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The sun is rising over the ice-covered mountains of Nuuk fjord and we are travelling along one of the world’s last wild frontiers.

But there are shadows gathering here and across the rest of the frozen spaces of Greenland.

With Donald Trump about to become president of the United States, his refusal to rule out taking Greenland by force is reverberating through conversations across the island.

“He’s welcome to come visit for sure,” says the skipper of the converted fishing boat taking us east. Conscious that he needs to do business with people of all political hues, he asked not to be named, but used a phrase I hear repeatedly here.

“Greenland belongs to Greenlanders. So, Trump can visit but that’s it.”

The waters are flat calm as we pull into the isolated settlement of Kapisillit – population about 40 – where a few hunters are setting out to shoot seals.

It’s -16C (3F), and with wind chill effect feels more like -27C.

But near the harbour I meet a local church elder, Kaaleeraq Ringsted, 73, a great-grandfather, who is out drying fillets of cod caught in the fish-rich waters beside his front door.

When I ask about President-elect Trump buying or invading Greenland, he chuckles at first. Then his tone becomes serious.

“It is not acceptable that he says this. Greenland is not for sale.”

Then he tells me how he learned to fish and hunt here with his father and grandfather, and how he wants to preserve this life for his children and grandchildren.

Crossing the bay, the boat nosed through the broken surface ice. Two eagles perched on a rock, scanning for fish in the clear waters.

We were heading to the farm of Angutimmarik Hansen who keeps sheep as well as hunting seals, wildfowl and rabbits.

All of his winter feed for the sheep needs to be imported from Denmark, a reminder of how a harsh climate defines the possibilities of life here.

Inside his front door is a rack of hunting rifles. He notices me looking at them.

“Those are in case there’s an invasion,” he jokes.

But his attitude to the bellicose rhetoric from Mar-A-Lago is far from relaxed.

“What a stupid person in the world like Trump,” he says. “Never will we sell Greenland.”

This little farm is about 3,000 miles (4,828km) from Florida where the incoming US president gave his now infamous press conference last week.

“But Trump is not the USA. We can work with the people of the USA,” Mr Hansen says.

The Trump effect went into overdrive with the arrival in Greenland of Donald Trump Jr, hot on the heels of his father’s pronouncements. He flew into the capital Nuuk on the family’s 737 jet – Trump Force One – and stayed for four hours and thirty-three minutes, meeting some locals and offering only polite remarks.

“It’s been incredibly nice to meet people, and people were very happy to meet with us,” he said, after lunch at a local hotel. “Dad will have to come here.”

Then it was back to the sunnier climes of Florida.

Trump Jr was welcomed by local businessman Jorgen Boassen, who once campaigned for the president-elect.

He told local media that he was Trump’s “biggest fan” and that “of course they are interested in our country, and they are welcome to come and see what our country is like. It is also about opening up for trade and cooperation.”

The city of Nuuk is the world’s most northerly capital. It has a thriving civil society and a robust press. And there is some satisfaction here that the Trump comments have propelled the debate about Greenland’s independence onto the international stage.

There must be a Greenland that is nobody’s colony, say campaigners like Kuno Fencker, an MP with the governing coalition and member of the local parliament’s Foreign and Security Committee.

We meet by the harbour, under the bronze statue of Hans Egede, the 18th century missionary widely seen here as the man who opened the way to colonisation.

“Donald Trump is a politician,” says Mr Fencker.

“He’s a hard businessman, and we know his rhetoric, and that rhetoric is something we have gotten used to since 2019, and it’s just a matter of talking to a peer, an ally, on how we can solve things here in the Arctic and also in Nato.”

Mr Fencker offers the central argument of pro-independence campaigners.

“What is necessary here is that Greenland as a sovereign state should negotiate directly with the United States and not Denmark doing that for us.”

Independence from Denmark could come at a significant financial cost.

Greenland receives subsidies from Copenhagen worth roughly a fifth of its GDP every year. Mr Fencker suggests, as have other leading figures here, that the island would negotiate with America and Denmark for support.

“We are not naïve in regard to that. We need support in defence, security, and also economic development. We want a sustainable and self-sufficient economy.”

The editor of the local newspaper Sermitsiaq, Maasana Egede, admits he was worried by the implied threat of force from Donald Trump, but wants to see how reality matches the rhetoric.

As for independence, Mr Egede has been frustrated by what he sees as a polarised debate in the media – local and international.

“We are very much telling this story that it has to be about independence or not independence. But there’s all of this story that is in between, that people want independence, but not at any cost. There’s a living standard that has to be maintained. There’s trade that has to be maintained. There are living ways that have to be maintained.”

There is an expectation that at some point – not in the immediate future – there will be a vote in favour and Denmark will accept the result.

The island’s Prime Minister, Mute Egede, addressed a joint press conference with the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, in the wake of the latest Donald Trump comments.

“We do not want to be Danish, we do not want to be American, we want to be Greenlandic,” he said. The Danish PM took care not to offend anybody, least of all the incoming US president.

“The debate on Greenlandic independence and the latest announcements from the US show us the large interest in Greenland,” she said. “Events which set in motion a lot of thoughts and feelings with many in Greenland and Denmark.”

Ms Frederiksen knows well how deep feelings run in Greenland. Memories of injustice and racism remain fresh here among the indigenous Inuit people.

Scandals like the campaign to insert IUDs (Intrauterine devices) to prevent pregnancies in thousands of Inuit women and girls in the 1960s and 70s, haunt the relationship between Greenland and Denmark.

It’s not known how many of these procedures were carried out without the permission of those involved, but the numbers are considerable. The aim was to reduce the Greenlandic population.

Maliina Abelsen is a former finance minister in Greenland’s government, and now a consultant for companies and organisations working on the island. She’s also worked for UNICEF Denmark and leading Greenland businesses, like the seafood group, Royal Greenland.

Ms Abelsen believes far more needs to be done to address the injustices of the past.

“I think a lot of people are saying, maybe also the Danish government and state have said, ‘Oh well, you know this happened in the past. This is so many years ago. How are we going to be responsible for that? It’s time to move on.’

“But you cannot move on if you have not been healed, and if you have not been acknowledged to what happened to you. That is a job that we have to do together with Denmark, not something Greenland can do on its own.”

And despite her own high profile in civil society and business, Maliina Abelsen says that when it comes to racism – for example jokes about Inuit people – she “can speak for most Greenlanders, that we have all experienced that in our life”.

The issues of self-determination and facing the past are intimately intertwined.

Now the intervention of Donald Trump has placed both before the eyes of the world.

But the message we heard – from the remote settlements on the fjord to the capital city Nuuk – is that Greenland’s destiny must be decided here, among people whose voices have been too long overlooked.

With additional reporting by Adrienne Murray and Kostas Kallergis.

Professional chef Daron Anderson always tells people he was “born in the kitchen” – quite literally.

The 45-year-old was delivered by homebirth at 295 West Las Flores Drive, where he lived with his mother until this week.

On Thursday, he stepped over charred debris where his kitchen once stood in Altadena, a tight-knit neighbourhood of north-eastern Los Angeles.

He was looking for his cast-iron pans in the hope they might have survived the blaze, one of several historic fires burning in the area that have killed at least 16 people and decimated multiple communities and left thousands homeless.

Across the street – at number 296 – his friend Rachel’s house also sits in ashes. The house next door – 281 – where he’d enjoyed family parties, is gone.

About three blocks away, on Devirian Place, where his girlfriend lived, some neighbours tried to fend off the roaring flames that would consume their homes with garden hoses.

Now they, too, are searching for treasured items in the rubble, after fire obliterated this entire community nestled in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

It all started on Tuesday night.

The Santa Ana winds had been fierce much of the day.

Daron was in his front yard just after 18:00 local time trying to secure items from flying away.

Across the street at 296 West Las Flores Drive, Rachel Gillespie was taking down Christmas decorations, concerned about her plastic icicles and patio furniture.

They exchanged worried glances. “This doesn’t look good, does it?” she remarked.

At the time, it was only wind that concerned them.

They had no idea that one of the two worst wildfires in LA history had just ignited a few miles away, part of a days-long nightmare that at its peak would see six blazes simultaneously threatening America’s second-largest city

The Eaton fire that tore through Altadena has now ravaged more than 14,000 acres, destroying thousands of homes and businesses, and left 11 dead. By the weekend, Eaton remained only 15% contained.

