This article contains distressing details and references to suicide. Some of the names have been changed to protect identities.

Kateryna cannot talk about her son, Orest, without tears. Her voice trembles with anger as she explains how she found out the news that he had died on the front line in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine in 2023.

According to the official investigation by the army, he died by a “self-inflicted wound”, something Katernya finds hard to believe.

Kateryna has asked for her and her late son to remain anonymous due to the stigma that surrounds suicide and mental health in Ukraine.

Orest was a quiet 25-year-old who loved books and dreamed of an academic career. His poor eyesight had made him initially unfit for service at the start of the war, his mother says.

But in 2023, a recruitment patrol stopped him in the street. His eyesight was re-evaluated and he was deemed fit to fight. Not long after, he was sent to the front as a communications specialist.

While Ukraine collectively mourns the loss of more than 45,000 soldiers who have died since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a quieter tragedy unfolds in the shadows.

There are no official statistics surrounding suicide among soldiers. Officials describe them as isolated incidents. Yet human rights advocates and bereaved families believe they may be in the hundreds.

“Orest was caught, not summoned,” Kateryna says bitterly.

The local recruitment centre denied wrongdoing to the BBC, saying impaired vision made Orest “partially fit” during wartime.

Once deployed near Chasiv Yar in Donetsk, Orest became increasingly withdrawn and depressed, Kateryna recalls.

She still writes letters to her son every day – 650 and counting – her grief made worse by how Ukraine classifies suicide as a non-combat loss. Families of those who take their own lives receive no compensation, no military honours and no public recognition.

“In Ukraine, it’s as if we’ve been divided,” says Kateryna. “Some died the right way, and others died the wrong way.”

“The state took my son, sent him to war, and brought me back a body in a bag. That’s it. No help, no truth, nothing.”

For Mariyana from Kyiv, the story is heartbreakingly similar. She too wishes to keep her identity and her late husband’s hidden.

Her husband Anatoliy volunteered to fight in 2022. He was initially refused because of his lack of military experience but he “kept coming back until they took him”, she says with a faint smile.

Anatoliy was deployed as a machine-gunner near Bakhmut, one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

“He said that, after one mission, about 50 guys were killed,” Maryana recalls. “He came back different; quiet; distant.”

After losing part of his arm, Anatoliy was sent to hospital. One evening, after a phone call with his wife, he took his own life in the hospital yard.

“The war broke him,” she says through tears. “He couldn’t live with what he’d seen.”

Because Anatoliy died by suicide, officials denied him a military burial.

“When he stood on the front line, he was useful. But now he’s not a hero?”

Mariyana feels betrayed: “The state threw me to the roadside. I gave them my husband, and they left me alone with nothing.”

She has also felt stigma from other widows.

Her only source of support is an online community of women like her – widows of soldiers who took their own lives.

They want the government to change the law, so that their bereaved families have the same rights and recognition.

Viktoria, who we met in Lviv, still cannot talk about her husband’s death publicly for fear of condemnation.

Her husband Andriy had a congenital heart condition, but insisted on joining the army. He became a driver in a reconnaissance unit and witnessed some of the most intense battles, including the liberation of Kherson.

In June 2023, Viktoria received a phone call telling her Andriy had taken his own life.

“It was like the world had collapsed,” she says.

His body arrived 10 days later, but she was told she could not see it.

An attorney she later hired found inconsistencies in the investigation into his death. The photos from the scene made her doubt the official version of her husband’s death. The Ukrainian military has since agreed to reopen the investigation, recognising failures.

Now she is fighting to re-open the case: “I’m fighting for his name. He can’t defend himself anymore. My war isn’t over.”

Oksana Borkun runs a support community for military widows.

Her organisation now includes about 200 families bereaved by suicide.

“If it’s suicide, then he’s not a hero – that’s what people think,” she says. “Some churches refuse to hold funerals. Some towns won’t put up their photos on memorial walls.”

Many of these families doubt the official explanations of death. “Some cases are simply written off too quickly,” she adds. “And some mothers open the coffin and find bodies covered in bruises.”

Military chaplain Father Borys Kutovyi says he has seen at least three suicides in his command since the full-scale invasion began. But to him even one is too many.

“Every suicide means we failed somewhere.”

He believes that many recruited soldiers, unlike career servicemen, are especially psychologically vulnerable.

Both Osksana and Father Borys say those who died by suicide should be considered heroes.

Olha Reshetylova, Ukraine’s Commissioner for Veterans’ Rights, says she receives reports of up to four military suicides each month and admits not enough is being done: “They’ve seen hell. Even the strongest minds can break.”

She says her office is pushing for systemic reform but it can take years to set up a good military psychology unit.

“Families have a right to the truth,” she says. “They don’t trust investigators. In some cases, suicides may cover up murders.”

When it comes to honouring theses soldiers as military heroes, she prefers to look to the future.

“These people were your neighbours, your colleagues,” says Ms Reshetylova. “They’ve walked through hell. The warmer we welcome them, there will be fewer tragedies”

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this story you can find information and support on the BBC Action online website here.

The suspect ‍in ​last week’s ‌mass shooting at Brown University has been found dead in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, following a six-day multi-state manhunt, police say.

They identified the suspect as Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national who studied at the university in Providence, Rhode Island, about 25 years ago.

Providence police chief Oscar Perez said video evidence and tips from the public led investigators to a car-rental location where they found the suspect’s name and matched him to their person of interest.

Officials said they also believe Valente killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor two days after the 13 December shooting at Brown.

Authorities have not provided a motive for either attack.

Brown University president Christina Paxson said that Valente was enrolled at the Ivy League school from the autumn of 2000 to the following spring, and was studying for a PhD in physics.

He had “no current active affiliation” to Brown, she said.

Officials said they believe Valente shot and killed MIT professor Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, on Monday at his home in Brookline, which is about 50 miles (80km) from Providence.

Both the victim and the suspect had studied at the same university in Portugal in the late 1990s, police said.

The cases were linked when the suspect’s vehicle was identified via CCTV footage and a witness at Brown University.

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Valente was found dead with a satchel and two firearms. Evidence in a car nearby matched to the scene in Providence.

The same car was spotted nearby to the scene of the professor’s shooting.

Initial findings suggest Valente died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and police were unable to comment on how long he might have been inside the storage unit.

“Even though the suspect was found dead tonight our work is not done. There are many questions that need to be answered,” FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Ted Docks said, adding that the agency had deployed approximately 500 agents to assist local authorities in the investigation.

Leah B Foley, the US state attorney representing Massachusetts, said Valente was using a phone that “obfuscated” tracking.

“He was sophisticated in hiding his tracks.”

Meanwhile, the US has suspended its green card lottery scheme in the wake of the shooting, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying Valente “should never have been allowed in our country”.

Noem said the Portuguese national had entered the US through the diversity lottery immigrant visa programme (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card.

The programme makes up to 50,000 visas available each year through a random selection process among entries from countries with low rates of immigration to the US.

She has paused the visa scheme under President Donald Trump’s direction to “ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme”.

For days, members of the public had expressed frustration at the investigation into the shooting at Brown University last Saturday, after it appeared to yield little progress almost a week after the attack.

A gunman burst into Brown University’s Barus & Holley engineering building and opened fire during final exams.

Two students were killed and a further nine injured. Six remain in hospital.

Authorities identified the two dead victims as Ella Cook, 19, a second-year student from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, an Uzbek-American first-year student.

Police had asked for patience from Rhode Islanders and on Wednesday released new footage of a person of interest, where a man was seen walking around the university campus with a black mask over his mouth.

The FBI also offered a $50,000 (£37,350) reward for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the attack.

The Australian government has announced a gun buyback scheme in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack – its deadliest mass shooting in decades.

The scheme is the largest since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which left 35 people dead and prompted Australia to introduce world-leading gun control measures.

Fifteen people were killed and dozens injured on Sunday when two gunmen, believed to have been motivated by “Islamic State ideology”, opened fire on a Jewish festival at the country’s most iconic beach.

On Friday, police also said there was no ongoing reason to detain a group of men who were arrested in Sydney over their “extremist Islamic ideology”.

Police allege Sunday’s attack, which they have declared a terrorist incident, was committed by a father-son duo. Naveed Akram, 24, has been charged with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder and one of committing a terrorist act. His father Sajid was killed during the attack.

The day after the shooting, national cabinet – which includes representatives from the federal government and leaders from all states and territories – agreed to tighten gun controls.

Speaking to media on Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said there are now more than 4 million firearms in Australia – more than at the time of the Port Arthur massacre.

“We know that one of these terrorists held a firearm licence and had six guns, in spite of living in the middle of Sydney’s suburbs… There’s no reason why someone in that situation needed that many guns.

“If you’re going to reduce the number of guns, then a buyback scheme has to be a piece of that puzzle,” Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett added.

The new scheme will purchase surplus, newly banned and illegal firearms, and will be funded on a 50-50 basis with the states and territories. Hundreds of thousands of firearms will be collected and destroyed, the government estimates.

National cabinet has also agreed to impose limits on the number of firearms held by any one individual, restrict open-ended firearms licensing and the types of guns that are legal and make Australian citizenship a condition of holding a firearm licence.

Work on a national firearms register will be accelerated and firearm regulators will have better access to criminal intelligence.

On Friday, New South Wales Police said they were preparing to release seven men with extremist ideology, but that they would continue to be monitored.

Tactical officers swarmed on the group, who had travelled from Victoria and were known to police there, in dramatic scenes in the suburb of Liverpool on Thursday. Officers found a knife, but no guns or other weapons.

NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told a press conference there is “no confirmed link” between the alleged terrorists and the detained group, but that Bondi Beach was one of several locations the latter was intending to visit.

“Whilst this specific threat posed by the males is unknown, I can say that the potential [for] a violent offence being committed was such that we were not prepared to tolerate the risk,” Commissioner Lanyon said.

TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance has signed binding agreements with US and global investors to operate its business in America, TikTok’s boss told employees on Thursday.

Half of the joint venture will be owned by a group of investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, according to a memo sent by chief executive Shou Zi Chew.

The deal, which is set to close on 22 January, would end years of efforts by Washington to force ByteDance to sell its US operations over national security concerns.

It is in ​line with a deal unveiled in September, when US President Donald Trump delayed the enforcement of a law that would ban the app unless it was sold.

In the memo, TikTok said the deal will enable “over 170 million Americans to continue discovering a world of endless possibilities as part of a vital global community”.

Under the agreement, ByteDance will retain 19.9% of the business, while Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX will hold 15% each.

Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, according to the memo.

The White House previously said that Oracle, which was co-founded by Trump supporter Larry Ellison, will license TikTok’s recommendation algorithm as part of the deal.

The deal comes after a series of delays.

In April 2024, during President Joe Biden’s administration, the US Congress passed a law to ban the app over national security concerns, unless it was sold.

The law was set to go into effect on 20 January 2025 but was pushed back multiple times by Trump, while his administration worked out a deal to transfer ownership.

Trump said in September that he had spoken on the phone to China’s President Xi Jinping, who he said had given the deal the go ahead.

The platform’s future remained unclear after the leaders met face to face in October.

