The 2024 election campaign has a new iconic image: Donald Trump, moments after narrowly avoiding serious injury or death from an assassin’s bullets, standing with his fist raised, lines of blood streaked across his face, an American flag billowing in the breeze behind him.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” the former president said, as some of the supporters, who moments before had feared for their lives, began cheering.

The bloodshed in Pennsylvania will leave a lasting mark on the American psyche, puncturing the veneer of security around the highest levels of presidential politics – of magnetic screening, bulletproof limousines and heavily armed Secret Service agents. Even former presidents are not insulated from the violence that can erupt in everyday American life.

It was also a dramatic moment in American political history; one that is sure to be replayed in video clips, still photographs and testimonial accounts throughout the course of this presidential campaign and in campaigns to come.

In a rare address from the Oval Office Sunday evening, President Joe Biden called on Americans to cool the temperature around political debate.

“[It] must never be a battlefield and, God forbid, a killing field,” he warned. “No matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence.”

The attack has already begun coursing through America’s partisan dialogue, as numerous Republicans have spoken out to condemn President Biden and the Democrats for creating a rhetorical environment conducive to the violence.

They point to dire warnings about the former president becoming a dictator and threatening democracy as examples of the overheated language that could inspire an assassin.

In particular, they highlight leaked comments the president made in private to donors just last week about increasing the attacks on the former president’s record and putting a “bull’s-eye” on him.

“They’ve tried to take him out in so many other ways, financially, they’ve tried to throw him in jail,” Donald Trump Jr said in a television interview on Sunday. “It’s almost as if they would love for this to happen.”

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Videos show how gunman shot at Trump despite public alerting police
• FIRST PERSON: First panic, then fury – what I witnessed at Trump rally
• SHOOTING SUSPECT: What we know so far about Thomas Matthew Crooks
• VICTIMS: Man killed during Trump shooting dived on family to protect them

At least so far, however, the motives and political affiliations of the alleged assassin, 20-year-old Pennsylvania resident Thomas Matthew Crooks, are in doubt. They may ultimately defy an easy partisan narrative.

The former president’s oldest son went on to add that, after the assassination attempt, those on the left can no longer accuse the former president of culpability for the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.

That violent episode took place hours after the then-president had held a rally just a few dozen blocks away, challenging the 2020 election results. His actions on that day led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives and, more than a year later, indictment by a special counsel appointed by the US attorney general.

If the Pennsylvania shooting defuses this line of criticism by Democrats, it’s just one way in which it will have fundamentally reshaped this presidential campaign. Others may become clear over the course of the Republican National Convention, which starts on Monday in Milwaukee.

The failed attack on the former president plays into several themes the Trump campaign was already planning for the quadrennial gathering, which culminates with Trump taking the stage to accept his party’s nomination on Thursday night.

The first is that it could provide a boost to the politics of grievance and persecution that have been a central focus of his rally speeches and social media posts.

“They’re not really after me; they’re after you,” is a common Trump refrain, on t-shirts, billboards and car stickers. “I’m just in the way.”

That message will land with new force after the former president and his crowd of supporters were sprayed with bullets. Trump’s legions of fans – many of whose support borders on near-messianic hero-worship – will have all the more reason to identify with a man who almost lost his life while standing before them.

The former president’s brush with death, and subsequent acts of bloody defiance, will also fit with the contrast Trump campaign officials have said they are trying to draw at this week’s convention – one where their candidate, and party, embody rugged masculinity and strength, while their opponents are feeble.

President Biden’s age and capabilities have dogged his campaign for months – and prompted a Democratic crisis of confidence in his re-election effort after a stunningly poor performance at the presidential debate just over two weeks ago.

Saturday night’s attack, and Trump’s response to it, will allow Republicans to put that contrast in stark relief in the days ahead.

Democrats have spent the past two weeks in anguished soul-searching over their president’s political future. Now, they have a new set of concerns.

In a way, the assassination attempt may end up providing a political lifeline to Mr Biden, given that the focus has dramatically shifted away from his age-related struggles and internal attempts to oust him. But the president’s re-election strategy – which hinges on painting Trump as a danger to the nation if he again becomes president – could be seriously hampered if the American public is hostile to new, pointed criticisms of the man.

The Biden campaign has already pulled all negative advertising directed at the former president, lest it be viewed as inappropriate given the national mood. The president also rescheduled a trip to Texas planned for Monday.

It is only a pause, however, and Democrats will need to go back on the offensive if they hope to erase the narrow lead the former president holds.

That lead – small and not insurmountable, but still significant – has held stable for months, even as national politics have been buffeted by a seemingly endless stream of unprecedented news stories.

The former president’s trial and conviction, a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions, Mr Biden’s debate flop – none of these has seemed to move the American political needle in what has been, and appears destined to remain, a sharply divided nation.

While there has been considerable talk about how this presidential campaign has been upended by the assassination attempt, there is no guarantee that the race will not return to its near-dead-heat equilibrium point in the three months before election day.

Only now the Democrats have less time, less of a money advantage and less political oxygen to shift the electoral dynamics in their favour.

What Saturday night’s tragedy demonstrated most clearly, however, is that expectations and political narratives can shift in seconds.

“Staged”.

Within minutes of the news breaking about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, that word was trending on X in the United States.

It’s a word that has become synonymous with conspiracy theories on the fringes of social media, often to cast doubts on an attack or shooting. But in the last 24 hours it has flooded into mainstream online conversation, and posts filled with evidence-free speculation, hate and abuse have racked up millions of views on X.

Assassination attempts on US presidents have in the past been magnets for conspiracy – the killing of John F Kennedy in November 1963, most famously. This one was the first to play out in real time, so it’s not surprising that unfounded rumours flourished.

But what has stood out is how this frenzy gripped all sides of the political spectrum.

It’s not been limited to committed groups of political supporters. Instead, it was actively recommended in users’ “For You” feeds as they tried to make sense of what had happened. And it was often posted by users who have purchased blue ticks, offering their posts greater prominence.

As ever, the conspiracy theories sometimes started with legitimate questions and confusion. They centred on alleged security failings, with lots of users understandably asking how this could happen.

How did the attacker make it to the roof? Why weren’t they stopped?

Into that vacuum rushed a wave of disbelief, speculation and disinformation.

“It looks very staged,” read one post on X which racked up a million views. “Nobody in the crowd is running or panicking. Nobody in the crowd heard an actual gun. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust him.”

The profile says it’s based on the south-west coast of Ireland. Its since been labelled with a note on X pointing out the shooting was real.

Once more footage and testimony from both inside and outside the rally was shared, the panic and fear of those there became all too clear.

The conspiracies were compounded by the extraordinary images that have come out since those initial clips. In particular, a widely-praised photograph taken by the Associated Press chief photographer in Washington, Evan Vucci, that shows Trump, fist raised, blood on his face and ear, with the US flag in the background.

One US-based YouTube account said the picture was just “too damn perfect” and described how they got “the flag positioned perfect and everything”. The post on X reached almost one million views – but was later deleted by the person who shared it. It’s important to correct yourself if you’re wrong, they said in a separate post.

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Video shows shooter on roof at Trump rally
• WATCH: Trump grimaces and ducks as several shots ring out
• ANALYSIS: Shocking act will reshape the presidential race
• SHOOTING SUSPECT: What we know so far about Thomas Matthew Crooks

Others pointed out that, as the shots were fired, Trump raises his hand on stage. They used this to suggest the event was set up when there’s no evidence to suggest that.

“Staged to get sympathy? You can’t trust these people with anything and no, I’m not going to pray for him,” a different US-based commentator wrote.

Lots of the most viral posts, including this, came from left-leaning users who regularly share their anti-Trump views. They already had hundreds of thousands of followers before today – and therefore a significant reach.

What unfolded on X was straight out of the pages of the conspiracy theory playbook, honed on social media by committed activists who deny the reality of almost everything, including the Covid pandemic, wars, mass shootings and terror attacks.

One post from a US-based account with a track record of sharing unfounded claims like this wrote: “This is price you pay when you take down the elite satanic paedophiles.”

They were alluding to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which suggests Trump is waging a secret war against a deep state – a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services, hidden from plain sight, looking to thwart his every move.

Without any evidence to support the idea, they then went on to suggest the “order” for the assassination “likely came from the CIA” and accused Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence of being involved. There is no evidence to support any of that – but the post has been seen 4.7 million times.

It’s a familiar pattern, but the real change here is how this kind of lingo is being widely used by the average social media users. That’s not only people who don’t like Trump suggesting this was staged, but also ones who support him alleging this is part of a sprawling conspiracy theory.

Elected politicians have also got involved. Congressman Mike Collins, a Republican in Georgia, posted that “Joe Biden sent the orders”. He referenced a comment President Biden had made earlier in the week about putting “Trump in a bullseye”, referring to their election battle.

There are legitimate questions being asked about some of the language used to describe Trump by other politicians and the media, as well as online, which some of Trump’s supporters argue has inflamed tensions and contributed to this assassination attempt. But to suggest this was ordered by President Biden is an entirely different proposition all together.

Collins’ post has more than 6 million views on X – but has since been labelled with a community note, which says there is no evidence Mr Biden was involved in any way. It added that his “bullseye” remark has been taken out of context.

Incorrect attempts to identify the shooter fed into the various evidence-free narratives.

Before the FBI named the gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot and killed by the Secret Service, other people’s reputations were being ruined.

Like football commentator Marco Violi, who posted on Instagram in the middle of the night from Italy to say he’d seen the totally false claims he was a member of Antifa – a loose affiliation of mostly far-left activists – and behind the attack. Those untrue allegations had millions of views on X by the time he attempted to set the record straight on Instagram.

On X, political activists and supporters quickly hunkered down in their own echo chambers, reading posts that were recommended by the site’s algorithm and confirmed what they already thought. The rest of us scrambled to avoid this deep pit of conspiracy and speculation.

This was a test for Elon Musk’s new Twitter – and it’s hard to say the site passed with flying colours.

The other social media sites haven’t been inundated in the same way, perhaps because of their target audience and X’s reputation as a home of political discourse.

X has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.

What happened at the Trump Rally? Listen to the latest episode of Americast on BBC Sounds.

US President Joe Biden has condemned the assassination attempt on his predecessor Donald Trump in a primetime address from the White House, telling Americans that US politics must never be a “killing field”.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was wounded in the ear after a gunman opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One person was killed and two more were critically injured in the attack.

In the Oval Office address – just the third of his presidency – Mr Biden urged Americans to “take a step back” and warned that “political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated”.

“No matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence,” Mr Biden said in remarks that lasted just under seven minutes.

His short, but forceful, address largely went off without a hitch, amid ongoing scrutiny following a number of high-profile verbal slips.

In his primetime address, the president called on Americans to come together and warned that increasing political polarisation meant November’s election would be “a time of testing”.

Mr Biden and Trump remain locked neck-and-neck in opinion polls ahead of the election.

Speaking from behind the Resolute Desk, Mr Biden listed off a growing number of violent political acts that have taken place in recent years.

“We cannot, must not, go down this road again. We’ve travelled it before in our history,” he said, citing shootings targeting congressional members in both parties, the assault on ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the 6 January riots.

“In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box,” he said. “At the ballot box. Not with bullets.”

Saturday’s attack left America reeling, as Trump was struck in the ear shortly after he began speaking in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In images beamed around the world, the 78-year-old could be seen with blood dripping from his ear and down his face, raising a defiant fist as Secret Service agents pulled him off stage and into a waiting car.

The gunman – identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks – was shot dead at the scene by Secret Service agents. Law enforcement agents told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that they discovered explosive materials in his vehicle nearby and at his home.

Officials say they are still investigating what motivated the attack. Crooks was a registered Republican who had previously donated $15 to a liberal campaign group in 2021, according to media reports.

Classmates described him as a quiet young man who was bullied throughout school. A local gun club near his home in Pennsylvania confirmed he had been a member.

In his speech, Mr Biden said he was praying for the family of Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former firefighter who was shot and killed – along with two others who were critically injured – during the rally. The father-of-two was killed while shielding his family from bullets as they whizzed past Trump and struck members of the audience.

Mr Biden called Mr Comperatore a “hero” who was killed “while simply exercising his freedom to support a candidate of his choosing”.

• Follow live: Biden urges America to ‘lower temperature’ of politics after Trump shooting
• Tragedy at Trump rally upends election campaign – for now
• Videos show how gunman shot at Trump despite public alerting police

Allies of Trump’s have been quick to blame President Biden and his campaign for the attack, alleging that the top Democrat had sought to stoke fears about his rival’s return to office.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” JD Vance – a Republican senator who is under consideration for the vice-presidential nomination – wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

President Biden avoided addressing those criticisms in his address on Sunday night, though his campaign has temporarily pulled attack ads against Trump.

The former president himself has sought to strike a conciliatory tone since the shooting, thanking his Secret Service detail for their quick actions and calling on citizens to “stand united” and to “show our True Character as Americans”.

He arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday night for the Republican National Convention, where he will accept his party’s nomination for president.

Trump is also expected to announce his running-mate. US media has reported that just three men are still under consideration for the vice-presidential slot: Florida Senator Marco Rubio, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and Senator Vance of Ohio.

In a news conference earlier on Sunday, the Secret Service said they had no plans to impose additional security measures around the convention, saying they were satisfied with existing arrangements.

The agency has come under scrutiny as to how Crooks was able to get so close to Trump, despite members of the audience reportedly pointing him out to police.

Former US President Donald Trump has arrived in Wisconsin for the Republican National Convention, a day after surviving an assassination attempt.

The party conference in Milwaukee is going ahead as planned despite Saturday evening’s shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania, in which Trump was shot in the ear.

Trump posted on social media that he had considered delaying his trip by two days, “but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else”.

The attack on the candidate has put a heightened focus on safety and security of the event, which begins on Monday at the arena that is home to the NBA Milwaukee Bucks basketball team.

But Audrey Gibson-Cicchino, RNC coordinator for the US Secret Service, said during a Sunday afternoon news conference in Milwaukee that there would be no changes to the security plan.

Some 50,000 people are expected to attend the four-day jamboree of pageantry, politics and policy as the party makes its case to voters ahead of November’s general election.

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Video shows shooter on roof at Trump rally
• WATCH: Trump grimaces and ducks as several shots ring out
• MORE: Secret Service faces questions after Trump assassination attempt

Once every four years each of the two main US parties hosts a convention to formally select their respective White House standard-bearer and prepare for the final stretch of campaigning.

The conferences include high-profile speakers, as well as a primetime speech from the presidential candidate.

During the convention, the delegates from each state pledge their support to the candidate of their choice and approve a platform.

It is merely a formality for Trump as the party’s presumptive nominee because he won 2,265 delegates in the primaries, which is enough for the nomination.

The Democrats will hold their convention next month in Chicago.

Trump is not expected to speak until Thursday night.

One of the biggest moments of the conference will be when he unveils his vice-presidential candidate.

But as the dust settles from the assassination attempt, it is unclear when Trump will announce who he has chosen as his running mate, or when he or she will speak.

Donald Trump Jr, the former president’s son, is expected to speak on Wednesday.

• Trump vice-president pick: Who will be the Republican’s running mate?

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, one of Trump’s fiercest rivals during the Republican primary, was originally expected to skip the RNC.

But after the assassination attempt, it was reported that she will now not only attend but speak at the conference.

Other speakers reportedly include Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia congresswoman, Arizona Senate contender Kari Lake, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Dana White, head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Teamsters union general president Sean O’Brien.

RNC co-chair Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of the former president, said celebrities will also be among the speakers.

Amber Rose, model, reality star and former girlfriend of Kanye West, is expected address the crowd.

But former stalwarts of the Republican party establishment, such George W Bush, Mike Pence and Mitt Romney, are not on the guest list.

Former First Lady Melania Trump, who rarely makes public appearances, will attend the convention, according to US media.

Mrs Trump did not attend the 27 June debate between President Joe Biden and Trump. Neither did she attend her husband’s hush-money trial earlier this year.

While the former first lady has held Republican fundraisers in the past year, this would be her first major appearance of this election cycle.

Monday’s theme will be “Make America Wealthy Once Again”, Tuesday will be “Make America Safe Again”, Wednesday is “Make America Strong Again” and Thursday is “Make America Great Once Again”.

The party platform this year sits at 16 pages.

Some themes of Project 2025, a much longer think-tank proposal, are also likely to come up during the convention.

