On Sunday morning, the New Delhi Railway Station in India’s capital looked much like it always does: bustling, with its many platforms full of eager, impatient passengers waiting to catch their trains.

But on Saturday night, a deadly crush – reportedly caused by overcrowding – killed at least 18 people and left several injured.

According to officials, two trains had been delayed at the station, while a third – heading to Prayagraj city where the massive Hindu religious festival, Kumbh Mela, is being held – was waiting to depart as people pushed against each other.

The crush occurred after “a passenger slipped and fell on the stairs”, a spokesperson for Indian Railways said.

Opposition leaders have criticised the government, alleging that Indian Railways did not make adequate arrangements to manage crowds at the station.

An investigation has been launched, and authorities have announced compensation for the victims.

When asked by the BBC about safety and security at the station, Pankaj Gangwar, Principal Chief Security Commissioner of Northern Railway, said “let the investigation be completed first”.

Crushes like these are not unheard of in India, where there is frequent overcrowding at religious events, festivals and public spaces. Last month, 30 people were killed and dozens injured in a crush at the Kumbh Mela.

Crowds at the railway station were also not unexpected – trains are by far the cheapest long-distance mode of transport in India and it is common for the number of passengers to far exceed the capacity of trains.

Eyewitnesses and the families of victims have been recounting their ordeal. Many of them were angry at authorities and police officials at the railway station, who they say did not act in time.

Some eyewitnesses said the crush was not limited to one place but took place on the overhead bridge, staircases and platforms.

Bipin Jha was at the station to meet his wife Mamta, who was arriving on a train. She died in the crush.

“I met her at the platform and we were walking on the footbridge overhead when she was trapped in the crush. She died in front of my eyes. I will live my life with the guilt of not saving her,” he says.

“We were on the stairs, suddenly we felt a push from behind. We fell, along with many others, and were trapped under bodies. I was barely breathing,” said Seema, whose sister-in law Pinky Devi died on the staircase.

Usha Devi, who was travelling to the eastern state of Bihar for her nephew’s wedding, said chaos erupted the moment she reached the platform.

“Many people fell. Everywhere, there were scattered belongings, food items and clothes. I was on the verge of fainting. So many people were collapsing. The crowd was so dense that we couldn’t board our train.”

Umesh Giri’s wife Shilam Devi was among the victims.

“The crowd became uncontrollable,” he told BBC Hindi while waiting outside the mortuary at Delhi’s Maulana Azad Medical College.

“I saw several bodies already lying there. People were colliding with each other, and others started falling over them,” said Mr Giri, who was also injured.

He added that help took time to arrive and that he pleaded with officers for help.

Senior police and railway officials at the scene did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Most of the victims were taken to the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital in New Delhi, where police and paramilitary forces were deployed, and railway authorities had set up a help desk to assist families. Journalists were not allowed to enter the hospital on Saturday.

Relatives of victims shared their grief with reporters waiting outside, while also expressing anger at the facilities in the hospital.

“Multiple people were crammed onto a single bed,” alleged Shobha, the sister-in-law of Shilam Devi.

Others coming out of the hospital also confirmed this. Hospital authorities did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

At Lady Hardinge Hospital, the grieving family of Riya, 7, completed the paperwork so they could receive her body.

“No child deserves to die like this”, her uncle Vivek said, wiping away tears.

Muhsin Hendricks, a pioneering figure dubbed the world’s first openly gay imam, has been shot dead in South Africa.

The 57-year-old cleric ran a mosque in Cape Town intended as a safe haven for gay and other marginalised Muslims. He was killed on Saturday morning after the car in which he was travelling near the southern city of Gqeberha was ambushed.

“Two unknown suspects with covered faces got out of the vehicle and started firing multiple shots at the vehicle,” police said in a statement.

News of Hendricks’ death has sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ+ community and beyond, prompting an outpouring of tributes from across the globe.

Julia Ehrt, executive director at the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (Ilga), called on the authorities to thoroughly investigate “what we fear may be a hate crime”.

“He supported and mentored so many people in South Africa and around the world in their journey to reconcile with their faith, and his life has been a testament to the healing that solidarity across communities can bring in everyone’s lives,” she said.

• Born free, killed by hate – the price of being gay in South Africa
• The volunteers taking on South African crime

Hendricks was killed after he had reportedly officiated at a lesbian wedding, though this has not been officially confirmed.

The details of the attack emerged through security footage that was shared on social media.

It shows a car pulling up and blocking the vehicle in which Hendricks was travelling as it was pulling away from the curb. According to police, the imam was in the back seat.

The angle of CCTV footage reveals what happened from one side of the road – an assailant jumps out of a car, runs to the ambushed vehicle and shoots repeatedly through the back passenger window.

Hendricks’ Al-Ghurbaah Foundation, which runs the Masjidul Ghurbaah mosque in the Wynberg suburb of Cape Town, confirmed he had died in a targeted attack on Saturday morning.

But Abdulmugheeth Petersen, chair of the foundation’s board, appealed via a WhatsApp group for their followers to be patient, stressing the importance of protecting Hendricks’ family.

Hendricks’ work challenged traditional interpretations of Islam and championed a compassionate, inclusive faith.

South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution was the first in the world to protect people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation and in 2006, became the first country in Africa to legalise same-sex marriage.

But despite a thriving LGBT community, gay people still face discrimination and violence. The country also has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Hendricks came out as gay in 1996, which shocked the wider Muslim community in Cape Town and elsewhere.

That same year, he founded The Inner Circle, an organisation providing support and a safe space for queer Muslims seeking to reconcile their faith and sexuality before going on to establish the inclusive Masjidul Ghurbaah mosque.

He was the subject of a documentary in 2022 called The Radical, in which he said about the threats he faced: “The need to be authentic was greater than the fear to die.”

Hendricks often spoke about the importance of interfaith dialogue and the need to address the mental health issues and trauma faced by LGBTQ+ individuals within religious communities.

He told the Ilga World Conference in Cape Town last year: “It is important that we stop to look at religion as the enemy.”

Reverend Jide Macaulay, an openly gay Anglican minister, described Hendricks’ death as “truly heartbreaking”.

The British-Nigerian LGBTQ rights activist runs House of Rainbow, an organisation that provides support for gay people in Nigeria where same-sex relationships or public displays of affection are illegal, and paid tribute to Hendricks’ bravery.

