Recovery operations are still under way in Washington DC, after an American Airlines plane from Kansas carrying 64 people onboard collided with a military helicopter, manned by three personnel, on Wednesday night.

The victims include top figure skaters from the US and Russia, a young pilot, flight attendants, and a lawyer travelling home on her birthday.

Here are some of the people believed to have been on board the helicopter and the plane.

Asra Hussain Raza

Indiana woman Asra Hussain Raza, 26, had moved to the Washington DC area after receiving a master’s degree in hospital management.

“She was returning from a work trip where she was helping to improve a hospital that really needed help,” said her husband Hamaad Raza, who showed the last text message from his wife to news crews outside the airport.

“And, you know, she was doing what she loved. She was even working on the flight.”

He added: “She gave a lot, but she had so much more to give. But if there was ever someone who took advantage of their 26 years of life, it was her.”

Professor Kiah Duggins

The president of Howard University confirmed Professor Kiah Duggins had died in the collision.

The civil rights lawyer was set to begin teaching at the university’s School of Law in the autumn.

“She dedicated her career to fighting against unconstitutional policing and unjust money bail practices in Tennessee, Texas and Washington DC,” the university said in a statement reported by US media.

Sarah Lee Best

Two DC lawyers were also on board the flight, their loved ones confirmed.

Sarah Lee Best, 33, was kind and hard working, her husband Daniel Solomon told the Washington Post.

Mrs Best and Mr Solomon had planned to travel to Hawaii, where she was born, for their 10th wedding anniversary in May.

Elizabeth Keys

Lawyer Elizabeth Keys, 33, “always, always managed to have fun… no matter what she was doing,” her partner David Seidman told the Washington Post.

She died on her birthday, Mr Seidman said.

The firm where both worked, Wilkinson Stekloff, paid tribute to the “cherished members” of its team.

They were “wonderful attorneys, colleagues, and friends,” firm founder Beth Wilkinson said in a statement.

Casey Crafton

Tributes were made to “dedicated father” Casey Crafton of Salem, Connecticut.

“Salem has lost a dedicated father, husband, and community member,” Governor Ned Lamont wrote on social media.

Salem Little League, where Mr Crafton was a coach, said the town was “heartbroken” by the loss of the “beloved” club member.

“The Crafton family, deeply involved in all things Salem, has suffered an unimaginable loss,” the statement read.

Michael Stovall

Michael Stovall’s mother said her son was “the happiest person”, who saw the good in everybody.

Mr Stovall, known as Mikey, was travelling home from an annual hunting trip with friends, Christina Stovall told Wink News.

“Mikey did not have one enemy. If you see pictures of him… he was the life of the party. He loved everybody.”

Mr Stovall’s cousin told the New York Times that he had been flying with at least six of his friends from the trip, some of whom had known each other since childhood.

Jesse Pitcher

Travelling with Mr Stovall was Jesse Pitcher, his father confirmed.

The 30-year-old from Maryland had got married last year and recently started his own business, Jameson Pitcher told the New York Times.

“He was just getting started with life,” he said.

“He said he’d see me when he got back.”

Pergentino N. Malabed

The Philippine National Police confirmed that the director of its Supply Management Division, Colonel Pergentino N. Malabed, had been on board the flight.

A body carrying Col Malabed’s passport was recovered from the Potomac, a police spokesman said.

He had travelled to the US with two other officers to test personnel vests the police planned to buy, and was on his way to the Philippine embassy in Washington.

• Live: Follow the latest updates
• What we know so far about the plane crash
• BBC Verify analyses moments before collision
• Watch: The scene in DC after moment of impact

Spencer Lane and Christine Lane

Ice skater Spencer Lane, 16, died alongside his mother Christine Lane, 49, and were among at least 14 athletes and coaches who died while returning from a skate camp in Wichita.

His father told local media his son was “a force of nature” who showed “drive and tenacity” to the sport.

“He trained at the Skating Club of Boston five days a week and attended high school online and just committed himself to it,” Douglas Lane said.

He added that his wife was “a creative powerhouse” who would do anything for her children.

Jinna Han and Jin Han

Jinna Han, 13, had also travelled to the skate camp with her mother, Jin.

In a 2022 interview, Jinna told a news network in her Massachusetts hometown that she was excited to watch the Olympics.

“It’s just so exciting,” Jinna Han said. “It’s like, who’s going to win, what’s going to happen, because anything can happen at the Olympics.”

Doug Zeghibe of the Skating Club of Boston called Jin “wonderful, pleasant, polite” person.

“Never a discouraging word,” he said. “Always appreciative, always supportive of not just Jinna, her daughter, but every athlete. Just role model parents in your sport, and you don’t always get that.”

Olivia Ter

Twelve-year-old Olivia Ter from Maryland was among the US figure skaters aboard the flight, local officials confirmed.

“Olivia not only excelled in figure skating programs but inspired others through her talent, determination and sportsmanship,” Prince George’s County Parks and Recreation said in a statement reported by CBS News.

“The impact of Olivia’s life will continue to resonate in our youth sports community, and she will be sorely missed,” said Bill Tyler, the director of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.

Brielle and Justyna Magdalena Beyer

Andy Beyer told ABC News that his daughter Brielle, 12, and wife Justyna, 42, had been flying home from the skating camp.

Brielle was “a fighter in everything she did” who “lit up the house” with her excitement and wonderful singing voice, he said.

Beyer had been on his way to collect the pair from the airport: “When it was time for the plane to land, they hadn’t landed.”

“We couldn’t get text messages through. I saw fire trucks and everything go by, and I knew.”

Cory Haynos, Roger Haynos and Stephanie Branton Haynos

Cory Haynos was travelling home from Kansas with his parents, Roger Haynos and Stephanie Branton Haynos, a family member wrote on social media.

“Roger has always inspired me by his absolute love for his family and dedication to providing only the best for his wife and kids,” Matthew Alan LaRavier, Roger’s cousin, wrote.

“Cory was an amazing skater with a very bright future,” he said.

“We all were expecting Cory to represent our country in the US Olympics in the future.”

Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov

The deaths of beloved ice skating coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who are Russian, were confirmed by the Kremlin.

Renowned skating coach and friend Rafael Arutyunyan told CNN that he had made his athletes train in silence after the crash as a mark of a respect.

“I know all these coaches,” he said. “All of our community was respectful to them and liked them, so I feel it’s they’ll stay with us forever.”

Alexandr Sasha Kirsanov

Former coach Sasha Kirsanov was on board the plane, the University of Delaware said.

His wife told ABC News she had “lost everything” in the crash.

Jonathan J. Campos

The plane’s captain Jonathan J. Campos had dreamed of being a pilot since he was three, his aunt told the New York Times.

“I think he wanted to be free, and be able to fly and soar like a bird,” said Beverly Lane.

Mr Campos, 34, was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and had worked for PSA Airlines (part of the American Airlines group) for eight years, she added.

Sam Lilley

The father of 28-year-old pilot Sam Lilley said that he was engaged to be married and “was just at the prime of his life”.

Tim Lilley told NewsNation that his son got his piloting licence in only a few years because he “pursued it with a vigour”.

“Sam’s right with Jesus, and I know where he’s going,” he said.

His sister Tiffany Gibson called him “an amazing person”.

“He loved people. He loved adventure. He loved travelling,” she told ABC News.

“He was so young, and he was excited about life and his future and getting a dog and a house and kids. And it’s just, this is just tragic.”

Ian Epstein

Virginia resident Ian Epstein was a flight attendant on the plane, his family said. He was known for his ability to make people smile and was “full of life”.

“He loved being a flight attendant because he truly enjoyed traveling and meeting new people. But his true love was his family,” the statement continued.

Epstein, 53, was a father, stepfather, husband, and brother, the family said, adding that he will be “truly missed”.

Danasia Elder

Danasia Elder was also working as a flight attendant, her family told US media in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Her brother-in-law Brandon Payne paid tribute to her, calling her “full of life”.

“She was a great wife, a great parent, a great friend,” Payne said. “She was very bright, very smart… This flight attendant thing was kind of like one of her dreams she wanted to do.”

He said that he was proud of his sister-in-law for pursuing her dreams, and that she “would want y’all do the same thing she did”.

“Chase your dreams, no matter what. Don’t let nothing scare you, push you away. Just believe in yourself, believe in God, and follow the path.”

Ryan O’Hara

Ryan O’Hara, 29, was the crew chief of the Black Hawk helicopter that collided with the passenger plane, according to CBS News.

He leaves behind a wife and one-year-old son, his local Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program said in a social media post confirming his death.

O’Hara is “fondly remembered as a guy who would fix things around the ROTC gym as well as a vital member of the rifle team,” the post said.

Andrew Eaves

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves confirmed that Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves was killed in the collision.

Paying tribute to her husband, Carrie Eaves confirmed he was one of the pilots of the Blackhawk helicopter.

“We ask that you pray for our family and friends and for all the other families that are suffering today. We ask for peace while we grieve,” she wrote on social media.

The Duke of York was in contact with the US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein longer than he had previously admitted, emails published in court documents appear to show.

“Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!” said an email sent to Epstein from a “member of the British Royal Family”, believed to be Prince Andrew.

The court documents, from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), show the email as being sent in February 2011.

In his BBC Newsnight interview, Prince Andrew had said he had not seen or spoken to Epstein after going to his house in New York in December 2010, a meeting which he described as a “wrong decision”.

The email was revealed in a court case involving the FCA and banker Jes Staley, who was banned from senior positions after he mischaracterised his relationship with Epstein.

Staley is appealing against the FCA, but the financial watchdog’s evidence about Staley’s contact with Epstein also contains emails relating to a “member of the British Royal Family”, showing what seem to be friendly and familiar exchanges.

In June 2010, Epstein emailed: “If you can find time to show jes around with vera that would be fun.. he told me he ran into you tonight,” in messages first reported by business news agency Bloomberg.

The Royal Family member responded by asking who Vera was, and a few days later Epstein replied: “my future ex wife, i know jes and she would love to see home”. A dinner then seems to have been arranged.

In Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview, he was asked about the extent of his association with wealthy financier Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting a further trial.

Andrew said he had ceased contact with Epstein “after I was aware that he was under investigation and that was later in 2006 and I wasn’t in touch with him again until 2010”.

A photographer had captured Prince Andrew and Epstein walking together in New York’s Central Park in December 2010, while the prince stayed at Epstein’s house.

“Was that visit, December of 2010, the only time you saw him after he was convicted?” interviewer Emily Maitlis had asked the royal.

Prince Andrew replied “yes”. Maitlis then asked: “Did you see him or speak to him again?”, to which Andrew responded: “No.”

But emails a few months after that New York meeting suggest, if not a direct conversation, there were still friendly exchanges.

According to the court documents, on 27 February 2011, Epstein emailed: “jes staley will be in London on next tue afternoon, if you have time.”

There was a reply from the “member of the British Royal Family” with a question: “Jes is coming on 1st March or next week?”

The court documents say there was a “discussion of press articles” and then the message: “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”.

The Duke of York’s office has been contacted for comment.

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The man tipped to be Germany’s next leader could rely on support from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party for the second time in a week, a move that has been widely condemned.

Friedrich Merz, the leader of the conservative CDU party, may need AfD votes to pass legislation toughening immigration laws.

Former chancellor Angela Merkel has accused him of turning his back on a previous pledge not to work with AfD in the Bundestag.

Merz has defended his actions as “necessary” and said that he had not sought nor wanted AfD’s support.

“A right decision doesn’t become wrong just because the wrong people agree to it,” he said.

As Friday’s proceedings went on, party leaders frantically tried to get MPs onside, with Merz facing a rebellion from centrists in his party.

The CDU leader has been hoping that a tougher stance on migration will win voters from the AfD. But his reliance on that party for this vote risks losing more moderate voters.

Thousands of people took to the streets of Germany on Thursday night in opposition to the CDU’s cooperation with the far-right.

The CDU is leading in the polls ahead of Germany’s snap election next month. The AfD is currently polling in second place, although Merz has ruled out any kind of coalition with them.

While Wednesday’s vote saw a non-binding motion over changes to immigration law pass through parliament, actual legislation will be tabled on Friday aimed at curbing immigration numbers and family reunion rights.

However, 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.

The proposed legislation is opposed by parties including current Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD). Scholz is among those to have criticised Merz’s reliance on the AfD, calling it an “unforgivable mistake”.

“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,” he said.

In her rare intervention in politics, Merkel said he was breaking a pledge made in November to work with the Social Democratic Party and the Greens to pass legislation, not the AfD. She described the pledge as an “expression of great state political responsibility”.

Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, meanwhile, accused mainstream parties on Wednesday of disrespecting German voters by refusing to work with her party.

Sections of the AfD have been classed as right-wing extremists by domestic intelligence.

Wednesday’s vote saw 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, which was triggered by the collapse of Scholz’s governing coalition.

The Palestinian armed group Hamas has released the names of three hostages it says it will free on Saturday under the ceasefire deal with Israel.

They are Israelis Ofer Kalderon, 53, and Yarden Bibas, 34, and American-Israeli Keith Siegel, 65.

Mr Bibas is the father of Kfir, the youngest hostage who was 10 months old when he was kidnapped by Hamas. His wife Shiri and their other son Ariel, four, were also captured.

The Israeli prime minister’s office said Israel had received the list of hostages.

Israel will release another batch of Palestinian prisoners in return.

It will mark the fourth such exchange of hostages for prisoners since the ceasefire came into effect on 19 January.

Some 251 hostages were taken by Hamas when it attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people.

The attack triggered a war which has devastated Gaza. Israel’s 15-month military offensive killed 47,460 Palestinians in the territory, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Ofer Kalderon and Yarden Bibas were taken by Hamas from Nir Oz, while Keith Siegel was taken from Kfar Aza.

Mr Bibas’ wife Shiri, and their two children, Ariel, now five, and Kfir, now two, were also taken captive. Their fate is unknown.

Their release will bring the number of hostages freed under the ceasefire deal so far to 18.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Association says nine prisoners serving life sentences and 81 serving long terms will be released on Saturday. Israel has not commented.

Four hundred Palestinian prisoners – ranging from those serving long sentences for bombings and other attacks to teenagers held without charge – have so far been freed in exchange.

Most have returned to the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, while many of the most serious offenders have been deported.

The most recent exchange, which took place on Thursday, demonstrated the precariousness of the arrangement. Israel briefly delayed letting the prisoners go after it was outraged by the way eight hostages were treated as they were released.

As seven of the eight were freed in Khan Younis, crowds of spectators – many taking pictures with mobile phones – pushed in as the captives were led by gunmen to Red Cross vehicles before being transferred to Israel. In a separate release, in Jabaliya, an eighth was led out through a scene of rubble from Israeli air strikes in a stage-managed event and put on a platform before being handed over to the Red Cross.

The Israeli prime minister’s office later said it had since received from mediators “a commitment that a safe exit will be guaranteed for our hostages” yet to be released.

Meanwhile UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has told former British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari that he was “overjoyed” at seeing her released, according to a statement issued by a spokesperson for the Damari family.

In a phone call with Mr Starmer on Friday morning, Emily – who was freed on 19 January – and her mother thanked the prime minister and everyone who had campaigned for her release, the statement said.

It said that the Damaris revealed to the prime minister that Emily had been held for a time in facilities belonging to the main UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, and that she had been denied medical treatment.

They called on Mr Starmer to put “maximum pressure” on Hamas and Unrwa to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit the hostages still being held in Gaza, the statement added.

Canada has been weighing its options in response to a threat of tariffs from US President Donald Trump.

Trump has said he could levy a 25% tariff on Canadian imports as soon as Saturday.

Tariffs are a central part of the economic vision of the returning US president. He sees them as a way of growing the US economy, protecting jobs and raising tax revenue.

Economists suggest that such a move could have devastating immediate impacts on Canada’s economy – while also leading to higher prices for Americans.

Canada is trying to avoid a trade war altogether. It has pledged more than C$1bn ($690m; £560m) to boost security at its shared border with the US – a key point of contention for Trump, who appears to be using tariffs as a negotiating tactic.

Canada has indicated its retaliation would be targeted and gradual, depending on what the possible US tariffs look like. Officials in Ottawa have been drafting a response, but say they are not ready to make the details public.

Here are four options Canada has on the table, and their possible impacts.

Canada has already fought one tariff “war” with Trump.

During his first term, the US president slapped 10% tariffs on Canadian aluminium products and 25% tariffs on Canadian steel, citing national security concerns.

Ottawa retaliated by imposing tariffs on select goods, which were chosen to send a political message to Trump and his allies.

It put levies on Florida orange juice, and whiskey and bourbon from Tennessee and Kentucky – the latter being the home of then-Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.

Both countries ended up agreeing to lift the tariffs a year later.

Senior Canadian officials recently told local media that if Trump imposed tariffs again, the immediate response would likely be targeted.

According to US government data, 17% of US exports go to Canada. More than 75% of Canada’s exports go to the US.

Canada stands to suffer a larger economic blow in any trade war with the US and this stark imbalance is why targeted tariffs are often the first and safest approach, said Peter Clark, a lawyer who previously worked on trade policy issues in Canada’s federal finance department.

By targeting select goods, Canada can hit the US without widely punishing its own citizens, as tariffs can immediately raise prices for consumers at home.

This approach is also why officials are pushing a “Buy Canadian” campaign as a way to lessen the impact of a potential retaliation.

But pundits argue that Trump is less politically vulnerable this time, given that he cannot run for a third term in the White House.

“You won’t have the same impact as last time,” said Julian Karaguesian, an economics lecturer at McGill University in Montreal and a former finance counsellor at the Canadian embassy in Washington DC.

Another move Canada made in its first tariff war with its neighbour was to apply dollar-for-dollar tariffs.

It slapped identical tariffs on US aluminium and steel, and ensured the total dollar value of the American goods it taxed equalled the US tariffs on Canadian exports. That came up to around C$16.6bn at the time.

This time, the possible use of dollar-for-dollar tariffs could be much larger, with Canada reportedly preparing a first round on about $37bn of goods, according to official sources quoted in Canadian media.

That could be expanded to another C$110bn worth of goods.

The challenge is that Canada still does not know just how sweeping Trump’s tariffs would be. The more sweeping they are, the more goods Canada would have to tax in response.