In west LA, the Palisades fire, which had started that morning, would go on to burn through more than 23,000 acres, reducing much of a vibrant community to ash, and killing at least five people.

Daron’s next-door neighbour at house 281, Dillon Akers, was at work at a donut stand in the Topanga mall – about 40 miles away – as smoke started filling their neighbourhood.

The 20-year-old rushed back when he heard the news, only to find his corner of north-west Altadena pitch black and members of his family frantically evacuating their home.

His uncle leapt over their white picket fence to save precious seconds as he stuffed items into the back of his car.

For the next two hours, Dillon did the same, gathering food, medicine, clothes and toiletries. In the rush, he mislaid his keys, and lost 30 minutes searching in the smoky dark with torches until he found them blown against a fence.

During the desperate search, he kept telling himself that local authorities would be able to handle the fire that was roaring down the mountain towards the home he shared with his mother, grandmother, aunt and two younger cousins.

Dillon had faced windstorms before, and had seen smoke in the mountains, but this time felt different. This time the orange glow in the sky was directly overhead.

“I was fully at a 10 on the scale of scared,” he said.

At 00:30 Wednesday, Dillon said that he and his mother were the last people to leave West Las Flores Drive. They may have been the last to get out alive.

The following day authorities would announce that the remains of a neighbour down the road had been discovered.

Rachel and Daron had left the neighbourhood about two hours before Dillon. Rachel was forced out by a friend who drove over to demand: “You’ve got to leave now.”

Rachel – with her wife, toddler, five cats, and two days of clothing – said goodbye to the home they had bought just one year earlier.

Daron also grabbed what he could: a guitar he purchased when he was 14 with money he earned working as an extra in a karate film and a painting of his family crossing Abbey Road in London, made to look like the cover of the iconic Beatles album.

As those on Las Flores Drive evacuated, Daron’s neighbours a few blocks away tried to fight the flames.

At 417 Devirian Place, Hipolito Cisneros and his close friend and neighbour Larry Villescas, who lived across the street at home number 416, grabbed garden hoses.

The scene outside looked hellish.

The garage of one home was in flames. A car in front of another, too.

They stretched hoses out from multiple homes and doused the structures with water – including the house of Daron’s girlfriend, Sachi.

“The water was just repelling off. It wasn’t even penetrating or nothing,” Hipolito said, referring to the bone-dry earth and brush around the homes.

Over time, they made progress, hosing off embers and spot fires. Larry thought they might be winning.

Then their hoses ran dry – all due to water pressure issues they’d later learn had hampered firefighting efforts across Los Angeles County amid intense demand.

An explosion sounded nearby, another home bursting into flames. By 01:00, both of their families were packing to leave.

“We tried. We really tried,” Hipolito said.

By 02:30 Wednesday morning, police cars rolled down their street with a loudspeaker, telling everyone to leave immediately.

As he turned the corner of his street, Larry watched in his truck’s rear-view mirror as his garage caught fire.

By 03:00, the street was empty.

Much of the Los Angeles region is made up of neighbourhoods and small communities just like Altadena.

On any given morning, people would walk through the lines of homes to get a cup of coffee at The Little Red Hen Coffee Shop, stopping to catch up while leaving for work in the morning.

Many have described decades of tight-knit community here, where they watched neighbours start families and the children who once played in the streets grow up.

But driving through the area for the first time since his world was upended, Daron barely recognises his neighbourhood.

The big blue house that marked one familiar turn is gone. All of the landmarks that once guided him have vanished. He points out each neighbour’s property, gasping as he realises that none are standing.

He takes photos of his and Rachel’s home and the street he shares with Dillon. Outside his girlfriend’s home – which Larry and Hipolito tried to save – he takes videos and chats with their families before calling Sachi to describe the state of her home.

“God, everything is gone,” he says, his voice cracking.

But a few items remain amidst the ruins.

At his sister’s home back on West Las Flores Drive, he finds multi-coloured plastic lawn ornaments stuck in her lawn, somehow untouched by fire.

He plucks each stake from the ground, knowing that while these flower decorations might feel insignificant amid the devastation, they also might make her smile.

Across the street at what was once his house, a red-brick chimney is all that is left standing. Around it is a pile of clay pottery.

With his hands dark black from the soot, he collects what he can, but many pieces disintegrate with his touch.

A scorched lemon tree sits in the lawn, some fruit still warm to the touch.

“If I can get a seed, we can replant one,” he says, grabbing a handful.

“It’s like a way you can start over.”

An eerie whizzing sound followed by a big boom startled Kenyan villagers relaxing recently one afternoon with family and friends.

“It sounded like a bomb, I was shocked. I started looking around, also wondering if it was gunshots,” Stephen Mangoka, a 75-year-old farmer from Makueni county’s Mukuku village, told the BBC.

“I looked up in the sky to see if there was smoke. Nothing.

“I rushed to the road to check if there had been an accident. Also, nothing. That is when someone told me that something had fallen from the skies.”

In fact, a massive round metal object had plummeted from above landing on farmland near a dry riverbed – and it was piping hot.

“We found a big piece of metal that was very red so we had to wait for it to cool before anyone could approach it,” said Ann Kanuna, who told us she owns the land where the object fell.

The giant ring took around two hours to cool down and turn grey – but it had already become a sensation with people arriving to look at it.

The rest of that Monday afternoon – with few people working as it was the day before New Year’s Eve – crowds came to view the giant metallic ring.

It was like selfie central, with people coming to pose next to it and great debates about what it could be.

The local authorities in Makueni county – which is around 115km (70 miles) south-east of the capital, Nairobi – were informed.

The Kenya Space Agency (KSA) then heard about it and made arrangements to come and investigate the next day.

But such was the object’s fame that Mukuku villagers feared it would be stolen overnight.

Together with local officers, some of them took it in turns to stand guard, lighting a fire nearby. They wanted to keep away potential scrap dealers and others wanting to make money out of the curiosity.

It is said to weigh more than 500kg (1,102lb) – around the same as an adult horse – and is around 2.5m (8ft) in diameter, roughly the size of child’s four-seater merry-go-round.

With daylight came more onlookers on New Year’s Eve – followed by the KSA team and the media.

Mukuku had never seen such activity. When the object was carted away later that day by the KSA, the buzz gave way to concerns about what the villagers had had in their midst.

The KSA said its preliminary assessments indicated the object was “a separation ring” from a space launch rocket.

“Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” its statement said the next day.

No-one was injured when it had fallen but some in Mukuku began to complain that the impact of the crash had caused damage to nearby houses.

Christine Kionga, who lives about a kilometre from the crash site, showed us cracks in the concrete of some of the buildings in her home compound. She said they had appeared after the crash.

Other neighbours alleged the structural integrity of their homes had also been affected – allegations that are yet to be substantiated.

“The government needs to find the owners of this object, and get compensation for those affected by it,” Mukuku resident Benson Mutuku told the BBC.

There were reports in the local media that some residents had begun to complain of feeling unwell after exposure to the metallic ring though there was no confirmation from those we spoke to when we visited – nor from the authorities or the KSA.

Nonetheless Mr Mutuku said there were concerns about the long-term effects of possible space radiation.

“This is a space object and we have heard in other similar incidents that there have been effects of radiation affecting even future generations and there is that fear in this community.”

However tests run later by the Kenya Nuclear Regulatory Authority revealed that while the metal ring did have higher radiation levels than the area in which it was found, they were not at a level harmful to humans.

Engineers from the KSA, which was established in 2017 to promote, co-ordinate and regulate space-related activities in the East African nation, are continuing to run other tests to find out more about the object.

The KSA director general said it was lucky that no significant damage was done when the object hurtled to Earth.

“The ultimate responsibility for any damage or injury caused by that space object is on the state in whose jurisdiction that operator may have launched the object,” Brigadier Hillary Kipkosgey told the BBC.

According to the Outer Space Treaty, overseen by the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, “states shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects”.

“[The ring] is a common item in many rockets and many space objects so it difficult to attribute it to a specific rocket or space object but we have leads but as I said our investigations are not conclusive,” Brigadier Kipkosgey said.

The BBC showed pictures of the object to the UK Space Agency to get the thoughts of its experts.

“The most plausible object it could be is the upper stage separation ring from an Ariane rocket in 2008,” its launch director, Matt Archer, said.

