South Korean lawmakers have voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol over his failed attempt to impose martial law, which sparked massive protests across the country.

He was suspended after some members of Yoon’s own People Power Party (PPP) voted with the opposition – though the decision still needs be ratified by the constitutional court.

Thousands of anti-Yoon protesters celebrated outside the National Assembly on Saturday evening after the impeachment motion passed, with the crowd singing as fireworks broke out overhead.

Yoon has vowed to fight on and said he “will never give up”, describing the vote as a temporary pause to his presidency.

“I will take your criticism, praise, and support to the heart and do my best for the country until the end,” Yoon added.

His defiant words are a marked change from his apologetic tone earlier this month over his short-lived martial law declaration.

Yoon attempted to impose military rule after months of political deadlock, saying it was necessary to block supposed North Korean efforts to undermine his government – but the declaration was overturned after a matter of hours by MPs.

There has been strong public support for Yoon’s impeachment, with recent polls finding three-quarters of South Koreans wanted to see him go.

Following days of public pressure the PPP had decided to let its lawmakers vote on the motion, after an effort to impeach Yoon last week failed when its lawmakers boycotted the hearing.

On Saturday, the impeachment motion reached the two thirds threshold needed to pass after 12 members of Yoon’s party voted in favour.

“To the people, we hope your end of year will be a little happier now, and all your cancelled year-end celebrations to be restored,” said National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-shik, as he announced the result.

“The future of the Republic of Korea and our hope is in the hands of the people, our hope is strong,” Woo, a member of the main opposition Democratic Party, added.

The constitutional court now has 180 days to rule on whether Yoon’s impeachment should be upheld or whether he can return to office. If it rules in favour of impeachment, an election for the next president must be called within 60 days.

Yoon has been suspended while Prime Minister Han Duck-soo has taken over as acting president.

Han said his focus is to “stabilise the situation” and “bring back normalcy for the people”.

However, both Han and finance minister Choi Sang-mok, who is next in line for the presidency, are both involved in an ongoing police probe over last week’s events.

Outside the National Assembly, where tens of thousands of protesters gathered throughout the day despite the bitter cold, people hailed the vote as a victory for democracy and spoke of their determination to see Yoon permanently leave office.

“I’m so happy that the bill passed… At the same time, the fight is not over,” physical therapist Sim Hee-seon told the BBC as she wiped her tears.

“We’ll have to wait for the court’s judgment for his impeachment to be finalised. We will keep watching.”

Two women decked out in Rudolf costumes held signs that read: “[It will be] a merry Christmas only if Yoon Seok Yul disappears”.

Across town at a pro-Yoon rally in Gwanghwamun Square, it was a different story. His supporters fell silent after hearing the news of the vote. Some people uttered angry insults before leaving the scene.

The success of the vote had depended on the support from the PPP, as the opposition lawmakers who tabled the motion needed just eight more to join them. Last Saturday, when the opposition first tried to impeach Yoon, they fell short by just a few votes as the PPP staged a walkout.

On Saturday, the party held a marathon meeting that began at 10am and lasted till just minutes before the voting session began, as PPP lawmakers struggled to reach a consensus on the party’s stance.

In the end, the party agreed to take part and allowed their lawmakers to vote according to their conscience. It appeared that at least 12 of them crossed the floor. Another 85 voted against impeachment.

South Korea has faced nearly two weeks of chaos and uncertainty since Yoon’s short-lived martial law attempt late last Tuesday.

Yoon had cited threats from “anti-state forces” and North Korea but it soon became clear that his move had been spurred by his own domestic political troubles, not by external threats.

Hours later he reversed the order after 190 MPs voted it down, with many of them climbing fences and breaking barricades to get into the voting chamber.

Yoon later apologised but on Thursday he defended his actions, saying he had sought to protect the country’s democracy and vowed to “fight on until the end”.

That speech galvanised people, and the president’s approval rating tumbled to a record low of 11%, according to a poll by Gallup Korea.

The impeachment of a president is not unchartered territory for South Korea, which last removed former president Park Geun-hye through this process in 2016.

Yoon – then a prosecutor – had led the investigation against Park, which ultimately resulted in her impeachment.

When Bashar al-Assad was toppled on Sunday, it turned the page on not only his 24-year presidency but on more than 50 years of his family ruling Syria.

Before Assad took office in 2000, his late father Hafez was president for three decades.

Now, with rebels led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir-al Sham (HTS) forming a transitional government, the future of the deposed president, his wife and their three children is uncertain.

They are now in Russia, where they have been offered asylum, but what lies ahead for them?

Russia was a staunch ally of Assad during Syria’s civil war and has two key military bases in the Middle Eastern country.

In 2015, Russia launched an air campaign in support of Assad that turned the tide of the war in the government’s favour.

A UK-based monitoring group reported that more than more than 21,000 people, including 8,700 civilians, were killed in Russian military operations over the following nine years.

However, distracted by its war in Ukraine, Russia was either unwilling or unable to help Assad’s government stop the rebel’s lightning offensive after it began in late November.

Hours after rebel forces seized control of Damascus, it was reported by Russian state media that Assad and his family had arrived in Moscow and that they would be granted asylum on “humanitarian grounds”.

But when Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about Assad’s whereabouts and asylum claim by reporters on Monday, he said: “I have nothing to tell you… right now. Of course, such a decision [on granting asylum] cannot be made without the head of state. It is his decision.”

The Assads’ ties to Russia, specifically Moscow, are well-documented.

A 2019 investigation by the Financial Times found that Assad’s extended family had purchased at least 18 luxury apartments in the Russian capital, in a bid to keep tens of millions of dollars out of Syria during the civil war.

Meanwhile, Assad’s eldest son, Hafez, is a PhD student in the city – with a local newspaper reporting just last week about the 22-year-old’s doctoral dissertation.

Amid the chaos at the weekend, Russian state TV reported that officials in Moscow were in talks with “the Syrian armed opposition” to secure Russia’s bases and diplomatic missions.

Assad is married to a dual British-Syrian national, Asma, who was born and raised in west London to Syrian parents.

She attended school and university in London before becoming an investment banker.

Asma moved to Syria full-time in 2000 and married Assad around the time he succeeded his father as president.

Dr Nesrin Alrefaai, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), told BBC News that Asma “holds a British passport, so could return to the UK” instead of remaining in Russia.

“However, the USA [has] imposed sanctions on her father, Dr Fawaz al-Akhras, who is also reported to be in Russia,” she said – suggesting Asma may want to stay put in Moscow for now.

In a report by the Mail Online, neighbours were quoted as saying Asma’s father, a cardiologist, and mother Sahar, a retired diplomat, wanted to be in Moscow to “console” their daughter and son-in-law.

Assad and his wife have three children: Hafez, the PhD student, Zein and Karim.

A 2022 US State Department report to Congress said the extended Assad family’s net worth was between $1bn (£790m) and $2bn (£1.6bn) – though it noted that it was difficult to estimate because their assets are “believed to be spread out and concealed in numerous accounts, real estate portfolios, corporations, and offshore tax havens”.

According to the report, Bashar and Asma maintained “close patronage relationships with Syria’s largest economic players, using their companies to launder money from illicit activities and funnel funds to the regime”.

It also said that Asma had “influence over the economic committee that manages Syria’s ongoing economic crisis” – and had made key decisions on Syria’s “food and fuel subsidies, trade and currency issues”.

She also exerted influence over the Syria Trust for Development, through which most foreign aid for reconstruction in regime-held areas was channelled.

In 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged that Asma had “become one of Syria’s most notorious war profiteers” with the help of her husband and her family.

Another senior Trump administration official described her as the “business head of the family” and an “oligarch” who had been competing with Bashar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf.

He is one of Syria’s richest men and the family rift became public knowledge after he posted videos on social media complaining about his treatment.

Following the fall of the Assad dynasty, Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard said Syrians had been subjected to what she called “a horrifying catalogue of human rights violations that caused untold human suffering on a vast scale”.

This includes “attacks with chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and other war crimes, as well as murder, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination that amount to crimes against humanity”.

She called on the international community to ensure that people suspected of breaking international law and other serious human rights violations must be investigated and prosecuted for their crimes.

On Tuesday, the Islamist rebel leader in Syria said any of the ousted regime’s senior officials found to have been involved in torturing political prisoners would be named.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani also said his so-called Syrian Salvation Government would seek to repatriate officials it identified who fled to another country.

In France, investigative judges have sought an arrest warrant for Assad for alleged complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes, in connection with a deadly chemical attack in Syria in 2013 under the legal concept of universal jurisdiction.

Russia does not extradite its own nationals – a legal process whereby someone is returned to another country or state to face trial for a suspected crime.

Assad is unlikely to leave Russia to go to a country where he could be extradited back to Syria or any other that might charge him with a crime.

A former Love Island contestant says it “took her breath away” to discover that someone removing a condom during sex is classified as rape.

Stealthing, as it is known, happens when someone removes a condom during consensual sex without informing the other person.

Megan Barton-Hanson says she experienced this up to six times, with a man claiming the condom had split on each occasion, leading to her having an abortion.

“I didn’t know it was a crime,” the 30-year-old tells the BBC.

“I just thought that’s something between partners that you have to discuss with them.”

Megan added that she knew his actions were “unfair and unjust” but it was only in a recording of the We Need to Talk podcast, when host Paul C Brunson told her, that she realised the man’s actions were rape.

“I’d never heard of stealthing, ever,” she says.

“When we started to have sex, the condom was obviously on – that was fine – and then at the end, he’d removed it intentionally but his excuse was ‘it split and it broke’.

“It was shocking.”

The Metropolitan Police says stealthing is a slang word but the practice is legally considered rape, although prosecutions are rare due to under-reporting, as many do not realise it is an offence.

In October, a University College London (UCL) survey showed just over one in 10 people aged 18-25 did not consider non-consensual condom removal to be sexual assault.

Andrea Simon, executive director of End Violence Against Women and Girls, says although sex can start off consensually, if someone violates that consent by removing a condom, it is considered rape and it can be prosecuted as rape.

“It’s very hard to know the prevalence of stealthing, as not many people may understand it as actually an act of sexual violence or a crime,” she explains.

“It’s really important that men, in particular, understand that it’s criminal behaviour to intentionally remove a condom during sex without consent and we know that it speaks very much to men’s sense of entitlement over women’s bodies and it’s a violation of women’s bodily autonomy.”

The issue was explored in the fourth episode of BBC drama I May Destroy You in 2020, where the main character Arabella has sex with a man who removes the condom without her knowledge.

Arabella doesn’t realise it’s rape until she hears it discussed on a podcast.

The seriousness of this form of sexual violence is accurately reflected in the language we use to talk about it, according to Ciara Bergman, chief executive of Rape Crisis England and Wales.

“So-called stealthing is a form of rape under English and Welsh law,” she says.

“If someone has received consent for sex on the basis that they will wear a condom and they then remove the condom without the other person’s knowledge or permission, consent for sex from that point is lost.”

Megan’s advice to someone who may have concerns is clear.

She says: “I think if you’ve got any kind of suspicions, red flags, tell a friend, tell someone and then you can go together and share to the police.

“You don’t have to make it a big old deal; you can call from the comfort of your own home, but I think definitely reach out to somebody because it’s not fair and it’s not OK.”

At least three people have been killed and dozens more wounded after an explosive was thrown into a crowd at a festival in Thailand.

The attack took place shortly before midnight local time on Friday at the Red Cross Doi Loyfa fair, held annually in the Umphang district in the northern Tak province.

Two suspects are being held in custody, but no charges have been pressed, the Associated Press and local media report, citing Thai police.

At least 48 people have been wounded, six of whom are critically injured, police said.

Police were alerted to the incident at 23:30 local time (16:30 GMT) on Friday.

In a statement, the Umphang rescue team said the explosive was thrown and landed at the foot of an outdoor stage where people had been dancing.

Some of the wounded were taken to a nearby hospital, it added.

Several reports suggest the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device (IED).

Footage said to be from the scene, posted on social media, shows scenes of panic as emergency workers and festivalgoers tend to the wounded.

One video appears to show at least two people lying in close proximity being given CPR, as crowds rush around them in a state of confusion.

The camera then pans to a person cutting the trousers off a man to reveal a wound on his leg pouring out blood.

Images taken in the aftermath, shared by the rescue team, show a cordon in place around an area strewn with rubbish and strung with lights.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra shared her condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the bombing in a post on X.

She said she had ordered the police and security agencies to investigate the cause of the explosion and help those affected. She also directed an increase in police officers to oversee all festival events.

According to the Bangkok Post, between 8,000 and 9,000 people attended the week-long festival this year, and the attack took place on the penultimate night of the event.

Umphang is the southernmost district in Thailand’s northern Tak province, which shares a border with Myanmar to the west.

A former Manchester City footballer has been appointed president by Georgia’s disputed parliament, after 17 days of pro-EU protests that have swept this country’s towns and cities.

Mikheil Kavelashvili, now 53, is a former MP from the increasingly authoritarian ruling Georgian Dream party and was the only candidate for the job.

On Saturday, 224 out of 225 members of Georgia’s electoral college voted for him.

The four main opposition groups have rejected Kavelashvili and have boycotted parliament, insisting that the elections held in October were rigged.

Large crowds of protesters, facing freezing temperatures, gathered outside parliament from the early hours of Saturday morning ahead of the vote.

Georgia’s outgoing pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has condemned Kavelashvili’s election as a travesty, insisting she holds Georgia’s only remaining legitimate institution.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has accused Zourabichvili of trying to harm Georgia’s interests, emphasising that when her term of office ends on 29 December, she will have to retire.

“We have very strong state institutions, so we certainly have no difficulty in bringing the situation under full control,” he was quoted as saying on Friday.

Party colleague Nino Tsilosani told reporters that Zourabichvili was no longer president in the eyes of the public.

Georgia is a parliamentary democracy with the president the head of state, and the prime minister the head of Parliament.

Protests against Georgian Dream began immediately after the October elections but they burst into life on 28 November when the government announced it was putting EU accession negotiations on hold until 2028.

An overwhelming majority of Georgians back the country’s path to the European Union and it is part of the constitution.

Every night, the main avenue outside parliament fills with protesters draped in EU flags, demanding new elections.

The night before the vote, the capital Tbilisi was convulsed by pop-up protests involving IT specialists, public sector workers, creative industry professionals, actors and lawyers.

“We are standing here to create a legal state once and for all, to respect the provisions of the constitution and human rights,” said lawyer Davit Kikaleishvili, 47.

Kavelashvili is a founder of the People’s Power party, known for being the main voice for anti-Western propaganda in Georgia.

He has accused opposition parties of acting as a “fifth column” directed from abroad, and described President Zourabichvili as a “chief agent”.

Kavelashvili moved into politics after he was disqualified from seeking the leadership of the Georgian football federation because he lacked the qualifications.

Although his party ran alongside Georgian Dream in the October elections, it has now decided to act in parliament as a “healthy opposition”, to fill the place of the “so-called radical opposition funded by foreign forces”.

