January 27 was formally designated Holocaust Memorial Day by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005. But how we remember the Holocaust has evolved over the decades and even now – some 80 years on – it is a story of remembrance that is still unfinished.

“Dear boy,” the short handwritten note from 1942 begins, “I was delighted with your May message. I’m healthy. I hope that I can stay here and see you again. I remain hopeful. Please write. Greetings, your father.”

The note is one of thousands of documents held by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, one of the world’s largest Holocaust archives.

The Jewish man who wrote it was called Alfred Josephs, and he was sending it to his teenage son Wolfgang, who had escaped with his mother to England. Alfred had been arrested and was being held in the Westerbork detention camp in The Netherlands.

He was still, at the time, able to pass short messages through the Red Cross.

What Alfred didn’t know was that Westerbork was a camp whose inmates were to be transported to Auschwitz. Wolfgang would never hear from his father again.

At first, Auschwitz was used by the Germans to house Polish prisoners of war. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it became a labour camp, where many inmates were worked to death. The Nazis called this “annihilation by labour”.

But what it became by 1942 is the Auschwitz that sits in our shared memory, for by now it was an extermination camp, whose main purpose was mass murder.

Newsreel filmed by the allies after the liberation of Europe shows German civilians being forced to visit the camps by the troops.

“It was only a short walk from any German city to the nearest concentration camp,” says the American voice-over. The camera catches relaxed, smartly dressed Germans laughing and chatting as they make their way.

They walk past the corpses, piles of emaciated men and women, men and women who may even have been their neighbours, colleagues, friends in the past. The camera that had captured their relaxed, easy smiles before they entered the camps now records their horror.

Shock registers on their faces. Some weep. Others shake their heads, fold handkerchiefs to their faces and look away.

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Post-war Europe looked at this horror and acknowledged the depth of the suffering. But how did post-war Europe make sense of the perpetrators?

When we talk of industrialised killing, we don’t just mean the scale of it, vast though it was. We also mean the sophistication of its organisation: the division of labour, the allocation of specialist tasks, the efficient marshalling of resources, the meticulous planning that was needed to keep the wheels of the killing machine turning.

Those same newsreels show well-fed Nazi guards, both men and women, now in allied custody.

What was the nature of the moral collapse that turned this horror into a normality for the Nazis who ran these camps, a normality in which mass murder became, for them, all in a day’s work?

This is a question that has been touched on many times before but even now, some 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, has yet to be fully comprehended.

For years after the war, public attention turned away from this question, but also away from trying to understand the question of what had happened more broadly.

Though some Nazi war criminals were prosecuted, the new priority, in a Europe divided by the Cold War, was to turn West Germany into a democratic ally.

The Holocaust almost disappeared from popular memory, in much of the Western world. The post-war public wanted to turn the page on the war. In popular culture, in Britain, for example, the appetite was for stories that could be celebrated and cheered.

“The culture of memory of the Second World War was still emphasising heroism,” says Dr Toby Simpson, the director of the Wiener Holocaust Library. “There was an emphasis on the Normandy landings, for example.

“And in the stories that the survivors wanted to tell there was very little heroism to be found in a story where they’ve been stripped of their humanity, agency, their choice. They’d been turned into a non-person.”

The Italian survivor, Primo Levi, wrote his Auschwitz memoir If This Is A Man immediately after the war. He had been one of a few thousand still at Auschwitz when Soviet troops arrived on 27 January 1945.

Most prisoners had been forced to march west, towards Germany, in freezing winter weather. Already weakened by camp conditions, many died on the way in what came to be known as the Death Marches. Levi was too sick and Soviet troops found him close to death in the camp infirmary.

Today, If This is a Man is regarded as a masterpiece of survivor testimony and one of the most important memoirs of the entire era. But in 1947, Primo Levi found it hard to find a publisher, even in his native Italy.

Finally, a small independent publisher in Turin published it in a print run of 2,500. It sold 1,500 copies then disappeared. For publishers, and for the public, it was still too soon. Few, it seemed, wanted to look.

“Primo Levi didn’t sell because the time wasn’t right and because he was too great a writer to give a heroic answer. His answer is greater than heroism,” says Jay Winter, professor of history Emeritus at Yale University. Many of Prof Winter’s mother’s family were killed in the Holocaust.

He adds: “A lot of people turned Primo Levi into a saint but all you have to do is to read the poem at the beginning of If This is a Man to see that he is not forgiving anybody – he is not forgiving and not forgetting.”

“There was Holocaust memorialisation in the 1950s,” says Prof David Feldman at Birkbeck University in London, “but it was something that was done by Jews themselves, in small fragmented groups.

“These were occasions of mourning more than memorialisation. The idea that we have now, of memorialisation, that somehow there are lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, was not commonplace then”.

According to Prof Winter: “The countries that were reconstructing… needed a myth of resistance, of heroic armed conflict against the Nazis or Italian fascists.” That myth of resistance “had no place for concentration camp inmates”.

Only in the 1960s did popular interest return. When Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the extermination campaign, they put him on trial in Jerusalem, and televised it. Now, Holocaust memorialisation began to reach the wider public.

Through the Eichmann trial, the new mass medium of television brought survivors’ testimony into the living rooms of the western world.

It coincided, too, with a cultural shift in public attitudes to war. A generation born in the aftermath of World War Two were coming of age in the 1960s.

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem incorporated the words of the World War One poet Wilfred Owen – whose poetry had also faded from popular consciousness – to a new generation. Anti-war sentiment was fuelled further by the US involvement in Vietnam.

“I would say the Eichmann trial also brought perpetrators into people’s living rooms,” says Prof Feldman. “Survivors’ testimony and the emphasis on survivors being central to Holocaust memorialisation came later. It developed slowly in the 1960s. By the 1990s it was well established.”

The Holocaust story – at last – took its place in our collective consciousness.

From the 1960s onwards, Levi’s memoir found a global readership. Anne Frank’s father Otto had also struggled, in the early post-war period, to find a publisher for his daughter’s diary. To date it has sold an estimated 30 million copies.

As for Wolfgang Josephs, as late as August 1946, he was still hoping against hope that he might find his father alive. He received a typewritten note from the British Red Cross. It informed him, with regret, that Red Cross officials in Europe had searched the lists of survivors, and his father’s name was not among them.

Wolfgang anglicised his name to Peter Johnson and settled in the UK, at a time when few in the western world wanted to hear the stories of those who had witnessed, or survived, the Holocaust. He donated his family papers to the Wiener Holocaust Library, which remains a vast repository of evidence of the darkest period in Europe’s history.

Now, 80 years on, there are so few survivors left that soon the duty to remember will pass to posterity.

“I think remembering the Holocaust is even more important now,” says Dr Simpson, “because it happened at such a scale, and with such an intensity of hatred, that [there is still] the need to understand, to explain this continent-wide event in which six million Jews were murdered.” And so too is there still a need to fully comprehend how to make sense of the perpetrators – and the nature of the moral collapse that enabled this to take place.

As Primo Levi wrote: “The injury cannot be healed. It extends through time.”

The chairman and president of Fuji TV, one of Japan’s biggest networks, have resigned in the wake of a sexual misconduct allegation against a famous TV host.

Dozens of companies have pulled their advertisements from the network, which was criticised for trying to cover up the scandal.

Masahiro Nakai was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a 2023 dinner party allegedly organised by Fuji TV staff. He announced his retirement from show business last week.

The Japanese government has called on Fuji TV to regain trust from viewers and sponsors.

In a press conference on Monday, Fuji TV chairman Shuji Kano and president Koichi Minato bowed as they announced their resignations. It came shortly after an emergency board meeting.

They apologised to viewers as well as stakeholders for the trouble and anxiety caused in a scandal that has rocked Japan’s entertainment industry.

“I feel deeply the weight of my responsibility for undermining trust in the media,” said Mr Minato. “Looking back, I realise there were shortcomings in our response.”

Mr Minato had admitted previously that the company had known about the allegation against Nakai shortly after the alleged incident took place. But Fuji TV chose not to disclose it at the time, as it “prioritised the woman’s physical and mental recovery as well as the protection of her privacy”, he had said.

Reports emerged last month that Nakai had paid the unnamed woman more than half a million dollars. More allegations then surfaced that a Fuji TV employee had helped to arrange the dinner party.

Nakai, a former member of boy band SMAP and a household name who fronted several Fuji TV shows, has denied using violence against the woman. He has also said that he had “resolved” the matter with her through a settlement.

But this did little to quell public anger.

Car manufacturers Nissan and Toyota were among the companies that pulled advertising from Fuji TV.

In an open letter, investment firm Rising Sun Management which is the majority shareholder of Fuji TV’s parent company, said that the scandal “exposes serious flaws in your corporate governance”.

Fuji TV has since set up an independent committee to investigate the scandal.

Executive vice president Kenji Shimizu, who will replace Mr Minato as president, said he would “never tolerate acts that violate human rights” and committed to preventing similar incidents by “starting from scratch”.

Earlier this month, the network suspended a weekly show hosted by Nakai while other major networks have also dropped the presenter.

Other TV networks have also announced their own investigations, following reports that similar dinner parties involving celebrities are a common practice in the industry.

Shares in major US technology firms have plunged after the rapid rise of a low-cost chatbot built by a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm.

The DeepSeek app, which was launched last week, has overtaken rivals including OpenAI’s ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app in the US.

US tech giants including AI chip-maker Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta all saw their share prices drop on Monday.

China’s chatbot was reportedly developed for a fraction of the cost of its rivals, raising questions about the future of America’s AI dominance and the scale of investments US firms are planning.

Last week, OpenAI joined a group of other firms who pledged to invest $500m (£400m) in building AI infrastructure in the US.

President Donald Trump, in one of his first announcements since returning to office, called it “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history” that would help keep “the future of technology” in the US.

DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was developed for around $6m – significantly less than the billions spent by rivals.

But this claim has been disputed by others in AI.

The researchers say they use already existing technology, as well as open source code – software that can be used, modified or distributed by anybody free of charge.

DeepSeek’s emergence comes as the US is restricting the sale of the advanced chip technology that powers AI to China.

To continue their work without steady supplies of imported advanced chips, Chinese AI developers have shared their work with each other and experimented with new approaches to the technology.

This has resulted in AI models that require far less computing power than before.

It also means that they cost a lot less than previously thought possible, which has the potential to upend the industry.

After DeepSeek-R1 was launched earlier this month, the company boasted of “performance on par with” one of OpenAI’s latest models when used for tasks such as maths, coding and natural language reasoning.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Trump advisor Marc Andreessen described DeepSeek-R1 as “AI’s Sputnik moment”, a reference to the satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.

At the time, the US was considered to have been caught off-guard by their rival’s technological achievement.

DeepSeek’s sudden popularity has startled stock markets in Europe and the US.

ASML, the Dutch chip equipment maker, saw its share price tumble by more than 10% while shares in Siemens Energy, which makes hardware related to AI, plunged by 21%.

“This idea of a low-cost Chinese version hasn’t necessarily been forefront, so it’s taken the market a little bit by surprise,” said Fiona Cincotta, senior market analyst at City Index.

“So, if you suddenly get this low-cost AI model, then that’s going to raise concerns over the profits of rivals, particularly given the amount that they’ve already invested in more expensive AI infrastructure.”

Singapore-based technology equity advisor Vey-Sern Ling told the BBC it could “potentially derail the investment case for the entire AI supply chain”.

But Wall Street banking giant Citi cautioned that while DeepSeek could challenge the dominant positions of American companies such as OpenAI, issues faced by Chinese firms could hamper their development.

“We estimate that in an inevitably more restrictive environment, US access to more advanced chips is an advantage,” analysts said in a report.

The company was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China.

The 40-year-old, an information and electronic engineering graduate, also founded the hedge fund that backed DeepSeek.

He reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, now banned from export to China. Experts believe this collection – which some estimates put at 50,000 – led him to launch DeepSeek, by pairing these chips with cheaper, lower-end ones that are still available to import.

Mr Liang was recently seen at a meeting between industry experts and the Chinese premier Li Qiang.

In a July 2024 interview with The China Academy, Mr Liang said he was surprised by the reaction to the previous version of his AI model.

“We didn’t expect pricing to be such a sensitive issue,” he said.

“We were simply following our own pace, calculating costs, and setting prices accordingly.”

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New Zealand has relaxed its visa requirements to allow tourists to work remotely while visiting the country in an effort to boost its tourism sector.

Under the new rules, visitors can now carry out remote working for a foreign employer while holidaying in the country for up to 90 days, after which they could face possible tax implications.

The country’s government has said the move is aimed at making New Zealand “more attractive to digital nomads”, referring to people who travel while working remotely.

“The change will enable many visitors to extend their stays, which will lead to more money being spent in the country,” said New Zealand’s immigration minister Erica Stanford.

The government said the changes applied to all visitor visas, including tourists and people visiting family, partners and guardians on longer-term visas.

It added that only remote work based overseas was allowed, while visitors whose employment required them to be in the country still had to obtain appropriate visas.

New Zealand’s tourism industry generates a revenue of almost $11bn, according to the government.

Many other countries have introduced visa programmes for digital nomads over the past few years in an effort to appeal to a growing number of people seeking opportunities to travel while working remotely.

The trend took off in the 2010s, mostly among young workers who were looking to escape their daily routine. It was further bolstered by the Covid-19 pandemic, when worldwide lockdowns led to a shift in attitudes toward remote work.

Countries offering digital nomad visas include Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Spain and Portugal.

