As Palestinians poured onto the streets of Gaza to celebrate the ceasefire, moments of joy faded for many as they returned to their homes to be met by destruction.

In Jabalia, a town in northern Gaza that is home to the largest refugee camp in the strip, pictures and videos shared by residents revealed entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble.

Returning to the al-Faluja area of Jabalia, Duaa al-Khalidi told BBC News: “I survived with my two daughters, we came out from under the rubble of our house.

“Here, beneath the debris, the bodies of my husband, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law have remained buried since 9 October.”

The 28-year-old mother of two continued: “I want nothing but their bodies so I can bury them with dignity.”

Jabalia camp, once home to over 250,000 Palestinians, became the site of the largest and most violent Israeli military operation during the war, with around 4,000 Palestinians killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

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Also returning to Jabalia was Hussein Awda, who documented his journey back from Gaza City.

The professional weightlifter, who has represented Palestine internationally, lost 10 members of his family at the start of the war.

“The best thing that happened today is that after 100 days, I was able to visit my family’s grave and pray for them,” he shared.

He also posted a video revealing the devastation to his three-storey home and sports club he owns.

“Here I lost the people closest to my heart – my brothers, my sons, my source of livelihood. The war killed everything beautiful inside us.”

In the southern city of Khan Younis, armed Hamas fighters drove through the streets to cheering crowds and chanting, according to Reuters news agency.

Hamas policemen, in police uniforms, were also deployed in some areas after months of hiding out of sight to avoid Israeli strikes.

Gaza City resident Ahmed Abu Ayham, who has been sheltering with his family in Khan Younis, told Reuters that his home city was “dreadful”.

In the city, which has suffered the heaviest destruction according to experts, people were seen waving the Palestinian flag and filming scenes on their mobile.

But the 40-year-old said it was no time for celebrations, despite the fact the ceasefire might save lives.

“We are in pain, deep pain and it is time that we hug one another and cry,” he said.

Gazans were also on the move to the southern city of Rafah near the Egyptian border.

Mohammed Suleiman told BBC Arabic’s Gaza Lifeline: “Thank God, we have received the news of the ceasefire coming into effect with joy and happiness.

“God willing, things will change for the better and we will return to Rafah. I hope every displaced person will safely return to his home.”

Many fled the city after Israel ordered their evacuation before starting an operation in the southern Gaza city.

In Rafah, Muhammad al-Jamal, a journalist for Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam, reflected on his own loss.

“The house was razed to the ground; everything was reduced to rubble,” he said. “The chicken coop and the fig tree whose fruits we shared together are now a thing of the past.”

The fragility of the ceasefire agreement became evident in its initial hours.

The truce finally took effect after a three-hour delay, during which 19 Palestinians were reportedly killed in what Israel said were strikes on “terror targets”.

By the afternoon, three Israeli female hostages were back in Israel, as part of a six-week first phase that will see 33 hostages released.

But people in Gaza remain fearful that the truce may falter once again.

After 15 months of war that began with a brutal attack on Israel by Hamas and ended with much of the Gaza Strip levelled by Israel, a ceasefire came into effect on Sunday that saw three women hostages released from Gaza and 90 Palestinians freed from Israeli jails in return.

For two tense hours on Sunday morning, the ceasefire looked as though it might falter from the very outset. Hamas failed to provide the names of the three hostages it planned to release, prompting Israel to postpone the ceasefire and continue its air strikes on Gaza.

In what should have been the first hours of peace, from 08:30 local time (06:30 GMT), at least 19 Palestinians were killed by the strikes and 36 more were wounded, the Hamas-run Civil Defence agency said. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had struck “a number of terror targets”.

The three hostages’ names were eventually sent by Hamas to Israel, via an intermediary, and Israeli military action in Gaza ceased for the first time since a brief, week-long ceasefire and hostage exchange back in November 2023.

At 11:19, Majed al-Ansari, the spokesman for the foreign ministry of Qatar, which has helped broker the ceasefire deal, wrote on X that the final obstacles had been cleared “and thus the ceasefire has begun”.

Six hours later, three Israeli hostages – Romi Gonen, 24, Doron Steinbrecher, 31, and Emily Damari, 28, who is a dual British citizen – were handed over by Hamas to the Red Cross in Gaza and then to the Israeli military. TV coverage showed chaotic scenes in Gaza City’s Saraya Square as crowds massed around the vehicle carrying the hostages and Hamas fighters struggled to push the people back.

There was a brief glimpse of the three women as they were taken from the van, amid the surging crowds. From the handover point in Gaza they were driven by the IDF to the nearby Re’im military base in southern Israel to be met by their mothers.

Extensive planning by the IDF had gone into the delicate handover, with military medics and psychologists readied for the first stages of the process at a reception centre designed to ease the hostages’ transition.

From Re’im, they were transferred by helicopter to the Sheba Medical Centre near Tel Aviv to be reunited with their wider families and receive further medical attention. Two of the three reportedly suffered gunshot wounds in the attack on 7 October 2023, when Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 hostage.

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The release was the first of several due to take place over the next six weeks – if the ceasefire holds – until a total of 33 hostages have been returned and about 1,900 Palestinians have been freed in exchange. Ninety-seven hostages are still in captivity, Israeli authorities said, though dozens of those are presumed dead.

In Gaza, where the health ministry says more than 46,900 people have been killed during Israel’s offensive and the majority of the strip’s pre-war population of 2.3 million has been displaced, many civilians yearning for home learned over the weekend that their long wait would continue.

The IDF, which should withdraw its troops from populated areas during the first phase of the deal, warned civilians on Sunday not to approach the buffer zone it had created along Gaza’s borders or the military zone in central Gaza, known as the Netzarim corridor, which cuts the north of the territory from the south.

It was expected to be a week before some displaced people in the south can cross the corridor and move back to their homes in the north.

For civilians who have spent 15 months in desperate conditions in tents and makeshift shelters in Gaza, suffering from malnutrition and disease, the relief of the long-awaited peace was tempered by the immense scale of the destruction and loss.

“By God, the feelings are mixed,” said Helen Jabri, 41, in a phone interview from a shelter in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

“Our hearts are aching for the people we have lost,” she said. “My brother and his entire family were lost. My father is a prisoner. We are very happy that the torrent of blood has stopped, but there is pain here in every house.”

Some began packing up and moving on foot Gaza on Sunday, particularly from the most southern areas including Rafah. But it will be a long time before any sense of home or normalcy can be returned to the vast numbers of displaced. The northern parts of the strip, including Gaza City, have been subjected in places to almost total destruction during the war.

The UN’s satellite agency estimates that 60% of structures across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli strikes and demolitions, meaning many displaced will have to remain for now in shelters or continue sleeping rough, prolonging a massive humanitarian crisis.

“The vast majority of shelters are overcrowded and many are simply living out in the open or in makeshift structures,” said Juliette Touma, communications director for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa. “They lack basic needs like warm clothes. I would not call these living conditions, they are not conditions fit for human beings.”

Noura Zakout, a ministry of education employee from Gaza City, told the BBC from a shelter in Khan Younis on Sunday that she would return to the city at the first opportunity “no matter the destruction and ruin”.

“I just want to go to the city and smell its air,” she said. “We know we have no home to go back to, but at least now with this ceasefire we can take a breath. Like a diver who goes deep underwater, we have come up for a moment for air.”

In Israel, the finalising of the first part of the deal brought relief for three hostage families after 15 months of pain. Video footage released late on Sunday night showed joyous, tearful reunions at the medical centre near Tel Aviv.

In a statement, Mandy Damari said her daughter’s “nightmare in Gaza was over” and thanked “everyone who never stopped fighting for Emily”.

For others, it brought another prolonging of uncertainty. Thirty-three hostages will be released in the first phase but their condition is not known and some are reported to have been killed. Among the remaining hostages, only two children are left – brothers Kfir and Ariel Bibas, aged two and four.

The boys were kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October 2023 alongside their parents Sheri and Yarden. Hamas announced in December 2023 that Sheri and the boys had been killed, but Israeli authorities have never confirmed the deaths.

“It scares me to hope,” Yarden’s cousin Eylon Keshet said, on Saturday night, on what would be Kfir’s second birthday.

“I’m not letting myself truly imagine it, because when I start to imagine it I feel like my stomach turning,” he said. Seeing Shiri and the boys alive would, he said, be “a miracle”.

Daniel Lifschitz, whose grandfather Oded is the second-oldest hostage, at 84, said on Sunday it was “wonderful to see the beginning of the ceasefire”.

“We are getting closer to the day when we might see my grandfather,” he said. “But at the same time, today has been very very hard, because we don’t know whether he is dead or alive. We don’t know whether to prepare for a funeral or a festival.”

In exchange for the three hostages released on Sunday, Israel’s prison service released 90 Palestinians from Ofer detention centre in the occupied West Bank early on Monday. They were also handed over to the Red Cross, before being taken to a designated area from where they will be allowed to return home.

In the nearby West Bank town of Beitunia, crowds gathered to wait for the prisoners, with some starting fires to create roadblocks.

For families in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, there is still great concern that the fragile ceasefire could collapse over the next six weeks. The delays on Sunday morning were quickly overcome, but a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that Israel “retains the right to continue our war aims” in Gaza if the conditions of the deal are broken again.

In Israel on Sunday, several far-right ministers resigned in protest over the terms of the deal, further weakening Netanyahu’s already fragile hold on government.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, the deal’s most prominent critic, has long objected to the ceasefire, saying it comes ahead of Israel’s main war aim of destroying Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

He declared on Sunday that his far-right Jewish Power party would resign en masse from the government. Though he pledged not to attempt to overthrow the government, the move leaves the embattled prime minister with just a razor-thin majority in parliament.

Speaking at a news conference on Sunday, Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said he would not speak against those who had objected to the deal, which he said brought a “heavy price for Israel”.

“Any agreement with a terror organisation is a bad event,” he said. “Releasing terrorists from our jails is a heavy price, with risks.”

Saar acknowledged that there had been a “very serious debate within government” about the terms of the deal. “But we are doing it because of our commitment to our brothers and sisters who are under captivity for more than 15 months already. We will do our utmost to release them.”

The BBC understands that under an agreement with Israel, control of checkpoints in Gaza previously manned by the Israeli military would be handed over to Hamas police, which will manage the flow of displaced people north as Israel withdraws. The arrangement raises questions about how fighters will be prevented from also moving north, and there are fears of chaos as a mass of people moves and attempts to access aid entering the strip.

Aid lorries began entering Gaza on Thursday 15 minutes after the ceasefire came into effect. But the scale of the need is enormous. Even before the conflict, Gaza was heavily dependent on aid. With farmland and food infrastructure destroyed, Unwra has said 600 lorries should cross into Gaza every day.

Majed al-Ansari, the Qatari foreign ministry spokesman, told the BBC that a dedicated operations centre in Cairo would monitor the ceasefire from abroad, to try and make sure there was a “minimum level of chaos as a result of aid going in”. But he added that for the first phase, Hamas would essentially be in charge of the process in Gaza.

Ansari described the deal as the “last chance for Gaza, and the last chance for the region”.

“This is the deal for hope, this is the deal for the future, this is a deal for all of us collectively,” he said.

US President-elect Donald Trump, whose envoy Steve Witkoff helped broker the deal alongside President Joe Biden’s team, welcomed the ceasefire in a post on his social media site Truth Social. “Hostages starting to come out today! Three wonderful young women will be first,” he wrote.

In Gaza City on Sunday night, Abdallah Shabbir, a young emergency doctor who had worked relentlessly since the day the war began, seeing hundreds of dead and treating thousands of wounded, was allowing himself a small moment of joy.

“It is only because these were my people I was able to keep going,” he said. “I don’t know how to express the feeling I have now, but there is joy. The most important thing is that the bloodshed has stopped. God willing, everything else will follow.”

On the eve of his return to the White House, President-elect Donald Trump promised to sign a blitz of executive orders on his first day as president, telling supporters that he would move with “historic speed and strength” in the hours after taking the oath of office.

Addressing a racuous crowd of thousands in a Washington DC arena for a “Victory Rally”, Trump offered a preview of the next four years and celebrated his November election victory over the Democrats.

The Republican promised to act unilaterally on a wide array of issues, using his presidential powers to launch mass deportation operations, slash environmental regulations and end diversity programmes.

“We put America first and it all starts tomorrow,” he told the crowd at the campaign-style event, adding: “You’re going to have a lot of fun watching television tomorrow.”

Trump is expected to sign more than 200 executive actions on Monday. This would include executive orders, which are legally-binding, and other presidential directives like proclamations, which are usually not.

“Every radical and foolish executive order of the Biden administration will be repealed within hours of when I take the oath of office,” the incoming president said.

Trump promised executive orders that would ramp up artificial intelligence programmes, form the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), make records available related to the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, direct the military to create an Iron Dome missile defence shield and eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies from the military.

He also told supporters he would stop transgender women from competing in female sports categories and hand back control of education to America’s states.

“You’re going to see executive orders that are going to make you extremely happy,” he told the crowd. “We have to set our country on the proper course.”

Presidents usually take executive action when they enter office but the volume of day one orders from Trump could dwarf his predecessors and many are expected to be challenged in court.

He promised that his executive blitz on Monday would target illegal immigration – an issue at the heart of the Republican’s winning campaign for the presidency.

But experts say his promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants will face enormous logistical hurdles, and potentially cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.

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Trump is also expected to issue pardons for people convicted of taking part in the January 6 riots at the US Capitol in 2021 led by his supporters.

He referred to January 6 rioters as “hostages” and promised that everyone would be “very happy” with his decision on Monday.

The rally took place at the Capital One Arena in downtown Washington DC, which has a capacity of around 20,000.

It began with a performance by Kid Rock and featured speeches from TV personality Megyn Kelly, actor Jon Voight and Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller.

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Elon Musk also gave a brief speech after Trump touted his creation of Doge, an advisory agency that the tech billionaire is set to run with Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who made a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Trump’s family also joined him on stage, including sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric, and Eric’s wife Lara Trump.

Supports of the president-elect have flooded the nation’s capital this weekend despite bitterly cold temperatures and snow on Sunday.

Monday’s inauguration ceremony has been relocated indoors into the Rotunda of the US Capitol for the first time in 40 years due to the poor weather conditions, leaving thousands of people who had hoped to watch the ceremony along the National Mall disappointed.

The temperature is expected to be about -6C (22F) at noon local time, when the swearing-in takes place.

Supporters have instead been asked to watch the event from the Capitol One Arena, which will also host a version of the traditional outdoor parade.

Trump has said he will “join the crowd” there after taking the oath of office and delivering his inaugural address. The themes of his speech will reportedly be unity, strength and “fairness”.

Franklin Graham – the son of famous evangelist Billy Graham – will give the invocation during Monday’s inauguration ceremony.

“I think President Trump is a much different man than he was in 2017,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme. “I think God has strengthened him and he’s come through this a much stronger man and he’s going to be a much better president for all these hardships he’s gone through.”

Every new president begins a fresh chapter in American history. And when Donald Trump is inaugurated in a frigid Washington DC on Monday, he will be hoping to usher in a new era for this country.

The ceremony in the rotunda of the US Capitol, moved indoors for the first time in decades due to the bitter cold, will also mark the moment he starts being judged on action and not promises.

And he has promised seismic change as well as action on day one. At a raucous rally in the city on Sunday, Trump said he would sign a flurry of executive orders within moments of being inaugurated, covering issues ranging from immigration and deportations to the environment and transgender rights.

“You’re going to have a lot of fun watching television tomorrow,” he told the crowd here.

But even if his presidency begins with a serious bang, there are still questions about what Trump’s second act will look like.

Will we feel the tectonic plates of power shift beneath our feet as he re-enters the White House? Can he deliver his pledged sweeping reforms? Will it be as apocalyptic as his opponents suggest?

Listening to some of his detractors, you would be forgiven for thinking the skies will darken and the birds will flee Washington as soon as he takes the oath of office.

Many worry he will try to rule as an autocrat and undermine American democracy. His predecessor, Joe Biden, pointedly used his final Oval Office address to warn of a dangerous oligarchy of unaccountable billionaires forming around Trump that threatens the basic rights and freedoms of Americans.

But no one can deny Trump, 78, has a clear mandate after his decisive election victory in November. He won the popular vote and the electoral college. He won a clean sweep of swing states. His agenda has the green light from voters.

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This time around, Trump is determined his agenda will be enacted. He has a far more experienced and deeply loyal team behind him to make sure that happens.

He also plans – presumably with the help of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” – to swiftly fire huge numbers of civil servants and officials.

Trump still believes there is a “deep state” within the US government that will try to frustrate his agenda. So we can expect a far more drastic clear-out of federal employees than would normally come with a change of administration, and a far more politicised government machine behind him.

Many of his plans, like major tax cuts for big corporations and the very wealthy, will need legislation passed by Congress.

But that will not be a problem, as he has control of the Republican Party and its majority in both chambers. Senators and Representatives are unlikely to defy him in significant numbers. And he has Musk on hand to wield his social media platform and vast wealth to pressure any rebels back into line.

Is there anything that could prevent Trump from rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented migrants or using the justice system to target political opponents he sees as his enemies?

There are logistical and financial hurdles no doubt, particularly when it comes to mass deportations, but Democratic opposition alone is unlikely to be enough to stop this. The party, after all, is still reeling from its resounding election defeat.

There is internal strife as members carry out a prolonged post-mortem over that result. And the resistance movement that mobilised before Trump’s first term, prompting days of nationwide protests after his inauguration that brought more than a million people onto the streets, appears less energised this time.

After his 2020 election defeat, Trump was kicked off social media platforms following the Capitol riot and his baseless claims of voter fraud. These companies are already treating him differently this time around, as he prepares to be inaugurated inside the rotunda where his supporters roamed on 6 January 2021.

Prominently seated in the VIP section to watch will be a collection of the richest men in the world. Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg will all be there. So will the CEOs of Google, Apple and TikTok. It is the living embodiment of the ultra-wealthy “tech-industrial complex” that Biden warned about in his farewell address.

These men have already moved to warm relations with Trump. Zuckerberg‘s Meta is abandoning fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, Bezos prevented the Washington Post (which he owns) from endorsing Kamala Harris. And all of them have donated millions to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Whether it is in Congress or the corporate world, Trump is taking office this time around with a warm welcome from America’s powerbrokers.

