South Korea’s impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol has been charged with insurrection after he attempted to declare martial law in December.

His ill-fated attempt to impose military rule plunged the country into an unprecedented political crisis and he becomes the first sitting president in South Korean history to be charged with a crime.

The indictment comes after a court in Seoul rejected a request to extend Yoon’s detention on Saturday, which meant prosecutors had to make a decision on whether to charge or release him before Monday.

“The punishment of the ringleader of insurrection now begins finally,” Han Min-soo, a spokesman from the main opposition Democratic Party told a press conference.

• Fear, fury and triumph: Six hours that shook South Korea

Separately, the Constitutional Court has begun deliberations on whether to formally dismiss Yoon as president or reinstate him.

The impeached president has largely refused to co-operate with the criminal investigation over the martial law declaration.

Yoon is set to stand trial along with his former defence minister and senior military commanders, who are accused of helping him plan and carry out the attempt to seize total power.

In an unprecedented televised announcement on 3 December, Yoon said he was invoking martial law to protect the country from “anti-state” forces that sympathised with North Korea.

At the time, the embattled leader was in a deadlock over a budget bill, dogged by corruption scandals and several of his cabinet ministers were under investigation.

The military announced all parliamentary activity was suspended and sought to impose controls on media outlets.

The opposition’s Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung urged people to protest at the National Assembly and asked his fellow lawmakers to immediately vote to repeal the order.

Less than two hours after Yoon’s declaration, 190 lawmakers who gathered – including some from the president’s party – voted unanimously to block it.

Soldiers equipped with rifles were seen entering the parliament building through smashed windows as a dramatic confrontation ensued.

Thousands of civilians gathered in front of the assembly and tried to block the soldiers.

Yoon was was impeached by parliament and suspended from his duties on 14 December.

The affair has triggered South Korea’s worst political crisis in decades and has polarised the country.

Many of his hard-line supporters have rallied around him. On Friday, tens of thousands gathered to protest, demanding he be released and returned to office.

If Yoon is removed from office, a presidential election would be held within 60 days.

The prosecutors’ office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

US President Donald Trump has said he wants Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians from Gaza.

Trump said he had made the request to Jordan’s King Abdullah and planned to ask Egypt’s president on Sunday, too.

Describing Gaza as a “demolition site”, Trump said: “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing”. He added that the move “could be temporary” or “could be long-term”.

Hamas has vowed to oppose any such action, and the comments will likely outrage Palestinians in Gaza, for whom it is their home. Jordan’s foreign minister said the kingdom was “firm and unwavering” in its rejection of displacing Palestinians.

Most of Gaza’s two million residents have been displaced in the 15 months of war with Israel, which has flattened much of Gaza’s infrastructure.

The United Nations has previously estimated that 60% of structures across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, and it could take decades to rebuild.

• BBC Verify: How 15 months of war have devastated Gaza
• History of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians

Trump made his comments while speaking to reporters on board the Air Force One.

“Almost everything is demolished and people are dying there.

“So I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where maybe they can live in peace for a change.”

Trump did not give further details of the proposal, and the subject was not referenced in the White House’s official read out of the call.

“Our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip endured death and destruction for 15 months… without leaving their land. Therefore, they will not accept any offers or solutions, even if they appear to be good intentions under the title of reconstruction, as announced by US President Trump’s proposals,” Bassem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told the BBC.

“Our people, just as they have thwarted all plans for displacement and an alternative homeland over the decades, will also thwart such projects,” he added.

Asked about Trump’s comments, Abu Yahya Rashid, a man displaced in the southern city of Khan Younis said:

“We are the ones who decide our fate and what we want. This land is ours and the property of our ancestors throughout history. We will not leave it except as corpses.”

Decades of US foreign policy has committed to the creation of a Palestinian state, with Gaza as a key part. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects this.

The US has previously said that it opposes any forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza or the occupied West Bank, with then Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying last year: “They cannot, they must not, be pressed to leave Gaza.”

More than two million Palestinian refugees, most of whom have been granted citizenship, live in Jordan, according to the UN. They are descendants of some of the approximately 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in the conflicts surrounding the formation of Israel in 1948.

Thousands of Palestinians have fled to Egypt since the war with Israel began, but they are not recognised there as refugees.

In October 2023, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he rejected any forced displacement of Palestinians into the Sinai peninsula, and that the only solution was an independent state for Palestinians.

Some on Israel’s far-right want to return to Gaza and establish settlements there. Israel ordered a unilateral pull out in 2005, with 21 settlements dismantled and about 9,000 settlers evacuated by the army.

The far-right former national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said he commended Trump “for the initiative to transfer residents from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt.”

“One of our demands from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to promote voluntary emigration,” he wrote on X.

Trump’s comments came as displaced people were delayed from returning to their homes in northern Gaza after Israel accused Hamas of breaching the terms of a ceasefire deal.

“There is nothing there – there is no life, everything is demolished. But still to return to your land, to your home is a big joy,” one man anxiously waiting told the BBC.

In separate comments on Air Force One, Trump said he had ended former President Joe Biden’s hold on the supply of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

“They paid for them and they’ve been waiting for them for a long time,” he told reporters on Air Force One.

The US is by far the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.

But the war in Gaza led to renewed calls for the US to reduce or end arms shipments to Israel, because of the level of destruction caused by US weapons in the territory.

On Saturday evening, as his plane headed from Las Vegas to Miami during a whirlwind, coast-to-coast first trip since returning to office, US President Donald Trump made his way to the back of Air Force One to talk to gathered reporters.

On the in-flight television screens, Fox News was back, having replaced CNN – and the president, fresh from a week in which he upended America’s government and ripped up its immigration policies, was feeling confident.

“We’re getting A-pluses on the work done – and also the amount of work done,” he said in response to a question from the BBC.

“People are saying it was the most successful first week that anybody can remember a president having,” he went on.

During a 20-minute conversation with journalists, Trump confirmed he had carried out a late-night purge of several independent watchdogs in government agencies.

There was more: the president said he thought the US would “get Greenland” as its own territory; he called on Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians; and he said he had a “very good relationship” with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer – even though “he’s liberal”.

It was the kind of impromptu question and answer session that Joe Biden rarely did while in office, and the latest sign that everything has changed in Washington and in US politics in the six days since Trump returned to the presidency.

In the Oval Office, the Diet Coke button – a contraption installed in an ornate wooden box which allows the president to command his beverage of choice at any time of day – is back.

So is the bust of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill, a rug used by Ronald Reagan and a portrait of the seventh president, Andrew Jackson.

But the changes in Washington go far beyond these trappings of presidential power.

From signing a cascade of executive orders with the stroke of his black Sharpie pen, to holding off-the-cuff meetings with the press in the Oval Office, Trump’s return to the White House has nearly erased his predecessor’s signature achievements in a matter of days and made it feel to many like he never left.

