There was a snarl of cars when we arrived. We could hear chanting. Someone was waving a rebel flag. Overnight news that Damascus had fallen and Syria’s president had fled spurred Syrians in Lebanon to rush to Masnaa, the border crossing closest to their capital.

We’d been planning to spend a day reporting from there, but packed a small overnight bag when we heard the Syrians had abandoned their side. Maybe we would be able to get to Damascus ourselves.

Amid the excitement around us was a tall man with curly hair who was trying to go the other way. I could see he was crying.

He told me his name was Hussein and that he was a supporter of President Bashar al-Assad. He was afraid.

“We don’t know anything about what is going to happen inside. They might kill us, it’s chaos,” he said.

“Anybody who used to work with the regime or the army, they say they are going to give them a safe exit, but nobody knows. If it’s not going to be true, they’re going to pay the consequences.”

He had brought his family with him, but didn’t have the documents to cross into Lebanon.

An hour later, we entered Syria. The road to Damascus was wide open. As we neared the capital we could see signs of an army in retreat – military jeeps and tanks, abandoned. Army uniforms littered the road where soldiers had torn them off.

There was traffic in the streets but shops were closed. People had gathered in the central Umayyad Square, overcome by the extraordinary end to more than five decades of authoritarian rule by the Assad regime – father and son.

Armed men were firing into the air in a constant cacophony of celebration – we saw one little boy who had been injured carried away.

Civilians were driving around in their cars, flashing peace signs, saying things would be so much better now that Assad was gone. One elderly woman was crying.

“Thank you, thank you,” she exclaimed as if praying. “The tyrant has fallen. The tyrant has fallen!”

Many in her family had died under Assad’s rule, she said, some in prison.

I approached a couple with four young children, their parents fairly bursting with joy.

“It’s an indescribable feeling. We are so happy,” said the man. “After all the years of dictatorship we have lived in our lives! We were in prison in 2014 and now we’re out thank God. We won because of our men, our fighters, and now we are at the moment that we are going to build the greatest Syria!”

“We call our sisters and brothers who left the country to come back,” he added. “Our hearts and homes are open for you.”

The whereabouts of Assad were a mystery until Russian reports said he’d turned up in Moscow. We made our way to his Damascus residence – now a tourist attraction, stripped bare of anything valuable, of anything at all.

We saw people carrying out furniture, with no one trying to stop them. The rebels may have brought freedom, but not security.

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Looters had also been breaking into other buildings nearby – deepening anxiety about this in-between-time without a government in charge.

“The transition has to happen in a proper and correct way,” said Alaa Dadouch, a 36-year-old father of three standing outside with his neighbours. “And the fact that he just left, you know…”

“Bashar al-Assad?” I prompted.

“Yes, you see I’m still scared to even mention this,” he said. “But the fact that he just left, that is selfish. Our president should have taken the proper measures that are needed for him to give at least the army or the police control over those areas until a new presidency comes in.”

He paused. “You know, two days back, I wasn’t able to say that he’s selfish, it would have been a big problem. A lot of everything is different.

“You can actually breathe, you can walk around. You can actually give your opinion. You can say what bothers you without being scared. So, yes, there is a change. I hope it’s a good change. But we’ve been living under false hope for 13 years [of civil war].”

This country is caught between joy and fear, hoping for peace and worried about chaos.

In the hours after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, hundreds have descended on the site which for many most encapsulated his oppressive rule: the Saydnaya prison.

The notorious military complex has been used to detain tens of thousands of people who fell foul of the Syrian government over the decades.

Among those searching for people who have vanished inside its walls was Dr Sharvan Ibesh, chief executive of the aid group Bahar.

He arrived there at midnight to help a friend search for her father, who she believes has been held there for 13 years.

Dr Ibesh described scenes of “chaos”, with hundreds of people inside the prison trying to find their loves ones.

“It was very disappointing. We did not find him and we got no information,” he told the BBC.

“My friend is so upset because for 13 years she dreamed of finding her father. We were told that many prisoners have been moved to another location.”

Dr Ibesh continued: “Hundreds of people were coming out of the prison and we were told we could not come in because so many people were getting in the way of the rescuers.”

Syrian civil defence group, the White Helmets, has been searching for inmates at Saydnaya following accounts from prisoners of secret entrances to underground cells, though none have been found.

A mosque 20km away is being used as a meeting place for released prisoners and their families.

When Ibesh visited there on Sunday, he saw several newly freed people clearly in a traumatised state, he told the BBC.

A group of people surrounded two men who had just been released, trying to help them.

“[They] had been held in the prison for several years and they were disorientated,” Ibesh said. “They didn’t even know the time zone.”

“People around them were asking ‘what’s your name’ and ‘how old are you?’, but they could not even answer those questions.”

It was hard to tell how old they were from looking at them, Ibesh said, adding: “The men were totally lost, they were just staring ahead.”

The Assad regime imprisoned hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. The Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP) group described Saydnaya as a “death camp”.

Throughout the civil war, which began in 2011, government forces held hundreds of thousands of people in detention camps, where human rights groups say torture was common.

Israel has confirmed it is carrying out air strikes on Syria to target suspected chemical weapons and missile sites.

Gideon Saar, the country’s foreign minister, said this was to stop weapons falling “into the hands of extremists”.

Media reports suggest there have been dozens of Israeli air strikes in the past two days, including on a site in Damascus said to have been used for rocket development by Iranian scientists.

Also on Monday, the Israeli military released photos of its troops who crossed from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights into the demilitarised buffer zone in Syria where UN peacekeepers are based.

It comes a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the military had temporarily seized control of the so-called Area of Separation, saying the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria had “collapsed” with the rebel takeover of the country.

The Golan Heights is a rocky plateau about 60km (40 miles) south-west of Damascus.

Israel seized the Golan from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed it in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so unilaterally in 2019.

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Speaking at a news conference on Monday, Saar said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was only making “a very limited and temporary step” taken for “security reasons”.

He also claimed that Israel had no interest in meddling in internal Syrian affairs and was concerned only with defending its citizens.

Defence Minister Israel Katz meanwhile said the Israeli military would “destroy heavy strategic weapons” – including missile and air defence systems.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, said on Monday that the Israeli military had conducted overnight strikes on multiple locations spanning coastal and southern Syria.

“Since the initial hours after the announcement of the fall of the former regime, Israel began launching intensive air strikes, deliberately destroying weapons and ammunitions depots,” it said.

The latest moves by Israel come after Syrian rebel fighters captured the capital, Damascus, and toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. He and his father had been in power in the country since 1971.

Forces led by the Islamist opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered Damascus in the early hours of Sunday, before appearing on state television to declare that Syria was now “free”.

On Sunday, Netanyahu branded the collapse of the Assad regime a “historic day in the Middle East”.

The Assad regime received much support from Hezbollah and Russia in the country’s brutal civil war. With Hezbollah involved in the Israel-Gaza war and cross-border air strikes between Israel and Lebanon, and Russia expending huge resources on its invasion of Ukraine, HTS, along with other rebel groups in Syria, were able to seize on the occasion and were ultimately able to capture large swathes of Syria.

During the 2011 Syrian uprising, Israel made the calculation that Assad, despite being an ally of both Iran and Hezbollah, was a better bet than what might follow his regime.

On Sunday, Netanyahu insisted Israel would “send a hand of peace” to Syrians who wanted to live in peace with Israel.

He said the IDF presence in the buffer zone was a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found”.

“If we can establish neighbourly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that’s our desire. But if we do not, we will do whatever it takes to defend the State of Israel and the border of Israel,” he said.

Israel is likely to be more sensitive over the Golan Heights, since HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani’s family has roots there. Thousands of Israeli settlers now live in the area alongside about 20,000 Syrians, most of them Druze, who stayed on after it was captured.

Israeli strikes in Syria are nothing new. It has previously acknowledged carrying out hundreds of strikes in recent years on targets in Syria that it says are linked to Iran and allied armed groups such as Hezbollah.

The Israeli strikes in Syria have reportedly been more frequent since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, in response to cross-border attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah and other groups in Lebanon and Syria.

Just last month, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, reported that a set of strikes hit a weapons depot and other locations in and around an area near Palmyra where families of Iran-backed militia fighters were, killing 68 Syrian and foreign fighters.

Police investigating the fatal shooting of a healthcare executive in New York City are on the ground in Georgia as they hunt for his fugitive killer.

Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare was shot several times last week in Midtown by a gunman who fled and then apparently boarded a bus out of the city.

Law enforcement sources told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that officers have been despatched to the southern state and to stops along the bus route.

The search has entered its fifth day on Monday, though police have revealed neither a name nor a motive for the suspect, who was pictured several times on CCTV wearing a mask.

Much of the police activity has been focused on New York’s Central Park which seems to have formed part of the gunman’s escape route.

The lake was trawled for a second day on Sunday and a discarded backpack found nearby contained a jacket and some banknotes from the board game Monopoly but no gun, sources told CBS.

Police believe he entered the park on a bike moments after the shooting, then caught a taxi after leaving the park on the Upper West Side.

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Images released over the weekend show the suspect masked in the back of the taxi heading uptown to Port Authority bus terminal near Washington Heights.

He has not been spotted on any cameras leaving the station so the presumption is that he made his escape by bus.

It is the same way he arrived in the city, 10 days before the shooting, on a Greyhound bus that originated in Atlanta.

He then checked into a hostel where he momentarily revealed his face to the receptionist, giving police their clearest image yet.

Police have not said anything about why they think he killed the 50-year-old, father-of-two Brian Thompson.

One theory is that it was an attack on the healthcare insurance system.

Bullet casings found at the scene had the words “depose,” “deny” and “delay” written on them.

This echoes the title of a book criticising the ways insurers avoid paying claims.

Thompson’s death has prompted an outpouring on social media of people sharing their stories about being denied healthcare by insurance firms.

South Korean authorities have imposed a travel ban on President Yoon Suk Yeol, who is under investigation for his short-lived martial law declaration last Tuesday.

Yoon narrowly survived an impeachment motion against him over the weekend, after MPs from his ruling People Power Party (PPP) boycotted the vote.

PPP members said they had decided not to support the motion after Yoon agreed to shorten his term and not get involved in foreign and domestic affairs.

However, the opposition Democratic Party, which commands a majority in the parliament have criticised the deal, with floor leader Park Chan-dae calling it “an illegal, unconstitutional second insurrection and a second coup”.

Tens of thousands of people have come out in protest since Yoon’s short-lived martial law order, calling for him to resign or be impeached.

Since then, despite the failed impeachment motion, several key figures involved in the martial law order have also seen action taken against them.

Former Defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun, who reportedly proposed the martial law declaration to Yoon, was arrested on Sunday. He had earlier resigned on Wednesday after apologising and saying he would take “full responsibility”.

Travel bans have been placed on Kim, Lee, Defence Counterintelligence Commander Yeo In-hyung, and Army Chief of Staff Park An-su.

Many others have stepped down from their posts.

These include former Interior Minister Lee Sang-min who resigned on Sunday, saying he would take responsibility for “failing to serve the public and the president well”.

And on Wednesday, senior aides of Yoon’s office, including his chief of staff, tendered mass resignations hours after the martial law declaration was lifted.

In a public address on Sunday, PPP leader Han Dong-hoon said Yoon will no longer be involved in foreign and domestic affairs until his early resignation – adding that Prime Minister Han Duck-soo would manage government affairs in the meantime.

“The President will not be involved in any state affairs including diplomacy before his exit,” said party leader Han.

However, Democratic Party floor leader Park Chan-dae described the proposed plan as “an illegal, unconstitutional second insurrection and a second coup”.

Representative Kim Min-seok of the Democratic Party similarly criticised the plan, saying “nobody gave” PPP leader Han the power to make such decisions.

“The prime minister and the ruling party’s announcement that they would jointly exercise the powers of the president, which no one has given them, is clearly unconstitutional,” he said, according to a report on The Korea Herald.

The Ministry of National Defence confirmed at a briefing on Monday that the president retains command of the armed forces. That means in the event of any foreign policy incidents, including any possible threat from North Korea, Yoon is still, in theory, able to make executive decisions.

“The president can take the lead again any time he changes his mind,” political science professor Shin Yul of Myongji University told The Korea Herald.

“No one will be able to stop him, if Yoon insists.”

On Saturday Yoon apologised to the nation in what was his first appearance since the martial law declaration. He pledged not to impose another martial law order, and apologised for the “anxiety and inconvenience” he had caused.

However, the opposition has insisted that they “will not give up” on impeaching Yoon and has vowed to hold impeachment votes against Yoon every Saturday.

“We will definitely return this country to normal by Christmas and the end of the year and give it to you as a Christmas and end-of-year gift,” Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung told a disappointed crowd after Saturday’s failed impeachment attempt.

He again urged Yoon to resign on Monday, telling a press conference that Yoon’s actions were “destroying” South Korea and its economy.

A fire which ripped through Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue is being treated as a likely terror attack, Australian police say.

Three suspects are being hunted over Friday’s early-morning blaze, which left one man with a minor burn to his hand and caused extensive damage.

Witnesses say they saw masked figures spreading what appeared to be an accelerant in the building, before setting it alight.

Victoria Police say they have no evidence that further antisemitic attacks are planned, but patrols are being increased to reassure the community.

After a meeting with Australian Federal Police and domestic spy agency Asio, the state police force said additional “intelligence” had led them to conclude the incident should be treated as a probable terror attack.

Commissioner Shane Patton said police had no information before the fire to suggest an arson attack was imminent.

He declined to provide any further details on the investigation while it continued.

Mr Patton’s declaration came a day after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the incident as “quite clearly terrorism” while acknowledging police were still to make up their minds. He called his description a “personal view”.

On Monday, state Premier Jacinta Allan said the terror designation meant police would now have extra resources for their investigation.

Jewish community leaders have said they believe the attack is an escalation of a recent documented increase in antisemitism in Australia, and that it has heightened fears of violence.

A few worshippers were inside the building at the time of the fire, and have described hearing banging and seeing a window smash, before liquids were thrown inside and lit on fire.

“The whole thing took off pretty quickly,” synagogue board member Benjamin Klein, who spoke to witnesses, told The Age newspaper.

After officers at the scene were confronted by angry and scared worshippers on Friday, Mr Patton said police were focused on ensuring their safety.

“We have… extra police officers deployed in those areas where there are high numbers of Jewish persons living and congregating,” he said.

Allan also called for the city to rally behind its Jewish communities.

“We cannot let this conflict overseas continue to be a cloak for behaviour like [this].”

Albanese also on Monday announced a new federal strikeforce to investigate incidents of antisemitism.

The prime minister said a special response was needed to combat the rising threat, pointing to two other recent incidents – the vandalism of a Jewish MP’s office and an attack in Sydney in which a car was torched and buildings graffitied.

US rapper Jay-Z has hit back at a lawsuit which alleges that he, along with Sean “Diddy” Combs, drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl at a party in 2000.

The anonymous accuser alleges she was assaulted at a house party after the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) in New York and that an unnamed female celebrity was in the room at the time.

In a statement, Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, dismissed the legal action as a “blackmail attempt”.

Mr Combs – who is in jail awaiting trial after being charged in September with sex-trafficking and other offences – denied the latest accusation.

The lawsuit was originally filed in October, and was refiled on Sunday to list Mr Carter as a defendant.

The BBC has contacted Mr Carter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, and his publicist for comment.

The legal action was filed under New York’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act, by a Texas-based lawyer, Tony Buzbee.

Mr Buzbee has filed several lawsuits in recent months accusing Mr Combs of assault and rape – though none have provided the names of victims. The hip-hop artist is due to face a criminal trial on 5 May.

Mr Carter said in a statement posted to social media: “My lawyer received a blackmail attempt, called a demand letter, from a ‘lawyer’ named Tony Buzbee.

“What he had calculated was the nature of these allegations and the public scrutiny would make me want to settle.

“No sir, it had the opposite effect! It made me want to expose you for the fraud you are in a VERY public fashion. So no, I will not give you ONE RED PENNY!!”

Mr Carter added that he found the allegations “so heinous in nature that I implore you (Tony Buzbee) file a criminal complaint, not a civil one!! Whomever would commit such a crime against a minor should be locked away, would you not agree?”

A statement from Mr Combs’s legal team said this amended lawsuit was the latest in a series of “shameless publicity stunts, designed to extract payments from celebrities who fear having lies spread about them, just as lies have been spread about Mr Combs”.

The statement said that the judicial process would show Mr Combs to be innocent of all the allegations against him. He faces 30 other lawsuits.

Responding to the criticism, Mr Buzbee posted a picture of himself to his Instagram as a younger man in military uniform, with a caption saying he had faced “a coordinated and aggressive effort” to stop him from bringing the case forward.

“I also won’t allow anyone to scare my clients into silence,” he wrote. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant and I am quite certain the sun is coming.”

• The charges against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs explained

The accuser in Sunday’s legal filing, who is identified only as “Jane Doe”, said that in 2000, when she was 13, a friend dropped her off at the VMAs at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.

She approached limousine drivers outside the venue to try to gain access to the show, according to the legal action.

One driver told her that he was employed by Mr Combs and that she “fit what Diddy was looking for”, says the lawsuit.

Later that evening the chauffeur drove her to a party at a white house, according to the legal action.

Jane Doe says when she arrived at the party she was asked to sign a document, which she believes was a non-disclosure agreement, says the lawsuit.

