The leadership of the Palestinian armed group Hamas has been left in “a state of shock” by the assassination of its political leader Ismail Haniyeh, top officials have told the BBC.

Hamas says Haniyeh, 62, was killed in an Israeli strike early on Wednesday morning in Iran. Widely considered the group’s overall leader, he has been a prominent member since the late 1980s.

As head of its political bureau based in Qatar, Haniyeh led Hamas’ outreach to regional governments and was central to its alliance with Tehran and its proxy groups across the Middle East.

He has been wanted by Israeli officials for months and the BBC understands that his protection team had recently vetoed a proposed trip to Lebanon amid security fears.

But he played little role in Hamas’ military operations and as such may have felt free to operate more openly than some of his colleagues – reflected by three trips he has taken to Iran since the 7 October attacks in Israel.

• Live updates on this story
• What does Haniyeh’s killing mean for Gaza ceasefire?

Questions over Haniyeh’s succession were already coming into view before his death. Hamas’ constitution prevents any political bureau chief serving more than two terms. A new candidate was set to be chosen in 2025.

But his death could now expedite an internal battle between competing wings of the movement.

Haniyeh himself was widely viewed by Arab diplomats as a pragmatic figure compared to others at the top of Hamas – driving the group’s political outreach to regional governments as opposed to the militant options favoured by Mohammed Deif and other leaders. Deif leads the military wing of Hamas. Earlier this month Israel said it had targeted Deif in deadly air strikes on Gaza but there has been no confirmation he was killed.

One Hamas official told the BBC: “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is an ideology. And the killing of the leader will not change Hamas, and will not make Hamas surrender or make any more concessions.”

It suggests an attempt by some leaders to dismiss the idea of any tension within the movement.

But in truth, the looming succession process could be lengthy and chaotic – defined by rivalries between those keen to reach a negotiated settlement to the war and extremist elements more closely allied with Iran.

CIA Director Bill Burns said recently that tensions have emerged among some senior Hamas commanders who have been urging the group’s leadership to show more flexibility in negotiations and to accept a hostage-ceasefire deal.

However, anger over the death of Haniyeh – and the January assassination of his deputy Saleh al-Arouri – likely puts the hardliners in pole position.

In summer 2023, one Hamas official identified Yahya Sinwar and al-Arouri as the two leading candidates to replace Haniyeh.

On Wednesday, Hamas officials told the BBC that there were now three likely candidates to put their names forward in the coming days.

The most likely contender is Sinwar. He is the group’s head in the Gaza Strip and is believed to be the mastermind behind the 7 October attacks in Israel that killed 1,200 people and sparked the ongoing conflict.

Sinwar is the key decision maker on how Hamas prosecutes the ongoing conflict and is said to be in hiding in Hamas’ tunnel network beneath Gaza.

Khaled Meshaal is another possible candidate. He is widely seen a less militant candidate than Sinwar and has previously served as chief of the political bureau. However, he has difficult relations with Iran – now the key ally and supplier of Hamas’ military wing.

During the height of the Syrian civil war, Meshaal – then living in Damascus – refused to support the Iranian-backed President Bashar al-Assad and his regime. The failure forced Hamas to relocate their political bureau to Qatar.

The final potential candidate is Zaher Jabareen, who is responsible for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. He could play a key role in ongoing negotiations on prisoner swaps with Israel.

• Who are the most prominent leaders in Hamas?

Either way, the contest is almost certain to be drawn out.

Under normal circumstances, Hamas’ political bureau is chosen by the Shura Council, whose members are elected by local council groups. The body then elects the 15-person political bureau, who choose a leader.

But members of the political bureau are scattered across the Middle East with representatives living in exile in Turkey and Qatar, making it difficult to assemble them at short notice.

Many are also on Israeli wanted lists – which may make some reluctant to travel.

Other questions continue to swirl over Hamas’ response to Haniyeh’s death.

In 2012, the death of the deputy lead of Hamas’ military wing, Ahmed al-Jaabari, saw Hamas respond with missile fire.

So how Hamas responds to Haniyeh’s death could indicate how much damage has been done to its military infrastructure after 10 months of war.

One Palestinian official also observed that his death could have a profound impact on the ongoing peace negotiations with Israel.

Haniyeh, as the acceptable face of Hamas to some in the region, was viewed as the most likely person to be able to broker a deal due to his good relations with regional diplomats.

A renowned NGO that was invited by Venezuelan officials to monitor Sunday’s presidential poll has said the election “cannot be considered democratic”.

The US-based Carter Center deployed 17 experts and observers to Venezuela after being asked to monitor the election by the National Electoral Council (CNE).

On Monday, the CNE – which is dominated by government allies – declared President Nicolás Maduro the winner, but the result has been disputed by the opposition which says voting tallies show its candidate, Edmundo González, has won by a wide margin.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the Carter Center said that it could not “verify or corroborate the results of the election declared by CNE”.

The Carter Center also said that the CNE’s failure to announce the detailed results by polling station “constitutes a serious breach of electoral principles”.

It added that the CNE had “demonstrated a clear bias in favour of the incumbent [President Nicolás Maduro]” and accused the CNE of a “complete lack of transparency in announcing the results”.

With its statement, the Carter Center has joined a long list of countries and organisations pressuring the CNE to release detailed voting data at the polling station level, among them the US, Brazil and the EU.

However, the statement by the Carter Center is likely to sting the Maduro government because its observers had been complimentary about the Venezuelan electoral system in the past.

President Maduro has often quoted a remark by the Carter Center’s founder, former US President Jimmy Carter, who in 2012 said that “of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world”.

The disputed result announced by the CNE has trigged a wave of protests in Venezuela with thousands taking to the streets for a second day on Tuesday.

NGOs say there have been at least 11 deaths in protest-related violence and that dozens more have been injured.

Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino read out a statement on Tuesday branding the protests “a coup” which he said the armed forces would defeat.

More than 700 people have been detained, according to Venezuela’s attorney general, who also said that two members of the security forces had died in the protests.

The opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has urged her supporters to remain peaceful even if provoked by the government and its allies.

On Tuesday, a close ally of President Maduro, National Assembly leader Jorge Rodríguez, called for the arrest of Ms Machado and Mr González, accusing them of leading a “fascist conspiracy”.

The Costa Rican foreign minister later offered Ms Machado and Mr González political asylum, saying that his government “had been informed of arrest warrants” against the two.

Ms Machado thanked the Costa Rican government but said that it was her “responsibility to continue this struggle alongside the people”.

This isn’t the retirement that Mary had dreamed of.

The former midwife spent years living on a cattle station with her husband on the north-western edge of Australia – outside her window, the vast and ruggedly beautiful Kimberley region.

Now, though, the frail 71-year-old spends most of her days and nights in her battered car. Her current view is the public toilet block of a Perth shopping centre.

Mary is not her real name. She does not want people she knows to find out she is living like this.

She is one of the roughly 122,000 people who are homeless in Australia on any given night, according to data from the country’s bureau of statistics.

A recent government report says that 40% of renters on low income are now at risk of joining that cohort.

That’s what happened to Mary. Pushed out of her flat last year when her landlord opted to lease it for short-term stays, she couldn’t find anywhere affordable on her state pension.

Her husband can’t help – he’s in a care home with Alzheimer’s disease.

“He’d be horrified [if he knew], absolutely mortified,” she says.

So now Mary’s 4×4 is full to the brim with her belongings. A walking frame lies in the back, along with piles of clothes. On the passenger seat sits a tin of rice pudding.

“That’s my evening meal, every night without fail,” she says, picking it up, her hands shaking.

She sometimes gets a bed in a shelter, but most nights, Mary settles down in a part of the city where more police are around. She explains she has been assaulted four times and does not want to take any risks.

Every so often, Mary coughs – the after-effects of a recent bout of pneumonia she suffered after getting caught in a rainstorm. The car battery died when the windows were down, and she had no money to fix it.

“It seems that the moment people know you’re homeless… you become what I call a non-person,” she says. “You no longer have any value in people’s lives.”

Homelessness services around Australia have reported a jump in demand amid a national housing crisis – with women and children the clear majority of those needing help. Indigenous Australians are over-represented too.

In recent years, record house prices, underinvestment in social housing, a general shortage of homes and drastically climbing rents, have left much of the nation’s growing population struggling to find a place to live.

Rents have risen the fastest in Perth – up an average of 20% this past year alone. In the few days we were in the city, everyone had a story to share.

Hailey Hawkins tells me she and her daughter Tacisha have been couch-surfing and living in tents for nearly four years, most of Tacisha’s life. They are eligible for social housing – but waiting lists are years-long.

“One week, I’ll have enough money to have decent enough accommodation plus be able to feed both myself and my daughter,” she says, struggling to hold back tears.

“Otherwise, it’s asking money to friends, family or pretty much anyone really that is willing to help.”

Michael Piu, head of St Patrick’s Community Support Centre, says they’re seeing people from all walks of life – young and old, working families and individuals alike – come through the doors.

“A single trigger can push people into homelessness, and there really are very few options for them,” he says.

“They don’t know where to start.”

The housing crisis remains a national talking point, and it is no different inside the country’s parliaments.

Wilson Tucker, a member of the Western Australia state parliament, recently made headlines for being a “homeless” politician – although he prefers the word nomadic. He was evicted and, despite a salary almost twice the national average, could not find anywhere else to live.

But what Mr Tucker didn’t initially mention was that he is also a landlord. He says he bought the home with tenants already living there, and didn’t want to turf them out in what he calls a “red hot” property market.

So now, when parliament sits, Mr Tucker stays in hotels. The rest of the time he is on the road in his 4×4 and roof tent.

“But there’s a lot of people out there that don’t have that privilege, and they’re resigned to fight over this handful of properties,” he tells the BBC.

Housing has also been on the agenda in the federal parliament, where MPs have been considering making it a legally protected human right.

Two independent parliamentarians introduced a bill on the issue off the back of advocacy by the Australian Human Rights Commission, but without government support it is unlikely to pass.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced in this year’s budget A$6.2bn ($4.1bn; £3.3bn) to speed up the construction of new houses, provide rent subsidies, and increase the pool of social and affordable housing.

States and territories also have a slew of initiatives they hope will ease the strain.

But homelessness charities are crying out for extra support to keep up with the growing demand, and advocates say more urgent reform – like scrapping lucrative tax concessions for investors or increasing protections for renters – is needed.

There has been criticism heaped on landlords too for hiking rents at a time when people are squeezed – and discussions about limiting increases and narrowing the reasons for which a landlord can evict a tenant.

But the property industry says landlords are hurting too.

In May 2022, interest rates began rising faster than at any time in Australia’s history – with 13 increases over 18 months.

“Most people only own one investment property and they’ve had their mortgage repayments [on those properties] go up by 50% as well,” says Cath Hart, chief executive of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia.

She says the conditions are tough enough already, and the pandemic showed that measures like rent increase caps and eviction moratoriums only push landlords out of the long-term rental market.

“What we saw during Covid… was that 20,000 fewer properties were available to rent as investors just went ‘You know what? It’s too hard.’”

In the meantime, every night different charities take turns offering help to those who want it.

As evening falls and commuters exit their shiny office buildings in the centre of Perth, crowds of people with nowhere to go gather in a square by the railway tracks.

With the Australian winter now kicking in, it is the clothes donations that are causing the biggest flurry. Supermarkets donate food, there is a laundry service, a mobile doctor surgery and a hairdresser.

Also out are street chaplains, providing meals.

Michelle Rumbold has joined them to help. Until a few months ago, she was the one receiving the handouts. A registered nurse, she was left with nothing after she got evicted and crashed her car.

“I ended up losing my job purely because I didn’t have accommodation and I didn’t have a car,” Michelle says.

“I think it took a while for people to actually realise I was homeless, because I didn’t look homeless. Gradually, over time, you become so used to the street that you lose yourself.”

Michelle managed to get transitional housing and she’s now back on her feet, working in a GP’s surgery. But she still likes to come back here and help.

“It’s hard to leave this place once you’ve been here,” she says. “It’s a really odd thing to say but people become your family here.”

But for every Michelle, there are plenty more like Mary, still struggling.

For Mary, it’s the loneliness that hits her the most.

“You’ve got no TV, no neighbours to say hi to,” she says.

“People often just give you the side eye and think ‘Oh God, not another one’ and walk away.”

A loud noise shook Ajay Ghosh awake at his home in the southern Indian state of Kerala in the early hours of Tuesday.

At first, the salesman, who lives in Wayanad district’s Mundakkai village, did not quite understand what caused the sound.

But when he looked out and saw an enormous amount of mud flowing down from a hill above, he knew what was coming.

At least 166 people have been killed and 192 people are still missing in the massive landslides that hit Mundakkai and the neighbouring Chooralmala area that night.

The disaster, which is the worst the state has seen since floods in 2018, has left behind a trail of destruction in its wake.

• India landslides kill 120 and trap dozens

Pictures show uprooted trees, flattened houses and broken bridges submerged in muddied waters.

“My family survived but 40 people died near my house, not even a mile away,” Mr Ghosh said.

The intensity of the landslide was so high that it split the Iruvanipuzha river, which flows through the area, into two.

On Tuesday, authorities launched a massive rescue operation in the area to look for possible survivors. But their efforts have been complicated by heavy rains.

A hilly region known for its rugged terrain and stunning vistas, Wayanad is a popular tourist destination which attracts more than 100,000 visitors every year. The district is mainly inhabited by indigenous tribes and is dotted with picturesque tea and cardamom estates.

A part of the ecologically sensitive Western Ghats – a mountain range that runs along the western coast of India – the district is not new to landslides.

• Scores still missing as India landslides kill 158

In fact, a 2011 report submitted by a panel of experts, led by ecologist Madhav Gadgil, had classified the entire Wayanad region as “fragile, medium fragile and less fragile area”.

The report also recommended a ban on all ” environmentally-hazardous” human activities along the Western Ghats, including in Wayanad.

The recommendations have since been continuously opposed by all political parties and governments of Kerala, who maintain that it would stall development in the area.

It was also opposed by the neighbouring state of Karnataka, which argued that it would impact livelihoods of local people.

The indecision on the issue has meant that environmentally-hazardous activities like deforestation, mining and building construction have continued in the region.

Experts say excessive rainfall in Wayanad this season – about 60-70% higher than usual – has added to the scale of the disaster.

“This time, the accumulated heavy rainfall of the last two weeks was followed with this extreme category rainfall of Tuesday, causing massive flooding,” said Abhilash S, director of the department of atmospheric sciences in Cochin University of Science and Technology.

“That was the primary triggering factor,” he added.

