a plane with a hundred people on board has crashed in khazakhstan, shortly after taking off from the almaty airport. the deaths of at least 12 people have been confirmed. the plane, operated by bek air, was on a flight to the capital, nur—sultan. israel's prime minister, benjamin netanyahu, has defeated his rival, gideon saar, for the leadership of the governing likud party. he will now lead likud into israel's third general election within a year, despite facing criminal charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. a rescue and recovery operation is underway in the philippines, hit by typhoon phanfone on christmas day. authorities say the storm killed at least 16 people and cut a swathe of destruction through the centre of the country.

now on bbc news, it's hardtalk with stephen sackur. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. the human preoccupation with sex is nothing new, but the internet has made it so much easier to explore and exploit every shade of desire. the online porn industry makes billions of dollars in profit every year, but the big winners are corporate players, not the women and men performing the sex acts. my guest today is mia khalifa. she was briefly a porn actress, garnering worldwide notoriety when she appeared in a sex video wearing the islamic hijab. after years of threats and insecurity, she's speaking out. what does her story tell us about the porn industry and 21st century culture?

mia khalifa, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. by many measures, you are a very famous woman. for instance, you have, what, more than 16 million followers on instagram. but the origins of your fame lie in your brief involvement in the porn industry. is that hard for you to deal with? absolutely. after i left, i deleted my... well, i didn't delete my instagram, it got hacked by isis sympathisers and propaganda was posted all over it, so instagram took it down and i didn't recreate one

for another year until i decided to kind of accepted my fate as the infamous former porn star and try to change the narrative. so i recreated an instagram account and tried to, for lack of a better term, become an influencer. because if you put your name, as indeed i have done researching this, put your name into google... on the work network? yeah, well, it was work. but the point is you get these countless links to videos. the word ‘porn star‘ appears immediately. that is something that you will never, ever overcome, however much... first of all, that's rude. i'm trying to. i understand that. i don't mean to say you want it to be but it's the way technology, the internet, works. yeah. i'm not very google—friendly and i'm trying to change that. one of the first things that comes up is the site that i don't

own or control but where the home page is written in the first person like i'm the one running it. on my wikipedia it's posted as my official website, and we've tried countless times to take it down, including taking legal action, but the company won't hear anything and we've made them countless offers. let's go through this step—by—step. how did a girl who was brought by her parents to the united states from lebanon, your home country, schooled in the united states. clearly smart, went to university in texas and read history. how did you get involved with the sex/porn industry? i don't think low self—esteem discriminates against anyone. doesn't matter if you come from a great family or if you come from a not—so—great background. i struggled my entire childhood with weight and i never felt attractive or worthy of male attention, and suddenly my first year of college i start

losing all this weight from making small changes. by the time i graduated, i was ready to make a bigger difference. i felt extremely self—conscious about my breasts, because that was the first thing to go when i lost all the weight. i lost about 50lb, i don't know how many kilos that is, or stones. well, it's a considerable amount of weight. it's changed your physicality... completely. my biggest insecurity was my breasts, i wanted to more or less go back to what they were. when i did that i started garnering all this attention from men and i was never used to it and ifelt like unless i held onto it and kind of did what was asked of me or what was expected of me it would go away. after feeling what it was like, that validation and the complements for the first time, i did not want that to go away. you were spotted, i think, there you were, a young graduate

and wanting to find a job and you were spotted on a street by a guy who said, "i can work with you," and clearly he opened up and said it's the porn business. what was it in you that, far from running away, was drawn into it? it wasn't. .. that's not how it was, it wasn't, "hey, do you want to come and do porn?" it was more, "you're beautiful, would you like to do some modelling? you have a great body, i think you would be great with nude modelling," things like that. when i came into the studio, it was very respectable. a gorgeous location in miami — doral, florida. it was clean, everyone who worked there was a nice. all of their cubicles were decorated with family photos.

it was nothing dodgy or made me uncomfortable. the first time i went in wasn't the first time i filmed porn... a porn movie. it was the second time. the first time was more so do you want to do this, like, sign the paperwork, et cetera et cetera. you have since talked about people who prey on callow young women. i'm wondering as we talk about it now whether you feel a sense of victimhood, whether you look back at your younger self, obviously now you're 26 but this is when you were 21, do you look at that 21—year—old and feel she was used, she was very much a victim? i feel she didn't have the tools to identify she was being taken advantage of and what she was being told was lies. maybe not so much lies, but trying to manipulate me into doing what they wanted me to do. i don't really see myself as a victim. i don't like that word. i did make my own decisions, even though they were terrible decisions.