“The satellites are fine, but the actual rocket body has come through and de-orbited.”

The Ariane was Europe’s main rocket launch vehicle, helping more than 230 satellites into orbit, before it was retired in 2023.

It seems the separation ring may have been orbiting Earth for 16 years before making its unexpected appearance in Mukuku.

This is not the first incident of space junk appearing in East Africa.

Just over a year and a half ago some suspected space debris fell over several villages in western Uganda.

And a few days ago, on 8 January, there were unconfirmed reports of what was believed to be space debris burning brightly in the skies above northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia.

As the space industry grows, it is predicted that such incidents will become more frequent – and African governments may need to invest in ways to better detect this speeding space rubbish.

Nasa estimates there are more than 6,000 tonnes of space debris in orbit at the moment.

There are many different estimates about the chances of such junk hitting someone, but most are in the one-in-10,000 range.

Such statistics are little comfort for Mukuku’s residents, who cannot help thinking of what damage the ring could have caused had it landed in the centre of the village instead of on farmland.

“We need assurances from the government that it won’t happen again,” said Mr Mutuku.

It was late at night, and Darim’s animation studio had just finished designing a new look for a character in one of South Korea’s most popular video games, MapleStory.

Darim was proud of her work. So, sitting alone on the floor of her small studio apartment, she posted the trailer on social media. Almost immediately, she was flooded with thousands of abusive messages, including death and rape threats.

Young male gamers had taken issue with a single frame in the trailer, in which the female character could be seen holding her thumb and forefinger close together.

They thought it resembled a hand gesture used by a radical online feminist community almost a decade ago to poke fun at the size of Korean men’s penises.

“There were insults I’d never heard before, they were disgusting and inhumane,” said Darim, which is not her real name. One read: “You’ve just sabotaged your job.”

Messages then started piling into Darim’s studio and the game developer claiming she was a feminist and demanding she be fired. Within hours, the company pulled the promotional video.

Darim had become the latest victim in a series of vicious online witch hunts, in which men in South Korea attack women they suspect of having feminist views. They bombard them with abuse and try to get them sacked.

This is part of a growing backlash to feminism, in which feminists have been branded man-haters who deserve to be punished. The witch hunts are having a chilling effect on women, with many now scared to admit they are feminists.

This is forcing the movement underground, in a country where gender discrimination is still deeply entrenched. South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the OECD, a group of the world’s rich countries.

The hunts are often spearheaded by young male video gamers, and target women who work in the industry, like Darim, though recently they have spread to other professions.

They look for anything that resembles what they term the ‘finger-pinching gesture’ and use it as proof that men-hating women are surreptitiously mocking them.

Once they spot a supposed sign, the hunt begins. “They decide that a dark, evil feminist is hiding in the company, and her life should be ruined,” explained Minsung Kim, a 22-year-old male gamer who, concerned by these witch hunts, set up an organisation to support the victims.

The witch hunters track down all female employees at the company in question, and trawl their social media accounts, searching for any evidence of feminism. Way back on Darim’s timeline, they found an ‘offending’ post.

Darim in fact had nothing to do with the disputed part of the animation, but her studio was rattled by the torrent of abuse – especially after Nexon, the gaming company, suddenly removed all the studio’s artwork from their roster and issued an apology to customers.

“My company and CEO were in a panic,” said Darim. “I thought I was going to be fired, and I’d never be able to work in animation again.”

Then Minsung’s organisation stepped in. They urged her studio to ignore the gamers and offered to pay Darim’s legal fees so she could report the abuse. “We said these demands will never end, you need to nip this in the bud now,” he said. The studio listened, and Darim kept her job.

But similar witch hunts have worked, in the gaming industry and beyond, and they are becoming more frequent. In one case, a young illustrator lost her job after a handful of disgruntled gamers stormed the company’s office demanding she be removed.

And it is not just Korean companies that have capitulated. Last year, the international car maker Renault suspended one of its female employees after she was accused of making the finger-pinching gesture while moving her hands in a promotional presentation.

“These anti-feminists are getting more organised; their playbook is getting more specific,” said Minsung. “By taking a hand gesture that everyone makes and turning it into a scarlet letter they can brand literally anyone an evil feminist,” he said.

Because the companies are folding to these baseless accusations, the instigators of these hunts have become emboldened, he said. “They are confident now that when you accuse someone of feminism, you can ruin their career.”

Minsung knows, because not long ago he was one of these men. He used to belong to the anti-feminist forums. “We are exposed to the uncensored internet unimaginably young,” he said, having joined the forums aged nine.

It was only when Minsung traded video games for playing real-life games, including Dungeons and Dragons, that he met women, and his views shifted. He became, in his words, an “ardent feminist”.

In South Korea, women commonly suffer discrimination and misogyny both at work and at home. But as they have fought to improve their rights, many young men have started to believe they are the ones being discriminated against.

The backlash began in the mid-2010s, following a surge of feminist activism. During this time, women took to the streets in protest at sexual violence and the widespread use of hidden cameras that secretly film women using toilets and changing rooms – around 5,000 to 6,000 cases are reported annually.

“Young men saw women becoming vocal and were threatened by their rise,” said Myungji Yang, a professor of sociology at the University of Hawai’i Manoa, who has interviewed dozens of young Korean men. “They learn about feminism from online forums, which carry the most radical caricature of feminists,” she said. “This has given them a distorted idea of what feminism is.”

One of their grievances is the 18-month military service men must complete. Once they leave the military they often “feel entitled” to a good job, said Hyun Mee Kim, a professor of cultural anthropology at Yonsei University in Seoul, who studies feminism.

As more women have entered the workforce, and jobs have become harder to get, some men feel their opportunities are being unfairly taken away.

These feelings have been validated by South Korea’s now disgraced and suspended President, Yoon Suk Yeol, who came to power in 2022 on an anti-feminist platform, claiming gender discrimination no longer existed, and has since tried to dismantle the government’s gender equality ministry.

More surprising than these views themselves, is that the men who hold them have such power over major companies.

I travelled to Pangyo, the Silicon Valley of South Korea, to meet a woman who has worked in the gaming industry for 20 years. After Darim’s case, her company started to edit all its games, removing the fingers from characters’ hands, turning them into fists, to avoid complaints.

“It’s exhausting and frustrating” to work like this, she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The idea that a hand gesture can be seen as an attack on men is absurd and companies should be ignoring it.”

When I asked why they were not, she told me that many developers share the gamers’ anti-feminist views. “For all those outside yelling, there are those on the inside who also believe things are bad.”

Then there is the financial cost. The men threaten to boycott the games unless the companies act.

“The gaming companies think the anti-feminists are the largest source of their revenue,” said Minsung. After Darim’s company, Studio Ppuri, was targeted, it said it lost nearly two thirds of its contracts with gaming companies.

Studio Ppuri, did not respond to our questions, but both Nexon, the game developer, and Renault Korea told us they stood against all forms of discrimination and prejudice.

There is evidence the authorities are also capitulating to the anti-feminists’ demands. When Darim reported her abuse to the police, they refused to take her case.

They said because the finger-pinching gesture was taboo, it was “logical” that she, as a feminist, had been attacked. “I was astonished,” she said. “Why would the authorities not protect me?”

Following outrage from feminist organisations, the police backtracked and are now investigating. In a statement, Seocho district police told the BBC their initial decision to close the case had been “insufficient” and they were “making all efforts to identify the suspects”.

The case left Darim’s lawyer, Yu-kyung Beom, dumbfounded. “If you want to say that you’re a feminist in South Korea, you have to be very brave or insane,” she said.

In November 2023, the violence spilled offline and into real life. A young woman, who we are calling Jigu, was working alone in a convenience store late at night, when a man walked in and started attacking her.

“He said ‘hey, you’re a feminist, right? You look like a feminist with your short hair’,” Jigu told me as she apprehensively recounted the night. The man pushed her to the ground and started kicking her. “I kept going in and out of consciousness. I thought I could die.”

Jigu did not consider herself a feminist. She just liked having short hair and thought it suited her. The attack has left her with permanent injuries. Her left ear is damaged, and she wears a hearing aid.

“I feel like I’ve become a completely different person,” she said. “I don’t smile as much. Some days it is agony just to stay alive, the memory of that day is still so clear.”

Her assailant was sent to prison for three years, and for the first time a South Korean court ruled this was a misogynistically motivated crime: in effect, that Jigu had been attacked for looking like a feminist.