But the presence of digital nomads in some places has also sparked debate. In the South African city of Cape Town, detractors say the influx of remote workers has led to an increase in costs.

The influx of visitors to countries such as Spain and Greece have also fuelled heated protests against overtourism.

Authoritarian Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has secured another victory in an election labelled by Western governments as a sham.

The Central Election Committee stated on Monday that Lukashenko won 86.8% of the vote and that turnout was almost 87%.

There were four other names on the ballot – carefully chosen to present no challenge to the current leadership – but no credible contenders were allowed to take part in the election, as all opposition figures are either in jail or in exile abroad.

No independent observers monitored the vote, either.

The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said the election had been a blatant affront to democracy, while German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock posted on X that “the people of Belarus had no choice”.

Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin – who has ruled Russia since 2000 – congratulated his close ally Lukashenko for his “solid victory”.

Peskov said Moscow believed that the Belarusian election was an “absolutely legitimate, well organised, transparent election” and slammed “the voices that sound from the West”.

The leaders of China, Venezuela and Pakistan also offered their congratulations to Lukashenko.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya dismissed the election as “yet another political farce”.

She claimed victory in the 2020 election, in which she stood in placed of her jailed husband.

Lukashenko mistakenly believed Tikhanovskaya would pose no challenge to him – but after she appeared to have won massive support, she was driven out of the country.

No opposition now remains in Belarus, which has also shuttered all its independent media.

On Sunday evening, Lukashenko told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg his opponents had “chosen” prison or exile.

“We never forced anyone out of the country,” he said, adding that he “couldn’t care less whether [the West] recognises our election”.

This will be Lukashenko’s seventh term in power. He has ruled Belarus since 1994.

Investigators say they have found evidence of a bird strike on a passenger plane that crashed in South Korea in December, killing 179 people.

The feathers and blood stains on both engines of the Jeju Air plane were from the Baikal teal, a type of migratory duck that flies in large flocks, according to a preliminary investigation report published on Monday.

The inquiry into the crash – the deadliest on South Korean soil – will now focus on the role of the bird strike and a concrete structure at the end of the runway, which the plane crashed into.

The engines of the Boeing 737-800 will be torn down and the concrete structure will be examined further, the report said.

The Jeju Air plane took off from Bangkok in the morning of 29 December and was flying to Muan International Airport in the country’s south-west.

At about 08:57 local time, three minutes after pilots made contact with the airport, the control tower advised the crew to be cautious of “bird activity”.

At 08:59, the pilot reported that the plane had struck a bird and declared a mayday signal.

The pilot then requested permission to land from the opposite direction, during which it belly-landed without its landing gear deployed. It overran the runway and exploded after slamming into the concrete structure, the report said.

Authorities earlier said that flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the plane stopped recording about four minutes before the disaster.

Experts who had flown the same type of aircraft involved in the crash have also questioned the presence of the concrete barriers at the end of the runway – with some suggesting that the casualty toll would have been lower if they had not been there.

The concrete structure holds a navigation system that assists aircraft landings, known as a localiser.

South Korea’s transport ministry had said this system could also be found in other airports in the country and even overseas.

Last week, authorities announced that they will change the concrete barriers used for navigation at seven airports across the country. Seven airports will also have their runway safety areas adapted following a review.

The preliminary report has been submitted to the United Nations’ aviation agency and to the authorities of the United States, France and Thailand.

Belgian footballer Radja Nainggolan has been arrested as part of an investigation into cocaine trafficking.

The 36-year-old was one of several suspects apprehended by Belgian police on Monday morning, after a series of raids were carried out across the country.

“The investigation concerns alleged facts of importation of cocaine from South America to Europe, via the port of Antwerp, and its redistribution in Belgium,” the Brussels prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

No further information has been released to the public.

The arrest comes just six days after Nainggolan came out of retirement to sign for Lokeren in the Belgian second division.

He scored on his debut, giving his side a point in their 1-1 home draw to K. Lierse.

Born in Antwerp, the midfielder spent most of his career in Italy, playing for both Roma and Inter Milan.

Between 2009 and 2018, he made 30 appearances for the Belgium national team.

A looming trade war between the US and Colombia appears to have been averted after the Colombian government agreed to allow US military flights carrying deported migrants to land in the Andean country.

The spat erupted on Sunday when President Gustavo Petro barred two military planes carrying Colombians deported from the US from landing.

The Trump administration responded by threatening to slap punitive tariffs on Colombian exports to the US.

President Petro at first said Colombia would retaliate by imposing tariffs on US goods, but the White House later announced that Colombia had agreed to accept migrants – including those arriving on US military aircraft – “without limitation or delay”.

The White House hailed the agreement with Colombia as a victory for Trump’s hard-line approach, after the country’s two leaders had exchanged threats on social media on Sunday.

“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.

She added that the tariffs and sanctions which the Trump administration had threatened to impose on Colombia, should it not comply, would be “held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honour this agreement”.

She also said that President Donald Trump “expects all other nations of the world to fully co-operate in accepting deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States”.

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

The row between Colombia’s left-wing president and Trump escalated rapidly on Sunday.

Petro, a keen user of social media, posted on X that he had “barred US planes carrying Colombian migrants from entering our territory” because “the US can’t treat Colombian migrants like criminals”.

He demanded that the US put procedures in place for migrants to be “treated with dignity”.

He also said he was ready to send the presidential plane to the US to transport the migrants.

Colombia has accepted deportation flights from the US in the past. In 2024, 124 planes carrying deported migrants from the US landed in the country.

But President Petro appeared to object to the return of deportees on military rather than civilian flights – and to the way the migrants may be treated on those military flights.

In his posts on X, Petro referenced a news video showing migrants deported from the US to Brazil, who had been handcuffed and had their feet restrained during the deportation flight.

He said that he would “never allow Colombians to be returned handcuffed on flights”.

Petro’s refusal to let two US military planes carrying Colombian deportees to land triggered a quick response by Trump on Truth Social.

“I was just informed that two repatriation flights from the United States, with a large number of Illegal Criminals, were not allowed to land in Colombia. This order was given by Colombia’s Socialist President Gustavo Petro, who is already very unpopular amongst his people,” he wrote.

Trump argued that Petro’s denial of these flights had jeopardised the national security and public safety of the US.

He said he had directed his administration to “immediately” impose 25% tariffs on all Colombian goods coming into the US, which he said would be raised to 50% if Colombia did not comply within a week.

He also said he had imposed a travel ban and revoked the visas of Colombian government officials “and all allies and supporters”.

In his post, he warned that “these measures are just the beginning”.

Petro responded on X with a long, rambling but ultimately defiant post in which he said he would match any US-imposed tariffs.

“Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, members of Petro’s administration worked behind the scenes to defuse the row.

In a late-night news conference, Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo announced that the two countries had “overcome the impasse” and that Colombia would accept returned citizens.

While Murillo did not directly refer to the White House statement, according to which Colombia had agreed to allow US military flights to take the deportees back, he did not deny it either.

The foreign minister reiterated Colombia’s offer to send its presidential plane to the US to transport the deportees.

While the Colombian concession seems to have averted the looming trade war, the US has said that visa restrictions on Colombian government officials would stay in place until the first planeload of deportees landed in Colombia.

Colombians arriving at US airports will also undergo greater scrutiny under the measures imposed on Sunday, the Trump administration said.

Colombia’s foreign minister said he would travel to Washington “in the coming days” for high-level meetings with administration officials.

The row marks a low point in relations between the two countries, which historically have been allies and co-operated closely in the fight against drug trafficking, with the US providing billions of dollars in military aid and training to Colombia’s security forces.

Punitive tariffs such as those threatened by Trump and Petro would have hurt both Colombian producers and US consumers.

Trade between the two countries was worth $53.5bn (£42.8bn) in 2022, according to the US Office of the US Trade Representative.

Colombia’s main exports to the US are oil, coffee and cut flowers.

Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged Americans to “remember: we pay the tariffs, not Colombia”.

“Trump is about to make every American pay even more for coffee,” she wrote before the tariffs had been suspended.

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On the edge of St Petersburg stands a dramatic memorial more than 40 metres high. At the very top is the figure of a mother with her children.

Down below, depicted in bronze, are real stories of human suffering.

At the bottom of some steps burns an eternal flame surrounded by the names of Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka…

Terrifying words synonymous with the Holocaust.

Yet this is not a Holocaust memorial as such. Its official title is “the memorial to Soviet civilians who fell victim to the Nazi genocide”.

I listen to a tour guide as she tells a group of schoolchildren about the Treblinka-2 extermination camp. There the Nazis murdered up to 900,000 Jews.

“Treblinka-2 was a death camp where a large number of people were killed in gas chambers,” she says, without specifying that most of the victims had been Jews.

Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled the monument last year on 27 January: a date with a double historical significance for Russia. On this day in 1944 Soviet forces broke the almost 900-day siege of Leningrad. Exactly one year later the Red Army entered the gates of the Auschwitz death camp.

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It is because of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz that 27 January was later declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But when he opened the memorial to Soviet civilians, Vladimir Putin spoke not of the Holocaust, but of the “genocide of the Soviet people”.

He argued that the Nazis’ aim had been “to seize our country’s rich natural resources and territories, as well as to exterminate the majority of its citizens”.

It’s not that Russia has gone silent on the Holocaust. In the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, there have been several Holocaust-related events across the country.

And in a message to mark the 80th anniversary, President Putin wrote: “In January 1945 the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp and revealed to mankind the truth of the crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices who exterminated millions of Jews, Russians, Roma and representatives of other nationalities.”

But in Russia today there is a discernible shift in focus, away from the Holocaust to how the Soviet people as a whole, including Russian people, suffered in World War Two. More than 27 million Soviet citizens were killed in what is known here as the Great Patriotic War.

This change in emphasis hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“Nobody argues that there were millions of victims during the second world war,” Israel’s Ambassador to Moscow Simone Halperin tells me.

“But an industrialised plan to kill, eliminate, erase from the face of the earth a race: that was against the Jewish people. I think it is of critical importance to remember that the Holocaust was designed as the genocide of the Jewish people.”

“It is not because [the Russian authorities] do not want to speak about the Holocaust or the Jews,” suggests historian and researcher Konstantin Pakhaliuk.

“The idea is about presenting Russians as victims, to feel that we are victims: victims of Western powers, victims in history. That is the core idea of this narrative.”

Konstantin lives and works abroad. Back home he has been declared a “foreign agent”, a label often used to punish critics of the Russian authorities.

He argues that the narrative of Russia as victim has become especially strong since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“If you are a victim, you cannot bear responsibility,” Mr Pakhaliuk says.

In the Soviet Union there was little public discussion of the Holocaust and what had been the systematic murder of European Jews by Hitler.

On sites of mass execution of Jews by the Nazis, on Soviet territory, there were few monuments or plaques referencing Jewish victims.

That began to change after the fall of Communism. Russian officials began to speak proudly of their country’s historic role in defeating Hitler and saving the Jewish people from extermination.

Twenty years ago President Putin was invited to Poland to take part in events marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Speaking in Krakow on 27 January 2005 he noted:

“The Nazis chose Poland as the site of the planned mass extermination of people, above all, of Jews… we see the Holocaust not only as a national tragedy for the Jewish people but as a catastrophe for all of humanity.”

“It is our duty to remember the Holocaust,” he added.

Since then, Russia’s relations with Poland, Europe and the West in general have grown increasingly tense, especially after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

• How Auschwitz became the centre of the Nazi Holocaust

Russian officials have not been invited back to Poland for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp.

“This is the anniversary of liberation. We remember the victims, but we also celebrate freedom,” the director of the Auschwitz Museum Piotr Cywinski wrote last September. “It is hard to imagine the presence of Russia, which clearly does not understand the value of freedom.”

The decision not to extend an invitation to Moscow has been condemned by one of Russia’s most influential Jewish leaders.

“Not inviting Russia is offensive to the memory of the liberators and their contribution to the victory over fascism,” Rabbi Alexander Boroda, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia said at a press conference recently in Moscow.

“It is a very bad sign because memory is important and there are common values that helped defeat fascism. Despite their differences, the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, different political systems and ideologies managed to unite… for a common victory.”

Meanwhile, Jewish groups here are doing what they can to remind Russians of the past so that it is never repeated.

“The right wing is on the rise everywhere. The number of Holocaust deniers is increasing,” says Anna Bokshitskaya, Executive Director of the Russian Jewish Congress.

“That’s why it is crucially important to let people know about the events that happened more than 80 years ago.”

King Charles will become the first British head of state to visit Auschwitz when he tours the former Nazi concentration camp to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation.

The King has travelled to Poland, where he met with Holocaust survivors and said “the act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task”.

Catherine, Princess of Wales will attend a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in London later, with her husband the Princes of Wales.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will be with Catherine and Prince William, as well as Holocaust survivors, at the commemorations.

Sir Keir has renewed his commitment to ensure all schools teach pupils about the Holocaust – warning over the weekend that society must “make ‘never again’ finally mean what it says”.

Holocaust Memorial Day, which takes place on 27 January each year, remembers the six million Jews murdered during World War Two.

It also commemorates the millions of people outside the Jewish faith who were murdered through Nazi persecution, and those targeted in more recent genocides.

• Follow live: 80 years since liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
• The difficult question about Auschwitz that remains unanswered
• Russia focuses on Soviet victims of WW2 as officials not invited to ceremony
• How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi concentration camp and was at the centre of the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe’s Jewish population.

The King has long wanted to be present at Auschwitz for the liberation ceremony – not just because of the significance of the anniversary but also to bear witness to the testimony of survivors in the location where so much suffering happened.