“Your leadership, courage, and unwavering dedication to inclusive faith communities have left an indelible mark,” he said.

Sadiq Lawal, a gay Muslim man living in Nigeria, told the BBC that Hendricks, had made such an impact as he had made “the impossible possible” by saying the words: “I’m a queer imam.”

“He’s a mentor to many queer Muslims in Africa, especially in Nigeria, because of religious extremism,” he said.

“I’m still in shock and devastated.”

• Homosexuality: The countries where it is illegal to be gay
• The Cape Town schools learning from transgender students
• ‘Being openly gay has held my career back’ – SA footballer
• South Africa’s gay radio station makes waves
• How South Africa’s oldest Quran was saved by Cape Town Muslims

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.”

“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.

• Ukraine end game: What each side wants from a peace deal
• Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia

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.

• JD Vance’s blast at Europe ignores Ukraine and defence agenda
• Trump wants peace. Ukrainians fear what that might look like

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.

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.

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 police issued the arrest warrant 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 fired back 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.

After 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 Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a pro-democracy NGO.

When China started putting bounties on dissidents’ heads in 2023, they targeted prominent protest leaders and opposition politicians. Chloe, still finishing her A-levels at the time, 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.”

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 activists back home face, she says.

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

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

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he is working in “full cooperation” with the US on a “common strategy” for Gaza, after talks with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Netanyahu praised US President Donald Trump’s “bold vision” for Gaza’s future and said he and Rubio had discussed ways to “ensure that future becomes a reality”.

Trump’s much-criticised plan for the US to take over Gaza and resettle its population, has been ruled out by Palestinians and Arab nations.

Rubio said the plan may have “shocked and surprised” people, but that it took “courage” for Trump to propose an alternative to the “tired ideas” of the past.

• Trump’s mixed messaging on foreign policy leaves world guessing
• ‘We are tired of war’: Israelis and Gazans fear ceasefire collapse
• How 15 months of war has devastated Gaza

Rubio is visiting Israel on his first tour of the Middle East as the US’s top diplomat. He also plans to meet Russian officials in Saudi Arabia in the coming days to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

Speaking at a news conference in Jerusalem after their meeting, Rubio and Netanyahu outlined areas of agreement, including a desire to eradicate Hamas’s governing capacity, prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, and to monitor developments in a post-Assad Syria.

Netanyahu also condemned what he called “lawfare” from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which he said “outrageously libelled” Israel.

He thanked the US administration for issuing sanctions against the ICC, which last year issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza – which Israel denies – as well as a top Hamas commander.

The US and Israel had a common position on Gaza, Netanyahu said, as he warned that the “gates of hell” would be opened if all Israeli hostages were not released.

“Hamas can not continue as a military or government force,” Rubio added. “And as long as it stands as a force that can govern or administer or a force that can threaten by use of violence, peace becomes impossible.”

Rubio’s visit comes after a shipment of American-made heavy bombs arrived in Israel overnight.

Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said his country had received a delivery of MK-84 bombs from the US late on Saturday, after Trump overturned a block on exporting the munitions placed by his predecessor, Joe Biden.

Biden initially shipped thousands of MK-84s to Israel after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, but later declined to clear the bombs for export out of concern for their impact on Gaza. The powerful 2,000-pound bombs have a wide blast radius and can rip through concrete and metal, destroying entire buildings.

Katz said the shipment represented a “significant asset” for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and served as evidence of the “strong alliance between Israel and the United States”.

Fears had been high that the fragile ceasefire agreement in Gaza could collapse, after a dispute over a planned hostage release, which was nearly aborted but ultimately went ahead on Saturday.

A stabbing in Austria that killed a 14-year-old boy and wounded five others was an Islamist attack, Austrian officials have said.

The attack took place on Saturday at Villach, a town near the border with Italy and Slovenia, and three of those who were injured remain in intensive care, authorities said.

A 23-year-old Syrian asylum seeker, who was detained at the scene, has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said an Islamic State group flag had been found in the suspect’s apartment, while state police chief Michaela Kohlweiss said he had sworn allegiance to the group.

Speaking at a news conference on Sunday, Karner said this was an “Islamist attack with IS links by an attacker who, according to the investigations so far, was obviously radicalised online, via the internet, within a very short space of time”.

“So those in a position of responsibility, the police, the authorities, must draw the necessary conclusions from that.”

Karner said the suspect had a valid residence permit, no criminal record, and had not previously attracted the attention of authorities.

Authorities previously said the suspect had a temporary residence permit and was waiting for a decision on his asylum application.

The attack took place around 16:00 local time (15:00 GMT) near the town’s main square.

On Sunday, officials confirmed the ages of those who were injured: Two 15-year-olds, with the other victims aged 28, 32 and 36. Five of them are Austrian nationals and one is Turkish.

Three are in intensive care, one is in a stable condition and another is receiving outpatient treatment.

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

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

The party 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.

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

On Sunday, Karner said there needed to be “legal reforms” for police and authorities and called for screenings of certain groups, such as asylum seekers from Syria and Afghanistan.

South Korean actress Kim Sae-ron has been found dead in Seoul, police have said.

The 24-year-old was found in her home in the city’s Seongsu-dong district by a friend at around 16:55 (07:55 GMT) on Sunday.

Officers said no signs of foul play had been found and they were investigating the cause of death.

Kim began her career as a child actor and was seen as one of South Korea’s most promising young actresses.

Born in Seoul in 2000, she rose to prominence with her role in 2009 film A Brand New Life – which saw her appear at the Cannes Film Festival.

She went on to star in South Korea’s highest grossing film of 2010 The Man from Nowhere and 2012 thriller The Neighbour, for which she received award recognition.

Other notable roles include the 2014 film A Girl at My Door and television roles such as Mirror of the Witch in 2016.

The actress largely withdrew from the public eye in 2022 due to a drink driving incident, for which she was fined 20 million won (£11,000) in April 2023.

Kim’s last role was in Netflix’s 2023 Korean drama Bloodhounds. Variety reported that most of her role was edited out due to the driving incident.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has 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 had made it clear the old relationship between Europe and America was “ending” and the continent “needs to adjust to that”.

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

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

• Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia
• What’s happening in Ukraine after three years of conflict with Russia?