i think that something needs to change in the way women are approached, if even they are approached. it is an industry, and it is a multibillion—dollar industry, but at the heart of it are young people, men and women, who are asked to and agree to perform sex acts in front of a camera. how much control, agency, did you have in the process of making those videos, which we now know have been viewed hundreds of billions of times? none, very little, other than kind of saying, "yes, no," to one outfit or the other. very little say on what was filmed. the theme of it, content, where it's filmed, it's not really up to you. consent would seem to me as an outsider would be

a fundamental important principle. if they ask you to perform a particular kind of sex act you absolutely did not want to do... no, they can't force you, no, absolutely not. you've talked interestingly in the recent past about the mindset you had when you were performing in the sex videos. you said that you sort of blacked out and now you look back you can't actually remember very clearly a lot of the things you did. try and explain to me what was going on in your head as you got deeper into this industry? i think that the word i couldn't quite grasp when i said that would be adrenaline. i think my adrenaline was so high because i knew what i was doing was beyond anything i ever thought that i would do, or anything that i could've imagined doing. so adrenaline was through the roof. makes it hard to look back and remember exactly what happened and the things that transpired. do you find it difficult talking about it now? a little bit, yeah.

yeah, i understand that. do you think it made a difference? i'm genuinely asking, you're of arab heritage, your parents are from lebanese. i'm from lebanese, i was born and raised there. you are arab and arab culture is deeply conservative on the whole. do you think that was an extra layer you had to peel away as you got involved in this business? probably. i think a part of it was also rebellion and wanting to do something so out of bounds and so out of character that i shocked even myself. i guess this is a very stupid question but of course your family had no clue as to what you were doing? no, and they disowned me when they did, when they found out. did they? yes. that must have been terribly hard. it was. i felt completely alienated by not just the world but my family and the people around me. when i quit, when i was still alone, i left and i mean ijust realised

some mistakes aren't forgivable. but time heals all wounds and things are getting better now. things are changing? yes. i want to ask you about the mechanics of the industry in one other way and that is power, authority, money. first of all, we've talked about men and women being performers in this business, but were there any women in positions of authority and control that you worked with? absolutely, one of the closest person that the talents worked with was a female. very nice, respectful, professional. a lot of female employees in, you know, the back office like vps of sales and people on the tech side. so the offices are full of women. i asked her, "how did you find this job, how do you apply for a job like this?" word of mouth, through a friend. the financial side of it is extraordinary too. after you made the video that i want to talk about in a moment,

which involved you wearing the islamic dress, the hijab, you for a time where the number one most popular porn actress on pornhub, which is this aggregator site for porn that is wildly popular throughout the world it seems, and you were getting hundreds of millions of views. and yet despite that in—the—porn—world stardom, you were paid a grand total for all the 12 sex videos you made, you were paid a grand total of 12,000 us dollars, and yet you made millions and millions of dollars for both bang bros, the company you worked with, and pornhub, the aggregating site. how could that be? that's how it is. i'm not the only one singled out, it's not like i had a terrible contract or a terrible manager... i didn't have a manager or an agent. no advisors at all? nothing at all. and you were 21, barely out of childhood frankly.

the human brain doesn't fully develop until the age of 25. the decision—making part of my brain still needed forming. there was no—one to tell me what to do or to say this is wrong. this is important about the nature of the porn business, you make a video and it lives forever online and the more popular it gets, the more hits it gets and this isn'tjust in the us, many of your videos were popular in the middle east. the most popular in the middle east. which is interesting in itself. and they were the ones tweeting death threats at me. we'll get to that in a moment but with the finances, however popular you became, number one star in the business, you had no residuals or rights whatsoever to get recompense for your popularity? none whatsoever. to this day is that the way porn contracts work for everyone? everyone, male, female, everyone who comes in.

i think we have to get through this one particular notorious video you were involved in that i mentioned at the beginning, which involved three young people, you were one of them, wearing the islamic headscarf, often known as the hijab, and then it developed into a sex scene. you must have known how provocative that was? i verbatim told them, "you guys are going to get me killed." and they said? they just laughed. why didn't you then say, "i'm not doing it." intimidation, i was scared. i knew that if i said no it would... you know, they're not going to force you to do it. at that point that's rape. no—one‘s going to force you to have sex. but i was still scared. imean...