The legal action says she recognised “many celebrities” at the party and observed widespread drug use, including cocaine.

A waitress offered her a drink that made her feel “woozy”, so she went into a room to lie down, according to the lawsuit.

Soon afterwards, the legal action says, Mr Combs and Mr Carter entered the room with a female celebrity, described as Celebrity B. “Plaintiff immediately recognized all three celebrities,” says the lawsuit.

The legal action says Mr Combs approached her “with a crazed look in his eyes”, grabbed her and said: “You are ready to party!”

Mr Carter held her down and raped her, before Mr Combs did the same, all while Celebrity B watched, according to the lawsuit.

Jane Doe fought back during the assault and when Mr Combs backed away in surprise she escaped, the legal action says.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, says the plaintiff still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression as a result of the alleged rapes.

In his statement, Mr Carter, who is married to Beyoncé, with whom he has three children, said: “My only heartbreak is for my family.

“My wife and I will have to sit our children down, one of whom is at the age where her friends will surely see the press and ask questions about the nature of these claims, and explain the cruelty and greed of people.”

There was a moment, a few weeks into the trial, when Gisèle Pelicot decided it was time to remove her sunglasses.

It wasn’t just an acknowledgment of the fading autumn sunshine in the medieval southern French city of Avignon. It was also an indication that she’d passed a milestone – one of many that have marked her slow, painful journey from serene grandmother, to anguished and shame-haunted rape victim, to fearful courtroom witness, to global icon of courage and defiance.

“She had these sunglasses she used to hide her eyes… to protect her intimacy,” said Stéphane Babonneau, the youthful criminal lawyer who for two years has guided Mrs Pelicot through the case against her ex-husband, Dominique, and fifty other men now on trial for allegedly raping her.

“But there was a point when she felt she no longer needed to protect herself. She didn’t need [the glasses],” Mr Babonneau explained, seizing on that moment as a way to illustrate the slow transformation of a “sincere… very humble person”, who had begun the trial “extremely worried”, shocked by the blaze of publicity, and still feeling “very ashamed of what had happened to her”.

Over the course of the trial, Gisèle Pelicot, 72, has said almost nothing about her ordeal, beyond the occasional and brief comment to supporters gathered in Avignon’s Palais de Justice.

But Mr Babonneau, speaking now with his client’s blessing, has begun giving us insights into the way she’s handled herself in court, and the way she has slowly and methodically sought to rebuild her life and, to a limited extent, her peace of mind.

Another moment – and milestone – sticks out.

It was earlier this year, in May. Mr Babonneau and his colleague Antoine Camus had been trawling through some of the 20,000 grotesquely explicit videos and photographs that police discovered back in 2020 on Dominique Pelicot’s computer hard drive.

A grim task. The videos were “absolutely disgusting,” said Mr Babonneau. But it was the audio that was almost more shocking.

“It’s possible to hear Mrs Pelicot snoring… to hear her breathing. It’s even more disturbing to listen to her choking when some of the men are abusing her. The sound was very important [evidence].”

Mr Babonneau knew that without those videos, “most likely there would have been no trial, no case”.

Mrs Pelicot understood that too, but could easily and understandably have decided, for her own sanity, to avoid watching any of the footage herself.

Instead, Mr Babonneau remembers, she simply announced one day: “I’m ready now.”

So, she sat down beside the two men, in their office, as they introduced a carefully selected portion of each video, explaining who the men were, and what she would be seeing them do to her. Then Mr Babonneau pressed play and images of the Pelicots’ bedroom, in their bungalow in the village Mazan, flashed up on the screen.

Gisèle remained still, watching intently.

“How could he?” she eventually asked, in her quiet voice. It was a phrase she would keep repeating over the coming days.

Then a little later, she noted the date on one of the videos.

“That was my birthday evening.”

“That happened in [my] daughter’s bed. In her beach house.”

Mr Babonneau remembers Mrs Pelicot’s sustained indignation, but noted too that she never cried, and that with the help of experts, she’d managed “to put an impressive distance between what she was seeing and her mental health.”

The lawyers saw this moment as a “final test” that showed their client had regained “some kind of equilibrium” in the four years since 4 November 2020, when she’d been informed about her husband’s actions and “her world was destroyed.”

She was now ready to face the rigours of a public trial.

Mrs Pelicot had wanted to watch the footage in order to understand who all these men were, and to help fill in the gaps in her memory, caused by the years of being drugged by her husband.

“She has entire pieces of her existence that don’t exist in her mind,” explained Mr Babonneau.

The same practical concerns first shaped her decision to opt for a public trial, and to push for the videos to be shown in open court.

She was beyond angry, for sure. But at that stage she wasn’t looking to change the world. She was simply nervous about the idea of spending months inside a closed courtroom packed with dozens of her abusers. A public trial would, she thought, feel less intimidating.

The first day of the trial was still traumatic. Sunglasses on, Mrs Pelicot was revealing herself in public for the very first time. And it got worse. Walking beside her up the steps towards the courthouse, Mr Babonneau noticed and recognised some of the accused men, in masks.

But Mrs Pelicot only slowly became aware that she was now surrounded by them, elbows bumping as they jostled to get through the same security barriers.

“It was stressful for her. She was surprised how casual everything seemed to be,” recalled Mr Babonneau.

And then came the moment – the first in four years – when Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot’s eyes met across the crowded courtroom. Their chairs were arranged as if to make such contact unavoidable.

“I saw sometimes that they exchanged looks,” Mr Babonneau noted. Gisèle had spoken repeatedly to her team of her concern about how she might react in that first encounter.

We know now, of course, that while giving evidence in court Dominique Pelicot confessed to everything and that he begged his family for forgiveness. We also know that Gisèle Pelicot has not forgiven him.

“For sure, no. She cannot forgive him,” said Mr Babonneau.

And yet, the couple were once deeply in love. They were married for fifty years. And in the courtroom, Mr Babonneau could tell, the former couple were not able to ignore their shared past entirely. So, what did the lawyer see in those glances they exchanged?

It was like they were saying “look at us,” said Mr Babonneau.

He felt they were communicating to each other a shared sense of disbelief. Almost as if they were, briefly, spectators watching the agonies of two strangers.

“How did we end up here?”

During the trial, defence lawyers for various accused men tried to suggest that Gisèle’s composure, her lack of tears, somehow implied that she was complicit in her own abuse. Or that she felt sympathy for Dominique Pelicot.

“When a victim doesn’t cry, or cries too much, there is always something to criticise,” said Mr Babonneau, with a flicker of contempt.

But while the attacks clearly rattled Mrs Pelicot, she also told her legal team not to worry.

There was a simple reason for that. Nothing that the lawyers could throw at her in court could ever compare with the very worst moment of her life, that day in November 2020, when an officer had sat her down at Carpentras Police Station and showed her the first grim images that investigators had extracted from her husband’s hard drive.

“You know I survived 2 November 2020, so I’m ready for everything now,” Babonneau remembers her saying.

As the trial went on, Gisèle Pelicot was surprised to find that public and media interest was not drifting away, as she and her team had imagined it would. Instead, she began receiving letters and gifts and applause from cheering crowds.

“When she started receiving these letters, she felt some kind of responsibility for victims who had suffered similar things,” said Babonneau.

She came to understand the uniqueness of her case – that the video evidence meant it was not simply “the word of the victim against the word of the suspect”, and that she now had a rare opportunity “to change society”.

“I’m lucky to have the evidence. I have the proof, which is very rare. So, I have to go through [all this] to stand for all the victims,” she told Mr Babonneau.

Her lawyer noticed, again, his client’s “simple,” practical nature. She has no interest in being “an activist”, but is simply thinking of how her experience of being drugged without realising it, could now help make other women aware of the issue, and look out for possible signs of similar abuse.

Had she known then what all of France knows now, perhaps she could have put an end to her ordeal.

And maybe other women can now do the same.

As for the future, Mrs Pelicot may, perhaps, break her silence with a few interviews in the months ahead. But she’s made it clear she wants “to remain an individual… she wants to live a very simple life.”

And while she may never forgive her once “perfect” ex-husband, she has found a way to manage her memories of him and to cling on to the “happy moments” they once shared.

Some psychiatrists argue that Dominique Pelicot is a relatively typical psychopath – a high-functioning narcissist with no capacity for empathy who weaved between his sordid hidden life and the self-gratifying role of playing of a family man. Gisèle Pelicot sees things more simply, embracing the idea, put forward at the trial, of a split personality.

As Mr Babonneau puts it, “there were two men in Dominique Pelicot and she only knew one of them.”

If you’ve been affected by the issues in this story, help and support is available via the BBC Action Line.

At least 110 mostly elderly people have been brutally murdered by gang members in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, according to a human rights group.

The National Human Rights Defence Network (RNDDH) said a local gang leader had targeted them after his son fell ill and subsequently died.

The gang leader reportedly consulted a voodoo priest who blamed elderly locals practising “witchcraft” for the boy’s mystery illness.

The United Nations said the number of people killed in Haiti so far this year in spiralling gang violence had reached “a staggering 5,000”.

While details from the massacre are still emerging, the UN’s human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday put the number of people killed over the weekend “in violence orchestrated by the leader of a powerful gang” at 184.

The killings happened in the Cité Soleil neighbourhood of the capital.

According to reports, gang members seized scores of residents aged over 60 from their homes in the Wharf Jérémie area, rounded them up and then shot or stabbed them to death with knives and machetes.

Residents reported seeing mutilated bodies being burned in the streets.

RNDDH estimated 60 were killed on Friday while another 50 were rounded up and murdered on Saturday, after the gang leader’s son had died of his illness.

While RNDDH said that all the victims were over 60, another rights group said some younger people who had tried to protect the elderly had also been killed.

Local media said that elderly people believed to be practitioners of voodoo had been singled out because the gang leader had been told his son’s illness had been caused by them.

Rights groups said the man who had ordered the killings was Monel Felix, also known as Mikano.

Mikano is known to control Wharf Jérémie, a strategic area in the port of the capital.

According to Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, a Haiti expert at the Global Initiative against Transnational Crime (GI-TOC), the area is small but hard for the security forces to penetrate.

Local media said that residents had been prevented from leaving Wharf Jérémie by Mikano’s gang, so news of the deadly killings was slow to spread.

The group forms part of the Viv Ansanm gang alliance, which controls much of the Haitian capital.

Haiti has been engulfed in a wave of gang violence since the assassination in 2021 of the then-president, Jovenel Moïse.

Data gathered by GI-TOC shows there was a decline in the murder rate between May and September of this year, after rival gangs had reached an uneasy truce.

But attempts by the gangs to expand their territory beyond their strongholds in the capital have led to particularly bloody incidents in the past two months, with ordinary residents rather than rival gang members being increasingly targeted.

On 3 October, 115 locals were killed in the small town of Pont-Sondé in the Artibonite department.

That massacre was reportedly carried out by the Gran Grif gang in retaliation for some residents joining a vigilante group to resist attempts by Gran Grif to extort locals.

If confirmed, the death toll given by the UN for this weekend’s killings in Cité Soleil, would make it the deadliest incident so far this year.

With gangs in control of an estimated 85% of Port-au-Prince and increasingly large swathes of the countryside, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been forced to flee their homes.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 700,000 people – half of them children – are internally displaced across the country.

Gang members often use sexual abuse, including gang rape, to sow terror among the local population.

In a report published two weeks ago, Human Rights Watch researcher Nathalye Cotrino wrote that “the rule of law in Haiti is so broken that members of criminal groups rape girls of women without fearing any consequences”.

Attempts by the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission to quell the violence have so far failed.

The international police force arrived in Haiti in June to bolster the Haitian National Police but is underfunded and lacks the necessary equipment to take on the heavily armed gangs.

Meanwhile, the Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) – the body created to organise elections and re-establish democratic order – appears to be in turmoil.

The TPC replaced the interim prime minister last month and seems to have made little progress towards organising elections.

“They reign over a mountain of ashes,” GI-TOC’s Romain Le Cour Grandmaison writes of the council in his report.

President-elect Donald Trump has said he will look at pardons for those involved in the 2021 US Capitol riot on his first day back in office next month.

“These people are living in hell,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press in his first broadcast network interview since winning November’s election.

The Republican also vowed to end automatic citizenship for anyone born in the country, but offered to work with Democrats to help some undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children.

In the wide-ranging sit-down, which was recorded on Friday, Trump promised to issue “a lot” of executive orders, including on immigration, energy and the economy, after he is inaugurated on 20 January.

While he suggested he would not seek a justice department investigation into Joe Biden, he said that some of his political adversaries, including lawmakers who investigated the Capitol riot, should be jailed.

Trump was asked whether he would seek to pardon the hundreds of people convicted of involvement in that riot, when supporters of his stormed Congress three months after his defeat in the 2020 election.

“We’re going to look at independent cases,” he said. “Yeah, but I’m going to be acting very quickly.”

“First day,” he added.

Trump continued: “You know, by the way, they’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”

The president-elect made other news in the NBC interview aired on Sunday:

• He offered a caveat on whether he would keep the US in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato): “If they’re paying their bills, and if I think they’re doing a fair – they’re treating us fairly, the answer is absolutely, I’d stay with Nato”
• Trump said he would not seek to impose restrictions on abortion pills, though when asked to make a guarantee, he added: “Well, I commit. I mean… things change”
• The Republican said Ukraine should “probably” expect less aid when he returns to the White House
• Trump said he thinks “somebody has to find out” if there is a link between autism and childhood vaccines – an idea that has been ruled out by multiple studies around the world. Trump suggested his nominee for health secretary, vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, would look into the matter
• The president-elect repeated his promise that he will not seek to cut Social Security, nor raise its eligibility age, though he said he would make it “more efficient”, without offering further details
• Pressed on whether his plan to impose tariffs on imports from major US trading partners would raise consumer prices for Americans, he said: “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow”

On the subject of immigration, Trump told NBC he would seek through executive action to end so-called birthright citizenship, which entitles anyone born in the US to an American passport, even if their parents were born elsewhere.

Birthright citizenship stems from the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that “all persons born” in the United States “are citizens of the United States”.

“We’re going to have to get it changed,” Trump said. “We’ll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.”

Trump also said he would follow through on his campaign pledge to deport undocumented immigrants, including those with family members who are US citizens.

“I don’t want to be breaking up families,” he said, “so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”

• A quick guide to Donald Trump
• When will Donald Trump take office as president?
• How Trump pulled off an incredible comeback

Trump also said he wants to work with Congress to help so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were shielded under an Obama-era programme, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which Trump once attempted to scrap.

“I will work with the Democrats on a plan,” he said, adding that some of these immigrants have found good jobs and started businesses.

Trump seemed to offer mixed signals on whether he would follow through on his repeated vows to seek retribution against political adversaries.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden this week issued a sweeping pardon to his criminally convicted son, Hunter. The Democrat is reported to be considering other blanket pardons for political allies before he leaves office next month.

Trump seemed to indicate that he would not seek a special counsel investigation into Biden and his family, as he once vowed.

“I’m not looking to go back into the past,” he said. “I’m looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success.”

But he also said that members of the now-defunct, Democratic-led House of Representatives committee that investigated him “should go to jail”.

One member of the panel, former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, hit back at Trump on Sunday.

She said his comment that members of the committee should be jailed was a “continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic”.

In his NBC interview Trump also said he would not direct the FBI to pursue investigations against his foes.

But he also told the network: “If they were crooked, if they did something wrong, if they have broken the law, probably.

“They went after me. You know, they went after me, and I did nothing wrong.”

What Trump could do on day one in the White House

How undocumented migrants feel about deportations

Who has joined Trump’s top team?

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Wicked’s Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are among the stars who have scored nominations for the Golden Globes, as the Hollywood award season kicks off in earnest.

British actress Erivo is shortlisted for best female actor in a comedy or musical for her role as Elphaba in the hit film, while co-star Grande is in the running for best supporting female actor.

Angelina Jolie, Hugh Grant, Timothee Chalamet, Sebastian Stan, Demi Moore, Pamela Anderson, Kate Winslet and Selena Gomez are among the other big names in contention.

The Golden Globes have been through controversy in recent years but remain the first major awards in the film calendar, and provide pointers for who could do well at next year’s Oscars.

• Follow live updates and reaction to the Golden Globe nominations
• See the nominations in full
• How to watch this year’s awards-tipped films

Netflix musical Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican drug lord who changes gender, leads the nominations overall with 10, including one for Gomez.

Other prominent films include heavyweight dramas The Brutalist, about a Hungarian architect who tries to build a new life in the US after World War Two, and Conclave, about a group of scheming cardinals who gather to select the new Pope.

The top film nominees:

• Emilia Perez – 10
• The Brutalist – 7
• Conclave – 6
• Anora – 5
• The Substance – 5

Unlike the Oscars, the Golden Globes also have awards for TV shows, with The Bear, Only Murders in the Building, Shogun and Baby Reindeer the main contenders in those categories.

Jolie is the frontrunner to win best film drama female actor for playing legendary opera singer Maria Callas in Maria.

She will face competition from Nicole Kidman for Babygirl, as well as Anderson for playing a veteran Las a Vegas showgirl in The Last Showgirl.

British stars Winslet and Tilda Swinton are also in that category, as is Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres.

Winslet has two nominations in total – one on the film side for playing war photographer Lee Miller, and one for her TV show The Regime.

