The extraordinary images of a defiant Donald Trump pumping his fist in the air, with blood on his face, being rushed off the stage by the Secret Service are not just history-making – they may well alter the course of November’s presidential election.

This shocking act of political violence will inevitably have an effect on the campaign. US Secret Service agents shot dead the suspect at the scene. And law enforcement sources told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that they are treating the attack as an assassination attempt.

The picture – of a bleeding Mr Trump, fist in the air, being escorted away- was quickly posted on social media by his son Eric Trump with the caption: “This is the fighter America needs.”

President Joe Biden appeared on TV shortly after the shooting and said there was no place in America for political violence like this. He expressed concern for his Republican opponent and said he hoped to speak with him later tonight.

Mr Biden’s election campaign paused all political statements and is working to take down its television ads as quickly as possible, clearly believing that it would be inappropriate to attack Donald Trump at this time and instead concentrating on condemning what’s happened.

Politicians from across the political spectrum – people who agree on very little else – are coming together to say violence has no place in a democracy.

Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were all quick to denounce the violence and said how relieved they were that Trump was not seriously hurt.

But some of Mr Trump’s closest allies and supporters are already blaming Mr Biden for the violence, with one Republican congressman accusing the president of “inciting an assassination” in a post on X.

Senator JD Vance, who is thought to be on the shortlist to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, said the rhetoric from the Biden campaign led directly to this incident.

Other Republican politicians are saying similar things, which will almost certainly be condemned by their opponents as incendiary at a dangerous time in American politics.

Already, we can see the battlelines being drawn in what may become a very ugly fight over a deeply shocking incident. And one that will reshape the election campaign.

Donald Trump was rushed off stage during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania after a gunman opened fire from a nearby building.

The Republican candidate for president dropped to the ground and was seen with blood on the side of his face. He later said that he heard the whizzing of a bullet, that ripped through his ear.

As the stage was swarmed by secret service agents, he raised a fist into the air and was escorted away.

Rallygoers dropped to the ground as shot rang out, with some then fleeing the area.

One witness told the BBC that he had seen a man with a rifle on the roof of a building moments before Trump was shot at.

Former US President Donald Trump was rushed off stage after gunshots erupted at a rally in Pennsylvania in an apparent assassination attempt.

Footage showed him grimace and raise a hand to his right ear, before ducking as sharp cracks – a series of shots – broke out.

He was quickly swarmed by US Secret Service agents and dragged off stage to a waiting vehicle. He raised a fist as he was bundled into the car.

In a post to his Truth Social network, Trump said a bullet pierced the “upper part” of his right ear. Earlier, his spokesperson said he was “fine” and receiving treatment at a local medical centre.

“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” Trump wrote. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”

Blood was clearly visible on Trump’s ear and face as protection officers rushed him away.

The suspect was shot dead at the scene by US Secret Service officers, the agency’s spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said. He added that one bystander was killed in the shooting and two others were critically injured.

Republican Congressman Ronnie Jackson told the BBC that his nephew was injured in the shooting. He sustained a minor wound to his neck and was treated at the scene, Mr Jackson said in a statement.

Law enforcement sources told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that the male attacker had been armed with a rifle and had fired from an elevated structure a few hundred metres away outside the venue. They added that the attack was being treated as an assassination attempt.

Mr Guglielmi said Trump was safe and that measures for his protection had been implemented. He added that an active investigation – which is being led by the FBI – was under way.

• Follow Live: Trump ‘safe’ after shots fired at rally

The Republican candidate for president had just started addressing his supporters in Butler, Pennsylvania – a crucial swing state in November’s election – when the shots started.

Multiple bangs rang out as Trump spoke about his successor, President Joe Biden, and his administration.

Several supporters holding placards and standing behind Trump ducked as the shots were heard.

Bystanders who spoke to the BBC suggested the gunshots may have come from a one-storey building to the right of the stage where Trump was speaking.

One witness – Greg – told the BBC that he had spotted a suspicious-looking person “bear crawling” on the roof of the building about five minutes after Trump took to the stage. He said he pointed the person out to police.

“He had a rifle, we could clearly see him with a rifle,” he said. “We’re pointing at him, the police are down there running around on the ground – we’re like ‘hey man there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle’ and the police did not know what was going on.”

Tim – who was also at the rally – told the BBC that he had heard a “barrage” of shots.

“There was a spray which we initially thought was a fire hose, and then the speaker on the right-hand side started coming down,” he said.

“Something must have hit the hydraulic lines [which caused it to fall]. We saw President Trump go to the ground and everyone started dropping to the ground because it was chaos.”

• Pictures from Trump rally where shots fired

Warren and Debbie were at the venue and told the BBC they heard at least four gunshots.

They said they both got on the ground as Secret Service agents came through the crowd, shouting for the attendees to get down. People remained calm, they said.

“We couldn’t believe it was happening,” Warren said.

Debbie said a little girl beside them was crying that she didn’t want to die and saying “how is this happening to us?”

“That broke my heart,” Debbie said.

Speaking from his home state of Delaware, President Biden deplored the attack, calling it “sick”.

“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” he said. “Everybody must condemn it.”

The White House later said President Biden had spoken with Trump before returning to Washington DC.

Trump remains locked in a tight contest with President Biden – the presumptive Democratic nominee – in a re-match of the 2020 election.

Politicians of both parties joined Mr Biden in condemning the apparent attack.

Former President Barack Obama said there “is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy” and that he was “relieved that former President Trump wasn’t seriously hurt”.

Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence said he and his wife were praying for his former ally, adding that he urged “every American to join us”.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement: “My thoughts and prayers are with former President Trump. I am thankful for the decisive law enforcement response. America is a democracy. Political violence of any kind is never acceptable.”

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer led international condemnation of the shooting, saying he was “appalled by the shocking scenes at President Trump’s rally”.

“Political violence in any form has no place in our societies and my thoughts are with all the victims of this attack,” he said in a statement.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called on people to oppose violence that “challenges democracy”.

And Canadian leader Justin Trudeau said he was “sickened by the shooting at former President Trump”.

Trump was set to accept his party’s nomination for president at the convention in Milwaukee on Monday. Some had speculated that he had been set to reveal his running mate at the Butler rally.

Some Republicans were quick to blame President Biden over the shooting, accusing him of stoking fears about Trump’s potential return to office.

Senator JD Vance, who is thought to be on the shortlist to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, said the rhetoric from the Biden campaign had led directly to this incident.

Mike Collins – a Republican congressman – accused the president of “inciting an assassination”.

Meanwhile James Comer, the chair of the powerful House oversight committee, said he would summon the director of the Secret Service before his panel.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says at least 90 Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli air strike on a designated humanitarian area.

About 300 people have been injured, according to the health ministry’s statement, in an attack which Israel says targeted senior Hamas leader Mohammed Deif and his deputy Rafa Salama.

In a news conference on Saturday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there was “no certainty” that either of them had been killed.

The strike hit the al-Mawasi area near Khan Younis, which the Israeli military has designated as a humanitarian zone.

An eyewitness in al-Mawasi told the BBC that the site of the strike looked like an “earthquake” had hit.

Videos from the area show smouldering wreckage and bloodied casualties being loaded on to stretchers.

People can be seen trying desperately to pick through the rubble of a large crater with their hands.

BBC Verify has analysed footage of the aftermath of the strike, confirming that it took place within an area shown on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) website as a humanitarian zone.

Mr Netanyahu said he gave the order for the operation to go ahead after being briefed by his general security forces.

He said he wanted to know there were no hostages nearby, the extent of the collateral damage and what kinds of weapons would be used.

During the news conference, he promised to eradicate all of the group’s senior members.

“Either way, we will get to the whole of the leadership of Hamas,” Mr Netanyahu added.

Later Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, quoted by the AFP news agency, accused Mr Netanyahu of seeking to block a ceasefire in the Gaza war with “heinous massacres”.

Hamas said the claim that their leaders were targets was “false”.

“It is not the first time Israel claims to target Palestinian leaders, only to be proven false later,” the group said in a statement.

An Israeli military official said the strike took place in an “open area” where there were “no civilians”.

He refused to say whether it was inside a designated safe zone, but said Hamas leaders had “cynically” set up in a civilian area.

The official also said he was unaware of any hostages taken during the 7 October attack on Israel being in the area.

He added that “accurate intelligence” was gathered before the “precision strike”.

• Who are Mohammed Deif and the other top Hamas leaders?

One of the doctors at a hospital dealing with the aftermath of the attack has told the BBC it is “one of the black days”.

Speaking to Newshour on the BBC World Service, Dr Mohammed Abu Rayya said the majority of cases coming in were dead, with others suffering from multiple shrapnel wounds.

He said it was like being in “hell”, adding that many of the casualties were civilians, notably women and children.

Footage from the nearby Kuwait field hospital showed scenes of chaos with patients being treated on the floor.

The Nasser medical complex in Khan Younis is “overwhelmed” and no longer able to function, said British charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Mohammed Deif, the head of Hamas’s military wing the al-Qassam Brigades, is one of Israel’s most wanted men.

He has near-mythical status in Gaza after escaping capture and surviving several assassination attempts, including one in 2002 when he lost an eye.

He was imprisoned by Israeli authorities in 1989, after which he formed the Brigades with the aim of capturing Israeli soldiers.

Israel accuses him of planning and supervising bus bombings which killed tens of Israelis in 1996, and of involvement in the capture and killing of three Israeli soldiers in the mid-1990s.

It is thought he was one of the masterminds behind the 7 October Hamas attack, when about 1,200 Israelis and foreigners – mostly civilians – were killed and 251 others were taken back to Gaza as hostages.

It led to the major Israeli military operation in Gaza which has killed more than 38,400 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

A Hamas official, cited by Reuters, called Saturday’s attack a “grave escalation” that showed Israel was not interested in reaching a ceasefire agreement.

The ceasefire negotiations being held in Qatar and Egypt ended on Friday without success, the BBC understands.

Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence agency said that in a separate incident, 17 people had been killed in an Israeli strike west of Gaza.

The attack is said to have targeted a prayer hall in the Shati refugee camp to the west of Gaza City. The Israeli military has not yet commented on the claim.

“This undoubtedly surprises you more than it surprises us,” Spain’s manager Luis de la Fuente told his country’s journalists.

His team had just beaten France in the European Championship semi-finals, setting up a showdown with England in Sunday’s final.

And surprise – of the pleasant kind – is perhaps the best word to describe what many Spanish fans have been feeling throughout this tournament.

Expectation was low on Spain’s sun-kissed streets as the Euros got underway, but that has quickly become national jubilation, helping to bring this much-divided country together.

Quite a difference to the trials and tribulations of Three Lions supporters.

“At first my friends and myself thought that the players selected were a very personal choice of the coach and didn’t represent the opinion of most Spaniards,” said Jorge Gallego, a Spain fan in Madrid.

“We didn’t expect to reach the final but throughout the tournament we started to realise that we could go far.”

While an estimated 11,500 Spanish fans have travelled to Berlin for the final, back home giant screens are being installed in parks, sports centres and squares on which to watch it.

Here in Madrid, local authorities have said that, if Spain wins, victory celebrations will take place around the Plaza de Cibeles in the capital’s centre.

Meanwhile, the players are being lauded, among them defender Marc Cucurella, who has become a folk hero thanks to his big hair and an online song about him which has gone viral.

The lyrics feature paella and beer – it’s a chant often heard in the stands of his league club, Chelsea.

The buoyant atmosphere surrounding the football contrasts with Spain’s rancorous and often toxic politics, where the left-wing government and right-wing opposition seldom agree on anything.

The football team provides a rare rallying point. Parties and politicians have celebrated not just the results but the emergence of players, like Lamine Yamal, who turned 17 on Saturday and has turned out to be the star.

This team also represents Spain’s multi-cultural reality. Yamal’s father is Moroccan and his mother is from Equatorial Guinea, while Nico Williams’s Ghanaian parents reached Spain after travelling across the Sahara Desert and scaling a fence that surrounds the enclave of Melilla.

Yamal has underlined his humble origins, holding his fingers up after scoring to show the postcode 304, the working-class, multi-cultural district of the Catalan town of Mataró where he grew up.

It’s a place that a member of the far-right Vox party, Manuel Gavira, once described as a “multi-cultural dung heap”.

But the overwhelming sensation is that Spaniards are embracing their team, both for its performances and what it represents.

El Periódico newspaper said “a young Spain, sassy and reinvigorated, has become the mirror for a country which has changed and is multi-racial and diverse”.

Even King Felipe joined in the plaudits, saying that the men’s team, radiated “excitement, joy and security”, while praising the “sparkle” of Yamal.

It’s easy to forget that Yamal’s selection raised eyebrows and led to accusations that De la Fuente – a relatively junior coach who had never worked with a top-flight club – did not have the experience to succeed.

On the face of it, the team was a far cry from the star-studded side that conquered two European titles and the World Cup between 2008-2012.

Now, there is a feeling that the national team has returned to the elite, restoring the self-esteem of Spanish fans in the process.

Results are an obvious reason for the renewed belief. It has six wins out of six – a first for any team in the Euros – against opponents that included not just Didier Deschamps’s France, but also hosts Germany and Euro 2020 champions Italy.

The style of those victories has also been crucial. Gone is the close-passing, possession-obsessed “tiki-taka” play which brought Spain so much success in the past. Instead, Spain is playing more directly, with two of its emerging stars, Williams and Yamal, wreaking havoc down the wings.

The result is a less controlled and more thrilling style than in the past.

Spanish fans, who abhor dull football, have bought into it.

“Spain is going to win, without a doubt,” said Luis García, a Venezuelan migrant who supports Spain.

“They’ve shown that they are the best team. It’s amazing that the team has improved so much with this younger generation of players and that our hopes rest on these kids.”

Renowned sex therapist and talk show host Dr Ruth Westheimer, who spoke openly about sex and intimate subjects, died on Friday at 96 years old.

Her publicist confirmed her death to BBC News partner CBS News without providing a cause.

Ruth Westheimer, often referred to as Dr Ruth, became known for talking openly about sex, becoming a pop culture icon as well as a best-selling author with guides like “Sex for Dummies”.

She pushed for having open conversations about sex with a non-judgmental approach.

Dr Ruth, who spoke with a German accent, is a Holocaust survivor who was born in Frankfurt, Germany.

In the 1980s, she had her own local radio program called “Sexually Speaking” which became well recognized and placed her on the path to national fame when it was nationally syndicated in 1984.

She wrote her first book, Dr Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex, in 1983 in which she aimed to demystify sex. It was the first of more than 40 books she authored.

Dr Ruth launched a television program the following year called The Dr. Ruth Show and wrote a nationally syndicated advice column.

“I knew that there is a lot of knowledge that is around but doesn’t get to young people,” Dr Ruth told NBC Nightly News in 2019.

Dr Ruth frequently made appearances on talk shows including The Howard Stern Radio Show, the Dr. Oz Show, Nightline, the Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman.

Last November, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced Dr Ruth would become the state’s honorary ambassador to loneliness.

“I am deeply honoured and promised the governor that I will work day and night to help New Yorkers feel less lonely!” Dr Ruth said at the time.