There’s little doubt that his mass of executive orders on day one will feature some eye-catching actions designed to titillate his base. Like issuing presidential pardons for many, if not all, of the people convicted over the Capitol riot. His supporters will be thrilled to see the people they regard as political hostages freed from jail.

Trump will need a steady stream of populist moves like this. Because there is a risk some of his plans are at odds with what a section of his supporters voted for.

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Many wanted lower prices after years of high inflation. But most economists suggest tariffs on imported goods will probably push prices up further.

Mass deportations could lead to a labour shortage in construction – complicating his pledge to build more houses – and in the agricultural sector, which could further increase the price of food. And it is billionaires, not the working class, who look set to benefit from the biggest tax cuts.

Eye-catching proposals, like promising to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, may well excite many of those who put him in office. But it remains to be seen how many Americans will feel the benefit of his headline policies.

Trump, however, is the ultimate political showman. His ability to entertain is part of his power and appeal. But his second term agenda goes deeper than pure showmanship and would be transformative if enacted.

His White House comeback will be dramatic and eventful, with consequences felt around the world. It may change America in fundamental and lasting ways.

Dr Mustafa Ali Abdulrahman Ibo and his colleagues bravely perform surgery under increasing bombardment in the last remaining hospital in el-Fasher, a city that has been under siege for the last nine months in Sudan’s western Darfur region.

Over the last month the hospital has recorded 28 deaths and more than 50 injuries among its staff and patients because of intense shelling. This is the highest number of casualties recorded in a month since the siege began.

“Recent continuous attacks targeting Saudi Hospital have intensified dramatically, it has become part of our daily lives,” Dr Ibo, a Darfuri who has lived in el-Fasher since 2011, told the BBC.

He said the most frightening day had been when a team of medics were performing an emergency caesarean as the shelling began – a near-death experience for them all.

”The first one hit the hospital’s perimeter wall… [then] another shell hit the maternity operating room, the debris damaged the electrical generator, cutting off the power and plunging us into complete darkness,” he said.

The surgical team had no option but to use the torches on their phones to finish the two-hour operation.

Part of the building had collapsed and the room was full of dust with shrapnel scattered all over the place.

Dr Khatab Mohammed, who had been leading the surgery, described the dangers.

“The situation was dire, the environment was no longer sterile,” the 29-year-old medic told the BBC.

“After ensuring our safety and the patient’s safety from shrapnel, we cleaned her and changed our surgical gowns since our clothes were full of dust and we continued the surgery,” he said, adding that the patient could have died from complications.

After successfully delivering the baby, the doctors moved mother and new-born to another room to recover and then gathered to take a group photo.

It was a testament to their survival, but Dr Mohammed added: “I thought it might be our last photo, believing that another shell would hit the same spot and we would all die.”

They went on to perform two more life-saving emergency operations that day.

These doctors – most of whom are graduates of the University of el-Fasher – have stayed put since Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023.

The conflict has pitted the army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and has caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, forcing more than 12 million people from their homes.

The two rivals had been allies – coming to power together in a coup – but fell out over an internationally backed plan to move towards civilian rule.

A year into the conflict, the siege of el-Fasher began. It is the only city still under army control in Darfur, where the RSF has been accused of carrying out ethnic cleansing against non-Arab communities.

The RSF began attacking el-Fasher from three sides and cut off supply routes. In a report issued last month, the UN Human Rights Office said the fighting had left more that 780 civilians dead and more than 1,140 injured – many of them casualties of crossfire.

The fighting has forced all other hospitals in el-Fasher to shut.

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South Hospital, which was supported by medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), was the main health facility in the city dealing with war casualties.

It was near the frontline and was stormed in June by RSF fighters, who also looted medicine and equipment and assaulted staff.

Saudi Hospital, which is run by the Ministry of Health and funded by non-governmental organisations, the UN and MSF, specialises in obstetrics and gynaecology but is now providing all medical services – it is the only place in North Darfur state with surgical capacity.

Amid shortages of medical supplies, equipment and personnel, Saudi Hospital is facing ”a heart-breaking situation that violates all humanitarian and international laws and values”, its medical director, 28-year-old Mudathir Ibrahim Suleiman, told the BBC.

He recalled how terrifying it was during recent bombings: “Pregnant women, children and staff were in shock and paralysis, some people were injured and had to be pulled out the rubble.

“All the current conditions push us to consider stopping our work, but women and children have no other place to save their lives except this hospital,” he said.

“The staff at the hospital are doing the impossible to save lives.”

All normal aspects of life have completely disappeared from el-Fasher, especially in the northern and eastern parts. The university, for example, operates via online learning, with exam centres established in safer cities like Kassala in eastern Sudan.

With widespread hunger and insecurity, the city has also emptied. About half the population have sought refuge in the nearby Zamzam camp, where an estimated 500,000 people now live in famine conditions.

Saudi Hospital also serves the camp, with MSF running ambulances to bring in emergency cases.

But these have also recently started coming under attack, including an incident earlier this month when a gunman shot at a “clearly marked ambulance with the MSF logo and flag”.

“We are horrified by this deadly attack on a humanitarian crew carrying out life-saving medical work where it’s desperately needed,” MSF’s Michel Olivier Lacharité said in a statement.

Dr Ibo admitted it was his colleagues – there are 35 doctors and 60 nurses at Saudi Hospital – who kept him going.

”We lose people every day, and offices and rooms are destroyed, but thanks to the determination of the young staff, we continue to persevere.

”We draw our resilience from the people of el-Fasher – we are its children and graduates of the University of el-Fasher.”

Aid agencies are warning that one of the worst maternal and child health emergencies is unfolding in Darfur, where some areas are also being targeted in air strikes by the military.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for a halt to attacks on health facilities and adherence to international humanitarian laws.

“The sanctity of health must be respected even in war,” WHO Sudan communications officer Loza Mesfin Tesfaye told the BBC.

Dr Mohammed, who is originally from Sudan’s White Nile State but came to el-Fasher to study medicine in 2014, also pays homage to his team, who have ignored many opportunities to flee.

“Our souls refused to abandon the people of this city – especially given the catastrophic conditions we witness daily.”

All the medics, who communicated via chats and voice notes on WhatsApp, sounded focused.

”We are determined to continue saving lives, from wherever we can, even underground or under the shade of a tree, we pray for the war to end and for peace to prevail,” said Dr Ibo.

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Irawati Karve led a life that stood apart from those around her.

Born in British-ruled India, and at a time when women didn’t have many rights or freedoms, Karve did the unthinkable: she pursued higher studies in a foreign country, became a college professor and India’s first female anthropologist.

She also married a man of her choosing, swam in a bathing suit, drove a scooter and even dared to defy a racist hypothesis of her doctorate supervisor – a famous German anthropologist named Eugen Fischer.

Her writings about Indian culture and civilisation and its caste system are ground-breaking, and are a part of the curriculum in Indian colleges. Yet she remains an obscure figure in history and a lot about her life remains unknown.

A new book titled Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, written by her granddaughter Urmilla Deshpande and academic Thiago Pinto Barbosa, sheds light on her fascinating life, and the many odds she braved to blaze an inspiring trail for the women, and men, who came after her.

Born in 1905 in Burma (now Myanmar), Irawati was named after the Irrawaddy river. The only girl among six siblings, she was doted on by her family and brought up in comfort.

But the young girl’s life took unexpected turns, resulting in experiences that would shape her as a person. Apart from strong women, Irawati’s life also crossed paths with empathetic, progressive men who paved the way for her to break barriers and cheered her on as she did so.

At seven, Irawati was sent to boarding school in Pune – a rare opportunity from her father when most girls were pushed into marriage. In Pune, she met RP Paranjpye, a prominent educationist whose family unofficially adopted Irawati and raised her as their own.

In the Paranjpye household, Irawati was exposed to a way of life that celebrated critical thinking and righteous living, even if that meant going against the grain of Indian society. Paranjpye, who Irawati fondly called “appa” or her “second father”, was a man far ahead of his times.

A college principal and staunch supporter of women’s education, he was also an atheist. Through him, Irawati discovered the fascinating world of social sciences and its impact on society.

When Irawati decided to pursue a doctorate in anthropology in Berlin, despite her biological father’s objections, she found support in Paranjpye and her husband, Dinkar Karve, a professor of science.

She arrived in the German city in 1927, after a days-long journey by ship, and began pursuing her degree under the mentorship of Fischer, a celebrated professor of anthropology and eugenics.

At the time, Germany was still reeling from the impact of World War One and Hitler had not yet risen to power. But the spectre of anti-Semitism had begun raising its ugly head. Irawati bore witness to this hate when she found out one day that a Jewish student in her building had been murdered.

In the book, the authors describe the fear, shock and disgust Irawati felt when she saw the man’s body lying on the footpath outside her building, blood oozing across the concrete.

Irawati wrestled with these emotions while working on the thesis assigned by Fischer: to prove that white Europeans were more logical and reasonable – and therefore racially superior to non-white Europeans. This involved meticulously studying and measuring 149 human skulls.

Fischer hypothesised that white Europeans had asymmetrical skulls to accommodate larger right frontal lobes, supposedly a marker of higher intelligence. However, Irawati’s research found no correlation between race and skull asymmetry.

“She had contradicted Fischer’s hypothesis, of course, but also the theories of that institute and the mainstream theories of the time,” the authors write in the book.

She boldly presented her findings, risking her mentor’s ire and her degree. Fischer gave her the lowest grade, but her research critically and scientifically rejected the use of human differences to justify discrimination. (Later, the Nazis would use Fischer’s theories of racial superiority to further their agenda and Fischer would join the Nazi party.)

Throughout her life, Irawati would display this streak of gumption combined with endless empathy, especially for the women she encountered.

At a time when it was unthinkable for a woman to travel too far away from home, Irawati went on field trips to remote villages in India after returning to the country, sometimes with her male colleagues, at other times with her students and even her children, to study the lives of various tribespeople.

She joined archaeological expeditions to recover 15,000-year-old bones, bridging the past and present. These gruelling trips took her deep into forests and rugged terrain for weeks or months, with the book describing her sleeping in barns or truck beds and often going days with little food.

Irawati also bravely confronted societal and personal prejudices as she interacted with people from all walks of life.

The authors describe how Irawati, a Chitpavan Brahmin from a traditionally vegetarian upper-caste Hindu community, bravely ate partially raw meat offered by a tribal leader she wished to study. She recognised it as a gesture of friendship and a test of loyalty, responding with openness and curiosity.

Her studies fostered deep empathy for humanity, leading her to later criticise fundamentalism across religions, including Hinduism. She believed India belonged to everyone who called it home.

The book recounts a moment when, reflecting on the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews, Irawati’s mind wandered to a startling realisation that would forever alter her view of humanity.

“In these reflections, Irawati learned the most difficult of lessons from Hindu philosophy: all that is you, too,” the authors write.

Irawati died in 1970, but her legacy endures through her work and the people it continues to inspire.

TikTok is resuming services to its 170 million users in US after President-elect Donald Trump said he would issue an executive order to give the app a reprieve when he takes office on Monday.

On Saturday evening, the Chinese-owned app stopped working for American users, after a law banning it on national security grounds came into effect.

Trump, who had previously backed a ban of the platform, promised on Sunday to delay implementation of the law and allow more time for a deal to be made. TikTok then said that it was in the process of “restoring service”.

Soon after, the app started working again and a popup message to its millions of users thanked Trump by name. In a statement, the company thanked the incoming president for “providing the necessary clarity and assurance” and said it would work with Trump “on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States”.

• What to know after Supreme Court decision to ban TikTok in the US
• TikTok creators mourn app where ‘overnight’ success is possible
• Americans and Chinese share jokes on ‘alternative TikTok’

TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration Monday.

Posting on Truth Social, a social media platform he owns, Trump said on Sunday: “I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark! I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, previously ignored a law requiring it to sell its US operations to avoid a ban. The law was upheld by Supreme Court on Friday and went into effect on Sunday.

It is unclear what legal authority Trump will have to delay the implementation of a law that is already in effect. But it expected that his government will not enforce the ban if he issues an executive order.

It’s an about-face from his previous position. Trump had backed a TikTok ban, but has more recently professed a “warm spot” for the app, touting the billions of views he says his videos attracted on the platform during last year’s presidential campaign.

For its part, President Joe Biden’s administration had already said that it would not enforce the law in its last hours in office and instead allow the process to play out under the incoming Trump administration.

But TikTok had pulled its services anyway on Saturday evening, before the swift restoration of access on Sunday.

The short-form video platform is wildly popular among its many millions of US users. It has also proved a valuable tool for American political campaigns to reach younger voters.

Under the law passed last April, the US version of the app had to be removed from app stores and web-hosting services if its Chinese owner ByteDance did not sell its US operations.

TikTok had argued before the Supreme Court that the law violated free speech protections for its users in the country.

The law was passed with support from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress and was upheld unanimously by Supreme Court justices earlier this week.

The issue exposes a rift on a key national security issues between the president-elect and members of his own party. His pick for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had vocally supported the ban.

“TikTok extended the Chinese Communist Party’s power and influence into our own nation, right under our noses,” he said last April. But he seemed to defer to the president-elect when a journalist asked if he supported Trump’s efforts to restore the ban.

“If I’m confirmed as secretary of State, I’ll work for the president,” he told Punchbowl media last week.

After Trump intervened on Sunday morning, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, broke with Trump by saying that any company that helps TikTok stay online would be breaking the law.

“Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from DOJ, but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs,” he wrote on social media.

An executive order that goes against the law could be fought in court.

Several states have also sued the platform, opening up the possibility to TikTok being banned by local jurisdictions, even if it is available nationally.

Although the platform went live again on Sunday for existing users, the question of whether third-parties – hosting platforms or app stores like Google or Apple – could support TikTok in the US remains murky, says University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias. The app had been removed from those stores in anticipation of the ban.

“It is murky,” he told the BBC.

In a post on Truth media, Trump promised to shield companies from liability, opening the door to TikTok being available on Apple and Google again.

“The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order,” the president-elect said on Truth Social Sunday.

But during the Supreme Court hearings, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar was adamant that an executive order cannot change the law retroactively.

“Whatever the new president does, doesn’t change that reality for these companies,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during the hearings.

“That’s right,” Prelogar said.

Professor Tobias said that the law does include a provision that would allow the president to postpone the ban for up to 90 days, if he can show that the company is making substantial progress on alleviating national security issues. But, he said, it’s not clear whether those conditions have been met.

“The best thing Trump could do is work with Congress, and not potentially be in violation of the law or have any questions left hanging,” he said.

“I don’t know that we’re going to know a whole lot more until we see that executive order.”

Donald Trump has promised he will “make heads spin” on his first day back in office on Monday, with a blitz of executive orders expected in the hours after he is sworn in as the 47th US president.

He has offered a preview of some of these yet-to-be-signed directives, saying they will target issues like illegal immigration, climate rules, diversity policies, classified documents and more.

It is common for presidents to sign a range of executive orders when they enter office. Such orders carry the weight of law but can be overturned by subsequent presidents or the courts.

But the scale of what Trump has planned could be unprecedented, with legal challenges expected.

Here is what to know.

Deportations

Trump has vowed to “launch the largest deportation program in American history”, starting from day one.

He is expected to declare a national border emergency, and order the military to help secure the southern border, according to Fox News.

Trump has also said he will end a longtime policy that has kept federal immigration authorities from conducting raids on churches and schools.

Any mass deportation programme is expected to face logistical difficulties, billions in costs and a flurry of legal challenges.

Remain in Mexico

Trump may quickly move to re-implement his “Remain in Mexico” policy, which during his first term returned about 70,000 non-Mexican asylum seekers across the border to Mexico to await hearings.

End birthright citizenship

Trump has called the 150-year-old constitutional right that says anyone born on US soil is an American citizen “ridiculous” and vowed to scrap it on day one.

But doing that is much more difficult than simply issuing an executive order, because birthright citizenship is explicitly guaranteed by the US Constitution.

Closing the border on health grounds

A 1944 measure called Title 42 allows the US government to curb migration to protect public health. It was last used during the pandemic, but US media reports that the incoming administration is looking for a disease that would help justify its plans to close the southern US border with Mexico.

Drug cartels

Trump is expected to classify drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”, putting them on a list alongside groups like Al Qaeda, so-called Islamic State and Hamas.

Build the wall

When Trump was first elected president in 2016, he signed an executive order to build a border wall. Although parts of the wall have been built, there is still much left uncompleted, and he may try to finish what he started.

Tariffs

Trump has vowed sweeping tariffs on imported goods as part of his promise to prioritise American manufacturing.

Trump introduced tariffs in his first term, including some on China that Joe Biden retained.

But this time he is promising 10% tariffs on all imports, 25% on Canadian and Mexican goods and 60% on things coming from China. He has said he will begin signing executive orders imposing these on day one.

Tariffs are likely to make consumer goods more expensive and could fuel inflation, experts say. Some countries are considering retaliatory tariffs.

Crypto pile

Trump has championed cryptocurrency and his election saw the value of Bitcoin increase by 30%.

Some believe Trump will move quickly to create a federal “Bitcoin stockpile” – a strategic reserve similar to the US’s stockpile of gold and oil – that he has said would serve as a “permanent national asset to benefit all Americans”.

Scrap Joe Biden’s climate policies

The outgoing president sees the series of directives, laws and funding programmes he championed to boost green jobs, regulate pollution and fund infrastructure as one of his biggest accomplishments.

Trump has made it clear he wants to undo much of it. He is expected to use executive orders to remove drilling restrictions offshore and on federal land – fulfilling his promise to “drill, baby drill” and increase US energy production and independence.

He has also pledged to ban new wind projects and cancel electric vehicle mandates.

Pull out of the Paris Agreement (again)

Within six months of taking office in 2017, Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement – a landmark international deal designed to limit rising global temperatures.

Biden moved to rejoin the accord on his first day in office in 2021, but Trump is expected to again pull out of it.

Free Jan 6 ‘hostages’

Hundreds of people convicted after the 2021 US Capitol riots are awaiting potential pardons on Monday, when Trump returns to office.

​​”I am inclined to pardon many of them,” he told CNN over the summer. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.”

More than 1,500 individuals were arrested in relation to the event. At least 600 were charged with assaulting or impeding federal officers.

At his pre-inauguration victory rally on Sunday, Trump said he would release classified documents related to the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963, a subject of countless conspiracy theories.

He said he would do the same for files related to the 1968 killings of Senator Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Ukraine war

Trump claimed during the campaign that he would end the conflict on day one of his presidency. He has since said that he may need six months. It’s unclear what he might do in his first days.

