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It was Christmas 2011, a year after Roman Abramovich had taken delivery of his new superyacht, Eclipse. But it seemed the oligarch would not be using it over the festive period – records show it had been chartered by a company based in the British Virgin Islands.

And yet photographs from Christmas Day that year show Mr Abramovich in the Caribbean sunshine, standing on the swim platform at the rear of the yacht, with Eclipse’s large letter-E logo behind him.

Charter records such as this were part of a decade-long scheme to mislead tax authorities, now uncovered in an investigation by the BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The scheme falsely presented the Russian oligarch’s fleet of yachts as a commercial leasing operation, to dodge millions of euros in VAT on their purchase and running costs.

“There has been tax evasion,” Italian tax lawyer and professor Tommaso Di Tanno told the BBC. “This is criminal.”

In a statement, lawyers for Mr Abramovich – who now reportedly divides his time between Istanbul, Tel Aviv and the Russian resort of Sochi – said he had “always obtained independent expert professional tax and legal advice” and “acted in accordance” with it.

The billionaire, who was sanctioned by the UK in March 2022 over his connection to Vladimir Putin’s regime, bought five luxury yachts over the course of the 2000s that were involved in the tax scheme.

Among them was the 115m (377ft) Pelorus, which he reportedly lent to Chelsea footballer John Terry for his honeymoon in 2007 – and Eclipse, which at 162.5m (533ft) was once the largest private yacht in the world and worth an estimated $700m (£559m).

The scheme to dodge tax on the yachts – and other secrets of the sanctioned oligarch’s corporate empire – is laid bare in over 400,000 files and 72,000 emails leaked from a Cypriot corporate service provider, MeritServus.

They show how MeritServus administered the oligarch’s businesses through a global network of companies owned by a series of trusts of which Mr Abramovich was the beneficiary.

The BBC and its media partners, including the Guardian, have been reporting on the leaked files since 2023 as part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Cyprus Confidential investigation. We previously revealed Mr Abramovich’s financial links to one of Mr Putin’s closest associates, accused of holding the president’s wealth.

The files reveal how Mr Abramovich’s advisers helped him avoid paying huge tax bills on the yachts’ running costs in EU waters by using companies to hire them out to himself or other companies he controlled.

Documents show how the five yachts were leased to a company in Cyprus called Blue Ocean Yacht Management, which chartered them on to a handful of companies in the British Virgin Islands that appeared independent – but which were all in fact controlled by Mr Abramovich.

The scheme to dodge VAT in Cyprus was set out in a revealing 2005 memorandum on the proposed “Operating Structure” for the management of Mr Abramovich’s yachts.

“We want to avoid paying VAT on the purchase price of the yachts and where possible to avoid paying VAT on goods and services provided to the yachts,” wrote the memo’s author, Jonathan Holloway, then a director of Blue Ocean.

• You can hear File on 4 Investigates: Abramovich, the Yachts and the Tax Dodge on BBC Radio 4 at 20:00 on Tuesday 28 January and at 11:00 on Wednesday 29 January – or on BBC Sounds

Although Blue Ocean and the companies hiring the yachts were all owned by Mr Abramovich’s trusts, they were intended to appear unconnected “so that an investigator checking on our operation would see it as a legitimate structure”, Mr Holloway wrote in the memo he sent to some of Mr Abramovich’s closest associates.

Mr Holloway warned them they should be “aware of the risks”. He wrote: “We all have to recognise that a determined investigator could eventually discover this is an in-house structure with the possible consequences that would entail.”

Mr Holloway wrote that Blue Ocean, the companies to which it leased the yachts, and the ultimate “customer” should not have the same shareholders, directors or registered addresses, to avoid any “common link” that might arouse suspicion.

As the memo noted, Mr Abramovich’s lawyer had agreed to put the ownership of Blue Ocean into an entirely separate trust – apparently distancing it from the other companies.

Sure enough, ownership of the yacht management company Blue Ocean was subsequently transferred from the oligarch’s main trust to a new one, the Neptune Trust.

The way Mr Abramovich’s companies leased the yachts to each other, Prof Di Tanno told the BBC, was an “artificial structure” that evaded tax – a criminal offence.

“My conclusion is that in the case, there has been a tax evasion… because all the parties know exactly what to do in order to hide the reality,” he said.

Tax expert Rita de la Feria told the BBC she had seen in the yacht scheme “indications” that they “may be misrepresenting information”.

“If that is the case, then we are now in the realm of evasion,” she added.

Mr Holloway, who stepped down as a director of Blue Ocean about 15 years ago, told the BBC that he “joined Blue Ocean 20 years ago and was there for a relatively short period of time”.

He said he had “managed literally hundreds of vessels from many different locations around the world”. “I can’t be expected to remember the individual circumstances of every vessel I have ever managed,” he said, adding that he “used structures others in the industry were using”.

Lawyers representing Mr Abramovich told the BBC he denied “any allegation that he had any knowledge” or was “personally responsible” or liable for “any alleged deception of any government authority” to evade tax.

His lawyers said that just as Mr Abramovich sought professional legal and tax advice and acted on it, he expects that “similar advice was sought at the relevant times by those with responsibility for the day-to-day running” of the companies involved in the scheme.

If this were a real superyacht leasing business, substantial profits might be expected. However Blue Ocean’s accounts show that from 2005 to 2012, its expenses almost matched its income.

This meant almost no corporation tax was due as the company’s profits were tiny.

A note from the Blue Ocean director suggests the close matching of expenses and income was no accident and the company would generate charters when the scheme needed to cover expenses.

“At the beginning of each week we will have a meeting in Blue Ocean where we will look at our current bank balances and our cash needs for the next 1~2 weeks [sic]. If we see a need for a cash injection we will raise an appropriate time charter and invoices,” he wrote.

There is also evidence in the leaked files that charter agreements were backdated. This includes a time charter agreement supposedly signed in July 2005 by Blue Ocean and another Abramovich company in the BVI called Eyke Services. However, records show Eyke Services did not exist at that point – it was not incorporated until a month later.

In another case, a director of Blue Ocean requested the production of a backdated and signed time charter in order to obtain delivery of duty-free fuel for Mr Abramovich’s 86m (282ft) yacht Ecstasea – which could accommodate 15 guests in eight suites – saving the billionaire $44,000 (£35,000) in tax.

In the documents, tax consultants from Deloitte in Cyprus wrote to Mr Holloway, the Blue Ocean director, saying if the ships were pleasure vessels, they would have to pay VAT. But if the vessels were classified as commercial, they would not.

A leading superyacht lawyer Benjamin Maltby told the BBC the type of contracts used for many of Mr Abramovich’s luxury yacht charters were actually designed for commercial ships carrying dry cargos such as grain or steel.

This gives us more evidence that the whole commercial “look” of the operation was a sham.

Mr Abramovich’s superyacht scheme came under legal scrutiny twice, with varying levels of success, the BBC and Bureau of Investigative Journalism has learned.

Richard Bridge captained two of Mr Abramovich’s yachts for almost six years from 2006 to 2012, including the Pelorus, and the giant Eclipse, the pride of Abramovich’s fleet. A couple of years after he finished working for Mr Abramovich, the captain was stopped and questioned at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport.

Italian prosecutors had started proceedings against three of Mr Abramovich’s captains – including Mr Bridge – for unpaid excise duties on refuelling and tax evasion.

But Mr Bridge told the BBC he had contacted Blue Ocean and “their lawyers got onto it”, telling him a few months later the case had been dropped.

Italian court records seen by the BBC show proceedings were halted after the lawyers “produced documentation” proving Pelorus was “entered in the registers as a commercial boat as it is used for commercial purposes or for hire”.

Mr Bridge said he was unaware Mr Abramovich also controlled the companies that were chartering the yachts.

In Cyprus, tax officials were separately investigating Blue Ocean over up to €17m (£14.3m) in unpaid VAT, disputing the company’s claim to be “zero-rated” for VAT because it was a commercial operation.

Blue Ocean’s lawyers said demands to provide evidence the vessels had been used commercially by the companies chartering them were “unreasonable and oppressive”, but they had asked its clients anyway and received no response.

We now know that Blue Ocean’s clients were, of course, Mr Abramovich’s other companies.

According to an appeal judgement in 2018, VAT investigators found Blue Ocean had failed to present any evidence the companies chartering the yachts were “engaged in economic activity” and its claim that the boats were used for commercial purposes was rejected.

In the end, Cyprus pursued Blue Ocean for the lower figure of €14m (£11.8m).

We do not know if the sum was paid – the company failed to attend its own appeal in March 2024 and was dissolved four months later.

Cyprus Confidential is an international collaborative investigation launched in 2023 led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) into Cyprus firms which provided corporate and financial services to associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime. ICIJ reporting team: Simon Lock and Eleanor Rose.

Media partners include The Guardian, the investigative newsroom Paper Trail Media, the Italian newspaper L’Espresso, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).

