychiatrist, she speaks often about the death camps and antisemitism, to audiences at home and abroad.

“Death Mills” is the title of a US war department film, shown to German civilians after the war, edited from allied footage captured when liberating the around 300 concentration camps run by the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945.

Skeletal naked people, with shaven heads and hollow eyes, shuffle and stumble past the camera. One man gnaws at a fleshless bone, clearly desperate for food. Piles of dead bodies are strewn in all corners; emaciated faces forever twisted in open-mouthed screams.

While in warehouse after warehouse, you see carefully labelled gold teeth, reading glasses and shoes belonging to murdered men, women and children. And bundles of hair shaved from female inmates, packed and ready for sale for Nazi profit.

The Nazis used concentration and death camps for the slave labour and mass extermination of people deemed “enemies of the Reich” or simply “Untermenschen” (subhumans). These included, amongst others: ethnic Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, people with disabilities, others labelled as homosexuals and the biggest target of all: European Jews.

In total, six million Jews were murdered in what became known as the Holocaust. Numbers have been calculated based on Nazi documents and pre- and post-war demographic data.

The legal term “genocide” was coined and recognised as an international crime, following the world’s realisation of the extent, and grim intent, of Nazi mass murder which continued with fervour even as they were losing the war. It refers to acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Auschwitz is probably the best-known Nazi camp. Its horrors have come to symbolise the Holocaust as a whole. 1.1 million people were murdered there, among them, a million Jews. Most were poisoned en masse in gas chambers. Their bodies burned in huge crematoria. The ash given to local farmers for use in their fields.

“I was too young to realise much of what was going on at Auschwitz,” Eva told the students. “But what my mind has forgotten, my body remembers.”

The teens listened intently. No-one fidgeted or glanced at their smartphones, as Eva explained she had the number A-26959 tattooed in blue ink on her arm.

Being forcibly tattooed was part of the “process” for every prisoner arriving at Auschwitz who wasn’t immediately gassed to death and instead was selected for forced labour or medical experimentation.

“Why did they choose to tattoo a two-year-old baby?” Eva asks. She says she finds just one answer to that question: that the “superhumans” – the Nazis believed they were creating a superior race – did not think that Jews were human beings.

“We were rats, subhumans, totally dehumanised by this master race. And so it did not matter to them if you were two years old, or 80 years old.”

Recounting the trauma she inherited from her young mother, the loss of every family member from before the Holocaust and the loneliness she felt postwar as a little girl with no grandma to hug her or bake cakes with her, Eva at one point begins to cry silently. Especially when she plays a video of her recently taking part in the annual “March of the Living” at Auschwitz, where survivors walk alongside youngsters from all over Europe, with the mantra “Never Again”.

As they watch her, a number of the teens in Eva’s audience have tears rolling down their cheeks too.

But a short drive away, in the Jewish community centre of Munich, which is guarded by armed police, acting president of the Jewish Community Charlotte Knobloch tells me how worried she is about spiralling modern-day antisemitism.

Born in the early 1930s, Ms Knobloch remembers holding her father’s hand and watching Jewish shop windows smashed and synagogues in flames on Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass in November 1938, when the Nazi regime carried out mass acts of violence against Jews and their property, while most non-Jewish Germans either cheered or looked the other way.

She says antisemitism never disappeared entirely after the war, but she hadn’t believed things would become as worrying again as they are now. Even in Germany, she says, which historically has done much to confront its Nazi past and to be vigilant against antisemitism.

It’s an assertion supported anecdotally by members of the Jewish community in Germany and elsewhere who say they now fear wearing a Star of David in public and prefer not to have a Jewish newspaper delivered to their homes, for fear of being labelled “a Jew” by their neighbours.

Studies by the Community Security Trust in the UK and the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency tell the same story. The FRA says 96% of Jews interviewed across 13 European countries report experiencing antisemitism in everyday life.

Jewish communities in South America note a significant uptick in antisemitism too, while in Canada, a synagogue was firebombed a few weeks ago and there was a shooting incident at a Jewish school. In the US last summer, Jewish graves were desecrated in the city of Cincinnati.

Former President Joe Biden identified global antisemitism as a foreign policy concern. Academic Deborah Lipstadt, who was his special envoy for monitoring and combating it, highlights antisemitism online – often along with Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination – which she says are manipulated by outside actors like Russia, Iran and China to sow division in society and to further their own goals and messaging.

She also speaks of a global rise in antisemitism following Israel’s military response in Gaza which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians – after the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people inside Israel on 7 October 2023.

Prof Lipstadt says Israel’s military actions are often blamed on Jewish people in general. All Jews cannot be held responsible for the decisions of the government of Israel, she says. That is racism.

The Amadeu Antonio Foundation, which collects information on antisemitic incidents in Germany, lists an incident last month where red-lettered graffiti was daubed on a church and the town hall in the town of Langenau, calling both for a boycott of Israel and the gassing of Jews – a reference to the Nazi gas chambers of the Holocaust.

Auschwitz and the Holocaust didn’t begin with poison gas. Their roots were in the othering of Jews that goes back centuries in Europe.

The CEO of the Conference of European Rabbis, Gady Gronich warns the targeting of minorities is now again becoming mainstream. The Muslim community is bearing the brunt right now, he says, also describing himself as shocked at the levels of antisemitism he sees.

He thinks 80 years on from World War Two, some are intentionally choosing to leave the Holocaust and the responsibility to learn from it in the past.

But the past will not be silenced. Near the Polish city of Gdansk, under snow-covered leaves covering the forest floor, you still find the discarded remains of shoes, belonging to victims of the Holocaust.

There are soles so tiny, partially buried under the earth, their murdered owners must have been young children. The stitching on some bits of leather are still plain to see. Millions of shoes were sent here to a leather factory, run by slave labour at what was then Stutthof concentration camp.

The shoes came from all over Nazi-occupied territory. But mainly, it’s believed, from Auschwitz.

“For me, these shoes are screaming. They are shouting: we were alive 80 years ago!” Polish musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski tells me. He’s a long-time campaigner for the shoes to be salvaged and put on display, alongside others already in the concentration camp museum. The shoes’ message is anti-war and anti-discrimination, says Gregor. And should be heard.

“These shoes belonged to people. You know, they could be our shoes, right? Your shoes, or my shoes, or my wife’s shoes, or my son’s shoes. These shoes are asking for attention, not only to preserve them, but to change ourselves (as human beings) in a moral way. I was pretty sure things would be very different in 2025 to how they are.”

This year’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz is seen as particularly significant. It’s possibly the last big anniversary that eyewitnesses and survivors will be alive to tell us what happened – and to ask us: what are we remembering today and which lessons have we already clearly forgotten?

In a powerful personal account, Fergal Keane reflects on living with PTSD, depression and his search for balance in life. What he has discovered along the way is a deeper study of happiness that can apply to those with serious mental health challenges, but also to those simply in need of a lift.

There was a moment, nearly two years ago, when the change inside hit me with force. I was walking with a loved one on the eastern edge of Curragh beach in Ardmore, County Waterford, a place of warm refuge since I was a child. We paused beside a river that flows into Ardmore Bay. I was listening to the different sounds the water made – the swift rush of the river, the surf crashing on the shoreline.

Suddenly there was the sound of air being displaced by dozens of wings. A flock of Brent geese came sweeping over the cliff, riding the wind towards the sky. I felt a lightness inside, and such gratitude that I laughed out loud.

“So, this is how it feels,” I thought.

To borrow and turn around the words of the novelist, Milan Kundera, I felt a wonderful “lightness of being”.

That moment came back to me this week. I was thinking about the Blue Monday phenomenon – the January day that is said to be the saddest of the year.

As anyone who knows clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will tell you, there are no specific days of the year for sadness. It can be the brightest day, in the loveliest place, and you still feel like your mind is trapped in permafrost.

But Blue Monday did prompt me to reflect on happiness. What is it anyway? What does it mean in my life?

Not long before that day of the beautiful geese, I had come out of an emotional breakdown. It was March 2023, and I felt as if I had gone 12 rounds with a heavyweight prize-fighter. But the person I’d fought was myself. As I had done for decades.

I had experienced several hospitalisations over the decades, stretching back to the early 90s. I fought a relentless battle with shame, fear, anger, denial – all these things that are the opposite of happy. There were grey, terrifying days. Every branch bare, even in deep summer. And nights waking drenched in sweat, waking to obsessive rumination, bad dreams leaking into the dawn.

Add in recovery from alcoholism at the end of the 90s, and I’ve done plenty of research into the dark nights of the soul.

By the time of the 2023 breakdown I had gone past the point of hoping for happiness. In those days I would have settled for a little peace of mind. In 2019, I had stepped back from my job as the BBC’s Africa Editor due to my struggles with PTSD.

Two years later I wrote a book on the subject and made a television documentary for the BBC. Yet, even after all that, I experienced another breakdown.

Professor Bruce Hood, of the University of Bristol, speaks of the human tendency “to blow things out of proportion…[focusing] on our own failings or inadequacies”. He runs ten-week courses at Bristol on the science of happiness and talks about the need to find balance because, as he puts it, “our minds are biased to interpret things very negatively”.

This certainly resonates with me. A caveat, however: Professor Hood’s area is addressing feelings of general low wellbeing, and he’s clear that focusing on the science of happiness will not necessarily be a cure all for someone with a condition such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) .

I have a specific diagnosis. In 2008 doctors first told me I had PTSD based on multiple instances of trauma as a war reporter, but also rooted in the circumstances of childhood in a home broken by alcoholism. Depression and anxiety were both major parts of that condition. As was addiction to alcohol. I escaped also into the exhilarating energy, camaraderie, and sense of purpose that went with reporting conflict.

I would also stress that what works for me as I try to find happiness, may not definitely work for everyone else. There are specific mental health conditions that require equally specific treatments. With PTSD, a combination of therapies helped me greatly, along with the fellowship of others who had similar experiences.

Medication also ameliorated the physical symptoms of anxiety and hypervigilance. A dropped plate, a backfiring car could reduce me to a pale, shaking, sweating wreck in seconds. Likewise, the nightmares which could leave me thrashing in my sleep.

I am privileged. I have had access to the best treatment. There are so many in our society who do not. According to the British Medical Association more than one million people are waiting to access treatment. It’s also important to recognise that there are numerous social, economic and cultural factors that influence our ability to experience happiness.

There is an ongoing study of genetic predisposition to depression and addiction. The World Wellbeing Movement (WWM), a charity promoting wellbeing in business and public policy decision-making, says that one in eight people in Britain live below what it called the Happiness Poverty Line – this is measured using data supplied by the annual reports of the Office for National Statistics, and based on the question – on a scale of 0 to 10: ‘Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’

The WWM describes the one in eight figure as “staggering” and says there are “worrying issues related to mental health [that] remain unaddressed and underfunded”.

Having expressed my caveats, I hope there are things in my experience, the tools for recovery I have been generously given, that might help people who are struggling with the loneliness of depression or the turmoil of PTSD, or just struggling with the normal pain of life from time to time.

In my experience, the secret to happiness is that… there is no secret. It’s out there in plain sight, all around us, waiting to be found. But it is not ever present. It is not the natural everyday condition of humanity; no more than depression or rage are.

As the American psychotherapist, Whitney Goodman, author of ‘Toxic Positivity: How to embrace every emotion in a happy-obsessed world’ puts it: “Anyone that is fixated on making you feel happy all the time is selling you snake oil in my opinion. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work… telling people that they just need to be happy, to manifest different thoughts, I think it would have worked by now.”

I spent years sitting in therapists’ chairs, and sometimes looking out the windows of psychiatric wards, hoping for the perfect cure that would fix my head and battered spirit.

For me loneliness was the defining characteristic of my mental health problems. I went deep into myself and found nothing to love or admire. I shut the door.

The answer didn’t arrive in a blinding flash of light. If I could pick one thing that made the greatest difference – after I had been stabilised with treatment – it was, and always will be, work. Not the work that drove me to a near constant state of exhaustion as I chased scoops and prizes so vital to my insecure ego.

Note to all who get their validation from work: the workaholic is the most accepted addict of all. In fact, he and she are celebrated. Why would you want to change when the bosses and society applaud you? Work is the great permissive addiction.

The work I am talking about is very different. Nobody will tell you what a brave, talented person you are for doing the work of real happiness. But you will feel it in the reactions of people you love, the gratitude of waking up without a sense of dread, the awareness of beauty around you. And knowing you will keep your commitments, and live as a person who doesn’t just talk about caring for people but does their best to live that talk.

One night in hospital, in 2023, having been admitted with PTSD, I watched a documentary in which the American psychotherapist, Phil Stutz, spoke of three fundamental truths to be accepted by people struggling with mental health problems: that life can be full of pain, full of change, and that living with these things needs constant work.

I was exhausted from suffering. But I was also willing to do whatever work I could to find peace of mind. The happiness came later.

What did I do? A lot of simple stuff at first.

I wrote a gratitude list every morning. My daily accounting of the good in my life. I read more poetry because it calms me down. I went for long walks with the dog by the River Thames and in Richmond Park. I even started to meditate – a miracle for a man who could rarely sit still for more than five minutes. I went to the movies more. I did simple domestic chores. Not the kitchen cameos of past days, but regularly cleaning, washing, cooking, paying the bills. Wonder of wonders, I could do it!

I made more time for friendship. And for love, of the people who mattered most to me. I listened where before I might only have pontificated. I worked very hard to shut up when someone wanted to express a resentment, instead of letting the childhood habits of defensiveness take over.

I offered to help others who were struggling. Those in recovery from addiction will know the maxim about sobriety: “To keep it you have to give it away.” Likewise, happiness.

The Finnish philosopher, Frank Martela, from Aalta University, suggests acts of kindness as part of the solution.

As it happens Finland is number one on the World Happiness Index. “Connect with others and connect with yourself,” he says.

“Connect with others through social relationships… doing good things to other people, contributing through your work or through small acts of kindness.”

There was a wonderful old friend of mine, Gordon Duncan, an addiction counsellor, who first alerted me to the fact that I had a lot of anger built up inside me, and that this drove my drinking and depression. We clashed a lot in the first weeks that we knew each other, but over time became the closest mates.

When he was dying in hospital, I visited one day, and saw that he had lapsed into a coma. Neither of us were particularly religious, but I whispered in his ear a prayer that was dear to us both:

I don’t know if he could hear me. I suspect probably not. But I remembered something he used to say to me when I was heading down into the depths. “You’re stronger than you think, son. Stronger than you think.”

I pass it on to all who are suffering in their minds. For me, I know things can change fast. There are no guarantees. Of happiness or anything else. But I accept that.

The American writer, Raymond Carver, who survived alcoholism to write some of the most beautiful poems about grief, and happiness, left a short poem before he died from cancer, aged just 50. It was his epitaph, and I think it sums up the whole quest for happiness.

I will wake tomorrow and be glad to open the curtains, and drink coffee and think of those I love who are near and far. And then I will get back to work, the real deep work that goes on every day.

The Trump administration has fired at least a dozen federal watchdogs late on Friday evening, a possibly illegal move that could face court challenges.

Speaking from the Senate floor on Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described the watchdog firings as a “chilling purge”.

“These firings are Donald Trump’s way of telling us he is terrified of accountability and is hostile to facts and to transparency,” said Schumer, a Democrat from New York.

The White House has not confirmed the firings and did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Affected inspectors general were sent emails from the director of presidential personnel overnight on Friday telling them that “due to changing priorities, your position as inspector general… is terminated, effective immediately”, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The group of dismissed watchdogs includes the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, and the inspector general of the Small Business Administration, CBS said.

There were competing lists of fired watchdogs circulating, according to the New York Times. Watchdogs at the departments of agriculture, commerce, defence, education, housing and urban development, interior, labor, transportation and veterans affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency were all reportedly considered.

It is unclear whom the Trump administration might pick to fill the newly vacant positions.

Congress created inspectors general in the wake of the Watergate scandal, as part of a wave of reforms intended to curb corruption, waste and fraud. The independent watchdogs – who work within federal agencies but are not controlled by the head of those agencies – are meant to serve as a guard against mismanagement and abuse of power.

Though they are presidential appointees, they are expected to be nonpartisan.

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The firings may be in breach of a law that requires the White House to give Congress 30-day notice and case-specific information before dismissing a federal inspector general.

Hannibal Ware, the inspector general of the Small Business Administration and head of a council of the watchdog across agencies sent a letter to Sergio Gor, the head of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel suggesting the dismissals were invalid.

“I recommend that you reach out to White House your intended course of action,” Ware wrote. “At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed inspectors general.”