A People’s Power party MP, Guram Macharashvili, who announced on 13 December that his faction would leave the ruling parliamentary majority, told the BBC that what was happening in the country was an “artificially created crisis characterised by the influence of foreign powers”.

Macharashvili and Kavelashvili are the architects of Georgia’s controversial “foreign agents” law, seen by the country’s opposition as Russian-style legislation.

When asked what “healthy opposition” means, Macharashvili said: “Opposition does not necessarily mean opposition on all issues, it does not mean only cooperation with foreigners. It means competition with the ruling party to make better proposals on what’s best for Georgia’s future.”

Georgian Dream, founded by billionaire businessman and former Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili, has been accused of dragging the country back into Russia’s sphere of influence.

Both the EU and US have condemned the government for democratic backsliding and more than 460 people have been detained across Georgia over the past two weeks, according to Transparency International.

More than 300 have been ill-treated or tortured, the organisation says, including dozens of people from Georgian media. Last weekend, thugs were filmed attacking a TV reporter and cameraman.

The EU has condemned the “brutal, unlawful force from the police” and foreign ministers are due to consider measures against the government when they meet on Monday.

The US state department has already imposed visa restrictions on Georgian officials, including government ministers and police.

Protesters have called on the international community to impose sanctions on top government officials as well as Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s most powerful man.

Pro-government groups have also waged a campaign of harassment towards civil society activists, beating them outside homes, and carrying out arbitrary arrests.

“There is systematic torture, inhuman and degrading treatment of citizens,” said former public rights defender Nino Lomjaria.

Theatre workers who joined the protests on Friday chanted: “The police are everywhere, justice is nowhere.”

It was a defining moment of the fall of the Syrian regime – rebels freeing inmates from the country’s most notorious prison. A week on, four men speak to the BBC about the elation of their release, and the years of horror that preceded it.

Warning: This article contains descriptions of torture

The prisoners fell silent when they heard the shouting outside their cell door.

A man’s voice called: “Is there anyone in there?” But they were too afraid to answer.

Over years, they had learnt that the door opening meant beatings, rapes and other punishments. But on this day, it meant freedom.

At the shout of “Allahu Akbar”, the men inside the cell peered through a small opening in the centre of the heavy metal door.

They saw rebels in the prison’s corridor instead of guards.

“We said ‘We are here. Free us,'” one of the inmates, 30-year-old Qasem Sobhi Al-Qabalani, recalls.

As the door was shot open, Qasem says he “ran out with bare feet”.

Like other inmates, he kept running and didn’t look back.

“When they came to start liberating us and shouting ‘all go out, all go out’, I ran out of the prison but I was so terrified to look behind me because I thought they’d put me back,” says 31-year-old Adnan Ahmed Ghnem.

They did not yet know that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad had fled the country and that his government had fallen. But the news soon reached them.

“It was the best day of my life. An unexplainable feeling. Like someone who had just escaped death,” Adnan remembers.

Qasem and Adnan are among four prisoners the BBC has spoken to who were released this week from Saydnaya prison – a facility for political prisoners nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse”.

All gave similar accounts of years of mistreatment and torture at the hands of guards, executions of fellow inmates, corruption by prison officials, and forced confessions.

We were also shown inside the prison by a former inmate who had a similar account, and heard from families of missing people held at Saydnaya who are desperately looking for answers.

We have seen bodies found by rebel fighters in the mortuary of a military hospital, believed to be Saydnaya detainees, that medics say bear signs of torture.

Rights group Amnesty International, whose 2017 report on the prison accuses authorities of murder and torture there, has called for “justice and reparations for crimes under international law in Syria”, including its treatment of political prisoners.

Saydnaya prison, a sprawling complex located atop a hill of barren land and surrounded by barbed wire, was established in the early 1980s and for decades has been used to hold opponents of the Assad family regime.

It has been described as the country’s main political prison since the 2011 uprising, when the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison says it effectively became a “death camp”.

The prisoners we spoke to say they were sent to Saydnaya because of real or perceived links with the rebel Free Syrian Army, their opposition to Assad, or simply because they lived in an area known to oppose him.

Some had been accused of kidnapping and killing regime soldiers and convicted of terrorism.

All said they had given confessions under “pressure” and “torture”.

They were given lengthy sentences or sentenced to death. One man said he had been detained at the prison for four years but had not yet been to court.

The men were held in the prison’s main Red Building, for opponents of the regime.

Qasem says he was arrested while passing through a road block in 2016, accused of terrorism with the Free Syrian Army, and sent for short stints at several detention facilities before being transferred to Saydnaya.

“After that door, you are a dead person,” he says softly in an interview at his family home in a town south of Damascus, as relatives gather around sipping coffee and nodding in grim captivation.

“This is where the torture began.”

He recalls being stripped naked and told to pose for a photograph before being beaten for looking at the camera.

He says he was then put onto a chain with other inmates and led, with their faces staring at the ground, to a tiny solitary confinement cell where he and five other men were crammed in and given uniforms to wear but deprived of food and water for several days.

They were then taken to the prison’s main cells, where the rooms have no beds, a single lightbulb and a small toilet area in the corner.

When we visited the prison this week, we saw blankets, clothes and food strewn on the floors of cells.

Our guide, a former inmate from 2019-2022, walked us through the corridors searching for his cell.

Two of his fingers and a thumb were chopped off at the prison, he says.

Finding scratch marks on a cell wall that he believes he made, he knelt down and began to cry.

About 20 men would sleep in each room, but the inmates tell us it was difficult to get to know each other – they could speak only in hushed voices and knew that guards were always watching and listening.

“Everything was banned. You’re just allowed to eat and drink and sleep and die,” says Qasem.

Punishments at Saydnaya were frequent and brutal.

All of the people we spoke to described being beaten with different implements – metal staffs, cables, electric sticks.

“They would enter the room and start to beat us all over our bodies. I would stay still, watching and waiting for my turn,” Adnan, who was arrested in 2019 on accusations of kidnapping and killing a regime soldier, recalls.

“Every night, we would thank God that we were still alive. Every morning, we would pray to God, please take our souls so we can die in peace.”

Adnan and two of the other newly released inmates said they were sometimes forced to sit with their knees towards their foreheads and a vehicle tyre placed over their bodies with a stick wedged inside so they couldn’t move, before beatings were administered.

Forms of punishment were varied.

Qasem says he was held upside down by two prison officers in a barrel of water until he thought he was going to “choke and die”.

“I saw death with my own eyes,” he says. “They would do this if you woke up in the night, or we spoke in a loud voice, or if we had a problem with any of the other prisoners.”

Two of the prisoners released this week and the former inmate at Saydnaya described witnessing sexual assaults by guards, who they said would anally rape inmates with sticks.

One man said inmates would offer oral sex to the guards in their desperation for more food.

Three described guards jumping on their bodies as part of the abuse.

In a hospital in central Damascus, we were introduced to 43-year-old Imad Jamal, who grimaced in pain at each touch from his mother who was tending to him at his bedside.

Asked to describe his time in Saydnaya, he smiled and responded slowly in English: “No eat. No sleep. Hit. Cane. Fighting. Sick. Everything not normal. Nothing normal. Everything abnormal.”

He says he was detained in 2021 under what he described as a “political arrest” because of the area he was from.

Speaking again in Arabic, he says his back was broken when he was made to sit on the ground with his knees against his chest as a guard jumped from a ledge on top of him as a punishment for stealing medication from another inmate to give to a friend.

But for Imad, the hardest thing about life in the prison was the cold. “Even the wall was cold,” he says. “I became a breathing corpse”.

There were few things to look forward to in the prison, but three of the inmates said anything positive was met afterwards with punishment.

“Every time we had a shower, every time we had a visitor, every time we went out into the sun, every time we left the cell door we would be punished,” says 30-year-old Rakan Mohammed Al Saed, who says he was detained in 2020 on allegations of killing and kidnapping from his former days in the rebel Free Syrian Army but had never faced trial.

He bares his broken teeth, saying they were knocked out when he was hit in the mouth by a guard with a stick.

All of the men we spoke to said they believed people in their cells had been executed.

Guards would come in and call names of people who would be led away and never seen again.

“People wouldn’t be executed in front of us. Every time they would call names at 12am, we knew that those people were going to be killed,” Adnan says.

Others gave similar accounts, explaining there was no way of them knowing what happened to these men.

Qasem’s father and other relatives say the family were made to pay prison officials more than $10,000 to stop him from being executed – at first to be converted to life in prison and then to a 20-year sentence.

Qasem says his treatment by guards improved a bit after this.

But, his dad says, “they refused any amount to let him free”.

Families sent loved ones money for food in the prison but they say corrupt officials would keep much of it and give the inmates only limited rations.

In some of the cells, inmates would pool all of the food together. But it wasn’t enough.

Adnan found the hunger even harder than the beatings. “I would go to sleep and wake up hungry,” he says.

“There was a punishment that we received one month where one day they would pass us a slice of bread, the next day half a slice, until it was a tiny crumb. Then it was nothing. We got no bread.”

Qasem says one day guards covered the face of his cell’s de-facto leader with yoghurt and made others lick it off.

The men said the behaviour of guards was as much about inflicting humiliation as pain.

All described losing significant amounts of weight in the prison because of malnourishment.

“My biggest dream was to eat and be full,” Qasem says.

His family paid officers bribes for visitation rights. He would sometimes be brought down on a wheelchair because he was too weak to walk, his father says.

Diseases were rife and the inmates had no way of stopping them from spreading.

Two of the men we spoke to who were released on Sunday say they had contracted tuberculosis in Saydnaya – one said medication was frequently withheld as a form of punishment.

But Adnan says the “diseases from fear” were even worse than the physical ones.

At a hospital in Damascus this week, an official said brief medical checks of the detainees that were sent there had found “mainly psychological problems”.

These accounts paint a picture of a place with no hope, only pain.

The prisoners spent much of their time in silence with no access to the outside world, so it is no surprise that they say they knew nothing of the rebel Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) rapid advance in Syria until they were broken free that morning.

Qasem said they could hear what sounded like a helicopter taking off from the hospital grounds before the men’s shouts in the corridors. But in the windowless cell they couldn’t be sure.

Then the doors opened, and the freed inmates began running as fast as they could.

“We ran out of the prison. We ran from fear too,” Rakan says, his thoughts on his young children and wife.

At one point in the chaos, he says, “I was hit by a car. But I didn’t mind. I got up and carried on running.”

He says he will never go back to Saydnaya again.

Adnan, too, says he couldn’t look back at the prison, as he ran crying towards Damascus.

“I just kept going. I can’t describe it. I just headed for Damascus. People were taking us from the road in their cars.”

He now fears each night when he goes to sleep that he will wake in the prison, and find it was all a dream.

Qasem ran to a town called Tal Mneen. It was there that a woman who provided the freed prisoners with food, money and clothing told them: “Assad has fallen”.

He was brought to his hometown where celebratory gunfire rang out and his tearful family embraced him.

“It’s like I am born again. I can’t describe it to you,” he says.

Raj Kapoor, fondly called the “greatest showman of Indian cinema”, was a leading filmmaker, producer and actor whose work continues to shape and inspire Indian films.

Today, almost four decades after his death in 1988, he remains one of India’s most-loved stars.

Kapoor began his film career in India’s post-independence era. His early work often carried a socialistic undertone, mirroring the country’s mood and aspirations of the time.

“Kapoor brought romance, sexuality, song and soul to Indian socialism,” said historian Sunil Khilnani, in Incarnations: India in 50 Lives, a 2015 BBC Radio 4 series on the men and women who made India.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that celebrations to mark what would have been his 100th birthday on Saturday are taking place across the country, honouring his enduring legacy.

Among them is a retrospective showcasing 10 of his iconic films that will screen across 40 cities and 135 cinemas in India at the weekend.

Born as Shrishti Nath Kapoor to actors Prithviraj Kapoor and Ramsarni Kapoor, he later took the name of Ranbir Raj Kapoor and debuted as a child actor in Inquilab (1935).

Before making waves on screen, Kapoor honed his craft behind the scenes – assisting filmmaker Kidar Sharma, working as an art director at his father’s Prithvi Theatre, and appearing in smaller roles.

His breakout came with Neel Kamal (1947), launching a storied career that combined artistic ambition with mass appeal.

In 1948, Kapoor founded the iconic RK Films studio, synonymous with blockbuster films and international acclaim.

He debuted as a director with Aag (1948) and showcased his versatility as an actor and filmmaker in landmark films like Barsaat (1949), Awaara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), and Sangam (1964). Other popular works include Mera Naam Joker (1970), Bobby (1973), Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985).

The world’s biggest iceberg is on the move again after being trapped in a vortex for most of the year.

A23a is 3,800 sq km (1,500 sq miles), which is more than twice the size of Greater London, and is 400m (1,312ft) thick. It broke free of Antarctica in 1986 though soon became stuck just off the coast.

The depth of the iceberg meant its bottom became lodged on the floor of the Weddell Sea, part of the Southern Ocean, where it remained static for more than 30 years.

It began to move northwards in 2020 but, since the spring, has been spinning on the spot after it was caught in a rotating column of water near the South Orkney Islands.

On Friday the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said it was now drifting further north.

Dr Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer at the BAS, said: “It’s exciting to see A23a on the move again after periods of being stuck.

“We are interested to see if it will take the same route the other large icebergs that have calved off Antarctica have taken.”

• A23a: Tracking the world’s biggest iceberg as it drifts towards oblivion

It is thought A23a will eventually leave the Southern Ocean and enter the Atlantic Ocean where it will encounter warmer waters and likely break up into smaller icebergs and eventually melt.

Dr Meijers and the BAS are examining the impact of icebergs on local ecosystems after they pass through them.

A year ago researchers aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough collected data from the water around A23a.

Laura Taylor, a biogeochemist who was part of the crew, said: “We know that these giant icebergs can provide nutrients to the waters they pass through, creating thriving ecosystems in otherwise less productive areas.

“What we don’t know is what difference particular icebergs, their scale, and their origins can make to that process.”

Prince Andrew has said he “ceased all contact” with a businessman accused of being a Chinese spy after receiving advice from the government.

In a statement, his office said Prince Andrew had met the man “through official channels” and there was “nothing of a sensitive nature ever discussed”.

The alleged spy, known only as H6, was described in court as having formed an “unusual degree of trust” with the duke and has since been banned from the UK following a judgement by the UK’s semi-secret national security court.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the government would “always stand ready to take action” on “any kind of challenge or threat to UK national security”.

In 2023, H6 brought an appeal against his initial ban but the decision has been upheld by the court.

Judges were told the businessman was attempting to leverage Prince Andrew’s influence.

The duke’s office said he was “unable to comment further on matters relating to national security”.

His statement did not specify when he ceased contact with the man, who was described as a “close confidant” of Prince Andrew, nor the duration of their communications.