have you ever felt scared to... not scared, but nervous to speak up and say something at a restaurant where the food isn't right and the waiter comes by and says, "how is everything ? " i was intimidated, i was nervous. what you're saying is the concept of consent is sought of meaningless in the power dynamic between the men mostly who are controlling the porn industry and a young 21—year—old actress such as yourself? absolutely. when there's four white male producers in the room and you say something like that to them and they all just laugh. .. i mean, it's kind of devastating and it makes you not want to speak up and say anything again. it's the same way when you sign your contracts. you have the president and the ceo of the company sitting in the room with you waiting for you to read it and when you're reading it you're not comprehending everything that's happening because you're so nervous because people are staring at you. when you walked out of that filming area at the end of that particular video film, did you in your heart know this is going to be

a disaster for you? it didn't hit until i think the next day because the adrenaline was still very high, but immediately after it was released it shattered my entire world. the reason i thought it was ok for me to do porn was because i thought no—one would ever find out about it. there's millions of girls found themselves having sex and do things like that and no—one knows the name. no—one knows as they are, no—one recognises them so, i wanted to do it as my dirty little secret but it blew up in my face. it really did. from the point of view of the filmmakers and the aggregators, it was a triumph. they got hundreds of millions of views straight away. they called me lightning and a bottle. but the reality was your face is now known throughout the world as the porn star who wore hijab. and you got threats.

oh, yes. i'm not going to say isis because i don't think anyone heavily involved in isis has a twitter account is in isis. they photoshopped a picture of me on to someone getting beheaded and they said... i don't know exactly what they said but they said something along the lines of, "you're next." i cannot imagine how alone you must have felt at that point because you couldn't discuss that with your family. of course you couldn't. no, it was terrifying but my defence mechanism is humour so my response was, "as long as you don't cut off my boobs, they were expensive." you're 21—years—old. you just said to me that was when my life was sort of ruined. but here you see it, we're five years later. how much personal responsibility do you feel you have to take what you did? 100%. i made the decision.

granted, the industry is flawed and we need to do something to protect other girls from falling into the same trap that i did, but at the end of the day, it was my choice. in terms of getting out of the business, when that went viral, that video, and yourface was just so well—known and associated with something so provocative, and you were receiving threats, was a very quick decision for you to say, "no more!" i wouldn't say very quick because i was still nervous, i didn't know how they would react to it. i actually called them all in to a meeting about a month later and sat them down and i had a resignation letter waiting in front of every single one of their chairs, and i spoke to them about my feelings and they tried to convince me to stay and they told me this would all blow over and that i'm overreacting and that i'm exaggerating about the level

of peril that i'm in. at that point did you have to have some sort of security, had you had to move out of your own apartment? i did have to move out of my apartment already but that's because someone took a screenshot of the google maps location of my apartment was. so these guys, they saw you as a money machine? absolutely. but you still had no advisors, you had a lawyer, you had nothing. what 21—year—old has a lawyer on retainer? i'm just trying to get my head around how stressful this would have been and because even now, you sit here so poised and time has passed, but do you think there is some sort of post—traumatic stress that is in you from this experience? yes. and i think it kicks in mostly when i go out in public because the stares i get, i feel like people can see through my clothes and it brings me deep shame. it makes me feel like... it makes me feel like i lost

all right to my privacy, which i did because i'm one google search away. yes, and those images, you cannot expunge. you have no right, even though it's deeply personal to you, you have no right to remove them from anybody‘s view around the world. yeah. it is very hard. it is. but i'm thinking, this story is your story but frankly it's also the story of other porn actors and actresses. i'm seeing that recently after the interview came out and people started reaching out and all the e—mails, my manager checks them, and when he gets stuff like that, he filters them and sends them to me. and reading the words of some of these girls who have been sex trafficked and forced into porn, and all of these stories of girls whose lives have been ruined by men who have taken advantage of them, and by contracts that they didn't even understand the jargon of, it makes me feel like, "ok, maybe it was good that i started

talking and that i posted this interview and that i'm speaking out now," because other people feel the same way and even though they don't relate on as deep a level as doing porn, they can relate on the level of being insecure and being pressured into doing something they didn't want to do. you have chosen to speak out in a way that very few people in the porn industry ever do, for all sorts of reasons, which i guess many of them are fairly obvious, but you have a platform now in a way because you've leveraged what was, shall we say, notoriety, into a different form of fame, you're trying to move into different businesses as well. but in terms of looking back and wanting to be a campaigner and activist, if you do, is it part of your mission to change the way society sees pornography and deals with it,