US President Donald Trump has called the rise of Chinese company DeepSeek “a wake-up call” for the US tech industry, after the emergence of its artificial intelligence (AI) model triggered shockwaves on Wall Street.

Shares in major tech firms such as Nvidia fell sharply, with the chip giant losing almost $600bn (£482bn) in market value.

What has shaken the industry is DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model was made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals – raising questions about the future of America’s AI dominance and the scale of investments US firms are planning.

DeepSeek has become the most downloaded free app in the US just a week after it was launched.

Responding to the news, Trump said the latest developments in China’s AI industry may be “a positive” for the US.

“If you could do it cheaper, if you could do it [for] less [and] get to the same end result. I think that’s a good thing for us,” he told reporters on board Air Force One.

He also said he was not concerned about the breakthrough, adding the US will remain a dominant player in the field.

However, DeepSeek has raised cyber security concerns in some countries with Australian science minister Ed Husic urging caution.

He told Australia’s national broadcaster ABC: “There are a lot of questions that will need to be answered in time on quality, consumer preferences, data and privacy management.”

DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was trained for around $6m (£4.2m) – significantly less than the billions spent by rivals. But this claim has been disputed by others in AI.

Its emergence comes as the US is restricting the sale of the advanced chip technology that powers AI to China.

To continue their work without steady supplies of imported advanced chips, Chinese AI developers have shared their work with each other and experimented with new approaches to the technology.

This has resulted in AI models that require far less computing power than before.

It also means that they cost a lot less than previously thought possible, which has the potential to upend the industry.

Following the shock to markets in the US on Monday, the FTSE 100 stock index of the UK’s biggest publicly-listed companies appeared resilient in early trading on Tuesday, rising by 0.46%.

Futures on the tech-heavy Nasdaq index were also up by 0.1% after Nvidia stock had ticked up slightly in after-hours trading.

But shares in Japanese AI-related firms including Advantest, Softbank and Tokyo Electron fell sharply, helping to push the benchmark Nikkei 225 down by 1.4%.

Several other markets in Asia are closed for the Lunar New Year holiday. Mainland China’s financial markets will be shut from Tuesday and will reopen on 5 February.

The company was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China.

The 40-year-old, an information and electronic engineering graduate, also founded the hedge fund that backed DeepSeek.

He was recently seen at a meeting between industry experts and the Chinese premier Li Qiang.

In a July 2024 interview with The China Academy, Mr Liang said he was surprised by the reaction to the previous version of his AI model.

“We didn’t expect pricing to be such a sensitive issue,” he said.

“We were simply following our own pace, calculating costs, and setting prices accordingly.”

After DeepSeek-R1 was launched earlier this month, the company boasted of “performance on par with” one of OpenAI’s latest models when used for tasks such as maths, coding and natural language reasoning.

DeepSeek’s technology has been praised by high profile figures including OpenAI chief Sam Altman who called it “an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price”, though he added that OpenAI would “obviously deliver much better models” moving forward.

“DeepSeek’s ability to rival US models despite limited access to advanced hardware demonstrates that software ingenuity and data efficiency can compensate for hardware constraints,” said Marina Zhang, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, who focuses on China’s high-tech industries.

Ion Stoica, co-founder and executive chair of AI software company Databricks, told the BBC the lower cost of DeepSeek could spur more companies to adopt AI in their business.

“If that happens, this reduction in cost can accelerate the progress of AI,” he said. “So overall, the market will expand faster, and the value of the market will grow faster.”

The Chinese company claims its model can be trained on 2,000 specialised chips compared to an estimated 16,000 for leading models.

But not everyone is convinced. Some have cast doubt on some of DeepSeek’s claims, including tech mogul Elon Musk.

He responded to a post which claimed that DeepSeek actually has around 50,000 Nvidia chips that have now been banned from export to China, saying: “Obviously.”

When ChatGPT stormed the world of artificial intelligence (AI), an inevitable question followed: did it spell trouble for China, America’s biggest tech rival?

Two years on, a new AI model from China has flipped that question: can the US stop Chinese innovation?

For a while, Beijing seemed to fumble with its answer to ChatGPT, which is not available in China.

Unimpressed users mocked Ernie, the chatbot by search engine giant Baidu. Then came versions by tech firms Tencent and ByteDance, which were dismissed as followers of ChatGPT – but not as good.

Washington was confident that it was ahead and wanted to keep it that way. So the Biden administration ramped up restrictions banning the export of advanced chips and technology to China.

That’s why DeepSeek’s launch has astonished Silicon Valley and the world. The firm says its powerful model is far cheaper than the billions US firms have spent on AI.

So how did a little-known company – whose founder is being hailed on Chinese social media as an “AI hero” – pull this off?

When the US barred the world’s leading chip-makers such as Nvidia from selling advanced tech to China, it was certainly a blow.

Those chips are essential for building powerful AI models that can perform a range of human tasks, from answering basic queries to solving complex math problems.

DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng described the chip ban as their “main challenge” in interviews with local media.

Long before the ban, DeepSeek acquired a “substantial stockpile” of Nvidia A100 chips – estimates range from 10,000 to 50,000 – according to the MIT Technology Review.

Leading AI models in the West use an estimated 16,000 specialised chips. But DeepSeek says it trained its AI model using 2,000 such chips, and thousands of lower-grade chips – which is what makes its product cheaper.

Some, including US tech billionaire Elon Musk, have questioned this claim, arguing the company cannot reveal how many advanced chips it really used given the restrictions.

But experts say Washington’s ban brought both challenges and opportunities to the Chinese AI industry.

It has “forced Chinese companies like DeepSeek to innovate” so they can do more with less, says Marina Zhang, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

“While these restrictions pose challenges, they have also spurred creativity and resilience, aligning with China’s broader policy goals of achieving technological independence.”

The world’s second-largest economy has invested heavily in big tech – from the batteries that power electric vehicles and solar panels, to AI.

Turning China into a tech superpower has long been President Xi Jinping’s ambition, so Washington’s restrictions were also a challenge that Beijing took on.

The release of DeepSeek’s new model on 20 January, when Donald Trump was sworn in as US president, was deliberate, according to Gregory C Allen, an AI expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The timing and the way it’s being messaged – that’s exactly what the Chinese government wants everybody to think – that export controls don’t work and that America is not the global leader in AI,” says Mr Allen, former director of strategy and policy at the US Department of Defense Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.

In recent years the Chinese government has nurtured AI talent, offering scholarships and research grants, and encouraging partnerships between universities and industry.

The National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Learning and other state-backed initiatives have helped train thousands of AI specialists, according to Ms Zhang.

And China had plenty of bright engineers to recruit.

Take DeepSeek’s team for instance – Chinese media says it comprises fewer than 140 people, most of whom are what the internet has proudly declared as “home-grown talent” from elite Chinese universities.

Western observers missed the emergence of “a new generation of entrepreneurs who prioritise foundational research and long-term technological advancement over quick profits”, Ms Zhang says.

China’s top universities are creating a “rapidly growing AI talent pool” where even managers are often under the age of 35.

“Having grown up during China’s rapid technological ascent, they are deeply motivated by a drive for self-reliance in innovation,” she adds.

Deepseek’s founder Liang Wenfeng is an example of this – the 40-year-old studied AI at the prestigious Zhejiang University. In an article on the tech outlet 36Kr, people familiar with him say he is “more like a geek rather than a boss”.

And Chinese media describe him as a “technical idealist” – he insists on keeping DeepSeek as an open-source platform. In fact experts also believe a thriving open-source culture has allowed young start-ups to pool resources and advance faster.

Unlike bigger Chinese tech firms, DeepSeek prioritised research, which has allowed for more experimenting, according to experts and people who worked at the company.

“The Top 50 talents in this field might not be in China, but we can build people like that here,” Mr Liang said in an interview with 36Kr.

But experts wonder how much further DeepSeek can go. Ms Zhang says that “new US restrictions may limit access to American user data, potentially impacting how Chinese models like DeepSeek can go global”.

And others say the US still has a huge advantage, such as, in Mr Allen’s words, “their enormous quantity of computing resources” – and it’s also unclear how DeepSeek will continue using advanced chips to keep improving the model.

But for now, DeepSeek is enjoying its moment in the sun, given that most people in China had never heard of it until this weekend.

His sudden fame has seen Mr Liang become a sensation on China’s social media, where he is being applauded as one of the “three AI heroes” from southern Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong.

The other two are Zhilin Yang, a leading expert at Tsinghua University, and Kaiming He, who teaches at MIT in the US.

DeepSeek has delighted the Chinese internet ahead of Lunar New Year, the country’s biggest holiday. It’s good news for a beleaguered economy and a tech industry that is bracing for further tariffs and the possible sale of TikTok’s US business.

“DeepSeek shows us that only if you have the real deal will you stand the test of time,” a top-liked Weibo comment reads.

“This is the best new year gift. Wish our motherland prosperous and strong,” another reads.

A “blend of shock and excitement, particularly within the open-source community,” is how Wei Sun, principal AI analyst at Counterpoint Research, described the reaction in China.

