BBC 2025-01-30 12:07:52


Five takeaways from RFK Jr’s first confirmation hearing

Nadine Yousif and Mike Wendling

BBC News
Watch: Protesters, McDonald’s and onesies – RFK Jr’s confirmation hearing

President Donald Trump’s pick for US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was questioned by senators at his first confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

The post of health secretary is a key federal government position that oversees public health issues, including medical research, food safety and public welfare programmes.

Kennedy, who had been a vocal vaccine sceptic, was asked to explain his past comments on the Covid-19 vaccine and other immunisations. He also was asked about his views on abortion, and his opinions on the US food industry.

His hearing was interrupted by shouting protesters, but he also received loud applause when he promised he would make America healthy again, a slogan used by the new administration.

Here are five takeaways from Kennedy’s first hearing.

Delving into vaccine comments

Throughout the hearing, senators brought up Kennedy’s past comments about vaccination.

A group he ran for eight years, Children’s Health Defense, repeatedly cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccinations, and continues to push the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism.

Kennedy insisted during the hearing that he was not anti-vaccine, and that he merely supports more stringent studies and safety tests for injections.

He said he supports the current childhood vaccination schedule and insisted he was not a conspiracy theorist.

“That’s a pejorative that’s applied to me to keep me from asking difficult questions about powerful interests,” he told senators.

However, they zeroed in on his past comments, such as a quote taken from a 2023 podcast when he said: “I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

He defended himself at the hearing, saying his words were taken out of context and that he was going to go on to say “for all people”. But, Kennedy said, he was interrupted by the host, Lex Fridman, who said: “Those are big words”.

In the podcast interview, Kennedy went on to outline what he called safety problems with several common vaccines, including the polio vaccine, and later called vaccines “inherently unsafe”, apparently quoting former President Ronald Reagan.

‘If you like a McDonald’s cheeseburger …’

A key point during Kennedy’s opening remarks and throughout the hearing was his criticism of processed foods in the US, which he said help drive the country’s obesity epidemic.

He promised to scrutinise chemical additives in food, and said he would work to remove the financial conflicts of interest in US agencies and the food industry.

“We will reverse the chronic disease epidemic and put the nation back on the road to health,” he told the committee.

Asked why he was a big advocate of nutrition-based disease prevention, Kennedy said that this generation has seen an “explosion” of autoimmune and allergic diseases, as well as diabetes.

He later clarified that he does not want to take away access to processed food for Americans.

“If you like a McDonald’s cheeseburger or a Diet Coke – which my boss loves – you should be able to get them,” he said, referencing Trump’s well-known affinity for the American fast-food chain.

‘Every abortion is a tragedy,’ Kennedy told senators

Kennedy, who previously stated that he was in favour of abortion rights, was asked about his stance on the issue by both Republican and Democratic senators.

Republican Senator James Lankford asked Kennedy whether he plans to bring back conscience protections for doctors who do not want to perform the procedure because of religious or moral beliefs.

Kenney responded by saying that forcing medical providers who believe abortion is murder to carry out the procedure “doesn’t make any sense”.

Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator, then asked Kennedy about his past comments, in which he expressed support for abortion rights and said that governments should not be involved in a woman’s right to choose.

Kennedy started his response by saying: “I believe every abortion is a tragedy.”

He later said he agreed with Trump that access to abortion should be controlled by individual states. Kennedy vowed to put his more liberal views aside, saying, “I serve at the pleasure of the president. I’m going to implement his policies.”

This stance drew scrutiny from Democrats, including senator Maggie Hassan, who accused Kennedy of “selling out” his pro-choice values in order to secure President Trump’s nomination.

Senator Sanders pushes over ‘unvaxxed’ onesies

Kennedy was asked by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a long-time advocate of universal healthcare, whether he believes the US should “guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right.”

He responded by saying he cannot answer the question so simply.

Kennedy posed a hypothetical situation of a 20-year cigarette smoker with lung cancer, then pondered whether that individual should have the same healthcare access as someone who does not smoke.

The smoker, Kennedy said, would be “taking from the pool”, referencing general health care costs.

Sanders then criticised the pharmaceutical industry, saying that in the US patients pay more than people in European countries for the same drugs. He asked Kennedy if he was willing to “end that absurdity.”

Kennedy responded: “We should end that disparity”.

Later, Sanders asked whether he supports baby clothes bearing anti-vaccine slogans. Some are sold by Children’s Health Defense, the organisation that Kennedy founded.

“Are you supportive of these onesies?” Sanders asked Kennedy, showing images of them to the rest of the committee.

Kennedy responded that he has no oversight of the organisation and resigned from his position there.

Watch as Sanders grills Kennedy over anti-vaccine onesies

Some Republicans cheer Kennedy on

As is typical, the nature and tone of the questions often differed depending on which side of the political aisle they were coming from.

Democratic senators largely grilled him on his past anti-vaccine comments, his promotion of misinformation on health issues, and his knowledge of the US healthcare system, including Medicare and Medicaid.

Some Republicans, however, focused their questions on Kennedy’s advocacy for eradicating chronic disease in children and his criticism of the US food industry.

One Republican senator in particular, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, said that Kennedy was the “answer to his prayers,” and that he was “awesome”.

Johnson himself has been criticised over anti-vaccine misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As proceedings ended, Republican Senator and Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo gave Kennedy his stamp of approval.

“I think you have come through well, and deserve to be confirmed,” he told Kennedy.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, on the other hand, accused Kennedy of delivering a “word salad” and ducking issues raised about his past anti-vaccine remarks.

“I find your presentation to be both untrustworthy and unprepared,” Wyden said.

Wednesday’s hearing was before the Senate’s finance committee. Kennedy faces a second confirmation hearing on Thursday before the health, education, labour and pensions committee, where he will face more questions from senators.

The committees will then vote on his nomination before it can pass to the whole Senate for consideration.

Australian feared dead in captivity is still alive, Russia says

Ayeshea Perera

BBC News

The Australian government has been told by Moscow that one of its citizens in Russian captivity is still alive.

Oscar Jenkins, a 32-year-old teacher, was captured last year while fighting for Ukraine.

“The Australian government has received confirmation from Russia that Oscar Jenkins is alive and in custody,” Foreign Minster Penny Wong said in a statement on Wednesday.

Earlier, there were reports that Mr Jenkins had been killed while in captivity, with the Australian government citing “grave concerns” for his welfare.

“We still hold serious concerns for Mr Jenkins as a prisoner of war,” Wong’s statement added.

It also called on Russia to release him and reiterated Australia’s stance that the Russian Federation was obligated to treat all prisoners of war in accordance with international humanitarian law.

Prisoners of war are protected from all acts of violence or intimidation by the Geneva convention.

Earlier, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had said that the government was “urgently seeking” confirmation that Mr Jenkins was alive.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia was quoted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as saying that it was “good news” but called on Moscow to provide “video proof” of his well being.

Mr Jenkins is thought to be the first Australian to have been held as a prisoner of war while fighting for Ukraine.

A video surfaced in December last year showing Mr Jenkins, with his hands tied, being hit in the face and questioned by Russian forces.

He explains he is a teacher and also a soldier who lives in both Australia and Ukraine.

They ask him if he is being paid to fight in Ukraine.

Renée Zellweger: ‘Fingers crossed’ this is not the end of Bridget Jones

Charlotte Gallagher

BBC News
Reporting fromLeicester Square, London

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy has been billed as the fourth and final film in the series – but its star Renée Zellweger says she has her “fingers crossed” that is not the case.

Zellweger has played our favourite hapless heroine for more than 20 years and seems as attached to her as ever, calling the character an “old friend”.

Speaking at the film’s premiere in London’s Leicester Square on Wednesday evening, the actress says she is “in denial” and “it hasn’t sunk in yet” that the franchise may be coming to a close.

“Let me live in denial for a little longer”, she laughs.

Yet, while there are no plans to take the Bridget Jones story any further, author Helen Fielding is not completely ruling out the prospect.

The new film sees Bridget living as a widow, becoming a single mother and tackling modern dating.

The story is partially inspired by Fielding’s own loss. Her husband, Kevin Curran, died in 2016.

Zellweger says the film is a “beautiful story and really the most personal for Helen. She is sharing about her own experiences about loss, grief and finding new happiness, it’s a pretty special one”.

She adds she has always felt “really, really lucky to get the part” and “was just trying not to get fired”.

Watch: Touching pink carpet reunion for Bridget Jones’ stars

It is obvious there is a real love between the cast too as Zellweger and her on screen father, Jim Broadbent, embrace on the red carpet.

Hugh Grant was also at the premiere. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy sees the return of Grant’s roguish anti-hero, Daniel Cleaver.

He was declared dead at the start of the last film, Bridget Jones’s Baby – only to be found alive just before the final credits.

We also see a slightly softer side of this notorious womaniser and cad in the new film.

New love interests

But Bridget’s love interests in the film are brand new characters.

One Day’s Leo Woodall plays her Tinder match who at 29 is (cough) a little younger than 51 year old Bridget.

Bafta winner, Chiwetel Ejiofor, plays a buttoned-up teacher Bridget encounters on the school run and a rain-soaked class trip.

Woodall says although he felt “a lot of pressure” going into the film he knew it was going to be “relatively easy” as soon as he met Zellweger as she was “joyous and generous and kind and good and obviously a wonderful actor”.

On whether he has had any clumsy Bridget Jones moments himself, Woodhall says “he falls over quite a lot”.

Ejiofor, who is mainly known for grittier roles in films like 12 Years a slave and American Gangster says the film is a “different speed” to his usual projects.

But adds it was lovely to film: “Even the set is so warm, everyone is so excited about telling the story”.

Gen Z appeal

For Fielding the success of Bridget Jones lies in its “emotionally honesty”.

“When I first wrote Bridget it was an anonymous column in the Independent which I thought would be stopped after six weeks for being too silly,” she says.

“That freed me up to be honest in a way I could never have been otherwise and I think that’s what people related to.

“I thought I was the only person who felt like that and it turns out for a lot of people there is a huge gap between how you feel you are supposed to be and how you really are.”

Bridget was a character created in the 1990s and Fielding says she is “really touched” that Gen Z have also embraced her.

“When I do a signing half the audience are Gen Z’s. They’re the first generation who have lived through a world crisis for ages. They’re very similar to Bridget in their emotional fragility, their ability to share and cry on TikTok.

“And they have their same little rituals, Bridget has ice cream and vodka and they have sleep routines and things like that.

“I think they’re a really interesting and lovely generation. I can’t wait until they start writing more novels.”

Inspired by Keir Starmer?

It has long been rumoured that the book’s character of human rights barrister Mark Darcy – played by Colin Firth in the previous Bridget Jones films – was based on barrister turned prime minister Sir Keir Starmer.

So is there any truth in this?

“All I’ll say about that is that if you look at early pictures of Colin in the film and pictures of Keir Starmer in a wig, they’re awfully similar,” Fielding says, with a smile.

So we may never know that for sure, but could there be another Bridget Jones book and film?

“Never say never,” Fielding adds.

Trump says US will send some migrants to Guantanamo Bay

Bernd Debusmann Jr

BBC News, White House
Will Grant

BBC Mexico, Central America and Cuba Correspondent
Watch: Trump directs construction of Guantanamo Bay detention centre for 30,000 migrants

US President Donald Trump has ordered the construction of a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay which he said would hold as many as 30,000 people.

He said the facility at the US Navy base in Cuba, which would be separate from its high-security military prison, would house “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people”.

Guantanamo Bay has long been used to house immigrants, a practice that has been criticised by some human rights groups.

Later on Wednesday, Trump’s “border tsar” Tom Homan said the existing facility there would be expanded and run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

He said the migrants could be transported there directly after being intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, and that the “highest” detention standards would be applied.

It is unclear how much the facility will cost or when it would be completed.

Cuba’s government swiftly condemned the plan, accusing the US of torture and illegal detention on “occupied” land.

Trump’s announcement came as he signed the so-called Laken Riley Act into law, which requires undocumented immigrants who are arrested for theft or violent crimes to be held in jail pending trial.

The bill, named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan migrant, was approved by Congress last week, an early legislative win for the administration.

  • Fear in migrant communities as Trump administration raids ramp up
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At a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Trump said the new Guantanamo executive order would instruct the departments of defence and homeland security to “begin preparing” the 30,000-bed facility.

“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back,” he said of migrants. “So we’re going to send them to Guantanamo… it’s a tough place to get out.”

According to Trump, the facility will double the US capacity to hold undocumented migrants.

The US has already been using a facility in Guantanamo – known as the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC) – for decades and through various administrations, both Republican and Democrat.

In a 2024 report, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) accused the government of secretly holding migrants there in “inhumane” conditions indefinitely after detaining them at sea.

The GMOC has principally housed migrants picked up at sea and was recently the subject of a Freedom of Information request by the American Civil Liberties Union for the disclosure of records about the site.

The Biden Administration responded that it “is not a detention facility and none of the migrants there are detained”.

The Trump administration, however, says the planned expanded facility is very much intended as a detention centre.

It will reportedly ask Congress to fund the expansion of the existing detention facility as part of a spending bill Republicans are working to assemble.

When asked by reporters at the White House, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said only that the money would be allotted through “reconciliation and appropriations”.

The military prison on Guantanamo has, for decades, held detainees taken into US custody after the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001.

At its peak it held hundreds of prisoners, and several Democratic presidents including Barack Obama have vowed to close it. There are 15 prisoners currently being held there.

News of the facility’s expansion was met with swift condemnation by the Cuban government, which has long considered Guantanamo Bay to be “occupied” and has denounced the existence of a US naval base on the island ever since Fidel Castro swept to power in 1959.

“In act act of brutality, the new government of the US has announced it will incarcerate, at the naval base at Guantanamo, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory, thousands of forcibly expulsed migrants, who will be located near known prisons of torture and illegal detention,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X.

The Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodriguez, said the announcement showed “contempt for the human condition and international law”.

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Far-right vote on asylum rocks German parliament

Jessica Parker & Damien McGuinness

BBC News, Berlin

Germany’s parliament descended into heckles and recriminations on Wednesday after a “firewall” against working with the far-right cracked.

A non-binding motion calling for tougher border and asylum rules passed with support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). During the stormy session, politicians of various parties hurled criticism and blame at each other.

Conservative CDU leader Friedrich Merz, who tabled the plans, defended his actions as “necessary”. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz slammed the move as an “unforgivable mistake”.

Merz now plans to propose actual legislation on Friday – again with possible AfD backing – aimed at curbing immigration numbers and family reunion rights.

But his proposed measures are highly unlikely to come into effect this side of February’s snap election and – if they did – could clash with EU law.

Referring to the AfD’s support for the motion, the CDU leader told the Bundestag that a policy wasn’t wrong just because the “wrong people back it”.

“How many more children have to become victims of such acts of violence before you also believe there is a threat to public safety and order?” he asked.

The CDU leader – tipped to be Germany’s next chancellor because of his party’s leading position in the polls – has also insisted he has neither sought nor wants AfD support.

“Thinking about how the AfD fraction will cheer and their happy faces makes me feel uncomfortable,” he told lawmakers.

Chancellor Scholz – a social democrat whose coalition government collapsed last year – castigated Merz for his actions.

“Since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany over 75 years ago, there has always been a clear consensus among all democrats in our parliaments: we do not make common cause with the far right.”

Germany’s already fraught debate on immigration has flared up following a series of fatal attacks where the suspect is an asylum-seeker, most recently in the city of Aschaffenburg.

It has become a central issue in campaigning for the election, triggered by the collapse of Scholz’s governing coalition.

Wednesday’s CDU motion, supported by the AfD and liberal FDP, called for a “ban” on anyone entering Germany without the right documents – but it cannot compel the current minority government to act.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the firewall against the far-right in German political culture. Remembrance of the Holocaust plays a fundamental role in modern Germany.

Before Wednesday’s vote, the Bundestag held its yearly commemoration for the victims of the Nazis, during which 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Roman Schwarzmann addressed parliament.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also delivered a speech to MPs, calling for the Nazis’ crimes never to be forgotten. There should be no “line drawn” ending our historical responsibility as Germans, he said.

This directly contradicts the policy of the AfD, which has criticised German memory culture and argued for a broader view of the country’s history.

That’s partly why so many were shocked when Friedrich Merz said last week that he didn’t care if the AfD supported his parliamentary motions or not.

This contradicts not only his previous statements, but also the official line of his party, which bans the conservatives from relying on the far-right in parliamentary votes.

Sections of the AfD have been classed as right-wing extremists by domestic intelligence, but the party is is currently polling second, although Merz has ruled out any kind of coalition with them.

This week, latest polls showed that support for the conservative CDU had slipped a couple of percentage points to 28%, while the AfD increased slightly to 20%.

AfD leader Alice Weidel has said the firewall amounts to an “anti-democratic cartel agreement” and has predicted it will crumble over the coming years.

Opening the door to leaning on support from the far-right is a gamble for Merz, who believes that his increasingly radical stance on migration will win back right-wingers who are tempted to vote for the AfD.

But in so doing, he could risk losing support from the centre.

With these latest parliamentary motions, Merz has definitively said goodbye to the era of his more centrist conservative predecessor Angela Merkel, who a decade ago famously said “wir schaffen das” or “we can do it” when Germany was faced with large numbers of migrants and refugees.

These motions are symbolic, signalling what the conservatives would like to do in power. But they are also a concrete signal to voters about who Merz appears prepared to accept support from.

Critics say he has broken his word on the firewall. No wonder the AfD cheered in parliament when the result was announced.

In pictures: Welcoming the Lunar New Year

Millions of people across Asia and the world are welcoming the Lunar New Year which coincides with the first new moon of the lunar calendar.

Widely considered to be the most important event in the year for many in Asia and some Asian communities worldwide, the Lunar New Year represents a fresh start for those who celebrate.

Fireworks, music, fairs, lanterns, dragon and lion dancing filled streets across Asia as celebrations that typically last about 15 days began.

Three Israelis and five Thai hostages expected to be freed next by Hamas

Anna Lamche

BBC News

Three Israeli hostages and five Thai nationals are expected to be freed from Gaza by Hamas on Thursday, Israel has said.

Two women, civilian Arbel Yehud, 29, and military observer Agam Berger, 20, have been named along with an 80-year-old man, Gadi Moses, as the Israelis set for release.

If completed, it will be the third hostage release of the latest Gaza ceasefire deal. In exchange for the Israeli hostages, 110 Palestinians are being freed from Israeli jails.

The Thai hostages’ names have not yet been made public. Their release would be a unilateral move by Hamas, and would not constitute part of the deal.

They are reportedly agricultural workers who were abducted from Israel where they worked.

Thailand’s government has said six of its citizens are still being held hostage in Gaza.

Their names are Watchara Sriuan, Bannawat Seatho, Sathian Suwannakham, Nattapong Pinta, Pongsak Tanna and Surasak Lamnau.

Thailand said two other Thai hostages – Sudthisak Rinthalak and Sonthaya Oakkharasri – are believed to be dead.

The names of the 110 Palestinian prisoners set to be freed by Israel have not been released either, but it’s thought they include at least 30 women and children, as well as prisoners sentenced to life terms.

Their release is part of the third such exchange since the ceasefire came into effect on 19 January. Seven women have already been freed alive in exchange for more than 290 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

A fourth hostage release involving three men is expected to take place on Saturday, the Israeli government said.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

More than 47,310 people in Gaza have been killed since then in Israel’s offensive, the majority of them civilians, the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry says.

Arbel Yehud

Arbel Yehud, 29, was taken from her home in Nir Oz in southern Israel during the 7 October attacks.

She was abducted along with her partner, Ariel Cunio. He and his brother, David Cunio, remain in captivity according to The Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

Arbel’s brother, Dolev Yehud, was initially believed to have been taken hostage, but was later declared dead by Israeli authorities after his remains were identified.

Arbel worked at the Center for Technology, Science and Space at the Eshkol Regional Council.

Gadi Moses

Gadi Moses, aged 80, was also abducted from Nir Oz where he worked as an agricultural expert.

His partner, Efrat Katz, was killed in the attack.

In September, his family told the Times of Israel that they had not heard any information about him since December 2023, when he appeared in a Hamas propaganda video.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said he was a founding member of his kibbutz’s vineyard, and helped look after its community vegetable garden.

Agam Berger

Soldier Agam Berger, 20, was kidnapped from the Nahal Oz military base on the border with Gaza. She was seen being taken away in videos released by Hamas.

According to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, she was serving as an observer at the base, having arrived just two days before the 7 October attack.

Hostages already freed in January ceasefire

Agam was taken captive alongside her fellow observers Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, and Naama Levy.

The other four Israeli soldiers were released by Hamas on 25 January, in a swap that saw Israel free 200 Palestinian prisoners.

They were handed to the Red Cross in Gaza City in the second such exchange since the ceasefire came into effect.

The first release saw three women hostages and 90 Palestinian prisoners freed on 19 January.

Karina Ariev

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naama Levy

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

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

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

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

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

Daniella Gilboa

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

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

Ms Gilboa’s mother, Orly, told the Jerusalem Post the video showed her daughter was “strong and determined”. However, she said she was concerned about her “poor mental state”.

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

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

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

Liri Albag

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

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

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

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

In January 2024, footage of Albag was released by Hamas and she could be heard saying her “entire life had been put on pause”.

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

First hostage release

Watch: Three freed Israeli hostages arrive in Israel

The hostages freed on 19 January – the first under this latest ceasefire deal – were Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari.