Others point out that rapid urbanisation and increasing mining activities in surrounding areas have made the region even more fragile.

In 2019, 17 people died in a landslide that struck Puthumala, 10km (six miles) away from Tuesday’s disaster. A report by the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) had then pointed out that the landslide was caused by rock mining and quarrying in the region.

“This entire area has very steep slopes. The only thing that holds it together is vegetation,” said TV Sajeev, the chief scientist of KFRI.

But in recent years, the Kerala government has allowed certain non-plantation activities in this region. “As a result, plantation owners have shifted to tourism and built mega structures for which the ground had to be levelled, making it even more fragile,” Mr Sajeev added.

The scientist says the government should go back to the Gadgil report that said fragile land must be managed in a different way.

“The way out is to make sure that our ecological systems are really healthy. If they are healthy, they can handle any kind of climate change,” he said.

Huw Edwards, once the BBC’s most senior news presenter, has pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children.

He admitted having 41 indecent images of children, which had been sent to him by a convicted paedophile on WhatsApp, Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard.

They included seven category A images, the most serious classification – two of which showed a child aged between about seven and nine.

Until last year, Edwards was one of the main presenters on BBC One’s News at Ten and often fronted coverage of major national events.

• Huw Edwards’ broadcasting career ends in disgrace

the BBC said it was “shocked to hear the details which have emerged in court today”.

“There can be no place for such abhorrent behaviour and our thoughts are with all those affected,” it added.

The BBC also said it had been “made aware in confidence that he had been arrested on suspicion of serious offences and released on bail” last November.

He had already been suspended at that point but remained employed on full pay until he left on “medical advice” in April. He was charged last month.

Edwards could face a jail sentence, and will next appear in court on 16 September.

Edwards was flanked by police officers and surrounded by photographers as he entered and left the court on Wednesday.

He was expressionless outside court and inside the hearing, which lasted for less than half an hour.

As the charges were read to him, he replied “guilty” three times, quietly and calmly.

The court heard he had been involved in online chat on WhatsApp from December 2020 with an adult man, who sent him 377 sexual images, of which 41 were indecent images of children.

Under the law, images can mean both video clips and still pictures. The Crown Prosecution Service said most of the category A images were estimated to show children aged between 13 and 15. Two clips showed a child aged about seven to nine.

Category A images show serious abuse including penetrative sexual activity.

He also had 12 category B pictures, which involve non-penetrative sexual activity, and 22 photographs in category C, which covers other indecent images. The category B and C pictures showed children aged between 12 to 15.

Police said officers started investigating Edwards after seizing a phone as part of an unrelated probe, which revealed his participation in a WhatsApp conversation.

The other man was a 25-year-old paedophile called Alex Williams, who was sentenced to a suspended 12-month jail sentence at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court in Wales on 15 March.

On 2 February 2021, Williams asked whether what he was sending was too young, to which Edwards asked him not to send any underage images, the court heard.

The final indecent image was sent in August 2021 – a category A film featuring a young boy.

Williams told Edwards the boy was quite young looking, and that he had more images which were illegal, the court was told.

Edwards told him not to send any illegal images.

No more were sent, and the pair continued to exchange legal pornographic images until April 2022.

Edwards’s barrister Philip Evans KC told the court: “There’s no suggestion in this case that Mr Edwards has… in the traditional sense of the word, created any image of any sort.”

He added that Edwards “did not keep any images, did not send any to anyone else and did not and has not sought similar images from anywhere else”.

Mr Evans also said the former broadcaster had experienced “both mental and physical” health issues.

The barrister told the court his client “was not just of good character, but of exceptional character”.

Edwards has not been on air since last July following high-profile reports in the Sun newspaper claiming he paid a young person for sexually explicit images.

The Metropolitan Police said they found no evidence of criminal behaviour in relation to those allegations, and that the current case was separate.

“These allegations did not form part of the matter which was considered by police in July 2023. They were investigated separately as a standalone case,” a police spokesperson said.

Edwards was suspended by the BBC last July and executives began an internal investigation, which has not revealed its conclusions. He resigned in April.

Edwards received between £475,000-£479,999 between April 2023 and April 2024, an increase of £40,000 on the previous year.

Edwards pleaded guilty to three charges of making indecent photographs of a child. In the law, a photograph can also mean video footage.

“Making” indecent images can have a wide legal definition, and covers more than simply taking or filming the original picture or clip.

The Crown Prosecution Service says it can include opening an email attachment containing an image; downloading an image from a website to a screen; storing an image on a computer; accessing a pornographic website in which an images appears in an automatic “pop-up” window; receiving an image via social media, even if unsolicited and even if part of a group; or live-streaming images of children.

A court must also decide whether an offence falls into the category of possession, distribution or production.

According to the Sentencing Council, creating the original image counts as production – the more serious of the three categories. It adds that “making an image by simple downloading should be treated as possession for the purposes of sentencing”.

In such cases, sentences can range from six months to three years in prison. However, a community order with a sex offender treatment programme requirement can be an alternative to jail time “where there is a sufficient prospect of rehabilitation”.

In a statement after Wednesday’s hearing, Claire Brinton of the CPS said: “Accessing indecent images of underage people perpetuates the sexual exploitation of children, which has deep, long-lasting trauma on these victims.

“The CPS and the Metropolitan Police were able to prove that Edwards was receiving illegal material involving children via WhatsApp.”

Children’s charity the NSPCC said: “Online child sexual abuse offences can have a devastating impact on victims and we should be in no doubt about the seriousness of Edwards’ crimes.”

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) also said: “This is criminal material, including images depicting the most extreme category of sexual abuse, which have real and lasting effects on victims.”

The organisers of a music festival in Kuala Lumpur are suing British band The 1975 for breach of contract and damages after its singer Matty Healy attacked Malaysia’s anti-LGBT laws, leading to the event being cancelled.

During the band’s headline performance last July, Healy also addressed the audience in a profanity-laden speech and kissed a fellow band member.

The company behind the Good Vibes Festival is seeking £1.9m ($2.4m) in compensation in the UK’s High Court over a violation of performance rules.

Homosexual acts are illegal in Malaysia and punishable by 20 years in prison. The festival does not allow talking about politics and religion, swearing, smoking or drinking alcohol on stage.

The BBC contacted the band who said “they have nothing to add at this time”.

In a court filing, the festival organisers said The 1975 and its management team were aware of its rules for performers.

Future Sound Asia said the band had performed at the same festival in 2016, and were given multiple reminders of the rules ahead of its performance last July.

The lawsuit alleges that the band decided to “act in a way that was intended to breach guidelines”.

It cited Healy’s “provocative speech” and “long pretend passionate embrace” with bassist Ross MacDonald, that it said had “the intention of causing offence and breaching the regulations”.

It added that the band also smuggled a bottle of wine on stage to give Healy “easy access” to it.

Future Sound Asia also cited guidelines by the Malaysia Central Agency for the Application for Foreign Filming and Performance by Foreign Artistes, which ban “kissing, kissing a member of the audience or carrying out such actions among themselves”.

The event in Kuala Lumpur was cancelled the day after the band’s performance. Malaysia’s communications ministry said it took an “unwavering stance against any parties that challenge, ridicule or contravene Malaysian laws”.

Last August the organisers threatened the band with legal action and demanded they acknowledge their liability and compensate the organisers for damages incurred.

Healy’s performance was also criticised by members of the country’s LGBT community who said the act of “performative activism” would make their lives harder.

The 35-year-old singer subsequently defended his actions.

“The 1975 did not waltz [into] Malaysia unannounced, they were invited to headline a festival by a government who had full knowledge of the band with its well-publicised political views and its routine stage show,” he said on stage in Dallas last October.

“Me kissing Ross was not a stunt simply meant to provoke the government,” he continued. “It was an ongoing part of the 1975 stage show, which had been performed many times prior.

“To eliminate any routine part of the show in an effort to appease the Malaysian authorities’ bigoted views of LGBTQ people would be a passive endorsement of those politics.”

The band were sued in a separate class action by several musicians and vendors who said they suffered a loss of earnings as a result of the second and third days of the festival being cancelled.

Babies with peanut allergies in Australia will be offered treatment to build immunity to the potentially life-threatening condition, under a world-first programme.

Supervised by select paediatric hospitals, eligible babies will be given gradually increasing doses of peanut powder each day for at least two years, to reduce sensitivity.

Oral immunotherapy has been available in clinical trials and some specialist allergy centres around the globe, but this is the first time it has ever been adopted as a national model of care for peanut allergies.

Australia is often dubbed the “allergy capital of the world”, with one in 10 infants diagnosed with food sensitivities.

Peanut allergy affects about 3% of Australians at 12 months old and – unlike other food allergies – few children outgrow it, making it the most common food allergy among school-aged children.

“[This] might be the game changer we have all wanted to stop this terrible allergy in its tracks,” Assistant Minister for Health Ged Kearney said.

The free programme is only available to children under 12 months who have already been diagnosed with a peanut allergy and are receiving care at one of ten participating hospitals across the country.

The dosing schedule will be carefully calculated for each child, until they reach a “maintenance dose” which they will remain on for two years, programme lead Tim Brettig told the BBC.

Some children may experience side effects including an allergic reaction, but for most children in this age group they are mild and do not require treatment, he said.

The aim is to raise their tolerance threshold and lower the risk – and anxiety – posed by exposure to peanuts, with results measured by a food allergy test at the end of the treatment.

“In some cases, [the threshold] might be so high that they can eat peanut in their diet freely, for others it might raise it to a level where accidental exposures wouldn’t result in an allergic reaction.”

“Ultimately, we want to change the trajectory of allergic disease in Australia so that more children can go to school without the risk of a life-threatening peanut reaction,” said Professor Kirsten Perrett, Director of the National Allergy Centre of Excellence (NACE).

NACE will evaluate the programme for both effectiveness and safety with the hope of extending it to more hospitals, and potentially other food allergies.

However, doctors have stressed that families should not try oral immunotherapy at home unsupervised.

“It’s definitely not a programme for everybody,” Dr Brettig said.

Dozens of staff at the Singapore office of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, have been hospitalised in an apparent food poisoning outbreak.

Health and food safety officials in the city state are investigating the incident, which left 60 people with symptoms of gastroenteritis on Tuesday. Fifty-seven of them were treated in hospital.

ByteDance has also said it is looking into what caused its employees to fall ill.

The BBC understands that no food is prepared or cooked at the ByteDance offices and that it uses third party caterers to supply food.

Seventeen ambulances were sent to the building in Singapore’s business district to treat those who had fallen ill, according to local media reports.

“We take the health and safety of our employees very seriously and have taken immediate steps to support all affected employees, including working with emergency services to provide care,” a ByteDance spokesperson told the BBC.

“We are investigating the matter and are working with the relevant authorities on this.”

“Food operators must play their part by adhering to good food safety practices” said the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) in a joint statement with the city-state’s Ministry of Health.

“SFA will not hesitate to take enforcement action against errant food operators,” the statement added.

Founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneurs, ByteDance had its first major success with short video app Douyin in China. A year later, it launched TikTok, an international version of Douyin.

TikTok, which is not available in China, has more than a billion active users around the world.

It is now run by a limited liability company based in Singapore and Los Angeles but is essentially owned by ByteDance.

Japan’s central bank has raised the cost of borrowing for only the second time in 17 years as it tries to normalise monetary policy in the world’s fourth largest economy.

The Bank of Japan (BoJ) increased its key interest rate to “around 0.25%” from the previous range of 0% to 0.1%.

It also outlined a plan to unwind its massive bond buying programme as it eases back from a decade of stimulus measures.

The move comes hours before the US Federal Reserve is set to announce its latest interest rate decision, while an announcement is also expected from the Bank of England on Thursday.

“The rate hike was widely expected after domestic media reported the decision ahead of time on Tuesday night,” said Stefan Angrick, a senior economist at Moody’s Analytics.

“But the move sits uncomfortably with a poor run of economic data and lack of demand-driven inflation.”

Official figures showed Japan’s economy shrank by an annualised 2.9% in January to March, while consumer prices rose by a less-than-expected 2.6% in June from a year earlier.

“Despite sluggish consumer spending, monetary officials sent a decisive signal by raising interest rates and allowing for more gradual balance sheet reduction,” said Frederic Neumann, Chief Asia Economist at HSBC.

“Barring major disruptions, the BoJ is on course to tighten further, with another interest hike by the start of next year,” he added.

In March, the BoJ raised borrowing costs for the first time since 2007.

It meant that there were no longer any countries in the world left with negative interest rates.

In 2016, the BoJ cut its main interest rate below zero in an attempt to stimulate the country’s stagnating economy.

When negative rates are in force people have to pay to deposit money in a bank. They have been used by several countries as a way of encouraging people to spend their money rather than putting it in a bank.

During the pandemic, central banks around the world slashed interest rates as they attempted to counteract the negative impact of border closures and lockdowns.

At the time some countries, including Switzerland and Denmark, as well as the European Central Bank, introduced negative interest rates.

Since then central banks around the world, like the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, have raised interest rates to curb soaring prices.

Ukraine says it has repelled “one of the most massive” attacks launched by Russia since the start of the war.

Air defence systems shot down 89 Iranian-made explosive drones and another missile overnight, the Ukrainian air force said on Wednesday.

The capital Kyiv was the main target of the attack. Buildings in the region were damaged by falling debris but there were no reports of casualties.

The attack comes more than 29 months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Almost daily bombardments have put the country’s air defences under considerable strain.

Russia insists it is targeting military and energy sites, but strikes on residential areas are frequent.

• Drones open new battlefront in Ukraine
• Tracking the war with Russia

Early on Wednesday the air force said it had “withstood and repelled a massive attack” by Iranian-made Shahed drones.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later said on Telegram: “Ukrainians can fully protect their skies from Russian strikes when they have sufficient supplies.”

He added: “The same level of defence is needed against Russian missiles and the occupier’s combat aircraft.”

Mr Zelensky repeated calls for allies to speed up deliveries of the air defence systems Ukraine relies on, particularly US-made Patriots.

“We need sufficiently courageous decisions from our partners – enough air defence systems, enough range,” he said.

Ukraine continues to strike back. Its military said on Wednesday that it had hit a weapons depot in the Russian region of Kursk.

The local governor said a “facility” had been hit overnight, causing a fire, but did not provide further detail.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s slow-moving advance into Ukrainian territory is grinding on.

Russian forces made small but incremental gains in July, reportedly capturing eight villages in north-east, eastern and southern Ukraine in July.

These were said to include Pishchane Nizhne in the Karkhiv region, Vovche, Ivano-Daryivka and Pivdenne in Donetsk, as well as Rozivka near Zaporizhzhia.