The history of the 2021 Capitol riot, which for a time saw Trump politically isolated after he left office, has been rewritten. The president pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters who were charged over the violence that day, one of his boldest moves this week, which sparked instant condemnation from Democrats and disapproval from some senior Republicans.

The release of “violent felons who brutally beat police officers and women” undermines public safety in communities across the US, said Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. On Sunday morning, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called the pardons a mistake.

He has renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, declared the US only recognises two sexes, pulled the country out of the Paris Climate Agreement, frozen America’s giant foreign aid programme and threatened the global business elite at Davos with billions in tariffs unless they make their products in America.

The stacks of leather-bound executive orders piled high on the Resolute Desk illustrate how the Trump 2.0 era is set against a different political landscape from four years ago – one which has produced a more emboldened commander-in-chief.

When Trump first met Barack Obama after winning the 2016 election, he appeared to be awed by the office he was inheriting.

He is no longer a Washington outsider and now, buoyed by a statement election victory that saw him sweep every swing state and become the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, Trump has shown in the early days of his White House return just how much he plans to wield executive power to reshape the country.

Advisers who cautioned the president to move slowly and respect political norms during his first term are long gone. The second Trump administration is stacked with true believers who never turned on him, with the lower ranks being filled by younger aides who do not know a Republican Party without Trump as its leader.

On top of that, his party holds – at least for the next two years – a firm grip on Congress.

During his first day back in office, Trump made his desire to overhaul the status quo in Washington and erase the work of his predecessor abundantly clear by signing a raft of executive orders.

The number far exceeded the quantity of any past president: while Biden signed nine in 2021, Trump nearly tripled that tally by signing 26.

“It’s supposed to be a grace day in which you heal the country from a partisan divide or a bitter election,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. Instead, Trump’s first day represented the “largest punch to the face of his opponents he could deliver”.

The orders also provide a glimpse into the president’s mindset.

Mr Brinkley compared Trump’s quest to rename the Gulf of Mexico to a move by Franklin D Roosevelt almost 90 years ago: after he defeated Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt christened the newly constructed dam over the Colorado River as the Boulder Dam – not the Hoover Dam as it had previously been known, in an effort to deny his rival the honour.

“That takes a mighty amount of wild-eyed, self-confidence and a nothing-to-lose attitude,” he said of both presidents.

Part of Trump’s confidence stems from having outmanoeuvred his political foes, evaded any punitive measures in his myriad legal battles and even escaping an assassin’s bullet, Mr Brinkley said.

A second term has also given Trump – who was convicted as a felon in New York last year – a chance to reshape his legacy.

The president has described himself as a victim of an overzealous justice department and of his political enemies.

On day one, he signed an order directing his attorney general to investigate the actions of federal agencies under the previous administration, including the justice department’s prosecution of people involved in the Capitol riot.

Mr Brinkley said Trump wants his name to “radiate for the ages” – “and he’s achieved that,” the historian continued. “He’s a force of nature and he’s defied political laws of gravity.”

Former administration officials say Trump’s slew of first-week executive orders and actions signal his team has returned considerably more prepared than when they first arrived in January 2017.

“It’s been much more disciplined, on-point and issue-focused,” said Lawrence Muir, a former official in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Mr Muir, who was tasked with hiring administration personnel as part of the 2016 Trump transition team, told the BBC his work was “essentially discarded” by the incoming White House at the time.

“They did not have a great idea about what they were supposed to be producing, or how to produce it,” he said. “[Trump’s] doing much better this time in terms of what he’s getting out, getting it out efficiently, and knowing how it has to be enforced down through the agencies.”

Trump’s first day in office in 2017 was overshadowed by a briefing in which then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer lectured reporters on the size of the president’s inauguration crowd.

A week later, Trump controversially ordered that citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya – were banned from entering the US for 90 days, prompting chaos at airports. The order was blocked by a federal court and went through two more versions before it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.

Trump allies say they believe the new administration appears to have learned lessons from that early public defeat in 2017, as well as other legal battles the administration faced.

“They had four years in exile to prepare for a potential return,” said Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA, an organisation that advocates for tighter immigration controls. “And now they have a plan that they can implement.”

The Trump team has “hit the ground running”, particularly on the immigration agenda, said Mr Muir. On Inauguration Day alone that entailed declaring a national emergency at the southern border, deploying troops and quickly moving to arrest hundreds of undocumented migrants with criminal histories.

“That’s partly because [new border czar] Tom Homan was there [in the first term], knows what went wrong and what went right, and now how to actually get things done,” he said.

In Trump’s first presidential term, many of his attempted reforms did not survive court challenges, often the victim of poor planning and execution from a team of political novices.

This time around, his team are more optimistic they are laying the groundwork for more durable change and that they have a friendlier judiciary, stocked with Trump-appointed judges.

But even if some of Trump’s executive orders are ultimately struck down, the president has already sent a signal, both to his allies and his adversaries: that the motto “move fast and break things”, ubiquitous inside tech companies, now applies to the US government.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Thousands of displaced Palestinians attempting to reach northern Gaza have gathered at an Israeli military barrier which is blocking their progress.

Images showed massive crowds waiting to pass the Netzarim Corridor, a road which separates north and south Gaza and is controlled by Israeli troops.

Israel was scheduled to withdraw its forces from the area this weekend but they remained after the government accused Hamas of breaching the ceasefire agreement.

Israel said it would continue to block the route to northern Gaza because Arbel Yehud, a female civilian hostage, was not released on Saturday. Hamas responded by providing proof she is alive and said she would be released next weekend.

On Saturday, Hamas freed four Israeli female soldiers it had held hostage since 7 October 2023, in return for 200 Palestinian prisoners. Ms Yehud, a non-military hostage, was scheduled to be freed first.

Mediators in Egypt and Doha are holding meetings over the smooth and safe return of displaced Palestinians to their homes in the north but a senior Palestinian official told the BBC that the process remains stalled.

• Trump says he wants Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians from Gaza

There were some chaotic scenes on Saturday evening as Palestinians who had expected to be able to walk north following the completion of the hostage release found the road was still blocked by Israeli tanks.

As crowds gathered along al-Rashid road in central Gaza to return home, gunshots were reportedly fired.

In one video posted online, which BBC Verify has confirmed was filmed on that road, people could be seen panicking and four gunshots could be heard.

In a separate incident, Reuters news agency, citing the Hamas-run health ministry, and Palestinian media reported one person was killed and others injured.

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”.

A statement continued: “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.”

Under the terms of the ceasefire agreement, Palestinians had been scheduled to be allowed to travel north of the Netzarim Corridor, a seven kilometre (4.3 miles) strip of land controlled by Israel that cuts off north Gaza from the rest of the territory.

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

Speaking on Saturday afternoon, she said: “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.”

