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Tributes have been pouring in for veteran BBC journalist Sir Mark Tully who has been cremated in the Indian capital, Delhi, a day after he died at the age of 90.

Hundreds of people – including friends and family – gathered at the Lodhi crematorium to bid their final goodbye to the broadcaster.

Sir Mark was widely regarded as the BBC’s “voice of India” and was one of the most admired foreign correspondents of his generation.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi described Sir Mark as “a towering voice of journalism”, adding that “his connect with India and the people of our nation was reflected in his works”.

On Monday afternoon, mourners lined up around Sir Mark’s body at the crematorium.

Wrapped in a white cloth, his body was laid on a platform on a bed of flowers, made up of rose petals and tuberoses. Marigold garlands and a wreath were placed on top.

Christian priests recited prayers and hymns were sung, before the body was taken for cremation.

Sir Mark, who died on Sunday at a Delhi hospital where he was undergoing treatment, has been described as a “chronicler of modern India”.

Over a career spanning several decades, he reported on big historical moments that defined South Asia’s trajectory, including the Indian army’s storming of the Sikh Golden Temple, the birth of Bangladesh, periods of military rule in Pakistan, the Tamil Tigers’ rebellion in Sri Lanka and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In 1992, while reporting on the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu hardliners, he faced threats from a mob and was locked in a room for several hours before a local official and a Hindu priest came to his aid.

Journalist Satish Jacob, who worked closely with Sir Mark at the BBC for nearly two decades and later co-authored a book with him, said he first met him on a flight in 1978, an encounter that “marked the beginning of a friendship that lasted 48 years”.

In a personal tribute, Jacob recalled one of his fondest memories of his friend, from the night India won the 1983 Cricket World Cup.

“The match had been over 30 minutes before and we were on the terrace on a warm summer night in June while our Old Delhi mohalla [locality] was celebrating the win,” he wrote on Facebook, adding that he soon heard Sir Mark’s distinctive voice shouting, “Hum jeet gaya!” – meaning “we have won”.

“There was Mark standing outside my house with a bottle of our favourite whiskey dancing in the street celebrating India’s victory.”

Author and historian William Dalrymple called Sir Mark a “giant among journalists and the greatest Indophile of his generation”.

“As the voice of BBC India he was irreplaceable, a man prepared to stand up to power and to tell the truth, however uncomfortable,” Dalrymple wrote in a post on X.

Senior journalists and academics across India have also spoken about Sir Mark’s influence on them and the impact of his reporting.

Political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote in The Indian Express newspaper that it “used to be joked that all Indians have a ‘Sir Mark memory’”. Mehta was a high school student when Sir Mark covered the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. When there was little reliable information, Sir Mark’s despatches became the “only voice of Indian history as it happened”, he recalled.

“It was only Sir Mark’s voice, each evening, speaking with controlled despair, that provided any coherent picture of what was unfolding. There was something about the soft, rhythmic lilt of his delivery that paradoxically made the horror he described even more vivid,” he added.

“During his decades of reporting for the BBC, he was the most recognised and trusted radio voice in India, at a time when the only real alternative was the completely government-controlled All India Radio,” veteran journalist Coomi Kapoor wrote.

Journalist Shekhar Gupta recalled how his mother wouldn’t accept that “Dacca [Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka] had fallen in December 1972” until she heard it on the BBC.

It was a belief shared by millions of Indians, including former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who said he would not believe his mother, Indira, had been murdered by her Sikh bodyguards until he tuned in to his short-wave radio and heard BBC confirm it.

“As familiar to ordinary villagers as Kashmiri militants and Afghan mujahideen, he was so well known to senior ministers in Delhi that the guards of one simply allowed him to amble through the front door,” the Times wrote in its obituary.

Born in Calcutta in British India in 1935, Sir Mark spent much of his life in the country.

He was knighted for services to broadcasting and journalism in the 2002 New Year Honours list. He also received two of India’s highest civilian awards – the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan – an uncommon distinction for a foreign national.

Additional reporting by Jugal Purohit, BBC Hindi

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France is on course to follow Australia in banning social media to younger teenagers, as debate on a new law opens in the National Assembly.