The app’s fate was clouded by ongoing tensions between the two nations on trade and other matters.

“TikTok has become a bargaining chip in the wider US-China relationship,” said Alvin Graylin, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“With recent softening tensions, Beijing’s sign off on the structure and algorithm licensing now looks less like capitulation and more like calibrated de-escalation, letting both capitals claim a win at home.”

The White House referred the BBC to TikTok when contacted for comment.

Oracle and Silver Lake declined to comment. The BBC has contacted MGX for comment.

The deal drew critiques from Senate Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, who said it wouldn’t do “a thing to protect the privacy of American user”.

Under the terms, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is set to be retrained on American user data to ensure feeds are free from outside manipulation.

“It’s unclear that it will even put TikTok’s algorithm in safer hands,” said Sen Wyden.

He opposed the 2024 law, and was among the US lawmakers who lobbied to extend the TikTok deadline in January in a bid to give Congress more time to mitigate threats from China.

Some users also expressed caution at the prospect of new investors.

Small business owner Tiffany Cianci, who has more than 300,000 followers and nearly four million likes on the platform, said she hopes the incoming investors will maintain the same user experience for entrepreneurs like her.

“I hope small business owners are protected,” Ms Cianci said.

TikTok has said that more than seven million small businesses market their products and services on TikTok in the US.

“I reserve judgement on whether or not we have saved the app for those small business,” she added.

Ms Cianci said she chose TikTok for promotion because the platform offers profit-sharing on terms that are more favourable than what competitors like Meta offer.

Over the last year, Ms Cianci has been active in organising protests in Washington and on TikTok aimed at saving the app.

A former Nascar driver and his family were among the seven people killed in a plane crash at a regional airport in North Carolina, the car-racing organisation has said.

A highway patrol spokesman said people on the ground confirmed that Greg Biffle was among those who boarded the plane.

The Cessna C550 crashed while landing at Statesville Regional Airport around 10:20 local time (15:20GMT), officials investigating the incident told reporters.

“Greg was more than a champion driver, he was a beloved member of the NASCAR community, a fierce competitor, and a friend to so many,” Nascar said in a statement where it confirmed Biffle had died along with his wife, daughter, son, and three others.

“His passion for racing, his integrity, and his commitment to fans and fellow competitors alike made a lasting impact on the sport,” the company added.

Beyond the racetrack, Biffle was remembered for helping in North Carolina in the aftermath of last year’s Hurricane Helene, when he used his personal helicopter to rescue stranded residents and deliver supplies.

Tributes to the former racer poured in on Thursday.

“Heartbreaking news out of Statesville,” North Carolina Governor Josh Stein posted on X. “Beyond his success as a NASCAR driver, Greg Biffle lived a life of courage and compassion and stepped up for western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.”

Motorsport YouTuber Garrett Mitchell wrote on Facebook that Biffle and his family were on their way to spend the afternoon with him.

“Unfortunately, I can confirm Greg Biffle, his wife Cristina, daughter Emma, and son Ryder were on that plane… because they were on their way to spend the afternoon with us,” he wrote on Facebook. “We are devastated. I’m so sorry to share this.”

Statesville Airport Director John Ferguson described the aircraft as a corporate jet and said it was already engulfed in flames when he arrived on the scene.

The Cessna C550 aircraft is owned by a private company associated with Biffle, CBS, the BBC’s US partner, reported.

The jet took off around 10:06 local time and was in the air briefly before it crashed on the east end of the runway.

Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash.

Statesville Airport will remain closed until further notice as crews clear debris off the runway, Mr Ferguson told reporters.

Officials did not provide any information about deaths or people aboard the aircraft during their first media conference.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation has sent in a team to investigate the fatal crash.

The Statesville Regional Airport (KSVH) is owned by the City of Statesville, which is about 45 minutes north of Charlotte.

It also provides aviation facilities for Fortune 500 companies and several Nascar racing teams.

Biffle, whose racing career spanned two decades, was named one of Nascar’s 75 Greatest Drivers in 2023. The 55-year-old won 19 Cup Series races in the Xfinity Series and Craftsman Truck Series.

Known as The Biff, the Vancouver, Washington, native received national notice in 1995 during that year’s Nascar Winter Heat Series, according to his Nascar profile.

He made a name for himself in the Craftsman Truck Series, winning the 1998 Rookie of Year award and the 2000 series championship.

He went on to be named 2001 Rookie of the Year in the Xfinity Series and to win the 2002 championship, becoming the first driver with championships in both the Xfinity Series and the Truck Series.

He also co-founded the organisation’s Sand Outlaws Series. Although he scaled back on racing after 2016, he seemingly came out of retirement in 2019 for a one-off race at Texas Motor Speedway, which he won.

“Racing is racing,” he told Nascar.com, external in 2021. “It’s that adrenaline, you want to be better than the competition, you want to build a better piece and have a faster car. I just enjoy the competition.”

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released a batch of around 70 photos from the estate of late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

It was the third such release from a tranche of over 95,000 photos the committee has acquired from Epstein’s estate. It includes images of quotes from the book Lolita written across a woman’s body, and redacted images of women’s foreign passports.

It came hours before the 19 December deadline for the Department of Justice to release all files related to its investigation into Epstein.

“These new images raise more questions about what exactly the Department of Justice has in its possession,” said ranking member of the committee, Robert Garcia.

Some of the photos released on Thursday show Epstein speaking with professor and activist Noam Chomsky aboard a private plane; Bill Gates standing beside a woman whose face is redacted; Steve Bannon sitting at a desk across from Epstein, and former Alphabet president Sergey Brin at a dinner event. The BBC has attempted to contact each for comment.

These are the latest wealthy, powerful men to be seen in Epstein estate photos released by the House Oversight Committee – previously released photos also show US President Donald Trump and former president Bill Clinton, as well as film director Woody Allen, former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, attorney Alan Dershowitz, former prince Andrew Mountbatton-Windsor, and others.

Appearing in the photos is not evidence of any wrongdoing, and many of the pictured men have said they were never involved in Epstein’s illegal activity.

In a statement accompanying the photo release, Democrats on the US House Oversight Committee said the Epstein estate did not provide context or timings for the pictures.

“Photos were selected to provide the public with transparency into a representative sample of the photos received from the estate, and to provide insights into Epstein’s network and his extremely disturbing activities,” the statement says.

The release also includes several photos of quotes from the Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita written in black ink across different parts of a woman’s body, like her chest, foot, hipbone, and back. Lolita tells the story of a young girl who was groomed by a middle-aged literature professor.

One quote from the book written across a woman’s chest reads, “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth”.

There are also a number of photos of female passports and identification documents from countries around the world, including Lithuania, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

Most of the information on the documents, like names and birth dates, is redacted but the House Oversight Committee said in a press release that the passports belong to “women whom Jeffrey Epstein and his conspirators were engaging”.

Another photo shows Epstein sitting at a desk closely surrounded by three female figures whose faces have been redacted – one has her hand on Epstein’s chest under his shirt, and another is crouching to look at a nearby laptop. Epstein appears to be helping the third put on a bracelet.

Another image released is a screenshot of text messages from an unknown person who says they have been sent “some girls” and are asking for “$1000 per girl”.

The committee has thousands of images in its possession from the Epstein estate, which are “both graphic and mundane”, its statement on Thursday explained.

The House Oversight Committee first subpoenaed the estate of Epstein, who died in a New York prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on allegations of sex trafficking, in August.

The photos and files the Epstein estate gave to the committee are separate from what is largely referred to as “the Epstein files”. Those are documents within the justice department’s possession related to its own investigation into Epstein.

Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Trump signed into law last month, the DOJ has until 19 December to release its files. The extent of what’s contained in the DOJ’s files is unknown, and it’s likely that much of the content will be heavily redacted, similar to House Oversight Committee materials.

South Korea’s well-coiffed president is on a mission to help the country’s balding residents.

In his crosshairs: the national health insurance scheme, which he suggests should foot the bill for hair loss treatments.

President Lee Jae Myung made the suggestion to officials at a briefing on this week, arguing that medical treatments for hair loss used to be seen as “cosmetic”, but now they are viewed as “a matter of survival”.

South Korea’s national health insurance currently covers treatments for hair loss caused by medical conditions. But it excludes people with hereditary hair loss because that does not threaten someone’s life, health minister Jeong Eun-kyeong explained at the meeting on Tuesday.

“Is it just a matter of whether to define hereditary disease as a disease?” Lee asked in response.

Lee’s proposal has earned him praise among social media users, one of whom called him the “best president in history”.

But not everyone is as enthused – not even those who stand to benefit from subsidised hair loss treatment.

The move feels “a bit like a vote-grabbing policy”, says Song Ji-hoon, a 32-year-old Seoul resident who takes hair loss medication.

“Saving money sounds nice, but honestly it costs less than 300,000 won ($200) a year, so… is it even necessary?”

In South Korea, a country notorious for its strict beauty standards, baldness comes with a stigma that can prove especially troubling for young people.

Out of 240,000 people in the country who visited hospitals for hair loss last year, 40% were in their 20s or 30s, according to authorities.

“My fringe keeps receding and won’t stay up, so I can’t get a perm or use wax properly,” says Lee Won-woo, 33, who lives in North Chungcheong province.

“Because I can’t style my hair the way I want, I end up thinking I look unkempt and unattractive, and that has seriously eroded my confidence.”

Mr Lee says while he would be “thankful” for subsidised hair-loss drugs, “the national health insurance system is already running a deficit and struggling financially”.

“This is not a situation where money can just be handed out,” he says.

And balding, he notes, is a “cosmetic issue”.

“It’s a natural part of ageing, not an illness or a disease,” he says. “I understand the emotional pain, but that doesn’t change the reality.”

South Korea’s national health insurance scheme, which faced a record deficit of 11.4 trillion Korean won ($7.7bn; £5.8bn) last year, is set to be further stressed by its ageing population.

To address the financial burden hair loss treatments would cause to the system, President Lee said on Tuesday that authorities could impose coverage limits.

But some critics argue priority should be given to helping more vulnerable members of society.

The Korean Medical Association said in a statement on Wednesday that government funds should go to more serious diseases before hair loss. Social media users are similarly pointing to bigger social woes – such as South Korea’s high suicide rate and misogyny faced by women.

“In a country where people bristle and react hysterically when there are calls to cover sanitary pads … or breast cancer medication under national health insurance, announcing that hair-loss drugs will be covered would honestly feel like a bad joke,” one person wrote on X.

“If hair loss truly becomes something that determines survival in a society, then changing that society should be the role of politics,” wrote another.

This may seem like an unlikely crusade for the president, but the proposal to insure hair loss treatment was a rallying cry in Lee’s unsuccessful 2022 presidential campaign.

Back then, Lee and his team gathered feedback from people struggling with hair loss and even starred in a viral parody of a hair loss commercial – a move that proved popular among some voters.

But critics accused Lee of using gimmicks to draw young male voters, who were backing his conservative opponent in large numbers on a rising tide of anti-feminism.

Lee lost the 2022 election. This year, he ran again and won, but his messages about hair loss treatment were cut from the campaign.