• Canada and Mexico face 25% tariffs on Saturday, Trump says

Not all of Canada is on board with dollar-for-dollar tariffs. Scott Moe, leader of the mineral-rich province of Saskatchewan, has said that broad levies on US goods would “rip this country apart”.

Mr Karaguesian said the promised US tariffs on Canadian goods could plunge the country into a recession. If Canada responded with dollar-for-dollar tariffs, it could lead to inflation.

This would result in “stagflation,” he said, referring to a combination of high unemployment and rising prices.

Mr Clark said that whatever decision Canada took, politics would likely be top of mind. Polls suggest a majority of Canadians support retaliation, and that many Canadian business leaders want targeted, dollar-for-dollar tariffs.

Canadian politicians might be pushed to respond more forcefully if it means a boost in approval, Mr Clark said. “We’re talking about political decisions, which are not always rational.”

One of the most valuable assets in Canada’s arsenal is energy.

North-eastern US states like Vermont, New York and Maine significantly rely on electricity sold to them by neighbouring Canadian provinces. British Columbia and Manitoba also supply energy to western and Midwestern regions of the US.

About 30 states receive some of their electricity from Canada, according to Canadian government data.

Canada is also the top supplier of crude oil to the US, making up 60% of total oil imports, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, has suggested that Canada cut off Americans’ supply to pinch Americans at the petrol pump.

Trump suggested on Thursday that oil and gas could be exempt from US tariffs but Canada still has the option of energy restrictions or taxes to inflict pain.

“The only thing that would really sting in the immediate to short-term is if energy prices went up, because Trump himself campaigned on bringing energy prices down very quickly,” said Mr Karaguesian.

But the move would be contentious, especially with the oil-rich province of Alberta – which has refused to sign off on taxing its oil and gas exports, arguing that doing so would disproportionately hurt its economy.

Other ideas have been floated.

Ford said that Ontario could pull American-made alcohol off shop shelves in the province, signalling a different approach in which different provincial premiers could define their own responses.

Another option is not retaliating – at least for now. For weeks, Canadian officials have been meeting their American counterparts in Washington DC in a bid to stave off any American tariffs in the first place.

On Wednesday, foreign minister Melanie Joly met Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deliver a message that tariffs would be bad for both countries, and that Ottawa was addressing US concerns about border security and fentanyl trafficking.

“We need to continue to engage,” she told reporters.

Canada has also signalled that it could bring in a relief programme for businesses harmed by the possible tariffs, similar to those introduced during the Covid pandemic.

Some argue, given the economic costs of retaliation, that Canada should instead focus on diversifying its trade relationships and increasing domestic production.

“We’re a natural resource superpower,” Mr Karaguesia said, adding that the country could use the tariffs as a push to harness that potential and sell its products elsewhere.

Families of people who were killed in a crush at a major religious festival in northern India this week are grieving their loss and waiting to take bodies of their relatives back home.

At least 30 people died in the crush at the Kumbh Mela on Wednesday, which was one of the holiest days of the six-week long Hindu festival.

The incident took place in Prayagraj city near the Sangam, an auspicious meeting point of the sacred Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers where devotees take a dip.

The festival, billed as the largest gathering of humanity, attracts tens of millions of pilgrims from around the world.

The crush reportedly took place after a surge of pilgrims making their way to the Sangam trampled over devotees sleeping near the riverbank.

Eyewitnesses have blamed the police and festival authorities for poor crowd-control measures and not making adequate space for pilgrims to move to their destinations.

The government in Uttar Pradesh state has launched a judicial investigation into the incident.

• BBC reports from scene of India’s Kumbh Mela crush

Meanwhile, the families of the victims are mourning the loss of their loved ones and some say that many of their questions remain unanswered. Others are still waiting for news of their relatives.

Kaikeyi Devi, who travelled from Bihar state with her husband to attend the Kumbh Mela, says she can’t shake the image of him getting trampled in front of her eyes.

“He was dragged in the chaos and we started crying… ‘Let him free! Let him be! We are here!’…but he never came [back],” Ms Devi told Reuters news agency as she waited outside a mortuary in Prayagraj city to collect her husband’s body.

Taposh Roy, a resident of Assam state who lost his brother in the crush, recounts the delay in getting help from authorities.

“He was just lying there for a long time because there was no ambulance to take him to the hospital. We pleaded with the police saying that we would carry him ourselves but they told us to wait. When he was taken by police, we couldn’t go with him,” Mr Roy told the Indian Express newspaper.

This was also the experience of Tarun Bose from West Bengal state who lost a female relative in the crush.

“The authorities failed to rescue her and the police only managed to retrieve her body after an hour and a half. There were no police officers around during the accident,” he told AFP news agency.

Deepak Hattarwat from Karnataka state is mourning the loss of his wife and daughter. He didn’t travel to the festival and says that he found out about their deaths only a day later and that too from a fellow traveller in their group.

“We were planning her [the daughter’s] wedding. What should I do and for whom should I live now?” Mr Hattarwat told the Indian Express newspaper.

Meanwhile, some people say that they are still searching for their loved ones, more than 48 hours after the incident took place.

Manoj Kumar Sahni from Bihar state told Reuters news agency that he has been desperately searching for his father who is missing.

“I have been searching for him since the last three days. I went to the hospital as well but didn’t find him. We also searched at the railway station and the bus stand but did not find him,” he said.

Since the incident, authorities have stepped up security measures in the festival and have also banned vehicles from entering the mela grounds until 4 February. The next auspicious bathing day is on Monday, when the festival is expected to witness massive crowds.

Five years ago, on 31 January 2020, the UK left the European Union.

On that day, Great Britain severed the political ties it had held for 47 years, but stayed inside the EU single market and customs union for a further 11 months to keep trade flowing.

Northern Ireland had a separate arrangement.

Brexit was hugely divisive, both politically and socially, dominating political debate and with arguments about its impacts raging for years.

Five years on from the day Britain formally left the EU, BBC Verify has examined five important ways Brexit has affected Britain.

Economists and analysts generally assess the impact of leaving the EU single market and customs union on 1 Jan 2021 on the UK’s goods trade as having been negative.

This is despite the fact that the UK negotiated a free trade deal with the EU and avoided tariffs – or taxes – being imposed on the import and export of goods.

The negative impact comes from so-called “non-tariff barriers” – time consuming and sometimes complicated new paperwork that businesses have to fill out when importing and exporting to the EU.

There is some disagreement about how negative the specific Brexit impact has been.

Some recent studies suggest that UK goods exports are 30% lower than they would have been if we had not left the single market and customs union.

Some suggest only a 6% reduction.

We can’t be certain because the results depend heavily on the method chosen by researchers for measuring the “counterfactual”, i.e what would have happened to UK exports had the country stayed in the EU.

One thing we can be reasonably confident of is that small UK firms appear to be more adversely affected than larger ones.

They have been less able to cope with the new post-Brexit cross-border bureaucracy. That’s supported by surveys of small firms.

It’s also clear UK services exports – such as advertising and management consulting – have done unexpectedly well since 2021.

But the working assumption of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the government’s independent official forecaster, is still that Brexit in the long-term will reduce exports and imports of goods and services by 15% relative to otherwise. It has held this view since 2016, including under the previous Government.

And the OBR’s other working assumption is that the fall in trade relative to otherwise will reduce the long-term size of the UK economy by around 4% relative to otherwise, equivalent to roughly £100bn in today’s money.

The OBR says it could revise both these assumptions based on new evidence and studies. The estimated negative economic impact could come down if the trade impact judged to be less severe. Yet there is no evidence, so far, to suggest that it will turn into a positive impact.

After Brexit, the UK has been able to strike its own trade deals with other countries.

There have been new trade deals with Australia and New Zealand and the government has been pursuing new agreements with the US and India.

But their impact on the economy is judged by the government’s own official impact assessments to be small relative to the negative impact on UK- EU trade.

However, some economists argue there could still be potential longer term economic benefits for the UK from not having to follow EU laws and regulations affecting sectors such as Artificial Intelligence.

Immigration was a key theme in the 2016 referendum campaign, centred on freedom of movement within the EU, under which UK and EU citizens could freely move to visit, study, work and live.

There has been a big fall in EU immigration and EU net migration (immigration minus emigration) since the referendum and this accelerated after 2020 due to the end of freedom of movement.

But there have been large increases in net migration from the rest of the world since 2020.

A post-Brexit immigration system came into force in January 2021.

Under this system, EU and non-EU citizens both need to get work visas in order to work in the UK (except Irish citizens, who can still live and work in the UK without a visa).

The two main drivers of the increase in non-EU immigration since 2020 are work visas (especially in health and care) and international students and their dependents.

UK universities started to recruit more non-EU overseas students as their financial situation deteriorated.

The re-introduction of the right of overseas students to stay and work in Britain after graduation by Boris Johnson’s government also made the UK more attractive to international students.

Subsequent Conservative governments reduced the rights of people on work and student visas to bring dependents and those restrictions have been retained by Labour.

Freedom of movement ended with Brexit, also affecting tourists and business travellers.

British passport holders can no longer use “EU/EEA/CH” lanes at EU border crossing points.

People can still visit the EU as a tourist for 90 days in any 180 day period without requiring a visa, provided they have at least three months remaining on their passports at the time of their return.

EU citizens can stay in the UK for up to six months without needing a visa.

However, a bigger change in terms of travel is on the horizon.

In 2025, the EU is planning to introduce a new electronic Entry Exit System (EES) – an automated IT system for registering travellers from non-EU countries.

This will register the person’s name, type of the travel document, biometric data (fingerprints and captured facial images) and the date and place of entry and exit.

It will replace the manual stamping of passports. The impact of this is unclear, but some in the travel sector have expressed fears it could potentially add to border queues as people leave the UK.

The EES was due to be introduced in November 2024 but was postponed until 2025, with no new date for implementation yet set.

And six months after the introduction of EES, the EU says it will introduce a new European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS). UK citizens will have to obtain ETIAS clearance for travel to 30 European countries.

ETIAS clearance will cost €7 (£5.90) and be valid for up to three years or until someone’s passport expires, whichever comes first. If people get a new passport, they need to get a new ETIAS travel authorisation.

Meanwhile, the UK is introducing its equivalent to ETIAS for EU citizens from 2 April 2025 (though Irish citizens will be exempt). The UK permit – to be called an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) – will cost £16.

Legal sovereignty – the ability of the UK to make its own laws and not have to follow EU ones – was another prominent Brexit referendum campaign promise.

To minimise disruption immediately following Brexit in 2020, the UK incorporated thousands of EU laws into UK law, becoming known as “retained EU law”.

According to the latest government count there were 6,901 individual pieces of retained EU law covering things like working time, equal pay, food labelling and environmental standards.

The previous Conservative government initially set a deadline of the end of 2023 to axe these EU laws.

But with so much legislation to consider there was concern there was not enough time to review all the laws properly.

In May 2023 Kemi Badenoch – the Trade Secretary at the time – announced only 600 EU laws would be axed by the end of 2023, with another 500 financial services laws set to disappear later.

Most were relatively obscure regulations and many of them had been superseded or become irrelevant.

All other EU legislation was kept, though ministers reserved powers to change them in future.

And the UK has changed some EU laws. For example, it banned the export of live animals from Great Britain for slaughter and fattening and changed EU laws on gene editing crops.

Brexit has also given the UK more freedom in certain areas of tax law.

EU member states are prohibited from charging VAT on education under an EU directive. Leaving the EU enabled Labour to impose VAT on private school fees.

A zero rate of VAT on tampons and other sanitary products was introduced by the UK government in 2021. This would not have been possible in the EU as the EU VAT Directive at the time mandated a minimum 5% tax on all sanitary products. However, in April 2022 the EU’s rules changed so the bloc also now allows a zero rate on sanitary products.

The money the UK sent to the EU was a controversial theme in the 2016 referendum, particularly the Leave campaign’s claim the UK sent £350m every week to Brussels.

The UK’s gross public sector contribution to the EU Budget in 2019-20, the final financial year before Brexit, was £18.3bn, equivalent to around £352m per week, according to the Treasury.

The UK continued paying into the EU Budget during the transition period but since 31 December 2020 it has not made these contributions.

However, those EU Budgets contributions were always partially recycled to the UK via payments to British farmers under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and “structural funding” – development grants to support skills, employment and training in certain economically disadvantaged regions of the nation. These added up to £5bn in 2019-20.

Since the end of the transition period UK governments have replaced the CAP payments directly with taxpayer funds.

Ministers have also replaced the EU structural funding grants, with the previous government rebranding them as “a UK Shared Prosperity” fund.

The UK was also receiving a negotiated “rebate” on its EU Budget contributions of around £4bn a year – money which never actually left the country,

So the net fiscal benefit to the UK from not paying into the EU Budget is closer to to £9bn per year, although this figure is inherently uncertain because we don’t know what the UK’s contribution to the EU Budget would otherwise have been.

The UK has also still been paying the EU as part of the official Brexit Withdrawal Agreement and its financial settlement. The Treasury says the UK paid a net amount of £14.9bn between 2021 and 2023, and estimated that from 2024 onwards it will have to pay another £6.4bn, although spread over many years.

Future payments under the withdrawal settlement are also uncertain in part because of fluctuating exchange rates.

However, there are other ways the UK’s finances remained connected with the EU, separate from the EU Budget and the Withdrawal Agreement.

After Brexit took effect, the UK also initially stopped paying into the Horizon scheme, which funds pan-European scientific research.

However, Britain rejoined Horizon in 2023 and is projected by the EU to pay in around €2.4bn (£2bn) per year on average to the EU budget for its participation, although historically the UK has been a net financial beneficiary from the scheme because of the large share of grants won by UK-based scientists.

There are, of course, a large number of other Brexit impacts which we have not covered here, ranging from territorial fishing rights, to farming, to defence. And with Labour looking for a re-set in EU relations, it’s a subject that promises to be a continuing source of debate and analysis for many years to come.

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Rwanda is illegally occupying the Democratic Republic of Congo and attempting to orchestrate regime change, the country’s foreign minister has told the BBC.

Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner said the world had allowed Rwandan President Paul Kagame decades of impunity and failure to hold him accountable for violating international law.

Her comments come after Rwanda-backed M23 rebels captured the eastern Congolese city of Goma and threatened to continue their offensive to the capital, Kinshasa, which is 2,600km (1,600 miles) away.

Rwanda’s government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo denied the accusation and said its troops were only deployed to prevent the conflict spilling over to its territory.

“We’re not interested in war, we’re not interested in annexation, we’re not interested in regime change,” Ms Makolo told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

The Southern African Development Community (Sadc), a regional bloc made up of 16 members, is holding a special meeting on Friday in Zimbabwe to discuss the situation in DR Congo.

Sadc has sent peacekeeping troops, primarily from South Africa, to DR Congo to combat armed groups like the M23 and restore peace in the mineral-rich region after decades of unrest.

Sixteen soldiers from southern African countries have been killed in clashes with the M23 around Goma in the past week.

In a public spat on X with his South African counterpart, Rwanda’s President Kagame said the Sadc troops were “not a peacekeeping force, and it has no place in this situation”.

• South Africa and Rwanda go head-to-head over DR Congo war
• DR Congo’s failed gamble on Romanian mercenaries
• What’s the fighting in DR Congo all about?

The fighting has worsened the humanitarian crisis in eastern DR Congo as the M23 has captured large areas of North Kivu province, around Goma.

Shelley Thakral, from the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said the city’s residents were running out of food, clean water and medical supplies.

“The supply chain has really been strangled at the moment if you think about land access, air access, when everything is closed down,” she told the AFP news agency.

Since the start of 2025, more than 400,000 people have been forced from their homes, according to the UN’s refugee agency.

Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Jeremy Laurence said there had been reports of sexual violence by Congolese troops.

There are reports that at least 50 women had been raped, some by several men, in South Kivu, he said.

The M23 has also killed at least 12 people in summary executions since the crisis started, according to the UN.

The Rwandan spokesperson asserted that the country’s troops were securing their borders in response to “repeated violations”, including 15 deaths, from cross-border shelling.

“The DRC needs to do a better job of getting their territory in order. That is their responsibility,” she said.

Ms Makolo added that Rwanda was placing “heavily defensive mechanisms, and offensive mechanisms” along the border to safeguard its investment.

She also said that Rwanda was concerned about the presence in DR Congo of militias responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and which wanted to return to Rwanda to “finish the job”. She accused the Congolese authorities of working with these groups.

The Congolese foreign minister also accused Rwanda of occupying DR Congo in order to exploit its vast mineral resources, such as gold and coltan, which is used to make batteries for mobile phones and electric vehicles.

“I think that Rwanda ought to be under an embargo for all of its mineral exportations, they should not be benefiting from what has been mined illegally and under forced labour in the eastern DRC,” she said.

This was denied by Ms Makolo.

Ms Wagner called for a halt to foreign aid being sent to Rwanda and sanctions to be placed on the leaders “enabling this warfare”.

She also called for Rwanda’s troops to be suspended from UN peacekeeping missions around the world.

“We have to witness a country that presents itself as a peace-bringer in other countries, be(ing) a warmonger in the Great Lakes region,” she said.

UN experts said last year that Rwanda had between 3,000 and 4,000 troops operating alongside the M23 in eastern DR Congo.

Human Rights Watch has warned of escalating risks to civilians as DR Congo’s army battle the M23 rebels. The humanitarian group has accused both sides of committing grave abuses against civilians.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the current conflict risks escalating into a broader regional war.

Uganda’s army has said it will strengthen its defences along the border with DR Congo in response to the increased fighting.

DR Congo is a vast country, about two-thirds the size of Western Europe, which borders nine different countries.

Previous conflicts in the country, in the 1990s, have drawn in several neighbours and were dubbed “Africa’s World Wars”.

• Watch: The crime behind the chaos in DR Congo
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AstraZeneca has scrapped plans to invest £450m in expanding a vaccine manufacturing plant in Merseyside, blaming a reduction in government support.

The pharmaceutical giant has announced its decision just two days after Chancellor Rachel Reeves set out Labour’s plan to go “further and faster” to boost economic growth.

AstraZeneca said that after “protracted” talks, a number of factors influenced the move, including “the timing and reduction of the final offer compared to the previous government’s proposal”.

The Treasury has been contacted for comment.

AstraZeneca said: “The site will continue to produce and supply our flu vaccine, for patients in the UK and around the world.”

