A code of practice for getting a dog is to be drawn up in Scotland under a new law passed by MSPs.

The Welfare of Dogs Bill aims to promote responsible ownership by making sure people understand the commitment required before they take on a pet.

Within 12 months the government will need to draw up a code, effectively a checklist of questions about whether the new owner has considered whether they have the time, space and money needed.

That would then inform a certificate, to be signed by the new owner and the person they are acquiring the dog from, to underline that both sides understand the commitment involved.

The new law is a member’s bill introduced by SNP MSP Christine Graham, who has been pushing for changes for more than seven years.

The Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale MSP first tabled a Welfare of Dogs bill in 2018 but saw it fall at the end of a term of parliament curtailed by Covid.

The inspiration behind the bill can readily be seen at Edinburgh’s dog and cat home, where Ms Grahame is a regular fixture – she literally has her name on the wall.

The facility is currently at capacity for dogs following a “worrying” increase in strays being brought in.

One of them is Susan, a four-year-old labrador-staffie cross. She is a friendly dog who has clearly had some training – she can sit, and offer a paw in exchange for a treat – but came in as a stray in October, having presumably been abandoned.

The home’s chief executive Lindsay Fyffe-Jardine says dogs do come to them because good owners see their circumstances change, through no fault of their own.

But she said there was also an issue with “decisions which perhaps aren’t talked through before purchase”.

She said: “It’s as easy to go out to the supermarket to buy your cereal as it is to get a dog from lots of different places and the reality is not everyone stops to think ‘can I afford this dog? can I fit them into my life?’.

“Because it’s a huge commitment.”

This is where Christine Grahame’s bill comes in.

The new law requires the government to produce – within 12 months – a code of practice which sets out steps that should be taken when buying, selling or giving away a dog.

This code must include a checklist of questions which prospective dog owners should ask of themselves and of the person they are acquiring the animal from.

These questions are intended to fit on a single side of A4 paper, and would include things like:

• whether the breed of dog is suitable for the new owner
• whether they have a suitable environment to house it
• whether they have time to exercise regularly
• whether they can afford the costs of having a pet on an ongoing basis
• and whether they can commit to caring for the dog throughout its entire life

The new owner would then have to sign a certificate showing that they have considered the questions set out in the code, while the seller would sign it to attest that they are content to hand the dog over.

This certificate isn’t a licence or a legally binding document. The point is to make people think carefully about what dog ownership entails before they take on a new pet.

There is already a 28-page code of practice for dog owners, which was introduced in 2010 under previous animal welfare reforms.

But Ms Grahame contends that few will have actually read that code, and that one which needs to be signed up to at the point of buying a dog would focus minds at the critical moment.

The Conservatives pushed to simply merge the two codes at committee stage, but otherwise there has been little dissent over the plans as they now stand.

The bill originally also included proposals to set up a Scotland-wide database for registering all dogs bred in unlicensed litters.

However, this was dropped after the government said it was “not convinced that developing a registration scheme would be an effective or proportionate way” to tackle issues around irresponsible breeding.

The final debate on the bill also included a row about shock collars, after Green MSP Ross Greer attempted to add in a ban on them at the final stage of debate.

This was voted down after the government pledged to return to the issue once further independent reports on the devices has been completed later this year.

“It’s like the United States doesn’t actually understand what I did for this country, it’s a betrayal,” Abdullah tells the BBC.

He fled Afghanistan with his parents amid the US withdrawal in August 2021 and is now a paratrooper for the US military. He worries he can’t help his sister and her husband escape too, because of President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending a resettlement programme.

The order cancels all flights and applications for Afghan refugees, without any exemption for families of active servicemembers.

Trump argues the decision addresses “record levels of migration” that threaten “the availability of resources for Americans”.

But Abdullah and several other Afghan refugees have told the BBC they feel the US has “turned its back” on them, despite years of working alongside American officials, troops and non-profit organisations in Afghanistan. We are not using their real names, as they worry doing so could jeopardise their cases or put their families at risk.

As soon as Abdullah heard about the order, he called his sister. “She was crying, she’s lost all hope,” he said. He believes his work has made her a target of the Taliban government which took power in 2021.

“The anxiety, it’s just unimaginable. She thinks we’ll never be able to see each other again,” he says.

During the war, Abdullah says he was an interpreter for US forces. When he left Afghanistan, his sister and her husband couldn’t get passports in time to board the flight.

Suhail Shaheen, a spokesperson for the Taliban government, told the BBC there is an amnesty for anyone who worked with international forces and all Afghans can “live in the country without any fear”. He claims these refugees are “economic migrants”.

But a UN report in 2023 cast doubt on assurances from the Taliban government. It found hundreds of former government officials and armed forces members were allegedly killed despite a general amnesty.