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

Romi Gonen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doron Steinbrecher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily Damari

Emily, 28, was shot in the hand and taken into Gaza from her home during the attack, and also saw her dog shot and killed. Photographs after her release showed Emily with a bandaged hand and two missing fingers from that attack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugs and tears as released hostages reunite with families

More Israeli hostages due to be released

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

There are 26 Israeli hostages due to be handed over in the first phase of the ceasefire deal. Israel has said eight of them are dead, citing a list provided by Hamas that gave information on the status of the hostages.

Australian police find explosives for possible antisemitic attack

Maia Davies

BBC News

Authorities in Sydney are investigating whether explosives discovered in a caravan were intended for an antisemitic attack.

The explosives could have caused a 40m-wide blast and “significant damage,” police said on Wednesday, adding that the threat was contained.

A note was found in the caravan that displayed antisemitic messages, investigators said.

“This is the discovery of a potential mass casualty event,” New South Wales Premier Chris Minns said.

New South Wales Police Deputy Commissioner David Hudson told a news conference that the caravan was discovered on 19 January in Dural, a suburb of north-west Sydney.

The investigation became public on Wednesday after details of it were leaked to the media.

There was “some indication that the explosives might be used in some form of antisemitic attack,” Mr Hudson said, but he wouldn’t be drawn on the possible target.

He said officers had “mitigated the risk as much as possible” but stressed: “I’m not saying it’s been eliminated. I’m saying it’s been mitigated.”

“That’s one of the reasons we’re talking today, for members of the public to be vigilant in relation to what they see and what they hear in relation to antisemitism in our community.”

An investigation involving the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has been launched.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told ABC Radio Sydney the threat was “clearly designed to harm people” and “create fear in the community”.

He said he agreed with Premier Chris Minns in describing it as “terrorism”.

It has not yet been designated as terrorism by NSW Police.

Earlier, Albanese said that New South Wales Police had “people in custody” and was working with the AFP taskforce investigating antisemitic crimes called Special Operation Avalite.

Minns said the threat would be “met with the full resources of the government”.

The discovery follows a spate of antisemitic attacks in Australia in recent months.

On Thursday, police said a Jewish school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs had been vandalised with antisemitic graffiti.

In December, worshippers were forced to flee as Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue was set on fire.

Earlier this month, a childcare centre in Sydney was set alight and sprayed with antisemitic messages.

Singapore influencer fined over false abduction claim

Joel Guinto

BBC News

A Malaysian court has fined a Singaporean influencer for falsely claiming that she was nearly kidnapped at a mall near Malaysia’s border with Singapore.

A post by beauty influencer Amyra Laila Ho went viral after she claimed that a couple tried to abduct her after forcing her to sniff tea leaves that left her feeling dizzy and numb.

However, police said their investigations disproved her claim, which went viral and sparked discussions about security in Johor Bahru.

Johor Bahru lies on one end of the roughly one-kilometre long causeway that links the southern tip of Malaysia to the north of Singapore. Millions cross over every day, making it one of the world’s busiest border crossings.

Ho pleaded guilty to providing false information to a police officer and was fined 1,000 ringgit ($228; £183), which she immediately paid, Singaporean and Malaysian media said.

Ho’s post where she detailed the alleged abduction attempt also appears to have been taken down from her Instagram account, which is under the name Venus Ho.

She had claimed that the abduction attempt happened after she refused to buy tea leaves from the couple.

She added that they then tried to abduct her. The man held her arm and pretended to be her husband while the woman took her bag containing 400 ringgit.

She said her alleged attackers fled and pushed her to the floor when passersby started noticing what was happening.

“Based on CCTV recordings and technical evidence, no movement involving the victim was detected at the location,” M Kumar, police chief for Johor state, which includes the city of Johor Bahru, told reporters.

Malaysian police said that after Ho posted about the alleged abduction attempt, “Social media influencers also commented on the issue, framing it as a threat to the safety of tourists visiting Johor”.

Police added that strict action would be taken against “anyone who deliberately spreads rumours or manipulates facts to cause public anxiety, particularly concerning safety issues”.

Johor Bahru lies on one end of the roughly one-kilometre long causeway that links the southern tip of Malaysia to the north of neighbouring Singapore.

About 300,000 commuters pass through the causeway daily, according to Singaporean media. Singapore and Malaysia also recently designated the area as a special economic zone, where they hope to attract more investments.

How a US freeze upended global aid in a matter of days

Tom Bateman

State Department correspondent

It was early Saturday, when hundreds of staff who operate a sprawling humanitarian operation at the Al-Hol displacement camp in northeast Syria were given a clear message: “Stop work.”

The despatch was as abrupt as it was distressing for those who knew the daily work of stabilising the site, which holds 40,000 people, mostly women and children, displaced from areas previously controlled by the Islamic State group.

Water, sanitation and security were all upended at the huge camp, said a senior humanitarian worker familiar with its operation. Another facility in Syria’s north-east, Al Roj, was also hit by the sudden order. IS suspects are held near both sites.

“All of a sudden, you [risked] real instability and violence rising, as well as, obviously, former ISIS on the street,” said Susan Reichle, a retired USAID Foreign Service officer.

The dramatic stop-work order came after President Trump froze all foreign assistance provided by the United States, by far the world’s biggest aid donor, on his first day back in office, calling for a review to ensure it abided by his “America First” foreign policy.

For days, aid officials and global charities had waited to understand the implications of that order. On Friday night, its scale became clear.

A leaked memo revealed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was placing a 90-day halt on all existing foreign assistance – with the only exceptions for emergency food aid, and for military funding for Israel and Egypt.

As news of the freeze filtered through the ranks of the international aid community, stop-work notices began to arrive.

Programmes ranging from water sanitation projects to vaccination initiatives were thrown into chaos as contractors tried to understand the implications of the directive. BRAC, the world’s largest non-profit, told the BBC that 3.5 million people would be affected by programmes it had suspended in four countries.

It felt “like an earthquake across the aid sector, with life-saving programmes in ruins”, one veteran international aid worker told the BBC.

Those who support the freeze of US aid programmes, worth around $70bn per year, say they are vastly bloated, with Washington carrying too much of the weight compared to other Western nations. And they argue the government sends far too much money abroad that would be better spent on Americans at home.

The administration has made clear that it specifically opposes any projects supporting diversity and inclusion, transgender rights, family planning, abortion access and other issues – some of which have been long-targeted by Republican administrations. The freeze, they say, is designed to create an opportunity to root out wasteful spending.

“Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions,” Mr Rubio has said. “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”

The programmes affected, however, have been vast, triggering widespread shock and criticism in many parts of a global system intertwined with US funding. Aid contractors fearful of losing further funding have mostly been voicing these concerns privately, though some have spoken out.

On Monday evening, staff who work on the US programme countering the global spread of HIV could no longer log into their computer systems, according to Dr. Atul Gawande, former Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID, and an expert on the project.

Then-President Bush launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar) in 2003. It now employs more than 250,000 doctors, nurses and other staff across 55 countries distributing anti-viral medication and doing critical preventative work. It is credited with saving millions of lives and suppressing the spread of HIV and Aids.

“The program is shuttered…. Services are shut,” Dr Gawande told the BBC on Tuesday, saying clinics that served 20 million people with HIV were affected.

Paul Jordan, who works at the European Institute of Peace on repatriating foreign citizens from Al-Hol and Al-Roj, said much of his work funded by Washington had stopped immediately.

“In terms of immediate impact I’ve never seen anything as significant as this before,” he told a UK parliamentary committee on Tuesday, adding the camps were set to be “in limbo” for months while the review was carried out.

“What that led to was in the last few days basically nothing being delivered within the camps,” he said. “There was no camp administration, very little security, food wasn’t delivered.”

Later on Tuesday, as aid organisations clamoured for exemptions from the US government to continue programmes, the first signs emerged that the State Department was trying to limit the impact of its sweeping freeze.

The definition of “life-saving humanitarian assistance” allowed to continue was broadened beyond emergency food aid to include “core life-saving medicine”, medical services, food, shelter and other provisions.

That guidance has reportedly seen Pepfar programmes restart, but whether preventative drugs – rather than just HIV treatments – are covered remains unclear.

Dr Gawande, who was appointed to a senior role in USAID under the Biden administration, said other programmes remained up in the air – including work combatting an Mpox outbreak in West Africa, bird flu monitoring across dozens of countries and initiatives targeting fentanyl trafficking.

“It was immediate and my immediate reaction was, this is catastrophic,” he said of the effects of the freeze.

Asked about those specific programmes,, a State Department spokesperson said: “We are judiciously reviewing all the waivers submitted. The Secretary of State has the ultimate responsibility…to protect America’s investments.”

Blumont, the US contractor that coordinates aid work at Al-Hol and Al-Roj, said it received a waiver from the State Department late Monday allowing it to continue “critical activities” at the camps for two more weeks. However, it has no certainty beyond that time.

Asked by the BBC about the situation at the Syria camps and other projects, the State Department said “critical national security waivers have been granted,” but didn’t specify whether any related to Syria.

The new State Department guidance also said: “This waiver does not apply to activities that involve abortions, family planning conferences, administrative costs… gender or DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life saving assistance.”

‘The only way to scrutinize and prevent waste’

Back in Washington, USAID headquarters have been roiled by the aid freeze.

Staff had been warned not to try and circumvent the directives and given strict orders not to communicate about the freeze outside the agency. An internal memo sternly warned that any breach would “result in disciplinary action”.

Unnamed staff have since been accused of trying to “circumvent” the president’s executive order and dozens of senior officials have been placed on administrative leave.

In the halls of the agency, picture frames that once displayed images of on-the-ground projects are now empty.

The world of US foreign assistance had been upended in a matter of days, said Dr Joia Mukherjee, an infectious diseases doctor from Harvard Medical School and the charity Partners In Health who helped advise on the creation of Pepfar.

“It’s taking 20 years of goodwill and turning it into an instrument of terror, when people feel like if they touch the drugs, if they see a patient, they might get fired,” she said.

As criticism mounted, on Wednesday, the State Department said the 90-day pause and review of foreign aid was “already paying dividends” to the US and its people.

“We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot,” it said.

Explaining why it was necessary to order a temporary suspension for all projects, rather than a more targeted approach, the State Department said: “It is impossible to evaluate programs on autopilot because the participants – both inside and outside of government – have little to no incentive to share programmatic-level details so long as the dollars continue to flow.”

It added: “A temporary pause, with commonsense waivers for truly life-threatening situations, is the only way to scrutinize and prevent waste.”

‘Sleepless nights ahead of me’

Thousands of kilometres away, in the Ugandan town of Masindi, Teddy Ruge is still grappling with the fall-out. He was told to “stop work” on Monday night, and the waivers given so far don’t seem to allow him to restart his US government-funded farming project.

Mr Ruge employs small-plot farmers who grow a nutrient rich leaf called Moringa. The plant is sold to North America and Europe where it is used to fortify bread and other foods.

His farmers rely on a wage of around $70 per month, their incomes bolsted by a yearly grant of around $250,000 from USAID.

But that lifeline appeared to fall away, exactly a week after Mr Trump’s executive order.

“We were actually preparing to have a meeting with all the farmers to talk about the new season and what to plant – a planning meeting,” Mr Ruge told the BBC. “But now it’s more of a funeral,”

He still doesn’t know whether he is allowed to continue employing the farmers or if they can show up to work.

“From what I’m reading, our program is at jeopardy of being permanently canceled because it’s at the edge of climate resilience and green manufacturing – which are not exactly at the top of the list of Trump’s priorities,” said Mr Ruge.

“It’s really disheartening. So I have a few sleepless nights ahead of me.”

Meta to pay $25m to settle Trump lawsuit over ban

Peter Hoskins & Natalie Sherman

BBC News

US President Donald Trump has signed a legal settlement that will see Facebook and Instagram owner Meta pay out roughly $25m (£20m).

Trump sued the social media giant and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2021 over the suspension of his accounts after the 6 January Capitol riots that year.

In July 2024, Meta lifted the final restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the lead up to US presidential elections.

The settlement was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Around $22m of the settlement will go to a fund for Trump’s presidential library.

The balance will be used to cover legal costs and the other plaintiffs who signed on to the lawsuit. Meta will not admit wrongdoing.

The company suspended Trump’s accounts in 2021 and said that it would ban him from the platforms for at least two years.

After Trump’s election victory in November, Mr Zuckerberg visited his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. The move was seen as evidence of an apparent thawing in their once frosty relations.

The following month, Meta donated $1m to an inauguration fund for Trump. Mr Zuckerberg was a guest at Trump’s inauguration at the US Capitol earlier this month – seated near other global tech billionaires.

For years, Trump had been highly critical of Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook – calling the platform “anti-Trump” in 2017.

Their relationship soured further after the president’s accounts were banned. He called Facebook an “enemy of the people” in March 2024.

Twitter, which is now named X and owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, also “permanently” suspended the president from its platform.

After buying the firm for $44bn, Mr Musk reinstated Trump’s account in 2022 after a poll he ran on the site narrowly backed the move.

Separately on Wednesday, Meta defended its $65bn investment in artificial intelligence (AI) after tech stocks were rocked in the wake of Chinese AI app DeepSeek’s sudden rise.

Mr Zuckerberg told investors there was a lot to learn from DeepSeek, but it was too soon to have “a really strong opinion” about what the app means for the future of AI.

“If anything, I think the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is right thing for us to be focused on,” he added.

Many US tech stocks sank this week after DeepSeek surged in popularity, though Meta’s has bucked this trend by rising.

The stock was up in after hours trading after it posted better than expected financial results on Wednesday.

However, questions remain about what advances in Chinese AI will mean for the US AI market generally considering DeepSeek’s claim it was developed at a fraction of the cost of its US rivals.

Mr Zuckerberg said in a call to investors following the results on Wednesday that DeepSeek’s rise strengthened his conviction in his company’s embrace of “open-source” AI.

Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, took a different tack from many US companies by releasing an open source AI model for free.

Mr Zuckerberg on Wednesday said he thought that approach was important to keeping the US at the cutting edge, as countries around the world compete to become the key players in the still-emerging industry.

“There’s going to be an open source standard globally and I think for our own national advantage it’s important that it’s an American standard,” he said.

“We take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using.”

‘Major advantage’

Meta last week announced it was planning to spend as much as $65bn this year to expand its AI infrastructure.

Mr Zuckerberg on Wednesday acknowledged ongoing debate about how best to direct AI investments, but told investors that for his firm, which serves billions of people globally, big investments made sense.

“I would bet the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage – for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale we want to,” he said.

He said it would also be a critical year for the company in other areas, saying he this year would be key to determining whether sales of the company’s smart glasses will take off as hoped.

Mr Zuckerberg has said he expects all glasses to be replaced by smart glasses within a decade, a prediction he repeated on Wednesday.

He also spoke of plans to revive the “cultural relevance” of Facebook, the social media sight that launched his fortune but which has fallen out of favour compared to other offerings such as Instagram and tikTok.

Mr Zuckerberg also defended his recently announced decision to end fact-checking, saying he thought plans for community notes would be more effective.

He said the company had seen no hit to advertiser demand as a result of its changes.

It reported more than $48bn in revenue in the last three months of 2024, up 21% from the same period the prior year.

Though AI spending has weighed on the company, it still reported quarterly profit of more than $20bn, up 49% from a year ago.

Asteroid contains building blocks of life, say scientists

Rebecca Morelle

Science Editor@BBCMorelle
Alison Francis

Senior Science Journalist

The chemical building blocks of life have been found in the grainy dust of an asteroid called Bennu, an analysis reveals.

Samples of the space rock, which were scooped up by a Nasa spacecraft and brought to Earth, contain a rich array of minerals and thousands of organic compounds.

These include amino acids, which are the molecules that make up proteins, as well as nucleobases – the fundamental components of DNA.

This doesn’t mean there was ever life on Bennu, but it supports the theory that asteroids delivered these vital ingredients to Earth when they crashed into our planet billions of years ago.

Scientists think those same compounds could also have been brought to other worlds in our Solar System.

“What we’ve learned from it is amazing,” said Prof Sara Russell, a cosmic mineralogist from the Natural History Museum in London.

“It’s telling us about our own origins, and it enables us to answer these really, really big questions about where life began. And who doesn’t want to know about how life started?”

The findings are published in two papers in the journal Nature.

Grabbing a bit of Bennu has been one of the most audacious missions Nasa has ever attempted.

A spacecraft called Osiris Rex unfurled a robotic arm to collect some of the 500m-wide space rock, before packing it into a capsule and returning it to Earth in 2023.

About 120g of black dust was collected and shared with scientists around the world. This might not sound like much material, but it’s proved to be a treasure trove.

“Every grain is telling us something new about Bennu,” said Prof Russell, who’s been studying the tiny specks.

About a teaspoonful of the asteroid was sent to scientists in the UK.

The new research has shown that the space rock is packed full of nitrogen and carbon-rich compounds.

These include 14 of the 20 amino acids that life on Earth uses to build proteins and all four of the ring-shaped molecules that make up DNA – adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine.

The study has also found an array of minerals and salts, suggesting water was once present on the asteroid. Ammonia, which is important for biochemical reactions, was discovered in the sample too.

Some of these compounds have been seen in space rocks that have fallen to Earth, but others haven’t been detected until now.

“It’s just incredible how rich it is. It’s full of these minerals that we haven’t seen before in meteorites and the combination of them that we haven’t seen before. It’s been such an exciting thing to study,” said Prof Russell.

This latest study adds to growing evidence that asteroids brought water and organic material to Earth.

“The early Solar System was really turbulent and there were millions of asteroids like Bennu flying about,” explained Dr Ashley King, from the Natural History Museum.

The idea is that these bombarded the young Earth, seeding our planet with ingredients that gave us the oceans and made life possible.

But Earth wasn’t the only world getting hit by space rocks. Asteroids would have been colliding with other planets too.

“Earth is unique, in that it’s the only place where we have found life so far, but we know asteroids were delivering those ingredients, the carbon and the water, throughout the Solar System,” said Dr King.

“And one of the big things that we’re trying to understand now is, if you have the right conditions, why do we have life here on Earth – and could we potentially find it elsewhere in our Solar System?”

It’s a key question that scientists will continue to try and answer.

They have decades of research ahead on the dust brought back from Bennu, and parts of our cosmic neighbourhood still to explore.

DeepSeek: How China’s ‘AI heroes’ overcame US curbs to stun Silicon Valley

Fan Wang and João da Silva

BBC News
Reporting fromSingapore

When ChatGPT stormed the world of artificial intelligence (AI), an inevitable question followed: did it spell trouble for China, America’s biggest tech rival?

Two years on, a new AI model from China has flipped that question: can the US stop Chinese innovation?

For a while, Beijing seemed to fumble with its answer to ChatGPT, which is not available in China.

Unimpressed users mocked Ernie, the chatbot by search engine giant Baidu. Then came versions by tech firms Tencent and ByteDance, which were dismissed as followers of ChatGPT – but not as good.

Washington was confident that it was ahead and wanted to keep it that way. So the Biden administration ramped up restrictions banning the export of advanced chips and technology to China.

That’s why DeepSeek’s launch has astonished Silicon Valley and the world. The firm says its powerful model is far cheaper than the billions US firms have spent on AI.

So how did a little-known company – whose founder is being hailed on Chinese social media as an “AI hero” – pull this off?

The challenge

When the US barred the world’s leading chip-makers such as Nvidia from selling advanced tech to China, it was certainly a blow.

Those chips are essential for building powerful AI models that can perform a range of human tasks, from answering basic queries to solving complex maths problems.

DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng described the chip ban as their “main challenge” in interviews with local media.

Long before the ban, DeepSeek acquired a “substantial stockpile” of Nvidia A100 chips – estimates range from 10,000 to 50,000 – according to the MIT Technology Review.

Leading AI models in the West use an estimated 16,000 specialised chips. But DeepSeek says it trained its AI model using 2,000 such chips, and thousands of lower-grade chips – which is what makes its product cheaper.

Some, including US tech billionaire Elon Musk, have questioned this claim, arguing the company cannot reveal how many advanced chips it really used given the restrictions.

But experts say Washington’s ban brought both challenges and opportunities to the Chinese AI industry.

It has “forced Chinese companies like DeepSeek to innovate” so they can do more with less, says Marina Zhang, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

“While these restrictions pose challenges, they have also spurred creativity and resilience, aligning with China’s broader policy goals of achieving technological independence.”

The world’s second-largest economy has invested heavily in big tech – from the batteries that power electric vehicles and solar panels, to AI.

Turning China into a tech superpower has long been President Xi Jinping’s ambition, so Washington’s restrictions were also a challenge that Beijing took on.

The release of DeepSeek’s new model on 20 January, when Donald Trump was sworn in as US president, was deliberate, according to Gregory C Allen, an AI expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The timing and the way it’s being messaged – that’s exactly what the Chinese government wants everybody to think – that export controls don’t work and that America is not the global leader in AI,” says Mr Allen, former director of strategy and policy at the US Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

In recent years the Chinese government has nurtured AI talent, offering scholarships and research grants, and encouraging partnerships between universities and industry.

The National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Learning and other state-backed initiatives have helped train thousands of AI specialists, according to Ms Zhang.

And China had plenty of bright engineers to recruit.

The talent

Take DeepSeek’s team for instance – Chinese media says it comprises fewer than 140 people, most of whom are what the internet has proudly declared as “home-grown talent” from elite Chinese universities.

Western observers missed the emergence of “a new generation of entrepreneurs who prioritise foundational research and long-term technological advancement over quick profits”, Ms Zhang says.

China’s top universities are creating a “rapidly growing AI talent pool” where even managers are often under the age of 35.

“Having grown up during China’s rapid technological ascent, they are deeply motivated by a drive for self-reliance in innovation,” she adds.

