Joe Biden has pre-emptively pardoned Covid response chief Anthony Fauci and the members of the 6 January riot investigation to prevent what he called “unjustified… politically motivated prosecutions”.

The outgoing US president said: “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment.”

Trump, who will be inaugurated on Monday, regularly clashed with Dr Fauci during the pandemic and has suggested he would take action against those who tried to hold him accountable for the 6 January Capitol riot.

Biden also issued a pre-emptive pardon to Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, who last year described Trump as “fascist to the core”.

LIVE: Follow the inauguration as it happens

EXPLAINED: What Trump could do on day one

GUIDE: What we know about Donald Trump’s inauguration

INSIGHT: Trump’s circle of influencers

FAMILY: Which Trumps are going where?

Biden’s statement said that the pardons should “not be mistaken as an acknowledgment” that any of those covered “engaged in any wrongdoing”.

Democrats had warned the outgoing president against such action. Adam Schiff, a Senator for California, said Biden could set a “precedent” for “each president hereafter on their way out the door giving out a broad category of pardons”.

Dr Fauci told US media that he “truly appreciated” Biden for taking action, adding that the possibility of prosecution has created “immeasurable and intolerable distress” on his family.

“Let me be perfectly clear, I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me,” he added.

General Milley, 66, thanked Biden in a statement and stated that he did not wish spend the rest of his life “fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights”.

“I do not want to put my family, my friends, and those with whom I served through the resulting distraction, expense, and anxiety,” he said.

Biden’s pardons cover all members of the House Select Committee investigating the 6 January riot, as well as their staff members and the officers who testified.

Former US Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn said he was “eternally grateful” to Biden, “not just for this pre-emptive pardon, but for his leadership and service to this nation”.

“Unfortunately, the political climate we are in now has made the need for [a pardon] somewhat of a reality,” he said.

“I, like all other public servants, was just doing my job and upholding my oath.”

Trump in December backed a call for the FBI to investigate fellow Republican Liz Cheney over her role in leading Congress’s probe.

The incoming president is set to pardon some of those convicted of crimes related to the riot. “You’re going to see something tomorrow,” Trump said on Sunday, in reference to the 6 January rioters. “I think you’ll be very, very happy.”

On the campaign trail, Trump railed against “enemies from within”, and has endorsed several figures who have vowed retribution against his foes to join his cabinet.

However, his choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said during her confirmation hearing last week that there would never be an enemies list and that she would not use the Justice Department to target anyone based on their politics.

Donald Trump is just hours away from being sworn in as the 47th president but the global impact of his second term is already being felt.

From Jerusalem to Kyiv to London to Ottawa, his election victory and the anticipation of a new Trump agenda has changed the calculations of world leaders – with some far-reaching consequences.

In the lead-up to the handover of power in Washington, our correspondents dissected these changes in the regions where they were.

• Latest updates from inauguration day

Donald Trump has made an impact on the Middle East even before he sits down in the Oval Office to start his second term as president.

He cut through the delaying tactics that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in alliance with his ultra-nationalist coalition partners, had used to avoid accepting the ceasefire deal that Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden put on the negotiating table last May.

American pressure on Hamas and other Palestinian groups is a given. Under Biden, pressure on Israel was the lever that was never pulled. Trump starts his second term claiming credit, with reasonable justification, for getting the ceasefire deal in Gaza over the line. He can bask in some glory.

• Read Jeremy’s analysis in full

Trump and his team are different this time round, more prepared, with a more aggressive agenda perhaps, but his delight in keeping the world guessing seems undimmed. It’s this uncertainty accompanying Trump that the British political establishment in Whitehall and Westminster finds so shocking.

How can the UK prepare for what it can’t yet know?

A small group of senior ministers has been trying.

There have been series of secret “mini-cabinet” meetings, with the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds “trying to plan for what might come”, according to one source.

One insider tells me there hasn’t been too much preparation for multiple specific scenarios because “you’d drive yourself crazy” trying to guess Trump’s next steps. But another source says various papers have been prepared to be presented to the wider Cabinet.

I’m told the focus has been “looking for opportunities” rather than panicking about whether Trump might follow through on some of his more outlandish statements, such as annexing Canada.

• Read Laura’s analysis in full

Twenty-four-year-old David joined up to fight in Ukraine’s war against Russia last September as Moscow’s troops neared his hometown. He now spends his time handling explosives – though he would prefer to be at college learning languages.

“No-one knows how long the war will last,” he says, “maybe not even the politicians”.

“I would like it to end soon so that civilians won’t suffer, and people won’t die anymore. But considering how things are now on the front line, it won’t be soon.”

He believes that if the guns are silenced, it will be only a pause, before Moscow comes back for more.

The winds get stronger and a vampire drone crash lands. It’s out of action for now. The unit pack up and leave, as fast as they came. They will be back in action at nightfall, resuming the duels in the sky.

But on the ground the Russians keep inching forward, and the Trump presidency will mean pressure for a deal. And there is one more hard truth here: if it comes it is unlikely to be on Ukraine’s terms.

• Read Orla’s analysis in full

The political instability in Ottawa comes as Canada faces a number of challenges – not least the vow by Trump to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian goods.

Until recently, Justin Trudeau seemed determined to hang on as prime minister, citing his desire to face Pierre Poilievre – his ideological opposite – in the polls.

But the shock resignation of Trudeau’s key deputy, former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, in mid-December – when she cited his perceived failure to not take Trump’s threats seriously – proved to be the final straw.

Members of Trudeau’s own party began to make it publicly clear they no longer supported his leadership.

And with that, the last domino fell. Trudeau announced his resignation as PM earlier this month.

• Read Jessica’s analysis in full

China’s economy rebounded in the last three months of last year, allowing the government to meet its growth target of 5% in 2024, Beijing announced on Friday.

But it is one of the slowest rates of growth in decades as the world’s second largest economy struggles to shake off a protracted property crisis, high local government debt and youth unemployment.

The head of the country’s statistics bureau said China’s economic achievements in 2024 were “hard won,” after the government launched a slew of stimulus measures late last year.

Beijing has rarely missed its growth targets in the past.

Experts had broadly predicted this rate of growth. The World Bank said lower borrowing costs and rising exports would mean China could achieve annual growth of 4.9%.

Investors, however, are bracing themselves: the threat of President-elect Donald Trump’s tariffs on $500bn (£409bn) worth of Chinese goods looms large.

Yet that is not all that stands in the way of China achieving its growth targets next year.

• Read Suranjana’s analysis in full

• EXPLAINED: What Trump could do on day one
• GUIDE: What we know about Donald Trump’s inauguration
• INSIGHT: Trump’s circle of influencers
• FAMILY: Which Trumps are going where?

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Pope Francis has said that Donald Trump’s plans to deport illegal migrants from the US would be a “disgrace” if they materialised.

Speaking to an Italian TV programme from his Vatican residence, Francis said that if the plans went ahead, Trump would make “poor wretches that don’t have anything foot the bill”.

“That’s not right. That’s not how you solve problems,” he said.

Trump has promised to begin the largest expulsion of undocumented immigrants in US history soon after he takes office.

• LIVE: Follow the inauguration as it happens
• EXPLAINED: What Trump could do on day one
• GUIDE: What we know about Donald Trump’s inauguration
• INSIGHT: Trump’s circle of influencers
• FAMILY: Which Trumps are going where?

In a message to Trump shared on Monday, Pope Francis offered him “cordial greetings” and urged him to lead a society with “no room for hatred, discrimination or exclusion” and promote “peace and reconciliation among peoples”.

The Pope is known to hold the issue of migrants dear. During a public audience last August, he said that “systematically working by all means to drive away migrants” was “a grave sin”.

In 2016, before the first presidential election won by Trump, Pope Francis said “a person who thinks only about building walls… and not of building bridges, is not Christian”.

Referring to Trump’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep migrants from travelling into the US, Francis said: “I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that. We must see if he said things in that way and I will give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Francis and Trump later met when Trump and his family visited Rome in 2017.

Before the US presidential election in 2024, the Pope declined to say whether people should vote for Trump or for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris, merely urging people to choose “the lesser evil” according to their conscience.

During the interview on Sunday evening, Francis also touched on the issue of migration to Europe, saying there was “a lot of cruelty” and that everyone had “the right to remain home and the right to emigrate”.

The Pope also added that some of the southern European countries that receive the most migrant arrivals “are not having any children and need manpower”.

“In some of these countries, there are entire villages that are empty. A good, well-thought out migrant policy would help countries like Italy and Spain too,” he said.

In another section of the interview, Francis was asked about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and said he did not know why making peace was so difficult.

“I don’t know why… it’s as if there was an international drive towards self-destruction,” the Pope said.

Francis, 88, has been in the post since 2013, when he was elected to succeed Pope Benedict XVI.

A parade of tech billionaires and key members of his orbit joined President-elect Donald Trump as he kicked off his pre-inaugural celebrations with a church service on Monday morning.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple leader Tim Cook, and Google chief Sundar Pichai were seen taking their prime seats at St John’s Church.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, FIFA president Gianni Infantino and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson were also spotted at the church.

Many of these executives were among the first business world critics of Trump during his first term, speaking out on issues such as climate change and immigration.

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• GUIDE: What we know about Donald Trump’s inauguration
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• FAMILY: Which Trumps are going where?

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chou too is expected to attend the inauguration, as his company grapples with the fallout from a US ban, as well as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber.

Then of course there is SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk, who spent nearly $300m helping the president campaign and has stuck closely to his side ever since.

It is a striking spectacle. The last public event in Washington to bring so many tech bosses together in the same room was a 2020 congressional hearing aimed at their companies.

Today, most of the firms still have serious outstanding matters before the US government, including anti-monopoly lawsuits, investigations, regulatory fights and tariffs.

Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bennett, both Democrats, shared a letter addressed to the executives, which accused them of trying to “cozy up to the incoming Trump administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation and buy favor”.

“Funny they never sent me one of these for contributing to Democrats,” Mr Altman posted on social media in reply.

How enduring the tech bromance proves and how far Trump will push on many of these issues remain open questions.

But the president, who left office the first time as a kind of pariah in the business world, appears to be revelling in his new position.

As he wrote on social media last month: “Everybody wants to be my friend!!!”

Trump’s budding friendships with tech executives have not gone over well with everyone in his circle.

Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on Sunday called Musk a “truly evil guy”, claiming he would have him “run out of here by Inauguration Day”.

“I look at this and I think most people in our movement look at this as President Trump broke the oligarchs, he broke them and they surrendered,” Bannon told ABC News.

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

Inauguration day is under way. It will include a formal swearing-in ceremony, musical performances and a number of formal balls.

But freezing temperatures have prompted events to be moved indoors, with Trump and Vice-President-elect JD Vance set to take the oath of office in the US Capitol Rotunda building.

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

It 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 will officially become 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 becomes vice-president.

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

Later, we will see the swearing-in of Trump and Vance inside the Capitol’s rotunda at the precise time of 11:47 EST (16:47 GMT). 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 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. He will call for a “revolution of common sense” according to extracts released in advance.

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. However, this is essentially cancelled, due to the weather.

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.

During his first day of power, Trump is expected to sign more than 200 executive actions. This would include executive orders, which are legally-binding, and other presidential directives like proclamations, which are usually not.

An executive order is a written order issued by the president to the federal government which does not require congressional approval.