Born in 1928 as Karola Ruth Siegel, at ten-years-old her parents sent her to Switzerland to escape Kristallnacht, a violent riot Nazis carried out against Jews before the Holocaust.

Dr Ruth never saw her parents after leaving for Switzerland and believed they were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz – a Nazi death camp.

On the face of it, this past week’s Nato summit in Washington has ticked the boxes. The alliance can show it is bigger and stronger than ever, its military support for Ukraine appears undiminished and it has just sent a robust message to China to stop secretly supporting Russia’s war on Kyiv.

Sir Keir Starmer’s new government has had a chance to position itself as a linchpin in the transatlantic alliance at a time when political uncertainty hovers over the White House and much of Europe.

Back home in Britain, the priorities for this new government are pressing: the economy, housing, immigration, the NHS, to name but a few.

Yet unwanted threats and scenarios can often have a habit of turning up and upsetting the best laid plans.

So what could be coming down the track during the life of this new UK government?

No surprises here, this one is on everybody’s radar. But that does not make it any less dangerous, for Lebanon, Israel and the entire Middle East.

“The possibility of a large-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon this summer should be at the top of the new government’s geopolitical risk register.”

That’s according to Professor Malcolm Chalmers, the Deputy Director-General of the Whitehall think tank, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

With the conflict continuing in Gaza and the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping continuing, Prof Chalmers believes “we could be entering a period of sustained multi-front warfare in the region, for which neither Israel nor its Western partners will be prepared.”

Ever since the Hamas-led raid into southern Israel on 7 October last year, there have been fears that Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza could escalate across borders into a full-scale regional war.

Israel’s troubled northern border with Lebanon is where such a war is most at risk of igniting.

The daily exchange of fire across this border, between the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia militia, have already resulted in hundreds killed, mostly in Lebanon.

More than 60,000 Israelis have been forced to abandon their homes and livelihoods in the north and an even greater number of people on the Lebanese side.

Domestic pressure is mounting for the Israeli government to “deal with” Hezbollah by pushing its forces north of Lebanon’s Litani River, from where they would have less chance of sending rockets into Israel.

“We don’t want to go to war,” says Lt Col Nadav Shoshani of the IDF, “but I don’t think any country could accept 60,000 of its citizens displaced. The situation has to end. We would like it to be a diplomatic solution, but Israeli patience is wearing thin.”

There are strong reasons for both sides not to go to war.

Lebanon’s economy is already fragile. It has barely recovered from the 2006 war with Israel and a renewed full-scale conflict would have a devastating impact on the country’s infrastructure and its people.

Hezbollah, for its part, would likely respond to a major Israeli attack and invasion with a massive and sustained missile, drone and rocket barrage that could potentially overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome air defences.

Nowhere in Israel is beyond its reach.

At this point, the US Navy, positioned offshore, could well join in on Israel’s side. Which then begs the question of what Iran would do.

It too has a sizeable arsenal of ballistic missiles as well as a network of proxy militias in Iraq, Yemen and Syria that could be mobilised to intensify their attacks on Israel.

One way to take the heat out of the tension on the Israel-Lebanon border would be for the conflict in Gaza to come to an end. But after nine months and a horrific death toll, a lasting peace has yet to be achieved.

The Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), designed to contain and monitor Iran’s nuclear programme, was the crowning foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration in 2015.

But it has long since fallen apart.

One year after President Trump unilaterally withdrew from it, Iran stopped abiding by its rules.

Buried deep beneath gigantic mountains, ostensibly beyond the reach of even the most powerful of bunker-busting bombs, Iran’s nuclear centrifuges have been spinning frantically, enriching uranium to well beyond the 20% needed for peaceful civil purposes. (A nuclear bomb requires highly enriched uranium.)

Officially, Iran insists its nuclear programme remains entirely peaceful, that it is purely for generating energy.

But Israeli and Western experts have voiced fears that Iran has a clandestine programme to reach what is known as “breakout capability”: achieving a position where it has the capacity to build a nuclear bomb, but does not necessarily do so.

It will not have escaped Iran’s notice that North Korea, an isolated, global pariah, has been steadily amassing an arsenal of nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them, constituting a major deterrent to any would-be attacker.

If Iran gets the Bomb, then it is almost inevitable that Saudi Arabia, its regional rival, would also go after acquiring it. So would Turkey and so would Egypt.

And suddenly there is a nuclear arms race all across the Middle East.

This depends on what you define as “winning”.

At its maximalist, it means Russian forces overwhelming Ukraine’s defences and seizing the rest of the country including the capital Kyiv, replacing the pro-West government of President Volodymyr Zelensky with a puppet regime appointed by Moscow.

That, of course, was the original plan behind the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022, a plan which failed spectacularly.

This scenario is currently thought unlikely.

But Russia does not need to conquer the whole of Ukraine to be able to declare some kind of “victory”, something that it can present to its population to justify the astronomically high casualties it is sustaining in this war.

Russia already occupies around 18% of Ukraine and, in the east, its forces are slowly gaining ground.

Although more Western weapons are on their way, Ukraine is critically short of manpower. Its troops, fighting bravely, often heavily outnumbered and outgunned, are exhausted.

Russian commanders, who seem to care little for the lives of their men, have mass on their side. Russia’s entire economy has been placed on a war footing, with close to 40% of the state budget now devoted to defence.

President Vladimir Putin, whose recent “conditions for peace talks” equated to total capitulation by Ukraine, believes he has time on his side. He knows there is a high chance that his old friend Donald Trump will be back in the White House within months and that Western support for Ukraine will start to crumble.

Russia needs only to hang on to the territory it has already seized, and to deny Ukraine the chance of joining Nato and the EU, to declare a partial victory in the war it has portrayed as a fight for Russian survival.

Again, there are plenty of warnings that this one might be coming.

China’s President Xi Jinping and his officials have stated on numerous occasions that the self-governing island democracy of Taiwan must be “returned to the Motherland”, by force if necessary.

Taiwan does not want to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Beijing.

But China considers Taiwan a renegade province and it wants to see it “reunited” well before the centenary of the founding of the CCP in 2049.

The US has adopted a position of what it calls “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan.

It is legally bound to help defend Taiwan, but Washington prefers to keep China guessing as to whether that means sending US forces to fight off a Chinese invasion.

China would almost certainly prefer not to invade Taiwan.

It would be hugely costly, in both blood and treasure. Ideally, Beijing would like Taiwan to give up on its dreams of full independence and volunteer to be ruled by the mainland.

But as that currently looks unlikely – the Taiwanese have watched with horror the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong – Beijing has another option up its sleeve.

If and when it decides to move on Taiwan, it is likely to try to seal it off from the outside world, making life unbearable for its citizens, but with the minimum of bloodshed so as to avoid provoking a war with the US.

Does Taiwan matter? It does.

This is about more than lofty principles of defending a democratic ally on the other side of the world.

Taiwan produces more than 90% of the world’s top-end microchips, the miniscule bits of tech that power almost everything that runs our modern-day lives.

A US-China war over Taiwan would have catastrophic consequences for the global economy that would dwarf the war in Ukraine.

Not exactly, but there are some moderating factors here.

For China, trade is all-important. Beijing’s ambitious plans to squeeze the US Navy out of the western Pacific and dominate the entire region may well be tempered by its reluctance to trigger damaging sanctions and a global trade war.

In Ukraine, President Putin may be making slow, incremental territorial gains but this comes at a horrendous cost in casualties.

When the Red Army occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, it suffered around 15,000 killed over a decade, triggering protests at home and hastening the demise of the Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, in just one quarter of that time, Russia has suffered many multiples of that death toll. To date, protest has been limited – the Kremlin largely controls what news Russians see – but the longer this war goes on, the greater the risk that the Russian public will eventually baulk at the mounting number of their fellow citizens getting killed.

In Europe, where worries abound over a future Trump presidency withdrawing its historic protection, a new UK-led security pact is being prepared.

As the US presidential election in November draws closer, plans are accelerating to try to mitigate any possible downsides to the continent’s security.

In Kenya, the youth protests against planned tax increases have served as a wake-up call for the Church.

They’ve shaken up a powerful institution, in a country where more than 80% of the population, including the president, are Christian.

The young demonstrators accused the Church of siding with the government, and took action against politicians using the pulpit as a political platform.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Catholic leaders responded to the challenge.

They organised a special Mass for the youth from churches in and around Nairobi, to honour those who’d been killed by police in the anti-tax protests.

Hundreds of young people crowded into the Holy Family Basilica to pray for the dead.

Just weeks earlier, Sunday Mass had been interrupted by chants from the altar of the basilica.

It was an unprecedented protest from young people – the digitally savvy generation known as Generation Z or Gen-Z.

They felt the church wasn’t backing their campaign against tough tax hikes.

Now, Bishop Simon Kamomoe tried to convince them they’d been heard.

“I know as young people sometimes you feel disappointed even in the Church,” he said.

“We would like to renew our commitment in serving you. We can be mistaken…May the Lord forgive us as a Church, where even before God, we have disappointed you.”

He also admonished them to be patient in pursuit of their dreams, to be guided by the Church, and to repent of any sins committed during the protests.

“We don’t want to lose you, we don’t want to lose our young people,” he said, with remarkable candour. “The Catholic bishops are so concerned about losing this generation,” he said, urging them to stay peaceful and protect their lives.

The Mass was punctuated by spirited singing and ended with boisterous cheering as people waved Kenyan flags.

Several who attended said the service was a welcome first step, but a belated one.

“I feel like for the first time, the Church is realising that the young people are serious,” said Yebo, who attended the protests before they turned violent and wanted to remain anonymous.

“And I feel also the Church hasn’t been really on our side. They have been sitting on the fence for a long time.

“The youth have actually been more persistent, they have brought results more than the Church with the current economic change. We can hear the president is taking the youth more serious than he takes the Church serious.”

Church organisations did lobby against the tax bill, but it was young people taking to the streets in overwhelming numbers that forced President William Ruto to back down.

Not only that.

The Gen-Z protesters are now condemning what they see as the cozy relationship between Christian and political institutions.

Again and again on the sidelines of the Mass, they mentioned suspicions about visits by Church leaders to the State House, the presidential residence, including during the protests.

“We believe the president is buying the Church,” said Meshack Mwendwa.

On social media “the Church leaders are seen holding envelopes (alongside) the executive leaders and the permanent members of the government,” he said. “And that’s not what we want as the youth, now it’s time for a change.”

One change they demanded, and got, was an end to the ostentatious practice of “harambee” – politicians giving large sums of money to the Church.

Such donations can buy political influence on Sunday mornings.

The protest movement aimed to stop that – they called it #OccupyChurch.

Some even demonstrated against President Ruto’s attendance at a Church-sponsored event. But he supported their position.

“On matters of politics on the pulpit I am 100% aligned,” he told a media roundtable that aired nationally.

“We shouldn’t be using the pulpit in churches or in any other places of worship, to prosecute politics. It is not right.”

Several days later, he banned state officers and public servants from making public charitable donations, and directed the attorney general to develop a mechanism for structured and transparent contributions.

But the president himself has been part of this political culture, converting the pulpit into a campaign platform.

“His political message was actually driven within the Church,” says Reverend Chris Kinyanjui, the general secretary of Kenya’s National Council of Churches (NCCK).

“So, people feel that they have a Christian government.”

Mr Ruto’s Christian narrative has made it difficult for many pastors to hold him to account, Rev Kinyanjui said. Rather they behave like “shareholders of this administration,” he claimed.

“Our president speaks from the pulpit. You know what the pulpit means? He cannot be questioned. So, he has become a very powerful figure in Kenya’s politics and church circles. The Gen-Z are questioning, and are saying, we don’t know the difference between the government and the Church.”

The BBC asked the Kenyan government for a response but the spokesman said he was unable to comment right now. He was speaking amidst sweeping changes in the cabinet and security services made by Mr Ruto in response to the protests.

The backlash from Kenya’s young people has the potential to reshape the way power works in Kenya.

They make up the vast majority of the population, and are outside predictable political dynamics.

The president is listening now, and so is the Church.

“We are the Church,” said Mitchelee Mbugua outside the basilica as the Mass wound up.

“If the Church shows that they don’t support us, we draw away from them. If there are no us, there’s not a Church. So, they have to listen to our grievances. Because we are the Church.”

Rev Kinyanjui goes further, underlining what he sees as the fragility of the social contract with Kenya’s youth. He acknowledged that NCCK leadership had been worried that Kenya might go the way of Sudan.

There, a youth revolution was aborted by a military coup, which eventually led to civil war.

“We were happy that the president was able to defuse [this crisis],” he said, “because if he had signed that finance bill into law, who knows what we’d have become.”

Rev Kinyanjui said the NCCK came out “too quietly” against the finance bill. Going forward they will adopt a strategy of “being proactive, being visible, being the voice of and the consciousness of society… by questioning, by correcting the regime.”

“In a way, we see the Gen-Z as doing the Lord’s work, and I think that’s something that has made many pastors to wake up.”

• Was there a massacre after Kenya’s anti-tax protests?
• Historic first as president takes on Kenya’s online army
• Protesters traumatised by abductions – lawyer
• Kenyan president’s humbling shows power of African youth
• Protesters set fire to Kenya’s parliament – but also saved two MPs

Police in Kenya say they found five bags filled with the dismembered remains of a number of women at a rubbish dump in the capital Nairobi on Saturday.

Detectives have been scouring the site in the Mukuru slum since Friday, when the corpses of six other women were found in sacks floating in a sea of rubbish.

Officers said the bags recovered on Saturday included severed legs and two torsos, speculating that the deaths could be related to the activities of cultists or serial killers.

But the country’s police watchdog said on Friday that it was investigating whether there was any police involvement in the gruesome deaths, which come amid allegations of widespread human rights abuses by officers during recent anti-government protests.

Human rights groups have accused police of shooting dozens of people who were demonstrating against planned tax rises, some of them fatally, and abducting or arbitrarily arresting hundreds more.

Local media reported that police deployed two water cannons to the scene on Saturday, after angry protesters threatened to open the bags filled with human remains.

Officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) urged people to keep calm and grant them space to investigate the discoveries, accusing protestors of impeding their investigation.

“We want to assure the public that our investigations will be thorough and shall cover a wide range of areas, including but not limited to the possible activities of cultists and serial killings,” the DCI said in a statement.

Earlier the Independent Police Oversight Authority (IPOA) said it was investigating whether there was any police involvement in the macabre deaths.

“The bodies, wrapped in bags and secured by nylon ropes, had visible marks of torture and mutilation,” the watchdog said, noting that the dump site was less than 100 metres from a local police station.

It added that “widespread allegations of police involvement in unlawful arrests, [and] abductions” meant it was undertaking a preliminary probe to establish whether there was any police connection.

Kenya’s police force is frequently accused of extrajudicial killings by human rights activists, but convictions are extremely rare. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have previously accused the force of “political interference in efforts to achieve accountability for police abuses”.

The country’s under-pressure leader, President William Ruto, has vowed that those behind the killings will be punished.

“We are a democratic country guided by the rule of law. Those involved in mysterious killings in Nairobi and any other part of the country will be held to account,” he said in a post to X, formerly Twitter.

The case is the latest disturbing such incident in Kenya.