In a separate statement released on Saturday afternoon, Ware wrote that dismissals “inconsistent with the law” were a grave threat to to the independence of inspectors general.

“IGs [inspectors general] are not immune from removal,” he wrote. “However, the law must be followed to protect independent government oversight for America.”

Democrats were quick to criticise the president for the move.

Schumer said the move was a “preview of the lawless approach” Trump and his administration were taking.

Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, called the firings a “Friday night coup” and an “attack on transparency and accountability”.

He and 20 other Democratic members of congress wrote a letter directly to President Trump which expressed “grave concern” for the dismissals and urged him to reconsider.

“Your actions violate the law, attack our democracy, and undermine the safety of the American people,” the representatives wrote, a group that included Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Zoe Lofgren of California, and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.

Some Republican lawmakers, including Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Senator Susan Collins of Maine also expressed concern over the purge.

“I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission it is to root out waste, fraud and abuse,” Collins said at the Capitol on Saturday. “I don’t understand it.”

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It began with a short email from a stranger asking for help and it ended six years later with a violent fraudster and rapist being jailed for 12 years – thanks to an incredible group of women and their fight for justice.

It was 2017 and I was working as a newspaper reporter when I got the email from a woman who detailed how she had met a man named Christopher Harkins on Tinder and he had stolen £3,247 from her.

Lisa, who is using a pseudonym because she doesn’t want to be linked to this story forever, explained that Harkins had lovebombed her, suggested they go on holiday together and then, when she transferred the money, went quiet.

It quickly transpired the holiday wasn’t real and Harkins would not refund the cash.

Lisa was afraid Harkins would go on to scam someone else. It didn’t occur to Lisa – or to me – that it was a scam he had already honed with experience.

Lisa had gone to Police Scotland for help and been told the issue was a civil matter.

Frustrated, but determined, now she wanted to protect other people by exposing this man in the press.

We spoke on the phone and she laid out the situation, how he’d overwhelmed her with attention, had been the perfect gentleman. And how things had quickly changed when he decided to push her for money.

Lisa, a smart, impressive, professional woman in her 30s, provided screenshots of WhatsApp conversations and bank account details.

It was clear very quickly that this man was a master manipulator but it wasn’t until I spoke to him on the phone that I realised how skilled he was at the practice.

Tracking him down was the hard part.

Lisa had told Harkins that she had spoken to a journalist and he was, let’s say, unimpressed.

He promised repeatedly to give her the money back if she put a stop to the story – but didn’t actually make a move to return the cash.

When I called him – on the two numbers I had for him – he didn’t reply.

Lisa’s story was credible, and she had hard evidence, but we wanted to speak to Harkins to hear his side.

Suddenly, Lisa was in touch to say Harkins had agreed to return her money. She was to meet him at a chip shop on the south side of Glasgow.

I went with her, waiting outside with a photographer to try to speak to Harkins.

The money was there in an envelope. There was no sign of him though.

We decided to publish the story, having tried all we could to track him down. And then my phone rang. It was Harkins.

Speaking to him was a baffling experience. It was hard to keep him on track.

He would state one thing and then, when challenged, very quickly change his position.

He tried to persuade me that Lisa was threatening him and he was frightened of her.

Harkins had had his chance to have his say – and we published the story.

Within the hour of the article going online I had an email from another woman claiming to have been targeted by Harkins. And then another.

My phone started ringing. I could tell as soon as I picked it up that this would be another Harkins target – he clearly had a type: smart and articulate.

Lisa, who I was updating all the time, was appalled. Neither of us had any idea who prolific he might have been.

Some women wanted to tell their stories publicly while others just wanted an outlet to share what had happened to them.

I heard stories of fraud, of manipulation, of verbal abuse – and worse.

One caller was a man who had known Harkins in his early 20s and warned me to be careful.

He claimed to have known Harkins to be physically violent and wanted me to know what I was dealing with.

We ran a second story in the paper.

This was another woman who had been conned by the holiday scam – this time in England. Harkins, in turned out, had been operating across the country.

She lost £1,600 to the fake holiday con and had also been pressured to take out loans for him, which luckily she didn’t do.

More than 20 women had contacted me by now and I had interviewed several who wanted to go public, hearing dreadful stories of fraud but also physical and sexual violence.

Many had gone to the police only to be told – as Lisa had been – that this was a civil matter.

Then, Police Scotland contacted me. They said that they were going to investigate and could we please stop writing about Harkins so as not to tip him off to how much was known about him.

Not wanting to jeopardise any case, we agreed.

Women I had interviewed were contacted by Police Scotland and several decided to make formal complaints.

They knew it was going to be a long and gruelling process – but they wanted this man taken off the streets.

Months passed and the wait for the women was intensely stressful.

Finally, in December 2019, he was arrested. We all thought this was the beginning of the end and the women relaxed a little.

In early 2020 my phone rang. It was a woman in London.

This woman said that she had stayed with Harkins in a five star hotel in an upmarket part of the city.

A receptionist at the hotel had taken her aside and told her the man she was with was using a false name, was in fact called Christopher Harkins and she should Google him.

The woman told me she found my articles online and read them, with increasing horror.

I listened with my heart in my mouth as she told me she went back to their room, where Harkins was still asleep, and took his wallet from his bag.

His bank card said Christopher Harkins. She took her belongings and left.

Knowing, at that time, what I knew about Harkins’ other behaviour, which wasn’t in the public domain, I had such an overwhelming feeling of relief that he hadn’t woken up.

He scammed another woman in London, and she went to the Metropolitan Police, who acted quickly.

He was convicted and jailed, which was both a relief to the women in Scotland and a frustration.

The English proceedings meant the impending trial in Scotland would be delayed. Again.

Just before Harkins was imprisoned in England he called my editor to complain that I was orchestrating a campaign against him because I was obsessed with him. That took a bit of explaining.

The delays were intensely stressful to the women involved in the case but they were determined to see it through.

Their bravery and solidarity was incredible to witness.

When the case called at the High Court in Paisley last year I attended every day of court.

Harkins by now was a diminished figure. I’d seen him years before in the High Court in Glasgow and he had been a muscular, imposing man.

Now he was thinner, his court suit too big. He was a man obsessed by appearance and I can only think his baggy shirts and mismatched shoes and trousers caused him stress.

Harkins was found guilty of 19 offences including rape, assault, recording an intimate video without consent, threatening and abusive behaviour and four other sexual offences.

He also admitted defrauding nine women out of more than £214,000.

In July last year Harkins was sentenced to 12 years in prison. As he was handcuffed to be led to the cells, he turned to look at me in the gallery.

“This is because of you,” he said. No. This was because of the women who were brave enough to stand up to him.

If there is anything to be taken from story of Christopher Harkins, it is the determination of these women and the way they held their nerve for years, standing together as a force Harkins that, in the end, could not reckon with.

Sir Paul McCartney has told the BBC proposed changes to copyright law could allow “rip off” technology that might make it impossible for musicians and artists to make a living.

The government is considering an overhaul of the law that would allow AI developers to use creators’ content on the internet to help develop their models, unless the rights holders opt out.

In a rare interview for Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Sir Paul said “when we were kids in Liverpool, we found a job that we loved, but it also paid the bills”, warning the proposals could remove the incentive for writers and artists and result in a “loss of creativity”.

The government said it aimed to deliver legal certainty through a copyright regime that provided creators with “real control” and transparency.

Sir Paul, one of the two surviving members of the Beatles, said there was a risk that AI would create a “Wild West” in which artists’ copyright is not properly protected.

“You get young guys, girls, coming up, and they write a beautiful song, and they don’t own it,” he said.

“They don’t have anything to do with it. And anyone who wants can just rip it off.

“The truth is, the money’s going somewhere. Somebody’s getting paid, so why shouldn’t it be the guy who sat down and wrote Yesterday?”

He appealed to the government to think again about its plans, saying: “We’re the people, you’re the government! You’re supposed to protect us. That’s your job.

“So you know, if you’re putting through a bill, make sure you protect the creative thinkers, the creative artists, or you’re not going to have them.”

In 2023, Sir Paul and Beatles drummer Sir Ringo Starr used AI to extract the vocals from an unfinished demo left by John Lennon to produce a new song, Now and Then.

The song, billed as the Beatles’ final release, drew widespread praise and has been nominated for two Grammys and a Brit award.

“I think AI is great, and it can do lots of great things,” Sir Paul said.

“We took an old cassette of John’s and cleaned his voice up so it sounded like it had just been recorded yesterday. So it has its uses.

“But it shouldn’t rip creative people off. There’s no sense in that.”

The government is currently consulting on proposals that would allow AI companies to use material that is available online without respecting copyright if they are using it for text or data mining.

Generative AI programmes mine, or learn, from vast amounts of data like text, images, or music online to generate new content which feels like it has been made by a human.

The proposals would give artists or creators a so called “rights reservation” – the ability to opt out.

But critics of the plan believe it is not possible for an individual writer or artist to notify thousands of different AI service providers that they do not want their content used in that way, or to monitor what has happened to their work across the whole internet.

An alternative proposal for artists to opt in to give their permission for their content to be used will be put forward in the House of Lords by cross bench peer Baroness Kidron this week.

Tom Kiehl, chief executive of music industry body UK Music, said: “Government plans to change copyright law to make it easier for AI firms to use the music of artists, composers and music companies without their permission put the music industry at a huge risk.

“It would be a wild punt against the creative sector that is already contributing over £120bn to the economy and be counterproductive to the government’s own growth ambitions.

“There is no evidence that creatives can effectively ‘opt out’ of their work from being trained by AI systems and so this apparent concession does not provide any reassurance to those that work in music.”

A government spokesperson said that the UK’s music industry was “truly world class” and had produced “some of the most celebrated artists in history”.

“That is why we have launched a consultation to ensure the UK copyright framework offers strong protections for artists with regards to AI,” they said.

“Our aim is to deliver legal certainty through a copyright regime that provides creators with real control, transparency, and helps them licence their content.”

The spokesperson added the government was “keen to hear the views of the music industry on these proposals” and would “only move forward once we are confident that we are delivering clarity, control and transparency for artists and the sector, alongside appropriate access to data for AI innovators”.

Sir Paul recently finished his Got Back tour, which saw the 82-year-old play in France, Spain and Brazil before ending at London’s O2 Arena.

Since taking office on Monday, President Donald Trump has announced a flurry of immigration-related executive orders, paving way for a widespread effort to crack down on undocumented migrants in the US.

In more than 21 actions, Trump has moved to overhaul parts of the US immigration system, including how migrants are processed and deported from the US.

The White House has since publicised some of these efforts. On Friday, the new White House Press Secretary shared images of deportation flights being carried out by military cargo planes.

While Trump has promised “mass deportations” and arrests, it remains unclear how much of his plan is already being implemented.

Here is a breakdown of some of the significant actions taken by Trump on immigration in his first week, and how they compare to past policies.

A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants out of the US and the promise of “mass deportations”.

To that effect, the Department of Defence has said that it will provide military aircrafts to deport more than 5,000 people that have been detained by Border Patrol in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.

ICE statistics show that over 1,000 people were removed or repatriated on Thursday, the fourth day of the Trump administration.

Trump has also moved to expand the scope of expedited deportations of undocumented migrants, reviving a policy under his first term that Biden had discontinued.

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Expedited removals were previously limited to areas within 100 miles (160km) of US international borders, and applied to those who did not request asylum or failed to show a legitimate case for asylum.

With Trump’s changes, these removals can now occur anywhere in the US, and will apply to undocumented migrants who can’t prove that they have been in the country for more than two years.

Deportations are not unique to the Trump administration.

Biden carried out deportations as well, with 271,000 immigrants deported to 192 countries in fiscal year 2024. This amounts to around 740 a day, making the current preliminary figures under Trump slightly higher.

In total, Biden carried out 1.5 million deportations in his four years, according to figures by the Migration Policy Institute. That is around the same that was carried out under Trump’s first term.

That number is lower than deportations carried out under Barack Obama’s first term, which added up to a total of 2.9 million.

The Pentagon announced on Wednesday the deployment of 1,500 active duty troops to the southern US border. This is in addition to 2,500 active-duty personnel already there, officials said – marking a 60% increase in Army troops in the area.

The troops will fly helicopters to help Border Patrol agents with monitoring, said acting Defense Secretary Robert Salesses. They will also help in the construction of barriers to stop migrants from coming in.

Salesses signalled that “this is just the beginning” and more troops may be sent soon.

Officials added that a number of additional “border enforcement missions” are in development, without providing specifics.

Biden also deployed active-duty troops to the border, which were used to assist Border Patrol with primarily administrative tasks ahead of the expiration of Title 42, a public health order that was used to expel migrants quickly during Covid-19.

Border crossings significantly dropped in Biden’s final year as president. In December 2024 – the last full month of the Biden administration – about 47,330 migrant apprehensions were recorded, down from a high of nearly 250,000 in December 2023.

The figures are lower than the monthly averages in Trump’s first term, before the Covid-19 pandemic. In May 2019, for example, border patrol agents recorded 132,800 migrant encounters.

In an executive order, Trump suspended the entry of all undocumented migrants to the US, and border patrol agents have been instructed to turn people away without granting them asylum hearings.

Before the order, migrants were able to arrive at the US border and had the legal right to seek asylum.

In June 2024, however, the Biden administration issued its own executive order that temporarily suspended the right to seek asylum for those who did not arrive at an official point of entry, or without an appointment using CBP One, a mobile application. In September, asylum restrictions were tightened further.

Trump has also halted the US refugee resettlement programme. Under Biden in 2024, the US accepted more than 100,000 refugees – its highest since 1995.

He also ended a major Biden-era programme that allowed up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to fly into the US on humanitarian grounds.

The “Remain in Mexico” policy from Trump’s first-term will be reinstated as well. This forced non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their asylum claims in the US were resolved. It impacted around 71,000 people under Trump’s first term.

The controversial policy was regularly criticised by immigration advocates, who said that the migrants were often left in Mexico for months and sometimes were preyed upon by criminal gangs.

There is an estimated backlog of 3.6m cases in US immigration courts, and migrants often have to wait years. Many have been left wondering whether those cases will still be heard.

Trump has fired several top immigration court officials since taking office, however, which may impact the processing of those cases.

A big change that was felt almost immediately after Trump took office is the scrapping of the CBP One smartphone app, which migrants were able to use to schedule appointments with US border patrol agents.

The CBP One app was launched by the Biden administration as a way to organise and streamline the entry of migrants who are fleeing prosecution.

Some 30,000 people were said to be stranded inside Mexico since the app was taken down – all of them with scheduled appointments that are now cancelled.

About 270,000 migrants were estimated to be on the Mexican side of the border waiting to get appointments through the app, according to government figures obtained by CBS, the BBC’s US partner.

The move was met with anguish by migrants who had travelled long journeys to the border, and who had waited months to secure those appointments.

Advocates say that, with its removal, there is now no practical pathway to protection for arriving migrants.

The American Civil Liberties Union has since filed a legal challenge against the app’s closure.

Mexico is anticipating an influx of migrants from Trump’s deportation orders, and has started building giant tent shelters in nine border cities to temporarily house them.

Municipal official Enrique Licon of Ciudad Juárez – a city that borders El Paso, Texas – told Reuters that these shelters will be able to house thousands of people and should be ready in a few days, calling the effort “unprecedented”.

The shelters will provide people food, medical care and assistance in getting identification documents. A fleet of buses will also be at the ready to help transport Mexicans back to their hometowns.

It is part of a larger effort called “Mexico Embraces You”, a government-wide campaign to welcome citizens who may be deported from the US and help them reintegrate in their home country.

Other nearby nations – like Guatemala – are launching similar efforts to absorb their deportees.

But some have raised concerns about whether Mexico and others will be ready to handle the number of people that may be coming their way.

Many of the migrants are also fleeing political turmoil or criminal violence in their home countries, raising questions about whether they’ll be safe if they return.

Some of Trump’s executive orders were signed with the aim of expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) ability to arrest and detain unlawful migrants on US soil.

One of them reverses a longstanding guideline that prohibited immigration raids in areas deemed “sensitive”, such as schools, hospitals and churches.

Another calls for an expansion of a programme that allows ICE to delegate its immigration enforcement duties to state and local police.

It remains unclear how many raids have taken place since inauguration day.

Cities have braced themselves for the large-scale raids promised by Trump, but sources have told US media that ICE has only been conducting “routine operations” so far.

White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that 538 arrests have been conducted on Thursday.

For comparison, ICE detained more than 149,700 in the 2024 fiscal year under the Biden administration, which equals an average of 409 a day.