Project 2025 – from which Trump has distanced himself – calls for expanding presidential powers, eliminating thousands of civil servant posts, tax cuts and dismantling the Department of Education.

• Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained

A demonstration, the Coalition to March on the RNC, is scheduled for noon local time on Monday.

Organisers say they expect 5,000 protesters, with backing from 125 liberal activist groups around the country.

Omar Flores, co-chair of the coalition, said on Friday: “Join us to fight against the Republicans’ racist and reactionary agenda, to stand with Palestine; to defend women’s, LGBTQ and reproductive rights; to defend and expand immigrant rights and to advocate for peace, justice and equity.”

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said the city would ensure public safety is tantamount this week.

“A national special security event is the highest designation that you can get for a security event of its size and magnitude in the United States,” Mayor Johnson said.

You can follow the latest news, including live pages, at bbc.com/news.

BBC World News and the BBC News Channel (available globally and in the UK, respectively) will broadcast Trump’s speech live on Thursday and bring you reaction and analysis afterwards.

And you can also watch on the RNC website.

The small Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park in Pennsylvania is reeling after the FBI named a young local man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, as the person who shot at Donald Trump during a campaign rally and shocked the nation.

Investigators believe that Crooks, armed with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, opened fire at the former president while he was addressing a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, leaving one audience member dead and two others wounded.

The 20-year-old kitchen worker was shot dead at the scene by a Secret Service sniper, officials said.

In his well-to-do hometown, however, neighbours are in shock, seemingly unable to grasp how a quiet young man is now accused in the shooting.

The FBI, for its part, has said only that Crooks was the “subject involved in the assassination attempt on the former president and that an active investigation was under way.”

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Video shows shooter on roof at Trump rally
• WATCH: Trump grimaces and ducks as several shots ring out
• MORE: Secret Service facing questions as investigation launched
• ANALYSIS: Spray of bullets shatters nation’s illusion of security

Thomas Crooks had not been carrying ID, so investigators used DNA and facial recognition technology to identify him, the FBI said.

He was from Bethel Park in Pennsylvania, about 70km (43 miles) from the site of the attempted assassination, and graduated in 2022 from Bethel Park High School with a $500 prize for maths and science, according to a local newspaper.

Crooks worked in a local nursing home kitchen just a short drive away from his home, the BBC understands.

State voter records show that he was a registered Republican, according to US media.

He is also reported to have donated $15 to liberal campaign group ActBlue in 2021.

He had a membership at a local shooting club, the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, for at least a year.

Law enforcement officials believe the weapon used to shoot at Donald Trump was purchased by Crooks’ father, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, two officers told AP that Crooks’ father bought a weapon at least six months ago.

According to US media reports, Crooks was wearing a T-shirt from Demolition Ranch, a YouTube channel known for its guns and demolition content. The channel has millions of subscribers featuring videos on different guns and explosive devices.

The day after the shooting, law enforcement sources also told CBS, the BBC’s US partner, that suspicious devices were found in Crooks’ vehicle.

According to CBS, the suspect had a piece of commercially available equipment that appeared capable of initiating the devices.

Bomb technicians were called to the scene to secure and investigate the devices.

Having established Crooks’ identity, police and agencies are investigating his motive.

“We do not currently have an identified motive,” said Kevin Rojek, FBI Pittsburgh special agent in charge, at a briefing on Saturday night.

The inquiry into what took place could last for months and investigators would work “tirelessly” to identify what Crooks’ motive was, Mr Rojek said.

Speaking to CNN, Crooks’ father, Matthew Crooks, said he was trying to figure out “what the hell is going on” but would “wait until I talk to law enforcement” before speaking about his son.

Crooks’ family is cooperating with investigators, according to the FBI.

Police sealed off the road to the house where Crooks lived with his parents.

A neighbour told CBS that officers evacuated her in the middle of the night with no warning.

Bethel Park Police said there was a bomb investigation surrounding Crooks’ home.

Access to the area remains tightly controlled with police vehicles blocking the roads. Only residents have been allowed in or out.

Law enforcement sources told CBS that they believe some degree of planning ahead of the shooting.

How much time was spent in that planning, however, remains the subject of an ongoing investigation.

Police believe he acted alone, but are continuing to investigate whether he was accompanied to the rally.

So far, a confusing – and at times conflicting – picture has emerged of who Crooks was as a person.

Speaking to local news outlet KDKA, some young locals who went to school with him described him as a loner, who was frequently bullied and sometimes wore “hunting outfits to school”.

Another former classmate of his, Summer Barkley, cast him differently, telling the BBC that he was “always getting good grades on tests” and was “very passionate about history”.

“Anything on government and history he seemed to know about,” she said. “But it was nothing out of the ordinary….he was always nice.”

She described him as well-liked by his teachers.

Others simply remembered him as quiet.

“He was there but I can’t think of anyone who knew him well,” one former classmate, who asked to remain nameless, told the BBC. “He’s just not a guy I really think about. But he seemed fine.”

Jameson Myers, a former member of the Bethel Park High School varsity rifle team who graduated alongside Crooks in 2022, told CBS that he did not make the team.

“He did not even make the junior varsity team after trying out,” Mr Myers added. “He never returned to try-outs for the remainder of high school.”

Mr Myers remembers Crooks as seemingly a “normal boy” who was “not particularly popular but never got picked on or anything.”

“He was a nice kid who never talked poorly of anyone and I never have thought him capable of anything I’ve seen him do in the last few days.”

Other community members said simply that they were shocked that the alleged perpetrator of the shooting could have come from the quiet, tree-lined streets of Bethel Park.

Among them was Jason Mackey, a 27-year-old local man who lives near the Crooks residence and worked at his school while he was a student.

While Mr Mackey said that he did not know Crooks personally, he is still reeling from a sense of disbelief.

“It’s just shocking. You wouldn’t think an event of this magnitude would come right out of your backyard,” he said. “It’s just a crazy situation.”

One person was killed and two others were injured in the shooting.

All three victims are adult men and were audience members, CBS News reports.

At a news conference on Sunday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro identified the deceased victim at Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old volunteer fire chief who was killed when he “dived on his family” to protect them.

He said that Comperatore “died a hero”.

A GoFundMe page, organised by the Trump campaign’s national finance director Meredith O’Rourke, was set up in the hours after the attack with donations going to the families of the injured.

It has so far raised more than $340,000 (£267,000).

In a post to his Truth Social platform, Trump said he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear” and said he felt the bullet “ripping through the skin”.

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

Trump is “doing well” and is grateful to law enforcement officers, according to a statement published on the Republican National Committee (RNC) website.

One witness told the BBC that he had seen a man – believed to be Crooks – with a rifle on the roof of a building before Trump was shot.

Video footage obtained by TMZ shows the moment the shooting began.

The assailant opened fire with “an AR-style rifle”, CBS News reports.

Law enforcement sources also told CBS that he was reported by a bystander and identified as a suspicious person by police, but that officers lost track of him before the shooting began.

However, the FBI says it did not immediately know what type of firearm was used or how many shots were fired.

A Secret Service sniper returned fire and killed the gunman, officials said.

Footage later shows armed officers approaching a body on the roof of the building.

One man in the audience died while trying to protect his family during the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday, authorities say.

Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old volunteer fire chief, dove onto family members when the shots rang out.

“Corey died a hero,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said at a news conference on Sunday.

Pennsylvania state police said the other two people shot were 57-year-old David Dutch and 74-year-old James Copenhaver. Both were in a stable condition on Sunday.

The Pennsylvania governor said that he spoke to Mr Comperatore’s wife and two daughters.

“Corey went to church every Sunday,” he said. “Cory loved his community. Most especially, Corey loved his family.”

He said that Mr Comperatore was an avid supporter of Donald Trump and was excited to be at the rally Saturday.

“Corey was the very best of us. May his memory be a blessing,” Mr Shapiro said. “Last night was shocking… political disagreements can never, ever be addressed through violence.”

State police said that Mr Comperatore lived in Sarver, about 12 miles (19km) away from the rally site in Butler, outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In addition to his volunteer firefighting work, he was employed as a project and tooling engineer at a plastics manufacturing company, according to his social media profiles.

“He was a good person,” neighbour Matt Achilles told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “We might not have agreed on the same political views, but that didn’t stop him from being a good friend and neighbour.”

“He donated money to us when I was in the hospital and he would always come by at our yard sales. He always waved hello when I drove past his house,” Mr Achilles said.

Mr Shapiro said also he spoke to the family of one of those injured, but declined to give details about the conversation.

A bullet, one of the six to eight shots that were fired at the rally, grazed the ear of former President Trump.

The gunman, named by authorities as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by Secret Service officers tasked with protecting the former president.

A group of Republican lawmakers are blaming US President Joe Biden, claiming his campaign rhetoric led to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

As of Sunday, nearly a dozen lawmakers have pointed fingers at Mr Biden and Democrats at-large for the shooting Saturday evening at the former president’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Many are pointing to a comment from Mr Biden while on a private phone call with donors last week.

According to Politico, Biden said on the call: “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

On Saturday, Mr Biden condemned the attack and called on Americans to denounce such violence. On Sunday, he ordered a review of security at the rally.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, the specific reference to “Trump in a bullseye” less than a week before, has led some Republicans to place the burden of the shooting in part on Mr Biden.

“Joe Biden sent the orders,” Georgia Republican Rep. Mike Collins posted on X, formerly Twitter, in a response to a post about Mr Biden’s comments to donors.

In another post, Mr Collins wrote “they attempted to neutralize the threat”, responding to a separate graphic featuring the president’s comments.

“Notice that after an attempted assassination of President Trump, the same people who wanted him prosecuted for telling his supporters to peacefully march to the Capitol on January 6 are not calling for President Biden’s prosecution after he said it was time to put President Trump in the bullseye after their debate,” Collins wrote.

FBI officials identified the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, a kitchen worker from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, who is a registered Republican.

A Secret Service sniper fatally shot Crooks after he fired at the president.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, also referenced Mr Biden’s bullseye comment in posts on social media.

“Just days ago, Biden said ‘it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye’. Today, there was an assassination attempt against President Trump,” she wrote on X Saturday evening.

Ms Blackburn also criticized Mr Biden for not releasing a statement for the first hour after the shooting, calling his delay “unacceptable”.

“Go to the Oval Office and address the American people. We do not settle our differences by violence,” she said.

Mr Biden spoke Saturday night from his home in Delaware where he was spending the weekend. He condemned the assassination attempt and called on all Americans to denounce such “sick” violence.

“We must unite as one nation to condemn it. It’s sick, it’s sick,” he said.

Mr Biden then left Delaware to return to the White House, where he addressed the shooting again Sunday afternoon. A national address from the Oval Office is planned for Sunday night.

The sitting president also spoke with Trump over the phone on Saturday night in a call that one White House official described as “good, short and respectful”.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee took to social media in response to Mr Biden’s bullseye statement, too, asking reporters in a post if they plan to delve into the president’s comment to donors.

“That just happened,” they wrote in a post after the attempted assassination.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, told 9News on Saturday night that she believes “much of the rhetoric from the left has escalated to this moment”.

“President Trump was literally put in a bullseye after the President of the United States, the sitting President of the United States, called for him to be put in a bullseye,” she said.

When asked if she thinks Biden bears responsibility for the attempted assassination, she replied: “I do believe that Joe Biden is responsible for the shooting today.”

Other Republicans pointed to Democrats’ recent efforts to end Trump’s Secret Service protection after he became the first president convicted of felony counts for falsifying business records related to hush money payments to an adult film actress.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, introduced the legislation in April that several House Democrats co-sponsored.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who blamed the media and several Democrats for the shooting in posts on X, posted a list on the social media platform of Democrats who co-sponsored the legislation.

“Pray for America. The left wants a civil war. They have been trying to start one for years. These people are sick and evil,” she wrote.

Sen. J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican, who is on Trump’s short list of vice presidential picks, echoed similar sentiments blaming the left’s rhetoric.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” he wrote on X.

Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said Democrats and the media have “recklessly stoked fears”, and called Trump and conservatives “threats to democracy”.

“Their inflammatory rhetoric puts lives at risk,” he also wrote on X.

Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, the House majority leader who was shot at a practice for a congressional baseball game in 2017, said Democrats have fuelled “ludicrous hysteria” about Trump being re-elected.

“Clearly, we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop,” he said.

Sometimes sounds can be deceptive. A car backfiring can make you jump; a firework can make you flinch; but as soon as we heard the gunfire at the Butler Farm showgrounds shortly after 6pm on Saturday evening, we all knew straight away that these were gunshots, and there were lots of them.

Donald Trump was mid-way through a sentence as the shots rang out. He grabbed his ear before dropping to the ground and being smothered by Secret Service agents.

We didn’t know it at the time, but the gunman was perhaps 150m away from where we stood, lying flat on the roof of a shed and firing at least six rounds using an AR-15 rifle at the former president and terrifed spectators.

I was about to go on air, with radio colleagues from the BBC World Service waiting on the end of a line. Instead all three of us in my team – me, producer Iona Hampson and cameraman Sam Beattie – went to the ground, using our car as some kind of shelter, the only shelter we had.

We had no idea where the shooting was coming from; how many shooters there were; and how long it would go on for. Frankly it was terrifying.

As we lay on the ground, Sam turned on his camera and I tried to give my first impressions of what was happening. In that moment, we had no more concrete information than that about six minutes into Donald Trump’s speech, the shooting had begun.

As I listened I could hear screams from the crowd but I could no longer hear the former president speaking. Was he hit, was he dead? All these thoughts flash through your mind.

When we felt the shooting was over, Iona picked me up off the ground and we went live on television as shocked members of the crowd poured out of the exits. The range of emotions we encountered was immense, as Iona persuaded terrified spectators to come and talk to me live on television.

Many were understandably frightened; many were dazed and bewildered; some were angry, very angry.

One witness, a man named Greg, said he had seen the gunman “bear-crawling” onto the roof of the shed minutes before the chaos began and had been frantically trying to point him out to police and the Secret Service.

Another man – and I can understand this – was furious that we were broadcasting; he put himself between me and Sam yelling at me to stop. I laid my hand as gently as I could on his arm and explained to him while we were on air that it was important people knew what had just happened; the public, I said, had to know.

Eventually, as I pleaded with him, he relented – still unhappy and still fuming, rightly so, at what he’d just experienced.

Others expressed their anger in more political ways.

One man approached me and simply said: “They shot first. This is [expletive] war.”

Another just yelled “civil war” as he passed behind me.

And a few minutes later a huge electronic billboard appeared on the side of a truck – Donald Trump’s face framed in a target – the words simply read “Democrats attempted assassination – President Trump”.

It sent a shiver right up my spine – and the horror of the potential consequences of this act started to sink in.

But amid the fear and anger, there was profound sorrow. People who were loyal Trump supporters, committed gun owners, wondered out loud to me about the way America was going. It was as if they could no longer recognise the country they lived in – as if everything had become strange and foreign.

Devin, a local farmer, was there with his son Kolbie. It was their first ever political rally – Kolbie, just 14, still not old enough to vote.

But Kolbie’s first experience of the rawness of democracy was to see two wounded people loaded onto stretchers and rushed off to ambulances. It’s hard not to believe that those images of muzzle flashes he witnessed from the Secret Service snipers who took down the gunman won’t stay with him for the rest of his life.

I’ve covered at least half a dozen shootings in my ten years as a correspondent in the US – but always the immediate aftermath – never have I been present until now when someone actually pulled the trigger.

I don’t want to experience it again, and in this gun-loving country, even those committed to their handguns and rifles in this rural part of Western Pennsylvania seemed sickened and worried about the randomness of the violence they witnessed in late-afternoon sunshine as they wondered whether their political hero was still alive.

But what happened in Butler goes much wider than arguments over gun control.

America has been spiralling towards this moment for years – a political culture that is not just adversarial but downright poisonous. People here – or should I say some people here – find it easy to hate their political opponents – it’s visceral; it’s become part of the nation’s DNA to hate.

And it’s not just political. You can see it in the divisions between the coasts and the centre. Between the north and the south; between the cities and rural America – everything being defined in terms of not being something or someone else.

Moments in history can only really be judged in retrospect. But I’ll take a guess that last night will go down as one of those moments. The question for the leaders of public opinion in this country is what will they now choose to do – to inflame or to calm. To further divide or to reunite.

As an outsider but someone who truly loves this nation, I’m not hopeful.