Abdullah’s sister and her husband had completed the medical exams and interviews required for resettlement in the US. The BBC has seen a document from the US Department of Defense endorsing their application.

Now Abdullah says Trump’s insistence that immigration is too high does not justify his separation from his family. He describes sleepless nights, and says the anxiety is affecting his work in his combat unit, serving the United States.

Babak, a former legal adviser to the Afghan Air Force, is still in hiding in Afghanistan.

“They’re not just breaking their promise to us – they’re breaking us,” he says.

The BBC has seen letters from the United Nations confirming his role, as well as a letter endorsing his asylum claim by a Lt Colonel in the US Air Force. The endorsement adds that he provided advice on strikes targeting militants linked to both the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

Babak can’t understand the president’s decision, given that he worked alongside US troops. “We risked our lives because of those missions. Now we’re in grave danger,” he says.

He has been moving his wife and young son from location to location, desperately trying to stay hidden. He claims his brother was tortured for his whereabouts. The BBC cannot verify this part of his story, given the nature of his claims.

Babak is appealing to Trump and his National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to change their minds.

“Mike Waltz, you served in Afghanistan. Please encourage the president,” he tells us.

Before saying goodbye, he adds: “The one ray of light we’ve been holding onto has been extinguished.”

Ahmad managed to fly out to the US amid the chaos of the withdrawal but is now separated from his family. He felt he had no choice but to leave his father, mother and teenage siblings behind.

If he and his father had not worked with the US, he says, his family would not be targets of the Taliban government. “I can’t sleep knowing I’m one of the reasons they’re in this situation,” he adds.

Before the Taliban takeover, Ahmad worked for a non-profit called Open Government Partnership (OGP), co-founded by the US 13 years ago and headquartered in Washington. He says the work he’s proudest of is establishing a special court to address abuses against women.

But he claims his work at OGP and his advocacy for women made him a target and he was shot by Taliban fighters in 2021 before the Taliban took over the country.

The BBC has seen a letter from a hospital in Pennsylvania assessing “evidence of injury from bullet and bullet fragments” which they say is “consistent with his account of what happened to him in Kabul”.

Making matters worse, he says his family is also in danger because his father was a colonel with the Afghan army and assisted the CIA. The BBC has seen a certificate, provided by the Afghan National Security Forces, thanking his father for his service.

Ahmad says the Taliban government has harassed his parents, brothers and sisters, so they fled to Pakistan. The BBC has seen photos showing Ahmad’s father and brother being treated in a hospital for injuries he claims were inflicted by people from the Taliban government.

His family had completed several steps of the resettlement programme. He says he even provided evidence that he has enough funds to support his family once they arrive in the US, without any government help.

Now Ahmad says the situation is critical. His family are in Pakistan on visas that will expire within months. He has contacted the IOM and has been told to “be patient”.

The head of #AfghanEvac, a non-profit group helping eligible Afghan refugees resettle, said he estimated 10,000-15,000 people were in the late stages of their applications.

Mina, who is pregnant, has been waiting for a flight out of Islamabad for six months. She worries her terror will threaten her unborn child. “If I lose the baby, I’ll kill myself,” she told the BBC.

She says she used to protest for women’s rights, even after the Taliban government took control of Afghanistan. She claims she was arrested in 2023 and detained overnight.

“Even then I didn’t want to leave Afghanistan. I went into hiding after my release, but they called me and said next time, they’d kill me,” she says.

Mina worries the Pakistani government will send her back to Afghanistan. That’s partly because Pakistan will not grant Afghan refugees asylum indefinitely.

The country has taken in hundreds of thousands of refugees from its neighbour, over decades of instability in the region. According to the UN refugee agency, the country hosts three million Afghan nationals, about 1.4 million of whom are documented.

As cross-border tensions with the Taliban government have flared, there has been growing concern over the fate of Afghans in Pakistan, with reports of alleged intimidation and detentions. The UN special rapporteur has said he’s concerned and Afghans in the region deserve better treatment.

Pakistan’s government says it is expelling foreign nationals who are in the country illegally back to Afghanistan and confirmed search raids were conducted in January.

According to the IOM, more than 795,000 Afghans have been expelled from Pakistan since last September.

The Afghan refugees we’ve spoken to feel caught between a homeland where their lives are in danger, and a host country whose patience is running out.

They had been pinning their hopes on the US – but what seemed a safe harbour has been abruptly blocked off by the new president until further notice.

The Brutalist tells the story of Hungarian immigrant and holocaust survivor László Tóth, who is trying to rebuild his life in post-war America through his work as an architect.