In the shadow of a vast crucifix, labourers and construction workers in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez are building a small city of their own. A tent city.

On the old fairgrounds, beneath an altar constructed for a mass by Pope Francis in 2016, the Mexican government is preparing for thousands of deportees they expect to arrive from the United States in the coming weeks.

Juarez is one of eight border locations along the 3,000-kilometre-long (1,900 miles) border where Mexico is getting ready for the anticipated influx.

Men in boots and baseball caps climb on top of a vast metal structure to drape over thick white tarpaulin, erecting a rudimentary shelter to temporarily house men and women exactly like themselves.

Casual labourers, domestic workers, kitchen staff and farm hands are all likely to be among those sent south soon, once what President Donald Trump calls “the largest deportation in American history” gets under way.

As well as protection from the elements, the deportees will receive food, medical care, and assistance in obtaining Mexican identity documents, under a deportee-support programme which President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration calls “Mexico Embraces You”.

“Mexico will do everything necessary to care for its compatriots and will allocate whatever is necessary to receive those who are repatriated,” said the Mexican Interior Minister, Rosa Icela Rodriguez, on the day of Trump’s inauguration.

For her part, President Sheinbaum has stressed her government will first attend to the humanitarian needs of those returning, saying they will qualify for her government’s social programmes and pensions, and will immediately be eligible to work.

She urged Mexicans to “remain calm and keep a cool head” about relations with President Trump and his administration more broadly – from deportations to the threat of tariffs.

“With Mexico, I think we are going very well,” said President Trump in a video address to the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The two neighbours may yet find a workable solution on immigration which is acceptable to both – President Sheinbaum has said the key is dialogue and keeping the channels of communication open.

Undoubtedly, though, she recognises the potential stress President Trump’s declaration of an emergency at the US border could place on Mexico.

An estimated 5 million undocumented Mexicans currently live in the United States and the prospect of a mass return could quickly saturate and overwhelm border cities like Juarez and Tijuana.

It’s an issue which worries Jose Maria Garcia Lara, the director of the Juventud 2000 migrant shelter in Tijuana. As he shows me around the facility, which is already nearing its capacity, he says there are very few places he can fit more families.

“If we have to, we can maybe put some people in the kitchen or the library,” he says.

There comes a point, though, where there simply isn’t any space left – and donations of food, medical supplies, blankets and hygiene products will be stretched too thin.

“We’re being hit on two fronts. Firstly, the arrival of Mexicans and other migrants who are fleeing violence,” says Mr Garcia.

“But also, we’ll have the mass deportations. We don’t know how many people will come across the border needing our help. Together, these two things could create a huge problem.”

Furthermore, another key part of Mr Trump’s executive orders includes a policy called “Remain in Mexico” under which immigrants awaiting dates to make their asylum cases in a US immigration court would have to stay in Mexico ahead of those appointments.

When “Remain in Mexico” was previously in place, during Trump’s first term and under the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, Mexican border towns struggled to cope.

Human rights groups also repeatedly denounced the risks the migrants were being exposed to by being forced to wait in dangerous cities where drug cartel-related crime is rife.

This time around, Sheinbaum has made it clear that Mexico has not agreed to the plan and won’t accept any non-Mexican asylum seekers from the US as they wait for their asylum hearings. Clearly, “Remain in Mexico” only works if Mexico is willing to comply with it. So far, it has drawn a line.

President Trump has deployed around 2,500 troops to the US southern border where they will be tasked with carrying out some of the logistics of his crackdown.

In Tijuana, meanwhile, Mexican soldiers are helping to prepare for the consequences of it. The authorities have readied an events centre called Flamingos with 1,800 beds for the returnees and troops bringing in supplies, setting up a kitchen and showers.

As President Trump was signing executive orders on Monday, a minibus swept through the gates at the Chaparral border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana carrying a handful of deportees.

A few journalists had gathered to try to speak to, ostensibly, the first deportees of the Trump era. It was just a routine deportation, though, one which was probably in the pipeline for weeks and had nothing to do with the documents Trump was signing before a cheering crowd in Washington DC.

Still, symbolically, as the minibus sped past the waiting media towards a government-run shelter, these were the first of many.

Mexico will have its work cut out to receive them, house them and find them a place in a nation some won’t have seen since they left as children.

Four female Israeli soldiers were released by Hamas on Saturday in the second hostage release of the Gaza ceasefire deal.

Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag were handed to the Red Cross in Gaza City.

In exchange 200 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel are set to be freed.

The four women were serving as observers at the Nahal Oz army base on the border with Gaza when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, 2023.

Their release is part of the second such exchange since the ceasefire came into effect last Sunday. Three hostages and 90 Palestinian prisoners were released in the first swap.

In total, 33 hostages are set to be freed over six weeks in the first phase of the ceasefire, which came into effect on 19 January, 2025.

About 1,200 people were killed in the 7 October attack and 251 were taken back to Gaza as hostages.

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

Karina Ariev, 20, was serving at the Nahal Oz army base when she was kidnapped on 7 October, 2023.

Her sister Alexandra told the BBC she heard shooting as Karina called her during the attack, and later saw a video showing Karina being taken away in a vehicle.

“She called me to say goodbye, we could hear shooting,” she said.

“She was scared, crying, she was in panic. Her last message was ‘they’re here’, in the bomb shelter. This was the last contact we had with her.”

Alexandra then saw the video circulating on Telegram of her kidnapping. “We identified her, she had blood on her face, she was screaming.

“I would never wish anyone to feel this feeling,” she told the BBC. “Time has stopped.”

After her release, her family described her as a “symbol of courage, heart, and determination, and we are proud of her beyond words”.

“After 477 tumultuous days of pain, worry, and endless anxiety – we finally got to embrace our beloved Karina, hear her voice, and see her smile that once again fills us with light,” the statement read.

Naama Levy, 20, was filmed being bundled into a jeep, her hands tied behind her back. The footage was released by Hamas and circulated widely on social media. According to her mother, the teenager had just begun her military service.

But she had previously been part of an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative, and her family called her “a peace seeker”.

In a video of her kidnapping from the Nahal Oz army base, she was heard to tell her captors in English: “I have friends in Palestine.”

In May 2024 her brother, Amit, said her family released the footage to “encourage all sides to get back to the table” to solve “an unbearable humanitarian issue”.

“We feel like she’s handling the situation like the true superhero she is, like a hero fighting for her life.”

Daniella Gilboa, 20, was injured in the leg when she was kidnapped along with other female soldiers at Nahal Oz.

She has been seen in several videos, and in one last year asked the Israeli government why she had been “abandoned” and “discarded” while war raged around her.

Ms Gilboa’s mother, Orly, told the Jerusalem Post that the video showed her daughter was “strong and determined” and that wounds suffered on 7 October were not as serious as first feared. However, she said she was concerned about her “poor mental state”.

Meanwhile, her boyfriend’s father told Maariv that his son awaits her return – and planned to propose.

“My son asked her parents for her hand in marriage, to which they answered yes, even though they are only 19-20 years old. Right after that, he shouted to the sky – ‘I’m going to propose to you!'” the father said.

“He prays that she will come back soon and be reunited with him and her family.”

After her release, her family said she had “survived 477 days in the hell of Gaza and has finally returned to our family’s embrace”.

“How we’ve prayed for this moment!” the statement said.

The family went on to thank Israelis for their “prayers and support during this time”, adding “we couldn’t have made it through without you”.

Liri Albag was 18 and had just started military training as an Army lookout when Hamas attacked the Nahal Oz base on 7 October 2023.

Her cousin Aya Albag, a corporal in the army, said she had told her she was “proud” of her passing her observation course before she went to the base

“She was motivated and so happy that she was assigned to Nahal Oz,” she told the Jerusalem Post. “She began her role on Thursday, and a day and a half later, on Saturday morning, she was kidnapped.”

Her family say that she has managed to pass messages back to them through released hostages.

In January 2024, footage of Albag was released by Hamas.

“I’m only 19 years old. I have my entire life in front of me, but now my entire life has been put on pause,” she is heard to say.

“The world is starting to forget about us. No one cares about us. We’re living in a nightmare.”

Three female Israeli hostages were already released as part of the latest ceasefire and hostage release deal.

Romi Gonen, 24, was captured as she tried to escape the Nova music festival when it was targeted by the militant group as part of the 7 October 2023 attack.

She was freed alongside Doron Steinbrecher, 31, a veterinary nurse, and Emily Damari, 28, who holds dual British-Israeli nationality.

All three arrived back in Israel on Sunday after being released by Hamas in Gaza, and were reunited with their families.

Romi had travelled from her home in Kfar Veradim, northern Israel, to the Nova festival, which took place in the Negev Desert in the south.

More than 360 people were killed at the festival when Hamas fighters crossed over the border, 2km (1.3 miles) to the west. The desert landscape offered partygoers limited cover and exit routes were blocked by gunmen.

When sirens sounded as the attack unfolded, Romi called her family. Her mother, Meirav, recalled hearing shots and shouting in Arabic in the final call with her daughter.

Romi was ambushed by Hamas militants as she tried to flee.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said Romi had gone to the festival “to do what she loved, to dance” – something she had studied for 12 years, starring in solo performances and becoming an “amazing choreographer”.

A video posted by the families’ forum last November described her as “the girl with the biggest smile, the brightest light, the greatest friend”.

The forum also said that Romi’s bedroom at her home “remains exactly as it was when she left”, awaiting her return.

In a video clip shared by the Israeli military, Romi’s father was seen jumping in the air before breaking down in tears as he watched footage of his daughter’s release on Sunday.

Doron, a 31-year-old veterinary nurse, was abducted from her apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza – near Gaza’s north-western border – when Hamas attacked.

The community, one of many Israeli villages along the border, was heavily targeted by armed militants during the 7 October attacks.

Israeli officials said Hamas burned homes and killed civilians, including whole families, as well as taking hostages.

When the assault began, Doron contacted her family and friends via WhatsApp to say she was hiding under the bed as militants advanced, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.

In her last voice message, she was heard screaming “they’ve caught me” as shouting and gunfire sounded in the background.

Doron’s family received no information about her whereabouts for nearly four months.

“After an unbearable 471 days, our beloved Dodo has finally returned to our arms,” her family said in a statement released by the missing families forum on Sunday.

They added: “We want to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who supported and accompanied us along this journey.”

She studied theatre and film in school, and developed a love for animals that led to her becoming a veterinary nurse.

Emily, a 28-year-old British-Israeli national, was also taken hostage from Kibbutz Kfar Aza on 7 October 2023.

She was shot in the hand and taken into Gaza from her home during the attack, and also saw her dog shot and killed. Photographs after her release showed Emily with a bandaged hand and two missing fingers from that attack.

Her mother, Mandy Damari, was also in the kibbutz in her separate home on 7 October. Mrs Damari hid in the safe room and was saved by a bullet hitting the door handle, making it impossible for attackers to get in.

As the assault unfolded, Emily sent her mother a text message containing a single heart emoji – that was the last contact they had.

Emotional images showed Emily reunited with her mother in Israel on Sunday, hugging while on a video call with her brother.

“I want to thank everyone who never stopped fighting for Emily throughout this horrendous ordeal, and who never stopped saying her name,” Mrs Damari said.

“In Israel, Britain, the United States, and around the world. Thank you for bringing Emily home.”

• ‘I just want to hug her’: Family of British-Israeli hostage on news she will be released

Mrs Damari was born and raised in the UK, and met her husband on a holiday in Israel aged 20.

Emily, the youngest of four children, has strong connections with the UK – she is a Tottenham Hotspur fan and would often visit to see relatives.

Before the ceasefire, Israel said 94 hostages remained unaccounted for but it believed only 60 to still be alive.

There are 26 Israeli hostages due to be handed over in the first phase of the ceasefire deal. Israel’s prime minister has said most are believed to be alive.

They have been named by Israel as:

Itzik Elgarat, 69; Agam Berger, 20; Ohad Ben Ami, 55; Arbel Yehud, 29; Alexander (Sasha) Troufanov, 29; Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36; Omer Wenkert, 23; Yair Horn, 46; Oded Lifshitz, 84; Or Levy, 34; Eliya Cohen, 27; Ohad Yahalomi, 50; Tsachi Idan, 50; Keith Siegel, 65; Shlomo Mansour, 86; Gadi Moses, 80; Eli Sharabi, 52; Omer Shem Tov, 22; Tal Shoham, 39; Ofer Kalderon, 53; Yarden Bibas, 34; Shiri Bibas, 33; Ariel Bibas; Kfir Bibas.

The list also includes two men Hisham al-Sayed, 35, and Avera Mengistu, 27, who were captured by Hamas after crossing into Gaza from Israel before the war.

As flames tore through large parts of Los Angeles this month, so did fake news.

Social media posts touted wild conspiracies about the fire, with users sharing misleading videos and misidentifying innocent people as looters.

It brought into sharp focus a question that has plagued the social media age: what is the best way to contain and correct potentially incendiary sparks of misinformation?

It is a debate that Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, has been at the centre of.

Shortly after the January 6th Capitol riots in 2021, which were fuelled by false claims of a rigged US presidential election, Mr Zuckerberg gave testimony to Congress. The billionaire boasted about Meta’s “industry-leading fact checking program”.

It drew, he pointed out, on 80 “independent third-party fact checkers” to curb misinformation on Facebook and Instagram.

Four years on, that system is no longer something to brag about.

“Fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US,” Mr Zuckerberg said earlier in January.

Taking their place, he said, would be something totally different: a system inspired by X’s “community notes“, where users rather than experts adjudicate on accuracy.

Many experts and fact checkers questioned Mr Zuckerberg’s motives.

“Mark Zuckerberg was clearly pandering to the incoming administration and to Elon Musk,” Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, told the BBC.

Mr Mantzarlis is also deeply critical of the decision to axe fact checkers.

But like many experts, he also makes another point that has perhaps been lost in the firestorm of criticism Meta faces: that, in principle, community-notes-style systems can be part of the solution to misinformation.

Adopting a fact checking system inspired by an Elon-Musk-owned platform was always going to raise hackles. The world’s richest man is regularly accused of using his X account to amplify misinformation and conspiracy theories.

But the system predates his ownership.

“Birdwatch”, as it was then known, began in 2021 and drew inspiration from Wikipedia, which is written and edited by volunteers.

Like Wikipedia, community notes rely on unpaid contributors to correct misinformation.

Contributors rate corrective notes under false or misleading posts and, over time, some users earn the ability to write them. According to the platform, this group of contributors is now almost a million strong.

Mr Mantzarlis – who himself once ran a “crowd-sourced” fact checking project – argues this type of system potentially allows platforms to “get more fact checks, more contributions, faster”.

One of the key attractions of community-notes-style systems are their ability to scale: as a platform’s userbase grows, so does the pool of volunteer contributors (if you can persuade them to participate).

According to X, community notes produce hundreds of fact checks per day.

By contrast, Facebook’s expert fact checkers may manage less than 10 per day, suggests an article by Jonathan Stray of the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI and journalist Eve Sneider.

And one study suggests community notes can deliver good quality fact checks: an analysis of 205 notes about Covid found 98% were accurate.

A note appended to a misleading post can also organically cut its viral spread by more than half, X maintains, and research suggests they also increase the chance that the original poster will delete the tweet by 80% .

Keith Coleman, who oversees community notes for X, argues Meta is switching to a more capable fact checking programme.

“Community notes are already covering a vastly wider range of content than previous systems,” he told me.

“That is rarely mentioned. I see stories that say ‘Meta ends fact checking program’,” he said.

“But I think the real story is, ‘Meta replaces existing fact checking program with approach that can scale to cover more content, respond faster and is trusted across the political spectrum’.”

But of course, Mr Zuckerberg did not simply say community notes were a better system – he actively criticised fact checkers, accusing them of “bias”.

In doing so, he was echoing a long-held belief among US conservatives that Big Tech is censoring their views.

Others argue fact checking will inevitably censor controversial views.

Silkie Carlo, director of UK civil liberties group Big Brother Watch – which ran a campaign against alleged censorship of David Davis MP by YouTube – told the BBC allegations of Big Tech bias have come from across the political spectrum.

Centralised fact checking by platforms risks “stifling valuable reporting on controversial content”, she told the BBC, and also leads users to wrongly believe that all the posts they are reading are the “vetted truth”.

But Baybars Orsek, the managing director of Logically Facts, which supplies fact checking services to Meta in the UK, argues professional fact checkers can target the most dangerous misinformation and identify emerging “harmful narratives”.