Walk through the streets of Shanghai and its café culture is unmissable. There are some areas where you won’t be able to turn without passing yet another new little café.

China’s financial capital now has so many coffee shops that the government claims it has the most of any city in the world.

The city’s café culture has been developing for years, but the post-Covid opening up has really given it a boost, as locals embrace outdoor living, looking for places to meet their friends and family.

However, with so many new establishments, the competition for customers has become fierce. Most owners we spoke to don’t think all these businesses can survive.

Shanghai officials say there are “more than 8,000 cafes in the city”. And a report by the Shanghai International Coffee Culture Festival, recorded 9,553 coffee shops at the end of 2023.

And it’s not just the number of outlets that sets Shanghai apart.

Where other Chinese cities are still dominated by big coffee chains like Starbucks and its local rival Luckin, Shanghai’s café explosion is largely fuelled by niche, independent outlets, like Hidden Track.

Its owner Dong Xiaoli says she had “no choice” but to dive head first into the industry because she was so passionate about coffee.

But it hasn’t been easy.

Asked what advice she would give someone considering following in her footsteps, she laughs and replies: “I’d say don’t do it.”

“The investment versus return is awful. You need to buy expensive machines and put a lot of money into decorating. You’re earning very small amounts of money compared to other industries.”

To succeed in this very crowded market, having a distinct vibe has become as important as anything else in attracting customers.

Hidden Track has gone for a limited menu and a simple, minimalist vibe which opens onto the street in a welcoming fashion.

Being seen at a café here is considered hip and urbane, and that has helped drive young customers through the doors. Cafes have become a social occasion with many young people to get dressed up and meet for coffee and a chat.

Shanghai’s residents who have long seen themselves as the inheritors of an outward-looking, cosmopolitan attitude which permeated Shanghai in the early decades of the 20th century, are also proud of their café culture.

“Shanghai has long been an international trading city: we started drinking coffee a long time ago. Smaller cities will also gradually get different types of cafes,” says one man sitting at a café.

A woman nearby agrees that the local café culture is now solidly established. Asked how many cups of coffee she drinks a day, she laughs out loud and replies: “As many as I like.”

And as the cafes increase, so does the appetite for experimentation.

The coffee converts of this tea-drinking giant are keen to try new flavours and new brews.

Yuan Jingfeng, who runs the R1070 café, says all his beans come from Japan.

“My costs are very very high. My imported beans include American and Italian styles which are all imported from Japan in their original packaging,” he says.

“Wholesale prices have gone up dramatically over the past few years. The wars in Yemen and Ethiopia have both had an impact. The good beans are getting fewer while the number of coffee drinkers keeps increasing.”

But, so far, he says he has resisted passing on the increased costs to his growing base of coffee drinkers.

AC café is owned by deaf people and employs deaf baristas.

Yang Yanfang – who interprets at AC for those who can’t speak with their hands – says that, after the pandemic, “friends are really keen to meet up for a coffee or a drink and Shanghai has become a city with a really strong coffee culture.”

“I can skip meals, but I can’t skip my coffee,” she adds.

And this is not the only café of its kind.

Another popular café, which is operated by blind staff, serves coffee through a hole in the wall, from someone wearing a monkey suit arm, to customers waiting in the street.

Along one stretch of road, we counted 18 cafes within only a couple of hundred metres. All of them had plenty of customers inside.

Owners are hoping this will not be just a passing fad.

According to some estimates, China’s coffee market was valued at more than 260 billion yuan (US$35bn) last year. It’s been projected that it could increase by another hundred billion (US$13bn).

The country’s branded coffee shop market grew by 58% last year, according to the World Coffee Portal.

With overheads so high in Shanghai, many coffee shops can’t afford to have their space under-utilised at night. So, when the sun goes down, they are turning their cafes into bars, sometimes with live music.

The owner of the Flower Café and Bar, Wang Xi, has a prime spot with a clear view of the city. His margins are very tight but, at the moment, his venture is surviving.

“I’m a quite optimistic,” he says. “I hope the Chinese economy will quickly return to pre-pandemic levels. If the economy flows again, everyone will make a profit.”

China’s economy may be facing some significant hurdles but, as Wang Xi speaks, he looks out across the customers sitting at little tables and chairs staring down Suzhou Creek towards a gleaming Shanghai skyline and – on this night – it’s hard not to share his optimism.

An Indian teenager is now among a handful of people in the world to survive a rare brain-eating amoeba, partly due to his father coming across a public awareness campaign on social media.

Afnan Jasim, 14, is thought to have become infected in June after he went for a swim in a local pond in the southern state of Kerala.

His doctor said that the amoeba – called Naegleria fowleri – likely entered his body from the water that had been contaminated by it.

Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM), the disease caused by the amoeba, has a mortality rate of 97%.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1971 and 2023, just eight other people have survived the disease across four countries – Australia, US, Mexico and Pakistan.

In all the cases, the infection was diagnosed between nine hours and five days after the symptoms appeared – which played a crucial role in their recovery.

Medical experts say that timely treatment is key to curing the disease. Symptoms of PAM include headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, disorientation, a stiff neck, a loss of balance, seizures and/or hallucinations.

Afnan began experiencing the symptoms five days after he had gone for a swim in a local pond in Kozhikode district. He developed seizures and began complaining of severe headaches.

His parents took him to the doctor, but Afnan did not improve.

Luckily, his father MK Siddiqui, 46, had the presence of mind to connect his son’s symptoms with something he had read on social media.

Mr Siddiqui, who is a dairy farmer, said he was reading about the effects of the Nipah virus – a boy recently died of it in Kerala – on social media when he chanced upon information about the deadly brain-eating amoeba.

“I read something about seizures being caused by an infection. As soon as Afnan developed seizures, I rushed him to the local hospital,” Mr Siddiqui said.

When the seizures didn’t stop, he took his son to another hospital, but this one didn’t have a neurologist.

Finally, they went to the Baby Memorial Hospital in Kozhikode, where the boy was treated by Dr Abdul Rauf, a consultant intensive care paediatrician.

“The disease was diagnosed within 24 hours of the onset of symptoms,” Dr Rauf told the BBC.

Dr Rauf credits Mr Siddiqui with informing doctors about Afnan’s swim in the local pond and his subsequent symptoms, which helped them diagnose the disease in time.

The amoeba is known to enter the human body through nasal passages and it travels through the cribriform plate – which is located at the base of the skull and transmits olfactory nerves to enable the sense of smell – to reach the brain.

“The parasite then releases different chemicals and destroys the brain,” says Dr Rauf.

Most patients die because of intracranial pressure [exercised by fluids inside the skull and on the brain tissue].

He added that the amoeba was found in freshwater lakes, particularly in water that was warm.

“People should not jump or dive into water. That is a sure way for the amoeba to enter the body. If the water is contaminated, the amoeba enters through your nose,” he says.

The best thing to do, he says, is to avoid contaminated water bodies. Even in swimming pools, people are advised to keep their mouths above the water level.

“Chlorination of water resources is very important,” Dr Rauf adds.

A research paper published in Karnataka state has also reported cases of infants locally and in places like Nigeria contracting the infection from bathwater.

Since 1965, some 400 cases of PAM have been reported around the world, while India has had fewer than 30 cases so far.

“Kerala reported a PAM case in 2018 and 2020,” the doctor said.

Just this year, six cases have been recorded in Kerala. Of these, three have died and one is in a critical condition. While Afnan has been discharged, the sixth person has also responded to treatment and is recovering.

“After two deaths at our hospital, we informed the government as it was a public health issue and an awareness campaign was launched,” Dr Rauf said. It was this awareness campaign that Mr Siddiqui had come across on social media.

Doctors conducted tests on Afnan which helped detect the presence of the amoeba in the boy’s cerebrospinal fluid – which is found in the brain and spinal cord – and then administered a combination of antimicrobial drugs by injecting them into his spine.

The treatment also included administering miltefosine – a drug that the state government imported from Germany.

“This drug is used for rare diseases in India but it is not very costly,” Dr Rauf said.

“On the first day, the patient was not very conscious due to the seizures. But within three days, Afnan’s condition started improving,” he added.

A week later, doctors repeated the tests and found the amoeba was no longer present in his body. But he will continue taking medicines for a month, after which he plans to resume his studies.

The experience has left a profound impact on Afnan, who says he now wants to do a degree in nursing.

“He told the doctor that nurses work so hard for the patients,” Mr Siddiqui says.

There have been protests across Venezuela following the announcement on Monday of the disputed result of the presidential election.

The National Electoral Council (CNE) – which is dominated by government allies – declared Nicolás Maduro the winner.

The CNE’s announcement has been widely decried as fraudulent both inside and outside Venezuela with the Carter Center demanding the CNE publish the detailed voting tallies.

The opposition says the tallies it has had access to – which it has made public – show that its candidate, Edmundo González, is the clear winner.

Here we look at some of the key moments which have led to thousands of Venezuelans taking to the streets in protest.

Even before polling stations opened at 06:00 local time on Sunday, long lines formed at many locations with some voters queueing overnight.

There were reports of some voters being blocked from accessing their polling stations, while at others there were long delays.

Some of those keen to cast their ballot joined in a chorus of “We want to vote”.

Many of the 7.8m Venezuelans who have fled their country’s economic and political crisis were not able to cast their votes after they encountered problems adding their names to the electoral register.

The hurdles they faced included strict requirements such as having to provide proof of legal residence in the host country and providing a valid identity card as passports were not accepted as a form of identification.

As identity cards are not issued by Venezuelan consulates abroad, this meant many Venezuelans whose IDs had expired could not vote.

Many also reported being left off the list of voters altogether or appearing on local registers in Venezuela rather than in their current countries of residence.

Others complained of consulates only opening for voter registration for very limited times.

Official figures from the CNE show that fewer than 68,000 people overseas were registered to vote, even though an estimated half of the 7.8m Venezuelans abroad are of voting age.

Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) has five members who are nominated by the legislative body, the National Assembly.

While it was created as an independent body to organise and oversee elections, it has long been dominated by allies of the governing PSUV party.

Its president, Elvis Amoroso, is a former lawmaker for President Maduro’s socialist PSUV party who went to work as Mr Maduro’s legal adviser.

Before being named head of the CNE, he served as comptroller general. In that post, he barred opposition leader María Corina Machado from running for office for 15 years.

As head of the CNE, he revoked the invitation which had been issued to the European Union to send independent electoral observers to monitor the presidential election.

In the early hours on Monday, Mr Amoroso announced that with 80% of the votes counted, President Maduro had an “unassailable lead” with 51% of the vote.

He said that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, had 44% of the vote.

However, the CNE did not provide a detailed breakdown of the results from individual polling stations.

The incumbent celebrated the announcement outside the Miraflores presidential palace.

“I am Nicolás Maduro Moros, the re-elected president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and I will defend our democracy, our laws and our people,” he shouted.

Before a crowd of loyal supporters, he mocked and mimicked former opposition and current opposition leaders , whom he accused of “crying fraud” every time they lost an election.

He praised the electoral system and urged “respect” for “Venezuela’s sovereignty”.

Mr Maduro also alleged that the CNE had been the target of a “massive hacking attack” on election night because “the demons didn’t want the total tally to be announced”. “We already he know who it was,” he said.

“We are setting an example for the world,” he told his cheering supporters.

Shortly after the CNE had declared Mr Maduro’s victory, opposition leader María Corina Machado denounced the result as fraudulent.

She said that the opposition had had access to 40% of the voting tallies and they suggested that opposition candidate Edmundo González had won with 70% of the votes.

In a news conference some hours later on Monday, Ms Machado said the opposition had been able to review 73.2% of the voting tallies and they confirmed that Mr González was the winner of the election.

She said that those voting tallies showed that Nicolás Maduro had 2.75m votes compared to Mr González’s 6.27m votes.

She added that even if all the votes in the remaining 26.8% of tallies the opposition had not had access to yet were for Mr Maduro, it would not be enough to beat Mr González.

“We have the records showing our categorical and mathematically irreversible victory,” Mr González said.

Ms Machado also announced that the opposition had uploaded the voting tallies to a website so that the Venezuelan people and independent observer could scrutinise them.

Despite international and national scepticism and criticism expressed about the result released by the CNE, the electoral authority doubled down on Monday.

It announced that all of the votes had been counted and declared Mr Maduro re-elected to a third consecutive term.

Elvis Amoroso, who has been a close ally of Mr Maduro for years, handed him the credentials for the presidential term from 2025-2031.

Even though it pressed ahead with the formalities, the CNE still failed to provide access to all of the voting tallies, despite pressure by the Carter Center, one of the few international organisations allowed as observers, to do so.

The already tense atmosphere was further inflamed by pro-government groups, the so-called colectivos and by clashes between protesters and the security forces.

In one incident, members of a colectivo attacked people who were waiting to enter a polling station to witness the vote count.

A non-governmental group said on Tuesday that three people had died and dozens were injured in the protests which have erupted across Venezuela.

Also on Tuesday, Venezuela’s attorney-general said 749 had been arrested during anti-government protests.

A Venezuelan opposition party – Voluntad Popular – said its national coordinator, Freddy Superlano, was among those detained.

As Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris vets potential running mates, spare a thought for the contenders as they undergo a process that one past participant likened to “a colonoscopy performed with a telescope”.

This is just some of the material in questionnaires fired off during the exhaustive vetting process for previous US vice-presidential nominees.

Potential partners to join Ms Harris on the Democratic ticket for November’s election will have to answer up to 200 questions before they can even begin to be seriously considered.

The vetters – campaign officials and lawyers who volunteer their billable hours for the networking and prestige – often have about a month to dig up every grain of dirt they can find.

The Harris campaign has a matter of days to pick a running mate, with a paperwork deadline looming. The vice-president, who went through the process herself only four years ago, has been assessing around a dozen contenders, with Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator Mark Kelly among those being touted.

Pete Buttigieg, who is also among the rumoured potential picks, was asked this week if the contenders are aware they are being vetted. “Yeah, you know,” he said with a smile.

What makes the whole undertaking especially challenging is that, unlike with cabinet picks, the FBI does not perform background checks on vice-presidents.

The vetters will pore over a contender’s tax returns and medical history. They may log on to his or her private social media accounts. They will scour the social media posts of his or her children. The grandchildren’s, too.

The least suggestion of marital infidelity, or any other skeleton in the closet, will be picked apart.

They will check every record of every word the potential candidate has ever uttered or written.

Jim Hamilton, a Democratic lawyer who evaluated potential running mates for John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, told the BBC that notes of the process are destroyed afterwards to preserve “a strict, strict veil of confidentiality”.

