European leaders are set to gather next week for an emergency summit on the war in Ukraine, in response to concerns the US is moving ahead with Russia on peace talks that will lock out the continent.

Sir Keir Starmer, who is expected to attend the summit in Paris, said it was a “once-in-a-generation moment for our national security” and it was clear Europe must take a greater role in Nato.

It comes after Donald Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine said European leaders would be consulted but not take part in any talks between US and Russia over ending the war.

Senior White House figures are also due to meet Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Saudi Arabia in the coming days, US officials say.

In remarks likely to raise concern in Ukraine and among European allies, special envoy Keith Kellogg said previous negotiations had failed because too many parties had been involved.

“It may be like chalk on the blackboard, it may grate a little bit, but I am telling you something that is really quite honest,” he said on Saturday.

Europe remains haunted by the Minsk agreements, a failed ceasefire deal between Ukraine and Russia reached in 2015. The talks, which were brokered by France and Germany, sought to end fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Sir Keir is understood to see his role as bringing US and Europe together to ensure a united approach to peace in Ukraine.

The UK prime minister will discuss the views of European leaders when he visits US President Trump at the White House at the end of this month.

A further meeting of European leaders together with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected after Sir Keir returns from Washington.

Sir Keir said the UK would “work to ensure we keep the US and Europe together”, adding the two could not “allow any divisions in the alliance to distract” from “external enemies”.

“This is a once in a generation moment for our national security where we engage with the reality of the world today and the threat we face from Russia,” he said.

“It’s clear Europe must take on a greater role in Nato as we work with the United States to secure Ukraine’s future and face down the threat we face from Russia.”

Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski said Emmanuel Macron had called the summit of European leaders, which has not yet been announced by the French president.

Sikorski said: “President Trump has a method of operating, which the Russians call reconnaissance through battle. You push and you see what happens, and then you change your position, legitimate tactics. And we need to respond.”

• Ukraine end game: What each side wants from peace deal
• Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia
• Trump wants peace. Ukrainians fear what that might look like
• Analysis: Vance’s blast at Europe ignores Ukraine and defence agenda

Earlier on Saturday, Zelensky called for the creation of an “army of Europe” amid rising concern the US may no longer come to the continent’s aid.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he said US Vice-President JD Vance’s speech at the event had made it clear that the old relationship between Europe and America was “ending” and the continent “needs to adjust to that”.

But Zelensky also said Ukraine would “never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement” after Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to start peace talks.

Earlier this week the US president announced he had a lengthy phone conversation with the Russian leader and that negotiations to stop the “ridiculous war” in Ukraine would begin “immediately”.

Trump then “informed” Zelensky of his plan.

Trump appeared confident that his leadership style could pave the way for a peace deal in Ukraine.

His rapprochement with Putin brought to an end more than three years of silence between Moscow and Washington.

Trump’s shock announcement rekindled memories of his meeting with Putin in Helsinki back in 2018.

The two men held nearly two hours of closed-door talks in the Finnish capital and went on to deliver a joint news conference, where Trump defended Russia over claims of interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

His comments came despite US intelligence agencies concluding, in 2016, that Russia was behind an effort to tip the scale of the US election against Hillary Clinton, with a state-authorised campaign of cyber attacks and fake news stories planted on social media.

On Saturday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also held a phone call with Russia’s foreign minister “building on” the 12 February call between Trump and Putin.

Trump’s call with the Russian president earlier this week broke nearly three years of silence between Washington and Moscow.

Senior officials from the Trump administration will start peace talks with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Saudi Arabia in the coming days, US Representative Michael McCaul told Reuters news agency.

McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he understood Zelensky had been invited to take part in the Saudi talks, which were aimed at arranging a meeting with Trump, Putin and the Ukrainian president “to finally bring peace and end this conflict”.

A day earlier, Vance had launched a scalding attack on European democracies, saying the greatest threat facing the continent was not from Russia and China, but “from within”.

In a speech at the Munich Security Conference, he repeated the Trump administration’s line that Europe must “step up in a big way to provide for its own defence”.

David Lammy has said the UK and EU countries must spend more on defence, with Europe facing an “existential question” even in the event of a negotiated peace in Ukraine.

The UK foreign secretary told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday “Putin will not go away”, and that, while it was positive 23 Nato countries were now spending at least 2% of their GDP on defence, “we all know we have to go upward”.

A crush at New Delhi Railway Station has left at least 15 people dead and a further 10 injured.

Dr Ritu Saxena, deputy medical superintendent of Lok Nayak Hospital in New Delhi, confirmed the numbers to BBC Hindi after thousands of people reportedly crammed into the railway station on Saturday evening.

The Reuters news agency reported that three of the dead were children, while 10 were women.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his thoughts were “with all those who have lost their loved ones” in a post on X.

Eyewitnesses told BBC Hindi a “huge crowd” had gathered at the station, through which many people were travelling to and from the Hindu religious festival, the Kumbh Mela.

Ruby Devi said the crowd at the Indian capital’s main railway station had been so big she was unable to get inside.

Another person said police were doing their job “but the crowd became too much”.

Inside the station, according to officials, two trains had been delayed, while a third – heading to Prayagraj, where the Kumbh Mela is held – was waiting to depart.

“There were far more people than I have ever seen at this station,” Dharmendra Singh, who was hoping to travel to Prayagraj, told India’s PTI news agency.

“In front of me, six or seven women were taken away on stretchers.”

• Thirty killed in crowd crush at India’s Kumbh Mela festival
• Families mourn loved ones who died in Kumbh Mela crush

KPS Malhotra, deputy commissioner of police, said the situation had been “out of control for a brief spell of 10 to 15 minutes due to overcrowding”.

Indian Railways had initially dismissed talk of a stampede as a “rumour”, according to Reuters, but confirmed that an undisclosed number of people had been injured and taken to hospital.

The incident comes weeks after dozens were killed in a pre-dawn crush at the Kumbh Mela festival in northern India, where tens of millions of Hindus had gathered to take a dip in sacred river waters on one of the holy days of a six-week festival.

Just over a year ago, Chloe Cheung was sitting her A-levels. Now she’s on a Chinese government list of wanted dissidents.

The choir girl-turned-democracy activist woke up to news in December that police in Hong Kong had issued a $HK1 million ($100,000; £105,000) reward for information leading to her capture abroad.

“I actually just wanted to take a gap year after school,” Chloe, 19, who lives in London, told the BBC. “But I’ve ended up with a bounty!”

Chloe is the youngest of 19 activists accused of breaching a national security law introduced by Beijing in response to huge pro-democracy protests in the former British colony five years ago.

In 2021, she and her family moved to the UK under a special visa scheme for Hong Kongers. She can probably never return to her home city and says she has to be careful about where she travels.

Her protest work has made her a fugitive of the Chinese state, a detail not lost on me as we meet one icy morning in the café in the crypt of Westminster Abbey. In medieval England, churches provided sanctuary from arrest.

Hong Kong officials issued the warrant for Chloe on Christmas Eve, using the only photo they appear to have on file for her – in which she is aged 11.

“It freaked me out at first,” she says, but then she issued a public response.

“I didn’t want the government to think I was scared. Because if Hong Kongers in Hong Kong can’t speak out for themselves any more, then we outside of the city – who can speak freely without fear- we have to speak up for them.”

Chloe attended her first protests with her school friends, in the early days of Hong Kong’s 2019 demonstrations. Protesters turned out in huge numbers against a bill seen as extending China’s control over the territory, which had enjoyed semi-autonomy since Britain handed it back in 1997.

“Politics were never in my life before… so I went to the first protest with curiosity,” she said.

She saw police tear-gassing demonstrators and an officer stepping on a protester’s neck.

“I was so shocked,” she says. “That moment actually changed how I looked at the world.”

Growing up in a city that was part of China but that had retained many of its freedoms – she had thought Hong Kongers could talk about “what we like and don’t like” and “could decide what Hong Kong’s future looked like”.

But the violent crackdown by authorities made her realise that wasn’t the case. She began joining protests, at first without her parents’ knowledge.

“I didn’t tell them at the time because they didn’t care [about politics],” she says. But when things started to get “really crazy”, she browbeat her parents into coming with her.

At the march, police fired tear gas at them and they had to run away into the subway. Her parents got the “raw experience”, she says, not the version they’d seen blaming protesters on TV.

Afters months of demonstrations, Beijing passed the National Security Law in 2020. Suddenly, most of the freedoms that had set Hong Kong apart from mainland China – freedom of expression, the right to political assemblies – were gone.

Symbols of democracy in the city, including statues and independent newspapers, were torn down, shut or erased. Those publicly critical of the government – from teachers to millionaire moguls like British citizen Jimmy Lai – faced trials and eventually, jail.

In response to the crackdown, the UK opened its doors to Hong Kongers under a new scheme, the British National Overseas (BNO) visa. Chloe’s family were some of the first to take up the offer, settling in Leeds, which offered the cheapest Airbnb they could find. Chloe had to do her GCSEs halfway through the school term, and during a pandemic lockdown.

At first, she felt isolated. It was hard to make friends and she had trouble speaking English, she says. There were few other Hong Kongers around.

Unable to afford international student fees of more than £20,000 a year, she took a job with the Committee for the Freedom of Hong Kong, a pro-democracy NGO.

When China started putting bounties on dissidents’ heads in 2023, they targeted prominent protest leaders and opposition politicians. Chloe at the time, still finishing her A-levels, thought was she too small-fry to ever be a target.

Her inclusion underlines Beijing’s determination to pursue activists overseas.

The bounty puts a target on her back and encourages third parties to report on her actions in the UK, she says.

China has been the leading country over the past decade trying to silence exiled dissidents around the world, according to a report this week.

Another Hong Kong dissident who reported being assaulted in London blamed the attacks on Chinese government-linked actors.

And last May, British police charged three men with gathering intelligence for Hong Kong and breaking into a home. One of the men was soon after found dead in unclear circumstances.

“They’re only interested in Hong Kongers because they want to scare off others,” Chloe says.

She says many of those who’ve moved over in recent years stay quiet, partly because they still have family in Hong Kong.

“Most of the BNO visa holders told me this because they don’t want to take risks,” she says. “It’s sad but we can’t blame them.”

Bounty targets

• July 2023: Eight high profile activists are named including: Nathan Law, Anna Kwok and Finn Lau, former politicians Dennis Kwok and Ted Hui, lawyer and legal scholar Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat, and online commentator Yuan Gong-yi.
• December 2023: Simon Cheng, Frances Hui, Joey Siu, Johnny Fok and Tony Choi
• December 2024: Tony Chung, Carmen Lau, Chung Kim-wah, Chloe Cheung, Victor Ho Leung-mau

On the day her arrest warrant was announced, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the UK would not tolerate “any attempts by foreign governments to coerce, intimidate, harass or harm their critics overseas”. He added the government was committed to supporting Hong Kongers in the UK.

But more needs to be done, says Chloe, who’s spent the first weeks of this year lobbying Westminster.

In the past fortnight she has met Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a Lunar New Year event at Downing Street, and shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel, who later tweeted: “We must not give an inch to any transnational repression in the UK.”

But she worries whether the UK’s recent overtures to China could mean fewer protections for Hong Kongers.

“We just don’t know what will happen to us, and whether the British government will protect us if they really want to protect their trade relationship with China.”

Does she feel scared on the streets in London? It’s not as bad as what political activists back home are facing.

“When I think of what [they] face… it’s actually not that big a deal that I got a bounty overseas.”

The US government is trying to bring back nuclear safety employees it fired on Thursday, but is struggling to let them know they should return to work, NBC News has reported.

The National Nuclear Security Administration workers were among hundreds of employees in the energy department who received termination letters.

An email obtained by NBC said the letters for some NNSA employees “are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel”.

The terminations are part of massive effort by President Donald Trump to slash the ranks of the federal workforce, a project he began on his first day in office, less than a month ago.

Last week, nearly 10,000 federal workers were let go, according to multiple US outlets.

That figure was in addition to the estimated 75,000 workers who have accepted an offer from the White House to leave voluntarily in the autumn.

The nuclear security officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN.

Attempting to reach the workers, the email, which was sent to current employees, said: “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails.”

Trump is working to slash spending across the board, abroad and at home, and going so far as to call for eliminating the education department. He is getting help from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who, through an effort called Doge for Department of Government Efficiency, has sent workers to comb through data at federal agencies and helped implement the “buyout” offer.

Last week, the Trump administration ordered agencies to fire nearly all probationary employees, those who had generally been in their positions for less than a year and not yet earned job protection. That included the NNSA staff members.

Altogether, the move could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of people.

Several of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the government’s size and spending have been met with legal challenges.

More than 60 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration since the president was inaugurated on 20 January.

“When I was growing up, everyone in my village would say: ‘She is blind, she is a waste’,” says Rakshitha Raju. Now, aged 24, she is one of India’s top middle distance para athletes. “It makes me so proud,” she says.

Rakshitha was born blind in a remote village in southern India and had lost both her parents by the age of 10. She was raised by her grandmother who is hearing and speech impaired.

“Both of us are disabled, so my grandma understood me,” she says.

When Rakshitha was about 13, the sports teacher at her school took her aside and told her she had the potential to be a great athlete.

“I wondered: ‘How? I am blind, so how do I run on a track I can’t see?'” she recalls.

Her teacher explained that visually impaired runners can have a guide, who runs alongside them. The athletes are joined by a tether – a short strap with a loop on both ends for each of them to hold on to.

For a while, other pupils acted as guide runners for Rakshitha. Then in 2016, when she was 15, she competed in the National Games, where a man called Rahul Balakrishna spotted her.

A middle-distance runner, Rahul had previously competed in the 1500m himself. He had been introduced to para athletics by a coach at the Paralympic Committee of India (PCI) a few years earlier, while recovering from an injury.

There was a shortage of guides and coaches and Rahul decided to take on both roles. The government pays him a salary for the coaching side of his work, but it does not pay guide runners.

However, if a visually impaired runner wins an international competition, their guide also gets a medal – something Rahul had not achieved in his own running career. “I felt proud that I could do this for myself and my country,” he says.

He invested his own time and money to support Rakshitha, helping her move to Bangalore in 2018 so she could have access to better training facilities.

When they are running “it’s the small things that matter”, says Rahul. “When they are approaching a curve, the guide has to alert the athlete or when a competitor is overtaking, he has to tell the athlete so they can put in a little more effort.”

Competition rules mean they can’t hold hands – they can only be connected by the tether, and the guide-runner is not allowed to push, pull or otherwise propel the visually impaired athlete.

Over time, the pair have built up a strong bond and now “I believe in my guide runner more than myself”, says Rakshitha.

They won gold medals at the 2018 and 2023 Asian Games, returning to a resounding welcome in Rakshitha’s village. She smiles as she describes how the people who used to taunt her organised a procession for her, cheering and waving flags.

Rakshitha became the first blind Indian woman to qualify for the 1500m in the Paralympics and she competed with Rahul in Paris in 2024.

They missed out on a medal in France, but India’s only other visually impaired female athlete to qualify for Paris, sprinter Simran Sharma, did make it to the podium, bringing home a bronze.

Simran is partially sighted and when she started running, she ran alone.

But in 2021, when Simran competed in the Tokyo Paralympics, she strayed out of her lane and realised that she would need a guide if she wanted to carry on running.

But the search proved challenging. “It can’t be any athlete. You need someone whose technique matches yours and who runs as fast as you do,” she explains.

Simran finally spotted a young athlete called Abhay Kumar, who was training at the same place as her. The 18-year-old was between competitions and guiding Simran was an opportunity for him to get experience at international events.

“They sent me videos and after watching them I thought: ‘I am a fast learner, this is going to be easy’,” he says. “But when I ran for the first time, it turned out to be very difficult.” Every movement has to be synchronised.

Simran and Abhay did not have time to practice together for long before their first international competition – the 2024 World Para Athletics Championships in Japan – just a few weeks after they met.

Their first race, the 100m, ended in disaster.

“Neither of us knew the rules properly,” says Simran. Abhay “thought he had to stop to let me cross the line first, so he stopped completely”. They were disqualified as he should have kept going and crossed the line just behind her.

But by the time they got to the 200m race, they knew what they were doing and struck gold. Simran became the World Champion in the T12 category.

Riding on that high, they went to the Paralympics in Paris. They came fourth in the 100m, but won bronze in the 200m race and Simran became the first Indian woman with a visual impairment to win a Paralympic medal.

But Simran is worried how long Abhay will stay as her guide. He has his own career to think of too.

Although guide runners get a medal when a pair wins, the Paralympic Committee of India (PCI) says it cannot support guides with salaries, cash prizes or offer a long-term career path.

“All we can do is support short-term needs like their food, accommodation, transport and training facilities,” says the PCI’s national athletics coach Mr Satyanarayana, who goes by one name.

Both Rakshitha and Simran now have sponsorship deals which help fund their training. They pay their guides themselves and give them a share of any prize money they win. But Rahul and Abhay would like more support from the state and want to be allowed to apply for public sector jobs reserved for sportsmen and women – like the athletes they work with.

Despite the uncertainty around her future with Abhay, Simran is already looking ahead to the next Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. “I won’t rest till I change the colour of this medal,” she says, hoping that next time she will win gold.

Rakshitha is hoping for a medal next time too, with Rahul at her side. “She must win a medal,” he says. “There are many like her in villages. They don’t know about sports and the possibilities. Rakshitha would be a role model for them.”

Find out about the nominees

A cracked windscreen forced US Secretary of State Marco Rubio into a rapid U-turn as his plane, en route to the Munich Security Conference, had to turn back an hour into the flight.

America’s top diplomat, his senior officials and the travelling press returned to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington DC on Thursday night.

But despite the mid-air scare the news was already firmly elsewhere. In Europe, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had stunned America’s allies with a speech setting out what many saw as a series of concessions Ukraine would have to make to sign any peace deal with Russia brokered by President Trump.

Hegseth said it was “unrealistic” to think Ukraine could win back its sovereign territory occupied by Russia, as was its demand for Nato membership, adding it was up to European and not US troops to keep the peace.

Critics, including some Republicans in Washington, castigated the speech, saying it gave away all of Ukraine’s leverage ahead of any negotiations. It was, they argued, a US capitulation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started,” said former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who co-chairs the European Council on Foreign Relation, a think tank.

The following day, Hegseth wound back some of what he had said. He clarified that all options were in fact still on the table for Trump to use as leverage between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“What he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world, President Trump,” said Hegseth. However he added he had been “simply pointing out realism” and rejected the idea he had offered any undue concessions to Moscow.

As for Rubio, the broken-down plane delayed his arrival in Munich, where his officials were briefing about his own priorities for the trip.

The United States would work for a “just and lasting peace” in which European countries would take the lead in creating a “durable security framework”, they said.

European leaders are expected to meet in Paris on Monday for urgent talks aimed at ensuring that their countries are fully involved in any Ukraine peace negotiations.

The US secretary of state’s position contained no trace of laying out limits for Ukraine in the way the defence secretary had done. Then, also in the German city, Vice-President JD Vance said the US could use “military tools of leverage” to compel Russia to do a deal, appearing to contradict Hegseth who had said no US troops would be deployed to Ukraine.

Later in the Oval Office, the fallout from Hegseth’s speech was put to President Trump – along with the commentary of a Republican senator who described it as a “rookie mistake”, like something a pro-Putin pundit could have written.

Had Trump been aware of what Hegseth was going to say? “Generally speaking, yeah, generally speaking I was,” said the president. “I’ll speak to Pete, I’ll find out,” he added.

The three days of to and fro gave some of the first major insights into Trump’s evolving position on one of the most consequential issues he faces – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and his vow to end the war – and also into how his administration is formulating and messaging its foreign policy.

On the substance, Hegseth’s speech – alongside Trump’s lengthy statement about an apparently warm phone call with Putin aimed at starting negotiations with Ukraine – sent shockwaves through European capitals, despite Hegseth’s attempts to row back.