Community-driven systems alone lack the “consistency, objectivity and expertise” to address the most harmful misinformation, he wrote.

Professional fact checkers, and many experts and researchers, strongly dispute claims of bias. Some argue fact checkers simply lost the trust of many conservatives.

A trust Mr Mantzarlis claims was deliberately undermined.

“Fact checkers started becoming arbiters of truth in a substantial way that upset politically-motivated partisans and people in power and suddenly, weaponised attacks were on them,” he said.

The solution that X uses in an attempt to keep community notes trusted across the political spectrum is to take a key part of the process out of human hands, relying instead on an algorithm.

The algorithm is used to select which notes are shown, and also to ensure they are found helpful by a range of users.

In very simple terms, according to X, this “bridging” algorithm selects proposed notes that are rated helpful by volunteers who would normally disagree with each other.

The result, it argues, is that notes are viewed positively across the political spectrum. This is confirmed, according to X, by regular internal testing. Some independent research also backs up that view.

Meta says its community notes system will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings, “just like they do on X”.

But this wide acceptance is a high bar to reach.

Research indicates that more than 90% of proposed community notes are never used.

This means accurate notes may go unused.

But according to X, showing more notes would undermine the aim of displaying only notes that will be found helpful by the most users and this would reduce trust in the system.

Even after the fact checkers are gone, Meta will still employ thousands of moderators who remove millions of pieces of content every day, like graphic violence and child sexual exploitation material, which break the platform’s rules.

But Meta is relaxing its rules around some politically divisive topics such as gender and immigration.

Mark Zuckerberg admitted the changes, designed to reduce the risk of censorship, meant it was “going to catch less bad stuff”.

This, some experts argue, was the most concerning aspect of Meta’s announcement.

The co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Board told the BBC there were “huge problems” with what Mr Zuckerberg had done.

So what happens from here?

Details of Meta’s new plans for tackling misinformation are scarce. In principle, some experts believe community notes systems could be helpful – but many also feel they should not be a replacement for fact checkers.

Community notes are a “fundamentally legitimate approach”, writes Professor Tom Stafford of Sheffield University, but platforms still need professional fact checkers too, he believes.

“Crowd-sourcing can be a useful component of [an] information moderation system, but it should not be the only component.”

For Margaret Charles, the new year started just as the old one ended, days filled with grief and no end to a mother’s worst nightmare, after her son’s life was snatched away in a brutal murder.

Sitting on the porch of her home located in Moruga, a rural town in south Trinidad, Margaret ran through a range of emotions as she spoke about her son, Shakeem Charles, who was killed last July.

“I’m being faced with it every day,” Margaret told the BBC.

“There’s a letter that Amarah wrote to her father for Christmas, and when we sat down for lunch, she said: ‘Nobody is to sit on that chair, that chair is for daddy.'”

Shakeem’s two children, Amarah, seven, and Amare, three, now spend a lot more time with their grandparents.

Their 32-year-old father was just one of the many murder victims in Trinidad and Tobago in 2024, which was the Caribbean nation’s deadliest year on record with 624 homicides, according to data from local police.

Shakeem was an Information Technology technician, but his family said that shortly before he was killed, he had started working with a local ride-hailing company to earn extra money.

Margaret said her son went missing on 9 July after taking a job to drop off a passenger in another southern town.

The ride-hailing company said Shakeem’s only trip that day ended at around 17:25 local time.

That night, calls to his mobile phone went unanswered. However, his family got a notification for an ATM cash withdrawal from a joint bank account.

The following day, through GPS tracking, his car was found abandoned more than 80km (50 miles) away in north-east Trinidad.

Margaret recalls how, after four days of searching, Shakeem’s body was discovered in the same southern town where he was hired to drop the passenger. An autopsy determined he died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Police are yet to charge anyone in connection with the killing.

With murders soaring, Trinidad and Tobago’s government declared a state of emergency on 30 December. It was originally due to last 15 days, but as it was about to run out, parliament voted to extend it for a further three months until mid-April.

Authorities blamed gang warfare for six murders over the two preceding days, while government officials said concern about reprisal killings prompted the state of emergency.

Five of those six killings happened in one shooting incident on 29 December, in Laventille, an area just outside the capital, Port of Spain.

Some residents say crime has become part of the culture in Laventille.

Joeth Roberts says that what stopped him from joining a gang when the opportunity arose was his upbringing.

“I was approached by a person who was looking for underlings, someone to run the block,” Joeth recalls.

“He offered me a firearm and other stuff, but that wasn’t in me,” Joeth says, thanking his parents for the way they brought him up.

Shaquille Gaskin, who also lives in Laventille, told the BBC that he knew a few people “who are very excited to do the wrong things”.

Shaquille is a musician who plays the steelpan. He says he remains firmly on the right side of the law, but that there are others in the neighbourhood who are drawn to crime.

“That’s because that’s what they know, they grow up seeing that, seeing the older ones doing that, so they automatically go into that.”

The musician is convinced that there are lots of opportunities for people in so-called “crime hot spots” to be law-abiding citizens, but he thinks the government and others offering those opportunities should engage with at-risk communities more actively.

He argues that in order to get young people on board, a consistent effort has to be made to get them to stay on the right path rather than be tempted by gang leaders’ offers.

It is an opinion echoed by Dr Malisa Neptune-Figaro.

The criminologist at the University of the West Indies says that her research suggests that gangs started becoming more prevalent in Trinidad and Tobago at the beginning of this millennium.

Dr Neptune-Figaro has also found that many offenders were victims themselves at some point.

“You have to look at how they feel as persons. If you feel despondent and you don’t feel like you belong in our contemporary society and mainstream society, you’re going to have this parallel society, where you feel like you belong,” she says.

“You have to talk about what the gangs do for them as well, [why] they feel at home.”

The state of emergency gives law enforcement officers extra powers to make arrests and conduct searches without warrants.

Minister of National Security Fitzgerald Hinds said the state of emergency had already led to a reduction in murders, shootings, robberies and car thefts.

Police say they have arrested over 650 people.

However, Dr Malisa Neptune-Figaro warns that this crime-fighting tool may only work in the short term.

The criminologist at the University of the West Indies argues that long term, there should be a focus on refurbishing and revamping the criminal justice system.

But she says that there has to be a wider approach too, incorporating “different elements of society, our education system, finding jobs for persons who are unemployed, giving them alternative measures to crime, better parenting styles”.

For Margaret Charles, the extension of the state of emergency has raised her hope that the police will catch whoever killed her son and bring them to justice.

“Not only Shakeem’s case, but in any case, that people who they suspect and for some reason or the other they couldn’t hold them and question them or probably search, that something happens,” she says.

If President Donald Trump was polarising on the campaign trail, his first week back in office was no different.

He was officially sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday before signing hundreds of executive actions, reversing policies from President Joe Biden’s administration and following through on many of the promises he made on the campaign trail.

We spoke to 10 Americans across the political spectrum about how they felt about the week.

Here are their big takeaways.

Kyle Plesa, 39, an independent who voted for Trump: “I felt like I was watching like WWE, professional wrestling. Just the boisterousness, the showmanship, the playing for the cameras. You can tell that the entertainment is a big part of Donald Trump’s credo as opposed to whether you had Barack Obama or Joe Biden inaugurated.”

Greg Bruno, 67, a Republican who voted for Trump: “I think Trump proved he’s a man of the people when he threw those pens into the audience after signing the executive orders in front of 20,000 people. It just showed you who he really is working for.”

Richard Weil, 74, an independent who voted for Kamala Harris: “[His inaugural address] was not quite as dark as his first speech [in 2017], but it was certainly bitter. There was nothing in there that said good things about America.”

Angela Ramos, 37, an independent who voted for Harris: “I found a lot of Trump’s speech to be disingenuous, because he mentioned specific things like justice, honour, integrity, trustworthiness, but these are not qualities that I think are reflected in his policy or his behaviour… I watched it out of a sense of civic duty.”

Larry Kees, 47, a Republican who voted for Trump: “I was happy [with the executive orders]. There were so many of them. I couldn’t keep track. Obviously he’s not a regular politician – with most politicians, you’ll hear one thing and they’ll do another.”

Tony Flecklin, 69, a Republican who voted for Trump: “You can expect behaviour from him that’s going to be unlike what you normally run into. But in general, his policies in terms of border protection, economic sufficiency, oil and gas, I am wholeheartedly in favour of.”

Greg Bruno, a Republican: “This is why he was elected. Many of these orders involve issues that the American public wants to see done. Those are promises that were made in the campaign and he’s fulfilling them.”

Carlyn Jorgensen, 40, an independent who voted for Harris: “I haven’t liked the fact that the front row was essentially CEOs – that you had Elon Musk and [Jeff] Bezos in the front row. That, to me, just felt like – are we heading towards an oligarchy at this point?”

Angela Ramos, an independent: “Most deeply concerning to me are the departure from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, simply because our actions have really deep consequences, not just for us within the US, but for the entire world.”

David Lieck, 58, a Democrat who voted for Harris: “I felt like he’s essentially pandering to his base in the action he took with respect to the pardons and the commuting of the sentences of the January 6 rioters. I felt that was vindictive and sending the wrong message to the American people.”

Greg Bruno, a Republican: “He came into his first presidency under attack… you put a person in a defensive crouch when you’re under attack like that. This presidency doesn’t have that element. So not only is he coming in not under attack, but he’s coming in as a highly experienced person in how to wield the power of the presidency.”

Shantonu Mazumdar, 58, a Democrat who voted for Harris: “I think he’s gotten a little bit harder, more hard line, it feels like. He’s, I think, emboldened a little bit by his constituents and the people who have supported him. I think he’s been given a little bit more… freedom to be further to the right than he was before.”

Richard Weil, an independent: “I think he’s more focused. I think he’s angrier, he’s more revengeful… but I think he’s turning into a bitter old man. I do think he has changed and I think he’s changed for the worse.”

Tony Flecklin, a Republican: “I’m happy that he’s following through with what his promises were. Sometimes his methods are a little draconian. That’s just the nature of Donald J. Trump. He’s not going to be wimpy about the way he approaches things.”

• EXPLAINED: What Trump has done since taking power
• VOTERS: 10 Americans give their verdict on week one
• BORDER: Six things Trump has done about migration
• PARDONS: Jan 6 defendants get nearly everything they want
• WATCH: Trump’s first week in three minutes

When the lists of the most successful songs of 2024 in the charts, streaming and social media were revealed recently, they included the expected big hitters and some evergreen classics. But sprinkled among them was a different type of hit song.

A number of tracks that failed to make a big impact when they were first released, mostly in the 2010s, have since bubbled up and become firm favourites.

The rise of these slow-burning sleeper hits in recent years is “one of the most fascinating trends right now”, says Stuart Dredge, head of insight at Music Ally.

Here is our guide to the biggest 2010s sleeper hits.

This song only reached number 77 in the UK at the time of release, but was the 60th most popular song in 2024, according to the Official Charts Company’s end-of-year list – above Charli XCX’s biggest track. It was even higher on Spotify’s global end-of-year chart, at 24.

The LA folk-rock group’s song first took off after being used in the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack in 2018, and with aching lyrics harking back to the start of a relationship, it has since been recycled in various TikTok memes and Molly-Mae Hague’s pregnancy announcement video in 2022 (even though it’s actually a break-up song). Cosmopolitan put it top of its playlist of Sad Songs to Blast When You’re Feeling Hella Moody.

This one reached the US top 20 but missed the UK top 40. It has snowballed on social media and is now the seventh most-streamed song in Spotify history, spending more than three years in total in its global daily top 50. The California band says the autumnal theme made it an “accidental seasonal hit”, and it has also been adopted as a bisexual anthem.

Champagne Coast didn’t chart originally but British singer Dev Hynes’ seductive “come to my bedroom” refrain was used in TV show Euphoria’s soundtrack in 2019, and then the song blew up on TikTok last summer. It was the most popular old song on the platform in 2024 and sixth overall on Billboard’s end-of-year TikTok chart. It finally reached the UK top 20 in July.

Evergreen is just 87 seconds long and didn’t chart originally, but became the go-to song for “hopecore” videos offering snippets of positivity and optimism on TikTok last year. It spent 35 weeks in the UK top 60 in 2024, and was in the overall end-of-year top 100.

Released on the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack, this track didn’t reach the UK or US top 40s, but Eilish’s delicate duet with Khalid is now her most-streamed song, and 14th on Spotify’s all-time list. It is apparently, among other things, good for sending you to sleep.

I Wanna Be Yours was on the hit AM album but only reached 99 in the UK as a single. However, last year it had more Spotify plays than any other song over a decade old. TikTok users have chosen the melodramatic chorus to soundtrack their romantic declarations.

This track is hard rock band Disturbed’s brooding but beautiful cover of the Simon and Garfunkel classic. It has now spent eight months in the UK top 60 in the past year, helped by a dance remix and a TikTok shuffle dance trend.

See You Again didn’t chart at the time but took off on TikTok (where else?), with one snippet turning into a personality quiz (do you sing along with Tyler’s “OK OK OK OK” or guest vocalist Kali Uchis’ “La la la la”?). The song finally reached number 21 in the UK in 2023, and was the 19th most-streamed song on Spotify in the US in 2024.

Songs from all eras have been resurfacing for several years, of course.

Many were hits to start with. Mr Brightside by The Killers (2004) is a fixture, while Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (1985) and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor (2001) shot back up the charts thanks to TV and film soundtracks.

But when it comes to songs that weren’t as big the first time around, the 2010s dominate.

One reason is that people who grew up in those years are introducing their favourite tunes to others, according to Sarah Kloboves from music data analysts Chartmetric.

“This revival is pioneered by these older Gen Z listeners [in their mid-20s]. But when they start to create these trends, you also have the younger Gen Zs and even Gen Alpha [young teens and below] that are hearing these songs for the first time – the release date is interesting because it’s old, but it’s not too old.”

Dredge agrees: “A lot of the influencers on places like TikTok are a few years older, so they are probably using songs from the 2010s that soundtracked their teenage years.”

Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer (2019) could even be described as a sleeper hit – it wasn’t released as an official single at the time, but eventually reached number one in 2023 and was the fifth-biggest song of 2024 overall on Apple Music.

Others, though, are not such obvious hits. Musically, most sound quite restrained and atmospheric – they’re emotive soundtrack songs rather than upbeat bangers or full-blooded anthems.

“These aren’t songs that were released with the intention of being a pop hit,” Kloboves says.

“Not to bash on pop music or pop stars, but sometimes they all sort of sound the same. But I think a lot of these songs are very different from what you might usually hear in the mainstream,” she says.

“I think that’s why listeners really resonate with them, because they’re slightly unique and different-sounding.”

Eight more sleeper hits:

• Pink + White by Frank Ocean (2016)
• No Role Modelz by J Cole (2014)
• Jocelyn Flores by XXXTentacion (2017)
• All I Want by Kodaline (2012)
• Lovers Rock by TV Girl (2014)
• Space Song by Beach House (2015)
• Apocalypse by Cigarettes After Sex (2017)
• Freaks by Surf Curse (2013)

Many of these songs owe their belated success to TikTok, and tracks that take off “evoke some kind of emotional response” in the listener, the platform’s UK head of music partnerships Toyin Mustapha believes.

“It’s having something that emotionally resonates. That could be a lyric. It could be the way that the instrumental lands.”

And our relationship with music has changed. When packaging songs with clips on social media, fans are choosing them as soundtracks to evocative moments.

“It’s no longer passive listening,” Mustapha adds. “People are really active participants in the culture. And they’re active because they are taking this music and essentially reimagining it in their own way.”

Record labels do try to help back-catalogue songs become sleeper hits, but it normally happens organically thanks to fans, Dredge says.

“One of the things you can see is it’s songs that lend themselves to a feeling or mood. It often is a particular line from the song that is the thing that is picked up on and goes viral,” he says.

“There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it other than they suddenly feel relevant to someone in a way that other people appreciate.”

Sometimes, it’s simply that a great song didn’t get the attention it deserved at the time: “Part of it is just that a brilliant song can connect with people, no matter how long ago it was made.”

The 15-year-old star of a film about a schoolgirl forced to marry an older man is evangelical about her role – despite the fact that her community in north-western Kenya might see it as a betrayal and treat her as an outcast.

“I want the movie to spark conversations about this topic, because it’s really not something people want to talk about,” Michelle Lemuya Ikeny tells the BBC.

She plays 13-year-old Nawi, the eponymous heroine of the coming-of-age film set in Turkana county, a rural area which borders Uganda and where the UN says one in four girls are married before they are 18.

