A Syrian woman whose grandfather, father and two brothers were detained by the military nearly 12 years ago has told the BBC it is “devastating” that her loved ones remain missing, despite the country’s most notorious prison being emptied.

“Now, miles away from that most brutal prison, we are huddling around screens, our hearts suspended between hope and despair,” Hiba Abdulhakim Qasawaad, a 24-year-old from the city of Homs, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“We are scanning every face in the footage, searching for traces of our loved ones. This is the only thing that we can do.”

On Sunday, when rebel forces swept into the country’s capital and declared an end to Bashar al-Assad’s rule, families rushed to Saydnaya Prison outside Damascus, where political opponents were reportedly held, tortured and executed.

But with rescue workers now ending their search for possible detainees in the prison, some families face renewed anguish.

“Now freedom rings like a bell too loud for ears accustomed to silence,” Ms Qasawaad said.

“Now, our hearts racing, we have this anticipation, joy and pain as we await the moment when we can finally embrace them, free at last, but I don’t know if we can see them again, because now we are torn between finding answers or never knowing at all.”

Ms Qasawaad was 12 years old when she witnessed soldiers drag the males in her family out of their home in the middle of the night on 28 January 2013. They were among 48 members of her family seized in a raid, she said.

Another of her brothers had already been killed fighting Assad’s army in 2012, she said, during a civil war that broke out after the Arab Spring protests in 2011.

“No words can describe the overwhelming anguish that consumed us at that time,” she said.

She has not seen her male family members since then – but released prisoners said they heard their names from inside Saydnaya, she said.

Her grandfather, who was born in 1939, would now be elderly, while her father was born in 1962, and her brothers in 1989 and 1994.

Ms Qasawaad said that after the fall of Assad’s rule and the liberation of prisoners, her family is feeling “a mixture between laughter and tears”.

“We don’t know what will happen next, all we can do is keep searching,” she said. “We hope we have this spark of happiness again in our lives, because it was swept away with the day that they have taken them.”

A real-life “Succession” battle for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has ended with a Nevada court commissioner denying the billionaire’s bid to change a family trust and give control to his eldest son.

The case pitted the 93-year-old against three of his children over who would gain the power to control News Corp and Fox News when he dies.

It has been reported that Mr Murdoch wanted to amend a family trust created in 1999 to allow his son Lachlan to take control without “interference” from his siblings Prudence, Elisabeth and James.

A Nevada commissioner ruled Mr Murdoch and Lachlan had acted in “bad faith” and called the efforts a “carefully crafted charade”, according to the New York Times.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Prudence, Elisabeth and James said: “We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members.”

Adam Streisand, a lawyer for Mr Murdoch, told the New York Times they were disappointed and planned to appeal.

A spokesperson for Mr Murdoch declined to comment to the BBC. Mr Streisand did not immediately respond to inquiries.

The famous family was one of the inspirations behind the hugely popular TV series Succession – something the Murdochs have always refused to comment on.

But according to the New York Times report, which is based on a copy of the sealed court ruling, the billionaire’s children had started discussing their father’s death and how they would handle it after an episode of the HBO series where “the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos”.

The episode led to Elisabeth’s representative to the trust writing a “‘Succession’ memo” that sought to prevent this from happening in real life, said reports.

The case has played out behind closed doors in Nevada, a state that offers one of the most confidential legal settings for matters including family trust disputes.

It has a “close on demand” statute that allows parties involved in certain sensitive cases to request that court proceedings be sealed from public access, ensuring complete privacy.

Mr Murdoch, who has been married five times, also has two younger children, Grace and Chloe, who do not have any voting rights under the trust agreement.

The case was launched after Mr Murdoch decided to change the trust over worries about a “lack of consensus” among the children, the Times reported.

Lachlan is thought to be more conservative than his siblings and would preserve the legacy of his media brands.

From the 1960s, Mr Murdoch built a global media giant with major political and public influence.

His two companies are News Corporation, which owns newspapers including the Times and the Sun in the UK and the Wall Street Journal in the US, and Fox, which broadcasts Fox News.

Mr Murdoch had been preparing his two sons to follow in his footsteps, beginning when they were teenagers, journalist Andrew Neil told the 2020 BBC documentary The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty.

“Family has always been very important to Rupert Murdoch, particularly from the point of view of forming a dynasty,” the former Sunday Times editor said.

In 1999, the Murdoch Family Trust, which owns the media companies, was supposed to largely settle the succession plans.

It led to Mr Murdoch giving his eldest children various jobs within his companies.

The trust gives the family eight votes, which it can use to have a say on the board of News Corp and Fox News. Mr Murdoch currently controls four of those votes, with his eldest children being in charge of one each.

The trust agreement said that once Mr Murdoch died, his votes would be passed on to his four eldest children equally.

However, differences in opinions and political views were said to lead to a family rift.

The battle over changes to the trust was not about money, but rather power and control over the future of the Murdoch empire.

The commissioner’s ruling is not final. The court filing acts as a recommended resolution but a district judge will still weigh in and could choose to rule differently.

The judge could take weeks or months to make a decision, which will not be available to the public.

Coffee drinkers may soon see their morning treat get more expensive, as the price of coffee on international commodity markets has hit its highest level on record.

On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. The cost of Robusta beans, meanwhile, hit a fresh high in September.

It comes as coffee traders expect crops to shrink after the world’s two largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam, were hit by bad weather and the drink’s popularity continues to grow.

One expert told the BBC coffee brands were considering putting prices up in the new year.

While in recent years major coffee roasters have been able to absorb price hikes to keep customers happy and maintain market share, it looks like that’s about to change, according to Vinh Nguyen, the chief executive of Tuan Loc Commodities.

“Brands like JDE Peet (the owner of the Douwe Egberts brand), Nestlé and all that, have [previously] taken the hit from higher raw material prices to themselves,” he said.

“But right now they are almost at a tipping point. A lot of them are mulling a price increase in supermarkets in [the first quarter] of 2025.”

At an event for investors in November, a top Nestlé executive said the coffee industry was facing “tough times”, admitting his company would have to adjust its prices and pack sizes.

“We are not immune to the price of coffee, far from it,” said David Rennie, Nestlé’s head of coffee brands.

The last record high for coffee was set in 1977 after unusual snowfall devastated plantations in Brazil.

“Concerns over the 2025 crop in Brazil are the main driver,” said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank.

“The country experienced its worst drought in 70 years during August and September, followed by heavy rains in October, raising fears that the flowering crop could fail.”

It is not just Brazilian coffee plantations, which mostly produce Arabica beans, that have been hurt by bad weather.

Robusta supplies are also set to shrink after plantations in Vietnam, the largest producer of that variety, also faced both drought and heavy rainfall.

Coffee is the world’s second most traded commodity by volume, after crude oil, and its popularity is increasing. For example, consumption in China has more than doubled in the last decade.

“Demand for the commodity remains high, while inventories held by producers and roasters are reported to be at low levels,” said Fernanda Okada, a coffee pricing analyst at S&P Global Commodity Insights.

“The upward trend in coffee prices is expected to persist for some time,” she added.

Israel has confirmed it carried out attacks on Syria’s naval fleet.

The BBC has verified videos showing blasts at the port of Latakia in Syria, with footage appearing to show extensive damage to ships and parts of the port.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) says it has documented more than 310 strikes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since the fall of the Assad regime on Sunday.

Israeli warplanes have also reportedly carried out hundreds of airstrikes across Syria, including on the capital, Damascus.

In a statement, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said the IDF was aiming to “destroy strategic capabilities that threaten the State of Israel”.

He added that the operation to destroy the Syrian fleet had been a “great success”.

Meanwhile, the IDF confirmed it has troops operating in Syrian territory beyond the demilitarized buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

It added that its strikes were to prevent weapons falling “into the hands of extremists” as Syria transitions to a post-Assad era.

The SOHR reported that the attacks spanned Aleppo, Damascus and Hama, with more than 60 taking place overnight between Monday and Tuesday alone.

They targeted military facilities of the Syrian Army, including weapon warehouses, ammunition depots, airports, naval bases and research centres.

Reports say that many of the facilities hit have not merely been damaged, but completely destroyed.

Rami Abdul Rahman, the founder of the SOHR, described the impact of the strikes as destroying “all the capabilities of the Syrian army” and said that “Syrian lands are being violated”.

The IDF acknowledged that its troops had entered Syrian territory but told the BBC that reports of tanks approaching Damascus were “false”.

It said some troops had been stationed within the Area of Separation that borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights “and then a few additional points”.

“When we say a few additional points, we’re talking the area of the Area of Separation, or the area of the buffer zone in vicinity,” IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told the BBC.

BBC Verify has geolocated an image of an IDF soldier standing just over half a kilometre beyond the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, inside Syria on a hillside near the village of Kwdana.

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.

The IDF seizure of Syrian positions in the buffer zone was a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.

“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 on Monday.

Turkeys foreign ministry condemned Israel’s entry into the buffer zone, accusing it of an “occupying mentality” during a “sensitive period, when the possibility of achieving the peace and stability the Syrian people have desired for many years has emerged”.

This buffer zone, also known as the Area of Separation was set up as part of Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Syria in 1974 to keep Israeli and Syrian forces separated, following Israel’s earlier occupation of the Golan Heights.

Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so unilaterally in 2019.

Asked about the IDF strikes on Monday night, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said Israel was concerned only with defending its citizens.

“That’s why we attack strategic weapons systems like, for example, remaining chemical weapons or long-range missiles and rockets in order that they will not fall into the hands of extremists,” he said.

On Monday, the UN’s chemical watchdog warns authorities in Syria to ensure that suspected stockpiles of chemical weapons are safe.

It is not known where or how many chemical weapons Syria has, but it’s believed former President Bashar al-Assad kept stockpiles.

• BBC correspondent: Assad’s police threatened to bury me and my reporting. Now I’m back, and free
• What comes next: Shaken by Assad’s sudden fall, Syria faces seismic turning point
• In maps: How did anti-Assad rebels take control?
• Saydnaya Prison: Syria rescuers end search for secret cells in notorious prison
• Refugees: Syrian asylum seekers in limbo as countries stop applications

Israel’s attacks come after Syrian rebel fighters captured the capital, Damascus, and toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime over the weekend. 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”.

Syrian rebel fighters say they have found around 40 bodies showing signs of torture in the mortuary of a military hospital in a suburb of Damascus following the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.

Video and photos showed bodies wrapped in blood-stained white shrouds piled up inside a refrigerated room at Harasta Hospital on Monday.

Several of the bodies appeared to have wounds and bruising on their faces and torsos. Pieces of adhesive tape bearing numbers and names were also visible.

“I opened the door of the mortuary with my own hands, it was a horrific sight,” Mohammed al-Hajj, a member of a rebel group from southern Syria, told AFP news agency.

He said the rebels had gone to hospital after receiving a tip from a member of staff about bodies being dumped there.

“We informed the [rebel] military command of what we found and co-ordinated with the Syrian Red Crescent, which transported the bodies to a Damascus hospital so that families can come and identify them.”

It was not clear how long the bodies had been stored at the mortuary, but they were at various stages of decomposition.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, says almost 60,000 people were tortured and killed in the Assad government’s prisons.

Human rights groups say more than 100,000 people have disappeared since Assad ordered a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011 that triggered the civil war.

A Syrian non-governmental organisation said it was likely that the bodies in Harasta were detainees from the notorious Saydnaya prison, which is just to the north of Damascus.

“Harasta Hospital served as the main centre for collecting the bodies of detainees,” Diab Serriya, a co-founder of the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), told AFP.

“Bodies would be sent there from Saydnaya prison or Tishrin Hospital, and from Harasta, they would be transferred to mass graves,” he added.

The discovery of the bodies came as the Syria Civil Defence, whose rescue workers are widely known as the White Helmets, announced that it had concluded a search operation for possible detainees in secret cells or basements at Saydnaya prison without finding anyone.

Five specialised teams assisted by two K9 dog units and individuals familiar with the layout of the prison checked all buildings, basements, courtyards, ventilation shafts, sewage systems, surveillance camera cables and surrounding areas on Monday, as crowds gathered there in the hope of finding their missing relatives.

“The search did not uncover any unopened or hidden areas within the facility,” the Syria Civil Defence said.

“We share the profound disappointment of the families of the thousands who remain missing and whose fates remain unknown,” it added.

The ADMSP meanwhile shared what it said was an official document, dated 28 October, saying that 4,300 detainees were being held at Saydnaya.

They comprised 2,817 judicial detainees held in the prison’s “White Building” and 1,483 detainees held on charges related to terrorism and military tribunals in the “Red Building”.

“This approximate number represents the detainees who were released at the time of the prison’s liberation,” the ADMSP said. The BBC could not immediately verify the information.

Rebel fighters entered Saydnaya prison and Harasta hospital as they advanced into Damascus over the weekend, prompting President Bashar al-Assad to step down and flee the country.

The ADMSP said in a 2022 report that Saydnaya “effectively became a death camp” after the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011.

It estimated that more than 30,000 detainees had either been executed or died as a result of torture, lack of medical care or starvation at the facility between 2011 and 2018.

It also cited released inmates as saying that at least another 500 detainees had been executed between 2018 and 2021.

ADMSP also described how “salt chambers” were constructed to serve as primitive mortuaries to store bodies before they were transferred to Tishreen Hospital for registration and burial in graves on military land.

Amnesty International used the phrase “human slaughterhouse” to describe Saydnaya and alleged that the executions had been authorised at the highest levels of the Assad government, and that such practices amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Assad government dismissed Amnesty’s claims as “baseless” and “devoid of truth”, insisting that all executions in Syria followed due process.

On Monday night, the leader of the Islamist militant group whose offensive led to the end of Assad’s 24-year rule said former senior officials who oversaw the torture of political prisoners would be held accountable.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) said the officials’ names would be published and repatriation sought for those who had fled abroad. Rewards would also be offered to anyone who provided information about their whereabouts, he added.

A profile is emerging of the 26-year-old man charged with murder over last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson, in New York City.

Police announced on Monday they had arrested Luigi Mangione after he was recognised at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

The Baltimore, Maryland, native was found in possession of a so-called ghost gun, a largely untraceable firearm, and a three-page handwritten document that indicated “motivation and mindset”, officials said.

Mr Mangione was born and raised in Maryland and has ties to San Francisco, California, according to New York Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.

He has no prior arrests in New York and his last previous address was in Honolulu, Hawaii, police said.

He is from a prominent Baltimore family, and attended a private, all-boys high school in Baltimore, called the Gilman School, according to school officials.

Mr Mangione was named as the valedictorian, which is usually the student with the highest academic achievements in a class.

In a statement, the school called the situation “deeply distressing”.

A former classmate, Freddie Leatherbury, told the Associated Press news agency that Mr Mangione came from a wealthy family, even by that private school’s standards. “Quite honestly, he had everything going for him,” Mr Leatherbury said.

