We're unlikely to see Prince Andrew at a royal public event now for at least six months. And then maybe only once or twice a year.

Banned from royal Christmas celebrations at Sandringham he won't be on the annual church walk. It could be April 2026, at the Easter church service, before he reappears on such a family occasion, maybe longer.

But when he resurfaces, how much will his life have really changed, despite the drama of the loss of his titles and honours?

The move against Andrew followed a public outcry for some kind of sanction and there's certainly been a powerful symbolic message of displeasure - but will it really end the accusing headlines and will his daily life be much affected?

Buckingham Palace will hope that this will be seen as a decisive intervention, ending the drip-drip of scandal.

The King was in Scotland when Andrew made his decision on giving up his titles and reportedly spoke to his brother on the phone.

He had consulted Prince William, who has all the warmth of an ice age for his uncle Andrew. When William is eventually on the throne, Andrew's royal appearances might be reduced from rare to never.

It had been William who had already intervened to stop Andrew from walking in the Order of the Garter procession.

There has been a colossal loss of reputation for Prince Andrew and he'll keenly feel no longer being able to use the Duke of York title and to take part in the Order of the Garter. He's become a persona non-garter.

It's a deep blow to his pride. But on a day-to-day basis, he's still a prince and he's still living in a mansion in Windsor. Royal Lodge has got a lease until 2078, so if he leaves it will be his own choice.

Living with him still will be his ex-wife, who is now also an ex-duchess. They've gone back to the position when they first met, Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew.

His downfall has been driven by his links with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But while Andrew has lost his status, if he ever looks at the infamous photo of him and Virginia Giuffre, everyone else in the picture - Ms Giuffre, Ghislaine Maxwell - and the person who was claimed to have taken it - Epstein - are either dead or in prison. The prince is the only one who has walked away.

He can still spend his days watching aviation videos or TV shows. His family life with his daughters, who are still princesses, can continue unchanged.

His statement about not using his titles, more or less a resignation letter, didn't have any flicker of remorse, continuing to assert his sense of duty and honour. So no change there.

When Andrew had to stop being a working royal, in the wake of his Newsnight interview, there was an expectation that he might take the time-worn approach of quiet contrition and some charity work, to gradually regain public respect.

Instead he showed no sense of regret. A royal insider, asked about Andrew's chances of a dignified return to public life, simply said to me: "The grand old Duke of York, he gave 12 million quid, to someone he never met, for something he never did."

It meant he had never really accepted responsibility for what had happened. Several years later, the only thing that's changed is that he's no longer the Duke of York.

The intense pressure applied this week by the Palace to Prince Andrew to accept the loss of titles was driven by two key factors, according to royal sources.

First, the Palace wanted to stop the cacophony of terrible headlines about Andrew that kept drowning out the rest of the Royal Family's work. They wanted a line drawn under the scandals.

And second, there was genuine disquiet at the discovery that Prince Andrew had stayed in touch longer with Epstein than he had previously admitted. If that part of his account was unreliable, what else might emerge?

Getting Prince Andrew to renounce the use of his titles, under the threat of forcibly taking them away, was an attempt to publicly show that the Palace was taking this seriously. They would put an end to his remaining links with royal life.

Although this made headlines around the world, it won't stop the underlying questions about Prince Andrew and Epstein and the accompanying headlines.

This week will see the publication of the posthumous memoir of Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim who claimed to have been forced to have sex with Andrew.

The prince has emphatically denied any wrongdoing, but the questions for Andrew about Ms Giuffre and Epstein seem to be getting louder than fading away. There could also be questions about what the Palace did or didn't know about Andrew and Epstein's circle.

Whether he's called a prince or an ex-duke, he's could still be caught up in the public and political pressure to reveal more documents about Epstein, particularly in the United States.

The press will keep pulling on other threads, like Andrew's business dealings with China. Whatever the Palace hopes, the headlines are unlikely to stop.

At the centre of it all is Prince Andrew, saying nothing now apart from his terse statement, written through gritted teeth, about his titles.

Before his Newsnight interview in 2019 he had been much more open to talking to the media. I remember speaking to him at an event in 2017 encouraging entrepreneurs.

Looking back it seems unintentionally prophetic.

"One of the things that I was taught at school was that the best way of being successful is to fail," he'd said.

"If you can learn about failure, and do it in such a way that it's a safe environment… then you will have learnt something, you will have experienced something.

"How many times did you put your finger in the plug socket as a small child and say 'ow' - and you never did it again.

"If you did it a second time, you'd think that was really stupid. They've failed and then they've learned what not to do next time," said Prince Andrew.

"You're always stronger from failure." Is that a lesson he was ever good at learning?

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Republican governors in several US states have placed National Guard troops on standby in preparation for a nationwide protest to oppose Donald Trump and his policies.

The organisers of the "No Kings" protests say that gatherings will take place at more than 2,500 locations around the US. Trump allies have accused the protesters of being allied with the far-left Antifa movement.

Governors in Texas and Virginia have activated their state's National Guard troops, however it is unclear how visible the military presence will be.

Organisers say that at the last No Kings protest, held in June, more than five million people took to the streets to denounce Trump's political agenda.

The protest organisers say the protest will challenge Trump's "authoritarianism".

"The president thinks his rule is absolute," they say on their website.

"But in America, we don't have kings and we won't back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty."

Some Republicans have dubbed the protests "Hate America" rallies.

"We'll have to get the National Guard out," Kansas Senator Roger Marshall said ahead of the rallies, according to CNN.

"Hopefully it'll be peaceful. I doubt it."

Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday activated the state's National Guard ahead of a protest scheduled in Austin, the state's capital.

He said the troops would be needed due to the "planned antifa-linked demonstration".

Democrats denounced the move, including the state's top Democrat Gene Wu, who argued: "Sending armed soldiers to suppress peaceful protests is what kings and dictators do — and Greg Abbott just proved he's one of them."

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin also ordered the state National Guard to be activated.

All 1,287 Betfred shops could disappear from the UK High Street if Chancellor Rachel Reeves hikes taxes on gambling firms, the company's co-founder and chairman has told the BBC.

Fred Done, who set up Betfred in 1967 with his brother, said a closure of that size would put 7,500 jobs at risk.

The billionaire businessman said tax rises were the "biggest threat" to the industry in his 57 years. It echoes similar warnings from other gambling brands.

Increasing taxes on betting firms in the Budget has been suggested to the chancellor. She recently told ITV: "I do think there is a case for gambling firms paying more… they should pay their fair share of taxes and we will make sure that happens."

Reeves has been encouraged by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown to increase taxes on the gambling sector and use the revenue from that to reduce child poverty.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank estimated over the summer that additional taxes on the industry, as high as 50%, could raise £3.2bn.

At the time the Betting and Gaming Council, which represents gambling companies, called Brown's plan "economically reckless", saying it would push gamblers into the black market.

Betting companies have resisted calls for taxes to rise. Up to 200 William Hill retail outlets could close if the industry faces higher taxes, its owner Evoke said earlier this month.

Betfred's Mr Done said that if taxes on UK gambling companies increased he would also feel compelled to close his High Street shops.

"It [tax] doesn't even need to go up to 50%. If it went up to anywhere like 40% or even 35% there is no profit in the business. We would have to close it down. I'm talking job losses. We're talking probably 7,500," he said.

He said 300 of his shops were "currently losing money" and claimed a 5% increase on gambling taxes would raise that number to 430.

"Once the [UK] industry is closed down, it's gone. People will still bet, but they'll bet offshore with it. There's plenty of bookmakers offshore who happen to take the bets, who don't pay anything to this country," he said.

Punters' winnings from gambling are not taxed in the UK, nor is VAT charged on bets. However, the gambling industry pays extra taxes, including:

• a tax of 21% on online casino gaming stakes
• duty of 20% on slots and gaming machines
• general betting duty on sports fixtures of 15%
• general betting duty on horseracing of 25%

Mr Done said recent increases in employer National Insurance Contributions (NICs) and the minimum wage had already added £20m to his company's costs.

He agreed that, like with banking or buying clothes, customers are increasingly going online, making it inevitable to close betting shops.

Rival firm Paddy Power on Thursday said it would close 57 shops across the UK and Republic of Ireland, citing increasing cost pressures and challenging market conditions.

"Slowly it will go online, but we're talking, without tax increases, we've still got probably 20 years of life on the High Street," said Mr Done.

"And you know, the UK High Street is being decimated with closures."

In its most recent annual results, Betfred took in nearly £1bn of revenue, but made an operating profit of just £500,000 after a series of writedowns on its assets.

The family-owned company has bases in the UK, Gibraltar, the US and South Africa, with investment in both online gambling and High Street sports betting.

Critics point to the social and financial harm caused by gambling. Office for Health Improvement and Disparities research from 2023 estimated the excess costs of harmful gambling to be between £1bn and £1.77bn.

Prof Ashwin Kumar, director of research and policy at the IPPR, said higher taxes were needed on the industry, particularly for online betting, to reflect the negative consequences gambling has on some people.

"We know that most of the profits made by gambling companies come from a very small number of gamblers, many of whom are at risk of serious harm. And so we think that the duties should be higher, just like tobacco and alcohol."

But Mr Done argues that UK-based, High Street betting shops provide better safeguards for people with gambling problems, as well as tax revenues, than online and offshore rivals.

As to whether he thinks his appeal to keep taxes as they are will win over the chancellor, Mr Done said "we're 10 to one against", which suggests it's odds on that many betting shops will close.

An HMT spokesperson said: "We do not comment on speculation around future changes to tax policy."

The Spanish town of Terrassa in north-eastern Catalonia has temporarily banned the adoption of black cats from animal shelters to prevent potentially sinister "rituals" during Halloween.

All requests for the fostering or adoption of the felines will be denied from 6 October to 10 November to protect them from being hurt or used as props, said the local animal welfare service.

Deputy Mayor Noel Duque told broadcaster RTVE that adoption requests for black cats usually increase around Halloween.

While black cats are often associated with witchcraft and seen as bad luck in Western culture, many other cultures, including Japan and Egypt, see them as symbols of prosperity and fortune.

Terassa's city council said there had been no record of cruelty towards black cats in the town, however there have been incidents in other areas and the decision was taken after warnings from animal welfare groups.

"We try to prevent people from adopting because it's trendy or impulsively. And in cases like these, which we know exist, to prevent any macabre practices," Duque said.

Terrassa is home to more than 9,800 cats, according to the local authorities, and the adoption centre houses around 100 of them, 12 of which are black.

The city council emphasised that the measure is "temporary and exceptional" and represents an extra precaution for animal welfare, but did not rule out repeating the ban in the future.

Exceptions during the ban period will be assessed individually by the adoption centre and normal fostering requests will resume after Halloween.

Spoiler warning: This article reveals details from the first four episodes of The Celebrity Traitors

"I feel awful. I didn't know what else to do! I've gone and murdered one of my best friends."

That was comedian Alan Carr’s immortal line, delivered to camera after he "killed" singer Paloma Faith in The Celebrity Traitors.

The first murder of the series was all the more brutal because the pair weren’t just on-screen competitors - they are actually friends outside the show.

And they're not the only ones who knew each other before entering the Traitors Castle.

This series is full of people who are connected in different ways, adding a whole new layer of drama.

Even if the stars didn’t know each other, they likely knew of each other - and that makes it much harder to lie.

So there’ll be no Charlotte Church pretending she's not Welsh. And if Tom Daley was actually Sir Stephen Fry's son, we’d already have a pretty good idea.

We've been unpicking the six degrees of separation. Here are some of the connections we’ve found - if we’ve missed any, we’d love to know. Get in touch with your thoughts in the comments below.

Jonathan probably knows the most people

... thanks to his long-running Saturday night chat show.

He's interviewed Paloma Faith, Sir Stephen Fry, Tom Daley and Alan Carr on The Jonathan Ross Show over the years.

Cat Burns performed on his show last year, Charlotte Church, Clare Balding and Lucy Beaumont have all been guests, and how could we forget about the time Joe Marler covered Adele's Somebody Like You on the show.

Having met so many of the contestants beforehand, that could help Ross "hide out as a traitor," said TV reporter Siobhan Synnot. He may make them feel wrongly at ease around him, and it could also make it easy for him to form alliances.

But knowing so many of the stars could also make it harder to wear the traitor’s coat, on a personal level.

Earlier this week, Ross wrote on X that he "did not enjoy the duplicity" as the game progressed. "It's a tougher psychological challenge than I expected," he said.

Followed closely by Alan

Alan Carr has also interviewed a bunch of his fellow contestants in the real world.

His former show Chatty Man featured guests including Sir Stephen Fry and Clare Balding - who were on the same episode - as well as Paloma Faith (more on that relationship below).

Sir Stephen also appeared on Carr's podcast, Life's a Beach, as did actor Mark Bonnar and singer Cat Burns.

Kate Garraway, meanwhile, has interviewed Alan Carr on ITV's Good Morning Britain.

Maybe knowing so many people is behind his sweating, flustering, and giggling. Or maybe that's just Alan Carr being Alan Carr.

Celia, Paloma and Sir Stephen all starred in the same film

Paloma Faith said as much, during the incredibly tense funeral scene earlier in the series.

At one point, a school tie was presented as a clue to who belonged in a coffin. The cast picked up that this was to do with the 2007 film St Trinian's.

The group started pointing fingers at Faith - but she pointed out that Celia Imrie and Stephen Fry had also starred in the hit comedy film.

Faith plays a goth schoolgirl in the film, Imrie plays a school matron, while Sir Stephen plays himself, as the school quiz master.

It’s not the only time Sir Stephen and Imrie crossed paths. The pair also starred together in ITV drama Kingdom.

Clare and Tom go way back

Clare Balding, a staple of British sports, and Olympic diving champion Tom Daley clearly know each other well. Balding has interviewed Daley in the past, including on her show - and she also spoke up to praise him after he came out on YouTube in 2013.

Their connection was clear in episode three, when Balding seemed gutted to see Daley murdered by the Traitors.

"I've known him since he was about 12 years old," she said.

Former England rugby union player Joe Marler is also from the world of sports, and it wouldn't be surprising if he has mingled with Baldwin and Daley at events over the years.

Lucy, Alan, Joe and Nick have all been on the comedy circuit

Sir Stephen Fry, Lucy Beaumont, Alan Carr, Joe Wilkinson, and Nick Mohammed are all comedians, and are likely to have met each other over the years.

In a Guardian interview last year, Beaumont described working with Sir Stephen recently - and she also admitted she made a faux pas when she met him, asking him what it was like being in prison for being gay.

"And thank God someone came in and he didn't hear me say it. I was mixing him up with when he played Oscar Wilde. I could picture him in his cell," she told the newspaper.

Beaumont is also a familiar face from Meet the Richardsons, and Carr appeared in an episode of the sitcom alongside her.