Watch: DeepSeek AI bot responds to BBC question about China

Deepseek’s founder Liang Wenfeng is an example of this – the 40-year-old studied AI at the prestigious Zhejiang University. In an article on the tech outlet 36Kr, people familiar with him say he is “more like a geek rather than a boss”.

And Chinese media describe him as a “technical idealist” – he insists on keeping DeepSeek as an open-source platform. In fact experts also believe a thriving open-source culture has allowed young start-ups to pool resources and advance faster.

Unlike bigger Chinese tech firms, DeepSeek prioritised research, which has allowed for more experimenting, according to experts and people who worked at the company.

“The Top 50 talents in this field might not be in China, but we can build people like that here,” Mr Liang said in an interview with 36Kr.

But experts wonder how much further DeepSeek can go. Ms Zhang says that “new US restrictions may limit access to American user data, potentially impacting how Chinese models like DeepSeek can go global”.

And others say the US still has a huge advantage, such as, in Mr Allen’s words, “their enormous quantity of computing resources” – and it’s also unclear how DeepSeek will continue using advanced chips to keep improving the model.

But for now, DeepSeek is enjoying its moment in the sun, given that most people in China had never heard of it until this weekend.

The new AI heroes

His sudden fame has seen Mr Liang become a sensation on China’s social media, where he is being applauded as one of the “three AI heroes” from southern Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong.

The other two are Zhilin Yang, a leading expert at Tsinghua University, and Kaiming He, who teaches at MIT in the US.

DeepSeek has delighted the Chinese internet ahead of Lunar New Year, the country’s biggest holiday. It’s good news for a beleaguered economy and a tech industry that is bracing for further tariffs and the possible sale of TikTok’s US business.

“DeepSeek shows us that only if you have the real deal will you stand the test of time,” a top-liked Weibo comment reads.

“This is the best new year gift. Wish our motherland prosperous and strong,” another reads.

A “blend of shock and excitement, particularly within the open-source community,” is how Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research, described the reaction in China.

Fiona Zhou, a tech worker in the southern city of Shenzhen, says her social media feed “was suddenly flooded with DeepSeek-related posts yesterday”.

“People call it ‘the glory of made-in-China’, and say it shocked Silicon Valley, so I downloaded it to see how good it is.”

She asked it for “four pillars of [her] destiny”, or ba-zi – like a personalised horoscope that is based on the date and time of birth.

But to her disappointment, DeepSeek was wrong. While she was given a thorough explanation about its “thinking process”, it was not the “four pillars” from her real ba-zi.

She says she will still give it another go at work, as it will probably be more useful for such tasks.

DeepSeek vs ChatGPT – how do they compare?

Graham Fraser

Technology Reporter

The emergence of Chinese AI app DeepSeek has shocked financial markets, and prompted US President Donald Trump to describe it as “a wake-up call” for the US tech industry.

DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 artificial intelligence (AI) model was made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals has raised questions about the future about of the whole industry, and caused some the world’s biggest companies to sink in value.

DeepSeek has become the most downloaded free app in the US just a week after it was launched.

So how does it compare to its much more established and apparently much more expensive US rivals, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini?

Writing Assistance

When you ask ChatGPT what the most popular reasons to use ChatGPT are, it says that assisting people to write is one of them.

From gathering and summarising information in a helpful format to even writing blog posts on a topic, ChatGPT has become an AI companion for many across different workplaces.

As a proud Scottish football fan, I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek to summarise the best Scottish football players ever, before asking the chatbots to “draft a blog post summarising the best Scottish football players in history”.

DeepSeek responded in seconds, with a top ten list – Kenny Dalglish of Liverpool and Celtic was number one. It helpfully summarised which position the players played in, their clubs, and a brief list of their achievements.

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DeepSeek also detailed two non-Scottish players – Rangers legend Brian Laudrup, who is Danish, and Celtic hero Henrik Larsson. For the latter, it added “although Swedish, Larsson is often included in discussions of Scottish football legends due to his impact at Celtic”.

For its subsequent blog post, it did go into detail of Laudrup’s nationality before giving a succinct account of the careers of the players.

ChatGPT’s answer to the same question contained many of the same names, with “King Kenny” once again at the top of the list.

Its detailed blog post briefly and accurately went into the careers of all the players.

It concluded: “While the game has changed over the decades, the impact of these Scottish greats remains timeless.” Indeed.

For this fun test, DeepSeek was certainly comparable to its best-known US competitor.

Coding

The emergence of advanced AI models has made a difference to people who code.

When ChatGPT experienced an outage last week, X had a number of amusing posts from developers saying they couldn’t do their work without the faithful tool by their side.

How does DeepSeek compare here?

Javier Aguirre, an AI researcher at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, South Korea, specialises in researching in medicine and AI.

In a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday, he wrote: “I am quite impressed with Deepseek. While coding, we usually try to explode AI chatbots to the limit to see their capabilities in assisting with coding.

“Today I had a really tricky and complex problem. Even chatGPT o1 was not able to reason enough to solve it. I gave a try to Deepseek and it solved it at once and straight to the point.”

He also pointed out that for coders, the combination of models can lead to success. This was echoed by Addy Osmani, who is the Head of Chrome Developer Experience at Google.

In a post to his 208k followers on LinkedIn, he spoke about combining DeepSeek with US AI firm Anthropic’s tool Claude Sonnet. In 2023, Amazon invested $4bn into Anthropic.

Mr Osmani said: “Code with AI? DeepSeek R1 + Claude Sonnet may be the best new hybrid coding model. Yes, engineers are using them together.”

Mr Osmani also said DeepSeek was “significantly cheaper” to use than both Claude Sonnet and OpenAI’s o1 model.

Brainstorming ideas

What about brainstorming? I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek to give me “ideas for a story for children about a boy who lives on the moon”.

ChatGPT responded in seconds with six neatly summarised ideas. One was about a boy called Max who worked as a postman on the moon and was sent on an adventure. Another was about Oliver, who was drawn by the sounds of a mysterious orchestra made up of aliens.

None of these stories are going to challenge Harry Potter or Roald Dahl any time soon, but it is a start for more refined ideas to flourish perhaps.

DeepSeek, on the other hand, responded with just one idea – “Luna and the Boy Who Chased the Stars”. Its response was 387 words (with no mention of anyone or thing called “Luna”), and comprised a story about a curious boy called Milo who lived on the moon.

It struck me that while ChatGPT gave me ideas, DeepSeek wrote a full story. It wasn’t particularly good, with a simple focus on a character going from A to B, but it was a start – and it was impressive how quickly it delivered it.

Learning and research

One of my memories from high school is my history teacher explaining to us how the First World War came about following a complex situation regarding many European powers, with the conflict finally sparked by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

How would the chatbots deal with explaining such a complex and nuanced piece of history? Pretty well.

ChatGPT gave a detailed account and outlined the key factors. DeepSeek’s account was not as detailed, but its brief overview did cover all the main points and events.

Google’s Gemini assistant gave a similar synopsis to ChatGPT and DeepSeek, and also gave the user the opportunity to click on links from reputable sources such as the Imperial War Museum in the UK.

As I saw on other tasks and prompts, DeepSeek was certainly comparable to its US competitors.

Steaming ahead

The tasks I set the chatbots were simple but they point to something much more significant – the winner of the so-called AI race is far from decided.

For all the vast resources US firms have poured into the tech, their Chinese rival has shown their achievements can be emulated.

Prof Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Department of Computer Science and Technology, at the University of Cambridge, said this was just the start.

“I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the type of innovation we can expect in these models,” he said.

He highlighted an example from history – James Watt is synonymous with the steam engine, even though he improved it rather than invented it.

“There’s plenty of space for budding James Watts to emerge, and that they are less likely to come from established players,” he said.

UK will not be able to resist China’s tech dominance

Faisal Islam

Economics editor@faisalislam

China’s success in technology has not come out of thin air, even given the unlikely origins of the DeepSeek deep shock.

The obscure Hangzhou hedge fund that coded a ChatGPT competitor as a side project it claims cost just $5.6m to train emerges from a concerted effort to invest in future generations of technology.

This is not an accident. This is policy.

The raw materials of artificial intelligence (AI) are microchips, science PhDs and data. On the latter two, China might be ahead already.

There are on average more than 6,000 PhDs in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) coming out of Chinese universities every month. In the US it is more like 2,000-3,000, in the UK it is 1,500.

In terms of patents generally, more are being filed in China than in the rest of the world put together. In 2023 China filed 1.7 million patents, against 600,000 in the US. Two decades earlier China had a third of the patents filed by the US, a quarter of Japan’s and was well behind South Korea and Europe.

While there are some questions about the quality, on some measures China now exceeds the US on what is known as “citation-weighted” patents too, which adjusts for how often new scientific papers are referred to.

Chinese lithium-ion electric batteries now cost per kWh about a seventh of what they cost a decade ago. DeepSeek is doing in AI exactly what China has done elsewhere.

While the impact of this was most visible in electric vehicles (EVs), where China is now the world’s biggest exporter, having cornered the supply chains and the science for battery technology, it stretches well beyond.

Even in auto the Chinese manufacturers are now pushing the concept of “electric intelligent vehicles”, in which conventional carmakers cannot compete, especially on software development.

China’s consumer electronics companies are shifting into car manufacturing, with “dark factories” operated 24/7 by armies of AI-powered robots, now also increasingly made in China.

The country is electrifying at an astonishing rate, and is referred to by some researchers as an “electro state”. It now files three-quarters of all clean tech patents, versus a twentieth at the start of the century.

Last year the US National Science Board asserted China’s objective of being the world’s leading science and engineering nation was on the verge of being achieved. “We already see this in artificial intelligence, where China out publishes us, has more patents, and produces more students than the United States,” they wrote.

Delegates who accompanied the UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves to China earlier this month marvelled at how the Beijing air had been cleaned up, and indigenous electric cars were everywhere. Another UK CEO told me of a visit to Huawei’s Oxbridge-style campus complete with spires and bridges, and its own Tube line, purely for its scientists.

Clearly, however, there are concerns about censorship, democracy and security. One of the drivers of the Chinese AI industry has been access to extraordinary amounts of data, which is more difficult to get hold of in the West.

If the US Congress was sufficiently concerned about TikTok to ban it, then surely a table-topping AI program could be highly problematic. President Trump’s argument this morning was that DeepSeek’s innovation was “positive” and “a wake-up call”. China has not been prominent as the first target of Trump tariffs.

There is still an obvious balancing act for the UK government here. But this sort of innovation and its impact on the world was exactly why the chancellor visited Beijing a fortnight ago.

She said at the time she wanted a long-term relationship with China that is “squarely in our national interest” with the visit part of a “commitment to explore deeper economic co-operation” between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and President Xi.

Other European nations such as Spain have encouraged China not just to set up factories but to transfer its advanced battery technology, for example, into Europe.

The West wants China to make its T-shirts, its tables, its TVs and EVs. But could that really now stretch into DeepSeek data-hungry AI models too? It is a deep tremor, not just for tech, but for economics and geopolitics as well.

DeepSeek shows AI’s centre of power could shift away from US

Marc Cieslak

AI correspondent

DeepSeek’s arrival at the top of the Apple App Store charts has placed it firmly in the public consciousness, shaking the belief that the US would continue as the largely unchallenged global superpower of AI.

This dominance has been mainly down to enormous capital investment – but China’s DeepSeek was developed for a fraction of the price of its US rivals. Its sudden debut has had a huge impact, wiping $1tn off the value of US tech stocks.

The efficiency and capability of DeepSeek’s model should not be underestimated.

All of this has been achieved using lower-end technology, a consequence of US restrictions on the export to China of high-tech components – Nvidia’s H100 chip at the higher end and its H800 chip at the lower end, both of which are commonly used in AI.

  • What exactly is DeepSeek and why is everyone talking about it?

The US barred its export over fears that China could challenge American AI dominance if given unfettered access to Silicon Valley technology, so a viable AI model created in this environment speaks for itself in terms of ingenuity and potential.

Despite this, it is what DeepSeek represents, rather than what it has produced, that may ultimately be its lasting legacy.

It highlights a new way of thinking about the economics of the AI industry.

It levels the playing field for governments and companies with aspirations to become AI power players.

And it demonstrates that innovation born of necessity can produce results with the power to make the money markets rethink the economic direction of travel.

Many already felt the US AI industry was rife with inflated valuations, leading to talk of an AI bubble. That bubble hasn’t quite burst, but its structural integrity is certainly now under strain.

Some may interpret DeepSeek’s impact as a sign that the seat of AI power is shifting eastward – but it’s also possible that innovators worldwide will now take inspiration and attempt to develop their own lower-cost AI technologies.

The investment plans announced in the US – worth hundreds of billions of dollars – were simply not replicable elsewhere, but that may no longer be such a problem.

  • DeepSeek vs ChatGPT – how do they compare?
  • Watch: Marc Cieslak explains why DeepSeek has caused shockwaves

The UK government has made clear its intention to use AI as an economic driver. If lower development costs become the norm, this ambition may become more attainable.

The UK has never lacked innovators, but British businesses have often struggled to scale without significant overseas investment. A cheaper, more resourceful approach to AI could help the UK and other governments realise the goal of cultivating homegrown AI powerhouses.

The US tech giants, however, are unlikely to take this lying down. They may have been given a bloody nose by the markets, but they still have enormous technical and financial resources at their disposal.

These companies are already exploring new ways of monetising their AI technologies and finding applications for AI across public life.

However, they may now face a tightening of belts and lowering of valuation expectations as a new economic reality kicks in.

Be careful with DeepSeek, Australia says – so is it safe to use?

Tom Gerken

Technology reporter

Australia’s science minister, Ed Husic, has become the first member of a Western government to raise privacy concerns about DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot causing turmoil on the markets and in the tech industry.

Chinese tech, from Huawei to TikTok, has repeatedly been the subject of allegations the firms are linked to the Chinese state, and fears this could lead to peoples’ data being harvested for intelligence purposes.

Donald Trump has said DeepSeek is a “wake up call” for the US but did not seem to suggest it was a threat to national security – instead saying it could even be a good thing if it brought costs down.

But Husic told ABC News on Tuesday there remained a lot of unanswered questions, including over “data and privacy management.”

“I would be very careful about that, these type of issues need to be weighed up carefully,” he added.

DeepSeek has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment – but users in the UK and US have so far shown no such caution.

DeepSeek has rocketed to the top of the app stores in both countries, with market analysts Sensor Tower saying it has seen 3 million downloads since launch.

As much as 80% of these have come in the past week – meaning it has been downloaded at three times the rate of rivals such as Perplexity.

Meanwhile, US officials have raised questions about national security, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“I spoke with [the National Security Council] this morning, they are looking into what [the national security implications] may be,” she said.

And the US navy has reportedly banned its members from using DeepSeek’s apps altogether, citing “potential security and ethical concerns”, according to CNBC.

The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BBC News.

What data does DeepSeek collect?

According to DeepSeek’s own privacy policy, it collects large amounts of personal information collected from users, which is then stored “in secure servers” in China.

This may include:

  • Your email address, phone number and date of birth, entered when creating an account
  • Any user input including text and audio, as well as chat histories
  • So-called “technical information” – ranging from your phone’s model and operating system to your IP address and “keystroke patterns”.

It says it uses this information to improve DeepSeek by enhancing its “safety, security and stability”.

It will then share this information with others, such as service providers, advertising partners, and its corporate group, which will be kept “for as long as necessary”.

  • DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking
  • Watch the AI bot respond to question about China
  • Is the tool as good as it seems?
  • Watch: Why DeepSeek has caused shockwaves

“There are genuine concerns around the technological potential of DeepSeek, specifically around the terms of its privacy policy,” said ExpressVPN’s digital privacy advocate Lauren Hendry Parsons.

She specifically highlighted the part of the policy which says data can be used “to help match you and your actions outside of the service” – which she said “should immediately ring an alarm bell for anyone concerned with their privacy”.

But while the app harvests a lot of data, experts point out it’s very similar to privacy policies users may have already agreed to for rival services like ChatGPT and Gemini, or even social media platforms.

So is it safe?

“For any openly available AI model, with a web or app interface – including but not limited to DeepSeek – the prompts, or questions that are asked of the AI, then become available to the makers of that model, as are the answers,” said Emily Taylor, chief executive of Oxford Information Labs

“So, anyone working on confidential or national security areas needs to be aware of those risks,” she told the BBC.

Dr Richard Whittle from University of Salford said he had “various concerns about data and privacy” with the app, but said there were “plenty of concerns” with the models used in the US too.

“Consumers should always be wary, especially in the hype and fear of missing out on a new, highly popular, app,” he said.

The UK data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office has urged the public to be aware of their rights around their information being used to train AI models.

Asked by BBC News if it shared the Australian government’s concerns, it said in a statement: “Generative AI developers and deployers need to make sure people have meaningful, concise and easily accessible information about the use of their personal data and have clear and effective processes for enabling people to exercise their information rights.

“We will continue to engage with stakeholders on promoting effective transparency measures, without shying away from taking action when our regulatory expectations are ignored.”

Inside the operation to bring Israel’s hostages home from Gaza

Alice Cuddy

BBC News in Jerusalem

It begins with a phone call with a location.

Once the details are received, a team from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sets off in vehicles marked with the humanitarian organisation’s logo to pick up the hostages in Gaza.

Israeli military and medical personnel are also assembled at several different locations, waiting to bring them home.

​​The hostage releases, watched around the world, come after months of tense negotiations aimed at ending a war that began on 7 October 2023, when Hamas fighters killed some 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 251 others.

In the 15 months that followed, more than 47,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, and many more lost their homes in Israeli bombardments.

Under the terms of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that began on 19 January, a total of 33 Israeli hostages are due to be released and returned to their families during the first phase, lasting six weeks.

In exchange, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are being freed.

If anything goes wrong, it risks the hostages remaining in captivity, and reigniting the war.

“This is more than just a drive,” says ICRC spokesperson Sarah Davies.

“These operations may seem simple, but in fact they are very complex and require rigorous security measures to minimise the risks to those involved.”

The ICRC, which acts as a neutral intermediary in the handover, assembles a team of specialists, some of whom have been involved in similar operations in the past – though this is more challenging than most.

Crucial planning

There are some details that the group cannot speak about publicly because of concerns that it could compromise the security of the operation.

Ms Davies says planning is crucial to ensuring that the exchange runs smoothly. They have mapped out alternative routes to get to different locations in Gaza, knowing that the “safest route can change” at any time.

Among their biggest concerns are the dangers posed by unexploded ordnance, destroyed and damaged infrastructure, and large crowds with “heightened emotions”.

“Our teams prepare and plan for as many scenarios as possible,” she says.

“The most important thing for us is to be able to return any person entrusted to our care safely back to their homes.”

But it is impossible to plan for everything.

“From previous experience, here and in other places around the world, we know that the logistics and final details can change at any time, even – and particularly – during operations themselves,” says Ms Davies.

Medical staff and so-called weapons contamination specialists, trained in identifying explosive remnants of war, travel with the teams.

During the operations, ICRC representatives also maintain regular contact with both Israeli officials and Hamas, as well as mediators.

In the previous releases, Hamas has circulated the names of the released hostages in advance on its Telegram channels, without revealing exactly where the handovers will happen.

The first public signs of the locations have been the presence of armed and masked members of Hamas’s military wing.

“I found out from a kiosk guy that there was something happening at the junction and that al-Qassam fighters were having a parade,” a local journalist says of the first release in Gaza City earlier this month.

Crowds started gathering to watch as the fighters assembled in formation, and word began to spread that the first three hostages released under the ceasefire deal would appear there.

“When people realised this would be the place where they would hand over the Israeli hostages, people started chanting [for al-Qassam and senior Hamas figures],” he says. “They started shouting ‘God is greatest’ – that showed how joyful they were.”

The journalist was also there for the second release – at a different location in Gaza City – the following week, which he describes as being “more organised”.

The fighters set up a small stage area with a desk and chairs, and stood in formation to separate the hostages from the crowds.

White cars with blacked out windows were used to bring the hostages – four women soldiers – to the area.

The young women were filmed thanking their captors and being handed gift bags in a video published by Hamas’ military wing.

They were brought on to the stage and waved at the cheering crowd, before being handed over to the care of the ICRC.

Hamas spokesman Abdul Latif al-Qanou said in a later statement that the “scenes and details” of the staged handover “tell the story of resistance creativity, heroism, and reinforce a model of pride and dignity”.

Ms Davies says there are some aspects of the handover that are “out of our control”.

“At all times, ICRC staff do their utmost to protect the dignity of those being released, but… it is important that people recognise the limitations of what we can do,” she says.

“Our priority remains the safe and successful release and transfer of those in our care.”

The hostages are transferred to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on the outskirts of Gaza.

Col Dr Avi Banov, deputy chief of the Israel Defense Forces medical corps, says: “We’re prepared through the outskirts of Gaza and other areas to receive the hostages.

“We always prepare because Hamas does not tell us, ‘OK, we’re going to free them in this area or in that area’.”

Across the border, reception points have been set up to receive them.

On site are military and medical personnel, social workers and the hostages’ families.

  • ‘My beauty, you’re home’: Israeli women soldiers reunited with families
  • Who are the four Israeli hostages released by Hamas in latest swap?
  • Israel says eight hostages to be freed in Gaza deal’s first phase are dead
  • BBC Verify analyses Hamas hostage handover video
  • What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal

A former Israeli army medic who was involved in the first hostage return operation during the November 2023 ceasefire remembers waiting next to an ambulance at a base near the border. His was one of several teams on standby in case one of the hostages had a medical emergency and says there were strict instructions about how to interact with those who returned.