“Any quick fix is a dirty deal,” said the European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas of the prospect of a US-led deal with Russia that might leave Ukraine’s voice on the sidelines.

Then there is the question of the way US foreign policy under Trump was being communicated. What happened in Munich seemed to be partly an attempt by his senior officials to interpret and relay Trump’s positions, but that effort resulted in sometimes explosive and often contradictory statements – some of which were then partly diluted or reversed.

It is not yet clear how much this is the result of a new but ill-coordinated administration still clarifying its lines to take internally, as opposed to a deliberate feature of a presidency less concerned about officials freelancing with rhetoric, even if it sows some confusion, so long as they remain loyal to his final word.

Trump’s first term saw a series of high-profile sackings or resignations of top officials who contradicted or disagreed with him, including three national security advisers, two defence secretaries and a secretary of state.

This time around, his appointments have been characterised more frequently by a willingness to show loyalty. Pete Hegseth, who had no previous experience running a military or government or agency, was a Fox News weekend presenter and former National Guard major who aligns strongly with Trump’s thinking and agenda.

His appointment was highly contested and scraped through its confirmation process with three Republican senators voting against him, seeing the result tied 50-50 with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.

As Trump said himself this week he was “okay” with the idea of taking Ukraine joining Nato off the negotiating table, calling it “not practical”.

Hegseth’s comments were hardly out of line with the president’s position – rather they were an amplification of it to an audience anxious to shore up Ukraine’s negotiating position not weaken it.

The challenge for those affected is that the precise position of US foreign policy is having to be divined. One of its features is uncertainty. This may well be deliberate – Donald Trump using the “madman” theory of foreign relations – often attributed to former Republican President Richard Nixon.

This suggests that being powerful but unpredictable is a way to make allies stay close while coercing adversaries. It would also explain a sense of his own officials going rogue but within the parameters of Trump’s broadly known positions.

But as this theory’s name suggests, it also carries considerable risks of mistakes or miscalculation in an already violent and uncertain world.

Trump’s recent proposals for Gaza – emptying it of its Palestinian population to build the “Riviera of the Middle East” under US ownership – were similarly permeated with confusion and contradiction.

While his officials appeared to try to correct some of what he set out – as only “temporary relocation” for example –Trump later doubled down saying it would in fact be “permanent” with no right of return.

As for Rubio – who wants the state department be the most influential government agency when it comes to Trump’s decision-making – his colleagues’ comments at Munich were already overshadowing his own.

His smaller, replacement plane finally landed in Europe – windscreen intact but without the press pool on board, while most of the headlines were also going elsewhere.

Mouldy half-finished food on bunk beds, discarded military uniforms and abandoned weapons – these are the remnants of an abrupt retreat from this base that once belonged to Iran and its affiliated groups in Syria.

The scene tells a story of panic. The forces stationed here fled with little warning, leaving behind a decade-long presence that unravelled in mere weeks.

Iran was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most critical ally for more than 10 years. It deployed military advisers, mobilised foreign militias, and invested heavily in Syria’s war.

Its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) built deep networks of underground bases, supplying arms and training to thousands of fighters. For Iran, this was also part of its “security belt” against Israel.

We are near Khan Shaykhun town in Idlib province. Before Assad’s regime fell on 8 December, it was one of the key strategic locations for the IRGC and its allied groups.

From the main road, the entrance is barely visible, hidden behind piles of sand and rocks. A watchtower on a hilltop, still painted in the colours of the Iranian flag, overlooks the base.

A receipt notebook confirms the base’s name: The Position of Martyr Zahedi – named after Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a top IRGC commander who was assassinated in an alleged Israeli airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Syria on 1 April, 2024.

The supplies recently ordered – we found receipts for chocolates, rice, cooking oil – suggest daily life continued here until the last moments. But now the base has new occupants – two armed Uyghur fighters from Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist militant group whose leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has become the new interim president of Syria.

The Uyghurs arrived suddenly in a military vehicle, asking for our media accreditation.

“Iranians were here. They all fled,” one of them says, speaking in his mother tongue, a dialect of Turkish. “Whatever you see here is from them. Even these onions and the leftover foods.”

Boxes full of fresh onions in the courtyard have now germinated.

The base is a labyrinth of tunnels dug deep into white rocky hills. There are bunk beds in some rooms with no windows. The roof of one of the corridors is draped in fabric in the colours of the Iranian flag and there are a few Persian books on a rocky shelf.

They left behind documents containing sensitive information. All in Persian, they have details of fighters’ personal information, military personnel codes, home addresses, spouses’ names and mobile phone numbers in Iran. From the names, it’s clear that several fighters in this base were from the Afghan brigade that was formed by Iran to fight in Syria.

Sources linked to Iran-backed groups told BBC Persian that the base houses mainly Afghan forces accompanied by Iranian “military advisers” and their Iranian commanders.

Tehran’s main justification for its military involvement in Syria was “to fight against jihadi groups” and to protect “Shia holy shrines” against radical Sunni militants.

It created paramilitary groups of mainly Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi fighters.

Yet, when the final moment came, Iran was unprepared. Orders for retreat reached some bases at the very last moment. “Developments happened so fast,” a senior member of an Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary group tells me. “The order was to just take your backpack and leave.”

Multiple sources close to the IRGC told the BBC that most of the forces had to flee to Iraq, and some were ordered to go to Lebanon or Russian bases to be evacuated from Syria by the Russians.

An HTS fighter, Mohammad al Rabbat, had witnessed the group’s advance from Idlib to Aleppo and Syria’s capital Damascus.

He says they thought their operation would take “about a year” and best, they’d “capture Aleppo in three to six months”. But to their surprise, they entered Aleppo in a matter of days.

The regime’s rapid downfall was brought about by a chain of events after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.

That attack led to an escalation of Israeli air strikes against the IRGC and Iran-backed groups in Syria and a war against another key Iranian ally – the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, whose leader was killed in an air strike.

This “situation of psychological collapse” for Iran and Hezbollah was central to their downfall, says 35-year-old fighter Rabbat.

But the most crucial blow came from within: there was a rift between Assad and his Iran-linked allies, he says.

“There was a complete breakdown of trust and military co-operation between them. IRGC-linked groups were blaming Assad of betrayal and believing that he is giving up their locations to Israel.”

As we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we come across a street painted in the colours of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as an Iranian headquarters.

On the wall at the entrance of the toilets, slogans read: “Down with Israel” and “Down with the USA”.

It was evident that these headquarters were also evacuated at short notice. We found documents classified as “highly sensitive”.

Abdullah, 65, and his family are among the very few locals who stayed and lived here alongside the IRGC-led groups. He says this life was hard.

His house is only a few metres away from the headquarters and in between, there are deep trenches with barbed wire.

“Movement at night was prohibited,” he says.

His neighbour’s home was turned into a military post. “They sat there with their guns pointing at the road, treating us all as suspects,” he recalls.

Most of the fighters didn’t even speak Arabic, he says. “They were Afghans, Iranians, Hezbollah. But we referred to them all as Iranians because Iran was controlling them.”

Abdullah’s wife Jourieh says she is happy that the “Iranian militias” have left, but still remembers the “stressful” moment before their withdrawal. She had thought they would be trapped in crossfire as Iran-backed groups were fortifying their positions and getting ready to fight, but then “they just vanished in a few hours”.

“This was an occupation. Iranian occupation,” says Abdo who, like others, has just returned here with his family after 10 years. His house had also become a military base.

I observed this anger towards Iran and a softer attitude towards Russia in many conversations with Syrians.

I asked Rabbat, the HTS fighter, why this was.

“Russians were dropping bombs from the sky and other than that, they were in their bases while Iranians and their militias were on the ground interacting. People were feeling their presence, and many weren’t happy with it,” he explained.

This feeling is reflected in Syria’s new rulers’ policy towards Iran.

The new authorities have put a ban on Iranian nationals, alongside Israelis, entering Syria. But there is no such ban against Russians.

Iran’s embassy, which was stormed by angry protesters after the fall of the regime, remains closed.

The reaction of Iranian officials towards developments in Syria has been contradictory.

While supreme leader Ali Khamenei called on “Syrian youths” to “resist” those who “have brought instability” to Syria, Iran’s foreign ministry has taken a more balanced view.

It says the country “backs any government supported by the Syrian people”.

In one of his first interviews, Syria’s new leader Sharaa described their victory over Assad as an “end of the Iranian project”. But he hasn’t ruled out having a “balanced” relationship with Tehran.

For the moment, though, Iran is not welcome in Syria. After years of expanding its military presence, everything Tehran built is now in ruins, both on the battlefield and, it seems, in the eyes of a large part of Syria’s public.

Back at the abandoned base, Iran’s military expansion was still under way even in the last days. Next to the camp were more tunnels under construction, apparently the beginnings of a field hospital. The cement on the walls was still wet and the paint fresh.

But left behind now is evidence of a brief fight – a few bullet shells and a military uniform covered with blood.

A year after Alexei Navalny’s suspicious death in a Russian prison, his supporters have been helping choose a headstone for his grave in Moscow.

“It will be a place of hope and strength for all those who dream of the wonderful Russia of the future,” says the opposition politician’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, quoting one of his best-known phrases.

Revealing her shortlist of designs in a video last week, she hoped the grave would become somewhere that those who oppose Vladimir Putin go “to remember they are not alone”.

Navalnaya now lives abroad, facing arrest if she were to return to Russia.

Her words capture just how far ambitions have shrunk.

For years, Alexei Navalny was Vladimir Putin’s biggest political rival: charismatic and courageous. Today, even his lawyers have been jailed as “extremists” and a huge number of supporters have fled Russia for safety. Those who’ve stayed are mostly scared into silence.

Now Vladimir Putin, far from being defeated by a ruinous war on Ukraine, looks like dictating the terms of a peace deal there alongside Donald Trump.

So did Russia’s democratic opposition and its dream of change die in an Arctic prison yard with Alexei Navalny?

Ksenia Fadeeva was serving a nine-year sentence when the TV in her cell announced that Navalny was dead. He had collapsed in prison on his daily walk.

“I was in a stupor; I couldn’t even speak,” the activist remembers. “It was a nightmare.”

Ksenia was a political prisoner herself, labelled an “extremist” for her previous links to Navalny. She managed his HQ in her Siberian hometown, Tomsk, when Navalny tried to run against Putin in the 2018 presidential elections. He was blocked.

Back then, Ksenia showed me how her car had been coated in paint and had its tyres slashed. On another day the door of her flat was sealed shut with foam glue, trapping her inside.

The young activist shrugged all this off. It came with the territory.

At that point, Putin had been squeezing the democratic life out of Russia for close to two decades. He’d moved from controlling the media to rigging elections and punishing protest. Then came poisoning and political assassination.

This month also marks 10 years since Boris Nemtsov, another powerful voice of opposition, was killed. He was shot in the back close to the red walls of the Kremlin.

Russia had annexed Crimea illegally the previous year and Putin’s approval rating was still riding a wave of toxic nationalism. Critics like Nemtsov were publicly slurred as traitors.

The politician’s lifeless body, sprawled beneath fairy lights in the colours of the Russian flag, marked the start of a dark new era.

Navalny did his best to breathe new life into Russia’s beleaguered opposition.

A master of social media and of the anti-corruption agenda, he had real appeal, especially to a younger crowd.

But in 2020 he was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and almost died.

“I knew they could put you in prison, break up protests with batons, invent criminal charges. But poisoning with a chemical weapon?” Ksenia Fadeeva remembers her shock at the attack. “I thought there were some brakes on the system, but I was wrong.”

When Navalny returned from treatment abroad, he was arrested at the airport.

He would never walk free.

In that environment, the lack of overt opposition within Russia is hardly surprising.

“I don’t think there is any country in the world where many would risk years in prison for speaking out,” Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent activist, wrote to me once from his own jail cell.

Sentenced to 25 years for condemning Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Kara-Murza smarted at criticism of Russians for failing to stand up to Putin more firmly and failing to stop the full-scale invasion.

Navalny was already in jail. A spattering of anti-war protests was quickly stamped out.

“Inside Russia, it’s not a matter of there being no one with the charisma of Navalny,” Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Centre says, explaining the lack of any new leader since his death.

“We’re talking about the complete criminalisation of opposition.”

Last August, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ksenia Fadeeva were taken from their cells and forcibly deported as part of a giant exchange of prisoners.

The Kremlin was exporting dissent.

By then, Navalny was dead.

Ksenia believes that had he lived, even from abroad Navalny could have made a difference. “Things would have been different if they’d let Navalny out in a swap. His voice would have been loud, the opposition would have had more influence”, she says.

“In today’s tough conditions, I don’t know where you find another leader like Navalny.”

His team haven’t stopped working in exile. One half lobbies Western governments for more effective sanctions, the others try to smash through the wall of Russian propaganda with exposés of Putin’s entourage.

Their latest film targets a powerful ally of Putin, Igor Sechin, arguing that Putin is only pretending to “make Russia great” while he and his cronies plunder the country’s wealth.

Such investigations used to spark real-life protests. Now those viewers still inside Russia can only watch via VPN and most dare not post comments.

“You can get a criminal charge now, just for lifting a finger,” Ksenia Fadeeva points out, although the latest film was seen almost two million times in 10 days.

Ksenia is sure most of that audience is in Russia.

“People haven’t changed their views, they’re still there. They definitely read and follow and watch,” she says. “But they can’t protest. They’re just surviving.”

That’s a word I hear often from activists: they describe Russian opposition forces in a kind of holding pattern.

“We can stick to our basic pro-democracy values and try to keep people safe for the future Russia,” Anastasia Burakova argues, and her own “Ark” project tries to do just that.

“But nobody knows how to successfully finish this dictatorship.”

But is there actually demand for that?

“Imagine asking: ‘Do you support Vladimir Putin or do you want to go to jail for 15 years,'” says Ksenia Fadeeva, mocking the value of conducting polling in an authoritarian regime.

Others believe researchers do still have ways to take the social pulse, and they confirm that it’s not set racing by Yulia Navalnaya and co.

Navalny’s widow has moral authority but nowhere near his political skills.

“All these… liberal figures have extremely low approval ratings,” says academic Tatiana Stanovaya. Instead, she detects a consolidation of support for the Kremlin which she links to a surge in Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia.

“People see that we are very vulnerable and they have to choose the strongest player to rely on,” the analyst explains. “It’s not because they like Putin or consider him a positive hero. It’s because he can protect Russia in a very hostile environment.”

No matter that Putin created that environment himself by going to war.

It helps that Donald Trump now appears to be siding with Moscow: the US president once said he “understood” Russia’s veto on Ukraine joining Nato. He now seems to have conceded that major condition, even before any peace talks.

“I think the war has further entrenched anti-Western sentiment,” Dr Jade McGlynn of King’s College suggests. “I also don’t really see evidence there’s even a strong minority of Russians who are desirous of a liberal, Western-allied type of democracy.”

“I think the liberals… ultimately failed to convince.”

There’s a whole lot wrapped up in that line, including the economic pain and massive corruption Russians experienced as the USSR fell apart. It all helped make democracy a dirty word.

For years, state TV has also been shouting into every living room that critics of Russia are its enemies, and Western agents.

“The Kremlin plays on a real fear, ingrained in Russian minds, that the West has been trying to ruin Russia, weaken and divide it,” Tatiana Stanovaya argues.

“There is good soil for the Kremlin to work on.”

Opposition forces are also deeply divided.

Fierce rivalries and personality clashes that go back many years have intensified in exile and now frequently erupt into vicious and very public fights.

“We can debate after democracy in Russia begins, but for now we have the same goal and the same enemy: he’s in the Kremlin,” Anastasia Burakova voices the frustration of many that such scrapping is a dangerous distraction.

That division is part of why Jade McGlynn thinks Russia’s exiled activists might better be called “dissidents” than a political opposition.

“Politics is about practicality, otherwise you are a philosopher,” she argues – and challenging those in power is impossible in Russia right now.

Anastasia Shevchenko agrees. But just surviving Putinism isn’t good enough for her. “I hate when people still talk about the ‘beautiful Russia of the future’,” the Russian activist quoted Alexei Navalny, when we met in a Kyiv coffee shop last month.

“You can’t be happy next to destroyed cities where so many people were killed.”

Other opposition figures insist on referring to “Putin’s war”, to suggest that most Russians are against the invasion – which infuriates Ukrainians.

“I think to claim that it’s one man’s war when you have 600,000 troops there and over three million in the defence industry, not including all the propagandists, is not convincing,” Jade McGlynn is firm.

But Anastasia Shevchenko struggles to focus on anything else. Whilst change within Russia remains “very far away”, she sees Ukraine is in trouble now and she can help.

She’s become a one-woman telephone exchange for Ukrainian soldiers held captive in Russia: prisoners of war, who can’t call Ukrainian numbers from Russian jails, dial Anastasia’s Russian mobile. She gets their mother or wife on another line and places the phones together so they can talk.

“If you can help Ukraine, you should do that,” she believes. “But we Russians are focused only on Russia and I don’t understand it.”

Still readjusting to life out of prison, and out of her country, Ksenia Fadeeva has shifted her own focus from politics to human rights for now, helping political prisoners.

“I still believe Russia has every chance of becoming a normal, free, peaceful European country,” Ksenia Fadeeva insists. “But the regime is far harsher now, more authoritarian.”

Anastasia Shevchenko agrees, though she remembers the collapse of the USSR and concedes that history is unpredictable.

“You never know what happens. Things can change quickly. So you have to be ready.”

But ready for what?

The idea of Russia leaping from Putinism to liberal democracy looks less likely than ever.

Jade McGlynn sees no prospect at all, unless the vision that led to the invasion of Ukraine – “this imperial, chauvinist vision of Russia” – is defeated.

“I think that’s where we will see real opposition,” she thinks. “From disgruntled nationalists,” especially in a country with tens of thousands of war veterans and all their trauma.

“What will the authorities ‘sell’ to the people then? What idea?,” Ksenia Fadeeva wonders, when the war is finally over.

All agree the political repression will remain intense. As the analyst Tatiana Stanovaya puts it: “The state, especially the repressive apparatus, do not have the skills to retreat.”

On Sunday, Navalny’s supporters plan memorials from Argentina to Australia to mark the anniversary of his death. In Moscow, some will visit his graveside. A few may dare to chant for change. But most of all, those who still cling to the dream of a democratic Russia will be checking who else is still out there. Still waiting.

An Indian court’s ruling that a man’s forced “unnatural sex” with his wife is not an offence has led to huge outrage and sparked renewed calls for better protections for married women.

The controversial order has also brought back into the spotlight the issue of marital rape in a country which has stubbornly refused to criminalise it.

Earlier this week, a high court judge in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh set free a 40-year-old man who was convicted by a trial court in 2019 of rape and unnatural sex with his wife, who died within hours of the alleged assault.

The lower court had also found the man guilty of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder”. He was sentenced to “rigorous imprisonment for 10 years” on each count, with all the sentences to run concurrently.

But on Monday, the High Court’s Justice Narendra Kumar Vyas acquitted the man of all charges, saying that since India did not recognise marital rape, the husband could not be considered guilty of non-consensual sex or any non-consensual unnatural sexual act.

The judgement has been met with anger, as activists, lawyers and campaigners renew their calls to criminalise marital rape in India.

“To watch this man walk away is unacceptable. This judgement may be correct legally, but it is ethically and morally abhorrent,” said lawyer and gender rights activist Sukriti Chauhan.

“An order that absolves a man of such a crime, to say it’s not a crime, is the darkest hour in our legal system,” she told the BBC.

“It has shaken us to the core. This needs to change and change quickly.”

Priyanka Shukla, a lawyer in Chhattisgarh, said a judgement like this “sends out the message that because you’re the husband, you have rights. And you can do anything, you can even get away with murder”.

She added that this is not the first time a court has given such a judgement, and there is always anger.

“This time, the outrage is more because it is so gruesome and the woman died.”

The court documents make for grim reading.

According to the prosecution, the incident took place on the night of 11 December 2017, when the husband, who worked as a driver, “committed unnatural sex with the victim against her will… causing her a lot of pain”.