It added that none of the current jobs at the Speke site would be affected.

The Labour government has made boosting growth its key objective and has been trying to encourage more firms to invest in the UK.

On Wednesday, Reeves named AstraZeneca as one of the “great companies” as she set out her plans to grow the economy, saying she was “determined to make Britain the best place in the world to invest”.

Plans to expand AstraZeneca’s site at Speke had been set out by the previous Conservative government in last March’s Budget by Reeves’ predecessor, Jeremy Hunt.

There have been subsequent reports that talks between the company and the Labour government had run into delays.

AstraZeneca also said the amount of support offered did not match the level put forward by the previous government.

India now hosts the world’s largest tiger population, despite having the highest human density and just 18% of global tiger habitat, according to a new study.

In just over a decade, India has doubled its tiger population to more than 3,600, accounting for 75% of the world’s tigers.

These tigers now inhabit an area of 138,200 sq km (53,360 sq miles) – roughly half the size of the UK – alongside some 60 million people.

This has been made possible by safeguarding the big cats from poaching and habitat loss, securing prey, reducing human-wildlife conflict, and uplifting local communities, the study published in Science, a leading peer-reviewed research journal, says.

“We think human densities are detrimental to conservation of large carnivores [like tigers]. But more than density it is the attitude of people that matters,” Yadvendradev Vikramsinh Jhala, the study’s lead author, told the BBC.

He cited Malaysia as an example, where, despite being economically prosperous and having a lower population density than India, tiger populations have not been successfully revived.

India’s tiger recovery shows how conservation can protect big cats, boost biodiversity, and support communities – offering key lessons for the world, the researchers believe.

The study by Mr Jhala, Ninad Avinash Mungi, Rajesh Gopal and Qamar Qureshi analysed tiger occupancy in India from 2006 to 2018.

Since 2006, India has surveyed tiger habitats every four years across 20 states, monitoring distribution of the big cats, co-predators, prey, and quality of habitat.

In that time, its tiger habitat has grown by 30% – about 2,929 sq km annually.

But while tigers in the country have thrived in protected, prey-rich areas, they have also adapted to landscapes shared by nearly 60 million people, primarily living in farming communities and settlements outside tiger reserves and national parks.

The level of coexistence with tigers varies across India, influenced by economics, social settings, and cultural factors, the researchers found.

In states like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, and Karnataka, tigers share space with people at high densities.

In regions with a history of bushmeat hunting or poaching, such as Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and northeast India, tigers are either absent or extinct. These areas also include some of India’s poorest districts.

In other words, researchers note, tiger coexistence with people is often found in economically prosperous areas, which benefit from tiger-related tourism and government compensation for conflict losses.

But development can be a “double-edged sword”, says Mr Jhala.

The researchers say economic prosperity through sustainable use of ecosystems helps recovery of tigers. However, it often leads to changes in land use that harm tiger habitats.

“Tiger recovery is thus constrained at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, by intensive urbanisation and poverty,” the researchers say.

“Hence, adopting an inclusive and sustainable rural prosperity in place of an intensive land-use change–driven economy can be conducive for tiger recovery, aligning with India’s modern environmentalism and sustainability.”

Armed conflict also significantly increases risk of extinction of tigers, the researchers found.

Globally, political instability has led to drastic wildlife declines, as militants exploit wildlife for funding, turning lawless areas into poaching hotspots.

In India, Manas National Park lost its rhinos during conflict, mirroring Nepal’s rhino decline during the civil unrest.

The researchers found tiger extinctions occurred in districts impacted by India’s Maoist conflict, particularly in tiger reserves in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

Reserves where the conflict has been controlled – Nagarjunsagar-Srisailam, Amrabad, and Similipal – have shown recovery, they say.

Also, several habitats in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and eastern Maharashtra have faced armed insurgencies, resulting in low tiger occupancy and high extinction risk, the researchers found.

“With improved political stability, these areas may see tiger recovery,” they say.

India’s tiger-free habitats – some 157,000 sq km – are mainly in Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Jharkhand. Reintroducing tigers and enhancing habitat connectivity in protected areas could restore around 10,000 sq km in these areas, the researcher say.

Recovering large carnivores in crowded, poverty-stricken areas is challenging, researcher say.

One approach, land sparing, suggests keeping people separate from predators. The other, land sharing supports coexistence between humans and wildlife.

Critics argue land sharing leads to conflict, while land sparing may be impractical. The study shows that both approaches – land sparing and land sharing – are necessary for tiger recovery in India, as each has a “role in conserving large carnivores”.

India is also grappling with rising human-wildlife conflict, leading to fatalities from tiger attacks. How does this align with the growing tiger population?

“We lose 35 people to tiger attacks every year, 150 to leopards, and the same number to wild pigs. Additionally, 50,000 people die from snake bites. And then about 150,000 also lose their lives in car accidents annually,” says Mr Jhala.

“It’s not about the number of deaths. Two hundred years ago, human deaths from predators were a normal part of mortality. Today, they’re abnormal, which is why they make the headlines. In fact, within tiger reserves, you’re more likely to die from a car accident than from a tiger attack.”

Ukrainians can again bring their children to join them in the UK, after the government reversed changes to visa rules.

Last February – without notice – the government restricted eligibility so Ukrainians without the right to live in the UK permanently could no longer sponsor people under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which allows people to host those fleeing the war.

Charities said this left families torn apart, with some desperate parents resorting to illegal routes to bring their children to the UK.

They welcomed the announcement as a “huge relief” for parents separated from their children but warned it will not help those forced apart from other family members such as siblings or parents.

More than 190,000 people have come to the UK under the Homes for Ukraine scheme since it was launched in March 2022, following the Russian invasion.

However, under changes brought in last February under the Conservatives, only British or Irish citizens, or those with the right to live in the UK permanently, have been able to act as sponsors, who provide somewhere for people to live.

This meant Ukrainians living in the UK without permanent residence could no longer sponsor family members to join them in the UK.

At the same time the Ukraine Family Scheme, which allowed Ukrainians to join family members who already had permanent residence in the UK, was also closed.

The government has now announced a parent or legal guardian who is in the UK under any of the visa schemes for Ukrainians can apply to sponsor their child under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

Valentyna – not her real name – applied for her 12-year-old son to join her in the UK last August but her application had remained pending because Ukrainians were no longer allowed to act as sponsors.

She first came to the UK before the invasion for seasonal work on a farm and extended her visa when the war broke out.

Her son was staying with relatives in Odessa while she found somewhere permanent to live before applying for him to join her.

Valentyna has not seen her son for six months and became emotional when asked how it felt to be separated from him.

She told the BBC the change in the rules gave her hope they would finally be reunited.

Dora-Olivia Vicol, chief executive of Work Rights Centre, a charity supporting migrants, said: “It will come as a huge relief to those parents who have been separated from their children, and will finally be able to bring them to the UK to reunite in safety.”

She added: “However, this action does not help those who have been forced apart from other family members, including siblings, parents or partners.

“We know there are many Ukrainians in the UK who left behind elderly, sick or disabled relatives with the belief they would be able to bring them later. They face a cruel choice: leave the safety of the UK to care for them in Ukraine, or remain in safety leaving their loved ones vulnerable at risk.”

The charity says it has heard from hundreds of Ukrainians separated from family members and trying to bring them to the UK.

Settled, another charity which supports Ukrainians applying for visas, said some families had resorted to bringing their children to join them through illegal routes, rather than leave them in danger.

Yuliia Ismail, an immigration advisor for the charity, said: “We ask that the Home Office now acts quickly to decide outstanding applications from children stuck in Ukrainian conflict zones some of which have been in limbo for almost a year.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Under the previous government, a change was made to the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which meant that parents could not sponsor their children to join them in the UK even if they had appropriate accommodation.

“We have taken urgent action to resolve this issue, which will now enable parents with Ukraine Scheme visas to sponsor their children to join them in the UK. These will apply to both applications that have already been made, as well as future applications.”

Stars including Billie Eilish, Pink, Katy Perry, Nirvana and Dr Dre performed at FireAid on Thursday, a benefit concert in Los Angeles to help the area recover from two of the largest fires in its history.

More than 20 artists from various genres took to the stage for the five-hour show, which is happening simultaneously at two large venues in the city and raising money for wildfire relief efforts.

Actor Billy Crystal welcomed the crowd at the Kia forum, wearing clothes he had on when he escaped the Pacific Palisades fire earlier this month.

“You’ll be hearing from a number of people who were tragically affected by these fires, and I was one of them,” Crystal said as he opened the show.

He had lived in the area for 46 years and spoke poignantly about losing his home.

Crystal joked that he looked like someone who had just robbed a convenience store, adding that it was important to find moments of humour amid the devastation.

Shortly after the show began at the Kia Forum, a second concert also kicked off at the Intuit Dome, with the online stream switching between the two venues. Many of the artists who performed are from or based in Los Angeles.

California native Katy Perry waved the state’s flag as she performed hits such as California Gurls.

Other stars taking to the stage included No Doubt, from Orange County, and Dr Dre, who performed his anthem California Love, a collaboration with the late 2Pac.

“This is a magical moment for me. I’ve got so much love, you guys… I appreciate all the first responders and all the firemen who put their lives on the line. It’s all about love for me today,” the rapper said.

Eilish duetted with rock band Green Day for a performance of Last Night on Earth. The band’s frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told the crowd: “We’re still alive, this is California, and we’re all in this together.

“From the bottom of our hearts, we love you Los Angeles, and we got your back no matter what.”

Later, Eilish was joined by her brother Finneas to perform her own hits including Wildflower and Birds of a Feather.

Elsewhere, Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks dedicated her Landslide performance to the firefighters who saved her home, and in doing so, likely saved her whole block.

“I was a full-on Pacific Palisadean woman with an old, beautiful, famous house that was almost taken from me as the fire came up the hill behind my house,” Nicks recalled.

“And I was pretty sure, as they whisked me away and evacuated me – my least favorite word now – to another safe place, that when I turned around and looked my house would be up in flames.”

But, the singer said her house “stands strong, just like [me]. And in my opinion, she saved that whole street.”

Actor Samuel L Jackson also made an appearance, praising the first responders as he introduced the crowd to a firefighter who lost his home in the blaze.

The actor then introduced the next musical guest, Rod Stewart, who performed Forever Young and Maggie May.

Alanis Morisette wore an “I Love LA” T-shirt and performed her hit Thank U, which carried a sentiment of gratitude towards firefighters and other key workers.

The remaining members of 90s rock band Nirvana, Dave Grohl, Pat Smear and Krist Novoselic also reunited with a series of guest female vocalists such as St Vincent and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

Other stars appearing at the two shows include Olivia Rodrigo, Earth, Wind & Fire, Gracie Abrams, Sting and Tate McRae.

Joni Mitchell, 81, made a rare public appearance, performing a rendition of Both Sides Now while sitting ona gold throne.

“Mitchell’s observation that ‘something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day’ was met with a huge cheer. It felt like a dose of regal perspective from one of the all-time greats,” said the Telegraph’s James Hall in his review of the concert.

“The song was recorded in LA. And this is where this concert was most effective. The host of songs recorded in, or written about, LA reminded us about the place’s musical pedigree and what could all too easily be lost.”

Red Hot Chilli Peppers performed their hit Under The Bridge, a paean to Los Angeles, with lyrics such as “the city, she loves me” taking on a new poignancy.

The night concluded with a performance from Lady Gaga, who delivered a powerful performance of her hit Shallow from the 2018 film A Star Is Born.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris was one of the famous faces spotted in the crowd at the Intuit Dome.

Her husband Doug Emhoff shared a picture taken inside the Intuit Dome on Instagram, with the caption: “Kamala and I are grateful to be at the FireAid concert tonight in our hometown of Los Angeles.

“It is a wonderful night that shows the strength and resilience of our city as we begin to recover and rebuild from the devastating wildfires.”

Audiences watching the show were encouraged to donate online. Early in the concert, Crystal revealed that the band U2 had contributed $1m (£804,829).

Proceeds from the concert and donations during the show will go toward rebuilding communities and preventing future fires in the region.

At least 29 people died and more than 16,000 homes and businesses were destroyed in the fast-spreading, destructive fires that broke out in early January.

Viewers will be able to donate money to relief efforts during the show, either by text message or via the FireAidLA website.

Donations will be overseen by the Annenberg Foundation, focusing on both short-term relief efforts and long-term fire prevention projects.

Additionally, Connie and Steve Ballmer – who own the LA Clippers basketball team, as well as the Intuit Dome and Forum – will match all donations made during the broadcast.

The Palisades and Eaton fires became the largest fires ever seen in the LA area earlier this month. Both erupted on 7 January as the region saw a strong wind event, making the small blazes in brushy, mountainous areas hard to contain.

Embers travelled miles, igniting whole communities and levelling neighbourhoods.

Nearly 7,000 structures were levelled in the Palisades fire in northwest LA. Another 9,400 were destroyed in the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County. The fires also claimed a number of victims.

Sixty-seven people are believed to have died after a passenger plane hit a military helicopter in mid-air near Washington DC’s Ronald Reagan airport on Wednesday evening.

It is not clear what caused the crash. Some experts have questioned whether the helicopter was flying above the permitted altitude at the time of the collision, and flight data appears to show that it was. But an investigation is continuing to determine what went wrong.

Authorities have recovered the flight data recorders from the American Airlines jet, and continue to find bodies in the icy Potomac River where the plane fell.

• Live: Follow the latest updates
• What we know so far about the plane crash
• Who are the victims?
• BBC Verify analyses moments before collision
• Watch: The scene in DC after moment of impact

The plane, a Bombardier CRJ700, had travelled from Wichita, Kansas. It was operating as American Airlines flight 5342.

The US Army helicopter was a Sikorsky H-60 Black Hawk that took off from Fort Belvoir in Virginia, and belonged to B Company, 12th Aviation Battalion.

The helicopter appears to have been flying above the permitted altitude, according to analysis by the BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

Recordings of air traffic control conversations published online suggested that a controller tried to warn the helicopter about the American Airlines plane in the seconds before the collision.

The helicopter pilot appeared to respond to confirm they were aware of the plane, but moments later the two aircraft hit each other. Transport Secretary Sean Duffy also said he thought the helicopter was aware of the plane nearby.

Joining Duffy at a briefing on Thursday, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth added that the helicopter was on an annual proficiency flight, performing a night evaluation – and the crew had night-vision goggles.

The collision happened at about 21:00 local time (02:00 GMT), as the plane approached Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

One eyewitness, Ari Schulman, told NBC Washington that the plane’s approach looked normal, until he saw it bank hard to the right, with “streams of sparks” running underneath the craft, illuminating its belly, which he believed to look “very, very wrong”.

Another eyewitness, Jimmy Mazeo, recalled seeing what looked like a “white flare” in the sky. He remarked that planes approaching the airport appeared to have been flying in “irregular patterns”.

After the impact, the passenger plane broke into multiple pieces and sank several feet into the river, while the helicopter ended up upside down on the water.

Hundreds of first responders on rubber boats were deployed to search for survivors. Officials highlighted the challenging conditions in which they were working due to ice floating on the freezing-cold river, and contending with the plane wreckage.

They later said they did not expect to find any survivors and had changed the focus of their mission to focus on recovering bodies.

Details are emerging about the 64 people who were on board the plane, who included top figure skaters, as well as four crew members. Meanwhile, the helicopter was carrying three soldiers.

The latest official update says 28 bodies have been recovered from the scene so far. The BBC’s US news partner CBS reports that number is closer to 40.

The people known to have been on the flight include the skaters, a young pilot, flight attendants, and a lawyer travelling home on her birthday.

They comprise a range of nationalities – and several of them have been identified by family members and organisations.

Among the skaters were six people linked to a club in Boston. They were two teenagers, their mothers, and two Russian coaches, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who were former world champions in their sport, the club said.

The plane’s captain Jonathan Campos was named by his aunt, who told the New York Times that flying planes had been her nephew’s lifelong dream.

Ryan O’Hara was the crew chief of the helicopter, according to CBS.

• Who are the victims?
• US and Russian figure skaters were on board crashed plane

It remains unclear what caused the crash. Officials have retrieved from the jet the data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder – known as the black boxes – and will look into possible contributing factors, including human error.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) began its first full day of investigation on Thursday and intends to release a preliminary report in 30 days.

Hegseth has said he expected the investigation to establish whether the helicopter was flying in the right corridor and altitude.

NTSB officials said on Thursday that the helicopter appeared to move from one corridor into another in a standard manoeuvre.

As the official probe continues, the New York Times has reported that the air traffic control staffing was “not normal” at the time – citing a preliminary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) report.

Normally two people manage helicopters and airplanes flying in the area, but only one person was reportedly doing so at the time of the crash, the NYT and CBS reported.

It has also been reported by the Washington Post and CNN that just 24 hours before the deadly crash, another jet had to abort its landing at the airport after a helicopter came close to its flight path.

President Trump said on Friday that the Black Hawk helicopter was flying too high “by a lot”.

“It was far above the 200ft limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???” he said.

The helicopter does appear to have been flying above the limit, according to publicly available flight data.

Data from FlightRadar24 showed the helicopter’s last estimated altitude was about 400ft when it crashed. “Why is it on this day, on that flight, they were [as much as] 150 to 200ft higher than they knew they should be?” Greg Feith, a former senior air safety investigator told CBS.

“The investigation will help us understand that,” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said. “Was the Black Hawk too high? Was it on course? Right now, we don’t quite know.”

Trump said earlier the country was in mourning, before going on to take a swipe at his political foes.

He speculated, without giving evidence, that lowered standards of hiring for air traffic controllers in the FAA during the Joe Biden and Barack Obama presidencies may have been a factor in the disaster.

Trump said he and his team had “strong opinions and ideas” about what had happened, but acknowledged that the investigation was at an early stage.

He also announced he was appointing Chris Rocheleau as the temporary head of the FAA. The top job there, as well as the positions of administrator and deputy administrator, have been vacant since Trump took office.

• Combative Trump blames diversity policies after tragedy

Major incidents of this kind are relatively rare in the US. The most recent comparable crash was in 2009, according to a list compiled by Reuters.

That year, an aircraft crashed on approach to landing in Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground.