During the attack, the man said he belonged to an extreme anti-feminist group, New Men’s Solidarity. Its leader, In-kyu Bae, has called on men to confront feminists. So, one evening, as he held a live-streaming event in Gangnam, a flashy neighbourhood in Seoul, I went to try to talk to him.

“I’m here to tell you these feminists are staining the country with hatred,” he shouted from the roof of a black van kitted out with loudspeakers.

“That psychopath [who attacked Jigu] was not a member of our group. We don’t have members, we are a YouTube channel,” he told me as he simultaneously broadcast to thousands of subscribers. A small group of young men who had come to watch in person were cheering along.

“We’ve never encouraged anyone to use violence. In fact, the violent ones are the feminist groups. They’re shaming men’s genitals,” he added.

Last year, Mr Bae and several of his supporters were convicted of defaming and insulting a feminist activist after harassing her for more than two years.

Anti-feminist views have become so widespread that Yuri Kim, the director of Korea Women’s Trade Union, recently established a committee to track cases of what she describes as “feminism censorship”. She found that some women have been questioned about their stance on feminism in job interviews, while at work women commonly face comments like “all feminists need to die”.

According to Prof Kim, the feminism academic, men are using now feminist threats in the office as a way to harass and control their female colleagues – it is their way of saying ‘we are watching you; you should behave yourself’.

Such harassment is proving effective. Last year, a pair of scholars coined the phrase “quiet feminism”, to describe the impact of what they say is a “pervasive everyday backlash”.

Gowoon Jung and Minyoung Moon found that although women held feminist beliefs they did not feel safe disclosing them in public. Women I spoke to said they were even afraid to cut their hair short, while others said feminism had become so synonymous with hating men they did not associate with the cause.

A 2024 IPSOS poll of 31 countries found only 24% of women in South Korea defined themselves as feminist, compared to an average of 45%, and down from 33% in 2019.

Prof Kim worries the consequences will be severe. By being forced to conceal their feminist values, she argues women are being stripped of their ability to fight against gender inequality, which penetrates workplaces, politics and public life.

Feminists are now busy brainstorming ways to put an end to the witch hunts. One clear answer is legal change. In South Korea there is no blanket anti-discrimination law to protect women and prevent them being fired for their views.

It has been repeatedly blocked by politicians, largely because it would support gay and transgender people, with anti-feminists, and even some trans-exclusionary feminists, now lobbying against it.

Minsung believes the only way to strip the witch hunters of their powers is for the companies and the authorities to stand up to them. They make up a small fraction of men in South Korea, they just have loud voices and a bizarrely oversized influence, he argues.

Since her attack, Jigu now proudly calls herself a feminist. “I want to reach out to other victims like me, and if even one woman has the strength to grab my hand, I want to help.”

Additional reporting by Jake Kwon, Hosu Lee and Leehyun Choi

It looked like an ordinary murder.

One hundred years ago on this day – 12 January 1925 – a group of men attacked a couple on a car ride in a upmarket suburb in Bombay (now Mumbai) in colonial India, shooting the man dead and slashing the woman’s face.

But the story that unfolded brought global spotlight on the case, while its complexity put the country’s then British rulers in a spot of bother, and eventually forced an Indian king to abdicate.

Newspapers and magazines described the murder as “perhaps the most sensational crime committed in British India”, and it became “the talk of the city” during the investigation and subsequent trial.

The victim, Abdul Kadir Bawla, 25, was an influential textile businessman and the city’s youngest municipal official. His female companion, Mumtaz Begum, 22, was a courtesan on the run from the harem of a princely state and had been staying with Bawla for the last few months.

On the evening of the murder, Bawla and Mumtaz Begum were in the car with three others, driving in Malabar Hill, an affluent area along the shore of the Arabian Sea. Cars were a rarity in India at the time, and only the rich owned them.

Suddenly, another car overtook them. Before they could react, it collided with theirs, forcing them to stop, according to intelligence and newspaper reports.

The attackers showered expletives on Bawla and shouted “get the lady out”, Mumtaz Begum later told the Bombay High Court.

They then shot Bawla, who died a few hours later.

A group of British soldiers, who had inadvertently taken a wrong turn on their way back from a golf game, heard the gunshots and rushed to the scene.

They managed to catch one of the culprits, but one officer suffered gunshot wounds when an attacker opened fire at them.

Before fleeing, the remaining attackers made two attempts to snatch the injured Mumtaz Begum from the British officers, who were trying to rush her to the hospital.

The newspapers suggested that attackers’ aim was likely abducting Mumtaz Begum, as Bawla – whom she had met while performing in Mumbai a few months earlier and had been living with since – had earlier received several threats for sheltering her.

The Illustrated Weekly of India promised readers exclusive photographs of Mumtaz Begum, while the police planned to issue a daily bulletin to the press, Marathi newspaper Navakal reported.

Even Bollywood found the case compelling enough to adapt it into a silent murder thriller within months.

“The case went beyond the usual murder mystery as it involved a rich and young tycoon, a slighted king, and a beautiful woman,” says Dhaval Kulkarni, author of The Bawla Murder Case: Love, Lust and Crime in Colonial India.

The attackers’ footprints, as speculated in the media, led investigators to the influential princely state of Indore, which was a British ally. Mumtaz Begum, a Muslim, had lived in the harem of its Hindu king, Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar III.

Mumtaz Begum was famed for her beauty. “In her own class, it was said, Mumtaz was without a peer,” KL Gauba wrote in his 1945 book, Famous Trials for Love and Murder.

But the Maharaja’s (king’s) attempts to control her – preventing her from seeing her family alone and keeping her under constant surveillance – soured their relationship, says Kulkarni.

“I was kept under surveillance. I was allowed to see visitors and my relations but somebody always accompanied me,” Mumtaz Begum testified in the court.

In Indore, she gave birth to a baby girl, who died soon after.

“After my child was born, I was unwilling to stay at Indore. I was unwilling because the nurses killed the female child that was born,” Mumtaz Begum told the court.

Within months, she escaped to the northern Indian city of Amritsar, her mother’s place of birth, but troubles followed.

She was watched there too. Mumtaz Begum’s stepfather told the court that the Maharaja wept and begged her to return. But she refused and moved to Bombay, where the surveillance continued.

The trial confirmed what media had speculated following the murder: representatives of the Maharaja had indeed threatened Bawla with dire consequences if he continued to shelter Mumtaz Begum, but he had ignored the warnings.

Following a lead given by Shafi Ahmed, the only attacker captured at the scene, the Bombay police arrested seven men from Indore.

The investigation revealed links to the Maharaja that were hard to ignore. Most of the arrested men were employed by the Indore princely state, had applied for leave around the same time and were in Bombay at the time of the crime.

The murder put the British government in a tough spot. Though it happened in Bombay, the investigation clearly showed the plot was planned in Indore, which had strong ties to the British.

Terming it “the most awkward affair” for the British government, The New Statesman wrote that if it were a minor state, “there would be no particular cause for anxiety”.

“But Indore has been a powerful feudatory of the Raj,” it said.

The British government initially tried to keep mum about the murder’s Indore connection in public. But in private, it discussed the issue with much alarm, communication between the governments of Bombay and British India shows.

Bombay police commissioner Patrick Kelly told the British government that all evidence “points at present to a conspiracy hatched in Indore or by instigation from Indore to abduct Mumtaj [sic] through hired desperadoes”.

The government faced pressure from different sides. Bawla’s community of wealthy Memons, a Muslim community with roots in modern-day Gujarat, raised the issue with the government. His fellow municipal officials mourned his death, saying, “there surely must be something more behind the scene”.

Indian lawmakers demanded answers in the upper house of British India’s legislature and the case was even discussed in the British House of Commons.

Rohidas Narayan Dusar, a former police officer, writes in his book on the murder that the investigators were under pressure to go slow, but that then police commissioner Kelly threatened to resign.

The case drew top lawyers for both the defence and the prosecution when it reached the Bombay High Court.

One of them was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would later become the founding father of Pakistan after India’s partition in 1947. Jinnah defended Anandrao Gangaram Phanse, one of the accused and a top general with the Indore army. Jinnah managed to save his client from the death penalty.

The court sentenced three men to death and three to life imprisonment, but it stopped short of holding the Maharaja accountable.