Last year the country was left horrified after the remains of hundreds of people associated with a doomsday cult were discovered in the Indian Ocean coastal town of Malindi.

Paul Nthenge Mackenzie went on trial in Mombasa earlier this week on charges of terrorism and murder over the deaths of more than 440 of his followers. He denies the allegations.

He is alleged to have encouraged men, women and children to starve themselves in order to “meet Jesus”, in one of the world’s worst cult-related massacres.

Lavish wedding celebrations for the son of Asia’s richest man resumed on Saturday with a star-studded guestlist including Hollywood celebrities, global business leaders and two former British prime ministers.

Billionaire tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son Anant and fiancee Radhika Merchant, both 29, are tying the knot this weekend in Mumbai, India, following months of pre-marriage parties.

Saturday will see a blessing ceremony during which the world’s rich and famous will greet and pay their respects to the couple at a 16,000-capacity convention centre owned by the Ambani family’s conglomerate.

This will be followed by a grand party where unconfirmed reports say pop stars Drake, Lana Del Rey and Adele are likely to perform.

It follows a formal ceremony and party on Friday evening which was attended by the likes of socialite Kim Kardashian, actor John Cena and former British leaders Tony Blair and Boris Johnson.

Fifa boss Gianni Infantino, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and Samsung chairman Jay Y Lee were also among hundreds of famous figures who made an appearance.

“Great wedding!” China’s ambassador to India Xu Feihong wrote on social media platform X along with footage of the couple from inside the venue.

“Best wishes to the new couple and double happiness!”

This weekend’s celebrations end on Sunday with a reception party.

• In photos: Kim Kardashian, Priyanka Chopra and Tony Blair at grand India wedding
• The marathon Indian wedding turning heads around the world

Wedding events earlier this year included a party at the Ambanis’ ancestral home, where a purpose-built Hindu temple was unveiled alongside private performances by singers Rihanna and Justin Bieber.

Guests included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and former US president Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

In June, the couple embarked on a four-day Mediterranean cruise with 1,200 guests, while singer Katy Perry performed at a masquerade ball at a French chateau in Cannes.

The Backstreet Boys, US rapper Pitbull and Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli also provided entertainment.

Rajan Mehra, chief executive of air charter company Club One Air, told Reuters that the family had rented three Falcon-2000 jets to ferry wedding guests to this week’s string of events.

“The guests are coming from all over and each aircraft will make multiple trips across the country,” he said.

On Wednesday, the family hosted a bhandara – a community feast for underprivileged people.

Anant’s father Mukesh, 66, is chairman of Reliance Industries, a family-founded conglomerate that has grown into India’s biggest company by market capitalisation.

The patriarch is the world’s 11th richest person with a fortune of more than $123bn, according to Forbes.

The family’s lucrative interests include retail partnerships with Armani and other luxury brands, more than 40% of India’s mobile phone market and an Indian Premier League cricket team.

His 27-floor family home Antilia is one of Mumbai’s most prominent landmarks, reportedly costing more than $1bn to build, with a permanent staff of 600 servants.

Merchant is the daughter of well-known pharmaceutical moguls.

Key roads in Mumbai are being sealed off for several hours a day until the festivities end on Monday, while social media is awash with minute-by-minute updates.

But the extraordinary opulence has also led to a backlash.

People living in the city have complained that road closures have worsened traffic problems caused by monsoon flooding, while others have questioned the ostentatious display of wealth.

The Ambanis have not revealed how much this wedding is costing them, but wedding planners estimate they have already spent anywhere between 11bn and 13bn rupees [$132m-$156m].

It was rumoured Rihanna was paid $7m (£5.5m) for her performance, while the figure suggested for Justin Bieber is $10m.

One unnamed executive at Reliance claimed the event was a “powerful symbol of India’s growing stature on the global stage” in a note shared with reporters.

But opposition politician Thomas Isaac said it was “obscene”.

“Legally it may be their money but such ostentatious expenditure is a sin against mother earth and [the] poor,” he posted on X.

• Meet the tycoons behind the grand Indian wedding

Alec Baldwin broke down in tears as a New Mexico judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter case against him for a fatal shooting on the set of the film Rust.

The trial collapsed three days into Baldwin’s trial in Santa Fe, at a court just miles from where Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer, was shot with a revolver that Mr Baldwin was using in rehearsals.

It is the second time the case against the actor has been dismissed since the October 2021 shooting. He will not be tried again.

“There are too many people who have supported me to thank just now,” Mr Baldwin wrote on Instagram on Saturday. “To all of you, you will never know how much I appreciate your kindness toward my family.”

His lawyers alleged police and prosecutors hid evidence – a batch of bullets – that could have been connected to the shooting.

A key aspect of the case has been how live ammunition ended up on the set and Mr Baldwin’s lawyers have questioned the investigation and mistakes made by authorities who processed the scene.

Their motion to dismiss sparked a remarkable set of events, with one of the two special prosecutors leading the case resigning, and Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissing the jury to hear from multiple witnesses.

The bullets, Mr Baldwin’s lawyer said, could be related to Ms Hutchins’ death, but were filed in a different case with a different number.

Prosecutors argued the ammunition was not connected to the case and did not match bullets found on the Rust set.

The judge ruled, however, that they should have been shared with Mr Baldwin’s defence team regardless.

“The state’s wilful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate,” she said from the bench. “There is no way for the court to right this wrong.”

Prosecutors will not be able to lodge the charge against Baldwin again, as the judge did not rule the case a mistrial, but instead outright dismissed it with prejudice.

“It was the nuclear option. The case is over,” Los Angeles trial attorney Joshua Ritter told the BBC.

• How events unfolded after fatal shooting on Alec Baldwin’s Rust film set
• What are the rules for guns on film sets?
• What are prop guns and why are they dangerous?

Mr Baldwin, best known for his role on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock and for portraying Donald Trump on sketch show Saturday Night Live, wept as the judge read from a lengthy statement detailing her reasons for the dismissal. His wife, Hilaria, covered her mouth. Other members of his family cried and smiled.

The actor hugged his lawyers then embraced his wife, who was seated behind him. They walked out hand-in-hand through a tunnel of press into a black vehicle without answering any questions or making any comments.

The evidence came to light on Thursday, when a crime-scene technician told the court that a man named Troy Teske, a retired police officer, had turned over live ammunition that could be related to the case.

Mr Teske is friends with the step-father of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armourer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter earlier this year.

He was working with Seth Kenney, who helped with props and ammunition on the film set.

• From the first day in court: Baldwin ‘played make-believe’ with gun
• Who was Halyna Hutchins?

After the judge sent the jury home on Friday, the court heard from a series of witnesses about the bullets, including authorities who led the case and Mr Kenney.

Towards the end of the hearing, one of the prosecutors leading the case – Kari Morrissey – took the stand to testify about the bullets and why they weren’t shared with the defence. It’s remarkably rare for a prosecutor to testify in a case they bring about their role in the investigation.

Ms Morrissey testified the ammunition had “no evidentiary value” from her perspective. While on the stand, she said that her co-prosecutor, Erlinda Ocampo Johnson, resigned on Friday as the judge weighed to dismiss the case.

She explained Ms Johnson “didn’t agree with the decision to have a public hearing” over the evidence claims.

Five people linked to one of Ecuador’s biggest criminal gangs have been jailed for the murder of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio last year.

Mr Villavicencio, a member of the country’s national assembly and an ex-journalist, was shot dead as he left a campaign rally in the capital, Quito, last August.

Carlos Angulo, the alleged leader of the Los Lobos gang, and Laura Castilla were sentenced to 34 years and eight months in prison for directing the hit.

Two men and a woman were handed 12-year sentences by the court in Quito for aiding a hit squad in the attack.

Prosecutors alleged that Angulo – widely known as The Invisible – ordered the hit from the Quito prison in which he is detained.

He denied the charges, claiming he was being made a “scapegoat” for the hit.

Castilla was left in charge of logistics for the hit. She allegedly supplied weapons, money and motorcycles to the men to carry out the hit.

The others – Erick Ramirez, Victor Flores and Alexandra Chimbo – were accused of helping the hit squad track Mr Villavicencio’s movements.

More than 70 people gave evidence during the trial, including a key witness who said the gang had been offered more than $200,000 (£154,000) to kill Mr Villavicencio.

A crusading anti-corruption activist, Mr Villavicencio had been one of the few candidates to allege links between organised crime and government officials in Ecuador.

In the weeks leading up to the election, the politician had received death threats and been given a security detail. But he continued to campaign and was gunned down by a group of assailants on 9 August outside a school in the north of Quito.

Prosecutors said during the trial that one of the men involved in the assassination was shot dead in a confrontation with police at the scene.

Six other men – all Colombian nationals – were later arrested in connection with the killing, but were subsequently found murdered at El Litoral prison, where they were being held in pre-trial detention.

A separate investigation into who contracted Los Lobos to carry out the hit remains ongoing, prosecutors have said.

Mr Villavicencio’s widow, Veronica Sarauz, welcomed the ruling. But she said it only marked the beginning of a long road to determine the entire story behind her husband’s death.

Ecuador has historically been a relatively safe and stable country in Latin America, but crime has shot up in recent years, fuelled by the growing presence of Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, which have infiltrated local criminal gangs.

The Los Lobos gang led by Angulo is said to have deep connections to the powerful Jalisco New Generation cartel in Mexico.

A man has been arrested on suspicion of murder following the discovery of human remains in suitcases at Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol.

The 34-year-old was detained by Avon and Somerset armed officers at Temple Meads Station in Bristol in the early hours of Saturday.

The remains found in the luggage and in a flat in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, belong to two men, police have said.

Investigators, wearing blue forensic suits, masks and gloves are continuing their work at the crime scene, which is outside the property on Scott’s Road and was earlier extended by 33ft (10m).

They could be seen working near a set of bins outside an estate, just off Scott’s Road, with one taking photographs of the area.

Three police vehicles were used to block the view from beyond the cordon.

The Met’s deputy assistant commissioner Andy Valentine said the arrest is “a significant development”.

“We understand the concerns of local communities in both Bristol and London and officers will remain in the Clifton and Shepherd’s Bush areas over the coming days to reassure those affected by this tragic incident,” he added.

“Anyone with any concerns is encouraged to speak with them.”

The Met Police had previously put out a statement saying they wanted to speak to a Yostin Andres Mosquera.

Police are not looking for anyone else and the man arrested at Temple Meads Station is being taken to London for questioning.

Just before midnight on Wednesday, Avon and Somerset Police received a report of a man with a suitcase acting suspiciously on the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Officers arrived within 10 minutes, but the man had left, leaving the cases behind. A second suitcase was found nearby.

The Metropolitan Police took over the investigation after body parts were found in the flat west London flat.

Police have said formal identification of the two victims is yet to take place.

A 36-year-old man who was arrested in Greenwich in south-east London on Friday in connection with the investigation has since been released without charge.

In Bristol, some locals have told the BBC the incident has left the community in shock.

Gemma Osborne, the manager of Hart’s bakery, which is near to the city’s Temple Meads Station, said it feels “very close to home”.

“It’s always a concern being with our start times being so early that everyone is safe on the way to work,” she said.

“It’s made me feel quite spooked. It’s very rare so we shouldn’t let it creep us out – but it definitely makes you think.”

For the last few months, Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani has been grabbing the spotlight in India.

It’s not because he has completed a major acquisition or cut a big philanthropic cheque, but it’s his son’s grandiose wedding celebrations that have entranced the entire nation and the world.

The pre-wedding parties, which began in March, have put the Ambani family firmly at the centre of many breakfast, lunch and dinner table conversations.

Anant Ambani, the youngest son of Mukesh Ambani, tied the knot with his long-time girlfriend Radhika Merchant at a family-owned convention centre in Mumbai on Friday, in a culmination of six-month-long festivities that have taken place across the globe.

Indian weddings can be lavish, but the sheer scale and size of the Ambani jamboree have perhaps eclipsed the celebratory fervour displayed by erstwhile royals.

• India tycoon’s son to marry after months of festivities
• The marathon Indian wedding turning heads around the world

The unerring presence of Bollywood A-listers at every party, the million-dollar performances by global pop-stars like Rihanna and Justin Bieber, and a bevy of VVIP dignitaries descending upon the celebrations have been a source of endless fodder for the paparazzi.

Consider some of the global elite who made it to the functions – Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg, Samsung CEO Han-Jong Hee, Bill Gates, former US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, former UK prime ministers Boris Johnson and Sir Tony Blair, Fifa president Gianni Infantino and the Kardashian sisters.

And the list goes on.

“These are very busy people. They aren’t coming just to have fun,” James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, told the BBC.

“What this tells you is that global business leaders believe the Ambanis are strategically important and also that they see India as a very big market.”

Meet the family

The Ambanis are often described as India’s most prominent business family.

They run Reliance Industries, an oil to telecoms conglomerate that was founded by Mukesh Ambani’s father Dhirubhai Ambani – a man with a controversial legacy who attained legendary status for deftly navigating India’s controversial pre-liberalisation polity, while creating enormous wealth for his company’s shareholders.

Dhirubhai died in 2002, and the empire he founded was split between his two sons – Anil and Mukesh – after what could be described as one of India’s most acrimonious succession battles.

Since then, the brothers’ fortunes have diverged, with the younger Anil declaring bankruptcy and Mukesh pivoting more and more to consumer-facing businesses, even while retaining his pole position in Reliance’s mainstay – petrochemicals.

His oil refinery in the western town of Jamnagar is the largest in the world.

In recent years, Reliance has brought some of the world’s most celebrated luxury brands to India, from Valentino to Versace and Burberry to Bottega.

Among other things, the company now owns a team in the world’s richest cricket tournament and the iconic British toy retailer Hamleys.

In 2021, it acquired the historic country club Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire for £57m.

Earlier this year, Reliance signed a binding pact to merge its entertainment platforms with Disney, in its latest attempt to transform the company’s industrial moorings. It is a deal that makes Mukesh Ambani a formidable player in the digital streaming space, with rights to cricketing tournaments and international shows.

But the conglomerate really began its shopping spree during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it got billions of dollars in investment from more than a dozen global players, including Meta and Google. The plan with Meta has been to connect WhatsApp’s more than 400 million users in India with its online grocery platform JioMart.

The company’s aggressive pricing strategy has mounted a serious challenge to foreign entrants like Netflix and Amazon.

Privately, foreign players, who compete in the same sectors as Reliance, sometimes complain of a lack of level playing field, claiming the Ambanis are among a select few who’ve benefited from the Indian government’s policy of awarding preferential contracts to local tycoons.

“Foreign players face a difficult choice,” says Mr Crabtree. “They can either fight with Reliance or get into bed with Reliance. Zuckerburg has chosen to partner with them, while Amazon has decided to fight. But these battles are often very costly, and foreigners end up losing.”

Now, Mukesh Ambani’s next target is financial services, with Reliance entering into a joint venture with US-based BlackRock for a brokering and wealth management business.

Not surprisingly then, for the Ambanis, this is much more than just a wedding.

It is a show of strength and of the clout they command, says Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy specialist. “It’s a show of the fact that this family is a magnet that attracts people from all walks of life – business, politics and entertainment.”