Russia’s foreign ministry said Saturday’s call had been made “at the request of the US side”. The statement did not give any further details on Ukraine but said both sides had “reaffirmed commitment to restoring a … dialogue” between the two countries.

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

Earlier on Saturday, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine also said Europe would be consulted but not take part in talks between the US and Russia, if and when they happen.

In remarks likely to raise concern in Ukraine and among European allies, 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.

Zelensky also said that he had blocked a Trump-led deal that would have given the US access to vast amounts of Ukrainian natural resources because it lacked “security guarantees” for Kyiv and “does not protect us”.

Trump has pushed for access to rare minerals in Ukraine in return for aid, or even as compensation for the support the US has already provided.

Earlier this week, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a “factory reset” for Nato which signalled the alliance needed to be “robust”, “strong” and “real”.

On Saturday, Zelensky said: “Let’s be honest. Now we can’t rule out the possibility that America might say no to Europe on an issue that threatens it.

“Many, many leaders have talked about Europe that needs its own military – an army of Europe.”

The concept of a European army has been proposed by other leaders, including France’s Emmanuel Macron who has long backed the bloc’s own military to reduce its reliance on the US.

The idea was quickly rebuffed by the EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.

Zelensky said: “A few days ago, President Trump told me about his conversation with Putin. Not once did he mention that America needs Europe at the table – that says a lot.

“The old days are over when America supported Europe just because it always had.”

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nears its three-year anniversary, Trump and Hegseth have both said it is unlikely that Ukraine will join Nato.

The US defence secretary also said a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders was unrealistic.

Zelensky said he would “not take Nato membership for Ukraine off the table”.

Trump had a phone call with Putin last week where they discussed peace talks regarding Ukraine, apparently sidelining key allies.

Zelensky said that, as well as Ukraine, Europe “should have a seat at the table when decisions about Europe are being made”.

The US president later said that he and Putin planned to meet in Saudi Arabia, and wrote on social media that the two had invited each other to their respective capitals.

No date has been set for Trump’s visit to Moscow.

On Ukraine’s involvement in talks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last week that Kyiv “will of course one way or another be taking part in the negotiations”.

Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said his country would never support a dictated peace.

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Europe needs its own plan on Ukraine, or “other global players will decide about our future”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to meet Russian officials in Saudi Arabia in the coming days for talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, US officials say.

America’s top diplomat will be joined by national security adviser Mike Waltz and the US special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, the officials told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

US special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg said Washington, Moscow and Kyiv would be involved in talks, but Europe was not invited.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv had not been invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia.

Amid European concern that the US is moving ahead on peace talks with Russia without consulting the continent, Ukraine’s European allies will gather in Paris next week for an emergency summit on the war.

Speaking on Saturday 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,” the US diplomat added.

Also on Saturday, Rubio spoke to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, where he reaffirmed US President Donald Trump’s “commitment to finding an end to the conflict in Ukraine”, according to state department spokesperson Tammy Bruce.

It followed a phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, when the White House shocked its European allies by reviving direct contact with Moscow after a freeze of more than three years.

After the call, Trump said negotiations to stop the “ridiculous war” in Ukraine would begin “immediately”.

The upcoming talks in Saudi Arabia follow tensions at the international Munich Security Conference, where US Vice President JD Vance sharply criticised European democracies on Friday.

Vance repeated the Trump administration’s line that Europe must “step up in a big way to provide for its own defence”.

On Wednesday US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to rule out Ukraine joining Nato or recovering all of its territory – fuelling European alarm that the US may be making concessions to Russia before any peace deal is negotiated.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, having already seized Crimea and part of the eastern Donbas region in 2014.

Addressing the Munich conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the creation of an “army of Europe” amid rising concern that Washington may no longer come to the continent’s aid.

“We can’t rule out the possibility that America might say no to Europe on issues that threaten it,” Zelensky said.

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.

German voters decide on 23 February who will run their next government, with Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democrats favourite to become the biggest party in power.

Controlling immigration and reviving the European Union’s biggest economy are the main issues in this snap election, triggered by the collapse of centre-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition late last year.

We assess what and who you need to know ahead of the vote for Germany’s next parliament, the Bundestag.

This election is taking place against a backdrop of a series of deadly attacks which have heightened pressure on the mainstream parties to reform immigration and asylum rules.

Germans were already reeling from four fatal attacks, in Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and Afschaffenburg, when a mother and her two-year-old daughter were fatally injured in a car-ramming attack in Munich, allegedly by an Afghan national, 10 days before the election.

These attacks have boosted support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Although no other party is prepared to let the AfD into government, if they come second and attract 20% of the vote, they could double their number of seats in the Bundestag.

Germany is also Europe’s biggest economy and after two years of decline, the onus is on the next government to turn it around and revive German industry. Germany has been hit by high energy prices and stiff Chinese competition.

Germans aged 18 and over will decide on their next parliament from 08:00-18:00 on 23 February.

There are five candidates for chancellor.

If the biggest party can secure a coalition deal with one or two other parties, the president will usually nominate its leader as chancellor. Then parliament will hold a secret ballot to decide.

The frontrunner in the race to run Germany is Friedrich Merz, whose Christian Democrats (CDU) are up to 10 points ahead in the polls. He was chosen as candidate for chancellor ahead of Markus Söder, the leader of their sister party in Bavaria the Christian Social Union.

Aged 69 and 198cm (6ft 6in) in height, Merz is a plain-talking, pro-business, social conservative who has spent years waiting in the wings.

Eclipsed in the CDU by Angela Merkel in 2002, he eventually left politics, served on the boards of investment banks and took up flying as an amateur pilot.

Merz’s first two bids to win the CDU leadership failed, against Merkel in 2018 and then Armin Laschet who went on to lose the German election in 2021.

Merz then took over the CDU and is running under the slogan “A Germany we can be proud of again”.

He has promised permanent border controls and faster asylum rules to restrict immigration, and to cut taxes and slash €50bn in welfare spending in a bid to kickstart Germany’s faltering economy. He has also promised to bolster aid for Ukraine.

But he provoked a furious backlash ahead of the election when he sought to tighten immigration rules by relying on the votes of the far-right AfD, and he ultimately failed.

Although Merz has ruled out working with the AfD, former CDU chancellor Angela Merkel said he was “wrong” to accept AfD votes and he has faced big protests.