Justice LC Crump, who led the trial, noted, however, that “there were persons behind them [assailants] whom we cannot precisely indicate”.

“But where an attempt is made to kidnap a woman, who was for 10 years the mistress of the Maharaja of Indore, it is not in the least unreasonable to look to Indore as the quarter from which this attack may have emanated,” the judge remarked.

The case’s prominence meant the British government had to act quickly against the Maharaja. They gave him a choice: face a commission of inquiry or abdicate, according to documents presented to parliament in India.

The Maharaja chose to quit.

“I abdicate my throne in favour of my son on the understanding that no further inquiry into my alleged connection with the Malabar Hill Tragedy will be made,” he wrote to the British government.

After abdicating, the Maharaja stirred more controversy by insisting on marrying an American woman against the will of his family and community. Eventually, she converted to Hinduism and they wed, according to a British home department report.

Meanwhile, Mumtaz Begum received offers from Hollywood and later moved to the US to try her luck there. She faded into obscurity after that.

Firefighters are making an all-out assault to prevent the largest of the deadly wildfires that is threatening Los Angeles from spreading into one of the city’s most exclusive neighbourhoods.

Aerial crews have been bombarding the flaming hills with water and fire retardant to hold back the Palisades fire, which has expanded an additional 1,000 acres and is now menacing Brentwood.

Officials have been on the defensive amid mounting anger at how hydrants ran dry as firefighters struggled to contain the fast-moving blazes.

Winds are expected to pick up again overnight, further fanning the flames that have already left at least 11 people dead.

“LA County had another night of unimaginable terror and heartbreak,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath on Saturday.

Firefighters have made modest progress against the worst of the infernos, the Palisades fire, which has scorched nearly 23,000 acres and is 11% contained.

But the conflagration has spread into the Mandeville Canyon neighbourhood, sparking evacuation orders for swathes of Brentwood, a ritzy enclave where Arnold Schwarzenegger, Disney chief executive Bob Iger and NBA star LeBron James have homes.

Also in the evacuation zone is the Getty Center, a hilltop museum that holds more than 125,000 artworks, including masterpieces by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Rubens, Monet and Degas. The building is undamaged so far.

The second-biggest blaze, the Eaton fire, has razed more than 14,000 acres and was 15% contained. Firefighters have mostly contained two smaller blazes, the Kenneth and Hurst fires.

But the National Weather Service warned that the gusty Santa Ana winds that whipped up the fires at the outset would increase again on Saturday and into Sunday.

Seven neighbouring states, the federal government and Canada and Mexico have rushed resources to California.

No cause has yet been established for the fires. The two biggest ones combined have razed an area more than twice the size of Manhattan.

Some 153,000 residents are under mandatory evacuation orders and another 166,000 have been warned they may have to flee, too.

The political repercussions have begun.

On Friday, Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat with rumored White House aspirations, ordered an investigation into why a key reservoir was out of service and some fire hydrants ran dry.

Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley complained about the shortage.

“When a firefighter comes up to a hydrant, we expect there’s going to be water,” she said.

Chief Crowley has also attacked city leadership for cutting her department’s budget and eliminating mechanic positions, which she said had resulted in more than 100 fire apparatuses being out of service.

On Saturday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass – who has been criticised for being in Ghana attending the inauguration of the African country’s president when the fires erupted in LA on Tuesday, hinted at her tensions with Chief Crowley.

“Let me be clear about something,” Bass told a news conference, “the fire chief and I are focused on fighting these fires and saving lives, and any differences that we might have will be worked out in private.”

More than 70,000 people have signed a change.org petition demanding the mayor’s immediate resignation.

As fears of looting grow, a sunset-to-sunrise curfew is being strictly enforced effect in evacuated areas, official said.

Newsom announced on Saturday that he would double the number of National Guard on the ground to “keep communities safe”, deploying 1,680 troops.

About two dozen arrests have been made, including for burglary, looting and curfew violations.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said cadaver dogs are helping 40 search and rescue team scour razed neighbourhoods.

The death toll is expected to rise once house-to-house searches are conducted.

The fires were so intense that wheel alloys on cars were melted to puddles of liquid metal.

Rick McGeagh, an estate agent, told Reuters news agency that in his Pacific Palisades neighbourhood only six out of 60 homes survived.

All that remained standing at his house was a statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Everything else is ash and rubble,” said the 61-year-old father-of-three.

At least 11 people have died as wildfires rage in Los Angeles – and there are fears that number will rise.

Officials say it may take several weeks to identify victims as traditional methods – such as fingerprinting and visual identification – may not be possible.

Here is what we know about those who are reported to have died, according to their family members.

Victor Shaw died trying to defend his home from the wildfire in Altadena, his family said.

The 66-year-old’s body was found on the side of the road by his property, with a garden hose in his hand, according to TV network KTLA. The property had been in Mr Shaw’s family for nearly 55 years, it reported.

Mr Shaw lived at the home with his younger sister Shari, who said she tried to get him to evacuate with her on Tuesday night as the fire moved closer.

She told KTLA that he refused because he wanted to try to fight the fire, adding that she had to flee because “the embers were so big and flying like a firestorm”.

Ms Shaw told CBS News she would miss her big brother.

“I’ll miss talking to him, joking about, travelling with him and I’ll just miss him to death,” she said. “I just hate that he had to go out like that.”

Anthony Mitchell and his adult son Justin died at their home in Altadena as they tried to escape the wildfires, their family said.

Hajime White told the Washington Post she received a call from her 67-year-old father, in which he said “the fire’s in the yard”.

Mr Mitchell, a 67-year-old retired salesman and amputee, lived with his son Justin, who was in his early 20s and had cerebral palsy, the newspaper reported.

Another one of Mr Mitchell’s sons, Jordan, lived with the pair but he was in hospital with an infection, the Washington Post reported.

Ms White told the newspaper she had received the news that Mr Mitchell and Justin had died, adding: “It’s like a ton of bricks just fell on me.”

Mr Mitchell was a father of four, grandfather of 11, and great-grandfather of 10, Ms White said.

Rodney Nickerson died at his home in Altadena, according to his daughter, who said her father believed the wildfire would “pass over”.

Kimiko Nickerson told KTLA her father had bought the property in 1968 and had experienced previous fires over the decades.

She said Mr Nickerson “felt this was going to pass over” and that he would remain at his home.

Ms Nickerson told CBS News that the last comment her father made to her was: “I’ll be here tomorrow.” She confirmed to the broadcaster that his body had been found.

The 32-year-old Australian citizen died when the Palisades fire broke out on Tuesday, his mother Shelley Sykes said in a post on X.

Shelley said she was with her son, who had cerebral palsy, in their 17-acre Malibu estate during the fire.

She added that Rory was in a cottage on the estate and that she had tried to put out the flames, but there was no water coming out of the hose.

“I’m totally heartbroken,” she said.

British-born Rory was born blind and had difficulty walking, but was able to regain his sight and learn to walk with the help of surgeries, going on to become an “inspirational speaker”, she shared.

Shelley told Australian outlet 9News that she could not lift her son because she had a broken arm.

The family of 83-year-old Erliene Kelley found out late on Thursday that she was among the victims, the Los Angeles Times reports.

According to the newspaper, Ms Kelley’s granddaughter Briana Navarro said her grandmother was “adamant” that she did not want to evacuate because previous fires had never reached their house in Altadena.

On Thursday evening, the family learned that authorities had found a body in the rubble of the home. It had been more than 48 hours since Ms Navarro last heard from her grandmother.

In recent weeks, US President-elect Donald Trump has shown renewed interest in taking control of Greenland, a largely autonomous territory of Denmark in the Arctic and the world’s largest island.

He first indicated an intention to buy Greenland in 2019, during his first term as president, but this week he went further, refusing to rule out economic or military force to take control of it.

Danish and European officials have responded negatively, saying Greenland is not for sale and its territorial integrity must be preserved.

So how could this unusual situation play out, with two Nato allies at odds over a huge territory which is 80% covered with ice but has considerable untapped mineral wealth?

And how could the aspirations for independence among Greenland’s population of 56,000, under Danish control for 300 years, affect the final outcome?

Here we look at four possible scenarios for Greenland’s future.

There is some speculation that Trump’s move is just bluster, a move to get Denmark to boost Greenland’s security in the face of the threat of both Russia and China seeking influence in the region.