After he left for work, she sought help from his sister and another relative, who took her to hospital where she died a few hours later.

In her statement to the police and her dying declaration to a magistrate, the woman said she became ill “due to forceful sexual intercourse by her husband”.

A dying declaration carries weight in court and legal experts say it is generally enough for conviction, unless contradicted by other evidence.

While convicting the man in 2019, the trial court had relied heavily on her dying declaration and the post-mortem report, which stated “the cause of death was peritonitis and rectal perforation” – simply put, severe injuries to her abdomen and rectum.

Justice Vyas, however, saw matters differently – he questioned the “sanctity” of the dying statement, noted that some of the witnesses had retracted their statements and, most importantly, said that marital rape was not an offence in India.

The lower court’s conviction was “a rarest of rare case”, Ms Shukla said, “probably because the woman died”.

“But what is shocking about the high court order is that there’s not even one sympathetic comment from the judge.”

Considering the nature of the assault, the high court’s order has come as a shock for many, who believe the judge should not have dismissed the case so lightly.

India is among more than 30 countries – along with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia – where marital rape is not a criminal offence.

A number of petitions have been filed in recent years seeking to strike down Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which has been in existence since 1860.

The British colonial-era law mentions several “exemptions” – or situations in which sex is not rape – and one of them is “by a man with his own wife” if she is not under 15 years.

Britain outlawed marital rape in 1991 but India, which recently rewrote its criminal code, retained the regressive law in its new statute book.

• India government says criminalising marital rape ‘excessively harsh’
• In India, growing clamour to criminalise rape within marriage

The idea is rooted in the belief that consent for sex is “implied” in marriage and that a wife cannot retract it later. Campaigners say such an argument is untenable in this day and age, and that forced sex is rape, regardless of who does it.

But in a country where marriage and family are considered sacrosanct, the issue has polarised opinions and there’s strong resistance to the idea of criminalising marital rape.

The Indian government, religious leaders and men’s rights activists have strongly opposed the move.

In October last year, the government told the Supreme Court that criminalisation of marital rape would be “excessively harsh”. The federal home ministry said it “may lead to serious disturbances in the institution of marriage”.

Authorities also insist that there are enough laws to protect married women against sexual violence. But campaigners say India cannot hide behind archaic laws to deny women bodily agency.

“A lot of people say the constitution cannot enter your bedroom,” Ms Chauhan said.

“But doesn’t it grant women – like all citizens – fundamental rights to safety and security? What kind of redundant country do we live in that we remain quiet when a woman has to face this level of violence?” she asks.

Violence within marriage is rampant in India.

According to a recent government survey, 32% of married women face physical, sexual or emotional violence by their husbands and 82% have experienced sexual violence by their husbands.

And even that doesn’t give the true scale of the problem, Ms Shukla said, because a majority of women do not report violence, especially sexual violence, out of shame.

“In my experience, women are not trusted when they complain, everyone says it must be fake. The only time such cases are taken seriously is when a woman dies or the assault is particularly gruesome,” the lawyer said.

Ms Chauhan believes nothing will change until the law changes.

“We need to criminalise marital rape. The wife not getting justice after such a gruesome incident deserves a nationwide campaign, which is not born of anger but is serious [and] well thought out.”

She added that the government and men’s activists try to project it as a “man versus woman debate”.

“But the demand for criminalising marital rape is not against men, but for the safety and wellbeing of women. Is it not important to ensure women’s safety?”

A 14-year-old boy has been killed and five people wounded in a knife attack in southern Austria.

Police said the suspect is a 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker who was detained at the scene in Villach, a town near the border with Italy and Slovenia.

Police are yet to establish a motive but have involved extremism specialists in the investigation, a spokesman told BBC News.

The incident took place around 16:00 local time (15:00 GMT) near the town’s main square. Two of the five people injured were in a serious condition as of Saturday evening.

A delivery worker who had driven his vehicle at the attacker helped prevent more injuries, police said.

The driver – also a Syrian man – said he witnessed the attack as he was driving by and deliberately rammed the knifeman.

The suspect was arrested shortly after by two female police officers. As of Saturday evening, he was still being interrogated, police said.

Some witness reports initially indicated a potential second attacker, leading to police shutting down train travel in the attack’s immediate aftermath.

However, local police told BBC News they were confident only one knifeman was involved.

Austrian law means the attacker’s identity has not been released but police confirmed he is a 23-year-old Syrian man who lived locally.

He had a temporary residence permit and was waiting for a decision on his asylum application.

Police initially said four people were wounded but a fifth person later came forward with minor injuries.

The identity of the teenager who was killed has also not yet been disclosed.

The attack comes amid national debates over asylum laws and a political crisis following an election last year which saw the far-right Freedom Party come out on top for the first time.

However it has failed to form a coalition government, leaving Austria’s President Alexander Van der Bellen weighing up whether to call a snap election, form a minority government, or invite other parties or a group of experts to try and form an administration.

Herbet Kickl, the head of the Freedom Party, seized on the Villach attack, saying in a statement that Austria needs a “rigorous crackdown on asylum”.

Peter Kaiser of the centre-left Social Democratic Party – who is the governor of Carinthia, the region where Villach is located – described the attack as an “unimaginable atrocity”.

He said the stabbings should not lead to “hateful” reactions while urging the government and European Union to tighten asylum policy.

Reality TV gold has a new three-word definition: “Montoya, por favor!”

If you’ve been anywhere near social media over the past fortnight, you’ll know the raw drama setting the internet ablaze this award season hasn’t come from Hollywood, but the love tragedy played out in clips posted from Spanish reality TV show Temptation Island.

Contestant Jose Carlos Montoya’s spiralling meltdown at watching his girlfriend Anita cheat with another man is like an uncensored Love Island on steroids.

In Temptation Island, couples are taken to a tropical island, separated and sent to separate villas filled with attractive singles ready to test their loyalty. In a final twist, every move made is recorded for the other half to see.

Forced to watch a graphic real-time stream of the betrayal, Montoya’s emotions swell until he snaps, breaking all the show’s rules.

Blind to the now infamous pleas of host Sandra Barneda (“Montoya, por favor!”), he rampages down the beach to confront the pair, tugging at his shorts in anguish as lightning streaks across the sky.

A second clip shows the resulting confrontation: Anita flips the script, calling out Montoya’s own indiscretions before collapsing in tears, begging for forgiveness.

“This is cinema,” wrote one X user, posting a clip that has now been watched on the platform a staggering 224m times since 4 February.

“Montoya. the tension … you don’t need to speak Spanish to understand, this is insane.”

Yet those behind Spain’s Temptation Island see its success as more than just shock value. Executive producer Juanra Gonzalo tells me they are overjoyed by the “completely unexpected” global reaction, and he believes the show’s appeal lies in its relatability.

“In Love Island, all the people are single. In Temptation Island, there are real couples, and they are putting their love at risk,” he says. “I think [audiences] know it too. These emotions and reactions cannot be faked.”

“Everyone wants to know what their boyfriend or girlfriend is doing when they are not with them. We can imagine, but we don’t know. Temptation Island lets the audience ask: ‘what would I do in that situation?'”

The magic ingredient to making this work is careful casting. “Montoya and Anita were perfect – they are very emotive and expressive,” he says.

Gonzalo calls Montoya, a singer by trade with previous TV experience, a “special man”. At 31, he told casters he’d “never experienced love like this before”, having been with Anita “every day for a year”.

“She’s a strong woman with a lot of character,” Gonzalo adds.

The Sun’s senior showbiz reporter Lottie Hulme says the programme’s “authentic emotion” sets it apart from competitors like Love Island, Love Is Blind, Married At First Sight and Dating Naked.

Seeing such unfettered and raw emotion may stand out to British and American viewers, who have become used to glossy and well-worn competitive reality formats like Love Island and semi-scripted reality shows like Made in Chelsea.

“It was refreshing and almost shocking to see something so raw, because it’s something that we just don’t see on the reality TV shows in Britain nowadays,” Hulme says.

“We’re at a point with reality TV culture where we’re wondering ‘what if’ – are contestants really being their authentic self… or are they after followings and a brand deal?”

Alongside constructed storylines, the commercialised reality TV to influencer pipeline has made existing formats feel “predictable” adds Hulme.

Audience figures reflect this.

Love Island is currently airing its All Stars edition on ITV2, which started last year. The 2024 final attracted 1.3m viewers – a sharp drop from the six million peak of its 2019 heyday.

While this season’s figures remain solid, even matching BBC Two’s audience on launch night, the show now usually only dominates non-terrestrial channels.

A curious quirk of the Montoya phenomenon is that the Spanish show isn’t available to watch in the UK – an irony that has only fuelled its illicit appeal on social media.

Previous UK and US versions failed to take off, and production company Banijay says it does not presently plan to broadcast the Spanish version in the UK.

After Montoya’s meltdown caught the eye of Love Island host Maya Jama, she posted: “They would never allow this on UK TV. For so many reasons. But it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen”.

When asked why, she simply replied: “people would complain”.

Like Big Brother before it, Love Island has been the subject of complaints to Ofcom.

A heated confrontation between 2021 Love Islanders Faye and Teddy over Teddy’s behaviour in Casa Amor (a segment similar to Temptation Island’s premise) sparked 25,000 Ofcom complaints.

Despite the shocked reactions Gonzalo’s show has provoked, he says it operates within strict boundaries, suitable for its primetime slot.

“Not everything we record is aired,” he says. “We are very careful – we only show a few seconds of sexual content.”

Temptation Island is just the latest in a string of particularly high-octane Spanish dating shows.

Take Falso Amor (or Deep Fake Love), for instance. Currently streaming on Netflix, it intensifies the premise of Temptation Island by asking couples to decide whether videos of each other are real or highly convincing AI deepfakes.

So is content which British audiences find shocking viewed differently in Spain?

When I raise Love Island’s Zara Holland being stripped of her Miss Great Britain title after having sex on the show in 2016, Gonzalo is shocked and welcomes the internet’s more light-hearted reaction to Anita’s sexual scenes.

“As in other countries, things in Spain are progressing from the past – this is positive for our view of women and sexuality” he says, adding no gender should face double standards.

In the UK, there has been heightened scrutiny and awareness of the impact reality TV can have on cast members’ mental health, following the deaths of several former contestants.

When I press Gonzalo on this, given the intensity of Montoya and Anita’s experience, he says a team of psychologists monitor contestants before, during, and after filming.

Montoya received particular support after his beach escapade.

“We made sure he was not alone, that he had a safe space to process everything. It was important for us to provide him with the right help,” he says.

Looking ahead, Netflix is to relaunch an American version of the show next month.

Gonzalo is up for the fight. He laughs at the internet’s playful suggestion that the beach scene should win an Oscar, then adds: “My team deserve all the awards. An Oscar. And a Bafta!”

Hamas has released another three Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners following a week in which the fragile ceasefire deal appeared under threat.

American-Israeli Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36, Argentinian-Israeli Yair Horn, 46, and Russian-Israeli Alexander Troufanov, 29, were freed in return for 369 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.

So far 19 hostages and more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners have been freed in the first phase of ceasefire deal which began on 19 January.

The swap came days after Hamas said it would pause the release of hostages, accusing Israel of violating the terms of the deal – an allegation denied by Israel.

Israel, backed by US President Donald Trump, said “intense” fighting would resume unless the hostages were handed over. Hamas later said it remained committed to the ceasefire, and that Israel was “responsible for any complications or delays”.

But on Saturday the sixth swap went ahead, with the hostages handed over to Red Cross workers in a highly-choreographed public show in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

Surrounded by heavily armed Hamas militants, the men briefly addressed a crowd of Palestinians before being transferred into Red Cross vehicles.

They did not look as gaunt as the hostages freed a week earlier – their appearance had aroused anger in Israel and elsewhere.

Under the first six-week stage of the ceasefire deal, 33 hostages and 1,900 prisoners are supposed to be freed.

The three men were airlifted by military helicopters to a hospital in central Israel, where they underwent medical tests and were reunited with relatives.

Yair Horn and his brother Eitan, 37, had been abducted from a kibbutz during the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas. Eitan remains in captivity in Gaza.

Pictures showed Yair Horn hugging his mother and his brother Amos in hospital, and a message where he wrote “Eitan, you’re next”.

US citizen Sagui Dekel-Chen also reunited with his wife, where he learned that he had one-year-old daughter. His wife had been eight months pregnant with their third child when he was captured by Hamas in October 2023.

US President Donald Trump marked the hostage release on Saturday, noting Hamas had not followed through with their threat.

“They seem to be in good shape,” he said.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, posting on social media, said the hostages had been “forced to endure” a “despicable and cynical ceremony”.

In a social media post, Defence Minister Israel Katz said Israel would continue to work with the US to “ensure that all hostages return to Israel soon”.

• Who are the released Israeli hostages?
• Key events that led to the ceasefire
• What we know about the latest Israel-Hamas deal

The majority of the freed Palestinians were taken to Gaza, although some were taken to the West Bank. In both areas, crowds gathered to welcome the former prisoners.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society told the BBC that five of those released in the West Bank city of Ramallah were taken straight to hospital.

“They all have chronic illnesses,” said Mohammad Faqih, an official from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, adding that one man had a broken leg.

Most of the 36 Palestinians serving life sentences will reportedly be deported to Egypt.

The latest releases mean that under the ceasefire, Hamas is due to free another 14 hostages.

However Israel says eight are of them are dead, meaning six living Israelis are still expected to be returned in the first phase.

A total of 141 hostages have now been freed, including 81 Israelis and 24 foreign nationals released as part of a previous deal between Israel and Hamas.

About 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to Gaza as hostages when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.

This triggered a massive Israeli military offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

This year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) was supposed to be primarily about two things: how to end the war in Ukraine without giving in to Russia, and how Europe needed to boost its spending on defence.

But the most senior American present, US Vice President JD Vance, used his time at the podium to talk about neither.

Instead, he shocked delegates on Friday by roundly attacking Washington’s allies, including Britain, in a blistering attack decrying misinformation, disinformation, and the rights of free speech.

It was a very weird 20 minutes – one met largely with silence from delegates in the hall.

• A quick guide to JD Vance
• Ukraine end game: What each side wants from a peace deal

Even a joke, “if American democracy can survive 10 years of [climate campaigner] Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk”, failed to raise a single laugh.

He accused European governments of retreating from their values, and ignoring voter concerns on migration and free speech.

Vance’s speech went down very badly – unequivocally badly. It was extraordinarily poorly judged.

But who was it aimed at?

A US commentator said to me afterwards: “That was all for US domestic consumption.”

The vice president did, however, go on to meet the embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who did his best to sound positive.

The pair had “a good conversation”, according to Zelensky, who said it marked “our first meeting, not last, I’m sure”. The Ukrainian leader emphasised the need for Washington and Kyiv to speak more and work together “to prepare the plan [on] how to stop Putin and finish the war”.

“We want, really, we want peace very much. But we need real security guarantees,” Zelensky added.

According to US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin also wants peace, but that is peace on his terms. Unless those have secretly changed, they involve capitulation to Russia’s demands and the permanent ceding of territory to Moscow.

Vance’s speech came days after President Trump effectively pulled the rug out from Ukraine’s negotiating position by conceding, via his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, that restoring Ukraine’s territory to where it was before the first Russian invasion in 2014 is simply “not realistic”.

The US also dashed Kyiv’s hopes of joining Nato, a key ambition of President Zelensky, and ruled out sending US troops to help protect Ukraine’s borders from the next time Russia decides to invade.

Ahead of the Munich conference Europe was stunned by news that Trump had held an apparently cordial 90-minute phone call with Putin, thus abruptly ending the West’s three-year freeze in talking to the Russian leader that has been in place since the time of the 2022 invasion.

The delegates in Munich are scheduled to focus on the war in Ukraine in a high-profile debate on Saturday.

The fear in Munich amongst European leaders and their delegations is that in Donald Trump’s rush to secure a peace deal in Ukraine, Putin will emerge victorious, stronger and planning to seize more parcels of land in Europe.

The UK and EU countries must spend more on defence, with Europe facing an “existential question” even in the event of a negotiated peace in Ukraine, David Lammy has said.

The foreign secretary told the Munich Security Conference “Putin will not go away”, and that, while it was positive 23 Nato countries were now spending at least 2% of their GDP on defence, “we all know we have to go upward”.

He said the UK was “absolutely” committed to spending 2.5% and would set out a “pathway” to achieving that goal in a few months’ time.

Lammy’s comments come after US Vice-President JD Vance told the conference on Friday that Europe must “step up in a big way to provide for its own defence”.

In his address, Vance said it was his belief the greatest threat facing Europe was not from Russia or China but “from within”.

He said many European governments, including the UK’s, had retreated from their values and ignored issues such as migration and free speech.

Speaking on Saturday during a panel discussion on European security, Lammy told the audience that successive US presidents had asked Nato members to increase defence spending and emphasised the importance of continued support for Ukraine.

Appearing alongside his counterparts from France, Germany and Poland, Lammy said: “There is a question for Europe. If we look at GDP combined, it’s about 0.01% that we are spending on that fight for Ukraine.

“We know this is the frontline, not just for Ukraine, but for Europe. We know too that even when we get to a negotiated peace, Putin will not go away. So this is an existential question for Europe.”

He said that he understood why the US was now focusing on its security interests in the Pacific, where China is a major power both economically and militarily.

“People have given the impression that the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific are tied just at this moment – it was tied in the Second World War,” he said, mentioning that 30,000 British soldiers died in the region during that conflict.

“We recognise that pacing threat as the United States bears down on that issue. So of course Europe has to do more.”

Earlier, in an article for The Telegraph, Lammy and Defence Secretary John Healey said the West had done too little in the past when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014.

They said the UK and Europe now needed to “do more together” to “share the burden” of security across the continent.

The UK had committed an additional £150m towards military aid for Ukraine as well as new sanctions on people close to Russian President Vladimir Putin as he “only responds to strength”, they added.

Meeting Vance on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he wanted “security guarantees” ahead of planned peace talks between the US and Russia.

US President Donald Trump said he had spoken to Putin on Wednesday and agreed to “work together, very closely” to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. It has been nearly three years since Russia invaded.

Zelensky has proposed what he described as an “army of Europe” to secure the continent.

He told the conference on Saturday: “As we fight this war and lay the groundwork for peace and security, we must build the armed forces of Europe so that Europe’s future depends only on Europeans, and decisions about Europe are made in Europe.”

He added: “Europe needs a single voice, not a dozen different ones.”

Asked during the panel discussion about the security guarantees being considered, Lammy said a long-term military and financial partnership might be best.

“The UK has just signed a 100-year partnership with Ukraine and I would encourage Donald Trump, and the Ukrainians, to look very carefully at a deepening partnership over the next generations,” he said.

“Why? Because the best deal, and the best security guarantee, is binding US industry, business and defence capability into their future.

“That is what will make Putin sit up and pay attention and that is what is attractive to a US president who knows how to get a good deal.”

Among the other possible measures mentioned by experts is the deployment of a peacekeeping mission to Ukraine.

Lord Dannatt, who was head of the British Army from 2006 to 2009, estimated that around 100,000 soldiers would be needed for such a mission and that the UK might need to contribute 40,000 of them.

“We just haven’t got that number available,” he told the BBC Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster.

“Our military is so run down at the present moment, numerically and as far as capability and equipment is concerned, it would potentially be quite embarrassing.”

Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato’s former deputy supreme commander, told Radio 4’s Today programme that “100,000 [troops] is probably the minimum”.

Asked about calls to significantly increase defence spending, he said: “This is a defining moment for European militaries [and] European governments”.

The UK military is “so run down” it could not lead any future peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, the former head of the Army has said.

Lord Dannatt told the BBC that up to 40,000 UK troops would be needed for such a mission and “we just haven’t got that number available”.

It comes after Sir Keir Starmer said the UK would “play its part” in guaranteeing Ukraine’s security after the prime minister was asked this week if he was open to sending British troops as peacekeepers.

