High winds and lack of rain are the main factors driving the Southern California fires, but climate change is altering the background conditions, increasing the likelihood of these conflagrations, say experts.

Researchers have shown that a warming world increases the number of "fire weather" days, when conditions are more suited to outbreaks of fire.

California is particularly vulnerable right now because of a lack of rain in recent months, following a very warm summer.

The powerful Santa Ana winds that naturally occur at this time of year, combined with the dry conditions, can result in fast moving and dangerous fire outbreaks.

Reaching 60-70 mph, these strong, dry winds blow from the interior of Southern California towards the coast and this month has seen the worst high wind event in the area in over a decade.

The winds are drying out the lands, and researchers say that while the strongest winds will occur at the start of this outbreak, the driest vegetation will come at the end, meaning these fires could drag on for quite some time.

The high wind speeds are also altering the location of the fires. Many outbreaks occur high up on mountains, but these recent fires have rapidly moved down into the valleys and into areas where more people live.

"That's where there are more potential ignition sources," said climate researcher Daniel Swain from UCLA in a social media post.

"It's also where it's harder to turn off the power pre-emptively than it is in other locations where these public safety power shut offs are more common and are prepped for at a more regular basis. So there's going to be some potential challenges there."

The impact of a changing climate is evident in the bigger picture for the state.

California has experienced a decades-long drought that ended just two years ago. The resulting wet conditions since then have seen the rapid growth of shrubs and trees, the perfect fuel for fires.

However last summer was very hot and was followed by dry autumn and winter season - downtown Los Angeles has only received 0.16 inches of rain since October, more than 4 inches below average.

Researchers believe that a warming world is increasing the conditions that are conducive to wildland fire, including low relative humidity.

These "fire weather" days are increasing in many parts of the world, with climate change making these conditions more severe and the fire season lasting longer in many parts of the world, scientists have shown.

In California, the situation has been made worse by the topography with fires burning more intensely and moving more rapidly in steep terrain. This area of California is also dominated by naturally very fire-prone shrub vegetation.

"While fires are common and natural in this region, California has seen some of the most significant increases in the length and extremity of the fire weather season globally in recent decades, driven largely climate change," said Professor Stefan Doerr, Director of the Centre for Wildfire Research, at Swansea University.

"That said, it is too early to say to what degree climate change has made these specific fires more extreme. This will need to be evaluated in a more detailed attribution analysis."

"Can that chap sit, do we think?" asks Dr Raj Paw, a senior consultant in the emergency department at Warwick Hospital.

He is speaking about a patient in his 90s who was brought in after collapsing at home, where he was found cold and confused.

Now he is stable. Could that open up a bed?

"If we can get him to sit then he could go into one of the chairs, and that would free up his bed," Dr Paw says.

This is the sort of conversation doctors and nurses are having in hospitals up and down the country as a severe flu season puts the NHS under pressure.

More than a dozen hospitals have declared critical incidents - including some of those considered among the best in the country.

Earlier this week, the BBC visited Warwick Hospital. It is run by the South Warwickshire trust, which is one of the top rated in the country and has prided itself on the smooth running of its four hospitals.

But the caseload has been overwhelming this week.

Warwick Hospital has 375 beds and at one point the predicted demand was almost 100 more than that. For the first time ever, it's had to declare a critical incident - the highest alert level in the NHS.

The BBC was there when hospital administrators made the call. Declaring a critical incident is a warning to the local health system that things are getting bad. Often, it frees up hospitals to redeploy doctors and create new temporary ward space.

Over a two-day period, the BBC saw doctors and nurses doing just that: finding stop-gap solutions to treat patients in whatever safe settings could be established.

With emergency departments overflowing, sick people need to be treated in the chairs they're sitting in.

Others have had to wait in ambulances parked outside emergency units for hours before they could even be taken inside.

One such patient is Percy, who is in his 80s and experiencing liver failure. He came to hospital because he had been feeling sick and had lost weight over recent weeks.

Dr Arun Jeyakumar, a senior registrar on the ward, is one of the doctors sent out to check on patients like Percy.

Hopping into the ambulance, he has a brief consultation with him. He tells Percy that everything is being done to get him into the hospital.

Percy smiles back weakly, resigned to the wait.

The paramedic who brought him to the hospital is also resigned: he's seen plenty of cases like Percy's this season.

He turns up the heating in the back of the ambulance and sits down again as Dr Jeyakumar hops out and closes the doors.

Back in the emergency department, doctors, nurses and consultants discuss how to make space for new arrivals.

Beds are at an absolute premium in the hospital. So many patients have arrived that a room near the ambulance entrance has been set up for people considered "fit to sit".