Cuba and Venezuela

Trump could use executive orders to undo Biden’s recent decision to remove Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. He could also reinstate sanctions against Venezuela. Both countries were frequent targets of his ire during his first administration.

DEI

In recent years, schools and businesses across the US have adopted policies designed to support women and racial minorities.

These practices, often classified under “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), have angered many conservatives and faced legal challenges. Trump has promised to dissolve them and major corporations including Meta, Walmart and Amazon have already begun rolling back related initiatives.

Trump could use an executive order to forbid federal funding going to schools or other institutions that have DEI programmes. He could also ban funding for schools that teach “critical race theory” (CRT).

Abortion

Like most Republican presidents before him, Trump is expected to reinstate the “Mexico City policy”, which bans federal aid to international groups that provide abortion counselling.

He is also expected to reinstate an abortion rule that prohibits Title X federal health providers, a low-income family planning programme, from mentioning abortion to patients. The change effectively stripped tens of millions of dollars from organisations that offer abortion or provide referrals.

Transgender women in sports

Trump has repeatedly criticised what he calls “transgender lunacy” in schools and healthcare, and has specifically vowed to bar transgender women from competing in women’s sports.

On Sunday morning, Trump promised to issue an executive order that would postpone a law banning Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok from being implemented.

His order, he said, would give them time to find a US partner to buy a 50% stake in the company.

Trump previously backed a TikTok ban, but recently reversed his stance, pointing to the billions of views he says his videos attracted on the platform during last year’s presidential campaign.

Chappell Roan can’t be stopped.

Over the last 12 months, the 26-year-old has become the buzziest star in pop. A flamboyant, flame-haired sensation, whose songs are as colourful as they are raw.

Her debut album, released to little fanfare in 2023, has just topped the UK charts for a second time. Next week, she’s up for six Grammy awards, including best new artist. And BBC Radio 1 have named her their Sound Of 2025.

Success has been all the sweeter because her former record label refused to release many of the songs that exploded onto the charts last year.

“They were like, ‘This is not gonna work. We don’t get it’,” Roan tells Radio 1’s Jack Saunders.

Reaching pop’s A-list isn’t just a vindication but a revolution.

The 26-year-old is the first female pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer person, rather than coming out as part of their post-fame narrative.

On a more personal level, she’s finally done well enough to move into a house of her own, and acquire a rescue cat, named Cherub Lou.

“She’s super tiny, her breath smells so bad, and she doesn’t have a meow,” the singer dotes.

If kitten ownership is a benefit of fame, Roan has bristled at the downsides.

She has spoken out against abusive fans, calling out “creepy behaviour” from people who harass her in airport queues and “stalk” her parents’ home. Last September, she went viral for cussing a photographer who’d been shouting abuse at stars on the red carpet of the MTV Awards.

“I was looking around, and I was like, ‘This is what people are OK with all the time? And I’m supposed to act normal? This is not normal. This is crazy’,” she recalls.

The incident made headlines. British tabloids called her outburst the “tantrum” of a “spoiled diva”.

But Roan is unapologetic.

“I’ve been responding that way to disrespect my whole life – but now there are cameras on me, and I also happen to be a pop star, and those things don’t match. It’s like oil and water.”

Roan says musicians are trained to be obedient. Standing up for yourself is portrayed as whining or ingratitude, and rejecting convention comes at a cost.

“I think, actually, I’d be more successful if I was OK wearing a muzzle,” she laughs.

“If I were to override more of my basic instincts, where my heart is going, ‘‘, I would be bigger.

“I would be way bigger… And I would still be on tour right now.”

Indeed, Roan rejected the pressure of extending her 2024 tour to protect her physical and mental health. She credits that resolve to her late grandfather.

“There’s something he said that I think about in every move I make with my career. There are always options.”

“So when someone says, ‘Do this concert because you’ll never get offered that much money ever again’, it’s like, who cares?

“If I don’t feel like doing this right now, there are always options. There is not a scarcity of opportunity. I think about that all the time.”

As fans will know by now, Roan was born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz and raised in the Bible Belt town of Willard, Missouri.

The oldest of four children, she aspired to be an actress – but, for a long time, it seemed her future would be in sport. She ran at state-competition level, and almost went to college for cross-country.

Then she entered a singing contest at the age of 13 and won. Before long, she’d written her first song, about a crush on a Mormon boy who wasn’t allowed to date outside his faith.

She took her stage name as a tribute to her grandfather Dennis K Chappell and his favourite song, a Western ballad called The Strawberry Roan.

“He was very funny and very smart,” she recalls. “And I don’t think he ever questioned my ability.

“A lot of people were like, ‘You should go completely country’, or, ‘You should try Christian music’. And he never told me to do anything.

“He was the only person that was like, ‘You don’t need a plan B. Just do it’.”

Eventually, one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, which signed her at the age of just 17.

Moving to LA, she recorded and released her first EP, School Nights, in 2017. It was a solid but unremarkable affair, steeped in the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde.

Roan only found a sound of her own when a group of gay friends took her to a drag bar.

“I walked into that club in West Hollywood and it was like heaven,” she told the BBC last year. “It was amazing to see all these people who were happy and confident in their bodies.

“And the go-go dancers! I was enthralled. I couldn’t stop watching them. I was like, ‘I have to do that’.”

She didn’t become a dancer, but she did write a song imagining what it would be like to be one and how her mother would react. Roan called it Pink Pony Club after a strip bar in her home town.

“That song changed everything,” she says. “It put me in a new category.

“I never thought I could actually be a ‘pop star girl’ and Pink Pony forced me into that.”

Her label disagreed. They refused to release Pink Pony Club for two years. Shortly after they relented, Roan was dropped in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.

Bruised but not broken, she went back home and spent the next year serving coffee in a drive-through doughnut shop.

“It absolutely had a positive impact on me,” she says. “You have the knowledge of what it’s like to clean a public restroom. That’s very important.”

The period was transformational in other ways. She saved her earnings, had her heart broken by a person “with pale blue eyes”, moved back to Los Angeles, and gave herself a year to make it.

It might have taken a little longer than that, but she hit the ground running.

During her exile, Roan had stayed in touch with her Pink Pony Club co-writer, Daniel Nigro.

He was also working with another up-and-coming singer called Olivia Rodrigo and, when her career took off, Roan got a courtside seat, supporting Rodrigo on tour and providing backing vocals on her second album, Guts.

More importantly, Nigro used the momentum to sign Roan to his own record label and ensure the release of her debut album in September 2023.

At first, it seemed like Roan’s original label had been right. Sales were disappointing and audiences were slow to catch on because her in-your-face queer anthems were out of step with the trend for whispery, confessional pop.

But those songs came to life on stage. Big, fun and designed for audience participation, they’re taken to new heights by Roan’s powerhouse voice and flamboyant stage persona.

“A drag queen does not get on stage to calm people down,” she says. “A drag queen does not say things to flatter people. A queen makes you blush, you know what I mean? Expect the same energy at my show.”

Sure enough, it was a live-streamed appearance at last year’s Coachella Festival that pushed her into the upper echelons of pop.

Dressed in a PVC crop top that declared “Eat Me”, she played the packed Gobi tent like a headliner, strutting purposefully across the stage and coaching the audience in the campy choreography for Hot To Go.

Then she stared directly into the camera and dedicated a song to her ex.

“Bitch I know you’re watching… and all those horrible things happening to you are karma.”

The clip went viral and, before long, her career did, too.

By the summer, all of her shows had been upgraded. Festivals kept having to move her to bigger stages. When she played Lollapalooza in August, she drew the event’s biggest ever daytime crowd.

“It just takes a decade,” she says. “That’s what I tell everyone. ‘If you’re OK with it taking 10 years, then you’re good’.”

As fans discovered her debut album, Roan also released a standalone single – a sarcastic slice of synth-pop called Good Luck Babe, which became her breakout hit.

“I don’t even know if I’ve ever said this in an interview, but it was originally called Good Luck, Jane,” she reveals.

“I wanted it to be about me falling in love with my best friend, and then her being like, ‘Ha ha ha, I don’t like you back, I like boys.’

“And it was like, ‘OK, well, good luck with that, ‘.”

A masterclass in pop storytelling, Good Luck Babe has a proper three-act structure, with a killer pay-off in the middle eight and a chorus you just can’t shake.

Still, Roan was shocked by its success.

“I just threw it out, like, I don’t know what this is going to do – and it carried the whole year!”

The question, of course, is what the star does next, now that she’s the Sound of 2025.

She’s already previewed two new songs, The Subway and The Giver, in concert – but all she will reveal about a second album is that she’s “more reluctant to be sad or dark”.

“It feels so good to party,” she explains.

Looking back at the last 12 months, she’s philosophical about what it means to be pop’s hottest new commodity.

“A lot of people think fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you possibly want than adoration?”

Roan does admit that the admiration of strangers is more “addictive” than she’d expected.

“Like, I understand why I’m so scared to lose this feeling.

“It’s so scary to think that one day people will not care about you the same way as they do right now – and I think [that idea] lives in women’s brains a lot different than men’s.”

Ultimately, she decides, success and failure are “out of my control”. Instead, she wants to make good choices.

“If I can look back and say, ‘I did not crumble under the weight of expectation, and I did not stand for being abused or blackmailed’, [then] at least I stayed true to my heart,” she says.

“Like I said before, there are always options.”

• 1) Chappell Roan
• 2) Ezra Collective
• 3) Barry Can’t Swim
• 4) Myles Smith
• 5) English Teacher

A hidden cross-border tunnel used to smuggle migrants and contraband between the US and Mexico will be sealed, Mexican border officials have said.

Running between Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and El Paso in Texas, which sit next to each other on either side of the border, the 300m tunnel was concealed in a storm sewer system and only discovered last week – despite official estimates it took at least a year to build.

Investigators are now looking into whether local officials knew of its construction.

Security has been ramped up on both sides of the border ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump, who has vowed to launch mass deportations of illegal immigrants once in office.

The tunnel had been reinforced with wooden beams to prevent collapses and was equipped with lighting and ventilation.

Such a structure could have taken at least a year to build, army officials said.

The Mexican Attorney General’s Office has been tasked with investigating whether local officials had been complicit in the construction of the tunnel, General Jose Lemus, commander of Ciudad Juarez’s military garrison, told Mexican media.

The tunnel was discovered on 10 January, after US border patrol agents removed a metal plate covering the entry hole to the tunnel and then alerted their Mexican counterparts to its existence.

The flow of migrants from Mexico in the US has long overshadowed relations between the two neighbours and became a defining issue of the 2024 US presidential election race that culminated in Trump’s victory last year.

Raids to detain and deport migrants living in the US without permission could begin as early as Tuesday – the day after Trump officially returns to the White House – according to US media reports.

Under US diplomatic pressure, Mexico has been conducting its largest ever migrant crackdown, bussing and flying non-Mexican migrants to the country’s south, far from the US border.

But Trump campaigned on a promise to seal the US-Mexico border and his threat to impose 25% tariffs was seen as an attempt to force Mexico into doing more to stop undocumented migrants from reaching the southern border of the US.

In response, the recently-elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has said she will ask the US take action to stop the flow of weapons being smuggled from the US into Mexico.

Two young women remain in intensive care after a chairlift at a ski resort in Spain collapsed on Saturday, leaving several people injured.

The Astún resort in the Spanish Pyrenees, where the incident happened, was closed as rescue services attended the scene but has since reopened.

A pulley failure appears to have caused a cable to slacken and some chairs to drop to the ground, throwing skiers into the snow.

Authorities are investigating what went wrong, state media reports. A statement from the resort stressed it has “all the permits and inspections”.

Regional officials initially estimated that about 30 people had been hurt, but the ski resort later said around 15 people had been considered injured.

Local emergency services triaged those who had fallen at the resort. They said 10 people were taken to hospital, and 20 others were discharged “on the spot”.

The two 18-year-olds in the worst condition were airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Zaragoza, Spanish state media reports. One is said to be stable while the other remains under observation but is improving.

A pulley at one end of the chairlift came loose and part of the structure supporting it collapsed, causing a cable to lose tension and several seats to fall, according the state broadcaster TVE.

Dozens of people left hanging on the 15m-high (50ft) chairlift were helped down.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he was “shocked” by the news of the incident.

Jaime Pelegri, who was on the lift, told the BBC that a cable lost tension before the chairs on his side of the structure fell.

“It was very scary, but very fast,” he said – adding that ambulances and helicopters arrived at the scene within 15 minutes.

He wrote in a post on X earlier: “Luckily we are fine but there are injured people, we have seen several stretchers coming down.”

Images on social media appear to show one of the chairlift’s flywheels off its upright.

Regional President Jorge Azcón and Spain’s Minister of the Interior Roberto Bermúdez de Castro went to the scene.

Azcón wrote on X: “All the necessary services of the [government] are working to assist the affected and injured people.”

PM Pedro Sánchez said he had spoken with Azcón to offer the “full support” of the government.

A telephone line has been set up for the families of those affected.

The Astún resort, which is popular with Spanish skiers, is located in the Aragon region of the Pyrenees mountains, near the border with France.

A court in Seoul has extended the time South Korea’s impeached president Yoon Suk Yeol will be detained over his botched attempt to impose martial law in the country last month.

Citing concerns Yoon could destroy evidence if released, on Sunday a judge issued a warrant allowing investigators to keep the suspended president in custody for up to 20 days.

The 64-year-old was arrested on Wednesday after a weeks-long standoff between investigators and his presidential security team.

Supporters of the president broke into the court after his detention was extended, reportedly smashing windows and doors in an incident condemned by Yoon and the country’s acting president.

The warrant – and Yoon’s subsequent refusal to comply with investigators – is the latest development in a saga that has left South Korea reeling from a political crisis.

The warrant was issued at around 03:00 local time (18:00 GMT on Saturday).

The suspended president is being investigated by the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO) on charges of insurrection over a failed martial law order on 3 December that plunged the country into turmoil.

He has been impeached by parliament and suspended – but will only be removed from office if a constitutional court upholds the impeachment.

Investigators now have 20 days – including the four days Yoon has already spent in custody following his arrest – to bring the president to trial.

After his detention was extended, Yoon’s lawyer, Yun Gap-geun, told the Yonhap News Agency that the president would refuse to be questioned by the CIO.

Pro-Yoon supporters rallied outside the court house in the lead up to the decision, with many entering the building after judges issued the extension.

Journalists at the scene reported seeing dozens of people arrested by police following the incident.

Acting President Choi Sang-mok expressed his “strong regret” over the violence, “which is unimaginable in a democratic society”, adding that authorities would increase security around future appearances.

Choi only recently stepped into the top job after the South Korean parliament voted to impeach the previous acting president, Han Duck-soo, over claims of frustrating Yoon’s impeachment process.

Yoon was “shocked” by the scenes in court, his lawyer said, and called on his supporters to express themselves peacefully, according to local media.

The incident is the latest episode in a series of attempts by Yoon’s supporters to frustrate legal proceedings against the president.

The night before his arrest, hundreds of pro-Yoon protesters camped outside the president’s home and jostled with the police officers attempting to take him into custody.

Similar scenes occurred during an earlier arrest attempt on January 3, where angry pro-Yoon supporters hoping to stop the arrest rallied outside the president’s house.

South Korean police were forced to call off their first arrest attempt after the president’s security team blocked entry to Yoon’s compound.

Public opinion has been divided after Yoon’s shock announcement of martial law last month, which he claimed was due to “anti-state forces” in the South Korean parliament, while mentioning North Korea.

But others have viewed the move as an extreme reaction to the political stalemate that arose after his party’s main opposition won a landslide in April, as well as Yoon’s unpopularity in the wake of a scandal surrounding the First Lady.

Thousands have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the suspended president in the weeks since his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law.

The death toll from attacks by a rebel group in Colombia’s Catatumbo region has risen to 60, the country’s human rights office has said.

Rival factions have been vying for control of the cocaine trade in the region – which sits near the border with Venezuela – for years.

The Ombudsman’s Office said the latest violence involved the National Liberation Army (ELN) – the largest armed group still active in Colombia – and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), which signed a peace treaty with the state in 2016.

The attacks broke an uneasy truce between the guerrilla groups, which had been in peace negotiations with the government.

• Who are the Farc?

The Ombudsman’s Office, a government agency that oversees the protection of citizens’ human and civil rights, previously reported that 40 had died in the violence.

It said that many people, including community leaders and their families, were facing a “special risk” of being kidnapped or killed at the hands of the ELN. It noted that 20 people had recently been kidnapped, half of whom were women.

The office said that among those killed were seven peace treaty signatories and Carmelo Guerrero, the leader of the Association for Peasant Unity in Catatumbo (Asuncat), a local advocacy group.

Asuncat wrote on social media on Friday that Roger Quintero and Freiman Velasquez, members of its board of directors, had not been seen since the previous day, and that it suspected armed groups had taken them.

“In some communities in the region, food shortages are beginning to be reported, affecting local communities,” the Ombudsman’s Office wrote in a statement on Saturday, adding that thousands of people are believed to have been displaced by the violence.

“Elderly people, children, adolescents, pregnant women and people with disabilities are suffering the consequences of these events.”

“Catatumbo is once again stained with blood,” the Association of Mothers of Catatumbo for Peace wrote on Friday.

“The bullets exchanged not only hurt those who hold the weapons, but also tear apart the dreams of our communities, break up families and sow terror in the hears of our children.”

The Ombudsman’s Office appeared to lay the blame for the latest violence on the ELN, which had been in peace talks with the Colombian government until they were suspended on Friday due to the violence in Catatumbo.

President Gustavo Petro – who since his election in 2022 has sought to end violence between armed groups in the country – accused the ELN of “war crimes” and said the group “shows no willingness to make peace”.

The ELN accused Farc of having initiated the conflict by killing civilians in a statement on Saturday, according to Reuters news agency. Farc has not publicly responded to the allegation.

On Saturday, the Colombian army announced it was sending additional troops to the region in an effort to restore peace.

Until recently, Jane would have described her family as normal, law-abiding citizens. But that changed last summer, when the full-time mum started illegally buying cannabis oil online for her daughter, Annie.

The 10-year-old has a severe, rare type of epilepsy, resistant to conventional treatments.

At her worst, Annie was admitted to hospital 22 times in 22 months. Doctors warned Jane there was a very real prospect of her daughter dying from a seizure.