It has also been reported by the Times that H6 was invited to and attended events at Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace and Windsor Castle at the duke’s request.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment, saying they do not act for Prince Andrew, who is not a working royal.

• ANALYSIS: Questions over Prince Andrew’s judgement and finances raised again

China’s embassy in the UK has denied the espionage claim saying “some individuals in the UK are always eager to fabricate baseless ‘spy’ stories targeting China”.

“Their purpose is to smear China and disrupt normal exchanges between Chinese and British personnel,” a spokesperson for the embassy said.

The former Home Secretary Suella Braverman banned H6 from the UK in March 2023.

He then brought his case to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a court set up to consider appeals against decisions to ban or remove someone from the country on national security or related grounds.

In the published ruling, the judges upheld Braverman’s decision.

Speaking to broadcasters on Saturday, Cooper said: “Our security and intelligence agencies are continually vigilant for any threat to UK national security.

“Whether that be around foreign influence, whether it be around espionage, whether it be around any security threat. We won’t hesitate to take action in individual cases or more widely wherever any challenge arises.”

The court was told that H6 was invited to Prince Andrew’s birthday party in 2020 and was told he could act on his behalf when dealing with potential investors in China.

It is not clear how H6 became close to the prince, but in November 2021 police officers stopped and questioned him at the UK border under powers to investigate suspicions of “hostile activity” by a foreign state.

During that stop H6 surrendered a number of electronic devices including a mobile phone.

What officers found on them so concerned the security service MI5, that Braverman used her exceptional powers to ban H6 from the country.

In a letter found on one of his devices, H6 was told by Dominic Hampshire, an adviser to Prince Andrew: “Outside of [the prince’s] closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.”

Mr Hampshire adds: “Under your guidance, we found a way to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house in Windsor.”

No further details about who the “relevant people” were are given in the excerpt from the letter included in the ruling.

Mr Hampshire also confirmed to H6 that he could act for Prince Andrew in talks “with potential partners and investors in China”.

A document listing “main talking points” for a call with Prince Andrew was also found.

It states: “IMPORTANT: Manage expectations. Really important to not set ‘too high’ expectations – he is in a desperate situation and will grab onto anything.”

The court assessed that this meant H6 was in a position “to generate relationships between senior Chinese officials and prominent UK figures which could be leveraged for political interference purposes by the Chinese State”.

The judges said H6 had won an “unusual degree of trust from a senior member of the Royal Family who was prepared to enter into business activities with him”.

They added that the relationship had developed at a time when the prince was “under considerable pressure” which “could make him vulnerable to the misuse of that sort of influence”.

The prince faced increasing scrutiny from late 2019 over his friendship with the late US financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which included his infamous Newsnight interview in November of that year.

He stepped back from royal duties in November 2019 and the prince has since been dogged by questions about his judgement and his finances.

Questions were raised about the prince’s finances after he reached a settlement – believed to run into the millions – in a civil sexual assault case brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers. The prince has always denied assaulting Ms Giuffre.

Isabel Hilton, editor at China Dialogue, told BBC News that Chinese state agents would typically look to target “members of the House of Lords or prominent business people, or people who have a voice in the community”.

She added that it was “quite ambitious” to target a royal and “quite unwise for a member of the Royal Family to allow himself to be targeted”.

Security chiefs feared Beijing was attempting to run an “elite capture” operation to influence the Duke of York because of the pressure he was under, a tactic which aims to appoint high profile individuals to Chinese businesses, think tanks or universities.

H6 was subsequently informed that he was believed by UK authorities to be associated with the United Front Work Department (UFWD), an arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tasked with conducting influence operations.

The ruling said MI5 director general Ken McCallum had expressed concern about the threat posed to the UK by political interference by China and that bodies such as the UFWD were “mounting patient, well-funded, deceptive campaigns to buy and exert influence”.

The Home Office said they believed H6 had been engaged in covert and deceptive activity on behalf of the CCP and that his relationship with Prince Andrew could be used for political interference.

Suella Braverman has now called for H6 to lose his anonymity and she told The Daily Telegraph that “disclosing the identity of this person will have a deterrent effect”.

However, when asked whether the anonymity should be lifted, the home secretary said: “We always respect the decisions of the courts and also don’t comment on individual cases.”

Life might be unfair but for Malcolm in the Middle fans things are looking up – the TV sitcom is making a comeback.

With familiar shouts of “Malcolm!”, actors Bryan Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek introduced a video posted on social media announcing the show’s return on Friday.

They played the comedically dysfunctional parents of the highly intelligent teenager who first appeared on our screens nearly 25 years ago.

The sitcom ended in 2006 after 151 episodes, during which it won several Emmy awards. A Grammy award was also given to the band behind the show’s opening theme song Boss of Me, which ends on the lyric “life is unfair”.

Frankie Muniz, who reprises his role as the show’s protagonist, said: “I have been waiting for this moment for 18 years. Let’s find out where Malcolm and his family are now.”

Four new episodes have been commissioned by Disney+ with the storyline based on Malcolm and his daughter being drawn back “into the family’s chaos when Hal (Cranston) and Lois (Kaczmarek) demand his presence for their 40th wedding anniversary party”.

Cranston, who received critical acclaim following the show for his performance in crime drama series Breaking Bad, said he was excited to return.

Kaczmarek added: “What a delight I get to yell at that kid again!

“We’re very excited about coming back together and seeing what this family has been up to.”

A date is yet to be set for when the new episodes will air.

Ayo Davis, president of Disney’s branded television unit, said she hoped fans would be glad of the show’s new run given how relatable it was when it first aired.

“Its hilarious and heartfelt portrayal of a lovably chaotic family resonated with audiences of all ages and we’re so excited to welcome the original cast back to bring that magic to life again.”

A Liverpool FC staff Christmas party in the city’s Anglican cathedral was shut down early amid reports that suspected drugs paraphernalia were found.

The football club confirmed an “incident” had taken place on Thursday night, adding: “We do not condone or tolerate the use of illegal substances at any of our sites or events.”

None of the club’s players or first team manager Arne Slot were in attendance at the event, which was held for non-footballing staff.

The party was ended by staff at the cathedral, which said in a statement that an “incident” occurred “that was not in line with our values”.

The details emerged in newspaper reports, which said a search was prompted by one of the attendees suffering a “medical episode”.

Liverpool FC said the staff member was “recovering well” after hospital treatment and the medical incident was “unrelated” to the other concerns.

Photographs shared on X by club staff showed a lavish arrangement with dining tables bathed in red light and the Liverpool club crest projected on to the cathedral’s inner walls.

A Liverpool FC statement said: “We do not condone or tolerate the use of illegal substances at any of our sites or events.

“We thank the events team at the venue for their swift action and professional response to the medical emergency which was unrelated.

“‘The member of staff is recovering well.”

Liverpool Cathedral, the largest in Britain and fifth largest in the world, said it hosts such events to help keep the site open and free to enter for the public.

A representative added: “During an event in the last week, an incident occurred that was not in line with our core values.

“The team on duty followed the correct procedures to bring the event to an early close.

“We want to thank our staff and Liverpool FC for the swift actions taken and partnership working, and will continue to review our procedures and mitigation measures for future events.”

Mystery continues to swirl after nearly a month of drone sightings over New Jersey, sparking fear among residents and furious debate about what the flying objects are – and if they are drones at all.

US authorities have been unable to provide definitive answers, saying only that the objects are not believed to pose a danger to the public or national security.

On Thursday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters that available images suggested that many of the reported drone sightings were actually manned aircraft.

But some lawmakers have criticised the government’s handling of the drones and the lack of information available to the public.

Here’s what we know.

Dozens of drone sightings have been reported over New Jersey since 18 November, according to local authorities.

The drones were initially spotted near the Raritan river, a waterway which feeds into the Round Valley Reservoir – the largest in New Jersey, the Associated Press reported.

The sightings soon spread to other parts of the state, including New Jersey’s coast.

Some of the flights were spotted near Picatinny Arsenal – a sensitive military research facility – as well as near President-elect Donald Trump’s golf course in the town of Bedminster, New Jersey.

In nearby New York City, several drones were reported flying over the Bronx on 12 December, a police official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

Officers who responded to the incident saw the drones flying overhead, but they disappeared soon afterwards.

Drones have also been reported in other parts of the state, according to New York State Police.

Police in Connecticut have also confirmed that “suspicious drone activity” has taken place in various parts of the state. A drone detection system has been deployed around the towns of Groton and New London.

• FBI investigates possible drones seen over Trump golf course

In Maryland, former Republican Governor Larry Hogan claimed he saw what appeared to be “dozens” of drones over his residence in Davidsonville, about 25 miles (40km) from Washington DC.

“Like many who have observed these drones, I do not know if this increasing activity over our skies is a threat to public safety or national security,” he wrote on X. “But the public is growing increasingly concerned and frustrated with the complete lack of transparency and the dismissive attitude of the federal government.”

In late November, the United States Air Force also confirmed that unidentified drones were spotted over three US airbases in the UK: RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk and RAF Feltwell in Norfolk.

UK defence sources told the BBC that suspicion had fallen on a “state actor” being responsible for the incursions.

In October, the Wall Street Journal also reported that mysterious drones were seen for 17 days near US military facilities in Virginia.

Both federal and state authorities have said that they do not believe the drones are dangerous or pose a threat to US national security.

Following a briefing with the Department of Homeland Security on 11 December, New Jersey assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia said the drones appear to avoid detection by traditional methods such as helicopter and radio.

Fantasia said the drones are up to 6ft (1.8m) in diameter, travel with lights turned off and “operate in a co-ordinated manner”.

Her comments stand in stark contrast to the White House, which has suggested that these are “manned aircraft”.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also said that the majority of sightings appear to be lawful, manned flights.

None have been reported in restricted airspace, the statement added.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released a statement on Friday saying more and more people are using drones, meaning more people are noticing them in the sky.

It added that while drones can be flown in most locations below 400ft (121m), drones can’t be flown within controlled airspace around an airport without FAA authorisation; over designated, national security-sensitive facilities; in certain military bases, infrastructure and national landmarks; and in airspace covered by temporary flight restrictions.

If the objects are confirmed to be drones – which at this point is unconfirmed – it is unclear who might be operating them.

Citing anonymous “high sources”, New Jersey Republican representative Jeff Van Drew said that they were coming from an Iranian “mothership” in the Atlantic.

The Pentagon swiftly dismissed the comment, saying “there is no truth to that”.

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” deputy spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters.

Another lawmaker, Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi – who is on a congressional committee that looks at China’s Communist Party – told media outlet NewsNation that there is a “non-trivial” chance that China could be involved.

“It’s definitely a possibility and the likelihood that they can then access data that is collected by these drones is very high,” he said.

The Pentagon and White House have both insisted that there is no foreign origin for the objects.

Van Drew and other lawmakers have pushed back on those denials.

“Here’s the deal: they don’t know what it is. They don’t know what it’s about,” Van Drew told Fox News. “They have no idea where it comes from, but they know what it’s not about? That’s nonsense.”

In a separate incident across the country, a northern California man was charged on 11 December with flying a drone over and taking pictures of Vandenberg Space Force Base, located near Santa Barbara.

The incident is alleged to have taken place on 30 November, according to prosecutors.

The man, 39-year-old Chinese national Yinpiao Zhou was arrested just before he boarded a flight to China. He appeared in court on Tuesday and no plea was was taken.

There has been no suggestion that the incident is related to the spate of reported drone sightings on the east coast.

Several lawmakers have suggested that the drones should be shot down and analysed to determine their origin and intentions.

Among them is President-elect Donald Trump, who took to his Truth Social media platform to suggest that drones couldn’t be flying without the government’s knowledge.

“Let the public know, and now,” he wrote. “Otherwise, shoot them down”.

The US Federal Aviation Administration has also established temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drone flights over Bedminster and Picatinny.

In a statement, the FAA also warned that drone operators who conduct unsafe or dangerous operations could face fines of up to $75,000 (£59,000) and have their drone pilot certificates revoked.

In a letter to US President Joe Biden published on 13 December, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy urged federal agencies to “work together” to solve the mystery, as well as push Congress to extend counter-drone capabilities to local law enforcement.

Some residents have suggested they may take action against the drones themselves – something authorities have strongly warned against doing, as it is illegal.

“A good shotgun will fix that problem,” a man commented on a video of a drone on social media.

A selection of news photographs from around the world.

The end, when it came for the BGP5 barracks, was loud and brutal. First, a crackly speaker calling out for their surrender; then, a thunderous barrage of artillery, rockets and rifle fire that tore chunks out of the buildings in which hundreds of soldiers were hiding.

BGP5 – the letters stand for Border Guard Police – was the Myanmar military junta’s last stand in northern Rakhine State, which lies along the border with Bangladesh.

Video by the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) which was besieging the base shows their rag-tag fighters, many barefoot, firing an assortment of weapons into the base, while air force jets roar over their heads.

It was a ferocious battle – perhaps the bloodiest of the civil war which has consumed Myanmar since the military seized power in a coup in 2021.

“They had dug deep ditches filled with spikes around the base,” an AA source told the BBC.

“There were bunkers and reinforced buildings. They laid more than a thousand mines. Many of our fighters lost limbs, or their lives, trying to get through.”

For the coup leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, this has been yet another humiliating defeat after a year of military setbacks.

For the first time his regime has lost control of an entire border: the 270km (170 miles) dividing Myanmar from Bangladesh now wholly under AA control.

And with only the Rakhine State capital Sittwe still firmly in military hands, though cut off from the rest of the country, the AA is likely to be the first insurgent group to take complete control of a state.

• ‘My 17-year-old was brutally killed, but I’m glad she fought for freedom’
• Young people attempt to flee Myanmar ahead of conscription order

The army has been in headlong retreat from the Arakan Army since the beginning of the year, losing town after town.

The last army units withdrew in September to BGP5, a compound covering around 20 hectares just outside the border town of Maungdaw, where the AA laid siege.

BGP5 was built on the site of a Muslim Rohingya village, Myo Thu Gyi, which was burned down during the violent expulsion of much of the Rohingya population by the armed forces in 2017.

It was the first of many burned villages I saw on a visit to Maungdaw right after the military operation in September of that year, a mass of charred debris in among the lush tropical vegetation, its inhabitants killed or forced to flee to Bangladesh.

When I returned two years later, the new police complex had already been built, with all the trees removed, giving defenders a clear view of any attacking force.

The AA source told us their advance towards it was painfully slow, requiring the insurgents to dig their own ditches for cover.

It does not publish its own casualties. But judging from the intensity of fighting in Maungdaw, which began in June, it is likely to have lost hundreds of its own troops.

Throughout the siege, the Myanmar air force kept up a constant bombardment of Maungdaw, driving the last civilians out of the town.

Its planes dropped supplies to the besieged soldiers at night, but it was never enough. They had plenty of rice stored in the bunkers, a local source told us, but they could not get any treatment for their injuries, and the soldiers became demoralised.

They started to surrender last weekend.