In the best film drama male actor race, The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody and Conclave’s Ralph Fiennes are seen as the main contenders.

Meanwhile, Stan is nominated for playing Donald Trump in The Apprentice, about the incoming US president’s early years, and Chalamet is recognised for playing singer Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown.

They are joined on the shortlist by former James Bond star Daniel Craig for playing a US expat in 1950s South America in Queer, and Colman Domingo for his role in Sing Sing, about a prison theatre group.

All will also have a shot of receiving Oscar nominations when they are announced in January.

Unlike the Oscars, the Golden Globe split most of their categories in two, with one award for dramas and a separate prize for musicals/comedies.

Newcomer Mikey Madison is hotly tipped for the award for best film musical/comedy female actor for playing a New York stripper who falls for the son of a Russian oligarch in Anora.

She will take on others including Demi Moore, who has won praise for playing a veteran Hollywood star who goes to extreme lengths to recapture her youth in body horror The Substance. It is Moore’s first nomination for 28 years.

Zendaya, Amy Adams and Karla Sofía Gascón are in the same category, as is Erivo, one of four nominations in total for Wicked.

The film, based on the Broadway musical about the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, will hope to combine awards acclaim with commercial success after making $455m (£356m) so far at the box office.

Grande will go up against fellow singer and former children’s TV star Gomez, who plays the wife of the drug lord in Emilia Pérez.

Gomez is a double nominee, also being shortlisted for TV comedy Only Murders in the Building.

Erivo is among a number of British stars on the shortlists.

Grant has the seventh Golden Globe nomination of his career, for horror film Heretic, while Felicity Jones has her second, a decade after her first for The Theory of Everything.

Her co-star in that film, Eddie Redmayne, is also hoping for a Golden Globe this year, for his TV show The Day of the Jackal.

He will go up against Gary Oldman, for Slow Horses, while his co-star Jack Lowden is listed in one of the supporting categories.

Elsewhere, Keira Knightley is nominated for her new spy drama Black Doves. Her competitors include Emma D’Arcy, who has House of the Dragon’s only citation.

Richard Gadd stands a strong chance of winning best male actor in a limited series for Baby Reindeer. His rivals include fellow Scot Ewan McGregor, for A Gentleman in Moscow.

Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning is in the running for best supporting female TV actor.

However, there was no nomination for Britain’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who had been tipped to be recognised for her role in director Mike Leigh’s hard-hitting film Hard Truths.

The Golden Globe winners will be announced at a ceremony in Los Angeles on 5 January, followed by the Oscars on 2 March. The host, Nikki Glaser, has been nominated herself for best TV stand-up for Nikki Glaser: Someday You’ll Die.

The body that used to be behind the Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, was criticised in 2021 for corruption and a lack of diversity in its voting body, and was accused of accepting “freebies” in exchange for nominations and other ethical lapses.

As a result, the body expanded and diversified its membership, implemented a new code of conduct, and changed its name.

Read more about the Golden Globe nominees:

• Ariana Grande channelled her loss into Wicked role
• Selena Gomez ‘shines’ in new musical Emilia Perez
• Mikey Madison leads Oscars race for Anora
• Colman Domingo wins Gotham prize for Sing Sing
• Angelina Jolie ‘spellbinding’ as opera star Callas
• Daniel Craig’s new film ‘smug’ but ‘beautiful’
• Demi Moore says role in The Substance was ‘risky and juicy’

A section of the American airliner which exploded over Lockerbie 35 years ago is being transported to the US for the trial of the man accused of making the bomb.

The wreckage from the fuselage of Pan Am Flight 103 will form part of the evidence in the case against Abu Agila Masud.

The Libyan has denied making the bomb which destroyed the plane on 21 December 1988.

Relatives of the 270 victims have been informed of the transfer of the fuselage section, which is part of a formal evidence sharing process between Scottish and American prosecutors.

The Boeing 747 Clipper Maid of the Seas broke up at 31,000 ft as it flew from Heathrow to New York.

All 259 passengers and crew on board were killed, along with 11 people in Lockerbie who died when the plane fell on their homes.

The victims included 190 American citizens. It was the worst terrorist attack against the US until 9/11.

Approximately 319 tons of wreckage from the plane were scattered over 845 square miles.

Air accident investigators reassembled a 65ft long section of the fuselage, showing the “petalling” caused by the explosion.

The bomb had been concealed in a radio cassette player in a suitcase in the hold.

Abu Agila Masud has been accused of making the device and is due to stand trial at a federal court in Washington next May.

The US authorities have accused him of causing the destruction of an aircraft resulting in death.

Laura Buchan leads the team of prosecutors working on the case at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

“The transfer of physical items of evidence from Scotland into US custody is beginning,” she said.

“The transfer includes parts of the fuselage of Pan Am 103 which are a production in the criminal investigation.

“We understand that the fuselage will hold significance for many of the families of those who lost their lives and they have been informed of the transfer plans.”

In 2001, three Scottish judges ruled that Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbasset Al-Megrahi had played a key role in the bombing and convicted him of the murder of 270 people.

Megrahi was jailed for life but freed on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government while terminally ill with cancer in 2009.

He had always protested his innocence and died in Libya three years later.

Scotland’s Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain KC said the verdict from the first Lockerbie trial had been the subject of intense scrutiny and had been upheld twice in the appeal court.

She described the transfer of the fuselage section as “a strong expression of the commitment that Scottish prosecutors and officers of Police Scotland have to bringing all those responsible for this terrible act to justice”.

That message was echoed by Police Scotland chief constable Jo Farrell, whose officers have been involved in building the case against Masud.

She said the force would pursue those involved in bombing the plane “no matter the passage of time”.

With a record 20 World Championship and 11 Olympic medals to her name, Allyson Felix is the most decorated track and field athlete of all time.

And not content with simply trailblazing on the track, in recent years she has become a fierce advocate for women, particularly in the realm of maternal health rights.

With violence against women athletes overshadowing the sport this year, Felix tells BBC 100 Women that she is greatly concerned for the safety of women athletes in some parts of the world.

“There has to be a change in the culture. Something is not right, and it does make me worry,” she says.

Felix says she was devastated to hear the news of the death of fellow Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei, who was set on fire by her boyfriend in Kenya earlier this year.

The mother-of-two was the third female athlete to be killed in Kenya in three years.

Felix says it’s a “real problem” that she will prioritise as a recently elected member of the IOC Athletes’ Commission, a body that represents athletes within the Olympic movement.

“The consequences have to be severe, but I think there has to be more than that,” she says. “I think we have to rally around the sports community and come together.”

The American runner, who retired in 2022, is one of the women featured on the BBC’s 100 Women list, which each year names 100 inspiring and influential women around the world. This year the list is focusing on the theme of “resilience”, which is particularly apt in Felix’s case.

In 2018, when 32 weeks pregnant, she was diagnosed with severe pre-eclampsia and given an emergency caesarean. Her daughter, Camryn, spent time in a neonatal intensive care unit.

The following year, in a powerful op-ed for The New York Times, Felix took on her then-sponsor, Nike, over maternity pay, revealing Nike’s threat to cut her pay by 70% if motherhood affected her future athletic performance.

Three months later, Nike changed its stance and new contracts guaranteed an athlete’s pay and bonuses for 18 months around pregnancy. Three other athletic apparel companies also introduced maternity protection for sponsored athletes.

In her article, Felix wrote pregnancy was “the kiss of death” in her industry.

“I was terrified what the consequences would be. I was terrified how it would be received. It just wasn’t in my nature. And so it was really difficult to be able to just be vulnerable,” she says.

The decision to speak out could have ended her career, but less than a year after giving birth, Felix made history when she secured her 12th World Championships gold medal in the 4x400m mixed relay in Doha, surpassing Usain Bolt’s record.

Felix has since carved out a new path for herself.

Two years after parting with Nike, she launched a footwear company with her brother, Wes, in 2021, selling athletic-inspired footwear modelled on women’s feet.

• BBC 100 Women names 100 inspiring and influential women around the world every year – Allyson Felix is on the 2024 list. Meet this year’s 100 Women here

This year, the mother of two was instrumental in ensuring there was a nursery in the Olympic village – the first ever available to athletes competing in the Games.

She considers it a huge win, but says more needs to be done.

“When you do come back, that’s a huge barrier to be able to re-enter the sport and figure out travelling the world and who is caring for your child,” she says.

“To be able to take something off of that plate, that’s what I look to do.”

Going forward, she wants to see sponsors change the way they represent women athletes.

Her newest venture, Always Alpha, is a management firm dedicated exclusively to women’s sports, which she says is part of her legacy.

“Traditionally, women have been put in the same box [as men]. I think women shouldn’t be an afterthought, especially as we think about the business and how strategy is created.

“In all of the negotiations with Nike, I was dealing with a team of all men, who were basically telling me how I would come back from childbirth. Now there are more women who have seats at the table and have power, but we still have a long way to go.”

Part of her role with the Athletes’ Commission will be listening to other athletes and advocating on their behalf.

“If it is your decision to have a child in the midst of your career, then do that,” she says. “We’re working really hard to support women who make that choice.”

Felix, who gave birth to her second child this year – her son, Trey – has also been very vocal in highlighting the disproportionately high risk of maternal mortality among black women in the US.

This year she was awarded a $20m grant from Melinda Gates, to improve maternal health outcomes. She has not ruled out using the money to support global projects.

“I have most of my experience in the US and in my own communities, but I am actively speaking to organisations all over the world,” she says.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), black women in the US are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women.

“There’s still an implicit bias in our healthcare system, and we’re not seeing the numbers change quick enough,” she says.

Felix believes that women are too often being ignored when they report concerns to their doctors.

“What I hear is that they are not being heard,” she says. “It’s not going to turn around if we’re not educating our medical professionals.”

Felix says having a daughter makes the subject of women’s health “very personal”.

With abortion rights back in the spotlight following the US presidential election, she believes women should be able to have a choice.

“You know, as a parent, we have seen so many things change in the world, it is a scary time,” she says.

“I do think about her and her generation and the things that they might be without.”

But she hopes her advocacy will inspire her children in years to come.

“I want them always to know that you should have an impact, that you should help others, that you should stand up for what you believe in.”

BBC 100 Women names 100 inspiring and influential women around the world every year. Follow BBC 100 Women on Instagram and Facebook. Join the conversation using #BBC100Women.

King Charles has recalled how his mother practised wearing the crown for her Coronation when she was bathing him as a child.

The King also spoke about his own Coronation and feeling “slightly anxious” about wearing the heavy St Edward’s Crown and worrying whether it would “wobble”.

Despite being only four years old at the time of his mother’s Coronation in 1953, he said many of his memories of the run-up to the ceremony were still vivid.

The remarks were in a documentary about a group of 50 Canadian women who attended the late Queen Elizabeth’s coronation as 17-year-olds. Twelve of them made a poignant return to London in 2023, where they attended a surprise tea party with King Charles.

“I remember it all so well then, because I remember my sister and I had bath time in the evening,” King Charles told the now-elderly Canadian visitors, recalling the run-up to his mother’s Coronation.

“My mama used to come up at bath time wearing the crown to practise.”

“You have to get used to how heavy [the crown] is.”

“I’ve never forgotten, I can still remember it vividly,” he told them as they were given a tour of Buckingham Palace and then tea with the King, in scenes recorded in December 2023 for the documentary Coronation Girls.

“It is very important to wear it for a certain amount of time, because you get used to it then,” King Charles told them about the crown.

“But the big one that you’re crowned with, the St Edward’s Crown, it weighs 5lbs.

“It is much heavier and taller, so there’s always that feeling of feeling slightly anxious, in case it wobbles.

“You have to carry it, you have to look straight ahead.”

The King also remembered his haircut from his mother’s Coronation and “what the barber did to me”.

The 17th Century golden St Edward’s Crown is worn by the monarch at the moment of their coronation and weighs 4.9lb (2.23kg).

But both the King and his mother wore the much lighter Imperial State Crown as they left Westminster Abbey.

The documentary, Coronation Girls, tells the story of 50 women from across Canada who were sponsored by a Canadian businessman, Garfield Weston, to attend Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation.

Many of them had never been away from their local areas before. Their journey to the UK in 1953 meant travelling by rail and sea, before a seven-week visit.

They had not all even seen a television set by then, so their trip to London, decorated for the Coronation, was an intense experience that made a huge impression on the teenagers.

Their career paths in adult life have varied – with a couple becoming professors, one a climate activist and another a nun – and many have stayed in touch with other.

The 90-minute documentary reflected on the journeys of their lives, with 12 surviving members of the group talking about issues now affecting them in their old age.

With an average age of 89, they flew to London last winter to see the sights that they had first witnessed as young women, including a tour of Buckingham Palace.

While going around the palace, the visit was interrupted by a surprise invitation to have tea with the King, where they shared their memories of the events from 1953.

President Joe Biden has said the US will try to bring home one of the longest-held American hostages following the sudden collapse of the Syrian government.

Speaking at the White House, Biden said the US believes Austin Tice is alive, but they must pinpoint his location in the war-torn country.

Mr Tice, a freelance journalist, is thought to have been taken captive close to Damascus on 14 August 2012 while he was covering the country’s civil war.

On Sunday, rebel fighters seized the Syrian capital in the culmination of a lightning offensive launched two weeks ago. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has fled the country.

Biden said Assad’s exit was a “fundamental act of justice” after decades of repression, but also “a moment of risk and uncertainty” for the Middle East.

“We are mindful that there are Americans in Syria,” Biden said on Sunday, “including those who reside there, as well as Austin Tice, who was taken captive more than 12 years ago.

“We remain committed to returning him to his family.”

On his way out of the room, Biden turned to answer a question from the media about Tice.

“We believe he’s alive,” said the president. “We think we can get him back, but we have no direct evidence of that yet.”

The president added: “We have to identify where he is.”

Mr Tice, 43, was last seen in a video, blindfolded and in apparent distress, posted online weeks after his capture.

While no government or group claimed responsibility for his disappearance, US officials soon said they believed that the former US Marine was being held by the Syrian government.

• Follow updates as rebels capture Damascus
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• Steve Rosenberg: Fall of Assad is a blow to Russia’s prestige

Mr Tice’s sister, Abigail Edaburn, told the BBC on Friday they believe he is still in Syria.

“We don’t know the exact circumstances of the place that he’s being held, but we do know it is in Syria and that he is healthy and well,” she said.

“I don’t know how much I can say, but there have been independent, trusted sources that have been able to verify this information,” she added.

The FBI said in a statement on Sunday that a $1m reward was still on offer for information that leads to Mr Tice’s “safe location, recovery and return”.

The US has about 900 troops in Syria, and Biden said on Sunday he planned for those forces to remain.

The president also said US forces had conducted “dozens” of what he called “precision air strikes” on Sunday against Islamic State group camps and operations in eastern Syria.

President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday that the US should not intervene militarily in Syria. “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,” he wrote on social media.

The Syrian opposition that brought down Assad is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which has been designated a terrorist group by the Biden administration.

The US, UK, UN and others consider HTS to be an al-Qaeda affiliate, though HTS says it broke off ties with the Sunni Islamist organisation years ago.

Last month, Rishabh Pant became the most expensive player in the history of the Indian Premier League (IPL) as he was signed by Lucknow SuperGiants for 27 crore rupees (£2.54m) at the mega auction in Saudi Arabia.

But it was the news of Prithvi Shaw – Pant’s Delhi Capitals teammate – going unsold that grabbed more attention.

Among those seated in the auction in positions to make bids were Sourav Ganguly and Ricky Ponting, who had been closely associated with Shaw in his years with Capitals, as also Rahul Dravid, who was coach when India won the under-19 World Cup under Shaw in 2018.

Their disinterest was telling. Shaw found no takers.

Ironically, just nine months earlier, before the start of the 2024 IPL season, it was Pant whose career looked in jeopardy.

A horrific car crash in December 2022 had left him with multiple life-threatening injuries. But showing iron will, great determination and self-discipline, Pant fought his way back from what seemed a dead-end to his career.

Pant faced the challenges of IPL 2024 head-on and excelled, earning a rapid recall to international cricket. He was part of the T20 World Cup-winning squad. Dominating the domestic season, he impressed in the domestic Duleep Trophy, paving the way for a sensational return to Test cricket. Against Bangladesh, he lit up the field with a scorching century.

Shaw, meanwhile, under pressure after a couple of poor IPL seasons, has lurched from one crisis to another.

His indifferent form in IPL 2024 saw him lose his place in the playing XI mid-season. A spate of low scores in the current domestic season saw him lose his place in the Mumbai Ranji Trophy team too. And an outright rejection in the IPL mega auction has brought his career to the precipice of a premature end.

It’s been a mighty tumble for the 25-year-old, who not too long ago, was touted as the ‘next big thing’ in Indian cricket.

Shaw hit the headlines in November 2013 as a 14-year-old when he smashed 546 runs for Rizvi Springfield in the Harris Shield, a prestigious school cricket tournament. It was the highest score in the world in minor cricket then.

Sachin Tendulkar, India’s most celebrated cricketer, had retired only a week earlier, and Shaw earned an instant comparison with the maestro.

Tendulkar’s spectacular rise to eminence following his world record 664-runs partnership with Vinod Kambli in a school game way back in 1987, had inspired quite a few batting prodigies, especially from Mumbai. Shaw was one of them.

