Ibrahim came to the UK two years ago on a tourist visa - then claimed asylum.

In the time he's been waiting to have his claim processed, he's met his partner Yvonne, who is English, and five weeks ago their baby daughter Alisha was born.

But his asylum claim remains unresolved, and he says he can't return to his home near Hebron in the West Bank because of his political activism.

"I can't just be stuck like this," he says. "I can't just waste day after day of my life waiting for somebody to say 'OK, we give you a decision'."

He wants to move on with his life and be allowed to work, he says.

"I don't think you need two years to process any asylum claim. I don't think there's any case that's complicated to that level. I'm not single any more. I've got other responsibilities now."

'I'd be happy to join hotel protests'

Formerly a farmer in the Golan Heights, Ibrahim says he's well aware of the shifting public mood over immigration and shares frustration over the money being spent on asylum seekers.

"I don't think they are putting their anger toward the right group," he says. "On many occasions, I spoke with a lot of them - the people who were protesting by the hotel.

"I said 'if you are really angry and if you really want to save your country, I will be more than happy to come with you and let's go together to protest'."

Ibrahim says he stayed in three Home Office-funded asylum hotels and claims at one point he got scabies.

He claims the food and conditions were so bad at one point, he left and slept on the streets.

Huge backlog of asylum claims

Meanwhile, the National Audit Office (NAO), the UK's independent public spending watchdog, has published a study on the processing and costs of people claiming asylum, examining the causes of delays and inefficiencies.

It analysed a sample of 5,000 asylum claims lodged almost three years ago and found 35% of them have so far been granted, while 9% of the claimants have been removed from the UK.

But the claims of more than half - 56% - remain unresolved.

Ruth Kelly, NAO chief analyst, says ministers have tended to take "short-term reactive interventions to fix problems, but then these have led to other pressures forming elsewhere in the system and new backlogs forming".

"That's led to wasted funds, poor outcomes for asylum seekers, and harm to the government's ability to meet its obligations to citizens."

The NAO estimates in the last year the Home Office and Ministry of Justice spent nearly £5bn on asylum - more than £2bn of that on asylum hotels.

It says there is a lack of a "whole system" approach within the Home Office; no shared objectives and there needs to be more robust shared data.

The NAO said it found the Home Office's effectiveness and value for money are being undermined because of fundamental barriers that mean people seeking asylum spend extended periods waiting in the system.

Read more on Sky News:
Asylum seeker taxi ban
Rise in asylum seekers in hotels
How immigration system is changing

The government has announced a raft of new measures to overhaul the asylum system but the watchdog points out they will take time and parliamentary approval to introduce.

In November, the home secretary acknowledged some people who are coming to the UK are economic migrants seeking to abuse the system, with even genuine refugees passing through other safe countries searching for the most attractive place to seek refuge.

Government vows to 'restore order'

With asylum claims falling across Europe but rising in the UK, the government says it wants to reduce illegal migrant arrivals and increase the removal of people with no right to be in the UK.

A Home Office spokesperson said the home secretary "recently announced the most sweeping changes to the asylum system in a generation to deal with the problems outlined in this report.

"We are already making progress - with nearly 50,000 people with no right to be here removed, a 63% rise in illegal working arrests and over 21,000 small boat crossing attempts prevented so far this year.

"Our new reforms will restore order and control, remove the incentives which draw people to come to the UK illegally and increase removals of those with no right to be here."

The prime minister said the way in which the ECHR is interpreted in courts must be modernised, with critics long claiming the charter is a major barrier to deportations of illegal migrants.

His deputy, David Lammy, will today be in Strasbourg, France, with fellow European ministers to discuss reforms of how the agreement is interpreted in law across the continent.

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Sir Keir and his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, said the change was necessary to prevent voters from turning to populist political opponents.

What's the issue with the ECHR?

The ECHR, which is the foundation of Britain's Human Rights Act, includes the right to family life in its Article 8.

That is often used as grounds to prevent deportations of illegal migrants from the UK.

There has also been a rise in cases where Article 3 rights, prohibiting torture, were used to halt deportations over claims migrants' healthcare needs could not be met in their home country, according to the Home Office.

The Conservatives and Reform UK have both said they would leave the ECHR if in power, while the Labour government has insisted it will remain a member of the treaty.

But Sir Keir admitted in his joint op-ed that the "current asylum framework was created for another era".

"In a world with mass mobility, yesterday's answers do not work. We will always protect those fleeing war and terror - but the world has changed, and asylum systems must change with it," the two prime ministers wrote, as they push for a "modernisation of the interpretation" of the ECHR.

What is happening today?

Mr Lammy is attending an informal summit of the Council of Europe.

He is expected to say: "We must strike a careful balance between individual rights and the public's interest.

"The definition of 'family life' can't be stretched to prevent the removal of people with no right to remain in the country [and] the threshold of 'inhuman and degrading treatment' must be constrained to the most serious issues."

It is understood that a political declaration signed by the gathered ministers could carry enough weight to directly influence how the European Court of Human Rights interprets the treaty.