Former US president Donald Trump was rushed off stage at a campaign rally after an assassination attempt.

Shots rang out as he was speaking at the event in Pennsylvania, sparking panic in the crowd.

The former US president, who emerged with a bloodied face and was pictured pumping his fist in the air, says he was shot in the ear.

He had been speaking at a campaign rally at Butler Farm Show Grounds, about 30 miles (50km) north of Pittsburgh, on Saturday when loud bangs were heard.

The suspected gunman – later named as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, from Bethel Park in Pennsylvania – was among two people killed. Two more people were critically injured.

The US Secret Service said the gunman had fired “multiple shots toward the stage from an elevated position” but had been shot dead by service personnel.

Video footage from the event shows law enforcement snipers on the roof of a building behind where Mr Trump was speaking, although it is not clear if they fired the shots that killed the gunman.

The gunman had been on a rooftop about 130m (430ft) from where Mr Trump was speaking – one witness told the BBC the gunman may have been hidden from the authorities by the slope of the roof he was lying on.

When the shots were fired, Mr Trump reached his right hand to his face before ducking as Secret Service agents surrounded him on stage.

As the agents began taking Mr Trump to his motorcade, he turned to the crowd, and with blood running from his right ear, he repeatedly pumped his fist in the air.

When two young Brazilian women were reported missing in September 2022, their families and the FBI launched a desperate search across the US to find them. All they knew was that they were living with wellness influencer Kat Torres.

Torres has now been sentenced to eight years in prison for the human trafficking and slavery of one of those women. The BBC has also been told that charges have been filed against her in relation to a second woman.

How did the former model who partied with Leonardo DiCaprio and graced the cover of international magazines come to groom her followers and lure them into sexual exploitation?

“She kind of resembled hope for me,” says Ana, describing her reaction on stumbling across Torres’ Instagram page in 2017.

Ana was not one of the missing women targeted in the FBI search – but she too was a victim of Torres’ coercion and would be key to their rescue.

She says she was attracted to Torres’ trajectory from impoverished Brazilian favela to international catwalks, partying with Hollywood A-listers along the way.

“She seemed like she had overcome violence in her childhood, abuse, all these traumatic experiences,” Ana told BBC Eye Investigations and BBC News Brasil.

Ana was in a vulnerable situation herself. She says she had suffered a violent childhood, moved alone to the US from southern Brazil, and was previously in an abusive relationship.

Torres had recently published her autobiography called A Voz [The Voice], in which she claimed she could make predictions as a result of her spiritual powers, and had been interviewed on reputable Brazilian media shows.

“She was on the cover of magazines. She was seen with famous people such as Leonardo DiCaprio. Everything I saw seemed credible,” she says.

Ana says she was particularly taken with Torres’ approach to spirituality.

What Ana didn’t know was that the inspirational story Torres told was based on half-truths and lies.

Torres’ ex-flatmate in New York, Luzer Twersky, told us that her Hollywood friends had introduced her to the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca, and she was never the same again.

”That’s when she kind of… started going off the deep end,” he says.

He said he also believed that she was working as a sugar baby – paid for romantic involvement with wealthy and powerful men who were also paying for the flat they shared together.

Torres’ wellness website and subscription service promised customers: “Love, money and self-esteem that you always dreamed of.” Self-help videos offered advice on relationships, wellness, business success and spirituality – including hypnosis, meditation and exercise programmes.

For an extra $150 (£120) clients could unlock exclusive one-to-one video consultations with Torres during which she would claim to solve any of their problems.

Amanda, another former client who lives in the Brazilian capital, says Kat made her feel special.

“All my doubts, my questions, my decisions: I always took them to her first, so that we could make decisions together,” she says.

But it appears that advice had a dark side. Ana, Amanda, and other former followers say they found themselves becoming increasingly psychologically isolated from friends and family and willing to do anything Torres suggested.

When Torres asked Ana in 2019 to move to New York to work as her live-in assistant, she agreed. She had been studying nutrition at university in Boston, but arranged to study online instead, and says she accepted the offer to look after Torres’ animals – and do her cooking, laundry and cleaning – for about $2000 (£1,564) a month.

Like, Follow, Trafficked: Insta’s Fake Guru

BBC Eye Investigations and BBC News Brasil uncover the truth behind the rise of wellness influencer and spiritual life coach, Kat Torres, and the international search for her trafficked followers

Watch now on BBC iPlayer (UK Only) or on the BBC World Service YouTube channel (outside UK)

When she arrived at Torres’ apartment, though, she quickly realised it did not match the curated perfection projected on the influencer’s Instagram.

“It was shocking because the house was really messy, really dirty, didn’t smell good,” she says.

Ana says Torres seemed unable to do even basic things without her, like taking a shower, because she couldn’t bear to be alone. She describes having to constantly be available for Torres, only being allowed to sleep for a few hours at a time, on a sofa covered in cat urine.

She says some days she would hide in the apartment building’s gym, grabbing a few hours’ sleep rather than working out.

“Now, I see that she was using me as a slave… she had satisfaction in it,” Ana says.

Ana says she was never paid.

“I felt like, ‘I’m stuck here, I don’t have a way out,’” she says. “I was probably one of her first victims of human trafficking.”

She had given up her university accommodation back in Boston, so she had nowhere to return to, and no income to pay for alternative housing.

Ana says when she tried to confront Torres, she became aggressive, triggering Ana’s painful history with domestic violence.

Eventually, after three months, Ana found a way to escape by moving in with a new boyfriend.

But that wasn’t the end of Ana’s role in Torres’ life. When the families of two other young Brazilian women reported them missing in September 2022, Ana knew she had to act.

By this point, Torres’ life had grown in scale. She was now married to a man called Zach, a 21-year-old she had met in California, and they were renting a five-bedroom house in the suburbs of Austin, Texas.

Repeating the pattern she had begun with Ana, Torres had targeted her most dedicated followers, trying to recruit them to come and work for her. In return, she had promised to help them achieve their dreams, capitalising on the intimate personal details they had shared with her during life-coaching sessions.

Desirrê Freitas, a Brazilian woman living in Germany, and Brazilian Letícia Maia – the two women whose disappearance would go on to spark the FBI-led search – moved to live with Torres. Another Brazilian woman, who we are calling Sol, was also recruited.

Posting on her social media channels, Torres introduced her “witch clan” to her followers.

The BBC has discovered at least four more women were almost persuaded to join Torres in the house but had pulled out.

Some of the women were too scared to appear in the BBC’s film – afraid of receiving online abuse and still traumatised by their experiences – but we have been able to verify their accounts using court documents, text messages, bank statements, and Desirrê’s memoir about her experiences – @Searching Desirrê, published by DISRUPTalks.

Desirrê says that in her case, Torres had bought her a plane ticket from Germany, having told her she was suicidal and needed Desirrê’s support.

Torres is also accused of persuading Letícia, who was 14 when she started life-coaching sessions with her, to move to the US for an au pair programme and then drop out to live and work with her.

As for Sol, she says she agreed to move in with Torres after becoming homeless and was hired to carry out tarot readings and yoga classes.

But it was not long before the women discovered their reality was very different to the fairytale they had been promised.

Within weeks, Desirrê says Torres pressured her into working at a local strip club, saying if she did not comply Desirrê would have to repay all the money she had spent on her: flights, accommodation, furniture for her room, and even the “witchcraft” Torres had performed. Desirrê says not only she did not have this money, she also believed at the time in the spiritual powers Torres claimed to have, so when Torres threatened to curse her for not following orders she was terrified.

Reluctantly, Desirrê agreed to work as a stripper.

A manager from the strip club, James, told the BBC she would work extremely long hours, seven days a week.

Desirrê and Sol say the women in the Austin mansion were subjected to strict house rules. They describe being forbidden from speaking to each other, needing Torres’ permission to leave their rooms – even to use the bathroom – and being required to immediately hand over all earnings.

“It was very difficult to, you know, get out of the situation because she holds your money,” Sol told the BBC.

“It was terrifying. I thought something could happen to me because she had all my information, my passport, my driving licence.”

But Sol says she realised she needed to somehow escape after overhearing a phone call in which Torres was telling another client she must work as a prostitute in Brazil as a “punishment”.

Sol was able to leave with the help of an ex-boyfriend.

Meanwhile, the guns Torres’ husband kept began to regularly feature on her Instagram stories, and became a source of fear for the remaining women.

Around this time, Desirrê says Torres tried to persuade her to swap the strip club for work as a prostitute. She says she refused and the following day Torres took her on a surprise day out to a gun range.

Scared, Desirrê says she eventually gave in to Torres’ demand.

“Many questions haunted me: ‘Could I stop whenever I wanted?’” Desirrê writes in her book.

“And if the condom broke, would I get a disease? Could [the client] be an undercover cop and arrest me? What if he killed me?”

If the women didn’t meet the earning quotas that Torres set, which had risen from $1,000 (£782) to $3,000 (£2,345) a day, they were not allowed to return to the house that night, they say.

“I ended up sleeping on the street several times because I couldn’t reach that,” Desirrê adds.

Bank statements, seen by the BBC, show Desirrê transferring more than $21,000 (£16,417) into Torres’ account in June and July 2022 alone. She says that she was forced to hand over a substantially higher figure in cash.

Prostitution is illegal in Texas and Desirrê says Torres would threaten to report her to the police if she ever talked about wanting to stop.

In September, friends and family of Desirrê and Letícia back in Brazil launched social media campaigns to find them, having become increasingly concerned following months without contact.

By this time, they were barely recognisable. Their brunette hair had been dyed platinum blonde to eerily match Torres’. Desirrê says by this point all her phone contacts had been blocked and she obeyed the influencer’s orders without question.

As the Instagram page @searchingDesirrê gained momentum, the story dominated news outlets in Brazil. Desirrê’s friends even worried she might have been murdered, and Letícia’s family put out desperate pleas for their safe return home.

Ana, having lived with Torres in 2019, said alarm bells rang as soon as she saw the news stories. She says she immediately guessed that “[Torres] was keeping other girls”.

• More information and support about human trafficking and modern slavery is available via BBC Action Line.

Along with other former clients, Ana began to contact as many law enforcement agencies as possible, including the FBI, in an attempt to get the influencer arrested. Five months earlier, both she and Sol had reported Torres to the US police – but say they weren’t taken seriously.

In a video she recorded at the time for evidence, since shared with the BBC, a distressed Ana can be heard saying, “this person is very dangerous and she has already threatened to kill me”.

Then the missing women’s profiles on escort and prostitution websites were discovered. Suspicions of sexual exploitation, shared on social media, appeared to be confirmed.

Panicked by the media attention, Torres and the women travelled more than 2,000 miles (3,219 km) from Texas to Maine. In chilling Instagram videos, Desirrê and Letícia denied being held captive and demanded people stop searching for them.

But a recording, obtained by BBC News, gives an insight into what was really happening at this time. By now the US authorities were aware of the concerns about the women’s safety. Homeland security had tipped off a police officer who managed to FaceTime Torres to check on the women. But just before this starts, Torres can be heard saying on the video:

“He will start asking questions. Guys, they are full of tricks. He’s a detective, be very careful. For God’s sake, I’ll kick you out if you say anything. I’ll scream.”

In November 2022, the police finally convinced Torres and the two other women to attend a welfare check in person at Franklin County Sheriff’s Office in Maine.

The detective who questioned Torres, Desirrê and Letícia – Detective David Davol – told the BBC he and his colleagues had been immediately concerned, noticing a number of red flags, including a distrust of law enforcement, isolation and their reluctance to speak without Torres’ permission.

“Human traffickers aren’t always like in the movies, where you have… a gang that kidnapped people. It’s far more common that it’s someone you trust.”

By December 2022, the two women had been safely returned to Brazil.

Det Davol says, in his experience, human trafficking is on the rise. His observation is backed up by the UN, which says it is one of the fastest growing crimes, generating an estimated $150bn (£117bn) in profits a year worldwide.

He believes social media gives it a platform on which to thrive, making it much easier for traffickers to find and groom victims.

In April this year, our team was granted a rare court order to interview Torres in a Brazilian prison – the first media interview with her since her arrest. At that point, she was still waiting for the verdict of a trial against her relating to her treatment of Desirrê.

Smiling, Torres approached us with a calm and collected demeanour.

She was adamant that she was completely innocent, denying that any women had ever lived with her or that she had ever coerced anyone to take part in sex work.

“When I was seeing the people testifying, they were saying so many lies. So many lies that at one point, I couldn’t stop laughing,” she told us.

“People are saying I am a fake guru, but at the same time, they are also saying that… ‘She is a danger to society because she can change people’s mind with her words.’”

When we confronted her with the evidence that we ourselves had seen, she became more hostile, accusing us of lying too.

“You choose to believe whatever you choose to believe. I can tell you I’m Jesus. And you can see Jesus, or you can see the devil, that’s it. It’s your choice. It’s your mind.”

As she got up to return to her cell, she issued a parting threat, claiming we would soon find out if she had powers or not. She pointed at me, and said: “I didn’t like her.”

The BBC can reveal that earlier this month Torres was sentenced by a Brazilian judge to eight years in prison for subjecting Desirrê to human trafficking and slavery. He concluded that she had lured the young woman to the US for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

More than 20 women have reported being scammed or exploited by Torres – many of whom the BBC has spoken to and are still undergoing psychiatric therapy to recover from what they say they experienced as a result of her treatment of them.

Torres’ lawyer told the BBC she has appealed her conviction and maintains her innocence.

An investigation into the allegations from other women is ongoing in Brazil.

Ana believes yet further victims may come forward, once they read about Torres’ crimes. This is the first time Ana has spoken publicly.

She says she wants people to recognise that Torres’ actions amount to a serious crime and not some “Instagram drama”.

In the closing pages of her book Desirrê also reflects on her experiences.

“I’m not fully recovered yet, I’ve had a challenging year. I was sexually exploited, enslaved and imprisoned.

“I hope my story serves as a warning.”

You can get in touch by following this link

King Charles III and Queen Camilla are set to visit Australia and Samoa in October, as the King takes on more public duties while receiving cancer treatment.

The pair will carry out engagements in the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales, before heading to Samoa for a Commonwealth summit.

The King will make the lengthy journey despite his diagnosis for an undisclosed form of cancer earlier this year.

But Buckingham Palace have confirmed that the couple will not visit New Zealand, saying doctors have advised against an extended visit on health grounds.

“In close consultation with the Australian and New Zealand prime ministers, and with due regard for the pressures of time and logistics, it has therefore been agreed to limit the visit to Samoa and Australia only,” the Palace said in a statement.

This will be the King’s first visit to Australia as Monarch. It is also his first official overseas tour since his cancer diagnosis.

In Samoa, they will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

In Australia, their programme includes visits to the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales.

The couple are expected to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm), which brings together delegations from the 56 countries in the Commonwealth.

Further details of the visit to the two countries are expected to be announced shortly, and the couple’s programme and schedule changes will be subject to doctor’s advice.

The 75-year-old monarch last visited Australia in 2018 with the Queen for the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.

Australians narrowly voted against cutting ties with the monarchy in a referendum in 1999, but calls have continued in the quarter-century since for another ballot.

It is a longstanding policy of Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to hold a vote on becoming a republic – but in January the government indicated that it has put that referendum on hold, saying it was not a priority.

Buckingham Palace confirmed in February that the King would pause some public events while receiving treatment for cancer.

At the time they said it was not prostate cancer, and that it was discovered during treatment for an enlarged prostate.

The King later returned to public-facing engagements in April when he spoke to patients at the University College London Hospital about the “shock” of hearing about his cancer diagnosis.

In recent weeks, he visited Normandy as part of a D-Day commemoration event, hosted actor Idris Elba for a summit on tackling youth crime and hosted the Japanese emperor and empress during their state visit to the UK.

Earlier on Sunday, the Princess of Wales presented the Wimbledon men’s singles trophy to Carlos Alcaraz, in her second public appearance since confirming her cancer diagnosis earlier this year.

Catherine made her return to public duties with an appearance at Trooping the Colour last month, waving and smiling from the Buckingham Palace balcony with her children.

At the time, the princess addressed her cancer diagnosis in a statement saying that while she is making “good progress”, she was “not out of the woods yet”.

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

It’s been more than a year-and-a-half since Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to the country’s presidency, back from the political dead after his conviction on corruption charges was dramatically annulled.

In that time, President Lula’s comeback has given renewed force to one of the world’s most unlikely economic alliances – the Brics, a grouping that unites Brazil with Russia, India, China and South Africa.