Speaking to the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, another classmate described themselves anonymously as a close friend of Mr Mangione – saying the shooting suspect “didn’t have any enemies” and was a “valedictorian for a reason”.

• Luigi Mangione charged with murdering healthcare CEO in New York

Mr Mangione went on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science, according to the school, and founded a video game development club.

A friend who attended the Ivy League college at the same time as Mr Mangione described him as a “super normal” and “smart person”.

Mr Mangione was employed as a data engineer for TrueCar, a digital retailing website for new and used cars, according to his social media profiles. A company spokesman told the BBC he had not worked there since 2023.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr Mangione previously worked as a programming intern for Firaxis, a video game developer.

He also spent time in a co-living surfing community in Hawaii called Surfbreak. Sarah Nehemiah, who knew him then, told CBS he left due to his back injury which had worsened from surfing and hiking.

The three-page, handwritten document found on him suggested a motive, according to investigators. The pages expressed “ill will” towards corporate America, they said.

A senior law enforcement official told the New York Times it said: “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done”.

Investigators say the words “deny”, “defend” and “depose” were written on shell casings found at the scene of Mr Thompson’s murder.

Critics of healthcare insurers call these the “three Ds of insurance” – tactics used by companies to reject payment claims by patients.

Friends have told US media he had surgery on his back. The background image on an X account believed to belong to Mangione shows an x-ray of a spine with hardware in it.

However, it is unclear how much his own experience of the healthcare system shaped his views.

A person matching his name and photo had an account on Goodreads, a user-generated book review site, where he read two books about back pain in 2022, one of them called Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry.

He also gave four stars to a text called Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski – also known as the Unabomber manifesto.

Starting in 1978, Kaczynski carried out a bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens of others, until he was arrested in 1996.

In his review, Mr Mangione acknowledged Kaczynski was a violent individual who killed innocent people but the book should not be dismissed as the manifesto of a lunatic, rather the work of an extreme political revolutionary.

His social media profiles also suggest that he had fallen out of touch with family and friends in recent months.

In a post on X from October, someone tagged an account believed to be Mr Mangione’s and wrote: “Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you.”

Mr Mangione comes from a prominent family in the Baltimore area who are known for businesses including country clubs, nursing homes and a radio station according to local media.

The suspect’s paternal grandparents, Nicholas and Mary Mangione, were real estate developers who purchased the Turf Valley Country Club in 1978 and Hayfields Country Club in Hunt Valley in 1986.

Shortly after the suspect was charged, Republican state lawmaker Nino Mangione – believed to be Mr Mangione’s cousin – released a statement saying the family was “shocked and devastated”.

“We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved”, the statement read, signing off as “The Mangione Family”.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is doing “well” after undergoing surgery for a brain bleed, his doctors say.

The 79-year-old was taken to hospital in the capital, Brasília, on Monday after he had complained of a severe headache.

An MRI scan revealed the bleed and Lula was transferred to the renowned Sírio-Libanês hospital in São Paulo to have it drained.

The intracranial haemorrhage was caused by a blow to the head he sustained when he fell in his bathroom at the presidential residence in October, according to a hospital statement.

Doctors said they had performed a craniotomy on the president, a procedure in which part of the bone is surgically removed from the skull to treat the bleed and relieve the pressure. The bone is then replaced.

In a news conference on Tuesday morning local time, the doctors said that the president was in a stable condition following the surgery and was conscious.

They said Lula was “lucid” and conversing with medical staff.

They also insisted that he had not sustained any brain injury and was not experiencing and after-effects from the surgery.

Asked when he would return to the capital, doctors said that if everything went well, they expected Lula to be back in Brasilia “next week”.

Earlier, the presidential spokesman, Paulo Pimenta, had said that Lula would likely remain in the intensive care unit for another 48 hours.

“He is stable, conscious and calm,” Mr Pimenta said.

While Lula is in hospital, Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin will take on some of the president’s commitments, including welcoming Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who is due to arrive in Brazil later today.

The doctors said the bleeding was a result of the fall Lula had sustained in October.

They explained that it was not unusual for problems from a blow to the head to appear “months later”.

Lula had slipped in the bathroom in the Alvorada Palace on 19 October and hit the back of his head.

He had to have five stitches and, on his doctors’ advice, cancelled his planned trip to Russia for a summit of the Brics countries.

He returned to full duties days later.

Lula has been in power since 1 January 2023 after narrowly beating the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, in a bitterly fought election.

During the election campaign, he often joked that he had “the energy of a 30-year-old”.

Former world champion cyclist Rohan Dennis has pleaded guilty over a car incident in Australia which killed his wife, fellow Olympian Melissa Hoskins.

Hoskins died in hospital on 30 December 2023, after being struck by a vehicle being driven by Dennis outside their home in Adelaide.

The 34-year-old was initially charged with dangerous driving causing death and driving without due care, but on Tuesday he admitted a lesser charge – one aggravated count of creating the likelihood of harm.

Dennis – who has two children with Hoskins – will be sentenced at a later date.

Few details are known about the circumstances leading up to Hoskins’s death.

However, Dennis’s guilty plea means he has admitted to driving a car when Hoskins was in close proximity, knowing that act was likely to cause harm or being recklessly indifferent to whether it would.

“There was no intention of Mr Dennis to harm his wife and this charge does not charge him with responsibility for her death,” the retired athlete’s lawyer told the court.

Hoskins was a world champion in the team pursuit in 2015 and a two-time Olympian, and her death triggered a wave of tributes from around the world.

She and Dennis married in 2018.

Dennis retired at the end of the 2023 season after a career in which he won stages at the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana.

A multiple world champion on both road and track, he won road time trial bronze at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, having won team pursuit silver at London 2012. He also won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2022.

New Zealand has announced plans to ban greyhound racing, citing an “unacceptably high” rate of injuries.

The sport has long faced criticism in the country, with some breeders accused of mistreating or doping the animals.

The government plans to wind down the industry over the next 20 months, to allow time for the rehoming of racing dogs and for people in the industry to transition to other jobs.

Apart from New Zealand, commercial greyhound racing is allowed in Australia, Ireland, the UK and the US.

“Despite significant progress made by the greyhound racing industry in recent years, the percentage of dogs being injured remains persistently high and the time has come to make a call in the best interest of the animals,” Racing Minister Winston Peters said in a statement on Tuesday.

“This is not a decision that is taken lightly but is ultimately driven by protecting the welfare of racing dogs,” he said.

The government on Tuesday introduced a bill to prevent the unnecessary killing of racing dogs, which “will be passed under urgency”, said Peters, who is also New Zealand’s deputy prime minister.

Further legislation will be tabled to enable the end to greyhound racing, he said.

There have been three reviews of the greyhound racing industry over the past decade, all recommending significant changes.

In 2021, 232 racing greyhounds died and 900 suffered injuries, according to local media reports.

The industry was placed “on notice” by the government in September that year, but the deaths and injuries continued. Animal rights group Safe logged more than 2,500 injuries and nearly 30 deaths in the two-and-a-half years that followed.

A key task now is to rehome the estimated 2,900 racing greyhounds that remain in the country.

Animal rights groups which have long fought for the industry to be closed cheered Tuesday’s announcement, with Safe calling it a “monumental win for animal rights”.

New Zealand’s oldest animal welfare charity SPCA said it is “ecstatic” at the move and called on other countries that allow greyhound racing to follow suit.

However Greyhound Racing New Zealand, an industry association comprising greyhound racing clubs across the country, said it is “devastated” by the government’s proposal.

“The greyhound racing community is left reeling from the announcement, with many voicing concerns over the potential cultural and economic void this decision will create,” said the association’s chairman Sean Hannan.

Greyhound racing accounts for 8.5% of New Zealand’s NZ$1.3b ($760m; £595) racing industry, with just over 1,000 full-time jobs, data showed.

“The government’s decision to close the industry is profoundly disappointing, as it overlooks the meaningful progress we have achieved,” said Hannan, who also urged the government to reconsider its decision.

Ghana’s opposition candidate and former President John Mahama has promised “a new beginning, a new direction” for the country after being officially declared the winner of Saturday’s presidential election.

Mahama won with 56.6% against 41.6% for Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia. It is the biggest margin of victory in the country for 24 years.

Voter turnout was 60.9%, said the head of Ghana’s electoral commission, Jean Mensa.

Mahama said he felt “humbled” that he and his National Democratic Congress (NDC) had “chalked one of the best results in the electoral history of Ghana”.

He also noted that Ghana had “made history” by choosing its first female Vice-President, Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang.

And he thanked Bawumia for conceding, which he did long before the official announcement of the results.

The vice-president said he was doing so “to avoid further tension and preserve the peace of our country”.

Nevertheless, there was still some frustration that it took so long to announce the official results.

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

• The former president set to lead Ghana once more
• Ghana becomes record fifth African nation to see opposition victory this year

This election comes amid the worst economic crisis in a generation.

Unemployment, the cost of living and concerns over the environmental impact of illegal gold mining, known as “galmasey”, were among the key issues.

With many Ghanaians desperate for a change, Mahama won several regions – including Bono, Ahafo, Western, and Central – which the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) had won in 2020.

Since Bawumia’s concession on Sunday, Mahama’s supporters have been celebrating across the country.

People have been 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.

Although the election was generally peaceful, two people were shot dead on Saturday in separate incidents.

The electoral commission office in the northern town of Damongo was also destroyed, allegedly by NDC supporters angry at the delays in announcing the results.

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.

Mahama’s NDC and the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) have alternated in power since the return of multi-party politics to Ghana in 1992.

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”.

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

• WATCH: The deadly dig for Ghana’s gold
• ON THE GROUND: What an accountant-turned-mechanic says about the election
• CHARTS: What’s on the minds of voters
• PROFILE: Who is Mahamudu Bawumia?

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested three suspects in connection with devastating explosions that rocked an apartment block in The Hague, killing six people and leaving a community in shock.

The blast, which occurred at 06:15 local time (05:15 GMT) on Saturday, demolished five homes in the Tarwekamp area of the city.

Police are exploring “all avenues” that could have led to the incident, with the arrests suggesting a potential criminal motive.

The suspects are being held in restrictive custody, only allowed contact with their lawyers, and are expected to appear in court later this week.

“Further arrests cannot be ruled out,” officials announced.

On Saturday night, we met local people trudging around in the rain between fire trucks and police vans.

The quiet neighbourhood has been shaken by the loss of six people and the uncertainty surrounding the nature of, and possible reason behind, the blast.

Among the victims were three members of the same family – a 45-year-old father, his partner, 41, and their 17-year-old daughter. Their 8-year-old son miraculously survived.

Three other men – aged 31, 44, and 63 – were also killed. Among them was a civil engineer from Greece, who was reportedly “in love with the Netherlands”.

Four others were rescued from the rubble of their former homes.

Several vehicles have been seized – though it’s unclear if any are the car seen speeding away from the scene shortly after the explosion.

Police have received dozens of tip-offs and are appealing for more witnesses and images from pet cameras or dashcams.

Forensic teams are poised to resume their investigation once the crime scene is deemed safe.

The explosion’s impact has extended beyond the immediate casualties.

Four people were hospitalised, including two who had been sleeping in the basement of a bar at the time and were treated for smoke inhalation.

A bridal store next door to the bar was completely destroyed, while another ground-floor bar’s wine stock remarkably remained intact. An artist’s studio was also totally decimated.

Many residents were evacuated and remain in shelters while structural damage is assessed.

An evacuation order is in place near the city of Malibu in the US state of California after a fast-moving wildfire broke out and burned hundreds of acres of vegetation.

The blaze has been dubbed the Franklin Fire by authorities, who say it started in Malibu Canyon at about 22:50 local time on Monday (06:50 GMT).

Firefighters are on the scene and a mandatory evacuation order is in place for a wide swathe of eastern Malibu. A shelter-in-place order applies to much of nearby Pepperdine University.

It is not yet clear what caused the blaze, which has been labelled a brush fire – meaning a type of blaze that affects lower-lying vegetation such as grasses.

Wildfires more generally in California have the capacity to burn through tens of thousands of acres of vegetation, meaning that this blaze is relatively small – although officials were quick to highlight its speed of spread.

Malibu city authorities initially said the fire was about three miles (4.8km) north of the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), but later spread south across the road into the Malibu Pier area. The pier itself and other structures had been affected, they said.

Malibu itself is a small, upmarket city west of Los Angeles popular with wealthy celebrities. More than 1,800 acres of land have so far been burned, according to the latest update from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

The evacuation order covered a region east of Malibu Canyon Road and South of Piuma Road as well as the Serra Retreat area, the County of Los Angeles Fire Department said.

The blaze broke out near Pepperdine University. The university said its community was sheltering in place. Power to the much of the campus and wider area had been cut and was expected to stay that way for the “foreseeable future”, it added.

The latest incident comes about a month after another fire forced thousands of people to evacuate another nearby city, Moorpark.

California is a state that is prone to wildfires. The amount of burned areas in the summer in northern and central California increased five times from 1996 to 2021 compared with the 24-year period before, which scientists have attributed to human-caused climate change.

Not all wildfires can automatically be linked directly to climate change. The science is complicated and human factors, including how we manage land and forests, also contribute.

However, scientists say that climate change is making weather conditions that lead to wildfires, such as heat and drought, more likely.

Have you been asked to evacuate because of the fire? Get in touch.

Syrian refugees have been celebrating the fall of Bashar al-Assad in the streets of Turkish cities, welcoming the sudden collapse of his regime, and many are now considering whether they should go back home.

Thousands of Syrians have flocked to Turkey’s borders with Syria, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced the opening of a border gate “to prevent any congestion and ease traffic”.

But almost three million Syrians are currently living in Turkey, having fled their country’s civil war since it began in 2011, and they will face a difficult decision on what they do next.

“There is still no water in many regions in Syria, electricity comes at certain times of the day. It is not even clear who will govern the country and how, but we need to return to get Syria back on its feet,” says Ibrahim, a chemical engineer who has lived for 12 years in Hatay province which borders Syria.

Despite all the risks he is among those Syrian refugees planning to go back as soon as possible, even though they will have to restart their lives from scratch.

• Follow updates: Syrian rebels to name Assad officials wanted for torture

Many Turks are also keen for Syrians to go back as soon as possible and Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said Turkey will work for their “safe and voluntary return home”.

Columnist Mehmet Tezkan voiced the opinion of many here when he suggested there was no reason for them to stay.

The lives of Syrians in Turkey have become increasingly difficult in the past two years as Turks face an economic crisis with spiralling inflation.

Anti-immigrant sentiment in society has increased and the Erdogan government has tightened policies on immigration.

Turkey had long tried to talk to the ousted Assad regime about sending its refugees home.

But most Syrians in Turkey will want to wait and see how the coming turbulent months unfold before making such a big decision.

“There will be some movement, but I don’t expect millions of people to leave at once, as everyone thinks,” warns migration expert Prof Murat Erdogan.

If this doesn’t happen, he says, “then a new atmosphere of tension may emerge.”