The airspace above Washington DC is both busy and highly controlled. It is used by domestic and international traffic using two airports, and there are extra factors of presidential flights, heavy military traffic and flights around the Pentagon.

Passenger airliners must follow fixed flight plans, said the BBC’s transport correspondent Sean Dilley. Unlike in uncontrolled airspace, military pilots operate under strict instruction of air traffic controllers. But unlike their civilian counterparts, they have freedom to deviate and a duty to “see and avoid” other aircraft.

Donald Trump stood before the White House press room cameras on Thursday to perform a traditional presidential duty – consoler-in-chief during a time of tragedy.

He said the country was in mourning, shared his condolences during “an hour of anguish” and paid tribute to first responders and the victims.

Then he sharply pivoted – providing yet another reminder of how his new presidency is going to be very different.

It will be combative. It will be unscripted. And it will be quick to point the finger of blame.

“We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” he said.

He then speculated, without giving evidence, that lowered standards of hiring for air traffic controllers in the Federal Aviation Administration during the Joe Biden and Barack Obama presidencies may have been a factor in the disaster.

• LIVE UPDATES: Get the latest on the crash investigation
• US and Russian figures skaters were on board plane

Trump and his fellow Republicans have regularly attacked “diversity, equity and inclusion” programmes in the federal government.

His team has made undoing such programmes a core part of their first days in office, saying they have divided Americans and weakened the country.

And less than 24 hours after the first major US air disaster in more than a decade, Trump – along with his secretaries of transportation and defence, and his vice-president – took turns hammering their point, even as they provided no evidence that federal hiring practices had any connection to this particular crash.

Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: “Because I have common sense.”

At other moments, he acknowledged there was no confirmed cause, saying “it’s all under investigation”.

But some of Trump’s fellow Republicans thought he spoke too soon.

“I’d have to see if the evidence is substantiated,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told The Independent. “It seems a bit early to me when I think that statement was made before we even have a flight data recorder.”

A number of disabilities rights groups including the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) issued a joint statement calling Trump’s comments “irresponsible, disparaging, and wrong”.

“The president is deliberately spreading falsehoods to demonize the quarter of American adults who live with disabilities rather than directing federal resources towards ensuring such a devastating tragedy never happens again,” said AAPD president Maria Town.

Trump said the hiring guidance for the FAA’s diversity and inclusion programme included preference for those with disabilities involving “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism”.

An archived version of a website for the FAA’s diversity and inclusion hiring programme that appears to have been taken down in December included a similar list. The agency was seeking people with “targeted disabilities” that the federal government was prioritising for recruitment at the time.

But it’s unclear how that drive to make recruitment more diverse may have impacted the ranks of air traffic controllers, who President Trump said needed to all be “naturally talented geniuses”. The FAA has more than 35,000 employees, only a fraction of which perform that role.

In response to criticisms over diversity hiring practices last year, the agency released a statement asserting that all new hires must meet “rigorous qualifications” that “vary by position”.

The agency has faced criticism over a longstanding shortage of air traffic controllers, particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic caused massive disruptions in commercial air travel.

Reports suggest that staffing levels at Reagan airport on Wednesday night may have been compromised.

In his remarks, Trump specifically blamed Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whom he described with an obscenity and said had ran the department “into the ground”.

Buttigieg defended his record on social media, calling Trump’s comments “despicable”. “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” he said.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer also criticised Trump’s comments.

“It’s one thing for internet pundits to spew off conspiracies, it’s another for the President of the United States to throw out idle speculation as bodies are still being recovered,” Schumer said.

Once he departed from his prepared remarks, however, speculation was what President Trump seemed most interested in offering.

Along with his condemnation of DEI policies, he offered extended discussion of the angles and elevation at which the two aircraft were flying, the weather conditions on Wednesday night, the temperature of the Potomac and the behaviour of the Army helicopter.

“We had a situation where we had a helicopter that had an ability to stop,” he said. “For some reason, it just kept going.”

But on Thursday evening, the White House doubled down on blaming his predecessor and DEI policies. The president signed a memorandum to end diversity efforts in the aviation sector and to review all hiring decisions and changes to safety protocols made during the Biden administration. He also signed an executive order to appoint a new head of the FAA.

Two things were very clear from Trump’s remarks on Thursday.

The first is that his eagerness to inject himself into a major news story is undiminished in his new term. And the second is that in his view it is never too soon to inject politics into national tragedy – and use it to attack opponents and advance his agenda.

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

The aviation world is struggling to understand how a deadly mid-air collision between a passenger plane and military helicopter was able to happen in what one expert described as “the most controlled bit of airspace in the world”.

A US Army Black Hawk helicopter with a crew of three collided with an American Airlines jet carrying 64 people seconds before the passenger aircraft was due to land at Washington National airport.

Both aircraft were sent careering into the icy Potomac River on Wednesday night.

The exact cause of the crash remains unknown.

Officials will release a preliminary report within 30 days, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) – which is leading the investigation.

Crews were able to recover flight data recorders – known as the black boxes – from the wreckage on Thursday, according to the BBC’s US news partner CBS. The devices can help investigators pinpoint what led up to a crash.

Airspace over the District of Columbia is heavily restricted to protect both national security and the buildings that house core aspects of US government.

Commercial planes are prevented from flying over the Pentagon, the White House and other historic landmarks.

Yet the area sees a lot of air traffic, Aviation attorney Jim Brachle, who has handled numerous litigation matters related to jets and Reagan airport, told the BBC.

There is commercial traffic but also private aviation and helicopters that fly around the city, often carrying high-ranking officials and politicians between sensitive locations.

“You got these really narrow pathways in and out and you’ve got a lot of congestion and extra airplanes, so you’re putting a lot of aircraft in a really confined space,” he said.

Jeff Guzzetti, a former aircraft accident investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the NTSB, told BBC Newshour that it seems the helicopter was in communication with the control tower before the accident. The air traffic controller pointed out the American Airlines flight to the helicopter, he said.

“The helicopter pilot indicated he had the airplane in sight and was going to visually separate from it – and then the accident happened shortly thereafter – so there’s going to be a lot of questions about exactly what did the helicopter pilot see?” Mr Guzzetti said.

Todd Inman, part of the five-member NTSB board, said that DC is also a “unique environment” because of helicopters and specific zones they’re allowed to fly.

“If you look at DC, you see a lot of helicopters going down into this area so there’s a very well-defined system in that regard,” he said.

Mr Inman could not provide any specifics on altitude of the helicopter before it collided with the American Airlines flight.

Mr Brachle, who has handled numerous litigation matters related to jets and Reagan airport, told the BBC the question that remains is how two aircraft ended up in the same airspace.

“What’s really unique about Reagan is right there on the river. There’s also a helicopter route that crosses right through that final approach and that’s at or below 200 feet,” he said.

Brachle said the routes for both helicopters and the approach for aircraft intersect.

“You’re putting potentially two different aircraft in a really small space with hardly any separation,” he said. “If you get one that’s maybe a little too low, one that’s a little too high, you end up being in the same spot.”

Aviation consultant Philip Butterworth-Hayes said the incident occurred at the “nexus of different aviation systems”, including civilian and military systems, as well as procedures specific to the airport.

“You are at the border of three or four aviation systems here – and it’s at those borders where most accidents tend to happen,” he added.

But UK-based aviation expert John Strickland said the amount of commercial air traffic in the area cannot fully explain why the deadly collision was able to happen.

As well as Washington National close to the city centre, he notes, there is the international gateway, Washington Dulles, and also Baltimore Airport a little further away.

• Live: Follow the latest updates
• What we know so far about the plane crash
• Who are the victims?
• BBC Verify analyses moments before collision
• Watch: The scene in DC after moment of impact

“There has to be management of traffic flows to keep separation. It’s much like we have in London where you have to manage traffic flows between Heathrow, Stansted, Gatwick and London City.

“So DC is not different in that sense to London or New York… it’s not totally unusual.”

Mr Butterworth-Hayes continued: “This is the most controlled bit of airspace in the world. You have both US government and civilian systems – Ronald Reagan airport is even owned by the government, it’s one of the very, very few like that.

“This really is the most secure – and should be the safest – airspace in the world, given the number of security and civilian safety organisations working in that area.”

The last fatal crash on a comparable scale involving a commercial plane in the US was in February 2009. Officials and experts alike have stressed that this type of incident is incredibly rare due to tight safety restrictions on all types of flights.

Footage obtained from an air traffic control source by CBS News, the BBC’s US news partner, showed the two aircraft which appear to have been involved in the crash clearly visible on radar systems accessible to controllers.

Audio sourced by BBC News appears to confirm the helicopter was in contact with air traffic control on the ground at the airport.

The helicopter was asked if it had the passenger plane “in sight” and to “pass behind” it. In the audio that follows, controllers appear to realise there has been a collision and can be heard directing other planes in the air to neighbouring airports.

Mr Butterworth-Hayes said an in-air collision like this requires a number of things going wrong.

He said that in order to fly in civilian airspace, the military helicopter would have needed to be fitted with a transponder alerting surrounding aircraft to its position.

That means both aircraft should have been able to see each other, he says, plus there would have been instructions from air traffic control and an aircraft protection safety device that operate separately from each other.

“On this occasion, you have these two different systems and both should have been able to keep these aircraft separate.”

The Black Hawk helicopter was part of B Company, 12th Aviation Battalion. It left Fort Belvoir, a military base in Virginia, and was taking part in a training exercise.

US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth has said the helicopter’s crew were “fairly experienced” and taking part in an annual night flight training session.

Speaking to CNN, Cedric Leighton – a retired US Air Force colonel – said it was normal for that type of military aircraft to be training at night in the area, particularly to make sure pilots are proficient with using instruments needed to fly in the dark.

He said one of the unit’s duties is to transport high-ranking personnel around the capital – though none were on board at the time of the crash as it was a training flight.

The unit’s pilots are expected to be proficient at flying in DC’s busy airspace and “train in order to avoid incidents like this”, he added.

Mr Butterworth-Hayes said only experienced pilots would be able to train in such a busy section of airspace.

“Whether it’s training for new systems or equipment, we need to know what systems the pilot had turned on in the helicopter and whether they had all the safety systems on board, or whether they were trying a new procedure or new route.”

For Christmas I received an interesting gift from a friend – my very own “best-selling” book.

“Tech-Splaining for Dummies” (great title) bears my name and my photo on its cover, and it has glowing reviews.

Yet it was entirely written by AI, with a few simple prompts about me supplied by my friend Janet.

It’s an interesting read, and very funny in parts. But it also meanders quite a lot, and is somewhere between a self-help book and a stream of anecdotes.

It mimics my chatty style of writing, but it’s also a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It may have gone beyond Janet’s prompts in collating data about me.

Several sentences begin “as a leading technology journalist…” – cringe – which could have been scraped from an online bio.

There’s also a mysterious, repeated hallucination in the form of my cat (I have no pets). And there’s a metaphor on almost every page – some more random than others.

There are dozens of companies online offering AI-book writing services. My book was from BookByAnyone.

When I contacted the chief executive Adir Mashiach, based in Israel, he told me he had sold around 150,000 personalised books, mainly in the US, since pivoting from compiling AI-generated travel guides in June 2024.

A paperback copy of your own 240-page long best-seller costs £26. The firm uses its own AI tools to generate them, based on an open source large language model.

I’m not asking you to buy my book. Actually you can’t – only Janet, who created it, can order any further copies.

There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody’s name, including celebrities – although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed “solely to bring humour and joy”.

Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a “personalised gag gift”, and the books do not get sold further.

He hopes to broaden his range, generating different genres such as sci-fi, and perhaps offering an autobiography service. It’s designed to be a light-hearted form of consumer AI – selling AI-generated goods to human customers.

It’s also a bit terrifying if, like me, you write for a living. Not least because it probably took less than a minute to generate, and it does, certainly in some parts, sound just like me.

Musicians, authors, artists and actors worldwide have expressed alarm about their work being used to train generative AI tools that then churn out similar content based upon it.

“We should be clear, when we are talking about data here, we actually mean human creators’ life works,” says Ed Newton Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, which campaigns for AI firms to respect creators’ rights.

“This is books, this is articles, this is photos. It’s works of art. It’s records… The whole point of AI training is to learn how to do something and then do more like that.”

In 2023 a song featuring AI-generated voices of Canadian singers Drake and The Weeknd went viral on social media before being pulled from streaming platforms because it was not their work and they had not consented to it. It didn’t stop the track’s creator trying to nominate it for a Grammy award. And even though the artists were fake, it was still wildly popular.

“I do not think the use of generative AI for creative purposes should be banned, but I do think that generative AI for these purposes that is trained on people’s work without permission should be banned,” Mr Newton Rex adds. “AI can be very powerful but let’s build it ethically and fairly.”

In the UK some organisations – including the BBC – have chosen to block AI developers from trawling their online content for training purposes. Others have decided to collaborate – the Financial Times has partnered with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for example.

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

Ed Newton Rex describes this as “insanity”.

He points out that AI can make advances in areas like defence, healthcare and logistics without trawling the work of authors, journalists and artists.

“All of these things work without going and changing copyright law and ruining the livelihoods of the country’s creatives,” he argues.

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, is also strongly against removing copyright law for AI.

“Creative industries are wealth creators, 2.4 million jobs and a whole lot of joy,” says the Baroness, who is also an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University.

“The government is undermining one of its best performing industries on the vague promise of growth.”

A government spokesperson said: “No move will be made until we are absolutely confident we have a practical plan that delivers each of our objectives: increased control for right holders to help them license their content, access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK, and more transparency for right holders from AI developers.”

Under the UK government’s new AI plan, a national data library containing public data from a wide range of sources will also be made available to AI researchers.

In the US the future of federal rules to control AI is now up in the air following President Trump’s return to the presidency.

In 2023 Biden signed an executive order that aimed to boost the safety of AI with, among other things, firms in the sector required to share details of the workings of their systems with the US government before they are released.

But this has now been repealed by Trump. It remains to be seen what Trump will do instead, but he is said to want the AI sector to face less regulation.

This comes as a number of lawsuits against AI firms, and particularly against OpenAI, continue in the US. They have been taken out by everyone from the New York Times to authors, music labels, and even a comedian.

They claim that the AI firms broke the law when they took their content from the internet without their consent, and used it to train their systems.

The AI companies argue that their actions fall under “fair use” and are therefore exempt. There are a number of factors which can constitute fair use – it’s not a straight-forward definition. But the AI sector is under increasing scrutiny over how it gathers training data and whether it should be paying for it.

If this wasn’t all enough to ponder, Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has shaken the sector over the past week. It became the most downloaded free app on Apple’s US App Store.

DeepSeek claims that it developed its technology for a fraction of the price of the likes of OpenAI. Its success has raised security concerns in the US, and threatens American’s current dominance of the sector.

As for me and a career as an author, I think that at the moment, if I really want a “bestseller” I’ll still have to write it myself. If anything, Tech-Splaining for Dummies highlights the current weakness in generative AI tools for bigger projects. It is full of inaccuracies and hallucinations, and it can be quite difficult to read in parts because it’s so long-winded.

But given how quickly the tech is evolving, I’m not sure how long I can remain confident that my considerably slower human writing and editing skills, are better.

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Families of people who were killed in a crush at a major religious festival in northern India this week are grieving their loss and waiting to take bodies of their relatives back home.

At least 30 people died in the crush at the Kumbh Mela on Wednesday, which was one of the holiest days of the six-week long Hindu festival.

The incident took place in Prayagraj city near the Sangam, an auspicious meeting point of the sacred Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers where devotees take a dip.

The festival, billed as the largest gathering of humanity, attracts tens of millions of pilgrims from around the world.

The crush reportedly took place after a surge of pilgrims making their way to the Sangam trampled over devotees sleeping near the riverbank.

Eyewitnesses have blamed the police and festival authorities for poor crowd-control measures and not making adequate space for pilgrims to move to their destinations.

The government in Uttar Pradesh state has launched a judicial investigation into the incident.

• BBC reports from scene of India’s Kumbh Mela crush

Meanwhile, the families of the victims are mourning the loss of their loved ones and some say that many of their questions remain unanswered. Others are still waiting for news of their relatives.

Kaikeyi Devi, who travelled from Bihar state with her husband to attend the Kumbh Mela, says she can’t shake the image of him getting trampled in front of her eyes.

“He was dragged in the chaos and we started crying… ‘Let him free! Let him be! We are here!’…but he never came [back],” Ms Devi told Reuters news agency as she waited outside a mortuary in Prayagraj city to collect her husband’s body.

Taposh Roy, a resident of Assam state who lost his brother in the crush, recounts the delay in getting help from authorities.

“He was just lying there for a long time because there was no ambulance to take him to the hospital. We pleaded with the police saying that we would carry him ourselves but they told us to wait. When he was taken by police, we couldn’t go with him,” Mr Roy told the Indian Express newspaper.

This was also the experience of Tarun Bose from West Bengal state who lost a female relative in the crush.

“The authorities failed to rescue her and the police only managed to retrieve her body after an hour and a half. There were no police officers around during the accident,” he told AFP news agency.

Deepak Hattarwat from Karnataka state is mourning the loss of his wife and daughter. He didn’t travel to the festival and says that he found out about their deaths only a day later and that too from a fellow traveller in their group.

“We were planning her [the daughter’s] wedding. What should I do and for whom should I live now?” Mr Hattarwat told the Indian Express newspaper.

Meanwhile, some people say that they are still searching for their loved ones, more than 48 hours after the incident took place.

Manoj Kumar Sahni from Bihar state told Reuters news agency that he has been desperately searching for his father who is missing.

“I have been searching for him since the last three days. I went to the hospital as well but didn’t find him. We also searched at the railway station and the bus stand but did not find him,” he said.

Since the incident, authorities have stepped up security measures in the festival and have also banned vehicles from entering the mela grounds until 4 February. The next auspicious bathing day is on Monday, when the festival is expected to witness massive crowds.

Brands including Dior, Chanel and Armani Privé showcased their new collections at a high-profile Haute Couture Week in Paris, with their shows attracting a host of global celebrities.

Chanel’s show was unsurprisingly star-studded, with Dua Lipa, Lily-Rose Depp and Kylie Jenner dressed in signature styles from the fashion house’s archives.

Blackpink’s Jennie Kim was among the other A-list onlookers at the Grand Palais.