The media blitzkrieg around it, he adds, is also a way for them to make a personal event “even more personal to the whole world” – such as the consumers of Reliance products and services for instance – who would never have got an invite.

If the Ambani patriarch, Dhirubhai, was credited with introducing the stock market to India’s retail investors, his son Mukesh is well recognised for creating a myriad touchpoints between his businesses and the average Indian consumer.

A bulk of what Indians consume today, from the shows they watch, to the clothes they wear and potentially even how they will transact in the future, comes from the Ambani stable.

And that is why there couldn’t have been a better occasion than a dazzling wedding for the family to market its brand to India’s burgeoning consumer class.

And sure enough, the wedding has captivated people in India and across the world.

An astounding number of mass graves surround Thabani Dhlamini’s home in south-western Zimbabwe.

One pointed out to the BBC lies near the ablution block at a primary school in the village of Salankomo in Tsholotsho district. Teachers were killed and dumped there in the 1980s.

In another, steps away from Mr Dhlamini’s house, 22 relatives and neighbours are buried in two graves – all killed by Zimbabwe’s military under the command of then-leader Robert Mugabe.

Mr Dhlamini was just 10 at the time – but the slightly built, soft-spoken farmer is still haunted by the memories.

“We were not able [to talk about it] and we were in fear to speak about it,” the 51-year-old told the BBC.

They were all victims of ethnic killings between 1983 and 1987, when Mugabe unleashed the North Korean-trained Five Brigade in strongholds of Joshua Nkomo, his arch-rival.

Some describe what followed as a genocide. It is not known how many people died – some estimates put it at more than 20,000 people.

Nkomo was a veteran freedom fighter from the south-western province of Matabeleland who, more than two decades after his death, is still fondly known as “Father Zimbabwe”.

The two men had had a fractious relationship during the long liberation struggle against white-minority rule – Nkomo came from Zimbabwe’s Ndebele minority and Mugabe from the nation’s Shona majority.

They fell out two years after independence in 1980, when Mugabe fired Nkomo from the coalition government, accusing his party of plotting a coup.

Operation Gukurahundi was launched, which at the time the government said was a counter-insurgency mission to root out dissidents who had been attacking civilians.

“Gukurahundi” means “cleansing rain” in the Shona language.

Those targeted by the elite soldiers were mainly from the Ndebele ethnic group in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces, and the killings laid the foundation for lingering ethnic tensions.

Mugabe ruled for another three decades – only after he was deposed by his former deputy Emmerson Mnangagwa did it seem that Gukurahundi might be properly confronted, even though he has also been accused of involvement.

Mr Mnangagwa made a point of addressing the subject of reconciliation, given the criticism over how various initiatives to allow exhumations and reburials had foundered.

Even so it has taken seven years for President Mnangagwa to establish what he has called the Gukurahundi Community Engagement Programme. A series of village-level hearings, where survivors can air their grievances, is set to follow Sunday’s launch.

Mr Dhlamini said he would take part in the hearings.

“I want to free myself from what I witnessed, I need to vent out what I felt,” he said, tapping his chest.

He, along with a group of boys from his village in 1983, saw how soldiers frog-marched 22 women, including his mother, into a hut which they then set on fire.

When the women broke down the door to flee the flames, the soldiers mowed them down with their guns before they could escape.

Mr Dhlamini’s mother was the only survivor as she managed to hide along the side of a nearby grain hut.

The soldiers then ordered the older boys in the terrified group watching nearby to carry the bullet-ridden bodies of the women into the smoking hut and another alongside it.

Mr Dhlamini’s 14-year-old friend Lotshe Moyo was one of them – but because he was wearing a pin supporting Nkomo, afterwards he too was ordered inside, shot and both huts burnt to ashes.

Today their remains are still in the ruins – an overgrown area surrounded by a chain-link fence and lots of crosses. On a whitewashed brick wall, the names of the dead are inscribed.

“When we started talking about it my memory returns and it seems as if it had happened today. It makes me feel as if I can cry,” said Mr Dhlamini, who added that his mother had been so traumatised she had never been able to live in the village.

Victims and survivors’ families are divided over whether the new government initiative will bring healing and change their fortunes.

In the neighbouring village of Silonkwe, 77-year-old Julia Mlilo shuffles slowly to meet us. She can barely walk now, but remembers every detail of what happened on 24 February 1983.

At the sound of gunfire she had dropped her hoe in the field where she was working and escaped into the bush with her husband and children.

When they emerged her father and more than 20 of her husband’s relatives had been badly assaulted and burnt, many beyond recognition.

“Only the heads were identifiable,” she said.

They gathered up the remains into a tin basin that had been used for bathing and buried them in a nearby pit.

The place where they were slaughtered and the area of their burial, adjacent to a field of crops, are now marked by reflective white and red crosses.

“I haven’t forgiven them, I don’t know what would make me forgive. Whenever I see soldiers I feel the pain and I start trembling,” Ms Mlilo told the BBC.

“I don’t trust the process because it’s being done by the government, but I will take part in it,” she said.

While Gukurahundi has ended, many believe they are still being punished.

Tsholotsho, like many parts of Matabeleland, remains a desolate and forsaken area, with little to no infrastructure and very little development over the last 40 years.

And since the 1980s the findings of various commissions of inquiry into the atrocities have never been made public.

During the Mugabe era, a programme to give identity documents to children whose parents had perished or disappeared did begin and continues.

But previous public hearings and exhumation programmes have stalled.

In Bulawayo, the main city in Matabeleland, Mbuso Fuzwayo from the local pressure group Ibhetshu LikaZulu spoke to the BBC as he collected a metal plaque to commemorate those killed in Silonkwe.

Several plaques commissioned by the group have been stolen or destroyed – a sign, he believes, that Zimbabwe is still not ready to confront its past.

The country has a long history of human rights abuses and impunity dating back to the white-minority government when it was called Rhodesia.

“We have a lot of violations of the people. What happened during the liberation struggle is that there was no-one who was brought to justice,” Mr Fuzwayo sid.

“After the genocide no-one was taken to justice,” he said, referring to Gukurahundi.

“What we are saying is that once justice takes place, people will start to respect the rights of other people.”

The suspicion and misgivings about the latest process are a big hurdle for President Mnangagwa to overcome as he presents himself as an honest broker, with a genuine desire to reunite Zimbabwe and redress the past.

He was minister of state security during the massacres, which explains the wariness felt towards him in the south-west.

Some of that strong opposition comes from traditional leaders who will be conducting the hearings.

Chief Khulumani Mathema from Gwanda North feels the process is fundamentally flawed.

“It needs to be a national issue that focuses on international best practices, which is how genocides are addressed in the whole world,” he told the BBC.

Everyone in the region was touched by the atrocities and has a story to tell. As a young boy, the chief was beaten up by soldiers.

“We’ve got countries that went through genocide. We’ve got Rwanda, we’ve got Germany, but we want to create and reinvent the wheel, which I think is not feasible,” he said.

“There’s no single genocide that has ever been completely solved when the perpetrators are still in charge of the levers of power.”

Mr Fuzwayo, whose grandfather was allegedly abducted and never heard from again during the massacres, agrees.

“They must not try to say this was a Mugabe thing. It was a collective thing. The chief perpetrator might be dead, that is Mugabe – but Emerson Mnangagwa remains in the absence of Mugabe,” the 48-year-old said.

Despite the continued finger-pointing, Mr Mnangagwa has always denied accusations he played an active role in Gukurahundi and successive governments have rejected allegations that the operation amounted to genocide.

Chief Mathema said the priorities of communities would be to exhume and identify bodies from the mass graves and allow families space to mourn their relatives appropriately.

But he believes there is another piece of the puzzle that the government will need to complete – truth-telling about what happened and the whereabouts of the disappeared.

This new inquiry will test President Mnangagwa’s sincerity – will the hearings get to hear from the perpetrators? Will they open up and provide answers to the survivors? Will the findings of previous investigations now be made public?

“Up to today we don’t know why the people were killed – the motive,” said Mr Fuzwayo.

“And they don’t want to talk about it and I still believe that they have got a lot that they are hiding.”

• Emmerson Mnangagwa – Zimbabwe’s ‘crocodile’
• The bones that haunt Zimbabwe
• Robert Mugabe – from liberator to tyrant

To get a sense of the public interest in the Vision Pro, Apple’s very high-tech, very expensive virtual reality (VR) headset – finally launched in the UK and Europe on Friday – where better to head than one of its own stores?

In the past, people camped outside Apple branches overnight, so desperate were they to get their hands on the tech giant’s latest product.

When I went to its branch in central London on Friday morning, though, there was just a small group, mainly comprised of men, waiting for the doors to open.

Partly, that’s because people these days prefer the convenience of pre-orders.

But it also perhaps tells us something about the question that continues to hang over the VR headset market: will it ever escape the realm of tech aficionados and go truly mainstream?

Apple’s plan to make its product break through is to position it as a product you use to do the stuff you already do – only better. Home videos become 3D-like, panoramic photos stretch from floor to ceiling, 360 degrees around you. Apple keeps reminding me it calls this “spatial content”. Nobody else does. Plenty suck their teeth at the Vision Pro’s price though – a whopping £3,499.

Facebook owner Meta has been watching Apple’s approach closely. It’s been in the VR game a long time. At a recent demo for the Meta Quest 3, which has been available in the UK since 2023, the team was very keen to talk to me about “multi-tasking” – having multiple screens in action at once. In a demo I had a web browser, YouTube and Messenger in a line in front of me. “We always did this, we just didn’t really talk about it,” one Meta worker told me.

And in its most recent advertisement, a man wears a Quest 3 to watch video instructions while building a crib. Not the most exciting concept, perhaps, but it shows just how Meta wants people to see its tech.

Oh – and it costs less than £500.

Apple and Meta are the two big players but VR is a crowded market – there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of different headsets already out there.

But what unites them all is none have quite hit the mainstream.

Up until now, the Vision Pro has only been on sale in the US – research firm IDC predicts it will shift fewer than 500,000 units this year.

Meta, which has been in the market longer, does not release sales data for the Quest either but it’s thought to have sold around 20 million worldwide.

VR headsets are nowhere near as ubiquitous as tablets, let alone mobile phones.

And it gets worse – George Jijiashvili, analyst at market research firm Omdia, said of those devices sold, many are abandoned.

“This is largely due to the limited in-flow of compelling content to keep up engagement,” he said.

But of course lack of content leads to reduced interest – and a reduced incentive for developers to make that content in the first place.

“It’s a chicken and egg situation,” Mr Jijiashvili told the BBC.

Alan Boyce, the founder of mixed reality studio DragonfiAR, warned that early adopters of the Vision Pro would have to “be patient” while more content arrived.

That’s where the Quest 3 wins out for him – it already has a “robust library” of games, and it can perform virtual desktop tasks just like the Vision Pro.

And IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo says we should not be too quick to write off a slow start for Apple’s new product.

“There’s always the expectation that Apple with every single product will sell in the millions straight away, there’s always the comparison with the iPhone,” he said.

But the reality is even the iPhone took time to find its feet – and a huge number of buyers.

According to Melissa Otto from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the iPhone only became mainstream when the App Store “started to explode with apps that added value to our lives”.

“When people start to feel their lives are becoming better and more convenient, that’s when they’re willing to take the leap,” she said.

There is another factor to consider here too though: the physical experience of using a headset.

Both Apple and Meta use so-called “passthrough” technology to enable what is known as mixed reality – the blending of the real and computer-generated worlds.

By utilising cameras on the outside of the headset, users are given a live, high-definition video feed of their surroundings – meaning they can wear it while doing things like walking or exercising.

But strapping something to your face weighing half a kilogram is not something that feels particularly natural. Generally headsets now are lighter than before, but I still can’t imagine wearing any of them for hours on end – though a colleague says he often does just this.

A sizeable number of people, myself included, have experienced VR sickness, which is when being in VR makes you feel queasy. This has significantly improved as the tech has advanced and is much less of a problem – but any experience that has you moving around with a controller instead of your feet will still take some getting used to.

Most VR experiences now include all sorts of settings to avoid this, such as the ability to “teleport” between locations. Sony’s VR game Horizon: Call of the Mountain solved the problem by letting you move by swinging your arms up and down – it sounds silly, but it goes some way to trick the brain and avoid nausea.

Whatever the experts say, the companies themselves appear bullish about their products, and their respective strengths

It’s no secret that the long-term ambition from the tech giants here is for mixed, or augmented, reality to become normal reality. Facebook owner Meta renamed itself after its grand plan for us all to inhabit a virtual world called the Metaverse – working, resting and playing there, and presenting ourselves as digital avatar versions of our ordinary selves. That all seems to have gone a bit quiet at the moment.

But they are all right in that one day, something will replace our phones and perhaps that thing is some form of VR headset. Eventually, I expect these things will start to look more like glasses and less like giant ski goggles… if they’re not brain implants (I’m not joking).

“The devices that look like what they look like today – I think we know that’s not a mass market device. It’s too heavy, it’s too awkward,” said Mr Jijiashvili.

That’s an area where rivals have focused their efforts, with Viture and XReal producing sunglasses with high-fidelity screens embedded in them.

Melissa Brown, head of Development Relations at Meta, told us she “absolutely” thought the Quest 3 could one day replace the smartphone. But the next day Meta’s PR team got in touch with a more measured response from Mark Zuckerberg, in which he said “the last generation of computing doesn’t go away… it’s not like when we got phones, people stopped using computers”.

Judging by what I saw in the Apple store in London’s Regent Street, the UK is not about to be flooded with people wandering around in Vision Pros or Quest 3s.

The very first customer I spoke to had actually just popped in for a charger and was a bit bemused by Apple staff applause as he walked in.

But in the couple of hours we were there, several people walked out grinning with big white Apple bags. The question remains: how many more can be persuaded to do the same.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban has no peace plan of his own, but he has spent the past two weeks on a whistle-stop tour of Kyiv, Moscow, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Washington and even Mar-a-Lago, on a one-man mission that has infuriated leaders in the EU and US.

“Peace will not come by itself in the Russia-Ukraine war, someone has to make it,” he proclaims in videos posted daily on his Facebook page.

He has been bitterly attacked by both Brussels and Washington for breaking EU and Nato unity and cosying up to Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping.

Few argue with his central premise, that there can be no peace without peacemakers. But his close economic relationship with Russia’s president leaves him open to the charge of acting as Mr Putin’s puppet.

The right-wing Hungarian PM says a ceasefire tied to a specific deadline would be a start.

“I am not negotiating on behalf of anyone,” he told Hungarian radio during a brief stopover in Budapest between visits to Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv and Mr Putin in Moscow.

For the next six months, Hungary holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

Mr Orban followed up his first visit to Kyiv since the start of the war with the first trip by an EU leader to Russia since April 2022. That visit to the Kremlin clearly angered his European partners.

Charles Michel, the head of the European Council of 27 EU governments, said the rotating presidency gave no mandate to engage with Russia on the EU’s behalf.

Mr Orban admitted that was the case, but insisted: “I’m clarifying the facts… I’m asking questions.”

In Kyiv he posed “three or four” to President Zelensky “so that we can understand his intentions, and where the red line is, the boundary up to which he can go in the interest of peace”.