“There is no reason he needs to be bound by the promise this time,” says Don S Lee, an associate professor of political science at Korea University – though he added that the president may be trying to “expand his base of supporters” for the upcoming local elections in mid-2026.

Since becoming president, Lee has put a clear focus on the country’s youth, many of whom face intense competition and bleak economic prospects.

On Tuesday, Lee also suggested adding obesity drugs to the national health insurance scheme, arguing that young people felt “increasingly ostracised” from the scheme because its benefits were not tailored towards their needs.

Dr Lee, the politics professor, is sceptical as to how serious the president actually is about bringing hair loss treatment under national health insurance coverage.

“Personally, I doubt President Lee will carry on this issue and take further action,” he says.

“It’s just a very strategic gesture targeting young male voters, signalling that ‘I am also caring about you’.”

When bullets began flying at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday, strangers Wayne and Jessica found themselves in the same nightmare scenario. They couldn’t find their three-year-olds.

In the chaos, separately, they desperately scanned the green. People who’d gathered to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah screamed and ducked. Others ran. Some didn’t make it far.

The 10-odd minutes that followed were the longest of their lives.

Wayne’s body was acting as a human shield for his eldest daughter, but his mind was elsewhere: with his missing daughter Gigi.

“We had to wait all that time for the gunshots to stop. It felt like eternity,” he tells the BBC.

Unbeknown to him, Jessica’s gaze had caught on a little girl in a rainbow skirt, confused, scared and alone – calling out for her mummy and daddy.

The pregnant mother couldn’t protect her own child, so in that moment she decided she’d protect this one. She smothered Gigi’s body with her own, and uttered “I’ve got you”, over and over again. They could feel the moment a woman about a metre away was shot and killed.

By the time the air finally fell silent, Wayne had become all but convinced Gigi was dead.

“I was looking amongst the blood and the bodies,” he says, growing emotional.

“What I saw – no human should ever see that.”

Eventually, he caught a glimpse of a familiar colourful skirt and found his daughter, stained in red – but okay, still shrouded under Jessica. Her son too would soon be found, unharmed.

“She said she’s just a mother and she acted with mother instincts,” Wayne says.

“[But] she’s a superhero. We’ll be indebted to her for the rest of our lives.”

It is one of the incredible accounts of selflessness and courage that have emerged from one of Australia’s darkest days.

Declared a terror attack by police, it is the deadliest in Australian history. Dozens were injured and 15 people – including a 10-year-old girl – were killed by the two gunmen, who police say were inspired by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).

More people undoubtedly would have been harmed if it weren’t for Ahmed al Ahmed.

A Syrian-Australian shop owner, he’d been having coffee nearby when the shooting began. His father told BBC Arabic Ahmed “saw the victims, the blood, women and children lying on the street, and then acted”.

Footage of the moment he sprung out from behind a car and wrestled a gun off one of the attackers immediately went viral. He was shot multiple times, and may lose his arm.

Another man, Reuven Morrison, was also seen on the video hurling objects at the same attacker in the moments after Ahmed disarmed him.

Sheina Gutnik easily recognised her dad in the footage.

“He is not one to lie down. He is one to run towards danger,” Ms Gutnick told BBC partner CBS News.

He had jumped up the second the shooting started, she said, and was throwing bricks at one of the gunmen before he was fatally shot.

“He went down fighting, protecting the people he loved most.”

The first two victims of the assault, Boris and Sofia Gurman, were also captured on dashcam footage grappling with one of the men for his weapon. When they succeeded, he got another gun from the car he’d just climbed out of and killed them.

“Even in the final moments of their lives, they showed the depth of who they were by facing those moments with courage, selflessness and love,” read a message from their proud son Alex, which was read out at the couple’s funeral on Friday.

“In doing so, they reminded us that they were not only devoted parents, but, in every sense of the word, heroes.”

The list goes on.

Chaya, only 14 years old, was shot in the leg while shielding two young children from gunfire.

Jack Hibbert – a beat cop just four months into the job – was hit in both the head and the shoulder but continued to help festival attendees until he physically couldn’t, his family said. The 22-year-old will survive, but with life-changing injuries.

Lifeguard Jackson Doolan was photographed sprinting over from a neighbouring beach during the attack, armed with critical medical supplies. He didn’t even pause to put on shoes.

Others at Bondi rushed from the beach into the fire, their red-and-yellow lifesaving boards working overtime as stretchers. One lifeguard even dived back into the surf to save swimmers who’d been sent into a panic by the shooting.

Student Levi Xu, 31, told the BBC he felt he could not shout for help, as he didn’t want to draw attention to himself or risk any potential saviours being targeted.

But lifeguard Rory Davey saw him and his friend struggling, and dragged them back to shore.

“We stood up and wanted to thank him, but he had already gone back into the sea to rescue other people,” says Mr Xu.

Thousands of Australians flocked to donate blood, dwarfing the previous record.

Authorities say many off-duty first responders travelled to Bondi on Sunday – from as far as two hours away – simply because they knew there was a need. Likewise, healthcare workers rushed to hospitals when they heard of the attack, shift or no shift, confronting unspeakable trauma to save lives.

“[They were] just coming into the station and saying ‘I’m ready to go’. Coming to the scene and saying ‘I’m ready… put me in’,” New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park told the BBC.

“Normally on a Sunday night, there is staff available to run one operating theatre [at St Vincent’s Hospital]. There were eight operating at once,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

State premier Chris Minns, too, has been quick to praise the heroics of ordinary, everyday Australians.

“This is a terrible, wanton act of destructive violence. But there are still amazing people that we have in Australia, and they showed their true colours last night,” he said, the day after the attack.

Wayne says he shudders to think what would have happened without people like Jessica and Ahmed.

When he speaks to the BBC, he’s just attended a funeral for the gunmen’s youngest victim, 10-year-old Matilda.

“I was sitting at this funeral and I was just thinking, tears pouring out of my eyes… I could have been in the front… It could have been my little girl.”

“There could have been so much more devastation without the bravery of [these] people… someone who could run just comes in. Someone who could worry about their own child looks after another child.

“That’s what the world needs more of.”

The costs of the border war between Thailand and Cambodia are cruelly obvious in the hospital in Mongkol Borei, a breezy, low-rise complex surrounded by trees.

Wounded soldiers lie quietly on their beds. One man, his arm amputated from the elbow, has his wife sitting with him, smiling and trying to encourage him. The wife and child of another sit on a mat next to his bed.

Anaesthetist Sar Chanraksmey’s hands are shaking, and tears rim his eyes, as he shows me graphic images on his phone of the terrible blast injuries he has treated.

“My heart aches,” he says. “Please tell the world we just want peace.”

This second round of fighting between the two armies in less than six months has lasted longer than the five-day war in July, and been a lot more destructive.

There have been artillery exchanges all along the 800km (500-mile) border, and intense close-quarter battles between Thai and Cambodian soldiers for control of a few forested hilltops.

The Thai air force has had a free hand bombing targets inside Cambodia, which has limited air defences and no air force of its own to speak of.

Cambodia’s feared BM21 rockets, an inherently inaccurate weapon, have rained down on the Thai side of the border, killing a civilian and injuring others, despite an early evacuation by the authorities.

Cambodia does not publish the number of soldiers killed since hostilities resumed on 7 December, but the Thai military estimates that it might be several hundred.

On the Thai side, 21 soldiers have died. This discrepancy is a testament to the much larger and better equipped armed forces that Thailand has.

As in July, it is difficult to work out exactly why the 120-year-old dispute over small strips of territory has erupted into such a large-scale armed conflict.

Thailand has blamed Cambodian forces for an ambush of a team of Thai engineers on 7 December, in which two soldiers were injured. The Cambodian government accuses Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul of restarting the war to boost his prospects in the coming general election.

What is different this time is the determination of the Thai military to keep fighting until, in the words of its commanders, the Cambodian army no longer poses a threat on the border. It has rejected Cambodian calls for a ceasefire, and even snubbed President’s Trump’s appeal to both sides to call a truce.

The line you hear in conversations with Thai military officers is that Cambodia cannot be trusted to honour a ceasefire unless it has suffered much bigger losses than it did in July.

The twisted steel and gaping hole in the road bridge which crosses the Me Teuk river in Pursat province offer vivid evidence of that tough approach.

On 13 December Thai F-16 jets dropped several bombs, tearing out a 20-metre section of the Chinese-built bridge, which links a long strip of Cambodia’s southern border with Thailand to the rest of the country. They also struck an eight-storey building next to a casino, which the Thais say was being used as a military command post.

The unintended, or perhaps intended, consequence of this was to prompt an exodus of Chinese men and women, who we saw pulling roller suitcases and clutching computers and screens as they made their way noisily across the river on the old steel bridge, which is still intact but unsuitable for heavy vehicles.

The officials who escorted us to the bridge explained, without much conviction, that they had been working in an upstream hydroelectric power station; but their clothing, and the equipment they were carrying, made it near certain they had come from one of the scam compounds which operate in many of Cambodia’s border areas. They covered their faces and would not speak to us.

The association of the Cambodian leadership with the scam industry is a weak point in the country’s battle for international sympathy, and Thailand has made targeting it a core part of its military campaign, bombing several casino complexes.

The Cambodian government says it is now taking action against scam centres, but their proliferation in the country in recent years, and their link to a number of very powerful, politically-connected Cambodian figures, raises doubts about how sincere that action is.

Where the Cambodian government hopes it can win sympathy is in its pleas for peace. Its almost constant refrain since the fighting restarted has been an appeal to return to the July ceasefire, and for international mediation. In Cambodian cities, signs in English and Khmer proclaim its desire for peace – one echoed by almost every Cambodian you meet.

There are good reasons for this. Aside from the terrible punishment its soldiers are getting on the front lines, the impact on the economy must be severe, although statistics on this are hard to come by.

More than 700,000 migrant workers have come back from Thailand, nervous of possible hostility among the public there. Some 480,000 Cambodians have been uprooted from their homes, and panic over real or just rumoured Thai air strikes has forced many families to move more than once.

The $5bn (£3.7bn) border trade with Thailand has stopped. Border communities in both countries are being hurt. And the increasingly global push against online fraud, with the US and UK among others recently sanctioning several Cambodian tycoons, threatens a scam industry which, by some estimates, accounts for more than half the national economy.

But since President Trump’s decisive intervention to stop the fighting in July, attitudes in Thailand have hardened towards its smaller neighbour.

The shock of seeing a political crisis, one which brought down a Thai government, deliberately ignited by Hun Sen, the veteran leader who wields decisive influence in Cambodia, and who leaked a private phone conversation with the then Thai prime minister, has soured the public mood. As did compelling evidence that Cambodian soldiers were still laying landmines during the ceasefire which have left seven Thai soldiers with amputated limbs.

Efforts by President Trump and Malaysian prime minister Anwar Ibrahim to revive the earlier ceasefire have been met with a firm refusal by the Thai prime minister. “We don’t have to listen to anyone,” he said.

A restaurant owner in Surin, on the Thai side of the border, told us how different this conflict is from the brief war 14 years ago.

There have always been close links between people in Surin, where many speak Khmer, and those on the Cambodian side. Many Cambodians work there.