“So many of my friends have had to leave school, or never been to school because someone paid a dowry to marry them, so their fathers had married them off,” she says.

Michelle, who grew up in Turkana where the film was shot, kept these girls in mind when portraying Nawi’s emotions – a performance that won her an Africa Movie Academy Award for best promising actor last November.

Like all the local children who star in the film, she had never acted before. When she signed up for it, she thought she would just be appearing in a school drama.

“It has changed my life, but I don’t want it to change my personality,” the teenager says.

In the film, just after 13-year-old Nawi finds out that her exam results are top in the county, she hears that her father is selling her to a wealthy man named Shadrack in exchange for “60 sheep, eight camels and 100 goats”.

Instead of accepting her fate, Nawi smears blood on her legs on her wedding night to fake a period and then runs away to pursue her dream of going to high school in the capital, Nairobi.

Her father and Shadrack are furious and try to follow her, but she manages to outsmart them with the help of her brother.

However, she than goes back home to Turkana to bravely confront them when she finds out that her new baby sister has been promised to Shadrack as a replacement bride.

There are many scenes which highlight how widespread child marriage is – and how it is accepted despite being against the law. According to Kenya’s 2014 Marriage Act, a person must be 18 years of age to marry.

In one scene, when Nawi’s classmate Zawari does not show up to the end-of year exam, the boys in the class joke that she is “busy making babies”.

The story was written by Milcah Cherotich, who won a writing competition launched by the German-Kenyan non-governmental organisation Learning Lions.

Cherotich says her own childhood was the inspiration for her first feature film script as she grew up Turkana.

When asked if the story is based on a single person, she becomes too emotional at first to answer – but then goes on to tell how her sister was forced into marriage at the age of 14.

By 15, her sister had given birth, but the child became sick and died while she was carrying it on her back.

“She ended up living a life that was not hers. A life that was designed by my parents and her husband. Those are things I wanted to change,” Cherotich tells the BBC.

Some backlash to the film is “very much expected” in Turkana, she says.

But to her delight she has already managed to change one person’s perspective when she watched an early video-link screening of Nawi with her uncle – a staunch supporter of child marriage.

“After about 55 minutes, his eyes were wet. So, he was crying. And I was rejoicing inside because I thought: ‘Now at least one man has been touched’,” she says.

“I realised the importance of storytelling, the power it has.”

Child marriage is far from being just a Kenyan issue – girls in sub-Saharan Africa are at the highest risk of child marriage in the world, with one in three marrying before the age of 18, according to the UN children’s agency Unicef.

As part of the UN’s sustainable development goals, 2030 was set as the deadline to completely end child marriage, however Unicef says progress will need to be “significantly accelerated” to meet this target.

The prevalence is decreasing globally – today, one in five women aged 20 to 24 years were married as children versus nearly one in four 10 years ago.

The fastest progress has been made in South Asia, where a girl’s risk of marrying in childhood has dropped by more than a third.

But a recent Unicef report stated that West and Central Africa, the region with the highest prevalence of child marriage, had made little progress over the last 25 years. At the current pace, it would take the region more 200 years to eliminate the practice.

Toby Schmutzler, one of the directors of Nawi, says everyone who worked on the film was passionate about the project, but the challenge now is to get the film seen.

“The message can be super beautiful but if no-one sees the film then no-one hears the message,” he says.

The film was screened at the UN headquarters in New York last month – and Kenya selected it for its Oscars submission, though it did not make it to last week’s shortlist.

Nonetheless the directing team is heartened to be in talks for an international release in the US, Canada, Europe, Central Africa and Australia.

The film was released in Kenya late last year, and in Nairobi had one of the longest cinema runs ever of a locally produced movie.

In Turkana, Apuu Mourrine, one of the film’s Kenyan directors, has organised free screenings of Nawi at the Kakuma refugee camp.

She says the response has largely been positive, though audiences have mainly been made up of young people and so the team plans to organise a truck to show the film to the elders in local villages and get their reactions.

On the ground, in a joint initiative with Learning Lions, a new school has been built where 300 girls have already enrolled.

Schmutzler says this has been welcomed by the Turkana community, as the school is free to attend and it also provides the girls with meals in an area where there have been a series of droughts that have pushed many to the brink of starvation.

Michelle believes if more people do see the film, it will have the potential to change lives.

“When you watch the movie, try to put yourself in the shoes of Nawi, put yourselves in the shoes of all those 640 million girls,” she says.

“When you are young, you have so many dreams. I have so many dreams. When somebody comes and takes it away – it’s the worst feeling ever.”

• ‘I was sold into marriage for £7 at the age of 12’
• East Africa drought: ‘The suffering here has no equal’
• Why Kenya’s Lake Turkana is flooding in a drought

LoveFit Café, near Brighton’s busy city centre railway station, used to say its toilets were available for any passer-by to use, even if they weren’t a customer.

But it was a disaster, says owner Jason Bright, as homeless people would lock themselves in there for long periods of time.

“They’d fall asleep in there or take drugs. You’d get abuse,” says Mr Bright.

“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done having a public toilet.”

Now he has a customer-only policy, although he does make exceptions for the elderly or young children.

We all get caught short sometimes, and for pregnant women, parents with children and people with certain medical conditions, it can be pretty often. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so you find yourself sidling into a café.

Increasingly, you run into a new problem: a little metal number pad, locking out anyone without a receipt and a keycode. In smaller establishments it might be a key dangling on a string and a lump of wood, but it amounts to the same thing.

Many places have a “no loo for non-customers” rule, and some are finding stricter ways to enforce it.

Recently Starbucks hit the headlines when it reversed its open-door policy in the US, prompting a new look at just how welcoming our High Streets full of coffee shops are, when it comes to people who want to spend a penny, without splashing out on lattes and buns.

In the UK Starbucks will still let non-customers in, but many rivals, including Costa Coffee, Pret a Manger, Waterstones and a large number of independent shops are limiting who can use their loos.

Some even say no to people with medical conditions, says Ellen, 27.

“My dad’s had a kidney transplant and we went in somewhere, explained that, and they still said no.”

But it’s too costly to always buy something, she says. “Coffees are like £4, I don’t really fancy paying that to go in and use the toilet.”

Alice, 25, does sometimes nip in without buying anything, but always asks first.

“If you ask nicely, more people are likely to let you use the toilet,” she says.

Gemma Wardle thinks that should be the general practice. She set up the popular TikTok account Loos of London, highlighting places for when you’re caught short.

“If [venues] have a customer toilet it should be open to all,” she says. She would like to see more public toilets, but doesn’t see why businesses can’t help.

“Shops and cafés should be doing their best to improve the toilet experience for all users, not trying to make it harder.”

Many other social media accounts and apps exist to help you navigate finding a bathroom when you’re out and about, including accessible toilets that people with disabilities can unlock with a Radar key.

One coffee shop that is happy for anyone to use their toilets is 200 Degrees, a chain based in Nottingham owned by Caffe Nero, with 22 shops across the Midlands and the North of England.

Commercial director Will Kenney says they think on balance it is probably good for business to let non-customers in.

“People may feel obliged to have a cup of coffee or a cake as they go back out,” he says. And it is nicer for staff. “No-one wants to be the toilet police,” he says.

But providing toilets isn’t free. As well as more cleaning, there are increased redecorating costs, as well as the obvious extra toilet roll, soap and paper towels, he says.

“We welcome people to come, but we don’t want our coffee shops to become public conveniences.”

None of this would be a problem if there were more public toilets.

But according to the British Toilet Association (BTA) their numbers halved after 2010. Cash-strapped local authorities closed facilities to focus on services they were legally obliged to provide.

Since 2018 numbers have risen again but Raymond Martin, managing director of the BTA, says that, at under 4,000, we still have less than a third of the number he estimates a growing and ageing population needs.

Some local authorities have leapt on what seems to be the perfect solution: to subsidise local cafes and shops to share their facilities. In many parts of the country, stickers can be seen advertising that non-customers are welcome to come in for the toilet.

Unfortunately, the schemes often break down, says Mr Martin, because local authorities see it as an opportunity to save money.

“As soon as they get about 10 to 15 cafes taking part, the council says let’s close [the public provision]. What then happens is those [café] toilets are swamped,” he says. “They can’t cope.”

Private providers often then withdraw, and put a lock on their loo door.

Mr Martin doesn’t think it should be left to coffee shops to fill the gap in provision, especially as they won’t cover the same hours as public toilets, catering to early morning dog walkers, delivery drivers, and evening joggers.

“This is about public decency, public dignity, we can’t have people defecating behind hedges,” he says. He wants the government to make it a legal requirement on local councils to provide enough conveniences.

The body representing local authorities, the Local Government Association (LGA), says its members have been trying to tackle the problem through partnerships with local business.

“However, councils are acutely aware that gaps in provision have opened despite these efforts, for instance where businesses have closed on our High Streets,” an LGA spokesperson said.

It is calling for longer-term funding pledges from central government that would allow authorities to “plan the transformation, rather than the closure, of facilities” and even restore lost conveniences.

US President Donald Trump has said Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has done a “very good job thus far” and that the pair have a “very good relationship”.

Asked by the BBC on board Air Force One about his relationship with Sir Keir, Trump added that they would be having a call “over the next 24 hours”.

Trump and the Labour leader have met on a number of occasions, including a visit by Sir Keir to Trump Tower in New York during the presidential campaign.

Tech billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk, however, has been strongly critical of Sir Keir and has repeatedly called for his removal from office.

• Can opposites Trump and Starmer find common ground?

“I get along with him well. I like him a lot,” Trump said of Sir Keir.

“He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person and I think he’s done a very good job thus far.

“He’s represented his country in terms of philosophy.

“I may not agree with his philosophy, but I have a very good relationship with him.”

Trump was speaking during a visit to the press room on board the presidential plane on Saturday.

He was asked about his relationship with Sir Keir after responding to a question about where he might go for the first international trip of his second term.

“It could be Saudi Arabia, it could be UK. Traditionally it could be UK,” he said.

“Last time I went to Saudi Arabia because they agreed to buy $450 billion of American United States merchandise.”

Sir Keir and Trump spoke by phone following Trump’s re-election in November, with Downing Street saying at the time that the two had agreed the relationship between the UK and US was “incredibly strong” and would “continue to thrive”.

Last week, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said Sir Keir would visit Washington for talks with Trump “within the next few weeks”.

Several diplomatic challenges loom for the government, including Trump’s pledges to introduce trade tariffs and to cut US support for Ukraine.

It is also unclear whether Trump will agree to the UK’s proposed deal to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, where there is a joint US-UK military base, although the UK has said the new US administration will be given the chance to “consider” the deal.

There have been further questions raised about whether Trump will accept Sir Keir’s nomination of former Labour minister Lord Peter Mandelson as the British ambassador to Washington.

Last month, Chris LaCivita, the co-manager of Trump’s election campaign, called Lord Mandelson “an absolute moron” and said he “should stay home”.

Earlier this month Tesla boss Musk, who is an adviser to the president, criticised Starmer in a series of messages on his X social media platform over the grooming gangs scandal, saying the prime minister was “deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes”.

In response, Sir Keir, who was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, has accused critics of “spreading lies and misinformation” and says he tackled prosecutions “head on”.

Lammy has described his own criticism of the president, made when he was a backbencher, as “old news”.

In 2018 he described Trump as a “tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” but the foreign secretary has since had dinner with him alongside the prime minister.

President Donald Trump has said he believes the US will gain control of Greenland, after showing renewed interest in acquiring the autonomous Danish territory in recent weeks.

“I think we’re going to have it,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Saturday, adding that the island’s 56,000 residents “want to be with us”.

His comments come after reports that Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen insisted Greenland was not for sale in a fiery phone call with the president last week.

Trump first floated the prospect of buying the territory during his first term in 2019, and has said US control of Greenland is an “absolute necessity” for international security.

“I think the people want to be with us,” Trump said in the press room on board the presidential plane.

“I don’t really know what claim Denmark has to it, but it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for the protection of the free world,” he added.

“I think Greenland we’ll get because it has to do with freedom of the world,” Trump continued.

“It has nothing to do with the United States other than that we’re the one that can provide the freedom. They can’t.”

Thousands of displaced Palestinians have been prevented from returning to their homes in the north of the Gaza Strip, after Israel blocked a main road, accusing Hamas of breaching the terms of the ceasefire deal.

The dispute came after Hamas released four Israeli female soldiers – and Israel freed 200 Palestinian prisoners.

But the Israeli government said Gazans would not be allowed to travel north until plans were in place for the release of Israeli civilian Arbel Yehud. Hamas has insisted that she is alive and will be freed next week.

According to the deal, Hamas was to release civilians before soldiers.

On Saturday evening, as crowds gathered along al-Rashid road in central Gaza to return home, gunshots were reportedly fired.

Reuters news agency, citing the Hamas-run health ministry, and Palestinian media reported one person had been killed and some injured.

Four gunshots can be heard in a video reportedly of the incident that was posted online. BBC Verify has authenticated the location of footage, but the BBC has not been able to independently verify reports of a casualty.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said troops in central Gaza had fired shots after “several gatherings of dozens of suspects were identified who posed a threat to the forces”.

“Contrary to reports emerging in recent hours, all of the shooting in the area was carried out for the purpose of distancing and not aimed at harm. We emphasise that as of this stage, no injuries to the suspects are known to have occurred as a result of the shooting.”

• ‘My beauty, you’re home’: Israeli women soldiers reunited with families
• What we know about the ceasefire deal

Earlier on Saturday, Muhammad Emad Al-Din was one of the thousands waiting to return home to northern Gaza.

“I know my house might be destroyed, but I’ll pitch a tent over its remains. I just want to go back,” he told the BBC over the phone.

“I need to reclaim my work. I am a barber in Gaza, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to repair the damage to my salon and restart my business. I’ve become indebted to so many people, and I can’t afford to buy the simplest things for my children,” he added.

“All I wish for is for this dispute between Hamas and Israel to end and for us to be allowed to move back to our homes in the north. We haven’t seen our loved ones for more than 15 months.”

The Netzarim Corridor is a seven-kilometre (4.3-mile) strip of land controlled by Israel that cuts off north Gaza from the rest of the territory.

Lubna Nassar arrived with her two daughters and son on a donkey cart in the afternoon, hoping to return to her home and reunite with her husband, Sultan, whom she has not seen in 11 months.

“I will stay here, as close as possible to the Israeli checkpoint. For months, my daughters have been waiting for the moment to meet their father. I want to be among the first to return to Gaza,” she said.

Qatari and Egyptian mediators are making progress in their efforts to allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return back to the north.

But Israeli tanks are still blocking the coastal road where people were supposed to walk into the north.

The Israelis have asked the mediators for proof of life from Hamas for Ms Yehud, and it seems that Hamas has given this to the Egyptians.

Four female Israeli soldiers taken hostage by Hamas on 7 October 2023 were released on Saturday as part of the ceasefire agreement which also saw 200 Palestinian prisoners freed.

Meanwhile, many Gazans watch anxiously for any breakthrough that could allow them to return.

For many, the hope of returning outweighs the reality of what awaits them – ruins and destruction.

Yet the dream of reclaiming their lives, rebuilding their homes and reuniting with their families are keeping their spirits alive.

In a powerful personal account, Fergal Keane reflects on living with PTSD, depression and his search for balance in life. What he has discovered along the way is a deeper study of happiness that can apply to those with serious mental health challenges, but also to those simply in need of a lift.

There was a moment, nearly two years ago, when the change inside hit me with force. I was walking with a loved one on the eastern edge of Curragh beach in Ardmore, County Waterford, a place of warm refuge since I was a child. We paused beside a river that flows into Ardmore Bay. I was listening to the different sounds the water made – the swift rush of the river, the surf crashing on the shoreline.

Suddenly there was the sound of air being displaced by dozens of wings. A flock of Brent geese came sweeping over the cliff, riding the wind towards the sky. I felt a lightness inside, and such gratitude that I laughed out loud.

“So, this is how it feels,” I thought.

To borrow and turn around the words of the novelist, Milan Kundera, I felt a wonderful “lightness of being”.

That moment came back to me this week. I was thinking about the Blue Monday phenomenon – the January day that is said to be the saddest of the year.

As anyone who knows clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) will tell you, there are no specific days of the year for sadness. It can be the brightest day, in the loveliest place, and you still feel like your mind is trapped in permafrost.

But Blue Monday did prompt me to reflect on happiness. What is it anyway? What does it mean in my life?

Not long before that day of the beautiful geese, I had come out of an emotional breakdown. It was March 2023, and I felt as if I had gone 12 rounds with a heavyweight prize-fighter. But the person I’d fought was myself. As I had done for decades.