Last month, Denmark announced a new $1.5bn (£1.2bn) military package for the Arctic. It had been prepared before Trump’s remarks but the announcement just hours after them was described by the Danish defence minister as an “irony of fate”.

“What was important in what Trump said was that Denmark has to fulfil its obligations in the Arctic or it’s got to let the US do it,” says Elisabet Svane, chief political correspondent for Politiken newspaper.

Marc Jacobsen, associate professor at the Royal Danish Defence College, believes that this is a case of Trump “positioning himself before entering office” while Greenland is using the occasion to gain more international authority, as an important step towards independence.

So even if Trump were to lose further interest in Greenland now, which Professor Jacobsen thinks is the most likely scenario, he has certainly put the spotlight on the issue.

But independence for Greenland has been on the agenda for many years, and some say the debate could even go in the opposite direction.

“I noticed in the last few days the Greenland PM is calmer in his comments – ie. yes, we want independence but in the long run,” says Svane.

There is a general consensus in Greenland that independence will happen eventually, and also that if Greenland votes for it, Denmark will accept and ratify it.

However, it is also unlikely that Greenland would vote for independence unless its people are given guarantees that they can keep the subsidies they currently get from Denmark to pay for things like healthcare and the welfare system.

“The Greenland PM may be up in arms now, but in the event that he actually calls a referendum, he will need some kind of convincing narrative about how to save the Greenland economy and welfare system,” Ulrik Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told the BBC.

One possible next step is a free association – something like the US currently has with Pacific states the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau.

Denmark has previously opposed this status both for Greenland and for the Faroe Islands, but according to Dr Gad, current Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen is not categorically against it.

“Danish understanding of the Greenland historical experience is way better than it was 20 years ago,” he says, with Denmark accepting colonial responsibility.

The recent discussions “might persuade [Frederiksen] to say – better to keep Denmark in the Arctic, keep some kind of connection to Greenland, even if it’s a looser one”, he adds.

But even if Greenland is able to get rid of Denmark, it has become clear in recent years that it can’t get rid of the US. The Americans never really left after taking control of the island in World War Two, and see it as vital for their security.

An agreement in 1951 affirmed Denmark’s basic sovereignty of the island but, in effect, gave the US whatever it wanted.

Dr Gad said that Greenland officials had been in contact with the last two US administrations about Washington’s role.

“They now know the US will never leave,” he said.

There has been speculation that Trump’s economic rhetoric is potentially the biggest threat to Denmark – with the US drastically increasing tariffs on Danish, or even EU, goods, forcing Denmark into concessions of some kind over Greenland.

Professor Jacobsen says Danish governments have been preparing for that, and not just because of the Arctic territory.

Trump has been threatening universal 10% tariffs on all US imports which could, among other things, significantly disrupt European growth, and some Danish and other European companies are now considering setting up manufacturing bases in the US.

Possible options for raising tariffs include by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Benjamin Cote of international law firm Pillsbury told the website MarketWatch.

One of the main Danish industries potentially affected by this is pharmaceuticals. The US receives products such as hearing aids and most of its insulin from Denmark, as well as the diabetes drug Ozempic, made by the Danish company Novo Nordisk.

Analysts say the hike in prices that would result from these measures would not find favour with the US public.

The “nuclear option” seems far-fetched, but with Trump failing to rule out military action it has to be considered.

Essentially, it wouldn’t be hard for the US to take control, given that they already have bases and plenty of troops in Greenland.

“The US has de facto control already,” says Professor Jacobsen, adding that Trump’s remarks seemed ill-informed and he didn’t understand the point of them.

That said, any use of military force by Washington would create an international incident.

“If they invade Greenland, they invade Nato,” says Svane. “So that’s where it stops. Article 5 would have to be triggered. And if a Nato country invades Nato then there’s no Nato.”

Dr Gad says Trump sounds like Chinese President Xi Jinping talking about Taiwan or Russia’s Vladimir Putin talking about Ukraine.

“He’s saying it’s legitimate for us to take this piece of land,” he says. “If we take him really seriously this is a bad omen for the whole of the Western alliance.”

Ten Reform UK councillors in Derbyshire say they have resigned in protest over Nigel Farage’s leadership.

The group said Reform was being run in an “increasingly autocratic manner” and “has lost its sense of direction” since Farage took over as leader last June.

But Farage told BBC Newsnight the councillors who had quit were put forward by a “rogue branch” of the party and that “none of them passed vetting”.

The Clacton MP also said he and Elon Musk had patched up their relationship after the tech billionaire posted on the X social media platform that Reform needed a new leader.

“We had a rogue branch putting people up and I think you’ll find, in many cases, there will have to be by-elections because they were not legitimately put forward,” Farage told Newsnight.

The Derbyshire group’s leader, Alex Stevenson, was suspended as a member pending an internal investigation in December.

The 10 signatories include Stevenson and nine others, who hold a mix of seats at county, town and parish level.

Nine of the 10 appear to stand on Heanor and Loscoe Town Council in Derbyshire.

Stevenson, who stood for Reform UK in Amber Valley in the general election and came second, did not deny that some of the candidates he put forward for local elections had not passed the party’s vetting process.

“Apparently one of them shared a Tommy Robinson post a few years ago,” he told the BBC. “We have got no issue with that.”

He added the councillor in question, who he did not name, was a “good bloke”.

In a statement seen by the BBC, and first reported by the Guardian, the group added: “We believe that the current party management is either incompetent or malevolent and we have lost all confidence in the leadership and its structures.”

They said they had voted against the party’s constitution adopted in the autumn and that a “lack of internal democracy remains a significant issue”.

The signatories added: “We have seen no meaningful steps taken towards democratising the party, which we were promised.”

The councillors backed the party’s former co-deputy leader Ben Habib who they say was “unceremoniously sidelined”.

In a statement on X, Zia Yusuf, Reform UK’s chairman said: “The leader of this group of ‘councillors’ was suspended weeks ago by Reform for nominating candidates that failed vetting [and] fraudulently nominating candidates with an invalid DNO certificate.

“As a result of [the latter], several of these ‘councillors’ are illegitimate and new elections must be held. Reform stands for the highest standards in public life, and those who commit fraud will always be expelled.”

Asked about Habib’s departure from the party, Farage told the BBC: “Good riddance”.

It comes after US tech billionaire Elon Musk said Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party – but did not explain his reasoning.

Farage told Newsnight that Musk had wanted him to “come out strongly and support [former EDL leader] Tommy Robinson.”

“Whilst many things Tommy Robinson has said have been right and it’s wrong he’s in solitary confinement, I certainly don’t want Tommy Robinson in my party,” he said.

Refusing to disclose the contents of their “private conversation”, Farage said that he and Musk have since made up and “absolutely agree we don’t want to be at war with each other and have very similar aims”.

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual abuse

It was 20:25 on a Monday evening in November 2020 when Caroline Darian got the call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was her mother, Gisèle Pelicot.

“She announced to me that she discovered that morning that [my father] Dominique had been drugging her for about 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Darian recalls in an exclusive interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme’s Emma Barnett.

“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” says Darian, now 46.

“I remember I shouted, I cried, I even insulted him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”

Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in jail at the end of a historic three-and-a-half month trial in December.

More than four years later, Darian says that her father “should die in prison”.

Fifty men who Dominique Pelicot recruited online to come rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Gisèle were also sent to jail.

He was caught by police after upskirting in a supermarket, leading investigators to look closer at him. On this seemingly innocuous retired grandfather’s laptop and phones, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Gisèle, clearly unconscious, being raped by strangers.

On top of pushing issues of rape and gender violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted the little-known issue of chemical submission – drug-facilitated assault.

Caroline Darian has made it her life’s struggle to fight chemical submission, which is thought to be under-reported as the majority of victims don’t have any recollection of the assaults and may not even realise they were drugged.

In the days that followed Gisèle’s fateful phone call, Darian and her brothers, Florian and David, travelled to the south of France where their parents had been living to support their mother as she absorbed the news that – as Darian now puts it – her husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years”.

Soon afterwards, Darian herself was called in by police – and her world shattered again.

She was shown two photos they found on her father’s laptop. They showed an unconscious woman lying on a bed, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

At first, she couldn’t tell the woman was her. “I lived a dissociation effect. I had difficulties recognising myself from the start,” she says.

“Then the police officer said: ‘Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek… it’s you.’ I looked at those two photos differently then… I was laying on my left side like my mother, in all her pictures.”