A former Nato chief told the BBC that Britain and France should lead a force of up to 100,000 troops as part of a long-term peacekeeping effort should Russia’s war with Ukraine end.

US President Donald Trump earlier this week announced he had had a lengthy conversation with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and that negotiations to stop the “ridiculous war” in Ukraine would begin “immediately”.

Trump then “informed” Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, of his plan.

Lord Dannatt – who was head of the Army from 2006 to 2009 – agreed that a force to keep the peace would require about 100,000 troops.

However he said the UK would have to supply “quite a proportion of that and we really couldn’t do it”.

“Our military is so run down at the present moment, numerically and as far as capability and equipment is concerned, it would potentially be quite embarrassing,” he told BBC Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster.

“I mean, if we were to deploy 10,000 troops, each rotation for six months, that would effectively tie up 30,000 or 40,000 troops and we just haven’t got that number available.

“So there are some big issues here that today’s politicians won’t really have considered.”

It comes as Britain’s foreign and defence secretaries called on the UK and Europe to “do more” to “share the burden” of regional security in a joint article for the Daily Telegraph on Saturday.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said he was “very encouraged” by his talks on Ukraine with US Vice-President JD Vance on Friday, on the first day of the Munich Security Conference.

“We share the view that there has to be an enduring peace,” Lammy told Reuters news agency following the meeting.

“There was an agreement that Zelensky and the Ukrainians have to be part of that negotiated deal.”

The talks came after Vance gave a speech at the conference, in which he was expected to address possible talks to end the war but instead attacked European democracies.

In the address, he said the greatest threat facing the continent was not from Russia and China, but “from within”.

He added that Europe must “step up in a big way to provide for its own defence” and said he hoped a “reasonable settlement” could be reached for the war.

Lammy and his defence colleague John Healey said that Putin had for two decades sought “to recreate the Russian empire and suffocate the countries around its borders”.

“Too often in the past, the West has let him,” they said in the Telegraph.

“We did too little in 2008 when he invaded Georgia, and in 2014 when he first went into Ukraine.”

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was Nato secretary-general from 2009 to 2014, said “a number of European countries need to step up to the plate” for any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, adding that the UK and France should lead that coalition by putting boots on the ground.

“I would let military experts determine [the number] but my guess would be between 50,000 and 100,000 troops,” he told BBC Newsnight.

As of October 2024, there were 74,612 members of the UK’s regular Army forces (excluding Gurkhas and volunteers), according to the latest Ministry of Defence (MoD) figures.

The Army has targets on how many new recruits below the rank of officer it should take on every year, set out by the MoD. These targets have been missed in almost every single financial year since 2010-11, according to a written answer to Parliament last January.

Lord Dannatt said the Labour government would need to “look at their priorities”, adding: “Yes, health, education, roads, infrastructure are important, but actually defence and the security of this nation are more important.”

The crossbench peer said he believes the UK government needs to go further than its commitment of increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP – a pledge that they have yet to put a timeline on when it will be delivered.

Zelensky has previously asked for the UK and other European allies including France to send troops to Ukraine for a peacekeeping operation after the war.

Sir Keir last month signed a “landmark” 100-year pact with Ukraine, building on the £12.8bn the UK hass already sent to the country, with further commitments of £3bn every year for “as long as it takes”.

The UK will also continue to train Ukrainian troops, 50,000 of whom have been trained on British soil so far.

In response to Lord Dannatt’s comments, an MoD spokesperson said Britain’s armed forces were “respected worldwide for their professionalism and excellence”.

“Right now, the Ukrainians are still fighting with huge courage. Our government is stepping up support for Ukraine’s war fighters to put them in the best possible position for any talks.

The spokesperson cited a £150m “firepower package” announced this week “providing more drones, tanks and air defence systems”.

Hollywood stars are in London for the Bafta Film Awards, as an unpredictable awards season finally begins to take shape.

Pope selection drama Conclave leads the Bafta field with 12 nominations, including best film and best actor for its British star Ralph Fiennes.

Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez has 11 nominations, but recently saw its awards chances damaged after offensive historic tweets from its star resurfaced.

The ceremony, hosted by David Tennant at London’s Royal Festival Hall, will be broadcast on BBC One from 19:00 GMT.

For months, there has been no consensus on what will ultimately win best picture at the Oscars on 2 March, with as many as six films having a possible path to victory.

The race narrowed last week, however, when Cannes Film Festival winner Anora, about a New York stripper who falls for the son of a wealthy Russian, leapt ahead after a string of precursor wins.

The film took the top prizes at the Critics Choice Awards (CCA) as well as two major guild ceremonies considered key Oscars indicators – the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and Producers Guild of America (PGA) Awards.

The winners at the Baftas could be the strongest indication yet of who will triumph at the Oscars. Last year, the winners of the top six categories matched up perfectly between the two ceremonies.

The films with the most Bafta nominations:

• 12 nominations – Conclave
• 11 – Emilia Pérez
• 9 – The Brutalist
• 7 – Anora, Dune: Part Two, Wicked
• 6 – A Complete Unknown, Kneecap
• 5 – Nosferatu, The Substance

Baftas 2025: The nominations list in full

How to watch the Bafta and Oscar-nominated films

The Bafta Film Awards ceremony starts at 17:00 GMT, two hours before its broadcast begins on BBC One, which means winners will be reported in the news and on social media before being seen on television.

One major difference this year is that the nominating juries which were introduced after a diversity scandal in 2020 have been phased out of most categories, which means the nominees have been entirely determined by Bafta members.

During the ceremony, Take That will perform their 2008 single Greatest Day, which features prominently in Anora.

Elsewhere, Wicked star Jeff Goldblum will play the piano during the In Memoriam section, which pays tribute to the film industry figures who have died in the last year.

Pamela Anderson, Anna Kendrick, Camila Cabello, Joe Alwyn, Celia Imrie, James Norton, Selena Gomez, Jesse Eisenberg, Naomi Ackie and Tom Felton are among the stars who will present prizes during the ceremony.

Actor and TV presenter Warwick Davis will be awarded the Bafta Fellowship, the highest honour bestowed by the British Academy.

The current acting frontrunners in the Oscars race are Demi Moore (The Substance), Adrien Brody (The Brutalist), Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez) and Kieran Culkin (A Real Pain).

It’s possible all four could also triumph in their respective categories at the Baftas – but their wins here are far from guaranteed.

Although the Baftas are usually an Oscars bellwether, the British Academy also occasionally goes its own way, and takes the opportunity to reward a home-grown star on their own soil.

For example, Rachel Weisz, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan and Joanna Scanlan are among the Irish and British actors who have won at Bafta in recent years and not gone on to win the Oscar (Scanlan was not nominated).

This year, British star Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths) is a strong contender for the best leading actress Bafta despite not making it into the same category at the Academy Awards.

Other British and Irish acting nominees this year include Ralph Fiennes (Conclave), Felicity Jones (The Brutalist), Hugh Grant (Heretic), Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) and Saoirse Ronan (The Outrun).

Meanwhile, Selena Gomez (Emilia Pérez), Ariana Grande (Wicked), Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice), Timothée Chalamet and Edward Norton (both for A Complete Unknown) are among the other Hollywood stars in the race.

By now, you’re probably familiar with the main films in the acting and best picture races, following their success at other film awards events such as the Golden Globes.

But just in case you’re joining us for the first time and keen to catch up on the major movies, here’s a quick cheat sheet with each contender’s plot summarised in one sentence:

• Anora – A New York stripper has a whirlwind romance with the son of a Russian oligarch after meeting at the club where she works.

• The Apprentice – A young Donald Trump begins to make his name as a real estate tycoon in New York.

• The Brutalist – Following World War Two, a Hungarian Jewish architect moves to the US and is taken under the wing of a powerful businessman.

• A Complete Unknown – Bob Dylan rises to fame in the 1960s, but becomes torn between rock’n’roll and his folk music roots.

• Conclave – A group of gossipy, scheming cardinals gather in Rome to select a new Pope.

• Dune: Part Two – Paul Atreides unites with the Fremen people of the desert planet Arrakis to wage war against House Harkonnen.

• Emilia Pérez – A dangerous Mexican drug lord decides to leave the world of crime and live a new life as a woman.

• I’m Still Here – Under the military dictatorship of 1970s Brazil, a woman investigates after her congressman husband disappears.

• Nickel Boys – Two young men are abused at a reform school called the Nickel Academy in 1960s Florida.

• A Real Pain – Two bickering cousins travel across Poland in remembrance of their grandmother.

• Sing Sing – A group of inmates in a high-security prison sign up for a performing arts programme.

• The Substance – A TV aerobics presenter in her fifties takes a black-market drug in order to create a younger, more beautiful version of herself.

• Wicked – The story of how The Wizard of Oz character Elphaba was ostracised in her school years, ultimately leading her to become the Wicked Witch of the West.

Most of the major categories at the Baftas are the same as other awards events, but the British Academy has additional awards specifically intended to recognise British talent.

That means there are some film nominated for Baftas which are not in the Oscars race, particularly in the outstanding British film category.

They include the superb Bird, about a young girl growing up on a tough housing estate, and Mike Leigh’s terrific Hard Truths, about a woman whose depression puts severe strain on those around her.

Other nominees in the category include Lee, about war photojournalist Lee Miller, Kneecap, about a hip-hop group who rap in the Irish language, and the excellent Love Lies Bleeding, about a gym manager who falls for a driven but dangerous bodybuilder.

World War Two drama Blitz, which follows a young boy who makes his way back to London after the city is evacuated, is also nominated, alongside The Outrun, about a young recovering alcoholic who returns to Orkney.

The category is rounded out by Oscars contender Conclave, box office hit Gladiator II, and animated favourite Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

Meanwhile, the Bafta nominees for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer are Hoard, Kneecap, Monkey Man, Santosh and Sister Midnight.

There is a brand new category this year too – best children’s and family film – which sees Wallace and Gromit nominated alongside Flow, Kensuke’s Kingdom and The Wild Robot.

It is not cricket or politics that triggers the most ardent debate in Antigua and Barbuda.

It is the ingredients of a beloved national dish.

The question of whether “ducana” – a sweet potato and coconut dumpling – should or should not contain raisins has divided local residents for decades.

The piquant pudding is one of many foods widely eaten in the Caribbean country that has its origins in Africa and has survived to this day.

And its inclusion in a national inventory of cultural heritage currently being created looks set to reignite the jocular dispute.

Antigua and Barbuda’s traditional food is just one aspect of the work under way to preserve the twin isles’ distinct features for posterity.

The inventory will also include its unique dialect, bush medicine, games, crafts, architecture and boat-building techniques.

The mammoth venture, being funded by the United Nations cultural body, Unesco, follows concerns that key elements of the country’s cultural identity are being lost, explains project leader Dr Hazra Medica.

“There is no longer the traditional transmission of knowledge from older to younger people,” she tells the BBC.

“Without that, we start to lose the sense of who we are. Outside influences can dilute indigenous culture and people fear that what is peculiarly Antiguan will be lost.”

More than two dozen specially trained data collectors have been tasked with interviewing residents from each parish, gathering stories, photos and information. The results will be meticulously entered into a publicly accessible database.

Local author Joy Lawrence needed little encouragement to take part.

The former schoolteacher’s books focus heavily on the country’s Creole/English dialect that weaves in many African words from Antiguans’ ancestors.

English may be the main language but patois, spoken at accelerated speed, is ubiquitous and routinely used to show kinship and camaraderie.

“When the British brought Africans here, they could not speak English and the British could not speak African languages. Because the Africans came from all over and spoke different languages, they could not even converse among themselves for the most part,” Ms Lawrence says.

“To communicate, the Africans borrowed some vocabulary from the British and incorporated their own pronunciation and syntax to form a pidgin thing. Over the generations, it became perfected and developed structure and grammar.”

A couple of generations ago, Antiguan dialect was sneered at and children were commonly forbidden to speak it in school. There are still some who look down their nose at it today, Ms Lawrence scoffs.

“Our forebears worked hard to coin that language,” she asserts. “It’s our first language; how can we not preserve what’s ours? It’s not a written language and we spell it any old how, but it has rhythm and I’m proud of it.”

The dialect is characterised by an “economy of words” and sparse pronouns, she continues.

“We don’t waste time to say ‘not at all’; we just say ‘tarl’. Instead of ‘come here’, we say ‘cumyah’. And we never say her or him; it’s always she or he.”

In places such as school and church, dialect is used for “emphasis, clarity and reinforcement”. “Because we think in it,” Ms Lawrence adds.

Disagreements over the “correct” way of doing something is one reason for the decline of some cultural practices, Dr Medica believes.

Varying methods of stirring “fungee”, a cornmeal paste which also hails from the mother continent, and precisely what to add to it is another subject of friendly bickering.

“There’s this idea that this is how it’s done and should always be done. Sometimes younger people are turned off by not doing it ‘right’.

“In the workshops, we saw the ‘fungee war’. Antiguans say it should have okra in it, while Barbudans add peas, which made some gasp in shock,” Dr Medica smiles.

Novella Payne – who produces a range of teas, sauces and seasonings under her “Granma Aki” brand – learnt everything she knows from her mother and grandmother, but adds her “own twist” to time-honoured recipes.

“The seasoning is what sets Antiguan food apart – garlic, onion, thyme and seasoning peppers,” she explains.

Many of Ms Payne’s creations feature local medicinal plants, long used to treat everything from coughs and fever to rashes and nausea. Soursop, lemongrass, noni and moringa regularly appear in her syrups and juices.

“Our food is delicious, nutritious and should be preserved because it’s part of our culture and heritage,” she adds.

The project recently got under way in Antigua’s sister isle, Barbuda, where Dwight Benjamin is striving to keep the art of traditional broom-making alive.

Mr Benjamin uses palm leaves, which must be sun-dried for two days, to create the bristles before weaving them on to a stick crafted from a bay tree.

The techniques were passed on to him by his grandfather and Mr Benjamin, an accountant by profession, is one of few people still making and selling the brooms.

He says they remain in high demand among Barbuda’s residents.

“I may be biased, but I find them more effective than store-bought brooms – you feel the difference when you use them. They cover more ground too,” he says.

“It’s not widely practised anymore, but it’s something we should cherish and document. I’m hoping my son will pick it up.”

For Dr Medica, the project has deeper significance still.

“When we talk about culture in Caribbean islands, we tend to forget the engagement with our colonial past and the impact of that. We’re told that our history began when Africans were brought here, projecting this notion that we came as empty vessels with no memory,” she says.

“The great thing about this work is the huge evidence of African cultural retention. As a people we can claim, ‘This is us.’

“In dialect, when someone treats you unfairly, we say ‘me smaddy [somebody] too’,” she adds. “And that’s what this whole project is; it’s a claim to personhood.”

Privacy campaigners have called Google’s new rules on tracking people online “a blatant disregard for user privacy.”

Changes which come in on Sunday permit so-called “fingerprinting”, which allows online advertisers to collect more data about users including their IP addresses and information about their devices.

Google says this data is already widely used by other companies, and it continues to encourage responsible data use.

However the company had previously come out strongly against this kind of data collection, saying in a 2019 blog that fingerprinting “subverts user choice and is wrong.”

But in a post announcing the new rule changes, Google said the way people used the internet – such as devices like smart TVs and consoles – meant it was harder to target ads to users using conventional data collection, which users control with cookie consent.

It also says more privacy options provide safety to users.

Google told the BBC in a statement: “Privacy-enhancing technologies offer new ways for our partners to succeed on emerging platforms… without compromising on user privacy.”

But opponents to the change say fingerprinting and IP address collection are a blow to privacy because it is harder for users to control what data is collected about them.

“By allowing fingerprinting, Google has given itself – and the advertising industry it dominates – permission to use a form of tracking that people can’t do much to stop,” said Martin Thomson, distinguished engineer at Mozilla, a rival to Google.

Fingerprinting collects information about a person’s device and browser and puts it together to create a profile of that person.

The information is not explicitly collected in order to advertise to people, but it can be used to target specific ads based on that user’s data.

For example, a person’s screen size or language settings are legitimately needed in order to display a website properly.

But when that is combined with their time zone, browser type, battery level – and many other data points – it can create a unique combination of settings which makes it easier to work out who is using a web service.

These details along with someone’s IP address – the unique identifier used by internet devices – were previously prohibited by Google for ad targeting.

Privacy campaigners say that unlike cookies, which are small files stored on a local device, users have little control over whether they send fingerprinting information to advertisers.

“By explicitly allowing a tracking technique that they previously described as incompatible with user control, Google highlights its ongoing prioritisation of profits over privacy,” said Lena Cohen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“The same tracking techniques that Google claims are essential for online advertising also expose individuals’ sensitive information to data brokers, surveillance companies, and law enforcement,” she added.

“My argument would be that fingerprinting sits in a little bit of a grey area,” says Pete Wallace, from advertising technology company GumGum.

“Should people feel comfortable staying in a grey area of privacy? I’d say no,” he adds.

GumGum, which has worked with the BBC on ad campaigns before, relies on something called contextual advertising, which uses other data points to target adverts to online users, such as keywords on the website they are on – rather than their personal data.

Mr Wallace says allowing fingerprinting represents a shift in the industry.

“Fingerprinting feels like it’s taking a much more business-centric approach to the use of consumer data rather than a consumer-centric approach,” he says.

“This sort of flip-flopping is, in my opinion, detrimental to that route that the industry seemed to be taking towards this idea of really putting consumer privacy at the forefront.”

He adds that he hopes ad tech companies conclude “that it isn’t the appropriate way to use consumer data,” but expects them to look at fingerprinting as an option in order to better target adverts.

Advertising is the lifeblood of the internet business model, and allow many websites to be freely available to users without them having to directly pay to access them.

But in return, users often have to give up private information about themselves so that advertisers can show them relevant adverts.

The UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), says “fingerprinting is not a fair means of tracking users online because it is likely to reduce people’s choice and control over how their information is collected.”

In a blog post in December, the ICO’s Executive Director of Regulatory Risk Stephen Almond wrote: “We think this change is irresponsible.”

He added that advertisers and businesses which decide to use this technology will have to demonstrate how they are staying within data and privacy laws in the UK.

“Based on our understanding of how fingerprinting techniques are currently used for advertising this is a high bar to meet,” he wrote.

Google said in a statement: “We look forward to further discussions with the ICO about this policy change.

“We know that data signals like IP addresses are already commonly used by others in the industry today, and Google has been using IP responsibly to fight fraud for years.”

A spokesperson added: “We continue to give users choice whether to receive personalised ads, and will work across the industry to encourage responsible data use.”

A giant inflatable dome which has been likened to a huge bouncy castle has caused uproar in an upmarket area of Edinburgh.

Residents in Stockbridge have dubbed the structure an “enormous zit”, blighting the views of the area’s picturesque Georgian architecture.

And some locals say they are being kept awake by noise and vibrations from the electric fans used around the clock to keep the dome inflated.

The dome, which houses tennis courts, was erected at a private sports club last October, after the Scottish government overruled a City of Edinburgh Council decision to reject the plans.

Now residents have launched a petition demanding “visual adjustments” and soundproofing for the fans while others have called for it to be taken down.

They say it is a “monstrous blight” in a conservation area which is close to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Edinburgh’s Old Town.

The Grange Club has not responded to requests to comment.

Claire Baxter, 45, who lives locally, told BBC Scotland News she was shocked when she saw the dome.

“It’s horrendous and looks like an enormous zit. Every time I walk past it I cannot believe it’s been allowed.

“Everyone in the neighbourhood has been talking about it for months.”

Keith Hughes, who lives in a house beside the inflatable, likened it to having a version of London’s Millennium Dome (now the O2) outside his window.

“I am awake every single night with the low hum of the background fans keeping the tennis court roof inflated.

“They have totally disregarded their heritage. They should be ashamed of themselves for the impact on this world heritage area. They have had no consideration for the local people.”

The 57-year-old said he was now planning to move house after enjoying three years in the “beautiful” suburb.