Lucy and Tom were on Bake Off together

Some of the Celebrity Traitors players have also competed against each other before.

Tom Daley and Lucy Beaumont went head to head on The Great Celebrity Bake Off for Stand Up To Cancer in 2023.

The pair tackled a savoury quiche, a technical teatime biscuit and a showstopping day off in cake form - although neither was crowned star baker at the end.

Nick and Celia were both in Bridget Jones's Baby

Beloved veteran British actress Celie Imrie starred in the Bridget Jones film series, as Una Alconbury, Bridget's mother's friend.

She was joined in one of the films - Bridget Jones's Baby - by Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed.

Perhaps because of this prior connection, Mohammed leapt to Imrie's aid at the graveyard in episode one, helping her find a shield - thereby protecting her from being murdered on the first night.

"My aim was to try and get Celia a shield, because I love her," he explained.

But this aroused suspicion, with Imrie said later: "Nick selflessly came to help me in my grave before even looking for his shield. And I'm thinking, he's absolutely adorable or he is up to something."

By the time the latest episode rolled around, they both seemed to be questioning each other's motives.

Imrie said she's "got her eye" on Mohammed, while he told the group that she'd make a great traitor.

Cat and Paloma share a record label

This was another Paloma Faith revelation, after she was murdered in episode two.

Speaking to the Uncloaked podcast, she said that's why she felt "betrayed" by fellow singer Cat Burns (who's a traitor).

"She's on the same record label as me and should have some loyalty," she said jokingly.

Sadly for her, that's not quite how the game works.

The singer later explained that even though they share a record label, they hadn't really spent time together beforehand - and that she'd enjoyed bonding with Burns during her brief stint on the show.

Alan and Paloma are (or were...) close friends

Paloma Faith may have been miffed at Cat Burns, but it appears her real beef is with Alan Carr, as he is her friend in real life.

"I don't think he should've done that to me, and I'm surprised that he did," Faith told the Uncloaked podcast, of his decision to murder her.

The pair are so close that he has even met her kids - but it turns out they're not best pleased with him now.

Speaking to the One Show, Faith said her four-year-old woke her up and said: "Mama, I don't like Alan anymore. He can't come to our house."

But in a video shared online, Carr poked fun at the row.

It showed him looking at a drinks menu before saying: "I could murder a Paloma."

He captioned the post: "Anyone thirsty? Love you @palomafaith #forgiveme."

Faith also indicated she had been mates with Jonathan Ross - who is also a traitor - before the show.

“I’m happy to lose him as a friend,” she told Uncloaked, after finding out his identity.

"I hope [Carr and Ross] never call me again, and I mean that," she added, in what - we think - was a joke...

Lots of them have done 8 out of 10 Cats... including Claudia

Amusingly, some of the celebrities have also crossed paths with presenter Claudia Winkleman in the outside world.

Ahead of the series starting, she said she knew “some of them”, adding: "They're all equally lovely."

Winkleman previously appeared on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown with Joe Wilkinson and Nick Mohammed.

She also co-hosts Strictly, so would've crossed paths with Tameka Empson when she was a contestant.

“Honestly, the layers to this are fascinating,” said entertainment journalist Natalie Jamieson.

“Whether the celebs know each other, or have worked with each other before appearing on screen here is one thing, but they'll already have made an assumption of the others' personalities, based on their known public personas, like we all do.”

Niko was the least connected

After all that, spare a thought for the ones who went into the castle with no friends at all.

As one of the younger stars, YouTuber Niko Omilana, 27, had fewer connections with the other celebs.

And that seems to have been part of his downfall.

After he was banished on Wednesday, a theory spread on social media that the real reason he was voted out was because the other celebrities didn't know him well.

"Niko has been voted because he's an outsider and he's not in their celebrity world. Nothing to do with the game," wrote one X user.

In a TikTok video posted later, Omilana seemed to address the speculation by showing him being shunned and spat on by groups of friends. He captioned it: "POV: You try and make friends in the Traitors."

Earlier this week, another of the younger celebrities - actress Ruth Codd, 29 - was murdered by the traitors.

She had previously admitted she, too, “didn’t know anyone” in the castle.

So it turns out, moving in the same circles doesn't just mean better fireside chats in the Traitors Castle.

For some, it can be the difference between life and death.

In July this year workers at Build a Rocket Boy, a video game studio in Edinburgh, were called to an all-staff meeting.

Their first ever game, a sci-fi adventure called MindsEye, had been released three weeks earlier - and it had been a total disaster.

Critics and players called it "broken", "buggy", and "the worst game of 2025".

Addressing staff via video link, the company's boss, Leslie Benzies, assured them there was a plan to get things back on track and said the negativity they'd seen was "uncalled for".

Then he pivoted, alleging "internal and external" forces had been working to scupper the MindsEye launch.

He told the assembled workers - who'd been informed they faced redundancy just a week earlier - there would be an effort to root out "saboteurs" within the company.

"I find it disgusting that anyone could sit amongst us, behave like this and continue to work here," he said, according to a transcript of the meeting verified by BBC Newsbeat.

Staff who worked at the studio say they were stunned - and not only by the strength of the language. They simply didn't believe him.

As far as they were concerned, there was no conspiracy - and the reasons for MindsEye's failure were clear.

Mr Benzies is well-known for his work at Rockstar Games where he was a senior figure on the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) action-adventure series, and regarded by many as a key architect of its success.

He left in 2016, three years after the record-breaking launch of GTA 5, sparking a legal row over unpaid royalties that was settled out of court.

In the same year, he set up the company that would become Build a Rocket Boy (Barb). By the end of 2024, it had grown to 448 employees.

Most were based at its main office - a former casino in Leith, Edinburgh - but the company also had studios in Budapest and in the French city of Montpellier.

Former staff say salaries were competitive, the company allowed remote working, and their response to the Covid-19 pandemic was good.

With Mr Benzies at the helm, Barb attracted a lot of interest and, according to documents UK companies are legally required to publish online, had managed to attract more than £233m of investment by 2024.

It had also spent large amounts of money without releasing any products.

Between 2020 and 2024, the company posted losses totalling £202.6m, with its largest for a single year - £59.1m - coming in 2023.

Barb's first project was Everywhere, described by one former employee, Jamie (not their real name), as a multiplayer role-playing game (RPG) based in an open-ended, futuristic city.

"I thought we had something quite special," says Jamie, who left the company in 2022.

To fulfill the vision, Jamie says, Mr Benzies requested new ideas and features be added at breakneck speed - too fast for them to be properly implemented.

The studio's main focus would eventually shift to MindsEye - a game originally intended to be offered as an experience within Everywhere.

"Leslie never decided what game he wanted to make," says Jamie. "There was no coherent direction".

This style of working "plagued the project from the start", they say, and would be a sign of things to come.

An open letter, recently signed by 93 current and former Barb employees, alleges studio management made "radical changes" without properly consulting workers.

Former lead data analyst Ben Newbon says it was common for staff to be caught off-guard by "knee-jerk" decisions from upper management without proper explanation.

The letter further alleges that leadership "repeatedly refused to listen" to its experienced workforce.

Ben, whose team was tasked with collecting feedback and presenting it to management, says there was rarely any response when they flagged issues.

"A lot of the points that we were hammering home on were just ignored and just never actioned," he says.

His former colleague, associate producer Margherita "Marg" Peloso, says the studio's culture also discouraged individuals from speaking out.

Marg, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, says their own attempts to raise concerns were "laughed at" in meetings with bosses.

Staff also accuse Mr Benzies of micro-managing the studio, a process allegedly illustrated in a video uploaded to the official MindsEye YouTube account.

It shows the director instructing an onlooker to make a note of an issue he has noticed as he plays the game.

Developers say this was a regular occurrence, resulting in what Ben and Marg claim were known within the studio as "Leslie tickets".

Jamie says they also heard them referred to as "Leslie bugs" or, simply, "Leslies".

Developers told Newsbeat these could range from minor cosmetic issues to instructions to ditch whole missions from the game, and there was an expectation that these would be given top priority.

"It didn't matter what else you were doing, what else was being worked on," says Ben, "the Leslie ticket had to be taken care of."

Jamie says the practice introduced instability and prevented teams from "taking ownership of their work".

Developers say the decision to launch MindsEye in June 2025 prompted a period of "crunch" - a games industry term for mandatory overtime.

They say this meant an extra eight hours of unpaid overtime a week for the majority of staff - although some employees were excused from it.

Marg says the crunch began in mid-February and continued into May, with workers eventually being promised seven hours of leave per eight hours' overtime, to be taken after MindsEye's release.

"People just felt like they were being commanded to give a lot to the company without too much in return," says Marg.

Ben alleges that some departments, such as the quality assurance team, were particularly affected, with some staff suffering physically and mentally as a result of the "stress and pressure".

Former audio programmer Isaac Hudd says "mistakes started piling up" during crunch, and says "regressions", where one team would fix a bug only for another to unwittingly bring it back to life, became increasingly common.

"And it does mess with you," he says. "You really do start to see the morale go down, the little arguments starting to happen.

"People are burning the candle at both ends and starting to think: 'What's the point?'"

Marg says many at the studio expected MindsEye to receive a negative reception on launch, describing the approach to its release as "everybody holding their breath".

Nevertheless, staff gathered in Barb's Edinburgh studio to celebrate MindsEye's launch on 10 June.

Marg says: "Everybody was drinking champagne, just having a good time, which was quite… heartwarming, I guess.

"At the same time, it really felt like this is the last good thing that's going to happen."

The celebrations were short-lived.

Barb had not shared advance copies of MindsEye with reviewers, but when early impressions of the game began to surface, the mood soured.

Players who bought the game on release day encountered major performance issues and reported various bugs, including pedestrians that appeared to walk on air and, in one heavily-memed example, one character's face appeared to melt due to a graphical glitch.

Twitch streamer CohhCarnage told viewers he was instructed to cancel a sponsored launch day stream at the last-minute, as word of the game's problems spread.

Audio programmer Isaac says he had maintained some optimism in the run-up to the release, but started to lose hope fairly quickly.

"You were just seeing disastrous review after disastrous review, and thinking 'This isn't gonna go well'," he says.

Marg says the team spent the next two weeks working on "hotfixes" - small, targeted updates to address major issues, until management informed them that they were at risk of being laid off.

This month, between 250 and 300 Barb staff lost their jobs, with the bulk of those roles based in Edinburgh, according to The Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union's Game Workers Branch.

The union, which put out the open letter on behalf of 93 employees, said it also planned to take legal action against Barb over what it called "disastrous mishandling" of the redundancy process.

Ben, who is a member of the union, says he took voluntary redundancy, but fellow members Marg and Isaac, who were laid off, say they were unhappy with how their departures were handled.

In a statement, Barb said staff had "poured passion, creativity, and hard work into our games and our studio", adding that it was "deeply saddened" and "didn't anticipate having to make redundancies after launch".

It said it approached the redundancy process with "care and transparency", meeting all of its obligations, and was "committed to learning and growing" from former employees' feedback.

In response to complaints about studio leadership, workplace culture and claims of "internal and external" forces working against the studio, Barb said: "Leslie and the entire senior management team take full responsibility for the initial launch [of MindsEye].

"The version of the game that was released did not reflect the experience our community deserved."

It said it remained committed to "ultimately delivering MindsEye as the game we always envisioned - and the one players are excited to play".

The statement added that the studio had already rolled out updates to address issues, and was working on "enhancements" and "fresh new content".

The ex-workers who spoke to BBC Newsbeat say they are doubtful that MindsEye can recover from its launch.

They are also pessimistic about their own future prospects and those of former colleagues in an industry which has seen tens of thousands of job losses over the past three years.

Ben says the impact will be felt in the Scottish development scene, too.

"It's really sad to see what could have been an amazing opportunity for the industry up here wasted," he says.

Despite the negativity around MindsEye and Barb, Isaac says, some of his colleagues were "incredibly talented" and "some of the best people" he's ever worked with.

Marg says they decided to speak out because of those colleagues - and in the hope something will change.

"We all know each other, and we know how much we're worth," Marg says. "We need to stand together."

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

The day after a body was found in his car in Hollywood, singer D4vd was belting his TikTok hit Romantic Homicide - a brooding breakup song about killing an ex with no regret - to a sold-out crowd in Minneapolis.

The US recording artist had self-launched his music career from his sister's closet while working a part-time gig at Starbucks. It led him to viral fame, millions of followers online, and a global tour.

But all of it came to an abrupt halt last month with the discovery of a severely decomposed body in the front trunk of his Tesla.

The corpse was identified as that of 15-year-old runaway Celeste Rivas Hernandez.

A month later, mystery still surrounds the teen's death, as well as her relationship to the 20-year-old singer, whose legal name is David Anthony Burke.

Deep dives into his macabre oeuvre - which is peppered with references to death, remembrance, violence and bloody motifs - have led some to question if life was imitating art and vice versa.

The young singer has yet to publicly comment on the case or the grim discovery in his car. His spokesperson has only said that that he is "fully cooperating with authorities" and he has since hired a prominent criminal defence attorney who has represented celebrities such as Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan, Kanye West and Britney Spears.

Representatives for the singer - including his lawyer Blair Berk, Universal Music Group, Darkroom Records and Sony Music Publishing - did not respond to the BBC's requests for comment.

Rivas Hernandez's cause of death has yet to be determined.

The county's medical examiner has said her body was "severely decomposed" when it was found and has deferred making a ruling on how she died - an investigation they say could take months.

Police have also not named a suspect or person of interest in case, even weeks after discovering her body.

The Los Angeles Police Department has not offered many details in the case or the probe, calling it an open death investigation. The department would not comment on multiple questions posed by the BBC about the case, the investigation and any connections the singer may have to Rivas Hernandez.

"It's just such a strange one," Neama Rahmani, a former prosecutor and Los Angeles attorney, told the BBC. "It keeps getting more bizarre each day that goes on without an arrest."

That lack of information has also seemed to fuel intrigue. Fans, true-crime enthusiasts and internet sleuths have launched their own inquiries, locking in on details that appear to connect the teen girl with the gamer-turned-songwriter, who was once heralded by GQ as a "Mouthpiece for Gen-Z Heartache".

A runaway teen found dead in a Tesla

Rivas Hernandez - who lived about 75 miles away from where her body was discovered - had last been reported missing by her family in April 2024, but it was not the first time she had run away from their Lake Elsinore home.

A first-generation daughter of immigrant parents from El Salvador, neighbours recognised her as a girl who would visit the corner store almost daily to buy candy and soda, according to the Los Angeles Times.

She first went missing on Valentine's Day 2024, and her family filed a missing persons report the next day.

Posters of her face were put up in her neighbourhood and her mother posted pleas on Facebook in Spanish for her return - public overtures that apparently irked the teen.