Oscar winner Adrien Brody delved deep into his own family history for his portrayal of the character, reflecting on his mother and grandparents’ experiences in fleeing their native Hungary, which after World War Two was becoming a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

“The wonderful thing is, it’s an opportunity for me to honour my ancestral struggles – my mother and my grandparents’ hardships and loss in fleeing Hungary in the ’50s and emigrating to the United States.

“[It’s] very moving to be reminded of the details and hardships that they experienced that very much parallel the lived experience of my character,” Brody says.

The actor says his character’s drive to create also reflects his own path as an actor.

“Any artistic person, I think, can relate to the struggle and yearnings to leave, create a body of work and leave behind something of great meaning,” he says.

The relationships in the film might be intimate and personal, but they’re set against a backdrop that is in so many ways epic – not least its running time. It clocks in at over three-and-a-half hours – something that might put off some moviegoers.

But director Brady Corbet believes The Brutalist’s length really shouldn’t deter audiences.

“For me, I think that the length of a movie is similar to the length of a book, a double album, a painting with a big canvas.

“I love small portraits and I love Anselm Kiefer (a German artist known for his large-scale installations). There’s a space for both of them, you know. And at the end of the day, especially because the film has an intermission, it’s only 100 minutes on each side, so it’s not so bad.”

Felicity Jones, who plays his wife, Erzsébet, says she spends a huge amount of time looking for realistic female characters who are more than just weak offshoots of their husbands.

“I spend most of my life foraging through scripts, trying to find decent characters to play. That’s a huge part of it,” she explains.

“I have to find someone who has some kind of spunk, or has some fight in them. Some sense of defiance is so key, so when I read the script it was an absolute no-brainer.

“I thought this woman is tremendous. But… they are few and far between, for sure. When you get something like this, you just grab it with both hands.”

In the film, Tóth is hired by rich industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren to design and build a vast project as a tribute to his late mother. Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce, is a man who is in awe of the architect’s talent. A useful parallel, then, for the actor.

“I suppose so,” admits the Australian. “I really admire Adrien and his work. I think he’s an extraordinary actor.

“It was really interesting the way Adrien played his role. He plays a man who has almost more sense of self than Van Buren does, which was a great thing for me to work off because I think Van Buren, even though he admires László, he probably is patronising of him.

“He probably expects him to be more subservient than he is, so it was a great dynamic between the two of us.”

On Thursday, the film was nominated for 10 Oscars, including a best-actor nomination for Brody. Even before the Academy Awards shortlists were announced, Brody said how thankful he was for the reception the film had received from awards bodies.

“I’m just really grateful and I’m very appreciative of having had a chance to flourish in a work that I’ve dedicated a life towards. And when that is received with respect and appreciation. It’s very rewarding.”

The Brutalist is released in cinemas on 24 January

Christina Welch still remembers what the sky looked like the day a wildfire came within 2 miles (3.2 km) of her Santa Rosa, California, home.

It was the Tubbs fire of 2017, the most destructive in California history at the time. Ms Welch’s neighbour woke her in the morning, and told her to grab her belongings and get out. When Ms Welch opened the door, ashes were falling from the sky and smoke filled the air.

Then, in 2019, the Kincade wildfire forced her parents to evacuate for five days.

It was the final push for Ms Welch. After advice from a friend, she packed her belongings and drove across the country to her new hometown: Duluth, Minnesota.

“It was just the culmination of all of it,” the 42-year-old said. “There’s only so many times that I was going to go through every fall of worrying about what is going to set on fire, if I was going to lose a house.”

Ms Welch is one of several people who has left California in recent years because of climate disasters, even before the most destructive wildfires in Los Angeles history killed 25 people this month.

Just this week, a new, fast-moving wildfire broke out in Los Angeles County, north-west of the city, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate a region already reeling from destruction. Trump plans to visit Southern California on Friday to witness the devastation from the blazes.

Climate experts say so far, they have not seen mass migration from the state because of climate change – and it’s difficult to estimate the number of people who have left for that reason. The state’s population growth rate, however, has continued to decline since 2000, according to the US census.

But scientists and demographic experts say that as climate change disasters become more extreme and unpredictable, the number of people leaving the state could rise, leaving some unprepared cities with the task of welcoming new residents.

“There could be this wave of new folks saying, ‘You know what? California is just not going to work out for me because this is the third time in five years that I’ve had to close my doors because of the extreme soot and smoke,’” said University of Michigan data science professor Derek Van Berkel.

“We have to start preparing for those eventualities, because they’re going to become more frequent and more extreme.”

A number of climate-related factors may push Californians to leave home over the next decade. From 2020 to 2023, wildfires destroyed more than 15,000 structures in California, according to CalFire. At least 12,000 structures have been lost in the Los Angeles wildfires that broke out at the start of this year.