And he contrasted the dome with the category A-listed cricket pavilion at The Grange Club, which is home to the Scotland national cricket team.

“You have this lovely grandstand since 1892, which looks in place and then you have this ugly monolith that dominates the skyline and jars the eye, it’s hideous, how have they got away with this? It’s a nightmare.”

Mr Hughes, an IT programme manager, added: “This only benefits a very select few who are members of the Grange Club and who don’t even live next door to it.”

It is not clear from planning documents how long The Grange Club intends to keep the inflatable structure. Residents believe it is now permanent.

The application to erect the structure was initially rejected by planners with City of Edinburgh Council but it was then appealed to the Scottish government.

Scottish government reporter, Andrew Fleming – an official appointed by ministers – overruled the council’s decision, paving the way for the dome to be constructed.

He said he allowed it for public benefit because there were a lack of indoor tennis facilities in Edinburgh.

Jacquie Christie said her 80-year-old mother, who has lived in the same house for 50 years, could feel vibrations from the powerful fans and it was “horrendous”.

“The stress it’s caused her, every morning when she gets up and looks out into the garden and that’s her view,” said the 58-year-old.

“She is really devastated over what they have done without a second thought or communication.”

Ms Christie said she was baffled how the “jumpy castle” got the go ahead when her mother had to go to three different appeal panels just to get double glazing installed.

Local resident Sarah Hill said she could hear the hum of the fans, as well as players calling to each other and whacking balls.

She also described the dome as “very overpowering”.

Ms Hill added: “The whole application proposal needs to be flagged up over the fact it was against the community wishes and was rejected by the city council but was overturned on the decision of one reporter.

“It’s not right and the process really needs to be addressed.

“None of us were consulted. I heard about it from someone on the community council.

“It is extremely ugly and is a big eyesore out with the keeping of the conservation zone.”

Another resident who overlooks the inflatable said she had stopped looking out of her windows because it dominated her view and upset her so much.

Meanwhile Lady Jennifer Bute, who has a house beside the structure, said she thought it was “objectionable”.

“I think they need to paint it a different colour to make it more invisible,” she added.

Max Mitchell, an Edinburgh councillor whose ward covers the tennis court, said: “It’s another frustrating example of a Scottish government civil servant overruling the decision of democratically elected and accountable councillors.

“The concerns around the impact on the conservation and residential amenity have sadly come true for those living nearby.

“I can understand why residents are unhappy especially when the applicant was allowed a second bite at the cherry via an appeal.”

A Scottish government spokesman said: “The right to appeal certain decisions made by local planning authorities is an important part of the planning system.

“The decision was issued by an independent reporter, who is required to make their decision on the planning merits of the case, taking full account of submissions made by all parties, including those from members of the local community.”

“When I was growing up, everyone in my village would say: ‘She is blind, she is a waste’,” says Rakshitha Raju. Now, aged 24, she is one of India’s top middle distance para athletes. “It makes me so proud,” she says.

Rakshitha was born blind in a remote village in southern India and had lost both her parents by the age of 10. She was raised by her grandmother who is hearing and speech impaired.

“Both of us are disabled, so my grandma understood me,” she says.

When Rakshitha was about 13, the sports teacher at her school took her aside and told her she had the potential to be a great athlete.

“I wondered: ‘How? I am blind, so how do I run on a track I can’t see?'” she recalls.

Her teacher explained that visually impaired runners can have a guide, who runs alongside them. The athletes are joined by a tether – a short strap with a loop on both ends for each of them to hold on to.

For a while, other pupils acted as guide runners for Rakshitha. Then in 2016, when she was 15, she competed in the National Games, where a man called Rahul Balakrishna spotted her.

A middle-distance runner, Rahul had previously competed in the 1500m himself. He had been introduced to para athletics by a coach at the Paralympic Committee of India (PCI) a few years earlier, while recovering from an injury.

There was a shortage of guides and coaches and Rahul decided to take on both roles. The government pays him a salary for the coaching side of his work, but it does not pay guide runners.

However, if a visually impaired runner wins an international competition, their guide also gets a medal – something Rahul had not achieved in his own running career. “I felt proud that I could do this for myself and my country,” he says.

He invested his own time and money to support Rakshitha, helping her move to Bangalore in 2018 so she could have access to better training facilities.

When they are running “it’s the small things that matter”, says Rahul. “When they are approaching a curve, the guide has to alert the athlete or when a competitor is overtaking, he has to tell the athlete so they can put in a little more effort.”

Competition rules mean they can’t hold hands – they can only be connected by the tether, and the guide-runner is not allowed to push, pull or otherwise propel the visually impaired athlete.

Over time, the pair have built up a strong bond and now “I believe in my guide runner more than myself”, says Rakshitha.

They won gold medals at the 2018 and 2023 Asian Games, returning to a resounding welcome in Rakshitha’s village. She smiles as she describes how the people who used to taunt her organised a procession for her, cheering and waving flags.

Rakshitha became the first blind Indian woman to qualify for the 1500m in the Paralympics and she competed with Rahul in Paris in 2024.

They missed out on a medal in France, but India’s only other visually impaired female athlete to qualify for Paris, sprinter Simran Sharma, did make it to the podium, bringing home a bronze.

Simran is partially sighted and when she started running, she ran alone.

But in 2021, when Simran competed in the Tokyo Paralympics, she strayed out of her lane and realised that she would need a guide if she wanted to carry on running.

But the search proved challenging. “It can’t be any athlete. You need someone whose technique matches yours and who runs as fast as you do,” she explains.

Simran finally spotted a young athlete called Abhay Kumar, who was training at the same place as her. The 18-year-old was between competitions and guiding Simran was an opportunity for him to get experience at international events.

“They sent me videos and after watching them I thought: ‘I am a fast learner, this is going to be easy’,” he says. “But when I ran for the first time, it turned out to be very difficult.” Every movement has to be synchronised.

Simran and Abhay did not have time to practice together for long before their first international competition – the 2024 World Para Athletics Championships in Japan – just a few weeks after they met.

Their first race, the 100m, ended in disaster.

“Neither of us knew the rules properly,” says Simran. Abhay “thought he had to stop to let me cross the line first, so he stopped completely”. They were disqualified as he should have kept going and crossed the line just behind her.

But by the time they got to the 200m race, they knew what they were doing and struck gold. Simran became the World Champion in the T12 category.

Riding on that high, they went to the Paralympics in Paris. They came fourth in the 100m, but won bronze in the 200m race and Simran became the first Indian woman with a visual impairment to win a Paralympic medal.

But Simran is worried how long Abhay will stay as her guide. He has his own career to think of too.

Although guide runners get a medal when a pair wins, the Paralympic Committee of India (PCI) says it cannot support guides with salaries, cash prizes or offer a long-term career path.

“All we can do is support short-term needs like their food, accommodation, transport and training facilities,” says the PCI’s national athletics coach Mr Satyanarayana, who goes by one name.

Both Rakshitha and Simran now have sponsorship deals which help fund their training. They pay their guides themselves and give them a share of any prize money they win. But Rahul and Abhay would like more support from the state and want to be allowed to apply for public sector jobs reserved for sportsmen and women – like the athletes they work with.

Despite the uncertainty around her future with Abhay, Simran is already looking ahead to the next Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. “I won’t rest till I change the colour of this medal,” she says, hoping that next time she will win gold.

Rakshitha is hoping for a medal next time too, with Rahul at her side. “She must win a medal,” he says. “There are many like her in villages. They don’t know about sports and the possibilities. Rakshitha would be a role model for them.”

Find out about the nominees

It has been more than a decade since James Howells’ hard drive – containing Bitcoin now worth hundreds of millions of pounds – ended up on a landfill site.

But despite facing numerous setbacks, he is determined to continue on his mission to retrieve it.

“This is my job, if you will. My 9 to 5,” he said, adding he would “absolutely not” give up.

The value of the cryptocurrency has dramatically increased in recent months, and with the hard drive currently worth about £620m, Mr Howells said “it makes sense for me to focus my energy on this” – although he does do some other work with crypto currencies.

Mr Howells, from Newport, claimed his ex-partner mistakenly threw out the hard drive, containing 8,000 bitcoins, in 2013, with it ending up in a tip owned by Newport City Council.

Last month, a High Court judge threw out his efforts to access the landfill or get £495m in compensation, saying there were no “reasonable grounds” for bringing the claim and “no realistic prospect” of succeeding at a full trial.

He is now planning a case – representing himself using artificial intelligence to support his claim – at the Court of Appeal. He has also expressed interested in buying the site after the council said it planned to close it in the 2025-26 financial year.

Newport council said it was making no further comment on the matter.

Mr Howells was an early adopter of cryptocurrencies, mining the Bitcoin in 2009 when it was a small fraction of its current value.

He has said that his former partner accidentally dumped the hard drive – about the size of a mobile phone – containing a Bitcoin wallet in 2013. As its value soared, he organised a team of experts to attempt to locate and recover it.

He repeatedly asked permission from the council for access to the site, offering it a share of the missing Bitcoin if it was successfully recovered.

After Mr Howells launched legal proceedings, the council applied for a High Court hearing to ask a judge to dismiss the claim before going to trial – which the judge did last month.

The council argued its environmental permits would forbid any attempt to excavate the site for the search and previously said such work “would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area”.

Unwilling to give up, Mr Howells now believes he has two options open to him to retrieve the digital wallet – launch a case at the Court of Appeal, or work with investors to try to buy the landfill site from the council, after it announced the site is “coming to the end of its life” and it plans to close it within the next two years.

Mr Howells told BBC News he was pleased with the work his legal team had done in the High Court trial, but that he would now be representing himself in a case filed with the Court of Appeal – using an “artificial intelligence agent” to assist his claim.

He described AI as “an absolutely amazing technology” that had helped him better understand court processes and the law, and that he believed he had about seven “solid grounds in law” for his case, which he hopes to be able to present in-person to the Court of Appeal.

One of the arguments in his case will centre on the council’s plans to close the site, something he argued should have been revealed during the High Court trial.

“That is material information that should have been made [at the trial] – the judge should have been aware of that, as well as myself,” he said.

Mr Howells also said buying and fully excavating the site would save the council what he argued were significant maintenance costs once the site closes.

“Every single piece would be extracted or recycled, and at the end of the process we would have a hard drive in our hands – and we would also have an empty landfill,” he said.

In the High Court trial, the council also argued that the hard drive became its property as soon as it entered the landfill site, but Mr Howells said this failed to take into account the fact it was his ex-partner who threw it out.

“It was taken without my permission or consent,” he said.

Mr Howells said he was also exploring the option of buying the site from the council, adding he had “preliminary agreements” with investors – including those in the Middle East and the United States – who could make funding available if he had permission to buy the site.

“They’re not just going to put millions of quid in my back pocket… but if the council show a willingness to sell the site, then the funding will be available,” he said.

The council has made no indication it is interested in selling the site and, as part of its closure, has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land.

Having spent many years pursuing it, including opening legal cases, Mr Howells said he was certain the hard drive remained on the landfill, which holds more than 1.4 million tonnes of waste.

He said he had done his “due diligence and research”, having spoken to a site manager at the landfill.

“Anything that was put into that site is still there. So, where else could it be?”

Asked if he would ever give up his mission to retrieve it, he said: “Absolutely not. This is like the final battle in Braveheart.”

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a virtual or digital currency that has no physical form.

Bitcoins can be split into smaller units, with a satoshi being the smallest monetary unit.

Satoshis are named after Bitcoin’s inventor Satoshi Nakamoto – believed to be a pseudonym – who wrote a key document about the currency in 2008.

Those investing in the product around this time, like Mr Howells, were part of a “very small” crypto community known as Cypherpunks, said Billy Bambrough, author of the CryptoCodex newsletter.

Bitcoin was not the first cryptocurrency to be invented, but it did gain considerable attention with early adherents being “very quickly enamoured with it”, Mr Bambrough said.

Prices began to rise in about 2016 and 2017, and again in 2020 during the Covid pandemic when “stock markets, cryptocurrencies and meme coins went up hugely”.

“A lot of people got very rich, but a lot of people also lost money,” Mr Bambrough said.

The cryptocurrency also saw rapid increases in late 2024, shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in the US general election, with his administration being seen as far friendlier towards cryptocurrencies than the Biden White House.

“A lot of people in the crypto and Bitcoin worlds say the price has gone up so much in such a short amount of time, they claim it could go higher and higher,” Mr Bambrough said.

“So I can understand why James [Howells] is keen to find his Bitcoin.”

Whether it’s the echo of beeping tills in a supermarket or the hissing of a coffee machine in your local café, the brain is constantly working to decode hundreds of noises each day.

But, for some, those background noises can become so overwhelming that they distract them from recognising voices or alerts.

This is the reality for Sophie, a 25-year-old administration assistant from London, who is used to being told she doesn’t listen, zones out, or is “a bit ditsy”.

“Even though I can hear that there are noises going on, I can’t listen to where the noise is coming from. I know it’s the person’s voice, I just can’t really compute it quick enough,” she said.

After a hearing test came back normal, Sophie met a private audiologist for further testing. She was eventually diagnosed with auditory processing disorder (APD), a neurological condition where the brain finds it difficult to understand sounds and spoken words.

Her audiologist and others in England are now calling for more research into whether the condition is linked to overuse of noise-cancelling headphones.

Having grown up on a peaceful farm in the countryside, it wasn’t until a few years ago when Sophie started university in London that she noticed a change in her hearing – specifically trouble identifying where a sound was coming from.

She rarely attended her university lectures in person, instead opting to watch them online and with subtitles.

“All the words sounded like gibberish when I was in the actual lecture, and I was trying to hear,” she said.

It affected her social life too and Sophie would leave bars and restaurants early because of the “overwhelming noise”.

The cause of Sophie’s APD diagnosis is unknown, but her audiologist believes the overuse of noise-cancelling headphones, which Sophie wears for up to five hours a day, could have a part to play.

Other audiologists agree, saying more research is needed into the potential effects of their prolonged use.

Five NHS audiology departments have told the BBC that there has been an increase in the number of young people referred to them from GPs with hearing issues – only to find their hearing is normal when tested and it is their ability to process sound that is struggling.

APD is more common in neurodiverse people, those who have suffered from a brain injury or had a middle-ear infection as a child. However, more patients with APD are presenting outside of those categories, leaving audiologists to question if external factors, such as noise-cancelling headphones, are contributing.

Renee Almeida, an adult audiology clinical lead at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, says it is important to hear a diversity of sounds so the brain can decide what is important to focus on.

Her team has seen an increase in the amount of young people referred for hearing services in the last year. She said: “There is a difference between hearing and listening. We can see that listening skills are suffering.”

Noise-cancelling headphones do have their benefits, particularly for long-term ear health where their soundproofing feature can prevent high frequency and loud noise from reaching and damaging the ear – even while listening to music.

Lisa Barber, technology editor at Which?, said the devices had “exploded in popularity” in recent years. But the level of transparency can vary from model to model.

“Some simply offer passive noise cancelling, where the acoustic seal between the headphones and your ears reduces nearby noise,” she said. Others have a transparency mode that allows you to hear partial background noise.

But Claire Benton, vice-president of the British Academy of Audiology, suggests that by blocking everyday sounds such as cars beeping, there is a possibility the brain can “forget” to filter out the noise.

“You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to. You are not having to work at it,” she said.

“Those more complex, high-level listening skills in your brain only really finish developing towards your late teens. So, if you have only been wearing noise-cancelling headphones and been in this false world for your late teens then you are slightly delaying your ability to process speech and noise,” Benton suggests.

For those experiencing difficulties with sound processing in England, APD care in the NHS is limited.

A UK-wide survey from 2024, distributed by the BAA and ENT UK, the professional body representing ear, nose and throat surgery, found that only 4% of audiologists consider themselves to be well-informed on APD.

And, for those who are 16 years and over, the Royal National ENT and Eastman Hospital is the only NHS provider in England offering a full APD assessment and the waiting list is nine months long.

Prof Doris-Eva Bamiou, who carries out the assessments there, says this is partially down to the time it takes to diagnose APD. “It is a costly service because it is not just an audiogram, the test can take up to two hours and it requires additional assessments. In adults I also refer them for a cognitive assessment and in children I may also need to speak to an educational psychologist.”

Particularly after the pandemic, behaviours and engagement with visuals and audio has changed. This comes in part due to new products and technology, as well as increased anxiety in noisy environments after the lockdown.

It is now common to see people walking outside wearing their noise-cancelling headphones and watching videos online with subtitles, despite perfectly hearing the sound. One YouGov survey showed that 61% of 18-24 year olds prefer to watch TV with the subtitles on.

Dr Angela Alexander, audiologist and owner of APD Support, a private organisation, is among the audiologists calling for more research into the impact of noise-cancelling headphones on auditory processing, particularly in children.

“What does the future look like if we don’t investigate this link? There are a lot of well-meaning parents and teachers who think the answer to children having problems with noise is to wear ear plugs or having noise-cancelling headphones on.”

Dr Amjad Mahmood, the head of audiology at Great Ormond Street Hospital supported the call for more research.

He said there had been a “significant increase in demand” for assessments at the hospital’s large APD clinic for under-16s. “especially with difficulties noticed at school”.

Treatment for APD can make a significant positive difference, with some patients able to make a full recovery.

So-called “word in noise” training exercises on mobile apps have become a popular way of practising pulling speech from background noise. But training can vary and includes practice with auditory discrimination too, such as how to distinguish separate sounds in words like seventy and seventeen, and free and three.

Microphones and low-gain hearing aids can also be provided to help the patient in certain situations, such as a meeting or classroom work, but adults outside the education system are not entitled to these products on the NHS.

“Right now I can hear there is a fan above my head but my brain is telling me that is not something I need to worry about,” says Dr Alexander, describing what is called auditory scene analysis.

“It’s the way we identify threats in our environment, so it makes sense to me that there would be an increase in anxiety if a person’s brain no longer has those inputs helping tell them what is a concern and what is not.”

To improve this, Dr Alexander suggests reducing headphone use time and using the transparency mode which can amplify the background noise as well as wearing headphones that don’t completely occlude or block the ears.

Wayne Wilson, an associate professor in the school of health and rehabilitation sciences at The University of Queensland, says more research needs to be done on the possible link.

However, he points out that doing controlled research with so many variables could prove tricky.

“The devil is in the detail as the answer probably depends on which sounds, which scenes, which noise, which noise cancellation, what period of noise cancellation, what age of child, etc.”

Sophie is set to start treatment for her APD in the next few months, and feels excited for the future.

“If me and my boyfriend go out to a bar, sometimes we will leave early because of the noise. It’s nice to know maybe after this treatment, I will be able to go to busier places and handle it a bit better.”

European leaders are set to gather next week for an emergency summit on the war in Ukraine, in response to concerns the US is moving ahead with Russia on peace talks that will lock out the continent.

Sir Keir Starmer, who is expected to attend the summit in Paris, said it was a “once-in-a-generation moment for our national security” and it was clear Europe must take a greater role in Nato.

It comes after Donald Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine said European leaders would be consulted but not take part in any talks between US and Russia over ending the war.

Senior White House figures are also due to meet Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Saudi Arabia in the coming days, US officials say.

In remarks likely to raise concern in Ukraine and among European allies, special envoy Keith Kellogg said previous negotiations had failed because too many parties had been involved.

“It may be like chalk on the blackboard, it may grate a little bit, but I am telling you something that is really quite honest,” he said on Saturday.

Europe remains haunted by the Minsk agreements, a failed ceasefire deal between Ukraine and Russia reached in 2015. The talks, which were brokered by France and Germany, sought to end fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Sir Keir is understood to see his role as bringing US and Europe together to ensure a united approach to peace in Ukraine.

The UK prime minister will discuss the views of European leaders when he visits US President Trump at the White House at the end of this month.

A further meeting of European leaders together with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected after Sir Keir returns from Washington.

Sir Keir said the UK would “work to ensure we keep the US and Europe together”, adding the two could not “allow any divisions in the alliance to distract” from “external enemies”.