Over the next two years, her parents would file at least two more missing-persons reports.

Her family and friends told the newspaper that every time Rivas Hernandez ran away, she would eventually return and blend back into her life as a middle schooler.

When the teens' remains were found in a bag in D4vd's Tesla on 8 September, the medical examiner said that she was wearing a tube top, size small black leggings and jewellery, including a yellow metal stud earring and a yellow metal chain bracelet.

She also had a tattoo that read "Shhh…" on her index finger - a marking nearly identical to that on the pop singer's own index finger.

The decomposition of her body indicated that she had already been "deceased for several weeks", investigators said.

Her family, who described her as a beloved daughter, sister, cousin and friend, has said they are "heartbroken and devastated by this tragic loss". They have since solicited money on a crowdfunding website to pay for her funeral, which took place earlier this month.

A singer on the precipice of main-stream fame

D4vd's rise to stardom - fuelled by TikTok and online gaming - is a paradigm for his generation.

Growing up near Houston, Texas, he was home-schooled and said he exclusively listened to gospel music until he was 13. He became an avid Fortnite player in 2017 and launched his music career using pop songs to soundtrack gameplay montages that he posted on YouTube.

He started making his own music when he ran into copyright hurdles, beginning by recording songs on The BandLab app in 2021 and uploading his work on SoundCloud.

Soon, he saw his music breaking through with thousands of listens. He then released what would become his two biggest hits thus far: Romantic Homicide and Here With Me.

The songs went viral on TikTok and led to billions of streams on Spotify, where he has amassed 33 million monthly listeners.

He signed with Darkroom and Interscope Records and released his debut EP, Petals and Thorns, in 2023. That same year, he landed on Variety's Young Hollywood list and opened for SZA on her SOS tour.

Last spring, he made his Coachella debut - known as the festival for up-and-coming talent to break into mainstream fame. He was also commissioned by Fortnite - which he has said shaped his story as an artist - to create the game's first official anthem, Locked & Loaded.

A discovery that broke a family and halted a career

But this ascent to fame came to a pause when his Tesla was towed to an impoundment lot and authorities found a bag inside the front trunk that contained Rivas Hernandez's decomposing remains after someone complained about a foul smell.

His world tour was cancelled within days of the discovery, and Sony Music Publishing reportedly suspended promotion of his sophomore album.

Los Angeles police soon raided the posh Hollywood Hills mansion where the singer was living, just blocks from where his Tesla had been towed.

US retailer Hollister and footwear giant Crocs dropped D4vd from marketing campaigns and Telepatía singer Kali Uchis announced she was taking down their collaboration, Crashing.

But while his career ground to a screeching halt, authorities have been silent on the investigation into Rivas Hernandez's death.

Investigators have not released any new information in the case since 29 September.

The agency also said that it is still unclear whether there is any criminal culpability beyond the concealment of her body.

While online sleuths have been quick to speculate, legal experts say that there is still much we don't know.

"You have this connection to David that seems pretty strong," Mr Rahmani, the former prosecutor, told the BBC. "There is a lot of smoke but look, he could be absolutely innocent and it could be someone else who had access to his vehicle."

Mr Rahmani said while there are many questions in this case, the biggest for him is "what is taking the LAPD so long".

"They haven't released any real information," he said. "This isn't a good look for the LAPD and it's a terrible look for D4vd."

He added that a case like this has added pressures: it involves a teen girl's death, it has garnered global headlines, and the investigation involves a celebrity.

Mr Rahmani noted that technology and potential for video footage is likely to be a "treasure trove" for investigators. Telsa vehicles come with advanced technology that tracks vehicles, notifies users when things like the trunk is open and are also outfitted with a slew of cameras as part of its Sentry Mode systems.

On top of this, the Hollywood home where he was living also had cameras. When authorities searched the home last month, investigators took a DVR that stores video and other data from the surveillance system.

Malden Trifunovic, the owner of the Hollywood Hills home D4vd was renting, has told the BBC that he has hired a private investigator to help uncover what might have happened inside his multi-million-dollar abode.

D4vd's manager Josh Marshall, the founder of Mogul Vision, rented the home for D4vd and has distanced himself from the singer. He vehemently denied rumours that he is connected to the death investigation.

The widening mystery

In addition to the mystery surrounding the cause of Rivas Hernandez's death, it is still unclear what relationship the teenager had with the 20-year-old singer.

Rivas Hernandez would have turned 15 the day before her body was found by police.

In California, the age of consent is 18.

Family, friends and those who knew her have told local media that she had been dating someone named David and said he was a music artist.

A former middle-school science teacher blamed her last attempt to run away from home, in the spring of 2024, on her dating a music artist she'd met online.

"She's been missing since I taught her," the teacher said in a viral video after Rivas Hernandez's body was identified.

Online sleuths have also connected her to the singer in a number of ways, from their matching tattoos to photos he posted online that appear to show them together.

But D4vd has not addressed the rumours, nor have police.

Like many who don't follow indie pop music, his landlord Mr Trifunovic said he had never heard of D4vd until news broke about the discovery. He didn't even know it was D4vd who was renting his home because the lease had been signed by the singer's manager, Mr Marshall.

"I share the same anxiety and desire to understand what happened to poor Celeste as everyone else does," Mr Trifunovic told the BBC.

Although he said he trusts the LAPD to conduct a thorough investigation, he too, is anxious for information.

"There is absolutely no question that a crime was committed," he said.

"She did not place herself in the front trunk of the Tesla or move the vehicle to where it was found."

For South Koreans, tteokbokki is more than a snack. It's soul food.

This sweet and spicy dish made with chewy rice cakes is a staple of Korea's street food culture and beloved by people of all ages.

It's the food students turn to after long school days, and as adults, one you seek after a hard day at work.

So when readers came across a book titled I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki in 2018, many were immediately intrigued. Its honest yet playful title sparked curiosity, some wondering just how much you must love tteokbokki to write an entire book about it. Many were soon drawn to its raw honesty.

It became an instant bestseller that was widely discussed and resonated deeply in Korea. This week, Baek Se-hee, the book's South Korean author, died aged 35. The details surrounding her death remain unclear. The fact the Korean Organ Donation Agency said Baek had saved five lives by donating her organs, emphasised her wish to help others.

Her death at such a young age has brought deep sorrow to readers who found comfort and understanding in her words. Social media and blogs have been flooded with tributes and personal stories from those her books have helped, while news outlets around the world reported her passing prominently.

At its heart, the book is a record of Baek's conversations with her psychiatrist as she navigates dysthymia - a mild but long-lasting type of depression - and anxiety disorders. Through these sessions, she opens up about her daily struggles - such as overthinking others' opinions, obsessing over her appearance, and wrestling with self-doubt. Rather than examining clinical depression, she reflects on the gentle melancholy many can relate to.

What makes her story so compelling is its candour. She captures that delicate human contradiction of living wearily with everyday sadness alongside the simultaneous desire to keep going. Just like a comforting dish of tteokbokki on a difficult day, her words offer warmth and understanding, reminding readers that even in vulnerability there is strength.

• A list of organisations in the UK offering support and information with some of the issues in this story is available at BBC Action Line. If you are outside of the UK, you can visit the Befrienders website.

'It's okay not to be perfect'

One of the many young people the book resonated with is Jo Eun Bit, a 25-year-old student at Korea University in Seoul, who found it helped her navigate uncertainty about her future.

"All generations in Korea tend to measure themselves against what others are doing and the achievements they've made, and that only fuels competition," she said. "But I liked this book because it seems to send the message that it's okay not to live according to the standards set by society.

"One of the most memorable passages in her book is that I am a one-of-a-kind being in this world, and that alone makes me special. I am someone I should care for throughout my life. The more I look within myself, the happier I believe I will become.

"To me, this offered comfort that it's okay not to be perfect, and at the same time reminded me that I, too, am someone who needs to be nurtured and cared for."

The relentless competition from school to the workplace, coupled with the pressure to meet family and societal expectations, is leaving many young South Koreans feeling disheartened. In a society still influenced by Confucian values such as righteousness and obedience, mental health issues remain heavily stigmatised and many experience feelings of shame or social judgement.

Baek's book inverted the notion that social success is the ultimate measure of a life well lived, openly addressing the mental health issues many commonly face and, in doing so, showing readers that acknowledging your emotions is the first step towards healing.

Sangeun Lee, an elementary school teacher in Korea, told the BBC the book has held a particularly special meaning to her for that reason.

"With the rise of social media, we're exposed to other people's lives too much, and it makes us increasingly critical of ourselves," the 35-year-old said.

"Being imperfect is natural for everyone, but seeing so much of this kind of information can feel like an attack on yourself, making you wonder if it's even okay to live the way you do. This book encouraged me to accept myself as I am."

Something many people relate to

The book's popularity has had a real-world impact, supporting many struggling with depression to seek professional help. It has also brought mental health issues into public conversation - RM of BTS, the globally renowned K-pop group known for songs promoting self-love, is among those who have shared the book online.

Baek's pages have resonated far beyond South Korea. First published in 2018, it has sold more than a million copies worldwide and been translated into 25 languages. In the UK, it sold 100,000 copies within six months of its release.

It has struck a chord with young women and played a significant role in expanding the reach of Korean literature. Marianna Szucs, a secondary school teacher in London, told the BBC she felt a connection to it and deep sorrow at Baek's death.

"Her book tells you that if you feel depressed or feel like you have problems, you are not the only one. She had all sorts of problems, from tiny little things to quite daunting ones. I think anyone who reads this book can find something they can relate to."

Seunghye Sun, director of the Korean Cultural Centre UK, said "it is highly symbolic that Baek Se-hee's voice has found resonance in the UK where great psychoanalysts like Freud and his daughter explored the human mind", in the process broadening the spectrum of K-literature and K-culture.

Her book tells a story that transcends generations and borders, sending a quiet but warm message to countless nameless readers around the world.

In the end, the paradoxical title "I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki" may, in fact, be another way of saying, "I want to live." Even in moments of deep despair, people often find the strength to carry on through small joys.

For her, that joy was tteokbokki, and it shows even the simplest pleasures in daily life can become a sustaining force.

"I remember just feeling so scared and vulnerable," says actor and TV presenter Joe Swash of becoming a father in his twenties.

Swash found out he was going to be a dad at the age of 24. He says it was a life-changing experience he felt "grossly underprepared" for, adding that "there was no one really for me to talk to".

The presenter says his and his former partner's conversations with midwives were "rightly" centred on the mum-to-be, but he felt lonely and no one had asked him how he was doing. There were no father-and-child support groups and having lost his own father aged 11, Swash felt he had no positive male role models to turn to.

He worried about small things like how to change a nappy or how hot his baby's bottle had to be, and felt everyone was "looking down" at him for being a young dad.

It was this feeling of being "completely unsupported" as a young father that he explores in the BBC documentary Joe Swash: Forgotten Young Dads.

In the film, the former EastEnders star meets four young fathers and explores some of the problems they face, from social stereotypes to a lack of parental support services.

Last year, dads were an average of 34 years old when their child was born, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. The fathers in the BBC documentary, meanwhile, are all 18 to 22.

Kevin Stoodley is founder of North East Young Dads and Lads (NEYDL), a charity that provides parenting and community support for young fathers.

Stoodley says that in his 27 years as a community youth worker, he has "never encountered a community as stigmatised" as young dads.

'Absent dads'

Swash says that as a young dad, he "really struggled" with judgement from others and felt that people viewed him as "irresponsible".

He adds that young dads often get a "bad reputation" and are characterised as "absent".

"I'd love to find out how many of them 'absent dads' are absent because they wanted to be, or because they were so vulnerable, scared and frightened that they had nowhere to go and had no support," he explains.

Swash says society needs to "readjust" how it sees young dads. Stoodley agrees, saying that young fathers have historically been wrongfully "perceived as being feckless, disinterested and in some cases, a risk to their children".

He adds that some of the young dads he's met face judgement from their own communities and are "told that they've ruined their life".

'Alpha male'

For Swash, having positive male role models is key in supporting young dads.

After his father died, Swash says he was "craving, as a young man, just to have a male role model put their arm around me and look after me - whether that was a negative role model or a positive role model, I was just desperate to have some role model".

"If all we're seeing is negative role models being put on social media and on TV, you can be mistaken in thinking that's the sort of man you want to be", he adds.

Swash explains: "We can all get in fights down the streets and go on boys' holidays, but not everyone can change a nappy and love and nurture and cherish a child and for me, that's an alpha male".

Stoodley says having positive male role models is "super important" in helping young fathers navigate their new roles.

The founder says NEYDL also looks to address toxic masculinity and steer young men on the path of being a good role model.

Recently, Stephen Graham, who starred in Adolescence, which explored toxic masculinity, announced a new book calling for fathers to have more open conversations with their sons.

'Fall through the net'

Swash says the lack of support available for young dads is "pretty unbelievable".

In the course of making the documentary, Swash notes that he and the team struggled to find support services for young men and he says there should be a service available to all young fathers.

Services that do exist, like NEYDL, provide parenting and community support to young dads. However, Stoodley says there needs to be more national investment.

Swash adds that support can mean simple things like having more nappy-changing stations in men's toilets, or bigger shifts: "Fundamentally, I think society has got to change the way they look at young dads and young families."

"I felt really lonely," Swash adds of his own experiences as a young dad.

Swash, a parent to six children, says he's "proud" to have been a young dad and loves his kids "with a passion".

However, he acknowledges a lot of young men are "not as lucky" as him and encourages young dads to have conversations with each other and to "not suffer in silence".

You can watch Joe Swash: Forgotten Young Dads on Monday 20 October at 20:00 BST on BBC Three, and on BBC iPlayer.

It has been described by prosecutors as one of the largest frauds of its kind in the UK.

A total of 14 people have been convicted for their part in a £28m conspiracy to defraud more than 3,500 timeshare owners.

The victims were desperate to get out of decades-old timeshare contracts and went looking for help.

Most were aged between 60 and 80. More than 500 of them lost over £10,000, and one handed over more than £80,000.

Those targeted were subjected to high-pressure sales meetings lasting up to six hours. They were left out of pocket, owning useless fake "credits" and still locked into expensive timeshare contracts they often could no longer use.

The company at the centre of the fraud was Sell My Timeshare (SMT). They took people's money to fund the owners' lavish lifestyle of private schools, millionaire mansions and private jets.

The man at the top of the company, Mark Rowe, was given a seven-and-half year sentence in January for conspiracy to defraud.

On Friday, his wife Nicola was one of the final three to hear their sentences.

She received a two-year suspended jail sentence at Southwark Crown Court after pleading guilty to money laundering.

This has been a long time coming and represents a huge win for the people who spoke out, the police and prosecutors.

Nine years ago, I made a programme for the BBC Scotland Investigates strand which exposed through secret filming the way SMT fleeced its victims.