The state faces other climate change impacts as well, including flooding. Sea level rise could put half a million California residents in areas prone to flooding by 2100, according to the state attorney general’s office.

The state also deals with at least two earthquakes on average each year of magnitude 5.5 or greater, according to the California Department of Conservation.

As climate disasters have become more extreme and more frequent, home insurance rates in the state also have continued to rise. More than 100,000 California residents have lost their home insurance since 2019, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis.

Data suggests that climate migration is, so far, more of a local phenomenon, with some moving inland within their home state or even seeking higher ground in their own city to avoid flooding, said Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications with First Street, which conducts climate risk modeling.

But, he said, in recent years, a smaller number of people have begun to flock to cities outside of California that advertise themselves as potential “climate havens”.

The term comes from climate adaptation researcher Jesse Keenan, who created a list of places in 2019 that are expected to be less affected by climate change.

Near the top of the list is Duluth, Minnesota, a former industrial city, home to about 90,000 people, a population that has grown slowly since 2020 after years of stagnation.

One of the draws of the town is its proximity to the Great Lakes, the series of lakes that comprises the largest freshwater body in the world. Around 10% of the US and 30% of Canada relies on the lakes for drinking water.

“In a scenario where resources have become scarce, this is a tremendous asset,” Mr Van Berkel said.

The Great Lakes water supply lured Jamie Beck Alexander and her family to Duluth. Alarmed by three consecutive, destructive wildfire seasons in California, Ms Alexander, her husband and two young children piled into a camper van and drove across the country to Minnesota in 2020.

Ms Alexander has found similarities between the small, progressive city and their old city of San Francisco.

“There’s a real depth of connection between people, and deep rootedness, things that I think are important for climate resilience,” she said.

Ms Welch ignored her friends who thought she was crazy to move to a city known for its record-breaking snowfall and icy conditions, with an average 106 days a year of sub-freezing temperatures. The crisp, pretty city on a hill has become her own, she said.

“There’s a lot of people here who love where they live and want to protect it,” Ms Welch said of Duluth.

Though some cities have embraced their designation as climate havens, it remains a challenge for smaller local governments to find the resources to plan for new residents and climate resilience, said Mr Van Berkel.

Mr Van Berkel works with Duluth and other cities in the Great Lakes area on climate change planning, including welcoming new residents moving because of climate change.

The city of Duluth declined to respond to the BBC’s request for comment on how it was preparing to potentially welcome climate migrants.

For now, Mr Porter said, the Great Lakes region and other “climate haven” cities aren’t seeing high levels of migration. But if that changed, many would not be ready, he said.

“It would take a huge investment in the local communities… for those communities to be able to take on the kind of population that some of the climate migration literature indicates,” Mr Porter said.

In the city of Duluth, for instance, housing availability can be an issue, Ms Alexander said. She said that although the city has space to create new housing, it does not currently have enough new developments for a growing population. As a result, in the years since she moved there, she said, housing prices have risen.

And any new housing and other developments also need to be made with climate change in mind, Mr Van Berkel said.

“We don’t want to make missteps that could be very costly with our infrastructure when we have climate change rearing its ugly head,” he said.

In 2024, a Category 4 Hurricane destroyed over 2,000 homes and businesses in Kelsey Lahr’s climate haven of Asheville, North Carolina.

She moved there in 2020, drawn to the city’s warm climate, restaurant and music scene, after a series of devastating wildfire seasons and mudslides near her town of Santa Barbara, California.

Before moving, Ms Lahr researched extensively the most climate-resilient places to live, with Asheville ranking near the top because of its milder temperatures and inland location, shielding it from flooding.

But last year, Hurricane Helene ploughed through western North Carolina, killing over 100 people in the state and decimating Ms Lahr’s new hometown of Asheville. Many were left without power for nearly 20 days and without potable drinking water for over a month.

“Clearly southern Appalachia is not the ‘climate haven’ that it was built up to be,” Ms Lahr said.

In Deluth, Ms Alexander said her family also learned quickly that they could not run away from climate change.

During their first summer, the town was hit with the same smoke and poor air quality that drove them away from California – this time from Canadian wildfires.

“It was like, this really profound joke that the universe played on me,” she said. “Unless we address the root cause [of climate change], we’re always going to feel like we need to pick up and move.”

She has since moved to Wisconsin for personal reasons, but says she doesn’t regret that first trek to Minnesota. Neither does Ms Lahr regret moving to Asheville.

Though Ms Lahr often misses the ancient forests of Yosemite National Park in California, where she would spend her summers working as a park ranger, a future that may bring more climate disasters requires sacrifices, she said.

“I sort of increasingly think that climate havens are a myth,” she said. “Everybody has to assess the risk where they live and go from there.”