On Monday, he gave a speech at the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow where he met Holocaust survivors.

In it, he said “as the number of Holocaust survivors regrettably diminishes with the passage of time, the responsibility of remembrance rests on our shoulders”.

In Krakow, “from the ashes of the Holocaust, the Jewish community has been reborn,” the King added.

Sources close to the King say this is a profound visit for him, with one aide describing it as a “deeply personal pilgrimage.”

In 1943, the King’s grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, saved a Jewish family by taking them into her home and hiding them in Nazi-occupied Athens – something the King has said brought him and the Royal Family an immense sense of pride.

During his brief visit to Poland the King will also meet President Andrzej Duda.

Speaking ahead of the anniversary, Sir Keir said while we remember the six million Jewish victims “we must also act”, adding that he wanted to make teaching young people about the genocide a “national endeavour”.

“It happened, it can happen again: that is the warning of the Holocaust to us all,” he said.

“The Holocaust was a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary people utterly consumed by the hatred of difference.

“That is the hatred we stand against today and it is a collective endeavour for all of us to defeat it.”

On Wednesday, Sir Keir welcomed a group of survivors and their families to Downing Street, describing the meeting as “an incredible privilege” and praised their “sheer and remarkable courage”.

A recent survey by Claims Conference, a group representing Jewish victims of Nazi German persecution and their descendants, showed some young Germans are unaware of the Holocaust – and a significant minority cannot name a single concentration camp, death camp or ghetto.

German ambassador to the UK Miguel Berger told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the results of the survey showed the country had to continue to invest in education about the Holocaust.

He also rejected comments by some members of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party who have been critical of the country’s culture of remembrance – called Erinnerungskultur – insisting it was a “German responsibility” to “keep the memory [of the Holocaust] alive”.

Mala Tribich, a survivor of the Holocaust who settled in England in 1947, also spoke to Today – telling the programme about her forced separation from her family, and her subsequent detention in the Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.

Jewish people were treated like “cattle” by the Nazis, Ms Tribich said, explaining how she felt the de-humanising treatment they were subjected to “did something to our soul”.

The 94-year-old also stressed the importance of ensuring “young people get the right education” to avoid a repeat of the horrors she had experienced as a girl. “We’re all hoping for a better world, but we need to contribute to it,” she said.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch spoke of the importance of confronting “the resurgence of antisemitism today”, while reflecting on the Holocaust as a “unique evil in human history”, in a statement to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

While Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey urged vigilance in defending “peace, human rights and compassion”, and guarding against “antisemitism, hatred, discrimination and oppression”.

“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.

• Follow live: 80 years since liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau
• The difficult question about Auschwitz that remains unanswered
• Russia focuses on Soviet victims of WW2 as officials not invited to ceremony
• How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust

“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?

Less than a week into his presidency, Donald Trump has briefly engaged in his first international tariff dispute. And the target wasn’t China, Mexico or Canada – frequent subjects of his ire – it was Colombia, one of America’s closest allies in South America.

Colombia’s offence was refusing to allow two US flights carrying deported migrants to land because they were military, not civilian, transport planes. That was enough to prompt Trump to threaten to drop the hammer.

“We will not allow the Colombian government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the criminals they forced into the United States,” Trump posted on his social media site.

On top of the 25% tariffs he said he would impose, Trump said the US would introduce a travel ban and “immediate visa revocations” on Colombian government officials, as well as its allies and supporters.

But later, the White House said Colombia had now agreed to accept migrants arriving on US military aircraft “without limitation or delay”. As a result, the US will not go ahead with the tariffs.

• Colombia backs down on deportation flights

For his first week in office, the US president had seemed to be prioritising executive action on immigration over trade measures – even if the latter were a key campaign promise. As if to drive that point home, Trump now appears ready to punish nations that he views as not sufficiently supporting America’s new hard-line immigration polices.

He is serving a warning to US allies and adversaries alike: If you don’t co-operate with the US, the consequences will be severe.

Colombia has backed down from a tariff war, but the tactic poses a test for the new Trump administration.

If future sanctions lead to higher prices for US consumers, will the American public object? Will they be willing to tolerate some financial pain incurred to advance Trump’s immigration priorities?

The US imports about 27% of its coffee from Colombia, according to the US Department of Agriculture, as well as other goods like bananas, crude oil, avocados and flowers. The coffee imports alone are worth nearly $2bn (£1.6bn).

Colombian President Gustavo Petro had initially responded by saying his country would accept repatriated citizens on “civilian planes, without treating them like criminals”.

It’s no secret that Petro doesn’t like Donald Trump – he’s heavily criticised his policies on migration and the environment in the past.

In a lengthy response on X, he said Trump would “wipe out the human species because of greed” and accused the US president of considering Colombians an “inferior race”.

Petro went on to describe himself as “stubborn” and said that while Trump could try to “carry out a coup” with “economic strength and arrogance” he would, in short, fight back.

Most significantly, Petro said: “From today on, Colombia is open to the entire world, with open arms.”

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This is something that should worry a US president who wants to tackle migration. His incoming administration officials have made clear that that mission will require looking beyond the Mexico border.

Trump’s pick for deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, has long argued that “working with other countries to stop such migratory flows” must be a “global imperative of US foreign policy”. Sunday’s spat might make working together a lot less likely.

Tens of thousands of migrants every year from around the world, from India to China, head north towards the US after landing in South America and travelling up through Colombia across the Darien Gap – a key choke point just north of the Panama-Colombia border. It’s a dangerous journey usually facilitated by criminal gangs.

In his response to Trump’s actions, President Petro noted that if talks over managing migration through Darien were suspended, “illegal activities will increase”. Those comments could be viewed as a veiled threat of more undocumented migrants on the way.

Petro was quick to say that his country would not refuse Colombian nationals deported from the US – only that they must receive “dignified treatment”.

Even after Colombia acted to defuse the row, it said a dialogue would be maintained to “guarantee the dignity of our citizens”.

But these kinds of tariffs are a test of will – and could still be applied to other nations that do not agree to the US’s demands. From the looks of it, this is just Trump’s opening move.

The mineral-rich east of the Democratic Republic of Congo has been dogged by conflict for more than 30 years, since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Numerous armed groups have competed with the central authorities for power and control of the potential fortune in this vast nation.

The instability has sucked in neighbouring countries to devastating effect – notoriously in the 1990s when two huge conflicts, dubbed Africa’s World Wars, resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

After a rapid advance in the region, fighters from the M23 rebel group have entered Goma – a major city of more than a million people in the east of DR Congo.

Sitting on the border with Rwanda and the shores of Lake Kivu, it is a vital trading and transport hub that is within reach of mining towns supplying metals and minerals in high demand such as gold, tin and coltan, which is a key component of mobile phones and batteries for electric vehicles.

The rebels say they now control the city, but the Congolese government says its troops still hold some key locations.

• Live: Follow the latest updates from the fighting in DR Congo

The M23 are led by ethnic Tutsis, who say they needed to take up arms to protect the rights of the minority group.

They say that several previous deals to end the fighting have not been respected – they take their name from a peace agreement that was signed on 23 March 2009.

Shortly after its creation in 2012, the M23 rapidly gained territory and seized Goma – acts that were met with international opprobrium and accusations of war crimes and human rights violations.

It was forced to withdraw from Goma, and then suffered a series of heavy defeats at the hands of the Congolese army along with a UN force that saw it expelled from the country.

M23 fighters then agreed to be integrated into the army in return for promises that Tutsis would be protected.

But, in 2021, the group took up arms again, saying the promises had been broken.

Neighbouring Rwanda has in the past consistently denied that it supported the M23, but ever since 2012 UN experts have accused it of providing weapons, logistical support and even ultimately commanding the rebels.

DR Congo’s government, as well as the US and France, have also identified Rwanda as backing the group. Last year, a UN experts report said that up to 4,000 Rwandan troops were fighting alongside the M23.

In a statement on Sunday, Rwanda did not explicitly deny that it backed the M23 but instead said that the fighting near its border was a “serious threat” to its “security and territorial integrity”.

It added that Rwanda was being scapegoated and blamed the recent fighting on the Congolese authorities, saying they had refused to enter into a dialogue with the M23.

A peace process, mediated by Angola and involving Rwanda and DR Congo, did result in a ceasefire deal last year, however that soon fell apart and fighting resumed.

The origin of the current fighting can partly be traced back to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

About 800,000 people – the vast majority from the Tutsi community – were slaughtered by ethnic Hutu extremists.

The genocide ended with the advance of a force of Tutsi-led rebels commanded by Paul Kagame, who is now president.

Fearing reprisals, an estimated one million Hutus then fled across the border to what is now DR Congo. This stoked ethnic tensions as a marginalised Tutsi group in the east – the Banyamulenge – felt increasingly under threat.

Rwanda’s army twice invaded DR Congo, saying it was going after some of those responsible for the genocide, and worked with members of the Banyamulenge and other armed groups.

After 30 years of conflict, one of the Hutu groups, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which includes some of those responsible for the Rwandan genocide, is still active in eastern DR Congo.

Rwanda describes the FDLR as a “genocidal militia” and says its continued existence in the DR Congo’s east threatens its own territory.

It accuses the Congolese authorities of working with the FDLR – accusations which DR Congo denies.

Rwanda is unlikely to stay out of DR Congo unless it is satisfied that the FDLR is no longer a threat to itself, or to the Tutsi communities in eastern DR Congo.

However, it is widely accused of using the conflict as a way to profit from eastern DR Congo’s mineral wealth.

A UN peacekeeping mission has been in place since 1999. The current force – known as Monusco – is made up of more than 10,000 troops.

However, of these, only the Force Intervention Brigade is allowed to carry out offensive operations against armed groups. It was this force that helped defeat the M23 in 2013.

Monusco has been the target of anger from ordinary Congolese who see it as failing to do its job. President Félix Tshisekedi, deeming the mission a failure, had asked it to leave by the end of last year.

But the departure was delayed and in December the mission was extended for another year.

The Southern African Development Community (Sadc), a regional grouping of 16 countries, has also deployed a military force to eastern DR Congo, but it has been unable to halt the rebel advance.

South Africa said nine of its soldiers had been killed in clashes with rebels.

Three Malawian soldiers have also been killed, the UN said, while Uruguay’s army said one of its soldiers – as part of Monusco – had died.

• A quick guide to DR Congo

Mangala Pradhan will never forget the morning she lost her one-year-old son.

It was 16 years ago, in the unforgiving Sundarbans – a vast, harsh delta of 100 islands in India’s West Bengal state. Her son Ajit, just beginning to walk, was full of life: frisky, restless, and curious about the world.

That morning, like so many others, the family was busy with their daily chores. Mangala had fed Ajit breakfast and taken him to the kitchen as she cooked. Her husband was out buying vegetables, and her ailing mother-in-law rested in another room.

But little Ajit, always eager to explore, slipped away unnoticed. Mangala shouted for her mother-in-law to watch him, but there was no reply. Minutes later, when she realised how quiet it had become, panic set in.

“Where is my boy? Has anyone seen my boy?” she screamed. Neighbours rushed in to help.

Desperation quickly turned to heartbreak when her brother-in-law found Ajit’s tiny body floating in the pond in the courtyard outside their ramshackle home. The little boy had wandered out and slipped into the water – a moment of innocence turned into unthinkable tragedy.

Today, Mangala is one of 16 mothers in the area who walk or cycle to two makeshift creches set up by a non-profit where they look after, feed and educate some 40 children, who are dropped off by their parents on way to work. “These mothers are the saviours of children who are not their own,” says Sujoy Roy of Child In Need Institute (CINI), which set up the creches.

The need for such care is urgent: countless children continue to drown in this riverine region, which is dotted with ponds and rivers. Every home has a pond used for bathing, washing, and even drawing drinking water.

A 2020 survey by medical research organisation The George Institute and CINI found that nearly three children aged between one and nine years drowned daily in the Sundarbans region. Drownings peaked in July, when the monsoon rains began, and between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. Most children were unsupervised at that time as caregivers were occupied with chores. Around 65% drowned within 50m of home, and only 6% received care from licensed doctors. Healthcare was in shambles: hospitals were scarce and many public health clinics were defunct.

In response, villagers clung to ancient superstitions to save rescued children. They spun the child’s body over an adult’s head, chanting invocations. They beat the water with sticks to ward off spirits.

“As a mother, I know the pain of losing a child,” Mangala told me. “I don’t want any other mother to endure what I did. I want to protect these children from drowning. We live amid so many dangers anyway.”

Life in Sundarbans, home to four million people, is a daily struggle.

Tigers, known to attack humans, roam dangerously close to and enter crowded villages where the poor eke out a living, often squatting on land.

People fish, collect honey, and gather crabs under the constant threat of tigers and venomous snakes. From July to October, rivers and ponds swell due to heavy rains, cyclones lash the region, and rampaging waters swallow villages. Climate change is worsening this uncertainty. Nearly 16% of the population here is aged one to nine.

“We’ve always co-existed with water, unaware of the dangers, until tragedy strikes,” says Sujata Das.

Sujata’s life was overturned three months ago when her 18-month-old daughter Ambika, drowned in the pond at their joint family home in Kultali.

Her sons were at their coaching classes, some family members had gone to the market, and an elderly aunt was busy working at home. Her husband, who usually works in the southern state of Kerala, was home that day, repairing a fishing net at the nearby trawler. Sujata had gone to fetch water at a local handpump because a promised water connection at her residence had still not materialised.