Almost a decade on, the end of the criminal process brings some closure to those who were ripped off. But it's worth knowing how the fraudsters were able to get away with it for so long.

I first heard about SMT in the summer of 2016. I was working in the investigations unit of BBC Scotland News, making current affairs and investigative documentaries.

A friend mentioned that his mum had inherited the use of a timeshare apartment in Spain and, after years of holidays there, had begun looking to get out of the contract.

It's worth mentioning here how popular timeshares had become with British holidaymakers in the 1980s and 1990s.

Timeshares allowed people to access the same accommodation every year, or swap their weeks with other owners who had properties in other resorts. About 600,000 sun-lovers took up that opportunity.

The first timeshare rush was accompanied by a lot of stories about rip-off merchants mis-selling properties. They became a staple of consumer and investigative TV programmes such as Watchdog and The Cook Report.

The typical timeshare contract tied investors in for decades.

By 2016, those owners who had enjoyed their guaranteed place in the sun for 20 or 30 years were ageing, and many were looking to wave goodbye to their timeshares.

Some had declining mobility and couldn't get to their properties. Some just felt they'd got all they wanted from them. And some had died, in many cases leaving their loved ones to inherit the contracts - including their annual payments and maintenance fees.

And that's where my friend's mum had found herself. She searched the web for answers and found SMT, a company whose website promised to get her out of her contract.

But, having paid a fee and booked a meeting with them, her family smelled a rat.

Further research revealed hundreds of people saying they had paid money and got nothing out of it. In fact, they had lost money. A lot of it.

Our team began investigating what was going on. It quickly became clear that there were some shady characters operating in the timeshare resale sector.

One lawyer had hundreds of individual complaints waiting to sue SMT.

We spoke to people who had used the firm and they all told the same story. They thought the company would buy their property off them but when they went to a consultation (for which they paid up front) they were told there was no re-sale value.

Instead, they were encouraged - in fact pressured - to spend more money investing in "Monster Rewards", named after the outfit's parent company, Monster Travel.

What exactly these were was not exactly clear. They sounded like a kind of currency, giving access to discount travel and services and shopping deals

And they were apparently "tradable" with other owners, some time down the line.

Investing money up front now would result in an eventual payoff that would cover SMT's fees and leave the property owner in profit, freed at last from their pesky contract.

Too good to be true? Well, yes.

A 'bait-and-switch' scam

If these accounts were true, this was a massive scam.

It's what is called a "bait-and-switch".

Someone - in this case SMT - "baits" the customer by advertising a particular product or service only to then say that's not available, pushing the client towards another, inferior, product or service.

That's illegal. Armed with all the testimony we had collected, we made the case to secretly film one of the company's meetings.

This takes time, effort, and clear arguments for why this is the only way to gather the information needed to prove wrongdoing.

Armed with that permission, our small team set up a meeting with one of the company's representatives in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Posing as a member of the public hoping to get his mum out of her timeshare contract, our presenter, the personal finance journalist Fergus Muirhead, filmed the entire three-hour encounter.

And everything went exactly as we'd been told.

For a start, Fergus was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, designed to stop him revealing anything that was discussed in the meeting.

Any idea the company would be able to sell the (fictional) property was soon dismissed. The only way out of it would be through Monster Rewards - and to get them, he would have to cough up £6,740 on the spot.

In the great traditions of British journalism, we made our excuses and left.

We broadcast the programme on 24 October 2016.

In the run up to transmission we gave SMT a right of reply to our allegations about their illegal business practices.

They denied any wrongdoing and questioned both the transparency and probity of our sources. They said our allegations were defamatory and they reserved the right to pursue legal action against the BBC.

What they didn't know, until the moment we published the online news piece ahead of transmission, was that we had everything on tape.

We never heard from them again.

Within days of broadcast, we were contacted by police who were already investigating SMT. They were looking to get hold of our footage of the recorded meeting.

As journalists, we have to be careful about handing over to the police material which we have collected for our reporting. We must remain independent, and the BBC will not normally hand over unused material in such circumstances without a court order.

So we waited until they were granted a court order for the material, which we then complied with. And that was the last we heard of the matter for the next three-and-half years.

As the nation headed towards the first Covid lockdown in February 2020, we were informed that 19 people connected to the firm had been arrested.

Fergus and I were asked to give witness statements. We spent the next five-and-a-half years never knowing whether we would be called, or knowing what was going on.

It was only with the end of the judicial process this week that we learned there had been four trials over two years at Southwark Crown Court in London. Reporting restrictions were in place until the final guilty pleas were lodged.

In total, there were 14 convictions.

Among those was 60-year-old Josephine Cuthill-Fox, the woman we filmed in 2016. She received 24 months' imprisonment, suspended for two years.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will now turn to pursuing the money and assets gained by the defendants through their crimes.

This story isn't over yet.

The Red Cross has received two bodies in Gaza that Hamas says are hostages, the Israeli military has said.

The remains will be transported to Israel and formally identified. Hamas earlier said the bodies had been recovered in the Palestinian territory on Saturday.

Prior to Saturday, the remains of 10 of 28 deceased hostages had been returned to Israel.

The delay has caused outrage in Israel, as the terms of last week's ceasefire deal stipulated the release from Gaza of all hostages, living and dead. Hamas says it has struggled to find the remaining bodies under rubble.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office has ordered the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt to remain closed until further notice, and said its reopening would be considered based on the return of the final hostage remains and the implementation of the ceasefire agreement.

The IDF has stressed that Hamas must "uphold the agreement and take the necessary steps to return all the hostages".

But the US has downplayed suggestions that the delay amounts to a breach of the ceasefire deal, which President Donald Trump claimed as a major victory on a visit to Israel and Egypt last week.

The text of the deal has not been published, but a leaked version that was seen in Israeli media appeared to account for the possibility that not all of the bodies would be immediately accessible.

Hamas has blamed Israel for making the task difficult, as air strikes on Gaza have reduced many buildings to rubble, and Israel does not allow heavy machinery and diggers into the territory.

UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC News Channel that the Gaza Strip "is now a wasteland", with people picking through the rubble for bodies and trying to find their homes - many of which have been flattened.

As part of the US-brokered ceasefire deal, Hamas also returned all 20 living hostages to Israel.

Israel's military confirmed the identity of the tenth deceased hostage returned by Hamas on Friday. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) named him as Eliyahu Margalit, whose body was taken from Nir Oz kibbutz after he was killed on 7 October 2023.

Also as part of the deal, Israel freed 250 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and 1,718 detainees from Gaza.

The bodies of 15 Palestinians were handed over by Israel via the Red Cross to officials in Gaza on Saturday, the Hamas-run health ministry said, bringing the total number of bodies it has received to 135.

Separately on Saturday, 11 members of one Palestinian family were killed by an Israeli tank shell, according to the Hamas-run civil defence ministry, in what was the deadliest single incident involving Israeli soldiers in Gaza since the start of the ceasefire.

The Israeli military said soldiers had fired at a "suspicious vehicle" that had crossed the so-called yellow line demarcating the area still occupied by Israeli forces in Gaza.

There are no physical markers of this line, and it is unclear if the bus did cross it. The BBC has asked the IDF for the coordinates of the incident.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 others hostage.

At least 68,000 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen by the UN as reliable.

In September, a UN commission of inquiry said Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel categorically rejected the report as "distorted and false".

Damar, one of the best surf guides on the Indonesian island of Lombok, feels right at home taking tourists out to sea.

With his fluent English and effortless banter, you would never guess what was his childhood fear: foreigners.

"When I was 10 or maybe seven, I used to cry - I used to just pee in my pants when I saw white people," Damar, now 39, tells the BBC.

That diffidence waned as the laidback island he calls home slowly found its popularity among Western travellers.

Just east of Bali, Lombok boasts the same azure beaches and stunning views as its famous neighbour, but without the exasperating crowds. Lombok's beaches are still a hidden gem among surfers, as is Mount Rinjani for hikers. Travel sites still liberally use the word "untouched" to describe the island as they offer reasons to venture beyond Bali.

So it should come as little surprise that the Indonesian government has sensed the opportunity to create another lucrative tourist haven on the sprawling archipelago.

The mission is to create more "Balis" - and Lombok will be one of them.

For islanders, this promise of "Balification" is a welcome opportunity but they are also wary of what it brings.

And the change has already begun to hit home in more ways than one.

Mandalika in the south has been chosen as the heart of the "new Bali".

Its rustic coastline has already given way to glitzy resorts, cafes and even a racetrack. Earlier this month, nearly 150,000 spectators showed up to watch the motorcycle Grand Prix.

Between 2019 and 2021, dozens of families were evicted from their village homes for the construction of the Mandalika circuit. Damar's was among them.

Confronted with what activists decried as a messy resettlement plan and unfair compensation, he and his neighbours were helpless, Damar recalls.

"I was angry, but I cannot do much. I cannot fight against the government," he says.

Since the eviction, Damar has bought a plot of land and built his own house, something that many of his neighbours haven't been able to do. As a surf guide, he estimates that he earns twice as much as a fisherman - a generational profession in his community.

"I've never really been to school, so joining the tourism industry was one of the best choices that I have ever made," Damar says. "Meeting a lot of people from many different countries… It has opened my mind."

Damar's indignation about his eviction even comes with a scrupulous caveat: "I'm not angry at the tourists. I'm just angry at my own government."

The makings of a tourist magnet

The drive to transform Lombok is part of a wider effort to lure travellers away from Bali, which has for decades played an outsized role in Indonesia's tourism industry.

The island makes up less than 1% of the country's land area and less than 2% of its 280 million-plus population. Yet last year it accounted for nearly half of all visitors to Indonesia.

But increasingly Bali's unrelenting traffic and pollution - a direct result of its success as a top tourist pick- are leaving those very tourists disappointed with what has long been touted as the "last paradise".

As it turns out, that elusive paradise lies just an hour's boat ride away.

But perhaps not for long.

More and more travellers are catching on to Lombok's appeal. Last year, 81,500 foreign tourists touched down at its airport, a 40% jump from the year before - still, a far cry from the 6.3 million foreigners who flocked to Bali.

Eager for Lombok to follow in Bali's footsteps, Indonesian authorities have secured hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, along with a $250m loan from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

This has accelerated the island's makeover.

In Kuta, a popular town in Mandalika, scrappy surfers' hostels have been replaced by a mosaic of chlorinated pools and plushy sunbeds, and an international school for the children of expats.

While authorities are hailing it as Lombok's success story, some see a cautionary tale.

The cost of paradise

A stone's throw away on the beach of Tanjung Aan, cafe owner Kartini Lumban Raja told the BBC that locals there "don't want to be 'organised' like Kuta".

"When beaches start to look like Kuta, they lose their charm. We lose opportunities. We lose natural beauty," she said.

For months, rumours of evictions had been swirling on Tanjung Aan, which was earmarked for ambitious development plans.

Days after the BBC's visit in July, they came like a rolling wave.

Security forces descended upon the beach to demolish nearly 200 stalls, including Kartini's.

Videos from that day show masked men tearing shop fences down with their bare hands as stall owners protested.

"They were banging on things, kicking plywood… it's truly inhumane," Ella Nurlaila, a stall owner, told the BBC. "My goodness, this eviction was so cruel."

The state-owned company leading Mandalika's tourism drive, InJourney Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC), has secured 2.1 trillion rupiah ($128m; £96m) to build a luxury hotel on Tanjung Aan.

Authorities said the project will create jobs and boost the local economy. But that's little consolation for stall owners like Ella and her husband Adi, who have sold coconuts and coffee on the beach for the past three years.

"Thousands of people here depend on [coastal land] for their livelihood," Adi said. "Where else are we supposed to go to earn a living?"

The couple said they had paid taxes for their stall - which, according to Adi, sat on land belonging to his parents.

But ITDC representatives told the BBC that Tanjung Aan is "state-owned land", and that the tax paid by those businesses "does not equate to legal ownership or land legitimacy".

This is just the latest bout of tensions over Mandalika's tourism push.

Just Finance International, a development finance watchdog, has repeatedly flagged "a pattern of rights violations linked to the Mandalika project" in recent years.

UN human rights experts estimate that more than 2,000 people "lost their primary means of livelihood overnight" because of the Tanjung Aan evictions. Stall owners were given neither "adequate notice" nor "suitable" resettlement plans, they said in a statement in August.

"The people of Mandalika must not be sacrificed for a project that promises economic growth at the expense of human rights," they said.

'If they want Bali, they should go to Bali'

In its quest for a remarkably different future, Lombok will also have to contend with what this means for local culture.

The predominantly Muslim island is home to thousands of mosques and the indigenous Sasak ethnic group. Compared to Bali, alcohol is not as readily available in parts of the island. On travel forums, tourists are encouraged to ditch bikinis and hot pants for more modest attire.

Such conservative sensitivities may change, or at least be driven further inland, as tourism heats up along the coastline. Travellers who have come to love Lombok are not happy about that either.

"Lombok is so special because it still has its own nature and people come to see that," said Swiss tourist Basil Berger, a sceptic of the"Bali-fication" of the island.

"If they want to see Bali, they [should] go to Bali," he said. Turning Lombok into another Bali "is the "the worst thing that they can do".

There are also environmental concerns. The motorcycle Grand Prix last year drew 120,000 spectators to Mandalika, leaving behind 30 tonnes of rubbish that authorities struggled to clear.

"Before it gets to Bali's stage of development, Lombok could learn. Because it's showing the same kind of strain," says Sekar Utami Setiastuti, who lives in Bali.

The government should ensure "tourism development brings welfare to a lot of people, instead of just bringing tourists to Lombok", she adds. "Lombok has to find its own identity - not just [become] a less crowded Bali."

No matter where that search leads, a new era has dawned on Lombok.

Andrew Irwin is among the foreign investors who have taken an early interest in Lombok's budding tourism. The American is the co-owner of LMBK Surf House, one of Mandalika's most popular surf camps.

The way he sees it, businesses like his are helping to uplift local employees and their families.

"It's giving people more opportunities to earn more money, send their kids to proper school, get proper insurance, get proper healthcare, and essentially live a better quality of life," he said.

While there's "not necessarily much one can do" about Lombok's changing landscape, he says, "we can just hope to bring a positive change to the equation".

Tourism has certainly ushered prosperity into the lives of many locals, who have decided to try their hand at entrepreneurship.

"As long you want to work, you'll make money from tourism," says Baiq Enida Kinang Lare, a homestay owner in Kuta, known to her guests as Lara. Her neighbours too have started homestays.

Lara started her business in 2014 with four rooms. She's now at 14, not counting a separate villa under construction.

As excited as she is about her prospects, she is also a little wistful as she recalled life before the hustle.

"It's difficult to find time to gather and see everyone. This is what we miss. We feel like the time flies very, very fast because we're busy," she says.