Qatari and Egyptian mediators who have facilitated talks between Israel and Hamas have made progress in their efforts to allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to return to the north.

Israel had asked the mediators for proof from Hamas that Ms Yehud is alive and it appeared that had been given to the Egyptians by Saturday evening, the BBC understands.

Meanwhile, many Gazans were watching 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.

Israeli soldiers have killed 15 people and wounded more than 80 in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese health ministry says, as the Israeli military remained in parts of the country after the expiration of a deadline for their withdrawal, and Hezbollah’s removal from the area.

On Sunday morning, thousands of residents returned to towns and villages along the border, despite warnings by the Lebanese and Israeli armies, and the UN, that the region remained unsafe.

Israel said the 60-day ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah had not been fully implemented, and it remained unclear how many of its soldiers remained in Lebanon or how long they would stay.

According to the Lebanese health ministry, Israeli forces attacked people as they tried to enter locations that were still under occupation. The Lebanese army said one of its soldiers had been killed and another wounded by Israeli fire.

The Israeli military said it had fired “warning shots in multiple areas” of southern Lebanon, without specifying if people had been hit, and apprehended several people it claimed posed an “imminent threat”.

The ceasefire deal, which was brokered by the US and France and put an end to 14 months of conflict, stipulated the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the removal of Hezbollah fighters and weapons from southern Lebanon. At the same time, thousands of Lebanese soldiers were expected to be deployed to the area where, for decades, Hezbollah has been the dominant force.

A Western diplomatic official familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Israel had said it needed more time to destroy Hezbollah’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon, and that the initial plan was for a 30-day extension.

In recent days, Hezbollah’s TV station Al Manar appeared to encourage people to return south and, in some places, convoys arrived waving the yellow and green flag of the group.

The passing of the ceasefire deadline is the first major test for the new Lebanese president, army chief Joseph Aoun, who is keen to bring stability to a country exhausted by multiple crises.

In a statement issued on Sunday, he said Lebanon’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity are non-negotiable”, adding that he was “following this issue at the highest levels”.

The conflict escalated last September, leading to an intense Israeli air campaign across Lebanon, the assassination of Hezbollah’s senior leaders and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. The offensive killed around 4,000 people in Lebanon – including many civilians – and led to the displacement of more than 1.2 million residents.

On Friday, the office of the Israeli prime minister said the withdrawal outlined in the ceasefire was “conditioned on the Lebanese army deploying in southern Lebanon and fully and effectively enforcing the agreement, while Hezbollah withdraws beyond the Litani”, a river about 30km (20 miles) from the the unofficial border between Lebanon and Israel known as the Blue Line.

“Since the ceasefire agreement has yet to be fully enforced by the Lebanese state, the gradual withdrawal process will continue, in full coordination with the US,” the statement said.

In a statement on Saturday, the Lebanese army said it continued to “implement the plan to enhance deployment” in areas along the border, but that there had been “delays in some stages due to the Israeli enemy’s procrastination in withdrawing, complicating the army’s deployment mission”.

There has been no immediate reaction from Hezbollah. On Thursday, the group said failure to comply with the deadline would be a “blatant violation of the agreement, an infringement on Lebanese sovereignty, and an entry into a new phase of occupation”.

However, the statement did not say how the group would respond if Israeli troops remained in the country.

This is possibly an indication of the delicate position the group finds itself in. The Iranian-backed militant, political and social movement was severely weakened in the conflict with Israel, although it continues to enjoy significant support among Shia Muslims in Lebanon.

The ceasefire deal was widely considered as a surrender by the group, after it saw its infrastructure and weapons arsenal depleted and hundreds of fighters and key figures killed, including long-time leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Despite some violations before the withdrawal deadline, the truce put an end to the violence which caused billions of dollars in destruction and damage, allowing thousands of residents to return to their homes in Lebanon.

If it decides to resume its attacks, Hezbollah will face opposition from critics, who had accused the group of dragging Lebanon into a war that was not in the country’s interests, and possibly even from some of its own supporters.

Hezbollah’s political influence has diminished, too.

Earlier this month, Lebanon’s parliament was able to elect a president after more than two years of political impasse blamed by critics on the group.

Aoun has promised ambitious reforms to rebuild state institutions long plagued by corruption, revive the collapsed economy after years of crisis, and the right to monopolise the possession of weapons, which would mean trying to curb Hezbollah’s military power.

It remains unclear whether the army is able – and willing – to do so, amid concerns that any action against the group could spark internal violence.

Israel’s stated goal in its war against Hezbollah was to allow the return of about 60,000 residents who had been displaced from communities in the country’s north because of the group’s attacks, and to remove it from areas along the border.

Hezbollah launched its campaign the day after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, saying it was acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

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.

Listen to Fergal read this story

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.

Singer and writer Nick Cave says the death of his two sons made him realise that art was not everything, and that responsibility to his wife and family now drive him.

The Australian musician told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that his wife and family are now the source of his creativity, and where he finds his joy.

“It’s difficult to exaggerate how beautiful this is that I have a little grandson, who’s like seven months old,” he told the show.

Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died in Brighton in a cliff-jumping accident in 2015 and his eldest son Jethro died aged 31 in Melbourne in 2022.

The frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 67, told host Lauren Laverne of his changing attitude: “It has a lot to do with Arthur and Jethro… I always just thought art was, kind of at the end of the day, everything.

“I mean, it’s a terrible thing to say, but it was, it was always there. It was always reliable.”

He said he would go into an office each day, lock the door and “work away… sort of, you know, in awe of my own creative potential”.

“And I think after Arthur died, I just shut the office, and I haven’t gone, I just locked it up,” he said. “I was just repelled by it in some way. It seems so indulgent.”

Cave has previously spoken about his grief over losing his sons, saying after Arthur’s death that he felt his presence all the time.

“Grief and love are forever intertwined,” he wrote in an open letter. “Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.”

He told Laverne that while he still works “very, very hard” it is no longer the “be-all and end-all of everything”.

Cave, known for songs including Red Right Hand and Into My Arms, continued: “I find my responsibility towards my children and my wife, and to be a citizen, a husband, these things are the actual animating force behind, or should be the animating force behind our creativeness.”

He said his greatest joy comes “from my family and from my wife, one aspect of my family that it’s difficult to exaggerate how beautiful this is that I have a little grandson who’s like, seven months old”.

Cave and his family, including Arthur’s twin Earl and fashion designer wife Susie, have moved from Brighton to Los Angeles as they found it too difficult living so close to where Arthur died.

He set up online site the Red Hand Files in 2018, partly to help others whose lives have been hit by sadness or loss – it allows fans to ask Cave questions, and he replies to some of the hundreds he receives each week.

“What I really want to try and do is let people know in some way that it doesn’t have to be thus, and that there is a world beyond the grief that they feel,” he said.

Cave is going on tour in North America this spring, and told Laverne he will retire from music when he can no longer perform knee drops on stage.