He has also been generous in his praise of two other allies, Xi Jinping and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Meeting Mr Erdogan on arrival at the Nato summit in Washington, he spoke of him as “the only man who has overseen an agreement between Russia and Ukraine” so far, referring to a now defunct Black Sea grain agreement.

“China not only loves peace but has also put forward a series of constructive and important initiatives [for resolving the war],” he said of President Xi Jinping, according to Chinese state media.

The final visit on his whirlwind tour was to presidential candidate Donald Trump, another close ally who he strongly backs to win again in November and who he refers to as a man of peace.

In one interview, he declared that during Trump’s four-year term as president “he did not initiate a single war”.

This has been a remarkable trip in the international limelight for the leader of a small East European country with 9.7 million inhabitants. But who is it designed to impress, and could it have any effect?

A key target of his message is the domestic public.

Viktor Orban has had a relatively bad year so far, losing the two most prominent female politicians in his party to a scandal in February, and witnessing the emergence of his first serious challenger for more than a decade – Peter Magyar.

In June, Mr Orban’s Fidesz party won an impressive 45% in European elections, to 30% for Mr Magyar’s three-month-old Tisza party.

But he lost more than 700,000 votes (one in four) compared with the last parliamentary elections in 2022.

For the first time, he does not look invincible.

What better way to show Hungarians that their leader was still strong than to parade across the world stage, in a global tour “to make peace”?

His mission was also targeted at an international public, in the week that his new Patriots for Europe (PfE) group in the European Parliament attracted 84 MEPs from mainly far-right parties in 11 countries.

Patriots for Europe has emerged as the third largest faction in parliament, edging aside the rival Conservatives and Reformist group of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

Mr Orban’s visit to Moscow won him effusive praise from the Russians: “We take it very, very positively. We believe it can be very useful,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

The US was less impressed.

“We would welcome, of course, actual diplomacy with Russia to make it clear to Russia that they need to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, that they need to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity,” said US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller. “But that is not at all what this visit appears to have been.”

At the same time, the US did welcome Mr Orban’s first visit to neighbouring Ukraine since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion.

The Hungarian leader has given very little away about the actual content of his talks in Kyiv, Moscow or Beijing.

A leaked version of his letter to Charles Michel, sent from Azerbaijan, offers some clues.

Mr Putin was open to a ceasefire, Mr Orban told the European Council president, provided it did not provide Ukraine with a chance to reorganise its army on the front lines.

Three days earlier in Kyiv, on 2 July, the Ukrainian leader used a similar argument, telling Mr Orban that the Russians would abuse any ceasefire to regroup their invading forces.

Mr Orban was apparently “surprised” that President Zelensky still believed Ukraine could win back its lost territories.

And Vladimir Putin told Mr Orban that “time favours Russian forces”, according to the leaked letter.

Arriving in Washington days later, Mr Orban posted yet another video on Facebook, saying he would argue that Nato “should return to its original spirit: Nato should win peace, not the wars around it”.

Unlike his Nato allies, Viktor Orban views Russia’s two-and-a-half year war in Ukraine as a civil war between two Slav nations, prolonged by US support for one of them.

One thing he probably does agree on is that this autumn the conflict will become only worse.

A Trump presidential victory in November, he believes, would force the Ukrainians and Russians to the negotiating table.

A selection of striking news photographs taken around the world this week.

The things they see. The dead girl lowered by a rope from a ruined building. She sways slightly, then comes to rest, legs folding beneath her on the rubble.

They see people and parts of people lying out in the open where the blast or the bullet caught them. Violent death in all of its contortions.

Bodies lying in the streets, in the blasted open sitting rooms of houses, under the rubble. Sometimes covered by so much concrete the men will never reach them, and only in the future when the war is over will somebody come and give them a decent burial.

The men of the Gaza Civil Defence cannot close their eyes to any of this. There is no shutting out the smell. Every sense is on alert. Death can come from the skies in an instant.

When the fighting in places like Shejaiya in eastern Gaza City, or Tal Al-Sultan, near Rafah, in the south, is as fierce as it has been in the last few days, the ambulances of the Civil Defence dare not venture out.

“Entering areas close to the Israeli occupation is dangerous, but we try to intervene to save lives and souls,” says Muhammed Al Mughayer, a local Civil Defence official.

He and his men seize any lull in the conflict to recover the dead and the wounded. Families constantly ask about missing relatives.

“It is very difficult to identify the bodies,” explains Mr Mughayer. “Some remain unidentified due to complete decomposition.”

Stray animals also prey on the corpses, tearing off clothes and scattering papers that might be used to identify them.

The ambulance crews are short of fuel. Two days ago one broke down in Tal Al-Sultan and had to be towed out, a nerve-wracking experience for the crews. The risk of being fired on by the Israeli forces, says Mr Mughayer, means seriously injured people often cannot be rescued.

“There is currently a report of an injured person near Al-Salihin Mosque from two days ago, but we can’t reach them due to delays in coordination. It may result in their death.”

Refugees are continuing to flee from Gaza city and areas like Shejaiya. Many have been displaced multiple times.

For them it is a world without laws or rules. World leaders express concern. But nobody is coming to rescue them. Nothing is more acute for these people than the sense that they can die at any moment.

Sharif Abu Shanab stands outside the ruins of his family home in Shejaiya with an expression that is part bewilderment, part grief.

“My house had four floors, and I can’t enter it,” he says. “I can’t take anything out of it, not even a can of tuna. We have nothing, no food or drink. They bulldozed all the houses, and it is not our fault. Why do they hold us accountable for the fault of others? What did we do? We are citizens. Look at the destruction around you…

“Where do we go, and to whom? We are thrown in the streets now, we have no home or anything, where do we go? There is only one solution and that is to hit us with a nuclear bomb and relieve us of this life.”

There are occasional glimpses of reprieve. The Al-Fayoumi family, arriving close to Deir Al Balah in central Gaza, were relieved to have escaped from Gaza City. This after a warning this week to evacuate from the Israel Defense Forces sent thousands of people onto the road south.

In the boiling heat of the asphalt road, without shade, family members were reunited with others who had gone ahead of them.

The new arrivals were given water and soft drinks. A boy sucked from a carton of juice, then squeezed it with all his strength to coax out a last few drops.

Nobody in the group took their survival for granted. So to see everyone alive, all in the one place, brought smiles and cries of happiness. An aunt reached into a car to hug her young niece. At first the child smiled. Then she turned her head and sobbed.

Where will they be tomorrow, next week, next month? They have no way of knowing. It depends on where the fighting moves next, on the next Israeli evacuation order, on the mediators and whether Hamas and Israel can agree a ceasefire.

These lines could have been written at any time in the last few months. Civilians dying. Taking to the roads. Hunger. Hospitals struggling. Talks about a ceasefire.

Since February, we have been following the story of Nawara al-Najjar whose husband Abed-Alrahman was among more than 70 people killed when Israeli forces launched an operation to rescue two hostages in Rafah.

They had fled Khan Younis 9km (6 miles) to the north, and took refuge closer to Rafah when bullets and shrapnel tore through the tented camp where they slept.

Nawara was six months pregnant when she was widowed, and taking care of six children, aged from four to 13. When a BBC colleague found her again today, Nawara was nursing her newborn baby, Rahma, just one month old.

She gave birth on a night of heavy airstrikes, rushed to the hospital by her in-laws.

“I kept saying: ‘Where are you Abed-Alrahman? This is your daughter coming into the world without a father.’” Baby Rahma has red hair like her dead father.

The Israeli advance into Rafah last month sent Nawara and her children fleeing again, back to their old home in Khan Younis. She struggled to settle there again.

“My husband’s things were there, his laugh, his voice. I couldn’t open the house. I tried to be strong. Then I took my children and opened the door, and we wandered around the house, but it was hard. I cried for my husband…He was the one who cleaned the house, cooked for us, made sure I was comfortable.”

There has been fighting around Khan Younis again in the last week. An Israeli air strike close to a school killed 29 people, local hospital sources say, and wounded dozens more.

But Nawara is adamant she will not move again. Here she is close to the memory of the man she loves. She imagines her husband as a still living presence. She sends texts to his phone: “I complain to him, and I cry to him…I try to reassure myself, telling myself that I need to be patient. I imagine he’s the one telling me.”

Elon Musk’s social media site X has been accused by the European Union of breaching its online content rules, with its “verified” blue tick accounts having the potential to “deceive” users.

The bloc’s tech regulator said users could be duped into thinking the identity of those with blue tick marks was verified, when in fact anybody can pay for a blue tick. It said it had found evidence of “malicious actors” abusing the system.

The investigation began under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

It could lead to X being fined up to 6% of its global annual turnover and being forced to change how it operates in the bloc.

Mr Musk reacted angrily: “The DSA is misinformation,” he wrote on X.

The billionaire, who bought the platform for $44bn in 2022, said the DSA rules amounted to “censored speech” which he said he found unacceptable.

X chief executive Linda Yaccarino also defended the company’s practices.

“A democratised system, allowing everyone across Europe to access verification, is better than just the privileged few being verified,” she wrote on the social media site.

The findings follow a seven month investigation under the DSA.

The law, which was introduced in 2022, requires big tech firms, like X, to take action to stop illegal content and safeguard the public.

ByteDance’s TikTok, AliExpress and Meta Platforms are also being investigated under the act.

The Commission said its review of X had found a lack of transparency around advertising and that X did not provide data for research use as required under EU rules.

“In particular, X prohibits eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, such as by scraping, as stated in its terms of service”, the Commission said.

The tech regulator also said that the way X designed and operated its interface for blue tick verified accounts did “not correspond to industry practice and deceives users”.

“Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a ‘verified’ status, it negatively affects users’ ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with,” it said.

“There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the ‘verified account’ to deceive users,” it added.

The Commission said X could defend itself against the findings or resolve the issue by committing to changes that would bring it into compliance.

Any such deal would be made public, it added, in response to Mr Musk’s claim that the commission had offered an “illegal secret deal”.

“Back in the day, BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information,” Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market, said.

“Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users and infringe the DSA.”

“X has now the right of defence – but if our view is confirmed, we will impose fines and require significant changes.”

The Commission pushed back against Mr Musks’s charge of censorship, saying its rules were aimed at ensuring “a safe and fair online environment for European citizens that is respectful of their rights, in particular freedom of expression”.

Among its rules, it said, are requirements that companies inform users when their accounts are restricted and that users who are banned can contest those decisions.

The Commission said it was continuing investigations into X’s practices around dissemination of illegal content, and how well it combats the spread of fake news.

When Banksy artwork Season’s Greetings appeared on a garage in Port Talbot in 2018 it kicked off a three-year saga that ended in it being removed from the town.

But more than five years on it has left a lasting legacy – a vibrant street art community.

“There were people doing it anyway,” said steelworker and street artist Ryan Davies.

“But there’s no two ways about it – when Banksy turned up in town, that really kicked off a scene here that had been bubbling under.”

Anyone paying a visit to the steel town could not help but notice its ever-growing collection of street art – everything from imposing murals to graffiti lettering and tagging.

“Port Talbot is renowned for it now,” said Ryan.

Ryan, a boiler man at the local steelworks for 33 years, began painting on walls over two years ago.

When he is not on shift he can be found painting alongside twin brothers Matthew and Aiden Cole. Together they are known as THEW Creative.

On a Friday afternoon they were at Margam Football Club, which had commissioned them to paint a mural on its clubhouse in the shadow of the steel plant’s blast furnaces.

With looming mass job cuts at the steelworks, Ryan said it was a welcome distraction from the day job, where people were feeling “very demoralised”.

“With me coming up to 50, I’m lucky enough to have paid off my mortgage… but there’s boys in their twenties there and they’ve just taken on mortgages, they’ve got young kids and a long way to go before retirement – so for them it’s very, very nerve-wracking,” he said.

Ryan said having colourful street art around the town was a hopeful sight during difficult times.

“It makes you think the town might actually have a chance and it’s not just about the steelworks,” he added.

“[The Banksy] made the common person realise that it’s not just anti-social, art is art,” said Aiden.

“People started realising ‘we could have art in our garden, on our children’s bedroom wall, on our football club, on our restaurant – it has really bloomed and there’s a nice scene going on in Port Talbot at the moment.”

But not everyone in Port Talbot is a fan.

“We got accused of making the place look like a third world country the other day by a random old man – fair enough,” said Aiden.

“But overwhelmingly it’s a positive reaction, I would say,” added Ryan.

“You can’t please everyone, can you,” added his friend.

It was back in December 2018 when Season’s Greetings appeared on steelworker Ian Lewis’ garage in Taibach, and following online speculation it was soon claimed by the famous anonymous street artist.

With an estimated 20,000 visitors flocking to see the artwork, wardens were drafted in to control traffic and film star Michael Sheen, who grew up in the area, helped pay for a protective plastic screen and round-the-clock security.

It was eventually bought by gallery owner John Brandler and taken to a building in the town centre so it could be viewed by the public.

But once an agreement to keep it there expired Mr Brandler moved it out of Wales in February 2022.

“It was a travesty,” recalled Ryan.

“It was taken away from us, a very rich person came in and bought it and off it went.”

When this was put to Mr Brandler he said he had bought the artwork intending to keep it in the town and create an international street art museum – but the idea had been scrapped by the local council.

A spokeswoman from Neath Port Talbot council said at the time: “Discussions were held on the potential for the work to remain in Port Talbot but the council was informed it would have to meet the costs of its removal and installation into a new venue, to continue to cover the insurance and to pay a fee in the region of £100,000 per year for the loan of the work.”

Recalling the dispute, Mr Brandler said: “I was travelling to Wales virtually every week costing me a day-and-a-half of my business time to have meetings, to be greeted by the phrase that it wasn’t going to happen because – and I quote – ‘Banksy isn’t Welsh’.”

He added he was “so, so saddened” that the artwork had not been able to remain in the town which he said was “in dire need of tourism”.

Thirty miles away in Cardiff, the Banksy effect is also being felt.

There, graffiti writer Amelia Thomas, better known as Unity, said: “People have their own feelings about Banksy, but something that can’t be disputed is one thing that Banksy has done is raise the profile of people painting on walls being acceptable.

“There’s a lot of people in Port Talbot who had already been painting for years and not getting any recognition, so it’s a bit barmy that it takes someone from outside to paint something for people to actually appreciate the local people.”

Amelia grew up in rural Llanfihangel Talyllyn in Powys, and said she had always been drawn to “making marks on walls”.

“I was getting into trouble because no-one else was doing it and it was quite obviously me,” she said.

Everything changed when she saw a graffiti magazine at her cousin’s house.

“I was like ‘Oh, my God, there’s other people doing this, that’s what I’m being drawn to.”

After moving to Cardiff in the mid 2000s she found walls where she could paint “without getting hassled”.

“It’s much easier to paint on the street without having people hassling you now, because people are used to seeing it for one. But also and there are places where you can say, ‘I’m allowed to be here, it’s nothing to do with you, leave me alone’,” she said.

Many places around the UK have open walls where artists are able to paint.

“That’s a massive step from where things were,” said Amelia.

For Amelia, expressing herself through art is a way of protecting her mental health.