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

This year, however, Washington DC is in the grip of brutally cold winds – with the National Weather Service (NWS) forecasting temperatures of 23F (-5C).

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

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. Trump says he will visit the crowd at the sports arena after his swearing-in.

It is 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.

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Local and federal officials are expecting about 200,000 people to show up in Washington DC – who 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 will 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, along with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Argentina’s President Javier Milei.

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.

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 performed at Trump’s victory rally on Sunday, and are expected again at one of the inaugural balls on 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 have received a certain number of tickets to the ceremony, which they have been distributing to their constituents for free.

It is also possible 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 will 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.

• EXPLAINED: What Donald Trump could do on day one
• INSIGHT: Meet the president’s circle of influencers
• 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

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Every new president begins a fresh chapter in American history. And when Donald Trump is inaugurated in a freezing 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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• EXPLAINED: What Trump could do on day one
• GUIDE: What we know about Donald Trump’s inauguration
• INSIGHT: Trump’s circle of influencers
• FAMILY: Which Trumps are going where?

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.

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Since the war started the job had become his life. Many of the people being bombed were his neighbours, people he’d grown up with.

Hatem Al-Atar, 25, wasn’t married. His bravery was not reckless, or born of ignorance. He knew he could die any second.

“All days of war since 7 October until now were difficult. Every second in this war was hard. You could lose your life, of a beloved one any second,” Hatem says.

He is sitting in the civil defence office in Deir al-Balah with his comrades. They chat and check their phones. Each one is a survivor.

Ninety-four of their comrades were killed. More than 300 were wounded – nearly half the civil defence organisation in Gaza.

For Hatem, death was as close as the explosion that blew him off his feet in a house near Nasser hospital.

“There were people injured and killed around the house,” he remembers.

“I entered to check if there is anyone there, alive or dead. Once I did, a reconnaissance missile hit the house.”

The footage taken by a colleague shows him striding into the building. A fire is burning to the left of frame.

Then there is a loud blast, clouds of smoke, a man staggering out, but it’s not Hatem.

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His friends go back inside and drag him out. He’s coughing and has to be held up. But he survives.

Others close to him were not so fortunate.

On 14 March last year – the start of Ramadan – he got a call at four in the morning from one of his brothers.

Nobody in Gaza, in the time of war, called at that time with good news.

“He told me that our house in al-Bureij was hit and my dad was killed.”

Hatem went to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah and met a family friend who directed him to the mortuary.

“When I went there, my father was laid on the floor next to eight other bodies. They were my sister-in-law and her seven children! I was in shock.”

Still, Hatem kept going, into the place of explosions, collapsing buildings, the rubble where the dead and occasionally the living were buried. He pulled out bodies, and parts of bodies.

Then came the hour when the bombing and shooting stopped.

The first night without air strikes. The time to start thinking of something that had not been guaranteed over the last 15 months – a future.

His thoughts turn to education, and romance.

“With the deal, I should think what to do next. I will pursue my university study once universities are back in business. I’m single but I will think about getting married.”

To try to tell the story of how the people of Gaza experienced this war, I and BBC colleagues have depended on the tireless efforts of local journalists working on our behalf.

Israel banned the foreign media from entering Gaza to report the war independently.

The BBC’s local journalists have been on the streets almost non-stop for the last 24 hours capturing the mood of Gaza in the time of ceasefire: a gunman standing in the roadway in Nuseirat in central Gaza, firing into the air; Hamas fighters and police re-emerging; a few yards down the road another group of men shooting towards the sky; crowds gathering at cross streets and on corners; a man kneeling and kissing the ground.

But all of this is taking place against a backdrop of ruin. Trucks and cars trundle past, weighed down with people’s belongings. Some use donkey carts to haul what possessions have survived after their multiple displacements.

There are hundreds of thousands of journeys in Gaza today. Some are actually under way. Others exist in the imagination. All have one direction – home.

Prof Jumaa Abu Shiha arrives at what remains of his house in Nuseirat.

First, he says the feeling of having survived is “indescribable”. He prays to himself: “God is the best disposer of our affairs.”

He repeats this as he goes from one ruined room to another. His wife and several children follow.

Walls are blown out. The interiors are scarred with machine gun and shrapnel marks.

Prof Abu Shiha describes how he built the house “block by block”, painted it and cherished the moment he brought his family to live here.

“I can’t find a house, I can only see destruction not a house,” he says. “I didn’t expect this. I was expecting to come back to a house and find a place to shelter me and my children.”

He points to his daughters’ room, and his sons’ room, so carefully decorated and now laid waste. “The feeling is indescribable,” he says.

There is a massive task of rebuilding ahead. The UN and aid agencies have repeatedly accused Israel of obstructing the flow of aid; the United States at one point threatened to curb military assistance to Israel unless more aid was allowed into Gaza. Israel denies restricting aid.

Aid trucks were crossing into the strip throughout the afternoon. Among them was a convoy from the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization, which we reported on last week, on the journey from Amman towards Gaza.

Forklift trucks moved tonnes of medicine and food to help the nearly two million displaced in Gaza – roughly 90% of the population.

Such aid is tangible assistance. It can be weighed, counted, loaded, and ultimately distributed. People can be fed and given medicine. But there is another challenge whose demands are immense, and which will have a profound impact on the future of Gaza.

The war has created unknown numbers of traumatised adults and children. We have recorded some of their stories but are aware of the tens of thousands more that remain untold.

Children have faced acute suffering. According to a survey of the caregivers of 504 children, for the UK charity War Child, 96% of children felt death was imminent.

The interviews also found that 49% had a desire to die. Frequently our journalists have heard young survivors say they wished they could join a dead mother, father, or sibling.

Ten-year-old Amr al Hindi was the sole survivor of an Israeli strike on the building where he lived in Beit Lahia last October. Our colleague in the area filmed Amr in hospital just after the attack.

The floor around him was covered with the wounded. A woman sat with blood seeping from her ear. Nearby a man had just died.

“Where’s Sherif?” Amr asked repeatedly. A nurse told him Sherif was OK. “I will take you upstairs to see him.” But Sherif, his brother, did not survive. Nor did his other brother, Ali, or his sister Aseel, or his mother and father. The whole family was gone.

Just after the ceasefire agreement was announced we went back to see what had become of Amr al Hindi. He was living with his grandparents, and it was clear they loved him with care and tenderness. The child had three of his toes amputated after the bombing, but was managing to walk normally.

Amr sat on his grandfather’s lap and stared directly at the camera. He was still, and composed, as if he was looking out from behind a thick protective screen. He began to speak about his brother Ali and how he had wanted to go to Jordan and study to become a doctor.

“I wish to become like Ali. I want to fulfil his dream, and travel to Jordan to become a doctor,” he said. But over the last few words tears began to fall and he broke into sobs.

Amr’s grandfather kissed him on the cheek; he said “darling” and patted his chest.

In this moment it is understood that there are many wars here.

Some that have paused. Others that, for the survivors, will live long into the future.

Police in the Indian city of Mumbai have arrested a man in connection with a knife attack on Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan last week.

Khan, one of India’s biggest stars, was stabbed by an intruder at his home, in an attack that shocked the country. He is recovering after surgery.

On Sunday, police said they had arrested the key suspect, Mohammad Shariful Islam Shehzad, adding that he was a citizen of Bangladesh who was staying in India illegally.

Mr Shehzad’s lawyer has denied the allegations and says he is not from Bangladesh.

Police say they arrested Mr Shehzad from Thane, a district in the outskirts of Mumbai.

Preliminary evidence suggests that he came to the city about six months ago and had been working at a housekeeping agency using a fake name and ID, Dixit Gedam, a deputy commissioner of Mumbai police, told a press conference.

Police suspect that Mr Shehzad allegedly broke into Khan’s home with the intention of robbing him, Mr Gedam said.

On Sunday, a court in Mumbai sent Mr Shehzad to five-day police custody.

His lawyer, Sandeep Shikhane, told reporters that his client was being made a “scapegoat”.

“There is no documentary evidence to suggest he is a Bangladeshi citizen,” he said.

The attack on Khan has made national headlines and also raised questions about safety and security in Mumbai, one of India’s most populated cities and its financial capital.

Khan was stabbed six times and suffered several injuries, including one on the back of his neck, in the attack at his home in an upscale neighbourhood.

A nurse, Eliyama Philip, who works in Khan’s home, told the police last week that she first noticed the shadow of a man near the bathroom door late at night while she was in the child’s room with the nanny.

Ms Philip said a man appeared holding a wooden object in one hand and a long blade in another and warned the two against making any noise. He demanded 10m rupees ($115,477; £94,511), she said.

A scuffle broke out, during which Ms Philip was injured. She also said that hearing the commotion, Khan and his wife rushed to the room and that the attacker struck the actor with a blade before fleeing.

On Friday, investigators reportedly detained – and later released – at least five other people for questioning in connection with the investigation.

Many of the men were taken into custody because they resembled the attacker, who was captured on CCTV camera while he was exiting the building.

China has executed a man found guilty of killing at least 35 people in a car attack in November, in what is thought to be the deadliest attack in the country for a decade.

Fan Weiqiu, 62, injured dozens more when he drove his car into people exercising outside a stadium in the southern city of Zhuhai.

State media said a second man was executed for a separate attack that came days later. Xu Jiajin, 21, killed eight people in a stabbing spree at his university in the eastern city of Wuxi.

Authorities said Fan was driven by “dissatisfaction” over how his property had been divided following his divorce, while Xu carried out his attack after “failing to obtain his diploma due to poor exam results”.

Fan was detained at the scene on 11 November, where police said he was found with self-inflicted wounds.

In December, he was found guilty of “endangering public safety”, with the Zhuhai Intermediate People’s Court describing his motive as “extremely vile” and the methods used “particularly cruel”.

His execution on Monday comes less than a month after the court sentenced him to death.

In the case of Xu, police said he confessed to his crime “without hesitation” on 16 November. He was sentenced to death on 17 December, with the court hearing that the circumstances of his crime were “particularly bad” and “extremely serious”.

Human rights groups believe China is the world’s leading executioner, killing thousands of people every year. The country does not release details about its use of the death penalty, so reliable numbers are unavailable.

China has been grappling with a spate of public violence, with many attackers believed to have been spurred by a desire to “take revenge on society” – where perpetrators target strangers over their personal grievances.

The number of such attacks across China reached 19 in 2024.

Within days of the Zhuhai and Wuxi attacks, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school in Changde city, injuring 30.

Authorities said the man, Huang Wen, wanted to vent his anger after dealing with investment losses and family conflict.

Huang was handed a suspended death sentence last month, which could be commuted to life imprisonment if he does not commit another crime in the next two years.

Analysts earlier told the BBC that the string of mass killings raised questions about how people in China have been dealing with various sources of stress, such as the country’s sluggish economy.

“The tensions do seem to be building, and it doesn’t look like there is any way it is going to ease up in the near future,” says George Magnus, an economist at Oxford University’s China Centre.

A court in India has sentenced a man to life in prison for the rape and murder of a junior doctor, in a case that sparked nationwide outrage and protests.

The judge rejected demands for the death penalty but said that Sanjay Roy, a hospital volunteer in Kolkata city who was convicted over the weekend, would spend the rest of his life in jail.

Roy has maintained he is innocent and is expected to appeal against the verdict in a higher court.

The victim’s family said they wanted him to be hanged, and that they were “shocked” by the sentence.