He recalls: “We were told if you evacuate them, don’t ask them questions, don’t do anything inappropriate, just be quiet and then if the hostages asks you something or want something, of course you’re going to answer and give it to them. But be low key.”

He says the atmosphere at the base was one of excitement and nerves. “It was a very important mission,” he says.

Col Dr Banov says the return begins with an introduction between the hostages and medical staff.

The returned hostages are assigned a physician, a nurse and a social worker who “accompany them all the way through” to them being taken to hospital.

Families are advised to give the hostages “a little bit of time” with the medical teams before the reunion to allow them to “breathe and understand that [they’re] in a safe place again”.

Giving hostages agency

“We start with vitamins, something small to eat and drink, and then the families,” Col Dr Banov says.

As part of a “grounding” process, he says, efforts are made to give the released hostages agency to make their own decisions, with questions like: “Would you like to take a shower before or after you meet your parents?”

Of the first seven hostages to be released, he says most had “some sort of shrapnel injuries” as well as suffering from malnutrition and metabolic problems.

“They’re not good physically, mentally it’s a very complicated issue,” he says.

In the coming weeks, he notes, the bodies of dead hostages will also arrive, with plans in place to transfer them to a forensic laboratory before funerals in Israel.

After receiving initial treatment at the reception point, the surviving hostages are transferred in a “specially adapted” helicopter to a hospital elsewhere in the country.

Col Dr Banov says: “We tell them… we will take a helicopter back home. And then, if you’re willing to, we’re going to start talking about what you have been through.”

It is there that the proper recovery process begins.

What is Kumbh Mela and why is this Hindu festival important?

Lucy Clarke-Billings

BBC News

Authorities say that at least 30 people have died and a further 60 were injured in a crowd crush at the massive Kumbh Mela festival in India.

The world’s biggest religious festival and humanity’s largest gathering, the event attracts millions of Hindu pilgrims to sacred riverbanks in India.

  • Live: The latest on the Kumbh Mela crush
  • Reporting from the scene of the Kumbh Mela crush
  • In pictures: Kumbh Mela crowd crush

What is Kumbh Mela?

Kumbh Mela is a religious gathering that draws tens of millions of Hindu pilgrims and spiritual seekers from India and across the globe.

The event is deeply rooted in Hindu mythology and centres on the belief in the purifying power of sacred rivers. Pilgrims bathe in these rivers, believing the ritual cleanses their sins and brings them closer to spiritual liberation.

The festival rotates between four key locations in India: Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad), Haridwar, Nashik and Ujjain. Each site is tied to a sacred river – the Ganges, Godavari or Shipra.

A full Kumbh Mela is held every 12 years in the four cities. A half (“Ard”) Kumbh is held mid-way between two full Kumbhs.

Officials say the 2025 festival is a Maha (Great) Kumbh Mela, which occurs only every 144 years, making it an even more significant event.

What does Kumbh Mela mean?

The name “Kumbh Mela” translates to “Festival of the Pitcher” in Sanskrit.

“Kumbh” refers to the pitcher or pot that contained the nectar of immortality in Hindu mythology, while “Mela” means a fair or gathering.

Hindu scriptures recount the legend of the Samudra Manthan – the churning of the ocean of milk by gods and demons in search of the nectar of immortality.

According to mythology, four drops of this nectar fell on the locations where Kumbh Mela is now celebrated, making them sacred.

Why do people go to Kumbh Mela?

Kumbh Mela attracts people from all walks of life, from sadhus (Hindu holy men) to ordinary citizens, including families and international visitors.

While most attendees are Hindus, the event also draws interest from people of other faiths who are curious about its cultural and spiritual significance.

The festival is ultimately an opportunity for attendees to seek spiritual renewal and salvation.

Bathing in the holy rivers during the festival is believed to absolve sins, liberate participants from the cycle of rebirth and bring them closer to moksha (spiritual liberation).

For many, the pilgrimage to Kumbh Mela is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, offering a chance to reaffirm their faith, connect with others and immerse themselves in the traditions of Hindu spirituality.

How long does Kumbh Mela last?

The festival is typically around 45 days long – with the 2025 Kumbh Mela taking place from 13 January to 26 February.

The event concludes after the final designated bathing day, known as the last shahi snan (royal bath).

The timing and duration of each Kumbh Mela are determined by astrologers and religious authorities.

What happens during Kumbh Mela?

The festival is a blend of religious rituals and cultural activities.

Its central feature is the shahi snan (royal baths).These ceremonial baths are led by groups of sadhus, including naga sadhus, who are known for covering themselves in ash and symbolising renunciation.

As well as bathing rituals, Kumbh Mela also features spiritual discussion, religious processions, prayers and cultural performances.

Religious organisations set up a number of temporary camps, providing food, shelter and opportunities for spiritual learning.

How many people attend Kumbh Mela?

Kumbh Mela’s scale is unparalleled. Attendance varies but the 2025 Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj stands out for its sheer scale.

About 400 million people are expected to attend throughout the 45-day period, authorities say.

Attendees spread out across the banks of the rivers, spanning some 12km.

Officials use a variety of sources to collate the number of pilgrims but they admit there is a possibility of some duplication. For instance, the one million long-term pilgrims, known as Kalpwasis, are counted daily.

CCTV cameras are used to monitor crowd density in real time, while manual headcounts at entry and exit points also validate numbers.

Drone surveillance provides aerial views of densely populated areas, especially during peak events like holy bathing days.

Analysis of mobile phone data, which uses the number of active mobile devices in the area, also helps to estimate crowd sizes.

How is Kumbh Mela managed?

Organising Kumbh Mela is a monumental task.

Authorities establish temporary cities with infrastructure to accommodate the millions of people who attend.

Facilities provided include makeshift hospitals, sanitation systems and transportation networks.

The 2025 festival is expected to cover 4,000 hectares (40 sq km).

This will include:

  • 160,000 tents
  • 40,000 police and security officials
  • 15,000 sanitation workers
  • 99 parking lots for over half a million vehicles
  • 30 floating pontoon bridges over the river
  • 67,000 street lights
  • 150,000 toilets
  • 25,000 bins

Idris Elba on stabbing crisis: ‘Not all kitchen knives need a point on them’

George Walker and George Sandeman

BBC News
Idris Elba tells BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that kitchen knives could be made without points on the end

Banning the sale of zombie knives is a positive step, but schools need to intervene earlier to help tackle the UK’s knife crime crisis, says Idris Elba.

The actor, 52, has spent the last year making a documentary for the BBC about solutions to knife crime, during which he met victims’ families, police officers and teenage offenders.

In addition to early intervention, he told the BBC that ninja swords should be banned and even suggested domestic knives could be made less dangerous.

“Not all kitchen knives need to have a point on them, that sounds like a crazy thing to say,” he adds, “but you can still cut your food without the point on your knife, which is an innovative way to look at it.”

A total of 507 children were treated in English hospitals for knife injuries in the 12 months to April 2024, according to the latest figures analysed by the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF).

“I’ve got three kids,” says Elba. “As a parent, that’s always going through your mind.”

In the documentary, called Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis, the Hollywood star meets a 17-year-old boy at Feltham young offender institution who first began carrying a blade when he was 13.

He grew up in a violent home and had been badly bullied at school for having dandruff.

“I looked around and saw that the only people who ain’t getting bullied are the people who are this certain way,” the teenager tells Elba, “so I felt the need to become that person.”

Asked by Elba how that made him feel, the boy says: “When I had a knife I felt like I could do anything, like I was a god – nobody could touch me.

“It makes you the bad man in the situation. Then push comes to shove and you end up using it.”

He stabbed someone and was a couple of months into his sentence for grievous bodily harm when Elba met him.

The figures from the YEF, a charity that uses government funding to help prevent children becoming involved in violence, show that knife crime remains a persistent problem for young people.

Elba says that, while the ban on zombie knives implemented last September was “a massive step in the right direction”, the country is still in a crisis.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said last week, following the sentencing of the teenager who murdered three young girls in Southport, that the government would bring in tougher checks for people trying to buy knives online.

Elba believes more attention needs to be paid to children in their pre and early teens, with disciplinary action like school exclusions, used as an opportunity to intervene in a young person’s life.

“When a young child is excluded, they’re more likely to go towards a dark place,” he says, but adds: “There are indicators of hope. There are intervention schemes that are really working and that no-one really knows about.”

Jayden, 16, is a beneficiary.

He started carrying a knife when he was 12 after a group of 20 boys started on him in a park in Coventry. One swung an axe at him.

“Ever since then I didn’t step outside without a knife,” he tells the documentary. “You’re going to be scared after that, aren’t you?… You’re going to want to protect yourself some way and that was the only way I could think of.”

He was eventually referred to the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence (Cirv), which is operated by West Midlands Police.

They identify teenagers who might commit or become a victim of knife crime and intervene before a stabbing takes place.

They then find education and career opportunities that suit each individual.

They sought out Jayden as there were concerns of him being involved in gang activities and carrying a knife. He had been excluded from school several times and kicked out of his family home.

He was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Through Cirv, Jayden joined a football academy and now aspires to be a coach.

He has stopped carrying a knife but says the dangers remain.

“It is still quite normal where I’m from to see someone carrying a blade on them,” he says. “I nearly got two pulled out on me this week.”

He paid tribute to PC Laura Cuthbertson who has mentored him as part of Cirv, though the funding for the scheme runs out in six months.

According to the Ministry of Justice, inmates with the highest rate of reoffending are aged 10-17.

The scheme costs £1,500 per child each year and Elba wants more funding for initiatives like this – that intervene in a child’s life before they commit a crime.

“There needs to be a very radical look at where we spend our money,” he says. “How we spend our money, what are the effective solutions versus the ones that we’re wasting a lot of money on that aren’t effective.”

Jayden tells Elba when he first joined Cirv he had no confidence in himself and was scared.

“I value life a lot more now,” he says. “There’s some beauty in the world for me, that wasn’t there before.”

Diana Johnson, minister for policing, fire and crime prevention, says the government has already banned zombie knives and it was progressing with a ban on “ninja swords”.

“In the longer term, we need to ensure that the right prevention systems are in place to stop crime in its tracks.”

Three military-run states leave West African bloc – what will change?

Chris Ewokor

BBC News, Abuja

Three countries under military rule have officially left West African regional bloc Ecowas, after more than a year of diplomatic tensions.

The withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger is a huge blow to Ecowas, which at 50 years old is considered Africa’s most important regional group.

The split was sparked after the three departing countries refused Ecowas demands to restore diplomatic rule.

On Wednesday Ecowas said it would keep its “doors open” to Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, even though they have forged ahead with their own bloc, the Alliance of Sahel States (AES by its French acronym).

What is Ecowas?

Ecowas – which stands for the Economic Community of West African States – was founded in 1975 in a bid to improve economic and political integration in West Africa.

Prior to Wednesday’s shake-up, the bloc had 15 members, including states like Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Senegal.

Citizens of all Ecowas countries currently have the right to live and work in all member states, while goods can circulate freely.

Why have Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso left?

Relations between Ecowas and the three Sahel countries have been tense since the military seized power in Niger in 2023, Burkina Faso in 2022 and Mali in 2020.

After the Niger coup, Ecowas imposed crippling sanctions on the country, such as border closures, a no-fly zone for all commercial flights and the freezing of central bank assets.

Ecowas also threatened to deploy its forces to Niger in order to restore democratic rule.

But this hard line merely strengthened the resolve of the three juntas.

Mali and Burkina Faso criticised Ecowas’ “inhuman” sanctions and vowed to defend Niger if the bloc intervened militarily.

After being suspended by Ecowas, the three states hit back by giving notice last January that they would withdraw in a year, meeting the timeline set by the bloc for states that decide to leave.

Negotiations between Ecowas and the juntas have taken place since then – but have failed.

The three countries accuse Ecowas of being too close to Western powers and have instead pivoted towards Russia.

How will the withdrawal affect the three countries?

According to the departing countries, they will now experience greater sovereignty and also independence from a force that has a foreign agenda.

But analysts say Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso may struggle outside the bloc – these are poor and landlocked countries whose economies depend on their West African neighbours.

While Ecowas works out the terms of its future relationship with the three countries, it says it will continue to recognise all passports and identity cards bearing the Ecowas logo held by citizens from Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

The countries will also remain in the bloc’s free-trade scheme.

Similarly, AES chairman, Mali’s military ruler Assimi Goïta, said last January that the right of Ecowas citizens to “enter, circulate, reside, establish and leave the territory” of the new bloc would be maintained.

Ilyasu Gadu, an international affairs expert and media consultant based in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, told the BBC: “The three junta leaders have taken steps to say: ‘Yes, we are pulling out of Ecowas but we want to maintain our relationships. We will not close our borders’ because they must have realised that if they do that, they would have shot themselves in the foot.”

West Africa observers are also concerned the withdrawal will worsen security in the region. The Sahel – the semi-arid region just south of the Sahara Desert that includes the three departing countries – is wracked with jihadist insurgencies and now accounts for “almost half of all deaths from terrorism globally”, a senior UN official said in April.

Ecowas was supporting Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger in their fight against the jihadists, but this help may now be rescinded, observers fear.

Although the juntas now receive weapons and mercenaries from Russia, the militants continue to inflict heavy casualties on both civilians and the armed forces.

How will Ecowas be impacted?

Ecowas will lose 76 million of its 446 million people and more than half its total geographical land area.

There are also concerns the withdrawal will weaken both regional unity and cooperation in combatting insurgencies.

The split “worsens a legitimacy crisis of ECOWAS which has often failed people’s expectations in upholding the rule of law,” Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, told the Associated Press.

“That the three poorest member states decided to leave the bloc makes Ecowas in the eyes of its citizens look even more like a loser in this conflict.”

How do residents of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso feel?

On Tuesday, some people in the three departing countries’ capitals took to the streets to celebrate the withdrawal.

But not everyone supports the juntas’ decisions.

Omar Hama from Niger said he wished the three countries had remained in Ecowas, while simultaneously belonging to the AES.

“I would have liked them to overcome their differences because we have a common space, same people with historical similarities and same economic realities,” he told the BBC.

Fatouma Harber, a journalist and blogger living in Mali, is worried that the change may eventually cause administrative and economic hassles for her and other citizens of the three countries.

“However, if the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) can really bring benefits for us, that would be an excellent thing,” she said.

Zabeirou Issa, who lives in Mali’s capital Bamako, took a firmer stance, saying: “Ecowas does not have any power, it is the Westerners who decide for the Ecowas leaders. Yes, I am very happy about the decision.”

In Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, Cisse Kabore told the BBC she wanted her country to remain in Ecowas because now the region “will no longer be united as before”.

What happens next?

Last month, Ecowas said it would give Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali a six-month grace period for them to reconsider their withdrawal.

However, at a press conference on Wednesday, Ecowas Commission head Omar Alieu Touray said: “Any state can decide to come back in the community at any time.”

To consolidate their exit from Ecowas and strenghten their alliance, the three countries said they would begin circulating new AES passports on Wednesday.

They have also decided to join forces to create a 5,000-strong military unit to fight the jihadist violence that has plagued the nations for years.

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Roman Abramovich could owe UK £1bn over tax dodge that helped bankroll Chelsea FC

James Oliver, Harriet Agerholm and Will Dahlgreen

BBC News and File on 4 Investigates

Sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich could owe the UK up to £1bn after a botched attempt to avoid tax on hedge fund investments, evidence seen by the BBC suggests.

Leaked papers reveal investments worth $6bn (£4.7bn) were routed through companies in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). But evidence suggests they were managed from the UK, so should have been taxed there.

Some of the money that funded Chelsea FC when Mr Abramovich owned it can be traced back to companies involved in the scheme, the BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) also found.

The oligarch’s lawyers said he “always obtained independent expert professional tax and legal advice” and “acted in accordance with that advice”.

Mr Abramovich – who now reportedly divides his time between Istanbul, Tel Aviv and the Russian resort of Sochi – denies having any knowledge of or being personally responsible for any unpaid tax.

Joe Powell, a Labour MP who leads a Parliamentary group on fair taxation, called on HM Revenue and Customs to “urgently” investigate the case to recover what could be “very significant amounts of money that could be invested in public services”.

At the heart of the scheme was Eugene Shvidler, a former Chelsea FC director and a billionaire businessman in his own right, who is currently challenging the UK government’s decision to sanction him for his close links to Mr Abramovich.

Mr Shvidler moved to the USA after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but from 2004 until 2022 he lived in the UK, with properties in London and Surrey.

A tax expert told the BBC that evidence Mr Shvidler had been making strategic decisions on the investments while based in the UK, and not in the BVI, was “a pretty big smoking gun”, suggesting the companies should have been paying UK tax.

Lawyers for Mr Shvidler said the BBC was basing its reporting on “confidential business documents that present an incomplete picture” and had “drawn strong and erroneous conclusions as to Mr Shvidler’s conduct”.

They said “the structure of investments” was “the subject of very careful and detailed tax planning, undertaken and advised on by leading tax advisors”.

The scheme involving Mr Abramovich’s hedge fund investments was revealed in a huge leak of data that the BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have been examining for over a year – thousands of files and emails from a Cyprus-based company that administered Mr Abramovich’s global empire.

The BBC and its media partners, including The Guardian, have been reporting on the leaked files since 2023 as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Cyprus Confidential investigation. On Tuesday, we revealed how Mr Abramovich had dodged millions in VAT on the running costs of his yacht fleet.

The leaked data shows how Mr Abramovich invested a large part of the wealth he acquired in the 1990s through a corrupt deal – ploughing it into a company in the BVI called Keygrove Holdings Ltd.

A network of British Virgin Islands companies owned by Keygrove invested this money – up to $6bn (£4.8bn) between the late 1990s and early 2020s – into Western hedge funds, according to the leaked files.

These investments made the oligarch an estimated $3.8bn (£3.1bn) in profits over almost two decades. By making the investments through companies in the BVI, which does not levy tax on corporate profits, the scheme appears to be set up to ensure as little tax as possible was paid.

‘Full power to do anything’

It is not unusual for businesses to legally avoid paying tax on their profits by making their investments from companies in tax havens. But the companies involved must be managed and controlled offshore where they are incorporated.

If an offshore company’s strategic decisions are being taken by someone in the UK, its profits could be taxed as if it were a UK company.

The leaked documents show how the directors of the BVI investment companies handed sweeping powers over them to Mr Shvidler, who was living in the UK and gained British citizenship in 2010.

The BBC has seen “general power of attorney” documents dated between 2004 and 2008, that gave him the “broadest possible powers” and “full power to do everything and anything” to investment companies in the BVI.

From 2008, Mr Shvidler appears to have acquired the power to direct the investments of Keygrove, which owned the BVI companies, through another company.

Millennium Capital Ventures Ltd, which was owned indirectly by Mr Shvidler’s wife and appointed him as a director in 2000, became Keygrove’s investment manager. It was assigned “full power and authority to supervise and direct” the investment of the assets, “all without prior consultation with client”.

‘Strong evidence’

Further evidence of Mr Shvidler’s crucial role in the investment decisions of the BVI companies emerged in a court case brought in September 2023 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against a New York firm called Concord Management.

The SEC filing says that Concord had only one client, since identified as Mr Abramovich. The company advised on investment decisions for the oligarch’s BVI companies.

It identifies a “longtime close associate” of Mr Abramovich, referred to as “Person B”, who “made investment decisions” for Mr Abramovich.

It says he was “the point of contact for receiving investment advice” and “for either deciding or communicating the decision whether to go forward with recommended transactions”.

Using the leaked documents, the BBC was able to identify “Person B” as Eugene Shvidler.

The evidence suggests Mr Shvidler was making the decisions described by the SEC, managing and controlling Mr Abramovich’s investments, from the UK rather than the BVI.

Tax expert Rita de le Feria told the BBC that evidence a UK resident, such as Mr Shvidler, was taking “strategic big decisions” on the hedge fund investments was a “clear indication” the huge profits should have been taxed by the UK.

“I think this is a pretty big smoking gun. That would be, again, strong evidence that the effective management of the company was not taking place in the BVI,” she said.

Mr Shvidler’s lawyers said there can be “no question of Mr Shvidler, either knowingly or negligently, being involved in an unlawful scheme to avoid paying tax”.

Lawyers for Mr Abramovich said that in addition to the advice he obtained over his tax affairs, he “expects that similar advice was sought” by those with responsibility for running companies related to him.

The leaked documents also reveal how large amounts of the untaxed profits from Mr Abramovich’s hedge fund investments passed through a network of the oligarch’s companies before flowing into Chelsea FC.

The hedge fund investments flowed back into his companies in the BVI and then into Keygrove, their parent company.

Keygrove then loaned out money to other companies in Mr Abramovich’s network, which in turn lent money to Camberley International Investments Ltd – a company set up to bankroll Chelsea FC.

By 2021, when Chelsea won the Champions League, Club World Cup and UEFA Super Cup, hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to the club could be traced back to companies benefiting from Mr Abramovich’s untaxed hedge fund investments.

How we calculated the bill

If HMRC were to investigate, how much could Mr Abramovich or the companies concerned owe?

We have assessed the profits made by the investment companies in the BVI from 1999 to 2018.

The leaked documents only contain complete accounts for the companies investing in hedge funds from 2013 to 2018.

But we can estimate how much money the companies involved were likely to have made over the entire period by looking at their “revenue reserves”. These are profits kept in the businesses, rather than being paid out to shareholders. By the end of 2018 this amounted to $3.8bn.

Applying historical UK corporation tax and currency conversion rates to the revenue reserves up to 2012, and the yearly profits to 2018, amounts to a potential tax bill of more than £500m owed to HMRC.

But in the event of an enquiry into unpaid tax, HMRC can also impose late payment interest and penalties for failure to notify the authorities.