He oversaw more than 200 lawyers who were tasked with finding Mrs Clinton’s running mate (she picked Virginia Senator Tim Kaine).

“Everybody’s got something in their background they’d just sooner not talk about,” Mr Hamilton said. “But you’d be surprised, once people commit to the process, at how candid they are in their answers.”

Evan Bayh, a finalist to become Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008, remembers the procedure took nearly three months and was “like having a colonoscopy performed with a telescope”.

“There was a whole team assigned to me: an accountant, a lawyer, a physician, you know,” the former Indiana senator and governor told the BBC. “They talked to my wife, they talked to my father.”

Television crews were soon camped outside his house in Washington DC. Mr Bayh recalls his shock one morning as he sat down to breakfast with the television on and heard an MSNBC host remark that the senator’s bowl of yoghurt and granola “sure looks tasty”.

The head of the vetting team phoned one day to ask Mr Bayh about a false internet rumour that he had once received psychiatric treatment.

“And I said, ‘No, it’s not true. But if you guys don’t hurry up and make a decision, it might be true,’” he remembers joking.

A list of 20 names was whittled away. Mr Bayh says it ultimately came down to himself and Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator.

He recalls how he was flown out “very clandestinely” to St Louis, Missouri, in August that year to meet the future president in his hotel room. They spoke for around three hours.

“There was about a three-foot high stack of materials there,” he recalls, “that he [Mr Obama] just gestured to it, and he said, ‘I’ve gone over all the reports on you, and nothing in there bothers me.’

“He said, ‘But if there’s anything that our team didn’t discover, you should tell me now because it will come out.’

“And I said, ‘Well, your people did do a very thorough job. But there were probably two or three things I should mention to you.’ And I did.

“And he looked at me, he said, ‘That’s it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ And he said, ‘Well, you haven’t led very much of a life, have you?’”

Mr Bayh did not elaborate to the BBC on his disclosures to Mr Obama in the hotel room, except to say they were family matters.

Mr Biden was ultimately successful. Campaign manager David Plouffe later quoted President Obama as saying it was a “coin toss” between the two.

Sometimes a vetter can pose a question that no-one else thought of, revealing a potential red flag, even if it’s not disqualifying.

Gary Ginsberg, who worked for the Clinton campaign in ’92, told the BBC he remembers Al Gore at a loss for words when asked during the process if he had any friends.

The reserved Tennessee senator bristled. But when pressed, he could name none, beyond his brother-in-law and two congressmen. Mr Gore’s lack of a social circle bothered one top campaign official.

From a long-list of 50, he was nevertheless picked to be running mate. They won. Mr Gore, however, would struggle to overcome low personal likability ratings.

The vetting process used to be largely informal and much less invasive, since it was seen as rude to ask a senator or governor about personal matters.

Two selection disasters changed all that forever.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
• ANALYSIS: Three ways Trump will try to end Harris honeymoon
• SWING STATES: Where the election could be won and lost
• Democratic VP: Five top contenders emerge in Harris VP hunt

In 1972, the Democratic White House nominee George McGovern dumped his running mate after just 18 days. He had picked Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton based on a two-minute phone conversation and no background check.

It almost immediately emerged in media reports that Mr Eagleton had received electroshock treatment in hospital for clinical depression a decade earlier.

Nixon aides began asking reporters: “How could McGovern be trusted after putting a crazy man on the ticket?”

In that November’s election, the Republican president annihilated his Democratic challenger.

Vetters soon began to cast their nets wider, to look more closely at a potential running mate’s family members, after another embarrassment upended the 1984 White House race.

Democratic nominee Walter Mondale needed a game-changer against Ronald Reagan that year, so he picked Geraldine Ferraro, the first female running mate ever on a major party national ticket.

But the campaign was hamstrung by revelations about her real estate developer husband’s financial dealings.

President Reagan went on to win 49 states in a landslide re-election.

Sometimes a potential running mate dazzles at the audition, but fizzles on the political stage. In 2008, Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s campaign had just 72 hours to vet Sarah Palin.

The then-44-year-old Alaska governor was asked by aides how she would react in a national security crisis where the president had been temporarily incapacitated by surgery.

Under this scenario, the director of national intelligence comes to Acting-President Palin and tells her they have pinpointed Osama Bin Laden.

A plane is overhead ready to kill the al-Qaeda leader.

But there’ll be multiple civilian casualties.

“Do you take the shot?” the vetter asked her.

“Yes,” she said, “I would take the shot because I’m the President of the United States, this is our archenemy who took the lives of 3,000-plus Americans. And then I would get down on my knees and ask for forgiveness for the innocent souls whose lives I would be taking.”

The vetters were highly impressed with this answer.

Yet after she was unveiled as the vice-presidential nominee, Ms Palin proved unable to answer a reporter’s basic question about what newspapers she read. Soon she was seen as gaffe-prone and unready for the political primetime.

Even when the vetting process is conducted with more rigour, the final decision is always up to the nominee.

George HW Bush – one of the 15 US vice-presidents who became president- went with his gut when he picked little-known Indiana Senator Dan Quayle to be his running mate in 1988.

Though they won, Mr Quayle, 41, was widely seen as more of a liability than an asset to the ticket, as recounted in the book First in Line, by Kate Andersen Brower.

The vice-presidential nominee was asked by a reporter aboard the campaign plane in 1988: “What’s the favourite book that you’ve read?”

Mr Quayle turned to his wife, Marilyn.

“What’s the favourite book I’ve read?” he asked her, leaving a nearby political aide aghast.

Across the summer in the UK there’s a music festival pretty much every week somewhere in the country.

Highlights include the summer kick off with Radio 1’s Big Weekend in May, Glastonbury’s dominance in June, Latitude in July and a Reading and Leeds Bank Holiday bonanza in August.

Some could argue British music lovers are spoilt for choice.

In some parts of the world there’s no option to dance with your mates in a field while holding a lukewarm beer, getting to grips with dry shampoo, shoddy phone signal and chants of ‘Oggy, oggy, oggy, oi, oi, oi’.

That’s where Dua Lipa and her dad Dukagjin wanted to change things by launching Sunny Hill festival in the family’s home city of Pristina, Kosovo – a part of the world few international artists toured.

“I want to change the rhetoric of what people think about Kosovo and it being war-torn,” Dua explained earlier this year.

“When I was living in Kosovo, none of the artists I wanted to see ever came down.”

Dua was born in the UK but moved to Pristina as a child after a war in the late 1990s left more than 10,000 dead, as Kosovo fought for independence from Serbia.

It declared it in 2008, although some countries – including Serbia – refuse to recognise it.

“Reinstating the country took more years than we’d liked,” Dukagjin says.

He says it was “always a dream” to have something like Sunny Hill in Pristina, after working in the live music events industry for years before Dua made it as an international pop star.

In 2018, 10 years after Kosovo declared independence, Sunny Hill launched – headlined by Dua as tens of thousands celebrated one of their own making the big time.

But it was harder then to convince other global artists to play. The following year though, friends of the New Rules star Miley Cyrus and Calvin Harris agreed to top the bill, the first time they performed in the region.

That changed how the festival was seen by other acts and their management teams.

“We really do punch way above our weight when it comes to the line-up,” Dukagjin tells BBC News.

“When I talk to the artists about coming I say: ‘Look you might not have the tequila you want on your rider, but trust me you’ll have the best sound equipment money can buy’.”

• Listen to an extended interview with Dukagjin Lipa

His latest data estimates that about 40% of visitors were from outside Kosovo – noting that will be strongly influenced by the country’s diaspora as those with family connections here bring friends with them.

Some had travelled as far from Chicago in the US to see artists like Bebe Rexha, Burna Boy, Stormzy, and DJ Snake headline the main stage last weekend.

Groove Armada, Black Coffee and Griff were all also on the bill.

Kosovo is thought to have Europe’s youngest population as more than half are estimated to be under the age of 30.

Travel restrictions, until earlier this year, meant local musicians didn’t have the flexibility to play in other parts of the continent.

“It’s not that easy to be a musician,” explains singer La Fazani, who’s played Sunny Hill multiple times.

“The only way you can actually make good income is by playing nightclubs.”

He recently won a big TV show in the country but says without Sunny Hill he wouldn’t get to play live to a crowd of thousands, and hopes the Lipa guest list could improve his career.

“Sunny Hill is one of the greatest generators of a positive image of Kosovo,” he says.

“There’s many international label people here and I hope I might have caught the eye of someone who might like what I do.”

Fresh from seeing his daughter headline one of the biggest festivals in the world, Dukagjin says “Glastonbury is one of a kind” and knows it will be hard for his project Sunny Hill, which took place for the first time on its new permanent site to accommodate the growing audience, to reach a status like that.

Although, he says industry friends like Coachella owner Paul Tollett say the project reminds him of Glastonbury in the 1980s, and there are plans to make it more than a live music festival.

“I love artists who spend a day or two longer in Pristina and have a chance to meet local artists and share ideas.

“And for them to rub shoulders with people in the music industry, and hopefully next year we can create a movement with some workshops,” Dukagjin says.

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

“We are protesting because we are hungry,” Nigerian activist Banwo Olagokun tells the BBC.

He is part of the Take It Back Movement, one of the groups that has called for 10 days of protest from this Thursday – despite pleas from the government to stand down.

“We are protesting because the inflation rate has made us to not be able to afford the simple things of life – food, water, clothes, medicals,” Mr Olagokun, 36, adds.

Nigeria is experiencing its worst economic crisis in a generation. Annual inflation is at 34.19% – its highest in almost three decades. Food prices have risen even faster – for example, in the commercial hub, Lagos, yams are almost four times more expensive than last year.

People often say that Nigerians are resilient and they adapt quickly to the changing circumstances.

In recent months some have opted for nearly rotten tomatoes, cheaper, lower-grade rice and fewer meals to get by. But it is not clear where the breaking point is.

The Take It Back Movement wants the government to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, and to also offer free education at all levels.

“We are just demanding for the reversal of the things that are making things expensive,” Mr Olagokun says.

Some of Take It Back Movement’s more radical demands include scrapping the country’s 1999 constitution, allowing Nigerians living abroad to vote in elections and releasing the Biafran separatist leader Nnamdi Kanu from prison.

The national co-ordinator of the movement, Juwon Sanyaolu, 31, says it has partly drawn inspiration from recent events in Kenya, where youth-initiated demonstrations forced President William Ruto to scrap a controversial tax-rise plan.

He says the demands of the Nigerians planning to demonstrate are realistic and could lead to similar change.

“If Kenyans were calling for the dissolution of [President William] Ruto’s cabinet, I’m sure people would have been saying, ‘Your goals are unrealistic’. But today they’ve dissolved the entire cabinet,” Mr Sanyaolu says

“They’re only exercising democracy,” he adds.

The planned protests have commanded the Nigerian government’s attention.

In recent days cabinet ministers have held two emergency meetings to discuss how to respond.

President Bola Tinubu made an appeal through Information Minister Mohammed Idris Malagi, asking organisers to shelve the plan and urging them to be patient.

“The young people out there should allow the president more time to see to the realisation of all the goodies he has for them,” he said.

Several state governors have also spoken out in an effort to deter people from taking to the streets, warning of violence.

Abia state Governor Alex Otti said young people should “think about the implications of pouring out onto the streets”, warning it might cause more harm than good.

Over the last week, government agencies have made various announcements that to many appear to be concessions to appease the public.

They include re-opening applications for young people to receive financial support to start or expand their businesses.

The state oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, put a call out for job applicants, leading to its website crashing.

Protest organisers say the government’s offers are not enough and have instead further fuelled their desire to rally for change.

“We have not put our boots on the ground and already the government is granting concessions and advertising jobs here and there,” Mr Sanyaolu says.

“If young people insist and put their boots on the ground, we’ll get more.”

Nigeria’s economic difficulties can be linked to three main things – firstly, a government policy that ended the pegging of the value of the currency, the naira, to the US dollar.

The move was designed to encourage foreign investment, but it caused the naira to plunge in value by around 70%, contributing to inflation.

Secondly, the removal of a subsidy on fuel was aimed at cutting government expenditure, but sent pump prices soaring with a ripple effect on other goods.

And thirdly, the economy has also felt the aftershocks of a security crisis, with rampant kidnappings and attacks across the country, affecting supply chains and driving up costs.

The state of the economy has, in the eyes of many, marred President Tinubu’s first year in office.

However, the government has insisted the reforms were necessary to reduce public spending, something economist Muda Yusuf agrees with, but believes they were not carefully planned for.

“The policies were inevitable because the economy was almost at the brink at the time the current administration took over. Our debt level had increased significantly,” he says.

“What I think the president could have done differently is to roll out these mitigating measures to cushion the outcome of the policies more quickly.”

The “mitigating measures” the government put in place include distributing 40,000 tonnes of grains from the national reserve and giving temporary cash payments to the very poor.

The crisis has led to businesses suffering.

A caterer in Lagos, Abosede Ibikunle, says her regular customers are now opting to cook their own food for events.

“Everything is costly. Nothing is cheap. People are suffering, people are dying, this hardship is too much.”

There are some who fear that demonstrations could lead to a repeat of the West African nation’s last mass protest by young Nigerians four years ago.

What had started as unhappiness in 2020 about the brutality of the police’s now-disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (Sars) became a conduit for young people to vent their anger.

The demonstrations, dubbed #EndSars after the protesters’ rallying hashtag on Twitter (now X), ended abruptly after two weeks when members of the armed forces opened fire during a demonstration in Lagos.

President Tinubu’s daughter, Folasade Tinubu-Ojo, has warned market traders in Dosunmu, Lagos, to prevent their children from protesting now, citing the violence that occurred at that time.

“Let’s tell ourselves, family, and children that there is nothing like protest in Lagos. It is a gimmick to destroy the country… look at how they burnt government properties. Can you see that they are fighting against us?”

Defence spokesman Maj Gen Edward Buba has warned that the country’s military will intervene to prevent any violence at the protests, while police chief Kayode Egbetokun blamed “self-appointed crusaders and influencers” as being behind them.

Organisers have called the warnings of violence a smokescreen for a potential crackdown by the government, saying it will not put them off.

“I’m not a prophet, as I like to say, but one thing I can assure is Nigerians are resolute and we will protest,” Mr Sanyaolu declares.

“The protesters have nothing to lose but their chains,” he adds, referencing Karl Marx.

He then cited a hymn: “A man who is down, is not to be afraid of falling. We are down already, so we have lost our fear.”

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A former US officer who was the only person to be convicted in connection with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War has died, according to reports.

William Calley died on 28 April at the age of 80, the Washington Post and New York Times reported, citing official death records.

Calley led the US Army platoon that carried out the mass murder of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of Son My in 1968.