Every chair is occupied.

"It isn't ideal," one doctor says. "But it is safe."

Porters have to wheel beds through this open space, between patients being treated in chairs and nurses kneeling on the floor to remove cannulas. Drip stands are shuffled back and forth to make room.

We see a nurse taking a patient, who is still attached to a drip, to the loo in a wheelchair.

She leaves the chair in the corridor and helps the patient in. A porter comes and goes to move the vacant wheelchair.

The nurse dashes back out. "That's my wheelchair," she cries.

We roll it back to her and she starts to laugh. "You can't take your eye off them for a second or another patient will be in it," she says - only half joking.

Elsewhere, Percy makes it it from the ambulance to the emergency department, after a three hour wait.

"It's getting worse," he says, wincing as he closes his eyes - but it will be another 12 hours before Percy is admitted to a ward.

When we see him finally being moved, he is contorted in his bed from the pain, clutching onto a sick bowl.

Dr Paw's first job during his rounds is to check the cubicles to see who he can move off beds.

He has a full waiting room just beyond the doors and four ambulances banked up outside.

A woman in the last cubicle he visits is crying. Dr Paw receives an update from a nurse on her condition and orders some morphine.

"You're in the right place," he tells the patient. "We'll sort out your pain."

Dr Paw tells us: "The people that come in now are sicker than they used to be. And here we are, trying to get them out quicker."

He then moves on to a man who was admitted for a heart attack two days ago but is no longer receiving active treatment. Can he safely be moved, Dr Paw wonders.

"These are the decisions we're being forced to make," he tells the BBC.

"I'm considering moving a heart attack patient to the waiting room so I can have his cubicle."

Another patient Dr Paw saw the previous day is still waiting for a bed in the ward more than 24 hours later.

"It's rubbish. It's not what should happen," Dr Paw says. "People shouldn't be spending 27, 28 hours in an emergency department."

At one point during our time at the hospital we were taken to a bank of screens displaying statistics.

It showed that patients in the emergency department were waiting nearly 30 hours for a bed and there were six ambulances queued up outside. One had been there for four hours.

"It's the worst I've ever seen it," one doctor says.

South Warwickshire Trust has since lifted Tuesday's critical incident declaration - however, staff tell the BBC they still face a similar level of pressure.

When David Lammy is asked about the new government's relations with the incoming US administration, he likes to talk about the dinner he and the prime minister had with Donald Trump in New York last September.

"We had a very good meal," the foreign secretary said on Thursday. "We had a long time to discuss the issues. He was an extremely gracious host, very affable, very warm indeed about our great country."

And throughout a series of media interviews, briefings and a speech at the Foreign Office, Lammy talked up UK-US relations, even daring to speak of a "special relationship", a phrase largely avoided by diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic.

The UK and the US, he said, were "required to work very closely together" on global challenges.

They include challenges such as the wars in Europe and the Middle East and what he called "the growing problems in Sudan". He cited the "close cooperation" between both countries on military and intelligence matters.

But what was striking was how far the foreign secretary was willing to challenge Trump only days before his inauguration.

The president-elect's refusal to rule out military action against Greenland was, Lammy said, an example of his "destabilising" rhetoric. He said Trump was focused on Arctic security but such an attack by one member of Nato on another was "simply not going to happen".

He said Trump was right to ask Europe to do more to defend itself but questioned his call for Nato members to spend 5% of their national income on defence, noting the US was itself spending only 3.38 %.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme earlier in the day, Lammy had cast doubt on Trump's campaign promise of a quick ceasefire in Ukraine.

"I see no evidence that Putin wants to come to the table to negotiate," he said.

"I think the indications are, from what I've seen over the last few days, a slight pushback on this sense that somehow a deal will be achieved on 21 January, I think that's now unlikely. And we're hearing that actually the timetable's moved down somewhat towards Easter."

Lammy played down the influence of Elon Musk, the wealthy ally of Trump who in recent days has personally attacked British ministers on X. He said the tech boss would have only a "domestic portfolio" in the new administration and his role had not come up in talks between British and Trump officials.

The foreign secretary also emphasised the need to engage with China – on trade, climate, health and artificial intelligence - and urged the country "not to throw in its lot" with Russia. This position is at odds with that held by Trump allies who see China already as a key member of an anti-Western axis including Russia, Iran and North Korea.

Lammy calls his approach to foreign policy "progressive realism". He said this means seeking progressive ends while accepting the world as it is.

When applying this framework to Trump, he said he will be guided more by the president-elect's actions than his rhetoric. We shall learn in coming days how far the two remain apart.