This is a feeling that would surely be shared by locals from Bali to Mykonos to Cancun, whenever tourism took off in their patch of paradise: "I miss the past, but we like the money."

President Donald Trump has said the US will return two people who survived a strike on what he called a "drug-carrying submarine" to their countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia.

Writing on social media, Trump said two other people were killed in the US strike on the vessel, which he said US intelligence confirmed was "loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics".

The attack on Thursday is at least the sixth US strike on ships in the Caribbean Sea in recent weeks. It is the first time survivors have been reported.

At least 27 people were killed in the prior five boat strikes in the waters off Venezuela, according to figures released by the administration.

The two survivors were rescued by a US military helicopter and then shuttled onto a US warship in the Caribbean, unnamed US officials told US media earlier.

In recent weeks, Trump has ramped up threats against Venezuela's leadership over claims that the country is sending drugs to the US. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has accused Trump of trying to make the South American nation "an American colony".

Trump has defended the ongoing boat attacks, saying they are aimed at stemming the flow of drugs from Latin America into the US, but his government has not provided evidence or details about the identities of the vessels or those on board.

"It was my great honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route," Trump said in his Truth Social post on Saturday.

"The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution."

He added that no US military personnel were injured in the attack.

On Friday, the US president had said the submarine targeting the latest attack was "built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs".

"This was not an innocent group of people. I don't know too many people who have submarines, and that was an attack on a drug-carrying, loaded submarine," he added.

UN-appointed human rights experts have described the US strikes as "extrajudicial executions".

Trump earlier told reporters that he had authorised the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela, and that he was considering launching attacks on Venezuelan soil.

Narco-subs have become a popular way to transport drugs as they can go largely undetected, and can be sunk after delivery. They are often homemade and constructed using fibreglass and plywood.

The US, as well as other coastal nations, have previously intercepted some of these subs.

One word sticks out in the Ukrainian leader's description of his latest high-stakes foray into the nerve-centre of American power.

His White House conversation with President Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X, was "pointed".

But we don't need to parse his semantic description of the exchange to know that this was not the meeting that the Ukrainian side had been expecting.

If the old British adage holds true that a week is a long time in politics, then Zelensky appears to have set a new record.

A short transatlantic flight, it seems, is now an age.

As they set off for Washington on Thursday, the Ukrainian side was in high spirits.

Listen to the words of Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of Ukraine's parliament – effectively the country's second in command – and a politician fiercely loyal to Zelensky.

In an interview with the BBC shortly before the president's plane took off, Stefanchuk described the trip as a "very important historical moment".

The meeting, he said, would leave the world in no doubt that Trump "finally understands that Putin is a liar, he can't be trusted, and actions are needed to stop the war".

And, he appeared to suggest, the crucial question for Ukraine – whether Trump would agree to its use of American long-range Tomahawk missiles - was close to being "solved".

But it was as Zelensky's flight was in the air that news of the two-and-a-half-hour Trump-Putin phone call began to emerge and, before its wheels were even on the Washington tarmac, we had the announcement that another summit between the two was in the offing.

The Ukrainians descended the steps, to be met with a low-key American greeting, and with their optimism, like a piece of waylaid luggage, lost somewhere en route.

Just a few weeks ago, the US president appeared to be running out of patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggesting he thought he might be stringing him along, that his continuing attacks on Ukraine were "crazy" and that he was growing "very angry" with him.

But Friday's meeting confirmed that the sense of frustration was gone.

"I think he wants to make a deal," Trump said, and then proceeded to repeat some of his old talking points, framing the conflict as, in essence, a personal gripe between two leaders.

"There's a lot of bad blood," he said.

Zelensky has learned from bitter experience that there are great risks in being seen to challenge Trump inside the walls of the White House.

And so, the underlying tension was - once again - palpable as Trump, his secretary of state, the war secretary and treasury secretary looked on sternly, while prominent members of the MAGA (Make America Great Again)-leaning media clustered around the back of his chair.

As expected, Zelensky was careful to offer effusive praise for the host's prowess as a peacemaker and to repeatedly express his gratitude.

Flattery is the currency of diplomacy in Washington nowadays.

But Zelensky also made it clear he did not share Trump's apparent confidence that Russia is acting in good faith.

"We understand that Putin is not ready," he said.

The outcome, though, appears to have been a foregone conclusion.

Trump ended the day insisting that the war should simply be frozen on the existing battle lines and both sides should simply "go home to their families".

For Ukraine and its allies, the conflict is not a personal dispute but a war of aggression being fought by an authoritarian state, with imperial ambitions, against a European democracy.

Ukraine wants the US Tomahawk missiles to help it pressure Putin into genuine negotiations, and it wants US security guarantees to make sure he is forced to abide with any future peace settlement.

Zelensky left the White House without either of those things.

• Zelensky fails to secure Tomahawk missiles at talks with Trump

What do Ukrainians think of it all?

In a suburb of Kyiv, recently hit by two Russian missiles, I spoke to some of the residents still working to repair the damage to their homes and businesses.

I asked Volodymyr Tsepovatenko - still busy fixing windows that were blown out of the small shop he owns – for his views on where Ukraine stands after the latest White House meeting.

"If we make a peace deal now," he told me, "Russia will start to prepare a new more professional war against Ukraine, or maybe other countries."

"I see one way for our safety and it's to destroy the possibility of Russia occupying or fighting any country in Europe."

Ukraine needs to keep fighting, he said.

Oleksandr Vilko's car was destroyed by the blast wave when the missiles struck. He is not too worried, he says, about the decision on the Tomahawks.

"The only power who decides what's going to be next is our army," he told me.

While Ukraine is grateful for any assistance provided so far, he said, it was Washington's sovereign right whether or not to give Ukraine its own long-range missiles to fight back.

But with or without them, Ukrainians would fight on, he said.

"It's almost the fourth year of the war with the biggest country in the whole world," he said.

"And still we survived."

Republican governors in several US states have placed National Guard troops on standby in preparation for a nationwide protest to oppose Donald Trump and his policies.

The organisers of the "No Kings" protests say that gatherings will take place at more than 2,500 locations around the US. Trump allies have accused the protesters of being allied with the far-left Antifa movement.

Governors in Texas and Virginia have activated their state's National Guard troops, however it is unclear how visible the military presence will be.

Organisers say that at the last No Kings protest, held in June, more than five million people took to the streets to denounce Trump's political agenda.

The protest organisers say the protest will challenge Trump's "authoritarianism".

"The president thinks his rule is absolute," they say on their website.

"But in America, we don't have kings and we won't back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty."

Some Republicans have dubbed the protests "Hate America" rallies.

"We'll have to get the National Guard out," Kansas Senator Roger Marshall said ahead of the rallies, according to CNN.

"Hopefully it'll be peaceful. I doubt it."

Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday activated the state's National Guard ahead of a protest scheduled in Austin, the state's capital.

He said the troops would be needed due to the "planned antifa-linked demonstration".

Democrats denounced the move, including the state's top Democrat Gene Wu, who argued: "Sending armed soldiers to suppress peaceful protests is what kings and dictators do — and Greg Abbott just proved he's one of them."

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin also ordered the state National Guard to be activated.

Prince Andrew's removal from the last vestiges of royal life has not only reshaped his future - it's sending ripples through his family too.

His ex-wife has now lost her duchess title and will simply be known as Sarah Ferguson.

Their daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, will continue to have the title of princess as scandal surround their parents.

Prince Andrew lost use of his Duke of York title over his links with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

So, what does life after the royal shake up look like for the women of the York Family?

For Ferguson, 66, the change will be the most visible.

For all these years, she has kept the courtesy royal divorcee title Sarah, Duchess of York. Now, she reverts to her maiden name of Ferguson.

And while arguably we've always referred to her as "Fergie", royal commentator Richard Palmer said that will "no doubt" have an impact.

"She will have lost a bit of cachet over this," he said. "She certainly does use the title – even her Twitter bio is @SarahTheDuchess."

But the loss of her title may impact her much less than the scandal she's facing separately about her own links with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

• Accuser's brother urges King to strip Andrew of prince title
• Sarah Ferguson dropped from multiple charities over Epstein email
• After all those scandals, why did Andrew quit his titles now?

Last month, several charities dropped her as patron or ambassador after an email from 2011 revealed that she called Epstein her "supreme friend" and seemed to apologise for her public criticism of him.

"I think as far as Sarah is concerned, her own recent controversy involving the email she is said to have sent Epstein is what has had the biggest impact for her of late," said royal commentator Victoria Murphy.

"Prior to that, she had sidestepped the firing line of the controversy around Epstein and I think may have continued to do so, albeit without calling herself Duchess of York, had that not happened."

Away from her philanthropy, Ferguson also has various business ventures.

And these, too, are more likely to be affected by the Epstein controversy than any change in title, says Murphy.

"I would say it's likely they will be impacted by the revaluations of her own contact with Epstein, in the same way her charity work was and the fact that charities didn't want to be associated with her."

But Ferguson has been a great survivor in royal circles. She's kept bouncing back.

Even though she split from Prince Andrew more than three decades ago, she has remained his strong supporter and still lives in his Windsor estate.

The Christmas before last, she was back in the royal fold, joining a royal Christmas gathering in Sandringham the first time in decades. That was despite she and her ex-husband not being working royals or allowed to be part of official royal events.

That ability to bounce back may help her this time too.

"She's the ultimate survivor and master of reinvention," said royal author Katie Nicholls.

"Not only has she been reaccepted by the public, but the late Queen Elizabeth II brought her back into the fold, and Charles is also very fond of her."

Nicholls argues that Ferguson, over the years, has been through "much worse", and won't be too impacted by the loss of her title.

"Having been a royal outcast for all these decades, she's learnt not to attach too much weight to things like that."

For the couple's two daughters, Beatrice, 37, and Eugenie, 35, there's no formal change.

They will still be known as princesses, which they have been entitled to since birth.

There is also no change to the line of succession.

Andrew remains eighth in line to the crown, followed by his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie, in ninth and twelfth place respectively.

But in reality their positions are "low down" and will likely become much further down as time goes on, says Murphy.

"So practically, their positions have little meaning for the future," she says.

• King Charles III's closest family and line of succession

Beatrice and Eugenie are also currently non-working royals, and while they do sometimes take on roles – Princess Eugenie was recently announced as a mentor for the King's Foundation's 35 under 35 network for example - Murphy also says she "can't see a world" in which they would step up into royal duties in any official way.

"I don't think that was ever really on the cards, and I certainly don't see it as an option," she said.

They have also benefited from all of the contacts their parents have made over the years, says Palmer. And while Andrew still remains a prince, losing the dukedom could have a knock-on impact there.

Prince Andrew will also no longer join the King and the rest of the royal family at Christmas at Sandringham, but it's possible his daughters will still attend, says Palmer.

"As far as Beatrice and Eugenie go, I think there's an appreciation of the fact that this scandal doesn't involve them, and it's not fair for it to impact them directly in the independent lives they are carving out for themselves," says Murphy.

"Their daughters are most unfortunate victims, they've had to suffer in silence and have been dignified in their silence," adds Nicholls.

"It can't be easy to see their parents dragged through something like this, and they remain very much loved nieces for the King. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see them at Christmas occasions in the future. They're largely untarnished."

Ultimately, there seems to be little doubt that the person who will be most affected by all of this will be Prince Andrew himself.

For a man who always liked the trappings of royalty, the pomp and the ceremony, the loss of his titles is deeply humiliating.

So to not have those, on a personal level, will really matter.

A Tory MP says he has reported a deepfake video depicting him announcing he had joined Reform UK to the police.

George Freeman said he remained "the Conservative MP for Mid Norfolk and have no intention of joining Reform or any other party", denouncing the video circulating on social media as "an AI-generated deepfake".

Freeman said he reported the video to the authorities. Norfolk Police and Facebook have been approached for comment.

"This sort of political disinformation has the potential to seriously distort, disrupt and corrupt our democracy," he added.

In the widely-circulated video, the MP appeared to say "the time for half measures is over" and that the "Conservative party had lost its way" after announcing he had joined Reform, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

In response, Freeman said: "The video is a fabrication, created without my knowledge or consent, and uses my image and voice without permission."

"Regardless of my position as an MP, that should be an offence."

Freeman has been a Conservative MP since 2010 and served in various ministerial capacities in the previous government.

Most recently, he was Minister of State in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

He said: "I do not know whether this incident was a politically motivated attack by political opponents or just a dangerous prank, but it is clear that in recent months there has been a huge increase in political disinformation, disruption and extremism – on both the left and the right, by religious extremists, by dangerous influencers like Andrew Tate, and anti-democratic disrupters.

"I have reported this matter to the relevant authorities, and I urge anyone who sees the video to report it immediately rather than share it further."

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The brother of Virginia Giuffre has called on King Charles to strip Prince Andrew of the title "prince" after he announced he is giving up his other titles, including the Duke of York.

Ms Giuffre alleged she was forced to have sex with the prince on three occasions, including when she was aged 17 at the home of his friend Ghislaine Maxwell in London in 2001.

The prince made a financial payment to Ms Giuffre in an out-of-court settlement in 2022, after she had brought a civil case against him. He denies all the accusations against him.

Sky Roberts told BBC Newsnight his sister, who took her own life earlier this year, would be "very proud" of the latest development regarding Prince Andrew.

The prince has been under increasing pressure over his links with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with calls for Buckingham Palace to take action against him.

On Friday, the prince announced that he was deciding to voluntarily hand back his titles and to give up membership of the Order of the Garter, the oldest and most senior order of chivalry in Britain.

He will also cease be the Duke of York, a title received from his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II.

But Mr Roberts said he would like to see the King go a step further, saying: "We would call on the King to potentially go ahead and take out the prince in the Andrew."

"I think anybody that was implicated in this should have some sort of resolve. They should have some sort of responsibility and accountability for these survivors," he said, adding that he would "welcome any contact from the King, from members of parliament".

When Prince Andrew was born in 1960, he was automatically a prince as the son of a monarch. This could only be changed if a Letters Patent was issued by the King.

In his statement on Friday, Prince Andrew said: "In discussion with the King, and my immediate and wider family, we have concluded the continued accusations about me distract from the work of His Majesty and the Royal Family.

"I have decided, as I always have, to put my duty to my family and country first.

"I stand by my decision five years ago to stand back from public life.

"With His Majesty's agreement, we feel I must now go a step further. I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me. As I have said previously, I vigorously deny the accusations against me."

He said he continued to "vigorously deny the accusations against me".

The prince had already ceased to be a "working royal" and had lost the use of his HRH title and no longer appeared at official royal events. His role now will be even more diminished.

The prince has faced a series of scandals over recent years, including a court case he settled with Ms Giuffre.