In his previous time as president from 2003 to 2010, Lula was instrumental in efforts to weld the Brics into a geopolitical entity, and an emerging counterweight to the West.

Now the bloc has momentum on its side once again. It’s come to be known as Brics Plus, after the original members agreed at a watershed summit in Johannesburg in August last year to admit a handful of new joiners, including Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Not bad for a grouping that was originally willed into being by sheer high-concept financial whimsy, the brainchild of economist Jim O’Neill, who saw it more as an investment opportunity than a new gang of nations.

“When the Brics were invented, it was pretty much an asset class,” says Monica de Bolle, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

“But it caught on in Brazil, because it directly spoke to Lula’s aspirations in foreign policy.”

At the Johannesburg meeting, Lula was particularly bullish about the group’s long-term economic prospects.

“We have already surpassed the G7 and account for 32% of global GDP in purchasing power parity,” he said.

“Projections indicate that emerging and developing markets will be those that will show the highest growth rate in the coming years,” he went on.

“This shows that the dynamism of the economy is in the global south and the Brics is its driving force.”

But that is disingenuous on Lula’s part, to say the least. As has been pointed out by the originator of the Bric acronym, who now rejoices in the title of Baron O’Neill of Gatley, all the economic growth in the group has actually come from Xi Jinping’s China and Narendra Modi’s India.

“None of the other Brics has performed anywhere near as well as those two,” he said in an article written in reaction to the bloc’s expansion.

“Brazil and Russia account for around the same share of global GDP as they did in 2001, and South Africa is not even the largest economy in Africa [Nigeria has surpassed it].”

As he also points out, China “dominates the Brics by being twice the size of all the others combined”, in much the same way that the US dominates the G7.

So what does slow-growth Brazil gain from being dragged along in China’s economic slipstream?

Rodrigo Zeidan, a Brazilian economist based at China’s New York University Shanghai, tells the BBC that Brazil and China alike see the Brics as a “hedge” in terms of global alliances, rather than as a top priority.

“The Brics right now, for Brazil, cost almost nothing,” he says. “So if the benefits are not high, it’s fine. They are neither a big benefit nor a hindrance.”

Since China is its biggest trading partner, Brazil is comfortable maintaining close relations with Beijing, even if the Brics grouping provides it with some “strange bedfellows”, as Mr Zeidan puts it.

Lula has certainly maintained an ambiguous position on Russia’s war in Ukraine, but that is more due to Brazil’s traditional neutrality in foreign policy than to a wish to support a fellow Brics nation.

For Monica de Bolle at the Peterson Institute, herself a Brazilian economist, President Lula showed “a lot of naivety” in committing to the Brics because of his belief in furthering relations among the big so-called global south nations.

As a result, Brazil has now acquired “a China dependency” that could harm it in other foreign policy relations, she says.

“If you are in the US, you know that the US stance on China is not going to change [whoever wins the presidential election in November],” she adds.

“In either case, it’s moving in the direction of greater anti-China sentiment. At some point, that’s going to create additional reactions from China, which could put Brazil in a very difficult position, because it’s perceived as being aligned with China.”

One tangible gain for Brazil from the alliance comes in the shape of the New Development Bank (NDB), a multilateral lender founded by the Brics and described by Lula as “a milestone in effective collaboration between emerging economies”.

It is currently headed by Brazilian ex-President Dilma Rousseff. She was President Lula’s political protegee, and succeeded him in 2011. But her time in office came to a chaotic end when she was impeached in 2016 for breaking budgetary laws.

The NDB has not only returned her to public life, but since the bank’s headquarters are in Shanghai, it makes her key to maintaining links between Brazil and China.

“Dilma is definitely huge in terms of political image. Having Dilma here in Shanghai is very important for strengthening Brazil-China relations,” says Mr Zeidan.

Brazil has also benefited directly from NDB money. In June, Ms Rousseff and Brazilian Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin signed a loan deal worth more than $1.1bn (£880m) to help pay for reconstruction after widespread floods in the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Regarding the NDB and Russia, the bank put all transactions involving the country on hold in March 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And the NDB has complied with international sanctions against Russia.

But Russia is due to take over the rotating presidency of the bank in mid-2025 and there is some uncertainty over what will happen then.

In the meantime, Ms Rousseff is not averse to attending financial gatherings in Russia, and shaking hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has praised her work at the helm of the NDB.

President Lula is a passionate advocate of the Brics as a means of reforming global governance and giving a greater voice to the developing world.

He has criticised the “paralysis” of global institutions, while praising the expansion of the Brics as strengthening the fight for more diverse perspectives.

But other observers retort that the Brics are themselves paralysed by their own internal contradictions, with Russia at war in Ukraine, while China and India have their own mutual squabbles.

Ultimately, says Ms de Bolle in Washington, the Brics are “a heterogeneous group of countries that have nothing in common, apart from the fact that they are big”.

“The Brics have no clear agenda that has any real weight,” agrees Mr Zeidan in Shanghai.

“Right now, China doesn’t ask much of Brazil. However, anything that China asks, Brazil does.

“It’s fine to be part of the Brics when the stakes are low. But what if the stakes rise?”

In other words, the effect of the Brics, on Brazil and on the world, may be minor for now. But if China decides to become more assertive, that could change rapidly – and Brazil could be faced with some uncomfortable choices.

The Israeli military says senior Hamas commander Rafa Salama was killed in an air strike in Gaza on Saturday. Hamas has not confirmed the report.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said that Israel’s strike hit a camp for displaced people in a designated humanitarian zone in Khan Younis, killing at least 90 Palestinians and injuring 289 others.

Israel has said the strike was targeting senior Hamas leaders, but Hamas says the claim is “false” and serves to “justify” the attack.

Eyewitnesses said they saw at least five “big warplanes bombing in the middle of Al Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis”.

Most of the injured were sent to the nearby Nasser hospital.

However, according to officials and medics, the facility is “no longer able to function” as doctors are “overwhelmed with large numbers of casualties”.

Speaking to Newshour on the BBC World Service, Dr Mohammed Abu Rayya, who is at a hospital dealing with the aftermath of the attack, said the majority of those injured were 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.

The Israeli army said Salama, a commander of the Khan Younis Brigade, was one of the “masterminds” of the 7 October attack and a close associate of Mohammed Deif, the top commander of Hamas’s military wing.

A military spokesman said Salama’s death “significantly impedes Hamas’ military capabilities”.

It is not known whether Deif was killed. The Israeli army said he was also targeted in the strike.

Deif has been among Israel’s most wanted men for decades and is blamed by Israeli authorities for the killings of multiple civilians and soldiers.

In a joint statement reporting Salama’s “elimination”, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Israel Security Agency (ISA) said Salama joined Hamas in the early 1990s and was appointed to the position of commander of the Khan Younis Brigade under the command of Mohammed Sinwar.

A Hamas official, cited by Reuters, called the 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.

Actress Shannen Doherty, best known for roles in hit TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and Charmed, died on Saturday from cancer at 53.

“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty,” her publicist, Leslie Sloane, said in a statement. “The devoted daughter, sister, aunt and friend was surrounded by her loved ones as well as her dog, Bowie.”

Doherty spent over four decades as an actress. She is best known for playing Brenda Walsh on four seasons of 90210. The series followed a group of Beverly Hills teenagers as they faced relationship and family issues.

Ms Doherty was nominated for several awards for her role on the show.

She later went on to play Brenda in a 2008 reboot of the series where her character grew up to become a theatre actress.

The actor was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2015 and underwent a mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy. She announced she was in remission in 2017, but the cancer returned two years later.

She was open about her battle with cancer, documenting it on social media. In a June 2023 Instagram video, she shared that the the cancer spread to her brain. She announced last fall that she is committed to battling the disease despite it spreading to her bones.

“I’m not done with living. I’m not done with loving. I’m not done with creating,” she said to People magazine in November 2023.

Born in Memphis, Ms Doherty started acting as a child. She appeared in TV series including Voyagers, Our House and Father Murphy before starring as Jenny Wilder at the age of 11 in Little House on the Prairie.

Three years later in 1985, she got her first major film role starring in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, which also starred Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt.

In 1988, Ms Doherty played Heather Duke in the iconic teen film Heathers alongside Winona Ryder, Lisanne Falk and Kim Walker.

The actress struggled at the time with being young and famous, earning a reputation as a troublemaker on the set of 90210.

“I was very confused back then about what I wanted for myself, and the attention was way too much,” she said. “I didn’t always handle it that well.”

She later starred in Charmed, a show about three sisters who were witches.

Ms Doherty also played roles in North Shore, set in a Hawaii hotel, and the offbeat film comedy Mallrats.

The actress was married twice before marrying her current husband, photographer Kurt Iswarienko, in 2011.

In the 2010s, she ventured into reality TV appearing on Dancing With The Stars and the US version of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing.

Ms Doherty was a passionate animal rights activist. Her semi-autobiographical book Badass, released in 2010, encouraged young women to live life with attitude and confidence.

Officers at a police station near a rubbish dump where dismembered body parts were found have been transferred, Kenya’s acting inspector general of police has said.

On Sunday, Douglas Kanja Kirocho said that so far, eight female bodies had been retrieved from the site in the capital, Nairobi.

Kenya’s police watchdog previously announced it was investigating whether there was police involvement in the gruesome deaths, which come amid allegations of widespread human rights abuses by officers during recent anti-government protests.

Mr Kirocho said officers from Kware police station were being moved to ensure “fair and unbiased investigations” into the “heinous” deaths.

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

On Saturday, five other bags containing body parts were recovered.

Preliminary reports show that the bodies were in various stages of decomposition and that the deceased were aged between 18 and 30.

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

But the Independent Police Oversight Authority said “widespread allegations of police involvement in unlawful arrests [and] abductions” meant it was undertaking a preliminary investigation to establish whether there was any police connection.

Human rights groups have accused the police of shooting dozens of people who were demonstrating against planned tax rises earlier this month, some of them fatally.

• Was there a massacre after Kenya’s anti-tax protests?
• Kenyan president’s humbling shows power of African youth
• Protesters set fire to Kenya’s parliament – but also saved two MPs

The police have also been accused of abducting or arbitrarily arresting hundreds more during the protests.

Responding to the bodies found in Mukuru, the Independent Police Oversight Authority said: “The bodies, wrapped in bags and secured by nylon ropes, had visible marks of torture and mutilation.”

The watchdog also noted that the dump site was less than 100m from Kware police station.

In contradiction to the police’s report, the Independent Police Oversight Authority said nine dismembered bodies were found at the Mukuru dump – seven female and two male.

Mr Kirocho said the police were working to conclude their investigation into the deaths “within 21 days”.

The bodies are being kept at a funeral home in Nairobi, pending post-mortem examinations.

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 protesters of impeding their investigation.

The grisly find has put pressure on President William Ruto, who 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.

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. She became 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.

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.

She moved to Palestine at 16 years old and joined the Haganah, an underground military organization fighting for Israeli independence

Dr Ruth was trained as a sniper at the time, but never put the skills to use.

While in Palestine, a bomb exploded in her dormitory that severely injured her legs.

In 1950, Dr Ruth met her first husband and moved to Paris where she studied psychology at Sorbonne University.

The marriage ended and she moved to New York with who would become her second husband. The couple had one daughter together.

Dr Ruthe divorced from her second husband before meeting Manfred Westheimer, a refugee from Nazi Germany. They married and had one son, staying together until Mr Westheimer died in 1997.

While in New York, Dr Ruth earned a master’s degree in sociology from the New School in New York. She later received a doctorate in education from Columbia University and taught at Lehman College in the Bronx.

Dr Ruth later taught at several universities and held her own private sex therapy practice.

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.

It’s 07:00 on a chilly winter morning and a group of students has just arrived at Chanyanya Primary and Secondary school, a little over an hour’s drive south-west of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka.

“You need to come early to school because there is a shortage of desks,” says 16-year-old pupil Richard Banda. “Two days ago I came late and I ended up sitting on the floor – it was so cold.”

His discomfort encapsulates the problem of a lack of resources and overcrowding that has come as a result of offering free primary and secondary school education here.

The school is in a compound made up of 10 classrooms arranged in a horseshoe shape around a playground where acacia trees and plants spring out of the sandy soil.

The rays of the early-morning sun are caught in a cloud of dust stirred up by boys and girls sweeping the classrooms.

Just before the bell rings, one of the students sprints to the middle of the playground and raises the Zambian flag atop a tall pole.

These start-of-the-day rituals have become part of a new routine for two million extra children who since 2021 have been able to go to state-run schools without having to pay, because the government made schooling free for everyone.

But without enough infrastructure investment, experts say overcrowding is now threatening the quality of education, especially for low-income students.

“I stopped going to school in 2016 when I was in grade four,” says 18-year-old Mariana Chirwa donning the Chanyanya’s girls uniform, a light-blue shirt topped with a tartan bow.

“Without free education I don’t know how my parents would have managed to take me back to school. They don’t work and just stay at home.”

A poster of the class sizes hanging on the wall of the headteacher’s office spells out the challenge schools like Chanyanya face.

In one of the classrooms, 75 boys and 85 girls are squeezed into a space that would comfortably fit only 30 pupils.

“When I started in 2019 I had about 40 students, but now it’s around 100 plus, and that is just in one class,” says 33-year-old teacher Cleopatra Zulu.

“Each and every day we receive new learners because of free education. Talking one-on-one is difficult, even marking is a challenge. We have even reduced the number of subjects that we are giving them”.

The experience of pupil Richard Banda reflects this.

“We don’t learn in the same way as those times when we used to pay, there’s a little bit of a difference,” he tells the BBC.

“When we were few the teacher would explain a topic again if you didn’t understand, but now because we are many, the teacher doesn’t repeat it again. That’s the difference.”

The uptick in the number of learners is reflected across sub-Saharan Africa with more children in school than ever before, the UN children’s agency Unicef says.

But with nine out of 10 primary school students in the region still struggling to read and understand simple texts, according to Unicef, the focus for policy-makers is now shifting to the quality of the education, the hiring of qualified teachers and the physical infrastructure and resources.

“When you don’t sit properly in a classroom, that affects the way that you pay attention to teaching, the way that you write your notes,” says Aaron Chansa, the director of the National Action of Quality Education in Zambia (NAQEZ), which the government consults.

“We are seeing learners getting into secondary school when they can’t read properly,” he says, adding that there are problems across the country.

“In Eastern Province we have more than 100 learners in one class. This has also worsened the book-to-pupil ratio. In some instances you find one book being fought over by six or seven learners.”

The government says it is listening and taking steps to address the challenges created by making education free.

“This is a good problem,” says Education Minister Douglas Syakalima. “I’d rather let the children be in a congested classroom than in the street.”

“The president launched mass production of desks, mass infrastructure-building is happening.”

Zambia has invested over $1bn (£784m) in the education sector since the introduction of free education three years ago – a much-needed boost after years of decline in spending as a proportion of GDP in this sector.

The government has announced plans to build over 170 new schools and has committed to the recruitment of 55,000 new teachers by the end of 2026, of whom 37,000 have already been hired.

The move has provided fresh job opportunities, but it has also led to a shortage of accommodation in rural areas. Some teachers are reporting having to live in grass-thatched houses and share pit latrines, which are at risk of overflowing.

“When it’s the rainy season here, you don’t really want to visit us,” says Ms Zulu, who lives in the school compound and remembers being nervous about the risk of cholera during the outbreak earlier this year.

Just outside her house, a large patch of dried-up shower gel marks the spot where one of the residents bathed earlier, in the open, with privacy provided only by the darkness before sunrise.

“The houses we live in are more like a death-trap,” says Ms Zulu. “The government should do something about the houses, especially the toilets.”

Worried about learning outcomes, some families have quietly begun to take action.

Robert Mwape is a taxi driver based in Lusaka.

In 2022, he moved his 11-year-old son from a private, fee-paying school to a public one to take advantage of free education, but he soon came to regret the move.

“I noticed [my son’s] results began going down. So one day I decided to visit the classroom. There were too many of them. You know what young people are like – so many of them, they waste time talking. The teacher couldn’t focus the entire class.”

The following year Mr Mwape, who did not want us to use his real name, reversed his original decision. Now aged 13, his son is back at a private school.

With Zambia slowly emerging from a debt default in 2020, some experts have cast doubt over the sustainability of the free education policy.