“It’s about raising awareness to the public that actually, this is something that’s benefiting the person that’s painting, they’re not doing it to annoy you, they’re doing it because it’s something that they need to do, that they’re compelled to do and that helps them keep their head above the water, because that’s what it is for me,” she said.

“When you’re painting, nothing else in the world exists. It’s just you and that wall.”

Hasan Kamil grew up in Swansea with a passion for creating graffiti art.

After spending five years working as a graphic designer he now lives in Bristol, and works creating large-scale murals and bespoke lettering.

When he is outside painting murals people frequently stop to ask him about his work, so he said he has a good gauge about how the public feel about art popping up on buildings, walls and underpasses.

“The average perception [says] ‘I love the street art but hate the graffiti, hate the tagging’,” he said.

“But they don’t realise they coexist and graffiti was kind of there first, so I will always be a big advocate for graffiti.”

There’s another frequent comment.

“The B word – Banksy. ‘You’re not Banksy are you?’ You get that a lot.”

The Prince of Wales will attend the Euro 2024 final in Berlin on Sunday to watch England play Spain, Kensington Palace has confirmed.

He will be joined by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer as the England men’s team aim to secure their first major trophy in 58 years.

Prince William is president of the Football Association (FA), and attended England’s victory over Switzerland in the quarter-final and the group stage match against Denmark.

After the semi-final win over the Netherlands on Wednesday, Aston Villa fan Prince William congratulated the team in a post on X, saying: “What a beauty, Ollie!”

Substitute Ollie Watkins secured victory with a last-minute strike which spared England from entering extra time.

The prince’s father the King also congratulated the Three Lions on their victory in the semi-final and sent his “best wishes” for the match on Sunday.

He added: “If I may encourage you to secure victory before the need for any last minute wonder-goals or another penalties drama, I am sure the stresses on the nation’s collective heart rate and blood pressure would be greatly alleviated!”

The Prince of Wales took his eldest son Prince George to the final of the delayed Euros in 2021 at Wembley, when England lost on penalties to Italy.

Prince William attended the Lionesses win against Germany in the Women’s Euro 2022 and awarded the players their medals.

Earlier in the tournament, the prince described the win against Slovakia as an “emotional rollercoaster” and the victory against Switzerland as “nail-biting to the very end”.

The men’s team has not won a major tournament since the World Cup in 1966 and has never won the European Championship.

Thousands of England fans are expected to be in Berlin on Sunday, with the match at the Olympiastadion kicking off at 20:00 BST.

Asked about a potential bank holiday if England win, Sir Keir said “we should certainly mark the occasion” but stopped short of confirming a day off for the country, saying he did not want to “jinx it”.

Some businesses have already said they will be making changes to their opening times on Sunday and Monday because of the match.

Sainsbury’s has said its local shops and petrol stations in England will close early at 19:30 BST, and Lidl said it will open its stores an hour later on Monday.

Before the semi-final win on Wednesday, Tesco said it would close 1,800 of its Express stores early at 19:30 BST on Sunday if England made it to the final.

A surge in beer, burger, and pizza sales is expected, and pubs and shops are competing for customers who will watch the match either at home or at a bar.

Music festival Wireless has announced it will end early at 19:00 BST on Sunday to give fans “plenty of time to travel home” to watch the game.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, who starred as Marianne in hit TV series Normal People, has said she would like to revisit the role in the future.

“I love those characters,” the British actress, 26, tells BBC News. “It would be wonderful to explore them again.”

Based on Sally Rooney’s novel, the BBC Three drama charted the on-off relationship of teenagers Marianne and Connell, played by Paul Mescal.

Released in April 2020 at the height of the pandemic, it propelled its young leads to fame. Both are now starring in major new films, Edgar-Jones in Twisters and Mescal in Gladiator II.

“Normal People was a series that was such a lockdown phenomenon,” Edgar-Jones says.

“I think it introduced Paul and I to a lot of people and film-makers,” she says, adding that she felt “really lucky” for the opportunities it opened up.

I meet Edgar-Jones in a central London hotel, where she is doing press interviews for her new film.

This round of promotion is very different from her experience during the pandemic, when she was “on Zoom for months on end”.

“I haven’t done that many in-person interviews yet,” she says. “It’s so nice.”

Since Normal People, Edgar-Jones has starred in films like Fresh and Where the Crawdads Sing, true crime mini-series Under the Banner of Heaven, and now Twisters.

For a lot of fans, she remains firmly in their minds as the smart and unafraid schoolgirl Marianne, whose relationship with Connell transfixed viewers.

A few months ago, Edgar-Jones and Mescal almost broke the internet with an Instagram post that appeared to tease a Normal People sequel.

The pair later clarified that, in fact, they were reuniting to host a marathon screening of Normal People for charity.

But Edgar-Jones indicates that she hasn’t shut the door on it yet.

“If [Rooney] is up for writing a new story, who knows,” she says.

So is she open to the idea? She laughs. “Keeping it open. Always open.”

Having shot to prominence during Covid, Edgar-Jones says fame is only now “starting to feel real”.

“I can’t believe I’m in a film of this scale,” she says of Twisters. “It’s definitely a pinch yourself moment.”

In the film, a sequel to 1996 blockbuster Twister, Edgar-Jones plays Katie Cooper, a retired storm chaser who returns to the open plains in central Oklahoma to test a new tracking system.

Edgar-Jones notes that Cooper, who is haunted by a tragic past encounter with a tornado, bears similarities to other characters she has played.

“I think my characters tend to be, and have been historically, quite introspective. Or characters who have a complex inner life, who are dealing with things that are heavy and emotional,” she says.

She relates to those roles, but adds that she has “a bit more craic” than her characters.

“I think maybe I’m more light-hearted. I’m quite silly.”

That said, this film did allow her to have some fun, including running and screaming across fields.

“I did do a lot of running. Which isn’t my strong suit,” she says.

“I’ve actually got a bit of a weird run, which I’ve been told, so I actually just tried to practice not looking like an eejit as I was running. That was the main thing.”

She also ate a lot of Oklahoma cuisine on set, possibly offsetting all the exercise she was getting.

“I had something called chicken fried steak, which I’d never had, which is steak – actual steak – which they fry in chicken batter, which was cool”.

Edgar-Jones stars opposite US actor Glen Powell as Tyler Owens, a social media superstar who shamelessly chases tornadoes for likes.

Powell, who has also starred in Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You and Hit Man, is seen by many as Hollywood’s latest heartthrob.

“I feel like I have a habit of starring with a lot of the men of the moment,” Edgar-Jones says.

“I’ve worked with a lot of really brilliant actors who have buzz around them too,” she says. She describes Powell as “magical”, and adds that Mescal is “one of my all time best friends”.

The Normal People co-stars were recently seen together at Glastonbury festival, in pictures posted on social media.

“We had the best time. Glastonbury is maybe one of my favourite places on Earth when the festival’s on,” Edgar-Jones says.

“It’s so much fun. I love dancing, I love being with all my friends, I love camping, I love it all. So yeah. We had such a blast.”

Twisters has received mixed reviews from critics. The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey awarded it four stars, praising it as a “comfortingly old school affair” and calling its leads “charismatic”.

Meanwhile, writing in Variety, Owen Gleiberman described it as “less awesome than the original”.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave it three stars, calling it a “fun film with some big set-piece scenes” but adding it was “weirdly coy” about mentioning climate change.

Edgar-Jones, for her part, says climate change was definitely a theme in the film.

“There’s an element of climate change and what that means for how tornado alley is expanding and how more frequently we’re getting extreme weather events,” she says.

“And I think the film really touches on that in a way that it’s encouraging you to be aware of it and think about how we can be more concerned about how we look after our planet.”

And while comparisons with the first film are inevitable, Edgar-Jones says the new version brings something different.

“Its so fun to see what the new technology will bring to this film,” she says.

Many of us also remain fascinated with films about the dark side of nature. Edgar-Jones counts herself among that camp.

“I’m fascinated by extreme weather,” she says.

“I think growing up in London I’m used to pretty average mizzle, or miserable drizzle, as I call it. So when I was filming in Oklahoma during tornado season, and I saw really extreme storms, it was incredible.

“It’s amazing how massive they are and how small they make you feel.”

A bear rescued from the war in Ukraine and rehomed in a West Lothian zoo has died.

Staff at Five Sisters Zoo in West Calder said they were “utterly devastated” that Yampil had died following an anaesthetic procedure.

The 12-year-old Asiatic black bear had been rehomed at the zoo in January after being rescued from the village of Yampil in the Donetsk province of eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian soldiers had discovered an abandoned zoo in the village when they arrived there in July 2022, five months after the Russian invasion.

They found Yampil injured and traumatised after Russian shelling of the zoo.

Of nearly 200 animals at the zoo, he was one of seven survivors.

Rescuers initially moved him to an animal sanctuary in Belgium before he was permanently rehomed in Scotland.

Romain Pizzi, a specialist vet at Five Sisters Zoo, said Yampil had been “comfortable and happy” at the West Lothian zoo.

However, he said animals that had been rescued from such “traumatic circumstances” could have “complicated health problems such as dental problems or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

He said: “Yampil was anaesthetised for further treatment for his health problems which were worrying the team.

“Sadly, anaesthetising animals always carries risks, and Yampil did not recover from the procedure.”

The bear was being observed for signs of PTSD when he arrived at the zoo after being concussed by shellfire in the warzone.

The vet said staff at the zoo were all “deeply affected by the loss of our beloved Yampil”.

He added: “We appreciate this will be a truly sad day for all the incredible people who helped make his rescue possible.

“While the zoo will remain open as usual, we kindly request respect and privacy for our owners and staff during this difficult time.”

The Asiatic black bear – also known as moon bears because of crescent-shaped yellow fur on their chests – are classed as a vulnerable species by conservation groups, with estimates suggesting there are fewer than 60,000 of them left in the world.

They are medium-sized bears averaging 4.5 – 5.4ft (137-165cm) in height, and weighing 90-115kg. The males are often heavier and can weigh up to 181kg.

Have you ever wanted to attend a huge event in person? Maybe you’d love to go to the Euros, or to see your favourite band.

But while it’s fun to imagine being part of the crowd, two teenagers from Surrey have taken that idea to the next level by playing tennis against some pros on court at Wimbledon.

Aashny and Saran were working as ball girls at the time.

In a clip posted by the official Wimbledon social accounts, the girls can be seen facing Britain’s Jamie Delgado and Juan Sebastián Cabal from Colombia.

Saran and Aashny have spoken to BBC Newsbeat about how they went from playing a supporting role to becoming part of the main event.

The girls were working as ball girls during the Gentleman’s Invitational Doubles games at the time.

The event features former professional tennis players and is less competitive than the ladies’ and men’s singles.

“They don’t take it too seriously,” says Aashny. “They like to have a joke about.”

“They just turned round to us and were like, ‘Do you wanna play?’

And of course the friends had to say yes.

The pair spent about five minutes swapping lobs with the pro players, with the crowd cheering every time they struck the ball.

The Wimbledon Championships, established in 1877, is the oldest tennis competition in the world.

Held in south-west London every summer, more than 500,000 people attend each year, according to organisers.

Aashny and Saran, both 15, went through multiple stages to become ball girls.

They told BBC Newsbeat they were made aware of the opportunity when starting at their secondary school, which is partnered with Wimbledon.

“I’ve wanted to do this since I was in Year 7,” says Aashny.

Many local schools have a connection with the tennis tournament and students can put themselves forward for the role of ball girl or ball boy.

When entering Year 10 in September 2023, they jumped at the chance.

“We started training and each week certain people would get through to the next round,” says Aashny.

Then they got picked for the Wimbledon trial, where more people were eliminated.

“It’s a long selection process,” she says.

Saran says the training is pretty tough.

“I was always really nervous to go in,” she says. “But I think the work has paid off.”

Aashny’s been a huge tennis fan her whole life and tells us she loves seeing the players close-up.

“The first time I went onto Centre Court was really special,” says Aashny.

“I get to see loads of players and be around this atmosphere for two weeks.”

But Saran’s a different story.

“I have no idea who they are,” she says.

Although she went to Wimbledon with her dad a few years ago, she has to ask Aashny any tennis-related questions when they’re working.

• Each year, there are about 250 ball boys and girls at Wimbledon
• They’re selected from about 1,000 entries each year
• The average age is 15
• Training begins in February and lasts until the middle of June, before the competition takes place in July
• Once selected, they train four times a week
• Most who get picked attend schools that are partnered with Wimbledon

Aashny said she felt lucky to be so close to the action, and if she hadn’t been selected would only have been able to attend one or two matches.

Both friends agree, though, that being ball girls has been one of the best experiences of their lives.

Listen to Newsbeat live at 12:45 and 17:45 weekdays – or listen back here.

The extraordinary images of a defiant Donald Trump pumping his fist in the air, with blood on his face, being rushed off the stage by the Secret Service are not just history-making – they may well alter the course of November’s presidential election.

This shocking act of political violence will inevitably have an effect on the campaign. US Secret Service agents shot dead the suspect at the scene. And law enforcement sources told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that they are treating the attack as an assassination attempt.

The picture – of a bleeding Mr Trump, fist in the air, being escorted away- was quickly posted on social media by his son Eric Trump with the caption: “This is the fighter America needs.”

President Joe Biden appeared on TV shortly after the shooting and said there was no place in America for political violence like this. He expressed concern for his Republican opponent and said he hoped to speak with him later tonight.

Mr Biden’s election campaign paused all political statements and is working to take down its television ads as quickly as possible, clearly believing that it would be inappropriate to attack Donald Trump at this time and instead concentrating on condemning what’s happened.

Politicians from across the political spectrum – people who agree on very little else – are coming together to say violence has no place in a democracy.

Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were all quick to denounce the violence and said how relieved they were that Trump was not seriously hurt.

But some of Mr Trump’s closest allies and supporters are already blaming Mr Biden for the violence, with one Republican congressman accusing the president of “inciting an assassination” in a post on X.

Senator JD Vance, who is thought to be on the shortlist to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, said the rhetoric from the Biden campaign led directly to this incident.

Other Republican politicians are saying similar things, which will almost certainly be condemned by their opponents as incendiary at a dangerous time in American politics.

Already, we can see the battlelines being drawn in what may become a very ugly fight over a deeply shocking incident. And one that will reshape the election campaign.

Former US President Donald Trump was rushed off stage after gunshots erupted at a rally in Pennsylvania in an apparent assassination attempt.

Footage showed him grimace and raise a hand to his right ear, before ducking as sharp cracks – a series of shots – broke out.

He was quickly swarmed by US Secret Service agents and dragged off stage to a waiting vehicle. He raised a fist as he was bundled into the car.

In a post to his Truth Social network, Trump said a bullet pierced the “upper part” of his right ear. Earlier, his spokesperson said he was “fine” and receiving treatment at a local medical centre.

“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” Trump wrote. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”

Blood was clearly visible on Trump’s ear and face as protection officers rushed him away.

The suspect was shot dead at the scene by US Secret Service officers, the agency’s spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said. He added that one bystander was killed in the shooting and two others were critically injured.

Republican Congressman Ronnie Jackson told the BBC that his nephew was injured in the shooting. He sustained a minor wound to his neck and was treated at the scene, Mr Jackson said in a statement.