Next week a posthumous memoir by Ms Giuffre will be published. It is likely to cast further attention on Prince Andrew's involvement with her and Epstein.

Ms Giuffre claimed that she was one of many vulnerable girls and young women who had been sexually exploited by Epstein and his circle of wealthy connections.

She alleged that she was forced to have sex with the prince at the house of his friend Ghislaine Maxwell in London in 2001, when Ms Giuffre was 17 years old.

Her memoir describes two other occasions on which she alleges she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew - in Epstein's townhouse in New York and on Epstein's private island in the US Virgin Islands.

Ms Giuffre's brother, Mr Roberts, told BBC Newsnight: "We have shed a lot of happy and sad tears today. I think happy because in a lot of ways this vindicates Virginia."

"All the years of work that she put in is now coming to some sort of justice, and these monsters can't escape from it - the truth will find its way out."

He said this was "a moment where survivors are not staying quiet any more".

"It's just a joyous moment for them because we're finally getting some sense of acknowledgement, like 'this actually happened, what we're saying is the truth'," Mr Roberts added.

He said there was "so much more to be accomplished, especially here in the United States".

Prince Andrew has faced intense scrutiny over his links with disgraced financier Epstein, more recently including questions about when he had really cut off contact.

In a now-infamous BBC Newsnight interview in 2019, Prince Andrew said that he had severed all links with Epstein after they had been photographed together in New York in December 2010.

But emails sent in February 2011 later emerged suggesting that he had privately stayed in touch with Epstein, including sending a message that read: "Keep in close touch and we'll play some more soon!"

Prince Andrew is expected to stay in his Windsor home, Royal Lodge, on which he has his own private lease which runs until 2078.

His ex-wife will be known as Sarah Ferguson and no longer Duchess of York, but their daughters will continue to have the title of princess.

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Gaza's Hamas-run civil defence says 11 people were killed, all from the same family, after the bus they were in was hit by an Israeli tank shell in northern Gaza.

The family, it said, were trying to reach their home to inspect it when the incident happened in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City on Friday night.

This is the deadliest single incident involving Israeli soldiers in Gaza since the start of the ceasefire eight days ago.

The Israeli military said soldiers had fired at a "suspicious vehicle" that had crossed the so-called yellow line demarcating the area still occupied by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Israeli soldiers continue to operate in more than half of the Gaza Strip, under the terms of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP news agency the victims were members of the Abu Shaaban family and were killed while "trying to check on their home" in the area.

The dead included women and children, according to the civil defence.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said a "suspicious vehicle was identified crossing the yellow line and approaching IDF troops operating in the northern Gaza Strip" on Friday, prompting it to fire "warning shots" towards the vehicle.

It said the vehicle "continued to approach the troops in a way that caused an imminent threat to them" and "troops opened fire to remove the threat, in accordance with the agreement."

Hamas said the family had been targeted without justification.

The IDF has warned Palestinians from entering areas in Gaza still under its control.

With limited internet access, many Palestinians do not know the position of Israeli troops as the yellow demarcation line is not physically marked, and it is unclear if the area where the bus was travelling did cross it.

The BBC has asked the IDF for coordinates of the incident.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Friday the army would set up visual signs to indicate the location of the line.

In a separate development on Saturday, the Palestinian embassy in Cairo said the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza will open on Monday for Palestinian residents in Egypt to return to Gaza.

In another part of the ceasefire deal, Hamas on Friday had released the body of Israeli hostage Eliyahu Margalit to the Red Cross, which returned it to Israel.

Mr Margalit was the tenth deceased hostage to be returned from Gaza. The remains of another 18 people are yet to be repatriated.

Israel handed the bodies of 15 more Palestinians over to officials in Gaza via the Red Cross, the Hamas-run health ministry said, bringing the total number of bodies it has received to 135.

There has been anger in Israel that Hamas has not returned all of the dead hostages' bodies, in line with last week's ceasefire deal - though the US has downplayed the suggestion it amounts to a breach.

The IDF has stressed that Hamas must "uphold the agreement and take the necessary steps to return all the hostages".

Hamas has blamed Israel for making the task difficult because Israeli strikes have reduced so many buildings to rubble and it does not allow heavy machinery and diggers into Gaza to be able to search for the hostages' bodies.

As part of the US-brokered ceasefire deal, Israel freed 250 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and 1,718 detainees from Gaza.

Hamas also returned all 20 living hostages to Israel.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 others hostage.

At least 67,900 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen by the UN as reliable.

Lady Annabel Goldsmith, the socialite and campaigner who gave her name to a famous 1960s London nightclub, has died aged 91.

Lady Annabel was the mother of six children from her two marriages, including Zac, who was Conservative MP for Richmond Park for eight years and who ran for mayor of London in 2016.

Her youngest child Ben said she was "quite simply irreplaceable".

He added: "We are bereft, not for her – because her life has been extraordinary and complete - but for us, because of the immense hole in our lives she leaves behind."

Mr Goldsmith said: "I spoke to her every day for 45 years, she truly had my back and we loved each other very much. I will miss her terribly."

Annabel's, which was opened by her first husband in 1963 and was one of London's first modern nightclubs, was named in her honour.

It was popular with the British aristocracy and celebrities in the 1960s and 1970s.

Born in London in 1934 into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart was the daughter of Viscount Castlereagh, who later became The 8th Marquess of Londonderry.

She became Lady Annabel in February 1949, when her father became marquess.

Lady Annabel was the mother of Rupert, Robin and India Jane with her first husband, hospitality industry entrepreneur Mark Birley: they were married from 1954 to 1979.

She then married financier Sir James Goldsmith and they had three children: Jemima, Zac and Ben Goldsmith.

Jemima is the former wife of Imran Khan, an international cricketer who served as prime minister of Pakistan from 2018 to 2022.

Lady Annabel was a campaigner and advocate for a range of causes, including the countryside, animal charities and working to lessen the impact of HIV/AIDS on children in South Africa.

In 2004 she published her memoirs Annabel: An Unconventional Life, where she recalled her aristocratic childhood, glamorous social life in 1960s Swinging London to her role as matriarch and grandmother.

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US prosecutors have accused a Louisiana resident of participating in the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel, recently unsealed court documents show.

Mahmoud Amin Ya'qub al-Muhtadi, 33, allegedly armed himself and joined a paramilitary group that fought alongside Hamas in the 2023 attack that saw about 2,000 people killed and 251 taken as hostages.

At least 67,900 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen by the UN as reliable.

A year after the attack, Mr al-Muhtadi allegedly travelled to the US on a fraudulent visa and became a permanent resident.

He was charged with providing, attempting to provide or conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and the fraud and misuse of a visa or other documents.

Mr al-Muhtadi was allegedly an operative of the National Resistance Brigades, the military wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, according to the complaint brought by the FBI.

He is accused of coordinating a "group of armed fighters" to cross into Israel after hearing about the attack and asked one man to "bring the rifles", court documents show.

Mr al-Muhtadi sent messages asking others to bring a bulletproof vest for another man and ammunition, prosecutors allege.

Hours after the 7 October attack began, his phone pinged a cell tower near Kibbutz Kfar Aza, the sight of a massacre, the documents said.

The complaint said that Mr al-Muhtadi denied ever having been involved in terrorist activities on his US visa application.

After coming to the US, he lived in a handful of places before landing in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he worked in a local restaurant.

He was arrested on Thursday, the Justice Department said.

During a court appearance in Louisiana on Friday, he was asked if he understood the charges against him. An interpreter translated his response as: "Yes, but there are a lot of things mentioned here that are so false, I'm innocent," according to the New York Times.

The documents do not accuse Mr al-Muhtadi of specific crimes or killings. Federal prosecutors have previously charged senior members of Hamas with the deaths of American citizens on 7 October.

Sir David Attenborough has broken the record for the oldest winner of a Daytime Emmy award for his work on documentary Secret Lives of Orangutans.

The 99-year-old came out top in the outstanding daytime personality, non-daily category, with the Netflix film - which follows a group of apes living in the jungles of Sumatra, Indonesia - also coming away with two other awards.

Sir David beat the record previously held by actor Dick Van Dyke, who was 98 when he won the guest performer in a daytime drama series category in 2024.

The 52nd annual Daytime Emmys was held on Friday in Pasadena, California, but Sir David - who is eight months away from his 100th birthday - was not in attendance.

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Secret Lives of Orangutans also won outstanding music direction and composition and outstanding directing team for a single camera daytime non-fiction programme.

Writer, broadcaster and naturalist, Sir David's career spans more than 70 years during which his voice has become synonymous with natural history programmes both in the UK and across the English-speaking world.

His award-winning natural history programmes include Life on Earth, The Private Life of Plants and The Blue Planet.

More than 40 animals and plant species have also been named after him.

Earlier this year he released his cinema-length film Ocean, which he described as one of the most important projects of his career and spoke of his belief it could play a decisive role in saving biodiversity and protecting the planet from climate change.

Other winners at Friday's ceremony included long-running daytime soap General Hospital for outstanding daytime drama series and actress and presenter Drew Barrymore for outstanding daytime talk series host.

As the end of October approaches, teachers and pupils alike are looking forward to the half-term holiday. But in some places, the traditional week off has become a fortnight. What do parents, teachers and experts think?

Unity Schools Partnership has decided to implement a two-week half-term across its eight primaries in Norfolk, following a trial last year.

The partnership, which already operates a two-week holiday in its Suffolk schools, said it was doing so to improve everyone's wellbeing and reduce ill-health absences.

Elsewhere, some other councils, including Nottinghamshire, already have two-week autumn half-term holidays, while others, including Surrey, are soon to adopt them.

In England, maintained schools - those funded and controlled by the local authority - must provide at least 190 days of education a year.

Other schools, including academies, free schools, foundation schools and voluntary-aided schools, have more freedom to set their own term dates.

While many are moving towards two-week autumn half-terms, most of these are shortening the summer holiday by a week to compensate.

That is not happening at Unity's schools, which are instead able to choose how to make up the lost 32.5 hours.

Colman Junior School, in Norwich, which piloted the longer half-term last year, has opted for an extra hour on Wednesdays.

The trust says it carried out two rounds of consultation before extending the half-term break and found most parents (58%) and staff (89%) in favour.

Its interim chief executive, Sarah Garner, says the autumn term is the "longest and hardest" for both teachers and pupils, and that its schools regularly see a spike in illnesses just before the Christmas break, impacting "wellbeing and more importantly... learning".

Ms Garner acknowledges the move might mean some some families with children at different schools now have to juggle three weeks of childcare, but says most parents have been managing.

Most are able to take advantage of community half-term activities as well as using parental leave, she says.

However, the trust will be organising additional childcare for the second week of the forthcoming half-term.

Waiting to pick up her children outside Colman Junior School is Abby Simpson.

"It's been OK," she says. "The good thing is that holidays are cheaper in the second week because all the other kids have gone back to school.

"But it's a little bit tricky around childcare sometimes, because it's that longer amount of time to find childcare when I'm working. So it's a sort of mixed bag but, overall, I'd say it's a good thing."

Her friend, Natalie, who does not want to give her surname, says the move actually helped her family situation.

"I think it's a good thing. I'm separated from my daughter's dad so she has a week on, week off. So we both get a week with her."

"But I'm self-employed, so I'm a bit different. So I have to take that week off because the childcare is non-existent in the second week.

"Also, it's a tricky term for most of the students when it's getting dark."

Picking up his son is Aaron Rushworth, 36, who believes the move could help improve teacher retention.

On the extra childcare required, he says: "It's no more than you have to adjust your pattern of life to having children generally.

"It's not saying that I'm impacted negatively; I just build it around having my son around."

He also feels the longer day prevents the need to rush for pick-up time.

Spencer Ward's son joined the school last year, so he "was aware of the policy and had planned for it", asking relatives to help out with the second week.

"I think overall it's really beneficial and this extra hour on a Wednesday gives him time to do stuff he wouldn't normally do in school," he says.

"It's extra-curricular, so it's fun stuff. It's music; it might be dancing, or the arts; might be gardening, something he doesn't normally do, and [he] spends time with other kids he doesn't normally spend time with."

While schools and government often emphasise the impact of time away from school on children's learning, Mr Ward does not agree.

"The children need a bit of time to relax as well," he says.

"We know what they're doing curriculum-wise and I think there's enough stuff we can do at home if we need to."

Michael Burdett, 31, teaches Year 6 at school and is its maths lead. He is also a parent with school-age children.

After the longer holiday was piloted last year, he noticed a huge drop in staff absence and sickness. Fewer children were ill, too.

And he says small adjustments were made to the curriculum to ensure there was no impact on the children's education.

"I don't think I could consider working somewhere that didn't have the two-week half term now, just because it has such an impact on my wellbeing," he says.

"Having that extra week off really charges me as a teacher again to go forward and be the best teacher I can heading towards that Christmas term.

"I also think it's vitally important for pupils to also rest and recover during that time."

Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at Exeter University, thinks a revision of the school year is called for.

"We need a rebalanced school calendar that reflects the realities of modern family life — supporting working parents, reducing holiday hunger, and ensuring pupils don't fall behind over the long break," he says.

"Reducing summer holidays and extending breaks during the autumn term would potentially help to reduce learning loss for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, spread workloads more evenly for teachers, and relieve the childcare burden that weighs heavily on working families during the summer."

However, parenting blogger Ruth Davies Knowles says she approves of children having as many holidays as possible, but not the longer half-term.

Until all schools adopt the policy, she says, families could have to juggle childcare issues over a longer period.

Up until 2013, head teachers could grant absences of up to 10 days for a family holiday in "special circumstances", and she would like this policy brought back to allow families to take time off when it suits them.

"Whenever we talk about school absences, head teachers always come on and tell us how vital it is that children are at school," she says.

"What sort of message does it send out when they're saying every day at school is important, but you can have an extra week off?"

The charity Coram Family and Childcare says more needs to be done about holiday childcare after finding fewer providers available over the half-term breaks.

It found particular gaps in provision for older children, those with special educational needs and disabilities, and those with parents working non-typical hours.

The average price of childcare for children between five and 11 was £179.33 per week for holiday clubs and £233.83 for childminders.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, is concerned about the impact to learning of the move.

Some of Unity's schools have opted to extend the school day by 10 minutes, but he dismisses this as "a conjuring trick", saying that if a longer half-term is to work, a week must be cut from the summer holiday.

"The children need to be in school, and they need to be in school when they're fresh and alert, and at the end of the school day, 10 minutes is not really going to help," he says.

"Look, for middle-class parents, maybe it would work. But for many mums and dads, they've got to go to work themselves; kids are hanging around.

"I think it's pretty dangerous territory."

Asked by the BBC how many schools in England were operating a two-week half-term, the Department for Education did not respond.