“Then we found her floating in the pond. It had rained, water had risen. We took her to a local quack, who declared her dead. This tragedy has woken us up to what we should do to prevent such tragedies in the future,” says Sujata.

Sujata, like others in the village, plans to fence her pond with bamboo and nets to prevent children from wandering into the water. She hopes that children who don’t know how to swim are taught in village ponds. She wants to encourage neighbours to learn CPR to provide lifesaving aid to rescued drowning children.

“Children don’t vote, so the political will to address these issues is often lacking,” says Mr Roy. “That’s why we’re focusing on building local resilience and spreading knowledge.” Support from India’s top science agency, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), in funding creches and pond fencing has also been crucial.

Over the past two years, around 2,000 villagers have received CPR training. Last July, a villager saved a drowning child by reviving him before he was sent to the hospital. “The real challenge lies in setting up creches and raising awareness among the community,” he adds.

Implementing even simple solutions is challenging due to costs and local beliefs.

In the Sundarbans, superstition about angering water deities made it hard to get people to fence their ponds. In neighbouring Bangladesh, where drowning is the leading cause of death for children aged one-four, wooden playpens were introduced in courtyards to keep children safe. However, compliance was low – children disliked them, and villagers often used them for goats and ducks. “This created a false sense of security, and drowning rates slightly increased over three years,” says Jagnoor Jagnoor, an injury epidemiologist at the George Institute.

Eventually non-profits set up 2,500 creches in Bangladesh, cutting drowning deaths by 88%. In 2024, the government expanded this to 8,000 centres, benefitting 200,000 children annually. Water-rich Vietnam focused on children aged six-10, using decades of mortality data to develop policies and teach survival skills. This reduced drowning rates, especially among schoolchildren travelling on waterways.

Drowning remains a major global issue. In 2021, an estimated 300,000 people drowned – over 30 lives lost every hour, according to the WHO. Nearly half were under 29, and a quarter were under five. India’s data is scanty, officially recording around 38,000 drowning deaths in 2022, though the actual number is likely much higher.

In the Sundarbans, the harsh reality is ever-present. For years, children have been either allowed to roam freely or tied with ropes and cloth to prevent wandering. Jingling anklets were used to alert parents to their children’s movements, but in this unforgiving, water-surrounded landscape, nothing feels truly safe.

Kakoli Das’s six-year-old son walked into an overflowing pond last summer while delivering a piece of paper to a neighbour. Unable to distinguish between the road and the water, Ishan drowned. He had suffered seizures as a child and couldn’t learn to swim due to the risk of fever.

“Please, I beg every mother: fence your ponds, learn how to revive children and teach them how to swim. This is about saving lives. We cannot afford to wait,” says Kakoli.

For now, the creches serve as a beacon of hope, offering a way to keep children safe from the dangers of water. On a recent afternoon, four-year-old Manik Pal sang a cheerful ditty to remind his friends: I won’t go to the pond alone/Unless my parents are with me/I’ll learn to swim and stay afloat/And live my life fear-free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From a set of roaring rapids, comes a grand vision.

There are plans to build a magnificent, multi-billion dollar mega-dam on the Congo River – one that would produce enough renewable electricity to power vast areas of Africa.

The structure would be called the Grand Inga Dam. Located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it would have twice the power generation of China’s Three Gorges and, therefore, be the world’s largest hydroelectric plant.

The Grand Inga Dam enticed investors and developers but decades after it was first dreamt up, the site reserved for the structure remains untouched.

While DR Congo’s government has insisted the plan is still in motion, critics point to the long delays, DR Congo’s record of poor governance and the potential for serious environmental harm.

There is also concern about the project’s revolving set of international partners. Just last week, Chinese state-owned firm the Three Gorges Corporation, withdrew from the project, a source close to the partnership told the BBC.

And then there is the eye-watering bill, which is reportedly as high as $80bn (£63bn) in a country that is one of the poorest in the world.

But some believe the nay-sayers are holding Grand Inga to a different standard than other major infrastructure projects. And while construction has not begun, there has been a flurry of meetings and discussions between interested parties over the past year.

The need for the Grand Inga is certainly there. Roughly 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency, a global watchdog. It is a pressing issue – African heads of state, private sector figures and development partners are currently discussing the issue at the Africa Energy Summit in Tanzania.

Attempts to solve this problem date back decades. In the early 2000s DR Congo and its neighbours – South Africa, Angola, Namibia and Botswana – dreamt up an interconnected electricity grid.

They looked to the vast Congo River, realising that its powerful waters have an immense hydropower potential.

The international collective – known as Westcor – sought to multiply the two dams that already existed on the river – Inga 1 and Inga 2.

DR Congo’s long-time leader Mobutu Sese Seko oversaw their construction in the 1970s and 1980s, but by the end of the century, both dams were dilapidated due to a lack of funding for their maintenance.

Westcor eventually disbanded but their Grand Inga dream lived on. Inga 1 and 2 now work at around 80% of their capacity and DR Congo has drawn up plans to supercharge this output, by adding six more dams along the river.

These extra dams are forecast to generate up to 40,000MW of electricity at any one time – enough to power New York city during the summer.

Through Inga, DR Congo will play its role as “the trigger of the African revolver… a catalyst for the industrialisation of Africa,” says the country’s Agency for the Development and Promotion of the Grand Inga Project.

The BBC contacted the agency for this article but it did not comment.

Despite its previous projections that Inga 3 would be completed by 2018, construction has not even begun.

The lack of visible progress suggests the project has stalled, but recent messaging from the World Bank – the world’s leading development organisation – implies otherwise.

Late last year, the bank announced it was back in talks with the Congolese government, having withdrawn its funding for Inga 3 back in 2016.

The World Bank had cited “strategic differences” but eight years later – and with Félix Tshisekedi having replaced Joseph Kabila as DR Congo’s president – it has done a U-turn.

“I think it’s the first time that I feel more optimistic. I almost believe that we can get it done,” Demetrios Papathanasiou, the World Bank’s global director of energy and extractives, told a South African panel last February.

This optimism seemed to be felt elsewhere, also. A pan-African alliance of finance institutions – including the African Development Bank – has recently been working together to help attract private investment to the project.

The Grand Inga is like a “serpent – it is up, down, visible, not visible,” José Ángel González Tausz, chairman of AEE Power, a Spanish-run company and partner in the project, tells the BBC.

In November, Fabrice Lusinde, the head of DR Congo’s public electricity company Snel, said that if work on Inga 3 began in 2026, two of its turbines should be up and running by 2032. Electricity produced by these turbines would then finance the plant’s other turbines, he said.

On its own, Inga 3 is projected to produce 4,800MW of electricity. South Africa, a country hindered by regular power cuts, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) stating that they will import just over half of this amount.

South Africa’s authorities have argued that Inga will deliver consistent and reliable energy, but critics in the country say cheaper electricity can be found elsewhere.

A Nigerian company, Natural Oilfield Services, has also reportedly signed up as a buyer. Like South Africa, Nigeria also suffers from severe electricity shortages.

Guinea and Angola have reportedly expressed interest in the Grand Inga Dam too.

So why – after decades of talks – have no new dams materialised?

“It is a project in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” Mr Tausz says bluntly. “Even if the project is one of the best all over the world – it does not have the credibility.”

For decades, DR Congo has been blighted by corruption, a lack of infrastructure and sluggish development. Conflict in the east of the country also makes international headlines – though Inga is thousands of kilometres away from the fighting.

Investors are also “afraid” because the Grand Inga would not show returns for decades, Mr Tausz says, adding “who knows what will happen in Congo in the next 30 years”.

Mr Tausz – whose father worked as an engineer on Inga 1 in 1972 – also says that a lack of financial commitment by the Congolese government has contributed to the delay.

And then there is the funding issue. In September 2023, DR Congo’s president told reporters that the country was “still facing difficulties in mobilising investments” for the dam.

The recent withdrawal of China’s Three Gorges Corporation intensifies these difficulties. Three Gorges was a major partner, which brought money and expertise to the complex project.

According to the BBC’s source, who spoke under condition of anonymity, Three Gorges pulled out as they were frustrated with the way DR Congo President Tshisekedi was handling the project.

There has been no official confirmation of the pull-out.

But are these problems unique to the Grand Inga Dam? Not really, says Professor George Aggidis, a hydropower expert at the UK’s Lancaster University.

He says years of delays and numerous changes of partners are “normal” for a major infrastructure project like the Inga Dam.

He points to the UK’s Mersey Tidal Project – which if successful would be the world’s largest tidal barrier. The idea was first floated in 1984 and has been abandoned, then revived in the decades since.

“Does that mean we are unstable here in the UK?” Prof Aggidis asks. He describes the Inga project as “doable”.

A similar sentiment is shared by Alexander Schwab, an executive at Andritz, an Austrian-based company that signed on to supply equipment for Inga 3.

Mr Schwab says Andritz signed a MoU with the Congolese authorities but has not received any word on the project since 2021.

He seems largely unfazed by the lack of communication, saying that one in three major infrastructure projects will be “stalled somewhere”.

For Mr Schwab, the Grand Inga is “one of the best mega projects… in the world”.

But despite its potential, there are deep concerns about the project’s environmental and social impact.

A common criticism is that the dam will benefit South African consumers and DR Congo’s mining companies, but not the Congolese people. Some 80% of the population lack access to electricity.

“Inga will not bring electricity for the people,” says Emmanuel Musuyu, the head of Congolese civil society coalition Corap. He alleges that the majority of electricity has already been promised to South Africa and the mines.

In a recent report on Inga 3, the DR Congo authorities acknowledged that the dam is “alone not sufficient to address DRC’s energy and development challenges” but said it could act as a “catalyst” for national change.

The World Bank said it was exploring how it could support the government to ensure Inga “delivers broad benefits for energy access”.

Environmental and rights groups also worry that approximately 37,000 residents in the Inga area will be displaced without compensation. According to organisations like International Rivers and Observatori del Deute en la Globalització, thousands were forcibly removed from their homes and never compensated when Inga I and II were built.

They also say that the first two dams damaged the region’s biodiversity and that any extra dams are likely to do the same.

“It will have a specific impact on the fish and all animals in the water… when you change the flow of water in rivers, we can see some species of fish disappear,” says Mr Musuyu.

A 2018 study argued that many large-scale hydropower projects in Europe and the US have been disastrous for the environment.

DR Congo’s authorities have recognised that people would be displaced by Inga III, but said residents would be resettled in areas with basic services and promised that “fair compensation” would be awarded.

They have also recognised the risks to the local environment and said an assessment aiming to reduce this impact would be completed within the next two years. However, according to the BBC’s source close to the project, the authorities have not yet raised enough money to fund these studies.

If the Grand Inga is simply experiencing the ups and downs that come with big infrastructure projects, the World Bank may still have cause for optimism.

But the dam is a complex engineering project – one that requires its many stakeholders to work together in harmony.

The World Bank returning, only for the Three Gorges to leave, suggests DR Congo is struggling to maintain such unity.

And despite DR Congo’s ambition, construction cannot begin unless funding is secured.

So for now, it appears as though this project which has the potential to change the lives of millions of people in Africa remains just that – a grand vision.

• The spectacular failures and successes of massive dams
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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.”

The BBC has heard from hundreds of people who have been angered by comments by the former boss of M&S and Asda that working from home is “not proper work”.

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

More than 350 people, the majority of whom support working from home, contacted the BBC with their stories.

One of them was Alba, 52, from Dorking, who is currently searching for a remote job. “We are not lazy. We don’t want to golf all day.”

Alba, who previously worked as a business administrator, lives with chronic pain, travel sickness and migraines, and says she needs to work from home to manage her condition.

“I just want a comfortable environment where I can deal with my health issues,” she says.

Out of 357 responses submitted by individuals who chose to contact the BBC, 250 people said working from home was essential, with many citing health issues as a key reason for flexible working.

“I’m not in senior management, I’m not asking for a high salary, I just don’t want to be on sickness benefits and that’s what will happen if I can’t work from home,” says Alba.

She adds that her health issues once resulted in an ambulance being called at work.

Clare McNeil, director at Timewise, a consultancy specialising in flexible working policies, highlights that the benefits of remote work extend to employers as well, with such policies reducing staff turnover and sickness absence.

Mark Mortensen, associate professor of organisational behaviour at the business school INSEAD, says defining productivity can be challenging, particularly in creative and collaborative roles.

But Rebecca Mitchell, 38, a software engineer from London, says the difference in her productivity at work has been “drastic” since she started working from home 10 years ago.

Rebecca, who has ADHD, says that before working remotely, she struggled to stay employed.

“Working from an office adds too much stress and leads to a wealth of mental health issues for me,” she says.

She says that whereas before, she felt overlooked for career progression because of her disability, since working from home her salary has tripled.

“Autism and ADHD are only now being accepted. People understand neurodivergence now like they didn’t before.

“People like me rely on working from home in order to be a productive part of the workforce.”

The shift towards working from home has increased in the UK since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

While the trend in working only from home has fallen since 2021, a hybrid-working model – some days travelling to work and some days working at home – has become the new normal for many people.

According to a snapshot survey from the Office for National Statistics, 25% of working adults in Great Britain were hybrid working in January 2025, while 15% were working from home. The data shows where people said they were working on the day they completed the survey, rather than their wider working pattern.

But, of the BBC’s responses, 50 were against working from home.

One of those was Hannah, 31, a technical support manager in Birmingham.

After the pandemic, her employer shut down all its offices so she had to work remotely full-time. She says this has taken a toll on her mental, physical and financial health, prompting her to consider changing careers and moving house to improve her situation.