Over on the runway, the offering was a perfect spring palette of creams and pinks, with plenty of nods to classic Chanel tweed.

The show was a celebration of the fashion house’s 110 years in haute couture, using huge ramps that aerially displayed the double C motif of the brand.

Created by Chanel’s in-house team of designers (new creative director Matthieu Blazy won’t be exhibiting his first collection until later this year), it took inspiration from Coco Chanel’s 1980s colour palette.

Megan Thee Stallion had one of the week’s most eye-catching looks, a retrofuturistic fusion she described as “primitive space Cleopatra”.

Her outfit was made from cascading silver chains, which WWD said were inspired by “payals”, a type of ankle jewellery traditionally worn to ward off evil spirits. Designer Gaurav Gupta said the US rapper’s outfit “embodies the spirit of tribal India”.

At Christian Dior’s show, Anya Taylor-Joy and Jenna Ortega opted for gothic but daring looks.

Artistic vision and craftsmanship are what separate haute couture from high fashion, and both were on display on the Christian Dior runway.

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s collection was said to draw inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, with much of the designs looking like they belonged to the fantasy world.

The show was described by many as dramatic – with dresses that more closely resembled lampshades, complete with delightful feathers, tassels and tulle.

Chiuri said the collection was a result of her recent research into historical fashion.

Also borrowing from history was Valentino’s haute couture show, which was one of the most anticipated events of the week.

Away from the from springtime pastels and prints, Alessandro Michele’s debut couture collection was full of clashing colours and harlequin print fit for a court jester.

Michele, whose prominence grew after a stint designing for Gucci, is known for his love of accessories – whether hats, bows or out-there embroidery.

The stand-out design was a chiffon ballgown that reportedly took the fashion house 54 days to make.

To add to the spectacle, half of the models were over 50. “Time provides grace and it multiplies beauty,” Michele said of the decision.

Age was also no barrier for 90-year-old Giorgio Armani, who walked the runway in a black velvet tuxedo to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of his haute couture atelier Armani Privé.

The show’s main guest was Oscar best actress nominee Demi Moore, who collected her Golden Globe award in a dress by the designer last month.

Armani’s show followed on from the feeling of the fantastical that’s been present across much of this week, with embellishments aplenty.

Trouser suits were donned with sequins, while glittery beanies and diamond-encrusted clutch bags were also a highlight.

Armani said the collection was for “a modern woman who has travelled widely and internalised her experiences”.

As an eventful January drew to a close, this week saw celebrations for a new lunar year and a new addition to the UK’s Royal Family.

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

Quiz compiled by Ben Fell and Grace Dean.

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

Sri Lanka is set to relax a ban on some vehicle imports in a sign the country is returning to normal after a severe economic crisis that toppled a president.

From 1 February, imports of buses, trucks and utility vehicles will be allowed to resume, while restrictions on other vehicles are expected to be gradually lifted.

Many Sri Lankans are waiting for authorities to also drop an import ban on private cars, sport utility vehicles and three-wheeled trishaws – which are commonly used as taxis.

But with prices of vehicles forced up by a scarcity of new ones to buy, a weak currency and high taxes, some are asking who will be able to afford a new car.

In 2022, Sri Lanka faced a severe foreign currency shortage, which meant it was unable to meet its obligations to creditors for the first time in its history.

The island nation of 22 million people was thrown into turmoil as it faced crippling shortages of fuel, food and medicines.

Massive anti-government protests toppled then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa just months later.

Colombo negotiated a $2.9bn (£2.3bn) bailout from the International Monetary Fund, while Rajapaksa’s successor introduced austerity measures including hiking taxes and ending energy subsidies.

The country’s finances have since improved and the economy is gradually returning from the brink.

The announcement to lift the import ban on vehicles has triggered a buzz among Sri Lankans who have been waiting for years to buy a new car or a van.

Murtaza Jafeerjee, chair of Advocata, an economic think tank based in Colombo, told the BBC he thought the move was long overdue.

“The vehicle imports will not only increase the government’s revenue but will also trigger other economic activities like car financing, dealer revenue, car servicing and other related activities, creating jobs,” he said.

But Nalinda Jayatissa, the country’s information minister told a media briefing on Tuesday that the country was “moving very cautiously because we don’t want a surge of imports that will deplete our foreign reserves”.

The country, which doesn’t have any major factories producing cars and trucks, imports almost all its vehicles, many of them from countries like Japan and India. Now there’s a also lot of interest in Chinese cars, particularly electric vehicles.

Prices of used cars in Sri Lanka have soared, with some models now costing two or three times as much as they did before the ban.

The restrictions have been particularly difficult for people like Gayan Indika, who provides vehicles for weddings and is a part-time cab driver.

“I want to buy a new car so that I can do my work and resume my private cab rental. Without a car, without mobility, I am losing a lot of my revenue,” he said.

In a country with poor public transport, a car can be vital, Sasikumar, a software professional from the central city of Kandy explained.

“As we don’t have a good public transport system, a car is essential to travel to other parts of the country. Either the government should lift the ban on cars or improve the public transport.”

Sri Lanka imported about $1.4bn worth of vehicles in the year before the ban was imposed. This year the central bank says it’s planning to allocate up to a billion dollars for vehicle imports, but said the money will be released gradually.

Arosha Rodrigo, from the Vehicle Importers Association of Sri Lanka, and his family have been running a car dealership for more than four decades.

The firm was importing about 100 vehicles a month before the ban. Since the restrictions came into force they have not been unable to import a single vehicle.

He points out that even if the ban is relaxed further, to allow passenger cars and other vehicles to be imported, many people won’t be able to afford them because of increased taxes and Sri Lanka’s weak currency.

The government has sharply raised excise duties on imported vehicles, both new and second hand, to 200% and 300% depending on engine size.

On top of excise duty, there is also 18% Value Added Tax (VAT) for any vehicle brought from abroad.

The price of imported vehicles will also be impacted by the weakness of the Sri Lankan rupee against major world currencies like the US dollar.

Those soaring costs are putting off people like school teacher R Yasodha.

“We have been waiting to purchase a vehicle for a long time. But if we calculate the tax and the price, the cost of an average sized car has doubled from 2.5 million rupees ($8,450; £6,800) to five million rupees,” she told the BBC.

“It would cost a fortune for us.”

The Russians came for Tetiana and Oleh Plachkov while they were sleeping, bursting into their home late at night.

It was 25 September 2023 in Melitopol, south-eastern Ukraine, where the couple had grown up, fallen in love and married. Now their city was occupied by Russian forces.

The men were armed and dressed in black. As some began searching the house, seizing devices and documents, others led Tetiana and Oleh away in handcuffs.

The couple then vanished without trace.

Ukraine has listed more than 61,000 people as missing since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, both soldiers and civilians.

When troops go missing in action there is a chance they might eventually be included in a prisoner-of-war exchange. But civilians are returned very rarely: the Russians don’t usually admit to holding them.

Four months after she was detained, Tetiana was abandoned at a hospital in Melitopol in a coma. She had no clothes or medical papers and the soldiers who brought her left no explanation. She died without ever regaining consciousness.

Oleh has never been found.

“It’s so hard for me to think about what they did to her, and why. My mum was 51. She loved life. She was such a radiant person, then everything was cut short,” the couple’s only daughter, Lyudmila, cries quietly.

“If, God forbid, something has happened to my father it will kill me.”

Lyudmila’s phone is full of happy memories of her parents. She showed them to me on a recent visit to Ukraine, where she’d travelled to wind up the family restaurant business and give a DNA sample that might identify her father if a body is ever found.

It’s not something Lyudmila wants to contemplate.

The family were extremely close. Every day under Russian occupation, her parents would send reassuring video messages. “Morning, daughter! Just checking in,” Tetiana announces in one video, then swings the camera round to her husband who waves and grins in his dressing gown.

There are pictures from life before the war, too: laughing on a beach, dancing at a disco. The couple are full of energy and life.

When Russian tanks rolled into their city in early 2022, the Plachkovs decided to stay. The entire country was under attack in an invasion that Vladimir Putin had threatened, but most could not imagine until the first explosions.

In those first weeks, Lyudmila joined the crowds waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags and shouting at the soldiers to leave. Then the round-up began.

In Putin’s Russia, fear is a way of rule: dissent is crushed and critics imprisoned. The aim is to punish the few and scare the rest into compliance.

Now the same principle was being imported to the swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine illegally claimed by Russia, with soldiers patrolling the streets.

There, those considered loyal to Kyiv were seen as traitors.

After a few months in that climate, Lyudmila fled abroad as a refugee. But her mother didn’t want to leave her city, her own parents or the business she and Oleh had built up. She also had faith in the Ukrainian military.

In late 2023, all the talk was of a counteroffensive in the southeast to take territory back from Russia and Tetiana believed Melitopol would be liberated.

“She was a strong optimist,” Lyudmila smiles. “I’d say, ‘mum, maybe you should leave.’ And she’d say, ‘Just a little more time. Our guys will push harder.'”

Earlier that year, Tetiana’s name had appeared online on a pro-Russian forum. It identified her as a ‘waiter’, a slur for those seen to be ‘waiting’ for liberation. Melitopol was full of informers.

“She definitely donated money and helped [Ukraine] however she could,” her daughter tells me. “Some people die on the battlefield and others die in occupation, helping Ukraine in other ways. To me, she’s a warrior. She knew the risks. But she had to help.”

By then, Ukrainians in occupied areas were being forced to take Russian passports. Russian citizens were brought in to staff schools, as well as police and prosecutors.

Eventually Tetiana and Oleh agreed to leave Melitopol if the Ukrainian army hadn’t pushed through by November. But in September, they were arrested.

Lyudmila was frantic. Unable to return to an occupied town, she wrote to every official body she could find, demanding answers as her grandmother began searching local police stations and prisons.

Then, in February 2024, came a call: Tetiana was critically ill, and Lyudmila’s gran could visit her in hospital – once she’d been questioned by the FSB security service. That’s how the family learned Tetiana was being investigated for espionage.

But by that point she was unconscious. A nurse later told Lyudmila her mother had arrived in hospital with severe bedsores, suggesting she had been immobile for some time. So where had she been and what happened to her?

Through sheer persistence, Lyudmila has gathered a thick file of documents on her parents’ disappearance but she says that none of the printed words make sense. They claim Tetiana had been passing information about Russian military personnel to Ukrainian intelligence, but the criminal case was only opened after she was brought to hospital.

Before that, the papers record that “unknown persons in military uniform” had taken her and Oleh in an “unknown direction” in September 2023.

Their whereabouts from then on is officially a mystery. But in Russia it is the FSB that handles espionage cases, including detention and interrogation, and it was Russian FSB officers who searched Tetiana and Oleh’s home.

“I’d like to believe her health deteriorated because of the poor conditions and lack of proper care, but deep down I understand that they tortured her,” Lyudmila believes.

Her view is formed from first-hand accounts of brutality in occupied territory, including from a restaurant singer charged in the same espionage case as Tetiana.

“They were probably extracting information,” Lyudmila says. “I know they like to use electric shock.”

The autopsy and a hospital report she obtained show that Tetiana died of pneumonia after a prolonged time on a ventilator. But why she was intubated initially isn’t recorded. Neither is what happened to Lyudmila’s father, Oleh.

“He is not on the lists of those detained, there is no criminal case against him,” a letter from the Russian Interior Ministry reads. Police have opened a criminal case for abduction but there are no suspects and no clues.

Lyudmila’s suffering is shared by many thousands of Ukrainian families. At a hotline in Kyiv run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), most of the calls are from people searching for relatives lost in this war.

The phone operators gather detailed information, often in long and emotional calls, which they then send to a tracing database in Geneva.

Lyudmila has logged her own details here and elsewhere, but so far there have been no answers.

“There are always limits to what we’re able to do, and we have to be very realistic with families to manage their expectations. There’s a lot of pain and frustration,” ICRC spokesman Patrick Griffiths explains.

He is also countering criticism in Ukraine that the organisation doesn’t push Russia hard enough.

International humanitarian law obliges all states to report every detainee during an armed conflict, and provide access, but Russia simply ignores that. It’s partly because it sees all civilians in occupied areas as Russian and nobody else’s business. It’s also a display of contempt for the rest of the world’s rules.

The ICRC does have staff in Moscow and parts of occupied Ukraine, but whilst handing out aid is allowed, occasionally, touring Melitopol to search for secret prisons is not.

“There are a lot of families who… may never receive the answer they’re looking for,” Mr Griffiths cautions, adding that the ICRC can’t “force its way in” anywhere. “But the process of dialogue with the authorities, trying to improve our access, never stops.”

Ukraine’s own national search squad has even less access. The Office for Missing Persons in Special Circumstances amounts to just three police officers, based at the end of an Interior Ministry corridor in Kyiv. But their powerful facial recognition software can scan websites and media, hunting for an ever-growing list of the missing.

Russian bloggers sometimes post videos of detainees, or the dead. But a search for Lyudmila’s father draws a blank.

“Either he’s being held hostage and can’t contact relatives,” commissioner Artur Dobroserdov explains before voicing the other alternative. “Sometimes, the bodies of civilians are returned to us along with our deceased soldiers. They are mostly in a very poor condition, so visual recognition is impossible.”

That’s why Lyudmila gave a DNA sample.

In occupied areas, the abductions have slowed as the full-scale war heads towards its fourth year, but they haven’t stopped.

The interior ministry recorded more than 1,000 new missing people last month but these days many of that number will be soldiers.

On the whole, Russia’s methods seem brutally effective: the staunchest supporters of Kyiv have either left occupied land, or keep their heads down and mouths shut. In some cases, Ukrainians who once fled such towns are now returning to live under Russian rule. For some, it’s better than being a refugee.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve heard some Ukrainians wonder out loud lately whether such land is still worth fighting for.

With the frontline barely shifting, certainly not in Kyiv’s favour, and soldiers dying each day, the country is starting to ask some very tough questions: about this war, the endgame and the immense costs.

In her own personal battle, Lyudmila still manages to find some cause for hope. Because sometimes the missing do resurface.

In 2023, Leonid Popov was detained in Melitopol, just like Lyudmila’s parents

He’d taken a photograph of Russian military hardware, was chased down the street by soldiers then disappeared.

Three months later his father got a call: Leonid had been left at a city hospital, exhausted and severely dehydrated.

The photographs his mother Anna has shared from that day are shocking: the young man’s ribs are clearly visible beneath his skin.

“He told me that he’d been in awful conditions,” Anna remembers talking to Leonid that day.

“He said, ‘mum, in a word, I was in hell.'”

Over the months, Leonid had been held and interrogated in multiple locations. “They were given plastic plates of buckwheat and a glass of water for about 20 people. When they said they were hungry, they were told to shut up or they’d be shot.”

His parents began making plans to get him out of Melitopol to safety. But as soon as he was discharged, he was detained immediately and disappeared all over again.

Like Lyudmila’s father, Leonid was officially listed as missing even though he’d been taken away by soldiers.

It was another whole year before his parents were told he was in pre-trial detention in Donetsk, another occupied city, and charged with espionage. Initially overjoyed to find him, they now worry about his health: Leonid has paranoid schizophrenia, managed with medication.

“They do not understand that for a person with such a diagnosis, it’s already deadly just to be in prison without his pills,” Anna worries. She has begun writing to Russian officials, pleading for Leonid to be included on a prisoner exchange list, on humanitarian grounds.

“No one could have foreseen this nightmare,” says Lyudmila. “Even now, as I talk about it, I can’t believe it’s real.”

She hasn’t chosen a photo for her mother’s grave, as if she’s stalling her grieving until she can find her father. But she’s run out of places to turn.

And now Donald Trump is back in the White House, with talk of negotiations to end the war. That won’t be quick or easy, if it happens at all, but it could force Ukraine to relinquish occupied areas like Melitopol to Russia.

“Maybe they’ll release the civilians if they think they’ve won?” Lyudmila tries to look on the bright side. “Or maybe it will get worse: a dead end.”

“Either way, accepting that this land is no longer Ukraine would be very hard.”

It is the land her parents defended and where they were happy and where, even now, Lyudmila believes Oleh could be held in a cold basement or a prison cell, still waiting to be found.

“I couldn’t save my mum, even though I tried so hard,” she says. “Now I need to save my dad.”

Recovery operations are still under way in Washington DC, after an American Airlines plane from Kansas carrying 64 people onboard collided with a military helicopter, manned by three personnel, on Wednesday night.

The victims include top figure skaters from the US and Russia, a young pilot, flight attendants, and a lawyer travelling home on her birthday.

Here are some of the people believed to have been on board the helicopter and the plane.

Asra Hussain Raza

Indiana woman Asra Hussain Raza, 26, had moved to the Washington DC area after receiving a master’s degree in hospital management.

“She was returning from a work trip where she was helping to improve a hospital that really needed help,” said her husband Hamaad Raza, who showed the last text message from his wife to news crews outside the airport.

“And, you know, she was doing what she loved. She was even working on the flight.”

He added: “She gave a lot, but she had so much more to give. But if there was ever someone who took advantage of their 26 years of life, it was her.”

Professor Kiah Duggins

The president of Howard University confirmed Professor Kiah Duggins had died in the collision.

The civil rights lawyer was set to begin teaching at the university’s School of Law in the autumn.

“She dedicated her career to fighting against unconstitutional policing and unjust money bail practices in Tennessee, Texas and Washington DC,” the university said in a statement reported by US media.

Sarah Lee Best

Two DC lawyers were also on board the flight, their loved ones confirmed.

Sarah Lee Best, 33, was kind and hard working, her husband Daniel Solomon told the Washington Post.

Mrs Best and Mr Solomon had planned to travel to Hawaii, where she was born, for their 10th wedding anniversary in May.

Elizabeth Keys

Lawyer Elizabeth Keys, 33, “always, always managed to have fun… no matter what she was doing,” her partner David Seidman told the Washington Post.

She died on her birthday, Mr Seidman said.

The firm where both worked, Wilkinson Stekloff, paid tribute to the “cherished members” of its team.

They were “wonderful attorneys, colleagues, and friends,” firm founder Beth Wilkinson said in a statement.

Casey Crafton

Tributes were made to “dedicated father” Casey Crafton of Salem, Connecticut.

“Salem has lost a dedicated father, husband, and community member,” Governor Ned Lamont wrote on social media.