Fiona Zhou, a tech worker in the southern city of Shenzhen, says her social media feed “was suddenly flooded with DeepSeek-related posts yesterday”.

“People call it ‘the glory of made-in-China’, and say it shocked Silicon Valley, so I downloaded it to see how good it is.”

She asked it for “four pillars of [her] destiny”, or ba-zi – like a personalised horoscope that is based on the date and time of birth.

But to her disappointment, Deepseek was wrong. While she was given a thorough explanation about its “thinking process”, it was not the “four pillars” from her real ba-zi.

She says she will still give it another go at work, as it will probably be more useful for such tasks.

Their numbers are dwindling but the voices of the Auschwitz survivors remain powerful.

“We were stripped of all humanity,” said Leon Weintraub, 99, the oldest of four who spoke beside the notorious Death Gate at the Birkenau extermination camp.

Marking 80 years since its liberation, world leaders and European royalty rubbed shoulders on Monday with 56 survivors of Hitler’s genocide of European Jews.

“We were victims in a moral vacuum,” said Tova Friedman, who described witnessing the horrors of Nazi persecution as a five-and-a-half-year-old girl clinging to her mother’s hand.

She described watching from her hiding place at a labour camp “as all my little friends were rounded up and driven to their deaths, while the heartbreaking cries of their parents fell on deaf ears”.

The warnings from history were clear: the survivors more than anyone understood the risks of intolerance, and antisemitism was the canary in the coal mine.

Under an enormous, white tent that covered the death camp entrance, Leon Weintraub appealed particularly to young people to be “sensitive to all expressions of intolerance and resentment to people who are different”.

The Nazis murdered 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1941 and 1945.

Almost a million were Jews, 70,000 were Polish prisoners, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war and and an unknown number of gay men.

This was one of six death camps the Nazis built in occupied Poland in 1942, and it was by far the biggest.

Another survivor to speak was Janina Iwanska, 94, a Catholic arrested as a child during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. She remembered how so-called Nazi “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele sent all the remaining Roma in the camp to their deaths at Birkenau, because he no longer needed them for his lethal medical experiments.

Marian Turski, 98, said only a few had survived the death camp and now they were but a handful. His thoughts turned to the millions of victims “who will never tell us what they experienced or they felt, just because they were consumed by that mass destruction”.

The director of the Auschwitz museum, Piotr Cywinski, issued a plea to protect the memory of what had happened, as the survivors died out.

“Memory hurts, memory helps, memory guides… without memory you have no history, no experience, no point of reference,” he said, as survivors listened on, many of them wearing blue-and-white striped scarves to symbolise prisoners’ clothing.

Memory was the watchword of this day, marked around the world as International Holocaust Memorial Day.

Polish President Andrzej Duda pledged that Poland could be entrusted to preserve the memory of the six death camps on its territory, at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmno.

“We are the guardians of memory,” said Duda, after laying a wreath at the wall where thousands of prisoners were executed at Auschwitz 1, the concentration camp 3km (1.85 miles) from Birkenau.

Far away from the entrance to a Nazi death camp, at the United Nations in New York, Secretary General António Guterres said “remembrance is not only a moral act, it’s a call to action”, and warned Holocaust denial was spreading and hatred was being stirred up across the globe.

He cited Italian survivor Primo Levi who wrote his memories of the camps for posterity but was unable to endure the scars of what he had witnessed. In the words of fellow survivor Elie Wiesel, Levi “died at Auschwitz 40 years later”.

Among those who travelled to southern Poland for Monday’s commemoration of the day the Red Army liberated Auschwitz were King Charles, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain, and Denmark’s King Frederik and Queen Mary.

Charles III became the first serving British monarch to visit Auschwitz, and could be seen wiping away tears as he listened to the accounts of the four survivors.

As he toured the camp he laid a wreath in memory of the victims.

Sources close to the King said it was a profound visit for him, and one aide described it as a “deeply personal pilgrimage”.

Hours earlier, he said remembering the “evils of the past” remained a “vital task”.

Visiting the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow, which he opened 17 years ago, the King said the Krakow Jewish community had been “reborn” from the ashes of the Holocaust, and that building a kinder and more compassionate world for future generations was the “sacred task of us all”.

Polish-born British survivor Mala Tribich, 94, was liberated from the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen, and attended Monday’s event at Auschwitz.

“We’ve seen the consequences of the camps and the beatings and hate,” she told the BBC. “And what [children] are taught under the circumstances of a despot can be so damaging, not only to them but to everything around. So we really must guard against it.”

Lord Pickles, the UK’s special envoy for post-Holocaust issues and chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, warned “distortion” was threatening the legacy and historical truth of the Holocaust.

Having listened to the survivors inside the tent at Birkenau, he told the BBC “we saw a transfer from memory into history”, as the likelihood of survivors delivering further speeches dwindles.

“That’s very daunting and I don’t believe we’re in a post-Holocaust world,” he added.

A survey across eight countries published last week suggested a widespread belief that another Holocaust could happen again. Concern was particularly high in the US and UK, according to the survey of 1,000 people in each country for Claims Conference.

Additional reporting by Laura Gozzi in London.

The cameras struggled to get a steady shot as Donald Trump took his first historic steps into enemy territory with Kim Jong Un. It was 2019 and the then-45th president of the United States patted the arm of the North Korean leader, then on cue, Kim led him across the threshold that separates his country from South Korea – two countries officially still at war.

Behind them, within the heavily fortified Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), it was chaos as TV crews jostled to get a clear view through a line of North Korean bodyguards who seemed surprised by the onslaught of US media.

At one point, a reporter asked for help and the White House press secretary had to pull them from behind a line of security to the Trump-Kim photo call.

This meeting had been hastily organised – and it showed.

“I never expected to meet you at this place,” said Kim to Trump.

The US president had organised the last-minute rendezvous on Twitter, as it was then known, just 30 hours earlier when he suggested meeting Chairman Kim at the DMZ “just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!”

The impromptu invitation created a third and last incredible TV moment between a showman president and a once reclusive dictator.

Now, it appears there could be more. Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview broadcast last Thursday that he will once again “reach out” to Kim.

“I got along with him,” Trump added. “He is not a religious zealot. He happens to be a smart guy.”

The BBC understands that there has been very little contact between the US and North Korea in the last four years during the Biden administration. Washington has sent messages but there has been no reply from Pyongyang.

The last meeting between the two nations, when Trump was last in office, did not advance a longed-for deal to get North Korea to give up its prized possession – its nuclear weapons.

Since then, Kim has advanced his missile programme and claims to have successfully tested a hypersonic missile, despite being subject to strict international sanctions.

It’s a far cry from when Trump used to boast that the two “fell in love”.

The question is, can the relationship be rekindled – or could it be a very different picture this time around?

Washington will, after all, be dealing with a very different Kim now. In the last four years his alliances and fortunes have shifted – and his relationship with another world leader appears to have strengthened too. So, could it mean that this has all changed his dynamic with Trump for good?

“It’s definitely a possibility,” says Jenny Town, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and the director of Stimson’s Korea Program.

“You can tell by Donald Trump’s decision to appoint a special envoy for sensitive issues that include North Korea, I think it gives you an indication of kind of where his thinking is on that right now.”

Trump has brought back some of those who helped set up his summits with Kim, including the former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell who has been picked as his presidential envoy for special missions on “some of the hottest spots” around the world, including North Korea.

But there have been changes in the intervening years.

“North Korea will spend the first year trying to prove to Trump that Kim Jong Un isn’t who he was in 2017 – that he’s militarily stronger, that he’s politically stronger, and that, if they ever get back to that point, it’s going to be a very different negotiation,” argues Ms Town.

Kim is also embracing a new friend – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

He has helped North Korea with food and fuel in return for weapons and soldiers for his war effort in Ukraine. Pyongyang is no longer as desperate for relief from US sanctions.

Rachel Minyoung Lee, who worked as a senior North Korean media analyst for the U.S. government told the BBC that Pyongyang has “primed” its people by informing them in state media about Donald Trump’s return.

But she believes the “bar for entering talks will now be higher than before.”

“Two things will have to happen,” she added. “North Korea is desperate enough to return to the negotiating table, for example due to a crumbling economy or a significant cooling off in its relations with Russia; or the United States makes an offer to North Korea that is drastically different from what it did in the past.”

Trump sparked speculation that he is willing to restart talks with Kim during a recent signing ceremony in the Oval Office, when he said: “I was very friendly with him. He liked me. I liked him. We got along very well.”

But the Trump administration should be realistic this time around, says Sydney Seiler who until last year was the national intelligence officer for North Korea on the U.S. National Intelligence Council.

“The arms control thing is a red herring. There is no arms control to be had with North Korea. We’ve tried arms control,” he said.

“Maybe North Korea will sit and talk, and maybe they’ll refrain from long range missile launches, and they’ll not conduct a seventh nuclear test, and the issue will be largely manageable. That’s the best-case scenario.

“The worst-case scenario is that even if you talk, they’ll continue to launch, they’ll continue to test. So, Donald Trump would have to consider: what is the value of engaging North Korea?”