If tax has gone unpaid, then depending on whether an investigation concluded those responsible knew but did not tell HMRC, or whether they did not know, the total amount due could range from almost £700m to over £1bn.

There is a possibility that some tax on the profits could not be recovered, as HMRC investigations can only go back a maximum of 20 years.

However, our calculations are also likely to be an underestimate, because we have applied the lowest rate of corporation tax that existed between 1999 and 2012, and it is possible profits had been extracted from the companies in that period that we have not included in our sums.

In any event, Mr Abramovich’s tax bill could dwarf the £653m bill imposed on Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone in 2023.

Frozen funds

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the British government allowed Roman Abramovich to sell Chelsea FC to Todd Boehly. It did so on the condition that £2.5bn from the proceeds would be donated to charities supporting victims of the war in Ukraine.

Nearly three years later, the money still sits in a frozen Barclays bank account, reportedly due to disagreement over how it should be spent, with Mr Abramovich wanting the money to go to “all the victims” of the war, and the UK government insisting it should be spent solely on humanitarian aid in Ukraine.

The BBC’s investigation suggests that, just as Ukrainians are waiting for money from the former Chelsea boss, so is the British taxpayer.

Swept away: The island family lost to a storm 20 years on

Shona MacDonald & Steven McKenzie

BBC Naidheachdan & BBC Scotland News

On the night of 11 January 2005, a family of five attempted to escape a violent storm battering their home on the island of South Uist.

Winds gusting to 124mph had coincided with a high tide, and a surging sea was threatening to overwhelm the MacPhersons’ house.

The conditions were so severe that wind and waves hurled sand and rocks against the outside walls.

Archie and Murdina MacPherson, their children Andrew, seven, and Hannah, five, along with Murdina’s father Calum Campbell set off in two cars.

They hoped to reach the safety of Archie’s parents’ home, just over a mile away, but they never made it; their cars were swept away.

Archie and Murdina had grown up in the Hebrides before moving away to the mainland for jobs.

Archie worked as a joiner in Glasgow and Murdina had been a personal assistant to the head of Gaelic at BBC Scotland.

They had returned home to the isles to raise their young family.

Archie took on work as a self-employed builder and Murdina was secretary at a local school.

Some of those closest to the family have spoken publicly for the first time about the tragedy in a new BBC Alba documentary, Eòrpa: After the Storm.

Murdina’s close friend Cirsty Macinnes said: “It’s been 20 years but I still find it hard to look at her house when I have to drive past it.

“The house is still there, but they’re not.”

Murdina’s brother Neil Campbell was due to have dinner with his sister and her family on the evening the storm hit

South Uist is home to about 1,800 people and one of the southern isles in the 160-mile (257km) length of the Western Isles, a chain of islands off Scotland’s west coast.

On the west side of the Hebridean islands is the North Atlantic, with nothing but open ocean until North America.

Islanders are long accustomed to wild winter weather.

But the suddenness and severity of the 11 January storm shocked many of them.

The storm had started days earlier as a low depression hundreds of miles away off America’s east coast.

By the time it reached the Western Isles it had increased in intensity.

The atmospheric pressure alone raised the sea level by almost 70cm (27in).

The bad weather coincided with a high spring tide, further raising the height of the water.

The Western Isles were hit by strong winds and heavy, driving rain.

Waves overtopped sand dunes on the low-lying island of South Uist.

Causeways, which are crossings carrying roads over short sections of sea between islands, contributed to raising flood levels as the storm roared in.

Power went out across the islands and mobile phone reception was lost.

Archie’s father David MacPherson was working a shift at a Ministry of Defence missile range in West Gerinish, South Uist, unaware of the tragedy unfolding near his home.

He recalled how the lights went out in his building at 15:00.

An emergency generator kicked in but it ran out of fuel at 20:00.

He said: “There was a light at the emergency exit that lasted until midnight, but that went out too.

“I was in darkness. I’ll never forget it, how terrifying it was.

“And no idea what was happening a few miles down the road.

“A terrible night.”

Murdina’s brother Neil Campbell had planned to meet his sister and her family that evening.

He said: “I’d been away for Christmas and we were going to have dinner together.

“We had presents to give each other.”

But on his drive from the neighbouring island of Benbecula he was stopped by the storm and forced to turn back.

“The wind hit the car and seawater started gushing through in front of me,” he said.

“I just froze.”

Neil said his sister’s house was on the edge of an area of coastal meadow called machair next to the sea.

He said: “The storm surge had surrounded them.

“There was sand and rocks thrown up against the wall of the house.

“They must have been terrified.

“I think they just fled.”

The family’s cars are believed to have been caught up in the storm surge, which breached the coastline and caused extensive flooding.

The vehicles were later discovered to have been swept into an inland loch.

The bodies of Archie, 36, Murdina, 37, and Calum, 67, were found first before the children’s in the following days.

Neil said: “You’re waiting all day for something, and then they tell you they’ve found them.

“It’s a relief in one way. But at the same time, they’re telling you you’ve lost everyone.

“That’s what’s difficult to deal with. You never deal with it.”

Cirsty remembered the anger and grief she felt in the wake of the storm.

She said: “The priest at the time said they went to God together.

“I was so angry, I said they didn’t. I said what kind of god would do such a terrible thing to such good people?

“To children who were so lovely and innocent?”

She said Murdina had been a great friend to her and was funny, generous and strong.

Five coffins laid in a row

Mourners travelled from across the isles to attend the funeral in St Mary’s Church at Griminish in Benbecula.

Five coffins were laid in a row before the congregation – the adults rested in three brown coffins and the children in coffins of brilliant white.

Large floral tributes spelling out each of their names were placed at the foot of the altar.

Three priests were joined by Archie’s uncle, The Reverend John Smith, for the service.

He told the packed church that life had been better because of the family’s existence.

There were prayers, readings, hymns and accordion playing.

Widower and former joiner Calum had been a piping instructor in local schools and a piper played as the coffins were carried from the church.

Mairi Macinnes was headteacher of Iochdar School, where Andrew and Hannah were pupils at the time, and where Murdina was a secretary.

She told the documentary how Murdina had spoken of the coming storm, but without any fear or expectation of the destruction it would bring.

Mairi said: “I remember well, on the afternoon beforehand when news came that there was really bad weather coming.

“I can still see Murdina standing there saying the school would be off, that there was a storm on the way.”

The evidence that shows Rwanda is backing rebels in DR Congo

Ian Wafula

Africa security correspondent, BBC News

Protesters in Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of Congo, have been burning portraits of Rwanda’s president and tearing up Rwandan flags as M23 rebels have taken control of most the eastern city of Goma.

Their fury is focused on Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who they accuse of backing the rebels – an accusation long made by the UN.

To put it bluntly, a group of UN experts maintains the Rwandan army is in “de facto control of M23 operations”, detailing how M23 recruits are trained under Rwandan supervision and supported by high-tech Rwandan weaponry.

Goma, which lies at the foot of a volcano near Lake Kivu, sits on the border with Rwanda. It is the capital of mineral-rich North Kivu province – and is an important trading and humanitarian hub and the base for the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission.

The city had also become a refuge for those fleeing the conflict between M23 fighters and the army that erupted again in late 2021 – with the population swelling to around two million.

They all face further turmoil as fighting erupted there on Sunday night with loud explosions echoing through the streets, which are now strewn with bodies. The exact circumstances of what is going on is unclear as phone lines are down and electricity and water supplies have been cut off. But the M23 seem to have captured most, if not all, of the city.

“There was no question that there are Rwandan troops in Goma supporting the M23,” said UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix, though he added that it was it was difficult to tell the exact numbers on the ground in Goma.

Tellingly some Congolese army soldiers in Goma who surrendered on Monday, did so by crossing over the border into Rwanda.

Since the conflict begun, President Kagame has repeatedly denied any involvement in supporting the M23 rebels, who are well equipped, well armed and well trained.

However, this response has noticeably shifted as accusations continue to grow with “overwhelming evidence” showing Rwanda’s support for the rebel group, according to Richard Moncrief, International Crisis Group’s project director for the Great Lakes

“The tone has changed to justification for defensive measures,” he told the BBC. “It has become harder to deny Rwanda’s support for M23.”

On Sunday, Rwanda’s foreign ministry said in a statement: “This fighting close to the Rwandan border continues to present a serious threat to Rwanda’s security and territorial integrity, and necessitates Rwanda’s sustained defensive posture.”

It said it was concerned by “misguided or manipulative” statements that lacked context about the conflict.

For Kagame, the context all comes down to the Rwandan genocide that took place over 100 days in 1994.

The ethnic Hutu militia involved in killing up to 800,000 people – the vast majority from the Tutsi community – fled to what is now DR Congo, some forming the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

This rebel group is still active in the notoriously unstable eastern DR Congo – and still includes some of those responsible for the genocide.

Kagame, who headed the rebel Tutsi force that ended the killing more than three decades ago, sees this “genocidal militia” as an existential threat.

His government has twice invaded DR Congo, saying it wants to stop Hutu rebel groups from staging cross-border attacks.

Earlier this month he called out his Congolese counterpart, Félix Tshisekedi, for failing to deal with the FDLR and talk to the M23, saying this was exacerbating the conflict.

Mr Moncrief believes that the targeting of Goma is more about making a political point as he says the M23 does not need the city strategically as it already “controls many more lucrative areas”.

“It is President Kagame’s way of exerting power over who is in charge of North Kivu,” said the Great Lakes expert.

Rwanda accused the military governor of North Kivu, who was killed in fighting last week, of collaborating with the FDLR.

The discovery of this kind of high-level collaboration, experts agree, would have been like a red flag to a bull for Rwanda.

The M23’s origins are tied to these tensions – it is the latest incarnation of a rebel group that says it is fighting for the interests of the minority Tutsi community in eastern DR Congo.

Its first uprising more than a decade ago ended with a peace deal – when its fighters disarmed and mainly moved into camps in Uganda.

But three years ago, they began leaving the camps saying the deal was not honoured and within a couple months was seizing territory.

The UN peacekeeping mission – first deployed in 1999 – is not mandated to go on the offensive. Two regional forces – an East African one followed by a southern African one – specially deployed over the last few years at the request of Tshisekedi have failed to contain the M23.

This gives an indication of the M23’s sophisticated operations.

According to the UN group of experts, this includes five months of training at the M23’s main base in Tchanzu, hilly terrain not far from Rwanda’s border, that incorporates courses on theory and ideology and then practical elements including “war tactics”, “engagement rules” and “bush tactics”.

It said Rwandan officers were often at the camp, where recruits, including children, were brought – some joining up on a voluntary basis, others forced to do so in a systematic operation where local chiefs had to provide conscripts.

The experts said Sultani Makenga, who once fought for Kagame in the early 1990s in Rwanda and is now the M23’s military chief, attended some of the passing-out ceremonies between 25 September and 31 October 2024 that involved 3,000 recruits.

Rwanda’s spokesperson Yolande Makolo did not address the question of whether Rwandan officers were in the M23 camp but she did deny the charges about child soldiers, telling the BBC last year: “The claim about recruiting minors in camps is absurd, it’s blatant information warfare against Rwanda.”

However UN expert reports detail how the M23’s strength has grown since May when numbers were put at around 3,000.

The experts estimate that between 3,000 and 4,000 Rwandan army troops are on the ground in DR Congo – saying it based this on authenticated photographs, drone footage, video recordings, testimonies and intelligence.

Captured M23 fighters said that the Rwandans were known as the “Friendly Force”, with the experts’ December report saying the English term was “generically used” even when interviewees were speaking in other languages.

They said these Rwandan special forces were there to train and support the rebels, and they did not interact with M23 regulars.

Rwanda’s ally Uganda, unhappy about another rebel group in DR Congo that threatens its security, has also been accused of helping the M23 – with its officers also spotted at Tchanzu. The UN experts say Uganda has also supplied weapons, hosted rebel leaders and allowed cross-border movements of M23 fighters – accusations Kampala denies.

Kagame recently expressed his frustration that after Tshisekedi came to power in 2019, his suggestion that Rwanda work alongside the Congolese army to tackle the FDLR had been rebuffed – unlike a joint offensive by DR Congo and Uganda against the Islamist Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels.

This may explain the re-emergence of the M23 in 2021 – with evidence showing Rwanda’s backing of the group continues to grow.

Clémentine de Montjoye, senior researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch, told the BBC that geolocated images placed Rwandan troops in Sake, a town just outside Goma last week.

The UN experts say the M23’s decision to capture the mining town of Rubaya, which fell to its forces in May, was “motivated by a strategic need to monopolise” the lucrative trade in coltan, which is used to make batteries for electric vehicles and mobile phones.

Its December report says the group now collects at least $800,000 (£643,000) a month from the taxation of coltan in Rubaya – and ensures that around 120 tonnes of the coveted mineral is sent directly to Rwanda every four weeks.

It includes satellite images to show how a road was widened by September on the Congolese side of the Kibumba border crossing to allow access for heavy trucks that were previously unable to use the route into Rwanda.

Ms De Montjoye explained how the advanced weapons being used by the M23 were not available to any other of the numerous armed groups operating in eastern DR Congo.

“Earlier last year, we documented how Rwandan forces, and M23 had fired 122mm rockets, hitting displacement camps,” she told the BBC.

“It’s certainly with the kind of military support that the M23 has received that they’ve been able to make such an advance [on Goma].”

The UN experts have documented many such examples, including the use of Israeli-made anti-tank guided missiles.

Mr Moncrief said the M23 was also using technology to interfere with Global Positioning System (GPS) that had stopped the Congolese army from flying drones it had acquired from China.

The UN experts said the “spoofing and jamming” near areas controlled by M23 and the Rwandan army had also disrupted other aircraft.

President Kagame has dismissed these UN reports, pouring scorn on their “expertise” and saying they ignore many outrages committed in DR Congo to focus on “imaginary problems” created by the M23.

The East African Community – currently headed by Kenya’s president – is now trying to mediate, though Tshisekedi has said he will not attend a hastily organised emergency summit.

Observers say Rwanda’s president will be telling any mediator that the FDLR is the only subject up for discussion as he is adamant their presence makes DR Congo an unsafe neighbour – something he reiterated at a press conference earlier this month.

“Honestly, for the last 30 years if anyone wanted to understand what the problems are [in DR Congo] and what solutions should be, you don’t even need to be an expert,” Kagame said.

You may also be interested in:

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American Airlines flight collides with helicopter in Washington DC

An American Airlines flight collided with a helicopter as it approached Washington DC’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, officials say.

It came down in the Potomac River, officials said, and search and rescue boats have been deployed to the area.

The Federal Aviation Administration said the Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet – which seats up to 78 people – collided with the helicopter as it was approaching the runway at around 21:00 EST (02:00 GMT) on Wednesday.

The plane was American Airlines Flight 5342 coming from Wichita, Kansas, according to the agency.

Takeoffs and landings have been halted at the airport as emergency personnel respond to the incident, the airport wrote in a post on X.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it was conducting an investigation into the crash.

The Metropolitan Police Department said a search and rescue operation was under way in the Potomac River with help from multiple agencies.

Local police said the helicopter involved in the crash did not belong to the police department.

Far-right vote on asylum rocks German parliament

Jessica Parker & Damien McGuinness

BBC News, Berlin

Germany’s parliament descended into heckles and recriminations on Wednesday after a “firewall” against working with the far-right cracked.

A non-binding motion calling for tougher border and asylum rules passed with support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). During the stormy session, politicians of various parties hurled criticism and blame at each other.

Conservative CDU leader Friedrich Merz, who tabled the plans, defended his actions as “necessary”. But Chancellor Olaf Scholz slammed the move as an “unforgivable mistake”.

Merz now plans to propose actual legislation on Friday – again with possible AfD backing – aimed at curbing immigration numbers and family reunion rights.

But his proposed measures are highly unlikely to come into effect this side of February’s snap election and – if they did – could clash with EU law.

Referring to the AfD’s support for the motion, the CDU leader told the Bundestag that a policy wasn’t wrong just because the “wrong people back it”.

“How many more children have to become victims of such acts of violence before you also believe there is a threat to public safety and order?” he asked.

The CDU leader – tipped to be Germany’s next chancellor because of his party’s leading position in the polls – has also insisted he has neither sought nor wants AfD support.

“Thinking about how the AfD fraction will cheer and their happy faces makes me feel uncomfortable,” he told lawmakers.

Chancellor Scholz – a social democrat whose coalition government collapsed last year – castigated Merz for his actions.

“Since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany over 75 years ago, there has always been a clear consensus among all democrats in our parliaments: we do not make common cause with the far right.”

Germany’s already fraught debate on immigration has flared up following a series of fatal attacks where the suspect is an asylum-seeker, most recently in the city of Aschaffenburg.

It has become a central issue in campaigning for the election, triggered by the collapse of Scholz’s governing coalition.

Wednesday’s CDU motion, supported by the AfD and liberal FDP, called for a “ban” on anyone entering Germany without the right documents – but it cannot compel the current minority government to act.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the firewall against the far-right in German political culture. Remembrance of the Holocaust plays a fundamental role in modern Germany.

Before Wednesday’s vote, the Bundestag held its yearly commemoration for the victims of the Nazis, during which 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Roman Schwarzmann addressed parliament.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier also delivered a speech to MPs, calling for the Nazis’ crimes never to be forgotten. There should be no “line drawn” ending our historical responsibility as Germans, he said.

This directly contradicts the policy of the AfD, which has criticised German memory culture and argued for a broader view of the country’s history.

That’s partly why so many were shocked when Friedrich Merz said last week that he didn’t care if the AfD supported his parliamentary motions or not.

This contradicts not only his previous statements, but also the official line of his party, which bans the conservatives from relying on the far-right in parliamentary votes.

Sections of the AfD have been classed as right-wing extremists by domestic intelligence, but the party is is currently polling second, although Merz has ruled out any kind of coalition with them.

This week, latest polls showed that support for the conservative CDU had slipped a couple of percentage points to 28%, while the AfD increased slightly to 20%.

AfD leader Alice Weidel has said the firewall amounts to an “anti-democratic cartel agreement” and has predicted it will crumble over the coming years.

Opening the door to leaning on support from the far-right is a gamble for Merz, who believes that his increasingly radical stance on migration will win back right-wingers who are tempted to vote for the AfD.

But in so doing, he could risk losing support from the centre.

With these latest parliamentary motions, Merz has definitively said goodbye to the era of his more centrist conservative predecessor Angela Merkel, who a decade ago famously said “wir schaffen das” or “we can do it” when Germany was faced with large numbers of migrants and refugees.

These motions are symbolic, signalling what the conservatives would like to do in power. But they are also a concrete signal to voters about who Merz appears prepared to accept support from.

Critics say he has broken his word on the firewall. No wonder the AfD cheered in parliament when the result was announced.

Five takeaways from RFK Jr’s first confirmation hearing

Nadine Yousif and Mike Wendling

BBC News
Watch: Protesters, McDonald’s and onesies – RFK Jr’s confirmation hearing

President Donald Trump’s pick for US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was questioned by senators at his first confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

The post of health secretary is a key federal government position that oversees public health issues, including medical research, food safety and public welfare programmes.

Kennedy, who had been a vocal vaccine sceptic, was asked to explain his past comments on the Covid-19 vaccine and other immunisations. He also was asked about his views on abortion, and his opinions on the US food industry.

His hearing was interrupted by shouting protesters, but he also received loud applause when he promised he would make America healthy again, a slogan used by the new administration.

Here are five takeaways from Kennedy’s first hearing.

Delving into vaccine comments

Throughout the hearing, senators brought up Kennedy’s past comments about vaccination.

A group he ran for eight years, Children’s Health Defense, repeatedly cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccinations, and continues to push the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism.

Kennedy insisted during the hearing that he was not anti-vaccine, and that he merely supports more stringent studies and safety tests for injections.

He said he supports the current childhood vaccination schedule and insisted he was not a conspiracy theorist.

“That’s a pejorative that’s applied to me to keep me from asking difficult questions about powerful interests,” he told senators.

However, they zeroed in on his past comments, such as a quote taken from a 2023 podcast when he said: “I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”

He defended himself at the hearing, saying his words were taken out of context and that he was going to go on to say “for all people”. But, Kennedy said, he was interrupted by the host, Lex Fridman, who said: “Those are big words”.

In the podcast interview, Kennedy went on to outline what he called safety problems with several common vaccines, including the polio vaccine, and later called vaccines “inherently unsafe”, apparently quoting former President Ronald Reagan.

‘If you like a McDonald’s cheeseburger …’

A key point during Kennedy’s opening remarks and throughout the hearing was his criticism of processed foods in the US, which he said help drive the country’s obesity epidemic.

He promised to scrutinise chemical additives in food, and said he would work to remove the financial conflicts of interest in US agencies and the food industry.

“We will reverse the chronic disease epidemic and put the nation back on the road to health,” he told the committee.

Asked why he was a big advocate of nutrition-based disease prevention, Kennedy said that this generation has seen an “explosion” of autoimmune and allergic diseases, as well as diabetes.

He later clarified that he does not want to take away access to processed food for Americans.

“If you like a McDonald’s cheeseburger or a Diet Coke – which my boss loves – you should be able to get them,” he said, referencing Trump’s well-known affinity for the American fast-food chain.

‘Every abortion is a tragedy,’ Kennedy told senators

Kennedy, who previously stated that he was in favour of abortion rights, was asked about his stance on the issue by both Republican and Democratic senators.

Republican Senator James Lankford asked Kennedy whether he plans to bring back conscience protections for doctors who do not want to perform the procedure because of religious or moral beliefs.