And as for that dinner with Trump last autumn, Lammy rarely mentions the fact the meal was almost the cause of a diplomatic upset.

He and Sir Keir Starmer were presented with large plates of Guyanese chicken, somewhat to the dismay of the vegetarian prime minister.

In the national interest, the foreign secretary was obliged to eat more chicken that night than he might have expected.

A judge has thrown out a man's attempt to sue a council to recover from a rubbish tip a Bitcoin hard drive which he says is now worth about £600m.

James Howells had argued that his former partner had mistakenly dumped the hard drive containing a Bitcoin wallet in 2013, and he wanted to access the site and recover the cryptocurrency.

But Newport council asked a High Court judge to strike out Mr Howells' legal action to access the landfill or get £495m in compensation.

Judge Keyser KC said there were no "reasonable grounds" for bringing the claim and "no realistic prospect" of succeeding at a full trial.

During the hearing in December the court heard how Mr Howells had been an early adopter of Bitcoin and had successfully mined the cryptocurrency.

As the value of his missing digital wallet soared, Mr Howells organised a team of experts to attempt to locate, recover and access the hard drive.

He had repeatedly asked permission from the council for access to the site, and had offered it a share of the missing Bitcoin if it was successfully recovered.

Mr Howells successfully "mined" the Bitcoin in 2009 for almost nothing, and says he forgot about it altogether when he threw it out.

The value of the cryptocurrency rose by more than 80% in 2024, and Mr Howells believes his 8,000 bitcoins to now be worth more than £600m.

But James Goudie KC, for the council, argued that existing laws meant the hard drive had become its property when it entered the landfill site. It also said that its environmental permits would forbid any attempt to excavate the site to search for the hard drive.

The offer to donate 10% of the Bitcoin to the local community was encouraging the council to "play fast and loose" by "signing up for a share of the action," said Mr Goudie.

In a written judgement the judge said: "I also consider that the claim would have no realistic prospect of succeeding if it went to trial and that there is no other compelling reason why it should be disposed of at trial."

The landfill holds more than 1.4m tonnes of waste, but Mr Howells said he had narrowed the hard drive's location to an area consisting of 100,000 tonnes.

Mr Howells has speculated that, by next year, the Bitcoin on his hard drive could be worth £1bn.

He told BBC Wales outside the court hearing in Cardiff last December that he believed in his case and was willing to take it all the way to Supreme Court.

Video game giant Ubisoft has announced a further delay to its upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows.

The long-running series is one of the French publisher's flagship franchises, with recent instalment, Valhalla, reportedly making more than $1bn.

Assassin's Creed Shadows, set in 16th Century Japan, was due to be released last November before an initial delay to February 2025.

Announcing the new release date of 20 March, executive producer Marc-Alexis Coté said a "few additional weeks are needed" to ensure the game's launch goes smoothly.

Players complained that Ubisoft's major 2024 release, Star Wars Outlaws, was launched with bugs and glitches.

The company's bosses told investors the sci-fi tie-in's sales were "softer than expected" and said "learnings" from Outlaws' launch had prompted the original delay to Assassin's Creed Shadows.

In his update, Mr Coté thanked fans for their support and said the extra time would allow the development team to implement "valuable feedback" from gamers.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is seen as an important title for Ubisoft - one of the biggest gaming companies in the world with an estimated 13,000 employees worldwide.

Its other 2024 titles, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown and pirate-themed online game Skull & Bones, were also reported to have fallen below the company's expectations.

The company also discontinued online shooter XDefiant and closed three of its studios.

In a conference call held around the same time as the Assassin's Creed delay was made public, CEO Yves Guillemot told investors Ubisoft was "taking decisive steps" to reshape the company.

It was also looking to "drive significant cost reductions", the meeting heard.

'Strong appeal'

BBC Newsbeat previously spoke to James Batchelor, former editor-in-chief of Gamesindustry.biz, who said the Assassin's Creed series is a "golden goose" for Ubisoft.

He said moving the game from its original November release date meant Ubisoft had missed out on sales from the busy pre-Christmas sales period.

But, he also said it would have faced stiff competition in February - a crowded month for high-profile new releases, with Monster Hunter Wilds, Avowed and Civilization VII also due to come out.

While Ubisoft's 2024 had been "tough", James told Newsbeat that colleagues who'd played preview versions of Assassin's Creed Shadows were impressed with the game.

He also pointed out that its feudal Japan setting was one series fans had been requesting for a long time, and he expected this to drive sales.

"Whether or not it sells quite the levels it would have done in November, or whether it sells as well as they hope. I don't know," he said.