I had experienced several hospitalisations over the decades, stretching back to the early 90s. I fought a relentless battle with shame, fear, anger, denial – all these things that are the opposite of happy. There were grey, terrifying days. Every branch bare, even in deep summer. And nights waking drenched in sweat, waking to obsessive rumination, bad dreams leaking into the dawn.

Add in recovery from alcoholism at the end of the 90s, and I’ve done plenty of research into the dark nights of the soul.

By the time of the 2023 breakdown I had gone past the point of hoping for happiness. In those days I would have settled for a little peace of mind. In 2019, I had stepped back from my job as the BBC’s Africa Editor due to my struggles with PTSD.

Two years later I wrote a book on the subject and made a television documentary for the BBC. Yet, even after all that, I experienced another breakdown.

Professor Bruce Hood, of the University of Bristol, speaks of the human tendency “to blow things out of proportion…[focusing] on our own failings or inadequacies”. He runs ten-week courses at Bristol on the science of happiness and talks about the need to find balance because, as he puts it, “our minds are biased to interpret things very negatively”.

This certainly resonates with me. A caveat, however: Professor Hood’s area is addressing feelings of general low wellbeing, and he’s clear that focusing on the science of happiness will not necessarily be a cure all for someone with a condition such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) .

I have a specific diagnosis. In 2008 doctors first told me I had PTSD based on multiple instances of trauma as a war reporter, but also rooted in the circumstances of childhood in a home broken by alcoholism. Depression and anxiety were both major parts of that condition. As was addiction to alcohol. I escaped also into the exhilarating energy, camaraderie, and sense of purpose that went with reporting conflict.

I would also stress that what works for me as I try to find happiness, may not definitely work for everyone else. There are specific mental health conditions that require equally specific treatments. With PTSD, a combination of therapies helped me greatly, along with the fellowship of others who had similar experiences.

Medication also ameliorated the physical symptoms of anxiety and hypervigilance. A dropped plate, a backfiring car could reduce me to a pale, shaking, sweating wreck in seconds. Likewise, the nightmares which could leave me thrashing in my sleep.

I am privileged. I have had access to the best treatment. There are so many in our society who do not. According to the British Medical Association more than one million people are waiting to access treatment. It’s also important to recognise that there are numerous social, economic and cultural factors that influence our ability to experience happiness.

There is an ongoing study of genetic predisposition to depression and addiction. The World Wellbeing Movement (WWM), a charity promoting wellbeing in business and public policy decision-making, says that one in eight people in Britain live below what it called the Happiness Poverty Line – this is measured using data supplied by the annual reports of the Office for National Statistics, and based on the question – on a scale of 0 to 10: ‘Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’

The WWM describes the one in eight figure as “staggering” and says there are “worrying issues related to mental health [that] remain unaddressed and underfunded”.

Having expressed my caveats, I hope there are things in my experience, the tools for recovery I have been generously given, that might help people who are struggling with the loneliness of depression or the turmoil of PTSD, or just struggling with the normal pain of life from time to time.

In my experience, the secret to happiness is that… there is no secret. It’s out there in plain sight, all around us, waiting to be found. But it is not ever present. It is not the natural everyday condition of humanity; no more than depression or rage are.

As the American psychotherapist, Whitney Goodman, author of ‘Toxic Positivity: How to embrace every emotion in a happy-obsessed world’ puts it: “Anyone that is fixated on making you feel happy all the time is selling you snake oil in my opinion. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work… telling people that they just need to be happy, to manifest different thoughts, I think it would have worked by now.”

I spent years sitting in therapists’ chairs, and sometimes looking out the windows of psychiatric wards, hoping for the perfect cure that would fix my head and battered spirit.

For me loneliness was the defining characteristic of my mental health problems. I went deep into myself and found nothing to love or admire. I shut the door.

The answer didn’t arrive in a blinding flash of light. If I could pick one thing that made the greatest difference – after I had been stabilised with treatment – it was, and always will be, work. Not the work that drove me to a near constant state of exhaustion as I chased scoops and prizes so vital to my insecure ego.

Note to all who get their validation from work: the workaholic is the most accepted addict of all. In fact, he and she are celebrated. Why would you want to change when the bosses and society applaud you? Work is the great permissive addiction.

The work I am talking about is very different. Nobody will tell you what a brave, talented person you are for doing the work of real happiness. But you will feel it in the reactions of people you love, the gratitude of waking up without a sense of dread, the awareness of beauty around you. And knowing you will keep your commitments, and live as a person who doesn’t just talk about caring for people but does their best to live that talk.

One night in hospital, in 2023, having been admitted with PTSD, I watched a documentary in which the American psychotherapist, Phil Stutz, spoke of three fundamental truths to be accepted by people struggling with mental health problems: that life can be full of pain, full of change, and that living with these things needs constant work.

I was exhausted from suffering. But I was also willing to do whatever work I could to find peace of mind. The happiness came later.

What did I do? A lot of simple stuff at first.

I wrote a gratitude list every morning. My daily accounting of the good in my life. I read more poetry because it calms me down. I went for long walks with the dog by the River Thames and in Richmond Park. I even started to meditate – a miracle for a man who could rarely sit still for more than five minutes. I went to the movies more. I did simple domestic chores. Not the kitchen cameos of past days, but regularly cleaning, washing, cooking, paying the bills. Wonder of wonders, I could do it!

I made more time for friendship. And for love, of the people who mattered most to me. I listened where before I might only have pontificated. I worked very hard to shut up when someone wanted to express a resentment, instead of letting the childhood habits of defensiveness take over.

I offered to help others who were struggling. Those in recovery from addiction will know the maxim about sobriety: “To keep it you have to give it away.” Likewise, happiness.

The Finnish philosopher, Frank Martela, from Aalta University, suggests acts of kindness as part of the solution.

As it happens Finland is number one on the World Happiness Index. “Connect with others and connect with yourself,” he says.

“Connect with others through social relationships… doing good things to other people, contributing through your work or through small acts of kindness.”

There was a wonderful old friend of mine, Gordon Duncan, an addiction counsellor, who first alerted me to the fact that I had a lot of anger built up inside me, and that this drove my drinking and depression. We clashed a lot in the first weeks that we knew each other, but over time became the closest mates.

When he was dying in hospital, I visited one day, and saw that he had lapsed into a coma. Neither of us were particularly religious, but I whispered in his ear a prayer that was dear to us both:

I don’t know if he could hear me. I suspect probably not. But I remembered something he used to say to me when I was heading down into the depths. “You’re stronger than you think, son. Stronger than you think.”

I pass it on to all who are suffering in their minds. For me, I know things can change fast. There are no guarantees. Of happiness or anything else. But I accept that.

The American writer, Raymond Carver, who survived alcoholism to write some of the most beautiful poems about grief, and happiness, left a short poem before he died from cancer, aged just 50. It was his epitaph, and I think it sums up the whole quest for happiness.

I will wake tomorrow and be glad to open the curtains, and drink coffee and think of those I love who are near and far. And then I will get back to work, the real deep work that goes on every day.

Nineteen-year-old Liri Albag rushes into her parents’ arms, igniting screams of joy.

“My beauty. You’re a hero. You’re home. That’s it,” her mother says as the three laugh and cry together.

The moment, filmed by the Israeli military, was the first time the family had seen each other in more than 15 months.

Liri was among the first Israelis to be taken hostage in the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, when the military base on the Gaza border where she was serving was overrun.

She was among four female soldiers to be returned to Israel on Saturday as part of the first phase of a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. Two hundred Palestinian prisoners were released in return.

“The feeling of relief and happiness envelops us after 477 long and unbearable days of nerve-wracking waiting,” her family said in a statement shortly after her return.

Crowds had gathered in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday morning, watching a live news feed from Gaza on a large screen as they waited for the group to be brought back to Israel.

Released alongside Liri were soldiers Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa and Naama Levy, all aged 20.

Cheers erupted as the women appeared, flanked by masked gunmen from Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, for a staged handover in Gaza City’s Palestine Square. They held hands and waved, before being taken away in Red Cross vehicles.

“It’s amazing. They’re amazing. Did you see them stand and smile?” one woman watching the live feed with the crowd in Tel Aviv said.

In the crowd watching in Gaza, one man told the BBC Hamas was returning the hostages in an “honourable way” and declared the moment a victory for the group.

The women were then transferred to the Israeli military and later brought by helicopter to a hospital.

• Who are the released hostages?
• Row over Israeli civilian blocks Palestinians’ return
• What we know about the ceasefire deal

In a press briefing, the director of Beilinson Hospital, Dr Lena Koren Feldman, described the released hostages as being in a “stable condition”, but said they would continue to be given a “comprehensive medical and emotional evaluation”.

They were the second group of hostages to be released under a ceasefire deal, aimed at bringing a permanent end to the war, which began a week ago following months of negotiations.

The four women were taken hostage on 7 October from the Nahal Oz military base, about a kilometre from the Gaza border fence.

They were part of an unarmed all-female unit of observers, known as tatzpitaniyot in Hebrew, whose role was to study live surveillance footage captured by cameras along the high-tech fence and look out for signs of anything suspicious.

Several conscripts from the unit and families of those who were killed have said that they had been warning that an attack was coming in the months before 7 October.

It was clear there was a “balloon that was going to burst”, one told the BBC.

The Israeli military has previously said it is in the midst of a “thorough investigation into the events of 7 October, including those in Nahal Oz, and the circumstances preceding”.

One woman from the unit, Agam Berger, remains in Gaza. In a statement on Saturday, her family said they were “overjoyed and moved” by the return of the four others, while they continued to “eagerly await embracing Agam, God willing, in the coming week”.

Another woman who served in the unit with them, but was not on shift on 7 October, told the BBC: “I have been very emotional… This feels like sisters coming home.”

“God willing, we will all sit together and talk, but of course no pressure. They have to heal first.”

For families of the observers who were killed on 7 October, it was a bittersweet moment.

“This is a very emotional day for us,” said Elad Levy, whose niece Roni served alongside the four women but was killed in the attacks.

“We are very happy to see Karina, Daniella, Liri and Naama coming back home to their families. At the same time, we remember that there are hostages still in Gaza. And for us, we remember Roni who will never come back home.”

Israel had expected female civilian hostage Arbel Yehud to be included in Saturday’s release, and accused Hamas of breaching the terms of the ceasefire to prioritise female civilians. Hamas said Ms Yehud would be released next weekend.

Another female civilian who is yet to be released is Shiri Bibas, who was taken hostage with her husband and two young children, Ariel and Kfir.

If President Donald Trump was polarising on the campaign trail, his first week back in office was no different.

He was officially sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday before signing hundreds of executive actions, reversing policies from President Joe Biden’s administration and following through on many of the promises he made on the campaign trail.

We spoke to 10 Americans across the political spectrum about how they felt about the week.

Here are their big takeaways.

Kyle Plesa, 39, an independent who voted for Trump: “I felt like I was watching like WWE, professional wrestling. Just the boisterousness, the showmanship, the playing for the cameras. You can tell that the entertainment is a big part of Donald Trump’s credo as opposed to whether you had Barack Obama or Joe Biden inaugurated.”

Greg Bruno, 67, a Republican who voted for Trump: “I think Trump proved he’s a man of the people when he threw those pens into the audience after signing the executive orders in front of 20,000 people. It just showed you who he really is working for.”

Richard Weil, 74, an independent who voted for Kamala Harris: “[His inaugural address] was not quite as dark as his first speech [in 2017], but it was certainly bitter. There was nothing in there that said good things about America.”

Angela Ramos, 37, an independent who voted for Harris: “I found a lot of Trump’s speech to be disingenuous, because he mentioned specific things like justice, honour, integrity, trustworthiness, but these are not qualities that I think are reflected in his policy or his behaviour… I watched it out of a sense of civic duty.”

Larry Kees, 47, a Republican who voted for Trump: “I was happy [with the executive orders]. There were so many of them. I couldn’t keep track. Obviously he’s not a regular politician – with most politicians, you’ll hear one thing and they’ll do another.”

Tony Flecklin, 69, a Republican who voted for Trump: “You can expect behaviour from him that’s going to be unlike what you normally run into. But in general, his policies in terms of border protection, economic sufficiency, oil and gas, I am wholeheartedly in favour of.”

Greg Bruno, a Republican: “This is why he was elected. Many of these orders involve issues that the American public wants to see done. Those are promises that were made in the campaign and he’s fulfilling them.”

Carlyn Jorgensen, 40, an independent who voted for Harris: “I haven’t liked the fact that the front row was essentially CEOs – that you had Elon Musk and [Jeff] Bezos in the front row. That, to me, just felt like – are we heading towards an oligarchy at this point?”

Angela Ramos, an independent: “Most deeply concerning to me are the departure from the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, simply because our actions have really deep consequences, not just for us within the US, but for the entire world.”

David Lieck, 58, a Democrat who voted for Harris: “I felt like he’s essentially pandering to his base in the action he took with respect to the pardons and the commuting of the sentences of the January 6 rioters. I felt that was vindictive and sending the wrong message to the American people.”

Greg Bruno, a Republican: “He came into his first presidency under attack… you put a person in a defensive crouch when you’re under attack like that. This presidency doesn’t have that element. So not only is he coming in not under attack, but he’s coming in as a highly experienced person in how to wield the power of the presidency.”

Shantonu Mazumdar, 58, a Democrat who voted for Harris: “I think he’s gotten a little bit harder, more hard line, it feels like. He’s, I think, emboldened a little bit by his constituents and the people who have supported him. I think he’s been given a little bit more… freedom to be further to the right than he was before.”

Richard Weil, an independent: “I think he’s more focused. I think he’s angrier, he’s more revengeful… but I think he’s turning into a bitter old man. I do think he has changed and I think he’s changed for the worse.”

Tony Flecklin, a Republican: “I’m happy that he’s following through with what his promises were. Sometimes his methods are a little draconian. That’s just the nature of Donald J. Trump. He’s not going to be wimpy about the way he approaches things.”

• EXPLAINED: What Trump has done since taking power
• VOTERS: 10 Americans give their verdict on week one
• BORDER: Six things Trump has done about migration
• PARDONS: Jan 6 defendants get nearly everything they want
• WATCH: Trump’s first week in three minutes

It began with a short email from a stranger asking for help and it ended six years later with a violent fraudster and rapist being jailed for 12 years – thanks to an incredible group of women and their fight for justice.

It was 2017 and I was working as a newspaper reporter when I got the email from a woman who detailed how she had met a man named Christopher Harkins on Tinder and he had stolen £3,247 from her.

Lisa, who is using a pseudonym because she doesn’t want to be linked to this story forever, explained that Harkins had lovebombed her, suggested they go on holiday together and then, when she transferred the money, went quiet.

It quickly transpired the holiday wasn’t real and Harkins would not refund the cash.

Lisa was afraid Harkins would go on to scam someone else. It didn’t occur to Lisa – or to me – that it was a scam he had already honed with experience.

Lisa had gone to Police Scotland for help and been told the issue was a civil matter.

Frustrated, but determined, now she wanted to protect other people by exposing this man in the press.

We spoke on the phone and she laid out the situation, how he’d overwhelmed her with attention, had been the perfect gentleman. And how things had quickly changed when he decided to push her for money.

Lisa, a smart, impressive, professional woman in her 30s, provided screenshots of WhatsApp conversations and bank account details.

It was clear very quickly that this man was a master manipulator but it wasn’t until I spoke to him on the phone that I realised how skilled he was at the practice.

Tracking him down was the hard part.

Lisa had told Harkins that she had spoken to a journalist and he was, let’s say, unimpressed.

He promised repeatedly to give her the money back if she put a stop to the story – but didn’t actually make a move to return the cash.

When I called him – on the two numbers I had for him – he didn’t reply.

Lisa’s story was credible, and she had hard evidence, but we wanted to speak to Harkins to hear his side.

Suddenly, Lisa was in touch to say Harkins had agreed to return her money. She was to meet him at a chip shop on the south side of Glasgow.

I went with her, waiting outside with a photographer to try to speak to Harkins.

The money was there in an envelope. There was no sign of him though.

We decided to publish the story, having tried all we could to track him down. And then my phone rang. It was Harkins.

Speaking to him was a baffling experience. It was hard to keep him on track.

He would state one thing and then, when challenged, very quickly change his position.

He tried to persuade me that Lisa was threatening him and he was frightened of her.

Harkins had had his chance to have his say – and we published the story.

Within the hour of the article going online I had an email from another woman claiming to have been targeted by Harkins. And then another.