Darian says she is convinced her father abused and raped her too – something he has always denied, although he has offered conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know that he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse. But I don’t have any evidence,” she says.

Unlike her mother’s case, there is no proof of what Pelicot may have done to Darian.

“And that’s the case for how many victims? They are not believed because there’s no evidence. They’re not listened to, not supported,” she says.

Soon after her father’s crimes came to light, Darian wrote a book.

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again explores her family’s trauma.

It also delves deeper into the issue of chemical submission, in which the drugs typically used “come from the family’s medicine cabinet”.

“Painkillers, sedatives. It’s medication,” Darian says. As is the case for almost half of victims of chemical submission, she knew her abuser: the danger, she says, “is coming from the inside.”

She says that in the midst of the trauma of finding out she had been raped more than 200 times by different people, her mother Gisèle found it difficult to accept that her husband may have also assaulted their daughter.

“For a mum it’s difficult to integrate that all in one go,” she says.

Yet when Gisèle decided to open up the trial to the public and the media so as to expose what had been done to her by her husband and dozens of men, mother and daughter were in agreement: “I knew we went through something… horrible, but that we had to go through it with dignity and strength.”

Now, Darian needs to understand how to live knowing she is the daughter of both the torturer and the victim – something she calls “a terrible burden”.

She is now unable to think back to her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, only occasionally slipping back into the habit of referring to him as her father.

“When I look back I don’t really remember the father that I thought he was. I look straight to the criminal, the sexual criminal he is,” she says.

“But I have his DNA and the main reason why I am so engaged for invisible victims is also for me a way to put a real distance with this guy,” she tells Emma Barnett. “I am totally different from Dominique.”

Darian adds she doesn’t know whether her father was a “monster,” as some have called him. “He knew perfectly well what he did, and he’s not sick,” she says.

“He is a dangerous man. There is no way he can get out. No way.”

It will be years before Dominique Pelicot, 72, is eligible for parole, so it is possible he will never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Pelicots are rebuilding themselves. Gisèle, Darian said, was exhausted from the trial, but also “recovering… She is doing well”.

As for Darian, the only question she is interested in now is to raise awareness of chemical submission – and to better educate children on sexual abuse.

She derives strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old – her “lovely son”, she says with a smile, her voice full of affection.

The events that were unleashed on that November day made her who she is today, Darian says.

Now, this woman whose life was wrecked by a tsunami on a November night is trying to only look ahead.

‘You can watch the full interview ‘Pelicot trial – The daughter’s story’ – on Monday at 7pm on BBC 2 or on the iPlayer. If you have been affected by some of the issues raised in this film, details of help and support are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline’.

Three decades ago, the world was on the brink of a nuclear showdown – until Jimmy Carter showed up in North Korea.

In June 1994, the former US president arrived for talks in Pyongyang with then leader Kim Il-sung. It was unprecedented, marking the first time a former or sitting US president had visited.

But it was also an extraordinary act of personal intervention, one which many believe narrowly averted a war between the US and North Korea that could have cost millions of lives. And it led to a period of greater engagement between Pyongyang and the West.

All this may not have happened if not for a set of diplomatic chess moves by Carter, who died aged 100 on 29 December.

“Kim Il-sung and Bill Clinton were stumbling into a conflict, and Carter leapt into the breach, successfully finding a path for negotiated resolution of the standoff,” North Korean expert John Delury, of Yonsei University, told the BBC.

In early 1994, tensions were running high between Washington and Pyongyang, as officials tried to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear programme.

US intelligence agencies suspected that despite ongoing talks, North Korea may have secretly developed nuclear weapons.

Then, in a startling announcement, North Korea said it had begun withdrawing thousands of fuel rods from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor for reprocessing. This violated an earlier agreement with the US under which such a move required the presence of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear watchdog.

North Korea also announced it would withdraw from the IAEA.

American suspicion spiked as Washington believed Pyongyang was preparing a weapon, and US officials broke off negotiations. Washington began preparing several retaliatory measures, including initiating UN sanctions and reinforcing troops in South Korea.

In subsequent interviews, US officials revealed they also contemplated dropping a bomb or shooting a missile at Yongbyon – a move which they knew would have likely resulted in war on the Korean peninsula and the destruction of the South’s capital, Seoul.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Carter made his move.

For years, he had been quietly wooed by Kim Il-sung, who had sent him personal entreaties to visit Pyongyang. In June 1994, upon hearing Washington’s military plans, and following discussions with his contacts in the US government and China – North Korea’s main ally – Carter decided to finally accept Kim’s invitation.

“I think we were on the verge of war,” he told the US public broadcaster PBS years later. “It might very well have been a second Korean War, within which a million people or so could have been killed, and a continuation of the production of nuclear fissile material… if we hadn’t had a war.”

Carter’s visit was marked by skillful diplomatic footwork – and brinkmanship.

First, Carter had to test Kim’s sincerity. He made a series of requests, all of which were agreed to, except the last: Carter wanted to travel to Pyongyang from Seoul across the demilitarised zone (DMZ), a strip of land that acts as a buffer between the two Koreas.

“Their immediate response was that no-one had ever done this for the last 43 years, that even the United Nations secretary-general had to go to Pyongyang through Beijing. And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going, then’,” he said.

A week later, Kim caved.

The next step for Carter was harder – convincing his own government to let him go. Robert Gallucci, the chief US negotiator with North Korea at the time, later said there was “discomfort in almost all quarters” about the US essentially “subcontracting its foreign policy” to a former president.

Carter first sought permission from the State Department, who blanked him. Unfazed, he decided to simply inform then-US president Bill Clinton that he was going, no matter what.

He had an ally in vice-president Al Gore, who intercepted Carter’s communication to Clinton. “[Al Gore] called me on the phone and told me if I would change the wording from “I’ve decided to go” to “I’m strongly inclined to go” that he would try to get permission directly from Clinton… he called me back the next morning and said that I had permission to go.”

The trip was on.

On 15 June 1994, Carter crossed over to North Korea, accompanied by his wife Rosalyn, a small group of aides and a TV crew.

Meeting Kim was a moral dilemma for Carter.

“I had despised Kim Il-sung for 50 years. I was in a submarine in the Pacific during the Korean War, and many of my fellow servicemen were killed in that war, which I thought was precipitated unnecessarily by him,” he told PBS.

“And so I had very serious doubts about him. When I arrived, though, he treated me with great deference. He was obviously very grateful that I had come.”

Over several days, the Carters had meetings with Kim, were taken on a sightseeing tour of Pyongyang and went on a cruise on a luxury yacht owned by Kim’s son, Kim Jong-il.

Carter discovered his hunch was right: North Korea not only feared a US military strike on Yongbyon, but was also ready to mobilise.

“I asked [Kim’s advisers] specifically if they had been making plans to go to war. And they responded very specifically, ‘Yes, we were’,” he said.

“North Korea couldn’t accept the condemnation of their country and the embarrassment of their leader and that they would respond.

“And I think this small and self-sacrificial country and the deep religious commitments that you had, in effect, to their revered leader, their Great Leader as they called him, meant that they were willing to make any sacrifice of massive deaths in North Korea in order to preserve their integrity and their honour, which would have been a horrible debacle in my opinion.”

Carter presented a list of demands from Washington as well as his own suggestions. They included resuming negotiations with the US, starting direct peace talks with South Korea, a mutual withdrawal of military forces, and helping the US find remains of US soldiers buried in North Korean territory.

“He agreed to all of them. And so, I found him to be very accommodating,” Carter said. “So far as I know then and now, he was completely truthful with me.”

Crucially, Carter came up with a deal where North Korea would stop its nuclear activity, allow IAEA inspectors back into its reactors, and eventually dismantle Yongbyon’s facilities. In return, the US and its allies would build light-water reactors in North Korea, which could generate nuclear energy but not produce material for weapons.

While enthusiastically embraced by Pyongyang, the deal was met with reluctance from US officials when Carter suggested it in a phone call. He then told them he was going on CNN to announce details of the deal – leaving the Clinton administration little choice but to agree.

Carter would later justify forcing his own government’s hand by saying he had to “consummate a resolution of what I considered to be a very serious crisis”. But it did not go down well back home – officials were unhappy at Carter’s “freelancing” and attempt to “box in” Clinton, according to Mr Gallucci.