“We will continue our fight, and won’t let investigations stop… Come what may, we will fight for justice,” the woman’s father told AFP news agency. Indian law prohibits revealing the identity of victims of sexual violence and that of their family members.

Immediately after the sentencing, dozens of doctors protested outside the court, saying they were not satisfied with the investigation and the sentence.

The trainee doctor’s murder last August at the state-run hospital in Kolkata in West Bengal state sent shockwaves across the country.

The 31-year-old had gone to sleep in the seminar hall of the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital after a night shift. Her half-naked, severely injured body was later discovered near a podium by a colleague.

The autopsy report indicated that the woman had been strangled and had injury marks that showed she fought back.

The crime sparked widespread protests and concerns over the safety of healthcare workers in India, especially women. In Kolkata, doctors went on strike for weeks, demanding action against the accused and officials who they said were complicit in delaying or derailing the investigation.

Roy was arrested a day after the crime. According to the charge sheet filed by federal investigators, which the BBC has seen, Roy went to the hospital in a drunken state and found the female doctor sleeping alone.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – India’s premier crime agency that investigated the case – had demanded the death penalty for Roy.

But on Monday, the judge disagreed, saying he had considered all the evidence and did not consider the case to be a “rarest-of-rare” crime.

Before announcing the sentence, the judge also gave Roy a chance to speak in court. He claimed that he was innocent and was being “falsely implicated” in the case.

Without taking any names, Roy alleged that there were “others involved in the crime”.

The judge dismissed Roy’s claims and said the court had already found him guilty of all charges.

Some politicians and social media users criticised the sentence.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that she was not satisfied with the court’s order. “We want justice. Such criminals should be hanged,” she told reporters.

A sociable sunfish who was reportedly missing its human audience during a temporary closure of its aquarium in Japan has been comforted in an unorthodox way.

In a photo posted by the Kaikyokan aquarium in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi prefecture, the sunfish is seen swimming in front of photos of human faces attached to a row of uniforms.

The move was a “last resort” to solve the sunfish’s health issues, which a staff member believed had stemmed from loneliness, the aquarium said on its X account earlier this month.

And it apparently worked. “It seems to be in good health again!” the aquarium wrote on X the next day.

After the aquarium shut for renovation in December, the sunfish stopped eating jellyfish and started rubbing its body against the tank, the Mainichi Shimbun reported on Monday.

Some staff members had initially suspected a case of parasites or digestive issues, but one of them suggested the fish might have been lonely without visitors showing up to its tank.

Sunfish, found in every ocean in the world, are a delicacy in Japan. They are believed to be able to live up to 10 years in captivity, though they are not commonly found in aquariums due to the meticulous care needed to host them.

The sunfish in Kaikyokan is about 80cm long (31in) and weighs nearly 30kg (66 lb).

Mai Kato, a staff member, told Mainichi Shimbun that the sunfish, which arrived at the aquarium a year ago, had a “curious” personality and “would swim up to visitors when they approached the tank”.

After the photos and uniforms went up, the fish “felt better” the following day and was seen “waving its fins” in the tank, the aquarium said in its X post.

The post has been met with an outpouring of support from social media users. Some shared photos and videos of they had taken of the sunfish on previous visits, and others promised to go and see it when the aquarium reopened.

This is not the first time a Japanese aquarium has come up with innovative solutions to entertain animals in their care.

During the pandemic, as zoos around the world reported that their animals were becoming lonely due to a lack of visitors, an aquarium in Tokyo organised an “emergency” video call event for its eels, which they believed had become uncomfortable with humans after not seeing them for a long time.

Working from home is creating a generation who are “not doing proper work”, the former boss of Marks and Spencer and Asda has warned.

Lord Rose told BBC Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” and employees’ productivity was suffering.

His comments come as some companies are calling time on remote working. Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are just some of the businesses who now require their head office staff to be in every day.

However, work-from-home expert Prof Nicholas Bloom said that while fully remote work can be “quite damaging” to some workers’ productivity, spending three days out of five in the office was as productive as fully office-based work overall.

Lord Rose, who was chief executive of M&S and recently stepped down as the chairman of Asda, said: “We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four.”

In a November 2024 GB snapshot survey by the Office for National Statistics, 26% of people said they had been hybrid-working in the prior seven days, with some days in the workplace and some days at home – while 14% had been fully remote and 41% had commuted to their workplace every day (the remainder were not working in the week surveyed).

The shift to working from home has transformed local economies. Industry estimates indicate that vacant office space has nearly doubled since the pandemic, a quarter of dry-cleaning businesses have shut down, and the number of golf games played during the working week has risen 350% – suggesting some people are mixing work and pleasure.

Working from home is rapidly becoming a major battleground in the culture wars. The government is currently legislating to strengthen the right of employees across the UK to request working from home and says that it intends to make it harder for employers to turn down requests.

But some employers – including government bodies – are battling with staff to get them back into the office, arguing that face-to-face interaction is essential to collaborative working.

In some cases, such as independent record label Hospital Records, this requires negotiation between a young workforce – some of whom may never have worked full-time in an office – and their older bosses.

Company founder Chris Goss, who introduced a new policy requiring staff work three days in the office rather than two, said he had “a nagging feeling” that remote working has affected the company’s bottom line.

“I firmly believe that the music industry is all about relationships, and so the one single way for any of us to be able to build those kind of meaningful relationships is to do it in person.”

Maya, a 25-year-old marketing manager at the company, said she likes being around her more experienced colleagues in the workplace. “There’s a lot of people in my team that are a lot further along in their career, so if I need help with something, you know, I can just ask someone.”

But she believes she would not be able to be in the office five days a week “because my social battery drains and I need sometimes to be just at home and just to smash out loads of admin”.

Prof Bloom, a Stanford University economist, said his research into working from home suggests employees in their teens and early 20s should probably be in the office at least four days a week to maximise their opportunities for being mentored.

However, he said polls of tens of thousands of employees in the UK, US and Europe suggest workers valued the ability to work from home for two days a week about as much as an 8% pay rise.

Employment rights minister Justin Madders told Panorama there was a growing body of evidence that working from home was more productive. He also said it was good for growth because companies will have “a much more motivated workforce” and “if we’re able to get more people into work because flexibility is available for them, that will help us reach our growth ambitions”.

Prof Bloom may not be as optimistic about the effect hybrid working has on productivity, but he does agree that increasing the number of roles which can be done from home could help with economic growth if it encourages more people back into work, such as those with caring responsibilities.

“That is a huge boost” and “kind of a win, win, win”, because people would be able to work in better conditions, contribute to tax revenue and “everyone gains”.

One of the people who could benefit is Harleen, who was made redundant after she had her second child and has been unable to return to work because she cannot find a fully remote role that fits around her autistic son’s routine.

“I am not seeing those jobs advertised. I’m not seeing anything that caters to that flexibility,” she said.

“Every day I wake up and I’m thinking I’m living in Groundhog Day. All I’m doing is being a mother. I enjoy being a mum, but I want productivity. I start to feel like I’m just being brain dead.”

In the public sector, productivity is the lowest it has been since 1997 – except for the pandemic lockdown years – and some blame working from home. Since November 2023, civil servants have been called back in for between two to three days a week.

But in several public bodies, including at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in Newport, South Wales, some staff are refusing to return.

Ed, an IT delivery manager at the ONS and a rep for the PCS trade union, said he has worked almost entirely from home since the pandemic. He says it helps him to get his children to school and nursery and not waste time on commuting.

“We’ve never been told by senior leaders at the ONS that there is a problem with productivity, there’s a problem with quality, there’s a problem with meeting deadlines,” he said.

“We will never see this opportunity again. We have to fight for workers’ rights.”

He and other union members are threatening to strike if they are forced to travel into the office 40% of the time. Civilian staff in the Metropolitan Police and union members at the Land Registry are also in dispute over policies on returning to the office.

The ONS, which is in talks with the union, says it believes “face-to-face interaction” helps to “build working relationships, supports collaboration, and innovation”.

But whatever the outcome of disputes such as this, it is clear that all of us working full-time in the office is now a thing of the past.

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.

• Watch Radio 1’s full interview with Sound Of 2025 winner Chappell Roan.

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 got the financial security 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

Nine women separately told police about one of Scotland’s most prolific and predatory romance fraudsters in the years before his arrest, the BBC has found.

Christopher Harkins was finally jailed for 12 years in July 2024 but women who had tried to report him in the previous decade said they felt “dismissed” when they approached Police Scotland.

A BBC Disclosure investigation has revealed that between 2012 and 2019 Police Scotland received nine reports from women who had met Harkins through dating sites including Tinder.

The women said they told police that Harkins had recorded intimate pictures and videos without consent, abused and threatened them and stolen tens of thousands of pounds.

None of the reports resulted in criminal charges at the time and his victims said their original complaints were dismissed as “civil matters”.

Police Scotland told the BBC there were no reports of physical or sexual abuse at that time.

They said they were “mainly around the financial situation” and were each treated in isolation.

The force said its understanding of abuse had progressed since the introduction of new domestic abuse legislation in 2019.

Harkins carried on offending until 2020.

He used dating sites like Tinder to target women, typically singling out successful, career-driven women around Glasgow and the central belt.

On his dating profile, the 38-year-old presented himself as a jet-setting, business-owning, “gym rat”, but in reality he was one of Scotland’s most prolific and predatory romance fraudsters.

Harkins’ scams included pretending to book romantic holidays, asking for money claiming his bank account was temporarily frozen or telling women he was investing their savings for them.

In other cases he pressured women to take out loans of up to £12,000 to give to him and also used their identities to take out loans himself.

One woman was forced into bankruptcy while others spent years paying off debts, suffering mental health issues as a result.

Many of the women who went to the police were too ashamed to tell family and friends of their ordeals.

One victim who tried to report Harkins in 2019, after she transferred £3,247 to him for a holiday booking that didn’t exist, said she felt the women were let down.

“The sheer number of people that came forward, I think it’s clear that there were opportunities to investigate,” said the woman, who we are calling Lisa to protect her privacy.

“There must have been a way that he could have been stopped before he was.”

Dr Jenn Glinski, from Scottish Women’s Aid, said early reports of financial abuse give authorities a chance to intervene.

When Lisa initially went to a police station to ask for help, she said she was told: “There’s not really much we can do if your boyfriend doesn’t want to take you on holiday”.

“It was very dismissive,” she said.

“They seemed to be a little bit unsure of how you would deal with that or how you would categorise that.

“I was asked whether or not I had slept with him at that point, which I didn’t feel was relevant. I remember feeling really frustrated.”

Determined to expose Harkins, Lisa emailed journalist Catriona Stewart, who published an article in Glasgow’s Evening Times newspaper.

It quickly became apparent that Lisa was not the only woman Harkins had targeted.

“Within a few hours of the article going live I had five women who had been in touch with Christopher Harkins phone me,” Ms Stewart said.

“It very quickly became apparent to me that this man had been operating for at least a decade, that his alleged crimes were far more than financial. And that this was an individual who was potentially very dangerous.”

After the newspaper article was published, police revisited the historical reports.

Harkins was charged and stood trial at the High Court in Paisley in May 2024.

One woman, whom we are calling Jane for legal reasons, met Harkins online in late 2018 before progressing into a relationship with him.

He stole from her and recorded an intimate video without consent before suggesting he would send it to her parents.

Giving evidence, Jane also described an incident when Harkins raped her.

“He was trying to have sex with me while I was asleep,” Jane said.