Especially because they will both carry significant scars from their last meeting.

I watched the Winter Olympics in 2018 in South Korea’s chilly Pyeongchang with an unexpected guest – sitting below my balcony seat was Kim’s sister.

It was the first time a member of the Kim family had visited the South since the end of the Korean War, a visit that elicited a loud scream of surprise from my South Korean producer. Sitting near her on the stands was the U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

From what I observed, they could barely look at each other. But still it was an extraordinary step for diplomacy, and one that would have been unimaginable a few months ago.

When Trump took office in January 2017, he had been warned about North Korea. The last three presidents had tried and failed to pressure the state to give up its nuclear weapons after several rounds of talks and sanctions.

After Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Kim fired a missile almost every month.

The president took to Twitter to air his wrath threatening to rain down ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea. He dubbed Kim as “Little Rocket Man”, in return Pyongyang nicknamed Trump “Dotard”.

Then came threats about pressing nuclear buttons, first from Pyongyang, then Washington.

Trump wrote on Twitter that he too had a nuclear button, “but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

After a year of acrimonious exchanges and brinkmanship that had some in Seoul wondering if they should plan for war – everything changed.

The liberal South Korean president, Moon Jae-in had been hoping for an icebreaker with Pyongyang. He was born in a refugee camp after his parents fled the war in the North. He had even visited his aunt there in a rare family exchange between the two countries.

When Pyongyang opened the door a crack and asked – could North Korea take part in the Winter Olympics? Seoul, led by Moon, kicked it wide open.

Trump arrived in Singapore for his summit with Kim promising to make history.

The North Korean leader took a night-time stroll through glitzy downtown and took selfies as if he was on a night out with the boys. He’d barely travelled outside his own borders – but he was proving that he too knew how to put on a show.

But even after his much-photographed handshake with Trump, this now very personal form of diplomacy produced very little in the way of concrete promises for North Korea to disarm.

They both signed a vaguely worded statement to work towards denuclearisation and promised to meet again.

The stakes were higher for the second Trump and Kim show in Vietnam. Photo-ops would not be enough from a US president who bragged about his deal-making prowess.

We waited for hours in the humid streets of Hanoi outside the gates of the French colonial Metropole Hotel, where we were initially told the pair were having lunch.

But it turned out, lunch had been cancelled.

The BBC has spoken to three people who took part in the summit to piece together what went wrong. It seems both leaders may have overestimated the hand they had to play.

Trump offered to lift U.S. sanctions on North Korea if Kim gave up all his nuclear weapons, nuclear material and nuclear facilities.

The president had reportedly been warned that the North had turned this deal down in the past, but he felt his personal rapport with the North Korean leader would help him succeed.

It did not.

Kim gambled on Trump accepting a more modest deal. He too thought their personal relationship would allow him to prevail. He offered to dismantle his aging Yongbyon nuclear complex for an end to all US sanctions since 2016.

“Singapore had given Kim Jong Un some prestige and the belief that finally, the United States is coming to its senses and talking to me on my own terms,” says Mr Seiler.

“He came to the table expecting, because he had been coached, we know, quietly, by the South Koreans who were saying, Donald Trump is politically desperate, he is no longer listening to John Bolton, he is willing to agree to a deal that puts a small part of your nuclear program on the table in return for sanctions relief.”

But the president had also been briefed. He had been told that the North could still produce uranium at an enrichment centre near Pyongyang. The U.S. said it had been monitoring other sites the North thought they’d kept secret for some time.

“I think that they were surprised that we knew,” Trump later said.

The deal Kim offered was not nothing, but it was not good enough for the US president. “Kim Jong Un comes to the table and he had no plan B,” says Mr Seiler.

“So, when Donald Trump says we’ve got to do more than this, Kim Jong Un remains totally inflexible.”

The BBC understands from its sources that Kim tried to save the deal. He sent an aide to remind Washington what was on the table and that they would dismantle all of the Yongbyon plant.

But Trump was already heading to the airport.

“The story of Hanoi needs to be gotten right,” says Mr Seiler. “The common theme is Donald Trump walked out of the room. It was an all or nothing deal, and when Kim Jong Un wasn’t willing to put it all on the table, Donald Trump walked. That’s a very simplistic pedestrian assessment of what transpired at Hanoi.”

As Trump flew back to Washington, the North Koreans took the unprecedented step of holding a press conference. Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho told reporters that this opportunity may never come again.

It hasn’t as yet – and Kim may think twice about taking part in talks again.

“There definitely was an opportunity there,” says Jenny Town.

“Kim Jong Un had actually built-up domestic expectation in North Korea that they were on the verge of a breakthrough, and that it was going to bring benefits.”

“If we could have taken advantage of that moment, we could have been on a very different track. Were you going to get denuclearisation easily? Absolutely not. But would we be in a very different place in terms of tensions on the Korean Peninsula and how far North Korea has gone in its nuclear development, maybe. We’ll never know, obviously, but there was definitely a will there that doesn’t exist now.”

Donald Trump’s unorthodox diplomacy reduced tensions for a while, but it did not stop the expansion of Pyongyang’s weapons programme.

His 20 steps into North Korean territory may also have legitimised a regime with one of the worst human rights records on the planet.

But after three meetings and there appeared to be a connection between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un that offered some hope that one day there would be peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Top picture credit: Getty Images

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DeepSeek, a Chinese AI-chatbot app which launched last week, has sparked chaos in the US markets and raised questions about the future of America’s AI dominance. The BBC takes a look at how the app works.

DeepSeek looks and feels like any other chatbot, though it leans towards being overly chatty.

Just as with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, you open the app (or website) and ask it questions about anything, and it does its best to give you a response.

It gives long answers and will not be drawn on expressing an opinion, however directly it is asked for one.

The chatbot often begins its response by saying the topic is “highly subjective” – whether that is politics (is Donald Trump a good US president?) or soft drinks (which is more tasty, Pepsi or Coke?).

It wouldn’t even commit to saying whether or not it was better than OpenAI’s rival artificial intelligence (AI) assistant ChatGPT, but it did weigh up the pros and cons of both – ChatGPT did exactly the same, and even used very similar language.

DeepSeek says it was trained on data up to October 2023, and while the app seems to have access to current information such as today’s date, the website version does not.

That is not dissimilar to earlier versions of ChatGPT and is probably a similar attempt at safeguarding – to stop the chatbot spewing out misinformation pumped onto the web in real time.

It can be quite fast in its responses, but is currently groaning under the weight of so many people rushing to try it out as it has gone viral.

But there is one area in which it is nothing like its US rival – DeepSeek censors itself when it comes to questions about subjects banned in China.

Sometimes it begins a response, which then disappears from the screen and is replaced by “let’s talk about something else”.

One obviously taboo subject is the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square which ended with 200 civilians being killed by the military according to the Chinese government – other estimates have ranged from hundreds to many thousands.

But DeepSeek will not answer any questions about it, or even more broadly about what happened in China on that day.

US-developed ChatGPT, by comparison, does not hold back in its answers about Tiananmen Square.

Kayla Blomquist, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and director of the Oxford China Policy Lab, says “relatively speaking” the Chinese government has been “hands off” with the app.

“I would say there’s a shift as we’ve seen an announcement in huge investment from the central government just in the last week – so that is probably going to signal a change moving forward.”

DeepSeek comes with the same caveats as any other chatbots regarding accuracy, and has the look and feel of more established US AI assistants already used by millions.

For many – especially those who do not subscribe to top-tier services – it probably feels pretty much the same.

Imagine a mathematical problem, in which the true answer runs to 32 decimal places but the shortened version runs to eight.

It’s not quite as good – but for most people, that won’t matter.

It may be the case it has managed to cut costs and compute, but we do know that it is built at least in part on the shoulders of the giants: it uses Nvidia chips – albeit older, cheaper versions – and utilises Meta’s open-source Llama architecture, as well as AliBaba’s equivalent Qwen.

“I think this absolutely challenges the idea of monetisation strategies that a lot of leading US AI firms have had,” said Ms Blomquist.

“It is pointing to potential methods of model development that are much less compute and resource-intensive that would potentially signal a shift in paradigm, although that’s unconfirmed and remains to be seen.

“We’ll see what the next couple of months bring.”

US President Donald Trump’s administration has fired more than a dozen justice department lawyers who worked on two criminal cases against him.

They were fired after Acting Attorney General James McHenry concluded they could not “be trusted to faithfully implement the president’s agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president”, a department official told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

The lawyers were part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s team which investigated Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and his alleged attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

The firings on Monday are effective immediately.

Mr Smith was appointed as special counsel in 2022 to oversee the two justice department cases into Trump. The president had vowed to fire him “within two seconds” of taking office, but he quit before his inauguration.

Both cases resulted in criminal charges against Trump, who pleaded not guilty.

But the cases were closed following his November election win. Prosecutors wrote that justice department regulations do not allow the prosecution of a sitting president.

It was not immediately clear which members of Mr Smith’s team were fired.