He has also promised greater leadership from Germany in Europe, and beefed-up support for Ukraine, refusing to rule out future membership of Nato.

Olaf Scholz has already served more than three years as chancellor, at the head of an unpopular coalition that fell apart in a row over loosening Germany’s strict debt rules.

His government struggled from the start, largely because of the effect of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine on Germany’s economy.

Germany became Ukraine’s biggest aid-provider in Europe. Scholz spoke of a (turning point) in boosting German defence policy and military spending – but he was accused of acting too slowly or too late. He now promises European support for Ukraine “for as long as necessary” and rejects the idea of any dictated peace.

Scholz has backed faster deportation of failed asylum seekers and his government reimposed border checks which he says have brought asylum requests down by a third in one year.

Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) want to establish a “Germany fund” to boost investment and to raise the minimum wage to €15 (£12.50) an hour from €12.82.

Many in party believed he should have allowed party colleague Boris Pistorius to run for chancellor instead.

However, the party has joined conservatives in the past and although Scholz said he could no longer trust Merz, the Social Democrats remain potential partners.

Alice Weidel, 46, is the AfD first candidate for chancellor since the party was created in 2013. She has also basked in the support of billionaire Elon Musk, and was rewarded with a meeting with US Vice-President JD Vance during his visit to Munich.

Weidel has little chance of winning power, but she has become popular with young voters on TikTok and her party has set its sights on four years’ time.

Co-led by Tino Chrupalla, the AfD has already secured one recent victory, in September’s state election in Thuringia in the east.

Elon Musk said the ex-Goldman Sachs analyst could not be right wing extremist as she “has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka”.

And yet she has backed the mass deportation of migrants, embracing the highly controversial term “remigration” – which she defines as deporting criminals and “illegal” migrants.

She also wants to end sanctions on Russia, repairing the destroyed Nord Stream gas pipelines; and she wants to tear down wind turbines, which she calls “windmills of shame”, even though they now provide a quarter of Germany’s electricity.

Party supporters have cheered her with the slogan (Alice for Germany), which sounds similar to a banned Nazi slogan

Robert Habeck’s Greens played a key role in the Scholz government as vice-chancellor and economy minister.

But one of his flagship policies, phasing out fossil-fuel heating systems in Germany, had to be watered down and led to a dive in the government’s poll ratings. He rejects any return to nuclear energy, and calls for more affordable access to renewable energy which by the end of last year supplied 63.4% of Germany’s electricity needs.

Habeck, 55, has taken a strong line on aid for Ukraine, and he has forcefully criticised Friedrich Merz for relying on votes from the AfD in parliament.

Relations with Friedrich Merz are awkward, after he accused the CDU leader of disqualifying himself as chancellor, but the Greens could still return to government.

Like Alice Weidel’s AfD, Sahra Wagenknecht and her BSW party back closer relations with Russia and has built a strong support base in eastern Germany.

Wagenknecht calls her politics “left conservativism” and presents herself as an alternative to the AfD, backing strict limits on asylum and immigration.

She shares the AfD’s opposition to German military support for Ukraine and has been accused of parroting Kremlin narratives on the war.

But she may struggle to reach the 5% national threshold to get into parliament.

Elections to the Bundestag usually take place every four years – this one had been due on 28 September 2025 but was brought forward because of the collapse of the Scholz government.

Over-18s get two votes.

One is to elect members of the Bundestag directly in 299 constituencies. The second is to choose a political party in one of the 16 states that you live in.

Any party that wins 5% of that second vote is allowed to enter the Bundestag, and they then use their state lists to pick their MPs.

Complex voting rules that meant the outgoing parliament had 733 seats have now been abolished. That means Germany’s next Bundestag will have a total of 630 seats – a reduction of more than 100 seats.

However, one of the old rules will remain. Any party that fails to poll 5% of the vote can still get in, if they win in three of the 299 constituencies.

The conservative CDU and CSU parties are favourite to win the most seats, but by ruling out a coalition with the AfD Merz has narrowed their options of potential partners in government.

That makes a deal most likely with either or both the SPD and the Greens.

Many in the SPD are reluctant to work with Merz after the migration row, but a so-called grand coalition of the two parties is considered possible.

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.

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

A couple who “risked it all” by quitting their jobs and selling their home to travel the world with their three children said the adventure had saved them as a family.

Chris and Tamira Hutchinson were “living from paycheck to paycheck” and barely spent any time together at home in Corby, Northamptonshire.

They sold their three-bedroom house almost two years ago and drove straight to the airport to start their new life with their three daughters, Olivia, 10, Scarlett, eight, and Bella, four.

“As a family, we were pretty much broken. But now we are living our dream,” Chris says.

Despite working “every hour under the sun” – Chris as a personal trainer and Tamira as a swimming teacher – they could not keep up with the cost of living in the UK.

“We went down to one car, we got rid of Sky TV, we didn’t go on holiday but the bills kept going up and up,” says Tamira.

“We only ate together as a family once a month because we didn’t get time. We were just working to make ends meet.”

It was during Covid that they first talked about selling up and travelling the world.

“We had a chance to breathe and we realised we didn’t want to go back to the life we were living,” Chris says.

The couple put their house up for sale in 2022 but it took longer to sell than they anticipated and they nearly backed out of the plan. When it finally sold in May 2023, they drove straight to Heathrow.

“Our last night in the house, we were all on the floor because we had sold all our furniture,” says Chris.

“We didn’t have the money to book our flights until we got the cash from the house, so we went to a hotel near Heathrow and booked flights to Kuala Lumpur [Malaysia].

“It was a huge risk. We thought it might not work and we might want to go home, but we’ve never looked back.”

Chris taught himself videography before they left so he could document their travels on social media, which has turned into their biggest source of income.

“We were already making videos about family life, but we didn’t have a huge amount of followers,” the 36-year-old explains. “We had 7,000 subscribers on YouTube but now we have 100,000, and we had about 12,000 on TikTok where as now we have 250,000.”

After exploring Malaysia, they went to Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia and Qatar.

It was during their trip to China that their social media “blew up” and the family “accidentally became famous” in the country.

One video they made about their drinks being dropped off by a drone received eight million views on TikTok.

They also saw a huge growth on Chinese social media platforms, where they have over one million followers and their videos reach tens of millions of views.

The couple say the trip has been “incredible”, but there have inevitably been tough times.