A short and stocky opening batsman, Shaw did not have the technical virtuosity Tendulkar had even as a teenager. But he had a gift of timing, and took the attack to the bowlers with such panache that selectors were instantly enamoured.

He was fast-tracked into first-class cricket, like Tendulkar, scoring a century on debut in the domestic Ranji and Duleep Trophy, which hardened comparisons between the two.

In late 2018, he got a Test call-up against the West Indies. Shaw hit 134 off just 154 deliveries, studded with rifle-shot drives, cuts and pulls. He was barely 19. Only Tendulkar among Indians had scored his maiden Test century at a younger age.

Touted as a worthy successor to Tendulkar and Virat Kohli, Shaw had the world at his feet. But he’s been on a slippery slope since.

Six years after his sensational debut he played in only four more Tests. Add six ODIs and a solitary T20i, it still makes for a dismal aggregate of international appearances for a batsman whose precocity had promised a long, dazzling career.

An unfortunate foot injury, which saw him being sent back from the tour of Australia in 2020 was the start of Shaw’s problems. Later that year, he tested positive for a banned substance and was lucky to get away with a light sentence. Thereafter his batting form started declining steadily, touching excellence agonisingly infrequently to impress selectors.

Meanwhile stories of Shaw getting embroiled in wild parties and brawls started to spread. By the middle of IPL 2024, he was on notice, as it were. After the IPL 2025 mega auction, his career seems engulfed in uncertainty.

Injury, illness, and poor form can derail even the best, but those close to Shaw reveal that misfortune has played only a minor role in his precarious downfall.

Ricky Ponting, who as Delhi Capitals coach worked closely with Shaw, says: “There’s only so much [advice] you can give and only so many times you can try [to sort him out] .”

Former India batsman Praveen Amre, who was assistant coach with Delhi Capitals was more direct. “Prithvi’s inability to handle IPL fame and money has been his undoing. I’ve talked to him several times, giving him the example of Vinod Kambli who frittered away his career for the lack of discipline,’’ Amre told a national daily.

The IPL has revolutionised young players’ lives, offering a platform for talent and livelihood. Yet, the challenges of early success, instant fame,and rapid wealth remain pressing. Rahul Dravid, drawing on his experience as U-19 and India A coach, has emphasised the need for stronger junior-level mentoring to keep players on track. Shaw’s struggles underscore the importance of his insight.

What the future holds for Shaw time will tell.

At 25, he still has age on his side. But Indian cricket is overflowing with talent, and competition for places is intense. The path from here is all uphill.

“Some of the greatest sports stories are comeback stories, If Prithvi Shaw has decent people around him who care about his long term success, they’d sit him down, tell him to get off social media & train his absolute backside off in getting super fit. It’ll get him back into the correct path where past success can return. Too talented to throw it all away,” Former England captain Kevin Pietersen posted on X.

The message to Shaw is clear. Redemption lies in his own hands.

Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani has dropped that nom de guerre associated with his jihadist past, and been using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in official communiques issued since Thursday, ahead of the fall of President Bashar al-Assad.

This move is part of Jolani’s effort to bolster his legitimacy in a new context, as his Islamist militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), leading other rebel factions, announces the capture of the Syrian capital, Damascus, solidifying its control over much of the country.

Jolani’s transformation is not recent, but has been carefully cultivated over the years, evident not only in his public statements and interviews with international outlets but also in his evolving appearance.

Once clad in traditional jihadist militant attire, he has adopted a more Western-style wardrobe in the past years. Now, as he leads the offensive, he has donned military fatigues, symbolising his role as the commander of the operations room.

But who is Jolani – or Ahmed al-Sharaa – and why and how has he changed?

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A 2021 PBS interview with Jolani revealed that he was born in 1982 in Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as an oil engineer until 1989.

In that year, the Jolani family returned to Syria, where he grew up and lived in the Mezzeh neighbourhood of Damascus.

Jolani’s journey as a jihadist began in Iraq, linked to al-Qaeda through the Islamic State (IS) group’s precursor – al-Qaeda in Iraq and, later, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI).

After the 2003 US-led invasion, he joined other foreign fighters in Iraq and, in 2005, was imprisoned at Camp Bucca, where he enhanced his jihadist affiliations and later on was introduced to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the quiet scholar who would later go on to lead IS.

In 2011, Baghdadi sent Jolani to Syria with funding to establish al-Nusra Front, a covert faction tied to ISI. By 2012, Nusra had become a prominent Syrian fighting force, hiding its IS and al-Qaeda ties.

Tensions arose in 2013 when Baghdadi’s group in Iraq unilaterally declared the merger of the two groups (ISI and Nusra), declaring the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), and publicly revealing for the first time the links between them.

Jolani resisted, as he wanted to distance his group from ISI’s violent tactics, leading to a split.

To get out of that sticky situation, Jolani pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, making Nusra Front its Syrian branch.

From the start, he prioritised winning Syrian support, distancing himself from IS’s brutality and emphasising a more pragmatic approach to jihad.

• Syria’s Assad falls – follow live updates

In April 2013, al-Nusra Front became al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, putting it at odds with IS.

While Jolani’s move was partly an attempt to maintain local support and avoid alienating Syrians and rebel factions, the al-Qaeda affiliation ultimately did little to benefit this effort.

It became a pressing challenge in 2015 when Nusra and other factions captured Idlib province, forcing them to co-operate in its administration.

In 2016, Jolani severed ties with al-Qaeda, rebranding the group as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and later as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in 2017.

While initially appearing superficial, the split revealed deeper divisions. Al-Qaeda accused Jolani of betrayal, leading to defections and the formation of Hurras al-Din, a new al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, which HTS later crushed in 2020. Members of Hurras al-Din, however, have remained cautiously present in the region.

HTS also targeted IS operatives and foreign fighters in Idlib, dismantling their networks and forcing some to undergo “deradicalisation” programmes.

These moves, justified as efforts to unify militant forces and reduce infighting, signalled Jolani’s strategy to position HTS as a dominant and politically viable force in Syria.

Despite the public split from al-Qaeda and name changes, HTS continued to be designated by the UN, US, UK and other countries as a terrorist organisation, and the US maintained a $10m reward for information about Jolani’s whereabouts. Western powers considered the break-up to be a façade.

Under Jolani, HTS became the dominant force in Idlib, north-west Syria’s largest rebel stronghold and home to about four million people, many of whom were displaced from other Syrian provinces.

To address concerns about a militant group governing the area, HTS established a civilian front, the so-called “Syrian Salvation Government” (SG) in 2017 as its political and administrative arm.

The SG functioned like a state, with a prime minister, ministries and local departments overseeing sectors such as education, health and reconstruction, while maintaining a religious council guided by Sharia, or Islamic law.

To reshape his image, Jolani actively engaged with the public, visiting displacement camps, attending events, and overseeing aid efforts, particularly during crises like the 2023 earthquakes.

HTS highlighted achievements in governance and infrastructure to legitimise its rule and demonstrate its ability to provide stability and services.

It has previously praised the Taliban, upon their return to power in 2021, lauding them as an inspiration and a model for effectively balancing jihadist efforts with political aspirations, including making tactical compromises to achieve their goals.

Jolani’s efforts in Idlib reflected his broader strategy to demonstrate HTS’s ability not only to wage jihad but also to govern effectively.

By prioritising stability, public services and reconstruction, he aimed to showcase Idlib as a model of success under HTS rule, enhancing both his group’s legitimacy and his own political aspirations.

But under his leadership, HTS has crushed and marginalised other militant factions, both jihadists and rebel ones, in its effort to consolidate its power and dominate the scene.

For over a year leading up to the HTS-led rebel offensive on 27 November, Jolani faced protests in Idlib from hardline Islamists as well as Syrian activists.

Critics compared his rule to Assad’s, accusing HTS of authoritarianism, suppressing dissent and silencing critics. Protesters labelled HTS’s security forces as “Shabbiha”, a term used to describe Assad’s loyalist henchmen.

They further alleged that HTS deliberately avoided meaningful combat against government forces and marginalised jihadists and foreign fighters in Idlib to prevent them from engaging in such actions, all to appease international actors.

Even during the latest offensive, activists have persistently urged HTS to release individuals imprisoned in Idlib allegedly for expressing dissent.

In response to these criticisms, HTS initiated several reforms over the past year. It disbanded or rebranded a controversial security force accused of human rights violations and established a “Department of Grievances” to allow citizens to lodge complaints against the group. Its critics said these measures were just a show to contain dissent.

To justify its consolidation of power in Idlib and the suppression of plurality among militant groups, HTS argued that unifying under a single leadership was crucial for making progress and ultimately overthrowing the Syrian government.

HTS and its civilian arm, the SG, walked a tightrope, striving to project a modern, moderate image to win over both the local population and the international community, while simultaneously maintaining their Islamist identity to satisfy hardliners within rebel-held areas and HTS’s own ranks.

For instance, in December 2023, HTS and the SG faced a backlash after a “festival” held at a glossy new shopping mall was criticised by hardliners as “immoral”.

And this August, a Paralympic Games-inspired ceremony drew sharp criticism from hardliners, prompting the SG to review the organisation of such events.

These incidents illustrate the challenges HTS faces in reconciling the expectations of its Islamist base with the broader demands of the Syrian population, who are seeking freedom and coexistence after years of authoritarian rule under Assad.

As the latest offensive unfolded, global media focused on Jolani’s jihadist past, prompting some rebel supporters to call for him to step back, viewing him as a liability.

Although he previously expressed willingness to dissolve his group and step aside, his recent actions and public appearances tell a different story.

HTS’s success in uniting rebels and nearly capturing the whole country in under two weeks has strengthened Jolani’s position, quieting hardline critics and accusations of opportunism.

Jolani and the SG have since reassured domestic and international audiences.

To Syrians, including minorities, they promised safety; to neighbours and powers like Russia, they pledged peaceful relations. Jolani even assured Russia its Syrian bases would remain unharmed if attacks ceased.

This shift reflects HTS’s “moderate jihad” strategy since 2017, emphasising pragmatism over rigid ideology.

Jolani’s approach could signal the decline of global jihad movements like IS and al-Qaeda, whose inflexibility is increasingly seen as ineffective and unsustainable.

His trajectory might inspire other groups to adapt, marking either a new era of localised, politically flexible “jihadism” or just a temporary divergence from the traditional path in order to make political and territorial gains.

You might not expect one of the world’s best-known video game actors to suffer from imposter syndrome.

But, as Troy Baker will tell you, no-one’s immune.

His most famous role is Joel Miller, the main character of post-apocalyptic adventure The Last of Us – a game regularly praised for its storytelling and performances.

He’s also appeared in celebrated series including Bioshock, Uncharted and Batman: Arkham.

But stepping into the lead role of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was a different matter.

Troy says taking on the character made famous by Oscar nominee Harrison Ford was daunting, even for him.

“I turned it down,” he tells BBC Newsbeat, thinking back to when he was first offered the job.

“I was scared. I felt the weight of what this character meant.”

Troy says the performance capture team at developer MachineGames convinced him to change his mind, but there was one more person he had to win over.

Todd Howard, the boss of publisher Bethesda, had long dreamed of making an Indiana Jones game and oversaw the project.

But, Troy says, he “rolled his eyes” when the actor was first put forward.

Howard felt it would ruin the experience for players so used to hearing him.

“I never thought that my success would actually work against me,” says Troy.

Rather than walk into the role, Troy says, he had to audition with dozens of others.

It eventually came down to him and and one other actor. The decision was left to a test audience and a “blind taste test” where they had to choose the performance they preferred.

“Todd Howard said they picked you every time,” Troy says.

“And I thought that was a compliment.

“He was like: ‘No, it’s a challenge. That’s the standard’.”

The weight of expectation isn’t only resting on Troy’s shoulders – anticipation for Indiana Jones’s first video game outing in over 15 years is high.

Bethesda’s parent company Zenimax was bought by Microsoft in 2020, before it acquired Activision-Blizzard last year for a record-breaking $69bn.

The games it got hold of in that deal – including Call of Duty and Warcraft – have continued to be successful, but its gaming division hasn’t had a new in-house hit this year.

They’re hoping Indiana Jones can change that.

Troy says the production for the game’s sets was lavish, with crews building accurate representations of boats, airships and other locations on giant motion-capture stages.

That’s not unusual for a blockbuster video game in 2024, but it will mean The Great Circle needs to sell well to recover the costs of making it.

The game will initially come out on Xbox and PC, and Microsoft recently announced plans to release it on rival platform PlayStation 5.

This angered Xbox fans, who accused it of going back on promises to keep the game exclusive, but the company has said its main goal is to get its games on as many devices as possible.

Axel Torvenius, creative director at Swedish developer MachineGames, speaks to Newsbeat as the final touches are being worked out prior to The Great Circle’s release.

He doesn’t get deep into the details of exclusivity but says he’s “happy” the game will be widely available.

Axel says his bigger concern was figuring out how to use the team’s expertise to create an adventure that felt authentic to its inspiration.

The studio is known for its work on the rebooted Wolfenstein series.

Like Indiana Jones, the 3D shooter’s hero William “B.J.” Blazkowicz takes on Nazi enemies, but he does so using a range of increasingly devastating firearms.

That wouldn’t sit quite right with the adventurous archaeologist, says Axel.

“That’s not Indiana Jones, that’s not the brand we’re working with. That’s something else,” he says.

Indiana Jones relies more on stealth than direct confrontation, and the game contains plenty of puzzles.

The game is also played from a first-person perspective, a decision Axel says was made early in the game’s development.

“We’ve been trying to make you feel like Indiana Jones, like literally stepping into his shoes and seeing the world through his eyes,” he says.

“There’s an intimacy you can’t achieve in third-person.”

Marios Gavrilis, who plays The Great Circle’s villain, Voss, had a slightly less rocky road to landing the part.

Like Troy, he’s worked in video games before, mainly re-voicing characters from English into German.

This is one of the first times he’s been part of an original cast, and his character’s appearance is modelled on his own.

Marios, who’s also got TV credits to his name in Germany, says there’s potential for more crossover with video games.

While understanding of motion-captured performance – the issue currently at the centre of an actors’ strike – is growing, he tells Newsbeat not everyone appreciates the work they do.

“Very often we’re referred to as voice actors,” says Marios.

“What we’re actually doing is full-on acting.

“This is something people forget, like we’re not just doing the voice.

“It’s the entire body, it’s the entire performance that’s being captured.”

Early verdicts on The Great Circle’s acting are positive, with many critics praising Troy’s version of Indiana Jones

It’ll come as a relief to the actor, who tells Newsbeat he spent the first days on set worrying he’d be fired after Todd Howard’s early scepticism.

But, he says, an email from the boss during recording helped to settle his nerves.

“He said: ‘You’re doing a hell of a job’,” says Troy.

“And I was like: ‘You have no idea how much I needed to hear that right now’.”

The final verdict will come from players when they get their hands on the game, and Troy says he plans to join them.

“I’ve already experienced it one way, as a performer,” he says.

“But there is nothing like picking up the controller and now you are Indiana Jones. so that’s what I’m looking forward to.

“If you get to the end of the game and you feel like ‘I was Indiana Jones’, then I’ve done my job.”

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

With winter nights drawing in across North America, Canadian “snowbirds” – citizens who flee their freezing temperatures for sunnier climes every year – are planning their annual trips to Florida or the Caribbean.

Traditionally, Cuba has been hugely popular among Canadians, drawn to the pristine white sands of beach resorts like Varadero.

They fill the void left by Americans wary of the travel restrictions imposed on them under the continuing US economic embargo of the largest island in the Caribbean.

Figures show that almost one million Canadian tourists visited Cuba last year, the top country of origin for visitors by some margin.

As such, a recent decision by the Canadian tour operator, Sunwing Vacations Group – one of Cuba’s leading travel partners – to remove 26 hotels from its Cuba portfolio is a blow to the island’s struggling tourism industry.

Sunwing took the decision after Cuba endured a four-day nationwide blackout at the end of October, caused by failures with the country’s aging energy infrastructure.

This was followed by another national power cut last month, when Hurricane Rafael barrelled its way across the island, worsening an already-acute electricity crisis.

A third countrywide blackout then happened on Wednesday, 4 Dec, after Cuba’s largest power plant broke down.

“Cuba has had some volatility in the last few weeks and that may shake consumer confidence,” Sunwing’s chief marketing officer, Samantha Taylor told the Pax News travel website last month.

“There are incredible places to go in Cuba,” she stressed, keen to emphasise that the company isn’t pulling out of Cuba altogether. “But we also recognise that if clients are a little uncomfortable, we need to give them options.”

Specifically, that involved drawing up a list of what they called “hidden gems” – alternative holiday destinations in the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and Colombia.

The implications for Cuba are clear.

With tourism now the island’s principal economic motor, and the main source of foreign currency earnings after remittances, that an important tour operator is pointing its customers towards other countries’ beaches over crumbling energy infrastructure is a real concern.

“Our message to Canadians is that tourism is one of the economy’s priorities,” said Lessner Gómez, director of the Cuban Tourism Board in Toronto in a statement. “The Ministry of Tourism has been preparing for the winter season to deliver better services, uninterrupted supplies, a better airport experience, and more and new car rentals.”

While Cuba’s tourism agency tries to ease fears about the extent of the electricity blackouts, few can deny that these have been extremely difficult months on the island. Hurricane Rafael was only the latest storm to hit Cuba in a frenetic Atlantic hurricane season in which more powerful and more frequent storms are the new normal.