Kenney responded by saying that forcing medical providers who believe abortion is murder to carry out the procedure “doesn’t make any sense”.

Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator, then asked Kennedy about his past comments, in which he expressed support for abortion rights and said that governments should not be involved in a woman’s right to choose.

Kennedy started his response by saying: “I believe every abortion is a tragedy.”

He later said he agreed with Trump that access to abortion should be controlled by individual states. Kennedy vowed to put his more liberal views aside, saying, “I serve at the pleasure of the president. I’m going to implement his policies.”

This stance drew scrutiny from Democrats, including senator Maggie Hassan, who accused Kennedy of “selling out” his pro-choice values in order to secure President Trump’s nomination.

Senator Sanders pushes over ‘unvaxxed’ onesies

Kennedy was asked by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a long-time advocate of universal healthcare, whether he believes the US should “guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right.”

He responded by saying he cannot answer the question so simply.

Kennedy posed a hypothetical situation of a 20-year cigarette smoker with lung cancer, then pondered whether that individual should have the same healthcare access as someone who does not smoke.

The smoker, Kennedy said, would be “taking from the pool”, referencing general health care costs.

Sanders then criticised the pharmaceutical industry, saying that in the US patients pay more than people in European countries for the same drugs. He asked Kennedy if he was willing to “end that absurdity.”

Kennedy responded: “We should end that disparity”.

Later, Sanders asked whether he supports baby clothes bearing anti-vaccine slogans. Some are sold by Children’s Health Defense, the organisation that Kennedy founded.

“Are you supportive of these onesies?” Sanders asked Kennedy, showing images of them to the rest of the committee.

Kennedy responded that he has no oversight of the organisation and resigned from his position there.

Watch as Sanders grills Kennedy over anti-vaccine onesies

Some Republicans cheer Kennedy on

As is typical, the nature and tone of the questions often differed depending on which side of the political aisle they were coming from.

Democratic senators largely grilled him on his past anti-vaccine comments, his promotion of misinformation on health issues, and his knowledge of the US healthcare system, including Medicare and Medicaid.

Some Republicans, however, focused their questions on Kennedy’s advocacy for eradicating chronic disease in children and his criticism of the US food industry.

One Republican senator in particular, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, said that Kennedy was the “answer to his prayers,” and that he was “awesome”.

Johnson himself has been criticised over anti-vaccine misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As proceedings ended, Republican Senator and Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo gave Kennedy his stamp of approval.

“I think you have come through well, and deserve to be confirmed,” he told Kennedy.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, on the other hand, accused Kennedy of delivering a “word salad” and ducking issues raised about his past anti-vaccine remarks.

“I find your presentation to be both untrustworthy and unprepared,” Wyden said.

Wednesday’s hearing was before the Senate’s finance committee. Kennedy faces a second confirmation hearing on Thursday before the health, education, labour and pensions committee, where he will face more questions from senators.

The committees will then vote on his nomination before it can pass to the whole Senate for consideration.

Trump says US will send some migrants to Guantanamo Bay

Bernd Debusmann Jr

BBC News, White House
Will Grant

BBC Mexico, Central America and Cuba Correspondent
Watch: Trump directs construction of Guantanamo Bay detention centre for 30,000 migrants

US President Donald Trump has ordered the construction of a migrant detention facility in Guantanamo Bay which he said would hold as many as 30,000 people.

He said the facility at the US Navy base in Cuba, which would be separate from its high-security military prison, would house “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people”.

Guantanamo Bay has long been used to house immigrants, a practice that has been criticised by some human rights groups.

Later on Wednesday, Trump’s “border tsar” Tom Homan said the existing facility there would be expanded and run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

He said the migrants could be transported there directly after being intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, and that the “highest” detention standards would be applied.

It is unclear how much the facility will cost or when it would be completed.

Cuba’s government swiftly condemned the plan, accusing the US of torture and illegal detention on “occupied” land.

Trump’s announcement came as he signed the so-called Laken Riley Act into law, which requires undocumented immigrants who are arrested for theft or violent crimes to be held in jail pending trial.

The bill, named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan migrant, was approved by Congress last week, an early legislative win for the administration.

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At a signing ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Trump said the new Guantanamo executive order would instruct the departments of defence and homeland security to “begin preparing” the 30,000-bed facility.

“Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back,” he said of migrants. “So we’re going to send them to Guantanamo… it’s a tough place to get out.”

According to Trump, the facility will double the US capacity to hold undocumented migrants.

The US has already been using a facility in Guantanamo – known as the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center (GMOC) – for decades and through various administrations, both Republican and Democrat.

In a 2024 report, the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) accused the government of secretly holding migrants there in “inhumane” conditions indefinitely after detaining them at sea.

The GMOC has principally housed migrants picked up at sea and was recently the subject of a Freedom of Information request by the American Civil Liberties Union for the disclosure of records about the site.

The Biden Administration responded that it “is not a detention facility and none of the migrants there are detained”.

The Trump administration, however, says the planned expanded facility is very much intended as a detention centre.

It will reportedly ask Congress to fund the expansion of the existing detention facility as part of a spending bill Republicans are working to assemble.

When asked by reporters at the White House, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said only that the money would be allotted through “reconciliation and appropriations”.

The military prison on Guantanamo has, for decades, held detainees taken into US custody after the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001.

At its peak it held hundreds of prisoners, and several Democratic presidents including Barack Obama have vowed to close it. There are 15 prisoners currently being held there.

News of the facility’s expansion was met with swift condemnation by the Cuban government, which has long considered Guantanamo Bay to be “occupied” and has denounced the existence of a US naval base on the island ever since Fidel Castro swept to power in 1959.

“In act act of brutality, the new government of the US has announced it will incarcerate, at the naval base at Guantanamo, located in illegally occupied Cuban territory, thousands of forcibly expulsed migrants, who will be located near known prisons of torture and illegal detention,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote on X.

The Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodriguez, said the announcement showed “contempt for the human condition and international law”.

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Pentagon strips Gen Mark Milley of US security detail and clearance

Ana Faguy

BBC News

The Pentagon has revoked the security detail and clearance for retired general Mark Milley, a former top US military commander who has been critical of President Donald Trump.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the move as one of his first acts in office, asking officials to investigate Gen Milley’s “conduct” and review his military grade.

Gen Milley previously served as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during Trump’s first term, but later criticised his former boss, and was quoted calling him a “fascist”.

Since returning to office, Trump has revoked security protections for a handful of former officials with whom he has clashed, including former top health official Anthony Fauci.

Trump previously accused Gen Milley of treason for phone calls he held with his Chinese counterpart during the final weeks of his first Trump presidency, including in the wake of a riot at the US Capitol building by Trump’s supporters in 2021.

Gen Milley reportedly used one of the calls to reassure China that the US would not launch a nuclear strike. On social media the president described those calls as “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”.

Gen Milley, however, testified the calls were coordinated with other defence secretaries.

It was in Bob Woodward’s book War, published last year, that Gen Milley was quoted calling Trump “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country”.

And in 2023, when giving his final speech as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Milley said the military did not take an oath to a “wannabe dictator”.

The comment was seen by many as a reference to Trump, the man who nominated him for the job in the first place.

Referring to Gen Milley’s alleged undercutting of Trump, the defence department’s new chief of staff said on Wednesday: “Undermining the chain of command is corrosive to our national security.

“And restoring accountability is a priority for the Defense Department under President Trump’s leadership.”

Ahead of Trump’s return to the White House last week, outgoing President Joe Biden issued Gen Milley – and a handful of others, including Fauci – a pre-emptive pardon in case they should face retribution from Trump.

Biden’s statement said the pardons should “not be mistaken as an acknowledgment” that any of those covered “engaged in any wrongdoing”.

Gen Milley thanked Biden for the move and said he did not want to spend the rest of his life “fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights”.

“I do not want to put my family, my friends, and those with whom I served through the resulting distraction, expense, and anxiety,” he said.

The news that Gen Milley was being stripped of his security detail and security clearance was confirmed in a statement to the BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General has also been told to “conduct an inquiry into the facts and circumstances surrounding Gen Milley’s conduct so that the Secretary may determine whether it is appropriate to reopen his military grade review determination”, the statement said.

Trump’s new administration has also revoked security protections for his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his former National Security Adviser John Bolton and his former Iran envoy Brian Hook.

In the hours after Trump’s second inauguration, Trump’s officials also removed from the Pentagon a portrait depicting Gen Milley’s as chair of the joint chiefs of staff.

Trump attacks Fed after no change in interest rates

Natalie Sherman

BBC News

US President Donald Trump renewed his attacks on the US central bank, hours after officials left interest rates unchanged despite his public calls for them to cut.

In a social media post, he accused the Federal Reserve and its chairman Jerome Powell of mishandling the economy, saying they had “failed to stop the problem they created with Inflation”.

The Fed left key interest rate unchanged at its January meeting on Wednesday, in a range of 4.25% to 4.5%, hitting pause after a string of cuts late last year.

Powell said the bank was not “in a hurry” to cut more, given significant uncertainty about where the economy might be headed.

Trump has promised significant changes to the US economy, with calls for sweeping tariffs, mass deportation of illegal migrants, and big cuts to taxes and regulations.

Some economists have warned that some of those policies could put upward pressure on prices, at least in the short-term, concerns Powell said were shared by some at the bank.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick to lead the Commerce Department, defended plans for tariffs and dismissed concerns about the impact on prices at his nomination hearing on Thursday.

But Powell said officials still had little sense of how those plans would shake out.

“The committee is very much in the mode of waiting to see what will happen,” he said at a press conference to discuss the interest rate decision.

The Fed hiked borrowing costs significantly starting in 2022 in an effort to stabilise prices, which were then rising at a pace not seen in decades.

Inflation, the rate of price increases, has since fallen to 2.9% as of December, but remains above the bank’s 2% target.

Trump’s campaign promises included calls for lower interest rates, which would bring relief to borrowers.

It has sparked debate about whether he will respect the tradition of Fed independence, which is meant to keep it focused on the long term health of the US economy and insulated from politics.

Powell told reporters that he had had “no contact” with Trump and the bank was focused on the data in setting rates.

But questions Powell faced about how the Fed is handling a new order from the White House to cancel diversity programmes – and why it had withdrawn from a global group of central banks focused on the risks of climate change to the financial system – underscored the challenges he will face keeping the bank above the political fray.

He said the Fed was reviewing the president’s order and said the group’s focus had expanded into areas too distant from the Fed’s.

“I’m aware of how it can look but it really was not driven by politics,” he said.

How a US freeze upended global aid in a matter of days

Tom Bateman

State Department correspondent

It was early Saturday, when hundreds of staff who operate a sprawling humanitarian operation at the Al-Hol displacement camp in northeast Syria were given a clear message: “Stop work.”

The despatch was as abrupt as it was distressing for those who knew the daily work of stabilising the site, which holds 40,000 people, mostly women and children, displaced from areas previously controlled by the Islamic State group.

Water, sanitation and security were all upended at the huge camp, said a senior humanitarian worker familiar with its operation. Another facility in Syria’s north-east, Al Roj, was also hit by the sudden order. IS suspects are held near both sites.

“All of a sudden, you [risked] real instability and violence rising, as well as, obviously, former ISIS on the street,” said Susan Reichle, a retired USAID Foreign Service officer.

The dramatic stop-work order came after President Trump froze all foreign assistance provided by the United States, by far the world’s biggest aid donor, on his first day back in office, calling for a review to ensure it abided by his “America First” foreign policy.

For days, aid officials and global charities had waited to understand the implications of that order. On Friday night, its scale became clear.

A leaked memo revealed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was placing a 90-day halt on all existing foreign assistance – with the only exceptions for emergency food aid, and for military funding for Israel and Egypt.

As news of the freeze filtered through the ranks of the international aid community, stop-work notices began to arrive.

Programmes ranging from water sanitation projects to vaccination initiatives were thrown into chaos as contractors tried to understand the implications of the directive. BRAC, the world’s largest non-profit, told the BBC that 3.5 million people would be affected by programmes it had suspended in four countries.

It felt “like an earthquake across the aid sector, with life-saving programmes in ruins”, one veteran international aid worker told the BBC.

Those who support the freeze of US aid programmes, worth around $70bn per year, say they are vastly bloated, with Washington carrying too much of the weight compared to other Western nations. And they argue the government sends far too much money abroad that would be better spent on Americans at home.

The administration has made clear that it specifically opposes any projects supporting diversity and inclusion, transgender rights, family planning, abortion access and other issues – some of which have been long-targeted by Republican administrations. The freeze, they say, is designed to create an opportunity to root out wasteful spending.

“Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions,” Mr Rubio has said. “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”

The programmes affected, however, have been vast, triggering widespread shock and criticism in many parts of a global system intertwined with US funding. Aid contractors fearful of losing further funding have mostly been voicing these concerns privately, though some have spoken out.

On Monday evening, staff who work on the US programme countering the global spread of HIV could no longer log into their computer systems, according to Dr. Atul Gawande, former Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID, and an expert on the project.

Then-President Bush launched the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar) in 2003. It now employs more than 250,000 doctors, nurses and other staff across 55 countries distributing anti-viral medication and doing critical preventative work. It is credited with saving millions of lives and suppressing the spread of HIV and Aids.

“The program is shuttered…. Services are shut,” Dr Gawande told the BBC on Tuesday, saying clinics that served 20 million people with HIV were affected.

Paul Jordan, who works at the European Institute of Peace on repatriating foreign citizens from Al-Hol and Al-Roj, said much of his work funded by Washington had stopped immediately.

“In terms of immediate impact I’ve never seen anything as significant as this before,” he told a UK parliamentary committee on Tuesday, adding the camps were set to be “in limbo” for months while the review was carried out.

“What that led to was in the last few days basically nothing being delivered within the camps,” he said. “There was no camp administration, very little security, food wasn’t delivered.”

Later on Tuesday, as aid organisations clamoured for exemptions from the US government to continue programmes, the first signs emerged that the State Department was trying to limit the impact of its sweeping freeze.

The definition of “life-saving humanitarian assistance” allowed to continue was broadened beyond emergency food aid to include “core life-saving medicine”, medical services, food, shelter and other provisions.

That guidance has reportedly seen Pepfar programmes restart, but whether preventative drugs – rather than just HIV treatments – are covered remains unclear.

Dr Gawande, who was appointed to a senior role in USAID under the Biden administration, said other programmes remained up in the air – including work combatting an Mpox outbreak in West Africa, bird flu monitoring across dozens of countries and initiatives targeting fentanyl trafficking.

“It was immediate and my immediate reaction was, this is catastrophic,” he said of the effects of the freeze.

Asked about those specific programmes,, a State Department spokesperson said: “We are judiciously reviewing all the waivers submitted. The Secretary of State has the ultimate responsibility…to protect America’s investments.”

Blumont, the US contractor that coordinates aid work at Al-Hol and Al-Roj, said it received a waiver from the State Department late Monday allowing it to continue “critical activities” at the camps for two more weeks. However, it has no certainty beyond that time.

Asked by the BBC about the situation at the Syria camps and other projects, the State Department said “critical national security waivers have been granted,” but didn’t specify whether any related to Syria.

The new State Department guidance also said: “This waiver does not apply to activities that involve abortions, family planning conferences, administrative costs… gender or DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life saving assistance.”

‘The only way to scrutinize and prevent waste’

Back in Washington, USAID headquarters have been roiled by the aid freeze.

Staff had been warned not to try and circumvent the directives and given strict orders not to communicate about the freeze outside the agency. An internal memo sternly warned that any breach would “result in disciplinary action”.

Unnamed staff have since been accused of trying to “circumvent” the president’s executive order and dozens of senior officials have been placed on administrative leave.

In the halls of the agency, picture frames that once displayed images of on-the-ground projects are now empty.

The world of US foreign assistance had been upended in a matter of days, said Dr Joia Mukherjee, an infectious diseases doctor from Harvard Medical School and the charity Partners In Health who helped advise on the creation of Pepfar.

“It’s taking 20 years of goodwill and turning it into an instrument of terror, when people feel like if they touch the drugs, if they see a patient, they might get fired,” she said.

As criticism mounted, on Wednesday, the State Department said the 90-day pause and review of foreign aid was “already paying dividends” to the US and its people.

“We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot,” it said.

Explaining why it was necessary to order a temporary suspension for all projects, rather than a more targeted approach, the State Department said: “It is impossible to evaluate programs on autopilot because the participants – both inside and outside of government – have little to no incentive to share programmatic-level details so long as the dollars continue to flow.”

It added: “A temporary pause, with commonsense waivers for truly life-threatening situations, is the only way to scrutinize and prevent waste.”

‘Sleepless nights ahead of me’

Thousands of kilometres away, in the Ugandan town of Masindi, Teddy Ruge is still grappling with the fall-out. He was told to “stop work” on Monday night, and the waivers given so far don’t seem to allow him to restart his US government-funded farming project.

Mr Ruge employs small-plot farmers who grow a nutrient rich leaf called Moringa. The plant is sold to North America and Europe where it is used to fortify bread and other foods.

His farmers rely on a wage of around $70 per month, their incomes bolsted by a yearly grant of around $250,000 from USAID.

But that lifeline appeared to fall away, exactly a week after Mr Trump’s executive order.

“We were actually preparing to have a meeting with all the farmers to talk about the new season and what to plant – a planning meeting,” Mr Ruge told the BBC. “But now it’s more of a funeral,”

He still doesn’t know whether he is allowed to continue employing the farmers or if they can show up to work.

“From what I’m reading, our program is at jeopardy of being permanently canceled because it’s at the edge of climate resilience and green manufacturing – which are not exactly at the top of the list of Trump’s priorities,” said Mr Ruge.

“It’s really disheartening. So I have a few sleepless nights ahead of me.”

Meta to pay $25m to settle Trump lawsuit over ban

Peter Hoskins & Natalie Sherman

BBC News

US President Donald Trump has signed a legal settlement that will see Facebook and Instagram owner Meta pay out roughly $25m (£20m).

Trump sued the social media giant and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2021 over the suspension of his accounts after the 6 January Capitol riots that year.

In July 2024, Meta lifted the final restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the lead up to US presidential elections.

The settlement was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Around $22m of the settlement will go to a fund for Trump’s presidential library.

The balance will be used to cover legal costs and the other plaintiffs who signed on to the lawsuit. Meta will not admit wrongdoing.

The company suspended Trump’s accounts in 2021 and said that it would ban him from the platforms for at least two years.

After Trump’s election victory in November, Mr Zuckerberg visited his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. The move was seen as evidence of an apparent thawing in their once frosty relations.

The following month, Meta donated $1m to an inauguration fund for Trump. Mr Zuckerberg was a guest at Trump’s inauguration at the US Capitol earlier this month – seated near other global tech billionaires.

For years, Trump had been highly critical of Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook – calling the platform “anti-Trump” in 2017.

Their relationship soured further after the president’s accounts were banned. He called Facebook an “enemy of the people” in March 2024.

Twitter, which is now named X and owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, also “permanently” suspended the president from its platform.

After buying the firm for $44bn, Mr Musk reinstated Trump’s account in 2022 after a poll he ran on the site narrowly backed the move.

Separately on Wednesday, Meta defended its $65bn investment in artificial intelligence (AI) after tech stocks were rocked in the wake of Chinese AI app DeepSeek’s sudden rise.

Mr Zuckerberg told investors there was a lot to learn from DeepSeek, but it was too soon to have “a really strong opinion” about what the app means for the future of AI.

“If anything, I think the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is right thing for us to be focused on,” he added.

Many US tech stocks sank this week after DeepSeek surged in popularity, though Meta’s has bucked this trend by rising.

The stock was up in after hours trading after it posted better than expected financial results on Wednesday.

However, questions remain about what advances in Chinese AI will mean for the US AI market generally considering DeepSeek’s claim it was developed at a fraction of the cost of its US rivals.

Mr Zuckerberg said in a call to investors following the results on Wednesday that DeepSeek’s rise strengthened his conviction in his company’s embrace of “open-source” AI.

Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, took a different tack from many US companies by releasing an open source AI model for free.

Mr Zuckerberg on Wednesday said he thought that approach was important to keeping the US at the cutting edge, as countries around the world compete to become the key players in the still-emerging industry.

“There’s going to be an open source standard globally and I think for our own national advantage it’s important that it’s an American standard,” he said.

“We take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using.”

‘Major advantage’

Meta last week announced it was planning to spend as much as $65bn this year to expand its AI infrastructure.

Mr Zuckerberg on Wednesday acknowledged ongoing debate about how best to direct AI investments, but told investors that for his firm, which serves billions of people globally, big investments made sense.

“I would bet the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage – for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale we want to,” he said.

He said it would also be a critical year for the company in other areas, saying he this year would be key to determining whether sales of the company’s smart glasses will take off as hoped.

Mr Zuckerberg has said he expects all glasses to be replaced by smart glasses within a decade, a prediction he repeated on Wednesday.

He also spoke of plans to revive the “cultural relevance” of Facebook, the social media sight that launched his fortune but which has fallen out of favour compared to other offerings such as Instagram and tikTok.

Mr Zuckerberg also defended his recently announced decision to end fact-checking, saying he thought plans for community notes would be more effective.

He said the company had seen no hit to advertiser demand as a result of its changes.

It reported more than $48bn in revenue in the last three months of 2024, up 21% from the same period the prior year.

Though AI spending has weighed on the company, it still reported quarterly profit of more than $20bn, up 49% from a year ago.

DeepSeek: The Chinese AI app that has the world talking

Kelly Ng, Brandon Drenon, Tom Gerken and Marc Cieslak

BBC News

A Chinese-made artificial intelligence (AI) model called DeepSeek has shot to the top of Apple Store’s downloads, stunning investors and sinking some tech stocks.