He was sentenced to life in prison in 1971 for killing 22 civilians, but only served three days behind bars after then-President Richard Nixon ordered his release under house arrest.

The My Lai massacre, known as the Son My massacre in Vietnam, is considered among the worst war crimes in American military history. The killings shocked the US public at the time and galvanised the anti-Vietnam war movement.

According to the Vietnamese government, 504 people were killed in the massacre.

Calley, a junior college dropout from South Florida, enlisted in the army in 1964.

He was quickly promoted to junior officer and then second lieutenant, at a time when the US army was desperate for soldiers.

On the morning of 16 March 1968, Calley’s unit was airlifted to a hamlet in Son My – known to US soldiers at the time as My Lai 4 – on a mission to search and kill Viet Cong members and sympathisers.

When they arrived, the officers were met with no resistance from the residents of the village, who were found cooking breakfast over outdoor fires, according to a 1972 report by journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker.

Mr Hersh reported that Calley and his unit proceeded to kill the civilians in the following hours. Many were rounded up in small groups and shot, he said. Others were pushed into a drainage ditch and shot, or were killed in or near their homes.

Women and girls were raped by American officers and then murdered, Mr Hersh reported.

The massacre was initially covered up but became public a year and a half later, thanks in large part to Mr Hersh’s reporting, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize.

Calley was one of 26 soldiers who were charged with criminal offences and the only one convicted.

His conviction polarised Americans. Some deemed him a war criminal while others felt the junior officer was used as a scapegoat to shift blame for a massacre that was ultimately the responsibility of his superiors.

While he was given a life sentence, Calley only served three-and-a-half years under house arrest after President Nixon commuted his sentence.

Calley married Penny Vick, the daughter of a jewelry store owner in Columbus, Georgia, in 1976. The couple had one son, William Laws Calley III, and divorced in the mid-2000s.

He rarely spoke about his role in the My Lai massacre and had refused to sit down with historians and reporters.

In 2009, he apologised while speaking to the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus.

“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” he said. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families.”

The Washington Post first reported Calley’s death on Monday, after receiving a tip from a Harvard Law School graduate who uncovered it in public records.

No cause of death has been cited.

After months of negotiation, Taiwan and China have “reached an agreement” on how to respond to the deaths of two Chinese fishermen following a sea chase by Taiwan’s coastguard, Taipei said.

The settlement involves compensation to the victims’ families and the repatriation of their bodies to China, according to reports. Taiwan’s coastguard declined to share details.

The deal may reduce tensions in the sensitive Taiwan Strait, which Beijing claims as its own.

China had condemned the incident in February as “malicious” and started regular patrols around Taiwan’s Kinmen archipelago following it.

The regular patrols aimed to “maintain operational order in sea areas and safeguard fishermen’s lives and property”, Beijing’s coastguard said in February.

The two men who died were among four people on board a fishing boat which trespassed into Taiwanese waters off Kinmen on 14 February and resisted inspection.

The boat capsized when Taiwanese authorities gave chase and the two fishermen drowned while trying to flee.

Beijing and Taipei used to be more flexible about each other’s fishing fleets, especially around Taiwan’s off-shore islands, which lie extremely close to the Chinese coast. Kinmen – Taiwan’s northernmost archipelago – lies just 3km (1.9 mi) from China.

But in recent years Taiwan has been enforcing its own waters more strictly – a response to what it says is a massive increase in poaching by fishermen from China’s coastal Fujian province.

Kinmen residents have reported seeing an increased presence of Chinese dredging vessels in its vicinity.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office had for months urged Taiwanese authorities to investigate the incident and offer assistance to the victims’ families. It also accused the self-ruled Taiwan – which Beijing sees as a breakaway province which will eventually be part of China – of “using various excuses to forcefully seize Chinese fishing vessels”.

Taiwan has defended its coastguard’s actions and called on Beijing to “restrain similar behaviours” on its waters.

On Tuesday, Taiwan’s coast guard director Chang Chung-lung apologised to the victims’ families “for the suffering [they have] endured” and also “for not recording evidence in this case”.

Both sides “will actively implement the agreed consensus as quickly as possible” said Hsieh Chin-chin, deputy director-general of the coastguard administration.

“We respect the families and the content of the consensus, so we are unable to provide further details,” Mr Hsieh added.

A spokesman for Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council revealed the compensation will be paid by private donors, while stressing it does not have any impact on the outcome of the investigation into what happened, and who was responsible.

Beijing said it hopes Taiwan will “actively implement the terms of the agreement to provide peace of mind to the victims and offer an explanation to their families”.

Nigerians are mourning veteran musician and actress Onyeka Onwenu, who has died at the age of 72.

Onwenu produced a string of popular songs throughout her long career, including the 1986 hit One Love, which remains one of Nigeria’s most well-known tunes.

She was performing at a birthday party on Tuesday night when she collapsed and was rushed to hospital, local media is reporting.

Her family has not yet commented, but Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu and other public figures have expressed their condolences.

Kelex Ofoedu, official photographer to Abia state governor Alex Otti, posted pictures of Onwenu performing at the birthday party, adding: “Who knew she’d be gone after I took these images of her last night.

“She sang extremely well, was humorous, and made everyone very happy with her performance.”

According to local media reports, Onwenu died at Reddington Hospital in the Lekki area of Lagos.

In his tribute to Onwenu, President Tinubu called her a “versatile and extremely gifted artiste” who brought joy and laughter to many.

Fellow musician Charly Boy said Onwenu’s “impact transcended the entertainment industry”.

“RIP Ma Onyeka Onwenu,” award-winning musical duo P-Square posted on social media platform X.

“The nation has lost a timeless legend and great artist,” popular lawmaker Shehu Sani said. “Her melodies will forever resonate in our souls.”

Born in 1952, Onwenu mostly released soul and gospel records.

She also acted in Nigerian films, winning several awards for her contributions to music and film.

Onwenu took up other roles outside of the entertainment industry, including broadcasting, activism and politics.

She used to be a member of the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and twice stood unsuccessfully for a local government seat.

During last year’s general election, she endorsed the rival Labour Party, which came third.

The party’s Lagos state chapter said it was “deeply saddened” by the “iconic” singer’s passing.

“This is unbelievable! Onyeka Onwenu was a celebrated Nigerian singer, songwriter, actress, journalist, and politician who virtually every Nigerian is proudly fond of,” its statement said.

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The new acting head of the US Secret Service said he “lost sleep” over security failures that led to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump during a testy congressional hearing on Tuesday.

At an hours-long US Senate hearing, Ronald Rowe and FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate outlined the ongoing investigation into what led to the shooting, elements of what they had learned about the would-be assassin, and the security failures that allowed the gunman to fire at the former president.

Mr Rowe’s testimony before a joint panel of the Senate Homeland Security and Judiciary committees comes a week after his predecessor, Kim Cheatle, was forced to resign.

Ms Cheatle faced intense criticism for the Secret Service’s handling of the 13 July rally in Butler that left a man dead and Trump and two others injured, and her inability to answer questions before the House Oversight Committee last week was ridiculed by Democrats and Republicans.

The two men’s answers at Tuesday’s hearings were more substantive than what was heard previously, and Mr Rowe attempted to reassure Senators with new plans to address security lapses.

Here are five new things we learned.

During the occasionally tense hearing, Mr Rowe on several occasions made reference to the mental toll that the Butler shooting security failures had taken, on him and his agents.

“My people are hurting right now,” he said. “Emotions are raw.”

One of the failures he outlined was that the Secret Service was unable to deploy a “counter unmanned aerial system” ahead of the rally because of cellular connectivity issues.

Had they done so, they would have likely detected a drone flown by the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, ahead of the rally.

Investigators now believe Crooks conducted “early surveillance” of the site.

“That is something that has cost me a lot of sleep, because of the eventual outcome,” Mr Rowe said.

“I have no explanation…I feel as though we could have found him, could have maybe stopped him on that particular day,” he added. “He could have decided this isn’t the day to do it, because law enforcement just found [him] flying his drone.”

Additionally, Mr Rowe said that agents from the service’s Pittsburgh field office – who were largely responsible for securing the rally site in Butler – had been “wearing this harder than anybody”.

“They feel completely demoralised,” Mr Rowe said. “What I’m trying to do is also let them know that I’m listening. They need to be focused on the mission at hand.”

While he was unable to reveal many details because of the sensitive nature of the Secret Service’s protective work, Mr Rowe said that the agency he now oversees had already been addressing “identified gaps in our security”.

Mr Rowe added that he “will not wait” for various investigations to be finished to ensure “we do not repeat those failures”.

In addition to its plans for drone threats, Mr Rowe outlined intentions to reform how the Secret Service communicates internally and with local police before and during events.

Officials have said that much of the communications chatter at the Butler rally took place via text messages, potentially contributing to confusion over reports of a suspicious person.

Mr Rowe said that suspicions about Crooks were “stuck or siloed” in a communications channel used mostly by state and local officers.

“It was great [that] there was a text chain,” Mr Rowe said. “But that communication needs to go over the net. It needs to go over a radio channel so that everyone has situational awareness of it….I want people using the radio.”

Mr Rowe added that the service would move to ban rangefinders – devices which measure distances between the user and a fixed distance – at future events.

One of the lingering mysteries about the Butler shooting is how Crooks was able to get a rifle onto the rooftop of the now-infamous American Glass Research building in Butler, which is where he had a clear shot of Trump.

Neither Mr Rowe or Mr Abbate was able to answer that question.

“We don’t have definitive evidence as to how he got the rifle up there,” Mr Abbate said, although officials believe it was in a backpack he had with him at the rally.

According to Mr Abbate, the rifle “would have been visible” if placed in the bag while assembled.

“We don’t have anyone who observed him with the backpack with a rifle barrel or other parts sticking out,” he said. “The rifle would not have fit fully into this backpack, concealed and whole.”

Newly uncovered video shows Crooks retrieving the bag from his car shortly before climbing up to the roof and firing eight shots at Trump’s podium.

“It’s possible he broke the rifle down and took it out of the bag in those moments before and re-assembled it there,” Mr Abbate said. “That’s one of the theories that we’re looking at.”

Despite conducting hundreds of interviews and poring over mountains of digital evidence, the two law enforcement leaders said that investigators have not yet been able to conclusively provide a motive that can explain why Crooks drove to the rally and opened fire.

Mr Abbate revealed that investigators have unearthed a social media account they believe may be tied to Crooks – a discovery that could potentially provide a glimpse at his worldview.

The account, which includes more than 700 posts, dates back to 2019 and 2020, Mr Abbate said.

Mr Abbate added that the posts, “if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence, and are described as extreme in nature.”

“While the investigative team is still working to verify this account to determine if it did in fact belong to the shooter, we believe it is important to share and note today,” he said. “Our work is very much ongoing and urgent.”

Even as the investigation into what took place continues, some lawmakers at the hearing made it clear that they expected additional disciplinary actions to take place.

South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, for example, said that the “best way to make sure it doesn’t have to happen again is to fire people, so that those who come behind them will realise there’s a consequence for not getting it right”.

While Mr Rowe said he would “not rush to judgement”, he did promise that “people will be held accountable”.

“If there were policy violations, those individuals will be held accountable,” he said. “They will be held to our table of penalties, which will include up to termination.”

A lavish lobster dinner for King Charles III cost the French president’s office €475,000 (£400,000), according to the country’s audit office.

President Emmanuel Macron pulled out all the stops for the monarch’s visit in September – with guests being treated to blue lobster, crab and an assortment of cheeses.

But in its annual report of the presidential accounts, the Cour des Comptes warned that higher spending on state receptions had contributed to leaving their budget €8.3m in the red.

And it says the Elysée now needs to make “significant efforts… to restore and sustain the financial balance of the financial balance of the presidency”.

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Of the money spent on the dinner, over €165,000 was on catering, with another €40,000 on drinks.

Guests at the star-studded banquet – which included actor Hugh Grant, football manager Arsene Wenger and Rolling Stone Mick Jagger – were treated to a menu of blue lobster and crab followed by Bresse poultry and mushroom gratin.

There was also a course of cheeses – including French Comté and British Stichelton blue.

And for dessert they were served a rose macaroon cookie, composed of rose petal cream, raspberries and lychees.

The extravagant banquet at the Palace of Versailles was part of King Charles’ three-day state visit to France, aimed at reinforcing a key alliance between the two countries.

It had been originally scheduled for March, but was postponed after widespread protests over pension reform hit major cities.

The King’s visit is not the only one cited in the report, with a July 2023 banquet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Louvre – which cost the presidential office €412,000 – also mentioned.

As a result of higher spending, including on these state receptions, expenditure increased by 14% on the previous year, the audit office said.

That compared to only a 6.5% gain in revenue earned by the presidency.

The internal anatomy of a prehistoric creature the size of a poppy seed has been revealed in “astonishing detail”.

Researchers used powerful X-rays to scan the 520-million-year-old fossil.

The results, published in the journal Nature, reveal its microscopic blood vessels and nervous system.

It is a peek inside the body of one of the earliest ancestors of modern insects, spiders and crabs.

Lead researcher Dr Martin Smith said this was a dream fossil, in part because it was preserved in its larval, or immature, stage – when its body was still developing.

“Looking at these early stages really is the key to understanding how those adult [body shapes] are formed – not just through evolution but through development.

“But larvae are so tiny and fragile, the chances of finding one fossilised are practically zero – or so I thought.”

Dr Smith’s colleagues found the fossil in a pile of “prehistoric grit” during a study of half-billion-year-old rock deposits in the north of China known to contain microscopic fossils.

“Our collaborators in China have large amounts of this stuff, which they dissolve it in acid and these little bits fall out,” Dr Smith said.

A team of technicians at Yunnan University spent years sifting through the material and picking fossils out of the dust.

After examining this particular specimen under the microscope during a trip to China, Dr Smith said, he had realised it was “something very special” and asked if he could bring it back to the UK to have a closer look.

The team mounted the fossil on the head of a pin in order to scan it with intense X-rays at Oxford’s Diamond Light Source facility. That is where its internal secrets were revealed.

“When I saw the amazing structures preserved under its skin, my jaw just dropped,” Dr Smith said.

Researchers generated three-dimensional images of miniature brain regions, digestive glands, a primitive circulatory system and even traces of the nerves supplying the larva’s simple legs and eyes.

Its brain cavity, which is divided into segments, has revealed the ancestral “nub” of the specialist, segmented heads of modern insects, spiders and crabs that later evolved their various appendages, such as antennae, mouthparts and eyes.

Study co-author, Dr Katherine Dobson, of the University of Strathclyde, said the natural fossilisation had “achieved almost perfect preservation”.