Tamira got dengue fever in Thailand, their family credit card got swallowed by a machine in Vietnam and all five of them got a sickness bug while staying in a hostel in the Philippines.

“Another difficult time was when we got lost in China. We were walking round with all our possessions in the early hours of the morning and our phone maps didn’t work. But we eventually found our hotel and we can laugh about it now,” Tamira says.

They have based themselves on the Malaysian island of Penang for the last few months, where their daughters, who are home schooled by Tamira, are “thriving”.

“They are learning about different cultures, currencies, languages and how to get around,” Chris says.

“All three of them have always been 110% on board with this idea, but if they ever changed their minds and wanted to go home, we would listen to them.

“They have grown in confidence so much and they make friends wherever they go. There are a lot of digital nomad families travelling round, who are working remotely.”

The Hutchinsons say they have got the next five years planned out, with trips to Dubai, Australia, India, Sri Lanka and Cambodia on the cards this year.

They might also go back to the UK briefly, but they have no plans at the moment to return permanently, because their “quality of life is so much better now”.

The couple receive lots of messages asking for advice and say they hope to inspire other parents.

“It’s not flowers all the time but if you’re a person who enjoys a challenge and enjoys spending time with your family, go for it. You will never know until you try,” Tamira says.

“It was a dream and we made it happen,” Chris adds. “As a family we have loved every moment and we have risen to the challenges.”

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 224 million 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!”

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.”

​​President Donald Trump has always understood the power of branding. As a celebrity businessman, he affixed his name to the facades of his skyscrapers and licensed his name to an array of products, from hotels to wines.

Now, he is attempting his boldest branding campaign yet: America itself.

On his first day back in office, he signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Denali, the indigenous name for the famed Alaskan peak, will revert back to Mount McKinley, a reference to the assassinated 19th century president.

Fort Bragg, which was named for a Confederate general until the military changed it to Fort Liberty, will again bear its original name – but this time attributed to a far less controversial soldier from World War Two.

Trump is not the first US president to rename a monument. It was Barack Obama, a Democrat, who renamed Mount McKinley to its Native American name, Denali, after years of lobbying from Alaskans.

George W Bush, a Republican, renamed the Caribbean National Forest in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to the El Yunque National Forest in 2007, to reflect the US territory’s heritage.

And after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 sparked a national reckoning on race, Congress initiated a process to rename US military bases named after Confederate figures. In 2023, during Joe Biden’s presidency, the Department of Defense renamed nine US military bases, including Fort Bragg.

At the heart of these decisions is a desire to portray America, and its values, in a particular light.

“The act of naming is a way that presidents can reshape their vision of the nation,” said Allison Prasch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies political rhetoric.

Trump’s choices in his second term send a clear message about his priorities too, she said.

“It is elevating a very nationalist, imperialist vision of the United States,” Ms Prasch said.

• Hegseth orders Fort Liberty be renamed Fort Bragg
• Google Maps updates Gulf of Mexico name for US users
• The chosen ones – 9 people trusted to deliver for Trump

Some of Trump’s name choices are callbacks to America’s expansionist age, when the prevailing ideology said that America had a God-given mission to expand from shore to shore.

Part of President William McKinley’s legacy was his role in annexing Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Hawaii. In changing Denali’s name, Trump said he wanted to honour McKinley because he “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent”.

It’s an ideology that seems to inform Trump today too, as he has also floated the idea of retaking the Panama Canal, which had once been under US control, buying Greenland and annexing Canada to become the “51st state”.

Meanwhile, renaming Fort Bragg is the latest in an ongoing debate over the legacy of the Confederacy – the coalition of southern states that seceded from the US over the issue of slavery and triggered the Civil War.

During Trump’s first administration, amid a national reckoning over racial injustice, Congress required the Pentagon to rename facilities named after Confederates and banned future military installations from being named after them.

The move rankled Trump then, who tried to veto the measure and declared that “our history as the Greatest Nation in the World will not be tampered with!” Congress overrode him with bipartisan support.

But historian Connor Williams, who served on the renaming committee that had recommended the name Bragg be removed in 2021, said that honouring the Confederacy is misguided.

“What makes Confederates such bad topics for commemoration is that they have very little to redeem them,” Williams said. “They committed treason against the United States.”

“What we commemorate, what we celebrate, what public displays we make, where we place wreathes – the president does have that ability to signal what he thinks is important,” he added.

In 2023, the Biden administration changed Fort Bragg, named after Confederate general Braxton Bragg, to Fort Liberty.

“We seized this opportunity to make ourselves better and to seek excellence,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue said at the renaming ceremony. “That is what we always have done and always will do.”

However, the name change prompted mixed feelings among lawmakers, former military personnel who spent time there, and the local community.

“I understand the reasoning behind the change, and I have to accept it because it’s what the elected leadership has determined is in the best interest,” Cumberland County Commissioner Jimmy Keefe said at the time according to local media. “But I hate that so many people who have had positive experiences at Fort Bragg, who have had children born there, weddings there, that they will no longer have that tether of Fort Bragg in the name.”

This week, Trump’s new Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, restored the base’s name to Fort Bragg. But this time, he said the base will be named after Private First Class Roland Bragg, who fought in World War II, rather than a Confederate general.

“That’s right,” Hegseth said. “Bragg is back.”

Republican lawmakers representing the base expressed enthusiasm about the change.

“Renaming Fort Bragg for Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart in WWII, was always the right decision,” North Carolina Senator Ted Budd wrote on Facebook.

But nationally, many of Trump’s name changes have proved controversial. A Marquette University poll suggested that 71% of US adults did not support changing the Gulf of Mexico’s name, and just 29% supported it.

Some of the changes have sparked debates about whose vision of American history should officially stand.

A poll by Alaska Survey Research suggested 47% of Alaska’s Trump’s voters favoured the name change. But overall, Alaskans opposed the name change by a two-to-one margin, the Juneau Express reported.

Democrats and Republicans in Alaska’s legislature banded together to pass a resolution urging Trump not to change Denali’s name.

“To officially change the name would not only dishonor those who have fought to protect Denali’s legacy but also dismiss the voices of the Native communities whose roots are intertwined with this land,” said Alaska Representative Maxine Dibert, a Democrat and a member of the indigenous Koyukon Athabascan community.

Time will tell whether Trump’s symbolic name changes endure. But the arguments about them shows no signs of abating.

