us special counseljack smith who led federal investigations into donald trump has resigned just days before trump reta kes the white house. and celebrations in sudan, after the army captures a strategic eastern city — from the paramilitary rapid support forces. hello, i'm carl nasman. we begin with the wildfires in los angeles, where the death toll has risen to 16. more evacuation orders have been issued as crews continue to battle multiple wildfires. the largest blaze is now bearing down on a new area — the wealthy neighbourhood of brentwood. these are pictures from los angeles in the past hour. cruiser continuing to work to keep the blazes from spreading.

—— crews. in addition to the 16 deaths — around a dozen others are missing. police dogs are helping the search for victims while control efforts are now being supported by firefighters from mexico, canada and seven neighbouring us states. as the new firefighters arrived, california governor gavin newsom expressed his gratitude. this is what friends do. this is what relationships are all about. friends in need, being there for one another. we want to be there for the people of mexico in times of need, and disasters, and we're incredibly humbled and grateful that the president was willing to send the crew you see behind me. they'll be out in the lines in the next 2a, 36 hours, and we're very, very grateful. there've been dramatic scenes of aircraft dropping thousands of gallons of fire retardant on the hills in an attempt to put out the blazes. more than 12,000 homes and other buildings have been destroyed.

now there are fears that the fierce winds that fanned the flames are likely to pick up again and continue for several more days. there are still four active fires — as two blazes were fully contained earlier today. the hurst and kenneth fires are now more than 75% contained, with the eaton fire, hitting the north of the city, only 15% contained. high winds and other dry conditions have been working against firefighters battling the palisades fire — the largest of blazes. five days on, it's still only 11% contained — and is on track to become the most destructive in california history. 0ur correspondentjohn sudworth has more now on the firefighting efforts. they're throwing everything they've got at these fires. in multiple waves, the aircraft swoop in — the helicopters dropping thousands of gallons of water every run.

so, we've seen these planes now coming in time and time again. this one is dropping fire retardant right on top of the fire there in a desperate bid to stop these flames reaching the communities on the other side of the hill there. this latest flare—up poses a major threat to new neighbourhoods. new evacuations have been ordered, with more property and lives in the reach of this disaster. this is what they're trying to prevent. 0n the other side of the city, an eerie silence. but amid the devastation and grief, questions are being asked, too. how were firefighters left without water? did budget cuts hamper the response? the city's fire chief has directly criticised city officials. in her latest press conference, though, the mayor pushed back. let me be clear

about something. 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. but right now, our first and most important obligation to angelenos is to get through this crisis. for the past few days, the weather's been on their side, but winds are forecast to pick up again, and this city's fight is far from over. john sudworth, bbc news, los angeles. i've been speaking tojohn harabedian about the situation. he's a california state assembly member for district 41, representing altadena, among other areas affected by the blazes. that eaton fire has really destroyed large parts of altadena. have you been back there? what have you been hearing from the community there?

good evening, carl, and thank you for your words and your sympathy. i have not left. we are here at the command centre. i am in and out of altadena and the affected areas every day, and i will tell you that it is a disaster. it looks like a war zone. so many of our friends and family members have lost everything, and i was born and raised in this community, i grew up here. many of the parks that i played sports at are gone. many of the homes that my friends lived in, that i played in, are gone. the community of altadena as we know it, carl, is forever changed, and as of now, we are all altadena, standing with them and helping them. but on the ground it's devastating. so many tears have been shed between all of us and as a community we are hurting. yeah, we've just been seeing so many devastating images coming out of altadena. for the people there,

for the residents who lost their homes, where are people finding shelter? how are they dealing now with this disaster and really in just the next days and weeks to come? right now there are formal evacuation centres that have been set up but let's be honest, carl, most people are going to friends and family members, sleeping in their cars and trying to do whatever they can to get the help immediately with friends and family and i think that going forward we are going to see weeks and months and even years where people are going to feel displaced, but the message and really the reality is at the statewide level, at the federal level, we are going to do everything we can to bring resources here and we will have a plan and we will rebuild and altadena will be stronger than ever and it will be better than ever and i want people to know that, that their elected

officials, their leaders, are 100% pushing for them and are here to help them in every way. we've had a reporter there on the ground. she's been speaking with some families who did lose their home in altadena. what they told her was that they didn't get a warning about the advancing wildfires. they made the decision on their own to go ahead and evacuate. do you have a sense of whether residents there did get enough of a warning from officials in order to be able to move to safety? we're going to have to go back and look at everything that transpired and we will make an assessment at the proper time. right now i am focused on making sure that people are safe going forward, making sure that this fire which is only 15% contained, gets attended to with as many fire personnel and resources as possible and making sure that this active disaster is attended to and accomplished so that less structures and less devastation happens. there will be a time to look back and see and answer those questions but right now the time is really to help our neighbours, ourfamily