Metin Corabatir, head of the Asylum and Migration Research Centre, predicts that a “gradual return” will take place within a year at best, provided that the necessary preparations are made.

“There are still risks in Syria in terms of both security and daily life. An internationally recognised government must take office in Damascus,” he told the BBC.

Ibrahim agrees that for many refugees there will be nothing left to return home to: “In some areas there are no houses, no schools left. Even big cities like Aleppo are in a bad situation.”

“But this country has come out of a 13-year war and we cannot wait for everything to be ready for us. As the Syrian people, we will try to rebuild everything little by little.”

In other words, Ibrahim says the identity of Syria’s next government is less important than Syrians going home to influence their future.

“Whoever comes will be better than Assad,” he says. “If we don’t return, who will go to the elections, who will decide how the country will be governed?”

Metin Corabatir points out that the big influx into Turkey came initially as Syrians fled the Assad regime from 2011-2013. The later exodus came when Syrians fled the rise of militant Islamist group IS and the spread of political instability.

“It’s not easy to tell how the groups that come to power will behave, and Syrians will naturally expect to see that,” he says.

“What kind of regime will be created there? The team that came says ‘we are not jihadists, we will allow diversity’ – but only time will tell to understand whether this is real or not.”

All Syrians in Turkey hold temporary protection status. The majority of them live in Istanbul and two border cities, Gaziantep and Sanliurfa.

Because many have been here for so long, Syrian families have put down roots, sending their children to Turkish schools and universities.

Syrians here also lead precarious lives.

Many work unregistered with salaries below the minimum wage, and often with no insurance.

If they all go home at once it could have a significant effect on the Turkish economy.

Murat Erdogan cautions that Turkey should not push Syrians to rush home all at once for the simple reason that there are big questions over infrastructure – a lack of schools, jobs and hospitals.

The United Nations estimates that 90% of the population inside Syria is now living below the poverty line.

“It may take hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild these devastated cities. Which country will provide the resources?” Mr Erdogan says. “The deep poverty and the collapse of infrastructure in Syria are likely to continue for a long time. These are not problems that will be easily fixed in the short term.”

Metin Corabatir warns also of the risk of unexploded bombs and mines when refugees head home: “They also need to find out in advance what condition their homes are in the destroyed cities.”

“We are talking about millions of people. The fact that they left their homes, reached Syria and settled there; all of this is greatly underestimated.”

Turks, he believes, should not see the Syrians living among them as a mass of people who will just pack up and leave all at once.

In just two weeks, Syrian rebels have swept from their enclave in the north west to capture a string of major cities, before reaching the capital Damascus and toppling President Bashar al-Assad 13 years after the start of the country’s civil war.

In convoys of small vehicles and motorbikes, fighters led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) moved rapidly along the north-south highway which forms the country’s main spine to take Damascus without resistance.

But while many in the country are celebrating the downfall of a family dynasty that ruled Syria with an iron fist, the future is uncertain and the situation on the ground remains in flux, with a number of different rebel groups controlling different parts of the country.

• Live updates on the downfall of Assad
• Watch: BBC reports from inside Damascus
• What has just happened in Syria?
• Analysis: End of Assad rule will reshape region’s balance of power

The fall of the Assad regime was brought about by the sudden and unexpected advance by HTS rebels but, although the group controls Syria’s main cities, it does not govern the whole country.

Syria has for years been controlled by a patchwork of rebel groups including HTS in Idlib and Kurdish-led groups in the country’s north east, some of which have also taken territory in recent days and weeks.

None of the rebel groups will mourn the falling of the Assad regime, but finding a consensus over how to run the country could still prove difficult and in the north of the country there have been clashes between competing factions.

After years locked behind frozen frontlines, the rebels mounted a lightning advance, culminating in the toppling of the president and takeover of the capital at the weekend.

After taking Syria’s second city Aleppo at the end of November, the rebels continued their offensive, moving south to take control of the city of Hama last Thursday.

The advance continued at pace, with Syria’s third city, Homs, falling on Saturday shortly before government forces also lost control of the capital.

Syria, with a population of about 22 million people, is located on the east coast of the Mediterranean sea. It borders Turkey to the north, Lebanon and Israel to the west and south west, Iraq to the east and Jordan to the south.

Turkey, Western powers and several Gulf Arab states have backed varying elements of the Syrian opposition to varying degrees during the conflict.

The Lebanon-based Hezbollah movement, backed by Iran, has fought alongside the Syrian regime army but has been severely weakened by its conflict with Israel. This has been seen as a key reason why the rebel advance was so successful.

Israel, concerned by what it calls Iran’s “military entrenchment” in Syria, has launched air strikes against Syria’s military.

Israeli warplanes have reportedly been carrying out hundreds of airstrikes across Syria, targeting Syrian Army military facilities, including weapon warehouses, ammunition depots, airports, naval bases and research centres.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) says it has documented more than 300 strikes by Israel since the fall of the Assad regime on Sunday, including on the capital, Damascus, Aleppo and Hama.

Reports say that many of the facilities hit have been completely destroyed.

Israel says its actions are to prevent weapons falling “into the hands of extremists” as Syria transitions into a post-Assad era.

Israel also says it has temporarily seized control of a demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, saying the 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria had “collapsed” with the rebel takeover of the country.

It denies reports it has tanks approaching Damascus but says some troops are operating in Syrian territory beyond the buffer zone.

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

Israel seized the territory 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.

In the northern city of Manbij there have been clashes between Turkish-backed forces and Kurdish-led rebels.

Both sides claimed to have taken parts of the city and fighting is reported to be ongoing in some neighbourhoods.

Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War said they could not yet ascertain who was in control of Manbij.

In 2015, Russia sent thousands of troops to Syria to help keep President Assad in power.

In return for this military assistance, Russia was given 49-year leases on two key military bases.

The port at Tartous is Russia’s only major overseas naval base and also its only naval base in the Mediterranean.

Along with the air base at Hmeimim, which is often used to fly Russia’s military contractors in and out of Africa, the two bases play an important role in Russia’s ability to operate as a global power.

The Kremlin has said it will hold discussions with Syria’s new administration on the future of both sites.

Since the collapse of the Assad regime on Sunday, Syrian civilians hoping for news of their relatives have been flocking towards the country’s most secretive and notorious prison, Saydnaya.

Established in the early 1980s in a small town about 30km (19 miles) north of the capital Damascus, Saydnaya is where the Assad family has held opponents of their regime for decades.

Referred to as a “human slaughterhouse” by rights groups, thousands of people are said to have been detained, tortured and executed at the prison since the Syrian civil war began in 2011.

The layout of Saydnaya has been a closely guarded secret and images from inside the prison have never been seen before.

• ‘I hope my dad comes back’: BBC News speaks to families looking for loved ones in the prison

Details of the prison’s layout can only be established based on interviews with former guards and detainees.

But information from rights groups and the US State Department have offered an insight into the building which became a powerful symbol of the Assads’ brutal and repressive rule.

Saydnaya was for decades administered by the Syrian military police and military intelligence, with construction beginning in the early 1980s. The first detainees arrived at the 1.4 sq km facility in 1987 – 16 years into the rule of President Hafeez al-Assad, Bashar’s father.

Once fully operational the prison contained two main detention facilities. The White Building was, according to rights groups, mainly built to hold military officers and troops suspected of being disloyal to the regime. It was an L-shaped complex in the south-east of the sprawling complex.

The Red Building – the main prison – was for opponents of the regime, initially comprising those suspected of membership of Islamist groups. This wing was noted for its distinctive Y-shape, with three straight corridors spreading out from a central hub.

Around 10,000-20,000 people could be housed between the two buildings, according to rights groups that have spoken to released prisoners. Videos circulating online since Sunday – which have been authenticated by BBC Verify – showed a large surveillance room in the prison filled with CCTV screens showing what appeared to be dozens of prison cells.

A 2017 report by Amnesty International citing ex-guards at the prison found that after the Syrian civil war began in 2011 the White Building was emptied of existing prisoners, and prepared instead to house those detained for taking part in protests opposing President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

One former officer told Amnesty that “after 2011, [Saydnaya] became the main political prison in Syria”.

The organisation also quoted testimony from former prisoners claiming that those held in the Red Building were frequently exposed to various methods of torture, including severe beatings, rape and denial of access to food and medicine.

Housed beneath the White Building is what those speaking to Amnesty called an “execution room”, where detainees in the Red Building would be transported to be hanged.

A former guard said that a list of those to be executed from the Red Building would arrive at lunchtime. Troops would then take those marked for death to a basement holding cell – which could sometimes contain up to 100 people – where they were subjected to beatings.

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Prisoners who spoke to Amnesty said detainees in the Red Building were typically “transferred” from the building in the dead of night – usually between midnight and 03:00.

Blindfolded detainees were then led down a flight of stairs into the “execution room” in the south-east section of the White Building, before being led up onto a one metre-high platform with 10 nooses from which they were hanged.

According to Amnesty, in 2012 the room was expanded, with a second platform with 20 more nooses. In footage shared by rebel-affiliated media after the fall of the regime, fighters displayed dozens of nooses they found in rooms around Saydnaya.

It is estimated by rights groups that more than 30,000 detainees had either been executed or died as a result of torture, lack of medical care or starvation between 2011 and 2018. Citing accounts from the few released inmates, at least another 500 detainees had been executed between 2018 and 2021, the Association of the Missing and Detainees in Saydnaya Prison (AMDSP) said in 2022.

In 2017, the US State Department claimed that authorities had constructed a possible crematorium on the site to dispose of the remains of murdered prisoners. In the images below, a small wing can be seen adjoining the White Building.

A State Department spokesperson said officials had built the facility as part of “an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison”.

Satellite images released by US investigators showed a structure which they said was a small building converted into a crematorium. Officials said snow melt on the roof of the building helped to back up their claims – adding that at least 50 prisoners a day were being hanged at the facility at the time.

Throughout its history, the facility was heavily guarded, with fortifications surrounding the grounds.

The exterior of the prison was patrolled by a detachment of 200 troops from the military, with an additional 250 soldiers from military intelligence and the military police responsible for interior security, according to the 2022 report from AMDSP.

Troops from the 21st Brigade of the army’s Third Division were chosen to defend the prison because of their strong loyalty to the regime. Soldiers were commanded by officers from President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority.

Since the downfall of the Assad regime, civilians have been urged to avoid rushing through the perimeter of the prison. Rights groups say the exterior of the complex is known to be heavily mined. A ring of anti-tank munitions runs around the exterior of the prison, with a secondary ring of anti-personnel mines running through the centre of the facility.

Images released by the White Helmets – a Syrian civil defence group – showed high walls topped with barbed wire also surrounding the complex. Guard towers can also be seen dotted around the facility.

The Assad regime always denied the accusations levelled against it by international organisations, calling them “baseless” and “devoid of truth”.

Amnesty says for families who suspect their relatives have been held in Saydnaya the fall of the regime “raises the prospect that they could finally discover the fate of their missing loved ones, in some cases decades later”.

In the end the Assad regime was so hollow, corrupt and decayed that it collapsed in less than a fortnight.

No one I have spoken to has been anything other than astonished by the speed with which the regime turned to dust.

In the spring of 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, it was different, when Syrians tried to grab some of the revolutionary magic that had swept away the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the veteran strongmen of Libya and Yemen.

By 2011, the regime created by Hafez al-Assad and passed to his son Bashar on his death in 2000 was already corrupt and decadent.

But the system that Hafez built still had much of the brutal, ruthless strength that he believed was necessary to control Syria. Assad senior had seized power in a country that was prone to coups and delivered it to his son and heir without a significant challenge.

Bashar al-Assad went back to his father’s playbook in 2011.

It is hard to imagine now, but back then he had more legitimacy among some of Syria’s population than the old dictators swept away by crowds chanting the slogan of that year – “The people want the fall of the regime”.

Bashar al-Assad was a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and of Hezbollah during its successful fight against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war. He was younger than the ex and soon to be former Arab leaders.

Since his father’s death he had been promising reform. Some Syrians still wanted to believe him in 2011, hoping demonstrations were the spur he needed for the change that he had promised, until he ordered his men to shoot peaceful demonstrators dead in the streets.

A British ambassador in Syria once told me that the way to understand the Assad regime was to watch Mafia films like The Godfather. The obedient could be rewarded.

Anyone who went against the head of the family or his closest lieutenants would be eliminated. In Syria’s case that could mean the gallows, or a firing squad, or indefinite incarceration in some underground cell.

We’re seeing them now, emaciated and pale, blinking into the light, filmed on the mobiles of the rebel fighters who have freed thousands of them from years behind bars.

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The weakness of the regime, to the point that it collapsed like a soggy paper bag, was disguised by the fearsome and repressive gulag it still maintained.

The international consensus was that Bashar al-Assad was weak, dependent on Russia and Iran, and presiding over a country he had fractured to preserve his family’s rule – but still strong enough to be regarded as a fact of Middle Eastern life, who could even be useful.

In the last days before rebels burst out of Idlib, it was widely reported that the US, Israel and the United Arab Emirates were trying to detach Assad’s Syria from Iran.

Israel had been launching increasingly heavy airstrikes against targets inside Syria it said were part of the supply chain Iran used to get weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel’s offensive in Lebanon had dealt severe blows to Hezbollah, but the idea was to stop it regenerating. At the same time the UAE and the US were trying to find incentives for him to break the alliance with Tehran, relaxing sanctions and allowing Assad to continue his international rehabilitation.

Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden have claimed credit for the fall of the Assad regime. There is something in that.

The damage Israel inflicted on Hezbollah and Iran with US weapons and constant support, and Biden’s supply of arms for Ukraine, made it impossible, even undesirable, for Assad’s closest allies to save him.

But the fact that they saw Assad as part of their strategy to contain and damage Iran until days before his fall indicates clearly that they did not for a moment believe him to be days away from a midnight flit to Russia.

They did contribute to his end, more by accident than design.

The fall of the regime might have ended Iran’s supply chain, if Syria’s new rulers decide their deals with others are more useful than the Iranian alliance.

All sides are thinking hard and thinking again about what comes next, and it is too soon to draw definite conclusions. Syrians, their neighbours, and the wider world are now confronted by another geopolitical earthquake, the biggest of the series that has followed the Hamas attacks on Israel in October last year. It might not be the last.

Iran is seeing the final collapse of the main planks of the network it called the axis of resistance. Its most important components have been transformed; Hezbollah badly damaged and the Assad regime gone.

Iran’s rulers might want to follow up on hints of talks on a deal with Donald Trump once he takes office. Or its new strategic nakedness might push it into a fateful decision to turn its highly enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon.

Syrians have every reason to rejoice. In the years after 2011, for all the repression and brutality of the regime, Assad and his acolytes could still find men who would fight. Many of the troops I met on front lines told me that Assad was a better option than the jihadist extremists of Islamic State group.

In 2024, faced by a well-organised rebel force that insisted it was nationalist, Islamist but no longer jihadist, the army’s reluctant conscripts refused to fight, stripped off their uniforms and went home.