Its latest version was released on 20 January, quickly impressing AI experts before it got the attention of the entire tech industry – and the world.

US President Donald Trump said it was a “wake-up call” for US companies who must focus on “competing to win”.

What makes DeepSeek so special is the company’s claim that it was built at a fraction of the cost of industry-leading models like OpenAI – because it uses fewer advanced chips.

That possibility caused chip-making giant Nvidia to shed almost $600bn (£482bn) of its market value on Monday – the biggest one-day loss in US history.

DeepSeek also raises questions about Washington’s efforts to contain Beijing’s push for tech supremacy, given that one of its key restrictions has been a ban on the export of advanced chips to China.

Beijing, however, has doubled down, with President Xi Jinping declaring AI a top priority. And start-ups like DeepSeek are crucial as China pivots from traditional manufacturing such as clothes and furniture to advanced tech – chips, electric vehicles and AI.

So what do we know about DeepSeek?

What is artificial intelligence?

AI can, at times, make a computer seem like a person.

A machine uses the technology to learn and solve problems, typically by being trained on massive amounts of information and recognising patterns.

The end result is software that can have conversations like a person or predict people’s shopping habits.

In recent years, it has become best known as the tech behind chatbots such as ChatGPT – and DeepSeek – also known as generative AI.

These programs again learn from huge swathes of data, including online text and images, to be able to make new content.

But these tools can create falsehoods and often repeat the biases contained within their training data.

Millions of people use tools such as ChatGPT to help them with everyday tasks like writing emails, summarising text, and answering questions – and others even use them to help with basic coding and studying.

What is DeepSeek?

DeepSeek is the name of a free AI-powered chatbot, which looks, feels and works very much like ChatGPT.

That means it’s used for many of the same tasks, though exactly how well it works compared to its rivals is up for debate.

It is reportedly as powerful as OpenAI’s o1 model – released at the end of last year – in tasks including mathematics and coding.

Like o1, R1 is a “reasoning” model. These models produce responses incrementally, simulating a process similar to how humans reason through problems or ideas. It uses less memory than its rivals, ultimately reducing the cost to perform tasks.

Like many other Chinese AI models – Baidu’s Ernie or Doubao by ByteDance – DeepSeek is trained to avoid politically sensitive questions.

When the BBC asked the app what happened at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, DeepSeek did not give any details about the massacre, a taboo topic in China.

It replied: “I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.”

Chinese government censorship is a huge challenge for its AI aspirations internationally. But DeepSeek’s base model appears to have been trained via accurate sources while introducing a layer of censorship or withholding certain information via an additional safeguarding layer.

Deepseek says it has been able to do this cheaply – researchers behind it claim it cost $6m (£4.8m) to train, a fraction of the “over $100m” alluded to by OpenAI boss Sam Altman when discussing GPT-4.

DeepSeek’s founder reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, which have been banned from export to China since September 2022.

Some experts believe this collection – which some estimates put at 50,000 – led him to build such a powerful AI model, by pairing these chips with cheaper, less sophisticated ones.

The same day DeepSeek’s AI assistant became the most-downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store in the US, it was hit with “large-scale malicious attacks”, the company said, causing the company to temporary limit registrations.

It was also hit by outages on its website on Monday.

Watch: What is DeepSeek? The BBC’s AI correspondent explains

Who is behind DeepSeek?

DeepSeek was founded in December 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, and released its first AI large language model the following year.

Not much is known about Liang, who graduated from Zhejiang University with degrees in electronic information engineering and computer science. But he now finds himself in the international spotlight.

He was recently seen at a meeting hosted by China’s premier Li Qiang, reflecting DeepSeek’s growing prominence in the AI industry.

Unlike many American AI entrepreneurs who are from Silicon Valley, Mr Liang also has a background in finance.

He is the CEO of a hedge fund called High-Flyer, which uses AI to analyse financial data to make investment decisons – what is called quantitative trading. In 2019 High-Flyer became the first quant hedge fund in China to raise over 100 billion yuan ($13m).

In a speech he gave that year, Liang said, “If the US can develop its quantitative trading sector, why not China?”

In a rare interview last year, he said China’s AI sector “cannot remain a follower forever”.

He went on: “Often, we say there’s a one or two-year gap between Chinese and American AI, but the real gap is between originality and imitation. If this doesn’t change, China will always be a follower.”

Asked why DeepSeek’s model surprised so many in Silicon Valley, he said: “Their surprise stems from seeing a Chinese company join their game as an innovator, not just a follower – which is what most Chinese firms are accustomed to.”

Australia’s science minister has raised some doubts over the security of the app.

“There are a lot of questions that will need to be answered in time on quality, consumer preferences, data and privacy management,” Ed Husic told ABC.

“I would be very careful about that. These type of issues need to be weighed up carefully.”

How are US companies like Nvidia hit?

DeepSeek’s achievements undercut the belief that bigger budgets and top-tier chips are the only ways of advancing AI, a prospect which has created uncertainty about the future of high-performance chips.

“DeepSeek has proven that cutting-edge AI models can be developed with limited compute resources,” says Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research.

“In contrast, OpenAI, valued at $157 billion, faces scrutiny over its ability to maintain a dominant edge in innovation or justify its massive valuation and expenditures without delivering significant returns.”

The company’s possibly lower costs roiled financial markets on 27 January, leading the tech-heavy Nasdaq to fall more than 3% in a broad sell-off that included chip makers and data centres around the world.

Nvidia appears to have been hit the worst as its stock price plunged 17% on Monday before slowly beginning to recover on Tuesday, roughly 4% by midday.

The chip maker had been the most valuable company in the world, when measured by market capitalisation, but fell to third place after Apple and Microsoft on Monday, when its market value shrank to $2.9tn from $3.5tn, Forbes reported.

DeepSeek is a privately owned company, which means investors cannot buy shares of stock on any of the major exchanges.

Watch: DeepSeek AI bot responds to BBC question about Tiananmen Square

China is celebrating DeepSeek’s impact

DeepSeek’s rise is a huge boost for the Chinese government, which has been seeking to build tech independent of the West.

While the Communist Party is yet to comment, Chinese state media was eager to note that Silicon Valley and Wall Street giants were “losing sleep” over DeepSeek, which was “overturning” the US stock market.

“In China, DeepSeek’s advances are being celebrated as a testament to the country’s growing technological prowess and self-reliance,” says Marina Zhang, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

“The company’s success is seen as a validation of China’s Innovation 2.0, a new era of homegrown technological leadership driven by a younger generation of entrepreneurs.”

But she also warned that this sentiment may also lead to “tech isolationism”.

Renée Zellweger: ‘Fingers crossed’ this is not the end of Bridget Jones

Charlotte Gallagher

BBC News
Reporting fromLeicester Square, London

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy has been billed as the fourth and final film in the series – but its star Renée Zellweger says she has her “fingers crossed” that is not the case.

Zellweger has played our favourite hapless heroine for more than 20 years and seems as attached to her as ever, calling the character an “old friend”.

Speaking at the film’s premiere in London’s Leicester Square on Wednesday evening, the actress says she is “in denial” and “it hasn’t sunk in yet” that the franchise may be coming to a close.

“Let me live in denial for a little longer”, she laughs.

Yet, while there are no plans to take the Bridget Jones story any further, author Helen Fielding is not completely ruling out the prospect.

The new film sees Bridget living as a widow, becoming a single mother and tackling modern dating.

The story is partially inspired by Fielding’s own loss. Her husband, Kevin Curran, died in 2016.

Zellweger says the film is a “beautiful story and really the most personal for Helen. She is sharing about her own experiences about loss, grief and finding new happiness, it’s a pretty special one”.

She adds she has always felt “really, really lucky to get the part” and “was just trying not to get fired”.

Watch: Touching pink carpet reunion for Bridget Jones’ stars

It is obvious there is a real love between the cast too as Zellweger and her on screen father, Jim Broadbent, embrace on the red carpet.

Hugh Grant was also at the premiere. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy sees the return of Grant’s roguish anti-hero, Daniel Cleaver.

He was declared dead at the start of the last film, Bridget Jones’s Baby – only to be found alive just before the final credits.

We also see a slightly softer side of this notorious womaniser and cad in the new film.

New love interests

But Bridget’s love interests in the film are brand new characters.

One Day’s Leo Woodall plays her Tinder match who at 29 is (cough) a little younger than 51 year old Bridget.

Bafta winner, Chiwetel Ejiofor, plays a buttoned-up teacher Bridget encounters on the school run and a rain-soaked class trip.

Woodall says although he felt “a lot of pressure” going into the film he knew it was going to be “relatively easy” as soon as he met Zellweger as she was “joyous and generous and kind and good and obviously a wonderful actor”.

On whether he has had any clumsy Bridget Jones moments himself, Woodhall says “he falls over quite a lot”.

Ejiofor, who is mainly known for grittier roles in films like 12 Years a slave and American Gangster says the film is a “different speed” to his usual projects.

But adds it was lovely to film: “Even the set is so warm, everyone is so excited about telling the story”.

Gen Z appeal

For Fielding the success of Bridget Jones lies in its “emotionally honesty”.

“When I first wrote Bridget it was an anonymous column in the Independent which I thought would be stopped after six weeks for being too silly,” she says.

“That freed me up to be honest in a way I could never have been otherwise and I think that’s what people related to.

“I thought I was the only person who felt like that and it turns out for a lot of people there is a huge gap between how you feel you are supposed to be and how you really are.”

Bridget was a character created in the 1990s and Fielding says she is “really touched” that Gen Z have also embraced her.

“When I do a signing half the audience are Gen Z’s. They’re the first generation who have lived through a world crisis for ages. They’re very similar to Bridget in their emotional fragility, their ability to share and cry on TikTok.

“And they have their same little rituals, Bridget has ice cream and vodka and they have sleep routines and things like that.

“I think they’re a really interesting and lovely generation. I can’t wait until they start writing more novels.”

Inspired by Keir Starmer?

It has long been rumoured that the book’s character of human rights barrister Mark Darcy – played by Colin Firth in the previous Bridget Jones films – was based on barrister turned prime minister Sir Keir Starmer.

So is there any truth in this?

“All I’ll say about that is that if you look at early pictures of Colin in the film and pictures of Keir Starmer in a wig, they’re awfully similar,” Fielding says, with a smile.

So we may never know that for sure, but could there be another Bridget Jones book and film?

“Never say never,” Fielding adds.

UK’s first smartphone video call via satellite made from Welsh mountain

Zoe Kleinman

Technology editor@zsk

Vodafone has carried out what it says is the UK’s first satellite-enabled smartphone video call.

The company says the call – made from a mountain in Ceredigion, west Wales – is part of the process of adding satellite connectivity to its UK phone network by the end of the year, and across Europe in 2026.

Vodafone boss Margherita Della Valle says it could eliminate “not spots” – places without mobile signal – which regulator Ofcom estimates can be found in 9% of the UK.

However, experts say regulatory hurdles will need to be cleared and many more satellites launched for the service to take off.

And astronomers warn the increasing number of satellites in orbit is making it harder to study space.

How does it work?

Satellite connectivity enables ordinary phones to operate as normal with full internet access when there is otherwise no coverage.

Many iPhones and Android devices already have emergency satellite connectivity, but it is currently text message based.

Vodafone says it has now gone further with a video call between a company engineer in a not spot in west Wales, and Ms Della Valle.

“It’s a really important moment because we are opening the door to universal connectivity, to connecting people in the UK, wherever they are,” Ms Della Valle said.

She likened the satellites to “antennas in the sky” but said they would not replace existing masts and towers – instead providing an additional layer of coverage.

Phone users will not require any extra equipment, the firm says, as it expands the service.

It does not yet know what the costs will be for customers.

It has partnered with a satellite company called AST SpaceMobile, which has relatively few satellites in orbit – Monday’s test had to be carefully timed around one being in the right place, at the right time.

“The challenges really are the fact that it is a relatively new satellite company,” said Luke Pearce, from analysts CCS Insight.

“They’ve got a few satellites up in the air as of last year, but they really need to build out a full constellation to be able to offer consistent coverage all of the time.”

Mr Pearce said the issue of how such satellite services would be regulated still needed to be resolved – something that also affects rival providers, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Ofcom has previously said it plans to consult on the matter in “early 2025”.

Is there space in space?

The prospect of more of the low earth satellites needed for mobile communications has been criticised by astronomers.

“The international astronomy community is concerned by the rapidly increasing number of satellites in low Earth orbit, which can contaminate astronomical images by leaving bright light streaks in them,” the IAU Centre for the Protection of the Dark Sky told the BBC.

Others have raised similar concerns, with astrophysicist Dr Megan Argo saying the increase in satellites is “making it increasingly difficult to study the universe outside our own atmosphere”.

“As well as being bright visually, satellites are relatively warm so shine in the infrared, and transmit radio signals down to Earth that are increasingly obscuring our view of the universe across several regions of the electromagnetic spectrum,” she told the BBC.

And she said there was a critical consequence of this – making it harder to spot asteroids.

“Spotting potentially hazardous asteroids that might one day impact the Earth is important work, but is becoming more difficult as more and more satellites are launched,” she said.

But astronaut Tim Peak – who joined Vodafone for the video call – said there was “plenty of room” in space for more satellites.

“What we need to think about in the future, with space becoming so useful to us, is how we manage and regulate the number of satellites going up there, how we safely bring them back down or take them away from the planet, and how we protect the space environment whilst using it for the benefit of everybody back on Earth,” he said.

Trump signs order restricting gender care for young people

Ana Faguy

BBC News

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at restricting gender care for people under the age of 19.

In the order, Trump said federal support for such care would end. He called on the Health and Human Services secretary to “take all appropriate actions to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children”.

The order said it was referring to treatments including puberty blockers, hormones such as oestrogen or testosterone, as well surgical procedures.

It is likely to face legal challenges.

The order directs federally-run insurance programmes to exclude coverage for treatments related to gender transition for minors. It also aims to stop medical institutions that receive federal grants providing such treatments

More than 26 US states have already implemented restrictions on gender care for children and young people.

Multiple American medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Medical Association have argued that this kind of care is needed.

But the science on medical interventions in gender care, especially for children, is disputed. Several European countries have commissioned reviews.

Last year, a review of gender identity services for under-18s in England and Wales said children had been let down by a lack of research and “remarkably weak” evidence on medical interventions in gender care.

Transgender rights advocates quickly criticised the White House’s move.

“Today’s order lays out a clear plan to shut down access to life-saving medical care for transgender youth nationwide, overriding the role of families and putting politics between patients and their doctors,” said Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT and HIV Project.

But conservative groups applauded the order. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group, called it “a refreshing return to sanity”.

Less than 1% of the population over the age of 13 in the US are transgender, according to a study by the UCLA Williams Institute, and the number seeking medical care is smaller.

Earlier this week, Trump signed an order urging defence officials to re-examine the military’s policy on transgender troops. That has already been challenged in court.

These executive orders fulfil a campaign pledge from Trump to his supporters to roll back policies around transgender people put in place by the Biden administration.

  • EXPLAINED: What Trump has done since taking power
  • VOTERS: 10 Americans give their verdict on week one
  • BORDER: Six things Trump has done about migration
  • FOREIGN POLICY: Trump faces a very different Kim this time
  • WATCH: How new press secretary, 27, did at first briefing

Princess Beatrice gives birth to daughter Athena

Sean Coughlan

Royal correspondent

Princess Beatrice has given birth to her second child, named Athena, Buckingham Palace has announced.

Athena was born several weeks prematurely and weighed 4lb 5oz, but is said to be healthy and doing well.

The new baby, the second child of Beatrice and her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, was born a week ago on 22 January at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London.

The King and Queen and other members of the Royal Family were said to be delighted at the baby’s safe arrival, said the Palace.

Beatrice had been due to give birth in early Spring, but in December had received medical advice not to travel long distances.

So instead of spending Christmas overseas with her husband’s family as planned, Beatrice and her husband and children had spent Christmas with the Royal Family at Sandringham.

The official photo issued of the new baby Athena shows her wrapped in a blanket, with her hand covering her face, presumably because of concerns about privacy.

In a social media post, her father Edoardo said: “She is tiny and absolutely perfect” and the family was “completely besotted with her”.

Athena, is the grandchild of Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, and Sarah, the Duchess of York. She becomes 11th in line to the throne.

“She is already so adored and I’m incredibly blessed to be a granny once again. So proud of Edo, Beatrice and the rest of my little 5-a-side team,” posted the duchess on social media.

The statement from Buckingham Palace gave the baby’s full name as Athena Elizabeth Rose Mapelli Mozzi, born last Wednesday at 12.57pm.

Beatrice, aged 36, and her daughter are both doing well, said the Palace, and the family are spending time with Athena’s older siblings Wolfie – Mr Mapelli Mozzi’s son from a previous relationship – and Sienna.

The parents thanked staff at the London hospital for their “wonderful care”, the same hospital where their older daughter Sienna had been born in 2021.

In ancient Greece, Athena was the goddess of war, handicraft and wisdom.

Princess Beatrice has worked for a number of charities, including the Teenage Cancer Trust and co-founding the Big Change, which helps young people to develop life skills, beyond academic subjects.

She has highlighted the challenges of dyslexia and spoke in 2016 to the BBC about her own struggles – saying dyslexia made exams “terrifying” for her.

Migrants on edge as Trump administration ramps up raids and arrests

Bernd Debusmann Jr

BBC News, White House

The Trump administration has ramped up arrests of undocumented migrants in major cities around the US, detaining thousands of people including criminals and those without criminal histories alike.

Since the president took office on 20 January, there have been raids in cities including Chicago, New York, Denver and Los Angeles.

In some communities, the arrests have prompted some migrants to skip work or keep their children home from school.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that while arrests of criminals will be prioritised, nobody in the country illegally is “off the table”.

More than 3,500 undocumented migrants have been arrested since Trump returned to the White House, including just over 1,000 on Tuesday, 969 on Monday and 1,179 on Sunday, according to daily statistics published by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

By comparison, an average of 310 were made during the 2024 fiscal year, when former President Joe Biden was in office, according to the agency.

Immigration officials have described these raids as “targeted enforcement operations” that have resulted in the arrest of violent gang members and dangerous suspects, and have deputised agents from other federal law enforcement agencies to help step up arrests.

“I haven’t seen anything remotely like this, and it’s just the first few days of the presidency,” said Gina Amato Lough, the California-based director attorney for the Immigrants Right Project, a division of a law firm, Public Counsel. “Nothing of this magnitude.”

She said the “stated intention is to create shock and awe”.

“It’s working,” she said. “It’s also creating terror in the community.”

The White House and ICE have publicised some of these arrests, showing pictures of the suspects and providing details of their countries of origin and crimes, which have included sex crimes, assaults and drug-trafficking offences.

But the White House has made it clear that any undocumented migrant caught up in these raids – whether criminals or not – are subject to arrest and deportation, even though simply being in the US illegally is a civil matter.

Earlier this week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that “all of them” are criminals.

“They illegally broke our nation’s laws, and, therefore, are criminals are far as this administration goes,” she told reporters on Tuesday.

The arrests have already had a chilling effect on many immigrant communities across the US.

Ms Lough, for example, said that undocumented clients have expressed a fear about going to any government agency – even to get a driver’s licence – or seeking medical attention in hospitals.

“We’re hearing people are terrified, and we’re getting calls left and right,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, an organisation which provides free legal representation to undocumented migrants detained by authorities.

“People are scared to go to work, or to send their kids to schools,” he said, adding the Trump administration has blocked his organisation’s efforts to enter detention facilities to meet with detainees.

“That’s exactly what the White House wants – to instil fear in people and make them leave,” he said. “That’s not something we’ve ever seen.”

Among those who have expressed fear is Gabriela, a Bolivian migrant who entered the US over 20 years ago, hiding under a pile of corn stalks in the boot of a smuggler’s case on the journey.

Now a housekeeper in Maryland, Gabriela was initially unconcerned by Trump’s election victory, believing that he would only target criminals and that many migrants would benefit from an improved economy.

But nine days into the administration, she says she’s grown fearful, along with many of her neighbours, after seeing that ICE had conducted operations in nearby communities.

“Lots of people in my building have stopped sending their children to schools. Nobody is even going to church now,” she told the BBC. “We’re tuning into mass online.”

Gabriela said she’s begun packing her belongings in the hopes that, if arrested and deported, acquaintances might be able to ship them back to Bolivia.

Watch: What to know about Trump’s migrant deportation flights

Another undocumented migrant, a Mexican national named Carlos who lives in New York City, told the BBC concerns over possible arrests have driven some underground.

“We heard that ICE came to a building not far from me,” said Carlos, whose son is a US citizen born in New York.

Like Gabriela, Carlos was initially cautiously optimistic about Trump’s electoral win and thought he would indirectly benefit from Trump’s promises to boost the economy and lower inflation.

“It’s scary. I’ve been avoiding being out on the street more than I need to,” he added. “I don’t have a problem with criminals being arrested. But we keep hearing that other people – workers – are also being taken away.”

Both Gabriela and Carlos asked to be identified only by their first names, fearing retribution or attention from authorities.

It is unclear how many of those arrested have criminal histories and how many are what have been what the first Trump administration termed “collateral” arrests.

NBC has reported that on 26 January, only 52% of those taken into custody were considered “criminal arrests”, citing administration officials .

The BBC has contacted the White House for comment on the figures.

When asked about the number at a press briefing on Tuesday, Ms Leavitt said only that anyone who “broke our nation’s laws” is a criminal.

The raids by ICE form part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to clamp down on undocumented migration into the US, which has also included declaring an emergency at the southern border and expanded processes that allow for rapid expulsions.