members and our community members that are affected and make sure that more members of this community are not negatively affected by this. as you mentioned, these fires still continuing to burn. crews working as hard as they can to try and get them under some sort of control. what is it like on the ground like now? we know there was a bit of a lull when it came to the winds earlier but we understand they could now pick up again in the next few hours or so? i'm glad you brought that up. there are going to be red flag wind warnings again. we're hoping they don't to the hurricane—type levels that folks saw a few days ago but some winds are coming. because of that, if there is an evacuation order, heed it. if there is any sort of evacuation order that comes to your area in the next day or so, take heed of it, evacuate immediately and find a friendor family

to stay with come to us for a voucher of some kind of a housing but we're not out this. this is a perilous, dangerous situation and this remains an active disaster zone and it's going to take time to actually repopulate, to come back to norm, but make no mistake, over the next couple of days, we are all hands on deck. we have over 2,000 fire personnel in the eaton fire as we speak. there are going to be thousands of folks every day working to put out this fire. but now is not the time to rest. it is really a time to make sure that catastrophe to a larger extent does not happen. just briefly, if you don't mind, before i let you go, you mentioned this community will be looking towards rebuilding. i'm from california. january we know is not the normal wild fire season. we've seen this drought really drying out the area there. how much do you think climate change and the new normal now in the state will factor into the way that community does rebuild? it has to be a huge

factor, carl. i think there is no doubt that factors of this fire a lot amount to do with climate change. in the rebuild we have to be smart, innovative and thoughtful about when and how we rebuild, this doesn't happen again. i don't want to have a situation where people wake up on a tuesday morning and hours later they are homeless and all that is left of their property is ash, rubble and a foundation. we will never let this happen again and i think to your point, when we rebuild, climate change and all the effects of it have to be taken into account. special counseljack smith has resigned from the us justice department after overseeing two federal investigations into president—elect donald trump. jack smith filed his final report on his criminal investigations into trump onjanuary 7 — but it's release has been temporarily blocked. smith's resignation came in a court filing submitted on friday — which urged to not further bar the release of the report. here's our north america correspondent merlyn thomas.

special counseljack smith has resigned after completing two investigations into the president—elect donald trump. those two cases were about, one, mr trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents, and number two, his alleged attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat against president biden. both of those criminal cases have been shelved and that's because of a justice department policy that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted. but — the report still could be released. this has been a long protracted battle with lots of back and forths. but the bottom line is that a portion of these reports could still be released, and yet mr trump's legal team could still ask the supreme court to intervene and to delay and block the release of the reports. so, we are still watching to see what will happen with that. but mr smith has been a thorn in the president—elect�*s side for a long time now.

mr trump called him deranged several times and he also vowed to fire him as soon as he went into the oval office, and he even suggested he might go after him in some form of political retribution. either way, even though mr trump may have won the legal battles, there still may be a final momentous clash as to whether the public gets to read any of mr smith's findings. for more on smith's resignation and his legacy, i've been speaking with former federal prosecutor annemarie mcavoy. jack smith stepping down really not a surprise, that was expected, but what do you make of the way he did it? this was buried in a footnote in some court documents. yes, everybody knew he was going to resign anyway but it was an odd way to do it. i guess he kind of wanted to quietly get out of the office, or as quietly hit as he could.

but it is surprising to see it done in an actual footnote. now might be as good a time as any to look back at these last couple of years and jack smith's legacy. what kind of legacy do you think this will be? in a lot of ways these were high—profile cases, trying a former and then future president and, in a way, he kind of stayed out of the spotlight during that whole period, didn't he? he did, it was certainly more about the cases than about the person actually doing the prosecuting. jack smith was very successful at doing that, keeping it about the facts in the case. it certainly is going to be interesting to look back on, as you've just said, and historians, i'm sure, will pour over these cases the years to come, given it was certainly the first time ever cases were brought against a presidential candidate and here, we had so many of them, and as it's turned out, it appears they've all basically gone bust. while he was sentenced yesterday,

there was no actual penalty imposed upon him, no fines, no jail time, nothing. in the new york state case, the georgia case is floundering with the da, fani willis, being told that basically she is being removed from the case by the courts and there is a big question as to whether that case will move on at all. and certainlyjack smith, both of his cases which he clearly had high hopes for, both of which he had to himself actually have them dismissed. classified documents case was dismissed but against donald trump only. there are two codefendants in that case. do you get the sense it could still go ahead with the codefendants there? it could potentially but the reality is that it won't. the whole argument also about whether to release the report or not, all of that