Back in 2011 she said there was no public animosity towards them, and they stayed in Thailand throughout the fighting. This time she said there was much more suspicion of the Cambodians, and most of them left. She put this down to the incendiary comments on social media, which have whipped up an angry and distorted nationalism in both countries.

That makes it difficult for leaders on either side to be seen to be conciliatory, especially in Thailand, where, thanks to the crisis caused by Hun Sen’s leak, an election will take place next February. None of the parties contesting the election is supporting a ceasefire.

Thailand accuses Cambodia, with its calls for outside intervention, of playing the victim. Cambodia accuses Thailand of acting the bully. These are not new stereotypes, but they have been amplified so much this year it is hard to see where the trust that is essential for restoring their relations can be found.

“I was scared that my child’s nationality would change if he was born in Bangladesh,” says a heavily pregnant Sunali Khatun, 25, who returned to India earlier this month after being deported to the neighbouring country in June.

Ms Khatun, a domestic worker from India’s eastern state of West Bengal, was detained in Delhi with her husband, Danish Sheikh, and their eight-year-old son, and deported to Bangladesh on suspicion of being illegal immigrants. Bangladeshi authorities later jailed the family for entering the country unlawfully.

Her deportation made national headlines and was stridently criticised by the West Bengal government, who accused the Bharatiya Janata Party-led federal government of deporting her without cause, external. She is among hundreds of people who have been detained and deported to Bangladesh in the past couple of months on suspicion of being illegal immigrants.

Delhi has not provided official data about these deportations, but top sources in the Bangladesh government had earlier told the BBC that in May alone, more than 1,200 people were “illegally pushed in”. The same month, the government-run All India Radio reported, external that about 700 people had been sent back from Delhi.

Crackdowns on alleged Bangladeshi immigrants are not new in India. The two countries share close cultural ties and a porous 4,096km (2,545-mile) border spanning five states. West Bengal, like others along the frontier, has long seen waves of migration as people sought work or fled religious persecution.

But rights activists say, external the recent deportations target Muslims who speak Bengali – the language spoken in both West Bengal and Bangladesh – and the exercise is being conducted without due process.

Ms Khatun and her family, along with three neighbours – all Bengali-speaking Muslims – were deported after Delhi’s Foreign Regional Registration Office said they lacked documents proving their legal entry or stay in India. Her seven-year-old daughter was left behind, as she was staying with relatives when the family was detained.

Under protocol, authorities must verify a suspected illegal migrant’s claim with the home state. West Bengal Migrant Workers Welfare Board chairman Samirul Islam told the BBC this was not done in Ms Khatun’s case.

The BBC has written to Delhi’s home department that monitors deportations.

In December, India’s Supreme Court asked the federal government to allow Ms Khatun and her son to return on “humanitarian grounds” while her citizenship was investigated. She has since been living with her parents in West Bengal. Her husband, released on bail, remains in Bangladesh with a relative.

Ms Khatun, says she has mixed feelings about being allowed back in India.

She is relieved that her baby, due in January, will be an Indian citizen by birthright, but is anxious about her husband, whom she has not seen for more than three months since they were held in separate prison cells in Bangladesh.

On video calls, she says, he breaks down often, saying that he wants to come home.

“We are not from Bangladesh, we are Indian. Why did they do this to us?” Ms Khatun asks.

She alleges that about a week after being detained by the Delhi police, her family and their neighbours were flown to the India-Bangladesh border and “pushed” across by paramilitary personnel from the Border Security Force (BSF).

“They left us in a dense forest [in Bangladesh] with lots of rivers and streams,” she alleges and adds that when they tried to enter India by a route shown to them by locals, BSF guards beat up some in the group, including her husband, and then led them back into the forest they had initially been brought to.

The BBC has sent questions to the BSF seeking a response to Ms Khatun’s allegations.

With help from locals, the group travelled to Dhaka, where they wandered for days with little food or water before being arrested and jailed. She says the prison food was inadequate for a pregnant woman and that her cell had no toilet.

“I was scared because it was just my son and me. All we did was cry,” she says.

The BBC has written to Bangladesh’s home and prisons departments for a response to Sunali’s allegations.

Back in India, her family was making desperate trips to courts to prove her citizenship so that she could be brought back. Her case is being heard by the Supreme Court.

“My family has been torn apart,” Ms Khatun says, as she sits in her parent’s one-room shanty in West Bengal. With two young children and another one on the way, she says she doesn’t know how she’s going to feed all of them.

But she is sure about one thing.

“We may not make enough money to eat three square meals if we live here, but I will never go back to Delhi,” she says.

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This week, Taylor Swift talked about the Southport stabbing attack, King Charles shared good news about his cancer treatment, and a couple from Wales won a second million-pound lottery jackpot.

But how much attention did you pay to what else happened in the world over the past seven days?

Quiz collated by Ben Fell.

Fancy testing your memory? Try last week’s quiz, or have a go at something from the archives.

After 17 hours of at times heated debate, EU leaders agreed in the early hours of Friday morning to jointly raise €90bn (£79bn; $105bn) in zero-interest loans to keep Ukraine financially afloat for the next two years.

Kyiv had been clear: the money wasn’t a nice-to-have; it was a must-have.

With the US under Donald Trump no longer looking to provide new direct military aid to Ukraine, the war-torn country has turned to Europe.

Without the cash, Volodymyr Zelensky told EU leaders he wouldn’t have enough money to pay Ukrainian soldiers or buy the weapons he needed to counter Russian aggression.

The now agreed EU loan will be guaranteed by the bloc’s common budget.

But in a blow to Brussels’ desire to demonstrate decisive European unity over Ukraine to EU sceptics in Washington and Moscow, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic only agreed to support the plan – it required unanimity to be passed – if they were exempt from it individually.

Yet another indication of the divisions in Europe over attitudes to Ukraine and to Moscow.

Hungary and Slovakia are known to be closer to the Kremlin.

This brings them into direct confrontation with EU countries geographically nearer to Russia such as Poland and the Baltic States.

They view Ukraine’s survival against Russia as existential.

If Kyiv were to lose to Moscow on the battlefield because it was cash or weapons-strapped, they believe that would embolden Russia and would be a disaster for European security and stability more broadly.

Arriving at the start of Thursday’s fraught summit, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said EU leaders had a clear decision to make: pay money today, he said, or pay in blood tomorrow.

He said he wasn’t talking about Ukraine. He was talking about Europe.

The new EU joint-loan plan for Ukraine replaces a much-debated EU proposal to raise the €90bn using frozen Russian state assets held in the bloc (€210bn euros’ worth in total), mostly in Belgium.

Kyiv had described that idea as morally justified, considering the billions of dollars’ worth of destruction wreaked by Moscow on Ukraine.

But a number of EU countries feared legal retribution by Russia. They worried too that the eurozone’s international reputation as a safe destination for global assets could be damaged.

Brussels said on Friday it was considering using the frozen Russian assets eventually, to repay the EU loan to Ukraine. But that would be something to be worked out in the future – if a peace deal is signed.

For now, on top of the new EU loan, it’s estimated Ukraine will need another €45bn euros to cover all its costs for 2026/2027.

Brussels hopes non-EU allies of Ukraine like the UK, Japan and Canada might pick up some of that tab. Not going bankrupt now also opens the door for Kyiv to receive loans from banks like the IMF.

An HR executive caught on the big screen at a Coldplay concert embracing her boss has described how “the harassment has never ended” following the viral moment.

Kristin Cabot has spoken publicly for the first time about the video in which she was seen hugging Andy Byron, then-CEO of tech company Astronomer, at the show in July, before they abruptly ducked and hid from the camera.

Ms Cabot, 53, who was the company’s chief people officer, stepped down following Mr Byron’s resignation after the firm announced he would be placed on leave and investigated.

Speaking to the Times, Ms Cabot said she is looking for another job but has been told she is “unemployable”.

The video, which showed the pair swaying to music at the concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, before trying to hide, quickly went viral after Coldplay’s lead singer Chris Martin said to the crowd: “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy.”

It was watched millions of times, shared widely across platforms, and they became the butt of many jokes. Within a few days, the internet had moved on, but for Ms Cabot, her ordeal had only just begun.

“I became a meme, I was the most maligned HR manager in HR history,” Ms Cabot told The Times, external.

Ms Cabot was separated from her husband, who was also at the concert.

In a separate interview with the New York Times, external, she explained she was not in a sexual relationship with Mr Byron and the pair had never kissed before that night – although she admitted to having had a “crush” on her boss.

“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she said, adding she “took accountability and I gave up my career for that”.

As to why she chose to speak out now, Ms Cabot told the Times “…it’s not over for me, and it’s not over for my kids. The harassment never ended”.

Her two children are too embarrassed to be picked up from school by their mother, she said, or to go to sports games.

“They’re mad at me. And they can be mad at me for the rest of their lives – I have to take that.”

Ms Cabot wondered whether Mr Byron had received the same level of abuse in the wake of the scandal, the Times reported.

“I think as a woman, as women always do, I took the bulk of the abuse. People would say things like I was a ‘gold-digger’ or I ‘slept my way to the top’, which just couldn’t be further from reality,” she said.

“I worked so hard to dispel that all my life and here I was being accused of it.”

At the peak of the scandal, her appearance, body, face and clothes were scrutinised and picked apart, with many high-profile celebrities including Whoopi Goldberg piling on. Gwyneth Paltrow, who was once married to Chris Martin, even took part in a tongue-in-cheek promotional video for Astronomer.

Ms Cabot told the New York Times she received threatening messages after the incident, including from a person who said they knew where she shopped and wrote: “I’m coming for you”.

She said “my kids were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die”, and that her family began to dread public spaces and social events.

Women were the cruellest critics, she told the New York Times, with all of the in-person bullying, plus most of the phone calls and messages coming from women.

Her private details were put online (known as doxxing) and for weeks she was bombarded with up to 600 calls a day, the New York Times reported. The paparazzi outside her house was like a “parade” and there were 50 or 60 death threats, she said.

Things are starting to improve, though. Ms Cabot has found therapists for her children and she has started leaving the house to play tennis.

While she and Mr Byron kept in touch for a short while, exchanging “crisis management advice”, Ms Cabot said they decided that “speaking with each other was going to make it too hard for everyone to move on and heal,” and have not spoken since.

For his part, Mr Byron has not spoken publicly.

A fake statement purporting to be from him, complete with Coldplay lyrics, went viral after the concert and Astronomer had to release its own to say that he had not made any comment.

“Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding,” the statement read. “Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability.”

The company later said: “Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the Board of Directors has accepted.”

The BBC has tried to contact Andy Byron, via his former employer Astronomer, for comment.

Keith Lee has won Creator of the Year at the inaugural TikTok Awards in the US.

Hosted by TV personality La La Anthony at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, the fan-voted awards ceremony doled out logo-shaped trophies to content creators on the platform across fourteen categories, including Storyteller of the Year and Live Creator of the Year.

Heiress and noughties icon Paris Hilton, US gymnast Jordan Chiles and former reality TV star Bethenny Frankel were among the presenters.

The ceremony, which took place in front of a live audience and streamed on TikTok and Tubi, happened on the same night TikTok’s Chinese owner agreed to sell its US operations.