AA video shows them coming out in a pitiful state, waving white cloths. Some are hobbling on makeshift crutches, or hopping, their injured legs wrapped in rags. Few are wearing shoes.

Inside the wrecked buildings the victorious insurgents filmed piles of bodies.

The AA says more than 450 soldiers died in the siege. It has published images of the captured commander, Brigadier-General Thurein Tun, and his officers kneeling beneath the flagpole, now flying the insurgents’ banner.

Pro-military commentators in Myanmar have been venting their frustration on social media.

“Min Aung Hlaing, you have not asked any of your children to serve in the military,” wrote one. “Is this how you use us? Are you happy seeing all those deaths in Rakhine?”

“At this rate, all that will be left of the Tatmadaw [military] will be Min Aung Hlaing and a flagpole,” wrote another.

The capture of BGP5 also shows the Arakan Army to be one of the most effective fighting forces in Myanmar.

Formed only in 2009 – much later than most of Myanmar’s other insurgent groups – by young ethnic Rakhine men who had migrated to the Chinese border on the other side of the country in search of work, the AA is part of the Three Brotherhood Alliance which has inflicted most of the defeats suffered by the junta since last year.

The other two members of the alliance have stayed on the border, in Shan State.

But the AA moved back to Rakhine eight years ago to start its armed campaign for self-government, tapping into historic resentment among the Rakhine population of the poverty, isolation and central government neglect of their state.

The AA leaders have proven to be smart, disciplined and able to motivate their fighters.

They are already administering the large areas of Rakhine State they control as though they were running their own state.

And they also have good weapons, thanks to their links with the older insurgent groups on the Chinese border, and appear to be well-funded.

There is a bigger question, though, over how much the various ethnic insurgent groups are willing to prioritise the goal of overthrowing the military junta.

Publicly they say they do, alongside the shadow government which was deposed by the coup, and the hundreds of volunteer peoples’ defence forces which have sprung up to support it.

In return for the support it is getting from the ethnic insurgents, the shadow government is promising a new federal political system which will give Myanmar’s regions self-rule.

But already the other two members of the Three Brotherhood Alliance have accepted China’s request for a ceasefire.

China is seeking a negotiated end to the civil war which would almost certainly leave the military with much of its power intact.

The opposition insists the military must be reformed and removed from politics. But having already made so many territorial gains at the expense of the junta, the ethnic insurgents may be tempted to strike a deal with China’s blessing rather than keep fighting to oust the generals.

The AA’s victory poses more worrying questions.

The group’s leadership is tight-lipped about its plans. But it takes over a state that was always poor and which has suffered greatly from the intense fighting of the past year.

“Eighty per cent of the housing in Maungdaw and the surrounding villages has been destroyed,” one Rohingya man who left Maungdaw recently for Bangladesh told the BBC.

“The town is deserted. Almost all the shops and houses have been looted.”

Last month the United Nations, whose agencies are being given very little access to Rakhine, warned of looming famine, because of the huge numbers of displaced people and the difficulty of getting any supplies in, past a military blockade.

The AA is trying to set up its own administration, but the BBC has been told by some of those displaced by the fighting that the group cannot feed or shelter them.

It is also unclear how the AA will treat the Rohingya population, still thought to number around 600,000 in Rakhine, even after the expulsion of 700,000 in 2017.

The largest number live in northern Rakhine State and Maungdaw has long been a predominantly Rohingya town. Relations with the ethnic Rakhine majority, the support base for the AA, have long been fraught.

They are now a great deal worse after Rohingya militant groups, which have their power base in the vast refugee camps in Bangladesh, chose to take sides with the military, against the AA, despite the army’s track record of persecuting Rohingyas.

Many Rohingyas do not like these groups, and some say they are happy to live in an AA-run Rakhine State.

But tens of thousands have been expelled by the AA from towns it has conquered, and not been allowed back.

The AA has promised to include all communities in its vision for a future independent of the central government, but it has also denounced the Rohingyas it found itself fighting alongside the army. In August dozens of Rohingyas, many of them women and children trying to cross over to Bangladesh, were killed by bombs, almost certainly dropped from AA drones.

“We cannot deny the fact that Rohingyas have been persecuted by Myanmar governments for many years, and the Rakhine people supported that,” said the Rohingya man we spoke to in Bangladesh.

“The government wants to keep Rohingyas from becoming citizens, but the Rakhine people believe there should be no Rohingyas at all in Rakhine State. Our situation today is even more difficult than it was under the rule of the military junta.”

Dola Posh has multiple identities: Photographer; woman; Nigerian; mother; Briton.

Yet after giving birth, she no longer felt sure who she was.

Six days after her daughter was born, she was lying in a bed in an English hospital, in the midst of a covid lockdown.

She worried about how her life had changed and if she would ever again do what she loved – taking pictures.

Unable to visit, relatives kept on calling to check up on her and the baby. After a difficult pregnancy, Dola felt under pressure.

Her mother was thousands of miles away in the place she had left two years earlier – Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city.

All this put her “brain in a very dark place… I thought: ‘I’m me; the baby’s out, I’m still me.’ But no, I wasn’t me any more.”

The loss of identity can be one of the causes of postnatal depression, which disproportionately affects black women. Though she did not recognise it at the time, this was what Dola was suffering from.

Once out of hospital, she was almost immediately being bombarded with unsolicited advice.

There was “too much talk, too much control around how I should raise the child. In a way that also affected my mind. It made me feel like I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t given the chance to be a mother.”

There is a matter-of-factness to the way the 33-year-old speaks about the events of 2020. She resists the tears this time, but she has cried – a lot.

One night, worn down from feeling like a zombie, because of a lack of sleep, and the isolation and mundanity of her new existence, a voice in her head told her to take her own life.

Emotionally unmoored, she clung on to her blanket as if it was a life jacket. Her baby girl – Monioluwa, meaning “I have God” in Yoruba – was by her side. She sang songs from home.

She then made a middle-of-the-night call to her health visitor who, fortunately, picked up and agreed to come round.

“I buried my head in shame, I just felt so much shame because it’s like I’m not even a good mother. I don’t have the strength to be a mother.”

Dola was persuaded to see a therapist, who encouraged her to use her camera as a way of dealing with her feelings.

Learning the craft in Nigeria, while studying for a marine biology degree, she stood out from the crowd with her dyed-gold hair and pink boots.

Dola began to build a reputation in Lagos’s male-dominated worlds of fashion and celebrity photography. But she gravitated towards portraiture as it allowed her to document people’s lives and encouraged subjects to share something more profound.

For the therapy she turned the lens on herself – and, using an app on her phone to remotely control the camera, began to produce a portfolio of shots of her with Monioluwa.

The mother-and-baby portrait, drawing on representations of the Madonna and child, is one of the fundamental motifs of the Western art tradition.

Dola’s photographs fit into this mode but the connection was unconscious at first and it took a mentor to point it out.

She was raised in a religious household – her father was a bishop in a Nigerian church. Paintings of Mary and Jesus were on the walls of her home, and the image of the mother and child was in the Bibles and hymn books.

“The colours: the green, red and gold; the gold frames and the light glow – growing up in that environment, it was all there in my subconscious.”

This all then came out in the way that she composed and lit her portraits.

“Sometimes you do things, you don’t even know why you do them and then when you sit down and reflect it’s like: ‘Oh!’”

The veil, or head covering, that had been part of her church-going uniform, also became an essential element of her work.

“When I put on the veil, it didn’t feel like that empty person any more. It felt more me… I was reconnecting with my family, it felt like I had their essence with me.”

The project was beginning to help Dola better understand her emotions.

She says that when she started sharing her story “that motherhood was not all joys and I suffered from postnatal depression, that opened a door for me not to have shame any more.

“Now I am starting to work on the stories of what actually happened and the darkness, how I crawled out of it, and try to depict that through images.”

Earlier this year, Dola won an award from camera manufacturer Leica to allow her to continue her series and encourage more women – particularly black women – to break the stigma around postnatal depression.

“I want a world where black mothers don’t have to carry so much burden and feel like they have to go through that journey alone and I want them to look in the media and see a reflection of themselves trying to make things work.”

In the UK, black women are more likely to experience postnatal depression than others, the Mental Health Foundation charity says. The reasons are complex, but Dola believes that being more open is vital in addressing the issue.

“It’s new for a woman to stand there and say: ‘I almost ended my life, I’m not ashamed of it – I am still an artist, I am still a woman and I have something to say.’”

• The NHS has lots of useful information about the signs of postnatal depression
• BBC Action Line: Information and support for your mental health

• How old Ugandan negatives are bringing families back to life
• Kenya’s Thandiwe Muriu: Standing out in camouflage
• ‘I want it to be normal for women to take photos’
• The continent through its own lens

As Argentina’s maverick libertarian President Javier Milei marks one year in office, his efforts to revive the economy are still a work in progress – but his policies are proving influential in the US.

Milei came to power with a mission to cut state spending in a country that had been living beyond its means for years.

Despite his tough austerity measures and a continued rise in poverty rates, he is still supported by just over half the population, according to a survey carried out earlier this month by the CB Consultora organisation.

That level of popularity is similar to that of Donald Trump right now. Roughly half of US voters backed the president-elect in last month’s presidential contest – and Trump has hailed Milei as a man who can “make Argentina great again”.

Meanwhile, tech billionaire Elon Musk, who looks set to play a key role in the incoming US administration, has also praised Milei, saying Argentina is “experiencing a giant improvement” under his leadership.

But what is it that Trump and Musk see in Milei? And are they as close ideologically as is often assumed?

Milei’s biggest achievement so far, the one which is most prized by Argentines, is his success in cutting inflation. But he has caused a stir in the US because of his deregulation drive, which has been seized on by small-government activists keen to shrink the size of the state in Washington along the lines of what is happening in Buenos Aires.

In Milei’s initial package of measures, he slashed state subsidies for fuel and cut the number of government ministries by half.

Now he is trying to force through plans for a mass sell-off of state-run companies, including the country’s flagship airline Aerolineas Argentinas, which has already been privatised once before being renationalised in 2008.

All this is music to the ears of Elon Musk, who is being tasked with similar cost-cutting initiatives under the banner of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency – a misleading name, since it is an advisory body, not an official government department.

Musk and his co-leader in the department, fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, have said they want to slash federal regulations, oversee mass layoffs and shut down some agencies entirely.

Musk has spoken of cutting federal government spending by $2tn (£1.6tn) – about one-third of annual expenditure. According to him, Milei is doing “a fantastic job” in Argentina by “deleting entire departments” – and he would like to follow suit in the US, with Trump’s blessing.

But long-time Latin America observers are sceptical.

Monica de Bolle, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, says that “taking inspiration from Milei to reduce the size of government doesn’t make any sense”.

“The situation in Argentina is very particular to Argentina, because it was about the removal of decades of mismanagement of public resources. That has nothing to do with the US.”

Ms de Bolle says Argentina had no choice but to take action, because government overspending was so excessive that the country was “bursting into crisis every few years”.

“That is appropriate for Argentina, but for nobody else.”

Marcelo J García, Buenos Aires-based director for the Americas at global consulting firm Horizon Engage, says Milei’s decision to wield a chainsaw on the campaign trail as a sign of his approach to government was a “masterpiece” of political marketing that has “captured the imagination of small-state activists across the globe”.

But he argues that while Musk’s own business interests would benefit from less government regulation, that’s not necessarily what Trump wants.

“I’m not sure that the Trump platform is compatible with a Milei-type chainsaw small government,” he told the BBC.

He points out that Trump’s policies “require big government in some areas”, such as the building of border walls and mass deportations of illegal immigrants. “You can’t do those kinds of massive programmes with small government.”

In Milei’s view, infrastructure projects are best left to the private sector and have nothing to do with government.

Milei and Trump are on the same side in the global culture wars, denouncing what they see as the “woke agenda”. But in economic terms, their ideas are very different.

Milei is a passionate free-trader, and Argentina is a member of the South American trading bloc Mercosur, which also includes Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

While he is in favour of Mercosur’s recent free-trade deal with the European Union, he doesn’t like the way that the organisation refuses to let its individual member countries strike their own deals. As a result, he says Mercosur “has ended up becoming a prison”.

“If the bloc is not a dynamic engine that facilitates trade, boosts investment and improves the quality of life of all the citizens of our region, what is the point of it?” he said at the Mercosur summit in Uruguay earlier this month where the deal with the EU was signed.

Trump also has beef with his own regional trade alliance, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), but for reasons that are the opposite of Milei’s.

Trump wants to renegotiate the USMCA, a deal that he himself put together during his first term in office, as a way of protecting US manufacturing and safeguarding US jobs.

He has even found a way of weaponising the alliance by threatening to impose a blanket 25% tariff on goods from both Canada and Mexico unless they secure their shared borders with the US.

Monica de Bolle doubts that Trump shares Musk’s enthusiasm for a smaller state: “You can’t be a populist nationalist and care about the size of government. So Trump doesn’t care. He put Elon there because it’s kind of fun to have someone there making noise.”

The economic debate is set to run and run, in both the US and Argentina. But ultimately, if one half of your population supports you, it means the other half doesn’t. Trump will have to deal with that after his inauguration on 20 January, but Milei is already having to cope with his own polarised population.

As Marcelo J García sees it, Milei is a “divisive leader” who has made no attempt to win over his opponents.

“The other half of the country that did not support him will arguably never support him, no matter how well the economy does, because he doesn’t want them to support him,” he says.

“Leaders tend to want to be liked by everyone. That’s not the case with Milei,” he adds.

In his view, this is a real weakness: “You don’t build a long-term sustainable political project if you don’t move towards the people who didn’t vote for you.”

Milei’s next big test of public opinion will come in October 2025, when Argentina holds midterm elections. That could prove crucial in deciding whether his small-government revolution determines the country’s future – or whether, like previous attempts at reform, it runs out of steam.

“There isn’t an easy or nice way of doing it.”

It’s a blunt reality check from a former Home Office minister describing one of the government’s most pressing dilemmas – how to crack down on the illegal trade of smuggling people into Britain.

The prime minister, his cabinet colleagues and nearly all their political rivals agree that this trade must end. People from all over the world risk their lives to try and get here – and hundreds of communities are affected when those who make it are sent to live in hotels or other accommodation while their cases are dealt with.

But there’s huge disagreement over what should be done.

Labour replaced Rishi Sunak’s “stop the boats” slogan with its own three word mantra: “smash the gangs”. One of Sir Keir Starmer’s first acts was to ditch the Conservatives’ plan to send people who arrived in the UK without permission straight to Rwanda.

Conservatives fume that Labour got rid of what might, theoretically, have stopped smugglers and migrants in their tracks. Frankly, we don’t even know if the first plane would have left the tarmac, and Conservatives can’t be sure that it would have worked as a deterrent – but the government can’t be sure that it wouldn’t have.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who will join me in the studio on Sunday morning, has instead concentrated on trying to do deals with other countries to stop the criminals who exploit the distress and ambition of those desperate to come to the UK. This weekend we’re with her in Italy as she brokers more cooperation with other governments.