But he admitted: “I could do (them), I can get down. It’s getting up. It’s a little bit harder.”

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 how 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 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

Donald Trump’s move to block diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives has led to the US Air Force removing material on the role of black and female pilots during World War Two from its training programmes.

A military official said “immediate steps” were taken to remove material to “ensure compliance” with the US president’s order, the BBC’s US news partner CBS reported.

Trainee troops were previously shown footage of pioneering servicemen and women as part of DEI courses during basic military training.

Trump signed an executive order banning such programmes in the federal government soon after returning to office, fulfilling a pledge he repeatedly made during the campaign.

Among the material removed from the curriculum are lessons on the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of around 1,000 black pilots who were trained at a segregated air base in Alabama between 1941 and 1946.

They flew hundreds of patrol and attack missions during the war, escorting American bombing crews over Europe.

Lessons on Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, have also been removed from lesson plans, an official confirmed.

The female pilots were vital in transporting new planes bound for fighting in Europe from the factories where they were produced. Their contribution was later recognised with the right to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, which is reserved for military personnel.

An Air Force official told CBS News: “Immediate steps were taken to remove curriculum that is now under review to ensure compliance with Executive Orders issued by the president.

“Historical videos were interwoven into US Air Force and Space Force curriculum and were not the direct focus of course removal actions. Additional details on curriculum updates will be provided when they’re available.”

DEI programmes are designed to increase minority participation in the workforce and educate employees about discrimination.

But Trump and other critics say the training is discriminatory because it takes race, gender, sexual identity or other characteristics into consideration.

Earlier this week the Trump administration emailed thousands of federal employees ordering them to report any efforts to “disguise” diversity initiatives in their agencies or face “adverse consequences”.

While Trump’s executive order is limited to state-funded agencies, several major companies have followed suit, including DEI training being scaled back at Meta and Amazon.

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.

Four ancient gold artefacts were stolen from a Dutch museum in an overnight raid in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Thieves used explosives to blast their way into the Drents Museum in Assen, which was hosting an exhibition of priceless Romanian jewellery made from gold and silver.

They left with three Dacian spiral bracelets and the exhibit’s central piece – the strikingly decorated Helmet of Cotofenesti, which was crafted almost 2,500 years ago.

Romania’s ministry of culture has promised to take all possible steps to recover the stolen items, which had been loaned to the Dutch museum from Bucharest.

Drents Museum director Harry Tupan said staff were “intensely shocked” by the burglary, which he said was the biggest incident in its 170-year history.

Police were called to the scene after reports of an explosion at 03:45 local time (04:45 GMT) on Saturday.

Officers carried out forensic investigation and reviewed CCTV footage throughout the day.

Police are also investigating a burning vehicle which was found on a nearby road, which they suspect may be linked to the burglary.

“A possible scenario is that the suspects switched to another vehicle in the vicinity of the fire,” a Dutch police statement said.

No arrests have been made, but authorities suspect multiple individuals were involved. Police have called global policing agency Interpol to help with the investigation.

A statement from the museum said four “archaeological masterpieces” were taken, including the Cotofenesti helmet, which dates from around 450 BC, and three ancient Dacian royal bracelets.

All four stolen items are of huge cultural significance to Romania, with the Helmet of Cotofenesti considered a national treasure.

In the late 1990s, 24 bracelets from the same era were dug up by treasure hunters and sold abroad.

The Romanian state worked for years to get them back from collectors in Austria, Germany, France, the UK and the United States.

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 say 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.

Hard rock band Disturbed’s brooding but beautiful cover of the Simon and Garfunkel classic 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.”

“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?

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.

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.”

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.

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, with 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 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

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.

Listen to Fergal read this story

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.

US President Donald Trump has said he wants Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians from Gaza.

Trump said he had made the request to Jordan’s King Abdullah and planned to ask Egypt’s president on Sunday, too.

Describing Gaza as a “demolition site”, Trump said: “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing”. He added that the move “could be temporary” or “could be long-term”.

Hamas has vowed to oppose any such action, and the comments will likely outrage Palestinians in Gaza, for whom it is their home. Jordan’s foreign minister said the kingdom was “firm and unwavering” in its rejection of displacing Palestinians.

Most of Gaza’s two million residents have been displaced in the 15 months of war with Israel, which has flattened much of Gaza’s infrastructure.

The United Nations has previously estimated that 60% of structures across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, and it could take decades to rebuild.

• BBC Verify: How 15 months of war have devastated Gaza
• History of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians

Trump made his comments while speaking to reporters on board the Air Force One.

“Almost everything is demolished and people are dying there.

“So I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where maybe they can live in peace for a change.”

Trump did not give further details of the proposal, and the subject was not referenced in the White House’s official read out of the call.

“Our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip endured death and destruction for 15 months… without leaving their land. Therefore, they will not accept any offers or solutions, even if they appear to be good intentions under the title of reconstruction, as announced by US President Trump’s proposals,” Bassem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told the BBC.

“Our people, just as they have thwarted all plans for displacement and an alternative homeland over the decades, will also thwart such projects,” he added.

Asked about Trump’s comments, Abu Yahya Rashid, a man displaced in the southern city of Khan Younis said:

“We are the ones who decide our fate and what we want. This land is ours and the property of our ancestors throughout history. We will not leave it except as corpses.”

Decades of US foreign policy has committed to the creation of a Palestinian state, with Gaza as a key part. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects this.

The US has previously said that it opposes any forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza or the occupied West Bank, with then Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying last year: “They cannot, they must not, be pressed to leave Gaza.”

More than two million Palestinian refugees, most of whom have been granted citizenship, live in Jordan, according to the UN. They are descendants of some of the approximately 750,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in the conflicts surrounding the formation of Israel in 1948.

Thousands of Palestinians have fled to Egypt since the war with Israel began, but they are not recognised there as refugees.

In October 2023, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he rejected any forced displacement of Palestinians into the Sinai peninsula, and that the only solution was an independent state for Palestinians.

Some on Israel’s far-right want to return to Gaza and establish settlements there. Israel ordered a unilateral pull out in 2005, with 21 settlements dismantled and about 9,000 settlers evacuated by the army.

The far-right former national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said he commended Trump “for the initiative to transfer residents from Gaza to Jordan and Egypt.”

“One of our demands from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to promote voluntary emigration,” he wrote on X.

Trump’s comments came as displaced people were delayed from returning to their homes in northern Gaza after Israel accused Hamas of breaching the terms of a ceasefire deal.

“There is nothing there – there is no life, everything is demolished. But still to return to your land, to your home is a big joy,” one man anxiously waiting told the BBC.

In separate comments on Air Force One, Trump said he had ended former President Joe Biden’s hold on the supply of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.

“They paid for them and they’ve been waiting for them for a long time,” he told reporters on Air Force One.