Salem Little League, where Mr Crafton was a coach, said the town was “heartbroken” by the loss of the “beloved” club member.

“The Crafton family, deeply involved in all things Salem, has suffered an unimaginable loss,” the statement read.

Michael Stovall

Michael Stovall’s mother said her son was “the happiest person”, who saw the good in everybody.

Mr Stovall, known as Mikey, was travelling home from an annual hunting trip with friends, Christina Stovall told Wink News.

“Mikey did not have one enemy. If you see pictures of him… he was the life of the party. He loved everybody.”

Mr Stovall’s cousin told the New York Times that he had been flying with at least six of his friends from the trip, some of whom had known each other since childhood.

Jesse Pitcher

Travelling with Mr Stovall was Jesse Pitcher, his father confirmed.

The 30-year-old from Maryland had got married last year and recently started his own business, Jameson Pitcher told the New York Times.

“He was just getting started with life,” he said.

“He said he’d see me when he got back.”

Pergentino N. Malabed

The Philippine National Police confirmed that the director of its Supply Management Division, Colonel Pergentino N. Malabed, had been on board the flight.

A body carrying Col Malabed’s passport was recovered from the Potomac, a police spokesman said.

He had travelled to the US with two other officers to test personnel vests the police planned to buy, and was on his way to the Philippine embassy in Washington.

• Live: Follow the latest updates
• What we know so far about the plane crash
• BBC Verify analyses moments before collision
• Watch: The scene in DC after moment of impact

Spencer Lane and Christine Lane

Ice skater Spencer Lane, 16, died alongside his mother Christine Lane, 49, and were among at least 14 athletes and coaches who died while returning from a skate camp in Wichita.

His father told local media his son was “a force of nature” who showed “drive and tenacity” to the sport.

“He trained at the Skating Club of Boston five days a week and attended high school online and just committed himself to it,” Douglas Lane said.

He added that his wife was “a creative powerhouse” who would do anything for her children.

Jinna Han and Jin Han

Jinna Han, 13, had also travelled to the skate camp with her mother, Jin.

In a 2022 interview, Jinna told a news network in her Massachusetts hometown that she was excited to watch the Olympics.

“It’s just so exciting,” Jinna Han said. “It’s like, who’s going to win, what’s going to happen, because anything can happen at the Olympics.”

Doug Zeghibe of the Skating Club of Boston called Jin “wonderful, pleasant, polite” person.

“Never a discouraging word,” he said. “Always appreciative, always supportive of not just Jinna, her daughter, but every athlete. Just role model parents in your sport, and you don’t always get that.”

Olivia Ter

Twelve-year-old Olivia Ter from Maryland was among the US figure skaters aboard the flight, local officials confirmed.

“Olivia not only excelled in figure skating programs but inspired others through her talent, determination and sportsmanship,” Prince George’s County Parks and Recreation said in a statement reported by CBS News.

“The impact of Olivia’s life will continue to resonate in our youth sports community, and she will be sorely missed,” said Bill Tyler, the director of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission.

Brielle and Justyna Magdalena Beyer

Andy Beyer told ABC News that his daughter Brielle, 12, and wife Justyna, 42, had been flying home from the skating camp.

Brielle was “a fighter in everything she did” who “lit up the house” with her excitement and wonderful singing voice, he said.

Beyer had been on his way to collect the pair from the airport: “When it was time for the plane to land, they hadn’t landed.”

“We couldn’t get text messages through. I saw fire trucks and everything go by, and I knew.”

Cory Haynos, Roger Haynos and Stephanie Branton Haynos

Cory Haynos was travelling home from Kansas with his parents, Roger Haynos and Stephanie Branton Haynos, a family member wrote on social media.

“Roger has always inspired me by his absolute love for his family and dedication to providing only the best for his wife and kids,” Matthew Alan LaRavier, Roger’s cousin, wrote.

“Cory was an amazing skater with a very bright future,” he said.

“We all were expecting Cory to represent our country in the US Olympics in the future.”

Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov

The deaths of beloved ice skating coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who are Russian, were confirmed by the Kremlin.

Renowned skating coach and friend Rafael Arutyunyan told CNN that he had made his athletes train in silence after the crash as a mark of a respect.

“I know all these coaches,” he said. “All of our community was respectful to them and liked them, so I feel it’s they’ll stay with us forever.”

Alexandr Sasha Kirsanov

Former coach Sasha Kirsanov was on board the plane, the University of Delaware said.

His wife told ABC News she had “lost everything” in the crash.

Jonathan J. Campos

The plane’s captain Jonathan J. Campos had dreamed of being a pilot since he was three, his aunt told the New York Times.

“I think he wanted to be free, and be able to fly and soar like a bird,” said Beverly Lane.

Mr Campos, 34, was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and had worked for PSA Airlines (part of the American Airlines group) for eight years, she added.

Sam Lilley

The father of 28-year-old pilot Sam Lilley said that he was engaged to be married and “was just at the prime of his life”.

Tim Lilley told NewsNation that his son got his piloting licence in only a few years because he “pursued it with a vigour”.

“Sam’s right with Jesus, and I know where he’s going,” he said.

His sister Tiffany Gibson called him “an amazing person”.

“He loved people. He loved adventure. He loved travelling,” she told ABC News.

“He was so young, and he was excited about life and his future and getting a dog and a house and kids. And it’s just, this is just tragic.”

Ian Epstein

Virginia resident Ian Epstein was a flight attendant on the plane, his family said. He was known for his ability to make people smile and was “full of life”.

“He loved being a flight attendant because he truly enjoyed traveling and meeting new people. But his true love was his family,” the statement continued.

Epstein, 53, was a father, stepfather, husband, and brother, the family said, adding that he will be “truly missed”.

Danasia Elder

Danasia Elder was also working as a flight attendant, her family told US media in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Her brother-in-law Brandon Payne paid tribute to her, calling her “full of life”.

“She was a great wife, a great parent, a great friend,” Payne said. “She was very bright, very smart… This flight attendant thing was kind of like one of her dreams she wanted to do.”

He said that he was proud of his sister-in-law for pursuing her dreams, and that she “would want y’all do the same thing she did”.

“Chase your dreams, no matter what. Don’t let nothing scare you, push you away. Just believe in yourself, believe in God, and follow the path.”

Ryan O’Hara

Ryan O’Hara, 29, was the crew chief of the Black Hawk helicopter that collided with the passenger plane, according to CBS News.

He leaves behind a wife and one-year-old son, his local Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program said in a social media post confirming his death.

O’Hara is “fondly remembered as a guy who would fix things around the ROTC gym as well as a vital member of the rifle team,” the post said.

Andrew Eaves

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves confirmed that Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves was killed in the collision.

Paying tribute to her husband, Carrie Eaves confirmed he was one of the pilots of the Blackhawk helicopter.

“We ask that you pray for our family and friends and for all the other families that are suffering today. We ask for peace while we grieve,” she wrote on social media.

A senior aide to Prince Andrew privately admitted to an alleged Chinese spy that the duke’s BBC Newsnight interview had been “ill advised”, court documents show.

Files disclosed to the BBC and other media outlets reveal how the prince’s aide Dominic Hampshire thanked Yang Tengbo for standing by the embattled duke in the months after he had sought to explain on TV his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

He told the Chinese businessman that the Newsnight appearance had been “unsuccessful”.

Last month a court rejected Mr Yang’s appeal against being banned from the UK, after an intelligence assessment that he could be secretly working for the Chinese state. Mr Yang has denied all wrongdoing.

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) previously said that Mr Yang had won an “unusual degree of trust” from the royal.

Mr Yang came to study in UK in 2002 and later set up a series of China-related travel and business consultancy firms.

He took on a role in the China-based version of Prince Andrew’s “Pitch@Palace” events, in which entrepreneurs sell their ideas to investors.

Documents from the Siac case now show that friendship deepened in the wake of the November 2019 Newsnight interview, in which the Duke was questioned over his relationship with Epstein, and denied assaulting Virginia Giuffre.

Writing in March 2020, Prince Andrew’s senior aide Dominic Hampshire told Mr Yang how much his “principal” appreciated the fact that he had stood by him.

“We have dealt with the aftermath of a hugely ill-advised and unsuccessful television interview,” wrote Mr Hampshire on official Buckingham Palace notepaper.

“We have wisely navigated our way around former Private Secretaries and we have found a way to carefully remove those people who we don’t completely trust.

“Moreover, in what originally seemed like a lost cause, you have somehow managed to not only salvage but maintain and then incredibly, enhance the reputation of my principal in China.

“Under your guidance, we found a way to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house of Windsor.

“We orchestrated a very powerful verbal message of support to China at a Chinese New Year’s dinner and between the three of us, we have written, amended and then always agreed a number of letters at the highest level possible.”

The disclosure on Friday comes after separate court documents revealed Prince Andrew appeared to have been in touch with Epstein for longer than he had previously admitted.

An email from a “member of the British Royal Family”, believed to be Prince Andrew, was sent to Epstein in February 2011, court documents showed.

In the Newsnight interview, the prince said he had not seen or spoken to Epstein since December 2010, when he visited the financier’s home in New York.

Canada has been weighing its options in response to a threat of tariffs from US President Donald Trump.

Trump has said he could levy a 25% tariff on Canadian imports as soon as Saturday.

Tariffs are a central part of the economic vision of the returning US president. He sees them as a way of growing the US economy, protecting jobs and raising tax revenue.

Economists suggest that such a move could have devastating immediate impacts on Canada’s economy – while also leading to higher prices for Americans.

Canada is trying to avoid a trade war altogether. It has pledged more than C$1bn ($690m; £560m) to boost security at its shared border with the US – a key point of contention for Trump, who appears to be using tariffs as a negotiating tactic.

Canada has indicated its retaliation would be targeted and gradual, depending on what the possible US tariffs look like. Officials in Ottawa have been drafting a response, but say they are not ready to make the details public.

Here are four options Canada has on the table, and their possible impacts.

Canada has already fought one tariff “war” with Trump.

During his first term, the US president slapped 10% tariffs on Canadian aluminium products and 25% tariffs on Canadian steel, citing national security concerns.

Ottawa retaliated by imposing tariffs on select goods, which were chosen to send a political message to Trump and his allies.

It put levies on Florida orange juice, and whiskey and bourbon from Tennessee and Kentucky – the latter being the home of then-Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.

Both countries ended up agreeing to lift the tariffs a year later.

Senior Canadian officials recently told local media that if Trump imposed tariffs again, the immediate response would likely be targeted.

According to US government data, 17% of US exports go to Canada. More than 75% of Canada’s exports go to the US.

Canada stands to suffer a larger economic blow in any trade war with the US and this stark imbalance is why targeted tariffs are often the first and safest approach, said Peter Clark, a lawyer who previously worked on trade policy issues in Canada’s federal finance department.

By targeting select goods, Canada can hit the US without widely punishing its own citizens, as tariffs can immediately raise prices for consumers at home.

This approach is also why officials are pushing a “Buy Canadian” campaign as a way to lessen the impact of a potential retaliation.

But pundits argue that Trump is less politically vulnerable this time, given that he cannot run for a third term in the White House.

“You won’t have the same impact as last time,” said Julian Karaguesian, an economics lecturer at McGill University in Montreal and a former finance counsellor at the Canadian embassy in Washington DC.

Another move Canada made in its first tariff war with its neighbour was to apply dollar-for-dollar tariffs.

It slapped identical tariffs on US aluminium and steel, and ensured the total dollar value of the American goods it taxed equalled the US tariffs on Canadian exports. That came up to around C$16.6bn at the time.

This time, the possible use of dollar-for-dollar tariffs could be much larger, with Canada reportedly preparing a first round on about $37bn of goods, according to official sources quoted in Canadian media.

That could be expanded to another C$110bn worth of goods.

The challenge is that Canada still does not know just how sweeping Trump’s tariffs would be. The more sweeping they are, the more goods Canada would have to tax in response.

• Canada and Mexico face 25% tariffs on Saturday, Trump says

Not all of Canada is on board with dollar-for-dollar tariffs. Scott Moe, leader of the mineral-rich province of Saskatchewan, has said that broad levies on US goods would “rip this country apart”.

Mr Karaguesian said the promised US tariffs on Canadian goods could plunge the country into a recession. If Canada responded with dollar-for-dollar tariffs, it could lead to inflation.

This would result in “stagflation,” he said, referring to a combination of high unemployment and rising prices.

Mr Clark said that whatever decision Canada took, politics would likely be top of mind. Polls suggest a majority of Canadians support retaliation, and that many Canadian business leaders want targeted, dollar-for-dollar tariffs.

Canadian politicians might be pushed to respond more forcefully if it means a boost in approval, Mr Clark said. “We’re talking about political decisions, which are not always rational.”

One of the most valuable assets in Canada’s arsenal is energy.

North-eastern US states like Vermont, New York and Maine significantly rely on electricity sold to them by neighbouring Canadian provinces. British Columbia and Manitoba also supply energy to western and Midwestern regions of the US.

About 30 states receive some of their electricity from Canada, according to Canadian government data.

Canada is also the top supplier of crude oil to the US, making up 60% of total oil imports, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, has suggested that Canada cut off Americans’ supply to pinch Americans at the petrol pump.

Trump suggested on Thursday that oil and gas could be exempt from US tariffs but Canada still has the option of energy restrictions or taxes to inflict pain.

“The only thing that would really sting in the immediate to short-term is if energy prices went up, because Trump himself campaigned on bringing energy prices down very quickly,” said Mr Karaguesian.

But the move would be contentious, especially with the oil-rich province of Alberta – which has refused to sign off on taxing its oil and gas exports, arguing that doing so would disproportionately hurt its economy.

Other ideas have been floated.

Ford said that Ontario could pull American-made alcohol off shop shelves in the province, signalling a different approach in which different provincial premiers could define their own responses.

Another option is not retaliating – at least for now. For weeks, Canadian officials have been meeting their American counterparts in Washington DC in a bid to stave off any American tariffs in the first place.

On Wednesday, foreign minister Melanie Joly met Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deliver a message that tariffs would be bad for both countries, and that Ottawa was addressing US concerns about border security and fentanyl trafficking.

“We need to continue to engage,” she told reporters.

Canada has also signalled that it could bring in a relief programme for businesses harmed by the possible tariffs, similar to those introduced during the Covid pandemic.

Some argue, given the economic costs of retaliation, that Canada should instead focus on diversifying its trade relationships and increasing domestic production.

“We’re a natural resource superpower,” Mr Karaguesia said, adding that the country could use the tariffs as a push to harness that potential and sell its products elsewhere.

Sixty-seven people are believed to have died after a passenger plane hit a military helicopter in mid-air near Washington DC’s Ronald Reagan airport on Wednesday evening.

It is not clear what caused the crash. Some experts have questioned whether the helicopter was flying above the permitted altitude at the time of the collision, and flight data appears to show that it was. But an investigation is continuing to determine what went wrong.

Authorities have recovered the flight data recorders from the American Airlines jet, and continue to find bodies in the icy Potomac River where the plane fell.

• Live: Follow the latest updates
• What we know so far about the plane crash
• Who are the victims?
• BBC Verify analyses moments before collision
• Watch: The scene in DC after moment of impact

The plane, a Bombardier CRJ700, had travelled from Wichita, Kansas. It was operating as American Airlines flight 5342.

The US Army helicopter was a Sikorsky H-60 Black Hawk that took off from Fort Belvoir in Virginia, and belonged to B Company, 12th Aviation Battalion.

The helicopter appears to have been flying above the permitted altitude, according to analysis by the BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

Recordings of air traffic control conversations published online suggested that a controller tried to warn the helicopter about the American Airlines plane in the seconds before the collision.

The helicopter pilot appeared to respond to confirm they were aware of the plane, but moments later the two aircraft hit each other. Transport Secretary Sean Duffy also said he thought the helicopter was aware of the plane nearby.

Joining Duffy at a briefing on Thursday, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth added that the helicopter was on an annual proficiency flight, performing a night evaluation – and the crew had night-vision goggles.

The collision happened at about 21:00 local time (02:00 GMT), as the plane approached Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

One eyewitness, Ari Schulman, told NBC Washington that the plane’s approach looked normal, until he saw it bank hard to the right, with “streams of sparks” running underneath the craft, illuminating its belly, which he believed to look “very, very wrong”.

Another eyewitness, Jimmy Mazeo, recalled seeing what looked like a “white flare” in the sky. He remarked that planes approaching the airport appeared to have been flying in “irregular patterns”.

After the impact, the passenger plane broke into multiple pieces and sank several feet into the river, while the helicopter ended up upside down on the water.

Hundreds of first responders on rubber boats were deployed to search for survivors. Officials highlighted the challenging conditions in which they were working due to ice floating on the freezing-cold river, and contending with the plane wreckage.

They later said they did not expect to find any survivors and had changed the focus of their mission to focus on recovering bodies.

Details are emerging about the 64 people who were on board the plane, who included top figure skaters, as well as four crew members. Meanwhile, the helicopter was carrying three soldiers.

The latest official update says 28 bodies have been recovered from the scene so far. The BBC’s US news partner CBS reports that number is closer to 40.

The people known to have been on the flight include the skaters, a young pilot, flight attendants, and a lawyer travelling home on her birthday.

They comprise a range of nationalities – and several of them have been identified by family members and organisations.

Among the skaters were six people linked to a club in Boston. They were two teenagers, their mothers, and two Russian coaches, Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, who were former world champions in their sport, the club said.

The plane’s captain Jonathan Campos was named by his aunt, who told the New York Times that flying planes had been her nephew’s lifelong dream.

Ryan O’Hara was the crew chief of the helicopter, according to CBS.

• Who are the victims?
• US and Russian figure skaters were on board crashed plane

It remains unclear what caused the crash. Officials have retrieved from the jet the data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder – known as the black boxes – and will look into possible contributing factors, including human error.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) began its first full day of investigation on Thursday and intends to release a preliminary report in 30 days.

Hegseth has said he expected the investigation to establish whether the helicopter was flying in the right corridor and altitude.

NTSB officials said on Thursday that the helicopter appeared to move from one corridor into another in a standard manoeuvre.

As the official probe continues, the New York Times has reported that the air traffic control staffing was “not normal” at the time – citing a preliminary Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) report.