This week, the White House blocked an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office this week because the wire service kept Gulf of Mexico in its popular style guide. AP executive editor Julie Pace called the decision “alarming” and said it violated the constitution’s free speech rights.

Meanwhile, Google – which now uses the name Gulf of America on its maps for US users – has begun deleting negative reviews of the name change.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America might be a land (or water) grab on paper only, but its symbolism is undeniable, said Ms Prasch, the professor of political rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin.

And it goes beyond geography to strike a chord about how the country views itself – and its history.

“I actually think that this is much more than renaming a body of water on a map,” she said. “It is a fundamentally rhetorical decision about how we think about the story of the nation.”

Muhsin Hendricks, a pioneering figure dubbed the world’s first openly gay imam, has been shot dead in South Africa.

The 57-year-old cleric ran a mosque in Cape Town intended as a safe haven for gay and other marginalised Muslims. He was killed on Saturday morning after the car in which he was travelling near the southern city of Gqeberha was ambushed.

“Two unknown suspects with covered faces got out of the vehicle and started firing multiple shots at the vehicle,” police said in a statement.

News of Hendricks’ death has sent shockwaves through the LGBTQ+ community and beyond, prompting an outpouring of tributes from across the globe.

Julia Ehrt, executive director at the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (Ilga), called on the authorities to thoroughly investigate “what we fear may be a hate crime”.

“He supported and mentored so many people in South Africa and around the world in their journey to reconcile with their faith, and his life has been a testament to the healing that solidarity across communities can bring in everyone’s lives,” she said.

• Born free, killed by hate – the price of being gay in South Africa
• The volunteers taking on South African crime

Hendricks was killed after he had reportedly officiated at a lesbian wedding, though this has not been officially confirmed.

The details of the attack emerged through security footage that was shared on social media.

It shows a car pulling up and blocking the vehicle in which Hendricks was travelling as it was pulling away from the curb. According to police, the imam was in the back seat.

The angle of CCTV footage reveals what happened from one side of the road – an assailant jumps out of a car, runs to the ambushed vehicle and shoots repeatedly through the back passenger window.

Hendricks’ Al-Ghurbaah Foundation, which runs the Masjidul Ghurbaah mosque in the Wynberg suburb of Cape Town, confirmed he had died in a targeted attack on Saturday morning.

But Abdulmugheeth Petersen, chair of the foundation’s board, appealed via a WhatsApp group for their followers to be patient, stressing the importance of protecting Hendricks’ family.

Hendricks’ work challenged traditional interpretations of Islam and championed a compassionate, inclusive faith.

South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution was the first in the world to protect people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation and in 2006, became the first country in Africa to legalise same-sex marriage.

But despite a thriving LGBT community, gay people still face discrimination and violence. The country also has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Hendricks came out as gay in 1996, which shocked the wider Muslim community in Cape Town and elsewhere.

That same year, he founded The Inner Circle, an organisation providing support and a safe space for queer Muslims seeking to reconcile their faith and sexuality before going on to establish the inclusive Masjidul Ghurbaah mosque.

He was the subject of a documentary in 2022 called The Radical, in which he said about the threats he faced: “The need to be authentic was greater than the fear to die.”

Hendricks often spoke about the importance of interfaith dialogue and the need to address the mental health issues and trauma faced by LGBTQ+ individuals within religious communities.

He told the Ilga World Conference in Cape Town last year: “It is important that we stop to look at religion as the enemy.”

Reverend Jide Macaulay, an openly gay Anglican minister, described Hendricks’ death as “truly heartbreaking”.

The British-Nigerian LGBTQ rights activist runs House of Rainbow, an organisation that provides support for gay people in Nigeria where same-sex relationships or public displays of affection are illegal, and paid tribute to Hendricks’ bravery.

“Your leadership, courage, and unwavering dedication to inclusive faith communities have left an indelible mark,” he said.

Sadiq Lawal, a gay Muslim man living in Nigeria, told the BBC that Hendricks, had made such an impact as he had made “the impossible possible” by saying the words: “I’m a queer imam.”

“He’s a mentor to many queer Muslims in Africa, especially in Nigeria, because of religious extremism,” he said.

“I’m still in shock and devastated.”

• Homosexuality: The countries where it is illegal to be gay
• The Cape Town schools learning from transgender students
• ‘Being openly gay has held my career back’ – SA footballer
• South Africa’s gay radio station makes waves
• How South Africa’s oldest Quran was saved by Cape Town Muslims

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 police issued the arrest warrant 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 fired back 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.

After 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 Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a pro-democracy NGO.

When China started putting bounties on dissidents’ heads in 2023, they targeted prominent protest leaders and opposition politicians. Chloe, still finishing her A-levels at the time, 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.”

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 activists back home face, she says.

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

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

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.

• Ukraine end game: What each side wants from a peace deal
• Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia

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.

• JD Vance’s blast at Europe ignores Ukraine and defence agenda
• Trump wants peace. Ukrainians fear what that might look like

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.

South Korean actress Kim Sae-ron has been found dead in Seoul, police have said.

The 24-year-old was found in her home in the city’s Seongsu-dong district by a friend at around 16:55 (07:55 GMT) on Sunday.

Officers said no signs of foul play had been found and they were investigating the cause of death.

Kim began her career as a child actor and was seen as one of South Korea’s most promising young actresses.

Born in Seoul in 2000, she rose to prominence with her role in 2009 film A Brand New Life – which saw her appear at the Cannes Film Festival.

She went on to star in South Korea’s highest grossing film of 2010 The Man from Nowhere and 2012 thriller The Neighbour, for which she received award recognition.

Other notable roles include the 2014 film A Girl at My Door and television roles such as Mirror of the Witch in 2016.

The actress largely withdrew from the public eye in 2022 due to a drink driving incident, for which she was fined 20 million won (£11,000) in April 2023.

Kim’s last role was in Netflix’s 2023 Korean drama Bloodhounds. Variety reported that most of her role was edited out due to the driving incident.

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.”

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.

On Sunday morning, the New Delhi Railway Station in India’s capital looked much like it always does: bustling, with its many platforms full of eager, impatient passengers waiting to catch their trains.

But on Saturday night, a deadly crush – reportedly caused by overcrowding – killed at least 18 people and left several injured.