“This is a once in a generation moment for our national security where we engage with the reality of the world today and the threat we face from Russia,” he said.

“It’s clear Europe must take on a greater role in Nato as we work with the United States to secure Ukraine’s future and face down the threat we face from Russia.”

Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski said Emmanuel Macron had called the summit of European leaders, which has not yet been announced by the French president.

Sikorski said: “President Trump has a method of operating, which the Russians call reconnaissance through battle. You push and you see what happens, and then you change your position, legitimate tactics. And we need to respond.”

• Ukraine end game: What each side wants from peace deal
• Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia
• Trump wants peace. Ukrainians fear what that might look like
• Analysis: Vance’s blast at Europe ignores Ukraine and defence agenda

Earlier on Saturday, Zelensky called for the creation of an “army of Europe” amid rising concern the US may no longer come to the continent’s aid.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he said US Vice-President JD Vance’s speech at the event had made it clear that the old relationship between Europe and America was “ending” and the continent “needs to adjust to that”.

But Zelensky also said Ukraine would “never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement” after Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to start peace talks.

Earlier this week the US president announced he had a lengthy phone conversation with the Russian leader and that negotiations to stop the “ridiculous war” in Ukraine would begin “immediately”.

Trump then “informed” Zelensky of his plan.

Trump appeared confident that his leadership style could pave the way for a peace deal in Ukraine.

His rapprochement with Putin brought to an end more than three years of silence between Moscow and Washington.

Trump’s shock announcement rekindled memories of his meeting with Putin in Helsinki back in 2018.

The two men held nearly two hours of closed-door talks in the Finnish capital and went on to deliver a joint news conference, where Trump defended Russia over claims of interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

His comments came despite US intelligence agencies concluding, in 2016, that Russia was behind an effort to tip the scale of the US election against Hillary Clinton, with a state-authorised campaign of cyber attacks and fake news stories planted on social media.

On Saturday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also held a phone call with Russia’s foreign minister “building on” the 12 February call between Trump and Putin.

Trump’s call with the Russian president earlier this week broke nearly three years of silence between Washington and Moscow.

Senior officials from the Trump administration will start peace talks with Russian and Ukrainian negotiators in Saudi Arabia in the coming days, US Representative Michael McCaul told Reuters news agency.

McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he understood Zelensky had been invited to take part in the Saudi talks, which were aimed at arranging a meeting with Trump, Putin and the Ukrainian president “to finally bring peace and end this conflict”.

A day earlier, Vance had launched a scalding attack on European democracies, saying the greatest threat facing the continent was not from Russia and China, but “from within”.

In a speech at the Munich Security Conference, he repeated the Trump administration’s line that Europe must “step up in a big way to provide for its own defence”.

David Lammy has said the UK and EU countries must spend more on defence, with Europe facing an “existential question” even in the event of a negotiated peace in Ukraine.

The UK foreign secretary told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday “Putin will not go away”, and that, while it was positive 23 Nato countries were now spending at least 2% of their GDP on defence, “we all know we have to go upward”.

A cracked windscreen forced US Secretary of State Marco Rubio into a rapid U-turn as his plane, en route to the Munich Security Conference, had to turn back an hour into the flight.

America’s top diplomat, his senior officials and the travelling press returned to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington DC on Thursday night.

But despite the mid-air scare the news was already firmly elsewhere. In Europe, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had stunned America’s allies with a speech setting out what many saw as a series of concessions Ukraine would have to make to sign any peace deal with Russia brokered by President Trump.

Hegseth said it was “unrealistic” to think Ukraine could win back its sovereign territory occupied by Russia, as was its demand for Nato membership, adding it was up to European and not US troops to keep the peace.

Critics, including some Republicans in Washington, castigated the speech, saying it gave away all of Ukraine’s leverage ahead of any negotiations. It was, they argued, a US capitulation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started,” said former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who co-chairs the European Council on Foreign Relation, a think tank.

The following day, Hegseth wound back some of what he had said. He clarified that all options were in fact still on the table for Trump to use as leverage between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“What he decides to allow or not allow is at the purview of the leader of the free world, President Trump,” said Hegseth. However he added he had been “simply pointing out realism” and rejected the idea he had offered any undue concessions to Moscow.

As for Rubio, the broken-down plane delayed his arrival in Munich, where his officials were briefing about his own priorities for the trip.

The United States would work for a “just and lasting peace” in which European countries would take the lead in creating a “durable security framework”, they said.

European leaders are expected to meet in Paris on Monday for urgent talks aimed at ensuring that their countries are fully involved in any Ukraine peace negotiations.

The US secretary of state’s position contained no trace of laying out limits for Ukraine in the way the defence secretary had done. Then, also in the German city, Vice-President JD Vance said the US could use “military tools of leverage” to compel Russia to do a deal, appearing to contradict Hegseth who had said no US troops would be deployed to Ukraine.

Later in the Oval Office, the fallout from Hegseth’s speech was put to President Trump – along with the commentary of a Republican senator who described it as a “rookie mistake”, like something a pro-Putin pundit could have written.

Had Trump been aware of what Hegseth was going to say? “Generally speaking, yeah, generally speaking I was,” said the president. “I’ll speak to Pete, I’ll find out,” he added.

The three days of to and fro gave some of the first major insights into Trump’s evolving position on one of the most consequential issues he faces – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and his vow to end the war – and also into how his administration is formulating and messaging its foreign policy.

On the substance, Hegseth’s speech – alongside Trump’s lengthy statement about an apparently warm phone call with Putin aimed at starting negotiations with Ukraine – sent shockwaves through European capitals, despite Hegseth’s attempts to row back.

“Any quick fix is a dirty deal,” said the European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas of the prospect of a US-led deal with Russia that might leave Ukraine’s voice on the sidelines.

Then there is the question of the way US foreign policy under Trump was being communicated. What happened in Munich seemed to be partly an attempt by his senior officials to interpret and relay Trump’s positions, but that effort resulted in sometimes explosive and often contradictory statements – some of which were then partly diluted or reversed.

It is not yet clear how much this is the result of a new but ill-coordinated administration still clarifying its lines to take internally, as opposed to a deliberate feature of a presidency less concerned about officials freelancing with rhetoric, even if it sows some confusion, so long as they remain loyal to his final word.

Trump’s first term saw a series of high-profile sackings or resignations of top officials who contradicted or disagreed with him, including three national security advisers, two defence secretaries and a secretary of state.

This time around, his appointments have been characterised more frequently by a willingness to show loyalty. Pete Hegseth, who had no previous experience running a military or government or agency, was a Fox News weekend presenter and former National Guard major who aligns strongly with Trump’s thinking and agenda.

His appointment was highly contested and scraped through its confirmation process with three Republican senators voting against him, seeing the result tied 50-50 with JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.

As Trump said himself this week he was “okay” with the idea of taking Ukraine joining Nato off the negotiating table, calling it “not practical”.

Hegseth’s comments were hardly out of line with the president’s position – rather they were an amplification of it to an audience anxious to shore up Ukraine’s negotiating position not weaken it.

The challenge for those affected is that the precise position of US foreign policy is having to be divined. One of its features is uncertainty. This may well be deliberate – Donald Trump using the “madman” theory of foreign relations – often attributed to former Republican President Richard Nixon.

This suggests that being powerful but unpredictable is a way to make allies stay close while coercing adversaries. It would also explain a sense of his own officials going rogue but within the parameters of Trump’s broadly known positions.

But as this theory’s name suggests, it also carries considerable risks of mistakes or miscalculation in an already violent and uncertain world.

Trump’s recent proposals for Gaza – emptying it of its Palestinian population to build the “Riviera of the Middle East” under US ownership – were similarly permeated with confusion and contradiction.

While his officials appeared to try to correct some of what he set out – as only “temporary relocation” for example –Trump later doubled down saying it would in fact be “permanent” with no right of return.

As for Rubio – who wants the state department be the most influential government agency when it comes to Trump’s decision-making – his colleagues’ comments at Munich were already overshadowing his own.

His smaller, replacement plane finally landed in Europe – windscreen intact but without the press pool on board, while most of the headlines were also going elsewhere.

Mouldy half-finished food on bunk beds, discarded military uniforms and abandoned weapons – these are the remnants of an abrupt retreat from this base that once belonged to Iran and its affiliated groups in Syria.

The scene tells a story of panic. The forces stationed here fled with little warning, leaving behind a decade-long presence that unravelled in mere weeks.

Iran was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most critical ally for more than 10 years. It deployed military advisers, mobilised foreign militias, and invested heavily in Syria’s war.

Its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) built deep networks of underground bases, supplying arms and training to thousands of fighters. For Iran, this was also part of its “security belt” against Israel.

We are near Khan Shaykhun town in Idlib province. Before Assad’s regime fell on 8 December, it was one of the key strategic locations for the IRGC and its allied groups.

From the main road, the entrance is barely visible, hidden behind piles of sand and rocks. A watchtower on a hilltop, still painted in the colours of the Iranian flag, overlooks the base.

A receipt notebook confirms the base’s name: The Position of Martyr Zahedi – named after Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a top IRGC commander who was assassinated in an alleged Israeli airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Syria on 1 April, 2024.

The supplies recently ordered – we found receipts for chocolates, rice, cooking oil – suggest daily life continued here until the last moments. But now the base has new occupants – two armed Uyghur fighters from Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist militant group whose leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has become the new interim president of Syria.

The Uyghurs arrived suddenly in a military vehicle, asking for our media accreditation.

“Iranians were here. They all fled,” one of them says, speaking in his mother tongue, a dialect of Turkish. “Whatever you see here is from them. Even these onions and the leftover foods.”

Boxes full of fresh onions in the courtyard have now germinated.

The base is a labyrinth of tunnels dug deep into white rocky hills. There are bunk beds in some rooms with no windows. The roof of one of the corridors is draped in fabric in the colours of the Iranian flag and there are a few Persian books on a rocky shelf.

They left behind documents containing sensitive information. All in Persian, they have details of fighters’ personal information, military personnel codes, home addresses, spouses’ names and mobile phone numbers in Iran. From the names, it’s clear that several fighters in this base were from the Afghan brigade that was formed by Iran to fight in Syria.

Sources linked to Iran-backed groups told BBC Persian that the base houses mainly Afghan forces accompanied by Iranian “military advisers” and their Iranian commanders.

Tehran’s main justification for its military involvement in Syria was “to fight against jihadi groups” and to protect “Shia holy shrines” against radical Sunni militants.

It created paramilitary groups of mainly Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi fighters.

Yet, when the final moment came, Iran was unprepared. Orders for retreat reached some bases at the very last moment. “Developments happened so fast,” a senior member of an Iran-backed Iraqi paramilitary group tells me. “The order was to just take your backpack and leave.”

Multiple sources close to the IRGC told the BBC that most of the forces had to flee to Iraq, and some were ordered to go to Lebanon or Russian bases to be evacuated from Syria by the Russians.

An HTS fighter, Mohammad al Rabbat, had witnessed the group’s advance from Idlib to Aleppo and Syria’s capital Damascus.

He says they thought their operation would take “about a year” and best, they’d “capture Aleppo in three to six months”. But to their surprise, they entered Aleppo in a matter of days.

The regime’s rapid downfall was brought about by a chain of events after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.

That attack led to an escalation of Israeli air strikes against the IRGC and Iran-backed groups in Syria and a war against another key Iranian ally – the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, whose leader was killed in an air strike.

This “situation of psychological collapse” for Iran and Hezbollah was central to their downfall, says 35-year-old fighter Rabbat.

But the most crucial blow came from within: there was a rift between Assad and his Iran-linked allies, he says.

“There was a complete breakdown of trust and military co-operation between them. IRGC-linked groups were blaming Assad of betrayal and believing that he is giving up their locations to Israel.”

As we pass through Khan Shaykhun, we come across a street painted in the colours of the Iranian flag. It leads to a school building that was being used as an Iranian headquarters.

On the wall at the entrance of the toilets, slogans read: “Down with Israel” and “Down with the USA”.

It was evident that these headquarters were also evacuated at short notice. We found documents classified as “highly sensitive”.

Abdullah, 65, and his family are among the very few locals who stayed and lived here alongside the IRGC-led groups. He says this life was hard.

His house is only a few metres away from the headquarters and in between, there are deep trenches with barbed wire.

“Movement at night was prohibited,” he says.

His neighbour’s home was turned into a military post. “They sat there with their guns pointing at the road, treating us all as suspects,” he recalls.

Most of the fighters didn’t even speak Arabic, he says. “They were Afghans, Iranians, Hezbollah. But we referred to them all as Iranians because Iran was controlling them.”

Abdullah’s wife Jourieh says she is happy that the “Iranian militias” have left, but still remembers the “stressful” moment before their withdrawal. She had thought they would be trapped in crossfire as Iran-backed groups were fortifying their positions and getting ready to fight, but then “they just vanished in a few hours”.

“This was an occupation. Iranian occupation,” says Abdo who, like others, has just returned here with his family after 10 years. His house had also become a military base.

I observed this anger towards Iran and a softer attitude towards Russia in many conversations with Syrians.

I asked Rabbat, the HTS fighter, why this was.

“Russians were dropping bombs from the sky and other than that, they were in their bases while Iranians and their militias were on the ground interacting. People were feeling their presence, and many weren’t happy with it,” he explained.

This feeling is reflected in Syria’s new rulers’ policy towards Iran.

The new authorities have put a ban on Iranian nationals, alongside Israelis, entering Syria. But there is no such ban against Russians.

Iran’s embassy, which was stormed by angry protesters after the fall of the regime, remains closed.

The reaction of Iranian officials towards developments in Syria has been contradictory.

While supreme leader Ali Khamenei called on “Syrian youths” to “resist” those who “have brought instability” to Syria, Iran’s foreign ministry has taken a more balanced view.

It says the country “backs any government supported by the Syrian people”.

In one of his first interviews, Syria’s new leader Sharaa described their victory over Assad as an “end of the Iranian project”. But he hasn’t ruled out having a “balanced” relationship with Tehran.

For the moment, though, Iran is not welcome in Syria. After years of expanding its military presence, everything Tehran built is now in ruins, both on the battlefield and, it seems, in the eyes of a large part of Syria’s public.

Back at the abandoned base, Iran’s military expansion was still under way even in the last days. Next to the camp were more tunnels under construction, apparently the beginnings of a field hospital. The cement on the walls was still wet and the paint fresh.

But left behind now is evidence of a brief fight – a few bullet shells and a military uniform covered with blood.

Just over a year ago, Chloe Cheung was sitting her A-levels. Now she’s on a Chinese government list of wanted dissidents.

The choir girl-turned-democracy activist woke up to news in December that police in Hong Kong had issued a $HK1 million ($100,000; £105,000) reward for information leading to her capture abroad.

“I actually just wanted to take a gap year after school,” Chloe, 19, who lives in London, told the BBC. “But I’ve ended up with a bounty!”

Chloe is the youngest of 19 activists accused of breaching a national security law introduced by Beijing in response to huge pro-democracy protests in the former British colony five years ago.

In 2021, she and her family moved to the UK under a special visa scheme for Hong Kongers. She can probably never return to her home city and says she has to be careful about where she travels.

Her protest work has made her a fugitive of the Chinese state, a detail not lost on me as we meet one icy morning in the café in the crypt of Westminster Abbey. In medieval England, churches provided sanctuary from arrest.

Hong Kong officials issued the warrant for Chloe on Christmas Eve, using the only photo they appear to have on file for her – in which she is aged 11.

“It freaked me out at first,” she says, but then she issued a public response.

“I didn’t want the government to think I was scared. Because if Hong Kongers in Hong Kong can’t speak out for themselves any more, then we outside of the city – who can speak freely without fear- we have to speak up for them.”

Chloe attended her first protests with her school friends, in the early days of Hong Kong’s 2019 demonstrations. Protesters turned out in huge numbers against a bill seen as extending China’s control over the territory, which had enjoyed semi-autonomy since Britain handed it back in 1997.

“Politics were never in my life before… so I went to the first protest with curiosity,” she said.

She saw police tear-gassing demonstrators and an officer stepping on a protester’s neck.

“I was so shocked,” she says. “That moment actually changed how I looked at the world.”

Growing up in a city that was part of China but that had retained many of its freedoms – she had thought Hong Kongers could talk about “what we like and don’t like” and “could decide what Hong Kong’s future looked like”.

But the violent crackdown by authorities made her realise that wasn’t the case. She began joining protests, at first without her parents’ knowledge.

“I didn’t tell them at the time because they didn’t care [about politics],” she says. But when things started to get “really crazy”, she browbeat her parents into coming with her.

At the march, police fired tear gas at them and they had to run away into the subway. Her parents got the “raw experience”, she says, not the version they’d seen blaming protesters on TV.

Afters months of demonstrations, Beijing passed the National Security Law in 2020. Suddenly, most of the freedoms that had set Hong Kong apart from mainland China – freedom of expression, the right to political assemblies – were gone.

Symbols of democracy in the city, including statues and independent newspapers, were torn down, shut or erased. Those publicly critical of the government – from teachers to millionaire moguls like British citizen Jimmy Lai – faced trials and eventually, jail.

In response to the crackdown, the UK opened its doors to Hong Kongers under a new scheme, the British National Overseas (BNO) visa. Chloe’s family were some of the first to take up the offer, settling in Leeds, which offered the cheapest Airbnb they could find. Chloe had to do her GCSEs halfway through the school term, and during a pandemic lockdown.

At first, she felt isolated. It was hard to make friends and she had trouble speaking English, she says. There were few other Hong Kongers around.

Unable to afford international student fees of more than £20,000 a year, she took a job with the Committee for the Freedom of Hong Kong, a pro-democracy NGO.

When China started putting bounties on dissidents’ heads in 2023, they targeted prominent protest leaders and opposition politicians. Chloe at the time, still finishing her A-levels, thought was she too small-fry to ever be a target.

Her inclusion underlines Beijing’s determination to pursue activists overseas.

The bounty puts a target on her back and encourages third parties to report on her actions in the UK, she says.

China has been the leading country over the past decade trying to silence exiled dissidents around the world, according to a report this week.

Another Hong Kong dissident who reported being assaulted in London blamed the attacks on Chinese government-linked actors.

And last May, British police charged three men with gathering intelligence for Hong Kong and breaking into a home. One of the men was soon after found dead in unclear circumstances.

“They’re only interested in Hong Kongers because they want to scare off others,” Chloe says.

She says many of those who’ve moved over in recent years stay quiet, partly because they still have family in Hong Kong.

“Most of the BNO visa holders told me this because they don’t want to take risks,” she says. “It’s sad but we can’t blame them.”

Bounty targets

• July 2023: Eight high profile activists are named including: Nathan Law, Anna Kwok and Finn Lau, former politicians Dennis Kwok and Ted Hui, lawyer and legal scholar Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat, and online commentator Yuan Gong-yi.
• December 2023: Simon Cheng, Frances Hui, Joey Siu, Johnny Fok and Tony Choi
• December 2024: Tony Chung, Carmen Lau, Chung Kim-wah, Chloe Cheung, Victor Ho Leung-mau

On the day her arrest warrant was announced, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the UK would not tolerate “any attempts by foreign governments to coerce, intimidate, harass or harm their critics overseas”. He added the government was committed to supporting Hong Kongers in the UK.

But more needs to be done, says Chloe, who’s spent the first weeks of this year lobbying Westminster.

In the past fortnight she has met Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a Lunar New Year event at Downing Street, and shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel, who later tweeted: “We must not give an inch to any transnational repression in the UK.”

But she worries whether the UK’s recent overtures to China could mean fewer protections for Hong Kongers.

“We just don’t know what will happen to us, and whether the British government will protect us if they really want to protect their trade relationship with China.”

Does she feel scared on the streets in London? It’s not as bad as what political activists back home are facing.

“When I think of what [they] face… it’s actually not that big a deal that I got a bounty overseas.”