A 2023 report from the Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis and Research says that if all eligible students take up the offer of free education, government expenditure is estimated to double, “raising questions on the commitment of subsequent governments to continue the policy”.

But the education minister says he is confident the administration can shoulder the cost.

“I don’t see [the challenge] myself. Education is the best economic policy, ” says Mr Syakalima.

Making school free is widely seen as a first step towards giving young Zambians a fair chance to a brighter future.

But the country’s experience so far shows the challenges of managing a growing number of students while trying to maintain the quality of the education they receive.

• Zambia cholera: Families grieve as infection kills loved ones
• Why free schools have not solved Kenya’s problems
• Zimbabwe education: Parents of school dropouts face jail

Fans are mourning US actress Shannen Doherty, who has died the age of 53 of cancer.

“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty,” her publicist, Leslie Sloane said.

Doherty enjoyed a screen career spanning four decades as the star of hit TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and Charmed.

Although Doherty and the characters she played usually seemed to inhabit a glossier, more beautiful world, she was always someone viewers could relate to on screen, and was a self-proclaimed “badass” in real life.

The Memphis-born star began acting as a child with appearances in TV series such as Voyagers, Our House and Father Murphy, before joining the cast of the long-running Little House on the Prairie as Jenny Wilder at the age of 11 in 1982.

Her first major film role came in 1985 with Girls Just Want to Have Fun, which also starred Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt.

• Beverly Hills 90210 star Shannen Doherty dead at 53

Three years later, she played Heather Duke, a member of the high school clique in cult 1988 teen drama Heathers, starring alongside Winona Ryder, Lisanne Falk and Kim Walker.

When a rebooted television series was commissioned in 2016, Doherty played the mother of one of the new generation of Heathers.

In 1990, Doherty landed the biggest role of her career – as Brenda Walsh in the original Beverly Hills, 90210.

The TV series followed a group of teenagers as they dealt with relationship and family issues that were relatable beyond the glamorous Beverly Hills setting.

While working on the show in the 1990s, she developed a reputation as something of a troublemaker, with reports accusing her of heated feuds with her fellow actors.

“There were times when we wanted to claw each other’s eyes out,” Doherty’s co-star Jennie Garth admitted in 2014. But the pair became close friends as they grew older.

Doherty admitted she struggled to handle the fame. “I was very confused back then about what I wanted for myself, and the attention was way too much,” she said. “I didn’t always handle it that well.

“And in truth, I was just shooting myself in the foot because the more I fought it, the more the celebrity took over versus the actor, and then the press ran with it.”

She told another interviewer: “Maybe my career would have taken a different direction if I’d been wiser and older, but I wasn’t. I started young and I got 90210 kind of success very early, and it came at a time in my life where I was a petrified kid.”

Doherty left 90210 after four seasons, with Brenda being written out to go to prestigious drama school Rada in London.

While the actress mellowed and became more private as she got older, she played up to her reputation with the release of 2010’s Badass, a semi-autobiographical book that encouraged young women to find their “inner badass” and live life with attitude and confidence.

Doherty went on to star in shows including Charmed, which followed a trio of sisters who are the most powerful good witches of all time, and North Shore, set in a Hawaii hotel. In 1995, she starred in the offbeat film comedy Mallrats.

Away from the screen, Doherty had a somewhat turbulent romantic life. She married Ashley Hamilton, the son of actor George Hamilton, two weeks after meeting him in 1993, but they divorced just six months later.

She wed her second husband Rick Salomon in 2002, but the marriage was annulled after nine months. She married her third husband, a photographer named Kurt Iswarienko, in 2011. The couple stayed together until her death.

As she got older, Doherty became a passionate animal rights activist and participated in campaigns against animal cruelty.

She also ventured into reality TV as the genre became popular in the noughties, and in 2010 she appeared in Dancing With The Stars, the US version of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing.

Beverly Hills, 90210 remained the role she was best known for, and in 2008 she joined the cast of a new version of the show, reprising her role of Brenda Walsh. In the reboot, Brenda had grown up to become a successful theatre actress and stage director.

But in her personal life, Doherty began to struggle with her health.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2015. The following year, she had a mastectomy and underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

She initially announced her cancer was in remission in 2017, but it returned two years later.

At the time, Doherty was appearing in another reboot of 90210, which she said she was keen to take part in to honour her former co-star Luke Perry, who died of a stroke aged 52.

“It’s so weird for me to be diagnosed and then somebody who was seemingly healthy to go first,” said Doherty. “It was really shocking. And the least I could do to honour him was to do that show.”

The latest version, titled BH90210, put a new spin on it. Rather than being a straightforward reboot, it followed Doherty and many of the other original cast members playing heightened, parody versions of their real selves.

Doherty kept the return of the disease secret at first, opting not to tell her fellow cast members except Brian Austin Green.

“I had moments of great anxiety where I thought, ‘I can’t really do this,'” she explained. “Prior to shooting, Brian would always call me and say, ‘Listen, you know, whatever happens, I have your back.’ So Brian helped me through a lot.”

In recent years, she openly documented her battle with cancer on social media – posting videos of herself exercising alongside the hashtag #cancerslayer.

In November 2023, she said she is committed to battling stage four breast cancer, which had now spread to her bones.

Speaking to People magazine, Doherty said she was determined to keep going with treatment, adding: “I’m not done with living. I’m not done with loving. I’m not done with creating.”

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.

Every day, for the last seven years, Arun Kumar has set up his fruit stall on a busy Mumbai street.

It’s not an easy way to make a living.

“Being a street vendor is a challenge. There’s the fear of being robbed or, as I am not a licensed vendor, the local body can come and dismantle my store anytime,” he says.

But over the past four years at least one aspect of his work has become easier.

“Prior to Covid everything was in cash. But now everyone pays with UPI. Scan the code and the payment is done within seconds.

“No issues of handling cash, giving change to customers. It has made my life and business smooth,” he says.

UPI, or to give it its full name the Unified Payments Interface, was launched in 2016 in a collaboration between India’s central bank and the nation’s banking industry.

It’s an app-based instant payment system, which allows users to send and receive money, pay bills and authorise payments in a single step – no need to enter bank details or any other personal information. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s free.

It has become so popular that India is now the biggest real-time payments market.

In May, UPI recorded 14 billion transactions, up from nine billion the year before.

But the popularity and ease of use has made it a rich feeding ground for scammers.

“While digital payments are convenient, they do come with vulnerabilities,” says Shashank Shekhar, founder of the Delhi-based Future Crime Research Foundation.

Mr Shekhar says that scammers use a variety of ways to trick people, including persuading them to share their UPI pin number, which is needed to authorise payments.

Some scammers have also created fake UPI apps, that are clones of legitimate banking apps, and then steal login details or other valuable information.

“The pace at which digital transformation took place in the country means unfortunately digital literacy and safe internet practice could not catch up,” says Mr Shekhar.

He says that between January 2020 and June 2023 almost half of all financial fraud involved the use of the UPI system.

According to government figures there were more than 95,000 cases of fraud involving UPI in the financial year ending April 2023, up from 77,000 in the previous year.

Shivkali was one such victim. She had always wanted to own a scooter, but they were beyond her budget.

However, earlier in the year the 22-year-old, who lives in Bihar state in northeastern India, spotted one for sale on Facebook that looked like a great deal.

“I grabbed the opportunity without thinking,” she says.

A couple of clicks later and she was talking to the owner, who said that for $23 he would send over the vehicle papers.

That went smoothly, so Shivkali continued to send the owner money, via instant transfers. She eventually ended up paying $200, but the scooter (also commonly called a Scooty in India), was never delivered.

Shivkali realised she had been scammed.

“I did not think I could be cheated, as I have some education background and know what is happing in the world. But scammers are smart. They have an art of speaking to convince the opposite person,” she says.

The government and the central bank are looking at ways to protect UPI users from scammers.

But at the moment, if a victim wants compensation, they have to approach their bank.

“The problem is deep rooted,” says Dr Durgesh Pandey, an expert in financial crime.

“Most of the onus lies with banks and telecom companies. They are lax in making identity checks, that’s why the fraudster can’t be traced.

“But the challenge for banks particularly is that they have to balance between inclusivity, ease of business and enforcement of identity checks. If they are too rigid, the vulnerable section of society will remain without banking facilities.”

But Dr Pandey argues that in most cases of fraud, the bank is not totally to blame.

“It’s a complex question because the problem lies with banks, but it’s the victim who is giving his credentials in most case. I would say both victim and bank should bear the loss.”

Despite those problems, UPI is being promoted in rural areas where access to banking services can be difficult.

Poonam Untwal from Rajasthan runs a guidance centre which helps people use the internet and digital banking.

“Most of us are not that educated, nor know the proper use of smartphones. I teach them that phones are no longer a device just to talk to people but banks at their fingertips,” she says.

She believes that UPI will help develop the local economy.

“Many women like me have a small business that we run from our home. Now we can receive and send money with UPI. People who don’t have smart phones come to my centre to get their transactions done,” she says.

As well as making inroads into rural areas, UPI is spreading overseas.

Retailers in Bhutan, Mauritius, Nepal, Singapore, Sri Lanka and UAE will take UPI payments.

And this year, France become the first European country to accept UPI payments, starting with tickets to the Eiffel Tower.

Back in Mumbai, Mr Kumar is happy that he no longer has to use cash, but remains wary.

If he can’t get a good internet connection then customers can, by accident or design, make off without paying.

“For a small vendor like me it [UPI] made receiving money very easy. But I am always scared of fraud. I keep hearing in the news how the UPI frauds are increasing. Hopefully some mechanisms are invented so a small vendor like me doesn’t face losses.”

America’s Sweethearts, which lifts the lid on life in the most famous cheerleading team in the US, has been climbing up the Netflix charts since its release last month.

The series follows the gruelling recruitment and coaching process for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders – DCC for short – and how much pressure the members face to be perfect.

Among the hopefuls is 24-year-old Ariana McClure – a medical sales rep who moved to Dallas to pursue her dream.

It is her second attempt at making the team, having been cut in training camp the previous year.

Dancers have to go through a tough audition process and training camp before they’re high-kicking in formation on the football pitch, all without a piece of hair or false eyelash being out of place. It’s ruthlessly competitive.

As well as learning the demanding acrobatic routines, they are required to stay the same size, so they can continue to fit in to the trademark uniform of tiny shorts, crop top and cowboy boots.

It’s not the first show about the cheerleaders, who are nicknamed America’s Sweethearts – there had already been 16 seasons of a reality show about the team on US network CMT.

But Netflix has brought DCC to a new audience. And many viewers have expressed shock at the demands on the cheerleaders, and the comparatively low wages they are paid.

In addition to intense training, most of the women have other full-time jobs.

In the opening episode, Cowboys boss Charlotte Jones admits the cheerleaders are “not paid a lot” – but says women on the team do not join for the pay, rather to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Ariana thinks pay has slightly improved across the board, but still says the cheerleaders should be compensated better.

“I definitely [don’t think we have to earn] anything near what the football players are making,” she tells the BBC.

“But I do think that these organisations have enough money.

“We like to say it’s a part-time job with a full time schedule. Apart from just the hours of practising, it’s also two hours beforehand, getting ready, you have to have your hair and make-up done.

“It’s also finding time within the day to work out so that you stay in shape, not only physically but to make sure you can get through the routines.”

She adds: “We would all ultimately do it for free because we love it and it’s our passion, but it is at the end of the day a job and they treat it as a job and so I think we should be rewarded for our work a little better – but it’s getting there.”

The series also touches on the mental health of the dancers.

Four-year veteran Victoria Kalina – who has since left the team – spoke about struggling with depression and eating disorders while she was on the team.

“I applaud Victoria for being so brave to speak about it because it’s a vulnerable thing and it’s hard to speak about that and we all have the same thoughts,” Ariana says.

In order to cope with the pressure of training, Ariana started journalling and seeing a therapist.

But she thinks, in order to help others, sports therapists should be offered to cheerleaders on NFL teams.

“My therapist was great, but she’s not a dancer, or wasn’t an athlete,” she explains. “And so having just some tools offered for the girls to talk to would be really beneficial.”

A DCC spokesperson told the BBC that all chearleaders, like its football players, have access to “immediate, independent and confidential support resources”.

“Also, just like our Cowboys players, they have access to our dedicated team Mental Health and Wellness Consultant on staff, as needed.”

The women featured in the series have won praise from viewers and TV critics for how they face the exacting expectations.

“America’s Sweethearts is a disturbing show on many levels, but the resilience of its women is impressive,” the Guardian said.

Emma Beddington wrote that there is “plenty to horrify” in the series, including the physical toll on the team members’ bodies, the “abysmal pay” and “the objectification”.

Time’s Judy Berman wrote: “At best, they’re athletes working at the apex of their sport; at worst, they’re casualties of a job market, a form of entertainment, and a society in which misogyny is so deeply ingrained, it’s often enforced by the women it oppresses.”

Writing in the New York Times, Jessica Grose said: “If there’s another season of the Netflix show, perhaps a more complete picture of the Cowboys cheerleading experience could force this elite institution to evolve, and it may make more of these talented women reach the conclusion that making the team isn’t worth the cost.”

For Ariana, the experience ended when she was cut from training camp on the last day.

She says she only found out why she was cut from the team while watching the show “at the same time as everyone else”.

In the emotional chat with director Kelli Finglass and choreographer Judy Trammel, Ari was told she was being dropped because there were only 36 spaces, without much further explanation.

But earlier, Jones – the team’s executive vice-president and daughter of owner Jerry – had told Kelli and Judy that Ariana looked like a “little girl” and “left behind” on the team, due to her 5ft 2in (1.57m) height.

“I found out details that I didn’t know,” she tells BBC News.

“And I think it allowed for me to not so much blame myself, not be so hard on myself – knowing it’s the one thing God gave me that I can’t change or fix.”

There are no height restrictions for the team, with guidelines simply saying there are no height or weight requirements, and women are expected to “look well-proportioned in dancewear”.

After watching the show, does Ariana think there should have been a height restriction?

“Had I known even going in the first year that height was a concern, I probably wouldn’t have tried out for Cowboys again,” she says.

“I do think they need to install a height requirement.

“But I also I know that the team changes throughout the years, and the demographic of the team, and they may have more taller rookies, may have shorter rookies.”

DCC were asked by the BBC to comment on the team not having a height restriction.

But Ariana’s hard work hasn’t gone to waste – she is about to start the season as a cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins.

“It’s nice, because the new director of the Dolphins squad was at the Cowboys, and so I knew her in Dallas for a little bit.

“And so a lot of the things I loved about Cowboys in that organisation, she’s taking over to Dolphins – but it is the most mentally positive, happy environment I’ve been in.”

A spray of bullets may have only grazed Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, but they killed one rally attendee and critically wounded two others.

They have also torn through the 2024 presidential campaign, damaging the social and cultural fabric of the nation. The illusion of security and safety in American politics – built over decades – has been dramatically shattered.

Trump received only minor injuries but it was close – a photograph by Doug Mills of the New York Times appears to show the streak of a bullet cutting through the air near the former president’s head.

Not since Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinkley Jr in 1981 has there been such a dramatic act of violence directed against a president – or presidential candidate.

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Video shows shooter on roof at Trump rally
• WATCH: Trump grimaces and ducks as several shots ring out
• MORE: Secret Service facing questions as investigation launched
• SHOOTING SUSPECT: What we know so far about Thomas Matthew Crooks

It harkens back to a darker time in US history, more than a half-century ago, when two Kennedy brothers – one a president and one a presidential candidate – were felled by assassin bullets. Civil rights leaders such as Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X all also lost their lives in political violence.

Like today, the 1960s were marred by intense political polarisation and dysfunction, when a firearm and an individual willing to use it could change the course of history.

It is difficult to predict the impact Saturday’s events will have on America – and its political discourse. Already, there have been some bipartisan calls for a cooling of rhetoric and national unity.

Within hours of the incident, President Joe Biden – Trump’s likely opponent in November – appeared before cameras in Delaware to make a statement to the press.

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick,” he said. “We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this.”

The president later spoke by phone with the former president. He cut short his weekend at the beach and is returning to the White House late Saturday evening.

But the violence has also quickly filtered into the bare-knuckle partisan trench-warfare that has characterised American politics in recent decades. Some Republican politicians have laid the blame for the attack on Democrats who have employed dire rhetoric about the threat they say the former president poses to American democracy.