My phone started ringing. I could tell as soon as I picked it up that this would be another Harkins target – he clearly had a type: smart and articulate.

Lisa, who I was updating all the time, was appalled. Neither of us had any idea who prolific he might have been.

Some women wanted to tell their stories publicly while others just wanted an outlet to share what had happened to them.

I heard stories of fraud, of manipulation, of verbal abuse – and worse.

One caller was a man who had known Harkins in his early 20s and warned me to be careful.

He claimed to have known Harkins to be physically violent and wanted me to know what I was dealing with.

We ran a second story in the paper.

This was another woman who had been conned by the holiday scam – this time in England. Harkins, in turned out, had been operating across the country.

She lost £1,600 to the fake holiday con and had also been pressured to take out loans for him, which luckily she didn’t do.

More than 20 women had contacted me by now and I had interviewed several who wanted to go public, hearing dreadful stories of fraud but also physical and sexual violence.

Many had gone to the police only to be told – as Lisa had been – that this was a civil matter.

Then, Police Scotland contacted me. They said that they were going to investigate and could we please stop writing about Harkins so as not to tip him off to how much was known about him.

Not wanting to jeopardise any case, we agreed.

Women I had interviewed were contacted by Police Scotland and several decided to make formal complaints.

They knew it was going to be a long and gruelling process – but they wanted this man taken off the streets.

Months passed and the wait for the women was intensely stressful.

Finally, in December 2019, he was arrested. We all thought this was the beginning of the end and the women relaxed a little.

In early 2020 my phone rang. It was a woman in London.

This woman said that she had stayed with Harkins in a five star hotel in an upmarket part of the city.

A receptionist at the hotel had taken her aside and told her the man she was with was using a false name, was in fact called Christopher Harkins and she should Google him.

The woman told me she found my articles online and read them, with increasing horror.

I listened with my heart in my mouth as she told me she went back to their room, where Harkins was still asleep, and took his wallet from his bag.

His bank card said Christopher Harkins. She took her belongings and left.

Knowing, at that time, what I knew about Harkins’ other behaviour, which wasn’t in the public domain, I had such an overwhelming feeling of relief that he hadn’t woken up.

He scammed another woman in London, and she went to the Metropolitan Police, who acted quickly.

He was convicted and jailed, which was both a relief to the women in Scotland and a frustration.

The English proceedings meant the impending trial in Scotland would be delayed. Again.

Just before Harkins was imprisoned in England he called my editor to complain that I was orchestrating a campaign against him because I was obsessed with him. That took a bit of explaining.

The delays were intensely stressful to the women involved in the case but they were determined to see it through.

Their bravery and solidarity was incredible to witness.

When the case called at the High Court in Paisley last year I attended every day of court.

Harkins by now was a diminished figure. I’d seen him years before in the High Court in Glasgow and he had been a muscular, imposing man.

Now he was thinner, his court suit too big. He was a man obsessed by appearance and I can only think his baggy shirts and mismatched shoes and trousers caused him stress.

Harkins was found guilty of 19 offences including rape, assault, recording an intimate video without consent, threatening and abusive behaviour and four other sexual offences.

He also admitted defrauding nine women out of more than £214,000.

In July last year Harkins was sentenced to 12 years in prison. As he was handcuffed to be led to the cells, he turned to look at me in the gallery.

“This is because of you,” he said. No. This was because of the women who were brave enough to stand up to him.

If there is anything to be taken from story of Christopher Harkins, it is the determination of these women and the way they held their nerve for years, standing together as a force Harkins that, in the end, could not reckon with.

The Trump administration has fired at least a dozen federal watchdogs late on Friday evening, a possibly illegal move that could face court challenges.

Speaking from the Senate floor on Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described the watchdog firings as a “chilling purge”.

“These firings are Donald Trump’s way of telling us he is terrified of accountability and is hostile to facts and to transparency,” said Schumer, a Democrat from New York.

The White House has not confirmed the firings and did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Affected inspectors general were sent emails from the director of presidential personnel overnight on Friday telling them that “due to changing priorities, your position as inspector general… is terminated, effective immediately”, according to CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The group of dismissed watchdogs includes the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, and the inspector general of the Small Business Administration, CBS said.

There were competing lists of fired watchdogs circulating, according to the New York Times. Watchdogs at the departments of agriculture, commerce, defence, education, housing and urban development, interior, labor, transportation and veterans affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency were all reportedly considered.

It is unclear whom the Trump administration might pick to fill the newly vacant positions.

Congress created inspectors general in the wake of the Watergate scandal, as part of a wave of reforms intended to curb corruption, waste and fraud. The independent watchdogs – who work within federal agencies but are not controlled by the head of those agencies – are meant to serve as a guard against mismanagement and abuse of power.

Though they are presidential appointees, they are expected to be nonpartisan.

• LIVE: Democrats cry foul after “late night coup”

The firings may be in breach of a law that requires the White House to give Congress 30-day notice and case-specific information before dismissing a federal inspector general.

Hannibal Ware, the inspector general of the Small Business Administration and head of a council of the watchdog across agencies sent a letter to Sergio Gor, the head of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel suggesting the dismissals were invalid.

“I recommend that you reach out to White House your intended course of action,” Ware wrote. “At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed inspectors general.”

In a separate statement released on Saturday afternoon, Ware wrote that dismissals “inconsistent with the law” were a grave threat to to the independence of inspectors general.

“IGs [inspectors general] are not immune from removal,” he wrote. “However, the law must be followed to protect independent government oversight for America.”

Democrats were quick to criticise the president for the move.

Schumer said the move was a “preview of the lawless approach” Trump and his administration were taking.

Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, called the firings a “Friday night coup” and an “attack on transparency and accountability”.

He and 20 other Democratic members of congress wrote a letter directly to President Trump which expressed “grave concern” for the dismissals and urged him to reconsider.

“Your actions violate the law, attack our democracy, and undermine the safety of the American people,” the representatives wrote, a group that included Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Zoe Lofgren of California, and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.

Some Republican lawmakers, including Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Senator Susan Collins of Maine also expressed concern over the purge.

“I don’t understand why one would fire individuals whose mission it is to root out waste, fraud and abuse,” Collins said at the Capitol on Saturday. “I don’t understand it.”

• EXPLAINED: What Trump has done since taking power
• VOTERS: 10 Americans give their verdict on week one
• BORDER: Six things Trump has done about migration
• PARDONS: Jan 6 defendants get nearly everything they wanted

• WATCH: Trump’s first week in three minutes

In the shadow of a vast crucifix, labourers and construction workers in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez are building a small city of their own. A tent city.

On the old fairgrounds, beneath an altar constructed for a mass by Pope Francis in 2016, the Mexican government is preparing for thousands of deportees they expect to arrive from the United States in the coming weeks.

Juarez is one of eight border locations along the 3,000-kilometre-long (1,900 miles) border where Mexico is getting ready for the anticipated influx.

Men in boots and baseball caps climb on top of a vast metal structure to drape over thick white tarpaulin, erecting a rudimentary shelter to temporarily house men and women exactly like themselves.

Casual labourers, domestic workers, kitchen staff and farm hands are all likely to be among those sent south soon, once what President Donald Trump calls “the largest deportation in American history” gets under way.

As well as protection from the elements, the deportees will receive food, medical care, and assistance in obtaining Mexican identity documents, under a deportee-support programme which President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration calls “Mexico Embraces You”.

“Mexico will do everything necessary to care for its compatriots and will allocate whatever is necessary to receive those who are repatriated,” said the Mexican Interior Minister, Rosa Icela Rodriguez, on the day of Trump’s inauguration.

For her part, President Sheinbaum has stressed her government will first attend to the humanitarian needs of those returning, saying they will qualify for her government’s social programmes and pensions, and will immediately be eligible to work.

She urged Mexicans to “remain calm and keep a cool head” about relations with President Trump and his administration more broadly – from deportations to the threat of tariffs.

“With Mexico, I think we are going very well,” said President Trump in a video address to the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The two neighbours may yet find a workable solution on immigration which is acceptable to both – President Sheinbaum has said the key is dialogue and keeping the channels of communication open.

Undoubtedly, though, she recognises the potential stress President Trump’s declaration of an emergency at the US border could place on Mexico.

An estimated 5 million undocumented Mexicans currently live in the United States and the prospect of a mass return could quickly saturate and overwhelm border cities like Juarez and Tijuana.

It’s an issue which worries Jose Maria Garcia Lara, the director of the Juventud 2000 migrant shelter in Tijuana. As he shows me around the facility, which is already nearing its capacity, he says there are very few places he can fit more families.

“If we have to, we can maybe put some people in the kitchen or the library,” he says.

There comes a point, though, where there simply isn’t any space left – and donations of food, medical supplies, blankets and hygiene products will be stretched too thin.

“We’re being hit on two fronts. Firstly, the arrival of Mexicans and other migrants who are fleeing violence,” says Mr Garcia.

“But also, we’ll have the mass deportations. We don’t know how many people will come across the border needing our help. Together, these two things could create a huge problem.”

Furthermore, another key part of Mr Trump’s executive orders includes a policy called “Remain in Mexico” under which immigrants awaiting dates to make their asylum cases in a US immigration court would have to stay in Mexico ahead of those appointments.

When “Remain in Mexico” was previously in place, during Trump’s first term and under the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, Mexican border towns struggled to cope.

Human rights groups also repeatedly denounced the risks the migrants were being exposed to by being forced to wait in dangerous cities where drug cartel-related crime is rife.

This time around, Sheinbaum has made it clear that Mexico has not agreed to the plan and won’t accept any non-Mexican asylum seekers from the US as they wait for their asylum hearings. Clearly, “Remain in Mexico” only works if Mexico is willing to comply with it. So far, it has drawn a line.

President Trump has deployed around 2,500 troops to the US southern border where they will be tasked with carrying out some of the logistics of his crackdown.

In Tijuana, meanwhile, Mexican soldiers are helping to prepare for the consequences of it. The authorities have readied an events centre called Flamingos with 1,800 beds for the returnees and troops bringing in supplies, setting up a kitchen and showers.

As President Trump was signing executive orders on Monday, a minibus swept through the gates at the Chaparral border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana carrying a handful of deportees.

A few journalists had gathered to try to speak to, ostensibly, the first deportees of the Trump era. It was just a routine deportation, though, one which was probably in the pipeline for weeks and had nothing to do with the documents Trump was signing before a cheering crowd in Washington DC.

Still, symbolically, as the minibus sped past the waiting media towards a government-run shelter, these were the first of many.

Mexico will have its work cut out to receive them, house them and find them a place in a nation some won’t have seen since they left as children.

The CIA on Saturday offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is “more likely” to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals.

But the intelligence agency cautioned it had “low confidence” in this determination.

A spokesperson said that a “research-related origin” of the pandemic “is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting”.

The decision to release that assessment marks one of the first made by the CIA’s new director John Ratcliffe, appointed by Donald Trump, who took over the agency on Thursday.

Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence during President Trump’s first term, has long favoured the lab leak theory, claiming Covid most likely came from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections emerged.

In an interview with Breitbart News published on Friday, Ratcliffe said he wanted the CIA to abandon its neutral stance on the origins of the virus and “get off the sidelines”.

“One of the things that I’ve talked about a lot is addressing the threat from China on a number of fronts, and that goes back to why a million Americans died and why the Central Intelligence Agency has been sitting on the sidelines for five years in not making an assessment about the origins of COVID,” he said.

“That’s a day-one thing for me.”

But officials told US media that the new assessment was not based on new intelligence and predates the Trump administration. The review was reportedly ordered in the closing weeks of the Biden administration and completed before Trump took office on Monday.

The review offered on Saturday is based on “low confidence” which means the intelligence supporting it is deficient, inconclusive or contradictory.

There is no consensus on the cause of the Covid pandemic.

Some support a “natural origin” theory, which argues the virus spread naturally from animals, without the involvement of any scientists or laboratories.

The lab leak hypothesis specifically has been hotly contested by scientists, including many who say there is no definitive evidence to back it up. And China has in the past dismissed the lab claim as “political manipulation” by Washington.

Still, the once controversial theory has been gaining ground among some intelligence agencies.

In 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News it was his bureau’s assessment that “the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”.

• FBI chief Christopher Wray says China lab leak most likely
• Have we found the ‘animal origin’ of Covid?
• FBI chief Christopher Wray says China lab leak most likely

President Donald Trump has revoked security protection for former top US health official Anthony Fauci, who has faced death threats since leading the country’s Covid-19 response.

“You can’t have a security detail for the rest of your life because you work for government,” Trump told reporters, when asked about the decision on Friday. “It’s very standard.”

This week, Trump also revoked security protections for his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his former National Security Adviser John Bolton and former envoy Brian Hook, who all faced threats from Iran.

Dr Fauci has now hired his own private security team that he will pay for himself, US media report.

Asked whether he felt responsible for the officials’ safety, Trump said on Friday: “They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security too.”

Dr Fauci was previously protected by federal marshals, and then a private security company, which was paid for by the government, according to the New York Times.

One of Dr Fauci’s most vocal Republican critics, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, had called for his security to be revoked.

He wrote in a post on X on Thursday that he had “sent supporting information to end the 24 hr a day limo and security detail for Fauci”.

“I wish him nothing but peace but he needs to pay for his own limos,” he said.

Trump has also revoked the security clearances of 51 intelligence officials who had claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Under US protocol, former presidents and their spouses are granted security protection for life. But protection for other US officials is decided based on the threat assessment from the intelligence community.

As the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Fauci faced death threats during and after the coronavirus pandemic, as well as criticism from Republicans over mask mandates and other Covid restrictions.

He led the institute for 40 years, including during Trump’s first term. Trump had also awarded presidential commendations to Dr Fauci who served on the Operation Warp Speed task force during the pandemic.

Before leaving office, then-President Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Dr Fauci.

The doctor told US media that he “truly appreciated” Biden for taking action, adding that the possibility of prosecution had created “immeasurable and intolerable distress” on his family.

“Let me be perfectly clear, I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me,” he said.

Every day families stream over a dry and dusty path into Chad, fleeing war and famine in Sudan – scenes that have clearly shaken the UK’s foreign secretary.

Under the sweltering sun, David Lammy visited the Adré border post on Friday to witness first-hand the impact of Sudan’s civil war which erupted when the army and its former ally, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell out.

Those who make it over the border have often been separated from their families in the chaos to escape and are desperate to see if their relatives have made it over safely.

“It’s some of the most horrific things I’ve ever heard and seen in my life,” said Lammy.

“Overwhelmingly, what I’ve seen here in Chad, on the border with Sudan, are women and children fleeing for their lives – telling stories of widespread slaughter, mutilation, burning, sexual violence against them, their children. And amongst it all, famine, hunger – such unbelievable plight.”

The foreign minister saw the dozens of women wrapped in light, multicoloured shawls and holding children of different ages crossing over on horse-drawn carts.

They looked weary sitting on bags holding the few belongings they could bring with them in the long journey to safety.

“Alhamdulillah” meaning “praise be God”, remarks Halima Abdalla when I asked her how she felt to have made it over the border.

The 28-year-old is relieved despite the tragedy she has suffered losing one of her children as she fled from Darfur, Sudan’s western region, which has suffered some of the most devastating violence over the last 21 months – much of it alleged to have been perpetrated by the RSF.

“I first went to el-Geneina, but I had to run again when fighting broke out there,” she says, explaining how she then became separated from her husband and two other children.

Aid workers in Adré say they have been trying to reunite families once they crossed the border.

“Some mothers have told us they had to choose which children to run with as they couldn’t carry all of them at one go,” an aid worker told the BBC.

Some abandoned children have been brought by humanitarian workers across the border and are put in foster care while efforts are made to find their families.

Standing on the Chadian side of the border, Lammy spoke to families that were fleeing and aid workers who were receiving them.

After meeting some of the refugees, he told the BBC: “All of these people have stories – very, very desperate stories of fleeing violence, of murder in their families, of rape, of torture, of mutilation.”

“I just sat with one woman who showed me burn marks. She had been burned by soldiers up and down her arms, she had been beaten and she had been raped. This is desperate, and we must bring the world’s attention to it and bring the suffering to an end.”

But he decried what he described as a “hierarchy of conflict” that has seemingly placed Sudan’s at the bottom, even though it is currently the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

In November last year, the UK foreign secretary spearheaded a resolution calling for a ceasefire at the UN Security Council, which Russia vetoed.

“How could you veto the plight that is going on here?” he asked, sounding exasperated.

He told the BBC he now planned to convene, in London, a meeting of Sudan’s neighbours like Chad and Egypt and other “international partners to broker the peace”.