According to officials, two trains had been delayed at the station, while a third – heading to Prayagraj city where the massive Hindu religious festival, Kumbh Mela, is being held – was waiting to depart as people pushed against each other.

The crush occurred after “a passenger slipped and fell on the stairs”, a spokesperson for Indian Railways said.

Opposition leaders have criticised the government, alleging that Indian Railways did not make adequate arrangements to manage crowds at the station.

An investigation has been launched, and authorities have announced compensation for the victims.

When asked by the BBC about safety and security at the station, Pankaj Gangwar, Principal Chief Security Commissioner of Northern Railway, said “let the investigation be completed first”.

Crushes like these are not unheard of in India, where there is frequent overcrowding at religious events, festivals and public spaces. Last month, 30 people were killed and dozens injured in a crush at the Kumbh Mela.

Crowds at the railway station were also not unexpected – trains are by far the cheapest long-distance mode of transport in India and it is common for the number of passengers to far exceed the capacity of trains.

Eyewitnesses and the families of victims have been recounting their ordeal. Many of them were angry at authorities and police officials at the railway station, who they say did not act in time.

Some eyewitnesses said the crush was not limited to one place but took place on the overhead bridge, staircases and platforms.

Bipin Jha was at the station to meet his wife Mamta, who was arriving on a train. She died in the crush.

“I met her at the platform and we were walking on the footbridge overhead when she was trapped in the crush. She died in front of my eyes. I will live my life with the guilt of not saving her,” he says.

“We were on the stairs, suddenly we felt a push from behind. We fell, along with many others, and were trapped under bodies. I was barely breathing,” said Seema, whose sister-in law Pinky Devi died on the staircase.

Usha Devi, who was travelling to the eastern state of Bihar for her nephew’s wedding, said chaos erupted the moment she reached the platform.

“Many people fell. Everywhere, there were scattered belongings, food items and clothes. I was on the verge of fainting. So many people were collapsing. The crowd was so dense that we couldn’t board our train.”

Umesh Giri’s wife Shilam Devi was among the victims.

“The crowd became uncontrollable,” he told BBC Hindi while waiting outside the mortuary at Delhi’s Maulana Azad Medical College.

“I saw several bodies already lying there. People were colliding with each other, and others started falling over them,” said Mr Giri, who was also injured.

He added that help took time to arrive and that he pleaded with officers for help.

Senior police and railway officials at the scene did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Most of the victims were taken to the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital in New Delhi, where police and paramilitary forces were deployed, and railway authorities had set up a help desk to assist families. Journalists were not allowed to enter the hospital on Saturday.

Relatives of victims shared their grief with reporters waiting outside, while also expressing anger at the facilities in the hospital.

“Multiple people were crammed onto a single bed,” alleged Shobha, the sister-in-law of Shilam Devi.

Others coming out of the hospital also confirmed this. Hospital authorities did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

At Lady Hardinge Hospital, the grieving family of Riya, 7, completed the paperwork so they could receive her body.

“No child deserves to die like this”, her uncle Vivek said, wiping away tears.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he is working in “full cooperation” with the US on a “common strategy” for Gaza, after talks with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Netanyahu praised US President Donald Trump’s “bold vision” for Gaza’s future and said he and Rubio had discussed ways to “ensure that future becomes a reality”.

Trump’s much-criticised plan for the US to take over Gaza and resettle its population, has been ruled out by Palestinians and Arab nations.

Rubio said the plan may have “shocked and surprised” people, but that it took “courage” for Trump to propose an alternative to the “tired ideas” of the past.

• Trump’s mixed messaging on foreign policy leaves world guessing
• ‘We are tired of war’: Israelis and Gazans fear ceasefire collapse
• How 15 months of war has devastated Gaza

Rubio is visiting Israel on his first tour of the Middle East as the US’s top diplomat. He also plans to meet Russian officials in Saudi Arabia in the coming days to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

Speaking at a news conference in Jerusalem after their meeting, Rubio and Netanyahu outlined areas of agreement, including a desire to eradicate Hamas’s governing capacity, prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, and to monitor developments in a post-Assad Syria.

Netanyahu also condemned what he called “lawfare” from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which he said “outrageously libelled” Israel.

He thanked the US administration for issuing sanctions against the ICC, which last year issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza – which Israel denies – as well as a top Hamas commander.

The US and Israel had a common position on Gaza, Netanyahu said, as he warned that the “gates of hell” would be opened if all Israeli hostages were not released.

“Hamas can not continue as a military or government force,” Rubio added. “And as long as it stands as a force that can govern or administer or a force that can threaten by use of violence, peace becomes impossible.”

Rubio’s visit comes after a shipment of American-made heavy bombs arrived in Israel overnight.

Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said his country had received a delivery of MK-84 bombs from the US late on Saturday, after Trump overturned a block on exporting the munitions placed by his predecessor, Joe Biden.

Biden initially shipped thousands of MK-84s to Israel after Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, but later declined to clear the bombs for export out of concern for their impact on Gaza. The powerful 2,000-pound bombs have a wide blast radius and can rip through concrete and metal, destroying entire buildings.

Katz said the shipment represented a “significant asset” for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and served as evidence of the “strong alliance between Israel and the United States”.

Fears had been high that the fragile ceasefire agreement in Gaza could collapse, after a dispute over a planned hostage release, which was nearly aborted but ultimately went ahead on Saturday.

A couple who “risked it all” by quitting their jobs and selling their home to travel the world with their three children said the adventure had saved them as a family.

Chris and Tamira Hutchinson were “living from paycheck to paycheck” and barely spent any time together at home in Corby, Northamptonshire.

They sold their three-bedroom house almost two years ago and drove straight to the airport to start their new life with their three daughters, Olivia, 10, Scarlett, eight, and Bella, four.

“As a family, we were pretty much broken. But now we are living our dream,” Chris says.

Despite working “every hour under the sun” – Chris as a personal trainer and Tamira as a swimming teacher – they could not keep up with the cost of living in the UK.

“We went down to one car, we got rid of Sky TV, we didn’t go on holiday but the bills kept going up and up,” says Tamira.

“We only ate together as a family once a month because we didn’t get time. We were just working to make ends meet.”

It was during Covid that they first talked about selling up and travelling the world.

“We had a chance to breathe and we realised we didn’t want to go back to the life we were living,” Chris says.