The jargon is to “disrupt at source”, to hamper the gangs, and cut the number of people who get into flimsy rubber boats in the cold seas in the hope of making it to the UK.

There’s been no shortage of activity. The measures agreed so far range from the UK paying to help train border security forces in Iraq to a new criminal offence being created to prosecute people smugglers in Germany. There have also been deals with Slovakia, Slovenia, and Kurdistan, as well as cash for Sudan, Chad, Vietnam, and Egypt.

She’s also focused on speeding up the system that decides what happens to those who make it here and are living in a horrible limbo, and on returning more people back home. For years the backlog of cases has run to the tens of thousands – an unhappy status quo.

• Starmer confirms Rwanda deportation plan ‘dead’
• ‘Stop the boats’ slogan was error, says Cleverly

So the overall approach is pretty clear: make it harder for people to get here without permission, and sort out what happens to those who do much faster.

But clear is not the same as effective.

Since Labour’s been in power the number of people making the crossing in small boats has gone up. More than 20,000 have arrived since July, up from 17,000 in the same period last year. And the government has admitted that the number of hotels being used to house asylum seekers has also risen since the election, to more than 35,000 people as of September.

The government is well aware of the unhappiness this causes to some of the public, seeing migrants “walk on to the coast like they’re getting ferries”, one insider says. And there is acknowledgement that this hotel housing causes a “major problem with social cohesion”, says the same source.

It’s not unheard of for Labour MPs and even some now ministers to object publicly to groups of new arrivals, who aren’t allowed to work, being put up at the taxpayers’ expense in communities without the right support or infrastructure, and without full explanation or support for local people either.

But ending the use of these hotels has become one of the promises Labour made during the election that is proving harder than they suggested to keep.

Cooper’s team, though, point to increasing number of failed asylum seekers being returned to their countries, and progress they have made in cutting the backlog of cases stuck in the system.

Neither stopping using hotels nor specifically cutting migration numbers or stopping the boats have made it on to Sir Keir’s very public list of “milestones”. Never fear, say sources in his operation – it’s not a milestone but a “foundation”. What on earth does that mean? In short, the government is well aware of how important it is that it gets a grip on illegal immigration and sources suggest the PM himself is spending a lot of time concentrating on it, and that it’s on the agenda with every world leader he sees.

But No 10 won’t repeat the practice of previous administrations, creating specific targets or setting lofty goals on immigration. Maybe it’s trap they won’t set for themselves.

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That lack of a visible measure of success, however, leaves the government open to accusations that they are not taking the public’s concern seriously enough. If there are targets for health, why not immigration? If there are numbers for kids’ education, why not boats?

With Nigel Farage’s Reform Party on the march in some polls, Labour’s opponents are on the hunt for any sniff of a lack of commitment to making immigration a top concern. The Conservatives fume that Labour gave up the chance of a deterrent that may or may not have prevented cross channel journeys taking place. They cite Australia, where boats were turned around and Belgium, where police have intercepted boats in the water.

One Tory strategist said there has been a “lack of political will” to solve the problem. The economy relies on migration, so gearing up the government machine to confront legal and illegal immigration requires a more fundamental level of honesty about the trade-offs that are needed, they say.

The criticism comes from inside Labour itself, too.

“There’s a fear, a lack of courage,” one source in the party tells me – with others describing Cooper as cautious. The only way to solve the hideous problem of vulnerable people arriving into the UK in a chaotic manner would be to do something entirely different, some argue, such as opening up more safe routes for people to come to the UK or developing so-called humanitarian visas to help those in danger flee their countries (although that wouldn’t necessarily stop others making the dangerous small boats journey).

Sir Keir’s leadership does not want to argue that it should be easier for people in desperately poor countries to move to the UK. Yet there are Labour voices who say a more grown up and honest conversation is required. Last year, I spoke to five former home secretaries about how hard it was to manage immigration, and they all felt they’d been hampered by the politics of the issue.

Labour, right now, does not want to pick a bolder deterrent, like the Conservatives’ Rwanda plan, or a more radical humanitarian approach. As so often, Sir Keir is picking what seems a pragmatic tack – do reasonable things better, and hope (like hell) that with enough effort, it works.

It is, critics on the right and left say, a muddle in the middle.

As 2025 approaches there is little doubt about the importance or the political emotion that surrounds the issue of illegal immigration. But nothing’s obvious about the viability of the government’s solutions – or the success or failure of what they are trying to do.

Swedish clothing brand Djerf Avenue is facing a backlash from fans following claims of bullying and body-shaming against its founder Matilda Djerf.

An investigation by Swedish news outlet Aftonbladet reported that 11 current and former employees described being belittled, called names and yelled at in the workplace.

Ms Djerf, 27, told the BBC she was “deeply sorry” to anyone who has felt mistreated under her leadership.

But customers like 22-year-old Sumi Mrkulic have vowed to “never purchase anything or voice support again”.

Sumi, from London, said she was particularly concerned after Aftonbladet reported that some models were told they didn’t fill out a pair of jeans, while others were called fat.

Djerf Avenue’s website promotes a world “filled with kindness, inspiration, and respect,” and the brand is known for its size inclusivity and diverse model representation.

Sumi told the BBC: “It renders all of their efforts to be inclusive completely performative. I actually find it really spineless.”

Influencer Matilda Djerf launched the brand in 2019 and it quickly became popular with young women. It says it made around $35m (£27.5m) in revenue last year.

It recently held its first 10-day pop-up shop in London, which saw queues forming up to three hours before the store opened.

Giulia Carrozzo, 20, from Germany, received an order from Djerf Avenue the day before the allegations emerged. She said she would be sending it back in light of the report.

“Djerf Avenue has always marketed itself as a body-positive, inclusive and empowering brand, so hearing allegations of body-shaming and a toxic work environment felt like a complete betrayal of the values they claim to uphold,” she said.

“I knew immediately that this wasn’t something I could support.”

Matilda Djerf, who started her online career in 2016, was recognised for her work within retail and e-commerce on the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2023.

Giulia said: “To me, supporting a brand led by a woman felt like celebrating progress and uplifting women in business. However, these allegations… directly contradict those values.

“I can’t justify supporting a brand that doesn’t practise the values it promotes. Until there’s real accountability and change, I won’t be purchasing from them.”

Matilda Djerf said in a statement: “If any team member has felt mistreated in their role because of my actions, I am deeply sorry, and I want to sincerely apologize.

“I don’t recognize myself in all the claims that have been made, and I’ve chosen not to comment on individual cases. However, I do believe it’s valuable that these concerns are being raised, as it gives both me and Djerf Avenue the opportunity to grow and improve.

“I want to emphasize that I take full responsibility and see this as a chance to reflect, grow, and contribute to a better culture for everyone at Djerf Avenue.”

Djerf Avenue’s chief operating officer, Pernilla Bonny, said the company acknowledged the challenges in its workplace environment and had taken steps to address them.

These actions include conducting monthly anonymous employee surveys, implementing an independent whistleblower function, strengthening the management team and carrying out an independent workplace assessment with an external psychologist.

Prince Andrew has said he “ceased all contact” with a businessman accused of being a Chinese spy after receiving advice from the government.

In a statement, his office said Prince Andrew had met the man “through official channels” and there was “nothing of a sensitive nature ever discussed”.

The alleged spy, known only as H6, was described in court as having formed an “unusual degree of trust” with the duke and has since been banned from the UK following a judgement by the UK’s semi-secret national security court.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the government would “always stand ready to take action” on “any kind of challenge or threat to UK national security”.

In 2023, H6 brought an appeal against his initial ban but the decision has been upheld by the court.

Judges were told the businessman was attempting to leverage Prince Andrew’s influence.

The duke’s office said he was “unable to comment further on matters relating to national security”.

His statement did not specify when he ceased contact with the man, who was described as a “close confidant” of Prince Andrew, nor the duration of their communications.

It has also been reported by the Times that H6 was invited to and attended events at Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace and Windsor Castle at the duke’s request.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment, saying they do not act for Prince Andrew, who is not a working royal.

• ANALYSIS: Questions over Prince Andrew’s judgement and finances raised again

China’s embassy in the UK has denied the espionage claim saying “some individuals in the UK are always eager to fabricate baseless ‘spy’ stories targeting China”.

“Their purpose is to smear China and disrupt normal exchanges between Chinese and British personnel,” a spokesperson for the embassy said.

The former Home Secretary Suella Braverman banned H6 from the UK in March 2023.

He then brought his case to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, a court set up to consider appeals against decisions to ban or remove someone from the country on national security or related grounds.

In the published ruling, the judges upheld Braverman’s decision.

Speaking to broadcasters on Saturday, Cooper said: “Our security and intelligence agencies are continually vigilant for any threat to UK national security.

“Whether that be around foreign influence, whether it be around espionage, whether it be around any security threat. We won’t hesitate to take action in individual cases or more widely wherever any challenge arises.”

The court was told that H6 was invited to Prince Andrew’s birthday party in 2020 and was told he could act on his behalf when dealing with potential investors in China.

It is not clear how H6 became close to the prince, but in November 2021 police officers stopped and questioned him at the UK border under powers to investigate suspicions of “hostile activity” by a foreign state.

During that stop H6 surrendered a number of electronic devices including a mobile phone.

What officers found on them so concerned the security service MI5, that Braverman used her exceptional powers to ban H6 from the country.

In a letter found on one of his devices, H6 was told by Dominic Hampshire, an adviser to Prince Andrew: “Outside of [the prince’s] closest internal confidants, you sit at the very top of a tree that many, many people would like to be on.”

Mr Hampshire adds: “Under your guidance, we found a way to get the relevant people unnoticed in and out of the house in Windsor.”

No further details about who the “relevant people” were are given in the excerpt from the letter included in the ruling.

Mr Hampshire also confirmed to H6 that he could act for Prince Andrew in talks “with potential partners and investors in China”.

A document listing “main talking points” for a call with Prince Andrew was also found.

It states: “IMPORTANT: Manage expectations. Really important to not set ‘too high’ expectations – he is in a desperate situation and will grab onto anything.”

The court assessed that this meant H6 was in a position “to generate relationships between senior Chinese officials and prominent UK figures which could be leveraged for political interference purposes by the Chinese State”.

The judges said H6 had won an “unusual degree of trust from a senior member of the Royal Family who was prepared to enter into business activities with him”.

They added that the relationship had developed at a time when the prince was “under considerable pressure” which “could make him vulnerable to the misuse of that sort of influence”.

The prince faced increasing scrutiny from late 2019 over his friendship with the late US financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which included his infamous Newsnight interview in November of that year.

He stepped back from royal duties in November 2019 and the prince has since been dogged by questions about his judgement and his finances.

Questions were raised about the prince’s finances after he reached a settlement – believed to run into the millions – in a civil sexual assault case brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers. The prince has always denied assaulting Ms Giuffre.

Isabel Hilton, editor at China Dialogue, told BBC News that Chinese state agents would typically look to target “members of the House of Lords or prominent business people, or people who have a voice in the community”.

She added that it was “quite ambitious” to target a royal and “quite unwise for a member of the Royal Family to allow himself to be targeted”.

Security chiefs feared Beijing was attempting to run an “elite capture” operation to influence the Duke of York because of the pressure he was under, a tactic which aims to appoint high profile individuals to Chinese businesses, think tanks or universities.

H6 was subsequently informed that he was believed by UK authorities to be associated with the United Front Work Department (UFWD), an arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tasked with conducting influence operations.

The ruling said MI5 director general Ken McCallum had expressed concern about the threat posed to the UK by political interference by China and that bodies such as the UFWD were “mounting patient, well-funded, deceptive campaigns to buy and exert influence”.

The Home Office said they believed H6 had been engaged in covert and deceptive activity on behalf of the CCP and that his relationship with Prince Andrew could be used for political interference.

Suella Braverman has now called for H6 to lose his anonymity and she told The Daily Telegraph that “disclosing the identity of this person will have a deterrent effect”.

However, when asked whether the anonymity should be lifted, the home secretary said: “We always respect the decisions of the courts and also don’t comment on individual cases.”

A doctor believed to be the last remaining orthopaedic surgeon in northern Gaza has been killed by Israeli tankfire, according to Palestinian officials.

Dr Sayeed Joudeh died on Thursday while he was on his way to work.

He was a surgeon at Kamal Adwan and al-Awda hospitals in northern Gaza.

The Israeli military said it was unaware of the incident, but it was investigating.

The grandfather had come out of retirement to help during the war.

Last month speaking at a press conference at the Kamal Adwan Hospital, he held up a placard that read “Save US”.

It didn’t work.

“On his way to al-Awda Hospital to evaluate a patient, one of the tanks fired on him directly,” according to Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital.

“Unfortunately, he was killed instantly.”

But some eyewitnesses say Dr Joudeh was shot by a drone.

Israel does not allow foreign journalists unrestricted access to Gaza.

But from Jerusalem, I spoke to Louise Wateridge from the main United Nations aid agency in Gaza.

“It’s devastating for his family. It’s devastating for people in the north who are relying on so few doctors,” said Ms Wateridge.

“Hospitals in the Gaza Strip are not hospitals anymore,” she said.

“There’s no sanitation. There are hardly any doctors. There’s no medical equipment. Patients are dying needlessly.”

Ms Wateridge described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as apocalyptic.

For more than two months much of Northern Gaza has been under Israeli siege and bombardment.

Israel says it is targeting Hamas operatives who have been regrouping there.

On 7 October last year, Hamas launched an attack in southern Israel killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.

In retaliation, Israel launched a massive operation inside the Gaza Strip with the stated aim of eliminating Hamas.

So far, at least 44,875 people have been killed and more than 100,000 injured – mostly civilians, the Hamas-run health ministry says. The UN regards these figures as reliable.

At least 30 of them were killed – and another 50 wounded – in an Israeli strike on a post office turned shelter for displaced people in central Gaza on Thursday night, according to local medics.

Locals say Gazans displaced by the 14-month conflict were sheltering there and that many members of one extended family had been killed.

The Israeli military said it was targeting a senior Islamic Jihad member behind attacks on Israeli civilians and troops.

It accused the armed group of exploiting Gaza’s civilians as human shields for its activities.

The US military has flown an American citizen out of Syria, just days after he was released from months of captivity during the chaotic last days of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Travis Timmerman, 29, was handed over to a US garrison in Syria, close to the borders with Iraq and Jordan. He is now reportedly in Jordan, where he met US state department officials.

He was found by local residents near Damascus this week after he was freed by hammer-wielding armed men.

Mystery has swirled over how exactly Mr Timmerman came to be in Syria. The White House says it had no prior indication that he was even in Syria or being held in captivity.

Two US government sources have told CBS, the BBC’s US partner, that an American military helicopter flew Mr Timmerman out of the country after Syrian rebels from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group brought him to US forces in the town of Tanf.

According to AP news agency, he has told American officials he hopes to remain in the Middle East rather than return to the US.