“It feels like I’m in a lockdown that’s never going to end,” she says.

Lord Rose, who recently stepped down as Asda’s chairman, told the BBC: “We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and the country’s wellbeing.”

For Hannah, who is single, remote work has left her feeling isolated.

“All the people who love working from home are in relationships, or have children, live with family – they’re not 100% alone all the time like me.”

Shares in major US technology firms have plunged after the rapid rise of a low-cost chatbot built by a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm.

The DeepSeek app, which was launched last week, has overtaken rivals including OpenAI’s ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app in the US.

US tech giants including AI chip-maker Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta all saw their share prices drop on Monday.

China’s chatbot was reportedly developed for a fraction of the cost of its rivals, raising questions about the future of America’s AI dominance and the scale of investments US firms are planning.

Last week, OpenAI joined a group of other firms who pledged to invest $500m (£400m) in building AI infrastructure in the US.

President Donald Trump, in one of his first announcements since returning to office, called it “the largest AI infrastructure project by far in history” that would help keep “the future of technology” in the US.

DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was developed for around $6m – significantly less than the billions spent by rivals.

But this claim has been disputed by others in AI.

The researchers say they use already existing technology, as well as open source code – software that can be used, modified or distributed by anybody free of charge.

DeepSeek’s emergence comes as the US is restricting the sale of the advanced chip technology that powers AI to China.

To continue their work without steady supplies of imported advanced chips, Chinese AI developers have shared their work with each other and experimented with new approaches to the technology.

This has resulted in AI models that require far less computing power than before.

It also means that they cost a lot less than previously thought possible, which has the potential to upend the industry.

After DeepSeek-R1 was launched earlier this month, the company boasted of “performance on par with” one of OpenAI’s latest models when used for tasks such as maths, coding and natural language reasoning.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Trump advisor Marc Andreessen described DeepSeek-R1 as “AI’s Sputnik moment”, a reference to the satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.

At the time, the US was considered to have been caught off-guard by their rival’s technological achievement.

DeepSeek’s sudden popularity has startled stock markets in Europe and the US.

ASML, the Dutch chip equipment maker, saw its share price tumble by more than 10% while shares in Siemens Energy, which makes hardware related to AI, plunged by 21%.

“This idea of a low-cost Chinese version hasn’t necessarily been forefront, so it’s taken the market a little bit by surprise,” said Fiona Cincotta, senior market analyst at City Index.

“So, if you suddenly get this low-cost AI model, then that’s going to raise concerns over the profits of rivals, particularly given the amount that they’ve already invested in more expensive AI infrastructure.”

Singapore-based technology equity advisor Vey-Sern Ling told the BBC it could “potentially derail the investment case for the entire AI supply chain”.

But Wall Street banking giant Citi cautioned that while DeepSeek could challenge the dominant positions of American companies such as OpenAI, issues faced by Chinese firms could hamper their development.

“We estimate that in an inevitably more restrictive environment, US access to more advanced chips is an advantage,” analysts said in a report.

The company was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China.

The 40-year-old, an information and electronic engineering graduate, also founded the hedge fund that backed DeepSeek.

He reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, now banned from export to China. Experts believe this collection – which some estimates put at 50,000 – led him to launch DeepSeek, by pairing these chips with cheaper, lower-end ones that are still available to import.

Mr Liang was recently seen at a meeting between industry experts and the Chinese premier Li Qiang.

In a July 2024 interview with The China Academy, Mr Liang said he was surprised by the reaction to the previous version of his AI model.

“We didn’t expect pricing to be such a sensitive issue,” he said.

“We were simply following our own pace, calculating costs, and setting prices accordingly.”

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January 27 was formally designated Holocaust Memorial Day by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2005. But how we remember the Holocaust has evolved over the decades and even now – some 80 years on – it is a story of remembrance that is still unfinished.

“Dear boy,” the short handwritten note from 1942 begins, “I was delighted with your May message. I’m healthy. I hope that I can stay here and see you again. I remain hopeful. Please write. Greetings, your father.”

The note is one of thousands of documents held by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, one of the world’s largest Holocaust archives.

The Jewish man who wrote it was called Alfred Josephs, and he was sending it to his teenage son Wolfgang, who had escaped with his mother to England. Alfred had been arrested and was being held in the Westerbork detention camp in The Netherlands.

He was still, at the time, able to pass short messages through the Red Cross.

What Alfred didn’t know was that Westerbork was a camp whose inmates were to be transported to Auschwitz. Wolfgang would never hear from his father again.

At first, Auschwitz was used by the Germans to house Polish prisoners of war. After Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it became a labour camp, where many inmates were worked to death. The Nazis called this “annihilation by labour”.

But what it became by 1942 is the Auschwitz that sits in our shared memory, for by now it was an extermination camp, whose main purpose was mass murder.

Newsreel filmed by the allies after the liberation of Europe shows German civilians being forced to visit the camps by the troops.

“It was only a short walk from any German city to the nearest concentration camp,” says the American voice-over. The camera catches relaxed, smartly dressed Germans laughing and chatting as they make their way.

They walk past the corpses, piles of emaciated men and women, men and women who may even have been their neighbours, colleagues, friends in the past. The camera that had captured their relaxed, easy smiles before they entered the camps now records their horror.

Shock registers on their faces. Some weep. Others shake their heads, fold handkerchiefs to their faces and look away.

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Post-war Europe looked at this horror and acknowledged the depth of the suffering. But how did post-war Europe make sense of the perpetrators?

When we talk of industrialised killing, we don’t just mean the scale of it, vast though it was. We also mean the sophistication of its organisation: the division of labour, the allocation of specialist tasks, the efficient marshalling of resources, the meticulous planning that was needed to keep the wheels of the killing machine turning.

Those same newsreels show well-fed Nazi guards, both men and women, now in allied custody.

What was the nature of the moral collapse that turned this horror into a normality for the Nazis who ran these camps, a normality in which mass murder became, for them, all in a day’s work?

This is a question that has been touched on many times before but even now, some 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, has yet to be fully comprehended.

For years after the war, public attention turned away from this question, but also away from trying to understand the question of what had happened more broadly.

Though some Nazi war criminals were prosecuted, the new priority, in a Europe divided by the Cold War, was to turn West Germany into a democratic ally.

The Holocaust almost disappeared from popular memory, in much of the Western world. The post-war public wanted to turn the page on the war. In popular culture, in Britain, for example, the appetite was for stories that could be celebrated and cheered.

“The culture of memory of the Second World War was still emphasising heroism,” says Dr Toby Simpson, the director of the Wiener Holocaust Library. “There was an emphasis on the Normandy landings, for example.

“And in the stories that the survivors wanted to tell there was very little heroism to be found in a story where they’ve been stripped of their humanity, agency, their choice. They’d been turned into a non-person.”

The Italian survivor, Primo Levi, wrote his Auschwitz memoir If This Is A Man immediately after the war. He had been one of a few thousand still at Auschwitz when Soviet troops arrived on 27 January 1945.

Most prisoners had been forced to march west, towards Germany, in freezing winter weather. Already weakened by camp conditions, many died on the way in what came to be known as the Death Marches. Levi was too sick and Soviet troops found him close to death in the camp infirmary.

Today, If This is a Man is regarded as a masterpiece of survivor testimony and one of the most important memoirs of the entire era. But in 1947, Primo Levi found it hard to find a publisher, even in his native Italy.

Finally, a small independent publisher in Turin published it in a print run of 2,500. It sold 1,500 copies then disappeared. For publishers, and for the public, it was still too soon. Few, it seemed, wanted to look.

“Primo Levi didn’t sell because the time wasn’t right and because he was too great a writer to give a heroic answer. His answer is greater than heroism,” says Jay Winter, professor of history Emeritus at Yale University. Many of Prof Winter’s mother’s family were killed in the Holocaust.

He adds: “A lot of people turned Primo Levi into a saint but all you have to do is to read the poem at the beginning of If This is a Man to see that he is not forgiving anybody – he is not forgiving and not forgetting.”

“There was Holocaust memorialisation in the 1950s,” says Prof David Feldman at Birkbeck University in London, “but it was something that was done by Jews themselves, in small fragmented groups.

“These were occasions of mourning more than memorialisation. The idea that we have now, of memorialisation, that somehow there are lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust, was not commonplace then”.

According to Prof Winter: “The countries that were reconstructing… needed a myth of resistance, of heroic armed conflict against the Nazis or Italian fascists.” That myth of resistance “had no place for concentration camp inmates”.

Only in the 1960s did popular interest return. When Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann, a key figure in the extermination campaign, they put him on trial in Jerusalem, and televised it. Now, Holocaust memorialisation began to reach the wider public.

Through the Eichmann trial, the new mass medium of television brought survivors’ testimony into the living rooms of the western world.

It coincided, too, with a cultural shift in public attitudes to war. A generation born in the aftermath of World War Two were coming of age in the 1960s.

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem incorporated the words of the World War One poet Wilfred Owen – whose poetry had also faded from popular consciousness – to a new generation. Anti-war sentiment was fuelled further by the US involvement in Vietnam.

“I would say the Eichmann trial also brought perpetrators into people’s living rooms,” says Prof Feldman. “Survivors’ testimony and the emphasis on survivors being central to Holocaust memorialisation came later. It developed slowly in the 1960s. By the 1990s it was well established.”

The Holocaust story – at last – took its place in our collective consciousness.

From the 1960s onwards, Levi’s memoir found a global readership. Anne Frank’s father Otto had also struggled, in the early post-war period, to find a publisher for his daughter’s diary. To date it has sold an estimated 30 million copies.

As for Wolfgang Josephs, as late as August 1946, he was still hoping against hope that he might find his father alive. He received a typewritten note from the British Red Cross. It informed him, with regret, that Red Cross officials in Europe had searched the lists of survivors, and his father’s name was not among them.

Wolfgang anglicised his name to Peter Johnson and settled in the UK, at a time when few in the western world wanted to hear the stories of those who had witnessed, or survived, the Holocaust. He donated his family papers to the Wiener Holocaust Library, which remains a vast repository of evidence of the darkest period in Europe’s history.

Now, 80 years on, there are so few survivors left that soon the duty to remember will pass to posterity.

“I think remembering the Holocaust is even more important now,” says Dr Simpson, “because it happened at such a scale, and with such an intensity of hatred, that [there is still] the need to understand, to explain this continent-wide event in which six million Jews were murdered.” And so too is there still a need to fully comprehend how to make sense of the perpetrators – and the nature of the moral collapse that enabled this to take place.

As Primo Levi wrote: “The injury cannot be healed. It extends through time.”

The chairman and president of Fuji TV, one of Japan’s biggest networks, have resigned in the wake of a sexual misconduct allegation against a famous TV host.

Dozens of companies have pulled their advertisements from the network, which was criticised for trying to cover up the scandal.

Masahiro Nakai was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a 2023 dinner party allegedly organised by Fuji TV staff. He announced his retirement from show business last week.

The Japanese government has called on Fuji TV to regain trust from viewers and sponsors.

In a press conference on Monday, Fuji TV chairman Shuji Kano and president Koichi Minato bowed as they announced their resignations. It came shortly after an emergency board meeting.

They apologised to viewers as well as stakeholders for the trouble and anxiety caused in a scandal that has rocked Japan’s entertainment industry.

“I feel deeply the weight of my responsibility for undermining trust in the media,” said Mr Minato. “Looking back, I realise there were shortcomings in our response.”

Mr Minato had admitted previously that the company had known about the allegation against Nakai shortly after the alleged incident took place. But Fuji TV chose not to disclose it at the time, as it “prioritised the woman’s physical and mental recovery as well as the protection of her privacy”, he had said.

Reports emerged last month that Nakai had paid the unnamed woman more than half a million dollars. More allegations then surfaced that a Fuji TV employee had helped to arrange the dinner party.

Nakai, a former member of boy band SMAP and a household name who fronted several Fuji TV shows, has denied using violence against the woman. He has also said that he had “resolved” the matter with her through a settlement.

But this did little to quell public anger.

Car manufacturers Nissan and Toyota were among the companies that pulled advertising from Fuji TV.

In an open letter, investment firm Rising Sun Management which is the majority shareholder of Fuji TV’s parent company, said that the scandal “exposes serious flaws in your corporate governance”.

Fuji TV has since set up an independent committee to investigate the scandal.

Executive vice president Kenji Shimizu, who will replace Mr Minato as president, said he would “never tolerate acts that violate human rights” and committed to preventing similar incidents by “starting from scratch”.

Earlier this month, the network suspended a weekly show hosted by Nakai while other major networks have also dropped the presenter.

Other TV networks have also announced their own investigations, following reports that similar dinner parties involving celebrities are a common practice in the industry.

New Zealand has relaxed its visa requirements to allow tourists to work remotely while visiting the country in an effort to boost its tourism sector.

Under the new rules, visitors can now carry out remote working for a foreign employer while holidaying in the country for up to 90 days, after which they could face possible tax implications.

The country’s government has said the move is aimed at making New Zealand “more attractive to digital nomads”, referring to people who travel while working remotely.

“The change will enable many visitors to extend their stays, which will lead to more money being spent in the country,” said New Zealand’s immigration minister Erica Stanford.

The government said the changes applied to all visitor visas, including tourists and people visiting family, partners and guardians on longer-term visas.

It added that only remote work based overseas was allowed, while visitors whose employment required them to be in the country still had to obtain appropriate visas.

New Zealand’s tourism industry generates a revenue of almost $11bn, according to the government.