• Listen to analysis from Anthony Zurcher on BBC Sounds

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Ohio Senator JD Vance, who is reportedly on the shortlist to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick, posted on social media. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s assassination attempt.”

Chris LaCivita, the Trump campaign manager, said that “leftist activists, Democratic donors and even Joe Biden” need to be held accountable at the ballot box in November for “disgusting remarks” that in his view led to Saturday’s attack.

Democrats may object, but many on the left used similar language to describe the culpability of right-wing rhetoric in the months before the 2011 near-fatal shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Arizona.

The Pennsylvania violence will undoubtedly cast a long shadow over the Republican convention, which begins on Monday. Security protocols will be tightened, and the protests – and counter-protests – near the site could be accompanied by a new sense of foreboding.

Meanwhile, an even brighter national spotlight will shine on the party’s nominee when he takes the stage on Thursday night.

Images of the former president, bloodied, with an upraised fist are sure to become a rallying point in Milwaukee. The Republican Party was already planning to make strength and rugged masculinity a central theme, and Saturday’s incident will give that a jolt of new energy.

“This is the fighter America needs!” Eric Trump wrote on social media, accompanied by a photograph of his father after the shooting.

The US Secret Service will also face intense scrutiny for its handling of security at the Trump rally. An individual with a high-powered rifle was able to come within firing distance of a major presidential candidate.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is promising that his chamber will conduct a full inquiry. Those investigations will take time.

But for now, one thing is clear: in a year of uncharted electoral waters, America’s politics have taken a new, deadly turn.

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

Wali Noori was working as an interpreter for the British Army in Afghanistan in 2009 when he stepped on an explosive device.

The blast left him completely blind at the age of 20.

Growing up, he loved running in the mountains of Kabul but Wali thought he would never be able to run again.

Here, in his own words, he explains how moving to the UK changed his life and his determination to never give in.

Growing up in Kabul I was a very good boxer and I used to run to keep myself fit. I finished my studies and wanted to go to university, but my family were very poor and I needed to support them. They were starving, my father was not able to work and I have five sisters and four brothers.

So at the age of 18 I joined the British Army as a translator and cultural adviser. I had studied English at school and I was good at it. My job was to help the British Army, the Afghan forces and the local civilians communicate with each other and it was a very important job.

I was asked if I would go to Helmand Province, and I said yes, even though I knew I had to accept I might die. It was like hell. So many ambushes and people were dying every day but I wasn’t scared.

I had been there for two years when I stepped on an IED (improvised explosive device) while on patrol. I was thrown up into the air and came crashing back down. I thought I must be dying but it felt like a dream. My whole face was full of shrapnel and I lost all 28 of my teeth.

I stopped breathing but put my hand down my throat and pulled out a piece of shrapnel. I could not see anything and I was helicoptered out, before spending two weeks in a coma in an army hospital in Kabul.

The doctors did not expect me to survive. When I woke up, I could not speak and I had to write my name down for them, so they could call my friend who told my family what had happened.

When my mum and dad came for the first time, it was very hard time for them. I managed to sit up so I would not look so poorly and I tried to smile for them, but I still could not speak.

I was transferred to Bagram Hospital and airbase, where the Americans treated my facial wounds and fractures. I was breathing through a tube from my neck. I was there for a month before I went to hospitals in both India and Pakistan to see if they could save my sight, but it was not possible.

It was not easy and I had some very dark days. I used to love running but I thought my running days were over. I was a single man and I ended up living back with my family in Afghanistan. I did not know how I would get through the rest of my life and I thought no one would want to marry me.

But in 2012, I had an arranged marriage. From that day on my wife has been my biggest supporter. She threw away my white cane and she said “I am your stick”. She is very kind and whenever I get sad she says “come on, I am here”. We have three beautiful children and we are so lucky.

I could not work while living in Afghanistan, even though I wanted to. The British Army gave me one year’s salary but I was struggling and the country is not set up very well for disabled people.

In 2014, I was told by the British Government that I was eligible to come to the UK with my family. It took two years to sort out but since we moved to Colchester, we have never looked back.

I really like it here. It is a nice place and I have made some lovely friends, especially at my running club, the Colchester Harriers. And we are safe.

I realised I could start running again, because they have guide runners, and this has given me back my freedom and my mental health. I get terrible headaches due to my injuries but I go out running and my headache is forgotten.

I waited for five years to get selected for the Invictus Games and I was so proud to represent the UK last September. I won four gold medals, in the 100m, 200m, 400m and 1500m. I met Prince Harry and Meghan and they were so warm and friendly.

Harry shook my hand, I didn’t know who he was. I said “who is this?” and he said “I’m Prince Harry” and we laughed and chatted. It was an incredible moment in my life.

I have now won 21 medals for running and three for swimming. I always want to move forwards in my life and I never look back. I am always trying to improve and I make sure I never give up.

My dream is to one day compete at the Paralympic Games. I qualified for it in terms of how quick I am, and meet the criteria, but I missed the deadline to apply this time. But I will get there one day. I would also like to complete the six major marathons, having done London in 2019.

I have just written a book about my life and it will be published on 12 September, which is 15 years to the day I went blind. I go into schools and colleges and different groups like army veterans to share my story and I recently spoke to some veterans who were injured in Ukraine. When I get money for these speeches I send it back to Afghanistan to help the widows and orphans there.

I will never regret signing up to work for the British Army and what happened to me. Life was very tough for me before that but life is going well for me now. I will never surrender to my blindness. I want to keep inspiring people and show that disability does not have to stop you from achieving great things.

Celebrities, politicians and popstars from across the globe have arrived in Mumbai for the wedding of youngest son of Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani.

Anant Ambani tied the knot with Radhika Merchant, daughter of Indian pharma tycoons Viren and Shaila Merchant, in a traditional Hindu ceremony in Mumbai city on Friday.

The wedding events began with parties and celebrations in March, before the family invited over 800 guests to join them on a cruise around Europe.

But Friday saw the arrival of some of the world’s most recognisable faces, as politics, sport and celebrity mixed on the red carpet.

Friday’s ceremony was part of a four-day extravaganza – the final stop in a string of elaborate parties the family has hosted since March, featuring performances by popstars including Rihanna and Justin Bieber.

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.

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.

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

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

The small Pittsburgh suburb of Bethel Park in Pennsylvania is reeling after the FBI named a young local man, Thomas Matthew Crooks, as the person who shot at Donald Trump during a campaign rally and shocked the nation.

Investigators believe that Crooks, armed with a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle, opened fire at the former president while he was addressing a crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania, leaving one audience member dead and two others wounded.

The 20-year-old kitchen worker was shot dead at the scene by a Secret Service sniper, officials said.

In his well-to-do hometown, however, neighbours are in shock, seemingly unable to grasp how a quiet young man is now accused in the shooting.

The FBI, for its part, has said only that Crooks was the “subject involved in the assassination attempt on the former president and that an active investigation was under way.”

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Video shows shooter on roof at Trump rally
• WATCH: Trump grimaces and ducks as several shots ring out
• MORE: Secret Service facing questions as investigation launched
• ANALYSIS: Spray of bullets shatters nation’s illusion of security

Thomas Crooks had not been carrying ID, so investigators used DNA and facial recognition technology to identify him, the FBI said.

He was from Bethel Park in Pennsylvania, about 70km (43 miles) from the site of the attempted assassination, and graduated in 2022 from Bethel Park High School with a $500 prize for maths and science, according to a local newspaper.

Crooks worked in a local nursing home kitchen just a short drive away from his home, the BBC understands.

State voter records show that he was a registered Republican, according to US media.

He is also reported to have donated $15 to liberal campaign group ActBlue in 2021.

He had a membership at a local shooting club, the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, for at least a year.

Law enforcement officials believe the weapon used to shoot at Donald Trump was purchased by Crooks’ father, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, two officers told AP that Crooks’ father bought a weapon at least six months ago.

According to US media reports, Crooks was wearing a T-shirt from Demolition Ranch, a YouTube channel known for its guns and demolition content. The channel has millions of subscribers featuring videos on different guns and explosive devices.

The day after the shooting, law enforcement sources also told CBS, the BBC’s US partner, that suspicious devices were found in Crooks’ vehicle.

According to CBS, the suspect had a piece of commercially available equipment that appeared capable of initiating the devices.

Bomb technicians were called to the scene to secure and investigate the devices.

Having established Crooks’ identity, police and agencies are investigating his motive.

“We do not currently have an identified motive,” said Kevin Rojek, FBI Pittsburgh special agent in charge, at a briefing on Saturday night.

The inquiry into what took place could last for months and investigators would work “tirelessly” to identify what Crooks’ motive was, Mr Rojek said.

Speaking to CNN, Crooks’ father, Matthew Crooks, said he was trying to figure out “what the hell is going on” but would “wait until I talk to law enforcement” before speaking about his son.

Crooks’ family is cooperating with investigators, according to the FBI.

Police sealed off the road to the house where Crooks lived with his parents.

A neighbour told CBS that officers evacuated her in the middle of the night with no warning.

Bethel Park Police said there was a bomb investigation surrounding Crooks’ home.

Access to the area remains tightly controlled with police vehicles blocking the roads. Only residents have been allowed in or out.

Law enforcement sources told CBS that they believe some degree of planning ahead of the shooting.

How much time was spent in that planning, however, remains the subject of an ongoing investigation.

Police believe he acted alone, but are continuing to investigate whether he was accompanied to the rally.

So far, a confusing – and at times conflicting – picture has emerged of who Crooks was as a person.

Speaking to local news outlet KDKA, some young locals who went to school with him described him as a loner, who was frequently bullied and sometimes wore “hunting outfits to school”.

Another former classmate of his, Summer Barkley, cast him differently, telling the BBC that he was “always getting good grades on tests” and was “very passionate about history”.

“Anything on government and history he seemed to know about,” she said. “But it was nothing out of the ordinary….he was always nice.”

She described him as well-liked by his teachers.

Others simply remembered him as quiet.

“He was there but I can’t think of anyone who knew him well,” one former classmate, who asked to remain nameless, told the BBC. “He’s just not a guy I really think about. But he seemed fine.”

Jameson Myers, a former member of the Bethel Park High School varsity rifle team who graduated alongside Crooks in 2022, told CBS that he did not make the team.

“He did not even make the junior varsity team after trying out,” Mr Myers added. “He never returned to try-outs for the remainder of high school.”

Mr Myers remembers Crooks as seemingly a “normal boy” who was “not particularly popular but never got picked on or anything.”

“He was a nice kid who never talked poorly of anyone and I never have thought him capable of anything I’ve seen him do in the last few days.”

Other community members said simply that they were shocked that the alleged perpetrator of the shooting could have come from the quiet, tree-lined streets of Bethel Park.

Among them was Jason Mackey, a 27-year-old local man who lives near the Crooks residence and worked at his school while he was a student.

While Mr Mackey said that he did not know Crooks personally, he is still reeling from a sense of disbelief.

“It’s just shocking. You wouldn’t think an event of this magnitude would come right out of your backyard,” he said. “It’s just a crazy situation.”

One person was killed and two others were injured in the shooting.

All three victims are adult men and were audience members, CBS News reports.

At a news conference on Sunday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro identified the deceased victim at Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old volunteer fire chief who was killed when he “dived on his family” to protect them.

He said that Comperatore “died a hero”.

A GoFundMe page, organised by the Trump campaign’s national finance director Meredith O’Rourke, was set up in the hours after the attack with donations going to the families of the injured.

It has so far raised more than $340,000 (£267,000).

In a post to his Truth Social platform, Trump said he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear” and said he felt the bullet “ripping through the skin”.

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

Trump is “doing well” and is grateful to law enforcement officers, according to a statement published on the Republican National Committee (RNC) website.

One witness told the BBC that he had seen a man – believed to be Crooks – with a rifle on the roof of a building before Trump was shot.

Video footage obtained by TMZ shows the moment the shooting began.

The assailant opened fire with “an AR-style rifle”, CBS News reports.

Law enforcement sources also told CBS that he was reported by a bystander and identified as a suspicious person by police, but that officers lost track of him before the shooting began.

However, the FBI says it did not immediately know what type of firearm was used or how many shots were fired.

A Secret Service sniper returned fire and killed the gunman, officials said.

Footage later shows armed officers approaching a body on the roof of the building.

When two young Brazilian women were reported missing in September 2022, their families and the FBI launched a desperate search across the US to find them. All they knew was that they were living with wellness influencer Kat Torres.

Torres has now been sentenced to eight years in prison for the human trafficking and slavery of one of those women. The BBC has also been told that charges have been filed against her in relation to a second woman.

How did the former model who partied with Leonardo DiCaprio and graced the cover of international magazines come to groom her followers and lure them into sexual exploitation?

“She kind of resembled hope for me,” says Ana, describing her reaction on stumbling across Torres’ Instagram page in 2017.

Ana was not one of the missing women targeted in the FBI search – but she too was a victim of Torres’ coercion and would be key to their rescue.

She says she was attracted to Torres’ trajectory from impoverished Brazilian favela to international catwalks, partying with Hollywood A-listers along the way.

“She seemed like she had overcome violence in her childhood, abuse, all these traumatic experiences,” Ana told BBC Eye Investigations and BBC News Brasil.

Ana was in a vulnerable situation herself. She says she had suffered a violent childhood, moved alone to the US from southern Brazil, and was previously in an abusive relationship.

Torres had recently published her autobiography called A Voz [The Voice], in which she claimed she could make predictions as a result of her spiritual powers, and had been interviewed on reputable Brazilian media shows.

“She was on the cover of magazines. She was seen with famous people such as Leonardo DiCaprio. Everything I saw seemed credible,” she says.

Ana says she was particularly taken with Torres’ approach to spirituality.

What Ana didn’t know was that the inspirational story Torres told was based on half-truths and lies.

Torres’ ex-flatmate in New York, Luzer Twersky, told us that her Hollywood friends had introduced her to the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca, and she was never the same again.

”That’s when she kind of… started going off the deep end,” he says.

He said he also believed that she was working as a sugar baby – paid for romantic involvement with wealthy and powerful men who were also paying for the flat they shared together.

Torres’ wellness website and subscription service promised customers: “Love, money and self-esteem that you always dreamed of.” Self-help videos offered advice on relationships, wellness, business success and spirituality – including hypnosis, meditation and exercise programmes.

For an extra $150 (£120) clients could unlock exclusive one-to-one video consultations with Torres during which she would claim to solve any of their problems.

Amanda, another former client who lives in the Brazilian capital, says Kat made her feel special.

“All my doubts, my questions, my decisions: I always took them to her first, so that we could make decisions together,” she says.

But it appears that advice had a dark side. Ana, Amanda, and other former followers say they found themselves becoming increasingly psychologically isolated from friends and family and willing to do anything Torres suggested.

When Torres asked Ana in 2019 to move to New York to work as her live-in assistant, she agreed. She had been studying nutrition at university in Boston, but arranged to study online instead, and says she accepted the offer to look after Torres’ animals – and do her cooking, laundry and cleaning – for about $2000 (£1,564) a month.

Like, Follow, Trafficked: Insta’s Fake Guru

BBC Eye Investigations and BBC News Brasil uncover the truth behind the rise of wellness influencer and spiritual life coach, Kat Torres, and the international search for her trafficked followers

Watch now on BBC iPlayer (UK Only) or on the BBC World Service YouTube channel (outside UK)

When she arrived at Torres’ apartment, though, she quickly realised it did not match the curated perfection projected on the influencer’s Instagram.

“It was shocking because the house was really messy, really dirty, didn’t smell good,” she says.

Ana says Torres seemed unable to do even basic things without her, like taking a shower, because she couldn’t bear to be alone. She describes having to constantly be available for Torres, only being allowed to sleep for a few hours at a time, on a sofa covered in cat urine.

She says some days she would hide in the apartment building’s gym, grabbing a few hours’ sleep rather than working out.

“Now, I see that she was using me as a slave… she had satisfaction in it,” Ana says.

Ana says she was never paid.

“I felt like, ‘I’m stuck here, I don’t have a way out,’” she says. “I was probably one of her first victims of human trafficking.”

She had given up her university accommodation back in Boston, so she had nowhere to return to, and no income to pay for alternative housing.

Ana says when she tried to confront Torres, she became aggressive, triggering Ana’s painful history with domestic violence.

Eventually, after three months, Ana found a way to escape by moving in with a new boyfriend.

But that wasn’t the end of Ana’s role in Torres’ life. When the families of two other young Brazilian women reported them missing in September 2022, Ana knew she had to act.