Of course, severe weather is a problem across the Caribbean. But for Cuba, there are other complications in play.

Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House and his choice for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, stand to make life even more complicated for Cubans than it already is.

“This is probably the Cuban Revolution’s hardest moment,” says former Cuban diplomat, Jesús Arboleya. “And unfortunately, I see nothing on the horizon whatsoever which allows for an optimistic view of the future of US-Cuba relations.

“Donald Trump has handed US policy towards Cuba to those sectors of the Cuban American right who have essentially lived off anti-Castro policies since their origins.”

Mr Arboleya adds that Marco Rubio, currently a US Senator for Florida, is the leading voice among them. He is a Cuban American long opposed to the communist government in Havana.

His parents were Cubans who moved to the US in 1956, three years before Fidel Castro seized power, but his grandfather fled the Castro-led turn to communism on the island.

“People are horrified by the idea of another Donald Trump presidency. It spells real trouble,” echoes Cuban political commentator and editor of Temas magazine, Rafael Hernández.

Current US policy towards Cuba is “somewhat schizophrenic”, he argues.

“On the one hand, the State Department facilitates support to the private sector, and [pushes for] economic changes in Cuba. But on the other hand, Congress and Senate seem to freeze any advances on those reforms.”

The expectation is, however, that a future Secretary of State Rubio will coalesce the US’s Cuba policy around a single idea – maximum pressure on the island by tightening the already-harsh sanctions.

Cubans fear that could mean the suspension of commercial flights to Cuba, or even the closure of the US Embassy in Havana, which was officially reopened in 2015 after decades of frosty relations.

If implemented, such steps would be deliberately designed to further harm Cuba’s floundering tourism trade, the aim to hit the communist-run nation when it’s down. Tourist numbers to Cuba have almost halved since the high point of nearly five million visitors during the Obama-era détente with Cuba.

Between 2015-2017 US visitors flocked to the island under more relaxed travel restrictions, keen to experience a country that had long been denied them. Around the same time, the Cuban government embarked on a major hotel-building spree, confident that demand would remain strong over the next decade.

However, there followed a double blow to Cuban tourism from which it hasn’t fully recovered. First, the Trump Administration rolled back President Obama’s engagement policies, and then the Covid-19 pandemic sent the industry into freefall.

With many of those hotels now registering much lower occupancy rates than originally predicted, and real difficulties in providing the five-star customer experience as advertised amid the blackouts and shortages, some question the strategy of putting so many eggs in the tourism basket in the first place.

“Why has Cuba invested 38% [of government funds] on average over the past decade in hotels and infrastructure connected to international tourism, but only 8 to 9% on energy infrastructure?” asks economist Ricardo Torres at the American University in Washington DC. “It doesn’t make sense. The hotels run on electricity.”

Even with all the current challenges, most visitors agree that Cuba remains a unique travel experience. The cliches – classic cars, cigars and mojitos – still appeal to many, while others prefer to travel the island absorbing its history, culture and music.

Yet as tour operator Sunwings’ decision to step back shows, some tourists are finding it hard to appreciate Cuba during its energy crisis, especially if it’s about to be exacerbated by a hostile administration – and Secretary of State – in Washington.

“The forest is our supermarket,” says Anstice Justin. “We get almost everything from the forests on these islands. It is what we survive on.”

Mr Justin, an anthropologist, has grown up in the Andaman and Nicobar islands straddling India’s east coast. A federally-administered territory, the ecologically-fragile region consists of 836 islands, of which only 38 are inhabited. The Nicobar Islands are a distinct group of islands in the southern part of the territory, located some 150 km (93 miles) south of the Andaman Islands.

Now Mr Justin watches with trepidation as India plans a multi-billion ‘Hong Kong-like’ development project on the Great Nicobar Island, one of the largest and most secluded parts of the Nicobar archipelago.

Built on a budget of 720bn rupees ($9bn or £6bn) and spread over 166 sq km, the project includes a transshipment harbour, a power plant, an airport and a new township, all designed to link the area to crucial global trade routes along the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal.

Positioned near the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, the project promises to boost international trade and tourism – the government reckons that some 650,000 people will be living on the island by the time the project is completed in 30 years.

Experts say the multi-billion plan is also a part of India’s larger goal to counter China’s growing influence in the region.

But the scheme has sparked alarm among the islanders who fear the loss of their land, culture, and way of life, with the project threatening to push them to the brink of extinction.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are home to some of the most isolated and vulnerable tribes in the world, with five groups classified as “particularly vulnerable.”

These include the Jarawas, North Sentinelese, Great Andamanese, Onge, and Shompen. While the Jarawas and North Sentinelese remain largely uncontacted, the Shompen – some 400 people – of the Great Nicobar Islands are also at risk of losing their way of life due to external pressures.

A nomadic tribe, most of them live deep inside the forest where they forage for survival – not much is known about their culture as very few of them have ever had contact with the outside world.

“The loss will be especially huge and traumatic for them,” says Mr Justin, who has been documenting the island since 1985.

“Whatever we call development in the outside world is not of interest to them. They have a traditional life of their own.”

Environmentalists say there are also huge environmental costs of the project.

Spread across 921 sq km (355.6 sq miles), around 80% of the Great Nicobar island is covered with rainforests, which are home to more than 1,800 animals and 800 flora species, many of which are endemic.

The federal environment ministry has said that only 130 sq km or 14% of the total area of the island will be cleared for the project – but that’s still about 964,000 trees. Experts warn the actual number could be much higher.

“The government always claims only a part of the forest will be cleared. But the infrastructure you’re building would lead to more pollution, which in turn would impact the entire habitat,” says Madhav Gadgil, an ecologist.

The environment ministry did not respond to BBC’s request for comment.

But Environment Minister Bhupendra Yadav in August had said that the project “will not disturb or displace” tribespeople and that it had received environmental clearances based on the “rigour of environmental scrutiny and after incorporating consequent safeguards”.

Yet, not everyone is convinced.

Earlier this year, 39 international experts from different fields of social sciences had warned that the development project would be a “death sentence” for the Shompen as it would destroy their habitat.

It’s a fear that haunts Mr Justin too: “The Shompen people do not have the knowledge or the means to survive in an industrial world,” he says.

He worries the group could meet the same fate as the Nicobarese, the biggest tribal group on the island, which suffered displacement in 2004, when a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean wiped out their villages.

Over the years, the government made efforts to resettle the people to a different area – but that too came at a price.

“Most Nicobarese here are now manual labourers and stay in a settlement instead of their ancestral lands,” Mr Justin says. “They have no place to grow crops or keep animals.”

There are fears that the project could also expose the Shompen to diseases.

“Uncontacted peoples have little to no immunity to outside diseases like flu and measles which can and do wipe them out – they typically lose around two thirds of their population after contact,” says Callum Russell, an official at Survival International, a conservation group.

There are other wider environmental concerns as well, especially about the marine life of the region.

Ecologists warn of the effect on the Galathea Bay on the south-eastern side of the island, which has been the nesting place for giant leatherback sea turtles for centuries.

Dr Manish Chandi, a social ecologist, says the project is proposed in an area which is home to saltwater crocodiles and the island’s water monitors, fish and avifauna.

A government statement has said the nesting and breeding grounds of these species would not be altered.

But Mr Chandi points out that there are several other species that nest in the area – such as the Leatherback sea turtles, corals and giant robber crabs – which might get displaced.

Even though the project would take 30 long years to finish, people can’t help but feel anxious about how it will irreversibly alter the delicate balance of both the environment and the lives of the island’s indigenous people.

It is among the most delicate and controversial challenges in modern medicine – how to determine whether the benefits of puberty blockers (or drugs that delay puberty) outweigh the potential harms.

This question came to the fore in June 2023 when NHS England proposed that in the future, these drugs would only be prescribed to children questioning their gender as part of clinical research.

Since then, a new government has arrived in Westminster and Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said he is committed to “setting up a clinical trial” to establish the evidence on puberty blockers. The National Institute for Health and Care Research is expected to confirm soon that funding is in place for a trial.

The dilemma that remains is, how will such a trial work?

Eighteen months since the announcement there is still a lack of consensus around how the trial should be conducted. It will also need to be approved by a committee of experts who have to decide, among other things, whether what’s being tested might cause undue physical or psychological harm.

But there is a second unanswered question that some, but by no means all, scientists have that is more pressing than the first: is it right to perform this particular trial on children and young people at all?

When the Gender and Identity Development Service (GIDS) was established at London’s Tavistock Clinic in 1989, it was the only NHS specialist gender clinic for children in England, and those referred there were typically offered psychological and social support.

Over the last 10 years, however, there has been a rapid increase in referrals – with the greatest increase being people registered female at birth. In a separate development, around the same time the approach of typically offering psychological and social support moved to one of onward referrals to services that prescribed hormone drugs, such as puberty blockers.

Known scientifically as gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues, puberty blockers work on the brain to stop the rise in sex hormones – oestrogen and testosterone – that accompany puberty. For years, they were prescribed to young patients with gender dysphoria (those who feel their gender identity is different from their biological sex). But in March 2024, NHS England stopped the routine prescribing of puberty blockers to under 18s, as part of an overhaul of children’s gender identity services.

NHS England said in a policy statement: “There is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of PSH [puberty suppressing hormones] to make the treatment routinely available at this time.”

The ban was later tightened to apply to private clinics as well.

In April 2024, a review of gender identity services for children and young people, led by Dr Hilary Cass, a past president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, published its final report, which called out the “field of gender care” for not taking a cautious and careful approach.

She also reported that the change in practice at GIDS away from one primarily relying on psychological and social support was largely based on a single study that looked at the effect of medical interventions such as puberty blockers on a very narrowly defined group of children and there was a lack of follow up in the longer term.

Elsewhere, some other countries were re-examining puberty blockers too. Scotland paused the use of them while Finland, Sweden, France, Norway, and Denmark have all re-evaluated their positions on medical intervention for under 18s – including puberty blockers – to differing degrees. In other places there is still support for the use of puberty blockers.

In medicine, when there is genuine uncertainty as to whether the benefits of a treatment outweigh the harms – called equipoise – some ethicists argue there’s a moral obligation to scientifically study such treatments. But there are some from across the debate who don’t think there is equipoise in this case.

The BBC has learned details about the arguments going on around the concept of a trial and how it could look. Some argue that there is already evidence that puberty blockers can help with mental health, and that in light of this it would be unethical to perform a trial at all because this would mean some young people experiencing gender distress would not be given them.

The World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) has expressed their concern about the trial for this reason. They support the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery. WPATH, who have faced increasing criticism of their guidelines from some clinicians, say that it is ethically problematic to make participation in a trial the only way to access a type of care that is “evidence based, widely recognised as medically necessary, and often reported as lifesaving.”

Meanwhile other clinicians believe there is no good evidence that puberty blockers can help with mental health at all. They also point to research that questions the negative impact that the drugs might have on brain development among teenagers, as well as evidence around the negative impact on bone density.

Dr Louise Irvine is a GP and co-chair of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender which says it is cautious about using medical pathways in gender dysphoric children. She says: “Given that puberty blockers by definition disrupt a crucial natural phase of human development, the anticipated benefits must be tangible and significant to justify the risk to children.

“In pushing ahead with a puberty blockers trial, we are concerned that political interests are being prioritised over clinical, ethical and scientific concerns, and over the health and wellbeing of children.”

The NHS adult gender services holds data that tracks 9,000 young people from the youth service. Some argue that this should be scrutinised before any trial goes ahead as it could provide evidence on, among other things, the potential risks of taking puberty blockers.

But there is a third view held by some others, including Gordon Guyatt, a professor at McMaster University in Canada, who points out that randomised trials are done in “life-threatening stuff all the time” where no-one can be sure of the long-term effects of a treatment. In his view it would be “unethical not to do it”.

“With only low quality evidence, people’s philosophies, their attitudes or their politics, will continue to dominate the discussion,” he argues. “If we do not generate better evidence, the destructive, polarised debate will continue.”

– Dr Cass found the existing research in the field was poor quality and that there was not a reliable enough evidence base to base clinical decisions on. Young people involved in many of the existing studies may have also had interventions including psychological support and other medical treatments and so it was not always possible to disentangle the effect of each different treatment.

– When it comes to suppressing puberty by using drugs, the rationale for doing so “remains unclear”, Dr Cass said. One of the original reasons given was to allow time to think by delaying the onset of puberty. But the evidence suggests the vast majority who start on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones – oestrogen or testosterone. It is not clear why but one theory, the Cass report suggests, is that puberty blockers may, in their own right, change the “trajectory” of gender identity development.

– Clinicians “are unable to determine with any certainty” which young people “will go on to have an enduring trans identity”, Dr Cass wrote. In other words, there’s a lack of clarity about which young people might benefit in the long term and which may be harmed overall by the process.

Recruitment for the trial is due to start in 2025, months later than originally anticipated. Young people will likely be referred after a full assessment by specialist clinicians. A lot is still to be determined, including how many participants there will be.

Ultimately the scientists running the trials will need to establish whether people who get an intervention are better off than those who do not. In this case, do the puberty blocking drugs and their effect make the young people better off?

“Better off” in this instance includes the extent to which a young person’s mental health may be improved if they are happy with their body. Quality of life is determined by various factors including self-confidence and self-esteem. As well as getting the personal views from the young people and parents, the trial could measure actual real life changes, such as time spent in education and time spent with family and friends.

But there are potential harms to study too, such as the possibility of reduced bone density. Some scientists suggest examining the impact on learning using a form of IQ test.

Normal brain development is influenced by both puberty and chronological age, which usually act in tandem during adolescence. It’s not clear how this is affected when puberty is suppressed. Brain scans are one way of understanding any effect.

Some scientists believe it may be possible to simply randomly assign trial participants into two groups where one gets puberty blockers, the other gets a placebo and nobody is aware which group they’re in.

But others believe a placebo group is impossible. They say the placebo group would go through puberty, realise they weren’t on puberty blockers and potentially drop out of the trial or even find other ways to obtain puberty blockers. Either scenario would reduce the validity of the results.

Professor Gordon Guyatt and others have outlined a potential trial where the group of patients not receiving drugs would be made up entirely of children who are keen to socially transition, such as by changing how they dress and altering their name and pronouns. Researchers could then monitor the difference between the groups.

A second possibility is that both trial groups are given puberty blockers but one group gets them after a delay, during which time they receive psychological and emotional support. This would help researchers determine, among other things, whether their gender-related distress subsides during that delay while receiving the support.

Alongside this there would be a “matched” control group that doesn’t take a placebo or puberty blockers, whether for health reasons or because they don’t want to, that get similar tests and scans.

Puberty occurs in stages when different bodily changes occur. A third proposal could involve a second group being given drugs at a later stage in puberty than the first.

This would allow researchers to explore when the right time to give puberty blockers might be. For example, it would enable the researchers to see if starting the drugs early improves wellbeing by reducing gender-specific body changes. They would also be able to see whether starting the drugs earlier has a greater negative impact on bone density and brain development.

Children referred to GIDS also experienced higher rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and autism compared to the general child population. Trial participants would continue to receive treatment related to these conditions but – so we know any differences in the results from the groups are down to the drug – they will need to be balanced for the above conditions.

All these considerations demonstrate the complexity of trying to obtain evidence in this area that is reliable and definitive.

Many parents are watching closely to see how it will play out. Annabel (not her real name) is one of them. She is part of the Bayswater Group, a collection of parents with children who are questioning their gender who say they are “wary of medical solutions to gender dysphoria”. She began looking into puberty blockers when her own daughter began questioning her gender in her early teens, an option put on the table by GIDS.

Ultimately her daughter decided not to take them. Annabel was not convinced there was enough evidence to show they were beneficial and she was unsure what it would mean for her daughter’s long-term physical and psychological health.

Today, she still has unanswered questions – including some further ones around the trial. “A big concern for me is will this new trial, if it gets approval, give us the evidence that we want? Or will we end up with more weak data that Dr Cass said undermined decision making in this area?”

Natacha Kennedy, a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London who researches transgender issues, has examined the results of a survey of 97 parents of young people with gender-related distress that took place following the puberty blockers ban. She believes that puberty blockers should be an option available for young people questioning their gender and that many will not accept being part of a placebo group in a trial.

“These parents are desperate and if [they] get to a trial and it turns out their child is not being given the actual puberty blockers, then there is no point in them being there,” she says.

“There may be some parents who would… find another way [to obtain the drugs].”

Whatever trial format is settled on, more scrutiny will follow. And there will no doubt be fierce debate about the merits of the trial and what it can tell us, as many scientists around the world are watching to see what happens in the UK.

But inevitably, there will be a long wait to fully understand the longer term effects on physical and mental health of those who take puberty blockers – and the long-term effects on those with gender-related distress who don’t. Nor do we know how many people detransition, though the Cass report says, “there is suggestion that numbers are increasing”.

“We really need to have long-term follow up,” argues Annabel. “Can a child possibly understand what that means to their fertility and a loss of sexual function and what that will mean for their future life?”

For now, she and the scores of parents, carers and young people, can only watch and wait for the trial to begin and for its verdict – and what that means for whether puberty blockers will be prescribed to children once again in the future.