Many other countries have introduced visa programmes for digital nomads over the past few years in an effort to appeal to a growing number of people seeking opportunities to travel while working remotely.

The trend took off in the 2010s, mostly among young workers who were looking to escape their daily routine. It was further bolstered by the Covid-19 pandemic, when worldwide lockdowns led to a shift in attitudes toward remote work.

Countries offering digital nomad visas include Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Spain and Portugal.

But the presence of digital nomads in some places has also sparked debate. In the South African city of Cape Town, detractors say the influx of remote workers has led to an increase in costs.

The influx of visitors to countries such as Spain and Greece have also fuelled heated protests against overtourism.

Belgian footballer Radja Nainggolan has been arrested as part of an investigation into cocaine trafficking.

The 36-year-old was one of several suspects apprehended by Belgian police on Monday morning, after a series of raids were carried out across the country.

“The investigation concerns alleged facts of importation of cocaine from South America to Europe, via the port of Antwerp, and its redistribution in Belgium,” the Brussels prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

No further information has been released to the public.

The arrest comes just six days after Nainggolan came out of retirement to sign for Lokeren in the Belgian second division.

He scored on his debut, giving his side a point in their 1-1 home draw to K. Lierse.

Born in Antwerp, the midfielder spent most of his career in Italy, playing for both Roma and Inter Milan.

Between 2009 and 2018, he made 30 appearances for the Belgium national team.

A looming trade war between the US and Colombia appears to have been averted after the Colombian government agreed to allow US military flights carrying deported migrants to land in the Andean country.

The spat erupted on Sunday when President Gustavo Petro barred two military planes carrying Colombians deported from the US from landing.

The Trump administration responded by threatening to slap punitive tariffs on Colombian exports to the US.

President Petro at first said Colombia would retaliate by imposing tariffs on US goods, but the White House later announced that Colombia had agreed to accept migrants – including those arriving on US military aircraft – “without limitation or delay”.

The White House hailed the agreement with Colombia as a victory for Trump’s hard-line approach, after the country’s two leaders had exchanged threats on social media on Sunday.

“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.

She added that the tariffs and sanctions which the Trump administration had threatened to impose on Colombia, should it not comply, would be “held in reserve, and not signed, unless Colombia fails to honour this agreement”.

She also said that President Donald Trump “expects all other nations of the world to fully co-operate in accepting deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States”.

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

The row between Colombia’s left-wing president and Trump escalated rapidly on Sunday.

Petro, a keen user of social media, posted on X that he had “barred US planes carrying Colombian migrants from entering our territory” because “the US can’t treat Colombian migrants like criminals”.

He demanded that the US put procedures in place for migrants to be “treated with dignity”.

He also said he was ready to send the presidential plane to the US to transport the migrants.

Colombia has accepted deportation flights from the US in the past. In 2024, 124 planes carrying deported migrants from the US landed in the country.

But President Petro appeared to object to the return of deportees on military rather than civilian flights – and to the way the migrants may be treated on those military flights.

In his posts on X, Petro referenced a news video showing migrants deported from the US to Brazil, who had been handcuffed and had their feet restrained during the deportation flight.

He said that he would “never allow Colombians to be returned handcuffed on flights”.

Petro’s refusal to let two US military planes carrying Colombian deportees to land triggered a quick response by Trump on Truth Social.

“I was just informed that two repatriation flights from the United States, with a large number of Illegal Criminals, were not allowed to land in Colombia. This order was given by Colombia’s Socialist President Gustavo Petro, who is already very unpopular amongst his people,” he wrote.

Trump argued that Petro’s denial of these flights had jeopardised the national security and public safety of the US.

He said he had directed his administration to “immediately” impose 25% tariffs on all Colombian goods coming into the US, which he said would be raised to 50% if Colombia did not comply within a week.

He also said he had imposed a travel ban and revoked the visas of Colombian government officials “and all allies and supporters”.

In his post, he warned that “these measures are just the beginning”.

Petro responded on X with a long, rambling but ultimately defiant post in which he said he would match any US-imposed tariffs.

“Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, members of Petro’s administration worked behind the scenes to defuse the row.

In a late-night news conference, Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo announced that the two countries had “overcome the impasse” and that Colombia would accept returned citizens.

While Murillo did not directly refer to the White House statement, according to which Colombia had agreed to allow US military flights to take the deportees back, he did not deny it either.

The foreign minister reiterated Colombia’s offer to send its presidential plane to the US to transport the deportees.

While the Colombian concession seems to have averted the looming trade war, the US has said that visa restrictions on Colombian government officials would stay in place until the first planeload of deportees landed in Colombia.

Colombians arriving at US airports will also undergo greater scrutiny under the measures imposed on Sunday, the Trump administration said.

Colombia’s foreign minister said he would travel to Washington “in the coming days” for high-level meetings with administration officials.

The row marks a low point in relations between the two countries, which historically have been allies and co-operated closely in the fight against drug trafficking, with the US providing billions of dollars in military aid and training to Colombia’s security forces.

Punitive tariffs such as those threatened by Trump and Petro would have hurt both Colombian producers and US consumers.

Trade between the two countries was worth $53.5bn (£42.8bn) in 2022, according to the US Office of the US Trade Representative.

Colombia’s main exports to the US are oil, coffee and cut flowers.

Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged Americans to “remember: we pay the tariffs, not Colombia”.

“Trump is about to make every American pay even more for coffee,” she wrote before the tariffs had been suspended.

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.

Family life is busy for Israr Hussain and his wife, Tasleem Akhtar, who have four daughters between the ages of five and 15.

They chose to have their wedding back home in Pakistan in 2007 and live in Birmingham.

The 47-year-olds are not only husband and wife, but also first cousins, as both of their fathers are brothers.

Marrying a first cousin is commonplace among Muslim families. It is about protecting wealth, land and property and helps keep the family together.

While marriage between first cousins is not illegal in the UK, medical experts say it can cause genetic diseases in the children they may bear.

Growing up, Mr Hussain and Ms Akhtar were told by their parents that one day they would be married, so when the time came, they never questioned it.

What they were not warned about was any potential health risks that could occur if they had children.

But even if they had known, Ms Akhtar said it would not have made a difference.

“That’s God’s will, nobody can say anything about that. Even if you marry outside the family, it could still happen,” she said.

“So many people have married outside the families and they may still have a child with a disability.”

The couple, who moved to the UK in 2004 and have been living in Birmingham since 2009, said all of their daughters were healthy and thriving.

First cousin marriages are more prevalent in certain communities across the UK.

According to a 2021 study, about 55% of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins, while the practice accounts for about 3% of all marriages nationally.

In Birmingham, which has a large British Pakistani population, these unions are a common tradition, though attitudes among younger generations are shifting.

After figures fell sharply in Bradford, researchers attributed the change to higher educational attainment, new family dynamics and changes in immigration rules.

In December, Conservative MP Richard Holden called for first-cousin marriage to be banned in the UK.

Introducing the proposals in Parliament, the MP for Basildon and Billericay said the children of first cousins were at greater risk of birth defects and the practice should be prohibited to protect public health.

However, independent MP Iqbal Mohamed argued a ban would be ineffective and stated these issues would be better addressed through education programmes to raise awareness of the risks.

Mr Hussain is against a ban being introduced in the UK.

“First-cousin marriages should continue, our religion says that, but you can also marry outside as well.”

His wife agrees and said she would not mind her daughters marrying a first cousin, if they wanted to.

“They can marry whomever they want, it’s fine, if it’s in the family or outside the family.”

Mr Hussain added: “Sometimes they see news on TV about cousin marriages and they tell us about it.”

The couple said their children were learning a lot about it and Ms Akhtar was in no doubt about what their future would look like when it came to finding a partner.

“They talk to different people, that will be their matter. They will talk and decide.”

Joyce Harper, a professor in reproductive science at University College London, said the problem with this type of union was that it could lead to genetic disease in children, if there was the presence of faulty genes in both parents.

“The issue with cousins marrying is what we call recessive diseases, so things like cystic fibrosis and thalassaemia where both of the couple have to have an error in that same gene.

“So genetics is the main worry, but there are other risks, but it’s still very low and I just don’t think it’s our right to dictate. I think it’s our right to educate those communities.”

It seems the younger generation is taking note.

Umer Azad, 22, works in his family-run supermarket in Birmingham.

He said that while first-cousin marriages were not unusual in Pakistan or India, it was a different situation in the UK.

“I think that’s what makes people think that’s not the norm, that young Pakistanis who are born in Britain, they don’t think it’s normal to get married to your first cousin and they might find it weird.”

He added: “For me personally I think it would be a bit awkward because it’s your close family.”

Downing Street said the expert advice on the risks of first-cousin marriage was clear, but indicated that the government had no plans to change the law.

The seven members of one of Scotland’s biggest child sex abuse rings have been given life-long sentences and warned that they may never be released.

Three victims under the age of 13 were subjected to horrific sexual abuse and violence in a Glasgow drug den dubbed “the beastie house” over a seven-year period.

Police said the children had suffered “unimaginable abuse”, with the offences including rape, attempted murder and assault.

Iain Owens, 46; Elaine Lannery, 40; Lesley Williams, 43; Paul Brannan, 42; Scott Forbes, 51; Barry Watson, 48, and John Clark, 49, were jailed for between eight and 20 years and handed orders for lifelong restriction (OLRs).

These orders are reserved for the most serious court cases in Scotland which do not involve murder, and mean the individual will either be in prison or on parole for the rest of their life.

Judge Lord Beckett told the gang, whose jail sentences totalled more than 93 years, that they may never be released from prison.

He said: “This court is used to hearing the worst examples of human behaviour but such depravity towards young children is beyond my experience.

“This is not typical behaviour and such extreme abuse of children seems to be rare.”

He praised the “formidable strength” of the children and their “courage and perseverance”, despite threats from Owens.

Lord Beckett added: “It is possible to imagine from their desperate darkness, their carers have brought some light to their young lives – a home, a structure and nurture over a number of years.”

Two girls and a boy were violently and sexually assaulted on multiple occasions between 2012 and 2019.

The trial heard that the gang would hold “rape nights” and “dance and sex nights” in a squalid flat in Glasgow that was frequented by drug users.

A girl was raped by members of the gang while she was still young enough to wear a nappy.

She described the flat as the “dark and scary beastie house” because she had been locked in a cupboard with a box that was full of spiders.

The girl was also shut in an oven and a fridge and was forced to eat dog food.

An older boy and girl were also subjected to savage beatings and sexual violence.

Members of the gang also used Class A drugs in front of the children and caused them to consume alcohol and drugs.

The trial heard that the children first came into contact with social work in Glasgow in August 2017 and were deemed to be at risk in July 2018.

But the allegations of violence and sexual abuse did not come to light until March 2020.

Police were alerted by a man who had got to know the children. One of the victims became hysterical when she mistakenly thought she had been shut in a room.

The man and his wife then documented details of what the children recalled happening at the hands of the gang.

Jurors were also told Owens, Lannery, Williams, Watson, Clark and Forbes – who was known as Scott the Cameraman – all had previous convictions but none were for any type of sex crime.

The gang had denied the charges but were found guilty in November 2023 after a two-month trial at the High Court in Glasgow.

Owens, Lannery, Brannan and Williams were found guilty of attempted murder.

Charges related to causing the children to take part in seances and witchcraft were dropped during the trial.

Sentencing had been delayed until now because of delays in risk assessments which were ordered to help Lord Beckett decide whether to impose the lifelong restriction orders.

Owens was jailed for at least 20 years before he can apply for parole, Lannery for 17 years, Brannan for 15 years and Williams for 14 years.

Clark was sentenced to at least 10 years, Watson to nine years and six months, and Forbes to eight years.

Another woman, 40-year-old Marianne Gallagher, was convicted of one count of assault to injury but was cleared of all other charges.

Her sentencing was initially deferred for 12 months for good behaviour and returned to court on 6 January this year.

She was spared further punishment and admonished by Lord Beckett after he heard Gallagher had not offended over the last year.

After the sentencing, Det Insp Lesley-Ann McGee said it had been “a long, complex and challenging investigation” and that she hoped the outcome could help the young victims move forward.

She also urged anyone who has been affected by abuse to contact Police Scotland, no matter how much time had passed.

Colin Anderson, independent chair of Glasgow’s child protection committee, said the case would now be the subject of a case learning review.

He said this would be led by an independent expert and feature input from agencies, individuals and families.

Mary Glasgow, chief executive at Children First, said no sentence would reflect the “extreme cruelty and horrifying abuse” that the children experienced.

She added: “The depths of their suffering will be unimaginable to most people in Scotland, but none of us should turn away from it.

“This is one of the most extreme cases of abuse ever seen in a Scottish court, but every day children and young people in Scotland are experiencing violence and abuse.”

Leading KC Tommy Ross said orders for lifelong restriction (OLRs) are reserved for the most serious court cases which do not involve murder.

Before an order is imposed the subject must undergo an extensive risk assessment process, conducted by psychologists, which typically takes about 12 weeks.

A judge then sets a minimum prison term – known as the punishment part – that the offender must serve before they are eligible to apply for parole.

And, if granted parole, they are subject to recall back to prison in the event that they commit any new offences or breach the terms of their release.

Mr Ross told BBC Scotland News: “Essentially when you get an order for lifelong restriction you will either be in prison or parole for the rest of your natural life.”

In 2023/24 a total of 18 OLRs were imposed in courts across Scotland

Investigators say they have found evidence of a bird strike on a passenger plane that crashed in South Korea in December, killing 179 people.