— once the trump administration comes in and takes over onjanuary 20, they will then have full control over what the department ofjustice does so i will be very surprised if the trump department ofjustice does not immediately withdraw the rest of that case against the other two defendants where it is still pending. in the end do you think thatjack smith was the right choice to prosecute these cases? he certainly was very zealous in going forward. he came up with very unique ways to use the law to try to support these cases. he clearly worked hard on them, put a lot of time and effort into them so i think, without question, if you're looking for a prosecutor to try a case, he was about as — he put in as much effort

as you possibly could. i think the bigger question, really, is whether it made sense to bring these cases in the first place. i mean, when we look at the handling of the documents, the reality is that they looked at biden�*s handling of documents and said, well, yeah, he did wrong, too, but he's really too senile for us to even prosecute so if you're not going against one, why would you go against the other? and there were real questions as to the viability of those claims and of course the other question, really the big question, was the timing and the effect that it had on the elections and the reality is it seems to have backfired and gotten people essentially even more upset about the status quo and helped him undoubtedly win office. rachel reeves has insisted her visit to china is in the uk's national interest after reaching new trade agreements in beijing. the chancellor's visit, however, has been overshadowed by criticism as the uk

struggles to bring the up the value of the pound, while borrowing costs have reached a 16—year high. rachel reeves says the new deals will bring £600 million back into the uk economy over the next five years and help grow british businesses. here's rachel reeves speaking in beijing — explaining the business reasons behind her visit. growth is the number—i of this government, to make our country better offer. the's why i'm in china, to unlock tangible benefits for reduced businesses, exporting and trading around the world, to ensure that we have greater access to the second biggest economy in the world, and when we have these pragmatic conversations with chinese leaders, and indeed chinese businesses, we will always be acting in britain's national interest. as the uk makes an effort to work with china on trade, the us appears to be taking a more combative stance. american users are getting ready to say goodbye to the chinese—owned social media app tiktok. it's set to be banned here in just over one week —

unless bytedance sells off the company in the us. tiktok�*s legal team gave theirfinal plea in hopes of overturing the ban at a us supreme court hearing on friday. they were joined by content creators, many of which rely on the platform as a means of income. president—elect donald trump has also argued against a ban. and while more than a third of americans use tiktok, some us lawmakers and supreme courtjustices are wary of potential surveillance or interference from the chinese government. tiktok accuses the us of unfairly targetting the rapidly growing social media company and says that implementing a ban violates free speech. i've been speaking with jacob huebert, president of the libertyjustice center. i know actually that you've filed a legal challenge to that bill. just walk us through your arguments against this law, now being considered, of course, by the supreme court, that could end up potentially banning tiktok here in the us? yes, we represent a non—profit

organisation that uses tiktok to reach a young, gen z audience, with its message of individual liberty and free markets, that they can't reach anywhere else. and if this platform shuts down, we say that's a violation of their right to free speech because they won't be able to speak there and they won't be able to reach this unique audience. and the government, to justify this, then says, well, we need to shut this down for national security — two national security reasons. one of them is protecting americans�* data privacy and the other is ensuring that china can't lean on bytedance to alter the content on tiktok in a way that would go against the us government's interests. the second one, we say,

is totally illegitimate because there, the government is essentially saying that it doesn't like the combination of ideas that might be put in front of people and thinks that would be harmful. the whole point of the first amendment is that the government cannot suppress speech that it thinks goes against its interests, even if the speech did directly attack the foundations of our system of government or something like that. although of course that's not really what's going on tiktok. 0n tiktok in america, it's primarily americans talking to other americans about all kinds of things. the father of molly russell — a british teenager who took her own life after seeing harmful content online — has appealed to the uk prime minister to tighten online safety rules to protect children. 14—year—old molly russell died in november 2017 after being exposed to a stream of dark content on the social media sites pinterest and instagram. her father ian russell is now warning more children are at risk due to the implementation of the government's 0nline safety act by regulator 0fcom — claiming it's been a "disaster". mr russell's letter

to sir keir starmer also came in response to meta's announcement that it will end third party fact—checking on its platforms in the us. iam sure i am sure keir starmer as a father protects his children from online dangers as much as any individual can, but as prime minister, he needs to really back online safety and move forward so that the uk is the safest place in the world to be a minor and children when they are there in the future don't face the danger they are facing today. the announcement that mark zuckerberg made comment in particular, just leads me to believe that meta is turning its platforms back towards the platforms that molly saw in the last months of her life. back towards the way that they were run, back towards the harmful content that molly was exposed to and therefore no —— more children will be exposed to in the future. meta says it's committed to promoting safety on its platforms.