Comedian Adam Waheed and lifestyle influencers Kristy Sarah, Alix Earle and Brooke Monk were also nominated in the Creator of the Year category.

Love Island USA star Jeremiah Brown (@findjeremiah) won the Rising Star of the Year award, with Tini Younger (@tinekeyounger) taking home the Storyteller of Year Award. Zach and Pat Valentine (@valentinebrothers) were presented with the TikTok for Good award.

The gong for Video of the Year went to Bretman Sacayanan (@bretmanrock), for a clip featuring its creator and a flock of chickens, with Doechii’s “Anxiety” as its soundtrack.

The ceremony featured performances from R&B star Ciara, and Mr Fantasy, an online persona that many have speculate might be the alter ego of Riverdale actor KJ Apa.

The awards were held on the same day that TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance has signed binding agreements with US and global investors for the majority of its business in America.

Half of the joint venture will be owned by a group of investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, according to a memo sent by chief executive Shou Zi Chew.

ByteDance will retain 19.9% of the business, while Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX will hold 15% each.

Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors.

The deal, which is set to close on 22 January, would end years of efforts by Washington to force ByteDance to sell its US operations over national security concerns.

In the memo, TikTok said the deal will enable “over 170 million Americans to continue discovering a world of endless possibilities as part of a vital global community”.

A Romanian court has sentenced Wiz Khalifa to nine months in prison for smoking cannabis on stage.

The American rapper, real name Thomaz Cameron Jibril, admitted to smoking a joint during his performance at the Beach, Please! festival last year in Costinesti.

A Romanian appeals court overturned an earlier fine of 3,600 Romanian lei (£619; $829) for drug possession and ruled the rapper must serve the sentence in custody.

However he was sentenced in absentia. Earlier this week he was seen on stage performing with Gunna in California, and on Thursday he posted pictures and clips from his home on streaming platform Twitch and social media.

The BBC has approached the ten-time Grammy-nominated artist for comment.

Police briefly held and questioned Jibril after the concert on 13 July 2024, and prosecutors later charged him with possession of “risk drugs” for personal use.

Romanian investigators said he was in possession of more than 18 grams of cannabis and consumed an additional amount on stage.

In a written decision, the Constanța Court of Appeal judges said they overturned the original fine because the artist had sent “a message of normalisation of illegal conduct” and thereby encouraged “drug use among young people”.

Calling it an “ostentatious act”, the judges said the rapper was “a music performer, on the stage of a music festival well known among young people” who “possessed and consumed, in front of a large audience predominantly made up of very young people, an artisanal cigarette”.

Jabril said in a post on X a day after the incident, external that he did not mean to offend the country.

“They [the authorities] were very respectful and let me go. I’ll be back soon. But without a big ass joint next time.”

Romanian criminologist Vlad Zaha told BBC News that there was little-to-no chance of the US extraditing Jibril, and described the sentence as “unusually harsh”.

“Given the defendant’s wealth and connections, Romania’s lack of real negotiating power on extradition, and the legal and political status of cannabis in the US, it is highly unlikely that Wiz Khalifa will be sent to serve a prison sentence in Constanța, even though a formal judicial request will be submitted to the United States,” Mr Zaha said.

The artist, known for songs like Black and Yellow, See You Again and Young, Wild & Free, is often pictured smoking on his social media and founded his own marijuana brand in 2016.

Cannabis is legal recreational and medical use in some US states, but remains illegal under federal law.

The UK has named career diplomat Christian Turner as its new ambassador to the US, Downing Street has confirmed.

The previous ambassador, Lord Peter Mandelson, was sacked by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer after evidence, including emails and photos, emerged showing his continued association with the paedophile Jeffery Epstein.

Turner has spent nearly 30 years working across Whitehall and the Foreign Office.

As the new ambassador in Washington, he will have to navigate relations with the Trump administration, which have been partly strained by disagreements over how to handle the war in Ukraine, as well as President Donald Trump’s criticism of Europe.

The White House said it looked “forward to working with Ambassador Turner to further enhance the strong relationship between the United States ‍and United ‌Kingdom”, according to a statement sent to Reuters news agency.

The Foreign Office said in a statement that King Charles had formally appointed Turner, and the UK would now seek official approval – or agrément – for his appointment from the US.

Turner said he was “honoured” to be nominated for the position.

“At a pivotal time for the transatlantic relationship, I look forward to working with President Trump’s administration, and leaders in Congress, business and society to strengthen that bond in the years ahead,” he said.

Turner will face a heavy load of diplomatic tasks when he takes up the role.

Chiefly among them is working with the US on Trump’s push to end the war in Ukraine, which European nations fear will undercut the long-term interests of the continent in favour of a quick resolution.

Earlier this month, a US national security strategy document – signed by Trump – argued that Europe was facing “civilisational erasure” and questioned whether certain European countries could remain reliable allies.

Turner will also have to work to secure a long-anticipated but delayed tech deal with the US, amid concerns from some White House and congressional officials who have been critical of the UK’s online safety laws. Some have characterised those regulations as “censorship” and legal overreach that impacts US firms.

Sir Keir’s government has pushed for close ties with Trump, hosting him on a second state visit in September, during which Trump praised the “unbreakable bond” between the US and UK.

But just days before Trump arrived, Sir Keir sacked Lord Mandelson after revelations over his friendship to Epstein. Lord Mandelson has repeatedly said he regrets his relationship with Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking offences.

The Foreign Office reportedly pushed hard for a diplomatically experienced figure to be appointed as the new ambassador.

Turner’s previous roles include political director at the Foreign Office, British High Commissioner to Pakistan, and Foreign Office Director for the Middle East and North Africa. He also previously worked in 10 Downing Street as private secretary to the prime minister.

Before entering government, he worked in television documentaries.

In a statement released by the Foreign Office, Sir Keir said: “The United Kingdom and United States have a very special relationship, and Christian’s extensive experience as an outstanding diplomat will support this uniquely close bond and ensure it continues to flourish.”

Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said Turner would bring “exceptional diplomatic experience and deep understanding” to the role.

Ambassador to the US is seen as one of the UK’s top diplomatic postings.

The board of the Kennedy Center has voted to rename the performing arts centre the Trump-Kennedy Center, according to the White House.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on social media that the board voted unanimously to make the change due to “the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building”.

Leavitt also congratulated the late President John F. Kennedy and wrote “this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur”.

The change will certainly meet controversy, particularly in Washington DC where the centre has been an iconic landmark since it was built and named for Kennedy.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he was “surprised” and “honoured” by the decision. Earlier this month, though, Trump appeared to suggest the possibility by joking about a name change at an event for the annual presentation of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Shortly after taking office, Trump fired all the centre’s board members, and replaced them with allies, who then voted to make Trump chairman of the board. His close adviser Richard Grenell became board president.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Second Lady Usha Vance, as well as a number of other administration officials. and political allies are also currently on the board.

The president also secured about $257m (£192m) in congressional funding to pay for major renovations and other costs at the venue, which recently held the Fifa World Cup draw.

“We saved it,” Trump said of the centre on Thursday. “It was really in bad shape, physically.”

While Leavitt and Trump both claimed that the board had “unanimously” voted to rename the centre, at least one board member has disputed that.

“This was not unanimous,” said Ohio Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, one of the board’s members. “I was muted on the call and not allowed to speak or voice my opposition to this move.”

Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, a Trump critic currently running for Congress, said on X that the “microphones were muted” and the board’s “vote NOT unanimous”.

Other members of Kennedy’s family have also criticised the reported change.

Joe Kennedy III, a former House member and grandnephew of the late president, posted on X that “the Kennedy Center is a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law”.

“It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial, no matter what anyone says,” he added.

Kennedy’s niece Maria Shriver wrote that “it is beyond wild” that Trump “would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable”.

“It’s downright weird. It’s obsessive in a weird way,” she wrote.

Work on a national performing arts centre began in the 1950s and after Kennedy, the 35th president, was assassinated in 1963, Congress decided to turn it into a living memorial to him.

Some US lawmakers and legal scholars said that because the centre was named in a 1964 law, Congress must vote to make the name change official. A measure to call the centre’s opera venue the First Lady Melania Trump Opera House, for example, was introduced as part of a spending bill this summer. The bill has not yet come up for a vote.

Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill who, by law, are ex-officio members of the board – including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries – said in a statement that “federal law established the Center as a memorial to President Kennedy and prohibits changing its name without Congressional action”.

“At today’s meeting, a sitting Member of Congress was muted, and participants were prevented from speaking – actions that reflect a troubling lack of transparency and respect for the rule of law,” they added.

Any requirements for a vote, however, would not necessarily prevent the centre from changing its name on its website or tickets, and potentially on the exterior of the building itself.

A similar name change took place at the Department of Defense – now called the Department of War – without congressional approval in September.

Trump’s involvement in the centre has been criticised by some political opponents as unnecessary political interference in the arts by the White House.

Soon after he took over the centre, Lin Manuel Miranda and his producing partner cancelled a planned run of Hamilton there, and other visiting artists have scrapped their scheduled appearances. Dozens of staff members, some in charge of making important artistic decisions, have been fired or resigned, as well.

At the same time, locals appear to have stayed away from performances at the Kennedy Center, with the Washington Post and other local news outlets reporting that ticket sales and subscriptions have fallen.

Earlier this year, the president said he was “98% involved” in the selection of this year’s Kennedy Center honourees, which included action star Sylvester Stallone and members of the rock band KISS.

At the time, Trump said he had rejected “wokesters” from being considered for the honour.

In June, during Trump’s first appearance at the Kennedy Center since returning to the White House, audience members both booed and cheered him and First Lady Melania Trump as they entered the presidential box.

Parents of children with thalassemia in India say they are devastated after life-saving blood transfusions left their children HIV-positive, confronting them with illness, social stigma, and uncertainty.

Thalassemia is a genetic blood disorder that requires regular transfusions to manage severe anaemia and sustain life.

On Wednesday, authorities in central state of Madhya Pradesh said five children with thalassemia, aged three to 15, have tested positive for HIV, prompting concerns over blood transfusion practices. A committee has been set up to investigate the cases.

The families are from Satna district. Although the infections were detected during routine screening between January and May 2025, they drew wider attention after local media reports earlier this week.

The cases follow a similar incident in the eastern state of Jharkhand weeks earlier, where five children with thalassemia, all under eight, were found to have contracted HIV after blood transfusions at a state-run hospital.

HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, spreads through unprotected sex, unsafe medical practices, infected blood transfusions, or from mother to child during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.

While no longer a death sentence, it requires lifelong management. In India, more than 2.5 million people live with HIV, with about 66,400 new infections each year. Over 1.6 million are on lifelong treatment at antiretroviral therapy (ART) centres, government data, external shows.

Satna district collector Satish Kumar S said the five children had received blood transfusions at different locations, involving multiple donors.

Health officials said these included government hospitals and private clinics, and that all the children are now receiving treatment.

In one case, officials said both parents of a three-year-old were HIV positive. In the other cases, the parents tested negative, ruling out mother-to-child transmission.

Satna’s chief medical and health officer Manoj Shukla said children with multiple transfusions are considered high-risk and are routinely screened for HIV.