The US is by far the biggest supplier of arms to Israel, having helped it build one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world.

But the war in Gaza led to renewed calls for the US to reduce or end arms shipments to Israel, because of the level of destruction caused by US weapons in the territory.

On Saturday evening, as his plane headed from Las Vegas to Miami during a whirlwind, coast-to-coast first trip since returning to office, US President Donald Trump made his way to the back of Air Force One to talk to gathered reporters.

On the in-flight television screens, Fox News was back, having replaced CNN – and the president, fresh from a week in which he upended America’s government and ripped up its immigration policies, was feeling confident.

“We’re getting A-pluses on the work done – and also the amount of work done,” he said in response to a question from the BBC.

“People are saying it was the most successful first week that anybody can remember a president having,” he went on.

During a 20-minute conversation with journalists, Trump confirmed he had carried out a late-night purge of several independent watchdogs in government agencies.

There was more: the president said he thought the US would “get Greenland” as its own territory; he called on Egypt and Jordan to take in more Palestinians; and he said he had a “very good relationship” with UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer – even though “he’s liberal”.

It was the kind of impromptu question and answer session that Joe Biden rarely did while in office, and the latest sign that everything has changed in Washington and in US politics in the six days since Trump returned to the presidency.

In the Oval Office, the Diet Coke button – a contraption installed in an ornate wooden box which allows the president to command his beverage of choice at any time of day – is back.

So is the bust of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill, a rug used by Ronald Reagan and a portrait of the seventh president, Andrew Jackson.

But the changes in Washington go far beyond these trappings of presidential power.

From signing a cascade of executive orders with the stroke of his black Sharpie pen, to holding off-the-cuff meetings with the press in the Oval Office, Trump’s return to the White House has nearly erased his predecessor’s signature achievements in a matter of days and made it feel to many like he never left.

The history of the 2021 Capitol riot, which for a time saw Trump politically isolated after he left office, has been rewritten. The president pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters who were charged over the violence that day, one of his boldest moves this week, which sparked instant condemnation from Democrats and disapproval from some senior Republicans.

The release of “violent felons who brutally beat police officers and women” undermines public safety in communities across the US, said Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. On Sunday morning, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called the pardons a mistake.

He has renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, declared the US only recognises two sexes, pulled the country out of the Paris Climate Agreement, frozen America’s giant foreign aid programme and threatened the global business elite at Davos with billions in tariffs unless they make their products in America.

The stacks of leather-bound executive orders piled high on the Resolute Desk illustrate how the Trump 2.0 era is set against a different political landscape from four years ago – one which has produced a more emboldened commander-in-chief.

When Trump first met Barack Obama after winning the 2016 election, he appeared to be awed by the office he was inheriting.

He is no longer a Washington outsider and now, buoyed by a statement election victory that saw him sweep every swing state and become the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, Trump has shown in the early days of his White House return just how much he plans to wield executive power to reshape the country.

Advisers who cautioned the president to move slowly and respect political norms during his first term are long gone. The second Trump administration is stacked with true believers who never turned on him, with the lower ranks being filled by younger aides who do not know a Republican Party without Trump as its leader.

On top of that, his party holds – at least for the next two years – a firm grip on Congress.

During his first day back in office, Trump made his desire to overhaul the status quo in Washington and erase the work of his predecessor abundantly clear by signing a raft of executive orders.

The number far exceeded the quantity of any past president: while Biden signed nine in 2021, Trump nearly tripled that tally by signing 26.

“It’s supposed to be a grace day in which you heal the country from a partisan divide or a bitter election,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. Instead, Trump’s first day represented the “largest punch to the face of his opponents he could deliver”.

The orders also provide a glimpse into the president’s mindset.

Mr Brinkley compared Trump’s quest to rename the Gulf of Mexico to a move by Franklin D Roosevelt almost 90 years ago: after he defeated Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt christened the newly constructed dam over the Colorado River as the Boulder Dam – not the Hoover Dam as it had previously been known, in an effort to deny his rival the honour.

“That takes a mighty amount of wild-eyed, self-confidence and a nothing-to-lose attitude,” he said of both presidents.

Part of Trump’s confidence stems from having outmanoeuvred his political foes, evaded any punitive measures in his myriad legal battles and even escaping an assassin’s bullet, Mr Brinkley said.

A second term has also given Trump – who was convicted as a felon in New York last year – a chance to reshape his legacy.

The president has described himself as a victim of an overzealous justice department and of his political enemies.

On day one, he signed an order directing his attorney general to investigate the actions of federal agencies under the previous administration, including the justice department’s prosecution of people involved in the Capitol riot.

Mr Brinkley said Trump wants his name to “radiate for the ages” – “and he’s achieved that,” the historian continued. “He’s a force of nature and he’s defied political laws of gravity.”

Former administration officials say Trump’s slew of first-week executive orders and actions signal his team has returned considerably more prepared than when they first arrived in January 2017.

“It’s been much more disciplined, on-point and issue-focused,” said Lawrence Muir, a former official in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Mr Muir, who was tasked with hiring administration personnel as part of the 2016 Trump transition team, told the BBC his work was “essentially discarded” by the incoming White House at the time.

“They did not have a great idea about what they were supposed to be producing, or how to produce it,” he said. “[Trump’s] doing much better this time in terms of what he’s getting out, getting it out efficiently, and knowing how it has to be enforced down through the agencies.”

Trump’s first day in office in 2017 was overshadowed by a briefing in which then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer lectured reporters on the size of the president’s inauguration crowd.

A week later, Trump controversially ordered that citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya – were banned from entering the US for 90 days, prompting chaos at airports. The order was blocked by a federal court and went through two more versions before it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.

Trump allies say they believe the new administration appears to have learned lessons from that early public defeat in 2017, as well as other legal battles the administration faced.

“They had four years in exile to prepare for a potential return,” said Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA, an organisation that advocates for tighter immigration controls. “And now they have a plan that they can implement.”

The Trump team has “hit the ground running”, particularly on the immigration agenda, said Mr Muir. On Inauguration Day alone that entailed declaring a national emergency at the southern border, deploying troops and quickly moving to arrest hundreds of undocumented migrants with criminal histories.

“That’s partly because [new border czar] Tom Homan was there [in the first term], knows what went wrong and what went right, and now how to actually get things done,” he said.

In Trump’s first presidential term, many of his attempted reforms did not survive court challenges, often the victim of poor planning and execution from a team of political novices.

This time around, his team are more optimistic they are laying the groundwork for more durable change and that they have a friendlier judiciary, stocked with Trump-appointed judges.

But even if some of Trump’s executive orders are ultimately struck down, the president has already sent a signal, both to his allies and his adversaries: that the motto “move fast and break things”, ubiquitous inside tech companies, now applies to the US government.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

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 how 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.

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 57,000 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 floated the prospect of buying the vast Arctic 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 when asked about the island 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.”