“The only memory I have was discomfort. I remember feeling in pain. I remember feeling uncomfortable. I remember feeling confused. I tried to push him away.

“I remember this was a time where he grabbed me by the neck.”

After a two-week trial, Harkins was convicted of 19 offences including rape, assault, recording an intimate video without consent, threatening and abusive behaviour and four other sexual offences.

He also admitted defrauding nine women, including Lisa and Jane, out of more than £214,000.

The BBC is aware of alleged frauds totalling a further £53,000 that have not been prosecuted and a further nine alleged victims who were not involved in the trial.

DCI Lyndsay Laird led the Police Scotland investigation into Harkins.

She said it was difficult to say why they weren’t investigated earlier.

“Each one was reported at different stages, so they weren’t all reported together, they were reported in different divisions throughout Police Scotland,” she said.

She added: “There was no reports of physical or sexual abuse ever made to the police at that time.

“It was mainly around the financial situation, which when they’re treated in isolation, they have been taken as civil investigations.

“I think it’s safe to say policing has evolved massively since the time those initial reports have come in.”

Asked if Police Scotland would apologise to the victims who tried to report Harkins in the years before he was arrested, DCI Laird said: “I think that’s a very difficult question to answer.

“I think they’ve got a successful court result now, based on the investigation that was conducted.

“I would say with everything that we’ve put in place since then, I would hope that that experience wouldn’t be replicated now.”

Harkins was first arrested and appeared in court in January 2020.

Despite his legal situation he continued his scams and found a new target.

We are calling her Naomi to protect her identity.

Naomi was seeing Harkins in 2020 while he was being investigated by police.

She alleges he stole £500 from her and later pressured her to withdraw £10,000 that he had transferred into her bank account.

She was unaware of the allegations against him.

“[I had] no idea”, she said.

“If I did I wouldn’t have been involved. It wouldn’t have happened.”

After spending a night with Harkins, Naomi said he sent her a still image from a video he’d taken of her while they were intimate, leaving her feeling “absolutely violated”.

In the year up to June 2024, almost £95m was lost to romance fraud in the UK with the average loss per person being £10,774, according to the national fraud intelligence bureau.

In July last year Harkins was sentenced to 12 years in prison and placed on the sex offenders register indefinitely.

Lisa, whose initial media interview sparked the police investigation that led to Harkins being jailed, said she felt vindicated for persevering.

She got her money back from Harkins months later, but most women did not.

Lisa said: “I was just so relieved for everybody that had stood up and told their story that there had been a positive outcome.

“I just think they’re incredibly brave and I’m so glad that they did do it. The result is exactly what should’ve happened years ago.

“I’ve felt for the last five years that I haven’t been able to move on. It’s a story I’m now proud to tell, rather than ashamed to tell.”

Additional reporting by Katie McEvinney

South Africa’s police have launched a manhunt for an alleged “kingpin”, who is accused of controlling operations at an abandoned gold mine where 78 corpses were discovered last week.

The police force said officials had helped James Neo Tshoaeli, a Lesotho national also known as Tiger, to escape after he was pulled up from the mine in Stilfontein.

More than 240 illegal miners were brought up alive from the mine after it had been blockaded for months by the police.

Officers had cut off food and water supplies in an attempt to force them out of the mine.

• Trapped underground with decaying bodies, miners faced a dark reality

Some of the miners accused Mr Tshoaeli of being responsible for “deaths, assault and torture” underground, a police statement said on Monday.

Mr Tshoaeli is also alleged to have hoarded and kept food away from the other miners, many of whom appeared emaciated and weak when they surfaced from the shaft.

Police commissioner Patrick Asaneng warned that “heads will roll” once they find the officials who helped Mr Tshoaeli escape, the police statement said.

In a candid appearance on South African channel Newzroom Afrika, police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said the force was “disappointed” and “embarrassed”.

Ms Mathe said an investigation into the escape has been launched and that the probe would start with the police “looking internally”.

After months when access to the mine shaft in Stilfontein was blocked, a court ordered the government to facilitate last week’s rescue operation.

On Thursday, as the rescue came to an end, Ms Mathe said it would be a “mammoth task” to identify the 78 bodies that were recovered – partly because many of them were undocumented migrants.

The miners had been underground since November last year, when police launched nationwide operations targeting illicit mining.

Thousands of illegal miners, known as “zama zamas” (“those who try their luck” in Zulu), operate in mineral-rich South Africa.

The mine in Stilfontein – some 145km (90 miles) south-west of Johannesburg – has now been cleared of both bodies and people alive, the police have said.

A trade union and rights activists have accused the authorities of overseeing a “massacre”.

But the police have defended their actions, saying that they were dealing with criminality and it was the kingpins in charge of the illicit mining who were controlling the flow of supplies and trying to prevent people from resurfacing.

• Inside South Africa’s ‘ruthless’ gang-controlled gold mines
• WATCH: The dangerous world of illegal mining in South Africa
• Illegal trade booms in South Africa’s ‘super-strange looking’ plants

Before she started university, Beth Beddall had never really thought about her Black Country accent.

But when she started attending seminars during her undergraduate course at Durham University in 2022, she began to feel self conscious, and avoided speaking up in front of the other students.

Beth, from Sandwell in the West Midlands, recalls a privately-educated student once telling her: “You don’t sound like you’re from a private school.”

When she replied telling him she went to a state school, he said: “You must be intimidated by us and how we speak.”

Like Beth, many university students have high levels of accent-based anxiety, according to a 2022 report on accents and social mobility by sociolinguists for the Sutton Trust.

More than a third of over 1,000 university students surveyed said they felt self-conscious about their accent, and 47% said they’d had their accent mocked, criticised or commented on in a social setting.

“In first year, I missed a lot of seminars and workshops because I was so scared to go in and actually have to give an opinion on something because I always felt what I was going to say was going to be wrong,” the 21-year-old says. “A lot of it did come down to the accent.”

She says she felt her fellow students would take her opinions less seriously, and that she was perceived as “stupid”.

According to sociolinguistics expert Dr Amanda Cole, experiences like Beth’s are down to a prejudice called accent bias.

People “draw conclusions about everything” based on someone’s accent, “and they do it really fast,” says Dr Mary Robinson, a research associate in language variation and change at Newcastle University.

Participants in new research by the University of Cambridge and Nottingham Trent University said they thought people with some regional accents were more likely to behave in certain ways.

Of the 10 accents studied, Glaswegians were perceived as most likely to stand up for someone who was being harassed, people with Scouse accents were seen as most likely to commit crimes and people with Standard Southern British English accents were viewed as most likely to report a relative to the police for a minor offence.

In Britain, the biases people have about certain accents largely come down to class, sociolinguists say.

Dr Cole, a lecturer at the University of Essex, says there is a “hierarchy of accents” in the UK, with accents from industrialised urban areas like Glasgow and Birmingham often seen as low status. “Accent prejudice maps onto societal prejudice,” she says.

Sandwell, where Beth is from, was ranked the ninth most income-deprived of the 316 local authorities in England in the latest available data in 2019.

Beth says when she was growing up, her parents were aware of how Black Country accents were perceived and encouraged her to disguise her accent.

Black Country accents are stereotyped as indicating “low intelligence”, says Dr Esther Asprey, a lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton who focuses on West Midlands dialects.

“Urban accents across the UK are associated with a lack of education,” she says. “Which isn’t true – there’s not a causal link.”

This stereotype stems back to the industrial revolution, when people moved to cities for jobs in factories, she says.

Dr Asprey says she has witnessed students being “laughed at” in seminars for the way they speak, and that teachers from the Black Country have told her anecdotes about being asked to get elocution lessons.

Dr Cole says stereotypes often cause people to change their accents.

In fact, the lecturer, who is from east London and grew up in Essex, says she herself has changed the way she talks.

“I’ve modified my accent down a lot,” she says. “I’ve had people call in on radio shows that I’ve been on, saying: ‘If you’re going to have someone talking about language, you should have someone who knows how to speak properly.'”

Accents are formed in early life by family, caregivers and nursery staff, though they might also change based on peer groups when people reach their teens, says Dr Jason Grafmiller, lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Birmingham.

Like Beth, Amy Kean, 42, from Thurrock, Essex, says she never realised she had a strong accent until she went to university.

People would quote Catherine Tate’s schoolgirl character Lauren Cooper’s catchphrase “Am I bovvered?” to her, which Amy says “implies you’re not articulate”.

As a result, Amy says she tried to “mask” her accent while at university to fit in.

Amy says that after she graduated, she was told by a recruitment consultant that she would never be allowed to work with clients because of her “common” accent.

Throughout her career in advertising, her accent would “constantly be referenced”, with people quoting phrases at her from reality show The Only Way Is Essex.

“It’s such a gross way to completely alienate someone when you’re taking the piss out of their voice, which is so personal to you and you use it all the time,” she says. “And it’s so hard to change it.”

Accent bias can also affect the impression candidates make in job interviews and how believable witnesses are seen as in the dock, says Dr Robinson.

Fiona Scott, from Radstock near Bath, says if she could have changed her Somerset accent when she was younger so that she could get her dream job, then she would have.

She says when she was working as a researcher for regional TV news in the mid-90s, she was told by an editor that she couldn’t be an on-screen reporter because her accent was “unsuitable” for TV.

“It never struck me at all that my accent would ever be an issue,” Fiona, now 58 and working in TV production and media consultancy, says. “It definitely hampered the career I hoped I was going to have.”

Dr Robinson says “everyone makes assumptions based on accents”. But when accents are used as a basis for discrimination, she explains this can be a tricky area because they’re not a protected characteristic.

She says that, for example, recruiters in job interviews might use excuses like: “They didn’t sound intelligent.”

“Guessing that someone is a middle class woman based on an accent isn’t inherently bad,” she says. “But if you decide not to hire a woman based on her accent, that’s where it becomes the problem.”

Sociolinguists say there are some signs of improvement, pointing to the wider range of accents now heard on radio and TV news broadcasts.

There are also a number of initiatives set up to raise awareness of accent bias by encouraging people to share their experiences – these include the Accentism Project, Speak For Yerself and Accent Bias Britain.

Dr Grafmiller says research suggests that raising awareness of accent bias can “significantly reduce” the impact of bias in hiring and other contexts. “We may still have a long way to go, but these findings are encouraging,” he says.

“There are gains in the awareness and understanding of the general public but on the whole, accent bias is so deeply entrenched that I believe it will continue to be a problem for a long time,” Dr Robinson says.

Amy is now helping other people who have experienced the same bias she has. She left her job in advertising to set up a company called Good Shout, which provides public speaking and communication training.

Most people who sign up to the training have a regional accent and say they’ve been made to feel “paranoid” about it by comments in the workplace.

“The reason I started it is because I have an Essex accent and I really want other people who don’t have that perfect Queen’s English voice to know that they can still use their voice and they can speak at conferences,” Amy says.

For the second time in the seven years since his death, Mac Miller fans have the chance to listen to a new album.

The US rapper was 26 when he died from an accidental overdose in 2018. Friends say he was lost in his prime and fans’ hunger for new music has remained.

Balloonerism, released on Friday to generally positive reviews, follows the 2020 posthumous release of Circles, made of unfinished work completed after he died.

Collaborators say the studio tracks first laid down more than 10 years ago used in the new album have barely been changed.

Some of those who worked on the new release – who were present at the recording sessions – describe the finished product as haunting, raw, and unpolished.