“Once detected, treatment was started immediately and is continuing. At present, the children are stable,” he said.

Every unit of blood issued by the district hospital’s blood bank is tested according to government protocol and released only after a negative report, Dr Shukla says.

However, in rare cases, blood donors who are in the early stages of HIV infection may go undetected during initial screenings but test positive later, he adds.

Cases of thalassemia patients contracting HIV during treatment are not new in India.

In October, after similar incidents in Jharkhand, authorities suspended a lab assistant, the doctor in charge of the HIV unit and the chief surgeon of the state-run hospital involved.

Chief Minister Hemant Soren also announced an assistance of 200,000 rupees ($2,212; £1,655) for each affected family.

In 2011, authorities in Gujarat launched an investigation after 23 children with thalassemia tested positive for HIV following regular blood transfusions at a public hospital.

Last week, thalassemia patients urged India’s parliament to pass the National Blood Transfusion Bill 2025, saying it would strengthen regulation of blood collection, testing and transfusion.

Campaigners, including patients who contracted HIV through unsafe transfusions, called the bill a long-awaited step towards safer, quality-assured blood for those reliant on frequent transfusions.

In India, where healthcare access can be limited, especially in rural areas and small towns, families of the HIV-infected children in Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand are deeply concerned.

“My daughter was already suffering from thalassemia. Now she has got HIV, all thanks to the pathetic medical facilities of Madhya Pradesh,” said one father, whose child is among those affected.

Another parent said their child was struggling with side-effects of HIV medication, including vomiting and constant fatigue.

In India, HIV still carries strong social stigma, often leading to discrimination. In Jharkhand, the family of a seven-year-old boy was forced to leave their rented home after the landlord learned of the child’s HIV status, the father told the BBC.

“I tried to convince them a lot, but they remained adamant on getting the house vacated. So, I had to return to my village, about 27km [17 miles] away,” said the father, who is a farmer.

“In the village, it is not only a challenge for my son to get better health facilities, but he is also deprived of a good education.”

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The suspect ‍in ​last week’s ‌mass shooting at Brown University has been found dead in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, following a six-day multi-state manhunt, police say.

They identified the suspect as Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national who studied at the university in Providence, Rhode Island, about 25 years ago.

Providence police chief Oscar Perez said video evidence and tips from the public led investigators to a car-rental location where they found the suspect’s name and matched him to their person of interest.

Officials said they also believe Valente killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor two days after the 13 December shooting at Brown.

Authorities have not provided a motive for either attack.

Brown University president Christina Paxson said that Valente was enrolled at the Ivy League school from the autumn of 2000 to the following spring, and was studying for a PhD in physics.

He had “no current active affiliation” to Brown, she said.

Officials said they believe Valente shot and killed MIT professor Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, on Monday at his home in Brookline, which is about 50 miles (80km) from Providence.

Both the victim and the suspect had studied at the same university in Portugal in the late 1990s, police said.

The cases were linked when the suspect’s vehicle was identified via CCTV footage and a witness at Brown University.

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said Valente was found dead with a satchel and two firearms. Evidence in a car nearby matched to the scene in Providence.

The same car was spotted nearby to the scene of the professor’s shooting.

Initial findings suggest Valente died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and police were unable to comment on how long he might have been inside the storage unit.

“Even though the suspect was found dead tonight our work is not done. There are many questions that need to be answered,” FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Ted Docks said, adding that the agency had deployed approximately 500 agents to assist local authorities in the investigation.

Leah B Foley, the US state attorney representing Massachusetts, said Valente was using a phone that “obfuscated” tracking.

“He was sophisticated in hiding his tracks.”

Meanwhile, the US has suspended its green card lottery scheme in the wake of the shooting, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying Valente “should never have been allowed in our country”.

Noem said the Portuguese national had entered the US through the diversity lottery immigrant visa programme (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card.

The programme makes up to 50,000 visas available each year through a random selection process among entries from countries with low rates of immigration to the US.

She has paused the visa scheme under President Donald Trump’s direction to “ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme”.

For days, members of the public had expressed frustration at the investigation into the shooting at Brown University last Saturday, after it appeared to yield little progress almost a week after the attack.

A gunman burst into Brown University’s Barus & Holley engineering building and opened fire during final exams.

Two students were killed and a further nine injured. Six remain in hospital.

Authorities identified the two dead victims as Ella Cook, 19, a second-year student from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, an Uzbek-American first-year student.

Police had asked for patience from Rhode Islanders and on Wednesday released new footage of a person of interest, where a man was seen walking around the university campus with a black mask over his mouth.

The FBI also offered a $50,000 (£37,350) reward for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the attack.

An HR executive caught on the big screen at a Coldplay concert embracing her boss has described how “the harassment has never ended” following the viral moment.

Kristin Cabot has spoken publicly for the first time about the video in which she was seen hugging Andy Byron, then-CEO of tech company Astronomer, at the show in July, before they abruptly ducked and hid from the camera.

Ms Cabot, 53, who was the company’s chief people officer, stepped down following Mr Byron’s resignation after the firm announced he would be placed on leave and investigated.

Speaking to the Times, Ms Cabot said she is looking for another job but has been told she is “unemployable”.

The video, which showed the pair swaying to music at the concert in Foxborough, Massachusetts, before trying to hide, quickly went viral after Coldplay’s lead singer Chris Martin said to the crowd: “Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy.”

It was watched millions of times, shared widely across platforms, and they became the butt of many jokes. Within a few days, the internet had moved on, but for Ms Cabot, her ordeal had only just begun.

“I became a meme, I was the most maligned HR manager in HR history,” Ms Cabot told The Times, external.

Ms Cabot was separated from her husband, who was also at the concert.

In a separate interview with the New York Times, external, she explained she was not in a sexual relationship with Mr Byron and the pair had never kissed before that night – although she admitted to having had a “crush” on her boss.

“I made a bad decision and had a couple of High Noons and danced and acted inappropriately with my boss,” she said, adding she “took accountability and I gave up my career for that”.

As to why she chose to speak out now, Ms Cabot told the Times “…it’s not over for me, and it’s not over for my kids. The harassment never ended”.

Her two children are too embarrassed to be picked up from school by their mother, she said, or to go to sports games.

“They’re mad at me. And they can be mad at me for the rest of their lives – I have to take that.”

Ms Cabot wondered whether Mr Byron had received the same level of abuse in the wake of the scandal, the Times reported.

“I think as a woman, as women always do, I took the bulk of the abuse. People would say things like I was a ‘gold-digger’ or I ‘slept my way to the top’, which just couldn’t be further from reality,” she said.

“I worked so hard to dispel that all my life and here I was being accused of it.”

At the peak of the scandal, her appearance, body, face and clothes were scrutinised and picked apart, with many high-profile celebrities including Whoopi Goldberg piling on. Gwyneth Paltrow, who was once married to Chris Martin, even took part in a tongue-in-cheek promotional video for Astronomer.

Ms Cabot told the New York Times she received threatening messages after the incident, including from a person who said they knew where she shopped and wrote: “I’m coming for you”.

She said “my kids were afraid that I was going to die and they were going to die”, and that her family began to dread public spaces and social events.

Women were the cruellest critics, she told the New York Times, with all of the in-person bullying, plus most of the phone calls and messages coming from women.

Her private details were put online (known as doxxing) and for weeks she was bombarded with up to 600 calls a day, the New York Times reported. The paparazzi outside her house was like a “parade” and there were 50 or 60 death threats, she said.

Things are starting to improve, though. Ms Cabot has found therapists for her children and she has started leaving the house to play tennis.

While she and Mr Byron kept in touch for a short while, exchanging “crisis management advice”, Ms Cabot said they decided that “speaking with each other was going to make it too hard for everyone to move on and heal,” and have not spoken since.

For his part, Mr Byron has not spoken publicly.

A fake statement purporting to be from him, complete with Coldplay lyrics, went viral after the concert and Astronomer had to release its own to say that he had not made any comment.

“Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding,” the statement read. “Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability.”

The company later said: “Andy Byron has tendered his resignation, and the Board of Directors has accepted.”

The BBC has tried to contact Andy Byron, via his former employer Astronomer, for comment.

This article contains distressing details and references to suicide. Some of the names have been changed to protect identities.

Kateryna cannot talk about her son, Orest, without tears. Her voice trembles with anger as she explains how she found out the news that he had died on the front line in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine in 2023.

According to the official investigation by the army, he died by a “self-inflicted wound”, something Katernya finds hard to believe.

Kateryna has asked for her and her late son to remain anonymous due to the stigma that surrounds suicide and mental health in Ukraine.

Orest was a quiet 25-year-old who loved books and dreamed of an academic career. His poor eyesight had made him initially unfit for service at the start of the war, his mother says.

But in 2023, a recruitment patrol stopped him in the street. His eyesight was re-evaluated and he was deemed fit to fight. Not long after, he was sent to the front as a communications specialist.

While Ukraine collectively mourns the loss of more than 45,000 soldiers who have died since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a quieter tragedy unfolds in the shadows.

There are no official statistics surrounding suicide among soldiers. Officials describe them as isolated incidents. Yet human rights advocates and bereaved families believe they may be in the hundreds.

“Orest was caught, not summoned,” Kateryna says bitterly.

The local recruitment centre denied wrongdoing to the BBC, saying impaired vision made Orest “partially fit” during wartime.

Once deployed near Chasiv Yar in Donetsk, Orest became increasingly withdrawn and depressed, Kateryna recalls.

She still writes letters to her son every day – 650 and counting – her grief made worse by how Ukraine classifies suicide as a non-combat loss. Families of those who take their own lives receive no compensation, no military honours and no public recognition.

“In Ukraine, it’s as if we’ve been divided,” says Kateryna. “Some died the right way, and others died the wrong way.”

“The state took my son, sent him to war, and brought me back a body in a bag. That’s it. No help, no truth, nothing.”

For Mariyana from Kyiv, the story is heartbreakingly similar. She too wishes to keep her identity and her late husband’s hidden.

Her husband Anatoliy volunteered to fight in 2022. He was initially refused because of his lack of military experience but he “kept coming back until they took him”, she says with a faint smile.

Anatoliy was deployed as a machine-gunner near Bakhmut, one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

“He said that, after one mission, about 50 guys were killed,” Maryana recalls. “He came back different; quiet; distant.”

After losing part of his arm, Anatoliy was sent to hospital. One evening, after a phone call with his wife, he took his own life in the hospital yard.

“The war broke him,” she says through tears. “He couldn’t live with what he’d seen.”

Because Anatoliy died by suicide, officials denied him a military burial.

“When he stood on the front line, he was useful. But now he’s not a hero?”

Mariyana feels betrayed: “The state threw me to the roadside. I gave them my husband, and they left me alone with nothing.”

She has also felt stigma from other widows.

Her only source of support is an online community of women like her – widows of soldiers who took their own lives.

They want the government to change the law, so that their bereaved families have the same rights and recognition.

Viktoria, who we met in Lviv, still cannot talk about her husband’s death publicly for fear of condemnation.

Her husband Andriy had a congenital heart condition, but insisted on joining the army. He became a driver in a reconnaissance unit and witnessed some of the most intense battles, including the liberation of Kherson.