The law would block access for under 15-year-olds to networks such as Snapchat, Instagram and Tiktok.

President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants the ban in place by the start of the school year in September.

The French move is part of a worldwide trend towards restricting social networks for children, triggered by growing evidence of the damage they can cause to mental health.

“We cannot leave the mental and emotional health of our children in the hands of people whose sole purpose is to make money out of them,” Macron said last month.

Under the new text, the state media regulator would draw up a list of social media networks that are deemed harmful. These would be simply banned for under 15-year-olds.

A separate list of supposedly less harmful sites would be accessible, but only with explicit parental approval.

The bill is believed to have a good chance of passing, with pro-Macron parties likely to be joined by the centre-right Republicans (LR) as well as the populist right-wing National Rally (RN).

Another clause would ban the use of mobile telephones in senior schools (lycées). The ban is already in effect in junior and middle schools.

If the law is passed, France will need to agree on the mechanism for for age-verification. A system is already in place that requires over 18 year-olds to prove their age when accessing online pornography.

In Europe, Denmark, Greece, Spain and Ireland are also considering following the Australian example. Earlier this month, the UK government launched a consultation on banning social media for under 16s.

The basis of the proposed French law is a text drawn up late last year by deputy Laure Miller, who chaired a parliamentary committee enquiry into the psychological effects of TikTok and other networks.

Separately, the government was told to draw up its own legislation, after Macron decided to make the issue a centrepiece of his last year in office.

The president has been sidelined from domestic politics since the Assembly elections which he called in 2024 resulted in a hung parliament, and the social media ban has been a rare chance to court public favour.

For a time the cause risked falling victim to bickering between Macron and his one-time prime minister Gabriel Attal (Miller is an MP from Attal’s party). But in the end the government appears to have rallied behind the Miller bill.

If the text is approved on Monday, it will pass before the upper house, the Senate, in the next month. Macron said he had asked the government of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to use a fast-track procedure to get the legislation on the books by September.

Without resort to the fast-track (which permits a single reading as opposed to two in each of the two houses), the law would have little chance of getting past the legislative backlog created by Lecornu’s difficulties in passing a budget.

The bill has already had to be redrafted to take account of questions raised by the Council of State, the body which previews draft legislation to ensure it conforms with French and European law.

A 2023 law which proposed a similar ban on social media for young teenagers proved inoperable after courts decided it broke European law.

Seven people were killed and one was seriously injured after a private jet crashed while taking off from Bangor International Airport in the US state of Maine.

The Bombardier Challenger 600 went down at around 19:45 local time (00:45 GMT on Monday), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said. The lone survivor of the crash was a member of the flight crew.

The incident came as a dangerous winter storm barrelled across a large swathe of the US, killing several people and leaving hundreds of thousands without power. Pilots had reportedly been struggling with visibility at the airport before the crash.

Bangor remains under a winter storm warning until Tuesday, with heavy snowfall forecast.

In a short report issued on Monday, the FAA said that the jet carrying eight people “crashed under unknown circumstances on departure” on Sunday evening.

The statement added that the aircraft “came to rest inverted and caught fire”.

Bangor International Airport said following the incident that it had closed and that emergency crews were responding. The incident remains under investigation, and officials have not released the identities of the victims.

Public records show that the plane is registered to a law firm in Houston, Texas.

Audio from air traffic control, reported by the BBC’s US partner CBS News and published by LiveATC.net, captured discussions between controllers and pilots minutes before the crash concerning poor visibility, though it was unclear which aircraft were heard in the communications.

Shortly afterwards, a controller was heard saying there was “a passenger aircraft upside down”. Images from the scene showed smoke and flames on the runway.

The disruption came amid widespread travel chaos due to the storm, with more than 11,000 flights cancelled and nearly 5,500 delayed across the US on Sunday, according to tracker FlightAware.

Airports in Philadelphia, Washington DC, Baltimore, North Carolina, New York and New Jersey were among those affected.

Between 10 and 16 inches (25-40cm) of snow is forecast to accumulate in parts of Maine, including Bangor, by Tuesday morning, according to the National Weather Service.