Dr Smith said this might have been caused by high concentrations of phosphorus in the ocean where this larva briefly lived and died.

“It’s washed into the oceans when rocks erode on land,” he said.

“And that phosphorus seems to have flooded the tissues of our fossil,” essentially crystallising its tiny body.

The threat from international and domestic terror presents a “breadth of challenge greater than it has ever been”, according to senior US and UK police officers who oversaw the successful prosecution of Anjem Choudary.

The Islamist preacher from east London is starting a life sentence for directing a group banned under UK terror law, and encouraging support for it online.

The officers say his case highlights the continuing danger posed by radicalisers – and the violent groups they support.

But they also say counter-terrorism forces are now battling a wide diversity of threats – including from a worrying number of people who don’t support an underlying ideology, but are simply drawn to violence.

Young people being attracted to online extremism through conspiracy theories, the actions of “hostile states” such as Russia, and the “toxicity of our political environment” are also of concern, they warn.

Following Choudary’s trial, the BBC spoke exclusively to Matt Jukes, the UK’s head of counter-terrorism policing, and Rebecca Weiner, Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism at the New York Police Department.

They told us that alongside extremist groups energised by events in the Middle East, the new security threats were sparking multiple investigations.

It is a “palpably different picture than it was,” says Assistant Commissioner Jukes.

Deputy Commissioner Weiner singles out online extremism as probably the most important aspect of what she terms an “everything, everywhere, all-at-once threat environment”.

With two wars – Israel-Gaza and Ukraine – being fought in what Ms Weiner calls “a tsunami of disinformation”, she says it is hard for people to understand what is true and what is not – “and that is playing out in the realm of violence”.

People are being “overwhelmed with false narratives” and fed conspiracy theories, she says.

A disturbing aspect of this, says Mr Jukes, is the increasing number of those turning to terrorism because of a fascination for violence, rather than ideological fanaticism.

He says in 20% of cases his officers now handle, terror suspects have no settled view of the world: “We are seeing people literally flip from searching for neo-Nazi material online to searching for Islamist material.”

This is a real shift, he says, with people having previously gone from a single ideology, to extremism, and on to violence.

Young people are viewing “dehumanising content”, including extreme pornography – says Mr Jukes – and being asked in online groups “to prove themselves by producing more and more extreme content”.

This includes terrorist material created using artificial intelligence, he says, with gaming being one of the “gateways” into extremism online.

The age profile of those drawn into this extreme environment is coming down – and he worries about “very young people who only need to take up a knife or use a vehicle as a weapon to carry out a deadly attack”.

Nearly one in five of those arrested as terror suspects in the UK in the past year were under 18.

Counter-terror police on both sides of the Atlantic have also been kept busy since last October’s attack by Hamas on Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage. More than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Fifty police investigations have been launched in the UK into support or encouragement of terrorism. There has also been a big increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crime.

Government statistics for the year ending in March 2024 show terror-related arrests in the UK were up by 23% on the previous year (although they were lower than the period between 2013 to 2020).

Five years ago, says Mr Jukes, he would have been kept awake primarily by fears of an IS attack in the UK, but now he says one of his main concerns would be the growing threat from “determined and shameless” state actors.

For many years, he says “hostile actions of states” formed only a very small part of police and MI5 investigations. But this has grown more than fourfold since the 2018 Salisbury poisonings, says Mr Jukes, when a nerve agent was used to try to assassinate a former Russian spy and his daughter.

The spy, who had defected to the West, and his daughter were badly injured – but a British woman died after coming into contact with Novichok. Russia has always denied involvement.

There has also been an increased threat from parts of the Chinese state, he adds, and at least 15 foiled plots by Iran in the past two years to either kidnap or kill those in the UK it considers enemies of the regime.

“If these authoritarian organs of the state feel like the UK or the US is fair [game] for them to pursue their adversities, then everything we stand for in terms of being a safe, liberal democracy is challenged,” says Mr Jukes.

The two police chiefs also point to “toxicity” in the political environment, which has led to politicians becoming targets of violence – including two British MPs murdered in terror attacks, and the failed assassination of Donald Trump at a campaign rally on 13 July.

I ask if there is any reassuring news amid this scary picture of dispersed danger.

People can “take a degree of comfort”, says Mr Jukes, that since the attacks in London and Manchester in 2017, “that terrible year”, police have disrupted nearly 40 “terrorist plots”.

“And we are doing that month-in, month-out, with real efficiency and effectiveness.”

“Thugs” who travelled to Southport to use the deaths of three children “for their own political purposes” were to blame for the violence that saw dozens of police officers injured, the town’s MP has said.

Unrest broke out in the Merseyside town hours after a vigil to honour the victims of Monday’s knife attack at a dance school in which three young girls were killed and eight other children injured.

Patrick Hurley said the disturbance close to a mosque, which saw officers pelted with bricks and a police van set on fire, had been “horrific”.

Merseyside Police Federation’s Chris McGlade said more than 50 police officers were hurt in a “sustained and vicious attack”.

Merseyside Police said the violence was believed to have involved English Defence League supporters.

Mr Hurley told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the “riot” was “led by people from outside the town”.

He said the “thugs who had got the train in” had used the “deaths of three little kiddies for their own political purposes”.

Mr McGlade said his injured colleagues were the same “courageous officers” who were themselves trying to come to terms with the “unimaginable tragedy” of Monday’s attack.

“I utterly condemn the actions of these mindless and violent thugs – and they will be brought to justice for their actions,” he added.

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ACC Goss said it was “sickening” that the disturbance happened within a “devastated” community.

He said the force had faced “serious violence” and was “so proud to have witnessed off-duty officers parade back on duty to support their colleagues who had displayed such courage whilst under constant and sustained attack”.

He also thanked officers from forces in Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales for providing mutual aid and support.

He added that the disorder involved many people “who do not live in the Merseyside area or care about the people of Merseyside”.

“Sadly, offenders have destroyed garden walls so they could use the bricks to attack our officers and have set cars belonging to the public on fire, and damaged cars parked in the mosque car park,” he said.

“This is no way to treat a community, least of all a community that is still reeling from the events of Monday.”

On Tuesday, Merseyside Police named six-year-old Bebe King, seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar as the three girls who were killed at a Taylor Swift-themed dance workshop at the Hart Space studio in Hart Street.

At about 18:00 BST, more than 1,000 people joined a peaceful vigil was held outside the Atkinson gallery on Lord Street.

However, following rumours throughout the day of a demonstration, a group began to gather near a mosque on St Luke’s Road, two streets away from Hart Street, at about 19:45 and engaged in a stand-off with police officers.

As the disorder escalated, the group attacked the front of the mosque, throwing bricks, bottles, fireworks and rocks, and officers donned protective gear and used riot shields to defend themselves as wheelie bins and other objects were hurled towards them.

A police vehicle was also set on fire.

Southport Mosque chairman Ibrahim Hussein said he had gone with colleagues to secure the building and had to be taken to a place of safety by police.

He told BBC Radio Merseyside that the group had “started to burn the fences and throw things burning stuff at the windows”.

“They smashed all the windows, they broke all the fences and obviously, the chanting and the screaming and the anger just was overwhelming for all of us.”

North West Ambulance Service said 27 officers were taken to hospital and 12 were treated and discharged at the scene.

Merseyside Police said those behind the violence had been fired up by social media posts which incorrectly suggested an Islamist link to Monday’s stabbings.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had earlier warned about disinformation linked to the attack.

A 17-year-old boy, who was arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder after Monday’s attack, has no known links to Islam.

Assistant Chief Constable Alex Goss said there had been “much speculation and hypothesis” around the teenager and “some individuals” were using it to “bring violence and disorder to our streets”.

“We have already said that the person arrested was born in the UK, and speculation helps nobody at this time.”

Mr Hurley said it was “reprehensible” that police officers who had been attending injured victims on Monday were finding themselves “being pelted with bricks by these thugs”.

He said they had “hijacked the grief” of the town and families.

“These people are utterly disrespecting the families of the dead and injured and totally disrespecting the town,” he said.

A 24-hour Section 60 Order has been put in place, giving police extra stop and search powers.

A Section 34 Order has also been introduced, allowing police to direct people who were engaging in antisocial behaviour or were “likely to become involved in such behaviour” away from the area.

Merseyside Police said extra officers would remain in the area “to provide a visible presence and reassure communities”.

Prime Minster Sir Keir Starmer said on X that the people of Southport were “reeling” after the “horror inflicted on them yesterday”.

He said those who had “hijacked the vigil for the victims with violence and thuggery” had insulted the community and would “feel the full force of the law”.

Families living nearby told the BBC they feared for their safety as stones flew past and police officers rushed to put on riot gear and pick up shields.

“I can’t believe this is happening in Southport,” one young woman shouted from the front of her car as she tried to drive her young daughter away.

The home secretary said it was “appalling” that police officers in Southport were facing attacks from “thugs on the streets who have no respect for a grieving community”.

“I think everyone should be showing some respect for the community that is grieving and also for the police who are pursuing an urgent criminal investigation now, and who showed such heroism and bravery yesterday,” she said.

Merseyside Police and Crime Commissioner Emily Spurrell also said she was “absolutely appalled by the disgraceful scenes of violence”.

“This is a community which has faced unimaginable tragedy, and it is grieving,” she said.

“Such behaviour is abhorrent and only causes further harm and suffering,” she added.

Huw Edwards, once the BBC’s most senior news presenter, has pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children.

He admitted having 41 indecent images of children, which had been sent to him by a convicted paedophile on WhatsApp, Westminster Magistrates’ Court heard.

They included seven category A images, the most serious classification – two of which showed a child aged between about seven and nine.

Until last year, Edwards was one of the main presenters on BBC One’s News at Ten and often fronted coverage of major national events.

• Huw Edwards’ broadcasting career ends in disgrace

the BBC said it was “shocked to hear the details which have emerged in court today”.

“There can be no place for such abhorrent behaviour and our thoughts are with all those affected,” it added.

The BBC also said it had been “made aware in confidence that he had been arrested on suspicion of serious offences and released on bail” last November.

He had already been suspended at that point but remained employed on full pay until he left on “medical advice” in April. He was charged last month.

Edwards could face a jail sentence, and will next appear in court on 16 September.

Edwards was flanked by police officers and surrounded by photographers as he entered and left the court on Wednesday.

He was expressionless outside court and inside the hearing, which lasted for less than half an hour.

As the charges were read to him, he replied “guilty” three times, quietly and calmly.

The court heard he had been involved in online chat on WhatsApp from December 2020 with an adult man, who sent him 377 sexual images, of which 41 were indecent images of children.

Under the law, images can mean both video clips and still pictures. The Crown Prosecution Service said most of the category A images were estimated to show children aged between 13 and 15. Two clips showed a child aged about seven to nine.

Category A images show serious abuse including penetrative sexual activity.

He also had 12 category B pictures, which involve non-penetrative sexual activity, and 22 photographs in category C, which covers other indecent images. The category B and C pictures showed children aged between 12 to 15.

Police said officers started investigating Edwards after seizing a phone as part of an unrelated probe, which revealed his participation in a WhatsApp conversation.

The other man was a 25-year-old paedophile called Alex Williams, who was sentenced to a suspended 12-month jail sentence at Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court in Wales on 15 March.

On 2 February 2021, Williams asked whether what he was sending was too young, to which Edwards asked him not to send any underage images, the court heard.

The final indecent image was sent in August 2021 – a category A film featuring a young boy.

Williams told Edwards the boy was quite young looking, and that he had more images which were illegal, the court was told.

Edwards told him not to send any illegal images.

No more were sent, and the pair continued to exchange legal pornographic images until April 2022.

Edwards’s barrister Philip Evans KC told the court: “There’s no suggestion in this case that Mr Edwards has… in the traditional sense of the word, created any image of any sort.”

He added that Edwards “did not keep any images, did not send any to anyone else and did not and has not sought similar images from anywhere else”.

Mr Evans also said the former broadcaster had experienced “both mental and physical” health issues.

The barrister told the court his client “was not just of good character, but of exceptional character”.

Edwards has not been on air since last July following high-profile reports in the Sun newspaper claiming he paid a young person for sexually explicit images.

The Metropolitan Police said they found no evidence of criminal behaviour in relation to those allegations, and that the current case was separate.

“These allegations did not form part of the matter which was considered by police in July 2023. They were investigated separately as a standalone case,” a police spokesperson said.

Edwards was suspended by the BBC last July and executives began an internal investigation, which has not revealed its conclusions. He resigned in April.

Edwards received between £475,000-£479,999 between April 2023 and April 2024, an increase of £40,000 on the previous year.

Edwards pleaded guilty to three charges of making indecent photographs of a child. In the law, a photograph can also mean video footage.

“Making” indecent images can have a wide legal definition, and covers more than simply taking or filming the original picture or clip.

The Crown Prosecution Service says it can include opening an email attachment containing an image; downloading an image from a website to a screen; storing an image on a computer; accessing a pornographic website in which an images appears in an automatic “pop-up” window; receiving an image via social media, even if unsolicited and even if part of a group; or live-streaming images of children.

A court must also decide whether an offence falls into the category of possession, distribution or production.

According to the Sentencing Council, creating the original image counts as production – the more serious of the three categories. It adds that “making an image by simple downloading should be treated as possession for the purposes of sentencing”.

In such cases, sentences can range from six months to three years in prison. However, a community order with a sex offender treatment programme requirement can be an alternative to jail time “where there is a sufficient prospect of rehabilitation”.

In a statement after Wednesday’s hearing, Claire Brinton of the CPS said: “Accessing indecent images of underage people perpetuates the sexual exploitation of children, which has deep, long-lasting trauma on these victims.

“The CPS and the Metropolitan Police were able to prove that Edwards was receiving illegal material involving children via WhatsApp.”

Children’s charity the NSPCC said: “Online child sexual abuse offences can have a devastating impact on victims and we should be in no doubt about the seriousness of Edwards’ crimes.”

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) also said: “This is criminal material, including images depicting the most extreme category of sexual abuse, which have real and lasting effects on victims.”

The leadership of the Palestinian armed group Hamas has been left in “a state of shock” by the assassination of its political leader Ismail Haniyeh, top officials have told the BBC.

Hamas says Haniyeh, 62, was killed in an Israeli strike early on Wednesday morning in Iran. Widely considered the group’s overall leader, he has been a prominent member since the late 1980s.

As head of its political bureau based in Qatar, Haniyeh led Hamas’ outreach to regional governments and was central to its alliance with Tehran and its proxy groups across the Middle East.