Taylor Swift thanked her fans for making the Eras Tour “the most exciting, powerful, electrifying, intense, most challenging” experience of her life, as she played the closing show in Vancouver on Sunday.

Prior to playing All Too Well, Swift told the audience in Canada that she had been “touring since I was 15 years old”, but the experiences of the past 21 months had been “completely unrecognisable” from anything she’d ever done before.

“I never thought that writing one line about friendship bracelets would have you guys all making friendship bracelets, making friends and bringing joy to each other.

“That is the lasting legacy of this tour,” she added. “I couldn’t be more proud of you.”

The lyric about friendship bracelets, from the song You’re On Your Own Kid, spawned a cottage industry of hand-crafted accessories, which were swapped and traded by the millions of fans who attended the tour – including, at one London show, Sir Paul McCartney.

Swift said the community her fans had created would always be “what I think about when I think about this tour”.

They responded by serenading Swift with a chorus of Happy Birthday – ahead of her turning 35 next Friday.

“You guys even sang a happy early birthday to Taylor?” noted the tour’s official social media account. “We love you so much!”

The Eras Tour kicked off in Arizona in March 2023 with an epic, 44-song setlist that lasted more than three hours.

The appetite for tickets was so great that Ticketmaster’s systems broke down, prompting a hearing into the company in the US Senate.

Despite that, more than 10.1 million tickets were sold for the tour’s 149 shows, spanning five continents, over almost two years.

Last December, it became the first tour in history to surpass $1bn (£786m) in ticket sales. At its conclusion, that figure totalled $2,077,618,725 (£1.63 billion), said Taylor Swift Touring, the star’s production company.

Merchandise has also proven to be a lucrative source of revenue, with estimates that it has brought in an extra $400m (£314m).

The final stop was watched by more than 60,000 fans in Vancouver’s BC Place stadium. One fan-hosted live-stream from the venue was followed by another 389,000 people on YouTube.

Swift was in a nostalgic mood throughout, calling the show “one last grand adventure” with her fans.

As she played Cardigan, from her pandemic-era album Folklore, the reality of the situation started to sink in.

“It’s just crazy to think I’m going to sing the last song I ever sing in the Folklore cabin,” she said. “That’s wild. Oh my God!”

And she paid tribute to her band, dancers and crew, “who all left their families” behind and “performed when they were sick [or] anything was going on in their lives” to keep the show on the road.

For the acoustic set – which showcases songs missing from the standard setlist – the star said she had tried to choose tracks that “really encapsulate how I feel” about the final show.

On guitar, she played a mash-up of A Place In This World, from her debut album, and 1989’s New Romantics, with the apposite lyric: “.”

Moving to the piano, she played Long Live, tweaking the words from “” to “prompting a huge cheer from the audience.

Continuing the theme, she added elements of New Year’s Day, a song about holding on to memories, and The Manuscript, whose story of heartbreak became a metaphor for the tour coming to an end.

““

Fans noted that the selection meant the acoustic sets had kicked off in 2023 with Tim McGraw, the first song in her discography, and ended with The Manuscript, the most recent.

Only six songs from her 11 studio albums were not performed on the tour: That’s When, Bye Bye Baby, Girl At Home, Ronan, Forever Winter and Soon You’ll Get Better.

Swift was watched from the audience by her mother Andrea – but her boyfriend, American football player Travis Kelce, had to miss the show to play (and win) a home game with his team, the Kansas City Chiefs.

Fans had predicted she would use the last concert to announce her next career move. Top of their wish-list was the reveal of Reputation (Taylor’s Version) – the latest in the star’s plan to re-record the first six albums in her discography.

In the end, there were no big surprises or special guests.

Instead, the Eras Tour got to bow out on its own terms – celebrating 18 years of music that has united people around the world.

As she cued up the set-closer, Karma, Swift thanked her fans one last time.

“I want to thank every single one of you for being a part of the most thrilling chapter of my entire life to date – my beloved Eras Tour.”

She dedicated the song to Kelce, changing the lyrics to ““, as she has done several times since they started dating last year.

Over the dying notes of the song, Swift shared an emotional hug with her dancers and backing singers. And rather than making her traditional exit of being lowered beneath the stage, she opted to walk out with her team.

It was, quite literally, the end of an era. We’re unlikely to see another tour on this scale for a long time.

Ghana’s Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia has accepted defeat in Saturday’s election and congratulated the opposition candidate, former President John Mahama, on his victory.

“The people have voted for change,” said Bawumia.

The elections come amid the country’s worst economic crisis in a generation, which saw the cost of basic goods shoot up, while young people struggled to get jobs and the country was unable to repay its debts.

Despite Bawumia’s concession, no official results have been declared.

The Electoral Commission (EC) said results had been delayed because supporters of the two main parties were impeding the process and it had asked the police to clear the collation centres.

Mahama’s supporters have taken to the streets around the country to celebrate, cheering, waving flags, blowing horns and spinning motorbikes.

“I’m so excited for this victory,” Salifu Abdul-Fatawu told the BBC in the central city of Kumasi.

He said he hoped it would mean that he and his sibling would get jobs, while the price of food and fuel would come down.

Even NPP supporter Nana accepted that “my party is NPP, but whatever they did was not good.

“The system was so bad in an election year and so most people were not happy.”

• Who is John Mahama?
• Ghana becomes record fifth African country to see opposition victory this year

Although the election has generally been peaceful, two people were shot dead on Saturday in separate incidents, while the electoral commission office in the northern town of Damongo has been destroyed, allegedly by NDC supporters angry at the delays in announcing the results.

Ghanaians had expected the first results to be announced within hours of the polls closing, however the head of the Electoral Commission has asked for patience, noting that it has 72 hours to declare the results.

Warehouses have also been looted in both Damongo, and Tamale, also in the north.

Bawumia said he was basing his concession on internal tallies from the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP).

He said these showed Mahama had won “decisively”, while the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) had also won the parliamentary election.

Mahama confirmed that Bawumia had called to congratulate him on his “emphatic victory”.

The NDC earlier said that its internal results showed Mahama had won 56% of the vote against 41% for Bawumia.

The vice-president said he was accepting defeat before the official announcement of the results “to avoid further tension and preserve the peace of our country”.

The US embassy in the capital, Accra, has congratulated Ghana on “a successful election”.

President Nana Akufo-Addo is stepping down after reaching the official limit of two terms in office.

Mahama, 65, previously led Ghana from 2012 until 2017, when he was replaced by Akufo-Addo. Mahama also lost the 2020 election so this victory represents a stunning comeback.

Since the return of multi-party politics to Ghana in 1992, the NDC and the NPP have alternated in power.

No party has ever won more than two consecutive terms in power – a trend that looks set to continue.

Mahama’s previous time in office was marred by an ailing economy, frequent power-cuts and corruption scandals.

However, Ghanaians hope it will be different this time round.

During the campaign, Mahama promised to transform Ghana into a “24-hour economy”.

In Tamale, NDC supporter Gajia One told the BBC: “We handed over to them [NPP] and thought they could manage the country well, but they have failed, and we take over again.”

“John Mahama is the right man to rule this country. We are fed up.”

The new president will be sworn in on 7 January 2025.

• PROFILE: Who is Mahamudu Bawumia?
• ON THE GROUND: What an accountant-turned-mechanic says about the election
• CHARTS: What’s on the minds of voters?
• IN BRIEF: Ghana – a basic guide

In New York City, sometime in the late 1980s, a group of friends sat in a bar near Central Park and flicked through a magazine.

One man, after looking at the stories of boxing, wrestling, and judo, turned to his friends and said, with some regret: “We don’t do any of those things.”

Almost 40 years later, on a coach on the M40 in England, a different man opened a Mars bar.

When he noticed the bar was smooth, rather than rippled, he posted a picture on Facebook. The post was picked up by the media – including the BBC – and the story of the unusually-smooth chocolate was read by millions of people around the world.

The friends in Manhattan, and the man with the Mars bar, do not know each other – but they are linked by a trans-Atlantic thread. Their stories mark the founding, and perhaps the high point, of a growing fellowship: the Dull Men’s Club.

Grover Click, now 85, was one of those friends in the New York bar in the 1980s.

“When my friend said ‘we don’t do any of those things’, someone else said: ‘We’re kind of dull, aren’t we?’ So I said: ‘OK – let’s start a club for us dull men.'”

The club began as a joke. They raced lifts (or elevators) to see which was fastest, and once organised a bus tour that started and finished in Manhattan, without going anywhere in between.

“We walked round the outside and the driver explained tyre pressures,” Grover remembers. “Silliness like that.”

In 1996, after Grover moved to England, his nephew offered to build a website for “that silly Dull Men’s Club”. And from there, says Grover, “it kind of morphed, and has really caught on now”.

Grover’s Dull Men’s Club Facebook group – it’s the one with the copyright symbol in the title, there are copycats – now has 1.5 million members. On it, men and women of all ages celebrate their observations and obsessions, without fear of ridicule (ridicule is against the rules, as is politics, religion, and swearing).

Posts this week include praise for the £2 coin design; before and after pictures of brass instrument repair; and how long it takes to fill a water bottle. One person comments: “Every morning at work I refill my water bottle and it takes 47 seconds… sometimes I close my eyes and count to 47.”

But the Dull Men’s Club is more than just a Facebook page: it also has a newsletter, a calendar, real-life meet-ups, and awards – including the coveted Anorak of the Year, for the truly dedicated dullster (Grover prefers dullster – “The opposite of hipster,” he says – to dullard).

This year’s winner was Tim Webb, 68, from Orpington in south-east London. He takes pictures of potholes with plastic ducks in.

Tim started taking his pictures in January last year, after a pothole in his area wasn’t repaired properly.

“I had a word with a council official, and he recommended that I look at the manifesto of the Monster Raving Loony Party from 2017. In there, it says residents should highlight potholes with plastic ducks – seriously, this is true. And I thought, OK, I’ll put plastic ducks in potholes.”

After taking the pictures (for safety reasons, he works at quiet times and takes a friend to help) he sent them to the council, and posted them on a local Facebook group. Encouraged by the feedback, he progressed from plastic ducks to other visual jokes.

“I put a toad in a pothole – not a real toad – and wrote: ‘This is my favourite Sunday dish.’ And people either get it or they don’t.”

Tim does not know how many potholes he has photographed – he guesses 100 to 150 – but now the pothole art is the “interesting bit” of his campaign. The dull bit, he admits, is his spreadsheet of every road defect in the borough, which allows him to chase up repairs.

“There are about 2,500 entries on there,” he says.

Grover encouraged Tim to join the Dull Men’s Club after seeing the pothole pictures online. Tim did so, and was happy to accept the Anorak of the Year award in the good-natured spirit in which it was offered.

But for Tim, there is a serious side to his hobby, even if it could seem… well, less glamorous than others.

“I don’t do it for money or fame,” he says. “I do it because I want to make a difference to my community.”

It’s an outlook shared by the Dull Men’s Club Anorak of the Year from 2021 – who, it turns out, is neither dull, nor a man.

In 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, Rachel Williamson was looking at a socially-distanced queue outside a chemist in her hometown of Rhyl in Denbighshire.

“My twin sister joined the queue. They’re all looking miserable, and I’m in the car waiting for her. And I just wondered – could I put a sparkly hat on the post box to make this queue smile?”

Although Rachel – a 61-year-old retired police detective – had knitted since she was a girl, she couldn’t crochet. With little else to do in lockdown, she tried, and within two days had a sparkly hat for the post box outside the chemist. Another one, for the box outside the Post Office, soon followed.

“My sister went in the Post Office and she said: ‘Nobody’s talking about Covid any more, they’re talking about the post box topper outside the door.'”

She has since topped more than 300 post boxes, and made countless other decorations for the community. She does requests from elsewhere in the UK – “I’ve sent one to Scotland, one to Nantwich [in Cheshire]” – and local people chip in with supplies.

“My living room is full of wool,” she says. “I don’t know where the Christmas tree is going to go.”

During lockdown, Rachel’s toppers featured in a charity book and calendar, which brought her to the attention of the Dull Men’s Club. So how does it feel for a woman to be invited to such a club?

“I’d never heard of it, but I felt very privileged,” she says.

Yet despite being an Anorak of the Year, is Rachel’s hobby even dull? Is it not colourful, life-enhancing, even – dare we say – ?

“I’ve got three grown-up sons, and when they come round, all I talk about is my knitting,” she says. “I am the dullest person on the planet to them. I’ve gone from a fast-moving detective to fluff and stuff.”

Like Tim, Rachel has found purpose in her (arguably) dull hobby.

“After 18 years in the police, it has restored my faith in people. The people of Rhyl have been absolutely great. And we’ve made lots of people smile.”

She picked up her Anorak of the Year award in a ceremony in a pub near Llangollen.

“The people who haven’t got hobbies are the dull people.” says Rachel.

It’s a realisation that also came to Grover Click – the original Dull Man – while compiling the club’s calendar, decades after that first conversation in the New York bar.

“We started writing about these people and thought it was kind of funny,” he says. “But then you see these guys are onto something. They’ve got their act together.”

To sum it up, Grover points to his foreword to the 2024 Dull Men’s Club calendar.

“What they [the dull men] are doing is referred to in Japan as ,” he writes. “It gives a sense of purpose, a motivating force. A reason to jump out of bed in the morning.”

The government is “not ready” for the sort of extreme weather brought by Storm Darragh, the new head of the Climate Change Committee has warned.

Emma Pinchbeck, who heads the government’s independent climate advisory body, told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that the UK is “off track” and must do more to prepare for scenarios like flooding and intense heat.

Storm Darragh brought 96mph gusts on Saturday, with two men dying during the storm and thousands being left without power. It was the fourth serious storm to hit the UK since mid-October.

The UK government has committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, as scientists warn the rate of extreme weather events will increase as the climate warms.

However, Pinchbeck said adaptations to homes and communities were needed immediately “regardless of what you think we should do in terms of reducing emissions”.

In her first televised interview since taking up the post of chief executive at the Climate Change Committee, she said: “We’re off track against where we should be – and that’s things like flood defences, or are our houses built on flood plains?

“In the summer are our cities ready for extreme heat? These basic things.”

Pinchbeck said the UK must plan for more extreme weather events like Saturday’s storm, adding: “We have to prepare our infrastructure for it.

“We have to prepare the economy for it. We have to prepare our homes for it.”

The government’s own climate risk assessment, published in 2022, warned the impacts of a changing environment could cost the UK billions of pounds a year.

It said that efforts must be undertaken to prepare for the effects of 4C of warming, regardless of international agreements with targets to limit warming to 1.5C.

Pinchbeck continued: “There are risks to our food yields, there are risks to where we can build safe homes for people, and risks to our towns and cities which are built on coastlines.

“These things are very obvious and we should be acting now to tackle them.”

Pressed on whether enough is being done to prepare for an increased rate of extreme weather events, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told the BBC the government has already put more money into flood defences.

She also said environmental factors will be taken into consideration as ministers press ahead with plans to build 1.5m new homes across the UK over the next five years.

BBC News has asked the government to respond to Pinchbeck’s remarks.

It’s morning in a makeshift camp on the remote British island of Diego Garcia, and Shanthi’s husband has just awoken to find their young children staring through a security fence.

As the children watch an officer and guard dog patrol the secretive island, home to a strategic UK-US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, they make a stark remark: “Even the dogs have more freedom than us.”

“When I heard that I felt heartbroken,” he says.

It was a scene that captured their family’s predicament – they were stranded on a mysterious military fortress by accident, yet had a son and daughter, aged five and nine, to raise.

In an effort to find normality in the tiny camp they were housed in under constant surveillance, the family found ways to entertain themselves, to study, grow food and celebrate special occasions.

Shanthi, not her real name, says they had paid $5,000 (£3,900) in savings and given all of her gold jewellery to smugglers for an ambitious journey to Canada, more than 12,000 km away, with dozens of other Sri Lankan Tamils.

They all said they were fleeing persecution in Sri Lanka and India, some because of links with the former Tamil Tiger rebels who were defeated in the civil war that ended in 2009.

The fishing boat they were in leaked in rough seas, prompting their rescue by the Royal Navy who took them in October 2021 to Diego Garcia – and they were placed in the fenced-off migrant camp. Shanthi remembers her son asking if they had arrived in Canada.

Her young children received no formal education on the island for the first six months there so, as a trained teacher, Shanthi began giving English lessons to the children in the camp.

“We started with the basics – the alphabet, nouns, verbs, present continuous,” she says.

Shanthi’s husband later built a writing desk out of wooden pallets so the children could do homework in the tent.

The children soon began to complain of boredom in the evenings so Shanthi – who had trained in Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance – began giving dance lessons, too, playing music downloaded from her phone.

Three years after the family first arrived in the camp, they were finally sent to the UK this week in what the government described as a “one off” case in the interests of their welfare.

“It’s like an open prison – we were not allowed to go outside, we were just living in a fence and in a tent,” Shanthi, aged in her early 30s, says in an interview on the outskirts of London.

“Every day our life was the same.”

It was like living “in a cage,” she adds.

While guards watched and military jets occasionally roared overhead, Shanthi and the other Tamils approached British forces on the island with a letter asking to be sent to a safe country. It marked the first time that asylum claims had ever been filed in the territory.

This sparked a lengthy legal battle 6,000 miles away in the UK, and while that took its course, Shanthi and the others stuck there, took matters into her own hands.