Many of those who worked on Mr Smith’s teams were career corruption and national security prosecutors who had worked across various administrations and were appointed to the cases.

They reportedly received a letter on Monday which said their role in investigating and prosecuting the president made them unsuitable to work in the department.

“Firing prosecutors because of cases they were assigned to work on is just unacceptable,” former US Attorney Joyce Vance told NBC News. “It’s anti-rule of law; it’s anti-democracy.”

The firings follow a major reassignment of some of the justice department’s top officials with expertise in a wide range of fields including national security and public corruption. On Monday, one of them, the chief of the public integrity section, reportedly resigned.

Trump and his team have accused the justice department of pursuing politically motivated cases against him, his associates and Republicans. Trump vowed an immediate overhaul of the department, which he says has been “weaponised” against him, while campaigning for re-election.

His nominee to lead the justice department, Pam Bondi, has echoed Trump’s view that federal prosecutions against him were political persecution, saying the department “had been weaponised for years and years and years”.

Mr Smith has publicly defended his work. In a letter accompanying the final draft of his report into Trump’s actions after the 2020 election, he wrote: “The claim from [Trump] that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable.”

Also on Monday, Washington DC’s top federal prosecutor announced the launch of an internal review into the charging decisions behind hundreds of Capitol riot cases, according to CBS.

Acting US Attorney Edward Martin, a Trump appointee, ordered prosecutors in his office to turn in documents, emails and other information related to the previous administration’s decision to bring an obstruction charge against more than 200 Capitol attack defendants.

US First Lady Melania Trump’s new official portrait has been released.

Shot in the White House one day after her husband was sworn in as president, the black and white photo shows her wearing a dark business suit and white shirt as she rests her hands on a reflective table in the Yellow Oval Room.

The Washington Monument, which towers over the nation’s capital, is seen in the background.

Mrs Trump – a former fashion model herself – is familiar with having her clothing choices and poses dissected by critics.

The portrait was shot by Régine Mahaux, a photographer from Belgium who has been taking photos of the Trump family for more than 20 years.

She also photographed Mrs Trump’s official portrait in 2017, for Trump’s first term in office. “I was really honoured to be chosen to shoot this official portrait for the second time,” Ms Mahaux told the BBC on Monday.

“As an artist to work with such an inspiring woman is a great privilege. She is a perfectionist and is really involved in the creative process.”

Here is what experts said about the image.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Faculty Director for the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She curated the exhibition Every Eye is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States at The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC.

Like the official portrait from her husband’s first administration, also by the Trumps’ favourite photographer Régine Mahaux, this picture of Melania Trump shows her wearing business attire and posed in front of a window.

While the window in the first picture was recognisable to White House aficionados as it was located in the family quarters of the executive mansion, this one sited in the Yellow Oval Room facing the Ellipse features the Washington Monument placed just off to the left behind the First Lady.

The rhyming of her body with this well-known obelisk, a symbol of the power invested in the first presidency, is striking.

Her pose, with fingertips placed firmly on a remarkably reflective table, seems to communicate a readiness to “get down to business” and act upon the platform afforded to the unique role of hostess and advocate for the disempowered that Americans have historically expected first ladies to inhabit.

Mrs Trump is extraordinarily comfortable in front of the camera, and this probably has a lot to do with her past as a model. But I think the relationship that she has developed with Ms Mahaux over the past two decades accounts for most of that ease.

This photographer is a person that she trusts to make her appear confident, composed, and classy.

To be good at their jobs, models must put themselves in the hands of the photographer who is directing the shoot and trusting that the resulting pictures will serve their purpose is critical to the equation.

Mrs Trump trusts Ms Mahaux to accurately communicate her message, whatever that may be. The message of this picture is that the first lady has moved from the marginal space of the family quarters to the room just above the Oval Office.

She appears ready to wield more of the power that she seemed rather reluctant to embrace in her first stay at the White House. And yet, she has positioned herself firmly behind that ultra shiny table, keeping a bit of a boundary between herself and the viewer.

Staying a little mysterious, a little enigmatic, and a little inscrutable.

Ellie Violet Bramley is a fashion writer who says the portrait carries a heaviness that appears at odds with the traditional role of a first lady.

From the suit to the stance, the new portrait feels carefully orchestrated to exude a kind of power that feels at odds with the first lady’s traditional role of softening a presidency in the public’s eyes – and making it feel more human.

Unlike the military-inflected ensemble worn by the first lady on inauguration day, this is a look that feels more aligned with corporate power. Ditto the stance: the positioning of the hands on the table seems intended to semaphore a kind of business-like intention – it has, after all, been reported that the first lady has been “preparing intensively” for the White House this time around.

Much could be read into the details.

Her shirt might be undone, in contrast to the severe, buttoned-up tailoring of last week, but her shoulders are sharp and accentuated. Her wide lapels could be reminiscent of the suiting of 1980s New York, a time and place when Melania’s husband cut his teeth, but the silhouette is more sculpted and modern.

During Trump’s first presidency, Mrs Trump was largely quiet, beyond a slogan jacket that read “I really don’t care, do you?” worn to a migrant child detention centre, and her Be Best platform, which had somewhat vague aims such as promoting healthy living.

This time around, her appearances have hinted at a more intentional second run. The Washington Monument stands in the background, locating her very firmly in DC and not New York or Mar-a-Lago.

And gone is the soft focus, the half-smile and the parted lips from her official portrait last time she was in the White House. Gone also is the colour: this time around the portrait is black and white.

Much can be read into her eyes. The mere fact that they are so directly looking at camera – and the viewer in turn – in contrast to inauguration day when she opted for a boater hat that shrouded her eyes, feels noteworthy.

But while eye contact can be about approachability, here it doesn’t read that way. If previous first ladies such as Michele Obama and Jill Biden made accessibility their brand, in her official portrait, Melania remains enigmatic.

An AI-powered chatbot by the Chinese company DeepSeek has quickly become the most downloaded free app on Apple’s store, following its January release in the US.

The app’s sudden popularity, as well as DeepSeek’s reportedly low costs compared to those of US-based AI companies, have thrown financial markets into a spin.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has hailed DeepSeek as “one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs” in AI.

The company says its latest AI models are on par with industry-leading models in the US – like ChatGPT – at a fraction of the cost.

Researchers behind the app have said it only took $6m (£4.8m) to build it, much less than the billions spent by AI companies in the US.

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company founded in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China.

The company was launched in July 2023, but its popular AI assistant app was not released in the US until 10 January, according to Sensor Tower.

Liang Wenfeng partly funded DeepSeek using money from a hedge fund that he also launched.

The 40-year-old, an information and electronic engineering graduate, reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, now banned from export to China.

Experts believe this collection – which some estimates put at 50,000 – led him to launch DeepSeek, by pairing these chips with cheaper, lower-end ones that are still available to import.

Mr Liang was recently seen at a meeting between industry experts and the Chinese premier Li Qiang.

The company’s AI app is available for download in Apple’s App Store and online at its website.

The service, which is free, has quickly become the top downloaded app on Apple’s store, although there have been some reports of people having trouble signing up.

It has also become the top-rated free application in the US on Apple’s app store.

DeepSeek has become popular for its powerful AI assistant which operates similarly to ChatGPT.

According to its description on the App Store, it is designed “to answer your questions and enhance your life efficiently”.

Comments left by users rating the app say “it gives the writing more personality”.

But the chatbot skirts at least one politically sensitive question.

When the BBC asked the app what happened at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, DeepSeek replied: “I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.”

DeepSeek was reportedly developed for a fraction of the cost of its US rivals – hundreds of millions of dollars less – raising questions about the future of America’s AI dominance.

The company’s possibly lower costs roiled financial markets on 27 January, leading the tech-heavy Nasdaq to fall more than 3% in a broad sell-off that included chip makers and data centres around the world.

Nvidia, a US-based company that makes the powerful chips that run AI, appears to have been hit the worst.

It lost nearly $600bn in market value on Monday – the largest one-day drop for any company in US history – as its stock price plunged 17% over the course of the day.

Nvidia had been the most valuable company in the world, when measured by market capitalization, but fell to third place after Apple and Microsoft on Monday when its market value shrank to $2.9tn from $3.5tn, Forbes reported.

DeepSeek uses less advanced semiconductor chips than the ones created by Nvidia.

Their success undercuts the belief that bigger budgets and top-tier chips are the only ways of advancing AI, a prospect which has created massive uncertainty about the need and future of high-performance chip.

US President Donald Trump is expected to officially move to remove diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from the defence department, one of several military-focused executive orders he is planning to sign on Monday.

A second order will task US officials with formulating a policy on transgender troops.

A third executive order will reinstate military personnel who were discharged for refusing Covid-19 vaccines.

Removing DEI programmes from within the federal government was one of Trump’s central campaign promises – and one that he moved swiftly to implement upon taking office last week.

DEI programmes aim to promote participation in workplaces by people from a range of backgrounds.