Law enforcement sources told the BBC’s US partner CBS News that the male attacker had been armed with a rifle and had fired from an elevated structure a few hundred metres away outside the venue. They added that the attack was being treated as an assassination attempt.

Mr Guglielmi said Trump was safe and that measures for his protection had been implemented. He added that an active investigation – which is being led by the FBI – was under way.

• Follow Live: Trump ‘safe’ after shots fired at rally

The Republican candidate for president had just started addressing his supporters in Butler, Pennsylvania – a crucial swing state in November’s election – when the shots started.

Multiple bangs rang out as Trump spoke about his successor, President Joe Biden, and his administration.

Several supporters holding placards and standing behind Trump ducked as the shots were heard.

Bystanders who spoke to the BBC suggested the gunshots may have come from a one-storey building to the right of the stage where Trump was speaking.

One witness – Greg – told the BBC that he had spotted a suspicious-looking person “bear crawling” on the roof of the building about five minutes after Trump took to the stage. He said he pointed the person out to police.

“He had a rifle, we could clearly see him with a rifle,” he said. “We’re pointing at him, the police are down there running around on the ground – we’re like ‘hey man there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle’ and the police did not know what was going on.”

Tim – who was also at the rally – told the BBC that he had heard a “barrage” of shots.

“There was a spray which we initially thought was a fire hose, and then the speaker on the right-hand side started coming down,” he said.

“Something must have hit the hydraulic lines [which caused it to fall]. We saw President Trump go to the ground and everyone started dropping to the ground because it was chaos.”

• Pictures from Trump rally where shots fired

Warren and Debbie were at the venue and told the BBC they heard at least four gunshots.

They said they both got on the ground as Secret Service agents came through the crowd, shouting for the attendees to get down. People remained calm, they said.

“We couldn’t believe it was happening,” Warren said.

Debbie said a little girl beside them was crying that she didn’t want to die and saying “how is this happening to us?”

“That broke my heart,” Debbie said.

Speaking from his home state of Delaware, President Biden deplored the attack, calling it “sick”.

“There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” he said. “Everybody must condemn it.”

The White House later said President Biden had spoken with Trump before returning to Washington DC.

Trump remains locked in a tight contest with President Biden – the presumptive Democratic nominee – in a re-match of the 2020 election.

Politicians of both parties joined Mr Biden in condemning the apparent attack.

Former President Barack Obama said there “is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy” and that he was “relieved that former President Trump wasn’t seriously hurt”.

Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence said he and his wife were praying for his former ally, adding that he urged “every American to join us”.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement: “My thoughts and prayers are with former President Trump. I am thankful for the decisive law enforcement response. America is a democracy. Political violence of any kind is never acceptable.”

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer led international condemnation of the shooting, saying he was “appalled by the shocking scenes at President Trump’s rally”.

“Political violence in any form has no place in our societies and my thoughts are with all the victims of this attack,” he said in a statement.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called on people to oppose violence that “challenges democracy”.

And Canadian leader Justin Trudeau said he was “sickened by the shooting at former President Trump”.

Trump was set to accept his party’s nomination for president at the convention in Milwaukee on Monday. Some had speculated that he had been set to reveal his running mate at the Butler rally.

Some Republicans were quick to blame President Biden over the shooting, accusing him of stoking fears about Trump’s potential return to office.

Senator JD Vance, who is thought to be on the shortlist to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, said the rhetoric from the Biden campaign had led directly to this incident.

Mike Collins – a Republican congressman – accused the president of “inciting an assassination”.

Meanwhile James Comer, the chair of the powerful House oversight committee, said he would summon the director of the Secret Service before his panel.

A man with a rifle was seen on a rooftop minutes before shots were fired at a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania, a witness has told the BBC.

Greg Smith said the man had crawled on top of a building just outside the event in Butler County on Friday evening.

He said he pointed the gunman out to police.

“I’m thinking to myself ‘Why is Trump still speaking, why have they not pulled him off the stage’… the next thing you know, five shots ring out.”

The former president was immediately swarmed by Secret Service agents and escorted away. He was seen with blood on his face and later said a bullet had pierced his ear.

The gunman was shot dead, officials later confirmed. Mr Smith told the BBC he saw Secret Service agents shoot the man.

Mr Smith was listening from outside the rally and said he saw the gunman around five minutes into Trump’s speech.

“We noticed the guy bear-crawling up the roof of the building beside us, 50ft away,” he said. “He had a rifle, we could clearly see a rifle.

“We’re pointing at him, the police are down there running around on the ground, we’re like ‘Hey man, there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle’… and the police did not know what was going on.”

Mr Smith said he tried to alert the authorities for three to four minutes, but thought they probably could not see the gunman because of the slope of the roof.

“Why is there not Secret Service on all of these roofs here?” he asked. “This is not a big place. “[It’s a] security failure, 100% security failure.”

He said he later saw the agents shoot the gunman: “They crawled up on the roof, they had their guns pointed at him, made sure he was dead. He was dead, and that was it – it was over.”

Anthony Guglielmi, a Secret Service spokesman, said agents had “neutralised the shooter” and “quickly responded with protective measures”.

The incident is being investigated as an attempted assassination.

A crowd member was killed and two others were critically injured, the service added.

Mr Smith later told the BBC his child was “crying and begging me to take him home” after the shooting.

“There were a lot of kids up there with us who were terrified, they’re still terrified,” he said.

Another witness who was inside the event described dropping to the ground after hearing five gunshots in quick succession.

Jason, who did not give his surname, told the BBC: “We see the Secret Service jump on Trump to protect him; everyone on the ground dropped down very quickly.

Then he “stood up and put his fist up in the air”.

“He was a little bloody, his ear was bleeding. He stood up and he was alive and breathing.”

An emergency department doctor at the rally told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, that he treated a crowd member for a gunshot wound to the head.

“I heard the shots, I thought it was firecrackers to begin with,” he said.

“Someone over there was screaming ‘He’s been shot, he’s been shot’.

“They guy had spun around [and was] jammed between the benches.”

“There was a lot of blood.”

Donald Trump was rushed off stage during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania after a gunman opened fire from a nearby building.

The Republican candidate for president dropped to the ground and was seen with blood on the side of his face. He later said that he heard the whizzing of a bullet, that ripped through his ear.

As the stage was swarmed by secret service agents, he raised a fist into the air and was escorted away.

Rallygoers dropped to the ground as shot rang out, with some then fleeing the area.

One witness told the BBC that he had seen a man with a rifle on the roof of a building moments before Trump was shot at.

Lavish wedding celebrations for the son of Asia’s richest man resumed on Saturday with a star-studded guestlist including Hollywood celebrities, global business leaders and two former British prime ministers.

Billionaire tycoon Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son Anant and fiancee Radhika Merchant, both 29, are tying the knot this weekend in Mumbai, India, following months of pre-marriage parties.

Saturday will see a blessing ceremony during which the world’s rich and famous will greet and pay their respects to the couple at a 16,000-capacity convention centre owned by the Ambani family’s conglomerate.

This will be followed by a grand party where unconfirmed reports say pop stars Drake, Lana Del Rey and Adele are likely to perform.

It follows a formal ceremony and party on Friday evening which was attended by the likes of socialite Kim Kardashian, actor John Cena and former British leaders Tony Blair and Boris Johnson.

Fifa boss Gianni Infantino, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan and Samsung chairman Jay Y Lee were also among hundreds of famous figures who made an appearance.

“Great wedding!” China’s ambassador to India Xu Feihong wrote on social media platform X along with footage of the couple from inside the venue.

“Best wishes to the new couple and double happiness!”

This weekend’s celebrations end on Sunday with a reception party.

• In photos: Kim Kardashian, Priyanka Chopra and Tony Blair at grand India wedding
• The marathon Indian wedding turning heads around the world

Wedding events earlier this year included a party at the Ambanis’ ancestral home, where a purpose-built Hindu temple was unveiled alongside private performances by singers Rihanna and Justin Bieber.

Guests included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and former US president Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka.

In June, the couple embarked on a four-day Mediterranean cruise with 1,200 guests, while singer Katy Perry performed at a masquerade ball at a French chateau in Cannes.

The Backstreet Boys, US rapper Pitbull and Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli also provided entertainment.

Rajan Mehra, chief executive of air charter company Club One Air, told Reuters that the family had rented three Falcon-2000 jets to ferry wedding guests to this week’s string of events.

“The guests are coming from all over and each aircraft will make multiple trips across the country,” he said.

On Wednesday, the family hosted a bhandara – a community feast for underprivileged people.

Anant’s father Mukesh, 66, is chairman of Reliance Industries, a family-founded conglomerate that has grown into India’s biggest company by market capitalisation.

The patriarch is the world’s 11th richest person with a fortune of more than $123bn, according to Forbes.

The family’s lucrative interests include retail partnerships with Armani and other luxury brands, more than 40% of India’s mobile phone market and an Indian Premier League cricket team.

His 27-floor family home Antilia is one of Mumbai’s most prominent landmarks, reportedly costing more than $1bn to build, with a permanent staff of 600 servants.

Merchant is the daughter of well-known pharmaceutical moguls.

Key roads in Mumbai are being sealed off for several hours a day until the festivities end on Monday, while social media is awash with minute-by-minute updates.

But the extraordinary opulence has also led to a backlash.

People living in the city have complained that road closures have worsened traffic problems caused by monsoon flooding, while others have questioned the ostentatious display of wealth.

The Ambanis have not revealed how much this wedding is costing them, but wedding planners estimate they have already spent anywhere between 11bn and 13bn rupees [$132m-$156m].

It was rumoured Rihanna was paid $7m (£5.5m) for her performance, while the figure suggested for Justin Bieber is $10m.

One unnamed executive at Reliance claimed the event was a “powerful symbol of India’s growing stature on the global stage” in a note shared with reporters.

But opposition politician Thomas Isaac said it was “obscene”.

“Legally it may be their money but such ostentatious expenditure is a sin against mother earth and [the] poor,” he posted on X.

• Meet the tycoons behind the grand Indian wedding

In Kenya, the youth protests against planned tax increases have served as a wake-up call for the Church.

They’ve shaken up a powerful institution, in a country where more than 80% of the population, including the president, are Christian.

The young demonstrators accused the Church of siding with the government, and took action against politicians using the pulpit as a political platform.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Catholic leaders responded to the challenge.

They organised a special Mass for the youth from churches in and around Nairobi, to honour those who’d been killed by police in the anti-tax protests.

Hundreds of young people crowded into the Holy Family Basilica to pray for the dead.

Just weeks earlier, Sunday Mass had been interrupted by chants from the altar of the basilica.

It was an unprecedented protest from young people – the digitally savvy generation known as Generation Z or Gen-Z.

They felt the church wasn’t backing their campaign against tough tax hikes.

Now, Bishop Simon Kamomoe tried to convince them they’d been heard.

“I know as young people sometimes you feel disappointed even in the Church,” he said.

“We would like to renew our commitment in serving you. We can be mistaken…May the Lord forgive us as a Church, where even before God, we have disappointed you.”

He also admonished them to be patient in pursuit of their dreams, to be guided by the Church, and to repent of any sins committed during the protests.

“We don’t want to lose you, we don’t want to lose our young people,” he said, with remarkable candour. “The Catholic bishops are so concerned about losing this generation,” he said, urging them to stay peaceful and protect their lives.

The Mass was punctuated by spirited singing and ended with boisterous cheering as people waved Kenyan flags.

Several who attended said the service was a welcome first step, but a belated one.

“I feel like for the first time, the Church is realising that the young people are serious,” said Yebo, who attended the protests before they turned violent and wanted to remain anonymous.

“And I feel also the Church hasn’t been really on our side. They have been sitting on the fence for a long time.

“The youth have actually been more persistent, they have brought results more than the Church with the current economic change. We can hear the president is taking the youth more serious than he takes the Church serious.”

Church organisations did lobby against the tax bill, but it was young people taking to the streets in overwhelming numbers that forced President William Ruto to back down.

Not only that.

The Gen-Z protesters are now condemning what they see as the cozy relationship between Christian and political institutions.

Again and again on the sidelines of the Mass, they mentioned suspicions about visits by Church leaders to the State House, the presidential residence, including during the protests.

“We believe the president is buying the Church,” said Meshack Mwendwa.

On social media “the Church leaders are seen holding envelopes (alongside) the executive leaders and the permanent members of the government,” he said. “And that’s not what we want as the youth, now it’s time for a change.”

One change they demanded, and got, was an end to the ostentatious practice of “harambee” – politicians giving large sums of money to the Church.

Such donations can buy political influence on Sunday mornings.

The protest movement aimed to stop that – they called it #OccupyChurch.

Some even demonstrated against President Ruto’s attendance at a Church-sponsored event. But he supported their position.

“On matters of politics on the pulpit I am 100% aligned,” he told a media roundtable that aired nationally.

“We shouldn’t be using the pulpit in churches or in any other places of worship, to prosecute politics. It is not right.”

Several days later, he banned state officers and public servants from making public charitable donations, and directed the attorney general to develop a mechanism for structured and transparent contributions.

But the president himself has been part of this political culture, converting the pulpit into a campaign platform.

“His political message was actually driven within the Church,” says Reverend Chris Kinyanjui, the general secretary of Kenya’s National Council of Churches (NCCK).

“So, people feel that they have a Christian government.”

Mr Ruto’s Christian narrative has made it difficult for many pastors to hold him to account, Rev Kinyanjui said. Rather they behave like “shareholders of this administration,” he claimed.

“Our president speaks from the pulpit. You know what the pulpit means? He cannot be questioned. So, he has become a very powerful figure in Kenya’s politics and church circles. The Gen-Z are questioning, and are saying, we don’t know the difference between the government and the Church.”

The BBC asked the Kenyan government for a response but the spokesman said he was unable to comment right now. He was speaking amidst sweeping changes in the cabinet and security services made by Mr Ruto in response to the protests.

The backlash from Kenya’s young people has the potential to reshape the way power works in Kenya.

They make up the vast majority of the population, and are outside predictable political dynamics.

The president is listening now, and so is the Church.

“We are the Church,” said Mitchelee Mbugua outside the basilica as the Mass wound up.

“If the Church shows that they don’t support us, we draw away from them. If there are no us, there’s not a Church. So, they have to listen to our grievances. Because we are the Church.”

Rev Kinyanjui goes further, underlining what he sees as the fragility of the social contract with Kenya’s youth. He acknowledged that NCCK leadership had been worried that Kenya might go the way of Sudan.

There, a youth revolution was aborted by a military coup, which eventually led to civil war.

“We were happy that the president was able to defuse [this crisis],” he said, “because if he had signed that finance bill into law, who knows what we’d have become.”

Rev Kinyanjui said the NCCK came out “too quietly” against the finance bill. Going forward they will adopt a strategy of “being proactive, being visible, being the voice of and the consciousness of society… by questioning, by correcting the regime.”

“In a way, we see the Gen-Z as doing the Lord’s work, and I think that’s something that has made many pastors to wake up.”

• Was there a massacre after Kenya’s anti-tax protests?
• Historic first as president takes on Kenya’s online army
• Protesters traumatised by abductions – lawyer
• Kenyan president’s humbling shows power of African youth
• Protesters set fire to Kenya’s parliament – but also saved two MPs

Renowned sex therapist and talk show host Dr Ruth Westheimer, who spoke openly about sex and intimate subjects, died on Friday at 96 years old.