Jane says she doesn’t want to break the law – but the severity of Annie’s condition is such that she doesn’t care. We have changed their names to protect their identities.

“[Annie] deserves to be happy. She deserves to have this quality of life,” Jane explains. “And if I’m breaking the law by giving her this quality of life, am I wrong or is the law wrong?”

The family cannot afford a private prescription, which costs approximately £2,000 each month from one of the many clinics that have been established since the legalisation of so-called full-spectrum medical cannabis – which includes the psychoactive ingredient THC.

File on 4 Investigates has spoken to several parents, including Jane, who are going to extreme lengths to obtain these medicinal cannabis oils to treat their severely epileptic children.

As well as sourcing the drugs illegally online, some are regularly smuggling it into the UK from the Netherlands. It can be bought there legally, but it is illegal to bring it back into the UK without a licence.

Medicinal cannabis was legalised in the UK in November 2018 following a high-profile campaign – but full-spectrum medicines, which the parents we spoke to are sourcing, have not been officially licensed.

Both the NHS and private clinics can prescribe medicine that hasn’t been licensed – but in the NHS’s case, it is rare. In the past six years, fewer than five patients have been prescribed full-spectrum cannabis oil on the NHS.

One cannabis-based oil has been licensed for NHS treatment for epilepsy, but this is based on just the plant’s CBD compound – often found in products sold in health food shops. Many families say this drug does not contain all the compounds they believe play a crucial role in preventing seizures – including the psychoactive ingredient THC.

Jane spent two years fighting for an NHS prescription for the unlicensed full-spectrum medicine. Eventually a review body turned her daughter down.

Unable to get it on the NHS, she now gives Annie 0.4 milligrams of illicit full-spectrum cannabis oil twice a day.

It costs her £55 a bottle and is posted by an online supplier – significantly cheaper than a private legal prescription. Both Jane and the supplier are breaking the law.

Since taking the oil, Jane says Annie’s seizures have “dramatically reduced”. “They are a lot less severe and they don’t last as long.”

But this approach is not without risks. “Sarah” from Dorset, who bought cannabis oil for her severely epileptic four-year-old daughter, says parents are “potentially playing with fire”.

After deciding to try it on herself first, Sarah says it made her feel really unwell. “I thought I was going to pass out.”

Sarah has since raised enough money to pay for a legal private prescription for full-spectrum unlicensed cannabis medicine and says she has seen a big improvement in her daughter’s epileptic seizures.

Parent support charity MedCan, which campaigns for wider access to medical cannabis, has attempted to quantify how many UK parents are accessing the medicines illegally online.

After conducting a review of three online forums and interviewing parents, it has counted 382 families involved – which campaigners suggest is the tip of the iceberg.

Elaine Gennard, from Hertfordshire, flew to Amsterdam six times last year to buy full-spectrum cannabis oil for her daughter Fallon. She has a legal prescription with a doctor in the Netherlands, but bringing it back to the UK without a licence is illegal.

Elaine says it is worth the risk as, even after her travel expenses, the cost of the oil is half the price she would pay in the UK.

She says the medication has saved the life of Fallon, 30, who is also living with treatment-resistant epilepsy, reducing her seizures from 200 per month to about eight.

“Anyone who has a child like my daughter – that could potentially die from these seizures – as a mother you go to any length for her,” says Elaine.

Smuggling the medicines into the UK amounts to international drug trafficking, says solicitor Robert Jappie, one of the country’s leading legal experts in the medical cannabis sector. Importation of a Class B drug has “fairly hefty” prison sentences, he says.

“In practice, it seems very, very, unlikely anyone would be prosecuted – but it’s not a risk that these families should be taking,” he adds. “They should be able to access this medication safely here in the UK.”

The BBC is not aware of any families who have been prosecuted.

People like Jane are turning to unlicensed cannabis dealers because they can be much cheaper than going to private UK clinics.

One dealer, who we are calling Steve, told us he replicates pharmaceutically-manufactured drugs and gives the oils to parents for free or a donation – in what he calls a compassion programme.

When we challenged him on the potential dangers of supplying these illegal oils as medicines, Steve told us each one was tested in his laboratory.

”We have the ability to know what every single molecule, every single compound in every single bottle is in there,” he said. “We’re not reckless in what we’re doing.”

He didn’t appear concerned about the prospect of being prosecuted.

“If you want to send me to prison for stopping children having seizures, go ahead, good luck with that.”

In 2019, a year after medicinal cannabis was legalised, the government’s Health and Social Care select committee investigated the issue of access to the drugs. Its report said: “We are deeply sympathetic towards the struggle of patients and their families who see others being treated with cannabis-based products for medicinal use, whilst not being able to obtain it themselves.”

The responsibility for the current situation lies firmly with the lack of government action, believes Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, now chair of the committee.

“We predicted that unless the government put money into research, actively tried to push on this, it probably wouldn’t happen. And that’s exactly where we found ourselves.”

Licensing of new medicines requires lengthy clinical trials that usually focus on one or two compounds. Researchers at Great Ormond Street Hospital and University College London are planning trials that will examine the cannabis compounds CBD and THC. This is expected to start in 18 months.

The Department of Health and Social Care told the BBC licensed cannabis-based medicines were routinely funded by the NHS where there was clear evidence of their quality, safety, and effectiveness.

“The NHS is taking an evidence-based approach to unlicensed cannabis-based treatments to ensure they are proved safe and effective before they can be considered for roll-out more widely,” it said in a statement.

A spokesperson for NHS England said licensed treatment had been approved by the regulator and recommended by NICE – the body that advises the NHS on best treatments – as being cost-effective.

“Many doctors and professional bodies rightly remain concerned about unlicensed products as there is more limited evidence available on their safety and efficacy,” they added.

“Manufacturers are encouraged to engage with the UK medicines regulatory process in order to seek a licence and provide doctors with the confidence to use their products.”

President-elect Donald Trump will move back into the White House on Monday after he officially becomes the 47th president of the United States.

Inauguration day includes a formal swearing-in ceremony as well as musical performances and a number of formal balls. But freezing temperatures this year will move events indoors, with Trump and Vice-President-elect JD Vance set to take the oath of office in the United States Capitol Rotunda building.

The weather has also derailed the traditional inaugural parade.

It’s the formal ceremony that marks the end of one president’s time in office and the start of the successor’s administration.

It is the most high-profile part of the transition of power between government leaders in Washington DC.

A key part of the ceremony includes the president-elect reciting the oath of office: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Though he won the election in November, Trump officially becomes the 47th president once he says those words. He previously served as the 45th president between 2017 and 2021.

Vance will also take an oath of office before he formally assumes the position of vice-president.

Trump’s second inauguration day will begin with a service at St John’s Church, Lafayette Square, a historic Washington DC church, followed by tea at the White House.

Musical performances and opening remarks are set to begin at 09:30 EST (14:30 GMT).

That will be followed by the swearing-in of Trump and Vance inside the Capitol rotunda. Each man will place their hand on a book – usually, but not always, a Bible – and recite the oath of office.

This year, Trump will use two – a personal Bible given to him by his mother in 1955 and the historic Lincoln Bible, a velvet-bound volume used at President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861.

The Trump Vance Inaugural Committee has said that Vance will also swear on a personal Bible, a family copy that belonged to his maternal great-grandmother.

Next, Trump will give the inaugural address in which the president will set out his goals for the next four years. The theme of his speech will reportedly be unity, strength and ‘fairness’.

Trump will afterwards head to the President’s Room – near the Senate chamber – to sign key documents.

He will then attend a lunch hosted by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.

This is usually followed by a parade that goes from the Capitol building down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, though it’s not clear how the parade will be adapted this year.

Later in the evening, Trump will appear at three inaugural balls throughout the city – the Commander-in-Chief Ball, the Liberty Inaugural Ball and the Starlight Ball.

He is expected to speak at all three.

The inauguration proceedings traditionally take place outside the US Capitol building, with viewing areas extending down the National Mall.

This year, however, punishing cold and brutal winds are forecast for Washington DC on Monday. Temperatures are expected to hit a low of -11C (11F) and a high of -5C (23F).

On Friday, Trump announced via social media that he had requested a venue change due to weather. He does not “want to see people hurt, or injured, in any way”, he wrote.

The inaugural address, speeches and other proceedings will move inside the Capitol, as will viewing areas for guests, lawmakers and dignitaries.

Other attendees can watch the proceedings on a livestream inside the nearby Capital One Arena, which can hold 20,000 people. The parade is essentially cancelled, due to the weather. Trump says he will visit the crowd at the sports arena after his swearing-in.

It’s not the first time extreme weather has moved the ceremony. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration was moved indoors and the traditional parade was cancelled due to unusually cold weather.

• Donald Trump’s inauguration moved indoors due to ‘dangerous’ cold

Local and federal officials are expecting about 200,000 people to show up in Washington DC, which could include Trump supporters and protesters.

Many US senators and House members also will attend, as well as guests of the incoming administration.

After Trump, Vance and their families, the next most important attendees are the outgoing president and vice-president. This means we’ll see President Joe Biden, and Vice-President Kamala Harris – who lost the November election to Trump – with their respective spouses Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff.

Former presidents and first ladies are often on the guest list, but former first lady Michelle Obama will skip this year’s inauguration, according to her office.

Mrs Obama was noticeably absent from a recent memorial for former President Jimmy Carter, remaining instead in Hawaii. She has attended every inauguration since her husband’s in 2009, including Trump’s first swearing-in in 2017.

Mrs Obama’s husband Barack is expected to be there, though, along with another former president, George W Bush, and his wife Laura Bush. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another Democrat, will not attend.

Billionaire tech chiefs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are expected to attend the ceremony, US media report.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will also reportedly be there, just one day after a potential ban of the social media platform could go into effect in the US.

China’s Vice President Han Zheng will also be in attendance.

Country singer and former American Idol winner Carrie Underwood is due to perform America the Beautiful during the ceremony.

“I love our country and am honored to have been asked to sing at the inauguration and to be a small part of this historic event,” Underwood said in a statement. “I am humbled to answer the call at a time when we must all come together in the spirit of unity and looking to the future.”

Country singer Lee Greenwood – Trump’s long-time friend and collaborator – will also perform at the inauguration ceremony, as will opera singer Christopher Macchio.

American disco group The Village People will perform at Trump’s victory rally on Sunday and at one of the inaugural balls Monday.

During the campaign, Trump frequently played the group’s songs – YMCA and Macho Man – at his rallies.

“We know this won’t make some of you happy to hear, however, we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics,” the band said in a post on its Facebook page.

“Our song YMCA is a global anthem that hopefully helps bring the country together after a tumultuous and divided campaign where our preferred candidate lost.”

Other performers are set to appear at Trump’s Sunday rally and the evening balls. Many of them are country acts, including Kid Rock, Billy Ray Cyrus, Jason Aldean and Rascal Flatts. Singer Gavin DeGraw and rapper Nelly will also perform.

• How YMCA became Donald Trump’s unlikely anthem

There is typically high demand to watch the inauguration in person, and tickets are highly prized.

Members of Congress receive a certain number of tickets to the ceremony, which they can distribute to their constituents.

These tickets are free, but often challenging to get. Americans can contact their member of Congress directly for tickets.

If you’re not able to attend in person, there are plenty of ways to watch remotely.

The White House will livestream the inauguration.

The BBC will cover it live on our TV news channel. Viewers in the UK will also be able to see coverage at 15:30 GMT on BBC One.

You can also watch a stream of the inauguration on our website and follow our live page, where we’ll bring you updates, analysis and key moments as they happen.

Listeners will be able to hear a radio special on the BBC World Service and, in the UK, on BBC Radio 4. Special episodes of Americast and The Coming Storm will be among the podcast offer.

• Just how big was Trump’s victory?
• What Trump can and can’t do on day one
• How undocumented migrants feel about deportations
• The chosen ones: Ten people trusted to deliver for Trump

Unless there is a sudden and staggering plot twist, Prince Harry’s legal battle against British tabloids for allegedly unlawfully intruding into his life reaches its most important moment on Tuesday when his claims against The Sun and the long-closed News of the World, come to trial.

The plot twist would be a settlement of his mammoth case against their parent, News Group Newspapers [NGN], the British press arm of the media empire founded by Rupert Murdoch.

Is it likely? You would get better odds on Harry and Meghan announcing a weekly lifestyle column for The Sun on Sunday.

This will be the first time that News Group Newspapers has had to defend itself against allegations that its journalists and executives across the whole organisation were involved in or knew about unlawful newsgathering techniques.

If it were to lose, and lose badly, a finding from the court of corporate-level wrongdoing would be in stark contrast to a longstanding defence that phone hacking was limited to bad apples in one now-closed title.

The prince’s allegations of tabloid wrongdoing date back to 1996. Harry and his brother Prince William first became aware they may have been targeted in 2006.

Back then, texting was still in its infancy and everybody left voicemails – and some tabloid journalists realised it was rather easy to listen in.

Clive Goodman, a News of the World journalist, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator, were arrested, and later jailed, for intercepting voicemails on phones belonging to the princes’ aides.

Prince Harry says as the scandal deepened, he held on for NGN to settle Royal Family claims under a “secret agreement” to avoid embarrassment in court. NGN’s lawyers have said this is “Alice in Wonderland stuff” – and the court has ruled it hasn’t seen evidence of such a backroom deal.

All these years on, the Duke of Sussex seems in no mood to give up on what has become a crusade against tabloid journalism. And so his case is going ahead – and what happens over the next two months may define both the prince’s legacy and the future of a British journalism institution.

NGN long ago apologised for unlawful practices at the News of the World and closed it down in 2011. It denies similar claims against The Sun – and the duke’s wider allegation of a corporate-wide cover-up.

It has settled cases brought by some 1,300 claimants, to the tune of around £1bn including legal costs.

That means it has seen off potential trials from people who say the newspapers ran stories that could have only been written with access to private or confidential sources of information that could not have been publicly known.

Those settlements left just two claimants – one of them Prince Harry.

When he launched his claim, he alleged that more than 200 articles published by NGN between 1996 and 2011 contained information gathered by illegal means. The trial will look at a sample of around 30 stories in detail.

Some of those will cover ground trodden in his successful Mirror Group case in 2023 and, just like in that case, he will give evidence in person.

There will be hours of analysis of how the Sun got scoops such as “Emotional Harry rang Chelsy at midnight” – a story it ran almost twenty years ago to the day about his then girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.

There will be further separate allegations from the second claimant, Lord (Tom) Watson. The former Labour MP says his phone was targeted around the time he was investigating the Murdoch newspapers at the height of the scandal almost 15 years ago.

Mr Justice Fancourt will decide if any of the NGN articles were the product of unlawful information gathering, such as information tricked or “blagged” out of phone companies by private investigators.

In Prince Harry’s case, he will not rule on whether there was any phone hacking because Prince Harry ran out of legal time to bring those allegations to trial.

None of this is going to be simple in court.

The judge had repeatedly expressed his frustration, referring to the two sides as entrenched well-resourced armies refusing to give any ground to each other.

And at no stage has Prince Harry looked like he was going to settle, despite the enormous financial hit he faces by not doing so.

If a claimant turns down an offer of settlement and is later awarded less in damages by a judge, they have to pay the legal costs of both sides.

Prince Harry has been very open about the hit he will take and why he was pressing ahead.

“The goal is accountability. It’s really that simple,” he told an audience at a New York Times event in December.

News Group has, in simple terms, three lines of defence. It will firstly argue that Harry has run out of time to bring allegations of unlawful information gathering.

This saw off his mobile phone hacking claim.

Secondly, its lawyers will test, article-by-article, the duke’s claims that the information in them came from dodgy sources.

Thirdly, News Group has lined up witnesses to rebut Prince Harry and Lord Watson’s broader allegation that the top brass knew what was going on and were party to the mass destruction of purportedly incriminating records in 2011.

While the celebrity focus will inevitably be on the prince when he goes into the witness box, that third allegation of a cover up is the most important element of this trial.

While the hit to Prince Harry’s wallet will be big, the damage to NGN’s reputation – and that of its executives – would be greater still if the court finds they were involved.

The executives the claimants will accuse of wrongdoing include the current CEO, Rebekah Brooks. She was found not guilty of conspiracy to hack voicemails in the seismic 2014 trial that ended with the jailing of Andy Coulson, her former colleague, News of the World editor and David Cameron’s communications chief.

Another is Will Lewis. He played a key role in managing the hacking crisis in 2011. He is now the CEO of the Washington Post – an appointment that has been opposed by many at the newspaper because of this association.

They and others deny wrongdoing.

Will they be giving evidence? A spokesperson for NGN said: “Both claimants allege unlawful destruction of emails by News International between 2010-2011. This allegation is wrong, unsustainable, and is strongly denied. NGN will be calling a number of witnesses including technologists, lawyers and senior staff to defeat the claim.”

Exactly what evidence Prince Harry brings to prove this claim – and what NGN says in defence – may define the entire battle.

Tuesday really is the beginning of the end. And someone is going to lose – and lose big.

Analysts have suggested it is “just matter of time” until the US ban on TikTok spreads to allied countries and beyond – if the Trump administration decides to keep it offline.

The app has been switched off in America after US lawmakers ruled it was a national security risk because of owner ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese government – ties it denies.

Incoming President Trump has indicated though that he is opposed to the ban and will find a way to reverse it.

If the US ban goes ahead, experts point to the previous ousting of Chinese and Russian tech companies on national security grounds as a potential blueprint for how the TikTok ban might spread around the world.

“There are big parallels between TikTok and what happened with China’s Huawei and Russia’s Kaspersky that indicates it’s just a matter of time until a creeping ban takes affect,” says Emily Taylor, Editor of the Cyber Policy Journal.

In both cases these companies were accused by the US of being a threat to national security – but no smoking gun was ever revealed by cyber security authorities.

The same has happened with TikTok.

Under President Trump, Kaspersky’s flagship antivirus software product was banned from civil and military computers in the US after accusations arose in 2017 that it was used by the Kremlin in a hacking incident that was never proven.

The UK followed almost immediately and one by one other allies fell into line with restrictions, warnings or bans.

It took years but eventually a countrywide ban took effect last year in the US but it was all but redundant by then. Kaspersky closed its US operations followed by its UK offices saying there is no viable business there.

The company has always argued that the US government based its decision on the “geopolitical climate and theoretical concerns” rather than independently verifying risk.

According to research from Bitsight Kaspersky’s decline in usage after the ban was pronounced, not just in the US but in at least 25 other countries too, even those with no overt public policy to ban the software.