In June 2023, Viktoria received a phone call telling her Andriy had taken his own life.

“It was like the world had collapsed,” she says.

His body arrived 10 days later, but she was told she could not see it.

An attorney she later hired found inconsistencies in the investigation into his death. The photos from the scene made her doubt the official version of her husband’s death. The Ukrainian military has since agreed to reopen the investigation, recognising failures.

Now she is fighting to re-open the case: “I’m fighting for his name. He can’t defend himself anymore. My war isn’t over.”

Oksana Borkun runs a support community for military widows.

Her organisation now includes about 200 families bereaved by suicide.

“If it’s suicide, then he’s not a hero – that’s what people think,” she says. “Some churches refuse to hold funerals. Some towns won’t put up their photos on memorial walls.”

Many of these families doubt the official explanations of death. “Some cases are simply written off too quickly,” she adds. “And some mothers open the coffin and find bodies covered in bruises.”

Military chaplain Father Borys Kutovyi says he has seen at least three suicides in his command since the full-scale invasion began. But to him even one is too many.

“Every suicide means we failed somewhere.”

He believes that many recruited soldiers, unlike career servicemen, are especially psychologically vulnerable.

Both Osksana and Father Borys say those who died by suicide should be considered heroes.

Olha Reshetylova, Ukraine’s Commissioner for Veterans’ Rights, says she receives reports of up to four military suicides each month and admits not enough is being done: “They’ve seen hell. Even the strongest minds can break.”

She says her office is pushing for systemic reform but it can take years to set up a good military psychology unit.

“Families have a right to the truth,” she says. “They don’t trust investigators. In some cases, suicides may cover up murders.”

When it comes to honouring theses soldiers as military heroes, she prefers to look to the future.

“These people were your neighbours, your colleagues,” says Ms Reshetylova. “They’ve walked through hell. The warmer we welcome them, there will be fewer tragedies”

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this story you can find information and support on the BBC Action online website here.

President Donald Trump has suspended the US green card lottery scheme in the wake of a mass shooting at Brown University last week in which two people were killed.

The suspect, a Portuguese man who was found dead on Thursday, entered the country through the diversity lottery immigrant visa programme (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she has paused the visa scheme under Trump’s direction to “ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme”.

US officials said they believe the suspect, 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente, also killed Portuguese Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro earlier this week.

The programme makes up to 50,000 visas available each year through a random selection process among entries from countries with low rates of immigration to the US.

Writing on social media, Noem said Trump had previously “fought to end” the scheme in 2017 after eight people were killed in a truck-ramming attack in New York City.

Uzbekistan national Sayfullo Saipov, an Islamic State supporter who is serving multiple life sentences for the attack, entered the US through the DV1 scheme, according to Noem.

Her comments come just hours after Neves Valente was found dead in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, from what police believe is a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Police said video evidence and tips from the public led investigators to a car rental location where they found the suspect’s name and matched him to their person of interest, following a six-day multi-state manhunt.

He was found dead with a satchel and two firearms. Evidence in a car nearby matched to the scene of the shooting at Brown University in Providence, according to Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha.

Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled at the Ivy League school from the autumn of 2000 to the following spring, and was studying for a PhD in physics.

He had “no current active affiliation” to Brown, she said.

Officials said they believe Neves Valente shot and killed MIT professor Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, on Monday at his home in Brookline, which is about 50 miles (80km) from Providence.

Both men had studied at the same university in Portugal in the late 1990s, police said.

Officials said the cases were linked when the suspect’s vehicle was identified via CCTV footage and a witness at Brown University.

The same car was spotted near the scene of the professor’s shooting, which happened just two days later.

Authorities have not provided any suspected motive for either of the attacks.

Two students were killed and nine others were injured as a gunman burst into Brown University’s engineering building on 13 December and opened fire during final exams.

They have been identified as Ella Cook, 19, a second-year student from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, an Uzbek-American who had just started at the university.

Millions of people will be able to set their own contactless card payment limits or even have no limit at all, a regulator has confirmed.

Banks and card providers will be given the power, from March, to set a maximum – or unlimited – single payment amount without the need to enter a four-digit PIN.

But they are also being encouraged by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to allow cardholders to set their own individual limits, or switch off contactless entirely. Some banks already offer this function.

The move comes despite the FCA’s own survey showing little appetite among consumers and industry respondents for a change from the current £100 limit on contactless cards.

The FCA said it did not expect card providers to make immediate changes to the current limit from March, but they had the flexibility to do so.

When contactless card payments were introduced in 2007, the transaction limit was set at £10. The limit was raised gradually, to £15 in 2010, to £20 in 2012, then to £30 in 2015, before the Covid pandemic prompted a jump to £45 in 2020, then to £100 in October 2021.

While contactless cards currently have a £100 payment limit, anyone using their smartphone to pay can spend any amount without the need for a PIN.

In-built security features, such as thumbprints and face ID, provide greater protection.

But concerns have been raised about cards becoming more attractive to thieves and fraudsters, when high-value payments can be made with a tap of a card.

Various protections are already in place, such as a prompt to enter a PIN after a series of consecutive contactless transactions are made.

Consumers would still get their money back if it was stolen by fraudsters, according to David Geale, executive director of payments and digital finance at the FCA.

“Contactless is people’s favoured way to pay,” he said.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, Mr Geale said while the system works well, rigid limits could “slow things down”.

“So what we want to do is give banks and payment firms greater flexibility to set their own approach to contactless payment, where they see low risk of fraud,” he said.

In practice, he said that means banks and payment companies could choose a limit based on their customers.

“But what we’re really encouraging is that they’ll open up that flexibility for customers to set their own limits,” he added.

Other countries, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand allow industry to set contactless card limits.

Jana Mackintosh, managing director of payments and innovation at UK Finance, which represents banks, said: “Any changes made in the future will be done carefully and ensure strong security and fraud controls remain in place.”

The FCA’s own survey on changing the rules, released during consultation, showed that 78% of consumers who responded said they did not want any change to the current limits.

Consumers and academics have suggested that the extra convenience of unlimited contactless payment limits could also lead to shoppers spending without thinking.

This is said to be a particular issue with credit cards, when people are spending borrowed money and accumulating debt.

Financial abuse charities have also warned that unlimited contactless spending could give abusers free access to drain a survivor’s bank account with no checks or alerts.

They also worry it could also hasten the shift towards a cashless society, despite notes and coins being a lifeline to many financial abuse survivors whose card transactions are monitored online by their abusers.

One policy to help vulnerable customers access cash, as bank branches close, is the development of shared banking hubs.

Cash Access UK, the organisation set up to protect access to cash across the UK, announced the official opening of its 200th banking hub in Billericay, Essex, on Friday.

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The board of the Kennedy Center has voted to rename the performing arts centre the Trump-Kennedy Center, according to the White House.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on social media that the board voted unanimously to make the change due to “the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building”.

Leavitt also congratulated the late President John F. Kennedy and wrote “this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur”.

The change will certainly meet controversy, particularly in Washington DC where the centre has been an iconic landmark since it was built and named for Kennedy.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said he was “surprised” and “honoured” by the decision. Earlier this month, though, Trump appeared to suggest the possibility by joking about a name change at an event for the annual presentation of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Shortly after taking office, Trump fired all the centre’s board members, and replaced them with allies, who then voted to make Trump chairman of the board. His close adviser Richard Grenell became board president.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Second Lady Usha Vance, as well as a number of other administration officials. and political allies are also currently on the board.

The president also secured about $257m (£192m) in congressional funding to pay for major renovations and other costs at the venue, which recently held the Fifa World Cup draw.

“We saved it,” Trump said of the centre on Thursday. “It was really in bad shape, physically.”

While Leavitt and Trump both claimed that the board had “unanimously” voted to rename the centre, at least one board member has disputed that.

“This was not unanimous,” said Ohio Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, one of the board’s members. “I was muted on the call and not allowed to speak or voice my opposition to this move.”

Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, a Trump critic currently running for Congress, said on X that the “microphones were muted” and the board’s “vote NOT unanimous”.

Other members of Kennedy’s family have also criticised the reported change.

Joe Kennedy III, a former House member and grandnephew of the late president, posted on X that “the Kennedy Center is a living memorial to a fallen president and named for President Kennedy by federal law”.

“It can no sooner be renamed than can someone rename the Lincoln Memorial, no matter what anyone says,” he added.

Kennedy’s niece Maria Shriver wrote that “it is beyond wild” that Trump “would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable”.

“It’s downright weird. It’s obsessive in a weird way,” she wrote.

Work on a national performing arts centre began in the 1950s and after Kennedy, the 35th president, was assassinated in 1963, Congress decided to turn it into a living memorial to him.

Some US lawmakers and legal scholars said that because the centre was named in a 1964 law, Congress must vote to make the name change official. A measure to call the centre’s opera venue the First Lady Melania Trump Opera House, for example, was introduced as part of a spending bill this summer. The bill has not yet come up for a vote.

Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill who, by law, are ex-officio members of the board – including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries – said in a statement that “federal law established the Center as a memorial to President Kennedy and prohibits changing its name without Congressional action”.

“At today’s meeting, a sitting Member of Congress was muted, and participants were prevented from speaking – actions that reflect a troubling lack of transparency and respect for the rule of law,” they added.

Any requirements for a vote, however, would not necessarily prevent the centre from changing its name on its website or tickets, and potentially on the exterior of the building itself.

A similar name change took place at the Department of Defense – now called the Department of War – without congressional approval in September.

Trump’s involvement in the centre has been criticised by some political opponents as unnecessary political interference in the arts by the White House.

Soon after he took over the centre, Lin Manuel Miranda and his producing partner cancelled a planned run of Hamilton there, and other visiting artists have scrapped their scheduled appearances. Dozens of staff members, some in charge of making important artistic decisions, have been fired or resigned, as well.

At the same time, locals appear to have stayed away from performances at the Kennedy Center, with the Washington Post and other local news outlets reporting that ticket sales and subscriptions have fallen.

Earlier this year, the president said he was “98% involved” in the selection of this year’s Kennedy Center honourees, which included action star Sylvester Stallone and members of the rock band KISS.

At the time, Trump said he had rejected “wokesters” from being considered for the honour.

In June, during Trump’s first appearance at the Kennedy Center since returning to the White House, audience members both booed and cheered him and First Lady Melania Trump as they entered the presidential box.

When bullets began flying at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on Sunday, strangers Wayne and Jessica found themselves in the same nightmare scenario. They couldn’t find their three-year-olds.

In the chaos, separately, they desperately scanned the green. People who’d gathered to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah screamed and ducked. Others ran. Some didn’t make it far.

The 10-odd minutes that followed were the longest of their lives.

Wayne’s body was acting as a human shield for his eldest daughter, but his mind was elsewhere: with his missing daughter Gigi.

“We had to wait all that time for the gunshots to stop. It felt like eternity,” he tells the BBC.

Unbeknown to him, Jessica’s gaze had caught on a little girl in a rainbow skirt, confused, scared and alone – calling out for her mummy and daddy.