He has been wanted by Israeli officials for months and the BBC understands that his protection team had recently vetoed a proposed trip to Lebanon amid security fears.

But he played little role in Hamas’ military operations and as such may have felt free to operate more openly than some of his colleagues – reflected by three trips he has taken to Iran since the 7 October attacks in Israel.

• Live updates on this story
• What does Haniyeh’s killing mean for Gaza ceasefire?

Questions over Haniyeh’s succession were already coming into view before his death. Hamas’ constitution prevents any political bureau chief serving more than two terms. A new candidate was set to be chosen in 2025.

But his death could now expedite an internal battle between competing wings of the movement.

Haniyeh himself was widely viewed by Arab diplomats as a pragmatic figure compared to others at the top of Hamas – driving the group’s political outreach to regional governments as opposed to the militant options favoured by Mohammed Deif and other leaders. Deif leads the military wing of Hamas. Earlier this month Israel said it had targeted Deif in deadly air strikes on Gaza but there has been no confirmation he was killed.

One Hamas official told the BBC: “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is an ideology. And the killing of the leader will not change Hamas, and will not make Hamas surrender or make any more concessions.”

It suggests an attempt by some leaders to dismiss the idea of any tension within the movement.

But in truth, the looming succession process could be lengthy and chaotic – defined by rivalries between those keen to reach a negotiated settlement to the war and extremist elements more closely allied with Iran.

CIA Director Bill Burns said recently that tensions have emerged among some senior Hamas commanders who have been urging the group’s leadership to show more flexibility in negotiations and to accept a hostage-ceasefire deal.

However, anger over the death of Haniyeh – and the January assassination of his deputy Saleh al-Arouri – likely puts the hardliners in pole position.

In summer 2023, one Hamas official identified Yahya Sinwar and al-Arouri as the two leading candidates to replace Haniyeh.

On Wednesday, Hamas officials told the BBC that there were now three likely candidates to put their names forward in the coming days.

The most likely contender is Sinwar. He is the group’s head in the Gaza Strip and is believed to be the mastermind behind the 7 October attacks in Israel that killed 1,200 people and sparked the ongoing conflict.

Sinwar is the key decision maker on how Hamas prosecutes the ongoing conflict and is said to be in hiding in Hamas’ tunnel network beneath Gaza.

Khaled Meshaal is another possible candidate. He is widely seen a less militant candidate than Sinwar and has previously served as chief of the political bureau. However, he has difficult relations with Iran – now the key ally and supplier of Hamas’ military wing.

During the height of the Syrian civil war, Meshaal – then living in Damascus – refused to support the Iranian-backed President Bashar al-Assad and his regime. The failure forced Hamas to relocate their political bureau to Qatar.

The final potential candidate is Zaher Jabareen, who is responsible for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. He could play a key role in ongoing negotiations on prisoner swaps with Israel.

• Who are the most prominent leaders in Hamas?

Either way, the contest is almost certain to be drawn out.

Under normal circumstances, Hamas’ political bureau is chosen by the Shura Council, whose members are elected by local council groups. The body then elects the 15-person political bureau, who choose a leader.

But members of the political bureau are scattered across the Middle East with representatives living in exile in Turkey and Qatar, making it difficult to assemble them at short notice.

Many are also on Israeli wanted lists – which may make some reluctant to travel.

Other questions continue to swirl over Hamas’ response to Haniyeh’s death.

In 2012, the death of the deputy lead of Hamas’ military wing, Ahmed al-Jaabari, saw Hamas respond with missile fire.

So how Hamas responds to Haniyeh’s death could indicate how much damage has been done to its military infrastructure after 10 months of war.

One Palestinian official also observed that his death could have a profound impact on the ongoing peace negotiations with Israel.

Haniyeh, as the acceptable face of Hamas to some in the region, was viewed as the most likely person to be able to broker a deal due to his good relations with regional diplomats.

Kamala Harris is bringing her newly-minted presidential campaign to Georgia, a state that some Democrats now consider up for grabs in the closely contested election.

The vice-president held a star-studded campaign rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, at which she challenged her Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her on the debate stage.

Pop star Megan Thee Stallion and rapper/singer Quavo performed while Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock also addressed the crowd of about 10,000 people.

The possibility of Democrats winning in the battleground state was a stretch one month ago, but some analysts now believe a new face on top of the ticket and a fresh burst of energy may change everything.

Ms Harris replaced Mr Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee after the president announced he was withdrawing from the race.

“It has been a reset button in so many ways,” Amy Morton, the CEO of Georgia-based consulting firm Southern Majority, told the BBC.

“It completely changed the landscape of Georgia.”

Taking the stage in Atlanta to a raucous crowd on Tuesday evening, Ms Harris said the momentum in the race was shifting.

She described her “people-powered” campaign as the underdog in the race, but pointed to how Mr Biden carried the state in 2020.

• Who will Harris pick as her running mate?
• Three ways Trump will try to end Harris honeymoon
• Who is Kamala Harris?

“I am very clear the path to the White House runs right through this state,” she said.

Ms Harris later turned to the subject of September’s presidential debate, which Mr Trump has not fully committed to yet.

“Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage because, as the saying goes, if you got something to say, say it to my face.”

Swing states like Georgia, which Mr Biden won by the narrowest margin in 2020, are fiercely contested because they can lean either to Republicans or Democrats and play a decisive role in presidential elections.

It’s a state Republicans are looking to flip back red.

Donald Trump will also be campaigning in Atlanta on Saturday – at the same venue as Ms Harris – to cement his support in the swing state.

Congressman Hank Jackson, a Georgia Democrat, told BBC News an “explosion of enthusiasm has been unleashed” since Ms Harris stepped up as the nominee, adding that she had “activated… all demographics” in the state.

Democrats in Georgia depend heavily on strong turnout among black voters, a state with one of the highest African American populations in the country.

Polls were suggesting that the state was drifting away from Mr Biden, University of Georgia Professor Charles Bullock told BBC News.

The state is on Ms Harris’s “watch list”, he added, noting she has made more than a dozen visits.

In a campaign strategy memo, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon lists Georgia as one of several Sun Belt states – as well as North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada – where the campaign plans to focus efforts ahead of November.

Before Mr Biden dropped from the race, Ms Morton, a Democratic political consultant in Georgia, said she was concerned about voter turnout, finding many throughout Georgia to be less engaged than when they broke records in 2020.

But now “that’s changed completely”, she says.

“We’ve gone back into all of our planning to calculate for higher turnout because enthusiasm on the ground is so much more apparent than it was in the beginning of June.”

Ms Morton said she had seen upticks in volunteer signups and social media engagement for down ballot candidates too since Ms Harris entered the race.

Recent polling suggests Ms Harris leads Trump by one point – 43% to 42% – among registered voters nationwide, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey.

Ms Morton said she thought those margins would only increase, specifically among Georgia voters.

But there is still strong support for Trump in the state.

Georgia is “Trump country”, said Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from the state. She posted details about his Saturday event on Twitter and claimed Ms Harris was a “radical extremist”.

Ms Harris has been facing attacks over handling the crisis at the southern border as vice-president and in her special role trying to stop the migrants at source.

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Although Georgia is far removed, the murder of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student allegedly killed by a Venezuelan who had entered the US illegally, made the issue of immigration more important to Georgian voters.

At Tuesday’s rally, Ms Harris said she would resurrect the border security bill that she said Trump helped kill, and sign it into law.

She also touted her experience visiting underground tunnels at the California border and as a prosecutor taking on human traffickers

Mr Bullock said Trump will have to be careful in his messaging to Georgian voters. His personal attacks on Ms Harris – and not on her policies – could alienate women voters who found him offensive, he said.

Trump’s allies have attacked Ms Harris’s background, claiming she was a “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hire”.

Ms Harris could also gain ground in the state by appealing to a significant group of establishment Republican voters who are less sold on Trump.

“There is a share of them – and these would be white college educated voters – who maybe find Trump offensive, they may not have liked the chaos of his administration, they may not like his misogyny,” Mr Bullock said.

A Treasury minister is being investigated by Parliament’s standards watchdog over a failure to register rental income on a London property.

Tulip Siddiq, Economic Secretary to the Treasury and Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, north London, is under investigation for the late registration of interests, according to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner’s website.

A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Tulip will cooperate fully with the Parliamentary Commissioner on Standards on this matter.”

Ms Siddiq is the first MP of the new Parliament to be placed under investigation by the Standards Commissioner.

Labour had previously told the Daily Mail that the failure to register the income was an “administrative oversight”.

Investigations into three former MPs which began during the last Parliament remain open.

Former Conservative MP Bob Stewart is being investigated for failing to declare an interest and an alleged lack of cooperation with the watchdog’s inquiry.

Ex-Tory and Reclaim MP Andrew Bridgen is being investigated over registration of his interests, while former Tory Sir Conor Burns is being investigated for use of information received in confidence.

During the last Parliament, the Standards Commissioner opened more than 100 investigations into MPs, the majority of which were resolved by “rectification” – a procedure that allows MPs to correct minor or inadvertent breaches of Commons rules.

We’re beginning to get some idea of how Ismail Haniyeh was killed. Early indications suggest that he and his bodyguards died when a rocket hit the house where he was staying in Tehran.

All eyes will inevitably fall on Israel, which vowed to hunt down and punish all Hamas leaders following the brutal attacks of 7 October, in which around 1,200 Israelis and foreigners were killed.

Israel typically does not comment on its operations abroad, but this attack may have followed the same pattern as an Israeli operation which targeted Iranian air defences around its nuclear facility in Natanz on 19 April.

Israeli jets are believed to have fired rockets from outside Iranian airspace.

But while details of the attack slowly emerge, its political consequences are also coming into focus.

The most obvious is the likely damage to fragile efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza.

Ismail Haniyeh may not have been in charge of day-to-day events on the ground in Gaza – that is the domain of the military commander Yahya Sinwar – but as the Hamas leader in exile he was a critical interlocutor in negotiations brokered by Qatar, the US and Egypt.

American officials had recently suggested that ceasefire negotiations might soon succeed, although a meeting in Rome last weekend did not result in a breakthrough.

But it is extremely hard to see how any progress can be made in the immediate wake of the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh.

• Follow live updates on this story
• Video shows Haniyeh in Iran hours before his death
• Who are the leaders of Hamas?
• Watch Yolande Knell analysis: ‘This would have been extremely well planned’

All of which begs the question: If this was, as everyone assumes, an Israeli operation, why was it carried out?

Beyond the desire to exact revenge on anyone associated with Hamas, what was Israel hoping to achieve?

Turkey’s foreign ministry has already summed up the likely reaction of many in the region.

“It has been revealed once again that the government of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has no intention of achieving peace,” it said in a statement.

In Ramallah, headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, news of Haniyeh’s death has been greeted with dismay.

“It’s opening the door of hell,” Sabri Saidam, deputy secretary general of the Central Committee of the ruling party, Fatah, told the BBC.

Mr Saidam said he was feeling a mixture of shock and anger.

“Not only did I feel that Israel was targeting the life of Ismail Haniyeh,” he said, “but rather the life of any settlement in the region. Israel has killed all hopes and aspirations for an end to hostilities.”

Fatah and Hamas have long been rivals, sometimes bloody rivals. But Mr Saidam strongly rejected the suggestion that Fatah might benefit from the death of the Hamas leader.

“There’s never been in Palestinian politics a feeling that leadership by elimination is the way forward,” he said.

“If anything, it creates more resentment and more friction.”

A strike has been called in Ramallah and across the West Bank.

Shops are closed and a protest march being held which could be an awkward moment for the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.

The most recent opinion poll showed that Ismael Haniyeh was considerably more popular than the elderly Palestinian President, Mahmud Abbas.

The timing of Haniyeh’s killing suggests this was a wider part of Israel’s threatened retaliation for the Hezbollah rocket attack that killed 12 Druze children and young people in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Saturday – retaliation that included the killing of a senior Hezbollah commander in Beirut on Tuesday.

Israel had warned that its response would be harsh.

Israeli officials regularly point out that Iran is the nexus for the so-called “arc of resistance” in the Middle East, which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, and the Houthis in Yemen.

After dealing a blow to Hezbollah in Beirut (and recently to the Houthis in Hodeidah), killing the Hamas leader in Iran sends an emphatic, chilling message, to the militant groups and their Iranian backers: Israel can and will come after you, wherever you are.

A man who was stabbed as he tried to stop a knife attack in which three young girls died told the BBC he was “saddened” he could not have done more to protect them.

Jonathan Hayes, who runs a business next door to the Southport studio where the attack took place, was in a critical condition after being stabbed in the leg and has undergone major surgery.

From his hospital bed, he told the BBC he did not see himself as a hero, as some press reports were portraying him.

Instead, he said: “Some would say confronting a guy wielding a hunting knife is utter madness”.

Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and nine-year-old Alice Dasilva Aguiar died in the attack, which took place at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at the Hart Space centre on Monday.

Eight children, Mr Hayes and one other adult were also injured, with several in critical condition.

Mr Hayes, a director at Calculus Legal Costs Limited, ran next door after hearing the screams.

As he tried to step in to save children, he came under attack himself.

He had surgery on Tuesday and said he expected to be in hospital for some time because he currently “can’t walk”.

Mr Hayes said he had been “overwhelmed by the number of well wishes I have received”, many from complete strangers, and that he wanted to thank everyone who had reached out.

One such message, which he received from someone who had tracked him down after seeing his name in the news, read: “I just wanted to send my love, admiration and gratitude as a father of young children.

“I pray there’s a John Hayes out there to protect my children if/when the time comes.

“I’m sure you wish you’d been able to do more but please be proud you acted at all.”

Saddened by the news of the girls’ deaths, Mr Hayes said it would take a while to process everything that had happened.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Mr Hayes’ wife Helen said he was “very upset that he wasn’t able to be more help”.

“Physically he will be OK, mentally I don’t know,” she said.

A 17-year-old boy was arrested on Monday on suspicion of murder and attempted murder and remains in custody.

The suspect, who has not been named because of his age, was born in Cardiff and later move to the village of Banks, just outside Southport.

The attack is not being treated as terror-related.

As Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris vets potential running mates, spare a thought for the contenders as they undergo a process that one past participant likened to “a colonoscopy performed with a telescope”.

This is just some of the material in questionnaires fired off during the exhaustive vetting process for previous US vice-presidential nominees.

Potential partners to join Ms Harris on the Democratic ticket for November’s election will have to answer up to 200 questions before they can even begin to be seriously considered.

The vetters – campaign officials and lawyers who volunteer their billable hours for the networking and prestige – often have about a month to dig up every grain of dirt they can find.