Almost the exact same thing happened with Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.

The US accused Huawei and other Chinese tech firms of being too close to the Chinese government. It argued that the company’s popular 5G kit should not be used to build telecoms in case it could be used to spy on or degrade communications.

A former Huawei UK member of staff said that once the US decided to ban, block or restrict Huawei it became almost inevitable that allies would follow.

“The UK and others spoke about independently coming to their own conclusions over security but the US was unrelenting in its lobbying behind closed doors. They warned about the national security risks which were never backed up by evidence,” said the former insider, who didn’t want to be named.

Intense US lobbying of allies on security issues is something often seen in many aspects of cyber policy.

It usually starts with countries in the Five Eyes Alliance.

The close-knit intelligence sharing arrangement is between five English-speaking democracies: the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

So far, all members have banned TikTok from government devices and some have issued public warnings too. Canada has ordered an end to TikTok’s Canadian operations citing national security concerns.

The Five Eyes knock-on effect can be considerable and restrictions have already spread with the app banned on devices of government employees, civil servants or military personnel in countries including Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, The Netherlands, Norway and Taiwan.

Ciaran Martin, who was head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre during the bans on Huawei and Kaspersky, agrees that generally when the US makes a national security or strategic decision about a company, the UK and allies eventually follow suit.

However, as with everything else to do with TikTok, he says there is a huge caveat in the form of the incoming Trump administration.

“What we don’t yet know is whether TikTok will be the exception as Trump has said he is opposed to the ban so will he order allies to replicate a ban? We don’t yet know.”

Trump’s position on TikTok has changed dramatically since his first presidency when he tried to get it banned. Since then he has become a supporter after his re-election campaign gained support through TikTok videos.

Emily Taylor agrees that this unknown factor might make TikTok different to Huawei and Kaspersky.

“It depends on how much pressure the administration is willing to exert”, she told the BBC.

“If their foreign policy agenda is packed then forcing other allies to follow the ban might fall down the list and allow countries to wait it out”.

At the moment, there are “no plans” for a TikTok ban in the UK, a government spokesperson said on Saturday. “We engage with all major social media companies to understand their plans for ensuring the security of UK data and to ensure they meet the high data protection and cyber security standards we expect.”

Meanwhile, UK government minister Darren Jones told the BBC on Sunday: “We won’t be following the same path as the Americans unless or until… there is a threat that we are concerned about in the British interest, and then of course we will keep it under review.”

The app was banned from the UK Parliament in 2023 over security concerns.

But Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that “for consumers who want to post videos of their cats dancing, that doesn’t seem like a security threat to me”.

Another aspect to consider about TikTok’s future post-US ban is whether or not the app can continue to thrive without a US customer base.

Any app that loses 170m users would suffer but US users in particular are valuable for creators, advertisers and direct spending in TikTok Shop.

If the rest of the West follows it will reduce the money flowing into the company and curtail development of new features, further entrenching the dominance of US platforms like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Snapchat.

TikTok is already banned in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India too – a massive market. It has no presence in China because of its sister app Douyin.

Kaspersky and Huawei both managed to weather their storms by relying on home-grown customer bases and by pivoting to regions like Africa and the Middle East.

So it might be possible for TikTok to build its user bases here. But if the US ban creeps around the world then the app will likely never be as big as it currently is and may well wither and die a slow death.

It is 40 years since the bloodied bodies of three soldiers were found in a heap next to a reservoir in Scotland’s Pentland Hills.

A farmer came across the scene on 17 January 1985, after following a trail of blood in the snow from a crashed Land Rover he discovered with the engine still running.

With the IRA bombings at their height, the soldiers from Midlothian’s Glencorse Barracks were initially thought to be the victims of a terrorist attack.

But Tom Wood, then a police inspector who was one of the first on the scene, said the evidence quickly led them to a fellow soldier.

He has spoken to BBC Scotland News about his memories of the triple murder on the 40th anniversary of the so-called Glencorse Massacre.

The men were discovered beside a small derelict house at Loganlea reservoir, about 10 miles south of Edinburgh.

Staff Sgt Terrance Hosker, 39, and Pte John Thomson, 25, were in uniform. They were found alongside retired Major David Cunningham, 56.

“When I got there at the back of the house and at the bottom of the stairs were three dead bodies all lying on top of each other in a crumpled heap,” Mr Wood told BBC Scotland News.

“There was blood and cartridge cases lying around on the snow at the bottom of the stairs.”

He said they were shocked as it looked like a terrorist attack, which would have been the first of its kind in Scotland.

But very quickly the evidence pointed to Andrew Walker, a long-serving corporal instructor from The Royal Scots, who was 30 at the time.

Walker had been desperate for money. He knew that Thursday was pay day for the junior soldiers training at Glencorse Barracks, and they got paid in cash.

Every Thursday “regular as clockwork” a Land Rover and a crew of three soldiers would make the trip to the bank in nearby Penicuik.

No special security arrangements were made and the escort was unarmed.

Walker took a Sterling sub machine gun from the armoury and loaded it with ammunition he kept as spare.

Then, concealing the short barrelled weapon under his army coat, he flagged down the payroll Land Rover and asked for a lift back to the barracks.

Being known to the payroll crew, they allowed him to jump into the back of the vehicle.

He had planned to shoot all three of them deep in the Pentland Hills but as he hijacked them at gunpoint there was a scuffle in the back of the vehicle and Staff Sgt Hosker was shot.

Walker then also killed Maj Cunningham.

Next he forced Pte Thomson to take a detour into the Pentland Hills at Flotterstone and up to Loganlea reservoir.

There he made the young soldier help him drag the bodies to the back of the cottage.

However, if Pte Thomson thought his help would earn him mercy he was wrong.

Walker would leave no witnesses – Pte Thomson was executed, with a bullet in the head.

“This is a soldier shooting his brothers in arms. It’s diabolical, it really is,” said Mr Wood.

And all for just £19,000 – enough to buy two cars at the time.

Walker had been deep in debt and he had thought he could make it look like an IRA terrorist attack and robbery.

But his plan went wrong when his getaway vehicle skidded on the slippery path on his way out of the Pentland Hills to the main road – getting stuck in an icy ditch.

“He had probably planned to dump the Land Rover, clean the gun and quickly return to barracks before he was missed,” Mr Wood said.

“As it was, his plan and timescales were in tatters. He was now on foot with a bloodied uniform, an inconvenient gun he had to return, and a bag of cash he had to hide.

“Being skilled in the art of concealment he probably hid out for a while before making off across the snowy landscape.”

When it was safe he made his way back to barracks but by that time his movements were under scrutiny.

Shootings were uncommon in the east of Scotland, multiple shootings rarer still.

This was no ordinary crime, Mr Wood said.

“On the face of it, the crimes bore some of the hallmarks of a terrorist attack.

“The Provisional IRA were active on the mainland of Britain, they favoured military targets, and were always looking for funds.

“They weren’t averse to a bit of robbery in pursuit of their cause.”

However, there were problems with the terrorist theory.

“First the Provisional IRA had never carried out an attack in Scotland – seeing the Scots as Gaelic cousins they had privately declared Scotland ‘out of bounds’.

“Secondly, it was the habit of the IRA to claim responsibility for their attacks, so as to enhance their reputations as well as spreading terror.”

No-one had claimed responsibility.

Col Clive Fairweather, the commanding officer at Glencorse Barracks, worked with police officers investigating the murders.

An experienced military man, he had been second in command of the SAS operation that stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980.

“No-one knew the Army or its soldiers better than Col Fairweather, and he quickly spotted the bullet cases in the back of the bloodied Land Rover,” Mr Wood said.

“He knew the type well, they were all 9mm parabellum cases, a calibre not usually favoured by terrorists but in common usage by the British Army for all its small arms, pistols and Sterling sub machine guns.”

The Det Ch Supt and Col Fairweather were beginning to suspect the robbery was an “inside job”.

A witness had also come forward to say they had seen four men in the Land Rover outside the bank – and three had been in uniform.

“It was a significant piece of information,” said Mr Wood.

There was also one gun that had been taken out of the armoury and replaced by Walker in the logs that day which matched with a bullet lodged in Staff Sgt Hosker’s shoulder.

“Each rifle barrel is different in minute detail and leaves distinct striation marks on the soft lead of a bullet head as it passes down the barrel,” Mr Wood said.

“The firing pins of individual weapons also leave distinctive marks on the detonator caps of bullet casings.

“It was best and conclusive evidence.”

Walker returned the gun before going absent without leave for three days.

He eventually returned to the barracks and attempted to bluster it out, denying all knowledge, and suggesting it had been the IRA that had been responsible but he was detained.

Shortly afterwards he was arrested when ballistic results arrived back from the lab.

Walker denied his crimes but a jury in the High Court in Edinburgh found him guilty of the murders.

Judge Lord Grieve recommended he serve at least 30 years in prison because of his “callous disregard for human life”. This was reduced to 27 years on appeal.

In 2011 Walker was released from prison on compassionate grounds, two years after a stroke left him severely disabled.

He died from a respiratory infection and suspected cancer in a care home in Wishaw, North Lanarkshire, in 2021 at the age of 67.

“Andrew Walker was a cold-hearted killer who set out to rob in the certain knowledge that to escape he would have to kill his three comrades in arms,” said Mr Wood.

“I suspect he was involved in some pretty brutal stuff in Northern Ireland because what he did was a cold-hearted execution.”

He doesn’t think Walker was mentally ill, he was “just a wicked guy”.

“He had absolutely no empathy for human suffering and that’s what makes me wonder what he had been exposed to early in his Army service.”

His planning of the crime was simple and audacious but poorly thought through, he added.

Mr Wood said, like many criminals, his plan of attack was much better planned than his plan of escape.

“As a military man he should have known that no plan survives contact with reality, yet when the first thing went wrong he had no back up plan,” he said.

“The simple act of skidding on an icy road derailed his brutal enterprise.”

The humble sandeel is set to take centre stage in the first courtroom trade battle between the UK and EU since Brexit.

The UK has banned European vessels from catching the silvery fish species in its North Sea waters to protect marine wildlife that depend on it for food.

But the EU is challenging the move, arguing it discriminates against Danish vessels that fish sandeel commercially, breaching the post-Brexit trade deal.

The dispute is now heading for a three-day trade tribunal hearing, after formal talks to resolve the wrangle failed.

Without a last-minute compromise, it will mark the first time the two sides have gone to arbitration under the 2021 trade agreement agreed by Boris Johnson.

The case is due to be heard from Tuesday next week at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a dispute resolution body based in the Hague, by a panel of three mutually-agreed international trade judges.

They could uphold the UK’s position – or order the UK to change or drop its ban, in which case Brussels could ultimately retaliate with tariffs on British exports if ministers refused to comply.

Under the trade deal, a final ruling must be delivered by the end of April, although it could be issued earlier. There is no right to appeal.

It comes as the UK prepares for tricky negotiations with the EU over new catch limits from June next year, when current arrangements under the trade deal run out.

Sir Keir Starmer is also hoping to persuade EU leaders to strike new deals in areas such as security and food trade, as part of a wider “reset” in relations with the UK.

Sandeel, a group of small eel-like fish species, is a jointly managed fish stock under the trade deal. It is not caught for culinary reasons and is unlikely to be found on restaurant menus in European capitals.

But it is a favourite food of other fish species like cod and haddock, as well as threatened seabirds such as puffins and kittiwakes.

The UK has effectively stopped its own vessels from fishing the species since 2021 through its licencing regime, on the grounds it is required to prevent overfishing and protect the North Sea ecosystem.

Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government then banned all vessels from catching the species in English waters of the sea in March last year, with a similar ban in Scottish waters brought in by ministers in the SNP-led Scottish government.

It won the UK plaudits from conversation groups, which had long campaigned for an outright ban, and Sir Keir’s Labour government has kept the ban in place since taking power in July.

But it has outraged Danish fishermen, who sell sandeel to animal feed and fish oil producers and under the post-Brexit trade deal hold the right to fish the overwhelming majority of the EU’s share of the species in UK waters.

The dispute centres on whether the UK’s right to restrict trawlers for conservation reasons unnecessarily restricts agreed EU fishing rights.

In its submissions to the court, the EU has argued the geographical scope of the ban is not justified by the scientific modelling on stock levels, or the “economic and social impacts” on Danish fishing communities.

The UK government’s detailed response is yet to be published, but a spokesperson told the BBC said it was committed to protecting the environment in line with its trade commitments.

Its decision to continue the ban has been backed by an unlikely coalition stretching across three political parties, conservation groups and committed Brexiteers.

The renewable energy industry has also taken an interest, arguing the ban helps achieve the necessary level of seabird “resilience” to allow more wind farms to be built whilst still hitting conservation targets.

The UK has previously estimated sandeel caught in its waters is worth around £45m a year, a tiny industry in the context of the wider trade relationship.

But the dispute will be watched closely for how the judges balance the UK’s right to take conservation measures with economic rights.

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Emily, 21, spends around £20 a month at Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein, turning to it whenever she needs a new party or holiday outfit.

“You can almost always find what you’re looking for, even if the quality is bad”, she says.

Like millions in the UK and the US, she buys from the online shop mostly because of how affordable it is.

The firm has faced scrutiny over how it treats workers, with a BBC investigation highlighting 75-hour weeks for workers in contravention of Chinese labour laws, but it is unlikely shoppers will be put off buying their clothes there.

Emily has considered stopping buying from Shein due to its labour practices, but says everywhere else “is way too expensive”.

“I’m happy to talk about the fact I shop at Shein because I know I’m not the only one,” she adds.

The numbers show she’s right, with Shein transforming from a little-known company just a few years ago into one of the world’s biggest clothing firms.

Global sales are estimated to have reached $36.9bn (£30.2bn) last year, according to GlobalData.

Shein is a private company and does not report its global results.

But profits in the UK doubled in 2023 to more than £24m, according to a Companies House filing.

Shein stocks thousands of different clothing lines, dwarfing rival fast fashion brands such as H&M and Zara.

It sells many clothes for below £10, and turns around new designs quickly.

The firm has been gearing up for for a stock market flotation in the UK, putting it under scrutiny over both its working practices and its environmental impact.

Last year, Shein itself found child labour in its supply chain after tightening scrutiny of suppliers.

It has also faced allegations that it uses cotton produced using forced labour, and last week declined to tell MPs whether it used such cotton.

Shein was contacted for comment.

In response to the BBC investigation into worker conditions it said it is “committed to ensuring the fair and dignified treatment of all workers within our supply chain” and is investing tens of millions of dollars in strengthening governance and compliance.

“We strive to set the highest standards for pay and we require that all supply chain partners adhere to our code of conduct,” it said.

Workers get paid about one to two yuan for making a tee-shirt – which is the equivalent of between 11p and 22p.

Sarah Johnson, the founder of consultancy Flourish Retail, a former head of buying and merchandising for Asos China, said the firm could pay suppliers more, which would give them more leeway to pay workers.

The supplier “doesn’t get paid an awful lot of the final price” of the garment.

When it comes to workers, “you could raise their pay and it would make a minimal amount of difference to the garment price,” she said.

An alternative would be for the firm to make less profit, she added.

Sophie Wills, from Birmingham, said she had previously bought clothes from the retailer due to their affordability.

“Times are hard,” Sophie says, adding she probably couldn’t afford higher-end clothes at the moment.

However, she says saving up and “making investments in stuff that is probably higher quality would be a good way to go”.

Thando Sibenke says she regularly shops at Shein.

“My whole outfit’s from Shein right now,” she says, adding she likes the price, convenience, and variety.

However, Thando says she plans to do more research in the future on how the clothes she buys are made.

Georgina, 24, from London, says she is “embarrassed” that she has shopped at Shein – and has now stopped.

“Since reading up on it, the negatives massively outweigh the positives and even when seeing Shein clothing in charity shops, I don’t feel comfortable buying it.”

Fashion designer and academic Shazia Saleem said that people in Generation Z – those born between about 1995 to 2010 – often say in surveys that sustainability and ethics are important to them, but that doesn’t necessarily come through in their buying choices.

Young people can feel pressure to buy new outfits to keep up appearances on social media, and they don’t have much disposable cash, so will probably continue to buy fast fashion, she said.

She added that although people should make informed buying decisions, it should be down to the government to strengthen existing UK trading standards rules to make sure companies are selling sustainable and ethically sound products.

Louise Deglise-Favre, senior apparel analyst at GlobalData, also said she expected affordability to continue to outweigh ethical concerns for Shein shoppers.

Younger customers tend to not have much disposable income due to being in school or low paying jobs, she said.

Shein releases thousands of new products daily, which can encourage shoppers to buy too much – but it’s also a response to “the desire from consumers to constantly update their wardrobes with the latest trends”, she adds.

“I wasn’t really a sporty kid and came last in cross country when I was 14.”

But that has all changed for 14-time Ironman champion Lucy Gossage, whose latest feat saw her win a gruelling ultramarathon between Derbyshire and Scotland.

The oncologist finished the 268-mile (430km) women’s Montane Winter Spine Race on Thursday evening in 87 hours 41 minutes 38 seconds.

Gossage, from Nottingham, said she had rested for just three hours and 40 minutes over the three and a half days of running.

Snow storms and freezing temperatures greeted Gossage and 150 fellow competitors at the start point in Edale in the Peak District on Saturday.

Prior to becoming a professional triathlete in 2014, Gossage had been spending endless hours in Cambridge laboratories doing research for a PhD into kidney cancer.

“For me, doing things that scare you and seem impossible is what makes me feel alive,” said Gossage, who became a full-time Ironman competitor when she was 34.

“It’s a race that takes you to places you’d never normally go in normal life. All your thinking about is survival.

“I don’t know where that performance came from – it did surprise me. It’s not what I anticipated doing.”

Competitors who take part in the race have to be self-sufficient and carry everything with them along the trail.

Half of those who started the event dropped out midway, organisers said.

There are five checkpoints along the route where athletes can stop to eat or sleep, although many, including Gossage, choose to rest in alternative locations.

“I had an hour and 10 minutes in some village hall, an hour on the floor on some public toilets and 40 minutes at an old farm that had some armchairs and dirty blankets,” she said.

“What’s quite incredible is how a short sleep really can rejuvenate you for the next 12 hours.

“Of course at some points you’re so tired, everything is hurting and you just want it to end.

“But the lows are why you sign up to things like this because when you overcome them you have such massive highs.”