The UK government is expected to bring forward its own legislation to change how Article 8 is interpreted in UK courts, and is also considering a re-evaluation of the threshold for Article 3 rights.

The plans have been criticised by Amnesty International UK, which described them as weakening protections.

"Human rights were never meant to be optional or reserved for comfortable and secure times. They were designed to be a compass, our conscience, when the politics of fear and division try to steer us wrong," Steve Valdez-Symonds, the organisation's refugee and migrant rights programme director, said.

Sir Keir's government has already adopted several hardline immigration measures - modelled on those introduced by Ms Federiksen's Danish government - to decrease the number of migrants crossing the Channel via small boats.

Read more: UK's immigration shake-up explained

Starmer-Macron deal 'a sticking plaster'

Meanwhile, French far-right leader Jordan Bardella told The Daily Telegraph he would rewrite his country's border policy to allow British patrol boats to push back small vessels carrying migrants into France's waters if he were elected.

The National Rally leader called Sir Keir's "one-in, one-out" agreement with Emmanuel Macron, which includes Britain returning illegal arrivals in exchange for accepting a matching number of legitimate asylum seekers, a "sticking plaster" and "smokescreen".

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He said that only a complete overhaul of French immigration policy would stop the Channel crossings.

Mr Bardella is currently leading in opinion polls to win the first round of France's next presidential election, expected to happen in 2027, to replace Mr Macron.

In the deep blue waters of the Caribbean, visible from space, an unremarkable grey smudge.

But this is the USS Gerald R Ford: the largest, most deadly aircraft carrier in the world. And it is only part of an armada, apparently set on Venezuela.

From being able to count on one hand the number of warships and boats in the Caribbean, since August we can see the build-up of the number, and variety of ships under US command.

And that's only at sea - air power has also been deployed, with bombers flying over the Caribbean, and even along the Venezuelan coast, as recently as this week.

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro told crowds his country has endured 22 weeks of aggression from the US and Donald Trump.

Things could be about to get worse.

So let's rewind those 22 weeks to understand how we got here…

'Drug boat' strike

On 2 September, the White House posted on X that it had conducted a strike against so-called "narcoterrorists" shipping fentanyl to the US, without providing direct evidence of the alleged crime.

Sky's Data & Forensics unit has verified that in the past four months since strikes began, 23 boats have been targeted in 22 strikes, killing 87 people.

Read more: The US-Venezuela crisis explained

The latest was on 4 December, after which US Southern Command announced it had conducted another strike on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific.

It was the first such strike since 15 November and since the defence secretary, sometimes referred to as secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, came under scrutiny for an alleged "second strike" in an earlier attack.

The US says it carried out the action because of drugs - and there has been some evidence to support its assertion.

The Dominican Republic said it had recovered the contents of one boat hit by a strike - a huge haul of cocaine.

Legal issues

Whatever the cargo, though, there are serious, disputed legal issues.

Firstly, it is contested whether by designating the people on the boats as narcoterrorists, it makes them lawful military targets - or whether the strikes are in fact extra judicial murders of civilians at sea.

And more specifically… well, let's go back to that very first video, of the very first strike.

What this footage doesn't show is what came afterwards - an alleged "second strike" that targeted people in the water posing no apparent threat.

That has created a crisis for Hegseth.

Speaking at a cabinet meeting last week, the defence secretary said he did not see that there were survivors in the water when the second strike was ordered and launched in early September, saying that "the thing was on fire".

And the 4 December strike shows this strategy isn't over.

The strikes are just part of the story, as warships and planes have headed toward the region in huge numbers.

Drugs or oil?

Some have said this isn't about drugs at all, but oil.

Venezuela has lots - the world's largest proven reserves.

Speaking to the faithful on Fox News, Republican congresswoman - and Trump supporter - Maria Salazar said access to Venezuela would be a "field day" for American oil companies.

And Maduro himself has taken up that theme. A few days later, he wrote this letter to OPEC - which represents major oil producing nations - to "address the growing and illegal threats made by the government of the United States against Venezuela".

That's how Maduro has framed this - a plan by the US "to seize Venezuela's vast oil reserves… through lethal military force".

Lethal military force - an understatement when you think of the armada lying in wait.

And it may be called upon soon. Trump on Tuesday said he's preparing to take these strikes from international waters on to Venezuelan territory.

Maduro has complained of 22 weeks of "aggression". There may be many more to come.

Additional reporting by Sophia Massam, junior digital investigations journalist.

The Data X Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

This feels wrong on every level. We have all heard the stories - there are so many, you can hardly avoid them. And everyone who's ever used social media knows it can be frustrating, to put it mildly.

Sure, it has its benefits. But it often feels empty, addictive or actively undermining. And that's even before you get to its more dangerous side, in particular for children - sexual predators, say, or disturbing and inappropriate content.

What's more, there's a worrying trend around the world which common sense tells you can only be explained by social media.

Teenage mental health is in decline, especially among young girls. In Australia, one measure of good mental health has fallen by 10%. A measure of bad mental health, self-harm admissions to hospital, has risen by more than 40%.