The couple put their house up for sale in 2022 but it took longer to sell than they anticipated and they nearly backed out of the plan. When it finally sold in May 2023, they drove straight to Heathrow.

“Our last night in the house, we were all on the floor because we had sold all our furniture,” says Chris.

“We didn’t have the money to book our flights until we got the cash from the house, so we went to a hotel near Heathrow and booked flights to Kuala Lumpur [Malaysia].

“It was a huge risk. We thought it might not work and we might want to go home, but we’ve never looked back.”

Chris taught himself videography before they left so he could document their travels on social media, which has turned into their biggest source of income.

“We were already making videos about family life, but we didn’t have a huge amount of followers,” the 36-year-old explains. “We had 7,000 subscribers on YouTube but now we have 100,000, and we had about 12,000 on TikTok where as now we have 250,000.”

After exploring Malaysia, they went to Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia and Qatar.

It was during their trip to China that their social media “blew up” and the family “accidentally became famous” in the country.

One video they made about their drinks being dropped off by a drone received eight million views on TikTok.

They also saw a huge growth on Chinese social media platforms, where they have over one million followers and their videos reach tens of millions of views.

The couple say the trip has been “incredible”, but there have inevitably been tough times.

Tamira got dengue fever in Thailand, their family credit card got swallowed by a machine in Vietnam and all five of them got a sickness bug while staying in a hostel in the Philippines.

“Another difficult time was when we got lost in China. We were walking round with all our possessions in the early hours of the morning and our phone maps didn’t work. But we eventually found our hotel and we can laugh about it now,” Tamira says.

They have based themselves on the Malaysian island of Penang for the last few months, where their daughters, who are home schooled by Tamira, are “thriving”.

“They are learning about different cultures, currencies, languages and how to get around,” Chris says.

“All three of them have always been 110% on board with this idea, but if they ever changed their minds and wanted to go home, we would listen to them.

“They have grown in confidence so much and they make friends wherever they go. There are a lot of digital nomad families travelling round, who are working remotely.”

The Hutchinsons say they have got the next five years planned out, with trips to Dubai, Australia, India, Sri Lanka and Cambodia on the cards this year.

They might also go back to the UK briefly, but they have no plans at the moment to return permanently, because their “quality of life is so much better now”.

The couple receive lots of messages asking for advice and say they hope to inspire other parents.

“It’s not flowers all the time but if you’re a person who enjoys a challenge and enjoys spending time with your family, go for it. You will never know until you try,” Tamira says.

“It was a dream and we made it happen,” Chris adds. “As a family we have loved every moment and we have risen to the challenges.”

The US government is trying to rehire nuclear safety employees it had fired on Thursday, after concerns grew that their dismissal could jeopardise national security, US media reported.

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

The department is responsible for with designing, building and overseeing the US nuclear weapons stockpile.

The terminations are part of a 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.

US media reported that more than 300 NNSA staff were let go, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.

That number was disputed by a spokesperson for the Department of Energy, who told CNN that “less than 50 people” were dismissed from NNSA.

The Thursday layoffs included staff stationed at facilities where weapons are built, according to CNN.

The Trump administration has since tried to reverse their terminations, according to media outlets, but has reportedly struggled to reach the people that were fired after they were locked out of their federal email accounts.

A memo sent to NNSA employees on Friday and obtained by NBC News read: “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”

“Please work with your supervisors to send this information (once you get it) to people’s personal contact emails,” the memo added.

Last week, nearly 10,000 federal workers were let go across several agencies, 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.

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 Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), 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.

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.”

Linda Koistinen and her husband Dale stood outside a Tesla dealership in Berkeley, California, on Saturday, protesting.

They were not there to take aim at the company’s electric vehicles, but the person behind Tesla – Elon Musk – and join with others who are upset at the world’s richest man’s work to disrupt and take apart large portions of the US government.

“It’s a place where we can make a visible stand against him personally,” Ms Koistinen told the BBC. “He should not be deciding the fate of our democracy by disassembling our government piece by piece. It’s not right.”

As part of an effort organizers dubbed #TeslaTakeover, clutches of protesters across the country gathered outside the company’s showrooms, having largely planned when to meet and where on the social media platform Bluesky, an upstart competitor to Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter.

In some places, those protests barely numbered a dozen, with people in Washington DC, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and Lyndhurst, Ohio, stamping their feet to stay warm amid snow and cold weather. Some held signs that read “Say no to Doge” and “Deport Musk”.

The protest in Berkeley – a top California city for electric car ownership – numbered 200.

As part of his White House-backed effort called Doge, for Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has been sending teams into government agencies to comb through data and pushing for massive spending cuts as well as “clawbacks” of money already spent.

President Donald Trump, who received an historic amount of campaign donations from Musk, is on the same page, freezing hiring as well as laying off thousands of federal employees.

Musk says he has uncovered wasteful spending and his work is aimed at making the government operate more smoothly. But to many, he is stopping the government from functioning while making decisions that should be left to elected leaders and accessing private information.

“It’s just really grinding on the mind,” said Dale Koistinen. “I’m 84 years old. This is unbelievable. This is a takeover of our government.”

Along with X, Musk also is the primary owner SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company. But it is Tesla he is most known for and Tesla is where people unhappy with his Doge work are taking out their anger.

For days, concerned Americans have been asking fellow citizens to dump their Tesla stock and sell their Tesla vehicles.

Singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow posted a video to Instagram that showed her Tesla being towed away.

“There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with,” she wrote in the caption. “So long Tesla.”

Crow added that she was donating proceeds from the car’s sale to National Public Radio in the U.S., a frequent target of Musk’s ire.

Tesla stock surged following Donald Trump’s election in November. Musk contributed a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s re-election effort, and hit the trail on Trump’s behalf in the final days of the campaign.

But after touching an all-time high in December, the company’s shares have shed 30% of their value with a pronounced selloff since Trump was inaugurated last month.

Saturday’s protests were promoted by prominent disinformation researcher Joan Donovan and the actor Alex Winter, who played Bill in the 80s movie “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

Teah Jackson, though, noticed the Berkeley protest during an outing with her girlfriend, and stopped to show her support.

“It’s hopeful,” Jackson told the BBC. “It’s an acknowledgement that people aren’t going to go down without a fight and that they’re going to continue to push for what they believe in.”

“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

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.

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.”

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.”