Despite Trump’s apparent confidence, the prime ministers of Greenland and Denmark have both previously said the island was not for sale.

Greenland’s PM Mute Egede said use of the territory’s land was “Greenland’s business”, though he did express a willingness to work more closely with the US on defence and mining.

Meanwhile, Danish premiere Frederiksen said earlier this month that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders”, and only the local population could determine its future.

Frederiksen reasserted her position in a heated 45-minute phone exchange with Trump last week, according to a report in the Financial Times.

The newspaper quoted an anonymous European official as saying the conversation was “horrendous”, and another saying Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland was is “serious, and potentially very dangerous”.

The Danish prime minister reportedly insisted the island was not for sale, but noted the US’s “big interest” in it.

Greenland lies on the shortest route from North America to Europe, making it strategically important for the US. It is also home to a large American space facility.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in Greenland’s natural resources, including mining for rare earth minerals, uranium and iron.

Though the island has wide-ranging autonomy, it remains part of the kingdom of Demark.

But there is a general consensus in Greenland that it will eventually become independent, which could pave the way for a new kind of relationship with the US.

President Trump’s claim that the people of Greenland “want to be with us” may come as a surprise to some of the island’s residents.

A fishing boat captain in the Kapisillit settlement told the BBC Trump was “welcome to visit” the island, but that “Greenland belongs to Greenlanders”.

And local church elder Kaaleeraq Ringsted said Trump’s language was “not acceptable”, adding “Greenland is not for sale”.

There are several ways Trump could pursue his desire to take over the territory. Asked earlier in January whether he could rule out using military or economic force, Trump said he could not.

His recent comments have sent shockwaves through the Danish political establishment, sparking hastily organised high-level meetings in Copenhagen earlier this month.

High winds have brought power cuts across the southwest of England as a new storm hit the UK on Sunday.

Berry Head, in Devon, recorded gusts of 83mph (133km/h) from the new storm, named Herminia, while power cuts were reported by thousands in Devon.

A 19-year-old man died when he was hit by a tree while driving in East Ayrshire on Friday during Storm Éowyn. He is the second death in the storm, with a 20-year-old man killed in County Donegal Ireland on Friday.

The Met Office has issued multiple yellow weather warnings for wind and heavy rain on Sunday and Monday, saying injuries and “danger to life” were a possibility.

Storm Herminia was named by the Spanish weather service Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET) on Friday and has now closed in on the UK, BBC Weather said.

More than 4,500 properties are now without power in Devon and Cornwall. National Grid said 2,968 properties have been hit in Cornwall, with another 1,488 in Devon.

National Rail said flooding between Par and Newquay has blocked the line and trains running between the two stations have been cancelled.

A Ryanair flight that was expected to land at Cornwall Airport Newquay at 07:35 GMT was diverted to London Gatwick.

People have been urged to stay away from the coast due to crashing waves. Maggie Howell, from Falmouth Coastguard, said the conditions out at sea were “really, really bad” on Sunday morning.

Forecasters said the storm brings a large risk of disruptive weather, especially across the southern half of the UK, which largely escaped Éowyn.

“Southwestern areas certainly bearing the brunt this time in terms of the most unsettled conditions,” Met Office meteorologist Jonathan Vautrey said.

Heavy rain is expected to move in across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and southern Scotland on Sunday, with between 10 and 20mm (nearly an inch) of rain expected to fall.

Another band of rain will sweep in across England and Wales overnight into Monday, increasing the risk of flooding as the ground is already saturated.

“Given recent heavy rain, this extra rainfall could lead to some local surface water and river flooding,” Mr Vautrey said.

Meanwhile, around 101,000 customers were still without power on Sunday following the devastation caused to the electricity network by Éowyn.

A yellow weather warning for wind and a yellow warning for snow and ice will be in place across Northern Ireland on Sunday.

It comes two days after Éowyn brought winds of more than 90mph to Northern Ireland.

“Given ongoing recovery work after Storm Éowyn, impacts may be more widespread than would ordinarily be expected with winds of this strength,” the Met Office said.

At the storm’s height, nearly a million properties were without power across the British Isles, while many road and rail links were blocked.

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

Israeli soldiers have killed 15 people and wounded more than 80 in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese health ministry says, as the Israeli military remained in parts of the country after the expiration of a deadline for their withdrawal, and Hezbollah’s removal from the area.

On Sunday morning, thousands of residents returned to towns and villages along the border, despite warnings by the Lebanese and Israeli armies, and the UN, that the region remained unsafe.

Israel said the 60-day ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah had not been fully implemented, and it remained unclear how many of its soldiers remained in Lebanon or how long they would stay.

According to the Lebanese health ministry, Israeli forces attacked people as they tried to enter locations that were still under occupation. The Lebanese army said one of its soldiers had been killed and another wounded by Israeli fire.

The Israeli military said it had fired “warning shots in multiple areas” of southern Lebanon, without specifying if people had been hit, and apprehended several people it claimed posed an “imminent threat”.

The ceasefire deal, which was brokered by the US and France and put an end to 14 months of conflict, stipulated the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the removal of Hezbollah fighters and weapons from southern Lebanon. At the same time, thousands of Lebanese soldiers were expected to be deployed to the area where, for decades, Hezbollah has been the dominant force.

A Western diplomatic official familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Israel had said it needed more time to destroy Hezbollah’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon, and that the initial plan was for a 30-day extension.

In recent days, Hezbollah’s TV station Al Manar appeared to encourage people to return south and, in some places, convoys arrived waving the yellow and green flag of the group.

The passing of the ceasefire deadline is the first major test for the new Lebanese president, army chief Joseph Aoun, who is keen to bring stability to a country exhausted by multiple crises.

In a statement issued on Sunday, he said Lebanon’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity are non-negotiable”, adding that he was “following this issue at the highest levels”.

The conflict escalated last September, leading to an intense Israeli air campaign across Lebanon, the assassination of Hezbollah’s senior leaders and a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. The offensive killed around 4,000 people in Lebanon – including many civilians – and led to the displacement of more than 1.2 million residents.

On Friday, the office of the Israeli prime minister said the withdrawal outlined in the ceasefire was “conditioned on the Lebanese army deploying in southern Lebanon and fully and effectively enforcing the agreement, while Hezbollah withdraws beyond the Litani”, a river about 30km (20 miles) from the the unofficial border between Lebanon and Israel known as the Blue Line.

“Since the ceasefire agreement has yet to be fully enforced by the Lebanese state, the gradual withdrawal process will continue, in full coordination with the US,” the statement said.

In a statement on Saturday, the Lebanese army said it continued to “implement the plan to enhance deployment” in areas along the border, but that there had been “delays in some stages due to the Israeli enemy’s procrastination in withdrawing, complicating the army’s deployment mission”.