The best scenario is that Syrians, helped by the big players in the region, will find a way to create a postwar mood of national reconciliation, not a wave of looting and revenge that will drag the country into a new war. Abu Mohammad al Joulani, the leader of victorious HTS, has called for his men and all of Syria’s sects to respect each other.

His men have removed the regime, and he is the closest Syria has to a de facto leader.

Syria, though, has dozens of armed groups that do not necessarily agree with him and will want to grab power in their own areas. In southern Syria, tribal militias did not recognise the writ of the Assads. They will not follow orders they don’t like from the new set up in Damascus.

In the eastern desert, the US saw a big enough threat from remnants of the Islamic State group to launch waves of air strikes. The Israelis, alarmed by the prospect of an Islamist state on their border, are pounding the military infrastructure of Syria’s armed forces.

It might be better to find a way to make a reformed Syrian Arab Army part of the solution in a country without much law or order. The reckless decision by the US in 2003 to dissolve the Iraqi armed forces had disastrous consequences.

In Turkey, President Erdogan must be satisfied by what he sees.

Erdogan’s Turkey did more than any other power to preserve the autonomy of Idlib province, where HTS was transforming itself into a fighting force when Syria seemed to be in the deep freeze.

Erdogan might see his influence lapping Israel’s borders, at a time when Israel-Turkey relations have been poisoned by the war in Gaza.

The worst scenario for Syrians is that their country will follow the example of two Arab dictatorships that spun into violent chaos after the fall of their regimes.

Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq were removed without a ready-made replacement waiting in the wings. Ill-considered foreign intervention did much to create two catastrophes.

The vacuum left by the dictators was filled by waves of looting, revenge, power grabs and civil war.

Syrians have not been in charge of their own destiny for generations. Individuals were robbed of it by the two Assad presidents and their followers. The country lost it after war left it so weakened that bigger foreign powers used it to increase and preserve their own power.

Syrians still do not have agency over their lives. They might have a chance of creating a new and better country if they did.

Eleven years ago, I left Damascus not knowing if I would ever be back.

Back then, the city was in the grip of war. Intense violence, which followed President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests, engulfed the capital. At any moment you could be shot dead on the streets.

I reported for the BBC from inside Syria on the very first protests in 2011. I reported on the “day of rage”, then on shootings, killings, disappearances, air strikes and barrel bombs – until I myself became numb and lost hope.

I was arrested several times. The regime limited my movements and threatened me, and in 2013 I had to leave.

Over the past decade, I’ve lived through a rollercoaster of hope and despair, watching my country ripped apart from abroad. Death, destruction, detention. Millions fleeing and becoming refugees.

Like many Syrians, I felt as though the world had forgotten about our country. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

When people took to the streets back then to call for the toppling of the regime, I never imagined it would actually happen, given President Assad’s powerful backers in Russia and Iran.

But on Sunday, at the blink of an eye, everything changed.

• Follow live updates on the situation in Syria

Last week, I was in Beirut reporting on the fall of Aleppo and Hama to anti-Assad militants, but I didn’t really think that would bring about change. I thought Syria would be split in two, with Damascus and the coastal cities remaining in Assad’s hands.

After midnight on Saturday, things suddenly turned around. By 04:00, it was announced that the regime had fallen and Assad had gone. As I’m writing these words now, I still can’t believe that this is a reality.

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• Listen to The Global Story podcast: The final hours of the Assad regime

I had been trying over the weekend to get clearance to enter the country from one of the most feared secret police organisations in Syria, called the Palestine Branch. They had an arrest warrant in my name, due to my reporting on the protests.

I couldn’t forget being detained during the first week of the uprising in 2011. I had witnessed men lined up to be beaten, fresh blood on the floor and screams of torture. A security officer grabbed my mouth and said he would “cut it for [me]” if I said a word.

On Sunday, I rushed with my colleagues down to the Syrian border. Now there was no-one at Palestine Branch – neither the security officers nor the investigator who threatened me when I last tried to enter Syria in January. He told me he could bury me seven floors underground and no-one would know. I wondered where he was now. How did he feel about the thousands he interrogated and threatened? Or those tortured to death in Assad’s prisons?

I crossed the border into Syria without fear of being detained. As I went on air for the BBC from Damascus, I reported without fearing for my safety.

There’s a sense of joy in the air in Damascus, despite worries about Islamist rebels being in control and whether they’ll ensure safety in the country. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) fighters have protected public institutions from looting after mobs stormed the presidential palace, and prisoners have been freed.

An HTS group met with Christian residents of Bab Touma, a neighbourhood in Damascus, to give assurances they were not seeking to limit their freedoms.

Some in the Alawite community – who long supported Assad – are worried about what will happen to them, but so far there haven’t been any reports of sectarian violence.

Since Sunday, friends and family members who fled have been texting me, saying they are coming back. It seems everyone wants to return home.

My central Damascus apartment was destroyed in 2013 when I left, after authorities deemed me a traitor and banned me from living there. Security forces and local officials broke in and destroyed its walls and ceilings.

Last month I was able to regain ownership of it after paying thousands of dollars in bribes. It will take time to rebuild it, but that’s what I will do.

And perhaps when it is ready, Syria will be ready for all of us to come back.

“They look like chocolate truffles, just don’t eat them,” jokes Jean Mason, the curator of the Cook Islands Library and Museum as she reaches into a display cabinet and pulls out a black, knobbly rock.

The “rock” she is holding may well determine the future of this Pacific nation.

It is what scientists call a polymetallic nodule, created over millennia as minerals accumulate on the seabed.

Packed full of cobalt, nickel and manganese, these ancient formations are now valuable: the metals go into batteries that power modern life, from electric cars to mobile phones.

They have become a source of friction in the low-lying Pacific Islands, which are among the nations most vulnerable to climate change.

With rising sea levels, the ocean – or Moana, as it’s called in Māori and many other Polynesian languages – remains their greatest threat, but it is also their biggest provider.

They fish in it and they live off the tourists drawn to their turquoise waters, but now the Cook Islands wants to dig deeper, up to 6,000m (19,685 ft), where the nodules lie.

It’s a pet project for Prime Minister Mark Brown, who believes it will reshape this country of 15 volcanic islands in the southern Pacific.

The hope is that the income from these metals could lead to more prosperity than the islanders had ever imagined.

Except the promise of deep sea mining may carry an environmental price.

Proponents say that harvesting these nodules for use in renewables will help the world transition from fossil fuels. They also believe that it is less invasive than mining on land.

But critics argue so much is still unknown about the impact of extracting what is one of the last untouched parts of the planet. They say there should be a pause on deep sea mining until there is more research on its effects on marine life and the oceanic ecosystem.

When Jean was growing up, she says, the nodules were only thought to be useful for making knife blades.

“We had no idea that cell phones were going to come, and wind turbines and electric cars.”

Nodules are a family conversation here and Jean is firmly in favour of mining them. Her husband is a lawyer for one of the companies given exploration licences by the government.

The library where she works is stacked full of holiday reads left or donated by tourists – tourism is the country’s biggest earner, accounting for more than 70% of its GDP.

It includes a newspaper archive.

Jean shoves a photocopy of an article from the Cook Islands News into my hand. It’s from 1974 and the headline reads “100% concentration of manganese nodules”.

“My point is, we’ve been talking about this for 50-plus years – I think the moratorium time is over.”

The Pacific Ocean covers close to a third of the planet. And the nodules buried in it have been known about since the 19th Century.

But in the 1960s, American geologist John L Mero published a book setting out the case that the seabed could provide many of the world’s mineral needs.

It’s not an easy process – nor a cheap one. But when prices of metals like nickel soared in 2008, it looked more appealing.

Then Covid hit. Tourists left and the money dried up.

Together with the impact of climate change – rising sea levels and unpredictable weather patterns – the country quickly realised it needed something else to rely on.

The Cook Islands’ Seabeds Minerals Authority estimates there are 12 billion wet tonnes of polymetallic nodules in their waters.

Some people argue mining the seabed is not financially viable. With technology moving so fast, these metals may not even be in demand by the time it gets going.

But there are takers. And in 2022, the Cook Islands gave out three licences to companies to start exploring the possibility of deep-sea mining.

They’re now working with scientists in researching the environmental impact.

“Nothing we do in life is risk-free. So, if you want zero risk you need to go and sit in a little room with cotton wool around you,” says Hans Smit, who runs Moana Minerals, one of the firms that has an exploration licence.

“We have this lifestyle, this lifestyle has a price. If we don’t want mining and we don’t want to get all these metals, we need to stop doing just about everything we’re doing.”

Hans is from South Africa and moved here to be part of the community. To him, the deep-sea metals are an “incredible resource” that could benefit the islanders.

While there’s a growing call to delay deep-sea mining until regulations by the International Seabed Authority are drawn up, this only applies to international waters.

The Cook Islands still have huge reserves of their own in their national waters – their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – so, they can crack on regardless.

“We’re known as small-island developing states, but we like to call ourselves large ocean states,” says Rima Brown, a young Cook Islander with a geography degree who jokingly calls herself the poster child for deep-sea mining.

Rima works for the Seabed Minerals Authority and much of her time is spent mapping the sea bed.

“While we’re only about 200 square kilometers in land mass, we have an exclusive economic zone of almost 2 million square kilometres,” she says.

That’s the equivalent of Mexico.

“It’s the only resource we’ve got,” Jean says.

“[Industrialised nations] destroy our atmosphere and then they’ve got a nerve to tell us, let’s leave your stuff in the seabed. How dare they tell us we can’t touch our resources?”

But it’s not just outsiders who are opposed to deep-sea mining in the Cook Islands.

Off the coast of Rarotonga, the largest and most populous of the Cook Islands, a crowd of surfers, kayakers and swimmers gather around a large vaka, a traditional Polynesian catamaran.

“Te Moana, Te Moana, Paruru ia ra, Paruru ia ra,” the people on board repeat – “Protect our ocean”, they are chanting in Māori.

“We are asking for more time for robust independent research, more time for our people to be made better aware of what potential risk might look like,” says Alanah Matamaru Smith from the Te Ipukarea Society, an environmental organisation based in Rarotonga.

“We’re seeing infrastructure being put up here on Rarotonga, accommodation for offshore mining companies to reside here, we’ve got draft mining regulations already in place. Actions are speaking a lot louder than words at the moment.”

Prime Minister Mark Brown, who is driving this, also happens to be the tourism minister and the seabed minerals minister. He’s made it clear he wants the Cook Islands to be a leader in the industry.

“It provides the opportunity for our kids to be able to study at any university in the world without having to incur a student loan,” says Brown, who has a vision of following the lead of Norway in establishing a sovereign wealth fund.

“It allows us to have the type of health care that our people have to go to New Zealand or Australia for. It allows our young people the opportunity to live fulfilling lives here in our country, without having to go to other countries to ply their trade in an industry that doesn’t exist here.”

To those who say a country threatened by climate change risks becoming part of the problem, he argues he’s trying to find solutions.

“We know that for the last 20 years we haven’t been able to get the financing from the larger emitting countries, so we’ve got to look for ways to protect ourselves.”

But activist June Hosking isn’t convinced.

She’s from one of the outer islands, Mauke, with a population of just 300 people.

While the government has organised consultations with residents across the islands as well as the large diaspora in New Zealand, she says the potential downsides of the industry are not being discussed.

“People don’t like to rock the boat in the outer islands,” she says. “So, when we have these consultations, there’s only maybe three of us who would speak up.”

June says such is island life, many refer to the PM as just Mark. She also says his wife is married to her husband’s cousin.

But family connections don’t stop her being seen as a bit of a trouble-maker in asking questions.

“When locals say ‘Oh no, I stay neutral on [deep-sea mining]’, I say ‘you can’t drive very far in neutral’,” she laughs.

“There are times in your life when you need to actually make a stand for something – we are talking about our future here.”

Bribery charges by a US court against the Adani Group are unlikely to significantly upset India’s clean energy goals, industry leaders have told the BBC.

Delhi has pledged to source half of its energy needs or 500 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from renewable sources by 2032, key to global efforts to combat climate change.

The Adani Group is slated to contribute to a tenth of that capacity.

The legal troubles in the US could temporarily delay the group’s expansion plans but will not affect the government’s overall targets, analysts say.

India has made impressive strides in building clean energy infrastructure over the last decade.

The country is growing at the “fastest rate among major economies” in adding renewables capacity, according to the International Energy Agency.

Installed clean energy capacity has grown five-fold, with some 45% of the country’s power-generation capacity – of nearly 200GW – coming from non-fossil fuel sources.

Charges against the Adani Group – crucial to India’s clean energy ambitions – are “like a passing dark cloud”, and will not meaningfully impact this momentum, a former CEO of a rival firm said, wanting to remain anonymous.

Gautam Adani has vowed to invest $100bn (£78.3bn) in India’s energy transition. Its green energy arm is the country’s largest renewable energy company, producing nearly 11GW of clean energy through a diverse portfolio of wind and solar projects.

Adani has a target to scale that to 50GW BY 2030, which will make up nearly 10% of the country’s own installed capacity.

Over half of that, or 30GW, will be produced at Khavda, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. It is the world’s biggest clean energy plant, touted to be five times the size of Paris and the centrepiece in Adani’s renewables crown.

But Khavda and Adani’s other renewables facilities are now at the very centre of the charges filed by US prosecutors – they allege that the company won contracts to supply power to state distribution companies from these facilities, in exchange for bribes to Indian officials. The group has denied this.

But the fallout at the company level is already visible.

When the indictment became public, Adani Green Energy immediately cancelled a $600m bond offering in the US.

France’s TotalEnergies, which owns 20% of Adani Green Energy and has a joint venture to develop several renewables projects with the conglomerate, said it will halt fresh capital infusion into the company.

Major credit ratings agencies – Moody’s, Fitch and S&P – have since changed their outlook on Adani group companies, including Adani Green Energy, to negative. This will impact the company’s capacity to access funds and make it more expensive to raise capital.

Analysts have also raised concerns about Adani Green Energy’s ability to refinance its debt, as international lenders grow weary of adding exposure to the group.

Global lenders like Jeffries and Barclays are already said to be reviewing their ties with Adani even as the group’s reliance on global banks and international and local bond issues for long-term debt has grown from barely 14% in financial year 2016 to nearly 60% as of date, according to a note from Bernstein.

Japanese brokerage Nomura says new financing might dry up in the short term but should “gradually resume in the long term”. Meanwhile, Japanese banks like MUFG, SMBC, Mizuho are likely to continue their relationship with the group.

The “reputational and sentimental impact” will fade away in a few months, as Adani is building “solid, strategic assets and creating long-term value”, the unnamed CEO said.

A spokesperson for the Adani Group told the BBC that it was “committed to its 2030 targets and confident of delivering 50 GW of renewable energy capacity”.

Adani stocks have recovered sharply from the lows they hit post the US court indictment.