Gossage, who finished third in the same event last year, drew in and overtook early leader Robyn Cassidy to cross the finish line in Kirk Yetholm in first place.

She said she had no plans to take on the event again, but insists she could be tempted by “other challenges” in future.

“I was a shell of myself [after the race],” she said. “I could barely dress myself when I got back.

“It’s something that takes you to a place that life would never usually take you.”

Some of the world’s biggest companies started from humble beginnings, but Games Workshop’s early days were less glamourous than most.

“We ended up having to live in a van,” says Sir Ian Livingstone.

He launched the brand – best known for its Warhammer games – with co-founder Steve Jackson back in 1975.

Sir Ian tells BBC News the pair asked a bank manager for £10,000 to kickstart their business.

They would go on to create popular miniature figures that players around the world collect, paint and battle in complex tabletop clashes.

But it was a rocky start.

“He looked at us rather like a dog watching television, no understanding of what we were talking about, and asked us to leave,” he says.

The pair ended up working out of a small room in the back of an estate agent’s office, and joined a local squash club to access the showers.

“We had no aspirations of it being anything large at all,” says Sir Ian.

“We were following the passion of being gamers wanting to be involved in some sort of fledgling games business.”

That passion has bloomed since then, and Games Workshop is more successful than it’s ever been, recently entering the list of the UK’s top 100 companies.

Headquartered in the Lenton area of Nottingham, it made £126.8m ($154.4m) profit in the second half of 2024, selling its products worldwide.

Miniatures were only part of the equation and a good chunk of its profits came from licensing – allowing its products to be adapted into video games, films and TV series.

Academic Dr Hailey Austin, from Abertay University’s department of games and arts, tells BBC News the company’s always been good at expanding into new areas.

“They’re willing to try new things,” she says.

“They’ve always been pushing the boundaries, going into miniatures, paints as well as books, magazines and even digitising their games.”

Games Workshop believes it’s sitting on “some of the best underexploited intellectual property globally” and has the potential to go further.

The company recently finalised a lucrative deal with Amazon to create Warhammer TV series and films, and lent its name to one of 2024’s best-selling video games.

Space Marine II – based on the hulking galactic soldiers from the sci-fi-inspired Warhammer 40,000 (40K) series – was a surprise runaway success, selling 4.5 million copies in its first month.

Games Workshop boss Kevin Rountree told investors Space Marine II had created “excitement” for its miniatures, and that store staff had told him they’d seen more people coming into the company’s high street stores as a result.

The power of TV and games to give fans more ways to engage with their favourite hobbies is something more companies are leaning into.

Last year, video game adaptation Fallout sent the 10-year-old title flying up the bestseller charts.

Warhammer fans say they noticed a similar effect too.

Katie Foad was first drawn to Warhammer through painting its detailed miniature figurines, but says her interest deepened when she played the 40K-inspired strategy video game Dawn of War.

That led her to the Games Workshop community and she’s now part of Tabletop Tactics – a YouTube channel dedicated to all things Warhammer.

She joined in 2021, when Games Workshop – like other indoor hobbies – was experiencing a boost off the back of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Katie says the channel saw a spike in new subscribers after Space Marine II was launched last year – and videos featuring characters and creatures from the game were especially popular.

“We’re definitely seeing way more of an interest coming in because of the popularity of Space Marine II,” she says.

Warhammer’s also had another boost from inside the entertainment industry – Superman himself, Henry Cavill.

The actor has been described as the “world’s coolest nerd” thanks to his very public interest in video gaming and Warhammer.

Katie thinks this has helped to expose new people to the hobby, and also encouraged them to be more open about their interest in it.

“For those people that were already into Warhammer, they’ve looked at him being so proud about it and gone: ‘Oh, this is something that is cool’,” says Katie.

“‘I can talk to people about it. I can encourage other people to get into the hobby’.

“And I think people that were already into it are now excited to share it.”

Cavill was a key part of the deal with Amazon and is due to executive produce and star in its Games Workshop adaptations.

Adapting the Warhammer universe and its vast tomes of lore – background information about the different races and characters within it – can be a challenge.

It’s something Clive Standen, who plays the lead role of Lieutenant Demetrian Titus in Space Marine II, knows well.

Standen tells BBC Newsbeat his early recording sessions involved negotiating with Games Workshop representatives to inject depth and emotion into his traditionally stoic ultramarine character.

“We have to find small nuances just to get the audience behind him,” says Standen.

“Otherwise, it’s going to be very cold out there.”

In the end, Standen says, they found a “common ground”, and his performance in the game has put him in the running for a Bafta Games Award.

He also voiced Titus in a Space Marine II-themed episode of Secret Level (the Prime Video anthology based on popular video games).

Amazon claims it was the biggest debut for an animated series on its streaming service.

Standen believes streamer’s deep pockets mean it is the right place to do justice to further Warhammer shows.

But he warns it will take a lot of work.

“You’ve got to do a fine balance between pleasing the fans and giving them something that they’ve personally invested in, and also pleasing the mainstream fans,” he says.

“Because if you don’t get enough viewers, it won’t get commissioned for a season two.”

Games Workshop has said it will be some time before its adaptations hit the screen, and cautioned that hits are not guaranteed in the volatile and unpredictable video games business.

Katie thinks the “massive universe” propping up Games Workshop means it will continue to be successful.

But she says she’s excited to see how future works based on Warhammer are received.

“There’s so much to it that I think it’s always going to be successful,” she says.

“But depending on how this Amazon show goes, if that really reaches a wider audience, I think it could go huge.

“It could be Marvel.”

Sir Ian, who sold Games Workshop in 1991 for £10m, says he’ll also be watching with interest.

“Standing now, almost like proud parents watching this great British success story kind of conquer the world and become one of the premier games IPs of all time, you can’t help but feel a great sense of pride,” he says.

“And hopefully that will long continue.”

“John Adams? Good luck!”

That’s the line spoken by King George in the record-breaking musical Hamilton after Adams becomes the second US president in 1797, beating his eventual successor Thomas Jefferson.

His place in American history is an important one, as one of the Founding Fathers, the first White House resident, an early campaigner against slavery and the first vice-president.

But did you know he has a direct link to a small village in Somerset?

Barton St David is about five miles south of Glastonbury and 12 miles north of Yeovil.

It has a population of about 600 people and a church which dates back to the 12th Century.

And it was here, in 1583, where Henry Adams was born – the great, great, great grandfather of John Adams, and the great, great, great, great grandfather of John Quincy Adams – the sixth president of the US.

“Henry Adams was born in Barton St David, although there is a bit of a dispute about where he basically was,” said Rob Butt, a member of the village’s history club.

“He was a tenant farmer and farmed lands both here and in Charlton Mackrell. There would have been more important people than him in Barton.”

Mr Butt told BBC Radio Somerset how an early historical record showed Adams was once taken to court by a landowner for failure to pay a debt of animals upon his father’s death in Barton St David.

He later emigrated to the US, along with other puritan pilgrims, perhaps as a result of the catholic practices being reintroduced by King Charles I, Mr Butt said.

Adams settled in Braintree, Massachusetts, which was named after the town in Essex where he had also lived during his time in England.

Mr Butt said: “There is a plaque [in the church], and the most interesting thing is that we get various requests from America for people who are related to the Adams family.

“We’ve got the visitor book with various people with the surname Adams which have signed in… to come and look at the plaque which celebrates these two men.”

But the links to Barton St David do not stop with John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

“Henry Adams married someone called Edith Squire,” Mr Butt explained, adding: “She was the daughter of Henry Squire, who was the son of a reverend, William Squire of Charlton Mackrell.

“Edith and Henry Adams… through another son of theirs, after 12 generations, we get Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States.”

Edith Adams’ sister, Anne Squire, married Aquilla Purchase, with a lineage that leads to Millard Fillmore, the 13th president.

Another sister, Margaret Squire, married a man called John Shephard, and their family tree guides to William Howard Taft – the 27th president.

It means this small corner of Somerset can claim to have the second, sixth, 13th, 27th and 30th presidents of the US traced back to it – and its nearby reverend.

Bob Dylan’s draft lyrics for his 1965 song Mr Tambourine Man have sold at auction for $508,000 (£417,471) in the US.

The lyrics on two yellow sheets of paper are three typewritten drafts of the song – but not the final version. The work in progress also features the folk-rock legend’s notes by hand in the margin.

The song is one of Dylan’s most famous hits and the draft pages were among 60 items belonging to the singer that went under the hammer in the city of Nashville.

A 1968 oil painting created and signed by Dylan, and a 1983 Fender Telecaster electric guitar owned and played by him, were also on sale.

The third draft seen on the paper is close to the final version of the song, although it still has significant variations from the final lyrics, according to Julien’s Auctions where the sale took place.

Also included in the sale is music journalist Al Aronowitz’s first-hand account of Dylan writing the song in Aronowitz’s home believed to be in March 1964.

Aronowitz said Dylan had spent the night writing and rewriting the song on the journalist’s typewriter.

In an article titled Bob Dylan: The Champ Has No Contenders, Aronowitz wrote that he “found a waste basket full of crumpled false starts” and what turned out to be the drafts of Mr Tambourine Man.

“I took the crumpled sheets, smoothed them out, read the crazy leaping lines, smiled to myself at the leaps that never landed and then put the sheets into a file folder,” he added.

One month after Dylan released Mr Tambourine Man, the Byrds’ version came out. The band’s debut single reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one in the UK making it the first Dylan composition to reach number one in both the US and the UK.

Several sketches by Dylan far exceeded their estimated price tags, with one that was expected to sell for between $1,500 (£1,233) and $2,500 (£2,054) going for $88,900 (£73,057).

A Levi’s denim jacket worn by Dylan in the 1987 musical drama film Hearts of Fire also sold for $25,400 (£20,874).

Nearly $1.5m was made in sales from the collection, the auction house said.

A biopic following Dylan’s rise to fame, called A Complete Unknown and featuring Timothee Chalamet as the singer, was released in December 2024 in the US.

A professional wrestler who almost died after breaking his neck during a match said he was “determined” to return to the ring.

Lee Mitchell, from Hopton-on-Sea, Norfolk, was injured while competing in Colchester on 1 December.

While doctors have said he will never wrestle again, the 32-year-old – who wrestles as Mitchell Starr – said he hoped to make a comeback in “two years tops”.

A 24-hour fundraising “wrestlethon” is currently under way in Norwich to help support his rehabilitation.

“I’m overwhelmed by all the love and care that I’ve been given. It’s a sense of love I didn’t realise could possibly exist,” Mr Mitchell told the BBC.

“The world is such an uncertain and fractious place at the moment, this has really shown how everyone can pull together in somebody’s time of need and not ask for anything in return.

“I want to get better for everyone that’s helped. I owe it to them and it means the world.”

Mitchell was taking part in an SOS Christmas in the Cage match at Colchester’s Charter Hall when he attempted to catch a wrestler who had dived outside the ring.

He broke his C3 – a vertebrae in the neck.

“It was just a move that went wrong,” said Saraya Knight, a fellow wrestler at the World Association of Wrestling (WAW), based in Norwich.

“Everyone knows that if you break your C3, usually it’s death, so for him to still be talking… is great.

“As one of his closest friends, I just want to raise enough money so that his house can be redone, take the pressure off his parents and then look to bring Lee back into the wrestling world once we can get him back on his feet.”

In the past few weeks, Mitchell said he had slowly regained a “bit of movement” in his limbs.

An online fundraising page, set up shortly after his accident, has so far raised almost £6,000.

The 24 hour wrestlethon, being held at the home of WAW on Diamond Road, began at 15:00 GMT on Saturday.

“It’s not a show per se. People can just come in, give us a tenner and stay as long as they want,” said WAW co-owner “Rowdy” Ricky Knight.

“The response from other wrestling companies has been amazing,” he said.

“We’ve got a lad coming over from Ireland, Italian wrestlers, someone from North Wales, Hull and Lincoln – they’re all sending people down.”

Mitchell, who may need his C3 replaced, said a final scan in a few weeks would show the “full extent of the damage”.

“I’m staying positive and optimistic, although I have my up days and down days,” he added.

“I’m determined that I’ll get back into that wrestling ring one day, and not too far in the future.”

On the eve of his return to the White House, President-elect Donald Trump promised to sign a blitz of executive orders on his first day as president, telling supporters that he would move with “historic speed and strength” in the hours after taking the oath of office.

Addressing a racuous crowd of thousands in a Washington DC arena for a “Victory Rally”, Trump offered a preview of the next four years and celebrated his November election victory over the Democrats.

The Republican promised to act unilaterally on a wide array of issues, using his presidential powers to launch mass deportation operations, slash environmental regulations and end diversity programmes.

“We put America first and it all starts tomorrow,” he told the crowd at the campaign-style event, adding: “You’re going to have a lot of fun watching television tomorrow.”

Trump is expected to sign more than 200 executive actions on Monday. This would include executive orders, which are legally-binding, and other presidential directives like proclamations, which are usually not.

“Every radical and foolish executive order of the Biden administration will be repealed within hours of when I take the oath of office,” the incoming president said.

Trump promised executive orders that would ramp up artificial intelligence programmes, form the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), make records available related to the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, direct the military to create an Iron Dome missile defence shield and eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies from the military.

He also told supporters he would stop transgender women from competing in female sports categories and hand back control of education to America’s states.

“You’re going to see executive orders that are going to make you extremely happy,” he told the crowd. “We have to set our country on the proper course.”

Presidents usually take executive action when they enter office but the volume of day one orders from Trump could dwarf his predecessors and many are expected to be challenged in court.

He promised that his executive blitz on Monday would target illegal immigration – an issue at the heart of the Republican’s winning campaign for the presidency.

But experts say his promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants will face enormous logistical hurdles, and potentially cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.

• GUIDE: What we know about the inauguration
• EXPLAINED: What Donald Trump could do on day one
• INSIGHT: Meet the president’s circle of influencers.

Trump is also expected to issue pardons for people convicted of taking part in the January 6 riots at the US Capitol in 2021 led by his supporters.

He referred to January 6 rioters as “hostages” and promised that everyone would be “very happy” with his decision on Monday.

The rally took place at the Capital One Arena in downtown Washington DC, which has a capacity of around 20,000.

It began with a performance by Kid Rock and featured speeches from TV personality Megyn Kelly, actor Jon Voight and Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller.

• ANALYSIS: Trump team’s confidence is sky-high but warning signs abound
• WATCH: Thousands protest in Washington ahead of inauguration
• FEATURE: From snowy US cities to Mexican border – deportations loom

Elon Musk also gave a brief speech after Trump touted his creation of Doge, an advisory agency that the tech billionaire is set to run with Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who made a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Trump’s family also joined him on stage, including sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric, and Eric’s wife Lara Trump.

Supports of the president-elect have flooded the nation’s capital this weekend despite bitterly cold temperatures and snow on Sunday.

Monday’s inauguration ceremony has been relocated indoors into the Rotunda of the US Capitol for the first time in 40 years due to the poor weather conditions, leaving thousands of people who had hoped to watch the ceremony along the National Mall disappointed.

The temperature is expected to be about -6C (22F) at noon local time, when the swearing-in takes place.

Supporters have instead been asked to watch the event from the Capitol One Arena, which will also host a version of the traditional outdoor parade.

Trump has said he will “join the crowd” there after taking the oath of office and delivering his inaugural address. The themes of his speech will reportedly be unity, strength and “fairness”.

Franklin Graham – the son of famous evangelist Billy Graham – will give the invocation during Monday’s inauguration ceremony.

“I think President Trump is a much different man than he was in 2017,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme. “I think God has strengthened him and he’s come through this a much stronger man and he’s going to be a much better president for all these hardships he’s gone through.”

A young woman described as “at her happiest when she dances” is among three Israeli women released after 471 days held hostage by Hamas.

Romi Gonen, 24, was captured as she tried to escape the Nova music festival when it was targeted by the militant group as part of the 7 October 2023 attack.

She has been freed alongside Doron Steinbrecher, 31, a veterinary nurse, and Emily Damari, 28, who holds dual British-Israeli nationality.

All three arrived back in Israel on Sunday after being released by Hamas in Gaza, and were emotionally reunited with their families.

Their release forms part of the first phase of the ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas, which began on Sunday. A total of 33 hostages are to be freed over the next six weeks.

• Follow the latest updates here

Romi had travelled from her home in Kfar Veradim, northern Israel, to the Nova festival, which took place in the Negev Desert in the south.

More than 360 people were killed at the festival when Hamas fighters crossed over the border, 2km (1.3 miles) to the west. The desert landscape offered partygoers limited cover and exit routes were blocked by gunmen.

When sirens sounded as the attack unfolded, Romi called her family. Her mother, Meirav, recalled hearing shots and shouting in Arabic in the final call with her daughter.

Romi was ambushed by Hamas militants as she tried to flee.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said Romi had gone to the festival “to do what she loved, to dance” – something she had studied for 12 years, starring in solo performances and becoming an “amazing choreographer”.

A video posted by the families’ forum last November described her as “the girl with the biggest smile, the brightest light, the greatest friend”.

The forum also said that Romi’s bedroom at her home “remains exactly as it was when she left”, awaiting her return.

In a video clip shared by the Israeli military, Romi’s father was seen jumping in the air before breaking down in tears as he watched footage of his daughter’s release on Sunday.

Doron, a 31-year-old veterinary nurse, was abducted from her apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza – near Gaza’s north-western border – when Hamas attacked.

The community, one of many Israeli villages along the border, was heavily targeted by armed militants during the 7 October attacks.

Israeli officials said Hamas burned homes and killed civilians, including whole families, as well as taking hostages.

When the assault began, Doron contacted her family and friends via WhatsApp to say she was hiding under the bed as militants advanced, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said.

In her last voice message, she was heard screaming “they’ve caught me” as shouting and gunfire sounded in the background.

Doron’s family received no information about her whereabouts for nearly four months.

“After an unbearable 471 days, our beloved Dodo has finally returned to our arms,” her family said in a statement released by the missing families forum on Sunday.

They added: “We want to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who supported and accompanied us along this journey.”

She studied theatre and film in school, and developed a love for animals that led to her becoming a veterinary nurse.

Emily, a 28-year-old British-Israeli national, was also taken hostage from Kibbutz Kfar Aza on 7 October 2023.

She was shot in the hand and taken into Gaza from her home during the attack, and also saw her dog shot and killed. Photographs after her release showed Emily with a bandaged hand and two missing fingers from that attack.