By this point, Torres’ life had grown in scale. She was now married to a man called Zach, a 21-year-old she had met in California, and they were renting a five-bedroom house in the suburbs of Austin, Texas.

Repeating the pattern she had begun with Ana, Torres had targeted her most dedicated followers, trying to recruit them to come and work for her. In return, she had promised to help them achieve their dreams, capitalising on the intimate personal details they had shared with her during life-coaching sessions.

Desirrê Freitas, a Brazilian woman living in Germany, and Brazilian Letícia Maia – the two women whose disappearance would go on to spark the FBI-led search – moved to live with Torres. Another Brazilian woman, who we are calling Sol, was also recruited.

Posting on her social media channels, Torres introduced her “witch clan” to her followers.

The BBC has discovered at least four more women were almost persuaded to join Torres in the house but had pulled out.

Some of the women were too scared to appear in the BBC’s film – afraid of receiving online abuse and still traumatised by their experiences – but we have been able to verify their accounts using court documents, text messages, bank statements, and Desirrê’s memoir about her experiences – @Searching Desirrê, published by DISRUPTalks.

Desirrê says that in her case, Torres had bought her a plane ticket from Germany, having told her she was suicidal and needed Desirrê’s support.

Torres is also accused of persuading Letícia, who was 14 when she started life-coaching sessions with her, to move to the US for an au pair programme and then drop out to live and work with her.

As for Sol, she says she agreed to move in with Torres after becoming homeless and was hired to carry out tarot readings and yoga classes.

But it was not long before the women discovered their reality was very different to the fairytale they had been promised.

Within weeks, Desirrê says Torres pressured her into working at a local strip club, saying if she did not comply Desirrê would have to repay all the money she had spent on her: flights, accommodation, furniture for her room, and even the “witchcraft” Torres had performed. Desirrê says not only she did not have this money, she also believed at the time in the spiritual powers Torres claimed to have, so when Torres threatened to curse her for not following orders she was terrified.

Reluctantly, Desirrê agreed to work as a stripper.

A manager from the strip club, James, told the BBC she would work extremely long hours, seven days a week.

Desirrê and Sol say the women in the Austin mansion were subjected to strict house rules. They describe being forbidden from speaking to each other, needing Torres’ permission to leave their rooms – even to use the bathroom – and being required to immediately hand over all earnings.

“It was very difficult to, you know, get out of the situation because she holds your money,” Sol told the BBC.

“It was terrifying. I thought something could happen to me because she had all my information, my passport, my driving licence.”

But Sol says she realised she needed to somehow escape after overhearing a phone call in which Torres was telling another client she must work as a prostitute in Brazil as a “punishment”.

Sol was able to leave with the help of an ex-boyfriend.

Meanwhile, the guns Torres’ husband kept began to regularly feature on her Instagram stories, and became a source of fear for the remaining women.

Around this time, Desirrê says Torres tried to persuade her to swap the strip club for work as a prostitute. She says she refused and the following day Torres took her on a surprise day out to a gun range.

Scared, Desirrê says she eventually gave in to Torres’ demand.

“Many questions haunted me: ‘Could I stop whenever I wanted?’” Desirrê writes in her book.

“And if the condom broke, would I get a disease? Could [the client] be an undercover cop and arrest me? What if he killed me?”

If the women didn’t meet the earning quotas that Torres set, which had risen from $1,000 (£782) to $3,000 (£2,345) a day, they were not allowed to return to the house that night, they say.

“I ended up sleeping on the street several times because I couldn’t reach that,” Desirrê adds.

Bank statements, seen by the BBC, show Desirrê transferring more than $21,000 (£16,417) into Torres’ account in June and July 2022 alone. She says that she was forced to hand over a substantially higher figure in cash.

Prostitution is illegal in Texas and Desirrê says Torres would threaten to report her to the police if she ever talked about wanting to stop.

In September, friends and family of Desirrê and Letícia back in Brazil launched social media campaigns to find them, having become increasingly concerned following months without contact.

By this time, they were barely recognisable. Their brunette hair had been dyed platinum blonde to eerily match Torres’. Desirrê says by this point all her phone contacts had been blocked and she obeyed the influencer’s orders without question.

As the Instagram page @searchingDesirrê gained momentum, the story dominated news outlets in Brazil. Desirrê’s friends even worried she might have been murdered, and Letícia’s family put out desperate pleas for their safe return home.

Ana, having lived with Torres in 2019, said alarm bells rang as soon as she saw the news stories. She says she immediately guessed that “[Torres] was keeping other girls”.

• More information and support about human trafficking and modern slavery is available via BBC Action Line.

Along with other former clients, Ana began to contact as many law enforcement agencies as possible, including the FBI, in an attempt to get the influencer arrested. Five months earlier, both she and Sol had reported Torres to the US police – but say they weren’t taken seriously.

In a video she recorded at the time for evidence, since shared with the BBC, a distressed Ana can be heard saying, “this person is very dangerous and she has already threatened to kill me”.

Then the missing women’s profiles on escort and prostitution websites were discovered. Suspicions of sexual exploitation, shared on social media, appeared to be confirmed.

Panicked by the media attention, Torres and the women travelled more than 2,000 miles (3,219 km) from Texas to Maine. In chilling Instagram videos, Desirrê and Letícia denied being held captive and demanded people stop searching for them.

But a recording, obtained by BBC News, gives an insight into what was really happening at this time. By now the US authorities were aware of the concerns about the women’s safety. Homeland security had tipped off a police officer who managed to FaceTime Torres to check on the women. But just before this starts, Torres can be heard saying on the video:

“He will start asking questions. Guys, they are full of tricks. He’s a detective, be very careful. For God’s sake, I’ll kick you out if you say anything. I’ll scream.”

In November 2022, the police finally convinced Torres and the two other women to attend a welfare check in person at Franklin County Sheriff’s Office in Maine.

The detective who questioned Torres, Desirrê and Letícia – Detective David Davol – told the BBC he and his colleagues had been immediately concerned, noticing a number of red flags, including a distrust of law enforcement, isolation and their reluctance to speak without Torres’ permission.

“Human traffickers aren’t always like in the movies, where you have… a gang that kidnapped people. It’s far more common that it’s someone you trust.”

By December 2022, the two women had been safely returned to Brazil.

Det Davol says, in his experience, human trafficking is on the rise. His observation is backed up by the UN, which says it is one of the fastest growing crimes, generating an estimated $150bn (£117bn) in profits a year worldwide.

He believes social media gives it a platform on which to thrive, making it much easier for traffickers to find and groom victims.

In April this year, our team was granted a rare court order to interview Torres in a Brazilian prison – the first media interview with her since her arrest. At that point, she was still waiting for the verdict of a trial against her relating to her treatment of Desirrê.

Smiling, Torres approached us with a calm and collected demeanour.

She was adamant that she was completely innocent, denying that any women had ever lived with her or that she had ever coerced anyone to take part in sex work.

“When I was seeing the people testifying, they were saying so many lies. So many lies that at one point, I couldn’t stop laughing,” she told us.

“People are saying I am a fake guru, but at the same time, they are also saying that… ‘She is a danger to society because she can change people’s mind with her words.’”

When we confronted her with the evidence that we ourselves had seen, she became more hostile, accusing us of lying too.

“You choose to believe whatever you choose to believe. I can tell you I’m Jesus. And you can see Jesus, or you can see the devil, that’s it. It’s your choice. It’s your mind.”

As she got up to return to her cell, she issued a parting threat, claiming we would soon find out if she had powers or not. She pointed at me, and said: “I didn’t like her.”

The BBC can reveal that earlier this month Torres was sentenced by a Brazilian judge to eight years in prison for subjecting Desirrê to human trafficking and slavery. He concluded that she had lured the young woman to the US for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

More than 20 women have reported being scammed or exploited by Torres – many of whom the BBC has spoken to and are still undergoing psychiatric therapy to recover from what they say they experienced as a result of her treatment of them.

Torres’ lawyer told the BBC she has appealed her conviction and maintains her innocence.

An investigation into the allegations from other women is ongoing in Brazil.

Ana believes yet further victims may come forward, once they read about Torres’ crimes. This is the first time Ana has spoken publicly.

She says she wants people to recognise that Torres’ actions amount to a serious crime and not some “Instagram drama”.

In the closing pages of her book Desirrê also reflects on her experiences.

“I’m not fully recovered yet, I’ve had a challenging year. I was sexually exploited, enslaved and imprisoned.

“I hope my story serves as a warning.”

You can get in touch by following this link

The 2024 election campaign has a new iconic image: Donald Trump, moments after narrowly avoiding serious injury or death from an assassin’s bullets, standing with his fist raised, lines of blood streaked across his face, an American flag billowing in the breeze behind him.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” the former president said, as some of the supporters, who moments before had feared for their lives, began cheering.

The bloodshed in Pennsylvania will leave a lasting mark on the American psyche, puncturing the veneer of security around the highest levels of presidential politics – of magnetic screening, bulletproof limousines and heavily armed Secret Service agents. Even former presidents are not insulated from the violence that can erupt in everyday American life.

It was also a dramatic moment in American political history; one that is sure to be replayed in video clips, still photographs and testimonial accounts throughout the course of this presidential campaign and in campaigns to come.

In a rare address from the Oval Office Sunday evening, President Joe Biden called on Americans to cool the temperature around political debate.

“[It] must never be a battlefield and, God forbid, a killing field,” he warned. “No matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence.”

The attack has already begun coursing through America’s partisan dialogue, as numerous Republicans have spoken out to condemn President Biden and the Democrats for creating a rhetorical environment conducive to the violence.

They point to dire warnings about the former president becoming a dictator and threatening democracy as examples of the overheated language that could inspire an assassin.

In particular, they highlight leaked comments the president made in private to donors just last week about increasing the attacks on the former president’s record and putting a “bull’s-eye” on him.

“They’ve tried to take him out in so many other ways, financially, they’ve tried to throw him in jail,” Donald Trump Jr said in a television interview on Sunday. “It’s almost as if they would love for this to happen.”

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Videos show how gunman shot at Trump despite public alerting police
• FIRST PERSON: First panic, then fury – what I witnessed at Trump rally
• SHOOTING SUSPECT: What we know so far about Thomas Matthew Crooks
• VICTIMS: Man killed during Trump shooting dived on family to protect them

At least so far, however, the motives and political affiliations of the alleged assassin, 20-year-old Pennsylvania resident Thomas Matthew Crooks, are in doubt. They may ultimately defy an easy partisan narrative.

The former president’s oldest son went on to add that, after the assassination attempt, those on the left can no longer accuse the former president of culpability for the 6 January attack on the US Capitol.

That violent episode took place hours after the then-president had held a rally just a few dozen blocks away, challenging the 2020 election results. His actions on that day led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives and, more than a year later, indictment by a special counsel appointed by the US attorney general.

If the Pennsylvania shooting defuses this line of criticism by Democrats, it’s just one way in which it will have fundamentally reshaped this presidential campaign. Others may become clear over the course of the Republican National Convention, which starts on Monday in Milwaukee.

The failed attack on the former president plays into several themes the Trump campaign was already planning for the quadrennial gathering, which culminates with Trump taking the stage to accept his party’s nomination on Thursday night.

The first is that it could provide a boost to the politics of grievance and persecution that have been a central focus of his rally speeches and social media posts.

“They’re not really after me; they’re after you,” is a common Trump refrain, on t-shirts, billboards and car stickers. “I’m just in the way.”

That message will land with new force after the former president and his crowd of supporters were sprayed with bullets. Trump’s legions of fans – many of whose support borders on near-messianic hero-worship – will have all the more reason to identify with a man who almost lost his life while standing before them.

The former president’s brush with death, and subsequent acts of bloody defiance, will also fit with the contrast Trump campaign officials have said they are trying to draw at this week’s convention – one where their candidate, and party, embody rugged masculinity and strength, while their opponents are feeble.

President Biden’s age and capabilities have dogged his campaign for months – and prompted a Democratic crisis of confidence in his re-election effort after a stunningly poor performance at the presidential debate just over two weeks ago.

Saturday night’s attack, and Trump’s response to it, will allow Republicans to put that contrast in stark relief in the days ahead.

Democrats have spent the past two weeks in anguished soul-searching over their president’s political future. Now, they have a new set of concerns.

In a way, the assassination attempt may end up providing a political lifeline to Mr Biden, given that the focus has dramatically shifted away from his age-related struggles and internal attempts to oust him. But the president’s re-election strategy – which hinges on painting Trump as a danger to the nation if he again becomes president – could be seriously hampered if the American public is hostile to new, pointed criticisms of the man.

The Biden campaign has already pulled all negative advertising directed at the former president, lest it be viewed as inappropriate given the national mood. The president also rescheduled a trip to Texas planned for Monday.

It is only a pause, however, and Democrats will need to go back on the offensive if they hope to erase the narrow lead the former president holds.

That lead – small and not insurmountable, but still significant – has held stable for months, even as national politics have been buffeted by a seemingly endless stream of unprecedented news stories.

The former president’s trial and conviction, a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions, Mr Biden’s debate flop – none of these has seemed to move the American political needle in what has been, and appears destined to remain, a sharply divided nation.

While there has been considerable talk about how this presidential campaign has been upended by the assassination attempt, there is no guarantee that the race will not return to its near-dead-heat equilibrium point in the three months before election day.

Only now the Democrats have less time, less of a money advantage and less political oxygen to shift the electoral dynamics in their favour.

What Saturday night’s tragedy demonstrated most clearly, however, is that expectations and political narratives can shift in seconds.

One man in the audience died while trying to protect his family during the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on Saturday, authorities say.

Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old volunteer fire chief, dove onto family members when the shots rang out.

“Corey died a hero,” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said at a news conference on Sunday.

Pennsylvania state police said the other two people shot were 57-year-old David Dutch and 74-year-old James Copenhaver. Both were in a stable condition on Sunday.

The Pennsylvania governor said that he spoke to Mr Comperatore’s wife and two daughters.

“Corey went to church every Sunday,” he said. “Cory loved his community. Most especially, Corey loved his family.”

He said that Mr Comperatore was an avid supporter of Donald Trump and was excited to be at the rally Saturday.

“Corey was the very best of us. May his memory be a blessing,” Mr Shapiro said. “Last night was shocking… political disagreements can never, ever be addressed through violence.”

State police said that Mr Comperatore lived in Sarver, about 12 miles (19km) away from the rally site in Butler, outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In addition to his volunteer firefighting work, he was employed as a project and tooling engineer at a plastics manufacturing company, according to his social media profiles.

“He was a good person,” neighbour Matt Achilles told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “We might not have agreed on the same political views, but that didn’t stop him from being a good friend and neighbour.”

“He donated money to us when I was in the hospital and he would always come by at our yard sales. He always waved hello when I drove past his house,” Mr Achilles said.

Mr Shapiro said also he spoke to the family of one of those injured, but declined to give details about the conversation.

A bullet, one of the six to eight shots that were fired at the rally, grazed the ear of former President Trump.

The gunman, named by authorities as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by Secret Service officers tasked with protecting the former president.

“Staged”.

Within minutes of the news breaking about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, that word was trending on X in the United States.

It’s a word that has become synonymous with conspiracy theories on the fringes of social media, often to cast doubts on an attack or shooting. But in the last 24 hours it has flooded into mainstream online conversation, and posts filled with evidence-free speculation, hate and abuse have racked up millions of views on X.

Assassination attempts on US presidents have in the past been magnets for conspiracy – the killing of John F Kennedy in November 1963, most famously. This one was the first to play out in real time, so it’s not surprising that unfounded rumours flourished.

But what has stood out is how this frenzy gripped all sides of the political spectrum.

It’s not been limited to committed groups of political supporters. Instead, it was actively recommended in users’ “For You” feeds as they tried to make sense of what had happened. And it was often posted by users who have purchased blue ticks, offering their posts greater prominence.

As ever, the conspiracy theories sometimes started with legitimate questions and confusion. They centred on alleged security failings, with lots of users understandably asking how this could happen.

How did the attacker make it to the roof? Why weren’t they stopped?

Into that vacuum rushed a wave of disbelief, speculation and disinformation.

“It looks very staged,” read one post on X which racked up a million views. “Nobody in the crowd is running or panicking. Nobody in the crowd heard an actual gun. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust him.”

The profile says it’s based on the south-west coast of Ireland. Its since been labelled with a note on X pointing out the shooting was real.