Circles was a big success but a mixed reception to recent posthumous albums from other artists has caused critics to question whether less is more when it comes to releasing music after death.

Audio engineer Josh Berg was in the LA studio, known as the Sanctuary, where Mac wrote and recorded all his material between 2013-2014.

“I always hoped this day would come,” he says of Ballonerism’s final release.

“And now it’s kind of sad.

“Everything except one thing is amazing about this situation. It really makes me feel his loss.”

Mac Miller, real name Malcolm James McCormick, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and started making music at school.

His debut album, Blue Slide Park, was the first independently released record to top the Billboard 200 chart in 16 years and all of his later albums followed the same path to the top five in the US.

He wrote Balloonerism between labels in 2014 and producer Eric Dan, who worked with Mac since he was a teenager, tells Newsbeat he was “just starting to come into his own”.

“That period was like a creative renaissance for him,” he says. “He was a creation machine.”

Josh says so many projects were started in that time but Balloonerism was among the ones that came closest to release, with Mac even getting to the stage of commissioning artwork.

While Circles was “in pretty rough shape” when he died and finished off by producers, Eric says Balloonerism is largely untouched.

“We made a conscious decision to keep things as they were and not go back and ‘fix’ mistakes, tune things or add anything.

“The rough edges were part of its charm and highlighted where Mac was creatively at that time.”

Josh describes the result of leaving in those imperfections as an album that’s “raw and emotional”, even “extremely haunting” in the context of Mac’s death.

“Once you start pulling everything apart and dusting it off, it starts to lose its magic,” Josh says.

“It’s beautiful to release an album that’s not so scoured of imperfection, that’s authentic and real.”

It’s that question of authenticity which troubles some fans about music released after an artist has died.

In 2024, posthumous albums released by the families of SOPHIE and Juice WRLD had mixed responses. While SOPHIE’s was named Rough Trade’s album of the year, some critics considered it too “safe” for such a pioneering and experimental talent.

Robin Murray, editor-in-chief at Clash magazine, reviewed Juice WRLD’s third posthumous album, The Party Never Ends.

The US rapper died two years after Mac, also from an accidental overdose, leaving a cache of unreleased music but Robin tells Newsbeat the latest album sounded like “unfinished demos that had been stretched”.

“Releasing an album or body of work after an artist has passed away is an incredibly difficult and complex task,” he says.

“There’s no telling how the artist would have proceeded with that work, if they would have proceeded at all.”

Josh and Eric agree it’s fair to question how Mac might have changed Balloonerism but they both believe it was always his plan to be release it when the time was right.

Eric also says that after “bootleg” versions of the album were leaked, it was important an official release, in line with Mac’s most up-to-date track lists, allowed the family to regain control of the album.

“I can certainly see where people have concerns with it,” Josh accepts.

“I was less concerned but now in this process maybe I shared more of that concern as we got closer.

“He would always change the playlist, he would always do something I’d never expect, so it will never really be true to him.”

The release of Balloonerism coincides with what would have been Mac’s 33rd birthday and a companion film was shared alongside it.

At a sold-out screening in London, fan Conor Grovestock says it felt like the last opportunity to “share thanks for the artist that he was”.

Most of the fans who spoke to Newsbeat say they had no reservations about the album being released but Conor says the passage of more than 10 years “does make it more complex”.

“It’s sad, at some point it does have to end but I’m all here for it for now.”

Another fan, Carolina, says she “didn’t give it too much thought, because I’m just a sucker”.

“I just want more, everything he made and was ready to be released, I’d like to be released.”

Robin says the success of Circles was in part due to how closely Mac’s family worked with people who knew him.

Eric, for example, worked on all his music and knew him for a decade, while Josh “pretty much lived in the studio” with Mac during the writing and recording sessions.

He says the family “really lead the way in showing how tenderness and care can be accomplished within posthumous projects”.

“Circles felt like a very well-judged, well-curated farewell to a special talent.”

Balloonerism will hope to replicate that success and has gone down well with critics, branded “poignant” in a four-star Observer review.

The Independent says it “feels complete and cohesive… a wonderful, albeit unsettling, reminder of a talent lost”.

However Robin says it’s important to know when enough is enough.

“One thing that Mac and SOPHIE had in common was that the evolutionary leaps between their projects were just gargantuan and there’s a temptation for fans to see how these steps were taken,” he says.

But, Robin adds: “There’s a danger of brushing away the myth and over-explaining.

“There is that temptation to open the door once more into the vault but I think less is more, certainly with posthumous albums.”

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

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.”

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 licensing 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 conservation 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.

In a response published by the court, the UK has defended the scientific advice behind the ban, adding that the EU has failed to point out “any superior model” available at the time.

It added that the UK was within its rights to bring in the ban, highlighting that the trade agreement itself commits both sides to taking account of the impact of fishing on marine diversity.

The UK 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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The first wife of South Africa’s Zulu King Misuzulu kaZwelithini has failed in her legal attempt to halt his plans to take a third wife.

Queen Ntokozo kaMayisela went to court ahead of what was expected to be the wedding later this week.

But despite the ruling, it is not clear whether the wedding will still go ahead as planned.

On Saturday, South African media quoted a letter reportedly from the king saying the ceremony had been called off “due to reasons beyond the control of the royal house”.

Polygamous marriages are recognised in South Africa but only if they are registered as customary weddings.

This latest row comes amid a series of scandals that has hit King Misuzulu since he came to power just over two years ago.

The Zulu king does not have formal political power and the monarch’s role within broader South African society is largely ceremonial, but he remains hugely influential with a yearly government-funded budget of several million dollars.

• Zulu King Misuzulu kaZwelithini: I am not poisoned, I am well
• In pictures: King Misuzulu crowned in historic ceremony

Before he was enthroned, the king married Mayisela in 2021 in a civil marriage.

In her legal argument heard in the high court on Monday, the queen, through her lawyer, said that the king could not marry anyone else as their marriage was still in force.

Under South African law, a civil marriage must either be dissolved or converted to a traditional union before a man can take any more wives.

In rejecting the application to halt the king’s marriage to Nomzamo Myeni, Judge Bongani Mngadi said that as the queen had already consented to the idea that her husband could marry other women, she could not prevent a ceremony from taking place.

Last year, according to what was said in court on Monday, the royal couple had agreed to convert their civil marriage to a traditional one. But since then the king has applied for a divorce, saying that their relationship had broken down.

Despite the reported letter, as well as the king’s lawyer in court, saying that the wedding would not take place, contradictory statements have also emerged.

South African news site TimesLIVE is reporting that the bride-to-be said she knew nothing about the letter and as far as she understood, her wedding would proceed as initially planned.

According to another news site, IOL, which reportedly spoke to the couple, the king insisted that he loved Myeni and would “marry her by force”.

Since his coronation in October 2022, there has been controversy around some of the decisions King Misuzulu has made.

In December, he unlawfully suspended the board of the Ingonyama Trust, which owns and controls vast tracts of communal land in KwaZulu-Natal, which is supposed to be for the benefit and welfare of communities under the king’s leadership in the region.

King Misuzulu is the sole trustee and chairperson of the trust but has no powers to hire or fire board members.

He has also recently summarily fired two close aides, including his traditional prime minister, in quick succession – moves which raised eyebrows among royal watchers.

Misuzulu’s position as king is also being questioned by some and a legal case is currently under way challenging his recognition as monarch by the state.

He ascended to the throne sooner than expected after his father, King Goodwill Zwelithini, died during the Covid pandemic in March 2021 of diabetes-related complications.

Zwelithini was the Zulu nation’s longest-reigning monarch, having served on the throne for almost 50 years.

• Trapped underground with decaying bodies, miners faced a dark reality
• Soweto’s ‘Lion King’ on his return for Mufasa
• Inside South Africa’s ‘ruthless’ gang-controlled gold mines

At least seven people have been killed in a clash with soldiers on duty at a mine in the central Ashanti region, according to the army.

The Ghana Armed Forces said about 60 illegal miners, armed with among others things “pump action guns”, had forced their way into the mine run by global giant AngloGold Ashanti and fired at the soldiers when they were intercepted.

This prompted the soldiers “to retaliate in self-defence”, leading to the deaths and injuries, it said in a statement.

A representative of the miners denied that they had been armed.

Following news of the deaths, there were protests in Obuasi town where several buses were set on fire.

Angry residents poured onto the company’s grounds following the killings, burning at least three vehicles and other equipment belonging to AngloGold Ashanti.

President John Mahama has ordered investigations into the matter, saying anyone found to have acted unlawfully will be brought to justice.

A statement from the presidency indicated that eight people had died.

• We are poisoning ourselves’: Ghana gold rush sparks environmental disaster

The government has asked AngloGold Ashanti to cover the medical expenses of the injured and the burial costs, while requiring security agencies to ensure peace in the area.

The company said the situation had since calmed down and it was working closely with the authorities.

It said its main concern was “the safety and health of our employees and those in our community” who were affected by the incident.

The local chairman of the Ghana National Association of Small Scale Miners, Kofi Adams, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying that the violence was “unprecedented”.

He said that nine people had died and 14 severely injured adding that it was “difficult to understand why it had happened”.

In the past, he said, warning shots had been fired to ward off intruders. He also disputed the allegation by the military that the people had been armed.

The army said the “illegal miners were wielding locally manufactured rifles, pump action guns” and other weapons. It said it had a duty to defend itself, innocent civilians and property, including by using lethal force.

There have been tensions between AngloGold Ashanti and residents who accuse them of exploiting mineral resources without doing much to develop the area or create jobs.

Some local small-scale mining associations have been asking to be given some of the company’s mining concessions.

The company insists it has been doing a lot for the local communities.

On Monday, some schools built and managed by the company in the area announced a two-day shutdown following the disturbances.

There have been several conflicts between security officers and mining communities in the past, but the situation has been exacerbated by the country’s current economic problems.

Ghana is going through its worst economic crisis in a generation with high public debt, high inflation and unemployment.

Amid the economic crisis, there has been a rise in small-scale mining, including unregulated sites that have been accused of having a devastating impact on the environment.

• Can Ghana’s new president meet the voters’ high expectations?
• Podcast: How illegal gold mining impacts Ghana
• Watch: The illegal gold mines killing rivers and livelihoods in Ghana
• Ghana IMF loan: Will $3bn solve the economic crisis?

A gang of cryptocurrency fraudsters based in Lancashire have been ordered to pay back £24.5m to the victim of their theft.

The fraud began in 2017 when James Parker from Blackpool discovered a glitch in an Australian crypto currency trading website which allowed him to steal money.

His co-conspirators Stephen Boys, 56, Kelly Caton, 46, and Jordan Robinson, 26, siphoned off more than £20m worth of credits over a three-month period before being jailed for money laundering two years ago.

The group have now been compelled to return the funds following a proceeds of crime hearing at Preston Crown Court, which revealed Lancashire Police had recovered assets of more than £28m.

Ringleader Parker died in 2021 before he could be prosecuted for masterminding the conspiracy from his Blackpool home.

The court heard police had seized assets totalling £4,029,293.13 from Robinson, £7,928,308.59 from Caton, £11,670,329.30 from Boys, around £8,000,000 from Parker and £1,100 from James Austin-Beddoes.

The total loss to the victim was £24.5 million and they have since been compensated in full, police said.

Due to the increase in the value of Bitcoin purchased by the offenders, the amount seized outstripped the original fraud by around £3m with the surplus being split between the Home Office, the courts and Lancashire Police.