Their backers say they address historical underrepresentation and discrimination against certain groups, including racial minorities, but critics say such programmes can themselves be discriminatory.

The Trump administration claims that removing these initiatives from the US military will help boost recruitment levels.

Defence officials have previously said that the military services collectively missed recruitment goals by 41,000 personnel in the 2023 fiscal year.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has promised to eliminate similar initiatives from the military, telling reporters on Monday that “there are more executive orders coming”.

The order include a ban on what the administration considers discriminatory race- or sex-based preferences by any branch of the military, Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security, a White House official confirmed to the BBC.

Additionally, any remaining DEI-related bureaucracy will be eliminated from those departments.

It remains unclear what specific programmes will be affected by the order.

In a December 2020 report, the department’s Board on Diversity and Inclusion recommended a number of steps, including the removal of “aptitude test barriers that adversely impact diversity” and incorporating the “value of cultivating diversity and inclusion” into leadership and professionalism curricula.

Over the weekend, it was reported that the US Air Force was reviewing material on the role of black and female pilots during World War Two from its training programmes as part of an effort to comply with Trump’s DEI orders.

But on Sunday, military officials clarified that certain curricula will not be removed from basic military training.

During the campaign in June, Trump said the military’s purpose is “to win wars, not to be woke”.

Hegseth told reporters on Monday that the job of the military is “lethality and readiness and war fighting”.

“Military training will be focused on the readiness of what our troops in the field need to deter our enemies,” he added.

The move forms part of a larger, government-wide effort to remove DEI practices from the federal workforce.

Immediately after taking office, Trump ordered that all US government staff working on DEI schemes were to be put on immediate paid administrative leave.

The White House gave them until 17:00 EST (2200 GMT) the following day to be put on leave before the offices and programmes in question were shut down.

In an order, Trump said that the programmes were “dangerous, demeaning and immoral”.

On Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs also said it had has placed almost 60 employees on leave as it works to implement Trump’s order last week to eliminate DEI from federal workplaces.

In a statement, the department said that the salary of the employees – who were solely focused on DEI initiatives – were collectively paid about $8m, an average of about $136,000 (£109,000) per year. One employee was making over $220,000 a year.

Trump is expected to sign a second executive order directing the military to formulate policies regarding the inclusion of transgender troops and update any guidance on the topic.

A White House fact sheet uses the term “trans-identifying” rather than transgender.

It is unclear how many transgender personnel are serving in the US military – although previous estimates from researchers have put the figure at between 9,000 and 15,000.

As part of the order, the use of pronouns will be forbidden across the defence department, and males will be explicitly forbidden from using facilities designated for females.

In 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed an order allowing transgender people to serve in the military and preventing discharges based on gender.

During most of Trump’s first term at the White House, transgender personnel were banned from joining or serving unless they received a waiver.

The Trump administration has claimed members who undergo transition surgery are often incapable of the physical demands of their jobs – potentially harming military readiness. The White House did not provide evidence of this claim and the BBC has reached out to the Pentagon for comment.

Sparta, an organisation which advocates on behalf of transgender military personnel, criticised the order, saying that transgender troops have served in combat zones and have “demonstrated their ability” to operate in military units.

“While some transgender troops do have surgery, the recovery time and cost is minimal, and is scheduled so as not to impact deployments or mission readiness,” said Sue Fulton, an army veteran and senior advisor to Sparta.

“The readiness and physical capabilities of transgender service members is not different from that of other service members,” Fulton added.

In 2017, the Palm Center – an independent research organisation – estimated that removing about 10,000 transgender troops from the military could cost approximately $960m.

The third order reinstates US military personnel who were discharged for refusal to accept Covid-19 vaccinations during the pandemic.

Those service members will be reinstated with full back pay and benefits, and receive their former rank.

In his inauguration speech, Trump said that these service members were “unjustly expelled”.

About 8,000 US military personnel were discharged from service for refusing the vaccines between 2021 and 2023 – of which only 43 were reinstated before Trump’s return to the White House.

A former high-ranking Pentagon official – who spoke on condition of anonymity – told the BBC that their refusal to take vaccines was tantamount to damaging “good order” and discipline.

The official called the reinstatement of the troops “concerning” and said he feared it could create a precedent to be able to opt out of other vaccines, such as those given to service members for yellow fever or smallpox.

The mineral-rich east of the Democratic Republic of Congo has been dogged by conflict for more than 30 years, since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Numerous armed groups have competed with the central authorities for power and control of the potential fortune in this vast nation.

The instability has sucked in neighbouring countries to devastating effect – notoriously in the 1990s when two huge conflicts, dubbed Africa’s World Wars, resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

After a rapid advance in the region, fighters from the M23 rebel group have entered Goma – a major city of more than a million people in the east of DR Congo.

Sitting on the border with Rwanda and the shores of Lake Kivu, it is a vital trading and transport hub that is within reach of mining towns supplying metals and minerals in high demand such as gold, tin and coltan, which is a key component of mobile phones and batteries for electric vehicles.

The rebels say they now control the city, but the Congolese government says its troops still hold some key locations.

The M23 are led by ethnic Tutsis, who say they needed to take up arms to protect the rights of the minority group.

They say that several previous deals to end the fighting have not been respected – they take their name from a peace agreement that was signed on 23 March 2009.

Shortly after its creation in 2012, the M23 rapidly gained territory and seized Goma – acts that were met with international opprobrium and accusations of war crimes and human rights violations.

It was forced to withdraw from Goma, and then suffered a series of heavy defeats at the hands of the Congolese army along with a UN force that saw it expelled from the country.

M23 fighters then agreed to be integrated into the army in return for promises that Tutsis would be protected.

But, in 2021, the group took up arms again, saying the promises had been broken.

Neighbouring Rwanda has in the past consistently denied that it supported the M23, but ever since 2012 UN experts have accused it of providing weapons, logistical support and even ultimately commanding the rebels.

DR Congo’s government, as well as the US and France, have also identified Rwanda as backing the group. Last year, a UN experts report said that up to 4,000 Rwandan troops were fighting alongside the M23.

In a statement on Sunday, Rwanda did not explicitly deny that it backed the M23 but instead said that the fighting near its border was a “serious threat” to its “security and territorial integrity”.

It added that Rwanda was being scapegoated and blamed the recent fighting on the Congolese authorities, saying they had refused to enter into a dialogue with the M23.

A peace process, mediated by Angola and involving Rwanda and DR Congo, did result in a ceasefire deal last year, however that soon fell apart and fighting resumed.

The origin of the current fighting can partly be traced back to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

About 800,000 people – the vast majority from the Tutsi community – were slaughtered by ethnic Hutu extremists.

The genocide ended with the advance of a force of Tutsi-led rebels commanded by Paul Kagame, who is now president.

Fearing reprisals, an estimated one million Hutus then fled across the border to what is now DR Congo. This stoked ethnic tensions as a marginalised Tutsi group in the east – the Banyamulenge – felt increasingly under threat.

Rwanda’s army twice invaded DR Congo, saying it was going after some of those responsible for the genocide, and worked with members of the Banyamulenge and other armed groups.

After 30 years of conflict, one of the Hutu groups, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which includes some of those responsible for the Rwandan genocide, is still active in eastern DR Congo.

Rwanda describes the FDLR as a “genocidal militia” and says its continued existence in the DR Congo’s east threatens its own territory.

It accuses the Congolese authorities of working with the FDLR – accusations which DR Congo denies.

Rwanda is unlikely to stay out of DR Congo unless it is satisfied that the FDLR is no longer a threat to itself, or to the Tutsi communities in eastern DR Congo.

However, it is widely accused of using the conflict as a way to profit from eastern DR Congo’s mineral wealth.

A UN peacekeeping mission has been in place since 1999. The current force – known as Monusco – is made up of more than 10,000 troops.

However, of these, only the Force Intervention Brigade is allowed to carry out offensive operations against armed groups. It was this force that helped defeat the M23 in 2013.

Monusco has been the target of anger from ordinary Congolese who see it as failing to do its job. President Félix Tshisekedi, deeming the mission a failure, had asked it to leave by the end of last year.

But the departure was delayed and in December the mission was extended for another year.

The Southern African Development Community (Sadc), a regional grouping of 16 countries, has also deployed a military force to eastern DR Congo, but it has been unable to halt the rebels.

South Africa said nine of its soldiers had been killed in clashes with rebels at the end of last week as they were trying to stop the advance on Goma. Three Malawian soldiers have also been killed.

The UN said that Uruguay had lost one of its soldiers who was part of the Monusco force.

The seven members of one of Scotland’s biggest child sex abuse rings have been given life-long sentences and warned that they may never be released.

Three victims under the age of 13 were subjected to horrific sexual abuse and violence in a Glasgow drug den dubbed “the beastie house” over a seven-year period.

Police said the children had suffered “unimaginable abuse”, with the offences including rape, attempted murder and assault.

Iain Owens, 46; Elaine Lannery, 40; Lesley Williams, 43; Paul Brannan, 42; Scott Forbes, 51; Barry Watson, 48, and John Clark, 49, were jailed for between eight and 20 years and handed orders for lifelong restriction (OLRs).