While the Tamils were not allowed to cook their own food, the camp was full of coconut trees, and Shanthi and others used the husks to line planters in which they grew their own vegetables – chilli, garlic and cucumber.

“They would sometimes give us red chilis so we dried them in the sun and collected the seeds and then grew them. In the salad sometimes we’d get cucumber so we collected the seeds and kept them in the sunlight and after they dried they would grow,” she says.

Every day, they would make sambol – a popular Sri Lankan side dish – by mashing the coconut and chilli.

They struggled to eat the American food served to them from the base, and would put the vegetables in hot water with garlic and chilli to try to make curries.

With limited access to clothing, particularly for the 16 children in the camp, Shanthi and other women stitched dresses from bed sheets. Come Christmas time, they turned paper napkins into flowers, and cut moon and star shapes out of food containers to decorate a tree.

Relations with the guards that watched over them were often tense, but at Diwali, Shanthi says an “officer with a good heart brought us a biryani”. On another occasion, a guard brought a cake for her son, who had been counting down the days to his birthday.

But as time went on, Shanthi says, the feelings of helplessness grew.

Life in the camp was to exist in a bubble – news of major wars breaking out in Ukraine and the Middle East trickled through from the guards watching over the migrants, but they were kept away from the base and consumed by their own lives.

Access to the island, part of the Chagos Archipelago, is heavily restricted. It has officially had no resident population since the early 1970s when the UK evicted all the people living there so it could develop the strategic base.

“From day one until we left, every day we were living with rats,” Shanthi says. “Sometimes the rats would bite our children – their legs, fingers and hands. They stole our food. At nights sometimes they would crawl over our blankets and our heads.”

Giant coconut crabs and tropical fire ants would also crawl into the camp.

During storms, rain water would pour in through holes in the tents, which had previously been used for Covid patients in the pandemic.

When United Nations investigators visited the camp late last year, the children told them they dreamed of going for a picnic, riding a bike or eating an ice cream.

At one point earlier this year, a medical official described the camp as being in “complete crisis”, with mass self-harming and incidents of attempted suicide.

“My daughter was watching everything that happened. She’d say ‘mum they’ve cut themselves. Should I cut myself?’ So I’d say ‘no, no. You can’t do anything. I’ll protect you. Come and listen to some music, come and take some paper and just draw,'” she recalls through tears.

Both she and her husband sob as they talk about the two times their daughter self-harmed.

“Both times I felt really bad and couldn’t process it. When she did this, she told me she did it because she hoped if she died her parents and her brother would go to a safe third country,” Shanthi says.

There were also cases and allegations of sexual assault and harassment within the camp by other migrants, including against children.

“Over three years we suffered so much. I don’t know how we survived,” Shanthi says.

Throughout the Tamils’ time on the island, British authorities acknowledged that it was not a suitable place for them, and said they were looking for long-term solutions. The government said the group’s wellbeing and safety was the “top priority”.

Shanthi says the happiest moment in the camp came recently when officials announced that they would be brought to the UK, where they would be given the right to remain for six months. Shanthi says no one in the camp slept that night.

Upon arriving in the UK, Shanthi says she was struck by “the cold” – and it felt like waking from a coma. She had forgotten how to download apps, send WhatsApp messages or pay in shops.

Her children talk of starting school, making friends and riding a double-decker bus.

But the family’s long-term future remains uncertain. They have now filed asylum claims in the UK in hopes of remaining. If unsuccessful, they will likely be returned to Sri Lanka.

The UK agreed earlier this year to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a historic move. Under the deal, which has still to be signed, Diego Garcia would continue to operate as a UK-US military base but Mauritius would take responsibility for any future migrant arrivals.

Shanthi brought a shell with her from Diego Garcia to remember her time there. One day, she plans to put it on a chain and wear it around her neck.

Australian breaker Rachael Gunn’s legal team has stopped a musical parody about her journey to the Paris Olympics from taking to the stage.

The show titled ‘Raygun: The Musical’ was created by Australian comedian Steph Broadbridge, who was also due to feature in the cast.

It was due to debut on Saturday at Kinselas in Darlinghurst, Sydney, but Broadbridge was forced to cancel the show after lawyers sent a cease and desist letter, saying that the Olympian owned the dance moves.

In a statement to the Guardian, Gunn’s legal and management team said it was committed to protecting her intellectual property and ensuring that her brand remained strong and respected.

Some of Gunn’s unconventional moves – such as the sprinkler and kangaroo-hop – went viral after her Olympics performance.

Now, Gunn’s lawyers have reportedly trademarked the poster for the musical and advised Broadbridge that she was “not allowed” to do the kangaroo dance because Gunn “owns” it.

“That one did puzzle me – I mean, that’s an Olympic-level dance,” Broadbridge said in her Instagram video. “How would I possibly be able to do that without any formal breakdancing training?”

Broadbridge said on Instagram that she planned for the show to be “back soon” and “with a whole new story arc”. Everyone who was due to attend the trial show would be offered a refund for their A$10 ticket, she added.

She said: “They [Gunn’s legal team] were worried I was damaging her brand, which I would never.”

Gunn failed to receive a single point from judges at this summer’s Olympic games and was subsequently eliminated from the round-robin stage which led to a torrent of abuse online.

Despite being defended by officials, her performance divided opinion within the breaking community, with some saying she made a mockery of the scene.

Gunn had initially planned to keep competing after the Olympics, but in November said the saga had been so “upsetting” that she changed her mind and had decided to retire.

She ended her video saying that she intends to change the name of her character to “Raygun with an I” in hopes that “fixes everyone’s concerns”.

In their statement to The Guardian, Gunn’s legal team said: “While we have immense respect for the credible work and effort that has gone into the development of the show, we must take necessary steps to safeguard Rachael’s creative rights and the integrity of her work.

“This action is not intended to diminish the contributions of others, but rather to ensure her brand is properly represented and protected in all future endeavours.”

President-elect Donald Trump has said he will look at pardons for those involved in the 2021 US Capitol riot on his first day back in office next month.

“These people are living in hell,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press in his first broadcast network interview since winning November’s election.

The Republican also vowed to end automatic citizenship for anyone born in the country, but offered to work with Democrats to help some undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children.

In the wide-ranging sit-down, which was recorded on Friday, Trump promised to issue “a lot” of executive orders, including on immigration, energy and the economy, after he is inaugurated on 20 January.

While he suggested he would not seek a justice department investigation into Joe Biden, he said that some of his political adversaries, including lawmakers who investigated the Capitol riot, should be jailed.

Trump was asked whether he would seek to pardon the hundreds of people convicted of involvement in that riot, when supporters of his stormed Congress three months after his defeat in the 2020 election.

“We’re going to look at independent cases,” he said. “Yeah, but I’m going to be acting very quickly.”

“First day,” he added.

Trump continued: “You know, by the way, they’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”

The president-elect made other news in the NBC interview aired on Sunday:

• He offered a caveat on whether he would keep the US in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato): “If they’re paying their bills, and if I think they’re doing a fair – they’re treating us fairly, the answer is absolutely, I’d stay with Nato”
• Trump said he would not seek to impose restrictions on abortion pills, though when asked to make a guarantee, he added: “Well, I commit. I mean… things change”
• The Republican said Ukraine should “probably” expect less aid when he returns to the White House
• Trump said he thinks “somebody has to find out” if there is a link between autism and childhood vaccines – an idea that has been ruled out by multiple studies around the world. Trump suggested his nominee for health secretary, vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr, would look into the matter
• The president-elect repeated his promise that he will not seek to cut Social Security, nor raise its eligibility age, though he said he would make it “more efficient”, without offering further details
• Pressed on whether his plan to impose tariffs on imports from major US trading partners would raise consumer prices for Americans, he said: “I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow”

On the subject of immigration, Trump told NBC he would seek through executive action to end so-called birthright citizenship, which entitles anyone born in the US to an American passport, even if their parents were born elsewhere.

Birthright citizenship stems from the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that “all persons born” in the United States “are citizens of the United States”.

“We’re going to have to get it changed,” Trump said. “We’ll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.”

Trump also said he would follow through on his campaign pledge to deport undocumented immigrants, including those with family members who are US citizens.

“I don’t want to be breaking up families,” he said, “so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”

• A quick guide to Donald Trump
• When will Donald Trump take office as president?
• How Trump pulled off an incredible comeback

Trump also said he wants to work with Congress to help so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were shielded under an Obama-era programme, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which Trump once attempted to scrap.

“I will work with the Democrats on a plan,” he said, adding that some of these immigrants have found good jobs and started businesses.

Trump seemed to offer mixed signals on whether he would follow through on his repeated vows to seek retribution against political adversaries.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden this week issued a sweeping pardon to his criminally convicted son, Hunter. The Democrat is reported to be considering other blanket pardons for political allies before he leaves office next month.

Trump seemed to indicate that he would not seek a special counsel investigation into Biden and his family, as he once vowed.

“I’m not looking to go back into the past,” he said. “I’m looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success.”

But he also said that members of the now-defunct, Democratic-led House of Representatives committee that investigated him “should go to jail”.

One member of the panel, former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, hit back at Trump on Sunday.

She said his comment that members of the committee should be jailed was a “continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic”.

In his NBC interview Trump also said he would not direct the FBI to pursue investigations against his foes.

But he also told the network: “If they were crooked, if they did something wrong, if they have broken the law, probably.

“They went after me. You know, they went after me, and I did nothing wrong.”

What Trump could do on day one in the White House

How undocumented migrants feel about deportations

Who has joined Trump’s top team?

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of US politics in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Israel has confirmed it is carrying out air strikes on Syria to target suspected chemical weapons and missile sites.

Gideon Saar, the country’s foreign minister, said this was to stop weapons falling “into the hands of extremists”.

Media reports suggest there have been dozens of Israeli air strikes in the past two days, including on a site in Damascus said to have been used for rocket development by Iranian scientists.

Also on Monday, the Israeli military released photos of its troops who crossed from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights into the demilitarised buffer zone in Syria where UN peacekeepers are based.

It comes a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the military had temporarily seized control of the so-called Area of Separation, saying the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria had “collapsed” with the rebel takeover of the country.

The Golan Heights is a rocky plateau about 60km (40 miles) south-west of Damascus.

Israel seized the Golan from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed it in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so unilaterally in 2019.

• LIVE: Syrians search underground tunnels in notorious Damascus prison after Assad’s overthrow
• What just happened in Syria?
• Who are the rebels in Syria?
• Analysis: End of Assad rule will reshape region’s balance of power
• From Syrian jihadist leader to rebel politician: How Abu Mohammed al-Jolani reinvented himself

Speaking at a news conference on Monday, Saar said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was only making “a very limited and temporary step” taken for “security reasons”.

He also claimed that Israel had no interest in meddling in internal Syrian affairs and was concerned only with defending its citizens.

Defence Minister Israel Katz meanwhile said the Israeli military would “destroy heavy strategic weapons” – including missile and air defence systems.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, said on Monday that the Israeli military had conducted overnight strikes on multiple locations spanning coastal and southern Syria.

“Since the initial hours after the announcement of the fall of the former regime, Israel began launching intensive air strikes, deliberately destroying weapons and ammunitions depots,” it said.

The latest moves by Israel come after Syrian rebel fighters captured the capital, Damascus, and toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime. He and his father had been in power in the country since 1971.

Forces led by the Islamist opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) entered Damascus in the early hours of Sunday, before appearing on state television to declare that Syria was now “free”.

On Sunday, Netanyahu branded the collapse of the Assad regime a “historic day in the Middle East”.

The Assad regime received much support from Hezbollah and Russia in the country’s brutal civil war. With Hezbollah involved in the Israel-Gaza war and cross-border air strikes between Israel and Lebanon, and Russia expending huge resources on its invasion of Ukraine, HTS, along with other rebel groups in Syria, were able to seize on the occasion and were ultimately able to capture large swathes of Syria.

During the 2011 Syrian uprising, Israel made the calculation that Assad, despite being an ally of both Iran and Hezbollah, was a better bet than what might follow his regime.

On Sunday, Netanyahu insisted Israel would “send a hand of peace” to Syrians who wanted to live in peace with Israel.

He said the IDF presence in the buffer zone was a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found”.

“If we can establish neighbourly relations and peaceful relations with the new forces emerging in Syria, that’s our desire. But if we do not, we will do whatever it takes to defend the State of Israel and the border of Israel,” he said.

Israel is likely to be more sensitive over the Golan Heights, since HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani’s family has roots there. Thousands of Israeli settlers now live in the area alongside about 20,000 Syrians, most of them Druze, who stayed on after it was captured.

Israeli strikes in Syria are nothing new. It has previously acknowledged carrying out hundreds of strikes in recent years on targets in Syria that it says are linked to Iran and allied armed groups such as Hezbollah.

The Israeli strikes in Syria have reportedly been more frequent since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, in response to cross-border attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah and other groups in Lebanon and Syria.

Just last month, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group, reported that a set of strikes hit a weapons depot and other locations in and around an area near Palmyra where families of Iran-backed militia fighters were, killing 68 Syrian and foreign fighters.

In the hours after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, hundreds have descended on the site which for many most encapsulated his oppressive rule: the Saydnaya prison.

The notorious military complex has been used to detain tens of thousands of people who fell foul of the Syrian government over the decades.

Among those searching for people who have vanished inside its walls was Dr Sharvan Ibesh, chief executive of the aid group Bahar.

He arrived there at midnight to help a friend search for her father, who she believes has been held there for 13 years.

Dr Ibesh described scenes of “chaos”, with hundreds of people inside the prison trying to find their loves ones.

“It was very disappointing. We did not find him and we got no information,” he told the BBC.

“My friend is so upset because for 13 years she dreamed of finding her father. We were told that many prisoners have been moved to another location.”

Dr Ibesh continued: “Hundreds of people were coming out of the prison and we were told we could not come in because so many people were getting in the way of the rescuers.”

Syrian civil defence group, the White Helmets, has been searching for inmates at Saydnaya following accounts from prisoners of secret entrances to underground cells, though none have been found.

A mosque 20km away is being used as a meeting place for released prisoners and their families.

When Ibesh visited there on Sunday, he saw several newly freed people clearly in a traumatised state, he told the BBC.

A group of people surrounded two men who had just been released, trying to help them.

“[They] had been held in the prison for several years and they were disorientated,” Ibesh said. “They didn’t even know the time zone.”

“People around them were asking ‘what’s your name’ and ‘how old are you?’, but they could not even answer those questions.”

It was hard to tell how old they were from looking at them, Ibesh said, adding: “The men were totally lost, they were just staring ahead.”

The Assad regime imprisoned hundreds of thousands of political prisoners. The Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison (ADMSP) group described Saydnaya as a “death camp”.

Throughout the civil war, which began in 2011, government forces held hundreds of thousands of people in detention camps, where human rights groups say torture was common.

The UK government could remove Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham from the list of banned terrorist groups after the rebels led the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Cabinet minister Pat McFadden told the BBC the situation in the country was “very fluid” and if it stabilised any change in the ban would be a “relatively swift decision”.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was proscribed as a terror organisation in the UK after being added as an alias of al-Qaeda in 2017.

McFadden confirmed the UK currently cannot have any communications with HTS.

The minister’s comments come after Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer welcomed the end of the rule of al-Assad, who was overthrown and reported to have fled to Russia.

HTS and allied rebel factions seized control of the Syrian capital Damascus on Sunday after years of civil war.

Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the home secretary may proscribe an organisation if they believe it commits or participates in, prepares for, promotes or encourages, or is otherwise concerned in terrorism, and if it is proportionate to do so.

It is a criminal offence to join a group on the list. It is also against the law to arrange a meeting if it is to support the activities of a proscribed organisation.

HTS also faces sanctions from the United States and UN due to its terror designation.

HTS’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who has now started using his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, cut ties with al-Qaeda in 2016. He has recently pledged tolerance for different religious groups and communities.

• LIVE: Syrians search underground tunnels in notorious Damascus prison after Assad’s overthrow
• What just happened in Syria?
• Who are the rebels in Syria?

When asked by BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Monday if a process to review HTS’s designation as a terror group was underway, McFadden said: “Yes, obviously that’s got to be considered. They’ve been proscribed for quite a long time now.”

“The leader of that group has distanced himself in a way from some of the things that have been said in the past.

“He is saying some of the right things about the protection of minorities, about respecting people’s rights. So we’ll look at that in the days to come.”

McFadden, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said the government was not aware of what is going to happen in Syria.

“But obviously if the situation stabilises, there will be a decision to make about how to deal with whatever new regime is in place there,” he said.

“I think should be a relatively swift decision. So it’s something that will have to be considered quite quickly given the speed of the situation on the ground.”

“A lot will depend on whether their statements about the protection of minorities and citizens are backed up.”

McFadden also confirmed he was not aware the government had any line of communication through an intermediary with the HTS.

The prime minister’s official spokesman said it is “long-standing” government policy not to engage with proscribed organisations, but it keeps the banned list “under regular review”.

Former ex-head of MI6 Sir John Sawers told Sky News it would be “rather ridiculous” if the UK was unable to engage with HTS because of the ban.

Shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel said the Conservatives wanted to “put the Syrian people first” and called on the government to review the “security and defence implications as well as the terrorist risks” posed by the rebel groups.

• Where is Bashar al-Assad?

McFadden confirmed there had been “no request” for al-Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, who holds a British passport, to come to the UK.