The scam made so much money that £5,000 in gift cards were handed out to people in the street and cars were bought for people Parker met in the pub, police said.

During the trial Boys told the court how he took £1m cash in a suitcase to buy a villa from Russians he met in the back office of an estate agents, and paid £60,000 to pay off corrupt officials so he could carry on laundering money.

During the investigation police recovered 445 Bitcoins – then worth £22m – along with luxury watches, houses, cars and designer goods, including a £600 wine cooler, along with more than £1m in bank accounts.

Boys, from Accrington, was found guilty of converting and transferring criminal property and jailed for six years, while Caton, from Blackpool, and Robinson, from Fleetwood, both received sentences of four years six months in prison after being convicted of fraud, converting and acquiring criminal property.

Austin-Beddoes, 28, from St Annes, was found guilty of fraud and acquiring criminal property and pleaded guilty to converting criminal property earlier and was jailed for 18 months, suspended for a year.

Det Sgt Dave Wainwright said it was an “extremely challenging investigation”.

“I am pleased that the victim has been compensated in full and that the defendants have been unable to benefit from their criminal activity,” he said.

“The defendants have three months to comply with their court orders or face risking another 14-years imprisonment.”

BBC Sounds

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.”

Tanzania’s president has announced an outbreak of Marburg virus, an Ebola-like virus, just a week after her health minister denied that there were any cases in the country.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan said at a press conference on Monday that health authorities had confirmed one case of Marburg in the north-western region of Kagera.

“We are confident that we will overcome this challenge once again,” Samia said, referring to a previous outbreak in Tanzania two years ago.

On 14 January, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a suspected Marburg outbreak in the country, having recorded nine suspected cases and eight deaths over five days in Kagera.

But Tanzania’s Health Minister Jenista Mhagama said in a statement that after samples had been analysed, all suspected cases were found negative for Marburg.

• What is the Marburg virus and how dangerous is it?

At Monday’s press briefing, which was held jointly with the WHO, President Samia said her government had stepped up its efforts and that a rapid response team had been dispatched to follow up on all suspected cases.

Marburg is highly infectious, with symptoms including fever, muscle pains, diarrhoea, vomiting and, in some cases, death through extreme blood loss.

On average, the virus kills half of the people it infects, according to the WHO.

Tanzania says that along with the one confirmed case, authorities took samples from 24 other people suspected of having Marburg. These all tested negative.

Meanwhile, the cause of the eight deaths reported by the WHO has yet to be revealed.

Tanzania experienced its first Marburg outbreak in March 2023 in the Bukoba district. It killed six people and lasted for nearly two months.

WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the global risk from Tanzania’s current outbreak was “low”.

“Even though there is no approved treatment or vaccines, outbreaks can be stopped quickly,” he said. “WHO advises against restrictions. Now is the time for collaboration.”

On Thursday, Africa CDC, the African Union’s public health agency, said more than 300 contacts had been identified for further testing. Health workers make up 56 of these contacts, while 16 on the list are known to have had direct contact with those suspected to have had Marburg.

The International Health Regulations (IHR) of 2005 require countries to report public health events and emergencies that could cross borders. Kagera is a transit hub with many people travelling to and from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda.

In December, neighbouring Rwanda declared that an outbreak in the country, which had infected 66 people and killed 15, was over.

The Marburg virus is transmitted to humans from fruit bats and then through contact with bodily fluids of infected individuals.

There are no specific treatments or a vaccine for the virus, although trials are under way.

• Tanzania’s fuel revolution slowed down by lack of filling stations
• Why Samia’s hesitant reforms are fuelling Tanzanian political anger
• All aboard the sparkling railway breaking new ground for East Africa

The mother of US journalist Austin Tice, abducted in Syria while on a reporting trip in 2012 and one of the longest-held American hostages, has returned to the country for the first time in a decade to renew the search for her son.

Debra Tice’s visit comes in the wake of the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in a lighting rebel offensive last month. Her son, a freelance journalist who is now 43, was taken captive as he travelled through the Damascus suburb of Darayya covering the Syrian civil war.

“We had information, but the whole world changed,” she said in an interview in the Syrian capital, Damascus, referring to Assad’s removal from power.

“We have no idea where he is now. It feels a little bit like square one, trying to figure that out again.”

Tice was last seen in a video posted online weeks after his capture, blindfolded and in apparent distress. No government or group has claimed being behind his disappearance, although over the years, US officials said they believed Tice was being held by the Assad government.

According to recent reports in US media, investigators believe that Tice, a former US Marine, briefly escaped weeks after being seized but was recaptured by forces who answered directly to Assad.

Last month, after rebels led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) toppled Assad and seized power, President Joe Biden said the US believed Tice was alive, but that his whereabouts remained unknown. The rebels opened Syria’s prisons, releasing thousands of people and giving experts access to documents that could shed a light on what happened to Tice and other disappeared people.

“I’ve never had a moment of doubt… I always knew that [Tice] is going to walk free. And, you know, we have a whole new way of thinking about how that’s going to happen,” she said. “I can hardly wait for my arms around [him].”

On Sunday, Debra Tice – who said she wore a “Free Austin Tice” badge even at home – met Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian de facto leader, who has vowed to hold accountable those responsible for the most serious crimes during the Assad regime.

She said she hoped the families would continue to have access to the facilities where prisoners were held “to allow people to search and keep hope”.

“I’m here to be with people that understand the longing, to be able to celebrate with people that are being reunited, and also hold the hearts of those of us that are still searching and waiting and wishing and hoping and praying.”

She had visited Syria for the last time in 2015, when the country’s authorities stopped issuing visas to her. Now, she said, “people are more relaxed” and “children have smiles on their faces”.

“I want to be one of the moms, one of the families that finds my loved one and throws my arms around him and takes them home,” she said.

Incoming first lady Melania Trump has launched a cryptocurrency on the eve of her husband’s inauguration as US president.

The announcement comes after President-elect Donald Trump launched the $Trump cryptocurrency. Both coins have risen but have seen volatile trade.

“The Official Melania Meme is live! You can buy $Melania now,” she posted on the social platform X on Sunday.

Disclaimers on the websites of both the $Trump and $Melania coins said they were “not intended to be, or the subject of” an investment opportunity or a security.

According to the CoinMarketCap website, $Trump has a total market valuation of about $12bn (£9.8bn), while $Melania’s stands at around $1.7bn.

• Follow live updates on inauguration day

Trump had previously called crypto a “scam” but during the 2024 election campaign became the first presidential candidate to accept digital assets as donations.

During the campaign, his family launched a cryptocurrency company called World Liberty Financial – which aims to lead “a financial revolution by dismantling the stranglehold of traditional financial institutions”, and is also selling a crypto coin.

The new Trump coin was launched from Trump Organization affiliate CIC Digital LLC, which is linked to previous sales of crypto collectable NFTs launched in 2022 that made millions of dollars but have since fallen dramatically in value for their owners.

According to CoinGecko, the NFTs once sold for more than $1,000 but have since dropped in value to around $300.

On the campaign trail, Trump also said he would create a strategic Bitcoin stockpile and appoint financial regulators that take a more positive stance towards digital assets.

That spurred expectations that he would strip back regulations on the crypto industry.

In the wake of Trump’s victory, Bitcoin jumped to a record high of around $109,000 according to crypto trading platform Coinbase.

On Friday, the incoming artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto tsar David Sacks held a “Crypto Ball” in Washington, DC.

Other cryptocurrencies, including Dogecoin – which has been promoted by high-profile Trump supporter Elon Musk – have also risen sharply this year.

Under President Joe Biden, regulators cited concerns about fraud and money laundering as they cracked down on crypto companies by suing exchanges.

The growth of Dogecoin has significantly increased the interest in so-called “meme coins” – cryptocurrencies typically linked to a viral internet trend or moment.

Melania’s Meme coin has come from her own incorporated company MKT World LLC – a firm she has used since 2021 for various ventures including selling portraits of her as first lady.

Meme coins can be created and launched by anyone, and there are thousands in existence.

With their profile and social media presence, Trump coin and Melania coin have already entered the top 100 coins in terms of value, and Melania’s coin is now worth more than AI entrepreneur Sam Altman’s Worldcoin.

• LIVE: Crowds brave freezing cold as Washington gears up for Trump inauguration
• GUIDE: What we know about the inauguration
• EXPLAINED: What Donald Trump could do on day one
• INSIGHT: Meet the president’s circle of influencers
• 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

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

A parade of tech billionaires and key members of his orbit joined President-elect Donald Trump as he kicked off his pre-inaugural celebrations with a church service on Monday morning.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple leader Tim Cook, and Google chief Sundar Pichai were seen taking their prime seats at St John’s Church.

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, FIFA president Gianni Infantino and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson were also spotted at the church.

Many of these executives were among the first business world critics of Trump during his first term, speaking out on issues such as climate change and immigration.

• LIVE: Follow the inauguration as it happens
• EXPLAINED: What Trump could do on day one
• GUIDE: What we know about Donald Trump’s inauguration
• INSIGHT: Trump’s circle of influencers
• FAMILY: Which Trumps are going where?

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chou too is expected to attend the inauguration, as his company grapples with the fallout from a US ban, as well as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber.

Then of course there is SpaceX and Tesla boss Elon Musk, who spent nearly $300m helping the president campaign and has stuck closely to his side ever since.

It is a striking spectacle. The last public event in Washington to bring so many tech bosses together in the same room was a 2020 congressional hearing aimed at their companies.

Today, most of the firms still have serious outstanding matters before the US government, including anti-monopoly lawsuits, investigations, regulatory fights and tariffs.

Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bennett, both Democrats, shared a letter addressed to the executives, which accused them of trying to “cozy up to the incoming Trump administration in an effort to avoid scrutiny, limit regulation and buy favor”.

“Funny they never sent me one of these for contributing to Democrats,” Mr Altman posted on social media in reply.

How enduring the tech bromance proves and how far Trump will push on many of these issues remain open questions.

But the president, who left office the first time as a kind of pariah in the business world, appears to be revelling in his new position.

As he wrote on social media last month: “Everybody wants to be my friend!!!”

Trump’s budding friendships with tech executives have not gone over well with everyone in his circle.

Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on Sunday called Musk a “truly evil guy”, claiming he would have him “run out of here by Inauguration Day”.

“I look at this and I think most people in our movement look at this as President Trump broke the oligarchs, he broke them and they surrendered,” Bannon told ABC News.

Joe Biden has pre-emptively pardoned Covid response chief Anthony Fauci and the members of the 6 January riot investigation to prevent what he called “unjustified… politically motivated prosecutions”.

The outgoing US president said: “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment.”

Trump, who will be inaugurated on Monday, regularly clashed with Dr Fauci during the pandemic and has suggested he would take action against those who tried to hold him accountable for the 6 January Capitol riot.

Biden also issued a pre-emptive pardon to Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, who last year described Trump as “fascist to the core”.

LIVE: Follow the inauguration as it happens

EXPLAINED: What Trump could do on day one

GUIDE: What we know about Donald Trump’s inauguration

INSIGHT: Trump’s circle of influencers

FAMILY: Which Trumps are going where?

Biden’s statement said that the pardons should “not be mistaken as an acknowledgment” that any of those covered “engaged in any wrongdoing”.

Democrats had warned the outgoing president against such action. Adam Schiff, a Senator for California, said Biden could set a “precedent” for “each president hereafter on their way out the door giving out a broad category of pardons”.