These orders are reserved for the most serious court cases in Scotland which do not involve murder, and mean the individual will either be in prison or on parole for the rest of their life.

Judge Lord Beckett told the gang, whose jail sentences totalled more than 93 years, that they may never be released from prison.

He said: “This court is used to hearing the worst examples of human behaviour but such depravity towards young children is beyond my experience.

“This is not typical behaviour and such extreme abuse of children seems to be rare.”

He praised the “formidable strength” of the children and their “courage and perseverance”, despite threats from Owens.

Lord Beckett added: “It is possible to imagine from their desperate darkness, their carers have brought some light to their young lives – a home, a structure and nurture over a number of years.”

The judge also highlighted the victim impact statements and said one child wrote with “agonising articulacy” about her ordeal and the suffering of the other children.

He added: “In stark contrast to what was inflicted on her, and its impact, an impression of innate humanity shines through her words.”

Warning: This article contains details readers may find upsetting

Two girls and a boy were violently and sexually assaulted on multiple occasions between 2012 and 2019.

The trial heard that the gang would hold “rape nights” and “dance and sex nights” in a squalid flat in Glasgow that was frequented by drug users.

A girl was raped by members of the gang while she was still young enough to wear a nappy.

She described the flat as the “dark and scary beastie house” because she had been locked in a cupboard with a box that was full of spiders.

The girl was also shut in an oven and a fridge and was forced to eat dog food.

An older boy and girl were also subjected to savage beatings and sexual violence.

Members of the gang also used Class A drugs in front of the children and caused them to consume alcohol and drugs.

The trial heard that the children first came into contact with social work in Glasgow in August 2017 and were deemed to be at risk in July 2018.

But the allegations of violence and sexual abuse did not come to light until March 2020.

Police were alerted by a man who had got to know the children. One of the victims became hysterical when she mistakenly thought she had been shut in a room.

The man and his wife then documented details of what the children recalled happening at the hands of the gang.

Jurors were also told Owens, Lannery, Williams, Watson, Clark and Forbes – who was known as Scott the Cameraman – all had previous convictions but none were for any type of sex crime.

The gang had denied the charges but were found guilty in November 2023 after a two-month trial at the High Court in Glasgow.

Owens, Lannery, Brannan and Williams were found guilty of attempted murder.

Charges related to causing the children to take part in seances and witchcraft were dropped during the trial.

Sentencing had been delayed until now because of delays in risk assessments which were ordered to help Lord Beckett decide whether to impose the lifelong restriction orders.

Owens was jailed for at least 20 years before he can apply for parole, Lannery for 17 years, Brannan for 15 years and Williams for 14 years.

Clark was sentenced to at least 10 years, Watson to nine years and six months, and Forbes to eight years.

Another woman, 40-year-old Marianne Gallagher, was convicted of one count of assault to injury but was cleared of all other charges.

Her sentencing was initially deferred for 12 months for good behaviour and returned to court on 6 January this year.

She was spared further punishment and admonished by Lord Beckett after he heard Gallagher had not offended over the last year.

After the sentencing, Det Insp Lesley-Ann McGee said it had been “a long, complex and challenging investigation” and that she hoped the outcome could help the young victims move forward.

She also urged anyone who has been affected by abuse to contact Police Scotland, no matter how much time had passed.

Colin Anderson, independent chair of Glasgow’s child protection committee, said the case would now be the subject of a case learning review.

He said this would be led by an independent expert and feature input from agencies, individuals and families.

Mary Glasgow, chief executive at Children First, said no sentence would reflect the “extreme cruelty and horrifying abuse” that the children experienced.

She added: “The depths of their suffering will be unimaginable to most people in Scotland, but none of us should turn away from it.

“This is one of the most extreme cases of abuse ever seen in a Scottish court, but every day children and young people in Scotland are experiencing violence and abuse.”

Leading KC Tommy Ross said orders for lifelong restriction (OLRs) are reserved for the most serious court cases which do not involve murder.

Before an order is imposed the subject must undergo an extensive risk assessment process, conducted by psychologists, which typically takes about 12 weeks.

A judge then sets a minimum prison term – known as the punishment part – that the offender must serve before they are eligible to apply for parole.

And, if granted parole, they are subject to recall back to prison in the event that they commit any new offences or breach the terms of their release.

Mr Ross told BBC Scotland News: “Essentially when you get an order for lifelong restriction you will either be in prison or parole for the rest of your natural life.”

In 2023/24 a total of 18 OLRs were imposed in courts across Scotland

If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this story, support and advice is available via the BBC Action Line.

Yellow warnings for wind and heavy rain have been issued for much of Wales and southern England as Storm Herminia hits parts of the UK.

The Met Office says Herminia – first recorded in Spain and France – brings with it the possibility of damage and disruption, days after Storm Éowyn left two people dead when it battered the UK and Ireland.

Heavy showers and thunderstorms are expected to continue across the UK on Monday, but there is particular concern for flooding in parts of Wales and southern England.

Strong winds have already brought power cuts to thousands in south-west England, while flooding led to a major incident being declared in Somerset.

One Met Office yellow weather warning is in force across southern England until 10:00 GMT on Tuesday and another across south-west Wales until 21:00.

Forecasters warn there could be some flooding, including more rapid flash flooding with the thunderstorms.

A Met Office yellow weather warning for wind is in place across southern England and much of Wales until 06:00 GMT on Tuesday.

Gusts are expected to reach 70mph or more around exposed coasts, while areas inland can expect wind up to 50mph.

This could cause damage to buildings, such as tiles coming off roofs, and cause disruption to transport.

National Rail is advising commuters to check before they travel – specifically for those using ScotRail, Transport for Wales and CrossCountry.

Somerset Council has declared a major incident as heavy rain and flooding continue to cause disruption.

A care home in South Petherton had to be evacuated after it flooded overnight and dozens of residents on an estate for over-50s in Charlton Mackrell were also evacuated by boat.

Emergency rest centres have been opened and some roads, schools and at least one shop are closed.

“It’s been a difficult night for some of our residents,” council leader Bill Revans told BBC Radio Somerset.

Storm Herminia was named by the Spanish weather service Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (Aemet) on Friday. Heavy rains and wind battered the north of the country, with gusts exceeding 62mph being recorded.

Meanwhile, floodwaters caused by the storm left cars and buildings submerged in western France.

A British sailor is also missing off the French coast after his yacht was found “eviscerated”, French authorities said.

Herminia is not powerful enough over the UK to be officially classed as a storm by the Met Office – unlike the far more powerful Éowyn, which left a trail of destruction and disruption after causing several rare red weather warnings.

The Met Office said Éowyn was “probably the strongest storm” to hit the UK in at least 10 years.

Two people were killed on Friday after trees fell on their cars. A 19-year-old died in East Ayrshire, Scotland while a 20-year-old man was killed in County Donegal, Ireland.

Thousands of properties across the UK were still without power on Sunday after Éowyn caused widespread damage to electricity infrastructure in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Around 65,000 homes and businesses are still without power in Northern Ireland, but supply has been restored to 220,000 customers so far, NIE Networks confirmed.

Ten schools in Northern Ireland remain closed on Monday due to storm damage, with around 80 schools still without power.

ScotRail said it had received reports of 500 incidents across its network and more than 120 trees having fallen onto tracks.

The train operator said on Monday that most lines had re-opened, but repair work on tracks was ongoing.

Scottish First Minister John Swinney said Éowyn acted as a “warning that climate change is with us”.

At the storm’s height, nearly a million properties were without power across the British Isles, while many road and railways were blocked.

Additional reporting by Kathryn Armstrong

On the edge of St Petersburg stands a dramatic memorial more than 40 metres high. At the very top is the figure of a mother with her children.

Down below, depicted in bronze, are real stories of human suffering.

At the bottom of some steps burns an eternal flame surrounded by the names of Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

Auschwitz, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka…

Terrifying words synonymous with the Holocaust.

Yet this is not a Holocaust memorial as such. Its official title is “the memorial to Soviet civilians who fell victim to the Nazi genocide”.

I listen to a tour guide as she tells a group of schoolchildren about the Treblinka-2 extermination camp. There the Nazis murdered up to 900,000 Jews.

“Treblinka-2 was a death camp where a large number of people were killed in gas chambers,” she says, without specifying that most of the victims had been Jews.

Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled the monument last year on 27 January: a date with a double historical significance for Russia. On this day in 1944 Soviet forces broke the almost 900-day siege of Leningrad. Exactly one year later the Red Army entered the gates of the Auschwitz death camp.

It is because of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz that 27 January was later declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But when he opened the memorial to Soviet civilians, Vladimir Putin spoke not of the Holocaust, but of the “genocide of the Soviet people”.

He argued that the Nazis’ aim had been “to seize our country’s rich natural resources and territories, as well as to exterminate the majority of its citizens”.

It’s not that Russia has gone silent on the Holocaust. In the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, there have been several Holocaust-related events across the country.