Some analysts told the BBC that a possible slowdown in funding for Adani could in fact end up benefitting its competitors.

While Adani’s financial influence has allowed it to rapidly expand in the sector, its competitors such as Tata Power, Goldman Sachs-backed ReNew Power, Greenko and state-run NTPC Ltd are also significantly ramping up manufacturing and generation capacity.

“It’s not that Adani is a green energy champion. It is a big player that has walked both sides of the street, being the biggest private developer of coal plants in the world,” said Tim Buckley, director at Climate Energy Finance.

A large entity, “perceived to be corrupt” possibly slowing its expansion, could mean “more money will start flowing into other green energy companies”, he said.

According to Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director at Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), market fundamentals also continue to remain strong with demand for renewable energy outpacing supply in India – which is likely to keep the appetite for big investments intact.

What could in fact slow the pace of India’s clean energy ambitions is its own bureaucracy.

“Companies we track are very upbeat. Finance isn’t a problem for them. If anything, it is state-level regulations that act as a kind of deterrent,” says Ms Garg.

Most state-run power distribution companies continue to face financial constraints, opting for cheaper fossil fuels, while dragging their feet on signing purchase agreements.

According to Reuters, the controversial tender won by Adani was the first major contract issued by state-run Solar Energy Corp of India (SECI) without a guaranteed purchase agreement from distributors.

SECI’s chairman told Reuters that there are 30GW of operational green energy projects in the market without buyers.

Experts say the 8GW solar contract at the heart of Adani’s US indictment also sheds light on the messy tendering process, which required solar power generation companies to manufacture modules as well – limiting the number of bidders and leading to higher power costs.

The court indictment will certainly lead to a “tightening of bidding and tendering rules”, says Ms Garg.

A cleaner tendering process that lowers risks both for developers and investors will be important going ahead, agrees Mr Buckley.

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.

Serhiy Petchenko lost both hands while defending Ukraine from Russian invaders in June 2023.

After surviving the bitter months-long battle for the city of Bakhmut, his injury came in a railway incident further from the front line.

It left the 42-year-old feeling helpless and in despair. After the amputations, his wife, Anna, had to remain by his side 24/7 for six months.

“What helped us survive is our love,” says Serhiy.

But it’s hard to believe he went through such an ordeal when you see him now, standing on the doorstep of a brand-new café, which he is about to open in Lviv, in the west of Ukraine.

He smiles widely, his arms – and hands – by his side.

Serhiy received two prosthetic hands and full rehabilitation at the Superhumans Center, a private clinic for people with war injuries, located outside the city.

At the same time, the couple received the training they needed to open a family business.

Serhiy says the centre gave him a chance to return normal life, while learning to live with a new disability.

At least 50,000 Ukrainians have lost limbs in nearly three years of war according to the Ukrainian Health Ministry – both soldiers and civilians.

“Some people have double, triple, quadruple amputations. All these people will need prosthetics, or some will use wheelchairs,” says Olga Rudnieva, CEO and co-founder of the Superhumans Center.

Many amputations are the result of delays in evacuation from the battlefield. The barrage of incoming fire can be so intense that it may take many hours to get a wounded soldier to hospital.

With more than one million people on the front line, Rudnieva says, Ukraine will become “the country of people with disabilities”.

“We want to normalise disability. OK, that’s how the country is going to look,” she says, describing the thinking behind her centre.

“Most of the people here at the centre shouldn’t be alive. The fact that they are is a miracle in itself.”

Rudnieva co-founded the centre amid the Russian missile attacks that have rained down on the country since February 2022. Some people called her “crazy” but she went ahead anyway.

“If I have an opinion, I’m sharing my opinion. If I know what to do, I just go and do it,” she says.

Her partners and team raised funds all over the world for high-quality prosthetics and reconstructive surgery. Her passionate presentation, explaining how injuries can be empowering, turned some celebrities into Superhumans supporters, including British adventurer Bear Grylls, Virgin boss Richard Branson, singer Sting and actress Trudie Styler.

“We truly believe that you can be empowered by trauma. The trauma can ruin you or it can build your superpower,” she says.

The Superhumans Center supplements Ukraine’s military hospitals and clinics, which are overloaded with the constant flow of wounded soldiers from the 3,200km long front line.

Since it opened in April 2023, more than 1,000 patients have received treatment here – both military and civilian, adults and children. Almost 800 of them have received prosthetic limbs.

“It’s the global headquarters of resilience,” says 47-year-old Rudnieva. walking energetically between patients’ wheelchairs.

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

They are waiting for modern prosthetics or are already practising to use their new limbs.

She asks some of the young men around, with double and triple amputations, to show her what they have learnt so far.

Ukrainian soldiers use callsigns instead of names, and Rudnieva has one too – “Mum”.

“They learned to walk with their mothers, and I was the second person they learned how to walk with,” she says proudly.

At the start of the war, Ukraine was not ready to support so many people with disabilities.

“Ukrainian soldiers are less afraid to be killed than to be wounded, because a severe injury means you are going to be disabled for the rest of your life – and the infrastructure is not right, and society is not ready, and the healthcare system is not right,” says Rudnieva.

A few times a day she visits the rehabilitation room where the “superhumans”, as she calls them, are learning to walk again.

Among the battle-hardened men is gentle Olena, a bakery manager from the city of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine. She lost her leg in a Russian rocket strike on the way to her mum’s birthday party.

“The first thing I’ll do when I have my artificial leg, if the weather is fine, is just go for a walk. Without any rush, without an aim. I’ll just take a walk to recall how it feels,” she says.

At present she uses a leg that belongs to the rehabilitation room, but soon she will have one of her own.

Rudnieva remembers Olena’s story in detail, and the stories of her other patients.

She knows about their wives and husbands, parents and pre-war jobs. “Younger guys bring me their girlfriends and ask my opinion,” she says, with a smile.

Couples have even come came to her before taking a decision on whether to divorce or not.

A severe war injury is a challenge not just for the survivor, but for his or her entire family, and it tests relationships.

Showing the newly equipped children’s room, Rudnieva smiles.

“We are waiting today for Nazarchyk, Serhiy and Anna’s son. He is so active. He will turn it upside down.”

Rudnieva says that her work has taught her to value life as never before, and also to stop fearing death.

Once a director of the Olena Pinchuk Foundation, working to halt the spread of HIV/Aids across Ukraine, she was abroad when Russia invaded. For a few months she ran a humanitarian aid hub in Poland, then she returned to Ukraine and founded her life-changing project.

She wasn’t the only one. Ukrainian civil society quickly rallied round, both to support the war effort – fundraising for drones and vehicles, importing medical equipment or clothing – and to keep society going while the country fought for its life.

There are now other private rehabilitation centres, ambulances and taxis that help evacuate people from half-destroyed towns, food services for refugees, and many other initiatives that supplement services provided by the state.

And women have played a key role.

“When the full-scale invasion started, I, as a feminist, was very scared. I thought that it’s the end of feminism, because war is a very masculine thing,” Rudnieva says.

But later on she realised that women have taken over many responsibilities as men have gone away to fight, as well as in some cases becoming fighters too.

“I think that women proved to be absolutely amazing during this war,” says Rudnieva, as some of her words are drowned out by sirens – part of the soundtrack of Ukraine’s new life. “I’m really proud to be among Ukrainian women.”

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.

“I get a lot of hate”. The words of content creator Winta Zesu, who last year made $150,000 (£117,000) from posting on social media.

What separates Winta from other influencers? The people commenting on her posts and driving traffic to her videos are often doing so out of anger.

“Every single video of mine that has gained millions of views is because of hate comments,” the 24-year-old explains.

In those videos, she documents the life of a New York City model, whose biggest problem is being too pretty. What some in the comments don’t realise, is that Winta is playing a character.

“I get a lot of nasty comments, people say ‘you’re not the prettiest girl’ or ‘please bring yourself down, you have too much confidence’,” she says to the BBC from her New York City apartment.

Winta is part of a growing group of online creators making ‘rage bait’ content, where the goal is simple: record videos, produce memes and write posts that make other users viscerally angry, then bask in the thousands, or even millions, of shares and likes.

It differs from its internet-cousin clickbait, where a headline is used to tempt a reader to click through to view a video or article.

As marketing podcaster Andrea Jones notes: “A hook reflects what’s in that piece of content and comes from a place of trust, whereas rage-baiting content is designed to be manipulative.”

But the grip negative content has on human psychology is something that is hardwired into us, according to Dr William Brady, who studies how the brain interacts with new technologies.

“In our past, this is the kind of content that we really needed to pay attention to,” he explains, “so we have these biases built into our learning and our attention.”

The growth in rage baiting content has coincided with the major social media platforms paying creators more for their content.

These creator programs – which reward users for likes, comments and shares, and allow them to post sponsored content – have been linked to its rise.

“If we see a cat, we’re like ‘oh, that’s cute’ and scroll on. But if we see someone doing something obscene, we may type in the comments ‘this is terrible’, and that sort of comment is seen as a higher quality engagement by the algorithm,” explains marketing podcaster Andréa Jones.

“The more content a user creates the more engagement they get, the more that they get paid.

“And so, some creators will do anything to get more views, even if it is negative or inciting rage and anger in people,” she says with a note of concern. “It leads to disengagement.”

• Listen to Business Daily: Making money from internet outrage

Rage bait content comes in many forms, from outrageous food recipes, to attacks on your favourite popstar. But in a year of global elections, particularly in the US, rage baiting has spread to politics too.

As Dr Brady observes: “There has been a spike in the build up to elections, because it’s an effective way to mobilize your political group to potentially vote and take action.”

He notes the American election was light on policy, and instead centred around outrage, adding, “it was hyper-focused on ‘Trump is horrible for this reason’ or ‘Harris is horrible for that reason’.”

An investigation from BBC social media investigations correspondent Marianna Spring found some users on X were being paid “thousands of dollars” by the social media site, for sharing content including misinformation, AI-generated images and unfounded conspiracy theories.

Some who study the trends are concerned that too much negative content can lead to the average person “switching off”.

“It can be draining to have such high emotions all the time,” says Ariel Hazel, assistant professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan.

“It turns them off the news environment and we’re seeing increased amounts of active news avoidance around the world.”

Others worry about normalising anger offline and the eroding effects on people’s trust in the content they view.

“Algorithms amplify outrage, it makes people think it’s more normal,” says social psychologist Dr William Brady.

He adds: “What we know from certain platforms like X is that politically extreme content is actually produced by a very small fraction of the user base, but algorithms can amplify it as if they were more of a majority.”

The BBC contacted the main social media platforms about rage bait on their sites, but had no responses.

In October 2024, Meta executive Adam Mosseri posted on Threads about “an increase in engagement-bait” on the platform, adding, “we’re working to get it under control.”

While Elon Musk’s rival platform X, recently announced a change to its Creator Revenue Sharing Program which will see creators compensated based on engagement from the site’s premium users – such as likes, replies, and reposts. Previously compensation was based on ads viewed by premium users.

TikTok and YouTube allow users to make money from their posts or to share sponsored content too, but have rules which allow them to de-monetise or suspend profiles that post misinformation. X does not have guidelines on misinformation in the same way.

Back in Winta Zesu’s New York City apartment, the conversation – which is taking place days before the US election – turns to politics.

“Yeah, I don’t agree with people using rage bait for political reasons,” the content creator says.

“If they’re using it genuinely to educate and inform people, it’s fine. But if they’re using it to spread misinformation, I totally do not agree with that.

“It’s not a joke anymore.”

A nail artist said she cried after seeing the nails she created for Cynthia Erivo for the Wicked movie on the big screen.

Shei Osei, 33 from Basildon, Essex, worked alongside the actress to create nail designs for her character Elphaba, having known each other for 15 years.

She was also asked to do Erivo’s nails for the green carpet when London’s Southbank became the Emerald City for the premiere.

“I was able to watch it amongst everyone else… I cried. There are many bits that I cried at,” she said.

“I’m very hard on myself when it comes to my work and what I do. I was checking to see if I had put it on properly, did I shape it properly and was the ombré good.”

The 33-year-old started learning how to do nails at the age of 14 before pursuing it as a career at the age of 18.

She has built up a celebrity client base including Candice Brathwaite and Maya Jama and has worked on Erivo’s nails before for Netflix film, Luther: The Fallen Sun.

She received the call from Erivo in 2022 and soon started creating designs.

“As the story starts, Elphaba comes across a bit shy and a bit timid and not as out there, but she was able to have these subtle green ombré nails which were still daring,” she said.

“When Elphaba comes into her own and she becomes more confident in who is she when she gets to the Emerald City… she has that confidence and her nails tell that story too. It’s more of a daring design and more ‘this is me, this is who I am and you will accept me for who I want to be’.”

She created more than 35 sets of press on nails, making sure they were all similar in style, colour, shape and design with each set taking up to 90 minutes.

“Cynthia outside of Elphaba is someone who enjoys getting her nails done… in the movie I feel like it tells the story of Elphaba but Cynthia can still feel authentically herself throughout the whole movie,” she said.

“We always knew we wanted the nails to be a part of the film… she’s touching the broom, she’s putting her hat on. You would want your nails to match and look good on camera.”

Since working on the film, she has received an “outpouring of love” and global recognition.

“Everyone says they don’t pay attention to nails, but in Wicked they paid attention to the nails. I’m grateful that my talent is being seen and I hope this can bring hope to other nail techs and other beauticians.

“These things don’t come overnight and if you keep pushing on, you’ll get there in the end,” she said.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time, and that’s especially true of gamers.

It’s something Tim Miller, the producer of Amazon’s new series Secret Level, knows all too well.

The animated anthology show is made up of 15 episodes, with each directly inspired by a different video game franchise – from retro classics such as Pac Man to modern multiplayer title Honor of Kings.

Working with so many publishers and developers is a big task, but, when Tim speaks to BBC Newsbeat he confesses:

“We’re not afraid of the companies. We’re afraid of the fans.”

Secret Level is Prime Video’s latest big budget video game to TV project, following on from its massively successful adaptation of Fallout earlier this year.

Hollywood’s increasingly been looking to games – which often have ready made, enthusiastic fanbases – as a source of new shows and films.

Amazon and Games Workshop just announced a deal for the streamer to create films and TV series set in its Warhammer universes.

One of Secret Level’s episodes is based on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, a big hit this year for developer Saber Interactive.

Secret Level’s director Dave Wilson says the game’s universe has “40 years of lore” behind it, which has to be balanced with the needs of a TV adaptation.

He gives the example of the space marines, who live by the credo “they shall know no fear”.

“If you take that too literally you can’t really have a hero make a choice if he’s not afraid of the consequences of that choice, right?,” says Dave.

“So there is the literal interpretation of what that means, and then there’s the storytelling interpretation.”

Secret Level stars a host of big-name Hollywood actors including Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kevin Hart.

But it also features performances from actors who are known for their work in videogames, such as Laura Bailey, who appeared in The Last of Us: Part II.

Clive Standen, who voiced the main character in this year’s hit Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, reprises the same role in the episode based around the game.