There has been no immediate reaction from Hezbollah. On Thursday, the group said failure to comply with the deadline would be a “blatant violation of the agreement, an infringement on Lebanese sovereignty, and an entry into a new phase of occupation”.

However, the statement did not say how the group would respond if Israeli troops remained in the country.

This is possibly an indication of the delicate position the group finds itself in. The Iranian-backed militant, political and social movement was severely weakened in the conflict with Israel, although it continues to enjoy significant support among Shia Muslims in Lebanon.

The ceasefire deal was widely considered as a surrender by the group, after it saw its infrastructure and weapons arsenal depleted and hundreds of fighters and key figures killed, including long-time leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Despite some violations before the withdrawal deadline, the truce put an end to the violence which caused billions of dollars in destruction and damage, allowing thousands of residents to return to their homes in Lebanon.

If it decides to resume its attacks, Hezbollah will face opposition from critics, who had accused the group of dragging Lebanon into a war that was not in the country’s interests, and possibly even from some of its own supporters.

Hezbollah’s political influence has diminished, too.

Earlier this month, Lebanon’s parliament was able to elect a president after more than two years of political impasse blamed by critics on the group.

Aoun has promised ambitious reforms to rebuild state institutions long plagued by corruption, revive the collapsed economy after years of crisis, and the right to monopolise the possession of weapons, which would mean trying to curb Hezbollah’s military power.

It remains unclear whether the army is able – and willing – to do so, amid concerns that any action against the group could spark internal violence.

Israel’s stated goal in its war against Hezbollah was to allow the return of about 60,000 residents who had been displaced from communities in the country’s north because of the group’s attacks, and to remove it from areas along the border.

Hezbollah launched its campaign the day after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, saying it was acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

South Korea’s impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol has been charged with insurrection after he attempted to declare martial law in December.

His ill-fated attempt to impose military rule plunged the country into an unprecedented political crisis and he becomes the first sitting president in South Korean history to be charged with a crime.

The indictment comes after a court in Seoul rejected a request to extend Yoon’s detention on Saturday, which meant prosecutors had to make a decision on whether to charge or release him before Monday.

“The punishment of the ringleader of insurrection now begins finally,” Han Min-soo, a spokesman from the main opposition Democratic Party told a press conference.

• Fear, fury and triumph: Six hours that shook South Korea

Separately, the Constitutional Court has begun deliberations on whether to formally dismiss Yoon as president or reinstate him.

The impeached president has largely refused to co-operate with the criminal investigation over the martial law declaration.

Yoon is set to stand trial along with his former defence minister and senior military commanders, who are accused of helping him plan and carry out the attempt to seize total power.

In an unprecedented televised announcement on 3 December, Yoon said he was invoking martial law to protect the country from “anti-state” forces that sympathised with North Korea.

At the time, the embattled leader was in a deadlock over a budget bill, dogged by corruption scandals and several of his cabinet ministers were under investigation.

The military announced all parliamentary activity was suspended and sought to impose controls on media outlets.

The opposition’s Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung urged people to protest at the National Assembly and asked his fellow lawmakers to immediately vote to repeal the order.

Less than two hours after Yoon’s declaration, 190 lawmakers who gathered – including some from the president’s party – voted unanimously to block it.

Soldiers equipped with rifles were seen entering the parliament building through smashed windows as a dramatic confrontation ensued.

Thousands of civilians gathered in front of the assembly and tried to block the soldiers.

Yoon was was impeached by parliament and suspended from his duties on 14 December.

The affair has triggered South Korea’s worst political crisis in decades and has polarised the country.

Many of his hard-line supporters have rallied around him. On Friday, tens of thousands gathered to protest, demanding he be released and returned to office.

If Yoon is removed from office, a presidential election would be held within 60 days.

The prosecutors’ office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Singer and writer Nick Cave says the death of his two sons made him realise that art was not everything, and that responsibility to his wife and family now drive him.

The Australian musician told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that his wife and family are now the source of his creativity, and where he finds his joy.

“It’s difficult to exaggerate how beautiful this is that I have a little grandson, who’s like seven months old,” he told the show.

Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur died in Brighton in a cliff-jumping accident in 2015 and his eldest son Jethro died aged 31 in Melbourne in 2022.

The frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 67, told host Lauren Laverne of his changing attitude: “It has a lot to do with Arthur and Jethro… I always just thought art was, kind of at the end of the day, everything.

“I mean, it’s a terrible thing to say, but it was, it was always there. It was always reliable.”

He said he would go into an office each day, lock the door and “work away… sort of, you know, in awe of my own creative potential”.

“And I think after Arthur died, I just shut the office, and I haven’t gone, I just locked it up,” he said. “I was just repelled by it in some way. It seems so indulgent.”

Cave has previously spoken about his grief over losing his sons, saying after Arthur’s death that he felt his presence all the time.

“Grief and love are forever intertwined,” he wrote in an open letter. “Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.”

He told Laverne that while he still works “very, very hard” it is no longer the “be-all and end-all of everything”.

Cave, known for songs including Red Right Hand and Into My Arms, continued: “I find my responsibility towards my children and my wife, and to be a citizen, a husband, these things are the actual animating force behind, or should be the animating force behind our creativeness.”

He said his greatest joy comes “from my family and from my wife, one aspect of my family that it’s difficult to exaggerate how beautiful this is that I have a little grandson who’s like, seven months old”.

Cave and his family, including Arthur’s twin Earl and fashion designer wife Susie, have moved from Brighton to Los Angeles as they found it too difficult living so close to where Arthur died.

He set up online site the Red Hand Files in 2018, partly to help others whose lives have been hit by sadness or loss – it allows fans to ask Cave questions, and he replies to some of the hundreds he receives each week.

“What I really want to try and do is let people know in some way that it doesn’t have to be thus, and that there is a world beyond the grief that they feel,” he said.

Cave is going on tour in North America this spring, and told Laverne he will retire from music when he can no longer perform knee drops on stage.

But he admitted: “I could do (them), I can get down. It’s getting up. It’s a little bit harder.”

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 57,000 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 floated the prospect of buying the vast Arctic 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 when asked about the island 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.”

Despite Trump’s apparent confidence, the prime ministers of Greenland and Denmark have both previously said the island was not for sale.

Greenland’s PM Mute Egede said use of the territory’s land was “Greenland’s business”, though he did express a willingness to work more closely with the US on defence and mining.

Meanwhile, Danish premiere Frederiksen said earlier this month that “Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders”, and only the local population could determine its future.

Frederiksen reasserted her position in a heated 45-minute phone exchange with Trump last week, according to a report in the Financial Times.

The newspaper quoted an anonymous European official as saying the conversation was “horrendous”, and another saying Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland was is “serious, and potentially very dangerous”.

The Danish prime minister reportedly insisted the island was not for sale, but noted the US’s “big interest” in it.