Once more footage and testimony from both inside and outside the rally was shared, the panic and fear of those there became all too clear.

The conspiracies were compounded by the extraordinary images that have come out since those initial clips. In particular, a widely-praised photograph taken by the Associated Press chief photographer in Washington, Evan Vucci, that shows Trump, fist raised, blood on his face and ear, with the US flag in the background.

One US-based YouTube account said the picture was just “too damn perfect” and described how they got “the flag positioned perfect and everything”. The post on X reached almost one million views – but was later deleted by the person who shared it. It’s important to correct yourself if you’re wrong, they said in a separate post.

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Video shows shooter on roof at Trump rally
• WATCH: Trump grimaces and ducks as several shots ring out
• ANALYSIS: Shocking act will reshape the presidential race
• SHOOTING SUSPECT: What we know so far about Thomas Matthew Crooks

Others pointed out that, as the shots were fired, Trump raises his hand on stage. They used this to suggest the event was set up when there’s no evidence to suggest that.

“Staged to get sympathy? You can’t trust these people with anything and no, I’m not going to pray for him,” a different US-based commentator wrote.

Lots of the most viral posts, including this, came from left-leaning users who regularly share their anti-Trump views. They already had hundreds of thousands of followers before today – and therefore a significant reach.

What unfolded on X was straight out of the pages of the conspiracy theory playbook, honed on social media by committed activists who deny the reality of almost everything, including the Covid pandemic, wars, mass shootings and terror attacks.

One post from a US-based account with a track record of sharing unfounded claims like this wrote: “This is price you pay when you take down the elite satanic paedophiles.”

They were alluding to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which suggests Trump is waging a secret war against a deep state – a shadowy coalition of security and intelligence services, hidden from plain sight, looking to thwart his every move.

Without any evidence to support the idea, they then went on to suggest the “order” for the assassination “likely came from the CIA” and accused Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence of being involved. There is no evidence to support any of that – but the post has been seen 4.7 million times.

It’s a familiar pattern, but the real change here is how this kind of lingo is being widely used by the average social media users. That’s not only people who don’t like Trump suggesting this was staged, but also ones who support him alleging this is part of a sprawling conspiracy theory.

Elected politicians have also got involved. Congressman Mike Collins, a Republican in Georgia, posted that “Joe Biden sent the orders”. He referenced a comment President Biden had made earlier in the week about putting “Trump in a bullseye”, referring to their election battle.

There are legitimate questions being asked about some of the language used to describe Trump by other politicians and the media, as well as online, which some of Trump’s supporters argue has inflamed tensions and contributed to this assassination attempt. But to suggest this was ordered by President Biden is an entirely different proposition all together.

Collins’ post has more than 6 million views on X – but has since been labelled with a community note, which says there is no evidence Mr Biden was involved in any way. It added that his “bullseye” remark has been taken out of context.

Incorrect attempts to identify the shooter fed into the various evidence-free narratives.

Before the FBI named the gunman as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot and killed by the Secret Service, other people’s reputations were being ruined.

Like football commentator Marco Violi, who posted on Instagram in the middle of the night from Italy to say he’d seen the totally false claims he was a member of Antifa – a loose affiliation of mostly far-left activists – and behind the attack. Those untrue allegations had millions of views on X by the time he attempted to set the record straight on Instagram.

On X, political activists and supporters quickly hunkered down in their own echo chambers, reading posts that were recommended by the site’s algorithm and confirmed what they already thought. The rest of us scrambled to avoid this deep pit of conspiracy and speculation.

This was a test for Elon Musk’s new Twitter – and it’s hard to say the site passed with flying colours.

The other social media sites haven’t been inundated in the same way, perhaps because of their target audience and X’s reputation as a home of political discourse.

X has not responded to the BBC’s request for comment.

What happened at the Trump Rally? Listen to the latest episode of Americast on BBC Sounds.

Actress Shannen Doherty, best known for roles in hit TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and Charmed, died on Saturday from cancer at 53.

“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty,” her publicist, Leslie Sloane, said in a statement. “The devoted daughter, sister, aunt and friend was surrounded by her loved ones as well as her dog, Bowie.”

Doherty spent over four decades as an actress. She is best known for playing Brenda Walsh on four seasons of 90210. The series followed a group of Beverly Hills teenagers as they faced relationship and family issues.

Ms Doherty was nominated for several awards for her role on the show.

She later went on to play Brenda in a 2008 reboot of the series where her character grew up to become a theatre actress.

The actor was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2015 and underwent a mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy. She announced she was in remission in 2017, but the cancer returned two years later.

She was open about her battle with cancer, documenting it on social media. In a June 2023 Instagram video, she shared that the the cancer spread to her brain. She announced last fall that she is committed to battling the disease despite it spreading to her bones.

“I’m not done with living. I’m not done with loving. I’m not done with creating,” she said to People magazine in November 2023.

Born in Memphis, Ms Doherty started acting as a child. She appeared in TV series including Voyagers, Our House and Father Murphy before starring as Jenny Wilder at the age of 11 in Little House on the Prairie.

Three years later in 1985, she got her first major film role starring in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, which also starred Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt.

In 1988, Ms Doherty played Heather Duke in the iconic teen film Heathers alongside Winona Ryder, Lisanne Falk and Kim Walker.

The actress struggled at the time with being young and famous, earning a reputation as a troublemaker on the set of 90210.

“I was very confused back then about what I wanted for myself, and the attention was way too much,” she said. “I didn’t always handle it that well.”

She later starred in Charmed, a show about three sisters who were witches.

Ms Doherty also played roles in North Shore, set in a Hawaii hotel, and the offbeat film comedy Mallrats.

The actress was married twice before marrying her current husband, photographer Kurt Iswarienko, in 2011.

In the 2010s, she ventured into reality TV appearing on Dancing With The Stars and the US version of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing.

Ms Doherty was a passionate animal rights activist. Her semi-autobiographical book Badass, released in 2010, encouraged young women to live life with attitude and confidence.

Former US President Donald Trump has arrived in Wisconsin for the Republican National Convention, a day after surviving an assassination attempt.

The party conference in Milwaukee is going ahead as planned despite Saturday evening’s shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania, in which Trump was shot in the ear.

Trump posted on social media that he had considered delaying his trip by two days, “but have just decided that I cannot allow a ‘shooter,’ or potential assassin, to force change to scheduling, or anything else”.

The attack on the candidate has put a heightened focus on safety and security of the event, which begins on Monday at the arena that is home to the NBA Milwaukee Bucks basketball team.

But Audrey Gibson-Cicchino, RNC coordinator for the US Secret Service, said during a Sunday afternoon news conference in Milwaukee that there would be no changes to the security plan.

Some 50,000 people are expected to attend the four-day jamboree of pageantry, politics and policy as the party makes its case to voters ahead of November’s general election.

• LIVE: All the latest developments after assassination attempt on Trump
• WATCH: Video shows shooter on roof at Trump rally
• WATCH: Trump grimaces and ducks as several shots ring out
• MORE: Secret Service faces questions after Trump assassination attempt

Once every four years each of the two main US parties hosts a convention to formally select their respective White House standard-bearer and prepare for the final stretch of campaigning.

The conferences include high-profile speakers, as well as a primetime speech from the presidential candidate.

During the convention, the delegates from each state pledge their support to the candidate of their choice and approve a platform.

It is merely a formality for Trump as the party’s presumptive nominee because he won 2,265 delegates in the primaries, which is enough for the nomination.

The Democrats will hold their convention next month in Chicago.

Trump is not expected to speak until Thursday night.

One of the biggest moments of the conference will be when he unveils his vice-presidential candidate.

But as the dust settles from the assassination attempt, it is unclear when Trump will announce who he has chosen as his running mate, or when he or she will speak.

Donald Trump Jr, the former president’s son, is expected to speak on Wednesday.

• Trump vice-president pick: Who will be the Republican’s running mate?

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, one of Trump’s fiercest rivals during the Republican primary, was originally expected to skip the RNC.

But after the assassination attempt, it was reported that she will now not only attend but speak at the conference.

Other speakers reportedly include Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia congresswoman, Arizona Senate contender Kari Lake, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Dana White, head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Teamsters union general president Sean O’Brien.

RNC co-chair Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of the former president, said celebrities will also be among the speakers.

Amber Rose, model, reality star and former girlfriend of Kanye West, is expected address the crowd.

But former stalwarts of the Republican party establishment, such George W Bush, Mike Pence and Mitt Romney, are not on the guest list.

Former First Lady Melania Trump, who rarely makes public appearances, will attend the convention, according to US media.

Mrs Trump did not attend the 27 June debate between President Joe Biden and Trump. Neither did she attend her husband’s hush-money trial earlier this year.

While the former first lady has held Republican fundraisers in the past year, this would be her first major appearance of this election cycle.

Monday’s theme will be “Make America Wealthy Once Again”, Tuesday will be “Make America Safe Again”, Wednesday is “Make America Strong Again” and Thursday is “Make America Great Once Again”.

The party platform this year sits at 16 pages.

Some themes of Project 2025, a much longer think-tank proposal, are also likely to come up during the convention.

Project 2025 – from which Trump has distanced himself – calls for expanding presidential powers, eliminating thousands of civil servant posts, tax cuts and dismantling the Department of Education.

• Project 2025: A wish list for a Trump presidency, explained

A demonstration, the Coalition to March on the RNC, is scheduled for noon local time on Monday.

Organisers say they expect 5,000 protesters, with backing from 125 liberal activist groups around the country.

Omar Flores, co-chair of the coalition, said on Friday: “Join us to fight against the Republicans’ racist and reactionary agenda, to stand with Palestine; to defend women’s, LGBTQ and reproductive rights; to defend and expand immigrant rights and to advocate for peace, justice and equity.”

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said the city would ensure public safety is tantamount this week.

“A national special security event is the highest designation that you can get for a security event of its size and magnitude in the United States,” Mayor Johnson said.

You can follow the latest news, including live pages, at bbc.com/news.

BBC World News and the BBC News Channel (available globally and in the UK, respectively) will broadcast Trump’s speech live on Thursday and bring you reaction and analysis afterwards.

And you can also watch on the RNC website.

The Israeli military says senior Hamas commander Rafa Salama was killed in an air strike in Gaza on Saturday. Hamas has not confirmed the report.

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said that Israel’s strike hit a camp for displaced people in a designated humanitarian zone in Khan Younis, killing at least 90 Palestinians and injuring 289 others.

Israel has said the strike was targeting senior Hamas leaders, but Hamas says the claim is “false” and serves to “justify” the attack.

Eyewitnesses said they saw at least five “big warplanes bombing in the middle of Al Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis”.

Most of the injured were sent to the nearby Nasser hospital.

However, according to officials and medics, the facility is “no longer able to function” as doctors are “overwhelmed with large numbers of casualties”.

Speaking to Newshour on the BBC World Service, Dr Mohammed Abu Rayya, who is at a hospital dealing with the aftermath of the attack, said the majority of those injured were 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.

The Israeli army said Salama, a commander of the Khan Younis Brigade, was one of the “masterminds” of the 7 October attack and a close associate of Mohammed Deif, the top commander of Hamas’s military wing.

A military spokesman said Salama’s death “significantly impedes Hamas’ military capabilities”.

It is not known whether Deif was killed. The Israeli army said he was also targeted in the strike.

Deif has been among Israel’s most wanted men for decades and is blamed by Israeli authorities for the killings of multiple civilians and soldiers.

In a joint statement reporting Salama’s “elimination”, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Israel Security Agency (ISA) said Salama joined Hamas in the early 1990s and was appointed to the position of commander of the Khan Younis Brigade under the command of Mohammed Sinwar.

A Hamas official, cited by Reuters, called the 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.

The Princess of Wales was given a standing ovation at Centre Court where she watched the Wimbledon men’s singles final between Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic with her daughter Princess Charlotte.

It was Catherine’s second public appearance following her cancer diagnosis and abdominal surgery earlier this year, and she was met with a standing ovation by spectators.

As patron of the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Catherine presented the singles trophy to Alcaraz.

Sunday’s head-to-head saw Alcaraz retain his title against seven-times Wimbledon winner Djokovic.

Before taking their seats, Catherine and Charlotte met some of Britain’s tennis players, including Emma Raducanu.

Ahead of the trophy presentation on Centre Court, Catherine also spoke to some of the ball boys and girls.

The princess commiserated and shook the hand of runner-up Djokovic, before presenting the trophy to Alcaraz, who won 6-2 6-2 7-6 (7-4).

In June, the princess made her return to public duties with an appearance at Trooping the Colour, waving and smiling from the Buckingham Palace balcony with her children.

At the time, Catherine addressed her cancer diagnosis in a statement saying that while she is making “good progress”, she was “not out of the woods yet”.

That was the most significant update on her health since revealing in March that she had cancer.

The princess said she has “good days and bad days”, and that her treatment will be ongoing for a few more months.

While Catherine settled in to watch the tennis final, the Prince of Wales was in Berlin, gearing up to support England in the Euro 2024 final against Spain.

US President Joe Biden has condemned the assassination attempt on his predecessor Donald Trump in a primetime address from the White House, telling Americans that US politics must never be a “killing field”.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, was wounded in the ear after a gunman opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One person was killed and two more were critically injured in the attack.

In the Oval Office address – just the third of his presidency – Mr Biden urged Americans to “take a step back” and warned that “political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated”.

“No matter how strong our convictions, we must never descend into violence,” Mr Biden said in remarks that lasted just under seven minutes.

His short, but forceful, address largely went off without a hitch, amid ongoing scrutiny following a number of high-profile verbal slips.

In his primetime address, the president called on Americans to come together and warned that increasing political polarisation meant November’s election would be “a time of testing”.

Mr Biden and Trump remain locked neck-and-neck in opinion polls ahead of the election.

Speaking from behind the Resolute Desk, Mr Biden listed off a growing number of violent political acts that have taken place in recent years.

“We cannot, must not, go down this road again. We’ve travelled it before in our history,” he said, citing shootings targeting congressional members in both parties, the assault on ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the 6 January riots.

“In America we resolve our differences at the ballot box,” he said. “At the ballot box. Not with bullets.”

Saturday’s attack left America reeling, as Trump was struck in the ear shortly after he began speaking in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In images beamed around the world, the 78-year-old could be seen with blood dripping from his ear and down his face, raising a defiant fist as Secret Service agents pulled him off stage and into a waiting car.

The gunman – identified by the FBI as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks – was shot dead at the scene by Secret Service agents. Law enforcement agents told the BBC’s US partner, CBS News, that they discovered explosive materials in his vehicle nearby and at his home.

Officials say they are still investigating what motivated the attack. Crooks was a registered Republican who had previously donated $15 to a liberal campaign group in 2021, according to media reports.

Classmates described him as a quiet young man who was bullied throughout school. A local gun club near his home in Pennsylvania confirmed he had been a member.

In his speech, Mr Biden said he was praying for the family of Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former firefighter who was shot and killed – along with two others who were critically injured – during the rally. The father-of-two was killed while shielding his family from bullets as they whizzed past Trump and struck members of the audience.

Mr Biden called Mr Comperatore a “hero” who was killed “while simply exercising his freedom to support a candidate of his choosing”.

• Follow live: Biden urges America to ‘lower temperature’ of politics after Trump shooting
• Tragedy at Trump rally upends election campaign – for now
• Videos show how gunman shot at Trump despite public alerting police

Allies of Trump’s have been quick to blame President Biden and his campaign for the attack, alleging that the top Democrat had sought to stoke fears about his rival’s return to office.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” JD Vance – a Republican senator who is under consideration for the vice-presidential nomination – wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

President Biden avoided addressing those criticisms in his address on Sunday night, though his campaign has temporarily pulled attack ads against Trump.

The former president himself has sought to strike a conciliatory tone since the shooting, thanking his Secret Service detail for their quick actions and calling on citizens to “stand united” and to “show our True Character as Americans”.

He arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday night for the Republican National Convention, where he will accept his party’s nomination for president.

Trump is also expected to announce his running-mate. US media has reported that just three men are still under consideration for the vice-presidential slot: Florida Senator Marco Rubio, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and Senator Vance of Ohio.

In a news conference earlier on Sunday, the Secret Service said they had no plans to impose additional security measures around the convention, saying they were satisfied with existing arrangements.

The agency has come under scrutiny as to how Crooks was able to get so close to Trump, despite members of the audience reportedly pointing him out to police.