The Harris campaign has a matter of days to pick a running mate, with a paperwork deadline looming. The vice-president, who went through the process herself only four years ago, has been assessing around a dozen contenders, with Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator Mark Kelly among those being touted.

Pete Buttigieg, who is also among the rumoured potential picks, was asked this week if the contenders are aware they are being vetted. “Yeah, you know,” he said with a smile.

What makes the whole undertaking especially challenging is that, unlike with cabinet picks, the FBI does not perform background checks on vice-presidents.

The vetters will pore over a contender’s tax returns and medical history. They may log on to his or her private social media accounts. They will scour the social media posts of his or her children. The grandchildren’s, too.

The least suggestion of marital infidelity, or any other skeleton in the closet, will be picked apart.

They will check every record of every word the potential candidate has ever uttered or written.

Jim Hamilton, a Democratic lawyer who evaluated potential running mates for John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, told the BBC that notes of the process are destroyed afterwards to preserve “a strict, strict veil of confidentiality”.

He oversaw more than 200 lawyers who were tasked with finding Mrs Clinton’s running mate (she picked Virginia Senator Tim Kaine).

“Everybody’s got something in their background they’d just sooner not talk about,” Mr Hamilton said. “But you’d be surprised, once people commit to the process, at how candid they are in their answers.”

Evan Bayh, a finalist to become Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008, remembers the procedure took nearly three months and was “like having a colonoscopy performed with a telescope”.

“There was a whole team assigned to me: an accountant, a lawyer, a physician, you know,” the former Indiana senator and governor told the BBC. “They talked to my wife, they talked to my father.”

Television crews were soon camped outside his house in Washington DC. Mr Bayh recalls his shock one morning as he sat down to breakfast with the television on and heard an MSNBC host remark that the senator’s bowl of yoghurt and granola “sure looks tasty”.

The head of the vetting team phoned one day to ask Mr Bayh about a false internet rumour that he had once received psychiatric treatment.

“And I said, ‘No, it’s not true. But if you guys don’t hurry up and make a decision, it might be true,’” he remembers joking.

A list of 20 names was whittled away. Mr Bayh says it ultimately came down to himself and Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator.

He recalls how he was flown out “very clandestinely” to St Louis, Missouri, in August that year to meet the future president in his hotel room. They spoke for around three hours.

“There was about a three-foot high stack of materials there,” he recalls, “that he [Mr Obama] just gestured to it, and he said, ‘I’ve gone over all the reports on you, and nothing in there bothers me.’

“He said, ‘But if there’s anything that our team didn’t discover, you should tell me now because it will come out.’

“And I said, ‘Well, your people did do a very thorough job. But there were probably two or three things I should mention to you.’ And I did.

“And he looked at me, he said, ‘That’s it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ And he said, ‘Well, you haven’t led very much of a life, have you?’”

Mr Bayh did not elaborate to the BBC on his disclosures to Mr Obama in the hotel room, except to say they were family matters.

Mr Biden was ultimately successful. Campaign manager David Plouffe later quoted President Obama as saying it was a “coin toss” between the two.

Sometimes a vetter can pose a question that no-one else thought of, revealing a potential red flag, even if it’s not disqualifying.

Gary Ginsberg, who worked for the Clinton campaign in ’92, told the BBC he remembers Al Gore at a loss for words when asked during the process if he had any friends.

The reserved Tennessee senator bristled. But when pressed, he could name none, beyond his brother-in-law and two congressmen. Mr Gore’s lack of a social circle bothered one top campaign official.

From a long-list of 50, he was nevertheless picked to be running mate. They won. Mr Gore, however, would struggle to overcome low personal likability ratings.

The vetting process used to be largely informal and much less invasive, since it was seen as rude to ask a senator or governor about personal matters.

Two selection disasters changed all that forever.

• SIMPLE GUIDE: Everything you need to know about the vote
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• Democratic VP: Five top contenders emerge in Harris VP hunt

In 1972, the Democratic White House nominee George McGovern dumped his running mate after just 18 days. He had picked Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton based on a two-minute phone conversation and no background check.

It almost immediately emerged in media reports that Mr Eagleton had received electroshock treatment in hospital for clinical depression a decade earlier.

Nixon aides began asking reporters: “How could McGovern be trusted after putting a crazy man on the ticket?”

In that November’s election, the Republican president annihilated his Democratic challenger.

Vetters soon began to cast their nets wider, to look more closely at a potential running mate’s family members, after another embarrassment upended the 1984 White House race.

Democratic nominee Walter Mondale needed a game-changer against Ronald Reagan that year, so he picked Geraldine Ferraro, the first female running mate ever on a major party national ticket.

But the campaign was hamstrung by revelations about her real estate developer husband’s financial dealings.

President Reagan went on to win 49 states in a landslide re-election.

Sometimes a potential running mate dazzles at the audition, but fizzles on the political stage. In 2008, Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s campaign had just 72 hours to vet Sarah Palin.

The then-44-year-old Alaska governor was asked by aides how she would react in a national security crisis where the president had been temporarily incapacitated by surgery.

Under this scenario, the director of national intelligence comes to Acting-President Palin and tells her they have pinpointed Osama Bin Laden.

A plane is overhead ready to kill the al-Qaeda leader.

But there’ll be multiple civilian casualties.

“Do you take the shot?” the vetter asked her.

“Yes,” she said, “I would take the shot because I’m the President of the United States, this is our archenemy who took the lives of 3,000-plus Americans. And then I would get down on my knees and ask for forgiveness for the innocent souls whose lives I would be taking.”

The vetters were highly impressed with this answer.

Yet after she was unveiled as the vice-presidential nominee, Ms Palin proved unable to answer a reporter’s basic question about what newspapers she read. Soon she was seen as gaffe-prone and unready for the political primetime.

Even when the vetting process is conducted with more rigour, the final decision is always up to the nominee.

George HW Bush – one of the 15 US vice-presidents who became president- went with his gut when he picked little-known Indiana Senator Dan Quayle to be his running mate in 1988.

Though they won, Mr Quayle, 41, was widely seen as more of a liability than an asset to the ticket, as recounted in the book First in Line, by Kate Andersen Brower.

The vice-presidential nominee was asked by a reporter aboard the campaign plane in 1988: “What’s the favourite book that you’ve read?”

Mr Quayle turned to his wife, Marilyn.

“What’s the favourite book I’ve read?” he asked her, leaving a nearby political aide aghast.

The organisers of a music festival in Kuala Lumpur are suing British band The 1975 for breach of contract and damages after its singer Matty Healy attacked Malaysia’s anti-LGBT laws, leading to the event being cancelled.

During the band’s headline performance last July, Healy also addressed the audience in a profanity-laden speech and kissed a fellow band member.

The company behind the Good Vibes Festival is seeking £1.9m ($2.4m) in compensation in the UK’s High Court over a violation of performance rules.

Homosexual acts are illegal in Malaysia and punishable by 20 years in prison. The festival does not allow talking about politics and religion, swearing, smoking or drinking alcohol on stage.

The BBC contacted the band who said “they have nothing to add at this time”.

In a court filing, the festival organisers said The 1975 and its management team were aware of its rules for performers.

Future Sound Asia said the band had performed at the same festival in 2016, and were given multiple reminders of the rules ahead of its performance last July.

The lawsuit alleges that the band decided to “act in a way that was intended to breach guidelines”.

It cited Healy’s “provocative speech” and “long pretend passionate embrace” with bassist Ross MacDonald, that it said had “the intention of causing offence and breaching the regulations”.

It added that the band also smuggled a bottle of wine on stage to give Healy “easy access” to it.

Future Sound Asia also cited guidelines by the Malaysia Central Agency for the Application for Foreign Filming and Performance by Foreign Artistes, which ban “kissing, kissing a member of the audience or carrying out such actions among themselves”.

The event in Kuala Lumpur was cancelled the day after the band’s performance. Malaysia’s communications ministry said it took an “unwavering stance against any parties that challenge, ridicule or contravene Malaysian laws”.

Last August the organisers threatened the band with legal action and demanded they acknowledge their liability and compensate the organisers for damages incurred.

Healy’s performance was also criticised by members of the country’s LGBT community who said the act of “performative activism” would make their lives harder.

The 35-year-old singer subsequently defended his actions.

“The 1975 did not waltz [into] Malaysia unannounced, they were invited to headline a festival by a government who had full knowledge of the band with its well-publicised political views and its routine stage show,” he said on stage in Dallas last October.

“Me kissing Ross was not a stunt simply meant to provoke the government,” he continued. “It was an ongoing part of the 1975 stage show, which had been performed many times prior.

“To eliminate any routine part of the show in an effort to appease the Malaysian authorities’ bigoted views of LGBTQ people would be a passive endorsement of those politics.”

The band were sued in a separate class action by several musicians and vendors who said they suffered a loss of earnings as a result of the second and third days of the festival being cancelled.

This isn’t the retirement that Mary had dreamed of.

The former midwife spent years living on a cattle station with her husband on the north-western edge of Australia – outside her window, the vast and ruggedly beautiful Kimberley region.

Now, though, the frail 71-year-old spends most of her days and nights in her battered car. Her current view is the public toilet block of a Perth shopping centre.

Mary is not her real name. She does not want people she knows to find out she is living like this.

She is one of the roughly 122,000 people who are homeless in Australia on any given night, according to data from the country’s bureau of statistics.

A recent government report says that 40% of renters on low income are now at risk of joining that cohort.

That’s what happened to Mary. Pushed out of her flat last year when her landlord opted to lease it for short-term stays, she couldn’t find anywhere affordable on her state pension.

Her husband can’t help – he’s in a care home with Alzheimer’s disease.

“He’d be horrified [if he knew], absolutely mortified,” she says.

So now Mary’s 4×4 is full to the brim with her belongings. A walking frame lies in the back, along with piles of clothes. On the passenger seat sits a tin of rice pudding.

“That’s my evening meal, every night without fail,” she says, picking it up, her hands shaking.

She sometimes gets a bed in a shelter, but most nights, Mary settles down in a part of the city where more police are around. She explains she has been assaulted four times and does not want to take any risks.

Every so often, Mary coughs – the after-effects of a recent bout of pneumonia she suffered after getting caught in a rainstorm. The car battery died when the windows were down, and she had no money to fix it.

“It seems that the moment people know you’re homeless… you become what I call a non-person,” she says. “You no longer have any value in people’s lives.”

Homelessness services around Australia have reported a jump in demand amid a national housing crisis – with women and children the clear majority of those needing help. Indigenous Australians are over-represented too.

In recent years, record house prices, underinvestment in social housing, a general shortage of homes and drastically climbing rents, have left much of the nation’s growing population struggling to find a place to live.

Rents have risen the fastest in Perth – up an average of 20% this past year alone. In the few days we were in the city, everyone had a story to share.

Hailey Hawkins tells me she and her daughter Tacisha have been couch-surfing and living in tents for nearly four years, most of Tacisha’s life. They are eligible for social housing – but waiting lists are years-long.

“One week, I’ll have enough money to have decent enough accommodation plus be able to feed both myself and my daughter,” she says, struggling to hold back tears.

“Otherwise, it’s asking money to friends, family or pretty much anyone really that is willing to help.”

Michael Piu, head of St Patrick’s Community Support Centre, says they’re seeing people from all walks of life – young and old, working families and individuals alike – come through the doors.

“A single trigger can push people into homelessness, and there really are very few options for them,” he says.

“They don’t know where to start.”

The housing crisis remains a national talking point, and it is no different inside the country’s parliaments.

Wilson Tucker, a member of the Western Australia state parliament, recently made headlines for being a “homeless” politician – although he prefers the word nomadic. He was evicted and, despite a salary almost twice the national average, could not find anywhere else to live.

But what Mr Tucker didn’t initially mention was that he is also a landlord. He says he bought the home with tenants already living there, and didn’t want to turf them out in what he calls a “red hot” property market.

So now, when parliament sits, Mr Tucker stays in hotels. The rest of the time he is on the road in his 4×4 and roof tent.

“But there’s a lot of people out there that don’t have that privilege, and they’re resigned to fight over this handful of properties,” he tells the BBC.

Housing has also been on the agenda in the federal parliament, where MPs have been considering making it a legally protected human right.

Two independent parliamentarians introduced a bill on the issue off the back of advocacy by the Australian Human Rights Commission, but without government support it is unlikely to pass.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced in this year’s budget A$6.2bn ($4.1bn; £3.3bn) to speed up the construction of new houses, provide rent subsidies, and increase the pool of social and affordable housing.

States and territories also have a slew of initiatives they hope will ease the strain.

But homelessness charities are crying out for extra support to keep up with the growing demand, and advocates say more urgent reform – like scrapping lucrative tax concessions for investors or increasing protections for renters – is needed.

There has been criticism heaped on landlords too for hiking rents at a time when people are squeezed – and discussions about limiting increases and narrowing the reasons for which a landlord can evict a tenant.

But the property industry says landlords are hurting too.

In May 2022, interest rates began rising faster than at any time in Australia’s history – with 13 increases over 18 months.

“Most people only own one investment property and they’ve had their mortgage repayments [on those properties] go up by 50% as well,” says Cath Hart, chief executive of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia.

She says the conditions are tough enough already, and the pandemic showed that measures like rent increase caps and eviction moratoriums only push landlords out of the long-term rental market.

“What we saw during Covid… was that 20,000 fewer properties were available to rent as investors just went ‘You know what? It’s too hard.’”

In the meantime, every night different charities take turns offering help to those who want it.

As evening falls and commuters exit their shiny office buildings in the centre of Perth, crowds of people with nowhere to go gather in a square by the railway tracks.

With the Australian winter now kicking in, it is the clothes donations that are causing the biggest flurry. Supermarkets donate food, there is a laundry service, a mobile doctor surgery and a hairdresser.

Also out are street chaplains, providing meals.

Michelle Rumbold has joined them to help. Until a few months ago, she was the one receiving the handouts. A registered nurse, she was left with nothing after she got evicted and crashed her car.

“I ended up losing my job purely because I didn’t have accommodation and I didn’t have a car,” Michelle says.

“I think it took a while for people to actually realise I was homeless, because I didn’t look homeless. Gradually, over time, you become so used to the street that you lose yourself.”

Michelle managed to get transitional housing and she’s now back on her feet, working in a GP’s surgery. But she still likes to come back here and help.

“It’s hard to leave this place once you’ve been here,” she says. “It’s a really odd thing to say but people become your family here.”

But for every Michelle, there are plenty more like Mary, still struggling.

For Mary, it’s the loneliness that hits her the most.

“You’ve got no TV, no neighbours to say hi to,” she says.

“People often just give you the side eye and think ‘Oh God, not another one’ and walk away.”