The feathers and blood stains on both engines of the Jeju Air plane were from the Baikal teal, a type of migratory duck that flies in large flocks, according to a preliminary investigation report published on Monday.

The inquiry into the crash – the deadliest on South Korean soil – will now focus on the role of the bird strike and a concrete structure at the end of the runway, which the plane crashed into.

The engines of the Boeing 737-800 will be torn down and the concrete structure will be examined further, the report said.

The Jeju Air plane took off from Bangkok in the morning of 29 December and was flying to Muan International Airport in the country’s south-west.

At about 08:57 local time, three minutes after pilots made contact with the airport, the control tower advised the crew to be cautious of “bird activity”.

At 08:59, the pilot reported that the plane had struck a bird and declared a mayday signal.

The pilot then requested permission to land from the opposite direction, during which it belly-landed without its landing gear deployed. It overran the runway and exploded after slamming into the concrete structure, the report said.

Authorities earlier said that flight data and cockpit voice recorders from the plane stopped recording about four minutes before the disaster.

Experts who had flown the same type of aircraft involved in the crash have also questioned the presence of the concrete barriers at the end of the runway – with some suggesting that the casualty toll would have been lower if they had not been there.

The concrete structure holds a navigation system that assists aircraft landings, known as a localiser.

South Korea’s transport ministry had said this system could also be found in other airports in the country and even overseas.

Last week, authorities announced that they will change the concrete barriers used for navigation at seven airports across the country. Seven airports will also have their runway safety areas adapted following a review.

The preliminary report has been submitted to the United Nations’ aviation agency and to the authorities of the United States, France and Thailand.

President Donald Trump has said he thinks the US will gain control of Greenland, underlining his persistent claim on the Arctic island, on one occasion pointing to “economic security” as the reason. While the autonomous Danish territory has been quick to say it isn’t for sale, its vast and mostly untapped mineral resources are in great demand.

Jagged grey peaks suddenly appear before us, as the motorboat navigates choppy coastal waters and dramatic fjords at Greenland’s southern tip.

“Those very high pointy mountains, it’s basically a gold belt,” gestures Eldur Olafsson, the chief executive of mining company Amaroq Minerals.

After sailing for two hours we stepped ashore at a remote valley beneath Nalunaq mountain, where the firm is drilling for gold.

It’s also scouring the surrounding mountain range and valleys, hunting for other valuable minerals, having snapped up exploration licences spanning over 10,000 sq km (3,861 sq miles).

“We’re looking for copper, nickel, and rare earths,” says the Icelandic boss. “This is uncharted, and still has the potential to have multiple big deposits.”

The base camp is a cluster of mobile buildings and bright orange accommodation tents housing more than 100 staff, including Greenlanders, Australians, and British former coal miners. From there a road climbs up the valley, and we drive by car into the gold mine, following a dark tunnel upwards inside the mountain.

“See here!” says Mr Olafsson pointing to a seam of white quartz and a thin dark line. “Gold, gold, gold. All the way over. Isn’t that extraordinary?”

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The mine, which Amaroq bought in 2015, had operated for most of the preceding decade, but closed due to then falling gold prices, and high operating costs.

Amaroq is confident that the mine will now be profitable. And it plans to ramp up production this year, where it has built a brand new processing plant to crush the ore and refine the precious metal into gold bars.

“We can either walk off site every month with a suitcase of gold, versus a 30,000 tonne ship [carrying the ore],” explains Mr Olafsson.

He says that Greenland presents an unrivalled opportunity because its huge mineral reserves are largely untouched.

“It can be the supplier of all the minerals the Western world will need for decades,” adds Mr Olafsson. “And that is a very unique position.”

Yet currently there are just two active mines on the entire island.

Greenland is a self-governing territory that is part of Denmark, but controls its own natural resources.

It’s endowed with the eighth largest reserves of so-called rare earth elements, which are vital for making everything from mobile phones to batteries and electric motors. It also has large amounts of other key metals, such as lithium and cobalt.

There is oil and gas too, but new drilling is banned, while deep-sea mining has also been ruled out.

Christian Kjeldsen, director of Greenland’s Business Association, says that the global “geopolitical situation right now is driving interest in the world’s biggest island”.

He points to China having the world’s largest reserves of rare earth metals, while the West wants to secure alternative supplies.

“You have a very strong China sitting very heavily on the critical raw materials,” he says.

That has fuelled a growing focus among Western nations to get access to Greenland’s minerals. China has also been keen to get involved, but its presence is limited.

Reuters recently reported that the US lobbied an Australian mining firm not to sell Greenland’s biggest rare earth project to potential Chinese buyers.

Greenland’s Minister for Business, Trade and Raw Materials, Naaja Nathanielsen, says that interest in the territory’s minerals has “absolutely increased within the last five years or so”.

She adds: “We’re used to being a hotspot for the climate crisis. We want to be a part of the solution.”

Permits have now been given for 100 blocs across Greenland, where companies are searching for viable deposits. British, Canadian and Australian mining firms are the biggest foreign licence holders, while Americans hold just one.

But there are many more steps before these sites become potential mines.

Yet while Greenland may be sitting on mineral riches, any “gold rush” continues to be slow to materialise.

The economy, which has an annual GDP of just over $3bn (£2.4bn), is still driven by the public sector and fishing. And the territory also relies on an annual $600m subsidy from Denmark.

Greenland’s politicians hope that mining revenues will reduce reliance on the annual $600m subsidy from Denmark, and help boost independence efforts. But in the meantime Greenland is making more money from tourism.

Officially mining is still important for independence, says Javier Arnaut, head of Arctic Social Sciences at Greenland University. “But in practical terms, you can see that there are very few mining licenses awarded.”

Ms Nathanielsen concedes that while there are partnerships being developed with the US and EU, “we still have not seen large amounts of money flowing into this sector”. She hopes that there will be another three to five mines operating within the next decade.

However mining is not easy in Greenland because of its remote geography and weather. It’s the world’s largest island and 80% of it is covered by an ice sheet. It has rugged mountains and no roads between settlements.

“It’s an arctic terrain,” says Jakob Kløve Keiding, from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which has mapped the territory’s deposits. “We have problems with harsh conditions in terms of the climate and limited infrastructure. So it’s quite expensive to open a mine.”

Those high costs, coupled with low global metal prices, have held back investors.

Others blame red tape for the sector’s slow growth. The territory has strict environmental regulations and social impact requirements, and getting permits can take time.

Ms Nathanielsen maintains that most communities do support mining, and that it boosts local economies. “They [overseas miners] are shopping in the local shop. They’re employing local employees. They’re chartering a local boat or helicopter,” she says.

Yet in the south’s biggest town, Qaqortoq, resident Heidi Mortensen Møller is sceptical whether new mines will lead to employment for locals. “When they say they’re going to add jobs, who are they talking about?”

Jess Berthelsen, head of local labour union, SIK, says that many people think mining income “will leave the country”, and not benefit Greenland. But he supports the growth of the sector. “Greenland needs more income and to earn money from other ways than fishing.”

It’s unclear how Trump’s latest gambit on Greenland will play out. However, the territory’s prime minister Mute Egede said earlier this month that “we need to do business with the US” and that it was “doors open in terms of mining”.

Mr Kjeldsen from the business association, hopes it will be bring “much needed investment” to the sector. “On the other hand, if the uncertainty surrounding the signals from Trump drag on for a longer period, there is a risk that this might impact the investment environment negatively.”

Mangala Pradhan will never forget the morning she lost her one-year-old son.

It was 16 years ago, in the unforgiving Sundarbans – a vast, harsh delta of 100 islands in India’s West Bengal state. Her son Ajit, just beginning to walk, was full of life: frisky, restless, and curious about the world.

That morning, like so many others, the family was busy with their daily chores. Mangala had fed Ajit breakfast and taken him to the kitchen as she cooked. Her husband was out buying vegetables, and her ailing mother-in-law rested in another room.

But little Ajit, always eager to explore, slipped away unnoticed. Mangala shouted for her mother-in-law to watch him, but there was no reply. Minutes later, when she realised how quiet it had become, panic set in.

“Where is my boy? Has anyone seen my boy?” she screamed. Neighbours rushed in to help.

Desperation quickly turned to heartbreak when her brother-in-law found Ajit’s tiny body floating in the pond in the courtyard outside their ramshackle home. The little boy had wandered out and slipped into the water – a moment of innocence turned into unthinkable tragedy.

Today, Mangala is one of 16 mothers in the area who walk or cycle to two makeshift creches set up by a non-profit where they look after, feed and educate some 40 children, who are dropped off by their parents on way to work. “These mothers are the saviours of children who are not their own,” says Sujoy Roy of Child In Need Institute (CINI), which set up the creches.

The need for such care is urgent: countless children continue to drown in this riverine region, which is dotted with ponds and rivers. Every home has a pond used for bathing, washing, and even drawing drinking water.

A 2020 survey by medical research organisation The George Institute and CINI found that nearly three children aged between one and nine years drowned daily in the Sundarbans region. Drownings peaked in July, when the monsoon rains began, and between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. Most children were unsupervised at that time as caregivers were occupied with chores. Around 65% drowned within 50m of home, and only 6% received care from licensed doctors. Healthcare was in shambles: hospitals were scarce and many public health clinics were defunct.

In response, villagers clung to ancient superstitions to save rescued children. They spun the child’s body over an adult’s head, chanting invocations. They beat the water with sticks to ward off spirits.

“As a mother, I know the pain of losing a child,” Mangala told me. “I don’t want any other mother to endure what I did. I want to protect these children from drowning. We live amid so many dangers anyway.”

Life in Sundarbans, home to four million people, is a daily struggle.

Tigers, known to attack humans, roam dangerously close to and enter crowded villages where the poor eke out a living, often squatting on land.

People fish, collect honey, and gather crabs under the constant threat of tigers and venomous snakes. From July to October, rivers and ponds swell due to heavy rains, cyclones lash the region, and rampaging waters swallow villages. Climate change is worsening this uncertainty. Nearly 16% of the population here is aged one to nine.

“We’ve always co-existed with water, unaware of the dangers, until tragedy strikes,” says Sujata Das.

Sujata’s life was overturned three months ago when her 18-month-old daughter Ambika, drowned in the pond at their joint family home in Kultali.

Her sons were at their coaching classes, some family members had gone to the market, and an elderly aunt was busy working at home. Her husband, who usually works in the southern state of Kerala, was home that day, repairing a fishing net at the nearby trawler. Sujata had gone to fetch water at a local handpump because a promised water connection at her residence had still not materialised.

“Then we found her floating in the pond. It had rained, water had risen. We took her to a local quack, who declared her dead. This tragedy has woken us up to what we should do to prevent such tragedies in the future,” says Sujata.

Sujata, like others in the village, plans to fence her pond with bamboo and nets to prevent children from wandering into the water. She hopes that children who don’t know how to swim are taught in village ponds. She wants to encourage neighbours to learn CPR to provide lifesaving aid to rescued drowning children.

“Children don’t vote, so the political will to address these issues is often lacking,” says Mr Roy. “That’s why we’re focusing on building local resilience and spreading knowledge.” Support from India’s top science agency, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), in funding creches and pond fencing has also been crucial.

Over the past two years, around 2,000 villagers have received CPR training. Last July, a villager saved a drowning child by reviving him before he was sent to the hospital. “The real challenge lies in setting up creches and raising awareness among the community,” he adds.

Implementing even simple solutions is challenging due to costs and local beliefs.

In the Sundarbans, superstition about angering water deities made it hard to get people to fence their ponds. In neighbouring Bangladesh, where drowning is the leading cause of death for children aged one-four, wooden playpens were introduced in courtyards to keep children safe. However, compliance was low – children disliked them, and villagers often used them for goats and ducks. “This created a false sense of security, and drowning rates slightly increased over three years,” says Jagnoor Jagnoor, an injury epidemiologist at the George Institute.

Eventually non-profits set up 2,500 creches in Bangladesh, cutting drowning deaths by 88%. In 2024, the government expanded this to 8,000 centres, benefitting 200,000 children annually. Water-rich Vietnam focused on children aged six-10, using decades of mortality data to develop policies and teach survival skills. This reduced drowning rates, especially among schoolchildren travelling on waterways.

Drowning remains a major global issue. In 2021, an estimated 300,000 people drowned – over 30 lives lost every hour, according to the WHO. Nearly half were under 29, and a quarter were under five. India’s data is scanty, officially recording around 38,000 drowning deaths in 2022, though the actual number is likely much higher.

In the Sundarbans, the harsh reality is ever-present. For years, children have been either allowed to roam freely or tied with ropes and cloth to prevent wandering. Jingling anklets were used to alert parents to their children’s movements, but in this unforgiving, water-surrounded landscape, nothing feels truly safe.

Kakoli Das’s six-year-old son walked into an overflowing pond last summer while delivering a piece of paper to a neighbour. Unable to distinguish between the road and the water, Ishan drowned. He had suffered seizures as a child and couldn’t learn to swim due to the risk of fever.

“Please, I beg every mother: fence your ponds, learn how to revive children and teach them how to swim. This is about saving lives. We cannot afford to wait,” says Kakoli.

For now, the creches serve as a beacon of hope, offering a way to keep children safe from the dangers of water. On a recent afternoon, four-year-old Manik Pal sang a cheerful ditty to remind his friends: I won’t go to the pond alone/Unless my parents are with me/I’ll learn to swim and stay afloat/And live my life fear-free.

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

A military official on Saturday 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.

But on Sunday, military officials clarified that certain curriculum will not be removed from basic military training.

This includes lessons highlighting the Tuskegee airmen and Women Air Force Service Pilots, which will remain in the programme.