The US government is trying to bring back nuclear safety employees it fired on Thursday, but is struggling to let them know they should return to work, NBC News has reported.

The National Nuclear Security Administration workers were among hundreds of employees in the energy department who received termination letters.

An email obtained by NBC said the letters for some NNSA employees “are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel”.

The terminations are part of massive effort by President Donald Trump to slash the ranks of the federal workforce, a project he began on his first day in office, less than a month ago.

Last week, nearly 10,000 federal workers were let go, according to multiple US outlets.

That figure was in addition to the estimated 75,000 workers who have accepted an offer from the White House to leave voluntarily in the autumn.

The nuclear security officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN.

Attempting to reach the workers, the email, which was sent to current employees, said: “Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails.”

Trump is working to slash spending across the board, abroad and at home, and going so far as to call for eliminating the education department. He is getting help from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who, through an effort called Doge for Department of Government Efficiency, has sent workers to comb through data at federal agencies and helped implement the “buyout” offer.

Last week, the Trump administration ordered agencies to fire nearly all probationary employees, those who had generally been in their positions for less than a year and not yet earned job protection. That included the NNSA staff members.

Altogether, the move could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of people.

Several of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the government’s size and spending have been met with legal challenges.

More than 60 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration since the president was inaugurated on 20 January.

A crush at New Delhi Railway Station has left at least 15 people dead and a further 10 injured.

Dr Ritu Saxena, deputy medical superintendent of Lok Nayak Hospital in New Delhi, confirmed the numbers to BBC Hindi after thousands of people reportedly crammed into the railway station on Saturday evening.

The Reuters news agency reported that three of the dead were children, while 10 were women.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said his thoughts were “with all those who have lost their loved ones” in a post on X.

Eyewitnesses told BBC Hindi a “huge crowd” had gathered at the station, through which many people were travelling to and from the Hindu religious festival, the Kumbh Mela.

Ruby Devi said the crowd at the Indian capital’s main railway station had been so big she was unable to get inside.

Another person said police were doing their job “but the crowd became too much”.

Inside the station, according to officials, two trains had been delayed, while a third – heading to Prayagraj, where the Kumbh Mela is held – was waiting to depart.

“There were far more people than I have ever seen at this station,” Dharmendra Singh, who was hoping to travel to Prayagraj, told India’s PTI news agency.

“In front of me, six or seven women were taken away on stretchers.”

• Thirty killed in crowd crush at India’s Kumbh Mela festival
• Families mourn loved ones who died in Kumbh Mela crush

KPS Malhotra, deputy commissioner of police, said the situation had been “out of control for a brief spell of 10 to 15 minutes due to overcrowding”.

Indian Railways had initially dismissed talk of a stampede as a “rumour”, according to Reuters, but confirmed that an undisclosed number of people had been injured and taken to hospital.

The incident comes weeks after dozens were killed in a pre-dawn crush at the Kumbh Mela festival in northern India, where tens of millions of Hindus had gathered to take a dip in sacred river waters on one of the holy days of a six-week festival.

One British tourist has died and three other people are seriously injured after a collision between a four-seater cycle and a car in New Zealand.

Officials said the incident occurred at about 10:45am local time on Thursday in the town of Martinborough, located near Wellington on New Zealand’s North Island.

Wellington police said that authorities arrived to find all four victims with serious injuries, but that one person died before they could be airlifted to hospital.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said it was providing support to the families of the victims.

“We are assisting several British people and their families after an incident in New Zealand and are in touch with the local authorities,” a spokesperson told the BBC.

An earlier statement given to the PA news agency said the FCDO team in New Zealand had “provided advice on bereavement abroad after one British person died and three others were seriously injured in Martinborough”.

“Our thoughts are with the family at this difficult time,” it said.

In a statement, Wellington District Road Policing Manager Brad Allen said that the serious crash unit was conducting a scene examination and inquiries into the circumstances of the crash are ongoing.

“Police’s thoughts, aroha [a Māori word that means love, compassion, sympathy, and empathy] and condolences go out to the family and loved ones of the deceased,” he said.

Images on local media showed the bike – a four-wheeled vehicle with an open frame and orange canvas roof – upside down beside a tree-lined road.

Indi Bikes Martinborough owner Wayde Mines told Radio New Zealand that he rushed to the scene after hearing about the incident and learned that the vehicle was one he rented to a couple he believed were tourists from the UK.

“It’s a tragedy. It’s terrible. I’ve been hiring bikes for 10 years and nothing like this has ever happened before. Not even scuffs and bumps,” Mr Mines said.

The deputy mayor and councillor for the district wrote on Facebook that “today five lives were irrevocably changed”.

“The hurt will ripple through our community,” wrote Melissa Sadler-Futter. “My heart goes out to you all.”

A 14-year-old boy has been killed and five people wounded in a knife attack in southern Austria.

Police said the suspect is a 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker who was detained at the scene in Villach, a town near the border with Italy and Slovenia.

Police are yet to establish a motive but have involved extremism specialists in the investigation, a spokesman told BBC News.

The incident took place around 16:00 local time (15:00 GMT) near the town’s main square. Two of the five people injured were in a serious condition as of Saturday evening.

A delivery worker who had driven his vehicle at the attacker helped prevent more injuries, police said.

The driver – also a Syrian man – said he witnessed the attack as he was driving by and deliberately rammed the knifeman.

The suspect was arrested shortly after by two female police officers. As of Saturday evening, he was still being interrogated, police said.

Some witness reports initially indicated a potential second attacker, leading to police shutting down train travel in the attack’s immediate aftermath.

However, local police told BBC News they were confident only one knifeman was involved.

Austrian law means the attacker’s identity has not been released but police confirmed he is a 23-year-old Syrian man who lived locally.

He had a temporary residence permit and was waiting for a decision on his asylum application.

Police initially said four people were wounded but a fifth person later came forward with minor injuries.

The identity of the teenager who was killed has also not yet been disclosed.

The attack comes amid national debates over asylum laws and a political crisis following an election last year which saw the far-right Freedom Party come out on top for the first time.

However it has failed to form a coalition government, leaving Austria’s President Alexander Van der Bellen weighing up whether to call a snap election, form a minority government, or invite other parties or a group of experts to try and form an administration.

Herbet Kickl, the head of the Freedom Party, seized on the Villach attack, saying in a statement that Austria needs a “rigorous crackdown on asylum”.

Peter Kaiser of the centre-left Social Democratic Party – who is the governor of Carinthia, the region where Villach is located – described the attack as an “unimaginable atrocity”.

He said the stabbings should not lead to “hateful” reactions while urging the government and European Union to tighten asylum policy.

A year after Alexei Navalny’s suspicious death in a Russian prison, his supporters have been helping choose a headstone for his grave in Moscow.

“It will be a place of hope and strength for all those who dream of the wonderful Russia of the future,” says the opposition politician’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, quoting one of his best-known phrases.

Revealing her shortlist of designs in a video last week, she hoped the grave would become somewhere that those who oppose Vladimir Putin go “to remember they are not alone”.

Navalnaya now lives abroad, facing arrest if she were to return to Russia.

Her words capture just how far ambitions have shrunk.

For years, Alexei Navalny was Vladimir Putin’s biggest political rival: charismatic and courageous. Today, even his lawyers have been jailed as “extremists” and a huge number of supporters have fled Russia for safety. Those who’ve stayed are mostly scared into silence.

Now Vladimir Putin, far from being defeated by a ruinous war on Ukraine, looks like dictating the terms of a peace deal there alongside Donald Trump.

So did Russia’s democratic opposition and its dream of change die in an Arctic prison yard with Alexei Navalny?

Ksenia Fadeeva was serving a nine-year sentence when the TV in her cell announced that Navalny was dead. He had collapsed in prison on his daily walk.

“I was in a stupor; I couldn’t even speak,” the activist remembers. “It was a nightmare.”

Ksenia was a political prisoner herself, labelled an “extremist” for her previous links to Navalny. She managed his HQ in her Siberian hometown, Tomsk, when Navalny tried to run against Putin in the 2018 presidential elections. He was blocked.

Back then, Ksenia showed me how her car had been coated in paint and had its tyres slashed. On another day the door of her flat was sealed shut with foam glue, trapping her inside.

The young activist shrugged all this off. It came with the territory.

At that point, Putin had been squeezing the democratic life out of Russia for close to two decades. He’d moved from controlling the media to rigging elections and punishing protest. Then came poisoning and political assassination.

This month also marks 10 years since Boris Nemtsov, another powerful voice of opposition, was killed. He was shot in the back close to the red walls of the Kremlin.

Russia had annexed Crimea illegally the previous year and Putin’s approval rating was still riding a wave of toxic nationalism. Critics like Nemtsov were publicly slurred as traitors.

The politician’s lifeless body, sprawled beneath fairy lights in the colours of the Russian flag, marked the start of a dark new era.

Navalny did his best to breathe new life into Russia’s beleaguered opposition.

A master of social media and of the anti-corruption agenda, he had real appeal, especially to a younger crowd.

But in 2020 he was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and almost died.

“I knew they could put you in prison, break up protests with batons, invent criminal charges. But poisoning with a chemical weapon?” Ksenia Fadeeva remembers her shock at the attack. “I thought there were some brakes on the system, but I was wrong.”

When Navalny returned from treatment abroad, he was arrested at the airport.

He would never walk free.

In that environment, the lack of overt opposition within Russia is hardly surprising.

“I don’t think there is any country in the world where many would risk years in prison for speaking out,” Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent activist, wrote to me once from his own jail cell.

Sentenced to 25 years for condemning Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Kara-Murza smarted at criticism of Russians for failing to stand up to Putin more firmly and failing to stop the full-scale invasion.

Navalny was already in jail. A spattering of anti-war protests was quickly stamped out.

“Inside Russia, it’s not a matter of there being no one with the charisma of Navalny,” Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Centre says, explaining the lack of any new leader since his death.

“We’re talking about the complete criminalisation of opposition.”

Last August, Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ksenia Fadeeva were taken from their cells and forcibly deported as part of a giant exchange of prisoners.

The Kremlin was exporting dissent.

By then, Navalny was dead.

Ksenia believes that had he lived, even from abroad Navalny could have made a difference. “Things would have been different if they’d let Navalny out in a swap. His voice would have been loud, the opposition would have had more influence”, she says.

“In today’s tough conditions, I don’t know where you find another leader like Navalny.”

His team haven’t stopped working in exile. One half lobbies Western governments for more effective sanctions, the others try to smash through the wall of Russian propaganda with exposés of Putin’s entourage.

Their latest film targets a powerful ally of Putin, Igor Sechin, arguing that Putin is only pretending to “make Russia great” while he and his cronies plunder the country’s wealth.

Such investigations used to spark real-life protests. Now those viewers still inside Russia can only watch via VPN and most dare not post comments.

“You can get a criminal charge now, just for lifting a finger,” Ksenia Fadeeva points out, although the latest film was seen almost two million times in 10 days.

Ksenia is sure most of that audience is in Russia.

“People haven’t changed their views, they’re still there. They definitely read and follow and watch,” she says. “But they can’t protest. They’re just surviving.”

That’s a word I hear often from activists: they describe Russian opposition forces in a kind of holding pattern.

“We can stick to our basic pro-democracy values and try to keep people safe for the future Russia,” Anastasia Burakova argues, and her own “Ark” project tries to do just that.

“But nobody knows how to successfully finish this dictatorship.”

But is there actually demand for that?

“Imagine asking: ‘Do you support Vladimir Putin or do you want to go to jail for 15 years,'” says Ksenia Fadeeva, mocking the value of conducting polling in an authoritarian regime.

Others believe researchers do still have ways to take the social pulse, and they confirm that it’s not set racing by Yulia Navalnaya and co.

Navalny’s widow has moral authority but nowhere near his political skills.

“All these… liberal figures have extremely low approval ratings,” says academic Tatiana Stanovaya. Instead, she detects a consolidation of support for the Kremlin which she links to a surge in Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia.

“People see that we are very vulnerable and they have to choose the strongest player to rely on,” the analyst explains. “It’s not because they like Putin or consider him a positive hero. It’s because he can protect Russia in a very hostile environment.”

No matter that Putin created that environment himself by going to war.

It helps that Donald Trump now appears to be siding with Moscow: the US president once said he “understood” Russia’s veto on Ukraine joining Nato. He now seems to have conceded that major condition, even before any peace talks.

“I think the war has further entrenched anti-Western sentiment,” Dr Jade McGlynn of King’s College suggests. “I also don’t really see evidence there’s even a strong minority of Russians who are desirous of a liberal, Western-allied type of democracy.”

“I think the liberals… ultimately failed to convince.”

There’s a whole lot wrapped up in that line, including the economic pain and massive corruption Russians experienced as the USSR fell apart. It all helped make democracy a dirty word.

For years, state TV has also been shouting into every living room that critics of Russia are its enemies, and Western agents.

“The Kremlin plays on a real fear, ingrained in Russian minds, that the West has been trying to ruin Russia, weaken and divide it,” Tatiana Stanovaya argues.

“There is good soil for the Kremlin to work on.”

Opposition forces are also deeply divided.

Fierce rivalries and personality clashes that go back many years have intensified in exile and now frequently erupt into vicious and very public fights.

“We can debate after democracy in Russia begins, but for now we have the same goal and the same enemy: he’s in the Kremlin,” Anastasia Burakova voices the frustration of many that such scrapping is a dangerous distraction.

That division is part of why Jade McGlynn thinks Russia’s exiled activists might better be called “dissidents” than a political opposition.

“Politics is about practicality, otherwise you are a philosopher,” she argues – and challenging those in power is impossible in Russia right now.

Anastasia Shevchenko agrees. But just surviving Putinism isn’t good enough for her. “I hate when people still talk about the ‘beautiful Russia of the future’,” the Russian activist quoted Alexei Navalny, when we met in a Kyiv coffee shop last month.

“You can’t be happy next to destroyed cities where so many people were killed.”

Other opposition figures insist on referring to “Putin’s war”, to suggest that most Russians are against the invasion – which infuriates Ukrainians.

“I think to claim that it’s one man’s war when you have 600,000 troops there and over three million in the defence industry, not including all the propagandists, is not convincing,” Jade McGlynn is firm.

But Anastasia Shevchenko struggles to focus on anything else. Whilst change within Russia remains “very far away”, she sees Ukraine is in trouble now and she can help.

She’s become a one-woman telephone exchange for Ukrainian soldiers held captive in Russia: prisoners of war, who can’t call Ukrainian numbers from Russian jails, dial Anastasia’s Russian mobile. She gets their mother or wife on another line and places the phones together so they can talk.

“If you can help Ukraine, you should do that,” she believes. “But we Russians are focused only on Russia and I don’t understand it.”

Still readjusting to life out of prison, and out of her country, Ksenia Fadeeva has shifted her own focus from politics to human rights for now, helping political prisoners.

“I still believe Russia has every chance of becoming a normal, free, peaceful European country,” Ksenia Fadeeva insists. “But the regime is far harsher now, more authoritarian.”

Anastasia Shevchenko agrees, though she remembers the collapse of the USSR and concedes that history is unpredictable.

“You never know what happens. Things can change quickly. So you have to be ready.”

But ready for what?

The idea of Russia leaping from Putinism to liberal democracy looks less likely than ever.

Jade McGlynn sees no prospect at all, unless the vision that led to the invasion of Ukraine – “this imperial, chauvinist vision of Russia” – is defeated.

“I think that’s where we will see real opposition,” she thinks. “From disgruntled nationalists,” especially in a country with tens of thousands of war veterans and all their trauma.

“What will the authorities ‘sell’ to the people then? What idea?,” Ksenia Fadeeva wonders, when the war is finally over.

All agree the political repression will remain intense. As the analyst Tatiana Stanovaya puts it: “The state, especially the repressive apparatus, do not have the skills to retreat.”

On Sunday, Navalny’s supporters plan memorials from Argentina to Australia to mark the anniversary of his death. In Moscow, some will visit his graveside. A few may dare to chant for change. But most of all, those who still cling to the dream of a democratic Russia will be checking who else is still out there. Still waiting.

Reality TV gold has a new three-word definition: “Montoya, por favor!”

If you’ve been anywhere near social media over the past fortnight, you’ll know the raw drama setting the internet ablaze this award season hasn’t come from Hollywood, but the love tragedy played out in clips posted from Spanish reality TV show Temptation Island.

Contestant Jose Carlos Montoya’s spiralling meltdown at watching his girlfriend Anita cheat with another man is like an uncensored Love Island on steroids.

In Temptation Island, couples are taken to a tropical island, separated and sent to separate villas filled with attractive singles ready to test their loyalty. In a final twist, every move made is recorded for the other half to see.

Forced to watch a graphic real-time stream of the betrayal, Montoya’s emotions swell until he snaps, breaking all the show’s rules.

Blind to the now infamous pleas of host Sandra Barneda (“Montoya, por favor!”), he rampages down the beach to confront the pair, tugging at his shorts in anguish as lightning streaks across the sky.

A second clip shows the resulting confrontation: Anita flips the script, calling out Montoya’s own indiscretions before collapsing in tears, begging for forgiveness.

“This is cinema,” wrote one X user, posting a clip that has now been watched on the platform a staggering 224m times since 4 February.

“Montoya. the tension … you don’t need to speak Spanish to understand, this is insane.”

Yet those behind Spain’s Temptation Island see its success as more than just shock value. Executive producer Juanra Gonzalo tells me they are overjoyed by the “completely unexpected” global reaction, and he believes the show’s appeal lies in its relatability.

“In Love Island, all the people are single. In Temptation Island, there are real couples, and they are putting their love at risk,” he says. “I think [audiences] know it too. These emotions and reactions cannot be faked.”

“Everyone wants to know what their boyfriend or girlfriend is doing when they are not with them. We can imagine, but we don’t know. Temptation Island lets the audience ask: ‘what would I do in that situation?'”

The magic ingredient to making this work is careful casting. “Montoya and Anita were perfect – they are very emotive and expressive,” he says.

Gonzalo calls Montoya, a singer by trade with previous TV experience, a “special man”. At 31, he told casters he’d “never experienced love like this before”, having been with Anita “every day for a year”.

“She’s a strong woman with a lot of character,” Gonzalo adds.

The Sun’s senior showbiz reporter Lottie Hulme says the programme’s “authentic emotion” sets it apart from competitors like Love Island, Love Is Blind, Married At First Sight and Dating Naked.

Seeing such unfettered and raw emotion may stand out to British and American viewers, who have become used to glossy and well-worn competitive reality formats like Love Island and semi-scripted reality shows like Made in Chelsea.

“It was refreshing and almost shocking to see something so raw, because it’s something that we just don’t see on the reality TV shows in Britain nowadays,” Hulme says.

“We’re at a point with reality TV culture where we’re wondering ‘what if’ – are contestants really being their authentic self… or are they after followings and a brand deal?”

Alongside constructed storylines, the commercialised reality TV to influencer pipeline has made existing formats feel “predictable” adds Hulme.

Audience figures reflect this.

Love Island is currently airing its All Stars edition on ITV2, which started last year. The 2024 final attracted 1.3m viewers – a sharp drop from the six million peak of its 2019 heyday.

While this season’s figures remain solid, even matching BBC Two’s audience on launch night, the show now usually only dominates non-terrestrial channels.

A curious quirk of the Montoya phenomenon is that the Spanish show isn’t available to watch in the UK – an irony that has only fuelled its illicit appeal on social media.

Previous UK and US versions failed to take off, and production company Banijay says it does not presently plan to broadcast the Spanish version in the UK.

After Montoya’s meltdown caught the eye of Love Island host Maya Jama, she posted: “They would never allow this on UK TV. For so many reasons. But it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen”.

When asked why, she simply replied: “people would complain”.

Like Big Brother before it, Love Island has been the subject of complaints to Ofcom.

A heated confrontation between 2021 Love Islanders Faye and Teddy over Teddy’s behaviour in Casa Amor (a segment similar to Temptation Island’s premise) sparked 25,000 Ofcom complaints.