However, a spokesperson says local authorities and schools, not the government, set their own term dates, so already have the flexibility to change the length of holidays if teachers and parents want to.

"Every school day is vital to ensure every child, no matter their background, can achieve and thrive," they say.

"While academies have the flexibility to change the length of holidays that best suit their community, it is of utmost importance that no child loses out on essential learning time."

Follow Norfolk news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.

Kayla first tried fentanyl as a troubled 18-year-old, growing up in the US state of North Carolina.

"I felt like literally amazing. The voices in my head just completely went silent. I got instantly addicted," she remembers.

The little blue pills Kayla became hooked on were probably made in Mexico, and then smuggled across the border to the US - a deadly trade President Donald Trump is trying to crack down on.

But drug cartels aren't pharmacists. So, Kayla never knew how much fentanyl was in the pill she was taking. Would there be enough of the synthetic opioid to kill her?

"It's scary to think about that," Kayla says, reflecting on how she could have overdosed and died at any moment.

In 2023, there were over 110,000 drug-related deaths in the US. The march of fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin, seemed unstoppable.

But then came a staggering turnaround.

In 2024, the number of fatal overdoses across the US fell by around 25%. That's nearly 30,000 fewer deaths – dozens of lives saved every day. Kayla's state, North Carolina, is at the forefront of that trend.

Why fatal overdoses have fallen so sharply

One of the explanations is a commitment to harm reduction. This means promoting policies that prioritise drug users' health and wellbeing rather than criminalising people - a recognition that in an era of fentanyl, drug-taking too often ends with death by overdose.

In North Carolina, where Kayla still lives, and where overdose fatalities are currently down by an impressive 35%, harm reduction strategies are well-developed.

Kayla no longer takes street drugs. And she's a client of an innovative law enforcement assisted diversion (LEAD) programme in Fayetteville. It's a partnership between the town's police and the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition. Together, they work to divert substance users away from crime, and get them on the road to recovery.

"If someone's stealing from a grocery store, we run their criminal history. And often we see that the crimes they're committing appear to fund the addiction they have," says Lt Jamaal Littlejohn.

This might make them a candidate for the LEAD programme, meaning they can get support to tackle their addiction, and can start thinking about secure housing and employment.

The proponents of LEAD say it isn't about being soft on crime. Drug dealers still go to prison in Fayetteville. "But if we can get people the services they need, it gives law enforcement more time to deal with bigger crimes," argues Lt Littlejohn, who watched his own sister struggle with a substance use disorder.

• Listen to Assignment: Drugs, Overdose, Hope on The Documentary Podcast on the BBC World Service

Kayla has blossomed. She's such a long way now from the days when she used prostitution to fund her fentanyl habit. As part of the LEAD process, her criminal record has been wiped. She recently graduated as a certified nurse assistant, and is now working in a residential home.

"It's like the best thing ever. This is the longest time I've been clean," she says.

Critical to Kayla's recovery has been treatment. She's been taking methadone for nearly a year when she tells her story to the BBC. "It's keeping me from going back," she believes.

Methadone and buprenorphine are medications used to treat opioid use disorder. They stem cravings and stop painful withdrawal. Nationwide, treatment has played a role in puncturing the overdose fatality statistics.

In North Carolina, it's been a game-changer: more than 30,000 people were enrolled in a programme in 2024, with numbers climbing in 2025.

'You're still playing Russian roulette, but your odds improve'

At 09:00 at one of the Morse Clinics in the state capital of Raleigh, two or three people wait their turn in reception.

"The busiest time is 5.30am to 7am, so before work," says Dr Eric Morse, an addiction psychiatrist running nine clinics offering medication assisted treatment (MAT) in North Carolina. "Most of our folks are working - once they're sober, they show up to work on time every day."

The clinic runs a finely-tuned operation. After patients check in, they're called to a dosing window to receive their prescription. They're in and out in minutes.

They'll randomly be drug tested for illicit narcotics. Dr Morse says around half his patients are still testing positive for opioids bought on the street, but he doesn't see this as failure.

"Maybe you're using once a week and you're used to using three times a day… You're still playing Russian roulette with fentanyl but you've taken a whole bunch of bullets out of the chamber, so your survival rate goes up significantly," says Dr Morse.

This is harm reduction. So rather than be expelled from the treatment programme, patients who get a positive drug test are given extra support and counselling. Dr Morse says 80-90% will eventually stop using street drugs altogether. And in time, many will taper off their medication too.

The abstinence debate

Not everyone thinks this is the right approach.

Mark Pless is a Republican who sits in North Carolina's state House of Representatives, and used to be a full-time paramedic. He points out that illegal drug-taking starts with a choice.

And he doesn't believe in harm reduction. In particular he's against treating opioid use disorder with medications like methadone or buprenorphine.

"You're replacing an addictive product with another addictive product," he says. "If you have to take it in order to stay clean, it's still addictive. We've got to figure out how to get people to where they can do better – we can't leave them on drugs forever."

He favours abstinence treatment programmes, when drug users go "cold turkey".

But there's pushback from health professionals in North Carolina.

"I believe there are multiple paths to recovery," says Dr Morse. "I'm not pooh-poohing abstinence-based treatment - except when you look at the medical evidence."

Dr Morse references a Yale University study from 2023 analysing the risk of death for opioid users in a treatment programme compared to people not in treatment. The study suggested that someone in abstinence treatment was as likely - or more more likely - to have a fatal overdose as a person who wasn't in treatment and was continuing to use street opioids like fentanyl.

• How does fentanyl get into the US?

Treatment aside, another drug is helping.

Naloxone is widely available, and used as a nasal spray it reverses the effect of an opioid overdose, helping someone breathe again. In North Carolina in 2024, it was administered more than 16,000 times. That's potentially 16,000 lives saved – and these are only the overdose reversals that have been reported.

"This is as close to a miracle drug as we can ever imagine," says Dr Nabarun Dasgupta, a scientist specialising in street drugs at the University of North Carolina.

Many users of narcotics like cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin want to know that what they're taking won't kill them. Some people use test-strips to check for fentanyl, because they know it's been implicated in so many fatal overdoses.

But the strips don't identify all potentially harmful substances. Dr Dasgupta runs a national drugs-testing laboratory. Users send him a tiny bit of their drug supply via local non-profit organisations.

"We've analysed close to 14,000 samples from 43 states over the last three years," he says.

A generational shift

Testing drugs for potentially dangerous additives is an additional weapon in the harm reduction armoury. Dr Dasgupta believes another reason for decreasing overdose fatalities in the US is that young people are avoiding opioids like fentanyl.

"We see a demographic shift. Generation Z are dying of overdose much less frequently than their parents or their grandparents' generations were at the same age," he says.

Dr Dasgupta isn't entirely surprised 20-somethings are steering clear of opioids. A shocking four out of 10 American adults know someone whose life has been ended by an overdose.

It was this epidemic of death, set in train in the 1990s by prescription opioids, that motivated North Carolina's former attorney general - now the state governor - to move against powerful corporations benefitting from so many Americans' dark spiral down into addiction.

Josh Stein picked up the phone to his counterparts in other states, and took a leading role in co-ordinating legal action against opioid manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

"There was a Republican attorney general in Tennessee, I'm Democrat in North Carolina… But we're all caring about our people and we're all willing to fight for them," Stein reflects.

The upshot, after years of intense negotiations, was an Opioid Settlement totalling some $60bn (£45bn). This is money that huge companies have agreed to pay to US states, to be used for the "abatement of the opioid epidemic". North Carolina's share is around $1.5bn.

"It has to be spent in four ways – drug prevention, treatment, recovery, or harm reduction. I think it's transformative," says Governor Stein.

Meanwhile, funding from the national government is uncertain. The cuts to Medicaid included in President Trump's One Big, Beautiful Bill Act could have a tremendous impact on this area.

In the Morse Clinics in Raleigh, 70% of patients depend on Medicaid. If they lose health insurance, will they end treatment and become more vulnerable to death by overdose? Although North Carolina's drug fatality statistics look optimistic, thousands of people are still dying - and the state's black, indigenous and non-white populations haven't experienced the same rates of decrease.

And there remain other states that have witnessed a stubbornly slower rate of decrease in lethal overdoses - including Nevada and Arizona.

No one is complacent. Least of all Kayla.

In the grip of fentanyl for three long years, she never overdosed herself, but she did have to save her friends. Kayla's parents didn't know what to do with her.

"They kind of gave up on me - they thought I was gonna be dead," she remembers.

Kayla credits Charlton Roberson, her harm reduction mentor, as being instrumental in her recovery. Her aim now is to taper off methadone and become medication- and drug-free. She also wants to find a job in a hospital.

"I feel more alive than I ever did when I was using fentanyl," she says.

If you've been affected by the issues in this story, help and support is available via the BBC Action Line.

There are not many sports that can keep an audience enraptured through 45 minutes of ceremony before the first point is even contested.

And yet, the intricate traditions unfolding in a small clay ring - virtually unchanged in hundreds of years - managed to do just that.

Welcome, then, to the Grand Sumo Tournament - a five-day event at the Royal Albert Hall featuring 40 of the very best sumo wrestlers showcasing a sport which can date its first mention back to 23BC.

London's Victorian concert venue has been utterly transformed, complete with six-tonne Japanese temple roof suspended above the ring.

It is here the wrestlers, known as rikishi, will perform their leg stomps to drive away evil spirits, and where they will clap to get the attention of the gods.

And above all this ancient ceremony, a giant, revolving LED screen which wouldn't look out of place at an American basketball game, offering the audience all the stats and replays they could want.

Sumo may be ancient, and may have strict rules governing every aspect of a rikishi's conduct, but it still exists in a modern world.

And that modern world is helping spread sumo far beyond Japan's borders.

It was a "random video" which first caught Sian Spencer's attention a couple of years ago.

This was quickly followed by the discovery of dedicated YouTube channels for a couple of the sumo stables, where rikishi live and train, waking up early to practice, followed by a high protein stew called a chankonabe, and then an afternoon nap - all in the service of bulking up.

Then she discovered the bi-monthly, 15 day championships, known as basho, and from there, she was hooked.

The London tournament was simply a "once-in-a-lifetime", not-to-be-missed, opportunity to see it all in real life, the 35-year-old says.

Julia and her partner Cezar, who live in Edinburgh, discovered sumo through a more traditional route: a trip to Japan six years ago.

"We saw it as a very touristy activity, but we actually ended up loving the sport," says Julia, 34.

"From there on, we tried to find communities, information, just to learn more and more about it," Cezar, 36, adds.

Colleagues, friends and family, they found, could be quite taken aback by their new passion.

"It's the only sport we watch," explains Julia - so they found like-minded people on messaging apps like Telegram.

"We found Italian groups, English groups," says Julia.

"Outside of Japan, online is the only way to interact with the sport," adds Cezar.

Going to Japan is almost the only way to see a top-flight sumo tournament.

This week's event in London is only the second time the tournament has visited the city - the first time was in 1991 - while the last overseas trip was to Jakarta in 2013.

But even going to Japan isn't a guarantee of getting a seat. Last year was the first time in 24 years that all six of the bi-monthly, 15-day events had sold out in 28 years, Kyodo News reported - fueled by interest at home, and by the tourist boom which saw more than 36m foreigners visit in 2024.

So for many, the London tournament is the first time they have watched sumo in person - and it doesn't disapoint.

"Seeing it up close, you get a sense of the speed and the power which you don't get on TV. It was incredible," says Caspar Eliot, a 36-year-old fan from London. "They are so big."

To win, one man needs to push another out of the ring or to the ground using brute strength. The majority use one of two styles to achieve this, often in split seconds - pushing, or grappling.

Either way, the sound of the two rikishi colliding in the first moment of the match reverberates around the hall.

Caspar and his wife Megha Okhai had been among those lucky enough to get tickets when they visited Japan last year - only for them not to arrive in the post in time.

It didn't stop them falling head over heels, however, and they have watched every basho this year. So when it came to the London Grand Sumo Tournament, they weren't taking chances.

"I think we had four devices trying to book tickets," Caspar tells the BBC ahead of the event, displaying his sumo towels proudly - a must for diehard fans. "We got front row seats, on the cushions."

The cushions right next to the ring are of course highly prized - but also, a bit risky.

On Thursday, it was all 181kg and 191cm of Shonannoumi which went plummeting into the crowd - perhaps making those in the slightly cheaper seats breathe a sigh of relief.

Of course, the size of the rikishi is one of the first things most people think of when they think of sumo. The Albert Hall's director of programming revealed to The Guardian earlier this week that they "had to source and buy new chairs which can take up to 200kg in weight".

But sumo - for all its sell-out events - is not without its troubles behind the scenes. A series of scandals over the last couple of decades around bullying, match fixing and sexism have dented its image.

And then there is the fact that last year - while being a bumper one for ticket sales - saw the lowest number of new recruits joining the stables.

Perhaps the strict life of a rikishi doesn't look as appealing as it once might have. Its popularity among young Japanese is also being threatened by other sports, like baseball. As Thomas Fabbri, the BBC's resident sumo fan, said: "My Japanese friends think I'm mad, as they see it as a sport for old people."

Japan's falling birthrate will also not help - nor is the Japanese Sumo Association's rule which restricts each stable to just one foreign rikishi. Despite this, Mongolians have dominated for the past few years - and one of the most exciting rising stars hails from Ukraine.

Not that any of this has worried fans in London.

"Seeing all this ritual and ceremony that goes with sumo is quite special," fan Sian says. "Now, seeing it in person, you feel like you are more part of it."

Julia and Cesar agree in a message the next day.

"It's a Japanese sport but we didn't feel out of place, so many people from all around the world around us."

For Megha, the drama "made it so incredible" - as did meeting the other fans.

"Getting out of a very niche Reddit community and being able to see all these sumo fans in person and being able to chat with other people who are just as into this as we are - it was worth every penny of sumo gold."

Additonal reporting by Thomas Fabbri

Want to watch? Audiences can tune in via BBC iPlayer, the BBC Red Button, the BBC Sport website and app.

A historic Clydebuilt sailing ship has been towed out to sea off the coast of Hawaii and deliberately sunk, prompting outrage from maritime conservation groups.

Falls of Clyde, built in 1878, had been moored as a museum ship in Honolulu since the 1960s but had fallen into a poor state of repair.

The Honolulu Harbour Board confirmed it had the ship towed into deep water about 25 miles offshore on Wednesday and then scuttled.

The news has been met with anger and dismay by campaigners who have spent more than a decade trying to bring the ship back to its birthplace to rebuild it.

Falls of Clyde was the first in a series of eight iron-hulled ships built in the late 19th Century by the Port Glasgow shipbuilder Russell & Co.

The ship spent many years carrying various cargoes to and from the Far East and Australasia before moving to Hawaii.