It is unclear what Mr Timmerman was doing in Syria.

Police in his native US state of Missouri, as well as in Hungary, have said that Mr Timmerman was reported missing in May, having last been seen in Budapest.

His parents have said he went missing in June.

Mr Timmerman has told US news outlets he was on a religious “pilgrimage” when he crossed into Syria from Lebanon.

• Jubilant Syrians crowd squares for victory rallies
• Trump says Syria ‘not our fight’. Staying out may not be so easy

He told CBS he was well-treated during his time in Syrian captivity. Speaking to NBC News, he said his imprisonment was “a time of solace, of meditation, and I’m stronger for it”.

Mr Timmerman’s family has expressed surprise that he was in Syria and said they were elated that he is safe.

His cousin, Mandy Pendridge, told CBS. “It’s hard not to think of negative thoughts at that time.

“We were kind of thinking it was going to be the worst outcome for us.”

Speaking to CNN on Friday, his parents said they had no idea how Mr Timmerman ended up in Syria, although his stepfather suggested he wanted to write a book about “old churches”.

His mother, Stacey Gardiner, said she believed her son “looked different” and had “gone through a lot”.

Another cousin, Miranda Collins, said finding him was the “best Christmas gift”.

“For seven months all we knew was that he disappeared,” she said. “We didn’t know if he was dead or alive.”

Mr Timmerman’s flight from Jordan comes as US officials and Syrian groups continue the search for Austin Tice, a freelance American journalist who was taken captive close to Damascus in 2012 while covering the country’s civil war.

He was last seen in a video, blindfolded and in apparent distress – posted online weeks after his capture. The US believes he was being held by the Assad regime.

President Joe Biden has said the US believes Mr Tice is alive, but that his location remains unknown.

A woman who found a giant 5kg (11lb) mushroom on a country walk said the vegetable fed her family for a whole week.

Alissimon Minnitt, 27, was walking with her father in a field in North Marston, near Winslow in Buckinghamshire, when they spotted the enormous fungus in the grass.

“It fed my family for a week… I’ve been eating it ever since. I still have three slices left in my freezer. I’ll be honest – I’m a little bit sick of it,” she said.

The musician is a keen forager with “an interest in mushrooms”, and said she knew how to identify it and not mistake it for something poisonous.

Ms Minnitt, from Chesham, found the fungi close to where she previously found another giant, but slightly smaller, mushroom in 2017.

“A giant puffball is the most easily recognisable ‘forageable’ mushroom,” she said. “It looks like something from another planet, they are so weird.”

The amateur mycologist explained she knew what shapes and colours to avoid. Experts say people without such knowledge should not take any risks.

The fungi was used to cook a meatloaf and mushroom steaks – and a mushroom-based pizza.

“My mum found a recipe on TikTok,” Ms Minnitt added. “We used the actual mushroom as the base for the pizza. That was nice.”

The rest was sliced, put into boxes and frozen, to be used at a later date.

In September, three people in Jersey were poisoned after mistaking a death cap mushroom for an edible one.

Mycologist Charlotte Shenkin warned people not to eat wild mushrooms they could not confidently identify themselves.

She said: “It’s essential to be aware of the real and potentially deadly risks of eating wild fungi without knowledge and caution.”

Ms Shenkin also advised foragers to seek a second opinion and keep an uncooked sample in case they did fall ill.

US President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to end daylight saving time (DST), arguing it is “inconvenient” and “very costly” to Americans.

In a post on his platform Truth Social, Trump said DST had “a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t” and that his Republican party would work to end it.

DST is the practice of moving the clock ahead by one hour in the spring and back an hour in the autumn to make better use of natural daylight.

It is observed in a third of the world’s countries, according to Pew Research Center, including most of Europe. Some in the US, however, have long advocated to end the timeworn tradition.

Those who want to stick with standard time say it benefits our health, as it is better to have more light in the morning, paving the way for improved sleep cycles on darker evenings. They say DST can be disorienting to sleep schedules.

But others want to make DST permanent instead, arguing that brighter evenings, especially for those commuting from work or school, would reduce crime, conserve energy and even save lives in terms of reduced road accidents.

Both sides say their preferred option would be better for the economy.

Trump’s plan is not the first attempt to alter the biannual practice of changing clocks seasonally in the US.

• Places around the world that opt out of daylight savings – and why

Making daylight saving time permanent was the aim of a 2022 bill that passed the Democratic-controlled Senate.

But the Sunshine Protection Act, which was introduced by Republican Senator Marco Rubio, never made it to President Joe Biden’s desk.

Rubio has since been picked by Trump for the role of secretary of state under his incoming administration.

The US first began changing its clocks seasonally in 1918 during World War One in an effort to conserve fuel. It was unpopular with farmers, and was repealed after the war.

But DST returned again during World War Two, and was made permanent in 1966, though states could opt out.

Hawaii and most of Arizona currently do not follow time changes under DST.

Research by Joan Costa-i-Font, a professor at the London School of Economics, found that DST has had “detrimental effects on sleep and physical health, and on feelings of fatigue, stress, time stress and mental health”.

Prof Costa-i-Font’s study found that, in monetary terms, an end to DST would lead to an increase in economic output of €754 ($792; £627) per person per year.

Countries that have ended the practice include Mexico in 2022, though DST is still maintained in regions near the US border for economic and logistical reasons. Jordan also ended the practice that year.

Others, like Turkey and Russia, have implemented a permanent DST instead in the past decade.

In a Monmouth University Poll, researchers found that about two-thirds of people in the US want make DST permanent.

Former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been admitted to hospital after sustaining an injury during an official trip to Luxembourg, her office said on Friday.

US media reported that Pelosi fractured her hip after she tripped and fell on a staircase while at an event, citing sources that were unauthorised to speak publicly on the matter.

Pelosi, 84, is “currently receiving excellent treatment from doctors and medical professionals”, spokesperson Ian Krager said in a statement.

The Democrat, who represents California in the US House, was travelling with a bipartisan Congressional delegation to Luxembourg to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.

Krager said Pelosi “looks forward to returning home to the US soon” and continues to work from the hospital.

The San Francisco congresswoman has been a prominent figure in US politics over a career stretching seven presidential administrations.

She first served as House speaker from 2007 to 2011, an influential post second in line to the presidency after the vice-president, then regained the job in 2019 after her party took back control of the chamber.

She resigned from the position in 2023 after two separate four-year terms in the role. But she has continued to serve in the House. Last month, she was elected to another two-year term.

• Nancy Pelosi: How she rose to the top – and stayed there

Pelosi joined 17 other House members in the bipartisan trip to Luxembourg, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office. The delegation is scheduled to take part in anniversary events along with veterans, their families, as well as military officials.

Pelosi will not be able to participate further in the events, her spokesperson said.

Her injury comes just days after outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, suffered a sprained wrist and cuts to his face after falling at the US Capitol.

When Bashar al-Assad was toppled on Sunday, it turned the page on not only his 24-year presidency but on more than 50 years of his family ruling Syria.

Before Assad took office in 2000, his late father Hafez was president for three decades.

Now, with rebels led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir-al Sham (HTS) forming a transitional government, the future of the deposed president, his wife and their three children is uncertain.

They are now in Russia, where they have been offered asylum, but what lies ahead for them?

Russia was a staunch ally of Assad during Syria’s civil war and has two key military bases in the Middle Eastern country.

In 2015, Russia launched an air campaign in support of Assad that turned the tide of the war in the government’s favour.

A UK-based monitoring group reported that more than more than 21,000 people, including 8,700 civilians, were killed in Russian military operations over the following nine years.

However, distracted by its war in Ukraine, Russia was either unwilling or unable to help Assad’s government stop the rebel’s lightning offensive after it began in late November.

Hours after rebel forces seized control of Damascus, it was reported by Russian state media that Assad and his family had arrived in Moscow and that they would be granted asylum on “humanitarian grounds”.

But when Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about Assad’s whereabouts and asylum claim by reporters on Monday, he said: “I have nothing to tell you… right now. Of course, such a decision [on granting asylum] cannot be made without the head of state. It is his decision.”

The Assads’ ties to Russia, specifically Moscow, are well-documented.

A 2019 investigation by the Financial Times found that Assad’s extended family had purchased at least 18 luxury apartments in the Russian capital, in a bid to keep tens of millions of dollars out of Syria during the civil war.

Meanwhile, Assad’s eldest son, Hafez, is a PhD student in the city – with a local newspaper reporting just last week about the 22-year-old’s doctoral dissertation.

Amid the chaos at the weekend, Russian state TV reported that officials in Moscow were in talks with “the Syrian armed opposition” to secure Russia’s bases and diplomatic missions.

Assad is married to a dual British-Syrian national, Asma, who was born and raised in west London to Syrian parents.

She attended school and university in London before becoming an investment banker.

Asma moved to Syria full-time in 2000 and married Assad around the time he succeeded his father as president.

Dr Nesrin Alrefaai, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), told BBC News that Asma “holds a British passport, so could return to the UK” instead of remaining in Russia.

“However, the USA [has] imposed sanctions on her father, Dr Fawaz al-Akhras, who is also reported to be in Russia,” she said – suggesting Asma may want to stay put in Moscow for now.

In a report by the Mail Online, neighbours were quoted as saying Asma’s father, a cardiologist, and mother Sahar, a retired diplomat, wanted to be in Moscow to “console” their daughter and son-in-law.

Assad and his wife have three children: Hafez, the PhD student, Zein and Karim.

A 2022 US State Department report to Congress said the extended Assad family’s net worth was between $1bn (£790m) and $2bn (£1.6bn) – though it noted that it was difficult to estimate because their assets are “believed to be spread out and concealed in numerous accounts, real estate portfolios, corporations, and offshore tax havens”.

According to the report, Bashar and Asma maintained “close patronage relationships with Syria’s largest economic players, using their companies to launder money from illicit activities and funnel funds to the regime”.

It also said that Asma had “influence over the economic committee that manages Syria’s ongoing economic crisis” – and had made key decisions on Syria’s “food and fuel subsidies, trade and currency issues”.

She also exerted influence over the Syria Trust for Development, through which most foreign aid for reconstruction in regime-held areas was channelled.

In 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged that Asma had “become one of Syria’s most notorious war profiteers” with the help of her husband and her family.

Another senior Trump administration official described her as the “business head of the family” and an “oligarch” who had been competing with Bashar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf.

He is one of Syria’s richest men and the family rift became public knowledge after he posted videos on social media complaining about his treatment.

Following the fall of the Assad dynasty, Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard said Syrians had been subjected to what she called “a horrifying catalogue of human rights violations that caused untold human suffering on a vast scale”.

This includes “attacks with chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and other war crimes, as well as murder, torture, enforced disappearance and extermination that amount to crimes against humanity”.

She called on the international community to ensure that people suspected of breaking international law and other serious human rights violations must be investigated and prosecuted for their crimes.

On Tuesday, the Islamist rebel leader in Syria said any of the ousted regime’s senior officials found to have been involved in torturing political prisoners would be named.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani also said his so-called Syrian Salvation Government would seek to repatriate officials it identified who fled to another country.

In France, investigative judges have sought an arrest warrant for Assad for alleged complicity in crimes against humanity and war crimes, in connection with a deadly chemical attack in Syria in 2013 under the legal concept of universal jurisdiction.

Russia does not extradite its own nationals – a legal process whereby someone is returned to another country or state to face trial for a suspected crime.

Assad is unlikely to leave Russia to go to a country where he could be extradited back to Syria or any other that might charge him with a crime.

A former Love Island contestant says it “took her breath away” to discover that someone removing a condom during sex is classified as rape.

Stealthing, as it is known, happens when someone removes a condom during consensual sex without informing the other person.

Megan Barton-Hanson says she experienced this up to six times, with a man claiming the condom had split on each occasion, leading to her having an abortion.

“I didn’t know it was a crime,” the 30-year-old tells the BBC.

“I just thought that’s something between partners that you have to discuss with them.”

Megan added that she knew his actions were “unfair and unjust” but it was only in a recording of the We Need to Talk podcast, when host Paul C Brunson told her, that she realised the man’s actions were rape.

“I’d never heard of stealthing, ever,” she says.

“When we started to have sex, the condom was obviously on – that was fine – and then at the end, he’d removed it intentionally but his excuse was ‘it split and it broke’.

“It was shocking.”

The Metropolitan Police says stealthing is a slang word but the practice is legally considered rape, although prosecutions are rare due to under-reporting, as many do not realise it is an offence.

In October, a University College London (UCL) survey showed just over one in 10 people aged 18-25 did not consider non-consensual condom removal to be sexual assault.

Andrea Simon, executive director of End Violence Against Women and Girls, says although sex can start off consensually, if someone violates that consent by removing a condom, it is considered rape and it can be prosecuted as rape.

“It’s very hard to know the prevalence of stealthing, as not many people may understand it as actually an act of sexual violence or a crime,” she explains.

“It’s really important that men, in particular, understand that it’s criminal behaviour to intentionally remove a condom during sex without consent and we know that it speaks very much to men’s sense of entitlement over women’s bodies and it’s a violation of women’s bodily autonomy.”

The issue was explored in the fourth episode of BBC drama I May Destroy You in 2020, where the main character Arabella has sex with a man who removes the condom without her knowledge.

Arabella doesn’t realise it’s rape until she hears it discussed on a podcast.

The seriousness of this form of sexual violence is accurately reflected in the language we use to talk about it, according to Ciara Bergman, chief executive of Rape Crisis England and Wales.

“So-called stealthing is a form of rape under English and Welsh law,” she says.

“If someone has received consent for sex on the basis that they will wear a condom and they then remove the condom without the other person’s knowledge or permission, consent for sex from that point is lost.”

Megan’s advice to someone who may have concerns is clear.

She says: “I think if you’ve got any kind of suspicions, red flags, tell a friend, tell someone and then you can go together and share to the police.

“You don’t have to make it a big old deal; you can call from the comfort of your own home, but I think definitely reach out to somebody because it’s not fair and it’s not OK.”

A former Manchester City footballer has been appointed president by Georgia’s disputed parliament, after 17 days of pro-EU protests that have swept this country’s towns and cities.

Mikheil Kavelashvili, now 53, is a former MP from the increasingly authoritarian ruling Georgian Dream party and was the only candidate for the job.

On Saturday, 224 out of 225 members of Georgia’s electoral college voted for him.

The four main opposition groups have rejected Kavelashvili and have boycotted parliament, insisting that the elections held in October were rigged.

Large crowds of protesters, facing freezing temperatures, gathered outside parliament from the early hours of Saturday morning ahead of the vote.

Georgia’s outgoing pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has condemned Kavelashvili’s election as a travesty, insisting she holds Georgia’s only remaining legitimate institution.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has accused Zourabichvili of trying to harm Georgia’s interests, emphasising that when her term of office ends on 29 December, she will have to retire.

“We have very strong state institutions, so we certainly have no difficulty in bringing the situation under full control,” he was quoted as saying on Friday.