Video game actors have a much higher profile than they used to, and Dave believes fans want to support the actors behind their favourite characters and enjoy the “continuity” of seeing them in spin-off projects.

“So much of the success is built from those actors setting those franchises up,” he says.

“I think it’s weird in a way just to sort of cast them aside when Hollywood comes calling.”

Tim points out that the movie stars who got involved were interested in the subject matter.

“It’s not like it’s a huge paycheque for them,” he says.

“There’s so many people in the world that play games, it is a huge clubhouse now.

“And there’s a lot of movie stars that are in that clubhouse. They play video games too.”

Reviews of Secret Level so far have ranged from very positive to less enthusiastic, with critics agreeing and disagreeing on their favourite episodes.

When the creators of the show speak to Newsbeat they admit to having some fear about how the public will receive the show.

Discussion around gaming online can frequently become heated.

One game included in the 15 episodes is Concord – Sony’s short-lived online shooter the PlayStation maker pulled offline after less than two weeks.

Its developer and staff who’d worked on the project were subjected to online abuse.

Tim hopes that temperatures won’t run so high in discussions around Secret Level.

“I would say in general that I wish that there was less toxicity in the discourse, whether it’s on the internet or in the public sphere,” he says.

“Because it just stops people from wanting to communicate with each other.

“I would love to see that go down a little bit and everybody realise that sometimes you may not hit the mark, but most people are earnest and trying to do a good job and trying to create something.”

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

Zambia’s top court has barred former President Edgar Lungu from standing for re-election in 2026.

The Constitutional Court ruled that the 68-year-old politician had already served the maximum two terms allowed by law.

Lungu was first elected president in January 2015 to serve the remaining 20 months of his predecessor’s term. President Michael Sata had died in office in October 2014.

Lungu had argued that this should not count as he did not serve a full five-year term. But the court disagreed – reversing previous rulings that had cleared him to run three years ago when he lost to Hakainde Hichilema.

“Mr Edgar Chagwa Lungu has therefore been twice elected and has twice held office. The [constitution] makes him ineligible to participate in any future elections as a presidential candidate,” the court ruled.

• Edgar Lungu – ex-Zambian president makes political comeback
• Zambian ex-first lady arrested on fraud charges
• A quick guide to Zambia

Last month, Lungu was picked by the opposition Tonse Alliance to be its presidential candidate in the 2026 election to challenge President Hichilema.

Their choice of Lungu came a year after Zambia’s government withdrew his retirement benefits and privileges following his decision to return to active politics.

As part of efforts to revive his public profile, Lungu had started jogging in public along with members of the public and his supporters – which the police termed as “political activism”.

In a move that angered Lungu’s supporters in October, President Hichilema sacked three top judges who had taken part in the controversial ruling that had allowed Lungu to stand in the 2021 elections.

At the time the presidency defended the dismissals saying Hichilema was bound by the decision of the Judicial Complaints Commission that had determined the judges should be removed following allegations of judicial misconduct.

Lungu said he accepted the Constitutional Court’s verdict, which he said did not come as a surprise as it had been steered by “the hands of political manipulation”.

“It speaks to the erosion of judicial independence, the weakening of our democratic foundations, and the weaponisation of our institutions for short-term gain,” he posted on social media.

“I am filled not with bitterness but with renewed determination, political hope and faith that democracy, not court politics shall certainly win in 2026 without any doubt.”

The government welcomed the ruling, which puts an end to what has been a long-running legal battle.

“This decision provides legal clarity for citizens and safeguards our democracy, allowing us to look forward to free, fair and competitive elections in 2026,” Attorney General Mulilo Kabesha said in a statement.

Following Sata’s death and Lungu’s first election, the constitution was amended so that the vice-president automatically takes office if a sitting president dies.

• ‘My son is a drug addict, please help’ – the actor breaking a Zambian taboo
• ‘Legendary Glamma’: How a grandma became an unlikely fashion icon
• Zambia made education free, now classrooms are crammed

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.

Donald Trump has described the Prince of Wales as a “good-looking guy” after a meeting with him in Paris at the weekend.

“He looked really, very handsome last night. Some people look better in person. He looked great. He looked really nice, and I told him that,” the US president-elect told the New York Post.

The incoming US president also said the pair had touched on health problems in the Royal Family, adding that they had a “great, great talk”.

Prince William met Trump after the re-opening of the Notre-Dame cathedral.

“And I asked him about his wife and he said she’s doing well,” the president-elect said.

“I asked him about his father and his father is fighting very hard, and he loves his father and he loves his wife, so it was sad.”

The reference to the King “fighting hard” was described by royal sources as being about his efforts to continue living actively, rather than a health update.

The King has been receiving cancer treatment, but has wanted to keep focusing on his work, with overseas trips expected for next year.

“We had a great talk for half an hour, a little more than half an hour. We had a great, great talk,” Trump said.

Kensington Palace did not comment on the account of the conversation.

Prince William and Trump held their meeting, arranged at short notice, alongside the international gathering that marked the re-opening of Notre-Dame, the Paris cathedral damaged in a fire five years ago.

UK and US leaders have continued to speak warmly of the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Prince William’s diplomatic trip to meet Trump may help build bridges between the incoming Republican administration and the UK government.

Trump is an avowed fan of the royals. After a meeting with the late Queen Elizabeth II, he described how he unsuccessfully tried to get her to reveal who was her favourite US president or UK prime minister.

“I liked them all,” Trump said the late Queen had insisted to him, although he added: “Many people have said I was her favourite president.”

The NY Post’s account of the interview also includes Trump’s comments about what he said to President Emmanuel Macron of France, who had hosted the event at the restored cathedral.

“He’s a good man, he did a good job. I told him: ‘You have no idea how good a job you did’ on that chapel. That’s very hard to do. Painstaking’.”

A court in France has found French-Cameroonian author Charles Onana guilty of downplaying the Rwandan genocide.

The 60-year-old writer was fined €8,400 ($8,900; £7,000) and Damien Serieyx, his publishing director from Éditions du Toucan, was ordered to pay €5,000. They are also required to pay €11,000 in compensation to human rights organisations that that filed the suit.

The Paris court ruled that Onana’s writings violated France’s laws prohibiting genocide denial and incitement to hatred, noting that France would “no longer be a haven for denialists”.

In just 100 days in 1994, about 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists.

They were targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

In his book Rwanda, the Truth About Operation Turquoise – published in 2019 – Onana described the idea that the Hutu government had planned a genocide in Rwanda as “one of the biggest scams” of the last century.

Rwanda’s Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe welcomed their conviction, posting on X that it was a “landmark decision”.

• Rwanda genocide – my return home after 30 years
• Rwanda’s 100 days of slaughter

The court said that Onana’s book had “trivialised” and “contested” in “an outrageous manner” the genocide that occurred between April and July 1994.

That case against Onana and Serieyx was brought by the non-governmental organisation Survie and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) for “publicly contesting a crime against humanity”.

Critics have argued that the book distorts historical facts and downplays the atrocities that occurred during the genocide.

However Onana’s lawyer, Emmanuel Pire, told the AFP news agency in October that the book was “the work of a political scientist based on 10 years of research to understand the mechanisms of the genocide before, during and after”.

He insisted that Onana did not question that genocide took place, or that Tutsis were particularly targeted.

Prosecution lawyer Richard Gisagara called the court’s decision as “a victory for justice that protects genocide victims and survivors”.

He said it was the first time those denying the genocide had been punished in Europe.

Under French law, it is an offence to deny or “minimise” the fact of any genocide that is officially recognised by France.

Both Onana and his publisher have appealed against the verdict.

• Rwanda genocide: World failed us in 1994, President Paul Kagame says
• ‘I forgave my husband’s killer – our children married’
• Hidden victims of Rwanda’s genocide
• Orphans’ search for family continues

Shares in US chocolate maker Hershey have jumped by more than 10% after a report that Mondelez International, which owns UK-based Cadbury, has approached the firm about a potential buyout.

A deal could create a snack food giant with combined sales of almost $50bn (£39.2bn) a year.

Both Mondelez and Hershey declined to comment on the report when contacted by BBC News.

In 2016, Hershey rejected a $23bn takeover offer from Mondelez.

The approach is still in the preliminary stages and it is not certain that talks will lead to a deal, according to Bloomberg.

Any deal would need the approval of the Hershey Trust Company, a charitable trust, that maintains voting control over the business. It has previously blocked the takeover of the firm.

A merger of the two companies could bring some of the world’s best-known confectionary and snack foods under one roof.

Hershey is known for brands including Hershey’s Kisses and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

As well as owning Cadbury, Mondelez brands include Ritz crackers, Oreo biscuits and Toblerone chocolate.

The packaged food industry has faced slowing growth as consumers feel the pinch from years of rising prices.

Chocolate companies in particular have had to transfer costs from higher cocoa prices to their customers.

Last month, Hershey cut its revenue and profit forecasts. Its chief financial officer, Steve Voskuil, said high cocoa prices will be the “biggest source of inflation” for the firm going forward.

Another food giant, Kraft Heinz, also recently cut its annual sales and profit forecasts as customers cut back on purchases after several rounds of price rises.

Some companies have looked for deals to secure new markets and boost growth.

In August, confectionery giant Mars struck a deal to snap up Pringles and Pop-Tart-maker Kellanova for almost $36bn.

Some analysts have forecast an increase in mergers during the upcoming Trump administration, as the president-elect is seen as more friendly towards deal making.

Google has unveiled a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.

The chip is the latest development in a field known as quantum computing – which is attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of mind-bogglingly powerful computer.

Google says its new quantum chip, dubbed “Willow”, incorporates key “breakthroughs” and “paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.”

However experts say Willow is, for now, a largely experimental device, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years – and billions of dollars – away.

Quantum computers work in a fundamentally different way to the computer in your phone or laptop.

They harness quantum mechanics – the strange behaviour of ultra-tiny particles – to crack problems far faster than traditional computers.

It’s hoped quantum computers might eventually be able to use that ability to vastly speed up complex processes, such as creating new medicines.

There are also fears it could be used for ill – for example to break some types of encryption used to protect sensitive data.

In February Apple announced that the encryption that protects iMessage chats is being made “quantum proof” to stop them being read by powerful future quantum computers.

Hartmut Neven leads Google’s Quantum AI lab that created Willow and describes himself as the project’s “chief optimist.”

He told the BBC that Willow would be used in some practical applications – but declined, for now, to provide more detail.

But a chip able to perform commercial applications would not appear before the end of the decade, he said.

Initially these applications would be the simulation of systems where quantum effects are important

“For example, relevant when it comes to the design of nuclear fusion reactors to understand the functioning of drugs and pharmaceutical development, it would be relevant for developing better car batteries and another long list of such tasks”.

Mr Neven told the BBC Willow’s performance meant it was the “best quantum processor built to date”.

But Professor Alan Woodward, a computing expert at Surrey University, says quantum computers will be better at a range of tasks than current “classical” computers, but they will not replace them.

He warns against overstating the importance of Willow’s achievement in a single test.

“One has to be careful not to compare apples and oranges” he told the BBC.

Google had chosen a problem to use as a benchmark of performance that was, “tailor-made for a quantum computer” and this didn’t demonstrate “a universal speeding up when compared to classical computers”.

Nonetheless, he said Willow represented significant progress, in particular in what’s known as error correction.

In very simple terms the more useful a quantum computer is, the more qubits it has.

However a major problem with the technology is that it is prone to errors – a tendency that has previously increased the more qubits a chip has.

But Google researchers say they have reversed this and managed to engineer and program the new chip so the error rate fell across the whole system as the number of qubits increased.

It was a major “breakthrough” that cracked a key challenge that the field had pursued “for almost 30 years”, Mr Neven believes.

He told the BBC it was comparable to “if you had an airplane with just one engine – that will work, but two engines are safer, four engines is yet safer”.

Errors are a significant obstacle in creating more powerful quantum computers and the development was “encouraging for everyone striving to build a practical quantum computer” Prof Woodward said.

But Google itself notes that to develop practically useful quantum computers the error rate will still need to go much lower than that displayed by Willow.

Willow was made in Google’s new, purpose-built manufacturing plant in California.

Countries around the world are investing in quantum computing.

The UK recently launched the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).

Its director, Michael Cuthbert, told the BBC he was wary of language that fuelled the “hype cycle” and thought Willow was more a “milestone rather than a breakthrough”.

Nevertheless, it was “clearly a highly impressive piece of work”.

Eventually quantum computers would help with a range of tasks including “logistics problems such as cargo freight distribution on aircraft or routing of telecoms signals or stored energy throughout the national grid”, he said.

And there were already 50 quantum businesses in the UK, attracting £800m in funding and employing 1300 people.

On Friday, researchers from Oxford University and Osaka University in Japan published a paper showcasing the very low error rate in a trapped-ion qubit.

Theirs is a different approach to making a quantum computer that’s capable of working at room temperature – whereas Google’s chip has to be stored at ultra low temperatures to be effective.

Scientific findings from Google’s development of Willow have been published in the journal Nature

A profile is emerging of the 26-year-old man charged with murder over last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson, in New York City.

Police announced on Monday they had arrested Luigi Mangione after he was recognised at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania.

The Baltimore, Maryland, native was found in possession of a so-called ghost gun, a largely untraceable firearm, and a three-page handwritten document that indicated “motivation and mindset”, officials said.

Mr Mangione was born and raised in Maryland and has ties to San Francisco, California, according to New York Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny.

He has no prior arrests in New York and his last previous address was in Honolulu, Hawaii, police said.

He is from a prominent Baltimore family, and attended a private, all-boys high school in Baltimore, called the Gilman School, according to school officials.

Mr Mangione was named as the valedictorian, which is usually the student with the highest academic achievements in a class.

In a statement, the school called the situation “deeply distressing”.

A former classmate, Freddie Leatherbury, told the Associated Press news agency that Mr Mangione came from a wealthy family, even by that private school’s standards. “Quite honestly, he had everything going for him,” Mr Leatherbury said.

Speaking to the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, another classmate described themselves anonymously as a close friend of Mr Mangione – saying the shooting suspect “didn’t have any enemies” and was a “valedictorian for a reason”.

• Luigi Mangione charged with murdering healthcare CEO in New York

Mr Mangione went on to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science, according to the school, and founded a video game development club.

A friend who attended the Ivy League college at the same time as Mr Mangione described him as a “super normal” and “smart person”.

Mr Mangione was employed as a data engineer for TrueCar, a digital retailing website for new and used cars, according to his social media profiles. A company spokesman told the BBC he had not worked there since 2023.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Mr Mangione previously worked as a programming intern for Firaxis, a video game developer.

He also spent time in a co-living surfing community in Hawaii called Surfbreak. Sarah Nehemiah, who knew him then, told CBS he left due to his back injury which had worsened from surfing and hiking.

The three-page, handwritten document found on him suggested a motive, according to investigators. The pages expressed “ill will” towards corporate America, they said.

