BBC News

The suspect accused of shooting dead healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York has dropped his legal challenge against being extradited to the city to face murder charges.

Luigi Mangione is now in NYPD custody and is expected to be flown from Pennsylvania, where he was arrested, to New York.

He faces charges including first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder, one of which describes the killing as an act of "terrorism”.

He attended two hearings in Pennsylvania on Thursday morning for a gun charge in the state and a second on the request to extradite him.

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Speaking at a marathon end-of-year press conference, Russian president, Vladimir Putin said he should've acted earlier in Ukraine and prepared more before the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

He said "victory is nearer" in Ukraine, the situation was "changing drastically" and that Russian troops were regaining more territory every day.

Putin also denies that the collapse of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime is a defeat for Russia and that he will "definitely" meet with former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Moscow following the toppling of his regime.

The Russian president took the opportunity to address other domestic issues including telephone scammers, the country's low birth rate and problems young people are facing when trying to get a mortgage.

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Gisèle Pelicot has thanked supporters in a speech outside a court in France, after her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot was jailed for 20 years for drugging her and recruiting strangers to rape her.

Gisèle told a crowd of journalists that she is thinking about her children and grandchildren and all the other families and the victims of stories "often in the shadows, saying "we have the same struggle".

She said she "never regretted" opening the doors of this trial, "so society could see what was happening" and shared her "profound gratitude" to those who supported her.

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Haiti is one of the poorest countries on earth and its capital, Port-au-Prince, is largely controlled by criminal gangs.

Despite the deployment of an international security force to help restore peace, there has been a recent upsurge in gang violence.

When a BBC team travelled to the capital, 200 civilians were killed by a gang, whilst they were there.

Gang violence has been especially common following the resignation of the country’s third prime minister so far this year.

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Dominique Pelicot has been sentenced for 20 years after drugging his ex-wife Gisèle Pelicot and recruiting strangers to rape her for years.

Fifty other have also been sentenced alongside him in Avignon, France.

Dominique admitted to raping her and inviting the men he recruited online to have sex with her in her bed at home while she was unconscious and unaware.

Gisèle has waived her right to anonymity, saying she wanted to make "shame swap sides" from the victim to the rapist.

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The leader of the most powerful group in control of Syria has told the BBC that the country is exhausted by war and is no threat to its neighbours or the West. In an interview in Damascus, Ahmed al-Sharaa told the BBC's international editor Jeremy Bowen that sanctions on Syria should be lifted.

Sharaa led the lightning offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad's regime less than two weeks ago. He is the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the most powerful group in the rebel alliance. He was previously known by his wartime name, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

Sharaa said HTS should be de-listed as a terrorist organisation. It is designated as one by the UN, US, and EU, among many others, as it started as a splinter group of al-Qaeda, which it broke away from in 2016.

Sharaa said HTS was not a terrorist group. He said they did not target civilians and considered themselves to be victim of the crimes of the Assad regime. The victims, he said, should not be treated the same way as the oppressors. He denied that he wanted to establish a regime like the Taliban in Afghanistan. Sharaa said the countries had very different traditions. Afghanistan was a tribal society. In Syria, he said, there was a different mindset.

He said he believed in education for women and referred to the high number of women attending university in parts of Syria.

Sharaa was relaxed throughout the interview, wearing civilian clothes, and tried to offer reassurance to all those who believe his group has not broken with its extremist past. However many Syrians do not believe him and fear that a hardline Islamist government will emerge.

Clive Myrie presents BBC News at Ten reporting by Jeremy Bowen in the Syrian capital Damascus.

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Today we look at Nigel Farage’s meeting with Elon Musk.

Adam and Chris discuss the significance of the Reform leader’s trip to Mar A Lago to meet Elon Musk and whether he’ll be allowed to donate to them under election spending rules.

They also talk about the WASPI women who have been campaigning for compensation over pension changes as they say they were not properly informed of the rise in state pension age.

And, Adam speaks to Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford Ben Ansell to reflect on the year of elections.

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Scientists have warned that climate change could spell danger, as melting ice is forcing polar bears to spend more time on land.

Churchill, a town in Manitoba, Canada, is known as the polar bear capital of the world, and is noticing the effects of climate change on the number of bears spotted.

Every year, the Hudson Bay - on the western edge of the town - thaws, and forces the bears on shore. As the freeze sets in in Autumn, hundreds of bears gather here, waiting.

The BBC’s Victoria Gill has been in Churchill along with a team of polar bear researchers.

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Over the past few days, videos have been posted online about mass graves where Bashar al-Assad's regime buried those tortured to death in Syria's notorious prisons.

Local people are reporting more and more locations of mass graves across Syria, as is the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based NGO.

Rights group have concluded that more than 80,000 of the missing are dead. Another 60,000 people are believed to have been tortured to death, according to the UK-based war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

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The UN special envoy to Syria has warned that unless the country gets urgent support, it could be plunged back into conflict.

Geir Pedersen called for free and fair elections in Syria, and urged for humanitarian assistance to the country more than a week on from the downfall of President Assad.

Bashar al-Assad's regime was overthrown less than two weeks ago by a rebel coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, known as HTS.

HTS is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN, the US, the EU, the UK and others.

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