Party colleague Nino Tsilosani told reporters that Zourabichvili was no longer president in the eyes of the public.

Georgia is a parliamentary democracy with the president the head of state, and the prime minister the head of Parliament.

Protests against Georgian Dream began immediately after the October elections but they burst into life on 28 November when the government announced it was putting EU accession negotiations on hold until 2028.

An overwhelming majority of Georgians back the country’s path to the European Union and it is part of the constitution.

Every night, the main avenue outside parliament fills with protesters draped in EU flags, demanding new elections.

The night before the vote, the capital Tbilisi was convulsed by pop-up protests involving IT specialists, public sector workers, creative industry professionals, actors and lawyers.

“We are standing here to create a legal state once and for all, to respect the provisions of the constitution and human rights,” said lawyer Davit Kikaleishvili, 47.

Kavelashvili is a founder of the People’s Power party, known for being the main voice for anti-Western propaganda in Georgia.

He has accused opposition parties of acting as a “fifth column” directed from abroad, and described President Zourabichvili as a “chief agent”.

Kavelashvili moved into politics after he was disqualified from seeking the leadership of the Georgian football federation because he lacked the qualifications.

Although his party ran alongside Georgian Dream in the October elections, it has now decided to act in parliament as a “healthy opposition”, to fill the place of the “so-called radical opposition funded by foreign forces”.

A People’s Power party MP, Guram Macharashvili, who announced on 13 December that his faction would leave the ruling parliamentary majority, told the BBC that what was happening in the country was an “artificially created crisis characterised by the influence of foreign powers”.

Macharashvili and Kavelashvili are the architects of Georgia’s controversial “foreign agents” law, seen by the country’s opposition as Russian-style legislation.

When asked what “healthy opposition” means, Macharashvili said: “Opposition does not necessarily mean opposition on all issues, it does not mean only cooperation with foreigners. It means competition with the ruling party to make better proposals on what’s best for Georgia’s future.”

Georgian Dream, founded by billionaire businessman and former Georgian PM Bidzina Ivanishvili, has been accused of dragging the country back into Russia’s sphere of influence.

Both the EU and US have condemned the government for democratic backsliding and more than 460 people have been detained across Georgia over the past two weeks, according to Transparency International.

More than 300 have been ill-treated or tortured, the organisation says, including dozens of people from Georgian media. Last weekend, thugs were filmed attacking a TV reporter and cameraman.

The EU has condemned the “brutal, unlawful force from the police” and foreign ministers are due to consider measures against the government when they meet on Monday.

The US state department has already imposed visa restrictions on Georgian officials, including government ministers and police.

Protesters have called on the international community to impose sanctions on top government officials as well as Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s most powerful man.

Pro-government groups have also waged a campaign of harassment towards civil society activists, beating them outside homes, and carrying out arbitrary arrests.

“There is systematic torture, inhuman and degrading treatment of citizens,” said former public rights defender Nino Lomjaria.

Theatre workers who joined the protests on Friday chanted: “The police are everywhere, justice is nowhere.”

South Korean lawmakers have voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol over his failed attempt to impose martial law, which sparked massive protests across the country.

He was suspended after some members of Yoon’s own People Power Party (PPP) voted with the opposition – though the decision still needs be ratified by the constitutional court.

Thousands of anti-Yoon protesters celebrated outside the National Assembly on Saturday evening after the impeachment motion passed, with the crowd singing as fireworks broke out overhead.

Yoon has vowed to fight on and said he “will never give up”, describing the vote as a temporary pause to his presidency.

“I will take your criticism, praise, and support to the heart and do my best for the country until the end,” Yoon added.

His defiant words are a marked change from his apologetic tone earlier this month over his short-lived martial law declaration.

Yoon attempted to impose military rule after months of political deadlock, saying it was necessary to block supposed North Korean efforts to undermine his government – but the declaration was overturned after a matter of hours by MPs.

There has been strong public support for Yoon’s impeachment, with recent polls finding three-quarters of South Koreans wanted to see him go.

Following days of public pressure the PPP had decided to let its lawmakers vote on the motion, after an effort to impeach Yoon last week failed when its lawmakers boycotted the hearing.

On Saturday, the impeachment motion reached the two thirds threshold needed to pass after 12 members of Yoon’s party voted in favour.

“To the people, we hope your end of year will be a little happier now, and all your cancelled year-end celebrations to be restored,” said National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-shik, as he announced the result.

“The future of the Republic of Korea and our hope is in the hands of the people, our hope is strong,” Woo, a member of the main opposition Democratic Party, added.

The constitutional court now has 180 days to rule on whether Yoon’s impeachment should be upheld or whether he can return to office. If it rules in favour of impeachment, an election for the next president must be called within 60 days.

Yoon has been suspended while Prime Minister Han Duck-soo has taken over as acting president.

Han said his focus is to “stabilise the situation” and “bring back normalcy for the people”.

However, both Han and finance minister Choi Sang-mok, who is next in line for the presidency, are both involved in an ongoing police probe over last week’s events.

Outside the National Assembly, where tens of thousands of protesters gathered throughout the day despite the bitter cold, people hailed the vote as a victory for democracy and spoke of their determination to see Yoon permanently leave office.

“I’m so happy that the bill passed… At the same time, the fight is not over,” physical therapist Sim Hee-seon told the BBC as she wiped her tears.

“We’ll have to wait for the court’s judgment for his impeachment to be finalised. We will keep watching.”

Two women decked out in Rudolf costumes held signs that read: “[It will be] a merry Christmas only if Yoon Seok Yul disappears”.

Across town at a pro-Yoon rally in Gwanghwamun Square, it was a different story. His supporters fell silent after hearing the news of the vote. Some people uttered angry insults before leaving the scene.

The success of the vote had depended on the support from the PPP, as the opposition lawmakers who tabled the motion needed just eight more to join them. Last Saturday, when the opposition first tried to impeach Yoon, they fell short by just a few votes as the PPP staged a walkout.

On Saturday, the party held a marathon meeting that began at 10am and lasted till just minutes before the voting session began, as PPP lawmakers struggled to reach a consensus on the party’s stance.

In the end, the party agreed to take part and allowed their lawmakers to vote according to their conscience. It appeared that at least 12 of them crossed the floor. Another 85 voted against impeachment.

South Korea has faced nearly two weeks of chaos and uncertainty since Yoon’s short-lived martial law attempt late last Tuesday.

Yoon had cited threats from “anti-state forces” and North Korea but it soon became clear that his move had been spurred by his own domestic political troubles, not by external threats.

Hours later he reversed the order after 190 MPs voted it down, with many of them climbing fences and breaking barricades to get into the voting chamber.

Yoon later apologised but on Thursday he defended his actions, saying he had sought to protect the country’s democracy and vowed to “fight on until the end”.

That speech galvanised people, and the president’s approval rating tumbled to a record low of 11%, according to a poll by Gallup Korea.

The impeachment of a president is not unchartered territory for South Korea, which last removed former president Park Geun-hye through this process in 2016.

Yoon – then a prosecutor – had led the investigation against Park, which ultimately resulted in her impeachment.

At least three people have been killed and dozens more wounded after an explosive was thrown into a crowd at a festival in Thailand.

The attack took place shortly before midnight local time on Friday at the Red Cross Doi Loyfa fair, held annually in the Umphang district in the northern Tak province.

Two suspects are being held in custody, but no charges have been pressed, the Associated Press and local media report, citing Thai police.

At least 48 people have been wounded, six of whom are critically injured, police said.

Police were alerted to the incident at 23:30 local time (16:30 GMT) on Friday.

In a statement, the Umphang rescue team said the explosive was thrown and landed at the foot of an outdoor stage where people had been dancing.

Some of the wounded were taken to a nearby hospital, it added.

Several reports suggest the blast was caused by an improvised explosive device (IED).

Footage said to be from the scene, posted on social media, shows scenes of panic as emergency workers and festivalgoers tend to the wounded.

One video appears to show at least two people lying in close proximity being given CPR, as crowds rush around them in a state of confusion.

The camera then pans to a person cutting the trousers off a man to reveal a wound on his leg pouring out blood.

Images taken in the aftermath, shared by the rescue team, show a cordon in place around an area strewn with rubbish and strung with lights.

Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra shared her condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the bombing in a post on X.

She said she had ordered the police and security agencies to investigate the cause of the explosion and help those affected. She also directed an increase in police officers to oversee all festival events.

According to the Bangkok Post, between 8,000 and 9,000 people attended the week-long festival this year, and the attack took place on the penultimate night of the event.

Umphang is the southernmost district in Thailand’s northern Tak province, which shares a border with Myanmar to the west.

The world’s biggest iceberg is on the move again after being trapped in a vortex for most of the year.

A23a is 3,800 sq km (1,500 sq miles), which is more than twice the size of Greater London, and is 400m (1,312ft) thick. It broke free of Antarctica in 1986 though soon became stuck just off the coast.

The depth of the iceberg meant its bottom became lodged on the floor of the Weddell Sea, part of the Southern Ocean, where it remained static for more than 30 years.

It began to move northwards in 2020 but, since the spring, has been spinning on the spot after it was caught in a rotating column of water near the South Orkney Islands.

On Friday the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said it was now drifting further north.

Dr Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer at the BAS, said: “It’s exciting to see A23a on the move again after periods of being stuck.

“We are interested to see if it will take the same route the other large icebergs that have calved off Antarctica have taken.”

• A23a: Tracking the world’s biggest iceberg as it drifts towards oblivion

It is thought A23a will eventually leave the Southern Ocean and enter the Atlantic Ocean where it will encounter warmer waters and likely break up into smaller icebergs and eventually melt.

Dr Meijers and the BAS are examining the impact of icebergs on local ecosystems after they pass through them.

A year ago researchers aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough collected data from the water around A23a.

Laura Taylor, a biogeochemist who was part of the crew, said: “We know that these giant icebergs can provide nutrients to the waters they pass through, creating thriving ecosystems in otherwise less productive areas.

“What we don’t know is what difference particular icebergs, their scale, and their origins can make to that process.”

It was a defining moment of the fall of the Syrian regime – rebels freeing inmates from the country’s most notorious prison. A week on, four men speak to the BBC about the elation of their release, and the years of horror that preceded it.

Warning: This article contains descriptions of torture

The prisoners fell silent when they heard the shouting outside their cell door.

A man’s voice called: “Is there anyone in there?” But they were too afraid to answer.

Over years, they had learnt that the door opening meant beatings, rapes and other punishments. But on this day, it meant freedom.

At the shout of “Allahu Akbar”, the men inside the cell peered through a small opening in the centre of the heavy metal door.

They saw rebels in the prison’s corridor instead of guards.

“We said ‘We are here. Free us,'” one of the inmates, 30-year-old Qasem Sobhi Al-Qabalani, recalls.

As the door was shot open, Qasem says he “ran out with bare feet”.

Like other inmates, he kept running and didn’t look back.

“When they came to start liberating us and shouting ‘all go out, all go out’, I ran out of the prison but I was so terrified to look behind me because I thought they’d put me back,” says 31-year-old Adnan Ahmed Ghnem.

They did not yet know that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad had fled the country and that his government had fallen. But the news soon reached them.

“It was the best day of my life. An unexplainable feeling. Like someone who had just escaped death,” Adnan remembers.

Qasem and Adnan are among four prisoners the BBC has spoken to who were released this week from Saydnaya prison – a facility for political prisoners nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse”.

All gave similar accounts of years of mistreatment and torture at the hands of guards, executions of fellow inmates, corruption by prison officials, and forced confessions.

We were also shown inside the prison by a former inmate who had a similar account, and heard from families of missing people held at Saydnaya who are desperately looking for answers.

We have seen bodies found by rebel fighters in the mortuary of a military hospital, believed to be Saydnaya detainees, that medics say bear signs of torture.

Rights group Amnesty International, whose 2017 report on the prison accuses authorities of murder and torture there, has called for “justice and reparations for crimes under international law in Syria”, including its treatment of political prisoners.

Saydnaya prison, a sprawling complex located atop a hill of barren land and surrounded by barbed wire, was established in the early 1980s and for decades has been used to hold opponents of the Assad family regime.

It has been described as the country’s main political prison since the 2011 uprising, when the Turkey-based Association of Detainees and The Missing in Saydnaya Prison says it effectively became a “death camp”.

The prisoners we spoke to say they were sent to Saydnaya because of real or perceived links with the rebel Free Syrian Army, their opposition to Assad, or simply because they lived in an area known to oppose him.

Some had been accused of kidnapping and killing regime soldiers and convicted of terrorism.

All said they had given confessions under “pressure” and “torture”.

They were given lengthy sentences or sentenced to death. One man said he had been detained at the prison for four years but had not yet been to court.

The men were held in the prison’s main Red Building, for opponents of the regime.

Qasem says he was arrested while passing through a road block in 2016, accused of terrorism with the Free Syrian Army, and sent for short stints at several detention facilities before being transferred to Saydnaya.

“After that door, you are a dead person,” he says softly in an interview at his family home in a town south of Damascus, as relatives gather around sipping coffee and nodding in grim captivation.

“This is where the torture began.”

He recalls being stripped naked and told to pose for a photograph before being beaten for looking at the camera.

He says he was then put onto a chain with other inmates and led, with their faces staring at the ground, to a tiny solitary confinement cell where he and five other men were crammed in and given uniforms to wear but deprived of food and water for several days.

They were then taken to the prison’s main cells, where the rooms have no beds, a single lightbulb and a small toilet area in the corner.

When we visited the prison this week, we saw blankets, clothes and food strewn on the floors of cells.

Our guide, a former inmate from 2019-2022, walked us through the corridors searching for his cell.

Two of his fingers and a thumb were chopped off at the prison, he says.

Finding scratch marks on a cell wall that he believes he made, he knelt down and began to cry.

About 20 men would sleep in each room, but the inmates tell us it was difficult to get to know each other – they could speak only in hushed voices and knew that guards were always watching and listening.

“Everything was banned. You’re just allowed to eat and drink and sleep and die,” says Qasem.

Punishments at Saydnaya were frequent and brutal.

All of the people we spoke to described being beaten with different implements – metal staffs, cables, electric sticks.

“They would enter the room and start to beat us all over our bodies. I would stay still, watching and waiting for my turn,” Adnan, who was arrested in 2019 on accusations of kidnapping and killing a regime soldier, recalls.

“Every night, we would thank God that we were still alive. Every morning, we would pray to God, please take our souls so we can die in peace.”

Adnan and two of the other newly released inmates said they were sometimes forced to sit with their knees towards their foreheads and a vehicle tyre placed over their bodies with a stick wedged inside so they couldn’t move, before beatings were administered.

Forms of punishment were varied.

Qasem says he was held upside down by two prison officers in a barrel of water until he thought he was going to “choke and die”.

“I saw death with my own eyes,” he says. “They would do this if you woke up in the night, or we spoke in a loud voice, or if we had a problem with any of the other prisoners.”