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

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

Lt. Gen. Brian S. Robinson, an air education and training command commander, said in a statement no trainees missed the lesson, but one group had their lesson delayed because of the review.

The Tuskegee Airmen are 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.

Other lessons thought to be at risk included those highlighting the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs.

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.

“The revised training which focuses on the documented historic legacy and decorated valour with which these units and airmen fought for our nation in World War II and beyond will continue on 27 January,” Robinson said in a statement.

An Air Force official told CBS News on Saturday: “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.”

The news frustrated some Republicans.

Alabama Senator Katie Britt, a Republican, took to social media in opposition of the military dropping lessons on the Tuskegee Airmen.

“I have no doubt Secretary Hegseth will correct and get to the bottom of the malicious compliance we’ve seen in recent days,” she wrote in a post on X.

Hours later, Hegseth replied: “Amen! We’re all over it senator. This will not stand.”

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.

A jury has retired to begin its deliberations in the inquest into the deaths of five people killed in a helicopter crash outside Leicester City’s King Power Stadium.

Foxes chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha was killed alongside fellow passengers Kaveporn Punpare, Nusara Suknamai, pilot Eric Swaffer and his partner Izabela Roza Lechowicz on 27 October 2018.

On Monday, coroner Catherine Mason addressed the jury as the inquest entered a third week at Leicester’s City Hall.

Prof Mason called the crash a “terrible tragedy”, as she instructed the jury that only an accidental conclusion could be reached.

She said: “The helicopter crash was a terrible tragedy that cost the lives of five people.

“These were remarkable individuals who were greatly loved and will be terribly missed.

“This hearing is to explain to the world how they came to die.”

She told the 11 jurors that they will answer four questions. Who was each deceased person? When did they die? Where did they die? And, how did they come by their death?

“That should not include such matters as systems, processes, and precautions that might have led to the helicopter and the bearing being designed differently”, she added.

The coroner explained that the identities of the deceased and the medical cause of their deaths were not in dispute.

Pathologist Dr Michael Biggs carried out post-mortem examinations on each of the five who died, and told the inquest previously that Ms Lechowicz died from injuries sustained from the impact of the crash.

He added the other four people on board would have died “quite rapidly” from smoke inhalation from the fire that broke out after the helicopter crashed outside the stadium, after the Foxes drew 1-1 with West Ham United.

Prof Mason also instructed the jury that its conclusions into where, when and how the five came to die could not legally dispute the findings of the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB).

An AAIB report, published in September 2023, found the crash was “inevitable” after a bearing failed setting in motion a sequence of mechanical failures shortly after take-off from the centre circle.

The jury was told that the report made it clear the pilot did “nothing wrong” and attempted to save everyone on board.

The court heard Mr Swaffer’s actions reduced the rate of the helicopter’s spin while he tried to “cushion” its impact in disorientating conditions, but “a crash landing was inevitable”.

The chairman and president of Fuji TV, one of Japan’s biggest networks, have resigned in the wake of a sexual misconduct allegation against a famous TV host.

Dozens of companies have pulled their advertisements from the network, which was criticised for trying to cover up the scandal.

Masahiro Nakai was accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a 2023 dinner party allegedly organised by Fuji TV staff. He announced his retirement from show business last week.

The Japanese government has called on Fuji TV to regain trust from viewers and sponsors.

In a press conference on Monday, Fuji TV chairman Shuji Kano and president Koichi Minato bowed as they announced their resignations. It came shortly after an emergency board meeting.

They apologised to viewers as well as stakeholders for the trouble and anxiety caused in a scandal that has rocked Japan’s entertainment industry.

“I feel deeply the weight of my responsibility for undermining trust in the media,” said Mr Minato. “Looking back, I realise there were shortcomings in our response.”

Mr Minato had admitted previously that the company had known about the allegation against Nakai shortly after the alleged incident took place. But Fuji TV chose not to disclose it at the time, as it “prioritised the woman’s physical and mental recovery as well as the protection of her privacy”, he had said.

Reports emerged last month that Nakai had paid the unnamed woman more than half a million dollars. More allegations then surfaced that a Fuji TV employee had helped to arrange the dinner party.

Nakai, a former member of boy band SMAP and a household name who fronted several Fuji TV shows, has denied using violence against the woman. He has also said that he had “resolved” the matter with her through a settlement.

But this did little to quell public anger.

Car manufacturers Nissan and Toyota were among the companies that pulled advertising from Fuji TV.

In an open letter, investment firm Rising Sun Management which is the majority shareholder of Fuji TV’s parent company, said that the scandal “exposes serious flaws in your corporate governance”.

Fuji TV has since set up an independent committee to investigate the scandal.

Executive vice president Kenji Shimizu, who will replace Mr Minato as president, said he would “never tolerate acts that violate human rights” and committed to preventing similar incidents by “starting from scratch”.

Earlier this month, the network suspended a weekly show hosted by Nakai while other major networks have also dropped the presenter.

Other TV networks have also announced their own investigations, following reports that similar dinner parties involving celebrities are a common practice in the industry.

The UK’s largest luxury car maker, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), says it will invest £65m ($81m) to expand its bespoke paint services in response to growing demand from wealthy customers.

The plan includes opening new paint facilities in Castle Bromwich, UK and Nitra, Slovakia.

The firm, which is owned by India’s Tata Group, says it expects to more than double its bespoke paint operation, including helping clients match the colour of exclusive Range Rover SV models to their private jets or yachts.

It follows a similar move by Rolls-Royce, which announced earlier this month that it was investing £300m to build more highly-customised versions of its cars for super-rich customers.

“Range Rover clients are increasingly choosing to tailor their vehicles with more exclusive bespoke and elevated palette paints,” said Jamal Hameedi, director of special vehicle operations at JLR.

“By increasing our capacity we can satisfy the demand growth from our Range Rover clients and… clients of our other brands.”

The company says the plan will also help it cut energy and water use as well as reduce paint waste.

Earlier this month, Rolls-Royce said it was expanding its Goodwood factory and global headquarters to meet growing demand for bespoke models.

Rolls-Royce said the plan would “also ready the manufacturing facility for the marque’s transition to an all-battery electric vehicle future”.

Last month, Jaguar unveiled a controversial new electric concept car.

Some on social media said the new Type 00 car was “exciting” and “absolutely stunning”, while others called it “rubbish” and told Jaguar’s designers to “go back to the drawing board”.

However, the carmaker suggested the reaction was exactly what it wanted as it was trying to reset the brand and revive sluggish sales.

Poland’s president has said that gas flows from Russia to Western Europe should never be restored, even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace deal.

Andrzej Duda told the BBC that the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which have not been used since 2022, “should be dismantled”.

This, he said, would mean the likes of Germany would not be tempted to restore Russian supplies to boost its own struggling economy.

“I can only hope that European leaders will learn lessons from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and that they will push through a decision to never restore the pumping of gas through this pipeline,” he said.

The Polish president, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, insisted that economic sanctions against Russia were working and European countries should resist pressure from companies to re-establish business links.

The Nord Stream gas pipelines were built by Russia’s gas giant Gazprom and run between Russia and northern Germany.

Nord Stream 1 was shut down in 2022 and Nord Stream 2 was never used, following the invasion of Ukraine. Both were damaged by explosions in 2022.

Gas prices in Europe surged after the shutdown and, in recent months, politicians from Germany’s far right AfD party have suggested the Nord Stream gas pipes should resume operations.

Germany will hold federal elections at the end of February.

“I believe the Nord Stream pipelines should be dismantled,” Duda said. “This pipeline causes a very big threat to Ukraine, to Poland, to Slovakia but also to other Central European countries.”

He added: “It is a threat from the point of view of energy, from the point of view of the military but also it is a huge economic threat because it means a domination of Russia over Europe in the economic sense.”

On the prospect of a deal between Ukraine and Russia now that US President Donald Trump has taken office, Duda insisted that no peace talks could take place without the participation of Ukraine.

“I’m saying that in my capacity as president of the Republic of Poland, as a neighbour to Ukraine and also as president of a country who has had very hard historic experiences itself,” he said.

“I’m speaking here and referring to World War Two and to Yalta where we were not included in those talks, where certain agreements were made beyond our heads and then we found ourselves behind the Iron Curtain, where, for almost 50 years, we were part of the Soviet sphere of influence,” he said.

Trump had previously said he would negotiate a settlement to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022 in 24 hours – he has since acknowledged it could take some time.

Duda said it would be “a violation of international law” for Russia to be allowed to hold on to territory it has occupied in Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin has said he is prepared to negotiate an end to the war, which first began in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, but Ukraine would have to accept the reality of Russian territorial gains, which are currently about 20% of its land.

Putin also refuses to accept Ukraine joining Nato, the military alliance of Western countries.

Duda said: “The international community cannot agree, and it is unacceptable that Russia would take certain territories of Ukraine and keep them by force. This is unacceptable.

“We must not let Russia win this war.”

Duda said Trump “understands the region” and US involvement would be key.

“President Donald Trump – as the leader of the most powerful country within Nato, as the leader of the most powerful economy – will be of key importance,” said Duda.

“I am waiting peacefully for the first steps which will be taken by Donald Trump.”

Swedish authorities have seized a ship suspected of damaging a data cable running under the Baltic Sea to Latvia.

The Vezhen – a Maltese-flagged ship – is now anchored outside the Swedish port of Karlskrona.

Prosecutors said an initial investigation pointed to sabotage. An inquiry has been launched involving Sweden’s police, military and coast guard.

Images shared by Swedish media showed that the ship appeared to have a damaged anchor.

However, on Monday, Bulgarian shipping company Navigation Maritime Bulgare, which listed the Vezhen among its fleet, said one of the ship’s anchors dropped to sea floor in high winds and that there was no malicious intent.

On Sunday, Latvia’s military reported that three ships were seen in the area where the damage occurred.

Less than a month ago, Nato launched a new mission in the Baltic Sea in response to repeated attacks on underwater power and telecom cables – some of which have been blamed on Russia.

Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina said her country was working closely with Sweden and Nato in response to the incident.

The cable belongs to Latvia’s state broadcaster, LVRTC, which said in a statement there had been “disruptions in data transmission services”, but that end users would be mostly unaffected.

Earlier this month, Nato launched its new Baltic Sentry mission, after several cables under the Baltic Sea were damaged or severed in 2024.

Nato chief Mark Rutte said the mission would involve more patrol aircraft, warships and drones.

While Russia was not directly singled out as a culprit in the cable damage, Rutte said Nato would step up its monitoring of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” – ships without clear ownership that are used to carry embargoed oil products.

Rutte said there was “reason for grave concern” over infrastructure damage, adding that Nato would respond to future incidents robustly, with more boarding of suspect vessels and, if necessary, their seizure.

Finnish police said late last year they were investigating whether a Russian ship was involved in the sabotage of an electricity cable running between Finland and Estonia.

The man in charge of the tallest tree in Edinburgh said he is “devastated” it has been felled by Storm Éowyn – 166 years after it was planted during a visit by Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Albert.

Simon Milne, Regius Keeper at The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, said his “heart sank” when he walked over the hill and saw the 100ft (30m) Himalayan cedar lying on the ground.

He told BBC Scotland News it was one of 15 trees uprooted or broken beyond recovery in Scotland’s national botanical collection, with a further 25 others badly damaged.

The species of tree is known to live for 600 years in its native habitat so it was not in its later stages of life.

Mr Milne said it would take many generations to see another cedar “of this magnitude” in Edinburgh again.

“I’m very sad for the loss of these very special specimens,” he said.

“These are all special trees with a history and with botanical and conservation value.

“I’m sad for the visitors as this was one of the favourite trees in the garden.

“I also feel very much for our staff who tended all these trees. The mood is sombre because the staff are passionate about the botanical collection.”

Mr Milne and his staff made the discovery on Saturday, the day after Storm Éowyn struck Scotland.

At least 150 panes of glass were also smashed in the garden’s hot houses during the storm, which saw wind speeds reach 100mph.

Mr Milne said staff had since wrapped many of the tropical plants in material in a bid to protect them from Scotland’s wintry weather while the windows are being fixed.

The Himalayan cedar’s wood is too brittle to make furniture, but staff hope they can find a use for it. They have not yet decided whether the stump of the tree will be left or uprooted.

The tree is currently cordoned off to the public for safety reasons but can be clearly seen from a path in the historic garden, which has now reopened to the public.

Mr Milne said they had started fundraising to cover the cost of the damage which runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds across its four sites across Scotland: Edinburgh, Benmore, Dawyck, and Logan.

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is home to one of the largest and richest plant collections in the world.

It was closed on Friday during the storm so nobody was injured by the falling trees.

The Himalayan cedar is regarded as a holy tree in its native country and its Sanskrit name means “wood of the gods”.

Belgian footballer Radja Nainggolan has been arrested as part of an investigation into cocaine trafficking.

The 36-year-old was one of several suspects apprehended by Belgian police on Monday morning, after a series of raids were carried out across the country.

“The investigation concerns alleged facts of importation of cocaine from South America to Europe, via the port of Antwerp, and its redistribution in Belgium,” the Brussels prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

No further information has been released to the public.

The arrest comes just six days after Nainggolan came out of retirement to sign for Lokeren in the Belgian second division.

He scored on his debut, giving his side a point in their 1-1 home draw to K. Lierse.

Born in Antwerp, the midfielder spent most of his career in Italy, playing for both Roma and Inter Milan.

Between 2009 and 2018, he made 30 appearances for the Belgium national team.