In the early 20th Century it had steel tanks fitted and was converted into a tanker to carry paraffin to the islands, where it later became a floating fuel depot before being acquired by a museum in Honolulu.

But the ship was badly damaged by a hurricane in the 1980s, the maritime section of the museum closed down and for years it has been left slowly decaying.

Enthusiasts in Scotland have spent a decade trying to bring the ship home for restoration, but were unable to reach an agreement with the harbour board which wants to redevelop the quay where it was moored.

The Hawaii Department of Transportation said the operation to remove the ship began at dawn on Wednesday and it was sunk about 25 miles south of the harbour.

It said the vessel's name, wheel and bell were retained along with other artifacts which will be put on display.

'A day that will go down in infamy'

The destruction of the historic ship has been widely criticised by maritime conservation groups both in the UK and the USA.

Friends of Falls of Clyde, a group of supporters in Hawaii, described it as "a day that will go down in infamy".

"It is almost inconceivable that this situation has been allowed to happen," the group posted on social media.

The group organised a farewell ceremony with bagpipers on Tuesday after learning that the ship was to be sunk the following morning.

The Tall Ship Glenlee, the charity that looks after another Clydebuilt sailing vessel moored beside Glasgow's Riverside Museum, said it was "deeply saddened".

David O'Neill, from the Scotland based Save Falls of Clyde campaign, said he was "horrified" at the behaviour of the authorities in Hawaii but had become resigned to the ship meeting such a fate after years of fruitless negotiation.

He first became involved in efforts to rescue the ship in 2015 when someone in Hawaii alerted him to its condition, prompting him to post an appeal on social media saying: "Old Scottish lady needs a lift home."

A Norwegian firm which operates heavy lift ships offered to transport Falls of Clyde back to Scotland for free, but the campaign was soon embroiled in a wrangle with the harbour board over insurance costs and other conditions.

Earlier this year Mr O'Neill said an American firm won a contract to remove the ship from the harbour and it also offered to transport it to Scotland for free.

"They didn't want to sink the ship - they had a conscience and a respect for maritime heritage," he said.

But the deal between the firm and the harbour board fell through, and the contract went instead to another company which then carried out the scuttling.

The Hawaii Department of Transportation has been contacted for comment.

Mr O'Neill said he had seen a video showing the final moments of Falls of Clyde.

"She was towed out of harbour looking really elegant and stunning for a 147-year-old ship, unaided, not needing any pumps," he said.

"She was still afloat and for us that's representative that she was truly Clydebuilt."

He said he found watching the ship go down "quite disturbing".

"She goes down by the stern and most of the ship lifts out of the water, like in the Titanic movie."

The businessman is now concentrating his efforts on trying to bring home a Clydebuilt ship from a different era - the Type 21 frigate HMS Ambuscade.

The warship was built for the Royal Navy at the Yarrow shipyard in Glasgow in the 1970s, and saw action in the Falklands War.

It later sold to the Pakistan Navy where it served until it was decommissioned two years ago.

Mr O'Neill said he secured the frigate for free after making a "cheeky request" to the Pakistani government, and he is working on plans to return it to the Clyde to become a museum ship.

There are not many sports that can keep an audience enraptured through 45 minutes of ceremony before the first point is even contested.

And yet, the intricate traditions unfolding in a small clay ring - virtually unchanged in hundreds of years - managed to do just that.

Welcome, then, to the Grand Sumo Tournament - a five-day event at the Royal Albert Hall featuring 40 of the very best sumo wrestlers showcasing a sport which can date its first mention back to 23BC.

London's Victorian concert venue has been utterly transformed, complete with six-tonne Japanese temple roof suspended above the ring.

It is here the wrestlers, known as rikishi, will perform their leg stomps to drive away evil spirits, and where they will clap to get the attention of the gods.

And above all this ancient ceremony, a giant, revolving LED screen which wouldn't look out of place at an American basketball game, offering the audience all the stats and replays they could want.

Sumo may be ancient, and may have strict rules governing every aspect of a rikishi's conduct, but it still exists in a modern world.

And that modern world is helping spread sumo far beyond Japan's borders.

It was a "random video" which first caught Sian Spencer's attention a couple of years ago.

This was quickly followed by the discovery of dedicated YouTube channels for a couple of the sumo stables, where rikishi live and train, waking up early to practice, followed by a high protein stew called a chankonabe, and then an afternoon nap - all in the service of bulking up.

Then she discovered the bi-monthly, 15 day championships, known as basho, and from there, she was hooked.

The London tournament was simply a "once-in-a-lifetime", not-to-be-missed, opportunity to see it all in real life, the 35-year-old says.

Julia and her partner Cezar, who live in Edinburgh, discovered sumo through a more traditional route: a trip to Japan six years ago.

"We saw it as a very touristy activity, but we actually ended up loving the sport," says Julia, 34.

"From there on, we tried to find communities, information, just to learn more and more about it," Cezar, 36, adds.

Colleagues, friends and family, they found, could be quite taken aback by their new passion.

"It's the only sport we watch," explains Julia - so they found like-minded people on messaging apps like Telegram.

"We found Italian groups, English groups," says Julia.

"Outside of Japan, online is the only way to interact with the sport," adds Cezar.

Going to Japan is almost the only way to see a top-flight sumo tournament.

This week's event in London is only the second time the tournament has visited the city - the first time was in 1991 - while the last overseas trip was to Jakarta in 2013.

But even going to Japan isn't a guarantee of getting a seat. Last year was the first time in 24 years that all six of the bi-monthly, 15-day events had sold out in 28 years, Kyodo News reported - fueled by interest at home, and by the tourist boom which saw more than 36m foreigners visit in 2024.

So for many, the London tournament is the first time they have watched sumo in person - and it doesn't disapoint.

"Seeing it up close, you get a sense of the speed and the power which you don't get on TV. It was incredible," says Caspar Eliot, a 36-year-old fan from London. "They are so big."

To win, one man needs to push another out of the ring or to the ground using brute strength. The majority use one of two styles to achieve this, often in split seconds - pushing, or grappling.

Either way, the sound of the two rikishi colliding in the first moment of the match reverberates around the hall.

Caspar and his wife Megha Okhai had been among those lucky enough to get tickets when they visited Japan last year - only for them not to arrive in the post in time.

It didn't stop them falling head over heels, however, and they have watched every basho this year. So when it came to the London Grand Sumo Tournament, they weren't taking chances.

"I think we had four devices trying to book tickets," Caspar tells the BBC ahead of the event, displaying his sumo towels proudly - a must for diehard fans. "We got front row seats, on the cushions."

The cushions right next to the ring are of course highly prized - but also, a bit risky.

On Thursday, it was all 181kg and 191cm of Shonannoumi which went plummeting into the crowd - perhaps making those in the slightly cheaper seats breathe a sigh of relief.

Of course, the size of the rikishi is one of the first things most people think of when they think of sumo. The Albert Hall's director of programming revealed to The Guardian earlier this week that they "had to source and buy new chairs which can take up to 200kg in weight".

But sumo - for all its sell-out events - is not without its troubles behind the scenes. A series of scandals over the last couple of decades around bullying, match fixing and sexism have dented its image.

And then there is the fact that last year - while being a bumper one for ticket sales - saw the lowest number of new recruits joining the stables.

Perhaps the strict life of a rikishi doesn't look as appealing as it once might have. Its popularity among young Japanese is also being threatened by other sports, like baseball. As Thomas Fabbri, the BBC's resident sumo fan, said: "My Japanese friends think I'm mad, as they see it as a sport for old people."

Japan's falling birthrate will also not help - nor is the Japanese Sumo Association's rule which restricts each stable to just one foreign rikishi. Despite this, Mongolians have dominated for the past few years - and one of the most exciting rising stars hails from Ukraine.

Not that any of this has worried fans in London.

"Seeing all this ritual and ceremony that goes with sumo is quite special," fan Sian says. "Now, seeing it in person, you feel like you are more part of it."

Julia and Cesar agree in a message the next day.

"It's a Japanese sport but we didn't feel out of place, so many people from all around the world around us."

For Megha, the drama "made it so incredible" - as did meeting the other fans.

"Getting out of a very niche Reddit community and being able to see all these sumo fans in person and being able to chat with other people who are just as into this as we are - it was worth every penny of sumo gold."

Additonal reporting by Thomas Fabbri

Want to watch? Audiences can tune in via BBC iPlayer, the BBC Red Button, the BBC Sport website and app.

When Charlotte Morjaria headed for a weekend at Butlin's with her two best friends, she had no idea it would save her life.

On the last day of their girls' trip in June, the group befriended a stag party and were playing games, running around outside their accommodation and "being silly".

"Probably a tad too much drinking, albeit we were having a fantastic time before disaster struck - or you could call it a miracle," Charlotte, 31, said.

When one of the men scooped her up over his shoulder during a game of tag, she heard something "go pop" but put it out of her mind and carried on enjoying her evening.

When she was still in pain after returning home to Newport from the holiday park in Minehead, Somerset, she went to A&E thinking she had broken a rib.

But a CT scan done to check for any internal damage revealed a "sizeable" cancerous tumour on her kidney that she had no idea even existed.

"In that moment, it was probably the most scared I've ever been in my life," she said.

Charlotte sat in the hospital A&E waiting room for 22 hours and nearly left several times.

"I've just come back from Butlin's, I'm absolutely done in, I don't want to be sat in a waiting room alone, falling in and out of consciousness," she recalled.

"I'm sat there with what I suspect is a bruised rib... I felt like a bit of a fraud."

Then, "out of nowhere" her mum, followed by one of her friends, arrived to keep her company and persuaded her to stay.

When she was seen, doctors ordered the scan and Charlotte was told her rib was OK but said the medics around her did not have "the faces of people who are just going to say you're fine".

"They said they'd found a sizeable mass on my left kidney."

"Still slightly hungover and in a daze", she was told the 7cm (2.5in) tumour was being treated as cancer and was sent straight from The Grange Hospital to nearby Royal Gwent Hospital in her hometown.

Charlotte said dozens of questions "flood your brain" including how a tumour this size was missed.

"The conversation was a strange one, because I thought I was fine. There really weren't very big tell-tale signs."

She explained there were a lot of factors which hid her symptoms of weight loss, chronic fatigue and back pain, and she enjoyed an active lifestyle, going to dance classes and swimming regularly.

Having previously struggled with disordered eating, she had been taking the weight loss medication Mounjaro in 2024, but stopped when it appeared to be making her unwell.

She also has depression, for which she takes medication, and put the "normal aches and pains" down to running around after her "absolutely crazy" two-year-old son Sebastian.

"The doctors were astounded, not only by the fact I was this young, healthy woman, but the fact that, on the surface, I'd had no idea," she added.

Charlotte was diagnosed with stage one TFE3 renal cell carcinoma - a rare form of kidney cancer.

In August, the day before her 31st birthday, she had surgery to have her kidney removed.

"[My consultant] had only heard of one case, it is rare. They didn't have a lot of information," she said.

"Thankfully it hadn't spread... but they still needed to get it out pretty quickly."

In September, Charlotte was told she was cancer free, but needs regular scans for the rest of her life as she is deemed high risk.

"The reality of it is, every six months I'm going to be scared. I'm going to be a mess. I'm cancer free, but I'm not free of cancer."

She said she felt lucky to have a "brilliant life" with her husband Ben and their son, but adjusting to her new reality had been hard.

"Even though I haven't lost my hair, even though I'm seemingly well... it's taken its toll."

She asked the doctors about lifestyle changes but was told "there was no rhyme or reason" for her tumour and to "be sensible" - eating healthily and not drinking too much alcohol.

"It's a silly story, it's a laugh and I'm happy people have a giggle. You walk into a room and you say the c-word, it makes people feel uncomfortable, it's often awkward to talk about.

"But I want it to raise awareness... an adult Butlin's weekender did indeed save my life."

Every week it seems US financial markets are hit by another bout of fear.

The latest worries spread this week from the banking sector in the US, after two regional lenders warned they would be hit by losses from alleged fraud.

But before that, markets swooned over signs of rekindled US-China tensions, as the two superpowers face off over tariffs, advanced technology and access to rare earths.

The bankruptcies of car parts supplier First Brands and subprime car lender Tricolor acted as a trigger for nervous chatter in September.

Over the last month, US shares, which had been climbing since their tariff-induced rout in April, have flattened.

But in many ways the market swings so far - down roughly 3% at the steepest - are not unusual.

Zooming out, the major indexes have still posted gains since the start of the year, with the S&P 500 up roughly 13%. That's smaller than 2024 but still solid.

"The market has done surprisingly well so far this year ... driven by an improvement in corporate profits and the enthusiasm surrounding AI," says Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research.

The resilience of the stock market is, ironically, exactly what is driving some of the jitters.

Put simply, when set against other standard metrics like profits, share prices in the US are very high.

Meanwhile, concerns about a possible bubble emerging in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry have generated a steady undercurrent of talk since the start of the year - discussions that have ramped up as analysts struggle to see how the vast sums of money the biggest players are throwing at one another all fit together.

The Bank of England warned recently of "stretched valuations" and rising risk of a "sharp market correction".

Those concerns were echoed in remarks from JP Morgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon and to some extent US central bank chair Jerome Powell.

The International Monetary Fund was the latest to chime in this week.

"Markets appear complacent as the ground shifts," it said in its financial stability report, which noted risks from trade tensions, geopolitical uncertainty and rising sovereign indebtedness.

James Reilley, senior markets economist at Capital Economics, said the market falls triggered by the regional banks were a sign of investors alert to risk and moving quickly to reduce exposure amid uncertainty about whether the losses were indicative of wider issues.

But he said the brief nature of the drops showed how quickly such worries could clear.

Many investors remain optimistic, with analysts at firms such as Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo in recent weeks boosting their forecasts for where the S&P 500 might climb by the end of the year.

David Lefkowitz, head of US equities at UBS Global Wealth Management, said he thought a sharp sell-off was unlikely at a time when growth in the US remains solid and the US central bank is lowering borrowing costs.

He is expecting the S&P 500 to end the year hovering around 6,900 points, about 4% higher than where it sits on Friday.

While he acknowledged the troubles popping up at banks, he noted that the lenders involved have alleged fraud.

He said the overall picture, when looking at default levels, appears healthy, and he saw little risk that demand for AI would suddenly decline, puncturing valuations.

"I'm not saying we're in a bubble. I'm not saying we're not in a bubble. The question is what's going to drive the downside," he said. "Things don't usually spontaneously decline."

A typical bull market - when shares are rising - lasts about four and a half years, said Mr Stovall.

With inflation still sticky, and investors wary of events in Washington, like the government shutdown and Trump administration's efforts to influence the US central bank, this year's market rally has been "unloved", said Mr Stovall.

On the other hand, he noted: "It's just a matter of time. Corrections and bear markets have not been repealed. They might simply be delayed."