The pregnant mother couldn’t protect her own child, so in that moment she decided she’d protect this one. She smothered Gigi’s body with her own, and uttered “I’ve got you”, over and over again. They could feel the moment a woman about a metre away was shot and killed.

By the time the air finally fell silent, Wayne had become all but convinced Gigi was dead.

“I was looking amongst the blood and the bodies,” he says, growing emotional.

“What I saw – no human should ever see that.”

Eventually, he caught a glimpse of a familiar colourful skirt and found his daughter, stained in red – but okay, still shrouded under Jessica. Her son too would soon be found, unharmed.

“She said she’s just a mother and she acted with mother instincts,” Wayne says.

“[But] she’s a superhero. We’ll be indebted to her for the rest of our lives.”

It is one of the incredible accounts of selflessness and courage that have emerged from one of Australia’s darkest days.

Declared a terror attack by police, it is the deadliest in Australian history. Dozens were injured and 15 people – including a 10-year-old girl – were killed by the two gunmen, who police say were inspired by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS).

More people undoubtedly would have been harmed if it weren’t for Ahmed al Ahmed.

A Syrian-Australian shop owner, he’d been having coffee nearby when the shooting began. His father told BBC Arabic Ahmed “saw the victims, the blood, women and children lying on the street, and then acted”.

Footage of the moment he sprung out from behind a car and wrestled a gun off one of the attackers immediately went viral. He was shot multiple times, and may lose his arm.

Another man, Reuven Morrison, was also seen on the video hurling objects at the same attacker in the moments after Ahmed disarmed him.

Sheina Gutnik easily recognised her dad in the footage.

“He is not one to lie down. He is one to run towards danger,” Ms Gutnick told BBC partner CBS News.

He had jumped up the second the shooting started, she said, and was throwing bricks at one of the gunmen before he was fatally shot.

“He went down fighting, protecting the people he loved most.”

The first two victims of the assault, Boris and Sofia Gurman, were also captured on dashcam footage grappling with one of the men for his weapon. When they succeeded, he got another gun from the car he’d just climbed out of and killed them.

“Even in the final moments of their lives, they showed the depth of who they were by facing those moments with courage, selflessness and love,” read a message from their proud son Alex, which was read out at the couple’s funeral on Friday.

“In doing so, they reminded us that they were not only devoted parents, but, in every sense of the word, heroes.”

The list goes on.

Chaya, only 14 years old, was shot in the leg while shielding two young children from gunfire.

Jack Hibbert – a beat cop just four months into the job – was hit in both the head and the shoulder but continued to help festival attendees until he physically couldn’t, his family said. The 22-year-old will survive, but with life-changing injuries.

Lifeguard Jackson Doolan was photographed sprinting over from a neighbouring beach during the attack, armed with critical medical supplies. He didn’t even pause to put on shoes.

Others at Bondi rushed from the beach into the fire, their red-and-yellow lifesaving boards working overtime as stretchers. One lifeguard even dived back into the surf to save swimmers who’d been sent into a panic by the shooting.

Student Levi Xu, 31, told the BBC he felt he could not shout for help, as he didn’t want to draw attention to himself or risk any potential saviours being targeted.

But lifeguard Rory Davey saw him and his friend struggling, and dragged them back to shore.

“We stood up and wanted to thank him, but he had already gone back into the sea to rescue other people,” says Mr Xu.

Thousands of Australians flocked to donate blood, dwarfing the previous record.

Authorities say many off-duty first responders travelled to Bondi on Sunday – from as far as two hours away – simply because they knew there was a need. Likewise, healthcare workers rushed to hospitals when they heard of the attack, shift or no shift, confronting unspeakable trauma to save lives.

“[They were] just coming into the station and saying ‘I’m ready to go’. Coming to the scene and saying ‘I’m ready… put me in’,” New South Wales Health Minister Ryan Park told the BBC.

“Normally on a Sunday night, there is staff available to run one operating theatre [at St Vincent’s Hospital]. There were eight operating at once,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

State premier Chris Minns, too, has been quick to praise the heroics of ordinary, everyday Australians.

“This is a terrible, wanton act of destructive violence. But there are still amazing people that we have in Australia, and they showed their true colours last night,” he said, the day after the attack.

Wayne says he shudders to think what would have happened without people like Jessica and Ahmed.

When he speaks to the BBC, he’s just attended a funeral for the gunmen’s youngest victim, 10-year-old Matilda.

“I was sitting at this funeral and I was just thinking, tears pouring out of my eyes… I could have been in the front… It could have been my little girl.”

“There could have been so much more devastation without the bravery of [these] people… someone who could run just comes in. Someone who could worry about their own child looks after another child.

“That’s what the world needs more of.”

The Australian government has announced a gun buyback scheme in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack – its deadliest mass shooting in decades.

The scheme is the largest since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which left 35 people dead and prompted Australia to introduce world-leading gun control measures.

Fifteen people were killed and dozens injured on Sunday when two gunmen, believed to have been motivated by “Islamic State ideology”, opened fire on a Jewish festival at the country’s most iconic beach.

On Friday, police also said there was no ongoing reason to detain a group of men who were arrested in Sydney over their “extremist Islamic ideology”.

Police allege Sunday’s attack, which they have declared a terrorist incident, was committed by a father-son duo. Naveed Akram, 24, has been charged with 59 offences, including 15 counts of murder and one of committing a terrorist act. His father Sajid was killed during the attack.

The day after the shooting, national cabinet – which includes representatives from the federal government and leaders from all states and territories – agreed to tighten gun controls.

Speaking to media on Friday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said there are now more than 4 million firearms in Australia – more than at the time of the Port Arthur massacre.

“We know that one of these terrorists held a firearm licence and had six guns, in spite of living in the middle of Sydney’s suburbs… There’s no reason why someone in that situation needed that many guns.

“If you’re going to reduce the number of guns, then a buyback scheme has to be a piece of that puzzle,” Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett added.

The new scheme will purchase surplus, newly banned and illegal firearms, and will be funded on a 50-50 basis with the states and territories. Hundreds of thousands of firearms will be collected and destroyed, the government estimates.

National cabinet has also agreed to impose limits on the number of firearms held by any one individual, restrict open-ended firearms licensing and the types of guns that are legal and make Australian citizenship a condition of holding a firearm licence.

Work on a national firearms register will be accelerated and firearm regulators will have better access to criminal intelligence.

On Friday, New South Wales Police said they were preparing to release seven men with extremist ideology, but that they would continue to be monitored.

Tactical officers swarmed on the group, who had travelled from Victoria and were known to police there, in dramatic scenes in the suburb of Liverpool on Thursday. Officers found a knife, but no guns or other weapons.

NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told a press conference there is “no confirmed link” between the alleged terrorists and the detained group, but that Bondi Beach was one of several locations the latter was intending to visit.

“Whilst this specific threat posed by the males is unknown, I can say that the potential [for] a violent offence being committed was such that we were not prepared to tolerate the risk,” Commissioner Lanyon said.

TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance has signed binding agreements with US and global investors to operate its business in America, TikTok’s boss told employees on Thursday.

Half of the joint venture will be owned by a group of investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, according to a memo sent by chief executive Shou Zi Chew.

The deal, which is set to close on 22 January, would end years of efforts by Washington to force ByteDance to sell its US operations over national security concerns.

It is in ​line with a deal unveiled in September, when US President Donald Trump delayed the enforcement of a law that would ban the app unless it was sold.

In the memo, TikTok said the deal will enable “over 170 million Americans to continue discovering a world of endless possibilities as part of a vital global community”.

Under the agreement, ByteDance will retain 19.9% of the business, while Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX will hold 15% each.

Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors, according to the memo.

The White House previously said that Oracle, which was co-founded by Trump supporter Larry Ellison, will license TikTok’s recommendation algorithm as part of the deal.

The deal comes after a series of delays.

In April 2024, during President Joe Biden’s administration, the US Congress passed a law to ban the app over national security concerns, unless it was sold.

The law was set to go into effect on 20 January 2025 but was pushed back multiple times by Trump, while his administration worked out a deal to transfer ownership.

Trump said in September that he had spoken on the phone to China’s President Xi Jinping, who he said had given the deal the go ahead.

The platform’s future remained unclear after the leaders met face to face in October.

The app’s fate was clouded by ongoing tensions between the two nations on trade and other matters.

“TikTok has become a bargaining chip in the wider US-China relationship,” said Alvin Graylin, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“With recent softening tensions, Beijing’s sign off on the structure and algorithm licensing now looks less like capitulation and more like calibrated de-escalation, letting both capitals claim a win at home.”

The White House referred the BBC to TikTok when contacted for comment.

Oracle and Silver Lake declined to comment. The BBC has contacted MGX for comment.

The deal drew critiques from Senate Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, who said it wouldn’t do “a thing to protect the privacy of American user”.

Under the terms, TikTok’s recommendation algorithm is set to be retrained on American user data to ensure feeds are free from outside manipulation.

“It’s unclear that it will even put TikTok’s algorithm in safer hands,” said Sen Wyden.

He opposed the 2024 law, and was among the US lawmakers who lobbied to extend the TikTok deadline in January in a bid to give Congress more time to mitigate threats from China.

Some users also expressed caution at the prospect of new investors.

Small business owner Tiffany Cianci, who has more than 300,000 followers and nearly four million likes on the platform, said she hopes the incoming investors will maintain the same user experience for entrepreneurs like her.

“I hope small business owners are protected,” Ms Cianci said.

TikTok has said that more than seven million small businesses market their products and services on TikTok in the US.

“I reserve judgement on whether or not we have saved the app for those small business,” she added.

Ms Cianci said she chose TikTok for promotion because the platform offers profit-sharing on terms that are more favourable than what competitors like Meta offer.

Over the last year, Ms Cianci has been active in organising protests in Washington and on TikTok aimed at saving the app.

Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar has formally apologised to Burkina Faso for the unauthorised entry of a Nigerian military jet into Burkinabè airspace, an incident that led to the detention of 11 Nigerian servicemen.

Tuggar’s spokesperson told the BBC that the detained personnel had been released and were due to return to Nigeria, without saying when.

The plane was flying to Portugal when it developed a technical problem and had to land in Burkina Faso, according to the Nigerian Air Force.

The unauthorised landing sparked a diplomatic row with the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) made up of Burkina Faso and its neighbours, Mali, and Niger.

In a statement, AES characterised it as an “unfriendly act” and said member states‘ respective air forces had been put on maximum alert and authorised to “neutralise any aircraft” found to violate the confederation’s airspace.

The three AES states, all run by the military, have withdrawn from the West African regional bloc, Ecowas, and moved closer to Russia, while most Ecowas members remain allied to the West.

Tuggar led a delegation to the Burkinabè capital, Ouagadougou, on Wednesday, to discuss the incident with military leader Captain Ibrahim Traoré.

“There were irregularities concerning the overflight authorisations, which was regrettable, and we apologise for this unfortunate incident,” Tuggar said on national TV.

It remains unclear when the military personnel, said to be in “high spirits”, and the aircraft will return to Nigeria.

According to Nigeria’s foreign ministry, both sides agreed to “sustain regular consultations and pursue practical measures to deepen bilateral cooperation and regional integration”.

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