there have been celebrations in parts of sudan — after the army captured the eastern city of wad madani from the paramilitary rapid support forces. the leader of the rsf acknowledged the loss, but vowed to continue fighting the sudanese army until victory, even if it took another 20 years. the rsf militia, which has controlled the city for the past year, has been accused of widespread human rights abuses — and just this week, the us officially designated its actions as a genocide. since sudan's civil war began, tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 11 million have been displaced. the un says the war has created the world's worst famine. for more on this i spoke to youssef taha of bbc world service. tell us more about the significance of this victory we're hearing about by the sudanese army. this is very significant because the rapid support forces have been holding wad madani for over a year. so this is a very major defeat for them, and that was

reflected in general hemedti, mohamed hamdan dagalo, also known as hemedti, in his tone and his rambling audio message. usually he makes video messages but this one was audio and he was very angry in it and used some colourful language to describe his opponent, general burhan — the leader of the sudanese army. he said that, yes, it's a loss butjust a loss of one battle rather than losing the war and he said that he is prepared with his forces to continue fighting. they have now been fighting for about 21 months. it started in april two years ago. he said it's 20 months now but he's prepared to fight for another 21 years, as he put it, until the tables are turned and that they win this war and put general burhan on trial. what about for the people themselves? we heard there about celebrations on the streets after this victory, and as we mentioned, the rsf has been accused of these human rights abuses

in the area too. well, they deny committing any abuses as general hemedti said earlier in his recording. and he said that they have not killed anyone, they would only kill people, as he put it, after a trial ruling, but no trials have taken place until after this war ends. but, the celebrations have taken place in various parts of sudan and even outside sudan itself as well, and some have been chanting "wad madani's back", "wad madani is free" and also "0ne army, one country". and this, of course, is inspired by the fact that general dagalo and general burhan, the leader of the army, have been actually power—sharing previously but they fell out, so the two were leading the transitional government that was formed after the removal of long—term president 0mar al—bashir

in 2019, but then was an incident in 2022 in march when an army officer shot dead at close quarters one of the protesters and that was a trigger for general dagalo to seize upon and fell out with his boss and this started this civil war. before we go — a reminder of our top story — those wildfires in los angeles. the death toll has risen to 16 people. about a dozen others are still unaccounted for, we do have these live images. you can see it is dark there which does make those efforts to control those fires a little bit more difficult but we have been seeing some images of those burning blazes, the embers there, in the night sky in los angeles. the efforts continue was not we will track that story right here on bbc news. hello there. this really cold spell of weather is coming to an end in the next few days

but we still have some cold, frosty and icy conditions this weekend. it was particularly cold in the midlands, where the fog lingered, and we have some fog in eastern england and also in northern ireland overnight. and these are the temperatures early on sunday morning, so a widespread frost. those temperatures not quite as low as they have been over the past few nights, mind you — that's because there's a bit more cloud around that's pushing its way through the midlands into eastern england, the mist and fog lifting. sunny spells developing in england and wales. the fog lifting in northern ireland. as the cloud comes in, the winds pick up and that cloud will push its way into scotland, bringing a little rain into the far northwest. but for many eastern parts of scotland, northern england, down through the midlands towards the southeast, it's still a cold day, butjust not quite as cold as it has been just recently. the really cold air that's been trapped underneath that high pressure — that's getting squeezed to a certain extent, allowing these weather fronts to topple down from the northwest to bring a bit of rain. but more significantly,

we're picking up a stronger wind coming in from the atlantic this time, and that's lifting the temperatures. early on monday, quite a contrast in the uk — a very mild start for scotland and northern ireland but still cold enough for some frost towards the southeast. here, the winds are a bit lighter. we may have some sunshine around on monday. elsewhere, that wind is picking up, blowing in the cloud. a bit of rain moves through scotland, northern ireland, into northern parts of england and north wales. a little bit of rain follows on from that as well. but it's the change in the wind direction and the strengthening of this south—to—southwesterly wind that is tending to lift the temperatures. it's still quite chilly, perhaps, on monday across large parts of england and wales, where temperatures are going to be five, six degrees perhaps. but it is much milderfurther north — 12 or 13 in scotland and northern ireland. as we head into tuesday, we're still close to high pressure in the south, where it's a bit chillier. but elsewhere, the winds coming in from the atlantic bringing in a lot of dry weather, but a lot of cloud and we're continuing to see those temperatures rising — perhaps getting into double figures across parts of england and wales. again, 12 or 13 further north. and the highest temperatures over the week ahead are likely to be in scotland and northern ireland.

still a bit chilly across the far south of england and wales at night, with a risk of frost, but otherwise we've got a breezy air, cloudy air and temperatures are rising.

voice-over: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines

for you at the top of the hour, which is straight after this programme. this week, we brave the arctic permafrost to visit the ultimate data storage vault. it's a remote destination, far away from wars, crisis, terrorism, disasters. so, what could be safer? nick goes down under to meet the people helping to preserve one of the great wonders of the world. though some of the techniques are quite old—school. it looks like a giant thermos flask. it really is. spencer challenges the boss of lg to gaze into his crystal ball in a no holds barred 0&a. the year is 2030.

my hair is still suspiciously brown.