Her mother, Mandy Damari, was also in the kibbutz in her separate home on 7 October. Mrs Damari hid in the safe room and was saved by a bullet hitting the door handle, making it impossible for attackers to get in.

As the assault unfolded, Emily sent her mother a text message containing a single heart emoji – that was the last contact they had.

Emotional images showed Emily reunited with her mother in Israel on Sunday, hugging while on a video call with her brother.

“I want to thank everyone who never stopped fighting for Emily throughout this horrendous ordeal, and who never stopped saying her name,” Mrs Damari said.

“In Israel, Britain, the United States, and around the world. Thank you for bringing Emily home.”

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Mrs Damari was born and raised in the UK, and met her husband on a holiday in Israel aged 20.

Emily, the youngest of four children, has strong connections with the UK – she is a Tottenham Hotspur fan and would often visit to see relatives.

Prior to the ceasefire, Israel said 94 hostages remained unaccounted for but it believed only 60 to be still alive.

Following the release of the three women on Sunday, another 30 Israeli hostages are due to be handed over throughout the first phase of the ceasefire deal. Israel’s prime minister has said most of the 30 are alive.

They have been named by Israel as:

Karina Ariev, 20; Itzik Elgarat, 69; Liri Albag, 19; Daniela Gilboa, 20; Agam Berger, 20; Ohad Ben Ami, 55; Arbel Yahud, 29; Alexander (Sasha) Troufanov, 29; Sagui Dekel-Chen, 36; Omer Wenkert, 23; Yair Horn, 46; Oded Lifshitz, 84; Naama Levy, 20; Or Levy, 34; Eliya Cohen, 27; Ohad Yahalomi, 50; Tsachi Idan, 50; Keith Siegel, 65; Shlomo Mansour, 86; Gadi Moses, 80; Eli Sharabi, 52; Omer Shem Tov, 22; Tal Shoham, 39; Ofer Kalderon, 53; Yarden Bibas, 34; Shiri Bibas, 33; Ariel Bibas; Kfir Bibas.

The list also includes two men Hisham al-Sayed, 35, and Avera Mengistu, 27, who were captured by Hamas after crossing into Gaza from Israel before the war.

TikTok is resuming services to its 170 million users in US after President-elect Donald Trump said he would issue an executive order to give the app a reprieve when he takes office on Monday.

On Saturday evening, the Chinese-owned app stopped working for American users, after a law banning it on national security grounds came into effect.

Trump, who had previously backed a ban of the platform, promised on Sunday to delay implementation of the law and allow more time for a deal to be made. TikTok then said that it was in the process of “restoring service”.

Soon after, the app started working again and a popup message to its millions of users thanked Trump by name. In a statement, the company thanked the incoming president for “providing the necessary clarity and assurance” and said it would work with Trump “on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States”.

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TikTok CEO Shou Chew is expected to attend Trump’s inauguration Monday.

Posting on Truth Social, a social media platform he owns, Trump said on Sunday: “I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark! I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, previously ignored a law requiring it to sell its US operations to avoid a ban. The law was upheld by Supreme Court on Friday and went into effect on Sunday.

It is unclear what legal authority Trump will have to delay the implementation of a law that is already in effect. But it expected that his government will not enforce the ban if he issues an executive order.

It’s an about-face from his previous position. Trump had backed a TikTok ban, but has more recently professed a “warm spot” for the app, touting the billions of views he says his videos attracted on the platform during last year’s presidential campaign.

For its part, President Joe Biden’s administration had already said that it would not enforce the law in its last hours in office and instead allow the process to play out under the incoming Trump administration.

But TikTok had pulled its services anyway on Saturday evening, before the swift restoration of access on Sunday.

The short-form video platform is wildly popular among its many millions of US users. It has also proved a valuable tool for American political campaigns to reach younger voters.

Under the law passed last April, the US version of the app had to be removed from app stores and web-hosting services if its Chinese owner ByteDance did not sell its US operations.

TikTok had argued before the Supreme Court that the law violated free speech protections for its users in the country.

The law was passed with support from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress and was upheld unanimously by Supreme Court justices earlier this week.

The issue exposes a rift on a key national security issues between the president-elect and members of his own party. His pick for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, had vocally supported the ban.

“TikTok extended the Chinese Communist Party’s power and influence into our own nation, right under our noses,” he said last April. But he seemed to defer to the president-elect when a journalist asked if he supported Trump’s efforts to restore the ban.

“If I’m confirmed as secretary of State, I’ll work for the president,” he told Punchbowl media last week.

After Trump intervened on Sunday morning, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, broke with Trump by saying that any company that helps TikTok stay online would be breaking the law.

“Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from DOJ, but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs,” he wrote on social media.

An executive order that goes against the law could be fought in court.

Several states have also sued the platform, opening up the possibility to TikTok being banned by local jurisdictions, even if it is available nationally.

Although the platform went live again on Sunday for existing users, the question of whether third-parties – hosting platforms or app stores like Google or Apple – could support TikTok in the US remains murky, says University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias. The app had been removed from those stores in anticipation of the ban.

“It is murky,” he told the BBC.

In a post on Truth media, Trump promised to shield companies from liability, opening the door to TikTok being available on Apple and Google again.

“The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order,” the president-elect said on Truth Social Sunday.

But during the Supreme Court hearings, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar was adamant that an executive order cannot change the law retroactively.

“Whatever the new president does, doesn’t change that reality for these companies,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said during the hearings.

“That’s right,” Prelogar said.

Professor Tobias said that the law does include a provision that would allow the president to postpone the ban for up to 90 days, if he can show that the company is making substantial progress on alleviating national security issues. But, he said, it’s not clear whether those conditions have been met.

“The best thing Trump could do is work with Congress, and not potentially be in violation of the law or have any questions left hanging,” he said.

“I don’t know that we’re going to know a whole lot more until we see that executive order.”

Every new president begins a fresh chapter in American history. And when Donald Trump is inaugurated in a frigid Washington DC on Monday, he will be hoping to usher in a new era for this country.

The ceremony in the rotunda of the US Capitol, moved indoors for the first time in decades due to the bitter cold, will also mark the moment he starts being judged on action and not promises.

And he has promised seismic change as well as action on day one. At a raucous rally in the city on Sunday, Trump said he would sign a flurry of executive orders within moments of being inaugurated, covering issues ranging from immigration and deportations to the environment and transgender rights.

“You’re going to have a lot of fun watching television tomorrow,” he told the crowd here.

But even if his presidency begins with a serious bang, there are still questions about what Trump’s second act will look like.

Will we feel the tectonic plates of power shift beneath our feet as he re-enters the White House? Can he deliver his pledged sweeping reforms? Will it be as apocalyptic as his opponents suggest?

Listening to some of his detractors, you would be forgiven for thinking the skies will darken and the birds will flee Washington as soon as he takes the oath of office.

Many worry he will try to rule as an autocrat and undermine American democracy. His predecessor, Joe Biden, pointedly used his final Oval Office address to warn of a dangerous oligarchy of unaccountable billionaires forming around Trump that threatens the basic rights and freedoms of Americans.

But no one can deny Trump, 78, has a clear mandate after his decisive election victory in November. He won the popular vote and the electoral college. He won a clean sweep of swing states. His agenda has the green light from voters.

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This time around, Trump is determined his agenda will be enacted. He has a far more experienced and deeply loyal team behind him to make sure that happens.

He also plans – presumably with the help of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” – to swiftly fire huge numbers of civil servants and officials.

Trump still believes there is a “deep state” within the US government that will try to frustrate his agenda. So we can expect a far more drastic clear-out of federal employees than would normally come with a change of administration, and a far more politicised government machine behind him.

Many of his plans, like major tax cuts for big corporations and the very wealthy, will need legislation passed by Congress.

But that will not be a problem, as he has control of the Republican Party and its majority in both chambers. Senators and Representatives are unlikely to defy him in significant numbers. And he has Musk on hand to wield his social media platform and vast wealth to pressure any rebels back into line.

Is there anything that could prevent Trump from rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented migrants or using the justice system to target political opponents he sees as his enemies?

There are logistical and financial hurdles no doubt, particularly when it comes to mass deportations, but Democratic opposition alone is unlikely to be enough to stop this. The party, after all, is still reeling from its resounding election defeat.

There is internal strife as members carry out a prolonged post-mortem over that result. And the resistance movement that mobilised before Trump’s first term, prompting days of nationwide protests after his inauguration that brought more than a million people onto the streets, appears less energised this time.

After his 2020 election defeat, Trump was kicked off social media platforms following the Capitol riot and his baseless claims of voter fraud. These companies are already treating him differently this time around, as he prepares to be inaugurated inside the rotunda where his supporters roamed on 6 January 2021.

Prominently seated in the VIP section to watch will be a collection of the richest men in the world. Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg will all be there. So will the CEOs of Google, Apple and TikTok. It is the living embodiment of the ultra-wealthy “tech-industrial complex” that Biden warned about in his farewell address.

These men have already moved to warm relations with Trump. Zuckerberg‘s Meta is abandoning fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, Bezos prevented the Washington Post (which he owns) from endorsing Kamala Harris. And all of them have donated millions to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Whether it is in Congress or the corporate world, Trump is taking office this time around with a warm welcome from America’s powerbrokers.

There’s little doubt that his mass of executive orders on day one will feature some eye-catching actions designed to titillate his base. Like issuing presidential pardons for many, if not all, of the people convicted over the Capitol riot. His supporters will be thrilled to see the people they regard as political hostages freed from jail.

Trump will need a steady stream of populist moves like this. Because there is a risk some of his plans are at odds with what a section of his supporters voted for.

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Many wanted lower prices after years of high inflation. But most economists suggest tariffs on imported goods will probably push prices up further.

Mass deportations could lead to a labour shortage in construction – complicating his pledge to build more houses – and in the agricultural sector, which could further increase the price of food. And it is billionaires, not the working class, who look set to benefit from the biggest tax cuts.

Eye-catching proposals, like promising to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, may well excite many of those who put him in office. But it remains to be seen how many Americans will feel the benefit of his headline policies.

Trump, however, is the ultimate political showman. His ability to entertain is part of his power and appeal. But his second term agenda goes deeper than pure showmanship and would be transformative if enacted.

His White House comeback will be dramatic and eventful, with consequences felt around the world. It may change America in fundamental and lasting ways.

Donald Trump has promised he will “make heads spin” on his first day back in office on Monday, with a blitz of executive orders expected in the hours after he is sworn in as the 47th US president.

He has offered a preview of some of these yet-to-be-signed directives, saying they will target issues like illegal immigration, climate rules, diversity policies, classified documents and more.

It is common for presidents to sign a range of executive orders when they enter office. Such orders carry the weight of law but can be overturned by subsequent presidents or the courts.

But the scale of what Trump has planned could be unprecedented, with legal challenges expected.

Here is what to know.

Deportations

Trump has vowed to “launch the largest deportation program in American history”, starting from day one.

He is expected to declare a national border emergency, and order the military to help secure the southern border, according to Fox News.

Trump has also said he will end a longtime policy that has kept federal immigration authorities from conducting raids on churches and schools.

Any mass deportation programme is expected to face logistical difficulties, billions in costs and a flurry of legal challenges.

Remain in Mexico

Trump may quickly move to re-implement his “Remain in Mexico” policy, which during his first term returned about 70,000 non-Mexican asylum seekers across the border to Mexico to await hearings.

End birthright citizenship

Trump has called the 150-year-old constitutional right that says anyone born on US soil is an American citizen “ridiculous” and vowed to scrap it on day one.

But doing that is much more difficult than simply issuing an executive order, because birthright citizenship is explicitly guaranteed by the US Constitution.

Closing the border on health grounds

A 1944 measure called Title 42 allows the US government to curb migration to protect public health. It was last used during the pandemic, but US media reports that the incoming administration is looking for a disease that would help justify its plans to close the southern US border with Mexico.

Drug cartels

Trump is expected to classify drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”, putting them on a list alongside groups like Al Qaeda, so-called Islamic State and Hamas.

Build the wall

When Trump was first elected president in 2016, he signed an executive order to build a border wall. Although parts of the wall have been built, there is still much left uncompleted, and he may try to finish what he started.

Tariffs

Trump has vowed sweeping tariffs on imported goods as part of his promise to prioritise American manufacturing.

Trump introduced tariffs in his first term, including some on China that Joe Biden retained.

But this time he is promising 10% tariffs on all imports, 25% on Canadian and Mexican goods and 60% on things coming from China. He has said he will begin signing executive orders imposing these on day one.

Tariffs are likely to make consumer goods more expensive and could fuel inflation, experts say. Some countries are considering retaliatory tariffs.

Crypto pile

Trump has championed cryptocurrency and his election saw the value of Bitcoin increase by 30%.

Some believe Trump will move quickly to create a federal “Bitcoin stockpile” – a strategic reserve similar to the US’s stockpile of gold and oil – that he has said would serve as a “permanent national asset to benefit all Americans”.

Scrap Joe Biden’s climate policies

The outgoing president sees the series of directives, laws and funding programmes he championed to boost green jobs, regulate pollution and fund infrastructure as one of his biggest accomplishments.

Trump has made it clear he wants to undo much of it. He is expected to use executive orders to remove drilling restrictions offshore and on federal land – fulfilling his promise to “drill, baby drill” and increase US energy production and independence.

He has also pledged to ban new wind projects and cancel electric vehicle mandates.

Pull out of the Paris Agreement (again)

Within six months of taking office in 2017, Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement – a landmark international deal designed to limit rising global temperatures.

Biden moved to rejoin the accord on his first day in office in 2021, but Trump is expected to again pull out of it.

Free Jan 6 ‘hostages’

Hundreds of people convicted after the 2021 US Capitol riots are awaiting potential pardons on Monday, when Trump returns to office.

​​”I am inclined to pardon many of them,” he told CNN over the summer. “I can’t say for every single one, because a couple of them, probably they got out of control.”

More than 1,500 individuals were arrested in relation to the event. At least 600 were charged with assaulting or impeding federal officers.

At his pre-inauguration victory rally on Sunday, Trump said he would release classified documents related to the assassination of President John F Kennedy in 1963, a subject of countless conspiracy theories.

He said he would do the same for files related to the 1968 killings of Senator Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Ukraine war

Trump claimed during the campaign that he would end the conflict on day one of his presidency. He has since said that he may need six months. It’s unclear what he might do in his first days.

Cuba and Venezuela

Trump could use executive orders to undo Biden’s recent decision to remove Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. He could also reinstate sanctions against Venezuela. Both countries were frequent targets of his ire during his first administration.

DEI

In recent years, schools and businesses across the US have adopted policies designed to support women and racial minorities.

These practices, often classified under “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), have angered many conservatives and faced legal challenges. Trump has promised to dissolve them and major corporations including Meta, Walmart and Amazon have already begun rolling back related initiatives.

Trump could use an executive order to forbid federal funding going to schools or other institutions that have DEI programmes. He could also ban funding for schools that teach “critical race theory” (CRT).

Abortion

Like most Republican presidents before him, Trump is expected to reinstate the “Mexico City policy”, which bans federal aid to international groups that provide abortion counselling.

He is also expected to reinstate an abortion rule that prohibits Title X federal health providers, a low-income family planning programme, from mentioning abortion to patients. The change effectively stripped tens of millions of dollars from organisations that offer abortion or provide referrals.

Transgender women in sports

Trump has repeatedly criticised what he calls “transgender lunacy” in schools and healthcare, and has specifically vowed to bar transgender women from competing in women’s sports.

On Sunday morning, Trump promised to issue an executive order that would postpone a law banning Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok from being implemented.

His order, he said, would give them time to find a US partner to buy a 50% stake in the company.

Trump previously backed a TikTok ban, but recently reversed his stance, pointing to the billions of views he says his videos attracted on the platform during last year’s presidential campaign.

US President-elect Donald Trump has launched his own cryptocurrency, which quickly soared in market capitalisation to several billion dollars.

His release of the meme coin, $Trump, comes as he prepares to take office on Monday as 47th president of the US.

The venture was co-ordinated by CIC Digital LLC – an affiliate of the Trump Organization – which has previously sold Trump-branded shoes and fragrances.

Meme coins are used to build popularity for a viral internet trend or movement, but they lack intrinsic value and are extremely volatile investments.

By Saturday afternoon, hours after its launch, the market capitalisation for $Trump reached nearly $5.5bn (£4.5bn), according to CoinMarketCap.com.

CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC, a company formed in Delaware earlier this month, own 80% of the tokens. It is unclear how much money Trump might make from the venture.

“My NEW Official Trump Meme is HERE! It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social as he announced the meme coin on Friday night.

Some 200m of the digital tokens have been issued and another 800m will be released in the next three years, the coin’s website said.

“This Trump Meme celebrates a leader who doesn’t back down, no matter the odds,” the website said.

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It included a disclaimer noting the coin is “not intended to be, or the subject of” an investment opportunity or a security and was “not political and has nothing to do with” any political campaign, political office or government agency.

Critics accused Trump of cashing in on the presidency.

“Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it,” Nick Tomaino, a crypto venture capitalist, said in a social media post.

Such digital tokens are notorious for speculators using hype to pump up the value before selling at the top of the market, leaving latecomers to count their losses as the price crashes.

Cryptocurrency investors are hoping the Trump administration will boost the industry.

President Joe Biden’s regulators cited concerns about fraud and money laundering as they cracked down on crypto companies by suing exchanges.

Trump was previously skittish about cryptocurrency, but at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville last year he said America would be “the crypto capital of the planet” once he returned to Washington.

His sons Erik and Donald Jr announced their own crypto venture last year.

Emily, 21, spends around £20 a month at Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein, turning to it whenever she needs a new party or holiday outfit.

“You can almost always find what you’re looking for, even if the quality is bad”, she says.

Like millions in the UK and the US, she buys from the online shop mostly because of how affordable it is.

The firm has faced scrutiny over how it treats workers, with a BBC investigation highlighting 75-hour weeks for workers in contravention of Chinese labour laws, but it is unlikely shoppers will be put off buying their clothes there.

Emily has considered stopping buying from Shein due to its labour practices, but says everywhere else “is way too expensive”.

“I’m happy to talk about the fact I shop at Shein because I know I’m not the only one,” she adds.

The numbers show she’s right, with Shein transforming from a little-known company just a few years ago into one of the world’s biggest clothing firms.

Global sales are estimated to have reached $36.9bn (£30.2bn) last year, according to GlobalData.

