At the height of the partygate saga, a joke went round Westminster that every time the sense of crisis began to escalate, Boris Johnson would get on the phone to the Ukrainian President to arrange another trip to Kyiv.
Perhaps old habits die hard, as this weekend saw the classic Johnson double-header of a Sunday newspaper scandal combined with a dash to the war-torn country.
But anyone searching for a reminder of the downsides of the Johnson era needn’t look far.
The curious case of the £800,000 loan, the prime minister and the BBC chairman taps into all the trappings of a textbook Westminster controversy.
This may prove to be just a precursor to the Privileges Committee partygate investigation though – potentially the moment where many more gory details are churned up and laid out for all to see.
Combine all this with polling showing Mr Johnson is a good deal less popular across the country than he is with his loyalists in parliament, and a return to power anytime soon seems unlikely.
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Boris Johnson meets President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine
But how damaging are these stories to Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party more generally?
Answering this question is always difficult given the tendency of Westminster scandal to lower the public’s opinion of all politicians, rather than those of one specific party.
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Mr Sunak may also find himself protected from some of the splatter of the Johnson controversies given his role in bringing down his former cabinet colleague.
That said, having kept the Tory Chairman Nadhim Zahawi in government, revelations that he had to repay tax from the sale of shares by an offshore trust are unfortunate for Mr Sunak given his wife’s previous non-dom status.
Setting this all in perspective though, it’s unlikely to rival NHS pressure and cost of living as issues that will influence the next election and determine how rough a ride the prime minister has with his MPs in the months ahead.
With that in mind, the most problematic moment of the last week for Mr Sunak could turn out to be when he told an audience in Lancashire that they were “not idiots” and so understood why he couldn’t cut tax straight away.
A well-known Iraqi social media influencer has reportedly been shot dead in her car by a gunman on a motorbike.
Om Fahad, whose real name is Ghufran Sawadi, was killed outside her home in Baghdad’s Zayouna district on Friday, according to the AFP news agency, citing security officials.
It appears the unidentified attacker pretended to be delivering food to the victim, one security source said.
Om Fahad, who has nearly half a million TikTok followers, became famous for posting light-hearted videos where she dances to Iraqi music.
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Six days ago, she shared footage of herself driving in a car and also posing in front of a mirror. They have each been watched hundreds of thousands of times.
The influencer was sentenced to six months in prison in February last year for sharing videos that a court ruled contained “indecent speech that undermines modesty and public morality”.
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A campaign was launched in 2023 by the Iraqi government to clamp down on social media content which broke the country’s “morals and traditions”.
The interior ministry set up a committee to look for “offensive” clips on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, with several influencers being arrested.
“This type of content is no less dangerous than organised crime,” the ministry declared in a promotional video which asked the public to help by reporting such content.
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“It is one of the causes of the destruction of the Iraqi family and society.”
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In 2018, gunmen in Baghdad shot dead Tara Fares, who was a model and influencer.
After years of war and sectarian conflict following the 2003 US invasion that overthrew dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq has returned to some semblance of normality despite sporadic violence, political instability and corruption.
But civil liberties, particularly among women and sexual minorities, are still constrained in a conservative and male-dominated society.
The family of a missing high school student who may have been the first victim of a suspected serial killer in Mexico City have protested at the site where bones were found last week.
The bones were discovered with the belongings of at least six women, police said, and Amairany Roblero’s relatives have been told that evidence was found relating to her 2012 disappearance.
Ms Roblero was 18 when she vanished and, as is often the case in Mexico, her family was left to investigate her disappearance with little help from prosecutors.
Family friend Alejandra Jimenez said: “The prosecutors had the case file but they didn’t ever give any results to her parents.”
Instead, her parents printed flyers and gave them out near her school – the last place she was seen – but they had “nothing, nowhere to start, nor any directions to the end”, Ms Jimenez added.
A suspect, identified only by his first name, Miguel, was detained by neighbours and police last week after he is alleged to have killed a seventh young woman.
He is accused of waiting for a woman to leave her apartment and then rushing inside to sexually abuse and strangle her 17-year-old daughter.
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The woman returned to the apartment to see the suspect leaving and she was slashed across her neck before he ran off.
She survived but her daughter died.
Investigators searched a room rented by the suspect and found bones, mobile phones and ID cards belonging to several women in the same block, thought to be mementos.
Miguel is awaiting trial on charges of murder and attempted murder relating to the most recent victims.
City prosecutor Ulises Lara insisted the suspect was difficult to catch because “he showed no signs of violent or aggressive behaviour in his daily life”.
Ms Roblero’s family and friends were not accepting this, however.
“They (authorities) have all the means to look for missing people,” Ms Jimenez said. “Instead of focusing on their political campaigns, they should help all the women who are looking for their children.”
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Juan Carlos Gutierrez, a lawyer representing the family of another victim, was also frustrated, asking why no investigation had never been launched in that case, despite missing person reports being filed in 2015.
Ms Jimenez said Ms Roblero’s family had not been told which of the items or remains in the apartment had been linked to her, adding: “This is wearing her parents down physically, mentally.”
Some 2,580 women were murdered in Mexico in 2023, according to the country’s National Public Security System but poorly funded and badly trained prosecutors have failed to stop serial killers over the years.
In 2021 a serial killer in Mexico City killed 19 people but their bodies were only found, buried at his house, after the wife of a police commander became one of the victims.
In 2018 another serial killer in Mexico City murdered at least 10 women and was only stopped after he was seen pushing a dismembered body down the street in a pram.