There are similar trends around the world.

Globally, depressive symptoms have jumped in adolescents worldwide, going from 24% in 2001-2010 to 37% in 2011-2020.

Read more:
How will the law work?

When did the decline start? Around 2010.

What else happened in 2010? Social media went mainstream. The conclusion seems so obvious it's hardly worth investigating.

Except that when scientists do investigate it, they cannot find the connection. The relationship between social media use and negative health outcomes is tenuous at best.

In 2024, a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge analysed 143 studies searching for a connection between social media use and psychological problems like anxiety and depression. They found one, but the correlation was very weak.

If there is a correlation, it seems tiny

Correlation tells you how tightly two things move together. For example, the link between the amount of alcohol a person drinks and their blood-alcohol level is extremely strong, with a correlation around 0.90. Height and weight show a solid relationship, at about 0.75.

This large study, which in total included 1,094,890 adolescents, put the link between social media use and mental health symptoms between 0.08 and 0.12.

The effect may be real, but compared with classic examples of strong correlations, it is tiny.

Time and again, studies confirm this finding. You would think, for instance, that if social media were bad for people, then the arrival of Facebook would cause well-being to plummet.

Well, researchers studied this, looking at Facebook adoption in 72 countries from 2008 to 2019.

"We found no evidence suggesting that the global penetration of social media is associated with widespread psychological harm," they concluded.

There was some impact on younger people, but once again, it was mild, and the picture was mixed.

"What that tells us is it's very hard to make decisions about how to intervene at a population level because the evidence of harm is not really clear-cut and the findings aren't clear-cut," says Victoria Goodyear of the University of Birmingham.

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This conclusion is far from decisive. Social media might generate oceans of data, but only the tech companies really get to see it, so researchers are working with extremely limited material.

One big source of information is diaries made by teenagers chronicling their social media use and symptoms - perhaps if there was a better way of measuring what's really going on, we would get a different picture.

'The Anxious Generation'

Of course, there are researchers who believe passionately that social media is undoubtedly harming children, most notably Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, a book which has become a bible among parents campaigning for smartphone bans.

I asked Dr Goodyear what she thought of The Anxious Generation.

"I'm not going to comment on that one," she replied.

This is a common response among researchers in this area, who privately believe that Dr Haidt has left the evidence behind in his crusade against smartphones and social media.

Those who do put their heads above the parapet are often sharply critical. A review of Dr Haidt's book in the scientific journal Nature called him "a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence". For academics, this is savage.

So what's an actual solution?

Critics of Dr Haidt say that the problem is the other way round. It's not that social media causes depression; it's that adolescents with depressive symptoms interact differently on social media. Banning social media for this is like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, as it will remove the benefits without necessarily treating the problem.

Instead, they argue, we need to rethink the way children are treated by society more generally, giving them fun and freedom so they are not pushed towards screens.

As the Nature review of The Anxious Generation concluded: "We have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research."

He died on Tuesday following a "tragic accident" while watching the Ukrainian military test a new weapon away from the frontline, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said.

Hostile fire is not thought to have been involved.

The Sun reported the serviceman was in the Special Forces. An MoD spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny the claim and the individual's rank and service have not yet been revealed.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Defence Secretary John Healey paid tribute to him.

"My deepest sympathy and condolences to the family of the member of our Armed Forces who sadly lost their life today," Sir Keir said.

"Their service and sacrifice will never be forgotten.

Mr Healey said he was "devastated by the death of a UK service person in Ukraine.

"My thoughts are with their family, friends and colleagues as they grieve for a loved one. Our hearts go out to them."

What role do Britons have in Ukraine?

The UK has previously acknowledged the presence of a small number of service personnel in Ukraine who are helping the Ukrainian military, as well as providing security for the British ambassador and other diplomats at the embassy in Kyiv.

There are also British troops who have been giving medical training.

Dozens of former British troops, as well as foreign fighters from many other countries, have travelled to Ukraine to fight for the Ukrainian armed forces ever since Russia launched its full-scale war almost four years ago.

A number of them have been killed in battle.

But this is the first time a serving member of the military has died.

"It is with deep regret that we must announce that a member of the UK Armed Forces died in Ukraine this morning, Tuesday 9 December," the MoD said in a statement.

"He was injured in a tragic accident whilst observing Ukrainian forces test a new defensive capability, away from the front lines."

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It was not immediately clear whether the accident happened on the same day that he died. The location where it occurred has also not been confirmed.

The serviceman's family has been notified.

Kremlin will likely seek to exploit death

The death shines a rare light on the little-discussed work of the UK military inside the country.

Very little is said about the mission amid concerns that Russia could exploit the discrete UK presence to falsely claim that serving British soldiers are actively fighting against Russian troops.

The first confirmed death of a serving member of the British armed forces confirms the significant risks they are taking.

But the Kremlin will also likely seize on the tragedy to amplify bogus claims about NATO forces already being deployed in Ukraine, fighting directly against Russia.