Shein is a private company and does not report its global results.

But profits in the UK doubled in 2023 to more than £24m, according to a Companies House filing.

Shein stocks thousands of different clothing lines, dwarfing rival fast fashion brands such as H&M and Zara.

It sells many clothes for below £10, and turns around new designs quickly.

The firm has been gearing up for for a stock market flotation in the UK, putting it under scrutiny over both its working practices and its environmental impact.

Last year, Shein itself found child labour in its supply chain after tightening scrutiny of suppliers.

It has also faced allegations that it uses cotton produced using forced labour, and last week declined to tell MPs whether it used such cotton.

Shein was contacted for comment.

In response to the BBC investigation into worker conditions it said it is “committed to ensuring the fair and dignified treatment of all workers within our supply chain” and is investing tens of millions of dollars in strengthening governance and compliance.

“We strive to set the highest standards for pay and we require that all supply chain partners adhere to our code of conduct,” it said.

Workers get paid about one to two yuan for making a tee-shirt – which is the equivalent of between 11p and 22p.

Sarah Johnson, the founder of consultancy Flourish Retail, a former head of buying and merchandising for Asos China, said the firm could pay suppliers more, which would give them more leeway to pay workers.

The supplier “doesn’t get paid an awful lot of the final price” of the garment.

When it comes to workers, “you could raise their pay and it would make a minimal amount of difference to the garment price,” she said.

An alternative would be for the firm to make less profit, she added.

Sophie Wills, from Birmingham, said she had previously bought clothes from the retailer due to their affordability.

“Times are hard,” Sophie says, adding she probably couldn’t afford higher-end clothes at the moment.

However, she says saving up and “making investments in stuff that is probably higher quality would be a good way to go”.

Thando Sibenke says she regularly shops at Shein.

“My whole outfit’s from Shein right now,” she says, adding she likes the price, convenience, and variety.

However, Thando says she plans to do more research in the future on how the clothes she buys are made.

Georgina, 24, from London, says she is “embarrassed” that she has shopped at Shein – and has now stopped.

“Since reading up on it, the negatives massively outweigh the positives and even when seeing Shein clothing in charity shops, I don’t feel comfortable buying it.”

Fashion designer and academic Shazia Saleem said that people in Generation Z – those born between about 1995 to 2010 – often say in surveys that sustainability and ethics are important to them, but that doesn’t necessarily come through in their buying choices.

Young people can feel pressure to buy new outfits to keep up appearances on social media, and they don’t have much disposable cash, so will probably continue to buy fast fashion, she said.

She added that although people should make informed buying decisions, it should be down to the government to strengthen existing UK trading standards rules to make sure companies are selling sustainable and ethically sound products.

Louise Deglise-Favre, senior apparel analyst at GlobalData, also said she expected affordability to continue to outweigh ethical concerns for Shein shoppers.

Younger customers tend to not have much disposable income due to being in school or low paying jobs, she said.

Shein releases thousands of new products daily, which can encourage shoppers to buy too much – but it’s also a response to “the desire from consumers to constantly update their wardrobes with the latest trends”, she adds.

Irawati Karve led a life that stood apart from those around her.

Born in British-ruled India, and at a time when women didn’t have many rights or freedoms, Karve did the unthinkable: she pursued higher studies in a foreign country, became a college professor and India’s first female anthropologist.

She also married a man of her choosing, swam in a bathing suit, drove a scooter and even dared to defy a racist hypothesis of her doctorate supervisor – a famous German anthropologist named Eugen Fischer.

Her writings about Indian culture and civilisation and its caste system are ground-breaking, and are a part of the curriculum in Indian colleges. Yet she remains an obscure figure in history and a lot about her life remains unknown.

A new book titled Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve, written by her granddaughter Urmilla Deshpande and academic Thiago Pinto Barbosa, sheds light on her fascinating life, and the many odds she braved to blaze an inspiring trail for the women, and men, who came after her.

Born in 1905 in Burma (now Myanmar), Irawati was named after the Irrawaddy river. The only girl among six siblings, she was doted on by her family and brought up in comfort.

But the young girl’s life took unexpected turns, resulting in experiences that would shape her as a person. Apart from strong women, Irawati’s life also crossed paths with empathetic, progressive men who paved the way for her to break barriers and cheered her on as she did so.

At seven, Irawati was sent to boarding school in Pune – a rare opportunity from her father when most girls were pushed into marriage. In Pune, she met RP Paranjpye, a prominent educationist whose family unofficially adopted Irawati and raised her as their own.

In the Paranjpye household, Irawati was exposed to a way of life that celebrated critical thinking and righteous living, even if that meant going against the grain of Indian society. Paranjpye, who Irawati fondly called “appa” or her “second father”, was a man far ahead of his times.

A college principal and staunch supporter of women’s education, he was also an atheist. Through him, Irawati discovered the fascinating world of social sciences and its impact on society.

When Irawati decided to pursue a doctorate in anthropology in Berlin, despite her biological father’s objections, she found support in Paranjpye and her husband, Dinkar Karve, a professor of science.

She arrived in the German city in 1927, after a days-long journey by ship, and began pursuing her degree under the mentorship of Fischer, a celebrated professor of anthropology and eugenics.

At the time, Germany was still reeling from the impact of World War One and Hitler had not yet risen to power. But the spectre of anti-Semitism had begun raising its ugly head. Irawati bore witness to this hate when she found out one day that a Jewish student in her building had been murdered.

In the book, the authors describe the fear, shock and disgust Irawati felt when she saw the man’s body lying on the footpath outside her building, blood oozing across the concrete.

Irawati wrestled with these emotions while working on the thesis assigned by Fischer: to prove that white Europeans were more logical and reasonable – and therefore racially superior to non-white Europeans. This involved meticulously studying and measuring 149 human skulls.

Fischer hypothesised that white Europeans had asymmetrical skulls to accommodate larger right frontal lobes, supposedly a marker of higher intelligence. However, Irawati’s research found no correlation between race and skull asymmetry.

“She had contradicted Fischer’s hypothesis, of course, but also the theories of that institute and the mainstream theories of the time,” the authors write in the book.

She boldly presented her findings, risking her mentor’s ire and her degree. Fischer gave her the lowest grade, but her research critically and scientifically rejected the use of human differences to justify discrimination. (Later, the Nazis would use Fischer’s theories of racial superiority to further their agenda and Fischer would join the Nazi party.)

Throughout her life, Irawati would display this streak of gumption combined with endless empathy, especially for the women she encountered.

At a time when it was unthinkable for a woman to travel too far away from home, Irawati went on field trips to remote villages in India after returning to the country, sometimes with her male colleagues, at other times with her students and even her children, to study the lives of various tribespeople.

She joined archaeological expeditions to recover 15,000-year-old bones, bridging the past and present. These gruelling trips took her deep into forests and rugged terrain for weeks or months, with the book describing her sleeping in barns or truck beds and often going days with little food.

Irawati also bravely confronted societal and personal prejudices as she interacted with people from all walks of life.

The authors describe how Irawati, a Chitpavan Brahmin from a traditionally vegetarian upper-caste Hindu community, bravely ate partially raw meat offered by a tribal leader she wished to study. She recognised it as a gesture of friendship and a test of loyalty, responding with openness and curiosity.

Her studies fostered deep empathy for humanity, leading her to later criticise fundamentalism across religions, including Hinduism. She believed India belonged to everyone who called it home.

The book recounts a moment when, reflecting on the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on the Jews, Irawati’s mind wandered to a startling realisation that would forever alter her view of humanity.

“In these reflections, Irawati learned the most difficult of lessons from Hindu philosophy: all that is you, too,” the authors write.

Irawati died in 1970, but her legacy endures through her work and the people it continues to inspire.

Chappell Roan can’t be stopped.

Over the last 12 months, the 26-year-old has become the buzziest star in pop. A flamboyant, flame-haired sensation, whose songs are as colourful as they are raw.

Her debut album, released to little fanfare in 2023, has just topped the UK charts for a second time. Next week, she’s up for six Grammy awards, including best new artist. And BBC Radio 1 have named her their Sound Of 2025.

Success has been all the sweeter because her former record label refused to release many of the songs that exploded onto the charts last year.

“They were like, ‘This is not gonna work. We don’t get it’,” Roan tells Radio 1’s Jack Saunders.

Reaching pop’s A-list isn’t just a vindication but a revolution.

The 26-year-old is the first female pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer person, rather than coming out as part of their post-fame narrative.

On a more personal level, she’s finally done well enough to move into a house of her own, and acquire a rescue cat, named Cherub Lou.

“She’s super tiny, her breath smells so bad, and she doesn’t have a meow,” the singer dotes.

If kitten ownership is a benefit of fame, Roan has bristled at the downsides.

She has spoken out against abusive fans, calling out “creepy behaviour” from people who harass her in airport queues and “stalk” her parents’ home. Last September, she went viral for cussing a photographer who’d been shouting abuse at stars on the red carpet of the MTV Awards.

“I was looking around, and I was like, ‘This is what people are OK with all the time? And I’m supposed to act normal? This is not normal. This is crazy’,” she recalls.

The incident made headlines. British tabloids called her outburst the “tantrum” of a “spoiled diva”.

But Roan is unapologetic.

“I’ve been responding that way to disrespect my whole life – but now there are cameras on me, and I also happen to be a pop star, and those things don’t match. It’s like oil and water.”

Roan says musicians are trained to be obedient. Standing up for yourself is portrayed as whining or ingratitude, and rejecting convention comes at a cost.

“I think, actually, I’d be more successful if I was OK wearing a muzzle,” she laughs.

“If I were to override more of my basic instincts, where my heart is going, ‘‘, I would be bigger.

“I would be way bigger… And I would still be on tour right now.”

Indeed, Roan rejected the pressure of extending her 2024 tour to protect her physical and mental health. She credits that resolve to her late grandfather.

“There’s something he said that I think about in every move I make with my career. There are always options.”

“So when someone says, ‘Do this concert because you’ll never get offered that much money ever again’, it’s like, who cares?

“If I don’t feel like doing this right now, there are always options. There is not a scarcity of opportunity. I think about that all the time.”

As fans will know by now, Roan was born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz and raised in the Bible Belt town of Willard, Missouri.

The oldest of four children, she aspired to be an actress – but, for a long time, it seemed her future would be in sport. She ran at state-competition level, and almost went to college for cross-country.

Then she entered a singing contest at the age of 13 and won. Before long, she’d written her first song, about a crush on a Mormon boy who wasn’t allowed to date outside his faith.

She took her stage name as a tribute to her grandfather Dennis K Chappell and his favourite song, a Western ballad called The Strawberry Roan.

“He was very funny and very smart,” she recalls. “And I don’t think he ever questioned my ability.

“A lot of people were like, ‘You should go completely country’, or, ‘You should try Christian music’. And he never told me to do anything.

“He was the only person that was like, ‘You don’t need a plan B. Just do it’.”

Eventually, one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, which signed her at the age of just 17.

Moving to LA, she recorded and released her first EP, School Nights, in 2017. It was a solid but unremarkable affair, steeped in the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde.

Roan only found a sound of her own when a group of gay friends took her to a drag bar.

“I walked into that club in West Hollywood and it was like heaven,” she told the BBC last year. “It was amazing to see all these people who were happy and confident in their bodies.

“And the go-go dancers! I was enthralled. I couldn’t stop watching them. I was like, ‘I have to do that’.”

She didn’t become a dancer, but she did write a song imagining what it would be like to be one and how her mother would react. Roan called it Pink Pony Club after a strip bar in her home town.

“That song changed everything,” she says. “It put me in a new category.

“I never thought I could actually be a ‘pop star girl’ and Pink Pony forced me into that.”

Her label disagreed. They refused to release Pink Pony Club for two years. Shortly after they relented, Roan was dropped in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.

Bruised but not broken, she went back home and spent the next year serving coffee in a drive-through doughnut shop.

“It absolutely had a positive impact on me,” she says. “You have the knowledge of what it’s like to clean a public restroom. That’s very important.”

The period was transformational in other ways. She saved her earnings, had her heart broken by a person “with pale blue eyes”, moved back to Los Angeles, and gave herself a year to make it.

It might have taken a little longer than that, but she hit the ground running.

During her exile, Roan had stayed in touch with her Pink Pony Club co-writer, Daniel Nigro.

He was also working with another up-and-coming singer called Olivia Rodrigo and, when her career took off, Roan got a courtside seat, supporting Rodrigo on tour and providing backing vocals on her second album, Guts.

More importantly, Nigro used the momentum to sign Roan to his own record label and ensure the release of her debut album in September 2023.

At first, it seemed like Roan’s original label had been right. Sales were disappointing and audiences were slow to catch on because her in-your-face queer anthems were out of step with the trend for whispery, confessional pop.

But those songs came to life on stage. Big, fun and designed for audience participation, they’re taken to new heights by Roan’s powerhouse voice and flamboyant stage persona.

“A drag queen does not get on stage to calm people down,” she says. “A drag queen does not say things to flatter people. A queen makes you blush, you know what I mean? Expect the same energy at my show.”

Sure enough, it was a live-streamed appearance at last year’s Coachella Festival that pushed her into the upper echelons of pop.

Dressed in a PVC crop top that declared “Eat Me”, she played the packed Gobi tent like a headliner, strutting purposefully across the stage and coaching the audience in the campy choreography for Hot To Go.

Then she stared directly into the camera and dedicated a song to her ex.

“Bitch I know you’re watching… and all those horrible things happening to you are karma.”

The clip went viral and, before long, her career did, too.

By the summer, all of her shows had been upgraded. Festivals kept having to move her to bigger stages. When she played Lollapalooza in August, she drew the event’s biggest ever daytime crowd.

“It just takes a decade,” she says. “That’s what I tell everyone. ‘If you’re OK with it taking 10 years, then you’re good’.”

As fans discovered her debut album, Roan also released a standalone single – a sarcastic slice of synth-pop called Good Luck Babe, which became her breakout hit.

“I don’t even know if I’ve ever said this in an interview, but it was originally called Good Luck, Jane,” she reveals.

“I wanted it to be about me falling in love with my best friend, and then her being like, ‘Ha ha ha, I don’t like you back, I like boys.’

“And it was like, ‘OK, well, good luck with that, ‘.”

A masterclass in pop storytelling, Good Luck Babe has a proper three-act structure, with a killer pay-off in the middle eight and a chorus you just can’t shake.

Still, Roan was shocked by its success.

“I just threw it out, like, I don’t know what this is going to do – and it carried the whole year!”

The question, of course, is what the star does next, now that she’s the Sound of 2025.

She’s already previewed two new songs, The Subway and The Giver, in concert – but all she will reveal about a second album is that she’s “more reluctant to be sad or dark”.

“It feels so good to party,” she explains.

Looking back at the last 12 months, she’s philosophical about what it means to be pop’s hottest new commodity.

“A lot of people think fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you possibly want than adoration?”

Roan does admit that the admiration of strangers is more “addictive” than she’d expected.

“Like, I understand why I’m so scared to lose this feeling.

“It’s so scary to think that one day people will not care about you the same way as they do right now – and I think [that idea] lives in women’s brains a lot different than men’s.”

Ultimately, she decides, success and failure are “out of my control”. Instead, she wants to make good choices.

“If I can look back and say, ‘I did not crumble under the weight of expectation, and I did not stand for being abused or blackmailed’, [then] at least I stayed true to my heart,” she says.

“Like I said before, there are always options.”

• 1) Chappell Roan
• 2) Ezra Collective
• 3) Barry Can’t Swim
• 4) Myles Smith
• 5) English Teacher

As Palestinians poured onto the streets of Gaza to celebrate the ceasefire, moments of joy faded for many as they returned to their homes to be met by destruction.

In Jabalia, a town in northern Gaza that is home to the largest refugee camp in the strip, pictures and videos shared by residents revealed entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble.

Returning to the al-Faluja area of Jabalia, Duaa al-Khalidi told BBC News: “I survived with my two daughters, we came out from under the rubble of our house.

“Here, beneath the debris, the bodies of my husband, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law have remained buried since 9 October.”

The 28-year-old mother of two continued: “I want nothing but their bodies so I can bury them with dignity.”

Jabalia camp, once home to over 250,000 Palestinians, became the site of the largest and most violent Israeli military operation during the war, with around 4,000 Palestinians killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

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Also returning to Jabalia was Hussein Awda, who documented his journey back from Gaza City.

The professional weightlifter, who has represented Palestine internationally, lost 10 members of his family at the start of the war.

“The best thing that happened today is that after 100 days, I was able to visit my family’s grave and pray for them,” he shared.

He also posted a video revealing the devastation to his three-storey home and sports club he owns.

“Here I lost the people closest to my heart – my brothers, my sons, my source of livelihood. The war killed everything beautiful inside us.”

In the southern city of Khan Younis, armed Hamas fighters drove through the streets to cheering crowds and chanting, according to Reuters news agency.

Hamas policemen, in police uniforms, were also deployed in some areas after months of hiding out of sight to avoid Israeli strikes.

Gaza City resident Ahmed Abu Ayham, who has been sheltering with his family in Khan Younis, told Reuters that his home city was “dreadful”.

In the city, which has suffered the heaviest destruction according to experts, people were seen waving the Palestinian flag and filming scenes on their mobile.

But the 40-year-old said it was no time for celebrations, despite the fact the ceasefire might save lives.

“We are in pain, deep pain and it is time that we hug one another and cry,” he said.

Gazans were also on the move to the southern city of Rafah near the Egyptian border.

Mohammed Suleiman told BBC Arabic’s Gaza Lifeline: “Thank God, we have received the news of the ceasefire coming into effect with joy and happiness.

“God willing, things will change for the better and we will return to Rafah. I hope every displaced person will safely return to his home.”

Many fled the city after Israel ordered their evacuation before starting an operation in the southern Gaza city.

In Rafah, Muhammad al-Jamal, a journalist for Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam, reflected on his own loss.

“The house was razed to the ground; everything was reduced to rubble,” he said. “The chicken coop and the fig tree whose fruits we shared together are now a thing of the past.”

The fragility of the ceasefire agreement became evident in its initial hours.

The truce finally took effect after a three-hour delay, during which 19 Palestinians were reportedly killed in what Israel said were strikes on “terror targets”.

By the afternoon, three Israeli female hostages were back in Israel, as part of a six-week first phase that will see 33 hostages released.

But people in Gaza remain fearful that the truce may falter once again.