Near the end of the trip, they told him to convey a statement to the North Koreans, reiterating Clinton’s public position that the US was continuing to press for UN sanctions. Carter disagreed, according to reports at that time.

Hours later, he got on the boat with Kim, and promptly went off-script. As TV cameras rolled, he told Kim the US had stopped work on drafting UN sanctions – directly contradicting Clinton.

An annoyed White House swiftly disowned Carter. Some openly expressed frustration, painting a picture of a former president going rogue. “Carter is hearing what he wants to hear… he is creating his own reality,” a senior official complained at the time to The Washington Post.

Many in Washington also criticised him for the deal itself, saying the North Koreans had used him.

But Carter’s savvy use of the news media to pressure the Clinton administration worked. By broadcasting his negotiations almost instantaneously, he gave the US government little time to react, and immediately after his trip “it was possible to see an almost hour-by-hour evolution in US policy towards North Korea” where they ratcheted down their tone, wrote CNN reporter Mike Chinoy who covered Carter’s trip.

Though Carter later claimed he had misspoken on the sanctions issue, he also responded with typical stubbornness to the blowback.

“When I got back to Seoul, I was amazed and distressed at the negative reaction that I had from the White House. They urged me not to come to Washington to give a briefing, urged me to go directly to… my home,” he said.

But he went against their wishes.

“I decided that what I had to offer was too important to ignore.”

A final dramatic coda to the episode happened a month later.

On 9 July 1994, on the same day as US and North Korean officials sat down in Geneva to talk, state media flashed a stunning announcement: Kim Il-sung had died of a heart attack.

Carter’s deal was immediately plunged into uncertainty. But negotiators ploughed through, and weeks later hammered out a formal plan known as the Agreed Framework.

Though the agreement broke down in 2003, it was notable for freezing Pyongyang’s nuclear programme for nearly a decade.

Robert Carlin, a former CIA and US state department official who led delegations in negotiations with North Korea, noted that Carter’s real achievement was in getting the US government to co-operate.

“Carter was, more or less, pushing on an open door in North Korea. It was Washington that was the bigger challenge… if anything, Carter’s intervention helped stop the freight train of US decision-making that was hurtling toward a cliff,” he told the BBC.

Carter’s visit was also significant for opening a path for rapprochement, which led to several trips later, including one in 2009 when he travelled with Clinton to bring home captured US journalists.

He is also credited with paving the way for Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un – Kim Il-sung’s grandson – in 2018, as “Carter made it imaginable” that a sitting US president could meet with a North Korean leader, Dr Delury said.

That summit failed, and of course, in the long run Carter’s trip did not succeed in removing the spectre of nuclear war, which has only grown – these days North Korea has missiles regarded as capable of hitting the US mainland.

But Carter was lauded for his political gamble. It was in sharp contrast to his time in office, when he was criticised for being too passive on foreign policy, particularly with his handling of the Iran hostage crisis.

His North Korea trip “was a remarkable example of constructive diplomatic intervention by a former leader,” Dr Delury said.

His legacy is not without controversy, given the criticism that he took matters in his own hands. His detractors believe he played a risky and complicated game by, as CNN’s Mike Chinoy put it, “seeking to circumvent what he viewed as a mistaken and dangerous US policy by pulling the elements of a nuclear deal together himself”.

But others believe Carter was the right man for the job at the time.

He had “a very strong will power”, but was also “a man of peace inside and out,” said Han S Park, one of several people who helped Carter broker the 1994 trip.

Though his stubbornness also meant that he “did not get along with a lot of people”, ultimately this combination of attributes meant he was the best person “to prevent another occurrence of a Korean War”, Prof Park said.

More than anything, Carter was convinced he was doing the right thing.

“He didn’t let US government clucking and handwringing stop him,” says Robert Carlin. “Carter had guts.”

Sitting on the front row of a war court on the US’s Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the world’s most notorious defendants, appeared to listen intently.

“Can you confirm that Mr Mohammed is pleading guilty to all charges and specifications without exceptions or substitutions?” the judge asked his lawyer as Mohammed watched on.

“Yes, we can, Your Honour,” the lawyer responded.

Sitting in court, 59-year-old Mohammed, his beard dyed bright orange and wearing a headdress, tunic and trousers, bore little resemblance to a photo circulated shortly after his capture in 2003.

Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks on the US, had been due to plead guilty this week – more than 23 years after almost 3,000 people were killed in what the US government has described as “the most egregious criminal act on American soil in modern history”.

But two days later, just as Mohammed had been set to formally enter his decision – the product of a controversial deal he struck with US government prosecutors – he instead watched silently as the judge said the proceedings had been paused under the orders of a federal appeals court.

It was expected to be a landmark week for a case that has faced a decade of delays. Now, with a new complication, it continues into an uncertain future.

“It’s going to be the forever trial,” the relative of one of the 9/11 victims said.

Mohammed has previously said that he planned the “9/11 operation from A-to-Z” – conceiving the idea of training pilots to fly commercial planes into buildings and taking those plans to Osama bin Laden, leader of the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda.

But he has not yet been able to formally admit guilt to the court. This week’s pause comes amid a dispute over a deal reached last year between US prosecutors and his legal team, under which Mohammed would not face a death penalty trial in exchange for his guilty plea.

The US government has for months tried to rescind the agreement, saying that allowing the deal to go ahead would cause “irreparable” harm to both it and the American public. Those in support of the deal see it as the only way forward in a case that has been complicated by the torture that Mohammed and others faced in US custody and questions over whether this taints the evidence.

After a last-minute appeal by prosecutors, a three-judge panel at the federal appeals court called for the delay to give them time to consider the arguments before they would make a decision.

But families of victims had already flown on a once-weekly flight to the base to watch the pleas in a viewing gallery, where thick glass separated them and members of the press from the rest of the sprawling high-security courtroom.

The attendees had won their place at this week’s proceedings through a lottery system. They arranged child care and paid for kennels for their pets to attend – knowing that they could be called off at any minute. They learnt Thursday night while speaking to the media at a hotel on the base that the pleas would no longer go ahead.

Elizabeth Miller, whose father, New York City firefighter Douglas Miller, died in the attacks when she was six years old, said she was in favour of the deal going forward to “bring finality”, but recognised that there were other families who felt it was too lenient.

“What’s so frustrating is that every time this goes back and forth, each camp gets their hopes up and then gets their hopes crushed again,” she said, as other relatives nodded in agreement.

“It’s like a perpetual limbo… It’s like constant whiplash.”

This week’s pause is just the latest in a series of delays, complications and controversies on the base, where the US military has now been holding detainees for 23 years.

The military prison on Guantanamo Bay was established during the “war on terror” that followed the 9/11 attacks that Mohammed is accused of orchestrating. The first detainees were brought there on 11 January 2002.

Then-President George Bush had issued a military order establishing military tribunals to try non-US citizens, saying they could be held without charge indefinitely and could not legally challenge their detention.

Dressed in bright orange jumpsuits, the 20 men were brought to a temporary detention camp called X-Ray, where the cells were exposed cages and the beds mats on the floor.

The camp, surrounded by barbed wire, is now long abandoned and overgrown – weeds are growing on wooden watchtowers and signs along the fence say “off limits” in red text.

While conditions have improved at Guantanamo, it continues to face criticism from the United Nations and rights groups over its treatment of detainees. And it continues to challenge US officials and advocates who hope to see it closed.

As president, Barack Obama pledged to close the prison during his terms, saying it was contrary to US values. These efforts were revived under the Biden administration.

Unlike Mohammed, most people held there since its creation were never charged with any crimes.

The current detention facilities are off limits to journalists, with access only granted to those with security clearance.

A short drive away, there is an Irish pub, a McDonald’s, a bowling alley and a museum, serving military personnel and contractors on the base – the majority of whom have never been inside the prison zone.

As legal teams, journalists and families gathered on the base for Mohammed’s scheduled pleas, a secret early morning operation was conducted to fly a group of 11 Yemeni detainees off of the base for resettlement in Oman.

With that transfer, the base, which once held almost 800 detainees, now holds just 15 – the lowest number in its history.

Of those remaining, all but six have been charged or convicted of war crimes, with lawyers arguing their cases in complex legal battles at the base’s high-security courtrooms.

As the court was dismissed on Friday, the judge said that Mohammed’s pleas, if allowed to go ahead, would now fall into the next US administration.