Her publicist confirmed her death to BBC News partner CBS News without providing a cause.

Ruth Westheimer, often referred to as Dr Ruth, became known for talking openly about sex, becoming a pop culture icon as well as a best-selling author with guides like “Sex for Dummies”.

She pushed for having open conversations about sex with a non-judgmental approach.

Dr Ruth, who spoke with a German accent, is a Holocaust survivor who was born in Frankfurt, Germany.

In the 1980s, she had her own local radio program called “Sexually Speaking” which became well recognized and placed her on the path to national fame when it was nationally syndicated in 1984.

She wrote her first book, Dr Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex, in 1983 in which she aimed to demystify sex. It was the first of more than 40 books she authored.

Dr Ruth launched a television program the following year called The Dr. Ruth Show and wrote a nationally syndicated advice column.

“I knew that there is a lot of knowledge that is around but doesn’t get to young people,” Dr Ruth told NBC Nightly News in 2019.

Dr Ruth frequently made appearances on talk shows including The Howard Stern Radio Show, the Dr. Oz Show, Nightline, the Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman.

Last November, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced Dr Ruth would become the state’s honorary ambassador to loneliness.

“I am deeply honoured and promised the governor that I will work day and night to help New Yorkers feel less lonely!” Dr Ruth said at the time.

Born in 1928 as Karola Ruth Siegel, at ten-years-old her parents sent her to Switzerland to escape Kristallnacht, a violent riot Nazis carried out against Jews before the Holocaust.

Dr Ruth never saw her parents after leaving for Switzerland and believed they were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz – a Nazi death camp.

A proposed Republican Party platform is expected to be approved at the party’s national convention next week, but a much more detailed think-tank proposal has drawn attention for some of its suggestions.

Project 2025 was created by the Heritage Foundation think-tank and runs for nearly 900 pages.

Led by former Trump administration officials, it calls for the sacking of thousands of civil servants, expanding the power of the president, dismantling the Department of Education, sweeping tax cuts, a ban on pornography, halting sales of the abortion pill, and a whole lot more.

There is substantial agreement between many parts of the official Republican Party platform and Project 2025, although the think-tank document is much more detailed and in some policy areas and goes much farther than the party line.

There is a sharper contrast between the two when it comes to the issue of abortion, with Heritage urging much more aggressive anti-abortion policies.

Democrats have highlighted Project 2025’s more controversial proposals, and called the document a blueprint for a second Trump term in office. However, Trump and his campaign have denied or downplayed its influence.

It is common for Washington think-tanks of all political stripes to propose policy wishlists for potential governments-in-waiting.

The conservative Heritage Foundation first produced policy plans for future Republican administrations in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was about to take office.

It has produced similar documents in connection with subsequent presidential elections, including in 2016, when Trump won the presidency.

A year into his term, the think-tank boasted that the Trump White House had adopted nearly two-thirds of its proposals.

The Project 2025 report was unveiled in April 2023, but liberal opposition to the document has ramped up now that Trump has extended his polling lead.

Recent US Supreme Court decisions that have strengthened presidential immunity and curtailed the power of federal agencies have further worried Democrats about what Trump might achieve if he returned to the White House.

With Mr Biden’s age increasingly a key election topic, the party has aimed to refocus their supporters’ attention in an effort to mobilise voters against Project 2025 – which Mr Biden recently said would “destroy America”.

In response, Trump has disavowed the document.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted on his social media website, Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

But the team that created the project is chock full of former Trump advisers, including director Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management while Trump was president.

Russell Vought, another former Trump administration official, wrote a key chapter in the document and also serves as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director.

More than 100 conservative organisations contributed to the document, Heritage says, including many that would be hugely influential in Washington if Republicans take back the White House.

In early July, Heritage president Kevin Roberts further stoked the ire around Project 25 by raising the prospect of political violence during a podcast interview.

“We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Mr Roberts told the War Room podcast, founded by Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

In response, the Biden campaign accused Trump and his allies of “dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America”.

The Project 2025 document sets out four main policy aims: restore the family as the centrepiece of American life; dismantle the administrative state; defend the nation’s sovereignty and borders; and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.

Here’s an outline of several of its key proposals.

Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control – a controversial idea known as “unitary executive theory”.

In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas.

The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.

The document labels the FBI a “bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization”. It calls for drastic overhauls of this and several other federal agencies, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education.

The Republican Party platform includes a proposal to “declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees”, pledges to slash regulation and government spending, and also suggests eliminating the Department of Education. But it stops short of proposing a sweeping overhaul of federal agencies as outlined in Project 2025.

Increased funding for a wall on the US-Mexico border – one of Trump’s signature proposals in 2016 – is proposed in the document.

Project 2025 also proposes dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and combining it with other immigration enforcement units in other agencies, creating a much larger and more powerful border policing operation.

Other proposals include eliminating visa categories for crime and human trafficking victims, increasing fees on immigrants and allowing fast-tracked applications for migrants who pay a premium.

Not all of those details are repeated in the Republican platform document, but the overall headlines are similar – the party is promising to implement the “largest deportation programme in American history”.

The document proposes slashing federal money for research and investment in renewable energy, and calls for the next president to “stop the war on oil and natural gas”.

Carbon-reduction goals would be replaced by efforts to increase energy production and energy security.

The paper sets out two competing visions on tariffs, and is divided on whether the next president should try to boost free trade or raise barriers to imports.

But the economic advisers suggest that a second Trump administration should slash corporate and income taxes, abolish the Federal Reserve and even consider a return to gold-backed currency.

On this and many other topics, Project 2025 is more detailed and goes further than the official Republican platform, which talks of bringing down inflation and drilling for oil to reduce energy costs, but is thin on specific policy proposals.

Project 2025 does not call outright for a nationwide abortion ban.

However, it proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, and using existing but little-enforced laws to stop the drug being sent through the post.

The document suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family”.

On this issue at least, the document differs fairly substantially from the Republican platform, which only mentions the word “abortion” once. The platform says abortion laws should be left to individual states and that late-term abortions (which it does not define) should be banned.

It adds that that access to prenatal care, birth control and in-vitro fertilisation should be protected. The party platform makes no mention of cracking down on the distribution of mifepristone.

Under the proposals, pornography would be banned, and tech and telecoms companies that allow access would be shut down.

The document calls for school choice and parental control over schools, and takes aim at what it calls “woke propaganda”.

It proposes to eliminate a long list of terms from all laws and federal regulations, including “sexual orientation”, “gender equality”, “abortion” and “reproductive rights”.

Project 2025 aims to end diversity, equity and inclusion programs in schools and government departments as part of what it describes as a wider crackdown on “woke” ideology.

Its proposals are broadly reflected in the Republican platform, which in addition to calling for the abolishing the Department of Education, aims to boost school choice and parental control over education and criticises what the party calls the “inappropriate political indoctrination of our children”.

Project 2025 is backed by a $22m (£17m) budget and includes strategies for implementing policies immediately after the presidential inauguration in January 2025.

Heritage is also creating a database of conservative loyalists to fill government positions, and a programme to train those new workers.

Democrats led by Jared Huffman, a congressman from California, have launched a Stop Project 2025 Task Force.

And many of the proposals would likely face immediate legal challenges from Trump’s opponents if implemented.

Alec Baldwin broke down in tears as a New Mexico judge dismissed the involuntary manslaughter case against him for a fatal shooting on the set of the film Rust.

The trial collapsed three days into Baldwin’s trial in Santa Fe, at a court just miles from where Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer, was shot with a revolver that Mr Baldwin was using in rehearsals.

It is the second time the case against the actor has been dismissed since the October 2021 shooting. He will not be tried again.

“There are too many people who have supported me to thank just now,” Mr Baldwin wrote on Instagram on Saturday. “To all of you, you will never know how much I appreciate your kindness toward my family.”

His lawyers alleged police and prosecutors hid evidence – a batch of bullets – that could have been connected to the shooting.

A key aspect of the case has been how live ammunition ended up on the set and Mr Baldwin’s lawyers have questioned the investigation and mistakes made by authorities who processed the scene.

Their motion to dismiss sparked a remarkable set of events, with one of the two special prosecutors leading the case resigning, and Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissing the jury to hear from multiple witnesses.

The bullets, Mr Baldwin’s lawyer said, could be related to Ms Hutchins’ death, but were filed in a different case with a different number.

Prosecutors argued the ammunition was not connected to the case and did not match bullets found on the Rust set.

The judge ruled, however, that they should have been shared with Mr Baldwin’s defence team regardless.

“The state’s wilful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate,” she said from the bench. “There is no way for the court to right this wrong.”

Prosecutors will not be able to lodge the charge against Baldwin again, as the judge did not rule the case a mistrial, but instead outright dismissed it with prejudice.

“It was the nuclear option. The case is over,” Los Angeles trial attorney Joshua Ritter told the BBC.

• How events unfolded after fatal shooting on Alec Baldwin’s Rust film set
• What are the rules for guns on film sets?
• What are prop guns and why are they dangerous?

Mr Baldwin, best known for his role on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock and for portraying Donald Trump on sketch show Saturday Night Live, wept as the judge read from a lengthy statement detailing her reasons for the dismissal. His wife, Hilaria, covered her mouth. Other members of his family cried and smiled.

The actor hugged his lawyers then embraced his wife, who was seated behind him. They walked out hand-in-hand through a tunnel of press into a black vehicle without answering any questions or making any comments.

The evidence came to light on Thursday, when a crime-scene technician told the court that a man named Troy Teske, a retired police officer, had turned over live ammunition that could be related to the case.

Mr Teske is friends with the step-father of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armourer who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter earlier this year.

He was working with Seth Kenney, who helped with props and ammunition on the film set.

• From the first day in court: Baldwin ‘played make-believe’ with gun
• Who was Halyna Hutchins?

After the judge sent the jury home on Friday, the court heard from a series of witnesses about the bullets, including authorities who led the case and Mr Kenney.

Towards the end of the hearing, one of the prosecutors leading the case – Kari Morrissey – took the stand to testify about the bullets and why they weren’t shared with the defence. It’s remarkably rare for a prosecutor to testify in a case they bring about their role in the investigation.

Ms Morrissey testified the ammunition had “no evidentiary value” from her perspective. While on the stand, she said that her co-prosecutor, Erlinda Ocampo Johnson, resigned on Friday as the judge weighed to dismiss the case.

She explained Ms Johnson “didn’t agree with the decision to have a public hearing” over the evidence claims.

For the last few months, Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani has been grabbing the spotlight in India.

It’s not because he has completed a major acquisition or cut a big philanthropic cheque, but it’s his son’s grandiose wedding celebrations that have entranced the entire nation and the world.

The pre-wedding parties, which began in March, have put the Ambani family firmly at the centre of many breakfast, lunch and dinner table conversations.

Anant Ambani, the youngest son of Mukesh Ambani, tied the knot with his long-time girlfriend Radhika Merchant at a family-owned convention centre in Mumbai on Friday, in a culmination of six-month-long festivities that have taken place across the globe.

Indian weddings can be lavish, but the sheer scale and size of the Ambani jamboree have perhaps eclipsed the celebratory fervour displayed by erstwhile royals.

• India tycoon’s son to marry after months of festivities
• The marathon Indian wedding turning heads around the world

The unerring presence of Bollywood A-listers at every party, the million-dollar performances by global pop-stars like Rihanna and Justin Bieber, and a bevy of VVIP dignitaries descending upon the celebrations have been a source of endless fodder for the paparazzi.

Consider some of the global elite who made it to the functions – Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg, Samsung CEO Han-Jong Hee, Bill Gates, former US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, former UK prime ministers Boris Johnson and Sir Tony Blair, Fifa president Gianni Infantino and the Kardashian sisters.

And the list goes on.

“These are very busy people. They aren’t coming just to have fun,” James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, told the BBC.

“What this tells you is that global business leaders believe the Ambanis are strategically important and also that they see India as a very big market.”

Meet the family

The Ambanis are often described as India’s most prominent business family.

They run Reliance Industries, an oil to telecoms conglomerate that was founded by Mukesh Ambani’s father Dhirubhai Ambani – a man with a controversial legacy who attained legendary status for deftly navigating India’s controversial pre-liberalisation polity, while creating enormous wealth for his company’s shareholders.

Dhirubhai died in 2002, and the empire he founded was split between his two sons – Anil and Mukesh – after what could be described as one of India’s most acrimonious succession battles.

Since then, the brothers’ fortunes have diverged, with the younger Anil declaring bankruptcy and Mukesh pivoting more and more to consumer-facing businesses, even while retaining his pole position in Reliance’s mainstay – petrochemicals.

His oil refinery in the western town of Jamnagar is the largest in the world.

In recent years, Reliance has brought some of the world’s most celebrated luxury brands to India, from Valentino to Versace and Burberry to Bottega.

Among other things, the company now owns a team in the world’s richest cricket tournament and the iconic British toy retailer Hamleys.

In 2021, it acquired the historic country club Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire for £57m.

Earlier this year, Reliance signed a binding pact to merge its entertainment platforms with Disney, in its latest attempt to transform the company’s industrial moorings. It is a deal that makes Mukesh Ambani a formidable player in the digital streaming space, with rights to cricketing tournaments and international shows.

But the conglomerate really began its shopping spree during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it got billions of dollars in investment from more than a dozen global players, including Meta and Google. The plan with Meta has been to connect WhatsApp’s more than 400 million users in India with its online grocery platform JioMart.

The company’s aggressive pricing strategy has mounted a serious challenge to foreign entrants like Netflix and Amazon.

Privately, foreign players, who compete in the same sectors as Reliance, sometimes complain of a lack of level playing field, claiming the Ambanis are among a select few who’ve benefited from the Indian government’s policy of awarding preferential contracts to local tycoons.

“Foreign players face a difficult choice,” says Mr Crabtree. “They can either fight with Reliance or get into bed with Reliance. Zuckerburg has chosen to partner with them, while Amazon has decided to fight. But these battles are often very costly, and foreigners end up losing.”

Now, Mukesh Ambani’s next target is financial services, with Reliance entering into a joint venture with US-based BlackRock for a brokering and wealth management business.

Not surprisingly then, for the Ambanis, this is much more than just a wedding.

It is a show of strength and of the clout they command, says Harish Bijoor, a brand strategy specialist. “It’s a show of the fact that this family is a magnet that attracts people from all walks of life – business, politics and entertainment.”

The media blitzkrieg around it, he adds, is also a way for them to make a personal event “even more personal to the whole world” – such as the consumers of Reliance products and services for instance – who would never have got an invite.

If the Ambani patriarch, Dhirubhai, was credited with introducing the stock market to India’s retail investors, his son Mukesh is well recognised for creating a myriad touchpoints between his businesses and the average Indian consumer.

A bulk of what Indians consume today, from the shows they watch, to the clothes they wear and potentially even how they will transact in the future, comes from the Ambani stable.

And that is why there couldn’t have been a better occasion than a dazzling wedding for the family to market its brand to India’s burgeoning consumer class.

And sure enough, the wedding has captivated people in India and across the world.