Despite the shocked reactions Gonzalo’s show has provoked, he says it operates within strict boundaries, suitable for its primetime slot.

“Not everything we record is aired,” he says. “We are very careful – we only show a few seconds of sexual content.”

Temptation Island is just the latest in a string of particularly high-octane Spanish dating shows.

Take Falso Amor (or Deep Fake Love), for instance. Currently streaming on Netflix, it intensifies the premise of Temptation Island by asking couples to decide whether videos of each other are real or highly convincing AI deepfakes.

So is content which British audiences find shocking viewed differently in Spain?

When I raise Love Island’s Zara Holland being stripped of her Miss Great Britain title after having sex on the show in 2016, Gonzalo is shocked and welcomes the internet’s more light-hearted reaction to Anita’s sexual scenes.

“As in other countries, things in Spain are progressing from the past – this is positive for our view of women and sexuality” he says, adding no gender should face double standards.

In the UK, there has been heightened scrutiny and awareness of the impact reality TV can have on cast members’ mental health, following the deaths of several former contestants.

When I press Gonzalo on this, given the intensity of Montoya and Anita’s experience, he says a team of psychologists monitor contestants before, during, and after filming.

Montoya received particular support after his beach escapade.

“We made sure he was not alone, that he had a safe space to process everything. It was important for us to provide him with the right help,” he says.

Looking ahead, Netflix is to relaunch an American version of the show next month.

Gonzalo is up for the fight. He laughs at the internet’s playful suggestion that the beach scene should win an Oscar, then adds: “My team deserve all the awards. An Oscar. And a Bafta!”

With its distinctive golden crown, red throat pouch and slender black legs, the crested crane is beloved in Uganda – featuring on the East African nation’s flag and coat of arms.

All the country’s national sports teams are also nicknamed after the iconic bird, but in recent years it has gone into decline and conservationists say it may face extinction if more is not done to protect it.

The bird is protected by law – it stipulates a life sentence and/or a fine of 20bn Ugandan shillings ($5m; £4m) for those found to have killed one.

Going back centuries, local Buganda cultural superstition also protected the elegant fowl, which was seen as a symbol of wealth, good fortune and longevity.

It was believed that if one killed a crane, its kith and kin would flock to the killer’s home, hold vigil and mourn by collectively honking until the person went mad or even died.

“Such stories instilled fear, and cranes would be respected and revered and not killed,” Jimmy Muheebwa, a senior conservationist at Nature Uganda, a local non-governmental organisation (NGO), told the BBC.

But for farmers in western Uganda, where the cranes mostly hang out, that fear has dissipated and often it is only conservationists who appear to know about the ban on killing them.

“I really don’t see any value in these birds because all they do is raid our plantations and eat our crops. We are worried about food security in this area,” Tom Mucunguzi, a maize farmer from a village near Mbarara city in Western Region, told the BBC.

Another farmer near Mbarara, Fausita Aritua, agreed, saying when she goes to her maize plot she spends the whole day chasing away the cranes – and if she cannot get there, she tries to get someone else to stand guard.

“We no longer harvest as much as we used to do because these birds eat everything,” she told the BBC.

Also known as grey-crowned cranes, the birds are predominantly found in Uganda but are also in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

They are non-migratory, but make local and seasonal movements depending on food resources, nest site availability and the weather.

Standing at about 1m (3.2ft) tall, the waterfowl mostly live in wetland areas – riverbanks, around dams and open grassland – where they breed and feed on grass seeds, small toads, frogs, insects and other invertebrates.

But with the increasing human population, the high demand for food is pushing farmers to cultivate in wetlands, leaving crested cranes with diminishing areas to call home.

“In eastern Africa, the population has declined terribly by over 80% in the last 25 years,” Adalbert Ainomucunguzi, who leads the International Crane Foundation (ICF) in East Africa, told BBC.

In the1970s, Uganda boasted a population of more than 100,000 crested cranes, but today that number has dwindled to a mere 10,000, according to Nature Uganda.

This decline saw the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) put the crested crane on its red list of endangered bird species in 2012.

“Despite its serenity, beauty and popularity, the bird is facing a serious threat. It means that if no urgent measures are taken to reverse this trend, we might see the cranes pushed to extinction,” Dan Sseruge, a Ugandan ornithologist, told the BBC.

Around Mbarara we found it was difficult to track down the birds – and only saw them early in the morning just after dawn.

Conservationists say they used to be much easier to find in the landscape surrounding Mbarara.

Dozens of cranes have in recent years been found dead after they were poisoned by rice and maize farmers in Lwengo district, in south-central Uganda.

“One of the biggest threats against cranes is poisoning by the farmers. This is because the birds are causing a lot of crop damage,” Gilbert Tayebwa, a conservation officer at ICF, told BBC.

Mr Tayebwa said he has been engaging farmers to use different deterrent methods like scarecrows to protect their crops from invading cranes.

Farmers like Philip Ntare, from Lwengo, said the cranes were sometimes mistakenly poisoned after eating crops sprayed with agro-chemicals and other pesticides.

“I just chase them, because I grew up knowing the crested crane is not supposed to be killed. But government should consider compensating farmers for crop damage,” he told the BBC.

However, John Makombo, director of conservation at the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), said this was not possible.

“It is one of those precious species that have freedom to go anywhere and so unfortunately the government is not liable for any damage done by the cranes,” he told the BBC.

Sarah Kugonza, an ICF conservationist, said the cranes also face a host of other threats – not just from farmers. Without the protective cover of the wetlands, their chicks are more likely to be captured by eagles.

Cranes are finding day by day that they are living in an increasingly hostile environment.

“Sometimes breeding areas are flooded and nowadays some cranes are killed by electricity lines when flying,” Ms Kugonza told BBC.

Their exceptional beauty has also put them at risk as people are increasingly capturing them to be pets, according to Mr Ainomucunguzi.

But crested cranes, who can live for just over two decades, hardly ever breed in captivity as the birds are famously faithful.

“It is a highly monogamous bird as it pairs once, for life. This means that if one of them is killed or domesticated, the likelihood of finding a new mating partner is almost zero,” said Mr Muheebwa.

They attract a mate by dancing, bowing and jumping – and are often seen walking as couples or families. A pair will define their own territory and can be very aggressive to defend it.

Scientifically called , the cranes also have unique nesting patterns as they usually return to the same location annually, often laying between two and five eggs that are incubated by both sexes for anywhere between 28 and 31 days.

Any destruction to these nesting areas impacts on these breeding patterns.

Their monogamy has also attracted the unwelcome attention of local traditional healers, who claim that the parts of crested crane may bring faithfulness from a partner – or good luck.

“Some people have been caught hunting cranes to take some of their body parts to witch doctors in a belief that they will get rich. Or, if you are a woman, your husband will never leave you,” Mr Tayebwa from ICF said.

This is also something conservationists are trying to counter – as well as alerting people to the law protecting cranes.

And in an effort to reverse declining numbers, the Ugandan government and conservationist groups are now rallying communities to restore wetlands.

President Yoweri Museveni, who comes from the Western Region, has been urging encroachers to vacate wetland areas and, according to local media, has declared 2025 a year of wetland conservation.

The ICF has also recruited custodians to monitor and ensure that the cranes’ breeding grounds are protected.

Nature Uganda’s Mr Muheebwa said these efforts were slowly helping to stabilise the situation but crane numbers remained “very low”.

For Mr Makombo, the UWA’s future emphasis is going to be on setting an example when it comes to the law.

“We shall arrest and prosecute those who are poisoning the cranes,” he said.

• Chimpanzees ‘self-medicate’ with healing plants
• Deforestation pushes animals in Uganda forest to eat virus-laden bat poo
• Climate change: Saving Uganda’s mountain gorillas
• Kenya rolls out poison in bid to cull a million crows

For 40 years, EastEnders has shown us life in a fictional community in East London – but from the iconic characters to the theme tune, could it all have been very different?

In the early research stages of EastEnders, multiple cities were considered for the new soap, from Manchester to London to Birmingham, according to BBC archive documents.

But one audience report recommended that a serial set in a working-class neighbourhood in London would probably have the most widespread appeal.

This would also set the soap apart from other big series of the time, like Coronation Street (set in Greater Manchester), Emmerdale Farm (set in Yorkshire) and Crossroads (set in a Midlands motel).

Though EastEnders creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland would eventually settle on the fictional Walford with its E20 postcode, at this point the show had a working title of East 8 – and it was to be based on a real street in the London borough of Hackney.

In March 1984, Smith and Holland headed to Lanzarote for a working holiday where they created 23 character biographies, three years of storyline overviews and 20 detailed story breakdowns.

Despite all their planning, however, some of the most important elements of EastEnders were last-minute accidents, including the iconic drum “doof doofs” in the theme tune, which have since become shorthand for the show’s dramatic cliffhangers.

“In those days, if a theme tune was popular, you’d often release it as a single. So I would make longer versions of the themes to allow for that,” says Simon May, the theme tune’s composer, who would go on to write EastEnders-related singles for cast members Anita Dobson and Nick Berry.

“The longer version gets a bit more Cockney, so I asked the drummer to play something to transition into the end theme. He played those ‘doof doofs’ and Tony and Julia happened to be in the studio at the time.

“They said: ‘We love that drum thing.'”

Another key ingredient of the early years of EastEnders also happened at the last minute: the pairing of the actors behind Angie and her bad-boy husband Den Watts, played by Leslie Grantham.

After a read-through of the first six episodes, the producers thought that original Angie Watts actress Jean Fennell was not quite working in the role. Anita Dobson took on the character at the last minute.

Actor and stuntman Derek Martin, who joined the soap 15 years later as Charlie Slater, explains he was also up for the role of Den.

“Leslie got it, and he was very good, he was the ladies’ man, and I was more the hard man,” the 91-year-old actor says.

This pairing of Angie and Den proved popular with the public – and the Christmas Day 1986 episode that sees Den serve Angie divorce papers remains the only scripted programme to have been watched by more than 30 million people in the UK, according to Barb figures.

The first episode of EastEnders was broadcast on 19 February 1985, with 17 million people watching – making it the second most-watched episode on the BBC that week behind The Two Ronnies.

This compared to the 18 million who watched the same week’s Coronation Street.

The episode started with a kick, as Den broke down a door to find the nearly dead body of Reg Cox (played by Johnnie Clayton) – and ended with a punch, as suspect number one in the attack, Nick Cotton (John Altman), put his fist through the glass of the Queen Vic doors.

Though the press was quick to set up a rivalry between EastEnders and Coronation Street, the cast had their eye on another ITV soap.

Actor Adam Woodyat, who played Ian Beale in that first episode, says: “We were going out at the same time as Emmerdale Farm at 7pm. It felt like Emmerdale Farm gave us an absolute kicking in the ratings until they shifted us to half past seven.”

Newspapers of the time suggested reactions were mixed. A Sunday People poll of 600 viewers showed 56% of respondents didn’t like the first episode, with complaints over “coarse” and “bawdy” dialogue.

The Guardian, however, was more measured, with their critic Hugh Hebert predicting it would “probably take a year before anyone knows whether the BBC has got it right”.

The show would prove itself earlier than that. On 25 July 1985, the programme was the most-watched on the BBC that week. This coincided with the show’s first blockbuster storyline that saw Michelle (played by Susan Tully) become pregnant by a mystery man, eventually revealed to be Den Watts.

“After the reveal of Den and Michelle,” says Woodyat, “that’s when we started to realise we might have something here.”

French customs officers have found nine dinosaur teeth during a routine check near the Italian border.

The discovery was made as the officers inspected a Spanish lorry on the A8 motorway on 28 January, officials say.

They spotted the apparent fossils in two parcels and sent them to be examined by a prehistory museum in the nearby city of Menton.

On Friday, an expert revealed the teeth had belonged to reptiles from the Late Cretaceous period – 72 to 66 million years ago – in Morocco, authorities said.

Lorries travelling on the A8 motorway between Spain and Italy are regularly stopped.

Agents open parcels at random as they sometimes contain illegal drugs, customs Samantha Verduron told AFP news agency.

But the latest haul was unexpected.

One of the teeth identified belonged to a Zarafasaura oceanis, a marine reptile measuring about 3m (10ft) and named in Morocco in 2011.

Three belonged to a Mosasaurus, a large aquatic creature that measured up to 12m.

Five other teeth are believed to have been those of a Dyrosaurus phosphaticus, a distant ancestor of crocodiles.

The lorry driver told officers he had been delivering the parcels to people in the Italian cities of Genoa and Milan, French authorities said.

Officials are working to identify the intended recipients of the packages. Collecting fossils is legal, but exporting them often requires a licence.

For the final 15km (9.3 miles) of the journey from Toulouse to the hamlet of Les Pequiès, you travel on narrow winding roads through hilly, dense woodlands. Without a reliable GPS system you can get lost very quickly, especially at night.

I expected the home of Andrew and Dawn Searle, the British couple found dead earlier this month, to be remote. That’s the suggestion from the photos of the crime scene I had seen. But I was surprised when I arrived to find it well within shouting distance of several homes.

It’s an important detail because Dawn’s partly naked body was discovered outside the front of the house on Thursday morning last week. The prosecutor in charge of the case, Nicolas Rigot-Muller, said she had severe head wounds caused by a blunt weapon. Any screams would have been heard very clearly by neighbours.

Her husband’s body was found hanging inside the back of the house. The prosecutor says no weapon has been found, that there’s no obvious sign of a burglary nor evidence that Andrew put up a fight, nor of a sex crime.

A friend discovered Dawn’s body when she came around to the house with her dog. The couple had two big dogs of their own, and they often walked with the friend or several other dog owners I talked to in the quiet hamlet.

One woman, Bénédicte, said the couple were “absolutely adorable, we would often meet like this simply walking our dogs around the village”.

“We are very shocked, of course we are,” she said.

Lydie, a butcher, sells her produce at local markets with her husband. Their property overlooks the Searle’s home, just a fallow field separates them.

“They were a great couple who smiled a lot and since I once lived in England I was able to talk to them in English,” she told me. “They were well integrated and every year invited everyone over for a party.”

But not everyone I approached wanted to talk. Their looks give away that this is a very difficult moment for this rural community in the glare of a criminal investigation.

The railroad crossing next to the village doesn’t have safety barriers, just a stop sign, which tells you how little traffic there is here normally. Now, you can feel the presence of the Gendarmerie, the branch of the French military which is leading the investigation.

While I was providing live coverage for BBC Scotland a large car with tinted windows drove past me slowly, inside four stony-faced officers from the Toulouse homicide and organised crime branch.

There is no question locals are scared. Several officers from the Gendarmerie photographed our car and asked to see our ID cards and urged us to be discreet. They said the residents were frightened and that their presence was partly to reassure them.

There is bright yellow Gendarmerie tape strapped to the front gate of the Searle’s home. The dogs are gone and their swimming pool has a cover over it. Two large candles have been lit in the driveway and a leaflet taped to the gate has a phone number for anyone who feels they need psychological counselling or moral support, provided by local social services. The same leaflet has been taped to a community board in the centre of the hamlet.

The Searle couple retired to this region five years ago, and other mailboxes in the hamlet indicate they are not the only expatriates in the region. This isn’t surprising: there are no official statistics but in the time I have been based in Toulouse, Foreign Office staff have told me at various times they believe around 30,000 Brits live full-time in the south west, making it the biggest British expat population in France outside of Paris.

On top of that tens of thousands more have holiday homes in this region, called Occitanie, which is one of the fastest growing areas of France, attracting people from not just the UK but Belgium, the Netherlands and Paris.

What attracts them here is the quality of life, wide open spaces, relatively cheap property and achingly beautiful countryside and architecture.

The nearby town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue has one of the most beautiful medieval stone arcade-lined central squares in a region teeming with them. In summer, an open-air market in the square is crammed with holiday makers, including many Brits, carrying woven baskets filled with local produce.

Various conspiracy theories circulate about how the couple died – I’ve been asked about them by countless French national TV and radio media outlets. But all we know for sure is that the prosecutor and his team are still trying to determine, as he reiterated to me on Wednesday night, “whether the tragedy resulted from a domestic crime followed by suicide or involved a third party”.

Ever since the deaths I’ve been speaking to the prosecutor leading the case, who revealed to me late this week that he was handing over the investigation to a senior judge in Montpellier with more resources available.

I asked him if that means he was leaning towards the idea that the Searle couple were both murdered.

He replied that he was not ruling anything out. He added that if they were murdered, and it goes to trial, he would lead the prosecution.

Dr Remy Sevigne, the psychologist who answers the counselling hotline from the leaflets, told me that so far around a dozen people had called him for some sort of support. They were all local, he said, and all knew the couple personally.

They were all either frightened or in shock, he said.

The family of a British couple in custody in Iran say they are united in their determination to secure their safe return.

Craig and Lindsay Foreman were arrested in January, but news of their detention emerged on Thursday when state-run Iranian media reported they were being held on unspecified security charges.

The couple, both aged 52, had been on a motorbike trip across the world, and had planned to be in Iran for only five days.

A statement issued by the Foreign Office on their family’s behalf said: “This unexpected turn of events has caused significant concern for our entire family, and we are deeply focused on ensuring their safety and wellbeing during this trying time.”

The family called it a “distressing situation”, adding: “We are actively engaging with the British government and relevant authorities, working diligently to navigate the complexities of this matter.”

They said the “emotional burden of this situation weighs heavily on us”, and “the outpouring of support from friends, family, and the community” had “provided us with strength and encouragement as we face this ordeal”.

Mr and Mrs Foreman were heading for Australia on their journey across the globe.

They had crossed into Iran from Armenia on 30 December and had planned to be in Pakistan by 4 January.

After staying in the cities of Tabriz, Tehran and Isfahan, accompanied by a tour guide, they travelled on to Kerman, in east-central Iran, but never checked into their hotel there.

In a series of social media posts before they were detained, the couple described their joy at being in Iran.

Lindsay Foreman, a life coach with a doctorate in psychology, said she was “having an amazing time”.

Her husband Craig, who is a carpenter, spoke of the “lovely people” of a “lovely country”.

Mrs Foreman posted a picture of herself on 3 January meeting a cleric in the town of Isfahan. Writing on Instagram, she said: “Travel continues to teach me that humanity’s core is shared: kindness, humility, and respect for one another.”

On Facebook that day she wrote: “Despite differences in culture, language, and traditions, we’ve seen something beautifully universal: kindness, humour, hospitality – and a shared love of good food!”

The Iranian authorities have not said what the couple are accused of.

The pair moved from East Sussex to start a new life in Andalucia, Spain, in 2019 and had appeared on an episode of Channel 4’s A New Life in the Sun in 2022 to showcase their lives as expats.

Mrs Foreman is reported to have been carrying out a research project on their journey to Australia, asking people what it means to be human and what constitutes a good life.

She was due to present her findings at a conference on positive psychology in Brisbane in July.

Posting on Instagram, she acknowledged travelling to the Iran, against Foreign Office advice, and to Pakistan was risky and “slightly scary”.

“Yes, we’re aware of the risks,” she wrote. “But we also know the rewards of meeting incredible people, hearing their stories, and seeing the breathtaking landscapes of these regions could far outweigh the fear.”

She added: “From the vast deserts of Iran to the towering peaks of Pakistan, we hope to share the beauty, hospitality, and humanity that often go unnoticed.”

The Foreign Office says it is in contact with the local authorities in Iran, and is providing the couple with consular assistance.

A photograph of the couple, with their faces blurred, meeting the British ambassador Hugo Shorter at the public prosecutor’s office in Kerman was published on Wednesday.

The Foreign Office currently advises British nationals to avoid all travel to Iran.

“British and British-Iranian dual nationals are at significant risk of arrest, questioning or detention,” advice says. “Having a British passport or connections to the UK can be reason enough for the Iranian authorities to detain you.”

Over the past few years, dozens of foreign and dual nationals have been arrested in Iran on vague security-related charges.

Human rights groups say they are often used by the Iranian authorities for political leverage.