Two of the prisoners released this week and the former inmate at Saydnaya described witnessing sexual assaults by guards, who they said would anally rape inmates with sticks.

One man said inmates would offer oral sex to the guards in their desperation for more food.

Three described guards jumping on their bodies as part of the abuse.

In a hospital in central Damascus, we were introduced to 43-year-old Imad Jamal, who grimaced in pain at each touch from his mother who was tending to him at his bedside.

Asked to describe his time in Saydnaya, he smiled and responded slowly in English: “No eat. No sleep. Hit. Cane. Fighting. Sick. Everything not normal. Nothing normal. Everything abnormal.”

He says he was detained in 2021 under what he described as a “political arrest” because of the area he was from.

Speaking again in Arabic, he says his back was broken when he was made to sit on the ground with his knees against his chest as a guard jumped from a ledge on top of him as a punishment for stealing medication from another inmate to give to a friend.

But for Imad, the hardest thing about life in the prison was the cold. “Even the wall was cold,” he says. “I became a breathing corpse”.

There were few things to look forward to in the prison, but three of the inmates said anything positive was met afterwards with punishment.

“Every time we had a shower, every time we had a visitor, every time we went out into the sun, every time we left the cell door we would be punished,” says 30-year-old Rakan Mohammed Al Saed, who says he was detained in 2020 on allegations of killing and kidnapping from his former days in the rebel Free Syrian Army but had never faced trial.

He bares his broken teeth, saying they were knocked out when he was hit in the mouth by a guard with a stick.

All of the men we spoke to said they believed people in their cells had been executed.

Guards would come in and call names of people who would be led away and never seen again.

“People wouldn’t be executed in front of us. Every time they would call names at 12am, we knew that those people were going to be killed,” Adnan says.

Others gave similar accounts, explaining there was no way of them knowing what happened to these men.

Qasem’s father and other relatives say the family were made to pay prison officials more than $10,000 to stop him from being executed – at first to be converted to life in prison and then to a 20-year sentence.

Qasem says his treatment by guards improved a bit after this.

But, his dad says, “they refused any amount to let him free”.

Families sent loved ones money for food in the prison but they say corrupt officials would keep much of it and give the inmates only limited rations.

In some of the cells, inmates would pool all of the food together. But it wasn’t enough.

Adnan found the hunger even harder than the beatings. “I would go to sleep and wake up hungry,” he says.

“There was a punishment that we received one month where one day they would pass us a slice of bread, the next day half a slice, until it was a tiny crumb. Then it was nothing. We got no bread.”

Qasem says one day guards covered the face of his cell’s de-facto leader with yoghurt and made others lick it off.

The men said the behaviour of guards was as much about inflicting humiliation as pain.

All described losing significant amounts of weight in the prison because of malnourishment.

“My biggest dream was to eat and be full,” Qasem says.

His family paid officers bribes for visitation rights. He would sometimes be brought down on a wheelchair because he was too weak to walk, his father says.

Diseases were rife and the inmates had no way of stopping them from spreading.

Two of the men we spoke to who were released on Sunday say they had contracted tuberculosis in Saydnaya – one said medication was frequently withheld as a form of punishment.

But Adnan says the “diseases from fear” were even worse than the physical ones.

At a hospital in Damascus this week, an official said brief medical checks of the detainees that were sent there had found “mainly psychological problems”.

These accounts paint a picture of a place with no hope, only pain.

The prisoners spent much of their time in silence with no access to the outside world, so it is no surprise that they say they knew nothing of the rebel Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) rapid advance in Syria until they were broken free that morning.

Qasem said they could hear what sounded like a helicopter taking off from the hospital grounds before the men’s shouts in the corridors. But in the windowless cell they couldn’t be sure.

Then the doors opened, and the freed inmates began running as fast as they could.

“We ran out of the prison. We ran from fear too,” Rakan says, his thoughts on his young children and wife.

At one point in the chaos, he says, “I was hit by a car. But I didn’t mind. I got up and carried on running.”

He says he will never go back to Saydnaya again.

Adnan, too, says he couldn’t look back at the prison, as he ran crying towards Damascus.

“I just kept going. I can’t describe it. I just headed for Damascus. People were taking us from the road in their cars.”

He now fears each night when he goes to sleep that he will wake in the prison, and find it was all a dream.

Qasem ran to a town called Tal Mneen. It was there that a woman who provided the freed prisoners with food, money and clothing told them: “Assad has fallen”.

He was brought to his hometown where celebratory gunfire rang out and his tearful family embraced him.

“It’s like I am born again. I can’t describe it to you,” he says.

They came in hoodies, they came in masks, shuffling their feet and laughing nervously while waiting for a winner to be announced.

Just a few days after UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered on a New York City sidewalk, these young men had lined up in Washington Square Park to compete in a lookalike contest for the man wanted for his murder.

It was sparsely attended and seen as a joke by those who did turn up, said Talia Jane, a journalist who was there.

But it underlined an obsession with a murder suspect that has gripped social media since the killing on 4 December, fuelled by latent anger directed at America’s private health insurers.

“There was a lot of tinder already there, a lot of discontent, a lot of frustration already there, and [this] sort of threw a match on it,” Ms Jane said.

And it has only grown since the suspect was named as Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League-educated member of a prominent Baltimore family.

In TikTok videos, memes and group chats, a young man accused of shooting a father-of-two in the back on a New York City sidewalk has been fawned over and praised as a kind of folk hero.

This fetishisation was remarkably widespread, not limited to radical corners of the internet or any political affiliation, troubling many observers.

“We do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint,” said Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, where Mr Mangione was arrested at a McDonald’s.

“In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice.”

• Killing of insurance CEO reveals simmering anger at US health system

Almost immediately after Mr Thompson was shot dead, the internet began to lionise his suspected killer. On TikTok, people posted videos of a “CEO assassin” New York City walking tour. On Spotify, playlists dedicated to the suspect started to appear.

Once Mr Mangione was arrested, these fans came to his defence.

The start of his legal battles prompted anonymous donors to chip in thousands of dollars towards his defence through various online fundraisers.

Etsy was flooded with pro-Mangione apparel, while Amazon pulled similar products from their site.

The McDonald’s worker alleged to have turned him in has become a target for online hate, while the fast-food franchise itself has been spammed with bad reviews.

The police department in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that arrested him even received death threats.

Much of this online reaction has focused on his looks, with the internet dubbing him the “hot assassin”.

Indeed, Mr Mangione’s appearance, which he showed off in shirtless social media posts, is now clearly part of the appeal, said cultural critic Blakely Thornton.

Americans are effectively “programmed” to trust and empathise with men who look like Mr Mangione, he said.

“That’s why they are the protagonists in our movies, books and stories.”

Public adoration for handsome men accused of crimes is not new – from Ted Bundy to Jeremy Meeks, violent men have developed cult followings.

But Professor Tanya Horeck, an expert on digital culture and true crime from Anglia Ruskin University, says that social media has given those sentiments massive visibility, and helped them spread.

The internet has caused “a blurring of the lines between celebrity and criminality”, she told the BBC, adding that when people see a good-looking person pop into their feeds, their first thought is lust, not moral criticism.

“The mood around Luigi Mangione is ‘thirst’,” she said.

Beyond his appearance, a large part of Mr Mangione’s online appeal is clearly his apparent ire against the private healthcare industry and corporate elites in general. US media has reported that Mr Mangione was arrested carrying a handwritten document that said “these parasites had it coming”.

The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a non-profit extremism research group based in New Jersey, said that after the shooting the hashtag #EatTheRich went viral.

Since Mr Mangione’s arrest, variations of “#FreeLuigi” were posted on X over 50,000 times, likely getting tens of millions of impressions. And by some measures, the NCRI said, engagement with posts about Mr Thompson’s killing across platforms like X, Reddit, and others surpassed that of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July.

An analysis of a sample of comments carried out by market research firm OneCliq found the vast majority – four-fifths – contained criticism of the healthcare system.

Mr Mangione’s X account has gained more than 400,000 followers since the shooting.

The shooting also seemed to inspire others to take action against healthcare insurers – “wanted” posters of other CEOs appeared around New York City, and a woman in Florida was arrested after telling an insurance agent on the phone “Delay, Deny, Depose. You people are next,” alluding to the words inscribed on bullet casings found at the murder scene.

Alex Goldenberg, a senior adviser at the NCRI, called the online reaction a “turning point” and “a catalyst for the normalisation of political violence that was once confined to extremists on the fringes”.

He compared the wave of comments to the online activity following racist mass murders, designed to defend the killers and signal-boost their beliefs – only more widespread, and happening across mainstream social media networks.

“The dynamic we are observing is eerily similar to the activity on platforms like 4chan, 8chan, Discord, and in other dark corners of the internet, where mass shootings are often met with glee,” he said.

Tim Weninger, a computer science professor at Notre Dame and expert in social media and artificial intelligence, said evidence suggests that the groundswell was authentic – not powered by bots or government influence operations.

“People are pissed off at the healthcare industry and they are using social media to express their frustrations,” he said. “They’re expressing those frustrations by supporting this suspect.”

Recent research by Commonwealth Fund, a health policy institute, found 45% of insured working-age adults were charged for something they thought should have been free or covered by insurance, and 17% of respondents said their insurer denied coverage for care that was recommended by their doctor.

There are indications that the shooting has prompted some introspection on the part of healthcare companies.

“I think all of us are taking a step back and trying to understand what’s happening with patients and their experiences,” Pfizer’s chief sustainability officer Caroline Roan told a conference in New York on Wednesday, according to Reuters.

Some of the people who have been protesting against health insurance companies for years, before online criticism about UHC took off, understand some of the darker sentiments, even if they don’t endorse them.

“It’s a horrific act of violence, and I absolutely condemn it no matter the motivation,” Jenn Coffey, who has been fighting to get UHC to cover her medical bills, said of Mr Thompson’s killing. “But I’m not shocked by the reaction.”

Ms Coffey, 53, from Manchester, New Hampshire, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013 and later fell ill with complex regional pain syndrome, a potentially debilitating neurological condition. When a doctor suggested that she try ketamine therapy, her UHC insurance would not cover the procedure, she said. She has since become involved in a protest campaign organised by activist group People’s Action.

Ms Coffey’s illness forced her to stop working as an emergency medical technician. She said she started a crowdfunding drive and had to sell most of her belongings in order to pay for the treatment herself.

“I get to have some normality. I can sit up and paint, or I can enjoy a meal with my family” because of the treatment, she said. “I can have a life that’s worth living.”

UnitedHealth Group told the BBC they could not comment on individual cases for privacy reasons.

At the same time, much of the online discussion has effectively ignored the victim, Brian Thompson, who was 50.

“It’s incredibly bleak that [Thompson’s death] hasn’t been covered as much because, bottom line, a person died, a person was murdered,” Blakely Thornton said.

“The collective rage over [the healthcare industry] is really outweighing what is still a tragedy.”

In his last post on LinkedIn, Mr Thompson talked about efforts to make healthcare more affordable – and was criticised in the comments. CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, obtained a message that UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty sent to staff this week, memorialising Mr Thompson and calling his murdered colleague “one of the good guys”.

“He was certainly one of the smartest guys. I think he was one of the best guys. I’m going to miss him. And I am incredibly proud to call him my friend,” he wrote.

In the email, the company shared messages from customers, including one who wrote about recovering from cancer, saying their treatment was paid for by the insurance company’s benefits.

“I’m thankful to UHC and everyone there who works within a broken system to help as many people as they can,” they wrote, according to the company.

Another message said: “So very sad that this world is so hateful. I have always had great experiences with UHC.”

Ms Coffey, the UHC policyholder and patient, said: “My heart goes out to the family and I can’t imagine what they’re having to struggle with that [killing]. It’s awful to me that this is the catalyst for this debate.”

“I would have much rather sat down and had a conversation with him.”

Life might be unfair but for Malcolm in the Middle fans things are looking up – the TV sitcom is making a comeback.

With familiar shouts of “Malcolm!”, actors Bryan Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek introduced a video posted on social media announcing the show’s return on Friday.

They played the comedically dysfunctional parents of the highly intelligent teenager who first appeared on our screens nearly 25 years ago.

The sitcom ended in 2006 after 151 episodes, during which it won several Emmy awards. A Grammy award was also given to the band behind the show’s opening theme song Boss of Me, which ends on the lyric “life is unfair”.

Frankie Muniz, who reprises his role as the show’s protagonist, said: “I have been waiting for this moment for 18 years. Let’s find out where Malcolm and his family are now.”

Four new episodes have been commissioned by Disney+ with the storyline based on Malcolm and his daughter being drawn back “into the family’s chaos when Hal (Cranston) and Lois (Kaczmarek) demand his presence for their 40th wedding anniversary party”.

Cranston, who received critical acclaim following the show for his performance in crime drama series Breaking Bad, said he was excited to return.

Kaczmarek added: “What a delight I get to yell at that kid again!

“We’re very excited about coming back together and seeing what this family has been up to.”

A date is yet to be set for when the new episodes will air.

Ayo Davis, president of Disney’s branded television unit, said she hoped fans would be glad of the show’s new run given how relatable it was when it first aired.

“Its hilarious and heartfelt portrayal of a lovably chaotic family resonated with audiences of all ages and we’re so excited to welcome the original cast back to bring that magic to life again.”

Raj Kapoor, fondly called the “greatest showman of Indian cinema”, was a leading filmmaker, producer and actor whose work continues to shape and inspire Indian films.

Today, almost four decades after his death in 1988, he remains one of India’s most-loved stars.

Kapoor began his film career in India’s post-independence era. His early work often carried a socialistic undertone, mirroring the country’s mood and aspirations of the time.

“Kapoor brought romance, sexuality, song and soul to Indian socialism,” said historian Sunil Khilnani, in Incarnations: India in 50 Lives, a 2015 BBC Radio 4 series on the men and women who made India.

So perhaps it isn’t surprising that celebrations to mark what would have been his 100th birthday on Saturday are taking place across the country, honouring his enduring legacy.

Among them is a retrospective showcasing 10 of his iconic films that will screen across 40 cities and 135 cinemas in India at the weekend.

Born as Shrishti Nath Kapoor to actors Prithviraj Kapoor and Ramsarni Kapoor, he later took the name of Ranbir Raj Kapoor and debuted as a child actor in Inquilab (1935).

Before making waves on screen, Kapoor honed his craft behind the scenes – assisting filmmaker Kidar Sharma, working as an art director at his father’s Prithvi Theatre, and appearing in smaller roles.

His breakout came with Neel Kamal (1947), launching a storied career that combined artistic ambition with mass appeal.

In 1948, Kapoor founded the iconic RK Films studio, synonymous with blockbuster films and international acclaim.

He debuted as a director with Aag (1948) and showcased his versatility as an actor and filmmaker in landmark films like Barsaat (1949), Awaara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), and Sangam (1964). Other popular works include Mera Naam Joker (1970), Bobby (1973), Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978), and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985).