Several attempts at peace talks led by the US and Saudi Arabia have failed to yield a solution to the conflict.

Since the mediation stalled, the US subsequently sanctioned the generals leading both sides of the war. It also determined that the RSF and its allies had committed genocide.

More than 12 million people have fled their homes since fighting broke out in April 2023.

Caught in the middle of the bitter fighting are more than 50 million civilians, almost half of whom desperately need humanitarian aid, according to UN agencies.

Malnutrition rates are among the world’s highest here. At the tented clinic in Adré, health workers measure the circumference of the upper arm of six-month-old Rasma Ibrahim.

The colour-coded tape goes all the way to the red end. The impact of her health status could last her entire lifetime. One in every seven children here in Adré is malnourished.

• Sudan war: A simple guide to what is happening
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The UK would continue to push for a ceasefire, said Lammy.

It has already doubled aid to £200m ($250m), and is calling for other donor countries to step up.

Aid agencies are however concerned by the announcement by newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump of a 90-day freeze on foreign aid.

A disruption in the support of one of the world’s largest donors will no doubt have devastating consequences on crises like Sudan. The UN is already struggling to meet its targets for badly needed aid money.

In 2024, an appeal for $2.7bn (£2.2bn) to support Sudan was put out, but only 57% of this money was provided.

At the food distribution centre in Adré, sacks of split yellow peas, millet, sorghum, and boxes of cooking oil and other supplies have been arranged neatly on top of tarpaulins as families from the nearby refugee camp queue for their quotas.

The cries of infants tied by shawls to their queueing mothers’ backs fill the air. One-by-one, the families are called to collect their rations.

A man helps lift a sack of dry food on to the shoulder of another, who then hums as he makes his way back to his makeshift home.

The population of Adré was about 40,000 before Sudan’s civil war began and now it has grown more than five-fold, according to local volunteers.

The refugees here are among the lucky few. Just across the border, in Darfur, famine was declared in August in Zamzam camp, near the city of el-Fasher, which the RSF has besieged for more than a year.

On Friday came the devastating news that one of el-Fasher’s last functioning hospitals was hit by a drone, killing at least 30 people. Regional authorities said RSF paramilitaries were the culprits, but they have not responded to the claim.

Back in December, the UN-backed Famine Review Committee said famine had spread to more areas – in Darfur to Abu Shouk and al-Salam camps and to parts of South Kordofan state.

The famine spread despite the re-opening of the Adré border that had been shut by the army on suspicion it was being used to transport weapons to its rivals.

As we left the border, three or four lorries with UN World Food Programme banners slowly rumbled down the dusty road crossing into Sudan.

They will be delivering much-needed aid to villages, towns and displacement camps beyond the border. But it is still far from sufficient.

“We have to step up and wake up now to this huge, huge crisis,” said Lammy.

• BBC hears of horror and hunger in rare visit to Darfur massacre town
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Jimmy Donaldson – aka MrBeast – was jubilant as he told his tens of millions of TikTok followers about his bid to buy the platform.

“I might become you guys’ new CEO! I’m super excited!” Donaldson said from a private jet. He then proceeded to promise $10,000 to five random new followers.

The internet creator’s post has been viewed more than 73 million times since Monday. Donaldson said he could not share details about his bid, but promised: “Just know, it’s gonna be crazy.”

Donaldson is one of multiple suitors who have expressed interest in purchasing TikTok, the wildly popular social media platform that’s become the subject of a fast-moving political drama in the United States.

Last year, then-President Joe Biden signed a law that gave TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance until 19 January to sell the platform or face a ban in the United States.

The legislation addressed concerns about TikTok’s links to the Chinese government and worries about the app being a national security risk.

President Donald Trump has floated the possibility of a joint venture.

“I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position,” he said in a Truth Social post on Sunday. “By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to [stay up].”

Trump has since signed an executive order that allows the app to stay operational for another 75 days.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that China was considering a TikTok sale to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close ally of President Trump, who already owns the social media platform X.

Musk himself wrote on X this week that while he has long been against a TikTok ban, “the current situation where TikTok is allowed to operate in America, but X is not allowed to operate in China is unbalanced. Something needs to change”.

At a news conference Tuesday, Trump was asked by a reporter if he would be open to Musk buying the platform.

“I would be if he wanted to buy it, yes,” the president replied.

“I’d like Larry to buy it, too,” Trump added, referring to Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, a long-time Trump supporter who was on stage with him for a separate announcement.

Oracle is one of TikTok’s main server providers, managing many of the data centres where billions of the platform’s videos are stored.

Last year, Oracle warned that a TikTok ban could hurt its business. The cloud computing giant was also a leading contender to buy the social media platform in 2020, back when Trump was trying to ban it.

Billionaire investor Frank McCourt has also expressed interest in TikTok, and has been doing media interviews about the prospect for several months.

McCourt has said he wants TikTok to run on technology overseen by the Project Liberty Institute, which he founded. He has been critical of data collection practices of social media companies.

Project Liberty is bidding for TikTok without its proprietary algorithm. McCourt told CNBC this week that Project Liberty is “not interested in the algorithm or the Chinese technology” even as he acknowledged that the platform is “worth less” without it.

Ultimately, President Trump is likely to have a major role in selecting a US buyer of TikTok.

“It’s going to be a winner that’s likely to be politically sympathetic to President Donald Trump,” said Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University.

Prof Chander said the 50-50 joint ownership model does not comport with the law’s requirements, which might prompt Trump to pressure Congress into revising the law.

For now, the platform’s future remains in limbo.

Prof Chander said the Biden administration made an “unforced error” by allowing the law to give the president outsized control over who owns TikTok.

“It was a terrible idea to put the future of a massive information platform into this political maelstrom,” Prof Chander said.

There are times in history when countries are gripped by election fever.

January 2025 in Belarus is not one of them.

Drive around Minsk and you’ll see no big billboards promoting the portraits of candidates.

There is little campaigning.

The grey skies and sleet of a Belarusian winter add to an overriding sense of inactivity.

And inevitability.

The outcome of the 2025 presidential election is not in doubt. Alexander Lukashenko, once dubbed “Europe’s last dictator,” who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for more than 30 years, will be declared the winner and secure a seventh term in office.

His supporters call it an exercise in “Belarusian democracy”. His opponents reject the process as “a farce”.

Even Mr Lukashenko himself claims to lack interest in the process.

“I’m not following the election campaign. I’ve got no time,” the Belarusian leader told workers at the Minsk Automobile Plant this week.

The workers presented him with a gift: an axe for chopping wood.

“I’ll try it out before the election,” promised Mr Lukashenko, to rapturous applause.

Four-and-a-half years ago, at a different enterprise, the leader of Belarus received a much cooler reception.

One week after the 2020 presidential election, Alexander Lukashenko visited the Minsk Wheels Tractor Plant. Leaked video showed him being jeered and heckled by workers. They shouted ‘”Go away! Go away!”.

In 2020 the official election result – of 80% for Mr Lukashenko – had sparked anger and huge protests across the country. Belarusians poured onto the streets to accuse their leader of stealing their votes and the election.

In the brutal police crackdown that followed, thousands of anti-government protesters and critics were arrested. Eventually the wave of repression extinguished the protests and, with help from Russia, Mr Lukashenko clung to power.

The UK, the European Union and the United States refuse to recognise him as the legitimate president of Belarus.

Alexander Lukashenko’s staunchest opponents (and potential rivals) are either in prison or have been forced into exile.

That is why this week the European Parliament passed a resolution calling on the EU to reject the upcoming presidential election as “a sham” and pointing out that the election campaign has been taking place “in an environment of severe repression which fails to meet even the minimum standards for democratic elections”.

I remember interviewing Alexander Lukashenko last October, on the day the date of the presidential election was announced.

“How can these elections be free and democratic if the leaders of the opposition are in prison or abroad?” I asked.

“Do you actually know who the leaders of the opposition are?” Mr Lukashenko hit back.

“An opposition is a group of people who should serve the interests, at the very least, of a small number of people in the country. Where are these leaders you speak of? Wake up!”

Alexander Lukashenko is not the sole candidate. There are four others. But they seem more like spoilers, than serious challengers.

I drive four hours from Minsk to meet one of them. Sergei Syrankov is the leader of the Communist Party of Belarus. In the town of Vitebsk I sit in on one of his campaign events. In a large hall Mr Syrankov addresses a small audience, flanked by his party’s emblem, the hammer and sickle.

His campaign slogan is unusual to say the least: “Not instead of, but together with Lukashenko!”

He is a presidential candidate who openly backs his opponent.

“There is no alternative to Alexander Lukashenko as the leader of our country,” Mr Syrankov tells me. “So, we are taking part in the election with the president’s team.”

“Why do you think there is no alternative?” I ask.

“Because Lukashenko is a man of the people, a man of the soil, who has done everything to make sure we don’t have the kind of chaos they have in Ukraine.”

“You’re fighting for power yourself, but you support another candidate. That is…unusual,” I suggest.

“I am certain that Alexander Lukashenko will win a thumping victory. But even if he wins and I don’t, the Communists will be the winners,” responds Mr Syrankov.

“The main Communist in our country is our head of state. Lukashenko still has his old membership card from the days of the Soviet Communist Party.”

Also on the ballot is Oleg Gaidukevich, leader of the right-wing Liberal-Democratic Party of Belarus. He, too, isn’t running to win.

“If anyone dares to suggest the outcome of the election isn’t known, he’s a liar,” Mr Gaidukevich tells me.

“It’s obvious that Lukashenko will win. He has a massive rating….We’re going to battle to strengthen our positions and prepare for the next election.”

Mr Lukashenko’s critics reject the assertion that his popularity is “massive”. But there is no doubt he does have support.

On the edge of Vitebsk is the little town of Oktyabrskaya. Talking to people there I detect concern that a change of leader may spark instability.

“I want a stable salary, stability in the country,” welder Sergei tells me. “Other candidates make promises, but might not keep them. I want to keep what I’ve got.”

“The situation today is very tense,” says Zenaida. “Maybe there are other people worthy of power. But by the time a younger leader gets his feet under the desk, makes those important connections with with other countries, and with his own people that will take a long time.

“God forbid we should end up like Ukraine.”

In Belarus today there is fear of instability, fear of the unknown, and fear of the government. All work in Alexander Lukashenko’s favour.

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.

Russia’s justice ministry on Friday designated the BBC Russian service’s Olga Ivshina a “foreign agent”.

Ivshina, who is based in London, is the fourth BBC journalist to be designated by Russia since the full invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.

Last week BBC Russian’s Anastasia Lotareva, a senior editor in Riga, and Andrey Kozenko, a reporter in London, were added to the list.

Those named as foreign agents are compelled to mark any online content available in Russia as having come from a foreign agent, and to share financial details. Failure to comply can lead to fines or even imprisonment.

A spokesperson for the BBC said the corporation “strongly rejects and will challenge the designation”.

“The role of BBC News Russian journalists, reporting independently and impartially, has never been needed more, and we will support them to ensure they can continue to do their jobs serving Russian-speaking audiences.”

A years-long investigation into rock star Marilyn Manson over sexual assault and domestic violence allegations has been dropped, California prosecutors said on Friday.

Prosecutors said in a statement the allegations against Manson exceeded the statute of limitations, adding “we cannot prove charges of sexual assault beyond a reasonable doubt”.

Four women had filed lawsuits against Manson – whose legal name is Brian Warner – accusing him of rape, sexual assault and bodily harm.

Through his lawyer, Warner repeatedly denied the accusations and dismissed the claims as “falsehoods”.

Howard King, Warner’s attorney, said in a statement to the BBC that they are “very pleased” with the decision, and that his client has always maintained his innocence.

The four women who filed lawsuits accusing Warner of sexual and physical abuse include model Ashley Morgan Smithline, Game of Thrones actress Esmé Bianco and Warner’s former personal assistant Ashley Walters. The fourth woman chose to remain anonymous.

“We recognise and applaud the courage and resilience of the women who came forward to make reports and share their experiences,” Nathan J Hochman from the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said in the statement.

“We thank them for their cooperation and patience with the investigation.”

Authorities began their investigations in 2021, looking into alleged incidents between 2009 and 2011 in West Hollywood, where Warner lived.

In total, more than a dozen women had made allegations against the rock star, including his ex-fiancée Evan Rachel Wood.

Smithline – who filed the most recent lawsuit of the four women – said in court documents that Warner had “repeatedly threatened” her life, saying he would “find her” and “kill her if she left him”.

Her testimony echoed the experiences of Walters who, in court documents, described Warner as a terrifying and violent boss who gave friends permission to grope and kiss her. He also made her work for 48 hours in a row.

Since the allegations were made, Warner’s record label, booking agent and manager have severed ties with him.

“Obviously, my art and my life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims about me are horrible distortions of reality,” Warner wrote in an Instagram post in February 2021.

Did the hero Prince slay the tabloid dragon? Or to quote one of its most memorable headlines, was it The Sun Wot Won It?

The dust is still settling on the settlement of Prince Harry’s epic legal battle against News Group Newspapers.

Had the trial gone ahead, Prince Harry would have alleged he had been the victim of unlawful newsgathering by NGN journalists between 1996 and 2011 – and that its leaders covered up wrongdoing by destroying evidence – something that the company denied. But the eight-week trial didn’t happen because the two sides suddenly settled.

He’s scored an apology for intrusion by The Sun, including NGN accepting that there was unlawful information gathering by private investigators working for the newspaper.

NGN has not admitted unlawful activity by journalists or editors – and the settlement means a judge won’t now have to decide if there was, as the Duke’s team alleges, a corporate cover-up of wrongdoing – a claim NGN vehemently denied and said it would fight at trial.

The space between those positions, in which both sides will feel they won something, is now the battleground.

The question is how far, realistically, can a campaign around historical events go? Is this week a reboot of investigations or, in fact, the final chapter?

The main focus of pressure and lobbying will be the police – because campaigners believe Scotland Yard didn’t go far enough in its previous investigations, missing opportunities to widen its focus beyond wrongdoing at The News of the World.

Speaking to the BBC on Friday, actor Hugh Grant – who said the financial risks forced him to settle, with The Sun’s owners last year – said the police’s job was not done “by any means” – and suing the newspapers was never going to get at the full truth.

So all eyes will be on Lord Tom Watson, the former Labour deputy leader, who NGN admits was placed under surveillance by News of the World journalists in 2009.

The last remaining claimant alongside Prince Harry, he says a dossier will go to the Metropolitan Police.

The Met for its part says there is no active criminal investigation into alleged newspaper wrongdoing.

That statement also means there’s no current probe into the separate Mirror Group titles, despite a judge ruling in 2023 that they had used phone hacking to get information on Prince Harry.

So why no investigation?

The police aren’t ruling one out, but Sir Mark Rowley, the Met’s commissioner, told LBC radio on Friday that they would need to see something “radically new”.

And that’s because Scotland Yard takes the view that it carried out a huge investigation 10 years ago.

Team Harry believe this is profoundly myopic. While some of their planned evidence for the NGN trial had come from the police, his lawyers also obtained new documents from NGN itself under rules for a fair trial.

Could that be new evidence? Let’s take the example of the records of the myriad of payments to private investigators.

Team Harry and Watson would have sought to prove at a trial that many were for unlawful activity. On one level you can see that would arguably fit a test of something radically new.

But, in its defence, News Group would have argued that none of this proved journalists or anyone else at the Sun knew information was being unlawfully gathered – far short of a whiff of a criminal enterprise.

What this single episode we had been expecting to see at the trial shows is how each allegation against NGN would have been fought rather than conceded. And if the police knock on the company’s door with its truncheon, they are likely to face a similarly robust response.

And that’s why the thrust of Lord Watson’s promised dossier to the police will become important. It will have to say something really big. And in the absence of a court finding – that challenge becomes larger still.

Other bodies could in theory act. Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee investigated phone-hacking allegations in 2011. It’s likely to face calls to review the evidence of NGN CEO Rebekah Brooks and others – evidence that NGN will stand by because there’s been no finding in court of unlawful activity by journalists, editors or executives.

There’s also the Information Commissioner’s Office. It had a role in the origins of this story, investigating privacy and data breaches by private investigators. The ICO says it has no plans to reopen or review this investigation.

The government has already ruled out launching “Leveson 2”, the second leg of the public inquiry promised by David Cameron. It was meant to investigate “unlawful or improper conduct” across tabloids and whether the police, put simply, had turned a blind eye to it because they had been corrupted by getting too close to journalists who may have been paying them off. But it never happened.

Labour in government won’t revisit it because too much time has passed.