Dr Fauci told US media that he “truly appreciated” Biden for taking action, adding that the possibility of prosecution has created “immeasurable and intolerable distress” on his family.

“Let me be perfectly clear, I have committed no crime and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me,” he added.

General Milley, 66, thanked Biden in a statement and stated that he did not wish spend the rest of his life “fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights”.

“I do not want to put my family, my friends, and those with whom I served through the resulting distraction, expense, and anxiety,” he said.

Biden’s pardons cover all members of the House Select Committee investigating the 6 January riot, as well as their staff members and the officers who testified.

Former US Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn said he was “eternally grateful” to Biden, “not just for this pre-emptive pardon, but for his leadership and service to this nation”.

“Unfortunately, the political climate we are in now has made the need for [a pardon] somewhat of a reality,” he said.

“I, like all other public servants, was just doing my job and upholding my oath.”

Trump in December backed a call for the FBI to investigate fellow Republican Liz Cheney over her role in leading Congress’s probe.

The incoming president is set to pardon some of those convicted of crimes related to the riot. “You’re going to see something tomorrow,” Trump said on Sunday, in reference to the 6 January rioters. “I think you’ll be very, very happy.”

On the campaign trail, Trump railed against “enemies from within”, and has endorsed several figures who have vowed retribution against his foes to join his cabinet.

However, his choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said during her confirmation hearing last week that there would never be an enemies list and that she would not use the Justice Department to target anyone based on their politics.

Donald Trump loves a show and he likes to surprise people.

And as he returns to the White House, the world is waiting to see if Trump 2.0 will really be a more disciplined and effective version of its previous, chaotic, incarnation.

But even before he steps back into the Oval Office, the single biggest difference between now and the start of his first term eight years ago is just how bold he feels.

Talking to people around Trump, the confidence is unmissable. He has the GOP in lockstep, the business community falling over themselves to donate money to his inauguration and an opposition that is exhausted and largely quiet.

The election was actually quite close, but you wouldn’t know it from Maga world. They feel vindicated and want to move fast to get things done, to hit back against the incoming president’s enemies and to change America. They believe the country backs Trump’s disdain of “woke” agendas, mainstream media and global elites.

• Follow live updates on inauguration day
• Here’s what to know about Donald Trump’s inauguration
• What Trump might do on day one in the White House

And the agenda reflects this. From the mass deportation of migrants and pardons for Capitol rioters, to punitive trade tariffs on America’s neighbours and an end to birthright citizenship, there’s a lot of fundamental change being promised and he could announce much of it on day one.

The effect would be dizzying – and that is the point.

The team that Trump will be bringing into the White House reflects that brashness. Gone is the president who seemed in awe of hierarchies and establishment credentials.

Take his picks for secretary of defence.

In 2016 Donald Trump chose Jim Mattis to lead the Pentagon, almost fawning over the longtime general “who everyone loves”.

He hailed Mattis as “a man of character and integrity.” (Two years later Mattis would quit amid very public differences of opinion and Trump would call him “the world’s most overrated general.” )

Fast forward to 2024 and Trump has picked a very different defence secretary: Pete Hegseth is a TV host with a military background but no significant management experience, who seems to have survived his Senate confirmation hearings despite multiple accusations of sexual abuse and drunkenness.

Trump isn’t out to impress anyone this time, and the Republican Party seems to have no ability or interest in providing checks and balances on his instincts. Trump standing by Hegseth as scandal swirled was seemingly a test for Republican lawmakers. Would they dare to defy Trump? They didn’t.

So, for the moment there is unity – but look below the surface and there’s less harmony, and with it the prospect of more chaos.

Trump’s cabinet is a team of people with surprisingly different views who may not always play well together.

His pick to run health care, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is a pro-choice former Democrat at a time when many Republican lawmakers want to restrict abortion access.

The nominee for Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, embodies old school Republican economic values and comes from Wall Street via a stint working for the liberal financier George Soros. But Trump’s Vice-President – JD Vance – is a populist who says “we are done catering to Wall St.” There is Elon Musk with his deregulation agenda serving alongside a Labor Secretary nominee who is pro-union and pro-worker safety regulations.

Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio is in the conventional, hawkish Republican mode. He has called Vladimir Putin a “thug” and a “gangster.” Meanwhile Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been sympathetic to America’s adversaries, including Russia and Syria’s now-deposed leader Bashar al-Assad and was described to me by a Trump ally as a peace-nik, “the Jimmy Carter” of the group.

Allies of the incoming president argue this unconventional mix of views is what makes Trump different, and exciting. A former Trump adviser told me that the uniformity of opinions in previous Democratic administrations was like “a bunch of parrots.” The whole point of Trump’s second term, this adviser said, is to shake up a stultified system of government.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin famously credited Abraham Lincoln for creating a cabinet that consisted of a team of his rivals. In Trump’s case, this incoming administration feels more like a court than a Republic. The courtiers have their divergent views and disagreements with each other and they have to get as close as possible to the man in the center of it all for their agenda to win out.

They know Trump’s reputation for agreeing with the last person who has his ear and in the first term White House, officials vied to be that influential person. When that failed, they often leaked to the press in a bid to get their opinions heard.

With so many competing opinions, there could be even more leaks this time, despite the best efforts of the new chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

And so the key question for this administration is whether this surprisingly eclectic group will be able to hash things out and produce the best possible result. Or if the cabinet will be like a middle school brawl of eager students battling and obstructing each other in a bid to be teacher’s pet with no clear principles to guide them.

The lack of cohesion already on display has some analysts alarmed, particularly on national security. “There is no consensus in the new administration when it comes to how China is viewed,” says Richard Haass, who worked in the Bush administration and is now president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “One can anticipate ongoing struggles over American policy and more than a little inconsistency.”

For now, Trump’s desires reign supreme. But the president knows that in two short years America will hold midterm Congressional elections and the conversation will shift fast to the future. The Republican train will leave the station, and President Trump will be left standing on the platform.

He’ll still have sway, and an awful lot of money that will give him some power over the succession, but the conversation will move on and the courtiers will be vying to become ruler themselves.

• EXPLAINED: What Donald Trump could do on day one
• INSIGHT: Meet the president’s circle of influencers
• WATCH: Thousands protest in Washington ahead of inauguration
• FEATURE: From snowy US cities to Mexican border – deportations loom

Follow the twists and turns of Trump’s second presidential term with North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher’s weekly US Politics Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.

Donald Trump is just hours away from being sworn in as the 47th president but the global impact of his second term is already being felt.

From Jerusalem to Kyiv to London to Ottawa, his election victory and the anticipation of a new Trump agenda has changed the calculations of world leaders – with some far-reaching consequences.

In the lead-up to the handover of power in Washington, our correspondents dissected these changes in the regions where they were.

• Latest updates from inauguration day

Donald Trump has made an impact on the Middle East even before he sits down in the Oval Office to start his second term as president.

He cut through the delaying tactics that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in alliance with his ultra-nationalist coalition partners, had used to avoid accepting the ceasefire deal that Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden put on the negotiating table last May.

American pressure on Hamas and other Palestinian groups is a given. Under Biden, pressure on Israel was the lever that was never pulled. Trump starts his second term claiming credit, with reasonable justification, for getting the ceasefire deal in Gaza over the line. He can bask in some glory.

• Read Jeremy’s analysis in full

Trump and his team are different this time round, more prepared, with a more aggressive agenda perhaps, but his delight in keeping the world guessing seems undimmed. It’s this uncertainty accompanying Trump that the British political establishment in Whitehall and Westminster finds so shocking.

How can the UK prepare for what it can’t yet know?

A small group of senior ministers has been trying.

There have been series of secret “mini-cabinet” meetings, with the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds “trying to plan for what might come”, according to one source.

One insider tells me there hasn’t been too much preparation for multiple specific scenarios because “you’d drive yourself crazy” trying to guess Trump’s next steps. But another source says various papers have been prepared to be presented to the wider Cabinet.

I’m told the focus has been “looking for opportunities” rather than panicking about whether Trump might follow through on some of his more outlandish statements, such as annexing Canada.

• Read Laura’s analysis in full

Twenty-four-year-old David joined up to fight in Ukraine’s war against Russia last September as Moscow’s troops neared his hometown. He now spends his time handling explosives – though he would prefer to be at college learning languages.

“No-one knows how long the war will last,” he says, “maybe not even the politicians”.

“I would like it to end soon so that civilians won’t suffer, and people won’t die anymore. But considering how things are now on the front line, it won’t be soon.”

He believes that if the guns are silenced, it will be only a pause, before Moscow comes back for more.

The winds get stronger and a vampire drone crash lands. It’s out of action for now. The unit pack up and leave, as fast as they came. They will be back in action at nightfall, resuming the duels in the sky.

But on the ground the Russians keep inching forward, and the Trump presidency will mean pressure for a deal. And there is one more hard truth here: if it comes it is unlikely to be on Ukraine’s terms.

• Read Orla’s analysis in full

The political instability in Ottawa comes as Canada faces a number of challenges – not least the vow by Trump to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian goods.

Until recently, Justin Trudeau seemed determined to hang on as prime minister, citing his desire to face Pierre Poilievre – his ideological opposite – in the polls.

But the shock resignation of Trudeau’s key deputy, former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, in mid-December – when she cited his perceived failure to not take Trump’s threats seriously – proved to be the final straw.

Members of Trudeau’s own party began to make it publicly clear they no longer supported his leadership.

And with that, the last domino fell. Trudeau announced his resignation as PM earlier this month.

• Read Jessica’s analysis in full

China’s economy rebounded in the last three months of last year, allowing the government to meet its growth target of 5% in 2024, Beijing announced on Friday.

But it is one of the slowest rates of growth in decades as the world’s second largest economy struggles to shake off a protracted property crisis, high local government debt and youth unemployment.

The head of the country’s statistics bureau said China’s economic achievements in 2024 were “hard won,” after the government launched a slew of stimulus measures late last year.

Beijing has rarely missed its growth targets in the past.

Experts had broadly predicted this rate of growth. The World Bank said lower borrowing costs and rising exports would mean China could achieve annual growth of 4.9%.

Investors, however, are bracing themselves: the threat of President-elect Donald Trump’s tariffs on $500bn (£409bn) worth of Chinese goods looms large.

Yet that is not all that stands in the way of China achieving its growth targets next year.

• Read Suranjana’s analysis in full

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• INSIGHT: Trump’s circle of influencers
• FAMILY: Which Trumps are going where?

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A sociable sunfish who was reportedly missing its human audience during a temporary closure of its aquarium in Japan has been comforted in an unorthodox way.

In a photo posted by the Kaikyokan aquarium in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi prefecture, the sunfish is seen swimming in front of photos of human faces attached to a row of uniforms.

The move was a “last resort” to solve the sunfish’s health issues, which a staff member believed had stemmed from loneliness, the aquarium said on its X account earlier this month.

And it apparently worked. “It seems to be in good health again!” the aquarium wrote on X the next day.

After the aquarium shut for renovation in December, the sunfish stopped eating jellyfish and started rubbing its body against the tank, the Mainichi Shimbun reported on Monday.

Some staff members had initially suspected a case of parasites or digestive issues, but one of them suggested the fish might have been lonely without visitors showing up to its tank.

Sunfish, found in every ocean in the world, are a delicacy in Japan. They are believed to be able to live up to 10 years in captivity, though they are not commonly found in aquariums due to the meticulous care needed to host them.