A senior law enforcement official told the New York Times it said: “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done”.

Investigators say the words “deny”, “defend” and “depose” were written on shell casings found at the scene of Mr Thompson’s murder.

Critics of healthcare insurers call these the “three Ds of insurance” – tactics used by companies to reject payment claims by patients.

Friends have told US media he had surgery on his back. The background image on an X account believed to belong to Mangione shows an x-ray of a spine with hardware in it.

However, it is unclear how much his own experience of the healthcare system shaped his views.

A person matching his name and photo had an account on Goodreads, a user-generated book review site, where he read two books about back pain in 2022, one of them called Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry.

He also gave four stars to a text called Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski – also known as the Unabomber manifesto.

Starting in 1978, Kaczynski carried out a bombing campaign that killed three people and injured dozens of others, until he was arrested in 1996.

In his review, Mr Mangione acknowledged Kaczynski was a violent individual who killed innocent people but the book should not be dismissed as the manifesto of a lunatic, rather the work of an extreme political revolutionary.

His social media profiles also suggest that he had fallen out of touch with family and friends in recent months.

In a post on X from October, someone tagged an account believed to be Mr Mangione’s and wrote: “Hey, are you ok? Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you.”

Mr Mangione comes from a prominent family in the Baltimore area who are known for businesses including country clubs, nursing homes and a radio station according to local media.

The suspect’s paternal grandparents, Nicholas and Mary Mangione, were real estate developers who purchased the Turf Valley Country Club in 1978 and Hayfields Country Club in Hunt Valley in 1986.

Shortly after the suspect was charged, Republican state lawmaker Nino Mangione – believed to be Mr Mangione’s cousin – released a statement saying the family was “shocked and devastated”.

“We offer our prayers to the family of Brian Thompson and we ask people to pray for all involved”, the statement read, signing off as “The Mangione Family”.

A 26-year-old man has been charged with murder over last week’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.

Luigi Mangione was taken into custody at a McDonald’s in the town of Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday after a customer at the fast-food outlet recognised him.

An Ivy League graduate from a prominent Maryland family, he was found in possession of a gun and a handwritten document that expressed “ill will” towards corporate America, according to police.

People who knew him told US media he suffered from a painful back injury and that he had become socially withdrawn in recent months.

Mr Thompson, 50, was fatally shot in the back last Wednesday morning outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan where UnitedHealthcare, the medical insurance giant he led, was holding an investors’ meeting.

Police say he was targeted in a pre-planned killing.

• Luigi Mangione: What we know about CEO shooting suspect

Mr Mangione initially appeared in a Pennsylvania court on Monday charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm and other charges.

He was handcuffed at the wrists and ankles and seemed calm during the hearing, occasionally looking around at those present, including the media.

Just hours later, New York investigators charged him with murder and four other counts including firearms charges.

Last week’s shooting triggered a huge manhunt, with New York City investigators using one of the world’s largest digital surveillance systems as well as police dogs, drones and divers in a Central Park lake to search for the attacker.

Investigators revealed that finding Mr Mangione was a complete surprise, as they did not have his name on a list of suspects before Monday.

It was ultimately a McDonald’s customer in Altoona that recognised the suspect from media coverage and alerted an employee, who then tipped off the police.

When police arrived, Mr Mangione showed them a fake New Jersey driver’s licence with the name Mark Rosario, said court papers.

A search of his backpack uncovered what police called a “ghost gun” – which could have been 3D-printed – and a loaded magazine with six rounds of 9mm ammunition.

Prosecutors said he was also carrying a US passport and $10,000 (£7,840) cash, $2,000 of it in foreign currency, though Mr Mangione disputed the amount in court.

The three-page document found in his possession said: “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologise for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done”, a senior law enforcement official told the New York Times.

Investigators say the words “deny”, “defend” and “depose” were written on shell casings found at the scene of Mr Thompson’s murder.

Officials believe this could be a reference to what critics call the “three Ds of insurance” – tactics used by insurance companies to reject payment claims by patients in America’s complicated healthcare system.

Earlier in the day, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the weapon and suppressor seized by investigators from the suspect were “both consistent with the weapon used in the murder” of Mr Thompson.

Mr Mangione is now expected to be presented with the option of waiving his extradition to the state of New York, or contesting it.

Different US states have different laws and judicial systems so there is a process involved in the transfer of fugitives, which can take days or weeks.

Mr Mangione’s family said they were “shocked and devastated” by his arrest, and offered their prayers to the family of Mr Thompson.

His paternal grandparents, Nicholas and Mary Mangione, were real estate developers who purchased the Turf Valley Country Club in 1978 and Hayfields Country Club in Hunt Valley in 1986.

One of his cousins is a Republican Maryland state legislator.

As a teenager, Mr Mangione attended a private all-boys school in Maryland, where he was class valedictorian, a title usually awarded to students with the best grades.

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League college.

His LinkedIn account says he worked as a data engineer in California. TrueCar, a website for car buyers, confirmed that he had been employed there but left in 2023.

Mr Mangione spent time in a co-living surfing community in Hawaii called Surfbreak.

Sarah Nehemiah, who knew him then, told CBS News he left due to his back injury which worsened when he surfed.

Several posts to an account on X, formerly Twitter, that appeared to belong to Mr Mangione suggested that friends had been trying to reach him, with one person posting in October that “nobody has heard from you in months”.

Israel has confirmed it carried out attacks on Syria’s naval fleet.

The BBC has verified videos showing blasts at the port of Latakia in Syria, with footage appearing to show extensive damage to ships and parts of the port.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) says it has documented more than 310 strikes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since the fall of the Assad regime on Sunday.

Israeli warplanes have also reportedly carried out hundreds of airstrikes across Syria, including on the capital, Damascus.

In a statement, Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz said the IDF was aiming to “destroy strategic capabilities that threaten the State of Israel”.

He added that the operation to destroy the Syrian fleet had been a “great success”.

Meanwhile, the IDF confirmed it has troops operating in Syrian territory beyond the demilitarized buffer zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

It added that its strikes were to prevent weapons falling “into the hands of extremists” as Syria transitions to a post-Assad era.

The SOHR reported that the attacks spanned Aleppo, Damascus and Hama, with more than 60 taking place overnight between Monday and Tuesday alone.

They targeted military facilities of the Syrian Army, including weapon warehouses, ammunition depots, airports, naval bases and research centres.

Reports say that many of the facilities hit have not merely been damaged, but completely destroyed.

Rami Abdul Rahman, the founder of the SOHR, described the impact of the strikes as destroying “all the capabilities of the Syrian army” and said that “Syrian lands are being violated”.

The IDF acknowledged that its troops had entered Syrian territory but told the BBC that reports of tanks approaching Damascus were “false”.

It said some troops had been stationed within the Area of Separation that borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights “and then a few additional points”.

“When we say a few additional points, we’re talking the area of the Area of Separation, or the area of the buffer zone in vicinity,” IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told the BBC.

BBC Verify has geolocated an image of an IDF soldier standing just over half a kilometre beyond the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, inside Syria on a hillside near the village of Kwdana.

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.

The IDF seizure of Syrian positions in the buffer zone was a “temporary defensive position until a suitable arrangement is found”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.

“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 on Monday.

Turkeys foreign ministry condemned Israel’s entry into the buffer zone, accusing it of an “occupying mentality” during a “sensitive period, when the possibility of achieving the peace and stability the Syrian people have desired for many years has emerged”.

This buffer zone, also known as the Area of Separation was set up as part of Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Syria in 1974 to keep Israeli and Syrian forces separated, following Israel’s earlier occupation of the Golan Heights.

Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan in 1981. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so unilaterally in 2019.

Asked about the IDF strikes on Monday night, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said Israel was concerned only with defending its citizens.

“That’s why we attack strategic weapons systems like, for example, remaining chemical weapons or long-range missiles and rockets in order that they will not fall into the hands of extremists,” he said.

On Monday, the UN’s chemical watchdog warns authorities in Syria to ensure that suspected stockpiles of chemical weapons are safe.

It is not known where or how many chemical weapons Syria has, but it’s believed former President Bashar al-Assad kept stockpiles.

• BBC correspondent: Assad’s police threatened to bury me and my reporting. Now I’m back, and free
• What comes next: Shaken by Assad’s sudden fall, Syria faces seismic turning point
• In maps: How did anti-Assad rebels take control?
• Saydnaya Prison: Syria rescuers end search for secret cells in notorious prison
• Refugees: Syrian asylum seekers in limbo as countries stop applications

Israel’s attacks come after Syrian rebel fighters captured the capital, Damascus, and toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime over the weekend. 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”.

Coffee drinkers may soon see their morning treat get more expensive, as the price of coffee on international commodity markets has hit its highest level on record.

On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. The cost of Robusta beans, meanwhile, hit a fresh high in September.

It comes as coffee traders expect crops to shrink after the world’s two largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam, were hit by bad weather and the drink’s popularity continues to grow.

One expert told the BBC coffee brands were considering putting prices up in the new year.

While in recent years major coffee roasters have been able to absorb price hikes to keep customers happy and maintain market share, it looks like that’s about to change, according to Vinh Nguyen, the chief executive of Tuan Loc Commodities.

“Brands like JDE Peet (the owner of the Douwe Egberts brand), Nestlé and all that, have [previously] taken the hit from higher raw material prices to themselves,” he said.

“But right now they are almost at a tipping point. A lot of them are mulling a price increase in supermarkets in [the first quarter] of 2025.”

At an event for investors in November, a top Nestlé executive said the coffee industry was facing “tough times”, admitting his company would have to adjust its prices and pack sizes.

“We are not immune to the price of coffee, far from it,” said David Rennie, Nestlé’s head of coffee brands.

The last record high for coffee was set in 1977 after unusual snowfall devastated plantations in Brazil.

“Concerns over the 2025 crop in Brazil are the main driver,” said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank.

“The country experienced its worst drought in 70 years during August and September, followed by heavy rains in October, raising fears that the flowering crop could fail.”

It is not just Brazilian coffee plantations, which mostly produce Arabica beans, that have been hurt by bad weather.

Robusta supplies are also set to shrink after plantations in Vietnam, the largest producer of that variety, also faced both drought and heavy rainfall.

Coffee is the world’s second most traded commodity by volume, after crude oil, and its popularity is increasing. For example, consumption in China has more than doubled in the last decade.

“Demand for the commodity remains high, while inventories held by producers and roasters are reported to be at low levels,” said Fernanda Okada, a coffee pricing analyst at S&P Global Commodity Insights.

“The upward trend in coffee prices is expected to persist for some time,” she added.

Syrian rebel fighters say they have found around 40 bodies showing signs of torture in the mortuary of a military hospital in a suburb of Damascus following the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad.

Video and photos showed bodies wrapped in blood-stained white shrouds piled up inside a refrigerated room at Harasta Hospital on Monday.

Several of the bodies appeared to have wounds and bruising on their faces and torsos. Pieces of adhesive tape bearing numbers and names were also visible.

“I opened the door of the mortuary with my own hands, it was a horrific sight,” Mohammed al-Hajj, a member of a rebel group from southern Syria, told AFP news agency.

He said the rebels had gone to hospital after receiving a tip from a member of staff about bodies being dumped there.

“We informed the [rebel] military command of what we found and co-ordinated with the Syrian Red Crescent, which transported the bodies to a Damascus hospital so that families can come and identify them.”

It was not clear how long the bodies had been stored at the mortuary, but they were at various stages of decomposition.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, says almost 60,000 people were tortured and killed in the Assad government’s prisons.

Human rights groups say more than 100,000 people have disappeared since Assad ordered a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011 that triggered the civil war.

A Syrian non-governmental organisation said it was likely that the bodies in Harasta were detainees from the notorious Saydnaya prison, which is just to the north of Damascus.

“Harasta Hospital served as the main centre for collecting the bodies of detainees,” Diab Serriya, a co-founder of the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP), told AFP.

“Bodies would be sent there from Saydnaya prison or Tishrin Hospital, and from Harasta, they would be transferred to mass graves,” he added.

The discovery of the bodies came as the Syria Civil Defence, whose rescue workers are widely known as the White Helmets, announced that it had concluded a search operation for possible detainees in secret cells or basements at Saydnaya prison without finding anyone.

Five specialised teams assisted by two K9 dog units and individuals familiar with the layout of the prison checked all buildings, basements, courtyards, ventilation shafts, sewage systems, surveillance camera cables and surrounding areas on Monday, as crowds gathered there in the hope of finding their missing relatives.

“The search did not uncover any unopened or hidden areas within the facility,” the Syria Civil Defence said.

“We share the profound disappointment of the families of the thousands who remain missing and whose fates remain unknown,” it added.

The ADMSP meanwhile shared what it said was an official document, dated 28 October, saying that 4,300 detainees were being held at Saydnaya.

They comprised 2,817 judicial detainees held in the prison’s “White Building” and 1,483 detainees held on charges related to terrorism and military tribunals in the “Red Building”.

“This approximate number represents the detainees who were released at the time of the prison’s liberation,” the ADMSP said. The BBC could not immediately verify the information.

Rebel fighters entered Saydnaya prison and Harasta hospital as they advanced into Damascus over the weekend, prompting President Bashar al-Assad to step down and flee the country.

The ADMSP said in a 2022 report that Saydnaya “effectively became a death camp” after the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011.

It estimated that more than 30,000 detainees had either been executed or died as a result of torture, lack of medical care or starvation at the facility between 2011 and 2018.

It also cited released inmates as saying that at least another 500 detainees had been executed between 2018 and 2021.

ADMSP also described how “salt chambers” were constructed to serve as primitive mortuaries to store bodies before they were transferred to Tishreen Hospital for registration and burial in graves on military land.

Amnesty International used the phrase “human slaughterhouse” to describe Saydnaya and alleged that the executions had been authorised at the highest levels of the Assad government, and that such practices amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Assad government dismissed Amnesty’s claims as “baseless” and “devoid of truth”, insisting that all executions in Syria followed due process.

On Monday night, the leader of the Islamist militant group whose offensive led to the end of Assad’s 24-year rule said former senior officials who oversaw the torture of political prisoners would be held accountable.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) said the officials’ names would be published and repatriation sought for those who had fled abroad. Rewards would also be offered to anyone who provided information about their whereabouts, he added.

Former world champion cyclist Rohan Dennis has pleaded guilty over a car incident in Australia which killed his wife, fellow Olympian Melissa Hoskins.

Hoskins died in hospital on 30 December 2023, after being struck by a vehicle being driven by Dennis outside their home in Adelaide.

The 34-year-old was initially charged with dangerous driving causing death and driving without due care, but on Tuesday he admitted a lesser charge – one aggravated count of creating the likelihood of harm.

Dennis – who has two children with Hoskins – will be sentenced at a later date.

Few details are known about the circumstances leading up to Hoskins’s death.

However, Dennis’s guilty plea means he has admitted to driving a car when Hoskins was in close proximity, knowing that act was likely to cause harm or being recklessly indifferent to whether it would.