"But of all the things they've put out in the last year and the varied performance they've had, this one has got the strongest chance and the strongest appeal."

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

Deadly wildfires have devastated parts of the city of Los Angeles and the wider county, destroying many homes and businesses, as well as schools and places of worship.

Here are some of the most striking images of places seen before and after the wildfires tore through them.

• Follow live: New wildfire sweeps through Hollywood Hills
• In maps: Thousands of acres on fire in LA
• What role is climate change playing?

Pacific Palisades

This affluent suburb is among those that have been the hardest hit, with many residents being unable to gather much or anything of value before they were had to flee.

Below are images showing the destruction some businesses have suffered.

The Palisades Charter High School is among landmarks in the Pacific Palisades area to have been damaged in the fires.

The well-known school counts celebrities including Will.i.am and Forest Whitaker among its alumni, and has been a filming location for Hollywood hits including Carrie, Teen Wolf and Freaky Friday.

Read more about what happened to the school here.

Pacific Coast Highway

Houses that sit along parts of the major state highway have also been hit by the Palisades fire, including in the city of Malibu.

Satellite imagery below shows what the coastline looked like before and after the fires took hold.

Altadena

The Eaton Fire has destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses in Altadena, which lies behind the mountains north of Los Angeles.

Below you can see the damage the fire caused to one home, as well as a wider look at the full extent of the damage the neighbourhood has suffered.

Pasadena

In nearby Pasadena, a Jewish temple was among the buildings lost to the Eaton Fire.

According to its website, the temple's congregation has more than 100 years of history in the area.

The Los Angeles wildfires are on track to be among the costliest in US history, with losses already expected to exceed more than $50bn (£40bn).

In a preliminary estimate, private forecaster Accuweather said it expected losses of between $52bn and $57bn as the blazes rip through an area that is home to some of the most expensive property in the US.

The insurance industry is also bracing for a major hit, with analysts from firms such as Morningstar and JP Morgan forecasting insured losses more than $8bn.

Nearly 2,000 structures have been damaged or destroyed in the fires, which has also claimed at least five lives.

With authorities still working to contain the fires, the scope of the losses is still unfolding.

"This is a terrible disaster," said Accuweather chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter.

The 2018 fire that broke out in northern California near the town of Paradise currently ranks as the disaster with highest insured costs, at roughly $12.5bn, according to insurance giant Aon.

That blaze, known as the Camp fire, killed 85 people and displaced more than 50,000.

The high property values in this case mean it is likely to end up as one of the top five costliest wildfires in the US, said Aon, which looks at insured losses.

Nearly 200,000 people in the Los Angeles area are under evacuation orders, with another 180,000 facing warnings.

Even after the situation is under control, Mr Porter said the events could have long-term affects on health and tourism.

It also spells trouble for the insurance industry, which was already in crisis.

Homeowners in the US with mortgages are typically required by banks to have property insurance.

But companies have been hiking prices - or cancelling coverage altogether - in the face of increasing risks of natural disaster such as fires, floods and hurricanes.

As companies stop offering coverage, people are turning in surging numbers to home insurance plans offered by state governments, which are typically more expensive while offering less protection.

In California, the number of policies offered through the state's Fair plan has more than doubled since 2020, from about 200,000 to more than 450,000 in September of last year.

Areas hit by the fires rank as some of the places with highest take-up, according to data from the programme, which was already warning of risks to its financial stability.

Denise Rappmund, a senior analyst at Moody's Ratings, said the fires would have "widespread, negative impacts for the state's broader insurance market".

"Increased recovery costs will likely drive up premiums and may reduce property insurance availability," she said, adding that the state was also facing potential long-term damage to property values and strain to public finances.

A Swiss national arrested in Iran and accused of spying has died in prison, according to Iranian state media.

The man was being held with another inmate at a prison in the eastern city of Semnan when he "committed suicide" on Thursday, Iran's semi-official Tasnim News Agency said.

The judiciary-run Mizan News Agency said prison officials immediately took action to save the Swiss citizen's life, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

Mizan gave no further detail about the man's identity.

"This morning, a Swiss citizen committed suicide in Semnan prison," a statement on Mizan's website, attributed to Mohammad Sadegh Akbari, Semnan's chief justice, said.

The statement added that he had been "arrested by Iranian security forces for espionage" and the case was "under investigation".

In recent years, Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have arrested dozens of dual nationals and foreigners, mostly on charges related to espionage and security.

Switzerland plays an important intermediary role between Washington and Tehran as it represents American interests in Iran and shares messages between the two countries.