Greenland lies on the shortest route from North America to Europe, making it strategically important for the US. It is also home to a large American space facility.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in Greenland’s natural resources, including mining for rare earth minerals, uranium and iron.

Though the island has wide-ranging autonomy, it remains part of the kingdom of Demark.

But there is a general consensus in Greenland that it will eventually become independent, which could pave the way for a new kind of relationship with the US.

President Trump’s claim that the people of Greenland “want to be with us” may come as a surprise to some of the island’s residents.

A fishing boat captain in the Kapisillit settlement told the BBC Trump was “welcome to visit” the island, but that “Greenland belongs to Greenlanders”.

And local church elder Kaaleeraq Ringsted said Trump’s language was “not acceptable”, adding “Greenland is not for sale”.

There are several ways Trump could pursue his desire to take over the territory. Asked earlier in January whether he could rule out using military or economic force, Trump said he could not.

His recent comments have sent shockwaves through the Danish political establishment, sparking hastily organised high-level meetings in Copenhagen earlier this month.

When Donovan Shears sent a text message to a random number in 1998, it changed the course of his life.

He had been given his first mobile phone for his 18th birthday and had just discovered text messaging.

He made up a random number and sent off a message saying “hello”, to which his future wife Kirsty wrote back “hi”.

“That single moment led to over 20 years of love, laughter, and partnership,” they said.

Out of several messages to unknown numbers he sent from the Coventry pub where he was working that night, Kirsty in Cleethorpes was the only one to reply.

Fast forward four years, and the couple were getting married in Scotland, where Kirsty is from. They now also have two children, aged six and nine.

Kirsty said she replied to Donovan’s message thinking it was someone she knew, but whose number she had not saved in her phone.

Speaking to BBC CWR, they remembered how they first met at Coventry railway station and went for their first date at the then well-known city nightclub, the Colosseum, which is now called The Kasbah.

Donovan said: “I started sending out random text messages, showing off to my friends.

“I picked the first four digits the same as mine, then the last three digits randomly – it was probably about five or six different numbers – and then didn’t think anything of it.”

Kirsty said: “We would text through the day and then obviously it would become more and more frequent and then at one point we decided we should phone each other.”

“We were texting so much my phone bill was over £250 a month, I think that’s when I decided we should call,” Donovan continued.

“Feelings started to develop and she’d got the most beautiful Scottish accent, which attracted me to her as well.”

The pair eventually met up about six months after Donovan sent the first text.

“I said to my stepsister, I’ve got to go and meet this guy, and she was like, ‘He could be anyone’, and I was like, ‘Yes, I know’, but I was 18 and didn’t really think about consequences”, Kirsty said.

“I just got on a train and came to Coventry.”

Donovan said he was scared to make the first move, but Kirsty was much more assured.

“The rest is history,” he said.

“I remember coming back from our first night out and we just cuddled up, it was kind of magical in a way.

“She is an amazing woman, she’s so intelligent and we know each other so well, she’s my best friend as well as my wife.”

More than 20 years on from their big day, the pair will be taking part in a mass renewal of vows at Coventry Cathedral on Valentine’s Day, organised by BBC CWR.

Donovan said they are looking forward to celebrating the day as a family.

“I took my son for a suit fitting yesterday and he absolutely loved it, then my girl, she’s like, ‘I want to see Mummy get dressed up’, she can’t wait,” he added.

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.

There are about 75,000 customers still without power in Northern Ireland following the devastation caused to the electricity network by Storm Éowyn.

A yellow weather warning for wind is in place across Northern Ireland on Sunday.

The warning lasts from 10:00 to 19:00 GMT with many areas experiencing gusts up to 40-60 mph.

A yellow warning was also issued for snow and ice from 18:00 GMT on Saturday to 10:00 on Sunday.

It comes two days after Storm Éowyn brought winds of more than 90mph to Northern Ireland.

“Given ongoing recovery work after Storm Éowyn, impacts may be more widespread than would ordinarily be expected with winds of this strength,” the Met Office said.

At the storm’s height, nearly a million properties were without power across the British Isles, while many road and rail links were blocked.

The managing director of NIE Networks said power has now been restored to 210,000 properties.

Derek Hynes said: “We believe that it will be around 10 days by the time we complete the repairs needed to get power back to everyone.”

The Police Service for Northern Ireland (PSNI) have warned people to take care when driving as many roads are still impassable following Storm Éowyn, with fallen trees, power lines and debris.

In the Republic of Ireland, there are approximately 330,000 customers still without power, down from a peak of 768,000 as a result of Storm Éowyn.

ESB said they anticipate that the majority of customers will have power restored by Friday night, but the remaining customers will have power restored over the course of the following week.

Uisce Éireann said there are still 109,000 people without water and 126,000 at risk.

One man, Kacper Dudek, 20, died after a tree fell on his car in Raphoe, County Donegal, during the storm.

Thousands of customers in Scotland are also still without power.

On Saturday evening, two teenagers had to be rescued from Slieve Donard in County Down as conditions there worsened.

The 16-year-old boys scaled the mountain earlier in the day when the weather had seemed reasonable, but after reaching the summit they realised they couldn’t get back down.

They returned to the summit where they took shelter and called for help.

A 14-strong team from Mourne Mountain Rescue responded.

Coordinator Alwynne Shannon told BBC News NI that the teens were “cold and frightened” when they were found, but that they had done the right thing by returning to the summit and calling for help.

She said it had become cold, dark and extremely windy.

She urged anyone considering scaling the mountain to think twice when conditions are so bad.

Clogher Valley Councillor Mark Robinson, who is a farmer, said he feels “frustrated” and believes rural communities have been left behind.

He said he spoke to one farmer on Friday morning who had been up from the early hours of the morning to milk his cows before the electricity went off.

“I understand it’s difficult conditions for everybody, but I just feel we are harshly treated in the rural community,” he said.

“I just think we need to get more bodies on the ground and try to get issues resolved for rural communities as well as the towns,” he added.

Train lines are reopening following “extensive damage” across the network.

Translink said the Belfast routes to Portadown and Bangor have reopened.

The Larne and Londonderry lines are also open, but the Portrush line remains closed.

Due to planned rail works, the cross border route to Dublin terminates at Drogheda with a bus replacement taking passengers the rest of the journey.

Speed restrictions are in place for some trains, so Translink has advised passengers to allow extra time for their journeys.

Metro, Glider and Ulsterbus services returned on Friday with some diversions in place due to ongoing road closures and clearance work in the wake of the storm.

To report faults or emergencies you should contact:

• Northern Ireland Housing Executive: 03448 920 901

• Openreach: 08000 23 20 23

• Gas networks: 0800 002001

• NI Water: 03457 44 00 88 or visit niwater.com

• Flooding Incident Line: 0300 2000 100

• NIE Networks: 03457 643 643 or visit nienetworks.co.uk

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