and treats people in that industry? everyone watches porn. have you ever watched porn in your entire life? in my entire life, i have watched porn. see, what needs to change is the way women are brought into porn. with the change and being able to approach them, only women can seek it instead of being pressured into it, or make it so you can't force them to sign a contract right in front of you, right there on the spot. it has to be looked over by a lawyer, and if that's too extreme, maybe they have to take a few days to think about it and read it over at home in their own time before they sign it. but we interview a lot of people, and many of them are middle—aged or older, it's great to have someone in the studio who's only 26 years old, there is a school of thought which says that our culture as a whole, notjust the united states or the uk, but in many, many countries, is being pornified, and young people in particular are so exposed to pornography so young in the lives that it is materially changing

the way males and females relate to each other, the way they think about relationships, in a potentially very corrosive, damaging way. what's your take on that? of course it affects relationships. porn addiction is very prevalent in america and i'm sure here too. the things that men see in videos they expect from the women in their lives, and that's not reality. no—one is going to be that perfect, no—one is going to do those acts on a wednesday night with the person they love. we've talked a lot, and i know it's been difficult for you, obviously it's difficult for you, to accept that still online there are so many images of you engaged in your brief porn career. but has it proved possible for you to move on from that, to forge a different kind of career, and indeed to forge relationships with people far beyond the notion that you were once involved in porn? yeah, i was lucky to meet a man who had never even heard of me, which was fantastic.

i ended up having to tell him about it but he told me after we started talking, "i googled you because you have five million followers and i'd be crazy not to google you." but it was very hard for me to date after, and i don't think it was hard for me to date because it was hard to find a man, it was hard to find somebody who wasn't into it. does that make sense? it does make sense. i suppose the bottom line is you never really wanted to be famous when you were a porn star, it was the last thing you wanted. you wanted it to be a secret, but now it seems you're embracing being famous. yes, and i get a lot of hate from female performers who say that i'm ungrateful for it, but it was never what i asked for. and if you could speak to the 21—year—old mia khalifa walking down the street in florida, stopped by the guy who said, "you're beautiful, you're lovely, i can work with you," what would you tell her to do today?

there's mace in your purse for a reason, use it. run. mia khalifa, it's been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you for having me. hello there. after the dry and often bright weather of christmas day, boxing day brought a return to something wetter for many of us. this was the scene for a weather watcher at southport on merseyside, quite a lot of rain here. but it wasn't like that everywhere, parts of northern scotland had

the lion's share of the bright and dry weather. and i think more of us will get to see some dry weather over the next few days. a lot of cloud around, and with that it is going to feel milder. this is what's going on as we start friday. this warm front moving its way north eastwards, taking a bit of rain with it, but also as the name suggests, introducing some warmer, or at least milder air, which will be wafting its way up from the south. particularly, i think, western areas feeling the effect of that as we go through the day ahead. so, we start the morning with a outbreaks of rain drifting across scotland, some of that rain getting into northern england as well, pushing its way eastwards. anotherfrontal system bringing rain back into western scotland and northern ireland through the day. elsewhere, generally a lot of cloud around but generally it will be dry. some glimmers of brightness here and there, top temperatures in single digits across eastern areas of england, but further west, 12 degrees for belfast, stornoway and plymouth. quite windy across the north—west

of the uk, particularly western scotland. then as we got the friday night, we will see another pulse of rain putting back across northern ireland, northwards across scotland. for england and wales it's predominantly dry. some clear spells, generally a lot of cloud on what will be quite a mild night. i think the vast majority will stay frost—free. so, the saturday morning then, still frontal systems running up towards the north—west, so there will be positive rain at times, but high pressure close to the east and south of the uk keeping things fine and dry here. but still, rather cloudy for many of us on saturday, some glimmers of brightness again developing, i think particularly across the south of england and south of wales through the afternoon. but for northern ireland, for scotland, we will again see some outbreaks of rain, some of that

will be heavy over hills in the west but notice that mild theme, temperatures of 9—12, maybe 13 degrees. and it stays mild into sunday and at this stage we're likely to bring some slightly drier air up from the near continent. so more sunshine to come across england and wales, northern ireland and also the south and east of scotland. still some rain to the north—west of scotland, but with those southerly winds, those temperatures up to 11, 12, 13, maybe for the moray firth for example, could see around 1a degrees.

this is bbc news — welcome if you're watching here in the uk, on pbs in america or around the globe. i'm mike embley. our top stories: a plane with 100 people on board crashes in kazakhstan, authorities say there are survivors. israel's prime minister retains the leadership of his likud party, he will lead it into the general election due in march. blocked roads and widespread flooding hamper rescue efforts in the philippines, where a typhoon has killed at least 16 people. is this a way to save the world's coral from climate change? scientists are trying to grow new reefs in the seychelles.