Normally two people manage helicopters and airplanes flying in the area, but only one person was reportedly doing so at the time of the crash, the NYT and CBS reported.

It has also been reported by the Washington Post and CNN that just 24 hours before the deadly crash, another jet had to abort its landing at the airport after a helicopter came close to its flight path.

President Trump said on Friday that the Black Hawk helicopter was flying too high “by a lot”.

“It was far above the 200ft limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it???” he said.

The helicopter does appear to have been flying above the limit, according to publicly available flight data.

Data from FlightRadar24 showed the helicopter’s last estimated altitude was about 400ft when it crashed. “Why is it on this day, on that flight, they were [as much as] 150 to 200ft higher than they knew they should be?” Greg Feith, a former senior air safety investigator told CBS.

“The investigation will help us understand that,” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said. “Was the Black Hawk too high? Was it on course? Right now, we don’t quite know.”

Trump said earlier the country was in mourning, before going on to take a swipe at his political foes.

He speculated, without giving evidence, that lowered standards of hiring for air traffic controllers in the FAA during the Joe Biden and Barack Obama presidencies may have been a factor in the disaster.

Trump said he and his team had “strong opinions and ideas” about what had happened, but acknowledged that the investigation was at an early stage.

He also announced he was appointing Chris Rocheleau as the temporary head of the FAA. The top job there, as well as the positions of administrator and deputy administrator, have been vacant since Trump took office.

• Combative Trump blames diversity policies after tragedy

Major incidents of this kind are relatively rare in the US. The most recent comparable crash was in 2009, according to a list compiled by Reuters.

That year, an aircraft crashed on approach to landing in Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground.

The airspace above Washington DC is both busy and highly controlled. It is used by domestic and international traffic using two airports, and there are extra factors of presidential flights, heavy military traffic and flights around the Pentagon.

Passenger airliners must follow fixed flight plans, said the BBC’s transport correspondent Sean Dilley. Unlike in uncontrolled airspace, military pilots operate under strict instruction of air traffic controllers. But unlike their civilian counterparts, they have freedom to deviate and a duty to “see and avoid” other aircraft.

Donald Trump stood before the White House press room cameras on Thursday to perform a traditional presidential duty – consoler-in-chief during a time of tragedy.

He said the country was in mourning, shared his condolences during “an hour of anguish” and paid tribute to first responders and the victims.

Then he sharply pivoted – providing yet another reminder of how his new presidency is going to be very different.

It will be combative. It will be unscripted. And it will be quick to point the finger of blame.

“We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas,” he said.

He then speculated, without giving evidence, that lowered standards of hiring for air traffic controllers in the Federal Aviation Administration during the Joe Biden and Barack Obama presidencies may have been a factor in the disaster.

• LIVE UPDATES: Get the latest on the crash investigation
• US and Russian figures skaters were on board plane

Trump and his fellow Republicans have regularly attacked “diversity, equity and inclusion” programmes in the federal government.

His team has made undoing such programmes a core part of their first days in office, saying they have divided Americans and weakened the country.

And less than 24 hours after the first major US air disaster in more than a decade, Trump – along with his secretaries of transportation and defence, and his vice-president – took turns hammering their point, even as they provided no evidence that federal hiring practices had any connection to this particular crash.

Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: “Because I have common sense.”

At other moments, he acknowledged there was no confirmed cause, saying “it’s all under investigation”.

But some of Trump’s fellow Republicans thought he spoke too soon.

“I’d have to see if the evidence is substantiated,” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told The Independent. “It seems a bit early to me when I think that statement was made before we even have a flight data recorder.”

A number of disabilities rights groups including the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) issued a joint statement calling Trump’s comments “irresponsible, disparaging, and wrong”.

“The president is deliberately spreading falsehoods to demonize the quarter of American adults who live with disabilities rather than directing federal resources towards ensuring such a devastating tragedy never happens again,” said AAPD president Maria Town.

Trump said the hiring guidance for the FAA’s diversity and inclusion programme included preference for those with disabilities involving “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism”.

An archived version of a website for the FAA’s diversity and inclusion hiring programme that appears to have been taken down in December included a similar list. The agency was seeking people with “targeted disabilities” that the federal government was prioritising for recruitment at the time.

But it’s unclear how that drive to make recruitment more diverse may have impacted the ranks of air traffic controllers, who President Trump said needed to all be “naturally talented geniuses”. The FAA has more than 35,000 employees, only a fraction of which perform that role.

In response to criticisms over diversity hiring practices last year, the agency released a statement asserting that all new hires must meet “rigorous qualifications” that “vary by position”.

The agency has faced criticism over a longstanding shortage of air traffic controllers, particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic caused massive disruptions in commercial air travel.

Reports suggest that staffing levels at Reagan airport on Wednesday night may have been compromised.

In his remarks, Trump specifically blamed Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whom he described with an obscenity and said had ran the department “into the ground”.

Buttigieg defended his record on social media, calling Trump’s comments “despicable”. “As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” he said.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer also criticised Trump’s comments.

“It’s one thing for internet pundits to spew off conspiracies, it’s another for the President of the United States to throw out idle speculation as bodies are still being recovered,” Schumer said.

Once he departed from his prepared remarks, however, speculation was what President Trump seemed most interested in offering.

Along with his condemnation of DEI policies, he offered extended discussion of the angles and elevation at which the two aircraft were flying, the weather conditions on Wednesday night, the temperature of the Potomac and the behaviour of the Army helicopter.

“We had a situation where we had a helicopter that had an ability to stop,” he said. “For some reason, it just kept going.”

But on Thursday evening, the White House doubled down on blaming his predecessor and DEI policies. The president signed a memorandum to end diversity efforts in the aviation sector and to review all hiring decisions and changes to safety protocols made during the Biden administration. He also signed an executive order to appoint a new head of the FAA.

Two things were very clear from Trump’s remarks on Thursday.

The first is that his eagerness to inject himself into a major news story is undiminished in his new term. And the second is that in his view it is never too soon to inject politics into national tragedy – and use it to attack opponents and advance his agenda.

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

Five years ago, on 31 January 2020, the UK left the European Union.

On that day, Great Britain severed the political ties it had held for 47 years, but stayed inside the EU single market and customs union for a further 11 months to keep trade flowing.

Northern Ireland had a separate arrangement.

Brexit was hugely divisive, both politically and socially, dominating political debate and with arguments about its impacts raging for years.

Five years on from the day Britain formally left the EU, BBC Verify has examined five important ways Brexit has affected Britain.

Economists and analysts generally assess the impact of leaving the EU single market and customs union on 1 Jan 2021 on the UK’s goods trade as having been negative.

This is despite the fact that the UK negotiated a free trade deal with the EU and avoided tariffs – or taxes – being imposed on the import and export of goods.

The negative impact comes from so-called “non-tariff barriers” – time consuming and sometimes complicated new paperwork that businesses have to fill out when importing and exporting to the EU.

There is some disagreement about how negative the specific Brexit impact has been.

Some recent studies suggest that UK goods exports are 30% lower than they would have been if we had not left the single market and customs union.

Some suggest only a 6% reduction.

We can’t be certain because the results depend heavily on the method chosen by researchers for measuring the “counterfactual”, i.e what would have happened to UK exports had the country stayed in the EU.

One thing we can be reasonably confident of is that small UK firms appear to be more adversely affected than larger ones.

They have been less able to cope with the new post-Brexit cross-border bureaucracy. That’s supported by surveys of small firms.

It’s also clear UK services exports – such as advertising and management consulting – have done unexpectedly well since 2021.

But the working assumption of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the government’s independent official forecaster, is still that Brexit in the long-term will reduce exports and imports of goods and services by 15% relative to otherwise. It has held this view since 2016, including under the previous Government.

And the OBR’s other working assumption is that the fall in trade relative to otherwise will reduce the long-term size of the UK economy by around 4% relative to otherwise, equivalent to roughly £100bn in today’s money.

The OBR says it could revise both these assumptions based on new evidence and studies. The estimated negative economic impact could come down if the trade impact judged to be less severe. Yet there is no evidence, so far, to suggest that it will turn into a positive impact.

After Brexit, the UK has been able to strike its own trade deals with other countries.

There have been new trade deals with Australia and New Zealand and the government has been pursuing new agreements with the US and India.

But their impact on the economy is judged by the government’s own official impact assessments to be small relative to the negative impact on UK- EU trade.

However, some economists argue there could still be potential longer term economic benefits for the UK from not having to follow EU laws and regulations affecting sectors such as Artificial Intelligence.

Immigration was a key theme in the 2016 referendum campaign, centred on freedom of movement within the EU, under which UK and EU citizens could freely move to visit, study, work and live.

There has been a big fall in EU immigration and EU net migration (immigration minus emigration) since the referendum and this accelerated after 2020 due to the end of freedom of movement.

But there have been large increases in net migration from the rest of the world since 2020.

A post-Brexit immigration system came into force in January 2021.

Under this system, EU and non-EU citizens both need to get work visas in order to work in the UK (except Irish citizens, who can still live and work in the UK without a visa).

The two main drivers of the increase in non-EU immigration since 2020 are work visas (especially in health and care) and international students and their dependents.

UK universities started to recruit more non-EU overseas students as their financial situation deteriorated.

The re-introduction of the right of overseas students to stay and work in Britain after graduation by Boris Johnson’s government also made the UK more attractive to international students.

Subsequent Conservative governments reduced the rights of people on work and student visas to bring dependents and those restrictions have been retained by Labour.

Freedom of movement ended with Brexit, also affecting tourists and business travellers.

British passport holders can no longer use “EU/EEA/CH” lanes at EU border crossing points.

People can still visit the EU as a tourist for 90 days in any 180 day period without requiring a visa, provided they have at least three months remaining on their passports at the time of their return.

EU citizens can stay in the UK for up to six months without needing a visa.

However, a bigger change in terms of travel is on the horizon.

In 2025, the EU is planning to introduce a new electronic Entry Exit System (EES) – an automated IT system for registering travellers from non-EU countries.

This will register the person’s name, type of the travel document, biometric data (fingerprints and captured facial images) and the date and place of entry and exit.

It will replace the manual stamping of passports. The impact of this is unclear, but some in the travel sector have expressed fears it could potentially add to border queues as people leave the UK.

The EES was due to be introduced in November 2024 but was postponed until 2025, with no new date for implementation yet set.

And six months after the introduction of EES, the EU says it will introduce a new European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS). UK citizens will have to obtain ETIAS clearance for travel to 30 European countries.

ETIAS clearance will cost €7 (£5.90) and be valid for up to three years or until someone’s passport expires, whichever comes first. If people get a new passport, they need to get a new ETIAS travel authorisation.

Meanwhile, the UK is introducing its equivalent to ETIAS for EU citizens from 2 April 2025 (though Irish citizens will be exempt). The UK permit – to be called an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) – will cost £16.

Legal sovereignty – the ability of the UK to make its own laws and not have to follow EU ones – was another prominent Brexit referendum campaign promise.

To minimise disruption immediately following Brexit in 2020, the UK incorporated thousands of EU laws into UK law, becoming known as “retained EU law”.

According to the latest government count there were 6,901 individual pieces of retained EU law covering things like working time, equal pay, food labelling and environmental standards.

The previous Conservative government initially set a deadline of the end of 2023 to axe these EU laws.

But with so much legislation to consider there was concern there was not enough time to review all the laws properly.

In May 2023 Kemi Badenoch – the Trade Secretary at the time – announced only 600 EU laws would be axed by the end of 2023, with another 500 financial services laws set to disappear later.

Most were relatively obscure regulations and many of them had been superseded or become irrelevant.

All other EU legislation was kept, though ministers reserved powers to change them in future.

And the UK has changed some EU laws. For example, it banned the export of live animals from Great Britain for slaughter and fattening and changed EU laws on gene editing crops.

Brexit has also given the UK more freedom in certain areas of tax law.

EU member states are prohibited from charging VAT on education under an EU directive. Leaving the EU enabled Labour to impose VAT on private school fees.

A zero rate of VAT on tampons and other sanitary products was introduced by the UK government in 2021. This would not have been possible in the EU as the EU VAT Directive at the time mandated a minimum 5% tax on all sanitary products. However, in April 2022 the EU’s rules changed so the bloc also now allows a zero rate on sanitary products.

The money the UK sent to the EU was a controversial theme in the 2016 referendum, particularly the Leave campaign’s claim the UK sent £350m every week to Brussels.

The UK’s gross public sector contribution to the EU Budget in 2019-20, the final financial year before Brexit, was £18.3bn, equivalent to around £352m per week, according to the Treasury.

The UK continued paying into the EU Budget during the transition period but since 31 December 2020 it has not made these contributions.

However, those EU Budgets contributions were always partially recycled to the UK via payments to British farmers under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and “structural funding” – development grants to support skills, employment and training in certain economically disadvantaged regions of the nation. These added up to £5bn in 2019-20.

Since the end of the transition period UK governments have replaced the CAP payments directly with taxpayer funds.

Ministers have also replaced the EU structural funding grants, with the previous government rebranding them as “a UK Shared Prosperity” fund.

The UK was also receiving a negotiated “rebate” on its EU Budget contributions of around £4bn a year – money which never actually left the country,

So the net fiscal benefit to the UK from not paying into the EU Budget is closer to to £9bn per year, although this figure is inherently uncertain because we don’t know what the UK’s contribution to the EU Budget would otherwise have been.

The UK has also still been paying the EU as part of the official Brexit Withdrawal Agreement and its financial settlement. The Treasury says the UK paid a net amount of £14.9bn between 2021 and 2023, and estimated that from 2024 onwards it will have to pay another £6.4bn, although spread over many years.

Future payments under the withdrawal settlement are also uncertain in part because of fluctuating exchange rates.

However, there are other ways the UK’s finances remained connected with the EU, separate from the EU Budget and the Withdrawal Agreement.

After Brexit took effect, the UK also initially stopped paying into the Horizon scheme, which funds pan-European scientific research.

However, Britain rejoined Horizon in 2023 and is projected by the EU to pay in around €2.4bn (£2bn) per year on average to the EU budget for its participation, although historically the UK has been a net financial beneficiary from the scheme because of the large share of grants won by UK-based scientists.

There are, of course, a large number of other Brexit impacts which we have not covered here, ranging from territorial fishing rights, to farming, to defence. And with Labour looking for a re-set in EU relations, it’s a subject that promises to be a continuing source of debate and analysis for many years to come.

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The Duke of York was in contact with the US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein longer than he had previously admitted, emails published in court documents appear to show.

“Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!” said an email sent to Epstein from a “member of the British Royal Family”, believed to be Prince Andrew.

The court documents, from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), show the email as being sent in February 2011.

In his BBC Newsnight interview, Prince Andrew had said he had not seen or spoken to Epstein after going to his house in New York in December 2010, a meeting which he described as a “wrong decision”.

The email was revealed in a court case involving the FCA and banker Jes Staley, who was banned from senior positions after he mischaracterised his relationship with Epstein.

Staley is appealing against the FCA, but the financial watchdog’s evidence about Staley’s contact with Epstein also contains emails relating to a “member of the British Royal Family”, showing what seem to be friendly and familiar exchanges.

In June 2010, Epstein emailed: “If you can find time to show jes around with vera that would be fun.. he told me he ran into you tonight,” in messages first reported by business news agency Bloomberg.

The Royal Family member responded by asking who Vera was, and a few days later Epstein replied: “my future ex wife, i know jes and she would love to see home”. A dinner then seems to have been arranged.

In Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview, he was asked about the extent of his association with wealthy financier Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting a further trial.

Andrew said he had ceased contact with Epstein “after I was aware that he was under investigation and that was later in 2006 and I wasn’t in touch with him again until 2010”.

A photographer had captured Prince Andrew and Epstein walking together in New York’s Central Park in December 2010, while the prince stayed at Epstein’s house.

“Was that visit, December of 2010, the only time you saw him after he was convicted?” interviewer Emily Maitlis had asked the royal.

Prince Andrew replied “yes”. Maitlis then asked: “Did you see him or speak to him again?”, to which Andrew responded: “No.”

But emails a few months after that New York meeting suggest, if not a direct conversation, there were still friendly exchanges.

According to the court documents, on 27 February 2011, Epstein emailed: “jes staley will be in London on next tue afternoon, if you have time.”

There was a reply from the “member of the British Royal Family” with a question: “Jes is coming on 1st March or next week?”

The court documents say there was a “discussion of press articles” and then the message: “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!!”.

The Duke of York’s office has been contacted for comment.

Sign up here to get the latest royal stories and analysis straight to your inbox every week with our Royal Watch newsletter. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

US President Donald Trump has said he will follow through with his threat to hit imports from Canada and Mexico with 25% border taxes, known as tariffs, on 1 February.

But he added that a decision about whether this would include oil from those countries had not yet been made.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said the move was aimed to address the large amounts of undocumented migrants and the fentanyl that come across US borders as well as trade deficits with its neighbours.

The president also suggested that he was still planning to impose new tariffs on China, which he said earlier this month would be 10%, but did not give any details.

“With China, I’m also thinking about something because they’re sending fentanyl into our country, and because of that, they’re causing us hundreds of thousands of deaths,” Trump said.

“So China is going to end up paying a tariff also for that, and we’re in the process of doing that.”

During the election campaign, Trump threatened to hit Chinese-made products with tariffs of up to 60%, but held off on any immediate action on his first day back in the White House, instead ordering his administration to study the issue.

US goods imports from China have flattened since 2018, a statistic that economists have attributed in part to a series of escalating tariffs that Trump imposed during his first term.

• Booze, oil and orange juice: How Canada could retaliate
• China calls for ‘win-win’ solution to trade tensions

Earlier this month, a top Chinese official warned against protectionism as Trump’s return to the presidency renews the threat of a trade war between the world’s two biggest economies – but did not mention the US by name.

Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Ding Xuexiang, Vice Premier of China, said his country was looking for a “win-win” solution to trade tensions and wanted to expand its imports.

Canada and Mexico have said that they would respond to US tariffs with measures of their own, while also seeking to assure Washington that they were taking action to address concerns about their US borders.

If US imports of oil from Canada and Mexico are hit with levies it risks undermining Trump’s promise to bring down the cost of living.

Tariffs are an import tax on goods that are produced abroad.

In theory, taxing items coming into a country means people are less likely to buy them as they become more expensive.