He added: “They’re in Russia. They’ve sought asylum there, refuge there, as far as I know. So, it’s not an issue that’s come up.”

Asma, a former investment banker who was born in London, met her husband in the English capital. She has been Syrian first lady since 2000, after al-Assad took over the presidency from his father Hafez, who had ruled since 1971.

US rapper Jay-Z has hit back at a lawsuit which alleges that he, along with Sean “Diddy” Combs, drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl at a party in 2000.

The anonymous accuser alleges she was assaulted at a house party after the MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) in New York and that an unnamed female celebrity was in the room at the time.

In a statement, Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, dismissed the legal action as a “blackmail attempt”.

Mr Combs – who is in jail awaiting trial after being charged in September with sex-trafficking and other offences – denied the latest accusation.

The lawsuit was originally filed in October, and was refiled on Sunday to list Mr Carter as a defendant.

The BBC has contacted Mr Carter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, and his publicist for comment.

The legal action was filed under New York’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act, by a Texas-based lawyer, Tony Buzbee.

Mr Buzbee has filed several lawsuits in recent months accusing Mr Combs of assault and rape – though none have provided the names of victims. The hip-hop artist is due to face a criminal trial on 5 May.

Mr Carter said in a statement posted to social media: “My lawyer received a blackmail attempt, called a demand letter, from a ‘lawyer’ named Tony Buzbee.

“What he had calculated was the nature of these allegations and the public scrutiny would make me want to settle.

“No sir, it had the opposite effect! It made me want to expose you for the fraud you are in a VERY public fashion. So no, I will not give you ONE RED PENNY!!”

Mr Carter added that he found the allegations “so heinous in nature that I implore you (Tony Buzbee) file a criminal complaint, not a civil one!! Whomever would commit such a crime against a minor should be locked away, would you not agree?”

A statement from Mr Combs’s legal team said this amended lawsuit was the latest in a series of “shameless publicity stunts, designed to extract payments from celebrities who fear having lies spread about them, just as lies have been spread about Mr Combs”.

The statement said that the judicial process would show Mr Combs to be innocent of all the allegations against him. He faces 30 other lawsuits.

Responding to the criticism, Mr Buzbee posted a picture of himself to his Instagram as a younger man in military uniform, with a caption saying he had faced “a coordinated and aggressive effort” to stop him from bringing the case forward.

“I also won’t allow anyone to scare my clients into silence,” he wrote. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant and I am quite certain the sun is coming.”

• The charges against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs explained

The accuser in Sunday’s legal filing, who is identified only as “Jane Doe”, said that in 2000, when she was 13, a friend dropped her off at the VMAs at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.

She approached limousine drivers outside the venue to try to gain access to the show, according to the legal action.

One driver told her that he was employed by Mr Combs and that she “fit what Diddy was looking for”, says the lawsuit.

Later that evening the chauffeur drove her to a party at a white house, according to the legal action.

Jane Doe says when she arrived at the party she was asked to sign a document, which she believes was a non-disclosure agreement, says the lawsuit.

The legal action says she recognised “many celebrities” at the party and observed widespread drug use, including cocaine.

A waitress offered her a drink that made her feel “woozy”, so she went into a room to lie down, according to the lawsuit.

Soon afterwards, the legal action says, Mr Combs and Mr Carter entered the room with a female celebrity, described as Celebrity B. “Plaintiff immediately recognized all three celebrities,” says the lawsuit.

The legal action says Mr Combs approached her “with a crazed look in his eyes”, grabbed her and said: “You are ready to party!”

Mr Carter held her down and raped her, before Mr Combs did the same, all while Celebrity B watched, according to the lawsuit.

Jane Doe fought back during the assault and when Mr Combs backed away in surprise she escaped, the legal action says.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, says the plaintiff still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression as a result of the alleged rapes.

In his statement, Mr Carter, who is married to Beyoncé, with whom he has three children, said: “My only heartbreak is for my family.

“My wife and I will have to sit our children down, one of whom is at the age where her friends will surely see the press and ask questions about the nature of these claims, and explain the cruelty and greed of people.”

Police investigating the fatal shooting of a healthcare executive in New York City are on the ground in Georgia as they hunt for his fugitive killer.

Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare was shot several times last week in Midtown by a gunman who fled and then apparently boarded a bus out of the city.

Law enforcement sources told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that officers have been despatched to the southern state and to stops along the bus route.

The search has entered its fifth day on Monday, though police have revealed neither a name nor a motive for the suspect, who was pictured several times on CCTV wearing a mask.

Much of the police activity has been focused on New York’s Central Park which seems to have formed part of the gunman’s escape route.

The lake was trawled for a second day on Sunday and a discarded backpack found nearby contained a jacket and some banknotes from the board game Monopoly but no gun, sources told CBS.

Police believe he entered the park on a bike moments after the shooting, then caught a taxi after leaving the park on the Upper West Side.

• Killing of CEO prompts anger at health system
• Who was Brian Thompson?
• What we know so far about NYC shooting

Images released over the weekend show the suspect masked in the back of the taxi heading uptown to Port Authority bus terminal near Washington Heights.

He has not been spotted on any cameras leaving the station so the presumption is that he made his escape by bus.

It is the same way he arrived in the city, 10 days before the shooting, on a Greyhound bus that originated in Atlanta.

He then checked into a hostel where he momentarily revealed his face to the receptionist, giving police their clearest image yet.

Police have not said anything about why they think he killed the 50-year-old, father-of-two Brian Thompson.

One theory is that it was an attack on the healthcare insurance system.

Bullet casings found at the scene had the words “depose,” “deny” and “delay” written on them.

This echoes the title of a book criticising the ways insurers avoid paying claims.

Thompson’s death has prompted an outpouring on social media of people sharing their stories about being denied healthcare by insurance firms.

For nearly a decade it was Russian firepower that had kept Bashar al-Assad in power.

Until the extraordinary events of the last 24 hours.

Damascus has fallen, Syria’s president has been toppled and has, reportedly, flown to Moscow.

Quoting a source in the Kremlin, Russian news agencies and state TV reported that Russia has granted Assad and his family asylum “on humanitarian grounds”.

In a matter of days, the Kremlin’s Syria project has unravelled in the most dramatic circumstances, with Moscow powerless to prevent it.

In a statement the Russian foreign ministry announced that Moscow was “following the dramatic events in Syria with extreme concern.”

• Follow updates as rebels capture Damascus
• HTS leader not only player in Syria’s fast-changing future
• Watch: BBC sees looting at Bashar al-Assad’s residence
• Syria in maps

The fall of the Assad regime is a blow to Russia’s prestige.

By sending thousands of troops in 2015 to shore up President Assad, one of Russia’s key objectives had been to assert itself as a global power.

It was Vladimir Putin’s first major challenge to the power and dominance of the West, away from the former Soviet space.

And a successful one, it had seemed. In 2017 President Putin visited Russia’s Hmeimim air base in Syria and declared that it was mission accomplished.

Despite regular reports that Russian airstrikes were causing civilian casualties, the Russian defence ministry felt confident enough to fly international media out to Syria to witness the Russian military operation.

On one such trip I remember an officer telling me that Russia was in Syria “for the long haul”.

But this was about more than just prestige.

In return for military assistance, the Syrian authorities awarded Russia 49-year leases on the air base in Hmeimim and naval base in Tartous.

Russia had secured an important foothold in the eastern Mediterranean. The bases became important hubs for transferring military contractors in and out of Africa.

A key question for Moscow: what will happen to those Russian bases now?

The statement announcing Assad’s arrival in Moscow also mentioned that Russian officials were in contact with representatives of “the Syrian armed opposition”.

The state TV anchor said opposition leaders had guaranteed the security of Russian military bases and diplomatic missions on the territory of Syria.

Russia’s foreign ministry says the bases in Syria have been put “on a state of high alert”, but claims there is “no serious threat to them at the current time.”

Bashar al-Assad was Russia’s staunchest ally in the Middle East. The Kremlin had invested heavily in him. The Russian authorities will struggle to present his toppling as anything but a setback for Moscow.

Still, they’re trying… and looking for scapegoats.

On Sunday night Russian state TV’s flagship weekly news show took aim at the Syrian army, apparently blaming it for not fighting back against the rebels.

“Everyone could see that the situation was becoming more and more dramatic for the Syrian authorities,” anchor Yevgeny Kiselev said.

“But in Aleppo, for example, positions were given up virtually without a fight. Fortified areas were surrendered one after another and then blown up, despite [government troops] being better equipped and outnumbering the attacking side many times over. It’s a mystery!”

The anchor claimed that Russia “had always hoped for reconciliation [between different sides] in Syria.”

Then his final point:

“Of course we are not indifferent to what is happening in Syria. But our priority is Russia’s own security – what is happening in the zone of the Special Military Operation [Russia’s war in Ukraine].”

There’s a clear message here for the Russian public.

Despite nine years of Russia pouring resources into keeping Bashar al-Assad in power, Russians are being told they have more important things to worry about.

South Korean authorities have imposed a travel ban on President Yoon Suk Yeol, who is under investigation for his short-lived martial law declaration last Tuesday.

Yoon narrowly survived an impeachment motion against him over the weekend, after MPs from his ruling People Power Party (PPP) boycotted the vote.

PPP members said they had decided not to support the motion after Yoon agreed to shorten his term and not get involved in foreign and domestic affairs.

However, the opposition Democratic Party, which commands a majority in the parliament have criticised the deal, with floor leader Park Chan-dae calling it “an illegal, unconstitutional second insurrection and a second coup”.

Tens of thousands of people have come out in protest since Yoon’s short-lived martial law order, calling for him to resign or be impeached.

Since then, despite the failed impeachment motion, several key figures involved in the martial law order have also seen action taken against them.

Former Defence Minister Kim Yong-hyun, who reportedly proposed the martial law declaration to Yoon, was arrested on Sunday. He had earlier resigned on Wednesday after apologising and saying he would take “full responsibility”.

Travel bans have been placed on Kim, Lee, Defence Counterintelligence Commander Yeo In-hyung, and Army Chief of Staff Park An-su.

Many others have stepped down from their posts.

These include former Interior Minister Lee Sang-min who resigned on Sunday, saying he would take responsibility for “failing to serve the public and the president well”.

And on Wednesday, senior aides of Yoon’s office, including his chief of staff, tendered mass resignations hours after the martial law declaration was lifted.

In a public address on Sunday, PPP leader Han Dong-hoon said Yoon will no longer be involved in foreign and domestic affairs until his early resignation – adding that Prime Minister Han Duck-soo would manage government affairs in the meantime.

“The President will not be involved in any state affairs including diplomacy before his exit,” said party leader Han.

However, Democratic Party floor leader Park Chan-dae described the proposed plan as “an illegal, unconstitutional second insurrection and a second coup”.

Representative Kim Min-seok of the Democratic Party similarly criticised the plan, saying “nobody gave” PPP leader Han the power to make such decisions.

“The prime minister and the ruling party’s announcement that they would jointly exercise the powers of the president, which no one has given them, is clearly unconstitutional,” he said, according to a report on The Korea Herald.

The Ministry of National Defence confirmed at a briefing on Monday that the president retains command of the armed forces. That means in the event of any foreign policy incidents, including any possible threat from North Korea, Yoon is still, in theory, able to make executive decisions.

“The president can take the lead again any time he changes his mind,” political science professor Shin Yul of Myongji University told The Korea Herald.

“No one will be able to stop him, if Yoon insists.”

On Saturday Yoon apologised to the nation in what was his first appearance since the martial law declaration. He pledged not to impose another martial law order, and apologised for the “anxiety and inconvenience” he had caused.

However, the opposition has insisted that they “will not give up” on impeaching Yoon and has vowed to hold impeachment votes against Yoon every Saturday.

“We will definitely return this country to normal by Christmas and the end of the year and give it to you as a Christmas and end-of-year gift,” Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung told a disappointed crowd after Saturday’s failed impeachment attempt.

He again urged Yoon to resign on Monday, telling a press conference that Yoon’s actions were “destroying” South Korea and its economy.

A man has admitted creating more than 400 child abuse images and videos and having a pornographic picture involving a dog.

Gary Cary, from Ipswich, pleaded guilty to three counts of making an indecent photograph/pseudo-photograph of a child and one count of having a prohibited image of a child.

The 30-year-old, of Rapier Street, was also charged with possessing an extreme pornographic image, or images, portraying an act of intercourse or oral sex with a dead or alive animal.

Cary entered his pleas at Ipswich Magistrates’ Court and is due to be sentenced at the town’s crown court on 3 January.

Cary made 75 Category A images (those defined by law as the most severe) of a child between 17 May and 15 December 2022, as well as 85 in Category B and 133 in Category C.

During the same period he also created 86 Category A videos, 53 Category B and 30 Category C.

The court heard the age of the children in the images ranged from six months to teenaged.

Cary was also found with an “extreme pornographic image” portraying a person performing a sexual act with a dog.

He was told sentencing would need to take place at Ipswich Crown Court rather than at magistrates’ court due to the offences being “so serious”.

“The forest is our supermarket,” says Anstice Justin. “We get almost everything from the forests on these islands. It is what we survive on.”

Mr Justin, an anthropologist, has grown up in the Andaman and Nicobar islands straddling India’s east coast. A federally-administered territory, the ecologically-fragile region consists of 836 islands, of which only 38 are inhabited. The Nicobar Islands are a distinct group of islands in the southern part of the territory, located some 150 km (93 miles) south of the Andaman Islands.

Now Mr Justin watches with trepidation as India plans a multi-billion ‘Hong Kong-like’ development project on the Great Nicobar Island, one of the largest and most secluded parts of the Nicobar archipelago.

Built on a budget of 720bn rupees ($9bn or £6bn) and spread over 166 sq km, the project includes a transshipment harbour, a power plant, an airport and a new township, all designed to link the area to crucial global trade routes along the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal.

Positioned near the Strait of Malacca, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, the project promises to boost international trade and tourism – the government reckons that some 650,000 people will be living on the island by the time the project is completed in 30 years.

Experts say the multi-billion plan is also a part of India’s larger goal to counter China’s growing influence in the region.

But the scheme has sparked alarm among the islanders who fear the loss of their land, culture, and way of life, with the project threatening to push them to the brink of extinction.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are home to some of the most isolated and vulnerable tribes in the world, with five groups classified as “particularly vulnerable.”

These include the Jarawas, North Sentinelese, Great Andamanese, Onge, and Shompen. While the Jarawas and North Sentinelese remain largely uncontacted, the Shompen – some 400 people – of the Great Nicobar Islands are also at risk of losing their way of life due to external pressures.

A nomadic tribe, most of them live deep inside the forest where they forage for survival – not much is known about their culture as very few of them have ever had contact with the outside world.

“The loss will be especially huge and traumatic for them,” says Mr Justin, who has been documenting the island since 1985.

“Whatever we call development in the outside world is not of interest to them. They have a traditional life of their own.”

Environmentalists say there are also huge environmental costs of the project.

Spread across 921 sq km (355.6 sq miles), around 80% of the Great Nicobar island is covered with rainforests, which are home to more than 1,800 animals and 800 flora species, many of which are endemic.

The federal environment ministry has said that only 130 sq km or 14% of the total area of the island will be cleared for the project – but that’s still about 964,000 trees. Experts warn the actual number could be much higher.

“The government always claims only a part of the forest will be cleared. But the infrastructure you’re building would lead to more pollution, which in turn would impact the entire habitat,” says Madhav Gadgil, an ecologist.

The environment ministry did not respond to BBC’s request for comment.

But Environment Minister Bhupendra Yadav in August had said that the project “will not disturb or displace” tribespeople and that it had received environmental clearances based on the “rigour of environmental scrutiny and after incorporating consequent safeguards”.

Yet, not everyone is convinced.

Earlier this year, 39 international experts from different fields of social sciences had warned that the development project would be a “death sentence” for the Shompen as it would destroy their habitat.

It’s a fear that haunts Mr Justin too: “The Shompen people do not have the knowledge or the means to survive in an industrial world,” he says.

He worries the group could meet the same fate as the Nicobarese, the biggest tribal group on the island, which suffered displacement in 2004, when a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean wiped out their villages.

Over the years, the government made efforts to resettle the people to a different area – but that too came at a price.

“Most Nicobarese here are now manual labourers and stay in a settlement instead of their ancestral lands,” Mr Justin says. “They have no place to grow crops or keep animals.”

There are fears that the project could also expose the Shompen to diseases.

“Uncontacted peoples have little to no immunity to outside diseases like flu and measles which can and do wipe them out – they typically lose around two thirds of their population after contact,” says Callum Russell, an official at Survival International, a conservation group.

There are other wider environmental concerns as well, especially about the marine life of the region.

Ecologists warn of the effect on the Galathea Bay on the south-eastern side of the island, which has been the nesting place for giant leatherback sea turtles for centuries.

Dr Manish Chandi, a social ecologist, says the project is proposed in an area which is home to saltwater crocodiles and the island’s water monitors, fish and avifauna.

A government statement has said the nesting and breeding grounds of these species would not be altered.

But Mr Chandi points out that there are several other species that nest in the area – such as the Leatherback sea turtles, corals and giant robber crabs – which might get displaced.

Even though the project would take 30 long years to finish, people can’t help but feel anxious about how it will irreversibly alter the delicate balance of both the environment and the lives of the island’s indigenous people.