On Thursday, Trump signed the so-called Laken Riley act into law, requiring undocumented immigrants who are arrested for theft or violent crimes to be held in jail pending trial.

The bill, named after Laken Riley – a Georgia nursing student murdered last year by a Venezuelan man, was approved by Congress last week, an early legislative win for the the administration.

At the signing, Trump said the government would move to set up a 30,000-person facility for undocumented detainees, doubling the government’s holding capacity and taking the US “one step further to eliminating the scourge of migrant crime”.

  • EXPLAINED: What Trump has done since taking power
  • VOTERS: 10 Americans give their verdict on week one
  • BORDER: Six things Trump has done about migration
  • FOREIGN POLICY: Trump faces a very different Kim this time
  • WATCH: How new press secretary, 27, did at first briefing

Massive avalanche kills skier in French Alps

Maia Davies

BBC News

A man died in a “very large” avalanche in the French Alps on Tuesday, local officials have confirmed.

The body of the dual Brazilian-Portuguese national was found in the resort of Les Grands Montets at the foot of Mont Blanc, rescuers said.

The avalanche, which occurred around 16:35 local time (15:35 GMT), was 1km (0.6 miles) in length and 400m wide.

It was first reported that the victim was British, but the public prosecutor and the Chamonix High Mountain Gendarmerie Platoon (PGHM) told the BBC on Wednesday that this had been incorrect.

The avalanche fell in an off-piste part of Les Grands Montets where the 55-year old man had been skiing.

It was spotted by a ski patrol on its way to close the area to the public, due to very poor conditions.

Rescue teams attended the scene, where the skier was pronounced dead.

PGHM told the BBC that the man’s family had been informed. It added that it had not received reports of any further casualties.

The Haute-Savoie prefecture reminded skiers and hikers to exercise caution and follow guidance amid January’s high avalanche risk.

Israel’s looming Unrwa ban a catastrophe, UN Palestinian refugee agency warns

Yolande Knell

Middle East correspondent
Reporting fromJerusalem

As Israel prepares to outlaw the main UN agency for Palestinian refugees on Thursday, there are warnings that it could undermine vital aid delivery and long-term chances of peace.

Israeli officials have not spelt out how they will enforce the legislation passed last year by Israel’s parliament, which accused Unrwa of being complicit with Hamas – an allegation the agency denied.

“It will be a catastrophe if this ban takes place,” says Juliette Touma, communications director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa).

“It will deepen and further the suffering of the Palestinian people who rely on the agency for their survival, for their education and healthcare.”

Even before 15 months of brutal war left the vast majority of the two million people in Gaza displaced and homeless, most were registered refugees.

Unrwa camps were first set up in Gaza to house Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their land in fighting before and after the state of Israel was created in 1948.

For seven decades, those original refugees and their descendants – as well as a new wave of refugees created by the 1967 Middle East War – have been cared for by Unrwa.

Across the Middle East – in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon as well as the occupied Palestinian territories – there are some six million Palestinian refugees.

They include the Naseer family, currently huddled in a tent in the courtyard of an Unrwa school-turned-shelter in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. They are from Beit Hanoun in the north but have decided to delay returning to the rubble of their home, even as a fragile ceasefire has taken hold.

“I have a disability, and I have a big family,” says Ahmed Naseer, a father of nine who says he struggles to access food aid. “Right now, we get hot meals twice a week from Unrwa and people are still starving. What would it be like if it stops for good?”

Ahmed says his children – all formerly Unrwa students – have forgotten basics like their times tables, as their schools have been closed for so long. Now they worry their lessons will never resume.

“We just want to go back to school to make up the days we’ve lost,” says 16-year-old Malak. “Every child in Gaza has a dream of what they want to do when they grow up – to be a doctor or engineer. If education is stopped, there will be no future for us.”

The full implications of legislation passed by the Israeli parliament are not yet clear. In October, it voted overwhelmingly to ban Unrwa activity on Israeli soil and forbid contact between Israeli officials and Unrwa employees. The laws come into effect on 30 January.

However, the legal wording does not directly address the agency’s operations in Gaza, or the occupied West Bank. UN workers say it will ultimately be impossible to function in either location without co-ordinating with Israel’s military authorities.

Talking to the BBC, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel suggests that only Palestinian officials should deal with Unrwa in the West Bank.

She accuses the agency of being infiltrated by Hamas in Gaza and becoming a security threat.

“Israel actually gave more than a year to the international community to clean out this organisation, but it didn’t. It tried to sweep it under the rug and turn a blind eye to breaching the law of neutrality,” Haskell says. “This was the only logical step.”

BBC
Israel actually gave more than a year to the international community to clean out this organisation, but it didn’t.

Israel has long accused Unrwa of perpetuating conflict by keeping alive Palestinian hopes of returning to their historic homeland.

However, tensions have risen dramatically since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the war they triggered.

A year ago, Israel accused 18 Unrwa employees of taking part in the deadly assault. A UN investigation then found that nine employees may have been involved and the agency fired them. UN officials reject most of Israel’s accusations against it and insist Unrwa is impartial.

Many international donors, including the UK and the European Union, have since resumed donations to the agency.

There is nervousness among tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in occupied East Jerusalem, where Unrwa workers could be seen stacking boxes outside some offices this week.

Israel’s government has ordered Unrwa to vacate its compound in this part of the city, which it has annexed in a move not recognised internationally.

“You can see in front of us the Unrwa Shufat health centre where I was director, and on the other side are the girls’ school and separate boys’ one,” says Salim Anati, retired GP, as he shows me along the bustling main road of Shufat refugee camp where he grew up.

He tells me how his parents – who were expelled from their homes in what is now Lod in Israel – never believed that the refugee camp or Unrwa would become permanent fixtures.

The fate of refugees – a core issue in the Israel-Palestinian conflict – was meant to be worked out in peace talks. However, they stalled a decade ago. Now Palestinians feel Israel is using the opportunity to push its own political solution.

Dr Anati says Palestinians refuse to accept the abolition of Unrwa and its services.

“All people are shocked, because it’s something fundamental for us as refugees and Unrwa represents the international agreements and our dream of the right of return to our villages and cities.”

The UN has repeatedly said there is no alternative to Unrwa.

At a heated meeting in New York on Tuesday, senior UN officials and every member of the Security Council except the US – Israel’s closest ally – described Israel’s actions as a violation of international law and its obligations under the UN charter.

The deputy US ambassador to the UN, Dorothy Shea, accused the Unrwa head, Philippe Lazzarini, of being “irresponsible and dangerous” when he outlined the expected “disastrous” impact, particularly on aid in Gaza.

But Mr Lazzarini said the legislation would impose “massive constraints”, particularly on the Gaza aid operation, and called on international powers to push back against it “in support of peace and stability”.

BBC World Service to cut 130 jobs in savings plan

Yasmin Rufo

Entertainment reporter

The BBC World Service has announced it will cut 130 jobs as part of a plan to save around £6m in the next financial year.

Planned cost-saving measures include closing posts in the UK and internationally as well as roles in BBC Monitoring, a division which reports and analyses news from media around the world.

The World Service was given a funding boost by the government as part of the autumn Budget, but financial pressures and the previous two-year freeze in the licence fee means the corporation’s projected total deficit will increase to £492 million for the 2024/25 financial year.

Despite the cuts, it said it will continue to provide journalistic coverage across its 42 language services.

Jonathan Munro, global director and deputy chief executive of BBC News, said: “While the result of the latest grant-in-aid funding settlement means we are able to maintain all of our existing language services, we were clear it would not stave off difficult decisions in order to remain globally competitive and meet our savings requirements.

“These changes will ensure we operate effectively with the resource we have, creating the most impact for audiences internationally.”

The BBC added that the service is “operating in a highly competitive global media environment” which has “international news providers investing billions in state-backed media that sees increased competition for staff, platforms and frequencies, and audiences”.

The broadcaster said it will “continue to counter disinformation, provide emergency services in times of crisis and report from all corners of the globe”.

As part of the Budget in October, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) settlement for the next financial year “provides an increase in funding to the BBC World Service, protecting existing foreign language service provision and its mission to deliver globally trusted media, in support of the UK’s global presence and soft power”.

The BBC World Service is predominantly funded by the UK licence fee and has received a grant of £104.4 million from the FCDO in previous years.

In October, ahead of the Budget, the BBC revealed a raft of cost-saving plans, including the axing of in-depth interview show HARDtalk and reducing more than 100 news roles at the broadcaster.

HARDtalk, which is broadcast from Monday to Thursday, is set to shut in March 2025 after nearly three decades on air.

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Manchester City’s Champions League campaign could have gone the same way as the merchandise stand outside Etihad Stadium that went up in flames before kick-off – but a firefighting act on the pitch meant they scraped into the play-offs.

Even City manager Pep Guardiola sensed the bad omens, saying: “When I saw the fire before the game I thought ‘the journalists have their headlines already’.”

Thankfully, no-one was hurt in that pre-match drama, while City were also able to finally emerge unscathed from a night of tension and nerves, displaying more of the fragility that has characterised their season.

It’s Real Madrid or Bayern Munich next – a scenario that might send shudders down the spine of the most ardent City follower.

City’s final placing of 22nd in the new Champions League opening phase after Wednesday’s 3-1 win against Club Brugge should be a source of embarrassment to a club of such high ambition, winners of this tournament in 2023.

And yet, for a short while, it look like it was going to be a lot worse as Guardiola’s side faced the humiliation of not even making the play-offs.

Apart from one noisy corner occupied by Brugge fans, you could have heard a pin drop when Raphael Onyedika’s low drive right on half-time left City needing two goals to score the win they required.

A play-off spot would have been viewed as an unlikely consolation prize at the start of the campaign. When even that began to fade from view, this season’s sense of crisis was heightening.

City were vulnerable at the back, with weakness out wide once more, and blunt in attack. This was only the second time a team managed by Guardiola failed to have a first-half shot on target, following on from a game against Borussia Dortmund in September 2022.

Those home fans inside the stadium were subdued. City had given their supporters nothing to ease their growing concerns.

Guardiola had gone through agonies in his technical area, clutching his head in anguish on several occasions as City were hit on the break, also aiming a wild kick at a drinks box, although he laughed this off afterwards with a reminder about his stellar playing career at Barcelona.

In the wider context, this was City’s season on the line – European ambitions threatened while languishing 12 points adrift of Premier League leaders Liverpool, their hold on that crown loosened.

It is to City’s credit that they responded, helped by Guardiola’s effective change of Savinho for Ilkay Gundogan at half-time, meaning the manager avoided the fate of failing to reach the knockout stage for the first time in his silver-lined career.

If City had gone out, it would have ended a run of 11 successive seasons in which they have reached the knockout stage – anything else would have been a severe body blow to the pride and status of a club who cherish their place at Europe’s top table.

City survived what would have been their biggest embarrassment under Guardiola, but on current form a play-off against either Real or Bayern to reach the last 16 cannot be approached with confidence.

It was only when the unfortunate Joel Ordonez turned Josko Gvardiol’s cross into his own net to give City the lead that Brugge’s threat was finally extinguished, their supporters also celebrating at the final whistle as they sneaked into the play-offs in 24th place.

The home side got there in the end, but this campaign has so far offered nothing to suggest there should be any fears for either Madrid’s elder statesman boss Carlo Ancelotti or for the City legend who is now Bayern’s coach, Vincent Kompany.

“We deserve it,” said Guardiola of City’s play-off fate. “I don’t know if they are happy to play against us but it is what it is. No complaints. We’re going to face them – one is the king of the competition, the other is the second or third.”

The defeats City suffered against Juventus, Sporting and Paris St-Germain, along with the collapse against Feyenoord to draw after leading 3-0 with 16 minutes left, will offer all the encouragement their next opponents need.

And even if these formidable hurdles are overcome, City will then face Diego Simeone’s nuggety Atletico Madrid or Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen in the last 16.

Easier? Not by much.

Even in victory here, City were too often vulnerable on the counter-attack, with too many spaces in midfield for Club Brugge to exploit, but they dug deep when it mattered and clawed themselves out of the hole they were in.

City will somehow have to fashion a vast improvement in the short period between this win and the play-offs if they are not to slip out at that stage.

This was unthinkable at the start of the season given their pedigree, but it has become very thinkable in recent weeks, especially after the fearful going over they got when losing 4-2 in Paris.

Guardiola, relieved as well as pleased, is hoping City will soon be in a stronger position, able to call on new forward Omar Marmoush among others, while history is littered with teams who turned early struggles into Champions League triumph.

John Stones made a welcome return, while Guardiola is hoping others such as Ruben Dias and Nathan Ake could be back, along with Oscar Bobb, while Kevin de Bruyne can acquire more minutes and fitness.

Guardiola can also call on the memories of beating Bayern and Real on their way to Champions League final victory against Inter Milan in Istanbul in 2023.

“It might seem impossible today, but tomorrow the mindset, the vibes will change,” Guardiola said. “We will try against Real or Bayern. We will create problems. These players have something special. We will try to do it.”

It was almost the talk of an underdog, rarely Manchester City’s station in recent years.

This is where they stand now in this tournament – but when a team of proven quality have a fighting chance, then can defy the odds.

City, however, will have to climb several levels if this painful, tortuous Champions League journey is to continue in the last 16.

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Lewis Hamilton has crashed his Ferrari during the team’s pre-season testing programme in Spain.

The seven-time champion was unhurt after losing control of the team’s 2023 car at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on Wednesday.

Ferrari declined to comment on the incident, which happened on Hamilton’s second day of running at the Spanish track, where he is sharing the car with team-mate Charles Leclerc.

The incident happened as Ferrari seek to embed Hamilton into the team as effectively as possible before the start of the season at the Australian Grand Prix on 14-16 March.

Ferrari regard the crash as nothing abnormal as Hamilton learns the characteristics of an unfamiliar car after 12 years with Mercedes, within the significant restrictions imposed on testing in F1.

Ferrari are running a limited programme in the 2023 car, the most recent model Hamilton is allowed to drive.

F1’s testing restrictions dictate that current race drivers can complete a maximum of 1,000km (621 miles) of what is known as TPC (testing of previous cars) running.

Hamilton completed 30 laps at the team’s Fiorano test track on 22 January before he and Leclerc moved on to this week’s three days of running at Barcelona, home of the Spanish Grand Prix.

Ferrari are giving no details of the test, where Hamilton is learning Ferrari’s procedures and working methods and building an understanding with race engineer Riccardo Adami and the rest of the engineering group.

Ferrari will launch their 2025 car at Fiorano on 19 February, the day after F1’s season launch event at the O2 in London.

Ferrari will give Hamilton further testing miles before the launch in a Pirelli-run tyre test.

The team will run for two days next week, also at Barcelona, on 4-5 February in a 2025 car modified to reflect the effect of the new regulations being introduced for 2026.

McLaren are conducting a similar Pirelli test at Paul Ricard in France this week as the Italian company seeks to define its 2026 product.

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A dramatic final round of Champions League games has finished, and after some epic permutations for the first time we know who will be in the knockout rounds.

Manchester City came from behind to beat Club Brugge and squeeze into a place in the play-offs, while Aston Villa and Arsenal joined Liverpool – who had long booked their place – in the last 16.

Celtic, who lost 4-2 to Aston Villa, will be in the play-offs too – as all five British teams progressed through the league phase.

These are the teams through to each stage:

Last 16: Liverpool, Barcelona, Arsenal, Inter Milan, Atletico Madrid, Bayer Leverkusen, Lille, Aston Villa.

Knockout phase play-offs: Atalanta, Borussia Dortmund, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, AC Milan, PSV, Paris St-Germain, Benfica, Monaco, Brest, Feyenoord, Juventus, Celtic, Manchester City, Sporting, Club Brugge.

Eliminated: Dinamo Zagreb, Stuttgart, Shakhtar Donetsk, Bologna, Sparta Prague, Leipzig, Girona, Red Star Belgrade, Sturm Graz, Salzburg, Slovan Bratislava, Young Boys.

And we already have an idea of who could play who in the next rounds – with City and Celtic in particular about to face huge tests.

Who meets in the knockout phase play-offs?

The teams who finished between ninth and 24th play two-legged play-off ties on 11-12 and 18-19 February to decide who goes through to the last 16.

The draw will take place on Friday, 31 January at 11:00 GMT… but teams already know which sides they have a 50-50 chance of meeting because of their final positions in the league phase.

One of Celtic and Manchester City will play European champions Real Madrid – with the other taking on fellow giants Bayern Munich.

Teams also know the two possible clubs they could face in the last 16 if they progress through the play-off.

The winner of those ties involving City and Celtic will take on either Atletico Madrid or Bayer Leverkusen in the last 16.

There is a 50% chance of Juventus facing AC Milan – and Paris St-Germain will face a Ligue 1 rival in either Monaco or Brest.

Who meets in the last 16?

Liverpool and Barcelona cannot meet until the final now after finishing in the top two.

The Reds will play one of Monaco, Brest, PSG or Benfica in the last 16 – with Barca facing another of those teams.

Arsenal, who finished third, will play Feyenoord, Juventus, AC Milan or PSV.

Aston Villa, who just finished in the top eight after beating Celtic, will take on Sporting, Club Brugge, Atalanta or Borussia Dortmund.

Those ties will take place on 4-5 and 11-12 March.

But they will not know which team exactly until the last-16 draw takes place on 21 February.

Clubs will know their potential route to the final by then – with the draws for the quarters and semis also taking place that day.

Which British clubs could meet further down the line?

There is a chance Liverpool and Aston Villa could meet in the quarter-finals if they both win their last-16 ties.

Arsenal could meet Celtic or Manchester City in that round too.

But all of those depend on which way the last-16 draw goes. It is also possible British teams could meet in the semis or final.

All should become clearer after 21 February when the draws for the last-16 onwards are made.

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Celtic’s enthralling defeat at Aston Villa was a near-perfect illustration of the club’s gripping, and ultimately successful, Champions League campaign.

A campaign which now rolls on to a tantalising two-legged play-off against either Real Madrid or Bayern Munich in less than two weeks.

In Birmingham, there were shades of the Borussia Dortmund horror show as Villa scored twice in the opening five minutes, while missing a host of other chances.

Celtic players looked stunned and cowed in a raucous stadium against an elite side.

But as those memories of the Westfalenstadion on matchday two – banished by recent improvements at Europe’s top table – came rushing back, Celtic dug deep.

There was some of the fight and character shown in digging out a point at Atalanta and coming from behind to draw with Club Brugge as they steadied.

Then some of the swashbuckling stuff seen against RB Leipzig and Slovan Bratislava as Adam Idah ended his goal drought with a double to level.

That got Celtic right back in the contest, which gripped until Morgan Rogers completed his hat-trick to make it 4-2 in stoppage time, as the pressure from Villa proved too much in the second half.

Even in disappointment the Celtic players and fans, both drained from another epic night, left Villa Park knowing the story is not over.

They get to do it all again in the play-off round against a European giant, with the draw made on Friday.

That was the aim, but now they’re there, Brendan Rodgers and his players will want to make the most of it.

Celtic live on edge of chaos

While Celtic’s fightback and competitiveness was admirable, the defeat was a reminder of the unforgiveable nature of playing the best in the Champions League.

Villa scored four, missed a penalty, hit a post, had one cleared off the line, racking up a hefty expected goals rating of 3.79.

Celtic played on the edge of chaos as they pressed and tried to move the ball quickly. At times it worked, but there were also a lot of mistakes.

They were caught in possession trying to play out from the back for Villa’s second.

And Liam Scales was punished ruthlessly for pushing too high up the pitch for the third as Villa easily broke through on the counter.

Auston Trusty erratically slid in to give away a penalty, while a poor header from the American in the first half lead to Jacob Ramsey hitting a post.

Young defender Dane Murray – only recently returned from Queen’s Park – was robbed in his own box for the fourth in stoppage time.

There were plenty more moments when Celtic got themselves into trouble.

Without their best centre-back Cameron Carter-Vickers it was always going to be a tough task defensively, while Daizen Maeda’s defensive output was missed as Villa got joy down the flanks in the first half.

Maeda will miss the first leg of the next round due to suspension, and with Kyogo Furuhashi away to Rennes, and left-back Alex Valle joining him out the door, the last few days of the transfer window are big for the club.

With Real or Bayern coming to town, they need to make sure they are as strong as possible from back to front.

Dortmund aside, Celtic have been competitive and adaptable throughout this campaign, and reaching the play-off round is just rewards for that.

Idah provides timely reminder

In the week Celtic lost talismanic striker Kyogo, Idah provided a timely reminder of his capabilities to some of the more angst-ridden among the club’s fans.

That could be the biggest positive to come from this defeat.

The Irishman’s two goals – the first Villa had conceded on their own patch in the Champions League – not only hauled his team back level from a bleak position, but demonstrated his finishing abilities to many who had forgotten he had them.

The final goal in a 5-0 home win against Ross County at the end of November was the last time the Irishman found the net before Wednesday.

‘BVP’ – before Villa Park – might become the reference point in Idah’s Celtic career, if he can kick on from this and fill Kyogo’s substantial shoes.

The hope for Rodgers is Idah’s instinctive finishes, particularly for the first goal where he managed to react brilliantly to get his leg in a difficult position to lash home, will spark something.

There were also glimpses of his running power in behind, particularly one moment in the second half when he sprinted in behind and got a strike away.

Rodgers said afterwards it will be “big for his confidence”, and this campaign has been a boost for Celtic’s overall esteem on the grandest stage in club football.

Their progress was epitomised by their first-half fightback in Birmingham.

They have nothing to lose from here on, but the next challenge is to make sure the pride they have worked so hard to restore remains intact against one of the giants of European football.