And in a message to mark the 80th anniversary, President Putin wrote: “In January 1945 the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp and revealed to mankind the truth of the crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices who exterminated millions of Jews, Russians, Roma and representatives of other nationalities.”

But in Russia today there is a discernible shift in focus, away from the Holocaust to how the Soviet people as a whole, including Russian people, suffered in World War Two. More than 27 million Soviet citizens were killed in what is known here as the Great Patriotic War.

This change in emphasis hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“Nobody argues that there were millions of victims during the second world war,” Israel’s Ambassador to Moscow Simone Halperin tells me.

“But an industrialised plan to kill, eliminate, erase from the face of the earth a race: that was against the Jewish people. I think it is of critical importance to remember that the Holocaust was designed as the genocide of the Jewish people.”

“It is not because [the Russian authorities] do not want to speak about the Holocaust or the Jews,” suggests historian and researcher Konstantin Pakhaliuk.

“The idea is about presenting Russians as victims, to feel that we are victims: victims of Western powers, victims in history. That is the core idea of this narrative.”

Konstantin lives and works abroad. Back home he has been declared a “foreign agent”, a label often used to punish critics of the Russian authorities.

He argues that the narrative of Russia as victim has become especially strong since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“If you are a victim, you cannot bear responsibility,” Mr Pakhaliuk says.

In the Soviet Union there was little public discussion of the Holocaust and what had been the systematic murder of European Jews by Hitler.

On sites of mass execution of Jews by the Nazis, on Soviet territory, there were few monuments or plaques referencing Jewish victims.

That began to change after the fall of Communism. Russian officials began to speak proudly of their country’s historic role in defeating Hitler and saving the Jewish people from extermination.

Twenty years ago President Putin was invited to Poland to take part in events marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Speaking in Krakow on 27 January 2005 he noted:

“The Nazis chose Poland as the site of the planned mass extermination of people, above all, of Jews… we see the Holocaust not only as a national tragedy for the Jewish people but as a catastrophe for all of humanity.”

“It is our duty to remember the Holocaust,” he added.

Since then, Russia’s relations with Poland, Europe and the West in general have grown increasingly tense, especially after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russian officials have not been invited back to Poland for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp.

“This is the anniversary of liberation. We remember the victims, but we also celebrate freedom,” the director of the Auschwitz Museum Piotr Cywinski wrote last September. “It is hard to imagine the presence of Russia, which clearly does not understand the value of freedom.”

The decision not to extend an invitation to Moscow has been condemned by one of Russia’s most influential Jewish leaders.

“Not inviting Russia is offensive to the memory of the liberators and their contribution to the victory over fascism,” Rabbi Alexander Boroda, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia said at a press conference recently in Moscow.

“It is a very bad sign because memory is important and there are common values that helped defeat fascism. Despite their differences, the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, different political systems and ideologies managed to unite… for a common victory.”

Meanwhile, Jewish groups here are doing what they can to remind Russians of the past so that it is never repeated.

“The right wing is on the rise everywhere. The number of Holocaust deniers is increasing,” says Anna Bokshitskaya, Executive Director of the Russian Jewish Congress.

“That’s why it is crucially important to let people know about the events that happened more than 80 years ago.”

President Donald Trump has said he thinks the US will gain control of Greenland, underlining his persistent claim on the Arctic island, on one occasion pointing to “economic security” as the reason. While the autonomous Danish territory has been quick to say it isn’t for sale, its vast and mostly untapped mineral resources are in great demand.

Jagged grey peaks suddenly appear before us, as the motorboat navigates choppy coastal waters and dramatic fjords at Greenland’s southern tip.

“Those very high pointy mountains, it’s basically a gold belt,” gestures Eldur Olafsson, the chief executive of mining company Amaroq Minerals.

After sailing for two hours we stepped ashore at a remote valley beneath Nalunaq mountain, where the firm is drilling for gold.

It’s also scouring the surrounding mountain range and valleys, hunting for other valuable minerals, having snapped up exploration licences spanning over 10,000 sq km (3,861 sq miles).

“We’re looking for copper, nickel, and rare earths,” says the Icelandic boss. “This is uncharted, and still has the potential to have multiple big deposits.”

The base camp is a cluster of mobile buildings and bright orange accommodation tents housing more than 100 staff, including Greenlanders, Australians, and British former coal miners. From there a road climbs up the valley, and we drive by car into the gold mine, following a dark tunnel upwards inside the mountain.

“See here!” says Mr Olafsson pointing to a seam of white quartz and a thin dark line. “Gold, gold, gold. All the way over. Isn’t that extraordinary?”

The mine, which Amaroq bought in 2015, had operated for most of the preceding decade, but closed due to then falling gold prices, and high operating costs.

Amaroq is confident that the mine will now be profitable. And it plans to ramp up production this year, where it has built a brand new processing plant to crush the ore and refine the precious metal into gold bars.

“We can either walk off site every month with a suitcase of gold, versus a 30,000 tonne ship [carrying the ore],” explains Mr Olafsson.

He says that Greenland presents an unrivalled opportunity because its huge mineral reserves are largely untouched.

“It can be the supplier of all the minerals the Western world will need for decades,” adds Mr Olafsson. “And that is a very unique position.”

Yet currently there are just two active mines on the entire island.

Greenland is a self-governing territory that is part of Denmark, but controls its own natural resources.

It’s endowed with the eighth largest reserves of so-called rare earth elements, which are vital for making everything from mobile phones to batteries and electric motors. It also has large amounts of other key metals, such as lithium and cobalt.

There is oil and gas too, but new drilling is banned, while deep-sea mining has also been ruled out.

Christian Kjeldsen, director of Greenland’s Business Association, says that the global “geopolitical situation right now is driving interest in the world’s biggest island”.

He points to China having the world’s largest reserves of rare earth metals, while the West wants to secure alternative supplies.

“You have a very strong China sitting very heavily on the critical raw materials,” he says.

That has fuelled a growing focus among Western nations to get access to Greenland’s minerals. China has also been keen to get involved, but its presence is limited.

Reuters recently reported that the US lobbied an Australian mining firm not to sell Greenland’s biggest rare earth project to potential Chinese buyers.

Greenland’s Minister for Business, Trade and Raw Materials, Naaja Nathanielsen, says that interest in the territory’s minerals has “absolutely increased within the last five years or so”.

She adds: “We’re used to being a hotspot for the climate crisis. We want to be a part of the solution.”

Permits have now been given for 100 blocs across Greenland, where companies are searching for viable deposits. British, Canadian and Australian mining firms are the biggest foreign licence holders, while Americans hold just one.

But there are many more steps before these sites become potential mines.

Yet while Greenland may be sitting on mineral riches, any “gold rush” continues to be slow to materialise.

The economy, which has an annual GDP of just over $3bn (£2.4bn), is still driven by the public sector and fishing. And the territory also relies on an annual $600m subsidy from Denmark.

Greenland’s politicians hope that mining revenues will reduce reliance on the annual $600m subsidy from Denmark, and help boost independence efforts. But in the meantime Greenland is making more money from tourism.

Officially mining is still important for independence, says Javier Arnaut, head of Arctic Social Sciences at Greenland University. “But in practical terms, you can see that there are very few mining licenses awarded.”

Ms Nathanielsen concedes that while there are partnerships being developed with the US and EU, “we still have not seen large amounts of money flowing into this sector”. She hopes that there will be another three to five mines operating within the next decade.

However mining is not easy in Greenland because of its remote geography and weather. It’s the world’s largest island and 80% of it is covered by an ice sheet. It has rugged mountains and no roads between settlements.

“It’s an arctic terrain,” says Jakob Kløve Keiding, from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which has mapped the territory’s deposits. “We have problems with harsh conditions in terms of the climate and limited infrastructure. So it’s quite expensive to open a mine.”

Those high costs, coupled with low global metal prices, have held back investors.

Others blame red tape for the sector’s slow growth. The territory has strict environmental regulations and social impact requirements, and getting permits can take time.

Ms Nathanielsen maintains that most communities do support mining, and that it boosts local economies. “They [overseas miners] are shopping in the local shop. They’re employing local employees. They’re chartering a local boat or helicopter,” she says.

Yet in the south’s biggest town, Qaqortoq, resident Heidi Mortensen Møller is sceptical whether new mines will lead to employment for locals. “When they say they’re going to add jobs, who are they talking about?”

Jess Berthelsen, head of local labour union, SIK, says that many people think mining income “will leave the country”, and not benefit Greenland. But he supports the growth of the sector. “Greenland needs more income and to earn money from other ways than fishing.”

It’s unclear how Trump’s latest gambit on Greenland will play out. However, the territory’s prime minister Mute Egede said earlier this month that “we need to do business with the US” and that it was “doors open in terms of mining”.

Mr Kjeldsen from the business association, hopes it will be bring “much needed investment” to the sector. “On the other hand, if the uncertainty surrounding the signals from Trump drag on for a longer period, there is a risk that this might impact the investment environment negatively.”