The sunfish in Kaikyokan is about 80cm long (31in) and weighs nearly 30kg (66 lb).

Mai Kato, a staff member, told Mainichi Shimbun that the sunfish, which arrived at the aquarium a year ago, had a “curious” personality and “would swim up to visitors when they approached the tank”.

After the photos and uniforms went up, the fish “felt better” the following day and was seen “waving its fins” in the tank, the aquarium said in its X post.

The post has been met with an outpouring of support from social media users. Some shared photos and videos of they had taken of the sunfish on previous visits, and others promised to go and see it when the aquarium reopened.

This is not the first time a Japanese aquarium has come up with innovative solutions to entertain animals in their care.

During the pandemic, as zoos around the world reported that their animals were becoming lonely due to a lack of visitors, an aquarium in Tokyo organised an “emergency” video call event for its eels, which they believed had become uncomfortable with humans after not seeing them for a long time.

Working from home is creating a generation who are “not doing proper work”, the former boss of Marks and Spencer and Asda has warned.

Lord Rose told BBC Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” and employees’ productivity was suffering.

His comments come as some companies are calling time on remote working. Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are just some of the businesses who now require their head office staff to be in every day.

However, work-from-home expert Prof Nicholas Bloom said that while fully remote work can be “quite damaging” to some workers’ productivity, spending three days out of five in the office was as productive as fully office-based work overall.

Lord Rose, who was chief executive of M&S and recently stepped down as the chairman of Asda, said: “We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four.”

In a November 2024 GB snapshot survey by the Office for National Statistics, 26% of people said they had been hybrid-working in the prior seven days, with some days in the workplace and some days at home – while 14% had been fully remote and 41% had commuted to their workplace every day (the remainder were not working in the week surveyed).

The shift to working from home has transformed local economies. Industry estimates indicate that vacant office space has nearly doubled since the pandemic, a quarter of dry-cleaning businesses have shut down, and the number of golf games played during the working week has risen 350% – suggesting some people are mixing work and pleasure.

Working from home is rapidly becoming a major battleground in the culture wars. The government is currently legislating to strengthen the right of employees across the UK to request working from home and says that it intends to make it harder for employers to turn down requests.

But some employers – including government bodies – are battling with staff to get them back into the office, arguing that face-to-face interaction is essential to collaborative working.

In some cases, such as independent record label Hospital Records, this requires negotiation between a young workforce – some of whom may never have worked full-time in an office – and their older bosses.

Company founder Chris Goss, who introduced a new policy requiring staff work three days in the office rather than two, said he had “a nagging feeling” that remote working has affected the company’s bottom line.

“I firmly believe that the music industry is all about relationships, and so the one single way for any of us to be able to build those kind of meaningful relationships is to do it in person.”

Maya, a 25-year-old marketing manager at the company, said she likes being around her more experienced colleagues in the workplace. “There’s a lot of people in my team that are a lot further along in their career, so if I need help with something, you know, I can just ask someone.”

But she believes she would not be able to be in the office five days a week “because my social battery drains and I need sometimes to be just at home and just to smash out loads of admin”.

Prof Bloom, a Stanford University economist, said his research into working from home suggests employees in their teens and early 20s should probably be in the office at least four days a week to maximise their opportunities for being mentored.

However, he said polls of tens of thousands of employees in the UK, US and Europe suggest workers valued the ability to work from home for two days a week about as much as an 8% pay rise.

Employment rights minister Justin Madders told Panorama there was a growing body of evidence that working from home was more productive. He also said it was good for growth because companies will have “a much more motivated workforce” and “if we’re able to get more people into work because flexibility is available for them, that will help us reach our growth ambitions”.

Prof Bloom may not be as optimistic about the effect hybrid working has on productivity, but he does agree that increasing the number of roles which can be done from home could help with economic growth if it encourages more people back into work, such as those with caring responsibilities.

“That is a huge boost” and “kind of a win, win, win”, because people would be able to work in better conditions, contribute to tax revenue and “everyone gains”.

One of the people who could benefit is Harleen, who was made redundant after she had her second child and has been unable to return to work because she cannot find a fully remote role that fits around her autistic son’s routine.

“I am not seeing those jobs advertised. I’m not seeing anything that caters to that flexibility,” she said.

“Every day I wake up and I’m thinking I’m living in Groundhog Day. All I’m doing is being a mother. I enjoy being a mum, but I want productivity. I start to feel like I’m just being brain dead.”

In the public sector, productivity is the lowest it has been since 1997 – except for the pandemic lockdown years – and some blame working from home. Since November 2023, civil servants have been called back in for between two to three days a week.

But in several public bodies, including at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in Newport, South Wales, some staff are refusing to return.

Ed, an IT delivery manager at the ONS and a rep for the PCS trade union, said he has worked almost entirely from home since the pandemic. He says it helps him to get his children to school and nursery and not waste time on commuting.

“We’ve never been told by senior leaders at the ONS that there is a problem with productivity, there’s a problem with quality, there’s a problem with meeting deadlines,” he said.

“We will never see this opportunity again. We have to fight for workers’ rights.”

He and other union members are threatening to strike if they are forced to travel into the office 40% of the time. Civilian staff in the Metropolitan Police and union members at the Land Registry are also in dispute over policies on returning to the office.

The ONS, which is in talks with the union, says it believes “face-to-face interaction” helps to “build working relationships, supports collaboration, and innovation”.

But whatever the outcome of disputes such as this, it is clear that all of us working full-time in the office is now a thing of the past.

Police in the Indian city of Mumbai have arrested a man in connection with a knife attack on Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan last week.

Khan, one of India’s biggest stars, was stabbed by an intruder at his home, in an attack that shocked the country. He is recovering after surgery.

On Sunday, police said they had arrested the key suspect, Mohammad Shariful Islam Shehzad, adding that he was a citizen of Bangladesh who was staying in India illegally.

Mr Shehzad’s lawyer has denied the allegations and says he is not from Bangladesh.

Police say they arrested Mr Shehzad from Thane, a district in the outskirts of Mumbai.

Preliminary evidence suggests that he came to the city about six months ago and had been working at a housekeeping agency using a fake name and ID, Dixit Gedam, a deputy commissioner of Mumbai police, told a press conference.

Police suspect that Mr Shehzad allegedly broke into Khan’s home with the intention of robbing him, Mr Gedam said.

On Sunday, a court in Mumbai sent Mr Shehzad to five-day police custody.

His lawyer, Sandeep Shikhane, told reporters that his client was being made a “scapegoat”.

“There is no documentary evidence to suggest he is a Bangladeshi citizen,” he said.

The attack on Khan has made national headlines and also raised questions about safety and security in Mumbai, one of India’s most populated cities and its financial capital.

Khan was stabbed six times and suffered several injuries, including one on the back of his neck, in the attack at his home in an upscale neighbourhood.

A nurse, Eliyama Philip, who works in Khan’s home, told the police last week that she first noticed the shadow of a man near the bathroom door late at night while she was in the child’s room with the nanny.

Ms Philip said a man appeared holding a wooden object in one hand and a long blade in another and warned the two against making any noise. He demanded 10m rupees ($115,477; £94,511), she said.

A scuffle broke out, during which Ms Philip was injured. She also said that hearing the commotion, Khan and his wife rushed to the room and that the attacker struck the actor with a blade before fleeing.

On Friday, investigators reportedly detained – and later released – at least five other people for questioning in connection with the investigation.

Many of the men were taken into custody because they resembled the attacker, who was captured on CCTV camera while he was exiting the building.

Pope Francis has said that Donald Trump’s plans to deport illegal migrants from the US would be a “disgrace” if they materialised.

Speaking to an Italian TV programme from his Vatican residence, Francis said that if the plans went ahead, Trump would make “poor wretches that don’t have anything foot the bill”.

“That’s not right. That’s not how you solve problems,” he said.

Trump has promised to begin the largest expulsion of undocumented immigrants in US history soon after he takes office.

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In a message to Trump shared on Monday, Pope Francis offered him “cordial greetings” and urged him to lead a society with “no room for hatred, discrimination or exclusion” and promote “peace and reconciliation among peoples”.

The Pope is known to hold the issue of migrants dear. During a public audience last August, he said that “systematically working by all means to drive away migrants” was “a grave sin”.

In 2016, before the first presidential election won by Trump, Pope Francis said “a person who thinks only about building walls… and not of building bridges, is not Christian”.

Referring to Trump’s promise to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep migrants from travelling into the US, Francis said: “I say only that this man is not Christian if he has said things like that. We must see if he said things in that way and I will give him the benefit of the doubt.”

Francis and Trump later met when Trump and his family visited Rome in 2017.

Before the US presidential election in 2024, the Pope declined to say whether people should vote for Trump or for his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris, merely urging people to choose “the lesser evil” according to their conscience.

During the interview on Sunday evening, Francis also touched on the issue of migration to Europe, saying there was “a lot of cruelty” and that everyone had “the right to remain home and the right to emigrate”.

The Pope also added that some of the southern European countries that receive the most migrant arrivals “are not having any children and need manpower”.

“In some of these countries, there are entire villages that are empty. A good, well-thought out migrant policy would help countries like Italy and Spain too,” he said.

In another section of the interview, Francis was asked about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and said he did not know why making peace was so difficult.

“I don’t know why… it’s as if there was an international drive towards self-destruction,” the Pope said.

Francis, 88, has been in the post since 2013, when he was elected to succeed Pope Benedict XVI.

China has executed a man found guilty of killing at least 35 people in a car attack in November, in what is thought to be the deadliest attack in the country for a decade.

Fan Weiqiu, 62, injured dozens more when he drove his car into people exercising outside a stadium in the southern city of Zhuhai.

State media said a second man was executed for a separate attack that came days later. Xu Jiajin, 21, killed eight people in a stabbing spree at his university in the eastern city of Wuxi.

Authorities said Fan was driven by “dissatisfaction” over how his property had been divided following his divorce, while Xu carried out his attack after “failing to obtain his diploma due to poor exam results”.

Fan was detained at the scene on 11 November, where police said he was found with self-inflicted wounds.

In December, he was found guilty of “endangering public safety”, with the Zhuhai Intermediate People’s Court describing his motive as “extremely vile” and the methods used “particularly cruel”.

His execution on Monday comes less than a month after the court sentenced him to death.

In the case of Xu, police said he confessed to his crime “without hesitation” on 16 November. He was sentenced to death on 17 December, with the court hearing that the circumstances of his crime were “particularly bad” and “extremely serious”.

Human rights groups believe China is the world’s leading executioner, killing thousands of people every year. The country does not release details about its use of the death penalty, so reliable numbers are unavailable.

China has been grappling with a spate of public violence, with many attackers believed to have been spurred by a desire to “take revenge on society” – where perpetrators target strangers over their personal grievances.

The number of such attacks across China reached 19 in 2024.

Within days of the Zhuhai and Wuxi attacks, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school in Changde city, injuring 30.

Authorities said the man, Huang Wen, wanted to vent his anger after dealing with investment losses and family conflict.

Huang was handed a suspended death sentence last month, which could be commuted to life imprisonment if he does not commit another crime in the next two years.

Analysts earlier told the BBC that the string of mass killings raised questions about how people in China have been dealing with various sources of stress, such as the country’s sluggish economy.

“The tensions do seem to be building, and it doesn’t look like there is any way it is going to ease up in the near future,” says George Magnus, an economist at Oxford University’s China Centre.