“There was no intention of Mr Dennis to harm his wife and this charge does not charge him with responsibility for her death,” the retired athlete’s lawyer told the court.

Hoskins was a world champion in the team pursuit in 2015 and a two-time Olympian, and her death triggered a wave of tributes from around the world.

She and Dennis married in 2018.

Dennis retired at the end of the 2023 season after a career in which he won stages at the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a Espana.

A multiple world champion on both road and track, he won road time trial bronze at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, having won team pursuit silver at London 2012. He also won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in 2022.

A real-life “Succession” battle for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has ended with a Nevada court commissioner denying the billionaire’s bid to change a family trust and give control to his eldest son.

The case pitted the 93-year-old against three of his children over who would gain the power to control News Corp and Fox News when he dies.

It has been reported that Mr Murdoch wanted to amend a family trust created in 1999 to allow his son Lachlan to take control without “interference” from his siblings Prudence, Elisabeth and James.

A Nevada commissioner ruled Mr Murdoch and Lachlan had acted in “bad faith” and called the efforts a “carefully crafted charade”, according to the New York Times.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Prudence, Elisabeth and James said: “We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members.”

Adam Streisand, a lawyer for Mr Murdoch, told the New York Times they were disappointed and planned to appeal.

A spokesperson for Mr Murdoch declined to comment to the BBC. Mr Streisand did not immediately respond to inquiries.

The famous family was one of the inspirations behind the hugely popular TV series Succession – something the Murdochs have always refused to comment on.

But according to the New York Times report, which is based on a copy of the sealed court ruling, the billionaire’s children had started discussing their father’s death and how they would handle it after an episode of the HBO series where “the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos”.

The episode led to Elisabeth’s representative to the trust writing a “‘Succession’ memo” that sought to prevent this from happening in real life, said reports.

The case has played out behind closed doors in Nevada, a state that offers one of the most confidential legal settings for matters including family trust disputes.

It has a “close on demand” statute that allows parties involved in certain sensitive cases to request that court proceedings be sealed from public access, ensuring complete privacy.

Mr Murdoch, who has been married five times, also has two younger children, Grace and Chloe, who do not have any voting rights under the trust agreement.

The case was launched after Mr Murdoch decided to change the trust over worries about a “lack of consensus” among the children, the Times reported.

Lachlan is thought to be more conservative than his siblings and would preserve the legacy of his media brands.

From the 1960s, Mr Murdoch built a global media giant with major political and public influence.

His two companies are News Corporation, which owns newspapers including the Times and the Sun in the UK and the Wall Street Journal in the US, and Fox, which broadcasts Fox News.

Mr Murdoch had been preparing his two sons to follow in his footsteps, beginning when they were teenagers, journalist Andrew Neil told the 2020 BBC documentary The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty.

“Family has always been very important to Rupert Murdoch, particularly from the point of view of forming a dynasty,” the former Sunday Times editor said.

In 1999, the Murdoch Family Trust, which owns the media companies, was supposed to largely settle the succession plans.

It led to Mr Murdoch giving his eldest children various jobs within his companies.

The trust gives the family eight votes, which it can use to have a say on the board of News Corp and Fox News. Mr Murdoch currently controls four of those votes, with his eldest children being in charge of one each.

The trust agreement said that once Mr Murdoch died, his votes would be passed on to his four eldest children equally.

However, differences in opinions and political views were said to lead to a family rift.

The battle over changes to the trust was not about money, but rather power and control over the future of the Murdoch empire.

The commissioner’s ruling is not final. The court filing acts as a recommended resolution but a district judge will still weigh in and could choose to rule differently.

The judge could take weeks or months to make a decision, which will not be available to the public.

Google has unveiled a new chip which it claims takes five minutes to solve a problem that would currently take the world’s fastest super computers ten septillion – or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – to complete.

The chip is the latest development in a field known as quantum computing – which is attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of mind-bogglingly powerful computer.

Google says its new quantum chip, dubbed “Willow”, incorporates key “breakthroughs” and “paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.”

However experts say Willow is, for now, a largely experimental device, meaning a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years – and billions of dollars – away.

Quantum computers work in a fundamentally different way to the computer in your phone or laptop.

They harness quantum mechanics – the strange behaviour of ultra-tiny particles – to crack problems far faster than traditional computers.

It’s hoped quantum computers might eventually be able to use that ability to vastly speed up complex processes, such as creating new medicines.

There are also fears it could be used for ill – for example to break some types of encryption used to protect sensitive data.

In February Apple announced that the encryption that protects iMessage chats is being made “quantum proof” to stop them being read by powerful future quantum computers.

Hartmut Neven leads Google’s Quantum AI lab that created Willow and describes himself as the project’s “chief optimist.”

He told the BBC that Willow would be used in some practical applications – but declined, for now, to provide more detail.

But a chip able to perform commercial applications would not appear before the end of the decade, he said.

Initially these applications would be the simulation of systems where quantum effects are important

“For example, relevant when it comes to the design of nuclear fusion reactors to understand the functioning of drugs and pharmaceutical development, it would be relevant for developing better car batteries and another long list of such tasks”.

Mr Neven told the BBC Willow’s performance meant it was the “best quantum processor built to date”.

But Professor Alan Woodward, a computing expert at Surrey University, says quantum computers will be better at a range of tasks than current “classical” computers, but they will not replace them.

He warns against overstating the importance of Willow’s achievement in a single test.

“One has to be careful not to compare apples and oranges” he told the BBC.

Google had chosen a problem to use as a benchmark of performance that was, “tailor-made for a quantum computer” and this didn’t demonstrate “a universal speeding up when compared to classical computers”.

Nonetheless, he said Willow represented significant progress, in particular in what’s known as error correction.

In very simple terms the more useful a quantum computer is, the more qubits it has.

However a major problem with the technology is that it is prone to errors – a tendency that has previously increased the more qubits a chip has.

But Google researchers say they have reversed this and managed to engineer and program the new chip so the error rate fell across the whole system as the number of qubits increased.

It was a major “breakthrough” that cracked a key challenge that the field had pursued “for almost 30 years”, Mr Neven believes.

He told the BBC it was comparable to “if you had an airplane with just one engine – that will work, but two engines are safer, four engines is yet safer”.

Errors are a significant obstacle in creating more powerful quantum computers and the development was “encouraging for everyone striving to build a practical quantum computer” Prof Woodward said.

But Google itself notes that to develop practically useful quantum computers the error rate will still need to go much lower than that displayed by Willow.

Willow was made in Google’s new, purpose-built manufacturing plant in California.

Countries around the world are investing in quantum computing.

The UK recently launched the National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC).

Its director, Michael Cuthbert, told the BBC he was wary of language that fuelled the “hype cycle” and thought Willow was more a “milestone rather than a breakthrough”.

Nevertheless, it was “clearly a highly impressive piece of work”.

Eventually quantum computers would help with a range of tasks including “logistics problems such as cargo freight distribution on aircraft or routing of telecoms signals or stored energy throughout the national grid”, he said.

And there were already 50 quantum businesses in the UK, attracting £800m in funding and employing 1300 people.

On Friday, researchers from Oxford University and Osaka University in Japan published a paper showcasing the very low error rate in a trapped-ion qubit.

Theirs is a different approach to making a quantum computer that’s capable of working at room temperature – whereas Google’s chip has to be stored at ultra low temperatures to be effective.

Scientific findings from Google’s development of Willow have been published in the journal Nature

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 Jwan Omar, a Syrian living in Turkey.

He travelled to Saydnaya prison on Sunday to search for his father-in-law who disappeared in 2013, after being arrested by the regime who accused him of helping the opposition.

“I went to the prison and showed photos of my father-in-law but nobody recognised him,” Omar told the BBC.

“My wife dreamed for 11 years of finding her father. Our hopes were raised when we heard the prisoners were released, but my wife has been crying since yesterday.”

He was disappointed to be told that many prisoners had been moved to another location.

Omar travelled to the prison with his friend Dr Sharvan Ibesh, chief executive of the Syrian aid group Bahar, who has been helping with the search.

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

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.

Since the fall of Assad, many families have had renewed hope that they might find loved ones missing in prisons.

One such family is the Nadaf family from Idlib, who are currently searching for Thaer Nadaf who was arrested and sent to Saydnaya in 2011.

Thaer had two children – a baby and a two-year-old – at the time he was arrested.

His son Mustafa, who is now 12, told the BBC: “I hope he comes back. I swear I miss him, I have never heard his voice.”

Thaer’s mother Fayzah Nadaf said “nobody knows the reason why he was arrested”.

She has sent her other son – Mohammad – to the prison in Damascus to find him.

A doctor who left the prison two months ago informed them that he was still alive. They believe he is being held in the underground section of the Saydnaya complex.

“I am looking forward to seeing my son again,” Fayzah said. He has been missing for 12 years, and all the time I prayed that he could see his children again.”

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.”

While there have been many family reunions since the prisoners were released, the search continues for many others.

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.

In the end the Assad regime was so hollow, corrupt and decayed that it collapsed in less than a fortnight.

No one I have spoken to has been anything other than astonished by the speed with which the regime turned to dust.

In the spring of 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, it was different, when Syrians tried to grab some of the revolutionary magic that had swept away the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt and was threatening the veteran strongmen of Libya and Yemen.

By 2011, the regime created by Hafez al-Assad and passed to his son Bashar on his death in 2000 was already corrupt and decadent.

But the system that Hafez built still had much of the brutal, ruthless strength that he believed was necessary to control Syria. Assad senior had seized power in a country that was prone to coups and delivered it to his son and heir without a significant challenge.

Bashar al-Assad went back to his father’s playbook in 2011.

It is hard to imagine now, but back then he had more legitimacy among some of Syria’s population than the old dictators swept away by crowds chanting the slogan of that year – “The people want the fall of the regime”.

Bashar al-Assad was a vocal supporter of the Palestinians and of Hezbollah during its successful fight against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war. He was younger than the ex and soon to be former Arab leaders.

Since his father’s death he had been promising reform. Some Syrians still wanted to believe him in 2011, hoping demonstrations were the spur he needed for the change that he had promised, until he ordered his men to shoot peaceful demonstrators dead in the streets.

A British ambassador in Syria once told me that the way to understand the Assad regime was to watch Mafia films like The Godfather. The obedient could be rewarded.

Anyone who went against the head of the family or his closest lieutenants would be eliminated. In Syria’s case that could mean the gallows, or a firing squad, or indefinite incarceration in some underground cell.

We’re seeing them now, emaciated and pale, blinking into the light, filmed on the mobiles of the rebel fighters who have freed thousands of them from years behind bars.

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The weakness of the regime, to the point that it collapsed like a soggy paper bag, was disguised by the fearsome and repressive gulag it still maintained.

The international consensus was that Bashar al-Assad was weak, dependent on Russia and Iran, and presiding over a country he had fractured to preserve his family’s rule – but still strong enough to be regarded as a fact of Middle Eastern life, who could even be useful.

In the last days before rebels burst out of Idlib, it was widely reported that the US, Israel and the United Arab Emirates were trying to detach Assad’s Syria from Iran.

Israel had been launching increasingly heavy airstrikes against targets inside Syria it said were part of the supply chain Iran used to get weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel’s offensive in Lebanon had dealt severe blows to Hezbollah, but the idea was to stop it regenerating. At the same time the UAE and the US were trying to find incentives for him to break the alliance with Tehran, relaxing sanctions and allowing Assad to continue his international rehabilitation.

Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden have claimed credit for the fall of the Assad regime. There is something in that.

The damage Israel inflicted on Hezbollah and Iran with US weapons and constant support, and Biden’s supply of arms for Ukraine, made it impossible, even undesirable, for Assad’s closest allies to save him.

But the fact that they saw Assad as part of their strategy to contain and damage Iran until days before his fall indicates clearly that they did not for a moment believe him to be days away from a midnight flit to Russia.

They did contribute to his end, more by accident than design.

The fall of the regime might have ended Iran’s supply chain, if Syria’s new rulers decide their deals with others are more useful than the Iranian alliance.

All sides are thinking hard and thinking again about what comes next, and it is too soon to draw definite conclusions. Syrians, their neighbours, and the wider world are now confronted by another geopolitical earthquake, the biggest of the series that has followed the Hamas attacks on Israel in October last year. It might not be the last.

Iran is seeing the final collapse of the main planks of the network it called the axis of resistance. Its most important components have been transformed; Hezbollah badly damaged and the Assad regime gone.

Iran’s rulers might want to follow up on hints of talks on a deal with Donald Trump once he takes office. Or its new strategic nakedness might push it into a fateful decision to turn its highly enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon.

Syrians have every reason to rejoice. In the years after 2011, for all the repression and brutality of the regime, Assad and his acolytes could still find men who would fight. Many of the troops I met on front lines told me that Assad was a better option than the jihadist extremists of Islamic State group.

In 2024, faced by a well-organised rebel force that insisted it was nationalist, Islamist but no longer jihadist, the army’s reluctant conscripts refused to fight, stripped off their uniforms and went home.

The best scenario is that Syrians, helped by the big players in the region, will find a way to create a postwar mood of national reconciliation, not a wave of looting and revenge that will drag the country into a new war. Abu Mohammad al Joulani, the leader of victorious HTS, has called for his men and all of Syria’s sects to respect each other.

His men have removed the regime, and he is the closest Syria has to a de facto leader.

Syria, though, has dozens of armed groups that do not necessarily agree with him and will want to grab power in their own areas. In southern Syria, tribal militias did not recognise the writ of the Assads. They will not follow orders they don’t like from the new set up in Damascus.

In the eastern desert, the US saw a big enough threat from remnants of the Islamic State group to launch waves of air strikes. The Israelis, alarmed by the prospect of an Islamist state on their border, are pounding the military infrastructure of Syria’s armed forces.

It might be better to find a way to make a reformed Syrian Arab Army part of the solution in a country without much law or order. The reckless decision by the US in 2003 to dissolve the Iraqi armed forces had disastrous consequences.

In Turkey, President Erdogan must be satisfied by what he sees.

Erdogan’s Turkey did more than any other power to preserve the autonomy of Idlib province, where HTS was transforming itself into a fighting force when Syria seemed to be in the deep freeze.

Erdogan might see his influence lapping Israel’s borders, at a time when Israel-Turkey relations have been poisoned by the war in Gaza.

The worst scenario for Syrians is that their country will follow the example of two Arab dictatorships that spun into violent chaos after the fall of their regimes.

Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq were removed without a ready-made replacement waiting in the wings. Ill-considered foreign intervention did much to create two catastrophes.

The vacuum left by the dictators was filled by waves of looting, revenge, power grabs and civil war.

Syrians have not been in charge of their own destiny for generations. Individuals were robbed of it by the two Assad presidents and their followers. The country lost it after war left it so weakened that bigger foreign powers used it to increase and preserve their own power.

Syrians still do not have agency over their lives. They might have a chance of creating a new and better country if they did.