The intention is that they buy cheaper local products instead – boosting a country’s economy.

But the cost of tariffs on imported energy could be passed on to businesses and consumers, which may increase the prices of everything from petrol to groceries.

Around 40% of the crude that runs through US oil refineries is imported, and the vast majority of it comes from Canada.

India now hosts the world’s largest tiger population, despite having the highest human density and just 18% of global tiger habitat, according to a new study.

In just over a decade, India has doubled its tiger population to more than 3,600, accounting for 75% of the world’s tigers.

These tigers now inhabit an area of 138,200 sq km (53,360 sq miles) – roughly half the size of the UK – alongside some 60 million people.

This has been made possible by safeguarding the big cats from poaching and habitat loss, securing prey, reducing human-wildlife conflict, and uplifting local communities, the study published in Science, a leading peer-reviewed research journal, says.

“We think human densities are detrimental to conservation of large carnivores [like tigers]. But more than density it is the attitude of people that matters,” Yadvendradev Vikramsinh Jhala, the study’s lead author, told the BBC.

He cited Malaysia as an example, where, despite being economically prosperous and having a lower population density than India, tiger populations have not been successfully revived.

India’s tiger recovery shows how conservation can protect big cats, boost biodiversity, and support communities – offering key lessons for the world, the researchers believe.

The study by Mr Jhala, Ninad Avinash Mungi, Rajesh Gopal and Qamar Qureshi analysed tiger occupancy in India from 2006 to 2018.

Since 2006, India has surveyed tiger habitats every four years across 20 states, monitoring distribution of the big cats, co-predators, prey, and quality of habitat.

In that time, its tiger habitat has grown by 30% – about 2,929 sq km annually.

But while tigers in the country have thrived in protected, prey-rich areas, they have also adapted to landscapes shared by nearly 60 million people, primarily living in farming communities and settlements outside tiger reserves and national parks.

The level of coexistence with tigers varies across India, influenced by economics, social settings, and cultural factors, the researchers found.

In states like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, and Karnataka, tigers share space with people at high densities.

In regions with a history of bushmeat hunting or poaching, such as Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and northeast India, tigers are either absent or extinct. These areas also include some of India’s poorest districts.

In other words, researchers note, tiger coexistence with people is often found in economically prosperous areas, which benefit from tiger-related tourism and government compensation for conflict losses.

But development can be a “double-edged sword”, says Mr Jhala.

The researchers say economic prosperity through sustainable use of ecosystems helps recovery of tigers. However, it often leads to changes in land use that harm tiger habitats.

“Tiger recovery is thus constrained at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, by intensive urbanisation and poverty,” the researchers say.

“Hence, adopting an inclusive and sustainable rural prosperity in place of an intensive land-use change–driven economy can be conducive for tiger recovery, aligning with India’s modern environmentalism and sustainability.”

Armed conflict also significantly increases risk of extinction of tigers, the researchers found.

Globally, political instability has led to drastic wildlife declines, as militants exploit wildlife for funding, turning lawless areas into poaching hotspots.

In India, Manas National Park lost its rhinos during conflict, mirroring Nepal’s rhino decline during the civil unrest.

The researchers found tiger extinctions occurred in districts impacted by India’s Maoist conflict, particularly in tiger reserves in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

Reserves where the conflict has been controlled – Nagarjunsagar-Srisailam, Amrabad, and Similipal – have shown recovery, they say.

Also, several habitats in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and eastern Maharashtra have faced armed insurgencies, resulting in low tiger occupancy and high extinction risk, the researchers found.

“With improved political stability, these areas may see tiger recovery,” they say.

India’s tiger-free habitats – some 157,000 sq km – are mainly in Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Jharkhand. Reintroducing tigers and enhancing habitat connectivity in protected areas could restore around 10,000 sq km in these areas, the researcher say.

Recovering large carnivores in crowded, poverty-stricken areas is challenging, researcher say.

One approach, land sparing, suggests keeping people separate from predators. The other, land sharing supports coexistence between humans and wildlife.

Critics argue land sharing leads to conflict, while land sparing may be impractical. The study shows that both approaches – land sparing and land sharing – are necessary for tiger recovery in India, as each has a “role in conserving large carnivores”.

India is also grappling with rising human-wildlife conflict, leading to fatalities from tiger attacks. How does this align with the growing tiger population?

“We lose 35 people to tiger attacks every year, 150 to leopards, and the same number to wild pigs. Additionally, 50,000 people die from snake bites. And then about 150,000 also lose their lives in car accidents annually,” says Mr Jhala.

“It’s not about the number of deaths. Two hundred years ago, human deaths from predators were a normal part of mortality. Today, they’re abnormal, which is why they make the headlines. In fact, within tiger reserves, you’re more likely to die from a car accident than from a tiger attack.”

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.

After a delay of several hours, there were jubilant scenes here in Ramallah where around 60 Palestinian prisoners were freed from Israeli detention into the arms of their overjoyed loved ones.

Among those released and tasting freedom for the first time in 22 years was 47-year-old Hussain Nassar, who was arrested in 2003 for taking part in the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising.

There to meet him were his daughters, 22-year-old Hedaya and Raghad, who’s 21. Both were dressed in the striking traditional red and black dresses from Nablus, their hometown.

The younger daughter had earlier told me that it was impossible to describe living for so long without her dad.

“This is the first time I will touch him. I will hug him. I cannot express my feelings.”

Almost shaking with the excitement of meeting her father, she said “the Israelis arrested him when my mum was pregnant with me. I feel like this is the first time I will know what it’s like to have a father!”

Among the 110 Palestinian prisoners released at this stage of what is still a fragile ceasefire, were several women and children – the youngest of them 15 years old.

Some of them were accused of relatively minor offences, others had not been convicted or formally charged.

But 21 prisoners convicted of the most serious offences, including murder, were not allowed by Israel to return home to the Palestinian Territories and were exiled to Egypt or neighbouring countries.

One senior figure who was not sent into exile, despite being convicted for his involvement in the deaths of several Israelis, was Zakaria Zubeidi.

The former commander in the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades was one of several detainees carried aloft by jubilant supporters through the streets near Ramallah’s civic centre.

It was a scene, like the earlier Hamas show of strength in Gaza, that will irk many Israelis and undoubtedly lead to renewed calls from some right-wing politicians for the war against Hamas in Gaza to resume after this initial six-week phase of the ceasefire is over.

For the governor of Ramallah and El Bireh, Dr Leila Abu Ghanam, this homecoming for so many former prisoners was an occasion to celebrate.

But she had mixed emotions as Israeli military operations intensify in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, and the Gaza ceasefire is still under strain.

“All Palestinians are happy about the release of the prisoners but we’re sad about what is happening in the provinces at this very moment. Mothers today, despite how happy they are for the release of their children, are also sad for those mothers who have lost their homes and children.”

Today was one of very few days, while covering this intractable conflict, that I’ve seen so many happy faces among both Palestinians and Israelis.

It has been a terrible, destructive war that has shattered so many lives.

Governor Ghanam accused the Israeli government of not being interested in peace. “But we don’t lose hope,” she said, smiling. “If we had lost hope, Palestinians would have ended 75 years ago.”

The next batch of prisoner releases in exchange for Israeli hostages should happen on Saturday.

A Mongolian sumo wrestler has been promoted to the sport’s highest rank in a ceremony on Friday.

Hoshoryu, real name Sugarragchaa Byambasuren, became the 74th yokozuna, or grand champion, after winning a major tournament last week.

To become a yokozuna, the wrestler must not only achieve great sporting success but also display good conduct and be approved by a board of judges.

Hoshoryu’s uncle Asashoryu, a former yokozuna who was known as the bad boy of sumo, was forced to quit the sport in 2010 after breaking a man’s nose in a drunken brawl outside a nightclub.

But Hoshoryu has already indicated he wants to follow a different path to his uncle, whose own ceremony took place 22 years ago to the day.

“I want to act properly as a yokozuna and do my best,” he said.

Around 3,500 fans arrived at the Meiji Shine in Tokyo to see the 25-year-old complete a number of rituals to receive his new title.

He was handed a white rope belt worn by yokozuna, which he put on for his ring-entering ceremony.

During this, he clapped his hands, stamped his feet and sat in a low crouch for several minutes as the crowd applauded.

“I practised a lot but I was still more nervous than I expected,” he said.

“I think I did it properly though.”

Unlike other ranks, a yokozuna cannot be demoted and is expected to retire if their level of sumo decreases.

Multiple wrestlers can hold the rank at any given time, but Hoshoryu will stand alone at the top after the last remaining grand champion Terunofuji, 34, announced his retirement earlier this month.

His appointment has avoided the sport having no grand champion for the first time in more than 30 years.

Three judges who oversaw Family Court hearings involving Sara Sharif in the years before she was murdered can be named for the first time following a legal appeal.

Sara’s father Urfan Sharif, 43, and stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, have been jailed for life for her murder in Woking, Surrey in 2023.

Following their convictions, the media were able to publish details from previous Family Court hearings relating to Sara’s care before her death.

However, a High Court ruling prevented the media from naming the three judges involved in the case, Judge Alison Raeside – who sat on most of the hearings – Judge Peter Nathan and Judge Sally Williams.

Mr Justice Williams, who made the High Court order, said there had been a “real risk” of harm to the judges from a “virtual lynch mob”.

Media organisations, including the BBC, successfully appealed, arguing that judges must expect “their decision-making to be the subject of public scrutiny”.

The most senior civil judge in England and Wales, Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, found in favour of the media saying “the whole idea of anonymising the judge was, I have to say, misguided”.

Now the judges can be named, we can report that Judge Alison Raeside sat on the earliest hearings involving Sara, the last one, and most of the hearings in between.

The court was involved with the family before Sara was even born, and the first time her name is mentioned was on 17 January 2013. She was six days old.

Surrey County Council was seeking an interim care order – it wanted Sara and two of her siblings to be temporarily taken into foster care until a final decision was made.

The hearing was before Judge Raeside, sitting as a family judge at Guildford County Court.

She was told there were concerns that Sara and her siblings were “not adequately supervised”, and that two of them had “unexplained injuries”.

The judge was also told that Urfan Sharif had subjected Sara’s mother Olga Sharif to domestic abuse.

Social workers had asked for the children to be taken into care. They said concerns about the family dated back to May 2010 – almost three years before Sara was born – when one of the siblings had been found alone in a local shop.

Judge Raeside heard that as far back as November 2010, there had been allegations that Urfan Sharif had beaten Olga Sharif and Sara’s older siblings, though she decided not to press charges. Police had then been called to the home on three occasions in 2011 and 2012 after complaints of further domestic abuse.

Judge Raeside decided against a care order and made an interim supervision order instead, saying that Sara and her siblings could stay with their parents under the supervision of Surrey County Council Children’s Services while further assessments were prepared.

The final hearing was delayed to 19 September 2013 and on that day Judge Raeside again decided the children should stay with their parents under supervision. By this time social workers had changed their recommendation to a “supervision order”.

Just over a year later, in November 2014, the case was back before the Family Court after one of Sara’s siblings said Olga had bitten them.

Olga Sharif had been charged with assault and Surrey council made an urgent application for the children to be taken into foster care.

The emergency hearing was heard by Judge Peter Nathan, but the next day the case was before Judge Raeside again.

She decided that Sara and one of her siblings could return to live with Urfan Sharif. The sibling who had been bitten was placed into foster care.

At a hearing the following year, Judge Raeside was told that Surrey council was still extremely concerned at the risk of harm to Sara.

One of her siblings had said that Urfan Sharif had punched them and slapped them with a belt on the bottom.

On the second day of the three-day hearing Olga Sharif announced she was separating from Urfan Sharif because of domestic violence.

She said that in the past Urfan Sharif had poured a flammable liquid on her and tried to set it alight.

On other occasions she said Urfan Sharif had held a knife to her throat and tried to strangle her with a belt. She said home life with Urfan Sharif was like living in a prison. She moved into a women’s refuge and the children moved with her.

In July 2015, another judge, Judge Sally Williams, had Sara and her sibling taken into temporary foster care after reports that Urfan Sharif had been secretly seeing them while they were still at the refuge.

That September, Judge Raeside agreed an interim care order that meant Sara and her sibling stayed for a while in foster care. But in November, she ordered that the children could live with their mother Olga Sharif, with Urfan Sharif getting supervised access.

For the next few years the family courts were not involved with the family, and on 1 February 2019 Judge Raeside was promoted. She was appointed as the designated family judge for Surrey. But a few months after that the family were back in front of her again.

By now Urfan Sharif had a new wife Beinash Batool. He was asking the court to sanction arrangements for Sara and her sibling to live with them with Olga Sharif getting some supervised contact. The court was told Olga Sharif had already agreed to this.

Judge Raeside heard that Sara and her sibling had complained that Olga had mistreated them, and they had already started living with their father and stepmother. Sara had apparently said her mother had slapped her and pulled her hair, and had tried to burn her with a lighter and drown her in the bath. It had been Urfan Sharif who first raised the allegations.

A social worker who was asked to prepare a report for the court also recommended that Sara and her sibling should live with their father and step-mother with supervised contact with Olga Sharif.

On 9 July 2019, Judge Raeside, who by now had been involved in hearings involving the family for more than six and a half years, agreed that Sara and her sibling should live with their father Urfan Sharif and stepmother Beinash Batool – the two people who would kill her five years later – “it is ordered that the children do live with the father and Ms Batool”, she said.

They were both convicted in December 2024 of murdering Sara Sharif.

The judge who ordered the anonymity of the judges said that if anything it was the system rather than individuals that should be held up to public scrutiny.

In a judgment Mr Justice Williams said: “In this case the evidence suggests that social workers, guardians, lawyers and judiciary acted within the parameters that law and social work practice set for them.

“Certainly to my reasonably well-trained eye there is nothing (save the benefit of hindsight) which indicates that the decisions reached in 2013, 2015 or 2019 were unusual or unexpected.”

“Based on what was known at the time and applying the law at the time I don’t see the judge or anyone else having any real alternative option.”

The lawyer acting for newspapers and broadcasters including the BBC, Adam Wolanski KC said judges were “the face of justice itself” and must expect “their decision-making to be the subject of public scrutiny.”

On Friday, the highest ranking judge in England and Wales announced the formation of a “security taskforce” to assess how to better protect the safety of judges.

In a letter seen by the PA news agency, Chief Justice Baroness Carr said that incidents were “becoming all too common”, and she was “increasingly concerned” about threats made to judges on social media.

The naming of the judges comes just days after new rules came in permitting reporting from family courts in England and Wales.

Chaos erupted in Ghana’s parliament late on Thursday night, with lawmakers destroying furniture, and pushing and shoving each other.

Police were called into the meeting – held to vet Ghana’s new ministerial appointments – as MPs damaged tables and microphones.

The vetting committee had disagreed over a number of issues, with some accusing opposition MPs of dragging out the process in order to settle political scores.

On Friday morning the vetting committee’s chairman apologised to the Ghanaian public, calling it “totally unacceptable”.

The cross-party committee had been scheduled to vet three lawmakers from the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The trio had been nominated for ministerial positions after the NDC triumphed over the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in December’s elections.

However, NDC MPs accused Alexander Afenyo-Markin, the NPP’s leader in parliament, of questioning the ministerial nominees for an unnecessarily long time.

More than five hours were spent on vetting just one nominee – communications minister designate Samuel Nartey George.

Many NDC MPs believe this was a form of payback from opposition MPs on the committee, who wanted George to retract his criticism of former president and NPP leader Nana Akufo-Addo and Akufo-Addo’s Vice-President Mahamadu Bawumia.

Members of the vetting committee ended up on their feet – shouting, pushing and shoving each other and upturning tables.

On Friday, the NPP’s Afenyo-Markin said parliamentary customs allowed committee members “the opportunity to enquire deeply into every nominee of the president, without limit to questions”.

He accused the NDC of trying to “frustrate” this process.

As a result of the chaos, the vetting ended up being adjourned until Friday.

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Controversial gaming streamer Herschel ‘Guy’ Beahm, known online as Dr Disrespect, has said he is able to start making money from YouTube again after being dropped in 2024.

His announcement came on the same day as the gaming studio he co-founded said it was “closing its doors after three incredible years”.

Developer Midnight Society, which was working on shooter game Deadrop, cut ties with the YouTuber last year after becoming aware of “an allegation” against him.

Beahm denied any wrongdoing, but admitted sending messages to “an individual minor” in 2017, insisting “nothing illegal happened”.

The content creator has 4.5 million subscribers on the platform and was dropped by various sponsors but declared on his stream on Thursday that “we’ve got our YouTube monetisation back”.

In a statement to BBC Newsbeat, YouTube said it had “reinstated” Dr Disrespect to its partner program “after careful review of the channel’s recent activity”.

“Dr Disrespect was previously suspended… for violations of our Creator Responsibility policies. If there are further violations, we’ll take appropriate action,” it added.

The Dr Disrespect character gained popularity for his chaotic style of play and aggressive – at times rude – commentary.

Last year, Midnight Society terminated Beahm’s role at the company, four years after he was abruptly kicked off streaming platform Twitch, where he had a big following.

In 2022, Beahm and Twitch agreed a settlement, where neither party admitted any wrongdoing.

The reason for his removal then was never made clear – with the Amazon-owned platform only saying it acted whenever users broke the rules.

Last June, a former Twitch employee said the removal was linked to messages sent to a minor.

Beahm responded: “Let me be clear, it was not a criminal case against me and no criminal charges have ever been brought against me.”

He did though apologise to his “community and colleagues” for his actions.

“That’s on me as an adult, a husband and a father… it should have never happened”, he wrote on social media.

He was suspended from YouTube’s partner program and retreated from streaming until September.

In November he signed a deal with video platform Rumble to head its gaming division.

The closure of Midnight Society comes amid wider struggles in the games industry, with Ubisoft and Bioware among notable companies already announcing cuts in 2025.

Midnight Society previously announced layoffs in September 2024 but said it remained committed to releasing the game this year.

In its statement announcing its closure, the company apologised for being “unable to reach our ultimate goal” of making Deadrop.

The game got its start through the sale of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) – “one-of-a-kind” digital assets that experience an intial boom before vastly dropping in value.

Some who invested have asked the company if they will be receiving refunds.

BBC Newsbeat has requested comment from Midnight Society but not heard back.

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